Contrary to the picture painted in “Hello” magazine and various other society journals, the life of a suburban Lib Dem Councillor isn’t one canape party after another. In fact, quite often I am bored to tears at weekends and forced to flick through the Sky TV directory until I stumble across the inevitable repeat of “Only Fools and Horses” somewhere.

This weekend though has been nothing short of a social whirl, as weddings, farewells and gatherings have collided to make it seem for a brief period as if I do indeed have some semblance of a life. Unfortunately, the social occasions have merely re-affirmed my suspicions that my emotional development is not sufficient enough to cope with the rigours of having friends. In particular, there seems to be a glut of my mates leaving for foreign shores at the moment. And my fragile ego isn’t coping at all well.

A few years ago it was fine. My friends lived in various bits of the UK, but nowhere that couldn’t be reached in four or five hours by car, even with a stop for a Ginsters at a service station on the way. So I would see them all a few times a year, and birthdays/christmases wouldn’t come and go without at least an evening somewhere loud.

Now though my life is taking on a definite international flavour, and not in the cosmopolitan way that I’d like. It all boils down to the fact that my mates are deciding to live in various parts of the other side of the world, and leaving me rattling around England getting bored and fat.

Saturday night saw me in a pub in Altrincham, bidding farewell to a girl I’ve known since I was at school. And bear in mind that I went to an all-boys school. Finding a girl friend at all against those odds is like digging up potatoes from the garden and unearthing the Cullinan Diamond. But I did find this one. I didn’t mind that she went to university in Durham, because I was in Birmingham anyway, and at holiday time there we both were, back home. Now though she’s going to live in Hong Kong. And that is far too far away to pop out to for a drink when I want reminding I can’t be old because, look, here’s someone I knew from school!

And with her go all the other friends, the hangers-on who I know through her, see twice a year, and am reminded each time that they’re actually a lovely bunch. I never think of them beforehand, and don’t notice if they’re not there. But after two hours chatting to them I realise that my life is touched by a hundred lovely people I never see as much as I should. And last night on my drive home from Altrincham, probably the only thing that kept me from crying about that was Tam sitting next to me offering practical tips like texting them once in a while.

This Hong Kong revelation has come hot on the heels of another very good friend of mine informing me that he is emigrating to New Zealand, a place so far away that it’s a long haul flight further on than Australia. It took the crew of Apollo 11 only marginally longer to fly to the moon than it would take me to fly to Auckland. And so rather than being able to meet up in Manchester and drown our sorrows after the typically horrific working week, now any meeting requires buying shares in Qantas. It’s awful. I won’t lie to you like I’ve lied to him. It’s just plain awful.

The guy I used to live with, and had two of the most dangerous years of my life sharing a bathroom with, now lives in San Francisco. My sister is one step away from packing it all in and going to live on a commune in the Ganges. A former colleague to whom I have come to rely on an unhealthy amount for emotional reassurance informs me that she’s chucking in Chorlton for Dorset. Fair enough it isn’t Cape Town, but it’s beyond the end of the M5, and that’s far enough away to warrant serious pre-planning. Others around me are planning their various escapes, all requiring passports. Is there a disease here I haven’t heard about? What’s the rush? Where’s the need?

My oldest friend, to whom I was introduced my my grandpa at the age of 0, now lives in Melbourne. Granted, it’s a handy stopping off point on my epic journey to New Zealand, but his presents living arrangements are very inconvenient indeed for someone who enjoys wallowing in self pity and contemplating the passage of time as much as I do. Just flying there would give me enough free time to depress myself into oblivion. He is back in England at the moment, and in the snatched few hours we’ve had together between him showing his Antipodean girlfriend the London Eye and me messing about delivering Focus leaflets, he told me he mightn’t be back for two years.

What can a I say about that? Two years? These people I love leading their lives so far away, for two years??… How can friends stay friends when lives go by in different time zones?

People tell me to look on the bright side - that at least I won’t have to pay for hotel rooms. But frankly I like hotel rooms, and I don’t like using other people’s bathrooms. Nor do I want to get off a 24 hour flight and have three nights on a sofa to look forward to. There is no plus side in this. Not for me.

My address book is beginning to resemble the call sheet of the United Nations switchboard. One after another the players in my life are stuffing their wallets with weird currencies and jetting off into the sunset, then the sunrise, then the sunset again, before landing somewhere so far away that they cease to exist in reality and are just an email address that beeps at me once in a while.

The best argument I could hear right now against globalisation is that without it, people like my friends wouldn’t leave people like me. Two generations ago, adventurous people might marry an actress from Melton Mowbray. But they’d still come back for birthdays. Now they dice with death living on top of the San Andreas fault line or commute to work via the Sydney Harbour Bridge. And they don’t come back for two years. Or five. Or ten. Or ever.

The best argument against an expansion of air travel isn’t that the world and everything in it might die from carbon overload, but that if they cancel flights people I know can’t go and live in New Zealand.

I’m not leaving. I love this country. I start getting home-sick in the airport departure lounge because they take Dollars at the tills. But I wonder how much of what I love about it is because of the people in it? And, no joke, the best ones I know are all leaving. Not because they believe the rubbish in the papers about being stabbed or paedophiled to death here, but because they don’t get sweaty-palmed at Passport Control. I can’t stop them going, but I wish I shared their outlook, or they shared mine, because frankly I like my friends, and making new ones is far too nerve-wracking.

Anyway, work in the morning. That’ll cheer me up…

Rick

The sponge-brained halfwits at Orange Broadband have made a spectacular, tumbling re-entry into my life this evening, with a letter demanding that I pay them £40. And after a particularly useless telephone call to them which got me not one millimetre closer to sorting out their mess, I feel it only right to inform my tiny readership about them and their foolish ways.

Let me begin by putting their customer-service shoddiness into context: As someone who has worked in a variety of public sector settings, each one devoid of any sense of urgency, and frequently entirely bereft of staff from about 14:30 on a Friday, I have encountered my fair share of dodgy customer services. As a Councillor trying to get Bury’s Six Town Housing to remove its head from its backside for half a second, I have experienced even worse. But Orange Broadband make even the most lethargic Housing Officer at Six Town look like a fawning, bowing, scraping butler who has just graduated summa-cum-laude from the Harvard School of Brown Nosing.

They are, without exception, buffoons. I must have spoken to thirty of them in my time, and not one of them has done a single thing remotely useful for me. I would have had as much joy speaking to the dialling tone. Their know-nothing, slack-jawed idiocy goes beyond the annoying and is actually a joy to behold, simply because it confirms my suspicion that even if I were to sell my brain to the highest bidder on eBay, and then look for a job with nothing in my head but the stitches, I could still find gainful employment working in the Orange Broadband call centre.

At one point last year, they cut off my broadband service for three months for no reason. Each time I rang their far-off call centre, I was met with a different baffled joker without the foggiest grasp of what my problem was or how to fix it. The excuse changed every day, the promises got more outlandish as I got more angry, and the solution arrived without warning or explanation after three long months. I still don’t know what went wrong or how it was fixed.

When I moved house I vowed to leave the world of Orange Broadband behind, and so whilst the ink on the property contract was still wet, I joyously rang my far away call-centre friends and told them that I was cancelling.

But alas, yet oddly predictably, the message appears not to have got through. And so today I was sent a bill for £40, and a letter telling me that because I hadn’t paid them anything for six months, they had had to close my account. Of course, had the lady in the call centre understood my phone call when I cancelled, she would have gathered my intention to cancel my account and the impending cancellation of my Direct Debit. But clearly the language I used in the phone call was in a code beyond understanding. After all, I said “I intend to cancel my account, and thus inform you of the impending cancellation of my Direct Debit,” which is highly ambiguous and open to various interpretations. 

Silly me, because when she said “Fine,” I imagined she meant “Fine.” Whereas in fact, of course, she meant “I have no idea what you are talking about. Goodbye.”

So now apparently I owe them £40, and they are threatening to “take legal action.” Which would be amusing, if the bureaucracy involved weren’t so annoying. I have no doubt whatsoever that if I were ever to get a court summons, I could muster about 10,000 people to testify to the general awfulness of Orange’s Customer Services, and demonstrate with diamond-solid proof that the chances of my cancellation instruction finding its way from The Call Centre At The End Of The Universe all the way back to Accounts was nil. Sadly, it probably won’t get that far, and the bill will lay on some credit reference agency’s file somewhere, meaning that their error will cost me the chance of a cheap  mortgage in a few years.

The thought of dealing with that makes me full of rage.

And yet I can’t solve it. I tried to tonight, but the guy in the call centre genuinely had not a clue what I was on about. He asked me for my land line number three times. Three times. And then, in the ultimate irony, my attempts at being helpful backfired spectacularly: I only received the bill when my former landlord posted it through the door of my new house today. We’ve moved on, you see. So, after our man in with the Brintey Spears headet in the call centre far, far away re-affirmed the looming court case and the outstanding bill which he said “must be settled in full as soon as possible,” I offered him the opportunity to take down the new address so as to allow me to engage in conversation with Orange without the landlord as an intermiediary. “No,” he said “We can’t take any new details. Your account has been closed.”

Idiots.

Rick

The first girl I ever loved got engaged today. And it wasn’t to me.

I was utterly in love with her for about three months in the spring of 1999. Stomach-turningly, heart-swellingly, swoon-inducingly gone whenever her name was even mentioned. I met her at my 18th birthday party. For a boy at an all-boys school who’d barely spoken to a girl in 7 years, having one this gorgeous at my party was quite an achievement, even if everyone there knew that one of the cool boys knew her really (through his mum), rather than me. 

In those days my heart was fairly easy to win. Having a pulse and being a female outside of my immediate blood-line were the two main qualifications, and honestly it was probable that neither were absolutely necessary given enough encouragement. She had both, and was lovely to boot. And so I was smitten.

I spent the whole spring and summer of that year doing nothing but rehearsing jokes to crack in front of her, and wishing pain on my friend Ben whom she seemed to whisper to her friends about, despite him being less amusing, generous or kind-hearted than I thought I was. I distinctly remember driving home on an early summer’s evening sobbing in my clapped out 1989 Nissan Micra after he kissed her in the back garden of a friend’s house. I thought my entire world had crashed, and I was so blinded by crying that it was only sheer luck that I didn’t crash my car into the central reservation of the motorway on the way home.

At one point during it all she’d sat me down and tenderly explained that although she liked me very much, we’d always be friends and nothing more. And she was true to her word. On both counts, no matter how drunk I got her.

We are still friends, and she’s still lovely. And she texted me tonight, as Tam and I were gorging on processed beef toenails at Dexter’s in the Trafford Centre, to tell me that her and her boyfriend had taken the leap we still haven’t taken ourselves, and got pre-hitched. There’s a diamond to prove it, I’m told, whereas the closest I have taken Tam to that is leaving her in Accessorize poring over the bangles whilst I stand outside looking bored.

On top of the marriages and the pregnancies that I’ve mentioned before, another door to the past slams shut tonight with this piece of news.

I’m happy for her of course. She was delirious on the phone. Her fella is a lovely guy. Nicer than Ben ever was, by a country mile, and now that my heart doesn’t treble its beat-rate every time I see her, I can concede that he’d even run me a close second if there was ever a contest. And Tam is the most wonderful woman on God’s green Earth, so there never would be.

But I haven’t forgotten entirely, and it’s an odd thought that this girl I was mad about is getting married now. She may never have succumbed to my 18 year old charm (which basically involved me looking at her a lot, alternating between hopeful and glum, depending on whether she was alone or with Ben), but at that age it takes quite some character not to laugh in my face. And yet she didn’t. She became my first grown up friend instead, and from little kids on the edge of a big adventure we’re now where we are, and she’s getting married.

Which is just great. Except I don’t know whether I should be too, or whether it’s just fine to be messing about in Dexter’s in the Trafford Centre and putting it off a bit more.

God knows. And it hurts my head to think about it, especially with a belly full of beef toenails.

Rick  

A couple of weeks ago I shrieked around the district in triumph having secured the construction of a bollard at the top of Dashwood Road. I had been trying to get it in place for about six months, and had strangled myself in more red tape than it would take to gift-wrap the Eiffel Tower. But a local resident and I got there in the end. God bless the Council and its lightning reflexes.

Today someone reversed into it, knocking it down, before driving off. Which was fairly irritating.

Thankfully someone got his number-plate, which I have passed on to the Police. I don’t know if wanton bollard destruction is a crime, but I hope so because he has deflated me somewhat, and thus deserves the type of punishment metered out to errant slaves in Roman times.

It is doubly bad because I am on day two of my “bikini fit” diet today, and in absolutely no mood for irritants. The first stage of the diet is a “detox,” which is apparently supposed to make you feel better by removing from your diet all solid foods for 48 hours. So I haven’t eaten anything requiring the use of teeth since Saturday evening, and am feeling the strain. Yesterday I was only allowed water. Today I have progressed to water and smoothies. Tomorrow I am on solids again, but only fruit.

I work with nurses and they doubt the healthiness of my choice. I doubt my own sanity, and would genuinely kill for a bag of crisps. And not just a stranger. I would kill a friend.

But the women in the book look good in bikinis, and since I am too lazy to find a diet for men, this will have to do for now.

Whether it works or not will be interesting. But regardless, if they catch the bollard murderer I will suggest to the judge that he don his black hat and sentence him to a fortnight of bikini fitness dieting. That’ll teach him.

Rick

I am at war with Manchester Airport.

Not literally, obviously. Because they’d win, what with their access to radar and aeroplanes. Not to mention duty free booze for the victory party afterwards.

But I am having a strongly-worded dispute with them all the same. And it concerns the fact that their recent security improvements are having a direct financial impact on regular people coming to pick up their relatives. And more importantly, those regular people now include me, as I found out a few weeks back.

I arrived to pick Tam up off a flight, and discovered that I could no longer drive up outside the terminal and wait. This is understandable given the attraction of airport curb-sides to people with bombs in their boots. But no free alternative provision has been made by the airport, and so the ludicrous situation arises whereby I drove into the car park and then had to pay to get out, despite being in there for less than a minute.

In fact, had I not had my credit card on me to pay at the exit barrier, I would have had to spend five times longer in there, parking up, and walking to a pay machine and back. And the only reason I would have had to stay was because I needed to pay for a stay I wouldn’t have had to make without the need to pay in the first place. Which makes my brain hurt a bit.

I wrote to the airport in the hope that their brains would hurt too. And they obviously did, because it was only today that I received a reply, six weeks later. They claim to have reduced the cost of very short stays. This may be true, but they haven’t reduced it to nothing, which is what it was before.

It is not impossible to implement a system which makes, say, the first ten minutes free. This would allow people who are simply coming to pick up a passenger the ability to find their loved one, load a suitcase, and get out, and to do this without incurring a charge. This type of system operates in lots of car parks in the city centre, where if you have a sudden change of heart or are struggling to find a space, you can leave without paying. But the airport haven’t done this. Nor have they given me an  answer yet as to why not. And so I have asked them again today.

I fully appreciate the need for tougher security. It’s a shame, but it’s needed. And I also appreciate the efforts airports go to to protect our safety, and the difficult job they must have doing it. But there is no need that I can see to penalise people in this way. If I park at an airport for half an hour, charge me. If I have to enter the car park for thirty seconds because if I don’t then the only alternative sees her wheeling her suitcase all the way home herself, then I think I should get in and out for free. 

Rick

A quiet day today, dominated by work and the return of Tamsin, who arrived back from France this evening, riding a bicycle, sporting a bunch of onions round her neck, and promptly going on strike and blockading the front garden. She surrendered fairly quickly though, so all is now well bar grumbling of discontent about the length of the working week.

Ward work wise, I found out a little more about the baffling dog waste non-prosecution today. This caving in by the forces of good against the forces of irresponsible canine carelessness is the result of my work in reporting the dog fouling on Agecroft Road West. Dog fouling which, to remind you, took place seconds after dog and owner had left their house, right in front of my eyes.

Apparently though, having the act witnessed and reported by a local Councillor is not enough. I am now told that since I didn’t manage to get the offender’s name (it’s owner’s name, I presume), no prosecution papers can be served. Instead, the best that can be done is to encourage the whole family to accept a formal caution, which has no practical effect, but in theory will be taken into account next time the offender is caught and, after surrendering his name to the witness, prosecuted. Oh, and the whole thing needs to be broadcast live on Sky News and then immortalised forever on the back of the new £20 note. Otherwise there really isn’t enough evidence.

Cast your wearied mind beyond the acres of red tape that apparently separate me from common sense on this issue, and ponder the strangely international flavour that this tale now takes on. I am told that the offender’s mother has told the dog wardens that her son has fled to Spain since the incident, and will remain there for “an indefinite period.” So, whilst I may not have extracted £50 from this filthy and respect-free individual, I have at least ensured that he’s fled the country. Prestwich now has its own Ronnie Biggs.

I think I may have taken this as far as I can. I have had a look on the Interpol website, and he’s not on there. The Spanish embassy don’t seem interested either, and I can’t afford a private detective. But apparently his Mum has accepted the caution, and the streets are safe once more.

Rick

There have been some remarkable re-unifications in my lifetime. East and West Germany… Madge and Harold from Neighbours… And today, one to top them all, as I am finally allowed back to my precious leaflets after almost a whole month of joyless and utterly free weekends where I could do sensible things like sitting in the garden, enjoying walks, and not helping us come third in Crewe.

It is, seriously, a happy event. Lack of leafleting means that my sole entry-point into the world of exercise is temporarily blocked, and my arteries have been audibly groaning for the last few weeks. I also get to meet a lot of people out on the streets whilst I’m leafleting, and obviously I don’t when I’m not. And of course the more leaflets we put out, the more people get to understand that we are at lest partially trying to do what they want us to do, rather than disappearing into a bunker after the election and not surfacing for 11 months.

So I am going to get all inkey again this afternoon, out and about in the ward. And of course God knows it, and so has replaced calm tranquility with a force 8 storm outside. We recently invested in some canvas covers for the garden furniture, which balloon out alarmingly in weather like this. All morning I keep glancing, from the corner of my eye, a dark green parachute billowing out across the garden. It takes a good half second each time for me to remember that this is caused by my own inability to tie a simple knot to the bottom of our swing-seat, rather than any military manoeuvres taking place on my lawn.

It’s the bank holiday of course. 7th one in five months, and the last one until the end of August. Hmm… There’s something askew there, I feel. But, regardless of the front-loading of our days off, Tam has upped and left me for the weekend, and gone to France. So I am free to do what young men do, in the prime of their lives, with time on their hands and money in their pockets. That’s right - leafleting. Marvellous.

I hope everyone has an enjoyable time.

Rick

Today I find myself over the worst of my near-death man-flu experience, but still without any physical energy at all. It’s a good job I work in a typical twenty-first century occupation – slumped at my desk in front of a computer screen for a reason beyond comprehension – rather than in an iron smelting works or anything that requires me to lug things about all day, or else I may have had to take the day off. So, for one day only, I am delighted at the decline in our glorious manufacturing heritage. I tried to walk up to a colleague’s office earlier, and the resultant strain on my body was akin to a solo assault on Kilimanjaro, so I have decided to seek refuge at my desk and communicate with others using only email for the rest of the day.

In the end I didn’t run the Great Manchester Run. I could barely climb the stairs at home without collapsing in a breathless heap, so it was fairly unlikely that I’d have managed to run to Old Trafford and back. St John Ambulance have enough problems without my wheezing body lying stiff and prone in the back of their van. So now I need to fend off the angry mob of people who sponsored me to do it by finding another 10k to run…

The week ahead is fairly light in terms of Council meetings. The committees and such are all still sorting themselves out, and won’t get going properly for another week or three. In the meantime there is ongoing casework and party malarkey to deal with. It was the post-election thank-you party for all of our many helpers and supporters at the weekend. I wasn’t there due to being shivering and moaning like a girl at home at the time, but I hear it went down a storm.

I hope everyone has a nice week.

Rick

I am sat in front of my computer wearing a dressing gown on a Saturday night at ten o’clock. Any fading memory of my loud and raucous youth has disappeared completely this evening, as I have forsaken the lure of a party to sit and write a draft of the Prestwich Plan.

However, my choice to swap socialising for solitary typing was made easier by an attack of Man Flu which has crippled me this evening, and turned me from erudite man about town, to groaning misery. It began during the FA Cup Final, a match normally so boring that it brings on comas, but today able to start a throbbing in a part of my head I can only reasonably call my brain stem.

This is a worrying part of the body to have anything abnormal going on in, and it has since spread to the rest of my skull, resulting in the type of regular throbbing that makes me think my head contains not just a brain but a high performance Swiss timepiece.

I am supposed to be running the Great Manchester Run tomorrow. This was already an unpleasant prospect, and is now rendered about as palatable as sharing a surfing lesson with Jaws. If I survive the night at all, I will make a decision about whether to run or not in the morning. I am relying on the healing powers of Lucozade and grapes in the meantime, and right now I am going to bed.

I may be gone for some time.

Rick

At my party on Saturday, a friend of mine who I’ve known since three minutes after I started university, and who has recently married, announced that she was now pregnant. I was overjoyed at the news, cooing around the place like a demented owl and generally doubting my own gender by getting the types of broody feelings I’m not sure men are biologically supposed to get. It was the best news I’d heard all year.

But now, two days and one clean-up later, I find myself asking how on earth this managed to happen. Obviously I have moved on from the biological now. My parents taught me about the dangers of baths that are too hot, and of cabbage patches years ago, and I tell Tam never to take such baths or eat such vegetables because I know we’re just not ready for children yet. No, I don’t mean how she managed to get pregnant in the first place, but how in the name of all that’s rational I came to be old enough not only to have friends who are married, but friends who are now carrying children of their own.

Does this sudden dismay happen to other people? Do others ever just stop for a moment and think about how many decades their inner-selves are from their outer-selves? Is there a cure?

Yesterday, and I mean, literally, yesterday, I was six years old. I lived in a house with my parents and sister, I went to primary school, and I played with a plastic football and Lego bricks. There is no way, NO WAY, that anyone in my peer group is now old enough to have a baby, without them being the talk of the town and rightly whisked off to a country house supervised by sadistic Irish nuns. And yet, it turns out that they are all old enough. How did this happen?

There was someone else at the party, a friend of Tam’s, who has gone through the whole pregnancy thing already, and emerged out the other end with a real child. A “Francesca” that breathes and cries and will soon walk and talk. How could she have done such a thing and survived? Here she is, with a baby, still managing to do normal things like engage in conversation and drive a car, and here I am struggling to come up with the necessary commitment to bung a pizza in the oven for 15 minutes. If I had an actual baby, I really don’t understand how I would be able to do anything other than act like a jibbering wreck.

I can pin-point the exact moment when we suddenly stopped being the young generation and started being the middle one. It was 19:50 on October 31st 2006, when the last of my grandparents died, and there was absolutely nothing and nobody standing between my parents and The Great Hereafter. The shield that separated my cosy little childhood from nasty things like time’s irritating ticking disappeared. But I didn’t have to do anything about it then. I could just pretend to still reside in kid-hood, because there was no-one beneath me coming up on the rails. Now that’s changed too, and there is no place in the play-pen left for me. I’m going to be shoved out of it by a gurgling newcomer who is the product of someone who was, last week, LAST WEEK I tell you, the 18 year old fresher at university tumbling about the place without a care in the world. And now she has travel-cots and stuff that pumps things. It’s unpleasant for any number of reasons.

I have a responsible job. I am elected to public office for God’s sake. People ask me to do things for them, and they get done. I debate issues that matter and people ask me for advice. And yet, in my head, I just can’t contemplate that it is even conceivable that a peer of mine is doing something this grown up. An actual baby, that will be here after we’re gone and will have babies of its own.  

I probably grossly undercooked a sausage or two at my party. I thought quite often about the mountain of debt it is necessary to tunnel into to afford the mortgage on the house. And I let two dozen people drink red wine near my cream sofas. But the one truly frightening thing about Saturday night was the thought that in six months time there’ll be a little one amongst us and we really really won’t be those kids who met on the first day of university any more.

Which would be a sad thought, were I not still absolutely gob-smacked with delight about the whole thing.

Rick