grumpyf1

This is a bit weird. I'm not a newspaper columnist any more. After submitting my foldy phones piece last week, I received an email saying The Mail are rearranging how they do things. Going forward, there will be a weekly "On the podium" section on a Monday, where a particular topic will be discussed. One week will be local MPs giving their viewpoint, the next the current columnists. Word count will be around 250-300 words (I was writing 400, originally 500, with that full-page period at 1000), so greatly reduced. Disappointingly, I had to ask if they wanted a final column from me for this week, before the new section starts on Monday. I was hoping I'd have a chance to say a kind of goodbye after seven years of penning my column. But they didn't. So, just like that, I'm no longer a columnist. In case they said yes, I wrote a farewell piece, so, for old times sake, here it is: One last Friday feeling Seven years ago, I was wondering what to write...

The name's Bond... Buggering Off Bond Is would appear that ace movie director Danny Boyle has had his licence to thrill revoked. Oscar-winning Boyle, the man in the driving seat of such monstrously successful and critically acclaimed blockbusters as Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire, has apparently dropped out of directing the 25th outing for James Bond, due for release next year. In the same way that the phrase “under the weather” can mean just about anything, Mr B is apparently putting his departure down to “creative differences”. It’s been a remarkably short time at the helm of the Bond franchise – it’s only three months since production company EON were effusively announcing their delight at having bagged Boyle for their next (and probably final) outing with Daniel Craig as the rugged super-spy. Filming was due to start in December, with the film slated for release the following October, so whilst the current situation might be described as both shaken and stirr...

Last Friday, the 4th of May, marked a significant anniversary for me. As my full page, 305th, newspaper outing was published in Cumbria's The Mail and News and Star, it was six years exactly since my first "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column in the North West Evening Mail, as it was back then. Amazing. I've mentioned before about the journey to the first column, through the paper's Big Blogger contest, and how I very nearly packed it in at the start of this year, only to be offered the full page. I said I'd review how it was going after a few months, but a stressful house move throughout this period means my perspective on all that is somewhat skewed - it's hard to make the time to write, and even to research or concentrate, when your life is all about legal paperwork, bewilderment, boxes and bubblewrap. To add to the confusion, I recently discovered that my original contact at the paper has left. So far, no-one has been in touch about who I no...

Hi. Did you miss me? To say it's been a busy few weeks would be a major understatement. I've packed for holiday, packed for moving house, been on holiday, came back to sign paperwork, went back to holiday, came home to move house, went back on holiday, and came home to the new house. Currently unpacking, and trying to figure out how everything works (e.g. Q: Why isn't the new washing machine pumping out the water?! A: Whoever fitted the waste water hose under the sink omitted to take the plastic bung out first...) Anyway - here I am! I'll post this week's column(s) over the next few days - yes, I also wrote that whilst on holiday -  but thought I'd share a couple of milestones, even if it seems no-one else is particularly bothered. The Russia/Horse in a disco/Cream-tea fury outing of the 9th of March was my 300th published newspaper selection. From the "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column of 500 words in the North West Evening Mail, through ...

Cheerio! Thank grumpy it's Friday is no more. After 291 columns (292 if you count the potentially libellous one that didn't get published), 145500 words, and 6 years, my days of writing 500 words a week for publication in The Mail have come to an end. In case you hadn't guessed, this is the big news I've been mentioning for a couple of months now. Having found myself, with increasing regularity, sat in front of a blank screen with the submission deadline screaming at me, I spent the latter part of last years worried I was drying up. This also got me questioning if I was actually any good any more. With little in the way of feedback from either the paper, or it's readers, I finally decided I'd call it a day at the end of the year, and sent an email to the paper explaining at the start of November. Column 289 would be my last outing. The reply was somewhat startling. They were just about to offer me a full page. Not just in the Mail. In the News ...

Any chance you could turning the heating down a bit..? Welcome on board this 0727 service to Heatstroke, calling at Overly-Hot, Boiling, Gasping and terminating at Hypothermia Central. Despite ongoing industrial action and fare price-hikes, there is something our rail service seems particularly good at providing; trains which are either Arctic-cold, or Sahara-hot. As most of us are neither penguins nor scorpions, this really isn’t helpful. A recent journey to Leeds on one of Northern’s finest fell-out-of-a-timewarp carriages was a classic example of the former. At no point in the journey did I remove my woolly hat, de-glove, or even contemplate unzipping my coat. True, it’s possible that the carriage was put into service before heating the indoors was a thing. Or possibly they just ran out of logs for the fire. With rolling stock that came into being this side of the millennium, the problem is usually at the other extreme of the temperature range. I know Scotland has a reputa...

Careful - I think your ball is boiling... Happy New Year. If you’re still trying to eat the last of the cheese from Christmas and are shocked that Creme Eggs are already in the shops, you have my sympathy. Using my uncanny soothsaying abilities, I’ve peered hard into the mystic tea leaves and rubbed my runes to predict, with startling accuracy, what will happen during the year some are already calling 2018. You’re welcome. January : The mists are blocking my view... looks like, possibly, someone called Eleanor will have a lot of wind early in the month? Brussels sprouts overdose, probably. Hey! It’s not my fault if this is weird – it’s just what’s going to happen, OK? February : Love is in the air! Following a leak from a chemical plant, the fumes released caused numerous fatalities following the... Death. Not love. Sorry. Easy to mix those two up, isn’t it? March : Article 50 is triggered, and we can all finally get on with our lives after a painful and draining lifetime...

Er..?! It’s an easy win to pick on flamboyant Formula 1 star Lewis Hamilton. That’s probably why I enjoy it so much. He does make it ridiculously easy for me, though. Take this week, when he decided to post a video on Instagram of him with his nephew. Slightly unusual, as he usually populates it with pictures of him looking moody and urbane with some famous models. Or effortlessly suave and moody with some famous music stars. “I’m so sad right now. Look at my nephew...” says Lewis, before turning the camera on the lad, who is wearing a fetching purple and pink outfit and waving a wand. “Why are you wearing a princess dress?” asks the fashionista multi-millionaire, who often looks like he got dressed in the dark with whatever ridiculously expensive tat he had lying around, and attended the black-tie F1 prize giving in something that looked suspiciously like his pyjamas. “Boys don’t wear princess dresses!” says Lewis, who is usually seen wearing lots of jewellery. “Celebritie...

Nice cheery song about... war... Today’s the day! The Christmas number 1 is announced! Will it be Ed Sheeran? The answer to that is – almost certainly, yes. Apart from his own single, he’s up against veteran purveyor of rap, Eminem. Who just happens to be joined on his song by... Ed Sheeran. True, there are a couple of possible late disruptors, but it looks like we’ll be having a ginger Christmas, and neither of the songs vying for the top spot are even of a Christmassy nature. If you’re counting Christmas No.1’s as having to actually mention Christmas, then Ed, and Ed and Em, are not alone in being discounted – Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2”, whilst brilliant, is also one of the most miserable songs to try and have a jolly time too over the festive season. And it was 1979 too. Double depressing whammy. Sing along, Grandma! “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control...” The biggest worldwide seller is Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas”, wh...

Let the Saturday morning good times roll! December 2016, and January of this year, were bleak times for those of a certain age, with the passing of TV, film and music stars that meant an awful lot to an awful lot of people. I’m hoping that 2017 isn’t about to follow a similar pattern. The brilliant musician Chris Rea had a near miss, collapsing on stage recently – fingers crossed for him that he’ll still be Driving Home For Christmas... or at least getting a lift. This was followed, all too quickly, by the news that TV presenter Keith Chegwin had died, at the age of 60. “Cheggers” was the ever-exuberant member of the line-up that presented Multi-Coloured Swap Shop on BBC1 on a Saturday morning. In the late 70s and early 80s, there wasn’t exactly an overload of TV for kids, so the arrival of the lengthy extravaganza of music, entertainment, interviews and fun was essential viewing for scruffy oiks like myself, even if it did mean having to get up and make sure I’d had breakfas...

Fancy an investment? A toilet-related problem at work has given me a brilliant idea for an app... The current lack of conveniences available for use in our offices is, well – inconvenient. Due to some underground pump-relating thingies failing (I’m very technically-minded, as you can see) we currently have to walk to different buildings several minutes away to spend pennies. Or other amounts of coinage. We have options, which means I’ve visited a fair few lavatories I’ve never been to before. Some were good, some were bad. Some had very good things, but were let down in other ways. Sharing my in-depth report on my visits with strangely underwhelmed colleagues, I realised there was a money-making opportunity here – a loo rating app for you phone. Why go through the misery of not knowing if a toilet is going to be nice, when you can open your phone and let the app show you ratings for your nearest available bogs? I had come up with a name, based on the popular “TripAdvisor”, but ...

Nope. No idea. Is that Ed Sheeran? So, you’ve successfully set up home beneath a rock. Congratulations. You therefore haven’t heard anything at all about the forthcoming royal wedding. For the rest of us, it’s been a pretty relentless week of news about Harry getting hitched. Mis-hearing it, I initially thought the 5th in line to the throne was preparing to marry Angela Merkel, which was somewhat surprising, as she’s already married (for starters). But no, the bearded Prince is preparing to say “I jolly well do” to American actress, Meghan Markle. Just to put the icing on the wedding-cake of news overload that ensued following the announcement, the BBC website even has a running stream of updates featuring both actual news and fascinating insights and opinions on the hottest topic of the week. In hindsight, I should have used some inverted commas around two of those items: ‘News’ is somewhat pushing it, when it’s basically the same bits of information endlessly re-played in s...

A Renault Kadjar (Weaponry is an optional extra) A while ago, one of those letters dropped through my letterbox that really helps to instil a sense of trust between you and your car manufacturer. In this instance the letter was from Renault, maker of my humble Twingo. The missive was a safety recall. Apparently, the bonnet and rear wing (if you’re thinking Formula 1 technology, you’re sorely mistaken) had potentially not been bonded correctly. Right – that’s probably not good is it? And they may fall apart whilst you’re driving, putting yourself and other road users at risk. Seriously not good, then. So a few weeks later, during which nothing detached itself in a dangerous fashion from my car, I rolled up at the garage to have my tiny chariot glued back together. Properly. Not with a Pritt Stick or whatever they used first time around. On presenting myself to the service receptionist, she cheerfully told me my courtesy car was just outside - “The black one”. I could see a s...

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

Lewis and his jet. (VAT not pictured.) Mired in an unpleasant and seedy world of harassment accusations and casting couch impropriety, some of the rich and famous elite needed something to take them off the front pages. Lo and behold it happened this week, but only by turning a spotlight on some of the rich and famous elite’s financial sleight-of-hand and unscrupulous practices. The leaking this week of a veritable mother-load of financial document relating to everyone from senior royals to the stars of Mrs Brown’s Boys (as if they hadn’t already done enough bad things) provided some entertainment, for me at least. People with oodles of money being made to feel bad about their dodgy tax-avoidance shenanigans? Grand. Unfortunately, they’ve still got lots of dosh in the bank (wherever it may be), so I doubt they’re too traumatised. We have a notoriously short attention span nowadays, so we will probably have forgotten all about... the thing... sorry, what were we talking abou...

It’s been an interesting week of experiences, good and bad... but some of them less obviously one or the other. Allow me to explain. First of all, there’s an obvious one which was not only good, but simply joyous. Whilst dropping Mrs G off at the station early one morning, a tiny wren landed on the wing mirror of our car, sat motionless for a few moments, then flitted away. Wonderful. By the same logic, seeing someone damage their car five minutes later at the petrol station should be categorised as bad. However, this was a souped-up VW, with tinted windows, ridiculous spoiler, massive shiny chrome exhaust tailpipe and a spiky haired surly lad behind the wheel, who pulled into a parking space as I was leaving the shop. Unfortunately for the young driver (and presumably his ego), he apparently forgot the ground-skimmingly low front spoiler as he pulled up to the kerb. A kerb that was several inches higher. The loud bang/crunch noise was a delight. I believe the Germans have a wo...

"£4billion for cash, mate?" I had a plasterer and electrician round this week. The work they did cost me getting on for £570. Add another seven zeroes to that, and you’ll reach 5.7billion quid – the possible cost of repairing the crumbling Houses of Parliament. The nursery rhyme got it wrong – it’s not London Bridge that’s falling down, it’s London’s parliamentary home. After 150 years of literally plastering over the cracks and carrying out running repairs, the Grade 1 listed building is at risk of sinking, falling to bits, catching fire or an exciting combination of all three at the same time, thanks to outdated cabling, a sewage system straight out of an engineering museum, and an extra large helping of chronic indecision. Despite a report five years ago warning that damage may be major and irreversible, MPs are still having a good old think about it, and unlikely to come up with an answer for another year and a half. Politicians putting off a decision that mig...

Lovely day in Cumbria... To make optimal use of the word ‘understatement’ - it’s been an interesting couple of weeks weather-wise, hasn’t it? Last week featured rain that would have seen Noah reaching for his saw and nails, whilst glancing nervously at the sky and wondering what the giraffes were up to. Where I work, on the edge of Ambleside, the river Brathay filled up rapidly enough that it was actually higher than the road. Unfortunately, this being Cumbria, it was being held back by a dry stone wall, so the river was squirting out through the gaps between the stones and filling up the road. True, it wasn’t all bad. Someone in a ’17-plate Mercedes obviously presumed their car must be amphibious, and had attempted to drive through the deepening flood. When you pay that much for a car, I guess you just expect it to come with an automatic ‘boat’ mode. Still, I’m sure their carpets will dry out eventually. And their shoes and trousers. My journey home (as I’m sure many of your...

Back when it began: Untidy, excessive undergrowth and in bad shape -and the allotment was pretty bad too. The dream is over. This week we relinquished tenancy of our allotment plot. Nearly eight years have passed since we took it on. Back then, the decade had only just started, bank notes were made of paper and I didn’t need a hat on a sunny day quite as much as I do nowadays. We were thrilled to bag our large plot. OK, it was waist-deep in weeds, but we had high hopes, untapped energy and boundless optimism. We would turn this patch of green stuff into a fruit and veg-based paradise. It would become an oasis of tranquil productivity. A sanctuary of bountiful (and edible) goodness. My first ever encounter with a slow worm, whist hacking at the undergrowth with shears, did involve me believing I’d stumbled upon a highly venomous snake (the screaming and running away wasn’t my finest moment). A little research revealed my wriggly chum was, in fact, a kind of leg-free lizard and...

Last year was rightly heralded as being a bad one for the music world, with numerous stars leaving us too soon. The chameleonic-genius that was David Bowie. The hugely talented, diminutive, star with just the one name – Prince. 80s pop-God with the amazing vocal range, George Michael. Each were individuals I admired and appreciated for their raw talent, their influence on others, and their contributions to my listening pleasure through the 1970s, ‘80s, and beyond. But the news this week that American rocker Tom Petty had died, as the age of 66, hit me harder than Bowie, Prince or Michael, or any of the other talented musicians and singers we’ve lost in recent times. Unless you count briefly landing there on the way to a holiday in Mexico, I’ve never been to the USA. I’m not specifically a fan of American music, but something about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ songs struck a chord with me. At a point in my life when I couldn’t have been more into music unless I lived ins...