A teenager, a panel beater and a night to remember - for all the wrong reasons

This is an extract from some memoirs I have written for my children to enjoy (or endure)when they get older. A true story, it happened when, as an 18 year old, I had just split up with a girlfriend and was looking for solace. Did I find it? Not really! Looking back now I can laugh, but at the time it was a little bit scary to say the least!
Sensing that I was feeling a bit down and in need of a bit of cheering up, my friend and work colleague Pete, piped up one day, shortly after Jenny and I had parted company, ‘Why not come down to Fulham Friday night? You can come out with me and my girlfriend for a few drinks and crash at my place'. Pete was 10 years older than me and had ‘lived’ a bit. He'd been married, but they had split up after a few years as they had grown in different directions. Put simply, Pete wanted to drink – a lot – his wife didn’t. His average alcohol consumption in a week at the time I knew him was something in the region of 70-80 pints. Being young and impressionable it was something I thought I could only aspire to. And, given that he sounded like he knew how to have a good time, it seemed like a good idea!

Normally I would have gone home to my mum’s for the weekend, but this particular week I didn’t really feel like facing my friends and confessing to having failed yet again. I decided instead to take him up on his offer and join him and his good lady for a night out in downtown Parsons Green.

It wasn’t an area I was at all familiar with. I’ve subsequently visited and lived in plenty of places, but back then, Fulham and its surrounds were totally alien to me. However, I was sure it was pretty much like anywhere else. I needed cheering up and this was just the tonic. Yes, the more I thought about the prospect of a night out on the tiles, the more I warmed to it.

‘Never mind Jenny. I’ll survive!’ I thought to myself. Onwards and upwards as they say!

Friday came and we started the proceedings with a couple of liveners at lunchtime, prior to the main event in the evening. It was in the days when the first scratchcards were introduced to pubs by Ben Truman. They were a great idea, but Pete and I soon discovered there were only about 12 different ones and, if you drank enough beer, you would eventually know all of the answers to all of the cards.

So, for a reasonable initial outlay, you could pretty much ensure that after a while you didn’t have to buy another pint for the duration of the promotion as your pockets were full up with winning cards that rewarded the bearer with a free pint! It’s fair to say we took full advantage of Trumans very generous offer!

Having finished work around 5pm, we started the evening session in a pub opposite Parsons Green station whose name escapes me, and, after a couple in there, embarked on a mini pub crawl of the area. Along the way, as well as meeting Pete’s girlfriend Anne-Marie, I was introduced to another couple, Trevor and Carol, acquaintances of Pete, who tagged along with us for the evening and decided to come back to the flat for some more drinking shenanigans after chucking out time.

We popped into the off licence about 11.15pm to buy a few cans and everyone was in a good mood as we headed back to Pete’s place. Yes, I was definitely feeling a lot better for this excursion! This was so much better than sitting at home wallowing in self-pity and generally feeling sorry for myself!

Time pushed on and we had been drinking, chatting and laughing for 2 or 3 hours in Pete’s flat, when I asked him if he minded me crashing on his sofa.

‘Not at all mate. Had a good evening’?
‘Yes, it’s been great thanks but I’m pissed and knackered and need to sleep’ I slurred.

As I lay there on the sofa listening to the conversations going on, I smiled to myself and thought ‘OK, so what? Jenny left you. There’s plenty more fish in the sea. Life’s not so bad after all.’ And with that, I turned over and drifted off to sleep, perchance to dream.

What happened next however, wasn't quite so good. Fair to say in fact that the tranquility of my drunken slumber was being very rudely interrupted.

In stark contrast to my consolatory thoughts before dropping off to sleep, I now awoke to find Trevor sitting on top of me and repeatedly punching me in the face.

What had happened in the time since I drifted off was that Trevor, a panel beater from World’s End if you must know the full details, had come to the conclusion that I’d been chatting up his girlfriend, Carol. He had then proceeded to first of all beat her up, before laying into me.

Hardly fair that I was pissed and sleeping when he attacked me, but clearly he didn’t play by the rules. What’s that old phrase? ‘All’s fair in love and war’? Er, I think not. What a load of arse that turned out to be on this particular occasion.

Picture the scene, panel beater Trevor sitting astride me, giving my face a bit of a pounding, telling me that I’ve been "chatting up his bird all night". I hadn't, but clearly that was how it had come across to our Trev.

Anyway, as I tried to come to terms with what the hell was going on, Trevor then proceeded to utter the words that will be etched on my mind for the rest of my life. And here they are....‘You’re f***ing lucky mate, I normally carry a blade'.

It was at this point that I started to get a little bit concerned for my safety.

Pete and his girlfriend were nowhere to be seen - presumably they were engaged in the sort of stuff love is meant to be all about - and this guy had already beaten up his girlfriend and was now threatening to stab me. Oh joy!

For reasons best known to himself, Trevor thankfully decided to give punching my face a rest for a while. His arm must have been hurting from the exertion or something, bless him. I know my face was.

He disappeared for a minute, to where I knew not. But my mind made me try hard to imagine.

I was still in the throes of regaining full consciousness, but I suddenly had a dreadful thought. ‘What if he’s gone to the kitchen to get a knife?’. ‘I don’t want to die. A nice little symmetrical action man type scar placed discreetly on the cheek is one thing. I could go for one of them. In fact I've often wished I HAD one of them. But not a frenzied stabbing attack with a pair of kitchen scissors or a fisherman’s knife’.

Here I was, 18, drunk, drowsy, naive, miserable because my girlfriend had finished with me and in a part of London I didn’t know. It was the middle of the night and some nutter had got it into his head that I somehow posed a threat to him.

So do you know what I did?

I quickly surveyed the scene. Girlfriend lying battered and bruised. Pete nowhere to be seen, probably shagging. Nutter more than likely testing knives on kittens for sharpness out in the kitchen. 'Shit! I have got to get out of here' I screamed inside.

I decided I couldn’t risk going out of the front door as it was bound to be locked at this time of night and anyway 'Trev' would hear me walking down the corridor.

The windows looked fairly well secured, plus there were nets covering them. I’d never have made it. So, there was only one thing for it.

That's right folks. I decided I was going out through the cat flap!

Seriously, as I glanced around in genuine terror, I spotted that in the dining room door there was a hole obviously designed for cat size animals to freely come and go. No doubt given the extreme circumstances, the drowsiness and the cumulative effect of too many pints of lager, I had suddenly convinced myself it was also just big enough for a weedy teenager like me to somehow squeeze through.

‘Hang on a minute. What if I got stuck?’ I thought to myself. ‘Bad enough to get stabbed, but your arse being used as a hastily improvised carving knife holder? I think not!’ Just the thought of what might happen made me shake like a leaf.

Suddenly, thankfully and miraculously as far as I was concerned, with me seriously contemplating taking on the role of a rather large, feeble and non-ginger tom cat, much to my relief, Pete appeared out of nowhere to find out what was going on.

I tell you, I could have kissed him right there and then, but I expect, knowing my luck, his girlfriend would have had a pop at me too and it would all have got very complicated and even messier than it already was.

So, instead, I explained to him that his friend Trevor had, for want of a better phrase ‘gone f***ing mental and wants to stab me’. I then asked him, very kindly, if he could sort the bloke out as "I'm pissed, tired, shitting myself and probably suffering from a broken nose" that was now starting to throb as the adrenaline of fear that was coarsing through my veins began to wear off.

Pete disappeared off to have a word with Trevor and, a few seconds later they both came back into the room, Trevor shouting and gesturing in my direction, but thankfully with no knife about his person, Pete playing the middleman trying to restore a bit of order. Carol by this time was sitting on the sofa looking a bit puffy eyed and shaken. I got the impression it wasn’t the first and probably wouldn’t be the last fight that she and Trevor would have.

Hooray! A bit like the Colditz glider, a futile escape via the cat flap was put on hold!

As I recall, Trevor and Carol left shortly afterwards and I at last settled down to a much-needed sleep. Alone. Battered. Bruised. And feeling even a hell of a lot sorrier for myself than I had at the start of the evening!

Sorry for my creative angst this week! (or how an anagram I tweeted went mad!)

(click on the image to enlarge)

I had a bit of a rant on twitter this week when my creative angst perhaps got the better of me when I saw one of my tweets repeated over and over again, word for word without crediting me. Here’s the story, including how someone tracked me down out of the blue because of it.

Generally when I tweet a joke I get perhaps half a dozen retweets, i.e. exact reproductions of my tweet with my name preceding the message. This joke “The male fox has one mate for life. If she dies he stays single. The female, on the other hand, gets a new one. Usually in my garden at 3am” was a recent exception to the rule when it got 17 retweets - nosebleed territory for me!

So, maybe you can, or maybe you can’t imagine my frustration when following my tweeting - Coincidentally, an anagram of Osama Bin Laden is “Lob da man in sea” - last Monday, the same day the news broke about his death, that whole tweet of mine was, during the course of the following week, reproduced word for word, comma for comma, speech mark for speech mark, not ten or twenty or even a hundred times, but literally thousand upon thousand.

The first few were straight retweets where my name was shown as the originator, but very soon it seemed to turn into a cut and paste free for all with people simply taking the whole tweet and failing to mention where they got it from! And, just to rub salt into the wound, someone informed me later in the week that the gag had been aired on a popular tv show the previous evening!

Now, I am not so naive as to assume that no one else in the world thought of the same anagram (see below an explanation about how I came up with it). It's quite possible a few people did, but this Google timeline http://lpr.st/m2aSrN shows quite clearly that I was the first person to put the gag online and that many have since simply copied,not just the anagram, but the whole tweet verbatim without crediting the originator.

It's no biggie at the end of the day (though I am reminded of the recent fuss over celebrities claiming their jokes are sometimes nicked by other people) but one fellow anagram fan, a certain Judson Pewther from New York, having seen that my tweet had been reproduced word for word a phenomenal number of times without credit, took it upon himself to track me down. I received this email message from him earlier today:

I stumbled across your anagram of "Osama bin Laden" on the Web, while searching for an anagram of "Osama bin Laden buried at sea." I did a Google search for the exact words "Lob da man in sea" and saw that Google estimated over 7000 results. Looking at a few of them, I couldn't figure out how to find the real author. Anyway, I agreed that the anagram was very funny and worth repeating, so I posted it at the Usenet newsgroup alt.anagrams, explaining that I didn't know who originally created this anagram.

However, tonight I tried searching some more, and found a website where you were complaining that 1000+ people had re-tweeted your anagram without giving you credit, and where you provided a link to a Realtime Google search showing that you were the first to tweet the anagram. So I added another message to my thread at alt.anagrams, giving you due credit.

How flattering that he empathised with my creative angst and went to all that trouble to find me!

Now, some people have said you can't claim licence over an anagram and that anyone could have come up with a funny line using the name Osama Bin Laden. That is true to an extent, but to me, the difference between finding a funny anagram i.e. Adolf Hitler = 'Fart? Do I hell!' and a topical one that actually has relevance to a news story, is crucial.

To this day I remember the perfect example of an anagram that hit the spot when Nigel Lawson was the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the country was going through a recession. The anagram was ”We all sign on” – it entirely summed up the state of affairs at the time. It was simply fortuitous and opportune. You can’t always make a funny and topical statement. The best anagram I can get from David Cameron is “Random advice’, and you try making ‘Nick Clegg’ funny. Gideon Osborne? (that’s his real name before he changed it to appear more street wise) Slightly better - “Go soon, inbreed” – sound advice but no cigar winner.

The name ‘Osama Bin Laden’ throws up an astounding 71,793 anagrams which in itself doesn't make matters easy. Clearly I could not have trawled through all of them and indeed, even if I had had the time, the likelihood of getting the exact phrase would be remote. Anagram servers are great but they don’t generally deliver the results as actual sentences. What's more, 'da' is not even recognised as a word by anagram servers. So, what I did was an advanced search for anagrams containing the word 'sea' just to see if it was possible to get a topical joke. Even then the line didn't come up in the 693 results. I did, however, spot the word 'lob' contained within a few of the results and, with a bit of jiggling around and using 'da' as in 'you da man' I eventually got the line I was looking for. It just happened to be topical and described what actually happened.

If I had opted for another of my shortlisted options, ‘Amen, Sandal Obi’, or any of the other possibly slightly funny but not topical combinations, I doubt my tweet would have been repeated more than my usual half a dozen times. And that, at the time, was the reason for my creative angst. Sorry!

You can't put a price (or a tax code) on love

Prompted by the recent furore over tax breaks for married couples who stay together, here's my take on things based on my own painful experience.

Marriage is only a good thing if both partners in it are happy. Full stop. Staying together for the sake of the children is something some choose to do, but inevitably it will lead to bitterness further down the line when the realisation dawns upon both people that they have lost many years of their lives staying in an untenable relationship and living in misery. That and the fact that they are probably too old to find another partner. In the meantime however, their children will have fled the nest without thanking their parents for the constant bickering and air of misery about the house they had to endure for all those years.

I was in an unhappy marriage over twenty years ago. We argued about anything and everything. My wife's intense jealousy was out of control and eventually drove us apart when I started questioning my own sanity on an almost daily basis. It was a huge wrench because I had a daughter of 4 at the time, but heartbreaking thoughit was for me, I couldn't take any more of the daily stress that existed betwen me and my wife.

When we split up I lost everything. The house, contents, everything. I was broke and living in a single room in a house share paying out one and a half times what I earned every month until the divorce came through. But you know what? I had at last regained something that you couldn't put a price on. Something I hadn't had for years. Peace of mind and sanity.

It took a long time to get back to normality, but I was fortunate enough two years later to meet someone who was right for me (so often we don't know what's right or wrong for us until we have experienced the wrong) and we both agreed, having come from bad relationships, that we would never settle for second best again. i.e. if we constantly argued or plain didn't get on, we would part.

20 years on and two children later, we're still together and happy. We've had our ups and downs, sure (and some truly stressful ones at that) but compared to my first marriage, it's no contest. Indeed, I often wonder what would have happened had I stayed in that first, miserable, marriage. I would never have known the happiness I have today, that's for sure.

Put simply, life is too short to live it in misery. Change is the biggest obstacle people fear. They would rather stick with what they know, even if in their heart they know it's not right. But you know what? Sometimes, when you're feeling so miserable that you just don't enjoy the prospect of the day ahead, it's worth enduring the stress of splitting up and facing up to the unknown that lies ahead, because the chances are there is a better life around the corner.

Would I have stayed in my first marriage for a few extra bob in my pay packet? Not in a million years. As The Beatles once said, money can't buy you love. The government's notion that a tax break for married couples will make the world a more harmonious place is totally ridiculous.

I'm not a believer, but....

...here's a thing. Today, it's three years since my brother died after a very swift illness. I don't tend to dwell on these things, indeed I only realised it when I looked at the calendar. I then spent a few quiet moments remembering Paul.

Anyway, when I went downstairs there was a letter waiting for me. One that I hadn't noticed on the doormat yesterday and which my wife had now put aside for me. I opened it to find a letter from my mother. She had enclosed an article that my father had written and submitted to Punch magazine. It's a humorous piece of about five pages of double spaced A4 paper. I started to read it with interest and two very random coincidences occurred.

Firstly, the story he had written contained the surname 'D'eath' - the very same surname as my neighbours, and secondly, he had used the word 'concatenated' - a word, which, up until two days ago, I had never seen or heard anyone use (indeed, call me ignorant for a writer, but I had to look up its meaning!).

Now, you may think that perhaps he knows the surname of my neighbours and the fact that the same word cropped up twice in 3 days having avoided me for a lifetime is just the way things sometimes happen, and I would agree, were it not for the fact that my dad died back in 1972 and that article was written possibly over 40 years ago.

As I say, I am not a believer - I haven't been since my father passed away far too soon all those years ago, but part of me likes to believe that today of all days, as I think of my dear departed brother, that maybe they conspired to send me a sign to comfort me and tell me that everything's alright.

Remember, not everyone's on holiday (or, how, no matter how chilled you are, it pays to keep your eye on the ball)

The old saying 'you never think it's going to happen to you' rings particularly true for something that happened whilst we were on holiday in Spain recently.

We've been there lots of times. Indeed, we have had a small apartment there for the past six years (pictured). Tucked away in a very quiet spot away from the main drag, it was meant to be an investment, but sods law we bought it at the time the property market had peaked and the euro was 1.65 against the pound. Today it's worth less than we paid for it, plus one English pound only equates to around 1.14 in euros, which means in effect that everything costs a good 40% more than it used to. But all that's another story!

Three days from the end of our break this time round and one of our friends had recommended a beach we hadn't been to before, El Rosario, which is between Marbella and Calahonda on the Mijas Costa (or 'Costa del Sol' as it is better, but not in a good way, known). 'Very good for kids' he said. 'Goes out a long way before getting too deep to paddle in'.

Always game to act upon a recommendation, we set off, first for the shopping centre to get a few bits and pieces and then on to El Rosario.

Sure enough, it is a lovely beach. Very busy at this time of year, but once you get your pitch it's a great place to while away an afternoon with the kids.

Except for one thing.

All the time we were there we had kept a careful eye on our belongings and one of us was always within touching distance of our almost two year old son who, mid afternoon, dropped off in his pushchair for his usual nap.

We decided to leave around 10 to 5, gathered up our stuff and made our way back to the car, which was parked some 300 yards away.

It was only upon getting back to the car however, that my wife made a horrible discovery. Her bag was missing. Passport, driving licence, credit cards, 150 euros on cash, camera phone complete with pictures taken during the holiday as well as a customised ring tone of our older son singing - all gone.

Of course we did the usual running back to the beach and looking in places we knew it wouldn't be in, but it soon sunk in that it had been stolen, on the beach in broad daylight whilst we milled around the 'pitch' that we had chosen for the day. How, we're not quite sure, but that somehow wasn't important at that precise moment. We had to somehow remedy the situation the best we could.

A trip to the police station some 30 minutes away followed. In the interim one of my brother in law's back in the UK had texted me the numbers to cancel the credit cards.

When my wife phoned the card company she was told that someone had tried to draw out 200 euros barely 15 minutes beforehand. Luckily they had failed in their quest but it was evidence enough that it had been stolen, not mislaid.

As it happened on a Friday afternoon, there was nothing we could do about getting an emergency passport until after the weekend on what was meant to be the last morning of our holiday. We were flying at 3.30pm so had to leave early to go to the British Consulate in Malaga, whereupon we had to shell out 115 euros for a passport that is valid for one trip! You could say it was an expensive trip!

So, a word of warning - it CAN happen to you, particularly when you're so chilled that you're not keeping your eye on the ball - or in this instance, bag.

My Virgin media saga (or how, just when I thought it was resolved, they threw in a curve ball!)

I got a new smartcard from Virgin Media recently. I put it in the slot somewhat apprehensively but it was fine, everything worked...until the next morning. Then began a catalogue of events that had me almost literally tearing my hair out.

I phoned Virgin Media's technical support at around 8.15 in the morning and explained that when switching the computer on that morning I got a ‘self-assigned’ ‘169.’ IP address. I was told it could be a fault with my computer’s network adapter. I suggested that as I had only previous afternoon installed the new smart card I had been sent that perhaps it could be something to do with that. I was told quite categorically that the smart card had nothing to do with broadband and thus couldn’t affect it.

I had to take my son to school, but upon my return home I phoned technical support again and was told by the second person I spoke to that day that I would be better off having a stand alone modem which would be installed free of charge. I was then put through to someone else (we’ll call him person 3) who told me because I had a set top box it would be £35 installation and that they couldn’t send someone out until 5th June at the earliest. I said that that timescale was ridiculous and I would think about it.

Having thought very briefly about their pretty rubbish offer, I phoned back and asked to speak to a Mac specialist. I got through to someone (Person 4) who suggested I try their wonderful digital home support service. £6 a month for as much technical assistance over the phone as you need. I said it sounded good and that I’d happily pay it if they could get me back online.

I was then again put through to someone else (Person 5) who tried to talk me through fixing the problem via me accessing the computer’s ‘terminal’. He then realised after we tried a few remedial bits and pieces that I was using a Mac and said he couldn’t help but that the Mac specialist started at 4pm and I should call back then.

I called about 4.15pm only to be told by Person 6 that the Mac specialist had gone into a meeting and that I could only speak to him if I was a Digital Home Support service subscriber. They then chucked into the conversation the fact that digital home support doesn’t actually cover those with a set top box! The only solution would therefore be to get a modem and the next available appointment was not until the 10th June - 5 days later than I had been told just a few hours earlier! It begged the question 'how many technicians work in my area and do they travel by horse and cart? Eleven days waiting time is a disgrace and merely added insult to injury for a problem that I hadn’t created.

Somewhere along the way I was also told by one of Persons 1 - 6 that Virgin are phasing out set top boxes and that the old server I used to get my IP address from is no longer active! So why send me a new smartcard for my set top box then? That doesn’t suggest to me that they are phasing out set top boxes. Why not instead a letter stating in no uncertain terms that if I do not get a stand alone modem I will never be able to go online again?

I was also told later in the day by someone in their Teesside Customer Services/Relations that they had heard of the same problem i.e. people getting a new smart card and then being unable to go online - from some customers in Leeds. Confused? I was. I was also rapidly losing the will to live so asked to speak to a manager, which I duly did.

The Manager couldn’t really do anything for me other than apologise, but pointed me in the direction of a technical specialist who would, he assured me, call me the following morning. He also gave me a direct line number, just in case I didn’t hear anything.

That evening, more out of desperation than hope, I rebooted the system again and to my surprise got a ‘10.40’ IP address. I phoned technical assistance and Person, let me see, it would be Number 9 I think, said it looked promising. We went through the computer provisioning log in screen and I rebooted again – but still no broadband connection. When I went back to the phone, Number 9 had been cut off or hung up. It was late in the evening and frankly I was tired of spending so many hours on the phone being told different things by each different person I spoke to.

The next day I waited in all morning before phoning the direct line I had been given. The phone rang for 4 minutes (no voicemail, there’s a surprise!) before I gave up. I then spoke to someone in customer services (or customer relations, who knows? They have department's called both) in Sheffield this time (it’s a lucky dip system, Sheffield or Teesside. Where it stops no one knows!). I asked them to email the Manager I had spoken to the previous day for an update.

My phone then rang at 12.16pm. I picked it up after one ring but whoever had called had had second thoughts. I did a 1471 and a redial and lo and behold it was a nice message from the Virgin customer team saying ‘you need do nothing, the time and date of the appointment for an engineer to come out has been confirmed’ – I hadn’t even agreed a time and date! That was the whole point! I had questioned the need to wait eleven days to rectify something that wasn’t my fault and was waiting for this technical guru to phone me and have a crack at resolving the issue without the need to resort to modem boxes – and, if it turned out I needed a modem, I wanted one much sooner than in eleven days time.

It was after 4pm by the time the manager phoned me to apologise for no one getting back to me sooner - and no, he doesn't have a voicemail on his phone. He then promised me that a fault technician would come out the following Monday (the bank holiday just gone) between 12 & 4pm, which he duly did and the problem was sorted in 15 minutes after he installed the modem I had previously been told for the last day and a half that I couldn't have until the 10th June!

But the story doesn't end there.

Out of courtesy I phoned Virgin Media on the following Monday, a couple of days before the engineer was due to come out. After all I didnt need him anymore and is is only polite to cancel unnecessary appointments. Bad move.

I discovered after the person at the other end of the phone cancelled the appointment my broadband had been cut off!

I immediately phoned back and spoke to another person who then told me it would be escalated to 2nd level IT and may take some time. How long? I enquired - BETWEEN FIVE AND SEVEN DAYS!!! I was told. What followed was, I must admit, a bit of a tirade of expletives from me, but come on, this was madness! A bad dream. For taking the trouble to cancel an appointment, Virgin Media cut off my broadband and then tell me that I may not be online for a week? You really couldn't write it as a sitcom, people wouldn't believe you, but believe me, this was no comedy, well it was, one of error after error. Shakespeare has nothing on Virgin media.

I honestly didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Here I was, having been dicked around for days the week before, the fault technician managing to do in minutes what countless people between them couldn't do in the previous 5 days and now here i was, once again the victim of Virgin media's incompetence. I honestly felt like was on the verge of a breakdown such was the exasperation of the situation.

I resigned myself to another few webless days and recounted the story to a few friends and members of my family. Each were totally amazed at the lack of cohesion that exists at Virgin media. An arse elbow situation they said. And it was. And is.

Thankfully, one bright spark somewhere in the bowels of this multi-site, multi-hymn book (none of them the same sadly) organisation spotted that someone had 'left a bit of code' in the wrong place and that this is what was causing the loss of broadband. Once again, a simple solution to a problem that Virgin media had made sound irretrievable within a timescale of less than 5 days. Incredible!

Put simply, it's the worst case of customer service I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. One department doesn’t know what the other is doing or talking about. I was passed around the Virgin Media organisation from person to person and on the first occasion, after maybe 5 hours spent on the phone over a day and a half was no nearer a resolution until they finally told me they would send out a fault technician. (Why didn't they do that at the beginning of my calls, rather than some 32 hours later?). Then a week later I had to go through a similar scenario once again because of a fault of Virgin Media's creation, not mine.

I tell you, if Virgin Media were a brewery there would be no piss ups! I've been with them for 15 years but am seriously considering a move. No one could be worse than them customer service wise could they?

Never take driving lessons from a Swedish au pair

This week a story from my youth that still makes me chuckle after all these years. At the time I wasn't quite so jocular about it though....

One Friday night in the local pub, me and a few friends were having a couple of beers when in walk these two very attractive girls, Inge and Brigitta.

I knew Inge vaguely as she had been going out with one of my friends, Craig, the last time I saw her.

When she saw me she came across and said 'hi', introduced her friend and announced, very matter of factly, that she was no longer with Craig.

Seeing a window of opportunity open up there and then in front of my very eyes, I offered to buy them both a drink and invited them to join our table. How cool was that? My friends were well impressed I can tell you!

Anyway for some reason, maybe because we were at that age, the talk somehow got round to driving lessons.

I admitted to never having had any lessons and nonchalantly explained that as I lived in London during the week I really didn’t need a car. It was impossibly expensive to run a car up in London and frankly there was nowhere to park it. No, I assured them, driving wasn’t an issue for me.

The fact that a lot of my friends by that time had either passed their test or were well on the way to passing it, and accordingly were pulling the girls left, right and centre, never even entered my head - honestly!

After my rather poor attempt at justifying myself, Inge turned to me and said, again, very matter of factly, ‘I could give you a driving lesson if you like’ at which point my mates were egging me on and reading every possible innuendo into the situation.

‘Go on, let her give you a lesson’ and other very silly and suggestive comments were flying about.

Blushingly, I said ‘Look I’ve had a couple of pints. Maybe another time’. ‘No it will be fine’ said Inge. I just need to drop my friend off at the hospital (her friend, incidentally, was a not only Scandinavian, but a nurse as well would you believe?) ‘And then I will give you the lesson’.

Under so much pressure from my friends and not wanting to appear like a complete and utter wimp, I agreed and left the pub with the Swedish au pair and Danish nurse, the cheers of my friends ringing in my ears. How I wished I’d had a camera, just for posterity.

They must have envied me that night - hell of course they did. After all, how many of them were going to score with a Swedish au pair?

We headed back to Inge’s car.

As Inge opened the car door and pulled the seat back to let me in the back, I was greeted by a huge English sheep dog which proceeded to leap up and start licking my face and barking furiously.

Rather than say ‘What on earth is that dog doing there’ and in the process blowing my chances with Inge completely, I politely asked, as this giant dog now began to cover me with fur, how it came to be there.

It turned out the dog belonged to the family she was working for and, because they were out, she thought it would be a good idea to bring him along! Personally I wasn’t so sure.

Yes, it made sense that her friend should sit in the front as she was getting out first, but if this carried on much longer I was in serious danger of looking like a giant fur ball and smelling strongly of dog by the time I got Inge back to my place.

In between dog licks and barks, my mind was beginning to work overtime.

I was starting to think to myself, as all young men in my position would, ‘hang on a minute, you are on to a real winner here. If you can get her to drop her friend off at the hospital, convince her that you don’t want the driving lesson and get her to take you back to your place, you are home and dry. Well, mildly wet from dog spittle. The dog was happy enough sat in the car whilst she was in the pub so it can stay in there whilst she comes into your house, which very conveniently just happens to be empty apart from you because everyone is away on holiday, remember? You can quickly nip to the bathroom, wash your face, splash on a bit of ‘Shag for men’ and you’re away’.

‘Oh joy! Unbridled lust continental style, and with a Swedish au pair to boot. Just wait until your mates here about this one!

I concluded to myself that the 'lady CV' was not only going to get qualifications on it, it was getting an honours degree from the University of Stockholm!

Phase one accomplished, we waved our fond farewells to her friend, dropping her off in the hospital car park ‘Take care. Lovely to meet you. Goodnight. See you soon. Yup, you too’. Look, just go will you’ is running through my head as the anticipation of what is to come gets nearer to being a full blown reality.

On any other occasion I would have happily have spent an eternity saying goodbye to her friend who was, in all honesty, a very attractive young lady. But this particular night I was on a mission. It was my destiny - and you really shouldn’t get in the way of destiny, even if you are an extremely attractive Danish nurse.

Phase two didn’t go so well.

Despite my protestations that I really shouldn't drive, Inge insisted that it would be OK. ‘We will just drive round this car park first and then, if you are doing good, you can drive back to your house, OK’?

It was a tough call I have to admit. I could have flatly refused. I could have feigned a heart attack or shrapnel wound in a sort of Basil Fawlty style, but no, Inge was quite insistent that I should drive. A quick glance round the deserted car park made up my mind for me. What could possibly go wrong?

I finally managed to wrestle the dog away from my face and climbed out of the fur-infested back seat and straight into the drivers. Inge then ran through the basic gist of what I was to do. Start the ignition, depress the clutch, put it into first gear, release the handbrake, slight revs, off you go.

It all sounded so easy.

By now my mind was working overtime thinking ‘Look, you’re not drunk, you’ve had a couple of pints, that’s all. Do the driving bit, get her back to yours and you are going to be the happiest bunny in the whole of bunnyland’.

There was one slight problem though.

As I started the ignition, depressed the clutch, engaged first gear, released the handbrake and gave it ‘slight revs’, I put my foot on the accelerator a bit too hard and the car shot straight into a wall whilst Inge screaming the words ‘brakes, brakes’ echoed in my ears.

Thankfully I had driven into the ward where they treat burns victims.

I say thankfully because if it had been a cardiac unit I daresay the bang that echoed around the car park and into the surrounding countryside would have wiped out most of the patients.

Let’s keep things in perspective here. At least I didn’t have mass murder on my hands – but I guessed that my chances of a shag had just diminished rapidly in those fateful few seconds.

Not for the first time in my life, panic and despair set in. We quickly swopped places. Add one barking sheepdog into the equation and you can imagine how I felt when the bursar came out to find out what was going on.

I didn’t actually look at his face. I was too ashamed to look anywhere, so I just listened to their conversation.

‘Is everything OK? What happened’? he enquired. ‘Oh I am so sorry. I just skidded on a patch of ice and lost control of the car for a second’ said Inge in her friendliest Swedish accent. ‘Oh that’s quite alright’ he replied, adding ‘You need to be careful in this cold weather you know’. A laugh and a wave later and he was gone!

Isn’t it amazing what a bit of feminine charm can do?

I mean, imagine if the roles had been reversed and I had been at the wheel. The police would have been called and I would have spent a night in the cells, no doubt accidentally banging my head on the wall on the way down. ‘Mind those steps, they are very slippery sir’.

I suppose I should have been thankful that I wasn’t caught sitting in the drivers seat, but instead I was cursing my bad luck and desperately wishing that the dog would shut up when it dawned on me that I had better do the gentlemanly thing and get out and assess the damage I had caused. Maybe I could retrieve the situation yet!

Not a chance.

In my very short career at the wheel, I had managed to crush the drivers side wheel arch down onto the tyre so that when Inge tried to pull away it made a high pitched howling noise that could be heard for miles around. The dog sounded positively like a diva by comparison.

Quite how it was possible to inflict so much damage on a vehicle in what could have been, at most, a ten yard run up, I have no idea. The body of the car must have been made of recycled drinks cans or something!

I soon found out that it wasn’t though when I tried a bit of the ‘he man’ thing (I never was much good at being one to be honest). I managed to move the arch ever so slightly so that, as we drove off, the noise was now only marginally worse than the sound of chalk scraping down a blackboard being amplified through a set of speakers and played back in an empty Albert Hall.

Suffice to say, the journey back to my house was spent mostly in embarrassed silence - only broken by me apologising profusely and wishing I could just die or simply disappear.

Inge was very good about it I must admit, but I didn’t have the guts to pipe up with that classic line ‘I suppose a shag is out of the question’.

I saw Inge a couple of weeks later. Apparently for all my worrying, and visions of her ‘boss’ coming round to my house and shoving a car jack up my arse or hospitalising me with a wheel brace, they were fine, only being concerned about her and the dog’s welfare.

The car was sent down to the local garage, had the panel beaten out and that was the end of the matter as far as they were concerned.

The damage to my ego took slightly longer to repair.

The last time I met Inge was in a night club in East Grinstead, shortly before she went home to Sweden.

As I sat at the end of the night as usual watching couples slow dancing together and wishing it was me someone was clinging to, Inge put her head on my shoulder and told me that if she hadn’t been going home maybe things could have developed between us.

The story of my life.

We laughed about the car incident, I gave her a quick peck on the cheek and we said our goodbyes - forever.