Hurlmere

Saddam's last Christmas...

2006-11-27T10:12:00.000Z

So Tony Blair is apologising for Britain’s part in the slave trade. We can look forward to more apologies, since there are plenty more episodes from our inglorious past for which neither Blair, nor his government, can be held responsible. The Irish Potato Famine. The bombing of Dresden. Losing to Germany on penalties. Again. However, if we want an apology for the one crime for which he is responsible – the War in Iraq – it looks like we’ll have to wait until his memoirs are published.

George Bush’s motivation for war was simpler. He had a vision of himself in battle fatigues, riding up front as the tanks rolled in to liberate Baghdad from the tyrrany of Sadam Hussein, and being cheered to the echo by grateful Iraqis. His little fantasy ended right there, with that victory parade, in the way that people in fairy stories live ‘happily ever after’. He no doubt thought the job was finished, once the fireworks had stopped. George Bush is probably regretting the day that Donald Rumsfeld blew the dust off the White House globe, and pointed out where Iraq was. The war wasn’t supposed to drag on like this, no sir; those Iraqis haven’t read the script.

Saddam Hussein must be shaking in his boots, as he faces yet another trial. Having already been sentenced to death by hanging, he’ll be wondering what’s next: a hefty fine, community service, a ‘short, sharp shock’? So much for victors’ justice...

Here in Hurlmere, we have the prospect of Christmas to distract us from these momentous world events. It’s less than a month away. Gulp...

It's the time of year when conversations tend to start with the meaningless pleasantry: "Are you ready for Christmas?" Don't say: "Ready for Christmas... how do you mean? Comatose? Broke? Bored? Argumentative? Suicidal?" This would just mark you down as a humourless killjoy. And don't brag that you bought all your presents back in October, or that your Christmas cards are already written, addressed, sealed up and stamped. This would mark you down as insufferably smug. The correct response to this kind of inanity is to clap both hands to your face, adopt a horrified expression and admit: "Oh God, no, I haven't even started yet." This reveals you to be as disorganised as the person asking the question, and honour will be satisfied all round.

2006-11-14T12:37:00.000Z

The man in black...

2006-11-11T15:34:00.000Z

Football referees are getting a lot of stick. From fans, managers, chairmen, players, pundits and journalists: anyone with an axe to grind, a pen to push or too much time to kill. It’s ‘open season’ on the men in black, and, well, it doesn’t seem very fair to Darren.

It’s a well-known truism amongst football fans that you don’t change clubs. Your unswerving loyalty may be based on something as insubstantial as a game your dad took you to when you were seven. But that’s it; that’s your club. Being a fan isn’t a matter of convenience. Watching a home game might entail a 300-mile round trip. No matter. Your team may be iredeemably hopeless, anchored to the foot of the table. That’s not the point. It’s your team. You support it ever more. Amen.

It makes about as much sense as using one brand of toilet paper all your life, simply because yout dad once wiped your arse with it. But, hey, that’s football for you.

Darren was in short trousers when his dad took him to see his first match. He can remember it like it was yesterday. The crowds; the floodlights; the racist chants; the surge of the crowd as a goal went in; some old guy pissing, via a rolled-up programme, into the pocket of his anorak. But, most of all, Darren was captivated by the calm composure of the referee. When the players were losing their heads, he would have a quiet word. When they swore at him, he would raise an admonishing finger. Even when they spat in his face and pushed him to the ground in a show of crowd-pleasing petulance, he managed to keep his cool. When players chased him, he ran backwards at speed. What a guy. No wonder Darren was star-struck.

When the other kids badgered their folks for replica shirts, Darren begged for a referee’s outfit and a whistle. It didn’t make for an easy life. When he shouted encouragement to the referee and his assistants - "Good decision, linesman" – he was shouted down. On the one hand, this taught him a lot about sportsmanship. On the other hand, the sight of a miniature referee was anathma to everybody in the stands. On match days he was in danger of being beaten up by both sets of fans.

To avoid spending Saturday afternoons with his wayward son, his dad would drive 30 miles to support some ice hockey team instead. The Penrith Perverts, or something. “I have no son”, he said, holding back the tears. He couldn’t see that Darren had found his vocation: standing up for referees when everyone else was castigating them.

Managers criticise referees, suggesting they’re part of some secret cabal (Referees United, perhaps?) dedicated to undermining Pele’s “beautiful game” with dodgy decisions. Yet managers encourage their own players to run into the penalty area and fall over, as though they’ve been shot by a sniper in the stands. Managers don’t have to agree with every decision that every referee makes, but they shouldn’t be given a soapbox for their post-match whinges either, which are as predictable as the seasons. Managers agree with 99% of decisions that go their way, and disagree with 99% of decisions that go against them. Insert an appropriate Mandy Rice-Davies quotation here.

Commentators put the boot in too. “I’d need to see that incident again”, says a pundit, unwittingly recognising that the ref gets just the one fleeting opportunity to make a decision. He’s denied what the commentators can see: the slo-mo replay from every conceivable angle. Everyone can make mistakes - even referees. If footballers never made mistakes, the team that kicked off would still be passing the ball to each other 45 minutes later.

Let’s be straight on the matter. The ref is a facilitator, arguably the most important person on the pitch. Without him, games would quickly degenerate into a playground brawl. And he can only officiate effectively with the players’ consent.

Darren longs for the day when players will keep their feet in the penalty area, and try, instead, to put the ball in the net. When these pampered, self-regarding millionaires will get down on bended knees and give grateful thanks to the referees who officiate their games. When managers will shut up and, well, manage. When fans will come to understand that you just can’t win ‘em all. And if his dream comes true, who knows... Darren might lay down his whistle for good and support some team instead. Hurlmere Harriers, down on Armpit Road, would welcome him with open arms.

A shower of sparks...

2006-11-09T10:44:00.000Z

It was Bonfire Night last week in Hurlmere (and everywhere else, presumably, where people have more money than sense). There was a new constellation of stars over Conciliation Street: neon chrysanthemums. Rocket zoom – an unrestrained “Ooooh!’... a shower of sparks – an unrehearesed “Aaaaah!” Scribbling nonsense in the sky with five grand’s worth of fireworks. It was brief, expensive, showy, meaningless: could there be a more appropriate symbol of modern life?

Speak of the devil...

2006-10-31T06:49:00.000Z

It's Halloween, so the shops are full of bats and face paints and pointy hats (memo to the manager of our local supermarket: don't ready-made pumpkin lanterns rather miss the point?).

The children of Hurlmere - dressed up as witches and wizards - are demanding money with menaces from unsuspecting householders. Steve, vicar of St Breville’s, looks on in frustration - wishing there was some way he could incorporate devil-worship into the church's calendar of sacraments, without alienating the more traditional members of his congregation.

Neville, landlord of the Grievous Bodily Arms, is boiling up a cauldron of oil in case any 'trick or treaters' have the temerity to call. This is not one of those pubs where businessmen go for lunch, with their Blackberries, braying voices and over-loud laughter. It's where strange, violent men with eyebrows that meet in the middle go to plan bank heists. While pubs such as the Flag feature guest beers, the Grievous Bodily Arms has guest bouncers.

What Hurlmere lacks, according to the drinkers propping up the bar, is a reputable brothel and an all-night pawnbroker. While you'd be unwise to ask for credit here, the barmaid can be quite obliging if a regular customer tips her the wink and rustles a fiver meaningfully between finger and thumb. So she makes a little money on the side by taking regular punters home after closing-time. She specialises in the things that women won't let their husbands do - like putting their elbows on the table and cutting their toenails in bed.

Spring forward, fall back...

2006-10-27T12:43:00.000+01:00

The clocks go back tomorrow. Unless it’s forward. Or next week. Whatever. One way or another, Hurlmere’s going to be gloomier and more depressing for, oh, about the next six sodding months. Soon the sun will set just after lunch - with nothing but game shows and lame comedies on TV to keep us from the existential, all-pervading dark.

The Lake District Escape Line (0870 224 1856), which opens today, apparently, includes seven recordings to “evoke a warmer era”. What could be more summery (the press release gushes) than the sound of Lake Windermere lapping against a jetty, the gush of Aira Force Waterfall, or fresh air whistling across Scafell Pike?

Well, how about some of the real sounds that typify the Lakeland life? Like the ker-ching of a cash register, as you’re being overcharged, yet again, by an avaricious shop-keeper or pub landlord? Or a jet flying over your house at an altitude of 20 feet, with a terrifying roar that sounds like a thermo-nuclear device being detonated inside your skull?

2006-10-22T14:09:00.000+01:00

Meals out...

2006-10-22T05:31:00.000+01:00

You can get a meal at most of the pubs in Hurlmere, apart from the Grievous Bodily Arms, of course, where the menu is limited to a choice of pork scratchings - with bristles or without. So here’s a handy ‘cut out & keep’ guide to what you can expect to get for your money...

On the lowest rung of the culinary ladder is ‘pub grub’, a ‘you get what you pay for’ deal that views food merely as ballast. There will be no surprises on the laminated, sauce-stained menu: just burger and chips, sausage and chips, pie and chips. There’s just the one vegetarian option: chips. A guy in a greasy vest will drop the plate in front of you.
Nobody will ask whether you’re enjoying your meal - for obvious reasons - but at least you get change out of a fiver.

For an extra quid or two you get ‘bar meals’: much the same unimaginitive fare, just with more florid descriptions (poisson, pommes frites avec pois mushy). You know your meal is nearly ready when you hear the ‘ping’ of the microwave. You’ll get garnish: a slive of cucumber and some limp lettuce. As she’s taking your empty plate away, the landlady will ask if it was OK, but she won’t wait around for your answer.

Some pubs have taken a lurch upmarket by dispensing with menus altogether, and writing the dishes on a blackboard. This pushes up the prices, since you’re paying about 50p for every extra adjective. ‘Pan-fried breast of corn-fed chicken, with a drizzle of raspberry coulis, served on a bed of wild rice’ will set you back at least a tenner. The waitress, a fresh-faced English rose, will hope you enjoy your meal. She’ll pop back when you’re half-way through, to check that your enjoyment is unabated.

We have a handful of gastropubs in the area, where they take food very seriously indeed. The Swan, for example, is aptly named. The staff, and the pub itself, seem to float serenely along through still waters. There’s a calm, unruffled air that proves happily contagious. Of course, it takes an awful lot of hard work behind the scenes to make catering appear so effortless. The staff give the impression that they actually enjoy working here: quite a novelty in a place like Hurlmere. They’re mostly young girls, smartly dressed in white blouses and black skirts. Intriguingly, they all seem to fall short, by the tiniest margin, of being absolutely bloody gorgeous. They’re wonderfully efficient and a little bit shy.

Your waitress will slide a huge, white, hexagonal plate under your nose. The food will be piled up into a sort of tower in the middle (if you were seven years old, this would be called “playing with your food” and you’d get a slap), with a moat of brightly coloured liquid surrounding it. Your vegetables – two baby sweet corns and a mange tout – will arrive on a separate platter.

You will be asked to enjoy your meal. She’ll keep hovering around. In fact she won’t leave you alone (“and how was that mouthful”). After you’ve finished, she’ll ask you if you’d like a sweet: an equally expensible – and tiiny - sliver of something sweet. What you really want, of course, is a burger and chips, because you’re just as hungry now as when you walked in. And there’s about twenty quid less in your pocket...

The last swallow...

2006-10-06T20:23:00.000+01:00

Limbo is a place, between heaven and hell, where newborn babies go who died before they could be baptised into the Catholic faith. What a comfort that must have been, down the centuries, to parents who lost a baby during childbirth.

The Pope’s having second thoughts about all this. A “30-strong commission of theologians established by John Paul II”, has decided, apparently, that unbaptised children deserve a better fate. It’s taken 700 years of hand-wringing and soul-searching for the Catholic Church to jettison this odious idea... when all it needed was one bloke in a funny hat to say: “Limbo? It’s bollocks, isn’t it?”

All those unbaptised children will now go straight to heaven. Great, except now it’s going to be over-run by kids. Christ, it’s going to be hell up there... like Hurlmere on a wet Bank Holiday: “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”...

Every sunny day in October is like being in remission from that unavoidable malady called winter. A solitary swallow dips and swoops over the lake. A few people noticed the first swallow of summer: a sighting that quickened the pulse, briefly, back in April. But nobody realises that the bird they see today - stretching its wings and preparing for that long flight south - is the last we shall see this year.

Evening classes...

2006-09-17T23:00:00.000+01:00

At this time of year Hurlmere folk are busy signing up to evening classes. Women go to classes in car maintenance to meet fit blokes... only to find that everybody else on the course is female too, with much the same idea. Blokes sign up to Indian Cookery classes, to meet fit lasses... and end up in a room full of other guys. After one week of checking the oil and making chapattis, no-one turns up for lesson two. Cars stay unmaintained; curries remain uncooked. Everyone can go back to feeling lonely and miserable, knowing that there’s nothing much to cheer us up between now and next spring.

A little light joshing...

2006-09-16T07:30:00.000+01:00

The Pope quotes a medieval ruler who thought Islam was "evil and inhuman”. Praise to the Pontiff for refusing to tiptoe around Muslim sensibilities: the man can really pick his moment. Respect to our Islamic friends too: they’re always ready for a rumble.

There’s always a load of placards stacked up in the hall and a brand new pot of paint. A few flags, too, bought from an Islamic website that specialises in ‘flammable flags’. Who’d have guessed the Danish flag would sell so well? They’re never too busy – or too idle – to over-react. They never say ”Hey, that Pope... what an idiot, eh? He must have had too much communion wine. Glug, glug. Come on, let’s not make a big thing about it.”

Now, more than any other time, we need the freedom to upset the followers of any and all religions, to be critical and satirical, as well as the freedom to hold our tongues. God is all-knowing and omnipotent; he can look after himself. He’s got a robust sense of humour and can take a little light joshing in his stride...

Having it both ways...

2006-09-14T06:24:00.001+01:00

Some people don’t enjoy being on their own. It doesn’t seem to bother Gina, though. Spreadeagled on a leathette sofa, naked apart from a velvet choker and a pair of white stilletos, she lets her hands wander idly over the warm, brown contours of her body. She seems perfectly content with her own company. With every caress she gives a little startled gasp, as though the probing fingers were not her own.

Arching her back in an exaggerated S-shape, Gina surrenders herself to sexual abandon. She doesn’t hold back - pleasuring herself expertly with two crooked fingers and a far-away look in her eyes. She bites her lip and closes her eyes.

Gina’s not the girl-next-door type (well, not unless you live next door to Hugh Hefner). She’s not about to get dressed and go to work; there seems to be no pressing reason why she should ever get dressed at all. She’s not exploring the dark continent that is womens’ sexuality; she’s every man’s fantasy made flesh.

Sensing she’s being watched, she opens her eyes in post-orgasmic langour. She stretches langorously, like a cat; looking out through the screen, she meet Kevin’s gaze with disarming directness.

“Hi Kevin, I hope you enjoyed my little show as much as I did”. Gina traces circles around her left nipple with a long, scarlet fingernail, and gives a well-practised moan. “I am here to satisfy your every whim. You can heap every imaginable sexual indignity upon my gorgeous young body, and I’ll still be begging for more.” The door opens. “Hey”, says Gina”, “maybe my friend Brandi can join in as well...”.

Brandi arrives, on cue, wearing nothing but a selection of skimpy PVC items. Gina and Brandi collapse onto the sofa in a photogenic tangle of tanned limbs. Mmmmm...

“Oh God, that’s good”, Gina gurns, in a convincing show of extasy. “And now I want you... yes you, Kevin... you with the straggly hair, the moist palms, the box of mansized tissues and the semen-stained underpants... to imagine you’re giving me a damn good seeing-to... and I want you to imagine it... now.” There’s a knock on the door. “Oh”, Gina raises an eyebrow in mock surprise, “I wonder who this can be?”

The door opens again; it’s the plumber, who sizes up the situation in an instant. Since he’s not wearing a thermal vest under his checked shirt, he probably doesn’t live in Hurlmere. And, to judge from the suspiciously new bag of tools he’s carrying, he might not be a genuine, time-served, CORGI registered plumber either. It doesn’t seem to matter; he hasn’t come to check the boiler or change a tap-washer. Seeing Gina and Brandi entwined in an intimate soixante-neuf manoevre, he just dives in. They say you can’t have it both ways, but the ensuing threesome suggests that you can.

There’s another, more insistant, knock on the door. Though the slurping threesome are too preoccupied to notice, Kevin leaps into action. As he presses a button on the laptop, the writhing figures disappear with a final ‘pop’.

Yes, that’s the trouble with fantasy: just when it starts to get interesting, real life has an unfortunate habit of butting in. Kevin zips up his fly, stuffs the tissues under a sofa cushion and answers the door. It’s the landlord, looking for his rent. “Come in”, says Kevin, glumly, “and we’ll look for it together.”

There are plenty of people in Hurlmere who are too ready to write Kevin off as just another sad, porn-obsessed pervert, but that’s not how he sees himself. He just has a well-honed appreciation of the unadorned female form, that’s all. And if that unadorned female is being shagged mercilessly by some well-hung, hairy-arsed stud... well, that’s nobody’s business but his.

A bad case of mildew...

2006-09-13T12:19:00.000+01:00

Autumn has arrived. Having delivered his usual post-mortem on yet another lacklustre season of predictable under-achievement, Dennis, captain of the Hurlmere cricket XI, offers his resignation - as he has done every September for the last twenty years. He's tired, disillusioned and nauseated by the smell of horse liniment. As he hurls his unwashed kit into the back of the wardrobe, he insists he's played his last game.

But winter will wipe away the feelings of failure that smart so much today. Next spring he will have a change of heart, think "maybe just one more season" and discover that the indelible grass stains on his flannels have been supplemented by a bad case of mildew. And, unaccountably, the waistband of his trousers will have shrunk about an inch.

As the evenings get shorter, the locals have a depressing foretaste of the long Lakeland winter to come. Wounded Man feels the seasonal changes more than most. Indeed, it was largely to assuage his own feelings of futility and despair that he decided to join the Hurlmere branch of the Samaritans. He hoped that listening to other peoples' misery might cheer him up.

It wasn't long before he saw ways to bring the organisation more up-to date - principally by setting up an automated answering service. Callers would hear a well-modulated female voice enjoining those with a touch-tone telephone to "Press 1 if you feel suicidal, press 2 if you want to have a wank, press 3 if you just want to waste our time". However, putting non-urgent callers on hold and forcing them to listen to a tinny rendition of the Last Post, played on a Rolf Harris Stylophone, was reckoned to fall below the Samaritans' high standards of empathy and understanding.

What finally brought his career as a Samaritan to a premature end was his suggestion for a uniform that would give the Samaritans a recognisable identity and help put despairing visitors at their ease. But when he turned up at the branch one day, wearing a full-face leather mask, with eye-holes, zips down the side and the word 'Samaritan' picked out in brass studs on the forehead, his fellow volunteers showed him the door with a collective and heartfelt sigh of relief.

Nat Gomorrah: a life in football, part 4...

2006-09-12T12:25:00.000+01:00

The fans took it remarkably well. In a moving show of sentiment, Nat won their votes as the club’s Player of the Year for 1969. And in a moving show of realism, they decided not to award him the traditional trophy, but gave him an orthopaedic bed instead.

As a reward for all his goals, Brian decided to keep Nat on the payroll. Nat’s been at the club ever since, an irreplaceable member of the backroom staff. Ironically, following an unequivocal vote of confidence from the club’s chairman, Brian got the sack. "He is a decent and honourable man”, the chairman said, “so we had to let him go". Since that time no fewer than twelve other incurable optimists have followed Brian through the revolving doors of football management.

Despite all these upheavals at the club, Hurlmere Harriers have never escaped from the Vauxhall Cars Beezer Homes Sherpa Van Division (North West). And now, in 2006, the team struggles to keep pace with the changing nature of football. That sign over the dressing-room door - This is Hurlmere - once struck terror into the hearts of visiting teams. Now it just makes them laugh. With an ageing team, the fastest-selling item at the club shop is a replica truss. Football’s all about money these days. If the fans are queuing all the way down Armpit Road, you can be sure it’s not season tickets they’re after, but share certificates.

It’s Saturday afternoon in Hurlmere and Nat hobbles onto the muddy pitch. It’s fifty years to the day since he played his first game for the Harriers. Waving to all corners of the ground, he does a laboured lap of honour. As the memories come flooding back, his eyes are rheumy, like a pair of oysters floating in milk. To look at Nat now, it's hard to imagine him leaping like a salmon at the far post, and heading one of Gary Brimstone’s pinpoint crosses into the top corner of the net.

Most of the crowd know him only as a backer of duff horses and a pub stalwart who, for the price of a pint, is happy to reminisce about the good old days. If you throw in a whisky chaser, he may show you his extensive collection of stud-marks. The current players smirk at this shambling figure but, in truth, they’re not fit to lace Nat’s drinks. He’s Hurlmere’s finest: a man who’s been there, done that and got the scar tissue. Nat Gomorrah, goal-poacher and footballing maverick, we salute you.

Nat Gomorrah: a life in football, part 3...

2006-09-11T12:17:00.000+01:00

Flabby, unfit and stung by the fans’ cruel taunts, Nat lurched down to the pub. If an alcoholic is a man who drinks more than his doctor, then Nat’s prognosis was grim indeed. As he sat morosely at the bar, sinking pints and whisky chasers, he poured out his troubles to a new barmaid called Sally. A good-looking girl, she'd done some modelling. Mostly, it must be said, for a company that made fridge magnets. Nevertheless, by the time Nat had unburdened himself, and the lights at the back of the bar were looking pleasantly blurred, he had fallen madly, desperately in love with her.

Nat was used to getting what he wanted, when he wanted it. So, after a whirlwind romance, he proposed. Impressed by his collection of Chris de Burgh records, and ignoring the warnings of well-meaning friends, Sally accepted. The wedding was the highpoint of Hurlmere’s social calendar. Fans came out in force, as a touching tribute to the team’s all-time record goal scorer. And, the year being 1967, the mere sight of a formal church wedding was enough to draw crowds.

There were many aspects of the wedding that should have made Sally think twice. Nat wanted to invite all his ex-girlfriends to the reception, but the building only had a fire license for two hundred people. Then there was the matter of the drip-dry wedding dress, and the cards from his more cynical friends that read: ‘Congratulations on your first marriage’. But love is blind. And probably deaf too. Which explains why Sally came to plight her troth to a man who thought monogamy was what you made furniture out of. A man who insisted, despite all Sally’s entreaties, on having a visitors' book on the bedside table.

With Sally’s help, Nat knuckled down to a strict regime of salads, early nights and sobriety. To the fans’ delight, he managed to win his place back in the team and renew his old partnership up front with Gary Brimstone. For Hurlmere Harriers it seemed like the good times were back again.

At first, Sally was able to handle Nat's mercurial mood-swings. But by the time they’d been together a year - and celebrating their Tupperware anniversary - cracks began to appear in their marriage. Having lost her virginity at a Hurlmere Harriers home game, Sally felt sexually inhibited unless the bedroom was full of cheering fans. And after years of gambling, drinking and having a series of meaningless affairs, Nat found marriage a bit of a letdown.

He recalled the good old days, when his sexual athleticism won plaudits. On one memorable occasion he’d even had a standing ovation from every member of a women’s netball team. But it’s always a mistake to try and relive past glories, especially in the marital bed. Sally came home one evening to find Nat in flagrante delicto with a couple of nubile young cheerleaders wearing nothing more than a light coating of olive oil.

Nat tried to make amends. "I'm sorry”, he bleated pathetically, “I'm only flesh and blood", which Sally correctly translated as "I'm an unprincipled bastard, a serial adulterer and an incorrigible liar... and the only thing I'm really sorry about is being found out”.

Sally could take no more of Nat’s philandering. She threw him out, changed the locks and got on with her life. Unlike Nat, who went into alcoholic freefall and gambled away what little money he still had. Perhaps somebody should have warned him never to play poker with soft-handed strangers, but Nat was deaf to well-meaning advice. His last words, before the heart attack that finally ended his playing career, were "Jacks or better... Ante up... Cut those cards... Let's play"...

Nat Gomorrah: a life in football, part 2...

2006-09-09T09:07:00.000+01:00

The fans took to Nat right away. They loved his flamboyance, his arrogance, his casual disregard for the rules of the game. Within weeks Nat had forged the striking partnership with Gary Brimstone that would bring such a glut of goals throughout the fifties and sixties. With Gary’s skill at crossing from the byeline, Nat’s uncanny ability to find goal, and Brian’s man-management, the trophy cabinet soon filled up with silverware. Yes, they were good times for Hurlmere Harriers. At three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, the compact ground on Armpit Road was the only place to be.

Those were the days when the maximum wage held sway, and Nat’s wages were never more than £20 a week. But with everyone in Hurlmere wanting to associate themselves with Nat’s achievements on the pitch, many a fat, manilla envelope was slipped into Nat’s jacket pocket as he propped up the bar of his local. In a rash moment of euphoria, following another Nat Gomorrah hat-trick, the butcher promised Nat that, as long as he lived, there would be a joint of beef on his dining table every Sunday. A local car dealer gave Nat an Austin Prefect, nearly new, with his name emblazoned on the side. Instead of painting the car to reflect the team colours, it seemed easier to change the team colours to match the car. That was why Hurlmere Harriers adopted the two-tone strip in the now-familiar colours of tarnished chrome and black leatherette.

Success came easily to Nat. Perhaps too easily. Never short of self-confidence, the boy from the back-streets began to believe the adulatory headlines in the Hurlmere Echo. He thought there was one rule for him, and another for the rest of the team. While they were working up a sweat down at the training ground, he’d be drinking in the local pubs. With only his dad as a role model, he succumbed to instant gratification. A life that was once so promising became one long lock-in of lager-topped licentiousness.

Whenever he wasn’t buying drinks for his freeloading friends, he’d be frittering his time and his money away at the betting shop. Nat loved a flutter; he’d bet on anything, happy to make unsolicited contributions each week to the bookmakers' benevolent fund. One day he bet a fiver that the 4.30 at Cartmel would be run at 5 o'clock. He lost, of course, but the odds were just too good to pass up.

Nat Gomorrah: a life in football, part 1...

2006-09-07T12:04:00.000+01:00

As he reaches the landmark of fifty years with the club, let's celebrate the career of Nat Gomorrah, the best centre forward ever to pull on a Hurlmere Harriers shirt. To the players of today, unaware of the club’s history, Nat’s just an old geezer with a gammy knee and a nose like an over-ripe strawberry. The guy who washes their kit and re-marks the pitch with quicklime. But to those who have followed the peregrinations of Hurlmere Harriers, around the Vauxhall Cars Beezer Homes Sherpa Van Division (North West), Nat Gomorrah is a living legend.

Nat was born with football boots on: a difficult birth by any standards. They were tough, those wartime years, especially in the Gomorrah household. Nat was the youngest of nine children, so, with never enough clothes to go round, the kids had to take turns playing out.

The Gomorrahs got by the best they could. Nat’s mum traded sexual favours with homesick American GIs for life’s little luxuries, like bubble-gum and nylon stockings: reckoned, at the time, to have been a fair swap. Money was tight, and so was his dad. He’d be down the pub, pissing away any spare cash he could find, and, in the process, providing an unfortunate role model for the impressionable Nat.

As a lad, Nat would spend hours dribbling a ball around the furniture of the cramped little house in Hurlmere. He learned how to nutmeg the wash-stand, and leave the sofa standing, before side-footing the ball between the legs of the kitchen table. “The boy’s a fool”, his dad would say, as Nat pulled a grubby vest over his head and practised his post-goal celebrations, “I’m off down the pub”.

Nat was playing a kickabout game in the park when he was talent-spotted by Brian Shoulder - then manager of Hurlmere Harriers - who selflessly devoted his Sunday mornings to watching young lads at play. Impressed by the lad’s precocious skills with the ball, Brian encouraged Nat to come to the ground for a trial.

Blessed with an educated left foot, Nat proved to be a natural goal-scorer. His right foot couldn't even manage a CSE in woodwork, but, hey, that's football for you. In next to no time he had risen through the youth team and the reserves; when he made his debut in the first team, back in 1950, he was just a gangly youth of fifteen, wearing borrowed shin-pads.

“A view, a brew and a loo”...

2006-09-05T10:22:00.000+01:00

At the height of summer, people need little more than an optimistic weather forecast to attract them to Hurlmere in hordes. They’ll put up, uncomplainingly, with bad food, over-priced accommodation and surly landlords, until their pockets are empty and they have to go back home again. Their needs are few: just “a view, a brew and a loo”, as Brenda acknowledges, in one of her more cynical moments.

If we want to keep the visitors coming all year round, we have to be a bit more imaginative. It’s Brenda’s job, as Hurlmere’s Tourism Officer, to dream up new ideas that will keep visitors coming out of season. There’s been no shortage of ideas, over the years, for opening up the clenched fists of visitors and prising a few coppers out, just a shortage of good ideas.

There was the Running of the Sheep, inspired by a holiday Brenda had taken in Pamploma. With Book Burning Day she tried to revive a fine old tradition that had rather fallen out of favour since the collapse of the Third Reich. When foot and mouth closed all the footpaths five years ago, and transformed the Lakeland landscape into a charnel house from Hell, Brenda tried to persuade seasoned walkers to stay off the fells. She created, instead, a ‘town trail’ that stuck resolutely to Tarmac, and guided walkers around some of Hurlmere’s many attractions.

Starting, sensibly enough, from the pay & display car-park, the Hurlmere Trail visited the cricket pitch (‘The scene of many epic performances. Usually by the opposition’), the duckpond (‘It attracts many species of ducks. Mallards mostly’) and the office of the Hurlmere Echo (‘Interesting, no doubt, to those who want to watch a large man in a swivel chair eating cake’). Walkers were warned to keep clear of the Grievous Bodily Arms, for good Health & Safety reasons. You can’t be too careful...

2006-09-04T19:14:00.000+01:00

Jemima Bleeding Puddleduck...

2006-09-04T18:08:00.000+01:00

September’s here already, and the kids are back at school. For most other holiday destinations in Britain, this marks the end of the tourist season: no more donkey rides, no more candy floss, no more alcohol-fuelled punch-ups along the sea-front. Apart from the stag and hen nights – and they can be more trouble than they’re worth - it’s all downhill from here until Christmas.

Here in the Lake District, though, the tourism tap is never switched off. Japanese people pour out of coaches every single day of the year, their enthusiasm undimmed for anything connected with Beatrix Potter. The lakes and mountains barely get a second glance, but they’d walk over burning coals to see Peter Rabbit or Jemima Bleeding Puddleduck.

England 5, Andorra 0...

2006-09-03T10:31:00.000+01:00

The boys done good at Old Trafford yesterday; it’s not often you hear a BBC commentator getting so carried away... “Ramon Velasquez... Pablo Paloma... Marcel Mignon... Albert Pinero... Juan Ignacio de St Auberge Picabbia... Your boys took one hell of a beating!”...

For those unacquainted with these famous Andorrans...

Ramon Velasquez was Minister for Culture in the Andorran government, 1994-97. With precious little culture to administrate, he took the role as a Saturday job, leaving him plenty of time to indulge his passion for wearing spats and propositioning showgirls.

Pablo Paloma has arguably been Andorra’s most heralded artist. in 2004 he put all his worldly goods through a car-crusher as “a gesture of solidarity with people who have nothing”. When last heard of, he was living under a bridge.

Marcel Mignon wrote Andorra’s most successful entry in the Eurovision Song Contest. He and his band shared 19th place, back in 1969, with ‘Shave your missus for me’. The song was dedicated to the bass-player’s wife, who was known for her luxurient growth of pubic hair. While some women trimmed their bush into the shape of a heart, she was able to recreate the chariot race from Ben Hur. That song should have been the first single of a lucrative career; unfortunately the tune was hijacked by an unscrupulous music publisher, who changed the lyrics. Brotherhood of Man blew away the competition at the 1976 Song Contest, and took their bastardised version - ‘Save Your Kisses for Me’ - to the top of the charts.

Albert Pinero was Andorra’s answer to Jean Paul Sartre, tackling the questions that have stymied mankind since the dawn of time. “Why are we here”, he would ask, plaintively, “instead of, say, over there?”

Juan Ignacio de St Auberge Picabbia was known throughout the mountainous principality for having a rather long name.

A sleeping dwarf...

2006-09-02T11:19:00.000+01:00

England are playing Andorra today. Steve McClaren insists the team will give the plucky Andorrans “respect”. Why? Andorra’s not a country... it’s just a duty-free shop in the middle of the Pyrenees, ranked 132nd in the world (which just edges them ahead of Rockall). Respect the Andorrans, by all means, for their keen prices, spectacular mountain scenery and their splendid contributions to the visual arts. But football? Forget it...

You could fit every resident of Andorra into Old Trafford, and they’d all have a seat (a few of them might want to stay behind in Andorra, of course, to make sure the place doesn’t get burgled. But the point still stands). If England can’t put a dozen goals past a motley collection of postmen, butchers, bakers and independent financial advisors, then we might as well give up. Christ, even our local football team could give Andorra a game.

It's approaching three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, and Hurlmere Harriers are being cheered onto the muddy pitch by a few loyal fans. So few, indeed, that the team has been informed, over the tannoy, of changes to the crowd. It's a chilly and cheerless afternoon in September, with an autumnal nip in the air. Older guys test the credulity of the younger fans by recalling the Ice Age ("Now that was cold...") when the arctic weather brought such chaos to the fixture list that the pools panel had to meet for three million Saturdays in a row...

Hurlmere Harriers are known in the league - the Vauxhall Cars Beezer Homes Sherpa Van Division (North West) - as a sleeping dwarf. A club destined for mediocrity at best. With the team having spent years propping up the league, the club chairman decided during the summer that drastic action was required. When he swapped the entire squad for two bags of Cheesy Whatsits, local football pundits reckoned he'd got the best of the bargain.

The new crop of players have mostly been plucked from park football. Still unaccustomed to the luxury of real goalposts they have to be dissuaded from throwing their jackets down on the grass before the start of play. The captain picks his team in traditional fashion ("one potato, two potato...") which is why the scrawny players with glasses warm the substitutes' bench for game after game.

When the sports reporter from the Hurlmere Echo says that the players are "a good advertisement for the game", he is merely pointing out that they are covered from head to foot in sponsors' logos. Whenever they get injured, the players are contracted to crawl towards an advertising hoarding, in case the photographer from the Echo has remembered to put a film in his camera. Yes, the financial situation at the club really is that dire.

This is Hurlmere, so the club has a sports psychologist who works on the players' motivation. Nevertheless, when it comes to getting the best out of players, no-one's yet come up with a better method than locking them in a small room and shouting at them. The bells at St Diana's Church are chiming three o'clock, so the pep-talk has to stop. Before taking his place in the dugout (actually a lean-to shed from B & Q), the manager cups his hands and bellows his final encouragement: "The grass is green, the paint is fresh... so get out there and bloody play"...

Five numbers up on the lottery...

2006-09-01T12:01:00.000+01:00

For an inveterate gambler, Bob the postman has the ideal job. He’s generally finished his round by 2pm... maybe earlier if he’s tossed the junk mail into a skip. That leaves his afternoons free to hang around in the bookies, with time to drown his sorrows in the Grievous Bodily Arms.

Gambling appeals to greed and sloth: the alluring idea of getting something for nothing. If six numbers appear on your card, you could be a millionaire. No strategy, no business plan, no playing around on the stock market... best of all, no hard work, except the time spent in idle imaginings.

Bob’s not so greedy: “Five numbers up on the lottery; that’d be alright. We’d have a holiday and maybe a new car. What’s that? Oh, go on then. Same again”. Twice a week Bob writes a resignation letter to his boss, detailing - in ever more graphic terms - just where he can stick his job. Twice a week, having failed to win the lottery, he tears the letter up.

Losing is a shared experience: the iniquities of the world boiled down to the toss of a coin, the appearance of a lottery ball. Losing is more powerful than winning - more visceral, more intense. As he eases himself onto a barstool and orders a beer, Bob feels he’s amongst friends. Or, if not friends, then drinking buddies: people he can borrow money off and share racing tips with, while confiding nothing more personal than his collar size. Which actually makes these strange, mis-shapen guys the best kind of friends a man can have.

Gambling fever...

2006-08-31T14:20:00.000+01:00

The government is hoping to revive the fortunes of one down-at-heel resort by building a new super-casino. Finally we have a Labour government returning to first principles, by promoting the redistribution of wealth. Just a shame it’ll be poor folk giving money to the rich, rather than the other way round. Do people really yet another opportunity to piss their money up the wall? Isn’t life a big enough gamble already?

Betting shops used to be grim places where men in shabby clothes would stand around, ankle-deep in torn-up betting slips, smoking roll-ups and wondering how they’d break it to the wife that their weekly wage now belonged to Ladbrokes. The windows were painted over... which merely lent the places an unwarranted air of excitement and intrigue.

Betting shops are going upmarket, of course. Hurlmere now has a branch of Ladbrokes: smart, clean, comfy, with banks of TV screens showing which hopeless nag you’ve backed. You can get coffee, maybe a sandwich, but the result’s the same as ever: you lose most of the money you walked in with (the clue’s in the name, for God’s sake: ‘lad’ and ‘broke’).

Where did this gambling fever come from? Is the government addressing a long-felt need of the electorate to risk their jobs, livelihood, marriages, famiies, reputation - in fact everything they hold dear – for the sake of a flutter? Have people been marching up and down with placards: ‘We want to lose our money, and we want to lose it now’?

Gambling is insinuating itself into every aspect of our lives. Next time you go to the cash machine in town, you’ll find an extra option on the screen. In addition to getting some spending money, or topping up your mobile, or checking the parlous state of your account, you’ll be offered an innovative ‘double or quits’ feature. What’s next: ‘Best of three’?

Dr Bloor and his Cold Water Cure...

2006-08-30T19:34:00.000+01:00

Hurlmere’s fortunes might have taken a very different turn. Back in 1848 it seemed that Hurlmere might become a spa town to rival Ilkley or Harrogate. The chance discovery of a source of brackish water encouraged the members of the Town Council to let their imaginations run riot. They assumed, since it tasted so foul, that the water must have invigorating properties. And the smell was even worse than the taste, which seemed to clinch the argument.

The first person to exploit the potential of this water source was Dr Ernest Bloor, a local practitioneer bored with treating mundane complaints, like warts and veruccas, and listening to his elderly patients rabbit on about their aches and pains. He was destined, he felt, for greater things. Which is why he established a small sanatorium, close to the spring, in the hope of persuading the great and good to come to Hurlmere and have their hypochondria pandered to in convivially upmarket surroundings. If he was going to spend his life dealing with imaginary maladies - and it looked like he was - he reckoned he should get well paid for his troubles. The sanatorium’s brochures* presented an upbeat impression of the town, illustrated with pictures that owed little to reality and a great deal to the artist’s imagination.

Dr Bloor and his Cold Water Cure enjoyed a moderate success; for a couple of years the town was full of surprisingly fit-looking people being pushed around the promenade in bath-chairs. After a few days of the cold water cure, and being reassured about how sick they really were, the health of most visitors declined in a gratifying manner. Unfortunately, there was little provision for dealing with genuine ailments, so whenever minor chills developed into pneumonia, the further application of cold water only made things worse.

Too many of Dr Bloor’s patients died: an inconvenient state of affairs which ended the treatment before it had had a proper chance to work. Dead people also created a lot of time-consuming paperwork. With the immediate families of the deceased being reluctant, under the circumstances, to settle his bills, Dr Bloor had no choice but to file for bancruptcy.

Instead of being welcomed into the upper echelons of Hurlmere society, Dr Bloor was struck off the medical register. He suffered the further ignominy of being blackballed by the members of the Union of Charlatans, Shysters, Mountebanks, Quacks, Hucksters and Snake-Oil Peddlars (still in existence, but, since the amalgamation of 1983, now operating, as the Union of Charlatans, Shysters, Mountebanks, Quacks, Hucksters, Snake-Oil Peddlars and Affiliated Workers in the Advertising and Public Relations Industries), which took a bit of doing.

Hurlmere never became the spa town that Dr Bloor had envisaged, and he died a bitter and broken man. Yet, in pandering to the delusions of gullible people, he unwittingly became a role model for the new-age charlatans who came to Hurlmere in more recent times.

* A pristine example of Dr Bloor’s brochure can be found in the small museum collection created by the Hurlmere and District Natural History Society, which, more than a century later, has still to find a permanent home. With the collection currently split between three secret addresses, the easiest way to acess any of the museum exhibits is to sidle up to one of the ladies in the Tourist Information Centre, rap three times, discreetly, on the counter-top, and whisper, sotto voce, “The geese are flying tonight”.

2006-08-30T06:25:00.000+01:00

Ringing 999...

2006-08-26T08:32:00.000+01:00

These days you can be fined for dropping a fag-end in the street, or flossing in a built-up area, while the real villains are busy robbing us blind. Instead of shooting CCTV footage of some poor, drug-addled sap nicking a bottle of British sherry from the off-license, we should be installing cameras in the boardrooms of some of our multinational companies and privatised utilities. We might get advance warning when those fat cats award themselves huge, unmerited pay-rises and consider raiding their employees’ pension funds.

All this surveillance equipment in Hurlmere might allow a few Daily Mail readers to sleep more easily in their beds at night, but it’s little more than a placebo. Burglars who set an alarm off during a robbery can just carry on stuffing valuables into their swag bags, secure in the knowledge that the police won’t show up for hours. Instead of ringing 999, it would be quicker to put a small ad in the Hurlmere Echo.

We’ve learned, of necessity, to manage without the long arm of the law. When we’ve been burgled we go straight to the Stolen Property Department (housed, conveniently, in the back room of the Grievous Bodily Arms) and make discreet enquiries.

The placebo option...

2006-08-24T15:04:00.000+01:00

We’re cranking up for another Bank Holiday: summer’s last hurrah. The ‘road safety’ sign on the approach to town has been taken down. Hurlmere no longer ‘Welcomes Careful Drivers’. By the end of August we’re not so choosy – happy to welcome even the most reckless drivers as long as they’ve got money in their pockets. Even under-age joy-riders from Lancashire mill-towns may have some ill-gotten cash to spend on burgers and alcopops, before ‘parking’ their stolen cars in the lake.

Plans are afoot to install close-circuit cameras around Hurlmere, to keep an eye on such miscreants, even though cameras would arguably create as many problems as they'd solve. If it's to be any use at all, camera evidence must be continually monitored. Who will be prepared to watch hour after hour of unremarkable videotape, on the off-chance of catching our Town Drunk pissing in a shop doorway? Even the most enthusiastic voyeur would soon get bored. Maybe we could market the footage, in 24-hour chunks, as lost classics from the Andy Warhol school of film-making.

The elected councillors of Hurlmere have fudged the issue. They've gone, predictably, for the placebo option: fake cameras, constructed from shoe-boxes and toilet rolls, mounted in prominent positions around the centre of town. The cost of materials will be minimal: sticky-back plastic, mostly. We live in hope that a battery of counterfeit cameras will deter wrong-doers, especially short-sighted ones.

Rare weeds and biting insects...

2006-08-23T03:05:00.000+01:00

Hurlmere’s compact cricket ground is a piece of reclaimed land by the lake which, after rain, defaults to what it used to be: a stagnant bog. Designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest, it's a valuable habitat for rare weeds and biting insects.

Cricket’s a wonderful game. How many other sports can be played, to the highest level, in a broad-brimmed hat? How many other sports are constructed around meal times? How many other sports can be played for five whole days and still not produce a result? During how many other games can a spectator fall asleep for an hour, and wake up – dribbling and disorientated - to find that he’s missed nothing of any importance. The Yanks will never understand cricket: just one more reason to love the summer game.

A brand new cricket ball is beautiful, as lustrous as a conker straight out of its shell. But, like a conker, it loses its bloom so very quickly. Some of our players have a red stain on the the crotch of their cricket trousers – marking them out as either a fast bowler or a desperately unlucky batsman. After a few overs the ball becomes dull and scuffed, teaching the flanelled fools the valuable lesson that good things don’t last.

The ball-tampering farago has taken the gloss off the game, leaving it dull and scuffed. If you take away cricket's civilities, you’re left with just another game where winning is all that matters. Like any other game, but slower... just baseball on Valium...

Hold tight at the back...

2006-08-21T03:16:00.000+01:00

The Hurlmere run is viewed by the bus-drivers as a punishment for poor time-keeping. If they want to get their regular routes back, they’ll have to follow the bus-drivers’ handbook to the letter. This requires them to accelerate as fast as possible from every bus-stop, then braking equally hard at the next one - thus making the journey as uncomfortable as possible for their passengers.

With a glance in the mirror and a well-timed tap-dancing routine on the gas pedal and the brake, they can transfer an old biddy and her shopping trolley from one end of the bus to the other in less time than it takes to say “Hold tight at the back”. It’s moments like these that make a bus-driver’s life worthwhile.

It’s a shame that buses are so maligned. OK, they’re mundane and utilitarian, but they get the job done. They just don’t inspire obsessive devotion, in the way that, say, motorbikes do. Otherwise these old biddies would be taking buses out to some scruffy café, in the middle of nowhere, with tables and chairs bolted to the lino floor, where they’d congregate in noisy groups, slurping strong tea from chipped mugs and talking about... well, buses mostly.

Debrett’s Guide to Omnibus Etiquette...

2006-08-20T04:48:00.000+01:00

Newcomers to bus travel need to be tutored in bus etiquette. Even choosing where to sit requires a little care. You might imagine you can sit wherever you like, but this is not the case. The bus is, albeit invisibly, segregated into different sections. On top it's kids at the front, smirking teenagers at the back, with adults - mostly smokers with hacking coughs - in the middle. On the bottom it’s old folk and the mad, with the oldest and most infirm towards the front. There is just enough space by the door for one boring arsehole - male, middle-aged, with a comb-over - to stand all the way into town and make small-talk to the driver.

It’s an uneasy mixture. The old folk look at the kids and regret their own lost youth, so long ago, when they still had most of their marbles. Seeing these kids - so boistrous and carefree - just adds insult to old age. The kids barely notice the old folk at all. They might conclude “Oh my God, that’s what I’ll be like one day”, but they are spared such gloomy thoughts by the happy conviction that they are immortal and that old age is something that happens to other people, and won’t effect them at all.

There is, please note, no first class section on a bus: no convenient way to winnow the wheat from the chaff, no demarcation between the riff-raff and the elite. There’s nowhere on a bus for a man in a pin-striped suit to sit and work at his laptop. Nowhere to spread out a spreadsheet. Nowhere to get a cup of coffee and a sandwich. But the social niceties of bus travel don’t end there. For example, do you sit next to someone you’ve been chatting to in the bus queue? To do so might seem a little forward, while not to do so might appear stand-offish. Or maybe you’re sitting next to someone on a crowded bus which almost empties at one stop. Should you now move to a new seat - and risk offending your neighbour - or stay where you are, wedged so tightly together that you can’t even cross your legs? We need a manual of our own - Debrett’s Guide to Omnibus Etiquette, perhaps - to help us mind our manners.

Parma voilets and piss...

2006-08-19T18:37:00.000+01:00

It can be fun to bounce around the country lanes in a bus - at least for those blessed with strong constitutions and with few constraints upon their time. The rural routes are in decline (“What’s that big red thing, dad?” “It’s a bus, lad. Take a good long look; it may be the last you see round here”) so go on, catch a country bus while you still can.

As soon as the bus-drivers venture off the main road and take to the hills, the normal rules of bus travel are suspended for the duration of the trip. Forget whatever you’ve read in the timetable, especially the length of time your journey might take. Don’t be lulled into any false sense of security by the idea that the bus is only going a few miles. The country lanes above Hurlmere are unmapped, labyrinthine, bereft of signs. Even locals get lost. Roads can come to a sudden end at a muddy farmyard, or deteriorate into a cart-track that heads off God knows where. Some of the bus-drivers have such a poor sense of direction that they have to to stop periodically and ask the passengers which way to go. It’s not unknown for the drivers to organise a whip-round to fill up the tank.

You’ll need provisions. Imagine you’re embarking on an African safari, and pack accordingly. At the very least, you should take some refreshments for the outward leg. If you’re attacked by crazed pensioners, suffering from hunger and acute tannin deprivation, you may be able to hold them off with some cheese & pickle sandwiches and a flask of milky tea. In extremis, a bag of Werthers Original might do the trick. Wear a scarf or cravat over your face; it will help to keep out the dust and the flies and the overpowering smell of parma voilets and piss. By the time the bus rolls into Hurlmere once again, having covered half the county, most of the passengers will be delirious. No wonder the rural routes have been re-classified as white-knuckle rides.

The ultimate humiliation...

2006-08-18T07:48:00.000+01:00

Buses arrive in Hurlmere on a regular basis. But you won’t just see a few old biddies with tartan shopping trolleys. Oh no. There’ll be a hundred Japanese tourists, with cameras clicking even before their feet meet the pavement. We have open-topped buses to take visitors around the lake and tell them when to look left or right. In fact the only kind of buses we rarely see are the only kind we actually need: buses that go to neighbouring towns and back again, hopefully the same day.

Buses suffer from a major image problem. Travelling by bus is a rather too accurate indicator of social standing, winnowing the wheat from the chaff. Motorists look at buses in the same way that our great-grandparents looked at the workhouse: in fear and trepidation that one day they too might be reduced to this most public admission of defeat. Petrol would need to be £100 a litre before drivers would consider giving up the sheer convenience of sitting in a traffic jam with hundreds of other cars, drumming impatient fingers on leatherette dashboards. Damn it, they’d rather push the car to work than be seen catching a bus.

A bus is not a viable option for busy go-getters - with places to go, people to do and deadlines to meet. If a busy executive were to get on a bus, he might just as well wear a badge on his lapel reading ‘I’ve been sacked, my company car’s been taken back and I’m on my way to the Job Club. Kill me now, please, it would be a kindness’. He would rather stand naked in the company car-park, being flicked remorselessly with wet towels, than be forced to spend a single second sitting on a bus. It’s the ultimate humiliation.

Lycra louts...

2006-08-15T09:59:00.000+01:00

A car may be essential for anyone living around Hurlmere, but it can be a liability too. With the exorbitant charges at pay & display car-parks, it costs more to leave a car standing still than it does to put a few miles on the clock. And that can’t be right.

Cycling is a good idea, in theory. In practise, however, cycling reinforces the notion of life as a lottery, with an accident blackspot at every turn. Cars and cyclists have the same kind of relationship as bulls and china shops; the further apart they are kept, the better. No-one gives way to cyclists - or ‘organ donors’, as they’re known down at the A & E Department. Even when they take refuge in bus-lanes, they have to share them with taxis and buses: the cyclists’ natural predators. Sudden death is never more than a heartbeat away.

Then there’s the clobber to consider. It’s an ‘all or nothing’ kind of deal these days. You can’t just go for a bike ride, you’ve got to buy into the whole cycling schtick. If you wear something sensible, you’ll be shunned by other cyclists. If you wear what they wear (a helmet that looks like a pound of over-ripe bananas and figure-hugging Lycra in a variety of day-glo colours, embellished with a stripe of mud all the way up the back) you’ll be openly mocked by everybody else. Prat or pariah: never an easy choice to make.

If you weave in and out of stationary traffic, you’ll make an enemy of every car driver you pass. Since drivers have long memories, short fuses and a pathalogical loathing of Lycra louts, you’ll be storing up trouble for yourself.

Crossing a contour line...

2006-08-14T10:36:00.000+01:00

Seasoned hikers need little persuading that Hurlmere is the ideal base from which to explore the Lakeland fells. But, almost by definition, they tend to be a self-reliant bunch. Instead of throwing their money about in Hurlmere, they come prepared for every eventuality - with rucksacks full of waterproofs, maps, blister cream, sandwiches and flasks of tea. Within ten minutes of arriving in Hurlmere, they are just specks disappearing over the first horizon.

For every accomplished hiker, however, there are dozens of people whose walking experience extends no further than a brief expedition down to the corner shop to buy a paper and twenty Bensons. People who have never knowingly crossed a contour line. They come ill-prepared for a change in the weather, or the ravages of hunger and thirst - assuming, unwisely, that there’ll be a take-away over the crest of every hill. The only thing they carry is a little brochure about the newly inaugurated Hurlmere Way: a splendid ramble that includes some of the area's loveliest landscapes. The proud handiwork of our tourism officer, the brochure offers - in theory, at least - an easily-followed route.

So much for theory. A few disgruntled farmers have tossed the newly-erected waymarking signs over the nearest dry stone wall or - more sneakily - rotated the finger-posts through ninety degrees. The result is a lot of disorientated walkers staring uncomprehendingly at their brochures, holding them first one way and then the other. The only thing they are sure of is that they are hopelessly lost.

This is the moment that panic sets in. The hills that looked so inviting through the windscreen of a speeding car now seem gloomily oppressive. The trees creak and bend alarmingly in a stiffening wind. Storm clouds gather. Grouse take off with heart-stopping suddenness, their call a mocking “Go back, go back”.

Groups of terrified walkers are emptying out their pockets. Some, fearing the worst, are scribbling notes to their loved ones: heartfelt things they wish they had said much earlier. Others are pooling their meagre resources, wondering how long they might survive by sharing a packet of Cheesy Wotsits and a can of Tizer. One or two are thinking the unthinkable: if the worst came to the worst, who would they eat first? Then someone cuts through the rising hysteria by fishing out a mobile phone.

Hurlmere’s hill rescue service is manned by a dedicated crew of men who would give Chris Bonnington a run for his money in a Chris Bonnington look-alike contest. In the past they’ve mustered every few weeks to bring an injured walker down from the tops. But now the fells are full of idiots with mobile phones, who regard the rescuers as an extension of room service.

They have only the vaguest notion of what constitutes an emergency, which is why the rescuers are taking an increasing number of calls requesting they deliver “a new pair of boot-laces” or “some milk for the tea, we forgot to bring any”. Some callers don’t have a clue where they are: “If we knew where we were, we wouldn’t be ringing you, would we? We're lost, for God's sake. Send a helicopter; it's starting to rain...”

2006-08-12T06:11:00.000+01:00

The Glorious Twelfth...

2006-08-12T06:09:00.000+01:00

Today is the Glorious Twelfth, when buffoons in mud-coloured clothing load up their Purdeys and send fat gamebirds to meet their maker. It’s a strange pastime; the attraction of shooting, like eating truffles, stems mostly from it on being both expensive and exclusive. If shooting was a cheap hobby - and the plebs could afford it too - wealthy folk would look for other ways to satisfy their blood-lust in a sociable outdoor setting.

It’s not such a glorious time of the year for the grouse and pheasants which have been bred for the shoot. Maybe not so glorious for the brave hunters either, because gamebird numbers have taken a tumble. They’ve succumbed to a variety of diseases, apparently... to avoid being blasted out of the sky by Japanese businessmen.

It may be for the best. We can recall, with a shudder of revulsion, what happened this time last year, when a shooting party was let out onto the fells with insufficient supervision. After an hour of frenzied activity, the catch was counted: grouse, sheep, one of the beaters and a couple of trout...

2006-08-10T17:52:00.000+01:00

Bandit country...

2006-08-10T11:04:00.000+01:00

It could happen to anyone. Well, anyone on the internet anyway. You're emailing each other. You find you have a lot in common. You're getting pretty close. Then suddenly, after months of soul-searching and breathlessly erotic correspondence, you realise that you've actually been pouring out your heart to a West Highland Terrier called Scotty. Or an 85-year-old criminally insane old bugger serving three life-sentences in Broadmoor. Or... who knows? Once you've waved goodbye to the real word (or '3D', as the netizens call it), you're cast adrift in the uncharted regions of cyberspace, where you can pretend to be whoever you want to be. It's a lawless place, bandit country, where the normal rules of life no longer apply. Where pornographers and conspiracy theorists find a home for their unsavoury wares. Where even the Luddites, God bless 'em, have their own website.

The Internet attracts hysterical headlines about the availability of pornography - as though the top-shelf of Hurlmere's own newsagent wasn't a more convenient source of smut. There's a lot of filth out there, in the cesspit of cyberspace. At least there is if you know where to look. And, yes, tapping the word 'sex' into Google will do for starters. You'll find terabytes of copyright violations. Billions of pictures. An endless production line of women - their nipples pert and pixilated - who look like they've been shot through the back by twin torpedoes. Women have sex with ponies; on upmarket sites they have sex with polo ponies.

Surfing the internet is a simple, one handed-operation. The upside is that web pages never get stuck together; the downside is the ever-present threat of repetitive strain injury. It's important, of course, to preserve our God-given right to disseminate filth to minors. Nevertheless it's a defining moment to realise that 'virtual sex' is never going to rival the real thing. When, after weeks of assiduous searching for cybersmut, all you have to show for your efforts is a gargantuan phone bill and a pile of virtual pin-ups hidden under your virtual mattress. Yes, despite all the hype about the internet, you still can't beat the old-fashioned idea of having two eager and consenting adults giving each other a serious seeing-to. Especially if it's two good-looking lasses and they'll let you watch.

The history men...

2006-08-07T23:00:00.000+01:00

The fortnightly meetings of the Hurlmere Antiquarian and Local History Society are held in a dusty room at the back of the library. The key is only available to members of the society and other registered pedants. Here, displayed in glass cases, are some of the archaeological finds made by the men whose fading photographs line the walls.

Local history was a serious business in the late 19th century, to judge from their bleak, unsmiling features. With their full beards and piercing eyes, they display the passion of religious zealots. They could have been Old Testament prophets, or ministers of the cloth. Instead, they were intractable men of impeccable character, with rather more time on their hands than was good for them.

Two portraits stand out. The protagonists face each other across the room, and across the expanse of the 20th century; the steeliness of their gaze is undiminished. Both were well known in Hurlmere for their encyclopaedic knowledge of the town's history. Both published scholarly papers on their archaeological discoveries. Other historians held them in equal respect, even awe. But their heroic deeds in the amphitheatre of local history had a doomed, Shakespearian quality. Hurlmere was just too small a town to accommodate two great minds and, more to the point, two such monstrous egos.

When these two locked horns in a debate, the other society members might just as well have crept out to the Poultry Dealers Arms. Which they often did. Whenever these two disagreed (and no matter was ever deemed too trivial to fuel a heated argument), you can be sure it was personal. Tightly-clenched fists would pummel leather-bound tomes, raising clouds of dust. And the more they disagreed, the more poisonously polite they would become.

Displaying the erudite skills and barbed observations of a pair of sparring lawyers, they fought long and hard over the custody of Hurlmere's heritage. They talked about each other in the third person, as though to distance themselves even further from views they found so repellent.

"I would like my learned friend to consider whether it might, in fact, be a more likely scenario that..."...

"Far be it for me, a humble seeker after truth, to question my colleague's grasp of a difficult subject. Nevertheless I would like to point out that..."...

It's no wonder that the local historians of the 21st century, busy delving into the same dusty tomes, can still feel the gimlet eyes of their antecedents boring into the backs of their heads.

Cheap & cheerful...

2006-08-07T11:03:00.000+01:00

At Blakeholme House (‘Officially vermin-free since 1999’), Mandy is trying to tap into the lucrative bed & breakfast market. She needs the extra money to do vital repairs on her tumbledown house. It’s a heap, frankly: you could double its value simply by screwing a satellite dish to the wall. Mandy is offering ‘self-centred accommodation’, aimed at people so narcissistic that they won’t notice that floorboards are missing. Plus, in addition to basic bed and breakfast, she’s offering to throw in a free tarot-card reading.

Blakeholme House appears in the new Lakeland accommodation guide, but only as Hurlmere’s sole representative in the hastily concocted ‘cheap & cheerful’ section. In all honesty, the place doesn’t deserve any stars. Telling bare-faced lies about Hurlmere is one thing, but we can’t recommend Blakeholme House to any visitors who aren’t up to date with their rabies shots.

The first thing that guests are likely to see, as they walk through the door, is an over-laden cat-litter tray. Sensible visitors understand immediately that they’ve made a big mistake, offer some excuse and make their escape. After five minutes at Mandy’s, fresh air never smelled so good. The turmoil even extends beyond her front door. The accommodation guide suggests that the garden of Blakeholme House looks a picture. Sadly, it's a picture by Hieronymous Bosch.

Warm, wet and willing...

2006-08-06T11:40:00.000+01:00

There’s going to be an anti-war demonstration in the square this evening. And if a handful of well-meaning Guardian readers can’t make George Bush reconsider his foreign policy, then God knows who will.

The current tenant of the White House worries us every bit as much as the suicide bombers. “Iraq... Iran... Hell, they’re practically the same. We’ll take them both while we’re there”. It’s sobering to realise that George Bush, a man who believes in the literal truth of the Bible (including Revelations...), is the man with his finger on the button. The Cold War may be over, but nuclear annihilation is still just a heartbeat away.

The last President wasn’t much better. Bill Clinton couldn’t even hit - from point-blank range - a target as warm, wet and willing as Monica Lewinsky's generously proportioned mouth. Christ, Bill, it was like hitting a barn door with a howitzer.

Bill Clinton wasn't the first man to besmirch the Office of the President of the United States. But few men have besmirched the Oval Office in quite such a literal way. The boys from forensic checked out the White House, paying particular attention to those places where a careless President might have spilled his seed and made a half-hearted attempt to clean up. Curtains, cushion covers, carpets (particularly under the footwell of the Presidential desk), table-cloths, pocket handkerchiefs, old T-shirts and the scummy tide-mark around the bath.

George Bush’s first act, on becoming President was to engage the services of Washington's foremost dry-cleaning business (‘Erasing the evidence of Presidential indiscretions since 1961’), to fumigate all the soft furnishings in the White House. His second act was to ride on a tank, at the head of his troops, as the Americans liberated Baghdad, accepting the plaudits – and bouquets of flowers - from grateful crowds of Iraqis lining the route. Unless that was just a dream...

A dance of death...

2006-08-04T20:58:00.001+01:00

We look back, nostalgically, to the good old days, when the Hurlmere Hunt ran roughshod over the fells, engaging in a dance of death with a worthy quarry. The foxes used to love it, you know.

The hunt was a cohesive social activity that bound country people together in a time-honoured ritual: the chase, the kill and the quasi-sexual thrill of watching a fox being torn limb from limb by a pack of hounds. The Master of the Hurlmere Hunt was unequivocal: "If we didn't hunt these animals, the delicate ecological balance would be upset. We are conservationists at heart; we love foxes. And the way we express our love for these fascinating animals is by hunting them down and killing them".

Then the Labour government decided to do the unthinkable, and honour a manifesto promise. They found – surprise, surprise – that hunting “compromised the welfare of the fox”. However much these people are paid, it’s just not enough. Then some civil servant pointed out that even a buffoon in a pink jacket could put a cross on a ballot paper, and the government couldn’t afford to lose the rural vote.

The result was a typical Labour fudge. Instead of banning fox hunting outright, they looked instead for “a gradual resolution of the fox-hunting problem”. They downgraded the ‘sport’ of fox hunting to fox hurting: a slight change of emphasis that might mollify the tree-huggers, yet allow the hunt to continue. Foxes were beaten up, warned about their future conduct and left to limp back to their loved ones.

It’s all part of a European directive, apparently. Bull-fighting has been downgraded to bull-frightening: with men in sparkly, skintight suits abandoning the muletas for flicking a bull with wet towels, before allowing the disorientated beast to leave – embarrassed but otherwise unharmed - through a side exit.

Donkeys don’t get thrown out of bell-towers in Greece any more. The ‘sport’ went underground – quite literally – when they took to throwing donkeys, instead, down lift-shafts and disused mines.

So that’s alright then...

Take-away tumbleweed...

2006-08-02T04:36:00.000+01:00

Visitors are encouraged to come to the Lake District in droves. ‘A warm Lakeland welcome awaits’, the brochures insist. Then, once they’re here, the visitors are greeted by prohibitions. Private. Keep out. Don’t park here. Don’t turn here. Don’t even think about turning here. Don’t drive on the railroad tracks, etc. It turns out to be a half-hearted welcome, at best: “Come if you must, spend your money, then bugger off back home”.

Hurlmere, that raddled old whore, is not so choosy. She leans against a lamp-post (hey, in a dim light she looks OK) and take on all-comers... if they've got money in their pockets and a tell-tale bulge in their trousers. “Hello, deario, fancy a good time?” A good time is just what the visitors want. They can stroll along the promenade, and sniff good Lakeland air: an enticing mixture of ozone, sunscreen and rancid cooking oil. Fish and chip wrappers blow along the front, the take-away tumbleweed of a throw-away society.

There are ducks to feed, ice-creams to eat and boats to row around the bay. Visitors can wander down to the promontory of Cocksure Point, lay out a picnic rug and relax; the problems only start when they try to gain access to the lake at any other point.

Most of the lake shore is in private hands. Big houses, mostly occupied for a few days each year, are testament to the money that was made, during the reign of Queen Victoria, in the milltowns of Yorkshire and Lancashire. The mill-owners – proud, well-upholstered men of means, who hooked their thumbs behind their braces as they stood with their backs to the fire - rewarded themselves with weekend retreats overlooking Hurlmere. They built with unrestrained self-aggrandisement, in an architectural style that offered a simple message to the rest of humanity: “This patch of land is mine. Not yours. So fuck off, sharpish, before I set the dogs on you”...

Pebble-dashed with puke...

2006-08-01T11:45:00.000+01:00

At the height of the tourist season, Hurlmere is packed with people who, for want of anything better to do in our Lakeland idyll, like to sit out in the hot sun all day and get pissed. It’s quite a problem. On Friday nights the back-streets of Hurlmere are pebble-dashed with puke, as gangs of lads from the industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire have a welcome break from getting rat-arsed in their home towns, to enjoy a long weekend getting rat-arsed in a semi-rural environment, when, if they put their minds to it, they can drink their own bodyweight in tequila slammers.

We can’t point the finger of blame at the pubs and off-licences. Oh no. They’re doing all they can to maintain public order by selling huge quantities of booze to anyone with money, who is tall enough to push it across the bar. A handful of do-gooders have been interfering with the profitable business of fool/money separation, by questioning the pub landlords’ genuine committment to ‘sensible drinking’. The Chairman of the Licensesd Victuallers Association of Hurlmere has reponded to these qualms with a prepared statement...

“Despite what people may imagine, there is no benefit to the drinks industry if people are winding up in hospital with liver failure and alcohol poisoning. When people drink, we’d prefer them to stop just short of doing permanent damage to themselves. A night out, fine; a weekend of binge drinking, if you must... but if you start each day with half a bottle of vodka, it's only sensible to have a chaser with it. You can’t drink all the time... much as we would like you to”.

Fast and furious...

2006-07-31T12:59:00.000+01:00

The silence in the countryside isn’t just an absence of noise. The sweet song of the skylark and the bubbling cry of the curlew are just two of the sounds that don’t disrupt the stillness. In contrast, there are quieter sounds that do: radios, mobile phones, even the insistent beeping of digital watches - dividing up the hours into convenient chunks for those who believe that most mendacious of equations, that time is money.

So many people spend their free time playing shoot-em-up computer games, or watching fast and furious films featuring men in dirty vests outrunning fireballs. These people will probably watch more senseless violence in the course of an hour than you’d witness in the taproom of the Grievous Bodily Arms over an entire Bank Holiday weekend. Here in Hurlmere we can go for weeks without experiencing anything more cataclysmic than a chip-pan fire in a pub kitchen.

People who are over-stimulated - like kids who quaff too many fizzy drinks - need bigger and bigger doses of eye-popping sensation. They are unlikely to respond to the quiet lure of the countryside, where excitements are subtle rather than blatant. Where you can stand on a hilltop and gaze across the patchwork of fields and fells to the town you call home.

Can something this beautiful really be the result of a chaotic accident? Just the chance collision of particles all those eons ago? The ‘big bang’ that movie directors seem so determined to replicate on film? Looking at Hurlmere - spread out in the valley, like a picnic arranged on a cloth of green gingham, surrounded by hills - it’s not hard to believe that there is, after all, a celestial hand on the tiller.

A sporting colossus...

2006-07-30T12:23:00.000+01:00

With our ‘win at all costs’ mentality, it should surprise no-one to learn that our sporting stars take performance-enhancing drugs. In the dock right now are the guy who won the Tour de France, and the fastest sprinter the world has ever seen.

Hell, we’ve seen it all before. Ski jumpers, for example: stoned Norwegians wheeling around the sky, like buzzards... well buzzards in skin-tight Lycra. You can test them for drugs, of course, but you have to get them down first.

It’s sad when Brits are caught out... particularly sad when they’ve taken shed-loads of proscribed drugs but still don’t win anything. So they’re not just crap at sport... they’re crap at taking performance-enhancing drugs as well. Whenever you hear that some plucky British runner is "still in twelfth place, trying to get past the Lithuanian", you can bet your boots he'll fail his drug test. It's humiliating.

Maybe this is the time to relax the rules, and let sports people take any drugs they want. After all, anyone who says sport and drugs don't mix have never had a couple of joints and watched synchronised swimming. OK, drugs may reduce the life expectancy of competitors to a matter of weeks, or days. But as long as they live long enough to finish the event, and stagger onto the winner’s rostrum to collect their medals... where’s the harm in that?

Instead of banning drugs in sport, we should be celebrating their ability to make people run faster, jump further, and break all those records that are supposed to matter so much. Athletes are, almost by definition, single-minded and self-obsessed. No-one outside their immediate families would miss them too much if the drugs proved fatal. Go for that record, guys, and damn the consequences.

There’s just one question that remains to be answered. If drugs really help competitive performance, then why wasn't Timothy Leary a sporting colossus?

A conspiracy of silence...

2006-07-29T14:15:00.000+01:00

It's the hottest July since the last really hot July... and we haven't even got to the end of the month yet. The school holidays have begun, making Hurlmere busier than ever. Parents try to keep the kids amused, but it's tough. “I’m bored” is an oft-heard cry from children whose first act, on waking up to a sunny summer’s day, is to switch on the TV for an hour or two of mindless cartoons. No wonder so many kids have the attention span of a particularly inattentive goldfish.

It’s not easy being a parent, of course. There’s a conspiracy of silence surrounding the whole business. After all, if young couples knew the whole truth about parenting, the human race would die out within a few generations. They imagine that the most painful part of parenting will be stepping on a Lego brick with bare feet. In which case, they’re in for a nasty surprise. That’s why the process of conceiving babies is designed to be such fun. We're seduced into thinking that child-rearing will, in its own way, be equally rewarding. Our children will be tiny versions of ourselves, we imagine, to whom we can impart all our skills and wisdom. But those few minutes of fun come at a fearful price, as parenting takes its toll, and prove beyond all doubt that God has a robust sense of humour.

Monumentally pointless...

2006-07-28T18:00:00.000+01:00

It seems to get harder and harder to hear the silence through the crackle and static of everyday life. We rush through life as though it were a race, hardly daring to stop, look and listen, in case - gulp - we discover we've wasted our best years doing something monumentally pointless... like being an estate agent.

Our time-saving devices would make more sense if we actually did something useful with all the time we save. We eat on the hoof, like grazing ruminants, in order to stockpile a few precious seconds... only to spend a fruitless hour stalled in a traffic snarl-up. It doesn't make much sense.

We seem happy to collude in the tawdry conspiracy to make us more stupid tomorrow than we are today. We're disorientated: dazzled by the lights of the marketing juggernaut. "Here I am", we seem to be saying, "rip me off". Yes, if there really is a conspiracy, then it looks to be well on schedule.

It's baffling. Whenever we are offered a free choice between something that's meaningful, resonant and real... and something that's utterly bogus... why do we inexorably plump for the latter? It is tempting to hope, at the start of a new millennium, that we’ll be searching, in ever greater numbers, for that elusive quality of authenticity in our lives. It’s tempting... but you wouldn’t put your shirt on it...

Unrestrained flatulence...

2006-07-27T10:42:00.000+01:00

There’s a poisonous atmosphere in the cricket pavilion today: a heady pot-pourri of sweat, fungus, unwashed socks, cheap deodorant, horse liniment, athletes foot lotion, talcum powder, mildew, hand-rolled tobacco and unrestrained flatulence. It’s gloomy too; the grubby windows are shrouded with spiders’ webs, where the trussed-up corpses of unwary flies are marinading gently. A prawn salad sandwich, thoughtlessly abandoned under a bench at the end of last season, is giving off a pale phosphorescent glow. Scientists seeking the perfect conditions for the propagation of virulent bacteria need to look no further than Hurlmere’s foremost sporting facility.

The pavilion is essentially a masculine environment. Women - even those blessed with strong constitutions, and who are up to date with their typhoid jabs - do not cross the threshold on match days. In any case, the wives and girlfriends of the Hurlmere XI have better things to do with their leisure hours than watch a bunch of overweight men chase a red ball around a field.

It was different in the old days. There seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of good-hearted women who’d be only too happy to make sandwiches, bake scones and mash the tea on match days. Visiting teams knew there would always be a good spread whenever they came to Hurlmere. It was some compensation for the bruises they’d be sure to go home with. Nowadays, alas, the players have to do all the catering themselves. With the result that ‘tea’ is nothing more than a jumbo bag of salt & vinegar crisps and a few cans of Special Brew.

Shanty town...

2006-07-26T10:49:00.000+01:00

Dennis, the captain of the Hurlmere XI, has made some dramatic changes. Now, having brought in seven new players, he reckons he's only three men short of a half-decent team. He wants to deliver his traditional pre-game pep-talk, so the team has convened in the pavilion. That’s what we call it, though it’s actually just a shabby pile of breeze-blocks and chipboard, with all the architectural allure of an allotment shed. It’s been put together, over the years, in piecemeal fashion - sprouting another lean-to annexe whenever we needed somewhere to keep the mower, make tea, or site a rudimentary toilet. If we carried on building in similar style, we’d soon have a sizeable shanty town.

The roller stays outside, padlocked to a tree. If anyone wants to go to the trouble of nicking it, they’re very welcome. It’s big, heavy and almost seized up with rust. We’re sick of the sight of it. We’ve pushed the damned thing up and down the pitch for years, to no apparent effect. Despite our best efforts, the wicket is as unpredictable as ever. Batsmen don’t know whether the next ball will shoot along the ground, or whistle past their ears. In a vain attempt to prevent injury, the players strap on an intriguing variety of protective devices, mostly hand-made from old pads, bubble-wrap and gaffer tape. Batting on the infamous Hurlmere strip can be an dangerous business.

Dennis crosses his legs gingerly as he thinks back to when he acquired his first cricket protector. He was just a lad; though glad to be getting a game or two for the team, he was embarrassed to be stuffing a folded-up copy of the Daily Mirror down his trousers before he went in to bat. So, having saved up his pocket money, he paid a visit to the sports shop. Finding a woman behind the counter, Dennis became tongue-tied and red-faced. He gesticulated towards a display cabinet with one hand, and offered a damp palmful of small change with the other. He left, hurriedly, with the cheapest cricket box in the shop. It proved to be a false economy; the few pennies he saved almost cost him his manhood.

It was shaped like half an avocado pear (the box, that is, not his manhood) and was moulded in pink plastic. The viciously sharp, unpadded edges should have made Dennis think twice before parting with his money. However, it wasn’t until he faced some seriously fast bowling that the box’s deficiencies became painfully apparent. He suffered a direct hit from a brand-new cricket ball, seaming in at him like a heat-seeking missile, from just short of a length. It had the same effect on Dennis’s groin as a pastry-cutter being pressed into freshly-kneaded dough. Forty years later, the memory can still bring tears to his eyes.

A magnificent obsession...

2006-07-25T17:02:00.000+01:00

Down at Hurlmere’s compact cricket ground, Dennis, our indefatigable captain, is marshalling his troops for yet another assault on the league title. He’s feeling his age; on the morning after a particularly hard game, he’s just too stiff to roll out of bed. One day he’ll pack it in and spend his Sunday afternoons mooching listlessly round a garden centre. But not just yet. The problem is that he loves his cricket. Unlike most love affairs, however, his passion has become more intense as the years slip by. What started out as a pastime has developed into a magnificent obsession.

The decision - about when to hang up his cricket boots - won’t be his for much longer. The spirit is willing enough, but the flesh is beginning to weaken. His eyesight isn’t what it was either, and he refuses to play in glasses. The price of his vanity is being hit by a hard leather ball on a regular basis. This makes his eyes water, and his vision blur, so he gets hit even more often. After a long innings his legs look like something out of a Francis Bacon painting: ‘Batsman Screaming’, perhaps.

Dennis has come to terms with the disappointments of last season: having no new silverware to brighten up the optimistically large trophy cabinet in the pub. It’s hard to cope with failure. It’s harder still to fail at all, since the Hurlmere and District Cricket League operates an egalitarian ‘everyone wins prizes’ policy. It means that most teams in the league end up with something tangible at the end of each season.

Talk of ‘silverware’ rings a little hollow, though, now that the league’s trophy budget is being sliced ever more thinly. Instead of lustrous metal, the trophies are cheap and nasty: just plastic sprayed to look like gold. On top of each little plinth is a figure who either bowls or bats, designed by someone ill-acquainted with both cricket and human anatomy. The batsman looks like he’s throwing a stick for a dog; the bowler appears to be dancing a jig. The gold paint soon peels away; after a few weeks the figures appear not merely deformed, but leprous too.

There are trophies for winners, runners-up, best individual performances and most sportsmanlike team. There are commemorative medallions for plucky losers. There’s the ‘Clubman’ award: given to good-hearted guys who, though useless at cricket, bring other talents to the summer game. Like turning out uncomplainingly every weekend, even though they’ll bat last (if at all), never get a bowl and have to field down at third man where the man-eating horseflies lurk. Or mowing the wicket every Friday night. Or shouting “Drinks all round” on a slow night in the pub.

So it’s actually quite an achievement for the Hurlmere XI to have ended up with nothing at all. Maybe this feat deserves a trophy too: ‘Most Undistinguished Team in the League’. The plastic figure could be seated disconsolately, head in hands. Something based on ‘The Thinker’, by Rodin. ‘The Plonker’, perhaps. On current form, Hurlmere could probably keep the trophy in perpetuity.

UFO Alley...

2006-07-21T16:16:00.000+01:00

At the height of the summer season, Hurlmere is chock-full of visitors; on a hot day it’s like a festival of belly buttons. We have other visitors too, as the members of the Society for the Investigation of Unlikely Phenomena (Hurlmere Chapter) are only too keen to point out. The area around Hurlmere is known as UFO Alley, because of the large number of bizarre and unexplained sightings. What's really unexplained, however, is whether this signifies a genuine preponderance of UFOs, or merely reflects the number of people in town who, at any particular moment, are gazing vacantly skywards.

We've even had a close encounter of the third kind. Following a protracted lunchtime session, Town Drunk was abducted by aliens and, due to a mysterious depletion in the available gene-pool on distant planet Zob, forced to mate - repeatedly - with a beautiful, silver-skinned princess. He was deposited back on earth, unsteady but otherwise unharmed, a mere hundred yards from the Grievous Bodily Arms, but only after he'd been forced - at ray-gun-point - to hand over all the money from the pub's collecting bottle. Money that was to have funded the next pub outing. Neville, the landlord, wondered how he’d break the news to his regulars. They’d been looking forward to that seal-clubbing weekend for months.

All told, the abduction has done Town Drunk's reputation no harm at all. Instead of being thought of as just another guy who could use a shower, he's rumoured to have been offered signing-up fees by a couple of other pubs in town. He's happy, in truth, to reprise his story to anyone who'll realise what thirsty work story-telling can be. And by the time he's repeated the tale a dozen times, it has assumed truly epic proportions.

He'd been too modest, at first telling, to mention that the denizens of a grateful planet had asked him - begged him - to stay on and assume the mantle of Supreme Time Lord. "I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't tempted", Town Drunk concedes, "but the beer was crap. Go on then, I'll have another pint. The strong one. And a slim Panatella. Cheers".

A fete worse than death...

2006-07-20T06:49:00.000+01:00

The Hurlmere and District Agricultural Show (‘featuring the best of local produce since 1894’) is a mid-summer extravaganza that promises something for everybody. That’s what the poster says, anyway. To the show committee it’s a Family Fun Day, though you have to think twice about any event that includes the words ‘Family’ and ‘Fun’ in the same sentence. Incomers, doubtless used to more sophisticated fare, call it the ‘fete worse than death’.

A field just outside Hurlmere is transformed, for one day each year, into a rural playground filled with marquees, stalls and show-rings. Our local squire, Lord Saveloy, has traditionally cut the ribbon to declare the show open. But times are hard for the rural aristocracy. He still lives in the Big House, but it’s mortgaged up to the hilt. His customary privileges have all but disappeared; even deflowering virgins is something he can’t take for granted any more. Opening the Hurlmere Show was his last public duty, and now that’s gone too. This year the show committee has made a break with tradition, and invited a second-string soap actress from daytime TV to do the honours instead.

We enjoy daring displays of derring-do by the Purple Helmets, Hurlmere’s very own motor-cycle stunt team. They risk life and limb by jumping over a line of cars. But audiences weaned on big-budget blockbuster films soon get jaded, so the stakes are raised with each performance. Last year the team attempted the stunt while towing a caravan, giving the crowd what they came for... that’s assuming they’d come to witness a lethal fireball.

The Hurlmere Show is an opportunity for the local farmers to get together and monopolise the bar in the beer tent. Once they’ve been let off the leash for the day, they can put a fair few pints away. When they emerge, blinking into the afternoon sunshine, they cast covetous eyes over the brand-new tractors on display. They try to convince themselves that their work-rate would increase if they had heated seats, double-glazed windows and a state-of-the-art in-cab CD system. Some gleaming new paintwork, too, instead of the unprepossessing two-tone colour scheme - rust and primer - of the clapped-out tractors languishing back on the farm.

The vicar’s wife runs the childrens’ pet show. When picking a winner, it would take the wisdom of Solomon to choose between the rival claims of, say, a guinea pig and a shaggy shetland pony. So, since they’re all God’s creatures, every pet get a rosette. Kids can toss ping-pong balls into buckets, and hope to win a goldfish. It’s a convenient way to teach children about pet-care and mortality, often on the same day.

You can find stalls selling all manner of country clothing. With their one indispensible fashion accessory being baling twine, the farmers don’t take much heed. But well-heeled incomers like to reinforce their country credentials and give their gold credit cards a bit of hammer. They’ll try on quilted waistcoats that resemble nothing so much as the insulation lagging around an old-fashioned central heating boiler. And those ubiquitous waxed jackets, from a rather upmarket stall offering ‘Mud-coloured Clothing to the Gentry’. After they’ve completed the ensemble with a pair of green wellies, they reckon they really look the part.

The Hurlmere Show is a pleasantly old-fashioned affair. In the main tent we can admire the displays of fruit, vegetables and home-made produce. The competition categories are reassuringly traditional; so it’s ‘three English apples’ and ‘six broad beans’ rather than ‘three mobile phones’ or ‘six website portals’. The children exhibit woven samplers, and examples of their neatest handwriting. Their models are made, in true Blue Peter style, out of toilet rolls, washing-up bottles and sticky-back plastic. The 'Guess the weight of the cake' competition was nearly cancelled one year, when a goat ate the cake. It took a sudden and triumphant leap of imagination to change the name of the competition to 'Guess the weight of the goat'.

Yes, when we see the marquees going up in Potter’s Field, we feel a sense of community that stretches back as far as anyone can remember.

Signs and portents...

2006-07-19T11:42:00.000+01:00

It’s hot in Hurlmere, and getting hotter by the hour. For those who take stock of such things, there are signs and portents aplenty. Dogs howl. Birds stay silent or sing out of tune. There are strange lights in the sky. The other day we had a shower of deformed frogs. Yesterday there were two blood-red suns, and that can’t be right, can it?

Yes, it’s all getting a bit Shakespearean. Something’s happening, and we’re not sure what it is. The last time we felt like this was during the countdown to the millennium. As the great day approached, we could feel on our cheeks the uncomfortably hot breath of religious fundamentalism. Anything seemed possible: the Second Coming, a plague of locusts, Chelsea football club signing an English player.

And, no doubt about it, odd things were happening. Old biddies, panicked by irresponsible forecasts of food shortages in The People’s Friend, were fighting like wildcats over the last few boxes of shortbread biscuits on the supermarket shelves. It was pandemonium, like the last plane out of Saigon. The windows of the bookshop were filling up with survivalist titles such as Hoarding Food for Fun and Profit and Buy a Rifle and Head For the Hills. Strange days indeed...

Our more anxious residents imagined the worst... The clock chimes twelve on the last night of the old year. Digital timers click fatefully from 1999 into the uncharted territory that is the year 2000. Computers implode, instantly. Irreplaceable data disappears into the ether, never to be seen again. Household appliances go berserk. Savings and investments evaporate; the FT index drops through the floor; we're reduced to bartering with beads. Within seconds we're back in the middle ages, the fabric of society unravelling like a badly-knitted sweater.

It never happened, of course. A micro-second of meaning, that’s all the dawning of the new millennium turned out to be: an infinitesimally tiny shard of time. It was the whoosh of a rocket, an involuntary “oooh!”; a cascade of stars, an unrehearsed “aaah!”. The tail-lights of the twentieth century disappeared into the distance, and we were cocooned in darkness once again.

Bare flesh and hot leatherette...

2006-07-18T10:19:00.000+01:00

It’s high summer in Hurlmere - hay time – and the landscape is been redrawn in desiccated sepia tones. In the middle of the day it's hotter than an arsonists' convention. We’re baking. Torper is infectious on a scorching day like this. It looks like a lot of Hurlmere folk have decided to postpone their chores until the sun has gone down. In the beer gardens of Hurlmere’s pubs, people loll beneath the beach umbrellas, nursing a pint or two through a sultry afternoon. Bumble bees ricochet off hard surfaces, like fuzzy musket-balls.

Not wishing to be upstaged, Neville has added ‘Beer Garden’ to a feeble list of his pub’s attractions that also includes ‘carpets’ and ‘running water’. The beer garden at the Grievous Bodily Arms turns out to be nothing more than the car-park, where a pot-pourri of intriguing smells - factor 15 sunscreen, engine oil and over-heated radiators - mingle unpleasantly. Every few minutes there’s a scream, as another motorist is reminded what happens when a man wearing nothing but a pair of shorts gets into a car that’s been standing in the sun all day. Bare flesh and hot leatherette are welded together; it makes your eyes water just thinking about it.

Dogs, especially the long-haired breeds, go a little crazy in the sun. They crawl into spaces that are far too small for them, in a vain attempt to escape from the heat. They dig holes in flower beds, and roll in dirt, then collapse with the effort into a panting heap. Cats saunter by, in a carefree manner, aware that the dogs of Hurlmere have put all cat-chasing activities on hold for the duration of this midsummer heatwave.

The attractions of body art...

2006-07-17T11:11:00.000+01:00

Having your girlfriend’s name tattooed on your body is a hostage to fortune. But Bob the postman has been lucky; girfriends came in a convenient sequence that entailed the briefest of visits - for a top-up - to the tattoo parlour. First there was Jan, then Jane, then Janet, and Janette. The sequence faltered when he fell for Cath, leaving Bob no option but to incorporate the earlier tattoo into a more elaborate design, feature the Taking of Goose Green and the Sinking of the Belgrano.

The barmaid at the Grievous Bodily Arms is a recent visitor to the tattoo parlour. She reckoned that if she’s going to be treated like part of the furniture, she might as well look the part... which is why she got a barcode tattooed on her arse.

The young folk of Hurlmere are keen to get their belly buttons pierced. It takes only five minutes of their time to aggravage strait-laced parents for months. However, for those past the first flush of youth (or whose parents have become inured to their unusual lifestyle choices) the attractions of body art are less obvious. Having decorated themselves with tattoos, rings and studs, what else is there to add? Fins? Go-faster stripes? Aerodynamic spoilers?

Taramasalata...

2006-07-16T14:00:00.000+01:00

The Carrion family is leaving the crowded streets of Hurlmere far behind, to enjoy a much-needed holiday in some sun-kissed, malaria-ridden, Mediterranean holiday haven. They're flying off to Taramasalata, blissfully unaware that it's not a real resort at all... but just a name made up for spurious comic effect.

Jack Carrion likes to travel first-class - or better - whenever he flies. This would make every sense if the first-class surcharge trimmed a few hours off the flight time. But, of course, it doesn't. The people travelling in sub-economy class - the very people that Jack has spent a small fortune to get away from - reach their destination at exactly the same time. This infuriates Jack who feels that, on arrival, the package-holiday riff-raff should be incarcerated on the plane for a few extra hours, to wipe the upholstery down and collect the sick-bags.

The airline bosses, aware of these inconveniently egalitarian arrival times, know they can't really make first-class travel any more luxurious. The glamorous hostesses already cater to the first-class passengers' every whim ("More champagne, sir? A blowjob?") so the easiest way to widen the gap between the classes is to make life in the cheap seats intolerable.

The budget passengers aren't served with meals; they get a pot snack each and a kettle to share. Their in-flight films all feature violent plane crashes. The piped music consists entirely of Chris de Burgh concerts. The hostesses don't bother to demonstrate how to inflate a life-jacket, in case of an emergency... because there aren't any hostesses in sub-economy class, and there aren't any life-jackets either. In any case, how reassuring is it for passengers to be told: "In case of an unscheduled landing on water, your life-jackets are stowed under your seat". At the risk of being pedantic, you don't land on water... you plummet from a great height and die.

The gerbil has landed...

2006-07-14T06:21:00.000+01:00

Visitors wonder if it’s OK to park their cars in Conciliation Street “just for a few minutes”. We look doubtful, preferring to leave them in a state of mild paranoia about the possibility of getting a parking ticket. Sometimes the traffic warden is an ever-present irritant, like an angry wasp; at other times he doesn’t show his ugly mug for days. He’s easy to spot; a man dressed in the sort of uniform popularised by Idi Amin’s henchmen tends to stand out in a crowd.

The traffic warden’s main weapon, against the inconsiderate motorists of Hurlmere, is surprise: a weapon that locals attempt to disarm with speed and timing. We know he’s going to show up at some point; we just don’t know when. So we’ve developed a well-choreographed routine, which goes something like this. Howard gets a brief and breathless phone-call from the first person to spot the traffic warden (Howard carries an extra mobile - always switched on - for this purpose alone). On hearing the coded warning (“The gerbil has landed”) Howard springs into action. He casually wonders whether this might be an opportune moment to check that the flood-warning siren is in good working order.

The race is on. The warden begins to patrol the streets - peaked cap at a jaunty angle, gold epaulets glistening in the sun and the heels of his jackboots clicking together impressively. Howard, meanwhile, is legging it to the council offices as fast as his little legs can carry him. The warden smiles, licks his pencil and prepares to write the first ticket of the day. For a man on the lowest rung of the law-inforcement ladder, this is what the job’s all about: a minor act of petty officialdom that acts like a shot of testosterone. Howard clatters downstairs to the basement, taking two steps at a time, and makes a grab for the lever. It’s touch and go.

The banshee howl of the flood siren galvanises everyone in town into action. People race out of houses and shops - wearing carpet slippers, mouth full of toast, face covered in shaving foam; it doesn’t matter, but speed does - climb into their cars, and move them a hundred yards across town. For half an hour the centre of Hurlmere is grid-locked with grim-faced motorists, but it’s worth the hassle to avoid getting a ticket, and to see the incredulous look on that weasel of a warden’s face.

Burnt to a crisp...

2006-07-12T10:42:00.000+01:00

This is the time of year for barbecues. We’ve had quite a few World Cup parties around Hurlmere, and one sorry affair that turned into a wake. We may have run out of unrealistic sporting expections (and no-one says “C’mon Tim” any more), but our love of outdoor eating is undiminished. For men, at least.

What is it about men and barbecues? Once they've had three sunny days in a row, even men who'd balk at grilling toast will haul a rusty barbecue out of the shed, set it up in the front yard, fill it with charcoal, half a can of petrol... and, without a thought for their personal safety, toss a match in. Then, once the flames have died down, they add some steaks (good idea) or maybe just a catering pack of budget beef-burgers (not so good...).

They turn the burgers over and drink some beer; they turn the burgers again and drink some more. They leave the barbecue unattended for five minutes, to go and get more beer; they get waylaid on the way back to talk about football or cars. They raid the fridge for more beer. By the time they get back to the barbecue, they can offer their guests an intriguing choice: meat that’s either dangerously undercooked or burnt to a crisp.

Yes, men and barbecues... Perhaps the smell of charred meat is a potent folk-memory from long ago: times when men dressed in fur, communicated in grunts and treated their women like chattels. That’s right, the Sixties...

The whole barbecue scene doesn't play so well with women. Feeding a bunch of people isn’t an intriguing novelty for them, just an everyday chore. Worst of all, men get extravagant praise for cremating cheap cuts of meat, while their wives just get another huge pile of washing-up to do.

Water features...

2006-07-11T09:09:00.000+01:00

Despite being flooded out over the winter, Old Ted has decided to go with the flow this year, and create a water feature in his cottage garden. This is in marked contrast to Bob the postman who, thanks to a leaky roof, already has a water feature making slow but inexorable progress down his back bedroom wall. The sound of water bubbling cheerfully over pebbles is supposed to make us feel relaxed and at peace with the world. Yet the same noise, when heard indoors on a rainy night, has the same effect on a terrified householder as listening to termites having lunch.

Bob is convinced that his garden is against him too. He stands at his back door, hurling abuse at the blameless garden plants. "I've had it up to here with gardening", he shouts, "you're on your own now". He’s vowed never again to lift a spade, or dig up another weed. That’s until wife Cath tells him to. Their garden is becoming a sublime profusion. To Bob it’s a self-sufficient ecosystem; to his neighbours it’s a constant source of irritation.

“What are weeds anyway?”, Bob asks, rhetorically, before providing the answer himself. “They’re just plants growing where people don't want them. The best way to get rid of them is just to reclassify them as flowers. I’m hoping for a good crop of dandelions this year. And if I do I’ll make some wine.”

Gracious outdoor living...

2006-07-10T21:38:00.000+01:00

Gardening used to be a congenial way for people to occupy their declining years. If their doctor had told them to avoid over-excitement, they could potter around the herbaceous borders, with a trug over one arm, pruning branches and dead-heading roses. It was a cheap hobby too. There was no need to rifle the petty cash tin for anything more exotic than a new dibber or a packet of lawn seed.

But those days are gone. We’ve all seen those programmes on TV, in which an unassuming - but perfectly servicable - back-yard is given an elaborate makeover. The rusting bikes and old mattresses are thrown out, a JCB moves in and two dozen labourers roll up their sleeves. The result: a brand-new garden that will make the neighbours purse their lips with envy.

A short stroll around town in high summer reveals that, under the influence of TV, Hurlmere folk have been splashing out. Mandy, the village’s self-appointed seer and sage, has designed her garden using tried and tested feng shui principles. Noting, cryptically, that “Less is more”, she’s gone for the minimalist approach. She has created what she calls a zen garden; it consists of half a dozen rocks artfully positioned in carefully raked gravel. To Mandy it represents a life of spiritual simplicity. To everyone else, alas, it looks unnervingly like a huge cat-litter tray.

An accountant by trade, Colin is a landscape photographer by inclination. So it’s appropriate that he’s busy developing his garden. “It’ll look a picture when I’ve finished”, he enthuses, optimistically, as he takes another trip down to the garden centre. He returns with his trailer piled high with decking: what we used to know, more prosaically, as ‘wood’. It’s thanks to people like Colin that the man who owns the garden centre is making plans to sell the place, take early retirement and move to Barbados.

Frank, the editor of our local paper, the Hurlmere Echo, used to be known as the Jersey Royal of couch potatoes. Once he got settled on the sofa, after a hard day’s work, only an earthquake would shift him. Or maybe the rustle of a crisp packet. Never known for his gardening prowess, Frank adopted a simple scorched-earth policy to tackle any weed that had the temerity to show its face between the crazy paving. A flame-thrower was the only gardening tool he owned; it was the only one he needed.

It was watching Alan Titchmarsh and Charlie Dimmock desport themselves on TV that gave Frank a taste for gracious outdoor living. Barbecues, waterfalls, brick paving, raised beds, wattle screens, trellises, summer houses, pergolas: he quickly embraced the whole ludicrous lexicon of instant gardening.

Frank’s a man who knows a thing or two about deadlines. He has no time for old-fashioned ideas like putting seeds in the ground and watching them grow. He wants a new garden and he wants it now. Having watched the gardening programmes, he knows how long it takes to create the kind of garden you see in the Sunday supplements. It takes half an hour.

Man the barricades...

2006-07-06T11:36:00.000+01:00

What’s different about Jim’s book, Lakeland Walks for Anarchists? Well, all the walks have one thing in common: they studiously avoid rights of way. These walks don’t appear on any Ordnance Survey map, no sir. The emphasis is firmly on fun and revolutionary ferment: putting two fingers up to the Country Code. As the handiwork of imperialist lackeys and capitalist lickspittles (try saying that with a mouthful of cream crackers...), these petty rural rules should be broken at every opportunity.

In more commonplace guidebooks there’s too much of the puritan walk ethic that keeps ramblers plodding onward long after the enjoyment has gone. Jim, on the other hand, encourages his readers to trample all over SSSIs (Sites of Specially Subversive Interest), pick rare flowers and sabotage grouse shoots. Without giving a bugger for the consequences, they can traverse the manicured lawns of aristocrats whose entitlement to keep whole swathes of our green and pleasant land to themselves stems from picking the right arse to lick after the Norman invasion, nearly a thousand years ago.

Some walking books recommend good pubs to visit. Well, Jim’s book takes his readers into really naff pubs: the ones that serve fizzy keg beer, have ‘coal effect’ fires and turn ramblers away. No self-respecting anarchist would actually want to drink in such an establishment, of course. They tramp straight through the lounge bar, pausing just long enough to use the loo and pocket a souvenir ashtray. If any landlord objects to muddy bootprints all over his carpet, walkers should show him Jim’s little red book, raise a fist in a concerted show of defiance and bellow “Man the barricades, comrades” at the startled drinkers propping up the bar.

To the usual, tedious catalogue of items that walkers should carry with them, Jim’s book sensibly adds rope, balaclava, camouflaged face-paint, hunting knife, surveillance equipment, industrial-strength bolt-cutters and a handy length of cheese wire (in case some stroppy farmer needs garrotting). This stuff isn’t for show. Readers may need to break into Sellafield some day, or abseil down the north face of the NatWest bank. And when that time comes, they’ll offer fraternal thanks to Comrade Jim for his helpful suggestions. Walkers of the world, unite!

2006-07-05T22:38:00.000+01:00

A muted fanfare...

2006-07-05T10:18:00.000+01:00

Jim reckons he’s found a gap in an overcrowded market for walking books. After many months of painstaking research, Jim has written a book of his own. The fruit of his labours - Lakeland Walks for Anarchists - has just been published, to a muted fanfare, by Hurlmere’s own Outlaw Press. A set of place-mats, featuring attractive hunt saboteur scenes, come free with the first hundred copies sold.

It has been, of necessity, a covert operation. Jim worked hand in glove with the paramilitary wing of the Independent Ramblers Association: a shadowy group of individuals who, weary of government intransigence over the Right to Roam issue, decided to take the law into their own hands. These guys walk where they want, when they want: a thrillingly rebellious notion.

It was hard working with a bunch of militant ramblers. If Jim had known just how hard it was going to be, he would probably have shelved the whole book idea. Anarchists are full of good intentions. The contributors promised faithfully to hit the printing deadlines, but deadlines came and went unheeded. They pleaded illness, or apathy, or said they'd just got a good job and weren't feeling quite so anarchic any more. Or they’d just look Jim straight in the eye, stab him in the chest with a forefinger and say: "Look, I'm an anarchist, right? I don't give a flying fuck about you, or your bourgeois little book. Now get out of my way before I crush you like a bug". Yes, anarchists are full of good intentions, but they can be full of bullshit too.

Going solo...

2006-07-04T10:36:00.000+01:00

The siren voice of the countryside is more insistent than ever. Stressed-out townies convince themselves that what they need is a bit of rural recreation. And then, as if to prove that the competitive flame can’t be doused quite so easily, they’ll cram so many activities into a weekend in the country that leisure begins to resemble work. Or they’ll join a throng of heads-down, no-nonsense walkers on some challenge walk or other, in the hope of knocking a few seconds off their personal best time.

It doesn’t make much sense to Jim, a man for whom walking is a pleasure, not a penance. On his Lakeland saunters he regularly comes across cagoule-clad plodders, whose joyless expressions indicate that walking has taken an unpleasantly monastic turn. They march stolidly, stoically, stupidly through wind and rain, as though a masked robber had broken into their homes, held their families to ransom with a pump-action rifle and said “You... yes you with the straggly beard and the bandy legs... walk twenty miles through featureless upland landscapes... right now... or I’ll blow your wife and kids away”.

As one of life’s dawdlers Jim is bewildered by these resolute drudges. He doesn’t really understand the attractions of walking fast and, in the process, seeing little more than the toecaps of a pair of walking boots. If he needs to be somewhere in that much of a hurry, he’ll take the car. What’s the point of walking if it isn’t to slow down sufficiently to enjoy the sights, sounds and smells of the countryside? Walking fast is a contradiction in terms: its utterly pointless, like meditating in a hurry. There’s a word for walking fast. It’s ‘running’.

Jim’s not so keen, either, on wandering the uplands in glum, nomadic hordes, like the lost tribes of Israel searching for the promised land. His views about walking in groups mirror his feelings about sex. Two participants are fine. Three or four can make an agreeable change from the norm. More than that is going to be rather better in theory than in practice. Going solo is, all things considered, probably the best option.

Strolling players...

2006-07-03T11:21:00.000+01:00

It’s hard to imagine it now, but there was a time - not too many years ago - when the late Alfred Wainwright had a virtual monopoly of the walking book market. Bookshops didn’t have a walking book section as such, but just a shelf of Wainwrights.

Walk into any bookshop now, of course, and the shelves will be groaning under the weight of walking books - featuring walks for the old, the young, the inexperienced and infirm, walks for those with a penchant for real ale, or cream teas, or industrial archaeology. You wonder if Wainwright would have approved of this heady proliferation. But you needn’t wonder for long: after writing and drawing, not approving of things was one of Alfred Wainwright’s favourite activities.

To accompany every slim volume entitled Twenty-five More Lakeland Walks From Pubs With Warm Beer, Vegetarian Food and a Relaxed Dress Code, you’ll hear the sound of a barrel being scraped. Let’s get it straight: every walk in every walking book is featured on the Ordnance Survey maps you already own. You know it, and most of the people who fork out folding money for walking books must know it too. But still the books sell. Which is why the Lakeland beauty spots are over-run with walkers who, carrying an open book as they walk, look like strolling Shakespearean players rehearsing a soliloquy.

England fan trying to drown his sorrows, only to find that they've learned to swim...

2006-07-02T09:17:00.000+01:00

Are we there yet?...

2006-07-02T09:12:00.000+01:00

The post mortem has begun. The players were too young; we needed the wisdom of years. Or they were too old; we needed youthful enthusiasm. They’d played too much football. Or too little. The team changed too often; there was no continuity. The team didn’t change enough; Sven showed no imagination in his selections. Why did he bother taking Theo Whatsisname along, if he wasn’t going to get a game?

The lad’s been out of his depth; whenever the players got on the team bus, there was this little voice piping up: “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”. Theo will be back to school soon; hopefully his World Cup will look like a bad dream... just as it does to the legion of disappointed England fans.

It’s a reliable litmus test of a mature society to accept failure with good grace. God knows we should be used to it by now. Hurlmere hasn’t been torched by gangs of lager-fuelled fans, but when Portugese bar workers celebrate their semi-final place, they’d be wise to do it discreetly.

Goodbye, Sven. You were pretty hopeless, yet you raked in millions: a role model for mediocrity. “You can’t practice taking penalties”, you said. Well, you could have fucking tried...

Shredded by buckshot...

2006-07-01T20:12:00.000+01:00

It’s quiet. Too quiet. Could we have coped with the sheer bloody arrogance, the hands-on-hips triumphalism, if England had ended those ‘forty years of hurt’ by winning the World Cup? Well, we’re never going to find out, with England going out, as always, on penalties. The only deviatiion from the familiar script was being beaten by Portugal rather than Germany – not that this will be any consolation to the fans. The post mortem starts here. Even the flags, flown from car windows, look ragged and threadbare, as though they’d been shredded by buckshot.

Let’s approach our country from a distance: looking down from space at the little blue marble that is Planet Earth. We see the the Himalayas, the great deserts, then the largest of the man-made edifices: landmarks such as the Great Wall of China and Bernard Ingham’s ego, before we home in on a small, insignificant, ragged-edged island parked off the continental shelf of Europe. Yes, it’s Great Britain: that’s ‘Great’, of course, in the way that Great Yarmouth is Great

Britain is a haven of democracy: a damp and overcrowded country that is, nevertheless, the destination of choice for those those would escape from tyranny, poverty and oppression. Instead of being flattered by the attention, we’d prefer to keep them out.

The government is considering a test for immigrants, about what it’s like to be British: an idea with all the relevant and foresight of John Major’s Cones Hotline (“M62... millions of the bloody things. Just thought you ought to know... Byeee...”). What are we going to ask the people who want to settle here? “Can you hold your beer?”

Britons have never gone in for asylum seeking. We’ve never bothered to ask anyone’s permission before entering their country. What would have been the point? We didn’t build up the British Empire by saying “please”. We invaded (or insinuated ourselves with honeyed words and specious promises into) any country that took our fancy.

“We never asked for benefits and handouts from the government”. That’s true: we didn’t look to the government for help... we became the government. We went where we wanted, when we wanted, and took everything of value that wasn’t nailed down, before abandoning the country to its fate (‘granting independance’, as we used to call it, with tongue firmly in cheek). The world should be grateful to have enjoyed caring British rule for a couple of centuries. But are they grateful? Are they buggery...

Despite the diminutive size of Great Britain, it’s still divided into four separate countries with a love/hate relationship with each other. We’re four countries wrapped up into one, though now we seem to be splitting up into our constituent parts.

The Welsh used to burn the country cottages bought up by the English. The Scots changed the words of their anthem “(“You’re not getting the oil back, la la la”) and the Irish have been in self-destruct mode for centuries, continuing a feud over... what was it now? Ah, yes, God.

And England... What a baffling little country this is, chock-full of contradictions. England: a country whose national dish is foreign beef, and, after 11pm, Chicken Tikka Masala; whose patron saint is a Palistinean bandit; whose tipple of choice is likely to be a chilled lager with a foreign name that’s actually brewed ‘on licence’ in Warrington. This is the stuff that England fans are busy crying into. Cheers...

2006-07-01T12:04:00.000+01:00

Farenheit and fuzzy felt...

2006-07-01T10:21:00.000+01:00

Jude thinks back to the Sixties: what a great time to be young, optimistic and in full control over vital sphincter muscles. It was a golden age when men fermented revolution and women made coffee. Simpler times when we had farthings, florins, farenheit and fuzzy felt. Antirhinums, antimacassars and avoidupois. Dubbin and dolly blue. Green Shield Stamps, twin-tubs, tiger nuts, spanish, singing cowboys, coltsfoot rock, barley sugar twists, temperance hotels, sarsaparilla, sweet cigarettes (what a great idea they were: introducing kids to a lifetime of addiction to sugar and nicotine), ginger beer, lemon curd, lead soldiers, penny plain and tuppence coloured.

The Sixties: that semi-mythical time when unicorns roamed the earth, Concorde was the future of travel, and, thanks to Neil Armstrong’s “Giant step for Mankind” on the moon, we got non-stick frying pans and pens that could write upside-down. Tell that to anyone who says the space race was just a huge waste of money.

We could leave our front doors unlocked, without any bother. We’d keep the doors wide open, all through the night. When we went on holiday we’d leave notes for the burglars, telling them the house would be empty for a fortnight. We left explicit instructions about where they could find the valuables. Sometimes we’d even go so far as to put a small ad in the local paper. But did we ever get burgled? Did we buggery...

People knew their neighbours back then, you see; people knew their place; the summers were warm, the winters were cold, like seasons ought to be; kids respected their elders; for a fair day’s work you got a fair day’s pay; you could walk the streets without getting mugged for your mobile, and AIDS was an ineffectual slimming product rather than a global plague of terrifying proportions. Waggon Wheels were so big back then that they wouldn’t even fit into your satchel; you had to bowl them back from the shop like a hoop. Now look at them. Pitiful. Yes, if the past is, indeed, another country, the old folk of Hurlmere would have few complaints at being repatriated.

That’s the great thing about nostalgia. Being an essentially meaningless concept, the Golden Age can be any time in the past: Ancient Greece, the Rennaisance, the 1960s, a week last Wednesday. Memory Lane has probably been upgraded to an eight-lane motorway by now. It really doesn't matter.

Sunny Delight...

2006-06-30T05:54:00.000+01:00

If the superannuated hippies of Hurlmere had known they were going to live this long, they might have taken rather better care of themselves. Jude, for one, smoked heavily throughout his youth, mostly to collect the coupons. His heart was set on a touring caravan, but his lungs had other ideas. By the time his favourite brand had been withdrawn (for being so high in tar you could have mended the roads with it) he’d accumulated only enough coupons for a workshop manual and a set of adjustable spanners.

He might have been a little more selective about his drug intake too. But, like so many others of his generation, Jude reckoned that being doped up to the eyeballs was a job only half done. He laboured under the misapprehension that by dropping acid he was helping to destroy the system, when really he was just destroying his own brain cells.

At the summer festivals, Jude might not have stood quite so close to the sound system. There’s a constant, angry buzzing in his head these day, like a wasp in a jar. As he’s now painfully aware, dancing around a muddy field, with flowers in his hair, did not make him immune to the twin terrors of age and gravity.

One by one, the old hippies of Hurlmere are winding up at Sunset House. Some go willingly enough, won over by promises of Sunny Delight for breakfast - the tartrazine gets them kick-started on a morning - and that heady Horlicks rush at the end of the day. The staff do their best to keep the residents’ minds active, (“Let’s try it again, Mr Skynyrd. Look: arse... elbow... No, no... Arse... elbow...”) but it’s not easy.

Light sleepers awake...

2006-06-29T09:42:00.000+01:00

Sunset House was purpose-built as a ‘drive-thru’ establishment - allowing successful people with busy lives to abandon their elderly relatives with a minimum of fuss, paperwork or sentiment. And, with Sunset House operating a ‘no questions asked’ policy, a lot of old folk arrive under cover of darkness. It’s an all too familiar scenario in Hurlmere. A car, its headlights off, cruises down the drive, as quietly as possible. But that’s not so easy on gravel.

In the dormitories of Sunset House, light sleepers awake. If they gnaw through their straps and peer through the windows, residents will see - or, more likely, just hear - what’s happening in the grounds below. The car stops, the passenger door opens. There’s a dull thud, perhaps a yelp of pain, and the car door slams shut again. Fuelled by relief and guilt - always a combustible mixture - the driver throws caution to the wind. Gunning the car through the gears - spinning tyres, scattering gravel, waiting till he reaches the end of the drive to switch the headlights on - he’s away down the road towards a new life, free from the shackles of responsibility.

Next morning the residents will find their number increased by one: some disorientated old duffer, with nothing except the clothes he’s stood up in, a Crackerjack pen & pencil set and a scrunched-up note in his fist that reads: ‘Hello. My name is Jack. Blood type O. Tea, not coffee. Honey Nut Loops. I talk to myself. Thank you’.

2006-06-28T10:27:00.000+01:00

The ravages of time...

2006-06-28T09:46:00.000+01:00

We’re watching with more than usual interest as yet another shop prepares to start trading in Hurlmere. Jude reads the name over the door. Zimmer Man. It seems vaguely familar. Pressing his nose up against the window pane, he finds a disconcerting display of stuff for old folk. Nothing they might actually want (like cream sherry or butterscotch or shortbread biscuits) but what they apparently need. Stannah stairlifts, artfully disguised commodes, telescopic walking sticks, reclining chairs, adjustable beds, zimmer frames and electric shopping buggies. These are the tools of the trade for the elderly: polished chrome and leatherette, with some flesh-coloured plastic thrown in for good measure.

It’s all quite a shock to Jude’s system: an unwelcome reminder of his own mortality. It’s way too late for him to die young and pretty, and - despite what he thought at 17 - he isn’t going to live for ever. At 17 life stretched out ahead, like a mirage: a tantalising dream of endless promise. Nothing seemed impossible.

It all seems so very long ago. Michael Jackson was black, the trains ran on time, and when we had a war the other side fought back; yes, that’s how long ago it was. The first storm clouds gathered over the Summer of Love, to usher in the Autumn of Disillusionment and the Winter of Discontent. One-man buses, televised snooker, one-day cricket, Vesta packet meals... what was the world coming to?

But now Jude’s in his fifties - an indeterminate time of life with very little to recommend it. He can’t use his age as one of his lottery numbers any more. People talk about being ‘only thirty’ as in “I’m only thirty... still plenty of time to start a family”. And “I’m only forty... still plenty of time for a change of career’. But what follows ‘only fifty’? “I’m only fifty... still time to book an appointment with the proctologist”? “Still time to become a storm-trooper for Age Concern”? “Still time to take up crown green bowling”? Fifty? Fuck it...

Jude has to face up to the prospect of old age, however unpleasant it may be. As the tail-lights of the 20th century disappear into the gloom, Jude has a glimpse of the future. It doesn’t look good. Meals on wheels. Sitting in a rocking chair, too tired even to get it going. Huddling over a one-bar electric fire, indulging in an orgy of bitterness, recrimination and regret. Watching snuff movies that just have snuff in them. Trying to roll a joint with arthritic fingers, then having to wait for the District Nurse to call round and put the roach in. And, worst of all, the prospect of spending his declining years in the old folks’ home (Sunset House: ‘Serving the decrepid and incontinent since 1985’). Jude gives an involuntary shudder. He doesn’t want to end his days like his grandad: just sitting around the house all day, waiting for TV to be invented.

Crime wave...

2006-06-27T15:07:00.000+01:00

Whenever there’s a shortage of genuine stories to print, the editor of the Hurlmere Echo compensates by composing an eye-catching headline. ‘Crime Wave in Hurlmere’ is a favourite standby. It may tempt a few more people to buy a copy of the paper, though what constitutes a crime wave in Frank’s overheated imagination might, in the city, be called a quiet weekend.

What we have in Hurlmere isn’t a crime wave so much as a crime ripple, with our criminals, too, having modest ambitions. OK, we have our fair share of roughnecks, shysters and ne'er-do-wells, but they mostly drink out of harm's way, at the Grievous Bodily Arms, where the people most at risk from their crazed outbursts are each other.

Most nights of the week they will be huddled around a corner table, planning some new scam. But it's pretty tame stuff: rustling geese, forging library tickets and organising protection rackets ("That's a lovely front yard you've got there; I'm sure you'd like it to stay that way...") represents the height of their criminal ambitions.

A local cat-burglar writes a regular column for Practical Housebreaking magazine. Every few weeks some fruitcake, maddened with guilt, gives himself up to the police for having done something bad in a past life. But most Hurlmere residents are studiously law-abiding; wearing a loud tie in a built-up area is about the closest they get to a major felony. They’re careful drivers too - especially when their tax-discs have expired.

Our latest crime wave is another product of Frank’s journalistic hyperbole. The miscreant on this occasion is one of Hurlmere’s senior citizens. He’s been forced into a life of petty crime to fund his spiralling snuff habit. Having to find £1.25 a week, every week, has made this old codger susceptible to the siren voices of lawlessness.

He was caught, red-handed, demanding money with menaces from a Womens' Institute bring & buy sale. "Come on, punk, make my jam", he'd snarled, unwisely attempting to go cold turkey after a long-term dependence on Old Mill Number 1. It was totally out of character, an aberration. And, once he'd been sedated with a mug of Horlicks, he made a solemn promise to go straight. Straight back to the old folks’ home, in fact. If this is what a crime-wave looks like, then Hurlmere’s more solid citizens ought to be sleeping soundly in their beds at night.

G-spot safari...

2006-06-26T05:03:00.000+01:00

For this year’s Mardi Gras we’re planning a rather more sombre event, provisionally entitled ‘A Requiem for the G-spot’. For years men have been encouraged - nay, badgered - to go in search of it, even though we didn’t really know what we were looking for, or where we might find it, or whether we’d recognise it even if we did happen to come across it.

Searching for the G-spot was reckoned to be ‘a good thing’, proving to his partner that a man could look beyond his own selfish needs. And if the G-spot had to be found, then, by golly, we were prepared to roll up our sleeves and give it our best shot. We deserved a medal - for persistence, at least. How many evenings of frustration would begin with a guy setting off on a G-spot safari? It seemed a mammoth undertaking, like trying to find the North West Passage, and doing it blindfolded.

So it’s hurtful to be told now that the G-spot doesn’t actually exist. It was a wild goose chase, guys. Just another lie, like ‘size doesn’t matter’. The reason we couldn’t find the G-spot isn’t because we weren’t trying hard enough. We couldn’t find the little devil because it wasn’t actually there. Have we received any kind of apology? Have we hell. Not even a shrug of the shoulders and a mildly embarrased “Sorry”, at having wasted so much of our time, energy and goodwill. Pah...

The Hurlmere Mardi Gras allows people to express their sexuality in a more public way than they might be accustomed to. When he loses his virginity, a guy may want to share his good fortune - perhaps by making a triumphant tour of the town in an open-topped bus. Another man may prefer to stand at the end of his street, hands on hips, and announce to the world: "I, Stanley Peregrine Gawkroger, have pleasured my woman".

A couple might give a demonstration of Tantric sex, a technique by which a man can postpone his orgasm for up to an hour. Maybe two hours if the couple take in a meal and a movie too.

An over-ripe watermelon...

2006-06-25T10:08:00.000+01:00

The longest day has come and gone; it’s all downhill from here. The last wet Sunday in June is a traditional date in the calendar, when Hurlmere holds its Straight Pride March and Mardi Gras.

We wanted to raise the profile of a beleaguered minority. People who feel drawn to express their sexuality in a traditional way. People who might not otherwise feel they had a great deal to shout about. That, in a nutshell, was the origin of the Straight Pride March. It seemed an inspired idea - giving heterosexual folk the chance to reclaim the streets, stand shoulder to shoulder and let the world know they exist. “Say it out loud... We're straight and we're proud".

We even have a prize for the best outfit, the Breeders’ Cup (‘bring proof of sexual orientation’, the brochure stipulates, without suggesting exactly what that might be). Yes, if there’s another Lakeland town that celebrates the multi-facetted nature of heterosexuality by dressing up in gaudy costumes, then we’ve not heard of it.

There’s more to the Mardi Gras weekend that just marching, though. Last year, for example, we took the theme of ‘Ogling’. We wanted to celebrate that defining moment of truth when young guys suddenly realise that underneath their clothes all women are naked. But let’s be specific: when a guy reckons “You don’t get many of them to the kilo”, exactly how many to the kilo are we talking about?

We organised an evening of ‘Pole and Lap Dancing’ - assuming, naturally enough, that the agency would send us a couple of good-looking lasses prepared to perform all manner of degrading sexual acts in the guise of harmless entertainment. Maybe a little girl-on-girl action, too, if the atmosphere was right. Great ogling opportunities, we thought, for shy men whose only contact with attractive women might be a bit of harmless frottage on a crowded bus.

What we actually ended up with was ‘Pole and Lapp Dancing’... not the same thing at all. One of the women - she looked as though she’d be more at home tossing hot rivets in the shipyards of Gdansk - swayed listlessly to a slow polka. The other lass - pleasant enough, but wrapped from head to foot in animal skins - performed an interminable dance that celebrated the return of the reindeer to the Arctic tundra.

We tried to withold payment; a breach of promise was mentioned. The women would have none of it. Though she could speak only a few words of English, the Polish lady illustrated, in a most graphic way, that she could crush a man’s head between her thighs until it burst like an over-ripe watermelon. Then she insisted on cash. We won’t be using that agency again.

A damn good blaze...

2006-06-24T09:23:00.000+01:00

We’ve promoted a wide variety of events, over the years, to bring more tourists to Hurlmere and facilitate the honourable process of fool/money separation. Book-burning, for example: a fine old tradition that's rather fallen out of fashion since the collapse of the Third Reich. Our aim was to resurrect the idea in a modern context, convinced that the collected works of Lord Archer - novels and short stories alike - would make a damn good blaze.

The Victorian Weekend enjoyed a brief vogue; from dawn to dusk you could hardly move for crippled children, unfrocked vicars and women of easy virtue. We’ve had beer festivals - even though, for most folk, the prospect of ‘200 real ales, ciders and perries’ on sale in a draughty marquee is, realistically, about 195 too many.

The Festival of Sarcasm ("Yeah, right, what a great idea that was") came and went, largely unlamented. One year we had a Festival of Shoplifting but, to be honest, that’s something else we’d rather forget about.

Precious liberty...

2006-06-23T11:13:00.000+01:00

Combine a morbid imagination, a flawed view of risk assessment and a paranoia fuelled by watching too many episodes of Crimewatch... and you've got an Identikit picture of Mr and Mrs Middle England at the start of a new millennium. They've been led to believe that violence is something that happens - routinely, randomly and explosively - on our city streets. They lock their doors every night, switch on their burglar alarms and pull their duvets apprehensively up to their chins. Sleep doesn't come easily to the fearful. They hope they'll survive till morning without having their throats cut from ear to ear, but they expect the worst.

The mad axeman, lurking in the shadows for his unwary victims, is a familiar template for demonic violence. Gangs of kids, high on crack and way out of control, roam the means streets of the nation's overactive imaginations, prepared to bludgeon little old ladies to death to fund their spiralling drug habits. Men with khaki fatigues, staring eyes and a grudge against society are loading pump-action rifles, before heading off to rake a crowded shopping mall with bullets. Or so the sensation-seeking press would have us believe. These cultural stereotypes help to create a conveniently supine electorate, too frightened of spectres and bogey-men to start the revolution. As long as they're worried about having their purses nicked, they won't be manning the barricades.

An Englishman's home isn't so much a castle... as a prison. Mothers keep their children in; old folk are frightened to venture out at night. We've traded in our precious liberty for what we fondly imagine is the safety of our own homes.

The truth, alas, is that our homes are probably the most dangerous places we will ever visit. It's here, behind those locked doors, that we are most likely to encounter violence, perpetrated by the people we know best: the very people who have promised to love and protect us. The locks that keep the burglars out also give protection and impunity to domestic tyrants, wife-beaters and child-abusers. The inescapable conclusion is that if you are walking late at night down a dark alley, and hear footsteps behind you... best hope it's a total stranger and not someone you know.

A flatulent fug...

2006-06-22T10:58:00.000+01:00

We’ve finally got a road-safety measure that’s even more useful than John Major’s ground-breaking ‘Cones Hotline’. Yes, we, the responsible road-users, now have a simple way of recognising bad drivers. For a few weeks (the pilot scheme will finish next month, alas) their cars will be marked with flags - a red cross on a white background – to indicate that they are likely to drive like arseholes.

Frank, editor of the Hurlmere Echo, prides himself on being a careful driver; he’s a founder member of CLOC, the Central Lane Owners’ Club. Frank and his elderly Austin Princess have been inseparable for nearly twenty years; that’s longer than most marriages. He’s owned the car from new, and - as he taps the polished walnut-style fascia, for luck - he swears that in all those years it’s never had so much as a scratch.

Frank and his Princess have shared the ups and downs of life, cruising the highways and byways around Hurlmere - slowly, sedately, like minor royalty - at the sort of speeds that prevailed when cars were preceded by a man with a red flag. There’s no great hurry. The Hurlmere Echo is a weekly, not a daily. And stories that don’t appear one week can always be held back till the next issue. Or the one after that. Or ‘spiked’ and never used at all.

Lost in a flatulent fug, humming along to a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, Frank remains blissfully unaware that a queue of impatient motorists is building up behind him. He inspires strong feelings in other road-users: apoplectic rage, mostly. Frank is only jolted out of his reverie when a red-faced driver overtakes - often on a blind bend, with no thought for personal safety - with knuckles white from gripping the steering wheel too tightly.

Unlucky and stoical...

2006-06-21T13:44:00.000+01:00

On the longest day of the year, the weather’s taken a turn for the worse. Out on the lake it’s getting a bit Shakespearean, with high winds whipping up the water into ‘white horses’. It’s a scrotum-shrivelling wind that comes straight from the Urals. Only a fool would think about sailing on a day like this... and there he is, clinging grimly to the keel of his upturned dinghy, waiting for the warden to rescue him from a watery grave.

A heron takes off from the water margins, but a sudden gust of wind blows him inside out, like an old umbrella. Isn’t it awful when that happens?

Les, farming a hundred unproductive acres up on Heartbreak Hill, watches the weather more closely than most. He has his own saws and superstitions, mostly of a pragmatic nature. ‘Red sky at night, farm’s alight’. ‘When clouds are big, or middling, or small, the wind will blow hard, or not blow at all’. Wise words indeed, even though he gets most of them from the omnibus edition of the Archers.

He’s unlucky, is Les, and stoical: a bad combination. He’s been struck by lightning so many times that he no longer looks for shelter when storm clouds are gathering. He looks at the sky, shrugs his shoulders, and just carries on regardless. He’s resigned to his fate. And yet, for all his accidents, he’s still here to tell the tales: sometimes lightly singed, sometimes with a facial tic that lasts for weeks.

Anne Hathaway's Cottage on wheels...

2006-06-20T11:47:00.000+01:00

Mandy's faith in intangible forces extends to her car. A 'half-timbered' Morris Traveller, it looks like Anne Hathaway's Cottage on wheels. It's knackered. When the second-hand car salesman saw Mandy coming, he rubbed his hand together; he knew his monthly sales bonus was in the bag. He, too, has special insights: he can spot a mug a mile away. There was a Morris badge on the back of the car, but a Toyota badge on the front. There’s just no pride in the spot-welding craft these days. The salesman told Mandy it was a special edition, but because she wanted it so much, she could have it at the same low, low price as the regular model. That was the clincher.

Mandy doesn't know why her car goes, and she doesn't know why it stops. It seems to run on the motive power of pleas and prayers. Instead of filling up with petrol she tries, through the power of psychokinesis alone, to persuade the needle on the petrol gauge to creep out of the red. It means she misses a lot of appointments, sometimes by a matter of days.

She parks the car all around Hurlmere, the exact location dependent on sound feng shui principles. It’s always there when she gets back; only a short-sighted thief of unsound mind would think to try the door handle. Whenever the car splutters to a halt - a regular occurance - she rings a mechanic or (if the problem’s with the bodywork) a carpenter.

A lot of people in Hurlmere share Mandy's ambivalent attitude to cars. We don't really approve of them. And if more people could be persuaded to give up their noisy, smelly, environmentally unsound vehicles, then there'd be more room on the roads for us.

To emphasise our distaste for the internal combustion engine, we take a perverse pride in knowing as little as possible about what happens under the bonnet. We're happy to give our cars affectionately silly names, but that's about the limit of our involvement. The result, predictably, is that Dave, at Hurlmere Motors, has a regular throughput of old bangers - cherished, but determinedly unmaintained - to sort out.

A visible aura of sanctity...

2006-06-19T17:18:00.000+01:00

Hurlmere has more than its fair share of vegetarians. For some reason it's never enough for vegetarians just to stop eating meat. No, they've got to be smug bastards as well. No problem finding where your veggie friends live: just look for the house with a visible aura of sanctity around it.

Some vegetarians think it's OK to eat fish. But has anyone polled the fish on this subject? Would you prefer a) to be caught by the gills, suffocate slowly and end up as a boil-in-the-bag Cod in Parsley Sauce TV dinner for one, or b) swim around with your mates and die of old age?

Concerned carnivores who want to salve their consciences can buy 'conservation grade' meat. They feel better, apparently, knowing that the animals they eat have enjoyed meaningful lives.

Each 'conservation grade' cut of meat carries a label, giving a brief history of the animal's life, pet-name (if any) and those endearing characteristics that had marked it out from the common herd. The 'conservation grade' charter promises that the animal will never have been spoken to in a gruff or threatening manner, and will have enjoyed at least three peak sexual experiences with the partner of its choice.

The end, when it came, is vouchsafed to have been both quick and painless: a lethal injection administered to the soothing strain of Mantovani strings. Deceased animals are given a short, non-denominational funeral service, before being sliced up into the bloodless, shrink-wrapped cuts neatly displayed on the supermarket shelves. So that's all right then...

Lithe and lissom...

2006-06-17T07:40:00.000+01:00

Indolence is almost an art-form here in Hurlmere - especially now, on a sunny Saturday, with the temperature rising again. Young lads loll about and watch the world go by, discussing the options open to the terminally idle... such as opening a flea circus or starting a cult religion. Wounded Man salivates discreetly as the square in town fills up with scantily-clad lasses. If clothes are supposed to say a lot about the wearer, then some of their dresses seem to be saying "Just leave a tenner on the bedside table".

He savours their youth, their energy and their joie de vivre. More to the point, pert nipples piercing thin fabric make a powerful impression on a man whose libido has lain dormant for far too long. Years of self-denial have taken their toll on him, but those days are over. Never again, when faced with the prospect of a sexual encounter, will he be tempted to take the coward's way out and hire a stunt double.

Willow Woman arrives in the square, as if on cue, to enjoy a lazy afternoon of conversation and conviviality. She’s lithe and lissom and delightfully ingenuous: she'll wear any old thing and make it look good. She really doesn't seem to be aware of the effect she's having on the male libido, which just makes her all the more beguiling.

She’s looking particularly gorgeous today, sporting the tousled, 'just-rogered' look that drives the men of Hurlmere to distraction. She looks like she last had a good time - a really good time - about twenty minutes ago.

A World XI...

2006-06-16T12:01:00.000+01:00

With every team having played at least once, we’re approaching the half-way point in the World Cup. It's one thing to be there in person, enjoying the sights, sounds and smells of football in Germany, and doing the hokey-cokey with other pissheads from around the globe. But here in Hurlmere we are adopting the more traditional approach: staying home, stocking up with microwave pizzas and a few crates of lager, pulling the living-room curtains tightly closed to keep the summer sunshine out, and enjoying blanket World Cup coverage on TV. Hours of pointless pre-match predictions, endless post-match analysis, and, oh yes, a few undistinguished football matches squeezed in between...

Some things are certain. John Motson will have trouble telling the black players apart. Our hooligans will follow in the footsteps of their great-grandfathers, by laying waste to foreign lands in the name of Queen and Country. Without prejudice - happy to engage in hand-to-hand combat with people of every colour, race and creed. And a player will fail a random drug test.

While many of the big-name players will fail to live up to expectations, the tournament will throw up a new crop of football stars, who will be able to add a couple of noughts to their next transfer fee. From the players we’ve seen already in the tournament, here’s a World XI that might give Venus or Mars a run for their money:

Catheter
Propane
Tiara (captain)
Trousseau
Caterwaul
Tabasco
Gaviscon
Bouffant
Schtick
Mullet
Satsuma

Human piccolo...

2006-06-14T13:08:00.000+01:00

Down at the Tattoo Parlour there's a 'three for the price of two' offer on nipple piercing this week, though it's conspicuously failed to bring the expected rush of customers. Visitors are resistant to the idea of having more holes in their bodies than they had on the day they were born. And the more adventurous locals already sport intriguing collections of piercings - wherever a spare tuck of flesh can be pinched between finger and thumb - and are fast running out of unperforated skin.

Our neighbourhood dope dealer, for example, has rings in his lips, nose, eyebrows and ears; perhaps elsewhere too, who knows? With his inelegantly wasted frame and pierced extremities, he's like a human piccolo. A light breeze makes him warble disconcertingly; a strong wind can force him indoors. If he were ever to consider getting a proper job (an admittedly unlikely scenario) it would take a lot of work to restore his raddled features to any semblance of normality. He would need to be retouched with Polyfilla, sanded down and given a coat of primer.

Town Drunk, unwisely venturing into the Tattoo Parlour midway through a three-day bender, needed little persuading to have his foreskin pierced. It means that nobody ever occupies an adjacent urinal in the Grievous Bodily Arms, but, looking on the brighter side, he's been offered a Saturday job as a lawn sprinkler.

The optimism of the damned...

2006-06-13T19:58:00.000+01:00

The heatwave ended dramatically with a violent hailstorm. Hailstones the size of peas/golf balls (pick your own hyperbolic comparison) beat down on the streets of Hurlmere like a protracted drum solo. For half an hour we were part of some prog-rock concept album called 'Wierd Weather'...

It takes more than a hailstorm to dampen the enthusiasm of the visitors, mooching around, looking for something to waste their money on. Our chemist has turned his back on years of supplying the good people of Hurlmere with essential - though unexciting - commodities, to relaunch his business as a pale imitation of the Body Shop. No longer can you find life's essentials, such as fungal cream, flavoured condoms or a family box of suppositories.

He has adopted, instead, the sales philosophy of Anita Roddick - acknowledging her saintly efforts to save the Third World from the horrors of dry skin, using the well-documented defoliant properties of Vimto and Branston Pickle. His pungent products aren't tested on animals, so God only knows what they're doing to us.

Shops come and go in Hurlmere. They open up like spring flowers, to meet our real or imaginary needs for organic cheeses, ethnic handicrafts and occult paraphernalia. Some of them disappear even before we realise they’ve opened. When people decide to “do without advertising and just see how it goes”, we know for certain that their trading days are numbered. Starting a business without advertising makes no sense; it’s like shouting in a whisper.

Drip-dry wedding dresses were never going to be hot-selling items in a small Lakeland town. And ‘Wicca World’: what the fuck was that all about? The record for sinking without trace is currently held by a second-hand shop selling Indian clothing. ‘Whose Sari Now?’ proved to be a rhetorical question. The boutique opened on a Friday and had closed by the Monday, without even adding to the £20 float.

But still they come: retailing rookies with exotic ideas, family windfalls and the optimism of the damned, ready to give shopkeeping a whirl. To counteract the gravitational pull of the out-of-town supermarkets, it might be more profitable to target the old, the infirm and those who've had their cars repossessed: the kind of people who have to shop locally. Offer ‘Everything for a Quid’, with some appropriate background Musak ('Buddy, can you spare a dime?'... 'Nobody loves you when you're down and out'), and wait for the money to roll in.

Our retailing entrepreneurs tend to have more exotic ideas, however, spotting niche markets so small that they’re almost invisible to the naked eye. One short-lived shop made a brief speciality out of impractical jokes, but who - beyond the small and shadowy world of S & M - buys exploding suppositaries?

Like some tragic hero on the operatic stage, other shops are a long time dying. Their closing down sales stretch out to weeks, months, even years. Sometimes those ‘Sale Must End On Saturday’ posters get so tatty they have to be replaced with new ones. And perhaps someone could explain to us why a florist needs to have a closing down sale at all.

Fish, chips and scraps...

2006-06-12T09:52:00.000+01:00

For most of the year the fish & chip shop does a roaring trade. Visitors eat their haddock, chips and scraps in the square, but no-one wants fish & chips in a heatwave.

That smell isn’t appetising. It’s rancid. And even from the other side of Conciliation Street it hits you like a slap across the face. When the weather’s like this, working in the chip shop looks like the worst job in the world: it’s like doing a shift down in Dante’s inferno. The woman in the shop is suffering - her hair lacquered to her forehead, skin glazed by the searing heat. Beads of sweat drip into the hot fat, and sizzle. You make a mental note to eat elsewhere. A sandwich will do. Or just a drink. It’s too hot to eat.

It’s a relief when the heat of the day subsides, and the swallows and swifts come out to play. We’re in luck: no bog-standard sunset tonight, it’s a special order. The sun becomes a huge, blood-red disc as it slips behind the Lakeland hills and disappears.

A silence shared...

2006-06-11T14:35:00.000+01:00

The Quakers of Hurlmere are gathering for an hour of shared silence. Yes, silence is what the compact meeting house is all about; you can feel it in the very fabric of the building. George Fox’s big idea was that everyone could have a personal relationship with God. They didn’t need priests to guide them or intercede on their behalf. There is no altar in a meeting house, no pulpit either.

If the Church of England has traditionally been ‘the Tory party at prayer’, then the Quakers can perhaps be seen as mild-mannered anarchists. No wonder they were seen as seditious; in the business of religion they were trying to cut out the middlemen. Fox had no truck with churchmen: “hireling priests”, he called them. He was equally dismissive of church buildings; they were nothing more than “steeple houses”.

From the beginning the Quakers were pacifists, and became known for their scrupulously honest dealings. But there were other reasons why they were persecuted and imprisoned. They didn’t doff their hats to their ‘social superiors’, they didn’t pay tithes and they refused to swear an oath.

While the hat business sounds rather quaint today, the refusal to take an oath has a compelling logic. At the risk of being pompous (a risk he never shied away from) George Fox declared that he only had one kind of truth. His “yea” was his “yea”, and his “nay” was his “nay”. Whenever they stood in the dock of some courthouse (which was quite often), Quakers would not swear to tell the truth, as this would imply that they spoke falsely at other times. How can you argue with that?

Quakers are still a force in the world, and Hurlmere’s meeting house echoes, every Sunday morning, with their silent meditations. But you won’t find Quakers knocking at your door, or trying to thrust a pamphlet into your hand. At a time when so many religions seem self-serving and confrontational (“Peace on earth and death to the infidel!”), Quakers won’t grab you by the lapels and try to drum their beliefs into you. “Let’s talk things over”, they may suggest, in a voice of sweet reason. The world could do with more like them.

Those siren voices...

2006-06-10T11:12:00.000+01:00

We hear the siren voices of the outdoor gear manufacturers. We’re all susceptible to the adverts - especially those of us who insist we aren’t.

We used to buy a pair of boots or a rucksack; now we buy ‘a system’. We used to buy scratchy woollen walking socks by the kilo; now the socks are so comfortable it’s like walking barefoot on shagpile carpet. We used to pull on a mud-coloured windjammer, made from the same low-tech, rain-attracting material from which they make bath sponges. Now we have smart, figure-hugging garments which keep us striding through torrential rain long after the enjoyment has gone... just to see if a £250 cagoule really is as waterproof as the manufacturers suggest.

For that money you get a garment that not merely keeps out wind and weather, but ‘breathes’ too. Hmmm, £250 is the sort of sum you spend on a car, not clothing. And for that sort of money you’d want a jacket that could do more than breathe; you’d want it to juggle and do card tricks too...

Fashion on the fells...

2006-06-08T11:27:00.000+01:00

Our memories are hazy. Was it last year we made poverty history, or was it the year before? What, you mean it never happened? Well, don’t blame us: we wore the wristbands and everything.

Yes, everything’s a fashion, these days... which is why walkers shop for cagoules, gaiters and three-season sleeping bags in Hurlmere, rather than some labyrinthine retail park off the M6.

Selling over-priced outdoor gear is serious business; in separating fools from their hard-earned money there’s no room for frivolity. If you’re going to be comprehensively fleeced, it would be impolite for shop assistants to start giggling hysterically until you’ve left the shop.

A stern and fatalistic demeanour is recommended for customers too, so you won’t arrive at the counter and scream “How much???” when the cost of your purchases are rung up on the till. Yes, if you want to give your credit card some serious hammer on colour-coordinated clothing, than Hurlmere fits the bill.

2006-06-07T13:19:00.000+01:00

The shamanic quarter...

2006-06-07T13:04:00.000+01:00

People with time to kill - and cash burning a hole in their pockets - can investigate the town’s shamanic quarter, where a variety of shops cater for esoteric tastes. Hurlmere has become the place to find that unusual gift. A combined ouija board and chopping block? No problem. Homophobic remedies? Look no further. Within minutes your invented ailments can be expertly matched up with ineffective placebos. Where’s the harm in that? You’ll probably get better in time – most people do - and you’ll have helped to keep an otherwise unemployable person out of the dole queue.

Relaxation tapes? Try the latest one; it features a tap dripping for five irritating minutes... followed by purposeful footsteps... then forty minutes of blissful, sleep-inducing silence. You can even buy anti-meditation tapes: just the job for those Hurlmere folk who, being under-caffeinated and over-relaxed, need geeing up for another hard day’s work at the coal-face of alternative therapies. Side one: the sound of someone trying, in vain, to start an old car on a cold winter’s morning. Side two: a car alarm draining the battery, and whining, eventually, to a merciful halt.

These shops stock many other staples of Hurlmere life, such as crystals, incense and decorative items from around the globe. No wonder Hurlmere has won a prestigious award from the Indian High Commission, for services to the subcontinent's soapstone and papier maché industries. You can gaze, uncomprehendingly, at strange paraphernalia and wonder, as so many have before you: “What can you weigh, with scales as small as that?” If you walk into a shop and say "I'm looking for a crystal that will offer me psychic empowerment", the staff will have been trained to interpret this request as "I'm very, very silly, and I've got a Barclaycard".

You may already be a winner...

2006-06-02T12:07:00.000+01:00

Bob the postman’s been: junk, bill, junk, bill, junk, junk, bill, junk, and, oh yes, a letter from Readers Digest. How likely is it – be honest – that you’ve won a competition that you haven’t entered? Hmmmm? And what’s this: a full-colour brochure detailing the many attractions of the Freeloader, a new off-road, 4x4 monster with bull-bars and all the aerodynamic qualities of a house-brick.

You have to admit that the pitch is appealing. You're different. You're a cut above the rest. You really are. You have distinct goals, a personal vision, a new kind of bank account. Let's not beat around the bush: you're just better than other people, goddammit. You deserve every perk and luxury that life can afford. Nothing is too good for you. Money is no object. You get what you want. You're just great. You really are. You rise above the common herd, with their pathetic dreams and meaningless lives. But you... you gaze confidently across the sunlit uplands of your own inestimable worth. You have the ropes of life grasped firmly in your hands, and you know exactly where you're going. And to get there you need a Freeloader, the car that thinks it’s a bus.

Who wouldn’t be tempted?

The old straight track...

2006-06-01T10:15:00.000+01:00

It comes as a surprise to those untutored in the folklore of the 'old straight tracks' to discover that Hurlmere lies on the convergence of some very powerful ley-lines. It even surprises Willow Woman (usually happy to espouse any old mumbo-jumbo) when Wounded Man produces a scruffy map of Hurlmere, seemingly drawn by an artistically challenged five-year-old and criss-crossed with lines.

As a founder member of the Society for the Investigation of Unlikely Phenomena (Hurlmere Chapter), he has wasted many an evening searching for significances where none exist. "This line", he points out, stabbing the map at random with a grubby finger, "is in perfect alignment with three important landscape features: the church spire, this hollow tree and the public bar of the Grievous Bodily Arms". He leans back, feeling his point is proved beyond reasonable doubt, unaware that the back of Willow Woman's sofa is caked in fresh cat vomit.

But what are these lines? Ancient tracks? Landing strips for extra-terrestrial craft? Or merely the vapid imaginings of people with too much time on their hands? Wounded man favours the first option. Indeed, he has unearthed exciting evidence that one of his distant ancestors tried - unsuccessfully - to thwart a controversial ley-line widening scheme.

2006-05-25T22:00:00.000+01:00

Still and soporific...

2006-05-25T12:10:00.000+01:00

It seems a little strange to us that so many visitors come to Hurlmere, ostensibly to escape the noise, clutter and pollution of our northern cities... only to bring their own noise, clutter and pollution with them.
But even on the sunniest of weekends, when Hurlmere is throbbing with visitors, it’s easy to escape the crowds. As locals are well aware (and the more discerning visitors, too), the noise quells to an unobtrusive murmur within ten minutes of lacing up the walking boots and taking any of the pathss that radiate away from the town.

Convinced they will get hopelessly lost, townies find the countryside unnerving. So this is the ideal time of year to show these benighted souls that the Lakeland landscape can be invitingly benign: a patchwork of ever-changing patterns of light and colour that never fail to fascinate. Even when walkers crest a hill, the breeze that brushes their faces is as warm as a kiss. Bare trees aren’t being bent by savage winter winds. Blizzards are unlikely. In short, there’s little to disturb the most timid of walkers.

The River Hurl meanders unhurriedly as it approaches the lake. Sulphur-yellow wagtails chase each other along the water-margins. Dippers slide effortlessly beneath the surface. Startled moorhens skitter into the reeds. Dragonflies flash by: vivid blurs of electric greens and blues.

The air is still and soporific. Stand on the old packhorse bridge. Feel the warmth and texture of weathered stone beneath your palms. Gaze down into the water. Watch the waterweed waving, hypnotically, like manes of hair, and fingerling trout basking lazily in the shallows. Let your problems melt away; there’ll be time enough to deal with them once you get home. Slip into the silence, with the same ease as the dipper, leaving barely a ripple.

Auditioning for Riverdance...

2006-05-24T12:27:00.000+01:00

What a morning to be up early, and take a leisurely stroll around Cocksure Point. Look out for the dog-shit, though. Avoiding it requires some nifty footwork; it makes you look like you’re auditioning for Riverdance.

There are plenty of dogs in Hurlmere, but too few gardens. A lot of owners, too idle to take their pooches for a proper walk, just boot them out of the door. This ensures that the paths and pavements are transformed into slippery skid-pans. It makes Hurlmere a nightmare for pedestrians, especially all those who walk around with their head in the clouds.

The dogs aren't too thrilled either. They'd rather be out in the wilds, fucking and fighting as nature intended, instead of squatting self-consciously on Tarmac. They’re forced into bizarre sculptural collaborations - featuring dogs of many different breeds, sizes and intestinal capacity. The lion's share, as it were, tends to come from a Great Dane or St Bernard. They create the broad canvas on which smaller, more agile dogs can extemporise, in a manner that Jackson Pollock would immediately recognise. The final additions - almost a garnish - would appear to be added by a particularly dexterous Chihuahua with the runs. Step in one of these putrid monstrosities and you won't just be wiping your shoes on the grass. Maddened by the stench, you'll be ripping your clothes off and leaping into the lake.