I thought I had touched sediment. I thought I could go no lower. Wrong!!!!!
I am 46, overweight, balding, a smoker, I drink too much and I have a face like a camel sucking a biscuit and the dress sense of Timmy Mallet. Then, last year, it was announced to me that my marriage was shortly about to end. Anything else?
Well, with my self esteem lower than Vanessa Feltz's gut, a little surprise dropped through my letterbox yesterday which must have surely taken me down as low as it is possible to go.
The surprise? A Valentine's Day card. Not something awful, you might think? Something to actually bring a smile to my face, you might think? Wrong again!! For the last 17 years I have not received a single Valentine's card. The reason is that for the last 17 years I have been married and my wife (soon-to-be ex-wife) and I agreed early on that Valentine's Day was just an excuse for card companies to make money. If you have to wait for one day in the year to tell your other half that you love them then your relationship is in serious shit.
All of a sudden I am single and in my first year of singledom I get a card. Hurrah, you might think. Pither's pants are still radioactive in women's eyes. Nope. You see, the problem is..................it's from a fucking dog!!!!! No, not one of those dogs, a REAL dog. It's from Ellie, the dog I sponsor through the Dogs Trust.


So, to recap, I'm 46, overweight, balding, a smoker, I drink too much, have a face like a camel sucking a biscuit AND................my only female admirer in the whole world is a mongrel bitch!!!!
Thanks Ellie, but it hasn't helped. No, Valentine's Day can fuck off to Grantham.

All White?

Praise God!! I think we've made it! The white-out of doom some believed was foretold in Revelations has struck - but puny mankind has stood up to Mother Nature and the Horsemen of the Apocalypse appear to have fallen at the first........ Yeah, right! What an unadulterated load of crap!!
The news reports yesterday would have had us believe that Britain was on the verge of a climatic disaster to rival the one which drove Noah to go out and build a boat. The first hint I got that things might not have been quite as bad as had first been feared was when I actually woke up this morning - I had thwarted the Angel of Death, I thought. I counted my blessings and switched on the wireless to listen out for advice from our leaders on where us few survivors should try to rally, assuming any of our leaders had made it through the blizzard. Why were there no emergency broadcasts advising us to flee south by whatever means we could? Why was there no information on who was still with us and had a tin of beans and a slice of bread to share? Which port of evacuation to the continent was still serviceable? So many questions, not the least of which was................why the fuck was Nicky Campbell still alive and spouting his usual brand of Jock crap?!
One look out of the window provided me with the answers. Jesus H Christ! Was the snow up to the rooftops? Was it bollocks! I put more sugar on my Frosty Wheatyflakes at breakfast! As for continued downpours, I have experienced worse standing next to someone with bad dandruff in a strong breeze!
No doubt some creatures were suffering. I mean, it must have been an inconvenience for the odd ant or two, trying to trudge through a white carpet which came up to their ankles (ok, ants don't have ankles, but you get my drift - no pun intended). There again, most of their brethren had no doubt stayed indoors and heeded the advice not to travel "unless it is absolutely necessary".
I'm sure there were a few aphids who had to spend an hour or so this morning clearing the snow from their drives. Obviously, Axa Sunlife would have been deluged with claims from protozoans whose fences had collapsed in the "blizzard". Apart from them, I don't think the rest of us were too badly affected.
So, to all those dickheads who went out yesterday and cleared every shop in the land of bread, eggs, cheese and milk, tough titty! Looks like you're going to be eating omelette on toast for the next fortnight. How long do you think it is going to take you to work through that stockpiled mountain of Alphabetti Spaghetti? What exactly are you going to do with the 5,872 candles you bought? Melt them down and fashion a lifesize model of your own stupidity, perhaps?
It's the same old story in this country every time snow is forecast. The same old predictions of doom and the same old non-event consequences. Jesus, even rats learn when they are negatively reinforced enough times. I mean, it makes you wonder how the Inuit get by? Do they rush out every afternoon and stockpile emergency seals just because Radio Eskimo has forecast a white-over - AGAIN? Do they listen to portents of doom every night on the 6 O'Clock News? Do they spend their lives stuck in their igloos because EBC 1 has advised them "not to go out unless it is absolutely necessary"? Je ne pense pas!!!
Oh dear. No, panic caused by "snow blindness" can drift off to Grantham.


NOTE: Since writing this, more snow has fallen. It is now about an-inch-and-a-half deep so apologies to all those ants, aphids and protozoans whose plight I might have underestimated. Is that the distant sound of horsemen I can hear? Quick, has anyone got a spare tin of Alphabetti Spaghetti?

The Cost of Sex with Saxon Sheep Minders.

Leslie Ash claimed that she broke a rib and punctured a lung during sex with her husband, Lee Chapman. Well, if her health insurance swallowed that belter then I could be in with a chance.
You see, it looks as if I'm going to have to claim on a policy by saying "She injured her leg falling off the back of an alsatian during sex!" That should tax the comedy claims department.
I'm not acting on Leslie's behalf, although she seems to have such an adventurous sex life that it does, admittedly, sound as though it could be one of hers. No, the injured female in this instance is my littlest dog, Tilly.
Our Till gets very excited when she goes in the car, so excited that she feels the evidently overwhelming urge to hump my alsatian, Padfoot. Pad is a shy, retiring kind of lad and is not overly keen on the attention but, with him, Till and two other dogs in the kennel compound in the back of my car, there is little room for manoeuvre. He just stands there and takes it, with typically British stoicism.
It's not easy trying to screw a dog which stands about as high as a Shetland pony. I'm not talking from experience, you understand. I'm talking on behalf of a dog which looks like a cross between a beagle and a hamster and is a mere 10 inches from paw to shoulder. Love making with a reluctant partner involves a lot of clambering and clinging.
Till, as is her custom, was aboard Pad yesterday afternoon as I drove the dogs to a local country park for a walk. She was getting to whatever the female equivalent of the vinegar strokes is when she fell off with a dull thud. She has been limping ever since.
If there is no improvement in her condition by tomorrow I shall have to take her to the vet. The vet's bills are extortionate but all the dogs are insured up to the hilt and I should be able to claim on this occasion.
Anyway, in the meantime, bizarre injuries resulting from sex with alsatians shall be the sole preserve of the people of Grantham.
NOTE: For the more obser-vant readers, Pither Towers is not actually some kine of squat - the torn wallpaper and chewed plaster in the photograph were a gift from Caty, one of the other dogs, and are about to be renovated.

A Liver Bird and Tree Phallus on Holiday.

A pal of mine is on holiday in Borneo. She e-mailed me this today to let me know she is having a good time! Her only comment was "Hurrah, they do grow on trees!" I'm not sure she'll be coming back!
Speaking as a man who is desperately trying to find some purpose in life, I feel compelled to banish todger trees to Grantham. Life is tough enough as it is, without arborial replacements getting wood and waiting in the wings - however poorly they are endowed.

Of Dogs and Salt and Wounds.

They say dogs have a sixth sense. They say they know when you're upset or worried. They say dogs can just sense your pain, without you having to outwardly weep and wail. I have always believed this.
I have had a truly awful day - truly awful! You know, one of those where if anything could have gone wrong, it did. I finally made it home and slumped onto the settee to stare into space and ponder my lot in silence. Just as I did so, the dogs gathered round me at my feet. They looked knowingly up at me with wrinkled brows and faces full of consternation. They stared for what seemed like an age but then quietly took themselves off and went upstairs.
They think I am best left alone, I thought. They sympathise deeply and want to help but all they can do is make sure they don't get under my feet, don't clamour for attention and don't make a noise. Their sixth sense has kicked in, bless them.
Their apparent thoughtfulness eventually prompted me to get up and go to them, to say thank you, to say everything was all right, to stroke them, to pat them, to let them know they were special.
I found them in my bedroom...........................two had crapped on my bed, a third had chewed up one of my training shoes and the fourth had wet on the landing!!! Bastards!!!!!

The Use of the Pudding is in the Heating.

On a weekend which has proved blogtastic for me, I have just one more thing to tell - you're never ahead for very long in this life!
I spoke yesterday of the gratitude I felt for friends who had gone to the trouble of making me a steak and kidney pudding, a dish I have always adored but have not tasted since I was young.
Well, I put this king of puddings on to steam this afternoon...............but forgot that the water boils away after a while and unless you top the level up regularly you end up with..................a fire followed by.................well, by this....



Oops!



.......but what are a small fire and a house full of smoke when this is the result. Thank you God (and Phil and Sarah).

Jumpers for Goalposts - Isn't It?

This is the most serious subject I have written about to date - football. I never thought I would EVER say this but football is now AWFUL. It can be the town sport of Grantham for all I care. The rest of us can enjoy what I always used to see as the game for toffs - rugby union!
I used to be obsessed by football. From the age of about five, when my late dad took me to my first ever game, I ADORED football. The very mention of it made by eyes resemble dinner plates. I spent EVERY SINGLE DAYLIGHT HOUR outside school playing it. My little pals and I used to race home, wolf down our tea and then charge up to the local park to get in as much of a kick-about as we could (my mum was glad to get me out of the house and the fear of being preyed on by paedophiles was not then prevalent). We re-enacted the great matches of the '60s and '70s, we used to pretend we were certain players (I was ALWAYS Ian Storey-Moore), we used to excitedly scream out our own commentary as we raced around with the ball, it WAS jumpers for goalposts and we loved it - ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT!!! The park keeper used to walk the outskirts of the park ringing a bell to tell everyone that he was locking the gates and we used to up-jumpers-and-ball and run to get ahead of him, start playing again and then decamp to the next near-gate spot when he caught up with us. We came home filthy, covered in cuts and bruises, tired but happy that we had actually managed to score that crucial extra goal against Poland which would, in the real world, have taken England to the 1974 World Cup Finals (yes, it still hurts!). If, by any chance, my pals weren't available to play (they had to provide a doctor's note!) I used to kick a ball against our garage door for hours on end, trying to place the ball in the furthermost reaches of a goal I had painted on myself (I got a severe slap for that!) In school I always played for the school teams and lived for Thursdays (double games in the afternoon) and Saturdays (a titanic clash with another school and, if it was an away game, the trip home on the bus listening to Sports Roundup).
I collected Shell football coins, Shoot comic stickers, I kept a league table and moved the little, card teams up or down, depending on that Saturday's results, which I also logged religiously, along with the following day's newspaper clippings of my team's game.
When it was too dark to play I used to play Subbuteo (a table football game) with my next door neighbour and kept equally detailed tables and reports of how my teams had performed. When that became impossible (because my mate's mum wanted me out of her house) I used to play the F A Cup board game - ON MY OWN!!!
When my dad died we moved to another place 70 miles away but I still travelled back to watch "my team" whenever I could. When my knees and my lungs no longer allowed me to play I still went to watch my heroes.
It was socially important as well. Towns lived and thrived on their football teams. A good run in the league or the cup brought prosperity and, in the case of my boys, international respect which no army of spin doctors could ever generate. A football team used to be the life and heart of a town.
All that ended about five or ten years ago - I forget. It all changed, and changed massively for the worst. MONEY became the God. A couple of teams started it. Managers were no longer important, it was players and their obscene wage demands which counted. Fans were sent to the sidelines. Shareholders and boards of fat, inadequate, publicity-seeking directors took centre stage. We had win-at-all costs football, a league ranked on how much a club was worth (THAT IS EXACTLY HOW IT IS RANKED AT THE MOMENT) and a yawning chasm appeared between about five greedy outfits and the rest. The others now have no chance whatever of reaching the heights, of winning "The Cup" or of joining the big boys.
The majority of the players are all utter, utter, utter, utter juvenile, chav, thick and obscenely overpaid wankers. They roll about in agony if their perm snaps, they cheat, they dive, they attack referees, they collect onyx ashtrays and awful, tasteless homes and knock off any braindead, under-age disco tarts they can find. I hate the fucking lot of them. They have ruined such a beautiful and special thing - as all Thatcherites do.
No, some years ago I started watching the posh boys' game - rugby union. I put aside my inverted snob prejudices and discovered what a fantastic game it is. Real men playing a real game. It's got nothing to do with being macho. It just happens to be more exciting than today's predictable footy debacles, more honestly played and more keenly contested. Bollocks to anyone who thinks it is only for public school types. The Welsh ruled the rugby world in the '70s and I don't recall many members of those famous sides attending posh schools - it was the pits for them, literally.
I hate to say this, because it has been such an important part of my life, but football can sod off to Grantham (no doubt in an extremely expensive Italian sports car).