Leaving

Today's an immensely sad day in my office, because two really bright, young, promising stalwarts of our company are leaving.

I'm absolutely gutted about both to be honest - between them they've not only given me a hell of a lot of laughs, but also taught me a staggering amount about the job that I do. In a nutshell, that's why you have work colleagues and friends - to accomplish those two goals. They make your life enjoyable, and they help you to advance day by day, month by month and year by year.

But now, they're leaving, which means I'll have to look elsewhere for that same inspiration. Happily my company isn't short of just such people, but that doesn't mean the loss of these two will be any easier to take.

Life moves on. Some people deal with it very well, some with it incredibly poorly. I now know which camp I'm in

Rain

Bristol, as anyone who's ever spent more two minutes in the city will know, has a bit of a problem with rain.

For five months of the year between May and September, the city is one gorgeous, sunny parade, with open stretches of grass, plentiful beer gardens and barbecues in every home. Or at least something relatively near that description anyway.

But something rather alarming tends to happen once you move outside of that corridor - it rains. And I mean it really rains. Big rain, fat rain, horizontal rain and especially that really annoying drizzly rain that soaks you slowly but surely over a period of fifteen minutes or so.

And so it was this weekend, when, after a brilliant night out celebrating birthdays, engagements and movings-in, I decided to brave the hangover and go round various houses to visit other sufferers of the night before.

Everything was going fine as we made it to house number one. The clouds were a little dark, the air a little damp, but fortune was generally favouring hungover men for the day.

I should have known better.

Leaving house number one was probably what I would pinpoint as the fatal mistake. There was no real reason to leave - it was warm, dry, it had a comfy sofa, a good friend, and best of all a series of hilarious (though surely fake) videos on YouTube of 'ping pong mastery'.

But leave we did, just as the lightest of light drizzle began. Then we began to walk and the hangover gods deserted us – light became heavy, drizzle became full-on rain, and we ploughed straight on, never looking back (ok, so we may have half looked back, but everybody would have, I mean it was really crappy rain!)

And why do this and not turn back? Simple. Because I have an insatiable appetite for making the most of my rare visits to Bristol, and with barely ninety minutes left I still had another house, as well as a walk to the train station to fit in. So on we ploughed to house number two.

Fifteen minutes later, with wet jeans, soggy underwear, and walking alongside a bloke who now more closely resembled a highland cow (at least from the forehead upwards), we arrived at house number two where there was general laughter at our predicament. This laughter was then replaced with general laughter at the predicament of the occupants of the house, who had endured a less than enjoyable morning meeting the vicar who is due to marry them one year this week – suffice to say hangovers and spiritual guidance just don’t mix.

But even with soggy boxers, a painful hangover, a run to the station and (yes, naturally) some more rain on the way, it was absolutely worth it, every second of it.

It does rain a lot, and that might well put some people off visiting or (more likely) staying for good. But I wouldn’t change it for anything or anywhere.

Verve

Damn good band The Verve, one of the best in fact. Every time I listen to Urban Hymns (and yes that’s what I’m doing now sat here on a train to Bristol) I’m reminded of just what a special record they put together, and how many instantly recognisable, longingly memorable songs are contained within it. To call two or three of those songs anything but ‘classic’ would be wrong.

Lucky Man isn’t one of those classics, even though it is a very good song. It is however the first song I ever learnt to play on a guitar. It’s brilliantly simple in fact – just three chords for the majority of the song with a bridge at the end of each verse.

I always fancied being in a band when I was younger (I suspect most teenagers and young 20-somethings do – X-Factor anyone?) as it just seemed to be quite possibly the best form of employment anyone could ever wish for. Go into a studio, thrash out a tune, play it to the world and then do it all over again.

As time advanced and my career of mega-stardom didn’t appear blissfully over the horizon (which I suspect is the sad delusion that so many of the contestants on X-Factor actually hold) I adapted to a less ambitious target. My future house was to contain a soundproofed room with four speakers, a drum kit and a very large amp. Suffice to say I’m yet to find that house, or the drum kit for that matter. Or even the speakers.

But I still think I retain enough of that youthful belief, desire and romanticism to cling to that thought. At least for a couple more years.

After that dream dies I don’t really know what the next step down will be for my musical dreams. Maybe I’ll revert back to the earlier goal of joining a band, only this time it’ll be aiming to make the grade with the local village band. But then again, the whole village life dream is another matter entirely – why is it the older you get the more the idea of a small place with one shop, one pub and one hundred houses appeals more and more?

Whatever happens though I can at least be sure of one thing – Urban Hymns will always be in my CD rack (and yes I will always have a CD rack despite what anyone says).

And now it’s Word Gets Around by the Stereophonics. The 90’s were bloody brilliant weren’t they.

Stag

Someone asked me a damn good question this weekend whilst I was up in Manchester - why are stag do's called stag do's exactly?

Sadly I failed to answer the question for two very good reasons. One, I don't actually know the answer, which proved a bit of a problem (though as certain friends of mine will know, I can generally bullshit an answer with the best of them - PR career anyone?).

And two, I was a little (for which read exceedingly, utterly and completely) drunk at the time and had more important things to focus on - like where the next round was coming from, which hideous-tasting shot it was going to consist of, and whether it was time to whip out trusty 'Mr Maestro' to pay for it again.

Even after extensive research (well, Google and Wikipedia at least) I still don't know the answer, but rest assured the quest will continue.

On the plus side, the event was brilliant, fantastic and utterly worth the trip. It might be immature (and frankly a bit strange) to say, but there really are few better feelings than waking up the morning after a huge night out with good friends, with a shocking headache, an overbearing thirst for any kind of liquid and the prayer that you avoid natural light of any kind for at least another hour.

I've always been a great believer in the hangover, because it effectively forces you indoors and onto the sofa with fellow sufferers for several hours at a time. And in that time, you tend, though feeling overwhelmingly crap, to have a genuinely brilliant time chatting, laughing, watching crap TV and eating plastic food.

So it's with a fantastic sense of anticipation that I look forward to this Saturday which will feature two birthdays, a housewarming and an engagement party all rolled into one night with my closest friends in my favourite city.

All I can say is, bring on Sunday!

Birthdays

At every stage of my life, and everywhere I've lived, there always seem to be lots of birthdays in September and October. Way more than any other time of the year.

At this point I could point to the rather obvious mathematical calculation of deducting nine(ish) months from September/October and ending up at the festive season. In that golden period between Christmas and New Year, alcohol flows and romance fleetingly returns. It's also the coldest time of year, when warmth and entertainment are at a premium. This may or may or not have something to do with it and I'll leave it at that.

But back to the birthdays thing. I've just had mine, next weekend I'm celebrating two more, and there are a stack of them in and around the office. Everyone celebrates them differently of course - ranging from what one soon to be 26 year old described as a 'classic night' (house, nibbles, wine/beer, pub, beer, bar, spirit, club, shot, shot, shot...) to those who choose to try to prove that the passing of time hasn't affected their physical abilities too much by climbing Britain's highest peak.

But the great thing is, despite the sheer number of birthdays out there, you really never get bored of going to them nor celebrating them. I mean think about it. If you have say thirty friends and attend each of their birthdays every year for thirty years that's ninety birthdays. That's being conservative to be honest, and yet still each and every one is different and entertaining in its own special way.

I suspect they get better the older you get too. Whilst it's true that the magic goes out of the whole 'turning a year older' bit fairly easily, the excuse for a good piss-up or event out of the ordinary more than makes up for that. Birthdays also become milestones in the calendar as you get older - a chance to see people that you don't see half as much as you used to or want to.

And maybe that's the most important aspect of them - the chance to see the people that matter most to you. The older you get, the harder you work, the more stuff simply gets in the way of that seemingly easy objective of spending time with those people.

So happy birthday to all fellow SeptemberOctoberites for this year and all future ones.

The Finger Rule

Brilliant things fingers. Without them there would be no music, precious few sports and almost certainly a total lack of ability to drink from a wine glass without ending up licking most of the pinot grigio from the tabletop. Come to think of it there'd probably be no tabletop either.

God certainly should be congraulated on the design of fingers because of all these joys they provide us, though of course they're also highly useful for a number of less brilliant activities - let's face it, swearing just wouldn't be the same without fingers.

But there is one use that I've always been fascinated by and that is when those fantastic fingers belong to a hairdresser.

On average, I have my hair cut roughly every six weeks. That's about nine times a year, or to put it another way, 180-odd times since my once golden brown locks were first exposed to the bloke with the spray bottle, designer stubble and personalised scissors.

I've had my fair share of hair cut types, though by and large nothing outrageous. But what's always amazed me is the same familiar pattern I go through with the barber.

I'll sit down, he/she will ask me what I want doing, we'll agree (or not in some isolated cases of teenage rebllion) and then they will proceed to run their hand over my hair, grasp a bit of it with two fingers and ask the question to which I'm yet to fathom any answer other than yes - "about this much off?".

About how 'much' off? From what I can see it's always the same two fingers, at roughly the same point on my head and usually broadly the same outcome.

So I ask again. How, with someone's hand in the middle of your head, looking in a mirror (left is right, right is left, yada yada yada) and with absolutely no ability as a pre-cogniscent being who can look into the future are you supposed to say anything other than a somewhat limp and utterly defenceless 'yes'?

Of course it all usually ends up broadly alright - bizarrely I've always thought the worst you look after a haircut is the second day, not the first day after you've had the snip. But by and large, by the end of the first week, everything is back to normal and you get on with things.

But I remain determined to solve this little conondrum and hence I've come to the conclusion that it's time for me to do the only thing possible - penetrate the inner hairdressing circle and decipher the genuis behind the finger rule.

I can see it already; the day in the lecture schedule where the doors to the auditorium are bolted shut, the global hairdressing deity (GHD for short) steps forward from the golden plinth, and a hush falls across the next generation of convertible car owners.

And then he utters the immortal, longed-for words:

"My pupils, today we learn the most important rule of them all, the rule that will guide your careers and ensure cash in your pockets. Today we learn, the finger rule"

OK, maybe not, but I freely admit here and now that I simply haven't got the balls to challenge the finger rule any other way

HIMYM

Acronyms. They're everywhere. I suspect there was a time when they didn't exist but as long as I've been alive (or at least as long as I can remember, so discount those first three years of joyful unaware bliss) they seem to have been around. The world of business is of course particularly susceptible for them. I remember spending nine months in a pensions office being confronted everyday with 'GMP', 'RPI' and 'AVCs', and the world of PR is just as bad (look at it, it's a bloody acronym itself!).

But it's the acronym above which has mostly been occupying my thoughts and indeed my evenings recently. It stands for How I Met Your Mother, a delightful little American sitcom that airs on one of the lesser channels (i.e. not Fox, ABC or NBC) in the US. It briefly ran on BBC Two here in the UK for the first couple of series, but then the Beeb has never been that good at maintaining American sitcoms on its channels (with the glorious exception of Seinfeld of course).

The central premise is simple but effective - Ted, the main character, sets up each episode by explaining to his kids the stories that led to the eventual meeting and marrying of their mother. The episodes then proceed by way of flashbacks to those events.

And of course, like every successful sitcom, HIMYM has a central comedy character at its heart. In this case it's the ultimate alpha male, Barney Stinson. Attractive, rich, a firm believer in the one night stand and yet curiously loveable - think Joey Tribbiani with intelligence and dress sense. Oh, and some wonderful catchphrases.

But the reason it really works, and is now entering its fifth season, isn't because it's devasatingly funny or indeed sharp, like say Frasier (still the greatest ever sitcom) or Mash. Rather, like Friends, Cheers, Will & Grace and all the rest, it works because it offers us some comfort, some security and some reassurance that good things can happen in our lives.

And that's all that people really want, and indeed need - human society wasn't forged from despair, it was forged out of hope and triumph. There's been plenty of the former and not nearly enough of the latter over the past 18 months so every little bit helps.

Go on, watch it. You might just be pleasantly surprised......