Happy Blogmany

Ah, New Year's Eve. I was at Leeds railway station this evening and honestly, the short skirts, the stiletto heels, the bosoms on show - I really shouldn't have worn those clothes, not with my figure.

I'm joking, of course, although I have worn some bizarre things on New Year's Eve in the past. When I was 16 I remember failing to get into Torquay's Piazza pub wearing a black and white checked shirt with a bow tie. Quite why I thought the 'harlequin waiter' look was going to help me appear over 18, I don't know. I was also brandishing very badly faked ID, so much so I might as well just handed over a piece of paper with 'I be 18' written on it in crayon, and it would have been more convincing. In the end myself and my chum Dave Baker went to KFC and ended up back at my house drinking the contents of my mum's sideboard. Happy New Year Mr Baker, I trust you will end up doing something just as exciting tonight.

The year after KFC-night, my girlfriend of the time told me she wanted an 'open relationship' so she could snog other blokes in front of me all night. Amusingly, she was diagnosed with glandular fever a few days later and I was the only one who hadn't caught it. Strange girl she was, I was told a few years ago that she is now a 'lesbian bookshop'. Not an owner of a bookshop, the actual bookshop itself.

Subsequent New Year's Evenings have always been a bit, well, different. 1997/98 I slept through, after having been so utterly bored of Torquay's 'Crazy Horse Saloon' (it was neither crazy, nor equine based)that I just went home at 9pm.

For the Millenium I ended up in a warehouse in Liverpool with various chums watching The Lightning Seeds, Stereophonics, Orbital and Pete Tong. But my abiding memory was attempting to sleep in a friend's car in the car park, having thought I could do without a sleeping bag and just put a coat over myself. It was -2C outside and I spent most of the night begging my friend to 'make the car hot'. I believe I actually passed out from the cold rather than fell asleep that night.

Then there was an evening of indie-rock in Wolverhampton which involved so much headbanding that me and chum Rusty ended up with whiplash for a week.

One lovely night saw my mum produce copious amounts of food from nowhere, and I shall always cherish the look of delight on my wife's face as mum pulled a massive trifle out of the fridge at 1am.

Ultimately, as time has gone by, I've wanted less noise, insane drinking and dancing like I've got rickets. Instead, it's just nice to spend time with the people you care about.

Anyway, whatever you end up doing tonight, be safe and enjoy yourself. And if you're planning on sleeping in a car, bring a duvet.

Thanks for reading my 2011 nonsense, I'll try harder next year.

Suitably alarmed

I’m pleased to say that we’ve got a brand new burglar alarm at our house. Not that I believe any of you reading this are committed thieves (well, there’s one or two of you I’m suspicious of) but it’s more just a sense of relief at getting the darned thing in place. Reason being, I’ve not had a great relationship with alarms and house security in the past.

When I rented a room in Wolverhampton many years ago I wasn’t given the code to the alarm, so when I returned from a long weekend and my landlady was out, I couldn’t shut the stupid thing off. Add to that a large hold-all over my shoulder and my generally shabby demeanour (it had been a long weekend of drinking, eating and 8 hours travel) and I couldn’t have looked more suspicious unless I had a small mask on, a stripy jumper and the word ‘swag’ emblazoned on a sack. Brilliantly I just stood on the doorstep telling passers-by “I do live here you know” which worked. But then that’s the reaction people get when they hear an alarm these days, not ‘my word, someone is being robbed’ more ‘there’s a bloody alarm going off, that’s so annoying.’

Another house I lived at had no alarm and I came home one day to find that my housemate had not only left the back door unlocked, but the door was wide open all day. I had no key to lock it, and he was away for the night, so I spent 40 minutes shuffling the fridge-freezer across the kitchen to block the door and slept with a kitchen knife under my bed. Me? Paranoid? Not at all, although I know you all think I am...

Then there was the alarm at our last house where the code to activate the thing worked a treat, no complaints there, but upon entering the code for a second time the unit had clearly decided I was now a murdering thief and went off with gay abandon. Still, I managed to shut the thing off by ringing the man who had installed it 4 years previous and saying “Can you tell me how to turn the alarm off, I’m not a burglar by the way.” His brilliant solution was simply “See those wires? Pull them all out.” Comforting to know that hi-tech security could be defeated by random violence.

So when we got to our new home I was delighted to find a brand new system with a state of the art control panel the size of Barnsley on the wall of the hall and sensors in every room. What could be simpler. Then it transpired it had been installed by the previous home owner who had the technical skills of a radish. The genius had managed to set it up so that you activated the box in the hall and then had a grand total of ‘no seconds’ to get out, so you immediately triggered it by moving towards the door. Perhaps he was made of gas or had the ability to teleport, like a member of the x-men, and was able to use it. Oh, and he’d left the master code as 1111, try working that one out eh? To be honest, we’d have been more protected just putting up an a4 sign on the door saying ‘please don’t burgle us’.

So now we have an uber-safe system that is pet-friendly too. By that I mean the sensors are tolerant to the cats, not that the burglar alarm chats to them while we are out.

Although, that would be ace.

Timolsky in need

No, you aren't dreaming. It's a new blog.

You're right, I've got a lot of explaining to do. What sort of time do I call this etc? Well, I'm sorry. I'll get round to writing about those missing two months of blogs at some point. Anyway, can't we just let the past be the past, especially when it's in the name of charity.

Tonight is Children in Need. A very worthy event, and a time when all of us should stick our hands in our pockets. I mean, to donate.

Over the years I've been at the forefront of fundraising. No, they didn't send me to Africa with Lenny Henry or anything like that, just that I've always been in jobs where promoting charities is super important.

Hence the picture on the right. Yep, that's me dressed as 'Arty Beat' to help launch the British Heart Foundation fundraising at a previous job. It wasn't supposed to be me. The bloke in question got stuck in traffic so, with 5 minutes notice I was asked if I would step into Arty's shoes. His enormous shoes that make every step feel like you've got children hanging off your ankles. Obese children at that.

As I was bundled into the shoes, red leggings and finally the actual heart bit, the woman from the charity told me "Remember, you can't say anything.". To which I replied "OK." and she immediately got angry and said "NO! You can't reply". To which I found my only way of communicating was to simply wave my hands around, my hands which were now giant foam gloves that felt like I had a turkey on each fist.

Anyway, I spent the next 10 minutes standing next to the CEO of the company I worked for, whilst he made a speech and I had to stand next to him and look interested. Quite hard to emote from inside a giant muscle on legs. I found shifting from foot to foot and occasionally putting my hands over my mouth did the job. In fact, that was pretty much all I could do - cover my massive mouth up. I then spent 10 minutes whilst people came up to me and tried to talk to me. No-one knew who I was, so under the cloak of anonymity I got mischevious. Following people around the office, doing basic admin tasks like photocopying, going in the women's toilets - that sort of thing.

Eventually the real mascot man arrived and I was taken into a room to be 'de-hearted'. When they took the costume off I was sweating like never before, feeling that I was actually having a coronary - ah, the irony.

Anyway, that was the most extreme thing. The same year, I made up my own face to look like Pudsey bear for a photoshoot. I daren't show you the picture as I can't draw, let alone apply stage make-up, so I looked less like Pudsey and more a clown who'd been involved in a massive industrial fire. Still, it got in the paper.

As did the final thing I arranged. And this is something I really am NOT proud of.

One year I saw a date in an online charity calendar called 'World Food Day', so I decided we'd support it and do a photoshoot. So I arranged for three people to dress up - an Englishman in a bowler hat with a sausage on a fork, a girl in a stripy jumper with a french baguette and a chap in a sombrero with some mexican food. Lovely, great picture, celebrating world food, fancy dress, bit of fun.

Except, it turned, out, World Food Day was actually a day about raising awareness of starvation in the world, and how we shouldn't waste it. So a photo of three national stereotypes laughing with food probably wasn't the best thing to send to the local paper was it?

50% off this blog, this week only, oh and free garlic bread for the first 50 visitors.

Remember email? Remember that eh? Excited when it arrived weren’t you? Old friend getting in touch? Amusing picture of cat on motorbike? Details of your online order for a replica medieval broadsword? Oh the innocence.

That was email when it started wasn’t it? All lovely and exciting. Nowadays it’s become a different story.

I’ve written before about the amount of spam my first hotmail account had and how I’m now careful what I sign up for. And, yes, the constant sales pitches for Viagra and free iPods and rocket powered trousers don’t seem to trouble my new email anymore.

But what does make up 90% of my mail these days is offers. Now, that would be a good thing – I like 50% off food (which is what most of them are about) but I’m getting almost daily reminders that I can eat my own weight in chicken at Nandos AND get a free drink. Every other day Pizza Express tell me that if I eat some food then it’ll only cost half the price (although they don’t mention it costs approximately £29 for two drinks to go with it). And I’m fed up hearing that a Debenhams sale has some things at almost 70% off – yes, 70% off very cheap things.

To be honest, I’m getting a bit annoyed.

The annoyance comes because now I can’t make a purchase without first checking if there’s an online code. If I order a pizza over the phone and don’t quote a code I imagine they put down the phone and say “He wants to pay full price!” before falling about laughing in heaps of mozzarella and dough. Same online, “If you have a code, please enter it now” pops up and I’m googling things like ‘discount voucher for underpants purchase’ which leads to 15 mins of fruitless searching and often losing the will to both live and buy pants.

And now, in ‘the real world’, I genuinely worry I’m paying over the odds for everything. It’s like going in a shop and buying something that you know is £5 but giving them a tenner and saying “THIS MUST COST TEN POUNDS” before running out of the place without taking your change.

In short, I feel like an idiot, and there’s seemingly no voucher code that can make that go away.

Lies, lies and a fake videoplayer.

I've never been that good at lying - untruths I mean, not stretching out horizontally on a surface (I'm great at that). There aren't many occasions I'm called upon to do it, and then it's usually to protect someone's feelings through phrases like 'Oh, what a beautiful baby' or 'I definitely think you should cut the green wire'.

So I thought I'd come clean with my deceptions to which you can decide whether I should be forgiven or not:

- I've told boring people who have sat next to me trains that my stop was coming, to which I've got up - gone out the door and walked down a few carriages before getting back on.

- Once or twice I've also pretended to be an answerphone when someone has rung me up - that's quite easy, if you can say 'Hi, I'm not around at the moment, leave a message' and come up with a convicing beat-box style beep. You can get away with it quite well if you can not laugh when people start leaving the message.

- When I was 7, a child boasted to me that he had a video player. Thinking on my 1982 feet I told him that our family had one too, but that it only recorded the programme you were watching at the time, and the TV had to be on. He questioned this and I remember just saying that it was a special one from Japan. Yes, a special one, that was techically useless. I might as well have said it ran on sticklebricks and had a remote control made out of toblerone.

- I also recall claiming, as a child, that I hadn't been playing with my father's razor and cut myself but that 'I was trying to cut excess string off a balloon' and that it was the only sharp thing handy. I got away with that.

-At University I managed to avoid being beaten up by a Coventry thug who wanted to kick the proverbial out of me by adopting a vaguely convincing accent (based on Richard Beckinsale in Porridge) and claiming that I actually ran the music counter at the local Woolworths, rather than being a sponging student. Somehow I got away with it.

As the years have gone by though, I've realised that my lies are nothing compared to the world-class, olympic level liars out that. My favourite was a chap at school claimed he couldn't go swimming with the rest of the boys as 'whenever I smell chlorine I get a nosebleed'. So whilst we were all diving for rubber bricks and being told to tread water by a fascist swim teacher, he sat behind the glass chomping 10p Wham bars and cola bottles. I remember that several of us got suspicious of his 'chlorine allegry' and when we had a vial of the material in chemistry lessons, ran towards him with it to see if it was true.

The same chap went on to claim that he had written a 32 part tv cartoon series, based on the Aliens from the film Aliens that a US TV network was interested. He also said that people got cancer from Skittles (the sweets, not the UK version of 10 pin bowling). I'm not sure any of it was true, what was though - was that he had bad BO and massive sunken eyes. He couldn't decieve us about that.

Anyway, it's people like that who make me realise that my lies are rubbish and that I'll never be a world class liar.

Unless I just made him up of course...