Decorative Wooden Doum-Ladder

The house is a tip. I feel like I'm living in a haunted junk shop. From my vantage point, at the dining room, table I can see a ceramic hare, a USB microphone, a half empty bottle of Chambord, a pile of CDs, a pritt-stick, an empty ziplock bag, a Co-Op food magazine with some of the pictures cut out, a bottle of sunscreen, a cat toy, nine bottles of red wine and a pirate flag. Everything is covered in a generous layer of dust, made more evident by the fact that four large pieces of furniture are black and someone (could have been me) has wiped their hand across each of them, as if to check exactly how dusty they are, before saying to themselves, 'I must buy some Pledge.'

I don't know how we've got to this state, after all Chris isn't working and I've only left the house four times in the last month. There's plenty of time for cleaning and yet  our bedsheets haven't been changed in a fortnight and there are toothpaste splashes on the bathroom mirror which are certain to require a fair amount of elbow grease to remove them.

I can hear the front bedroom door banging in the wind upstairs. There's a hook on it to prevent it from properly slamming but it's not tight enough to stop it completely and it clatters away as long as the windows are open. Chris has a fixation of airing the house which is why the window in the spare bedroom, much like every other room upstairs, is open in the first place. It's only used as a guest room three or four times a year and the rest of the time it's either a laundry room or somewhere to deposit junk until we decide to either throw it away or officially add it to the hoard.

It's windy outside so the door is banging a couple of times a minute and it's driving me mad. I mean, how fresh does a room we barely use need to be anyway?

I took a little break from work earlier when my eye was caught by an advert on Instagram and I found myself poring over the website of a furniture and interior decor company. Years ago I worked for Habitat and over the six years of my employment I developed an interest in beautiful and impractical things for the home that I just couldn't afford. Back then it was fine because I had staff discount, I knew when the sales were on, and for a while at least, I worked at the company's clearance store so if I was happy to wait till an item was 'last season' then I could get some real bargains.

Most of our furniture is Habitat, with the noticeable exception of the dusty black pieces that are taunting me right now. I once bought a fuscia pink chair designed by Philip Treacy, I don't remember how the hell I got it home because it was huge. A round piece that barely made it through the door and which I had to ebay eventually because it was so ridiculously large. A woman in Belfast won the online auction and sent an HGV to collect it from our little village.

I came home with an oversized paper lantern one day, the sort of thing you'd see hanging from the ceiling in a student rental, only the one I bought was at least five feet in diameter and stood on the floor. It ended up in an attic room of the house we lived in Derbyshire because it just wouldn't fit anywhere else. It was in good company up there standing proudly next to three eight foot panels with a picture of the Queen by some German artist I forget now, which made up an old shop display, a two foot letter E which hung from the ceiling and a massive white plastic coffee table which looked like a ginormous aspirin.

Today's online window shopping found me staring at a decorative wooden doum-ladder wondering if I could justify €74, where I would put it in my house, and importantly what exactly 'doum' meant.

I shared this find with Alison and Nicola on our group chat, safe in the knowledge that they'd not find this out of the ordinary, Alison having recently ordered a portrait of the dog and this morning buying magnetic fake eyelashes.

I asked how they worked, whether you needed metal eyelids or some kind of cranial implant but apparently the reality is far more pedestrian. You need to use some special eyeliner with magnetic properties that attracts tiny little magnets on the lashes themselves. I suppose she'll be alright so long as she doesn't walk past a fridge door with them in. Next on her list is a carbon monoxide detector.

The tech company I work for took a hit today after being told by a large, international client they wouldn't be paying us tens of thousands of pounds worth of outstanding invoices for the foreseeable future. Their business is music and entertainment, and in the case of the work we do, music festivals, and it has all but closed till further notice. This has meant a number of our staff being furloughed and the small team shrinking drastically.

It was expected that future work would take a hit but we assumed the bills we'd already issued would be honoured, after all this is a multi billion dollar company. I didn't realise just how hard they'd been hit until I read today that their value had dropped by more than half in three weeks.

Much of the work we do, day to day, is for individual festivals but they ultimately fall under this one organisation so our cashflow has been clobbered. The Government's furlough scheme is being used to cover eighty percent of these colleagues' salaries while our company will pay the remaining twenty percent. Without the scheme a bunch of them would be wondering how they were going to pay the bills so it's going to be a valuable safety net.

It's all very sad but the light at the end of the tunnel is that eventually my workmates will be brought back and I'm confident that the invoices will eventually be settled. There's no bad blood, everyone accepts that these really are exceptional times.

My job, for the time being at least, is safe. A lot of what I do is administrative, I do some bookkeeping, some marketing and PR, social media and so on, none of which is directly affected by today's news.

While on social media duty today I had a quick check of LinkedIn. There was nothing much to report or note but as I was scrolling through I was reminded of my pet hate - business language. It's not formal business language per se that does my head in, but that type of things people write on social media instead of writing what they actually mean.

The main culprits are words like 'excited', 'thrilled' and 'proud.' Proud to be part of the team that landed a million pound contract to supply goats to Chester Zoo; Thrilled to be working with Team Goat in East Cheshire; and so on.

In more than twenty five years of employment I've never been thrilled, proud or excited about anything I've ever done at work! Maybe it's because I don't work with goats but I suspect people just feel uncomfortable saying what they really mean - Look at me! I just landed the biggest contract of my career and that makes me totally employable! Maybe I'm just too cynical...

The People of Roebuck Lane

I grew up in the countryside on a narrow and windy lane called Roebuck Lane on the edge of Saddleworth. At one end of the lane was the Roebuck Inn, a typical country pub, well known in the eighties for the quality of it's restaurant (sadly not so now) and at the other end was a little shop owned and run by Joan Greenwood. Between the two were ten houses.

Starting at the pub end there was a lady whose name slips my mind but who kept to herself and was kind enough to give us 50p one bonfire night towards food and fireworks; on the other side was an old farmhouse which had been converted into two residences - in one side was Vinny and Mad Mary (so named by my mother for her tendency to feed sliced white bread to the cows in the field behind our houses and the fact that they kept chickens in an old broken down ambulance) and in the other side was Jean, Frank, Christie and Damian.

Next along the lane was a terrace of five houses the first of which I lived in with my brothers Robert and Matthew and our parents Hilary and Howard. We lived at number five. During the time that I lived there I remember three sets of next door neighbours, the first Kevin and his wife Lorraine. Kevin was, I believe, the tour manager for the Grumbleweeds - a comedy and music act. Next to move in were Howard Jones the sign maker and Brenda who shouted a lot at each other and on whose wedding night introduced me to the word bonking through a sign on their front door which read 'Do not disturb - all night bonking in progress.' I think he made the sign himself but I can't be certain. As family tradition dictated they were both given nicknames, Brenda was the poisoned dwarf and Howard was affectionately known as the ferret - but never to their faces...

The Molloys lived there next. Steve was a professional rugby player who played for Featherstone Rovers and Paula was a nurse who according to my youngest brother had a huge arse. They also shouted at each other a lot.

Clara and John lived at number nine with their grown up kids. Clara and Jean from number three, were good friends and I used to go with them and Damian on shopping trips to such wild and adventurous (to a young child) places as the Mosley Mill Shop with it's fascinating aquarium shop full of the biggest and ugliest fish ever to have graced a tank and Ashton Market where Damian and I wandered between the stalls while Jean and Clara shopped and where twenty years previous Brady and Hindley had picked up that poor Kilbride boy and taken him to the moors. For me, through my childish eyes, Ashton Market was not about that, it was about Cornish pasties and my ever growing keyring collection.

Number eleven was an odd one. Brenda lived there with her husband who I only ever knew as China man. They would spend a long time abroad every year and then we would see Brenda and their daughter for a few weeks before they were off again. I might have seen China Man once a year if I was lucky but he was very elusive.

On the other end of our little block of five lived Jimmy and Elaine. Jimmy was known as Mr Angry after a rather unfortunate instance of trespass on my and Damian's part.

Next along the lane was George Groves's farm. He always had a dog tied up in the yard at the front of the house. This dog liked nothing more than barking incessantly and went particularly wild when someone walked past. It was the most terrifying dog I had ever encountered. I used to try sneaking past the farm to avoid the rabid outbursts of this devil creature and woe betide you if the dog wasn't tied up! Grovesy was accused of feeding our dog Dylan rat poison. The poison made Dylan's stomach bleed and cough up blood before he would try to cool down in a bog in one of the fields across the road from our house. We had to have him put down. Grovesy never denied having rat poison on the farm, what he did say was that Dylan must have gone in one of his barns to get it and he shouldn't have been in there in the first place. Whizbang, our cat, was also ill with what we suspected was poison but he recovered. Our next dog Skipper, another Dalmatian but this one with liver colouring rather than black, also died from rat poisoning. Needless to say that we didn't have a great relationship with George Groves and as a young child he was almost demonised in my eyes. It was years until we got another dog and when we did we took great lengths not to let him out of the house without a lead.

Further along the lane was a little stone cottage in the corner of a field. This is where Connie lived. I couldn't begin to start telling you about Connie, all I can remember is that because hers was the nearest house to Joan Greenwood's shop she became know as her near Joan's which over time and with the assistance of Oldhamers' accents morphed into something altogether more unpleasant. Connie tragically adopted the name Hernia Jones and was known as such for ever more.

Finally we follow the lane around the corner and down a dip and reach Joan's shop. A right old treasure chest of goodies and necessities. Sweets of course were there in abundance. Great big jars of chewing nuts and midget gems weighed out and served in little white paper bags. The penny sweets in the glass counter which would make up our traditional 10p mix (an occasional treat for going to Joan's for your parents,) the cans of pop - the ever elusive cherry pepsi which I asked for relentlessly for years and years and she never sold, shandy bass, giant cans of coke the size of a lager can and briefly when i was a teenager, the nasty but fascinating Tab Clear; chocolate bars - Fry's chocolate creme, Terry's Pyramint, Hellas Bars. I don't know why I wasn't the size of a house.

Joan didn't just sell sweets and drinks. Damian's mum used to send him to buy her cigarettes there - something my mum tried with me on a couple of occasions rather unsuccessfully as Joan was not at all happy about selling cigarettes to children. She did though. There was a big bacon slicer in the corner, you could buy potatoes, cleaning products, wine, cat food, fire lighters... The list goes on. Joan had a real community shop. When the lane was cut off by snow in the winter, which it was most years, she stayed open for those brave souls that could make it through the snow drifts (usually us kids) until Holroyd, another local farmer, would dig the lane clear of snow with his tractor. Even when the snow brought power cuts with it she'd be there with candles burning on the counter helping us to get through it and of course flogging us the boxes of household candles that we'd invariably run out of the previous winter.

Joan was in the paper once. The Oldham Evening Chronicle (the chron) ran a story about her shop being robbed. Joan was threatened with a gun which the thieves shot into the ceiling (something I looked for every time I went in there afterwards but never saw) and cleared her till out. I seem to remember that they didn't get very much cash - bad timing on their part. From that day on Joan always peeked through the little glass pane in the door between her house at the back and the shop at the front before she came in to serve anyone.

Roebuck Lane was a good place to grow up - despite the guns, the poison and the scary neighbours - it's a shame that I don't have a reason to go back there any more but I suspect if I did I'd be disappointed so I'm happy to leave it where it is - in my childhood.

Shopping

When did shopping become such a chore? Surely going out to choose a new sofa or buy a lamp should be fun? Why did that woman call me a jumped up shop boy before hanging up on me and how much do I enjoy throwing middle aged women out of my shop for being rude?

Shopping has become a battle.

I blame the Americans. They have perpetuated the myth that good customer service is giving the customer whatever they demand - without limitation - and because of this a happy compromise is very difficult to agree on. Granted, if the planters you buy for your garden go rusty and mark your patio it's not great but to demand - and expect - a full refund, payment for the cleaning products, payment for a gardener to replant new pots and compensation for distress is, in my opinion, a little over the top.

A friend of mine was once required to turn the hands of a clock to various positions so that the customer could decide whether he liked the aesthetics of said clock at different times of the day.

I myself had to deal with a tantrum from a woman when I couldn't tell her whether the dinner candles she had asked me about dripped or flowed as the wax was melting.

These days I won't tolerate that kind of behaviour. The rude and demanding get nowhere and as the boss I can get away with it. They still annoy me but I won't pander to it now.
Thus far I have thrown two people out of the shop, been smug to numerous and instructed three not to be so rude to me. Rudeness should not be accepted.