Spudulike

I'm reading the second instalment of Danny Baker's memoir at the moment.  This volume, like the first, is a thinly disguised love letter to his late father, Fred, or Spud, as he was universally known.

DK was clearly in awe of his old man, and with good reason - he sounds like a riot.  Here was a man absolutely brimming over with rough-hewn joie de vivre.  He was a docker with all the attendant industrial language and volatility that that role usually brings, but he was also a vibrant and funny man.  He played fast and loose at times, like Dan, but was always convinced that good times and good fortune would prevail in the end.  It's easy to see why people wanted to be around him.  The book really makes you wish you'd been around when he was in his pomp.

In fact Dan's entire childhood sound idyllic.  It's easy to look at the material facts and imagine it was little more than Dickensian: the council flat in Deptford, the dept-collectors calling at the crack of dawn etc.  But, as Dan is quick to point out, there was laughter, noise and fun at all hours of the day and night.  There was also a feeling of freedom and community that I suspect children these days are denied.

My own childhood home was like this.  Yes, we were skint, but that just makes to revel in what scant pleasures you could afford.  A week in the Isle of Sheppey was a joy to me as a boy, an absolute joy.

Could you do my back for me?

As I've stated before in these pages, I cycle to work.  To avoid upsetting my workplace neighbours, then, I have a shower in the gym in the office prior to beginning my meagre duties.

This morning, as I was running a little late, I spotted a chap whom I hadn't seen before down there.  So far, so ordinaire.  I noticed he was very tanned, as if he'd just stepped off the plane from Gran Canaria or Florida.  As he stripped off to abulute, I noticed he was tanned all over.  But something didn't look quite right.  His tan was a little too good.

He was the colour of builder's tea from head to toe.  The were no tide marks on him at all.  He was covered in nut-brown skin in all directions.  There wasn't an aperture or crevice on his not insubstantial chassis that wasn't tanned right up to the event horizon.  Presumably he'd paid some unfortunate immigrant to intimately apply the creosote for him.  He was a big chap, and didn't look flexible enough to have slapped it on, himself.  

Are people really so impoverished that they have to do things like this for a living?  It's 2014, ferchrissakes.  Also, what's the thinking behind getting your perineum painted brown?  Is it supposed to make one irresistible to women?  Even if it did, they're not the kind of women you want to introduce to you mother, are they?  Great Scott - people died defending this sceptred isle...and for what?  For the liberty to do *THAT* to oneself?  The brain fcuking boggles at times.