Happy Birthday to Me

Too many candles spoil the icing

Uh huh. It’s my birthday.  They recur with remorseless regularity, which of course is the whole point of them.
 

I had cards from Mrs K, the Kirwood sister, friends and my acting agent. I also had a message from the Google people: “Hey Tony, it’s your special day!” Thanks, guys, but you really shouldn’t. I’m only going to have to reciprocate.

I also had three “Happy Birthday”emails from Netlog.  I tried to sign up with them last year, in a fit of guilt at being underconnected to the social network (in my day we called it “the pub”). I’m crap at all this stuff and it took me three tries with different passwords and usernames. Now I know they all worked.

I have at least five different identities lurking in cyberspace: akirwood, tkirwood, anthonykir, tonykirwood and kirwoodtony.

Not many know this, but each identity is a different facet of my personality. Akirwood is my public online persona: affable, approachable, knows his html from his cms. The job of emailing editors and casting directors is his. Tkirwood is the grumpy, anxious face behind the mask. He’s the one who gets trapped at the shopping baskets.

Anthonykir is the devastating email joker who irritates my friends. Tonykirwood is the slack-jawed hippy slavering over classic youtube music clips. Kirwoodtony is a vindictive hunchbacked troll whom you don’t want to know and neither do I.

These days, when the entire world is muscling in on my birthday observations (why??? You won’t get a drink out of it), it’s touch and go which identity you’ll get.

You mean you don’t know my age? Meet the affable akirwood.

What do you like about birthdays?

What do you hate about them?

Fever Bitch

We've even won the One-Eyed Handball  Event

Damn these Olympics. They’re so un-British. When Mary Rand or someone won in Seoul in ’88, Reykjavic in ’73 or Punxatawny in ‘67 (have I got this right?) people would say “Oh yeah?”

A headline “Britain Gets Gold” would impinge on our consciousness in about the same way as one saying “Big Cod Caught off Norway”. No one got excited. In fact, it was slightly embarrassing.

Winning was what more vulgar nations did. The odd medal won by we Brits was by mistake really. Or just to show we weren’t that standoffish.

But last Saturday night I was screaming at my TV, pumping my arms and yelling “Go Mo go!!!” as Mo Farah raced down the final lap of the 10,000 metres. Being a sensible bloke he took my advice. When Jess Ennis did her spurt in the final pentathlon event, I was on my feet waving my arms screaming “Get ‘em, Jess!” She did just as I said.

I think I’ll drop everything and become an athletics coach.

I’m alarming my friends. Next morning I met an old pal on the train. “Fantastic, isn’t it?” I said. “What, you got that film part?” he replied. “No, much better -” I yelled, “six Golds!”

I’m becoming enthusiastic about Sport. It’s not typical. Soon I’ll start be wearing Union Jack face paint. I’ll go up to strangers and blab about the importance of the transition in the Triathlon. I’ll sign up to a Triathlon event…

I’ve just realised what I’ve written. This is going too far. I’ve lost my British cynicism. Us baby boomers should take our sneering seriously. But let’s not panic. There’s the third cricket test against South Africa coming up.  Plenty of opportunity to lose there.

Have the Olympics been making you behave in uncharacteristic ways?

Memory Loss? If it’s good enough for goldfish it’s good enough for me

As long as I can remember the taste of beer......

My memory’s leaking. Every day another fact or word vanishes into the mist. These days I have trouble remembering….damn, what’s the word? Ah, that’s it – things.

It’s annoying. I keep having to change the subject because a name goes. Now what’s his name? Tall guy. Nice suit. Er…. Twenty minutes later, I’ve found it – Barack Obama.

I forget where I put my pens. If I’m lucky I might find them a month later piled up somewhere they shouldn’t be, such as under the spanner in the toolbox. I never use the toolbox. If I’m unlucky they go to the graveyard of words, combs, phone numbers and debit cards which have been lost in action in my life over the last decade.

I went to a Prom concert last week. Mrs K rang to say she didn’t have the tickets. I was entering my finest “Koh! Typical!” mode when it turned out it was me who had brought them. I later found them in a forgotten drawer, along with eighteen pens.

But who cares? I forget the names of annoying people. I don’t have to send them Christmas cards. If someone says something crass or boring, half an hour later – it’s gone. I forget to pay the bills. OK, I keep having to ward off the bailiffs but think of those extra weeks when my bank account is fat.

I can remember the important things. Like the names of all The Animals: Eric Burdon, Alan Price, Hilton Valentine, John Steel and Chas Chandler and no, I didn’t just Google them. I can tell you the storylines of all 13 episodes of “Fawlty Towers” with the full cast. No one can live a full life without those facts at their disposal.

I can even remember Mrs K’s birthday. OK, I admit, it’s tattooed to the inside of my lip.

Men's dress rant

Not a good look

I hate summer. It brings out the worst things in life. The new Big Brother series. Ice Cream vans. And, God help us, mens’ legs. Especially old mens’ legs.

If I was Prime Minister, my top priority would be to make it an offence for men over 50 to wear shorts. Varicose veins and knees which look as if they’ve been put through a rock crusher would be classified as a threat to public health and morality and showable only in darkened rooms to a private audience. Failure to observe this would be an ASBO offence.

The wearing of sandals with uncut toenails, however, would incur the death penalty. Men would not be permitted to make like Rosa Klebs. If that’s your method of mowing the lawn, fine, but step out of the house like that, then – chop. I mean heads, not nails.

T shirts would grudgingly be permitted for males over 50, but only if no flesh is visible between the bottom hem and the belt. Having a beer belly which forces the bottom of the T shirt to nudge upwards would not be deemed an excuse. Exposure of pubic hair would be classified as Aggravated Navel Exposure - maximum penalty fifty lashes.

Now to the gravest matter of all. Today I saw a man, who shared Bill Nighy’s age group but not dress sense, with sagging man boobs, wrinkled arms and an underarm crow’s nest, wearing, and my trembling hands can barely type this, a Bruce Willis vest. Everything was revealed.

There’s only one solution for men like that. Stick their head on a pole and display it over London Bridge. It won’t look pleasant, but at least we won’t have to peer at the rest of their bodies.

All this is making me retch as much as it is you. I’m doing it out of pure public spiritedness. Make me PM and I pledge to enact all the above.

And then I’d go on to the lesser stuff such as eradicating poverty.

Dancing in the Patio

                                                        Inside, they're rockin'

“What do old people do at parties?” That’s an idle question My Teenage Self would ask occasionally, in between doing more interesting things such as spraypainting his bedroom slippers silver and flicking his fingernail dirt at the settee.

I’m in a position to report back to MTS. I was away at the Kirwood sister’s place in a Gloucestershire village over the weekend where we went to a do with friends down her lane.

Here’s my answer. “When they go to parties older people put on 60s pop music, drink beer, muck about and talk rubbish. Sound familiar?”

We also talked about holidays in Portugal and Mrs K’s choir singing. “Boring and trivial!!!” snorted MTS. “You didn’t talk about anything really important.” “Such as?” “Such as…such as… such as whether John Lennon wears contact lenses. Or did Derek Abbot at the end of the street really do 69 with a girl?”

“How about this?” I replied, “We also talked about the visit of Rowan Williams to the village the next day.” “HUH! I bet you didn’t roll a single joint. I bet no one puked over the roses. I bet you didn’t play Jimi Hendrix so loud that the neighbours called the police!”

“That’s because we were the neighbours. And what’s so bad about puking over roses? It fertilises them. Though I suppose it depends what’s in the puke.”

“Huh,” he snorted again, “A bunch of nobodies.”  “One of them was a District Councillor,” I answered hesitantly. “Traitor! Mixing with authority figures!” screamed MTS
.

I explained how we actually talked to each other, were still able to remember most of it the day after and how no one at any stage hunched over a mobile phone or glued themselves to their ipod.

He’d be OK about that. He hasn’t a clue about those things either. 

Ambulance music

Not Jazz

Jazz

                         

Just got back from the Copenhagen Jazz Festival. The politeness of the Danes teeters on the brink of criminality. If you scratch your head on the street ten of them will jump on you and ask if you want any help.

It didn’t stop them from flashing their mobile screens during the big gig at the Royal Theatre, though. Or the woman behind me sticking her bare feet up next to my head. Her toenails were lacerating my earlobes. But these were almost welcome distractions from what was happening onstage.

The support act were what you’d call ambient. This means they sounded like a whale in labour bumping into an iceberg. I guess they passed for jazz because they had a couple of saxes and introduced each other after every number. They all had the same floppy-on-one-side-of the-head haircut and were about 26 (that’s the total age, not the average). Their idea of improvisation was to play the same turgid three-note riff at slightly varying speeds. Needless to say, the audience whooped, roared and clapped. Their age was about 460 (again, a total, not including us).

You know you’re in trouble when a band’s name is more creative than their music. This lot were called Morons on Mogadon.  Well, they should have been.

Anyone under 30 should have to pass a test before being allowed to be in charge of a concert seat. Before that your musical tastes are still at the “Mummy I want a Curly Wurly bar” stage. Well, mine were. I remember going to hear The Crazy World of Arthur Brown in 1968 and thinking it was the greatest gig ever because he set his hair alight.

The main act in the Copenhagen Royal Theatre was guitar maestro John Schofield. Proper music. Nothing to do with ambience, nu jazz, fusion sounds or folky-hip hop grooves with a touch of acid house and a hint of baby vomit. But he was held up at the airport and we took  refunds. Typical.

On the way back to the hotel we popped into a bar and sang along to a cheesy covers singer doing “American Pie.” Compared to M on M - musical ecstasy.

Every day’s a bad hair day

                    
                                                                It's just not me

Haircut today. These days I leave it for months. It’s lost its fun. Gone are those happy decisions: Jon Lord mane, David Bowie mullet or Kevin Keegan frizz? These days I come out either nondescript smarmed-down or nondescript wispy. It’s been a successful cut if I can look in the mirror without reaching for a crucifix.

I had a woman this time. She was about 25 and approximately Polish. That’s fine. Poles are nifty at skidding a plastering trowel round a wall so I felt sure she could whisk a pair of scissors round my head. And a woman isn’t going to ask embarrassing questions about wanting something for the weekend.

OK, her conversation wouldn’t have got her on the Jonathan Ross Show: “And so we are feeling good today, yes sir?” But she snipped away with panache. Then she said “Is that so good for you sir?” and held the mirror behind my head. I groped for my specs as without them it’s a bit like looking through a windscreen in a blizzard. I stuck them on and gaped.

I had a mat of hair flopping over one side of my face with a six inch fringe drooping over my right eye. She’d given me an Indy band cut. My hair looked like a hamster slipping off the edge of a cliff.  I had a stark choice. Either an emergency administration of botox to make me look 20, or a drastic trim off the top of my head to make me look 60.

 “Noooo!” she cried. It was her masterpiece and I wanted her to desecrate it. I normally give barbers free rein but I put my foot down. A few snips later and I could face the streets. It’s all been another brutal reminder I’m way too old to look like a rock ‘n’ star.

Next time I’ll ask for a Miles Davis cut. It’ll look just as ridiculous on me but I’ll enjoy their confusion as they won’t know who the hell he is. And the music’s a lot better.