No Mottos Please, We're British

Gordon Brown, secure in the knowledge that now he’s decided there isn’t going to be a ‘snap’ General Election before he absolutely must have one, has decided that the country needs a bit of a morale boost. After all, we’ve been handed a Prime Minister we didn’t really want, our petrol is now the most expensive in the world, our local councils are planning to charge anybody for daring to enter their towns in a car, we’re not allowed to climb a ladder without insurance and fourteen different people to check the safety of the ground the apparatus is going to stand on first (and then they’ll tell us we need scaffolding), our football team are the highest paid – yet the worst – in the whole world and the media have more control of our daily lives than the Cabinet itself does.

No wonder we’re all feeling a little bit jaded.

To make us feel better, old Gordy has decided the country needs a motto. We don’t actually have a written constitution and, since we handed all the assets of our Empire over to anybody who asked us for it, not to mention the fact that Gordon himself sold pretty much all our gold reserves whilst the price of gold was at its lowest point, coming up with a motto seems a bit of a weak attempt to garner public favour.

Mr Brown, who earlier this year denied he had any plans to give the country a motto, has now done one of politics fabled u-turns and decided that it would be a good idea for us to have one. But I’m sort of perplexed as to why we need one. Yes, the Americans have got “In God We Trust” and the French have the passionate “liberté, égalité, fraternité” as their slogan. Search around hard enough and you’ll find that Aruba has the motto “One Happy Island” while Barbados uses “Pride and Industry”. Both could – and should – equate to Britain, but they don’t. Not anymore.

Many country mottos sprout the same message: unity, justice, peace and freedom. Some are religious (Iraq’s motto translates as “God is Great” and Vanatu’s “Long God yumi stanap” translates as “Let us stand firm in God”) whilst Norway’s is perhaps a touch more selfish: “Everything for Norway”.

One of my favourites, not counting for Norway’s amusing axiom, is India’s: “Truth alone triumphs”.

With all these aphorisms floating about then, Gordon’s idea doesn’t seem quite so pointless, until you start trying to think up a motto that would suit the country. The idea is simple: our motto must capture the essence of the country, in just five words, and the best will be chosen as our new maxim.

To plagiarise, “I’m taxed, therefore I am” springs to mind. And that’s the problem we have. We aren’t a country united any longer. We are a country made up of a disjointed and disparate society with divided religious beliefs where loyalty amongst our countrymen is weak. Talk to anybody on the train, in the pub or, if you’re a youth, ask the granny whose handbag you’re pinching what she thinks and the essence of the country will shine through. Great Britain has no self-esteem any more, morale is all but stripped from us, and this shines through in some of the suggestions already put forward by the people of our nation. Have a look at the Times Online page on the subject and you’ll get some witty responses, such as “Robbin’ hoodie and Jade Goody” (by Josh) or Jake’s “Land of yobs and morons”. This surely can’t be the message we want to send out to other countries, can it?

Somebody else has suggested “Sorry, is this the queue” and “In America we trust”, or there have been the more acerbic suggestions: “At least we’re not French” and “Britain: live wrong and prosper”. For every sensible suggestion there have been at least ten sarcastic rejoinders.

I’ve been coming up with a few of my own, as well. “Taxed to Hell; still smiling” is weak, admittedly, but it reflects the thoughts and feelings of the people who stand around my bar every night. They know they’re paying through their noses because of tax for the pint they’re enjoying and for the petrol that brought them to the pub, but still they stand there and smile and, when they leave, they say they’ve had a good night.

Of course, if you own a business, run a business, are in some way related to the manager of a business, you live in constant fear of the Health & Safety Officer. These days so much red tape, so many rules and regulations, stifle the chance for Britain’s businessmen to better themselves, their families and their employees. And, of course, unless you’ve dotted every ‘i’ and crossed every ‘t’ there’s every chance that if a passing stranger slips on a stone somewhere in the vicinity of your grandmother your business could be sued for tens of thousands of pounds. This means that a generation of professional claimants, following the American model of “sue or be sued”, has spawned an entire industry of ProfessionalIndustrySuer4u.coms hell bent on leaching off little old ladies who slip on a leaf that has fallen overnight and hasn’t had the decency to be blown away by the wind before the cleaners turned up.

It encourages people to think up slogans like “Health and Safety Ruined Everything.”

Maybe Britain does need a motto, a jaunty motivating jingle upon which we can pride ourselves, but we don’t need it to boost morale. For that, we need a change in the way the citizens are viewed by those in power. The working man needs to be recognised for what he is – somebody trying to earn a crust, not somebody who is there to simply pour more money in to the Government’s coffers through ever-increasing taxation. While the British are filling in their tax forms and worrying about whether a ladder should be used or scaffolding should be brought in, we’re allowing people from other nations to come in and take the jobs that our guys daren’t for fear of the Health & Safety Officer. And that’s just not right. We are watched, monitored, evaluated constantly, with no reprieve.

Speed cameras blight almost every road in this country, many of them now observing each car as it passes and checking not just on its speed but also its legality. Drive in to London and four billion tiny cameras watch your every move and charge you £8 for the privilege. Walk on any major town high street or shopping centre car park and CCTV cameras watch your every move. I often wake up expecting to find my corneas have been replaced and that I’ve become one of Tom Cruise’s extras in Minority Report.

So my final suggestion, if we must have a motto rather than a change in policy, echoes George Orwell’s sentiments. It’s five words and it fits the country perfectly.

“Big Brother Is Watching You.”

Tragic Magic and the Hamsters from Hell

Last week, as you’re all probably aware by now, I went shopping for a hedge-trimmer. I returned, unsurprisingly, with a hamster having, as a man, failed to make a decision on the spot. I was mulling over the differences between a cordless Bosch and a cordless Flymo; with the obvious difference of almost £40 not being enough to sway me, I was caught in a bit of a dilemma.

Ali, aware there was money to be spent, seized the opportunity to distract me by walking us to the local pet store while I tried to make my mind up and, before I knew it, Tiger had been purchased. He was a Syrian hamster with brown and white colourings and, unlike the hedge-trimmer, cost only £6. Then, of course, we had to buy the cage for him. Not for old Tiger was there going to be anything as boring as the traditional square tray with wire bars atop it to keep the rodent in, oh no. Habitrail offer the penthouse of all hamster cages and, by the time the boxes were piled in to the boot of the car, I could have bought both the Bosch and the Flymo and decided which one to use once I’d got them home.

Malachy and Jacob were as excited as only four- and seven-year-old kids on Coca-Cola can be. They stared at the cage, they cooed over the cage, they gasped in awe at the bright orange wheel and giggled with delight at the cardboard maze that Tiger could have so much fun in.

If only he’d come out of his bedroom.

Telling the children that Tiger just needed time to settle in, we left him alone but, to the children’s disappointment, the next day he was still hiding in his little room. As he was on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. In fact, since he was bought last Wednesday, we’d only seen him once and that was when, in frustration, Jacob had got hold of the cage and tipped it upside down. Even then, Tiger had quickly found another place to hide.

On Monday we were convinced he had died. The only reason we knew it was still alive was because it bit me when I decided to prod it.

So yesterday, we decided to use the seven-day guarantee on the hamster and take it back to the shop where it was purchased. Having spent almost a week trying to encourage the little pet to come out of its hidey-hole, even in the early hours of the morning when its nocturnal instincts should have taken over, we decided enough was enough. Our hamster was clearly faulty.

And so I went to get my hedge-trimmer, only to return home with Smartie.

Smartie is another Syrian hamster, only this time he’s got black and white striping and he’s quite inquisitive. He likes to look around his cage and he comes out to play with the children. They are beside themselves with excitement.

The other thing Smartie likes to do is fill the inside of his bright orange hamster wheel with nuts and treats and biscuits and then run in it.

All – night – long.

Hairy Bush or a Hamster?

My bush is getting a little overgrown and unkempt. To be fair, it's sprouting in all sorts of directions and now bits of it are really starting to get right up Ali's nose. It's annoying her to the point that she's been having a bit of a moan at me for a while now that it really needs trimming. And that's just the one around the perimeter of our private garden.

Then there's the one near the entrance to the car park, and the one over by the neighbour's wall and then, ridiculously, there's all the ivy over the back of the old sheds and the stuff that's encroaching on the property of another neighbour towards the back of our grounds.

So, yesterday, I decided that I had to do something about it. I had to get it all trimmed back, tidied up and, in general, try to make the garden area look a lot more respectable. To do this, I thought, I need a hedge-trimmer. Or something similar. So off we went to Homebase to see what hedge-trimming utilities they might have.

Now, our grounds are quite large so anything with a cable had to be discounted straight away. Most of them had a 15m cable and then I'd have to plug it in to my 50m extension cable, which I'd probably chop straight through. The options, then, were either a rechargeable cordless trimmer, or a petrol one.

Petrol would probably be better, but they were ridiculously expensive, so we looked at the rechargeable options, of which there were two. Bosch made one, Flymo the other. In fairness, the Flymo option looked a lot better, but it was nearly double the price of the Bosch. I mulled the two of them over for a while and then decided that I couldn't make my mind up like that. Ali suggested we wander down to the carpet place to look at new flooring for the kitchen while I tried to decide what was the best option, so we took a stroll, looked at some lino flooring and still I couldn't make my mind up on which one to buy.

"I think I'll leave it for now," I muttered despondently to Ali and she asked if we could have a look in the new Pets @ Home store that had just opened next door. "But we don't have a pet," I said, cautiously.

We spent some time walking around the store before I suggested that we really ought to head off. It was about now that I spotted the sales guy, animatedly discussing the shop's livestock with Ali. I wondered how long he'd been there.

"We should go," I said.

"Don't worry, I'm just looking at something."

"Please don't buy a rabbit," I whined.

"Don't worry, I'm not."

But, before I had chance to breath a sigh of relief, she had paid for a hamster. And a new cage. And all the ancillary items that the cage needed.

I went shopping for a hedge-trimmer; I came home with a hamster. My bush remains untidy.

This Is The Police, You Have The Wrong Number...

If you’ve read this morning’s blog, received the e-mail, been on the end of a telephone call to me in the past twenty-four hours, received one of the numerous text messages I’ve sent or simply been near me while I’ve been needing somebody to bitch to, you’ll have heard that yesterday I borrowed a friend’s car and, whilst it was in my care, it was broken in to.

Obviously, despite my ramblings of yesterday, I did actually report it to the police. A crime had been committed, even if nothing had actually been stolen, and the police report number would be needed in order for a claim to be made against the insurance policy to replace the driver’s side window. We had been at the Brent Park Ikea, somewhere near Wembley, so we’d gone to the security office, reported the incident and then asked them to call the local police station for us so that we could report the crime.

Now, I am aware that dialling 999 for such a trivial incident would have been a bit silly and I’m aware that the police have more important things to do, such as telling people off for smoking in public areas, but a police car was actually in the car park at the time I was making the telephone call to the local station. Still, as I wasn’t actually speeding at the time of the incident and the car that I was driving was taxed and insured correctly, the crime was deemed too insignificant for the nearby officer to attend and so a telephone report was taken. The CAD number (I presume some form of Crime Reference Number) was duly issued and this is apparently all I needed in order to replace the window on the insurance policy.

It didn’t really bother me, to be honest. Obviously, there are far more important things for the police to really be worried about than a broken car window, so forgive my facetiousness; Wembley is nearby and, as Meat Loaf had announced he was cancelling his tour just a few hours earlier, starting with yesterday evening’s Wembley venue, there were probably some rampaging rock hounds that required more attention than my mate’s car.

What did bother me, however, was the telephone call I received just a few moments ago from the police station I’d called yesterday afternoon, informing me that I’d rang the wrong police station in the first instance and could I please call the correct one to report the incident again ...

Tragic Magic's Latest Shopping Trip ... To Ikea

Not content with having spent the summer months uprooting the customers, tearing down walls, re-plastering the bars, buying new carpet and generally just making a great big mess of things, I’ve decided it’s time to rip out the old kitchen as well.

So, from Monday 12^th November for somewhere between five days and five months (it is me doing the DIY, after all), we’re going to close the kitchen so we can put a new one in. It’s fair to say that, whilst clean, The Tharp’s incumbent cooking facilities are somewhat old and beyond their useful life. The girls have been making the best of what they can and really, if the business is to grow on the food front, they need better facilities.

This means that we have spent the best part of the last four weeks trying to source commercial kitchen equipment. Obviously, we’ve been round all the usual suppliers, the auction houses, old building sites, office blocks where disused kitchens reside and even eBay. So it was a bit of a surprise, really, when the best value free-standing, stainless steel individual kitchen units could be found at ... Ikea.

Now I hate shopping at Ikea at the best of times. I’ve never seen the attraction of the place and am completely flummoxed by everybody’s fascination with it. Even midweek, when children should be at school and employed people foolish enough to pay tax are supposed to be sitting at their desks, your local Ikea will be packed full of people paying gargantuan amounts of money for flat-packed furniture. MFI would be wise to look at Ikea’s business plan, because even on a bank holiday weekend with one of their fabled sales I have never seen an MFI store as busy as Ikea is on an average Tuesday in November.

Ikea’s general shopping strategy seems to be to force everybody upstairs, herd them around from department to department where their stylists appear to have forgotten that time has moved on from the 1970s and where everything has weird Swedish names like Bravad, Udden or Faktum, then force the entire customer-base down in two lifts where they then have to look for their flat-packed goods in a warehouse as complex and large as NASA’s Space Shuttle storage facility before taking them to the till. This is where the beleaguered customer realises they completely forgot to make a note of where their item would be stored when they were looking at it on the showroom floor.

Yesterday, then, I had to make the dreaded journey to an Ikea store to collect our new kitchen. Having been caught out by Ikea’s “stock-control” system in the past, where I was advised by the shop that they had the items in stock but had managed to sell it by the time I arrived to collect it, Ali rang around several Ikeas before identifying one that had a plentiful supply of the particular kitchen that we wanted.

Having obtained the packaged measurements, I wasn’t sure whether the units would all fit in the back of the Jeep. Barmaid Amy suggested the use of her husband’s Discovery, a commercial version, and he kindly loaned it to us. Off we set for Wembley Ikea, stopping en route at the bank to collect change for the pub for later in the day.

And this is where the problems with Ikea start. Even though we knew exactly what we were shopping for, even though we knew exactly how much it would cost and even though we knew that, regardless of how much she would try, Ali couldn’t shop for anything else because there would be absolutely no room to squeeze a mouse’s naughty bits in to once all the kitchen had been packed in to the back of Shaun’s Land Rover Discovery, we still managed to spend over two hours in Ikea. Two hours.

By the time we left the shop, wads of money lighter and trailing a shopping trolley so full of produce we couldn’t see each other over the top of it, I was numb. Brain dead. Almost lifeless. I was the living embodiment of a Resident Evil zombie.

So as we walked in to the ground floor of Ikea’s multi-storey car park, the largest free car park in North London with space for 3’000 cars and not a CCTV camera anywhere, it was Ali – not me – who spotted Shaun’s car first.

Broken in to.

With shards of smashed glass, everywhere.

Tragic Magic Starts the Next Great Fire of Chippenham

Ever since I was a child I have hated fire. Not in me was there ever a latent desire to get in to trouble at school by setting the bike sheds on fire no tendencies towards arson were ever discovered. In fact, at the age of seven, I used to have to get my Dad to check under the bed to convince me there wasn’t an inferno raging there and, when he’d gone, I’d get out of bed and double check. I was never afraid of monsters or child-eating spiders residing under my duvet.

Today, if candles need lighting, I’ll hand the matches to Ali and I go nowhere near the roaring open fire in the pub’s lounge.

It’s because of this foremost fear of fire that I’m not particularly keen on Bonfire Night. Sure, the annual celebration of Guy Fawkes’ failed attempt at blowing up the Houses of Parliament can be good fun but the potential for disaster just makes me shudder – especially with a roaring bonfire to contend with. It’s the one celebratory night of the year that I simply dread here at the pub. Give me over a hundred people in the pub on New Year’s Eve any day. I’ll take the giant inflatable and all those kids romping recklessly around on it on August Bank Holiday without any problem. I’m even happy to put up with the surge of festive drinkers on Christmas Day, all desperately trying to fit a day’s worth of drinking in to two hours.

But fifty people standing around watching pretty lights go pop in the sky while a fire rages just a few feet away? It’s enough to make my right testicle shrink.

So, for last night’s bonfire party, we made sure the bonfire was built in such a way that it would collapse and burn itself out quite quickly. The air was quite still and a smattering of rain fell an hour before the event was due to take place, damping down the bracken nearby and taking away the potential for some of the stacked wood to flame too high in to the night.

At 6:15, Barmaid Amy and I took to the gate and waited for the crowd to arrive to watch the show.

At 6:30, Grumpy Pete set about lighting the bonfire and, by 6:45, we had a nice little crowd standing around behind the sheds ready to watch the resident pyromaniacs have a go at shooting down the Hercules that was patrolling from nearby Mildenhall Air Base.

Once the fireworks display began at 7:00, Amy went off to watch the show while Pete and I marvelled at how quickly the bonfire had burned down. In fact, it was little more than a happy pile of glowing embers by the time the show was properly underway; it had probably burned out a bit quicker than expected but at least I could relax. I wasn’t going to start the next great fire of Chippenham this year...

It was all over by 7:25. Like my sex life, it finished with one large, colourful and very loud bang but had lasted about twenty-four minutes longer, and then the crowds were strolling back out, each one apparently very happy with the show they’d just paid to see and most of them piling back in to the pub for beer and food. It had all gone well and, with all the patrons gone, Pete and I set about making the area safe. After we’d cleared away all the external lighting and moved the safety barriers we began tamping down the fire.

“Hang on,” I said, a thought occurring to me. “We didn’t put any of that cardboard, or the pallet that’s in the sheds, on this fire. Shall we burn that off now?”

“Might as well,” Pete said with a shrug and so, with the help of a couple of local lads, we started dragging round all the disused cardboard and pallets people had somehow left behind and threw them on the dying embers of the fire.

They caught well and the fire picked up again for a few minutes. The heat on this cold November night was quite enjoyable as Pete and I stood and watched. For a laugh, we got all the old pumpkins that had been used last week for Hallowe’en and threw them on too. Very quickly, the pumpkin faces took on a sinister appearance as smoke billowed through their glowing eyes. It was as if we’d woken a few malevolent spirits.

As we watched the pumpkin faces glow and burn and decant smoke in to the night sky, the wind whipped up around us. The flames took a firm hold on the pallets and the burning cardboard roared into life, imbuing the dark air with glowing embers and large pieces of floating, flaming boxes.

And that was when a nearby fir tree caught fire.

Tragic Magic's Subtitled Weekend

What?

That seems to have been the most prolific noun used in the pub this weekend. Along, of course, with: Pardon? Sorry? Eh?

A stranger walking in to the pub could have been forgiven for thinking that the majority of my patrons were stone deaf or, perhaps, just a bit dim-witted, when in fact they all thought they were being very amusing. The words uttered were all in response to me saying “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you very well at the moment,” to which not one customer – and I mean not one – was able to resist thinking they would be the first to say “What?” in a very loud voice.

I am prone to sinus problems, which could be the cause of my current lack of hearing, but the sensation on this occasion is very unusual. For most of my life I’ve suffered with sinus-related issues and, with just the slightest change in air pressure or temperature, my sphenoethmoidal recess can clog up faster than a fat man’s arteries but, according to my doctor, these can all be very easily resolved if I’d just let them drill in to my face a little bit. I don’t know about you, but I’m not too keen on the idea of some surgeon wielding ideas of being Bruce Willis and attacking my face with a mouse-sized pneumatic drill so, for the most part, I’ve always put up with a lack of smell and the occasional puffy cheeks. When I do get a bad bout of sinusitis, however, it can hurt quite badly and this is where it’s all a bit different this time round.

On Friday evening I simply stood up from my sofa, felt my ear go pop and have pretty much not been able to hear through it since – hence the diaphragm-trembling original wit of those around me who all seem to have found it rather amusing to talk to me simultaneously in order to overload and confuse the one remaining ear that still works.

Of course, I have booked an appointment with a doctor for this afternoon and no doubt he’ll simply stick his torch in my ear, mutter and tut the way my accountant does, complain bitterly about wax build up (which, admittedly, my accountant doesn’t do) and then book me in for an ear-syringing before going on at me about having my sinuses drilled once again. Thankfully, I won’t be able to hear him.

Obviously, I’ll be quite lucky – this is either sinus-related or nothing more than an ear infection and a bout of antibiotics will quickly clear it all up but losing one of your senses, even temporarily, does bring home to you how difficult it must be for people with permanent hearing difficulties. You have to focus desperately hard on the person who’s talking to you and, to an untrained eye like mine, reading lips is bloody difficult. The only sign language I’m familiar with is the type used to tell other drivers what I think of their roundabout etiquette and if everybody around me talks at once it’s a very confusing experience.

And then there’s the background noise. We hosted a quiz in the pub last night and most of the players were taking part from the Public Bar, where I was sat with the computer. They used coloured bats to indicate to me which answer they thought should be given as we competed against other pubs up and down the country but, occasionally, they shouted out the answers. There was a general hubbub of noise in the bar as people joshed, joked and discussed (in less than thirty seconds) what they thought the answer should be. I couldn’t hear a word they were saying. Yet, on the other side of the server in the Lounge Bar, behind another wall, I could hear most of the conversations quite clearly. I seem to be able to pick up on a noise and pitch or a certain frequency, but can hear nothing right in front of me. This probably means that tonight’s fireworks party will bugger the other ear up, too.

When I sat down at two o’clock this morning to watch some TV, I found the telly volume had to be at a specific level in order for me to make sense of what news stories Paul Merton and Ian Hislop were belittling this week. Not wishing to wake the children, I turned down the volume and experimented with the subtitles – and what a sensory-depriving experience that was. The words flash up on the screen so fast your eyes are unable to follow them and concentrate on what was going on onscreen. The subtleties of humour and sarcasm are completely lost amidst the fast-flowing yellow or white text and eventually I gave up, closed the living room door and turned the volume back up.

A loss of hearing is not a pleasant thing, whether it is temporary or permanent. It’s amazing how much we rely on these senses and it takes a while for the other senses to start compensating or for your brain to realise what is actually going on. But watching television when you’re hard of hearing seems to me to be an almost impossible experience.

And as for the guy that the BBC sticks in the bottom right hand corner to sign-language everything the news reader’s saying... Well, by the time I’d finished watching him for a few minutes I hadn’t a clue what was going on and wanted to take a pneumatic drill to his face instead.

A Truly Rubbery Experience

Rubber is quite important to us in our daily lives. For some, it’s the little pink thing at the end of our pencils, used to rub out the mistakes we make on paper. For others, the use of rubber gloves is important – either medically or simply to prevent your fingers getting wrinkly when you do the washing up. My postman seems to like to use red rubber bands to keep all my bills neatly together, alphabetised by creditor, and because of his propensity to deliver all my letters so neatly wrapped I like to think that he and his missus enjoy wearing rubber gimp suits on a Saturday night.

The most prolific use of rubber, however, is that used in the manufacture of tyres. You know the sort of thing I mean: Lewis Hamilton famously forgot to change his rubber in China and ultimately Kimi Räikkönen is now the Formula One World Champion. Of course, there’s a million miles between a Formula One racing tyre and the remoulds we used to stick on our cars as teenagers, but rubber is rubber is tyres and so, when my Jeep took it upon itself recently to develop a slow puncture in the rear left tyre and then also presented to me a spare wheel complete with nail shoved through it, I felt it was time to look around for a supplier who could put a new strip of rubber on my manly four-by-four’s alloy wheel.

In my halcyon days of being a company car driver I didn’t really care who did it or what it cost. I would throw the keys of my Lexus at the whimpering Fleet Manager who would then arrange with the local ATS or Kwik Fit for them to come out, collect the car and then charge a quazillion pounds to put a new tyre on the wheel and then balance it all. Then they’d add VAT.

Of course, these days I run my own business and every penny counts so, when it came to putting some new rubber on the Jeep’s wheel, I started shopping around for the best price without compromising on quality. Well, give me a break, I might be a cheapskate but I do have to put my family in the car, so I won’t put the most basic tyre on it. Plus I do actually take my 4x4 off road, so I don’t want it to deflate at the first sign of a stinging nettle.

Big name tyre-fitters that adorn your local high street are all well and good but, at the end of the day, they’ve got a myriad of staff to pay, not to mention the upkeep and business rates of each and every one of their establishments. This is reflected in the price of their products. Then you have to arrive and show the car to the attendant, who will suck in air through his diamond-studded teeth and promptly inform you that at least four of your tyres are completely illegal, the tracking’s out and you need a battery before winter sets in. Even though it’s only April. Before you know it you’ve spent over a thousand pounds and your mates in the pub are asking if you sent your blonde wife in on your behalf or whether you really are a complete halfwit.

Better, then, to look at the online services that are available to you. Out of all of them, e-Tyres stands above the rest. It has a recognised brand, a pretty website and a good reputation. And the prices aren’t too bad either. Ordering your tyres is easy and, because it’s all done online, it means you don’t have to deal with a pierced throwback from the nineteen fifties who wants to your empty your bank account.

To purchase your rubber, all you have to do is visit the very neat online website at www.etyres.co.uk or call them on 0800 028 9000. Online, the process is simple. Click on ‘buy tyres’ and enter the dimensions of your wheel (these can be found on the side of your tyre). You’ll then be presented with the available options that e-Tyres have, plus their prices – including VAT. The appropriate Goodyear Wrangler for my Jeep was £92.14, including VAT, balancing and fitting. Not bad, considering one of the well-known high street competitors wanted over £124 for the same bit of tread.

Go through to the next page and you are asked for your details and your payment information. That’s it: job done. The company aim to install your tyre the next working day for you, although they do have caveats that allow them to take longer if you order late in the day or if they don’t have immediate stock of the exact tyre you wish to buy.

The website is extremely simple to use. It is neatly laid out, all the options are placed in front of you in a straight forward manner and each page loads quickly; there’s barely any hesitation from clicking the ‘next’ button to the following page appearing in front of you. To top it off, the little padlock will close in the corner of your web-browser, indicating that they are using the appropriate security to protect your credit card information. The site sticks to a very simple white background with red striping to highlight the important bits and all the pertinent information is in front of you in big, bold type. It’s an extremely pleasant site to use and ultimately very satisfying but, should you have any problems, you can always call the freephone number where your query will be dealt with by a very efficient and friendly clerk. The exact tyre I wanted wasn’t available unless I was prepared to wait over a week and so e-Tyres called me, offered me several options and, even though it was almost 6pm on the Wednesday evening by then, confirmed that a fitter would be with me at some point the following working day. There was no ongoing delay to my order.

One of the ways that e-Tyres keep their prices down is that they don’t have a nationwide collection of e-Tyres branded vans sitting in cheesy lay-bys eating greasy burgers waiting for your call. Instead, they use a network of independent mobile tyre fitters in much the same way Green Flag do for your breakdown needs. Place your order for some rubber and e-Tyres locate the nearest franchised individual who can service your requirements. When the man in his van arrives, all you’ve got to do is give him your keys – he’ll do the rest, thanks to a van loaded with all the usual tyre-fitting gubbins and some rather feminine looking rubber gloves. Clearly, he doesn’t want to get his fingernails dirty...

e-Tyres quote a fitting time of between 15 and 30 minutes; it took my man just twenty minutes to replace the tyre on my nailed spare and then swap that wheel over with the slowly deflating wheel on the car. Sign a bit of paperwork and he’ll give you your car keys back and head off to save the next punctured individual. You don’t even have to pay him, as you did that the day before on the website; e-Tyres send your invoice through by the post a few days after the repairs have been done.

It’s not just tyres they do either, mind you. Having problems with your battery? Then they’ll sort you out a replacement one of those, too. Mind you, while e-Tyres are cheaper than most for tyres – this is evidenced by their ‘price checker’ page on the website – they aren’t such good value when it comes to replacing the battery. For my Jeep, e-Tyres quoted £92.90 for a replacement battery; spending just two minutes doing a quick price check online saved me £30 by sourcing a battery elsewhere.

Let’s not let the battery side of their business detract from what is, essentially, an excellent service. Next time you’re in need of some new rubber, give e-Tyres a try. I’m sure you’ll find it a truly rubbery experience.

Just remember: they don’t do gimp suits.

Eat My Cheese

What is it about restaurants – specifically American-themed outlets – that believe you must, without fail, accompany everything on your plate with a slab of processed cheese? This obsession with stuffing slices of manufactured cheese on to every plate not only means that the average American still weighs more than the entire population of Scotland, but also that a night out with friends or family has now become a dangerous game of finding an establishment where you can actually get a meal without being force fed the produce of Laughing Cow.

Take TGI Friday’s, for example. On Tuesday, Ali and I took the opportunity to have a bit of time to ourselves and, snubbing the expensive hotel restaurant, looked around Thurrock’s Lakeside shopping centre for somewhere half-decent to eat. We spurned the McDonalds and Burger King establishments, purveyors of great processed cheese that they are, and ended up at Friday’s where we were assaulted with a menu so elaborately decorated in cheese that James L. Kraft himself might have dipped it in one of his vats.

To start, why not try some Mac ‘n’ Cheese Bites? Apparently, they’re an irresistible blend of macaroni and creamy cheese that have then been deep-fried, just to ensure the heart-attack starts early. Don’t like the sound of that? How about some Wicked Wings, served with celery and a blue cheese dip. Or there’s the Tomato Bruschetta. It sounds healthy, being toasted garlic Ciabatta bread served with a generous helping of chopped tomatoes, basil and garlic, all drizzled in Balsamic Vinegar. Then they top it with grated cheese...

From the main menu, indulge yourself with the Sizzling Chicken: two marinated breasts of chicken served on a skillet of melted Colby & Monterey Jack Cheese. The Jack Daniel’s Chicken comes with cheesy mash, the Spicy Diablo Pasta is sprinkled with grated cheese and the vegetarian San Fran Burger is, you guessed it, neatly topped with Mozzarella.

Or you could just plump for the Cheese Nachos.

At this point I should say that I don’t eat cheese. Nothing long white and stringy with a pliable texture should ever enter my mouth. I don’t eat fish either, for that matter, as I can’t abide the thought of eating anything that comes from a deep salty background. This, then, makes eating at TGI Friday’s somewhat difficult.

Ask the waitress if I can have my burger without a slab of cheese on it and I get looked at as if I’m somewhat fermented. Asking for my Cajun-Spiced Chicken Quesadilla to be served without cheese prompted a string of incomprehensible expletives from our Polish waitress and asking for my cheesy mash to be served sans fromage almost got us thrown out of the restaurant.

Instead, I plumped for another pint of Stella Artois.

Despite all this, I quite like TGI Friday’s. They’ve been force-feeding cheese to the American public for forty-two years and there’s now hardly a major city around the world that doesn’t have a Friday’s located somewhere. The atmosphere is lively and fun as the management desperately try to ensure their staff keep to the company’s motto of “in here, it’s always Friday.” The price of a meal isn’t too bad, either – just remember: you don’t get discount for asking for your food without cheese.

When all’s said and done TGI Friday’s is an entertaining destination for food and drink that makes a change from going to the pub. There’s a bar to sit at, TV Screens displaying sport and news, loud music, and good food. It’s sort of like going to your local, but instead it’s American.

And, when you’ve finished, you can treat yourself to dessert. I’d like to recommend their Cinnamon-Swirl Cheesecake - but I hate Cinnamon.