Santa Needs To Modernise - And Fast!

I have come to the conclusion that all children should receive nothing but coal on Christmas Day, and that Santa would do well to upgrade his computer systems so that the Naughty and Nice list can be processed swiftly in the final few days before he’s due to leave the North Pole.

You see, the system falls down relatively early on. Thanks to the wonders of fable and Hollywood, we’re all lead to believe that Jolly Saint Nick sits down sometime in November and starts to study reams of paper, instinctively knowing who’s been nice and who’s been naughty. But I think he’s got it all wrong.

In November, every child on the planet is being nice. They’re all excited and dreamy about what’s going to happen on December 25^th and so they’re trying to atone for all their naughtiness over the previous ten months. This means that when Father Christmas starts putting ticks in the appropriate boxes, all he’s getting is a sense of joy and goodness. But fast-forward to the 22^nd December and it’s a totally different story.

With three days to go until the fat guy works his magic on your chimney, your kids have figured out that all the hard work has been done. The younger kids, thanks to movies like The Santa Clause, understand that the elves have been labouring hard in a cold and cramped environment all year to make sure the toys are built and ready for dispatch, while the older children, noticing the panicked look on their parents’ faces when the credit card bill arrives, comprehend that the PlayStation 3 and its accompanying games have already been purchased.

And this means that they can start pulling their sister’s hair again.

With barely 72 hours to go, anarchy has descended on the household. Parents fret that they still haven’t wrapped Little Johnny’s AK47, while the little cherub himself is merrily dangling his brother from the top of his bunk bed.

Santa needs to get with the programme, update his list closer to Christmas and then, if he did that, I wouldn’t have to be sitting here with two days to go ‘til the big event, still trying to figure out how to tell a four year old boy that no, despite the fact that Tim Allen’s version of Santa did produce a seven-foot long canoe - complete with oars - from his sack, there will be no Yamaha YFM50 quad bike sitting under the tree for him on Christmas morning.

Instead, judging by the way he’s currently smashing an Etch-a-Sketch over his older brother’s head, there will be coal.

Wishing you a speedy Christmas and a swift return to normality in 2008.

Lewis Hamilton Forces Me To Eat Cheese

No one seemed more surprised about his failure to win the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award than the bookmaker’s favourite himself, Lewis Hamilton. Or, perhaps, me as I had, rather foolishly, been so confident of the 22-year-old’s success in the awards that I had bet my customers that I would eat cheese if he didn’t win.

Now, I don’t eat cheese. Or fish, for that matter. Anything that’s long white and stringy, or that comes from a salty background, should not be eaten. Or, in Ali’s words, anything that’s got a long blue vein running through it. So that rules out Stilton. Or maybe Gorgonzola, too.

The concept of eating anything made by coagulating cow juice seems as alien to me as it was to Hamilton when his name was read out in second place, sandwiching him between the boxers Ricky Hatton and Joe Calzaghe. The bookmakers had listed the Formula One driver as odds-on favourite to win the award, and so had I. So much so that I had been prepared to risk the forfeit of consuming fermented fungus.

Hamilton has, after all, single-handedly lifted the public opinion of Formula One out of the doldrums and made it a popular topic of conversation over the bar once again, whilst Ricky Hatton seems to have achieved third place simply because his name has been mentioned repeatedly in the press this week during the build-up to his fight with Floyd Mayweather on Saturday night. Which he lost.

It’s almost as if the voters looked at the list of sports personalities in this year’s Personality line-up, which included such noted names as Paula Radcliffe and Johnny Wilkinson, and thought “ooh, I’ve heard of Hatton a lot this week, he must deserve my vote.” And then they looked at the others and thought, “well, there are two boxers in there and the other chap seems to have done better than Hatton, so he must be the better one to vote for.”

That’s not to belittle Joe Calzaghe’s victory at all. He’s the same age as me and has been World Champion in his sport for the past ten years, undefeated in 44 fights and thus is a deserved contender to the sport, plus I don’t want to annoy him as – at 35 years old – I certainly couldn’t take a punch off him. But, as one of my 17-year-old sisters succinctly put it, Hamilton lost to a boxer who she had never even heard of.

And that’s the problem. Whilst Hamilton stole all the headlines this year and did his utmost to do what no rookie has done before him, all the while lifting the popularity of his sport, few people in the general public had heard of Joe Calzaghe unless they actually followed boxing. Had Chris Evans not campaigned so vehemently in his BBC Radio 2 show over the past week to lift the profile of Calzaghe, he probably wouldn’t have won it at all. Evans’s argument was that Hamilton hadn’t won anything – yet he has. He narrowly missed out on the overall championship for drivers, yet he maintained a dignity and attitude that showed a sparkling personality throughout the year, despite the trials and tribulations of working with a truculent team-mate. And he won four Grand Prix this year that took him to within one point of the World Championship, losing out only in the last race to Ferrari’s Kimi Räikkönen. That’s no mean feat in your first year in the sport.

The lad from Stevenage has done well this year. But, by losing out to Calzaghe in Sunday night’s awards, he forced me to eat cheese.

So, as I put the viscous lump of mature cheddar into my mouth and bit down, I rued the day I ever thought up such a bet. The pale yellow cheese felt soft and glutinous between my teeth and I felt the bile rise in my throat as I forced myself to chew through the crumbling lump and ignore, as best I could, the taste of off-milk as it slid over my tongue and down my throat.

Two pints of water later and I could still feel my stomach curdling as it tried to process this offensive food stuff and, as I woke on Monday morning, my appetite for the day had completely gone.

However well Hamilton does in 2008, I will not be backing him so favourably for the Sports Personality of the Year next year, because I will never, ever eat cheese again in my life.

Unless it’s on a pizza, covered in Pepperoni and topped copiously with mushrooms, sweet corn and pineapple then liberally covered with Jalapeño chillies to disguise the flavour.

Tragic Magic Does An Outside Bar...

Yesterday [Saturday] was always going to be a tough day and it started out in true fashion as I was woken by a text message from Slaveboy Adam at 8:15 in the morning, calling in sick for the outside bar I was due to do last night. In fairness to Adam, he has been poorly all week, but he may also have had the foresight to realise that last night’s bar for eighty-odd people from a religious background might not have been going to be the most exciting bar he’s ever done with me.

Indeed, said bar was full of Coca Cola drinkers and people who had a rather over-developed taste for tap water which resulted in Julia (who had been drafted in as Adam’s replacement) and I simply sitting back and enjoying the rather good band. Who only played for 45 minutes.

But, early yesterday morning, I wasn’t to know that lager and wine wouldn’t be consumed because, being a pub landlord who was asked to do a licensed bar, it seemed reasonable to me to assume that lager, bitter, spirits and wine would be the chosen drinks of choice, and not tap water. So, with Adam off sick and Julia drafted in to replace him for the bar, I had to figure out a way of getting all the equipment I needed up to the Village Hall.

My attention turned to Young Colin, who seems to be developing muscles I never had as a teenager, and he helped hoist a keg of Carling, the necessary cooler, more than twenty bottles of various wines, 48 bottles of tonic to go with the three litres of gin and vodka and eight bottles of Coca Cola to mix with the 1.5 litre bottle of Jack Daniels or the 1.5 litre bottle of Famous Grouse. Obviously, I needed some Diet Coke in case these people might be afraid of sugar, and some Lemonade in case they wanted a little top in their lager or bitter. I wasn’t to know that I was going to return with a full keg of Carling, nineteen bottles of various wines, six litres of various spirits or, indeed, 48 bottles of tonic. Still, I didn’t have to worry about bringing the soft drinks back – there weren’t any left.

Colin helped me unload at the hall and set everything up. The bitter was hooked up, the cooler was in place and cooling, the wines were stored in the fridge and the various washing apparatus were installed, where necessary, to ensure Julia and I could keep the glasses clean. And then I tried the lager pump.

Nothing.

Having done these bars on many an occasion, I know to start with the obvious and work backwards. Gas: check. Lager connected: check. Cooler: cooling. And so on. Still no lager. Feebly, I flicked the pump handle back and forth a few times but still nothing happened. The only logical solution was that it was the keg of Carling itself. Getting in the car, I raced back to the pub and convinced a customer, Older Colin, to help me hoist the new keg up to the car and install it at the hall, which he happily did.

Connecting the new keg, I wasn’t really surprised to discover that that didn’t work, either. Colin, having worked on many a bar in his time, worked backwards through the system himself to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, until he suggested I tried disconnecting the beer supply from the cooler, which I did.

Lager, fired in your face under a pressure of about 40psi straight through a narrow bore tube, is not the most pleasant experience, but fortunately Colin was able to quickly disconnect the gas and the supply shut down.

“There’s your problem,” he said, “a blockage in the cooler.” We connected directly to the pump handle and, hurrah, beer started flowing. Warm and frothy, but at least there was some lager. “It might be that the pressure just released an air bubble,” he suggested, before leaving me to the messy puddle of lager on the floor as he wandered back up to the pub.

I cleaned up the mess and contemplated his theory that maybe the back pressure had released whatever was causing the blockage in the cooler as I had disconnected the pipe. Best way to try was to reconnect the system as it should have been connected and try again.

With all pipes in place, I pulled on the lager handle and.... nothing. No lager. The block was still there. Swearing to myself, I reached down and disconnected the lager line from the cooler.

Whereupon Carling lager, under high pressure, simply sprayed all over me because, this time, there was nobody standing next to the gas cylinder to shut the supply down.

Tragic Magic Builds a New Kitchen...

Since 6^th August Ali and I have been living beneath a fine layer of dust, grout and general grime. Finding a coffee cup whose insides did not resemble the mechanics of an Etch-a-Sketch has been almost impossible as the renovations continued and, for most of November, it’s been almost impossible for us to move around the place without bumping in to the big buffoon of a friendly plumber that is Tony, as he diligently placed over 2’000 tiles on to our kitchen walls.

But, finally, the renovations – for 2007 at least – are over. Yes, I know, the toilets could do with a lick of paint but that will happen at some point in 2008. For now, I’m happy to say that the Public and Lounge Bars are now completely finished and, at long last, the kitchen is completely refurbished and fully functional once again.

It’s been a slog, not simply because of the gallons of Timotei needed each day to keep our hair dust-free, nor the general patience needed with Tony’s obscure sense of humour, but also because – for the last three weeks – we haven’t had a kitchen. And I don’t mean that just because the business has been without a kitchen, so we’ve not been able to sell food or generally make money during what is traditionally the quietest period of the year for this business, but many people don’t realise that the pub’s kitchen is also our domestic one. We have no cooking facilities upstairs at all so, when we decided to rip out the old kitchen, we were also taking away our ability to cook for ourselves.

My plan to have the kitchen totally renovated in just five days seemed feasible, until the rear suspension of the Jeep collapsed under the sheer weight of the tiles needed to complete the job. Of course, being me, things couldn’t go simply – and from thereon in it didn’t. The original plan to shut the kitchen for five days stretched to three weeks and I’ve grown fat and spotty on a diet of KFC, steak & kidney pud and chips, and a variety of rather bland and insufficient Tesco value microwave meals. The delays, we hoped, would be worth it and, in the meantime, I stretched the overdraft to its limit as we attempted to dine healthily by visiting the local Hungry Horse on more than one occasion. We begged, borrowed and stole food from friends and neighbours and gladly accepted their hospitality as the days lingered into weeks and the children, much to their disgust, ended up eating school meals each day, just so that we knew they’d had some Jamie Oliver style grub.

Of course, it wasn’t just the delays that were a problem. We borrowed a friend’s car in order to collect the new kitchen in, only to have it broken in to while it was in our care. And then there was the pipe work. As soon as we ripped out the old kitchen all the old plumbing – which looked like it had been installed in the mid eighteenth century – simply rotted to dust in Tony’s hands. So that all had to be replaced. Then there was the disposal of all the old kitchen, which we entrusted to Big Shaun, who simply burned it all and walked away whistling as something wailed and screamed and crackled away amidst a cloud of black smoke.

In order to comply with regulations, we fitted a lovely new non-slip floor, which cost a small fortune. And then we ripped it as we carried in the large fridge-freezer. Then the shiny new shower tap, installed for the purpose of rinsing off dirty plates brought back from satisfied customers, broke.

But, eventually, with a sigh of relief, the kitchen was finally completed and looks fantastic in its new coat of tiles and with shiny free-standing stainless steel units and a big and bright electric range cooker as its centrepiece. And it didn’t come a moment too soon. Apart from the fact that Tony and I could probably no longer stand each other’s company for fear of our sanity, we really needed to start making up ground after having had the kitchen closed so long and, with Christmas coming, it was time to get things up and running again.

So, as the weekend arrived, we declared the kitchen open, to a hurrah of cheers from customers and staff alike.

“What’s on the menu?” I asked Ali.

“Oh bugger,” she replied, “I forgot to place the food order yesterday...”

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If you fancy having a sneaky-peak at the new-look kitchen during its refurbishment, click here... http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/thetharparms/KitchenRefurbishment?authkey=A4g6DE8BPLY

More Minty Than A Mini

I thought my love affair with the hot hatch ended when my twenties arrived, when girlfriends stopped being overnight conveniences and when – as happens with all men at some point – the size of my car began to be more important than the size of my manhood.

The VW Golf GTi 16v was the hot-hatch of choice when I hung out with girls form Essex who left their cheese-string thongs under the passenger seat for my mother to find and then, in my twenties and when my career began to be more a priority rather than a nuisance, it was the BMW 3-series that was the car of choice, because it was the one that was most likely to get you in to the knickers of the slender young female sales executive who wore the pinstripe trouser suit and smoked Marlboro Ultra Lights. When I got married and settled down to create a family, it was the urban four-by-four that became the motor to have, so that I could blend in with the Yummy Mummies on the school run.

From here on in my motoring future looks bleak. As I get older, greyer and fatter, I’ll have to start looking at the Mercedes S-Class or the BMW 7-series to meet my more stately position in society and to allow me to cavort with attractive middle-aged ladies who dress demurely, sip champagne and discreetly shave their bikini lines in the hopes that it will delay the onset of menopause.

In my mid-thirties, then, with wife and two children, the idea of the hot hatch is nothing more than a fond, but distant, memory. Or so I thought, until somebody handed me the keys to a 2007 VW Polo GTi.

For all intents and purposes, the Polo GTi – as superminis go – is quite innocuous. You wouldn’t really realise that the car sitting behind you, with the spotty oik behind the wheel desperately flashing his headlights to move you out of the way, had about 150bhp to play with, for example. You also wouldn’t realise that it can do the 0-60 dash in 8.2 seconds or wind itself up to an acne-popping 134mph. And because of this, you probably wouldn’t care that its sports suspension means it’s quite nifty round the corners, too.

You wouldn’t realise any of this because, well, it’s quite bland to look at. Sure, it’s got slightly flared wheel arches and a bespoke honeycomb grill to give it a beefier appearance, but if it didn’t say GTi on the front (or the back) you’d be none the wiser.

If you were looking for a hot hatch, you probably wouldn’t even think of buying a VW these days. The original hot-hatch was the Golf GTi, available in 8 or 16 valve format, but that was the modern day Polo’s great great great grandfather twice removed and these days the Golf is all frumpy and fat. Today’s hot-hatches are made by Renault and Ford, Suzuki or Vauxhall and you’d be forgiven, if you are young enough to still get away with looking cool behind the wheel of such a car, for choosing the Renault SportClio or the Ford Fiesta ST over the Polo. Both look far more exciting than the Polo GTi and are a little bit more exciting to drive. The Clio, for example, is almost a second and a half quicker in the 0-60 dash than the Polo while the Fiesta ST is almost £2’000 cheaper and, despite those rather garish go-faster lines, manages to be marginally faster too.

But there’s still something to be said for the spritely Polo that puts it over its rivals. The Fiesta is, well, a Ford while the Renault’s switchgear has a touch of Fisher Price about them. In contrast, the Polo is a lot better built – as you’d expect from German designers who appear to be deliberately bred with a touch of OCD in their systems – and you drive the car with a confidence that everything will work when you want it to. Compared to the Renault and the Ford, the Polo’s blue light dashboard and contrasting red switch gear looks funky and futuristic.

And then there’s the level of specification. The Polo is literally littered with useful, functional gadgets. Automatic Air Conditioning, for a start, and electric windows all round (if you get the five-door version). Neither the Renault or the Ford boast these as standard. The Polo also sports an indicator light to tell you when your tyres might have gone flat, and a stereo system with eight-speakers that’s perfect for listening to music made by a man who owns his own dungeon.

Of course, when you drive it VW’s heritage shows through. The little Polo simply whizzes around B-roads as if it were made for the challenge, despite having only 16-inch alloy wheels as standard compared to the Renault and Ford’s 17. Its 1.8 litre turbocharged engine is eager and exciting, although it can get a little asthmatic towards the top of the rev range as the turbo starts to run out of puff, but it’s brisk and inviting and the standard fit ESP (Electronic Stability Programme) includes EDL (Electronic Differential Lock) coupled with the ASR (which is nothing more exciting than Traction Control) and ABS make this car as difficult to crash as it is to understand all the acronyms associated with it.

The chunky steering wheel, aluminium drilled pedals and overall superb quality of this car make it a little joy to drive. In fact, as hot hatches go, it can only be surpassed by another German hot hatch. The Mini.

The Mini Cooper is slower than the Polo GTi while the Cooper S is undoubtedly quicker. The trouble is that the Cooper might start out cheaper than the Polo, but by the time you’ve added the options you want on it to bring the spec level to match the Polo’s it becomes more expensive. And it’s not as big – you can barely fit a couple of kids in the back, let alone a child seat or two, whilst the Polo is better designed for the Yummy Mummy than her VW Touareg is. And the Cooper S starts at £16’000 only to end up at £18’000 by the time you’ve added alloy wheels and air conditioning. In fact, there’s almost 100 different options you can add to your Mini Cooper and the Cooper S, fully loaded, will set you back almost the same as a good BMW 3-series, only it’s not as good as the 3-series and not as good looking as the Polo. That said, the Cooper S is blisteringly good fun to drive...

Still, if you’re young enough to still be in love with the hot hatch, or are having a mid-life crisis and can’t afford a Porsche, the VW Polo GTi is a great choice to consider. It’s priced competitively at a little over £15’000 brand new, kitted out with enough equipment to keep the average joy-rider occupied, comfortable, spacious, safe and quick, is reasonably economical returning a shade under 40mpg on the combined cycle and, being German, it’s pretty much bomb-proof too.

With all that said, however, the hot-hatch is still not a car of choice for a man approaching middle-age. If I owned it, it would look like I was desperately trying to recapture my youth. The Yummy Mummies would sneer as it quivered alongside their Range Rover Sports and BMW X5s and Lady Toff would rather let her pubic hair grow back than be seen in the passenger seat beside me.

But it’s perfect for single lads in their late teens or early twenties who like to do handbrake turns around Tesco’s car park late at night with aftermarket neon lights glowing eerily alongside the exhaust pipe. Or for strange little men called Dave who live in Red Lodge...