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Youngest Nephew had an interview for a part-time job in Tesco. Now, in my view stacking shelves and pushing trolleys around for £4 an hour, is not something you need much in the way of skills for, but nevertheless, when one goes for a job interview for pretty much anything these days, one has to be ready for the usual facile questions about skills and abilities. I asked him how it went.


"They said, 'Tell us about a time you helped someone.'"


"Oh yeah, what did you say?"


"I couldn't think of anything so I just lied."


He's nothing if not enterprising, Youngest Nephew. "What kind of lie?"


"I just sat there for like three minutes and then I said 'Oh aye, I remember! My friend's dad died and I had to help him.'"


"Were they convinced?"


"Well, they asked how I helped him."


"What did you say?"


"I said that after he broke his leg, he came and stayed at our house". 


"He broke his leg?"


"No, I made that up too."


"You said that his dad died and then he broke his leg and so he stayed with you?"


"Yeah, 'cos his mum went crazy."

V&A

There are few better ways to spend a rainy day in London than wandering around a beautiful building, caressing lumps of cold marble and gazing at the patterns in a 500 hundred-year old carpet.


I went to London to visit my lovely ex-colleague, and she took us to the V&A. I lusted after the lights in the main dining room and had cake in the Poynter room, which reminded me of a bruin cafe in Antwerp. I only walked through the room decorated by William Morris and Burne-Jones, but my ambition for next time is to sit there nursing a coffee and staring at these panels. 

Donald, where's yer troosers?

It's not every day I get to say, “Excuse me, but I think you forgot your trousers” to a complete stranger. The man opposite me on the train had left his on the seat. Alas, they were the orange rubbery type, folded up for carrying and he was wearing a normal black pair at the time.

Sent to Coventry

I was attending a conference and had consulted Google maps before I left. As I walked under one flyover, over another, round some orange barriers saying “Road closed”, past a patch of waste ground and under a 10-lane motorway, I thought, “This can’t be right”. It was. Another couple of minutes of scurrying through dingy alleys and across car parks found me at the university. 

As well as being unrelentingly ugly and poorly designed, Coventry also seems unnervingly security conscious. There were at least eight policemen in the train station when I arrived and the place where I was staying had a series of intimidating buzzers, self-locking doors and sets of rules. Even the university classrooms had security cameras. 

Over lunch, I asked someone, “Is Coventry a nice place to live then, despite its aesthetic shortcomings?” Without a moment’s hesitation, she replied, “Nah, it’s a shithole”.

Travel pussy

On our travels, Timorous Beast made me go to Germany. I am scared of Germany for reasons too numerous to list, but partly to do with the fact that men there so often seem to be called Norbert, Herman or Wolfgang and, in my experience, have an unhealthy interest in rubber. 


Berlin served, as usual, to defy my prejudice. We found one of the loveliest squares in Europe to eat dinner in, and saw a water tower that used to be a concentration camp but had since been converted to expensive flats. Not many water towers can make this claim.


Dresden, which we visited mainly because we were ashamed that we'd never visited when we lived in Prague, confirmed my worst fears. We had been in the city for approximately 6 minutes when Timorous Beast saw this on a vending machine:

Interrailing for oldies

Paris on Monday looked like this:

By Thursday, we were in the Czech Republic, where it looked more like this:

But aside from freezing our tits off, we did manage to see the most important sights in Europe: 

We barged into a textile workshop in Paris to stroke a fox terrier that was sunning itself in the window, cuddled a pooch with a knitted collar in Berlin Hauptbahnhof, tickled a golden retriever in Siena, and rubbed a Jack Russell's lugs in Lyon. We also did a bit of this kind of thing:

Despite our lack of health insurance, Timorous Beast did not fall over his stupid arse and I didn't have to leave him in a ditch. I did, however, almost have to leave him in the Paris metro when the barriers closed on his rucksack leaving him tangled there, limbs flailing like a upturned beetle.

Le grand mésaventure

Timorous Beast and I have been tricked into attending a sham wedding in Italy. His brother is getting married for a second time, except it'll really be a third time since he and his bride have already tied the knot in a registry office in Cardiff. But then I suppose that still makes it the second time, since the thing in Rome is an excuse for a party rather than an actual wedding. 


In any case, Beast and I are taking the opportunity to visit Paris, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, Florence and Siena while we're at it. We've left it too late to get the required European Union healthcare card, but "It'll be fine" I say, "we're not likely to break our legs getting on and off trains." 


As this utterance leaves my mouth, I do wonder if it's really true. Unassuming as he is, Beast does have a tendency to attract trouble. 


"I'm bound to fall over my stupid arse" he replies "If I die, just leave me in a ditch somewhere quiet".  


See you in a few weeks then, Timorous Beast's untimely death notwithstanding.