Gone With The Pigeons

Totally incapable of blogging today. I was up with the larks. Or is it crows? Could well be pigeons, the number of the damn things sitting on the house this morning. Bad omens indeed; or at least it was for the state of our double glazing. Thankfully, I won’t be around when Judy gets the ladders out later this morning and shinnies up them to Mr. Sheen the glass.

I’m away from home for a couple of days, in the great city of Manchester where I’m doing some voiceover work on an exciting new TV series that charts the fortunes of Bolivia’s nose flutists. ‘Richard Madeley and the Bolivian Nose Flutists’ (provisional title) should go out on ITV in the Autumn. I’m also taking this time to shut myself away in my hotel room and get some writing done. The novel is coming well, thank you, those of you who’ve been asking. I’ve managed to get past the difficult part where my hero, Rex Spanner, was stuck in the regimental barracks of the Iranian National Guard with only half a lemon and quart of baby oil. Things are now building to a pleasing climax.

All of which means, if I fall silent, at least you’ll know where to find me.
Room 721. Knock three times and whisper ‘Uncle Dick’ three times through the keyhole.

Why I Don't Chase Windmills

There was a moment when I was riding though the dark, my train high above the already busy city streets, when I believed I was dreaming. It was a token of my tiredness; my mind lulled towards sleep by the idling motion of the train and the dormant warmth of my body still in the wrap of my bed. A few of my fellow passengers were typically quixotic, chasing their windmills. Whilst some sensibly slumbered, too many were already wide awake and at work, adjusting spreadsheets, hammering out reports, or reading magazines with titles like ‘Management Monthly’ and ‘The Good Corporate Accounting Yearbook’. Meanwhile, down on the streets, the angry eyes of tail lights glared from the wet tarmac as hundreds of drivers pressed on deeper into the city.

I say I thought I was asleep because I couldn’t really believe that I was there or that this was real. The first hours in the day are our best and I’m idealistic enough to believe that they should be worth more than all the others or they should be ours to do with as we want. They are the hours when it’s best to be ourselves. To be the best of what we can become.

I’m pragmatic enough to recognise that this isn’t the case. I doze on the train because I don’t want to waste these hours on something so mundane. I head into Manchester these two days so I can write and better myself the rest of the week. But for forty eight hours, my family get to see me for the hours at the end when I’m tired, snappy, unable to work and irritated by my limitations. In the office, my mind is alive with ideas, with jokes, with witty one-liners that should really be going into a book or a blog post. None of this is how it should be and I wish I could just sleep away these two days.

Which, in a way, is exactly what I do.

On A Theme

Last night, I worked despite the agony of the eyestrain which was like trying to write and draw with football boots inside my eyeballs. It accounts for the lack of something written today and only two half-sketched drawings, which just about sum up how I’m feeing. It’s a ugly day here in Manchester. The grey light and the dreadful gloom of this great carnivorous city: it does nothing to lighten my mood. It is always a sign of how I’m feeling when I wear my favourite sweater from Millets. Build for Arctic conditions, the only action it gets to see is to wrap me in its deep embrace on these cold dark morning. Even Molesworth 1 and the cruelty he inflicted on Molesworth 2 wasn’t enough to cheer me up on the commute into work.

Touchy Good Things

When Nige reminded me that some people still use CDs, I was filled with a warm glow but not a little shame. It’s like my own love affair with typewriters or admiring Elberry for collecting fountain pens: there is something so at odds in my nature that means that I yearn for the next great thing yet long for the old ways of doing things, as messy, noisy, and as difficult as they were.

This time it began with lust. This particular lust was directed towards a laptop. My current machine is a rather battered Sony, moulded from plastic, which rattles whenever I type and is now scratched to smithereens. And it’s rather heavy. It’s well over seven pounds but that doesn’t include the rather manly power supply which is not known for being light on its toes. I carry the whole kit with me to work but find that I can’t use it in public. It’s too cumbersome to take out on a train, to wide for the tables of my local bookshop / coffee shop.

Years ago I had a small 10 inch Sony laptop. It cost me a hefty chunk of a grant, had a titanium body, and weighed next to nothing. It lived in my backpack as I trawled the obscure corners of libraries, crawling for volumes that hadn’t been touched in years. I wrote a PhD thesis and a novel on that little beauty and it lasted me five years. Then a volume of Sir Walter Scott’s letters fell on it from a high shelf and it developed a whine (Scott’s letters can have that effect). The whine slowly drove me mad enough to attempt to replace the hard disc. In the process, something snapped, something shot across the room, I did much swearing. I had destroyed the machine.

My recent tax rebate came along at a good time. I had earmarked it for a lightweight laptop, with a smaller screen. I was thinking 13 inches. I wanted something I could carry with me when I’m out and about and save me when I’m wasting hours travelling.
I trawled around the websites and came to the conclusion that there just weren’t any machines with what I wanted. Or none near my ‘price point’. Sony have a TT series – the current version of my original, much loved Sony – which start at a dizzying £1700 of carbon fibre goodness. I then started to visit Manchester’s Apple store to try out the keyboard on their new Macbooks. I must have looked a fool these last few weeks, standing there, drooling over their cases, carved from a single piece of aluminium. I would just stand there, typing away on the laptops without there even being a wordprocessor loaded. But everything they say about the Mac keyboard is true. Forget about processor specs, graphic subsystems. I'd buy it just for the responsive touch, the size of the keys and the gaps in between. It’s just the most perfect writing environment. Macs gave some of the best software for writing and I had begun to dream of matching that kind of attention to a writer's needs with that touch. However, I had 929 problems standing in my way, each one with a rim in Latin and the Queen’s muzzle on the front.

And so, I began to look for something cheaper. The alternative was a Dell. Their portable laptops begin around the £600 mark but once you start upgrading to the better processors.... Well, they’re heading into Mac territory and even the basic models are too steep for my humble savings and tax rebate.

Which brings me to the iPod Touch. When Judy bought herself one for Christmas, I had a play with it and discovered, to my great delight, that there are tools for writers in the ‘App Store’. One of them allows you to turn the iTouch on its side and use the full width of its screen as a keyboard. I’m not expecting to write any great masterpiece on it but I now have the smallest portable word processor I could afford. And the other surprise was Shakespeare. It’s a free download and apparently contains the complete works. I will be happy now, jotting away, rereading Othello and the rest.

But I’ll stop here before I become Stephen Fry and describe how I hope to procreate with my touchy little devil. Heavens! Indeed, bless! For the syncing is now at an end and I’m itching to go off and play some more with my pod.

I'm On My Way...

As this post goes live, you find me moblogging. That’s mobile blogging to you, though I might equally be said to be 'mob logging'. I’m currently on a train travelling into the distant north, Manchester bound, imagination stifled by this suit, and scowling at anybody who dares look my way. Have another doodle, blog friends, have another doodle. This tired old TV great is getting old. My comedy pimple is beginning to fade. How many more journeys will it continue to disguise my real identity from these commuters? They’re a miserable lot. Nobody speaks. Occasionally one of them will silently vent gas.

I never understand people who choose to vent in the confines of a crowded train with poor ventilation. It must be cowardly way to get back at the world without actually going on any kind of spree. I suppose it's possible they might go on a farting spree but it's probably not going to last very long. Or, alternatively, it will last a very long time but with many periods of inactivity.

Other than the mysterious devotee to flatus, the rest sit here playing with their toys. The iPhone users are a breed apart. As Elberry might say: everyone a potential killer. They certainly look down on the Blackberry users, though it’s clear that this second group have the better jobs. I have a Samsung. I don’t fit into either camp. My old phone is a Sony. It doesn’t even have a touch screen. People are right to treat me like the pariah I am. I'm listening to Nick Cave. It's loud. He’s singing about ’15 Feet of Pure White Snow’. It's the song I always associate with these trips into the north.



I think I’ll follow it with some Stagger Lee.

Soon I’ll be at Manchester Piccadilly, scooting off down the side of the GMPTE building. There are guards there that stop people photographing the building, which makes no sense to me. One of these days, I’ll try to snap a picture of the place just to see if I can get arrested. I didn’t think it possible to be stopped from taking pictures in a public place.

My mind is drifting. There’s a woman in the seat next to me writing questions for some seminar she’s attending. The questions are for Edward de Bono, he of lateral thinking fame. Question 1: ‘Do you think your ideas are as current today as they were in the past’. She’s clearly thinking laterally. I’m sure he’s going to hold up his hands and tell his acolytes that his ideas are outmoded and that it’s about time he retired.

Oh, now I’m just being sullen. Manchester makes me sullen but this mobile blogging isn’t a good thing. I'll try to post more later on. Of if I can't post, I'll Twitter. Does anybody read my Twitter? If a bear twits in the woods, does anybody care? Why does an eight hour working day really mean eleven hours? I miss Judy. And I also maintain that the mighty red is the king of all onions. I dare you to disagree.

On The Other Side

A strange thing happened on the other side of everything that’s gone before.

I was walking in Manchester when a stranger approached me and asked me why I wasn’t still writing my Appreciation Society.

‘It’s simple,’ I replied. ‘A close personal friend of mine suffered a difficult few months and I gave him room on my blog to detail his personal suffering. In light of that, I thought it poor taste to continue to be so frivolous or go on about how unendingly successful I am. There’s a time for being humble, you know. All great men recognise that at some point in their lives.’

‘Bah!’ said the stranger so forcibly that he melted the waxed tip of his moustache. ‘Nonsense, Dick! Your blog is a gift to the world. It gives great joy to the lesser millions. I’m sure that even a man who has suffered some personal tragedy in his life would see that eventually an enterprise as great as the Richard Madeley Appreciation Society should continue. Dare I say that it should flourish? Heavens!’

I gave the stranger another look as he towered over me by a good twelve inches. Being, myself, a rather sexually sublime six feet two, I estimated that the man’s height topped out around the seventh imperial foot and all of that height seemed faintly familiar to me.

‘I’ll give it some thought,’ I said as I tried to disengage myself from the man’s grip and move off in the direction of the junction between Chinatown and the Gay Village where oriental men wear florid shirts. I had an appointment to keep with a producer who had contacted me about doing the voiceover for his line in budgerigar breeding DVDs. I knew from personal experience that it’s not good to keep a budgerigar handlers waiting. Geoff Capes once turned me upside and rectally fed me millet for being just ten minutes late to an interview with the World’s Strongest Fat Man.

‘Look here,’ said the stranger, not allowing me to go. ‘You must take up the reigns of your much missed blog. You owe it to your public, you owe it to Judy and you owe it to your friends.’

‘My friends!’ I scoffed. ‘Since when do they miss my blog?’

It was a good question. Bill Oddie received the news of my blog’s closing with a faint smile and a comment about it being ‘good for the owls’. Clarkson had scoffed somewhat before making a rather distasteful crack about taxi drivers and sped off in his jet car. As for Judy, she had be relieved that I had abandoned my passion for detailing her private life in such a public way. She had celebrated the end of the blog by burning my private papers in the back garden.

‘Not all your friends are so cruel,’ announced the stranger after I’d explained this to him.

‘Oh, you fool!’ I snapped. ‘You don’t know the celebrity mind.’

At once, I regretted being so rude and risk losing my disguise of the comedy pimple and large orange wig fashioned in a fetching combover.

‘Oh but Richard, I do understand them,’ said the stranger. He looked up the street one way and then up the street the other before he raised his black eye patch and peeled back one half of his Hercules Poirot moustache.

‘Fry!’ I cried, stumped to the tips of my shanks by the man’s presence. Suddenly the seven feet all made sense.

‘Ah, indeed, ’tis I, Fry,’ said Stephen Fry. ‘Here in Manchester dressed like a piratical Belgian problem solver. I have travelled all this way by black London taxi cab to say that you’re missing. Set aside all this talk of tragedy. Return to what you do best.’

‘You mean presenting the TV version of the perennial family favourite board game, Cluedo?’

‘I mean writing your blog,’ said Stephen as he readopted his disguise.

I left him standing beside the art gallery, adjusting the poppy on his purple cape, and I was soon in the heart of Chinatown, sharing noodles with the budgerigar man. But Stephen’s words lingered long after the taste of soya sauce and fried eel had faded. On reflection, I did allow my friend’s sadness to get the better of me. Much as I appreciate what he went through, how can I live without my blog? I have missed writing it and cannot leave it on such a sad note. It’s too dramatic to say that I’m back since I never really went away. But I will say that I’m stepping out from my disguise, casting aside the comedy pimple, and doing what Stephen Fry would want me to do: telling the world about the life of a ‘A’ list celebrity, revealing the contents of Judy’s dresser, and being the web’s foremost expert on just about anything and everything.

I’m back but now I’m sexier than ever...

Not Making The Grade

The fates mock me. I’m in Manchester again and who do I see on Piccadilly Station at 7.50? Michael Grade. I gave him a nod, a smile, a flash of my cufflinks but he refused to shake my hand. I would have said something but I was rushing for the office.

But is this a sign of what I've become? A pariah, shunned by the very men that once begged me on their knees to adorn their morning sofa? Is this the fate of all handsome talent consigned to satellite?

God Gave Me A Banana

God gave me a banana. Of course, I don’t mean that he gave me bananas, per se, though if you swing your hips to that whole creationist rap, you might well believe it. In which case, he gave us bees, birds, bananas, and that Billy Blanks character who’s to blame for Judy’s slipped disk. Today, however, God was also the reason why I found myself possessing a banana. I emerged from Picadilly Station to find a member of His lot doling out free fruit to commuters. You might wonder why they were giving them to people in full time employment, rather than the poor, but as they say: God works in mysterious ways, which is this case also involved a little brown paper bag containing an apple and cranberry Fusseli bar (didn't he paint 'The Nightmare'?), a teabag, a sachet of sugar, and a badly written pamphlet which asked me, among other things, for ‘an indication of age’. Judy said that I should list my liking for Johnny Mathis and the general state of my teeth.

I don’t know why I’m telling you all this except I’m falling asleep at my keyboard tonight. The truth is that there’s nobody out there reading this. In the past four days, I’ve recieved one hundred and ninety two emails. Of those, one hundred and eighty eight were SPAM. Bigger testicles, more efficient shafts, things to do with ping pong balls: the usual quality communications from the heart of Russia. Two messages were from two separate people expressing their hope that I die because of some joke I once made about Harry Potter. One more email was a more general insult concerning my masculinity because of something I’d once written about Frank Lampard. How my masculinity and Lampard are linked I’m really not sure but there you have the way of the web. Nothing makes sense. The final email was a note from a casual blogging acquaintance, which made up for the one hundred and eighty eight SPAM emails, two death threats, and the more general insult about my masculinity.

All of which explains why, tonight, I’m in no mood to do my usual. Ratting on about showbiz is such a long way from where I am at the moment; worn down by commuting to Manchester. I didn’t get a seat on the train all week, suffered mild claustrophobia (or, let’s be honest, they were really panic attacks) wedged among commuters in the end of the two coach special, packed to the luggage racks with passengers normally cramped in three. This morning, the nausea was particularly strong. My headphones ran out of juice half way through Serge Gainbourg’s ‘Melody Nelson’ album and I ended up listening to the guard chatting to the guy who waves the trains off from the platform. I was still a stop two away from Piccadilly. I had no way to escape.

Perhaps somebody out there can explain duties of the chap with the paddle who waves trains away from the platform. Perhaps you are one of those souls blessed with a paddle whose job it is to wave away trains and you can explain the following snippet of conversation.

Guard: Working this weekend?

Chap With Paddle Who Waves Away The Trains: No, had a good month. £1200 after tax... Then I’ve been promoted to RO4. That’s an extra £300 quid, and it’s been backdated six months. Then there’s our usual 5.4% coming in, so I’m doing alright.

I forget the rest. I was dizzy and sweating like a fat man’s armpit. Depending on your point of view, I either have millions in the bank or £14 to last me to the end of the month. I need to get myself a better job. I need to abandon this futile idea of writing for a living (you know I'm not funny but, bless, you haven't the heart to tell me), change careers, perhaps fleece the uninformed working as a computer programmer. I build blogs. I know code. I know my SQL and PHP. I could earn a fortune in that spiritually vacant life where you fool those people that don’t understand computers by making them think you’re working some kind of tonic. That’s my fault. I don’t see it as magic. I always give my knowledge away for nothing. I’m an utter fool.

I’m rambling again because I’m tired. So tired. No structure to my thought. I’m talking to myself tonight. Nobody’s out there. Not even Nige whose owls I’ve been missing this week, Selena whose legs I think of when I’m lonely on the train, or Elberry whose brain scares me with the thought that it might get bigger and destroy the universe. I've not even been reading Bryan's blog. Much too tired for that. Much too busy eating bad food; 79p cheese and onion pasties from Greggs the Bakers.

And then there's this post. Such a sad, limp way to the end the week. I’ve not written enough, though I launched another blog earlier this week. It gives me a break, something to do. You know where it is or, if you don’t, email me and I’ll tell you where to find it. It might not last – they never do – but I’m not advertising it here. It’s somewhere where I wear a different pair of pants and don’t comb my hair.

God gave me a banana tonight. Judy says I shouldn’t eat it. She says it might be injected with something.

Comes to something when you can’t trust free fresh fruit given to you by God...

A Blue Sky

There are mornings when I love coming to work in Manchester. Days like today when there’s just a bite of Autumn in the air. It makes it feel particularly good arriving in the city early. The buildings are at their best in the oblique light, casting strong shadows. The architecture is what nourishes me when I’m here. There’s always a building that I can stand and admire. That’s not to say that the city suddenly makes it to my list of Madeley’s Top Ten Haunts but days like this make my brain work in a random fashion and that’s always to be welcomed. Thoughts jump in and set their slippers amongst the usual bric-a-brac of half-resolved plots, story ideas and reminders to return Bill Oddie’s lawnmower.

Each time I arrive in the city, I’m struck how it’s growing upwards. The Hilton Tower dominates everything. It always makes me wonder why the lesser buildings stopped when they did. It makes me wonder why the builders of the Hilton tower stopped when they did. Didn’t they think to themselves: we’ve got to here so we might as well keep going? But I guess that’s the eternal problem of building these towers. They have to stop eventually. Every one of them is a testament to the architect’s failings. I suppose they’re a bit like blogs. Something eventually declares: here and no further.

Human failings are on show too. There was a young woman on the train this morning. Impeccably made up, though, in my opinion, a little too made up, her skin was like brushed terracotta and she had a presence like some Chinese god over in the corner of the carriage. Unfortunately, she was also on the larger side of petite – there’s no nice way of saying that which won’t immediately attract criticism but there you go – and she clearly aware of the fact. Yet hers was one of those faces that you can’t help but still see thin. The excess was quite different to the feature living at the centre. Her very being was like that of a very thin model onto whom weight had been so brutally applied. In a post-Nivea world where ‘big is beautiful’ and cellulite is to be admired, I’m meant to say that this didn’t make her any less attractive. I might even say that I believe this and she inhabited a rare place in female beauty. But I still do wonder how she copes. I wonder how she feels. That obesity could happen to me wouldn’t be such a huge loss. You can believe this or not but I’m on the raggedly side of scruffy and never look in a mirror. But when a woman so clearly cares about her appearance, invests so much energy into her looks, the result is a mixture of calamity and vanity, pride and tenderness, hope and despair.

Final thought for the morning. What use are one pence pieces? I’ve had nine of them in my pocket all week and I know I’ll never get rid of them unless I get into one of those hostage situations for which Elberry yearns when I get to throw a handful of change in the face of a Channel 4 extremist. Pennies only exist because companies refuse to price their products sensibly. They are testament to all those bargains that end with the 99p price tag. That I have so many pennies in my pocket marks me out as a man who likes a bargain.

Smiles

I witnessed a traffic accident today and it cheered me up enormously. And not only me. It seemed to cheer up everybody else who stumbled across the pileup outside Manchester’s art gallery. I’ve never seen so many smiling faced since the Beijing Olympics, only these were genuine smiles. No botox was injected into any five year old’s cheeks. This was real pleasure, when strangers turn to look at you and their faces say so much. A few took photos and others cheered the arrival of the police. I just moved on. Happy to have witnessed such a sublime moment.

So, I’m sure I speak on behalf of everybody who was there when I thank the rich pin-stripe with the nice new Mercededes-Benz who so graciously ploughed it into the side of a Manchester tram this afternoon. I don’t know what he was thinking – the tram was hardly going to swerve out of the way – but it made my lunchtime, possibly my week, and the lunchtimes and weeks of a great many people who found that rarest of pleasures: a shared comfort in the misfortune of others.

In My Dreams I Visit Sunderland

Every night recently, I’ve had extremely vivid dreams. Some have been nightmarish. I can sometimes wake in the middle of the night rigid with the fear that some shape in the folds of the curtains looks vaguely human. A few have been comic and I wake laughing manically at some joke I’ve already forgotten. Some have been neither, just crazy jumbles of meaning that hide something deeper.

Very little of last night’s adventure made it through to morning. I do remember that it involved a day out to Sunderland in the company of Judy, Jeremy Clarkson and, for reasons that will become apparent, New York poet and songwriter, Suzanne Vega. At some stage of the proceedings, Jeremy found himself wearing a bronzed bikini which precluded him from returning home by train. Instead, he used his vast wealth to charter a luxury yacht and we all sailed home with Jeremy clinging to the mast a la Simon Le Bon from some Duran Duran video of the early eighties.

As I say, much of the dream is lost to me but there was a very clear moment when I was sitting in a art gallery’s cafe talking to Suzanne Vega about the novels of Thomas Pynchon.

‘I have tried to read them but I grow quickly bored of their prolonged insanity,’ I was saying.

Suzanne looked at me, her eyes twitching in that way she has when excited. ‘But he’s a master of prose and his surreal take on the world should appeal to you Richard. Isn’t that what you’re trying to do with your books?’

‘I don’t know if it’s surreal or just lacking a strong through story,’ I replied. ‘And I don’t know if I want to be considered as hysterical realist. What’s wrong with a good old fashioned plot?’

I fear that this is the point at which I disappointed Suzanne. She was immediately whisked off by some long haired bohemian type who could talk the talk about Pynchon and play the bass guitar. I paid for the coffees, looked up, and found myself emerging from Manchester’s art gallery and turning left towards the office.

Waking up this morning, I could see how the dream arose from my waning literary hopes and concerns for my future. When Suzanne Vega first burst onto the music scene, she was the woman whose love I wanted to win through my wit and artistry. I fell in love with her distinctive looks, but even more so, her dry humour, her introversion, her sublime lyrics, and that voice like a cold wind whipping down the aisles of New York. She was everything I wanted to find in a woman, everything I wanted from life; intelligence, poetry, an ability to fingerpick the acoustic guitar, a left-of-centre brilliance, everything that was out of the ordinary yet so very right for me. That she should appear at this moment in a dream is no coincidence. It was my heart telling me something.

That Jeremy should be there too is no surprise. I think the dream was my subconscious reminding me that wit skirts around success, fame, intelligence, passion, oddity, and art. Your kind comments have helped me recently when I’ve been feeling low and tired. Elberry sent me an email that cheered me immensely and Selena wrote a piece to which I’m too humble to respond except to say that she’s right in every significant detail. As for me: I’m going to look again at my novel that left me feeling so underwhelmed yesterday. I’m going to rededicate myself to it and it to Suzanne Vega and Jeremy Clarkson. I can see now that few things make sense and it’s better to embrace the unusual. I should thrive on it and make it my own.

The only thing that still worries me is Sunderland. Why Sunderland? I’ve never been there in my life and I can’t say I’m keen on starting now. Call me old fashioned but I really don’t want to visit a city that sells bikinis in Jeremy Clarkson’s size. Or perhaps that’s it. Sunderland was really Manchester, where I’ll be tomorrow and Thursday, where they do sells bikinis in Jeremy Clarkson’s size.

Not Long

... to go!

On Rowing, Sleep, and Needing This Job

My constantly sunny disposition suffered a rare moment of eclipse this weekend. Some long dormant weariness overcame me and I retired to bed for two days of sleep and constant Olympic rowing action. I really don’t have much to say about the rowing except that I’ve never seen so many well brought up young men wielding paddles since I was once accidentally hunted by a pack of Young Conservatives who mistook my bohemian style for causal vagrancy. About sleep, however, I have far more positive things to say. It really is the great healer. I don’t know what had laid me low. I think it might have been emotional exhaustion brought on by the continuing concerns for my friend’s father who has now been moved from Intensive Care and into a High Dependency Unit. I do know that, for me, sleep was the answer. I’m feeling better today and I intend to spend this time on my blog explaining Friday’s paranoia and why Manchester is such an important part of my weekly routine.

As many of you know, every week since February, I’ve been forced to make a two day trip up to Manchester to work on a new series of ‘Eye of the Storm’. I didn’t want to take the job but those in charge of my finances told me that my dream of writing for a living was not going to earn anything like a wage. Not even the wage of a one-legged paperboy with a part time round during a time of dwindling newspaper sales. Yet whatever my doubts about the job, I still believe it will be the TV series to end all TV series. Never before has the documentary form been used to investigate weather with the same rigorous attention. We’re not just focussing on the dramatic weather systems like hurricanes and lightening storms. We’re looking at all the less glamorous forms of weather, such as light precipitation, drizzle, summer nips, and winter flushes. We have three programmes on Indian Summers and intend to launch a spin off series that deals with every kind of snow, from crispy white to yellow mush.

Recently, however, I’ve begun to have reservations about my life. The end of our Channel 4 contract was always going to make a sensitive man re-evaluate his future. Should I continue to write? Should I continue to blog? Should I retire from the public eye and devote myself to my inventions? I came to the conclusion that Manchester is slowly ruining me as both a man and a writer. These trips are making me deeply unhappy. I have tried to blog my way through them but that has to now stop. Simon Merfalanger, our producer, has spotted the way I’ve been sneaking off to my laptop and returning in a much chirpier mood.

‘Richard,’ he said after he called me into his office on Thursday afternoon, ‘we’re paying for your wonderfully rich melliferous voice. We don’t pay you to write this tedious blog of yours...’

‘What do you mean tedious?’ I snapped.

He turned around his monitor and then pointed to the wall next to my desk outside his office. ‘You’ve been taking pictures of our walls again,’ he said. ‘Only this time you’ve been posting them to the web.’

‘I did it once,’ I replied. ‘But I was bored. Bored. Bored. Bored. So utterly bored! You make me sit on the same uncomfortable office chair for eight hours, giving me only thirty minutes for lunch. The only view I have is of a wall painted cream and the exciting diversion of some plastic electrical conduit. And the work is not stimulating for a man of my many qualifications and talents. I’m a creative man with imagination. You can’t expect me to enjoy fixing margins and proofreading copy. The weather just doesn’t interest me in the same way as it does you.’

‘You don’t really want to be here, do your Richard?’ tutted Simon, sadly.
I thought it only right to be honest. I’m a man who hates deception and nothing gives me greater worry than when a person has misjudged me.

‘To be honest, Simon, you’re right. I really don’t want to be here. This is not the life I would have chosen for myself yet now I can’t find a way out of it. I once had so many hopes for my future... Ronnie Corbett once told me that he’d only ever wanted to be a dentist but the height restrictions came into play. I now know what he meant when he said that I should never trust a man holding a diamond tipped drill who has to stand on a wobbly orange crate to see into your mouth. Well, Simon, not being published is my wobbly box of oranges. And I’ll never overcome that obstacle so long as I’m being dragged up here every week. Do you know how many books I have sitting unfinished at 30,000 words?’

‘But you have a book coming out in October,’ he said.

‘And believe me, I’ll review it on my blog as soon as I receive my complimentary copy from the Richard&Judy Foundation.’ I explained how they had authorised some other chap to write the thing for them and that it would probably share very few characteristics with my blog. ‘I bet there are very few laughs in the whole volume and not a single mention of Bill Oddie’s owl fetish or my beating Stephen Fry at Scrabble.’

‘So it’s not even written by you?’

‘Only the blog is written by the real Dick Madeley,’ I said. ‘Ask yourself, Simon: how can I find time to write a book? I’m in this office two days a week and recovering for another two days. I lose four good writing days whenever you pluck me from Judy’s arms for two eight hour shifts parked behind a desk and proofreading scripts.’

The man was clearly moved. ‘I didn’t realise that we were standing in the way of literary greatness,’ he said.

‘Well, now you know, Simon. Literary greatness has been left bound and tethered and dumped in an alley somewhere between Manchester’s Chinatown and Gay Village.’

‘I didn’t mean to be so hard on you, Richard...’

‘Think no more about it,’ I said. ‘We’ll carry on as though nothing has happened. Just so long as you realise that my presence here is depriving the world of the funniest series of books since PG. Wodehouse’s slippers went cold.’

‘Just no more blogging during office hours,’ he warned me.

I agreed though it went against every fibre of my being. ‘No more blogging,’ I promised.

‘And Richard,’ said Simon. I paused at the door. ‘Just so you know: there are other men with rich melliferous voices out there. If I catch you posting from work one more time, your rich melliferous voice will be left bound and tethered and dumped in an alley somewhere between Manchester’s Chinatown and Gay Village.’

My heart sank. Judy has such hopes for ‘Eye of the Storm’ that losing this job would destroy her.

‘I understand,’ I muttered as I slid away.

So, from now on, whenever I’m up in Manchester, expect only silence and think of me sitting staring as a slightly off-white wall and a length of plastic electrical conduit.

Can blog...

... but I’ve decided to have today away from my desk and to write nothing.

I hate these self-enforced breaks. I’m not a man given to taking holidays and even Judy never rests when we do take a break. She spent most of our last holiday in the Caribbean helping the locals to pick coconuts.

As for me, I work even when I'm on the beach. When I’m writing, I want to work for long hours. Two days up in Manchester changes everything. I come back so exhausted that by the time I’ve recovered, I’ve lost at least three days of my week. A broken routine is no routine. Perhaps I need a holiday from work so I can do some serious work. It would allow Judy to help strengthen her knee by shimmying up a few palm trees. It would also make a welcome break from this incessant rain.

The View From My Desk

I often wonder what people look at when they work. Here in the heart of Manchester two days a week, I enjoy the above panorama. This isn't a meme but feel free to share the views from your desks. I doubt that any of your can top this but have a try.

[Chicken update: I have thought of three chickens today and I'm happy to report that one of them was brown.]

Kliban

Bill Oddie once told me about the Lesser Tufted Mallard which, when faced with a life of office drudgery, will choose to peck out its own eyes and then begin to waddle indifferently in heavy traffic. Lacking a beak but stuck in Manchester, I have to find my escape elsewhere. Which is why Nige’s recommendation of the work of B. Kliban has me smiling even more this morning. It’s rare that I post something on this blog which isn’t my own work but this cartoon has had me smiling for two days and made me determined to hunt down some of the great man’s work in my lunch hour in Manchester’s woefully few second-hand bookshops.

Sylvester Polyester

My thighs know polyester even if the label says 100% cotton. I swear that there are unnatural fibres in these trousers of mine. Perhaps even something ungodly. It teaches me to buy pants on a whim. I’m enduring a terrible day here in hot sweaty Manchester. My skin can’t cope and the pain of the chafing is enough to give me religious visions. I swear I saw Saint Sylvester nearly getting clipped by a tram on the road outside the art gallery. Soon I’ll be heading for lunch in search of a shop that sells ointments and balms. There must be something to extinguish the fire that’s burning below my beltline.

Not So Eager For Deaver

A hot stinking lunch break and the smell of grease defies gravity, rising from the Greek burger bar below the production offices here in the heart of the M1 postal district. It’s now that I make my move after a difficult morning working on ‘Eye of the Storm’. I’ve been ad libbing a voiceover for a thunderstorm; not an easy thing to do with that fork lightening which is so tricky to scan. It’s a relief to be making the ten minute dash into the centre of the city, all the time talking with Judy on the mobile. She’s at home, sitting with a bag of frozen king prawns wrapped around her swollen knee. She promises that they’ll be defrosted in time for tonight’s risotto. I can hardly wait.

W.H. Smiths is my target and the book signing is by Jeffrey Deaver, thriller writer and the man who took away Denzel Washington’s legs and made Angelina Jolie look sexy poking rat droppings in forensics gear. In my weaker moments, I can easily give in and pick up a hack-and-slash psychological thriller and Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme books were always a good read. That was until the last two which I thought were a matter of an author growing jaded with his characters, his storylines tired, a publisher demanding more of the same with the promise of a fat pay cheque. I swore that I wouldn’t buy another Deaver. I didn’t want to prolong the poor man’s misery.

It’s why I was thankful that the queue outside the shop was as off-putting as the Minotaurs disguised as security guards standing in the doorway. Beyond them was a wall of hardbacks, either the edge of King Minos’s labyrinth or the blunt end of the publisher’s mantra: pile them high, sell them cheap (unless the author’s in the store and then it’s RRP only). This would have been my first book signing had I not been offended by the very thought of waiting in line for a scribbled signature from the demonic man being photographed at the front of the store.

I think it was the beard that did it. As you know, I distrust men with beards and I distrust men with neatly trimmed beards even more. When he finally arrived, Deaver was nothing like the clean shaved guy on the dust jackets. He now looks every inch the professional writer; a depressing artifice of the publicist’s art, the nationwide book tour, the promotional interview. His clipped black beard looks like it could pen a few novels on its own. Everyone a best seller. Million pound movie rights.

The queue seem excited. I felt deflated and ready for lunch. But these were ‘real’ readers and I took a moment to take them in. It was sobering to see that they look just like me even without my disguise, my cheap black beret, my comedy pimple. In the end, it was all I could do to turn my back and head back to the office. Disillusioned, disappointed, hugely jealous. At moments like this, asking an author to sign a book feels so horribly dispiriting. I even forgot to take a photo.

Manchester: 8:22AM

This morning I lost a close friend under the wheels of a train. It was the button from the shoulder of my favourite casual jacket. It had got stuck under the strap of my bag which, I pulled the bag from my shoulder, went ping and merrily rolled along the platform before it disappeared under the wheels of the second carriage. It was something of a highpoint.

The train was packed. I found a spare seat next to an aspiring Jordan, her jacket and bag sitting in the chair.

‘Can I sit down, please?’ I ask.

She moves the jacket’s cuff all of one inch to make one third of the seat available to me. I’m not a man to make a scene – much as I would love to be – so I sat down as she made a tactical move for territory by taking up the whole of the table with her OK Magazine. This is how I came to I spend my journey from Manchester Airport reading Katie Andre’s column about ‘what a laugh we had at Club Slap which we got to at midnight but I needed to be up early the next day so I called it a night at around three and Pete wanted a shag...’ I have the luxury or reading the magazine because this delightful creature answers her phone (hands free) and I have to listen to her barking laughter in my ear for the next twenty minutes.

‘Life is so hard,’ she tells her friend. ‘How many holes are you going to play today?’

A Fragment From the Madeley Notebook: Thursday, 24th July, Lunchtime

I carry a notebook around with me at all times. Often, I can be found scribbling little pieces down, recording something that has happened to me in my day, or, as is the case here, writing something that means nothing to anybody but myself, yet perfect for posting to my blog to cover for the fact that I’m exhausted with travel, running around the house waiting on a woman with a gammy knee, and hosting a TV show on the day I traveled to Manchester to proofread scripts for ‘Eye of the Storm 7’.

So there he is: Madeley about town. A prime example of masculine real estate, untouched by portliness but dappled by the handsome. The bookshop is not unknown to him, nor he to it. In the doorway, He stares down at Himself; the latter detecting a trace of recognition in the former’s cardboard lips set at a pleased yet pleasing angle. Beside him, a woman browsing the Richard&Judy Book Club racks hitches up her blouse, her own rack a grocery bag with no handles. The only thing to grip is the g-string that sits that sits high on her hip where her sweatpants have run low. A ripple of cellulite reminds him of a beach after the tide.

She doesn’t recognise Madeley watching her from behind his thick sunglasses. His hair is swept across his forehead at a foreign angle, the large comedy pimple adequate disguise for this lunchtime in Manchester. Nobody would expect to see him here in Waterstone’s in the Arndale , dressed all in black, liberated from his fame. He browses the staff picks and wonders if any of the faces really match real flesh, blood and critical opinion. He wants to question them on their selection. Are the shelf-stackers and bar-code swipers any better judges of literary merit than he? He doubts it.

The cool of the shop is a mild salvation from the noonday sun and like a animal, hot from the chase but now scalded by the refrigerated air, he wanders the shelves, a mist of condensed sweat coming off his body like clouds from a mountain. He recognises the books of rivals and wonders what he must do to join these choired ranks for the great, the good, the chosen, the insufferingly lucky.

It’s all too much. He has a flight to catch. He leaves the shop empty handed. Perhaps he’ll buy something tomorrow when he again flies North. There was a F. Scott Fitzgerald that caught his eye, a Dostoyevsky for which he’s never had time, but then, Jeffery Deaver’s also in town in the morning. He might try his comedy pimple out in W.H. Smiths on the floor below. Stand in line with other desperate people hoping to breath in the stale but talented air of a real writer.

So there he is: Madeley about town. And nobody recognises him.