A taste of winter weather

We had snow last night; not a lot, but enough to send my wife into paroxysms of joy, and the children into various states of amused fascination. This photo was taken when I thought I'd be going into the office. However, I soon realised that the snow had also been enough to send the road and rail networks into chaos and so shortly after this photo opportunity, I abandoned the work idea and jumped into jeans and a jumper instead. Today has been spent watching snowflakes falling, and what a pleasant experience that is, after many years in the land of heat and dust. Mind you, we don't half miss the Indian temperatures.

eBay ain't a bad place to be

In the interests of even-handedness, and having written about people's wastefulness, I suppose I should also comment on certain buying habits.

Years ago, my brother and a friend and I took ourselves up to Hammersmith Odeon, bought tickets from a tout and then shook our heads to AC/DC and Def Leppard. I kept my ticket stub from that concert and thought I'd put it up for sale on eBay. It's of no interest to me now, and anyway, it's been in my parents' loft for the past thirty odd years. I see from the ticket that the face value was £3.75 which means that we probably paid a fiver for those tickets. If I remember rightly, I paid for my brother's ticket because it was his birthday the previous day.

That ticket stub has now reached the heady heights of a £10.50 offer on eBay with the number of people watching the item now well into double figures. Here, you can bid on it yourself if you'd like to: AC/DC Ticket.

Hallowhere?

I was well prepared for Halloween this year. Having been reminded that the US-imported nonsense of trick or treat is now an annual UK occurrence as well, I thought that well, if you can’t beat ‘em, at least be prepared to dish out sweets on your doorstep to the local horrors rather than have them throw eggs at your door, or uproot your plants. And so I bought a tub of sweets from the supermarket and left it ready by the front door. I also somehow found my hairy werewolf hands and witch mask which I’ve worn at Halloween parties in the past, and I determined that if anyone did knock on the door, that I’d turn the hallway lights out, put the hairy hands and mask on, and try and scare the living daylights out of whoever was waiting on the doorstep.

I waited and I waited.

Finally, at around eight-thirty I think, there was a ring on the doorbell, and I went into action: hands on, mask on, lights off, hairy hand creeping slowly round the door, followed by the warty old witch face… There was a little gasp, a faint “Oh!” and… it was the woman from over the road delivering the local church newsletter.

So I invited her in, she exorcised my demons and I gave her some sweets from the tub for her and her husband. And that was the only visitor we had that whole evening.
Halloween? Hallo-WTF.

A trip to the tip

With excess cardboard to dispose of after our goods from India had been unpacked, I took Shilpi and the children for an outing to our local dump. I'm good like that. We strapped the kids into the back of the car, filled the boot with flattened cardboard boxes, and then sped off to the municipal tip.

It was around 10am on a Sunday morning and there was already a queue. I supposes it gets worse later on when the car boot sales close and people come and get rid of their unwanted tat. In any event, we weren't there for very long, probably about five minutes, if that. But in the time it took us to unload the cardboard and dump it into the cardboard-only skip, we saw the following items being crushed:

1. A sofa
2. An armchair
3. Hi-Fi separates - amp, CD player, cassette deck
4. A coffee table
5. Cupboards
6. Carpets
7. A double mattress

In fact there was enough stuff trashed in that short time that we were there, to set up a new home. It actually made me slightly ashamed to be throwing away cardboard boxes. Seeing what everybody else was dumping I felt somewhat guilty that I wasn't throwing out a chaise-longue, or that old Chippendale chair that had been in the shed.

After our furniture arrived from India I donated the stand-in dining room suite that we'd been using, back to the second-hand charity shop that I'd bought it from for £40 eight weeks earlier. I also gave them a couple of items of Indian furniture, shipped five thousand miles and at some cost, and now on offer in an Essex junk shop. We did wonder why the people who were dumping their furniture hadn't given it to charity instead. Probably they couldn't be bothered or maybe, like me when I'd phoned our local hospice shop earlier, they'd been told , "sorry, but we're not taking mahogany."

It's all a far cry from India where everything has a re-sale value - even those things that you wouldn't normally think of re-selling. We had people almost killing each other for our seven year old mattress and here in Essex, better-looking bedding was just being chucked away. I'm sure that most self-respecting Indians, being the natural businessmen that they are, could have made good money out of that tip had they been given the chance to set up stall there. As it was, there was a lot of very good looking and serviceable product simply being ground to dust.

Mine, all mine

Chilean miners? Aren'tcha sick of 'em? I mean, I'm glad that they're being winched out of their tomb, but I'm even more glad there are only 33 of them and not a hundred and thirty-three. As it is, virtually every news channel seems to have had its cameras pointed at that dusty hole, whilst the reporters have been desperately trying to fill air-time with potted biographies of the men and the family. At times, it felt a little like one of those awful game shows, Chile's Got Talent, or similar.

"Yes, here we are at the dusty hole in some god-forsaken spot in Chile. The next miner up, we hear, will be Pedro Amigo who has been a miner for seven years. He is one of thirteen children - unlucky for some, eh Pedro - and his hobbies are football and tennis. At least, those were his hobbies. Of late, his hobbies have been, eye-spy (something beginning with R - ROCK! Darn! Your go...) and sleeping..."

Sky News even had some idiot psychologist sitting in the studio, talking us through the miners' first moments as they arrived back on the surface:

"Well yes, he'll be feeling delighted right now [as the miner punches the air, whoops and salutes the crowd] whereas this man [cut to a miner kneeling and praying] is just thankful to God for being alive. This man, on the other hand, is a little emotional because he's been buried in a hole in the ground for over two months [cut to miner weeping]."

Well thank you, Mr Miner-Psychologist, for those deep and telling insights. You know, despite all the coverage of these poor chaps; the personal stories, the little details about how they're coping with being banged up with each other for weeks on end, not one news channel has, as far as I know, told us what we really want to know, the answer to that six million dollar question: where have the miners been taking a dump? I mean, of course they HAVE to go somewhere, and yet nobody has covered that angle - and after two months and thirty three bottoms, that will be quite some angle.

I guess we'll just have to wait for the Hollywood film to find out the answers to that one: Tom Cruise as the leading miner and Bruce Willis as the man in charge of the rescue team. You know, I could really see Tom Cruise doing that leaping about bit when he reaches the surface. Well anyway, let's hope there will be a film, and a book deal and endorsements of Homebase special Chilean gravel "because there's nothing miner about DIY", after all, these guys need a break.

Daft

I watched one of those much beloved Police documentaries last night. They’re much beloved by the TV stations because they afford cheap entertainment, by the police because they get the chance to show how great they are, and by the viewers because we’re all spitting feathers at the arrogance of our boys in blue. The irony of it all is that the police really haven’t got the faintest idea that they are being smug. And so last night we saw two of England’s finest stopping a cyclist who had ridden through a red light in the small hours of the morning. They eventually got him for:

• Running a red light
• Riding without lights
• Riding on the pavement
• Obstructing the police

They also accused him of being drunk which may or may not have been the case. In any event, he was a good deal more erudite than the two policemen, especially when he asked them, incredulously, whether they didn’t have anything better to do at 1am on a Saturday morning, than arguing the toss with him about such a petty matter. It was all to no avail. The cyclist was subsequently fined a whopping great £700 with £200 costs. And didn’t that make the police feel smug.

It was daftness of a darker kind later on Channel 4 with a documentary about a US Army Company in Afghanistan. I only caught the tail end of it but I did manage to see the bit where a group of sheepish US marines, presented an Afghan man with $10,000 as compensation for the four family members they’d accidentally killed the previous day. It was surreal television, the soldiers sitting shamefaced before the stunned Afghan; a much older man sitting cross-legged next to him, silently weeping and wiping away the tears. The American soldiers didn’t want to be there and the Afghanistan people certainly didn’t want to be there. We were treated to US marines who were genuinely proud of a mosque they’d helped build, while the indigenous population smiled politely and then said to the cameras that they simply just wanted them to get the hell out.

Finally, tattoos. I’ve never felt the slightest inclination to have somebody stick needles into me and scar me for life and so I personally can’t understand why anybody would want to brand themselves, especially as so much of the branding is so unoriginal – cobwebs on the elbows, LOVE and HATE on the knuckles. I mean, if you have to write on your hands wouldn’t it be more useful, for instance, to tattoo 1 2 3 4 5 and 6 7 8 9 10 to save you the bother of counting on your fingers? Or perhaps, F*** and C***, so that you can wave the F*** hand in the air when you stub your toe, and the C*** hand when you’re waving to a policeman.

On my way into work this morning, a girl cycled past me who had half a dozen stars tattooed on her calf. I mean, what’s the point of that? And that’s the other thing about tattooed Brits, they love to show off their artwork. So it can be freezing cold, or pouring with rain, and yet somebody will still cycle past you in shorts because they want you to see their calf stars. Like I say, daft.

Comedy value for money

From this morning's METRO newspaper:

" A mother who bought a lucky bag full of games for her three-year-old son found a card with the word wanker on it inside. Anna Royce complained but was dismayed to find the game still on sale a week later. "I couldn't believe it, particularly because it states on the bag it is suitable for children aged three and over," said Ms Royce, 32 from Colchester, Essex. She bought the Doodlewonker game featuring a monster called the Galloping Wanker from a Poundland store for son Jamie. Poundland pledged to investigate."

Well, what do you expect for a pound?

A start

My Blackberry alarm goes off at 6am but I’ve already been awake for some while. At various points in the night my two sons have found their way into our bedroom and the youngest one has been kicking me in the head for at least two hours. Despite the fact that my phone is downstairs, the alarm is still loud to wake the household and so I go down to switch it off. I determine, whilst I’m down there, to try and find the razors and shaving cream that I’d bought the other week. Last seen on one of the kitchen worktops when I unpacked the shopping bags, they have since disappeared. I check every cupboard, nook and cranny in the kitchen, my bedroom wardrobe, and the cupboards in the bathroom. Zilch. I suspect that my youngest son has somehow broken through the stairgate into the kitchen, found the razors and cream and posted them both into the dustbin. He’s making a habit of doing that. I saved two LEGO cars from the same bin the other day but I obviously wasn’t in time for the razors. Two packets of pegs have also mysteriously disappeared...

I shave my head and face with a blunt razor, miraculously retaining both ears.

Shower, dress, and fold clean clothes from the washing line. Place clothes in airing cupboard. Leaving them folded on shelves will mean that small hands will pull them off again just as quickly.

By now it’s seven o’clock and time to wake my daughter. She started school on Monday and she needs to be out of the house by 8.30. I rouse her, bathe her and dress her, getting told off as I do so for pulling her tights up too high and giving her “granddad trousers”.

We go downstairs together and I sort out some breakfast for her. While she’s eating I unpack the dishwasher and then stack a couple of dirty plates from the previous evening. I’ve also brought dirty clothes down for the washing machine but it’s full of clean clothes from yesterday and so I peg these out first and then set a new wash going. It goes straight to the spin cycle and I realise that my youngest son, not content with posting my shaving gear into the bin, must have also fiddled with the programme on the washing machine. I stop the machine, re-programme it and start again. By now, Niharika has finished her breakfast and so I sponge the last remnants off her skirt, wipe her mouth and she’s good to go. So too, am I. It’s just gone ten to eight and I have about seventeen minutes to get to the station in time for the 8.09 to Liverpool Street. I saddle up and set off. I’m there by three minutes past, lining the platform at the start of another day.

Great Cock Taste

There's a nice quote in this morning's The Sunday Times:

"It is understood that executives at Cocal-Cola's headquarters in Atlanta last week ordered the London office to sever ties with [Wayne Rooney]. The multinational is worried that the allegations that Rooney, 24, paid for prostitutes while his wife, Coleen, was pregnant will taint its image as a family brand."

"Taint" its image? Yep, I should think that would just about do it.

Pret a Jesc

My weekday lunch these days consists of a cheese roll rather than chicken biriyani, and the Pret a Manger chain is usually the beneficiary. This afternoon it was as if I'd travelled not five hundred yards to the local Pret, but five hundred miles to Gdansk. The bright and lively blondes behind the counter all bore names like Marinia, and Davinia, and Gloskzsky; and all had exactly the same heavy European accent so ably taken off in Harry Enfield's Polish cafe sketches.

It's a funny thing, but when I go there in the morning, the staff all appear to be of south asian extraction, but by lunchtime it's the Polish shift. The Pret website states:

"Our starting salary is £7 an hour (after 10 days, including bonus). Many get over £8 an hour and more..."

And that probably explains why Pret is staffed by hard-working foreign labour which is prepared to work for around 300 quid a week, and not by British workers who can sit around on their arses all day and, with a bit of ducking and diving with social services, pull in the similar money without doing a stroke of work. Or am I out of touch? "Jesc" by the way, would - if the accents were in the right place - mean 'eat' in Polish. Photo courtesy of Pret.

Wastage, and the great British eccentric

I was in our local Sainsbury's at 7am the other day. We needed milk and a loaf of bread, and although I could have probably picked up both at the local newsagent's, it was chucking it down outside and I needed a lightweight raincoat as well.

As I reached the bread counter, the staff were throwing away the loaves and rolls from the previous day: great big bags of them, dozens of loaves of bread baked a few hours earlier and now thrown into a bag marked "NOT FIT FOR SALE". I don't suppose those loaves were even donated to homeless people as there's probably an EEC rule which bans such benevolence just in case a vagrant happens to choke on a sunflower seed. It always made me smile in India when we'd go along to the laacaal shop to get bread and then ask if it was fresh.

"Aaah, aah, fresh saar, yes; fresh yesterday."

Which links, not at all well, to the great British eccentric. One of the joys of commuting is that you get to see all manner of nutcases, listen to all manner of banal and tedious conversations, and witness bizarre behaviour. Years ago, I used to carry a notebook with me and jot down these eccentricities, even trying to transcribe particularly dull conversations word for word. Once all my stuff arrives from India, I might dig out some of those old notebooks and post some of the conversations here. But anyway, back to the present.

Last week I sat next to a courting couple who obviously hadn't seen each other for three or four hours or more and were consequently overcome by the urge to eat each other's lips in between each sentence. After ten minutes of slurping, I gave up trying to read my book and shut my eyes. Yesterday evening, I sat next to a Chinaman who, five minutes into the journey, stuffed several pages of The Sun newspaper down the back of his shirt. Well actually, he stuffed the pages up the back of his shirt. I suppose it gave him more satisfaction than actually reading the thing.

Image from The Eccentric Club blog.

Use it again, Sam

I have to keep telling myself, "It's for the children." And I find myself repeating it more and more as a mantra these days, as I bang my head in the cubbyhole under the stairs, or knock my temples against the cupboard in the kitchen. "It's for the... ouch! Children."

I wouldn't mind if it were just paper, or just tins, or just bottles, but these days it seems, it's just about everything. Great Britain has gone recycling crazy and it's only going to get worse.

I was looking at our recycling leaflet this morning, trying to work out whether we should be putting out household refuse with paper, or cardboard, or charity appeals. Actually, I needn't have bothered because we missed the binmen altogether and therefore they'll have our marinated refuse to greet them next week. But I did see that the council was gleefully announcing a new "plastics collection" in the same way that GAP, for instance, would announce its new "Autumn Collection". So now, instead of chucking away your empty milk containers or your fast food packs, you can stick them in another bag and then try and find space in your house for the blasted thing until it's time for you to miss the refuse collection operatives on their weekly round.

At this point in time I have a cardboard collection in the living room. Outside the back door I have a box for tins and bottles. In the kitchen cupboard I have sacks for plastics and newspaper. Polythene and plastic bags go in a separate bag, so too would batteries, tin foil, engine oil and uranium (that goes into the lead-filled container under the stairs). Currently, polystyrene, bubble wrap and naval fluff are not recycled and may be thrown into a waste bin. The point is that we don't live in a mansion and I tell you, it's a nuisance trying to find space for all this blasted rubbish. I really do feel half inclined at times to dump it all into our brown (garden waste) bin and cover it over with six inches of grass cuttings and just hope that the bin men are looking the other way when it's tipped noisily into the dust cart.

I recall, a few years ago when I was clearing my house in England, that I took a load of stuff to the local tip and then had to fanny around in the rain putting this junk in one skip, and that junk in another one. Chastened, I returned home, booked a skip to turn up on my drive and then emptied absolutely everything into it: cardboard, paper, plastics, bottles, iron, an old sofa set... You name it, the skip ate it; and it was a curious quirk of fate that it was completely legal - if a little expensive - to do that.

And if you think I sound like an irresponsible old whinger, well just try unpacking a shirt and then disposing of anything that isn't a shirt. The plastic cover goes into the plastic bags' bag, whilst the plastic clips and that clear plastic bit under the collar go into the "new plastics' collection" bag. The cardboard backing goes into the cardboard collection box in my living room, and the tissue paper goes into the paper sack - by way of a bumped head - in the kitchen cupboard. As for the pins, I'm saving those to jab into the eyeballs of Chelmsford Borough Council's Recycling Manager when he calls round to complain about household refuse being dumped into his garden refuse bin.

"It's for the children...
Breathe...
It's for the children...
And, relax."

The years in between

At times I have to pinch myself to confirm that I am where I am. I last commuted to London in, I think, 1994. Then, the company I was with re-located to St Albans, and the following two companies I joined were both based in Essex. That takes us up to September 2003 and my decision to move to India. Fast forward seven years and I'm back in England and back on the train. I'm even commuting to and from the same stations. It's a bit like something from the X-Files; as if the Indian experience and my fundraising career never happened.

The trains are the same, the route is the same, but the people are more casual. In 1994 there was far more evidence of suits and ties. Now, every day seems to be a dress-down-Friday. I'm not so sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. I had seven years of pretty much dressing down in India. My normal work dress was, for several years, jeans and a t-shirt. I upgraded slightly to jeans and a collared shirt when FLOvate became WNS and we traded our lovely spacious and secluded office for a few square yards in a call centre, but that was as far as it went. To be honest, I was looking forward to getting back into a suited routine in the City of London, but the company I'm now working with also has a relaxed and informal attitude to dress. Yesterday I arrived in a suit. Today I've dispensed with the tie; tomorrow it may be the jacket. I'll retain the trousers at least.

And, as with life in 1994 London, I'm eating sandwiches and rolls at my desk again. In due course too, a few weeks from now, I'll also be upending my keyboard and emptying old breadcrumbs over my desk.

Fun with flatpacks

I'd forgotten how much fun it was assembling flat-packed furniture. I'd ordered a cabin bed and wardrobe for Niharika and then spent the best part of Thursday, and a couple of hours yesterday, putting the things together. I roped in my dad for the last part of the cabin bed, and the two of us then pored over the wardrobe instructions, even then somehow contriving to get it wrong which necessitated taking bits of it apart again. The cabin bed instructions told me that it should have taken two hours to put together, but I'm pretty sure that they'd based that time on the world record set by Scandanavian craftsman Jorg Jorgen Jorgensen. In any event it took more like four or five hours.

"Don't tell Health and Safety about this" said one of the delivery men as he was lugging the thing upstairs, "we're not meant to do this." I suppose that was his way of saying, "that's got to be worth a few quid for taking the trouble" but as I only had a tenner on me at the time I replied, "it's OK, your secret's safe with me." In India I would have probably given a hundred or so rupees as a tip but in India they'd have put the thing together for me as well, not to mention torn the wallpaper, knocked off a wall tile and probably chipped a bed panel or two. The grubby fingerprints are always thrown in free.

But it's been a bit of a whirlwind two weeks for me. From arriving in the UK with nothing, I now have a family-sized car and a solid suburban house which is pretty much ready to go - or at least will be once I've assembled our new bed tomorrow. I have all the essentials: an iron, an ironing board, a microwave, a fridge, a washing machine and dishwasher and a 42" television to keep the kids amused. I have a DVD player, an old video recorder bought for twenty pounds, and a growing video library courtesy of a local charity shop (one pound each). I have warm clothes for myself and the children and I've even paid for my season ticket in preparation for re-joining the rat race on Monday.

Meanwhile, back in India, the packers have been in and all my books are in boxes. The fridge, the microwave, the washing machine, my desk, and various other bits and pieces have all been sold. The packing will complete tomorrow and then, all being well, a couple of months from now I'll be re-united with my chattels. India already seems another world away.

Trappings

For what seems like the umpteenth time, I'm setting up a new home. I took possession of house keys yesterday, and later today I'll be getting car keys. The last week has seen household trappings slowly coming together.

Most of our stuff is being shipped across from India but that's going to take six to eight weeks and there are some things that you just can't do without for that length of time. And so yesterday I was at an electrical showroom booking our TV and microwave, a vacuum cleaner and other bits and pieces.

My seven years in India has probably made me a better shopper, and a better bargainer. So far I've probably saved around a hundred and twenty pounds just by asking various salesman to do me a deal. I like to think my wife would be proud of me but I know that had she been sitting in my shoes she'd not only have secured significantly higher discounts, she'd also have persuaded the salesmen to donate one of their kidneys - and maybe a lung - to the local hospital.

But I do like this 'starting afresh' approach, and in the UK it's so much easier than in India. My tenancy agreement was executed without the need for stamp paper - an essential anachronism in India - a financial guarantor, or black-jacketed lawyers. Neither did I need to pay the exorbitant ten months' rental deposit that is demanded in Bangalore. An estate agent handled my particular transaction but I didn't have to pay him the equivalent of one month's deposit; just an admin fee. I took gas and electricity readings at the property and I also booked my Virgin broadband, landline and satellite TV connection via a call-centre in the Philippines. I set up a direct debit with the water authorities without the need of proof of address, photos, passport copies and goodness knows what else. No form that I have filled in so far has asked for my father's name, and on all occasions that I've booked appointments so far, both parties have been punctual; none of this, "sorry saar, traffic saar; fie minutes; gie me fie minutes."

So all in all, it's rather exciting and I reckon I'm on track to having a partially furnished house -or at least somewhere to sleep and something to sleep on - for when my wife and boys arrive in the country next week.

On the road

After three years of driving in India, it's time to get back to the comparative sanity of English roads. I signed up for a Vauxhall Zafira this morning and will collect it next week. In the meantime, I have been searching for car insurance. Having been out of the UK for seven years, I've lost any No Claims Bonus that I had - and I had the maximum - and so it's back to scratch for me.

I went to Go Compare to search for insurance and was staggered at the different trades and professions that appear on the drop-down list for "business type". Here's a selection:

Animal breeding
Baby Food Manufacturer
Blast Cleaning
Candle Dealer
Childrens [sic] Panel
Clock & Watch Manufacturer
Contact Lens Manufacturer
Egg Merchants

and so on...

Which is all well and good if the list is extensive and comprehensive; but it isn't. I couldn't find "surveyor" or "chartered surveyor" for instance, and I would have thought that there are probably more people employed in that industry than there are "Roller shutter manufacturers". Similarly, "civil engineering" is noticeable by its absence, whilst "Ice Merchant" is noticeable by its presence. At one stage, frustrated by my inability to find anything close to the new line of work that I'll be taking up in a week or so's time, I selected "calibration manager" as my occupation and "falconry" as the business type. I got a damn good quote for motor insurance too, which presumably means that calibrating birds of prey is seen as a soft risk - unless you happen to be a water vole of course.

But I do wonder what the call centre staff in India think that the people in Britain do for a living. "A nation of shopkeepers?" they must be thinking, "more like a nation of bee-keepers". They must be quite surprised when UK claimants are re-routed through to Bangalore and are revealed not as "sand blasters" or "pipe cleaners" or working in the "log and firewood" industry, but rather dull secretaries employed by county councils, and pen-pushers working not for G M Smeggins and Co (Cordwainers) Ltd, but rather G M Smeggins and Co (Chartered Accountants).


The image of Turkmenistan falconers at the Reading Birds of Prey festival comes from Ab's blog.

Britain's got nutters

I've just returned to England after seven years in India - and it feels great! I enjoyed India, worked with brilliant people and made some fantastic friends, but now the country is pretty much a closed chapter for me and I'm looking forward to the next episode in calmer, cleaner and more organised surroundings. I still have a few things left to say about India though, and in due course, I'll post again on India-aaagh.

But in the same way that the India blogs were my responses to the quirkiness, the injustices, the absurdity, the fun and the frustrations of India, England, this England will tread a similar path in Albion. And what better place to start than with Laika, the guitar-playing dog.

I was in town today with my five year-old daughter and as we approached a busker on a bridge, I pulled out a few coins from my pocket and told Niharika to go and drop them in the woman's empty guitar case.

"Have you come to see Laika the famous guitar playing dog from Britain's Got Talent?" the busker asked.

Actually, I hadn't even see the dog, but when I looked a little closer, there it was, sprawled out next to the railings and wearing a comedy bonnet. The woman called to Laika.

"Come along Laika, come and play the guitar." Judging by the amount of grey around its muzzle Laika should probably have been in a canine retirement home rather than still treading the boards, and yet it managed to drag itself up and stagger over to where the three of us were standing. The woman produced a tiny pink guitar from somewhere, held it out to the dog and pleaded, "Laika, play guitar; Laika, play guitar." The dog just looked at her.

"Laika, play guitar; Laika, play guitar." Again the same blank look from the senile dog-guitarist. "My dog can do that" I said. "Maybe you should try a violin?"

By now a crowd of one had gathered, and the woman continued with her pleading. I bent down to the dog. "Come on Laika," I said, "play the guitar for us please." And finally Laika lifted her paw up and touched the guitar. Classic melody it was not, but I suppose it was just about worth the 22 pence that Niharika had tipped into the woman's guitar case.

"Go to You Tube - Britain's Got Talent - Laika the guitar-playing dog" the woman shouted as we were departing. And so here's the link: Britain's got nutters - not to a mention a dog that seemed to perform even worse under camera lights than it did on an Essex bridge at lunchtime today. I look forward to more of the same.