Since it’s my birthday week and I’ve neglected this blog since the outset of the pandemic I've decided to finally write a post on a certain annual meteorological phenomenon I’ve come to notice over the years and which I point out to my friends every September: it never rains on my birthday celebrations, and hasn't done for as long as I can remember.

It is always warm, always dry. And this week’s outlandish late heatwave just takes the biscuit. Not so much an Indian summer as not far off what it would actually be like in parts of the Indian subcontinent in their actual summer – 29 degrees in my town tomorrow!
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It was Thursday 12th March 2020, a fortnight before things got serious on the Covid front, when I was invited to the press launch of Q Shoreditch: a new pool club cum cocktail bar in a swish casino-style setting on East London's Tabernacle Street, as far removed as can be from the dingy snooker clubs I'm better used to.

I readily accepted the invite, being a life-long cuesports fan (blogged a few years ago about meeting Ronnie O'Sullivan, and tweeted only last week my Crucible ticket for the cancelled World Championship, and having to settle instead for a BBC rerun of an old Steve Davis match.)

Handily for me I was already in town that afternoon for a Puressential press conference at The Ivy (eat your heart out Alan Partridge) so was able to arrive early doors for the Shoreditch opening, which I also made sure of after finding out a certain six-time World Championship snooker finalist (and my mum's favourite ever player) was in attendance for the evening.

​I've had some pretty crappy days over the past couple of years, but last week had one of the worst of my whole life, and funnily enough after recently breaking a long blog hiatus to reveal I'd actually joined the police, it was a police officer who made a fleeting cameo in my afternoon and was instrumental in fucking it up. 

The backstory is that since leaving the force I haven't had much use for my battered old Ford Fiesta that now sits forlornly outside my house, literally gathering cobwebs on its wing mirrors. After being driven only a couple of times in the preceding six months – to pick up my late dad from hospital then later help clear out his pad – it was needed again for a short-notice work assignment in the neighbouring county, which meant having to jump the flat battery.

​No problem: my one local mate Andy (a driving instructor, who taught me to drive) was able to swing by during his lunch break with jump leads, and after we hooked up our engines mine instantly spluttered into life along with the radio and alarm with a turn of the ignition. Happy at the painlessness of the procedure, I went back into the house after waving Andy off to gather my stuff and lock up, leaving the engine running because of course if I switched it off it wouldn't start up again due to low battery level.

Incredibly, however, in the space of those few minutes a random passer-by on my quiet residential street actually got into my car and grabbed the keys – but he wasn't a thief. I heard the engine cut off while closing my front door and looked around to see a man opening my front gate with my car keys in one hand and an opened police badge in the other.

​"You know that leaving your engine running is illegal sir," he admonished while handing over the keys. "And anyone could drive off with it?".

​To escape one of our worst early summers of recent years I visited Seville and Cadiz in Andalusia for the first time last month, just in time for the weather in southern Spain to hit the other extreme, of often unbearable 40+ degree heat – the Spanish version of a heatwave.

However my week there was made a whole lot cooler by two random animal-themed incidents on the first and last day which perfectly captured the vibe of the place.
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THE PEACOCK

Without going into too much detail about the city, Seville’s biggest cultural draw is its 14th-century Moorish palace called The Alcázar, where the mrs and I decided to visit on our first morning before the afternoon heat took hold. Unfortunately that’s what hundreds of other tourists had opted to do too, so in we bundled with the queuing hordes to wander the ancient halls and courtyards.

After an hour of having to muscle in on photo vantage points I decided to escape the herds, grab a coffee and stroll solo around the quiet shaded area of the outdoor gardens while Jen continued inside, as she wanted to find the spots where Game of Thrones had been filmed. It turned out to be one of the better holiday decisions I've ever made.

​Charity shops have generally been a happy hunting ground for me over the years. At least half of my book and record collection, and a fair few wardrobe items, can trace their lineage to Marie Curies and Faras across the land.

​In this post-recession retail landscape they've proliferated more than ever, often occupying empty high street spaces no sooner have they been vacated, attracted as ever by heavily discounted business rates. 

​Whenever I’m on a weekend away or assignment in another part of the country I’ll always duck into one if there’s time to kill, in pursuit of another random find, be it a pair of vintage flares or an old Beano annual.

​After last month's day with the police dealing with some of London's more unsavoury characters, this month I spent six days on a press trip to Israel with someone who was in many ways a lot worse, to the point that the Israeli guards' weapons (pictured) looked increasingly attractive as the week drew on. (*To clarify, I don't have the full data on Britain's bullshitters but he's indisputably the biggest I've ever met.)

The background to this is that you often have to spend press trips with other journalists, and as many PR people will tell you: “There’s always one in every group...(making) the trip less enjoyable for everyone else".  Step forward - 'Stan', which is as close to his real name without fully revealing it.

All I know about Stan is he used to work for a red-top tabloid before losing his job, not long after somehow being shortlisted for 'Reporter of the Year' - something he mentioned at least four times during the week. His most immediately prominent physical attribute though was his grating, unintelligible accent: a nasal babble somewhere between a sped-up Liam Gallagher and that Lancashire girl off The Apprentice a few years back.   

​Last week I had a much more exciting day than the usual shift at my writing desk, after being permitted to shadow a Metropolitan Police response unit for an afternoon and evening in central London, as part of the police ride-along scheme.
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After meeting my sergeant contact at Paddington Green Station I went through a series of checks and disclaimers – understandably a fair bit of bureaucracy involved due to the potential dangers – then was fitted with a bulletproof vest and invited into the daily group briefing before officers’ shifts begin.

Ride-alongs have generally been more widespread a scheme in the United States, however UK police forces have recently become keener to implement the practice here, perhaps due to lapses of public trust in law enforcement.
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It presents an unobstructed view of a police shift – dealing with offenders and victims, statement taking, arrests, even the form-filling back at the station if you’re that interested. As a fan of police procedural TV shows – BBC’s The Met by chance the most recent – the opportunity of being a solo spectator in a live and unedited episode was never going to be refused.

So there I was on the 12.35am train home, fairly sozzled after a few large reds with my mate Chris at a restaurant in London following pre-beers at a theatre preview, and I'd royally fucked up by forgetting I had to change at Stevenage to catch the last train onwards two stops to my current hometown.

The penny clanged when the scenery changed dramatically from what I'm used to on my usual train straight home, and it grimly dawned that I was on the final Peterborough service with no more going back the other way. 

I get off at the next stop, Arlesey, a Bedfordshire village in the middle of nowhere, no nearby high street nor taxi rank, just fields and a few houses. Next train anywhere is 4.30am, nearest cab office miles away in wrong direction says Google - rang em anyway and was quoted £60 "at least" - and mrs funnily enough not answering at 1.30am, not that she'd've come to get me at that time anyway.

Close to contemplating hanging out til 4.30 I spot a man outside the station entrance, swaying on his feet, head bowed, pained expression - I knew instantly that he'd made the same fuck-up. As I switch off my phone to conserve the remaining battery he spots a public phonebox, staggers up to it, sticks in some coins then starts swearing loudly when it inevitably cuts him off and eats the last of his money. "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!".

After I tentatively approach to offer some help, he turns out to be a softly-spoken Scot once the bellowing subsides, dressed in a dapper summer suit and boater hat like he's just stepped out of the Henley Regatta. Turns out he's just returned from the Henley Regatta. And after the long rail mission back from Oxon to - then through - London, he passed out just before his Stevenage stop on the same last train from Kings Cross. His mobile dead, phonebox ate his last two quid, wife gonna kill him, has to be back at work in 6 hours - if only he could remember the number of his local cab firm he has a business account with.

​This unattributed Nuremberg Trials quote was one of many dark lines from the Manics’ bleakest album ‘The Holy Bible’,
in a song inspired by the band’s visits to former WWII concentration camps.

As a teenager I listened to the album a lot though never quite related to this track and its message of the ‘sounds’ of evil, from industrial clanging to “screaming souls” – all seemed a bit heavy-handed even by the Manics’ then standards.

It was only when I went to Poland for the first time last month that I finally, unwittingly, visited the ‘Oswięcim’ mentioned in that quote – the Polish town the Nazis renamed Auschwitz and where they built their biggest death camp complex, Auschwitz-Birkenau, responsible for the murder of at least one million people, 90% of them Jews.

After reading and watching so much about it over the years it doesn’t feel real until you’re physically there, amid the grim smokestacks and barbed-wire fences sprawled over hundreds of acres of barren land. Despite summer being a popular time to visit, when the surrounding fields might approach picturesqueness, it felt more fitting to visit when winter was closing in.

For my first blog post I thought I’d recount the bizarre turnaround I experienced a few weeks ago after losing my wallet, with a good moral to the story.

I’d met two mates at a busy Shepherds Bush pub for a rushed pint before the QPR-Barnsley game, and basically left my wallet on my chair, realising only when approaching the stadium almost a mile away. 

With only minutes til kickoff, rather than leg it all the way back I quickly googled and rang the pub to ask with clenched hope if a kind soul had handed it in. The bar manager I spoke to went to check and returned a minute later with the inevitable shitty news: no, and it was nowhere to be seen at the pinpointed table and chairs. 

As ever with a lost wallet it’s not so much the cash loss that grates most but the bank cards, driving licence and in my case a recently topped-up Oystercard and return rail ticket. So I wasn’t a happy chappy as I took my seat at kickoff, the usual matchday atmosphere lost on me. As I didn't want to wait til HT to cancel my card in case someone went to town on it I had a surreal mid-match conversation with a call-centre clerk from my seat as thousands bellowed and cursed around me.

QPR tried their best to worsen the afternoon, not the team but the usual supporters’ bar shambles which makes you queue from almost 10mins before HT until the 2nd half whistle for just a beer (why not pour them en masse before HT like at music festivals instead of individually per order when hundreds arrive at once?)

Thankfully the team won 2-0 – a defeat would’ve been the last straw. But the walletless cloud lingered and I was no longer up for the planned post-match session. On a whim I swung by the earlier pub before hitting the underground to ask if anyone had handed it in since – nope, sorry – so as a last throw I returned to our previous table for a final scan.

Unbelievably the wallet was there, exactly where I’d left it, camouflaged against the chair leather. The table occupants who’d been unwittingly sitting beside it for the previous two hours couldn’t believe it when I picked it up with incredulous laughter then summarised the story for them. The relief rush was tempered by slight anger though as I returned to the bar and waved it pointedly at the manager who’d supposedly had a search – it had been camouflaged to the incognisant drinker’s eye but would’ve revealed itself to anyone looking with purpose.

Anyway, with it retrieved and spirits instantly lifted I reinstated the evening's drinking plans with renewed gusto and was duly a mess by 10pm when I called it a night. The hangover though wasn’t half as painful as it could’ve been. 

​Moral: if you leave something in a pub, go back and look for it with your own eyes. Some people are fuckin' blind.