Do stand by my grave and weep. No, really.

So naturally, today’s post is about funerals.

I was expecting a normal day when I got into the office on Thursday, but with hindsight stopping by Mandy’s desk was a fairly reliable way to make sure that didn’t happen. Mandy and Abi sit in the bay next to mine - Mandy is a part time yoghurt thief and founding member of the cool kids. Abi is tall, statuesque, likes to pretend that she’s French and is occasionally mistaken for a transsexual (entirely unfairly, I might add). They have that kind of symbiotic relationship you often see in the workplace where they get on almost sinisterly well and finish one another’s sentences but would never dream of actually seeing each other outside work.

I still don’t quite recall how, at five past nine in the morning, we started talking about Abi’s funeral. It was especially confusing as she looked in pretty good health to me.

“I’m feeling morbid today.” said Abi. “I’ve always known I’m not going to live past forty.”

In my experience this is a common feeling in adolescence, but generally it’s supposed to fade away once you become an adult. Lots of people have a skewed view of the future when growing up. I was convinced I would never find a girlfriend. So, for that matter, was my mother: at one point I think she would have seriously considered giving me away free with a packet of Corn Flakes much in the same manner as those nacky plastic toys you could never quite work up the enthusiasm for collecting. I had another friend called Owain who was convinced he wouldn’t make it past the age of thirty. Of course he did, just like the rest of us, leaving him like one of those people who prophecies the end of the world and then looks like a complete lemon the day after it utterly fails to happen.

I on the other hand have never been fond of the “live fast, die young” philosophy. I’m more aiming for the “live so slowly you are practically in reverse half the time and die at the age of 90, possibly in a jacuzzi at the Playboy mansion” approach.

“I’ve got Abi’s funeral all planned.” said Mandy with evangelical enthusiasm.

I did a visible double-take. Normally this would sound sinister, a threat with more than a whiff of the gangland about it. But Abi was nodding and grinning along. Had somebody slipped something in my cappuccino that morning?

“You’ve planned Abi’s funeral?”

“Of course, it’s all sorted.” said Mandy. “I’m going to put the ‘fun’ back into ‘funeral’. I’ve got the songs and the buffet organised and everything.”

I looked round but everybody else, it seemed, was behaving perfectly normally. Maybe it was me that had gone mad. I wanted to pick up the whole scene and shake it like an Etch-a-Sketch, clear it and start again.

“You’ve picked the songs?” I was so fazed that all I could do was repeat words from what Mandy had told me in the hope that eventually it would begin to make something approximating to sense.

“Definitely. I want to have all the classics from when we were at school. I thought we’d start with Autumn Days, and then go on to something like Cross Over The Road.”

You couldn’t argue with the nostalgia value.

“I think at my funeral I’d like Simply The Best by Tina Turner, Nobody Does It Better by Carly Simon and How Do I Live? by LeAnn Rimes.” I said.

“Good call, I love that LeAnn Rimes song.” said Abi.

“I don't, I loathe all of them. But they’d be bloody fitting. And it’s not like I’m going to have to sit through them, is it?”

“Good point.” said Mandy.

“Mandy, for Abi’s funeral are you not tempted to go with Dude Looks Like A Lady by Aerosmith? Or possibly that song from the Wizard Of Oz - Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead?”

A hard stare from Abi ended the conversation and sent me scurrying to my desk. But the whole surreal exchange got me thinking about funerals. The selection of music is an especially thorny issue. One of the oddest funerals I went to was last year - the deceased was a biker and so were most of the congregation. On the plus side, everybody was wearing black. I was, however, about the only one with a tie on. The ceremony was conducted by two priests from the Universal Life Church who had purchased their titles on the internet, namely “Reverend Panther” and the rather less macho “Reverend Shrew”. After a series of touching tributes Reverend Panther took to the lectern.

“We’re now going to play one final piece of music to end the service. As many of you know, the deceased was a keen musician and here is one of his own compositions. This is Kaotika by the band Kaotika.”

At this point Reverend Shrew sidled up to a disturbingly large ghetto blaster, pressed the play button and the strains of Kaotika filled the genteel stone Cotwolds church. On second thoughts "strains" probably isn't the right word. It conjures up images of Vivaldi, whereas this band made Napalm Death sound like an awful lot like James Blunt. It wasn't really music in my book, more a man with severe laryngitis trying to set the Guinness World Record for coughing up phlegm accompanied by some exceptionally frenzied and brutal shredding. The pall bearers hoisted the coffin on their shoulders and as they carried it down the aisle all the bikers got to their feet and, as one, gave it a standing ovation.

Astonishingly it was deeply moving, though in the back of my mind I was also silently relieved that none of them had considered doing any crowd surfing.

Later that day I got an instant message from Mandy.

“Do you want to see the plan for Abi’s funeral?”

“I’d love to.”

So she sent it across.

ABI’S FUNERAL PLAN

If Abi dies:

1. Arrange buffet – ask Chet’s mum to make bhaji and samosa and perhaps some pakora.
2. Ring Jamie on "secret number". Don’t break the news, just get him to go to the hospital. Let them tell him. They are used to it.
3. Log on to her emails and send blanket email to everyone saying “sorry, Abi died. Don’t contact her on this mail address.” Login name W%$£"!* Password )(*&^%$£"
4. Empty her desk. If anything odd is found, pass to Mr London Street so that he can make a key ring out of it.

If Abi doesn’t die:

1. Be happy.
2. Say I told you so.
3. Still ask Chet’s mum to make bhaji.

My first reaction was to be completely nonplussed. My second reaction, naturally, was to be thrilled that I was specifically mentioned in the arrangements. My third and more lasting reaction was to think about my own funeral.

You know those people that say “I wouldn’t want everyone to be sad. I’d want it to be a joyous celebration of my life. I’d want everybody to have a great day and then try to get on with their lives.”?

Bollocks to that is what I say.

I want proper Old Testament style weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, rending of garments, the whole shebang. I want everybody to be absolutely devastated with grief. I want all the men to make touching speeches about how they wanted to be me. I want all the women to deliver heartfelt eulogies about how they always regretted never sleeping with me and that now it’s too late. All the ones who have actually slept with me can instead get up and declaim at length that nobody they’ve ever slept with since has had a chance of living up to me and in particular that thing I do.

(Actually, playing Nobody Does Is Better around this point would be a good idea.)

Oh, and everybody has to wear black. If you took a photograph of all the women I would be fully expecting it to look like the Addicted To Love video, or… well let’s just say there will be trouble. And if they all end up having a massive catfight like Alexis and Krystle out of Dynasty, even better.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realised this was too important to be left to chance. It sounded like an amazing day out, I was almost more disappointed to be missing it than I was about the thought of passing away. It just didn’t seem fair. After all, people had dress rehearsals for weddings. Why not have one for my funeral? It would be the event of the decade for all concerned. Seized by enthusiasm I leaned over the partition to my colleague Phil.

“Phil, if I had a dress rehearsal for my funeral would you come along?”

“Sure. As long as you don’t expect me to carry your coffin. Not unless you lose a couple of stone anyway.”

The wedding spanner (Part 2)

I always thought when you got a new job or took on a new venture the reaction from your nearest and dearest was supposed to be supportive excitement. After all, the shops are full of greetings cards saying "Congratulations on your new job!", aren’t they? The shelves don’t, however, groan with cards saying "Well done on agreeing to photograph a wedding against your better judgment!" and over the next couple of weeks I found out why. When I told my friends what I had signed up for they visibly quailed. A couple almost crossed themselves. If you’d been watching the scene with the mute button on you’d think I’d told them I had three months to live.

"But it’s the only record of their big day! What if all your photos are bad? It’ll all be ruined."

Not What a superb idea! Not Well, you take fantastic photos. Who would have thought that my friends would prove to be so supportive? At that point, it suddenly felt like an unbelievably heavy burden to shoulder. I knew that the alternative was Gemma taking the photos. I knew that the marriage was hardly a romantic celebration of love’s young dream given that they had been together for donkey’s years and would have their two illegitimate kids there on the big day. I even knew that, this being Bracknell after all, the kids would probably spend the whole ceremony picking their noses and eating Turkey Twizzlers out of a carrier bag. But none of that made matters any easier.

Anyway, there was no point in thinking about it any further. Promises were promises, Gemma was my friend and there was no way on earth I was going to be responsible for wrecking her dream and scuppering her plan A.

On the big day, I went into work with my cameras in my manbag, palms clammy with terror and stomach cramping with apprehension. The plan was that Gemma would pick me up at lunchtime and take me to the venue. Gemma’s boyfriend wasn’t going to be there as he was working (he was clearly an awful lot better at getting out of things than I was). As I worked through the morning my not especially supportive colleagues gave me a range of looks which ran the gamut from wry to amused to actively delighting in my discomfort. The sentiment they all boiled down to was Rather you than me. The last time I got looks like that was either shortly before or shortly after a previous girlfriend of mine had flashed her breasts at my best mate.

There was a brief glimmer of hope when I bumped into Mandy in the kitchen.

"Is it true that you’re photographing a wedding?"

I nodded.

"I did photography at college. I did a few weddings."

"Really, how did you find that? Any tips?"

"Oh, I couldn’t take the pressure. It’s unbelievable, I’ve never known stress like it. I couldn’t sleep the night before, and if I did I’d wake up in a cold sweat. I had to stop doing them. Nothing’s worth that."

I briefly considered hailing a taxi home or faking my own death. Mandy grinned from ear to ear.

"Good luck!"

Everyone seemed to be deriving inordinate pleasure from telling me how colossally stressful being a wedding photographer was. Didn’t they think I knew that already?

By the time I stood outside the office waiting for Gemma to pick me up, I felt like a condemned man being led off to the scaffold. I got in the car to find Gemma and her mum both dolled up to the nines. Suddenly I regretted not bringing a tie with me. We started off with some smalltalk about the wedding which, it turned out, was going to be every bit as high class as I was expecting.

"The groom isn’t going to have a wedding ring." said Gemma. "He had one on order at Argos but they don’t have it in stock. They rang him up and told him the next most expensive one cost another twenty quid and he decided they couldn’t afford it."

Argos, for the uninitiated, sells about the cheapest jewellery you can buy. I don’t think it necessarily constitutes a step up from fashioning your own out of tinfoil. I always thought the idea was that, since you were wearing a wedding ring for the rest of your life, it was the sort of thing you’d want to spend some money on. But this is Bracknell after all, and that extra twenty pounds would buy a lot of Bacardi Breezers, possibly even enough to make you forget that you’d just had the cheapest wedding of all time.

By the time the agonising drive to the venue neared its conclusion my intestines had managed to contort themselves into something resembling a treble clef. The trauma was unbelievable: people who bang on about how stressful it is being a bride patently have no idea whatsoever what they are talking about. The bride has it easy, she just has to turn up and repeat things after the registrar. I, on the other hand, had to take pictures of her which made her look beautiful, and I didn’t even have a clue what she looked like or how difficult that would prove to be.

I just prayed to God that she might be wearing something distinctive so I could pick her out.

"You owe me for this Gemma. I’m only doing this because you’re the wedding planner."

"Oh no, I’m not." said Gemma airily. "I offered to help but she never took me up on it."

I paused for a moment to take in the implications of this. Surely Gemma wouldn’t just ask me to take the photos because she’d chickened out of taking them herself? That couldn't possibly happen... could it?

"Oh well, she’s your friend anyway. I’m only doing this because she’s your friend."

"Actually she’s more my sister’s friend."

Roughly at this point the car pulled up outside the venue, the door opened and my jaw gently bounced along the gravel. I had been duped. I should have known this is why Gemma came over to my desk all those weeks ago with the look she had when she wanted something. And then, smiling sweetly, she administered the killer blow.

"This is my wedding present to them, having you along to take the photos."

So much for No cost, no pressure. I just hoped that Gemma had explained that I was some guy who had agreed to take pictures rather than the photographer.

This vaguely comforting illusion lasted about as long as it took for them to frogmarch me into the venue and introduce me to the registrar. I think it was her words "Ah, you must be the photographer!" that unequivocally burst that particular bubble.

"You stand here." she said, ushering me into my dedicated position. "You’ll be the only person who can take pictures during the ceremony."

So they had better not be shit or we will run you out of town with pitchforks or possibly tie you up in a wicker man came the unspoken next sentence.

"The only thing I would ask is that you don’t take any flash photography."

"Don’t worry, there’s going to be absolutely nothing flash about this photography, I can assure you." is the sentence I just about managed to restrain myself from saying.

I looked round the venue. There was a syrupy Celine Dion song playing in the background just to make sure that, however queasy I was feeling, things still had the potential to slide further downhill. The room was almost empty and almost completely devoid of atmosphere. Many of the women looked like they had come straight from a provincial nightclub, probably without any sleep. Nearly all of the men looked like they had only previously appeared in photographs in profile with an eight digit number running horizontally along the bottom.

Next the mother of the bride came up to me. "Thank you so much for doing this." she said effusively. If I’d known then just how unphotogenic she would prove to be, I might have accepted her thanks slightly less graciously. Everybody there seemed to be under the impression that I was a proper photographer. I was trapped in an episode of a very bad sitcom and there was no way out apart from legging it. Just as I was giving this option serious contemplation, the Celine Dion song (which had been playing in a continuous loop) stopped and the bride started to walk down the aisle.

You know how people who rescue somebody from a burning building say "I just did what anyone would have done?" Obviously the analogy of trying to salvage something from a hideous wreckage couldn’t be any less appropriate, but the truth is I don’t remember much after that. I sort of slipped into a state of photographic automatism and just took an awful lot of pictures. The ceremony passed without incident - the vows, the signing of the register, even the exchange of what can only, under the circumstances, be described as "ring".

If their kids, looking on mutely in the front row, did have any Turkey Twizzlers to hand I didn’t see them. The happy couple looked terrified more than anything. The only light relief was provided by the bride’s younger brother, an eight year old kid who looked suspiciously like Pugsley Addams and spent most of the time alternating between asking the bride whether he could marry her instead (something which probably goes on in Bracknell a lot more than anyone will tell you) and trying to hump Gemma’s leg. He was almost completely dead behind the eyes. It’s doubtless something to do with additives.

"That wasn’t so bad, was it?" said Gemma outside the venue later, after I had finished taking group photos of the happy couple with their nearest and dearest. She was looking very pleased with herself. And I hate to admit it, but she was probably right: it was almost fun in a way, being able to boss people around and get people to pose and generally direct things. It quite suited me. So if things don’t work out as a writer I reckon being a wedding photographer would be the perfect job. Or it might be, if it wasn’t for one thing: they’re probably expecting to see some photographs at some point.

My only regret is that I didn’t give them both a card. From what Gemma said, I couldn’t rule out the possibility of some repeat business.

The wedding spanner (Part 1)

There was a magical time at school when I didn’t need to think very far in the future, but all that began to change at a fateful point somewhere between getting my TB jab and picking what subjects I was going to study at GCSE. The defining moment was my trip to see the careers advisor. First, I was given some kind of survey to do. It was full of questions which were almost completely incomprehensible to me at the time, given that I was far more interested in the events of Dogtanian And The Three Muskehounds than something trifling like what I was going to be when I grew up. I didn’t know what I wanted out of life, I just thought the future would never come - or that when it did, I would be somehow different and better equipped to cope.

They took my answers, such as they were, and fed them into a computer. This was the height of space age technology at the time - our school had three computers in a room in a hut. They could be used for typing “Ivor is a wally” and sending it to his computer in approximately four hundred times as long as it would have taken to shout it across the room at him. The careers computer was clearly more advanced as they had to send my completed questionnaire away, presumably to some form of gleaming computer laboratory that looked like the set of 2001.

This, of course, was back in the days when we all thought that the year 2001 might actually look like the film 2001, proving that we had learned absolutely nothing from 1984.

Eventually the day came, the careers advisor sat me down and told me they had analysed the results. Apparently my ideal job was an “Army education officer”. That was the first setback; I didn’t recall seeing a question in the survey saying Would you like to join the army? and I was pretty sure I would have remembered that. I was equally confident that I would have answered it very strongly in the negative. Either way, it indicated a glaring shortcoming with the whole process.

I don’t recall the conversation that took place after that bombshell. I assume that the nice lady asked me what I wanted to do when for a living when I stopped being a boy and became a man. The passage of time has erased my precise answer but I’m virtually certain that what I didn’t say was this:

"I would love to spend all my time in a dimly lit beige office sorting spreadsheets. I get my kicks from asking people to do things they have absolutely no intention of doing and which I have absolutely no power to make them do. If you could throw in a range of emails, conference calls and face to face meetings with the differently competent and/or incomprehensible, most of whom earn considerably more than me, that would be brilliant. Oh and while you’re at it - any chance of an appalling canteen, tepidly minging tea and coffee making facilities and a computer that takes fifteen minutes to start up in the morning and makes random noises that sound like a chainsaw bisecting an asthmatic?"

But hey ho, that’s pretty much what happened anyway.

One of the problems, of course, is that the world has changed immeasurably since I filled out my multiple choice form and got told to enlist in the armed forces by the HAL of the Careers Service. The best way to illustrate this is by talking about French lessons. The most important things you were taught to communicate in French were your name, your age, where you lived and how to get to the train station. The aim, I assume, was to adequately equip young Britons with all the tools they would need to bore people rigid in more than one language.

The other thing you learned was how to tell people what your dad did for a living. And that used to be easy - my dad, for example, was an engineer. There’s a nice simple French word for that. But what about nowadays? How on earth are children supposed to explain that their parents are "tertiary service providers" or "programme delivery specialists" or "project coordinators"?

Worst of all, how can you expect kids to explain in French that their parents are management consultants? Not because of the complexity of translating it into another language, simply because of the shame of being related to one. That said, wouldn’t it be lovely to live somewhere where the locals have no word for "management consultant"?

The point I’m trying to make is that however pleasant it sometimes is working where I do, that doesn‘t change the fact that it‘s still Plan B for most of us. Mikey’s Plan A, for example, is to make music for a living. Mine (stop laughing at the back, don't think I can't hear you) is to be a writer. Gemma’s Plan A, on the other hand, is the one that got me into an awful mess a few weeks back.

Gemma, you see, has always wanted to be a wedding planner – much like Jennifer Lopez in that duff film with Matthew Mahogany. We even went through a phase of calling her 'G-Lo' but it never caught on. Gemma started organising team meals and departmental events, then she graduated to helping with the Christmas party. But the glittering prize was still to plan an actual wedding. And finally, a few months back, she got her opportunity. It turned out that a friend of hers was planning to get married, didn’t have a lot of money and needed all the help she could get with making the arrangements. And so, Gemma became her de facto wedding planner. G-Lo had her big chance at last.

At first, this didn’t really feature on my radar. It occasionally came up at lunch but once we’d established whether it was going to be a glamorous Posh Spice style wedding (it wasn’t) and whether the bride was a looker (she wasn’t – "and they’ve got two kids already", said Gemma) it rapidly stopped being interesting. But then, about a fortnight before the big day, Gemma stopped by my desk with that look she has when she wants something.

"You know the wedding I’ve been planning?"

"Yep."

"Is there any chance you could do me a massive, massive favour?"

"What is it?"

"They don’t have a photographer, and unless I can get one I’m going to have to stand at the front and take pictures with my crappy digital camera. They’ll be well rubbish. Will you do it?"

Then she gave me the look again. It’s roughly the same look she used when trying to talk me into going to the Christmas party last year. I sighed. Resistance was completely useless - when Gemma wants something, she tends to get it. She's barely 24 and has all the bouncy self-confidence of someone who has never experienced a serious setback of any kind. So I said yes, and looking back I still really can’t work out why. She even offered me money, but I refused. I figured that as long as no money was changing hands, it wouldn’t really matter if the photos were shite. No cost, no pressure.

You know how these things are, you agree to do something two weeks in the future thinking that the future will never come, or that when it does you’ll be somehow different and better equipped to cope, which of course you patently aren’t.

Of course, I now realise that was stupidity of epic proportions. Tune in next time, and I’ll explain what happened.

The final That Was The Week That Blogged

This is the last time I’m going to do That Was The Week That Blogged.

I always thought I’d carry on doing it as long as I was finding new blogs and as long as people kept sending in suggestions, but things have changed since I started it all the way back in August. The suggestions have dried up and I feel like the same people are coming up again and again. I never wanted it to just be me giving awards to my blogging friends every week - I’ve seen other blog awards fall into that trap and I wanted to bring it to a close before it got to that stage. It’s boring to watch.

Also, something has come along which makes it much easier to find new blogs - Double Sifted, which is an excellent website which captures really good blog writing from across the blogosphere. They do a much better job than I ever could, I have no idea how they do it but they’re quite excellent and well worth checking out.

Another reason to stop is that I feel like the battle has kind of been won. I started this because I was cross that an excellent post by Hannah Miet had been overlooked by the existing Post of the Week schemes. So I set up TWTWTB to celebrate posts like that; great writing rather than asinine cobblers or rehashing other people’s poems or songs or just posting a crappy YouTube link and saying "hey fellas, any of you remember this?" But it’s worked. Hannah was awarded Blogger’s Blog Of Note on Friday. Maybe the good writing is starting to win. (Although ironically I nominated another of her posts for a weekly blog award last week and it didn't win. You should have seen some of the dross that did).

But also, I guess I’ve spent nearly four months giving credit and although it’s been lovely, I’d quite like to get some credit for a change. So enough already. If you liked it, do it yourself. Or tell loads of people to read my blog instead. It sounds wanky, but I’m a big believer in paying it forward.

Here are the final winners of TWTWTB. I think they’re a very fitting trinity and yes, they’ve all won it before.

1. 4 by You. Me. No Adult Supervision…

“You always kissed me goodbye, kissed me like we would never see each other again. Even if you were going to the mailbox. Even if you were going out for just a few minutes. You kissed me like the world was ending. That is one thing that I still miss.”

I love Sal’s blog. This piece is heartbreaking, and it’s only the first part of this story. She hasn’t published the follow-up yet but already I find myself dreading what I know is going to be an emotional sucker punch. Her writing is beautiful and, as always, completely unsentimental. I was very moved by this - it probably didn’t help reading it on what was a relatively raw week for me. “Like” just isn’t the right word for writing like this, but if you check it out you won’t regret it. And if you check it out and you have a love like the one Sal is writing about here, you won’t neglect it.

2. This is Love & I Am The Music by Birdykins: Fly. Crash. Repeat.

“I blink into the face of the city and try to take pictures with my cellphone but I can’t see the buttons. I want to capture it, the weightlessness of it all, the sheer joy for living. I would bottle it and send it to you. All of you.”

I don’t really understand some of Birdykins’ posts but I suspect that’s really not the point. This is writing you can lose yourself in, rich verdant sentences that you don’t so much read, more wander through in a narcotic haze. There is a fantastic filmic feel to prose like this which I deeply envy with my rather prosaic approach to stringing words in a line. Go and look. There aren’t a lot of stylists like this writing anywhere, let alone in blogland.

3. Alone V. Lonely by My Soul Is A Butterfly

“I used to want to save the world alone like Superman. But now I just want to smile at no one. Now I just want to type words into vacuums, breathe deeply and sip and stare and sigh. I want to hold someone’s hand and feel warm in the winter and change the world in inches and waves and whispers.”

The circle is complete. She prompted this competition, she won it in the first week and she wins it in the last. I said I wanted to see what she would come up with next and now she is really living up to all that potential. I couldn’t be prouder of somebody winning Blog Of Note (unless it was me. Obviously.) When you go there, if you leave a comment tell her I sent you. She’s getting a lot of comments lately and a lot of them are people just plugging their blogs. Stand on a box and shout.

There you go. If next week you read something especially good, or write something you’re especially proud of then don't tell me, let everybody know. Write it on your blog. Tweet it. Give them an award. Do something, anything to celebrate good writing. And if you like my blog, tell your friends.

It's a sin

I am sitting here pondering a whole weekend of doing nothing and I have to say it sounds pretty good from where I am now, namely reclining on the sofa. I reckon sloth gets an undeserved bad reputation - it’s neither deadly nor a sin, just an important component of anyone’s weekly regime. Without it, how can you appreciate the busy times? So I’m saying let’s hear it for sloth. Really, it’s a wonder I can even summon the strength to type this.

That got me to thinking about how the seven deadly sins are all a bit outdated. So many of them form the cornerstones of modern life that it seems pointless to carry on railing against them. The war on sin has been comprehensively lost: we all stuff ourselves with food we don’t need, feel very pleased with ourselves, want things we haven’t got, get cross about the people who have them and masturbate a lot.

Or maybe that‘s just me.

But really, if all the deadly sins were on a bingo card who amongst us wouldn’t be shouting “House!” by now? I think we need new deadly sins that mean something in this day and age. Here are my starters for ten:

Talking about mortgages at social gatherings. Yes, congratulations on switching from a fixed rate to a tracker mortgage at just the right time. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to head to the kitchen where I will try to forcibly remove both my eyes with the melon baller.

Name-dropping. Of course, you have never achieved anything in your life, are of no interest to anybody and are such a waste of oxygen that you should be an agenda item at Copenhagen. But if you went to school with someone who has since turned out to be moderately famous, naturally I will drop everything to bask in third hand reflected pisspoor glory. Knock yourself out.

Taking seven items into the “six items or less” queue. Really, this is beyond the pale. It’s just not English to do this - it’s like trying to travel peak time on an off-peak ticket. This minor piece of supermarket skullduggery is the start of a slippery slope that leads inexorably to total anarchy. Rules are rules.

Text-speak. Orwell was right about poverty of language fuelling poverty of expression. You have all those characters, you should bloody use them. And what is the point in freeing up valuable space by using “thx” instead of “thanks” if you’re then just going to use those extra characters putting multiple exclamation marks at the end of a sentence? It’s the equivalent of putting a little heart instead of a dot over the letter “i” - a useful shorthand if you want to broadcast to the world that you’re an idiot, but otherwise hard to see the point. My father, a disturbingly clever man, texts like a 13 year old hoodie. Go figure, as I understand the cool kids like to say.

Self-righteous veganism. Well, any kind really. I’ve never met a happy vegan. More to the point, given that they eat oodles of pulses and wear plastic shoes I’ve never wanted to stand downwind of one either. Militant veganism is every bit as bad as those bizarre individuals who stand in the middle of a shopping precinct at weekends shouting non-stop about god. The biggest irony is that I’ve never met a vegan who was fine with random nutjobs yelling at them on the subject of the afterlife.

Advertorials in magazines. We’re not stupid. I can tell it’s an advert, and I’m still not going to read it. Oh, there’s a new recipe section in this magazine compiled by a completely impartial chef! How amazing that every single recipe happens to feature Philadelphia. I must go out and buy some. This will never ever happen.

Right, that’s six of the seven sorted. Suggestions for the last one in the comments. Almost accidentally, this post is made of 666 words.

Passport photos

“So given that you’re not in contact with your mother and your wife’s away this must be an interesting week for you.” she says, “All that space and these two significant female figures missing from your life.”

I hadn’t seen it that way. I ponder that thought all the way to the pub.

This living alone malarkey is a doddle, but it hasn’t worked out exactly how I’d planned. I’m behaving in ways that are most unlike me. After I’ve eaten dinner, I wash the dishes instead of leaving them on the side to congeal and turn nasty. I know the bin needs emptying, and I’m going to do it. The dishwasher is regularly filled and emptied. I may even run the hoover round. Don’t tell anyone.

Being here on my own I realise how much of what goes on in my living space is a complete mystery to me. If anything went wrong or broke I wouldn’t have the first idea what to do to make it better. But it’s more fundamental than that; I can now see how many things happen around me that I’m oblivious to. Clothes magically end go in the washing machine, come out, are neatly laid out on the airer and appear in drawers. The recycling magically ends up in a crate which ends up in a bin which ends up on the kerb.

But it’s not really magic, is it?

I like to bang on about autonomy and all the changes I’ve made this year but I’m a passenger in lots of bits of my own life. One day, if I carry on opting out of the gritty boring tasks that keep everyday life moving, I might wake up to find that she’s opted out of me. It’s a sobering thought.

I make lists. This is a new thing for me. Kelly loves lists. I think her idea of heaven would be making a list of all the lists she has made in the last year. Going into town? Make a list. Off to the supermarket? Make a list. But now I am doing it too. I know all the things I want to sort out before she comes back, so that everything’s okay.

There is a list on the notepad in the living room in her spidery handwriting of things to pack for her trip. I smile when I see two different types of hand cleaning products written down one after the other. If she doesn’t wash her hands about ten times a day she starts to feel uneasy. Scanning the paper I can see an encyclopaedic list of all the stuff she has taken with her. I more than half wish my name was on it.

But really, I’m fine. I wouldn’t want you worrying. Nearly every evening is booked, and I’m seeing three of my very oldest friends. I don’t feel deserted in the slightest, and I’m getting on with things. Last night I went out for dinner with Ivor and we went to the new Lebanese restaurant in town. I enthused about Lebanese wine and the waiter jogged off to the counter to show me the finest reds his country has to offer. “This one’s not on the menu, but to you twenty-five pounds” he said. I had a warm feeling as I gave them my email address and asked them to keep me posted. I want them to do well.

Ivor and I sat out on the terrace well after midnight drinking mint tea and smoking a strawberry shisha. The hot bricks glowed and you could hear the pleasing sound of bubbling as we both puffed away and talked nonsense. We’ve each had a good year in our different ways. It’s comforting to stay up late and talk to somebody who’s known you for twenty-five years, and I am running out of people who I’ve known for that long.

The next morning, I wake up not quite so convinced that the shisha was a good idea. Everything smells of strawberry in a way which isn’t good or bad so much as extremely disconcerting. I have an appointment and I’m badly late. Pulling my clothes on I dash into the living room and see the passport photos on the table.

When Kelly had her visa done she had new photos taken, and they only used two of the set of four, so the other two have been on the dining table since she left. Seeing them every morning has felt a bit like saying goodbye to her, a final ritual before I pop on my headphones, lock the front door and head to work worrying about whether I’ve remembered to switch the oven off. But this morning, running late and flustered, I stop for a second and properly look at them.

She seems wary and a little startled, as if the camera has come as a surprise - no mean feat when you’re in a photo booth. I have a pair of passport photos of her in my wallet, but they’re not like these. The ones in my wallet are of the woman I married. The ones that have looked up at me every morning are of the woman I’m married to now - the woman that I am suddenly, painfully aware is not here. Just like that, out of nowhere, it hits me with a stunning force that makes me blink. This is far harder than I thought it would be.

I pull on my coat and start my rush up the hill. The damp gloom earlier in the week is slowly turning to gold - the sun is out, the pavements are gleaming and there is a crisp, cold feeling in the air. You don’t need to walk past the tacky shop fronts or watch the relentless adverts or switch on your radio, you can just tell: it will be Christmas soon.

I send her a message to tell her that I miss her. And a phone bleeps, halfway across the world.

My house, my rules

Tomorrow morning at half past six the taxi will pull up outside the house and the buzzer will go. There will be a bleary-eyed goodbye and she will take her case, get into the waiting car, and speed away. There will be a short drive, then a long flight, and I won’t see her in ages. For the first time in a very long time, I will be the master of all I survey.

I’ll be the king of my suddenly gigantic flat, because in the time between the front door clunking shut and the cab becoming a black dot at the top of the hill it will have doubled in size.

I’ll be able to do exactly as I please.

I don’t mean the clichés about sleeping in the starfish position in the middle of the bed, nothing so hackneyed and obvious as that (though you can rest assured I’ll do that too). But the bedroom is as good a place to start as any. I shall have the bedroom door shut at night. I come from a family which shuts doors - often with very good reason - and yet our bedroom door is always resolutely wedged open. I have never really understood why.

While we’re at it, I will have the heating nudged up in the bedroom (“I like a cold bedroom”, she always says). Maybe I’ll have the towel rail on in the ensuite. Warm towels every morning in my sweltering bedroom with the door firmly shut. Why not? There’s nobody there to stop me.

I will listen to music at night when I read. She cannot read with music on in the background, it’s a matter of eternal frustration to me. If music’s on she can’t really do anything. And if she reads in bed it’s a precursor to falling asleep - many’s the time I have had to take the book out of her slumped hand, put it on her table and flick off her bedside lamp.

Maybe I won’t stop there. Maybe I’ll drift off to sleep with music playing too - that too is a complete no-no when she’s here. I miss falling asleep with music in the background. And when I have music on to do the ironing I can have it as loud as I like. And the TV, let’s not forget the TV. I can have that on as loud as I want (“Turn it down!” she says “The ad breaks are really loud.”). I can have it blaring away and watch all the shows she doesn’t like. Come Dine With Me, Hollyoaks, all the brainless pap that takes my mind off things.

I can watch it while I eat my dinner with all the lights blazing away. She can’t stand it when I have the main light on. But when I eat my dinner it‘s a meal, not a date. I want to see what I’m putting in my mouth, it’s no time for mood lighting. I’ve told her this a hundred times but - in this as in so many things - I am nowhere near as convincing as I need to be.

Not that I’ll necessarily be cooking anything. I could go out. I could worship at the temple of yaki soba every single night. I could sit at a long bench on my own watching other people and imagining their stories, drinking plum wine and eating all the duck gyoza without having to share them with her. There won’t be anyone to talk me out of it.

There will be nobody to tell me to turn the lights off, nobody to tell me to turn the music down. Nobody to tell me to change the channel. Nobody to tell me off for not making the bed: when I’m on my own I don’t plan to make the bed. It’s a crumpled mess in the morning, it’s going to be a mess seconds after I get into it. I just can’t see the point, so I refuse.

My house, my rules.

Nobody to handily press the mute button when those voiceover ads come on, the ones we both hate. Nobody to see me off at the doorstep without fail, every single morning. “E me” she says as I slope off the stairs, and for some reason I never do. Nobody to uncomplainingly make me tea, because her need for tea is greater than mine. She has to drink it hot but I can wait until it’s slightly warmer than blood, so it’s always her that ends up heading for the kettle when we play chicken.

Nobody to tell me if I’ll need a coat in the morning. They don’t tell you when you get married that the first thing you lose is the ability to predict the weather adequately. They should do weather forecasts for men like me where the sun and rain symbols are replaced by overcoats, jumpers, umbrellas and shorts. Because we’re so useless.

Nobody to ask me how my day was. Nobody to tell me it will be okay. Nobody to stop me worrying or point out, in that ever so gentle way, that I’m being an idiot. I might come home and not hear a single word until the next morning. In any case, there will be nobody saying goodnight to me.

Nobody singing recklessly at the top of her lungs in the kitchen to whatever stuff they are playing on the radio. All those songs I hate, except when she’s belting them out.

Yes, things are going to be pretty different round here.