Thank you everybody for coming in search of Blazing Saddle.

I’ve been persuaded to host it myself so I can have a little more control over the presentation, so please follow this link to find me at www.blazingsaddle.co.uk

I look forward to seeing you all there.

The Easter holiday is almost upon us and a straw poll at the Grot last night reveals the true meaning of the weekend is not lost.

‘Well I’ve made sure I’m having the kids on Friday morning’, said Adge. ‘That way I can take ‘em to the open day at the racing stables on Friday, then fill ‘em up with chocolate on Saturday before taking them back to the missus and her latest’

‘It’s alright for you lot. Some of us have got to work all weekend. I haven’t got a table unbooked until Tuesday’. Does Ossie really think we’ll be crying into our beer for him?

‘Sunday is the big day, innit?’

Ah, at last. Piggy (don’t ask!) is something of a surprise. I wouldn’t have had him down as a man with a strong faith.

‘United versus Liverpool at half one, then Chelsea ‘gainst Arsenal at four. What a bloody great day!’

Forgive us Lord, for we have sinned!

It’s got to be thirty-three years at least since I woke up sober on March 18th.. It is also possibly the first time I have the day off when it hasn’t fallen on the weekend. I have woken up grumpy (insert your own joke here, but trust me, I’ve heard it).

Celebrations yesterday were ruled out because Mrs Blazing was starving herself, and more, in preparation (not her favourite word at the moment) for a barium meal today. I’m not so totally inconsiderate as to sit there chucking bacon, cabbage, and Guinness down my neck last night as she suffered.

I wanted to write something funny about how this isn’t the first time she has faced this procedure, and how unconcerned we are. We know, don’t we, that once again this will be a false alarm? Anyway, grumpy is as grumpy does and I don’t feel in the least bit funny this morning.

I’ve given her a cuddle, asked all the right questions (I hope) and as she starts her morning medication regime I have slunk out here into the centre of my media empire, aka the spare room.

I want to write a stinging criticism of our private health insurance, and the ‘will they or won’t they cover this’ quandary before the National Health took over and said you qualify for an immediate referral. I’m not in the mood to write in praise of that policy. How curmudgeonly am I?

It will be alright, won’t it?

‘Afternoon Blazing. 2L for you?’ Ossie regards me as a creature of habit. I like to keep him on his toes.

‘No, Guinness please. I’m celebrating Paddy’s Day’. Deliberately I leave it at that, knowing full well that Ossie is in inner turmoil. He vanishes into the next bar, and returns even more puzzled.

“It’s not until Monday? And unless I am very much mistaken you are not a Paddy.”

The time for explanations has come. I just hope he can keep up with me. Actually I understand that my maternal great-grandmother on my father’s side (Don’t worry, Ossie couldn’t quite follow that either!) was from Cork. I proudly claim plastic Paddyhood, being more qualified to play for the Republic than a number of those who have sported the green in recent years.

There is however a tradition to be maintained. When I first left home over thirty years ago I was ‘adopted’ by the landlord and landlady of my new local. ‘Sure a lad of teenage years is taking quite a step’. Pat and Florrie taught me that stereotypes are just plain wrong.

Pat was not six and a half feet tall with curly ginger hair and hands like shovels. He didn’t call everybody ’sor’. He was five and a half feet tall, middle aged, grey, and once you got to understand his sense of humour he was as good a friend as you could wish for. Not that you would know when a local walked through the door to be greeted with ‘Jesus Christ, not you again!’

Flo was a little more like you would have been led to expect on the face of it. Flame haired and fire in the eyes, and tongue. She taught us anglos to use ‘feck’ instead of our version. ‘It’s not swearing if you use feck when you want to use the other, and I won’t clip you round the ear’.

Looks can be deceptive though, and when you got to know her you learned of a woman with a brilliant mind, who gave up a world of academia to enjoy the social aspects of running a small town pub in another country.

Friends arrived regularly from all over Ireland and Britain, and I learned how to play cards. Pat and his oldest friend Jerry, a former chief inspector in the Met, no less, were the biggest ‘toe-tapping under the table’ rogues a going. Once I worked that out though I used to regularly supplement my income in their company.

So on 17th March 1976 I celebrated my first Paddy’s Day. ‘You will take the day off and be here at half past ten for breakfast. Then it is games and Guinness until you can drink no more pints, then the poteen will appear. You will pay for every other drink and you will have a fecking good time!’

All these years later I still raise a glass of the black stuff to them on the day. ‘But it’s not until Monday, Blazing?’ That is the start of another, much longer tale. Mrs Blazing is being compelled to endure ‘nil by mouth’ on Monday. I can hardly go out and fill my ample gut on the same day, can I?

Feck it!

The BBC are to be congratulated for exposing the results of vital research into the behaviour of West Country crabs.

Now I am not saying I am sceptical of claims that Cornish crabs have ‘more backbone’ than their Devon cousins, but I thought I should consult an expert in the field. So having not seen my old mucker Denzil in nearly a year I have contacted him for the second time in a week.

Crabs and Denzil are old associates. There is not a single type of crab he has not put in a pot at one stage or another. He hasn’t seen the study and is somewhat startled by the call. ‘You’m takin’ the piss or what, Blazin’?’

I read the article to him and explain my lack of faith in the conclusions. ‘I see where you’re coming from now’, he agrees.

‘If you want my opinion there is another explanation. Them Cornish crabs are thick as shit!’

I thank Denzil and apologise for getting him out of bed on a Saturday morning. His input though has been invaluable, and shows there is always more than one way of interpreting the evidence of your eyes. Or indeed of cold hard scientific facts.

Have a lovely weekend.

It’s been a long day. Being woken by sis in the middle of a very short night didn’t help. A doctor’s appointment mercifully cut short the working day, but there are better reasons to escape the office early.

Ossie smiles as I take up my berth in the Grot and gulp frantically at the first pint of 2L. ‘See Tottenham last night?’ he asks with a chuckle. Almost simultaneously we think of one who is no longer with us.

‘Mad Mel would have been livid’, we agree. We are reminded of the days he used to work in the filling station by the ‘magic roundabout’ (I’ll tell you about that another day!). The number of people that would stop and ask him directions were legion. No matter where they wanted to go he would give them the same directions, and five minutes later he would be roaring with laughter at them as they passed him on the other side of the road!

Mel’s problem was that he was what we used to call ‘highly-strung’, and one day the string snapped. Thankfully this was in the days before nothing could be done for him, or should I say before ‘care in the community’ was introduced.

Mel found himself at an establishment some thirty miles away receiving professional help. A couple of us decided we would visit him as nobody was aware of him having any family.

We found the place in the middle of nowhere, an idyllic country retreat. The reception smelt like a hospital. Well it would really, wouldn’t it! ‘You’ve come to see Mel? He shouldn’t be long. We wouldn’t have given him any work had we known you were coming’.

‘Work?’

‘Well nobody visits and he gets distracted easily, so we have him mowing the lawns today.’ We are impressed. He is making progress.

Indeed he is. We are shown to a lounge where he should be able to see us. There is one problem. A beautifully mown strip crosses the lawn by the window, and disappears into the wheat crop in the next field. Mel has heard the call of the wild in the Oxfordshire countryside, and evidently has answered it!

The police recovered him twenty three miles away, stopped only by the running out of fuel on his Atco. He wanted to get back to the magic roundabout one last time.

My fuel tank is empty too. ‘Another 2’s, Blazing?’ Oh yes. I raise the glass to Mad Mel. He’s mowing the crops on a much loftier plain these days. I’m absolutely bloody certain I heard him roaring with laughter too.

The phone going off at six in the morning is enough to turn the stomach. One instinctively fears the worst. I shouldn’t have fretted so for the thirty seconds it took me to come to and answer the damn thing.

Sister of Blazing has a problem. ‘I’m on my mobile. The telegraph pole across the road has come down in the storm and we have no landline, no internet, nothing’

I point out, not unreasonably I feel, that at this hour of the morning there had better be a good reason for calling me with this sorry tale.

‘I can’t get hold of Tiscali and BT won’t do anything about it. Can you try reporting that you cannot contact me, tell BT it’s an emergency.’ She is fortunate she is over a hundred miles away on the Cornish coast or she would indeed be in immediate physical peril.

Like a good brother I contact BT, input her number, and am politely told to piss off, by a machine. So at twenty past six I am scouring the Tiscali website for a number to report out-of-order phones. Eventually I give up and try some customer service line.

Half an hour later I find the combination of numbers that connects me to Deepak. I explain the problem. ‘Whereabouts is the line severed?’ he enquires.

‘Cornwall’

‘No, I mean is it on your property, or in the road, or where?’

‘The offending line is in Cornwall. I am not. I am over a hundred miles away.’

‘Can you not see it?’

Sweet mother of God, of all the call centre employees in all the world, you connect me to this one.

Eventually Deepak gets the picture and informs me that the fault will be rectified ‘within five days’. What sort of service agreement do Tiscali have with BT for goodness sake?

Later, I phone sister on her mobile. She apologises for waking me at sparrowfart. In retirement she has lost all semblance of time. ‘Not to worry’, I assure her. ‘Have they fixed it?’

‘Well the engineer turned up so I went to check everything was ok. Apparently not. He was there to wrap the severed cable around the grounded telegraph pole so nobody fell over it. He is not the engineer who actually fixes the fault.’

‘Not much of a engineer then, really?’

‘Well no’.

Because of her location these engineers are travelling for a couple of hours to get to her. Why could they not just send one who was equipped to do the job?

I’ve no doubt I will return to piss-poor service from all sorts of organisations in the future, but the utility companies (and Virgin Media!) do seem to be absolute masters of incompetence.

And in case you are wondering I don’t think Deepak is any worse than Kylie or Jason when the call centre was in Swindon. Piss-poor service crosses multi-national boundaries with frightening ease.

There is consensus in the Grot. This bloody chancellor hasn’t made a good start. We are almost alone in the western world in facing an ever-greater tax burden. Yet still we borrow.

There will almost certainly be a greater devil in the detail yet to be made public. Perhaps I am being overly pessimistic there, but I doubt it.

For sure the headline grabbers tonight are the usual easy targets. Does anybody really think that money on booze, and fags are intended to do anything other than fill the coffers? Will the heavy drinkers and smokers be priced out of their anti-social behaviours? Don’t be daft.

Hard drugs look ever more attractive as the price drops in relation to the established sins. Dealers have relatively few overheads. Pubs may be driven out of business by this Government, but the darker arts are thriving.

Talk to me Mr Darling about your 2% inflation figure. All of the things that working people have to spend money on are climbing at a much higher rate. Forget the booze and fags. My inflation is caused by community charge, insurance, fuel costs, heating and lighting. Two percent, my arse!

And do you know what really irritates my farmers? Watching you and Brown chuckling through the responses in the place where you are meant to represent, as well as lead us. Taking not a jot of notice you display an arrogance, and disregard for the electorate, that is quite breathtaking.

How I wish I had a labour party to vote for.

‘Coming for lunch Blazing? I think they have a Nepalese chef in doing specials today’. I don’t need asking twice. I must have tried Nepalese cuisine before, but it hasn’t lingered in the memory for some reason.

As I join the long queue snaking its way back towards the entrance I catch sight of the ‘Nepalese chef’. I decide to give the queue a miss, grab a salad bowl instead.

Everybody was back in the office by one, enthusing about the eastern delights they had just sampled. I ambled back up to the restaurant.

‘Dirty Denzil!’

‘Blazing! How the devil are yer?’

I haven’t seen Denzil for a year or so. We are old mates and it’s good to see him doing well for himself. He was always a top notch chef in local establishments, but if anybody upset him he could be, shall we say, artistic. Even he couldn’t tell you how many people have unwittingly consumed his various bodily fluids!

‘What’s this Nepalese nonsense then? You haven’t been further East than Jaywick Sands.’

‘Now you know that’s not true Blazing. I did a fortnight in Bangkok once.’

Indeed he did, and I could not begin to tell you what unsuspecting diners may have digested in the wake of that particular sojourn. Suffice to say those of us who were regular customers at the time were under strict instructions not to touch the chilli for a few weeks.

‘You didn’t have the lamb at lunchtime then?’, he enquired.

‘Strangely no old son’.

‘Very wise’.

We chuckle. It turns out in reality not as many people have tried Nepalese cuisine as think they have. Denzil went to one of the companies offering catering services to large facilities within an hour of home. They agreed a deal for him to offer a series of one-off specials in the restaurants and canteens they run.

‘Where are you drinking these days?’, he asks.

‘The Grot. Guess who is landlord?’

‘Not Ossie?’ He sees me nod. “I’ll have to come for a pint with you one night. You know the cook that works for him?’

I nod again, nervously.

‘I taught him everything he knows!’

So there I was, in the Steambucket, or whatever it is called this month. All the locals still refer to it as ‘the grot’. The brewery, ungrateful for our patronage, try a new name and a sign or two every now and again, but it’s still ‘the grot’, and it always will be.

I have to say the 2L was particularly tasty last night. If you are unaware of the brew 2L is code for double laxative. Again that is implicitly understood by the locals if not entirely encouraged by the brewery. It’s their own fault. Keen to push it as a trendy brand during the eighties heyday of the rave scene they tried launching a bottled version with the tagline ‘It keeps you going’.

Anyway, the bowel-loosening property of the fine dark and nutty ale is a benefit when one suffers from the chalfonts, and it remains my favourite. For how much longer remains shrouded in mystery. A brash new brand, 3L, is now pushed in most of the ‘theme pubs’ in town, so less and less outlets have my preferred tipple. I’m preparing for the fight!

Ossie is the landlord of ‘the grot’, and a good job he does too. His real name isn’t Ossie, he’s just a Chelsea fan and we’ve called him that for so long nobody can remember his real name, least of all Ossie, who is not the sharpest pitchfork in the barn, if you catch my drift.

He does however have the benefit of a first class cook who has been largely responsible for the building of a steady food trade. Ossie, bless him, thought yesterday to be a remarkable day when fielding numerous calls from potential diners. ‘There was something very odd about the calls though’, he confided in us last night. ‘Must be some new fad. Everyone wanted to know if we had Barnsley chop on the menu’.