TICKET TO SUCCESS

"Return to Edinburgh please," I say, glancing across at the train arriving at the opposite platform.

"You’ll not get that one,” the ticket operative remarks, flatly.

I’ll not get that one! Now that’s the reason he’s sat at the other side of a sheet of glass spewing forth boring little pieces of reformed rainforest, while I’m partly in charge of a semi-successful, often creative production company.

I’ll show you 'not get that one’. I snatch up the tickets (which I sense he has spewed forth a tad slower than usual to help prove his point) and bolt for the door. I have learnt, and he obviously hasn't, that we’re not limited by what we can’t do, but what we think we can’t do. The world isn't made up of people who can and people who can’t. It’s made up of people who can, some of whom think they can’t. It’s all about having the right mental attitude which, if you ask me, he hasn’t.

CANON BALLS

"That’ll be 279 pounds," says the sales assistant.

"You mean 259 pounds right?"

"No that’s 279 pounds."

I check the price tag, and repeat - with renewed confidence:

"No, you mean 259 pounds - look."

"No, that’s the price with the discount."

"Exactly. The discount. The 20 pound discount that is the reason I’m here today buying this camera from you."

"But Currys don’t actually give the discount, Canon do. You’ll have to go online to get it."

I pause for a moment to consider the implications of what I'm hearing. Not that Currys and Canon are actually plural entities. I know that not to be the case. No - that I've been deceiving myself into thinking that the price tag is telling me what the camera costs. When actually it's telling me what it will have cost at some point in the future after something else has happened. This is a price tag with its very own tense.

THE NEW ROGUE AWAKENS

It’s not a Star Wars Story it’s a prequel. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

It doesn’t get much more ‘pre’ than having a creepily rejuvenated Princess Leia stood clutching a floppy disc and mouthing a large proportion of the first instalment’s title at you. Perhaps that's what a Star Wars Story is: a cruelly curtailed prequel in which anyone with aspirations to appear in the follow-up gets vaporised on a beach.

Rogue One, like all the worse kinds of prequels, obsesses with answering questions that no one has asked.

Want to know why it was so easy to blow up the Death Star? 

No.

No really, do you want to know why it was so easy to blow up the death star?

No, I really don’t.

Okay then. You interested in how those rebels got hold of those plans? 

No.

Actually I’m more interested to know why a basic wireframe graphic heralding from the age of Atari won’t fit on a USB stick. Or hasn’t the Empire got round to inventing those yet? Preferring instead to pour its tech budget into jaw droppingly elegant shuttle craft to whisk it’s bad guys around the galaxy. And a pointlessly spacious apartment built over flowing lava to contain its arch villain’s disabled shower unit.

SURPRISED & DELIGHTED

We get settled in seats at the back of the cinema and realise that the youngest has left his glasses at home and can’t see the screen.

"It’s okay," says my wife. "We’ll move forward when it starts, there’s plenty of room."

But people are coming in all the time and I can’t live with that level of uncertainty. So I go off to get our seats moved. We’re still on the ads so there’s plenty of time. On the way out I clock the rows further forward that have spaces - ammunition if needed. But actually I’m quietly confident; the whole thing’s shaping up like something out of a customer service training video and I’m sure I’m going to win the sympathy of the Odeon staff.

NAIL IN THE COFFEE

This morning I ordered an Americano instead of a Latte. With hot milk for prolonged rapture. And it made me wonder where this is going. I’m guessing the next step is drop the milk. Then add an extra shot (whatever that is). Then two extra shots, then three, four - I don’t know, what’s the maximum? When do they pat you on the shoulder and say ‘I think you’ve had enough son’ and alert the security staff to see you off the premises?

For years I held out against coffee. It was tea all the way, the comforting and benign ritual of bubbly water on herby pillows. The aural equivalent of a hot bath - every half hour. Because that’s the thing about tea. It’s such a non event that you just keep doing it. Not so much a drink as a periodic change of texture. In those days the coffee drinkers were a dark and mysterious under-class. Masters of the infernal filtering apparatus that summoned forth the pungent black liquid of their desire. I treated them with suspicion, nay disdain.

BATTLE FOR BEACH 8

Never sure how to take being trained. I’m just not comfortable around people whose sole purpose is to know more about something than I do. It makes me nervous. I guess I’m just out of practice. I think the last person who taught me something useful was my driving instructor. Everything since then - largely useless - has been picked up through trial and error. Mainly error. So it feels quite novel to be in a small boat in the middle of a harbour being shown how to make it go and, more importantly, stop, without killing everyone involved. 

We’ve hired a Yellow Boat for the day on the promise of accessing one of twelve Beautiful and Secluded Beaches just up the coast. Beaches that no one without a boat, or hooves, can reach. But first I - and my fellow trainee, a wiry cockney with a nicotine croak and scarlet polo shirt - need to learn the ropes.

I don’t much like our teacher. If Ben Affleck was asked to play a Greek sleazeball this is probably how he'd do it. I don’t think he likes me either. I suspect he’d just as soon drop me to the bottom of the harbour in concrete flip-flops as teach me how to use his boat. 

Anyway, unlike my co-trainee, I have prior boating experience. Which is why I’ve not bothered looking at the video before we came, and he has. We’re shown how to moor the thing off a Beautiful and Secluded Beach. I ask what happens if the anchor gets stuck. Scarlett lets slip that the video covered that and sends his eyes briefly skyward. Point made. He gets to drive the boat back to shore, I don’t. I take this as our mentor acknowledging my innate nautical aptitude. Or possibly he wants me dead.

GREEK LOAF

Our luxury villa has been laid waste, pulverised into little more than a pile of gravel on an arid hillside. Either that or the sat nav got it wrong.

"Ring the number."

"I’ve tried, it doesn’t work. Just goes to beeps."

Despite our best efforts we’re both thinking the unthinkable. That we’ve been taken in by people who dupe people far less intelligent than us. That we might have to go on the telly and sit side by side holding hands to relate our sad and tragic tale for the amusement and edification of people to whom this kind of thing never happens. People like us.

Nearby a goat bleats insensitively as if nothing’s happened.

"What do the directions say?"

"Turn left before the Shell garage." 

But this doesn’t feel like the kind of place you’re going to find one of those. In fact it feels like we're the first motor vehicle ever to pass this way. Other than the one that brought the gravel. 

STILL HERE

David went cos he lost. Nigel went cos he won. Boris went cos he won but can’t win thanks to Michael, who reckons he can win despite having won. Theresa lost but might win, even though no one who lost can. Jeremy won but, like Boris, can’t win, so he’ll be gone soon too - once someone who can win wins. Tony would probably have to go soon if it weren’t for the fact that he already went. So he’ll stay gone.

Meanwhile, the rest of us - winners and losers - aren’t going anywhere. Us amateur legislators don’t have the luxury of resigning, disgraced and discredited, because we never had a reputation to besmirch. Of fading back into the background, because we never stepped out of it. Of spending more time with our families because we spend too much time with them already.

MIND THE GAP

Today as I boarded a tube train I was warned to "mind the gap". Twice. And then, more specifically, to "mind the gap between the platform and the train". So I took a proper look at the gap for perhaps the first time in my life. And found it to be around 2.5 inches wide. Which left me wondering what danger such a gap could represent. Later at the airport I traversed a gap at least half an inch wider between the top of some stairs and an aeroplane. And no one said a word.

Is it because, when it comes to flying, falling fifteen feet through a 3 inch gap onto concrete is the least of your worries? Or does EasyJet just not care? Or can London Underground just not help itself trotting out the same old gap thing because it’s what it’s always done, and if it didn’t the tourists would complain? Even though no one really knows what they’re minding, and what it means to mind it.

But given the number of times it gets a mention, we can only assume the gap is insanely dangerous. So it seems strange not to be given more detail. 

CENTENNIAL BUG

As a rule, I think you should understand what something is before you commit to looking after it for the rest of its life. For example, last year the youngest wanted a pet so I bought him a Roborovski Hamster. On the misapprehension that anything with ‘hamster’ in its name would do the job. Turned out it's too fast to handle and sleeps all day. And keeps the rest of us awake all night by spinning its wheel at an rpm that would put a supercharged V8 to shame. In short, it’s very bad at being a pet. But that’s not its fault. Because, it’s excellent at being a Roborovski Hamster. And what more can you ask of any rodent - or anybody for that matter - than being itself, well. Undoubtedly the fault was mine.

And it looks like I’ve never understood my children either. Because an article in the paper has just told me what they actually are. Turns out we’re not the same species, which accounts for a lot. They’re something called Centennials; 21st century super beings descended from late breeding Generation X’ers (like us) and our beloved successors, the Millennials. 

Who have had their day it would seem. Fine by me, never liked them anyway. Moping around with their suspicious-looking tubs of homemade super juice. Nibbling bird seed and whinging on about terrorism and not being able to buy a house. 

Anyway, now they’ve got something else to worry about. They’re about to be outclassed by Centennials, and I’ve got two of them.