Last night’s dancing was mesmerising. Mesmerising in a sixth-form production, they’ve certainly got a bit of front type-way, with added lap dancing routines, which was some small compensation. It lasted about an hour (though it seemed longer), and then there was a forty-five minute interval before there was to be an hour more of it. You’re joking aren’t you? My companion and I went off for a beer, and then home for chicken sandwiches.

Here’s a bit more from the Where the *** Are we Going to Find an Auberigine, which will morph into The Ciabatta Years, (Short Books, next spring). This blog cannot be all high culture and pictures of trainers.

Findus crispy pancakes were a frozen product that came in boxes of four. They were a pale yellow colour, half-moon shaped, and filled with mince, or cheese, or mushroom. The cheese and mushroom varieties contained a chemical sauce rather than actual cheese or mushrooms. You cooked the pancakes by shallow frying in oil. The mince version was relatively straightforward, the cheese and mushroom varieties more demanding as they had a tendency to turn out either ‘not quite done,’ ie. still frozen in the middle, or done, ie. the filling had reached a temperature and consistency that meant it could perform the same job to the roof of your mouth as Nitromors does to paint. And this before the invention of the microwave, too (my mother is so dedicated to the microwave now that she even has one in her caravan).
Due to mother’s conscientious objections, it was me, as the eldest, who carried out most of the cooking in our house. Our father was out working all hours, and our parents were soon to be divorced: where, in the case of her children, our mother discarded her cooking duties, in the case of her husband she made a point of virtually discarding them, somehow managing to let him know that she wasn’t cooking for him even though she never did anyway.

If this sounds rather deprived - which, as food, it is - in terms of developing culinary technique there was something to be said for it. There was a skill to be learned in handling crispy pancakes. The great challenge with the product is to get the insides cooked perfectly without burning the outside to black. By improvising the exact right balance between time, temperature, and height of flame, this is possible. Once you have finessed this ability you have done well, because it is the same method that is employed in frying steak. You have given yourself a head-start for the moment when you become a short-order chef and are required to deliver cuts of sirlion and fillet to the varying degrees of finish - au bleu, saignant, à point, bien, or bien cuit - that you will be asked to produce when one day you find yourself working in the heat an à la carte restaurant.
As my confidence grew, it became a matter of pride to me to serve the crispy pancakes to my siblings just as they liked them - à point. Four pancakes into three children doesn’t divide all that neatly, so it was two-and-half each for the younger pair, and one for me. It makes me sound a saint, but this is not why I say it. I say it to make a point about chefs - they seldom eat much, they take pleasure from the organised delivery of perfect food, not from the eating of the stuff. There are some fat chefs, of course, but they are never much good. The ones to trust are those who live on nicotine, caffeine and champagne, who only take on the occasional steak sandwich when the need for solids becomes pressing.
The preferred accompaniment to crispy pancakes was pommes frites avec sauce brun, ou ketchup de tomate, ou alternatively, le Smash.

This is only a few miles from the trainers on the wire, at the UEA campus. I waited for that heron (the thing that looks like a paper aeroplane) quite carefully but this was the best shot I could get of him as he took off because I didn’t have the camera switched on.

Have just been offered some tickets to see a dance group from Barcelona dancing to tunes by Kraftwerk and the Beach Boys; that’s very Norwich on a Friday night. I said yes: it could go either way.

I had the camera on me. I noticed this high over the road. It made me think of that Leonard Cohen song, Like a Bird on a Wire, and Billy’s Boots from Tiger. It’s a good effort, by whichever boys did it. There’s something on the lens, too, that blotch on the left.

There will be a new name in the Premiership next season, beside ourselves. I am all for that, new fans make most noise. Talking of which, I can hear Dylan two floors below, squawking. He had a different type of anaesthetic today, but it still drove him bonkers. Poor boy, he is not himself. The vet thought he found a grain of sand stuck in his pad. Sounds unlikely, doesn’t it. He has a bandage on his leg which he is repeatedly savaging. We tried a plastic lampshade, it lasted a second. He doesn’t like being a patient. Ollie, thank goodness, with all the injuries he went through, was much more sanguine, though you did wonder if he wasn’t a case of Munchausen’s syndrome. Certainly he has never tried biting Gerhard.

The poor boy, looking sorry for himself

He’s been to the vet this afternoon, he’s got a bit of a limp on his front right leg. We think there’s something lodged in a pad, like a thorn or a nail. Gerhard (the vet) couldn’t really find anything but as he was pulling the toes gently apart Dylan let out a yell that was enough to pierce my eardrum, and I was standing, holding his lead, whereas Gerhard’s ear was next to Dylan’s mouth. ‘I think we’ve found something,’ he said, rather stoically. He went back for another feel, so Dylan, not unreasonably, went to bite him. That was enough of that.
He has to go back tomorrow, to be knocked out so a proper investigation can take place. The only other time he had a sedative he cried for 24-hours non-stop afterwards in an existential crisis of ‘Who am I?’ until it finally wore off. We’re not looking forward to it.

Normally benevolent (I am holding up a balloon to achieve this shot: he hates them) you can see how those teeth could be put to use

I have just been told that Martin Amis has read my book on Stoke City, She Stood There Laughing. This information was passed on a football messageboard. I’d link the thread but it’s so full of internal ‘jokes’ and people calling each other names that it’s both embarrassing and incomprehensible.

However, here is the lead post, written by my posh friend Wilbur. It has made me feel rather proud. It seems that I have put myself into a position that Amis considers risky. Money and London Fields were two of the great novels of the last Millenniun. Few ideas can be more thrilling for a young(ish, a few years back) writer than that Amis has read you and has even remembered enough about your work to have formed an opinion. I may mix myself a celebratory glass of something involving pink gin. [Wingo, at the end, is me; ** is the Great Man himself]

So, I’m having a beer yesterday with assorted acquaintances while our respective other halves are attending a baby shower*. The conversation turns, as it does when men who don’t know each other very well, to sport in general, and football in particular.

We talk of the premier league and attention is drawn to my allegiance to Stoke City. The father-to-be states that he has recently read a book about Stoke in which the sweary author takes his son all over watching Stoke be shit, and is very rude indeed about Tony Pulis.

His father-in-law, who is one of this island’s most famous proper** authors, has also read this flimsy pamphlet, and with a chuckle wonders how the next edition will be altered to reflect Pulis’ current high standing. The phase “hostage to fortune” is used.

Imagine their surprise when I inform them that the author remains quite firmly of the opinion that Pulis is a c**t, and that not even our remarkable automatic promotion to the top flight of English football will soften his stance even slightly.

Wingo, you can be proud that one of our foremost word-inventing iconoclasts has not only read your book, but whistles inwardly like a mechanic on time-and-a-half at your valiant pissing in the wind.

Of course, if you just keep walking, the litter tends to dry up.

We took our usual late-evening walk around the nearest lake, a broad, in fact, made out of a flooded quarry, where at the end nearest the carpark there is a little ‘beach.’ Usually there’s no one there except a man and his old mum feeding the ducks. Tonight there weren’t many there either, but those who had spent the day enjoying themsleves had left behind about a hundred plastic bottle, the remnants of bar-b-ques, empty Soltan bottles, and sundry other junk. As my friend ‘grey man’, another ex-working class now middle-class ariviste such as myself once said to me, ‘People were rough, but we never used to have all this scum.’ I continuned on our walk, noting other debris, and imagining what I’d do if I only had a gun. I was reminded of that film ‘Falling Down’ in which Micheal Douglas plays an everyday guy who goes berserk.

Ollie had a (successful) go at trumping Dylan, on camera. He is s a smart boy, in his way.

Elsewhere I’ve been starting a new book which will chronicle Stoke’s Premiership season. It’s always hard to home in on your tone when you’re setting out on something. Here’s an extract of the first draft of the first draft of the beginning.

1. Fat Boy’s Sports Bar

So, here we are, gathered around a table outside this bar in the Place du Luxembourg, Brussels. The penultimate match of our season (we hope) is about to kick off. Inside Fat Boy’s there are seven or eight screens showing Sky coverage of a live lunchtime game between Chelsea and Manchester United. It is me who is dispatched to the bar for a round. It’s the second half of the game, service is frantic, but slow. While I wait I listen as a man and a woman seated on barstools beside me discuss the situation on the screens. ‘Oooh,’ she says, as a ball goes wide. ‘What position are we in the table?’ he asks. She looks at the paper, to check. Man Utd and Chelsea and are first and second respectively. This is not a matter that needs checking, not if you are an actual fan of an actual football team.

I pass nine pints of Jupiler lager backwards and outside through the relay of my son, Jack, who in turn hands them on to his mate John. John is a late addition to this weekend. We left Norwich, where we live, at one in the morning, in order to drive to Birmingham where we were to catch a flight from the airport at six am. I picked Jack up in Norwich city centre, where he’d been with John, and with their mates, in a bar. They are nineteen and eighteen respectively.
‘Can you give John a lift home, dad?’
‘Hop in,’ I said.
I detoured to pick up Graham, another Stoke supporter who lives in Norwich. Between Graham’s house and John’s house, Graham filled John in on the details of the forty eight hours ahead. These included half-arsedly watching the Man U-Chelsea game - we’d catch that somewhere as a prelude to listening to the serious business, our match, on a laptop. Then we were going to catch a train to this place called Dender, twenty miles from Brussels, to see whether our previous manager, Johan Boskamp, a fat Dutchman who is everything that Pulis is not, could pull off the great escape and keep this Dender team in the Belgium top flight, a division about which none of us cared a jot. John was excited by these details, and voiced the wish that it would be great to come along too: it would be much better than going to work at his Saturday job in an electrical retailers on an industrial estate. I asked him if he knew where his passport was. Fifteen minutes later, having picked up a toothbrush and a pair of pants, he was on the road with us.

We’ve been stopped several times in the past few days as Dylan has been getting down with his bad self.
‘What are we looking at here?’ an Australian bloke asked Trezza.
It’s a fair question, the way his tail conformation works in conjunction with his front leg conformation and everything else.