The Edge April 2021

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EDGE

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The Edge Editor’s Column A TIME TO THINK We’ve all had a lot of time to think during lockdown, but sometimes that doesn’t take you down the right path.

For instance, I got to thinking back to one of my first days at infant school. I’d already started running away the moment the teacher’s back was turned, or if ever they popped out of the classroom. You see, me Mum had split up from me Dad permanently, so we were staying with me Grannie & Grandpa in Skelmanthorpe where they both worked just along tut road from tut school in a carpet mill. No wonder they both went deaf early, what with the relentless clatter of those machines. Eeeee, there were no such thing as ear-defenders back in ‘them days’, I tell thee.

So anyway, one day our teacher was ushering us all out of the main school doors (great big wooden things, I seem to recall, more akin to what you’d have at a castle) when she happened to ‘pat me along’ by the seat of my pants.

To which she immediately said, “Oh you’ve got a big bum, Shaun.” And I looked up at her, with doleful eyes, and replied, “Yes, miss. I’ve kekked me pants.” So off she immediately took me to the toilets to, you know, sort me out.

I’d felt it ‘coming on’ during class while she’d been reading to us, but there was no way I was going to put my hand up and let the rest of my peers know that I needed the toilet. How embarrassing would that have been for a 4 year old?

Hey, I’m not even sure I was wiping my own arse at that age either, as I don’t think my Mum stopped doing it for me until I was at least into double-figures.

So instead, I’d simply curled it out where I’d sat in my seat, perhaps raising one cheek off my ickle school chair, and I seem to recall it somehow went upwards towards my back, which startled me as I’d never done a vertical poo before.

But she cleaned me up like a shiny new pin and somehow produced a clean pair of ketts from god knows where (the staff room cupboard, where they kept text books and crayons?).

What was worse though, at the end of the day (mid-afternoon), when it was time to go home, I sauntered off (we only lived up tut road a stone’s throw from tut school), only I heard: “Coooo-eeee, Shaun!” And to my horror, there was my teacher, waving a package at me, wrapped in newspaper, from those big old school doors. So I bowed my head in shame and walked all the way back to collect my kekked up undercrackers from her, all the while thinking, ‘I hope none of my classmates twig.

Perhaps they’ll think it’s a portion of fish & chips, or something?’

True story, that.

BEAR IN MIND

COMFYBALLS What a name for a men’s briefs manufacturer.

But it’s true. I spotted ’em in a Saturday supplement. “Comfort is king and Comfyballs has this covered; it has worked long and hard to find the perfect cut and fabric for the highest level of comfort a man can get.”

Bollocks (if you’ll excuse the pun).

How can ‘one size fit all’ in the gonad department; when some of us have broad beans for testicles and others have ostrich eggs?

COUSINS REUNITED One absolutely brilliant thing to come out of this latest lockdown period, so far as I’m concerned, is the fact that after a period of some 30 long years, I have reconnected with my proper, long lost ‘blood cousin’, Laura, who still lives in the very same village oop north where we were both born back in the swinging sixties.

I cannot tell you how much this has filled my lil heart with joy. I genuinely can’t.

FARTS ARE LIKE FINGERPRINTS Apparently farts are like fingerprints; their bacterial composition is unique to an individual.

Which is why we aren’t seemingly bothered by the smell of our own, yet we turn our noses up and are nauseated by those of others.

I LOVE BAKED BEANS I particularly have a penchant for eating cold Baked Beans straight from the can.

Branston ‘Black Tin’ (deduced sugar & salt) 410g are my favourite as they’ve got a richness and a zestiness about them. Only dear oh dear, I spotted ’em for 99p in a mini-mart the other day. Have they suddenly become a delicacy?

Please bear in mind that certain pieces in this issue were written in January and February.

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For Christ’s sake, readers, do NOT let this ever happen to you, no matter where you buy your shoes, be they top end or bargain basement.

The Edge happened to be in Maldon recently, pre-090.00am, when people were still making their way to work, where I happened to be walking a few paces behind two rather well-dressed ladies.

Well, one of them definitely was (the boss?) while the other, younger lass (early twenties) was clearly the apprentice and certainly had a thing or two to learn from her esteemed colleague.

One of which is to always, always, ALWAYS remove any tell-tale stickers from beneath a pair of shoes before you wear ’em.

It’s simply crass not to, as well as it being a particular pet-hate of The Edge’s, as it says an awful lot about a person and none of it good (a lack of attention to detail being the least of it).

In fact, I would have liked to have pointed out such a grossly offensive error on a personal level, only I couldn’t keep up, despite the fact they were both wearing heels, as I was nursing a hamstring injury at the time, which was forcing me to hobble about at a snail’s pace.

I’m also exactly the same whenever I see labels poking up out of the back of tops/sweaters and have even been known to go up to total strangers and tuck them back in.

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Something like that, at any rate.

Because right now, writing this, at the very beginning of 2021, with pretty much only the most gloomy 3 months of the year to look forward to, stuck in Tier-4, it simply feels as though the vast majority of us are waiting. Waiting to get out of the mess we’re in.

Yes, of course the new Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine offers us hope - a lifeline out of this hideous pandemic. But is it our only hope?

BIG QUESTION: Will life return to normal (as we once knew it) at some point this year?

And if, by some miracle, it does, then surely we’ve all got to play a part in making the future better than ‘normal’. We’ve got to respect each other, and the earth we live upon, so much more than we have done in our immediate past.

But hey, you don’t want The Edge going all hippy on you, do you?

So instead, let me give you an example about waiting.

I was once one of 4 people waiting for a cab, just after midnight, in Phuket, to take us to the airport for a flight back home to Blighty. We’d already checked out of the place we’d been staying (which was off the beaten track about a mile away) and the last thing you want at the very end of a fortnight’s holiday is any stress whatsoever, right?

Fact is, I am quite a stickler for punctuality and at 00:03am the cab was already 3 minutes late and I began pacing back and forth at the open-air cab stand (there were no other cabs about) with a number of scenarios milling around in my mind. At this juncture, I should perhaps point out that we’d booked the cab earlier on that same day, at the cab stand we were now stood at, by the beach, and we were in one of the quieter parts of Phuket where, right then and there, everything was closed. Also, this was a time not so much before mobile phones, but certainly none of us had one on our person.

So, big question: what to do?

Well, we were saved about 10 minutes later when a cab turned up to drop some new arrivals off and the driver was happy to take us back to the airport. Feck knows what had happened to the cab we’d booked. Maybe he’d had a better offer?

Another time there were 4 of us on two motorbikes in Kerala, India, and our 2 guides were in a vehicle that got separated from us, along with our money, passports and mobile phones.

We waited for them for over an hour, by which time I was also in desperate need of an ‘Ertha’ (Kitt) and you simply can’t think straight when you’re desperate for one of those, can you?

Oh, and we didn’t know how much fuel we had left in our tanks as the gauges were faulty, which only added to our predicament.

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Yes, yes, yes.

As soon as The Edge saw the buxom lady running left to right, ahead of the chasing pack, across its TV screen, it instinctively knew that this was indeed going to become a most memorable commercial indeed.

“We got angry, we got sad, we cried,” recites Iggy Pop (yes, Iggy bloody Pop). “But we picked ourselves up and we started again, knowing that the sun is always shining somewhere.”

Which is surely EXACTLY what the vast majority of us were wanting to hear, as I don’t know about you, readers, but I am totally GAGGING for a holiday of almost any description.

Here’s what Iggy says in full.

“That was some year.

The sun came out when we were stuck inside.

Lockdown local.

We stood outside and we clapped for our carers.

We followed government guidelines.

STAY IN, BREATHE OUT. We got angry. We got sad. We cried.

We pick ourselves up and we start again, Knowing the sun’s always shining somewhere.

And at some point, some day, you’ll be on your dream holiday.

Thinking....is it too early for a drink?

No, no it’s not.

Everything’s better on the beach.”

These words oh so totally resonate, don’t they just?

People: by the time you are reading this, and it may well be March, it may well be April, or maybe even May, remember that it was 12 months ago when this whole damn pandemic kicked-off, so far as the vast majority of us are concerned.

Does it seem like a year? Does it feel like a year?

Time seems to go by so very, very quickly these days that The Edge isn’t sure. But one thing it does know is that it is hankering for far better times ahead and to feel the sand once again beneath its feet, scrunching it up with its toes, before ordering yet another ice-cold beer.

Simple pleasures we once took for granted, perhaps once every year, or twice is we were lucky.

And if, when, we eventually come out of all of this (while some of us unfortunately won’t), the very least we can do is appreciate everything so much more and be far better people in general, right?

People who are no longer so selfish and inconsiderate.

Wouldn’t that be good?

As that way, at least we’d have learnt something from it all.

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up an instant bond with the owner’s lovely wife ‘Beverlee’ who did a sterling job of trying to calm me down and encouraging me to stay positive.

Which led on to talk of our families and generally putting the world to rights, so by the time my car actually landed in their workshop, I felt like I had known her and her husband ‘Bob’ for years.

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The initial diagnosis was fairly positive. The car apparently needed a new pressure sensor on the exhaust. I can’t pretend to understand what this meant, but I do know that the bill came in just shy of £400. However, when I went to collect the car, Bob delivered the bad news that was basically, in mechanical terms, our car was in a coma. After replacing the pressure sensor, on a test drive, Bob had encountered the full ‘engine malfunction’ experience complete with a stalling of the engine and a cry for help with a diagnostic code concerning a fork in the automatic gear box. To directly quote him, it really was “the worst possible news you can get” and he offered his sincere condolences.

It is an assumption, often jokingly shared amongst the female population, that: ‘If it has tyres, or testicles, it’s going to cause you aggravation at some point’. As those of you who have been following me will know, I undisputedly struck gold in the latter department with my husband, Dave (unfortunately for him he’s far more likely to be the one with spouse induced grief, particularly in the form of my neverending ‘great ideas’ which are synonymous with yet more work for him...). So it arguably stands to reason that if you believe in the law of averages, or relative karma, that I’m likely to have more than my fair share of trouble with cars.

I have to say at this point that I absolutely love our family car; a Ford S Max. It’s clearly not winning any high performance or beauty contests, but it is endlessly efficient, ticks all of our boxes as a family with its elasticated boot and optional extra seats, and to me it is very much the Mary Poppins of cars i.e. ‘practically perfect in every way’.

We have had it for just over 5 years and it has proven to be a faithful workhorse. It’s been driven all over the country for endless weekends away, not to mention numerous camping trips loaded to the rafters, complete with roof box and trailer (never let it be said that we don’t travel prepared for any eventuality). For around 60,000 miles, the endurance truck has served us well, asking only for its annual service, a new tyre every now and then, and some replacement brakes in return.

But as a wise person once said: “Cars go three ways. Forwards, backwards and wrong...”

A few weeks ago our car obviously decided enough was enough. I was driving along a dual carriageway when I got a dreaded dashboard bleep of doom complete with a message about an engine malfunction. Once I had got over my initial panic about the car conking out on me there and then, and I had made it home in one piece, I telephoned my local garage and arranged to have our S Max checked out.

Unfortunately, the ailment plaguing the car was not an easy diagnosis and I found myself being passed to three different garages before I ended up in completely unknown territory at a somewhat specialist garage, approximately 25 minutes drive away. I ended up speaking to the garage on multiple occasions before our car went in, and I struck

Page 8

So we were left with a dilemma; did we offload the car (to webuyanycar or such like) and replace it with something that, in our price range, could easily have similar problems due imminently, or pay out the best part of £5k to resurrect our faithful family workhorse from its death bed?

After a full-on weekend of debate, extensive market research, and soul searching, we made the decision to invest in our beast and pray that it gives us another few years of (relatively) trouble free motoring. I’m not sure whether we will ever know if we made the right decision, and I’m also not totally sure whether Bob was happy to hear from me again or not (but at any rate, at least I know my new friend Beverlee was). Replacing our auto gear box, plus our engine belts which had reached that time of their life, was a long old job, and Bob actually worked until nearly 10pm on a Friday so we could have our car back for the weekend (what a legend).

One thing I learnt from this saga was that the Ford automatic powershift transmission is renowned for issues and consequently has a servicing threshold of 36k miles. This was news to us, so if you drive an automatic Ford S Max, double-check whether you have this system, and if so do yourself a monumental favour and get the gear box serviced.

Having no family car whilst ours was in for repair (or one that was bleating despairingly at us for a period before that) really made us realise just how reliant we are upon it. We couldn’t drive to one of our favourite parks or go anywhere together as a fivesome, and even the school run would have been a logistical nightmare involving cabs if Beverlee hadn’t managed to throw me a lifeline in the form of a little courtesy car. Dave and I also had to make the 102 mile round trip around the M25 to my spinal MRI scan in his almost Flintstone-style go kart, so by the time I arrived, I think my vertebrae had felt every single crack in the road.

This experience has made me realise that a heavily used family car is a bit like a gall bladder - rarely given much thought or consideration when all is functioning well, but when it all goes wrong, it can be seriously painful (logistically and financially) and cause endless aggravation. Although it turns out that even ludicrously, ball-busting car repair bills have silver linings, because when the heart, pancreas or kidneys of the car start playing up, at least I can look forward to having a chat with my new friend Beverlee once again.

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Channels Bar & Brasserie is situated in stunning surroundings in the heart of the Channels Estate. A family owned and run business for over 40 years, they pride themselves on making every person who visits a part of their extended family. While 2020 was a very strange year for us all, Channels have used the time to develop a brand new extension to their already popular bar and restaurant and are now exceedingly excited to share the results of their stunning new space with you all.

The all new bar & brasserie will now hold 140 inside covers and a further 300 outdoors on their gorgeous new patio, which provides both covered and heated seating, as well as al fresco casual dining.

The bar & brasserie also allows for every type of dining, whether you would simply like to take the family out for a meal, or have a far more intimate experience, there’s now sufficient space for both. The brand new patio and part of the indoor dining is now also dog friendly as furry family members are also welcome and have their very own Doggy Dining Menu!

Channels think guests will also find ‘a quick coffee’ will often lead to them staying on impromptu for a bite to eat, as the cosy, rustic interior is so inviting you genuinely won’t be able to tear yourselves away.

For those looking for a very special night out, you can also reserve their new and exclusive Chef’s Table. Designed to give you the most enjoyable of evenings, your party will receive a bespoke menu and enjoy superior views of the surrounding countryside. And they definitely know how to celebrate at Channels and are looking forward to making any celebration you may have on the horizon one you will remember for years to come.

If you have never previously dined at Channels, you are in for a treat.

Their menu boasts only the freshest, finest ingredients from many locally sourced distributors who Channels like to support. They have also recently undertaken their very own bee hives for the most glorious honey, as well as growing their own seasonal vegetables, ensuring that only the freshest of produce is used. What’s more, they are further excited to announce that they now have their very own fishing boat that will bring fresh fish to their kitchen on a daily basis.

Head Chef Dan Pitts will create seasonal menus which use only the very best in fresh meats and produce. However, if you prefer vegetarian and/or vegan options, you will be delighted to hear of their exclusive Plant Menu which caters to both.

So, whether it is visiting Channels for their numerous live music events, dining in their new restaurant, or simply enjoying a walk in the countryside and stopping off for a well deserved cuppa, Channels cannot wait to see you and show off their all new surroundings.

Please note: Channels advise their new rear patio space will be available by the end of April, with the entire restaurant making its grand opening on Monday 17th May (following government guidelines). Please view their website for all up to date information and further details.

You are also advised to please book your table in advance to avoid any disappointment.

www.theedgemag.co.uk

Oh, he is.

Maybe not so much in his playing days, but he definitely is now.

I honestly didn’t want ‘How to be a Footballer’ to end. But now that it has, I cannot wait to get hold of his follow up book, ‘I Robot - How to be a Footballer II’.

Of course, it helps massively if you like football. I certainly wouldn’t advise anyone to read it who isn’t up-to-speed where the subject matter is concerned. But this is a little bit of a fresh look at things, as well as being a gentle piss-take out of former players the likes of Stephen Ireland (particularly for the black and pink livery on his Range Rover) and Djibril Cisse, for pretty much being style-above-substance. Not to mention another player who left his Porsche parked at a railway station and forgot all about it, only being reminded of the fact when he was playing for a another club, in another country (just how many cars did that guy own?).

When a football player brings a book out, you immediately doubt they spent very much time tapping away two-fingered style (like Edgy) in front of a computer screen. We presume it’s pretty much ghost-written. But Crouchy was never your average footballer. At 6’7” he was very different right from the start and there are both expressions and the way things are constructed in these memoirs that lead The Edge to the conclusion that he must have been fairly hands-on in the production of his recollections.

Of course, a lot of non-footie fans may recognise Crouchy for his once adopted robotic goal celebration dancing, which he first performed at international level after scoring for England against Hungary in 2006 and later went on to perform in a private gathering for Prince William, much to the roar of approval from his teammates.

Since quitting the game, he’s gone on to do something called ‘That Peter Crouch Podcast’, which The Edge really must listen to at some point, and he’s even had his very own short-lived Saturday night BBC TV series called ‘Save Our Summer’ that he hosted alongside the extraordinarily tasty Maya Jama, although in his private life he is loved-up to wife and model Abbey Clancy and their 4 kids.

The Edge very much doubts we’ve heard the last of Crouchy though.

Surely you cannot keep those legs out of the limelight and I think he’d make a great sports and music chat show host.

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Are you even aware of it, readers?

If so, did you see it featured on ‘Remarkable Places To Eat’ with Fred Sirieix and Michael Roux Jr? The Newt in Somerset was formerly the Grade II listed Hadspen House, but now a South African owned hotel, spa, farm shop, ‘cyder’ press and garden museum, set on an 800-acre estate which is now a visitor attraction.

rebuilding work that followed. Thus, in homage to the troublesome amphibian, the owners changed Hadspen’s name to The Newt, which The Edge thinks is really quite poetic.

Their Butchery & Farm Shop, just behind their Victorian glasshouse, displays flanks of Hereford beef hung against an amber-coloured wall of salt bricks.

You can eat there, wander around the truly magnificent gardens, relax at their health spa, stock up from their farm shop, all at a cost I haven’t quite been able to get to grips with from looking at their website; but it ain’t going to be cheap.

Everything truly appears to be all so quintessentially English - a buttery, flower-filled version of our still most green and pleasant land.

And it looks ABSOLUTELY AMAZING! Only at this juncture, let your editor say for the record that he is not into ‘poncy places’ at all. However, from what it can gather, The Newt isn’t (poncy). It’s expensive alright, but some how laid back, chilled and relaxed. And you can eat there and dress casually, informally.

The Edge is pretty sure it’s nearer £400 than £300 to stay overnight, but you’re going to need to stay somewhere, aren’t you, as I wouldn’t fancy doing it in a day (after all, you want to enjoy the experience to the full, don’t you?).

What it appears to be is a true foodie’s paradise.

Fact is, we’ve all needed ‘a carrot’ during lockdown, haven’t we? Something to look forward to; to aspire to, even.

Well, I think this is it. Hell, I’ll be 60 this year, and if that’s not a sufficiently good enough excuse to visit The Newt, then I don’t know what is.

The name was changed due to the builders having to work around the meticulous rules imposed by the government agency Natural England, which wouldn’t let construction begin until the estate’s rare 2,000+ newts were assured safe passage throughout the five years of

Page 10

So do investigate, readers. Watch the Michael & Fred show first on Catch-Up (which also showcases three other fantastic eateries to visit in Bristol & Clifton) and then see of you can get your head around The Newt’s website to see how much booking a table might cost.

You can even stay over. There are 13 suites in the Georgian mansion, plus a further 10 in the outbuildings of the Stable Yard.

Meanwhile, the Garden café is open to non-residents, which is probably where I’ll be headed!

It’s also handily placed on route to visit the wife’s sister in Cornwall (M25, M3, A303) so there’s yet another half-decent excuse for me to book a visit this spring, summer, or whenever we’re next allowed.

But you do need to book in advance; it’s definitely too much of a trek from Chelmsford to turn up on the off-chance.

They even press their own cider (see photograph bottom-left) which they treat with the reverence of champagne and also offer tastings.

Bruton, Somerset, BA7 7NG.

The Edge 01245 348256

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If Coronavirus isn’t bad enough, experts believe the Earth is overdue a mass extinction event (basically where everything is wiped out) by a period of a staggering 30million years (imagine being overdue on your gas bill for that long).

They have worked out that catastrophic global incidents occur roughly every 27million years, but with the last mass extinction occurring 66 million years ago - when dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid or a van from Comet or such like), they reckon we’re living on borrowed time.

Catastrophic events tend to follow a cycle and with substantial new statistical anal(ysis), researchers have concluded that extinction comet showers occur every 26-30million years when they piss through the galaxy.

But if they hit Earth, Jeez, the cataclysmic impact could create widespread darkness and coldness beyond belief, not to mention wildfires, acid rain and ozone depletion, which would potentially kill off all land and marine life.

“Any threat comes down to how our planet orbits the Milky Way,” says Professor Rampino. “It seems that large body impacts and the pulses of internal Earth activity that create flood-basalt volcanism may be marching to the same 27million year drumbeat, perhaps paced by our orbit throughout the galaxy.

“New findings of sudden mass extinctions on both land and in our oceans, together with the common 26 or 27million year cycle, lend credence to the idea of periodic global catastrophic events as the triggers for extinctions.

“In fact, three of the mass annihilations of species on land and in our oceans are already known to have occurred at exactly the same times as the three largest impacts of the last 250million years, each capable of causing global disaster and resulting in mass extinctions.

“Such cataclysmic impacts and massive volcanism often work in tandem.”

So you see, readers, we’ve got a helluva lot to look forward to.

For further information, please consult The Edge’s equivalent of Patrick Moore: the kingpin@hotmail.co.uk

He did.

The Edge’s eagle-eyes spotted him when it watched the movie again during lockdown. He had a very small role as the piano teacher. In fact, I’m not sure he even uttered a word, but it was definitely him alright.

Weird, eh? The lot of an actor.

Of course, he will forever be remembered for playing the part of Trigger in ‘Only Fools & Horses’ and I guess Owen Newitt in ‘The Vicar of Dibley’, but to a lesser extent.

The Edge actually met him. Briefly. It must have been circa 1994 outside a theatre in Stratford.

No, not upon-Avon. The East London one. I was there to sell them some advertising space and he was parking up a beat-up Ford Orion.

And I thought to myself, ‘But you’re Trigger. You’re on the tele. What are you doing in a car like that?’

Parking it, I guess. Bless him.

Something else The Edge has been guilty of during lockdown is watching far too many episodes of ‘Escape to the Country’ (this is Gold Hill in Shaftsbury, Dorset, if you were wondering, scene of the famous Hovis ad), to such an extent that it is now adamant it needs to up sticks. But where do you go? What county do you choose?

Jeez, it’s going to take at least a year or two to investigate them all properly. Where’s Phil & Kirsty when you need ’em?!

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I’M LIKE MARMITE, I AM!

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Gregg Wallace

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What the bloody hell’s the craic so far as Gregg Wallace is concerned these days, eh?

I’ll confess, readers, that at fast approaching 60, your editor let things slide during this most recent of lockdowns - half-coated dark chocolate McVities Digestive biscuits, mmmmm, bring ’em on - and so seeing Gregg Wallace flaunting his newly honed bod all over magazines and TV was a proper kick in the testicles, as he’s no spring chicken himself (age 56).

But fair play to him, you cannot argue with his results.

I mean, we might find him irritating in the extreme, but we cannot knock him for shedding the pounds and toning up, that’s for sure.

And to be fair, The Edge does like his ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’ attitude to health and fitness. So here’s a few more of his soundbites.

1. If you want to resist eating crisps and cake, the first step is not to have them in the house. Sounds obvious, but it’s actually a good point.

The only trouble is, being a Yorkshireman, I’d have trouble chucking out the Doritos and the choccy biccies, knowing full well I’d bought them (i.e paid out good money for such treats).

2. Lift weights. A lot of women, in particular, get worried that lifting weights will turn them into Arnetta Schwarzenegger, but it honestly doesn’t work like that. Weights simply help tone you up is all, and also helps burn calories. You’d have to lift like crazy to turn into Arnie, and maybe take a steroid or two, so you can remove that myth from your thoughts.

3. Take caution where so-called protein bars are concerned. That’s because many of them are crammed full of fats and sugars. More often than not, you’d be far better off eating raw nuts.

4. Fats and carbs aren’t your enemy. It’s simply a case of getting the right balance. What was that diet where people were eating loads of meat and carbs were pretty much banned? The Atkins diet, wasn’t it? And you also ended up with dog breath. There’s really no point in doing anything that’s too extreme, as you’re simply not going to keep it up.

5. Snacking out of boredom. Lethal. I myself have fallen into this trap, on the grounds that ‘Covid’s about, so the least I can do is treat myself to a few jellies’, only I end up eating the whole bloody packet.

In short, there doesn’t seem to be anything radically new to what Gregg is saying, but you’ve got to want to do it, haven’t you? And this latest lockdown has pretty much meant we’ve had to train indoors, but I cannot stand training at home (I had enough of that in my teenage years). So what I’ve ended up doing is simply going for a walk, although I do always put ‘my best foot forward’ and make it a bit of a march for anything between 1hr - 2.5hrs. Only I’ve ended up doing it every other day, rather than every day, if the weather’s not too inspiring, like it generally isn’t during January and February. So it’s going to be a long journey back to some semblance of fitness once the gyms reopen for yours truly, which I’m kind of looking forward to, although with a certain degree of trepidation.

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It has, hasn’t it, readers?

Surely it’s not just your editor that thinks so?

Let me give you an example. The other day I was astounded - yes, absolutely fecking astounded - to receive an email from those wonkers at Dart Charge (the thieving bridge/tunnel shysters) informing me that I hadn’t used ‘their’ crossing facilities in the past 12 months and if I didn’t contact them within the next so many days, they would automatically close my account.

Well, the no good Essex/Kent borderline bestards.

I even had a credit of £11.67 on my account as well, so what would have happened to that? Go towards their 2021 Staff Christmas* Party, The Edge shouldn’t wonder. (*Doh! I said the bloody ‘C’ word in April.)

So I rang the twats, didn’t I, despite the fact they were advising me that it’s both ‘quicker and easier’ to contact them online.

Only I’ll not be told by them what’s best for me.

“Right, I’ve just received an email from you....” I immediately launched into them, upon the blower eventually being picked up.

“Account number and car registration number, please, sir?”

“Oh for feck’s sake. LISTEN! Who is the fecking customer here, eh?

You’ve had the ignorant, cocksure, bare-faced temerity to send me an email appertaining to me not having used your bridge/tunnel - which I thought had been paid for several times over by now? - for the past 12 months, stating that you will close my account henceforth/forthwith if I (aye) don’t contact you. Only shouldn’t that be the other way around, me being the bleeding customer and all? Why the hell do you expect me to waste my time contacting you in order to continue something that is already in place regarding an account that is in credit, you absolute pricks?

After all, if I no longer required your services, believe me, you’d have heard from me. So why are you creating an inconvenience, eh?”

Monotone voice: “By law it’s standard business practice...”

“Then whoever passed that LAW is clearly a fecking ARSEHOLE, aren’t they?”

Only I couldn’t get the chappy to agree with me as no doubt ‘all calls are recorded’ so that they can have a right laugh about them afterwards.

Worst of all, I could just picture the prick I was talking to giving me the wonker sign as he was sat there, listening to me spout off.

But it’s NOT bloody me, is it, readers?

It’s THEM, for Christ’s sake!

Some of those nuns in the abandoned harem 8,000ft up in the Himalayas seemed as though they were absolutely gagging for it, didn’t they?

But it was all a bit of a damp squib, didn’t you think, with far more peculiarities to be seen during the 1990 movie Nuns on the Run, starring Eric Idle and that huge lump of sexy Scottish beefcake, Robbie Coltraine.

There was always a strange air of HDP (heavy duty porn) simmering just beneath the surface, but all of The Edge’s hopes for a bit of NONA (nun on nun action) went unrequited.

All in all, The Edge felt a bit cheated after binge-watching all three episodes.

“I desperately wanted one of the sister’s psyches to crack,” said EE.

www.theedgemag.co.uk

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stant loss of breath and wheeziness which made even the simplest things, such as talking (mainly me asking the better-half for yet another hot water bottle to help with the pain and shivers), extremely difficult, whilst on other occasions, merely getting out of bed to go to the loo made me feel like an 84 year old, rather than the 44 year old that I am.

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By day nine I phoned the NHS hotline as my condition was showing no improvement whatsoever and if anything was actually getting worse. Paracetamol, on its own, didn't seem to be helping. The very, very helpful lady on the other end of the line thought the best thing she could do was send an ambulance out to give me a check-up.

POLIT INCO ICALLY RREC T

ONE YEAR ON

Written in January 2021...

SORRY, because I didn’t really want to go here, but more than one year on, things haven't improved, have they? In fact, they seem to have got worse when it comes to dealing with Covid.

I honestly promised myself I wouldn't write anything about it again, because we’re all sick to the back teeth of hearing about it, but I find myself writing this on the back end of actually having had Covid and being out of action for almost a month.

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So to any of you out there who STILL thinks it's a hoax and that it can’t be as bad as the media are making out, you seriously need to wake up and smell the coffee, because I am telling you from the horse’s mouth, I honestly wouldn't wish it on anyone.

I've had the flu (real flu, not just Man Flu) a couple of times over the years, but by god, Covid is honestly a hundred times worse.

At least when I've had the flu, by day three I've started feeling like my old self and could see light at the end of the tunnel. But not with this new strain of Covid I couldn’t.

When my test results showed positive, I wasn't really showing any major symptoms at all, apart from a headache and a little tiredness. But even then I put that down to my new job and the varying hours/shifts that I was now undertaking.

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But by day four of isolation, BOOM. Suddenly things started to change very quickly indeed.

My headaches got worse, I ached all over my body, I had nausea, sickness, loss of both smell and taste, which quickly led to a complete loss of appetite. I was constantly thirsty. I suffered sleep deprivation, which absolutely killed any energy levels that I might have had. Not to mention ‘the sweats’.

But the hardest part was the con-

Page 14

At first I felt guilty about having one sent out, as we all know the strain the NHS were under. But once they came and did all the checks and were happy with my heart and blood oxygen levels, it gave me a certain peace of mind, but also showed that the body thermometer we had definitely needed upgrading, as when we’d been taking my temperature it was showing 36, but when the ambulance guys took it, it was in the high 39's and confirmed why I was feeling so bad.

On the back of upgrading our thermometer we also bought an oximeter to keep an eye on my heart rate and blood oxygen levels. If you are unfortunate enough to contract the virus, I would honestly recommend you purchase the latter, as one of the biggest problems seems to be the hardening of the lungs which can occur when your blood oxygen levels get too low.

While at work I always wore full PPE, yet I still eventually caught it. So please, please, for the sake of yourself and others, only go out if you really need to go out and wear as much protection as you can to give yourself the best possible chance of staying safe.

One of our close friends recently had her husband omitted to hospital as he was so bad during the same period that I was ill, and then she sadly also lost her Dad to Covid, all in the same week.

At some point it will affect you, or at least someone you know and love, and therefore I just pray there is a happy outcome and they are as fortunate as I have been to come out on the other side.

Furthermore, I would just like to say a BIG THANK YOU to our friends and family who were able to drop off bits and pieces to our door whilst we all had to isolate, which included about a year's supply of Lucozade that we've now got stashed away. It all definitely helped me pull through.

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On 17th February, completely out of the blue, The Edge received an email from someone who these days goes by the name of ‘The British Mother’, asking if, by chance, it still had a photograph of her (Tracey) and her sister (Candy) that The Edge took of them way back in either 1997 or 1998, in Chicago’s, when, said Tracey, “The Edge used to take pictures of girls”.

“I appreciate it’s a long-shot,” she continued, “but I lost a big box of old photo’s recently and I remember you taking one of us. I think lockdown’s been making me go through some sort of a nostalgic period.”

And do you know what, readers? The Edge never found the original photograph, but it did discover Tracey and her sister featured in an old copy of its October 1998 issues.

These days Tracey has a BA (hons) degree in Film & Literature, a PGCE (post graduate certificate of education) in teaching English & Drama, three children and a website called www.thebritishmother.com (Instagram: @thebritishmother) which is all to do with travel inspiration for families, including interviews with people about their travel experiences.

She is also the founder of ‘Children Of The Deep’ (I know, readers, that was my quizzicle expression too). “It will be launching in a couple of months time,” Tracey informed me. “It’s devoted to wild and natural beauty and rebel girls of eternal summer. I create eco bikinis and beachwear worn by girls of substance. It’s a sustainable swimwear brand for teens and twenties.”

Of course, in order to find the photograph of Tracey and Candice, I obviously had to drag out file#1 (I have 8 large files of back issues) which I hadn’t looked at in donkies years, and it was...well, I’m not even sure how to describe the experience, but it was certainly different.

The very first Edge (I’m not even sure whether I have a copy of every single issue, but if I’m missing any, it’ll only be one or two at the most) on glossy paper wasn’t until issue no: 31 (May1999) and was a gamechanger as it looked so much better. Club Zeus were advertising way back then (remember them?) while Dukes were on the back cover.

Then, as Tracey has mentioned, there was the Chicago Rock Cafe (on the outside edge of page 9) and Osborne Honda (Writtle), which is all just houses now. Another advertiser was Prime Video on Rainsford Road (opposite Club Zeus); do any of you readers remember them? I used to love renting videos (‘3 for a tenner’ style)!

Chelmsford has changed so very much since I’ve been doing The Edge.

But for the better? Let’s be hearing your thoughts, readers...

www.theedgemag.co.uk

No, not the self-proclaimed ‘Zlatan the Incredible’.

Heading a football and its link with dementia, The Edge is on about.

During your editor’s former playing days at the lowest level, the very worst was when the opposing goalkeeper had the ball in his hands at the edge of his 18 yard box, before proper launching it down the field, in your direction, particularly when the ball came down with snow on top.

Now the trick, when heading a football, is always to meet the ball with the ‘meat’ of the forehead, as opposed to the ‘soft spot’, which is on the very top of your head where often there’s often a little dip, or anywhere else for that matter.

But you can get shoved by an opposing player just before the moment of impact, or you can simply cry off. Either way, you don’t always impact the ball exactly where you ought to, and particularly where old, wet, leather footballs were concerned of yesteryear, that could bloody well hurt. Thus we are seeing more and more cases of retired footballers sadly suffering from dementia, the late Jeff Astle and Nobby Stiles being but two of them.

So what are the options?

Should there be a changing of the rules, such as players only being allowed to aerially challenge a ‘long kick’ (would referees be issued with tape measures?) after the ball has bounced once? Or is there a simpler solution, such a players wearing some form of headgear?

I was actually at the match when former Chelsea goalkeeper Petr Cech sustained his head injury at Reading (when they were in the Premier League) in October of 2016 and subsequently required an operation for a depressed skull fracture. Although that had nothing to do with heading a football, does it not add weight to the argument that perhaps all XI outfield players would be safer if they were all wearing some form of headgear, like Cech then did for the remainder of his career?

For some reason, we’re always resistant to change, presumably for fear of ballsing things up, like VAR has done. Yet the capabilities of VAR are not at fault; it’s been VARs implementation that’s caused such a mess of things, and that’s the fault of those who set the rules, as opposed to the fantastic technology that’s now available.

‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’

But it is broke, isn’t it, as dementia cases are sadly on the rise, so it looks as though something’s got to be done. The question is, what’s the safest, sensiblest, practical solution?

The fact is, it would be a nonsense to remove the ability and opportunities of heading a football from the game altogether. But so far as long punts upfield of 75 yards and above are concerned, from deep defence to attack, then yes, The Edge believes a ‘one bounce’ rule would not reduce the spectacle of the game to its detriment, whilst the wearing of protective headgear should also not be ignored.

When all’s said and done, players need to be protected. And while we’re at it, let’s look long and hard at OTT tackles too, a la Virgil van Dijk.

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The Edge 289 new_The Edge 172.qxd 3/23/2021 3:48 PM Page 18

HERE COME THE GIRLS

A Beaulieu Park Wife’s Diary in which names have been tweaked to spare blushes and exposed breaches to Pre-Nup Agreements.

April already; how is that even possible? Are we finally ready to emerge from the Covid winter hibernation period and turn our Vitamin-D starved faces towards sunnier climes, much like the daffodils already pushing their way through in Beaulieu’s ever-decreasing green spaces? I have been sooooo missing the sunshine and holidays, thanks to the travel ban. I was honestly one phone call away from the loony bin the other day when Mr. S popped into the en-suite to find me sitting in the middle of the highly polished, Italian-imported porcelain floor tiles, rocking and sniffing the Ambre Solaire. Seriously, anytime I smell anything with a faint whiff of something ‘tropical’ I’m on the Kuoni website positively drooling.

Nathan ordered coconut rice with his Friday night take-away last week and I was about to pick the phone off its cradle and dial my PTA (personal travel advisor) and cane the credit card, mine the endless depth of my neglected air miles and pack up the LV ‘Horizon rolling luggage’!!!! FML - how desperate can a girl get?

I did enjoy the brief snowy spell, if I’m being honest. After all, what fashion conscious Essex dweller doesn’t appreciate the rare opportunity to don the furry headband with oversized sunglasses and dazzling your neighbours with your brilliant white Bognor Fraenzi Ski Trousers? Okay, so I did feel a bit of a twat trotting round Sainsbury’s looking like I’d just stepped off the slopes in Tignes (when all of the other shoppers clearly looked like they’d just flung on yesterday’s dinner-soiled tracksuit), but that’s what happens when your prissy child needs an emergency pair of gloves to tolerate the chill-factor whilst out sledging (and it’s “way too far” to pop back home and get them).

At least the snowy exploits provided a welcome distraction from the purgatory that was home-schooling. I have always known that I would have made a lousy teacher (and not only because the salary would ill-afford the trappings of the life of luxury I subscribe to). I simply cannot imagine having to look after a classroom of whiny, privileged, snotty, idle brats, so having to don the mantle of home tutor these past few months has used up every last scrap of tolerance I possess. Not sure if it’s just

my child, but how is it that a soon-to-be 8 year old can recite and perfectly learn every last lyric and dance move to a TikTok video, but forgets what she has to do by way of homework in the minutes between leaving a class Zoom call and coming into the room to tell me about it?

So, there’s me, sitting and listening to every live-streamed lesson with her, so that I know what it is ‘we’ have to do. I’d love to say that we are bonding over our shared learning together, but in reality, if I hear the terms ‘fronted adverbial’, ‘alliteration’, ‘homophone’ or ‘prefix/suffix’ again, I think I may just end up in a ‘detention’ centre all of my very own. Plus, and I know that this is like admitting in public that I don’t believe in God, I bloody detest Roald Dahl. Or at least I do when he is subject to ‘guided class reading’, inspiration for writing a diary entry for Matilda, or a letter to f@cking Fantastic Mr Fox (that’s alliteration right there for you)! For any parent currently battling to get your beloved offspring to come up with a short piece of creative writing when they have the attention span of a gnat, you will appreciate that it’s probably far easier to get a next day home delivery food shop.

It’s little wonder that gin sales in the retail sector have apparently topped £1bn for the first time ever. Home schooling, I tell you, has a lot to answer for. In my humble opinion, it has single-handedly creating a nation of alcoholic parents and uneducated offspring. What a cheery thought. All of our children will be as thick as pigshit, but hey-ho, we’ll all be too pissed to care! The weekly grocery shop is now HEAVILY punctuated with Whitley Neill alongside the watermelon, Sav Blanc nestling amongst the salmon and Paracetamol (to counter the effects of the above), interspersed with the pesto. I’ve even taken to driving to the local bottle bank once a week to get rid of the evidence; by the time the fortnightly glass collection happens our ‘green bin’ looks like we’ve held a street party on Beaulieu Boulevard.

So it only remains for me to say - stay sane, stay safe, watch Bridgerton and definitely do NOT stay sober!

N.B. This column was supplied to The Edge mid-February’21, so take into consideration exactly how you were feeling way back then, before Boris’ announcement!

BEAULIEU PARK HOUSEWIVES

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The Edge thinks it’s absolutely obscene.

It has no axe to grind with the South London builder himself. Good luck to him.

But the fact that this has happened at all is surely testament to his 2,000,000 ‘followers’ who regularly tune-in to his so called antics, such as bouncing up and down on his sofa with his kids (yep, truly extraordinary stuff like that).

account is called @thesmithyfamily and The Edge has just logged onto it for the very first time, watched the first three clips at random (one of which shows a plate of food he is having for lunch) and they are simply utter rubbish/shite/bollocks (sorry, but they are).

It all honestly beggars belief!

“People seem to like watching some of the wacky stuff we get up to,” he says.

The 33-year-old shares clips of his family’s everyday lives, from sweet, personal moments, such as opening up a tin of peas, to ‘sketches and pranks’. And he says that he now earns enough to step away from his building business in order to focus on social media full-time, with the family’s presence on Facecock alone paying more than he was earning laying bricks.

“It’s far more enjoyable to be at home with the wife and kids,” he says. “Rather than us having a bad year, the past twelve months has probably turned out to be the best year of our entire lives.”

And get this, he’s even in the process of creating an 11,000sq ft ‘content warehouse’ (whatever one of those is) where he, and eventually other ‘creators’, can film their very own spectacular brand of nonsense.

?????

“We do a lot of pranks with silly content.

There’s not just one set thing we do. We’re versatile. It’s whatever we’re up to that day.

And it’s glued us as a family.”

Good for him. Only how have things escalated (or descended) to this sad degree?

The couple have two daughters, a ‘bun in the oven’, plus the wife’s half-bro’ is also a regular feature in the family’s videos, as is the chap’s son via a former missus.

The Edge instinctively knew that Facecock wasn’t a good thing when it first came out, yet such mediocrity has spread like the plague (or, dare it be said, Covid-19).

What a right riveting line-up, eh?

Once again, The Edge stresses it bears the builder no ill-feeling. It is merely questioning the fact that in the world we live in today, mere idiotic self-promotion appears to be netting some folk gainful employment.

Now you could call that enterprising, and no doubt it is. But it’s the sheep who follow such bullsh t that The Edge is calling to task.

For those of you that’re interested, the

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He joined TikTok back in December 2019 after his daughter called him “embarrassing” (hint, hint) and told her dad that she wouldn’t be doing any further TikToks with him.

Fuelled by such high praise, he then decided to open an account of his own and it appears to have ‘gone through the roof’, to quote a layman’s phrase from his former profession.

How on earth did that happen?

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There really is no craft of any sort involved.

All people seem to do these days is forward video clips on to one another, while no-one thinks to ask anyone how they actually are, or how they’re feeling. It’s sad that those days just don’t seem to exist any more.

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The Edge 289 new_The Edge 172.qxd 3/23/2021 4:01 PM Page 20

Back by popular demand!

A belated hello, dear readers.

At the time of writing this column, at the beginning of February, I have no idea when The Edge will next go to print due to the current lockdown restrictions. What a world we live in.

Hopefully if you are reading this it is a sign that things are improving.

Hallelujah!

How are you guys coping? I’m doing OK, if I’m honest with you.

But my life is so different now as compared to 12 months ago. I actually managed seven days in Barbados in February 2020, as well as 14 days in Portugal February/ March. And when you consider I also managed to slip in a trip to Crispiero in Italy during June, between lockdowns, I reckon I might be amongst the 5% most travelled people in the entire world during 2020. I’m being serious. Think about it; the vast majority of the people who inhabit the earth do not travel anywhere, pandemic or otherwise, while the millions of regular travellers have all been stuck at home due to the pandemic. So that’s my claim to fame for 2020 and I’m sticking to it.

DEAKS

It is great to see the vaccine being rolled out. I have friends and family that have had the first jab and I expect to be invited along for mine soon, certainly before this column is published. Bring it on, I say. The development and roll out of the antivirus makes me proud to be British and I hope it sees off the Coronavirus once and for all. However, do stay safe in the meantime, as I need all the readers I can get.

The biggest danger for me during lockdown is whenever I am tempted to pick up the hair clippers that I keep in the back of my bathroom cabinet. It happened twice in 2020 and I regretted it immediately both times, as I listened to them calling me once again this week. “Use me, use me,” they hissed. “Cut your ridiculously fluffy hair with us!” With no barbers open, my hair tends to grow out as opposed to down, so I tend to look like a member of The Hair

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Bear Bunch (you remember them, right?). Eventually, and I’m only human after all, I break and out they come, even though I’m well aware of the damage these bad boys can do. So I generally scoot around them for 3-4 days, often moving them into another room to avoid temptation, yet their calling seems to become louder as the image facing me in my bathroom mirror every morning becomes too much for even me to bear and eventually I crack.

It’s the first cut that does the damage. You know there is no going back once you’ve put a 50mm wide parting through your barnet front to back. At that point you know that even though you have selected the longest cut, a #12 in my case, it’s going to look ridiculous. And so it does. After which you simply cannot get it even, even when exerting more pressure on the top than the sides, and thus I end up looking like Rab C. Nesbitt, which is not a good look at all.

My current movie star look, and I’m thinking Frankenstein’s monster here, has been complimented by my losing two front teeth just before Christmas. Yes folks, I honestly managed to dislodge two of my teeth while gnawing on a bone, whilst drunk, so now I’m in desperate need of a pair of implants, which unfortunately I cannot have done until the world returns to normal. A friend of mine has recommended me to a Polish dentist that I can visit once lockdown ends. Apparently I will get a whole new set of pearly white gnashers, just like Simon Cowell’s, for but £24.99. Bargain. I only hope my hair will have grown back by then to restore my film star good looks. Did I mention my club foot as well? Only kidding. I guess my fan mail will probably dry up now I’ve shared this information with you. No more 3 day old worn knickers in my postbag anymore, I suppose?

Moving on, I wanted to tell you about dogs and horses. I’m a big fan of the gee-gees and the greyhounds, you see. I used to own a part share in a woofer called Morningtown Tom, which was good fun. I’ve still got a photo of him somewhere. I also owned a part share in several horses too, including Inching Closer, Blue Moon and Ackzo to name just three from memory.

Judging by how much I saw of the prize money, I guess I must have owned their back leg, the trailing one that crossed the finishing line last. But it really was good fun as we got to go to lots of great race courses around the country and receive lots of ‘nudge nudge, wink wink’ tips from the trainers and the stable boys. You’d be surprised just how many of the horses are not trying in races. It’s definitely a mug’s game, unless you have a little insider knowledge.

Anyhow, as I’ve just mentioned, Ackzo was one of the horses that our little consortium owned and believe it or not it started red hot favourite in the Irish Grand National, which is run just outside Dublin at a place with the magical name of Fairyhouse. So we all turned up for 3 days of racing, and boozing, in a private box and a posh hotel (ah, so that’s where my share of the prize money went) to watch Ackzo romp home to untold riches. It finished 17th.

I vaguely recall that he might have been ‘pulled off’? I can’t remember now.

Or is it ‘pulled up’? Yeah, that’s probably it. He only used to receive the former if he actually won a race.

I used to have so much fun with that consortium of owners, aka mates. I could write a column, or six, about those days alone, and I honestly think I might, with the names changed, of course, to protect the innocent, not to mention the not so innocent. So that’s the remainder of this year’s columns sorted then!

Did you know that all race horse names must be approved by the British Horseracing Board to avoid any form of inappropriation? Meanwhile, mischievous owners are quite clever and often get a name through unnoticed, simply to embarrass a racehorse commentator on television, I suspect. An example of this was Hoof Hearted that slipped through the net, so to speak. Other applications have included Ben Timover, Neil Andblowme, Oil Beef Hooked (an Irish owner, I strongly suspect), Anita Hanjaab and my own personal favourite, Willy Fisterbottom. You’ve clearly got to have your wits about you to be in charge of the horse registration department at the British Horseracing Board, haven’t you?

EDGE

the Page 20

Which reminds me of the time a pal begged me to get him an invite to a posh cocktail party at Claridges in Mayfair that me and my team at Coughdrop, Bollox & Bellend had been invited to. I told the host that I had a client over from New York and I wanted to bring him along. “Sure you can,” replied the host. “What’s his name and I’ll have a name badge left at the reception for him?” I told him that his name was Wally Foresckin and I even spelt it out, letter by letter, to make sure he got it right. My mate then spent the entire evening telling everyone what a complete and utter wanker I was. Meanwhile, the host, who was in on the joke by then, asked the girls and boys serving the champagne and canopies to only serve guests who were wearing their name badges, so my mate couldn’t take his off.

And on that note, I think that’s about it from me for this month, folks, whichever month this edition ends up being published.

So until next time, stay safe and stay well.

TTFN, Deaks.

Email: gmdeakin@gmail.com Instagram: gmdeakin

The Edge 077 646 797 44

The Edge 289 new_The Edge 172.qxd 3/23/2021 4:01 PM Page 21

SPRING CLEAN I was in the middle of doing some spring cleaning and came across a box that I had completely forgotten about. Opening it up I was delighted to see that it contained tons of old sporting memorabilia that I used to collect.

As a kid, I used to collect a match day programme every time I went to watch the mighty Hammers and I also used to buy old programmes from games I was too young to have attended (or, in some cases, wasn’t even born).

went on to become professionals.

Tony Carr, the ex-West Ham youth team manager, was one of them and my Grandad stayed in touch with him throughout the years.

Turns out he went on to help develop one of England’s greatest generations of youth players and he often used to invite us down to the training ground where I was able to get my hands on lots of signed memorabilia from the likes of Joe Cole, Rio Ferdinand, Frank Lampard etc.

I also used to go to the odd away game too and managed to get some signed bits from the likes of Cristian Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney and Dennis Bergkamp. That lead me also into buying a few bits online and my pride and joy is an old Romford recorder signed by Bobby Moore.

It was really nice to look back over it all. I don’t know whether any of it is worth anything? I guess my kids will find out one day, when they clear the loft out once I’m goner!

CRYPTOCURRENCY

The pick of the bunch is a 1966 World Cup final programme signed by (Sir) Alf Ramsey.

My Grandad used to run a football team where a couple of players

It was a few years ago that I first learned about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. I was aware of it before then, but had always associated it with shady characters conducting business on the so called ‘dark web’. It wasn’t until one day I attended a seminar, at work, on the use of ‘block chain’ and ‘smart contracts’ that I really saw the potential of the technology that sits behind

the coins and just how clever the concept of digital currencies really is. After doing a bit of reading up, I decided I wanted to invest and ignored all of the warnings about a ‘fool and his money’ being easily parted. But I obviously didn’t want to lose any money, so I only put £40 in, which wouldn’t have been the end of the world if I did.

Full of hope that I would be able to retire within a year or two, I signed up to an exchange call Binance and quickly swapped my £40 into Bitcoin (BTC). What I then discovered is that you have to save your coins in a wallet and after a quick Google I found out that wasn’t the most straightforward of processes.

Unbelievably, I somehow managed to do it and had it transferred onto an old laptop. I then had every intention of buying some low value coins, as I thought they had the most potential to help me get rich quick, but I couldn’t work out how to do it and, more disappointingly at the time, I couldn’t work out how to trade my coins back. After a few hours of trying, I resigned myself to the fact that I just couldn’t do it and wrote off my £40.

I recently set up a new office and have been transferring some photos and documents off my old laptop. I stumbled upon the old Bitcoin wallet and after another quick Google search I found that technology is now much more user friendly. I managed to swap the fraction

of a coin that I held into a new wallet/exchange and sat patiently waiting for the transaction to complete.

When it did, I was most pleasantly surprised to see that my account flashed up as having £1,100 in it.

Turns out Bitcoin has taken off quite a bit of late and whilst it is not enough for me to retire on, I am well chuffed with my 2,650% return!

The only question I have now is whether to stick or twist. There are lots of commentators who say that Bitcoin will keep on growing, while others suggest it is a giant Ponzi scheme. But for the time being, it is continuing to grow, so I will keep it where it is. I say that because it makes me sound like I know what I’m doing, when the reality is I don’t really know how to get my money out. Therefore this article in no way constitutes sound financial advice!

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Page 21

The Edge 289 new_The Edge 172.qxd 3/23/2021 4:02 PM Page 22

ONLY JO KI NG! APE

God: "I’m running short of feet and I’m working on a new creature.”

Angel: "I have a box of hands.”

God: “Hmmm.”

After a couple of minutes...

God: "Feck it. Plenty of hands is fine.”

Angel: “But what will it be?”

God: "A kind of an ape.”

Angel: "It’s really weird looking.”

God: "Yes. But it has thrice the hands to throw a lot more faeces at a time.”

EXTRA FRIES “What do you mean extra fries? If there’s room for extra fries, it means you didn’t put enough on in the first place.”

HEALTHY Healthy is merely the slowest possible rate at which a person can die.

‘SERVES FOUR’ Challenge accepted.

Q&A Q. How do deaf people know when the icecream van is coming?

A. ???

WINKY FACE Yes kids, it is a winky face. But in olden times, the semi-colon was used to separate archaic written devices known as 'complete sentences’.

NOSTALGIA Nah, it’s not what it used to be.

Back in the day, you used to be able to cough to cover up the sound of a fart.

HONESTLY Honestly, I am trying to see things from your point of view. Only I just can’t seem to stick my head quite that far up my arse to get where you’re coming from.

FIRST DIBS Her: “You wanna take off my bra?”

Him: “Umm, okay.”

Her: “Just so long as you understand that I have first dibs on any food you find in it.”

MESSY DIVORCE Me and the missus just went through a particularly messy divorce and naturally we had to split the house between us.

Unfortunately, I got the outside.

TEMPER TEMPER "Doc, you gotta help me. I keep losing my rag with people really quickly.”

Doc: "So tell me about the problem?”

"I just did, you fecking deaf twat.”

GEEK I'm not a nerd, I'm a geek.

Get your societal reject dichotomies in order, w nker.

*

‘SERVES TWO’ Yeah, right. Only if you buy two...

F1 Have you ever noticed that a lot of F1 drivers seem to be named after Scottish towns?

For instance, there’s Stirling Moss, Lewis Hamilton, Eddie Irvine and, at a push, Ayr Town Centre.

HELIUM Dentist: "Helium?”

Me: "Will it kill the pain?”

Dentist: "No. But when you scream, it’s funny.”

LAST £100 Don’t be afraid of success.

I was down to the last £100 in my bank account and did I use it to buy food? Or to pay the rent?

No. I invested it and now I have £47.38

SOCIAL ETIQUETTE Interviewer: "So, what do you consider to be one of your major strengths?”

Me (thoughtfully running hand through beard): "Hmmm, I guess I'd have to say social etiquette.”

Interviewer: "Please let go of my beard. And get off my knee and go back round to your side of the table.”

DRIPPING BLOOD If your nose and ears are dripping blood, you are obviously playing the bagpipes correctly.

NAKED Damnit!

I’ve just sent a picture of me naked to everyone in my address book.

Not only is this a very embarrassing situation in which to find myself, it has also cost me a small fortune in postage stamps.

HORROR MOVIES "Horror movies don’t scare me,” I said with a degree of confidence to the missus.

"Au contraire,” she said. “You forget that I do the washing in this house and I saw your pants after we watched The Blair Witch Project.”

INSECURITY ISSUES The missus left me due to my insecurity issues.

No, wait? Yes, she’s back. SHE’S BACK! Apparently she just went to the kitchen to make herself a brew.

THE FIVE STAGES OF MAN 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Pees pants.

Sits on potty to pee.

Pees standing up.

Sits to pee.

Pees pants.

PREVIOUS LIFE Went to see a spiritualist the other day.

Told me I was a fish in a previous life.

Talk about being gutted.

UPSET She said: "I can't even tell you how upset I am."

Only to prove herself wrong 5 seconds later.

STICKY SUBSTANCE When Spider-Man shoots a sticky substance all over someone, bystanders call him ‘amazing’ and things like that. Yet whenever I try it in Costa, I am at the very least frowned upon, and sometimes even asked to leave.

BIT OF A LOOKER A young lass down our street reckons I’m a bit of a looker. Well, ‘voyeur’ were her exact words, but I knew where she was coming from.

IMMEDIATELY She wakes me up with a hushed, yet urgent, whisper into my shell-like. "Quick! My husband’s just returned home unexpectedly. You’ll have to leave immediately.”

So I grab my stuff, climb through the bedroom window and begin lowering myself silently down the drainpipe. I hastily pull my pants on in the bushes, when suddenly I realise that I live here.

This is my home. So I go round to the front of the house and there, at the door, is my wife, waiting for me with a bit of a face on.

"Guilty conscience?” she suggests.

BAD BOYS I accidentally let it slip that I have a bit of a thing for bad boys, so now he’s loading the dishwasher up all wrong on purpose.

PSYCHO When a woman laughs during an argument, trust me, it’s the first sign that the psycho part of her brain has been engaged. So take two steps back and make sure she’s not covering the escape route.

LINSEED OIL & EPSOM SALT Do you know that if you rub Linseed Oil and Epsom Sea Salts onto a painful part on your body it will immediately feel both greasier and taste saltier?

DORITOS What, share a big bag of Doritos?

Jog on.

POST-OP WARD Meanwhile, on the post-op ward.

Surgeon: "Yeah, sorry about that extra set of stitches. Some wally was holding the X-ray upside down.”

All jokes published are supplied by Edge readers. Please send your ‘egg yokes’ to shaun@theedgemag.co.uk

The Edge 289 new_The Edge 172.qxd 3/23/2021 4:02 PM Page 23

The average person farts around 15 times a day, even though some of them are barely noticeable and some are during sleep.

We all do it, don’t we?

However, The Edge knows some couples who have supposedly never farted in front of each other (or so they say) in their entire lives.

Heaven forbid, what’s that all about? How uncom(fart)able must that be?

FARTS SOUND FUNNY - IT’S AS SIMPLE AS THAT. They’re like the same old joke told day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, yet they’re still as funny as the first time you ever heard it.

Which in The Edge’s book makes then PURE GENIUS. But when all’s said, smelt and done, they are merely intestinal gas which forms as a result of digesting food, which is why sometimes they smell of whatever you’ve last eaten.

Due to the build up of gas and air swallowed throughout the day, farting is often at a premium during the evening hours, particularly after the consumption of dinner, the main meal of the day.

What’s more, the activity of coughing can trigger flatulence, yet we’ve all tried to disguise the sound of a fart by coughing over it (and quite often getting the timing wrong), haven’t we?

In the 1600s, a man who worked for Queen Elizabeth was so embarrassed after an accidental fart in her presence that he left England for seven long years.

Cow’s farts and burps are far more damaging to the environment due to methane gas which is 20 times more powerful than CO2. The average cow releases 200lbs-400lbs of methane per year through flatulence. Feeding cows alfalfa and flaxseed can reduce their methane by up to 25%.

During the Apollo 16 mission to the moon, astronaut John Young got really bad flatulence from drinking orange juice.

Farting into a jar and then smelling it was thought to be a cure for the Bubonic Plague, as opposed to a trick played on a distant Aunt.

There are documents from the Edo period of Japan that suggest fart battles used to take place. Ancient drawings depict men blasting farts at one another, and sometimes at women too.

Rupert Grint’s first movie outside of the Harry Potter series was a film called Thunderpants which featured a young boy whose explosive farts land him a job as an astronaut.

The world record for an uninterrupted fart is (apparently) 59 seconds.

www.theedgemag.co.uk

Dolly Parton & Queen Elizabeth II went to the Pearly Gates on the same day. They met with an Angel to find out if they would be admitted to Heaven.

The angel said, "Unfortunately, there's only one space in Heaven today, so I must decide which one of you will be admitted."

The Angel asked Dolly if there was some particular reason why she should go to Heaven.

Dolly took off her top and said,"Look at these puppies, they're the most perfect breasts God ever created and I'm sure it will please God to be able to see them every day for eternity."

The Angel thanked Dolly, then asked Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II the same question.

The Queen walked over to the toilet, pulled the chain and flushed it without saying a single word.

The Angel immediately said, "OK, your Maj, you’re in."

Dolly was upset and asked, "What was that all about? I showed you two of God's own perfect creations and you turned me down. She simply flushed a commode and she got admitted to Heaven! Would you care to explain that to me?"

"Sorry, Dolly," said the Angel, "but even in Heaven, a royal flush always beats a pair."

Page 23

The Edge 289 new_The Edge 172.qxd 3/25/2021 12:11 PM Page 24

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Page 24

We all know it’s been a very difficult past 12 months and a lot of us have struggled throughout the lockdowns, what with a loss of liberty, our ability to go out, visit the gym, watch football matches, go out for drinks and meals etc. During that period, some of us have probably developed new skills and hobbies, or rediscovered old ones.

For me, one of those discoveries, or perhaps rekindled interests, has been my love of Marvel comics. YES, the comics, not the films, which are, in the main, very, very good indeed.

If you’re a Marvel fan, the films tend to contain enough nods and imagery to the old original comics to keep an OAP such as myself interested. The writers and directors clearly have enough love of the comics to make sure that they reference the old origins of the superheroes and place them in an up-to-date setting, such as including a Psychotic Yellowjacket (I remember reading the original story), the use of the original Ant-Man (Hank Pym) quoting ‘Amazing Tales’, in which he made his first appearance, and finding Captain America encased in ice - taken directly from Avengers No. 3 - an issue I even had way back in the early 60’s; plus the acknowledgement that Pietro’s father was Magneto - and the image in Captain America Civil War where Avengers fight Avengers, which is lifted directly from one of the early comics.

In the very late 1950’s and early 1960’s US comics provided a very much needed splash of colour in that particularly grey period of Post War Britain, as many of the original comics had been left behind by departing US troops, although by 1959 they were being officially imported into the UK. These were the DC comics whose heroes included Batman and Superman, plus a few others, such as the modern Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Hawkman and Flash, who didn’t make their appearance until the early 1960’s. I remember buying the very first Justice League around 1960, together with Green Lantern and Flash. Whilst both were fun and colourful, there was no real edge to the characters; they always won their battles and the heroes were all clean-cut American figures.

Then, in 1961, the comic world changed. Marvel Comics evolved and produced some proper heroes and superhero teams that really didn’t like each other, not to mention mutants!

This was all many years before DC would allow Batman to become the dark, psychotic figure we all know and love today.

Marvel gave us the Fantastic Four, a family constantly at war with each other, the rather uncanny X-Men, a mutant group who were persecuted for being who they were, which was very different indeed, and Spiderman, a teenage hero with all the problems of yes, just that, being a teenager.

Meanwhile, Iron Man was a hero with a heart problem, not to mention a dodgy moustache, which was simply unheard of in an American superhero. Best of all

though, they gave us Daredevil, who was a blind hero, Silver Surfer (no relation), a Galactic Herald with attitude, and Nick Fury, a super spy who had a love of fast cars and John Lennon.

Despite all these superheroes featuring in the comics, we have to acknowledge that they were brought to colourful life by the wonderful imagination and art of Jack Kirby, Len Wein and Jim Steranko, all giants in the comic world, carefully corralled by Stan Lee. My own particular favourite artist of all time (apart from Steranko) was Klaus Janson, who with great passion wrote and illustrated the Daredevil comics and shares with me the trauma of having had his comic collection thrown away by his very own mother!

The Marvel artwork was exceptional and at the time light years ahead of the DC artwork.The pride of my collection were the Original X-Men/Daredevil/ Silver Surfer and the Nick Fury series, amazingly illustrated by Jim Steranko.

And yes, they did all genuinely get binned, as were many original comic collections, often by mothers (and inlaws), wives and girlfriends, which is why they now fetch such high prices.

Such comics are an extremely rare and a very valuable commodity.

Back in the 1960’s, a Marvel or DC comic would set you back ninepence (or 9d) or just 4p in today’s money, whereas a decent copy of Uncanny X-Men No 1 will now cost you about £40,000 and for The Avengers around £20,000. So if you have any of these comics knocking about, do NOT throw them away. Enjoy them, cherish them, and love them instead.

The Edge 01245 348256

The Edge 289 new_The Edge 172.qxd 3/23/2021 4:20 PM Page 25

San Diego, California calling. Anyone out there in Chelmsford?

If each one of us has a 24 hour clock of our life, there are a number of events that signify another hour has just passed. There is the first time you admitted to yourself you probably aren’t going to make it as a professional footballer. About age 30.

Tick-tock, the clock is running. You’re still young though, right? Definitely not turning into your parents yet.

Well, it’s been a good couple of months, hasn’t it?

Since the last Edge hit the newsstands the world has started to get itself vaccinated and there is light at the end of a very lengthy and dark tunnel.

There’s a long way to go yet, of course, and we must not act like dicks and derail the progress, but at least we can see an end to it.

Despite ridiculous claims about ‘world beating’ over the last year, there is one part of the whole pandemic that has been very well handled in the UK - the vaccination rollout. It seems not coincidental that it’s the one aspect that has been left to professionals to run - in this case the NHS. No ‘help’ from incompetent politicians. The only thing world beating about the UK’s handling of Covid until the vaccines was the death rate.

Anyway, enough of that. This column has made its feelings about Johnson and his cabinet of fellow no talents very clear on many previous occasions.

This month we’ll leave all that behind and take a look at something concerning everyday life, whether that’s in or out of lockdown. It’s something that cannot be changed no matter how much we try. Without exception, every one of us is going to get old.

In the very unlikely circumstances that somebody under 25 is reading this, boy have you got some shocking news coming. To those over the limit, well, there’s nothing here you don’t know, but it does no harm to have a laugh at youth’s naivety every now and then.

This train of thought was brought on by some TV adverts that run in the US. Out here, as in the UK, TV adverts run the whole gamut from fantastic, witty and professional productions to embarrassingly bad. The same strategies are in play too.

Just as Compare the Market stumbled on the Meerkats by chance, realised they were popular and then invented a whole storyline around them for future adverts, the same thing happens here, with characters touching a nerve and becoming long running stars on the back of it.

shaun@theedgemag.co.uk

The realisation that drinking too much ruins the whole of the next day, not just the hour after you wake up. Tick-tock.

The time when going out in the evening is an effort you can’t be bothered to make very often.

Tick-tock.

One such example in the US is a series of commercials for an insurance company. It has tailored its sales pitch around a man whose job is to stop people becoming their parents. It’s clearly aimed at the younger generation, the message being that you don’t want to get old and boring like mum and dad, but you do want insurance. From us.

So all of you under 25s are totally certain that you will never succumb to the boring middle-aged way of life your parents lead, aren’t you? You’ll never spend Sundays washing the car. Or days worrying about wallpaper. You’ll always stay up to date with the contemporary music scene. Sensible shoes will never adorn your feet. Well, believe us oldies it doesn’t last. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a story - it doesn’t happen in real life.

So the insurance adverts have picked up on this phenomenon and rely on the concept that a group of twentysomethings have been referred to our man for lessons because they are showing disturbing signs of middle age. One advert has them huddled round a computer and being scared stiff of the term ‘pdf’. Another has them in a hardware store, trying their best to ignore, without comment, a passing teenager with blue hair.

You get the drift.

Like most situational humour, it’s funny because there’s an element of truth that we all recognise.

And the arrival of your own children. Jeez, now you are a parent and you find yourself repeating all the things your own mum and dad said.

Tick-tock, another hour has passed and you realise you have become all the things you swore you wouldn’t be.

The first time you told your kids to “turn that bloody row down - call that music?” Tick tock.

There is one final step that signifies that midnight is fast approaching on your personal life clock. It’s the day you look at a pair of beige trousers in Marks & Spencer and quietly think you could see yourself in those quite happily. Then, truly, the end is nigh, my brethren.

So anyway, what has all this got to do with anything? Nothing really, it was just a gentle amble through something insignificant at a time when humanity feels as if it’s in a bad place. The pandemic, climate change, anti-democratic violence on the rise. All that needs to be worried about, but it’s OK every now and then to admit you’re not OK and, as we have just done, let some meaningless thoughts float by.

And on that note, it’s over and out until next time.

There is growing optimism from your Californian correspondent that he’ll be able to return to MidEssex for a visit later this year. It’s been quite a few years since the last one. Has anything changed?

Page 25

ANDREW ELEY

The Edge 289 new_The Edge 172.qxd 3/23/2021 4:25 PM Page 26

Families who gathered around their television sets on Christmas Day to watch Disney & Pixar’s latest movie, expecting a warm, feel-good and colourful animation, may have been surprised to end up sitting through a philosophical lecture about the purpose of life.

Directed by Pete Docter, who has written some of Pixar’s very best, including Up and Wall-E, Soul feels closest to his much-celebrated Inside Out. Whereas that took an imaginative look at the internal workings of emotions within the mind, Soul peers into the afterlife, or great before, where we see its almost bureaucratic like function.

Music teacher Joe (Jamie Fox) believes his purpose in life is to perform in a late-night jazz band, but after a near fatal accident, finds himself transported to the great beyond, and then the great before, not quite dead, but not fully alive either. (N.B. Possibly an allegory of how most of us live our lives). After a series of events unfold, Joe ends up sharing in a body-swap adventure with Soul 22 (Tina Fay) as they both go looking for their purpose and ‘spark’ on earth.

Inside Out dealt with similar lofty themes about life and presented them in an engaging, humorous and emotional way. On first viewing, I initially thought Soul to be missing some of that magic, as early on it throws big ideas and big phrases at its audience (not to mention Graham Norton voicing a transcendental mystic named Moonwind) that may leave many viewers bewildered. And once the main adventure starts, the relationship between Joe and Soul 22 didn’t quite seem to connect for me.

Soul does look incredible though, with a wonderfully detailed New York City and a highly imaginative set of characters that dwell within the afterlife presented to us. So with the film appearing in many people's ‘Top 10 Movies of 2020’ as well as recently winning a Golden Globe for ‘Best Animated Movie’, I began to wonder whether I’d missed something.

Yes, I understood the message of the film was to appreciate and enjoy the simple things in life, yet it took my second viewing to see the story fully playing out, so that when it came to the reveal, it felt much more emotional.

Soul is unique in that it steers away from the usual ‘follow your dreams’ mantra so often sold to us as the only way to be truly happy, although at first Page 26

it seems to be heading in that very direction for much of its run time.

However, when Joe achieves his dream of being in a jazz band, he questions to himself, ‘Is that it?’

Ultimately, his life-long dream was not as fulfilling as he had hoped and he is left wondering that if being a jazz player is not what will make him happy, then what will? This is where the real message of Soul comes to the forefront, when Joe reminisces about his recent adventures and then ponders his early memories and the simple pleasures that made him smile. The taste and smell of a freshly cooked pizza, watching a leaf fall from an autumnal tree, riding his bike in the snow as a child, or chewing the fat with his regular barber. A collection of simple day-to-day events that we either ignore or take for granted become the reason for our joy and purpose, yet we miss them almost every day. And the message is even more important right now. Many people have been complaining about lockdowns, not being able to travel and go to bars and attend festivals, even to the point of writing off the entirety of last year, as well as much of this year already.

And yet if we stopped and really looked at what is all around us, what is closest to us, we may be like Joe who says: “Life is full of possibilities. You just need to know where to look. Don’t miss out on the joys of life”.

I recently asked my better-half what was her goal in life. She replied: “To be happy.”

So I asked her: “Are you happy right now, in this moment?”

To which she replied: “Yes, I am.”

“Well done!” I said, in a celebratory tone, “for you have succeeded in achieving your goal.”

Ask people what they want to achieve in life and a very common theme is ‘to be happy’ or ‘achieve happiness’. Self help gurus and publishers know this.

That is why there are so many books trying to tell us how to be happy.

Way back when David Cameron was our PM, he even created the Welfare Index, a guide to measure the population’s general happiness.

We are clearly a people obsessed with finding that elusive prize of ‘being happy’. It is our Lost Ark. Our Holy Grail. And if we cannot find it, we often try to create it ourselves through the false gods of working longer hours, drinking to excess, selfish ambition, unhealthy relationships and/or approval addiction. Quite the heady cocktail.

Yet the reason we cannot find happiness is because happiness is not there to find. It is not a goal. Instead, happiness is a feeling, a choice, a moment.

And it can only be experienced in the now, not in some unknown future.

You can find a sense of joy and wonder in the simplest of things and even learn to appreciate challenges and obstacles that come your way as opportunities to learn and grow.

Andrew Eley: So why were you so surprised you enjoyed Parasite?

Edge Editor: Cos it’s South Korean, innit? With subbies.

AE: They produce a lot of decent films.

The director is well known.

EE: Aye. Bong Joon Ho. It proper trips off the tongue, doesn’t it? Isn’t it where that Kim Jung-un hangs out? I just didn’t expect them to be, I don’t know, so humorous. So savvy, I guess.

AE: He’s from North Korea. Have you seen Train To Busan?

EE: Yes. Really enjoyed it.

AE: That was a South Korean movie.

EE: Aye, I figured if was foreign, mainly due to the subbies again. But the subject matter of Parasite genuinely surprised me.

AE: Bo Joon Ho made a name for himself with his 2006 creature-feature flick The Host, followed by the cult classic Snowpiercer, a bonkers action flick that also looks at the class divide.

EE: What, like the North and the South of England, lad?

AE: He definitely likes to have a strong, social, political theme to his films. Two of my favourite movies are Oldboy and I Saw The Devil. They both came from South Korea.

EE: Never heard of ’em, but I’ll definitely look out for them.

AE: So what exactly was it that surprised you about Parasite?

EE: TBH, it was probably sheer and utter ignorance on my part, in so far as I just didn’t expect ‘a South Korean film’, terrible as it might sound, to have the wit to come up with such a freshness of script. I mean, Ki-jung being an ‘art therapist’. That really tickled me.

Surely there’s no such thing?

AE: There is.

EE: You what? There’s really a profession called art therapy? I thought they’d invented it for the purposes of humour?

Either way, it certainly made me laugh.

AE: [Looks to the heavens] EE: Come on then. I can just sense you want to enlighten us all as to a particular scene that stood out for you in the movie. So let’s be having it?

AE: I thought you’d never ask.When Ki-taek, the father, and son Ki-woo and his sister Ki-jung eventually escape from the Park’s house and travel back to their own home, further and further into the the depths of the city, only to find it has been flooded by the perpetu-

al rainfall with water and even raw sewage. Such exemplifies the stark contrast between one family, who spend their lives living in a cramped basement, situated lower than street level, while the (wealthy) Park family live on much higher ground in supreme grandeur.

EE: Aye. It was almost as poignant as Al Pacino and Robert de Niro having that cosy little chit-chat together in that cafe in Heat, wasn’t it? For me though, I thought housekeeper Moon-gwang’s peach allergy was epic, which once again surprised me, as I didn’t think the South Korean’s would come up with that - not to mention hiding her husband in the Park house’s fall-out bunker for the past 4 years.

AE: Although that cafe meeting is often considered a classic scene, I always thought the only reason it was there was to say: ‘Hey, look. We finally have Pacino and de Niro in the same scene together.’ Not to mention it’s a near for word copy of the original scene in LA Takedown. But I digress...

So who is the titular Parasite referred to in this movie? Is it one, or both, of the families concerned?

EE: Titular, eh? Well, given that the definition of a parasite is: ‘A living thing that lives in, or on, another living thing and gets food and, sometimes, shelter from it, yet usually causes it harm’, it can only be the Kim family. But no doubt you’ll beg to differ, Andrew. So off you go?

AE: I won’t beg to differ, although it could easily refer to both. Sure, the Kim family do seem to be the ‘Parasite’ in question, but equally the Park family, despite their apparent wealth, are seemingly unable to function without feeding off the lower class. They need them to cook, teach, clean, drive and babysit. They, in effect, leech off the cheap labour of the working class. So it’s possibly metaphorical for both.

EE: Perhaps we should let the readers decide, as surely they’ll be gagging to watch it after reading this? Meanwhile, I’ve just recorded yet another South Korean movie called The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil.

AE: If readers want to watch Parasite, it’s available on Amazon Prime in both its original theatrical release, as well as a swanky black & white version.

EE: Swanky. Now there’s a word.

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The Things We Love

KiNGPiN

We’ve all just lived through a year that has seen hundreds of thousands of people lose their lives and hundreds of thousands more lose their jobs, businesses and homes. After a pandemic that left no corner of the world untouched by grief, and in all likelihood has fundamentally changed all of our lives, it almost seems perverse to think of the things we love and enjoy.

But honestly, what better time is there?

I’ve always been a firm believer that you have to appreciate the little things in life, so when our editor said he fancied relaunching The Edge by having us all chip in with those little things we all love about life, I thought it was a marvellous idea. And I hope that reading these columns helps some of you to focus on all of the things you love, the things you may not have been able to do for the past year, or hobbies or pastimes you’ve simply let slide, due to the fact that we’re all so bloody busy so very much of the time, and maybe pick them up again?

While it’s only right to acknowledge that we’ll be feeling the effects of the pandemic for years to come, I hope we can all look forward with some hope, rather than mere trepidation, and enjoy much of the little things along the way.

The Kingmeister reports

grown to love. But what I love even more is getting home with a tired dog who just wants to curl up next to me and have a cuddle and a snooze.

Gaming I’ve been a gamer since I was a little boy, and now that I’m a big boy, I love it even more. I was talking to our Ed. a while ago about life during lockdown and I mentioned to him then that I felt lucky, as I’d always spent a lot of time in virtual worlds anyway, something that’s perfect for coping with lockdown.

For those of you not into gaming, I think it’s worth making the point that, while games like Space Invaders and Donkey Kong still exist, the medium has made quantum leaps since those days and with almost photo-realistic graphics and surround sound these days, you can really lose yourself in breath-taking landscapes, or be terrified by the sound of claws in the dark as you creep through a cave, struggling to see in the gloom, thanks to the advanced lighting engines.

A lot of games are basically interactive movies with many featuring voice-acting by A-list stars.

When the writing and story are on a similar level

ter turn from hero to pariah as he begins to lose himself in his quest for revenge. That sort of connection to the characters and investment in the story really helps me to lose myself for a while and forget about everything else that’s going on in the world.

Sometimes you don’t want thrills’n’spills or blood and gore, you just want to relax, which is when I boot up Farming Simulator (no, seriously). You literally just run a farm, which entails ploughing, cultivating and harvesting and the like, all of which takes just enough brain power to let me switch off 90% of my consciousness and lose myself in the zen-like motions of going up and down a field in a straight line with my combine harvester. I never thought the sight of a freshly ploughed field would give me so much satisfaction, but here we are!

I’ve always loved putting my headphones on and losing myself in a good game for a few hours, but over the past year, being able to escape into another world and another life entirely has been an absolute lifesaver.

We’ve definitely moved on from Donkey Kong Paddle Boarding

If my fiancé and I had to name all the things we’ve really missed during lockdown, paddle The Great Outdoors & Doggy Days boarding would easily make it into our top 3. As soon as lockdown is over proper and we can Out get back out on the river, we’ll be straight there.

One of the reasons I’ve felt so lucky during the I’ve always loved the water and pandemic is because I live in a “It wasn’t until we got Daffy, our stubborn, loving, any chance I get to swim, paddle, rural location. boat or board, I’ll take it. Paddle wonderful idiot of a dog, that I really began I can literally cross the road from boarding is one of the most relaxour house and walk for miles to fall in love with the great outdoors.” ing things I can think of to do and across fields, or walk 10 minutes I always feel really chilled out when we get back you can experience some genuinely thrilling, through the local village and wander along the home again afterwards. moving, or horrifying tales. Rather than be a river. Like lots of people, when we were only We even paddleboard in winter (and paddling in passive observer, you’re taking an active role, allowed out of the house for an hour or so of winter has given us a few ‘This is so awful it’s sometimes making choices that drastically affect exercise, we discovered a sudden love of walkfunny’ moments, as we’re lashed by driving wind the world around you and the outcome of the ing, but it was only and rain), but it’s after we got Daffy, our obviously better durstubborn, loving, woning the summer derful idiot of a dog, months. I love being that I really began to out on a warm, sunny fall in love with the day, in the middle of great outdoors. the river, barefoot on Daffy has a lot of the board with the energy and being part cool water lapping Dalmatian, she’s bred over my toes. The to run and run, so sun on the water and we’re out at least the sights, sounds twice a day, every and smells of the single day without fail. river, all of it just I take her out in the works for me and morning and usually within seconds of get to catch the sunpushing off from the rise across the fields bank I am feeling as or over the river. It’s happy and relaxed as peaceful and quiet Larry. and most of the time My fiancé is much it’s just the two of us, more of an ‘adventure so I get to start my paddle boarder’ than I am, and while I do enjoy game, which is something I think really increasdays with an hour of clean, fresh, calm and exploring new areas and interesting culverts and es the immersion and the investment you have quiet exercise, which has had a hugely positive channels on the various rivers we board on, it’s in the story. impact on both me and my life. mainly about the peace and quiet for me. I could I’m currently playing something called ‘Ghost of I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of seeing Daffy quite happily spend a day slowly paddling down Tsushima’, set during the Mongol invasion of run, tail wagging furiously, as she chases a the river without seeing or speaking to another Japan, and I can literally spend hours just riding pheasant or rabbit, jumping into a pond or living soul and I’d really be quite happy, so slowly through the golden forests or cherry blosbounding up to me to see if I’ve got any treats in come the summertime I’m thinking of using som trees, finding a spot by a waterfall to commy pockets for her. There’s a copse of trees that some of my Fridays off to do just that. pose a Haiku, or play the flute. When I’m not has a rabbit warren underneath and she always However, the first order of business will definitedoing that though, I’m battling some of the most spends a few minutes shoving her face into the ly be to try and get Daffy on a board with us. well realised and evil characters I’ve come various entrances, or trying to dig them up.

She loves the water, so I think she’ll really enjoy across in any medium.

While she is otherwise engaged doing that, I it every bit as much as we do. The trick will be I’ve got a long way to go before I’m ready to just stand there and listen to the birds. to get her to sit still for more than 10 seconds face-off against the ‘Big Bad’ of the Mongol That 10 minutes of just standing still in the counand not dive off to chase every bird she sees. horde, but I’m absolutely desperate to take him tryside, not thinking about anything in particular, I’m sure that’ll be a lot of fun though, even down, because I’ve genuinely grown to loathe just listening to the sounds of nature all around though it won’t be quite so relaxing. him. At the same time I’m watching my characme, is priceless and it’s something I’ve really shaun@theedgemag.co.uk

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Max Headroom’s

BIZARRE NEWS HAIRYCLAM

This is one of the images you get when you type ‘Hairy Clam’ into Google, naturally amongst others.

Now the clam is a common name for several types of bivalve mollusks and the edible types, which live as infauna, spend most of their lives buried in the sand on the seafloor or riverbeds.

What’s inside clams can vary. There’s the obligatory retractable foot, plus a siphon for sucking up water, and sometimes, in rare instances, even a pearl.

Like oysters and mussels, clams are encased in a shell of two valves, or hinged parts, and come in many different sizes.

Oh and by the way, yes, they can feel pain.

On the menu front, they can be eaten both raw or cooked and are particularly delicious served in chowders, like The Headroom Crew once experienced in Southern Ireland on an Edge jolly.

They mainly feed on plankton.

Meanwhile, ‘bearded clams’ are found less and less often these days, despite the fact that we have recently experienced one of the coldest winters on record (in Greenland).

N.B. Sometimes people have a tendency to get the wrong end of the stick where clams are concerned.

WALKING THE HUSBAND A woman in Canada has been fined for breaking a Covid curfew by walking her husband on a lead. When stopped by police, she claimed that her partner was in fact a dog. At that time, the area of Quebec had clearly stated that people would have to stay indoors between 8pm-5am in a bid to halt the spread of coronavirus. However, dog walkers were allowed to be outside during such time as an exception to the rules. Police spotted the pair at around 9pm, not long after the curfew took effect. Both of them were fined the equivalent of £900 despite claiming they were acting within the rules. The local Police Department said they ‘did not co-operate with the police at all’ and the woman said she would not pay. Meanwhille, 19 similar breaches were also issued to Canadians for similar capers.

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MOTCO

Man on the Clapham Omnibus

JUST ONE MORE THING As contributors, we get very little in the way of instructions from EE, outside of the strict non-use of the well documented ‘C’ word in the January editions (which generally starts around September). However, this year has brought about a small change, to go with all of the others we have been enduring of late. There was a request printed on the notice board in the fabled Edge Writer’s Lounge, prior to the proposed February editions, which ultimately didn’t happen, due to you know what. It being the month of ‘Lerv baby’, due to St.Valentine’s Day, it announced that it might be enlightening to talk about the things we love. Not the obvious, of course. Not wives, partners, children, pets etc., but other things. That said, this article is therefore more of a homage than my usual wry look, or light hearted approach, to the subject matter.

It got me thinking about my choices. Would it be my singles collection, or possibly my old car that I buzz about in at weekends? Both were close, but ended up being neglected. The answer, as older readers may have guessed from the title, started way back in the TV land of the 1970’s and continued until 2003. A period of some 35 years of crumpled crime solving. In a nod to yet another guilty TV secret, I could have said, “Holy crime solving crumpled criminality, Batman”. I think you have probably got that one. But the idea tied in nicely with an article I was thinking of writing anyway, and also seemed to tickle the fancy of EE.

The episodes also tend to follow an opposite path to the usual ‘Whodunnit’. These are called a ‘Howcatchem’ in that we see the murder, and the murderer - we know who it is in the first ten minutes - but there are still eighty minutes to go.

So in comes the shambling raincoat, unkempt, full of humility and immediately assumed by the killer to be just another flatfoot detective from downtown. But to sum up the murderer’s nemesis, one must consider the saying ‘so great the enemy that lies in wait’. Ignore him at your peril, and they do.

I will admit, like any long running series, there are some true stinkers of episodes that even a die hard fan like myself cannot bear. But the joy of watching the great man in action is fantastic. Peter Falk, who plays Columbo, had a glass eye. Does Columbo have one eye, or two? It is answered in an episode. Columbo asks a friend to double-check something, making the comment: “Lets face it, three eyes are better than two”. Peter Falk was apparently a serious ‘actorrr’ and used to demand high standards from his fellow cast members. The famous fumbling and prevaricating, such as searching his pockets and asking for pencils, was often unscripted. This was done to wrong foot his fellow actors and their exasperation and irritation was for real. He felt it made for better TV, and it did. Once I found this out, it only added to my enjoyment when seeing his often big name guest murderer getting shirty with him for real.

The famous “just one more thing” line came about by accident. The writers had finished the script, but when the scene finished shooting, it was short on time. So to make up the missing minute, they had the character come back into the room and utter the immortal line. Thus a catchphrase was born by accident. In the 1970’s and 80’s every impressionist on TV ‘did’ Columbo. It was a quick win for them. A crumpled raincoat, ruffled hair, a wonky eye, a reasonable NY accent and you’re off. Oh boy, you couldn’t turn your TV set on without someone doing Frank Spencer and the ‘Lootenant’ back-to-back, mainly because they didn’t need a change of clothes.

But I love this guy. He is fallible, he is smart. But it’s a smartness gained from a tough school at the University of Life in NY, before he heads to LA. He doesn’t need a two grand suit and a Rolex to do it. He smokes dime store cheroots and looks like a regular Joe. No Ferrari, no speedboat, and certainly no tailor. In short, he looks an awful lot like the viewing population, a bloke just doing his best. Like using a favourite take-away restaurant, you know what you are going to get; satisfaction pretty much guaranteed.

My guilty secret is, of course, the fact that I have watched and loved Columbo from my teenage years. Lieutenant, or in his New York accent, ‘Lootenant’ Columbo, our shabby friend from the Los Angeles Police Department. A sheer safety blanket of TV viewing. It’s so comforting, like the favourite dinner you crave in times of stress. It’s dependable; you know what you are going to get, and all will be okay. For my sins, I do love, yes love, this shambling wreck of brilliance, as surely a four decade-plus ‘minor obsession’ qualifies as love of a certain kind.

But there are more reasons why love is the term I have used and I will cover them.

The Lootenant has many of the characteristics of the loner who is continually up against it and it seems to be a group of people I am drawn to in both films and on TV. We could, if we wanted to, get deep into psychobabble and connect it all together.

For instance, my friends say I am a well-balanced man because I have a chip on both shoulders. It has been a long and uneven road for me to get to 60, which is probably why I like the loners who push on through; the Jason Bourne’s, Poirot, the Inspector Morse’s of this world. And, of course, the Lootenant. N.B. I do have to say that Morse has the best car in his mkII Jaguar (my all-time favourite, one of which I have been lucky enough to own) despite the ancient, but still cool, Peugeot 403 that Columbo favours.

But I can tell you this was a close-run thing. David Suchet, as Poirot, is divine to watch, particularly in his fine tailoring. I admire his polite, thoughtful, ‘dandying about’ in his ultra fine threads, because I have to say, any tailor who can make a short, bald and well-fed man look good is fine by me. And let us not forget his sidekick, Captain Arthur (Battler) Hastings. A favourable chap imbibed with old school, but dim witted decency. Although I can watch the episodes repeatedly, they do not have the same draw as Columbo. I have the full DVD box set of LAPD’s finest, so they are available to me upon demand. But that does not stop me watching them on Sundays on 5USA where they are shown back-to-back all day long. It does mean one has to suffer the insane advert breaks for river cruises and free pens with life insurance, but I endure, even when I could watch them advert-free, such is my fanaticism. Columbo never has a full-time partner and instead is normally assigned some hapless sergeant from the squad of available flatfoots. shaun@theedgemag.co.uk

There is also the never seen wife and never seen children. Do these people even exist, or are they just devices he uses to gain an advantage? It all adds to the little bit of mystery that surrounds our man and allows us to make our own little world for him.

It is easy to see why the character is always in the ‘top 10’ detectives ever created.

He’s one of us, as opposed to the ridiculously perfect, white toothed, gym fit people in designer clothes who attend the murders in the various NCIS or CSI programmes.

At least in the UK we offer an antidote to all of that nonsense with Vera, and again, she fits into that loner type that I am attracted to.

Our man is based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment detective character Petrovich, but is a hell of a lot easier to understand. Petrovich is relentless in his pursuit of the man he knows has done it, just like our LAPD hero, except he isn’t a hero in reality. Friends of mine gasp when I tell them I have never seen Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad. Modern TV series are big heavyweight events that demand major investments of time. Only don’t get started about (sodding) reality TV. It’s a show about that darkest of human acts, murder. Yet for all that, it manages to be pretty easy viewing. There’s no mass shoot-up or raging on-screen violence.

There is very little blood, certainly compared to the autopsy scenes favoured in most modern programmes. No swearing either, while sex and drugs are sort of only alluded to in later episodes. Columbo follows a strict moral code, is inherently respectful and knows how to treat people well. He won’t carry a gun and he’s entirely happy with his life away from work. Maybe, watching Columbo harks back to an easier time generally. Only don’t take me as some kind of rose tinted glasses wearer where the past was always better. Often it wasn’t. The bonus is seeing the regular Joe triumph, taking down the often morally-bankrupt privileged elite. Many of us could nominate a few in the modern world, where the gap between rich and poor gets ever wider, who need to have their collar felt by a Columbo type.

Oh, and just one more thing. His first name is Frank. Frank Columbo.

Yours aye,

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the luxury of turning on a tap for water simply doesn’t exist. And whilst it might sound like some sort of spiritual mumbo jumbo, I believe that when you start appreciating the little things, the ‘energy shift’ comes automatically. So instead of moaning when things don’t go my way, I now think of it as a positive, that ‘everything happens for a reason’ and that bigger and better things will come to me.

LOVE YOURSELF Edgy sent me an email last month, direct from ‘Edge Towers’, asking me to write about all the things I love. Have to say, I was somewhat taken aback as he’s not normally known for his soft and fluffy side.

“Would you be interested in publishing something in The Edge about feeding the homeless and helping to raise money to buy a catering van to go out and feed the homeless?” the email asked.

I told the guy to ‘shoot’. So he did. Take it away, John...

“Hi. My name is John Wealleans and I have extensive experience in both the cooking and preparation of food, adhering to health and hygiene, due to solid knowledge and experience of food safety regulations.

I am very passionate about helping the homeless and rough sleepers and have for sometime now been providing hot, nourishing home cooked meals every Wednesday evening and handing these out to those in need. We have also done a lot of outreach on cold evenings. My family and I have walked the streets helping those in need with hot food. I was originally providing all of the food, but through networking I am now thankfully receiving kind donations from other groups as well as kind individuals.

I then set up my own Facebook Page called STREETFOOD with the aim of establishing a group of like minded supporters to help combat the really important issue of helping to feed the hungry and homeless people on our streets.

To increase our ability to reach far more of the people in need, we would like to purchase a food van to enable us to effectively help even more needy folk in Chelmsford and the surrounding areas.

But we cannot do this without help, so I have set up a GoFundMe campaign to try and help us realise this really important service.

I have researched the market and we need to raise approximately £15,000 in order for us to purchase a fully equipped second-hand food van, road insurance and public liability insurance, along with all the necessary certification.

So now we are asking YOU if you would kindly consider donating towards this cause. Any amount would be gratefully received.

Please join us in helping to make a difference.

Thank you so much.

John at STREETFOOD. Page 30

So it got me to thinking about all the things I love. For instance, I could tell you I love the new ‘Jimmy Choo’ shoe collection, or the latest ‘Dior’ handbag.

I could tell you about all the Instagram and TikTok influencers I follow and how I love waiting for the very next make-up video to pop-up, or the latest photo showing the results from some ‘Juice Fast Diet’ that no one could ever possibly follow and live to tell the tale.

But when I really got to mulling the question over - and I am going to be brutally honest here - what I love most in the world is ‘me’. Now that might sound conceited and totally selfobsessed, but it’s taken me over 40 years to be able to say that and a true ‘Life Journey’ through hell, through many dark tunnels, to be able to say: “I love and respect myself most.”

I had a very, very religious upbringing where it was considered sinful to ‘love yourself’. In an age where we all spend far too long taking hundreds of selfies and hours looking in the mirror, it seems weird to think that such a thing would have got me a hard slap and catty comments such as: “That girl loves herself far too much”. So a few years back, when I found myself in yet another dark place, I went on a ‘Dark Night of the Soul Journey’, as they call it. My awakening. I did counseling, meditation, healing and the ultimate the Shaman Walk - which lasted 4 days, and I came out of it a totally different person. It teaches you that no one is coming to save you, or change your life, but that the change you crave is already within you. All that you need is actually within your own grasp and that is what I love about life.

Having said all of that, I was brought up to be humble and not conceited.

It’s just that my whole way of thinking has changed. We need to love ourselves and not continually beat ourselves up. Body shaming is now such a thing where women are expected to look a certain way and behave as social media dictates. There is a great power in accepting those extra few pounds, and those wrinkles, and wearing a favourite pair of boots even if they are way out of fashion!

I love the fact that lockdown has taught me to accept the things I cannot change, but embrace it and work with it. During lockdown, I rediscovered my love of dressmaking, reading and cooking. All things I used to love, but travelling back and forth to work and everyday life had taken over. I started doing my own facials and luxuriating in a bath with candles and telling myself ‘I am worth it’. I started ironing my fitted sheets and duvets just that little bit more carefully, as there is nothing better than getting into a bed with freshly ironed sheets.

I learned to say what I wanted in life and to become more assertive and to believe in myself far more. None of us is perfect, but it is learning to love the little things that make us happy that can make a huge change to our lives.

I live for the day when we will all be able to travel on a plane once again and not worry about masks and being socially distanced. I love the fact that during lockdown we have all begun to realise what is important and for the first time in our lives we have had time to take stock. It has forced people to do things that they would not have ever thought possible in the past. If someone had told me we would all be “locked indoors and have to wear masks” I would have thought them crazy. Yet the majority of us have got through it and made the best of things and surely you have to love yourself for the power within you to achieve that.

I love life. I love every minute of every day. And I love all of you readers who drop me the odd email to tell me how you’re doing and that you read my columns. But I was not always like this.

I used to be lying on a beach, moaning about trivial things. Whereas these days I just love the fact that the new breed of social media coming out is about self care, self love and self promotion. Because after all, if you don’t love yourself and your life, how can you possibly love anything else?

Because nowadays I love the little things; the sunshine on my face, the food I eat, the friends I have. I get up in the morning and I thank myself for having another wonderful day to live. I So fall in love with yourself today - not thank the water that comes out of my tomorrow - today! tap, because in some parts of the world tracie123@aol.com

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LEAFLET DISTRIBUTION

ELECTRICAL

BUILDERS

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