The playwright David Eldridge has, for the second time, christened me The Mighty Windass. Which, coming from such an esteemed theatrical gent, is very nice indeed (and marketing will, I'm sure, be keen to use it on the posters come January). In the spirit of Lewis Carroll, of course, if he says it a third time I will indeed become The Mighty Windass and I shall rule, if not the Universe, the World or the country, then at least a couple of the dirtier streets in east Hull. I am assuming that David is, perhaps, a fan of the Christopher Guest film A Mighty Wind, a piece of work that I wish had existed during my school days as The Mighty Windass is certainly preferable to a lot of the utterly uncreative names I was called as a trembling, spotty member of Woggy (!) Hall's form with an oh-so-funny surname at the boys only Riley High - an establishment designed and run with the encouragement and training (but very rarely education) of thugs in mind. All of which, in a rather contrived way, brings me round to a conversation I overheard at the bus stop this afternoon. Someone was talking about being bullied. A bigger, older chap who should have known better offered the bullied some advice: "Yeah, bullies, they don't give a shit about you. So if you're gonna be punched you may as well give them a slap. Tell you what you need to do. Put some pool balls in a sock and whack the bastards across the head."
Actually, steering my thoughts back to the playwright David Eldridge, I've not given up on Big Brother. I'm there every night - even forcing M to endure the show on the nights when she feels indifferent to tuning in - and will be until the end. There's nowt so life-affirming as meaningless trash on telly, is there? But I've gotta say that I'm missing Russell Brand on Big Mouth enormously, and have yet to find a guest presenter that doesn't leave me wanting to throw one of the cats at the television or, say, whack Pete Burns across the head with some pool balls in a sock.
So, we we're in town - I had to drop a hard copy of the aformentioned half a script in at the theatre - and I walked past a newspaper bill board, announcing the staggering news Hull shops to open late. Which illustrates, I suppose, that we're in the middle of the silly season when nothing much happens but is hardly the earth-shattering stuff of your above-average front page. Keen, as ever, not to buy a copy of the paper I read the story online when I got home, amazed that mother-of-two Lynn Smith, 32, of Belvoir Street, west Hull, reckoned that "Late-night shopping will make life easier." Which makes it sound like shops being open until 7pm is on a par with the invention of the wheel, the availability of food and peace in all corners of the globe. But never mind late night shopping, you want stuff that makes life easier, you read what the clever Newsround kids have to say. I especially like 10-year-old Lauren's: "I would invent a robot dog called Interpup. On his belly would be a screen and you could play games or surf the web. You could teach him to speak and sing by telling him through the speaker!" The Mighty Windass would certainly buy one of those.
