Before I forget.....

Making coffee just now I was mulling over how absent minded I had become, counting the spoons in to the cafetiere, when I noticed the glass container that I'd just washed, drying by the sink. Looking down there was the metal frame and a neat little pile of ground coffee on the kitchen surface.

This kind of thing happens only too frequently. The other night I undressed, getting ready for bed, while chatting to Gill about something. Before I knew it I was half dressed again with fresh clothes. Looking around the room I knew I had missed something - ah yes, of course, the night!

Come to think of it, I've always been absent minded. I remember once going to school without my blazer under my top coat. No big deal you might think. But when you're the single grey jersey among a sea of navy blazers in school assembly you're made to feel a proper plonker. No-one wants to stand out at school.

Once on holiday in France we travelled miles up the motorway and I was thinking how clear the traffic looked through the rear-view mirror until we noticed that the hatch of our estate car was standing vertically, fully open. Fortunately our cases were so squeezed in the rear we avoided the nightmare of belongings strewn across the motorway.

Another time, on a train journey in to Paris we discovered we were on the stopping train and switched platforms to the fast line - except Gill left her handbag with all our passports and money on the other train. In Paris we waited for the train come in to the station and I dashed down the platform. Through a window I saw a woman placing the handbag in to her shopping bag. Bounding in to the carriage for perhaps the only time in my life when a smattering of French came in useful, I shouted: "C'est mon sac!"

During my years of commuting I must have left virtually every accessory possible on trains: briefcases, hats, scarves, umbrellas, gloves, coats, a mobile phone, more hats. Very few, if any, were later retrieved from the lost property office. My mum used to sow my mitts to a long piece of elastic, threaded through my coat sleeves. Unfortunately I never outgrew this dependency.

Sometimes I forget the whole train and, with a sense of deflation, watch the Woking sign sailing past as we run through the station. Over the years I have become quite familiar with Winchester station down the line in Hampshire.

I would never, ever, ever tie a knot in a handkerchief. It would drive me mad, wondering what it was supposed to be reminding me about.

As I get older the forgetfulness seems to be getting worse. The boys tell me that I'm always starting sentences but before I get to the end.......

And so it continues. I'm sure there are many more examples but as you might guess, I just can't recall them.

Marriage - not all plain sailing

Tomorrow Gill and I will be celebrating thirty years of marriage. As I write this I'm not sure we're going to make it. The thing is I don't have a good head for anniversaries and had arranged to go sailing that day. This is work, not pleasure. I'm writing a piece for the FT.

Since it turns out that it is our wedding anniversary and since Gill is doing nothing special that day I'm thinking she might enjoy coming along with me. "Fancy a day out in Poole?" I ask. "Sounds good," says Gill, thinking about the shopping in nearby Bournemouth.

"You could come sailing with me."

"It's OK I'll be happy shopping."

"But I've asked the sailing people and they're very happy for you to come along."

"Must I?"

"Well I think you must now. Besides, the experience will be good for you if we're going to try a sailing holiday in future."

Gill had been thinking of the shops with dinner afterwards at the West Beach restaurant in Bournemouth. It seemed a little bit expensive but I really shouldn't have said so.

"OK, forget it, we'll celebrate some other time," she says huffily.

I try to salvage things, making a joke about having a sardine but she doesn't see the funny side. Meanwhile the wind is getting up but it's not as stormy outside as it is here. "Thirty years. People don't get that for murder," she says.

I try a different tack. "I have plenty of other women friends who would just love to go. I should have asked one of them."

Silence.

Perhaps we should have gone fishing.

Night caller

It doesn't do much good, but I value my beauty sleep all the same, so I wasn't too amused and nor was Gill when the telephone awakened us at two in the morning. Gill answered to hear the kind of beep you get from fax machines. She put down the receiver and five minutes later the phone rang again.

We switched off the ring tone but the phone kept ringing in other parts of the house, disturbing everyone.

This time I decided that something had to be done. I dialled 100 to get the operator. It was an answerphone. I had to listen to three options before getting a fourth option enabling me to speak to an operator.

Operators used to be such useful and helpful people. Not any more. I'm not sure whether this one was actually employed by BT or whether they were in the UK, not that their location mattered.

I complained about the call and asked for the caller's number to be blocked (I had called it back and found it was engaged. I presume it was an automated fax machine). This is the number if you would like to check it yourself: 0207 719 8407. I rang it at length just now and no-one answered. Maybe I have made an enemy. I did write a negative book review recently.

The operator put me through to something called the nuisance call service. The person manning this service gave me another number to dial - 0845 070 0702 - for the Fax Preference Service and gave me an online address (www.fpsonline.org) since it did not have a 24-hour switchboard.

By this time I was becoming a tad irritated since it appeared that, after being passed from pillar to post, that BT did not have a remedy for my immediate problem: how to get a good night's sleep without being interrupted by an inconsiderate fax.

So I called the operator again and got a bit cross. The operator - it was the same one and she remembered me - got a bit cross too and passed me on to her supervisor who soon became as cross as the operator. They have training for this kind of thing (highly frustrated, grumpy, sleepless man fed up with being fobbed off) but the training is designed only to ensure that the operator (and supervisor) can stay relatively calm and professional while explaining that nothing can be done.

Having had no such training I cannot claim to have remained relatively calm. I didn't want a service that would become active in 28 days (what they were offering). I wanted the caller at 0207 7198 407 to be wiped off the face of the Earth.

The supervisor did offer one piece of advice. "You could unplug the phone," she said. But I had phones plugged in all over the house and some of the sockets were in places that are difficult to access. I didn't want to go on a plug hunt at what was now 2.30 am. I asked for the private number of Ian Livingstone, the BT chief executive, so I could call him that minute for a chat about things. But the supervisor, who was also grumpy by now, said she did not have it.

What irritated me most is that I did not have a beef with the operator (or the outsourced service that is employed now to tell nighttime callers that they cannot be helped), but with the fax machine operator. Who was it and why were they ringing me at that ungodly hour? I unhooked my fax machine long ago, about the same time that I got rid of the pony and trap.

Gill, meanwhile, explained that there was a master plug for the phone. Why didn't she tell me earlier? I went downstairs and unplugged it.

By this time I was wide awake so reached for my bedside book, The Book of Eels, by Tom Fort. This also happens to be about slimy nocturnal creatures, but ones that manage to go about their business without disturbing people.

"What? You're going to read now?" said Gill. She couldn't stand any more and went off to sleep in the spare room. What was going on? Why did I feel guilty when this whole fractious episode had been caused by an automated fax system.

There must be some privacy issues here. It can't be right that we can be disturbed in our beds in this way and we shouldn't have to instigate various services to deal with it. Yes, there is a Call Prevention Registry but this is a subscription service. Why should I have to pay for my privacy? A call to the operator should be enough.

NB. I called the operator back during office hours today and had a much better reception. This time I was put through to someone who actually seemed to care about my problem. The number, she said, was not registered with BT and was probably dialling our home number by mistake. She would get on to the relevant service provider and ensure that it didn't happen again. I hope she's successful.

Snow event

We never have snow in Woking but we did today, lots of it, more in fact than I can remember falling over a single night when we lived in Yorkshire, apart from in 1963 and in the winter of 1979. It hung around a while those years.

We took Doug the dog for a walk this morning but had to bring him back as so much snow was clinging to his fur, he could hardly walk. He wasn't amused. I must have spoken to more of my neighbours in half an hour than I usually do in six months. Everyone was saying hello to each other. It was like Christmas.

One of my neighbours was on the hill trying to clear a path for cars. He had been there nearly three hours since 7 am when I strolled past. It didn't look great weather for cars but Gill needed to work this afternoon so I ran her in to work and the car cleared the hill just fine, the hill-clearing neighbour having thrown in the towel.

It seemed that everyone with a four-wheeled drive car was out on the road, looking smug, whether or not they had anywhere to go. It's better when the snow fall is so bad that most people leave their cars at home. The worst is when the snow comes just before evening rush hour and everyone is trying to drive home. That can be a nightmare.

A big snowfall like this is fun for about a day and then you realise that you can't hibernate for ever although I don't have a pressing need to go out for a day or two. I suppose that this kind of weather is a good opportunity to test the merits of home-working. I notice that the BBC weather forecasters were calling it a "snow event." It looked to me very much like a snowfall.

I did a bit of snow-clearing, not that I needed to do so, but because it felt good. I noticed other people doing likewise for the same reason. Odd, that.

George, meanwhile, made a snow man in the garden which has lasted a little bit longer than the last one he made(OK, it does sometimes snow a little bit in Woking). His school was closed and he's hoping it will be closed tomorrow. If it is we might venture over to Box Hill, my favourite sledge run.

It's brightened up an otherwise dreary winter. You have to make the most of snow like this. It's an event.

Happy Box

Today I received a parcel by courier. It was about eight inches square, so reasonably substantial and well taped together. There was a label on the side saying "This way up."

I shook it and there was something fairly solid inside. But I didn't open the package. I like to spend time contemplating a good box. Besides, I know that most things I get like this are from PR companies and the thing that's rattling turns out to be a branded paperweight or a stress ball. The only clue was something on the outside that said "happy box."

Gill came back from the gym and wanted to know what was inside the box. I told her I didn't want to open it. She was not amused. In fact she was so not amused she sulked the whole day. The more she sulked the greater my malevolent delight at her frustration. Oh, the power of the Happy Box!

She would have to wait, I told her, because our youngest son George - who just loves parcels - would soon be home from school and I wanted to see whether the happy box would also work its magic on his curiosity. Unfortunately Gill primed him about the pathetic way his father was behaving over the box so George told me he couldn't care less about it.

By this time, the only one of us who had any great desire to know the content was me. But I left it there a little bit longer, all through dinner in fact.

I wish I hadn't opened it. Unopened boxes are far more interesting. But as I removed the cardboard outer my excitement increased because inside the box was.....another box. This one was smart and yellow. On the outside it said "Happy Box." I lifted the lid and inside was a satin ribbon tied over a card on top of some navy blue raffia.

Instead of reading the card, I put the lid back on and waited a little bit longer. But the magic was fading, so I lifted the lid again, undid the ribbon, and read the card that told me the box had been sent by The Work Foundation as a thank you for judging its media awards.

Underneath the raffia was - oh yes - another box! This contained real drinking chocolate. In addition to the drinking chocolate, wrapped in tissue paper was a pair of grey cashmere gloves. Even the dog was jumping up to see what was inside the paper-wrapping. There was also a card all about the Happy Box company. One of the boxes in their range, "the gold standard" box, contains a hundred chocolate coins! A hundred! That's treasure trove!

If you happened to see that nauseating Argos TV advertisement just before Christmas you will know that Argos thoroughly disapproves of such packaging. Sod Argos, I love it.

I gave the gloves to Gill - can't eat them. But that sounds ungrateful. On the contrary, the happy box brightened this dull day in January no end. In fact it made me quite happy.

To love, honour and Obama

Barack Obama's decision to retake his presidential oath just to be on the safe side, after one word was fluffed during the swearing in ceremony, demonstrates the importance we still place on the spoken promise.

Oath-taking was serious stuff in medieval times and its significance was revived within Germany's Third Reich when the oath of loyalty to Hitler probably ensured that the Second World War lasted a little bit longer than it should have done.

I can only recall taking two oaths in my life time. The first was in the Boy Scouts when I promised to do my duty for God and the Queen.

The second was my marriage vows. Gill, my wife, was a bit of a thespian in her younger days, acting with Bradford University Theatre Group and with Bradford Playhouse. She thought it would be a good idea that we learned our marriage lines rather than repeat the vicar's words.

The vicar wasn't too enthusiastic, having performed hundreds of marriages and knowing how nervous people can be on these occasions. Neither was I as I can't even remember a one-line knock knock joke.

But Gill was going to get her way and we did recite our vows to each other, word perfect. I remember that beforehand there was a little bit of debate about the word "obey." It was becoming fashionable for women to leave it out, influenced by the feminist argument that promising to obey a husband (when he makes no such promise) reduced women to the status of chattels. Funnily enough they never object to the man's promise to "worship" his missus, never mind giving her all his "worldly goods" (in my case, a beat up old Saab).

The vicar was a traditionalist and made some neat point that I can't remember, so we left it in, much to the disgust of some of her friends. And I've been obeying her ever since.

The bald truth

I'm 51 - long past the age for a mid-life crisis but I was patting my hair this afternoon like you do. Don't you pat your hair? No, I'm not sure I do very often either which is probably why I was surprised to find that there didn't seem much to pat.

"My hair seems to be going a bit thin on top," I said to Gill. "Yes there's not much there now," she said. "Your bald patch is showing like a tonsure these days."

Is it? This came as a surprise to me. I tried to look at the back of my head in the wardrobe mirror, turning as I did like a dog chasing its tale, then bending backwards like a limbo dancer. This explained everything. You can't see the back of your head. It's unfamiliar territory.

So I found another small mirror and did the thing that barbers do when they show off their handy work after cutting your hair. It made me realise how clever my barber has been. He must hold the mirror at such an angle that it only shows the lower head hair and not the shiny round skating-rink on top.

The thing is that there is still a bit of hair on the crown so it feels hairy rather than polished. But the inspection revealed more pink than grey. It's definitely going.

The great thing is that this is no big deal. This isn't premature baldness. It's "about the right time" baldness which makes all the difference. I don't feel the need to shave it all off like some younger blokes I know. But it's left me wondering about future trips to the barber's: at what stage can you ask for concessions?