Well, I'm back on this blog again, at just after midnight this warm, mild November night.
Do people still do blogs? Do people still read anybody's but their own?
Is every body else on ebay, or Facebook, or MySpace, or whatever else is the latest 'kewl' trend for teenyboppers ont' tinternet?
It's getting hard to keep up with all this guff. Social networking onl;ine, all from the privacy of your own spare bedroom!
Whatever happened to going out and meeting people?
Let's face it, you DON'T want to be meeting the people who spend all their time doing stuff like this on the net.
They've obviously got something lacking in their lives to find the time to 'post' it all, anyway.
Me? I have to do it because I get paid to do it, and somebody noticed I hadn't posted anything since July.
Fact is, you don't want to meet me, either.
Although many of you have. I'm a regular in Worksop town centre. You may have served me at one of the finer delicatessens in Bridge Street.
Which reminds me, there's a continental market on at the mo.
Still not sure what to think about them.
At first, the sight of all these exotic cheeses and dried meats and giant open-air pans of paella was a breath of fresh air in a town built on Greggs cheese straws and Cheese 'N Bean Melts.
But this latest market is about the ninth or 10th, or summat...
And it strikes me they're still flogging the same cheeses and meats and stuff... and by that I mean EXACTLY the same, know what I mean?
But that's just me.
Folk have accused me of being a bit of a cynic, a sort of 'glass half empty' guy, rather than a 'glass half full'.
What they don't know is that MY glass is always full... and when it's empty, I fill it up again.
It must be late now, I'm starting to ramble.
So there you have it. A 10-minute stream of consciousness from the fevered brain of the one and only A. A. Grundi's exhausted being.
Must stop watching all these James Bond films (settled down to Moonraker tonight on DVD but it's got more holes in the plot than there are in my gardening socks... and I haven't even got any gardening socks).
That's it. Goodnight!
(Let's see what bizarre comments I get to THIS posting, eh?

I'm wading through tons of old rants and trying to get them uploaded with the worst software I've ever been tormented with in my life... yet this is what the Worksop Guardian want me to use to create stuff like this blog and my website.

Anyway, at present, half the archive stories for the Grundi Archive are showing up in Grundi Fanmail, and the archive links are going in the wrong meta-tagged box, or something, and I've just wrecked Aidan and Angus's District News section, although I got Tracy and Amy's Guardian Rose guff working on the Dinnington website, and now I can see little birdies flying past my eyes, you know, little cartoon birdies like what helped Snow White clean up the Seven Dwarfs's room... you know, it's half past midnight and I reckon I'll just grab one of me Viz annuals and retire to bed.

Goodnight.

Well, I was just bashing out a load of new guff for this blog in the Worksop Guardian office when I hear that all the power has gone out up the top end of town.

Potter Street was affected, but the council staff fast asleep inside their grey lubyanka did not even register that there'd been a problem.

A few calls to electricity boards and the like establishes that men are "working on the problem and power will be restored within an hour or so".

Next minute, the Guardian office is plunged into darkness.

I imagine two blokes in a decalled-up Transit, fancy overalls, tool belts, the lot, standing next to an electricity substation control box, scratching their heads as they browse their "Power Cuts For Dummies" manual.

"Ere, Nige, d'y'reckon it's this red switch 'ere?"

"Dunno.. flick it and see worrappens."

(Of course they might be talking in Croat or Polish or Bengalese, but the gist will remain the same).

"Bloody 'ell, the rest of the town's gone art unall! Well, blow me!"

After another hour's faffing, pausing only to stop working for 55 minutes to read The Sun and eat their Greggs butties, the fine electric lads finally find the right switch, flick it, and... hoorah! Worksop rejoins the 21st century.

Of course, the power cuts could equally be the fault of the Environment Agency teams who have now arrived in town to do a bit of post-flooding work shoring up Worksop's defences.

One random slice with a JCB and a load of cables get sheared in two.

Perhaps I'm getting too cynical in me old age, I dunno.

Wednesday 6th June 2007

It's 11.30pm. And tonight I will reveal a little of what goes into writing the A.A. Grundi column in the Worksop Guardian every week.

This is how it goes...

Last week's page gets all the copy 'drained' from it, like emptying an old bucket of glop, which somehow seems rather apt.

The Editor then calls over to me, as I sit in splendour behind my mahogany desk in an air-conditioned office.
"Oy, Grundi, your page is ready," he'll call affably. And then, in one of his abrupt mood changes, he'll bark: "You've got 45 minutes to gerrit done, or else I'm finishing it for good."

I pull over a mug of coffee, roll my chair towards the bright screen of my Dell whatever-it-is, click a couple of buttons on the keyboard... and there, in front of me, is last week's page.

And it's all empty.

A vast desert of white, awaiting my vitriolic attentions.

And I sit there, looking up at the clock. It's just after 11 in the morning. What's everybody else doing at this time?

Teachers are standing in front of classrooms, getting verbally and physically abused by riffraff pupils with vile hideous parents.

Council officers are sitting round tables in meetings, spreading maps out and dreaming up new ways of meddling pointlessly with our affairs.

Checkout girls are listlessly dragging bags of sugar across barcode readers, repeating robot phrases to uninterested customers: "Have you got a Nectar card?" and "Are you collecting the schools vouchers?" and "Do you want any help with your packing, even though I can clearly see you've only bought a newspaper and two packets of Polos?"

Junior hacks on the Guardian are pounding away at their keyboards just a few yards from where I sit, transforming the dull and mundane into the hopelessly incomprehensible dull and mundane.

And me? I'm halfway down my cup of coffee.

And then I pick up last week's Guardian for inspiration.
And I see a photo of the A1 Housing team smiling away after failing yet again to get anything like a decent rating for looking after people's council houses in Bassetlaw.

And I'm off.

And then I hear someone say: "Are there any Post offices closing down round here?" as they pursue the story about how our great national mail service is failing as well.
And suddenly I've done two bits.

Then I open a little email folder called 'Grundi Emails In', placed there by the deputy editor who filters all the millions of emails the Guardian gets every day.
And I find some good ones, some unprintable ones, some dull ones, some that go on and on and on forever... and I select three that tickle my fancy and drop 'em in the Fanmail box on the left.

Another sip of coffee. Hell, I'm two thirds done!

Another picture catches my eye in last week's Guardian... yet another artist's drawing of that preposterous Tree Monster they want to build as Sherwood Forest's Visitor Centre in Edwinstowe.
Five minutes of fevered clacking on the keyboard and that hole's filled.

Only the Boil In The Bag snippets to do, and I can go home.

One of the sub-editors wanders by.
"Hey, I've got a Grundi for you," he says, and then gives me the best line of the week as he presents a reasoned argument about women drivers: "It's an established fact that women can't drive."
Great stuff! I blast out the words even as he stands there ranting.

Nearly done now!

Then the undisputed King Of Office Banter Richard Mason breaks off from spinning out a couple of sports pages for four days to start carping on about a nightmare walk into town, where he ran the gauntlet of morons with clipboards trying to block his path, getting run over by a yob on a mountain bike, before ending up in "one of them Pound shops" and wondering why they had tills in there at the checkouts.

"What do they need a till for?" he muses. "Everything in there's a pound. So why don't they just have machines with a big red button on them, marked £1?"

I pinch this fabulous bit of observation lock, stock and barrel... and hey presto! Another week's worth of waffle is done.

And it's not even 12 noon! And I'll get a week's wages for this!

And that's it. Another page, another week. Talented original incisive copy like the Grundi page doesn't grow on trees, y'know!

Except now, of course, I'm expected to service my 'online section', whatever that is (have you tried looking at this on the Guardian website? Let me know what bits don't work properly, will you?)

Oh, and "Keep this blog up to date".

Does anybody read blogs any more? There must be 200 billion on the go even as I blurge this guff into cyberspace.

Oh well. When I've gone at least I've left some sort of footprint behind.

Even if it's just a grain of sand on an endless beach.

Goodnight!

It's 3 in the morning, just got back from a DVD night at my pal Angus's house where the menu was... a 1965 episode of The Saint, with Roger Moore on the racetrack at Brand's Hatch, hair slicked back like a vast orange Mr Whippy icecream...

Followed by Snakes On A Plane, perfect DVD night fodder - completely stupid from start to finish, a dumb 10-second Hollywood pitch turned into brainrot for the moronic masses (like me). When Samuel L. Jackson starts yelling about those m****** snakes on the m***** plane, then  you know you've hit rock bottom.

And at that precise moment I'd engorged meself on a full litre of Pepsi Max, half a bag of Sensations Spare Rib Flavour nibbles, two bags of Iced Gems, 23 carrot sticks dipped in Tesco Thousand Island Dip, 7 Jaffa Cakes and two individual packs of Rainbow Drops. Plus some melon because I'm on a diet.

Later we nipped to McDonalds for a cheeseburger and six McNuggets and a milkshake apiece... why do I do these things? I wasn't even hungry, as you can imagine. And the teenage kids manning the place seemed far more interested in larking about with each other than serving us. Does this place have a manager, or what?

And then back to Angu's home cinema for a nice cup of tea to 'tamp it down' with... while watching Daniel Craig snogging Rhys Ifans in some ridiculous guff called Enduring Love, all to do with the aftermath of a hot air balloon tragedy in the countryside. What do you expect? It's all Film Foundation stuff backed by Channel 4... even when it gets shown on the telly, nobody watches it, so why the hell did I buy it on DVD, even at the knockdown price of a '3 for £20' choice in the HMV sale?

By 1am, the junk I'd scoffed was mulching nicely in my bloated gut as I watched the denoument of this strange tale...

And then I bade Angus goodnight, drove home in the Bentley singing along at full pelt to Come Sail Away by Styx, surely the finest rock anthem ever recorded, and returned home to beat the computer eight times ina row at backgammon, and then I thought I'd write this.

There. What a blog entry, eh? Full of minutiae that nobody cares about, and, like the 25 billion other gallons of cyberspace diarrhoea, completely throwaway, transient and worthless.

And on that note... goodnight!

Somebody told me my blog had to be updated every day. Whaaat? I'm a busy man!

How can I get to find out about stuff to rant at if I'm stuck in front of this Dell Optiplex thing, bashing out lightweight guff for the internet all day long?

Anyway, I've got five minutes to kill before I go out and investigate a chicken dinner at the lovely Charnwood in Blyth.

What a great restaurant, eh? Done up to the gills, and with gorgeous gardens and trees all around... and as you pull into the car park at the back, the beautiful tower of Blyth parish church rises up like a..., er... well, rises up.

Since they built that extension at the Charnwood, it's the only place to go for a meal round here. The food's exquisite, and has definitely taken a turn for the better in the past year or so.

The same can't be said for Worksop's main establishment, the Lion Hotel, which tries hard, bless it, but never quite delivers. I dunno who the chef is but I've had some right strange melas up there... a meat pie, for instance, with a 'crust' on it that was the size, colour and consistency of a house brick. What was the point of that?

Of course, this is a subjective opinion, like all my rants. Anybody out there want to speak up for the Lion, or any of our other eating establishments? Or perhaps, shock horror, you agree with me? Go on, let me know, eh?

Friday 4th May 3.40pm

Hello happy surfers, I'm back again after a three-week break! And I see that my earlier ramblings have disappeared into the ether because I haven't been updating this blog often enough!
Well, I'm back again, on a muggy Friday afternoon, eating a raspberry-flavoured ChupaChup while I try to think what's getting my dander up.
I hear all sorts of things in my circles, y'know. Did you know that there's a long-term sinister plan to seal off Lime Tree Avenue in Clumber, which would totally close the park? No more evening strolls in the twilight, no more doggy walks at dawn as the sun rises over the lake...
And all because they can't control a few riffraff from manton, who like to take their souped-up bangers into the park for a quick 'burn-up' at dusk, and a 'catch me if you can' taunt at the security patrols.
It does my head in, really it does.
Why should everything have to be closed down just to keep a tiny minority of scumbags at bay? Shouldn't it be the other way round? Close down the scumbags and leave the park open for the rest of us.
Instead, all the little joys of our lives are being taken away from us as we fail to control the riffraff.
Well, it's nearly 10 to 4 now and I've got to do a bit more Grundi stuff for next week's paper, early deadlines because of Bank Holidays etc. Plus my ChupaChup has gone and I now fancy a mint Aero.
Honestly, if you're still sitting up rerading this guff you really ought to take up a hobby. Stamp collecting, perhaps?

Sunday 25th February 2007

WHAT in the name of hell is going on at Carlton in Lindrick and Wallingwells?
Who’d have thought a gentle Sunday lunchtime stroll through Wallingwells Wood would end up putting the fear of God into me?
It started off innocently enough. Park the Bentley up next to the church, then a short stroll up the A60 and turn left on the footpath opposite the Sherwood Ranger pub.
There. I’m off. Off on a healthy fulfifilling countryside walk. Shape Up In Notts! Get healthy! Get some air into the lungs! Get some peace of mind!
How naive and utterly foolish a man can be, eh?
So off I went up the path signposted ‘Wallingwells 1 and a half Miles’. A path squashed in at the side of a field, with houses to the right of it.
After lots of rain it was a bit muddy underfoot. The perfect disguise for the depressingly familiar Mr Whippy swirls of dog muck piled up every 10 yards.
Footpath? Dog toilet, more like. You don’t need hiking boots or welligogs to go a walk round here - you need radiation suits.
But even more unsettling than the festival of faeces was the creepy surburban underbelly of Carlton as exposed in the back gardens of the houses that back on to the path. Who lives here? Why do they pave little sections of the path, yet leave other bits all squelchy?
Why do they have cheap Wilko £4.99 white plastic chairs out on tiny little two-foot square ‘patios’, and then seal them off from the sunshine with 10-feet high wooden fences?
The scent of their Sunday lunches cooking assailed my nostrils. Crikey, I thought as I hurried along, eyes watering, I thought that bird flu scare had done for Bernard Matthews... but up here they apparently still find his Turkey Twizzlers ‘absolutely bootiful’.
Mercifully, before the greasy aromas could hook their claws into the back of my throat, I reached the woods.
It was still very muddy underfoot, but under the cooling ardour of the trees, I should have felt calm.
Instead it started to get all Blair Witchy. Fag packets carefully and sinisterly positioned in the bare branches. Strange little carefully arranged pyramids of stones and branches. Creepy figures skulking just out of sight on the confusing maze of criss-crossing paths. The wild echoey yelps of a bunch of out-of-control kids playing on a rope swing and splashing about in malaria-ridden brackish water.
I checked my ‘100 Walks For Idiot Lardbutt Motorists’ book for reassurance. Nowhere did it say: “Get the hell out of there while you still can!” But it should have. Must sue the publishers.
Bravely, I decided to soldier on.
Then, as I struck out away from the urban detritus, a new hellish cacophony of sound caught my ear.
Demented whoops, snarls, shrieks, howling and yelping cannoned off the bare boughs like rifleshot. What in God’s name was that all about?
Just what you need on a supposedly peaceful countryside walk - the Hound of the Baskervilles trying to mate with a crateload of panic-stricken gibbons.
What foul inhumane torture was being applied out here among the scabrous branches and farmer’s fields dotted with sinister buildings surrounded by wooden pallets?
Had I stumbled on to Carlton’s answer to the mountain men scene in Deliverance? “Squeal like a pig, boy... go on, squeal! Yaahaaaar!”
It turned out to be feeding time at the local dog kennels. And boy, were these dogs (if, indeed, they were dogs) excited to see their Bonios arrive.
What an infernal racket! How do the people who live near this put up with it?
This hellish wailing and screeching followed me for the next couple of hours wherever I trudged... along forest tracks covered in litter, along boggy fields and swamps never made for foot traffic (but that’s where the footpath signs sent me anyway).
One field not far from the kennels looked like several Allis-Chalmers Earth Scrapers had had a ‘wheely’ competition. Massive deep ruts, full of black oily scummy water, had torn up the whole bottom half of an otherwise ordinary grassy field.
This vile mess of troughs two feet deep, flanked by banks of mud four feet high had been ‘created’ right over the area where the path went.
Anyone would think some misery guts had done this deliberately to annoy walkers like me.
Isn’t this illegal? Aren’t Notts County Council supposed to make these footpaths passable? You’d need a bloody moon buggy to get over that safely.
With the aid of a nearby branch for support, I carefully skirted this and tromped defiantly across the untainted part of the field, willing somebody to come out of the nearby buildings and yell at me: “Oy, this is private property, you’re trespassing! Get orfff my laarnd!”
Because I swear I’d have gone after him (with the branch) and wouldn’t have rested until I’d administered the cruellest punishment of all to him... make him finish the walk with me. That’d learn him!
A brief respite on a tarmac track into Wallingwells, where there seemed to be no discernible public roads linking this frankly unsettling conurbation to the outside world. Who lives here? Where do they work? How the hell do they get to work?
Some bearded bloke faffing about with a Transit van eyed me suspiciously as I approached. I decided to eye him suspiciously back. Neither of us spoke. Who’d be the first to crack? To my immense satisfaction, it was him. He broke my stare and returned to his task, which appeared to be wiping the underside of his exhaust with a cat.
I turned left at the post box (last opened in 1955) to be directed by another footpath sign across yet another boggy swamp.
By now my boots had collected so much mud and cow-flopI looked like I’d got size 27 snow shoes on. Yomping ahead in a crazy fashion, rocking from side to side like an old drunk, I managed to negotiate two more fields before I began babbling hysterically to myself and starting to imagine I could see cartoon mermaids waving seductively at me.
After circling round the hideously eerie, grey, scummy, silent and totally deserted Wallingwells angling lakes (“No Bloodworm Allowed”, said a faded notice flapping in the breeze like the beckoning finger of a dead man), I finally decided I’d had enough of all this and turned back towards the woods to fight my way home.
En route I passed a heroic gaggle of ramblers in full coloured gear, bobble hats, canes, gaiters, the lot, marching determinedly across a ploughed field that looked like it had been urinated and dumped on by a million miserable farmers.
“Bit slippy underfoot, eh?” said one cheerily as he slithered and squelched along his ‘public right of way’. My heart went out to him.
“Go get ‘em!” I wanted to yell as they sludged off into the distance. “Don’t let the beggars grind you down! Walk where you damn well like! Ignore all the miserable ‘Private - Keep Out!’ signs! Let’s strike a blow for the common man!”
Back in the woods, my nightmare was made complete by the approach of two complete and utter morons in full army combat gear, air rifles cocked and ready to go, scanning the treetops for any signs of wildlife they could heroically pick off and brighten up their feeble useless lives.
I had this fantasy of grabbing their guns off them, giving them a two-second start, and then, whooping and hollering like a madman, chasing them off into one of the muddy fields, peppering their sad sorry backsides with pellets until they fell face down in the slime, blubbering and begging for mercy.
One can but dream...
Back near the church I saw to my right a fabulous sprawl of top-of-the-range rich folk’s houses - tennis courts, giant arched windows, massive sprawling 20-bedroom extensions, the lot. Two million quidders, probably - the only drawback being you have to live in Carlton.
These grand edifices made Grundi Mansion seem like an end terrace - and yet they all looked cold, quiet, deserted and totally soul-less. Perfectly in keeping with the freaky weekend jaunt I’d just been on.
Back in the Bentley, with the heater on and an Isley Brothers CD going full tilt, I felt my shot-to-ribbons composure slowly coming back.
However I didn’t return to my normal cheerful cantankerous self until I’d carved a quick route home via the back roads to Hodsock and the blessed A1, and, cleaned and showered and nicely full from a Tesco’s Finest Chicken Korma and a glass of chilled lager, fell asleep in front of the Chelsea-Arsenal Mickey Mouse Cup Final.
Wallingwells? Wailing hell, more like! (And why isn’t bloodworm allowed, then? What is bloodworm, anyway?)