3 and Me.

3 Things about me...

Three names I go by:
1. Steve
2. Daddy
3. Dear debtor

Three jobs I have had in my life.
1. Bank clerk
2. Bricklayer
3. Hard-core pornographer - via my website www.adultextreme.co.uk (sadly closed you pervs)

Three Places I have lived
1.Far Cotton, Northampton
2.East and West Hunsbury, Northampton
3.Kingsthorpe, Northampton - though I fail to see a pattern.

Three Favorite drinks
1. ANY real ale that is brewed more with love than with chemicals
2. Stella Artois - which is just chemicals.
3. Water - to counteract the two choices above - which is hardly any chemicals.

Three TV shows that I watch
1. The Wire (though anything by David Simon)
2. The I.T.Crowd (though anything by Graham Linehan)
3. The Inbetweeners - for the word "clunge"

Three Places I Have Been
1. Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga, Tennessee - USA.
2. Some neolithic rock city in Menorca - name escapes me - it was so quiet it was magical.
3. Paradise - but I've never been to me.

Three people who e-mail/Facebook me regularly
1. Fletch
2. Mother Plowman
3. Some Facebook bot that is always asking if I want to send people a hug or a kiss or some cheesecake or whatever.

Three of my favorite restaurants
1. McDonalds, Disney Village, Disneyland Paris - you've saved me 100's of euros over the years.
2. The Turnpike, Northampton - where Andrea and I had our first date
3. The Jade Pavillion, Northampton - where Andrea and I briefly escape our kid-dom.

Three friends I think will respond
1. Fletch - in iambic pentameter, of course
2. Plowman - via some zombie blog, of course
3. Gerry Burt - via the club, decidedly off course.

Three things I'm looking forward to
1. South Africa 2010
2. London 2012 - the only sports Andrea and I will watch together
3. The next football game either of my two sons are playing in.

Three Records I Couldn't Be Without
1) Sleep of the just - Elvis Costello
2) Lost in the flood- Springsteen...but once I've worked out the lyrics it'll change.
3) Delapre Middle School 1500m champion - 1979

Three Films I Always Watch
1) Apocalypse Now
2) A Matter of Life and Death
3) The Raw Wank Redemption.

Three Places I Want To Visit
1) Ireland (yeah, I know its not far away)
2) China
3) Brisbane, The Gold Coast, Australi

25 Things About Me

(originally written 2nd February 2009)

1) My eldest son was 10 today, 2nd February, Groundhog Day - I felt old today, I felt old yesterday and I'll feel old tomorrow. He shares his birthday with James Joyce and Data from Star Trek.

2) I've never read Ulysses - how far can one man travel in a day, anyway?

3) I've seen all the episodes of Star Trek, The Next Generation - how far can one man travel in a day!!

4) Our two boys went back to school today after having last week off due to heating problems in their 100 year old primary school and I let out a sigh of relief that could have been heard from space.

5) The school phoned today at 1pm asking that we collect the kids as the boiler had broken down again and they would be off until at least Wednesday - in space, no one can hear you scream!

6) The last word I ever remember miss-spelling was liaison. I missed out one of the I's. Oh, the shame.

7) My eldest son and my father are both better footballers than me.

8) My father is 62!

9) I have a genuine affection for the novel "To Serve Them All My Days" by R.F.Delderfield and often wonder if the transformation of the main character really does mirror the inter war years in Great Britain or whether I have an underlying interest in public school buggery.

10) I have noticed as the years have progressed that, whilst I have less tolerance for people in general, my reaction to their perceived idiosyncrasies lessens as the years roll by. The fight or flight response has never seen such mismatched synchronicity.

11) I waffle sometimes.

12) I am shy. This outwardly manifests itself in many ways. I am loud, open and gregarious in equal measures. Not immediately indicative of a shy guy, I'm sure you'll agree, but they're a helluva cloak.

13) I waffle often.

14) I would cut off my right hand if it meant Liverpool Football Club were to win the league this year. I would not have done this 25 years ago as Liverpool were winning everything in sight and my right hand and I had an understanding.

15) I am left-handed yet right-footed.

16) I could still "do a job" as centre- half for any team stupid enough to pick me.

17) If I don't apply some sort of wax/cream/gel to my hair after washing it I look like a 6ft dandelion.

18) My daughter, Poppy, is the most beautiful little girl in the world.

19) Anybody who has a baby thinks that their child is the most beautiful in the world. Between the last two statements I'm sure is a blueprint to end all war. Only send fathers to fight who have small children...oh no, we do that already!

20) I am turning into an apolitical animal as I get older. My fear and loathing of ALL politicians knows no boundary.

21) I vote at every election out of a sense of duty/guilt to all the people who have died defending our freedom. I eat greens as that was also drilled into me as a child.
If dead men dont talk, as the saying goes, then that's me sorted I suppose and Derek Acorah fucked !!

23) I love to write about feelings and experiences but the Far Cotton in me means I rarely speak of them.

24) I was born on Peter Cooks 30th birthday.

25) My favourite colour is 7.

Twilight Parazone

(Best Rod Serling impression) "Stephen Kerr was an ordinary man, doing an ordinary job...but nothing is ordinary...in The Twilight Zone"

Once I was in Letchworth Garden City (I didn’t know where it was either) on a mission to get a Mr Richard Wilson to sign up with Pickford's - for all his Careful Moving Needs.

I entered the slightly rundown garden of the above and knocked on the door, whilst making notes about parking/access etc. Very boring to read, even more boring as a job, believe me.

He didn’t answer first knock. With a second knock I turned my back to the door to cast my eyes over mini-Basra and said, "I don’t believe it!", under my breath. It's quite a good impression actually.

I then turned around to find that he had opened the door, second knock, and was standing there like the shopkeeper from Mr Benn, suddenly appeared , but looking like a fat Goth, for indeed that was what he was.

He ushered me into a house that had "character", shall we say. I was half expecting a Fagin or Miss Havisham to loom large. He apolgised for the truly extravagant amount of books that littered literally every room.

I replied that I loved a house crammed full of books and said, trying to engage him and find common ground,
"If I leave a house without books then I think the occupants are nothing but Pagans"

"We are Pagans, actually", he replied with all sincerity.

This was backed up by a very dodgy-looking pentangle thingy hanging from his wall and a broomstick resting in his hallway.

I'm ushered upstairs, being dragged there by a strange smell. I have smelt it before but I couldn't put my nose on it.

In the first bedroom was his wife, on a PC, suitably Gothed. I'm informed that the PC and table are going as part of the move but the cage of rats to her side was their responsibility.

THAT WAS THE SMELL!

About eight Rattus Rattus (or is that sixteen?) all coiled together like a huge King Rat.

Unperturbed, I carried on nonchalantly, as if a bedroom full of rats was an everyday occurrence.

The second bedroom bought more and more books, my eyes focusing on the Alan Moore tome, "From Hell."

I mentioned to Mr Wilson that Alan Moore was a famous Northamptonian, I was from Northampton, and my dad's cousin, Tom Hall, had him singing/talking on a couple of his early albums. It's all in the detail to secure the sale!

Hearing our conversation Mrs Wilson then seemed to float into the room. Apparently Alan Moore was on old family friend.

Did she remember my dad’s cousin? Tom Hall? The singer? Full, Falstaffian figure always recognised, when I was a kid, in a pair of red, white and blue dungarees?

Not only did she remember him but in the only hanging wardrobe in the house not to have books or rats falling off of them she pulled out a pair of dungarees. When she was younger, darker-skinned, and not wearing any colour as long as its black, Tom had given them to her to play dressing up games with.

(Best Rod Serling impression) - "What had started as an ordinary day in Letchworth Garden City would end as ordinarily too. But every so often, Stephen Kerr, and maybe you, enter The Twilight Parazone."

Cornish Nasty

You don't need an awful lot of rope to hang a man, really you don't.

A 6 foot man doesn't even need 6 feet of rope to be dispatched through the trapdoor.

What you do need, however, is a clinical understanding of the hanging process. Short drop, standard drop, long drop, knot placement, body weight etc. It all counts toward the perfect hanging.

Underestimate anything and you can seriously hurt somebody, which nobody wants. Who wants to be left hanging around?

Overestimate and the head just comes clean off. This, conversely, is deemed too brutal. Just a neck snap or slow strangulation is required.

I used to know a bearded brute of a scaffolder, a Cornishman called Mick. Years of drinking had filed away the sharpness from his features and his facial growth and pony-tailed hair was as wild as his ways. He looked your archetypal West Countryman though he was too large to fit into a Shrimper, a tin mine or indeed any other Cornish cliches. The open air and the boozing coupled with the times spent hanging from his scaffold with 13 foot tubing rubbing against him had sand-blasted the exposed skin left on his face to a burnished red that Schwarzkopf would've surely sold in a bottle for £15 a go. Cider Glow, or some similarly over-priced, multi-used name for red.

Like the many ships that had floundered on his native coast Mick was a wreck. He'd walked the planks on a daily basis with work and he had decided that enough was enough and it was time to drop.

Mick recounted the story to me over a tea break in the shell of a Co-Op building we were refurbishing on Newport Pagnell High Street. 30 feet up the scaffold that Mick had built we were eating sandwiches, smoking roll-ups, enjoying our rest and having a right laugh.

"I tried to kill myself once," Mick recounted with a gloomy air of finality that suggested he would've been more successful if he'd have been in this frame of mind at the time.

"Oh right," I replied, "how dya get on?" I knew I was being a cheeky young sod but loved the danger of poking the Grizzly Bear with a honeyed stick.

"Nah, didn't work out how I expected."

The Bear had licked the honey and disregarded the stick. I poked a little harder.

"What happened then, Mick? You have a change of heart, mate? Realise that life IS worth living?"

"Nah, the frigging scaffold I built in my front room brought the whole ceiling down when I jumped. The rope was too long and I hadn't tightened the base plates enough."

"Sounds a death trap, Mick."

Irony had yet to land in Launceston and Mick just nodded in agreement and munched on his cheese roll.

I knew irony had landed in Newport Pagnell, however.

I was suspended 30 feet in the air on scaffold built by a suicide risk who had proven to be no good at building scaffold.

You really wouldn't need any rope from this height.

No Place Like Home

Did the Earth move for you last night? If you were resident in my street I can assure you it did.

Hundreds of people were evacuated from their homes due to a huge explosion in a small garage located 8 doors up from us. We live in a relatively quiet Victorian terraced street and know a couple of neighbours by name, five or six to nod to. I’m sure your area is not much different in that respect.

Seeing so many people in their pyjamas, nightdresses and dressing gowns in the middle of the street at midnight made the whole event seem even more surreal. An Arthur Dent Fan Club reunion anyone? Too surreal? Please yourself.

Taken to the local church around the corner we swapped tea, coffee, gossip and got to know each other more in the seven hours that we were together than in the three and a half years that we had lived there. We now know 20 or so neighbours by name and an even greater number to nod to .

The children played as if they’d known each other forever. I lay claim to the chaviest kids in the church, however, as upon seeing the first of many police cars patrolling the area last night my 12 year old ran off shouting “Po! Po!” and my eight year old went the other way shouting, “5-0! 5-0!” I really must cut down on the American TV drama that they watch!

The fire service was , as usual, magnificent. We were allowed back home at about 6.30am. We bid farewell to our new friends and put our heads down.

Nobody died and nobody was injured. The garage and two houses either side of it were destroyed. Other houses and gardens down the hill, stopping just four doors from us, were also severely damaged.

Nobody could sleep, nobody went to work and the kids were kept off school.

Opening the door this morning I saw, rather than the normally empty street, neighbour talking to neighbour. They had gathered again by the remaining fire tender, just behind the cordon, watching the work still in progress in investigating the fire, possibly arson we were sadly told.

I know how Dorothy felt when she awoke from her journey to Oz and was back in the black and white world. Everybody seemed strangely familiar, though they weren’t wearing their costumes in the cold light of day and had dispensed with stripey PJ’s, ill-fitting slippers and fluffy dressing gowns.

There’s no place like home, unless there’s a raging inferno on your doorstep.

Then there’s no place like the church hall whilst wearing your dressing gown.

Photo Finish?

Take a look at the photograph published here.

It's taken on Coronation Day, 1953. The golden age of bunting. If you are under 50 then please Google, “bunting”. If you are over 50 then please ask someone under 50 what “Google” is. If you're 50 today and slap bang in the middle – Happy Birthday!

A street race for the women of Cambria Crescent, Northampton, following on from the Coronation celebration street party that day for all of the residents. Pretty unremarkable, I'm sure you will agree, in so much as thousands of events were taking place the length and breadth of Britain and the Empire simultaneously. All the pink parts of the world map having colourful street parties and street races and having them eternally set in black and white.

I've only recently discovered this photograph online and it has literally stopped me in my tracks, a bit like the women who are captured here forever in theirs.

My grandparents and mother lived in Cambria Crescent in 1953. In fact in other photographs discovered from the same day I have found my mother, dressed as the Queen of Hearts, celebrating with pirates, chimney sweeps, beggars and other fancily-dressed children.

The photograph I'm drawing your attention to shows my grandmother, right of the picture, looking slightly to her right with her right arm across her chest as she races all the other women of the street. She's the one in the black shoes if you still can't place her. I give this description for me as much as you because this is not the image of my “nan” that is in my minds eye. Although she is many years passed now she was always an old lady as I was growing up. Dispensing sound advice, quiet wisdom, hard-boiled sweets and soft cuddles. Your archetypal, matriarchal Grandmother. Just like yours, I'm sure, but here she is sprinting the length of the street, and without her fluffy slippers or furry ankle boots too.

And that's just the point.

We tend to fix a person, long gone, with an historic stare that is almost entirely focused on the last part of their life. We discard or can't comprehend that our aged relatives once partied and raced the days away long before we came along and invented the same things for the very first time.

That's a dangerous thing to do because it won't be long before we are just photographs (coloured ones, admittedly, and probably JPEG's) being focused on by our distant offspring who can't quite believe that their dusty old grandparent, that spent most of their time asleep in the chair, did once really ride that banana boat off the coast of Ibiza wearing nothing more than a pair of sunglasses and a smile.

Same party, different time. Party on.

Freedom For Tooting

I am really unsure how to approach what can only be described as middle-age.

Whilst my body is showing all the early signs of mid-life decay it is far from the knackers yard. Grey hairs are respectfully staying to the sides of my head and a paunch has yet to fully explore the rest of my body. Reflexes are fairly sharp, teeth good and my non-smoking continues to roll on at an alarming rate of one year and rolling.Now exercise may be something that other people do to ward off the excesses of youth but I really don't have that much gym time in me. If I want to feel the burn then give me a steaming Madras or a an Ikea wardrobe to assemble.

As I get older I find myself become less tolerable with the world and its odd little ways versus my odd little ways. I'm sure the world couldn't give a flying fig but then that just serves to make me even angrier with it. So enough is enough.

If you are old enough to remember Wolfie Smith from the late 1970's BBC series Citizen Smith then not only will your body also be entering, journeying through or even exiting middle-age, you will be aware that he kept a little black book in which he wrote the names of all those that had offended him, chided him, goaded him, attacked him or even just rubbed him up the wrong way. Come the Glorious Day he was to line then all up against the wall and seek retribution, Pop! Pop! Pop! - revolutionary style.

This was, and still is, an excellent idea. Far too many people seem to almost form a disorderly queue these days to offend, abuse and generally hack me off. I'm not conceited enough to think that it's only me that they hack off but I am conceited enough to tell you all about it.

I have purchased a little black book and have been feverishly filling it up.

My list, is as follows, in no particular order, and up to now…

- People who buy bottled water - it falls from the sky, people, and isn't half as tasty as coke.

- People who are the victim of shark attacks – sharks live in the sea and eat in the sea. Important last part there. Have done for millions of years before we were even on Earth. Stop paddling in their larder!

- Lottery winners that carry on working – Karma gave you this great fortune for a reason - “My Name Is Earl” style. Don't squander a once in several lifetimes opportunity by continuing to clean toilets for minimum wage everyday, pausing only to holiday in Rhyl in the same caravan you've visited for the last 35 years, whilst accruing £2,000 per week in bank interest until the day you die surrounded by cats and tiny snow globes of Rhyl.

- T.V. companies that ask if you have been affected by the programme just broadcast – if an episode of Coronation Street, the one where Roy and transexual Hayley kiss, for instance, pushes you toward gender modification, then you were walking a well-trodden path prior to 7.30 on any Monday evening on ITV1.

- 3D TV – I've just spent £850 on a 42 inch HD TV with cinema surround sound – I was told it was the latest thing by a guy in a shop who hadn't told his tie, shoes or haircut the same thing.

It's not 3D TV, though.

Dear world, If I promise to buy a 3D TV will you put off Holographic TV projection for about 10 years or until at least I've paid for this TV?

Regards 2D Steve Kerr

- TV lesbians and TV makeovers – both look so much better on Channel 4 TV than they ever have in real life.

- Textspeak on Facebook. There really is no need for abbreviation when you are sat at a keyboard. I exonerate my teenage nieces for such speech as it's their Cockney rhyming slang to our inquisitive, prying eyes. The rest of you...WTF? Lmao. ;

- Packets of peanuts that warn on the rear of their packets that they contain nuts. Let the gene pool filter out such numbskulls who are allergic to peanuts yet still buy a packet of peanuts only to then read the warning on the back and slowly put the packet down and walk away – smug that they cheated death.

- People who have neither the imagination nor the inclination to finish their sentences. It probably is the