The fine art of dying on stage (Pub life Telford Oakengates Open Mic night)

With months off work sitting on my arse, I decided on Thursday to take part in the monthly Open Mic Session at my local watering hole.

Before I go further I should clarify, this isn’t the cacophony of noise that alludes to being the weekly jamming session. This is a bon-fide Open Mic session hosted by the Francis and Clare who supply all the kit, speakers, leads, PA system and musicians from all over Shropshire clamour to get their 20 minute slot, wherein you can play anything you like during your 20 minutes of fame.

However, I wasn’t expecting to put my foot through my beloved crafter guitar the week before. And so there I was one week later, the opening act, with a cheap second hand lefter in my sweaty paws: the sort tat that wouldn’t be amiss at a car boot sale.

Now I haven’t played for a bit but I had practiced and was reasonably confident I would do ok. But try as he might, Howard couldn’t get any decent sound out of the thing in the sound check. After a few pregnant pauses, we decided the only option was to place a mic right up in front of the guitar in the hope of getting something. Despite my growing concerns, I decided to have a go.

First song to blow out the cobwebs and settle myself…..bit crap but hey, I got through it….second song….and that’s where things begun to slowly unravel. The sound kept fading in and out as I moved about on the stool and I begun to lose my place….. A few tricky chords later and I started to slip out of control. I lurched from one disastrous chord to the next…. The empathetic audience felt my pain and gave me a sympathetic clap between songs but their gaping mouths confirmed for me that this was car-crash telly and I was the star! My face was burning up like Sputnik on re-entry but I gamefully played on, slowly morphing into the quasi- Lampwick/Donkey dude from the storybook Pinocchio, wildly wind-milling the strings with my cloven hooves in a frenzy of sweat and hair and bellowing out jumbled lyrics…’Hee-haw! .... Hee-haw! .... HEE-HAW!!....’

If the arse of Beelzebub himself was to have opened up in front of me at that very moment, I’d have gladly dived straight in. The end came swiftly… mercifully…when I simultaneously lost any sound from the guitar and my place in the song. Bereft of any dignity, I just stopped, right in the middle of a line, as abruptly as one hears when simply lifting the needle off a record. “I should have quit 2 songs before” I muttered to myself, as I guiltily quaffed the free pint John the landlord gives to performers…

The stage was perfectly set for the next guy, following someone who’d just crashed and burned. However, performers at Open Mic do share a genuine camaraderie. No performer relishes the prospect of following someone who has just wowed the pub with some incredible guitar but equally no-one would wish someone to flunk his set. They share you pain when you flunk because they’ve been there before and know how it feels to play a bad-un.

So what did Grasshopper learn in today’s lesson?

Good at home, unplugged, does not necessarily mean good when you amp up.
I need a new guitar.
The key to any success is to evaluate what has happened and apply you have learned.


Editor’s note: The Francis-Bell duo do a great job providing the staging and equipment for the monthly Open Mic nights which are normally the last Thursday in any month. The atmosphere is friendly and Howard and Clare make you feel most welcome. The crown audience too is incredibly forgiving (as demonstrated in this blog entry)

So if you fancy having a go, contact Francis-Bell at www.francis-bell.com to get a slot. Demand for these slots is fierce. You need to book early to get a slot. And it’s always busy. Go on give it a go, if you fall flat on your arse the worst that will happen is you will land on top of me….

Slugs and snails.....(controlling slugs and snails the old fashioned way)

Slugs and Snails are very interesting creatures. Firstly they are hermaphroditic, each equipped with both male and female reproductive organs, so they can, quite literally, go **** themselves.

And that’s not even the best bit. They have also been bestowed the gift of extraordinarily huge penises. Indeed, the garden slug's penis is nearly half its total body length! Fancy that. (*snigger*) Furthermore, penis size is reflected in the scientific name of one banana slug species - ‘dolichophallus’ - Latin for "long penis."

Amorous slugs make for great voyeuristic entertainment during evening veggie patrol. All you need is a torch (and if you are a bit ‘Marquis de Sade’ some salt to calm their ardour). The sight of a courting pair of slugs majestically circling one another whilst solemnly waving their oversized penises overhead puts the most improbably athletic couples of Pompeii and Khajuraho into a more appropriate and severely diminished perspective.

So, what with our veggie patch on the go, our garden has become a veritable smorgasbord for a Cornucopia of slugs and a Rout of snails. Interesting collective nouns aside, the gardener’s chief enemies Mr Slug and Mrs Snail need to be kept in order- naturally of course, being the diminutive eco warrior that I aspire to be.

Ultimately I’m after a hedgehog. But with hedgehogs being quite the little travellers they are, we need one that wouldn’t ordinarily make it in the wild. So, whilst we wait with trembling anticipation for the phone call to say that that a three legged hedgehog needs a loving home, a few fat toads or frogs would be quite useful keeping slugs and snails at bay. So I have installed a small but bijou nature pond in the back garden, designed specifically to attract toadies and froggies. I’ve put in some nice ferns and I plan to let the surrounding grass grow wild. When the jasmine shoots off again it should look pretty cool.

Last week I added a bunch of tadpoles and when they change into froggies and toadies I will have an army of hungry amphibians at my disposal. Between Wifey’s folks and my mate Rich (see blog ‘Old Man Rich’) I have an almost inexhaustible supply to supplement my forces should the slugs hire some mercenary grass snakes or herons and my army begins to sufer losses.

I’m expecting great things from my raw recruits. Once metamorphosis has taken place, I expect them to get to the battlefront post haste and start engaging the enemy

Signing off, Goosh dolichophallus….


The Enemy.

My army....working hard at fighter school











Allied HQ....

Jake the Master Baker (Pub life in Oakengates telford)

This Easter bank holiday weekend, The Goodchild Clan all entered into the Easter Hot Crossed Bun baking competition at the Crown Inn.

Having won it last year I had a title to defend.
Having failed to get a mention last year, Wifey had a point to prove.
Jake was just in it for the ride.
The judges cogitated and deliberated and finally announced the results. It was a close run thing with Paul (Wifey’s brother) third and me, elbowed into second place by my very own boy.












It was pleasing to note that he was guided into first place by my expert tutelage…

And Wifey? Back to the drawing board I’m afraid. As she was flicking through her Emails yesterday I noticed a Hot Cross Bun Recipe in her In-box….reeks of desperation methinks….

(Cray) Fishing (Fly fishing in shrophsire)

This Tuesday Geoff and I set out once again on a lovely sunny day to the trout pond in Bridgnorth intent on me breaking my trout duck.

I am pleased to say my casting is much improved. My ability to catch trout though, isn’t. I should not be too hard on myself really. I’m casting further and more consistently and I actually hooked a couple of trout but both managed to wriggle free whilst I played them in.

Of course ‘JR Hartley’ blithely caught a brace yet again. He even had the temerity to put the second one back so that he could ‘fish on’.

Not to be outdone though I did land something quite a bit more unusual: a Crayfish.
The advice from the trout pond owner was ‘If you manage to land one, stamp on it’.
Well I wasn’t so enamoured with this approach so being the big softie I am, I let her scurry back into the pond.

Editors note:
I have researched this further and have since found a minefield of byelaws protecting the English Crayfish with one hand and savagely curtailing the all non native Crayfish with the other. My advice if you see one is simply ‘run away’…which shouldn't be too difficult as they are quite ugly.
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Gawn Fishing...

I’ve always fancied having a go at fly fishing. Only problem is that it’s not a sport you can just turn up and have a go. You need the right equipment for starters which costs a fortune and then a licence to boot. Not only that, learning how to cast requires the tutelage of someone already proficient in the skill. Well, wifey’s Old Man, Geoff, I was advised, is a dab hand at fly fishing and what’s more, he had bundles of kit and no-one to go with!

So a couple of weeks ago after a bit of web research, Geoff and I found ourselves at a fly fishing pool near Bridgnorth. We had with us the sort of bag boys love; full of interesting oddities and closed boxes that had not seen the light of day since they were closed away some 15 years ago. Each revealed an array of flies, some brightly coloured, some shiny, some sparkling in the sun, and all incredibly intricate and skilfully created.

There were already several guys fishing at the pool and after exchanging pleasantries with a couple, we headed off to a quiet spot.

Now there really is no substitute for having a go yourself and thankfully the Geoff concurred. He showed me a couple of casts and then I was off on my own having a go with the spare rod. I soon got the hang of it, albeit somewhat weak and lacking in distance.

No such problems for the master though. Geoff rolled back the years in a vintage display of fly fishing. He caught his first on a particular kind of fly called ‘The missionary’ (Every time he said that thereafter, I was childishly forced to stifle a belly laugh)

So I swapped my fly to the same one too…..Nothing.

So we swapped places and continued fishing.…Nothing.
So we swapped back…and he promptly caught his second after a couple of casts.
To add insult to injury, fish were mocking me, jumping out of the water all around me in some kind aquatic trout circus …...

(I wasn’t frightening them with amateurish and clumsy casts).

In short I caught sod all. To make matters worse, all but 1 other person on the pool caught a fish that morning. However I wasn’t unbowed. In fact I loved every minute of it. Having agreed with Geoff that we should make this a regular thing, he promptly gave me a rod and reel from his collection. An exceedingly generous gift and one that I now am compelled to use as soon as another session can be arranged.

Watch out Mr Trout, there’s a Goodchild about…

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The pool....

The missionary fly; the name of which invoked much hilarity. (the actual image is somewhat disappointing compared to that which I conjured up in my mind’s eye)