S03E04: Tinned Meat
[gentle, sombre piano music]
In a moment, the podcast itself will begin. Its tone breezy, bright and fresh, quite different from the Panorama-like voiceover you're hearing now.
Clearly, I didn't expect the thing that happened at the end to happen, but writing now in its aftermath, the event itself, the thing that happened, has affected me in ways I could never have predicted. What was it? Well, you can tell by the background music there's a foreboding quality to what's about to unfold.
Indeed, so different was the tone of this podcast that I had no choice but to ask my musician friend Nathaniel to reinterpret the closing theme tune into something suitably disturbing, while maintaining the core brand.
So, once again, the bit you're listening to now was recorded after the event. And, at the end of the episode, I'll do a recap. Here is that episode.
[outside, chickens cluck in the background. Alan is on his phone]
Yes. Yeah, a gift card for the afternoon tea, and could you make it out to Lynn Benfield?
God, no, don't put Ms! No, she can't stand Ms. Says it makes her sound like a women's-libber. She would not like that at all, she has no time for women who complain.
Yeah, the full works, please. Sandwiches, cakes, scones. Right, and how much more is the champagne package?
No. No, I think she'll be fine with tea and tap-water. Thanks.
Hello, and welcome. You join me outside at the roost as I throw feeds to my four beloved chickens. My pride and joy, these little cluckers. Four Norfolk blacks, John, Paul, George and Richard. I realise now they're all female, because they lay eggs, but I still like the names.
And the phone call you heard at the start, or top of the ep, or episode, that was me buying a carrot. What do you mean? What do I mean? Well, it's an enticing reward to dangle under the nostrils of an underperforming employee to boost performance and encourage excellence. The carrot in question, tea for two, at the Maid's Head Hotel in Norwich. The donkey, my wonderful assistant Lynn.
The prize is hers for the taking if, by the end of the month, she has hit each one of her key performance indicators. If she doesn't, the gift card is returned, or I surrender it to my girlfriend, Katrina, obviously upgrade to the champagne package, or donate it to a good cause such as a local private school. Sounds a bit mean? Not a bit of it. It's all part of a new, leaner way of working.
Heck, a new way of being that I've incorporated into my own life, and which I'm trying to feed into my assistant's... It's a way to combat those old foes, drift, lethargy and faffing. Don't worry, I'm not here to preach at you or wow you with a new-fangled life improvement system. That'll form the basis of a separate podcast, The Effective Ape with Alan Partridge, which I'm looking to get off the road as soon as we secure funding.
It's essentially a series of interviews with high achievers from the world of business, media and swimming. Tim Martin from the Wetherspoons pub chain, broadcaster and thinker Jake Humphries, the swimmer Sharon Davies, then we've got Sir Kenneth Branagh, Grant Shapps, big-wigs from the Norfolk Business World; Chris Dixon, Bill Shepard, Paul Stubbs and Ray Sylvester from Kaleidoscope Sausages, all offering practical tips on being the best you you can be.
Just got to wait for Audible to bite. I said "If you don't go for it, Spotify will!". They'll definitely have it. And they've got deep pockets. And people have heard of them, but anyway I've left it with them.
These hens are picking at my laces. They think they're, I don't know, they think it's pasta or something or liquorice. I think my black lace is liquorice. It's not liquorice, Richard! Silly old muppet. I'm literally being hen-pecked! Are you hen-pecking at my laces? Paul, sorry, George.
Part of being a high-achiever is how to function as the head of a team. And even though this is more of a breezy podcast than The Effective Ape, with the vibe of a couple of friends just hanging out, it did feel like a fruitful subject matter, how to get the best from your underlings. But truth be told, I am grappling with my assistant right now. Not literally, although I'm sure she'd give a good account of herself if it came to a wrestle. She's squat and strong, not quick. You can outrun her, but if she gets hold of you, game over. I've seen her suppress an angry dog with a forearm across the neck before. And I've no doubt she'd do the same to me. She wouldn't look out of place on a farm, carrying a yoke with two full pails at each end, while singing a hymn at the top of her voice.
No, I mean grappling with the issue of her underperformance. Not an easy issue to broach, but it's nothing I've not said to her face. She's a diligent, committed worker but, of late, there's just the sense that she's taking her eye off the ball, just a fraction. We'll come on to what's going on with her soon enough, but I'm going to say right now that the standards I'm expecting on my team are only those that I demand of myself. And since we last spoke, I've undergone a very real metamorphosis.
If you're noticing a certain, almost virginal-perkiness to my voice, that's because I'm in a truly fantastic place right now! Not just literally, the Oasthouse has four bedrooms, three bidets, and a garage converted into a one-man squash court, but metaphorically too. I'm happier, fitter, and better slept than I have ever been.
It's funny, some people laugh at the one-man squash court thing, but I'll tell you this; wake up feeling frustrated, and thrashing the hell out of a ball really helps get rid of all the tension. You can't win, but you also can't lose, so I swear by it. Every morning before my shower, I go into the garage, grab a couple of balls, and play with myself until I am well and truly spent.
Yeah, I'm in a very good place. I wouldn't say I'm Alan Two Point Zero, because I used that term when I wrote another self-help book that didn't work. Instead, I'm Alan Three Point Zero or Alan 3. Lynn said I could call myself Alan III, but that sounds like a not-very-good king. I agreed, but she chuckled as she left the room. That's when we circle back to the whole attitude thing.
All right, let's get the chickens back in the coop. Go on, go on, back in. John, Paul, George, Richard, get back! In the coop where you once belonged!
[trendy electronic music]
For a limited time only at all Hungry House pubs, there's a twenty percent discount on food and drink.
So that's steak and egg and chips, five nine-nine! Gammon, egg and chips, four nine-nine! Gammon and egg, three nine-nine. Egg and chips, two nine-nine. Eggs, nine-nine.
[beat drops]
We've got Carling, four nine-nine. Carlsberg, four nine-nine. Foster's, four nine-nine. Strongbow, four nine-nine. John Smith's, four nine-eight. And special offer just this week, Carlsberg, wine and eggs for an unbeatable nine nine-nine!
Change on a tenner!
So what happened to me? Well, two years ago - by the way, if you're listening to me, I'm just walking past a large wall I own on the decking section - two years ago, I was relieved of my position as lead co-presenter of BBC One's This Time, a clear, clear, clear case of constructive dismissal. I took them to court. Not literally, I haven't become a cabbie! I took them to court, lost, appealed, lost again, re-appealed, re-lost, and was ordered to pay costs that were so substantial. I was so shocked I didn't shout,
I actually whispered, "Oh, my god. I'll have to sell my camper van and my car and buy a smaller car!".
Yet rather than responding by falling into depression, I decided to turn my experiences into a positive.
Jesus may have turned water into wine, but by casting off the luxuries of my old life and embracing a simpler way of being, I, if you like, turned wine into water, which I think is better. Now, obviously, I'm not saying I'm as good as Jesus, I'm simply saying that when it comes to my approach to alcohol, in that regard alone, I am better than Jesus.
So, rather than feeling down or crying in the toilet about no longer being able to buy Duchy's Organic All-Butter Shortbread or locally grown tomatoes or chicken that can go wherever it likes, aka free-range chicken, I've leaned into my stripped-back, simpler, purer way of living.
First big change, the supermarket shop. I eschewed the relative luxury of Waitrose and I'm slumming it at the budget end of town in the form of Morrisons. And using a few simple tricks, I'm getting maximum bang for my buck. It's not confusing, there's no con, it's simply fusing! I'm fusing a simple, spiritual, monastic way of life with living on a budget.
Tip one; never shop hungry. If you shop hungry, your judgement is impaired and you're going to make crazy decisions. Box of mini muffins, box of muffins, doughnuts, cheese, big bag of Mini Wispas, another box of muffins. Silly decisions! It's just a juvenile way to shop. So I park up and eat two or three buttered ham baps. My belly's full, I'm ready to shop!
Head inside and it's protein first. Get there just before closing and you'll be able to help yourself to some welcome discounts on meat that's not on the turn but is a cigarette paper away from gone off. Next, fruit and veg, don't allow your decision-making to be clouded by concepts such as food miles or fair trade. Your potatoes may have been trafficked from Chechnya but a cheap spud is a cheap spud and that's the only fair trade you need to worry about.
But if I can only offer you two words of supermarket advice it would be these; Tinned meat. Like beef casserole, you can get it in a tin. Stewed chicken, it's in a tin. Fancier pie, tin. Mince and onion, tin. Steak and kidney pudding, it's in a tin.
Delicious, filling and extremely salty, tinned meat options give you all the benefits of fresh meat but at a fraction of the price and it will still be edible after you've died and after your children have died following a long and fulfilling life.
For someone to pick up a tin of meat and say "Oh no, it's past its sell-by date!", they'd probably be in a space suit and I'm not even joking!
[jaunty acoustic guitar strumming]
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With my professional life less frenzied I can also spend time getting absorbed in the little things of life and I have to admit it's immensely rewarding. I've dedicated time to tackling the stubborn patches of dry skin on my elbows. I'll marvel at the wonder of nature, sometimes spending hours staring at a flower in my garden, especially if I've been out the night before.
I will go for a long walk and just see where the road takes me. When eventually I reach a city centre, I just order an Uber. So there are some of the changes I've made to my life which I do think gives me licence to demand similar improvements from my staff.
I've become better at motivating them too. I'll knock five minutes off the working day for every task my cleaner Rosa completes to a standard I deem excellent, and ten minutes for any that hit outstanding. If she achieves good or very good she will have to work the full shift and that system just works.
Same deal when it comes to disciplinary issues. The extra time at my disposal means I can reprimand in a smarter, more effective way, so rather than dressing her down in English I'll use an online translation tool and speak to her in her mother tongue with phrases such as 'Medio, nakaligatan ka', you missed a bit, or 'Go in mo yulit', do it again. I'll even use Filipino to praise her too, she responds particularly well to 'Malakas ka tulad nga baka', you are strong like an ox.
But Lynn, my assistant, hmm, she's a different case. She's quite possibly the most straightforward person ever born. Her life is enviably uncomplex, it's a life of simple desires often passionately felt but simple nonetheless. A strong coat to wear in winter. A biscuit and a cup of tea at eleven. A consistent downward trend in the number of illegal immigrants reaching our shores. A weekly bath.
A solid, if unspectacular worker, loyal as a dog and clinically-Baptist, she has been at my side or by my side and slightly behind me for over thirty years now, through the good years and the bad, through all the major global events such as Operation Desert Storm, the second Gulf War, Kosovo, the death of the Queen, the death of the singer from Queen, she's been available if not twenty-four, seven, three-six-five then certainly twelve, six, three-one-three.
It was Lynn who was with me the day Diana died. I was just wandering around the house in tears producing so much mucus I couldn't even be bothered to wipe the snot off my chin. Lynn had to follow me around the house with what used to be called man-sized tissues now we probably have to call them tissues that choose to identify as larger than average! That's a cracking observation. Well, I just thought of that then.
When I blubbed through my tears that Diana was the best and brightest of us she said "She might not have been the brightest but she was certainly the best". I said, "You can't help it, can you? You have to have a dig. Even at a dead princess!". And so began a long and fruitful relationship.
Yet of late her focus has been worryingly awry. How to describe it? Lynn gets these ideas. She's made friends with Moira, a woman she met on Facebook who shares her love of true crime, both from Channel 5 documentaries and supermarket trash mags, and the two of them have become a couple of local crime fighters. They spend a lot of time monitoring paedophiles who've been released in the area tracking what time they leave, what time they come back, who they're with. It's just diligent neighbourliness. Good practice. It's one of those things that brings out the best in people. Food banks. Summer faiths. Keeping tabs on registered sex offenders. They just bring communities together.
When she's not doing that, she's making sure that immigrants have the correct paperwork. If they don't have the correct paperwork she'll just advise them of who they need to speak to and to speed the matter along she'll pass their details onto the Home Office to get the matter resolved one way or the other.
And recently she got herself a new fixation. It began with a visit to the Norwich branch of the Big Yellow Storage Company. I've had a unit at the childishly named storage provider since 2002,
it was a joint arrangement with an old acquaintance of mine, a Geordie by the name of Michael who's ex-army and ex-hotel and equally adept at both. I suppose he went from Zero Dark Thirty to zero hours contracts! Gotta do a stand-up.
Michael and I both needed storage. I wanted a bit of space to store items my ex-wife had left in bin bags by the road when I moved out which at the time were too painful to sort through. Like a time capsule of painful memories, everything inside was a reminder of something Carol and I had done together. A toaster reminded me of the time we bought the toaster together. A blender of the time we went blender shopping. There was a kettle, butter dish, chopping board, tea tray. When I opened a biscuit tin I burst into tears. Inside, an old solitary biscuit, once such a treat but now no longer edible.
A perfect metaphor for what had happened to our marriage.
An idea I captured in a song I started to write and haven't yet finished called, quite simply, Stale, brackets Shortbread Crumbs of Love.
As for Michael, he had a collection of army paraphernalia he didn't want to return to the MOD. Ten PRR radios, Kevlar helmet with MTP cover, camo gloves, couple of old tents and an 81mm mortar which I think might be illegal. I know it works, he showed me once on Dartmoor. I asked why he had it and he said he didn't want it to fall into the wrong hands. I said "What? Like a man with PTSD from the army?" but he just gave me that thousand-yard stare.
So we shared this unit. Now I've not needed to visit for fifteen years or more but I'd asked my assistant to take a look at a bag of receipts and when she got back I knew something had happened. She's a woman whose skin is incredibly quick to blotch. It will mottle and bruise at the drop of a hat both metaphorically and if she's at church and has to bend over to retrieve it, literally.
But this time it was something else. Something more. Her skin was the giveaway. She parked the car, jumped out without even turning to lock it and scurried up the driveway. She came in like a whirlwind, a blur of nylon and brown perm. When she finally came to a halt I could see we had a problem.
She was so flushed it was like she'd had a menopause all in one go. She was in a right state. Her efforts to tell me what had happened were so garbled that in the olden days it would have necessitated a smart slap across the face but in these more enlightened times, I just had to sit her down by an open window, make her a liquorice tea with the bag left in and wait.
Two hours later she finally calmed down enough to make sense. She said she'd arrived at the facility, done a quick inventory check and found some of my items were missing. It also looked like someone had slept in it. Livid, and no doubt blotchy, she confronted the man on the front desk whose ethnicity she was quick to tell me, even though I had at no point asked. And he told her it was last accessed in 2013.
"And...?", I said. "And", she spluttered, "You've not been there since 2008", she said. "True," I said, "But Michael had a key. I mean, I didn't keep tabs on when he came and went".
"A-ha!", she replied, full-well knowing that I'd used that phrase and wanted me to acknowledge it but I didn't. "Look at the date!", she said, "Last entry, 29th of July 2013!". "And?", I said. "Michael died four days before that".
Which is true, Michael lost the run of himself during a police standoff on Cromer Pier and got himself swept out to sea on the 25th of that month, never to be seen again. I said, "Well, clearly the chap was mistaken and they got the date wrong!". She squared up to me. "Are you going to hit me?".
She said, "It was on the computer!", she said. "It was on the computer! Computers don't make mistakes!". Obviously, she'd never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, then again, neither have I. I said, "What is it you're trying to say Lynn?", she pushed her face close to mine, eyes so wide I could see every burst capillary in her eyeballs. "He's alive!", she said, "Michael's alive!".
Clearly, Lynn had put two and two together and come up with about seventy-four, her age. And ever since then, she and Moira have been frantically trying to search for clues to buttress her theory. Fair enough, we all need a hobby, But the two of them were beavering away until all hours on a Facebook group like two Miss Marples, or two Murders She Wrote, or four Rosemary and Thymes. Which would be fine if it weren't encroaching on her day job. My contention is it is.
The other week, she was meant to send hand cream to Greg Wallace and she actually sent a wallet to Greg Hands. I said, "Wake up, Lynn! You've not been listening!", that's when I knew I needed a new managerial ethos.
I did toy with the old tough-love approach, but Lynn has developed a form of selective deafness, which means she'll let you prattle away for ten minutes, giving her a bit less than a bollocking but a bit more than a ticking off by saying, "Oh, sorry, were you talking to me?". No, a carrot is what is needed. I'll just offer her a tea and scone - she pronounces it scone, she maintains the scone is tinged with a feminacy that she finds unattractive - but the elegance is precisely why I like it. The flat vowel of scone I find unforgiving, which is again why she likes it.
But I always slip in the word scone as a litmus test on how much pushback I'll get for the day. Would you like a scone, Lynn? If she's on the warpath, I'll get a shot across the bows with a "No thanks. I had a scone earlier". If she says "No thanks, I've just had Battenberg", and avoid the need to use a directive containing her flat-vowel alternative, I know she'll be good as gold. [phone rings]
Lynn, speak of the devil!
"I beg your pardon?!".
No, I'm not saying... no, I know you bat for the other side, the God Squad, the Christ Crew. Listen, I've got something that might appeal to you, a little something I think might spur you on.
"Alan..."
You like tea and a scone, don't you?
"Is this a secure line?".
Did you hear what I said?
"Alan! Is this a secure line?!".
What's wrong?
"You're not going to believe this. It's Michael".
What?
"I found him".
You found him?
"I'm looking right at him".
[sombre piano refrain from the intro starts again] Found him? Found who? Could she be talking about my former friend, Michael? I'm going to stop talking like that now. I did hope so because Michael brought out the best in me. He gave me a sense of purpose. Lord knows he wasn't the most sophisticated guy in the world, but he had something you don't see a lot of these days, good, old-fashioned honesty! Apart from the odd fib about his bravery.
He did a lowly job, shovelling shit and doing the things that no one else will do, but he humbled me and I learned from him. People would say, "How can you learn from someone that thick?", and I'd say, "He might not have been very bright, but in many ways he was a bigger man than all of us". And, yeah, I regretted the fact that I should have been more patient with the guy when he said things like, "I learned him a lot" when he meant "I taught him a lot", and "Can you borrow me a fiver?" when he meant lend? And when he said should of ,instead of should have. But some of the best chats I've ever had were with him.
We'd sit around the fire and talk long into the night about war or helicopters or who would win in a fight between a horse and three dogs.
I guess deep down, I wanted to not just befriend him, but to fix the bit of him that had been damaged by the ravages of war. The bit that had been damaged before the war, that was a bit more complicated and he'd have to see a professional to unpick that.
So could it be that she's found my long-lost friend Michael? Or was it just an innocuous comment about someone else? [mechanical stop button]
And I've paused it there so that the ambiguity will create a cliff-hanger, a cynical device to create suspense and encourage you to continue listening? That would be a pretty low thing to do, to use the plight of a suspected dead man to generate clicks. But that kind of thing does go on.
Which is it? Listen to the next podcast, I'll tell you.
[closing theme music, but sombre and with choir-like vocals]
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