Prepare to raise an eyebrow. Or, should you wish to pip Roger Moore, by all means raise both. Simultaneously. You will perhaps be surprised to learn that a degree of fitness is required to drive a truck. There, I’ve said it.

No, nothing to do with the hefty rigours of manipulating sixteen gears and assisting the occasional prostitute into the cabin; one has to be declared medically fit by a doctor before a Heavy Goods Vehicle licence can be issued. And then, every five years from the age of 45, one has to sit and pass another medical.

What condition would a man – or a woman, now that we’ve let them vote – have to be in to fail? One wonders whether this test speaks, at least obliquely, of a farce. Take Namibian as an example.

Doctors and Nurses

Let’s envision being a fly on the wall. Or, better still, why don’t you engage in some uniformed role play. Right, stethoscopes at the ready as Namibian floats gracefully into your imaginary doctor’s surgery. No, you needn’t  bounce sympathetically with the floorboards, but you could pretend to be a grimly-visaged health official waving an admonitory finger. 

Should he really be tucking regularly into a dainty repast of a hog washed down with a loaf? Ought he to have vivid violet fetlocks and, to phrase it delicately, be the size of a Kodiak bear? And what about that cough? Yes, should be OK. Tick the Pass box.

Well done, you’ve just pronounced him fit as a fiddle. Well, a misshapen double bass, at least. He’s now free to spend five more years in the driving seat, wittering away on the CB and cleaning my mirrors. But can he last five years, more to the point?

Life Expectancy of a Bear

Well, there have been occasions when I’ve been wrong. Embarrassingly I learnt at a dinner party once that Julienne is not a ballet position; it is a manner of dicing vegetables. See, I’m not infallible.

And estimating in 2009 that Namibian would live only 56 summers is also turning out to be, if not an absolute clanger on my part, at least on the conservative side. That coarse, earthy and carnal babe magnet is going from strength to strength, spurred on through the dark hours, no doubt, by the promise of a substantial breakfast.

Would you like to meet this biological anomaly? Well, if so, you can find him touring with Cirque de Soleil’s Immortal Michael Jackson World Tour until the end of April. He won’t be far from his lorry.

Don’t take this as an ironclad guarantee, but, if the HGV medical is anything to go by, I’ve got a feeling he might even make 60. Hooray!..

What have the French ever done?

Apart from give us Brigitte Bardot, obviously. And produce Chantal Thomass, creator of the first babydoll negligee for daywear in 1972. Well, and dream up supremely apposite words for my blog, such as lingerie, brassiere and femme fatale. Oh bugger, I’d forgotten about Debussy and Baudelaire, too. Let me start again.

Did you know that Jim Morrison is buried in Paris? Famous for saying, ‘Some of the worst mistakes of my life have been haircuts,’ and a bit of singing for The Doors, one might expect rather an arresting headstone in Pere Lachaise Cemetery? Nope, an anti-climax. Oscar Wilde is also interred there, but of course he never wrote anything worth quoting.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s a smashing burial ground, with people dying to visit. And views of the Eiffel Tower are sublime. But I’m not a Doors fan. I could just as well have been conducting an experiment in my truck, back at the Walking With Dinosaurs venue.

Medical Experiment

I wondered, you see, whether bedsores might be achievable between loading equipment into an arena and loading it back out again. Surely a 120-hour break, given unstinting, dedicated application – and a bedpan – would be enough time to nurture a pressure ulcer? 

Well, I Googled it…and am now none the wiser. From what I’ve gleaned, I could get one in the space of a few hours, but the clincher seems to be not noticing you’re uncomfortable lying on a bony bit for the requisite period. Hmm. And it helps if you’re in ill-health to start with. Drat! Want to know how this Voltairian philosophy arose in the first place?

I’ll give you a clue. ‘She’s the cutest little trick in shoe leather.’ Ring any bells? No, OK, how about the following, imprinted on a sundial during the film. ‘Do Not Squander Time. That Is The Stuff Life Is Made Of.’

Frankly, My Dear, I Don’t Give A Damn

The irony, of course, is that Gone With The Wind (1939) – in glorious technicolour, no less – is almost four hours long. If that isn’t squandering time, I don’t know what is. A half-page precis would serve you better but, if you’re blighted with a predilection for bloody-mindedness, at least stop for tea and turn yourself during the intermission.

If you survive the film – or better still, only the synopsis – and fancy popping over to Paris, here’s a tip. Tear yourself away from the Can Can girls for an hour and check out Place des Vosges, near The Bastille – musicians play in the cloisters on Sundays. Super acoustics. Wonder if Jim ever busked there…

‘Long Wave 198,’ proclaimed Simon. ‘The Archers and then the afternoon play for me, I think. Ooh, lovely. I mean, why would you bother going out in Paris?’ He sipped his tea and fingered his beard sagely as we finished up a spot of tiffin.

I like a moment of calm myself – a Twining’s Pure Camomile can work marvels – but where does one draw the line? I’ll tell you where: eschewing Eiffel Towers for The Archers.

So, roistering summarily through the city like a couple of Tudor monarchs, Lewis and I headed out into the purgatory of howling, battered Citroens. ‘More quail’s eggs, my man,’ I thought, ‘and don’t stint on the Yorkshire puddings.’ Oh, it was like the good old days, when menace, hot wine and beheading a wife filled the mornings rather splendidly. Oh, OK, so we bought a ticket for the metro and took utmost care not to put our feet on the seats.

Gustave Eiffel

Ah, there she is – the Tour Eiffel. Completed in 1889, illuminated nightly by 20,000 lightbulbs and requiring 50 tons of paint each time she needs a touch-up. It is certainly worth going up her – all 324 metres of her. Well, you can’t, actually – not unless you want to shimmy up the UHF antenna and get arrested. But you can get to the viewing platform at 279 metres.

How do you get up there? Either take the stairs to the second stage (only 600 stairs up to the equivalent of a 43rd floor) and then a mandatory lift, or queue with the porkers for three-and-a-half euros extra. Bear in mind, however, if you’re sharing a lift with half a dozen trans-Atlantic piggies that those bottom-stage lifts are nineteenth-century, operated by water pressure. Dodgy.

Coo, what a view from the top. We’re giddy, like schoolboys in short trousers. ‘You take a picture of me and then I’ll take a picture of you,’ we gushed, no doubt a little bereft of oxygen. What man-made structure could possibly be higher? Aha, funny you should ask that.

Highest Tower

No doubt you’ve heard of Petronas Towers and Sears Tower – the latter’s tip reaches 527m – but then there is the Really Big One. Burj Khalifa in Dubai is an extraordinary, knob-tingling edifice, topping out at 830m –  by far the tallest building in the world and surely an unassailable king of all castles. Well, apparently not.

Trek west to discover some unequivocal Arab one-upmanship. The Saudis, taking the role of architectural vanguard, are in the process of sticking up two fingers at the UAE. ‘Nah nah, we’ve got more oil than you,’ or words to that effect. Jeddah’s eye-boggling, white knuckle Kingdom Tower was originally planned to be a mile high (1600m). However, owing to dodgy surrounding geology, when it’s finished in several years it’ll be nearer the paltry kilometre mark.

‘Hardly worth bothering with an extra 170 metres,’ sighed Lewis, updating his Facebook status. Yet that is a difference in height of more than a Blackpool Tower on top of the Burj Khalifa. Let’s hope they don’t get too much wind down there..

Good Christmas? A minimum of fanfare and a small sherry, or were you beleaguered by irrepressible, slavering relatives “finishing off” sealed cheeses from the pantry? Must have felt a bit like Martin Freeman in The Hobbit: one minute bathed in a rosy introspective glow, hunched over a tasty fish supper for one; the next, overrun with histrionic dwarves, hellbent on vengeance at dawn. Tut.

Still, it’s all over now. Savour the silence, finish off the chocolate money on the coffee table and evict any snoozing uncles overstaying their welcome. What is 2013 going to herald for you? Or, more Carpe Diem, what are you going to achieve? Maybe simply engineer increasing your happiness quotient by looking forward to the film version of Fifty Shades of Grey. Yawn.

So, cinema. Wow, what a quantum jump, both in CGI (computer-generated imagery) and ticket prices since I was a small boy. ‘Erm, would you like to sit in the stalls?’ persuaded my dad on Friday, treating me to a night out. He’d noted the ruinous expense – it was about £1.80 when we last went in the ‘80s – and was trying to make the dearer balcony chairs seem unappealing.

Cinema Prices

Damage limitation, you see. It had already been an excruciating blow to learn that film theatres take a dim view of smuggled-in thermos flasks. And the bill for more than one seat was already spiralling inexorably into double figures.

It’s a simple concept, really: a moving picture projected on a screen. But go back a century or so to the 1890s and the race was on to achieve it. Aah, halcyon days, you say – Noel Edmonds hadn’t been born and people talked to each other properly, without keeping one eye on a sitcom. But man is never content; one must strive forward, forsaking blunderbusses for intercontinental ballistic missiles, and swapping family huddles around the pianoforte for television. Double tut.

Lights, Camera, Action

Blame the Lumiere brothers, if you must. Louis and Auguste – a couple of Frogs from Lyon – were rather under the cosh after Thomas Edison had revealed kinetoscopes, kinetographs and kinetophones. The trouble with Edison’s screen, however, was that only one person could watch at a time, hunched awkwardly over a machine resembling a peephole into a cupboard.

1895 is the year to put in your memory bank, though, folks – the Lumiere boys invented the Cinematograph. If you’re ever in Lyon, it’s worth taking a trip to the Lumiere Institute, a masterpiece of architecture built in the Gangnam Style. (Just my little joke, to see if you’re paying attention.) Really, it’s a super museum, tracing the birth of cinema.

Happy New Year!

That was unusual. I woke earlier this week to the sound of two fellows mowing the roof. Yes, I did say the roof. Why mention it? Because the building in question, to follow on prosaically from last week, is allegedly France’s biggest indoor arena – The Palais Omnisport de Paris-Bercy.

Yes, Walking With Dinosaurs rolls on, unimpeded by the brace of chaps playing tug-o-war with a Flymo on the arena’s near-vertical slope. One waggled his end of the rope, the other let out more slack from above. Thus the mower’s serpentine twists triumphed and the roof was trimmed. It was so interesting to watch, in fact, that I headed inside for a cuppa after twenty seconds or so.

Haute Cuisine

Now, there’s been plenty of undiluted nonsense over cups of tea on tour recently. For example, Roast Guinea Fowl was on the menu the other evening. ‘Poor little bastard,’ said one driver. ‘Probably spent all his life on a wheel in a cage.’ The confusion with guinea pigs, however, weakly compared with the misunderstanding between nasturtiums and Cistercian monks. Sound similar if said quickly? No. Funny then, that it was I who misheard, euphoric at the prospect of seeding a sprinkling of Cistercians before the last Spring frost.

Doomsday

Still, at least it looks like we’ll have a Spring. And, indeed, a Happy Christmas – Mayan prescience turned out to be iffy. An advanced knowledge of spherical trigonometry? Tick. Short fellows living in the jungle? Tick. Forecasters of impending doom on December 21st, 2012, presaging blackened skies and cataclysm? Whoopsydaisies. I’ll have to award a black mark there, Johnny Mesoamerican.

We’re still here. Ipso facto, your Long Count calendar contained a rather glaring error. Unless that “1” was shoddily written – a smudged “7”, perhaps – I’m afraid you simply didn’t know your onions.

BBC Weather Blooper

But don’t feel bad. If it’s any consolation, weatherman Michael Fish wasn’t doing any better in 1987. ‘Don’t worry, there isn’t,’ he assured the nation, dismissing reports of a brewing hurricane speeding across the Atlantic. The following night devastation struck; it was the worst storm to hit south-east England since 1703, and I can remember waking to a howling chimney and trees being uprooted. ‘Up yours Michael,’ said one irate viewer on Youtube recently. ‘Our fucking garden fence blew in through our fucking window. Ya shitter.’

On that note, Happy Christmas, Everybody. Would you like a crap joke, just in case you don’t get one in your cracker at dinner? OK, then. Q) What does a transvestite do at Christmas? A) Eat, Drink and Be Mary. Told you it was crap. Maybe check out this two-minute clip of Santa Claus disgracing himself instead, then..

Have you heard of Walking With Dinosaurs? It’s a corking Arena Spectacular, well worth shelling out to attend, if only for the unmitigated joy of frightening your children. Yes, you’ve guessed correctly – I’m involved in the trucking. To be specific, I have an Ankylosaurus in my trailer. ‘She won’t bite,’ I say to bothersome Customs officers.

This week the 26-truck production is in Lyon, the infamous gastronomic capital of France. Well, I say infamous, but actually how well known is the city’s culinary prowess? It’s just that my colleague’s question on Monday evening rather nonplussed me. In fact it left me reeling. ‘Are you up for dinner?’ he opened, promisingly. ‘There’s a McDonalds over the road.’ Oh dear. Tut tut. Daft as a fencepost..

Anyway, the hall pictured above is Halle Tony Garnier, our venue for seven shows on the tour. Who was Garnier? In a nutshell, the architect responsible. But the building (1906-24) wasn’t commissioned to hold events; it was originally a slaughterhouse and livestock market. Nowadays, if humans are corralled through the entrance and made to stand – chewing the cud, if you like – it can hold 16.500 people, thus making it the third largest indoor venue in France. You’re correct again – that was bankrupt blogging, utterly worthless information.

The Butcher Of Lyon

How about Barbie, then? Who? You know, the Nazi sent to Dijon in 1942 after the fall of France. In November of the same year, at the age of 29, he was assigned to Lyon as the head of the local Gestapo. And persona non grata he was too, his arrival precipitating electroshock, bone-breaking and general ghastliness. His appellation “Butcher of Lyon”, was by all accounts well earned.

Queens of Lyon

As I cycled back to the Garnier gig yesterday – returning from evensong, naturally – I espied a light. Two candle flames danced merrily in the front window of a beaten-up Renault panel van, drawing my gaze. Kebab vendor, I mused? Or perhaps a mobile pizzeria? Now that I’d crossed the road, I saw there were several of these vehicles, essentially piles of shit parked behind one another at the side of the road. I peddled towards the mesmerising beacon.

Ooh, I say. Beneath the dashboard candle was a pair of still more mesmerising ebony thighs, a contiguous hand resting on them holding a lit cigarette in the gloom. ‘Doner with chips please, Nicole,’ I thought of saying, but, noting her crotch-grazing boots, shrugged it off as foolish and judiciously peddled on.

Aubergine parmigiana back in Catering, beneath venerable dinosaurs Jagger  and Richards, seemed oral treat enough for one day…

‘Kiwis?’ asked my Australian colleague. ‘Yeah, you just tap them on the head and their knickers fall off.’

Doubt dandered along the embankment of my thoughts, like a nagging suspicion that you’ve left the front door unlocked. Nope, no matter how tightly I squeezed shut my eyes, my evening with a coquettish New Zealander remained a blur. Was there any tapping? In fact, was she even wearing any knickers to start with? Hmm.

Hang on, I’m getting my own in a twist. Before you try this at home – or preferably in teeming bars around London’s Shepherd’s Bush and Acton areas – let me double check. Are we looking at a researched, seminal declamation, or a generalisation based on Bugger All? ‘That’s a fact,’ he confirmed, in that nasal brogue that has me laughing even if it’s not funny. Well, then – it’s official. Do let me know how you get on.

G’day Bluey

Now, shall we call my colleague Blue, given his nationality? After all, he is one of those stereotypical, fair dinkum fellows with a sense of humour more desiccated than the Atacama Desert. Or drier than a nun’s nasty, to use his own vernacular.

He’ll say frightful things like, ‘Yeah, I’ve got some culture…up my arsehole.’ Probably has a flaming galah on a perch at home, too.

Anyway, aptly, we were driving for Incubus together this summer. No, not the mythological male demon who lies upon female sleepers in order to have sexual intercourse – I meant the band. And we were sitting in deckchairs at Rock in Rio, Madrid, behind the biggest stage I’ve ever seen – a little like Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum further north.

All Went Pete Tong

As the sun lost some of its ferocity, Pete Tong took to the stage somewhere in the distance. One earphone on, one off, he did something clever with records and sporadically blew a whistle. Meanwhile, Blue had engaged me in the topic of the biggest killer in Australia. Now, what would be your first guess?

Box jellyfish? Snakes? Funnel web spiders? ‘Nope, bowel cancer,’ he said, smiling, pleased he’d caught me out. Apparently, over the age of 50 in Australia, you’re obliged to post – yes, I did say post – a stool sample every year. ‘A letter comes back, notifying you of the result,’ he added.

Several thousand people milled and danced to Tong’s groove. Festival goers trickled through the gate, ready for the ultimate party weekend as Blue crescendoed into prostate tests at the surgery.

‘Nice bloke, the doctor was,’ he said, uncapping another beer. ‘Used to be a bricklayer. Jeez, I wish he’d worn gloves.’…

Surely he won’t do it. Surely, as a man of 23, he’ll see sense.

Surely, realising that bicycles and salt water are uneasy bedfellows, Anton The Fearless will abort. Surely… Oops, too late. He’s picking up speed, pedalling like billy-o along the jetty.

Cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am. But does he think? Is pulling a BMX wheelie into a Norwegian fjord manifest proof of the absence of rational thought? Well, whatever your opinion, it certainly augmented my afternoon. And, really, what’s the worst that could happen?

Deep Fjord Diving

‘I’ve dropped it,’ he cried, surfacing and jangling like a marionette. Oh, that is worse than I’d thought – the bicycle was expensive and new. Anton bobbed up again, treading water where a saddle ought to have been, and spluttered a crackle of obscenities.

‘Quick, dive down before it sinks completely,’ yelled Lewis, helpfully. A furore ensued, magnanimous colleagues leaping headfirst into the depths and wrangling with pressured eardrums.

Alas, it was lost. 35 feet deep into a murky abyss proved too much for any of us; specialist free divers we are not. But wait, what’s this?

Which quick-thinking mastermind has found an anchor? A preposterous idea perhaps, but certainly worth a shot. And there was no rush to leave – Cookie had started modelling a new range of Lawrence of Arabia head towels.

Operation Anchor

Well, you won’t believe this, but on the first cast, more than ten metres down, metal meshed with metal. Surely not. Surely a retrieval mission of this magnitude wouldn’t strike gold on first throw. Surely, given that we’re unskilled buffoons, a BMX would be too lofty a haul. Yet there was no denying that we’d hooked it.

The exertion commenced; the chain fed through rough hands; the motherlode hove into view. And… Well, I’m dashed. Another bicycle. Rather misshapen, admittedly, but another actual bicycle.

A relic from an English daredevil last summer? Or the result of an unhinged local taking time off from shagging reindeer?

We’ll never know, but you’ll be relieved to know that an hour’s fishing finally paid off – the water-logged bicycle was seen rusting majestically in Suffolk a month later.

To paraphrase Dickens, Anton really ought to be boiled with his own pudding. But one can’t help rather liking him..