While my wife could no longer resist the JDOCD burning within and set off for yet another day standing around in Leicester Square in 30 degree heat being pushed and shoved by screaming teenage girls, I set off for a nostalgic trip back to my home town and surrounding villages where I had not been for a good many years. For me, a big part of such a journey was to set foot again in Epping Forest, the playground of my childhood.

I was lucky enough to be bought up a mere 30 yards or so from the edge of the forest and, as I mentioned in a recent item, not many days would pass without me walking or playing in this wondrous place. It is what I have always missed the most since leaving and was the second thing I wanted to do on this trip – after taking a look at the old house.

The boundary of my freedom as a young 7 or 8 year old was clearly defined. No further in than the small area we always called ‘Drum Maids’ although nobody seemed to know why ir bore that name. Drum Maids was a small amphitheatre shaped clearing and at one edge was a small hill that kids liked to roll down in the summer and toboggan down after snow. It obviously looked bigger when I was 7 of course. Pathways to Drum Maids were clearly defined and it was quite a highpoint so that once you got passed it you were treated to a panoramic view of the forest to the distant horizon many, many miles away. This was an enchanted place and a summer evening would not be complete without the laughter of children running around keeping the long grass at bay in the clearing.

My first problem yesterday were that the pathways, worn down and distinct in my childhood, were no longer there. In the place of the patchwork of pathways and trails were dense patches of nettles growing right up to the oak trees I used to sit under collecting up acorns and growing right up to the forest edge. When I did eventually find a way in it was still overgrown with nettles and brambles but I finally broke through and while there were still no clearly defined pathways I managed to get to where I wanted to be. Except it wasn’t there any more. The photo shows the surrounding trees beyond which was once a small clearing and a favourite place for children to play. It is now merely an overgrown tangle of bushes, nettles, brambles and is completely impenetrable. In short – it has been abandoned. Nobody comes here any more.

In fact, there was little evidence to show that many people visit this part of the forest and this is a tragedy. And for me, a great sadness. And for the kids of today an experience missing from their lives.

It’s all been a bit quiet on the JDOCD front lately. If you are new here and you don’t have a clue what I am talking about then all is explained back in 2005.

It’s not like, she assures me, the disease is waning here at Swordfish Towers. Any suggestion I may make on that score meets with one of those stares reminiscent of Paddington Bear. It’s more like it has gone underground and I don’t get to hear so much of what is going on. But, of course the next big event in the life of any JDOCD sufferer is looming with the imminent release of Public Enemies which premieres in London Monday 29th June. (Here is a link to the official website and if you can sit through the time it takes to load up then you must surely be infected).

My wife – as my posts over the years on this subject have detailed – has been to every London Depp premiere since Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. So now I am going to impart some shocking news. She is wavering. That’s right – she might give it a miss. And if that isn’t a clear sign of gradual recovery from this debilitating ailment then I don’t know what is.

I thought perhaps I had hit on it the other day when she came waltzing in from the shops with a copy of the Vanity Fair magazine pictured above. See – one of the claims made by women with this disorder – and probably some men too but let’s not go there – is that Depp still looks the same as he always did. He doesn’t age, they say, but retains those youthful looks. Ha, thought I, catching sight of the magazine and holding it up triumphantly declared “look… wrinkles”!

She looked at me with sad eyes, a sigh and a slow shake of the head and then looked back at the picture. “Yes…’ she agreed. “Aren’t they cute?”

The bastard.

The top picture here is of a 1952 Vauxhall Velox that I recently encountered at a local town show. It bought back memories for me because my father had one of these when I was a kid and his, too, was black. A few years before I could legally do so, he even let me once have a drive although decided this was a bad idea when I nearly put it through our neighbours hedge. He loved this car just like he loved all of his cars from his very first owned ’30s Wolseley Hornet convertible in which he courted my mother through to the Cavalier he cherished when he died.

Saturdays for him were often spent with his head under the bonnet, or lying underneath the thing, tools spread everywhere, tinkering with this or adjusting that. And Sundays, of course, they were off for a drive. His family were the first people to own a car in the village I grew up in and he was so used to the mechanical workings that he bemoaned the rise of electrical components and would have hated my computer controlled Audi. No – he would have loved to have driven it but hated the fact that he couldn’t repair it. Except, of course, it doesn’t really go wrong. A Sunday drive in the late ’50s often ended up counting the cars pulled up on the side of the road, bonnets up, refusing to go any further. How often do you see that now?

And that’s my problem. Because I have always had a hankering to get a ’40s or early ’50s Jaguar. Whenever I see one I just want to buy the thing. But then I remember my Dad and all the cars on the side of the road and I realise that I haven’t got a clue. I can usually manage to get the bonnet open and I can do the oil and water thing and the rest is just… lots of bits of odd shaped metal and pipes all joined together in some chaotic, mystic fashion. I know the names of some of the components as well – but I wouldn’t be able to identify or find them. So rather than having some motoring fun I play it safe and don’t remember the last time a car of mine actually broke down.

The Ford Consul is vintage 1962 (the last year this model was made). In 1959. my eldest brother worked as a test driver for Ford and took me in one of these up the M1 the day it opened. I was 8 years old and still remember being awestruck by this huge road that just went on and on and the speed that we ate up the miles.

They might not be real vintage – but it was fun to see them both again.

I have touched on this subject before but events have now moved on a little and the battle lines are drawn. But first, a little personal history.

When I was a kid I used to play outdoors – most often in the forest that we lived beside. In warm weather and when school was out, my friends and I would disappear early in the morning and as long as I touched base at home from time to time it was likely to be sunset before I returned. We had a ‘play’ area that stretched for many miles and on those hot, lazy days, we would get cuts and bruises, eat the blackberries growing in the hedgerows and get dirty and covered in the detritus of the forest floor. The cuts miraculously healed themselves, the blackberries didn’t poison us and the dirt? Well, what was wrong with a bit of dirt. It washed off. Childhood was an experience, slowly pushing the boundaries of our independence and the odd medical emergency was a necessary part of learning to cope. We learned which adults to avoid, which ones we could rely on for help if needed and mourned a wasted day if the weather forced us inside.

As a young teenager I still remember buying my first pair of headphones. I bought them in a local hi-fi shop where the guy behind the counter not only had good product knowledge but was quite happy to impart it because he wanted you to go away happy with your purchase. And he wanted you to come back some day and buy something else. So I got advice. But more importantly I got to handle the goods and try them out for comfort and sound quality. That’s right, they went on my head and I put the earpieces over my ears. My actual ears. I guess many people before me had tried on some of those phones and guess what… I didn’t catch any diseases. My ears didn’t fall off two weeks later and the world as I knew it did not come to an end. This was a truly serious and risky business – my life was at stake. But I survived and, what’s more, ended up with a pair of headphones that were just what I wanted, fit perfectly and eventually gave me years of service.

Wind forward to today and I am in need of a new pair of headphones. You already know what this is about. There they are on a rack in John Lewis, all bubble packed in that stiff plastic you need to take an axe to and no – you can not try them on before you buy. You can not test for comfort, fit and, above all, you can not test the sound quality. So says the evil Health and Safety Executive. So – I naturally ask – what happens if I get them home, manage to prise them out of the packaging and when I get back from the local Accident and Emergency department find they don’t fit? Well – said the guy at John Lewis – you get your money back less 10%. I kid you not – that was what I was told. I bought them – those ones in the picture – whilst making a verbal declaration at the till that I expected a full refund if I had to return them. You know the rest. Got them home – there was much swearing and searching for industrial strength tools to penetrate the packaging which, in the end I managed to do with no blood being spilled and do they fit? Of course they don’t. For a £69 pair of phones from a respected manufacturer like Denon they are bloody useless. If I put them on and someone asks me a question to which I nod my head – they fall right off. When my wife tried them on, the ear cups dangled somewhere around her lobes missing the actual ear altogether. Did it say on the box that they were for people with really big ears and long heads? Did the guy in Lewis’s inform me they were no good to me because my head just wasn’t big enough? How many petty laws might he have broken of he had done?

So – as I said at the top – the battle lines are drawn and these have got to go back. Now forgive me for this but I am about to say something hypocritical. I have ranted enough in the past about petty regulations that strangle our every moment and dictate our every move but sometimes you just have to bite your tongue. What I want to know is who wins between the appalling Health and Safety and the office of Fair Trading who dictate that what I buy has to be fit for the purpose?

I guess I am about to find out.

I have made no secret over the years of the twin facts that I am a smoker and that I use a MacBook Pro. What I have probably not mentioned is that most of the time I roll my own ciggies.

This means I can be endlessly entertained as stray bits of tobacco and ash disappear without trace between the keys on my laptop. They have even managed to work their way down the side of the trackpad. But, amazingly, things still work. Which is not the case for the MacBook belonging to my other half. She doesn’t smoke and probably the worse thing to get lost between her keys are small particles of Green and Blacks. And I do mean ’small’ as any Green and Blacks that might get lost would automatically register as a tragedy and I would have heard about it. Her MacBook, despite being newer than mine and not subject to tobacco abuse, had sticking keys and the odd one that had to be hit firmly with a small mallet to function.

So – always helpful and thoughtful – my eldest son came over to Swordfish Towers at the weekend armed with his compressor and airbrush to gently blow – at round 50 psi – the muck from our Macs. That’s him in the first picture doing just that and the second is an enlarged area of my screen where you can see some of the stuff that was being blown out.

Great fun was had by all as we watched hairs, fluff and other unidentifiable particles coming back out from their resting place. The good news is that my wife now has a fully functional keyboard. We did not, however, retrieve enough tobacco out of mine to give me a smoke.

The picture, snapped on a mobile phone in our local Sainsbury, says it all really.

I am not one of those old farts who wants to preserve traditions. I might be saddened by the widespread loss of courtesy and politeness, I might be shocked that so many people these days seem unable to speak coherent English and I might make a lot of noise regarding the systematic dumbing down of our culture and education. But that doesn’t mean I disdain ‘progress’ – whatever that means – or wish to preserve old ways and traditions just for the sake of it. But really…. there are some things that should remain sacrosanct.

A decent pair of shoes should come in a box. A silk tie should be gently wrapped in tissue paper. Quality cigars should not come encased in cellophane. And wine…. ah wine. It was bad enough slopping plonk into a plastic bag inside a cardboard box – but this?

I am lost for words.