The last thing I ever collected was idioms, at the behest of someone at university with whom I was absolutely not trying to sleep with in any manner whatsoever. It was a prerequisite of admission to my particular degree that you walk through a specially adapted sheep dip of two parts cheap banana liqueur to one part pretension but he'd swallowed a little more of the curious-smelling yellow liquid than the rest of us and intended to write a genre confounding short story with as many included as possible. Having provided my telephone number purely for the unquestionably innocent purposes of impromptu data collation, I found myself frequently woken up at four in the morning by excited exclamations regarding plus sized women and the finality of their vocal exhortations or the comparative value of wildfowl when found about the person and local shrubbery. Out of mere laziness or perhaps a sudden respect for the English language he never actually wrote the story however but while that particular exercise ended with both our mission objectives sadly unfulfilled, it did leave me with a new favourite idiom.^*

To carry a torch for. Etymology unknown but torch apparently derived from the old French torche or 'twisted thing', which I like. To set something broken alight and sit with it while it burns. Definitions vary too, from the loudly declared and ever-popular unrequited love through to an uneasy pining for something that's long since left the building and every shade of embarrassed red in between. I favour the latter; anyone can stew in unreturned desire and while that might be pleasantly distrcting for an hour or two if you've nothing better to do on a Saturday night if left unchecked that road only leads to bad poetry and looking a bit too speculatively at the customisation options on the Real Dolls website. But a long-term, lingering affection for that which is past suggests at its best an attractive ideal of courtly love and maidens in pointy hats and at its worst, a dignified kind of low-level suffering for those too busy drinking or working or actually sleeping with somebody else to indulge in a full time obsession.

But torches proper are cumbersome things, thick sticks bound with rags soaked in pitch. I've never really mustered the strength needed to pick one up and as such any real romantic idolatry on my part has been necessarily limited. Once, I will admit, I carried a keyring flashlight (from a Christmas cracker) around in my pocket for several weeks before losing it down the back of a sofa in a pub and on occasion I have been known to let a cheap tealight from an IKEA multipack burn for much longer than the recommended two hours until it left a perfect blackened hole on my sheets or brand new bedside table or skin but these incidents are few and far between. That's not to say, of course, that I'm not willing to take my fair share of extravagant, uncomfortable and potentially amusing longing should the opportunity arise but desire is a capricious thing and if even the lightest, most portable torch would find itself suddenly extinguished by the merest flash of Homer Simpson boxer shorts, what chance my poor candles from the pound shop?

^* I also have a favourite present participle verb; despite the subsequent ten years' worth of boil washes I find myself still with an unsightly ring of pomposity around my collar that just wont shift.

Tufty is still alive today and to my great pleasure, his modernisation has been minimal and has certainly not included the wearing of a baseball cap at a jaunty angle and therefore he both effortlessly eclipses those excessively perky road safety hedgehogs and remains one of the very few idols I've ever had who hasn't eventually abandoned me in one way or another.

The people we admire fall into three categories; the domestic, the heroic or the mirror. This means your idol will either be your mum, Ranulph Fiennes or... well, let me put it this way for you in a series of broad and breathtakingly simplistic generalisations. Those in the first category see great achievements in everyday actions, which might well be the place in which true courage lies if this also didn't mean they consider their wives to be heroes for doing the washing up without complaint, like to spend their Saturday evenings watching programmes with Esther Ranzten called Winsome and Terribly Photogenic Despite the Wheelchair Children of Courage and are brought to the point of tears by that dreary D:Ream song. Those in the second never quite got over not collecting as many whittling badges in the Scouts as they feel they deserved, probably enjoy war films a little more than is seemly and secretly rub themselves up against pictures of New York fire fighters when no-one is looking. And those in the third group choose anti-heros, not aspirationally but as as representations of themselves; fuck-ups, freaks and aberrations fighting their bloody battles out there for them in an increasingly vicious war of attrition. I belong in that third category.

But the casualty rate for us is high. Cool Hand Luke and Jack Kevorkian were captured by the enemy, Richey James deserted and Dorothy Parker, a loyal foot soldier of the old days, finally succumbed to the horror and ended up in a hospital somewhere back home with a pair of y-fronts on her head and two pencils stuck up her nose. Morrissey has grown a huge set of whiskers and an addiction to port and now on the rare occasions he is heard it is only to mumble about the Hun and direct some half-hearted action from a cosy living room somewhere seven miles behind the front line. More recently, Jarvis Cocker fell by an increasingly popular method when he got married and started cooking fish fingers for his kids instead of watching roaches climb the walls. His music may or may not be as good as ever but as soon as he had other priorities than telling me that my bedsit-living, cheap vodka-vomiting and even cheaper romancing ways were okay he failed to notice that the pram in the hall concealed an devastatingly accurate sniper. Very few still stand with me and only this morning I heard the distressing news that Stephen Fry might have fallen on his sword and got a Facebook profile; god knows how Chris Morris is going to hold the fort on his own.

And it's not easy to find new recruits, either. Richard Dawkins had only been in the regiment for six weeks when I was forced to kick him out for spending more time looking at his own reflection in his shiny boots than kicking people up the arse with them. The message appears to be clear; adapt, die or take up arms myself.

So it's me, Tufty and some particularly sharp badges against the world, then. Refusing to grow up, ignoring the comments about our trousers and never, ever forgetting to look both ways.

MALIBU
IMMODERATE 6 OR 7 BECOMING LEERING. REGRET BACKING MODERATE TO GOOD. POSSIBLY GALE 8 IN MCDONALDS LATER. POOR TO VERY POOR.

Hmmmm.....no, I said. Oh I wanted to, don't get me wrong. There's no way quicker into my heart than a capriciously crafted turn of phrase and certain sentences of his have been known to make three of my internal organs stop working simultaneously. But every time I'd try to open my mind to a long term, loving relationship with his perky prehodiernal past tense and swooningly sardonic verbs it descended into an ill tempered one night stand and I'd invariably find myself on the night bus home at four the next morning in yesterday's knickers with an unpleasantly literal nasty taste in my mouth.

This did not go down well with him. Will Self was hovering precariously closel to the top spot on his own list of literary crushes and he started to wave the sherry bottle about his head in an agitated fashion.

But, I declared, sensing the wisdom in a timely change of subject, the soiled feeling of a night spent with Will Self is much more palatable than the crushing disappointment of being led astray by Martin Amis only to find out, two books in, that he is a cad who keeps trophy knickers from his conquests in an Asda bag under the bed. London Fields had me smitten from page one; ready to declare that I'd never known true love until now and how foolish, how terribly foolish I have been to not see the exquisite joy in big white dresses and the perfect church venue and please take me right now on the back seat of the 29 bus from Wood Green. But then - and how these words rend my heart! - I started to read Money. And before the end the first chapter he was nothing to me but a drunken man at a bar, trying to impress me by telling me how much his watch cost.

He put the sherry bottle down and his arm round my shoulder, nodding sympathetically.

Such was my hurt, I continued haltingly, that I started to fling myself at Ian McEwan. My companion gasped with shock, but having started to bare my soul in such a manner I decided to press on and let the worst be known. Wearing low cut tops and the tightest of skirts I visited any bookshop where he might be, picking up novels at random without any thought to their character or suitability. I took a different one to bed with me every night but found no solace in their cold exteriors and verbose, self-conscious techniques.

We sat quietly for a few minutes while my confession settled around us like dust.

And then, I said, when I was at my lowest point and had sworn off novels for ever in favour of cheap pornography and women's self-hatred monthlies, I met Julian Barnes. Of course I was aloof at first; if it hadn't been for a tutor making the introduction I think I'd still be reading the Top Ten Things He Wishes You Knew In Bed. But she insisted that the first five chapters needed to be read by Monday morning and so I took him home with me. Nervously we sat together on the sofa and when I could no longer think of any excuses I held him on my lap and he said this:

One of the troubles is this: the heart isn’t heart-shaped

Love is a kick to the stomach from someone with inexplicable reasons but singular aim. This is why David Tennant's Doctor Who may have the well filled pinstripes and the insouciance and the smile but Christopher Eccleston's has my heart. Tennant wears Converse but Eccleston had steel toecaps.

My friend eyed me suspiciously. That's a dubious metaphor, he said.

I know, I said. But how else to end this story?

We're out of sherry, he mumbled sadly after a while. Shall I tell you the terrible thing I once did with Edith Wharton?

I did try Big Brother once, but after fifteen minutes had to flee the living room shrieking from the deeply unpleasant sensation of having my frontal lobes enthusiastically rubbed with a nutmeg grater.

Blogs are okay up to a point, but after vigorous weeding for photographs of children, the use of the word 'wacky' or any of its synonyms to describe the author, text speak, dense and hysterically dreadful prose about how unappreciated the author is by their boss, partner or that bitch they sit next to in double Geography on Wednesday afternoons, thinly veiled whining about not having a book deal/Bloggie nomination or anything at all about actually having one, minute details about mowing the lawn at the weekend and the hilarious things that ensued with the rabbit or any one of another approximately one thousand five hundred things that are liable to annoy me about tiny people and their tiny lives at any one point, this leaves me with approximately 0.3% blogs I can read on a daily basis without succumbing to violence unimaginable. Obviously this is insufficient and by definition, the most interesting people give the least away.

It is for these reasons that I've had to take to satisfying my curiosity about lives other than my own by peering into the back gardens of strangers. If I were an outdoorsy type with perpetually pink cheeks and and item of clothing that was waxed this shameless peepingtommery would no doubt take the form of dark glasses and shoes that do not squeak; however I am an under the duvet on a cold evening with a bar of Dairy Milk in one hand and some well thumbed pornography in the other type and as such my spying is confined to speculative snooping as one of the trains I've recently spent a disproportionate amount of time on rushes me out of town.

From the back, all inner city terraced London houses look like slums. Painted white or respectable magnolia or Hint Of Gentrification from the front, the back walls are stained, sooty brickwork stolen straight from a particularly lively production of Oliver Twist, all jutting angles and afterthought bathrooms cutting into tiny, cracked concrete yards; like putting on your best party dress but forgetting to wipe your arse. I know these, they're my life; crammed full of random bits of luridly coloured children's plastic toys, heaps of forgotten charcoal briquettes and rusting slices of unidentifiable machinery. As the suburbs approach the green of blutacked flags on grimy glass gets replaced by the carefully displayed green of untouched Cath Kidson watering cans which finally gives way to large swathes of grass, yawning and stretching out from the railway line to meet their child's drawing houses; one door, four windows, nets twitching. These are the carefully clipped and neutered gardens of polished conservatories and city incomes, polite Boden-clad children on trampolines and whispered grievances behind the imported Spanish hardwood furniture.

Through choice, chance and inability, lives I'll never lead. And I could ponder for days what makes a gas fired barbecue and all that comes with it the pride and joy of someone's life without ever coming up with an answer that satisfies but all I'd really be doing is testing whether I can still examine these lives, or as much as their matching curtains and scatter cushions tell me about them, without regret.

So far, so good.

My mother died young, leaving me with nothing but a pendant that proudly states she was once a ball girl at Wimbledon, date unknown, and judging by the only picture I've ever seen of her, unmanageable hair and the unattractive habit of sticking out the tongue when concentrating. My stepmother, unlike me in every way, likes nothing more than to stop random strangers on the street for a chat while I cower behind hedges and lampposts, no less embarrassed at twenty eight than I was as a child. Relentlessly chirpy, she fills every second of silence with chatter or song insisting that "if God hadn't intended us to make noise he wouldn't have given us mouths", logic that even given her faith and my manifest lack would still would only make sense to me if she also accepted the truth in, say, "if God hadn't intended us to smother people who won't stop singing the Kelloggs cornflakes jingle he wouldn't have invented pillows". Needless to say, she does not.

She knew my father before he knocked up my already-married birth mother and stole her away from her husband, only to have her die on him less than two years later. This information came from her, of course - my father as taciturn as I was to become - and there was more where that came from. Stories of my father, two sheets to the wind and being pushed at great speed on a blazing piano down the Old Kent Road, police in feverish pursuit as he bashed out Great Balls of Fire to open mouthed pedestrians became aspirational to me as a teen. Other parents passed on hard-earned tips on life and love, mine let me know why you should never fill the taproom of a pub with beer and go swimming if you're the only ones there (pressure of the liquid will render you unable to open the door from the inside). I've remembered that to this day, and so far that dreadful outcome has been avoided.

Born in 1944, he was infected by the rock and roll virus in the mid fifties and never recovered. I was nearly called Elvisa until my mother won the long and bloody battle for me to be named something only marginally more suitable. Every free inch of my parents retirement bungalow by the sea is covered in fifties and sixties memorabilia of one kind or another and for my father, 1969 was the year in which he made a conscious choice to stop paying attention to the world around him. We all hold a special fondness for the music and culture of out youth but for my father, this regard is absolute. His taste for the media of the period is not subjective but a considered opinion of unshakable truth; nothing was or could ever be as good as it was then. And this isolation has incubated other points of view which have blossomed and multiplied as he has grown older like bacteria in petri dish and like an infection, passes them silently on.

Women, my father now believes, should not be allowed to be on television. The old sitcoms and Vaseline-lensed, black and white films he enjoys to the exclusion of everything else inevitably portray women in the light of prevailing uncomplimentary attitudes of the time and are there merely to look pretty; once they open their mouths or take a single dainty step in any direction they do nothing but land their heroic, lantern-jawed leading men into trouble and thus, men and films in general would be better off if the cowboys were allowed to shoot the Indians in peace with no stupid dame to have to rescue. This, my father would argue, is not merely a conceit of the scriptwriters; the women are not behaving as they have been directed but as they really are. My stepmother who cannot drive, will not enter a pub without a man, does not know how to pay bills and had never written a cheque in her life is in no position to offer any alternative to this, even if she were so inclined.

But it is for modern fashion that he reserves his most vigorous opinions. Shampoo is for girls, of course. A quick squirt of Fairy Liquid once a week in the bath is more than sufficient and is without a hint of a doubt the sole reason why he is not going even slight bald aged sixty five. Deodorant is for woofters - as is all kind of jewellery including wedding rings, the irony of which is hopelessly lost on him. And heaven help the nicely groomed, pink cheeked young lad who happens to cross him in the street wearing his favourite band t-shirt or the bewildered young father in the pub, too slow to express a favourable opinion of string ties and winkle pickers.

Yesterday I found myself sitting on the bus, looking at a woman in jeans two sizes two small with JUICY picked out in diamanté across her not inconsiderable ass, high heeled baseball boots and a mobile phone with a crying baby as it's ringtone (I nearly applauded that, such a marvellously and previously unconsidered combination of two annoyances), while a voice shrieked inside my head that never mind metal detectors, tube stations...no, in fact, ALL public spaces...should have big metal structures that immediately detect and cleanly eliminate this kind of hideousness on sight. And then it hit me, like a baseball bat round the head from a twelve year old after my iPod; as sure as if the woman had turned round and had my father's face that the voice I heard was not my own. And despite loving my parents as I do, I do not wish to see their faces looming out at me on public transport any more than I'd want to see them making enthusiastic use of the spanking bench in the dungeon at Torture Garden. I resolved there and then to banish the spectre of my father's intolerant influence and turn a benevolent eye upon those less sartorially fortunate than myself.

Until she bent over to pick up her squalling, squirming toddler off the floor and the seat of her jeans split from crotch to waistband and I was forced to feign a billious attack to cover up my laughter. Oh dad, save a seat for me next to you on the bus to hell.