Last updated 13:23, Thursday, 17 April 2008

FOR as long as I can remember, I have harboured the desire to become invisible at will.

It started with that black and white television series from the 1950s, The Invisible Man, where a bungling scientist turned himself permanently invisible.

He walked around in dark glasses, swathed in bandages, and wearing a flasher’s mac and trilby in all weathers.

His garb should have turned a few heads even in the 1950s, but no-one seemed to find anything untoward in his attire.

When he took his hat off, the camera would pan down and the bandages would be completely hollow.

To an eight-year-old, the special effects were stunning, especially when cigarettes floated through the air smoking themselves, and wine glasses drained themselves in a satisfyingly mystifying manner.

The bad guys – usually eastern Europeans in ill-fitting suits – would be going about their nefarious business when they would be suddenly sent reeling by a flurry of blows from an opponent they could not see.

While I had no intention of taking up mystic smoking and drinking, I thought being invisible would be the ultimate accomplishment.

I didn’t want to go the whole hog and be invisible all the time, but the ability to vanish at will would bring with it all sorts of advantages, I imagined.

I could pretend I’d gone to bed, and then get back up again and watch all those television programmes I wasn’t allowed to watch like Quatermass and the Pit and the even scarier Quatermass Experiment.

I could follow my dad to the pub on Sunday dinner time, and discover for myself what happened there which transformed him from a harsh disciplinarian to a joyful cove bubbling with bonhomie over a couple of hours.

We could even sometimes persuade him to show us how he could walk on his hands, in the hope that the odd sixpence or even half crown could tumble from his pockets without him noticing.

And when he woke up in a foul fettle from his beer-induced slumbers, I could also avoid his implacable wrath at anything and everything that came into his sight.

I could also sneak up undetected on rabbits on my uncle’s farm, or retrieve lost balls from the gardens of crotchety pensioners.

Most of all, I could also wander into the girls’ changing rooms at school at PT time, and catch them in their vests and liberty bodices.

It would also have come in handy in later life, for whenever I was at a function where “the turn” required a member of the audience to humiliate, his eye invariably fell on me.

No matter how much I sank into my seat, feigned sleep or adopted a Jack Douglas twitch, the sequin-jacketed funster would bawl: “Yes, you sir, with the National Health glasses and Beatle haircut – come and join me on stage.”

All manner of degradations would follow before I was allowed to return to my seat crimson with embarrassment, with cruel laughter ringing in my ears.

It all seemed an impossible dream, but 50 years on I have achieved my target.

For, despite my considerable bulk, I find I have become completely invisible in a certain Hexham hostelry.

I stand at the bar waving my £5 note vigorously, but the girls behind the bar seem completely unaware that I am there.

No matter how vigorously I bang my empty glass on the bar, they will attend to the needs of everyone else first, including old ladies wanting a coffee mocha, or a man in a cardigan who appears to be ordering different meals for every member of the crowd at the last fixture at St James’s Park.

This week I was fortunate enough to get to the bar when there was no-one else there, and after a chat with her colleagues the barmaid dispensed a pint of stout.

I bore it to my seat in triumph, and took a hearty draught – only to find it tasted like something seeping from an open wound.

A tentative second swig confirmed it was indubitably off, so I repaired back to the bar for a replacement, more in hope than expectation.

I spent the best part of 15 minutes being completely ignored as bar staff came and went, serving all and sundry, and it was only when I virtually climbed on to the bar and honked like a barnacle goose that I attracted a glacial “You’ll have to wait your turn...”