The Apocalypse – as told through the medium of Reality TV

If I want to stare mindlessly at hundreds of pathetic individuals with meaningless lives and next to no social prospects I simply go and stand alone in a hall of mirrors and sob until my tear ducts run dry. Some people, who we shall from now on call the “crazies”, instead decide to believe in their own social worth (the fools). In order to prove to themselves they aren’t the lowest piece of scum in the universe, the crazies watch reality television. And who can blame them? In a world full of airbrushed reminders of your own fat imperfections, it can be reassuring to see other people failing at things and leading miserable lives – and annoyingly my friends won’t do that (I’ve become the loser one). In the old days we had to make do with EastEnders and Chucklevision but over the last decade we’ve “enjoyed” the rise of the reality show, watching people attempt (and usually fail) at singing, dancing, business, conducting an orchestra, masturbating a pig and feeding children to wolves – ok I made the last one up, but worryingly I didn’t make the penultimate one up (The Farm – anyone?).

Reality TV now forms such a tightly run year round schedule, you could (if you were mad), not use a calendar and simply work out the time of year from which reality show was on at the time. January – March you’d be seeing celebrities injuring themselves in the campest show ever created for television Dancing on Ice, then Graham Norton would take over to find some member of staff for Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, then it’s the Apprentice and Big Brother taking over for the summer, before passing the baton over to The X Factor to run a marathon through until Christmas with Strictly Come Dancing and I’m A Celebrity… joining the party and in a warning that if all three of us are on, you really should go Christmas shopping. However this year that meticulous plan has been ruined by the late start of Big Brother this week (The X Factor hasn’t actually started any earlier this year, it just feels like that!).

Yep this week saw the double whammy with both The X Factor and Big Brother kicking off. At this point I should declare a small conflict of interest that I have, in that I know someone currently working on Big Brother. Incidentally, whilst I’m on the subject of people I know, I should apologise for last week describing and old uni friend as a “prick” (particularly as they read it and worked out I was referring to them - dam) they’re not a “prick” I just got carried away in my rant. Sorry, I’ve slapped myself round the face with a used tampon as punishment. Any way the new Big Brother kicked of this week on Channel 5 (not to be confused with Channel 4 + 1, a common pitfall for the mathematically gifted person in charge of the remote control), and Brian Dowling has taken over the reins (in a jacket ever so slightly too small for him). Admittedly he is less enthusiastic than Davina McCall, but in fairness I don’t believe it’s possible for anyone to be more enthusiastic than Davina McCall without being declared a public health threat by the UN. He’s welcomed a pack full of “celebrities”, and I use the term exceedingly loosely, into the all new house. In a risky twist Channel 5 are running Celebrity Big Brother back to back with the standard format, leading to the worryingly possibility that those of us not paying attention won’t notice when the switch over has occurred. In fairness the line-up is a bit dodgy but there never was a mythical golden era when we’d heard of all the contestants in Celebrity Big Brother so it’s probably unfair to expect any better from Channel 5. As we met the contestants on launch night it became clear that never had the phrase “You’ll probably know me from…” been so misused. For those of you unaware I’ll give you a quick rundown of the “celebs” (that I’ve heard of):

Amy Childs – represents the rather disturbing trend of reality TV for inbreeding, where by someone gets on a reality show simply for having been on a previous reality show. In this case The Only Way is Essex, which I saw once and mistook for a government propaganda film promoting birth control.

Bobby Sabel – is someone… probably.

Darren Lyons – I have actually heard of before, but I’m not sure how or why? He looks like a genetic splicing of everything in the world that is poor taste, like a twat version of Mr Potato Head. His sole purpose seems to be to make Jedward’s hair look normal.

Jedward – I find it hard to slag off Jedward, primarily because I accidentally caught myself in the mirror the other day (something I try and avoid so I don’t vomit) and due to a combination of bad highlighting and lack of haircut, for a brief moment I thought I saw Jedward’s aging father.

Kerry Katona – I find her much easy to slag off, there’s something I find deeply irritating  about her, like rabies. Annoyingly she refuses to go away or fall under a train – too harsh? No I didn’t think you’d mind. I remember her preaching to the CD:UK audience about how great it was to divorce Brian McFadden (nice content for a children’s programme), which I believe was the first time I wanted to slap her – since then my hands have become red raw just considering the mental imagery.

Lucien Laviscount – A successful young person, reason for us all to intensely dislike him.

Paddy Doherty – Another “star” from another “show” I’ve not seen, though apparently he’s a former bare-knuckle fighter, so we can only hope he gets drunk and decides to reprise his role.

Pamela Bach-Hasselhoff – A woman who has a selection of names from popular Baywatch stars, and that’s about it.

Sally Bercow – Wife of the House of Commons Speaker, who seems to have simply gone in their specifically to annoy the Daily Mail, something she should surely be commended for. And how can she do any worse for politics than George Galloway did?

And finally Tara Reid – Famous for being in American Pie and American Pie 2, though I watched both films and don’t remember her. I suspect it could be a lie, and she isn’t really famous at all. I mean does anyone check these things?

So with that line up, is it too much to hope for a biblical plague to sweep through the house? Please Channel 5, pretty please, it’s not like it would be the least tasteful thing you have ever done, don’t you remember that show that featured Keith Chegwin naked?

Meanwhile over on ITV The X Factor arrived back on our screens in its usual demure and understated fashion as approximately one billion tonnes of pyrotechinques are detonated to a voiceover recorded by God himself (or voiceover artist Peter Dixon, but I imagine God sounds a lot like him, though hopefully he says more worthwhile things than “THE BIGGEST ARTIST IN THE WORLD” – note Peter Dixon can only ever be quoted in capital letters). The main attraction of the show this year is the new judges, who begin the show by being flown in, in four separate helicopters – not because they don’t like each other, but because much like the Royal Family they can’t risk flying together in case of a crash. And who can blame the producers for being cautious given the number of judges they’ve lost recently? Talk about careless it’s like ITV accidentally organised a massacre at last year’s rap party, and much like a cockroach nothing can finish off Louis Walsh. As a result this year it’s The X Factor: The Next Generation, with a whole host of new judges – in fact when I saw the first wave of publicity featuring the judges I thought it was one of those dodgy spoof comedy shows, who really struggled to find actors to play the panel, bar a remarkably good likeness for Louis Walsh. Speaking of Louis Walsh, whoever thought watching back in Series 1 that of all the “talent” (talent by the way is media wanker speak for people who appear in front of the camera, instantly implying that everyone else on the production doesn’t have talent – which in my case is true), on the show at the time Louis Walsh would be the only one still standing by Series 8? I mean really, Louis? Back during Series 1 you could have got 10-1 on for Louis being sectioned by Series 3. Of course Louis did briefly leave the show in 2007 in a completely “unstaged publicity stunt” where conveniently despite being fired he hadn’t booked any other commitments in his busy schedule, so was free to come back to the show on Week 2. Incidentally did anyone think in Louis introductory VT, that given they credited him with “finding amazing pop talent over the last 30 years” that showing Girls Aloud was a bit much – I mean we (and when I say we, I don’t mean me) picked the final line-up for Girls Aloud, so who can he claim full credit for that.

The new judges are of course Kelly “Destiny’s Child” Rowland who claimed “she’s really excited by all the talent in the UK” proving she’s clearly never watched The X Factor before. Second Tulisa “I don’t have a surname”, who appears to have completed her community service looking after the other members of N-Dubz. And finally we have Gary “I’m not the new Simon Cowell, but I’m going to try” Barlow who, as explained by means of a VT montage. is as mean as Simon Cowell, except he’s not, he just says “no” a lot like an evil doppelganger version of the Churchill nodding dog.

Other shocks are of course the inclusion of a new audition in Liverpool, because it’s well known that talented people in Liverpool are unable to travel, so good news for them. And of course the bombshell hidden in the credits, that Dermot O’Leary has a stylist. A stylist who presumably was off the day they went to Birmingham and Dermot put on those beige chinos.

My favourite part of the whole show was seeing a woman being sick in a Morrisons bag, something that we should see more of on television, though I was disappointed that she didn’t throw up on the judges which would have been “the new and refreshing thing” the British pop industry is looking for. This along with pointless statements, (such as Gary Barlow saying “this isn’t just an audition, it’s an X-Factor audition” – well durrrhh, what did you think all the X’s emblazoned over the place were for – well not for bloody buried treasure), appeared to be one of the many things making up the show rather than actual auditions, I counted only five full auditions (other than the montage of people Gary said no to). Still that’s only five people to hate. First up we got to meet Frankie who has the name of seven girls tattooed on his bottom (coincidentally I’ve got a copy of the Daily Mail tattooed on my bottom, so I can enjoy defecating through it on a daily basis), this provoked much cheering from the stupid women in the audience – proving that it’s ok to sleep about so long as your pretty. He then went onto say “a night out with me would be mental”, where I suspect what he actually means by “mental” is “not fun to any sane person”. Annoyingly he was actually a half decent singer, and the judges let him through because of his “cheeky demeanour” or “being a twat” as I call it. There was then a boring collection of vaguely talent girls followed by Goldie, a mad women, (the one who was sick in the Morrisons bag). She sung a song no one could understand (not even her friends and family) then mounted Gary Barlow, this lead to Louis Walsh asking her to sing another song – I suspect he’s getting the hint of Wagner already, fifty quid says she’ll be one of his finalists. And then finally we had a previous auditionee who threw a foul-mouthed tantrum two years ago, he reassured us he had changed before having another foul-mouthed tantrum in which he called Tulisa every name under the sun, and then said she wasn’t Cheryl Cole, so at least he ended on a nice comment.

So that’s what we’ve got to look forward to in the way of reality television for the next few months. Still if that doesn’t float your boat you could always while away the time like I do, making a likeness of yourself from Angel Delight. 

 And they say I don’t know how to have fun.

It’s just easier to hate Football.

I have a confession to make, a big one, yes I am crushing on your sister – she’s hot. I am of course joking. No, not about your sister being hot, about me crushing on her. I’m sure she’s very hot, at least 500 degrees Celsius, but in fairness I’ve never met her. If I had met her I most certainly would crush on her, but respectively from afar so as not to upset you, but not like a stalker. Confused yet? Good I need you distracted so I can reveal my real confession without you flipping out, I don’t hate football. There I’ve said it. I repeat, I don’t hate football.

Shocking as this may seem I am however guilty of high level apathy, the fact that the English Premiership kicked off this weekend (except in Tottenham where everything literally kicked off last weekend) provided me with no stimuli other than as a source of topic for this here blog. To me football IS only a game, and much like Cluedo I neither love nor detest it. I don’t even mind the World Cup, yes during the tournament there’s a lot of mentions of football as people try to be topical. In fact all the commercials in the whole country are annoyingly about football, but let’s be honest adverts are always annoying. The fact they now have a theme makes no difference. It’s like swapping from one type of genital warts to another, nothing’s really changed it’s still very irritating.

Generally I’ve found though, that being someone with a non-descript ambivalence to football is harder for football fans to accept than someone who actually actively announces their utter disgust for it. For some reason it’s easier for supporters to comprehend people who tell them that football should be banned, than to understand people who find England losing the World Cup disappointing - but disappointment on a par with going to the fridge and finding someone’s drunk the last of the orange juice. Confusingly me sitting watching a football game coming up with comments such as “isn’t their kit an odd colour”, “oh well, it doesn’t really matter” and “at least the best team won” is more infuriating to supporters than me simply not watching the game at all.

I’m not quite sure why this is, perhaps football fans find it easier to simply categorise those who hate footballers as the enemy and dismiss them as cretins, whereas those of us simply not bothered by football are harder to fathom. “They understand football and yet they do not convert – this makes no sense”. This theory would at least explain the bizarre opinion the offside rule is held in. Stereotypically women are said to be football haters, and so it “therefore follows” that it must be because they don’t understand the offside rule – so secure is this belief that Andy Gray and Richard Keys even presumed a woman who had studied football in order to become a lineswoman couldn’t understand the offside rule. This all sounds perfectly reasonable until you realise the offside rule isn’t that complicated, to prove it I’ll have a go at explaining it “a player is offside if they are affecting play and there are less than two opposition players closer to their own goal”, a quick look at Wikipedia shows that I missed two mini caveats (one that they must be in front of the ball, and secondly that you can only be offside in the opposition’s half of the pitch), but broadly speaking I was along the right lines, and even with those caveats it’s pretty easy to understand. Admittedly it is one of the more complicated rules of football, but that doesn’t make it beyond comprehension. It’s still after all far easier to understand than the rules to the National Lottery: In It To Win It – an horrendously complicated game that would be difficult for even Professor Stephen Hawking to play. Though that might be more to do with the fact he’d find it difficult to constantly wheel himself in and out of Dale Winton’s red area (no smut intended… on my part at least, I can’t speak for Dale). Secondly, even if I didn’t understand the offside rule, I don’t believe that makes football inaccessible. It seems a tad unlikely to presume that if a football hater was explained the offside rule, that they’d jump up screaming “Oh my god, how could I have missed this amazing game for such a long time? It now all makes sense.”

In my university days I did used to try and get involved during the World Cup, but it is hard work, having to pretend to care more than you actually do, so as not to annoy your friends. Sitting there watching them turn into w***ers in front of the game – why do most football fans do this? Why do they feel it’s useful to heckle people who are clearly far more talented than they are, through a television screen, whilst their obese frames fill up the sofa? I mean how would they like it if a group of professional footballers turned up at their office to shout abuse at them, as they mucked up using the photocopier, which is the effective equivalent of what they’re doing. And whilst I do sort of care if England win, I’ve found that much like the Lottery, you don’t have to actually watch the show to find out the result – it usually crops up in the news, and saves you ninety minutes of your life.

But whatever my feelings about national football, I can’t even begin to force an interest in league football – well other than lying about supporting a football team to impress people cooler than myself (i.e. everyone) and trying to become part of their cool gang. If you answer any football comment without the phrase “I absolutely detest football” then instantly the next question will be “What team do you support?”. This I’ve come to find is a hidden minefield of a question, it’s too hard to give the honest answer of “whilst I don’t really hate football, I don’t have a favourite team” because instantly you become that confused group football fans don’t understand. So instead you’re forced to pick a team, to lie. But which one to pick? Unlike national football there isn’t an obvious answer (local geography seems irrelevant in this matter), and this answer matters. In any group of people announcing your footballing allegiance (faux or otherwise) will at best end with you receiving a mixture of cheers and boos, like you’re being watched by a confused pantomime audience. At worst you’ll end up with a bottle-shaped extension to your face, so you need to pick carefully. At this point you can be clever by saying something generic like “the reds” in the hope that the questioner will assume you mean one of the “red” teams they don’t utterly despise. Though a word to the wise here whilst there are enough teams that you might get away with “the reds” or “the blues”, for some inexplicable reason this doesn’t work with “the yellows” or “the greens”, you’ll look like a fool – don’t ask me I have no idea what’s going on.

In short you can save yourself a lot of time, anguish, and awkward hours spent watching the “beautiful game” with people who care far too much to be healthy, simply by saying you absolutely detest the game, even when really you’re not that fussed.

Although there is one thing about football I do hate, and that’s its privileged place in the world of hobbies and interests. It, along with other popular sports and media (by that I mean music, cinema and television) form a unique group of interests where you can know as much as you like about them – and not be classed as a geek. It’s perfectly ok to know the results of QPR’s last one hundred games and not be considered a weirdo, but express even a passing curiosity in anything from steam locomotives to crochet or from papyrology to ancient Greece and you’ll be consider a nerdy freak for all of humanity to pour scorn upon. And god forbid you try to compare the importance of your interest in exotic horses, for example, to their interest in football. Once a friend of mine was upset that their precious football team failed to qualify from one pointless lower league to the next marginally less pointless league up, and was deeply upset. While their other friends mocked them, I explained that I could understand their feelings as I had interest very important to me, at which point they replied “You can’t possibly understand my pain, this is worse than anything you’ve ever gone through” – what an unmitigated prick! How dare you presume my hobby to be less important to me than yours is to you, just because yours is bloody soccer (and yes I said soccer just to annoy you). And honestly “worse than anything I’ve ever gone through” – really? I was forced to play Rugby at school, despite being a pathetic feeling wreck of a teenager – seriously until you’ve been a wretched wreck forced to be the prop in a rugby scrum, you know no pain.

So in summary, I don’t hate football, I have no problem with its existence and now and again I might even pass a casual glance of interest in its general direction – but it’s a hell of a lot easier to just say I hate it.

And by the way football fans, if you are reading this, may I be so bold as to suggest a minor improvement to the game? Surely the random adding on of an undefined number of minutes at the end of the game, and then stopping the action at simply a mutually convenient point is a very unsatisfying way of ending a football match. Wouldn’t it be better to do what they do in ice hockey, stop the clock for every disruption to play and simply countdown the last few seconds of play in an exciting, tense way much like the way they end the cooking time in Ready, Steady, Cook. Admittedly by mentioning Ready, Steady, Cook in my exciting idea, I haven’t really helped sell it – but I hope you get the point.

“Come on the greens”. Or maybe just “come on the green peppers.”

There’s Nothing to Fear, except Fear itself - oh and Angry Rioting Mobs.

Ever sat at home watching a really good disaster movie, a very realistic one in which familiar places are being destroyed. Then it dawns on you that this isn’t a disaster movie, it’s the news, it’s real - at which point your anal sphincter opens wider than Davina McCall’s mouth and you need to reupholster your settee. Which is exceedingly hard when every sofa store within fifty miles is ablaze.

In case you’ve locked yourself in a secure vault, possibly not the worst idea I’ve heard all week, you won’t know that over the last few days a number of places in London, and across the country, have decided to twin themselves with Tottenham. As civil disturbances, which are generally as welcome as a Jim Davidson comeback tour, spread the land. Rioting is generally better, I find, when it is happening somewhere else, Libya, Athens or Bradford. When it’s happening down the road it’s particularly scary.

The rioting has sparked a number of questions, such as what was the initial trigger for such acts? What are the socio-economic conditions that have caused such violence? Have the police been using the right tactics? And how is it possible to loot a Vision Express? I mean seriously, what was there to take from Tottenham’s Vision Express? Ok, so there’s the till, but that’s just simple burglary, to loot you’ve got to do more than that. What did they do come away with hundreds of pairs of dummy glasses and a lifetime’s supply of contact lens solution? Perhaps they turned up late and there were no shops left to loot, either the opticians or an estate agent and they realised that hundreds of pairs of glasses were better than a load of pictures of houses they don’t own.

Ok, so I’m making light of a very serious situation with some very sad consequences. To some extent I have to, simply in order to keep myself sane – if I actually thought about this seriously all day and night my brain would have a fit, then explode and dribble out my ears, and we’ve already had far too much stray bodily fluid in this post.

The truth is I am supreme worrier, I can worry about anything and everything and frequently do. If worrying were an Olympic sport I wouldn’t compete because I’d be worried the starting official might accidentally fire the gun when pointed in the wrong direction – seriously has that ever happened? Should I be worried? Thank god I didn’t get those Olympic tickets. I’m the kind of person who walks past some broken glass on the street and worries that someone could fall over on it and DIE! Or that at any moment standing on a balcony the railing could rust and we’d all plunge to our deaths. It may seem overly paranoid here in text, but in my mind these are just the tip of the iceberg of the very real threats that plague my every waking moment.

As you can imagine this situation hasn’t been improved by the fact that I passed through the corner of Clapham Junction, by Debenhams, just an hour or so before it descended into full scale anarchy last night, nor the fact I’ve been watching the BBC News Channel non-stop all day (thankfully I didn’t watch Sky News or I’d have died in a fatal stress attack at about 11am). Television and film tend to have a very worrying effect on my psyche, far more that mere newspaper reports, radio or idle conversation can achieve. I’m not quite sure why that is, it must be something in the moving pictures convincing me that terrifying situations are indeed real – even when they’re not. After seeing Jurassic Park 3, I remember being extra anxious walking the streets of my hometown for fear that a velociraptor might leap from a dark corner and rip my body limb from limb at any moment, this of course didn’t happen, but it didn’t stop my brain from cycling through the potential consequences in alarming detail.

I’m particularly “good”, at imagining myself within films – not in an egotistical, “starring myself as the lead hunk” kind of way. But in “I wonder what would happen to me, if I was the character in the story”, invariably these unstable psychosis based simulations don’t end well for my imaginary self. I’m never the hero of any situation, simply the shrivelling wreck who lives a highly implausible but unfortunate life. Few of you may remember the 2000 film The 6th Day starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (you probably blocked it from your mind), but our good friend Arnie wakes up to discover that has been replaced by a clone who is currently living out his life and must battle to uncover the highly unbelievable, sinister multinational company plot that has given him two roles in this film. You probably remember it for the dodgy acting, two hours of your life you’ll never get back, and the creepy dots the clones had on their eyeballs. All I remember is the fact that I spent most of the next week worrying about what would happen if I were replaced by a clone, and concluded that even though my clone would also be a pathetically weak individual I would lose out to him, and he would end up sitting all my university lectures. Obviously a pointless waste of my worrying energy which could have only been more misused, had I spent my time worrying about the prospects of entering a long term relationship.

So bad has this odd psychosis become that I can no longer watch end-of-civilization-epoch-shattering-apocalypse-disaster movies any more, as my chances of survival in the resultant imaginary sequel featuring myself are so remote that I end up deeply depressed. I don’t know when this happened, as a child this didn’t bother me. I remember going to see Independence Day at the age of about 12, and practically bursting with joy as aliens, who really should have renewed their Norton Anti-Virus subscription, blew city sized chunks out of humanity. I suspect that I’d been spoilt by a diet of sanitised children’s television in which no matter the number of explosions or bullets everyone survived (except Bambi’s mum) and no one had to rebuild their destroyed lives, as a quick swish of a broom tidied up even the worst of explosions. Perhaps if I’d grown up with the high body count of the current Doctor Who, or watching the surprisingly dark Captain Scarlett, I’d have had a more realistic appreciation of the consequences of alien invasion. Because it actually turns out having a sizeable chunk of the White House smack into your face at high velocity can really put a dampener on your career prospects. Certainly by the time I caught my last disaster story - when I accidentally watched the BBC’s reimagining of Day of the Triffids last year, my priorities had changed. Rather than marvelling at the special effects, and odd casting of Eddie Izzard, I instead spent the entire programme worrying about the poor sods who’d been blinded by a solar flare and then eaten by a geranium. And then the rest of the week going to bed with a bottle of weed killer under my pillow.

Given that in the real world I’d lose out in a bare knuckle boxing match to any one of the Cheltenham Under 8s Ballet Class members, in my fictitious simulations of any of Hollywood’s civilization destroying scenarios I meet the same fate. I end up surviving the initial mass destruction meted out to mankind, but in the process have my sanity utterly mauled by the horrific scenes I’ve witnessed, only to then die straight away in the “new world”, as the “character that dies pointlessly, just to prove that even though the volcano/rampant virus/alien invasion is over, the world is a dangerous place”. If I’d been in Lost I’d have been the guy who, after living through the trauma of a plane crash and emerging on the deserted island, promptly gets sucked through the plane’s jet engine and chopped into a rather messy fifty billion piece jigsaw puzzle in episode one - just to prove to dear viewer how dangerous the island is. Still at least I wouldn’t have had to live through trying to work out the remaining six seasons.

And in real life that’s probably a good thing, I mean if civilization really does come to an end, what use am I going to be? How long after the Domestos style destruction of 99.99% of mankind, and the subsequent collapse of all society, will someone with the skills of a children’s television producer actually be useful? I reckon it’s going to be quite a while, in the meantime there’s going to be lots of cold winters and my rotisseried buttock flesh will probably end up keeping those doctors and civil engineers from going hungry. Oh well, it’s for the good of civilization I suppose.

So as not to end on a sour note, I’d like to go off on a complete tangent and recommend one of my favourite shows of the moment Only Connect which returns next week for a new series. The show’s everything that ITV2 isn’t, surely that should be sufficient encouragement to view? But it’s essentially a logic based quiz-show which is unashamedly high brow, full of questions so fiendish that if you’ve scored zero by the end of the of the programme, you’ll be quite proud. So make sure you tune in to BBC Four at 8.30pm this coming Monday, provided you haven’t been vaporised by Lord Voldemort in the meantime. I mean it could happen… I knew I shouldn’t have gone to see Harry Potter.

Oh and please feel to comment below, only nice things please – actually sod that I’m a lonely attention seeker I’ll take abuse to, just any kind of comment or message just to prove I’m loved. Or apparently if you put your e-mail address in the box at the bottom you can subscribe to this blog, I have no idea how it works, maybe you do?

In the words of South West Trains: "Better late, than cancelled."

If you’re reading this welcome, you’ve stumbled blindly into the first edition of my blog – I can only deduce that you’re at work… bored, and no one can see your computer screen from where they’re sitting. There can be no other reason for being here. So you might be wondering why I’ve decided to start a blog and write about all the tedious details of my life, well it’s much like EastEnders – it’s uplifting. Uplifting in the sense that you watch it and think no matter how bad your life is “at least I’m not Ian Beale” and this blog will probably fall somewhere in that realm of uplifting through relief.

Unless you’ve spent the last decade living under a rock, with Jim Davidson’s career, you can’t fail to notice that I’m rather late to arrive on the blogging scene. According to Wikipedia the word “blog” was coined in 1997 and the first example of an internet blog was back in the 18^th century – who knew. Yes like everything in my life I arrive late, once it's no longer fashionable but almost drifting out of mainstream. At school I was the last person in my year to get a Saturday job I struggled along doing a god awful newspaper round that was about as pleasant as having my genitalia ripped off by a rabid pack of wolves, when everyone else had the comparatively much more glamorous job of working in the Sainsbury’s food hall – look when you’re a paper boy any job involving a roof over your head is glamorous. I was the last person in my school to go to university, not because I had a gap year travelling, but instead because I sort of watched everyone else go for a year just to make sure it was alright. I’m not sure what I expected to happen, such that I needed to send off a metaphorical canary to investigate – if maybe 50% of my sixth form had died by the end of the first term I might have been justified in not going.

Similarly I only just got an android phone, most of my friends have been able to do exciting things like use GPS to locate the nearest hedgehog tattoo parlour, or take pictures of their belly button and turn in into the London Underground map for years. I finally get an iPhone just before the new jPhone comes out, presumably and makes me look like a Stone Age relic yet again. Likewise I still haven’t learnt to drive, I never got round to learning how to ride a bicycle (it was a traumatic incident involving malfunctioning stabilisers and a particularly thorny rose bush). And if we start comparing my love life with that of my peers I’m likely to start throwing so many things round the room that it will make the average student protest look like a civilised reorganisation of the fire extinguisher cabinet.

For a further case in point consider my living arrangements, I currently rent with a friend, I should say a good friend (just in case he’s reading), and I have no problem with this setup. But compare my status to all my similarly aged friends and you’ll find they almost exclusively all own their own accommodation. It’s making it harder and harder for me to find a flatmate, everyone I know of my age keeps buying their own houses the net result being I have to move in with successively younger and younger people, in twenty years time I shall probably have to flatshare with a foetus. In fact wombs are a lot like flatshares, in that it’s much easier to find an already occupied womb to share in undesirable areas like Penge than it is in say Kensington.

Maybe I should try and lead an exciting life whereby I lead the pack rather than follow like a sheep with a limp, in a wheelchair, trying to go uphill. Maybe I should run out and buy the latest technological advance now, today, this minute. Though the problem with trying to be cutting edge is trying to work out what is cutting edge. Is the reason no one I know owns an internet enabled bath plug because it’s new and modern or because it’s s**t? The problem is I take my cues from my friends, until they’ve bought an internet enabled bath plug I can’t possibly know if it’s good or not. And even then I need lots of convincing, I need at least five friends to tell me it’s the must have thing, before I even consider taking them seriously. I practically had to be forced at gunpoint to join Facebook, and a full blown internet petition was required before I invested in an iPhone.

And even then intense peer pressure doesn’t always help, I still stubbornly refuse to take up driving despite the fact that it comes more highly recommend than oxygen itself. I tell people it’s for environmental reasons, so I don’t think of myself as an epic failure. In fact it’s fear, the fear that I’ll probably kill someone. And given I can’t even walk down an empty pavement without daydreaming and ploughing into stationary objects I suspect that it’s a sensible move for all concerned.

So I’ve finally taken the plunge then and joined the blogging scene, it’s only taken me six months to deeply consider a decade old technological advance, and go "ok then I’ll give it ago". It’s sort of generational procrastination, I’m wasting my life away failing to make decisions. Though it’ll probably take me an extra 200 years to decide how and when to die, so maybe that will make up for it. Obviously I have no idea if this blog will be a success, or if anyone will enjoy it, for all I know I could be tapping away on the keyboard and no one’s reading – obviously no one’s reading at this exact moment I am tapping, that would be creepy as it would imply you’re in my bedroom and the idea of sharing my bedroom is an idea completely foreign to me. Sigh!

Oh well I best go, I’ve still got to decide what to have for breakfast tomorrow, and that will require me getting up early.