Thursday 4 August 2011

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 18th 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.

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