DraMattics

Oh my God there’s a Raging Inferno in the Kitchen – Oh no Wait it’s just the Candles on my Birthday Cake!

2012-03-15T09:05:00.001Z

This week DraMattics is celebrating its 30^th blog entry, sadly I’m about to celebrate a similar anniversary, so it seems rather appropriate to tackle that thorny subject of age.

Ever had someone ask you how old you are, and then when you reply with you REAL age, they say the phrase “In your head maybe, go on what’s your real age?”. This is always a comforting reaction to admitting your age, in that sort of way that having an armed squad from the KGB smash in your windows and hold you at gun point is comforting.

To avoid the inevitable awkwardness of having to guess my real age is I can tell you now, that contrary to popular opinion it’s not 21, but I’m in fact 29 but not for much longer, 30 is looming like Eric Pickles looming over an all-you-can-eat buffet, hence the reason I feel this conversation is specifically pertinent.

As I get towards the age where the London Fire Brigade need to be called to put out the candles on my cake, I’m forced to question at what point am I old, and at what point is it ok to moan about being old? Is 30 old? It would be old for a cat but young for a cast member of Last of the Summer Wine, so I guess like all things its relative.

Which brings me to the next point, friends of mine who are closer to 40 have claimed that I have no right to moan about being old? Really? But what about a 50 year old, surely they would say the same to thing to the aforementioned 40 year old, if he moaned about being old. Extending this logic surely the only person allowed to moan would be the oldest person alive, as they bore the second oldest person alive with statements beginning “You think you’re old…”. But surely if you follow my earlier logic a two-year old can moan at a one-year old about how young they are, which to be honest I don’t mind if it’s done with appropriate wit and comic flare.

Clearly neither of the extremities I have detailed above are any more correct than the fact that Kerry Katona’s allowed to breed and she hasn’t been chemically sterilised for the good of the gene pool. So what age is it ok to moan about being old? To add to the evidence only a few weeks ago I was telling a friend who’d just turned 23 to “shut up” after they moaned about being old. If that’s the case what gives me the right a mere seven years later to do the same?

Well in fairness I think there’s one very good reasons why the mid-twenties (and by that I mean late-twenties, but at least it’s still the twenties), are the time to start moaning about your age. Because this is the first time in your life you start to realise you’re not the youngest any more. Fair enough people in their thirties are older, but it’s in your late twenties when you first realise you are at the top of a slippery slope. It’s here at the top of a hideous metaphorical helter-skelter ending in a pit of spikes somewhere around the eighties mark, that you realise thirties are your inevitable destiny, just as forties are the destiny of those in there thirties and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

You see between 18 and 25 you can claim you’re young, because no one’s younger than you. Of course there are children, but there have always been children, and you’re used to children being younger than you from school. In school children are segregated entirely by age, and there was an advantage to being older, as older kids got to beat up younger kids/take their pick over who got anally bu**ered (dependent on whether you were state or private educated). No the late twenties are the first time there are genuine adults younger than you, and not even ones you can excuse away with the fact they are at university so there still kids really. I have two 25 year old people working in my office (who nominally I’m in charge of, though they have other ideas), they’ve been to uni, and whilst I think of them as kids, they’re proper genuine adults and they are clearly younger than me! Up until the mid to late twenties this has never happened before; people younger than me have always been children.

Additionally you spend the first twenty years of your life believing your body will never age, the most traumatic thing to drop out of your body are your teeth and your testis (but you get a new set of at least one of these). Now hair’s starting to fall out, except for my nose which is now sprouting hair so fast a team of landscape gardeners needs to be called in. Seriously if don’t do at least a weekly root around the nasal area with a shaver I start to look like that attachment you put on the vacuum cleaner when you want to do the skirting boards. I’m also coming to the inescapable conclusion that my face is slowly starting to slide down my head, there seems to be a build-up of excess skin around the chin area, at this rate by the time I’m fifty my face will look much like my scrotum. Though in fairness I’m less likely to get arrested for waving it around in a school playground.

And then there’s my health and physical fitness, gone are the days where I can eat what I want, no longer am I able to hide successive days of junk food binging without worrying. Now a pizza binge manifests itself so that under poor lighting I look like I could be a few months pregnant. And as for exercise, it becomes that much harder for that much less reward, gone are the days where a quick 5 mile jog started the day and got me off to a bouncy start. Now running for the Tube makes me more breathless than an asthmatic in the vacuum of space.

There’s also the worry about things you can’t do any more, as a child getting older meant there were more things you can do drinking, driving, lottery, buying pornography without the need for a step ladder. The only things you stopped being able to do was go to the under 8s ballet class, and then that was alright because you got to go the 9-12 year olds ballet class. As you get to the late twenties, you’re simply not allowed to do things any more, I’m questioning whether I should go on an 18-30 holiday now before it’s too late. Yet the concept of an 18-30 holiday utterly despises me, but what if on the day I turn 31 I suddenly decide that I really want to vomit all over beautiful areas of the Mediterranean, hang my undergarments off a lamppost and go to a foam party and have more inappropriate fun with bubbles than Michael Jackson ever managed?

So you see I admit that 30 is not that old in the grand scheme of things, but it’s the end of that crucial age where nature finally reminds you that you are going to be old. As superhuman and as invincible as you may have seemed during childhood, 25-30 is the age at which your body starts to rebel, at which the signs of age start to show you that soon you will look like a Colonel Gadaffi body double with exactly the same employment prospects. You may not be old yet, but you’re no longer young and no matter what you thought, your body is deserting you, it won’t be long before when you stand up your knees make a sound like an old dial-up modem connecting to the internet. Or put another way the late twenties-early thirties is the age where getting older starts turning s**t, under 25 and there’s usually a bonus to getting old, over 30 and you already know your life is s**t so you shouldn’t be surprised! There the perfect conclusion to an argument on why turning 30 is the worst age to be, I think it makes sense, but it might not – my brain is old now.

So there you go, the official point at which my mental breakdown at turning 30 starts is here. Don’t worry there’s a few more blogging opportunities between now and the big day for me to cry. And when I say big day, it will actually consist of me crying into a large tub of Ben & Jerry’s with a candle in, because I’ve dropped the spoon on the floor and my stiff old back won’t let me bend down and pick it up.

Where were you when ITV Play died?

2012-03-06T09:05:00.000Z

There are many important moments in global history that for the rest of your life you’ll almost certainly remember where you were, when you first heard about them.

Where were you when The Berlin Wall fell? – I don’t know, I was only seven at the time. Though I do seem to remember hearing about it on Newsround and wondering why the people didn’t just walk around the wall to get to the other side of Berlin (simpler times).

Where were you when Princess Diana died? – At home sitting on my bed annoyed that the news was on when it was supposed to be CBBC.

Where were you when the Queen Mother died? – At home, where I’d just finished watching Auntie’s Bloomers, the outtake programme hosted by Terry Wogan. Problem with watching outtake programmes is you get in the mind-set that whatever you’re watching is about to go wrong. So as I was watching Peter Sissions break the news of the Queen Mother’s death I kept expecting him to fall of his chair – as it was the only thing that went wrong on that day was when he decided to leave his burgundy tie on.

Where were you when September the 11^th happened? – On my first trip to America, unashamedly shi**ing myself as my holiday seemed to be turning into Armaggedon – obviously now with hindsight I wasn’t really affected by those events, certainly compared to the thousands that were, but sadly that logic still doesn’t pay for the resultant rather expensive dry cleaning bill.

This is rather roundabout way of filling up some blog inches before I ask you the key question of this blog, where were you when ITV Play died? You probably don’t remember, the reason I ask is because today the 6^th of March is the fifth anniversary of the day ITV Play said goodbye – and they say I can’t be topical. I believe to mark the occasion ITV are burning Brian Dowling on a giant bonfire consisting of your cash. If you want to be part of this event all you have to do is call 08845 600 9000, and answer this simple question, what is the name of the main street on which Coronation Street is set?

A. Coronation Street

B. Baghdad High Road

C. Cheryl Cole’s Driveway

Calls cost £85 per minute and you almost certainly won’t be picked to be put through to the studio but your call will still be charged.

For those of you who don’t remember ITV Play it was one channel, amongst a plethora of other digital and satellite offerings which showed back to back phone-in quizzes. Where suspiciously attractive looking presenters, and Brian Dowling (I should at this point apologise to Brian Dowling for being the only quiz show presenter I unfavourably compare throughout this blog, but it’s your own fault being the only quiz show presenter who has reinvented their career and thus remains in my consciousness) asked a series of apparently deceptively simple quiz questions. Each question was worth a not unreasonable cash prize, and as caller after caller rang into the studio only to give the wrong answer the average viewer was left increasingly confident that their answer was the correct one, until eventually they called in.

Television call-in quizzes got in trouble back in 2007 after a number of high profile programmes, across many channels, had been found to be conducting their quizzes unfairly with callers not being selected equitably or production team members standing in for callers, amongst some of the complaints. ITV Play itself got in trouble when viewers complained about the question “What items might be found in a woman’s handbag?”, to which two of the answers were “Rawplugs” and a “Balaclava”. As the numbers of scandals across the industry increased the Press eagerly started a campaign against television for not being 100% honest, thus making the revelations back in 2011 that the press weren’t 100% honest all the more shocking. Eventually, with public opinion mounting, ITV suspended all quiz channels and interactive quizzes within programmes on the 5^th of March 2007 pending an independent audit with ITV Play broadcast its final shows in the early hours of the 6^th of March. On the 13^th March ITV announced ITV Play would not return, and on the 16^th of March ITV replaced the ITV Play channel with ITV2 + 1 making the channel about 96% less watchable.

Of course television has changed lot since then, after it went through another scandal as viewers realised that television lied to them about other things to. The scandal had many sorry chapters including the revelation that EastEnders wasn’t a documentary, the discovery that Gordon the Gopher wasn’t real and the outrageous disclosure that Dale Winton was actually straight.

The reason why I bring all of this up and focus specifically on ITV Play, yes there is a point – you’ll be shocked to discover, is that I once auditioned for ITV Play. Many years ago when I began my career in television when I was 18, (don’t question the fact that according to this blog I was seven in 1989 and eighteen in 2007 – that would be rude), I was on many websites where television jobs were appearing and I often applied for all kinds of different entry level jobs in order to get myself more experience. One such job was as an assistant presenter on an ITV Play programme called “The Debbie King Show”. The job involved being taking over during the show when quiz-show royalty Debbie King was having a break, clearly it’s exhausting ripping off the general public for three hours straight.

Despite my MAJOR reservations about doing this kind of job, let alone the moral and ethical issues, I was convinced by friends that applying would be an experience – they weren’t wrong! After sending off my application I was contacted by a researcher from the programme, for the purposes of storytelling let’s call him Gavin. Gavin informed that they would like me to come in for an audition and provided me with the time and location for where to attend. It was at this point it first became clear that Gavin had all the intellect of a Findus Crispy Pancake. I quickly Googled the provided address only to find it was several miles away from the nearest station that Gavin had told me to go to, something smelled odd. I e-mailed Gavin to confirm that the address provided was correct, only for him to reply with “No! That’s not the correct address” in a tone that seemed to suggest I’d volunteered the location, rather than was querying the address that he’d sent me in the first place. It turned out that Gavin hadn’t sent me a different address, he’d just manage to make a typo in the correct address. Easily done you may think, except Gavin had managed to make a mistake on three lines of a four a line address! An impressively moronic feat even before you remember the fact that this address was the location of where he worked, his office, a place he visits every day! It’s almost if Gavin had got the address of his workplace through an elaborate game of Chinese whispers in the office.

Despite Gavin’s best attempts I managed to turn up at the company’s offices, where I was shown in by Gavin who impressed even himself by being able to successfully operate a door. It also turned out that Gavin was not only a cretin, but had an annoying habit of just laughing moronically in response to whatever was said. I introduced myself as Matt, Gavin laughed. I thanked him for showing me in, Gavin laughed. I think the response would have been the same if I’d have produced a surface-to-air missile launcher from my bag and threatened to fire the entire salvo directly into his genitalia.

Inside I found myself in an office so ridiculous trendy that it was almost a caricature of itself, if Edina and Patsy had stumbled out from one of the doors I wouldn’t have been surprised. I wandered in between desks, avoiding the office’s resident dog – which apparently was necessary for a “creative department”. Gavin headed towards a room named the “creative room”, which given what I’d already seen, concerned me that it might be a wing of Battersea Dogs Home. Fortunately I wasn’t set upon by a pack of ravenous hounds, Gavin ushered me to one of the chairs, but being a “creative room” these weren’t normal chairs, instead I was asked to sit on a Perspex chair which was artily designed so that the seat of the chair was approximately one inch off the floor. This major design feature essentially made the chair impossible to use for its primary purpose of sitting, as I was forced to squat down in a ridiculously low position looking about as graceful as I imagine I would if I was trying to climb onto a camel. Once in the seated position, I now had the strange problem of what to do with my legs, with my bottom only an inch off the ground my legs were completely obscuring my face to Gavin as he tried to brief me. In the end my legs ended up sort of splayed out across the floor, making it look as if I’d fallen off a high balcony and landed on the chair breaking my back in the process. These ridiculous transparent Perspex chairs were accompanied by an equally stupid clear Perspex table which to match the chairs was only two inches high, thus representing an almost invisible trip hazard. I started to seriously consider the possibility that Gavin had designed this furniture himself.

After a quick briefing I was taken over to stand in front of a camera and do my audition piece, I wasn’t too nervous about this, primarily because Gavin was operating the camera so I suspected the chances of it actually being filmed were minimal. I was given a question, a fictitious phone number and a celebrity gossip story to talk about. The twist on The Debbie King Show, was that as well as playing the competition she would also be discussing topical celebrity news stories, which viewers would be able to call in about and offer their opinion on (for the nominal fee of 75 pence a call). My celebrity gossip story was about Heather Mills’ appearance on the American version of Strictly Come Dancing. As I preceded to “host” the competition, Gavin played the role of a series of moronic callers giving ridiculous answers to the set question and asking me whether I thought Heather Mills would be able to dance with only one leg, a role which he seemed suited to, were it not for the moronic laugh he gave every time I told him he had the wrong answer. Once I completed my audition Gavin laughed, unsurprisingly, and then told me I’d been very “technical”. Technical? Really? The only technical thing I did was read out the question and phone number, a question and phone number he had invented?! Perhaps reading out 11 consecutive digits is technical to Gavin, either that or in my tedium I’d accidentally told the audience how to go about changing a carburettor in your car engine. It could have happened.

I never saw my audition tape, according to Gavin it was sent to the ITV Bosses for review, which I sincerely hope is a different postal address than submissions for You’ve Been Framed. So rather fortunately that tape will never see the light of day again, though this is ITV so there is a chance it will be played out during England’s next World Cup goal or broadcast on their current affairs programme after being described as IRA training footage.

As I went to leave the audition room an unbelievably camp drip of a man burst through the door in a manner so ridiculously over the top that even Julian Clary would have thought it a tad effeminate. He introduced himself as JC, presumably because he shares all the personality of two-thirds of a digger. And then with his camp lisp, excitedly disgorged the information that Britney Spears had just shaved her head and walked into the path of oncoming traffic. This revelation that a celebrity and mother was having a full scale mental breakdown caused both Gavin and JC to burst into hysterics, something that I felt was rather distasteful. I left at this point, worried that my Gaydar was going to explode in the presence of such a highly refined source of pure homosexuality.

I never heard back from The Debbie King Show, which I presumed meant I hadn’t been successful in my audition, though it may have been and Gavin simply rung the speaking clock in error confusing our similar phone numbers. To be honest I was quite relived not to have been selected, if anything the audition process had cemented my views on the hideousness of the genre. I did decide to watch the launch night of The Debbie King Show, in that sort of morbidly curious way you watch a car crash. I was strangely intrigued to see if JC had got the job, though the bit I managed to stomach solely featured Debbie King. Based on my snapshot of the programme, it would appear that the production company had hoped to recover the entire outlay spent on the set with the first phone call!

Unfortunately for The Debbie King Show its first transmission date was the 5^th of March 2007, and if you remember way back at the beginning of this blog, you’ll know that on the early hours of the 6^th of March, ITV Play ceased transmission permanently. That’s right after all that effort there was only ever one addition of The Debbie King Show – poor Debbie, Gavin and JC, they must have been devastated.

If you take one thing from this blog, let it be the theory that if you turn me down for a job your channel gets pulled the very next day! If enough people think it’s true, the myth will enter folklore and I’ll never be looking for work again!

Abercrombie & Bitch

2012-03-01T08:53:00.001Z

I look and feel like a tramp, no really I do. Recently I’ve noticed that my favourite clothes and shoes are starting to resemble a novelty colander, there’s so many holes in them that I look like a cartoon representation of Wile E. Coyote after he’s been savaged by a pack of hungry tigers. This means it’s time to go clothes shopping. Problem is I’m sure clothes shopping is supposed to be fun, after all I’m a gay man I’m supposed to find purchasing new garments at least 168% as much fun as throwing around a selection of scatter cushions in an artistic fashion. Sadly stereotypes aren’t always correct, though I do like a good scatter cushion.

Middle age must be beckoning, because now when I go around clothes shops I find myself saying horrendous comments that I believed only my parents were capable of uttering such as “These don’t look very practical”, or “They’ll be a bugger to iron.”. It’s all really quite upsetting, I blame modern fashion. How on earth are you supposed to wear jeans whose legs taper to an infinitesimally small point at your ankle, so that they only really fit the triangular Mr Rush from Roger Hargreaves’ Mr Men books? Or trousers that have a seam that spirals around your legs like a rampaging anaconda desperate on sucking the life force out of every vein your body. See they don’t look very practical, and they would be a bugger to iron.

Frustrated by my inability to find anything I like in my regular shopping haunts, which whilst boasting an impressively large shop floor space seem to be laid out much like an episode of Scooby Doo. In that if you run for long enough it turns out you’re just passing the same three T-shirts and one style of chino as that is all the animators could be bothered to draw. I decided to take the plunge and head to some more “designer” shops, shops that have been recommended by my friends, who whenever I meet them seem to be wearing clothes that look fashionable but not so outlandish fashionable, that they look like thye were dressed by a blind flamingo. So with expectations riding high, and a need to get some clothes that don’t make me look like I’ve been attacked by Edward Scissorhands I headed for the “designer” shops.

The first thing I notice upon entering such stores, is it’s not immediately obvious where the gender divide runs. Shops I’m used to like Next and River Island and even the department stores my mother used to take me to, are usually split with male and female departments on different floors. Which for men always means a trudge up and down a flight of stairs, I sometimes think it’s a miracle that disabled men actually own any clothes and don’t have to wheel around naked all the time. However in the new-fangled designer stores of my new fashionable lifestyle, it’s not to so obvious. An arbitrary wiggly line runs down the middle of the shop with all the definition of a hotly dispute international border. It’s easy to accidentally stray into hostile waters and find yourself looking at a T-shirt that looks really nice, except upon checking the price you realise it’s a Size 8. With disgust you throw back the T-shirt horrified that someone might have seen you and instantly presumed you’re a transvestite, rather than coming to the far more logical conclusion that you were shopping for someone else. Some shops make it even more complicated, Gap for example has pictures of androgynous models all around the store so you can’t be sure if their male or female pictures near the clothes you are looking at. They’re beautiful definitely, but every single model has a smooth face is clean shaven and sports suspiciously short hair. It takes just as long to judge their gender as it does to judge the gender of the clothes beneath them. Other stores go to more random extents, I’m sure my recent visit to Superdry was confused by them having a large men’s department surrounded by various satellites of ladieswear, with no clear frontiers between the two. The other problem with this kind of stylish fashion, is even the garments that look obviously feminine could be for men, perhaps plunge neck T-shirts have become fashionable for the man about town, or maybe Culottes are now a unisex item, you can never be sure.

Of course complex segregation of male and female stores isn’t the only potential pitfall for the unwary shopper. I recently visited a store called Abercrombie & Fitch for the first time, despite sounding like the name of two particularly ostentatious cats (“come down from the worktop Abercrombie”), it’s actually a high-end designer clothing store. On arrival you’re not met by the usual shop system that we’re used to, the one that’s served us well for the rest of our lives. No rather than being faced with the traditional door that you enter the shop through surrounded by windows displaying what the shop actually sells. You instead come face to face with a store with no windows, because it’s too exclusive to actually display its wares, and a queuing system that would make Chessington World of Adventures envious. Yep that’s right you have to queue outside the store just to make the store look more desirable so that more people join the queue, in a vicious cycle that couldn’t be more British unless whilst waiting you were served tea and scones and got to say something deeply xenophobic. In my mind this doesn’t make Abercrombie & Fitch look designer, it makes it look like the Post Office but with less old people.

Once you’ve meandered your way through the queuing system, there’s a veritable team of people to great you at the door. Firstly, in order to give you the entirely false impression that the store is actually a five-star hotel, a number of smartly dressed men open the doors for you. Because you are clearly too important to open the door for yourself, as an aside (and I don’t wish to do people out of jobs, especially in these tough economic times) but if not having to open the door is that important, why not just fit automatic doors – it works for Poundland. Up next there’s a woman employed solely to say “Hello”, that seems to be all she does, just says “Hello” – I could do that job…, if I was woman, wasn’t a grumpy s**t and didn’t have all the looks and charm of a rancid plate of semolina. Then there’s an unfeasibly attractive half dressed man, with a ripped torso who you can pose and take a photo with. If that is you’re mad. No one in their right mind gets their photo taken next to an unfeasibly attractive person, because in the resultant photo their beauty will make you like Quasimodo on a particularly unpleasant visit to the Burns unit. Upload that photo to Facebook and people won’t be thinking about how attractive the man looks, or how much of a fun time you’re having, but instead on how old you’re looking or that they didn’t realise you’d got fat. This is why sensible people only ever agree to get their photo taken with their ugly friends, because it makes them look that much better. And if you can’t work out who the ugly person in your group is, then it’s you. And before you make a smart a**e comment, I am fully away of my place in the food chain of looks, what can I say? I appreciate the plight of the plankton. Apparently you have to pay for the photos, again another connection between Abercrombie & Fitch and Thorpe Park, though at least in this photo you won’t look like you are vomiting your dinner up (sadly the same cannot be said about your friends viewing the photo making unfortunate comparisons between you and the model).

All this and you haven’t even entered the store properly, in fairness it has to be said Abercrombie & Fitch looks pretty plush. Where Primark at the end of a busy day looks like the aftermath of a particularly bloody explosion at a Bring and Buy sale, Abercrombie & Fitch still looks elegant and tidy. Primarily this is because the minute you do so much as even breathe in the direction of one of the display racks a team of highly trained professionals rush to rearrange all the tops lest you upset the karma of the store. The shop’s wears are, as you’d expect from a designer clothing label, perfectly bog standard t-shirts, hoddies and jumper swhere the inclusion of a designer logo has led to the decimal point, on the price ticket, jumping one place to the right. Aside from the clothes, the most bizarre thing I discovered in the store was a dance floor complete with dancers. No, not some professional dance act recruited in from a swanky London performing arts college, but actual members of staff, in the staff “uniform” dancing away. As if to show that working for this company is soooo amazing, all we get to do is dance all day because we’re that cool, and our lives our wonderful because we work for Abercrombie & Fitch and we’re only employed because we’re beautiful. All us mortals can do is hope that they all spend the work Christmas party crying in the corner because they realise just how fake all their work friends are, that they’ll be forced to wear a branded paper bag over their head the minute they hit 25 in case they make people wretch, and that their lives are meaningless pawns in a sea of commercialised bulls**t. As I say, all we can do is hope, because actually they’re having a great time. To**ers.

Despite the clear abundance of staff in the store, with enough spare people to dance next to the racks of clothes and fold out every micro-crinkle that the displaced air caused as you moved your fat body through the store. Despite all this, when I visited there was only one till open, and a massive queue. Would it have killed the brand image if for one moment the dance floor had been emptied and some people manned the tills? Apparently it would have. Unfortunately for some ridiculous reason the problem of the large queue was magnified by the fact that the till area was decked out with more mirrors than the average swanky hair salon. Resulting in thousands of copies of the same row of frustrated sand bored faces being visible on every surface wherever you looked, much like a Girls Aloud concert.

Obviously the big question is did I buy anything? Of course not, I was just confused by the array of unknown shopping experiences I hadn’t expected. Like Henry VIII wandering through a modern shopping centre for the first time, both appalled and intrigued at what I saw with equal measure. Which coincidentally is the same set of facial reactions you see if ever I’m forced to watch The Only Way is Essex. Instead I simply walked out of the store, empty handed only to pass the “Hello” lady again, except this time she said “Goodbye” – but in a tone that really said “I knew this shop wasn’t really for you, but I didn’t say anything as you came in.’

On that note I’ll bid you adjure, except to say you can now follow my tedious ramblings on Twitter just “connect with” @mattymatician #goonyouknowyouwantto – see look at me down with the kids. And incidentally if anyone has any decent second hand clothes they wish to send me, they’ll be welcome. The situation is getting quite desperate. I claim to be a size Small, but in reality unless it’s at least a big Medium, the fabric will be pulled across my body tighter than the skin on Anne Robinson’s face.

The Cycle of False Hope - The Horrors of Online Dating Part 2

2012-02-22T08:06:00.001Z

Welcome back to DraMattics the blog you’ll be wishing was stopped halfway through by James Corden. If you read yesterday’s entry you know that we’re halfway through a two-part special on the pitfalls of online dating. With your profile finally constructed it’s now time to meet that special someone online. Slightly nervous, you log online and start the search...

Initially you start browsing through the profiles carefully reading all the text, as you know that compatibility and shared interests are far more important than looks. Within 15 minutes you just start flicking through the photos and dismissing people based on the slightest blemishes. Eventually after a lot of searching, you find the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen, there’s not a flaw in any of their photos, they are the one. You even read their profile and convince yourself you’re a perfect match “They like watching television, going to the cinema and socialising as well, what are the chances?”. So you go to write them the perfect message, the message that’s going to get them as excited about you as you are already about them. Problem is it turns out that just because you’re not face to face with them, doesn’t stop you being awkward, which makes writing an opening message rather tricky. You start with “Hi”, after hours of thinking of something witty to say your message still reads “Hi”, eventually you send a message reading “Hi, how are you?”.

The minutes pass, they’ve not replied, why not? Your opening message was so good. Finally an e-mail pops up, someone has messaged you – it must be them, you log on with excitement. What can they have possibly said? You open up your messages, it’s not from them, it’s from someone 20 years older than you with a face that looks like it’s been attacked by a cheese grater. Additionally they have a bizarre penchant for typing their messags in capital letters SO IT LOOKS LIKE THEY’RE SHOUTING AT YOU LIKE A PSYCHO. Disappointed you reply to the sender, “Sorry you seem like a nice person, but you really aren’t what I am looking for. Thanks”. And then the questioning begins, they ask you “why aren’t I what you are looking for?” no matter how polite you try to be in fobbing them off they continue to reply to you. It as if their emotional self-worth has a death wish that it’s desperately trying to fulfil and won’t be sated until they hear the words “Your face looks like a scrotum that’s been in a hot bath too long”. Finally they stop e-mailing you, you can’t be sure they haven’t taken their own life but by this point you don’t care, just desperate stop the never-ending torrential barrage of questioning. It represents the most pointless conversation you’ve ever been in, since you last got stopped in the street by a charity worker, knowing full well that as soon as they pause to take breath in their opening spiel you’re going to say “no”. You soon learn it’s better to ignore those who message who you clearly want nothing to do with.

It then dawns on you, that maybe the reason your true love hasn’t replied is that they, didn’t get your message – that’s the only logical answer left clearly. You best send them a new message, however if you thought the first message was awkward, you soon realise that trying to explain in words that “you’re not sure if they got the first message” only serves to make you appear desperate. You send the message, and wait. Suddenly a new message pings in your inbox, you open it excited, you were right they didn’t get the first message. Turns out the message is an automated message from the site, telling you about an exciting new feature, where you answer a series of mind-numbing questions in attempt to match your pathetically vague answers to other people’s pathetically vague answers on the site.

Finally you accept that the true love, isn’t going to reply. In fact you don’t actually know if they want to reply but are unable to. The clever thing about the strategy that allows you to join a dating website without paying is that there can be a number of profiles online at any one time, of people who haven’t paid up. So you can send these people messages (the site wants this, to encourage those people to join to read your messages), but you will never know if you were ignored because of your face or because they weren’t prepared to part with their cash. You decide to move on, knowing the reply rate of dating messages is about the same as letters to Santa Claus, or CVs sent in Wolverhampton, you send a number of messages to different people. Lowering the standards of your potential suitor as you go. Again you wait for replies. Nothing.

Eventually you get a reply, to your dismay, it’s from one of the least worst choice options you e-mailed, someone you messaged on a particularly lonely night home alone when your standards were so low you’d have considered dating a jar of Bovril. Now in the cold light of day, you realise that their hobbies include murdering babies, strangling squirrels and watching Loose Woman and their picture makes them look like a less attractive version of a Crimewatch photo fit. You feel awkward now you have to fob them off, and you initiated first contact. You try hinting in your e-mails that you have socially unacceptable hobbies, like developing your own deadly strains of body odour and kleptomania – sadly they find this endearing. Eventually the only option is to tell them you’re dead, or convince them that you’re seeing someone else. All the more difficult a lie to spin when you’re still regularly logging onto the dating site, as most sites have an annoying feature that lists when you last logged on, on your profile. After this loop completes itself a number of times you decide to give up, online dating clearly isn’t for you. Your membership is going to expire today, there’s no point in wasting any money and renewing it. Oh well there’s more to life than being happy you reason.

One hour after your subscription expires, a new message pops in, you can’t read it but you check the sender. It’s your true love, they’ve finally replied. But now you can’t read the message, your subscription has expired. Hurriedly you reach for your debit card, eager to tap in the 16-digit card number, just so you can read the marriage proposal you’ve clearly received. You go for the worst value for money option, the one-month subscription, you won’t need a longer subscription – this is the love of your life after all. With your payment approved you hurriedly open their message, your heart is racing with excitement as you read the words “Sorry you seem like a nice person, but you really aren’t what I am looking for. Thanks”. Your world collapses in on itself, you experience the kind of disappointment usually reserved solely for opening Christmas Crackers and discovering the “prize” was a novelty one-piece jigsaw. Convinced there must have been some terrible mistake you reply “why aren’t I what you are looking for?”. A number of messages are exchanged before they block your profile and report you to the site administrator.

Still your disappointment has been slightly tempered, one of the other people you messaged a few weeks back has replied. You’ve agreed to meet up for a meal, that should be nice. It’s only a few days until your date and you keep looking back at their profile. You realise actually you’ve got a lot in common, they’re pretty attractive and you’re sure something special is going to happen between the two of you. Finally it’s the day of the date, you’ve made a supreme effort, much to the mocking of friends and colleagues, you’re wearing your best clothes, your smart shoes and you’ve spent ages getting your hair to look just perfect. What could possibly go wrong?

You turn up at the pre-arranged meeting point, eager to find your date you look around, there’s lots of attractive looking people but you can’t see the person shown in the pictures you’d been looking at. Finally you spot them amongst the crowd, except it’s not them as you expected, it’s a hideous cartoon parody of the pictures you’ve seen on their profile. You approach them, not sure whether you should make contact or run, but too late they’ve spotted you, and you realise the awful truth it is them. In that three seconds the extent of their “being economical with the truth” unravels as you realise that the photos they uploaded of themselves were taken at least seven years ago, before they put on six stone, before they developed male pattern baldness (even if they aren’t male), before they decided to have a tattoo across their face and before they suffered a terribly disfiguring car crash. Additionally their description of age and build are so wildly unbelievable that even Hans Christian Anderson wouldn’t have attempted to write such fanciful bulls**t.

Reluctantly you proceed to dinner with them, cursing yourself for not suggesting any other dating activity that would have been shorter such as a pint, a coffee or even a group suicide pact. As you begin dinner they suggest doing the full starter, main course, dessert option, whereas you’d hope you could have taken one bite out of your meal said your full and then left. As the conversation continues you realise that you have nothing in common, the only thing they can talk about is how exciting Lady Gaga’s latest video is, which you haven’t seen. They find it incredulous that you haven’t seen it, they’d be less shocked if you told them that you were a Mermaid and had to return to the ocean in the next five minutes before you dehydrate and die. The only other thing they can talk to you about is The Only Way is Essex, you realise that you are essentially on a date with a copy of Heat Magazine, except it’s costing you a lot more than one pound fifty and doesn’t have the one redeeming feature that you can wipe you’re a**e with it if you’ve run out of loo roll.

Worse still they haven’t asked a single question about you, instead they’ve spent the last hour babbling along about their pointless life, a life so disinteresting you want to rip your own windpipe out and fashion into a crude trombone just to give yourself something to relieve the boredom. When they do finally let you speak, no matter what you say their only response is to laugh inanely, like a hyena on nitrous oxide. Regardless of whether you utter a simple reply to what they’ve said, tell a joke, say a statement of fact, or even commenting that you have megalomaniacal tendencies and one day hope to destroy the world, all they can do is reply with that inane pathetic laugh. Despite all your best efforts to wrap up the meal as quickly as possible you can’t they wait out for dessert, don’t get any of your hints about having to leave soon or be up early the next day. Not only that but you’ve got food down your best clothes, they’re ruined, like your life. Finally the meal comes to the end; they have forgotten their credit card, so you end up paying. They then suggest going for a drink afterwards, inexplicably you lose your mind and say “yes”, what the hell were you thinking?

Five hours later, five hours of utter torture with someone you wouldn’t even want to spend ten seconds in a lift with, let alone a tedious evening of pathetic prattle about topics so low brow even ITV2 would turn its nose up at them you crack. You inform that you have to go and that you’ve had an awful night. They simple inanely laugh at you. As you leave you stupidly give the automatic response “See you soon” cursing your own idiocy. They then move in for a goodbye kiss, which you spot and try and manoeuvre yourself to force it into a goodbye hug, but you end up knocking a table over and embarrassing yourself. Still you’ve left, you’ve escaped the hell.

There are four potential outcomes of a first date, providing you didn’t kill either them or yourself during the initial encounter.

You both like each other – this is so unlikely to have happened that we won’t bother discussing any further.
You both hate each other – given the remoteness of option 1, this is the best option you can hope for.
You like them and they don’t like you – you send them a nice text saying you’d like to meet again, they politely tell you how awful it was and explain they never wish to see you again. You cry lots.
They like you and you don’t like them – this is the worst option, as then you have to send the awkward message saying you don’t want to meet. At least in option 3 you had the comfort of being bitter, now you have to be the ba****d, and there’s no comfort in that.

Clearly your date ends in option 4, but you speak to some friends about it, and they convince you it’s worth giving this person another try. After all maybe a spark will grow. Reluctantly you agree. The above scenario plays out again, except you feel even more guilty sending the text in Option 4 as now you’ve strung them along for two dates. At the end of it all, you’re poorer, bitterer and just as single. You continue trawling the website looking for more dates, but they all end as above, before long you’ve been on the website for six months, and all the profiles that pop up are just the same faces as before. All of you locked into a cycle of loneliness, depression, and false hope fuelled by the dating website’s empty promises.

And that’s how internet dating works, happy hunting!

If Argos did Romance… - The Horrors of Online Dating Part 1

2012-02-21T07:58:00.001Z

Have you ever been online dating? If the answer is no, then you’re probably a good-looking, confident, humorous, approachable person who enjoys the company of others. If not then you probably fall short or one or more of these traits, or like in my case all of them.

As the most socially awkward person in the Western hemisphere with all the confidence and small-talking ability of a British-Argentinean state dinner, I have succumbed to the potential pitfalls of online dating. There’s a number of online dating sites all keen to collect the loneliness tax from you and add you to their books, but broadly speaking they all work in a similar way (not that I’ve been on many – awkward), from the mainstream, heavily advertised dating sites to the niche Velcro fetish ones (not that I’ve been on any of those at all – awkwarder still).

Anyway after last week’s Valentine’s hell, many people have suggested I be more proactive and try and find myself a boyfriend, so for those lucky enough to be unfamiliar with the process of internet dating, here’s my two part guide to the potential horrors you face in searching for your soul mate, which will hopefully convince you it’s not worth trying. Today we’ll look at setting yourself up on a dating website, and tomorrow we’ll go through the exciting carnage of interacting with other people online and arranging that all important date.

The first step is creating yourself a profile, so that prospective suitors can find a good reason to dismiss you and save both of you the cost and inconvenience of a date. Many sites will ask you to choose a unique username, rather than just allowing you to call yourself by your own name – which would be arguably a lot more helpful. The trick here I’ve found is to be broadly non-emotive and not try and use this to sell yourself. Overconfident usernames such as HornyDogXXX and BigBreasts49 generally make you come across as a knob, ironically trying the reverse and using under-confident usernames like EssexWeedyBoy and LonelyGirl2 actually just come across as truthful and plastered immediately above a photo of you leave a strange psychological imprint that makes other users instantly close your profile.

Next up you’ll need to fill out a short questionnaire to give a summary of you and what you are looking for. Questions that usually come up include age and location – which provide a helpful way to filter out a large proportion of the online community. Also things like occupation, education (for some unknown reason), eye colour (just in case Hitler himself is indulging himself in a spot of online dating) and the important question “do you drink?” – I think if you select no to the drinking option, a pop-up box appears warning that you need to start, in order to meet the level of tolerance required to survive on-line dating.

I’ve noticed a handful of questions that particularly stick out, first is Height – not necessarily an odd thing to ask, but am I the only person who doesn’t actually know their own height? This has come up in other situations and I haven’t a clue, the last time I measured myself was when I was 12 and my parents routinely stood me next to a height chart. This seemed to serve no practical purpose other than to give family members an opportunity to tut loudly and moan about how fast your growing, and how you’d probably need a fortune worth of new clothes soon. Then there’s increasingly common question of “Do you take Drugs?” – for the avoidance of doubt I don’t, I’m simply not cool enough. To be perfectly honest I’m not sure why the police’s anti-drugs team don’t get themselves a profile and round up all those who tick the “yes” box to this question. As a side note to the people who leave this box empty or select “prefer not to say”, you aren’t really creating any mystery – even the stupidest of people can read through your elaborate avoidance of the question. Lastly there’s the question on “Build”, this is the first real opportunity to be creative with the truth, unless you’ve been trying to cover up your red satanic eyes in the eye-colour question. Options here usually range from “very skinny”, through “muscled”, “average” or “a few extra pounds” right through to “have been mistaken for a bouncy castle”. The general rule seems to be always class yourself one category better than you actually are, anything more is a blatant lie, and may result in a visit from trade’s descriptions.

Next up you’ll need to write a short essay on your interests, broadly speaking this will go one of two ways. Either people struggle to write this and up putting down a lame set of interests that include “watching television, going to the cinema and socialising” as if they’re fleshing out their CV circa the age of 14. Sometimes given how obvious the choices are, you wonder if the people considered listing things like breathing and defecating just to fill up the character count. Though this at least feels like it has a sense of refreshing honesty, unlike the other option, which is to go crazy and make your entire life seem like one long gap year. Contenders for this need to list white-water rafting, abseiling, kayaking and travelling, lots of travelling – if they haven’t listed The Moon as one of their top tourist destinations they’re not even trying. The primary problem with this is that all the non-liars won’t want to date you as they feel they will be shown up as exceptionally boring in your company. And all of this is rather arbitrary as the average forum browser will select you solely based on your picture and won’t read any of the torturous c**p you spent seven hours writing.

This leads us nicely onto the final thing you need to do – select at least one, preferably a number of, photographs. As a quick note here if you don’t select a photograph you will not be appear like a mysterious romantic stranger – instantly people will correctly presume you are ugly. Photo selection is always fraught with quandary, particularly if like me you are about as photogenic as an explosion in a septic tank. Clearly you don’t want to show a picture that actually features an accurate representation of yourself, because quite frankly if you looked naturally attractive in all your photos you wouldn’t be needing online dating in the first place. The question here is always how much to lie, a flattering photo taken at a good angle seems reasonable, one taken a few years ago possibly less so, a photo of someone else seems definitely morally questionable. But you’ll be surprised at the lengths some people will take “bending the truth” hoping you won’t notice the extra 50lbs when they have subsequently put on when you meet them in person.

Up to this point you won’t have had to pay a thing, all dating websites allow you to create a profile and search for matches for free. But the minute you want to send or read a message, is where the cash comes in. Incidentally setting up your profile counts as joining the website, being able to read messages is considered an “upgrade” even though there’s no way to use the site without it! This is why many website list themselves as “free to join” even though just joining them is about as much use as voting for the Liberal Democrats historically was.

At this point you can receive messages, but not read them so the temptation to part with your cash increase all the more in order to view these mystery messages. The pricing strategies of dating websites follow an interesting model, despite adverts suggesting you’ll be finding your true love very soon, the price list encourages you to sign up long term – as let’s face it you’re destined to be single. Just one month’s membership comes in at a hefty thirty pounds on average, but if you’re prepared to part with upward of a hundred pounds you can join for a year. Which if you do certainly implies you don’t have much faith in your own ability.

With credit card worn out, you’ve finally joined, you can start browsing the website, flicking through the pages like your glancing through the Argos catalogue looking for a flat pack wardrobe. Although sadly should you meet up with anyone from the dating website they won’t be delivered to you down a conveyer belt – which would make the whole thing a lot more fun.

By this point you’re exhausted, to get this far has taken you all weekend and now you can’t be bothered to look at all the other profiles. With any luck you’ll forget about the whole project and not bother arranging any dates. Just cut your losses here, because the actual dating part will be awful.

Join me tomorrow when I’ll explain the fate that you are destined to fulfil when you start browsing those online profiles.

Anti-Valentine’s Day – The Business Pitch

2012-02-15T08:48:00.001Z

If you read yesterday’s blog you may have seen a tiny hint of bitterness that I have on Valentine’s Day. I’m not sure, it might not have come through, the writing was quite subtle. Oh and for the curious, no I didn’t get any Valentine’s cards - no surprises there.

Well today, the 15^th of February I propose to turn into Anti-Valentine’s Day. I know I am not the first, and probably not the last, to propose this celebration by any means, but I may the first to actually have made a full range of products – so dear readers I am looking to you for an investment of up to £250,000.

Just in case you’re the kind of annoying happy person who has never thought about launching this kind of event, here’s a quick overview. Anti-Valentine’s Day is the celebration where we celebrate failed and unrequited love, bitterness and singledom. I think it’s only fair when we already have Valentine’s Day, and indeed represents a massive marketing opportunity, which in these harsh economic times can only be a good thing for the country.

First job is to get Clinton Cards onside, given they’d happily push “I am a Child Molester Day” if they thought it would flog them a few cards and some of those stupid grey teddy bears (though I would be interested to see the versions of that teddy that would be produced for I’m a Child Molester Day), they surely would be happy to jump on the bandwagon. Especially given there are lots of greeting cards opportunities for Anti-Valentine’s Day. In fact arguably a single individual would be able to send a whole range of cards, rather than just one card to their only true love, because there’s a whole range of unfortunate relationships you could, and probably, have had.

First up you’d be able to send cards to people who you hold an unrequited love for. For example the card could have the message on the front “Why Won’t You Go Out With Me?” and inside read:

“Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
You’re responsible for the unfortunate stains on my bed,
And I’m outside your house watching you”

Touching.

Or for the person who dumped you, a card that simply reads “You Ruined My Life” and inside:

“Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
I can’t get the thoughts of you out my head,
I’d do anything for one last screw”

Or my favourite for the person who cheated on you a card that reads “Remember Me?” and inside:

“Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
I want you dead,
And your new boyfriend too”

Like Valentine’s Day cards these should all be anonymously signed for proper stalkerish effect, and to reduce the likelihood of the relevant authorities finding you. Personally I think this would be a genius marketing ploy for retailers because as we all know love may last forever but only bitterness is eternal.

But why stop at cards? Like Valentine’s Day there’s a full range of tatty merchandise that could be released for Anti-Valentine’s Day, and the good news is you don’t even have to imagine them because I’ve actually made them.

For the last few years I have been embracing Anti-Valentine’s Day with my own Anti-Valentine’s Day meal where I have cooked for a selection of my single friends on Valentine’s Day, forcing my housemates in couples to go out for the evening and spend an inordinate amount of money on their partners – ha ha ha.

The below photos from my Anti-Valentine’s Day meals show the full range of potential investment opportunities, in a whole wealth of tatty Anti-Valentine’s merchandising:

Just as the heart is the symbol of Valentine’s Day the shattered heart is the symbol of Anti-Valentine’s Day with broken hearts everywhere.

To remind us why it’s better to be single than in a couple, pictures of famous celebrity break ups are scattered around the dining room:

Always good to see Les Dennis and Heather Mills featured in the same vein.

Even the menu can be themed:

With the starter being Bitter Paté, main course being Broken Chicken Hearts and dessert being Date-Free Cake – see what I’ve done there? Additionally shots are only available as singles. Oh come on that’s clever!

It’s important to make sure the door into the event is appropriately themed:

Incidentally this image makes a great R.S.V.P. to wedding invites that your more successful friends send you. The bastards.

No Anti-Valentine’s Party would be complete without a touch of burnt rose petals for the smell of your hopes and dreams burning:

Just in case it gets too much an appropriate emergency sign is placed on the balcony:

Of course you need some table decorations. Here’s Valentine’s Doggy holding a lovely heart and with a knife sticking through his chest, and blood dripping out of his body:

And Valentine’s Teddy whose head has unfortunately been ripped off – the smug smiling turgid bear:

I’d like to say no Valentine’s Teddies were hurt in the making of these products, but I can’t.

So there you go potential investors, the perfect celebration to get your backing. It’s a sure fire way to make money. Make your offers, except Deborah Meaden, you clearly don’t actually have any money.

At this point you’re likely to be backing away from the computer, and thinking to yourself I probably shouldn’t approaching the person who wrote this blog if they’re holding a sharp instrument. And to be honest any good psychologist would probably agree with you.

Now to those of you, who think this is unhealthy and I probably shouldn’t spend Valentine’s night hosting Anti-Valentine’s parties. I have tried. Last year there was no Anti-Valentine’s night, primarily as my regular group of single friend invitees had pretty much all found partners, and those that hadn’t, responded to the above paragraph. So in an effort to be positive and take control of the situation I signed myself up to a Valentine’s network and socialising event, the idea being that as it was on Valentine’s Day only single people would go. Thus you could all meet up get laid and live happily ever after – well that’s what the brochure said.

The problem is that any event in which romance is being attempted to be artificially orchestrated will only attract social retards, like myself, because clearly those who aren’t social retards can meet people they like in normal situations and ask them out without the need of some grand "shag me" event. Also I failed to realise the key plan that everyone else would do at this events, they’d bring at least one other single friend along, so they had someone to talk to. I didn’t. So now we had a room full of social retards, no one talking to anyone, except within the pre-existing groups of friends. And the individual singletons, like myself, standing there in a corner on their own, either acting excited by a coat hook or pretending to read texts on their mobile. Seriously I ran out of things to do on my phone, I’d cleared out the drafts text message folder and reorganised my phone book all whilst pretending to read a text. In fact it was this kind of social awkwardness that encouraged to get a smart phone, at least now I can use Google whilst pretending to read texts to escape awkward social situations.

Anyway having spent £10 for this “exciting” event and drunk my free glass of wine, I decided, after an hour of avoiding making eye contact with the creepy looking people, I should abandon this lost cause. So my Valentine’s evening consisted of wasting £10, feeling depressed about being unable to pull in what by all accounts should have been a dead cert – room full of desperate singletons on Valentine’s Day. Then I went home binge ate a pizza and two cheesecakes and completed a level on Mario Kart. So there we go Anti-Valentine’s is the way forward, and I look forward to reintroducing it.

Before I go and calm down and let my vein stop throbbing, I should impart to any couples out there the three golden rules that you should always obey when trying to comfort single people on or around Valentine’s Day:

1. Don’t tell us that Valentine’s Day is worse for couples. If it that’s bad leave them, you are miserable by choice, we are miserable despite our best efforts not to be. Your level of pain pales in comparison to our own, don’t try and trivialise it.

2. Don’t tell us that you and your partner aren’t doing anything for Valentine’s Day. How could this possibly help? What you are effectively saying is that you have a ticket to the Happiness Party we're not allowed to go to, but your life is so happy you don’t need to go to the Happiness Party – this makes us hate you.

3. Don’t tell us that "don’t worry you’re bound to meet someone perfect soon". Quite frankly I’m too old for this Disney bullshit - it’s perfectly possible that I will spend the rest of miserable life sad and lonely with my only companionship provided by a group of dismembered Valentine’s Day teddies. Fate has nothing to do with it, don't patronise me!

On that cheery note I bring this post to a close. I wonder if anyone will still approach me in public without a canister of pepper spray.

Happy I Have a Job Day

2012-02-14T08:30:00.001Z

Why don’t we have a nationwide celebration, one day a year where we celebrate having jobs? That’s right everyone who has a job sends one other person who has a job a card congratulating them on having a job. Giant displays would go up in windows two months before hand reminding people that they must buy chocolates, flowers and other themed tat to show those people who have a job just how lucky they are. Then on the big day all those with jobs would go out and have the best night of their life, enjoying a nice meal, a trip to the cinema, or even a holiday to Paris. Meanwhile those without jobs would stare forlornly at the festivities, cursing the unfairness of it all that they cannot attend. No matter how much they tried to avoid thinking about “I have a Job Day – Ha Ha Ha” (as it would be known) they wouldn’t be able to escape seeing the merchandising, advertising and general hubbub about the day.

Of course we can’t do this because this would be inhuman and insensitive. It’s just one step away from locking up the unemployed in a giant animal enclosure, forcing them to dance for us naked whilst we throw scraps of food at them and cheer as they fight each other for every morsel. Though please don’t suggest that idea to George Osbourne, I can already see Her Majesty’s Government putting in a bulk order for chicken wire as I type.

No kind and thoughtful person would want to rub their current employment status in the face of a less fortunate individual. And no right-minded society would allow a national day in which this kind of behaviour happened. Except that they do, not in the case of jobs but in the case of romance. Yes that’s right Valentine’s Day is here again. In actual fact, I hadn’t noticed, over recent weeks I’ve managed to navigate my supermarket blind so haven’t noticed the large heart shaped displays hovering above every isle like an extract from the Ladybird Book of Autopsies.

Obviously it’s still before three in the afternoon, so the postman hasn’t been and I have no way of knowing yet if I’ve received thousands of Valentine’s cards or if I have strained the Royal Mail to breaking point. For the sake of reality let’s assume I haven’t, in fact let’s assume that my letter box has been opened less today than a branch of Lloyds TSB after 12pm on a Saturday. In fact the only way I am managing to get through today is by routinely placing pictures of happy couples in my handy home office-sized shredder.

I wouldn’t really shred the nation’s sweethearts Wills and Kate would I?

Turns out I would, there goes my knighthood.

Over the years that I’ve come to accept that I will never know the love of another human, and that at death my genitalia will able to be auctioned in eBay under the description “Mint in original packaging”, that or very soon I will be getting myself a cat. But despite my apparent grumpiness on the issue, I have come to happily take my position at the bottom of the romantic food chain along with the other socially retarded individuals such as the Go Compare tenor and Justin Bieber fans. I am content in life, knowing that no matter how lonely I am, I will never have to share my dessert in a restaurant with someone who didn’t want one at the point of ordering. I’ll always be able to wrap a full double duvet around myself on cold winter nights. And the only awkward conversations about children I’ll have to have, are if I’m caught abducting a baby from the local hospital’s maternity ward.

I say I am content being single, I am content when I am allowed to wallow in my own self pity and masturbatory juices free from reminders of my own inadequacies. Valentine’s Day does not allow this, a national celebration where the nation gathers together to point, laugh and throw stones at the single people. As if the knowledge that their genetic material is being removed from the gene pool isn’t punishment enough. Rational humans, and I do realise I’m not one of those, may say, “Well it’s just a day, ignore it!”. Really try! Everyone under the sun wants to remind me that today is Valentine’s Day. Just a walk along the High Street will lead you to pass a thousand different window displays filled with giant red hearts starring down on you like the Eye of Sauron, only marginally more satanic. I appreciate restaurants, chocolate shops and perfumeries need to advertise and rely on the Valentine’s day business, but really do toy shops, chemists and estate agents need to fill their windows with hearts. I swear I passed the funeral director’s last week and they had a giant heart-shaped coffin in the window. Is it me or does that seem a bit much?

Sorry please excuse me I need to shred another happy couple…

Sorry where was I? Oh yes, even if you lock yourself in your house you’ll be constantly reminded of Valentine’s Day what with television adverts telling you all about the special Dine in For 2 offer at your local supermarket. Mind you I did take that up – mainly so I could eat both meals at home tonight and get fat. Well it’s that or cry. There’s no escape even if you turn your television off, I clearly hadn’t set my spam filter correctly as a number of Valentine’s offers managed to get e-mailed to me. Including, and I’m not making these up, a Valentine’s e-mail suggesting you buy your loved one something from eBay – I mean nothing says I love you, like second hand goods. Plus I also received this e-mail…

Yes that’s right First Hull Trains want me to book a special romantic getaway to London, this is wrong on so many levels, it’s virtually become the Empire State Building of awkwardness. Surprisingly the most difficult problem to overcome is not my singledom, but the fact that I would have to move to Hull to take advantage of this offer. I am not saying anything bad about Hull but I’d rather jump into the bath with a live three-bar electric fire under my arm than move to Hull. Apologies to anyone living in Hull. No seriously you have my condolences, still on the plus side if you want to move First Hull Trains have got some good special offers on. And if e-mailing and television advertising offers weren’t enough my weekly trip to Sainsbury’s was largely ruined by a repeated tanoy announcement beginning “Did you know it’s Valentine’s Day this week?...” – no how could I have possibly noticed what with the fact you’ve played the same bloody announcement every five minutes for the last half hour and the store has more pink bunting up, than at Elton John’s wedding? Plus of course the cashier who upon receiving payment wished me a “Happy Valentine’s Day”, which is creepy A) because the cashier actually spoke to me and B) because f**k off, you’re intervention into my life is about as welcome as those old school friends who haven’t spoken to you for the last 20 years but decide it would be really good idea to upload an old class photo to Facebook and tag you in it. Piss off.

Sorry the vein is throbbing again…

Ahhh, that’s better.

At this point some rational people will probably be suggesting that all this is due to the unwanted commercialisation of Valentine’s Day, well no, normal people are bloody annoying as well – and they have no commercial need to cause vitriolic bile to rise to my throat. Public displays of affection are never welcome within my eyeline, but especially not on or around Valentine’s Day. The escalators on the London Underground are not an appropriate place to do a quick dental inspection of your partners pre-molars using only your tongue – even if the staggered staircase corrects a rather awkward height difference that otherwise blights your happy relationship. And as for the couple in the queue in the supermarket this week, who had their tongues wedged so far down each others throats they were practically popping out of each other’s anuses. Is it really necessary to also make a noise wallpaper paste being slopped around a bucket? I nearly had to run them both through with a frozen Be Good To Yourself garlic baguette.

Oh and please don’t bring Valentine’s Day into the workplace, if a loved one sends 24 red roses to your office. When all the single people say “isn’t that lovely”, what we’re actually thinking is “Bitch” and wondering if we’d get fired for feeding the flowers into the shredder. One year, a girl genuinely arrived into my office on Valentine’s Day and started moaning at me about how awful it was she had to come into work so early, because she had missed the post and would have to wait until she got home to receive her boyfriend’s card. She moaned about this to me. Yes that’s right to me. It’s the equivalent of complaining to a person who has had both legs amputated that the shoe shop is closed. By the way if anyone is wondering what happened to the aforementioned girl, and why she stopped coming to work, you’ll find her bloodied body hidden behind the photocopier. For some reason I felt the need on that Valentine’s Day to repeatedly slam her head in the lid of the photocopier, that will also explain what the red mess on the glass plate was – just in case the police are reading this I didn’t actually do this (except in my mind).

Oh and if you even think of commenting on this blog that Valentine’s Day is just as bad for people in couples, it’s not. Otherwise logically you would dump them, to make yourself happier, and you haven’t – although if you have I would like to hear about that it would make me feel better.

See told you Valentine’s Day was anti-social, inappropriate and unjust. In fact I’ve decided it would be less awful to rename this day “I Have a Job Day”. So Happy “I Have a Job Day”, unless of course they do find that body behind the photocopier in which case I may no longer be joining in with this celebration either.

On that note it’s time for another trip to the shredder, bloody happy couples.

I’m coming out – scores 54 on a triple word score!

2012-02-06T08:14:00.001Z

Warning this blog contains some grim imagery, you have been warned!

I’m having a baby. I’m dumping my girlfriend. A pet died in my care. I’m ginger. I have an unnatural love for royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell. What do all those sentences have in common? That’s right they can be quite difficult to tell your nearest and dearest.

I think everyone in their life at one point or other has had difficulty telling people a particular statement, with the possible exception of Katie Price – who could perhaps do with developing the ability to not routinely tell us all about her private life. Get a super injunction woman, we’re not interested.

The statement I’ve struggled with telling some people over the years is that I am gay. There I’ve said it. Though in fairness at this point I am only telling my computer, and given it’s been the sole observer of my pornography collection, it has probably already guessed. Apologies by the way if you didn’t already know this news, as you will discover I probably wasn’t keeping from you for any bad reason, extra apologies if you were a woman and was hoping that one day I’d be your husband – I realise that this post may be a bitter pill to swallow.

For some of you, mainly those who have met me, you may be wondering how I ever managed to keep it a secret from anyone. Well you’re quite rude. Certainly in recent years I’ve never really had a problem in people finding out my sexuality, although if they come towards me waving a placard marked “Burn in Hell Faggots” I’ve found it best not to choose that moment to begin a sentence “By the way…”. As it turns out whilst I’m reasonably adept in defending myself with some cuttingly witty remarks, these count for little against pitchforks and flaming torches in the Top Trumps situation that is an angry mob.

One of the main problems of sharing this secret is how you go about working it into the conversation? I don’t consider my sexuality to be an issue, but it can be tricky to tell people without making it an issue. For example last time I started in a new job, where I didn’t know anyone in the office, I had no problem on the face of it of telling my colleagues I was gay, but how do you go about it? I mean if I burst into the room, bounding between the desks shouting “I am a homosexual” that might seem a little inappropriate. And you wouldn’t expect any of your heterosexual colleagues to confess their sexuality in a similar way. I could of course wolf-whistle at a passing male colleague and shout “Phwoar” but again that feels indelicate and may mean that the Human Resources department find out I am gay quicker than I’d anticipated.

I always figured it would be easier to tell people if I had a boyfriend, then you could at least answer the natural office question “What are you doing at the weekend?” with “I’m spending it with my boyfriend” which feels like a subtle way of announcing the news. Sadly, as anyone who has read even one addition of this blog will be able to tell you, I am not with boyfriend. My Facebook status has been displaying “Single” for longer than a branch of discount store Madhouse’s window has been displaying “Closing Down Sale”. It becomes less discreet and office friendly if you answer the question “What are you doing at the weekend?” with “I am out in pubs desperately trying to get a boyfriend. I am looking for a man by the way, that’s right looking for a MAN! Get the hint”. Not so subtle. So typically I’ve had to wait for colleagues to ask me the question, and this inbuilt waiting time only suggests to them, that I may have an issue with said subject prompting them not to feel it’s appropriate to ask. A vicious circle of secrecy ensues.

Now if telling people you’ve only just met seems difficult, telling people you’ve known a long time always feels much harder. I probably realised I was homosexual at the age of about 16, after spending the last four years of my puberty wondering when the oft-mentioned childhood phrase, recited by elderly relatives, of “one day you won’t mind it when girls kiss you” would come true (it still hasn’t), whilst in the meantime vigorously pleasuring myself to the thought of male boyband members. Seemingly unaware of the actual implications of what I was doing. It then took until I started university at the age of 20 to be comfortable telling selected other people about it, (I am referring to the sexuality aspect, not the “vigorous pleasuring” aspect which you’re probably wishing I’d been more coy about). The main reason it seemed fine was because, these were new people to my life if they didn’t like it then we would simply not be friends – no real loss. As it turned out, no one I’ve told has ever had an issue with my confession, in fact I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve only ever bumped into a very small number of homophobic people. And usually this has been in the company of a much larger number of right minded thinking individuals, which meant that the homophobic idiot has ended up being the one shunned by the group – which I actually find quite fun. In fact I often like to vigorously pleasure myself thinking about homophobic people I’ve met, simply because you know it would really annoy them. Sorry too much information I know!

Whilst it might seem good that I came out at the age of 20, and now am happy telling people going forward, this does present a back log of two decades worth of acquaintances and family members that you need to update with the news. And this to me is the hardest part. It’s not really that I expected any of these people to react badly to the news, it’s more that the longer I’ve known them, the longer it feels like I’ve been keeping a secret from them, which makes telling them all the harder in another vicious cycle of secrecy. There comes a point when you wonder if it would just be easier to publish a pamphlet to all your loved ones, with a series of questions answering what they’re likely to ask, with a small tick box at the bottom asking whether you wish to receive any more direct mail from the author.

Anyway I’ve finally broken the secret pact, over the last few months, I’ve managed to tell some key school friends, and my immediate family. Apologies if this blog is how I got round to telling you. It wasn’t that I thought you’d object, it was just I didn’t really know how to bring it up.

The biggest trauma was of course telling the parents, I sort of had an attempt at this a few years ago, I built myself up to telling them and my sister all in one go at the end of a birthday. Sadly at the point I was about to speak, my dad decided to go to bed, ruining the plan and I ended up half-heartedly muttering it under my breath to my mum and sister. Obviously they heard, but I can only describe the situation for me as feeling wrong, so utterly wrong, like I’d told them an untellable secret such as the fact I’d been vigorously pleasuring myself on their bed – for the avoidance of doubt I haven’t, but it felt like I’d revealed something THAT wrong. Apologies that is the third time I’ve used the phrase “vigorously pleasuring myself”, I promise not to do it again. Anyway the upshot was that in my mind I hadn’t really told them and I certainly didn’t go on to tell my dad.

As 2012 dawned I finally resolved I really need to tell the family, it would be awful if I never got round to doing it, and if my mum and sister knew it might break their heart that I didn’t talk about it more or tell my father. So it was when I was at home over New Year that I decided that the 2^nd of January would be the day I’d tell them.

As with all such things, the more time you spend worrying about the potential permutations of outcomes that might occur when you tell someone some big news, the less likely it is that there will be any discernable reaction. I finally managed to blurt out the phrase “by the way there’s something I should tell you, I’m gay” over an evening game of Scrabble. The result of this was odd. My mum said “Why are you telling us this now?” as if the news had ruined her placement of a key word, my sister said “Is this relevant to the move you’re about to make?” as if somehow I was desperate to place the word “Butmuncher” on a triple word score – just in case you were planning on using that word it’s not in Chambers Dictionary, I checked. In response to the general reaction of this being inappropriate time I replied, “I thought it was about time I told you”. To which my mother and sister replied “We already knew!” and my dad said “I didn’t!”

So there we go I managed to tell all my family I’m gay, and create family tension as my dad now knows he didn’t get told first, all over a single game of Scrabble Oops! Despite all my worries about what they might say, they said nothing. On the face of it this is the best reaction “I’m gay”, “Yeah and…” but still whilst I’m sure it’s for good reasons I find it odd they had nothing to say no questions, nothing. As if there’s still an elephant in the room and one day we’re going to have the awkward questions. Or maybe they just realise how terminally single I am, and figure it doesn’t matter whether he fancies women or men, he’s not getting any.

Oh well there you go even the biggest drama of my life - coming out, turned out to be dull beyond belief. Still it filled some virtual pages of this blog. On that note I’m off to check the family will… just in case.

Want to come clubbing? Unless it involves bludgeoning baby seals to death, NO!

2012-01-19T08:19:00.000Z

What on earth is the point of clubbing? What am I missing? Is the part of my brain that appreciates clubbing simply not functioning? I just don’t get it. You pay a small fortune to use it, cram yourself into an overcrowded area where you get shoved about by other people, have to put up with listening to awful music, have limited toilet facilities, the chances of getting a seat are remote and you’ll leave the place dripping in sweat. In all regards it is exactly like your morning commute on the Northern line except for the one small detail you don’t actually end up going anyway. That’s right you are re-enacting the morning commute, but without commuting. What is wrong with you people?!

If you’re reading this and are under 18, you might not know what I am talking about. Consider yourself lucky. Those bouncers on the door aren’t doing you a disservice by not letting you in; they are saving you from a horrible fate. Stop trying to fake ID, flutter your eyelids or look more grown-up, you are only wishing a despicable evening of disappointment on yourself.

You might think this grumpy nature is due to the fact I’m getting on a bit, and whilst I am getting on a bit I can assure you I’ve never enjoyed clubbing. I’ve been with friends in sixth form, I’ve been with university friends, I’ve been with work colleagues, I’ve been in my late teens, I’ve been in my early twenties, I’ve been in my late twenties, and the only times I’ve ever enjoyed clubbing is when I’ve been paralytically drunk. Literally so off my face I’d have a good time wherever I was, I might as well have been locked in a burning Biffa bin at a lock-up in Croydon. I’d still have had fun because I was so drunk that I was unaware of my surroundings.

Really is that the secret to clubbing that I’ve missed all these years? Is the only reason it is enjoyable is because any sense of taste and reason have been destroyed? Be it by alcohol, drugs or the worst toxin of them all love, unless you’re up to your eyeballs on some combination of these you’ll hate clubbing. And if you are, you’re so unaware of you’re surroundings you’d probably have just as much fun being mauled by a pack of hungry rottweilers in a septic tank connected to the diarrhoea ward of your local hospital.

“Oh but you should go clubbing, you might pull?”, or so the idiots cry, I could count the number of times I’ve pulled in a club on one hand, even if I had a tragic accident involving an out of control threshing machine. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not for the want of trying. I’ve ground my hips up against some attractive specimen in a desperate bid to prove to them that the reason they should choose to spend the rest of their life with me isn’t due to my intelligence, ability to provide witty conversation, amount of money I own or how nice a person I am, but is instead due to my ability to gyrate my hips to the latest number by the Black Eyed Peas. Not because this is in any way logical, but apparently because this moronic act of patheticness is how “dating” works. I’ve tried flashing a smile at a potential suitor, but usually they call a steward over because they think I’m having a stroke. I’ve tried making eye contact with a potential target, but as soon as I lock onto them with my eyeballs they are forced to glance elsewhere, it’s as if our eyes are like two magnets of the same polarity forced never to be aligned due to the epoch shattering forces on display. Hell, I’ve even tried jumping up and down with a giant placard saying “for god’s sake won’t anyone date me please”. All that manages to do is get the token bald, one-eyed, seventy-five year old homeless person, that all clubs seem to be legally obliged to employ to stand in the corner of the dance floor, to lollop after me all night with a blood rage in their eyes. You know that look that means should they ever get within touching distance of you, they will rape you an infect you with dry rot.

Combine all these factors in and you’ll see exactly why it is hell! Firstly the fact that the floor of every club is stickier than a box of tissues in a 15 year old boy’s bedroom. Secondly all nightclub toilets seem to operate on some communal urine pool system. Thirdly on entry you’re forced to pay a pound to enter a raffle you don’t want to enter, where the best you can possibly do is win your own coat back at the end of the evening – there’s reasonable chance you won’t even be that lucky. Fourthly until someone invents a live subtitling app for the iPhone it’s impossible to have a conversation with any of your friends there because regardless of where in the club you stand, you will always end up rammed up against a speaker bumping puerile pop trash into your brain at a level so intense your ears are about to melt. Fifthly entry to the club requires your arm to be branded like cattle, with an ink stamp that will only come off when you scrub the skin clean off with a scouring pad. As you can see clubbing really isn’t my cup of tea in any shape or form, in fact I’d rather lower my scrotum into a tank of piranha fish than go clubbing. Oh and if I am clubbing with you, stop moaning that I look miserable, I am miserable, I’m clubbing it’s s**t. I could only be having a worse evening if I’d accidentally got my nipples caught in a cheese grater. Forcing a false smile onto my face will not improve the situation or lift the cloud of doom circling above my head.

At this point you’d probably be thinking “Given all these reasons to hate clubbing, why do you go?”, and you’d be right to think that. It is utter madness, but the problem with clubbing, is that clubbing is universally seen as cool. And any person who doesn’t like clubbing is seen as the world’s biggest loser, who deserves to live the rest of their days in solitary confinement as they clearly don’t have the capacity to enjoy themselves in the company of others. It doesn’t matter that I am happy to go for a meal, have a coffee, go for a drink, see a film at the cinema or even spend an evening round a friend’s house or any number of other social activities, if I don’t want to go clubbing I’m boring. Because clubbing is the universal definition of the epitome of enjoyment, the pinnacle of pleasure and social interaction, so clearly everyone must enjoy it.

Well guess what people? I’ve got news for you. We don’t enjoy the same things. I get pleasure out of knowing that my CD collection is in alphabetical order, that doesn’t mean I expect you to come round my house and sort my CDs whilst standing in an inch deep pool of piss at 4am in the morning, only to leave my house throw up and then have to travel home on the night bus of the damned. I also enjoying learning and reading about science, but unlike clubbing morons, I don’t expect you to enjoy it because I enjoy it. If I get tickets to a series of lectures on quantum string theory, I won’t declare you a boring loser just because you don’t want to go. Somehow clubbing is exempt from this system of logic and acceptance of variations in tastes and interest, if you don’t want to go clubbing your hen-pecked and bullied into, and told you must go because “you will enjoy it”.

No more, I am making a stand on behalf of all those of us who don’t enjoy clubbing. I am a 29 year old man, I don’t like clubbing and I am not going any more. I don’t care if you find it fun, you go. I’m not. I have to do enough things in my life that I’d really rather not do, without actively going on leisure activities I utterly despise, simply because society has deemed them fun. Personally I would rather lock myself in an airing cupboard with a bunch of 85 year old retired French teachers with a terrible degenerative groping disease and only the board game Twister for entertainment than spend another minute on a urine soaked dance floor.

On that note it’s chucking out time, so in true club bouncer style – grab your coat, piss off, wait in the rain for an unlicensed minicab and make some bearded cesspit man’s dream come true.

I am not sure the medication’s working. See you next week.

If 2011 had been voted off The X Factor… Part 2

2012-01-12T09:22:00.001Z

Welcome back to my review of 2011, a review so showbiz that it’s got more celebrity appearances than on Dancing on Ice so one.

Now let’s get back to the review…

2011 Review of the Year – Part 2

July

In July Norway was rocked by a shocking series of terror attacks. The Space Shuttle Atlantis completed the final mission of the fleet to deposit Piers Morgan into outer space for the good of all humanity, and the first artificial organ transplant was carried out, or so says Wikipedia I after all know nothing. The News of the World was closed down after 183 years, when it emerged it’s journalists had hacked the voicemail of the missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler. Rupert Murdoch became one of many big names to visit the Levison inquiry where he was hit in the face by a custard pie, which contained no custard – even now the media lie, and the whole significance of his appearance was reduced to the level of a children’s television programme – still at least I understood. In showbiz news the final Harry Potter film was released in cinemas, and Amy Winehouse defied medical science by living to the age of 27 despite the abuse her body had suffered.

August

In August the season finale to the Arab Spring began with The Battle of Tripoli as rebel forces seized the capital from Colonel Gaddaffi’s hands, in other news about tyrants The X Factor began it’s eighth series. A raft of new judges couldn’t distract the general public from the shock news that Louis Walsh is still on the show! Big Brother launched over on Channel 5 and some people won it. And the Iranian embassy condemned British authorities overuse of police force in a “hahaha” comment, as rioting and looting spread across London. Initial anger towards the police shooting of a suspect in Tottenham soon lead to looting in large areas of the capital later spreading to other parts of the country. A shocked nation found things only got worse with every political commentator in the country trying to come up with inventive reasons as to why the riots started, while the rest of us wondered how on earth anyone could be stupid enough to loot Tesco Value Basmati Rice and then post a picture of themselves doing it on the internet so the police could find them. Plus of course this very blog was launched to worldwide apathy.

September

September like April and June saw another quiet month in the world, according to the news summaries anyway, again with more continuations of all the year’s big stories. However other things popping up in the news were the news that Albert Enstein’s Theory of Relativity might be wrong after some neutrinos managed a cheeky shortcut to overtake the speed of light in a tortoise and hare style race. While TV scientists desperately tried to explain neutrinos to a confused population shock spread the world, nothing to do with the science, Lindsay Lohan had unveiled her new haircut. Meanwhile ITV’s brand new current affairs show Exposure exposed itself to ridicule and embarrassment after accidentally airing some computer game footage claiming it was shots of the IRA. Of course as a former employee of ITV who was made redundant by them I would never dream of enjoying revelling in ITV’s embarrassments, so let’s move onto Red or Black? Oh dear. Ant, Dec & Simon Cowell’s hyped up version of You Bet with all the charm sucked out. Contestants were whittled down by answering a question even simpler than Deal or No Deal? in order to whittle them down to one contestant who would get the chance to spin a prop left over from The Wheel of Fortune in order to win one million pounds. The programme didn’t help itself when it turned out one of it’s winners had spent five years in jail for attacking a former partner.

October

October saw the Eurozone lurch from crisis to crisis as combined talks lead by the French and Germans tried to prop up the economies of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland as a domino effect threatened to engulf Europe – in the sense that the only entertainment anyone in these countries could now afford would be dominos. The global population reached a massive 7 billion, all of which attempted to travel on the Northern Line with me on a daily basis. The government proposed raising the speed limit on the UK’s motorways to 80mph in order so that people could leave Wolverhampton quicker, and broadcasting legend Sir Jimmy Saville died and then turned in his grave when he heard that Shane Richie was to present a tribute show. And the Arab Spring came to it’s conclusion with the death of Colonel Gaddafi and the subsequent printing of his bloody corpse on the front of every newspaper which was only marginally more tasteful than The Sun’s page three that day.

November

November 2011 saw a host of goodbyes as Silvio Berlusconi reluctantly stepped down from his country’s premiership in order to allow it to be guided through economic turmoil, depriving a number of good comedians of reams of material. Berlusconi himself is unlikely to be happy with the decision as he is now no longer immune to trial in a number of Italian cases – that should be fun. Daybreak’s presenting team of Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakly were unceremoniously dumped amid poor ratings and reviews after a high profile poaching from the BBC resulting in replies of hahaha from former GMTV presenters and the BBC alike. Michael Jackson’s doctor Conrad Murray was found guilty of accidentally causing the singer’s death after confusing painkillers with Pringles. Nick Hewer was announced as the new host of Countdown after completing a series of tasks where he had to sell as many letters to members of the general public as possible in two days, make an advert for the show itself and project a manage a team to clear out Jeff Stelling’s dressing room. After a nervous final boardroom battle he beat The Chuckle Brothers to the role. Meanwhile the public sector went on a day of nationwide Christmas shopping in order to protest about reduced public service pensions and Jeremy Clarkson offended them all by suggesting they should be shot in a completely serious interview untouched by any hint of irony.

December

December not only was the close of 2011, but bought close to a lot of other things, the British ended all pretence of being popular in Europe after vetoing its latest mandate on economic harmony in order to protect its important financial mismanagement industry. The United States officially declared the end of the war in Iraq leaving the country in a completely stable unwarlike state. A plethora of reality TV shows came to an end with Strictly Come Dancing stealing the ratings crown as Harry Judd won the glitterball trophy, Little Mix won The X Factor and were forgotten in the space of a week, and I’m a Celebrity… was won by one of the other McFly people, I wasn’t watching. Kim-Jong Il ended his grip on North Korea prompting a large number of jokes around his name and being “oh so lonely”. Samoa and Tokealu said goodbye to the 30^th of December, entirely skipping the day, to shoot across the International Dateline and be at GMT +14. And we all shed bucket loads of tears as a child gave a poorly wrapped present to his parents from John Lewis and The Military Housewives stole the Christmas Number One from Little Mix’s clutches.

And that ladies and gentlemen was 2011 in a slightly large nut shell. Of course no review of the year would be complete without some updates on my previous blogs. On the subject of socks I decided to use the day specific socks in the end – you’ll be pleased to know. Plus I was given the excellent suggestion of wearing socks with aggressive toe seams inside out. Thank you for that.

Yes that is my leg hair, calm yourself.

And as regards WHSmith as you can see things have improved in their shops as this photo I took at Brixton store shows:

Not spotted the problem yet? How about now:

There you go!

On that bombshell, all that remains is to wish you an exceptionally happy New Year (a bit late I admit) and I hope that 2012 doesn’t pan out anything like the film of the same name, if we are all to die this year let’s hope the plot’s better, and also hopefully nothing like the awful BBC Three spin-off Spooks: Code 9 kudos if you remember that, and indeed Kudos if you made it – a little TV production joke to end with, forgive me.

If 2011 had been voted off The X Factor… Part 1

2012-01-10T09:06:00.001Z

Welcome back to DraMattics returning after the Christmas break. As you’ve probably noticed by now its 2012, and as is customary I’ve written an exciting review of 2011 for us to reminisce over. Now traditionally reviews of the year are written before the end of the year, but by saving my review until 2012 I won’t have missed out on any last minute events that occurred of those final days of 2011 – I mean if the world had ended on the 30^th of December 2011 what a fool I’d have looked with this incomplete review of the year. Secondly and most importantly publishing in 2012 gives me an opportunity to look at everyone else’s reviews of the year to save me having to rely on my increasingly erratic memory or doing any proper research.

2011 was a bumper year full of more events than you can think of, the months literally whizzed by with your calendar pages turning faster than Aleisha Dixon at the sight of Simon Cowell’s cheque book. I’ve broken the year down into 12 nice convenient chunks which I’ve called months, sadly the real world has s**t all over this by spreading more complex news stories across many months so please bare with any chronological errors. And I challenge you to get through this list without at least once saying “oh I’d forgotten that”.

2011 Review of the Year

January

2011 began bright eyed and bushy-tailed with the UK buried under tonnes of white stuff, no not the explosion of Kerry Katona but a thick blanket of snow. And 2011’s Award for “If only we’d had hindsight” was claimed early in the year when on the 1^st of January Estonia became the 17^th country to join the Euro. And in what would become known as the Arab Spring, the Tunisian government fell to a wave of upraising all started when a vegetable seller set fire to themselves in late 2010. Southern Sudan became the world’s newest country annoying atlas makers by declaring peaceful independence from Sudan. England won the Ashes representing a token effort by me to include sport when I know nothing about it (apparently that was good?!). And in stupid news Andy Gray and Richard Keys got fired from Sky News after tapes of them accusing women of not being able to understand the outstandingly complex game of football were released. The primary mistake the duo made was in thinking that women don’t follow football because they’re too stupid, whereas in reality they don’t follow it because their too busy getting incensed over EastEnders. The soap spent January in trouble for portraying a depressing story, even by it’s standards, as Ronnie Mitchell swapped her dead baby for that of Kat Moon’s, to an increasing chorus of angry viewers who’d completely forgotten that EastEnders wasn’t a documentary.

February

Back in February the traditional Valentine’s month saw the glittering Oscars ceremony where the King’s Speech triumphed winning 4 Oscars and showing that people with speech impediments used to have proper jobs and didn’t need to become chat show hosts. The Arab Spring continued (even though February is technically still winter), as the Egyptian government was overthrown. Up until then Egypt had been considered one of the most stable countries in the region, primarily as it’s government was built on a pyramid scheme – oh come on give us a laugh, there isn’t much funny about global uprising, except of course Colonel Gaddafi who continued to deny the existence of the Libyan rebellion, his fashion sense and sanity in a series of bizarre speeches that caused confused even Charlie Sheen. Back in the UK surprise TV hit of the year Big Fat Gypsy Weddings launched on Channel 4 regularly achieving a massive eight million viewers, just shy of the figures this blog gets.

March

March’s news was of course dominated by the tragic earthquake and subsequent tsunami which devastated the North East of Japan, which then became further overshadowed by the meltdown of the Fukushima reactor. Providing the disturbing revelation that I along with most people in the developed world seem more shocked by natural disasters that occur in other developed countries. At home large scale protests against the government’s austerity measures were overshadowed when a small angry group attacked banks and shops in an anti-capitalist protest which it later turned out was just the qualifying heats to the August finals. Charlie Sheen was fired from his job as the world’s most highly paid actor, after an increasing series of bizarre public statements and the revelation he was on the drug “Charlie Sheen”. 13 year old Rebecca Black became the subject of an internet hate campaign after she recorded a pop video as part of one of those day-out experience events that was universally condemned as the worst music video ever after being shown on YouTube, causing bitter disappointment amongst The Cheeky Girls who had been assured of the award. And Midsommer Murders got in trouble after revealing to those fearsome interviewers at The Radio Times that they portray the universally white middle England with a cast whiter than a Persil advert.

April

My research into April showed that according to the news not much happened, this was primarily due to some unseasonably hot weather – due to the disastrous project of outsourcing climate to Boris Johnson, which resulted in the hottest weather of the year falling in April and October. Additionally Easter and a bumper crop of Bank Holidays (three with a further one close behind in May) due to the Royal Wedding increased the incentive for a non-news worthy month. Although an estimated TV audience of 2 billion tuned into watch Prince William and Kate Middleton tie the knot, with 1 billion women ogling the dress and 1 billion men ogling Pippa Middleton’s bottom, all of them distracted from the disturbing sight of the spontaneous growth of a forest in Westminster Cathedral. April Fool’s Day erupted into a bumper edition when Nick Clegg launched a referendum on the Alternative Voting system (you’d forgotten about that hadn’t you?!) the result was announced in May, but not much happened in April so I needed something to write about here.

May

May saw a flurry of US news stories makes the headlines when Cheryl Cole was shot by US Navy Seals and Osama Bin Laden was sacked from The X Factor USA – I think that’s the right way round. While Osama’s Geordie accent was blamed for his lack of likeability critics praised his judging of American talent, whereas Cheryl Cole was found holed up in Pakistan and buried at sea. In sports’ news Manchester United and Manchester City won some things and the superinjunction story finally came to a head when the world’s worst kept secret that footballers do stupid things emerged. As it became clear Ryan Giggs had slept with someone he shouldn’t have. Obviously the most disturbing thing about the whole superinjunction saga was not the limiting of the freedom of the press, but the shock news that two people had slept with Andrew Marr – amazing, I thought one was pushing the limits of plausability. Portugal was rescued by the EU Monetary fund in what turned out to be a mini-cliff hanger on the road to 2011’s season finale of Europe-wide financial collapse. And it was proved the public really shouldn’t be allowed a say when The Only Way is Essex won a BAFTA Audience Award – thank god we don’t let the public have a say on any important issues like who is running the country.

June

According to all the news websites nothing happened in June, nothing not a single thing. Every review of the year skims over June like a proud mother skims over her rapist son when introducing her family at Christmas. Broadly speaking there was a continuation of every event already running, the Arab Spring rumbled on (even though it’s now summer), the Fukushima reactor continued to degrade, economic collapse continued in the Eurozone and protests at austerity measures hit many countries. Oh err… Glastonbury happened.

And on that pathetically lacklustre note, I will leave our review of 2011 there. No it’s not because the second half isn’t written but just because I am an irresistible tease, make sure you check out Part 2 later in the week!

The Return to Tedium

2012-01-04T09:30:00.001Z

So can I officially be the last person to wish you a Happy New Year, and can I also be probably the only person to welcome you back to your tedious life. Yes I’m afraid Christmas is over, the New Year is gone, there are no more Bank Holidays left and it’s back to the hum drum tedium that is your life. The only difference being you’re fatter, a lot poorer and you have a selection of jumpers you didn’t want. Sorry. Unless of course you’ve taken a couple of extra days off, in which case you’ve simply prolonged the inevitable and essentially made the fall all the worse.

All you have now is months of poor weather, and no bank holidays to look forward – the next one is not until April 6^th, really that long away? Oh well, on the plus side at least New Year’s is gone and done, is it me but isn’t the worst celebration ever? Perhaps that’s why they have it at the beginning of the year to get it out of the way? I mean talk about anti-climax, everyone waits excitingly for the clock to change to midnight, and then what? What changes? Nothing. Other than the physical number of the year, your calendar and the fact that you’ll spend the next six months mucking up filling in forms, sometimes inexplicably writing the year as 2013 (why does that happen?), nothing has changed.

I’ve had a series of New Year’s horrors, dealing with drunken/hysterical friends, being rammed into pub/clubs/parties with loads of happy couples kissing over the New Year (my favourite thing as I’m sure regular readers will have guessed), attending a party where the DJ missed midnight and announced 10 minutes late that it was now the New Year, and being in bed with food poisoning over the Millennium New Year’s celebrations after eating a dodgy prawn sandwich.

Worse than all those disasters was the year I did the traditional banks of the Thames, standing in conditions so arctic that my reproductive organs had retracted so far into my body that I’d become an Action Man figure, however to make up for it my nipples had become so erect that if I turned round quickly I’d have run the risk of knocking five people into the Thames. Typically you spend hours standing at the banks of the Thames just to get a good position to see a clock strike 12am – at no other time of the year is this considered entertainment for very good reason, it’s dull. Some people have actually turned up at lunchtime to get the best positions – I mean I ask you?! Then you seem some admittedly nice fireworks, but you’d have a better view on telly. And then you have to get home, yes the Tube runs all night and is free – but all the useful stations have been closed to avoid overcrowding, so you have to walk to Zone 2 before you can even board a train.

This year I had none of that, I stayed at home like a miserable git with my parents, for the second New Year running where we watched Jake Humphrey – the Formula 1 presenter, who’d lost the BBC’s annual sweepstake and was forced to endure the banks of the Thames so we didn’t have to. We all had one drink, then played Scrabble on the Wii until 2am. Perfect, and much like the rest of the year, miserable. Still I’m happy I got a 203 point word, which really annoyed the rest of family “EQUALING” across two treble word scores (yes it is an Americanism but it was worth it). In some ways it was probably the best New Year I’ve had.

And of course since I last ranted at you, it’s been Christmas, how was your Christmas? I don’t really care, but it’s polite to ask. The Christmas period, I find, brings with it its own ills – and I’m not talking about Christmas dinner washing up and pretending that you liked those Christmas presents that you really didn’t. This Christmas I ended up feeling very old, there’s many reasons for this. Firstly spending time with your parents, which I’ve come to realise, is like looking into a mirror of the future, you see yourself in thirty years time an inescapable fate, your destiny is to turn into this people no matter what you do, you cannot avoid it. It’s like a science fiction movie where the characters see their own future and no matter how they try to avoid the future unravels as is written. Those of you under the age of 25 will be reading this puzzled, I spent all my late teenage years and early twenties convinced that I would be nothing like my parents, determined in fact I wouldn’t copy their annoying habits, I’d be “cool” at the age of 60. Then somewhere around the mid-twenties the awful truth hits you, you are turning into them, well a hideous hybrid – almost like you’re 50% your mother and 50% your father. You’ve started seeing their traits in you. I know I’ve started shouting at inanimate objects like my mother, sighing loudly for no reason like my father, generally being baffled by new technology and moaning that the buttons on new gadgets are too small, turning down the TV and wandering round the shops rejecting the arrays of clothing presented to me because “it wouldn’t be practical”. It’s only a matter of time before I start going upstairs and by the time I get there forgetting what I came up for – though I’ve come up with a cunning plan to avoid this by only every living in single story buildings, clever eh? Then I’ll be off to buy a beige cardigan and start a 1,000 piece jigsaw just for fun. Why on earth they need to do DNA testing on Jeremy Kyle, just wait until the child is 30 you’ll be able to tell the parents just from the annoying traits.

However that’s not the only reason I’m feeling particularly old, whilst seeing family this Christmas my sister said “Is that a grey hair on your head”, following up with “only joking!”. How we laughed… until I throttled the bitch with a string of tinsel and shoved her face in a Sainsbury’s Yule Log – the cow! Not that I’m overly sensitive, you understand. But worse than that, I got the news that everyone dreads, the awful news that you lay awake at night hoping will never come. The first of my university friends has had a baby. Yeah some of my school “friends” have been pregnant before, several times, but they were slags they don’t count, these people are like you, they are your peers. I mean it was bad enough when they all got into long term relationships, and increasingly you realised that you were in a minority and that single didn’t just describe your relationship status, but how many of your friends have time for you any more. Then a year or two after you last spoke to them a card drops through your door inviting you to their wedding, laughably asking if you’d like to bring a +1 with you, if they’d actually spoken to you in the last year they’d know I was still terminally single, still sitting on the shelf as wanted as a Jedward Album, where even a 99p sticker hasn’t done anything to shift you.

I’ve just been through that phase, there are two of us left unattached, bitterly meeting for coffee to bitch about all the friends that we haven’t seen in years. Now the next phase has begun, the one that makes you feel even more alone, the baby phase – there all going to start popping them out soon. I’ll be invited to baby showers, your last chance to see these people before they become eternally tired, where undoubtedly well meaning but essentially moronically patronising friends will declare “don’t worry I’m sure it’ll be your turn soon”, I have news for you the evidence suggests that it won’t be. Who knows maybe even asked to be a Godparent – though if any of them have read this blog they’ll surely be questioning my suitability in that role? It’s all so deeply depressing and cementing two things, one I’m no longer young – if people my age are grown ups, and two I’m living my life through moaning about their lives. Oh dear. Still I’m looking forward to the next phase, the awkward and bitter divorce phase, at least I’ll feel less single this time round. Perhaps we can have divorce parties, where I can cheerfully announce to the remaining couples don’t worry I’m sure it’ll be your turn soon”. And some people say I have issues.

The Third Great Trial of Christmas: Friends & Family

2011-12-23T08:48:00.001Z

Here’s my third and final moan about all the nice things about Christmas in an attempt to ruin the festive season for all.

The problem with Christmas is in a sense the whole point of it; you have to spend it with family and friends. Admittedly a Christmas spent on your own would be about as much fun as spending the festive season in the Fritzel’s basement, but at least there wouldn’t be the rows, awkwardness and general problems always associated with interacting with other people which are compounded during the holiday season.

Now before you get deeply offended early on in the post (there’ll be plenty of time for that later), I want to say I love my friends and family – as much as my bitter and twisted cold heart will allow for anyway. But the problem is everyone has a different vision of what Christmas should be, from the full on Victorian traditional feast with the million friends and family around sharing well-thought gifts and cards over the ultimate meal, to a quiet one with only your closest, to avoiding every relative at all cost, like they were street based charity workers. If everyone had a same standard idea of what Christmas should be, at least we’d all know the bench mark.

Christmas Cards seem like such a simple idea, a brief message to say Merry Christmas in a card posted to a loved one. But nowadays do you bother? And if you do bother, who do you leave on or off the Christmas card list? It’s a bit like a dry run for organising your wedding (were that ever to be likely – in my case I think this would be wasted practice), admittedly with smaller ramifications but still... if you send a card to one friend why aren’t you sending a card to all your friends. It may seem like a small thing, but generally most friends don’t like to find out that they’ve been segregated into a sub-friendship group within the rest of your friends, it’s not considered polite. Cards sent around the office are even more problematic, as there’s a lot more of an obvious opportunity to compare who received a card and who didn’t, in a small office you can probably manage everyone but in a large office the line has to be drawn somewhere unless you want to spend December operating like a 17^th century printing press. And then of course there’s the awkward moment when you receive a card from someone who you haven’t sent a card to, uh-oh potential festive disaster (unless you don’t give a toss!), especially if it’s now past the last posting date for Christmas, or you’ve run out of cards in your festive box consisting of 24 cards consisting of 4 designs – I mean I probably should send them a card, but it’s not worth rushing out to buy a new box.

If you think card giving for friends is tricky, consider how this problem is magnified within the realm of present buying. Whilst your said friend may not be that concerned if they’ve missed out on a well thought, but essentially cheap card, they may when actual cash value presents are taken into account start to get a bit miffed. But say a special friend has done something nice for you this year and so you want to thank them for it. Well do you need to buy every mutual friend, that you and the original friend share, gifts as well for fear of offending them? And then where does it stop? Sufficient extension of this logic results in the nightmare scenario where you end up having to get every person you’ve ever met a gift and that can be expensive, even for the socially retarded. The potential for absolute awkwardness for me doesn’t end there, because what if you receive a present from someone you haven’t actually got a return present for? Are they expecting something back? Will they be offended if you haven’t got them anything? Are you supposed to rush out and get them something at the last possible moment?

In some ways worse than this can be the potential for gift mismatch, this is where you’ve both bought each other gifts but one person has way out spent the other. If you receive a luxury designer watch costing around £300, and in return you’ve got them a chocolate Santa and a soap in the shape of a reindeer, you can feel a little uncomfortable. Even worse because you’ve got them something, you can’t play the “sorry I haven’t had a chance to get you a present yet” card.

Still at least with friends you can shop in nice shops, after all they’re likely to have similar interests and be a similar age to you. Whereas this luxury is not often afforded with family members, in the case of friends you can shop in nice clothes shops or look for fun music and DVDs. However involve family members and you’ll be soon trawling through shops you feel about as comfortable at as a South Korean who is accidentally stumbled into Kim Jong-il’s funeral service. Before you know it’ll you’ll be groping your way blindly through places you’d never normally go cross-stitch shops, Fishing Accessory World and worst Edinburgh Wool Mill.

The family gift buying trauma is also compounded by the fact that as you know family better you know what they’ll do with your gift – more to the point if you buy them tat you know they are going to put it in the bin. You can pretend your friend will keep that awful Wall-mounted Singing Mackerel you found in the junk shop, your mother will not and you know it. You’re going to have to get something thoughtful. Worse still my parents make rules on what I can and cannot buy them – no clothes as no room in the wardrobe, no toiletries as they never get used, no food as they’re on a diet, and nothing that will take up any space as the house is full of junk. I mean what can you get them, a gift-wrapped skip for them to empty the spare room into?! Then you ask them what they would like and they reply “I don’t really know” – well if they don’t really know, what chance do I have. Instead I end up plodding up and down the high street so much the shop assistant in Boots thinks I’m stalking her just for her clubcard points.

To make matters worse, 10 years ago I foolishly suggested that wouldn’t it make a nice change to use Make Your Own Crackers – these are crackers where you buy them unassembled and purchase your own gift to place inside. An ideal way to avoid the usual awful crap they put in crackers, which they might as well send straight to landfill now and save us all wasting 2 seconds of our life doing it. Anyway at the time the cracker idea seemed like a good one, but now it’s been adopted as a family tradition this means having to hunt down another set of family presents obeying all the above rules but being small enough to fit within the inside of a cracker. Why did I ever suggest such a disastrous idea in the first place? Now a decade later I’m wandering through stores with a tape measure trying to see if gifts will fit in a cracker, desperately resisting the urge to form the bloody thing into a noose and end it all there.

The other problem with family, bar the rows and having to spend time with them – things I’ll gloss over because surprisingly I actually get on with my family and so have nothing to add on this subject (An optimistic note?! Who’d have thought, well it is Christmas). Any how, the other problem with family is that they have a bizarre set of traditions that they insist you adhere to, being sent out to buy two jars of pickled onions and a Christmas table cloth on Christmas Eve because “otherwise Christmas will be ruined” I feel may be taking festive preparations a little too far. In fact let’s sod the whole thing and have fish fingers and chips?! What do you reckon? Who could be unhappy with that?

And with that my last blog of 2011 is drawn to a close, thank you very much reading and commenting. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about the collapse of my life!! I’ll be blogging again in January so look out for that, in the meantime have an amazing Christmas and a brilliant New Year. I’ll be spending the break relaxing and attempting to find a partner to end my miserable single life and make next year’s blog a whole lot cheery. And although Christmas may be a time of miracles, this plan still seems rather unlikely doesn’t it? Until 2012 bye bye!

The Second Great Trial of Christmas: The Spirit of Christmas

2011-12-19T08:28:00.001Z

In your dim distant past, somewhere probably is the lingering meaning of the true message of Christmas taught to you through copious of use of tinsel and tea towel headdresses in a Nativity play. No matter how hard you try modern society has thoroughly beaten this well taught lesson out of you like an untimely visit from a group of Anti-Gadaffi rebels. Nowadays your vision of Christmas is most likely to be one of the Utopian visions of the festive season created through films, television, popular culture and advertisement.

Advertisements in particular are guilty for giving you a snap shot of the perfect Christmas without any context or setting. The most talked about one this year has to be the John Lewis advert which performs a surprising trick in which a seemingly impatient brat waiting for Christmas is suddenly turned into a darling sweetheart when it turns out he can’t wait to give a loving gift to his parents. And thereby telling the true meaning of Christmas – that you’re a horrid person if you don’t buy your gifts from John Lewis. Obviously we’ve never seen any context, what if the gift turns out to be a novelty pooing reindeer? That’s less magical, what if he’s got the wrong size and not asked for a gift receipt? Our angelic Christmas has suddenly collapsed in on itself like a vortex sucking all the magic from our lives with the efficiency of a Dyson Airblade.

Elsewhere in advertising land, Iceland seem to suggest that the perfect Christmas should be spent accompanying Stacey Solomon as vast satellites of party food revolve around her like a giant clockwork planetarium, that provides approximately 5,000 nibbles for a pound, leading you to wonder what exactly is in them, and offers similar nutritional value to eating a lump of Plutonium. Littlewoods advertising has attracted record numbers of complaints, as apparently it carries the hidden subversive message that Father Christmas doesn’t exist (clearly a lie children – don’t worry), despite the fact that the advert doesn’t actually say this. Yet no one has complained about the actual message it does convey which is that if mum is worth her salt she’ll buy an horrendous range of overpriced designer tat in order to buy the love of her family and friends and then spend the rest of her life paying for it at an exorbitant rate of interest. A lesson their learnt from the Greek book of fiscal policy. Meanwhile Marks & Spencer, every middle class person’s favourite shop, appears to have struck a Luciferian pact with the devil as an ever changing cast of X Factor misanthropes sings the stores’ wondrous praise in a effort to convince you to buy a melt in the middle chocolate pudding because that is what Little Mix will be doing this year. And the least said about Bruce Forsyth accidentally wandering onto the set of the Morrisons advert probably the better, he thought it was the Strictly Come Dancing wrap party.

Generally none of these adverts really offend me, I’m used to the usual nausea-inducing assault on the senses that is festive commercials, in fairness it’s not that different to the usual nausea-inducing assault on the senses that is commercials during the rest of the year. However I do reserve a certain hatred for one particular style of Christmas advertising. These are the adverts that tell you that unless you buy a specific product not only will you’re Christmas be worse off it will actively be awful. Last year I recall a particularly awful example of such an advertising campaign run by a satellite television provider which said that unless you buy their latest channel package your Christmas will be a disaster ending in a massive row that even the family dog will be embroiled in. Said advert also implied that your Christmas would only occur in grey scale and even your decorations wouldn’t light up, whereas with their latest package the whole family would be happy and your room would be illuminated in a radiant glow – presumably as the family in question have now freed up enough time from rowing that they can actually turn the light switch on. If only the residents of Albert Square could see this warning from history and the EastEnders Christmas Day special might be a whole lot different.

Pathetically soppy as it may sound whatever your religious persuasion is, Christmas should be out spending time with family, friends and loved ones (apparently loved ones can include friends and family – I’m not really an expert in this field) and celebrating how lucky you are to have them as part of your life. Nice as Christmas Trees, turkeys, bulging sacks of presents, the perfect party spread and a XBox 360 under the tree are, all of these should be sideshows to the true event spending time with those who love you – admittedly that sentiment would put the final nail in the High Street coffin and cause Mary Portas to spontaneously explode covering us all in lured orange hair, but it’s important point. Though if you are planning to buy me an XBox 360 or any other gifts/cash amounts please don’t be put off they will be gratefully accepted at the usual address. Thank you very much.

The First Great Trial of Christmas: Christmas Shopping

2011-12-12T09:23:00.001Z

I should imagine you’ve barely recovered from the excitement of yesterday’s X Factor result, so what you need is another exciting edition of my blog to calm you down. I should first apologise for my shocking lack of blogging recently, it’s been nearly 3 weeks – or approximately the time I’ve spent traipsing up and down the high street and shopping centres Christmas Shopping.

That’s right I have just about completed The First Great Trial of Christmas: Christmas Shopping. Before embarking on Christmas shopping you need to decide which of the three basic routes you wish to adopt:

1. The Gift Voucher Option - Gift Vouchers, or for the more modern amongst you Gift Cards, are where you have your perfectly useful cash in the form of pounds sterling, that can be spent in any store with very limited restrictions. You take this cash into a store of your choosing and swap it for a new form of cash that can only be spent in that store, and must be spent within 24 months of being converted, cannot be used in conjunction with any special offer, and can never be converted into any other form of cash no matter how hard you try. Put like this it makes perfect sense. The good news about this major inconvenience you can inflict upon your friends and family is that it’s very easy to wrap. The main problem with this option is if, like me, somewhere back in late October-early November you had a Utopian vision of the perfect Christmas in which family and friends opened up the perfect, well-thought out presents you’d got them, Gift Vouchers probably didn’t feature. They represent virtually zero effort!

2. The Online Shopping Option. Online shopping is the future apparently, you go online and find your loved ones the perfect gifts, or after two hours of looking through the Boots website you go “sod it” and get them a set of toiletries. After several attempts to attempt to pay for these goods using your credit card, they are eventually dispatched to you, and it’s at this point you realise the estimated delivery date is April. At some point these will be attempted to be delivered to your house, when a card will be popped through the door telling you, that you were “out when we came to deliver the package”, even though you were in – because you have no social life. You’ll then be given the option to go and collect the package from your “local” depot, usually somewhere in Crawley, or for a small fee of £5 you can have them redelivered to your nearest store for collection, thusly removing the entire point of collecting online in the first place other than to pay an exorbitant postage & packing fee. Given my flat doesn’t have a letter box (for complicated reasons), it represents Fort Knox to the postman and thus online ordering is not for me.

3. In Store Shopping Option. Having exhausted all the above options I am left with the last resort, of actually going into a shop and purchasing goods in person. May god have mercy upon my soul.

So a couple of times over the last few weeks I headed to Westfield in London, the original one, not the “Stratford City” one – since when has Stratford been a city?:

Apologies for the lack of focus, my hands were shaking as I was having a fit before entering the store!

Here’s more proof, I should point out it’s 3pm in the afternoon not the dead of night as implied in this photo:

I was particularly excited about my trip to Westfield, because two years ago I went Christmas shopping there and was refused a free sample of alcohol in Marks & Spencer because I looked too young. Result!!! That wasn’t just a boost to my ego, that was an M&S boost to my ego!

If you believe the news reports, then if you do decide to go shopping in real shops rather than online, you should be walking into a ghost town, with shop keepers begging you, the only shopper in sight, to purchase their wares – this is a lie. For the purposes of December Westfield has been twinned with Purgatory and represents the second busiest place you can go shopping in Central London, unfortunately to get there I have to change tubes at Oxford Circus, the first busiest place you can go shopping in Central London. Surprisingly enough this didn’t go well, and so I have put together a list of the 10 most frustrating things about my Christmas shopping experience, in the hope that this will give you some insight and tips and allow you to avoid the pitfalls I’ve succumbed to. At the very least it will allow me to vent my rage and get these things off my chest.

1. Bags. Invariably you will want to do all your Christmas shopping in one go to avoid countless trips to hell and back, which means at some point you will end up with thousands of carrier bags. What you certainly don’t want is your bloody carrier bag to split:

This results in countless stops as you slump in the fire exit of a store, whilst you rearrange all your shopping like some decrepit bag lady. Then you have to go into Next and demand that they give you 8 extra large carrier bags, even though you’ve only bought a box of cufflinks, to re-triple bag your shopping before all your bags explode all over Westfield in a shit, very unfunny version of Buckaroo. And let’s be honest Buckaroo wasn’t fun to start with.

2. Picky Relatives. Some relatives can be picky, I shan’t name names just in case they are reading, but they lay down ground rules for getting them Christmas gifts: No clothes (I have no room in my wardrobe), no toiletries (the bathroom is full), no food (I’m on a diet), no gift vouchers (they’re not personal enough), no alcohol (I’m a recovering alcoholic and it would be inappropriate) – that last one might be a lie. Then when you ask what you can get them they say “Oh don’t worry you don’t need to get me anything”. Fine I won’t. That approach should go down about as well as a Christmas card from Wikileaks at the White House. So instead for the sake of peace I navigate Westfield for all eternity (or the time it takes Louis Walsh to answer the question “In one word who do you want to send home from the X Factor tonight?” – depending on your chosen measurement of time), looking for a gift that like Piers Morgan’s charisma doesn’t actually exist. Best I could find is a reindeer that pooes chocolate covered raisins – any good?

3. People. Christmas shopping would be bearable if it weren’t for the fact that other people are there. Apparently it’s too much to ask for Westfield to be cleared for my visit, because all these other selfish people are busy buying gifts for their loved ones – gits. The main problem is stores are generally crammed full of much merchandise as physically possible. They are usually laid out such that one medium wasted person can easily pass up and down an isle, this as a policy fails when you try to pass down the aisle with 84 bags of shopping whilst coming the other way is a woman armed with a double buggy and an arse the size of a badly parked Vauxhall Vectra.

4. Buying for Yourself. The fatal pitfall of Christmas shopping is buying for yourself, understandable when everyone else is so difficult to get for, but still you must resist that pair of jeans, DVD, computer games console or new car, particularly as undoubted if you do get it, someone will have already got that exact same thing for you for Christmas (probably not the car). As a rule of thumb if you’ve bought yourself an entirely new wardrobe, and all you’ve bought for other people is one packet of gift tags – then that shopping trip is generally not considered to be “Christmas shopping” and is in fact known as “shopping”.

5. Sunday Closing. Many years ago when I was young, sometime around the Bronze Age, Sunday opening was very rare. You had to go a big town to find shops that opened on a Sunday and then it was only big department stores. Now everywhere is open on a Sunday regardless of whether you want it to be or not, and as society we now can’t live without it. Hence my annoyance that one store is Westfield proclaims itself to be “Keeping Sunday Special” by not opening an Sundays, this is not helpful, I have come shopping on Sunday because I work during the week. What about “Keep Wednesday Special”? I’ve never got time to go shopping on a Wednesday, its Frozen Planet night after all (aren’t he penguins sweet?). Moral high grounds are all good, but don’t let them inconvenience me.

6. Decorations. Shopping centres and town centres at this time of you attempt to display a selection of festive decorations in order to calm you down and make you feel festive during the shopping period. For example:

As you can see Westfield have gone for decorating their trees such that they appear to have survived the aftermath of Chernobyl, this is not making me cheerful. Quite frankly given that I’m so stressed during shopping that even the presence of scantly clad models handing out vodka and crisp fifty pound notes would probably do nothing to calm my nerves, you can imagine how I feel about snowman suspended from the ceiling like Russel Grant on Strictly Come Dancing. Not calming at all.

7. Christmas Music. I would say my tolerance for Christmas music is higher than most, I am in fact listening to some now as I rant about my shopping experience. Though one particular year when I spent October having a Pizza Hut meal with a friend and was forced to listen to the same Christmas CD on loop for two hours, I did have a different opinion to Christmas music. However, the general rule is, it’s all about appropriateness. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to begin the allied Shock & Awe assault on Baghdad to the soundtrack of Lady Gaga’s Poker Face. Similarly the sound of children screaming, valuable crockery smashing, and people rowing in Westfield is not best rounded off by a rendition of Cliff Richard’s Mistletoe & Wine.

8. Receipts. Over recent years I have noticed a disturbing trend to receipts, they either handed to you with a pile of paperwork consisting of a series of vouchers that I don’t want – do I look like I want half price children’s books or £5 off my next No. 7 purchase? I don’t think so. Alternatively they are printed on ridiculously long pieces of paper, recently I went to Hamleys to buy some toys – no I’ve not become a paedophile, they were comedy gifts for a friend! I only purchased two items, but because of the promotional blurb and an offer for money off at Leeds Castle printed at the bottom of the receipt, I was a presented with a receipt that was a foot long – genuinely I measured it (god I need to get a partner, my life is dull). What if I had children and bought a stocking full of toys? I’d probably have been presented with a receipt long enough to embalm myself in, or at the very least form a noose and end it all – which in fairness in Hamleys at Christmas time may be the only option. The upshot of all this is my wallet is now filled with enough receipts and money off vouchers that I could beat a whale to death with it, it’s thicker than the Argos catalogue – although not quite as thick as an Argos employee. And the one solitary fiver in there has spontaneously combusted due to being compacted in with so much paper.

9. Shops that make you Queue Outside. At Westfield there is a number of desirable designer shops that wish to make them seem more aspirational than they really are, to this end they make people queue up outside in a roped off area. I’m sorry but f**k off, you aren’t the log flume at Chessington World of Adventures, why on earth do you think I’d want to queue up to see all the things I can’t afford in the shop that you don’t have in my size. I think you’ll find I’ll be doing my Christmas shopping in good old unfashionable M&S where everyone is welcome. Admittedly everyone will think their gifts are unfashionable, but at least they’ll stop being my friends and I won’t have to go Christmas shopping for them ever again.

10. Shop Assistants. Now I have been a shop assistant, in fact pretty much all my after dinner anecdotes are based at my time working in a shop. So I do know the pressure some shop assistants are under, and many of them are very good. However many of them complete troglodytes, shambling around the store like a disembodied Margaret Beckett. Case in point, I spent thirty minutes in Boots, the world’s most impossible store to navigate (every aisle’s bloody bottles and no matter how they label the aisle I still don’t know where to look for what I want). This half an hour consisted of me being sent repeatedly upstairs and downstairs by different shop assistants who themselves hadn’t a clue where the item I wanted was. Still it’s better than in shoe shops. Typically there’s no one to serve you at all, so you grab the one shoe on display then wander round like sodding Prince Charming looking for Cinderella to see if she’s got the other crystal slipper in a size 11. Which results in them just nipping out to the stock room, which judging by the time it takes them must be located on the dark side of the Moon. They then finally return to say they don’t have a size 11, but they do have a size 6 would that be any help? Only if I wanted to wear them on my hands you idiot!!

11. Inappropriate Drinks. To ease the pain of Westfield shopping I arranged to meet a friend at Costa for a drink and a chat / moan about our tedious lives. Feeling rather festive I decided to order a Frosted Mint Hot Chocolate – how something can be Frosted and Hot at the same time I’m not quite sure, but it was on the Christmas menu nonetheless. I was then asked if I wanted chocolate sprinkles on it, to which I said yes and then was presented with this:

I’m sorry what the bloody hell is this?! As a terminally single man, I don’t want to be presented with a beverage that’s had more romantic existence than me. Why not just rub it in and present me with a chocolate muffin shagging an apple turnover, or a cheese and ham baguette surrounded by hundreds of other cheese and ham baguettes having a wonderful birthday. F**k you! It is not helping, it ranks up there with people snogging on the escalators of the London Underground, don’t do it I will push you to your deaths – you have been warned.

12. People who claim to have a Top 10 of things to rant about, but get carried away… Yeah alright sorry, I got carried away. I am off to have a lie down and some strong medication, hope this guide proves of some use or failing that you ostracise all your friends and family in the next 12 days and don’t bother. If only.

The War on Socks

2011-11-21T07:21:00.001Z

I’ve never liked socks, all my life I’ve been locked in a constant struggle with survival, a war that can never be won against the sock-kind. Over the years the nature of sock-warfare has evolved and changed as new technologies have been developed and new frontiers have opened up, but at all times I’ve been engaged in a War with Socks. I just don’t like wearing them. I can just about tolerate wearing them at work or out shopping, whilst wearing shoes. But as anyone who’s ever lived me will be able to tell you, as soon as my shoes come off my socks are whipped off faster than the average I’m A Celebrity... contestant whips off their dignity.

I just can’t see the point, you wouldn’t wear gloves indoors, so why socks? Admittedly you’re lumbered with the unpleasant side effect as you travel around the house and your feet pick up all kind of debris that collects on the carpet like dust, pepper seeds, bits of tissue and the odd homeless person. It’s like my feet are like some kind of super kitchen roll dredging the carpet, but surely this is a small price to pay for the freedom of toe-based flexibility (they’re not battery hens after all). If it’s cold I put on a pair of slippers, ok they’re less sexy than a Midsomer Murders DVD Box Set but if comfort, warmth, rights for toes and victory over socks are what you’re after they’re the way forward. Though you will have to get machine washable ones as a few weeks of sockless slipper wearing and they end up smelling like nuclear Armageddon in a Babybel factory.

Socks are intrinsically evil. Not convinced? Well consider is the seam that joins the toe of the sock to the main body. Is it just me or is there something inherently annoying about the fact this seam is in exactly the same point as where toe-nail and toe join? And I find this very uncomfortable, admittedly not in every pair of socks, but if I buy a pack of seven pairs for some reason at least one pair will have a particularly annoying seem making them unwearable. Why does this happen randomly? Are these faulty? Can they be sold in special cheap packs like broken biscuits? Who knows? Either way I don’t want them. And itchy seems are just one of the weapons socks use. As it is you can’t even trust socks, their numbers are constantly changing, you put an even number of socks in the wash, and an odd number come out. What’s happened? Has a sock gone undercover in the T-shirt drawer to spy on your every move and report to sock command? Or have the socks been breeding, increasing their foul numbers to take over the world?

At this point you may be thinking that I’m a child, and I should just shut up and wear socks as things will never get better. Well you’d be wrong. In recent years a great victory in my battle with sock-kind was secured, I finally broke through enemy lines with only the deaths of 25,000 innocent civilians. This first big break through came in the discovery of coloured-toe socks. You know the kind, that all the big department stores sell in large multi-packs?

Up to now the biggest bane of my domestic chore life (other than the daily trip to the bottle bank to deal with my drinking habit) was the pairing up of plain black and navy socks. Over time the various pairs bought across a number of years had all slightly faded by differing amounts. This turned the task of the correct pairing up of them whilst removing from the clothes dryer’ into a Krypton Factor-esque challenge, but without the excitement of Gordon Burns or an obstacle to course to finish with. Coloured toe socks have changed all this, they can be paired up quicker than E-list celebrities in the Big Brother compound. And when out and about wearing a shoe, (typically two) no one need know about your eccentric behaviour of wearing mad coloured socks with crazy coloured toes, unless you’re wearing sandals that is. This victory alone has saved about half an hour off my weekly chores.

However, while I may have won the battle, I certainly haven’t won the war, for with new socks came new problems. Now I do realise by even opening up this can of worms, I sound older than Peter Stringfellow’s hair cut, but is it me or has the quality of socks got worse? Either that or my feet are slowly turning into talons and I’ve not realised. Rarely a week goes by when I haven’t manage to shred the toe of one of my socks on my barbed, cheese-grater like feet. I’d be happy, it’s the destruction of socks, but sadly I need socks – society forces me into a symbiotic relationship with them.

Thank god I never shed a bed with another human or, judging by the state of my socks, my toes would slice their feet off like a scythe ploughing through wheat. Which on the plus side would mean if I did ever convince someone to get in bed with me, they’d find it hard to run away.

All this has lead to a new frontline with the socks, I need new socks, I’m losing them faster than Adrian Childs is losing jobs. Obviously I could get more socks. But through reasons more tedious than Louis Walsh, I’ve been gifted an unwanted set of socks with the days of the week embroidered on them:

We all know the type, quirky socks with the days of the week printed on them, that want to be quirky and friendly when really they’re evil. On the one hand these sound perfect, they are easy to pair up and no one need know I am wearing anything other than plain black socks. But am I ready to accept that my life has reached the point where it’s tragic enough to have the day printed on your sock? It seems a ridiculous level of organisation, even for my anal standards, to have my socks already designated to a specific day. What does that say about individuality, surely it means the socks are controlling me – they’ve won? I mean I could wear the socks on the wrong day, to spite them, but introducing an additional level of complexity to my already worrisome existence doesn’t seem healthy. Also if I was going to have a calendar based system printed on my footwear, days of the week aren’t that helpful, (except on holiday and at Christmas – where socks have no chance of being worn) I generally know what day of the week it is. The date would be more useful, and let’s face it a pack of 31 socks is likely to fit better with the average lazy person washing schedule that a pack of 7. Though that would mean letting 62 socks in my house, that sounds dangerous.

As it stands, with my social life being about as exciting as a meeting of the Keith Chegwin fan club, I never leave the house at the weekend. Thus if I take up the offer of these free socks the Saturday and Sunday pairs will stay shop fresh whereas Monday to Friday will be ripped apart like the body of a small child fed to a pack of hungry wolves. And what if Wednesday’s socks have the dodgy seam, and are unwearable? What am I supposed to do? Introduce a midweek barefoot office day? I don’t think it will catch on. Oh the dilemmas! Will there ever be simplicity in my life.

As you can see The War on Socks is never won, there are always new battles to be fought. Constant vigilance is required, I’ll see you on the front line.

The Ladybird Book of Adrenaline

2011-11-11T08:45:00.001Z

Yep it’s another update from the blog with more words on it than are tattooed on Frankie Cocozza’s arse, although at least it’s 191% less twatish. However much like Frankie I have been kicked out by Gary Barlow – who knew Take That Concerts had such good security?

Anyway moving on to this week’s topic, last weekend I had my first ever taste of Extreme Sports, I say “extreme” sports, “extreme” is of course a relative term. Those of you veteran blog readers will remember way back in August, when I talked about the London rioters and my predisposition to worrying.

If not click here.

Yes. When worrying is a full on hobby for you, crossing the road without using a designated pedestrian crossing can give you the kind of terrifying thrill, that a normal person can only find by going parachute jumping without a parachute. So given my deep nervous disposition you’ll understand when I say that my Sunday spent Go Karting, to me was a foray deep into the world of Extreme Sports. In fact not knowing how to drive and never even having had a single driving lesson, all meant that this would be my first time in charge of a motor vehicle with any speed above that of kiddy dodgems, which generally are so slow that even the most lacklustre of snails have time to throw themselves to safety should they see one approaching.

Usually pathetic people, such as myself, would only ever dream of doing something so adventurous if we were forced to by circumstance – such as a stag weekend, or other such hideous social activity where people do things they don’t want to please someone they sort of like. As a general rule I try and avoid new experiences in case they’re aren’t enjoyable, why do something that could turn out to be unpleasant when you can do something you always do, that you know you’ll enjoy? Never have I once been horrified by sitting on my own sofa, except for the time my flatmate had Coach Trip on.

Anyway for reasons too tedious to explain, on Sunday I found myself at a Go Karting track near Tower Bridge with a group of work colleagues/friends - they might be reading so I don’t want to sound too fond of them. Now you’d think trying out a new activity in amongst a group of friends, would be the perfect way to test out new experiences – as they’ll be there to support you every step of the way, even if you don’t enjoy the experience or aren’t any good. How wrong you are. Friends I’ve found can often be as much support as Gordon Ramsay in a beginner’s cookery lesson. Unlike friends even the most obnoxious of strangers tend not to pour scorn over you whenever you make a mistake or find yourself out of your depth, whereas friends (certainly these ones – in case they are reading!) have an entirely different dog-eat-dog agenda where all that counts is finding new material with which to mock you. A hobby which they already excel at. Still part of me had high hopes, maybe I’d be naturally good at Go Karting, maybe despite all on-paper predictions, I’d be a brilliant Go Karter zooming around the track, weaving in out of the opposition and running loops round my friends. As I claimed victory after victory and got to stand on the podium spraying champagne around with comic disregard for where it was landing. It would be like the movies where the nerdy kid is really good at American Football and has a result wins a place in the cool kids and a hot girl to be at his side. Maybe, just maybe, I held onto that dream as I entered the building.

If you’re are feeling a bit nervous prior to your first race you’d be hoping that walking into the Go Karting centre is going to reassure you of some of your fears - it’s not. As to great you at the door is a sign saying that “Go Karting is a potentially dangerous sport, you are here at your own risk.”, after reading that you are presented with a waiver to sign, accepting you may die, and asked to give details of your next of kin. All of which is about as comforting as receiving a large package at your house hand delivered by the Taliban. You’re then presented with a one-size does not fit all Crystal Maze-esque jump suit (Richard O’Brien era of course, with different coloured shoulder pads for no real discernable reason) to put on in the changing room where you also find a locker for all your worldly goods and a pad and pen for recording your last will and testament.

Afterwards it’s time to head to the briefing room to be given a tutorial on how the karts work, and all the important safety information. My general reading of the room is the more manly a person you are, the more likely you are to scoff at and ignore the safety instructions. I took detailed notes. The controls seemed simple enough, a steering wheel – which was pretty self-explanatory and two pedals, the accelerator and the brake (this is broadly speaking how normal cars work – or so I’ve been told). And the basic rules were no bumping, no hitting the sides (who aims to hit the side anyway?), no running down the marshals, no spitting and no wearing poppies on your shirts. There’s also a complicated system of flags and lights dotted around the track, green lights mean go (with me so far?), flashing yellow lights mean proceed at walking pace (and try not to hit the marshal who is on the track pushing someone off the wall), red means stop and black means you’ve been disqualified. How anyone is supposed to see a black light though?

With all that information appropriately stored, I nervously headed trackside, a place where it’s impossible not to hum Fleetwood Mac’s Formula 1 theme tune in your head, no matter how inappropriate to your driving skill it may feel. Here I was given a helmet, which due to my hideously deformed oversized head had to be one of the super-freak sized helmets on the top shelf designed to fit Andrew Marr’s ears. I followed the important advice to leave the visor open a crack so as not to steam it up. Given my nervous heavy breathing there was every chance my helmet would turn into a Finnish sauna at any minute, and driving round with a completely obscured visor might not be the safest driving experience. Still I held onto my dream, maybe I would claim victory?

Approximately ten seconds after leaving the starting grid it became exceptionally apparent that I would not be fulfilling my dreams today. Whilst everyone else roared off (well didn’t really roar, they were electric not petrol go karts), I stuttered along the track like a crippled milk float. Unaccustomed to being in charge of a motor vehicle at any speed, the 30mph these karts could easily achieve left me a stressed, terrified, wreck at the wheel. Which didn’t improve as I headed into the first hairpin bend and simply ploughed straight into a wall of tyres, only to have to be pulled out by a marshal, a feat which much to the marshal’s disapproval, I repeated on the next four laps. The lights changed from green to flashing yellow so often due to my incompetence you could be forgiven for thinking it’s an indoor disco. After the marshal gave me a little pep talk on how using the steering wheel would help get around the corner (I knew that, I’m just not very good!), I started to worry that I’d be taken off for poor driving – crashing into the walls, after all, is disallowed. Bad as it would be to come last, I’d never survive the post race ribbing I’d get from my friends if I was disqualified for been as inept as Maureen from the old BBC show Driving School. Hence the next few laps were spent carefully steering around the course, allowing people to overtake me, simply concentrating on getting around the track rather than worrying at all about position.

After a few laps like this, I made a fatal mistake. I became confident. Heading into a rather tight corner, I decided speed was of the essence, the brakes weren’t required, simply confident steering. A few seconds later a sharp skid caused me plough side first into the tyre wall at what I considered to be an horrific velocity, I was flung into the side of my seat which dug right into my ribs. The combined force of the impact and the surprise, as unlike most of my other crashes I hadn’t seen it coming, successfully took the metaphorical wind out of my sails. Not to mention leaving with a really sore set of bruises all over the side of my body which are currently the colour of the Ribena berries. The force of the impact had been so great that my visor sprung off it’s mountings on my helmet, and I headed straight to the pits to have it repaired, much to the mocking of fellow racers who considered my foolish worry for protecting my eyesight to be ridiculously unnecessary.

The rest of the first race I completed terrified of repeating my crash I headed around at the pace of an average student tidying their bedroom, stopping at each corner before looking both ways and completing the turn in a safe and serene fashion. I got lapped so often, that the race organisers thought the lap board must have been malfunctioning. Eventually the chequered flag was waved, and we all had to head in the pits next time we’d passed them, but where were the pits? In all the “excitement” I’d forgotten where the entrance was. I couldn’t afford to just miss it, and go around again, that would surely get me thrown off the track as it would like I was taking the piss. Plus the other drivers would have to wait seven hours for me to complete one more circuit of the average twenty-eight second course. The track ahead was clear, so I took my eyes of the road and darted around looking for the pits, ahhh there they were just round the next corner. My eyes darted back to the road, to find that I simply veered off at a right angle and was rapidly approaching a tyre wall. I hit the brakes and came to a rest about 10 centimetres in front of the wall, I’d not crashed, I’d effectively parked. However without a reverse gear there was no way I could get out of this position without crashing. Worse I’d crashed/parked on a completely straight bit of the track, there were no marshals around to help as no one had ever crashed here before in the history of the course. Instead I was forced to call one over with a camp wave and a shout of “Ahoy there!”. I finally made it back to the pits and gracefully navigated the tight entrance to stop a foot behind the car ahead of me, in what I thought was quite a controlled manoeuvre. Unfortunately the marshal wanted me to close the small gap between the cars to half a foot, as expected I was unable to perform such a subtle navigational change and simply ploughed into the back of the car ahead shunting everyone ahead along like a racing themed Newton’s cradle.

The remaining two races were much the same, with me trailing at the back of the leaderboard, simply pleased to have stayed on the track as everyone else merrily overtook me. In fact the only people I ever overtook were stationary cars that had crashed, I never once overtook anyone at speed. Finally we got trackside again, and were presented with our result’s sheets, at this point no one else knew how awfully I’d done the leaderboard only listed kart numbers not names. Sadly this ignorance was shattered when the marshal handing out my sheet called my number in a very loud and unsubtle way – that man should not be allowed to break bad news in a hospital.

So there we go, my first taste of Extreme Sports, did I enjoy it? My ribcage would certainly say no, I’d go as far as to say it was “alright”. The fun aspect was largely balanced out by the stress I found during the whole experience as I constantly gripped the steering wheel so hard it was probably bent out of shape. I did get better in fairness, by race three I came last by a considerable margin rather an astronomical one. Would I do it again? Maybe, with a roll bar, padded seating, wrapped entirely in bubble wrap and with someone else to do the driving. Oh and to the bright spark who after the race suggested paint-balling next time… no thank you, I’d rather eat my own scrotum! Leave me my own Extreme Sport of walking past a broken glass bottle worrying that if I feel over I could cut my neck open. It could happen.

WH-at a Dump?

2011-11-02T07:30:00.001Z

What’s the scariest thing that can happen to you whilst walking down the High Street? Get caught by 15-year old Trick or Treaters, who are actually topical muggers? Seeing someone in a scary Halloween mask and then tragically realising it’s just your own reflection in a shop window? Meeting Boris Johnson on the campaign trail? – Something which incidentally I have seen, fortunately I was looking down from the top deck of a bus, so was protected. Though saying that I am presuming he was campaigning for votes, for all I know he was flailing around the High Street asking people to tell him where his feet were. Going off on a tangent at this early stage, a couple of months back did you get a letter from him entitled Tell Boris What You Think?

The essential point of it seemed to be a survey that you could fill out about London so he (and by he, I mean someone else) could collate the results into useful sound bites saying how well he is doing. For example Question 4c) read “Since being elected, Boris Johnson has quadrupled London’s rape crisis provision. Do you support his efforts to increase support for victims of rape?” Given the wording of this question, it’s almost implicit that every single respondent, bar Julian Assange, would tick the yes box in response to this question. Thus generating the impressive but entirely fabricated soundbite, that 99.9% of Londoners support Boris Johnson’s effort to tackle rape.

As a legal aside I should point out that Julian Assange has never been proved guilty of rape and I am sure he is a very nice man in person, though I wouldn’t trust him with my diary.

What puzzled me is that presumably Boris’s team of advisers helped him with this letter, otherwise it would have probably be written on the back of a telephone box and hand delivered by him on his bicycle. So surely they could have got to him pose for a better photo than this.

Here it looks like he’s fallen through a hedge backwards and then is surprised by his own existence. Perhaps he is genuinely surprised by the fact that we are still yet to realise he doesn’t know what he’s doing? But surely his advisers could have got a photo where he looks a bit less moronic, or were they worried if they did, we wouldn’t recognise him?

Anyway back to the point, the scariest thing that can happen when walking down the High Street is to accidentally walk into WHSmith having forgotten what an absolute abomination of a shop it’s become. This keeps happening to me, I merrily walk into the shop expecting to find something nice in there that I want to buy and as soon as I enter the repressed memory that it’s actually turned into a downmarket version of Poundland floods back (without the one redeeming quality that everything in there is a pound).

I’m sure not that long ago it used to be a decent shop, with its random but eclectic mix of stationary, greetings cards, books, magazines, music and videos. An odd combination that I’m sure were it ever to be pitched on Dragon’s Den today would be laughed back into the entrepreneur’s face with all the sour disgust the overly shouldered Cruella DeVille look-a-ike could manage (seriously if you’re struggling for inspiration this Halloween then you’ll find no concept more scary than going dressed as her). However odd a mix of things it may have seemed it worked. You knew that if you were going for a particular book, magazine or a good selection of birthday cards you’d find it. But with the pressure of the internet and supermarkets cashing in on those markets WHSmith decided to diversify, unfortunately no one seems to be quite sure into what it diversified. It seems to have turned itself into Woolworths except only stocking the rubbish tat you’d pass by on the way through Woolworths to get something more useful like some clothes pegs or a grill pan.

Nowadays in WHSmith you can pick up Adopt a Polar Bear Kits, enough chocolate to sink a battleship and Henry the Hoover wind-up toys but you’d be hard pushed to find that book or DVD you’re looking for. In fact the DVD selection in their Oxford Street store looks like one you’d find in a service station on the M4. As in, containing five titles, three of which you already have and the other two are so awful that even if the only other thing in the world to watch QVC’s Christmas in March Shopping Spectacular, you’d still find the DVD perfectly encased in it’s shrink wrap on your shelf.

For those of you who haven’t had the misfortune of visiting a branch of WHSmith recently here’s a step by step guide of what to expect:

Firstly you’ll turn up and the store will be closed. Like it or not opening hours have been lengthening in recent times, and whilst the rest of the High Street has embraced this as an opportunity to sell more goods at more convenient times, WHSmith has not. The branch right outside the busy Brixton Underground Station, perfectly poised to capitalise on the rush hour footfall is only open 9-5. This coupled with the staff’s eagerness to pull the shutters to the store down and stop people entering 15 minutes before closing all but guarantees you won’t get in (I mean seriously how long do they think it takes to browse the four books and one pen set and decide none of it’s for you – no one could possibly spend 15 minutes in the store, discounting queuing time). Still count yourself lucky, at least the store’s still there. In the time it took Paperchase to refurbish and reopen the old branch of WHSmith that closed down at Clapham Junction Station, the WHSmith website has not managed to remove it as “the nearest store to my current location”, which is annoying if you made the trip specially.

Should you manage to miraculously arrive during the brief window of opportunity provided by 1970s opening hours, you’ll find the shelves stuffed with things you’ve always known you’ve never wanted. With magazine racks cleared to make way for Pic N’ Mix and the stationary section so small you can blink and accidentally walk through it, there’s limited chance that you’ll be bothered by the next point, and that is queuing at the till.

I reasonably regularly visit the Oxford Street store, as it’s close to my place of work, and despite being located on the busiest shopping street in the country; there are only ever two members of staff on the till. So unchanging is this situation I can identify them on sight. It’s always the exact same two people on the tills, except at busy times of course when one of them’s on lunch. Consequently the queue snakes on and on through the store like the polling queue in the Syrian election, although of exceptionally less historic note:

Despite this there’s always another member of staff pointlessly stacking the shelves or faffing with something else right next to you as you queue for seven hours, oblivious to your plight. Whilst in the massive queue pictured above in Brixton branch, rather than helping out the nearest member of staff was attending to this display:

I’d argue surely the more current matter at this time, given the 55 shopping days to Christmas, would be the queue, not the 3 for 2 wrapping paper stand. Though admittedly I should have picked some up, as by the time I left got to the head of the queue there were only two shopping days left until Christmas.

Should you survive the Herculean task of getting to the front of the queue, regardless of who you are and what you’re buying, you will always be offered a bottle of mineral water, bag of mints, or a chocolate bar the size of a double duvet for just a pound. Yep it’s equal opportunities in WHSmith you will be actively encouraged to become obese regardless of race, gender, sexuality or social standing. I should imagine if an armed gunmen held up one of their branches, as the cashier loaded the contents of the till into the bag of swag they would utter the immortal line “would you like a bar of Dairy Milk for just a pound” before proceeding to give the robber a receipt buried in amongst a thousand bloody money off vouchers. For the love of God stop giving these out, shocking as it may seem one visit to your store was enough, without thrusting a Yellow Pages thickness worth of money off vouchers encouraging me to return into my hand as I’m trying to leave the store. Stop doing this immediately. I suppose at least they’re not for Boots No. 7 range. I mean seriously do I honestly look like the kind of person who would want to buy that.

In response to the horrendously long queues, WHSmith management have come up with two plans to try and address this problem. Firstly they’ve opened up branches of the Post Office within their stores, so that by comparison their own queues look short. If WHSmith are looking for ideas to make money, why not set up a mini one of your travel branches of WHSmith (like the kind you get at airports and railway stations) so that people intending to queue for the Post Office can purchase sweets, a book, bottle of water and a crossword magazine to get them through the long haul economy class only queuing system operated by the Royal Mail. The second plan is the introduction of self-scan tills, these are tills where you the shopper both purchase and weigh your shopping. Already popular on the High Street these tills are part of the ongoing campaign to outsource customer service, as should you want anyone to answer a question or be polite to you in a High Street store, you are now expected to ring head office. However these aren’t popular with all customers, as a woman behind me in the queue who was brave enough to cause a fuss (rather than cowardly just grumbling about it under their breath, leaving the store vowing to never come back, only to return the next day and rant about in their blog) pointed out. When questioning a member of staff as to why they wouldn’t open the till and she had to serve herself, they replied that “the tills were only to be opened in an emergency”. An emergency, really? I suspect that at the moment the East Coast of the United States of America was battered by unseasonal snowstorms and several states declared a state of emergency, the next step was NOT the opening of WHSmith’s tills. When pressed further on this point by the aforementioned customer, the staff member replied that self-scan tills were “the future”. Which I thought showed a remarkable strength of character as the staff member explained his own inevitable redundancy to a complete stranger, particularly when the customer replied “I’ll probably just shop somewhere else”. Good for her for saying what I chickened out of.

Still I uncharacteristically looked on the positive side, and reasoned that the self-scan tills would be an opportunity to escape the bullshit of the usual “chocolate bar for a pound routine”:

At least I won’t be saddled with a mass of money off vouchers:

OH THAT’S IT! Will this f**king s**t charade never end, I am never ever setting foot in WHShit again…

Of course tomorrow I’ll probably have forgotten this entire rant and will bravely enter the store once more in a doomed attempt to do my Christmas shopping. I hope my family like four kilogram bars of Galaxy chocolate.

Every little s**t helps themselves

2011-10-25T07:23:00.002+01:00

Apologies for my lack of blogging last week, I had a nasty case of man-flu, or what unsympathetic woman call “sniffles”, piss off - you get grumpy once a month that’s your thing, we get ill with the “sniffles” ok. It’s all fair. Anyway here’s what I would have talked about if I hadn’t been in my bed dying – that’s right dying! Get well gifts welcome.

Last week’s news was dominated by lots of important stories, from the death of Colonel Gaddafi to the reformation of Steps, approximately none of which I have picked to talk about this week. Such is life. The story that perked my interest was one showing the worst of human nature (no still not Steps), as a horde of (presumably soon to be obese) people descended on Tesco’s stores around the country desperate to buy up every single Terry’s Chocolate Orange in the place.

For those of you who missed this news, basically Tesco’s accidentally placed a number of special offers on Terry’s Chocolate Orange all at the same time, it was one of those accidents that when you read about in the paper, you instantly despair at the story and go “How could this happen?”. Yet all of us could probably have easily made a similar mistake, due to our society’s dependence on simply shoving random numbers in a computer and hoping for the best in the completion of all tasks. The advantage of modern technology making it possible for less people to be employed to do simple tasks, like pricing up confectionary objects, is countered by the disadvantage of there being less people to go “Hang on a minute, are you sure this is a good idea?”

Anyway fun as it to rant about the insatiable march of technology that will eventually lead to us all having our brains replaced with iBrains and instead of learning new skills we’ll be downloading them from iTunes (still it’d be simple than salsa lessons in the local school hall). I’m instead going to side step that important issue and concentrate on the thing that grabbed me about this story. And that is the nature of the people who took advantage of this offer, as word spread across the internet faster than pornographic shots of Emma Watson dripping in baby oil. Facebook groups appeared and internet discount sites tweeted that £2.75 Terry’s Chocolate Orange were now available for 29p each. Excited by this news people appeared to go stark raving bonkers. According to The Sun (which is a bit like saying according to a badly translated fairy tale recited by John Prescott whilst under the influence of class A drugs, but let’s go with it anyway), people were taking photos of their massive haul and posting them on Facebook. As if they’d won it big on the Premium Bonds and these were piles of cash they had sprayed round the living room. Not as was the real case, that they’d just bought a lot of chocolate and have little going on in their life. Some of them even journeyed to multiple stores to clear them all out – really? Have you nothing better to do?

One shopper, apparently, loaded their trolley with 192 individual Terry’s Chocolate Oranges, apparently saving £471. Amazing, but you’ve still spent £57 on Terry’s Chocolate Oranges that’s a lot of money to spending on chocolate, what the hell are you going to do with them all, build a bloody house?! Place them all in a bingo machine and recreate the National Lottery Draw in your own living room, but with more tasty consequences?

You could eat them all, of course, except that these 192 oranges weigh in at 176,640 calories (or about 3 Burger King Whopper meals) - which is equivalent to your daily calorific intake for THREE MONTHS! And that’s not mentioning the 10kg of fat (equivalent to FIVE MONTHS allowance). So presuming you aren’t planning an Eamonn Holmes tribute act, or intending to gorge them all and hibernate for winter, you presumably bought them for some other reason. But what? What is the point of having nearly 200 Chocolate Oranges in your house?

Some papers reported that people had been selling them on and making a profit, but who buys second hand Terry’s Chocolate Oranges? Is there a black market for them? Are people really going out to the back of a pub car park or heading onto eBay for chocolate? Is this black market frequented by people trying to work their way onto heroine but starting out at lower levels? In fairness having tired the Popping Candy version of the Terry’s Chocolate Orange I strongly suspect there is something deeply narcotic in that. The other alternative is that you’re buying them as a Christmas presents, now whilst I think it’s reasonable (especially in these tough economic times) to try and make some savings whilst doing the Christmas shopping, this might be a step too far. Suspicions will arise if everyone around the tree opens their presents from you to find all they have a single Terry’s Chocolate Orange, particularly if one of them is nut intolerant and still that’s what you’ve bought them. I for one know that if I open a Terry’s Chocolate Orange this Christmas my first thought is going to be “cheapskate”, who probably ironed the wrapping paper I gave them last year and has wrapped this cheap gift in the said old paper.

This all of course completely overlooks the moral issues that I have with shopping in this way. In fairness I know no one else is going to agree with me. Having recounted stories where I’ve returned to the till to ask the cashier to charge me for an item I’ve noticed they’ve missed on the bill - friends and colleagues have only ever replied to this admission with gasps of horror which suggest that such behaviour is on a par with organising an orgy in a branch of the Early Learning Centre. However surely all these people knew Tesco were not intending to charge 29 pence for a Terry’s Chocolate Orange otherwise they’d have signs up advertising the fact (they’re quite good at advertising apparently), so is it okay to take advantage of their mistake? I’m not sure that it is, sure you may have accidentally bought some and not realised the vast saving you were making – in which case it isn’t your fault, you don’t need to rush back to the shops with them. But clearing the shelves into your trolley, as if you’ve realised the apocalypse is coming and the only way to save yourself from the ensuing fireball is to hide in a vault constructed entirely of confectionary products once advertised by Dawn French. That seems a bit different. I mean if there was a charity cake sale, and you noticed a horrendous pricing error in your favour would you take advantage? Would you? If an old lady was selling her house in order to fund her retirement and you noticed the decimal point was in completely the wrong place, would you still buy? Now I’m guessing if you’re not a cold heartless bastard (or a Conservative MP) you’d say no. Because it is immoral. But surely the whole point of morals is that they apply equally regardless of the people affected, if it’s wrong to take advantage of mispricing by a little old lady it’s also wrong to do the same against a large multi-national company, because it’s the act that is wrong not the victim. And if not, what is it that Tesco does that makes it ok to take advantage of their mistake, as I’m aware they’re a company that tries to provide you with cheap goods to save you money and keeps a lot of people in employment. Yes they make a profit, as all companies attempt to, but it’s not as if every tenth customer is shot in the kneecaps, or for every Clubcard point you earn, a live rabbit is dipped in a deep-fat fryer. One of the quotes in the newspaper was from a woman who said 'I only bought 42 as that's all they had on the shelves. I wish I asked for more, but then I'd be worried I would be banned, having bought all their stock.' – sounds like you think what you are doing is wrong doesn’t it? As otherwise why would Tesco ban you?

Of course this isn’t the first nor probably the last time something like this has happened. Every now and again we hear stories of people fighting in supermarket car parks over crates of beer accidentally being sold for £2, or huge queues forming at cash machines which have accidentally been dispensing twice the amount of cash people have been withdrawing. In our enlightened, civilized society, where we’ve reached some impressive moralistic heights it’s good to have your faith in humanity restored in the knowledge that should you make a mistake people will not point it out but instead queue up to take advantage of your cock up and milk you for every penny they can. Welcome to modern day Britain.

Oh and whilst we’re on the subject of supermarkets I was in the computer games and DVDs aisle (see I’ve spelt ‘aisle’ right this week) of Sainsbury’s recently when I saw this on one of the display cases:

Yes that’s right this computer game says on it “To buy me, please take me to the till.” – I’m sorry but what products in the store does this advice not apply to. Are all products without this label fair game to shove under your top and wander out of the store with? Not the Chocolate Oranges of course, you don’t want to miss out on the discount. Worse of all this ridiculous sign is on the one product in the store you can’t take to the till to buy. No, as I’ve found to my cost if you take this to till they will laugh in your face as if you’ve undertaken the most cretinous act in the world since The Daily Mail last wrote a headline. This item which proudly claims, that unlike all other items in the store you should go to the till with them, is lying. In fact you have to take it to the customer service desk where another more qualified member of staff will poor scorn on you using advancing techniques for having the audacity to ruin their day by expecting them to get the key and open the drawer with the computer games in. I’ve had a bad experience ok!

Cleaning Up Our Act

2011-10-14T07:31:00.009+01:00

I’ve got a question for you, one that I’m almost certain you won’t be able to answer. No not “Where are your house keys?” or “Why is it that people actually like listening to Chris Moyles?”, but something far more taxing. Ok, ready for your starter for ten?

“What is the name of the cleaner(s) in your office?”

An innocuous little question, but one that I’ll wager you probably can’t answer, I know I can’t. Oh and by the way it doesn’t count if you are the office cleaner, or you are their direct manager (in which case chances are you probably call them Scum A and Scum B anyway) – that’s cheating.

This problem was bought to the forefront of my mind when I was in Sainsbury’s the other day and heard the following announcement “Could the in-store cleaner please come to aisle four.”, two things initially sprang to my mind. One that something incredibly grim has occurred in aisle four hopefully involving a pot of Chicken Arrabbiata pasta sauce rather than a small child not making it to the in-store toilets in time – there’s something to put you of your purchase of HP Sauce. Secondly, was the fact that the cleaner wasn’t named, I’ve often heard calls for Steve, Shelia or whoever to come to the Customer Service Desk, or I’ve heard calls for generic people “could a manager come to the tills” for example. But in the above case we’re referring to “the in-store cleaner”, so presumably there is only one, therefore why doesn’t the person giving the announcement refer to them by name? Why are they just called in like some electronic slave? Although saying that in this case the in-store cleaner has been treated worse than an electronic slave, R2-D2 was always called R2-D2, he was never summoned with the phrase “Could the droid that looks like a kitchen bin on wheels grab his mop. Spillage in spacedock three”.

As an overly self-critical, slightly egocentric, madman these comments made me look inwards and examine my relationship with cleaners. I can only judge others when I have judged myself. Actually this is a lie, I’m almost certainly judging someone right now, probably you for reading this blog – don’t worry it’s a nice judgement (unless of course you’ve got those hideous piercings– you know the ones where you have your ear hole-punched. And then you gradually force the hole wider and wider with a ring until you can hang a towel through it. In that case I am judging you. And I’m judging you as a moron). Anyway back to the point, and I realised I don’t know the names of any of the cleaners in the office building where I work, in fairness much like the Tooth Fairy and rapists they tend to work in the wee hours when I’m not in the building. But occasionally due to unfortunate “excrement thrown in the air-conditioning” disasters I’ve had to work in these obscene hours and thus have seen them. Yet I have no idea of their names. We’ve never even engaged in anything approaching conversation, admittedly this is probably not unusual. I often avoid conversation with people, as they often avoid conversation with me. But in this case it feels somewhat disturbing – they don’t even know I’m the kind of tedious person not worth talking to. Of course there are other people in the office I’ve pretty much never spoken to, but I have an idea on their names or I’d at least be happy to ask them their names should the need for contact arise. But not cleaners, for some reason I don’t feel there’s a need to know their names. Which is not only rude and unfair, but also odd because of all the people in the office they are one of the most critical if the manager of such and such a department didn’t come in I probably wouldn’t notice, if the cleaner didn’t come in I’d notice within seconds when I discovered the office kitchen looks like a student bedroom that’s been inhabited by fifteen boys all manically studying for their final year exams who have yet to discover the joys of bin bags or washing-up liquid.

In fairness it’s not always easy, I’ve noticed (with the cleaners that I’ve worked with anyway) that they seem to have an inbuilt repulsion to engaging in conversation – more so than the usual repulsion of conversation that people have with me you understand. But they seem to have had the mantra beaten into them, that somehow they are second class citizens and everyone else who works in the company they work for must be treated like royalty. I think they’re taught this at the same place that anyone who appears on Britain’s Got Talent is taught that the judges must be screamed at and respected at all times as if they represent the reincarnation of the Messiah (which for the avoidance of doubt Amanda Holden certainly doesn’t). For example early in the morning the cleaners often use the lift, if it stops and as they board they find I’m already in it, they apologise to me. Why? Who the hell do they think I am? They clearly have far higher esteem of me, than I do.

Of course, they’re perfectly welcome to travel in the lift with me. I always reply with “It’s fine”, but they still sheepishly board the lift as if the knowledge they’ve just accidentally thrown up in the managing director’s face. If I’m in the kitchen and they walk in to clean it, again they will apologise to me – despite the fact that I’m clearly the one in the way, they’ve come in extra early to clean so they don’t disturb the other residents of the building and I’ve rudely come in at this god-forsaken hour and thrown their plans into chaos, yet they still apologise to me. It makes no sense, unless they revere me as some kind of hair gel based God, which actually still doesn’t make any sense - but does give me an amusing image of myself sitting on a throne entirely constructed of VO5 tubs. It floats my boat, ok?

Perhaps the answer as to why the office cleaners consider themselves beneath us all lies in the way they are managed. In a previous job, in a supermarket as it happens (yes once upon a time I had to work in the lower classes too!), again I didn’t know the name of any of the cleaners. I did however know the name of the manager of the cleaners, who was perfectly nice… when she spoke to myself and other members of staff. When she spoke to the cleaners, (when she thought we were out of earshot) she screamed absolute blue murder at them – like a satanic version of Jeremy Kyle, without the reassuring knowledge that at any point you can save yourself and switch over to BBC One. This combined with the fact the cleaners were given their own staff “room” (read hovel) and weren’t allowed to use the normal staffroom – is probably enough to give anyone a complex about being a second class citizen. Well that and earning less money an hour than the average set of “weigh yourself scales” on Brighton seafront.

So my call to action for you to is to get to know your cleaner, say hi, learn their name, go for a drink with them, invite them round for dinner. Who knows they might even whiz the vacuum round for you? Ok so we both know it’s never going to happen, but at least by thinking you probably should do it, you can alleviate some of the guilt faced when you next hear the announcement “Could the in-store cleaner please come to aisle four.”. Or alternatively be an uncaring bastard, that works for me too.

Speaking of “uncaring bastards”, sadly I am forced to briefly turn my attention to The X Factor, I know I lured you in with high class philosophical debate in the earlier part of this blog, I can only apologise. I tried my best to avoid it, but sadly I became subject to a portion of this weekend’s show, not all of it you understand, else I wouldn’t have had time to live my life, write this blog, or even get washed. Two and half hours!! I mean seriously! Who can stand it? Especially given it feels like a hell of a lot longer. Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity states that time appears to pass more slowly for an observer who is stationary. I can only presume that during the average edition of The X Factor I become frozen in the exact spot I was sitting, with even the movement of the tiniest molecules in my body completely curtailed thus forcing me to sit through the maximum possible duration of the programme. I mean perhaps if the programme makers had made the programme slightly shorter than an eternity, it would have actually been physically possible for Simon Cowell to appear in both the US and the UK versions without having to violate the laws of time. And after two and half hours, is there really anyone who can stomach the thought of “turning over for more with The Xtra Factor” – seriously are you on some kind of suicide pact?

Fortunately I only caught the result show, of which approximately 75% is a recap consisting of pretty much all of the original show bar the advert breaks. But this week the “big twist” was the fact that rather than us voting, the judges were each forced to evict one of their own acts. The Sun said “X Factor contestants and judges wept last night as four acts were dumped from the show live on air in shockingly brutal scenes.” Shockingly brutal, really? I don’t remember that bit, were the losers savaged by a pack of wolves unleashed by Caroline Flack over on ITV2? In which case I’m disappointed I didn’t turn over to The Xtra Factor. Obviously these “shockingly brutal scenes” were completely different to the previous week’s exceptionally similar scenes where multiple acts were also jettisoned from the show by individual judges – but as it happened in the sunshine it’s clearly not brutal (despite them being thousands of miles away from the support of any family and friends, unlike in the studio). Even poor old Dermot was shocked as Digital Spy reported “O'Leary described the changes to the opening live show as the "worst thing we've ever done",”. Conveniently forgetting the fact The X Factor has previously mocked the mentally ill, exploited children as young as 14 by entering them in the show and worst of all given birth to Chico – an act for which surely everyone involved in the entire production should rot in hell for, for all eternity as penance.

Thankfully unlike pretty much everyone else on the planet, I’ve managed to maintain my sense of perspective by remembering it’s only a bloody reality show – these people would probably have been voted off anyway, and harsh as the “big twist” is, the only purpose it’s really served is to save a lot of morons a fortune in telephone voting. That and I’d say that anyone who goes on the show deserves what they get, but perhaps it was the only way to escape the commands of “Could the in-store cleaner please come to aisle four”, in which case who can blame them for wanting to escape that?

Anyway I’m off to wash my mouth out with soap and water for discussing The X Factor – again my heartfelt condolences.

Enforced enjoyment of the sunshine is just the first step to totalitarianism.

2011-10-05T07:17:00.003+01:00

Unless you’ve been on holiday somewhere much colder, like the Mediterranean, you probably noticed that the civilized parts of the UK (sorry Scotland) were bathed in unseasonable sunshine this weekend. It was sticker than on Peter Stringfellow’s leather sofa, as we broke the record for the all-time hottest day in October. Well done us.

In addition to the rather bizarre sight of sunbathers being buried in the fall of autumn leaves, and birds wondering around scratching the heads and checking the date on their tickets to fly south for the winter, every moron in the country rushed to tell us how “if this is what global warming does, count me in”. As if the collapse of the planet-wide ecosystem is some how a reasonable price to pay for them to be wearing their three-quarter length linen chinos in late September. I should imagine that if the greenhouse effect does go unchecked and the Earth bakes in 60 degree heat, that at the very moment the wave from the final melted piece of the Antarctic rushes to flood the last vestige of un-submerged land, said island will be covered in thousands of scantily clad humans all thinking “what a lovely January we’re having” as their untimely death rushes towards them. On the plus side the mass starvation that global warming induced total crop failure will have caused will at least mean you finally fit into that bikini.

The problem I find with hot weather, seasonal or otherwise, is there seems to be an inordinate amount of social pressure to “make the most of the weather”. But what exactly does that mean? I found that throughout the weekend and Monday people were asking me if “I’d spent all the day in the sun?” with the tone of the questioning strongly implying that to say anything other than yes would make stupider than the person who had the idea for “Don’t Scare the Hare” (Saturday early afternoons BBC One – bring a trowel so you can gouge your own eyes out). Don’t get me wrong I did venture out of the house at the weekend briefly, but I find it odd the assumption that I have to go outside and soak up every last ray of light like a cold-blooded lizard that’s about to be taken on a six month expedition into the darkest depths of hell (or Croydon as cartographers prefer to name it). Yes we don’t get glorious sunny days that often, but we don’t get hurricanes that often, and I wouldn’t go and stand in the path of a Force 10 gale and get blown down the street just to “make the most of it because there won’t be another one until May”.

Of course the difference is sunshine tends to be both nicer and less likely to flatten you under an upturned ice cream van than a hurricane. But what are you supposed to go and do outside, if like me you happen to be on your own. No I’m not just talking about my fatal allergy to forming a meaningful relationships with a partner; I mean the fact that my flatmate and everyone who lives nearby had better things to do this weekend than spend it with me. Am I supposed to find an excuse to go it alone alfresco? Needlessly coming up with something productive that I could do outdoors on my own like a solar-powered loner?

Ok, so I could go sunbathing but whilst that’s ok to do on your own in a garden, it feels a bit odd in a public space alone. Won’t everyone be judging me going “look at the loner”? In fairness those people don’t matter as I don’t know them, and I’ve freely told everyone I know on this blog that I am a loner. So given that, you’d think I wouldn’t be bothered. But I am. Groups of happy people, enjoying all the things that are alien to me, like social interaction and laughter.

Besides where do you go to sunbathe? The minute there’s even the faintest glimmer of sunshine in London every single public space is carpeted in people within about 20 seconds. Clapham Common this weekend just looked like a giant ocean of undulating flesh. Which in reality is about as attractive as that simile makes it sound. I suppose on the plus side for a lone sunbather like myself, it’s so crowded that wherever you sit you appear to be with a group, all you need to do is occasionally laugh at something someone says and the illusion is complete. On a serious note though, where do all these people come from? I mean I have never seen so many people in Clapham ever, are all these people living in hibernation until the one day a year when the sun actually shines. Or is literally every house and public building in the capital empty, surely good weather is a burglar’s paradise what with empty homes and windows wedged open for ventilation – well it would be if they weren’t also on Clapham Common slapping on the factor 10, that they stole from Boots. I mean did I miss the new legislation that it is illegal to be indoors on a sunny day? Presumably that’s the reason why no one bothers to build houses in the suntrap that is the Sahara.

Of course there are other pitfalls of solo sunbathing, in your garden you can always pop in for refreshments, books or sun cream. Not so in public sunbathing, you’ve got to bring everything with you, and then eat it or drink it within 10 seconds of arrival before it turns to melted mush (not the books and sun cream you understand). Without a fellow sunbather you can’t even nip to the ice cream van without losing your spot, and don’t whatever you do leave your stuff to reserve your space – remember all the burglars are out sunbathing too. And what happens if you need the loo, you just have to do it in situ and hope that onlookers presume that any unfortunate stains are the result of melted choc ices. Then of course there’s the fact that at least one other person within ear shot of wherever you choose to lay on whatever public space you do it at, will decide that this is the perfect opportunity for them to become a DJ. They’ll be pumping out heavy base “tunes” faster than Theresa May pumps out b****cks about cats and asylum seekers. And, much like Theresa, whatever noise they make you’re guaranteed to hate it. I mean no one ever played out a nice episode of Just a Minute whilst in the park; instead we get music whose heavy dull beat is designed to penetrate into the deepest synapses of your ear and shake all the wax loose. When you get up they’ll be two piles of orange residue either side of your head, it’ll look like a freak accident where both David Dickenson and Dale Winton melted in the sun at exactly the same moment.

Plus, of course, there’s the sporty types (read w***ers) playing with their football, discus or bat and ball set, for some reason the former is always the most annoying. Who will then proceed to smack you in the face with the ball before apologising as they trample all over with you whilst wearing studded boots in order not to “interrupt play”. Still you’ve got to love the beautiful game, or perhaps NOT. And finally there’s of course the people who feel that clothes aren’t really for them, yes it’s hot, and whilst we don’t mind short sleeves and shorts, walking around with more oil on you than John Prescott’s chip pan and in pants so tiny that if they were televised they’d disappear between the pixels on the screen is a bit too much. If you haven’t got the body for that look you really shouldn’t be trying it on grounds of taste and decency, and if you have got the body then stop making all the rest of us feel inferior. There’s nothing quite as soul destroying when you’ve got a body so vile that taking a bath makes you nauseous, as seeing the modern day Adonis wondering the streets half naked. And before people rush to my defence and say “don’t worry you’re not that fat” as I’m sure you were about too (rather rude if not), it’s not the fact that my torso is fat. But more that it has absolutely no contours, it just looks like a bland lump of fat that’s been sliced off from a mound of nondescript flesh in preparation to be moulded in some dark genetic experiment – much like that old school ice cream you used to get in long cardboard boxes and just hacked slabs off for dessert.

And they say I have issues?

Still sunbathing is not the only thing you can ruin your day doing in the sun, yeah that’s right you can also ruin your day by going swimming in an outdoor pool. The problem is you won’t be the only person with that idea; the pool will be so crowded that your “swimming experience” will be much like standing on a packed Victoria line train during an unfortunate flash flood (where all the passengers happened to be wearing their undergarments… yeah ok the comparison sort of breaks down there). The other problem being that despite this being a typically freezing cold country, no one seems to have worked on the idea of the outdoor heated pool. Thus the pool is typically so icy cold that stepping in it causes your genitalia to retract into your body so fast that you end up getting whiplash of the penis. Which is just as unpleasant as it sounds.

Then there’s the beach, which is basically the above but with pollution instead of chlorine and the joy of sitting through eight hours of tailbacks to get there. And if that wasn’t enough there’s the utter thrill of sand. All you have to do is catch sight of a beach for hundreds of thousands of grains of sand to get stuck up every orifice of your body. This is just the beginning of the most tedious game of hide and seek known to man as you then spend the next six months finding the grains of sand that accompanied you home in the most obscure of places in your house, you name it there’ll be sand there, from the bottom drawer of the freezer to the fuse box – sand will have got there.

So thanks but no thanks to all those who judge me for not going out and enjoying every moment of the sun, even when there’s no one to spend the day with. I think I’ve successfully argued my way into going against the sun-worshipping norm and embracing hermitage. Roll on winter, the season where it’s socially acceptable to be a loner and never leave the sofa.

P.S. This is the tenth week of my blogging, so thanks if you managed to stay with me all this time, much appreciated (I know it’s not been easy), and special thanks to those who leave comments, especially if you manage it every week - you know who you are!

If you haven’t already been, feel free to leave a comment below (I’ve changed the settings so you don’t have to submit an e-mail address if you’re worried about being spammed for ever more!), and you can subscribe to this blog and get it delivered directly to your inbox (much like spam) by shoving your e-mail in the box at the very bottom. And if you happen to understand Blogger software and can suggest any other cool features I can add, I’d love to hear from you.

Until next time…

For God’s sake whatever you do, don’t question Einstein!

2011-09-29T08:02:00.003+01:00

This week my blog is addressing those of you who managed to get slightly further into last week’s news than the ratings for X Factor USA. If this isn’t you, then A) you probably can’t read the last sentence without speaking out loud and asking an adult how to pronounce “addressing” – i.e. A Sun reader. And B) this week’s blog isn’t really for you, I’ll let you off reading, but just this week.

The rest of you, (one reader), may have seen that it was announced last week that Einstein’s theory, the one that states that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, may be incorrect. DON’T LOG OFF, THIS IS IMPORTANT – PAY ATTENTION!

The news story widely reported in the media was that Einstein’s theory was in “tatters” due to new research at Cern – you remember Cern the giant particle accelerator under Switzerland that the newspapers said was going to create a black hole and destroy the Earth in probably the worst example of media scaremongering ever recorded since The News of the World alleged that Margaret Thatcher was going to do a strip tease for Comic Relief (that didn’t happen by the way, except now in your mind where it will continue to happen all day, think of all those saggy wrinkles! Sorry!). Anyway the truth of the matter is slightly different; basically scientists at Cern discovered that neutrinos (tiny particles smaller than Piers Morgan’s charisma) managed to travel around the ring slightly faster than the speed of light. However said scientists have pretty much said they expect something has gone wrong, and they’ve probably made a mistake – they just haven’t a clue what, so they’re asking the scientific community to take a look. It’s a bit like when you get stuck on the last clue of the crossword when an earlier spelling error has almost certainly balls-ed it all up, and you’re now desperately passing it round the family for scrutiny. So there we go, I can exclusively reveal that there is probably no big news, probably no mistake and probably Einstein’s correct (albeit not on the appropriate use of hair styling products).

Incidentally those of you wondering why nothing can travel faster than the speed of the light, it’s because…, well…, errr… well actually it’s just like… put simply… well… it just is, ok?! Stop being inquisitive and questioning everything, you’ll drive us all mad.

The reason I talk of this topic is, as some of you may or may not know, that I have a physics background. Yes beneath this young, good looking, boyish exterior known throughout the children’s television sector (stop laughing), exists a university trained physicist. At this point most people ask “What went wrong?” in a tone that seems to imply the only way they can fathom that I could have gone from physics to children’s television must involve being thrown out of the scientific community after being caught performing some kind of indecent act whilst in charge of an electron microscope. That didn’t happen, no I entered the world of children’s television through choice. A choice that for the most part I don’t regret, admittedly the times when I’ve been staring at unemployment have made me wonder why I didn’t pursue a boring career that no one else wanted, but in fairness anyone whoever visits the Job Centre must surely be forced to question their entire reason for being. Whilst wondering if they’ve actually wandered into The Jeremy Kyle Show green room.

The problem however is that as time marches on my slender grip of understanding on the physics world is slowly crumbling. Assaulted on all sides, by the ever increasing passage of time, since this knowledge was last used properly, and by pure old age my scientific superpowers are slowly ebbing away. Retreating faster than a glacier in Jeremy Clarkson’s garden. Once upon a time I could derive all of Maxwell’s Equations of Electromagnetism now I walk into room and forget why I entered in the first place. Once I could express the sine function as a series of exponential terms now I look at the computer screen and have no idea how to open a Word document. At the rate my brainpower is decaying by the age of 42 I’ll struggle to be able to dress myself, capable only of operating the till at Morrison’s or working as a Capital FM disc jockey. Often it feels as if I’ve forgotten more than I’ve actually ever learnt, though that would imply I actually now have a negative amount of useful knowledge. Which is much like how regular Closer magazine readers must feel.

I’m not sure how much my current career choice can be blamed for this, in fairness it’s certainly inhibited my language skills as it turns out I need a much smaller vocabulary for conversational English than I do for scientific papers. I now use “cos” primarily as a contraction for “because” rather than to stand for the mathematical function cosine, and I am not sure this is a good development.

Given all this general degradation of my mental capacity you can imagine how I now feel about the thought that I all the physics I learnt in the first place was actually wrong. It may seem like an interesting page three story in the Metro, but the possibility that the fundamentals of Einstein’s theory of relativity might actually be wrong has very broad ramifications for my social standing (and what could be more important). For starters should I ever wish to return to the physics community the stigma that I was trained in the pre-“Einstein was a fraud” era isn’t going to help me one iota. A bit like taking a break from driving during the horse-drawn carriage era only to return to the motor car – you end up looking a bit like the village idiot / average Britain’s Got Talent auditionee. Secondly, and most importantly this knowledge bursts my smug superiority bubble no longer can I swan away around the office / flat / local branch of Sainsbury’s with an air of self-righteousness based on the fact that I know more about physics than the average pleb, all I know now is a load of theories that turned out to be wrong. Like a conspiracy theorists only 175% less interesting. ( I should point out that obviously all my colleagues will be replying to this blog shortly to confirm that I am only joking about the being smug in the office bit, won’t you guys? Guys?... Guys!).

If it were up to me, we’d leave Einstein’s Theories alone, what does it matter if they don’t really work? The Bakerloo line doesn’t really work and people still use that, why are we picking on poor old Einstein. I mean blowing the myth that the world was flat didn’t really do anything for us, except make long haul flying and thus airline food a reality – and I don’t think that is progress. So what if Einstein made a mistake, we all do, look at Pat Sharp’s hair, and ITV’s documentaries – doesn’t mean we need to rewrite the laws of physics. Let’s just live in blissful ignorance, in a world where people happen to think I’m clever, what’s wrong with that? We’re never going to know everything, so let’s stick with this scenario. In fact stop teaching science to children at all, let’s keep this knowledge to ourselves, so that when I’m 84 and alone in a home I’ll be revered as an oracle rather than waiting for someone to come and change my urine-stained bed sheets.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to forget all about thermodynamics and write another poo joke – you’ve got to love career development.

Terror, available freely for NHS patients on the High Street

2011-09-22T22:52:00.001+01:00

If you usually Facebook to find updates on my blog, well done on getting this far! Cinderella apparently couldn’t find it, and it all got too much…

…as I discovered on a walk near my house this week. Sorry children if you’re reading, it probably wasn’t a painful death!

What Cinderella clearly needed was a stay-cation, for those of you not wanky enough to know what a stay-cation is, it’s basically where you take a vacation but stay at home. Stay-cations are excellent for those people without any friends or loved ones to go on holiday with, step forward me. One advantage of the stay-cation is that you can get all manner of things done. You know all the things that you really should get done in the weekend, but can always far more frivolous things to do and thus put them off. Leaving tasks like sorting out your house, cleaning the bathroom and finding a purpose to your life all undone for weeks on end. A stay-cation can be perfect because it gives you an opportunity to get these done, primarily because you run out of things to put them off with after seven days. Obviously I didn’t get any of these things done, what with having the attention span of an attention-deficient child who has just been fed a skip filled entirely with sherbet dip.

Rather than doing any of those important tasks I decided instead to go and give my body a full MOT. I managed to go to the doctors, dentists and opticians all in the same day. A list of activities that can feel even the bravest man with fear. Often it depends what you are going in for, as to which of these is going to be the most scary. Obviously if you’ve got an entire volume of Encyclopaedia Britannica wedged firmly up your arse then I’m guessing that the doctors will top the fear list, that and you’ve probably recently been banned from the popular reference section of your local library.

However typically the dentist tops people’s list of terror, for some unknown reason the thought of someone boring into your mouth with Channel Tunnel drilling equipment whilst charging you an amount somewhere in the region of Greece’s national debt for the privilege, isn’t top on people’s to-do list. I have to say I never really had a big problem with the dentist; my top reason for not going is laziness. Despite this I finally made it in, during my stay-cation allowing someone to poke around in my mouth like a squirrel searching for where it buried it’s nuts made of plaque. Turned out I needed a filling, now don’t judge (I know I do when I hear someone’s had to have fifteen teeth removed, invariably telling you as the down a six-pack of Coca-Cola), but I didn’t need a new filling, an old one had broken. In fact my teeth are doing better than the fillings, I’ve got enough dental floss coming out my mouth to string up the Blackpool Illuminations. So there Mr or Mrs Judgmental.

I’ve never been that bothered by the drilling part of the dentist, largely because the provision of anaesthetic generally counters my primary objection to a fully operational dolls’ house scale set of power tools being operated in my mouth. Though I must admit the angle grinder attachment that comes out to sand down the finished teeth is a little disconcerting and if anything feels like a little too much craftsmanship. My main objection to the dentist is the vacuum cleaner like hose that is inserted into your mouth to presumably suck up flying bits of tooth, gum or tongue that occurs during the construction work. The sensation of a high powered suction pump pull air at force ten gale speeds through your teeth is probably one of the most unpleasant things I’ve ever experienced. It’s like having your tongue extracted by a Henry Hoover without the reassurance that at least it can offer you a dam good blow job when it’s finished.

Bit much? Sorry.

On this particular visit, the experience was not helped by the fact that the operator of said “Suction Tube of Death^TM” was a ruthlessly efficient German woman, who never once raised her surgical face mask and only ever replied to any statement with the word “Yah”. She showed approximately 5% more personality than the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica or about 150% more personality than Piers Morgan for those requiring a reference other than Battlestar Galactica.

However for me, it’s not the dentist that evokes the greatest sense of dread as I walk down the High Street, no it’s the opticians. Don’t agree? Well I ask you this, which of these sounds most like the goings on in an underground government torture facility, having your teeth drilled into whilst under anaesthetic, OR having metal frames strapped to your head whilst an array of powerful lights is shinned into the deepest recesses of your eyes and you’re ordered to recite a jumbled list of pointless letters off the wall. See. On the gates of Guantanamo Bay there’s a sign that reads “twinned with Dollond & Aitchison, Swansea Branch”.

My regular opticians is Boots the Opticians whose tagline, coincidentally, is Should Have Gone to Specsavers, this has been earned to the general haphazard nature of the service provided. It’s not that any, ok not that many, of the front line staff I’ve met haven’t been anything other than pleasant and competent. It’s just that they’re invariably always reporting on some calamitous disaster that has happened behind the scenes, like the inadvertent fitting of the lenses of the Hubble Space Telescope into my new glasses during the manufacture or accidentally placing of next month’s contact lenses in the eyes of a passing badger. It’s almost like the head office is being run by the Chuckle Brothers, ably assisted by Jedward as their PAs. In fairness they clearly employ clever mind-reading staff though, as every time they detect me wavering and considering moving to another optician, they offer me a discount and suddenly it all becomes right again. It turns out I am happy to trust my eye care to a bunch of cretins who couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery, even if the instructions were written in a chart of decreasing font size on the wall, so long as they offer me a hefty discount.

For those of you who, unlike me, weren’t blessed with the optical strength of a rusty teaspoon at birth, and therefore would have at least a decent chance of reproducing were the government to reintroduce survival of the fittest as a policy again, you might not be familiar with the journey to hell (on a rail replacement bus service) that a typical visit to the opticians represents. First up you’re seen by assistant, rather than an optician, it’s their job to operate on you with the shop’s latest torture devices. Previous examples include the device which blasts a jet of high pressure air directly into your eyeball to see what reaction this produces. Invariably it causes me to flail around uncontrollably until I punch the assistant in the face, at which point they usually stop. This time the latest device of mass destruction was a piece of equipment designed to provide an exceptionally detailed photograph of the back of the eye. Which it captures, apparently, by detonating a naval grade distress flare approximately two nanometres from the surface of your eyeball, the resulting flash of light being enough to stun a fully grown African Elephant. Still all these escapades pail in comparison to the time when I was given drops to open the pupils of my eyes for an in depth examination. I was told the drops took about thirty minutes to kick in, but it was an exceptionally hot day, and the air conditioning in the waiting room had broken so the helpful optometrist suggested I go for a browse down the High Street. Approximately twenty minutes later at the height of the midday sun, my pupils opened to their maximum aperture on a permanent basis. Thus causing me to have walk back to the opticians in absolute agony, shielding my face as best from the sun as possible, whilst forcing my eyelids to go against their every natural desire and stay open in the blinding sunlight. I had so many tears streaming down my face I looked like a pre-pubescent teenage girl who’d just heard that Take That had broken up.

Those who survive the first round of pain, which feels like it’s been closely modelled on the first round of Total Wipeout, are then allowed into the optician’s examination room, a Santa’s grotto of torture equipment decorated with cross-sections of the human eye. Although worryingly my opticians has now started doubling up doing hearing tests, so this time round I had to sit next to a fully annotated diagram of the ear. Which given the usual competence of Boots the Opticians lead me to worry that someone might try and fit a hearing aid under my right eyelid. However there’s no time to panic, as instead a giant metal arm swings round to pin you into the Mastermind style chair. The opticians then proceeds to shine a blinding light into your eyes whilst commanding you to look left, look up, look down and blink on command as they invade your personal space. After five minutes of this they ask if you ever experience sore eyes or see flashing lights, “YES” straight after you decided to blind me for a laugh. Next up they proceed to cover one of your eyes whilst showing you the traditional optometrist chart depicting the letters of various sizing. Unfortunately despite having the modern technology required to actually project the chart on the wall, most opticians appear to have only one set of letters, meaning the examination of the second eye simply becomes a memory puzzle to see how much you remember from the previous eye.

After all these you are presented with your prescription, which unlike an NHS prescription costs a dam sight more than £7.40 when they utter the immortal line “you need new glasses”. Yes, because if it wasn’t enough to be born blind enough to mistake a hat stand for your parents, over the next twenty years of your life your eyesight will deteriorate faster than the Liberal Democrats opinion poll.

Choosing glasses is always a horrid affair fraught with danger, even if you have contact lenses you’re probably going to need to spend a good proportion of the next few years of your life with these glasses proudly displayed on your nose for all to see. There aren’t many facial features you get to choose, and the process of choosing glasses proves that in most cases you’re better off sticking with nature’s lottery – unless of course you’re me and you look like you were constructed by a deprived child using the Halloween Edition of Mr Potato Head. Unlike a t-shirt which can be subtly placed at the bottom of a drawer after a few wears once the realisation sets in that you’ve made a bad choice, glasses that turn out to be a rash purchase remind you of their existence for a long time to come, unless you’re prepared to shell out a three figure sum for another set. This can be where it’s a good idea to take a friend with your for honest advice, though don’t take a wise guy joker as you’ll probably end up looking like Deidre from Coronation Street’s less fashionable cousin.

Of course if you don’t want to pay a fortune you can always ask for NHS glasses, provided of course you can convince them you’re a small child. At this point a secret drawer will be opened up beneath the lush display cabinets of glasses, the inside will be filthy and its contents will look like a lost property cupboard in a school populated by only those with no taste. I don’t see how it’s any cheaper to make glasses that look as bad as these glasses actually do; in fact I suspect extra money has been spent to make them look hideous. I think the deal is that if you want the rest of the tax paying community to pay for your eyesight that’s fine, so long as you’re prepared to go around with pieces of plastic strapped to your face that look like they would survive orbital re-entry to give everyone who has paid for them a good laugh.

Sadly at the young age when I first needed glasses, my parents had a different philosophy. They firmly believed that if you’re going to wear glasses you should be proud of this fact and wear the biggest and boldest rimmed spectacles you find, much like Dame Edna Everage, except without the comic irony. Effectively they paid to put me in NHS glasses, as at that age my only aesthetic requirement was that they be blue. And maybe this one fact explains my true terror at the thought of revisiting the opticians.

Still with glasses like that it gave people something to laugh at other than my face, in some ways it was a welcome relief.

I told you there was something cheesy about the Queen.

2011-09-16T09:17:00.003+01:00

Regular readers of this blog will know that I lead a lonely and tedious life, with all the joy of a lifetime subscription to What Misery! magazine. Even Facebook e-mailed me this week to tell me it was giving up on our relationship and was going to stop e-mailing me in the future. Nice. So as I sit here in my bedroom relentless tapping at the keyboard like a woodpecker, only with 85% less purpose in their life, I’m alone. My flatmate’s down the gym, which is depressing, not just because I’m alone, but also because he’s put me to shame. All I’ve done today is waddle to the kitchen to get a cake. I didn’t even waddle back with the empty plate.

Anyway no longer, I’ve come up with a plan to turnaround my social fortunes and develop myself as an “internet celebrity”. It’s a plan so genius that even Professor Stephen Hawking would sit up and say “that’s genius” albeit in a robotic voice. Turns out the one of the most popular things on the internet at present are conspiracy theories, there’s a constant internet buzz around anything to do with conspiracy theories like flies swarming around a steaming turd or turds swarming around the News of the World phone hacking case. People are desperate to know any and all goings on to do with conspiracy, it’s like Heat Magazine but with all the pages covered with a scratch and sniff section made with crack cocaine. The plans is if I become the central authority on a conspiracy theory I’ll become an internet sensation and give my life some meaning.

Now I could simply join in with the existing conspiracy theories, but if I’m going to go with this plan, then I’m go for it 100%. And rather than competing to be a minor informant on an existing conspiracy theory I’m going to need to develop my own new exciting conspiracy theory, one which I can be the centre of all authority on. Sadly Delia Smith is yet to write her book on how to cook up a conspiracy theory, however having studied a number of the more popular theories I’ve worked out they all follow a similar pattern which hopefully I can replicate. As they said on the Hindenburg “What could go wrong?”.

Up first we need our central conspiracy, it needs to be easily expressed as a concise sentence, because let’s face it we need to lure in the simple gullible people first. Generally these conspiracy theories consist of saying something that we all think did happen, actually didn’t or that someone who we thought didn’t do something actually did. They’re bite-size statements that on the face of first glance seem ludicrous, but represent such epoch-shattering consequences if they turn out to be true that even people who don’t care, can’t help but take notice. Much like if you saw a newspaper report that Bobby Davro had died in a tragic blancmange making accident, you don’t really care, but you’d have to look just in case it contained a picture of his nose squished in a food blender or such like. So we need a central conspiracy theory hmmm…, I know:

The entire Royal Family is actually made from Dairylea.

It fits our plan; it’s both ludicrous sounding but potentially has far reaching consequence if it’s true. I mean imagine if it were true, would the entire United Kingdom constituency collapse? Would we have to replace our coins with Ritz crackers? And would lactose intolerant people demand we become a republic?

Of course there will be people who claim our theory is wrong, people say who’ve met the Queen or know a little bit about the science of creating artificial live from Dairylea Triangles. The beauty of a conspiracy theory is that we can just claim that they’re in on it. It doesn’t matter if these people have no rhyme nor reason to be involved in our conspiracy theory, the simple fact that they claim we’re wrong gives the whole theory gravitas.

Now we don’t need to prove that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is actually constructed from processed cheese, no bizarrely the thing with conspiracy theories is that the onus of proof lies with the doubters to prove that our conspiracy theory is wrong. However it helps if we can find some statements to back up our original accusation. Generally these statements aren’t evidence; they simply represent gaps where the evidence supporting the counter opinion (to the conspiracy theory) doesn’t quite meet. Gaps which in the real world would be covered by common sense. But we all know just like Danni Minogue there’s no room for common sense in our world any more. So for example if your partner (ewww I said partner in a non bitter sense, I feel quite queasy) wanders in with a cup of tea for you, common sense dictates they’ve made you a cup of tea. But did you see them make the tea? No! For all you know they boiled the water poured it down the sink and then pissed in a mug. You can’t be sure, and that’s what conspiracy theories rely on that element of doubt in the obvious. So here are my supporting statements to the theory that the Royal Family is in fact made from Dairylea, I’ll think you’ll find it hard to disagree:

1. The Queen always wears gloves; this is so she doesn’t leave a cheesy residue on any person she shakes hands with.

2. The Royal Family never travel together on the same aircraft; this is because there’s not enough space to keep them all in the fridge and stop them going off.

3. Licking a stamp tastes disgusting; much like licking Dairylea tastes disgusting.

4. The Queen wears a lot of silver in her crowns and robes; this is to keep her foil fresh, so she doesn’t start to whiff at state occasions.

There. Irrefutable facts in the fight to prove the truth about the Royal family.

Next up we need someone with some scientific kudos to support our cause. It doesn’t matter if the vast majority of scientists agree on the counter argument; just one crack point scientists opinion can cause a storm of controversy. Take global warming, all scientists agree it’s happening except one deranged man in his garden shed who is currently growing potatoes in the shape of Jedward. This one man’s opinion leads to worldwide doubt on whether the destruction of mankind is happening or not. Fortunately I have a scientific background, the fact that it is in physics and not in biology or cheese studies is not important (no one will check), so I’ll release a paper claiming I have proof the Royal Family is made from Dairylea. It doesn’t matter that it’s not scientifically accurate, as no scientist worth their salt will bother reading it, let alone refuting my claims.

The final thing we need is a reason for this conspiracy, a perpetrator if you will. Like all good pantomimes we need a villain, Cinderella has the Ugly Sisters, the X Factor has Tulisa’s stylist. And this conspiracy needs a villain too, politicians are an easy choice as people find it completely believable that they’re actually the devil incarnate – well have you seen the way Peter Mandelson looks? So we’ll say that Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg stuffed the real Royal Family into an airing cupboard in Wolverhampton, and had them all replaced with Dairylea clones – except the Duke of Edinburgh who he had recreated in feta cheese. This way he could divert all the money spent on the Royal Family to buy a giant teddy bear so he could hug away the pain.

There a fully crafted conspiracy theory, that everyone will be contacting me about to find out the latest developments. It doesn’t matter that I’ve ruined the memories or the achievements of other people, or that I’ve distracted from the real and important issues that actually matter in our world. Because in the end all that’s important is creating a hubbub of activity about nothing to feel my and others boring and meaningless lives.

So go on spread the news, the Royal Family is made from Dairylea (or spread the Royal Family on your crackers). The authorities will of course deny it, but that’s what they would say.

30 Reasons to take Cyanide

2011-09-08T09:06:00.001+01:00

The number thirty is currently rushing towards me like a judge asked to pin a rosette on the winner of the Ugliest Face competition (that childhood memory still hurts). Yeah sadly I am significantly closer to thirty than twenty, about nine years five months if I’m being honest. No matter what age you are, you always poor scorn on people younger than you moaning about their age. I truly understand that if you’re reading this on the cusp of turning forty, fifty or sixty plus, you’ll find my annoyances at turning thirty tiresome. But I think the point of what I am saying will strike a chord with whatever age you are, unless of course you’re not bothered about your age – in which case you must be young, and on behalf of everyone else reading this let me just say “We hate you, with a passion you can’t even imagine!”.

As a complete aside, what does one do to celebrate their 30^th birthday? A drink down the pub seems a bit under ambitious, but then a trip to Centre Parks seems like the kind of thing that would mean you end up spending your birthday alone. Perhaps I should go on my last (and coincidentally first) 18-30 holiday, or then again perhaps not?

What bothers me about turning thirty is not the number per se, but the fact that at thirty you are supposed to look back at your life and take stock at your wonderful accomplishments. Oh dear…, it’s a bit like looking at a mantelpiece covered in all of the music industry’s awards to Chico, it feels rather bare shall we say. So I’ve completely tried to avoid thinking about it. This plan would have worked until my flatmate decided to shove a copy of the Evening Standard under my nose, the Evening Standard is a good newspaper if you ignore the fact that it’s hideously overpriced and deeply depressing. This is without the fact that this particular edition contained an article entitled “30 things to do before you’re 30”. Suffice us to say my flatmate’s actions provoked the kind of response you’d expect to get if you repeatedly poke a lion in the eye with a stick.

For those of you who fancy a look, you must either be nowhere near thirty or have a death wish, here’s a link to the article:

30 Things To Do Before You're 30

In case you do look at the online version, I should point out that in the actual print version it’s laid out in such a way that on seeing the headline you go straight to the numbered list rather than reading the introductory paragraphs in which the author explains that your thirties are much better than your twenties and that you shouldn’t worry about completing the list or not. By the time I read this disclaimer it was too late, the damage was done.

So let’s have a look at this long list (I didn’t decide there should be 30 things in it, don’t blame me) and see what I’ve accomplished:

1. Buy a Property – If by “property” you mean packet of crisps and a 15 tog duvet (things that arguably are your “property”) then I have achieved this. Otherwise have you seen the prices of houses?! I’ve got more chance of owning a Nobel Peace Prize.

2. Have a Baby (if you’re a woman) & 3. Avoid having a Baby (if you’re a man) – First of all this is cheating, as by putting these as two separate things you cannot possibly achieve all thirty. Unless of course you’ve had a sex change from a woman after having a still birth, and to be honest that doesn’t feel like an achievement you should be celebrating. In fairness I have achieved number 3, but given last week’s blog this doesn’t really feel like an “achievement”, more an outcome of being hideous.

4. Live Abroad – No. Why would you want to live abroad? It’s hard enough making friends without going somewhere where you neither know anyone nor know the language. This is not for the social recluse that I am.

5. Build Your Brand – Essentially this is the new wankerish trend to be top of Google when you search for yourself, have over 1,000 Twitter followers and get regular comments on your blog. I think you’ll find by scouring these pages the later has not been achieved. You can also tell by reading this blog I have nothing worth tweeting. And also there’s an Irish folk singer with the name “Matt Cunningham” who rudely keeps topping Google over me.

6. Leave Home – Ok, so I’ve achieved this one. But beyond your early twenties you have to stop living with your parents, as it becomes too depressing. It’s like looking into a mirror that shows the future. It slowly dawns on you that your inescapable fate is to become your parents as you see their traits develop in you, but worse still (and this is the terrifying part) you realise you’re going to have all the annoying habits of both your mother and your father – yay for genetics. Leaving home and not thinking about this is the only way to stay sane.

7. Look After the Pennies – This one’s all about savings, but unfortunately there’s no criteria on how much you should have saved (how you can have any money saved if you’ve achieved item #1 on the list is another matter). I’m going to say tick, as I have at least £100 in the bank, and that’s a lot more than the UK Government.

8. Drop Out – Meaning leave your boring 9-5 job. Are you mad? It may be boring, but how can I have all these savings, leave home, move abroad, buy a house and support or not support a baby, if I’ve decided to give up my job and live of the profits of Bring & Buy sales like some tedious Blue Peter appeal?

9. Co-Habit – Yes I have managed to achieve this, but the person I’m co-habiting with gave me this damned article in the first place, so I don’t think that worked out!

10. Have a Threesome or Moresome – Some of us are still struggling with Twosomes thank you very much.

11. Own a Designer Handbag – This is random, I have no idea why this is in the article. The closest I come to this is that I own designer clothes, if by designer you include Burtons Menswear. Guess that’s a no then.

12. Grow a Pair – Balls not breasts here, and no we’re not talking about sex changes again, but sticking up for yourself. Given I spend most of my day, hiding in the corner trying to avoid making eye contact with anyone (regardless of whether I know them or not – especially if I know them), I suspect this is a no.

13. Always wear Sunscreen – Technically no, as I’m not wearing it now. But have you seen outside? It looks like deepest winter… on Pluto, when did summer happen? But having managed to achieve some rather unpleasant comedy sunburns over my life, I suspect this is still a no.

14. Dump the Debt – Pay off your student debt. Sadly I don’t happen to have a five-figure cash sum cluttering up my bedroom, so sadly this is impossible. Though maybe I’ll pop it on my credit card, no mention of clearing credit card debts in this article so clearly that’s a far more sensible thing to do. I don’t think so.

15. Build Up Your Black Book – Have a good list of contacts. “Networking” is one of the most disturbing terms in the English language, just behind “floating shelves” (which are not natural and should be burnt). The idea of meeting people and convincing them I’m worth knowing is making me feel quite, quite ill.

16. Drop Your Last E – Nothing to do with spelling your name this one, all to do with giving up drugs. Sadly I haven’t even got round to starting yet (I’m that much of a failure), so I can’t tick this one off. Instead I’m planning to work my way up from soft drugs to harder substances so I can then give up. I’m currently working on caffeine – I know call me crazy.

17. Be a Fashion Victim – Now I am the master of unfashionable, what’s wrong with slippers? But fashion victim is all about being too fashionable and that has never happened, and has no danger of happening now I’ve caught myself looking at clothes in shops and going “it’s nice, but it’s just not practical”. Depressing isn’t it.

18. Heal a Broken Heart – Have a fully functioning, sanity-restoring relationship. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! I’d take that as a “no”.

19. Get Married – Seriously? You’re even asking?

20. Take it to the Extreme – Take up some kind of extreme sport. Problem with being me is that I have an acute fear of everything (see last month’s blog about the London Riots), which makes crossing the road away from a designated crossing an extreme sport. The thought of bungee jumping off a mountain, is about as appealing as becoming Ann Widdicombe’s sexual partner, and no she is certainly not going to be involved in item #10.

21. Write A Book – Who on earth would publish what I’ve written? Few enough read what I’ve written. It’s only due to the true marvel of the internet than anyone can write any old tosh online, that I get away with any writing at all.

22. Know Who Your Friends Are – This is a hard one to tick off, it’s all about finding your true friends. But friendship is ever evolving, in my case my current acquaintances are gradually working out what I’m really like so I having to trick new people into liking me without realising what I’m really like at the same rate to maintain the status quo.

23. Learn to Cook – Ok so I can do this one. But it doesn’t really feel like the coolest thing on the list. When you’re weighing up whipping up a cottage pie against having a threesome, I can’t help but feel that I’ve fallen in the tragic group…, again.

24. Learn a Language – My bumbling attempts at French and Latin (yes I had to learn Latin at school), probably don’t count. I can ask “where is the cat?” in French, over the years I can’t honestly say this has proved that useful.

25. Make a Million Pounds – Wwhilst arguably more obtainable for me than item #19, I can safely say I have not achieved this. If I had, do you think my blog would be this miserable?

26. Find Yourself – I’m desperately trying not to find myself, all the evidence seems to suggest I’d hate myself if I did, so best keep to avoiding myself at all costs.

27. Have a Summer of Love – There’s an uncomfortable theme running through some of these entries, and one I’m not enjoying. The closest I’ve come is a Summer of Chicken Pox, on the plus side it’s less vomit worthy than a Summer of Love.

28. Get a Second Life – Basically find a hobby to occupy yourself with. You know for all the time you’ve got when you’re not making friends, whipping up a meringue, spending your millions, applying sunscreen, moving out of home and f**king two or more people at once, preferably during the summer. Funnily enough given all that, I have found time for a hobby, fortunately the Evening Standard hasn’t dictated any standards for “coolness” of this hobby else I’d lose out again.

29. Sleep When You’re Dead – All about partying through the night and not worrying about sleep because it’s cool. This is a lie, perpetrated by young people, sleeping is fun, and if starts at 10pm after a cup of Ovaltine all the better.

30. Start Your Own Business – No, just no. I’ve watching Dragon’s Den, all the people who’ve started their own businesses, come in begging for money looking like they last slept around the time Eldorado was on the telly.

So out of those 30 things I have to have achieved, by the end of the next seven months, to be considered a person worthy of the flesh I was born in, how many I have achieved? Six (items #3, #6, #7, #9, #23 & #28). Six!!! Just six! And one of those was not to have a baby. In other words I’m 80% failure. Terrific. Thanks Evening Standard, and they wonder why people throw themselves under trains on the way home.

Personally I think the list is flawed, because most of the things on it I don’t want to do. And any sane person wouldn’t want to do either. So instead I present my alternate 30 things to do before you turn 30, except there’s only 15 because 30’s a lot to get round to. Who has the time? So here are 15 exciting, wacky things that you’d actually want to do:

1. Tell all your younger friends, that like to buy you birthday cards joking about how old you are, to F**K OFF AND DIE! – Trust me you’ll be grateful they’re not your friends and no longer sending those cards on your 30^th.

2. Have a Onesome – Go to bed on your own, for a change (if you’re luckier than me). Less likely to need to change the sheets, and no one to steal the duvet off you. Bliss.

3. Go and buy a new bin for the bathroom – I only put this, because I did it yesterday. Easy to tick off.

4. Go to McDonalds and don’t order Fries – Sometimes you’ve got to let your hair down and do something crazy, like not ordering fries at McDonalds no one does that. Top tip go at breakfast, they don’t even serve them then.

5. Leave a party early to get the penultimate Tube – This way you can party and get to sleep in your own bed at a not unreasonable time. And the penultimate tube is a bit less drunk filled than the final one.

6. Eat an entire Double Chocolate Cheesecake on your own, because you have no one to share it with – meals for one, always represent worse value than shopping for two, so get your own back by eating the whole cheesecake. It may not work mathematically but you’ll feel better for it.

7. Stalk an ex/“never was” through social media (or even in real life) – Go on you know there’s someone who either dumped you, spurned you or was rude enough to already be in a couple when you wanted them. Stalk their every move, sift through all their photos (or their bins), and imagine your happy life together that will never happen ever. It’ll help you move on, honest.

8. Go into a toy shop, even though you have no kids to buy toys for – This doesn’t count if you’re under 12. Just go and look at all the toys you’d have bought as a kid, it’s fun!

9. Spend an entire day at home in your pyjamas – Sod what your flat mates/relatives think, relax a little and enjoy being casual, even if you really do start to smell at 3pm.

10. Attempt to get two Weetabix from the packet into the bowl, without dropping a single crumb – Harder to do than it sounds this one, but it’s a challenge and the rush of excitement when you do it is better than that provided by any hard core drug… probably.

11. Delete someone off Facebook you don’t really like – Sod friend numbers, it’s the quality that counts (though I’ve found if you have less than two friends people start to judge) get rid of the annoying tit. Oh that’s me you’ve deleted, didn’t think this one through.

12. Run up a flight of stairs on all fours – Surprisingly liberating this one, though best do it at home - might annoy people on the Piccadilly line otherwise.

13. Eat a chocolate from your Advent Calendar on the day before you’re supposed to – Bit of a naughty one here, but if you can’t break the rules before you’re thirty when can you?

14. Go Commando! – Just for fun, one day, when you’re at home, probably in your pyjamas because it would be weird if it was proper “going out” clothes.

15. Leave a comment on my blog – Only the coolest of the cool would do this before they hit thirty. So here’s your chance to be a trend setter, do it now.

There, and as luck would have it I’ve done all 15 - I’m a success. And don’t worry if you haven’t yet, because you’ll have a lot more fun doing it than the 30 listed in the Evening Standard.

Oh and before I go, for those of you wondering how the wedding I went to last week turned out. Well you’ll be pleased to know, as expected, I got on well with the pot plant:

In fact it was a great joke teller:

That was of course until it wandered off in shame leaving me all alone at the edge of the dance floor, still social interaction can’t all be fun now can it?

The Happiest Day of Someone Else’s Bloody Life

2011-09-01T07:38:00.001+01:00

Love, l-o-v-e, pah! Even hearing the word out loud is enough to make me want to vomit so hard that my entire insides are sprayed out all over the floor like an elaborate Persian rug. Incidentally this is the reason why I’m banned from tennis matches, puts people off their strawberries and cream.

Being a terminally single man, who was last dating sometime around the fall of Hadrin’s wall, you can imagine how I feel about weddings. Weddings are the ultimate symbol of happiness, joy and togetherness and thus completely alien to me. Like deodorant is completely alien to twelve year old boys, only unlike Lynx I suspect I’ll never grow into them.

Unfortunately I am now at the age where weddings are inescapable, at the age of three you’re not expected to go because you’re too young, lucky sods. Approaching thirty and you find all your friends are popping off to get married, whilst you spend longer on the shelf than the average Korean language-edition Jeffery Archer novel. And being such a good friend you’re expected to go to each and every one of the love-based rituals to be joyous as the happy couple embark on their new wonderful life, whilst every step of the ceremony is designed to remind you that their life will be much better than yours. As tasteless acts of suffering go it is akin to inviting a group of starving Ethopian people to come and watch the opening of an All-You-Can-Eat-Buffet, without letting them tuck in. With all this said, you can imagine how excited I am by the fact that I am not only going to a wedding this weekend, but have also have had to toast another happy couple getting married on the same day!

Don’t get me wrong I am off course happy for both couples, as I was at the hundred odd other weddings I’ve been to in the last few years, in fact I’m overjoyed. Ok that’s taking it too far, we’ll stick at happy. In fairness all the weddings I’ve been to have been lovely affairs, all different but each one perfectly suited to the couple getting married. As I am sure this weekend’s wedding will also be. And whilst I’m not quite at the level of turning up with “It Should Have Been Me” placard, my hatred of weddings is firmly based in selfishness, the “always the page boy never the groom” bitterness is fully in charge here. It’s like university graduation, I’m happy to celebrate other people’s graduations knowing that I’m graduating too. But if you were forced to go to graduation after your 58^th resit of the first year, it would all start to feel a bit like a sick joke.

And this is weddingdom for me, currently I’m just an anomaly on a seating plan that makes the whole thing uneven “well if you could bring a plus one, table allocation would be easier”. A plus one! Thanks, who do you expect me to bring a bloody teddy bear, Norman Lamont or perhaps one of the Sugababes? With the option to bring a minus one sadly frowned upon, I resort to being the person standing awkwardly at the edge of the dance floor whilst the bride, groom and all the other couples in attendance go for a romantic dance. I’m there looking interested in a plant pot, until the plant pot gets ashamed by association and wanders off, then I’m just there alone in a sea of happiness, trying desperately to look cheerful but ending up looking about as natural as Gordon Brown’s smile.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I felt there was a decent chance of me being able to return the favour and invite everyone round for my wedding sometime, but even in an infinite universe with infinite time for all events to play out at multiple times, it still seems an extremely remote possibility. I’ve probably got more chance of winning Euromillions. Which would at least give me a vague chance of funding the wedding, yes as gratuitous displays of affection go; a wedding seems the most carefree way of pissing a load of cash up the wall. A wall which incidentally has been gold plated, and accessorised by the bride and her mother for approximately 400 working hours to ensure it doesn’t clash with the flowers and compliments the shade of the groom’s tongue perfectly, lest he open his mouth whilst walking past at some point during the ceremony.

If you’re the organisers of the ceremony, you’ll run up a debt as large as a medium-sized African nation as you spend money on a church or registry office, reception venue, suit hire, wedding dresses, transport, horses, more finger nibbles than have ever been eaten in the history of the world and enough wine so that everyone gets so pissed they can’t remember the event. For all anyone will be able to recall you could have hosted it in a burnt out garage in a back street of Wolverhampton. But wedding’s are also expensive if you’re a guest, an expense that leaves an extra stain on your debit sheet if you’re still single, as you have to pay for accommodation (which is more expensive per person if you’re single!) and transportation. It’s bad enough if it’s in the UK, but there seems to be a trend for getting married aboard. “Not only are we the happiest couple who have ever lived, but we’re going to celebrate it on a holiday” - a holiday that has all the disadvantages of being a holiday (e.g. expensive, long journeys, arguments, lost baggage, food poisoning) without any of the advantages, such as relaxing and having fun. I mean seriously how happy do you want me to think your life is, because there’s a danger you’ll become so happy I might punch you in the face - and blood is very tricky to get out of a wedding dress and tends to dampen down the happiness factor.

And of course there’s the gifts, this is the happiest day of our life, but we’d be even happier if you could bring us something of monetary value. Oh and we’ve seen your usual gift buying skills, you’re crap, please only buy us something form this pre-approved list, because asking for the receipt is always awkward. Of course the bride, groom and family have spent a lot of money on the event, so it seems only fair you should buy them a gift - except when you realise the whole event is to make them feel happy anyway, my happiness has certainly not been factored in. In this context the gift buying tradition just feels greedy. Still I intend to milk it for all it’s worth if I ever get married, an event pencilled for the year 2080 at the earliest. I should imagine by then the iPhone 73 will be out, so that’s going on my wedding list (I don’t want pots and bloody pans), and the ceremony - that’ll be held on the Moon. Sod Europe, now you’ve got to pay for interstellar return tickets, serves you right for inviting me to f**king Venice way back in 2009.

You’d think given my resolute bitterness towards marriage that I’d revel in break ups and misery, but no, even they are depressing. For starters it’s considered rude to point and laugh at the recently separated, you’re not even allowed a big piss-up based celebration, like with a wedding. Instead they expect a shoulder to cry on, they want to wallow to you about how shit it is that their life has become just like yours. Except unlike you, they recently had “happiness” and should be grateful for that. Someone once said “It’s better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all”, try telling that to someone who’s just broken up and they’ll slap you. And then people worry about inviting them to weddings, because they worry it will be “insensitive”, surely it’s insensitive to invite the long-term single, at least the recently single have the perspective that it could happen to them. Instead we just watch on, spectators at the initiation to an exclusive club to which we’ve been barred entry from for no discernable reason other than having a face like the rear end of a water buffalo and being about as socially aware as a bowl of salmonella. And worse of all you have to listen to reassuring people saying “don’t worry it’ll be your turn soon”, or “it will happen, you’ve just got to not worry about it” – can we please have a ban on these phrases, we’re not living in a f***ing Disney movie, it’s perfectly possible and extremely likely that I will be miserable for all my life. And refusing to accept this is plain stupid.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m now off to get a new shirt. It turns out that binge eating on chocolate not only fails to take the pain away but also causes your collar size to expand exponentially.

The Apocalypse – as told through the medium of Reality TV

2011-08-25T07:03:00.001+01:00

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.

2011-08-16T23:29:00.001+01:00

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.

2011-08-09T21:54:00.000+01:00

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."

2011-08-04T22:16:00.001+01:00

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.