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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.