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.

The War on Socks

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

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?

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

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

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.