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.