JUST RESTING MY EYES

The 4am Phone Call

2012-01-05T21:02:00.002Z

Apologies in advance. This is wholly solipsistic and self-pitying and melodramatic, and will probably get deleted in the fullness of time, but it has to come out. The time for tributes will come, but it's not yet. I do not in any way mean to come across as callous or insensitive and hope anyone who knows me personally will understand what I'm trying to get across and my reasons for putting it down on the internet as opposed to screaming it down Wandsworth High Street of a chilly evening. A trouble shared and all that...

You think you live under the constant shadow of fear of the 4am Phone Call until it happens, and you realise despite having your phone on, by your side, every night, in proper Scoutly readiness for the 4am Phone Call to rudely burst into your life, you haven't actually thought about it for years.

And so you're totally unprepared on how to react.

The most amazing thing is how quickly and clearly the brain works in that scenario. You go from fully asleep to your stomach being 90% of the way out of the front door in the half a second it takes you to read the caller ID, and by 2.3 seconds later when you've answered and heard the first half-choked attempt at a word from the other end, you know in perfect, chiming clarity exactly what's happened; that your life has taken a mathematically precise 90 degree turn into an unknown which quietly and without drama reveals itself to be an infinite plane of blankness. No wailing, no weeping. Just a sudden absence of anything, like your brain is a line drawing in MS Paint and you've just clicked in it with a black paint can.

Two thoughts were my constant companions on 23rd December. Number one: "Oh. Oh, well, that's happened then."

And number two, a small snippit from the film BASEketball, which I had watched a few weeks previously, where Squeak, a small rodent of a man, is trying to psyche out his enormous and threatening opponent with something hastily passed to him from his team-mates:

Squeak: (reading awkwardly from a card) Your mum's deaf.
Opponent: My mum's dead, you little squirt.
Squeak: Well, I guess that's why she didn't move around much.

The first was understandable. The second was thematically relevant and would not leave me alone. Grappling for any kind of reaction, my poor godforsaken subconscious had desperately typed "mum dead" into the google search of my memory dump and hit "I'm feeling lucky", and played it over and over and over again. And I wanted to tell someone, I wanted to share that ridiculous thought-spasm, but how could I? And when I found myself in a Little Chef after a hurried drive to a hospital in Salisbury through dawn's crepuscular light, and there was no toilet paper in any of the cubicles, I wanted to tell someone how fortunate and timely and hilarious it was that I was so freshly bereaved because I had pockets full of tissues. But how could I?

I wanted to tell everyone in the world that I had used the word crepuscular in its correct sense like I was Will bloody Self, but how could I? How could I even be thinking those things at such a time? Shouldn't I be inconsolable?

I wanted to ask someone why I wasn't inconsolable. Why, beyond a few chemically-induced, post-adrenaline run-off, meaningless days, I hadn't really cried, and still haven't. But how could I? I was with my family, and they were devastated. They didn't need my questions and inappropriate quotes from spoof films. Tricky.

So many questions. But in absence of any answers - apart from the large, obvious one, which is that I am careering Road Runner-style down a path that leads into a dark and foreboding tunnel with a tantalising glimpse of light at the end, but that tunnel is actually painted onto a rock which soon I shall smack face-first straight into without any warning whatsoever - there was instead something else: quite spectacular loneliness. Unsurprising, maybe. But I just wanted to reach out to everyone, every single person in my life, those people that I loved, and people I was fond of, and people who probably had no idea how much they meant to me, and...

(An aside. My partner and friends have been absolutely the most amazing partner and friends anyone could ever hope to have. If you're reading this, you're probably one of them - the friends, that is, I don't have thousands of other, well, thousandths - and basically, I have no words to describe how much every single nugget of support and comfort has meant to me. Each one has helped chip away a tiny bit more of this expanse of solid cement that seems to have appeared instead of my normal brain workings, and I literally, literally, would be nowhere very pleasant if it were not for all of you. Cannot thank you all enough. I might try. Be prepared for epically damp shoulders)

..and just talk to them. Tell them things. Tell them anything. Everything. That I had just had my favourite umbrella from Japan destroyed by the wind and I was sad I'd probably never get to replace it. That they were the best thing in my life. That I couldn't believe Darren Boyd had been ensnared by the terrible net of Direct Line advertising and was ruined forever. But how could I?

And I went back to work and I wanted to tell everyone that there was a reason I was monosyllabic and morose, and that when they cheerily said "Happy new year!" to me there was a reason I could only half-mumble in reply, and that the oppressive silence pounding the insides of my skull was exhausting, but how could I?

And I want to go back on Twitter and say stupid things about TV and the Bloody Wind™ and that even though I knew how ridiculous it was, I was frightened that while I was the girl trapped inside this perspex bubble that I'd created but had no idea how to crack, I'd be forgotten, replaced, I'd fade away. And how silly and guilty I felt for even thinking that, given I'd been overwhelmed by the genuine shock and warmth of reaction of the people who had managed to peek through the fogged-up doom-sphere. But how could I?

Because what could I say?
What could I possibly say?

Ach. I guess I've said it now. And I know that in time the plane of blankness will turn a quite frightening blood-red and then eventually fade away. Again, thank you to everyone who knows who they are, and sorry to anyone I may have offended. This was all done in a splurge. And seeing as I still haven't worked out the noble art of ending pieces of writing, I'll just say: It's highly likely probability-wise that I love you. Take care. Jules x

Post Gig Comedown

2011-07-21T20:01:00.005+01:00

Probably something that should only affect people who actually did the performing. But look at that blurry horror of a picture of Jonathan Higgs, lead singer of Everything Everything. I took that. I took that while standing next to the stage - so close, in fact, that it barked my shins. That's how low down the stage was. I could have stepped onto it without even bothering my lazy and recalcitrant hamstrings. My headmaster at primary school kept more distance when he was pretending to sing the ditties out of Come And Praise. Here, I could have reached out with no straining or visible effort whatsoever and improvised an extended solo on the bassist's damn instrument. And on his bass. Fnarrr.

I was very, very close. So maybe the post gig comedown leaked forth from the enthusiastic and seemingly happy-as-larry band and lapped upon the feet of us chosen few who muscled our way to the front of this tres intime gig. All I know is this: after I had waved goodbye to my wonderful new companion, who had, with the professional hawk's eye of an inveterate gig-goer and merchandise-lover, claimed the last remaining pristine advertising poster off the walls of the club and thus secures all my slow, knowing nods of admiration I have in my nodding locker, I had a number of thoughts which all rear-ended each other like they were a procession of cliched, never-arriving buses controlled by leering men in the '90s who'd never seen a Wonderbra poster or, presumably, boobs before.

These thoughts:

That was actually the best gig I've ever seen. A beautiful conflagration of time, opportunity, happenstance, whatever, but that is currently my favourite band, they are about to become megastars, and I have seen them perform all their amazing songs standing three feet away from me.
It is now over.
I have just seen a proper Mercury-nominated band blow the roof off a classic venue at incredibly close range!
It is now over.
Thing is: I'm not very good at being in the moment. While I'm in the moment, I am often worrying that I'm not enjoying the moment to the fullest of its potential. I am also quite focussed on the encroaching end of the moment, thus missing quite a large proportion of the moment. This is excellent in some realms of life, like getting inoculations or eating a sandwich in a Caffe Nero, but pretty damn inconvenient in other areas, like having sex with things and watching astoundingly good gigs.
Which are now over.
Why am I on my third lap of Trafalgar Square?
...
OH NO! Did I actually use the advantage of standing right at the front, right at the side where the band would enter and exit the stage, to do a light tippy-tappy motion on Jonathan Higg's arm as he walked past, as if a) he was a desk and I was a bored secretary from the '50s, or b) he was an unexploded World War 2 bomb I was pretty sure was filled with water, but just drunk enough to try and make go boom-boom? Yes. Yes, I did. At least I didn't stroke his arm (inappropriate) or hug his arm (groupie-lite) or wrench his arm off and beat someone to death with it (too purty for gaol).
I don't want to listen to them any more.

That was the most worrying one: that I'd somehow broken the unbreakable covalent bond between my hypothalamus and those damn songs. That I'd not actually be able to hear to them again, because the painful yearning for a memory that wasn't fully committed, the emptiness somewhere above the gut which should be exploding with frothing pleasure like an extra strong mint in a Coke bottle when the cymbals crash and the synth swells, would be oh oh oh too much to bear, with the swooning, and the crying, and the FLAVEN...blaven...

Anyway, I was, as always, guilty of overthinking the fuck out of it, and although that evening did not feature any more Everything Everything, I did rediscover my EE mojo a few days later, skipping through the rain like some kind of unbearable bell-end. You could have filmed me and stuck me on a match.com advert, if they ever wanted for some reason to run their own company into fiery ruination.

But still. Bit blue after something which should have cheered me up for weeks. Meh. Still waiting for something to happen...anything. Anything?

NOT THAT!

Maybe that.

You Are My Everything Everything

2011-07-19T23:35:00.001+01:00

An interesting theory expounded to me by the rather wonderful N-La while we were avoiding being hugged and/or ostracised by leather-shorted men at Pride the other week - it is very possible indeed to have a crush on an actual song, rather than its creator. Yes, yes, I nodded. I very much agree with that, I insisted. That's because I have gone a bit further recently. Not just a crush, but a full-blown love affair with a whole album.

And here will follow an extended metaphor so tortured that the USA has denied it even existed and immediately flown it to sit inside a shipping crate on an airbase in Siberia for the next 30 years. If you do not wish to witness this extraordinary word rendition, please click away immediately. Look: here's some sausage dogs pissing about.

It began, as all good love affairs do, with 6 Music. Because I'm so hip and now and with it, I totally listen to 6 Music when I'm doing the washing up, and sometimes I don't even pointlessly squeeze closed my eyes and loudly hum old Ben Folds Five during four out of five songs they play. So I'd seen this song around. It was called Final Form, and it had an endearing little hook to it. A flirty way with the bassline. Bit of a melancholic angel sheen. Whatever, I thought. There's a lot of those types about, all nice harmonies and interesting nuances, I thought. No, I'm not hoping that it'll be played again, I thought. I don't have time in my life to learn about a new band, especially one as syllable-heavy as Everything Everything. God, by the time I've said their name, I could have boshed three Elbow tracks and had a nice cup of tea.

Ah, but then...but then there was Glastonbury. And let's face it, some crazy shit happens at Glastonbury. Especially when I'm there, which I wasn't. I was sat in a booth in West London for three days, watching the peerless if I may say so thank you very much BBC coverage of all things musical and glittery-spiritual-wank, and putting incorrect words in Beyonce's mouth, as is my want. And there they were in the BBC2 Saturday running order. Everything Everything, two unknown songs. Better give them a bit of a cursory research then...

45 minutes later, I emerged from a YouTube fest, breathless with lust. MY KZ UR BF, Photoshop Handsome, Suffragette Suffragette, Final Form, and repeat, and repeat... I was all over it. I could barely wait to get it home and go all the way with every one of the 12 tracks. I sat impatiently jiggling for hours while Coldplay farted and tooted their way through several million dirges. You were all yellow, they belmed, but all that was playing through my mind was "Brother, you look like the Taj Mahal..." And then finally, finally, the time had come; myself and the album Man Alive were, as the coy coyly say, as one. I'll admit, money changed hands. Ian Apple (© Herring) was as brutal and frustrating a pimp as that bastard always is.

So then came the first week - it couldn't keep its grubby little paws off my ears, as I listened on repeat to the whole album, two or three times a day. It made me laugh ("Are you guys together, honey? But now I can't find his torso...I guess you're separated") and it made me think deep, staring interestingly into middle distance on tube trains thoughts ("I awoke in the future, I had turned to stone with fear") and we shared our little jokes at the expense of others (Yeah, sweetness. I know when you're saying face, and when you're saying fence. They don't know. I do) It was, as all love affairs are at first, disgraceful, disgusting and downright doolally. Who the fuck even listens to an album more than once a day? What was I, some kind of teenage ball of scrunched-up angst and woe, carving band logos into my forearms with blunt compasses, thinking these songs were actually talking to me?

Well, sort of. And this had really never happened to me before. Albums ALWAYS have a skip-it-skip-it track. Albums NEVER revolve and twist and reveal facets on the 15th listen which means your favourite track is a moveable feast. It was blind infatuation, as sudden and overpowering as a concrete block dropped off a motorway bridge. Ridiculous as a space-hopper in a cathedral. Inexplicable as the phrase "ratings-winner Peter Andre". Not with a person or persons who wrote a song, but with the bloody songs themselves. Ridiculous: but true.

We're into the comfortable phase of companionship now, me and Man Alive, where we can just co-exist quite happily with it being the background music to my daily life without me having to passionately stare into its lyrical eyes all the time, and I can start to flirt with my iPod shuffle again. And I know it will come to pass, Man Alive will outgrow me - finally get the success it deserves, get a Mercury nomination, get some proper broadsheet attention - and the little idiosyncrasies that are currently adorable will start to grate. Why are you so impossible to sing along to? Why won't you tell me what would happen if the summer was over us in bursts? Who's that girl you're emailing with your Qwerty Finger, you terrible bastard?!

And as Man Alive keeps telling me, it knows how this all ends, it knows how it ends, it knows how it all...

But meanwhile - I continue to be besotted. Great songs. Yup. Beautiful songs. No idea who those blokes at the top of the page are. That one on the right's quite fit, inn'he?

Oh. Ah. OK. Never mind.

Update: this was all written on planes coming to and from the beautiful Italian paradise of Lake Como, where I stood in a deluge for three days, but more on that later. Between arriving home and publishing, I have discovered that a) EE have been deservedly nominated for the Mercury and b) I have actually won tickets to go and see them, live, in a tiny venue, tonight. Quite how I'm going to deal with this given my above emotion-puke remains to be seen. Well, no, this is exactly what's going to happen - I'm going to go into the 100 Club and I'm going to stand near, but not at, the front and stare lovingly at the lead Mr Everything (on the right up top) and he will not notice. Then I will go home. And of such moments a whole life is constructed. I'll attempt to report back later...

The Secret Of Happiness Is An Ironic Thing To Call A Blog Post Which Will Severely Disappoint Those Who Google It

2011-05-17T02:40:00.002+01:00

I did quite the foolish thing the other week. While wafting peacefully on a haze of cider fumes, I got to that bizarre faux-zen stage of drunkeness where you seem to transcend the frenzied solo arguments of normal brain activity and start to process the world with perfect clarity, every synapse singing like a wet finger being swept round the rim of a wine glass, every thought appearing as an unblemished sphere of translucent crystal. Of course, you only feel like that because in an attempt to prevent any more of it from being destroyed by the evil fermentations of apples, your brain has shut down all but the most basic of functions - lungs will still contract, heart will still pump, life will hang on in there - and it's easy to mistake the stillness of the calmed mind with the catatonia of lying on your kitchen floor with the fridge door open and ignored bacon slowly charring itself to atoms under the grill.

Anyway, while in that state, I still managed to get onto Twitter (which has ascended to a credible third in the hierarchy of the non-booze-disabled brain functions, after the aforementioned heart beating and breathing, which often means me waking in various pools of unmentionables but with phone firmly gripped in hand and a pristine timeline with not a spelling mistake in sight) and I asked the following question, like a numbskull:

Are you happy?

Cos I was floating above it all, see?! And I thought I could CURE people of their unhappiness with the direct simplicity of my follow-up question - this, I drooled (drolly, natch), would jackboot through the wet tissue paper walls of their misery and release their tortured souls into a world full of bucolic pleasure or stygian excess, depending on preference! Follow-up question? Thusly:

Why?

Obviously, I was horrifically ill-equipped to deal with the response I got. No, we're not happy, said the Twitter massive. And the reasons are heartbreaking, insoluble, occasionally pathetic, massive, and please would you wipe that self-satisfied saintly half-smile off your face, JRME, we can tell you're doing it even though we cannot and will not ever see you. So all I could do was parp back a few sympathetic platitudes and flappy-handed apologies, and hold my head and sigh remind myself to mind my own damn biznis. If you were affected by the actions of that night, again, I'm sorry. And the BBC has an ActionLine number where you can call and request that I'm fired for being a twatting bugger. They don't employ me but hey, they have ways.

I'm not happy either, but my reasons are dancing at the end of the pathetic rainbow, being as they are mostly to do with how bored I am and my incipient mid-life crisis. It seems my only options may be to have an affair or a baby, and both of those things seem like too much of an administrative nightmare for someone with such a pronounced fear response to organisation as me (curl up, zip hoodie over head, check email every ten seconds but never, ever reply to anyone, occasionally empty contents of in-tray into nearby canal), so unless someone designs a really shit-hot iPhone app to help me - "here is an excuse for coming home late smelling of Lynx Africa again!" "here is the GPS location of the exact shelf in Waitrose you left your infant propped up on!" - I shall have to continue with my bloody comfortable get a grip woman life as is.

Anyway, I was musing on this - on Twitter (will I ever learn?) so apologies if this is all old news though it was 4am so mazel tov if you did read it at the time, I'm grateful, and you should probably follow more people - and I believe most people's unhappiness can be broken down into three basic building blocks (this excludes all the mucky "my body doesn't work as it should"/"I have been the victim of a grave injustice" stuff. It's the more woolly oh I me myself ennui that infects most of us. Keep it light, for God's sake, as the Prophet Limmy once said)...

I have yet to be convinced by myself or anyone else that I am utterly without worth.
What no-one really understands is that everything I project into the world is a mask, and underneath I'm scared, isolated and misunderstood.
My fucking bastard neighbours are too fucking bastard loud.

Oh, and there's a fourth...

4. No-one will shag me. (And 4b - OK, that person will shag me, but that's not the right person)

And that's when I came up with it. The Secret Of Happiness in ten words or less. Ready for this? You won't be. Here it comes:

SODIUM PENTATHOL CENTER PARCS BLINDFOLDED ORGY PARTIES.

Just leave my Nobel Prize with the tattoo shop next door, Ban-Ki Moon. I'm off to Elveden Forest.

Man, I can't believe I haven't got a lifestyle column yet...

Comic Relief Possibly Killing Me Live!

2011-03-18T18:07:00.048Z

Red Nose Day. As a youth, between weeping in butcher's shops, it was something I'd look forward to. It was a whole night of live telly which was anarchic and punky, where I honestly believed anything could happen, especially in the post 10 o'clock news section, when my parents would send me to bed to settle down and watch Ben Elton do his tried and tested tampax! I said tampax! And smear test! And I'm a bloody man and everything! material, and I would lurk at the top of the stairs, ears straining, not even daring to imagine the comedic wonders that would be unfolding.

Also, you could usually legitimately wear some kind of fancy dress at primary school, and the teachers would warily note the seas of hyped-up nine-year-olds high off the plastic fumes from poorly-made red noses washing around their shins, and declare the whole day a write-off; sponsored running around out of Miss's hearing range became the only lesson plan.

And then Dawn French snogged Hugh Grant, and the whooping went on for hours and hours and hours, and that was just me. If Dawn French could snog him, well...then, I could snog Dawn French! YEAH? Right on.

Anyway, now - now, it's just an unbearable procession of terror.

Well, it might be, anyway. Who can tell? I'm going to be typing gubbins throughout, starting...well, not now, because I'm not home yet. Let's say 8:30ish, yes? Lovely.

20:10 Hello, friends.

So, I've missed McIntyre and Claudia, but still, it was cheering to see that he'd got pregnant in sympathy with her. That's my level tonight; better get used to it now.

And good lord! Lucky first VT to stumble onto, as Harry Hill does some of his usual stuff and nonsense and manages to bring back Bernie Clifton and kill him with a boyband within the space of a minute, and tickle Ronnie Corbett under the chin. Harry Hill retains his 100% untarnished record; he could probably shill for Gadaffi and we'd all think it was a bit of wacky fun. "Well, I like the Israelis, but then I like the Palestinians..."

All in the best possible taste tonight!

20:24 Dear God! Thandie Newton is talking about doing a stinky fart? Or is he just describing the plot of Run Fatboy Run?

20:30 Here's a fun game during these MasterChef bits. Try to pinpoint the exact moment David Cameron realises he's in an unprecedented time of international chaos and war, so should probably not be eating chilli con carne served by a perma-blinking slinky spring, and preening in front of a fatheaded greengrocer. Clue: IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN.

20:34 Anyway, I haven't even opened my wine yet. I will attempt to open it with the same enthusiasm of a load of office workers walking into a photoshoot with Blue: shouting "WHO?!" at it until it cries, although it will never cry, because it, as an inanimate bottle, is 12 times more intelligent than the whole of Blue combined.

20:41 That EastEnders sex trafficking stuff is much more fun when it's silent and you can play a bit of jaunty Laurel and Hardy piano over it!

20:44 Well, I've never seen Downtown Abbey so let's assume it's just a standard Jennifer Saunders parody from the late 80s, produced by an automated programme written in BASIC on the very first BBC Micro by Stephen Fry. Meanwhile, look at my supplies for the evening:

You'll see I've covered the main food groups of carbs, some kind of bloody paste, fake fruit, Sticks Of Deliciousness, faintest waft of health, and GAH!

20:52 Well, there you go. Thanks to @rEddie_brek on that there Twitter for alerting me to concentrate on the Downtown catastrophe. Someone must have set the FryWriter to Sir Punalot mode. Here's some maids they didn't use. PomMAID (woman with slicked back hair). MAIDstone (woman carrying tiny pebble). Iron MAIDen (woman bleeding to death from multiple gory puncture wounds in the face and body).

21:05 OK, all everything else aside, Whitney is a bloody good little actress. She breaks my heart with those big Bambi eyes.

21:08 Graham Norton can't do the sincere gear changes. While Davina passionately emotes about the horror of child exploration, he looks like someone who's listening to the restaurant manager explaining why his carpaccio was undersalted.

21:15 Everyone! Bring the children! Gather round! Take That have turned into Kraftwork's younger brother's schoolfriend's cousins who once listened to Fischerspooner!

21:20 First genuine LOL of the night at "A terrifying glimpse into the future, Fake That still to come". God love him, I'm not going to stop loving Dermot any time soon. It's a whole forgotten Channel 4 reality programme about sleep deprivation thing, I don't want to talk about it.

21:26 You see? These barbershop lovelies are the best thing that's ever happened to music, and are they on telly apart from now and that advert? More importantly, are they serenading me to sleep, serenading me awake, and serenading me to a shuddering climax 10 times a day? No, they are not. Where's my appeal VT, you bastards?

21:33 Finding this whole Ant and Dec thing quite charming. Drunk half a bottle of red wine in the last half hour. Scientists around the world are currently working on the logarithms to see if there is any correlation between these two events.

21:40 If there's anything that we can bring from tonight's events, it's that Peter Kay can't even be bothered to come up with any sort of new material or new ideas even if it'll save a million infant's lives. Let's face it: he's going to have to say "garlic bread" about three or four times to win back the inexplicable love of the British public after this. There's not even any jokes. It's just him, in a wig, duetting with Susan Boyle, in a wig, with a picture of Trevor Macdonald at the end as if that's some kind of punchline. That is a homoeopathic punchline.

21:48 Oh, gawd, this little downer bit has been going on for far too long now. I was just about to make comment, but @helencairns has just summed it up wonderfully on That There Twitter, better than I could: "Yes Adele, this is totally the time to tell us all about your ex-boyfriend and how you're all SADFASS about it."

Might have a little ten minute break now. Jack Dee doing his serious face is making me, through sensitive shot changes, accidentally laugh openly at starving infants, which is not the best look for a modern, forward-thinking girl about town like me.

21:56 LITERALLY? DAVINA AND DERMOT LITERALLY SMASHED IT OUT OF THE PARK, FEARNE? Goodness! Well, what did they smash? What park? I mean, this is probably a health and safety issue, now. If things are being smashed out of parks, the police should be involved. Things being smashed out of parks, that could damage passers-by. I'd hate for all your charity to be wiped out by a lawsuit from me, frankly, because I was hit over the head and badly injured from whatever was smashed out of the whatever park it was.

On a related point, Fearne, if you could attempt to smash yourself out of a park, just to empathise with the plight of the grammatically brutalised in the world, we'd be ever so, ever so, EVER SO GRATEFUL.

22:06 I don't have much to say about the Fake That thing. I said everything I wanted to say when Spice Girls and all those bloody people did exactly the same thing in 1997. But I have stumbled upon a horrifying truth. Please listen to this:

And then this:

Take That, you stole from Japanese geeks. I hope you Burn In Hell.

22:16 Well, of course Miranda's going to be unfunny if you take it out of context! It has to be in the context of, um... Well, it's funny because, you know, it's when she... It's traditional sitcom or, er...

OK, come on. Let's just admit it, all the ladies who watch Miranda and love it. It's because she looks like that and can pull that Giles Coren-refracted-through-handsome-glass geezer.

22:25 I wrote a little song.

# Fearne Cotton

# You came and presented quite badly

# But we still had to watch

# Fearne Cotton

# One tip that we'd give you quite gladly

# Don't do that "special" voice... #

22:36 I feel I'm being slightly unfair to Lenny Henry here. At this juncture, for the record, it should be noted that he is being equally as awful as Fearne and her anti-disability bias.

22:44 The Smithy sketch will be remembered as the exact moment when the country was affected by the hallucinatory dirty bomb sent by Mars. This cannot possibly be happening.

22:48 Second LOL at sudden appearance of half-naked boy-champion. Also, Bieber. Also, as it seemed to be mandatory, I just appeared in this sketch. Where were you in it?

23:02 During the second Downtown, I'm having a wee lie down. I've been buried under a massive collapsing fourth wall. As soon as I build it up, they demolish it all over me again.

23:08 What the fuck? Seriously, that phone in the bottle thing was actually impossible. If you were a demon sorcerer, I'd like to think you'd actually pretend to be a rather shifty-looking ratty boy who popped up in an airport to do inexplicable things to you between your last Costa and the secretly pleasurable bit when you leave a couple of coins in your pocket in order to get felt up by someone surly of the same sex.

NOT JUST ME, SURELY!

23:18 Inbetweeners in real life. Lovely, lovely, lovely boys. They will fit perfectly into my lovely boy dungeon that I've just coincidentally constructed.

23:25 Pray silence for the new renaissance of Partridge.

23:28 George Michael's cover of True Faith. It's weird. You hear about these things, conceptually, but they have no real effect on you. It's like when you hear about the massive scale of space, the numbers just don't fit into your brain. Something is 20 billion light years away. It means nothing. George Michael has covered True Faith in the style of David Lynch having a slow-motion coughing fit into an accordion . It means nothing.

But it happened...

And the David Lynch, for reference. And because this is an accurate reflection of my mental status right now.

23:44 The updates, yes, they are coming a little slower. The quality is rising; there's been a bit of Elbow, there's been a bit of Partridge. Tim Key's lying on the floor. Partridge is sneezing blood on a nun. It's all got a little bit good.

23:55 24 hour Panel People! A world record to see how long one man can stretch out the joke of being straight, but talking as if he's gay. Do you see? He's straight, and married. But he says things as if he wants to have sex with men. No, but, I'm not sure you understand. He's got a model girlfriend. But...

FOR 24 HOURS.

IT'S MIDNIGHT!

Thank you if you have commented after my pathetic plea on Twitter. My lovely boy dungeon is feeling very snug.

My lovely boy dungeon, incidentally, is guarded by a very special creature, so beware.

00:10 I'm still going, incidentally.

OK, it's this bit. If it wasn't bad enough that we have had the dubious wonders of Karl Pilkington, who I've ranted about before, let's be all bloody post-modern about it. Ha ha ha ha! You can say things that even Jon Gaunt would blanch at because Ricky Gervais is shrieking like a blown seal in the background! Ha ha ha ha! HA HA HA WE'RE SO CLEVER!

00:23 I can smoke, right? Right? I mean, I've written... I'm actually going to measure this now...

1934 words tonight.

And Annie Lennox is about to play a song.

It's almost a sign from God! Even God hates Annie Lennox and wishes she would wash that bloody tshirt!

00:28 It's a tribute to the awesome power of Annie Lennox that her song Universal Child makes me think of Elton John rubbing up against international plug adaptors.

00:35 ONE DAY LIKE THIS! Thank God! I was beginning to lose all hope.

00:40 Yep, I'll take that Armstrong and Miller sketch as a minor win. And further proof that all off-duty celebrities will grow credibility beards as soon as they are able.

00:50 And as hell's own Loose Women settle their six scarlet-clad buttocks onto Alan Carr's sofa, and Russell Brand narrates as kids falls over themselves in happiness to be reunited with their parents, I felt a small pang of guilt. Thankfully, this was immediately dissipated by Fearne Cotton accusing everyone who had logged on to see her bony, bescribbled body in a swimsuit - a swimsuit which she had donned to raise money for Comic Relief - as "pervs". Oh, darling. I had forgotten briefly that it's all about you.

01:03 Newport State Of Mind. Done by enthusiastic amateurs on YouTube, who were immediately slapped down by the might of Jay-Z's lawyers. But who cares, when you can get the Go Compare guy and famously Welsh Paul Whitehouse to mime stuff in black and white and say it's for charity. Next year: Charlie bit my finger, starring Brooker biting Chris Morris on the end of his fake satirical penis.

01:20 It's the sweepings from the bottom of the Benson factory floor now, as it seems to be a procession of Fearne bitching about people seeing her half-naked, David Walliams saying "penis" in all the various amazing connotations the Latin-based languages can offer, and then these bellends who have worked out that if you pitchshift everything correctly, it sounds similar. Because most music is written on the major scale, apart from the stuff that's written on the minor scale.

01:35 I'm a bit tired now.

01:38 Harry Hill seems so very, very long ago. Gosh, remember back then? When the night was young, and things seemed so fresh, and we hadn't seen James Corden and George Michael drive round and round and round and round White City?

Actually: remember 16 years ago, when Vic and Bob did this? I did. I didn't think anyone else did, until another Miracle Of Twitter, when @profanityswan came up trumps. I've just laughed until I cried. If you don't, something's gone wrong.

01:56 Throughout that whole 24 hour Panel People thing, there was not one mention of the amazing filler people who were constructed only from modern hair and Jedward comprehension skills. Poor, benighted, not even on Freshly Squeezed morons.

02:10 It should have ended. I feel like I have to stick it out. And lucky I did, to get that amazing end of office karaoke night vibe; when everyone tries to sing Never Forget, but can't quite do it because a) they're arseholed on cheap cocktails b) they've got their tongue exploring the inner caverns of that one a few desks down that wears tank tops even when it's raining outside c) they are slumped in the corner, the general ennui of their life weighing upon them so much that even the words "Never Forget" are mocking echoes smashing into their self-esteem like cannonballs into a brick wall. Never Forget that she doesn't want you. Never Forget your life is going nowhere. Never Forget that you're going home to YouPorn and a cry-wank.

03:00 Jack Whitehall and Kevin Bridges are still going, but that's it. I'm out. It's been seven hours of stuff I can't remember, which will make moulding this into a publishable article an interesting experiment for my weekend. If you've read even a few words of this, I am full of gratitude. If you're reading after the event and you've got this far, you deserve some kind of award which I am happy to provide - email me at justrestingmyeyes at hotmail dot co dot uk for details of how to claim it. And if you take away one thing from this, it's that I specifically love one of you, and you'll never know who. Night-night, everybody. Night-night.

Christ On A Mic

2011-01-20T23:16:00.000Z

I had a dream the other night - one of those long, expansive, drawn-out dreams that goes on for hours and hours - and the sole event within it was me explaining to someone particularly argumentative just how intelligent Richard Herring is.

"Really?" said the faceless antagonist. "But I've listened to his podcast. He just says the rudest possible thing he can think of at any point. That's not intelligent. That's just being childish and reactionary."

"No, no!" I insisted, probably waving a deliciously lit cigarette furiously just to infuriate myself on recollecting the dream because my subconscious is just that kind of bastard, "It's more than that. Look, it's like... OK, like on his blog, OK?" Yeah, take that, subconscious! I made you sound inarticulate! "Like, on his blog, he'll write about something that I've thought about that's happened that day, but he'll say something that's a lot more intelligent than what I've come up with, and he'll make it funny, and he does it every day. He's a bloody clever bloke."

"Ah, I see," replied the tetchy dream-dweller, chewing on a cheroot to make a point of some sort, "so what you're telling me is he's more intelligent than you, which, let's face it, plants him firmly in the centre of a very inexclusive group containing much of the human population, and a fair whack of the animal population too. Also, that you clearly fancy him."

"I really don't!" I whined at this point, stamping my foot right through the sodden cardboard base of the dream into the top of my conscious brain, and up I most suddenly woke.

Richard Herring had a dream too, full of gods and mythical creatures and Christ on a bike. And verily, he came forth to the Leicester Square theatre to share that dream with his new disciples, one of which was unemployed, one of which was Michael Legge, and one of which was me. Richard Herring's dream was of a hubristic Christ, a possible Cheddar-based messiah, but most importantly, his dream was goddamn funny.

Richard Herring is not the messiah: he's a very naughty boy.

(May I just interject on myself at this point? Why, certainly! No-one has made that gag, as far as I can see, in any review of this show on the whole bloody internet. That can only mean one of three things. 1) Herring makes it himself in the show and I've forgotten and no-one would be so crass as to nick it for their own review; 2) I'm a bona fide MacArthur Grant-level genius; 3) it's a shit joke. Answers on a postcard, as long as it's got 3 written on it)

Well, not the messiah according to the audience anyway, polled at the end of a journey taking in Jesus' similarity to both The Fonz and Trigger from Only Fools and Horses, the problems of quantifying transubstantiation in terms of units of whole bodies, and why The Bible should probably have been more thoroughly proofread. It's when deconstructing the ridiculous inconsistencies within the Gospels and overwrought list-making tendencies of the jealous, passive-aggressive, arrogant Old Testament God that Herring gets the biggest laughs; you'd be hard-pressed not to get carried away with him, as his frustration with the absurdity of it all builds into a tsunami of spittle-flecked comedic rage. As one dampened front-rower wryly remarked at the bar during the interval: "He should probably call his next show Richard Herring Gets You Wet."

There's cock jokes too, as is traditional, and echoes of Stewart Lee, although more suggesting a common ancestor evolving into two different comedic styles than any kind of sneaking peeks at each other's answer papers. And for anyone who had a deathly dull childhood spent in church every Sunday, parroting prayers without any consideration for their meaning, there's the mother of all Proustian rushes over the words "Let us give thanks to the Lord our God; it is right to give him thanks and praise." The sheer effort of will to not automatically "offer each other a sign of peace" at this moment, forcing everyone around me into a sudden and unwanted clammy handshake, almost made me implode.

It was a good show. A great show. But at the end, I did feel a little disappointed. I wanted more. It felt like there was so much more to say. "Come on, Rich!" I wanted to jump up and hoot. "We've barely scraped the surface here! All that doctrine, all those people following blindly... Tell me more about what you think about Jesus the man versus Jesus the messiah. Let me crawl into your head. I spent a whole bloody dream defending you, you sandalled beast! I could have used that dreamtime to tumble out of moving planes to my never-quite-arriving grisly fate, or nearly get the chance to kiss some fabulous fantasy figure before being interrupted at the last minute! Don't prove me right with your intelligent handling of 2,000 years of religious idiocy then leave me hanging after 90 minutes just because you're a comedian and it's only a comedy show, not a personal lecture series for me and me alone!"

Is that an endorsement? If it's not, I've failed. Please, just make up your own one. A good evening of comedy that makes you think, and not just about whether God would give his only son a knee-grazer, or if he was more of a "Knowest thou this: the size of the vessel matters not when you are the One Lord and God of all the seas of the Hea'ens and Earth" kinda guy? There's something to start you off. Two nights left in London, then everywhere, everywhere.

PS. So I went to Herring's gig on my own. But it's OK, because I asked Twitter if that was acceptable behaviour, and they said it was. And Laura Barnard, her of the epic graphical designage talent and excellent face and head and body and mind and soul, even wrote me a note that I could produce with a flourish if any askance looks were cast in my direction, which, of course, they weren't, because, of course, who cares? We're all going to die someday.

Anyway, I was going to ask Mr Herring to sign it, but chickened out. The vision appeared before me of trying to explain to a disinterested comedian about this self-involved "joke" that had nothing to do with him (with no offence to the wonderful Ms Lau's illustration) while behind me queues of genuinely deserving fans fumed over their free programmes, and it was not a good look. So I thought, instead, I'd write a self-involved review of someone else's show. Yuh-huh. Gotta get me, me, me, I, me, me, myself in there somewhere, friends!

Nothing Is Wasted, Only Reproduced

2011-01-12T19:39:00.001Z

Bonus extra hidden track, that's not hidden, that isn't a bonus, stop, doctor, there's nothing more we can do, this metaphor was DOA!

So basically, before Christmas, I was asked to write a list of 2010's best 10 albums and best 10 films. Hark at me! As if Alan Rusbridger himself descended upon a silver-tinged cloud to grovel at my be-slippersocked feet and beseech that I could put together a few hundred words that he wouldn't even publish for the normals, but instead save for a secret best-ever edition of the Guardian that would only be read by the most important people in the country; leaders, A-listers, and Nando's gold card holders!

No. In fact, one of the beautiful deviants from hecklerspray idly wondered if some kind of end-of-year summing-uppery would be in order. It never came to pass, as he informed me the other day, reminding me of the spiel I'd written about my top 5 films of the year then utterly forgotten about. (Only a top 5? And no albums? Well, as I said to him I said, due to being a nerdish hermit, I could only scrape together five films and when faced with music made after 2002 my head pops into my body like a tortoise, so I had no opinion on the year's albums, apart from that they were all confusing noise, obviously.)

So here, taking irrepressible Essex darbouka-botherer Damon Albarn's advice from the top there, is what I wrote. Dated-tastic!

1. Four Lions
The film that means every protest for the next thirty years will contain one clever dick waving a placard reading "Fuck mini Babybels." If you only see one sympathetic black comedy about British suicide bombers - and let's face it, there will only ever be one sympathetic black comedy about British suicide bombers made - you'd better bloody make it Chris Morris's feature-length debut. You'll laugh, then laugh more, then feel sad and guilty and confused and cross, but it's worth it.

2. Scott Pilgrim vs The World
So he looks like Mr Burns and his face is frozen into that pathetic man-child simper 100% of the time. But hey, Michael Cera still manages to charm up a storm in this fun and faithful comic book adaptation. Gaming nerds will chuff their nuts off at the many thousands of Nintendo references, and everyone else gets a good laugh when Superman turns up from Vegan school and hits a girl. Somehow it's OK when he does it.

3. Green Zone
Jason Bourne, Jason Bourne, running round Iraq! Jason Bourne, Jason Bourne, with his merry...ark...? OK, so it's not Jason Bourne but it might as well be, as Matt Damon sniffs out a great big conspiracy and is chased by a great big moustache with "hello to" Jason Isaacs hanging off of it. Grumpy Matt Damon is the best Matt Damon in this fast-moving actioner that'll make you think (if only about grumpy Matt Damon).

4. The Social Network
Because, of course, who hasn't had a massive depressive self-destructive phase at university that directly resulted in a multi-billion dollar fortune? Everyone does that. It's a rite of passage. Wake up with a traffic cone, start thinking wearing a kaffiyeh is a good idea, and set up epoch-making social networking trends. Oh no, wait. Only really, terminally awful bastards in Harvard get to do that. And they get to meet Justin Timberlake too! This film is a tightly-scripted, visually interesting two-hour explanation that there's no justice in the world.

5. NOT INCEPTION. NEVER INCEPTION.
OK, so you know at the beginning they explain it's all about the subtle difference between dreams and reality and bang on about some little spinning thing, and then there's a bit in Africa so hackneyed and moronic that you think "Oh, so this is all a dream then," and stop caring, then it's like watching someone playing Call of Duty with tedious efficiency for two hours, then the thing keeps spinning and it ends and you were right and the whole thing's stupid and no-one ever dreams like that because at no point did Leonardo Di Caprio's mum turn up as a zombie and try to eat him, and anyway the best bit where the road folds over on itself is in the trailer? No? Then you're an idiot.

Aim High, Fall Fast, Land Hard, Regret Everything

2011-01-07T21:48:00.003Z

So here we go then: with some aims for the Year of Our Lord Twenty-double-el. Or as I am now going to call it 20-lublubublulblblulblulbub!

That really only works if I do it in person, so do request it next time you see me, friends, and I shall perform for you like the flamboyant simian I am. Do.

Aim the First: Be a bit more timely with blogging

Oooh, er... Um... *shifts uncomfortably*

OK, so I'm doing the traditional January 1st or at the very least, January 2nd if you are one of the cool dudes who see in the New Year lying underneath their television, watching the pixels dancing vertically and incomprehensibly, hearing the bongs and hilariously asking your fellow party-goers whoozzfoanizzringinggg, basically, under the influence of more than the slight buzz generated from a particularly charming episode of Father Ted, blogpost, on the 7th. Let's bump this one to next year.

Aim the Second: Write a sitcom (in the next four-and-a-half weeks)

Because it's always good for the mind-state to start with a nice, easy one. The time limit is due to this life-changing opportunity. But, like the ten or twelve life-changing opportunities that waft past my snoozing nosey on a monthly basis, probably - they are too stealthy to make enough noise to rouse me, the ninja bastards - this will pass without any discernible effect on me. I am too busy STILL being troubled by the fact that the frozen stares those two singing bozos on the match.com advert give each other after they've completed their hellish duet is because of the realisation they've each been croon-seducing their own sibling to be bothered by such trifling matters as life-changing opportunities.

I'd love to write a sitcom, but I have no ideas. So, unless I can somehow extend the whole brother/sister seduction story into a feelgood six-parter (note to self: can probably pitch it to Channel 4 if I make it Katie Price's kids and cast Frankie Boyle as a disturbed therapist) I'm looking at attempting to write stuff based on what comes out of the random article generator on Wikipedia. So, BBC, look out for the knockabout tale of a Mexican banda group from Limon who move to Coso, California and whose leader falls in love with an Indonesian frog who, despite a failure to understand even basic arithmetic, was rather cruelly named Panos Papasoglu!

Don't worry: I never even left the drawing board.

Aim the Third: Stop The Bitterness!

Hollow laughter from certain corners of Peterborough, Essex/the high seas and deepest darkest Turkey to this one, I'm sure... But I'm thinking that maybe, finally, 2011, at the age of 30, should be the year when I stop hating all women in the world.

Wow, you think I'm kidding! I'm really not! Ask them people up there in those far-flung places! I do. With very few exceptions (Peterborough, Essex/the high seas and deepest darkest Turkey xx) I hate all women. That's usually fine - women all over the world are having a fantastic time of it all despite my hatred of them - and really only impacts on me when they bloody dare to do the same bloody thing as me. So, when I was 14 and thought I was a good singer (I was not) I got that oh-so-special knot in my stomach when confronted with Louise Wener, Justine Fricshmann and that keyboard bird out of Pulp. (She didn't even sing, I don't think. So unfair of me) And now, I think I'm a good writer (I really don't. A good writer would not need so many parenthetical interludes. Say, whatever did happen to Zoe "Brackets" Williams? OOH! I'm so delicious!) so it's whoever happens to write something good, especially if they're unpaid and/or younger than me, that now makes me grind my teeth into a pointless talc.

I have no idea why I have this reaction. Hungry for attention? Daddy never loved me? Sociopathic bitch? Can't fuck their bodies, so need to fuck their minds (not like that)? Or everybody feels like this all of the time, but no-one would be so crass as to mention it in their blog? Everything but the last, let's hope. Whatever. It's getting too expensive in clothing to hulk out every time someone female on Twitter gets praised or retweeted.

So no more. Carry on, ladies of the world. I am behind you 100%, unless you continually tweet "hello to my new followers!" and "Thanks for the follow fridays!" when you are UTTERLY UNDESERVING OF EITHER.

OK...no more from now.

Aim the Fourth: Go On An Impulse Trip To Vegas With Someone Off Twitter

Or something equally as rash and stupid that seems like it will be like a brilliant offbeat movie but would instantly descend into a gordian knot of practical impossibilities and sullen disagreements and no-one would win any money or expand the realms of their consciousness or see Celine Dion or anything.

My need to go to Vegas is now reaching unbearable levels, though. Dear Jim...

Aim the Fifth: Give It A Cigarrest

Finally, one that's possible. And has worked for five days now! Not a whiff of beautiful, life-sapping smoke has entered my lungs since Sunday, expect for when I frenched that startled tramp in the bus stop on Wednesday night. He hadn't even been smoking - I just had a funny turn. (The smoke in that instance came from our burning sexual compatibility) And I don't miss it at all. Here is photographic evidence of me not missing it.

That is not me. I would kill for those arms, and I would also kill whoever gave me that fringe. Then skin them, then dry out their skin over a period of several years, then crumble the skin into flakes, then roll it up in a rizla, then swap it with a local friendly cannibal (a fine young one, perhaps? Oooh-ma-hahaaa!) for a packet of Marlboro silvers.

I have given up before. It lasted, I think, about 18 months. But I think that's because I didn't give myself strict guidelines. So this time, I will not smoke unless one of these circumstances should befall me:

walking over a bridge at night while listening to Kind Of Blue
needing to prove that I am cool in awkward social situations when acres of sparkling banter has not suddenly made itself available to my front-brain after 30 goddamn years of skulking around the inaccessible hinterland of my back-brain
dispersing clouds of mosquitoes
creating an unspoken bond with dangerous-looking youths at bus stops
or because I really want to.

It'll all go fabulously, I'm sure.

Updates to follow as and when they become relevant.

New Beginnings: Not Nude

2010-12-29T13:10:00.005Z

It was definitely time for a spruce-up round here. So anyone who's ever been put off by the old-school white-on-black eye-vexing headache-inducing textuality I used to flaunt around here... Well, you clearly won't be reading this, what with having run screaming from this site many months ago. Look what you've missed! Broken promises, maudlin mopage, and some pictures of waffles. It's the coalition government at the IHOP!

So here we are: it's a bright new world of light and airiness and hope. Awful, isn't it? With any luck, I'll be just as slack about blogging in the new year as I have been in 2010, and we can all avoid this place for as long as possible.

In the spirit of the above, I'm going away now. I will be back as soon as I've a) decided what to do with 2011 and b) found and throttled whoever it is that's shouting NO-ONE CARES just out of comfortable earshot.

Happy New Year, fellow word-readers.

Just Resting My Mince Pies Day 20: Peter, You've Lost The News!

2010-12-20T23:53:00.004Z

So Brian Hanranhan died today. He was a BBC reporter and the BBC went big on it, in between their fervent protestations that because it had snowed, it was the end of everything ever and life itself would never be the same again. It's hard not get caught up in the apocalyptic panic of the rolling news, if only because there are so many reporters posted around the country, standing next to snow-covered roads, next to snow-covered fields, next to snow-covered cows, that the news becomes one gigantic pissing match to see which region can come up with the most alarming statistic to guarantee their 30 second slot on the 6 o'clock news.

In fact, they should just make it into a dance-war musical extravangaza, West Side Story style. Northern Ireland do the record-breaking low temperature soft-shoe shuffle. Scotland counteracts with the highest inchage of snow slinky clicking-fingered jazz walk. And then London beats allcomers with its sprawling, disturbingly sexual interpretive representation of the anguish of having to wait more than 8 minutes for a plane to Mauritius.

Anyway, Brian Hanrahan died, but with the greatest of respect to everyone who has ever lived or died, I don't really know who he is. But he did remind me and four million other people on Twitter of the great Peter O'Hanra-Hanrahan, from the annoying prescient news-splang The Day Today. Which would have baulked at the coverage of the snow-pocalypse today as being too ridiculoud even for them. See, everything's linked. I don't just throw this together, you know!

Sorry, I'm just getting something in my earpiece... Oh, apparently, yes I do. Apologies for that.

Here is Peter O'Hanra-Hanrahan and his spider.

Just Resting My Mince Pies Days 13-19: I'm A Commitment-phobe, All Right?!

2010-12-19T23:56:00.002Z

Probably worse that that, I'm a miserable commitment-phobe. Ah, but there are mitigating circumstances! It's the age-old question: does a week of early shifts with no sleep begat the misery, or does misery begat the week of early shifts with no sleep?

Well, no. The week of early shifts are begatted by the evil warlords who control my rota, who are, I hasten to add, not even slightly related to the area of warlording, and are all the very essence of sweetness and light and holiness. The misery is begatted by...yeah, well. You'd have to pump me full of alcohol and listen to me stutter and stumble and watch my stupid face contort with masochistic narcissism to get that little nugget of knowledge, and to any real-life friends who have experienced, or are about to experience, this joyful festive occasion, may I take this opportunity to wish them a very merry Christmas!!!

And thank them massively and profusely because, obviously, you know, thanks. Oh! And sorry as well, but that's about as devalued as a '30s Deutschmark at this point. 500 million sorry-marks to each of you, about the value of a cob loaf, or the wholesale value of a small shrew.

It's fine. Early shifts heighten all and any emotions, and a slight case of the bluesies has thus been overblown dramatically by me into a state of near-mental collapse. The fact is, I ate a burrito this week, and no-one who is the embryonic stages of a nervous breakdown has ever eaten a burrito, because they're such wonderfully joyous foods, so I think I'm probably OK, and so are all the avocados. God bless 'em.

Down to business, then. A mini-blast of good stuff in day-by-day format. Prepare your AIOTM voice!

Monday. Where I discovered the true meaning of nerdgasm: Mark Heap being a silent psychologist for the first ten minutes of the latest Miranda. I can't embed that, obviously, but if you haven't been watching Miranda, you should rectify that immediately. But let's celebrate Mark Heap with one of my favourite Brian moments from Spaced.

WHICH I CAN'T EMBED EITHER. This is not going too well. Let's move on swiftly.

Tuesday. Where this song failed to give me any perspective, but that's not its fault. It's marvellous nonetheless.

Wednesday. Or The Blaady, Blaady, Blaady, Blaady, Blaady Apprentice day, as it has become for me of late, thanks to the very kind people at hecklerspray letting me review it for them every week. I'm churning out about 2,000 words for each one, which is absurd in every way, and easily beats the length of any essay I wrote at university. I'm not even cribbing it from "Apprentice for Dummies" like I did for most of my Freud essays. Here's the sum total of my Freud knowledge now: the one disturbing dream I had about killing my mother and the "All You Want Is A Penis" song from Friends.

Thursday. And BBC4 gently took a sacred bull by its sacred horns and led it into a field laced with landmines and hair-trigger hoof-traps and butchers with lots of pent-up aggression. And you know what? It kind of came out unscathed. This is my tortured way of saying that they made an adaptation of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and although they gave Dirk iPhones and emails and a rather too prominent mean streak and Stephen Mangan's face, by which I mean hair, it was a worthy programme. As long as you forgot all about the book, that is.

It fared rather better than the film of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, which was far too cute and featured far too much snogging (Arthur Dent does not have sex! Well, not till the fourth book). But the film did have one redeeming feature: if you grew up with the TV and radio series as I did, when the theme kicked in, it sent one mother of a shiver down the spine. This theme!

Friday. Christmas shopping day. And although I was tempted to jog round the undulating, twinking belly of the corporate beast of Westfield to Eye Of The Tiger, randomly punching people as I went, I decided this may not have been the best way to approach the festive season. After all, I didn't particularly want to spend my actual Christmas inside the belly of Shepherds Bush police station. Though if I did, I could put this groovesome little number on repeat in my brainbox, and jive like the kid with the afro contained in this clip to the sounds of pained strip searches and the sickening crashing of baddie-bonces with the truncheons of justice, and I'd be happy.

Saturday. A day of rest from the internal turmoil of the week, due to a pretty serious slab of sleep, only interrupted by the daily 7am liberal dousing of cat dribble. And suddenly, as if to prove that hey, today will be a better day, the sky released all the pent-up snowy action it had been hoarding for so many days in one great orgasmic dump, and transformed Earlsfield into a snowy wonderland. A quick panic-buy in the local Sainsbury's, elbowing past the yummy mummies loading up their 4x4 tank-buggies scrambling for the last morsels of chorizo and barley wheat for delicious warming tagines, and we were set for an amusing day watching the cat get a year's worth of karmic comeuppance by being perpetually irritated by the snow. Much like this:

Sunday. I saw Catfish, and was puzzled by it. It rang particularly horrendous bells - as regular and patient readers will know, my charge sheet is littered with disastrous collisions between conversing on the internet and real life; but I can't really discuss anything about this film without spoilering the hell out of it, and plus, I haven't stop being puzzled yet.

I was going to show you the trailer, but it a) makes it look like something it's not and b) has all the best bits in it. It's one to go in blind to. Not literally. So here's a nice Adam Buxton music video for no particular reason. One week to go. Let the mince pies roll.

Just Resting My Mince Pies Day 12: Ding Fries Are Done

2010-12-12T23:26:00.001Z

So finally, finally, a little bit of Christmas cheer because today was the day we could play with Blu-Tac. Nothing more Christmassy than Blu-Tac. As a child, I used to get a satsuma-sized ball of Blu-Tac deep in my stocking every year. I could not, obviously, due to its never-disappointing levels of stickiness, get it out of the stocking. But its friendly weight would remain with me as all year, starved of normal childhood human contact by my crippling shyness, I trailed the stocking around behind me like a dead dog, gathering muck and oomska in its wake.

Well, that's sinister and untrue!

We stuck the green plastic watering cans and fake Chinese rubber plants and fake plastic tree (just the last one, really) and fairy lights up today, so Christmas has finally arrived, and all in the house is twinkling and shining and occasional ugly blobs of blue. To that end, let's have my second favourite Christmas song, which I had wanted to have in its rightful place at the end of the best episode of West Wing ever - the one where Josh goes mental and Yo Yo Ma is there and there's a saccharine speech at the end which made my pancreas have to have a bit of a lie down - but I couldn't find that online anywhere, so you'll have to cope with the Generic Christmas Imagery And John Williams Beating Small Boys Into Perfectly Tuned Perfection version instead.

And, of course, this.

Just Resting My Mince Pies Day 11: Seasonal Maladjustement

2010-12-11T23:55:00.000Z

Sometimes, when it's the pre-penultimate Saturday before Christmas, and you have spent the day lolling about in a dressing gown, staring huntedly at the front door which has stayed resolutely closed due to your dressing gown-bound ways, and you attempt to think about Christmas shopping but all that fills your mind is 12 million sharp-elbowed fiends who know what they want for Christmas - to stand in front of you in a lot of queues and take the last mince pie and the last table in Caffe Nero - and also, when you can barge past the fiends to get to the dusty filing cabinet at the centre of your brain, you open up the "Christmas Ideas" drawer and are attacked by a flock of bloodthirsty bats; though why bloodthirsty bats are always found hanging round empty things is a mystery, surely some sort of evolutionary imperative would lead one of them to say to the others "Tell you what, chaps, bit low on the old blood levels in this dark empty space. I mean, yes, we can flutter out alarmingly at someone when we eventually discovered, but the chances of us happening upon a vein in the kerfuffle are pretty damned small, what?", sometimes when all of that happens, all you want to do is watch a short funny zombie film.

Maybe something like this, made by a set of dudes I'm sure most of you reader types will be familiar with what with knowing me and everything, but if you don't, they're a ruddy talented family and I order them to go even further than they have already gone. In a having success way, not in a walking briskly away from me way. They are free to do that anyway.

Zombie Cuisine?

Just Resting My Mince Pies Day 10: Moon On A Stick

2010-12-10T23:48:00.001Z

Oh, the excitement. It was the day to go and see Stewart Lee, and endure two hours of self-analysis of one's own laughter levels. Sure, you're laughing, but are you laughing at the right level? Are you laughing at the joke, or at the fact it is Stewart Lee saying the joke, or at the reaction he knows the joke will get, or at his own reaction to the reaction that the joke is getting? Is this OK? Am I doing it right? Do you despise me, Stew, for laughing at the wrong thing? It's a whole passive aggressive nightmare, and the sooner Stewart Lee and his whole audience just get it over with and fuck already, the better.

This is unfair to Stewart Lee. He's a comedian and I laughed and therefore both sides of the normal performer/audience member contract were filled to a surprisingly adequate degree. I stopped thinking about how much I should be thinking about it after I got lost, Inception-style, between levels 6 and 7 of post-modern self-reflexive meaning. Whatever. I'm not a clever person.

I am, however, getting a little bit Second Life in my advancing years. I had taken my book with me to get it all signed and that - God knows why, never meet your heroes, they'll look at you with their sad eyes and forget you forever and you live with that imbalance which, if you are the monolith of arrogance that I am, is tricky - and as I perambulated through the power of trembling to the Stewart Lee, my mind started to do a glitch, and this happened:

SL: Who should I sign it to?

Me: Can you sign it to Jul...er...

SL: *stares in silence*

Me: ..er, JRME please?

SL: Sorry? J...

Me: JRME. The letters. Um...

SL: *with disdain* What... is that text-speak for Jeremy, or something?

Me: *as single tear rolls down cheek* Pretty much, yeah. Thanks.

Then I ran away. I didn't say "Great show". I didn't say "No, it's actually the initials of my internet nom de plume, under which I write many informative articles about TV shows that you'll never in a million years watch." I didn't even say "I'm so, so sorry."

What's up with that? Am I now more JRME than I am Jules? Should I worry? Or be happy? Or stop gazing at my navel? Yes, that one.

So, anyway, look! It's Fist Of Fun! Full half hour of it!

Just Resting My Mince Pies Day 9: Return Of Teh Qute

2010-12-09T23:04:00.000Z

One of the nice things about working in the same place as your no-rings-please-we're-too-antisocial-to-host-a-party heterosexual life partner is that when the faecal matter starts to fly around the place like a cloud of horrible starlings, as it does with quite worrying frequency in our fabulous establishment, he will know instantly what to do: down tools and send me a calming video of a cat hugging his teddy.

That's it!

Just Resting My Mince Pies Day 8: Baboon Baboon Baboon Baboon

2010-12-08T21:14:00.001Z

Just before we get too complacent, let us not forget, this is a rare and special time in our lives, cricket-wise. And to remind us of two things: a) the natural order of things between us and those danged Ozfolk and b) just how enormous a quantity of excellence that young Neil Hannon manages to cram into his slight and, frankly, rather bloody gorgeous form, and how he can create a side-project called the Duckworth Lewis Method and write a concept album about cricket and this, a whole song based on one ball.

What a ball though.

Life continues at an uneventful pace.

Just Resting My Mince Pies Day 7: I Don't Like Cricket

2010-12-07T10:53:00.000Z

I LOVE IT.

Ecstatic jubilations on Tuesday, as we grabbed hold of those Aussies by the baggy greens and hoofed them right out of the park. Then we won the cricket. We WON. The CRICKET. In AUSTRALIA. This is an incredible thing. I unfortunately missed it, due to an immense disagreement between myself and my body clock which saw me asleep by 10:30pm but bolt awake at 3am, by which time the players were off the pitch, the champagne was glugged to oblivion, and I had to watch the rolling teletext pages and listen to the light jazz and scream a little scream of you.

No, not you. You're my favourite.

Anyway, the day afterwards, handily, I discovered Test Match Sofa - an alternative commentary, kind of like a melding of TMS and the Guardian OBO but with more swearing. And they have provided today's (well, Tuesday's. It's now Thursday. This is all going terribly well) clip, because they would occasionally play a snippit from the chorus of this song when the wickets fell, in an amusing fashion. And it's been lodged into my head ever since. So this is a crude attempt to dislodge it, which won't work. And you won't enjoy it. Never mind.

Oh, I can't embed it. Way to harsh my buzz, Justin Timberlake.

GONE!

Just Resting My Mince Pies Day 6: No, You're A Dog, But I'll Let That Pass

2010-12-06T10:45:00.000Z

Right, sorry! Where were we?

Obviously, few days behind now, because of some reasons. So a quick rattle through, yes? Yes!

I can't now remember what I did on Monday, so I shall post the first thing I can think of. And as at most times of my life I am thinking about puppies singing mid-60s beat numbers, let's have a puppy singing a mid-60s beat number. Always a pleasure, never a chore.

Just Resting My Mince Pies Day 5: You Sound Like A Trapped Boy

2010-12-05T22:10:00.004Z

So Devon, yeah? Glorious morning it was too, full of this:

And this:

But then, we left Devon to drive back to the heathen wastelands of London, and suddenly all was this:

We were literally driving into walls of cloud that were feeling really down and dejected about their lot in life, and had slunk down to prowl around at ground level, listening to The Smiths and blowing themselves away with hairdryers. It made the drive back a little unnerving for MrJRME, who was trying to deal with the perverse and wrist-breaking positions of the light and windscreen levers in our new car whilst wiping away tears of mirth from listening to old Adam and Joe podcasts.

But A+J can wait for another day. Even though we weren't out on the wild and windy moors, even though we were in the wrong part of the country, it still reminded me of Wuthering Heights and thus, Alan Partridge. Can't find a clip of the actual show, so you'll have to just remember its majesty ("Sweet feet!") and make do with this slightly cringey Comic Relief effort. Then go and watch the whole series of The Trip and Mid Morning Matters and decide Steve Coogan is a bit of a genius.

Kiss my face!

Just Resting My Mince Pies Day 4: Extremely Ameowsing

2010-12-04T20:03:00.000Z

So down to Devon to chew the fat with MrJRME's mumelade and dadford for the weekend. All was most pleasant and passed without incident. Well, nearly all. There was a very strange ten second interlude where the mumelade had spotted some schmutz on my coat and was brushing it off by smacking me repeatedly on the bute-ocks, and at that exact instant I noticed a) the dadford was shaving in the middle of the kitchen which struck me as incredibly odd and slightly distasteful and b) just next to him on the counter was a massager and some baby oil.

These observations in close proximity brought up some interesting feelings and questions that I didn't even slightly want to think about going into, so instead we spent most of the day talking about cats: how much they missed their little bundle of joy-fluff, and how much of a bastard ours is. Look at him, with evil intent in his little "eyes"...

Chilling.

Anyway, all this felineosity made me think of this modern gem of the internet, from that bloke wot puts his voice on cats and makes them say all funny fings and shit. I believe that's his official YouTube bio. So for the fourth day, may I present Kitty Is A Very Bad Mystic:

Treat...

Just Resting My Mince Pies Day 3: Kangabaroooooo!

2010-12-03T22:53:00.007Z

A slightly melancholy feeling to today, because it was Friday and I always feel melancholy on a Friday. And plus, I saw today's scrolldown picture courtesy of @shoutsatcows. This is the closest I have ever seen to a real-life Chris Ware cartoon...

Hey, Skippy? What are you, boy? You're so crazy and funny. Look at you messing about in the water! Your joy for life completes me, Skippy!

Skippy? Where are you going, Skippy?

Skippy...?

Sorry it's a bit of a downer today. That is the way of the world!

Just Resting My Mince Pies Day 2: We Love The King

2010-12-02T22:40:00.003Z

To be honest, it's a while since I've seen my own skin. So cold it has been of late that I've had to keep on a few layers of clothes even when in my accursed slumber. I mean, yes, of course I've washed, but I usually shower with my eyes tightly scrunched shut anyway to stop all sorts of unpleasant internal machinations. And also because I have been humiliated once by the phrase "No more tears" and I will never be fooled again. NEVER. AGAIN. I'd do a thousand-yard stare at this point but it still stings when I de-focus. Thanks for that, Johnsons and Johnsons!

Anyway, so yes, it's cold. But trying to think of a nice snowy thing to share just led to thousands of Christmassy thoughts, and it's too early for Christmas clips. Luckily, something else happened today apart from the artic monkeying, which was that the World Cup way in the spacesuit-hoverboard-soylent green-future times year of 2018 went to Qatar. Or was that 2022? God knows. Who cares? It was an excuse for 20,000 gags about mucus to be unleashed along the Twit/Fassbook axis, in which my lone nerdish voice squealed out "Qatarmari Damacy!"

Check out this clip of one of the most insane, addictive, compulsively satisying games, like, evah. Plus, massive J-pop soundtrack win. What could be more advent-y than the screams of a thousand citizens as you roll up their apartment block?

Hmm. I'm not being so great at this advent thing.

You rolled up the MOON!

Just Resting My Mince Pies day 1: Ello Dahlin

2010-12-01T13:08:00.008Z

So here's what I'm going to do, in lieu of the fact that I have been a very naughty JRME and not blogged at all really this year: a bit of daily postage for the Christmas period.

But to save myself from actually having to think of anything to write, it'll be more an advent calendar of funny clips or pictures or whatever comes to me on the day.

It won't last long. Let's face it, I'm already a day late with this one. The date below may SAY it's 1st December, but it's not. It's the 2nd. I'm already lying to you. I'm so sorry. I only hurt you because I love you!

But if it were still the 1st, I would be telling you this: in a restful day today, I watched a very old man with an extreme shaking disorder attempt to pull apart my car with his bare hands in sub-freezing weather, all because I wanted a new car stereo and he worked for Halfords. Also, a great cack of white nonsense fell out of the sky and scared the cat. I failed to form any interesting opinions about either of these things, so let's just move on to the clip.

In tribute to the rather pleasant young Twitterer and Lego maniac Chris Salt, who now has my Big Train DVD and no better home there is for it too, one of my favourite Big Train sketches.

Happy the 1st!

Sunday: Run, 40,000 Forests, Run!

2010-10-13T02:40:00.008+01:00

Up well before the lark had even got out of REM sleep this morning, for it was the whole reason myself and the whole Mr JRME clan are in Chicago: Papa-MrJR and Brother-MrJR wanted for some reason to get hideously sweaty and out of breath and red-raw among 40,000 other people. Ha ha, that could have two meanings! Good thing I meant they were here for the world's biggest incestuous orgy. Wouldn't want there to be any misunderstandings.

Nope. Chicago marathon, stoopid. And as we wended our way to the El station at the ungodly hour of 5:30am, we encountered a merry group of Boystown revellers who were heading home. They were, to turn a phrase, screaming. And also, literally, screaming. After finding out I was from London, they screamed happily at me for a while, but then I was well and truly trumped by the Japanese cutie hoving into view. They damn near squealed themselves inside out on learning that she hailed from Tokyo, even though she doesn't. "Fashion capital of the world, bitch!" they yelled happily into her rather startled face, causing a great deal of cross-cultural misunderstanding and nearly the start of a minor war. Once it had been explained that they meant it in a nice way and everyone had put down their weapons, they wished us well, and we boarded the most irritatingly healthy and fit train ever seen in human history; several hundred marathon runners, one passed-out dude with slowly-encrusting dribble forming a stalactite from his snoring face, and me and Mr JRME bringing down the attractiveness averages admirably.

Not that we cared. Cos once we'd waved the stupid idiots off for their five-hour long run, it was fatty-fat breakfast time!

In deference to the stupid idiot runners pounding past the pavement next to our magnificent diner, I got fruit instead of bacon on top of my corned beef hash. FRUIT. What else do you want from me, people? Jesus.

I've never been to a marathon before: it's an awful lot like being hypnotised by the entire cast of Logan's Run who are all, in turn, taking part in a huge real-life re-enactment of Where's Wally. Rows and rows and rows and rows of identically dressed, shiny, healthy human specimens, each more shiny and healthy than the last, all flitting past in a never-ending parade of white earphones and self-satisfaction. It really is quite mesmerising, especially if you're trying to look out for someone and you've forgotten what they're wearing, what the, er... who...you...feeling...so...sleepy...

You get the picture.

I can only blame the discombobulation caused by the sheer mass of passing humanity, and the unseasonable bloody gorgeous sunshine, and the fourteen cups of Gatorade I snafued from various tables around the route (there were plenty more! I only could have contributed to the dehydration comas of two, three athletes, tops) for the fact we ended up in the Elephant and Castle! BRITISHER PUB!

Or, if you prefer, and this is an exact representation of how I remembered this scene when addled with Chicago sunbeams and pints of Tennants (yes really)...

Then...

Then?

Editors note:

Well, it's 27th November. I think we can safely say I ran out of steam with this whole travel blog thing. I can only apologise. The rest of the trip passed along in a haze of, yes, more food, a couple of hazardously trippy nights on incredibly strong American cold medication, and thanks to a strange cable channel, the entire back catalogue of the IT Crowd and Monty Python.

And one evening in a comedy club on 23rd street where I found myself standing at the closed bar while some US guy made a mildy amusing quip about all cats being gay last for a full, tortuous 2o minutes. And the two lone figures accompanying me at the bar, within breathing and, dare I say, slight licking and nibbling distance? Adam Buxton and Simon Amstell. And then? As I drew breath to let fly my torrent of maniacal praise and admiration which would have rendered them deaf, dumb and impressed to death, an officious little prick of a woman moved me on because I was standing near a fire exit, and another dream died on the streets of New York.

God, I love New York. And I love YOU.

Saturday: Fail Whale

2010-10-10T22:35:00.000+01:00

People wot know me and my stupid larynx in real life - especially those exposed to the Great Scottish Accent Horror of '01 - will be thrilled to hear that I'm picking up quite the bushel of Americanisms. I'm catching myself saying "sure" instead of yes, I'm asking if I can "get" food instead of "have" it, and I even said "oh my gosh, dude!" in place of my usual "FACKIN' HELL YOU CAHNT!" To complete the transformation from mild-mannered Londoner to fully-fledged hiding in the bins from Immigration Chicagoan, I have been ticking off various American cliches so that I can blend in totally unnoticed and react calmly when confronted with Big Gulps (enormous litre-cups full of fizzy drink you get at Circle Ks) and Half and Half (semi-skimmed milk) and American labor laws NO U (nine days holiday a year, set sick days after which you don't get paid, 12 weeks maternity leave, no redundancy rights, holy Jesus, don't work here)

And the IHOP! Like in those stoner movies: hey, man, let's go to the IHOP. Duuuude! IHOP! No? Well, it's the International House of Pancakes, it's open 24 hours, it's a breakfast-based menu - enormous - and it's so retro a Hackney Hipster would ejaculate himself to dessication with one step inside. It's basically Little Chef for Yankees, but with excellent service, delicious food and four different types of syrup. Oh my!

A quick note on where we're staying. It's the cutest little B&B, a gorgeous wooden building set back off the main road, all fresh-baked muffins and huge baskets of shiny fruit and wheatsheaf bundles artfully laying about the place. It's also smack bang in the middle of the biggest gay district in the northwest, called...wait for it...a little longer...looooonger...bereadynow! Boystown. Ho yay! So next door there's a leather sex shop, and opposite, there's a bathhouse boasting "70 private rooms, the best hunks in town, and a monthly Bear, Bath and Beyond night." A category Mr JRME fits into like a big gay bear dream; so if we run short of money, I'm going to pimp him out over there. The boys can stroke his beard while he talks like either Hugh Grant or Vinnie Jones, depending on their preference. They'll love it.

Anyway, we were going to go and see the beluga whales today and laugh at their stupid faces and inability to ovulate expensive foodstuffs, but it turns out the whole of Illinois had had that idea about ten minutes before us, and moreover, were willing to stand in 25 degree direct sunshine for hours to do so. Which we certainly weren't, so it was straight onto lunch, and our Man Vs Food-recommended double-dipped Italian beef sandwiches. Not pretty, but omnomnomnomnom...

It's roast beef, sliced mega mega thin, soaked in beef roasty juices, and then the sandwich itself is dipped in the juices. Yeah? So it's a roast dinner, complete with the bit of bread you smoosh around the plate after you've finished the dinner built right into it. All about convenience over here.

If I may be serious for one moment - maybe not quite as serious as cancer, perhaps the level of seriousness of one of those really bad colds that knocks you out for a couple of days, but not quite enough to prevent you from watching an entire box set of a quality US drama - there is a major racial segregation issue in Chicago. I know the same could be said for London, and yes, there are black areas and white areas etc, but there's also a little bit of a mish-mashery around the borders and the centre of London's pretty much a free-for-all. Not so Chicago, as we found out when we wandered one block into the black district and suddenly every single face, every single one, was black, and we were definitely not in Kansas any more. And along with that, the poverty level became noticably higher. More beggars, more empty shops, more payday loan sharks, the whole deal. Feeling like a total shitforbrains white woolly liberal is preventing me from thinking about this for any longer, so I'll just leave that point there, proudly stinking up the joint like a toddler's first potty-based twosie.

Anyway more food, right? A guest appearence by Mr JRME's plate tonight, as I had a rather boring (though obviously mammoth, enormous, gargantuan, size of an everage washing-up bowl) spaghetti and meatballs concoction.

*pushes half-moons up nose* Now, please to be noticing here, ze very, very unusual addition to ze normal combination of mini-hamburgers unt ze large potato sections. Zere is, as you can see, a cake located on ze western quadrant of ze plate in question. Zis is most peculiar unt requires much more in-depth research by my institute. So far, ve have only managed to surmise zat ze cake in qvestion contained a high level of incongrous yumminess. Ze danger to ze world if all meals were to be coming with ze cake as standard could be ze catastrophe! You! Achtung! Send ze wheelbarrows full of Deutchmarks to ze United States! Schnell schnell!

Friday: Glower At The Tower

2010-10-09T14:49:00.009+01:00

Day the first! (Plus a little bit of day the minus one)

So here's a disclaimer before I go on. It is twofold. 1. I ain't going down the route of "I did this and I saw this and I did this" because a) that's kind of boring and b) I am not very good at sightseeing. I look at things, sure - I see the sight - but I then don't have the capacity to form an opinion of it apart from "Huh. Building" or "Huh. View" or "Huh. President Obama" (we were quite excited to discover that the Bar-O-Bam was in town...well, one of our party was more "utterly terrified" as she found out about the President's arrival as she was in a plane which got within 10 feet of the Chicago runway tarmac before abruptly taking off again like a panicked albatross, because Air Force One pushed in in front on her plane. Big bully. Anyway, he was only in town for three hours, so we've missed him. Never mind)

And 2. (remember? Twofold) This will mostly be about food. Because, generally, I am mostly about food. I'm going to photograph every meal I have. You'll see it - you won't be able to un-see it!

And here is the first, day-minus-one meal:

It's meatloaf. And tater tots. What am I, in the lunchroom in the Simpsons?! No I'm not! I'm in Chicago! Have you not been paying attention? Anyway, stop passing notes and listen: turns out meatloaf is kind of like meatballs but for some reason flat, and tater tots are crispy potato croquette thingies. Both are utterly delicious. There you go: US culinary edumacation up your slunge.

So to the first day. And straight on to meal 2, in a diner that we trekked past twelve million Dunkin' Donuts to find. Seriously: Dunkin' Donuts is to Chicago what Sam Smiths pubs are to Soho. Do a comprehensive crawl of either and you'd be dead within 800 metres of your starting point. Course, with Sam Smiths you probably would have picked up some interesting Estonian swearwords and (unrelatedly - don't sue me, Estonia) exotic sexual maladies along the way, which is reason 46 why Britain is slightly better than America. Of course, there's about twelve million reasons in the other direction and only half of those are branches of Dunkin' Donuts, so I won't dwell on that train of thought.

There's bacon...baked INTO THE WAFFLE! Tomorrow I hope to eat a muffin with sausage injected into the blueberries.

Hypocritical travelogue moment: we went up the Willis formally Sears Tower (I didn't ask, I just assume it's just gone through a painful tower divorce. It's certainly got a chipper new haircut and reeks of gin) to gaze across the majesty of Illinois into the majesty of Wisconsin and Michigen and somewhere else. Huh. View. There was one of those see-through plastic boxes stuck to the side of the viewing platform to enable you to stand and look directly downwards onto the street 110 floors below and darkly fantasise about flinging yourself off a building or being Spiderman, depending on inclination. Weird sensation: I was kind of OK with walking onto the ledge, but when I gingerly reached down to try and touch the transparent floor, my brain - who'd clearly been idling away somewhere else, probably idly singing that bloody Go Compare advert again - suddenly realised what was going on and screamed "NO TERROR FALL DEATH NO", leading me to yelp incontrollably and skitter out to the safety of the back wall, much to the amusement of a couple of Indian teenagers who were literally lying face-down on the plastic ledge as if they were on a Hawaiian beach.

Dinner. (Skipped lunch, shamefully, but did have a Slurpee which was the colour of ADHD and tasted like freezing, acidic, fizzy diabetes. Amazing) And one of Chicago's most famous foodstuffs, the deep dish pizza.

They put the cheese on the bottom, and put the tomato sauce on top, which is genius beyond compare because by GOD you can get more cheese in that way! ACTION SHOT!

(Ignore the Japanese cutie in the background: she's just an affectation I have, she follows me around like Gwen Stefani had a few years ago. I'm so retro.*)

Remember that advert for Pizza Hut, possibly, in the Eighties, where the pizza slice was lifted from its base station and the stretched cheese would spell out PIZZA HUT? Well, this was kind of the same deal, only it spelt out YOU FAT BASTARD. Which in itself was odd, seeing as that's a peculiarly British phrase, but what can I say: they're just damn good at intuitive pizza.

Two random thoughts to leave you with.

1. In tannoy announcements on the L train in Chicago, passengers are refered to as riders. As in, "Please allow other riders off the train first." Riders? How very cool and Knightmare is that?! I keep wanting the driver to say "Caution, Riders! I sense danger ahead! The signals seem to be failing! The wise Rider will transfer at Belmont onto the Brown line and then onwards...to DESTINY!"

2. Spent last night talking to someone who bartended through college: she made $500 a night in tips. Undeclared income. Her friend was once left with $90,000 a year in cash at the end of the year, stashed in a big safe like a gangster. The myth is true. WHY ARE WE ALL STILL LIVING IN ENGLAND, FOR GOD'S SAKE?!

Anyway, I must away. My presence is being missed somewhere. Hasta manana as they don't say here...

*She's Mr JRME's brother's girlfriend and very lovely she is too

Japes On A Plane

2010-10-08T06:57:00.000+01:00

Thing is about American holidays is that they're immense and wonderful and life-affirming and all that is good about the world condensed into seven days of pure, unadulterated bacon fat. Er, I mean, pleasure.

Thing is about American holidays is that you've got to go on an aeroplane to get there.

Thing is about going on an aeroplane is that it's the worst thing a human can subject themselves to outside of willingly putting the Femail section of the Daily Mail in their RSS feeder.

So here I am: on a plane, writing on a laptop, like a wanker. Actually, bear with me a second while I rummage in my hand luggage:

OK. Now, here I am, on a plane, writing on a laptop AND listening to music on my iPhone FOUR. FOUR. Like a really, really, really, really prolific wanker. A wanker that has put in the wanking hours and really honed his wanking craft to the best standard that an amateur wanker can hope for. (I mean, he doesn't kid himself, he knows that there will always be those with natural wanking talent, the born wankers, that'll be one step ahead of him in the wanking ranking; but he's happy with what talent he's got, because he's worked for it.) So basically, I'm like the...say, RObin Ince of wankers.

That's probably not very complimentary to Robin Ince: for which I will never, ever apologise.

Where was I? Where am I? According to the animated map in my little seat back screen, somewhere approaching the southernmost tip of Greenland, like a recalcitrant teenager giving their first blowie. (Gosh, I'm sorry! I've had a Valium and two large glasses of red wine, and apparantly, instead of sending me into a blissful sleep dreaming of being inside a large and friendly purring lion, it's made me into a filth pervert. This is maybe why you shouldn't mix the two. All that accidental overdose blah blah blah is just a smokescreen so that we don't become an overmedicated, slightly pissed nation of crude-metaphor makers. That would be just awful, like a recalcitrant teenager giving their first blowie! BOOM!) But enough of that.

Areoplanes. Thing is, I don't care about 99% of the usual things that people carp on and on and on and on and on and on about when they talk about air travel. I quite like the food: it's a little three course meal in minature and you often get a bread roll, which is like going out to dinner in the '80s, and you get free booze, for goodness sake! I think it's generally quite admirable. Have you seen the size of the galleys? What do you people expect? A pig roasting on a spit in the luggage hold? Fine, but don't come crying to me when the cabin is filled with acrid porksmoke and you spend your entire holiday fighting off the affections of a ragtag bunch of rascally but adorable mutts in gingham waistcoats who can, for some reason, wink.

And the seats: meh, you know, I spend all of my time sitting. If I was at home, I'd be sitting. If I was at work, I'd be sitting. So I'm travelling somewhere and sitting: big whoop. Again, another thing to admire: we're currently travelling at 500mph and yet we're not all moulded to the inside of the aeroplane's tail, being inextricably flattened to a few molecules deep and several miles wide. People'd really have something to complain about if flying was basically a 9-hour long wall of death. Sitting's a dream, dude.

No no no. None of that does me in one little bit. There is only one thing I dislike about flying, one thing only, but that's enough to ruin the whole experience: TUR. BU. LANCE.

I used to know about science years ago. It's all gone now, to be replaced by endless reams of tweets and snippets from TV shows and the lyrics to pretty much every song up till 2005 when all songs either became about being in a club or having sex with someone in a club or being so, so, so emo and alone in your massive mainstream cultural strata. So I no longer have the scientific wherewithal to understand why a plane can be travelling quite happily and smoothly at 38,000 feet and then abruptly start bouncing about in a terrifying and stomach-churning manner. I get it when you're ascending and descending: I can look out of the window and see the cloud pixies pummelling the sides of the plane with their wispy fists. But at the moment, say, where it's bumpy as FUCK, all I see is clear unadulterated blue skies. I get it in principle: eddies in the airflow. Is he, as Douglas Adams would say. Well, I wish he'd stop jumping up and down on the bloody wings.

There are only two solutions to this that my epic mind can see.

1. Colour-in the wind. Hear me out. It's a closed system up here, right? The atmosphere doesn't escape out into space. There's got to be a way to release a pigment or something into the air which would flow around with the winds or pressure streams or whatever the heck it is that's flopping my orange juice liberally out of its beaker and into my lap. So then we can look out of the window and see glorious stripes of colour streaming round the plane and chucking it around like a child's plaything, and be sated with our knowledge that it's not juddering because the underside of the plane has fallen off and the wings have become imaginary. Bonus Nobel Prize if they can make the pigment look like rubber duckies.

2. Have different grades of "The seatbelt sign is now on", like the terror threats. Enough of this diffuse sense of dread whenever those fateful words are uttered by the cabin crew. I need to be told when to really panic. So we could have the stewards announcing "Seatbelts on but we're still going to be trying to flog you perfume and won't really mind if you go for a quickie in the lavs", then maybe "OK, you're putting your seatbelts on, we're putting our seatbelts on, it's going to sound like the engine's cutting out but don't panic, we're still going to try and flog you perfume by hoiking it down the aisles at you," and then the toppermost poppermost, "JESUS CHRIST! NO NEED FOR SEATBELTS, THIS BIRD'S GOING DOWN! SNAP YOUR OWN NECK WHILE YOU STILL CAN!"

Can't see anyone having a problem with that.

I'd welcome a good layman's explanation of sudden mid-air turbulance from someone who's not Wiki-frickin'-ooh-look-at-me-I-think-I'm-a-proper-scientific-journal-I-don't-need-to-dumb-myself-down-pedia. Brown? JT? Anyone? Bueller? Let me know.

Anyway, better stop for now. Sorry if this was a bit OHGODSHUTUP, it's a stream of rubbish consciousness. It's gone batshit bumporama again and I'm going to put on a eyemask, listen the Watch With Mothers podcast and repeat loudly "Bumpy road, just a bumpy road, just a bumpy road" until someone beats me into a coma. See you in Chicago, babies!

You Should Hear Our Discussions On How To Spell "The Sound Noel Edmonds Makes To Announce His Impending Breakdown"

2010-09-30T13:47:00.006+01:00

May I present, with no comment, a typical IM conversation that I would have with a colleague that goes some way to explain the oddities of my mostly mundane but often surreally amusing job.

Eagle-eyed viewers may spot that the colleague in question is my heterosexual life-partner Ed; anyone who has a problem with me being in a relationship with someone with the same job as me is probably quite safe to take it outside, as I'm clearly too scared to venture out there and look at strangers myself. Possibly enjoy.

JB says:
what's the word we use instead of "farts" again?
Ed says:
parp?
JB says:
GORILLA PARPS?
Ed says:
for kidzzzz
Ed says:
breaks wind
JB says:
well it's a real gorilla
JB says:
deadly 60
Ed says:
silent but deadly 60
JB says:
GORILLA BREAKS WIND?
JB says:
hehe!
Ed says:
trumps?
Ed says:
GORILLA TRUMPS
Ed says:
nah
JB says:
silverback: 80 points. I WIN SUCKA
Ed says:
phew, I can smell the victory from here. smells like gorilla leavings
JB says:
there's got to be a middle ground between breaks wind and parps
Ed says:
is it a dry one or a wet one?
Ed says:
pfft.
JB says:
it's quite a wet one
Ed says:
um...
JB says:
PRRRRT
Ed says:
voluminous?
Ed says:
um...
JB says:
nah, just a little peep-flapper
Ed says:
:)
JB says:
It's definitely more Rs than Fs
JB says:
PFFRRRRRT
Ed says:
yeah
Ed says:
it's got comedy factor too. kids'll love it
JB says:
indeed so
JB says:
thank you for your valuable input.
JB says:
into his valuable output
JB says:
OH HOH!
Ed says:
boom!

Patience. Watch The Whole Thing. It's Worth It

2010-09-02T16:43:00.004+01:00

OK, look: I wrote this for WWM as an experiment. Didn't work out. So just pretend you're reading a TV blog, otherwise none of this makes any sense. (No malice towards WWM, of course. It totally doesn't fit on there)

If there's one thing this has taught me, it's that I have absolutely no sense of my own writing skillz, cos I think this is the best fucking idea I have ever had. Good Lord, I'm an idiot. Anyway, here you go...

The Role Of The Digital Economy Versus, Um... OMG Meme!

No-one can deny that the traditional model of broadcasting is going through a rum old time at the moment. We live in an age where everything is on demand, tailored to our every whim, sweetened to our satisfaction; there's no such thing as appointment-to-view television in an era where you can watch EastEnders on your phone on the train the next morning, series-link Sherlock and watch it all on a rainy Sunday, or download whole boxsets of the latest US hit drama for free before it's even reached these shores.

So how do the broadcasting giants respond to these threats? Project Canvas, Apple TV, all attempts to claw back revenue and channel brand loyalty by offering streaming, multi-platform content with added value to stop the wily P2P consumer in their tracks. "We make this stuff," they claim, "someone's got to pay for it." And with advertising revenue at an all-time low, they may have a point. But what about the new creativity that comes from video-sharing sites like Vimeo and YouTube? In a time when TV is in compliance meltdown and in a commissioning rut, these sites are a place where new and out-of-favour talent can broadcast exciting, taboo-busting shows. The internet is truly a place where every voice can be equally heard.

So what does this mean for the increasingly tired-looking five-channel terrestial broadcast model? Do we have to retain them as a quality arbiter? Will we tire of the lo-fi nature of YouTube creativity? What will be the sustained link between the internet and television?

Do you want to have that discussion?

Or do you want to use that as an excuse to see the latest LOLmeme sweeping the internet on what is ostensibly a TV blog?

Thought as much.

In Fact, I Went On Holiday A Month Ago. That's How Much I Suck

2010-08-23T18:20:00.000+01:00

CHRIST!

Two and a half months?!

I just don't know what's happened.

Well, I do. Firstly: I have been furiously writing elsewhere. Secondly: I have been redefining the word "furiously" to mean "oh, I dunno, once a week or so, if I can be bothered" purely to make a nonsense of all those films where the cars are fast and oh I dunno once a week or so if they can be bothered. Thirdly: I have been developing a oh I dunno once a week or so if I can be bothered obsession with an internet nemesis which is playing out entirely within my own head without their knowledge because that is what a crazy cat I am and that is how I roll straight into a fetid soup of burning self-hatred. Ah ha ha ha!

Oh hell yeah!

And fourthly: I have been on holiday.

Ah, Berlin! Beautiful dreariness, chaotic order, the schizophrenic, formally cleaved city of many faces, minimum two! Is what I thought would be echoing poetically round my mind as I wandered the streets in a blissed-out haze of beer and sausage. Of course, that didn't happen. In fact, reflecting on our four days in the wurst capital of the world (no, that's harsh. It was all right really. HA! That gag, incidentally, made up 86% of myself and MrJRME's conversation over the holiday), me and MrJ concluded that our ingested footage of sausage fell way below what are, and if there are none, there should be, EU standards of sausage consumption for visitors to Germany. That was a disappointment, I'll admit. I quite wanted to return home having metamorphosed into a hybrid sausage/human creature; looking like a tube of flesh nipped at random intervals into bulging quadrants of delicious, pearled, shining meat. But then I realised I look like that already, so my wishes were moot.

I'm only kidding, those who know me and get annoyed by my constant and wilful self-depreciation! Calm down, yer buggers.

Berlin then: Thoughts? Well, it's in Germany... Oh, you want more? Well, that's reasonable.

1. Hungry birds
Bloomin' hot over there, it was. So we took the opportunity to square up to fruhstuck every morning and growl "Hey, pal. Wanna take it outside?" And there were many, many al-fresco boiled eggs, served inexplicably in a glass for the two-gulp chugged egg experience, and along with those, beautiful seeded rolls. And where there's beautiful seeded rolls, there's Berlin's population of very cute, very brave and very opportunistic sparrows. Sorry, sparras. They seem to have cornered the winged rat market in the city, and they're a darn site more adorable than London's scabrous and peg-legged pigeons. Though if you are sitting under a parasol to shield your delicate British dermis from the uber-power of the German sun, and they get on top and you hear the skitch-skitch-skitch and see the little forks of their feet hopping menacingly across the plastic like miniature Hitchcock villains... Those sweet little sparra bastards will haunt my dreams.

2. No Shops

Day 1
Mr JRME: We need cigarettes.
Me: Oh. I haven't noticed any shops or anything. No worries, there's a machine over there.
Mr JRME: Cool.

Day 2
Mr JRME: Huh, this is weird. I still haven't seen any little shops. Or newsagents, or supermarkets, or anything like that.
Me: Well, we're staying right in the centre of town. It's like Mayfair or something. People don't live here, or they're too rich to need to ever buy anything. They'd pop out for a sports car, not a sports drink. Heh! Yeah? Yeah?
Mr JRME: I hate you.
Me: That's fair.

Day 3
Me: OK, this is getting stupid now. We've been walking the streets of Berlin for three days, been all round the city, and we still haven't found anywhere to buy a banana or a pint of milk.
Mr JRME: (techy) I know.
Me: I mean, what's the deal?! This is crazy! They can't all go to huge out-of-town supermarkets. It's lunacy.
Mr JRME: (beyond techy) I know.
Me: What if they wanted to make a spag bol? Where would they buy a tin of tomatoes? Where? Where?! ..Ed? ... ..Ed...?
*eyes tiny Mr JRME-shaped dot running down street*

Me: ..if you find a shop, will you buy me a banana...?

Day 4

Me: *sinks to her knees, crying, wailing, randomly grappling at the legs of passing horrified Berliners*

Mr JRME: Entschuldigen! Entschuldigen! Bitte müssen Sie erklären mir! Ich gehe geisteskrank! Wo kaufen Sie Bananen? Wo sind die Supermärkte? Wie sind Sie nicht zum Tod oder Bankrott gemachtem zu in den Gaststätten, Sie GeistesGeman verhungert? Hören Sie auf mich! Warum ignorieren Sie mich? Helfen Sie mir!

Me: Ed?

Mr JRME: Ja?

Me: You don't speak German.

Mr JRME: No.

Me: I think we need to go home.

Mr JRME: I think you're right.

*walk off arm-in-arm into sunset, past nearby unnoticed Lidl*

Something like that, anyway.

3. Mr Tie and Mr Skull
So as is traditional for every place where more than ten people have gathered since the beginning of time, 1% of the population of Berlin have set up a small market to flog their idea of homely crafts to the other 99%, who will buy it whilst drunk on the raw creativity enemating from the simple canvas stalls, only to get it home half an hour later and realise it's absolute unmitigated shite. Every city has a market like this, always has, and always will, and they are all identical. Thus most houses around the world will contain the same three identical items bought from as far afield as Peru and Poole; a roughly-hewn ceramic "fertility god", an unidentified gizmo made from polished steel wire, and a GCSE-standard painting of a sad girl.

Anyway, the Berlin craft market was unremarkable apart from one little anomaly. Most stalls were manned by stony-faced individuals, grimacing at all potential buyers, burning through cigarettes with the intensity of those who believe being wreathed with smoke is a good shortcut to demonstrating artistic endeavour. Natural salesmen one and all, but all hermetically sealed in their own little craftworlds, apart from one twosome, sharing a double-berthed stall; one selling smart neckware, one selling gothic paraphernalia. One looking exactly like someone who would sell smart neckware, and one looking exactly like someone who would sell gothic paraphernalia. Mr Tie and Mr Skull.

I loved it. It was a sitcom in motion. Mr Tie and Mr Skull not only work in the same canvas booth, where they share an uneasy bonhomie based on the fact that the venn diagram of their clientèle has no intersection whatsoever, but of course, they also share a duplex apartment somewhere on the outskirts of the city. And of course, one floor is anally neat and tidy, and one floor is a riot of dribbling candles and Iron Maiden t-shirts. And of course, they have a variety of hilarious misunderstandings based on their disparate personalities. And of course, Mr Skull will meet a goth-looking girl, and Mr Tie will fall for her too, and Mr Tie and Mr Skull will fall out over this raven beauty, and it will look like it could be the end for our adventurers, until the goth-looking girl will one day reveal that underneath her black velvet basque, she is secretly wearing a paisley tie, and Mr Tie and Mr Skull will look at each other and laugh and freezeframe and in the epilogue back at the stall, as the credits roll, they will discuss what could have been with goth-looking-tie-wearing girl had she not tragically choked on an over-curried and under-chewed currywurst, and then a smartly-dressed prudish-looking woman will walk past and smile at Mr Tie and Mr Tie will smile back but then as she walks away no-one will notice, glinting on her hand, a tiny little skull ring. OF COURSE!

Mr Tie and Mr Skull. Two conflicting halves shoved together in a strangely wonderful balance. That's basically Berlin, baby.

And you thought that story was going nowhere!

So in conclusion: four days, a shedload of beer and food, one classy entrance into my 30th year which definitely involved me reclining in a beautifully opulent cocktail bar, supping on a cosmopolitan, swishing my salon-perfect hair about the place while Mr JRME loosened his tie into a position of sexy dishevellment, and definitely didn't involve both me and Mr JRME being giddy and ravenous on many pints of Pils, eating Big Macs in our pants and watching Girls Of The Playboy Mansion dubbed into German.

There's that then. Sorry I've been away for so bloody long. It is everyone's fault but mine.

See you in another few months then, my darlings...

Bye Bye Bete

2010-06-01T21:52:00.002+01:00

Well, well, well. Now? Now I feel like a bit of a twat.

Now followeth a sanitised and updated version of what I wrote in a heightened state of emotional blood-letting - or perhaps bed-wetting - on Sunday night. If you caught that last post before I deleted it in what was a surprisingly satisfying move, I apologise for what might look like rewritten history. It's not. It's just a less Tanya Gold way of looking at it.

The mystery has been solved; the mystery that I didn't even realise was a mystery until last Monday. That's the best kind of mystery, right? The kind that whips the rug out from under your feet, when you could have sworn you were standing, feeling the grass squiggle pleasantly beneath your toes, in an entirely empty field?

Yes, it is.

Bete De Jour is no more: killed in a metaphysical flash of light by his author and creator, Karl Webster. Read the linked "twat" up there (linked twat? Hi, guy who's just arrived here from Google! I know pretty much everything can be found on the internet, but "linked twat"? I think you might have just found the mythical edge of the perversion universe. Congratulations) and you'll see that last October, I went a bit funny over Bete De Jour. Obviously, that post wasn't even an atomic layer of the funnyness. I went a LOT funny. As my closest friends will attest, going funny over a boy is something I do with almost clockwork regularity, despite (because of? No. Er...no. Really. I promise. No) being in a stable and long-term relationship. Usually, it's fine; a miniature obsession which burns with the fiery intensity of magnesium; all light and heat and drama for a few seconds, then nothing but an empty crucible and an audience of bored 11-year-old science students, who have all learned NOTHING.

But this one was different. It flamed for a bit, sparkled and hissed as normal, but then, something in the school science lab caught, and the whole thing went up in a conflagration of burning uniforms and screams and pain, and I was standing outside with a tiny glass of water which evaporated in an instant and I was powerless against the onslaught and I was paralysed with fear and I nearly, very nearly, flipped my lid completely. I nearly, very nearly, decided that that was it for my stable long-term relationship, and that my future lay with someone I didn't know, and I'd never even met.

I knew it was insane, and that telling a random man off of the internet that we were as entwinéd as fronds of ivy in the rosebush of destiny - or more likely emailing him "Omigod I love your blog! I could probably be persuaded to shag you if no-one else will!" - was probably in the top ten of really, really, the worst things I could ever do, and so thankfully, I didn't. And eventually, it burnt itself out (the students were all wearing flame-retardant full-body thermals underneath their uniform. Don't worry yourself.) But never once during the inferno, or since, did I think that the random man off of the internet wasn't, strictly speaking, real. Dodged quite the bullet there, yeah? Hence, my twattish opening statement.

He's not real. He's a fictional composite of autobiographical elements and fantasy. I didn't see this coming. And when it did come, and the looming visage of Stan Cattermole vanished, and the curtain was whisked away and someone older, more attractive, less elbows, appeared, I thought I'd be totally humiliated. Angry. Furious.

But I'm not. It's not about what was real and what wasn't. I even said in my original blog that this might have been a carefully constructed "perfect" character designed to ensnare passing womenfolk into pouring out their hearts and flashing their boobs onto emails. No, that's unfair. That sounds predatory. Whatever Karl Webster's motives were, I'm sure they weren't that sleazy (though who knows, right? Never believe what you read on the internet. Gah! When! When will I learn my lesson!) Even if it was all completely fictional, what I fell for - if I may use such an inappropriate term - was the writing itself, not the content. So his cat didn't die. His account of what someone could feel when their cat died was enough to tie my throat into knots and shake from head to tail and make one of my colleagues think I was completely batshit mental, and be slightly wary of me to this day. That's what counts. That ongoing feeling he provoked of despondency and alienation.

Kidding.

Actually, that smacks of rationalisation so that I feel like less of a twat to me, but never mind. We'll push on through.

The only thing that bothers me is that I really wanted parts of it to be real, to prove that it could happen. Specifically, the parts that kind of related to David, the writer from my "twat" blog above. Where the anonymous blogger - ahem! - writes with such beauty and passion and humanity - ahem! AHEM! - that people actually recognise them in the street, fall in love, have doomed romances, blah, blah, blah - AAAAAAAA*coughs up lung* - ahh, hell. Look, I'm needy. Frankly, you've guessed that by now. I'm secure in my neediness. Most of the time. But it saddens me that Stan Cattermole never met a true love running in a park, that he never told someone a fairy-tale at a speed dating evening, that he never had thrillingly literate cybersex with a stranger. Cos if Stan Cattermole never did, there's a good chance Just Resting My Eyes never will.

Not that I want to.

And unless Karl Webster did all those things.

This is all very confusing.

Hey ho. Farewell to Bete De Jour: if it's been anything, it's been a pleasure to read his blog, and I do recommend his book which is great apart from this bit -

;-)

- slight split loyalties there, I'll admit. I'm definitely going to read it again with the fresh knowledge that it's a fiction and see how my previous feelings are refracted through it. I expect I'll feel very sheepish for a bit then enjoy it in a romping style. He's a good writer. He's a great fiction writer who created a sympathetic and believable character. But he's an author. And I've got a big old real life with a real name and a real partner which I am going to retreat back into and enjoy.

But before I do, one more thing to give thanks and almighty praise for: Bete De Jour - Karl Webster - THANK YOU for not turning out to be Martin Amis. I just don't think I could have handled it.

Beee-Beee-Beeeeep...

2010-05-31T11:43:00.004+01:00

"I'm sorry, the post you are trying to view has been deleted for being more revealing as a Penthouse centrefold, and about as welcome as a Penthouse centrefold in the middle of Spare Rib. Please try again later when the author has abandoned all self-respect in favour of permanent guts-out confessional miserablism because no-one's paying her enough attention. Meanwhile, please enjoy some light music."

No, wait, WAIT! I said light music!

That's better.

This Is Not Live

2010-05-07T21:26:00.000+01:00

It was going to be live. I had it all sorted out. I was going to go and have a hilarious evening of comedy, come back and liveblog all through the night into a shining yellow future. I was going to liveblog so hard. I was going to liveblog the shit out of it.

But it was not to be. First, the comedy was 5/8ths disappointing; then, on arriving home, the most dispiriting sight to greet any middle-class, over-privileged twankles such as me - apart from the childishly written, cursive, sparkly sign in the local deli saying "Sorry, no handmade focaccia today :(" - the light on my modem was blinking. To quote myself at the time:

OH MY GOD! THE INTERNET IS DOWN!!!!

Which put me in a stanking funk, which in turn got Mr JRME all grumpy in a slight overreaction to my massive overreaction to being deprived from Twitter. And then, as we grimly sat in a filled with silent accusations and grimly stared at David Mitchell grimly staring right back at us, the glorious wave of Lib Dem wins singularly failed to wash over us, and the evening took a turn for the macabre.

No, not really! I was very disheartened to not be able to join in the barracking on Twitter, although I did discover at around 2am that I could access Facebook on my phone, so my thoughts were freed into the internet like the beautiful, evil butterflies they were. Oh, a self-absorption addict! What an attractive quality! And I would have loved to have liveblogged it, but equally, at no point did it occur to me that I could write stuff down and upload it to the internet at a later date. Three point deduction from the brain, there. That puts it in danger of relegation into the Secondary Organ League next season, where it will have to face up to Spleeds United and a resurgent Borussia Monchengladbappendix.

So I would at this point relay what my thoughts were on the election night, but I stayed up till 5am when Evan Harris lost his seat and the tiny little yellow number in the top corner stayed resolutely in the lower double digits while the reds'n'blues cantered away into the dawn and I couldn't really take it any more, and then got up again at 7am when my cat - who, in a moment of hasty jocularity which has backfired massively, we named Dave - marched his Tory paws all over my face in an active demonstration of the new Big Society where cats take control of failing foodgivers and facilitate the efficient transfer of Whiskas into kittymushes. And I've been wired directly into the coverage ever since. Hence: I am a soggy paper towel in the bottom of the sink of the world, getting all tangled up in stuff and floating about and generally not being any sort of use to anyone.

I have just about enough neurons still firing, though, to say... I am not quite as horrified as I thought I would be at the possible prospect of a Conservative government. Firstly, cos it still looks tantalisingly distant; there's always the chance that The Cleggulator will tell Cammers to ram it up the smooth, unbroken cleft where his android buttocks meld together, and not instantly vapourise all the goodwill he's built up over the last two weeks (or maybe he'll go along with a ConLib coalition just to punish us for not voting in the correct proportions across the country to get his seats up...) Secondly, as it wasn't a victory, let alone a landslide, there was a tangible lack in the specific brand of Tory smugness that gets under your skin like invisible mites and makes you want to frantically claw your own scalp off. That, I fear, is still to come.

Wow. I think I'm on about my 15th wind. I've kind of lost count. Still, all to play for as we enter the second day of negotia... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Liveblogging Democracy In Painful, Ridiculous Detail

2010-04-29T19:45:00.011+01:00

I once read in a silly magazine a silly article about Rules For Office Working, and one of them was something akin to this: 'Every work-related phone call must be concluded by a cheerful "Cheers then. Bye!", replacing the receiver and muttering under your breath "Wanker."' I mention this merely in passing. Who hasn't done it, eh? And who, my friends, would have known anything about it if it were not for the 24-hour hyperdriven news culture? This point I will come back to at a later date, because it's important.

Anyhow, here's the debate thingy. Let's have a look at it.

20:33 The three leaders at the podiums No! NO! PODII! have BBC written on their navels like nameplates. So now all I can think of is what those initials stand for in all their cases. Big Boy Clegg. That's it for now.

20:44 This is just so hard to listen to. The words are just sliding through my ears. All that can be said is Cameron seems to be on a bet to plug Mothercare in every single answer he gives. And he's got a baby on the way! Why aren't the papers picking up on this enormous nappy and chewy mobile backhander?

20:50 Waste! Taking money from mouths of babes! Why can't we all just get along! Dimbleby sarcastically repeating the question everyone is failing to answer! Repeat for the next 70 minutes. Someone streak, or something. Or question asker to whisper at the end of a question "Bigotsezwhat?"

20:58 Cameron suddenly takes the "I agree with Nick" meme and shoots it into the stratosphere by unexpectedly agreeing with Obama. Clegg now hoping to counter-attack by agreeing with the Norse God Odin.

21:04 The thing is, none of us, not one of us, unless we have doctorates in macro-economics, have the slightest clue about tax policy or deficits. So most voters will decide their party on the simple economic fact of "Will they take away my pound coins?" and "Is it going to cost me 10p more to buy some fags?" We should all just give up and go home.

21:18 Are the politicians really there to "serve us"? Or are they not there to basically run a massive bureaucracy that we all live within? I do really think that anyone who ever says "Well, what's the government going to do for me?" should shut the hells up. The government directly or indirectly give you free healthcare, collect your rubbish, ensure you've got parks to run around in, give you free schooling, runs a transport network, and helps you when you get mugged etc etc. We really don't have to do much for ourselves. Get a job, not spend everything we earn on iPhones, and try not to walk in front of buses.

21:37 I am so glad that they all believe in work. But really, hands up who actually knows of people who live off benefits because it's easier than working? Everything I've ever heard about the benefits system suggests it is nigh-on impossible to get any money without wading through incredible amounts of red tape and form-filling. This demon group of people that we are wasting all our efforts talking about just don't exist, surely.

21:58 The final statements are here. But yet again, it has gone right through my system like Shredded Wheat. It seems to come down to who you believe: each party claims that the other parties are pure unadulterated evil, and want to wilfully ruin the country. Apart from the Cleggles, whose whole argument seems to boil down to "Go on, give us a go. We're not entirely sure what we'd do either, but hey, at least it'll be a laugh, right?"

A new post, I feel...

Shat On By Tories, Shovelled Up By Labour

2010-04-15T19:39:00.002+01:00

A week and a bit into the election campaign, and the apathy is dripping off the walls like multi-cultural sweat in a municipal sauna. Although, as some smarty-pants pointed out on the Daily Politics yesterday, it's more like antipathy: not so much that we can't be arsed, just that we loathe all the parties equally, which just makes it so difficult to choose between them! Oh, aren't we all just like Davina consulting her invisible and dead mum over delicious hair colours! So let's have a look a the options so far:

Labour Labia Red: I dunno. Really, I dunno. I gave up listening to Labour when they gave up using coherent arguments in favour of listing irrelevant achievements made ten years ago. The only thing I can say of their campaign so far is that Gordon is still smiling a lot, which is still faintly disturbing, like being 14 seeing your normally dour and suited teachers out in Tescos dressed in jeans and the same vintage band t-shirt as you. Oh, and as pointed out by the insane lunatic Napoleon on WWM, their manifesto artwork has the distinct whiff of Fallout 3 to it. And aligning yourself in the minds of voters with a dystopian future where an oppressive regime keeps most citizens locked underground and a few wingnuts worship an unexploded nuclear bomb... Well, actually, it might just work. Let's face it, at least it might wake us from our hate-filled stupor, as we run around collecting bobbleheads just in case. (Very niche gamer joke there. Sorry)

It doesn't matter, really. They're not going to win, it seems, and even if they do, I doubt they will get back into power, the scales will fall from their eyes and they will glow with a righteous serenity, knowing that they finally, finally, have the solution to the world's ills. Five more years of muddling along firing out white papers at a rate of ten a minute, more like. Tchuh.

Conservative Blue-di-blue-di-blue: Slippery, slimy, virile salesman Cameron and his merry bunch of punchable-faced hoo-hah boys stalking middle England like serpents smugly displaying their newfound limbs and opposable thumbs. It is strange, because although I am into equal rights and loving the minorities and vegan lesbian weaving theatre groups paid for by the GLC and all that jazz, like most...well, nice, tolerant people, I'm small-c conservative in a lot of ways. But all Tories, without exception, make my skin crawl. They all seem to have a veneer of privilege which means if I ever did get close enough to wrap my hands around their necks, I would not get any purchase, and just spin round and round them like a hula-hoop.

A bad image.

Anyway, the Tories have said that once they're in power, we can decide what goes on! Yes, us! Anything we want! It's all down to us now. Local control for local people. An example: local referendums on any rise in council tax. Hooray! Because of course, people will make a considered decision when it comes to matters of local government budgeting. There's no chance at all that they'll see the words "tax rise" and instantly go "Well, we're having none of that." And equally no chance that the resultant expense of having the bloody referendum in the first place will tank an already struggling council. No sireeee bobster.

No, Tories. Here's how government works: you have all the experts and stuff, we are idiots. You make big decisions about policies we will never have anything above a basic level of comprehension of, we complain about it because we are idiots. Are you really just telling us whatever we want to hear so that you'll win? You do realise, my Tory friends, that once you're in, you'll have to run the country? Sometimes it seems like that's been forgotten.

It might be worth pointing out at this juncture that I know next to nothing. Carrying on...

Lovely Daisy Lib Dem Yellow: Poor old Lib Demmers. They come up with a credible-sounding manifesto, they were actually right quite a lot during the last few parliaments, they've got the avuncular charm of Vince Cable who everyone loves and dishy Evan Harris, friend of the scientists, and Nick Clegg who seems inoffensive enough, and all anyone can ask them is "So, all this policy nonsense. You're never going to win, so why bother?" Now, it would be fabulous if Nick Clegg on Newsnight had suddenly slumped in his seat, burst into loud, shuddering sobs, decried the whole process of parliamentary democracy and announced he was going to move to the Orkneys and raise angora goats, then not give the wool to anyone. But that's sadly not going to happen. But Nick Clegg could score a few million points in tonight's leaders' debate.

Talking of which...

It's imminent. And I will pay every single one of you £10 if it's not exactly the same as your average PMQs. The chances of Clegg accidentally speaking Russian, or Cameron weeing down his leg, or Brown's eye popping out, are slim. Enjoy anyway, my hearties. And I may well be back with terrible analysis tomorrow.

But probably not. Sorry, Sulky Blogger Personification.

Tonight. You.

2010-04-11T23:55:00.005+01:00

It's the Sabbath. And someone's been at the controls. I think what must have happened is my four-month-old boiler got a little bored yesterday, what with the heating being off and the household's general weekend slovenly ways meaning no-one particularly wanted to wash anything, and decided to catch up on a pile of old DVDs. That's OK. We've all been there. If only he hadn't watched An Inconvenient Truth, thought very hard about his own personal carbon footprint, and forsworn burning gas for the foreseeable future.

In other words, it's borked. Thanks a lot, Al Gore.

So as I'm still grumpy from having to go to the gym and use its ancient scout hut showers, I will just leave you with this excellently disturbing episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Cheers again, The Tav.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force - Hand Banana - Watch more Funny Videos

Day Six: Cat Sicks

2010-04-10T23:54:00.000+01:00

Summer blundered into my world today like a slightly clueless bull who's only just been told about the whole Pamplona thing and has chosen to drink through the pain, starting and ending with my expansive wine cellar. And apart from a couple of hours this morning where I lay motionless on my sofa with my eyes scrunched shut, trying to will into existence some kind of reverse-SAD so I'd have a medical reason to paint all my windows black and wear jumpers 365 days a year, I was pretty damn chipper about the whole thing. A pleasant day all round; apart from the universal mind-meld that overtook every middle-class poncey couple in south-west London, leading us to all stumble like zombies to Homebase to buy citronella torches and easy-light charcoal, queuing like it was 1930s Germany.

Anyhow. I said, or maybe didn't, maybe I just thought it, and a rare thought it would be that didn't instantly get broadcast on Twitter, but now it's on here so that's a null statement, and good God, even for me, this sentence has a lot of clauses, that I wouldn't do general boring "Here's what happened to me today" stuff in this intense-o-bloggerama. So instead, here's something that happened a few days ago! IT COUNTS! CHECK THE RULES, YOU BASTARDS!

My cat is a very very very fine cat. Apart from a few things: he doesn't particularly like being stroked. He absolutely loves nipping out while you're not looking on the last cigarette of the evening, meaning you have to sit with the door open waiting for him to return for anything between two minutes and five hours. And while he doesn't rate cat food, he does rate any other rubbish he finds on his mysterious sojourns, up to and including, it seems, broken glass, which he then gaily horks up in the middle of sensitive social interactions.

In other words, he's a cat.

I was on early shifts last week, meaning I go to bed pretty early, and Mr JR stays up on cat-watch chain-smoke Ultimate Force duty. I'll just pause to let you take in the glamour there. Breathe through it, breathe through it. So off I toddled to dream the dreams of the evil and insidious. But later on, as Mr JR stealthily slipped into bed like a Devonian ninja, I was roused from my slumber. Not by him, but by a stench, seemingly from the underworld. I gagged as I was enveloped by its meaty texture; as if Death himself had done a 12-hour shift at an abattoir then draped his fetid overalls on my face. I knew the smell - it meant one thing only.

As I grumpily flumped out of bed, Mr JR stirred and mumbled into his pillow "whtryudng?" Sulking slightly, as I was the one who had to be up in three hours, I snapped "The cat's puked up everywhere. It stinks. I've got to clean it up." There was a guilty pause, before Mr JR's pillow muttered "Oh, sorry, no. That was me. I just made some southern fried chicken Supanoodles."

Groo.

There was a moral to this story, but I've temporarily misplaced it.

I Was Drinking When I Wrote This: But Only Coke, So It'll Probably Be All Right

2010-04-09T23:37:00.000+01:00

So, inevitably, I didn't get my point across at all well yesterday. I was one bottle and one glass of wine down - in that order - and I apologise for the angry splurge. I am a lot calmer today, but rest assured, I will still not be able to articulate my thoughts nearly as well as I'd like. Thus, normal service is tediously continued.

Hello all!

Point of order from yesterday: I honestly, honestly, honestly don't have anything against I Live For Glitter, and it is obviously unpleasant that she had a bad time of it. Out of the many bajillions of comments her blog has now got (mmm! New! Delicious! Transparent bitter!) , some of them made a similar point to mine yesterday, but really quite horribly. More along the "you deserve everything you get, you hypersensitive cow" lines. Well, goodness me! This is the internet, isn't it? Aren't we all supposed to get along?

Trolls aside, what really got my goat, then imprisoned my goat in a passive-aggressive, loveless marriage for many years, until my goat reluctantly joined a goat book group, slowly built up its confidence and found the answer to overcoming its goaty inadequacies lay in within the pages of Chocolat and the hooves of a handsome young billy, was this whole offensive comedy issue. A shower of barking nobodies quick to instantly snap to a state of jowl-shuddering offence without knowing any details of the situation whatsoever. And then assuming that being offended somehow top trumps any other emotion anyone cares to feel. I am offended! they bellow. That's 99 points! What have you got? Reasoned logic? What is that, 42 points at best? Give me all your cards. I have won them all. And I wish to be offended by them.

I find some comedy offensive. I then avoid it. I accept that some other people might find it funny, but that if they do, they're not the type of person I'd like to associate with. And also they find it funny because of internal personality repugnance; the repugnance isn't put there because of the comedy. A "joke" about, for example, a dirty p*ki (racist Googlers thwarted there, I hope) is only funny if you agree with it.

Is that true? I don't know.

I never get offended by stuff I haven't actually heard. That's quite a simple rule. And bloody easy to live by. Saves a lot of mental energy. More people should probably try that.

Ah, yes. Now. Dave's just come in, and wishes to have the final word:

m nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnúj

Well said, that cat. Showing your Polish roots there.

I Was Drinking When I Wrote This: Forgive Me If It Goes Astraaaauuuuuggghhhh

2010-04-08T23:17:00.002+01:00

Angry. I am angry. And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak...

Now, I am going to tread incredibly carefully around this topic, because I don't want to offend anyone. No, wait a second. I don't care if I offend anyone. Well...yes, of course I care. I wouldn't want anyone to read something I wrote and get upset. I wouldn't make jokes about race, disability, sexuality or anything else. At least, not intentionally.

But I am not a professional stand-up comedian.

Frankie Boyle is a professional stand-up comedian.

This was a blog written today, and retweeted with venom. In it, a woman, who has a daughter with Down's Syndrome, writes about going to see Boyle, who makes a series of, in her view, tasteless jokes about Down's. She gets upset by these jokes, has a quiet word with her husband, then gets picked on by Boyle for talking. She explains she is upset, and Boyle reacts, etc, etc, etc. It’s a very reasonably-written piece.

BUT!

Then the internet got involved.

OK, firstly: I do not know what Boyle said, and I can only go from what I Live For Glitter said, and she is obviously not an impartial observer. And as I said before, it's not a hysterical piece, and I have absolutely nothing against the blogger herself. Although, from my personal point of view, it is quite a precarious position to get tickets for a Frankie Boyle gig - possibly, whether deserved or not, the most notorious well-known comedian gigging at the moment - and in the front row, especially, ESPECIALLY when you admit yourself that you're not sure if that was wise or not because presumably you know that IF YOU SIT IN THE FRONT ROW OF A STAND-UP GIG YOU'LL PROBABLY GET PICKED ON (apologies for the random lapses into capitals; these are the bits I have been actually screaming at the walls) and then get offended when in his scattergun approach to bad taste, he accidentally shoots you in the emotional balls.

It's Frankie Boyle. Frankie Boyle. His show is actually called "I Would Happily Punch Every One Of You In The Face." Seriously, what the hell were you expecting? Kabuki? It's not like you went to see a nice friendly cookery demonstration from James Martin and he unexpectedly served lightly sauteed panda marinaded in blackface.

Boyle said, according to I Live For Glitter, that it was the most excruciating moment of his career. And then went on to try and make a joke of it. Thus doing his job. He's a stand-up, and so, rightly or wrongly, tried to make it funny. He had a lot of people who'd paid to watch him funny things up, not admit his whole approach to his comedic career was flawed, have a live breakdown on stage, and immediately tender his resignation.

All of this didn't make me that angry, really (really!). That was reserved for the commenters on I Live For Glitter's post. Who, apart from a few exceptions, screamed from their righteous podiums (podii?) that Boyle was SCUM! And, in a few cases, deserved to be ASSAULTED!

OK, seriously? Do you have enough facts about this situation to wish physical violence on someone?

Eeek, sorry. At this point, with this level of internal alcohol, I have somewhat run out of steam. Apologies; I will continue this tomorrow. It will probably contain the word "pernicious".

Blog Promise Kept!

uCan't Always Get What uWant

2010-04-07T21:24:00.000+01:00

Very good news today for fans of schadenfreude, the German concept that leaves you with an extra U you thought you'd need to use but don't, so you can use it wherever else you waunt!* Mere days after a load of Yanky people with a load of money flushed it all down a lovely, ergonomic, shiny, fruit-branded bog, their internet placemats have decided that they're too cool to do anything dorky like interface with wi-fi, instead choosing to lounge around and be pretty but useless, like a barmaid at a trendy pub ignoring the baying and dehydrated customers in order to blankly stare at a Dostoevsky tract they will never absorb.

Too harsh. Way too harsh. I have nothing against Apple. In fact, I want an iPhone more than David "Dave" Cameron wants to puree your immortal soul and use it as body butter. (Allegedly) And I know that these wi-fi glitches are just birthing pains and will surely be sorted out before most users have got to the second level of Peggle. But the iPad? Do. Not. Get.

(Incidentally, if it helps with the rising sense of deja vu you must be feeling reading an opinion piece on the iPad, let's just call this a nostalgia post, or retro-style, or something.)

It's all to do with feeling futuristic, surely? No doubt, it's a sexy old thing to play with. Nothing would make you feel more CTU than swanning about with your sleek flatscreen, manipulating vast swathes of digital information with a stroke of your fingers, even if it's less planning a convoluted counter-terrorism operation against a crack team of seemingly indestructible, vaguely Middle Eastern agents with a dirty bomb and a grudge against Manhattan, and more getting into a convoluted argument with Draperrocks46 on the Guardian messageboards about the latest episode of Mad Men. But it just seems massively impractical. Too big to stick in your pocket and carry around, too valuable to risk flaunting on the top deck of the 44, too uncomfortable to type on... But you can read books on it! Or I could just read a book, which I wouldn't worry about damaging as I fling it merrily around my manbag. But you can watch TV on it! Fine, but you'd have to put it on a flat surface and look down on it, and I don't fancy catching the latest Glee through a reflection of the interior of my own nostrils. But you can slap in on your lap and use it to browse whilst you're watching telly! Hey! Look what I'm doing right now:

That's my diddy netbook, a gadget which Steve Jobs roundly slagged off when introducing the iPad into our lives. Well, stuff it up your applehole, Steve. My diddy netbook has got nice clicky keys which make it lovely to type on, will not constantly take the piss out of my freakishly porky fingers with your oversensitive keyboard ("The fingers you have used to dial are too fat. To order a dialling wand, please smoosh the keypad now.") And it won't seem hopelessly pointless when the novelty wears off, and it sits gathering dust between my desktop computer and my iPhone, looking sadly between them, wishing it was a little bit smaller, wishing it was a baller, wishing it had a girl who looked good, it would call her, only it's too big to be used as a phone...

Anyway: the only amazing futuristic technology I will ever be interested in now is the paper smartphone as seen in Caprica. It's paper, but then internetty stuff appears on it. All this has happened before, so it'll all happen again. Yeah!

* This isn't very good. Should I explain it? OK, I will.**

** You see, I always thought it was "schaUdenfreude", but it's possible I've been pronouncing it wrong all my life, thus making the whole sentence nonsensical. Oh well. This is what happens in daily blogging, I guess.

When I Go Forwards, You Go Backwards

2010-04-06T21:38:00.002+01:00

Hello, yes, here I am, to hastily apply the blog-a-day sticking plaster that will temporarily prevent the collapse of my relationship with...well, myself. Hey, I really shouldn't feel too bad about it, though. I could have gone down the dangerous path of having a baby with myself. Man alive, can you imagine the issues that homunculus would have?

So it was very nice of our dear Leader Mr Brown to call an election and give me something to write about, because let's face it, there wasn't quite enough coverage today. The BBC News channel had the large, blaring BREAKING NEWS! banner on their screen all morning. The fact that the election is on May 6th is not breaking news. In fact, it is the only news story in history that we have all definitely known about for weeks and weeks. It's the very opposite of breaking news. It's self-healing news! It's news risen from its news grave! It's zombie news! This would have been a great day to do something really catastrophic or amazingly newsworthy, like announcing you'd invented time travel by stacking up a wall of gasping coelacanths across the M25. The news channels would have nowhere to escalate to, and would probably either spontaneously launch into orbit through sheer panic or just wipe out their own brains. "And of course, there's further coverage of this story on the News Channel, where Carrie Grace and Jon Sopel are staring slack-jawed into middle distance."

Exciting times, though, upon us. The first election for years that's pretty wide open, the first with all-new Prime Ministerial candidates, the first where I live somewhere where I can see my local polling station from my bedroom window; I will be creating history by enacting the first Rear Window/West Wing mash-up, doing live voyeuristic straw polls on the local electorate complete with Sorkin-esque quipping, before clubbing someone to death and burying them in my back garden. But before that, we've got a whole month of campaigning to sit through. Gordon Brown started with his whole cabinet behind him, looking like he was taking the lead vocal in a spirited but deeply disturbing choral rendition of Let's Get It On. David Cameron made a biblical dash across the river and stood piously among his disciples in lieu of any coherent policies. And Nick Clegg loves everyone. Won't you love him back?

I dunno. If Cameron wins, I'm not sure the country's smug reserves will last us more than a week. If Brown wins, the word "tired" will have to be completely redefined. If Clegg wins, Jeremy Vine will have an swingometer embolism. It's too difficult to think about, innit.

More insight tomorrow!

Dancing With Myself

2010-04-05T18:52:00.001+01:00

- No, no, no and no. This simply will not do any more. I am not standing for it. Once a month blogging? What is this, 2007? And don't you even dare trying to use Watch With Mothers as an excuse again. You only write for them once a month as well. Is there not a single thing rattling around in that ginormous skull of yours that could be turned into some scintillating text?

- Er, yeah, sorry about that. I've been around, other places, you know. Sorry, who am I talking to here?

- Other...? I knew it. I knew it. I can't believe it. You've been cheating on me, haven't you? Again. With that whore. That flighty painted Jezebel, Twitter. Did she dress up for you? Oh, she can look like Tweetdeck, can't she? Did you do it on your phone? My God. You disgust me.

- Hey! That's hardly cheating. I've been on Twitter for over a year and I've still made time for...hang on, what... Cheating on you? Are you a personification of Blogger?!

- Well, if you don't know, I'm not going to tell you.

- Right, you're a personification of Blogger. Great. Good. You're a huffy, stereotypically female impersonation of Blogger, accusing me, a straight female, of cheating on you with another female, Twitter. I'm not quite sure what that means, actually.

- No point asking me. You never tell me anything any more. Just scraps, that's all I get recently. "Oh, here's what I think of Battlestar Galactica. Oh, I bought some boots. Oh, I went all kiss-arsey all over Collins and Herring cos one of them follows me on me on stupid Twitter."

- Stop doing that stupid voice. And put down that handbag. I don't even have a handbag.

- "Oh, I don't even have a handbag! I'm so unconventional!!"

- OK, OK, I'm sorry. I get that you're angry. I'm not exactly sure why, seeing as you're a non-sentient piece of software, but I'll run with it. You're right. I've been wasting all my thoughts in little bursts on...well, not here. But I'll be better. I promise. How about this...I'll do a blog every day now, *every day*, till I can't do it any more. At least a week, and I'll aim for a month. Would that make you feel better?

- ...

- Hmm?

- What, like Richard Herring?

- Yes, like Richard Herring.

- Or like Mark Watson?

- Yes, or like Mark Watson.

- Well... OK. Tell you what you should do as well. Maybe grow a Hitler moustache and do a comedy show about it? Or change your name to Mark Watson, Little Miss Originality?

- Passive-aggressive point taken. Wow. You really are quite the snarky little cow, aren't you? But I know you're only doing it to spur me on to greater heights, so I appreciate it.

- Er...yeah, that'll be it.

- Right then. Guess I'll see you tomorrow, for what will surely be an interesting and exciting experiment! Yeah? Yeah? Hello? Why are you crying?

Buckle up, peeps; I may have finally lost it...

Admiring The Beautiful Texture On The Final Curtain

2010-03-09T22:37:00.000Z

It's been a while since I've been around here. Sorry about that, if you are easily offended by an absence of words. If you are, may I suggest you avoid this Chopin nocturne which is both nice and hilariously histrionic towards the end, and contains no words at all?

Anyway, I've been busy recently both with the very occasional article for rather lovely TV blog Watch With Mothers (and, of course, spending most of my working days lurking around its comments section with devillish intent and Jeremy Paxman's face) and also with my aim for this year to do one exciting thing a week. So far, and I tediously list this purely for my own personal records, I've seen: Stefan Golanszewski, Stewart Lee, Richard Herring (solo), Collings and Herrin (duo), Tim Key in Slutcracker, Tim Key and others in Party, the films Exam and The Hurt Locker, done the big scary box in the Turbine Hall (well, not really. I was, and I say this as a fully-fledged grown-up who is actually running out of time to reproduce, too scared to go in the big scary box. Even holding someone's hand, like a five-year-old), done the National Portrait gallery (bottom floor, celebrities, only - to my untutored eyes, Hello! on canvas and a head made of blood) and been to see a gig in a vintage furniture shop in Hoxton with about 12 other people, one of whom I randomly follow on Twitter, although we didn't know we knew each other until after the event (Hello Breeks!)

I have also found time to hoover up five series..es...eses of the peerless Battlestar Galactica. Which was great, until it ended. For those of a nervous disposition, look away now, I'm about to shout in bold: HERE BE SPOILERS. HERE BE SPOILERS. I AM ABOUT TO TALK IN DETAIL ABOUT THE END OF BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. SPOILERS! SPOILERS! DO I MAKE MYSELF PERFECTLY CLEAR?!

Good.

Let's get this straight: I absolutely loved Battlestar Galactica. I loved the plotting, I loved the politics, I loved the characterisation, I loved the way no-one was perfect and your allegiances swayed from episode to episode to support the religious nuts, the other religious nuts, the military guys, the civilian guys, the robots and the other robots. I loved the way someone obviously decided on a whim to cut the corners off paper in the pilot to make it look futuristic and stuck with it doggedly for five years, despite the fact that there's no way such a laborious paper production process would ever evolve in a functioning society. I loved the Final Five stuff, I loved the "Kara Thrace: Saviour of the Universe" stuff, I particularly loved that Hoirish lawyer guy with the dark glasses and the imaginary cat and all his stuff. But then, after five seasons of being sensually massaged to a simmering boil, the final episode was like a jackboot to the teeth.

I guess all you really want from a long-running and impressive show like BSG is that they will have the slightest clue where they're going with it, so even if they are suddenly given the TV equivalent of a P45, a rapidly signed leaving card and a gentle shove out of the front door, they will be able to write a satisfactory ending to their saga. And the kernel of the good idea, presumably there from the start - that after their search for "Earth" came to naught, the fleet would find Earth, and eventually become us, so we are all Cylons - was quite a nice one. But herein lies the first problem, which I shall label the "We Get It" problem.

Here's how the episode went: fight fight fight, cylon cylon cylon, fight fight fight. Oooh, look, swimming out of the inky blackness of space: it's Earth! Oh, we get it. They're us! Cool! Wait, there's half-an-hour left.

OK, now they're on Earth. Look, neanderthals. Yeah, OK, it's a long time ago, all this has happened before and it will all happen again. Very nice. We get it.

Right, they're going to spread out across the continents and settle, and thrive, and we're going to be their descendants. WE GET IT.

Whh...? Modern-day New York? Cos Mitochondrial Eve was in fact Hera, and look, THAT was THEN, and THIS is NOW? Yes! WE GET IT!

Gaius and Caprica Six visions appearing and patiently explaining all of the above to us?!?! Jimi Hendrix on the radio?!?!?! The Honda Asmio robot on a TV?!?!?!?!! WE! GET! IT!

It's just a shame that something that was subtle and nuanced and somehow made broad, grand, sweeping statements about America and its attitudes to race, in a completely alien world, without saying anything at all, felt the need to take a plot point like that and smash it repeatedly round our faces like a fetid flatfish. But maybe they went so overboard on that because of the other weaknesses in the finale, which I shall label the "Really? Really?" problem.

1. Crikey, we've found Earth! Er, somehow. Really? Really?

2. That was all to do with Kara Thrace, who came back from the dead, with a brand-new Viper, saw visions of her dead father, and from a song she had learned as a kid on a piano (long line of keys) typed in the co-ordinates onto a standard keypad (narrow block of rows of keys). Really? Really?

3. Having lead the fleet to Earth, and not having explained what she was or where she'd been, she vanished into thin air. Really? Really?

4. As the fleet observed the neanderthals they would eventually be responsible for shouldering out of the evolutionary history of the Earth - you know, just like at the end of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - they decided to disperse around the planet and start afresh, Galen, for example, going to Lapland where he hung around growing his beard for a few millennia and became Santa Claus - and foreswear all technology. What, really? This random collection of military and civilians who were used to a transient mode of living that was entirely artificial and man-made and reliant on technology beyond OUR wildest dreams could survive more than one winter? Really? Really?

Ah, well. It's merely a teeny crack in what was otherwise a marvellous road of entertainment. (A teeny crack that caused a car to spin straight into the central reservation killing all the occupants, but never mind) I will still have all the good times; and the moment when Saul sank into the wall and muttered "Said the joker to the thief..." is still hovering near the top of my "Ow, my chin!" jaw-drop moments chart.

Talking of endings...

This has broken my heart into a thousand pieces. The arguments from every angle have already been made, so I won't bother myself, if only to say: there is no commercial alternative. It's not the same as Last FM or any other music recommendation engine because in an hour it'll cover at least 50 genres I know nothing about and I'll enjoy it all. It won't be the same if the presenters go elsewhere because they'll still be slaves to playlists. And my washing-up will never be appealing again.

Save 6 Music!

Herring Herring Herring Herring Collins! Herring Collins! Herring Herring Herring

2010-02-07T22:52:00.000Z

A very Herring-heavy week, with a few exquisite shavings of Collins delicately scattered on top. Nom nom nom. Or, as they would have it, but I am absolutely never going to write because I'm not going to be won over by their childish nonsense, nyum nyum nyum.

Damn.

So first on Monday was the Collings and Herrin 100th-ish-maybe podcast, live from the Leicester Square theatre. I've had my ups and downs with their podcast since I discovered them last September. Oh, the good times, as Andrew Collins told the story of how a slightly botched handshake with a friend as an adolescent led to a brief moment of tender hand-holding, and I was rendered helpless while walking to work, paralysed with embarrassment, as abundant laughter which would have been airy and pleasant if I had allowed it to escape my body condensed internally into a high-pressure plasma stream and make me squeak like a tea-kettle in a whispering gallery. And the bad times - well, I'll just say "baby made of shit", and allow the kaleidoscope of wonderful imagery that provokes dance painfully across your mind's eye.

But frankly, they have been talking about everything and nothing for 100 hours and that's the only bad thing I can recollect, and they do it for free, and are peerless in an increasingly crowded field which had been mostly planted because of them anyway, so what else can you do but heartily approve, and give thanks, and have the perverse fanboy hope that they don't get so successful and popular that they stop doing it?

And so generous are the pair that our evening's entertainment was not just the podcast; nay, nay, thrice nay! We were also treated to a bit of Herring stand-up, and Mr Collin's Secret World of Secret Dancing. I was particularly taken by this demonstration of how to listen to your iPod and dance like your soul's on fire while maintaining the outer stillness and serene grumpy-face of the average commuter. It's nice to see A-Col doing stand-up...he's obviously a naturally funny and charming fellow, and he communicates that loud and clear through the medium of miming a record scratch on his man-bag, which is, let's face it, not an easy thing to do. (Incidentally, I covet that man-bag. Passionately covet it all the way into next week, if you know what I mean, which I certainly don't.)

I do something similar myself to secret dancing myself, but instead of dancing, I favour a secret music video approach. Thusly: as I walk, I'm making a video, so depending on the song in question, I'm either strutting like Shara Nelson in South Central LA or bounding about like a Chris Martin-based puppy, singing without opening my mouth and casting meaningful looks at cameras that aren't there. Much fun to be had doing that, there is.

And then there was the podcast, which was a fun but very different experience in a live scenario. I'd got a ticket rather late which meant I was standing by the bar, in what would have been a rather cool and louche manner (all James Bond, sipping a martini and removing panties with a glance), were it not for being flimsy and bedraggled from a day of gastrointestinal suffering (all John Hurt three seconds before the profusion of groo). So I was a bit removed from the main audience banter; not so much sitting in Richard's attic and joining in with the fun as scaling the drainpipes on his house to try and peer in through the Velux blinds. But still much precarious enjoyment was squeezed from the 1 hour 6 mins. Mainly because they genuinely seem to respect and enjoy each other's company, and in a world of two-man comedy where often scripted bonhomie is used to paper over deep pustules of resentment and egotism, that's as refreshing as a glass of Andrew's salts isn't.

Much love. I will stop short of calling for the much-threatened bumming, and instead give them a portmanteau name like Brangelina. Richdrew. Andard. Richancoldrewhellins. Sorted.

Then, a mere two days and six paragraphs later, I was back down Leicester Square way - this time with a functional digestive system and beer and actual company - to see Hitler Moustache, Richard's Edinburgh show. Properly reviewed by proper critics in proper places elsewhere I can't be arsed to link to, summed up by one comment from a friend: "Bloody hell, comics these days are so clever and funny, aren't they? Bastards." Thought-provoking yes, bracingly ideological without hectoring yes, funny bits about bleeding dogs in Shepherd's Bush yes, and all with a free velcro Hitler moustache of your own. I got a white one which I did not in any way, shape or form stick on one of Richard's posters over his real moustache, because that would be desperately unoriginal and unfunny. In summary: a chuffing good night's work all round.

Yes!

Blog post title note: modelled after "Bunny bunny bunny bunny whoops! Bunny whoops!" etc, which is about as much fun as you can have with children and your hands this side of police intervention.

The Clicking Dichotomy

2010-02-02T18:32:00.000Z

A little background, if you will. While you read this post, listen to this:

And look at this:

So... It's dark. It's the 1940s. You're hunched over the bar in a smoky dive off 45th Street, trenchcoat loosely hanging, fedora pulled down, nursing a double whisky, no ice, head heavy with thoughts of your no-good son of a gun partner who folded quicker than a chancer with a 5 buck chip and a pair of twos. Suddenly, a sound punctures the gloom and stirs your from your reverie. An unmistakable sound; a sound somehow staccato and piercing, but at the same time long, languorous and deeply sensual. Footsteps approaching you. Click...clack...click...clack...

All right, stop! (Collaboration and listening optional) I'd just like to digress at this point and explain something to those who don't know me. Despite a brief dalliance with the world of flowery print dresses in my late teens which has left me with a severe allergy to the works of Sandie Shaw, I'm not one of life's glamourpusses. My wardrobe choices tend to revolve around two questions: a) is it jeans? and b) no, really, wouldn't you rather buy some jeans? And recently, when it was raining and snowing and generally being of and about winter, and my meagre collection of trainers all simultaneously wailed and ripped themselves asunder in an impassioned expression of grief at the apparent death of the sun, I bought myself some boots of the brown, biker, buckles'n'leather persuasion. Like this:

Mm. Boots. And it was fine. But then: I wore them outside.

Cast your mind back to two paragraphs ago. Who did you picture coming into the bar? This?

Or this?

The point is this. My biker boots have, for some reason, got incredibly clicky heels. When I walk around in them, it sounds like Little Miss Tottering, mayoress of Totteridge and Whetstone, just got herself some really precarious shoesies. To the casual listener, when I am approaching round a darkened street corner, or across a pub's wooden floor, I sound like Rita Hayworth. Then I appear, and I'm a potato in a German army jacket.

OK, not that bad, but there's been a definite statistical increase in the proportion of faces dropping I've seen in recent weeks. I'm just hoping I don't get sued for false advertising. Or try and spin a whole blog post out of the surprising sound my new shoes make. Even if it's an excuse to listen to some Barry Adamson.

Sorry. To make it all better, here's a picture of a patient Japanese cat:

Ahhhn.

The Stefan Golaszewski Plays: Great. But: Awkward!

2010-01-07T22:14:00.003Z

Culture alert! It's only 7th January and already I have seen a play. This makes this, with extrapolation, the most highbrow year I've ever had, although my presence at a karaoke evening next week means that statistic is already tottering on the omnipresent ice.

The play that I saw last night was in fact a) two plays and b) not so much two plays as two one-man dramatic monologues. Hey! They have names, you know! The Stefan Golaszewski Plays, Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About A Girl He Once Loved and Stefan Golaszewski Is A Widower; written and performed by Stefan Golaszewski, both a talented bloke and a boon to every theatre critic with a word quota to fill and few ideas to fill it. Stefan Golaszewski is someone I know through being one quarter of the Cowards - seek out their stuff on BBC4 if it is repeated again, although I know not if they still operate as a foursome due to their successful solo careers, which is a great shame for Coward-lovers who I will herefore refer to as Cowardly Custards because I am a linguistic genius - and also because Stefan Golaszewski is a college friend of a friend of mine, of which more later.

So, The Stefan Golaszewski Plays. (I'm sorry. I just love the challenge of typing his name. Try it! Stefan Golaszewski. It feels like your fingers are doing some kind of triple Salko) I can't give a particularly incisive review, seeing as the last time I saw a play I caught a lollipop thrown from stage by a cow, but I thought it was pretty damn good. The first play is the first-person description of an 18-year-old Stefan Golaszewski...OK, OK, SG...hopelessly falling for a gorgeous woman that wanders into his line of vision in a pub, eats his pork scratchings, inspires majestic poetry of the soul and then shits on his heart, as gorgeous women are wont to do. Having made every woman in the audience (ahem) fall madly in love with him, he returns after the interval as the 76-year-old SG - recently widowed, looking back on his life, in turns rueful, giddy with happy memories, and snarling with bitterness, with few flashes of the innocent, sensitive kid of the first play. And every woman in the audience (AHEM!) falls madly straight back out again. Some beautiful visual touches, too, in a mostly wordy experience. A suitcase full of yeses in various languages showered over the audience in response to the gorgeous woman asking for a kiss; an unending parade of parcels bought for a cold and distant wife, thrown to the ground in exasperation. The second play didn't get the critical acclaim of the first when they were performed separately, but I slightly preferred the second one, which probably shows how much I know.

So far so great. What about awkward? Well, this is a bit that both intensified and awkwarded-up the Stefan Golaszewski experience. As I mentioned, SG is acquainted with my theatre-going pal, let's call him The Bo, and due to the scrummy intimateness of the venue - The Bush Theatre in Shepherd's Bush, less a theatre and more a box with some benches on three sides - plus the popularity of the play and the lateness of our feet, we were left to sit right at the front, in full Stefan Golaszewski view. As he clocked The Bo, who he had not seen for a good long while, there may have been the teensiest of pauses, but an object of professionalism, SG ploughed on regardless. (Although what would he do? Fall to his knees sobbing? Angrily demand we get out? Thought not.) But as the plays went on, there were quite a few moments when he directed stuff straight at us. Both of us. Which included me. (Hang on, let me just put that narcissism alarm that's blaring on mute - it's gonna be going for a while...) He's quite the intense performer, is Stefan Golaszewski, and fantastic with it. But it did mean that as I stared, mesmerised, at him in full ranting flow, and he suddenly looked directly at me and screamed the killer line right in my face, it was...awkward. I didn't know what to do. I tried to hold his glare but I couldn't, so I dropped my eyes to the floor and twisted my paper yeses round and round until they were razor-sharp spears.

Then I poked his eyes out.

Obviously not. And obviously he wasn't looking at me, rather through me, and obviously it was just a coincidence of eyeline, but I do thoroughly recommend the front-row challenge, if you ever see The Stefan Golaszewski Plays. It meant it definitely made more of an impact on me than if I was tucked away in a corner. And obviously I am now composing a one-woman play about a freakish loon who goes to see a one-man play and sits at the front and reads far too much into the experience and ends up destroying the man's life, who then recovers his life by writing a one-man play about a woman who went to see his one-man play and *explosion of meta*

CONCLUSION: Play very good. Stefan Golaszewski fun to type. I still bit fruit-looped. End.

Update: just realised here, two days later, the massive inconsistency of my Stefan Golaszewskis. Goleszewski, Golaszewski. Let's call the whole thing off. Anyway, all misspellings now spelt correctly. I should probably fire myself.

Hamlet Was Pretty Good Too (Apart From Unexpected 6pm C-Bomb And Grandparent Collision)

2010-01-03T18:14:00.007Z

The Christmas period, with all its treacherous snowy ravines, has been successfully negotiated, and once again I have triumphed in breaking my personal best in stomachual distention via the medium of mid-priced fowl and low-priced alcohol. This year, I added an exciting sub-challenge which involved the perfection of the technique known to us in the greedy bastard trade as "Ferrero Layer-off", gently caressing the nutty truffle with the feather-lightest of touches to disrobe it, sensually, layer by layer, without disturbing the texture that is revealed, until you get your prize: a pristine, virginal hazelnut. And because I am a massive tease, I then throw the nut away. Well, that and cos I don't like hazelnuts.

But that is not all that has been distended to breaking point and beyond! Oh, no. My poor little brainium has been stuffed like a stocking, full of the squishy satsumas and unsatisfying boxes of Fruit Pastilles that are, in this tortuous metaphor, Christmas TV. So what's on the booooooooooox? Her head's in the boooooooooox! No, not that. Other stuff! Join me!

So, EastEnders, where a desperate, sweaty union at the Storyline Christmas party between Who Shot Phil and Den Done Over In The Vic produced a bouncing but unloved baby story-son: Who Done Archie Over In The Vic. I have admittedly not been paying much attention in the build-up to this chapter of Slightly Disappointing Enders Deaths, but it seems Archie has been working his way through the whole cast to give them stone-cold motives to introduce his cranial matter to the vicious side of Queen Victoria. Quite why he's had to whip up such anger is a bit of a mystery; it seems the end result was to gain ownership of the pub to convert it into flats. An odd time to be doing that, when the rest of the Square seem to have suddenly realised the planet is on the verge of monetary collapse and all gone simultaneously bust, and you can now pick up a penthouse riverside apartment for a couple of grand and a bag of chips, as long as you don't mind sharing it with the ghosts of the shattered dreams of HBoS workers and a cheerful pack of urban crack foxes. Whether financial gain was Archie's real motive, we will never know, certainly not from watching him, as Larry Lamb has spent his last Square-bound 18 months with the blank, fixed facial expression of a man pondering switching his car insurance.

But anyway, Christmas dawned and Archie's spurned lover, screeching daughters, wig-shuddering ex-wife, drunken-baby almost-stepson, and, for some reason, Bradley and Ian Beale, all took their positions with their chosen weapons in secluded corners of the set, where they peered in darkness at each other and stalked into the Vic, one by one, to have their moment in the Archie glower (he had set his face down one notch into grimness, giving him the look of a man who, while pondering switching his car insurance, had got the "Go Compare" song stuck in his head). And then one of them killed him in a series of flashy directorial tics, and no-one cared, and then everyone forgot because there was a Muslim wedding honking round the corner!

Yes, big gay Syed was about to marry Amira, despite being in love with the deep beefcake (deefcake, if you will) Christian. They had managed to conduct an affair in secret despite spending their every waking minute staring mournfully at each other, or indeed into space in the direction where they imagine the other is, eyes tracking and following like Robocop set to "mope". In fact, every conversation Syed has had with anyone in the last six months has been interrupted at least once with the bark "Syed! Are you listening to me?" at which point he drags his sad puppy eyes back to the present and wells up as he contemplates his future sans bouef gateaux et avec bouef rideaux. The incredibly lavish wedding eventually passed with only light incident, Christian buttoning his enormous boobs into a funeral suit and resisting the "MRS BOUVIER!!!!" urge, random members of the cast who weren't filming elsewhere donning colourful scarves and dancing to drums for several days, and Tamwar getting off with a teenager from the early '90s and generally stealing the show by treating the whole week as an extended audition for The Inbetweeners. Tamwar is my favourite thing on TV right now, and I predict big things for him, if he ever escapes the Enders vortex.

There was actually other stuff on over Christmas, most of it David Tennant-based, setting up an odd hostage/kidnapper situation between me and my telly where he was omnipresent and I was unable to escape him, but due to him playing with my mind by continually switching between accents and dazzling me with his array of wildly-coloured velvet jackets, he broke me down to the point of Stockholm Syndrome, and I fell passionately in love with him. But even the fevered beating of my heart could not drown out the snorts of derision echoing round the country at the overlong and preposterous Doctor Who finale. A tiny speck of plankton of a good idea - "He knocks four times" not being the Master's maniacal head-drum, but Bernard Cribbens trapped in the gunge tank from Noel's House Party - lost in the gaping maw of Russell T Davies' mawkish basking shark, the whole thing made no sense and descended into a series of "Hey, look! It's that guy!" cameos, rendering it nothing more than Who bingo with unnecessary wailing violins.

And what else?

Couldn't possibly say. For at that point, I hoovered away the hundredweight of mince pie crumbs that had been anchoring me onto the sofa, chucked on a jaunty smile, plunged out of the door and headlong into the HMV sale, and got myself Battlestar Galactica, all seasons, box set, BOOM BOOM POW.

See you on the other side...

To Summarise The Summary Of The Summary: Boffo

2009-12-24T18:34:00.000Z

End of the year, end of the decade, end of my twenties, end of the unending tyranny of participating in conversations starting "You know the Millennium? That was TEN YEARS AGO!", end of seeing every cultural artifact created in the last decade given a strict ranking and being told to line up in order like a group of sulky teenagers in a class photo. Because how can I enjoy a film, song, album, game, TV show, flavour, sexual position, hamster breed or random flash of firing neuron without knowing exactly how it racks up in comparison to its bedfellows?

I have nothing against lists. I just can't retain anything in my brain for long enough to compose one. I can't even remember the beginning of this paragraph. In fact, I have nothing against lists.

*tap tap* Is this thing on?

OK, it's Christmas, and so here is a quick last post of the year type affair, to say what things and people have been mostly all up in my 2009 brainspace and that and so! (And if you would like to make a donation to combat syntax abuse at this time of year, please click here. Every penny welcomed)

****

You know what? I just wrote a load of bobbins, but screw it. Basically, if you're reading this, if you're a regular reader, or you've commented, or you've arrived here because you think Charley Boorman is a tit or you're looking for a picture of Steve Holt or any other reason, it's all about you. With this blog and Twitter, it's the first year since 15 years ago with the usenet forums that the internet really became social for me, so from the bottom of my stupid soppy heart, thank you. It means a lot. See you in the new decade, my absolute bloody darlings.

And Merry Christmas to you all! x

Llorando! 2: Electric Boo-hoo-hoo

2009-12-07T22:11:00.000Z

Shift work. It's pretty much been part of my whole working life. It has its disadvantages, of course; the gradual erosion of any social or family life, the pallid complexion of one who is highly deficient in serotonin, and the undeniable mania behind the eyes of someone who hasn't had a regular sleeping pattern for eight years. As the title bar will testify, I am so very, very tired. But the advantages heave their massive guts all over the other side of the scale, many of them relating to the wonderful emptiness of London town when all you office workers and "children" are chained to the merry hell of your desks, or meeting rooms, or futuristic neural-implanted learning hubs, or whatever. There's nothing better than going to the cinema on a Tuesday afternoon and being in the company of nowt but a handful of the unemployed and unemployable, on their own, too poor to buy rustling popcorn and too weary of life to muster up any kind of noisy ejaculations of enjoyment, preferring to sit silently weeping into their trenchcoats. Well, that's what I do, anyway.

So it was a certain amount of apprehension that Mr JR and myself hovered down to the cinema last Sunday evening to watch Up 3D. And the apprehension rose higher than a wooden house that could never possibly be lifted by any viable amount of helium balloons when we arrived to find the cinema full to bursting with every card in the Top Trumps Film-Watching Irritants deck; the group of yobbish youths in hoodies chucking popcorn and swearwords around, the precociously talkative toddler who is a lousy conversationalist, the can't-stop-gassing-even-for-a-second friends whose chat, although low in volume, creates a constant and inescapable buzz that fills every nook and cranny of your aural passages like a group of particularly flexible and insistent wasps. A peaceful cinematic experience, I beamed into Mr JR's brain, this will not be. He glowered in telepathic response.

But! As the pre-feature short started, the cinema lapsed into an excited 3D silence. Perhaps the nasal pressure of the glasses are keeping normal flappy mouths bolted, I pondered happily! I began to relax as the heartwarming tale of the storks and the anthropomorphised clouds streamed through me. Aww, I thought, and ahhh. Hmm. That was very lovely, and there seems to be something wrong with my throat. I gulped the small lump that had formed down with some diet Coke and prepared myself for Up.

I had been warned about this. The first ten minutes, they had said darkly. Brace yourself. So I braced.

Two minutes in, my face was awash with hot, salty tears. This is absolutely, positively fine, I thought. Silent tears streaming down my face in response to something that isn't even sad - we had not even got into the couple's adult life yet - is perfectly fine and normal and focus on the key word here, silent. But they wouldn't stop. And the pressure was building. My throat was constricting, spasms were threatening to form in my gutular system, and the cinema was, damn them all! Still in noiseless awe! Scared to even breathe lest it set off a cataclysmic eruption of wails, I turned in desperation to Mr JR. He took one look at my damp, pleading face, and instantly began his pitch-perfect impression of Muttley.

The sound that this provoked from me was almost, but not exactly, "Pppffftthhhaaaaaaargh!" I was simultaneously hysterical with tears and laughter. That in turn prompted Mr JR's entrance into the bad, bad world of the bad, bad sound, with a perfect "BAH!" And that was it. The valve had been opened. The endless feedback loop o'noize had been established. For the next five minutes, the most beautifully moving five minutes of cinema you'll see this year, me and Mr JR honked, spluttered, barked, caterwauled, and when lung capacity allowed it, whispered furious accusatory obscenities to each other.

So I can only apologise from the bottom of my ridiculous heart to the good and amazingly well-behaved audience of Wandsworth Cineworld for not only breaking all of my stringent movie-going rules, but also ruining the best bit of the film for everyone. I'm so sorry.

And for those of you who have seen the first ten minutes of Up, don't, whatever you do, click on this link and relive those ten minutes without first informing all your family of your imminent emotional breakdown. And for Christ's sake, don't do it at work.

Squirrel!

6/8 Time Signature Is The Happiest Time Signature

2009-11-21T00:58:00.003Z

I do so love a challenge. And the thing I love most about a challenge is when it's stupendously easy. So, for example, I challenged myself to write a 50,000 word novel in a month, but because I'm a particularly canny operator, I wrote a microscopic proviso into the dot above the i in "write" which said I would get to, oh, say, the 20th, and have only have got a fifth of the way through, and that would also count as a success. And you will never guess how far I've got! No, go on, guess! That's right. 300 words.

I do, of course, kid. 10,000 words of pure, solid, gold-effect Elizabeth Duke jewellery. Send it to reallywe'lldefinitelysendyoumoneyifyousendusyourvaluables

andnoofcoursewe'renotlaughingupoursleeve.com and you'd get paper money! Literal worthless paper money.

Digressing, as per usual... I have been tagged by the peerless I Should Be Working and politely asked to come up with a song that makes me smile, and then pass the tag on to some other blogging wonderfuls who also make me smile, and ask them to carry it on. I was 20% through the mind-sentence "Ooh, crikey. That might be quite difficult..." before I had come up with my answer. So in fact the mind-sentence went "Ooh, crik...oh yeah, Grandaddy!"

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure why this song makes me smile more than any other. I'm not an enormous Grandaddy fan, just because I don't know many of their songs. The pleasure is not related to 28 Days Later, or Screenwipe; it's not connected to any particular memory. In fact, I can't even remember when I heard this song first, but it was inevitably all Nic's fault, as most of my musical heritage is. In a way, I don't want to examine it too closely in case I overthink it. But the instant feeling of soaring joy I feel whenever it pops its little head onto my iPod is...well, it's an instant feeling of soaring joy. I have to ration it. I never play it intentionally, because I have a silly notion that I will use up its power, and I love being surprised by it in mundane situations. I'm struggling to think of anything else that can give that you that visceral jolt, which makes you stop in your tracks and close your eyes and raise your face to the skies and just beam.

Of course, those actions made in public make me look like an actual lunatic, which all helps, you know.

Now for the second, more arduous part of the challenge. I fear I may have to break the rules somewhat here, as no other blogs really make me smile to the extent that the ones I'm about to mention do, and I can't tag them, really, for various reasons. Honorable non-mention to the blog I can't mention because I said I wouldn't. But the two people I want to point to are first, my tagger, I Should Be Working. (Second link alert!) The best-written and most life-affirming blog you'll ever want to read, her wry, hilarious observations and general intelligent insight into the world make me smile every time, and she's a continual inspiration. She's already done this though, so can't tag her. Gah!

Second: the stupendously talented Ms Laura Barnard, who if she wrote a blog would write a blog of rapier wit and faultless charm. But instead she has the gaul and audacity to be a bloody fabulous artist, and her blog is a treasure trove of her work, every bit of which is infused with rapier wit and faultless charm. And she does brilliant monsters as well. Lau, I know your blog is for your proper work etc, but if you want to play and pick a song and some people you like reading, please do so in the comments, my brutha!

Sorry I broke the chain, ISBW. I used to throw away chain letters as well. God knows how I have any loved ones left who haven't died in mysterious and gruesome circumstances.

Anyhow, gush gush gush! There's a lot of love in the room. I'm going to go away and get really tetchy about something, and blast the love out with my next post. Ooh, is Children In Need still on? Perfect...

No, But, Seriously

2009-11-11T00:43:00.000Z

Now, I don't mean to scare you, my precious babies, but I have a fact for you. Death comes to us all. Yes, even you. Not you though, you have hitherto undiscovered immortality, which you will only discover when you slowly realise that everyone around you is withering away while you stay fresh and youthful and beautiful, and that moment of realisation will crash into your brain and mash it all up like a freight train through an inexplicable sack of corned beef, and you will spend the rest of eternity rocking back and forth in a chair in the corner of an empty room in a dark, cobweb-filled mansion that no mortal will ever set foot in.

Yeah, sorry to break that to you like this, but hey, better here than on Twitter, right?

Anyhow, one of the more recent people to feel the sarcastic raise of Death's icy eyebrow is my lovely Nana. So here I sit, alone at midnight in the ridiculously opulent bar of the Cork International Airport Hotel, rather guiltily glugging the most expensive pint of Heineken I've ever bought as fast as I can so the poor bar staff can go home, and while I should be chucking another few hundred words gloomily onto the pile of my very-behind-schedule NaNoWriMo novel, I felt I'd better write something down about her.

Memories of Nana no 1: Laugh

Nana was of good solid Berkshire stock, which makes her sound a little like cattle, but I'm sure she'd forgive me. I didn't actually know her that well. She moved to Ireland when I was about 9, and she and my father had a mother/son relationship which was never really explained to me, my father being of the "hush, hush, bottle it up and brazen it out" school of thought, but I think centred around being as far away from each other as humanly possible without it seeming actually rude. So what few memories I have of her are mostly vague and unfocused, but her broad Berkshire accent and more acutely her laugh - throaty, huge, but with a squeaky Muttley quality, and unfurled at the slightest provocation - burn through above all else. She found a great deal of life funny, and that, I think, is something we should all heartily approve of.

Memories of Nana no 2: Puppies

Shortly after she moved to Ireland, we went to visit. For some reason, I had to fly across on my own, which was just the most exciting thing possible as I was an Unaccompanied Minor with a big pass around my neck declaring it, and a stewardess had to accompany me everywhere I went, even if I wanted to go and buy sweeties, which I could because I had my own money and she really couldn't have given less of a fuck what I did with it! Hoorah! While we were staying with Nana, who lived in a very beautiful and rural corner of south-west Ireland, we woke up one morning to hear the most pitiful cries from her garden. Investigating, we found under a bush, shivering, sopping wet and terrified, a tiny little puppy. It was quite the most adorable thing I'd ever seen. Further investigations yielded a few more puppies dotted around, and even further human-based investigations led to a nearby farm, and a mysteriously missing litter of newborn puppies. We reunited the little guys with their mum, congratulated them on their adventurous spirit, and I was privy to the word "bitch" in its correct context for the first time. Nana was a rock throughout all this, involving me every step of the way, and I felt like a proper grown-up, even though I was a shivering, terrified pup myself.

Memories of Nana no 3: Boyfriend

Nana was quite the most ferociously independent and strong-willed woman you would ever care to meet. Divorced from my grandad way before I was around, she moved to Ireland by herself and never needed anybody else around her (as far as I know. I like to think she had her toyboys dotted about the Irish glens, or fens, or whatever they have round here. Sorry, Ireland, I don't know you that well either) She built, virtually by herself, her own home, living in a caravan for years during its construction, all well after she was 50. But she would, without fail, after I reached about 15, whenever I spoke to her briefly at Christmas, ask me if I had a boyfriend. No-one else in the family wanted to know about this side of me. My dad, I suppose understandably, refuses still to acknowledge any partner's existence without major prodding. The massive swell of pride when I was able to tell her, finally, after years of this question, that yes, I DID have a boyfriend, and her joyous reaction, was something I retain to this day.

There's loads more coming back to me now; stuff about her house, and her scent, and the things she said, and the last time I saw her; how glad I am that she met Mr JRME, and that I phoned my uncle who I haven't spoken to in 12 years to pass a message on to her before she died. And how much it was a horrible, long and degrading way to go, and how much she must have hated every second of being trapped in a hospital bed. And how glad I am that she's free, but how sad I am that she's gone. Good on you, Nana. I'm sorry we didn't know each other better. And I really hope you don't mind I've spewed all this onto a blog.

Cheers for bearing with me, guys...back to normal business next time. And for those keeping count, yes, it's now 00:42, but the bar staff threw me out ages ago, so you can stop your fretting. They're fine.

Based On A Story By A Man Named Lear (That's Gerald Lear, Worst Writer In The World)

2009-10-31T17:07:00.000Z

Today's tip for the top: If, when you are nose-deep and motorboating in the heaving bosom of the demon drink, you agree to do something in somewhat of a rash manner, don't ever write it in your diary. (I will just pause here to let you wipe the tears of laughter away from your beautiful eyes and refocus on your screen. Yeah, I've got a paper diary. Not for some neo-Luddite chic, just because I am guilty of massive O2 contractual idiocy and am shackled to my poxy not-iPhone for another six months at least) Because if you do, you will forget you've agreed to it, carry on down into the navel of the demon drink and filthily beyond, wake up the next morning, blithely continue about your day, and it could be weeks before you open your diary to the correct page and get slapped in the face by the biro-scratchings of your drunken self. And that can be a painful slappin'. Not to mention the small blush of shame at your bad penmanship.

Here's what I've agreed to do. Not exactly life-changing or horrifying, but still terrifying and exciting in equal measure: take part in National Novel Writing Month, or cutey-cutely, NaNoWriMo, which involves...yes, yes...! Writing a novel in a month. Pleasingly, the site counsels that quantity is a higher virtue than quality, setting an arbitrary target of 50,000 words in 30 days and not bothering with editing, plot structure, character development, or showing it to anyone else ever. Sounds like a good deal. So, in a useful warming up exercise designed to get the blood pumping through the writing cortex - or a slowly-expanding deadly leak of precious, precious writing oil on the hairpin bend of success (and guess which I'm going with, folks...) here's a few novel ideas I have been batting around like a cat on a frictionless surface. (No mu, you see. One for the physicists! *high-five, presumed in a vacuum*)

1. Warrrrrrr and Peace (Up A Lamppost)

A pretty sprawling tale, in all: there's a cast of thousands interacting and chatting and laughing and loving and screaming and dying and generally experiencing life to the very fullest. It's actually quite a dull read, until the dying moments, when it's suddenly revealed that THEY'RE ALL DOMESTIC DOGS!

Pros: good shock value with the ending, may tap into lucrative personalised novel market (starring Rover! Yes, your Rover!)

Cons: title may give it away just a teency skoosh, quite difficult to work in all the plot-relevant ball-licking and constant repetition of "sausages" without causing suspicion

2. The Wayfarers' Guide To The Universe

A normal English bloke suddenly discovers his curiously vehicularly-named best friend is an alien who takes him on a befuddled journey round a universe he can't comprehend whilst nursing an endless thirst for a good latte.

Pros: Could work in some mysterious number shenanigans, just like in Lost! Able to tack on unconvincing romance in the film version

Cons: Is it me, or does that sound...maybe a bit...familiar...?

3. Nnnnnnnyyyaaaaaahhhhhhhh

A Joycean stream of consciousness following a man trying to go about his daily business while really, really, really needing the toilet. Onesies, not twosies. This isn't Stalinist Russia.

Pros: Nice kinetic theme, could knock novel off in two days once on a roll. Heh, "roll". Heh, "stream".

Cons: ..oh.......ohhhhh no. Uh. I just have to go and change now.

4. Just Rested My Eyes

Tale of a very-late-twenties blogger who forgoes all other writing outlets and goes to live a hermit's life up a tree in Bishop Stortford to try and forget the shame of being reduced to cheap wee-wee jokes.

Pros: Would probably be quite easy to write, could be inspiring for other rubbish bloggers

Cons: Laptop stops working when soaked with tears, risk of self-referential meta black hole opening up and consuming whole planet

Hmm. T-minus, as the smart ones say, 7 hours until novel-writing start-me-do. And T-minus 6.5 hours before the real Olympic procrastination kicks in, this being procrastination on, at most, a spirited amateur level. I shall keep you posted, you lucky dickens.

Strangely, I Have No Problem With The Following: Chilling Out, Maxing, Cooling, Shooting B-Balls

2009-10-26T02:20:00.000Z

Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream...

Hey, you know what, John? I think I will. Mm. Ahh. OK. There I float. Huh, this is actually quite nice. Splishy splash splash. I'll just get onto that turning mind off thing, except...um...those trees, the ones that were gliding past, they now seem to be more *flashing* past... And it's quite hard to relax when the not-so-gentle breeze is forming my hair into a horizontal windsock which is in turn trying to scythe my scalp from my skull in a scandalous scene of scurrilous...scintillating...sc... Jesus, what's that ear-splitting roaring? The roaring of a million gallons of water cascading wildly down into a chaotic, spiky killing foam? Oh, it's a million gallons of water cascading wildly down into a chaotic, spiky killing foam. Oh, great! Thanks so very much, John. Would it have been so hard to write "relax and float downstream, but first ensure you are not on the Niagra"?! Damn you, Lenno-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o...

I think what I am trying to say is this: I'm not very good at relaxing. As I write, I am three-tenths of the way into a holiday, but no classy chilled Sancerre on a sun-baked piazza will be passing through my skint lips. No no no. Home is where the heart is, and home is where my heart is pacing from room to room shaking its little ventricle angrily at the walls. So; to relax. What can be done? Here's a few options I have been digging my hands into my pockets and loping grimly towards.

1. Why don't you go and get pampered?

Good point, pointless questioning writing device! I should probably get my hair done at some point soon, as I am tired of frightening birds, the hapless little fluttery idiots. Ah, but...this is not something I can get down and relax to. Here's the thing: I have both an enormous freakish potato of a head and just absurd amounts of hair. So whenever I do partake of a trip to the salon, there is always a guilty weariness to my trudge. Those poor devils. I can see it as I walk in. The stylist's eyes sweep across my mangy mane, and her smile falters ever so slightly before hardening into something frosted with hostility. She knows the next two hours of her life minutely dividing my hair into tiny segments and painting it with bleach will be repetitive, boring, stupid and difficult. It's amazing how having your hair done by someone who hates every strand of it can make you a little tense around the shoulders.

(Oh, and don't even get me started on the head massage post-washing. The moment the fingers turn from mere functional conditioner dispersement to passionate scalp rubbage, I turn into Mark Corrigan. "Oh God, the massage. Should I close my eyes? Might be rude not to...don't want her to think I'm not appreciating her work. And I look a bit stupid just staring wide-eyed at the ceiling like a hamster who's just spotted a slavering Alsatian. But closing my eyes feels a bit too sexual. God, I hate this touchy stuff. She doesn't actually want to have sex with me, why is she doing what could accurately be classified as foreplay? By the same logic, I may as well start groaning with pleasure and proffering people my erect penis." Luckily, I then remember I don't have a penis.)

2. Um... OK, just go and and get completely plastered or something, I don't know.

Ah, yes. Like that old advert said: "If relaxing's your aim, make boozing your game. CAUTION: side-effects of boozing may include sudden bursts of hysterical honesty, general whinging, massively inappropriate over-sharing, ill-advised attempts to chat up horrendous American musicians with frankly stupid moustaches, the inability to locate Charing Cross despite walking round and round and round and round and round Trafalgar Square, drowsiness when in presence of night buses and the comfy shoulders of silent goths, and a magnetic attraction to Mitcham."

It didn't even mention the hangover shame. Groo. And: not relaxing.

3. Fine, fine! Jesus! Why don't you just bugger off to somewhere windswept and isolated, where you can lose yourself in the russet-tinged beauty of the mountainous landscape, oh, and shove it up your arse while you're at it?

Um... OK.

So, I am now nine-tenths of the way through the holiday, and it's taken me to the wonderful island of Skye, the wonderfulness of which is entirely not captured above, and here, finally, finally... As I turn round in my seat of my hired 2 litre Ford Mondeo after driving from Glasgow to Skye over 200 miles of winding country roads round lochs and through glens and Scottish Scottishness (where at one point I quite pathetically squeaked "Let's conquer Ben Nevis!" cos that is seemingly not over yet) and saw my loved ones, white with fear, frozen in horrified expressions, bleeding profusely from self-inflected nails-digging-into-palm wounds, and I finally feel totally relaxed. So thank you, Skye. Thank you for teaching me relaxation is delivering one-liners to an imaginary Top Gear camera in the dashboard while my family prays for deliverance through unuttered screams.

Nice.

Picture The Scene: Roaring Fire, Overflowing Bookshelves, Scent Of Slight Abuse Of Power

2009-10-14T22:51:00.004+01:00

Good evening, class. Please come into my beautifully well-appointed study. Tonight we're going to pick up where we left last time, and consider what it is about writing that can so enrapture one's heart and muddle up one's rational thinking processes. Let's start by considering the words kindly left by M Bete de Jour. No, no, you can't see them sitting all the way over there. Come a little closer. Here, I'll shuffle up my lavishly overstuffed Chesterfield. But not quite enough for anyone's comfort except mine. Just let the tops of your thigh awkwardly rest against me. That's the way. Ahh, yes. That is definitely the way.

Anyway! Over to La Bete:

I think we fall for writers because writing is a short cut to the soul. Words are everything, aren't they? Most of the time. But sometimes we make mistakes, and sometimes writers lie. I don't mean the twists and tweaks that I (for example) perpetrate to keep myself hidden (although some people would count those as lies of a most dastardly order, I'm sure), but big emotional lies.... Actually, maybe writers lying isn't the problem - maybe it is just that we read them wrong. I mean, there's no way that Kurt Vonnegut, for example, who I think is one of the warmest and most decent human beings I've ever read - there's no way that he could have been a bad person in real life. I just don't believe that. But then there are other writers, who may be brilliant and outrageous and incendiary and inspiring even - no names mentioned, but maybe your David falls into this category - who in real life are wholly self-centred and utterly incapable of properly relating to other human beings or opening themselves up. Yet because we love their writing, we assume they're wonderful people. Maybe we just blind ourselves with our admiration.

OK. Let's all hold hands and turn to each other and laugh and run and gaily plunge right into the big 'un. Writing is a short cut to the soul. A distinction first, between fiction writing and the kind of stuff I want to refer to more, blogs, columns, confessional, personal stuff. Not that there might be much difference; it must be very easy for a person with a modicum of imagination (that's a standard scientific unit - 1 modicum equals 12,000 Boormans, and no, I will never let this grudge lie) to create a character purporting to be themselves that is every bit as fictional as the most heroic and sympathetic of imaginary folk. Assuming that there is no cynical manipulation, and what goes on the page or screen is them, it IS their soul bared in saucy textuality, is that the real them, or maybe a more polished, confident representation of the best of them, and is that what we fall for?

I mean, I dunno about other bloggers, but this is not what I sound like in real life. There's something about putting yourself and your experiences and sometimes your innermost, most boring thoughts onto a blog, then sharing them with potentially everyone with a working fucking laptop thanks very MUCH Dell with your stupid graphics card that literally can't stand the heat and blows up 2 weeks after warranty...excuse me, I must wipe the angry foam away before it leaks onto my little netbook and I am stranded from the land of the internet forever, clinking sadly like the Saucepan Man as the cloud moves away from the top of the Faraway Tree... Yes, sharing them with potentially anyone, that is paradoxically and simultaneously really cowardly and monumentally overconfident and arrogant. I don't have my real name anywhere near this, although most people who read it know me *waves maniacally till wrist snaps* because I'm petrified that someone I vaguely know will read it and think it's crap. And it will affect what they think of me in real life. That is cowardly. But also, I am not a gregarious sort, and there is no way I would ever go up to someone at a party (or indeed go to a party) and go "Hey! Wanna hear my views on Derren Brown? The G20? Earlsfield Library? Pull up a pew! It'll take hours and hours and hours!" But, and this is arrogant, I'm perfectly happy to do it on the internet. Maybe because I don't have to watch them going glassy-eyed with boredom, then glassy-faced with boredom-related death.

Point? Oh, must I? OK. Point. I agree that writing is a short cut to the soul. I think what comes out onto this blog is as close to me as anyone's ever gonna get, but a me that a lot of people in my real life don't see, a me that is confident, outgoing, shiny, and has absolutely perfect, and I mean heartbreakingly, angels weep, heaven itself is ripped asunder by the unending beauty of it all perfect, tits. And when I read other people's blogs and columns, I assume that's what's coming through too. (Not the tits. OK, mostly the tits.) So if the substance is there, the soul is there to be connected with, and all the crap of normal life that gets in the way, that makes you self-conscious and self-centred, closed and unresponsive, and frankly human, is not, it makes it very easy to think you're falling for someone.

OK, but can that ever be real? Wellllll. Not in my sorry experience. But maybe for someone, somewhere it will be. I hope so. That would be nice. Not me though.

Last thing, and then I promise I will never mention him again, cos, you know, as my sidebar will always state, OBSESS MUCH?! I made a trip into Big London today to the Big Foyles to buy Mr Cattermole's book. I found it, in a rare moment of Dewey Decimal System Hilarity, in the Relationships section surrounded by the lurid pinks and reds of various sexy sex sex SEX guides. I quite wanted to take a picture but a) woman in large army coat slightly flushed and sticky from brisk walk hanging suspiciously round the Kama Sutra? Not sure what impression that would beam out into the world but I'm pretty sure it's exactly the wrong one and b) there was a ridiculously well-adjusted couple giggling over the more salacious books, presumably before going and having a ridiculously well-adjusted shag that no mere written words could ever improve. Sod 'em. I'm sure they sod each other. Urgh. Anyway, I'm about three chapters in, and I highly recommend it, but possibly for not reading on a crowded train where you will laugh and people will peek and their peeking eyes will see extraordinary streams of filth and their noses will crinkle and their feet will shuffle away. Though, actually, more room. Yay! And I am looking forward to seeing if I will, by the end of the book, be utterly enamoured or merely completely infatuated. It's nice to have choices.

Warning: Your Scrolling Finger Will Get Tired And Agitated

2009-10-13T00:10:00.002+01:00

Talk about being totally behind the loop. I'm so late to the party with this guy, it's a Wednesday afternoon, the empties are mouldering in the section of landfill marked "Ha! They thought they were recycling!", and my continual efforts to enter the host's bedroom and deposit my coat have resulted in a worryingly large and sudden police presence. Sorry, what guy? This guy. This guy, who has already progressed through unknown blogger to book deal and out the other side. This guy, who I chanced upon a few months back but only fully got into two days ago, after a surprising incident where I was at work, idly reading his heart-wrenching post about his cat dying, and suddenly found myself actually weeping. I don't weep. I occasionally snuffle, maybe a sob or two will work their way out when I'm feeling particularly slighted, but mostly I favour the single dignified tear rolling down the cheek in a satisfyingly picturesque manner. But this made me weep, at work, in front of a bemused colleague more used to seeing me flailing angrily about myself and muttering dark accursed words in the direction of our useless IT department, in between cheerily making cups of tea for everyone in sight.

So, Bete de Jour, or Stan Cattermole, is a blogger who interests me thusly: He writes about his life as, in his own words which we must believe as he's not about to give us pictorial evidence and all power to him, an ugly, ugly man. But through his writing, which is by turns silly high-pitched hoot-producing hilarious, so heartbreaking it actually removes your heart and squeezes it cruelly in front of your face like in Indiana Jones, and frankly at times eye-wateringly HOT, he comes across as entirely perfect. If you don't believe me, I invite your disbelieving eyes to focus themselves on his comments box, which is generally packed full of internet females with their faces set to swoon. Which brings me back to an old chestnut: why is it that we can virtually fall in love just through writing?

I have prior in this area, and in homage to the wonderful confessional style of Mr Cattermole, though not with even a tenth of his skill - please expect the hooting and heartwrenching to be at an absolute minimum, and your expression to be unmoved from this position :-| - here's the story of me and the sports writer.

Let's call him David, and I'll curb my enthusiasm for telling you his real name (oh-ho! Let me just award myself a peanut for that one) and let's say he worked for the Times, which he didn't, writing about football, which he didn't. So David the football writer had a real-time column of sorts, which had a bit of an interactivity angle, where people would email in and get their name published against various witty banterage that David would pass comment upon, which would cause a small frisson of glee. One evening myself and two good friends, one human, one gin-bottle-shaped, were having a rather intense communion, decided to write in and got a few emails published. Two thirds of the party were big fans of David (the other third merely exhibited glassy stoicism) so got quite giddy with the minute amount of fame and recognition. The evening passed into alcoholic coma stage, and I thought no more of it.

Till the next day, when I checked my inbox and there was an email from David.

My heart did a little funky dance as I read the email. It was friendly, passing amused judgement on the slightly drunken state of our emails, but was otherwise unremarkable - apart from it coming from a famous writer who didn't know me from Adam, of course. I didn't really know what to do, so I replied in equally open but non-committal tones, with a slight aftertaste of WTF. Not expecting anything more to come of it, I got on with my week.

Then another email. Which I replied to. Then another one. Not thousands a day, or anything, maybe one a week, but they kept coming and I kept replying. He seemed like a thoroughly nice chap, and a great writer. So on it went.

I should at this point it was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like the dreadful film You've Got Mail. There wasn't any of that self-conscious, slightly wry, "I feel closer to you than anyone I know, so I can share with you my theory on why I'm the only one in the world who understands Godfather III" cruddington. I just, if you can possibly believe such a thing, blurted a load of words onto virtual paper in a misguided attempt to be funny.

But he seemed to like it. He kept emailing. It was fun, it was illicit, I started getting an odd but familiar lurch in my stomach when I opened my email. This was the greatest shot in the arm my self-esteem could ever get - this random writer, who I really admired, wanting to read what I wrote, and getting ever so slightly more flirtatious with every reply. So when, as was inevitable, he hesitantly floated the idea that we should, shock amongst horrors, meet up for real, I was Imbruglia'd. (Torn. Must I do everything for you?) Don't get me wrong, I'm not of the Bete de Jour school of thought that I'm cursed with a face that looks like a bag of elbows, but I'm aware that I'm pretty unremarkable. ..Sorry, can you still see me all right behind that enormous guffing great violin that's just appeared and is trying to bow your eyes out with its sad little song? Ignore it, I'll carry on. Anyway, as I considered David's offer of a quick drink somewhere, the words "I WILL BE A CRASHING DISAPPOINTMENT" kept barging through my head like a couple of bailiffs.

But I acquiesced. And we met up. And I got stonkingly drunk, and he'd just split up with his live-in girlfriend, and the combination of those factors resulted in me clonking him over the head and dragging him back to my hovel by his hair. And then proceeded a quite horrific period of six months or so, where we would periodically meet, pretend we were just mates, innit! s'all fine! until I (it was always, always me) got drunk enough to actually get over my innate Britishness and fear of intimacy and general hang-ups, and we would retire to somewhere usually uncomfortable to do things which I would never properly remember.

But I liked him. I really, really, *really* liked him. So when I had finally had enough of this strange one-sided fuck-buddy arrangement, and sort of tried to say, well, hey, maybe we could try maybe doing a relationship type of thing, well, OK, not even that, but you know, I'm not talking about two hearts beating as one death do us part but maybe YOU could just kiss ME, touch the side of my face, maybe, just once, what did I get? Nuh-uh. No way Jose. And why? Cos I really wasn't the person that I came across as over email.

Needless to say, I only saw him eight or nine times more and that was totally IT. Kidding. I did of course run home and cry my little face off, and have barely seen him since... A couple of lunches, of course never, ever mentioning the whole heartbreak elephant that was stamping in our soup, and once they fizzled out, nothing. So, over email, I'm pretty amazing. Real life? Not so much.

This mental fence did, as you may well imagine, take me quite a few attempts to clear. Many, many brain-horses were shot for glue.

Gosh, what was my point? This is the longest post ever, apologies. Ah, yes, Mr Cattermole. On his blog, and through his book which I am going to buy as soon as I can find it, as everywhere I go says that they have it on their shelves and don't, he is funny, warm, amazing, fantastic, beautiful, inspiring, thesaurus fail, and boffo. Is it a carefully crafted facade, designed to twang the fallopian tubes of the silly wimmins like me, or is he actually perfect? And how can stuff like this come across so heavily in how people write?

Dunno.

Well, that was going to be the meat of the post, not an incredibly long-winded confessional booth whine and then a massive, massive Bete de Jour scrotal massage, but dear readers, it is long past bedtime and it will have to wait till another day. Hold it! ..OK, now you may celebrate. Hootenanny!

Anagram Of Charley Boorman - "I Am A Pointless Waste"

2009-09-30T23:46:00.000+01:00

This is what I've heard - people, as a breed, are meant to be 100% happy and contented all the time. That is supposed to be our natural state; grinning inanely at the empty space inside our heads, like an acid-house smiley, or a post-shitting baby. (Please insert your own postal strike gag here, depending on geographical location) Which is great. Fair enough. But if all our behaviour is reward-based, as a genus, we don't half spend a lot of time deliberately making ourselves miserable. Something as simple as looking at beautiful Facebook pictures of long-lost lovers until your heart aches and your insides churn and your brain does a sudden bluescreen data dump, or as complex as writing an offhand comment about gawping over long-lost lovers on your blog in the knowledge that your partner may read it, and not ever mention it, but file it away among a litany of other slights which will eventually lead to the irretrievable breakdown of the relationship and all the myriad unexplored facets of misery that will result therein.

I'd never do something that stupid, of course. He doesn't read it. Checkmate.

Or you could do something as ridiculous as subjecting yourself to a TV programme that has previously enraged you utterly for the purposes of squeezing some rancid blog juice out of it, especially when that involves you missing the last in the series of House, and another hour of truly, truly awful screen-kissing. Good on you, Hugh! American in every way but you show your true Britishness with your sexual inadequacies. Thus I salute you with everything but my similarly inadequate genitals.

Gird your loins, people. Charley's back for another pointless jolly at the taxpayers' expense. This time he's going from I don't care to I DON'T CARE via the method of DEAR GOD, REALLY, I ACTUALLY DO NOT CARE and again, the BBC are filling a large plop of Sunday night real estate with it. To explain to the uninitiated: Charley Boorman filled the sidekick/dunce role in a show where Ewan McGregor rode some bikes into small villages and spread his Scottish charisma among them like rampant cholera, whilst raising money for charity. And Boorman and his Richard Herring face is now inexplicably on his second - SECOND - series of a similar travelogue adventure. But without the charity aspect. Oh, no: this is just for our "entertainment." My, what good children we must have been.

As the hour of miserable television settled heavily upon my shoulders, there to loom angrily at me for days and days until it could be shifted by repeated Peep Show viewings, the following observations smacked me round my sad little face:

- Boorman has nothing to say about anything, except for a small set of excited ejaculations and obvious facts. "Brilliant! Amazing! Australia is a big place, and it takes a while to get anywhere! Fantastic!" It sounds like it should be on CBeebies. At one point, he visited an Aboriginal community riddled with alcoholism and broken people, due to years of institutional human rights abuses, and said nothing and did nothing but rattle about noisily, messing up stuff that didn't belong to him, like a toddler in a Tesco Extra. Why are the BBC subjecting us to this non-entity?

- He whines and whinges almost constantly, almost as if he isn't being given a free six-month holiday where everything is pre-arranged for him and all he has to do is get up every morning, do a great big self-satisfied shit and put on his stupid boxfresh Converse trainers. (I know about the shit because a good two minutes of the show was dedicated to him telling us. It was a beautiful synecdoche. Ohhhh yeah. I'm a tit)

- He blundered dangerously close to death on so many occasions - being bitten by a snake, wandering idiotically into jet engines - and it so mirrored the innermost desires I was unknowingly screaming incoherently at the screen that I began to think the production team were just toying with me. Teasing, tempting... "Oh, look! Look at the imbecile! Wouldn't it be nice if he just...just dropped off the cliff he's walking along? Yeah? Just lost his footing, and down he'd go? Bones crumbling, flesh rending, heap crumbled? Well...he ain't gonna! How does that make you feel? Nauseous, is it? Bile-ridden?"

It was at this point that an eerie calm washed over me. I realised that's probably been his whole life. Born into privilege, veering through life with nary a care, trouble and strife sliding off his Teflon form. I can't fight it. He's invincible. Of course he's got *another* series. Of course I've watched it, contributed to the ratings, made it a little bit easier for him to be recommissioned. He is evil. He is the Antichrist. Stuff Derren - he has nothing on this guy.

And that, my friends, will be my last ever post. I have a holy mission now. It must end! He must cease to be!

No, I'm only kidding. It was quite good actually.

Debunking The Derren

2009-09-09T23:52:00.002+01:00

Well...I bloody hope not.

God, I love Derren Brown. I love his pixie beard, I love his little nodding tic, I love the fact he collaberates with Patrick from Dead Set, and I love every single mind-bending stunt he pulls. During Russian Roulette, I whooped so loudly I roused my then-flatmate from a gin coma. She had been clinically dead for 20 minutes. THAT'S how good Derren Brown is.

So now here he is, back for an extravaganza of guessing. He says he's going to predict the Lotto numbers - one assumes correctly, although I'm not sure that's been specified, and it will slightly damp-squibbish if he dances merrily onto screen, swigs from a can of Fosters and says, "Errrr, I dunno, four? Never said I'd get them right. Ha! You didn't read the small print, you tiny-brains!" And for once in my life my late working hours are working right in my favour, if you don't count that one time I was here so late that the canteen started giving away free food that was out of date and I caught a parasitic worm from a king prawn wrap, as if there's one thing there's an abundance of round these parts, it's TVs that can broadcast independently from each other. So I can monitor both Channel 4 and the BBC at once, to prove there is no cheeky exploitation of broadcast signals.

Dude! Check out my sweet-set up.

So that's one TV on the left showing Channel 4, one on the right showing BBC1, a spare one in the middle (that doesn't work) and a rather wonderful cartoon on my desktop courtesy of @laura_barnard whose work you can peruse somewhere over there ->

So, initial thoughts - it's gotta be a reveal rather than a prediction - a sealed envelope or box with the numbers inside, rather than a beautiful duet between Derren and Alan Dedicot, voice of the balls... DB: "Four!" ADVOTB: "Four! The number of scotches I can imbibe between balls!" A reveal is something that Derren has done many, many times before, always successfully, and can be easily twiddly-doo'd. Plus, if it was an actual prediction, quite large chunks of statistical theory, relativity, and rational thought would have to be hoofed out of the universe's window, and I'm not sure Mr Brown would like the inevitable rift in the space-time continuum laid on his opulent doorstep.

Right, pointless liveblogging section alert.

10:30 OK it's nearly go time. I have Gordon's Kitchen Nightmares in one ear and the weather in the other. Oh, it's Jay Wynne! The croakiest man in all the land. One cough away from a lung flopping onto Wales and gliding gently down the Channel.

10:33 The continuity bloke on Channel 4 made a balls joke. Dammit! My ballsjoke sweepstake didn't go into negative values.

10:36 AAAAH ANNE ROBINSON'S FACE HAS HURT MY FEELINGS. Well, the two shows are starting at roughly the same time.

10:37 Who the hell is this guy on the lotto? When did Danny Wallace and Vernon Kaye produce vile progeny?

10:40 Awww, look at him filling. This is either ridiculously good acting or actual desperate filling.

10:41 Is the answer in among some of this legality stuff? Did he secretly just say "by the way this isn't live and I'm in on it with Camelot, which is of course run by an evil cabal of lizards, of whom I am king, yes, that's right, king of the lizards?"

10:43 There's definitely no delay between the feeds. My BBC1 and the BBC1 on his telly are as synchronised as my brain and this trick are not.

10:45 Well...hell.

Very impressive. Mayhap: a) Camera trick. Some kind of whizzery with the locked-off camera, easy to split the screen in half, replace the footage of the balls and have a little helper pop the right ones in as the draw progresses. Come on! We've all seen Speed. But, as Derren kept pointing out, he is going to show us how to predict the Lotto numbers on Friday, and I'm pretty sure most of us don't have the whole of Television Centre in our back gardens. b) Clever balls. They light up with the correct numbers? They have tiny miniature printers inside them? The lizards have technology far beyond our ken! Fear it! c) Collective hallucination. There is one poor person somewhere in the country who is immune, screaming at the TV, "he's just written down zero six times! Why can't you see?!" He's probably put it on Twitter with a #DerrenBrown and everything, just to be swept away by the 40,000 tweets saying "OMFG how did he do that????" He's sitting there now, rocking slightly, just waiting for that one little reply saying "yeah, me too!" I believe you, Mr Cynical.

I just have to go to sleep now. Truly sorry for the quality of the above. Hard to type with brain puttyfied.

Also: Point Black Arcade Machine That Pays Out Money! (To Other People Who Have Aiming Abilities)

2009-08-28T19:31:00.003+01:00

I appear to have been even more taciturn than my usual sulky self recently. In blogging terms I am the sullen teenager in the corner of a family reunion; the rest of the happy blogging family chats and laughs and shares and loves, and I lurk pathetically in the background, all but absent from the gathering due to my iPod earphones disguised under my stupid emo hair. Well, yes. But no. Terrible metaphor - I haven't blogged very often, is what I'm trying to say, but I have a non-emo-hair'd reason and that is that I have been staring at the walls. But with purpose, as finally I have moved house, and I can say that I'm wall-staring for inspiration...but while I am meant to be picturing a whirling kaleidoscope of colours settling on a scheme, or a theme, or a meme or whatever, secretly, I'm just staring at the walls slack-mindedly, like I always do! Tee hee!

The horrors that befall you when you move house will not be the subject of this blögge, you will no doubt be pleased to read, because a) everyone knows it's a pain, of course it's a pain, you have to put everything in boxes and then move the boxes and then move the boxes again and take the stuff all out again and what more is there to say on the matter and b) risk of post-traumatic flashbacks. You weren't there, man. You don't know. So instead of that, let me, in the manner of a myopic electrician, attempt to focus on the positive.

I'll just let that pun settle in for a moment there. Aaaaaah.

I have moved to a small hamlet within a big town; a tiny, beautiful gamete in the huge, shuddering ballsack that is London. A field of Earls! Imagine such a thing! Placed gingerly in the south-west, between the place where the Wombles womble and an STI-ridden piggy! And as I gyre and gimble (not womble) through the hallowed turf of this "Earlsfield" there have been many things which have tickled my pleasure centres and made me light up like a myopic electrician. BAM! Bulletpoints!

The river. Or rather, the crossing of it, something I must do twice-daily now to and from work and which fills me with ineffable feelings of happiness and contentment. God alone knows why. I can't swim for I am an idiot, which mean the river could literally kill me for my idiocy. Plus, it is a lurking snake of dread winding through London, threatening at any time to rise up and wash us all to godforsaken Canvey and beyond. I'm currently about as scared of the Thames Barrier breaking and fetid estuarine water swamping us all as I am that I'm going to suddenly contract CJD from all the beef I ate in the eighties, which means either someone vaguely respectable said it would happen or I saw it on QI. It's about a 6 on the SwineFlu-o-Rama scale. But even so, every time my little chunty train goes choo-choo-choo over Grosvenor Bridge and I look out at the glistening river, my heat swells a little and I realise I properly love London. Till the inevitable day I look out and see a bloated corpse floating by, of course.
Roll up, roll up, and enter the magical and munificent world of Earlsfield Library! You won't believe your eyes as you encounter the wond'rous array of modern technologies! GAWP! At the checking-out table that can identify and register a whole pile of books in an instant just by placing them on a little glass panel! GASP! At the... well, that's it, really. But that was enough to set my ass on fire.
The Buffet Brazil restaurant, or as I refer to it, the Torment Of 1,000 Meaty Skewers. You order an unlimited barbecue, and settle at your seat, replete with salad and ricey side-dish goodness. And then the Torment begins. A man emerges from the kitchens with a skewer - well, a sword, really - laden with sausage, and puts a little segment on your plate, where it sits, sadly, looking alone and forlorn, until you wolf it down your gizzard. Just as you start to grumble at the meagre nature of the supposed unlimited meal, the man reappears, with another sword of flesh. Yum! More meat! And on it goes, the man reappearing at increasing intervals with ever-more bizarre offerings ("Chicken hearts. Mmmm!") until you realise you have eaten a phantasmagorical amount of meat, there is more piled on your plate and your chair is about to collapse. In fact, the place could be improved in two ways. First, an element of peril - if your plate gets too overburdened, and you are not transferring the meaty goodness into your colon at an efficient enough rate, a switch is triggered and you are flipped bodily through the roof and into the black London night. Second - when you finally finish your enormous repast, a scoreboard covered in animal symbols lights up to tell you exactly how much you've consumed. "Ding ding ding ding! Congratulations! Four cows, two sheep and three-eights of a cockerel!"

So there you have it. A few wonderful things about my wonderful new part of town. On a scale of one to ten, I'd give it one. I REALLY WOULD.

Found! Another Thing Twitter Is Useless For: Cat Name Research

2009-07-24T17:28:00.004+01:00

I have apparently been "staycationing". Which is odd, as I wouldn't have been "vacationing" what with being one of those frightful British people who get inordinately annoyed about Americanisms, ulcers bubbling away on hearing "Can I get" instead of "Could I have" and stiff upper lips quivering at the thought that most software will heartlessly brand such beautiful words as "honour" with the Squiggly Red Underline Of Wrongness. But obviously some sub-editor somewhere didn't like the sound of a "holistay" so merrily staycationing I have been.

So I was in Devon, celebrating my birthday by going to someone else's birthday party and making her guests sing Happy Birthday to me despite none of them having a clue who I was, and doing a number of other British holiday cliches like attempting to eat an ice cream before the pelting rain turned it into a pavement-based gravelly soup. One evening, as there was a blissful lull between the terrifying humanoid screeching of the seagulls and the equally terrifying racist mewling of the locals, conversation with the young chap turned to the new house we will be imminently squatting in, and the pet cat who will be accompanying us into this brave new world of thirty years of debt and likely squalor. This cat doesn't exist yet - well, it probably exists somewhere, and seeing as we want to get a rescue cat, that must mean that I'm hoping it's getting horribly abused in some way right at this moment, which is obviously completely true - so it will need naming when it eventually comes to pass, and here are a few ideas we came up with.

1. Steve, Dave, Wayne etc - I was always taken with the idea of naming a cat after a builder, purely because I like the juxtaposition of it sauntering in in a slinky, feline manner and me going "awright, Dave?" in the voice of Garry from EastEnders. Always a danger I would kill the little bugger by getting a little carried away and feeding it too much tea with five sugars.

2. Odin's Beard, Gandhi's Hairdryer, Voltron's Vector - because I will never be proficient enough at the double-necked guitar or own enough sequins to actually be in a gothic-space-prog band. And I did nick the middle one from Robert Rankin. It's tradition, or an old charter, or something.

3. The Punishment, Destroy Him! - especially if the cat is weak, declawed, and a pussy. Cat. Pussycat. *fail*

4. Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem - by far the winner in my non-rested eyes, this is if we manage to cobble together a bushel of cats. One would be the leader - Dr Teeth - and the rest would be only known collectively as the Electric Mayhem, and would skulk around in beautiful synchronicity, to a soundtrack of '50s bebop, clicking their little claws and occasionally freezing in flamboyant jazz poses. Picture it. Come on, just picture it. Nothing better.

I'm sure that when the time finally comes to welcome a fluffy pile of goodness into our good hearts and shitty home, we will be overwhelmed with mediocrity and name it something like Socks, or Sooty, or Manfred Mann. I will keep you posted.

Don't Know Why, There's Some Sun Up In The Sky, Lovely Weather

2009-07-09T21:13:00.003+01:00

Time for my annual moan about atmospheric conditions that have happened with clockwork precision every 12 months for the last 28 stinkin' years of my life, but which I still react to with surprised indignation, like a walrus being slapped by the fin of an insolent guppy. Yes: according to all the sources, it's gonna start (continue) raining (being sunny) men (no men are involved).

I am not suited to this weather. I am supposedly descended from good, solid Italian womenfolk, but if I merely glance at the sun I crisp up like some kind of Celtic porcine demon. I dislike the feeling of being so hot that you cannot undress any further, so you wish to rip your flesh away in great steaming chunks and plunge your skeleton into liquid nitrogen. And it alarms me when we're trapped under the oppressive reign of the heatwave; it's unnatural, like the Earth has suddenly spun off its axis and everyone is just lolling about in parks while we're hurtling towards the centre of the sun and ONLY I HAVE NOTICED. It does seem like the zealous, chipper little tykes at the Met Office share my overhyped sense of panic, which pleases me greatly. Not a weather forecast has gone by in recent days where they haven't been looking imploringly out at me, with their puppy-dog eyes, wiping their nose down their sleeve, and beseeching that I check on the nice old lady next door lest she dies! That's right, dies! In the heat! The heat can make you die! Quite why I'm painting the weather forecasters of this fair isle as satanic children, I don't know. Must be the heat. Tee, and indeed, hee.

That's not the worst thing. The worst thing is the feet. Oh, the feet! Feet are, by absolutely the furthest margin ever, THE most unattractive part of any human anatomy, and suddenly they are everywhere. I once knew a guy at university who had really freakishly long toes, making him look like he was walking around on a pair of Beadle's teeny hands. I'm expecting the long, piercing scream I emitted on first spying them to bounce off Saturn and reflect back into my ears at some point in the near future - probably when I'm sitting on a river bank, maybe watching the evening sun speckle prettily off a duck's bill, and suddenly I will be assailed by an unearthly shriek that will shatter my peace and tip my brain into merry insanity. And what will I see around me as I stagger through the streets drowning in a hell of my own creation? Feet! Everywhere, the feet! There's a guy, looks perfectly normal, t-shirt, jeans, nothing wrong with that, and then OMG flip-flops! Why would you voluntarily wear footwear that is so very uncomfortable? It is the shoe equivalent of a t-shirt that you wear by clothes-pegging it to your armpits.

I am forever summer-doomed. Doomed to be the only one who sees the sense, sweating in my trainers, scuttling from air-conditioned building to shade of tree to hiding under my bed. Until I move to...Canada! Canada! Canada! (It's only a model.)

Update: because it takes me so gosh darn long to write these things, as if they're the fucking Gettysberg Address or something, the sunny weather of last week has been washed away on a flood of...well, floods, and the sky has chucked enough water on the planet to fill, say, a Nissan Micra with its sunroof left open by a forgetful and heat-addled simpleton. Needless to say, after all of that whinging, I have a quite poetic cold now. Bovril!

Achtung! Heavily Linked Post About Telly

2009-06-22T23:14:00.001+01:00

Much gaiety and rejoicing for those of us not so much feeling the recessionary pinch as having our very bones and flesh pulverised into a goopy, powdery mess by the recessionary car crusher - it's been a purple patch for your basic, non-subscription, good, old, prudent, august Auntie Beeb-type television. No need to go out and liberally splash your pennies on real humans and their stupid company! Just stay in and sharpen the corners on your square eyes. Entschuldigen bitte! May I take you through some current favourites? Why, you're so kind.

Well, honourable mentions must go to The Wire, the third season of which starts again tonight despite my fears that it would be bumped back into the Stone Ages (well, July) by the Annual Let's All Bray Like Poshos And Allow Mediocrity To Froth Us Up Into A Whooping Frenzy fortnight. As I type, the young chap is watching the last episode of season 2, having watched the entire boxset since 10pm last night. He's looking surprisingly well on the experience - largely unaffected, apart from his hair is sticking up in an alarming hand-on-a-Van-de-Graff-generator manner, which I'm not sure I can adequately explain. I can only assume that as he is not wearing trousers, at some point over last 20 hours, he's jumped right out of them. Anyway, The Wire is The Wire, and there's nothing more I can add to the commentary cloud surrounding it. Ask Brooker on YouTube.

Next. Psychoville, the new comedy from a dismembered half of the League Of Gentlemen. I came late to the LoG, and I enjoyed the third series and the film much more than the first two, which were more catchphrase-based and studio-friendly. They're damn good at a narrative thread, are the demi-LoG, and Psychoville got off to a mysterious and intriguing start. They're damn good at a cavalcade of grotesques spouting one-liners too, and there's no shortage of those, but as always, the funniest and most disturbing stuff is when Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton are feeling each other up - in this case, as a serial-killer obsessed possible psychopath and his long-suffering, bontempi-playing mother. Two men playing mother and son, virtually tossing each other off... Ohhhh, entertainment. But apart from the depraved thrills, the real strength is the acting chops. Unlike many written/performed by monstrosities, R+S can really properly act, and the amount of pathos they can cram into, respectively, a misanthropic '80s horror nightmare clown and the aforementioned mum-wanking misfit is quite extraordinary. So, ha ha, urgh God!, aw no... in that order. Oh and AND, the best incidental music you'll ever hear on BBC2 courtesy of Jody Talbot. Boffo. A good one.

The ha-has continue with That Mitchell And Webb Look, back with more self-regarding wordy sketchy fun. Smart move including a sketch pillorying criticism of their show as "hit and miss", and, oh, I don't know, some pretty clever other things and stuff... Yeah, I only really included this one because of my burgeoning and somewhat beautiful love for David Mitchell, after this interview and this appearance on J-Ross. After being quizzed on whether he had gadgets, gizmos, a big TV, wireless, an iron, and hair straightners, lovely David said with a delightful note of exasperation, "Yes, I am quite literally a contemporary of yours. We are alive at the same time." (A phrase which has quickly replaced the more conventional "I love you" from the larynx of the young chap.) And thereafter I laughed. Whisper it, but he may even unseat Mr Brooker from the top of my "If I saw them in the street, it would take a good couple of weeks and some really unsettling blog posts to flush the experience out of my system" chart.

Last one! Quick quick! Supersizers are back. Touched upon before, I am now ready to admit to the world my tiny little crush on Giles Coren, which will somehow not be swayed even with a visit to his Wikipedia page, which does not exactly paint him in the most flattering light. In fact, if you were to base your entire Giles Coren knowledge on Wiki, you'd think he was an angry, racist bully who writes bad sex scenes (and thus one must conclude also privately stars in bad sex scenes). But, hey...citation needed. Anyway, he works well with still the funniest woman on telly, Sue Perkins. But am I the only one who has been so worn down by endless formulaic plots where any man and any woman appearing on camera together for more than one minute must by law have some sort of sexual contact - Hollyoaks being a good example, where actually every single combination of cast members regardless of gender or sexuality have slung it up each other - and spends quite a lot of time waiting for Sue and Giles to tenderly lean into each other's embrace?

I am the only one? Excellent! Right, time for a Wire re-up.

I've Made A Huge Mistake

2009-06-01T08:55:00.002+01:00

In that, of late, I have let this sacred place become just a conduit for all the asinine, self-loathing, woe-is-me adolescent crap that gathers in the cobwebby, tricky-to-reach top corners of my brain space. I mean, what is this, MySpace? (Actually, MySpace jokes? What is THIS? 2006?) So, while I arrange for a long line of nuns, businessmen and '70s blaxploitation pimp stereotypes with increasingly alarming weaponry to beat some sense into me, here's a story about me being Secret Agent Man.

So I'm wiling away an afternoon on the District Line, as a cheap and convenient alternative to buying a man-sized oven to bake myself alive in, and something catches my eye. I must record this for posterity, I think, but how to do that without drawing attention to myself? At that moment, the tense Bourne-style background music starts up in my head. DUN-duh-duh-duh-duh DUN DUN dun DUN... My face remains impassive as I shoot glances at my fellow passengers. Sure, they look normal, but I know that the imaginary shadowy Bluth Enterprises has operatives everywhere. Suddenly a man looks sharply up from his paper, directly at me. Dun-duh DUN! I am a picture of studied nonchalance as my heart races. I subtly reach up and touch my hand to my imaginary earpiece, and an imaginary voice from imaginary HQ crackles back at me. "Stay focused. We know they're watching. You've only got three stops before they get suspicious and you've got to capture this intel. We need photographic evidence, and we have to get it without them knowing." Deeeee-deeeeee!

But how? The carriage is quite empty. Any one of these passengers could be a hair's breadth away from blowing my cover and shooting me stone dead. Or worse! (Duh-dun!) I get out my non-imaginary phone out and idly press a few buttons. "What are you doing?!" screeches the imaginary voice in my ear. "Stop pretending you're writing a text! You're underground, not sitting in a pub on your own pretending you're waiting for friends to turn up." Damn it! What a rookie mistake. Cursing inwardly, I set my phone to camera mode and inconspicuously slip it up my sleeve.

The trains slows and draws into another station. I start to inwardly panic. Only one station left. The whole future of the world lies on my shoulders. The imaginative shadowy Bluth Enterprises must not get away with this. Suddenly, a chance! A tourist family clamber on board, pinning me into the corner of the carriage. And in a microsecond, the music in my head ramps up, changes into a major key, and a plan forms in my my mind.

Dun daaaaah dah daaah dahhh! I look over at the man reading the paper. He is engrossed, or appears to be. This is my chance. The tube gains speed through the tunnel, the rattling building and building. I must judge this perfectly. The imaginary voice remains tensely silent. I am on my own. I slowly slide the phone into my hand and aim it at my target. The tube ratchets up to its highest speed. The man looks up at me from his paper. The tube swings round a corner. The rattling reaches a crescendo. I pretend to stumble into into the children standing in front of me. "Oh, I'm terribly sorry!" I trill, masking the giveaway clicking sound my phone makes as I take a picture, as I appear on an imaginary film screen in a three-way split screen, all different angles of my phone taking a picture. Job done. Mission accomplished. Dun dahh dahhh... The imaginary men at the imaginary HQ slump back in their chairs with relief and high-five each other. One reaches back for the intercom and the imaginary voice in my ear says, "You've got it. Now get out of there!" The tube rolls into Piccadilly Circus, and I run through the station away from imaginary pursuers, until I emerge into daylight, and melt away into the crowds.

All this actually happened. To get this:

BA Executive Class, eh? The boy's done good since the old days.

Synecdoche, You're So Fine, You're So Fine You Blow My Mind*

2009-05-29T19:33:00.011+01:00

It was an absolutely scorching and beautiful day in London town today, so I did the only good, correct and sane thing to do: went and hung around the bobos and the fed-up film freaks at the Curzon Soho to watch Synecdoche New York.

I had been assured by two entirely separate and very different people that it would blow my brain right out of my earholes, which is always a poisoned chalice, as you can't help but sit in the cinema and think "Right! Mind about to be blown! OK! It's starting! WOW! That's amazi...no...wait, that's just the THX jingle... OK! Now mind about to be blown!" And you're so busy waiting for the mind-blowing to happen, you don't really watch it properly. Or in my case, watch too damn hard, as person no.2 had said that it was a multi-layered treat and every scene was packed with clever foreshadowing, so I spent the first half hour memorising every tiny detail in the background like it was the Krypton Factor observation round, and ignoring the actual dialogue, plot etc. Unfortunately, I got bored of doing that just before the really key thing that would have made the rest of the film make a lot more sense, missing it completely. Only when I came home and read all the reviews to see what I should have thought about the film did I realise my mistake. Damn it.

Anyway, it was bold and confusing and funny and droll and bleak and depressing, but it really was a bit of a mess. I love all of Charlie Kaufman's other stuff - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of my all-time favourite films - but it does seem that he needs a mediating and controlling influence on his sprawling vision. It's too long and does drag in places, and there are a few too many little self-indulgent directorial tics for my liking. So what's it about? The endless unrequited longing of life, the inevitability of death, the arrogance of thinking we are all main players in our own insignificant performance piece... I think that's why I didn't really chime with the film as much as I have with his others. I couldn't really put myself in the main character's shoes, and I think to fully appreciate the film you have to. I'm not overly hassled by my own mortality, as secretly inside I still think I'm young and vibrant, despite evidence to the contrary. And instead of feeling that I have to observe my own life from the outside and reflect myself in others to make sense of it all, I tend towards self-consciousness in the extreme, and feel I'm trapped inside a movie of my own life that nobody's watching. Perhaps that's why I write this blog - to feel like I'm at least upping my own box office slightly. Which is arrogant in a whole other, stupid, self-pitying way, Narcissus staring at himself, getting all miserable because the lake's not teeming with people cooing with admiration at his reflection.

So basically, what I'm saying is I've come out of Synecdoche New York really, really wanting to appear on Big Brother, which I'm pretty sure is what Charlie Kaufman was pitching for.

And of course the most awesome thing about it was it included a gag based on this little peach:

I just love the thought of Kaufman getting script ideas from sticking "TV news bloopers" into YouTube. (Which, incidentally, is a whole afternoon of face-scrunching hysteria in itself).

*and yes, I did send this blog title as a tweet. Hey, give me a break. Brevity is not my strong point and when I achieve it I need to re-damn-cycle.

That's Me In The Corner. Shove Up A Bit, Andrew Collins

2009-05-14T20:36:00.000+01:00

Right, enough of all this twatting about with swine flu, and G20, and Bovril, or whatever the hell it is I have been wittering around. Less wittertainment, more witoredom? Doesn't really work. Maybe wittedium? No! I am getting distracted once again, you beastly fiends! It's all your fault! No. No, I don't mean that. How can I stay angry with you? I love you. Hold me.

OK, you can all stop shuddering now. Let's get on with it. Religion! Religion, religion, religion. So I saw a film this week which was possibly the most offensive thing that has ever been shown on British television, and it sneaked up on me totally unawares as it was nestling comfortably between the adverts for denture toothpaste and walk-in baths and lothario cheetahs in the "There there, dear, did the news scare you? Here, reminisce about the old times until Countdown comes on, though mind you, I don't think much of those new people, too smutty by half" matinee slot on Channel 4. Why so offensive? It was nothing more than a typically dull '50s effort but was so horrifically pro-Christian it made my blood boil. How very intolerant of me.

So anyway, it got me thinking, and once the government had been informed, the proper containment procedures were put in place, and the utter destruction caused by the sudden seismic movement of a brain that has not erupted for billions of years was hushed up in a labyrinthine conspiracy that makes Watergate look like Watership Down, it was time to write thoughts down on internet paper.

My first thought: being religious is slightly like being in a horribly passive-aggressive relationship with a partner who is continually giving you the silent treatment. Being a stupid bloody girl, put me in a room with the young man and subject me to mere milliseconds of silence and I will go through a massive internal dialogue thusly: "Why is he not talking to me? What have I done? Oh God, I've done something, it must be something terrible! I am full of guilt and shame! But hang on, that thing that I've done was totally not my fault. I was a victim of circumstance. How dare he dangle that above me like a sword of Damocles! He doesn't understand me at all. What an arse. We should not be together. No, no, what am I saying? I love him. I could never leave him lest I will truly DIE." At which point, I will hug the living hell out of him, startling him out of his male reverie, and prompting something usually akin to "What?!" And everything returns to normal. And the young man is the most laid-back geezer ever to breeze through London town. God only knows what I'd be like with someone who actually ever got angry about anything.

Point being, that seems to be the central premise to having faith. A continual process of second-guessing someone who you're sure is good for you in the long run but is always silently standing over you with one eyebrow raised. If you believe that someone ethereal and God-like is there to guide you through your life, and leaving aside for the moment the utter lunacy of taking instructions from a voice inside your head believing it's beamed in from elsewhere, then whenever you hit upon a bad patch, the only explanation can be that your precious God is testing your faith. So you get angry, and you rail against him and scream "How dare you, Lord! After all the dedication I have given you!" Ah, but then you realise the path to true salvation is lined with patience, and this is all part of God's mission for you in your life, and the power of prayer is the salve of any wound. So you pray (again - ahem - talk to yourself) and hey presto, the bad patch resolves itself in, coincidentally, exactly the same way it would if you hadn't spent the entire time ranting and snivelling at nothing and no-one.

It must be truly exhausting. I have no idea why any sane person would bother.

I have plenty more points to elucidate upon, like a veritable craphorse Hitchens, but I may have to save them for another time. A magpie just briefly landed on my windowsill, and I didn't salute it. So now I have to go out and find another one, and shoot it.

The Duologue Currently Playing Out On Repeat Within My Brain

2009-04-29T23:56:00.000+01:00

A casually-dressed but otherwise collected-looking woman, Frontal, sits contentedly on a wooden chair in a large, run-down hall. The "Retro Text The Nation" jingle from the Adam and Joe show floats quietly through the walls. Frontal strains to hear, and slumps dejectedly as she recognises it.

Frontal: Oh, God. Stuck on this again. I will be driven literally to distraction. (shouting) Shut up! I cannot think with this playing again and again! I'm trying to sum up my day and make new friends in just 140 characters!

Suddenly, a flurry of noise as a mostly identical but far shabbier woman, Limbic, bursts through the door, slamming it behind her and holding it shut, as if hordes of zombies are trying to scrabble through it. Frontal smirks at the sight.

Frontal: Ah, distraction. Right on cue. And what flight of fancy ails you today?

Limbic sidles over, looking around huntedly, and cowers by the chair.

Limbic: (hissing) It's already here!
Frontal: (dripping with sarcasm) Oh, poor you. What is?

Limbic shoves a well-thumbed copy of thelondonpaper into Frontal's hands. The headline screams "TUBE FEAR: SWINE FLU HITS CITY". Frontal scoffs and tosses it aside. Limbic screeches and pounces upon it, feverishly re-reading an article she's already memorised.

Frontal: Great. So you think we're going to die of a disease that is currently affecting 0.000000008% of the population of this country cos Murdoch has told you you will. More people have died in the last week sharpening pencils.
Limbic: No, no, no, this is the one. This is the big one. This is end of days stuff. Don't you remember that thing on the TV? That thing with that guy, and he was crumpled in the tunnel in the subway in New York, and then three days later every housing estate in Britain was like gulag redux?
Frontal: That was smallpox. And that other thing...oh yeah, FICTIONAL.

Limbic stares glumly into space. Suddenly she slaps a hand to her forehead.

Limbic: Oh, my head. My head hurts! Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God...

She frantically scans the article again and points to the list of symptoms. She stares imploringly at Frontal.

Frontal: Yeah, and how much liquid have you drunk today? Half a cup of tea. Why? Because you've been too busy staring at the computer, without your glasses on, compulsively updating the Guardian swine flu panic blog to go and get a drink. You don't have swine flu.
Limbic: (ignoring her completely, still reading paper) I've got a sore throat too!
Frontal: Your job involves you talking loudly, unnaturally and at length and you've had a very busy day. It's affected your throat as it often does. You don't have swine flu.
Limbic: (hand dramatically back on forehead) My head is hot!
Frontal: Your hand is cold. You don't have swine flu! Jesus, you haven't even BEEN on a tube!
Limbic: (screaming) People sneeze on buses too!

Limbic really quite upset with all this. Frontal sighs. Time to put a stop to it.

Frontal: (gently) Look...this is just a consequence of spending too much time watching 24 hour news channels. They hype this stuff up out of total necessity. They have to fill the time. You've been watching Charlie Brooker, haven't you?
Limbic: (warily) Yeah...
Frontal: We make a passably intelligent person between us. We know that we've not been near anyone who's been to Mexico, that our chances of catching swine flu from the few random people we've been in contact with are very slim, that it seems to be relatively benign in most people it affects, that modern medicine is more prepared than ever for a pandemic, and that it's more likely we'll die being flung joyfully under a bus by a passing murderer.
Limbic: (calmer) I guess that makes sense...
Frontal: Good. Now let's just get on with our lives, and not let ourselves get driven to a breakdown by sensationalist tabloid reports.

Limbic is thoughtful. Then a sudden startling revelation.

Limbic: Oh, sensationalist, is it? Well, answer me this. Has Ben Goldacre rubbished it yet?

A beat. Frontal is stunned. She wasn't ready for that one.

Frontal: What?
Limbic: Has. Ben. Goldacre. Rubbished it. Yet!
Frontal: (knows she's utterly defeated) No.

Limbic leaps up triumphantly and throws her hands in the air. Distant squealing fills the room. Triumph turns to horror, and they run away in a flap. Exeunt, pursued by a swine.

UPDATE: Since I wrote this, the WHO has raised the pandemic level, and we're certainly all going to die. And as you may be able to tell, Limbic has taken full control.

When I Say "We", Of Course I Just Mean "I". You Are Wonderfully Intelligent

2009-04-26T16:29:00.000+01:00

Lo, the internet! A brave new world, filled with exciting words and pictures and sound and vision, only 0.01% of which is extremely pornographic, according to QI! (That does seem a little low to me. Possibly the genteel middle-class QI view on pornography is different from mine, and they don't classify it as truly hardcore until the number of phalluses exceeds the number of orifices by at least three) But yet, I am a weaselly creature of habit when it comes to surfing, looking at the same old websites in the same old order - email, email the second, a rifle through all of those lovely gents+dames over there on the right, and finally the peerless BBC news website, which will inform me in clear and unpatronising terms about interesting events around the country and globe, tickle my frivolousity gland with tasteful celebrity factoids, and lie to me about the weather.

But recent events have dragged me from my comfort zone. Try as I might, and believe me, I've tried till my nonchalance-controlling muscles screamed in agony, I cannot ignore the current stinking wave of news stories surrounding politics and the sleazy, nasty, money-grabbing politicians in this once-great land (TM every tabloid reporter currently working furiously on "Kettlegate - Now It's Even Blacker!"). So I ventured into the Politics section to see how long it would be before the picture of David Cameron's chinless, smug face made me so angry I condensed into a super-hot ball of fury and spontaneously launched into an ironically serene orbit around the planet. My ceiling's structural integrity thus far remains undisturbed, which surprises me.

Anyhow. There's budgetry screaming, smearing Dollys, and spouses wanking with subsidised bathplugs, and it all seems to be...well, completely pointless and irrelevant. So there's this bunch of blokes who run things, and most of the running things stuff carries on out of the public eye because it's terribly boring and involved and to do with clauses and sub-clauses and this is why the BBC Parliament channel is niche viewing for democracy nerds and pasty middle-aged white men in suits fetishists. But the rest of it, the rest of the politics that we see, is peacock-posturing and sniping and point-scoring. Great, but who are they talking to? When Cameron splutters indignantly about the irresponsible culture of sleaze, and Brown does his usual mumbled pronouncements of denial interspersed with flashed smiles revealing micro-second glimpses into a truly psychotic mind, who's listening? Us? We may listen for a few minutes, but then we'll get bored and start thinking about Twitter, or Resident Evil, or Creme Eggs. It won't make any difference - we're such a bunch of craven thickos that the 40% of us who actually can be arsed to drag ourselves 300 feet down the road to stick slip in slot will just vote for whoever the Sun tells us to. Such blithering imbeciles that we'll actually spend our hard-earned, credit-crunched money texting into a news channel opinion poll to tell them we don't know how the budget will affect us. We shouldn't be trusted with a democracy.

But yet the pantomime continues, eating up valuable news space that could be used for even more breathless (heh) panic about swine flu (or, One Flu To Rule Them All). Politicians will continue to be somewhere between worthless peons and exemplary members of society, depending on who you listen to, and us numbnuts will continue on our merry way being blithely unaffected by all the ranting and raving and mouth-frothing generated in Westminster and Wapping. Because we're too stupid to do any different.

World's Problems Solved By Multiplyed Pop Forces of G4 And 5ive

2009-04-01T22:20:00.000+01:00

Oh yay! It's happened again. I've got all confused and don't know what to think about things. This week: G20 protests and anti-capitalists in general. Incidentally, I am making a small concession in their crusty direction by ruminating upon this subject not in one of my local dens of capitalistic fuck-piggery (RIGHT KIDS) Starbucks, but in an independent and groovy cafe-type thing. Even though it's so twee it's literally making me break out in hives. And yes, I mean literally. Cutesy blackboard menus scattered with chalked hearts? Check. Loaves of gorgeous-looking crusty (not hippy) bread idly lolling about the place like organic wheat Bacchuses? Check. A "pram station" to encourage that bilious of social sub-stratas, the "I claim I'm letting my child roam free to express his individualism but in fact I'm just ignoring him which is neglect bordering on child abuse" yummy mummy? Checaaaaarrgh!

So yes - I know exactly what to think about this so-saccharine-it-should-be-on-Gilmore-Girls caffeine zone. I don't know what to think about the anti-capitalist protesters. First of all. I may have a similar level of knowledge and understanding of the current economic crisis as a rusty and unloved garden trowel, but even I can glean that if capitalism was a person, it's currently experiencing the moment 30 seconds after that "pretending to topple off a cliff to freak people out" gag goes horribly wrong. Why protest about it now? Rebranding Coco Pops as Choco Krispies didn't work and died a death, and no-one's still protesting about that, wearing cartoon monkey masks and squatting in Tesco Express. OK, I concede that it may have got us into this mess - capitalism, not Coco Pops - but ranting at a storm as the clouds disappear over the horizon strikes me as pretty damn pointless.

Even though the protesters are totally right. And I can see that, and I agree with their principles, and of course the world would be a fine and beautiful place if there were no fat cats and no greedy bankers and everyone had a daisy drawn on their face and danced with free abandon in the streets. (Oh! Mother of all shudders) But they're just so annoying! When I was watching the footage of the protests today, watching the dreadlocks shake and the hippy bums parking on the tarmac, I slowly turned into a 1950s bowler-hatted Tory, until I found myself screaming at the television "Get a haircut! GET A JOB!" They annoy me in exactly the same way that animal rights activists do. How come they only ever want to save cute and fluffy animals? Foxes, polar bears, bunny-wunnies... I never see people camped outside Boots showing me graphic pictures of snakes being experimented on, or claiming that giant venomous scorpions have rights too. They're worse body fascists than Heat magazine.

So I remain confused. I like a McDonalds once in a while, and want the banks to lend me many hundreds of thousands of pounds to buy into the bourgeois capitalist notion that I need to own my own home, but I also like smashing windows and shouting at horses and the general process of "daubing". What to do, what to do...

Lost Love As Cheering Factor

2009-03-21T18:38:00.004Z

Right, well. Enough of all that self-pitying rubbish. Good old Harry Hill buoyed me up, I'm getting nicely annoyed at the unneccesary hotness of the statistics woman on The Colour Of Money (I suppose I should just be grateful that there is a tiny element of logic included unlike DOND, although it's drowned out by the blaring discordant trombones of superstition and emotional manipulation). And here's something rather wonderful by Terry Saunders. I say wonderful - in fact, it made me miserable as all get out, but I imagine that was the desired effect. Well...miserable in a happy way. No - actually, just miserable. Hey ho.

I look forward to the next one, in the hope that it won't totally tip me over the edge. Fun times!

Self-pitying Whining, Not In An Amusing Way, Skip To The End, Do Not Read, No Seriously I Mean It

2009-03-21T17:03:00.004Z

Yes, this is about Twitter. Of course it is. 98% of all internet-related typing now is either into Twitter or creating enormous sweeping great epic satirical tracts about how all Twitter users are self-regarding friendless twerps, endlessly spewing mundane details of their tiny, insignificant lives onto the internet, like a continual ticker-tape stream of tedium. It's Eddie the Shipboard Computer. And yet again Douglas Adams predicts the development of Web 2.0 with such prescience that I'm comforted, because clearly he did not tragically and suddenly die at a ridiculously young age, and instead ascended into some kind of human race control room, 100 miles above the clouds, where he gifts our mindless asses one big social networking craze every couple of years. He's halfway betwen Hari Seldon and Jesus Christ. He'd be the best Twitterer ever. Oh, I miss you, Douglas Adams.

Anyway, all those Twitter naysayers miss the point. And all the naysayer-naysayers miss the point too. Quoth the naysayer: "Who the hell cares what you ate for lunch and what you think of Red Riding? I don't spend any time on Twitter. I prefer to hang out in super-cool bars discussing the Nietzschen influence the latest Add N to X album with my real friends." Quoth the naysayer-naysayers: "It's so not about that, you prick! It's about connecting with new people who share your interests and loves and forming intense, long-lasting and earth-shattering relationships with them!" What utter bollocks. It's about stalking celebrities and showing off, as simple as that. Anyone who follows me and doesn't know me is very welcome and I love them utterly, but they're just gonna get me trying to be clever in 140 characters every couple of hours or so, and I can imagine that could get pretty tedious pretty quickly. So why do I bother? Why does anyone bother? Behold, the truth! I just want to be LOVED!

I don't write this stupid blog because I'm just overflowing with creative juice and it has to escape somewhere. I hate writing it. Every post creates a horrendous internal torrent of self-hatred, a constant nattering in the back of my brain telling me that I haven't got any ideas at all. Every time I sit down to write, I have to quell the ctrl-A, delete instinct that seizes my fingers, Dr Strangelove-style, every few words. It's frankly amazing that anything ever gets published on here. Not to mention the fact that I have got this far into this paragraph without pulverising my fingers by repeatedly smashing the laptop closed on them. So why do it? I write this blog on the tiny off chance that someone I don't know will happen upon it, and think it's funny. Oh, and then if they could pay me a lot of money to write for them as well, that'd be swell. Of course, I would have a completely miserable life if I were a professional writer due to the endless mind-fuckery detailed above, but I feel I'm nothing if not ridiculous.

I am ridiculous, though! Although I yearn for people to read this and like it (not this post, obviously. This doesn't count. Normal service will resume shortly), I'm also terrified that someone I know will read it and I'll be found out. Friends very kindly tell me they like it, and I crumple with embarrassment. It's anonymous, even though it doesn't need to be, because I'm no-one. But yet, but yet... Gah! I am trapped between frantically hoping for acceptance which should be rightfully mine because I'm obviously so marvellous, and not daring to make any pro-active moves towards being a proper writer because I'm obviously so shit.

Oh, man. I sincerely apologise. This is terrible, angsty, adolescent nonsense, and not something that should be published, really. But I'm going to publish it in the hope that it'll spur me on to blog again on something actually entertaining to push this off the top page. At least we can take comfort in this: it has turned out not to be about Twitter.

Daft Punk, Please Sell Me Your House, Your House

2009-02-26T00:53:00.000Z

Cor, do you remember the end of last year, when as a nation we all descended into a screeching, flapping panic and were convinced the end of civilisation was upon us, because we had a dim, distant memory of once buying an album on cassette in Woolworth's in 1991, and now we would never be able to do perform that precious action again? When we thought it would be mere hours before the whole concept of "money" would be rendered as dead as a big old papery dodo, and we would be forced to return to a barter economy where our meticulous collection of Wire DVDs and original Alan Moore comics would suddenly only be fit for teeny amounts of fuel and as effective shiny surfaces to reflect the sun and singe the circling vultures? How hilarious was all that hoo-hah, eh? What's that? It's very real, it's here and it's going to get worse, you've already lost your job and you're wasting your last pound in an internet cafe reading this? Oh, er... Um. Awkward.

Screw the credit crunch, I say. I'm going to buy a bloody house and you can't stop me, unless you are one of two things: 1) a bank who is unwilling to lend me enough money to fill a decent-sized suitcase (although only if it's in 50ps - one thing that working in a casino taught me was how laughably small a stack of money £200,000 in notes actually is. You could, if you'll forgive the vulgarity, shove it up your arse and still walk like a general) or 2) a house-seller who is unwilling to let me traipse my outside muck through their corridors, sneer at their wainscotting and then chuck a fiver in their direction and yell "S'all you're getting in the current climate, sonny-jim!" I'll ignore the fact that these are not so much stumbling blocks as bone-crunching-fall monoliths.

Anyway, my father has wailed himself into a coma on hearing this news, and I can't say I really blame him. His analysis that I am a lily-livered sap who would be panicked into buying sunscreen in a monsoon, especially if the salesman was a suave, suspiciously dry, gentleman in a nice coat and a big Audi, is pretty much spot-on. "They love people like you," Papa muttered darkly, before he gently slipped into his semi-permanent slumber. And so far, I have been bamboozled into thinking if we do not make an offer in the next 35 seconds, all available decent housing stock in this quadrant of London will be swept back into the stratosphere on a wave of young urban professionals earning slightly more than me, and I shall be left quivering in fear in a high-rise in Streatham, waiting for the moment when the local feral youth scratch through the paper-thin walls, staple-gun my ears to the floor and mess up my XBox Live rating.

So, as every other facet of my admittedly weak-broth-plain life is now infected with a pulsating lust for square-footage, outside space and APR, I apologise in advance if this blog turns into a long Rory Bremner dinner party sketch without any sign of humour, wit or subtlety. Welcome one and all to my world.

Cry Up A Liver (If That Is Indeed Possible)

2009-02-18T22:20:00.005Z

All right, all right, I admit it. Much as I sometimes wish it isn't so, although never quite enough to start winking lasciviously at anything with legs from here to yah-yah and binding down my bosom (baby, there just ain't enough binding in the world, noewaddimean?) I just have to come to terms with the fact that I am a girly-woman-lady type. And thus, I am occasionally prone, when I let my guard down, to engaging in girly-woman-lady type activities, like looking at videos of animals trampolining (thanks, Mippy!), paying inordinate amounts of money to have people apply poisonous chemicals to my hair with micrometre precision, and chronic self-hatred. Also, crying at things on the TV that are not upsetting, even through the foul-mouthed stream of invective that such things usually provoke in me. Here are a few things that make me cry:

1. The Coffee And TV video, specifically the moment at the end where Graham returns to the homestead and his family, who have been sadly gazing out of the window, suddenly hear him enter and rush to...well, one assumes greet him, but it's offscreen - they could be so maddened by his total disregard for their feelings and selfish skulking about in Britpop bands behaviour that they beat him to a pulp. I'm guessing that's not the way Hammer and Tongs pictured it. Peculiarly, the death of the milk cartons leaves me cold, the cheery Tetrapak idiots.

2. The episode of Futurama where Fry's fossilised dog is almost brought back from the dead, before Fry realises the dog lived a long life after Fry had gone, and so leaves him to his stony rest. But oh no, then the sucker punch - the dog had in fact stayed in the spot where Fry left him, pining after his lost master, for years and years until he grew old and died, lonely and unloved. Heartbreaking. Tragic. But a stupid cartoon set 1,000 years in the future, for the love of all the ponies!

3. Any advert for Cancer Research or somesuch where a big-eyed teary child looks into the mirror and sees their departed mother smiling back at them. Or the Mastercard advert where people joyfully greet their long-lost relatives in airport terminals.

Ah-ha! Sky One seem to have run with this last idea, straight into a wall made of emotional manipulation. A new show starts this week called "Hello Goodbye" (I base all of the following on the trail alone, BTW, I have no intention of watching - misinformed opinion once again the best opinion!) which hangs around Heathrow and sticks a camera into the faces of people saying - yes, yes! - hello, or goodbye, to friends and family. It's hardcore emotional pornography. None of the backstory, nothing you need to fast forward through, just straight-up crying, sobbing, and snuffling. Look, look at them cry. You can cry too. Look at those tears, running down their faces. Ohhh, yeah. Do you like that? Do you like those tears? Oh, the anguish! Oh, God! The anguish! More, more! Cry harder! Harder! And...! Quick, get a tissue, you've made an awful mess all down your face.

Disgusted? You should be. It's a ridiculous idea for a show, but it's somehow genius in its simplicity. You just have to beam footage of people suffering, but not in a horrible "my whole family's just been gunned down" kind of way, into the living rooms of saps who'll watch so they can "just have a good cry". There's no such thing. Just as there's no such thing as a hilarious homicidal rage. Trouble is though, it would make me cry in a way that, for example, watching footage of far-flung wars or real terrible human suffering wouldn't. And that is what is worrying to me.

Ah well - just have to fall back on the saviour of all girly-woman-lady types - blame it on the hormones. I knew there was a good side to it somewhere.

Rejected Idea On Grounds Of Taste: Walliams' Thallium Dalliance

2009-02-03T22:47:00.001Z

I have no comment to make on the snow. Oh, all right, one comment. Snow is no fun when you're stranded at 2am in Trafalgar Square with nary but a hysterical four-month pregnant stranger and your ex-boyfriend for company. It is also no fun when you wake up on the wrong side of London with no phone and public transport nothing but a dim, distant memory. In all other instances, it is masses of fun. So guess which two instances I experienced during the Great London Snow-pocalypse? Anyway, let's not dwell on that. Let's dwell, instead, on this.

There is a phenomenon round here, which I think is particular to London, if not just this tiny section of West London - which is very popular with film crews for some reason., possibly because of its proximity to the great mothership of media, Television Centre - where you will often see little florescent arrow signs cable-tied to signposts, directing crews to location shoots and filming bases. Because they're only tiny signs, and possibly to mystify and amaze the neanderthal minds of the hoi polloi, they usually have written on them just the initials of the show and then "base" or "loc" or whatever. Eg: LS for Love Soup, which was filmed just round the corner from me. Thrilling, I know. But that's given me a little game to play, which is to guess the show from the initials. For example, this morning I noticed lots of signs for WTD. So! Without further ado, let's play!

Start with an obvious one:
What The Duck?! - culture-clash sitcom where lovable geek is punished for hacking into Downing Street website and changing all instances of words "Prime Minister" to "Great Orc Overlord" by community service at wetland centre. Soon has corralled reticent birdwatchers into forming most brutal battalion World Of Warcraft has ever seen, and learns a few interesting truths about bitterns along the way. Starring Kris Marshall in NHS specs, Geoffrey Palmer and the ghost of Compo.

Wet Thatcher Dream - Nostalgic coming-of-age drama set in Eighties mining village. Young boy dreams of escaping life in rundown terraced house and becoming commodities broker in deregulated Thatcherite economy. Befriended by school's economics teacher, who helps him build up full Filofax collection, including rare astrology guide. Starring Kelly Le Brock as Thatcher. Contains intense scenes of free marketeering from the outset.

When Thickets Divide - Boring old period drama about a wealthy landowner and the poor, beautiful maiden who tills the adjoining fields, or whatever. Lashings of heaving tits to keep the grunts amused, all the will they, won't they, will they, won't they crap. In alarming break with tradition, they do, but he then immediately kills and eats her in repugnantly graphic fashion.

I may have got a little bored with the game at the end there. With enormous great guffs of apology to TV Go Home.

Residents Of West London - I Am Studying Your Necks Intently

2009-01-29T08:57:00.007Z

My cinema mission has got off to a mixed start. Film not bad, more on that later (try not to whoop yourself right off your chair). But one of those things happened that is the cranial equivalent of the Blue Screen of Death, or Red Ring of Death, or...I don't have a Mac alternative as, like all those wonderfully vibrant, multi-cultural people on the adverts, I'm a pissy...where your brain reboots and leaves you reeling in confusion. In my case, reeling directly into the path of one of Shepherds Bush's many purveyors of the dubious pleasures of the more dubious flesh, who cheerfully told me to fuck off before continuing on her unsteady way.

I had lost something during the reboot, as you often do. A much-loved, currently very useful and irreplaceable without great expense thing. But a very unexciting thing. You see, I had a scarf, from Ecuador, spun from the wool from the only the very snootiest and disapproving of llamas (ie all of them. Llama humour!) My chronic ability to buy any souvenirs of anything anywhere for fear of finding exactly the same product on the shelves of my local Tesco Express had meant I had nothing to remind me of the rather epic time I had in that lovely country (three weeks of harrowing emotional turmoil punctuated with starbursts of utter wonder. Another story for another day) so the young chap had kindly given me one of the many trinkets he'd accumulated along the way, the aforementioned scarf. It was a nice scarf, and it kept my neck warm. And it has accompanied me for three years, to three continents, through drunken nights where all up to and including dignity had been lost, into new homes, out of the front door, onto the bus, and into the cinema. It sat quietly all the way through the film. Snuggled nicely into my bag for the exciting walk out into the gathering dusk. Then there was a glitch in the matrix, and it was gone.

I had it. I distinctly remember placing it in my bag. Then it suddenly wasn't there. False memory? Very stealthy wool-seeking thief? Loose thread in the fabric of reality? Or did I just drop it on the way out like a dolt? No way of knowing. But it's gone, and my clavicles are chilly.

Luckily this happened after I had watched The Wrestler, which had not exactly packed an emotional punch, or indeed bodyslam. Anything more powerful and I would have thrown myself under a bus in scarf-mourning. Film all very well and good, but the "wrestlers are a noble band of brothers" schtick was laid on a little thick. And the device of the camera mostly hovering behind the shoulder of the characters, looking at the back of their heads, which I'm sure is a fabulous directing trick meant to evoke an overwhelming feeling of something or other, but just left me feeling like I was playing a really dull FPS with no ammo and a broken right analog stick.

I am really not intelligent enough to be allowed into the cinema. I don't appreciate the films and I litter the place with articles of clothing. I even needed extra assistance with my hotdog purchase, not being able to figure out myself where in the holding hierarchy it fitted in as I was already clutching a wallet and a ticket. But Vue has given me a money-off voucher, the total pricks, so I'm off again tomorrow to nod thoughtfully at another Oscar-botherer, whilst in my head the little monkey keeps on clanging those cymbals together...

I Must Confess I Still Believe, Still Believe

2009-01-27T12:04:00.004Z

So off I shuffled to the lovely, sprawling scourge of west London, Heathrow, which would normally be a journey I would do with a song in my heart as it means I'm off to do something ribald in a foreign country, but this time was coloured by sadness as I was sending the young chap off for a two-week business trip. This is not an occurrence that usually would impinge on our lives, as we are happy in our relatively minor and menial positions in the hulking media behemoth that pays our wages, and in return for our continued suppression of any career aspirations, we are given no responsibilities to weigh down our brows after we clock out of an evening. But, alas and alack, the young chap's natural abilities have shone through his disinterest-encrusted exterior, and he has been given a promotion he didn't ask for. So off he's veritably buggered, leaving me with two weeks to make my own entertainment, in a strictly non-euphemistic way.

At first I was afraid, I was petrified. Kept thinking I could never live without him by my side. Or more realistically, that I'd be really bored without someone to laugh indulgently when I start ranting at the television, or the computer, or the gods. But now I have two whole weeks on my own, I can't see how I'm going to fit everything in. At least four cinema trips (smuggling in contraband coke to reduce snacking costs), my Richard Herring book has arrived and needs to be rapidly consumed, there's a whole lotta Liberty City that requires ripping the hell up, and I may even fit in a few slivers of time for interactions with other pleasant humans. There's a good chance I'm going to have so much fun that I will never want the young chap to come back and litter up the place. Apart from the long, crippling bouts of loneliness, I'm having a ball.

So I may even be blogging slightly more often over the next two weeks, although my creative momentum may not get the opportunity to build up too much if I'm just absorbing other bits of culture. My rotary momentum, however, is building up way too much as I spin round and round and round and round on my cheap-assed Ikea office chair. I think I miss surfing-whilst-on-couch ability more than man who has taken said ability away with his laptop.

Good thing he never reads this, huh?

Altogether Now - # Joey Ramo-o-o-o-one! #

2009-01-18T01:02:00.007Z

As I be-twittered the other day - and time, space and generally 1am-ness prevent me from expressing exactly to what degree my life has been incomplete without broadcasting my tiniest thoughts in a great, splattering sneeze across the internet - my fantastic, immortal headphones turned out to have a weakness, and that weakness was being used every day for three and a bit years. And so here I am, cruelly bereft of noise in one ear, and that, my friends, is one ear too many.

Anyway, that was not the point. This is the point. In the death throes of my headphones, as I slumped home from work in not-so-glorious mono, my iPod sensed the doom in the air and served me up a double-header of Dying All Young by Chuck Prophet and the following work of genius which I had quite forgotten about by The Awesome Power Of William Shatner. (Excuse the fan vid. That's YouTube for you)

Question! What's the most blessed part of this thing? Is it: a) when Shatner suddenly lists random celebrities who have carked it? b) When the backing singers respond with a beautifully harmonised "Dead!" after each name? c) When the backing singers spell out "You're gonna die" D-I-V-O-R-C-E-style? Or d) when they sing the list of interesting or imaginative ways that your, my, everyone else's life is going to suddenly END?

What's the best? Why, all of those things, of course! Once again, in the words of Futurama: the Shatner has found a way.

Point Of Order: I Am Not And Never Shall Be Indie

2009-01-14T16:19:00.001Z

"Sigh. Yeah, that's right. Sigh. Two years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a piece about the world's bizarre insistence on marrying me off..."

Quoth the Brooker on Monday. And may I add: Sigh. That means it was two years ago, almost to the day, that I wrote this post about that piece. Here's what I said in summary back then, to avoid any unpleasant whiplash-type effects from being forcibly dragged two years into the past by your linky-click-finger: Ooh, Charlie Brooker's single! Look at all those internet losers flinging themselves at him. I flung myself at someone off the internet once, and it really bloody hurt. But still, I actually got a response and a soul-destroying total non-relationship out of it, not like you losers. Never catch me doing that again. What losers. What I meant, though, was an entirely different manner. I was, in fact, climbing into my copper suit, moistening up my joints, dragging my metal bucket of water to the top of the highest hill, shaking my fist at the sky, loudly casting aspersions on the sexual proclivities of Thor's mum, and generally willing with all my might that lightning would indeed strike twice.

Although if I really did want that to happen, I probably could have tried a little harder. I wasn't even one of the millions of tiresome indie girls who left oh-so-nonchalant "Yeah, I'll marry you, although of course I'm completely not bothered"-type comments. Only cos I'm completely not bothered, you understand. And, more importantly, because I'm not an idiot, and I realise no-one anywhere in the world could read a 20-word comment and fall head over heels in love, no matter how pithy, witty, and goddamn sexy it might be. Indie girls, take heed: The Brooker will not read the comments. He will not then look at your commenter profile, will not find your blog, will not read it all in an evening, be charmed by your turn of phrase and identify deeply with your cynical view on life's little idiosyncrasies. He will not email you saying that he didn't quite know why he was emailing a stranger but just somehow felt he had to, you will not embark on a hilarious and increasingly flirtatious email exchange, he will not tentatively suggest you meet up, and he will not see you across a crowded pub and be struck dumb by your indie stylings. He will not react, at first, in an angry and defensive way, as he is forced to re-examine all his opinions of love in the face of an unexpected onslaught of emotions he is unable to process. He will not gradually soften up over the course of a number of evenings where you discover a mutual love of various high points of low culture. And most of all, he will not eventually realise that you are the one person who could crack through his hard-bitten hack exterior and when you're there, he can finally sleep at night.

Mostly because he's probably totally married already.

So why did I write this post, then?

Oh...

Stone Cold Reminisci-funk

2009-01-07T21:44:00.000Z

This is a strange time of year for me. The limbo between Christmas and New Year means nothing to a shift worker such as my very excellent self. Life returns to mundane banality and work-work-work with a frosty slap in the face on 27th December precisely, but it's another week before the rest of the world catches up, so you're left in a hazy netherworld where everything seems normal, but the fridge is full of exotic leftovers and chocolate and the TV schedule's gone all weird. Most disconcerting. And on top of all that, New Year is here again, heralding the yearly visit from the Grand Old Duke of Vague Sense of Disappointment With Your Lot in Life. Hey-de ho, though, I am countering the waves of attacks from his soldiers of shame by staying in on New Year's Eve, going to bed before midnight, and generally pretending my name is Nico Bellic and all I need worry about is where to take women on dates so that I will definitely get laid.

And that, my friends, is my first resolution taken care of - more recycling in 2009! Yes, I wrote that last week, but could not work up the energy to think of a cohesive conclusion to my sorry tale, so just went straight on back to the Xbox. I did in the end go to bed early on New Year's Eve, like the crazy muthafucka that I am, but didn't get to smugly snooze through midnight like some kind of emo with a false sense of superiority, because, of course, the rest of the world was celebrating the arrival of the new year with noisy bang-bangs. Oh, and fireworks HONK HONK. So I marked midnight by grumpily rolling over and muttering about how early I had to get up.

Over Christmas, the normal family dinner took a frightening turn when my mother flung down the roast potatoes and announced she had finally had enough of my accumulated crap taking up valuable space in their attic, and that the time had come to clear it the FUCK out. (She didn't say that, but looking in her eye, I knew she meant it deep down in her foul-mouthed heart) This caused both my stomach to fall and my bile to rise, leaving a small black hole in the centre of my being, which collapsed under its own gravity, sucking me, my family, and the whole Christmas spread into an area smaller than a neutron. Or that would have happened, had I had my way. Instead, with a grimace, I mentally adjusted my plans for the rest of the day from hurtling down the motorway in an empty car towards the warm and loving embrace of my Slanket, to crawling around a cold and cobwebby loft, trying to sort through boxes of stuff not quite rubbish enough to count as actual rubbish, but not nearly important enough to be worth carting 80 miles to my already over-stuffed flat-ette. Thankfully, my mother sensed my discomfort at this turn of events, and instead dumped a shoebox full of photos in my arms and toe-punted me out of the door, to distant cheers of approval.

And so, back in the big smoke, and coincidentally in a cloud of big smoke, I found myself in the titular SCR-F. They were all pictures from around my university days, bringing back floods of mostly unpleasant memories, contrasted with a small amount of pleasure that my 18-year-old self looks very similar to my 28-year-old self (I have been labouring under the illusion that I have spent the intervening years gradually getting more repulsive, but happily, I started off with a healthy level of repulsiveness! Heh, that's maybe a little bit too self-consciously self-hating, even for me. Apologies) Anyway, I have singularly failed to keep in touch with anyone from uni, mostly because I am terrible at replying to emails, but also because there were never many emails to reply to to begin with; I did a quite magnificent complete job of isolating myself actually physically inside a bottle of Southern Comfort, mooning over various men. So where are they all now, these beautiful young things I have captured forever on shiny photo paper? Who knows. A bit of googling revealed almost nothing, so my reminisci-funk continues on unfettered.

Where are you, class of 1998 Fitzwilliam College Cambridge (I know, I know)?? Any information gratefully recieved. So my reminisc-funk can be reminisci-sunk!

Oh, yeah. I'm back, baby!

All Is Vanity

2008-12-14T21:46:00.001Z

Here's something to skeeve you out to the very depths of your soul: I can see you. Oh yes. I know you're reading this, and I know where you're from, and I know how you got here. Sing it:
# I travelled the world and the seven seas
I am watching you through a camera! #

OK, not quite. But thanks to the counting robots hiding underneath the little green and white box at the bottom of this page, I can go to a website and see which internet providers (or something) have been accessing this palace of wonderment, how long they stayed (mostly around a paragraph's worth) and most importantly, how they found it. And yes, I am shallow enough to be affected the browsing habits of complete strangers. Hey, man! I'm only human! And I need some comfort, after I was roundly slagged off for being anti-social on a comment thread on Andrew Collin's blog, which I used to think was the politest place on the internet. Politest place on the internet, my deep blue eyes! I tell you, they may be woolly liberals, but they have tongues of steel. Steel wool, yeah? Ah, I'm wasted on you people.

So, trawling through the admittedly tiny amounts of data puked out by the counting robots, two glaring points were just waiting to be made. Point the first. For the people, possibly person, who is desperately searching for a "just resting my eyes t-shirt" - is this what you're looking for? Though to be honest, dude, sling me 15 bucks and I'll make you one that's far, far cooler. Why, just look at the imaginative and radical design on this page! Wow kaleidoscope woo woo woo oh OK fine.

Point the second - to the poor searcher who happened upon here while searching for "nubile wench" - I apologise deeply. There is really not a hollow enough laugh in all the world to represent the error of your click. When the hell did I ever write "nubile wench" anyway? But look, I've just written it twice again, so with any luck someone else might make the same mistake. And to them I say again: I'm very sorry. Unfortunately, I'm thinking of subscribing to Word magazine, so the last paltry vestiges of femininity that have been hanging desperately around my shoulders, pathetically evoking honeyed dreams of mascara and skirt lengths and chicken-literature, have finally dissipated in a puff of 45-year-old man stench.

Pint of Large, barkeep.