Greetings!

Good afternoon friends,

Over the last few years, I've been mulling over some key choices in my life. Lunch now, or later? Haircut or sweeties? Is TV more, or less fun than pushing hot staples into your flesh? To blog, or not to?

Well, since returning from my extended travels, I decided it was only right to start to take writing more seriously and start a blog where people what I know can look and see things what they might like and 'dat.

Why don't you take a look below? If you don't like it, I hate you.

Loveyoubye.xx

Thursday, 13 December 2012

Christmas Time. Vengeance is mine. Children weeping all of the time.


Here's a Christmas movie quiz. Very little additional help for ya'll, but if you need a clue, the internet is always at your disposal…

So why not give it a try? If you get all the answers right I promise to let them all go... who, you ask? That's for me to know and you to find in several different skips in the Berkshire area.

You can comment, Facebook or email your answers back to me and, if you are the first, you win a sticker (this is real. I have 2 stickers to give away). Yeah. Stickers. I bet you're thinking 'why, oh why, didn't I take the blue pill'

Anyways, happy landings.
  1. How many gigawatts does it take to power a flux capacitor?
  2. What kind of skills does Napoleon say he needs to get himself a date (other than owning a Sledgehammer or developing the ability to grow a moustache)?
  3. What character links Christopher Nolan's debut film Following with his 2010 film, Inception?
  4. What are the names of Alex's droogs?
  5. Which characters does Mathilda dress up as during her game with Leon?
  6. Can you name the creatures Dorothy so afraid of in the woods, other than flying monkeys obviously?
  7. What is the name of Douglas Quaid's alter ego (or his other name, or his dream name, or real name, or whatever…)?
  8. How many drummers have been in Spinal Tap?
  9. What's 'like a virgin' really about?
  10. What's the name of the little girl in To Kill a Mockingbird?
  11. According to Henry Jones, what is Indiana Jones' real first name, and who does he call himself 'Indiana' after?
  12. Name the actor who portrayed Hitler's Downfall.
  13. Robocop had 3 prime directives: Serve the public trust, protect the innocent and uphold the law. What's the secret 4th directive?
  14. In The Night of the Hunter, what words are tattooed across Robert Mitchum's knuckles?
  15. What happens if the groundhog sees a shadow?
  16. Which instrument does Gene Hackman's character play in The Conversation
  17. Which oscar winning film was a remake of Hong Kong classic Infernal Affairs
  18. See if you can name the American counterparts to these foreign language films too: REC, Reykjavik – Rotterdam, Seven Samurai and Let the Right One In.
  19. Who played Rob Gretton and Martin Hannett in 24 Hour Party People?
  20. Where's a good place to stay on Summer Isle (if you can stand the tinned fruit, missing pictures and creepy locals)?
  21. Blow up is about a photographer who may have witnessed a murder. Who's the star?
  22. How many Iron Man suits has Tony Stark been through already (up to and including The Avengers)?
  23. According to Tyler Durden, what do you get if you mix equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate?
  24. What was the working title of the first Scream movie (think about it)?
  25. Explain the effect of crossing the streams (yeah, you might have to look this up, but what the hell…)?

Finish these written or spoken lines from classic films:
  1. "Come quietly, or there will be….."
  2. "Frank was here, went to get…"
  3. "Ray, when someone asks you if you're a God, you say…"
  4. "Some people call it a sling blade, I call it a…"
  5. ""I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of him." Well I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is…"
  6. "Never mind that shit. Here comes…"
  7. "It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else…"
  8. "You didn't let me finish my sentence. I said, I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to..."
  9. "I'm not in the business…."
  10. "You can't fight in here, this is the…"
Merry Christland Day. Enjoy your little faces off.

xxx

Monday, 17 September 2012

English Must Hard


This morning I decided it was high time to throw on my galoshes and take an extended stroll around the local community. No sooner had I removed my electronic tag and opened my Knife Crime Wound Spotters Guide, when some playful local oik approached me; “Dear Mr Savage, have you a copper to spare, I’m right on my uppers? I’ve n’er a single groat to spare for Special Brew.”

Post haste I replied, “Ahh, my sweaty, overweight, greasy, ugly, dim-witted friend. Fear not, for this is England. In this land of hard workers and strong backs you shall not go hungry. Go forth and work a day’s toil in my field, then thou shalt find me a generous master”.

When I woke, I continued my stroll to the nearest hospital to be treated for head wounds and report the theft of my almanac, my galoshes and everything I own.

Whilst making my way back to reservation towers, bandaged but proud, chomping on a cox’s and sporting a tweed bandana over my newly minted stiches, I took the chance to reflect on my Englishness.

I recently read an article about the national burden those German fellows feel in relation to their recent past and their desire to cover up their own history: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/16/bernhard-schlink-germany-burden-euro-crisis

Historian, philosopher and former judge Bernhard Schlink argues that the European project presented Germans with a chance to whitewash their history and replace it with the colours of the European dream. For Germans, the burden of shame stemming from the War and more specifically the holocaust, could be dissipated so long as their identity remained tied to a central European, rather than national, experience.

The faltering of the Euro has led to some describing German foreign and economic policy as dictatorial and ugly wounds have been reopened. If the European dream goes sour, Germans will be forced to confront their past once again.

Whilst the German experience has been examined and dissected, in no small part due to the West’s continuing obsession with Hitler as a kind of psychological bogeyman, I wonder how the English public would respond if they were to sum up their sense of nationality.

Many people seem to classify their relationship with their country as the same as their relationship with their flag – either hanging it out of the window to ‘reclaim’ it from the far right, or wincing at the sight of cars daubed with national emblems. This seems to be restricted to the English flag as there was something altogether more jolly about the Union Jack’s roger, which seems to be viewed as the kindly old aunt to the George’s Cross ASBO gathering teenager.

I can’t speak for the Scottish, Irish or Welsh relationship with their identity, but there seems to be an easy pride in the flying of the flag at least, something which English people seem to regard as a frontline in their national identity.

I hope that it is too simplistic to boil down the English experience to flag waver, flag hater, flag burner or flag ignorer, because a bit of cloth seems a rather pointless way to demonstrate your relationship with your country.

Whereas Germany has tried to position itself as part of a wider, cooperative community within Europe, the English have adopted the position of social pariahs, lurking at the fringes of the party, smiling at the host, but dissing their CD collection and stealing beers from the fridge when his back is turned.

The English seem to have a curious sense of false entitlement which stretches back to the chastening experience at the end of the war when foreign territories were handed back and the Empire was consigned to history. As my American friends ceaselessly remind me whenever a certain ‘George W’ is brought up, there isn’t many corners of the world that the English have failed to fuck up royally, something which we have never really been held account for.

Whereas Germans retreated from themselves by hurling themselves into the European Project, the English acted like spoilt adolescents, drunkenly swaggering around and picking fights whilst silently guarded by an American older brother, ready to knee the rest of the world in the balls if we get in a tizz, so long as we lend them our pocket money when they need to buy petrol.

English people seem to revel in our dominant ‘otherness’ and being viewed as eccentric or cynical while the rest of the world is emotional, excitable or moody. We position ourselves as above reproach, whilst going slightly bonkers, tortured by the memory of how we used to be contenders, a Miss Havisham of a country, jilted at the altar of history.

Looking online at the reaction to the opening ceremony of the Olympics, I tried to find comments to describe why so many people regarded it a success, especially as it was so individual. It was precisely its lack of a homogenising ‘one world’ corporate approach that seemed to make it so palatable. We know we’re odd, so you just have to go with it. And they did, American press reports gleefully passed the time commenting on the unique vision being somewhat baffling, hinting that it might have been a joke that the rest of the world simply didn’t get.

In spite of a spate of articles reflecting on what it means to be British, the English have so far remained immune to self-reflection or chastisement in relation to its sins and its responsibility to the rest of the world. All attempts to recognise ourselves as the cause of our own problems have been resisted, perhaps in fear of what we might find. Fingers have been placed in ears and we’ve started humming the theme to Super Ted.

Rioters remain chavs, protesters idealists and politicians fuckwits and everything is neatly explained away into its own little box, but sooner or later we are going to have to get to grips with ourselves or we might find that the after party has already started and no one gave us the address.

I guess it won’t matter. We seem to like it that way.
Goodbyeeee

Wednesday, 12 September 2012

Blog: Redux


The world needs better lighting.

We could also do with high fidelity sound and digitally enhanced colour. While we’re at it, can I order some jump cuts, Dutch angles and a red velvet curtain primed to descend when life gets too tricky? I could do with more montages when there’s hard work to do and more chance meetings with beautiful strangers who become instantly enthralled and seductive when I start blithering insecurely about spoons or milkshakes or catching ghosts.

I need a pithy and withering comeback for someone who barges past me in the queue at Tesco. Something to make them reconsider their life choices and reduce them to a burbling heap of angry tears. Then they transform into a mind altering cuttlefish of doom that I have to wrestle to the ground and behead with a spatula from the home wares section.

One thing’s for sure; if life were on film (the crazy, imagined, goblin fighting, ninja cat-scrap, dynamite version. Not the sofa jockey, haircut, tepid tea, bum picking version – i.e. reality) then I’m pretty sure it couldn’t be any less well received than Hollywood’s current output, which seems to be about as popular as a pie made of arses.

Looking through the movie blog bile duct (the internet), the anger and despondency seem to be divided into 5 categories of hatred. I like to call them;

The 5 Categories of Hatred *BOM, BOM, BOM*
(BOMs added for dramatic effect. Any relation to any BOMs living or dead is purely coincidental)

TV spin offs.
The Sweeny, The 3 Stooges, Miami Vice, even The Muppet’s Oscar baiting toe-tappery doesn’t cover up the fact that it’s pretty lazy. Chucking money at instantly recognisable no-brainers so they can expand their width from tellybox to bigtellybox doesn’t take a huge leap of faith does it? Come on Hollywood, if you had any guts you’d try the same with Rainbow or the Clangers or the weather. Surely Antiques Roadshow: Annihilation, is a summer hit waiting to happen?

Foreign Language minus Foreign Language.
Everyone likes homogenising, so REC becomes Quarantine, Let the Right one In becomes Let Me In and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo… stays exactly the bloody same, but with crap script and acting. Quite right too. All that wacky noise from foreign mouths and bizarre symbols no-one really understands is just a way for dusky looking otherplacers to try to be smug. Let’s get Justin Timberlake and Orlando Bloom in and remake Triumph of the Will.

Comic book adaptations.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all love whining about this shizzle, whilst slapping our tenners down on the counter of the Odeon popcorn hut; “I think Hollywood is a machine, designed to exploit established pop culture lamb chops, because it’s too lazy to season and prepare the filet mignon of tough and troubling, blah, blah, bumcakes, let off, wee, poo, cocknoise.”

Sequels, reboots and the seemingly bloody endless stream of vampire movies.
Speaks for itself…

Remakes
Nothing espouses more Soylent Green infested, guttural bile from the mouths of filmgoers than a straight up, merchandise hag, ‘buy yourself a ticket and I’ll tickle your balls’ remake. The potential harm remakes can inflict on an audience is most evident in the horror genre. At a creative peak during the 80s, poorly backed directors exploited the shock value created by handwringing censors and religious zeal, to grab attention, scream their guts up and satirise the age.

Fearlessly moist, fingers aloft and buttocks clenched, Sam Raimi, George Romero and Peter Jackson forged reputations. Now endlessly re-jiggled, classic zeitgeist gorefests have been boiled down and Hollywoodefecated until they retain the shock value of a rude and amusingly shaped carrot.

The remake backlash is strong and the arguments are endlessly trotted out as an example of the decline of the film industry. Still, I don’t remember anyone getting on at the RSC about their constant remakes of bloody Hamlet, or the ‘Richard’ trilogy that keeps popping up (I didn’t see the first one, but the sequels were ace). Come on Stratford, isn’t it about time you got a new flavour?

Well, no. No it isn’t. I’ve never been sure why remakes are immediately derided before even having been watched. Sadly, the wages and the potential profits involved mean there’s a deep suspicion it’s only trotted out for the benefit of people with deep pockets which weighs heavily on the back of directors, who in turn seem reluctant to try anything more radical than concoct a misty eyed episode of ‘I love 1982’ and be sure to name check all the ‘classic moments’ from the original.

The fact that most remakes are indeed cack doesn’t help, but simply being a remake doesn’t instantly equate to a bad film. It’s very hip to sit around in cafĂ© bars, examining your vintage iPad collection and emitting high pitched squeals of derision about the lack of Hollywood creativity. It’s even easier to forget True Grit, The Fly and A Little Princess and only remember the turd stained undercarriage of Psycho, Planet of the Apes and The Wicker Man (“Not the bees!!!”).

Still, I don’t ever remember any directors or actors dropping much ‘new and exciting’ out of their collective bum hole in the recent past. If Seth Rogen, Christopher Nolan, Will Ferrell or George Clooney pitched a Victorian period drama about a terminally ill squirrel living in a wood made of car parts fighting a giant talking squid, the studios would probably see where they went with it, offer them a $100million budget, then dismiss it as a vanity project if it all went tits to the sky and bombed like Kevin Costner on a U-Boat.

The studios can only develop what’s out there, folks. Yes, we know they’re morons, but until the people who own the thinking caps start trying harder, rebelling against the studios or abandoning the gravy train, the whinging will go on for a long time to come. It’s not all bad. Go watch Submarine.

Lotsoflove xx

Tuesday, 4 September 2012

Back to the Present


And so…

Where once was calm, only chaos reigns.

The Earth is in the early throes of the second dark ages. The Book of the Dead has been opened and incantations of a deadly nature have been uttered. Where once professors with wild notions leapt from buttock to buttock with excitement at the prospect of creating a world where we summon the spirits of the past to instruct our future, now only glance suspiciously out of the log cabin window and await the sound of a cackling moose which signals their doom.

Dark forces circle like herds of cattle. Evil, demented, wild-horned cattle. Their once soft lowing now taint the air with their bovine wails. Zombie Cattle. Zombie Cattle from Mars. Cattle with Guns. Yeah, big laser guns that melt your eyes and rattle your teeth.

Humanity, morality, underpant elasticity… once constant and reassuring bastions of stability now fluctuate wildly and our lives spin dizzyingly out of control as we lack a moral compass to guide us. Even now the undead walk the earth, chanting repetitious bile from our telly boxes and radiotrons to keep us just bored enough. All the while, the detritus of what they have us consume clogs up our veins and our seas. The sun scorches our backs, but all we can do is lather up and sit burning under the decaying skyline. Wizards live in trees. A lamb shot a pensioner. Cupcakes give you cancer. It’s all true; I read it in a newspaper.

The modern world is failing and flailing, hunched under the weight of its own expectations and repeatedly slapping itself across the forehead in disgust. We are connected but distant, kept as pets by wax eyed automatons who occupy government while we provide compliant defiance by occupying the bit of concrete outside. Financial spivs treat the world like their own personal Playmobil barnyard, to rearrange and break at will and keeping us looking at the moving cups rather than the ball. Blood is pouring from the cracks in the wall and our own hand is trying to choke us.

Somewhere, quietly, in a backroom next to nowhere, a cold, desperate and desolate figure begins to cough and shake. Could there be life? Could there be someone to pick up the chainsaw of truth, to once again wield the shotgun of fury, to go down into that dark and terrifying cellar ready to ‘carve ourselves a witch’?

Yeah, I guess I’m back…

Groovy.

Hubris aside, since my last post (March? Really? How cruelly you have been neglected my faithful few) I do feel that there has been a lot more to be positive about. Perhaps it’s the Olympic hip-hip-hooraying epidemic that has me all mollycoddled and cutie-pied or maybe it was the tedious perma-drizzle giving way to ten seconds straight of good weather, but I was feeling pretty good and also pretty silent.

However, recently the dark clouds have begun to gather once again. American Senate candidate Todd Akin stuck his finger in the brain pie and pulled out the plum of ‘legitimate rape’. Lucky for us all, George Galloway waded into the rape debate and had a similar revelation that if you’re asleep (or drugged or mute or dead) you’re fair game, which is pleasing to hear, as I’m planning  to release a hoard of death row inmates into his bedroom at 3am to see how their ‘bad sexual etiquette’ impacted on his morning. Happily, as with everything that George Galloway says, does or even imagines, during the act of expressing his opinion, he simultaneously reminds everyone that his opinion can’t be taken seriously. It’s a sort of Mobius band of infinite twatbadgery.

Mitt Romney (est. wealth: $190-250 million. Hmmmmm…) danced into the popular consciousness as the Republican presidential candidate (Just think about that... This man could potentially become the owner of the finger dilly dallying over the nuclear button whilst looking at a picture of Iran on his wall and secretly hoping the coin lands tail side down. I wonder if he’d remain Pro-Life when it does) and apparently has an eye on increased military spending, expanding the death penalty and drilling a big hole in Alaska so he’s got somewhere to stick the straw and ‘drink their milkshake’.

Then there was Julian Assange letting down his golden hair from the Ecuadorian balcony for giddy journalists to scamper up and send everyone into a moral quandary over the fit and proper nature of his Ecuadorian sponsorship (which was reported along the lines of: ‘Ecuador. Why, oh why, oh why…’) and remind everyone that although his work, his website and his stance are not only right but required,  J-Ass the man is at best a bit of a tit and at worst a rapist who deserves to be tried and convicted for that crime.

In amongst it all, Georgie Porgie Osbourne can still be seen doodling pictures of helter-skelters and cobwebs in his exercise books whilst we surf a tidal wave of bullshit, Nick Clegg is still pretty sure he’s relevant and Camerobot2000 continues to channel the spirit of Kipling by meeting triumph and disaster and treating those two imposters just the same. As disaster.

Between Harry Hewitt’s twirling scrotum, continuing council cuts, The Unamazing Spider Man and the resurfacing of the Spice Girls for the taxi ride from hell, it seems there is, just as ever, reasons to be furious.

So with more of a spring in my step than a Brazilian Paralympian on a tightly wound trampoline, I leap back into the world of denouncing, decrying and decomposing for your viewing pleasure.

Beware. Once again, there be beasties here….

Wednesday, 14 March 2012

Isolation approximation

Blog me up, buttercup...

After spending a hard day toiling unflinchingly at the furious, white knuckle coalface of minor administration I'm lucky that when I'm released back into the the real world, I live in a kind of perpetual Cheers bar of bonhomie giddiness.

I can walk freely through every town and city of the globe, backslapped and 'go get em-ed'. I'm cheered and winked (WINKED) at by passers by who are eager to embrace my every move and support me along the yellow brick road of life. Everybody not only knows my name, but wants to take my name out for a candlelit supper and canoodle on a rowboat in springtime, take my name out for an awkward second date that failed to rekindle the magic, before ultimately declaring 'it's complicated' on Facebook and then never calling my name again. Poor my name. Always the bridesmaid.

Sadly, much like my name's dreams of a union that goes past the feeling up stage, my cheery, daisy chain, hippy commune fantasy is bothersomely deluded. Recently, while walking through town I'm feeling less and less like Sam Malone and more and more like there's ghosts everywhere. Dark silhouettes of danger, loaded with the potential to want to fight you, rob you or squawk ugly challenges in your general direction. Perhaps my failed dreamland fantasy of other people simply being extras in my own personal deodorant commercial has turned into bitterness and, in a fit of pique, my brain has created another, darker, fantasy. My head has constructed a mysterious world, populated by shadowy figures waiting to test my pain threshold with their fists.

What could easily be elderly men chatting to their grandchildren on the phone has become beer bottled, broken jawed, sawn off shotgun owners, mumbling the addresses of their latest hits to their mob paymasters. A group of youngsters on their way back from the gym are transposed into unshaven crack heads with riot hangovers, loaded with simmering desires to kick my face off my face, leaving me with a kind of pulpy mass where once my delicious features sat.

I'm not sure where it comes from. Is this fear a result of my disappointment now morphing into silent self harm, where fear and danger become the default setting for perceiving my world?When did it start, this walking around with eyes on the floor, avoiding people's gaze, waiting for a glass bottle to be pushed into my brain cavity by an imagined assailant? Why do we perceive the stranger as a ghost that you try to see right through rather than look at, to fear rather than ignore, to label rather than excuse?

Natural introversion is no bad thing despite the stigma the modern world tries to put on it. We put a lot of stock in extrovert toss bags who clutter up day to day life by appearing to be smarter, more 'on the ball' or even (sweet Jesus, NOOOOOOOO) have more friends than you simply because they squark the loudest in meetings and have the concentration span of a goldfish with Alzheimer's.

People like this are the kind of onion faced, cack eyed weasels who end up doing some kind of marketing knob-hole job, getting paid to swan up to you in the street, steal all the oxygen in the world by spouting pointless rhetoric designed to entice you to buy this tat or other, have 'banter' with you and then disappoint everyone by failing to crash through the window of a moving articulated lorry or duck the hot knives you've just launched towards their eyelids.

Introversion is not the same as shyness. Just because you don't high five everyone you meet is not the same as worrying about social disapproval or stigma until it prevents you from doing as you ple-diddly-ase. But when introversion becomes mutilated by shyness, it becomes suspicious or isolating. Then you can find yourself wandering in a world of fear, trying to see around corners or avoiding eye contact with both cuddly charity shop workers and slavering rapists alike.

I suppose there's a middle ground somewhere. If people didn't have a safety net of avoiding strangers we'd all be swanning up to every wrong'un on the street, trying to make small talk with murderers and excusing people who fart on buses. But I'll wager that no introvert ever got themselves into a scrap on a Saturday night, or a bellowing festival with a klaxon mouthed bint accusing you of 'looking at me'.

The other golden rule is to never take unnecessary risks. Unless you have a handy friend in marketing with you, then everyone will keep the fuck away.

Until next week, sexy.

I'mjustputtingonmytophat....

Tuesday, 28 February 2012

A lasting impression

Blog looks like a lady...

I forget the name of the minstrel who first uttered the immortal, haunting words:

"The very first time that I saw your brown eyes, your lips said hello and I said hi..."

My initial thoughts led me to Confucius, via Victor Hugo... or was it Shakespeare, Petrarch, Barlow?
For those of you looking smug, remembering back to your early 90's heyday, I can tell you that it wasn't even the twin forces of Brian Harvey's East 17 and Gabrielle (who first brought these beloved verses into the hearts of the nation in 1997) who actually wrote this lyrical ballad. In actually it was the great Carl Martin who penned this mastodon of melody.

What? Surely not THAT Carl Martin? Not the Carl Martin who was a member of 90's boy-band pan flashers Shai? Not Carl Martin, formerly of Howard University who formed the group aged 18 with college friends and who went on to submit the single "The Place Where You Belong" for the Beverly Hills Cop III soundtrack which placed at number 42 in the US charts? Yes, it was he, that very same songsmith who accomplished all the feats listed above, who also penned the thoughtful lines that open this blog.

Say what you want about Carl Martin (which I assume is absolutely nothing at all), he knew the value of making the right first impression. He knew this, apparently most acutely, when gurning in the general direction of a presumably startled, hazel eyed floozy who can only blither a startled "hello" before leaping in, breathlessly uttering bold and impassioned rhetoric, such as "Hi".

But Carl 'knew right from the start'. I too know the value of a great first impression, especially when I'm hanging around a wooded area, wearing my cut out cardboard Carl Martin mask over my own face and jumping out on dog walkers from behind a spruce and screaming "HIIIII" into their astonished faces, before making my escape to the chorus of rape alarms and hysterical screaming that usually signal the end of another successful date.

And it's not only woodland predators and chart botherers who can appreciate how important a good first impression can be. The recent Match.com adverts that have been plastered all over my tellybox espouse the benefits of instant attraction to the mating ritual (getting laid) and the importance of seizing upon that first chance meeting to snare your perfect partner. The fact that they do this by puzzlingly featuring a flaccid eyed, ukulele plucking tossbadger ("The girl on the platform smiled...") smugly serenading a stranger like he's a George Formby impersonator making a public information film warning commuters against dangerous stalkers, is beside the point.

Sadly not all first impressions go as smoothly as they do for the train stalker, whos' artless plucking (...I said 'plucking') eventually wins him a date and presumably the lifting of the restraining order. Most right thinking people would instantly assume that a man standing opposite them on a deserted railway platform and singing a song to himself about the colour of your hair is either an escaped convict, a dangerous sex pest or from Coventry.

Most first impressions are made within seconds of meeting, or even hearing the voice of, another person. It's depressing, but a fact that in my new job of sifting through CVs for suitable candidates to fill various teaching roles, the brutal reality is that my left wing champagne socialist ideas fly out the window quicker than a half eaten spam fritter from a bulimics' car.

I've become lost in a fog of requirements and mired in the soil of a lazy desire for an easy life, so I find myself taking less and less time considering each application especially if there is anything quirky or unexplained. Sometimes I find myself zoning out mere seconds into an interview because I already know that the person on the other end of the line didn't fulfil some mysterious wish list of 'needs', 'wants' and 'might possibly consider if I really can't be arseds'.

People have an in built 'kill switch' when it comes to new people that kicks in after the first 10 seconds of seeing someone. On one hand, it protects us from potentially dangerous liaisons with nutbars on train platforms, but it often leaves us perpetually afraid. I suppose this tendency towards making an instant judgement served as part of a long docile survival instinct, the same animal tendency that prevents lonely wildebeest shuffling up to lionesses, holding a tray of mixed canapes and making small talk about the state of the England team. Then again, as it's unlikely in most human encounters that a perfect stranger is sizing you up for a between meal snack and wondering how best to get that difficult but tasty meat from between the more fiddly bones in your spine, this instinct seems at best defunct and at worst totally isolating.

It's a sad part of our nature that so many people fear what they don't know, especially when it leads to more profound restrictions, cutting them off on an island of their own tastes, their own ideologies or perhaps their own company. Before we all start getting out our E17 back catalogue and heading for the nearest wood though, perhaps it is good to remember that privacy is one of the rights that makes us civilised. We don't have to like everybody, but being a miserable fucker is a different kettle of cod.

Unless you're carrying a ukulele, in which case you'd better get with the programme. Get a Carl Martin CD on and let the good times roll.

Night night cupcakes.

Daydreambelieverandahomecomingquee-eee-ee-eeeen

R.I.P Davy Jones.

Tuesday, 7 February 2012

Sleep queasy

Blogbeat, the word is on the street...

If I was to march into a room during a dinner party and declare at the top of my lungs that I was being hunted by a giant seal with the skin of a cactus and the voice of Martin Clunes, I'd be derided as an idiot, hauled into a separate room away from where the cheese course was being served and immediately be shot in the head with a crossbow, so that my pink brains were splattered across the walls like it was the inside of Bernard Matthews shed.

However, in the world of my dreams, my lunatic exclamation would be met with sorry acceptance from the assembled guests who would silently turn away to gaze apathetically out of the window across the salty planes and beyond the orange river running through the forest of guts.

Obviously, many people have dreams. Most of us in fact. Sometimes our dreams remember our 4 little children, sometimes they're interpreted by lengthy bearded hippies, or intellectual cigar chompers, preying on our insecurities. Sometimes our dreams scare us with their truth or simplicity, or because we don't like the thought of being chased by an army of plastic mannequin legs. In fact, most dreams are such a tornado of the personal and comforting, the unsettling and bizarre, that it's a wonder that we are ever able to sleep through them at all.

I've spent quite a lot of my twenties wrestling with the ticklish problem of getting to sleep. If you're lying in bed and start to think about doing it, you can't. If you're trying not to do it like while you're sitting in a church, driving on a motorway or attending a child's birth, nothing could come more easily.

I find that I need a failsafe; some kind of ludicrous drizzle of thought to think on in an attempt to 'trick' my brain into believing it's asleep and leaving my imagination take up the narrative automatically and drive the autopilot of my mind into sleepyville. My current favourite is to imagine I'm taking part in a massive competition to see how long I can stand on my head for. The ludicrous image of hundreds of people in row upon row of arse over titedness of set against the tedium of the endurance contest somehow combines the dreary and the ridiculous effectively enough to switch my mind on standby. It's a bit like imagining you're listening to a Newsnight debate on the colour of peanuts.

I'm not sure that it's a measure of my insomnia growing or a symptom of simply being too bored to sleep that I have to resort to waking dreams before slipping into an otherworldly coma. Perhaps it's a concealed desire to resurrect a part of my brain that becomes more and more underused the older I get - the simple, resuscitating power of imagination.

I'm envious of children who use dolls and action figures to construct elaborate worlds that exist in an imaginative universe. The power struggles of little green army men, facing an evil and tormenting plastic skeleton (won from a grizzly toothed carny in a ball throwing game) all the while controlled by my own omniscient and unflinching hand, were perpetual battles on my blue carpet when I was nipper. This followed an afternoon spent constructing impenetrable fortresses out of bedclothes and scaling the insurmountable mountain summit of my stairs using only tied together dressing gown belts.

The more I disappeared into whatever insane, nonsensical, misogynistic and derivative universe my friends and I had the care to recreate, the Z'ds followed as easily as cows up an abattoir conveyor belt. The more time I spend in my adult life, circumnavigating my own imagination and relying on TV, interweb, computer screens and staring at neighbours through my steamed up binoculars, the less I'm able to suspend the real world and wonder into snooze town.

Perhaps I'm a victim of my own desire to be switched on, alert and 'living in the real world'. A little suspension of disbelief could well be the remedy to induce narcolepsy.

Thank the lord there's still delicious rum to guide me into the abyss. Pirates are never wrong.

Later dudes. xx

IfyoustrikemedownIshallbecomemorepowerfulthanyoucouldpossiblyimagine.