Rich's Wanderful: Underwater Cycling

Bloging from Miami Beach, B.O.A.C,

The United Kingdom, Atlantis, Ho Chi Minh City and Robert Maxwell... what do they all have in common? Currently all of the above are lurking below a considerable amount of precipitation with no hint of an end in sight.

So while the UK version might be the cuddly-wuddly, roll it into a ball and stick a carrot in it, sliding down hilltops, pensioner murdering, chillier than Mr. Frostie's handle, frozen kind; here in HCMC we are still labouring under the literal and figurative cloud of a never ending rainy season.

There's real problems with the rains here, most of which are linked to the ZX Spectrum powered, city electricity structure collapsing like a foppish uncle with the vapours every time the sky 'looks a bit Lancashire'. The other problems are to do with the aftermath, as the immediate flooding of the major city streets prevents you getting anywhere (which, if you're somewhere with a cocktail hour, isn't too bad) and even when the streets do clear, walking on them becomes a process about as pleasant as cleaning your toilet with your bare feet while a cackling Ferne Cotton plucks your eyelashes out with her grimy fingers.

In Saigon's constant mission to always be counter intuitive, rain doesn't clear the streets of filth and grime, rather it brings up the cess and cack and detritus to the surface like blood to a beaming child's ruddy cheeks on a cold day. In this way, the personality of Saigon will always remain intrinsically linked to the stench.

My flatmate recently made a diary of the aroma's around Saigon, which basically boiled down to:

Monday: Toilet, rotting flesh, over ripe fruit, beer, poo

Tuesday: Toilets, rotting flesh, fruit, beer, sick and poo.

Wednesday: Toilets, flesh, fruit, beer, sick, poo and just a hint of lavender.

It's quite a thing to autosave a list of disgusting things to your hard drive so you can reproduce them in your blog (just ask Leslie Grantham) but it is absolutely true that Saigon smells like nothing, nor anywhere else that I've been, read smell biographies about, or had some street grime sent to me from.

If, perchance you disagree and wish to send me some filth from your city or town, then please do so. Perhaps we could have a low budget X - Factor where some piles of shite are paraded as entertainment. We can call it "Britain's Got Talent" ('parp').

Wakemeupbeforeyougogocusimnotplanninongoinsolo.

xxx

Rich's Wanderful: Pho Kit

GOOOOOOOOOOOD MORNING VIET..... oh, sod it.

Through time, the great philosophers (Socrates, Nietzsche, Kyle) have all mused on the life of a man through reasoned consideration of the human experience and lie detector tests. Great literature is constantly preoccupied with the cyclical nature of the human experience. In the mater bothering, eye gouging, orgy of Oedipus Rex, the Sphinx posed the riddle of the three ages of man; In Twelfth Night, Feste the clown muses that 'What's to come is still unsure', and the Very Hungry Caterpillar had to eat his way through 1 red apple, 2 green pairs, 3 purple plums, 4 red strawberries, 5 whole oranges, a cake, a salami, a swiss cheese, ice-cream, cherry pie a whole watermelon and a single leaf before he could realise his full flutterby potential. It's a fable which is either a nuanced rhetoric on the importance of experience to formulation of the psyche, or Kerry Katona's daily 'to do' list.

So it is with these musings in mind that once again my feet have itched like Usain Bolt's slippers and I have relocated the blog to the streets of Ho Chi Minh city, better known as Saigon. Like the US army, various stoned pack-packers and a very successful Vespa sales rep before me, I now find myself pitched up in this often filmed but little visited city in the South of Vietnam.

The tedium and tiredness of a 16 hour journey (highlight = the peanuts) quickly gave way to befuddled anxiety when I reached the Vietnamese boarder control and realised that the local immigration processes were probably sketched on the back of a fag packet and hidden in a safe that everyone was looking for the key to. Scrawny, clueless looking officials in ill fitting olive green shirts stood around attempting to adjust their frowns just enough to convince their superiors that they were taking it all very seriously and not standing around idly while a gazillion new arrivals jostle pointlessly for some indication of what the bloody hell was going on.

In front of me in the queue were two Chinese Monks apparently failing miserably to be allowed to go about their business. The argument which followed regarding the legitimacy of their papers took approximately 14 hours and so many officials that it appeared that they were recruiting, training and dispatching new officers to add to the futile squabble. After a while they were led off to another room, presumably to be frowned at in new and exciting ways, leaving me free to approach the counter, cough up my $50 and be waved instantly through. Money definitely speaks louder than mixed metaphors in this part of the woods.

Once I was able to leave the airport, I was feeling sweatier than Satan's jock strap, so to get into the icy, air conditioned cab was exquisite. The heat is almost terrifying, because it seems to suck all the air out of the room, leaving you with only a kind of moist stew which occasionally allows oxygen to enter your lungs. Sweat beads gather on glasses, on shirts, around your wrist watch and if you wear tight pants, you might as well cut out the middle man and simply boil your gonads in warm marmalade.

In this type of oppression, the last thing you want is to be swapping barely understandable platitudes with a hotel owner in the middle of the back-packer district of Saigon whilst wondering if the ten thousand or so locust-like scooters which swam the city streets are actually participating in a kind of live action Grand Theft Auto where the mission is to attempt to fracture your spine with a wing-mirror.

Still, as a hotelier, Mr. Binh is friendly enough. The only real draw back is his increasingly hostile attempts to sell you whatever shite he was able to pick up off ebay the previous week. Sim cards, chocolate, water, fags, T-shirts, tactical nuclear weapons. He's so excited to have a captive audience of bewildered teachers to flog his wares to he actually leaps from buttock to buttock in his chair with excitement if anyone so much as shows a passing interest. His reaction to a knock back is more disappointment than anger, but don't feel sorry for him. The mark up is at least 50% and the quality is at least -40%. Who said business was difficult? - think of a number, double it, sell it. If you can't do that, you're fired.

So over the next week I'll actually start teaching English to the little darlings of Vietnam, which should provide ample distraction from the fifty cent beers, trying to count money in the millions and blocking up the holes in the walls from the gathering armies of furious looking ants.

More updates to follow - probably in their thousands. In the meantime, remember, this is the country where 'five dollar' can get you some things, but it still can't get you through customs.

Saigoneroaming xx

Return

No Mr. Bond, I expect you to blog...

Blinking, red eyed, white skinned and looking leaner than a butchers dog after a weekend at a swanky health spa, eating hummus sausages and playing mixed doubles with Cheryl Cole and Lassie, I finally emerge from the dark cavern of my blog-exile and launch into the second phase of the life and times of the reservation.

This is indeed the second phase of my project to bring whimsy, foolhardy rhetoric and misleading opinion to the masses. Actually, when I say masses, I'm referring to you, the tens of people who actually take the time out to read this grim nonsense.

You make me very happy and sad in almost equal measures mainly because I worry that to some people I must be at least as entertaining as stalking ex-girlfriends on Facebin, losing to the computer at chess in 9 seconds and looking for ways to avoid the NSFW tag and avoid detection from the morality police (i.e. your boss at work). I feel the weight of responsibility to match the entertainment value in these wholesome pursuits and spend my nights shivering and wailing that I can't live up to the expectations.

Luckily for me, since my last blog, quite a bit of excitement has been taking place in the wacky world. Oh boy, hasn't it been fun? There's plenty to enjoy out there, like 6 month Chilean potholing expeditions, the George Michael driving school, BP vs. the World and the Pope-aid concert tour. Eventually, I fear that the spending cuts imposed by the gay pin up couple (Cleggover and Camoron) may lead to some actual news being deposited on the telly box, and Natasha Kaplinsky will have to switch her robt face to the matronly 'stern face' setting to report on the 3 day week and public sector walk outs. While it's still the silly season, we can keep ugly things like 'facts', 'debate' and 'information' out of the news, and look at Katy Perry's magnificent swirrling ass instead. Mmmm. Twirrly.

I'm guessing that to some people the visit of the Pope to these shores is significantly newsworthy. In fact, so much time and reverence is being dedicated to Benedictators trip, that the Daily Mail hasn't even mentioned another foreigner on these shores driving down house prices. The BBC has even wheeled out a special 'Pope 2010' graphic to accompany their reports.

You know the BBC are getting serious when they enlist the work experience kid with an A-Level in Fonts, to make some curly graphic appear behind the newsreader, but ultimately making News at 10 look like a low budget PowerPoint presentation by a biscuit company salesman on the quality of Bourbon sales in Scunthorpe. Thus is the power of the Pope. Look upon his wonders and despair.

Well, actually I have despaired a little bit. The trip has been largely a mask of mass public mass delivered with all the mediocrity that attending an open air gig starring Carol Vorderman, Susan Boyle and an old man in a hat could possibly provide. All they needed to do was to add Daniel Bedingfield and Sooty to the bill to make it so boring that members of the congregation start melting each others faces with pilgrim candles just for something to do.

There's a typically British feeling to the way the visit has been staged, lacking the pizazz and balls out, dick swinging largess of an American event, or the class, tradition and reverence of religious events in Europe. We always seem to find a way of giving a large scale event a touch of middle management, patting each other on the back for 'staging this scale of event so very bloody well' whilst the whole thing looks like it's taking place on the main stage of a minor peace festival in the Cotswold's, attended by badminton enthusiasts and sponsored by Muller Rice.

However, underneath all of this, the whole even is stalked by the spectre of the systematic cover up of paedophilia in the church, making the pale white plastic staging look all the more desperate. The mire that the Catholic church has become central to in its role covering up the mess it's responsible for resolving, shows how reluctant mass organisations are to confronting and dealing with their own failures. The head of the Church is seen as God's representative so can't exactly resign, however great the pressure becomes. The scandal is one thing, the cover up quite another. It is always in the cover-up that the true evil becomes exposed, as the people who know but do nothing become as culpable as the monsters perpetrating the crime.

Whatever your views on the church in general, the central idea of faith (be good, treat others as yourself, take responsibility, help the weak) are good values to live by in a socially responsible world. If you want to add having a finger wagged at you by a mythical man in the sky to the mix, then who the devil am I to argue the why's and wherefores. I don't care if you think Noel Edmond's is is judging you from the back of a tortoise made of ham or that we all live inside the anus of Anneka Rice, if you live by the principles of being quite nice to people and not stealing my crisps, then as far as I'm concerned, you're A-OK.

Religion, however, is a very different horse to 'faith'. Religion is hierarchy, corporate responsibility and fund raising. Religion is political, personal, furious and moralistic. It decrees war, outlaws contraception, builds monasteries, desecrates monasteries, chases people down the street, forgets to flush the toilet, gets newsprint in the carpet and hides in places you wouldn't expect then jumps out at you giving you quite the fright. Religion causes as many problems as it solves and as such, like dairylea dunkers and The Pussycat Dolls, the Pope isn't necessarily a good idea.

But, he's here now whatever I think about it, so it's time for him to offer support and offer an ear to the victims of hideous crimes committed by servants to his church. If change comes as a result then this Pope could be seen as a great man, who faced up to and conquered a culture of protection and obstruction. I fear though that all that will come to pass is tedious distraction, pretty fonts and a selection of Pope related merchandise intended to bore us into distraction.

So all that's left to say is a big welcome back to the reservation. Follow me. The alternative isn't too good.

Solongandthanksforallthefish xx

Soon to be....

Be not proud...

The spirit of the Reservation lives within the souls of all mankind.
Soon everybody will witness the rebirth of the legend. The four line sentences. The swearing. The insults. The ridiculous metaphors. The use of the word 'bum' without a hint of irony.

Get ready for the level up...

Soon.

So what became of the monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey

Currently the reservation is dillying and, indeed, dallying around in Oxford. No doubt, I'll be seen loading saddlebags with the complete works of Edith Bowman, wearing a neckerchief and pooh-poohing theories as you read this, whilst swinging from side to side on my ancient bicycle as a result of a rather 'topside' sherry.

The reality is that I'm up to my glands in lesson planning, teaching and the like so the blog has had to go into hibernation for now. Please feel free to check back occasionally to re-read some old posts or leave comments.

Put down the razor blades and shotguns. It'll only be for a couple of weeks while I get used to all this mish mash. We'll meet again. Very. Very. Soon.

Toodlepipmylittlemonkeys. xx

Orb chasing and skirt slobbering

Some people are on the pitch, they’re reading a blog...

It's a curious thing, that once every 4 years, I find that it's completely appropriate to become a gurgling neanderthal, shedding millions of years of natural selection in the process. It leaves me scouring round the flat, scuttling after pigeons that land on the windowsill, hoping to lure them inside so I can bash them to death with an IKEA bedside lamp and grill the meat over the toaster. I got LOVE and HATE tattooed onto my eyelids. I started clapping with my elbows. I enjoyed yelling jingoistic slogans in the direction of the magic picture box in the corner of the pub and imploring some of the fittest men in the world to 'work harder' while I recline in my seat and suck warm beer through a straw like an alcoholic stroke victim.

The World Cup has a reputation for turning hoards of right thinking, modern people into flag draped, riot inciting, monotoned, shameless anti-socials or sunshine fearing, TV worshiping, offside rule explaining, entertainment vacuums. This time around though, the emperor is starting to look somewhat exposed around the edges. This World Cup is a little bit rubbish, despite infinite adverts rubbing their crotch and jocularly backslapping us into remembering how much we all really like football. No really... NO REALLY - YOU DO (eat at McDonald's) YOU DO. FOOTBALL. EURRRGH. FOOTBALL!

I’ve taken a short break to write this, after 7 days cultivating the impression of my buttocks into the couch and treating myself to herculean doses of the most soporific matches in history. I'm begining to think it's me vs. the World Cup. If this was a boxing match, they’d have called it off, mainly on account of being bludgeoned to death by rank tedium and the fearful sight of Alan Shearer seemingly aging on screen before my eyes.

As a dedicated football fan, I really look forward to enjoying my favorite sport with people who have a bi-decade, passing interest in it. I love watching everyone coming together and enjoying the games. The World Cup allows people who normally have stupid pointless things, like friends and lives, to stand in the pub with the rest of us, shouting at In-ger-land for doing a rubbish “ball kick thing” or celebrating a goal by shouting “BINGO”. Of course, there will always be a few hardened wretches, glumly forced into grumbling acceptance that TV is suspended for a month and complaining about the Eastenders start times.

This time around I have a sort of sympathy for the naysayers. My ears are hounded by the relentless muffled white noise of the Vuvuzelas (or ZuluAliens as someone at work calls them – you can tell he’s the father of young children) which make the match sound like it’s being beamed to us direct from the inside of Mosses' arse during a biblical plague of wasps. It's a din more irritating than having your temple prised open with a crowbar and teams of glass ants being pushed inside your brain cavity. At least the unique sound of the screeching little Pingu’s tootling away has caught the public imagination, while somewhere in the middle distance several overpaid athletes hoof their orb to and fro, with a lack of enthusiasm that suggests they're just killing time between Thai massages and adultery.

The action to date has been a humourless, grey display of defensive inscrutability, just begging for characters and big game players to get the flyaway pound shop ball under control and reverse the current trend of pinging it over the bar like Johnny Wilkinson and standing, hands on hips, looking heavenward with a ‘why me’ expression all over their sour puss.

Lucky then that there are a couple of wacky tales underpinning the drudgery and wing-backs. The astonishing sight of the overweight, onion headed North Korean goal hanger blubbing during the national anthem was something to savour, until you remembered that his tears were probably the endgame of a knowing acceptance that failure to cruise to glorious victory would mean suddenly going ‘missing’ and being replaced by another gaggle of interchangeable patriots in the next game as a result of the edict from the 'Dear Leader'.

There's the ludicrous story of a bevvy of Dutch beauties being thrown out of Holland's first game for wearing matching micro dresses that showed sponsorship logos from an evil non-FIFA endorsed brand. Only an organisation as myopic and slapstick as FIFA would fail to realise that banning the dresses and kicking them out of the ground would only draw attention to the brand that oh so badly offended them. Sure. There's literally no way pictures of dutch hotties wearing tiny orange dresses would ever get on TV or in the papers. Behold; Sepp Blatter, the thinking man's idiot.

The hilarity seemed to not only double, but square, when it turned out that monotone ITV summariser Robbie Earle was responsible for the ladies getting into the ground in the first place, leading to him losing his job, his dignity and becoming the unwitting subject of 'Well I would have done the same..' conversations up and down the country between gangs of slobbering teens and overweight, bear knuckled gruntholes.

The opening ceremony promised myriad delights, with a huge concert held in a cavernous corporate rock venue in a South African township called Myideaohell. It was quite a sight to see Shakipsdon'tlie, The Black EyePods and other paid up members of popville trying to whip up some atmosphere. The organisers helped by dumping a load of beach balls on the bedazzled onlookers and first rate strategic flag distribution. The camera's occasional, ill-judged, close ups of the crowd showed them looking like they’ve been bussed in from the Eurovision Song contest to wear sparkly costumes and tick the appropriate boxes of enthusiasm and retain starry eyed rapture, making whole thing resemble a Loony Tunes re-imagining of the Nuremberg rally.

But, for those of us who know, this is everything we've been waiting for. Only a certain type can appreciate the warm, sunny feeling of waking up each day knowing that there's going to be 3 full matches. Not only that, but they're on the telly. Then, the world seems to open it's full glory to us; no matter that it's BBQ weather outside, no matter that the kids want to be taken for a bike ride, or you need to eat, or that you've failed to move for 12 hours and the DVT is threatening to move towards your spine if you untie the bit of string holding it in your calf. For just a short time, every four years, the world comes together. And watches a goalless draw between countries you've never been to. Ah. Sweet mysteries of life.

BabywhenyoucallmeyoucancallmeAl... xx

No place like homeless

28 Blogs Later...



It's a bi-product of my nomadic lifestyle over the last couple of years, that I seem to be in a constant state of unpacked half and half. The things that I own, the books that I've read, the CDs I've borrowed and never returned (and put in box labelled "Mwahhhahhahhhaaa, it's MINE now") they all live in stasis. Little nuggets of my personality packed away in the attics of friends and family waiting to eventually be reanimated into my world. It feels like I'm trapped in a cautionary satire of my own life, written by a disturbed John Lennon obsessive, riffing on the idea of removing all my possessions and warbling a tedious, patronising song about it.

The stinging and painful sensation of homelessness comes into focus during more depressed moments, like when I stub a toenail, drop a plate or stand, weeping, in front of a mirror. Being without a base causes a worrisome split within me and gives me a feeling of something being out of joint. Although I've had some great times renting in flat shares, it's inevitable to be haunted by an impotent feeling of not being able to influence your surroundings and the acceptance that you must at all times be seen to be grateful and get your bloody feet off the sofa.

I've never actually owned my own house, mainly on account of the fact that I don't possess a magic duck that shits golden eggs, so find myself somewhere short of the 47 billion lifetimes I would need to be working for in order to afford a deposit. Instead, I've been wandering from short term lease to short term lease and sharing with live in landlords. Although I've never been anything other than welcome (in no small part on account of the pennies coughed up monthly) there will always be a sense of being the second rooster in the hen house. Especially when I was discovered burying turds and crowing outside the back door at six in the morning.

Perhaps my dislocation from my location is caused by the split from my possessions as much as the lack of the traditional notion of a home. This is a personal Hell, not because I live in a manner that is even approaching "mildly inconvenient", but because I am absent from my heaven. Everything I own is absent from me, locked away in storage and bundled into boxes. It's a continuously weird situation to be so transient and it's a situation that makes me wonder constantly about what my future holds.

When you lose something important; your wallet, an old letter, the key to a secret basement dungeon, the frustration is driven by the function or emotional significance of the item and how desperate you are to use it. Eventually it dissipates and you give up searching, so the anger, the looking down the children's throats, the threats to perform an emergency c section on the kitten, they give way to a constant migrane of irritation. This feels like a yearning, caused by the knowledge that it's out there. Somewhere. Mocking you. Entering your dreams and whispering quietly; "I'm here... why can't you find me....? I'm so aloneeeeeeeeee..... BURN THINGS"

All the things I've owned in the past and at some point given away, outgrown or sold for crack, they're all out there, somewhere. My history is in those artifacts. My old sofa is being guffed on by a flatulent, bum picking sloth in somebody else's front room. My old washing machine is being cacked on by a seagull on a rancid landfill. My first toothbrush was probably pushed inside a broken oil pipe in a dismally futile 'Top Kill' exercise.

Thinking about these things can lead to either a sad nostalgia, where your missing object is romanced, mourned or even personified, which is exactly what I was telling my hairbrush this morning. I know it's silly to attach painful emotions to mere items, but it's hard not to want to pin your experiences to things that remind you of certain times in your life. It has to be better to think of the objects you shed as discarding a past, rooting you in inactivity. I'm glad I can move on and create a vacuum which is ready to be filled with experiences rather than commodities.

I do miss a home and a solid base. It makes life more comforting to know you can always return to your own sanctuary, but for now, life is constantly about emptying baggage and doing as much as I can to refill it. Perhaps next time, I'll pitch up somewhere I'll be able to stay.

At least my old toothbrush is doing its bit to stop the apocalypse. Not a surprise really. It did have Mighty Mouse on it and there ain't nothing he can't do. Apart from blocking pipes vomiting oil into the sea, it appears, but then I might have missed that episode.



Callmeonthelinecallmecallmecallmeanytimecallme xx

Seasons Weepings

The Blogfather...

You'll be pleased to know I had a charming weekend, spending most of it in my deckchair overlooking Reservation Towers, with a knotted hankie on my forehead and wearing a string vest covered in vinegar stains from pickled eggs consumed over 12 hours sat in persistent drizzle.

It got a bit alarming when two care workers were dispatched by the council to smile at me cautiously and ask “If I was ok” in patronisingly cheery tones, before I shooed them from my roof terrace with a cricket bat. I was merely enjoying the freezing weather as only a patriotic Hercules and borderline alcoholic can.

I’ve always considered June to be the start of summer and thoughts turn to walking through the gardens of stately homes while unshaven, flat capped grounds keepers wielding multi-barrelled shotguns, shout unintelligible threats about walking on the paths and not picking the Hydrangeas. Images flash across my mind of never ending bike rides down steep country hills, staying out past nine o’clock and the taste of barbecued meats followed by the sound of uncontrollable retching and the satisfying ‘plop’ as hunks of undercooked sausage repatriate themselves from gullet to toilet bowl like a ten year old hitting a belly flop from the high diving board.

In this country we have a shared understanding and disappointment regarding the seasons which is often discussed nervously by people stuck in awkward social situations. Who among us hasn’t passed the time during, say, a chance meeting at the water cooler, the gathering round a fatal accident or the aftermath of a mugging, by politely discussing Mother Nature’s unwillingness to provide Britain's with slightly less hail?

People often speculate as to why the Brits talk so much about the weather, but it’s not that surprising because it’s always on the change, morphing from one partially recognisable state to another, before you’ve even had chance to check if you remembered your brolly.

Helpfully, people from previous generations often remind us (normally in the manner of wise sages issuing Caesar a grim warning to watch out for the Ides. Nothing more dangerous than an Ide. More dangerous than a Lion with a broken bottle... Sorry, I digress) about weather they remember from their youth and how bloody brilliant it was. Yes. That’s right. Even historical weather gets a good going over. Well, great. Let’s all get on board the fun bus and have a good old chat about historical weather. Parp, Parp.

To hear it told, this was a golden age, when summers lasted exactly the 6 weeks of the school holidays and were so hot, the oven was turned on to cool the house down, you could fry eggs on your nipples and lambs spontaneously combusted in the fields before being scooped up from the ground into pita bread and scoffed on the beachfront. Winters, in turn, were semi-arctic with great drifts of snow blocking in pensioners and marauding Yetis were hunted in the hills by SAS marksmen.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that indulging in imagined wonderment at historical weather might possibly be a cathartic exercise to purge us of our jealousy of the really nice stuff the rest of Europe seems to enjoy. Either that, or the frame of reference has simply changed. A beautiful summer forty years ago probably involved a trip to Margate, a dip in the brine, then back behind the windbreak before your eyes turn blue. Nowadays a good summer is judged by a previous Majorcan getaway, where it was so hot your entire body evaporated, leaving only a thin mist and the smell of BO and Ambre Solaire where you once stood.

I don’t put much stock by these rememberings of extreme conditions because it’s amazing how selective the brain hole can be. I can remember as many rainy days as sunny when I was a kid and frankly it didn’t bother me too much. It just meant a day kicking lumps out of pixelated Spectrum footballers on Kick Off 2 rather than playing “knock and run” or being bullied at the local park. The myth of summer never amounts to much more than shop windows displaying skin tight hot pants instead of woolly-pully’s, advertising agencies finding legitimate reasons to reduce their adverts to semi-pornographic levels by stripping the female models down to thong bikinis and people finding increasingly grim excuses to hang out the back of the pub with the fag ends, dog turds and frenetic kids, rather than huddled round a storage heater praying for the lock in at the Onion and Weasel.

This year there does seem to be an unhealthy number of tight shorted, floppy fringed morons around, looking like gay lumberjacks engaging in a battle as to who can look the most mentally incompetent whilst at the same time maintaining a galactic level of smug self-satisfaction that would make Fearne Cotton blush (as an aside, you know what they say; you can’t spell “Fearne” without FEAR. You also can’t spell “Cotton” without wanting to stop writing “Cotton” and instead go round to her house and push her face into an industrial belt sander, but that’s for another time...). It’s still raining, it’s still windy, but the sunglasses remain in place and I have to restrain myself from hurling concrete blocks from my window and watching these preening foreskins dodge them like little Asos froggers.

I think that, as a nation, we need to break free of the tyranny of an imagined summer that never happens and be bloody thankful for the nice days that we do get. Drizzle adds nice depth to a beautiful view, so it shouldn’t stop us doing what we want anyway. It doesn’t matter. In 50 years we’ll all be underwater anyway and all that will be left to moan about will be who gets the last lilo.

LoveisthedrugandIneedtoscoreooohohohcan’tyouseeloveisthedrugforme xx

Dropping your guts... LIVE

The Curious Case of Benjamin Blog...

After this week's shopping taking me down to my last and final groat (perhaps I should have only had one bottle of rum and put back the toothpaste) I was delighted to see my wealthy uncle, who popped in for tea and scones.

SavagereservationsforClaridgesatsix lent me a tenner to pay off the gambling nuns that live in the flat above (who threaten to give me a good shoeing unless I pay up), then the both of us spent the afternoon laughing at beggars, stuffing shrimp cocktails into our slobbering faceholes and taking a jaunt to Paris to hurl pennies from on top of the Eiffel Tower, of which the security guard managed to turn a blind eye. Mainly on account of the fact that he was looking up at the time.

Following this extravagance, I was a bit bewildered to be sitting in front of The Million Pound Drop (C4) which started on Monday, a live game show which aims to give away a million brothel tokens to contestants who can answer 8 questions correctly. The contestants bet their million pound jackpot across one, or more, of 4 possible answers. If their chosen answer(s) prove to be wrong, the money drops out of sight and away forever, leaving the contestants regretful and sobbing like they've just sent their child to boarding school.

First off, never have I seen so much cash up for grabs in such a cheap way. It appears that the set was built from the left overs from the Woolies clear out by GCSE art students the Sunday morning after buying fake IDs to get into the local boozer. It's not helped that it goes on. And on. And on. Until, by the time the credits roll, you actually feel liberated, like you're coming out of a deep coma and your senses are returning to you for the first time in decades.

The format plays out the interminably lengthy conflict between tedium and a niggling desire to prove yourself cleverer than the gurning contestants, keeping you interested, bored, irritated and ambivalent all at the same time. This odd selection of competing emotions is probably designed to stop you thinking too much about the title and conjuring with mental images of the morning after Godzilla and Mothra took a constipated King Kong out for a particularly spicy curry.

The contestants appear to have been handpicked from a random sample of Hollyoaks extras and the criminally insane, ranging from grinning, peppy little yappers trying to convey personality through the sheen of terror or wide eyed, talking bookends who look like they received council assistance to put their trousers on. I was amazed by their ability to be irritating and yet forgotten, almost while they're still playing the game.

And so to the host. Davina. Her chummy everywoman shtick creates a vortex of unlikability. She possesses a unique kind of reverse Midas touch when it comes to personality, in that everything she touches (says or secretly thinks) turns to insincere. She tries so very hard to come across as a next door gal, a tomboy mukka, winking (I said winking) into the camera and pulling that face she makes when she doesn't like something (you know the one. It's a kind of lip curl of faux disgust and confusion that is supposed to make us think she 'doesn't take herself too seriously' but makes her come across as a patronising old sow, who might be having a stroke).

The harder she works on her breezy charm the more, I fancy, she is masking the fact that she's an overacting pantomime dame, irritating people's arses off and telling them she 'loves them' a good twelve minutes after she met them...
"Here's Carol and Mike from Redditch"
"Hi Davina.."
"Wow, I love you... the way you're, like, so cool about it... I luuuvvv' you guys, you're great"
Oh sod off Davina. You're about as warm and fuzzy as myxomatosis.

Her gracious gift of love extends until the time it takes for these people's dreams to fall down an unconvincing plastic slide like a huge Ker-plunk of destiny, then it's back to the green room to call her fake mum and tell her about some hair dye.

With the likes of Lauren Laverne, Kirsty Wark and Gabby Logan around, I can't understand how her style of anti-entertainment still gets on the box. Especially as, when she's not presenting and on shows like Never Mind the Buzzcocks, she comes across as pretty likable. I get the distinct impression that the only million pound drop going on is the one into her bank account on Monday after the show. Either that, or that's my uncle at the top of the Eiffel Tower making paper aeroplanes from the foldin' money.

TheyplaysofineIthinkyou'llagree. xx

Celebrity Fuckwit Shock Soup

Fear and Blogging in Las Vegas


I'm not a nosy person in my heart, but boredom and the proximity of my neighbours has made me enthusiastic to keep up a healthy level of community engagement recently. I restrict myself to normal levels of interest. I can tell you though, it can be quite hard to resist taking it to that slightly creepy next level. You secretly want to start peeping into people's windows, keeping detailed notes on every one of their comings and goings; when they visit the lavatory, their favorite programmes, how much they mention me, try to find out why they ignore me. Why don't they see me..? Why wont they listen...? I told them I'd do it... the voices.... So as you can tell, I keep it pretty friendly.

Nowadays, idle curtain twitching tittle tattle is apparently the news. On Sunday the eighties revival gathered further pace, as Fergie was back, making herself look like a massive tool after being caught in a sting, trying to sell off her ex-husband's brain cavity as real estate space (or something). Her dippy naivety, although not hugely newsworthy over a weekend which saw a tragic Indian plane crash and a fatal coach accident, did at least give me a warm, fuzzy feeling of nostalgia at seeing her back on form, making a huge tit out of herself.

For ages, the news has been encouraging us to look over the fence into the celebrity dirtbox and glare at the foibles of these porridge brains with hand clapping glee. Watching Fergie, Lord Treismen and Ronan 'the pest' Keating, all try to wriggle out of it is like watching someone recover from a huge hangover the morning after a dinner party where they got hideously drunk, made rude comments about the pigs in blankets and headbutted the host before squatting over the table and curling a juicy log into the coq-au-vin.

This nasty habit the tabloids have consists of getting bored with real reporting, tying a Dictaphone to a fat titted wench or passing themselves off as a Sheik, waving boobs or cash under a non-specific celebrity, then spending the next six weeks perving over the fallout and moralising on our behalf. All this plays out endlessly while we sit dumbstruck and unblinking like an old man catching the ten minute freeview by accident while flicking through the channels looking for the snooker.

As a populace are we really passing moral judgement on stupid people caught in entrapment-o-ramas? We seem to really be just bedazzled by suddenly being faced with decisions on how to react best to the life of people we previously gave only fleeting attention. Are we tittering, or are we pontificating on what we would have done with our friends then secretly knowing what we REALLY would have done and thanking the Lord it wasn't us?

I'm not going to even bother passing judgement on the tabloid sting tactics. I'm not even judging the failure of the celebrity rats to recognise they had landed on the cheese or to hear the clunk clunk clunk of the marble heading down the stairs before it was too late and the little man was being pinged off the diving board and into their faces with a giant telescopic lens. The notional service of the news being a secondary medium to report to the public a sequence of important events that have already taken place has long since died, to be replaced with an unending episode of Trigger Happy TV that takes itself about a million times more seriously and the pranks organised by men even uglier, fatter (but probably more funny) than Dom Jolly.

Instead, one can only marvel at the frequency, ease and dexterity of the whole system. There are seemingly endless skeletons in closets who crave swimming pool funds, willing to cash in on their exploitation of the only celebrity they will ever meet. There is also a sickly and less comfortable element to how some of the stories are played out and how we are encouraged to view the celebs after the sting. Brad Pitt remains a lovable rogue following his affair with Angelina Jolie, whilst England's Brave John Terry is hauled into the tabloid kangaroo court to be branded a trollop and hit round the head with a collective red top 'harrumph' of indignation. Cheryl Cole is the wronged woman, standing, doe eyed beside her man (until he finally located enough straws to break her back, in the form of further short sighted text wanking arrangements), yet Victoria Beckham remains about as popular as a turd in a souffle.

There's no point searching for indignation to attack readers attracted to scandal mongers who spend their nights cackling in the dark and plotting who to take down next, because the society makes the system, makes the society. We're all in some part complicit in this, making us all responsible. I especially hope that Fergie takes that comment seriously and is inclined to divvy up my share of the loot. I'd even watch an episode of Budgie the Helicopter for that. As long as I didn't have to look at her face. Ever. Again.

Cleopatracominatcha xxx

Festivalentine

An American Blog in London...


As the entrails of winter finally seem to be losing the battle to keep us in a semi permanent state of drizzle, visions of dipping toes into ponds, running hand in hand through the park, building a daisy chain and enticing skin cancer run through my thoughts.

Outdoor pursuits of all manner come to mind and I can literally taste the covering of sweat on my upper lip in anticipation of the heady days of summer, involving such activities as looking out of a shadowed office’s window at frolicking children playing outside like new born lambs and returning, weeping to routine work based tasks like spreadsheet corruption, embezzlement and burying corpses in a landfill site.

There’s always so much to look forward too when the days get longer and I’m hoping for a bumper summer. For the worker there’s the prospect of coming home in daylight, for the sportsman there’s jogging in the park and the World Cup on the telly, for the film fan, blocks will be fully busted at the local Megaplex and for the alcoholic tramp there’s a summer sniffing round pub car parks for the dregs at the bottom of Magner’s bottles. With a bit of luck, there’ll even be a dead wasp inside... Mmm, protein.

It’s also in about May that I start to eye up the summer festival schedule, dribbling lust spittle over the lineups, checking prices and having a squeeze of my lower back to check which of my kidney’s is ripe enough to sell so I can afford a day ticket. The mailing lists all bark at you unexpectedly like Lassie letting you know there’s a boy trapped down the well, to let you know that this year Jay Z is playing on the rec ground round the back of Morrison’s, or the latest kitsch revival act from the 80’s (Del Amitri? Big Fun? Chaka Demus and Pliers?) are literally aching for you to sing along in a field whilst off your box on a mixture of cider, pot noodle and heroin flavoured lip gloss.

Aside from the main ones, there’s little festivals popping up all over the place and there’s not much to choose between them all. The seasoned genericoholic can immediately see through each festival’s attempt to present themselves as a flower sniffing hippie love in, with names like “Petal Floppyhat Kooka Mania”, “Nostalgianthaystacks” or “Groin Swirl”. No matter how hard they try to inspire whimsy, it’s all blown apart once you try to order your tickets and find the Krypton-Factor like hoops you need to train your dogbox brain to leap through. Demanding £750, a cheek swab and an imprint of your arse in a bit of concrete for a weekend camping ticket is rationalised by the curious allure of sleeping rough, not brushing your teeth and consuming falafel butties twice a day at the special festival price of £9.50 a pop.

The joys of the summer festival are multiple. For some it’s the camaraderie of the camp fire at the end of a long day’s moshing. For some it’s leaving the group and returning late at night to discuss the ‘amaaaaaaaazzzzzziiinngg’ world music tent, featuring bands called something like “Anal Spectrum” or “Peruvian Corn Lighthouse”, your enjoyment of which was in no way influenced by 48% cider and the giant pipe being passed around by a bloke in dungarees called Flute. Other’s like to chase the hit monsters, barging themselves to the front for all the big name acts, trying to look meaningfully into Bono’s eyes and wishing they could get close enough to really test that court injunction. For my part, every time I’ve been to a festival it’s been about avoiding trench foot, locating the bar and bouncing semi-rhythmically until my head feels numb.

I really enjoy the camaraderie of a solid weekender. It’s across between a prison break, an orienteering holiday and a really weird dream. It’s a mix of making friends immediately with people you’ve never met, sneaking rum past security men with foreheads larger than the main stage and falling asleep standing up despite the “Acid-funkinghellthatsloudotronical Bloodlung Remix” of the theme from Emmerdale blaring into your earcups from skyscraper sized speakers four feet from your face. You’d probably find a more relaxing break spending four days in an Afghan desert pothole while a bearded 1890’s circus strongman hammers foot long nails into your temples whilst bellowing the word “SOUND” continuously into your face.

In spite of the cost and the camping, the rain and the rancid, these complaints are still just woods obscuring trees. I absolutely bloody love a festival. In fact, right now I’m turning to the back of the Review section of the Observer (confirming my official position as a middle class, left leaning, humus muncher) to see where Morrissey's going to be, if I can catch Richard Hawley and find out if this is the year that Yaz makes her main stage return, surely ushering in a new era in popular culture. We all know pop wears cycling shorts, don’t try to fight it.

Overtheteethandroundthegumslookoutstomachhereitcomes xxx

Shock result: Greens take power (by mixing yellow and blue)

Oh blog. Oh Jesus Christ....

Here I was, happily tippy tappying away on my keyboard about the hot topics of the day. Hotter topics than the surface of the sun covered in Regge Regge sauce and served on a bed of razor blades. Hotter than Hansel. Hotter than a Chinese burn from Ian McBurningham who lives in a volcano and has onions for eyes. But, the cold, sour cream of breaking news was poured onto my lust for blog, and I stopped dead. Not literally, but it was the kind of news that makes me think that might have been the better option. News that had me weeping salty tears onto my keyboard and singeing my fingers with the electrical sparkles that followed.

Finally, after what seemed like the entire length of Avatar, Gordon Browneyesburninglikefire accepted the inevitable and disappeared into the middle distance, squinting into the sun and checking his P45 for potential rebates. After the year he's had, I wouldn't be surprised if when he finally got out of the resignation press conference, he wasn't body popping round the room, necking all the Creme De Menthe he could nick from the Cabinet office and laughing like a madman howling at the moon now that he's finally free of it all. Free of the daily bitterness, the daily recriminations, the Daily Mail.

So here I stand, staring into the abyss of today, after the clear skied, starry eyed possibility of a week ago. Ah, a week ago. A simpler time. The time when Nick was pure, when he was strong, when he was beautiful. It was a time where we could stare meaningfully at the way the studio lights flicked wistfully off his golden flowing hair, as he toyed playfully with the evil robot Camer-tron and the befuddled dough faced Brown. He was hip, he was pop, he was a "mania".

Such is life. Much like the Spice Girls found overnight success that promised a new era of dominance and 'Girl Power', only for the ginger one who buggered off for a glittering and 100% successful solo career, so too, Nickle-ohdear-on found himself abandoned by his own electorate who decided to double check the odds in the Racing Post and finding "Devil you know" to be a solid 2/7 bet.

On this point I must become serious - it is not a sin to vote lib dem. There. I said it. I'll say it again... oh sod it, just read that bit again, I can't be bothered to type it. OK, so it appears that by voting Lib Dem, it prevented Labour gaining enough seats to keep The Lord of the Ringpiece out of Downing Street. However, I say this to you - voting is about progression, it's about pinning your colours to the mast of the professionals who best represent you. It is not about keeping people out. It's not about popularity. It's not some sort of primeval, flag waving tribalism favored by fictional ogres, four year olds or Middle Ages knights with obscure upper crust names like Bedevere, Ernst or David.

I support the Lib Dems when I'm feeling politically motivated, mainly because I feel that they best represent my ideas on progression, understanding and fairness and not because they themselves should become part of the political tradition in this country of hurling ever so witty soundbites across a room, pandering to the will of wealthy newspaper magnates or weeping over the crumbs of a creaking economy. I'd like to be represented by a member of parliament who is interested in representing their constituency and not using tax money as a kind of delicious slush fund to keep his staff in Magnums and choc ices throughout the World Cup. This is why I find myself at odds with this decision to endorse the Blue Side of the Moon.

I am no fool, and I understand that before governing, a political party may need to find its substance to support its ideas. I really believed though that the tide was turning and that the yellow brigade could find themselves in opposition after the election, where they could build on their common sense policies and begin to shape the will of the incumbant government. My realisitic best(ish) case scenario, I saw the Tory's held to account by a new, aggressive, Liberal party built on the solid economic policy supplied by the ever respected Vince Cable and carried off by the odds defying Mr Clegg. I honestly couldn't see the Labour party surviving the election with half their seats.

Now I fear that the Lib Dems have hamstrung their future endeavors by endorsing a coalition that they will claim will ensure their agenda is considered slightly more enthusiastically than something that Oliver Letwin discovered hanging from William Hagues nose. Neither the voters who despise the Tory's, nor the floating, left leaning voters will take much notice of these claims. It's funny, but what with Labour losing the power to govern, the Tory's failing to secure the majority that every poll for the last 1000 years had predicted they would and the Lib Dems selling their soul to the street bullies so they don't get a kicking after school, this is perhaps the only election in history where everybody lost.

So now it's begun, but where will it end? We've never seen anything like this before. Lets hope they've got the foggiest about what they're going to do. I for one, can't wait to be proved wrong. First time for everything....

Ifyoudontlookitmightnotbetrue xx

Matron simply loves a well hung Parliament

All the President’s blogs....

When I awake, crusty eyed, breath reeking like 3 day old road kill that’s been kept in the greenhouse, eyes moving independently of each other like a goggle eyed lizard, what I crave is routine, order and clarity. In the morning I lack the apparatus to cope with surprises, uncertainty and the last of the milk smelling a bit ripe. Once I get up, after a quick rum and coke, I’m usually going to spend the next half an hour or so trying to resurrect the sensation in the left side of my face by weakly prodding it with my finger and pouring half of Columbia’s export quota of coffee into my gullet at Norris McWhirter bothering speed.

This morning I woke seeking comfort and assurances from my telly box that we had a clear winner, with a mandate, a will and a giant shit-eating grin on his mush, ready to get on with driving this country into the ground. Oh. Wait... What’s all these graphs? What’s going on? Why’s HE still in there???? Nothing like clarity to start the day.

The news outlets political correspondents probably spent the night leaping from buttock to buttock in moist excitement at the prospect of the election coverage rumbling on during the melee of a hung Parliament and the amusing prospect of covering Brown as he takes up a squat in Downing Street. However, this excitement began to recede in the cold light of day as everyone conceded that they hadn’t the faintest idea what was going on, who was in charge and what the bloody hell we were going to do about it. Journalist and commentator alike were rounded up like cattle and shovelled in front of the cameras to give us incisive reporting, such as “the prevailing mood is confusion”. Mostly this confusion seemed to be happening between the reporters themselves, whilst the population at large produced a collective shrug of the shoulders (probably large enough to be seen from space) got off their arses and went to work.

So with parliament hanging like a piñata waiting for a college student with bleary vision to take a ruddy great stick to it, I frankly have had just about enough of it all. While Gord spends the morning checking his lease at number 10 to see if he can get planning permission to bring a hoard of gypsy caravans onto Downing Street to blockade himself in, leaving Cameron outside the gates trying to rouse a posse and holding up placards reading “Not In My Back Yard”, the rest of us wonder what the bloody point of it all was.

The media seemed to be telling us we were surplus to the requirements of the political process after the expenses scandal by dabbling in self-fulfilling prophecy reporting, running stories telling us that nobody was interested in voting, leading to people to watch these reports, and tell each other they weren’t interested in voting. Despite this, and perhaps helped by the grandstanding, Clegg-over, love in of the live debates people turned out in veritable droves to either see off old misery guts or keep out Eaton-y Blair, only to be locked out of the polling stations or find their wasn’t enough ballot papers to begin with. To be fair to them, I hear that the current head of the Electoral Commission was only doing this job because incompetence forced them out of their previous position as Head of Ad-hoc Refreshment at the Carlsberg factory, but this is only a rumour.

So, a nation told that ‘their vote counts’ and implored to ‘engage’ find that it’s pointless and worthless turning up at all. Good work all round then. Of course, it seems the Lib Dem voters didn’t bother anyway, finding it all a bit tough going when it came to the crunch and having to lie under a duvet and hoping it all went away. Either that or their liberal nature meant that they let more bombastic Tory’s jump the queue, only to find that once inside they locked the door behind them and blew raspberries through the window.

So all in all, it’s an unmitigated success to rank right up there with the Millennium Tent-o-tron, Iraq-tung Baby and Gordon Brown’s entire life. We have no leader, no ruling party, no new opposition, no competence, no engagement and no no, no no no no, no no no no, no no, there’s no limit. I miss it already. Can’t wait for the next one.

Gotapictureofyoubesidemeyourlipstickmarkstillonmycoffeecup xx

I is proper gonna vote and 'dat

The Blog of the Titans...

I’ve been an interested observer of this election and especially the tactics involved to woo us in the post-collapse, post-expenses era, as usually elections are fought on the “bottom line” battleground: Who can save us the most cash as family, as a business person, as a claimant, as a student? Who can provide jobs and cut taxes? Who can avoid looking like a total plum for long enough for us to actually get up off our fat surpluses and but a shaky X in a box with a big felt pen?

In this election a number of factors has meant that, rather than a fiscal campaign (and as much as Gordon Brown would hate to admit it) this has been an ideological campaign waged on concepts rather than strategy, on ideas rather than policy. This seems a perverse paradox at a time when our financial security is at its most vulnerable, but it does make some sense when you look deeper. The opposition parties have lobbied on the “change” vote and the focus of the leaders debates have been for the Conservatives and the Lib Dems to wage war over their credentials as the true reform party.

How is it, that in the midst of a recession, this election ends up being remembered as the campaign where Labour’s focus on fiscal security could be so easily undermined by the ideological reform focused strategy of the Lib Dems and the Tory's?

1. Obama’s successful Presidential campaign pointed the way for change agendas to transform into votes, especially when pitted against embattled incumbent parties with aging, futile leadership. British politicians are all snuggling up in their cosy beds with visions of mass global support rallies and Nobel Peace Prizes landing on their doorstep just because they represent an ideological opposite to an insane southern oil baron wielding a pointy stick in the general direction of the middle east and make some pretty cool posters.
2. The 13 year ruling party is running out of ideas faster than... errr.... a thing that runs out of ideas.
3. The lack of vote winning financial bumper giveaway’s. Traditionally we get pre-election ‘good timey’ budgets, electioneering bumfights over who can dish up the most tax cuts and moon tinted ‘boom’ promises. In this election, promises like that simply don’t make sense. In the wake of the collapse of the banking system, voters are more likely to view such promises as either fanciful whimsy or downright lies. Better not to mention it at all and distract everyone with fascinating words like ‘change’ and calling each other by their first name.
4. The expenses scandal means that the idea of politicians claiming to be the ones who will look after you financially seems almost sarcastic. The electorate don’t buy them telling us that they are the party to steady the ship, when the ship is itself awash with more dirty money and kickbacks than a prohibition era Chicago gin joint.
5. Gordon Brown = fiscal security = tax inspector dull = Labour. The opposition parties are so keen to put as much distance between themselves and Labour they’re practically falling over themselves to avoid Storming Gordon’s dour realism and trying to throw up jazz hands to distract us from the dizzying craphole we’re really in.
6. Rupert Murdoch is directing the entire election strategy of one of the main parties, ensuring that they keep hush about inevitable cuts and make preparations for all party donations to be siphoned off into the special Volcano Lair project.

All of this spells trouble for Labour, who at first tried to present themselves as a war cabinet: perhaps not the most glamorous option, but the safe one for the recovery. Then they tried “Agreeing with Nick” in a sorry attempt to woo Lib Dem tactical voters from behind the bushes by waving a Curly Whirly and blowing kisses. Finally they reverted to an original strategy of insulting their bigoted lifelong voters and amusing themselves by becoming a laughing stock, probably as preparation for the inevitable standing-down of Gordon Brown tomorrow and 10 years of unelectable infighting.

So with none of the parties focusing too heavily on the, not exactly joyous, spectre of the inevitable cuts each is looking to present themselves as ideological saviours, either as the party of “Fairness”, the party of “Change” or the party “for one” depending on their chances of success. One thing is sure, even though they’re trying not to talk about it, there’s a hell of a bill been left by the last lot. If I were them, I’d get out quick while everyone else is in the toilet.

As for today, whatever you do, make sure you vote. Especially if you want to be able to criticise, satirise, smirk at, throw eggs and kick your foot through the telly whenever one of their hideous smirking visages is vomited onto the screen, because if you don’t, the only goon to hate is yourself.

Seeyouontheothersideray. xx

Car-tharsis

The Blog that Shakes the Barley....

I've never exactly been the world's most confident driver. To say that I was a bit fearful to get behind the wheel of a car is an understatement to rank alongside Captain Birdseye's prosecution claiming the gaggle of underage boys locked inside the hull of his ship might look a bit fishy. It took me so long to finally take and pass my test that, while my peers would wind down the window of their brand new Audi Skirtlifter9000 to wink in a semi-threatening manner at passing honeys, I was relegated to waiting in the bus queue with wheezing grannies, shadow-eyed chavs and the criminally insane.

So leaving my flat to make the short yet terrifying journey into work, normally provides few surprises, just another 30 minutes in my never ending gigglesome highlight reel of almost-stalls, white knuckle gripping of the steering wheel and Chris Evans. I've come to terms with the fact that my daily foray into traffic raises my heart rate to rodent levels and as such probably counts as a workout and is perhaps the only thing keeping me out of the warm, juicy clutches of heart disease.

Today though was a special day. It seemed as though I had woken up on the day of the bi-annual festival that is "Optional Indicator" day, celebrated particularly vigorously on the outskirts of Coventry. I swear, it was like the frigging circus out there: car doors opening into heavy oncoming traffic, buses pulling into the middle of duel carriage ways, goons starring at me like zombies as they trundled the wrong way up one-way streets. All it needed was for Penelope Pitstop's garish pink motor to pull up alongside me at the lights, wind her window down and beg me to "heylp, heylp" her escape from Dick Dastardly. Dick bleedin Heads more like.

I admit that occasionally I drift off when waiting at a red (probably singing along to INXS, 10cc or other stock anthems from my cassette player which I refuse to update on account of its historical value - my car is like an episode of Time Team waiting to happen, only with fewer tedious small walls and more gummy bears) so that I might be a second or two slower to get away. I am a big enough man not to deny that I have occasionally flicked on the hazard lights when I'm undecided which way to turn. I can happily state for the record that I have once or twice been up past midnight smashing bits of jawbone free from the front bumper of my Polo with a broom, before heading to a local woodland with a shovel and a copy of "Home Eviscerater" (but that was only one school crossing and they really should have been quicker). However, no one can really say that I'm a bad driver. Even the so-called "victims" that have managed to retain speech wouldn't call me a bad driver.

Why is it then that day after day I find myself frowning deep gullies into my forehead and turning pale when out and about on my roads? All I want is a bit of fairness. Someone to let me out when I'm waiting, for people to remember that letting me know which way they're going might be useful information prior to me having to break so hard, blood flows through my tear ducts and my eyeballs splash against the inside of the windscreen like frogs popping in a microwave.

So when you're out and about tomorrow, pootling from point A to point B in your swanky Gogetamobile, occasionally turning your head to laugh at the peasants on the streets, please try to remember to take your eyes off them long enough to break in time, or flick on the indicator, or stop for a funeral procession, or slow down for wild geese, or not enter a yellow box if you can't get out, or indicate to switch lanes. Please try, or the next time you look in your mirror, you might find you're treated to the view of me, weeping whilst trying to maintain control of a tin box travelling at 70 miles per hour. As final sights go, it can't possibly be a good one.

Takecareandpleasedon'thavenightmares. xxx

At (good) odds with myself...

I'd buy blog for a dollar...

I'm not used to hard work and that ain't no lie. I prefer to spend swathes of what would otherwise be productive time imagining a life spent on a chaise longue carved from unicorn horn, lying prone as hoards of fantasy bosomed wenches bring me dolphin kebabs, ambrosia smoothies and the TV guide.

Despite my imaginings seemingly limited to lounging about, indulging tedious misogynistic leer-a-thon's and watching the telly (perhaps I should become a Premier League footballer. As long as I didn't have to endure the twice weekly running about, all I need is a haircut and a lobotomy) recently, even this has proved to be a bridge too far in the "effort" stakes and I've been investing all my efforts into operating on a kind of sub-human level of inactivity where only my wild screams at the prod of the morticians scalpel can separate me from a cadaver.

This has the knock on effect of making me ever so slightly annoyed with myself whenever the daily grind of breathing, eating, hanging over and weeping silently at the futility of it all, threatens to raise my pulse rate above 'occasional'. Inactivity breeds laziness and therefore it becomes increasingly difficult to a) take the rubbish out before the council have to knock in the front door and hose me down with a mixture of sulphuric acid and Cillit Bang, and b) ensure that the one thing it's worth doing, still gets done. The "one thing" that I refer to is, obviously, feeding the blog monster, who I adore, loath, am obsessed with and avoid in equally futile measures.

To combat this, perhaps it's best to change tactics. Rather than weekly (kinda) updates on the weighty topics such as elections, iPods, watching telly, I could focus more regularly on the trivialities of my day: sweating, grunting, combing, murder. More regularly, but shorter. A bit like the children's version of the Bible, only with less fiction and more swearing.

For example, yesterday's trip to the races brought me, squinting, blinking out of the darkened catacombs of my room and into the real world, starring real people with slightly less regular ad breaks (I looked at an advertising hoarding occasionally to preserve the illusion that it was on telly). It had been quite a while since I'd been to the races, but I was genuinely sad that the weather was typically biblical for England and therefore most of the more eccentrically dressed racing crowd stayed away. By this, I'm of course referring to women dressed as cake decorations, having covered themselves in Bisto and wrapped up against the cold with a small piece of wedding dress material and 6 pints of Blue Nun. There was only really the occasional overdressed, multi-coiffured male to gawp at as he sported a V-neck, day old stubble and a suit jacket to indicate his sophistication, despite struggling to tame the twin demons of understanding betting odds and the concept of shame.

I wonder if he was able to comprehend the lack of willing, idiotic, awful people that he could impress, instead finding himself at an event populated by spit-fingered old men grasping their last betting slip, while their dignity is released fluttering into the breeze, and regular people, having a bit of a giggle with 2 pound bets and struggling to stay warm. Eventually even these walking clotheshorse chaps dropped their meaningless search for 'cool' and just decided to jump up and down and scoff profanities at losing ponies like the bloody rest of us.

There's nothing to be gained by trying to be cool at the races. Especially once you've reached the point where you are simply 'cold'. Still, better cold and living than warm and watching stuff do it inside the magical box in the corner of the room. Might be something in this 'doing things' lark after all.

Now budge up, Friends is on....

Seeyousoonerthanishealthy. xxx

Televisonandonandonandon

Back in Blog...

On my busier days, I find my time is taken up by at least 5 different activities (as long as I can count sleeping, weeping and trying to teach myself to be able to blink out of unison as 'activities') which I think probably counts as the third most dismal social life in the entire universe behind OJ Simpson and a disused fridge partially buried in a landfill. Entire weeks of my calendar are filled with tantalising 'To Do' lists, including items such as 'breathing', 'picking out new envelopes' and 'throwing away disused envelopes as the gum has perished after nine years sitting at the bottom of my bedside table'.

Luckily, I'm expecting my second cousin "Savagewithoutreservation" to come over tonight to catch up. We have such fun together. He normally starts the japery by playfully kicking my door off its hinges, jokingly punching me in the gut and hilariously picking through my wallet before pissing on the floor and leaving on the back of a motorbike driven by his girlfriend, Teela, who elegantly gives me the finger and drives off cackling as I'm bent double on the carpet trying to suck in wind and coughing up blood like a spitting cobra that's been cut in half with a rake. We have such fun...

Still, since moving into my new flat, I've found myself in the dangerous position of being back in control of every aspect of my life, leisure time and how I fill the hours between coming home from work and reporting to the parole board. This gives me a bit of a dilemma because, for the first time in nearly two and half years, I can pretty much please myself. Having lived with various landlords, my folks (stop snickering: I know... I know...) and in ratbag, metal grated, fear sodden hostels, located in the puddles that congeal secretly behind the backwaters of the USA, I've always had an agenda, or at the very least, been a guest. Now, suddenly, I'm the master of my own destiny. The freedom to explore the vistas of star sparkled excitement, glorious, thrilling challenge or character affirming, bleak and windswept defeats, are all open to me.

Or.... I can sit on my arse and watch the telly.

Yes, I have once again firmly grasped the remote from the sofa of life and am wearily flicking through the Sky menu, trying to work out if the gut-boilingly awful background music qualifies as some kind of human rights violation. It's been a long time since TV has played a significant part of my life and I was anxious to see how it had changed. Don't get me wrong, I have seen some telly in the last 2 years, but American TV is so awful, it seems as though it's been specifically designed to prevent you watching it, like some kind of perverse, Prisoner-esq social experiment, or a kind of oblique post-modern art form. After enduring that, when I've been in the UK and staying in houses not owned by me, politeness and common sense have meant that I have mainly watched whatever anyone else wanted to watch and picked up a book instead. Well, balls to that. Books.... I ask you...

However, I've begun to notice that things have changed in the digital era, and that something has gone badly wrong. On this, there are many, many far better blogs (hard to believe I know), dedicated to deriding TV's weakening output over the last 20 years, so I wont go into that too much. It is reaching a point where it no longer even pretends to be an outlet for cultural expression, more a declining and dying media slowly dragging on until it reaches it's inevitable event horizon, finally becoming a 32 hour a day rolling slide show of Simon Cowel's face altering imperceptibly apart from his ruby lips mouthing the word 'despair' over and over again. Meanwhile, across the bottom of the screen, a number flashes up so you can vote on which one out of Graeme Norton, Declan Donnolly or Thatfriggingmeercat you would like to come to your house and smash you over the head with a sledgehammer like a playful six year old hammering plastic shapes into the correctly shaped hole.

Although it's true that the overall quality of channels and shows has descended to sub-garbage levels, probably due to the proliferation of channels all desperate to leap up and down and distract you, I have noticed more and more just how little the schedules differ. When I come in from work, make my cup of steaming hot heroin and settle down for some hard core, remote prodding action, it's the same thing every single night, not ideologically, but literally. Every hour of every channel is exactly the same as that very same hour the previous evening, leaving you feeling drowsy and numb before you even settle into it. Now, I can understand the point of things like soaps having regular time slots, but they do it with the repeats as well, until you find yourself whispering 'Top Gear, Buzzcocks, Mock the Week, Top Gear, Buzzcocks, Mock the Week, Top Gear...' to yourself whilst slowly rocking backwards and forwards and waiting for Nurse Ratched to softly announce that it's 'medication time' and you can go for your tea.

The problem isn't the content, the problem is me. Why can't I break the cycle? Why am I trapped in this Groundhog inspired malaise, controlled by the 2 song visual jukebox pushing indifference into my skull until my entire sensory repertoire has been switched to a level below comatose and into the realms of Tess Daly-like zombification. The only thing approaching a response is chuckling sadistically at the pratfalls of the gormless interchangeable contestants on the inflatable, zero-budget, rat maze that is Total Wipeout. That show is on every day, at the same time and it's exactly the same show, every time and I still watch it despite the fact that it's totally awful. It's the TV equivalent of sitting on your arm long enough not to feel it when your second cousin's girlfriend starts bending your fingers backwards until they make a satisfying 'pop'.

I tell you what though, I've definately figured out the answer. If only I can track down this mysterious 'Dave' character... I mean, who is this guy, that we give so much of our free time over to his cheaply acquired re-runs of game shows and Ray Mears' woodland based, ruddy cheeked scuttling? I always assumed he looks like the Evil Emperor from Star Wars, wearing a dark cloak and whispering vaguely intelligible threats of world domination if he can't secure the rights to old episodes of Come Dine With Me before the end of the year.

I suppose that there is something slightly comforting about it all, knowing that every time you're bored, or life makes you feel like clamping your testicles between the hot irons of a sandwich toaster, or you can't afford to eat anything more expensive than previously sucked mints rescued from down the side of your elderly neighbour's sofa, you can always turn to the endless show reel of Friends / Scrubs / Hollyoaks that makes up E4's entire schedule. This in turn leaves you free to switch off the dwindling embers of your mind, lay back, and shower yourself with nothingness. I'm sure that bit of down time must be good for the brain? It must be enjoyable, mustn't it, to be totally oblivious to sense, reason or quality? If it wasn't, Avatar would never have made any money, would it?

As for me, well I'm discovering that there's a time for sitting on your arse watching the telly, but you can't do that forever. Luckily, I'm the creative type, so I sit on my arse writing crap that's added, regular as clockwork to a never ending cycle of mind dribble for you to pick over with scant regard. There's no way Dave's got me in his grip, he can take his schedule and shovel it right up his.... oooooo, I like Frankie Boyle...

OldmcrichiehadablogEeeeiiiiieeeeiiiioooooohhhhhhTheEnd xxxxx

Ash 2 life, ash 2 reality...

I agree with Blog...

So, I've taken a break from the Leaders Debate on SKY and the frankly astonishing sight of Gordon Brown trying to swarm up to the Twitter generation by grinning in a vaguely sinister manner out of the corner of his mouth like a cartoon pirate. It's almost sad watching him offering weak platitudes to the centre left and filling every silence by grumbling tediously about fiscal policy while flanked by NC/DC (Nick Clegg, apparently auditioning for the vacant 'jocular everyman' slot on the sofa of The One Show and David Cameron sweating nervously like a sixth former waiting on the results of the head boy elections) and batting back and forth sense and relevance while a comatose audience of mannequins wonder where Ant and Dec are and if there will be nibbles afterwards.

Actually, I really wanted someone in the audience to ask if the collapse in the economy was responsible for Iceland claiming their revenge for their treatment at the hands of the British Government by inducing one of their volcano's to vomit ash into the air like a Geordie chav on a hen night spewing 14 Jagermiesters into a skip. Indeed, the unprecedented ban on air travel seemed to send the nation into a kind of existential crisis of confidence. News outlets couldn't decide if this was a story of tragedy; reporting the families stranded abroad and chaos at the airports whilst simultaneously showing gleeful weathermen, explaining tedious looking satellite pictures and looking smug at finally being on the "big" news rather than only being noticed for wearing quirky ties or predicting drizzle.

In fact most of the major news outlets accompanied the doom and gloom reporting of 200 million pounds a day being lost by the airlines in refunded tickets with slide shows of astonishing lightning storms taking place inside the ash cloud. The ethereal and other worldly pictures made my eyeballs sweat with glee whilst also leaving me with an odd sense that an apocalypse was coming. If I felt like that, with Google, newspapers and cuddly-wuddly weathermen to guide me through the science behind it all, it makes me wonder what people who saw Vesuvius erupt must have thought about it. They probably thought it best to bar the door and stay inside out of wrath's way "Oi, Claudius, come away from the door.... I don't care 'ow 'ot it is in here, there's no way you're going out in this.... what do you mean river of fire? Come away from that window you nosy boy and help me arrange pottery into useful places to be discovered easily in 2000 or so years...."

Yes, there was panic at the airports, panic in the stations, panic in hotels, panic in Majorca, panic on the ferries, panic on the beaches, panic in the fields and in the streets. There was panic in oceans, panic in the wood, panic in the schools, panic the homes, panic on the streets of London. I wonder to myself....

Yet, despite all this panic, there seemed to be precious little once it became clear that the cloud wasn't simply going to blow away and become just another minor irritant, like the snow or the Conservative party, but a fully fledged threat to the viability of Northern Europe's airlines. With a combination of the recession, increasing fuel bills and losses going back to 2001 still putting a strain on the industry, the collective might of the airlines finally upgraded the ash from "dangerous" to "safe" which is the kind of leap of faith that I would certainly trust to a large corporation struggling to find profits to appease their shareholders, right up there with footballers offering marriage counselling or Tim Lovejoy opening a charm school.

Still, not all of the newspapers were convinced but the assertions that flying a huge metal object into a plume of broken glass, sand and rock is a good idea. The Daily Star (that beacon of sense and rationality) ran a suitably sensitive headline: "TERROR AS PLANE HITS ASH CLOUD" which was incomprehensibly pulled from airport concession stands because some namby-pamby travellers were a tad upset. The fact that the accompanying pictures and story related to a TV drama based on an incident that occurred 28 years ago might have weakened the relevance of the headline slightly with the Star incredibly being accused of sensationalism. Luckily, on Pg 3, Katie (from Bristol) says "The cloud of ash has been a worry". Phew. That's cleared that one up, cheers Katie. Now put some clothes on love, you'll catch your death.

Other than semi-literal representations of terror in the skies, most of the news has been taken up with grumbling travellers bemoaning the lack of planes flying into said plumes of danger and telling their tales of barefooted, un-business classed pilgrimage without so much as a free hotel room to call their own. Obviously, I'm being a bit flippant, but who are these people? Shouldn't you be at work, instead of taking the children out of school to lounge about by a pool on the Costa-del-Boy? These people got exactly what they deserved... an extra 6 days of holiday.... damn them.

I for one have had to cancel my worldwide tour, despite having made my savagereservations months ago (6 months I've been waiting to crack that gem out) and therefore disappointing both the fans attending the live blogs in New York, Rome and Swansea. The Icelandic audience were weak though. Ashen faced throughout (HAHAHAAAAAAA)....

sorry...

Takecaremylittletulips. xx