Puerility

My mum once banned the watching of Blackadder on the basis that it was puerile. This was a touch harsh on a number of levels, the most important being that 1) I was a child, and therefore it would be very appropriate for me and 2) no it bloody wasn't. It was occasionally bawdy, and seldom but sometimes scatological - but no more than the average Shakespeare comedy. Fortunately, mum has now seen sense and views BA as a comedy classic. Indeed she denies using the word with regard to Mr Adder, but given it was the first time I'd ever heard anyone use it and I had to go and look it up, she's not getting away it that easily.

We re-edit reality to suit us all the time. I have a few Indian friends who are now trying to suggest that when they predicted a 3-1 kicking of England by the India team they were kidding. Yes, that will be why you bet a tenner on it. And how many psychopathic mass killers do you know who have totally sublimated their murderous impulses and have no idea at all how many blondes they've killed in their bathtub until they find bloody hairs in the plug hole. Honestly, it happens all the time.

Take this very morning - I reported to my Beloved that a male friend (known here as TLSoM) had made a Facebook posted which asked "Have you seen Bridesmaids? It's actually very funny." Since she has seen and liked the film, her response was the slightly testy "oh, he's surprised it's funny because it's a bunch of of women, and women can't be funny, is that it?"

I gently reminded her that her reaction to the trailer before she had seen the film was something like "Christ, they've tried to make some sort of female version of The Hangover - that looks awful".

I still haven't seen it. It looks puerile to me.

Degenerate

I'm degenerating. It's like being Doctor Who, but instead of turning into Matt Smith I just turn into a fractionally older version of me, one that gets sore thighs after climbing long staircases or has weird niggling pains that won't go away even though there's clearly nothing actually wrong.

It's one of the joys of creeping up on 40. I'm still trying to work out whether the aching shoulder joints I'm getting in the morning are because of a new mattress (which is otherwise extra comfy) or because my body just can't handle sleeping on its side any more and is rebelling. I could be facing a whole new era of sleeplessness, since I can't sleep on my back (and sleeping on your front is frankly weird).

But I can't let it bother me. If I get worried about this, what will I have left in the tank to rail against the fact that my last tooth has fallen out and that tourists keep mistake my legs for the tube map?

Maybe ageing won't be that bad, and rather than look in the mirror and be disgusted by what I see, my perceptions will adapt and I'll be vaguely revolted by how smooth and shiny young people are, as if they were blank-faced aliens or were all in the process of very slowly being suffocated with white plastic bags with eyes drawn on them. Perhaps we fall apart so slowly that we only really notice when a doctor takes one of our legs away and refuses to give it back.

So I shall ache in a more upbeat fashion. For a little while.

Red Eyes

Is it a kind of cold?

Or am I just slightly hung-over?

And slow to recover because I’m old?

Or is it a cold?

There’s a fog all through my brain,

A thumb print on my sinus

I feel pretty suspect and look quite low

Or so I am told

Oh-oh, is it a cold?

Red eyes

Burning like acid

Red eyes

How can you itch so much

How can the eyes that seemed so placid

Now seem so hot to touch

Red eyes.

Is it the pints that I drank

That’s causing this sense of distraction

Should I have eaten the food I was sold?

Or is it a cold?

There’s a dull throb in my temple

A perpetual sniff in my nose

And the bags under my eyes are as dark as holes

With creases and folds

Oh-oh,  is it a cold?

Red eyes

Burning like acid

Red eyes

How can you itch so much?

How can the eyes that seemed so placid

Now seem so hot to touch

Red eyes. 

Machinery

I learned that I was not made for engineering (or even engineered for making) at an early age. As a child I wasn't particularly adept at using pester power, but I deployed it on a few occasions to get what I thought I wanted. My most magnificent triumph was the Fantom Four Hovercraft, a toy that brought such befuddlingly long-winded yet fleeting pleasures that it was either going to teach children the very meaning of patience, or end up in the bin.

But my most shameful experience came after identifying a very exciting looking box of Meccano in the local toy store (now a PC repair shop that also specialises in fixing Sky remotes). I banged on about it for ages, inspired by the amazing things the TV advert suggested I would be able to make.

Of course, what the TV doesn't make clearly, is that making anything interesting out of Meccano when you have the technical abilities of a gerbil requires hard work. Lots of hard work. The kind of hard work you're not really looking for in a toy shop, but might expect to find in some sort of El Salvadoran copper mine. I probably spent all of half an hour trying to stick some perfectly basic metal struts together, before realising that they were more fun if you pretending they were swords and rushing off to slay some dragons in the garden shed. Of which it turned out there were fuck loads. Who'd have thought it?

To this day, me and machinery get on like an EDL organiser and a Kurdish shopkeeper.

Dole

Over at Speedyrants, my huffin' and puffin' alter ego asks can benefits claimants sue the Daily Express? The answer to which turns out to be "probably not" but getting there presumably makes him feel better, which was was in all honesty the only point.

I was unemployed at the tail end of John Major's 1990s recession, for about 9 months. It was soul destroying and deeply unpleasant. Though I did have a lot of time to play Civilization. But what I think people who might never have gone through this fail to perceive - mereckons -  is that being able to sit around doing nothing and playing shitty PC strategy games and watching daytime tv is only fun if that isn't all you have to do.

You can't skive if you have nothing to do. There is no glorious frisson of breaking the rules, or feeling that you have got out of doing something unpleasant. That's it. That's your life. Conquering Macedonia with your chariot force is all well and good,  but then you realise that your real life plunder consists of a tin of TESCO basics spaghetti hoops and sellotaping the wallpaper back on.

Well

I'm not. Well, that is. Which I suppose, when it comes to random words, gives me more to work with than if I was feeling dandy, tip-top, swell, on top of the world and peachy-keen, though if I was thinking all those phrases it would probably mean that I wasn't very well.

Despite having a major orange juice fetish (I lied in my last blog, I like orange coloured drinks that taste of orange as well as those that don't) I must be lacking in Vit C or something, because my body appears to be utterly incapable of fighting off colds. If the end of human evolution means that we will eventually all succumb to some sort of mutant virus, I might be the only survivor - a mutant virus would pass so quickly through my immune system it wouldn't have time to kill me.

On the plus side, having a cold gives me a chance to really stretch out when it comes to luminous drinks. Now, next to my trusty bottle of Irn Bru, I've got some water in a green plastic bottle, and (drumroll) a nuclear waste-shaded simmering pot of LemSip, its lurid yellowness hinting heavily to my brain that I SHOULD NOT DRINK IT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. It reminds me of the colour my wee turned when I used to take Quest Super Once-a-Day time released multi-vitamins and minerals (I was only 18, and for a short time thought aliens had been experimenting on me before I remembered the suspicious , baguette-sized pills I'd just started popping).

The LemSip has now melted the spoon with which I stirred it. I accept that it might have been the heat, but this is a teaspoon - made, I would guess, for boiling water. Look at it! How can this be good for me?

Then I remember - it isn't supposed to make me better, it's supposed to make me feel better, like other health foods, such as Heroin. Oh well.

Amber

I probably drink too much orange-coloured fizzy drink. We're talking a likely 2,409,000ml since I was 19, when a bout of glandular fever first sent me hunting pig-like for the truffles of artificial energy boosts. Obviously GF doesn't last 20 years, but frankly by the time it subsided completely I was 20, ergo an old man and in need of stimulants. I've drunk so much of it that I sometimes wonder if I should be like one of those classic fish-aliens of sci-fi cliche that get pushed around the world in their tanks having bubbly conversations with humans. Except, of course, my tank would be full of Irn Bru or Lucozade.

Orange coloured fizzy drinks that don't taste of orange, I should stress. No, I'm a slave to drinks that taste only of themselves. If it tastes even remotely like something that exists in the real, non-fizzy-drinks world, I'm not interested. Even if it's nice. Obviously I'm not interested in a drink that tastes like a hair brush, but then noone else is either. But someone out there would like a drink that tastes like a kumquat. It's not me. (while I'm at it, why are there not a wide range of tangerine-flavoured cordials? Did tangerines upset someone high up in the drinks industry? Maybe they're not very good at networking, or something.)

Lucozade - what does it taste of? Lucozade. It's a lucozade flavoured drink. Which is quite cleverly self-referential for a sugary liquid. It's practically post-modern. Or possibly even post-post-modern. Have we reached post-post-post-modern yet? Modernism was now so long ago that you feel we must have at least squared it by now. Otherwise how would we have Lucozade and Ant & Dec?

Sunday mornings are supposed to be for getting over hangovers. If you haven't got one it's almost as if you have to invent one. So I'm drinking Lucozade to get over the torpor of having done next to nothing yesterday. I feel so lethargic I'm thinking of applying for a job as a speed bump. It'll pass. Hand me my post-post-modern drink and I'll see you later.

What did you do during the war, daddy?