27 Mar 2010
Irn Bru. One of the few local soft drinks in the world that outsell Coca-Cola in its homeland. Also one of the few drinks in the world with more sugar in it than Coca-Cola. This all makes sense given its homeland is Scotland, the land that brought you tablet*
Unfortunately for me, my Scottish Grandma gave me a bit of a taste for Irn Bru. Well, I say unfortunate - I enjoy it very much and (to date) my teeth haven't melted into little enamelly pools, though it can only be a matter of time. My insides are probably bright orange, to the extent that should I be unlucky enough to become an organ donor it's going to seriously freak out the doctors performing the transplant.
"Nurse, is this a liver or a Butternut Squash?"
Of course, everyone says things like "have you any idea what colour that stuff is making your insides" as if the colour of the interior of your small intestine is something you should be overly concerned about. It isn't going to matter if it clashes with the deep scarlet of some other part of your body - if anyone's looking then you've got a lot more to worry about than colour coordination.
Irn Bru is a great hangover cure. It's the Alka-Seltzer of soft-drinks. Unfortunately this is lost on quite a few people for whom the thought of drinking it is akin to supping the bile extracted from the spleen of a living gerbil. After this amount of time drinking it though, it's mainly a cure for the state of not drinking Irn Bru. It's possible I have a big, fizzy orange problem. But I do still have teeth.
* possibly the least healthy thing in the entire universe. Up to and including nuclear waste.
Wednesday, 31 March 2010
Pod
26 Mar 2010
While you're out there bashing trade unions, as being British I'm sure that's what you're all doing - it's over taking tea-drinking and auto-erotic asphyxiation as the major national pastime - just think this: podiatrists have a union.
Well, not to themselves. They have to share it. With Chiropodists. It must be difficult being a podiatrist. No one knows the differences between you and the Chiropodists so you have to go halves with them in your trade union to avoid confusing anybody. And it doesn't work, because now they're trying to convince us that "There is no difference between a chiropodist and a podiatrist." Hah! is that so - then why are you letting both of them into your union, eh? It's a plot.
Probably a communist one. They are trade unionists after all. You'll be able to tell if your podiatrist is a trade unionist. As he* treats your foot he'll be wearing some sort of tweedy cap and agreeing the bill will take a series of negotiations chaired by ACAS with a lot of journalists from The Daily Scale waiting outside the surgery to see if you beat him down to less than 150 quid while he holds your bunions to ransom.
There are some people who hate feet. I wonder if it's because they look just a little bit like hands that have been forced into a pair of brogues filled with acid and tied up for a day so that they melt into the shape of a shoe's interior. This wouldn't be very nice. Which makes foot fetishists people who get off on the idea of forcing people's hands into brogues filled with acid. So much for harmless peccadilloes**. You can't trust anyone.
* it will be a man. with a moustache, a northern accent and a donkey jacket. If you're reading The Daily Scale.
** a kind of sandal, I imagine
Well, not to themselves. They have to share it. With Chiropodists. It must be difficult being a podiatrist. No one knows the differences between you and the Chiropodists so you have to go halves with them in your trade union to avoid confusing anybody. And it doesn't work, because now they're trying to convince us that "There is no difference between a chiropodist and a podiatrist." Hah! is that so - then why are you letting both of them into your union, eh? It's a plot.
Probably a communist one. They are trade unionists after all. You'll be able to tell if your podiatrist is a trade unionist. As he* treats your foot he'll be wearing some sort of tweedy cap and agreeing the bill will take a series of negotiations chaired by ACAS with a lot of journalists from The Daily Scale waiting outside the surgery to see if you beat him down to less than 150 quid while he holds your bunions to ransom.
There are some people who hate feet. I wonder if it's because they look just a little bit like hands that have been forced into a pair of brogues filled with acid and tied up for a day so that they melt into the shape of a shoe's interior. This wouldn't be very nice. Which makes foot fetishists people who get off on the idea of forcing people's hands into brogues filled with acid. So much for harmless peccadilloes**. You can't trust anyone.
* it will be a man. with a moustache, a northern accent and a donkey jacket. If you're reading The Daily Scale.
** a kind of sandal, I imagine
Cigarette
25 Mar 2010
I used to smoke when I was seven.
I can't remember how long this went on for. Our next door neighbour would procure the offending death sticks and we'd smoke them under the fir tree in his back garden. I don't remember being caught - that sort of thing would stick in the mind - but evidently 7-year old me didn't have an addictive personality and I gave it up without recourse to nicorette gum. Which is handy, since it didn't exist.
I wonder how serious smokers gave up in the seventies? Did they just employ someone to follow them around than smash them repeatedly in the face if they tried to buy a packet of fags? Or did they get the cat to wee on their cigarettes, dry them on the radiator and then still smoke them, so that they associated cigarettes with an act of utter abasement?
It is a cheap and low-tech solution. Don't knock it.
I used to smoke when I was seven.
I can't remember how long this went on for. Our next door neighbour would procure the offending death sticks and we'd smoke them under the fir tree in his back garden. I don't remember being caught - that sort of thing would stick in the mind - but evidently 7-year old me didn't have an addictive personality and I gave it up without recourse to nicorette gum. Which is handy, since it didn't exist.
I wonder how serious smokers gave up in the seventies? Did they just employ someone to follow them around than smash them repeatedly in the face if they tried to buy a packet of fags? Or did they get the cat to wee on their cigarettes, dry them on the radiator and then still smoke them, so that they associated cigarettes with an act of utter abasement?
It is a cheap and low-tech solution. Don't knock it.
Pinhead
Mar 24 2010
I had a friend at Sixth Form who was obsessed with Clive Barker. He was so obsessed that he would make his own latex models and masks, including a very convincing Pinhead from Hellraiser. And Hellraiser II, of course. And III and, actually I have absolutely no idea how many they made. It might well have been as many as the Police Academy movies, in which case I strongly suspect that Hellraiser XVII went straight to video, after the studio realised that the story of Pinhead repenting of the error of his ways (again) and settling down to a life a junior civil servant in Croydon with his wife and spawn, happily adopting suburban bliss until a squad of murderous angels appear smiting the righteous and unrighteous alike with their holy fire and ONLY PINHEAD CAN SAVE MANKIND! But to do so he must re-embrace his former hellish fiery powers and abandon his new family forever.
Fucking tragic.
I'd probably be a sucker for that. I don't consider myself an over-emotional human being, but I can't watch a sad movie without breaking the hosepipe ban. Nor can I watch a happy movie. Or a movie with a dog in it*. This is why my film collection tends not to contain any of these films - I can't afford the moisture loss that would accrue; a couple of hours in there'd be just a little pile of dust, like in Batman: The Movie. I don't like such films - I've never quite worked out why anyone would seek out a film to make them cry. There's probably a complex psychological reason about catharsis and the transference of emotional turmoil away from real problems, but frankly someone cleverer than me has to explain that, and until that happens I reserve the right to mindlessly condemn all such behaviour as weird, just because I don't understand it. It's an approach that works well for the Daily Mail.
Crying gives me a headache anyway, so I have good reason not to seek it out. I'm in a bit of a cul-de-sac though, and getting slightly nervous. I've nearly finished reading The Lord of the Rings and I happen to know through virtue of possibly having glanced at it a couple of times before that the end is a bit sad. It's going to make me cry. It's going to give me a headache. If I was strong I could just leave the final chapter and start reading the copy of From Hell than someone has lent me. But I can't do that - I have to see it through, even if it's like sticking pins in my head. Wish me luck.
* though that's nothing to do with crying.
I had a friend at Sixth Form who was obsessed with Clive Barker. He was so obsessed that he would make his own latex models and masks, including a very convincing Pinhead from Hellraiser. And Hellraiser II, of course. And III and, actually I have absolutely no idea how many they made. It might well have been as many as the Police Academy movies, in which case I strongly suspect that Hellraiser XVII went straight to video, after the studio realised that the story of Pinhead repenting of the error of his ways (again) and settling down to a life a junior civil servant in Croydon with his wife and spawn, happily adopting suburban bliss until a squad of murderous angels appear smiting the righteous and unrighteous alike with their holy fire and ONLY PINHEAD CAN SAVE MANKIND! But to do so he must re-embrace his former hellish fiery powers and abandon his new family forever.
Fucking tragic.
I'd probably be a sucker for that. I don't consider myself an over-emotional human being, but I can't watch a sad movie without breaking the hosepipe ban. Nor can I watch a happy movie. Or a movie with a dog in it*. This is why my film collection tends not to contain any of these films - I can't afford the moisture loss that would accrue; a couple of hours in there'd be just a little pile of dust, like in Batman: The Movie. I don't like such films - I've never quite worked out why anyone would seek out a film to make them cry. There's probably a complex psychological reason about catharsis and the transference of emotional turmoil away from real problems, but frankly someone cleverer than me has to explain that, and until that happens I reserve the right to mindlessly condemn all such behaviour as weird, just because I don't understand it. It's an approach that works well for the Daily Mail.
Crying gives me a headache anyway, so I have good reason not to seek it out. I'm in a bit of a cul-de-sac though, and getting slightly nervous. I've nearly finished reading The Lord of the Rings and I happen to know through virtue of possibly having glanced at it a couple of times before that the end is a bit sad. It's going to make me cry. It's going to give me a headache. If I was strong I could just leave the final chapter and start reading the copy of From Hell than someone has lent me. But I can't do that - I have to see it through, even if it's like sticking pins in my head. Wish me luck.
* though that's nothing to do with crying.
Flying
23 Mar 2010
I have a carbon footprint the size of Nebraska.
It's a little unfair. I'm a vegetarian*, and apparently that's good. I have no children, also good apparently, and no pets. I don't have a car. Lovely. But I flew to Australia three times in 2009, so I think I would have to live off locally-sourced salad and sleep in a ditch until I'm 77 before I pay that one off.
It's all rather depressing. And not really for me. Air Travel has shrunk the world - the ability to leave your family behind in a different country, work somewhere else and yet still see them at Christmas has sent people criss-crossing around the world leaving a tiny trail of filaments behind them, always connecting them to where they started via many nodal points and making sure they never get lost.
But the world is changing back. It's getting bigger. And I worry about all those people who made life choices on the basis of ease of travel and are beginning to feel a bit like a sun-bather finding out they're on a sand bank whilst the tide flows in. It can't be nice.
I've watched the main parties trying to sort out their policies on this with some interest. The Tories, influenced perhaps by the 'shampoo-crusties' of Plane Stupid, have made a big fuss of targeting air travel in their policies, though in their usual half-arsed way they are only planning to slow the increase in air travel (and I can't help but think part of their anti-plane zeal is due to pricing out all those nasty foreigners they're so concerned about coming here). Labour fucked up when they raised taxes on long-haul flights and did nothing to short-haul flights, despite the fact that mile for mile short haul flights are more damaging** and - and this is the important bit - can be achieved by other transport methods. It didn't come across as the most coherent policy I've ever come across, but it does explains their passion for an extra runway at Heathrow - more long-haul flights means many times more the £20 levy. Help the treasury or help the environment - fly to Honolulu, your country needs you.
Maybe all the flying is because "the rich are flying more". Maybe it's because of the family from Pakistan who have relatives in Dubai, London and Seattle. Maybe it's because as long as you have no luggage and a good deal of patience you can fly Ryanair to Sweden for the price of a Ryanair sandwich***. I don't know. But restraining air travel - however necessary - will mess up more people's lives than almost any other change we're going to have to make in the years to come.
* there was a piece in The Guardian recently that "debunked" this, claiming that dairy is more "carbon intensive" and therefore that lacto-oovo veggies are destroying the world. Yes, McDonald's is cutting down the rain-forest to make the little squares of processed cheese for its burgers. Daft. Especially when you reread the piece and realise they are saying that hard cheese is more intensive than chicken. Is there a vegetarian on the planet who has ever claimed that their beneficial environmental impact is down to all the fucking chickens that no longer need to be kept in a shed in Norfolk? I don't think so.
** 60% worse per mile. But of course, but the time you have flown 600% times as far this is a bit like a builder fucking your house up so badly that they have to charge you for an extra year's work but telling you they'll give you a 10% discount on their daily rate. I bet they'd do that, too.
*** about £25
I have a carbon footprint the size of Nebraska.
It's a little unfair. I'm a vegetarian*, and apparently that's good. I have no children, also good apparently, and no pets. I don't have a car. Lovely. But I flew to Australia three times in 2009, so I think I would have to live off locally-sourced salad and sleep in a ditch until I'm 77 before I pay that one off.
It's all rather depressing. And not really for me. Air Travel has shrunk the world - the ability to leave your family behind in a different country, work somewhere else and yet still see them at Christmas has sent people criss-crossing around the world leaving a tiny trail of filaments behind them, always connecting them to where they started via many nodal points and making sure they never get lost.
But the world is changing back. It's getting bigger. And I worry about all those people who made life choices on the basis of ease of travel and are beginning to feel a bit like a sun-bather finding out they're on a sand bank whilst the tide flows in. It can't be nice.
I've watched the main parties trying to sort out their policies on this with some interest. The Tories, influenced perhaps by the 'shampoo-crusties' of Plane Stupid, have made a big fuss of targeting air travel in their policies, though in their usual half-arsed way they are only planning to slow the increase in air travel (and I can't help but think part of their anti-plane zeal is due to pricing out all those nasty foreigners they're so concerned about coming here). Labour fucked up when they raised taxes on long-haul flights and did nothing to short-haul flights, despite the fact that mile for mile short haul flights are more damaging** and - and this is the important bit - can be achieved by other transport methods. It didn't come across as the most coherent policy I've ever come across, but it does explains their passion for an extra runway at Heathrow - more long-haul flights means many times more the £20 levy. Help the treasury or help the environment - fly to Honolulu, your country needs you.
Maybe all the flying is because "the rich are flying more". Maybe it's because of the family from Pakistan who have relatives in Dubai, London and Seattle. Maybe it's because as long as you have no luggage and a good deal of patience you can fly Ryanair to Sweden for the price of a Ryanair sandwich***. I don't know. But restraining air travel - however necessary - will mess up more people's lives than almost any other change we're going to have to make in the years to come.
* there was a piece in The Guardian recently that "debunked" this, claiming that dairy is more "carbon intensive" and therefore that lacto-oovo veggies are destroying the world. Yes, McDonald's is cutting down the rain-forest to make the little squares of processed cheese for its burgers. Daft. Especially when you reread the piece and realise they are saying that hard cheese is more intensive than chicken. Is there a vegetarian on the planet who has ever claimed that their beneficial environmental impact is down to all the fucking chickens that no longer need to be kept in a shed in Norfolk? I don't think so.
** 60% worse per mile. But of course, but the time you have flown 600% times as far this is a bit like a builder fucking your house up so badly that they have to charge you for an extra year's work but telling you they'll give you a 10% discount on their daily rate. I bet they'd do that, too.
*** about £25
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
Casement
22 Mar 2010
I don't have a window in my room; certainly not a horizontally hung one. I do have a set of French doors, so if I'm particularly keen to look out at the bottom of a set of stone steps and the garden drain, I can get the portrait equivalent of wide-screen. There's occasionally a squirrel. In fact two at the moment. I think there's a been a bit of a winter truce lately, but that will probably all be over soon. Unless I'm missing an important detail and it's actually a beautiful squirrel romance.
The squirrels around here do have a tendency to be completely mental. I once got menaced by one on the way to Cross Street. It was guarding the gate of the local school as I passed, and I briefly wondered whether I was witnessing a prototype anti-pedophile security measure in reaction to the latest Daily Mail scare stories.
One of the ones in my garden has a little spot on a tree branch about 15 feet up where he sits and emits endless squeals like someone hitting a priest in the face with a squeaky rubber hammer. The patch where he sits is a different colour to the rest of the tree. I don't really want to think about why. Why would you go back and sit there again? I'm never licking a squirrel, and I advise you not to.
The other downside of the French doors is that on a hot summer's night it's not all that simple to open them and let in a little air. if you do you run the risk of an entire menagerie entering the bedroom. Discounting the mosquitoes and moths that wander in in the hope of a new life and a cup of tea, I swear a fox strolled in one night. Either that or it was a fucking big hamster.
I think God owes me a more interesting word next...
I don't have a window in my room; certainly not a horizontally hung one. I do have a set of French doors, so if I'm particularly keen to look out at the bottom of a set of stone steps and the garden drain, I can get the portrait equivalent of wide-screen. There's occasionally a squirrel. In fact two at the moment. I think there's a been a bit of a winter truce lately, but that will probably all be over soon. Unless I'm missing an important detail and it's actually a beautiful squirrel romance.
The squirrels around here do have a tendency to be completely mental. I once got menaced by one on the way to Cross Street. It was guarding the gate of the local school as I passed, and I briefly wondered whether I was witnessing a prototype anti-pedophile security measure in reaction to the latest Daily Mail scare stories.
One of the ones in my garden has a little spot on a tree branch about 15 feet up where he sits and emits endless squeals like someone hitting a priest in the face with a squeaky rubber hammer. The patch where he sits is a different colour to the rest of the tree. I don't really want to think about why. Why would you go back and sit there again? I'm never licking a squirrel, and I advise you not to.
The other downside of the French doors is that on a hot summer's night it's not all that simple to open them and let in a little air. if you do you run the risk of an entire menagerie entering the bedroom. Discounting the mosquitoes and moths that wander in in the hope of a new life and a cup of tea, I swear a fox strolled in one night. Either that or it was a fucking big hamster.
I think God owes me a more interesting word next...
Murderer
21 Mar 2010
I haven’t quite decided whether writing this blog constitutes killing time or using it. If I write an average of 350 words for each entry then the total tonnage of my trite twaddle will touch 128,000 words. There are shorter fantasy epics.
So, is this dedication a good use of time? Maybe. Because frankly no matter how disciplined I was I wouldn’t write 350 words a day of a novel, because I’d constantly agonise about whether the plot was going where I wanted to and if the lead character was engaging and whether I had conjured a poetic enough description for the canal-side where they find the mutilated corpse of Piers Morgan.
Procrastination may be the Thief of Time, but we do have a habit of leaving the door open and leaving our valuables lying about. Whether its body and brain chemistry or just plain laziness, I just can’t sit down and do the things I ought to be doing. There’s all these wonderful minutes available, but it takes so long to get myself into the right ftrame of mind that I barely have any time left over. Forget the smug assertions of the writer (Peter De Vries, apparently) who said:
“I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning”.
Bully for him (though I notice that whatever he was producing at 9 o’clock in the morning hasn’t exactly burned itself on popular consciousness). But Life ain’t that simple. Imagine a world where there were no distractions – no TV, no games, no facebook or twitter, no sport, no dartboard with Thatcher’s face stuck to it, no genetically-engineered performing frog that can juggle potatoes with its feet while whistling “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go”. In this wonderful world of ascetic focus would you free your time and entertain yourself by scouring the inner limits of your imagination and unleashing a menagerie of fantastic creations upon an unsuspecting world?
Well, I wouldn’t. Because I’d be too fucking bored to create anything. And that’s the cruel twist in my creativity. I do it because I am engaged and excited about things – it doesn’t make me excited about things.
This is why some of these entries are frankly shit. Sorry about that.
Plumpness
21 Mar 2010
I'm convinced I'm getting fat.
Now, I don't have much to back up that assertion apart from the fact that I'm feeling generally more squidgy than I did before. I still fit the same jeans, but I'm having trouble with a few of my favourite waistcoats, which suggests to me that although my limbs are static my torso is slowly enlarging to inconvenient proportions.This is not good, since if it continues I will probably end up looking like Humpty Dumpty.
At the same time I'm creeping up on 12 stone. For the last few years I've been hovering on 11. Where did this stone come from? Have I been eating rocks? Have my bones fossilised before death?
This must stop. I was always a skinny person. It's written through me like Blackpool rock, except now it seems that someone's wrapped the rock up in a few layers of candy floss and added some toffee from the toffee apple machine.
Well, actually what they've added is beer.
It's the downside of being sociable in Britain. For the last few weeks I've been accepting almost every social invitation I've received (there's a good reason for that, but I won't trouble you with it now). Unfortunately, most of these invites are not to the cinema or the theatre or anything else that doesn't involve sloshing back vast quantities of the devil's brew. They're mostly to the pub.
So I'm feeling a bit like Superman might feel if, because he was a bit lonely being the last of his kind and all, his friend kept inviting him down the Kryptonite Bar. Or kept inviting Samson down the hairdressers' for a natter. Thinness was my only superpower, unfortunately, and age will take it away soon enough without the Reverend James adding to it. Not that I didn't need the pints at the time.
Well, I've fixed my bike, and a week in a training course with 3 hours' homework a night has kept me away from the alehouses, and I'm probably going to do the Swimathon this year, and the cricket season is round the corner... there's hope yet. I might just avoid plumpness. For now.
Why
20 Mar 2010
A good question. I missed this day. What happened. Where did it happen? And why?
I could have caught up easily by just writing "because", but I fear the robot search engines that are my only readers would come round and exterminate me if I tried.
It's fairly amazing that I haven't missed any other days to date - trying to keep up with a project like this is like trying to keep up with a camel. It doesn't look like it's going very fast, but it's not going to stop, while you're walking on sand.
By why? Why indeed? It's good to question things. Or is it? Should I be questioning that?
Anyway, Sunday 20th March is firmly in place. But I can't tell you why.
A good question. I missed this day. What happened. Where did it happen? And why?
I could have caught up easily by just writing "because", but I fear the robot search engines that are my only readers would come round and exterminate me if I tried.
It's fairly amazing that I haven't missed any other days to date - trying to keep up with a project like this is like trying to keep up with a camel. It doesn't look like it's going very fast, but it's not going to stop, while you're walking on sand.
By why? Why indeed? It's good to question things. Or is it? Should I be questioning that?
Anyway, Sunday 20th March is firmly in place. But I can't tell you why.
Glockenspiel
19 Mar 2010
Thanks random word generator. Very helpful.
I was terrible at music at school. Those who've heard me sing may think I'm still terrible at music, but they are of course very wrong, but we'll move on.
There was something odd about school music. They introduced you to musical instruments as if they were a toy box, which was great for variety and “exposure”, but it did mean that you looked at a glockenspiel in broadly the same way you would at a plastic box with shaped holes in it for the pushing in of similar shaped objects. The idea that you could become a proficient glockenspieler or xylophonist and perform them on stage was about as likely as being on telly pushing the star shaped block into the right gap.
Triangles. It will never cease to amaze me that people are paid to play the triangle in the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Not because there's anything silly about it (OK, there is), but simply because it's impossible to imagine anyone being inspired to do it via school music. Thank God some schools obviously teach it better than mine did.
Mind you, I assume the triangle player has to do something else as well. Surely you can't make a living hitting a triangle of metal, no matter how tunefully and rhythmically? It's like that bloke that Prince Charles has to squeeze his toothpaste for him – I take it he does something else at one point? I know dentists say you should brush your teeth twice a day, which doubles his workload, but he must do something else - at the very least he should be laying out measured strips of dental floss.
Maybe it's more of a skill than I thought. There may be very specific techniques to toothpaste squeezing that I've never contemplated. Perhaps the BBC will introduce Strictly Squeezed Toothpaste and the whole country will be amazed that it was a lot more complicated than they ever realised, as Darren Gough and Rachael Stevens go head to head to show that they can squirt the best dollup of enamel boosting whitener onto an Oral B Anglehead. The theme music could have a triangle in it.
Culprit
18 Mar 2010
I love my brother dearly, but he did something to me once that I suspect I still haven't forgiven him for.
When we were kids we'd get very excited about holidays. Now, I'm not sure why because holidays actually = visiting relatives in distant parts of the UK. With sets of family in the exotic locales of Aberdeen and Newcastle you can imagine that sun sea and sand weren't very high up the agenda, unless you count the occasional trip to Bamburgh with a stick-in-the-sand wind-break and a couple of sweaters.
This may explain why we were both exciting at the possibility of heading to an activity holidays camp in Kent called Carroty Wood. Despite the fact that it sounds like a place inhabited by knitted mice, it was at least six-hundred miles south of Hazelhead Caravan Park and lacked the typical easterly wind bearing low temperatures and smell of fish.
However, this year we hit a major diplomatic incident. A box of chocolate orange Matchmakers (like Twiglets, only nice) went missing from the kitchen. All hell broke loose. After denials from both me and my brother, an ultimatum was issued. Either the Matchmakers were returned, or Carroty Wood would be left to the knitted mice.
The offending chocolates, very shortly afterwards, were found under my bed. Poorly hidden. Now, given that my bed had already been searched, it wasn't too much of s stretch for Mum to realise that even a six-year old wouldn't be quite stupid enough to move the booty from a perfect hiding place to somewhere easy to spot that incriminated him.
We got to go to Carroty Wood. I have no recollection of whether I enjoyed it, or spotted any knitted mice. But I remember being framed.
Trips to Aberdeen did have their upside. My Grandma used to buy vast quantities of Irn Bru and keep them under her sink, next to the drain unblocker. It was the start of a long, wonderful and tooth destroying relationship that is still going to this day. But I never ate another Matchmaker.
Trust
17 Mar 2010
We learn to trust many things. Gravity. Fridges. Accountants. Footbridges. Apples. It would be a shock if any of these things let you down, some of those shocks more serious than others.
Of course, it would be dreadful if we took this trust to its logical conclusion and started trusting people. That's not what they are for. Or should I say that we do trust people – to be untrustworthy. As we all know, all politicians are greedy liars, journalists are pernicious fibbers, your male friends and relatives will molest your kittens, your female friends will steal your husband (or possibly your goat), the Ocado delivery man is really just casing your joint (normally the left knee) while the local mugger is really trying to give stuff away so that he doesn't have to hold a car boot sale. No one can be relied on! It's a shocker.
I had a relief today. I passed the first bit of by hideous PRINCE2 course, which means I don't get slung out on my ear and barred from attending the rest of the course. I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing, but I probably shouldn't be looking towards abject failure as sensible a way of pressure management. But anyway, this means that when the trainer looked at us all and said very reassuringly that if we paid attention and did the homework we'd pass, he was trustworthy.
Or was he? Just because he was right doesn't necessarily suggest this. Maybe he was gambling. Otherwise how could he know? Did he fix the papers? Was he sent by the mafia? What's in it for him anyway? He gets paid whether we pass or not. He's clearly up to something. I will have to watch him for the next couple of days. Obviously I was going to have to do that anyway, since he's still training me. Consider it a metaphorical watching coupled with a real watching to create a special existential Watching+ like something advertised by a cable TV company.
Now I've been let down by something I did trust – the Myspace blog page. I can't write this in. Obviously I have subsequently beaten the system, or you would not be reading this, but currently it won't show me a cursor. This doesn't happen with shoes. You don't slip your shoes on, kneel down and find that your laces have vanished. At least very rarely.
Shoes you can trust. Like apples. Just keep away from the people.
We learn to trust many things. Gravity. Fridges. Accountants. Footbridges. Apples. It would be a shock if any of these things let you down, some of those shocks more serious than others.
Of course, it would be dreadful if we took this trust to its logical conclusion and started trusting people. That's not what they are for. Or should I say that we do trust people – to be untrustworthy. As we all know, all politicians are greedy liars, journalists are pernicious fibbers, your male friends and relatives will molest your kittens, your female friends will steal your husband (or possibly your goat), the Ocado delivery man is really just casing your joint (normally the left knee) while the local mugger is really trying to give stuff away so that he doesn't have to hold a car boot sale. No one can be relied on! It's a shocker.
I had a relief today. I passed the first bit of by hideous PRINCE2 course, which means I don't get slung out on my ear and barred from attending the rest of the course. I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing, but I probably shouldn't be looking towards abject failure as sensible a way of pressure management. But anyway, this means that when the trainer looked at us all and said very reassuringly that if we paid attention and did the homework we'd pass, he was trustworthy.
Or was he? Just because he was right doesn't necessarily suggest this. Maybe he was gambling. Otherwise how could he know? Did he fix the papers? Was he sent by the mafia? What's in it for him anyway? He gets paid whether we pass or not. He's clearly up to something. I will have to watch him for the next couple of days. Obviously I was going to have to do that anyway, since he's still training me. Consider it a metaphorical watching coupled with a real watching to create a special existential Watching+ like something advertised by a cable TV company.
Now I've been let down by something I did trust – the Myspace blog page. I can't write this in. Obviously I have subsequently beaten the system, or you would not be reading this, but currently it won't show me a cursor. This doesn't happen with shoes. You don't slip your shoes on, kneel down and find that your laces have vanished. At least very rarely.
Shoes you can trust. Like apples. Just keep away from the people.
Rectangle
16 Mar 2010
I don't think there's enough TV shows named after shapes. Perhaps given the reception 1980's ferry-bound soap Triangle received programmers have been reluctant to commission Rhombus or Parallelogram. All of which is a shame, since there's something satisfying about sitting down to watch a programme so simple minded that it needs to be named after a 2-dimensional geometrical entity.
Consider the TV listings:
7.30pm - Ellipse: episode 9. Dave has finally found out who has stolen his teeth and is on the war path. Meanwhile Damien confronts Dierdre about the death of Daniel and a mysterious bump on Doris' head leads to a surprising revelation.
8.00pm - Trapezium: Reality show following the exploits of a circus troops in Rome.
8.30pm - Arbelos: David Bellamy presents a conservation show about arresting the decline of forest habits in the British Isles while making strange hooting noises into the hollow carcass of a dried mouse.
9.00pm - FILM: Circle of Friends
10.30pm - Hexadecagon: episode 3. Sally becomes convinced that a trio of witches is repeatedly influencing a card game at the local Kebab house. Samuel witness a horrific accident with a pencil sharpener and a careless bean and Stewart really wishes he hadn't poked his nose into someone else's cat.
11:15pm - Triquetra: A bunch of English people with distant Irish ancestry are sent to live in Wexford to see how long it takes for their endless assertions of Irishness to get them beaten up.
12:00 - Rectangle: (new series) series following a diving rescue team as they seek to help trapped divers escape from submerged ships. Tonight, Gordon helps a newly wed couple escape from the remains of the SS Boobleflap after the groom gets his flipper caught in a towel rail while Gary get sexually assaulted by a potato cod.
I don't think there's enough TV shows named after shapes. Perhaps given the reception 1980's ferry-bound soap Triangle received programmers have been reluctant to commission Rhombus or Parallelogram. All of which is a shame, since there's something satisfying about sitting down to watch a programme so simple minded that it needs to be named after a 2-dimensional geometrical entity.
Consider the TV listings:
7.30pm - Ellipse: episode 9. Dave has finally found out who has stolen his teeth and is on the war path. Meanwhile Damien confronts Dierdre about the death of Daniel and a mysterious bump on Doris' head leads to a surprising revelation.
8.00pm - Trapezium: Reality show following the exploits of a circus troops in Rome.
8.30pm - Arbelos: David Bellamy presents a conservation show about arresting the decline of forest habits in the British Isles while making strange hooting noises into the hollow carcass of a dried mouse.
9.00pm - FILM: Circle of Friends
10.30pm - Hexadecagon: episode 3. Sally becomes convinced that a trio of witches is repeatedly influencing a card game at the local Kebab house. Samuel witness a horrific accident with a pencil sharpener and a careless bean and Stewart really wishes he hadn't poked his nose into someone else's cat.
11:15pm - Triquetra: A bunch of English people with distant Irish ancestry are sent to live in Wexford to see how long it takes for their endless assertions of Irishness to get them beaten up.
12:00 - Rectangle: (new series) series following a diving rescue team as they seek to help trapped divers escape from submerged ships. Tonight, Gordon helps a newly wed couple escape from the remains of the SS Boobleflap after the groom gets his flipper caught in a towel rail while Gary get sexually assaulted by a potato cod.
Hideout
15 Mar 2010
Apart from wanting to escape from my PRINCE2 course (started today) , I don't have that much need for a hideout. Maybe I will if I write the wrong thing in this blog one day and my friends come after my with pitch forks and flaming torches. I'll just have to be careful.
I wonder whether it is a programmed survival instinct for kids to like hideouts. I used to love them. There'd be dens in the gardens, in the field at the back of the house (not so much in the main road at the front of the house - just saying that in case you imagine some sort of rural idyll), in bits of waste ground. Hideouts were good. Whether this would, in times past, have saved me from the ravening jaws of some sort of slavering prehistoric beast I'm not sure. Probably not, since I was quite good at drawing attention to myself by playing with matches (though again, would I have had these in 30,000BC? What's next:"I would have been discovered by a Cave Lion because of the bleeps from my Nintendo"? Might be time to think these statements through a little more, or we'll be back on slip on shoes for peasants again.)
Here's a tip. If you're going to build a den under a hedge in a ditch on the edge of the field, and you're going to use straw from the field to turn the hedge into something like a roof and walls, and if you're doing this on a beautiful 1970s summer day when everything is about as dry as it can be with actually being sand, it's probably not the best time to get the match box out.
Just a thought.
I gave myself plenty of time to get to my course this morning, by the way. Or so I thought. My watch had stopped, meaning I had to run all the way to the course. Bugger.
Apart from wanting to escape from my PRINCE2 course (started today) , I don't have that much need for a hideout. Maybe I will if I write the wrong thing in this blog one day and my friends come after my with pitch forks and flaming torches. I'll just have to be careful.
I wonder whether it is a programmed survival instinct for kids to like hideouts. I used to love them. There'd be dens in the gardens, in the field at the back of the house (not so much in the main road at the front of the house - just saying that in case you imagine some sort of rural idyll), in bits of waste ground. Hideouts were good. Whether this would, in times past, have saved me from the ravening jaws of some sort of slavering prehistoric beast I'm not sure. Probably not, since I was quite good at drawing attention to myself by playing with matches (though again, would I have had these in 30,000BC? What's next:"I would have been discovered by a Cave Lion because of the bleeps from my Nintendo"? Might be time to think these statements through a little more, or we'll be back on slip on shoes for peasants again.)
Here's a tip. If you're going to build a den under a hedge in a ditch on the edge of the field, and you're going to use straw from the field to turn the hedge into something like a roof and walls, and if you're doing this on a beautiful 1970s summer day when everything is about as dry as it can be with actually being sand, it's probably not the best time to get the match box out.
Just a thought.
I gave myself plenty of time to get to my course this morning, by the way. Or so I thought. My watch had stopped, meaning I had to run all the way to the course. Bugger.
Pi
14 Mar 2010
Nearly the right date for this one to show up.
An American friend wished me Happy Pie Day yesterday. Naturally I completely failed to understand and asked (understandably, given our colonial cousin's obsession with all things pastry-cased) " You have a pie day?"
"Of course! So do you!" was the reply, pointing out that the date was 3.14
To her credit she remembered that we look at things backwards (we've never understood the recent fuss about the 9th November, for instance: this was why the British bombers very thoughtfully chose 07/07 as the date of their attack so that the date could be universally applied without confusion).
Of course, in Britain we could never *have* a Pi day. We don't have enough months. Of course, since we've got own date system, why can;t we have our own months. We used a different calendar to the rest of Europe until 1752, so given we're about to ruled by the Conservative Party - whose approach to Europe is a bit like a Victorian Lady's approach to fellatio, we could just go back to being contrary and have our own. You'd have to have months of 26 days to fit in a Pi day, but that would mean more pay days for me, so 'yay'.
There seem to be a suspicious number of maths jokes (no pun intended) about at the moment. A friend of mine recently asked "There are only 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't." This was on the back of practically a full comedy routine by a drunken Bristol Liberal Democrat in a pub who seemed to know a joke about every field of mathematics, like Bertrand Russell crossed with Bernard Manning and Russell Brand.
Fortunately I can't remember any of them. Relieved, aren't you?
Nearly the right date for this one to show up.
An American friend wished me Happy Pie Day yesterday. Naturally I completely failed to understand and asked (understandably, given our colonial cousin's obsession with all things pastry-cased) " You have a pie day?"
"Of course! So do you!" was the reply, pointing out that the date was 3.14
To her credit she remembered that we look at things backwards (we've never understood the recent fuss about the 9th November, for instance: this was why the British bombers very thoughtfully chose 07/07 as the date of their attack so that the date could be universally applied without confusion).
Of course, in Britain we could never *have* a Pi day. We don't have enough months. Of course, since we've got own date system, why can;t we have our own months. We used a different calendar to the rest of Europe until 1752, so given we're about to ruled by the Conservative Party - whose approach to Europe is a bit like a Victorian Lady's approach to fellatio, we could just go back to being contrary and have our own. You'd have to have months of 26 days to fit in a Pi day, but that would mean more pay days for me, so 'yay'.
There seem to be a suspicious number of maths jokes (no pun intended) about at the moment. A friend of mine recently asked "There are only 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't." This was on the back of practically a full comedy routine by a drunken Bristol Liberal Democrat in a pub who seemed to know a joke about every field of mathematics, like Bertrand Russell crossed with Bernard Manning and Russell Brand.
Fortunately I can't remember any of them. Relieved, aren't you?
Terror
13 Mar 2010
I admit. I'm terrified. I'm chewing my fingernails. I'm avoiding all thought of next week, because when I do I'm coming out in a cold sweat and I find myself trying feverishly do what I was supposed to do before it all starts, motivated finally by an inchoate but growing sense of utter helplessness.
I'm being sent on a training course. All week.
Now, normally this would be grounds for some sort of celebration, possibly involving cheese and pineapples on sticks. In this case the cocktail sticks would be best employed being stuck in my eyes. The course I'm being sent on is called PRINCE2 - the least convincing acronym since SPECTRE. It's all about project management and seems to consist of many documents and procedures of widely differing application but with all essentially the same name apart from the two or three letters. 87% of all definitions begin with the word "Project". The remaining 13% begin with the word Product. It would be easier to learn Sindarin. And there are exams. I haven't done exams since 1993. Apart from a half-hearted attempt to join the Inland Revenue in 1998, but I'm not sure that counts (because I certainly can't, hence my failure perhaps).
So forget fear of disease, terrorists, Nick Griffin, psycho killer badgers or a Tory Government; this is what's keeping me up at night.
That, and accidentally rolling over on to my iPod as it manages my sleep patterns and causing it to vibrate in protest. Oops.
I admit. I'm terrified. I'm chewing my fingernails. I'm avoiding all thought of next week, because when I do I'm coming out in a cold sweat and I find myself trying feverishly do what I was supposed to do before it all starts, motivated finally by an inchoate but growing sense of utter helplessness.
I'm being sent on a training course. All week.
Now, normally this would be grounds for some sort of celebration, possibly involving cheese and pineapples on sticks. In this case the cocktail sticks would be best employed being stuck in my eyes. The course I'm being sent on is called PRINCE2 - the least convincing acronym since SPECTRE. It's all about project management and seems to consist of many documents and procedures of widely differing application but with all essentially the same name apart from the two or three letters. 87% of all definitions begin with the word "Project". The remaining 13% begin with the word Product. It would be easier to learn Sindarin. And there are exams. I haven't done exams since 1993. Apart from a half-hearted attempt to join the Inland Revenue in 1998, but I'm not sure that counts (because I certainly can't, hence my failure perhaps).
So forget fear of disease, terrorists, Nick Griffin, psycho killer badgers or a Tory Government; this is what's keeping me up at night.
That, and accidentally rolling over on to my iPod as it manages my sleep patterns and causing it to vibrate in protest. Oops.
Fatuousness
12 Mar 2010
This could possibly be the title of the whole blog series.
This could possibly be the title of the whole blog series.
Many apologies, since I realise that quite a few of these entries will, in fact, be utterly fatuous. There's a quality control issue in churning out a blog a day based on a random word that you don't really know until the day – it's a bit like 24-hour rolling news – no, not utter shit, just very difficult to do well all the time.
OK, not like rolling 24-hour news then.
I got turned down for a part the other day. I'd auditioned for the part of Paul in a production of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park. It's a good part. Very funny. Been ages since anyone has given me a funny role. When the Director rang me to let me down, she attempted to make me feel better.
“There was a lot of competition,” she said. Well, fair enough then, I thought. But she went on. “I saw eight people for the part of Corrie.”
Right. And if I'd stuck on a dress and a falsetto that would have been relevant. Nice to know I don't have a monopoly on fatuousness.
Advert
10 Mar 2010
I haven't watched many adverts lately.
Now, this isn't one of those North London “I don't watch TV anymore” rants. It's true that I don't come home and turn on the TV the way I used to – but that's not a boast, since what I do is come home and log into Facebook, which is just as much of a soul sucker as the goggle box ever was. But any TV I do watch was probably recorded on Sky+, or was bought on DVD, or is a BBC programme anyway.
Or – and this is important – it was between overs on the cricket and completely failed to register on my brain.
I've been watching cricket on Sky for a few years now, and two things bother me:
Why do I have to watch adverts on a subscriptions channel?
Do the advertisers realise that no one takes any notice of the adverts anyway?
It's not that I don't appreciate the chance to learn more about stair-lifts (and the physical decay of June Whitfield), Skodas and “no win no fee” lawyers, it's just that this particular line-up smacks of desperation and is admitting that no one is watching. So if they're only on because no-one watching, I'd like to hook my skateboard onto the back of this particular self-fulfilling prophecy and ride it round the block.
As for adverts on subscription TV? They're the equivalent of brightly coloured advertising on “Black” Cabs, a recent phenomenon that is starting to have unintended consequences (like everything else). I recently observed a cab pull up at the side of Bedford Square to pick up pre-booked fare. The woman, of advanced middle-age years, appeared at the office door and made it several steps towards the road before she froze. The taxi driver was standing holding the passenger door open with an eager, helpful smile. But she didn't move.
“I'm not getting in that!” she declared, indicating the cab.
The Cabbie looked with surprise at his pride and joy. “What's wrong with it? It's just been MOT'd. Safe as houses.”
“I am not,” she repeated firmly. “Getting in anything that looks like that.”
The Cabbie was forced to take another look. After much discussion, he got back in his cab and drove away, hopefully on the blower to one of his colleagues to arrange alternative transport for his awkward customer.
And why was she awkward? His cab was entirely covered with the pouting visages of “Spearmint Rhino” girls, and the woman had understandably taken a stance of either ethics or comfort (possibly both) and decided she'd rather travel with someone else. It's all very well spotting some available advertising real estate, but if it interferes with your core business it's really not worth it. I might as well include an ad that reads
halfway through the blog (besides, you know it's true).
So I haven't seen any adverts lately. Except on the sides of buses, where they seem to either advertise a) God or b) movies that came and went six months ago.
To be fair they sometimes advertise a lack of God, but popular atheism seems to have come and gone some months ago as well. Nearly time for the hastily arranged sequel, like some sort of Theological variant on the Moonlight saga (Look! Atheism sparkles in full sunlight!). I think they should include a photo and quote of Alan Davies as the Face of Atheism 2010, since I'd like to see whether Church attendances actually rise.
Perhaps the slightly disconcerting habit of advertising deities on the omnibus is part of a subtle TfL plan to reduce crime. There must – somewhere – be some statistics to show whether there are quite as many stabbings, assaults, bouts of projectile vomiting and acts of exposure on buses that have the word “Jesus” written on the outside. I think we should be told.
Preciosity
9 Mar 2010
People change. Everyone knows that. And if they don't, then they'll probably change and grasp it eventually. Because people change.
People change. Everyone knows that. And if they don't, then they'll probably change and grasp it eventually. Because people change.
Everyone knows that.
People have a bad habit of changing when you least expect it, but most of the time that's your fault. All the signs are there. Your boyfriend suddenly becomes a selfish wanker only interested in drinking with his mates and flirting with your friends? Are you sure this an overnight change, or have you only just taken off the metaphorical airline issue eye mask and started to catch up with the horror movie you've been sleeping through? You marry a girl and she turns into a psycho-bitch from Hades? The signs were there, buster, especially when she tortured your Guinea pig to death with a trowel.
But sometimes they really are overnight. When I left university I moved in with a friend I'd met there. For two years everything was just fine – mostly because we were both chaotic slobs and it didn't matter that the flat resembled an apocalyptic landscape where the only species that survived was wasps. Then - literally one day -, for reasons that still escape me, he had a major personality change and suddenly become the most fastidious, tidy minded human being on the planet. Even now his delightful flat consists entirely of cupboards where he can hide any loose items that might otherwise distract from the clean lines of his abode.
Back at flatshare central, this immediately became a source of tension, since I was – and basically still am, constantly the epicentre of an earthquake of dishevelment. It was never going to work out. When a man is tired of Weetabix crumbs entirely covering the kitchen floor, he is tired of Speedy.
I'm sure I will change overnight one day. Please. Please. I can't stand me any longer!
Heretofore
7 Mar 2010
When I was at school, History class often used to rely on a technique known as empathy. This was an attempt by teachers to get teenagers - who were pretty bad at empathising with each other, let alone people who’d lived in a different century – to imagine that they were
a. A sailor in the Napoleonic Wars
b. A cloth maker in medieval York
c. A pre-colonisation Australian aborigine
d. The Duke of Gloucester
e. A potato experiencing Elizabethan England
f. Samuel Johnson’s lip
It’s a lovely idea in principle, but I’ve never decided whether trying to get society’s least empathetic age group to engage in putting themselves inside the heads of others is a noble and potentially life-changing tactic that will open their minds and establish a Utopia of people who can think themselves into the lives of people and appreciate their motivations, needs and taste in socks, or about as much use as giving a book of brain teasers to a jellyfish.
I quite enjoyed it. I liked writing stories. At age 13 I overreacted to the specification of “empathising” with a young Koori on walkabout, and ended up writing a 25 page story about inter-tribe warfare in the Australian desert. This got me a “see me”. So the next time, when I was supposed to be a 14th century peasant, I merely wrote a list of all the things that would have made me miserable, ending with:
“They also didn’t have slip-on shoes”.
See? Empathy coming out of my arse, mate.
Distaff
6 Mar 2010
Sometimes this random word thing can lead you close to hot water. As does this one.
Women. Women women women. Womeny women. Hmmm.
Here are some things to get me into trouble, or avoid it, depending on how you read it.
- · Some of my best friends are women.
- · That’s what you’re supposed to say when you’re embarrassed and floundering, isn’t it?
- · So are some of my worst enemies, but we won’t get into that.
- · I am extremely comfortable with allowing women to read “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”
- · They shouldn’t read anything by Jeffrey Archer, but then neither should men.
- · I always got my girlfriend to do all the map reading and navigating when I drove and she was much better at it than I was.
- · I can only imagine women get easier to interact with as you get older. If you are a 21 year old man and your main experience of girls is seeing them grouped together in close-knit shrieking masses on a Friday night, I think you’re probably well within your rights to be intimidated.
- · I have a senior colleague renowned for not being able to deal with women crying in his office. He should probably get over this, since my ‘intel’ tells me they’ve sussed this and are therefore more likely to do it. Men often say that “crying is cheating”, but that’s because they’re too lazy to read the rules properly.
- · One third of women in London think that another woman ‘dresses provocatively’ they should share the blame of being raped.
- · In a similar poll they agreed that Belgium was “asking for it” in 1940.
- · As this shows, women are just as likely to be dangerously insane or stupid as a man, but seem to be better at hiding it.
- · More women like “The Lord of the Rings” than you could possibly imagine.
- · If I had been a girl, I would have been called “Helen”. Until I changed my name to “Speedette”, anyway, like some sort of Smurf.
- · The full-time gender pay-gap is still over 12%. David Cameron might want to stop dicking about with tax-breaks for married couples and do something about this.
Vagracy
5 Mar 2010
It’s not a very nice word and I would hazard a guess that most homeless people would rather not be associated with it, even though it just comes from the Middle English for “to wander”, which actually sounds quite pleasant. Here I am, vagranting about in the hills. La la la.
On a slight tangent, I will admit to not buying the Big Issue anymore. I bought it religiously for several years, even after it went up to a pound*. But two things happened. Firstly, I realised that I wasn’t reading it anymore, simply because it seemed (to me) to be filled with absolute shit. I thought about this. The big draw card of buying the Big Issue is that the vendors are working not begging – its empowerment and less patronising than charitable giving, or something. But surely this becomes bollocks if the only reason you are buying their newspaper is because they’re homeless? It’s a great way of raising awareness, but ethically there are other perfectly good ways of making a contribution, so I set up a direct debit to Shelter instead.
I still felt bad though. It’s not the vendors’ fault that John Bird knows as much about making an interesting magazine as a local council. Then, in the dying days of my purchasing habit, I encountered an increasing number (though still a minority) of sarky-sellers. You must know them.
Them: Big Issue, sir?
You: No thank you.
Them: (in tones of deep sarcasm) Well, have a lovely day, sir.
Well, I thought. They don’t know that I have one in my bag. Maybe I should mention it?
Them: Big Issue, sir?
You: No thank you, already got one.
Them: (derisive snort)
Then I didn’t feel so bad. Life’s too bleedin' short. There are hundreds of Big Issue vendors in London, so the odds are that many of the people who say “no thank you” are doing it because they already own the edition.
Perhaps they should give out stickers or something?
.. ..
* not a cheapskate thing – I just used to love a vendor who chanted “Buy the Big issue, 80p; Cos if you don’t I’ll get no tea”. ....
Belief
4 Mar 2010
I tread carefully around belief. I’m a cynical agnostic, if only because it allows me to disengage entirely from the debate until people start being too damn certain about stuff, and then I sneer at them.
I tread carefully around belief. I’m a cynical agnostic, if only because it allows me to disengage entirely from the debate until people start being too damn certain about stuff, and then I sneer at them.
But mostly I’m careful because my Mum’s a church Deacon and I don't want to either offend her or set her off on a small crusade. Now, she’s good people, to the extent that I get very uncomfortable with Alan Davies’ mocking on QI (if you’re a smug, unfunny former Keynes college student, don’t target the mysteries of time and space as your main target), but the flip side of this is that even “good people” get fucking scary on the subject of belief.
I was trying to debate the Israel-Palestinian problems with my Mum a few years ago. She’s a liberal, who scorns the occasional Daily Mail reading tendencies of her Congregation. She votes Labour – though not with the same tribal fervour as my Dad did until finally got sick of Tony – and if she may not campaign in favour of Gay marriage, I’ve certainly never heard her say anything against it either (or maybe she just doesn’t say it in front of me).
Given this general left-leaning tolerance, when I started the conversation I was unprepared for her position. The Israelis were in the right! Not for any issues of international law. But because God gave them Israel.
Now, I’ve not seen the lease that God signed with the Israelis, and I’m not a theologian, but it strikes me as dangerous territory to start saying that you can do what you like because God told you to. That way lies 9/11 and the entire Mormon faith. But the only way I could dissuade her from the frankly preposterous view was to get a copy of the bible and an atlas and track the biblical position of Israel.
The trouble is, it’s in the wrong place. Israel is too far to the south. This conversation was a while ago, so I can’t remember exactly where it should be, but basically the biblical boundaries stretch well into Lebanon and – I think- parts of Syria.
So the Palestinians aren’t getting their arses kicked because God gave an exact map reference, they’re being spanked because Israel doesn’t fancy its chances of hanging onto the territory to the north. Israel was in such the wrong place that I actually convinced my mother to stop using biblical justifications for her support for Israel.
That was a success. Less so was my next attempt at preaching religious tolerance. “Mum”, I said rather tritely. “The thing is, that people who believe in other Gods are as totally convinced in their faith as you are in yours.”
“Yes,” she agreed, nodding sagely. “But they’re wrong and I’m right”.
Insensible
3 Mar 2010
This is what I am at the moment. I didn’t sleep very well last night, but at least I knew I wasn’t sleeping very well. Being awake will do that to you. But now I have discovered a new and terrifying experience – knowing that I haven’t slept well even if I feel fine.
Technology is to blame of course – or at least my insistence on using it. You may have heard of an iPod/iPhone app called “Sleep Cycle”. It’s quite remarkable. It’s an intelligent alarm clock, and the basic principle is that – using the touch & iPhone’s motion detecting capabilities (you know, the one’s that turn the screen on its side when you’re trying to surf the internet in bed and which skip your songs if you forget to turn of “Shake to shuffle” before you go running) – the app will monitor your sleep by attaching certain physical movements to a phase of sleep (or almost sleep) from a) awake through b) dreaming and down to c) deep sleep (the holy grail).
When you get within a certain distance of your chosen wake up time, the app will respond to the sensors suggesting that you are in a light sleep phase, and gently waken you with a mellow tune. The idea is that if you wake from light sleep, you feel more refreshed than if you are unluckily pulled from the middle of deep sleep by your non-flexible old fashioned alarm clock.
It seems to work. Not only that but if often buys you an extra 20 minutes or even half an hour, since it’s obviously designed to play safe and nudge you awake *before* your alarm time and not afterwards.
But there is a downside. It has the nifty ability to turn the results of its monitoring into a wee graph. So each morning, after you are synthed awake by Jean Michael Jarre’s mellow nephew, it shows you exactly how well you slept. And bugger me if that isn’t one of the most depressing things I’ve ever seen.
The first night was full of the delightful dips of deep sleep. The fact that I knew that made me feel as restful as if I spent a week on a desert island being fed grapes by a young Angela Rippon (who would keep me up to date with the news at the same time).
Well. Hurrah.
The next night, I didn’t sleep so well. My graph representing a rather sad curve of “awake” with two narrow spikes of deep sleep, evenly spaced. It looked a bit like a vampire’s smile.
Not so good. But I knew I hadn’t slept well. It was a couple of weeks later that depressed me.
I awoke, a little tired but happy enough. I turned off Synth Man and lazily flipped to the statistics chart.
The chart looked like The Remarkables in New Zealand. And endless jaggedy progression of really not being properly asleep, marching its way across my night.
As soon as I saw it, I felt as exhausted as if I had climbed that range myself. Was I tired because I didn’t sleep well? Or was I tired because I knew – thanks to external factors – that I hadn’t slept well.
I don’t know. But I’d like someone to sneak into my room and re-programme the phone so that it tells me that I’ve had 8 hours of deep sleep, even if I know that I’ve gone to bed at 2am and had to get up at 5 to get a train to Bratislava. It would be nice.
Astral
2 Mar 2010
Facebook is throwing up a rather sad statistic at the moment. A worrying number of my friends appear to be doing nothing except checking their horoscopes. One page I visited there were 20 entries for Gemini and a wall post about baby sitters. It was one of the most depressing pages I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen mine.
For the purposes of research I signed up to the Astrology application. I did it on my spare account (don’t ask) and there was absolutely no way I could load the application at all. It kept trying to direct me to “flirt with singles”, which – whilst a good idea in principle – I suspect would not have happened in the way that the advertising suggested. I was hoping to find out what absolute arse they were suggesting would happen to me today, but in the end the closest I got was a premonition that if I didn’t give up, my day would consist of screaming at my computer while desperately trying to stop it showing a silhouette of two singles “flirting” rather athletically on my screen as my work colleagues wandered by and thought “what’s he up to?”
So I’ve written my own.
Taurus: Beware human beings. They will cause you pain. Avoid too much self-reflection to avoid being sucked inside yourself and creating a logical paradox that leads to the end of all life in the universe. Though you probably think this would be a good thing.
Compatibility: Quorn
Mood: Fucked off
Lucky Animal: gerbils
Lucky historical architectural style: Georgian
Lucky type of salad: Baby spinach
Thursday, 25 March 2010
Wiretap
1 Mar 2010
It is sooo tempting to use this word as an excuse to go on at great length about how much I love The Wire. I’m not going to do that. Nor am I going to talk about a friend of mine who has accused me of “stealing her life” by lending her the DVD Box Sets. I am actually a soul-sucking fiend, but it’s not my fault in this case, guv.
Like Denethor’s palantir, it’s very hard to make this word look at anything else, but it did eventually remind me of something other than Jimmy McNulty.
Someone was asking – in a polite, rant free way – if I believed they could ever vote Labour again because of the proposed law blocking internet access to anyone accused of downloading illegal material. And despite my general position, I thought it quite a good question.
I’ve had similar thoughts. New Labour – despite huge advances in some kinds of “no choice” social liberalism (people are gay, people are women, people are black - it’s just the way it is) – have been depressingly bound by Daily Mail style moralism or paranoid overreaction when it comes to anything else (you chose drugs, you bad boy, off to jail you go; well, you did have to option *not* to take a photograph of that building, give me that camera; ooh, you’re downloading an illegal film? We’ll shoot your dog).
This upsets me. I don’t like this shit. It’s lowest common-denominator, run-away from the press stuff. There was a brilliant short film on Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe a couple of weeks ago that alluded to the reforming zeal of Roy Jenkins, (Newswipe) that looked at how we got to the stage where everyone jumps to the tune of the press – watch it, it’s sobering.
But we have 2.5 party politics in the UK, and until we have a more responsive electoral system (i.e. one in which you can pretend that you’re voting for a party that matches more of your personal inclinations, until they win and get into bed with the Bugger Animals to Death on Tuesdays Party and you kill yourself in despair* ) we have to choose from a menu of shit. If we ruled out voting for parties because of one or two policies we didn’t like, we’d be utterly disenfranchised.
So the fact that New Labour want to wiretap me just to make sure I’m not saying anything mean about Ed Milliband’s hair has to be put in a broader context. For example (to scratch the surface):
| Labour Cons (LC) | Con Cons (CC) | (LC) John Hutton looks like Gollum | (CC) Michael Gove looks like Smeagol | (LC) They want to watch you to make sure you don’t want to kill everyone | (CC) They haven’t promised to stop watching you, and they’ll probably have one hand down their pants while they do | (LC) Labour have barely changed the debate on drugs in 13 years, but did give us 24 drinking. | (CC) The Tories think 24 hour drinking is a terrible evil, but won’t promise to reverse it because they know we don’t. Until we’re not looking. | (LC) Labour gave Murdoch free reign to dominate pay-TV and newspapers. | (CC) The Tories will destroy the BBC so that Rupert Murdoch can become 7% richer and our TV and radio will go to shit. | (LC) Labour fucked the economy by giving the bankers too much freedom so that they could use the money to fund public services | (CC) The Tories *are* the bankers and would have used the money to make themselves richer | (LC) The 10p Tax debacle | (CC) Ashcroft |
Put like that, you just want to stick your head under a pillow and hope that someone quietly shoots you through it.
That’s plenty of reason not to vote for either of them. But if I actually knew what the 0.5 Party Liberal Democrats’ policies were yet I’m pretty sure I could list six reasons why they couldn’t be stomached either. And of course you *can* vote for someone else. But the problem is that you won’t *get* anyone else, so I fear that by voting for someone else you might as well draw a rude picture on your ballot paper and write “fuck you all” in green marker pen. It will send a message, but no-one will take it very seriously.
If, unlike me, you’re not a tribal voter, I can only suggest one thing. Get all the manifestos before the election. Actually read them. Select what you think are the 40 most prominent policies. Grade them from -3 to +3 on what you think of each one. Add up the scores. Don’t score on personalities. Do factor into your scoring whether you trust the parties to deliver each manifesto pledge. Vote for the winner.
See what happens.
Then pick the policy you hated most from either party, and join a pressure group to oppose it.
Schizoid
27 Feb 2010
Go away. You shouldn't be looking at my blog anyway. I don't care if you are my readers. These are my thoughts, not yours.
Go away. You shouldn't be looking at my blog anyway. I don't care if you are my readers. These are my thoughts, not yours.
No, there's nothing schizoid about me, as I sit here on my own typing away expressing my lack of enjoyment about anything that happens to me. Nothing to see here. Keep moving.
Bopped
26 Feb 2010
Well, that was a happy word coincidence since tonight I did a smidge of bopping. I'm a self-conscious dancer though, so I never actually try to move to any beat until I am so inebriated that the chances of my brain being able to pick up and respond to a rhythm are a little slender. So I didn't do very much of that, though one inebriated fellow bopper did choose to dance in a way that had I felt less charitable could have involved the police, or at the very least a lawsuit. Beware strong drink.
The best thing about this particular venue, however, was the presence of Rockaoke, a singer-less band that specialise in providing full on pop-rock backing in order for random vocalists to experience “live karaoke”.
A few years ago a friend from work was supplying the same service for our annual Christmas party. This had gone so well that I suggested to him the potential for turning the skill into a money-making venture. “Maybe”, he said. “But I wouldn't enjoy it.”
After being invited along to Rockaoke, I forwarded him a link to their promotional site, thinking to remind him of that long-distant conversation.
“That's a good idea,” he said.
Oh well. At least I got to sing Brown Eyed Girl yet again. A song which has massive resonance in my life, or would if any women I'd been out with had actually had brown eyes. I'm still looking, obviously.
Food
25 Feb 2010
I have a strange relationship with food. Sometimes I just forget to eat it.
I have a strange relationship with food. Sometimes I just forget to eat it.
Now, I am aware that my body is supposed to have certain safeguards to prevent this happening. Hunger being the obvious one; I'm not sure whether suddenly finding that your legs have turned to jelly making you fall down in the street and accidentally crush a passing dog counts as a safeguard. Probably not.
At this point I should probably have dinner. But what the hell – I'm still alive, why should I eat? Waste of time.
This doesn't mean I don't *like* food. I think I resent its neediness. One of things my mum always said was that if there were leftovers in the fridge they "needed eating up". Food just hangs about the place and expects you to do its bidding, like a pretty blonde with fake breasts hanging around at the Orange Tree in Barnet waiting for a passing footballer. Well, I've had enough of dancing to your tune, food.
So, should you ever observe the contents of my fridge and note the disgusting, suppurating mess evolving into the Conservative front-bench at the back of the second shelf, it's not me being a slob, it's a political statement against oppression. Which smells a bit.
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
Sunshine
23 Feb 2010
“You might call it ultra-violet radiation; it's only sunlight.” Lloyd Cole.
“You might call it ultra-violet radiation; it's only sunlight.” Lloyd Cole.
I'm being taunted by this one. It's amazing how long ago a visit to Australia can seem only about six weeks after leaving, but even though I missed all the snow (with perfect timing: there were just a few attempts by Gatwick staff to blend Inuit and Aztec cultures by building little pyramids of snow all over the place when I landed) it still seems as though Phil the Groundhog definitely saw a shadow.
It'll be March soon, and there's half a chance that Spring will actually happen, though I'm starting to look out for signs of fauns and talking wolf police, because this cold spell is beginning to worry me. I think Tilda Swinton may be involved somewhere.
But should I be looking forward to sunshine? Isn't it just going to kill me? Perhaps rather than over-exposed to the sun I've just been overexposed to Australia, where making up scary adverts about sun damage is one of the major employers and a powerful contributor towards their GDP (the trams in Melbourne carry warnings about spending even 10 mins in the sun leading to massively increased risk of your skin turning into something that looks a bit like the surface of an overcooked lasagne and killing you. Damn, I'm stuck on a Melbourne street with no shade and I have to be somewhere more than 10 minutes away! I'm terrified, what can I do? I know! I'll get a tram! Kerching!). The result has been over the last few years that I'm so pale I regularly get mistaken for Gollum.
However, I'm also told that if I don't get enough sunlight, my bones will break and I'll die of prostate cancer. Yay! This is because Vitamin D (again apparently, I'm not medical man) helps protect against prostate cancer and helps the absorption of calcium, and can only be generated in enough quantities to do this by regular and fairly prolonged exposure to the same yellow balminess that's going to cause Doctors to flay you alive for your own protection.
Confused? Bloody hell. Winter. Isn't it lovely?
Littoral
22 Feb 2010
There's a narrow margin between the right and wrong decision. I'm sure everyone knows that. Do you have kids, or not have kids? Seems like an easy choice until you think “yes” and spend your whole life mopping after a sullen ball of unwashed hair that eventually gets arrested for sexually assaulting the neighbours' budgie.
An easier choice, in theory, is “shall I get a taxi to work because I'm embarrassingly late”. It should be easy. But good risk management suggests that there are so many things that could go wrong.
Your driver could be the only driver that passes through Islington who doesn't know to avoid Angel.
This being the case, he may be the only driver anywhere who thinks it is sensible to then take a shortcut that takes you full three miles out of your way.
By avoiding roadworks in Angel, you may encounter six other sets of roadworks not on the obvious route.
This could all cost you a full 15 times more than the bus.
It may take you longer than the bus.
You will end up late, poor and thoroughly pissed off.
Decisions. They're bastards. I've always wondered about decisive people. Obviously they can't be right all the time, or they'd all be God. But they're still decisive. Is this because they just don't care about being wrong?
See, I'm sure I could do that. I'm just not entirely sure that it's a good thing. There aren't many walks of life where not giving a fuck is considered a positive character trait. But I'm determined to try it.
Or at least, I think I am.
Feel
21 Feb 2010
I’m a soft, marshmallow creature. No, I am. I am weirdly intimidated by the oddest things.
Not, I must stress, but that many. I am not scared of cabbages. I do not feel a frission of fear from fromage. I’m coul with clowns. A friend of mine vouchsafed yesterday that she is physically sick if, when jogging, someone comes and runs behind her shoulder. That’s quite an unusually strong reaction.
I used to be scared of wasps, but that was before I lived for 10 years in a flat infested with the stripy bastards. They used to pop out of the air vents every morning and fly around your face, or wander happily around the kitchen floor as you wandered in bleary and barefoot looking for the weetabix. It’s amazing how you can go from spotting one on your curtain rail and being rooted to the spot in fear, to chasing them round with a huge rolled up newspaper screaming “die muthas!*” It must be a general principle that a lot of things aren’t quite as terrifying as they first appear.
Except telephones. Yikes.
So it was that I went to a stadium gig on Saturday. I’ve never been to one before. The biggest crowd I’ve been in was Glastonbury, the claustrophobia of which is nicely counterbalanced by the open sky (or as open as a leaden, rainy murk can be). There were the Nuremburg Rallies, but I suspect that was an hallucination brought on by watching one of David Cameron’s speeches. But yesterday I trooped off to the O2 to watch Depeche Mode. I was a little terrified.
There’s something a little pathetic about a Londoner struggling with crowds but I only really notice the day-to-day crowds of milling tourists, commuters and other meandering psychopaths when I’ve been out of the country for a while. At such points I oscillate alarmingly between wanting to run and hide and being tempted to swing my bag around like a mace** and try and destroy them head first like something out of a zombie film. Of course, I choose the middle way, which is to mutter constantly about how stupid everyone is as I walk around and occasionally think about stepping on the back of someone’s foot if they’re being really annoying but never actually do it.
I had no idea what kind of ticket I had. This was because it wasn’t really my ticket. It had been bought for a friend of a friend, but when the original gig date was cancelled because of Dave Gahan’s ill health, her pregnancy became a more significant factor than it would have been, so she cried off (or her baby did for her). It was then offered to Jude the Obscure, but he was busy polishing some masonry in an analogous south west regional capital and taking his children down off the backs of doors, so it was offered to Moby Dick, who was well up for it, except he had a bearded lunatic stuck to his side and therefore would have needed an extra ticket. So they offered it to me.
It turns out I had a seat. No moshing, jostling or getting elbows in my face. Just a good view, some music and a nice sit down. Fuck, I’m old. Though people older than me were doing some very disturbing things in the aisles. At one point Gahan’s ability to make 50,000 perform embarrassing bodily movement in near synchrony made him seem like Billy Graham in a sparkly waistcoat. One man had clearly lost his friends, and kept wandering up and down the stairs. But he was enjoying the music so much that every few seconds he had to break into a happy jig on a step. A woman in front of me pre-empted Dave’s demand that everyone start waving their arms from side to side like the little blue aliens in the “I’m Blue” video by a good three minutes, making her look like some sort of deranged Aunt following an exercise regime on her iPod whilst everyone else is watching opera. Everyone*** eventually joined in though, so no doubt she walked out of the stadium feeling like a cutting -edge trend-setter, rather than just a mother of nine having a nervous breakdown.
To put aside cynicism for a tiny second, it was truly great. From the opening of I Feel You to the rocked up version of Personal Jesus, I had a great time. Jude and Moby, tough shit.
S.
* I'm all for wasp rights, but they leave them outside the window when they break into my flat.
** is it a mace? is it a morning star? Whoever tells me the answer has played too much D&D
*** except me of course. You're not surprised, admit it.Saturday, 20 March 2010
Viva
20 Feb 2010
I'm supposed to have some long lasting colour on my hair. Unfortunately, heaven only knows what will happen. Not only is my DIY to be avoided, but my chemistry skills were never much to write home about. Or rather they were, as my teachers wrote home things like:
“Dear Mrs Speedy
It is with some regret that I include this year's report card for your son. Young Speedy displays admirable enthusiasm during class, but mortifyingly little skill in handling chemical compositions. If he could perhaps concentrate a little more, rather than viewing the actual mixing of potentially hazardous chemicals as the same process with which he mixes paints in his art class, we may get a mixture that carries the intended properties, and not one which whilst a beautiful shade of red, also removes the eyebrows of the back half of Class 2B and melts all nylon underpants within a radius of 12 yards.”
I have no idea what shape my head will be in the morning. It's probably OK, but in a moment of absent mindedness I emptied the little tube of colour fast conditioner, rather than the tube of conditioning colour, into the little pointy bottle. In all likelihood all that will happen is that the colour isn't as good. Chemical reactions being what they are, though, I may well wake up with a scalp that resembles an artex ceiling and hair the colour of Phil Mitchell's cheeks.
I'll let you know. Long live my head.
Famously
19 Feb 2010
The Tory party famously complained this week about being called Scum Sucking Pigs by a Labour MP. The MP, David Wright, was lampooning Conservative Ads and used the phrase “I've never voted Tory because you can put lipstick on a scum-sucking pig, but it's still a scum-sucking pig.”
Crude yes. Funny? Not particularly. True? Ah.
Let's look at the reaction. Tory chairman Eric Pickles said at the time that such behaviour was likely to further alienate the public at a time when politicians were held in low regard. "This is exactly the sort of politics that voters are so sick of."
Well, perhaps. But on Sunday (not Friday) we had this from William Hague:
“[Gordon Brown is] chalking up as much debt as possible, making as many spending commitments as possible which he doesn't know how to finance, partly in the hope of leaving a new government with a really difficult situation".
No, William. Gordon Brown is following a policy that – internationally – has seen a potential new Great Depression reduced to bad but manageable recession. He is following a policy supported by many, many economists (despite your party's lies to the contrary). He is taking decisions to help people cope with economic problems when they are vulnerable. I wouldn't expect a party that cannot tell the difference between 54% of deprived teenage girls being mothers or pregnant (Tory claim) and 5.4% of deprived teenage girls being mothers or pregnant (true figure), and which then claims it “makes no difference”, to understand the subtleties of managing a croquet club, let alone the national economy, but if you think a new kind of politics is necessary and that voters are sick of political posturing, then isn't it time to stop being disgusting, cynical hacks throwing eggs at someone because you know perfectly well you don't know what the fuck you're talking about and you're scared the voters will notice?
You had every right to complain about being called scum sucking pigs. Pigs are warm blooded and, I'm told, affectionate, charming creatures. Now fuck off.
Abominate
18 Feb 2010
It's a strong word. It sounds like a religious Dalek, rolling through life screaming out its disapproval in a harsh, hate-filled voice, a bit like a Jan Moir column. Speaking of which, the PCC's response that although effectively letting the Daily Scale off the hook, is a moral slap in the face for a newspaper that regularly attacks the right of comedians to say what they like about topics in the public eye. The PCC is essentially defending the right of journalists to say “uncomfortable” things for no good reason because the alternative is censorship. Perhaps the Scale will remember that next time it tries to generate a lynch mob against someone for trying to make people laugh.
Abominate hate. I'm sure I've heard that before, somewhere.
S.
With thanks to http://alittlenutmegaddsflavour.blogspot.com/
Update: this is now about 5 views off from being my most popular entry. Why? Is it the picture of a Dalek with flowers? Do feel free to look at other posts. Most of them are better.
This ought to have been a a godsend. Especially since God is good at abominating things. But it was my Mum's birthday yesterday, and having spent a lovely time with the family, I'm not full enough of bile and hate to abominate anything.
Yet. Let me get worked up.
It's a strong word. It sounds like a religious Dalek, rolling through life screaming out its disapproval in a harsh, hate-filled voice, a bit like a Jan Moir column. Speaking of which, the PCC's response that although effectively letting the Daily Scale off the hook, is a moral slap in the face for a newspaper that regularly attacks the right of comedians to say what they like about topics in the public eye. The PCC is essentially defending the right of journalists to say “uncomfortable” things for no good reason because the alternative is censorship. Perhaps the Scale will remember that next time it tries to generate a lynch mob against someone for trying to make people laugh.
They won't, of course.
We will probably have to endure many more examples of the disgusting little green mutant steering its bonded polycarbide shell through life, trying to squeeze the faces off random targets with its plunger of outrage. And we will put up with it, because the alternative is censorship, but that doesn't mean we can't shoot back. Aim for the eyepiece.
S.
With thanks to http://alittlenutmegaddsflavour.blogspot.com/
Update: this is now about 5 views off from being my most popular entry. Why? Is it the picture of a Dalek with flowers? Do feel free to look at other posts. Most of them are better.
Hammer
Feb 17 2010
When Ewan MacGregor recites his famous speech at the start of Trainspotting that ends with “You DIY you DIE” or something, it feels as if he might have seen my few and embarrassing efforts at fixing 'stuff'. That's not even a colloquialism, since I have no idea what sort of things I might have tried to fix over the years, so I might as well call it “stuff”, in the same way that Cheryl Cole's grasp of music means we might as well call her songs “turds”.
When Ewan MacGregor recites his famous speech at the start of Trainspotting that ends with “You DIY you DIE” or something, it feels as if he might have seen my few and embarrassing efforts at fixing 'stuff'. That's not even a colloquialism, since I have no idea what sort of things I might have tried to fix over the years, so I might as well call it “stuff”, in the same way that Cheryl Cole's grasp of music means we might as well call her songs “turds”.
Said the Girls Aloud fan. Ahem.
There may be a link between my clumsy efforts to wire plugs and hang pictures and my chronic inability to progress at learning French. An odd connection, but they are both routed in the utter fear of getting it slightly wrong in practice. Admittedly with DIY I might accidentally hit a hidden wire with a nail, shut down the entire electricity grid for miles around, blow up my computer and – last but not least – send thousands of volts through my body until I become so crispy and charred I resemble the average English tourist on holiday in Spain.
Whereas language failure would most likely result in a sardonic Parisian slightly raising an eyebrow and then laughing about it later with his mistress. Frankly I'm not sure why I'm worrying.
But of course if you are as incredibly sensitive and uptight as I am, that raised eyebrow is a bit like someone shoving a power cable up your bum and flicking the switch. I can remember the words, I even have half an idea what order to put them in, but there's no way I'm going to use them in case I accidentally ask for directions to my own teeth or call someone a margarine tub. It could happen.
Which is odd, because surely the potential for embarrassment in posting this blog is higher? Humans, ever irrational. I'll keep hammering away at this keyboard and try not to fry.
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