Correlate

There's a piece in the media Guardian today saying that there's no correlation between a newspaper's online circulation and any falls in it's print readership. It's fairly interesting and a bit surprising, but not as surprising as finding out that The Daily Mail's online readership is growing by 60% a year.

I truly don't understand. I can imagine the 2m Mail readers pouring over it's racist cancer scare stories and wiping the ink from their fingers on the face of a passing
immigrant child. What I don't expect them to do is be surfing away and choosing the Daily Mail when they could looking for porn footage of someone in a Winston Churchill mask buggering someone dressed up as Jacques Delors.

In short I have a default expectation of Internet users to be young trendy liberal types. In other news Narnia is real and the Government truly believes in fairness. Yup, I'm as naive as a Disney character.

It's not like there's a single sane person commenting at the bottom of BBC articles. These angry drooling maniacs have clearly found a perfect bosom to nestle in with Mail Online. If we could hack into it and, at a peak traffic moment, transmit a deadly ray that pierces their living brains and turns them into smoking husks we might just make the world a better place. Though mass murder probably causes cancer, so I'd better not.

Shedding

When a reptile sheds its skin, does it hang it up next to the lawnmower? Not if it's a snake. Given what happens to a hose pipe when it gets put in the shed, I reckon no snake would be safe to go in there.

Bad jokes, I know. But I wonder how long it will be before the word "shedding" morphs into some sort equivalent of "housing" but with more wood and a tendency to house families of robins? Words change all the time, and since so do human habits (I know some who started a business in their shed) and people need words for them they might just save time and borrow this one.

When I was a kid my parents had an asbestos shed. That's reassuring, isn't it? An entire shed made of one of earth's most poisonous naturally occurring substances. A bit like building a shed out of nuclear waste, or making a chicken coop by tying a load of foxes together in a hoop. We only got rid of it becuase while we were on holiday one of the neighbours' kids climbed on it and fell through the roof. The asbestos roof. She's still alive. So far. I'll wait another decade before I breathe a sigh of relief. With a hankie over my mouth.

Still, the shed never burned down, eh? That's a relief. Almost worth it.

Decay

There's definitely something going on with my teeth. They've come over all sensitive after a lifetime of being fine, like a 35 year old ballet-dancer suddenly thinking "shit, you can basically see my cock in this outfit! Get me some trousers!"

It's most disconcerting.

Of course, my 2 bottles of Irn Bru-a-day habit probably isn't really making positive contribution to my dental health, so it was always a matter of time. It's a miracle that I have anything sticking out of my gums other than blackened stumps. Maybe I should just think "stuff it" and have them all removed. After all, they're all going to fall out in the end anyway (unless I'm beaten to death by members of the Bullingdon Club on a day trip to Cambridge, thus sparing me the pain of ageing). At least I wouldn't have to chew anything anymore. I could have all my hair lasered out to get used to being bald husk, and have tiny brown spots tattooed all over my hands. Genius. Age will hold no fears.

But what to do about my decent skin? I could spend hours a week deliberately exposing myself to harmful radiation in order to accelerate the decay of my skin cells. I hear it has the unfortunate side effect of making you look - very briefly - healthy and good looking, but don't worry, that wears off pretty fucking quickly.

Disguise

There's a tradition in drama and comedy of a lead character disguising himself (or possibly herself) and hearing truths about themselves that they would never normally discover (think Henry V walking amongst his troops). This may be the cause of the old expression that eavesdroppers never heard anything good about themselves.

That's fairly harsh. Are they suggesting that the kind of person who would eavesdrop is clearly a cunt, and therefore all their friends will be saying: "Geoff, he's such a fuckface. And he's an eavesdropper, the weaselly shit, I hacked into his emails and read him talking about it.What a misshapen cock."? Or is it just supposed to be bad luck, so that if you eavesdrop it will be the one moment when someone is saying "... and he fucks badgers..." and then you run away screaming and miss the bit where they add "...but no one minds cos he's so nice the rest of the time and who doesn't occasionally want to violate a medium sized omnivorous mammal anyway, I say fair enough."?

It's a fucking minefield.

Helping

One of these days I will work out why people have second "helpings". How does a bowl of custard become a "helping"? It's not the most helpful of substances. You can't paint your house with it (not for very long, anyway). It won't do the dishes. Apparently it can be promoted to run a government department, but so can squirrels and Chris Grayling, so that's hardly high praise.

It's probably something to do with "helping yourself", showing that the idea of self-service long preceded petrol companies trying to save a packet at gas stations.

I've just looked at the bottom of this blog, where some text is begging me to "label" this blog, and gives the examples "scooters, holidays, autumn". I've like to know who decided that those were the ideal archetypes of a successful blog. Perhaps they'd just returned from a scooter holiday in late September. Or maybe they were just really stuck for something interesting to suggest that a blog might be about, which is fair enough on the basis of this one.

I'm not helping.

Repertory

A hard word to spell, repertory. Even harder to explain what it was. My dad wistfully recalls days when there were many rep theatres, and they were a popular form of entertainment for decades, and a key way for young actors to earn their Equity cards and work their way up to the West End.

I'm sure a lot of it was awful, and you couldn't switch it off after 5 minutes and stick the snooker on, which is probably why television was so beautifully placed to steal its ecological niche and push it towards extinction. It's a shame TV took over, though. Just think what Sky could have achieved if they'd managed to deploy Live Pause at the Bolton Empire.

There probably isn't a Bolton Empire. But I suppose in some sort of post-apocalyptic nuclear bomb ravaged world where the North West of England is the first to recover we could soon all be under the dominion of hordes of suburban Mancunians desperate to avenge the Bolton massacre. Best to die in the first flash, I think.

Chew

My granddad always used to tell me to chew my food 32 times. I don't know where the number came from. It feels somewhat unlikely that extensive field tests had been conducted with a troupe of volunteers munching away on a specially prepared batch of sesame seed buns, all chewing them for a different number of chews and then monitoring their digestion and testing the quality of their stools.

"Sir, I have the results! The stools which demonstrated the most efficient processing of the useful, nutritious parts of the special sesame seed bun belonged to volunteer Clyde, sir."

"Clyde? But isn't he the one you made chew 32 times because he looked at you a bit funny? Something of an own goal!"

One chew for each tooth. It's good as a beginning. If you have no teeth then I suppose you want food that you don't need to chew at all. Where it breaks down is in between. What the fuck are you supposed to do if you only have one tooth left? What requires one chew? And how can you chew with one tooth anyway, even once? It's bullshit, granddad, it's bullshit I tell you!

Still, I miss him sometimes, even if he did talk shit about chewing.

Barrister

I spent some considerable time last night seething. I love the word seethe, but I don't love seething. Especially when trying to sleep. It's not soothing, seething.

The reason for the seething was just one of many reasons I'm a supporter of trade unions (this doesn't necessarily mean being a supporter of Bob Crow, any more than saying you're a people person compels you to like Donald Rumsfeld). But you really shouldn't be able to fuck people over when it comes to jobs. A very good friend had been offered a temp job doing some clerking for a barrister (I think he's a barrister - I'm very hazy about this things. Apparently there's things called "laws" and stuff). Unfortunately she spent the entire weekend before her first day with a stomach bug that left her vomiting like a lawn sprinkler, aching in places that didn't ought to have ached, Mr Frodo, running a scary fever and being semi-comatose.

Come Monday morning, she got up, vomited again, made her sandwiches, vomited again, put on her jacket, fell on the floor for a while, then got up and went to work. After 400 yards she nearly collapsed in the street, so she phoned her boss to explain, was nearly sick over her phone, left him a message and staggered back to bed.

She kept calling to try and get hold of the barrister, but he didn't answer his phone. She called a mutual acquaintance who managed to get hold of him and see what the situation was.

He replied with a single message: "No longer required"

Now, I appreciate the frustrations of someone trying to do a job when someone helping them doesn't turn up, but anyone who isn't even prepared to listen when that someone tried their very best and just physically could not manage the journey is really just a spiteful cunt. He probably feels a lot better about his life now, grasping at the illusion of power in a vast and uncaring universe. That's nice. I'm sure he gets a warm glow. Hopefully he'll get so excited about it that he'll drink too much on his own in his kitchen, and run skipping happily into the street, where he'll slip on a discarded used condom, crack his head on the pavement and wake up hours later with all his fingers eaten by rats.

You can but dream.

Hmm. Actually, this probably puts me in the same camp as Bob Crow and Donald Rumsfeld.

Hairstyle

I'm quite lucky to still have one. Hairstyles seem to be a bit like making new friends down the pub, or having a favourite advert or something, a thing that somehow fades with age until not only is it not there, but it seems odd to have ever cared in the first place.

Not that I ever made any new friends down the pub. I always assumed it was something that happened to other people. Maybe it didn't. Or only to pub-based alcoholics. If you're an alcoholic, being pub-based is either a) a really good idea or b) a really fucking stupid idea. Not quite sure which.

Anyway.

I have a hairstyle, of sorts. It only looks very good when I treat it with a special hairstyling implement, known to some as millinery, and to me as a hat. If I don't wear a hat, the hairstyle adopts sarcastic quote marks around it, and becomes a hair "style", mostly consisting of some sort of tenacious fluff, like a really stubborn dandelion in a gale.

I don't really get to choose my hairstyle. It sort of happens to me. I'm currently sporting what is almost certainly called a grown out mid-period Alan Turing. Ha. I bet there's no-one reading this* who has one of them.

* a statement which is equally true if you just stop at this asterisk.

Cancan

Having read and agreed with Victoria Coren's excoriation of School Cheerleading, I was disappointed to be corrected by a younger (female) person who apparently knows about these things and told me that British schools have male cheerleaders too. There goes that little bit of (male) feminist outrage in me, and leaves me feeling slightly bewildered, as if a lamb had got up and head-butted me for my vegetarianism.

If indeed we have equal opportunities cheerleading the UK, then I suppose the argument moves from "is it sexist bullshit" to purely "is it sport?". And the problem that goes with that is simply that no-one has an agreed definition of what sport actually is, so any attempt to answer the question reveals a suitcase full of interesting prejudices and preconceptions that say quite a lot about the person shoving their oar in. Ooh, that was a sporty metaphor. Or was it?

I have grave misgivings about the idea of dance as sport, but I'll also admit that this is based on no real analysis of the arguments and little more than a lingering feeling that giving someone a Gold medal in Traditional Morris is sillier than giving the same for running into a sandpit in a slightly complicated way.

Which it may not be.

All of which has left me feeling a little bit confused and lacking in a good dose of moral certainty and outrage. So what I need the Government to do - right now - is introduce can-can dancing to the national curriculum, making it eligible only to pretty girls whose legs represent at least 60% of their total height and who have perfect skin. Then all I'd have to do is wrestle with whether or not it was more sexist and degrading than Beach Volleyball.

Mileage

I'm running out of steam it would appear. All down to a shocking lack of commitment. I keep telling myself that I'm just too busy and a bit tired and therefore can;t keep up, but it's all shocking self-delusion and the simple fact is that I'm a lazy bugger.

I always wanted to be a writer. Much more than I wanted to be an actor, singer or cricketer, and certainly much more than I wanted to be an office worker. But like almost everyone else the job that pays the bills takes over the rest of your life. Why else is the small talk protocol to ask "so what do you do" so early on in a conversation?

"So, what do you do?"
"Well, sometimes I eat. Tea, breakfast, lunch - that sort of thing. Occasionally a Mars bar, but not so much since my last tooth fell out."
"No, I mean, what do you do for a living?"
"Well, I wouldn't be living if I didn't eat. Excuse me, but you seem a bit dim."

The Onion has a particularly nice take on it here

But I shall not give up! Oh, not me. The purpose of this blog is to keep me writing, so that eventually I start writing properly. You've got to keep your hand in. So I can't give up. Plenty of mileage in this yet.