Somebody

I recently changed my relationship status on Facebook. I would like to stress that the change had actually happened some time ago, but the modern world throws up all sorts of new and interesting social mores, in this case "when is it reasonable to change my status?". I left it private, viewable only to me, as I tend to view the public changes of others as irritating statements of smugness or pleas for sympathy (del as app).

Of course, the one entity you cannot keep this private from is the Facebook monster itself. It knows.  And within seconds of saving my edited profile, all the interesting (comparatively) things being offered in the advertising strip (506 of your friends like Beer! Like Beer too!) on the right hand side evaporated like mirages, to be replaced by an endless, and in some cases a tad disturbing, parade of dating and general "make women want you" ads.

You may have guessed the status by now. We'll move on.

Facebook's desperation to get me fitted up with somebody, anybody, is all very sweet, a bit like an over eager friend who's always trying to interest you in a blind date with their third cousin and doesn't understand that you're in no hurry and perfectly happy. And so there's a stream of perfectly non-threatening dating ads, offering a chance to "Date Attractive Ladies" (surely the equivalent of shouting "play good football!" at the telly during England's euro 2012 campaign), or "Boyfriend wanted" over a picture of a woman whose head is twisted so unnaturally she looks like a reanimated car crash victim with nice make up. All fine, in a take it or leave it sort of way.

Except that it seems that Facebook is also that slightly sleazy friend of a friend down the pub who reckons he's one for the ladies and knows all the tricks you could possibly want to know on 'getting birds', normally involving treating 'em mean or monitoring their menstrual cycle.

My worries were first alerted by:

"3, stealthy, ninja sexual triggers to turn women on. TRY NOW!"

Ninja sexual trigger? What the hell is that? Does it involve using your cock as an impromptu nun-chuck?

Then it gets worse. Grammatically, as well as ethically:

"The covert and dangerous tricks to make any woman wants you, FAST!"

Glossing over the peculiar slippage into the present tense, it seems as though Facebook is allowing an ad for rohypnol. Date rape drugs - covert? Yes! Dangerous? Certainly! Do they make any woman wants you fast? No, not really, but they do make it irrelevant! (insert capital letters or multiple exclamation marks where you will).

Compared to that, the "Secret psychology that makes hot women want to sleep with you fast" looks like children's literature. This could be anything. It could be wholesome, like adopting a positive attitude (not very secret), or ever so slightly less so, like breaking into their house/PC to read their letters/emails in order to find out what their emotional triggers are and then exploiting them by reducing them to a psychological wreck that will cling to anyone or anything to feel secure again in this malevolent world.

That sort of thing.

I don't know for certain, because there's no way in a million years that I'm clicking on that link. I dread to think what I might find there if their ads are this weird. But I do know that the advertisers are clearly aware that they're up to no good, because their final offering is this:

"Covert methods for attracting women that dating experts want BANNED!"

What, exactly, is a dating expert? Can you get a degree in dating? Are there perhaps dating guidance counsellors ready to advise newly-met potential couples who feel that their initial "activity-date" at the Laser Tag centre didn't go quite as well as they'd hoped? Whoever they are, thank God that they're out there, looking after us like Swamp Thing looked out for Lacroix, Louisiana.

God bless you, Dating Experts. Are you , y'know, free this evening?

Offing

A drink is in the offing. It's with someone I would call a "fellow blogger", except that would be hideously presumption of me, since she actually keeps hers up to date. This drink is necessary, since I've wasted the first day of the Jubilee spare-time-fest and I'm feeling pretty miserable about it. I did have plans to start a much needed inventory of stuff before my move in July, but instead I pottered around, watch tv and - the highlight of the day - went for a ride on my shiny birthday bike. But it was all rather lonesome, so I dropped a view hints until a friend said that they'd have a drink with me. They probably think they're stopping me offing myself, or something.

Pity pint. I can live with that.

Hellish

It all seemed like a good idea at the time. A nice trip home to see my old mum, check out the commute to see if I can bear to do it while I try and buy somewhere to live, get out of the house. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, not much in the big scheme of things, but I'm certainly not getting the best of this train route. Firstly, the West Ham fans up for their Wembley play-off today appear to have 'started early'. In their generosity, they must have responded to the parched look of the train floor and altruistically offered it quite a lot of beer. The floor, however, is clearly teetotal, and has refused to soak up any of the offered alcohol, which is now adorning the surface with a sticky and nasally offensive sheen. 

But I regret complaining about the beer, since I can no longer smell it. Not just because as I get out to the greenbelt my hay-fever is getting worse, but because Shenfield has supplied the latest in anti-beer smell air-fresheners by loading a tramp onto my carriage.  He's sitting in the next set of seats, and I can honestly say that I miss the smell of stale West Ham beer.

In commuting terms I suppose he's unlikely to be able to afford the peak fares, and city types - for all their flaws - probably don't crack open the Tennant's lager at 7:30 in the morning. But it's not cheering me up about the possibility of having a 100 minute commute to work not only in the middle of the bloody Olympics, but through the middle of the bloody Olympics - Stratford every morning. If I don't come up with plan B I'm looking at a hellish time in July.

But at least I'm better off than my carriage mate. All things in perspective.

(Hurray! He's getting off!)

Soap

A slightly unorthodox blog today – random word comes not from my beloved “Watch out for Snakes”, but from a simple Facebook comment:

“Now it’s your turn to write about soap”.

Far be it from me to shirk a challenge (unless said challenge involves any kind of physical risk or requirement to hard work) , here I am, writing about soap.

I don’t watch soaps anymore. I’m not sure when this happened. They were as big a part of my life at one point as they were of any fiendish telly addict’s. For several years I didn’t miss a single episode of EastEnders (with the notable exception of, weirdly, the very first one* and two that were broadcast while I was staying in a Paris tower block as part of our school’s French exchange). My addiction even survived University, where I didn’t watch any other telly other than the cricket and Quantum Leap. Years before that, at junior school, I would watch “The Sullivans” at lunchtime , if only to update the lollypop lady as to the latest plot developments (such as they were). What I still don’t understand is how she came to be so interested in a show that, because of her job, she could clearly *never watch*. Odd.

And then it stopped. This, I suspect, is because soap watching requires momentum. Soap isn’t about the grand plots, it’s about the details, the tiny things the characters do or say to each other. They are shows very much about people – poorly written and insufficiently motivated, and even more dreadfully acted as they may be at times – and as such you require an investment, a real desire to know what they will do next (even if it has no impact on a wider storyline). Miss it for a few weeks, and you no longer have any compass to tell you why people are behaving in a certain way, and you quickly stop caring.

The same applies, oddly, to snooker.  Stop watching for a year and the procession of spotty automatons that replace the ‘characters’ you so enjoyed watching will make you imagine you are watching some sort of humourless mash up with I Robot, and you’ll find greater satisfaction in watching your shower drip.

Of course, the very fact that I’ve just wittered on about “soaps” and not “soap” just shows that except for frequenters of “Lush” and other purveyors of high-end smellies, soap is just a word that jostles for attention alongside shampoo, shower gel and hand wash.  I don’t think I own a bar of soap, and if I do I probably stole it from a hotel in Kuala Lumpur.   My cleanliness routine relies entirely on various forms of liquid, which is probably terrible for the environment since said liquids require an ever more advanced concoction of plastic packaging to keep them in place. On the other hand, Nizorel shampoo aside, I don’t have to worry about animal fat in gels and liquids, and shower gel just looks less like it’s up to something than soap. Bars of soap look like they’re planning a takeover of the world. Nothing that slippery is ever up to anything good – just look at George Osborne. I remember being slightly disturbed by the contents of the built-into-the-tiles soap dish in my bath back home (I nearly wrote “in my bath where I grew up”, but people might think I was a bonsai human). As a child it was on my eye level, and never contained bars of soap as much a strange, bubbly blobs of green matter floating in a few millimetres of disgusting looking cloudy water.  I assume my mum thought that the overall mass of the soap was what mattered, not whether each molecule was actually joined to the next. She did grow up under rationing.

I, on the other hand, felt like Zach Galligan’s mum having to clear up the bits of Gremlin after she microwaves one. No-one ever thinks of things of that.  Cif lemon just isn’t going to fix it.

* I boycotted after the intensely irritating previews featuring characters from the square saying their names. Mee-shell? Really? And I still can’t stop myself thinking, if I hear the name “Debs”, of “and Andy” in a Scottish accent. 

Bundle

I've just finished a rather delightful show. It was called "Ghoooooulty Pleasures", and was a cabaret of tenuously Halloween themed musical numbers. So, if a show had magic, or monsters, or magical monsters it qualified, and we had entries from Rocky Horror, Shrek, Wicked, Evil Dead and Buffy.

Our Director is something of a crazed genius, but I worry about her sometimes, as 70% of all the numbers seemed to involve some sort of sex-bundle. Somewhere down the line, however, my sex-bundle got cancelled and instead I got left deserted on stage by two suddenly unwilling female zombies.

UnLife is hard.

So hard, it seems, that I forgot to finish this entry and it lay for months, in a metaphorical muddy riverbed, ready for my Deagolly hands to fumble upon it unexpectedly. I'd probably throw it away, but it does have the most delightful illustration, and at least my best friend hasn't strangled me in order to get his hands on it.

Though it rather looks as though he has. 

Nonpayment

There's a pigeon war going on outside.

Last night it rained. You may have noticed. It rained so much the storm drains were choked and gasping, chimneys were flooding fireplaces and bipeds of all kinds were taking shelter under whatever outcrops they could find.

On the sanctuary of my window sill a power struggle of awesome intensity served to keep me awake more than the gusts of wind rattling the panes or the steady drip drip of the rain water in the chimney. Derek the scruffy whitish pigeon who roosts regularly outside my bedroom, was wrestling for space with three other pigeons, including one conventionally coloured pigeon bully intent on taking away Derek's kingdom.

Pigeon wars seem to consist of several elements, most obviously high-decibel cooing, scrabbling at window frames (it sounded like rats were trying to get in) and, rather lamentably, vast quantities of shitting. My sill looks as though someone has held an avian Glastonbury on it. The pane itself has smears where wings have bashed against it mid fight, a conflict that dragged me out of bed to confront the offenders only to see Derek and the Bully in a mutual beak-lock dragging each other around their scant square inches of disputed territory.  Two female pigeons cowered in the corner, their support hard to fathom as they hid from both rain and violence.  Normally when I pull back the curtains, the pigeons flap away. Instead, these frightened females just cocked a terrified eye at me, while the tussle went on unabated. Though weirdly, as if they knew they were pushing their luck,  the two males continued their fight in feathery silence.

All this may be punishment for skipping my local pizza restaurant without paying for a glass of sparkling water, though I prefer to view our non-payment as a misunderstanding that has its roots in culinary authenticity. This pizzeria is so Italian that the waiters don't actually seem to understand any English, which meant my companion's multiple requests for water were entirely ignored. After we had requested the bill, we tried again to get a glass of tap water, only to receive a lemon-garnished glass of frizzante. Being both parched and irritated there was no way we were sending our acqua back.

At least my attempt to photograph what looked like the world's smallest stick insect climbing up the side of a cocktail stick ended up looking like the opening credits of the original Hartnell Dr Who. Definitely safer to photograph something with this many splinters than put it in your mouth... I imagine Derek the pigeon will return to the fray with a flaming spear looking very much like this to vanquish his foes this evening. It could be another noisy night.

Strategy

I am not a naturally strategic thinker. I know this for one very good reason - I suck at strategy games. In particular Civilization (of various numerals), a game that has devoured many a spare hour of my life since I was about 20.

I find them a depressingly accurate barometer for my life - I'm very good to start with, opening up early leads against my computery opponents and bossing the game. And then...

Well, not much really. Everything seems to be going well so I stop really thinking about it and keep hitting the 'end of turn' button rather than nurturing my civilisation's cities or upgrading their military units. And before I know it the bloody Russians have stolen my capital city and the French have got rocketry and started building spaceships out of cheese. 

Hey, Saladin, do you like hospital food, pal?

It's not a bad way to discover quite what an abysmal completer-finisher I am. Weirdly I play the game much better when I'm slightly drunk, as all the caution of my sober approach flaps away like a vanquished pigeon and I start kicking the living shit out of the Japanese. In previous decades I could probably adopt this approach in the workplace and achieve some spectacular results. These days, however, I'm told that hip flasks and cans of beer in the filing cabinet are generally frowned upon, and besides there is - conceivably - a difference between destroying the digitised Dutch and drawing up a decent digital inclusion delivery model. Though the good thing about bottles of whisky is that not only can you drink from them, you can also hit people with them, a constant temptation in any modern workplace.
 
Oddly, the discovery that I'm not very good at strategy doesn't put me off playing Civilization, because although I'm a very poor strategic thinker, I clearly am an excellent appreciator of tiny animated workers building roads over the top of mountains. Something to be proud of. Now pass the whisky.