Unfortunate goujon incident

"'Mussolini: 2nd Edition': looking forward to seeing what he's been up to since the 1st edition."

This was the hilarious (not hilarious) comment that led to me deleting my Twitter account. My first try had been slightly long, but having edited it down and posted it I realised that a couple of rogue words had been left in. I tried to delete so that I could have another go, this time with re-reading it properly, but the site refused, first giving me the "There is NO undo" message as if I didn't know my own mind and then resolutely ignoring me when I clicked OK. It warned me again when I found the 'delete your account' screen, but this one did my bidding.

Despite being ridiculously cautious in real life, I tend to be rather impetuous when it comes to removing my stuff from the internet. Sometimes I live to regret this, but on this occasion I'm fairly sure I'm right. I'd been getting annoyed with Twitter for a few days. The novelty of subscribing to updates from Witty Celebrity X had long since worn off, the endless spamblokes had worn down my patience (particularly as blocking them didn't seem to remove them from my followers screen any more) and various of my updates seemed to disappear into the ether. Not that my thoughts on watching Blur at Glastonbury were probably worth keeping for posterity (although I was quite pleased with the one suggesting that Albarn's voice sounded like a Mitch Benn-esque hilarious (not hilarious) parody of him from 1996 or something), but as I'd gone to the trouble of typing them out it would have been nice to have seen them on screen.

It's all a bit vexing, as I did rather like the idea of Twitter - I think condensing thoughts into such a short space appealed to my inner editor - but sometimes enough is, well, enough. I may change my mind in a few weeks (probably too late for the joke about Mollie Sugden's unavailability to play Hazel Blears that I had worked out), set up a new account (I have previous in this, after all) but I might not: at least this way if everyone else starts to abandon it in a few months' time I can claim to have been ahead of the curve.

Blacker than the void where Jo Whiley's soul would be (*)

Being something of a serial offender when it comes to internet dating, I was going to do an in-depth analysis of the various flaws in an article I read on the subject. However, this would have been slightly dull and consumed time that I don't really have to spare at the moment. The crux of the argument was going to involve this particular nugget:

"But the people for whom it works seem strikingly similar: they don't take it too seriously, they aren't fragile and they aren't seeking to fill some aching hole in their lives."

Because, obviously, if you were looking to meet someone in what we shall call for want of a better phrase 'real life', you would seek out someone who was particularly fragile and with an aching hole in their life. I claim no expertise when it comes to human relationships, I know as much of affairs of the heart as I do of the gross national product of Botswana, but even I can tell that the people who do best in anything are the ones who aren't terribly fragile and don't have some sucking void in their life that they're unrealistically trying to fill in some way.

Although, being pathetic, I suspect that the reason I really wanted to comment on this article was the following:

"A friend met a man online, and after their first date he came back to her flat. She thought they were going to kiss and cuddle. Instead, he masturbated on her"

Now, ignoring for a moment the fact that no matter how well it might have gone nobody I met from the internet ever invited me back to theirs at the end of a first date and that even if they had I probably would have politely declined, I don't quite work out how this could have got as far as seems to be being implied. Because, and I realise that what with me being a single man in his early-to-mid-30s this may surprise you, I know a bit about this subject and, well, it takes time to get from undoing of trousers to the bit with the tissues. Certainly enough time to get out of the way, anyway, and to say "excuse me, could you put that away please". (The phrase "excuse me, could you put that away please" should be enough to shame someone into stopping, I think. And if it doesn't you probably ought to call the police.)

I therefore conclude that either this incident is entirely apocryphal or the writer's chum deserved to get wanked on out of sheer stupidity.

(*) I was going to name this entry "Seems Hard" after the song by The Cardigans which popped up on my playlist of songs I haven't listened to in far too long and whose innocuous opening and cacophonous ending summed up my last few days quite well, but the subject matter kind of precludes it. Shame, that.

When inspiration is as lacking as amusement in the skits of that bloke who does the attempted amusing interludes on 6 Music, there's always...

Mobile Phone Photography Corner

Actually it's been a while since I cleared out the pictures on my phone, otherwise I would have long since deleted this one I took last August of the posters advertising the Notting Hill Carnival.


This was going to be a hilarious bit of satire about what happens when the Tories get in, except with me remembering times when I've got trains home with revellers returning from the carnival and realising that actually most of the people that attend do look like that. The bloody whistle is an obvious clue.



I have no idea why I took this. I think I have a subconscious thing which forces me to take pictures on tube trains once in a while without realising that I'm doing it. Or maybe it's something else. Hatred of piece-of-crap free newspapers? Wanting to take obscure snaps of Stratford station before they start demolishing bits of it? Who knows.



I was quite pleased with my new socks.



This is absolutely the worst greetings card I have ever seen. "It's your birthday but not as we know it!"? It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. And given the nature of people who enjoy science fiction, is an amusing birthday card based around their hobby really something they would appreciate? The only person that you could safely give this card to is someone who likes Star Trek who you absolutely despise.


The floodlights went off moments after the end of Dagenham & Redbridge v Brentford, plunging the ground into darkness. However, the power to the scoreboard remained on and it looked great, with the red light against the pitch blackness, so I took a picture. Unfortunately it doesn't look quite as impressive in a picture taken with a camera on a mobile phone. Some would say that D&R's subsequent capitulation in the final day last play-off place decider followed by three key members of the squad leaving for, o-ho-ho-ho, Brentford was at least partly my fault. As the sort of person who starts getting worried when the entire day seems to consist of hearing about celebrity death, I am one of those people.


Ibiza foam party there. I'm sure there was a tremendously amusing reason for taking this, but I can't get past the idea of an Ibiza Foam Party in Romford now I come to look at this again.

More Mobile Phone Photography Corner next time I run out of things to write about! How exciting.

Kids love Napoleon

I've been invited to a birthday party for one of my cousin's kids. (I've been agonising over where to place the apostrophe in that last sentence, by the way. I'm sure that's right - one of the kids of my cousin - but I'm not certain, and I'm wondering why I've suddenly started caring because usually slack grammar and my witterings on the internet are like water to a drowning man, or something.) The youngster, as I must call her now that I'm in my 34th year, will be turning 18, and for her birthday she's having a party with the theme of 'glitz and glamour'.

There are so many things I do not understand about this.

1. Why would a 17 year old with an upcoming birthday want a party largely attended by extended family? I've watched an episode of Skins and as such I know exactly what The Kids Today are like, unless the Guardian Guide has been lying to me again. And even if this isn't a fair representation of The Kids Today, spending their 18th birthday with a lot of older relatives complaining about the music doesn't seem like what anyone should be doing when they reach 18.

(Quick aside: for my 18th birthday - well, the day after my 18th birthday; on my 18th birthday I had an exam to revise for - I went to the pub with some friends. We'd been going to the pub for months, but it still felt like the right thing to do.)

2. "Glitz and glamour" seems like a very bad theme for a party. Now, I realise that I'm biased here - while I accept that in some circumstances glitz and glamour are fine and possibly even necessary, none of them could ever involve me; I am an anti-glitz black hole. Were I to attend an event where there was a hint of glitz, I would suck it from the room in a manner that would make James Dyson weep with envy just by walking over to the buffet - but when the people you're inviting to your party aren't a particularly glamourous lot, putting this requirement on them seems a bit unfair somehow.

3. In fact, why have a party with a 'theme', anyway? What's wrong with just having a party? Well, actually, I can think of lots of reasons to not have a party - my birthday having just passed with scarcely any hoo-hah whatsoever, which suits me just fine - but if you must, why do you need a 'theme'? If you must have a theme, why not "people who haven't seen each other for a while having some drinks with some nibbles, and some music so that people can do some dancing later if they feel so inclined while leaving enough room for everyone else to talk amongst themselves"? That, to me, seems like a very good theme for a party; no awkwardness, no showing off, no muttering about what such-and-such has come dressed as and no one lets the side down unless they're sick in an inappropriate spot.

4. Is there a polite way to get out of going to a party you don't want to attend when you really don't want to offend the people holding it? Not that I haven't missed family events before, but usually there's been a good reason (my uncle was perfectly understanding that I had to miss his 60th to go to the play-off final, even if my mum couldn't quite grasp it) or I haven't given a toss about the people involved, but for this one I'd feel really bad about missing it even if I'm not going to be there. I suppose that technically it will be during the football season, and I could pretend that I'm at a festival or something, but even so I'd feel really bad about it. On the other hand, I really don't want to go.

33 years old, there.

The snails should not suffer for this

Ah, tube strike days. There are those who think that it's actually quite a good thing that some people are willing to stand up for themselves and that maybe you wouldn't, for example, be able to close a chain of banks and put lots of people out of work without flinching if more people were willing to do so, and there are those who think that it's a disgrace because they're going to be a bit late for work and aren't the tube drivers greedy, it's not like it's a difficult job like mine is it? (Admittedly if you drew a pie chart of these opinions the slice for the former would be so tiny that it would need an arrow to point it out.) But either way, who couldn't enjoy a tube strike day? For, if nothing else, it gives you the opportunity to feel superior to huge swathes of the population of an overcrowded city, and that can only be a good thing.

For a start, you can lord it over people who decide that the thing to do is to drive into London. You would have to be some sort of large-scale idiot to drive into London at any time, but to do so on a day when there's going to be more traffic on the roads is clearly the act of a fairly high order imbecile. Nothing more really needs to be said on the subject, but let's tip our hat to drivers who decide that, even though the lights have turned red and they have no hope of getting across, they're going to stop over the pedestrian crossing anyway. Presuming the hat is like his in that Bond film's and we can slice their wretched heads off with it.

Then you have people who make it to Central London and then choose to take the bus. Because standing in a long queue to cram onto something that's going to get stuck in the additional traffic is clearly a bright thing to do. The only reason I can see for queuing for a bus in Central London on tube strike day is because it's the most likely place to see people who do nothing but complain about their jobs for the rest of the year fighting over their place in a queue to get on a bus to take them the workplace they hate, but while there's certainly some self-satisfactory pointing to be done in such a situation it's probably not worth it.

There're taxis, of course, but they only apply if you have lots of money that you don't mind giving to someone who probably voted English Democrat, so best move on quickly.

You could cycle, I suppose, but... look, I try to not mind cyclists, I try to have sympathy when they complain about how they get treated compared to drivers, but today's sent me over the edge. Fucking cyclists. Put the stabilisers back on and don't take them off until you learn how traffic lights work, eh?

No, the only sensible option is to walk. But even then there are issues. If you were to follow the official TFL guidance on walking from Liverpool Street to Euston, you'd walk along City Road, Pentonville Road and Euston Road which, if memory serves, are about the most polluted roads in Central London. (I can't find the relevant statistics but trust me, the Euston Road is horrible.) This is just the sort of route you expect when you put a fucking cyclist in charge of the city: lacking in imagination and more about martyrdom than common sense. Estimated walking time: 55 minutes. Takes about five minutes to get from Euston to my office, so make it an hour.

But as you walk, ignoring the official guidance and taking to the back streets, you realise that not all walkers are equal. There are those that choose to walk three abreast down narrow pavements. There are joggers; fine in theory, but on busy pavements both impractical and inconsiderate. There are people in walking boots, as if the streets of London are some sort of rough terrain. There are women in big heels; not that these aren't, you know, nice, but not really practical for the task at hand. There are people incapable of carrying a big umbrella with a pointy end without needing an exclusion zone around them lest they stab you. There are people incapable of standing at bus stops without getting in everyone's way. Not looking where they're going, staring at their phones, confused by even the simplest map, having as much grasp of traffic lights as the fucking cyclists; walkers are, on the whole, absolutely useless.

Except for me, obv: I walked to Liverpool Street in 47 minutes, and that with getting a bit confused around Bloomsbury. I am brilliant.

Conclusion: I am 23.7% better than everyone else in London, and that's with choosing too warm a shirt because I believed the weather forecast and nearly choking on a strawberry Revel from the packet I bought to celebrate being much better than everyone else. Amazing.

One day and five and a half hours

It's not very often that I find myself thinking along the same lines as the BBC website, otherwise most of the people responsible for their football pages would now be trying to make a living handing out piece-of-crap free newspapers outside tube stations, but today we've temporarily converged. As I was checking to confirm things that couldn't be reproduced in invigorating educational publications, I spotted that one of their most popular stories concerned hats, and so I had a look, because just recently I've had reason to consider hats.

I started pondering hats last week, having got sunburnt at the Southend Air Show again. The circumstances were much the same as last year - the sun only put in a brief appearance, but as it coincided with looking into the sky to watch planes flying past, the inevitable result was a big burnt face. And this got me thinking; as I seem to burn quite easily and as my hair is beginning to recede, I really need to think of some way of protecting my bonce more effectively. Hence: hats.

The problem is that I know very little about hats, and as such finding a hat that I might be able to pull off with any dignity is clearly going to be a problem. Particularly when the main thing that I do know about hats can be neatly summed up by one of the illustrations accompanying the article...

... ie most men who wear hats badly need their necks hacking through. Consider Ollie Thomas, 25: "When I am in the office I prefer to wear a more traditional flat cap as opposed to weekend (sic) when I would wear a beanie." Who wouldn't want to pummel Ollie repeatedly? "He says he also likes the link with tradition, 'especially with my tweed flat caps'." Presumably 'Ollie Thomas' is some sort of pseudonym, a plausible enough name for an obnoxious cretin to put off the inevitable angry mobs.

So what to do? Seek out hats and run the risk of people hating me on sight because of my headgear or find myself feeling distinctly sunstroke-y on a regular basis? It's a cheery thought for the start of the summer months.

The spider threw itself down the plughole

I realise that this looks like a staggeringly unproductive month, even by my low standards, but, honestly, I've got three entries half written that I'm fully intending to return to and another three on a list of things I really must write about and some other stuff floating about in my pretty (not pretty) little (not little) head (definitely a head). I just haven't had... well, not time as such, and obviously there's a certain amount of inspiration because I've come up with the ideas in the first place. It's just been a stupid few weeks. Stupid stupid stupid. Not that this week should be any less stupid, but at some point the stupidity will ease and I'll have all kinds of time to write about stuff. Yes.