The pudding-faced stars of TV's The Hills

As the bus idled at the traffic lights, I spotted that someone had made some additions to the sign above the recycling bins. At the top of the sign someone had written "SEX!" in large letters; near the bottom of the sign they'd added a phone number, followed by the instructive comment "4 GIRLS ONLY".

Questions spring to mind:

1. Was the person who added this inspired by those crappy small ads that being "SEX! Now we have your attention, would you like buy some new windows?" or somesuch? And do people still put small ads in newspapers which start with "SEX! Now we have your attention etc"? I haven't seen one in ages, but then I don't buy local newspapers and so probably wouldn't have done. It was a crap tactic though; I suspect that they put off far more people than they lured in.

2. Did the person whose phone number was on the sign leave the details there himself? Ordinarily I'd assume it was a hilarious jape by someone's friends/enemies, except in those circumstances I'd expect the closing message to read "4 MEN ONLY". Unless the gentleman prefers the company of men. Or is a woman, although that seems unlikely, for some reason.

3. If someone actually decided that the best way to meet women to engage in, um, that sort of thing with was via advertising on a board whose main purpose is to indicate the presence of recycling facilities, what sort of person did he think was likely to respond? Surely the sort of sensible person who carefully sorts out their rubbish isn't the type to be impressed by this particular form of advertising?

4. Furthermore, isn't the addition of "4 GIRLS ONLY" maybe a little over-defensive? Quite frankly, if you've resorted to putting your phone number on the sign for the recycling bins next to a tube station, I don't think you're in any position to be fussy.

5. Is there any way I can take a picture of this to illustrate this entry without looking a bit creepy? Actually, I can answer that one; it's "no".

6. Why the fuck did someone text into John Kennedy on XFM earlier on and suggest that, in his forthcoming Oasis interview, he ask Noel Gallagher about his thoughts on knifecrime? This has nothing to do with the recycling sign at the station (other than that the perpetrators of both will die alone and unloved) but it's been bugging me for about half an hour now and didn't seem worth an entry of its own. Why would you care? If you wanted to ask someone about knifecrime, wouldn't it be better to ask an expert rather than someone who amusingly got shoved off a stage once? What do you think he's going to say? Have you been sitting there thinking to yourself "oh dear, I just can't work out whether people getting stabbed is a good thing or a bad thing, if only Noel Gallagher was on hand to give us some guidance in the matter"?

7. Sorry about that last one.

What we've learned

While I try to remember all of the things that I was going to write about in the entry I mentally started on while the bus back from Ilford was idling at the traffic lights, here are a few important things that I felt I ought to jot down before I forget them in an attempt to stop myself from making the same mistakes again.

1. Of all the ways to go about impressing a woman, doing quite well in a pub quiz definitely isn't one of them. Particularly if you get over-excited when you actually get an answer to anything. (I don't know what the ways to go about impressing a woman are, obviously, but I'm keeping quite an impressive running total of the ones that don't work.) And just because you overheard them telling someone how you'd got a lot of questions right (and frankly overstating things somewhat, I thought), doesn't mean that they might be interested you in... well, in any way other than if they're ever putting together a pub quiz team together.

2. Wondering where you're going to purchase an album that comes out in about five weeks time, because you're worried that you might not get a copy if a certain set of circumstances arise, would be foolish in the extreme if you were a particularly naive child. If you're 32 years old it suggests some serious issues that you should probably see an expert about.

3. I really shouldn't talk to people in bands. It never goes well. Should the situation be totally unavoidable in future (and it seems unlikely that this would ever be the case, but let's just run with it for now) I will just mumble and move on as swiftly as possible.

4. I definitely lack ambition. This is probably an even more unattractive trait than the whole pub quiz business.

Still, apart from all of that it's been quite a good week. Phew.

The secret word is 'fucknuts'

I was already in a bad mood.

(I'd come down in the lift with one of my colleagues. She was telling me how she fasted on Tuesdays, for worthy and admirable reasons. As we left the building she asked which direction I was going in, as we usually go to the same station; this evening, however, I was going the other way because, as I explained, "I have to go to Sainsbury's". This, while containing the commendable attribute of truthfulness, did lack in certain other areas - tact, sensitivity, not being an utter prick, that sort of thing. And I couldn't get what I needed in Sainsbury's, necessitating a visit to my local branch, where I came across the first panic buyers of the credit crunch loading up on, well, everything.)

As such it wasn't going to take much to get my dander up, and so it was that I became possibly unreasonably annoyed when I spotted that one of the piece-of-crap free newspapers had plastered the headline "FOXY KNOXY IN THE DOCK" all over its front page.

(This morning on the way into work I'd spotted that the piece-of-crap free newspaper that fancies itself as catering specifically for city types had came in an advertising sheet promoting a spread betting company, so if anything I was actually feeling better disposed to piece-of-crap free newspapers than usual until this point.)

There's something about this that really riles me. The crime that Miss Knox and her chums are accused of is a particularly unpleasant one, and yet for some reason the same newspapers that are always harumphing about how terrible it is that crime isn't taken seriously enough refer to her to in this slightly knockabout way, as if she was a character in a soap opera or a reality show contestant rather than, say, a possible murderer or accomplice to the same, which seems somewhat unbelievably crass to me.

Also, I can't help but feel that the logical conclusion of this would have been for the last word of the headline to rhyme with the first two, and I am annoyed that they wimped out of it as I'm intrigued as to whether they would have spelt it "DOCKSY" or "DOCKXY".

List of fictional sheep (was: Less an elbow, more a forearm smash)

I had a mundane dream last night. It's quite unusual for me to be able to recall my mundane dreams the following morning, so I thought I'd recount it while I try to work out whether the prospect of seeing The Bobby McGees playing at an event effectively sponsored by Boris Johnston is tantalising enough for me to drag myself into London for.

So. In my mundane dream I was taking part in a TV panel game. It was some sort of QI-type affair, with intellectual rigour being as important as wit, so quite why I was invited to participate is anyone's guess. (I had watched the recording of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue last night, which I'm guessing was in some way influential.) I'm not sure who the other panelists were, although one of them was eating all of the time and another was a puppet that appeared to have been based on Nobby The Sheep, but I think Kit Hesketh-Harvey was the host. I have never, ever given either Nobby The Sheep or Kit Hesketh-Harvey that much thought before.

For some reason the company making the programme seemed to have hired an enormous aircraft hangar-type arena for it to be filmed in, the sort of place you might expect them to stage, say, Gladiators rather than an intellectual and witty panel game. (I'd seen a poster advertising Sky One's highlights for the new season a couple of days ago and spent some time wondering why anyone would want to watch any of these programmes, which again may have influenced my sub-conscious in some way.) Curiously, the seating at this arena was almost full.

I knew that a chum in the audience had a ticket for a football match the same evening but had decided to come to this TV recording instead. For some reason, the football scores were flashed up on a giant laser display board as the matches and the panel game progressed. As it became clear that the panel game was terrible, it became equally clear that the football match was turning into a thrilling event, ending up as a 5-5 draw. I felt quite guilty about this.

Secret dream meaning: It's probably something to do with your penis (secret dream meaning (c) S Freud).

A shame you weren't carrying something sharp

I spent the journey home thinking about compliments. (Well, that and wondering if I'd looked like an idiot when I turned my iPod on and then had to scramble to turn the sound down because it had been left up high when I'd been listening to Mogwai Fear Satan on the way in. (It was the start of Under Canvas Under Wraps by The Delgados that had made me jump, but I don't want you to think that I was having some sort of early-Chemikal Underground on the Underground day, at least not consciously anyway. I've been trapped in my own parentheses, haven't I? Start again.))

I spent the journey home thinking about compliments. You see, I'd been paid a compliment just before I left work, someone passing on nice comments from one of his chums who we'd been for a drink with. Only, being me, instead of saying something about how nice it had been to meet her (which it had), I felt the need to point out that in fact she was a little drunk by that stage of the evening in an attempt to suggest that her impression of me may have been slightly misconceived, only I'm not sure that it came out well and that I'd given the impression that I thought that the complimentor was a bit of a lush.

I've never been good at taking a compliment. I'm sure I've written about this before somewhere but I can't find it now, so you've probably heard this rather flimsy theory of mine before, but I think it stems from my early teenage years when girls would occasionally come up to me and say "my mate fancies you", when it was pretty obvious that their mates really didn't fancy me. I remember being quite upset the first time this happened - I suppose because I was young and naive and it was a new experience there was a brief glimmer of hope that actually her mate did fancy me, quickly being snuffed out when the mate's horrified face came into view - but after a while I got used to it and shrugged it off. I like to imagine that by the final time it had happened (I think it happened about four or five times, which I'd say is pretty good when you're as anti-social as I've always been) I was doing a certain amount of eye-rolling and sardonic commentary, although that probably wasn't the case.

The problem is that any vaguely nice thing that anyone has said to me me since tends to get treated with the same suspicion, that the person involved may, in fact, be taking the piss. Not that people pay me compliments on a regular basis, but it does prove quite difficult when, say, someone tells me that some bit of work I've done looks good (fortunately I've managed to get round that of late by making horrible, stupid errors in important new projects, so phew). I realise that this is something else that I should be over now, but it never quite seems to happen. Perhaps I need an etiquette guide to tell me how to react properly, or some inane news item on the BBC website will come to my rescue again. Yes, I have forgotten precisely what the point I was intending to make was going to be. Oh dear.

Why the English are rubbish (*)

I spent much of the weekend being confused about a woman. I realise that this is foolish behaviour and that I really ought to be old enough to know better by now, but the more I thought about it the more uncertain I became. When does being sociable and friendly become something slightly more? Was there any particular reason why she started mentioning ex-boyfriends? Was the fact that a fair amount of drink had been consumed by this point an issue? Shouldn't I have worked this sort of thing out by now?

(Not that that's all that I thought about over the weekend; I spent a fair amount of time pondering football, for example, as well as the usual random junk that springs to mind for no obvious reason. At one point, for example, I found myself thinking about English Tea by Thurman, possibly because I knew through my amazing psychic powers that I'd hear The Metros on the radio and wanted to prepare myself for something that awful. And there was a point when I found myself thinking about that Yellow Pages advert where they call for a French Polisher, which raised all sorts of questions - why would the people who've woken up in his house help him so readily? Why would he instinctively know to look up 'french polisher'?)

Fortunately, with the issues unresolved despite two days of moping and, er, cleaning the flat, science has come to the rescue. Well, all right, it hasn't, but there has been an unbelievably fatuous, tell-nothing study that for some reason is the third most read story on the BBC News website because it's Monday and people have gone back to work feeling tired and fed up and wondering about women they're not sure about, and so they read stupid stories that say things like "Telling someone you fancy 'I really like you' could make him or her find you more attractive", even though this bears no relation to anything else in the article, and "avoid wasting time on attractive individuals who appear unlikely to reciprocate", as if that wasn't absolutely bleedin' obvious.

Although, having given it some thought, this did give me cause to think of the relative attractiveness of Her and Me, and this did at least make me realise exactly how I should proceed. Which means that my behaviour has been influenced by an idiotic sub A-level psychological study written up by someone who has gratuitously used the word 'singleton'. My life is effectively over.

(*) I had originally planned to write an entry complaining about various things - people who tell you pubs smelt better when you could smoke in them; people who go one stop on the bus and then walk back in the direction that the bus has come from; probably some other thing as well, except I've forgotten them now - but have decided better of it, for reasons too complex to go into in this particular font size. However, I can't get the song out of my head and so I have retained the title.

Be average to each other

Final day of my week and a bit off, then, and I'm feeling oddly unemployed. Maybe I should have got over feeling a bit knackered this morning and gone out and done something. I did go to Sainsbury's, as I'd run out of some minor necessities such as food, but that only had the effect of reminding me of when I used to work from home and would go shopping during the week. I almost felt tempted to log into my work email, just to check that I still have a job. (Well, actually I felt tempted to log into my work email because I was wondering if the workmate who was due to have a baby last week had had a baby, but to admit this would make me look rather soppy and useless.)

Am currently wondering whether an extensive Flickr-based review of my weekend watching bands and making my back/hip/knees/back of neck sore would be a good idea, as practically all of my pictures of bands are crap. And my picture of crap is a bit blurry. While I consider this, here is a picture of the bass player from The Victorian English Gentlemens Club.


And, y'know, if you can't take a good picture of the bass player out of The Victorian English Gentlemen's Club, there's probably no hope for you (me).