An afternoon with me lacks a certain magic

I went to have my hair cut yesterday. This should not come as a shock to anyone as I have my hair cut approximately every four weeks: it's the only way to keep the straggly grey bits from being too distracting and hopefully makes it look as if I'm not ashamed of my thinning pate.

What was different was the person who cut my hair. You see, I went to the usual place, was told that the barber was some distance away and, given my busy schedule for the day, decided I couldn't wait. However, as I made my way towards my next port of call (which, in traditional TAoF style, was the supermarket) I spotted another barber shop and decided that, with my hair short enough for any cutting to go too disastrously wrong and my requirements not particularly complex, I should chance it.

(The last time I had my hair cut elsewhere was in my first term as a student. My hair was beginning to stick up a bit around the ears in an unsightly manner, it was getting quite long which is never appealing on the portlier gentleman, and I decided that with my regular style (and calling it a 'style' is really stretching it) nothing could go wrong. Quite how my requirements for a number three around the ears and at the back and then cut shorter on top were transmitted into 'looking like an escaped mental patient who's been let loose with a pair of scissors and a pudding basin' remains unclear, but the effect was enough to put me off having my locks chopped off elsewhere for 14 years.)

(I should point out, in an attempt to give this entry some sort of intrigue and salacious value, that the day after this haircut our student flat was expecting a return visit from a chum of one of my flatmates, who'd been up a couple of weeks previously. On that previous visit she seemed to have taken a shine to me: I think it may have been because I found her quite annoying and wasn't fascinated by her surgically enhanced bosom, or possibly it was my response to her grabbing at my groin being to point out that of course it's going to shrivel up if someone tries to attack it, with no movement even as she explained in detail what she was going to do to me next time she came up. I don't know if my haircut was in any way responsible for her not visiting that week, or indeed for the rest of the year. Whether she would have done the things she promised remains moot; at the time I was probably quite relieved.)

Where was I? Oh yes, haircuts. I had my hair cut by someone unfamiliar. As I left his little shop (a proper old-fashioned barbers shop too, with pictures on the wall with men with haircuts that may possibly have been terribly stylish 25 years ago) I was uncertain. As I looked in shop windows trying to judge, I became disconsolate; it looked rubbish. When I got home I thought again and decided that it would be all right after I washed it.

Which is pretty much my opinion now, having washed it and lived with it for a day; hard to go that far wrong when your hair is fairly short and boring at all times, really. There seem to be less stubbly bits around the back, which I miss as I find running my hand over them rather satisfying, but then they tend to grow out over a couple of days so it seems a bit churlish to miss them. On the plus side he has left my sideburns at their current length, which does leave the prospect of being able to grow them to an absurdly long length if I so choose. I won't, obviously, because extravagant sideburns are for idiots, but it's nice to have the option.

Just as well I threw in my crap student reminiscences, really.

My trip to the supermarket (part 3 of 3)

My attempt to get into the energy-drinks-and-posh-lemonade aisle was blocked by a toddler called Josh and a man I assume was his father, although in our modern times he could just have been serving as some sort of weekend substitute. Anyway, Josh seemed as determined as I was to head for the Lucozade, and this was causing some consternation for the male parental unit. "Josh" he called, "come here please Josh". Josh ignored him. I stood there and watched, hoping that I was adding to the man's awkwardness; I was rather rooting for Josh. He'd been saddled with this trendy-for-ten-minutes name and now he's running amok. Quite clearly, Josh had decided that the man who was in theory his male role model was a fucking idiot and that brightly coloured bottles were of far more interest, and watching the hapless gent flap around I couldn't help but agree with him.

A little later, as I tried to decide whether I could manage to carry two boxes of tissues rather than one, I heard a voice coming from the next aisle over. This time it was a mother lying to a child: "If you don't come now I'm going to leave you here, you'll have to stay in the supermarket and the people who work here will have to look after you". This was plainly a fib of a fairly high order, and I was tempted to call out "no! Don't believe her! She wouldn't do that, and if she did the law would be onto her like a flash!".

I had a think about this and decided that I, and all of those like me (single, childless and with little likelihood of this situation changing whether we want it to or not, fed up with the insistence that we'll find someone eventually and the offers to introduce us to their single friends or say nice things for our internet dating profiles and their insistence that we can't possibly be heartbroken over someone we've only met three times or the glares of the other ones, the ones who give you the skunk eye at you in the waiting room at the doctor's surgery because you've dared to respond when their child asks you what colour the soft toy they're playing with is because telling a small child that something is blue basically makes you a paedo, after all you're on your own in the doctor's surgery what more evidence do you need? pass me the pitchfork) have a duty to interfere with the upbringing of people's children. After all, where else are they going to learn dissent, to question authority, to realise that not everything they're told is strictly speaking true? The National Curriculum? CBBC? The parents? No. It's going to have to be us. So the next time I'm in Sainsbury's and I see a parent having some sort of difficulty controlling an unruly infant, I'm going to cheer the little 'un on and point out when he or she is being lied to or bribed with promises of chocolate or other sweetmeats in an attempt to get it to shut up. It is my duty as an Englishman.

Mind you, if they get complaints they might ban me, and then I'd have to get my shopping somewhere that's even more inconvenient to get to and from. So actually I might not do that after all.

My trip to the supermarket (part 2 of 3)

As I made my way down the path that marks the final stage of the unbelievably convoluted pedestrian route to Sainsbury's, I could hear singing coming from behind me. I looked around: he was about 15 or so, wearing a pair of very big headphones and laying waste to what I imagine was a horrible R&B ballad-type number. (Note that I have absolutely no idea what I might be describing here.)

Now, this is the third time something like this has happened to me lately. One was on a late night tube, with the singing being perpetrated by a girl who I was trying not to look at: I suspect that I failed in this. At the time I thought she might be doing it for my... well, not 'benefit' as such, more a signal that she was on to me, but I may have been reading too much into it. As usual. Given the lateness of the hour she could have had the excuse of intoxication, and she may also have had the excuse of being nuts, which are the two traditional excuses for public singing.

However, the other time there was no such excuse. This was on a bus one morning: I think I was on my way to the doctors. She sat in the seat behind me and had the same big headphones/R&B ballad-type song combination. Plenty of melisma and that sort of breathy "huh-huh-oooh-huh-huh" sound which I would imagine is so popular with the young people these days. It was too early for drunkenness and she stayed on the bus past the mental hospital, so I presume her sanity was firmly in place.

Now, it seems to me that to have one person singing at you in public is unfortunate, but to have two people doing it must be carelessn... no, hang on, I mean must be indicative of some sort of a trend, with people all over the country singing in public whether people want them to or not.

I suspect that it's S Cowell's fault, and that what's happening is that the young people have decided that they must sing AT ALL TIMES to make sure that they're ready for the next set of auditions for the Popular Talent Factor or whatever it is, That or they're expecting to be discovered by some sort of talent scout looking for a hot new singer who's just like all of the other hot new singers, but the chances of someone looking for the next hit generic singing sensation down the pedestrian path to Sainsbury's early on a Saturday morning seems slim at best. Either way it is has to stop now. It's jolly annoying.

My trip to the supermarket (part 1 of 3)

I realise that walking under a ladder is supposed to be bad luck (you could insert a mildly bawdy joke about hosiery at this point: I tried but failed to come up with one (*)), but I would like some clarification on the luck status of walking under a trampoline.


I came across this as I took the unbelievably convoluted pedestrian route to Sainsbury's this morning. I shouldn't have been worried as I walked under it, but I was. This possibly says more about me than about the correct method of storing a trampoline.

(*) Although I did end up spending more time than I thought likely looking at Wikipedia's pages on women's underwear to make sure I had correctly understood the meaning of the word 'hosiery'. I'm sure there are some people who look at these sections for, er, certain other reasons which must be the modern day equivalent of looking at the women's underwear sections of your mum's Littlewoods catalogue. Or possibly they don't, and I'm just too enamoured with the idea of someone getting all het up over the idea of bustles.

Inaugural Daily Express Poetry Corner

The problem of having a takeaway where the food is pretty good on your route home from the station is that it becomes very tempting to go in there on a slightly-too-regular basis. Tonight, for example, as I approached it I started thinking about how I didn't have a lot in, and hadn't got anything out to defrost in case we went out to lunch, and how I wasn't hungry enough for a whole pizza, and that the potatoes would probably be a bit spongy and inedible by now, and how pasta doesn't seem right for Friday night because Friday nights should be special and different, like when you were 8 and on Fridays you'd have burgers in rolls with hamburger relish and cheese slices and The Pink Windmill Show on the telly and that.

Trying not to think of the various tempting items on the menu, I decided to think about Daily Express Poetry instead. You see, while attempting to find who to write to to ask permission to reproduce an article of theirs for a new People's Princess For GCSE text, I found myself browsing the contacts list of the World's Greatest Newspaper (and, goodness me, I would like some independent verification of that particular claim) and, scrolling down, was astonished to realise that they have a Poetry Editor.

And, naturally, this got me pondering what sort of poetry the Daily Express might publish. And so, to distract me from the thought of Chow Mein and that chilli chicken thing that I decided that I was definitely going to have next time when I was waiting last week, I composed a suitable ode. Inspired by TV's famous Mark X, I attempted a limerick about Muslims but couldn't get the line OH MY GOD HE'S GOT A BACKPACK WHY AREN'T THE POLICE ARRESTING HIM NOW? IT'S POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD I TELL YOU to scan, so instead I went for another popular favourite.

Ode to Madeleine

Oh, poor, poor Maddy
Your parents and their chums have taken our cash
I bet they did it

Note the topical reference to something I thought had happened fairly recently but was actually months ago. This poetry lark is harder than it looks.

I had the pasta in the end.

Half the lights have gone out and I'm worried

Wednesday night, and I was feeling hungry and tired and dispirited. This seemed like an excellent opportunity to use the facilities of the new Chinese just down the road. I'd been there once and enjoyed the food, and if you can't eat takeaway when you're feeling hungry and tired and dispirited, when are you going to eat it?

(There can be few more dispiriting sights for the single man than a woman looking at him with a look of confusion bordering on bewilderment. Most other expressions can be dealt with - anger, grave offence, disgust, anything along those lines can be elegantly danced around, but not confusion. You can't confuse someone and expect her to call you back, no matter how much you apologise and put it down to the insomnia. The only more dispiriting look I can think of is that of the parent glaring at you when you respond to a question that their small child has asked you, as if agreeing that they have a lot of sticklebricks or whatever automatically makes you a paedophile.)

The Chinese takeaway had opened rather suddenly. The shop was a Chinese before but had been closed ever since I moved here, with only the eerie glow of an empty fridge to indicate any sign of life. Then, a few weeks back, a new sign appeared outside and the shop was open for business in about two days flat. At around the same time, the rubbish Indian takeaway a few doors along from it had turned into a chicken takeaway, with a generic chicken takeaway name like "Chicken Spot" or something like that. As I approached the Chinese on Wednesday, I noticed that the sign proclaiming the chicken takeaway to be called "Chicken Shack" or whatever had disapeared, although the shop was still open.

Yesterday morning, as I passed on the bus en route to Sainsbury's, I noticed that the chicken takeaway had a new name: Mr Chicken's. Here it is with some of the other, equally scintillating, shops on the parade in a shot expertly taken from the bus on the way home from Sainsbury's:


Not only does the timing of the renaming seem odd - it's only been open a month or so if that, and being that rare thing, a chicken takeaway without three other chicken takeaways in close proximity, there's no need for it to distinguish itself from the competition - but why "Mr Chicken's"?

I'm not objecting to the rogue apostrophe: these things happen. I could understand if they'd called it "Mr Chicken": Mr Chicken sounds like the definitive, last word in greasy, smelly fast food, whereas Mr Chicken's seems, well, less authoritative somehow, as if they have to reassure the public that they have more than one chicken and aren't going to run out. I'm sure even the most ill-educated chicken takeaway customer is going to be able to guess that all of those aren't coming from one giant infinito-chicken with drumsticks that grow again every time one's torn off, unless those Jamie Oliver programmes were more effective than we could have imagined.

Loose Tooth Tactile (*)

It's about 3.40 (well, actually it's about 9.12, but I'm typing this up from notes I made earlier) and I'm sat in the coffee shop at Queen's Hospital, Romford. I have a mocha and a chocolate cookie ("it's got nuts in" said the magnificently surly woman who served me, in a tone in which you might warn someone that they're about to eat the marinated eyeballs of your firstborn). My appointment was for 3.30, but I'd wandered into the after-effects of a major communication breakdown and had suggested that I wander off for a bit while they cleared the backlog, the alternative being to sit in a waiting room of properly sick people, which is always a bit depressing.

(When I joined the queue in the coffee shop I'd made the amateurish mistake of not picking up a tray and thus had to carry my drink and plate-with-cookie across the room in a slightly awkward manner. If I was an expert I could also tell whether the selling of hot pastries is normal behaviour for a coffee shop. It seems wrong somehow; maybe Starbucks do a range of sausage rolls and cheese and onion slices to go with your frappucino, but it seems somehow unlikely.)

I have no idea how to drink coffee. What do you do with the foamy bit at the top? It's tasty, but surely you can't just lick at it? But if you don't it'll just sink to the bottom and you'll have missed the best bit of the drink. Also, I tend to get bored with coffee about halfway down the cup in a way that I don't with, say, lemon-flavour Lucozade. Oh the first sip I think "oooh, that's tasty, why don't I drink coffee more often?", and now I'm thinking "how much did I pay for that again?".

Like pop's forgotten The Sultans of Ping F.C, I care as little for tea as I do for coffee. And yet, oddly enough, I did drink a cup of tea the other day. I was at the football, I was cold to the point of shivering, I was thoroughly miserable and I needed something to warm me up; extreme circumstances called for extreme measures. Coffee seemed like a bad move as I've been sleeping badly lately, so I went for tea: it was only after I'd ordered it that I realised that they did hot chocolate as well. This was the first time I'd had a cup of tea for 13 years, the previous one being an accident involving a girl and a media studies seminar group that I shan't go into in the hope that it sounds more intriguing than it actually was.

I took my first sip of the tea somewhat nervously, almost expecting it to cause some sort of unpleasant reaction, and wary of what it might taste like even though I wasn't expecting anything other than hot, slightly sweetened water. I was pleasantly surprised by the slight milkiness of it, which at least gave it some flavour, even if the flavour was 'hot diluted milk'. And it did make me feel slightly warmer, although how much of that was from consuming the tea and how much was from holding the polystyrene cup I don't know. I drank it all down: I was very cold.

And somewhat reassured: if I'd enjoyed the tea I would have had to live with the thought that I'd spent years missing out on a great taste sensation. And I'm sure that all of the girls I'd failed to strike up conversation with in workplace kitchens because I was just getting some water from the cooler rather than hanging around waiting for the kettle to boil wouldn't have been interested anyway. Phew.

(*) I thought I'd already named a post after this, but apparently not. "People in the future will need a special juice. What is that juice? Orange juice!" Well, of course.

(**) In the hilarious reminiscences of The Sultans of Ping FC's jumper-loss debacle, people tend to overlook that their album was called Casual Sex In The Cineplex. At the time someone did try to convince me that this was a good name for an album. I thought he was wrong then and I still do.

Extensive musings on events in the month of February

Hang on, if I do this again does it mean that this month's going to be even worse than last month, as happened last month? Sod that.