Bus Shelters of Ilford

Yes!

2011-12-05T23:06:00.001Z

I was trying to avoid looking at the shopping of the woman in front of me. She positioned her copy of the Daily Mail on top of some of it, and while I wasn't quite taking in the front page headline the words "NOW" and "FOREIGN" were clearly present and if I'd bothered to try to take it in I would have ended up feeling miserable, and I'd been feeling relatively cheery until that point. (I suspect the word 'NOW' was the real killer; amazing how such an innocuous word becomes so utterly loaded in the wrong hands.) Instead I turned my attention instead to the display of DVDs by the counter, as some copies of The King's Speech were leaning over and putting them back seemed a good way to distract myself from printed xenophobia.

The first curiosity of the display was that the seemingly haphazard selection - a collection of classic musicals here, a 3 disc-set of romantic comedies there, Alvin and the Chipmunks positioned next to Transformers - was actually carefully planned, as the titles of the films had been printed on the back of the display. Which meant someone had presumably spent hours trying to work out the optimum configuration of DVDs for maximum impulse-buy effect, or possibly that someone has come up with some sort of algorithm; Oscar wins squared over family appeal and multiply by the square root of Kate Hudson, or something.

The algorithm had positioned a 3 CD-set of the Lord of the Rings films next to The King's Speech, and as the queue was quite slow I had time to consider this further as, with its £5 price tag, there as something oddly appealing about it. Now, I've never seen any of these films, never had any desire to see any of the films, never read the books, have absolutely no interest in the entire orc-y saga. I have no idea if there are any orcs; I think I may have played the wrong computer games at the wrong moment and it put me off the orc-y world of fantasy for life. (Well, I do get the occasional urge for another go at Lords of Midnight, but it's not quite the same thing.)

But what I do know that all of the films are extremely long (at least part of the reason for not going to see them, as I regard any film that's much over two hours with suspicion. I still haven't seen the last Batman film on the grounds that a film about Batman does not need to be three hours long, no matter how good everyone might insist it is. And I'm far more interested in Batman than a load of bloody elves). And it's that that I think tempted me; for a fiver it seemed you got an awful lot of film, and being someone who can get tempted into trying something by a timely 2 for 1 offer in Sainsbury's on a Saturday morning (or miscellaneous bread-based products from the reduced to clear rack of a weekday evening), it defnitely held some appeal. If an item that the Daily Mail reader had placed rather precariously near the edge of the conveyer belt hadn't toppled on to the floor and distracted me, I may have ended up buying it. (Naturally, despite her despicable choice of reading material, I picked the item up and popped it on the converyer belt; remain decent in the face of evil, that's my motto.) (It's not my motto.)

But this would have been madness. Where would I find the time to watch three long films I'm not interested in? I have piles of programmes I've recorded to re-watch at a later date gathering dust, a games console I hardly ever use, a Spotify playlist of albums I'd like to listen to that runs to 6 days and the occasional urge to play Lords of Midnight, so why on earth would I watch a series of films I have no real interest in? Boasting an excellent price-per-minute of film clearly isn't enough. What on earth is going on in my stupid head? Have I been warped by the craziness of capitalist credo gone mad? Or am I just a fathead?

It's nearly Christmas. Don't answer that.

Three posters and four people in flourescent bibs, and you still didn't spot that there were engineering works

2011-10-09T23:27:00.003+01:00

I was sat in a comfy chair at my parents', digesting the huge dinner I'd just consumed while my mum asked me how Facebook works, when I heard possibly the most asinine thing I've ever heard in all my days.

My parents listen to a radio station named after a precious metal that plays old records all day. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing - I like old records - but their playlist tends to be rather narrow; any station where you might hear In The Year 2525 by Zager and Evans (*) twice in the same day really isn't trying. Anyway, today they were playing lots of tunes by The Beatles and associated acts for various reasons, and at the end of one Lennon song - let's say Instant Karma, that one's not too bad - the DJ starts speaking. I'm paraphrasing a little, but he said something along the lines of the following:

"Playing lots of Beatles and Lennon today, it would have been John Lennon's 71st birthday and I'm sure he would have been celebrating it at Paul McCartney's wedding if he hadn't."

Now, it may not be apparent to the layman but as someone with an eye for this sort of thing I feel I can point out that this sentence doesn't seem quite complete. It's almost as if the person saying it decided that they needed to end it early, perhaps because they realised that the only logical conclusion to it would have been "... was shot", and decided that this might spoil the otherwise cheery sentiment.

But this isn't the only issue I have with this sentence. Even if we ignore the possibility that John Lennon may not have survived another 30 odd years if it hadn't been for the hastily passed-over event, even someone who isn't that familiar with The Beatles would be aware that Lennon and McCartney's relationship was somewhat uneven. And while some people do mellow with age, some people become incredibly cantankerous and unforgiving, and while a highly-trained psychologist may be able to predict such things, an idiot DJ's thoughts on the matter would be essentially worthless.

And this is before we even consider the different course McCartney's life might have taken if Lennon hadn't had the the unfortunate incident which we apparently can't mention. If a butterfly flapping it's wings can cause a hypothetical hurricane, an old mate not getting shot by a nutter would presumably impact on someone's life quite a bit as well. Reunions? Court cases? Not meeting Heather? Anything could have happened that may not have led to today's happy event (happiness of event to be determined at a later stage when hindsight is available).

So, in several respects, this sentence is utter, utter bollocks, driven by a strange desire to create a cuddly everything's-all-right-after-all view of the world rather than talk to your audience as if they were capable of thought. And yet someone - no idea who; all presenters on this station sound exactly the same and make no impact whatsoever - is paid to say things like this. So maybe Zager and Evans were right all along.

(*) No points if you forgot the (Exordium and Terminus), but a bonus point if you identified the song as being "utter shit".

I haven't mentioned trains for a bit

2011-09-03T23:35:00.002+01:00

On the train back from the seaside I was taunted by some small children.

All right, some small girls.

It started when one of them, who'd been bounding excitedly from seat to seat in the way that children who've had a day at the seaside and have therefore probably consumed far too much sugar will do, bounced into the seat in front of mine and then peered over the top of it at me. I looked up at her and smiled, she laughed and then began a game where she would peer at me from around the side of the chair, leaping back when I turned to look at her. This was all very sweet.

"You're silly", she said. "You're a silly man. You're a big poo poo willy!"

And then for what seemed like several minutes she repeated the charge that I was a poo poo willy. Her sister toddled over at some point and joined in, albeit not quite as clearly as she was too young to be able to form the words properly. Eventually the mother came over to remove them. She ignored me as she walked past; I'm not sure if this was out of embarrassment, or because she'd decided that I was beneath contempt, or because she'd decided that I was a paedo.

Upon changing trains when we reached the main line, I found myself sat across the way from a couple of... no, I'm not going to call them 'goths', that would be needlessly reductive, but they were dressed in a manner that suggested that their plans for the evening involved listening to dark, doomy music of an industrial hue. He was in PVC trousers, big boots and a difficult-looking collar; she was wearing fishnets, a tiny skirt and those boots where the entire sole lifts you several inches off the ground (*). This looked to me to be an uncomfortable way to dress for long-distance travel, although I suppose that you can't really take your PVC trousers with you and change in the train toilet on the way.

At was at about this point that I decided to eat some of the fudge I'd bought earlier in the day.

There was a time when I would have knowingly smirked at their outfits, but these days I'm more inclined to be impressed by this sort of thing. It's not as if I was ever really part of any subculture where dressing up was ever part of the deal, and I wonder if I missed some important rite of passage by not being part of anything. I suppose that when I used to go to gigs where the bands were all teenagers wearing too much glitter and mascara playing for an audience of teenagers wearing too much glitter and mascara that I could have adopted the too much glitter and mascara look, but I was too fat (glitter and mascara suiting the tubbier gentleman as well as PVC trousers), too old (being 22 invariably made me the oldest person in the room, saving the odd member of bar staff and the band's parents if they were present) and had a job in tax publishing; it would have been *wrong*.

As we neared London she went to the loo. "That must be difficult" I thought to myself, and then wondered why I should think such a thing.

(*) Which I thought might be called 'platform boots', but a quick search suggests that they aren't. So you'll have to guess what they're called yourself while I remain secure in my lack of knowledge of women's footwear.

Too long (too dull) for Tumblr

2011-07-28T23:31:00.003+01:00

It wasn't the woman who seated me at the Gourmet Burger Kitchen's fault that I cleared off without ordering anything, at least as far as I can tell. She explained the menu, explained the ordering system (you have to order at the counter and give them your table number), she was politeness personified. At that point in proceedings I was confident that my burger-based lunch was going to go smoothly. The options on the menu were intriguing. I wondered why I'd never been to a branch before.

(I would say that I seem to have spent all of my week off eating burgers of various kinds, but actually the burger rampage started before I finished work at the end of last week. Just think: every time I eat a burger Morrissey feels angry. Wish I'd had a few more now.)

It was partly the fault of the woman in front of me at the counter. She'd brought a small child up with her and the small child kept running off, and instead of giving her order she made to go after the child, then didn't, then did, then didn't, then stood around uselessly gawping while the bloke behind the counter stared at her. Eventually a man I assume was her partner came along to get the child; why on earth didn't she just leave the child with him in the first place?

Anyway, this gave me time to look over and realise that a family had taken over my table. I hadn't left anything to indicate that I was sitting there, because it wasn't a day for coats and I don't leave my bag sitting around on its own while I'm elsewhere because I wasn't born yesterday, but then I didn't think I'd have to. The woman who seated me was there with them, but I can't imagine that she'd sat them at the table next to mine as there were at least six of them and the next table only sat four, which is why they'd taken over mine.

I suppose it's partly my fault, because I should have stayed in the queue, made my order and then got the people to leave my table, but I suspect that with their small children they'd have been quite a nuisance. I'm probably being a bit unfair but I always suspect that families with lots of small children are going to look down their nose if they deal with me. "Well, look at us with our children; how dare you suggest that just because you were sat at this table first and have ordered food to be delivered to this table that we should vacate it! Look at you with your bag! We have spawned on several occasions, therefore outrank you. Now, hie and away with you, before we spawn again and outrank you even further!".

I left the woman who seated me to sort this out and returned to the counter, where two people had leapt in ahead of me. And then, having decided that everyone in this place except for me and the woman who seated me was an idiot and that I didn't want to be here any more, I kept going. And for this state of affairs I mainly blame the Gourmet Burger Kitchen for not hiring enough staff so that they could come to the table and take your order; if you can't be arsed to do that, in a place where there are plenty of other options for lunch (including another overpriced burger place, where I had a burger and a chocolate milkshake to boot), once in a while you're going to lose a customer.

The man who broke the bank at Monte Carol

2011-05-25T22:52:00.001+01:00

For the last couple of weeks there's been a bloke stationed outside the entrance to the Underground at Liverpool Street holding a sign bearing the slogan "YOU NEED COFFEE", with an arrow pointing to a concession on the other side of the concourse. (The sign is square and on the end of a pole, so it's held like a Roman standard or its modern day equivalent, the Golf Sale sign.)

I use the word 'stationed' because the bloke has adopted a number of poses. On a couple of occasions he's been slumped on the floor, feigning sleep and leaning against his sign. On others he's been standing, propped up against the sign and with his eyes closed. The idea, I suppose, is that you see him and think 'that's how I'm feeling, I must go and buy some coffee', although as I haven't spotted anyone turning around and heading in the direction that the arrow is pointing, I'm not sure that it's been particularly effective.

This morning the man had his eyes open and was looking alert; I'm not sure if this was because he was supposed to be showing the after-effects of what happens when you drink coffee or if someone had tried to rob him, which I would imagine is the most likely outcome if you had slept on a station concourse for two weeks.

This got me to thinking about job satisfaction. Because presumably the bloke's job isn't solely to sit outside the entrance to a station holding a sign; he can only do that for about four hours or so each morning, and you're not going to be able to feed yourself on the wages earned from sitting outside a station holding a sign for four hours a day. I'm guessing that the bloke is employed by the coffee-selling concession (well, baguette-selling concession - I guess they're trying to make themselves relevant to something other than the "it's late and I'm hungry but I don't want to go to Burger King" market) in some other capacity and has just drawn the short straw, or possibly he runs the concession stand and is doing this as a stunt to get himself in the company newsletter. But sitting outside a station with your eyes as several thousand people tramp past doesn't seem like a satisfying way to spend your time, what with the risk of dozy commuters trampling all over you and you not seeing them coming.

But then last night I was lying in bed trying to stop myself from thinking about work, and being particularly vexed that I was doing this as I'd only just woken up after nodding off while listening to a particularly intellectually rigorous edition of In Our Time. (*) And I suspect the bloke whose morning involves sitting outside a station pretending to sleep and holding a sign probably doesn't have this issue when his head hits the pillow. And if the bloke had a blog he'd probably do a much better job of ever writing anything in it because of not really having much time when he's got home late from work. So I'm in no position to judge, really.

(*) My current favoured method of getting to sleep, not because the programme is boring - it isn't, most of the time at least - but because it's not easy to follow and requires a lot of concentration so that I might understand one sentence in two rather than one sentence in three, and having to concentrate late at night makes me sleepy. Or maybe it's all down to the mellifluous tones of M Bragg.

No, it's definitely the concentration thing. It's 2011 and I'm doing a joke about M Bragg having a funny voice. Maybe the Rapture wouldn't be such a bad thing after all.

Deficient Skeleton Saturday: This is not a music blog II (or: Bad Draft Thursday)

2011-03-19T21:41:00.002Z

That's a pleasingly convoluted title. Clearly I'd been thinking about Bad Drafts long before the last time I did one of these. Anyway, I was thinking about this one earlier in the week for topical reasons (well, because Marc Riley mentioned the album in question) and it seemed as good a time as any to get this out of my system. From 3 July 2010, then:

There was a display in the supermarket relating to what I assume was a special issue of Q, the 100 albums you have to hear before you become middle-aged OH NO TOO LATE or something like that. I spotted it the other week and didn't really think anything of it, as I'm trying to avoid things like "buying stuff unless it's important" at the moment on the grounds that if I don't I tend to run out of money horribly in advance of pay day and as such racks of cheap CDs are dangerous territory.

I passed by a little closer at the weekend as I had business near the end of the fruit aisle, and as such was able to note that one of the albums prominently displayed was the distinctive splodgy cover of Screamadelica. And this caused me to suck a thoughtful tooth, as Screamadelica is an album I remember well.

When my then chums and I were about 16 or so, Screamadelica was an album we listened to an awful lot. Thing is, none of us could afford to buy many albums (and we were all too lazy and feckless to get a job to enable us to buy more) so the ones that we did own got played a lot. And because my chums were the sort of people who were really very cool indeed and liked all the most exciting, cutting-edge stuff (their opinion) or hopelessly fell for any hype going (my opinion) it was fairly inevitable that a copy of Screamadelica would turn up at some point.

I wonder now if the reason I took against Screamadelica was deliberate contrariness or just not thinking much of it. Pretty much everything else they enthused over didn't meet my rigorous standards: I recall a chum coming around with a copy of The Drowners and me saying "is that it?" when it was finished. And I didn't get the Manics at all. (I didn't really *get* the Manics until Kenickie came along and I read mailing list epistles by lots of people who really loved them, that being the nature of the Kenickie internet fanbase, but even then I never particularly wanted to listen to their records, which I tend to find disappointingly important when it comes to liking bands.) But I never came round to any of those, so maybe I was being right all along. I never came round to The Smiths or Joy Division or all sorts of other things that I probably ought to like either.

But all this lead me into thinking that I should give it another listen, which the magic of the internet allows. (If only we'd had Spotify when we were 16. Kids today, eh? Don't know they're born. Tcha.) I think the issue for me at the time with Screamadelica was that after Movin' On Up (which I liked) it all seemed to blur into one great melange, and I needed more of a pop thrill than it provided; I just wasn't ready for songs that lasted longer then three minutes, let alone ten. I'm not sure I'd necessarily hold that against it now but I can see where I was coming from; most of the songs, such as they are, don't really go anywhere. There's things I don't remember (Inner Flight, for example, which I rather like; maybe we fast-forwarded that one? And the really horrible sax solo I'm listening to now may have been something I simply chose to forget) but it doesn't strike me that I've been missing something important for the last (Christ) 19 years.

And yet I like other similar things that have come since. Surf Solar springs immediately to mind as something that probably wouldn't have existed without Screamadelica (what with having the same producer and all) but which I really like. So, while I have no particularl interest in ever listening to this again, I can at least see that it's (hnngh) important. And this is the disturbing thing, realising that things from my childhood have become part of the canon, or at least someone's canon anyway.

Reason for deficiency: Dunno. Seems OK now that I look back at it. Wussy final paragraph, I suppose. I always feel a bit uneasy when I'm commenting on music, particularly if I'm asserting that something is clearly influenced by something else; I've always been a bit envious of people who can tell what things sound like and track the way types of music evolve and that. I saw a box set of Screamadelica and Give Out But Don't Give Up for three quid the other week. Didn't buy it, natch.

Don't try to finish what you ain't got started

2011-03-06T23:15:00.001Z

How to tell you're in the pub with people who work in publishing: it's Friday evening, drink has been taken and discussion has turned to umlauts.

But anyway.

If there's one thing in the world I'm not qualified to do (and there are millions, from rewiring a house to preparing a banquet for the Queen of The Netherlands; the only things I am qualified to do are check the spelling and do some DTP work in 2005) it's to offer relationship advice. Which makes it all the stranger that someone asked me for some the other night, and while I tried manfully I was of very little use. However, if there is one piece of advice I can offer, it is this: if you're asking two men in their mid-30s for relationship advice when you're in the pub on a Friday evening with people you work with, you're probably not quite ready to embark on anything particularly significant.

Just a hunch.

What made it worse was that at least part of the reason that I'd stayed in the pub, beyond the initial couple of halves of lager I'd intended to drink due to the curious stomach ailment that nearly caught me out on a train home the previous day (I'd had to dash to the Liverpool Street station toilets, or at least as close to a dash as I could manage in the circumstances), was the big-eyed look of interest the same person had given me earlier in the evening when I'd explained some fascinating (NB not fascinating) aspect of my new-ish job. This was a poor reason to stay for a number of reasons, not just the ones relating to my belly. But I did it anyway, because it's very important that I never learn under any circumstances.

(It's odd that anyone would assume that because you're of a particular gender that you're able to offer an insight into the thinking of any other person of that gender and thus can answer the question "you're a man, why do you think he hasn't called?". And it's only in this area that such a thing is expected; for example, in the last few days nobody has said to me "you're a man, could you give me an insight into the mind of Colonel Gaddafi/David Walliams/Spiderman?".)

Also, in attempting to prove my lack of qualifications I ended up letting on slightly more about some recent events than I ought, which I'm hoping nobody who might have been sober or better at holding their drink will have overheard. Still, at least looking suspiciously at people will add an extra frisson to the working week.

We've bought a coachload down with us

2011-02-25T23:13:00.000Z

What I know about music can safely be written on the back of a tiny thing that has shrunk in the wash, but I have seen a lot of support bands. And I'm finding that my tolerance for support bands is much less than it used to be when I was younger and exciting and didn't wince when getting up after being sat down for more than 20 minutes.

(Although I did enjoy Summer Camp supporting Los Campesinos! the other week, even though they had a slide-projector thing. I don't see bands nearly as much as I used to and yet I'm still sick of back projections. Bands! Spend more time concentrating on being any good and less time sorting out sodding back projections! Although Summer Camp got away with it by being thoroughly charming.)

Anyway, I thought it might be useful if I passed on what I hope are useful bits of advice for support bands everywhere, based on years of watching them and not just specifically moaning about something I saw last night, oh no.

(I went to see Rose Elinor Dougall last night. Her and her band were good, although the new songs were a bit, I don't know, not as out of the ordinary as I thought they might have been given the oft-stated influences, although the one I heard them playing on Marc Riley on Wednesday which persuaded me to go was splendid; I do like a big Stereolab-by conclusion. And the stuff from the album was all good, May Holiday working particularly well I thought. It was apparent that a certain percentage of the audience were, er, gentlemen whose first concern was not the music, and I was a bit worried that a casual observer would mistake me for one of them (*). I did get particularly annoyed with one who kept bobbing around in front of me with his camera and was tempted to proclaim "look, pal, I'm sure that massive wank you're going to have when you upload these will be the highlight of your week but the rest of us are trying to watch this", but decided agin it.)

1. Having your mates dancing on stage only emphasises how crushingly mediocre your band is

There's something about watching a girl in a spangly bra do some sort of interpretive dance that bears no relation to the song being played that really makes you think that your plan to go out for the evening might not have been a wise one. There were four of them; they started off in the audience and then migrated to the stage, where they seemed to have secreted various bits of costume and feather boas. I think, given the way bits of clothing were peeled off, that it was supposed to be alluring in some way, but the effect was of more of the sort of hen party you'd change train carriages to avoid spending more than one stop in the company of.

And all the time their OTT jigging was totally out of keeping with the music, which remained relentlessly unremarkable throughout. Nothing they seemed to do seemed to be in time or in keeping with the singer's portentious wailing. It did not enhance the show.

2. Don't say "this is our new single, which we're doing promotion for at the moment"

I'm sure it's tough being up on stage and not having anything particular to say by way of an introduction to your song, but you really need to think these things through carefully in case you say something like "this is our new single which we're doing promotion for at the moment". Because nothing says that you've put your heart and soul into entertaining a crowd, that the song that you're about to play is a creative marvel, the thing you've spent your entire life building up to ever since you first started striking poses while singing into a hairbrush, nothing says these things less than "this is our new single, which we're doing promotion for at the moment". You may as well have sent along a Powerpoint presentation and been done with it.

3. No sodding back projections.

I've said this already.

(*) Why you'd pay 7 quid to go and letch at someone when there are all sorts of perfectly good tube trains to be doing it on I don't know.

All my dreams are nondescript

2011-02-14T23:22:00.002Z

This morning I shared train carriages with both A Pigeon and B Crow. Ha! You see what I've done there? See? See? I am droll.

The pigeon flapped on to the train at Liverpool Street and got off at Moorgate, which, as we've long established, does not mean that it wanted to travel to Moorgate. If the pigeon wanted to get from Liverpool Street to Moorgate it would have been far easier for it to have flown, and then it would have been where it wanted to be in Moorgate rather than stuck at the end of the Circle Line platforms where no pigeon would want to be. Pigeons may have impeccable homing instincts, but if half the people who ride the northern side of the Circle Line can't tell whether a train is going to Paddington or not there is absolutely no way that a pigeon can tell. If it had got off at the further distant and open-air platforms of Barbican or Farringdon I might have conceded the point, if anyone had made it.

I've seen B Crow on the train before, but this morning I didn't notice him at first, because I was... well... er... all right, I was trying not to look at a woman. I realise that this is pathetic behaviour, it always was pathetic behaviour and as I get older it only become more pathetic, but she was really was. Really. And the moment I realised that I was gazing slack-jawed at her and averted my eyes, I realised that I was staring at B Crow and averted my eyes again. I'm sure B Crow is used to being stared at, usually by people thinking "there's that bloke who stops the tubes from running" (or, as it would be at the moment, "there's that bloke who stops the tubes from running but isn't nearly so good at it as Transport For London seem to be") (SATIRE), but I'm not really that sort of person. I looked out of the window instead, with the occasional furtive glance between the bouts of shame. (At the woman, not at B Crow.)

At Farringdon someone from the office boarded the train and stood opposite me. After a brief moment of recognition she got her book out, which was quite a relief; I know her well enough to be on nodding terms, perhaps to carry a brief chat in the kitchen, but not enough to manage a conversation all the way to work, and to attempt it on a Monday morning when my head was full of pigeons and stuff would have been excruciating. (I really should have been listening to Soft Verges at this point, although I was actually listening to Little In The Way Of Sunshine.) This did leave the issue of what to do when we left the train; as it was she seemed to pause quite deliberately to put her book back in her bag, which I took as my cue to move off, so I did. I realise that this is even more pathetic behaviour than that that I'd engaged in earlier, but I was clearly on something of a feeble roll by now.

Ned Sherrin

2011-01-31T20:59:00.002Z

I've been meaning to sift through my CD singles for about a million years, and, finding myself at a loose end on Saturday evening, it seemed as a good a time as any to make a start. (Yes, I know, but I'm using it being January as an excuse at the moment.)

The idea is that I get everything on to my computer (taking care to back everything up, lest I get caught up in one of those hilarious "oh noes! I have lost all my music because I got rid of the CDs and didn't back everything up and now it's not working" scenarios, which I'm sure I'll still manage to contrive anyway because that's what happens to me) and then get rid of as many of the CDs as possible. The problem with this idea is that I'm finding it really hard to get rid of them; I fear I may be sentimentally attached to the worst format of all time. Why did anyone think CD singles were a good idea, with their big plasticky cases and their taking up a tiny fraction of the usable space of the CD? I know that they didn't really last long, but it was still too long, and unfortunately it coincided with the time I was most active in my music-buying, leaving me with hundreds of the wretched things.

Some decisions on what to get rid of are easy. I did really like the first Badly Drawn Boy album but I can't think of why I own several singles from that era, sometimes falling for the CD1/CD2 trap which marked out the most gullible purchasers. Some are comparatively easy; I doubt I've listened to My Father My King by Mogwai in at least five years, almost certainly longer, but there's no way I'm getting shot of it. But most of them are causing me to pause, ponder and then make thoroughly irrational decisions that I cannot possibly defend.

Consider, for example, Girl From Mars by Ash. I suspect that, until I removed it from the case, it hadn't been used for about 13 years or so. I suspect that there will never be a time when I voluntarily decide that I want to hear Girl From Mars. It's not that I don't like the song, although I seem to remember being much keener on it at the time than I am now; I suspect it's a song that sounds much better when you're 19 than when you're 34. But it's a song I've heard so many times - from overplaying at the time and on the radio, back when I used to listen to XFM and the playlist consisted of about 12 songs being continually repeated (imagine the frequency with which 6 Music plays that song by The fucking Vaccines but with the same 12 songs repeated over and over again) (albeit with none of them being as bad as that song by The fucking Vaccines because such a thing would be impossible) (although, actually, one of them was Whipping Piccadilly by Gomez, so maybe nearly as bad as that song by The fucking Vaccines) - that I can't imagine actually wanting to listen to it again. And even if I did, it's not as if it's an obscure song that the internet is going to never have heard of, So why is it on my pile of CD singles that I can't bring myself to get rid of?

I had no such qualms with putting my limited edition copies of The Private Psychedelic Reel by The Chemical Brothers (no 18546 of goodness knows how many) and Risingson by Massive Attack (no 24000 and something out of goodness knows what) on the reject pile; maybe it's because I have those on albums elsewhere, or because I'm so massively offended by the misuse of the word 'limited', or because I probably won't ever need a live version of Setting Sons/dub remix of Risingson. But then I probably won't need an Ash b-side called Astral Conversations with Toulouse Lautrec either, so I'm not sure that's a good reason for making a decision either.

I'm also left with the problem of what to do with the wretched things now that I no longer want them. I'd cheerfully give them away if anyone wanted them (I'm not thinking for a moment that anyone would want to buy the things, and even if they did I imagine that the effort involved would hugely outweigh any benefit I might get). Unless CD recycling has become markedly easier than it was last time I looked I suspect that that may be not be an option either. So for now they'll sit in a box under my bed, gathering dust until the next house move, at which time they'll probably be tossed into the rubbish, my own private environmental catastrophe. Cheers, the music industy. Cheers, idiotic early-mid 20s me and my poor purchasing decisions.

Youth Hostelling with Douglas Hurd

2011-01-24T23:14:00.002Z

Behold The Railwayings with Michael Portillo is at least 50% of a programme that I want to watch. I find railways endlessly fascinating. Not trains - never been able to get excited about rolling stock other than its ability to take me from one place to the other (although calling it 'rolling stock' may be a bit of a giveaway) - but railways, where they go, where they used to go and such, pushes my buttons. I like riding on trains as well; few things make me happier than sitting on a train, headphones wodged in my ears, belting across country towards wherever. And Behold The Railwayings with Michael Portillo features a lot of sitting on trains looking out of the window.

But there's a problem. The clue is in the 'with Michael Portillo' bit. Eh? What?

1. Why Michael Portillo?

See, when I see Michael Portillo's Easter Island statue face, I think of him losing, and how brilliant it was, and how bad must the last lot have been for everyone to have forgotten how downright evil the Tories are and why is everyone surprised when poor people are told to sell their firstborns for dogfood to pay for bankers to have £50 notes to light to their cigars with? or whatever they've come up with this week. It doesn't make me think that here is a nice programme about railways and that. Didn't those guys hate trains anyway? I presume he's been slightly rehabilitated by sitting next to Diane Abbot, and the fact that he's appearing on the BBC rather than carving it up for R Murdoch's benefit at least puts him at an advantage over the rest of them, and it's probably my fault for not being able to let go, but still.

2. Why Michael Portillo?

Did he come attached to the programme, or did someone decide that a nice programme about railways might be a good idea and then thought that they knew who'd be just perfect to present it? I can understand that you might not want to pick someone from the usual round of jobbing weather presenters and the like, someone with a bit of authority and gravitas, but you'd have thought they would have checked that the presenter didn't seem slightly uneasy whenever he's talking to anyone given that that's an important part of the programme. Particularly when he approaches some member of the public or member of railway staff to ask them about their town or to impart some ancient railway fact.

Mind you, it doesn't help that he starts each conversation with a slightly uneasy introduction where he approaches whoever he's about to talk to about the model railways of Betws-y-Coed or the recycling heritage of Batley, who is always looking in the other direction for some reason, and then introduces himself as if they hadn't spoken when they set the shot up beforehand. You'd have thought that at some point in the edit someone would have realised that it was a bit excruciating.

3. Why Michael Portillo?

Also, he has this really weird reading style when he reads from his ancient guide book; he seems to put on a voice which I assume is supposed to sound grand and authoritative, but actually just sounds like he's taking the piss.

And yet the stupid thing is that despite all this, I'm still watching Behold The Railwayings with Michael Portillo. And I'm warming to him a bit - when he got excited about pulling in at Llandudo because he liked seaside termini, I knew exactly what he was talking about because I like a good seaside terminus as well. When he starts talking about the history of rail replacement bus services, I try not to be interested but I can't manage it. When he gets through a conversation with a ticket collector with no awkward moments, I feel quite pleased for him, because I know what it's like to be socially awkward and the relief of getthing through any sort of encounter with someone you don't know unscathed. I realise this makes me as bad as all of those people who voted for A Widdecombe on Celebrity Sequin Scatter or whatever it's called and that next thing you know I'll be saying things like "say what you like about Maggie, she did what had to be done".

Well, all right, maybe not that.

Deficient Skeleton Saturday: Everything's Gone Cantaloupe

2011-01-15T23:37:00.002Z

Casting around for something to write about for TITOITS - man, that's an acronym I won't ever be using again - I found myself looking at the file in which I'd jotted down things I was planning to write about at some point, only none of them seemed like anything I wanted to write about now. I'm not sure why this led me to open the program I keep my BSoI entries in, but I did and realised that I've become tremendously good at starting things and not completing them. Looking over a couple of recent-ish ones and thinking that bits of them would be worth using, if only I could think of a worthwhile conclusion, led me to recall something that Ste Curran (I think) used to do on the Triforce where he would put post unused drafts up and comment on them and call it Bad Draft Saturday because he used to do it on Saturday, except I've just searched for an example and I can't find any so I may have imagined it. Anyway, this in turn led me to think of an exciting new feature which I've decided to call Deficient Skeleton Saturday, a title inspired by the thesaurus and my almost complete lack of imagination, where I stick an incomplete entry up and comment on it. Here's one from 11 December 2010 about girls and that.

So, yeah, in the pub the other night it was just me, a current workmate and an ex-workmate. Or, more relevantly, me and two women in their mid-to-late-20s who are quite close and see each other fairly regularly. Which leads to all sorts of potential for awkwardness; I am basically an interloper. And yet it wasn't. Awkward, that is. Or it wasn't for me, anyway; maybe they were both silently hoping I'd clear off so that they could resume whatever they usually talk about (I suggested that they would prefer to talk about clothes and boys at one point, which I think they took as the joke I intended it to be), but if they were they didn't show it.

I was wondering about this and I've concluded that this is another thing to add to the Life Skills Developed Through Internet Dating manual; I can now talk to women in pubs. It's almost as if it's a situation I'm now quite comfortable in; put me in any other social situation and I will struggle, all awkwardness and sticking my foot in my gob with depressing regularity, but sit me opposite a woman in a pub with a table and some drinks between us and I'm suddenly in my element, bringing out my good anecdotes, asking (hopefully) pertinent questions, offering to buy drinks and generally not seeming like a hopeless social inadequate. I've done it often enough that I have it down pat.

(Not that this situation was exactly the same as an internet date - there's always a slightly unpleasant extra layer of, well, I was going to call it 'meaning' but that might be making it sound much less base than it really is; when you meet someone you've been talking to from an internet dating site you are, basically, trying to decide if you fancy her and if she might fancy you. Which doesn't happen with people you've worked with for two years, because you know already whether you do or not.)

The problem is that I'm not sure if this is necessarily healthy.

Reason for deficiency: Probably because I couldn't work out in which ways it wasn't necessarily healthy, although I was absolutely sure that it wasn't necessarily healthy. Possibly it's because it suggests that by the time I gave up on internet dating (well, the last time I gave up on internet dating; it's happened at least three times now) I was going into these things on autopilot, and you're never going to impress anyone when you're on autopilot. Except that makes it seem that, with this new self-knowledge, it's time for another go at internet dating. It's alarming how easy it is to trick yourself into these things.

The Life Skills Developed Through Internet Dating Manual is a good idea though, and one I suspect someone else has probably picked up on. If I think of a couple more I'll have to turn it into some sort of series. Now, if I did internet dating again I'd be bound to come up with some new... NO STOP IT NO THE HORROR etc etc. Maybe Deficient Skeleton Saturday isn't such a good idea after all.

Leftovers

2011-01-02T23:16:00.002Z

I don't make New Year resolutions. As far as I recall, I've never done such a thing. Unless I did so as a spotty adolescent, but if I did then none of them were memorable and almost certainly weren't kept to. Which makes it all the more odd that this year I have four New Year resolutions, and that I went as so far as to write the things down to ensure I would remember them. I'm not sure what caused this change in attitude; usually if I wanted to do something or change something about myself I'd just get on with it rather than storing it up for a date that's been arbitrarily co-opted for such things. I'd like to think it's a reaction to my parents managing to give up smoking last year after something like 45 years, of which I remain totally proud of them (although I shall be impossibly angry if they crack), although it may also be an attempt at a clean slate after what I managed to turn into a fairly miserable couple of months at the end of last year despite being in a situation where things were generally going my way.

So I've made four resolutions. (It was nearly five, as I was listening to the end of the Festive 50 on Dandelion Radio and scribbling down songs I liked the sound of on the same notepad and thinking "I should listen to this more often", but it didn't seem like a very good resolution, particularly as I want to work through Simon's chart, Adam's chart, Gillen's top 40 and some of these 140 podcasts before I start thinking about listening to anything new.) I'm not going to say what those resolutions are - bad enough that I'm subjecting them to my own scrutiny, let alone anyone else's - but they're there, and it feels slightly odd to have them.

I decided to make a start on them I was rearranging my iTunes library (to be fair, none of my resolutions are exactly massively life-changing) (although I remain convinced that somehow my life will be better if I sort out my music; I'm not sure how, exactly, although the idea of being able to call up stuff I taped off the radio years ago has a certain appeal, and to be honest this task has been looming over me for years now, ever since I realised that if I ever brought a woman home she'd turn on her heel within moments of entering) and I had the odd experience of watching song titles flash up in front of me, passing at high speed. It was like my entire life passing before my eyes. Which suggests that there really should have been a fifth resolution about doing something to ensure that if my life ever does flash before my eyes that there's more to it than rearranging an iTunes library.

Indulge a man with a cough (or: The Duality of Dagenham)

2010-12-15T23:12:00.004Z

(Tumblr seems determined to eat my post about having a cold - that's what it's about, honest - so instead I post it here. And decide that actually I'm probably going to give up on Tumblr. I'm loathe to criticise something that I'm using for nothing, but if it's not going to work half the time and eat half a post, then what's the point? Anyway.)

I'm convinced that when I have a cold I can do an impression of Billy Bragg. If there's anyone I should be able to do an impression of it's Billy Bragg - Barking isn't all that far away, and that road that they named after him is near the hall where my sister used to go to majorettes - but for some reason I can only pull it off when I'm full of snot. Or possibly the effect that the snot has on my system causes me to think that I sound like Billy Bragg, when I really sound like a man doing a poor impression of Billy Bragg but who can't hear quite how badly he's out. Fortunately I only do this at home when nobody else is around to hear, which meant that when A13 came up on 6 Music the other morning, I was able to lustily join in.

The first version I heard of this was, I think, a Peel session version on a tape given away with some mag or other, which featured BB pronouncing 'Dagenham' with three syllables first time around and only two the second time. The second version is the correct one, or at least the proper local pronunciation anyway; you only ever hear 'Dag-en-ham' at the football ground, when the duality of Dagenham means it fits handily into various songs. Here Billy uses three syllables both times, but he is in Foreign Parts and so it's probably the linguistically correct thing to do in the circumstances.

This had cheered my up hugely after an evening spent beating myself up, only for me to come across this:

So that's The Blockheads doing A13 with Billy Bragg in a park near where my parents live (and on the road in question if it's the one I'm thinking of) and the first I know of it is over a year later? Pshaw.

Youse have come to get tortured, after all

2010-12-06T23:35:00.001Z

Didn't get round to the Spotify playlist in the end, having spent too much time finding ways to ruin Christmas parties by dint of noting how many Christmas-related tunes by The Fall can be found on Spotify, to please the person who was trying to find a way to get them into his party playlist. (I make it five, and Jingle Bell Rock is barely more than a minute long. It all seems too perfect for words.)

But in the shower I found myself thinking about Hell. This was because of the Evening Piece Of Crap Free Paper's headline "WAR ON LONDON ROADWORKS HELL", which, of all the wars ever declared, seems to be the most spurious and feeble excuse for a one. I don't really want to know the details, because if I read the details I'll become depressed.

It seems a pretty shoddy sort of a Hell as well. And this got me thinking that I don't really know what Hell is supposed to be. It seems unlikely that it involves temporary traffic lights, whatever it is, but the more I think about Hell the more I realise that I know precious little about it. There's the River Styx, obviously, but then there's also the road paved with good intentions; are there two routes in? This would surely win the approval of the average Evening Piece Of Crap Free Paper reader. But then, once you get inside, all I really know is that there's a bloke pushing a boulder up a hill and the chance of getting poked in the backside with a trident. My entire knowledge of hell is based around parody, the South Park film and the odd episode of Old Harry's Game; I'm not sure that this is really enough. I have less understanding of Hell than I do of the Lego town that I used to build up when I was a kid. Although I suppose that at least my Lego town was real and actually existed.

Here is a goode booke to learne to speke French

2010-12-05T23:38:00.002Z

Tumblr seems to have collapsed under its own weight - it can be no coincidence that this has happened just after that Kieron Gillen Looking At Things page appeared - so I'm doing my (near) daily update here. Which begs a question about what the point is of having this page and another page where I blether about stuff 'n' that. I think it's a quality control issue; I tend to plan stuff I write here. Apart from this. And that last post. And I haven't written anything for a while, which was kind of the whole point of having somewhere else as a sort of sketchpad. Oh dear.

Anyway. Today I headed off into That London to see the Evolving English exhibition at the British Library and the Illumini thing at St Pancras church. (I had planned to go to the thing about drugs at the Wellcome Collection as well, but I spent longer at the Library than planned and was feeling a bit hungry, so I went to have some lunch instead.) And it was all jolly interesting; the Illumini thing would have been worth it for the cyborg Santa alone (and reminded me that I must watch the Futurama Xmas shows at some point soon) and the Evolving English thing was properly fascinating, and the fact that for all of the books from the 15th century on display the things I liked most were the posters says more about my being pathetically shallow than anything.

I was a bit disappointed that the posters I really liked weren't well represented in the shop. The Riot Act poster (fourth dot along) looks fantastic but was only available as an Oyster card wallet, and I have a much more functional one of those already. (Although if you're standing in front of someone as you slowly shuffle towards the ticket barriers with their crappy sponsored card-holder and you bring out your one with "THE RIOT ACT HAS BEEN READ" on it, they're going to be hugely jealous; I'm going to go back and buy one tomorrow.) And I would have loved to have been able to buy a reproduction of the splendid Victorian (I think) bill for what appeared to be a dog show, but which also featured the world's biggest rat and both a human skeleton and a fat child, but all I could get was a postcard of the skeleton. Which is still cool, but not as cool as I would have liked.

(I do love a good playbill. In the museum in Yarmouth a couple of months back I was utterly fascinated by the playbills in their circus exhibition, which were full of similar sorts of things. Even the posters in the lobby of the Windmill theatre fascinated me, although I think I have a fairly good grasp of where Jack Douglas stood in the showbiz firmament so there was no danger of me getting confused at his apparent superstardom.)

Anyway, I highly commend both of these entertainments to anyone in the near vicinity in the run-up to Christmas, and, er, a good night to all and sundry. Wherever tomorrow's entry occurs, it will be CHRISTMASSY, KIND OF. Oh yes. Or maybe it will just involve a Spotify playlist. That seems more likely.

Hastily upgraded from Tumblr so I could fit more photos in

2010-11-26T22:50:00.004Z

Snow? Bring it on.

I haven't bought new boots in ages; the previous boots lasted forever, before finally conking out on a wet day in Yarmouth a few months back. The last time I tried to buy boots I ended up going with shoes instead, possibly out of a misguided attempt to avoid buying black DMs. This time around I had no such compunction. The only moment of doubt came when I started looking at blue ones instead, but I need something reasonably practical and waterproof that I won't feel a bit self-conscious wearing at work. Maybe in the new year.

I'd forgotten how entirely beautiful they when they're new, or maybe I'd never realised it before and am just getting excited about curious things in my old age. My old ones are so worn and battered now (which has a certain charm as well) but when they're new and shiny they look extraordinary. And I don't get like this about footwear; not that I do such things very often, but I can't recall being in any way excited about the trainers I bought last year or the shoes I bought a few months ago. I never wanted to put them on and pose about the flat while listening to loud music, which I did at 1.15am on the day when the new boots showed up.

This makes me basically a girl, doesn't it? Damn.

We've had our jellied eels and our pint of beer

2010-10-07T23:12:00.002+01:00

I spent 9 and half minutes of my morning being patronised by an author. This is an occupational hazard, but today's episode was notable for me dealing with it particularly poorly. I could blame the foul mood I was already in due to our systems running painfully slowly for the fourth day in a row, or feeling that this was quite unfair as I've not really had much chance to grasp the workings of the project, but these are poor excuses; I let myself down. It was unfortunate that the person who should have taken the call (and whose absence from his desk was one of the things I seemed to be being blamed for) came by just as it ended and when I was in the mood to stand on my chair and shout "RIGHT, I'M OFF, FUCK THE LOT OF YOU" while hurling my keyboard into the monitor, rather than when I'd had the chance to calm down a bit, and thus led to me subjecting the entire office to my subsequent voice-an-angry-quiver rant, but there y'go.

While the author was cataloging the various crimes committed against her meisterwerk, explaining how I couldn't possibly understand what exam boards are like (because working in educational publishing would give you no idea of such a thing), and generally giving the impression that she'd called to say "I told you so" rather than suggest anything that might be constructive, the following phrase was uttered on no less than three occasions:

"I'm a Northern girl, belt and braces."

Now, aside from confusing the issue - it's a book about computers rather than geography - I was unsure as to what exactly was so important about this statement that it had to be made so often. For a start, being quite good with accents, I could already tell that she was from the North. Secondly, I'm not quite sure what relevance, if any, it has to a conversation of an exam board's criticism of someone's worksheets; I'm fairly sure that your ability to construct a worksheet isn't really determined by where you were born. I can only think that it was some sort of euphemism for plain speaking, except that if you're using a euphemism for plain speaking then you're not speaking plainly. If she'd said "I'm a Northern girl, belt and braces, and I think you're a fucking idiot" I might have had more respect for her.

Probably not much more respect for her though.

(I don't really get this idea of having an innate sense of superiority based on where you come from, but then I do come from Dagenham. And I realise that there are plenty of people who have a similar complex about coming from the South; the Cabinet is full of them. It doesn't make it right either way.)

Fortunately, having done some research, I've confirmed that the phrase "go fuck yourself sideways, you patronising cow" means the same in the North as it does in the South, so if anyone ever gives me a job and she happens to call while I'm working out my notice, I know what to say. I was thinking of adding a wire brush into the equation, but that may be me being overly effete and Southern.

Like Waiting For Godot or To Me To You, I forget which

2010-09-28T21:59:00.002+01:00

Ever since the Songkick email had plopped into my inbox earlier in the week, I'd sort-of planned to go and see Standard Fare on Saturday night. I was increasingly leaning towards not going to Charlton in the afternoon but wanted to do something with my weekend, and as I'd been listening to the album a lot it all fitted. When I discussed weekend plans before leaving work on Friday I realised that I hadn't actually taken note of where the gig was, but it wasn't as if I was doing anything else on the Saturday, thus leaving me plenty of time to find out and plan a route.

And so on Saturday I looked at the email again, noted that the show was at the Proud Gallery, and eventually wended my way to the people staging the gig's website where I read a phrase that caused me an unpleasant shudder. That phrase was this:

"Please arrive early and dressed to kill."

Now, arriving early wasn't the thing that worried me. Arriving early is something that I tend to do as a matter of course; if there's one thing that I learned from internet dating it's that punctuality is possibly my most appealing quality. Now, you may scoff at this point, but let us be honest; it's one more appealing quality than I thought I had, and if you can't manage being handsome or charming or scintillating company, you may as make the most of what you do have, particularly if the only skill required is being able to tell the time. It's not much but it is something.

(Although. given the second part of their request, I wonder what happened to being fashionably late? If I'd been standing around waiting for my potential online inamorata because she'd failed to turn up at the arranged time, I would usually brush away any apologies when she did arrive with the suggestion that she was supposed to be late because that's what all the cool kids did. And this would go down very well, and yet I remain single to this day. Had I realised that this idea had been (quite rightly, from my punctual perspective) done away with, I wouldn't have said such things.)

Anyway, arriving early wasn't the problem; it was the 'dressed to kill' bit that made me baulk. The phrase 'dressed to kill' brings many images to mind, but none of them involve slightly lumpy men showing the effects of male pattern baldness in a pair of battered DMs and whatever he's decided his favourite shirt is this week. It may be so much bravado on the part of the organisers, but what if I turn up looking like me and everyone else looks like they've followed instructions? I'm going to stick out like a gangrenous thumb, that's what, and nobody wants to see that.

So I decided not to go and see Standard Fare on Saturday night and instead stayed in and watched the programme about Blair and Clinton from the previous week, where I was thoroughly distracted by the woman playing Cherie being far too attractive for the role. (It transpired that she'd also played the vampire lady in that ep of Dr Who; this made me feel less bad, although I'm not sure why.)

I missed seeing Standard Fare playing on Sunday as well, because I'm really crap sometimes. Tcha.

A silent order for those who've had enough

2010-09-04T00:27:00.003+01:00

Dear Woman on the Northern Line southbound at about 6pm this evening with the carrier bag full of stuff you'd bought at KFC,

What the hell were you thinking? Seriously? Are you stupid or something, or what?

Right, it's bad enough that you're buying food at KFC in the first place, that given all of the options for eating in London that you've chosen something so pathetically unimaginative to serve up. (I'll be generous and assume that you weren't going to eat all of it yourself, given that there was quite a lot of it and that you weren't immensely fat.) But to buy your food and then take it at least four stops on a tube train? What the hell were you thinking? How difficult is it to find somewhere to buy horrible, greasy, unpleasant fried chicken that you need to take it at least four stops on the tube? I don't know if Bank was your eventual destination - it seems unlikely - but even if it was, is there nowhere closer by that you could have gone to?

(Actually, just looking at the KFC store locator - yeah, this is what I do on a Friday night. Earlier on I was moping about a woman for ages as well - I might be wrong about this. There is one near Liverpool Street, but then a big KFC empty patch across the city. But there are so few places that you might actually take your horrid takeaway to eat near Bank that I suspect that you were changing trains there as well.)

And even if Bank was your journey's end, taking into the account the time taken for you to get to the Northern Line platforms at Kings Cross, time spent waiting for a train, the journey time, leaving the station at Bank, then making your way to your eventual destination - that's what, at least 25 minutes assuming that you weren't going on anywhere else. What's that going to do to your horrible fried chicken? It's going to turn it into horrible lukewarm fried chicken, that's what. The fries are going to have collapsed on their own salt content. If it was edible in the first place it's not going to be now. Your dinner is going to be horrible. Did you really not think about this?

Now, given that you didn't consider any of this, I wouldn't imagine you might have the courtesy to think about the other people travelling on this overheated tube train that I was only taking because of a possible signal problem near Farringdon. So I shan't complain too much about having to stand awkwardly so that the draft from the open window at the end of the carriage might slightly diminish the horrible wiff from your horrid meal, and the associated feeling that what with the way people seem to have taken to not listening to what I say and seem generally unbothered about things I've done and the bloke sitting behind me singing ZZ Top songs to himself while I was trying to work and the downward trajectory of the train and the group in fancy dress who got on at Old Street and the smell of decaying meat that somehow I may actually be in Hell even though that's an imaginary concept invented by the church to keep people in line, because what would be the point?

So, to summarise: what the hell were you thinking? Seriously? Are you stupid or something, or what?

Yours sincerely,
MS, BSoI, TCoT etc etc etc.

God is in a good mood

2010-08-09T23:14:00.002+01:00

I'm really worried about this. The last time I wrote up what I'd got up to on an away trip Dagenham promptly lost their next game, and while I'm with Dawkins when it comes to the existence of mysterious forces controlling our destinies, I am pointlessly and uselessly superstitious when it comes to football. However, having made some notes about stuff that happened on my day out in Sheffield on Saturday, I now feel obligated to write them up. If this all ends in tears, I for one will be in tears.

Inept bullet point list then? OK.

* I have a theory that pulling a wheeled suitcase causes your IQ to drop. I've no idea how this works in practice, but there is something about them that seems to cause what I assume are usually sensible people to struggle with basic functions like walking in a straight line. After my experiences as I walked briskly towards St Pancras from the underground, I'd suggest that the percentage of the IQ drop is around 125%.

* If ever there was a sign that this season has started way too early, it's the number of people who were obviously on their way to weddings. I've done away games on the first day of the season before and I'm sure there's not usually quite that many smartly dressed gents and behatted ladies going about their business. I felt quite inadequate in my t-shirt and boots still a bit grubby from Field Day, particularly after looking for far too long at one woman going in the opposite direction as I left Sheffield station... Why don't I get to go to weddings? Because I'm hopelessly socially inadequate. Forget I asked.

(* Contrast this with the previous evening, when I'd been walking through the streets of Holborn and stared too long at another woman, except this was out of grim fascination rather than an admiring (if swiftly regretted) glance: she was wearing a very low cut dress which was malfunctioning horribly, seemingly without her noticing. Things were wobbling all over the place, like a blancmange with half a nipple showing. It was horrible. "I think she's popping out" said one of her friends walking behind her, understating somewhat. )

* When I left the house I had my keys in my hand, which is unusual as I usually shove them in my bag or pocket once I've locked the door. As the train reached Kettering I decided that this must have been because I didn't close the front door, and began to wonder if it would be fair to call my dad and ask him to spend two hours out of his weekend checking this theory. Eventually I decided that it wasn't, and tried not to worry about it, but was still quite relived to arrive home and find my door firmly locked.

* As gratuitous wastes of water go, the fountains and the wall with the water pouring down it outside Sheffield station are definitely quite good ones. I had a lovely sit in the sunshine there contemplating the world before getting the train home.

* My attempts to locate the cultural highspots of Sheffield mostly ended in failure. I didn't locate the Leadmill, although I did find the Crucible. I was heading in the right direction for the Ponds Forge Hamilton Bland Memorial Swimming Pool, but eventually had to turn the other way to get back to the station. And I missed the paternoster lift at the University altogether.

* All town centres may look the same, but they don't sound the same. Generally I wander around with headphones wodged in at all times so that I don't have to listen to other people's conversations, but in a strange town it's quite exciting to hear voices that don't sound like those that you're used to, even if most of what they're saying is the same old nonsense. You can imagine that you're a spy and everything. I did wonder what would happen if I'd been asked for directions, as seems to happen to me a lot: perhaps I could have attempted the accent, thought I'd got away with it, and then the person asking me would have said "thanks for your help" in a dull Essex monotone and I would have said "no problem" in mine, and then an exciting chase would have ensued.

* One thing Sheffield town centre did have was some Christians wielding guitars, singing and holding a sign saying "God is in a good mood", which is much nicer than the signs prophesying doom that they often prefer to carry. "Still no requests" said one, cheerfully launching into his next song. I'm with Dawkins when it comes to mysterious forces controlling the universe (I may have mentioned this before) but I did feel a certain amount of sympathy for him.

* The steward who searched my bag was looking for cameras, although as he had problems distinguishing my iPod from one I'm not sure how successful his search was. What's the point of stopping people bringing cameras in anyway? Aren't the cameras on phones really good, thus making the whole thing pointless? Bag aside I didn't get searched for the second week in a row. I am clearly no threat to anyone.

* The feeling that something was going to go badly wrong didn't strike me until the teams broke away from the centre of the pitch and took up their positions, and Tony Roberts came down to the goal in front of us. I think it's fair to say that Robbo has had a good summer, but it was more the fact that he was wearing a shirt without name, number or sponsor's logo that worried me. This said, he wasn't really at fault for the goals, and if D&R hadn't decided to demonstrate to the Sheffield public where they'd come from by defending like a mid-table Conference side for 20 minutes things might have been different. (End of bit about actual football.)

* As I took my seat on the train home, a man walked past clutching reduced-to-clear sandwiches from Marks and Spencer. Wish I'd thought of that.

* There appeared to be a monsoon centred on Leicester station. As the train raced through the Derbyshire countryside it had been a beautiful sunny evening. The rain had gone by the time the train passed Friar Lane and Epworth FC and sunlight was already poking through the clouds. The weather held all of the way into North London, with the sun setting over the grubby rooftops of Camden as the train pulled into its destination. But for the couple of minutes that the train halted at Leicester the rain bounced off the windows like the end of days was nigh. Strange.

This is not a music blog (*)

2010-08-04T23:30:00.003+01:00

I knew I forgot something from my Field Day round-up: t-shirts. Or, more specifically, band related t-shirts. Because the odd thing was that with several thousand people in a park watching bands, very few of them were wearing band t-shirts.

The first person I saw wearing a band t-shirt was someone wearing a somewhat battered old Oasis t-shirt, possibly ironically. The second was a woman of about my age wearing a Kenickie t-shirt, which is when I noticed that nobody else seemed to be wearing band t-shirts, and that until this point I'd seen nobody wearing a t-shirt of a band that had been a going concern this side of 1998. The Kenickie t-shirt was a classic as well, a green one with the Kenickie logo on it. Like this one, say.

(No, it doesn't fit, and never has; I bought it in the post-split fire sale in a fit of optimism. The brown Get In t-shirt I bought does fit though, and I wish I'd worn it on Saturday now.)

I was trying not to stare at her, as this is rude and unpleasant and may have caused the woman's gentleman friend to come and biff me on the nose, but I had to look a little to see if she was someone I might have recognised from back in the day; I don't think she was though.

I saw a few band t-shirts as the day progressed, but with one notable exception I don't think I saw any band represented more than once. Which could be a reflection on the sort of person who goes to Field Day (eg people who are far too cool for that sort of thing, or worried that if they wear a t-shirt proclaiming their love of the wrong band their friends will point and laugh at them as if they were still wearing a flat cap, because they're so last year), I suppose. The exceptions were a few blokes in The Fall t-shirts, but then people who like The Fall are presumably long past caring whether The Fall are cool or not - they must have gone through so many cycles of it by now that everyone has lost count - and would be too devoted to care anyway.

This also makes me realise that I have no idea who the cool t-shirt band of the day are, or indeed if there is one. I'd have guessed The XX (about whom I've developed the following rule of thumb: if I can hear music and am bored and someone cooler than me is nodding their head appreciatively, it's The XX) but I only saw one X-clad gent all day, and that may have been a suggestion that he had a large amount of treasure concealed in his belly. Who can say?

(*) You can tell that this entry is about music and related topics as I'm incapable of writing about it without using lots of parentheses, as if compensating for never doing a fanzine back in the day. Probably just as well that this is not a music blog, really.

Is this water safe for drinking?

2010-08-01T12:22:00.005+01:00

Earlier this week I had a curious hankering to go and watch music being played outdoors. (I blame reading about last weekend's spate of festivals that I would like to go to, if only I were more organised and didn't dread the prospect of spending three days away from home on my own.) So I bought a ticket for Field Day. Unfortunately the batteries in my camera ran out while I was trying to take pictures of Cate Le Bon's fringe, so I can't do one of my amusing (for me anyway) write-ups where I take lots of terrible pictures and comment on them, so instead here are some thoughts in a handy list.

* £33 for a ticket doesn't seem unreasonable given how much it costs to go to a gig these days; however, then charging £5 for a few bits of crappy plastic with the stage times which aren't particularly easy to read, which are markedly less use than just writing down the times of the bands you want to see on a piece of paper (as that way you can look at them all at a glance instead of having to rifle through them - if only I'd taken a pen) and have no further information about, say, bands you might not have heard of but might like to see, is absolutely unreasonable, and if you do it you are morally no better than Tony Hayward, Fred Goodwin or any other fucker who thought only about profit while screwing people over. The scale may be different but the intent is the same.

* On the plus side, the bloke searching me on the way in gave me and my bag little more than a cursory glance (having looked closely at the men I'd followed in) and said "thank you, young man" as I picked my bag up. What a nice man.

* Cate Le Bon has an excellent fringe. And the Welshest voice ever. This is no bad thing at all.

* While I was waiting for These New Puritans to start a slightly annoying group pushed in next to me. I realised that one of the women was wearing a dress very similar to, if not the same as, one that my deskmate sometimes wears. (Is there a proper term for "person you sit opposite at work" that I should be using instead of "deskmate"?) I am slightly worried that I am able to spot items of women's clothing in this way.

* I've liked some of what I've heard of the new These New Puritans album, but watching them reminded me of the early 90s, where you'd go to indie discos and have to listen to Age Of Panic by Senser and feel miserable and think that Britpop had to happen.

* I felt I ought to see The Fall, as I've never done so before (I was at a Reading Festival where MES sacked most of the band just before they went on but went to see something else instead), but that meant leaving Max Tundra, which turned out to be a mistake as The Fall were... well, they weren't playing a festival set, or rather they were playing The Fall's festival set. MES seemed quite cheerful though; he apologised for keeping us waiting and everything. After a while I went back to see the end of Max Tundra, who was excellent.

* Also, it was during The Fall that I first had smoke from someone in front of me blowing back into my face. It's strange; this used to be the default for any gig you might go to, and now it seems like a lifetime ago. And why did it take so long for it be banned anyway; it's deeply unplesant. Why did we tolerate it for so long?

* I had to leave Gruff Rhys and his Brazilian chum's set, as the sound was horrible. I don't know if it was how Gruff had set his guitar up, or if it was a problem with the sound, but it went right through me in a not particularly pleasant way. I used to go to Melt-Banana gigs, so I don't think it's me, unless I'm getting old or fussy or something. So I went for a wander; I couldn't get near the tent for Yuck, but I did see Matthew Herbert racing between a ladder, a tent and whatever else he was doing to generate noise. Not sure about the music but you can't knock someone who disppears up a ladder every few minutes.

* What do you do when you spot that someone you went out with once (I liked her more than she liked me) is standing a few rows in front of you? This is an awkward situation which I am not equipped to cope with. Especially when she looks great and you know that you don't. And then people between you keep moving off, despite it being The Archie Bronson Outfit.

* The Archie Bronson Outfit are excellent, and a band I really ought to have seen before now, and would like to see somewhere where the sound isn't slightly lacking.

* Other things I liked: Amiina, Steve Mason (surprisingly, as I'm still a bit sore about the terrible Beta Band gig I went to ten years ago), Beth Jeans Houghton (also surprisingly, as the many Marc Riley sessions she's done have never done that much for me).

* I'm sure Caribou was a bit more interesting just after he became Caribou. Also, having thought that Chapel Club were something I might have heard of and liked, it turned out that they weren't. This left me with around 50 minutes to kill until Mouse On Mars came on, and as my stomach was beginning to feel as if it might need a trip to a horrible toilet soon, and with a nicer toilet barely half an hour away, I decided it might be time to go home. It felt as if I'd had my money's worth, anyway. I was curious to see that the ticket windows were still open; do they still charge full price with two hours left of proceedings? I wish I'd stopped to ask now.

In conclusion then, it was mostly good, but I suspect that I only need one day of watching music outdoors per year to satisfy my outdoor-music-watching urges.

What it's like being me (except someone else)

2010-07-17T17:56:00.002+01:00

I had a lovely day out in Yarmouth last summer, and only finally got round to sticking all of my photos up today because I'm under orders not to do anything strenuous. Which means that I've been attempting to write a witty commentary on things that happened 11 months ago. I probably just made most of it up in the end. Anyway, it's there in the sidebar if you want to take a look at it (I'm typing this in Flickr, which is exciting, but I'm not sure that I can do links from here, although I suppose if you click on the photo it'll probably take you to it. The internet, eh?).

I can't spell and I smell as well

2010-06-27T00:14:00.001+01:00

My trip to the supermarket was unusually diverting. My bemusement at one of the dangling World Cup kits is detailed elsewhere, but my fevered state of mind wasn't helped by finding myself with a bad trolley. I don't think I've ever had a broken trolley before. I realised straight away that the front wheel wasn't quite rolling properly but decided that it wouldn't matter too much and that it was far too much fuss to go back and change it for another one.

This was a mistake. By the time I'd been round the supermarket my arms were tired from the extra effort involved in steering the thing, even before I had the task of carrying four bags of shopping home on a warm morning.

It seemed like my chance to do a good deed for the day, so as I waited for my card details to process I asked what I should do with my useless trolley. "You've got a wonky one? Best to take it to customer services" she said. I rather liked the description of it as wonky. At customer services I was slightly irritated that I had to wait for someone paying for her goods. She was buying seven bags of ice. She'd come prepared; she had a cooler bag and everything. Just as I thought she was finished, someone else came along with 25 punnets of strawberries for her. This seemed a very specific order, but I'm not sure what you can make with 7 bags of ice and 25 punnets of strawberries.

Eventually I explained the problem to the chap at the desk: "Oh, you've got a wonky one" he said, so I can only think that this is a technical term. He hailed a passing youth, who gave me a look and bade me to follow him to the car park. "Bloke here reckons he's got a wonky one" he said to a man in an official-looking fluorescent jerkin. "Er, yeah" I said, feeling I was being mocked. I steered the trolley over the trolley park, and then allowed the youth to park it for me. "Oh, that's really bad" he said: I was triumphant. Although as I still had to carry four bags of shopping to carry home with my tired arms on a warm morning, it was something of a pyrrhic victory.

Repeat to Fade

2010-05-23T00:44:00.005+01:00

I'd never really thought of myself as a pessimist, but I'm going to have to concede that that's what I am. I finally realised it during the 2nd half of the football the other night, when it was becoming clear that Morecambe weren't going to score seven goals after all and actually were never going to, despite me managing to convince myself that they would over the previous couple of days. Nobody with any spark of optimism remaining in their soul would have thought there was even a chance of it happening. I am, basically, Eeyore.

However, I am unequivocally right when I say that there's not a snowball in hell's chance that 6 Music, the Asian Network and the bits of the BBC website that they're planning to get shot of might be spared. None whatsoever. No chance at all.

I hadn't felt that at the time of the first protest (which I meant to write up and never got round to), although there were signs. The best and most convincing speaker that day was Tom Robinson, a man who I'm sure has addressed crowds in similar circumstances, who spoke a lot of sense about branding and marketing.

It seemed to me, as much as you could tell from a man speaking through a megaphone, that Tom was not optimistic. And then I finally got round to looking at the consultation document, and I realised why.

Statue above the entrance of Broadcasting House. Look, it's a small boy, and you can see his winky and everything! And just a few yards from London's busy Oxford Street, where innocent families are passing! More BBC filth! The Daily Mail should be informed.

The "doing fewer things better" business came up a few times during the initial interviews where everyone from Paxo to Buxton made Mark Thompson look like a chump, but it wasn't until I actually read the strategy review that I realised quite how far they'd gone with it. There it is under a big heading on page iv, with some blether about "reducing the number of reach/services" as if being paid for by everyone isn't reason enough to provide a service for everyone. And here we run into a problem, because the BBC's first go at "doing fewer things better" isn't by getting rid of stuff that everyone else does as well, but by getting rid of things that are unique and that nobody else is interested in doing.

(There's also the question of whether you would trust the BBC to "put quality first". Let us consider - oh, let's choose a completely random example - Luther, where the BBC takes good actors and put them in a risible-maverick-cop-who-gets-the-bad-guys-his-way piece of shit that manages to be less convincing than that plan I had for A Very Stringer Bell Christmas, but to which the BBC appears to made on the basis that "it's got the bloke who was in The Wire in it, therefore it is as good as The Wire".)

(The other point I was going to make in relation to Tom Robinson's speech was about the BBC's apparent inability to think about people who actually like anything. I'd thought that the "37 years old" rubbish about 6 Music listeners was a desperate attempt at a defence at first, but no, there it is in the review (page 11) along with what seems to me to be the tell-tale line "And whilst 6 Music does not have a target demographic audience", which you can imagine them spitting out in disgust. Looking around the crowd at the first demo you'd have said that the median age of the audience probably was about 37, kids 20 years younger than that, people 20 years older than that and all ages in between. The clever marketing people who run BBC Radio don't know how to deal with this, because they don't fit into the handy "ABC1 males aged 18-35"-type categories that they've based their careers on, which is why the only successful marketing campaigns for 6 Music have been by the people who are trying to save the thing.)

Of course, the other thing that's happened since then is the arrival to ministerial power of the man whose name is so close to being "Jeremy Cunt" that it would be tempting to try to find an alternative name for him, if only he wasn't such a cunt. Now, as we know, Jeremy Cunt's gang want shot of the BBC Trust, on the grounds that if you're going to demolish the BBC on Uncle Rupert's behalf you may as well start there (other more informed political commentaries are available). So in these circumstances, are the BBC Trust going to make a stand by refusing to close down bits of the BBC, or are they going to attempt to appease the government and try to keep their well-remunerated posts for a bit? I wonder. And even if they did stand up for themselves (which they won't), it would only be a stay of execution before the Tories do their worst,

("But", you say keenly, "the Tories are in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, who would be much more inclined to defend the BBC, and there's that nice peer of theirs who's spoken at the demos and said all the right things. They might stop it." "Yes", I would reply, "and would you be interested in this bridge I have for sale? It has turrets and everything.")

Sculpture atop the extension to Broadcasting House, which I was going to be sarcastic about until I read about what it stood for. A shame it isn't on more public display, really.

But I still wrote to the Trust explaining why I thought everything was wrong, and I went along to the second demo anyway because it's nice to be around other people who care about the thing you care about. There were more people than the first demo, enough to make it worthwhile but still not enough people to make a difference. The speakers spoke well; the high point was Ed Byrne, a man with nothing particular to gain by 6 Music being around other than having a radio station to listen to, and who summed up the absurdity of the thing quite neatly.

I'm not sure if the people from the Asian Network were always due to appear or they just sort of piggybacked on, but it was good to see them anyway. They shouldn't lose their radio station either, and now I wish I knew a bit more about it. A shame there wasn't a way to represent the bits of the BBC website that are going skywards, but then I suppose that we won't miss them until they've gone.

A marshal passed by writing 6 on people's hands, which I thought was some sort of solidarity thing but turned out to be the way into the after-show gig. I thought about it for a bit, but The Magic Numbers had less appeal than the football and so I headed home. I took a picture of my hand on the way. Which is where we came in.

It was Duncan Dunky

2010-05-12T23:49:00.002+01:00

I'm on a train waiting to leave Liverpool Street, annoyed at the way everything seems to fall apart when one train turns up a bit late. The train is quite crowded (the train in the adjacent platform having just left while near-empty as nobody had thought to tell anyone which train might be leaving first) and the man in the Barbour jacket who's stood next to me pulls out his Daily Mail. I'm trying not to look, but as he folds over the page and I try to look away from the loving close-ups of the Prime Minister's wife, I spot a box headed "ECHOES OF JFK".

Now, I realise it's easy to scoff, but the more I thought about it the more it seemed to me that actually this may be the Daily Mail's most accurate story ever, even more than the one about bananas straightened at the EU's behest giving you cancer. Admittedly I have just finished reading American Tabloid and as such my view of JFK has been shot through a rather cynical prism (this replaced my previous source of JFK knowledge, the Unrelated Assassination Special) but I could certainly see some parallels, eg:

Joe Kennedy = Lord Ashcroft: sinister background figure, putting up the funding and with all manner of dubious dealings in the past that nobody really wants to talk about.

Mafia types = businessmen enthusing about tax cuts: happy to back anyone who they think they'll gain from, guaranteed to whine if things don't go their way after the election.

Nick Clegg = Lee Harvey Oswald: handy patsy if ~~Cameron gets shot in Dallas~~ the coalition collapses in a miserable heap. Nobody would be all that upset if he gets shot on live TV.

David Cameron = John F. Kennedy: happy to screw any ("thing that needs screwing, because a screw has become lose for example" - Ed) he comes across, and you can bet he'll be screwing ("anything that can be repaired with a screwdriver or other similar implement" - Ed) just as soon as he gets the chance.

Can I be on The Now Show please? Oh.

The worst thing ever to happen in the history of the world

2010-05-05T22:21:00.001+01:00

A couple of years ago, I decided that spending Saturday afternoons during the football season when I wasn't at a match either sitting in front of Sky Sports News or lying prone somewhere listening to the radio and fretting wasn't a productive use of my time. I get two days off at the end of the week and spending two hours of it in a self-induced state of paralysis was clearly stupid.

So these days, if I'm not out doing something useful, I tend to clean the house, headphones on in a desperate attempt to catch up with podcasts and not allowing myself to check the scores until well after 5 in case there's been a lot of injury time. Then comes a brief moment of instant gratification or otherwise, and then I can get on with the day. As with most things with me and football, it's turned into something approaching a superstition, even though a quick look at Dagenham's away record would tell you that it's not a very good one. Dawkins would look at me smugly, but then he always looks like that.

The reason I mention this is because it seems like the only sensible approach to take to election night. Like away games, I can't help but suspect that election night is going to go terribly badly. And so it seems that the best thing to do is ignore it as far as possible and just find out the result afterwards, in this case when my alarm goes off the next morning. Unless Murdoch has already instructed Cameron to shut down the BBC by then. Which is entirely possible. Like I said, I'm expecting the election to go terribly badly.

(I'm going to vote, but I can't imagine I'll have the spring in my step I managed the last time. I still haven't decided who to go for yet. I feel less inclined to vote LibDem - last time around it seemed as if they had their hearts in the right place, but this time... I dunno, maybe we'll see on Friday. I'd like to vote Green, but their candidate around here is deeply unconvincing. The Labour MP isn't one of the good ones who votes against the government on the things that need voting against. I don't vote Tory. Not ever. I really don't vote Ukip. So I may end voting for the Save The Hospital candidate, on the grounds that at least I can't work out any major flaws in their hospital-saving manifesto. Well, I assume it's a hospital-saving manifesto. I can't actually find out anything more about them and their candidate at all, although it does seem that every other party standing claims to be the only one determined to save the hospital, which seems a bit unfair on the Save The Hospital candidate.)

So the plan is: go to the polling station after work; go to the chip shop, which is a bit further down the road; eat too much bad food; watch stuff on the iPlayer, or maybe listen to some of the dratted podcasts; some Wii Sport Swordfighting to cheer myself up a bit; go to bed; try not to fret. No Twitter, no internet, no Channel 4 election night special (which I suspect will just be good as their big comedy special thing the other week), no election night blogging or keeping up with other people's. I really don't want to know. I suspect that this may reflect badly on me, but as far as I can see it's the only way to play it.

I'm going to go read this back and see if I can shoehorn something resembling a joke now. I don't think it's going to work.

Select the colour which best reflects your view of life

2010-04-06T22:49:00.002+01:00

I was going to write an entry on Saturday night, only to forget what it was and then remember it just as I was about to nod off to sleep. This has become something of a habit of late; I remembered my sister's birthday in the early hours of [it], and I tend to think of terrifically clever and amusing things that I was going to say to women several hours after we've parted company and I'm lying in bed trying not to think about them.

It was about the leaflets I found where my doormat would be if I had one on returning home from one of the more agreeably lunatic football matches I've attended. They were on behalf of some of the candidates of the forthcoming and largely forgotten local council elections, standing for the party that, while not overtly xenophobic or racist or homo... well, all right, maybe just a little bit homophobic, but anyway, a party of the right. The blue party. The party of our future posho overlords. Nobody I'd ever vote for, ever. As such I didn't look at the leaflets for any length of time, but as I took them over to the recycling bag (given the hugely limited amount of stuff I can recycle due to it not being profitable enough I'm not sure if this was the right thing to do, but I wanted to think that at least some good might come from this) I noticed that one of the leaflets began with the words "Unfortunately you were out when we called..."

Once I'd got my initial scoffing at the use of the word 'unfortunate' out of the way - imagining a scenario where I devastatingly put down their arguments about how great they are before chasing them off my doorstep, whereas in reality I'd have just apologised for my lack of interest and closed the door on them - I began to get quite annoyed by this. I'd had a lovely afternoon doing the thing I enjoy best, and there they are telling me how unfortunate it was that I wasn't at home? How dare they?

Presumably they don't do all of their canvassing on a Saturday afternoon, but surely at any time someone is out of the house it wouldn't be 'unfortunate' that they weren't there. If you were out at work, for example, it clearly wouldn't be considered unfortunate when people all around are losing their jobs, particularly if you're calling from the party who traditionally regard anyone not in a job as some sort of workshy layabout. And if you're not at work but out spending your leisure time doing something you enjoy, what kind of killjoy would suggest that you'd be better off at home awaiting the canvasser's knock? Across the weekend I helped support a number of small local businesses (barbers, bakers, phone unlockers): are the blue party suggesting I should let them go to the wall so that they can pop round and tell me how great it is that I have to take my cardboard to Sainsbury's to recycle it?

And what if you were at home doing something important - reaching across to do the difficult corner bit while painting a ceiling, say, or performing the Heimlich Manoeuvre on a choking relative - and were distracted from this because someone was rapping on your door clutching a leaflet? That would be hugely unfortunate, and yet this circumstance isn't taken into account of from this impossibly self-regarding pamphlet which seems to regard a visit from the blue party as the most important thing you might do in your home. Phooey to them. Wasn't going to vote for them anyway.

So, in conclusion, while it would be unfortunate if you were out when an important package arrived, or if an eccentric billionaire popped over to give you a cheque, it is never unfortunate to miss electioneering councillors. Or prospective Members of Parliament, come to that. Unless George Clinton starts sending prospective band members door to door, but as that's both highly unlikely and a particularly poor joke that must have been done 1,000,000,000,000 times before, let's not dwell on the prospect. And that's all of my political material. Oh dear.

Mario Kart Wii is Super Street Fighter II without the point

2010-04-03T00:19:00.002+01:00

History has proven that there is no greater way to commemorate the day that Jesus carried his cross around the streets of Goodmayes than listen to a load of songs that you haven't listened to (through your computer, at any rate) since some time in 2008. So, in between trips to supermarkets and documentaries about Delia Derbyshire and finally getting round to watching some of Wonders of The Solar System (I'm not sure it's been a very constructive Bank Holiday, but it has been a culturally enriching one), I've been doing that thing, and my findings are as follows:

* One of the John Peel quotes I remember reading after his death concerned him wandering around HMV in Oxford Street and feeling a sadness that he'd never have time to hear all of this music, and this is increasingly how I'm beginning to feel. I don't have time to listen to all of the music I already have. My list of albums to listen to on Spotify runs to 3.1 days. I have 45 unlistened to podcasts (not all music, granted, but all things I want to listen to). When I moved house I came across a wodge of cassettes of old radio programmes from goodness knows how many years ago that I'd never sorted out that I want to listen to. And I know I should be grateful that it's all there for me to listen to, but it does get a bit daunting.

* Girls Are The New Boys totally deserved its Festive 50 triumph.

I've no idea what the lass with the gun has to do with it, though.

* I need better ways to categorise playlists. I'm sure there are heaps of songs that I really ought to listen to more often, but other than having a playlist called 'Really good songs I don't listen to nearly enough' (current total: 929 songs) I don't know quite what to do with them. I'm not really good at sorting music by mood. I've got some best of the year lists I sometimes dip into, but being fairly narrow selections they leave huge amounts of stuff I probably haven't paid enough attention to untouched.

* Even Frente's b-sides were awesome.

This isn't really a lot, I realise, but it didn't occur to me that taking notes might be a good move. I'm toying with an idea of having a go at this, but looking at what I've come up with here suggests it may not be a good idea. Oh dear.

David Coverdale would get someone in

2010-03-25T23:16:00.001Z

I did a good deed at 9.03am today. The train was pulling into Liverpool Street, and as I got up from my seat I noticed that there was an umbrella in the set of seats opposite. I picked it up and attempted to attract the attention of the woman who'd been sitting there. My initial hopeful "excuse me" fell on deaf ears and eventually I had to tap her on the shoulder: I asked if this was her umbrella and she confirmed that it was. She thanked me, the doors opened, and everyone got on with their lives. I was pleased with myself, perhaps slightly more than was necessary for such a small act, but rain was forecast and it would have been easy to have left the umbrella to fester in some lost property office somewhere.

Now, I won't deny as I made my way across Liverpool Street that I was thinking about a woman. But the woman I was thinking of was the one I'd met the night before. Her life seemed to have been remarkably well-lived, and I couldn't help feeling both pleased to have had her company and that I'd maybe gone about things all wrong. She's told me of how she'd been talking to [feted contemporary pop star X] at some event the night before, about the time she'd lived with [failed pop star Y] and how he'd had [sometime pop star Z] on the speed dial. I was in the lift with that North-Eastern political journalist who sometimes turns up on HIGNFY the other week. It's not quite the same. She told me of what tremendous people [TV stars A and B] were, and the time she was set up on a blind date with [witty gentleman C]; I once went out with someone who'd edited an episode of Holby City. I couldn't help but feel a little inadequate.

As I made my way into the Underground station, wondering if I should ask her out again even though I knew what the answer was likely to be (*), I realised that I was now following the woman I'd handed the umbrella to. And at this point I reacted in my usual way and began to worry; what would she think if she spotted me? Would she realise that it was quite likely that two people leaving that train would go in the same direction and that two people from the same carriage would likely arrive at the same time? Or would she think that by taking her umbrella from me she'd unwittingly been caught up in one man's twisted mind games and that this was almost certainly the prelude to a string of horrifying events and psychological torment that could only end in death?

She went up the stairs. I followed. She carried on up the stairs. I continued to follow. At the top of the stairs she turned right. So did I. This is exactly the same route I take to the platform every day. At the foot of the stairs she continued up the platform, in exactly the same way that I would, except that she stopped fairly abruptly. I carried on to a point slightly further along, maybe the length of half a carriage further down the platform, but with enough people between us to be out of sight. Phew.

As the train trundled around the top of the Circle, I mused that this is no way for a man in his mid-30s to be thinking of himself, and wondered why I do. And in the end my good deed just ended up reminding me how thoroughly useless I can be, and the warm glow of smug satisfaction turned out to be excess stomach acid after all.

(*) I did, of course. Faint hearts and that.

Our inevitable replacement by trained gibbons

2010-03-14T23:19:00.000Z

In theory, the bus into Ilford takes six minutes. Sometimes the bus into Ilford does take six minutes. It happened once. I was there and everything. However, more often than not it takes more than six minutes, because in all my days I’ve never known a short stretch of bus route that takes in so many people apparently thoroughly unable to board a bus without causing some sort of contretemps.

I should have guessed from an encounter with the route while I was flat-hunting. I’m not quite sure which took me that way - probably a desire to avoid the Gants Hill roundabout in order to make an appointment. Anyway, as I boarded the bus was already quite crowded and the couple who got on with me had to fold down the buggies that each was pushing as there were already two prams in situ, something they only did after a certain amount of argument. Two stops later someone else tried to board with a pram, which she parked in the doorway and refused to move. A five minute stand-off ensued, with the woman refusing to move no matter how many people pointed out that there was nowhere to put the pram other than to leave it in the aisle, which would be hugely inconvenient for anyone wanting to get on or off the bus who wasn’t Spiderman. If the following bus hadn’t caught up we might still there be there now. (Well, obviously not, as this was about four months ago, but still.)

Now, the reason I relate this rather dull tale is to point out that I should have known, that I could have concentrated my search elsewhere rather than take a dwelling on a bus route which was clearly used by some of the most relentless useless, pig-headed, unbelievably cretinous people imaginable, but no. Since I started using it regularly I've been delayed by people running down the middle of the road to prevent the bus from moving off, people insisting that the oyster reader must be broken because they have a huge amount of credit on their card and besides they're only going a few stops, and people who seem set on some sort of row and have decided that a bus driver is as good a person as any for it.

And so it was that this morning the bus idled as the driver attempted to explain the finer points of the Oyster system to someone who didn't think it applied to him, and then stopped unbidden at a request stop while the gentleman stood there was looking down the road in entirely the wrong direction. Which all led to the journey taking rather more than six minutes. Well, all right, not by that much - about three minutes or so - but I was trying to catch a train and could have done without it. As it turned out I caught the train, the subsequent shopping trip was an utter failure and I'd have been better off staying at home. Hurdy ho.

I'm trying to write more entries. You can probably tell.

Famous, Rich and Jobless? Yes please!

2010-03-03T23:08:00.002Z

The thing about Mark Thompson is that he's a politician. Looking at his relentlessly non-dashing media appearances, it's clear that he didn't get his job through creativity or flair or genius; he got there by ticking the right boxes and sucking up to the right people. Well, all right, I don't know if that's exactly how he got his job, but watching him squirm though an interview with Snow and blethering away at Paxman, he gives a politician's answers. He answers the question he would have liked to have answered, and witters on vaguely about 'quality', and when everything he says is discredited in one interview he changes his mind about it in the next, in the traditional politician's style of saying exactly the opposite on the 10 O'Clock News to what they said on Today in the morning. I suggested a doomed junior minister on Twitter, and there is a certain Blinky Ben from The Thick Of It about him, but the more I think about it the more Charles Clark springs to mind; like a badger snuffling about in the daylight, hopelessly exposed and unsure of quite where to go. Except we can't have him culled for carrying TB, although it might be worth suggesting it to someone.

Mind you, a proper politician would have offered up a pained smile when Buckles offered him out instead of sneering at him. Never let the true feelings out, that's the trick. How else does he think Cameron gets through those events where he stands in front of poor people? And Paxman was shit as well, banging on about 1Extra when he could have just as easily used Radio 3 as an example; an easy out for the Newsnight audience.

(This blog was definitely better when I just used to do entries summing up the nightmarish ways of modern living by going "girls, eh?". I could have done one of those yesterday as well. Girls, eh?)

The other thing about politicians is that their main interest is keeping their own jobs, even though they're theoretically supposed to be interested in improving the lot of the people. And hacking off the bits of the BBC he's hacking away at are a total politician's solution; chop away at the bits too many people won't notice, dismiss those that complain as being a bunch of undeserving wretches and blether on about commercial interests as the solution to all ills as if such a thing hadn't been utterly discredited by, say, that global financial downturn which people will have noticed.

(I don't get this business about people not knowing about 6 Music being some sort of proof that it doesn't deserve to exist. Granted, if my mum's heard of 6 Music it's only because I've mentioned it to her, but she'd have little to no idea of what it might consist of. On the other hand, practically every programme she mentions to me that she's been watching is a mystery to me as well; I have no need whatsoever to know about them. I'm fairly sure that wouldn't be taken as good enough reason to get rid of them though. See, Thompson might blether "we can't do everything", but as everyone has to pay for the thing they're obliged to do everything: they can't say "thanks for the money, here's some Lady Gaga and Holby City for you... oh, you're not interested in those. Radio 3? Hotter Than My Daughter? No? Well, sorry about that, thanks for the cash and mind the door on the way out", and yet it seems that's precisely where this is heading.)

So now I have the exciting opportunity to take part in a public consultation. I'm not entirely comfortable about this; it feels like the sort of thing the Daily Mail does as part of its carefully orchestrated outrages. And I feel a bit bad about being mainly interested in 6 Music when the website stuff is altogether worse for people being put out of a job for no good reason (unless we count "making people pay for crappier alternatives so that we can boost some huge corporation's bank balance" as a good reason, anyway; my employer's view may differ from mine on that one) and anything that appears to upset the Speak You're Branes types as much as the Asian Network's existence seems to is worth it for that alone. I'm trying to psyche myself up to read through the whole report, which might take a while; fortunately I seem to have until May, although I suspect I need to get this done as soon as possible. Hence leaving myself a reminder to do it. Which I've just done.

Still, girls, eh?

This will never be the same

2010-02-27T00:55:00.004Z

I've never understood people not wanting the bands that they like to be popular and sell lots of records and play big shows and that. (There will now be a pause where anyone who knows me rolls their eyes and drags up hundreds of examples of me disapproving of exactly that.) I always wanted the bands that were really special to me to be, for want of a better term, big. Kenickie, for a pertinent example, should have been playing huge shows to thousands of adoring fans; clever, funny people playing catchy tunes that worked whether you wanted to analyse them minutely or just bellow along: what wasn't to love? (I'm obviously simplifying here somewhat, but then it's all been put better elsewhere already.) I recall on the old mailing list when we'd routinely wait for the chart placings to come around and be disappointed at every turn; why didn't people get it like we did?

(Which makes me wonder why we should care about such things at all. It seems an odd thing to want. Is it for our sake, personal validation that other people like the things we like? Genuine desire to share our love for something with others? Or do we want the things we love to be successful because we feel the people who've created them deserve the rewards? I must've considered this before at some point, but I really don't remember doing so. How odd.)

Which is why Los Campesinos! last night was an unremittingly joyful experience. Koko isn't that big a venue (capacity of 1500, which isn't really a lot in a city of 7,500,000 people plus however many more in the surrounding suburbs, but never mind) but the roof is high enough to make it feel big, so when you look across the crowd during Letters From Me To Charlotte and see enough arms raised that you could probably get away with calling it a sea, it feels like a triumph.

There were a few moments like that: Gareth scanning the crowd during the intro to There Is A Flag. There Is No Wind, his gaze going up and up, the way the crowd went for Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown #1 despite Gareth suggesting it was the 'mid-set lull', the way You! Me! Dancing! was.. well, all right, it was always going to tear the roof off of the place, but it felt like the whole room had its face set in some sort of rictus grin while they did it. Or maybe that was just me. And Gareth is so self-effacing and the rest of the band looked so happy that you couldn't help made up for them, even though there's no particular reason why you should.

So, yeah, it was great.

And on the way home I thought of the other bands I loved (several of which appeared on the list of influences on the LC! Myspace when I looked at it after I'd first seen them, which helped me to make sense of what I'd just seen; of course a band who liked all of that were going to be that good) that I'd never seen play gigs at venues that big to crowds like that. And I felt a bit sad, and a lot happy, and wondered if it was right to be 33 years old and still getting a buzz from things like this, and whether the girls on the train who'd been to seen JLS had had the same sort of night I had. They seemed in a high old mood. Good for them.

Addendum

2010-02-27T00:54:00.002Z

Such was the post-gig high (and the fact that I had a day off work) that I was still up a couple of hours later, in time to see my first #save6music tweet, which led to me staying up for another hour being furious. (And then another hour playing Miles Edgworth: Ace Attorney, which did at least cheer me up a bit.) There's much to be said about the pathetic act of the person charged with running the BBC lying prostrate before the bloke who wrote that popular smash hit The Conservative Party Election Manifesto 2005 and allowing himself to be fucked again and again and again instead of, you know, showing some backbone and standing up for himself, and the people who work for him, and the people who like the things they create, but they're more likely to be more eloquently and better informedly be said elsewhere as I'm still too angry. Clearly. But I still wanted to say this much, and yet I couldn't bear to put it in the same post as the stuff above (even though there's a connection between the two, about the things you care about and why you care about them that nobody involved in this decision apparently seems to understand - essentially it's the old price of everything, value of nothing business) so here it is.

The Most Expensive Twirl I've Ever Had

2010-02-21T23:06:00.004Z

The thing about the Tube that those who stay at home at the weekends don't realise is that it can be far more dispiriting on a Sunday than it is in the rush hour. There aren't quite as many people about, granted, but there are so many buggies and suitcases that they more than compensate. And whereas the rush hour crowd tend to know how to behave on a crowded tube train - when to grab hold of something to stop themselves from falling, when to get out of the way - the weekend passengers don't. Today, for example, on my way home a woman who bore an uncanny resemblance to Fabio Capello didn't realise that she ought to hold on when the train moved and nearly planted her hand in my face as she stumbled. A couple of stops later, two teenage boys with a huge case made a similar mistake and one nearly ended up in my lap. On my outward journey I'd given up my seat when a woman with two small children boarded. Here are the thanks I received for this:

But I'd made the journey into town nonetheless, as I'd decided that I rather liked the look of Decode at the V&A. I'd seen the ad for it swirling across one of the usually annoying video ad board things at Moorgate the other week when I'd gone to the Identity Project (about which I tried to write an entry but failed: weirded up my head, did that one, and is still doing so to a certain extent). It had been quite striking: usually the ads on those things involve adspeak text (never pleasant) or gurning faces (possibly worse), so to see something swirling intriguingly made a pleasant change.

V&A Decode generative identity from postspectacular on Vimeo.

The exhibition was small but as delightful as something that largely involves staring at screens can be. The opening bit, with various graphics and such swirling about on screens, was interesting enough (I particularly liked the digital zoetrope - the scraps of story on the black and white screen were oddly wistful - and the exquisite clock, which I'm glad to note that you can stare at all day if the urge so takes) but the interactive bit was splendid. Playing with the exhibits was fun but watching other people's reactions to them was better. Also, if I ever win the lottery, I'm getting a weave mirror. I don't do the lottery and I doubt that they're for sale, but it's a nice thought.

I'd planned to walk back through Hyde Park and up towards Marble Arch, which took me past Speaker's Corner. I've walked across the park before but I'd never passed through on a Sunday, so it was the first time I'd ever seen the place serving its proper purpose. There were four speakers, and I didn't really tarry long enough to hear what any of them had to say. The biggest crowd were around a bloke (all of the speakers were men) insisting that democracy was overrated, another who'd drawn a much smaller crowd insisting that there was 'nothing in the city', another fellow who was arguing about the benefits of Islam with a heckler, and... actually I didn't really take in what the other was saying as by then I'd become fascinated with their choices of podium, which varied from sturdy steps to precarious ladders. Essentially, I suppose it was exactly as I would have imagined it to have been. Which is reassuring, in some way or another.

Annoyingly I'd failed to spot that Marble Arch station was closed when I was checking for engineering works; as I prepared to do battle with Oxford Street the playlist I'd prepared flicked on to Hit Me To Your Rhythm Stick with unerring timing. Fortified by this, I managed to battle my way down to Bond Street and then steeled myself for the train home, which is where we came in.

Take the bit between your teeth

2010-02-06T00:18:00.001Z

Er... I've been really busy, and so the slew of entries I've been wanting to write have gone unwritten, or partially written without ever getting properly finished off. This one was supposed to be finished on Monday but wasn't and the point of it is slightly lost now, but never mind.

The idea was that I wasn't going to do anything at the weekend. Nobody was coming to visit, I wasn't going to visit anyone, no boxes needed unpacking, nothing needed particularly urgent cleaning and there was no football to go to unless I fancied an abortive trip to Lincoln. A man needs a lazy weekend once in a while and this was going to be mine.

(Except it wasn't a lazy weekend even before Sunday, because I'm not wired that way: I spent Saturday morning doing various bits of shopping and Saturday afternoon doing some mundane run-of-the-mill cleaning. I don't think it's a low boredom threshold as such, but I'm just not very good at doing nothing.)

And then I remembered that there was a Los Campesinos! in-store at Rough Trade on Sunday, and that all that was required to gain entrance was for me to buy the album at Rough Trade on Sunday. And as I was going to buy the album anyway, and I probably would have bought it at Rough Trade anyway (as I tend to buy things I want *now* there), and as it was much more convenient to go and buy it on Sunday instead of Monday, it seemed rather foolish not to do so. And so on a bright crisp winter's morning, the sort that's delightful enough as it is without the prospect of Los Campesinos! to look forward to, that is what I did.

(Other notable bands I have seen in shops: Rosita in the other Rough Trade shop in Portobello - I'd come straight from work and was wearing shirt and tie, which I kept on despite the heat of the day. The other Rough Trade shop isn't really set up for bands to play in it, and Tiny from Ultrasound couldn't fit in the shop and had to watch from the doorway. Afterwards, I was the only person who didn't get my copy of Live It Down signed, because I felt a bit awkward about it. And I saw The Pipettes at HMV that time. And there was that time I had to leave the same HMV because the terrible honking voice coming from the stage was putting me off my DVD browsing; I'm surprised Amy Winehouse got past the first album, really.)

I felt a bit self-conscious when I got to the shop. Up until that point I hadn't really thought about being a man in his mid-30s going to a record shop on a Sunday morning in order to buy an album to get a wristband to see the band play later on. Perhaps it was because the only other people clutching copies of the album seemed to be teenage girls. Anyway, I somewhat nervously approached the counter, handed over my copy of the CD (I'd pondered buying the vinyl, but then decided that it would be pointlessly extravagant) and wondered if I'd have to ask for a wristband. Happily, the girl behind the counter reached for them straight away, and handed one over with my purchase. "See you later" she beamed at me. Hurrah for excellent customer service. I bounded back into the bustle of Shoreditch on a Sunday market morning and bought some banana cake in Spitalfields without being even slightly annoyed by the slow-moving crowds.

I returned about six hours later, wristband safely secreted in my bag. There was quite a queue outside of the shop, some of whom appeared to be at least as old as me. This was a relief. As the queue began to move I attached my wristband, managing to trap several hairs from my arm in the sticky bit in the process.

Having found a spot near the back, I was rather miffed when a girl who was slightly taller than me pushed in front. This annoyance turned to excitement when Olly, Ellen and Rob took to the stage, and became slight confusion when it became clear that the rest of the band were also in attendance but out of view. By peering between shoulders I could just about spot Gareth, but then the girl in front decided to start taking photos and my view of everything was obscured. This was mildly annoying, particularly when she started leaning back into me and forcing me to shuffle back slightly to avoid an unfortunate frottage incident, but I didn't seem as annoyed as the people behind me, who seemed most put out, almost as if they hadn't considered that their view of an 8-piece band playing on a tiny stage might be in some way compromised.

(I do suspect that one day people who spend gigs taking photos of the band will look at their lovingly assembled collection of pictures, with their tens of Flickr views and acclaim from some of their mates, and think to themselves, "you know, I really wish I'd just watched the band and enjoyed the music at the time instead of taking all of these pictures". Hope so, anyway.)

The band were... interesting. Not even Los Campesinos! can be mid-alteringly amazing in a shop playing a set of songs that you don't really know, but having listened to the album a couple of times in the afternoon there were things that made more sense hearing them live. Do Not Make An Enemy Of Me, with its awesome careering intro in particular. And the start of Who Fell Asleep In sounded thoroughly lovely, even if I remain unsure about where the song goes from there. And there was a pleasing element of rawness that might not be there in a month's time - Plan A sounded like it was going to fall apart at any moment, which rather suited it. (Although having listened to the song quite a lot over the last week, maybe it just sounds like that anyway.)

So, in weedy non-concluding conclusion, going to see bands in shops is a curious experience, but worth it. Especially when it's that band, obviously.

Judi Dench is the one on the right

2010-01-17T00:36:00.001Z

(I went to see Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll the other day and this is... well, probably not a review as such, but a badly compiled list of what I thought of it. So if you're the Internet's famous Alan Jenson or you're planning to go and see it, there may be spoilers below. In as much commenting on a film about someone who wasn't particularly obscure and has been dead for nearly 10 years can be classed as spoilers.)

Nobody asked me what I was expecting from the film version of Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but if they had I would have suggested that, apart from my reservations about Him from The Office's inability to play any character other than Him From The Office, it should probably be OK because of the source material. I would have been wrong, but despite it being largely crap there was one bit that made me come over slightly unnecessary. As I recall (and I haven't seen the film since my original viewing of it so I may have forgotten the exact details) there's something flying through space - the Vogons? The Heart of Gold? Anyway - which passes an object that reveals itself as the title, which is accompanied by a brief sting of the theme music from the radio and TV series. And because those things are important, seeing them on a big screen with the music blaring through the speakers gave me the curious but pleasing sensation in my back that I get with these things.

I suggested to someone the other day that Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll couldn't be completely terrible because if nothing else the soundtrack would be good, and as it was every time a song started up I had the same involuntary shudder. The bits where the band are on stage work really well; watching them made me think that, awesome though it was to see Ian Dury in his later years and splendid though The Blockheads' shows are now, it would have been astonishing to have seen them at the time when these songs were fresh and new, which I think reflects well on everyone involved. And Serkis puts the songs over really well: at the start of the film it's a bit jarring but once you're into the film it's fine. (Every adulatory review of Andy Serkis is correct; he's properly great.)

And there are plenty of good bits: I liked the bit where he recruits the Blockheads, and the Spasticus bit (any film that credits both Norman Watt-Roy and Kirk Douglas really can't be all bad). In fact, the more I sit and think about it the more I think that actually it was pretty good and I shouldn't try to put people off seeing it.

"But why would you be putting people off seeing it if there are plenty of good bits and the bits with the band are really well done? Also, have a shower you filthy smelly man" you might say. To which I would reply that the heating doesn't kick in for another hour and it's too cold to have one before then, and that it's possibly a little fanboyish of me to complain about the bits of the film that are about his relationships with his son and the rest of his family and his girlfriend but... well, I think the problem is more that those bits are terribly badly done. There's a bit where Naomie Harris - lovely, lovely Naomie Harris, who is lovely - says 'My weakness is that I love him'; this line should only be in dismal ITV dramas, and the fact that it's being said to Chaz Jankel doesn't make it any better.

(Also, and I'm definitely being fanboyishly churlish here, the bits of lyrics dropped into the script made me cringe. Not that all, or indeed any, of these would have been obvious to someone who wasn't familiar with the songs. And I got a bit distracted by the timeframe of events and songs not really matching, but that's a problem with my idiot pedantic head than with the film.)

Oh, and the wrong song comes in over the end credits. But that might be me again. Anyway, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is pretty good, and probably worth seeing, but I wouldn't lose too much sleep if you miss it at the cinema and end up picking it up cheap on DVD.

I believe in you, Isaac Newton (or: Post 200 Super Snow Special)

2010-01-16T00:09:00.002Z

I already miss the snow. Not as much as this chap, maybe, but still quite a bit.

I've lived here for 14 days now. For more than half of that time there's been snow or ice all about the place. Today was the first morning since the snow started that the near vicinity has been more green than white. The place looked better in the snow, somehow: maybe there was an air of unreality about the place when it was blanketed with white dung that the thaw has taken away. Or maybe I was too busy concentrating on not falling over to notice.

The above, I feel the need to point out, is one of only two pictures I took during the cold snap. The other was of the same snowman, but slightly further back for perspective.

I do wonder about people taking lots of pictures of the snow. I went for a walk in the park on Wednesday, on the grounds that it was likely to be my last chance before the thaw set in, and every other person seemed to have a camera to hand. Now, the park was beautiful, proper picture postcard stuff, snow on the branches of trees and leaves of hardy plants, robins perched on branches, ducks waddling across the frozen lake in formation, the whole shebang. And I suppose if you're handier than I am with a camera you could have a decent stab at capturing it, but you'd never quite get the joy of being there.

What's going to be done with all of those pictures? Put on Facebook and Flickr, the first few to be looked at by close chums and then forgotten about, I suppose. Better that than clogging up local news programmes anyway.

The Year of the Shape of the Pear

2009-12-31T19:40:00.004Z

With the end of the decade now a matter of hours away, and inspired by Sweeping the Nation's excellent end of decade list-thing and Broken TV's splendid on-going countdown and probably some others on pages that don't appear on my top sites screen that I've forgotten about, and being keen to draw a line under what's been a pretty dreadful year, I'd decided that I should come up with some sort of 00s-related list. However, given that my speciality is 'wittering on about myself in a pathetically solipsistic way', the only thing I can usefully prepare is a list of stuff mostly related to me from the last ten years that I thought was quite good. So:

A list of six things from the last ten years most of which are to do with me which are notable enough for me to put them in this list of six things (I couldn't think of ten, which is worrying) in no particular order

1. Losing weight

I probably now weigh less than at any time since I was... oooh, about 14 or so. (Well, give or take the four pounds I seem to have put on over Christmas, although that's not too bad compared to some of my post-hols weigh-ins.) Oh, I'm still on the porky side (the best I could have ever hoped for given my height and build was 'stocky', and I think I'm at least closer to that these days than 'lardbucket') and it doesn't seem to have had much effect on my health or made me any more attractive to women, but it does at least make it easier to buy trousers and that's really all you can ask for in life.

2. The Adventures of Flossie

I'd had websites before and I've had websites since, but looking back over it when I was egomaniacally re-posting most of it I did feel quite pleased with myself in a way that I never did at the time. I used to think in blog entries; anything that happened, however minor, I seemed to be able to write up, whereas these days I tend to stop and think about it for so long that by the time I get a moment to type it up the point seems to have been lost.

(Also, I used to go to bed later then. Man, I used to be so productive between 11 and 12 at night in those days. Earlier nights are clearly the enemy of writing anything interesting at all, if you're me anyway, but not feeling tired in the morning is also very rewarding and so I'm probably going to stick with it.)

3. Falling in love with bands

There were three distinct stages with me and bands. There were the formative years, back when I was six and did my best to wear out my copy of Complete Madness through overplaying. Next, when I was about 20 or so and fell for Bis and Kenickie several years after my chums had been into the Manics (who I always thought were somewhat silly) and Suede (who I thought were plain old no good). Said friends told me that I'd be embarrassed about this in a few years time: I outgrew the friends before I outgrew the bands (and long after they were embarrassed by the Manics and were busy enthusing about intelligent dance music instead). And finally there was the period where I listened to Marine Research and Emergency And I by The Dismemberment Plan too much: I don't think these last two changed my life in quite the way that the others did but they were a constant soundtrack at an important time. There were bands I liked after that, bands I liked a lot, but I'd got to a stage where I didn't think I'd ever get properly exited by a band again in quite the same way.

The exact point when this changed came when I went to see Los Campesinos! at the Scala. I liked Los Campesinos!, otherwise I wouldn't have forsaken a copy evening in the pub to go and see them, but I never expected quite what I got. If I had to pick a moment, it would be at the end of the introduction to You! Me! Dancing!, the eight thumps of the drum to indicate that the song proper is about to start. The first time it made my jaw drop; every other time I've seen them it's nearly made me blub. I don't think I've been quite the same since.

4. Having a proper girlfriend

Ah. Yes. Um.

Thing is, most of the time I regard this as being a bad thing. I don't buy into that 'better to have loved and lost' shit: at least beforehand I didn't know what I might be missing out on. But sometimes, particularly at this time of year, the moments when I'm reminded of my one attempt at having a proper girlfriend bring to mind the good bits rather than the constant angst of wondering whether it might be going wrong, the excruciating, agonising pain of it actually going wrong, the zombie-like trance I wandered around in for some time afterwards, the subsequent occasions where I teetered on the brink of doing something pathetic and regrettable and the one time that I did do something pathetic and regrettable, and the understandable reluctance of anyone to be interested in me in that way since.

Er, yes. But some of it was good. The awkward early stages can actually be tremendous fun rather than, well, awkward, it turns out; you just need to be awkward around the right person. And the bit just before it all starts to go wrong, when things couldn't be going any better, are fairly amazing. If maybe not worth everything that comes after.

5. Dyson Airblades

Finally! Hand drying technology is now as efficient as using a paper towel! Few things delight me these days as much as walking into a public toilet and discovering that they have the Dysons (but not the cheaper imitators, and yes I am looking at you John Lewis) and that no additional drying by the traditional method of wiping my hands on my trousers will be necessary. (See also point 4.)

6. Generally feeling a bit more confident about myself and that

Which is good. I used to claim that I wasn't really fully formed until I was about 23 or so, but now I come to think of it I spent most of my time at 23 moping about a girl and listening to Marine Research (not that listening to Marine Research isn't a perfectly valid way to spend your time, but moping about a girl isn't: not when you're 23, anyway). Whereas now, I dunno, I just feel much happier about myself. I put it down to the early stages of hair loss; once you realise that that bloke in the bus' CCTV camera who looks like he's come dressed as a monk from is actually you there's not really any point in being precious about anything any more.

And that's that, really, apart from when I read this back later and add bits and change bits and such, which is a really bad habit and if anyone follows this through an RSS feed I'm really sorry about it, but then who reads everything that turns up in their RSS feeds?, not me, and as I'm getting older I think it's entirely reasonable that what I do is the same as what everyone does in the same way that my dad does. I shall be spending New Years Eve, never my favourite night of the year (except for that one year when... oh, see point 4), clearing the bottles from my fridge and watching Father Ted, which seems as good a way to end the year as any.

It looks quite boaty

2009-12-28T23:44:00.002Z

My parents don't have the internet. Which is fine - they have no use for it, and it's not as if I'd have spent much time on it while I was staying with them for Christmas: too much risk of being asked awkward questions. I was planning to take advantage of this to spend any free time I might have had typing up some of the various entries I have notes for scribbled down in notepads, only I never quite got around to it. I did write most of this though.

I try not to think as myself as unfortunate, that the world has somehow treated me unfairly while other people live high on the hog despite doing nothing useful or valuable or worthwhile with their lives. But, very occasionally, I wonder. On Christmas Eve I found myself wondering, because I watched The Impressions Show with John Culshaw and That Woman One while we waited for my sister's kids to go to sleep so that we could get on with the important business of setting out gifts for the morning.

Now, I'm aware of Culshaw's astonishing prowess when it comes to impersonation. I watched a bit of an episode of Dead Ringers once and spotted fairly quickly that every skit began with John Culshaw saying "Hello, I'm Michael Burke" or whoever he was supposed to be. ("But Michael Burke says that at the start of the news!" a slack-brained, easily-impressed moron on an internet forum might have said to me about six years ago. "No he doesn't" I reply: "the continuity announcer might say it but Michael Burke wouldn't. Moreover, he doesn't have to say it because we know he's Michael Burke. Whereas when we see John Culshaw doing an impersonation of Michael Burke he has to say 'I'm Michael Burke' otherwise we'd squint at him saying 'Huw Edwards? Peter Sissons? Sandy Gall? I'm confused', thus missing the comedy, although that would be just as well".)

But The Impressions Show with John Culshaw and That Woman One is properly astonishing. We'll pass briefly over the script, as it doesn't really matter what they're saying, but even in the hands of gifted impressionists it would as amusing as a seasonal dose of shingles. We'll even pass over the fact that the wardrobe department know the jig's up by the way The Woman One looks exactly the same whether she's supposed to be Kylie Minogue, Amanda Holden or that one who's married to Vernon Kaye. Because the thing about The Impressions Show is that calling it The Impressions Show puts a great deal of importance on the impressions, and the impressions are absolutely appalling.

John Culshaw's Bruce Forsyth sounds less like Bruce Forsyth than Andrew Collings' Bruce Forsyth. He doesn't even sound like someone doing an impression of someone doing an impression of Bruce Forsyth, and I reckon even I could have a stab at that. He sounds like... well, I don't know who he sounds like; whoever it is, it isn't Bruce Forsyth. His Michael McIntyre sounds South African. His Ross Kemp sounds like someone with a bit of a sore throat. (I've no idea how long the Ross Kemp sketch lasted, but Nigel Blackwell saying "those tough-looking characters over there are The Mendips" took a few seconds and was much funnier.) I think the joke with his David Cameron is that he keeps saying "I'm David Cameron", but it's hard to tell if it's just Culshaw reminding himself (or the writers goading him) and the editor didn't notice. His Gordon Brown doesn't sound Scottish. How difficult is that? His Gene Hunt is almost passable. That's as kind as I can be. The Woman One sounds the same whichever voice she's supposed to be doing. This comes as a blessed relief.

And the thing is, when I see The Impressions Show and I consider that John Culshaw has probably made a comfortable living from his rotten impressions, and that people got paid for writing this, I suddenly think that actually the world is terribly unfair and that I've somehow been hard done by. And all this at Christmas time too.

On the plus side, after this whatever rubbish I happened to end up watching - even the Catherine Tate Saying Fuck In An Exaggerated Manner Christmas Special - seemed almost amusing by comparison.

What is that juice?

2009-12-23T20:10:00.003Z

I was going to see Where The Wild Things Are this evening (any thoughts as to whether it's worth going to see and running the possible gauntlet of concerned parents looking at me askance appreciated; I've already missed Up and Fantastic Mr Fox, although that was down to laziness as much as anything), but I was inadvertently reminded of where I was three years ago tonight and it put me off in a way that the prospect of freezing cold waits for buses and sliding around on the frozen pavement couldn't hope to. I went to the cinema three years ago tonight as well. Casino Royale. I'm not big on Bond films but rather enjoyed it, possibly because it was quite un-Bondish. If I'd stayed in three years ago today I might have felt more inclined to go to the cinema tonight.

Odd how a long-buried memory can utterly slay you. I'm going to have to do something excellent tomorrow morning otherwise it's going to be awful. Or I'll have forgotten and got on with my life, one of those anyway. Hopefully the latter, as my first two thoughts as to places to go are closed tomorrow. (Which slightly surprises me; plenty of people still working tomorrow, even if I'm not and wouldn't have been even if I hadn't had holiday to take.)

As such, it's time for a quick round of...

Festive Mobile Phone Photography Corner

My mum asked me to buy her a light fitting for Christmas. I was given instructions as to what one they wanted, but there were three or four fairly similar ones so I took a picture to send to her to ask whether this was the one she wanted. However, the picture then refused to send, for reasons I've never got to the bottom of. Obviously I can't reveal whether this is the one I eventually bought for them but... well, actually I can, because they have no internet access and probably wouldn't find this page anyway. I did buy this one. This is my parents' taste in interior furnishings. Hopefully. Make of it what you will.

A couple of weeks ago I was somewhat bemused to find this on the doormat. Occasionally post gets misdirected, that's fair enough, these things happen. But you would have thought that somewhere between the Plymouth (I'm guessing from the postmark) postbox in which this was posted and the Ilford letterbox it was eventually put through, you would have thought someone might have noticed that it wasn't quite on its way to Torquay. I wouldn't mind but aside from the word 'Avenue' the addresses are utterly different. The postcode bears no resemblance whatsoever, not even if you squint. If we were playing some sort of postcode-based version of Mastermind then there would be one right number in the right place and five empty spaces, and the sinister beardy man would be stroking his chin in triumph.

Eventually I popped it back in the post box and it hasn't returned since, so hopefully it's gone back west. I slightly regret not popping it in an envelope and a card of my own, wishing the Relphs a splendid of Christmases and telling them what had happened, perhaps enigmatically leaving my name off or inventing an unlikely alias. You always think of the best ideas too late.

The other morning I was distracted on my way out of the building by a fox prowling around in the field over the back. I watched it for a bit, then decided to take a picture. And, um, this is the result. I think it's in the centre of the picture hiding behind some twiggy branches, but I may be wrong.

The rain is rapping against my window in a way that suggests that not leaving the house was probably a good move. I'm going to find a blanket to hide under for the rest of evening. Happy Christmas, all of you. And that.

Eating it would make Jesus cry

2009-12-20T23:54:00.002Z

Friday. Snow day. I'm on the tube, feeling slightly disappointed that I'd made it to the station without any particular difficulties and only had to wait a minute for a train. I'd been promised TRAVEL CHAOS, and I rather like the battle against TRAVEL CHAOS and the feeling of smug satisfaction when I get to work despite it.

I don't usually sit down on tube trains in the morning - the twin perils of not spotting someone who might need the seat more than I do and the prospect of some bloke sitting next to me with legs splayed - but I was going a few stops further than usual and... man, this stuff really isn't interesting, is it? Anyway, this left me unsure of where to look when a reasonably attractive woman sat down opposite me and started applying make up, a process I've always found unduly intriguing. My gaze drifted above her to an advert, except it wasn't an advert but part of an Art on the Underground project. This was something apparently taken from a book of quotations given to Picadilly Line staff to use in announcements, and featured a quite from Engels. This quote, in fact:

"An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory."

This bemuses me in two respects:

1. I'm not sure sure how this particular quote relates to life on the Picadilly Line. If you're, say, announcing that the train will now terminate at Arnos Grove or asking them to stand clear of the doors, I'm not quite sure how the action/theory thing quite comes in to play. Unless it's a deliberate attempt to confuse people and then move off while they're obfuscated.

2. Did they run this past the Mayor? Because something tells me that promoting the wisdom of one of the founders of Communism doesn't really tally with current Mayoral thinking.

I considered taking a picture, but as mentioned the woman sat below the quote was quite attractive and I'd have worried that she thought I was taking a picture of her. Also, I might have tried to take a picture of her on the sly, because I am rubbish.

Eventually I had to leave the train one stop early, as someone had been taken ill on a train at Finchley Road. This sort of thing is absolutely typical of this country and wouldn't have happened anywhere else in the world.

I love 2002

2009-12-06T00:16:00.003Z

What could be more self-regarding than having an internet page where you write about yourself and the stuff you get up, and another internet page where you post short updates about what you're up to? How about "putting most of the entries from an old internet page you wrote about yourself and the stuff you got up to back up on the internet, but with most of the spelling errors corrected?". That'd do it.

Actually I'd finished putting all of the bits of TAoF that I'd been planning to put up a couple of months ago, but I was going to go back and add tags to make it easier to find, say, all of the entries about going to Tesco, only to get fed up with it. So, not having anything better to do before The Thick Of It tonight, I decided that I may as well tidy everything up and do some sort of introductory round-up post thing, which proved easier than expected as it turned out I'd done one three years ago.

(Incidentally, The Thick Of It: I liked those hour long specials and the film was ace, but the half hour ones... I'm just not sure that they're all that good. The funny bits and the plot bits all feel too crammed in, and tonight's seemed to dispense with funny bits almost entirely and I spent more time being concerned that I'd sworn too much in the pub last night. I'm probably just an idiot. An increasingly sweary idiot.)

I'm not sure quite why I decided to put TAoF back up; I think the idea was that it would be handy to have backstory to link to for new posts, or reading the old stuff would give me lots of exciting new ideas, or I really really love myself. Probably all three, except that it hasn't worked in any of those regards. Anyway, it's there now, for no obvious reason and to no obvious effect, another dusty bygone internet relic of the type that I'm best at. I'll probably get really into Facebook next. I'm so achingly current.

Haircuts with bicycles

2009-11-17T23:18:00.000Z

I'm walking towards the supermarket. The early evening has passed and is rapidly turning into well past dinnertime. A family walk out of a side turning and walk along in front of me - well, I assume it's a family, one male, one female, one child, one dog. I'm walking rather faster than them and as I approach the woman shepherds the child out of my way. I walk past. I hear her.

"The thing I really like about it round here is that people are so polite, they always say please and thank you when you move out of their way. Such a nice..."

I stop and look at them. "Excuse me?"

"I said, the thing I like..."

"I heard what you said. Do you know what sort of a day I've had?"

"Well, I..."

"I'll tell you, shall I? This morning, for example, I was stuck on a tube train for 40 minutes and ended up arriving at work about an hour late, so I had to work through my lunch hour, in an overheated office on a delightfully sunny day when I would have usually gone for a walk in the park. I wasn't forced to do this because my employers aren't bad people, but I felt I had to because I have a lot on at the moment. Work, do you?"

"Er, I..."

"Just before taking my lunch, I received a call from a letting agent to tell me that the landlord of the flat I was going to move in to has changed her mind and decided to live in the flat rather than letting it out, which means that I have to go through the process of finding somewhere to live again, as well as hoping that my current landlord will let me stay on despite me telling them that I was going to leave next week. I've just spent 20 minutes stood outside an apartment block in a godforsaken part of Barking waiting for someone to show up to let me see a flat, eventually giving up when someone called me a cunt for asking if he was from Flat 3. This was followed by a bus journey where the man behind me spent most of the trip hollering into a mobile phone so loudly that I couldn't hear the music in my earpieces above him no matter how loud I had the volume at. And now I'm going to Sainsbury's. So you'll have to forgive me if, just this once, my level of politeness doesn't quite match the standards of the leading book of etiquette of the day."

I glared and them, and waited. I knew what was coming next. I knew it would be the woman who said it as well. She looked the type.

"Politeness costs nothing, you know."

"Politeness? Politeness? You, with your awful family slopping about all over the pavement, lecture me on politeness? Me, the man who waits for everyone to leave the lift first in case he treads on them? Me, who gave up his seat to an old woman on the overcrowded tube I eventually caught this morning and got glared at for my trouble? Me, who offered to help someone with her pram at the stairs at the station the other day and got told to fuck off? Well, madam, politeness can go hang as far as I'm concerned, but frankly keeping your appalling family in line doesn't class as politeness at all; it could only be considered polite if you never left the house at all and didn't pollute this otherwise inoffensive street with your horrific awfulness."

And with that I turned on my heel and walked briskly on, the sound of soundless lips smacking together all that was left in my wake. Well, that's what would have happened if I'd said that stuff instead of just ignoring them, stomping on to the supermarket and eventually swearing quite loudly at someone who told me his till was closing just as I arrived at it. Still, this is better than the version where I end up bludgeoning the parents to death anyway.

Refried Ectoplasm

2009-11-05T20:51:00.002Z

Astonishingly, despite my entry for Sweeping The Nation's series on songs of the last ten years being largely about boilers leaking and the cuteness of the guest vocalist, I did manage to write some even more irrelevant fluff about Hear The Air that I edited out for everyone's sake. However, whereas most of my offcuts tend to end up clogging up my hard drive to be seen by no one, I've decided to try and conjure something out of this one, on account of the post complaining about the spelling of "The First Noel" on the posters for Myleene Klass' Christmas Spectacular turning out to be hopelessly misguided.

(Seriously, who knew? I'm sure that at some point in the last 33 years I must have seen the title written down somewhere, and I'm sure I would have noticed if it was spelt 'Nowell'. And you don't really expect the promoters of Myleene Klass' Christmas Spectacular to be the people to be pedantic about this sort of thing. But, good on them for doing it.)

Other than the fact that I really like it, one of the reasons why Hear The Air stood out for me when I was considering songs I might write about is because I really didn't care for Mo-Ho-Bish-O-Pi at all. And I've always had a soft spot for one-off really good songs by bands I otherwise dislike: there's something oddly reassuring about it, as if the dreadful support slots I had to stand through, looking at my watch and wondering why I bother, were actually worth it in the end; that there's the chance that all bands with the whiff of averageness about them may have one existence-justifying shining moment lurking within.

(I used to have this theory that every vaguely competent band had at least one good single in them. It was a particularly stupid theory - to be honest the only other song I can recall that fits it is Take It Easy Chicken by Mansun - and by the turn of the millennium this had already been irrevocably proved so by the continuing existence of the Stereofuckingphonics (trad.), and clearly it would never have survived Kasabian.)

I remember seeing Mo-Ho-Bish-O-Pi three times, although, unusually for me, I can only place two of them: one was at the Camden Falcon when the Barfly was still based there (they were supporting Rosita, but I seem to remember leaving early to go and see Spearmint around the corner somewhere - oh, the days when I would wander the streets of Camden going from gig to gig), and once at one of those NME Awards shows at the Astoria. The Astoria one was particularly memorable as being the worst gig I'd ever been to, something which wasn't really Mo-Ho-Bish-O-Pi's fault. I think I'd probably still hold it up as the worst I've ever attended, not so much because of the wretchedness of the bands (although two of the four were pretty rotten), but because of the horrible dashing of expectations.

Being useless at deleting things, I still have my commentary of events from the night, and my review of Mo-Ho-Bish-O-Pi is telling: "Save for one nice thumpy thing when some girl called Rachel (probably in some band or other, I expect) joined them, they were pretty much any band you're likely to see first on in any old backroom in Camden." Telling, that is, that I haven't had any new ideas in the last 10 years. They were followed by a then largely unknown Sigur Ros ("They'd possibly have been much better playing where people actually went to see them rather than as support, and were less likely to chatter incessantly or imitate bow-wielding bloke's extraordinarily high-pitched 'ooooo's'") and Mudlumz, who were hand-picked to represent British hip-hop but mostly reminded me of the time I saw Chumbawamba, and you never want to be reminded of that.

However, none of this was anything to do with why this was the worst gig I ever went to (not that Mudlumz weren't dreadful, but I can handle bad support bands): that was down to the headliners, who were The Beta Band. Because I've never seen a band as insultingly, willfully rotten as The Beta Band were that night. I don't mind bands who don't necessarily play the songs that you want them to play, as long as what they choose to do instead is worth seeing. But bands who play the songs you want them to play in a really half arsed manner and just noodle around amusing themselves the rest of the time... well, that's not really on, is it? The only positive thing was that they were so dull that I felt able to go to collect my coat early, thus beating the Astoria's notoriously long queues to retrieve your belongings. I sulked for about a week afterwards. No band I'd been looking forward to seeing let me down as badly as The Beta Band did that night.

And yet, despite all that, I still really like Hear The Air. And now I have to write six more bits about songs I like, despite the ones I've already done being like pulling teeth and those being the easy ones.

Save Biggins

2009-10-25T23:34:00.002Z

Last night I watched The X Factor for the first time. I've seen bits of it before but never the whole progamme all the way though. But I was round someone's house, and they were watching it, and after spending the start of the programme being all disdainful I then got drawn in like a big fat hypocrite. I suppose it was like watching Eurovision, if you don't think Eurovision is something to be celebrated by donning some sort of national costume and going round to the house of someone dreadful.

Here are my observations:

* I can kind of see why people would watch it, because I started out trying to ignore it and then found myself getting drawn in, and instead of just saying that such and such was awful, tried to explain precisely why I thought such and such was awful. Which, given how paralysingly unable I am to write anything even slightly coherent about music I really like for Sweeping The Nation's latest feature, is clearly going to make me look an idiot, particularly when I'm sitting around with a family who can spot my bullshit a mile off.

* The really painful thing is that every now and then, amongst the nondescript pretty boys and girls doing really weedy versions of songs that didn't deserve it, there'd be someone who actually might be any good. Take, for example, the girl who my sister declared useless before she started, and who I thought wasn't half bad (and really quite cute until she started shrieking once she'd completed the song): all right, so she was being horribly drowned out by the band - I spared the family the stuff about modern music mastering at this point - but she could sing a bit, and there was a bit of life in the performance rather than a lot of simpering at the camera. And it seemed even better in the brief recap after most of the following contestants had been thoroughly dull.

* I really wanted to like the Welsh lass, as her parents seemed pleasingly humble and self-deprecating compared the other families with their dull stories about how exciting it is to see their kids on the TV and the amazing sacrifices involved in driving into London from Kent once a week, but it turned out that she had an even weaker voice than most of the others. Shame that.

* Anyone who wonders why the BNP do so well in Dagenham only has to listen to the one from Dagenham who the bloke on the PA at Victoria Road was urging us to vote for last week speak; ie, the reason the BNP do so well in Dagenham is that a lot of the people there are fucking idiots.

* The strange thing about watching the 'big band night' is how little big bandiness there was. (I realise that in this instance 'big band' means 'Robbie Williams doing Mack The Knife', by the way, but there wasn't even any of that.) Now, I don't proclaim to be an expert on these things, but I did listen to those eps of Big Band Special featuring D Gedge which at least suggested that you can adapt jangling guitar pop to a big band format in a way that works quite well sometimes, which means that if someone must sing Angel Of Harlem or When You Wish Upon A Star (and there's no need for anyone to sing either in any circumstance that doesn't involve Jiminy Cricket) you could at least do something out of the ordinary with them. This, I suspect, is where the ITV audience and I part. (Although the sneery comments on that link suggest that people who'd probably think themselves above The X Factor are every bit as unimaginative.)

* The box of the Singstar game I was asked to look at (so that I could read out the names of the artists included for someone who couldn't see them properly) lists the names of the artists in alphabetical order but with solo artists listed by first name rather than surname (so the list starts Alphabeat - Amy Winehouse - Bronski Beat - all right, not Bronski Beat unless you want to make the game entirely unbeatable). And this is downright despicable: I don't mind iTunes listing things that way, because clearly it would be quite complicated to get it to behave in any other way, but it wouldn't have been that difficult to order things properly. It's just lazy and stupid and clearly a sign that the Daily Mail was right all along in some way.

* And then there were The Twins. "You must see the twins", us non-viewers were told. "Everyone's talking about The Twins" says the otherwise admirable O'Leary, who I've always hated before. Nothing could possibly live up to this sort of build-up, but I was expecting better (well, worse) than something that looked a bit like The Chuckle Brothers doing a Eurovision parody. Except that The Chuckle Brothers doing a parody of Eurovision would clearly be awesome.

*But you know the real shame of it? Having decided that I was going to do the ironing while watching Doc Martin tonight (and, really, if anyone with any sense had the choice, clearly they'd go off with the strict doctor woman rather than the annoying woman with the scary eyelashes, even if they had got scary eyelashes up the duff), I turned the TV on early to find out the result. I even had an opinion on it. (Clearly it had to be the women who'd decided that pinstripe suits were a good idea, even though everyone was miles better than the simpering manchild one who we were told had been given some 'sexy choreography' that seemed to involve him waving his arms around a bit; I make no claims to any idea of what counts as being 'sexy' but I'm willing to suggest that this probably isn't it.) And now I'm scared I'll watch it again next time I happen to have nothing better to do on a Saturday night (ie next Saturday). There is no hope. No hope.

Baby's First Youtube Embed

2009-09-23T23:32:00.005+01:00

I'm long used to my favourite bands splitting up. Madness split when I was 10, for example, a useful early lesson in the lack of permanence of everything. And so it's been ever since: Kenickie, Bis, The Dismemberment Plan, McLusky, Stereolab... I know that my current favourites will go the same way sooner or later, that one day Los Campesinos! will decide that they want to get proper jobs and that Falco will get fed up with looking on indulgently while Kelson hurls himself into the crowd, but that's fine. (And anyway, I suspect Half Man Half Biscuit will outlive us all.)

Chas & Dave haven't been among my favourites at any point in the last 26 years, but the 7 year old me would probably have been a bit sad that they've called it a day and, particularly for the reasons given, so am I.

(NB: The phrases 'Snooker Loopy' and 'LOL' will not appear in close proximity at any point in the following. Although I do recall being on the bus coming back from swimming and a mass singalong of it starting, primarily for the excellent opportunities for saying the words "nuts", "balls" and "screw" that the song provided. This what being a 10 year old growing up in Dagenham is all about.)

Look! On the Rockney label and everything! With my infant doodlings on the label to boot!
 
I'm not sure quite why I liked Rabbit at the time. It might have been the incongruous nature of being a song called Rabbit (not that I would have been using words like "incongruous" at the time; I don't use words like that very often now), or possibly it was the ending, the "yep yep rabbit rabbit yep yep rabbit rabbit bunny bunny jabber jabber" bit. Listening again I can't imagine that it fitted in with my understanding of pop music as it stood then and I think that this rather suited me, despite only being 5 or 6; some sort of interest in the different (or some strange sort of musical snobbbery) that I've never really got over. (I was going to attempt some sort of conceptual link to listening to Fuck Buttons while walking in the park and feeling rather giddy, but it wouldn't really wash.) These days I wouldn't say it's as splendid as Jake Thackray's treatise on the same subject, or that my experiences with women suggest that the problem they describe is a common one, but I do admire it's use of the word "incessant" in a rockney sing-a-long. S'not as good as Gertcha, mind, but then I don't have a copy of Gertcha.

I don't have a copy of Chas & Dave's Christmas Jamboree album either, but I definitely wanted one. I recall a family party where a copy was present and my insisting on it being played. Looking at the tracklisting I can still remember bits of it; there's no other reason why I would know how Robert E. Lee goes, although I am rather foggier on the subject of Too Fat Polka. Sounds like a good 'un though. A pity Spotify only appears to have a re-recorded Best Of.

I eventually saw Chas & Dave at the Ian Dury Memorial Concert thingummy. I seem to recall that there was some sort of spurious justification for them being on the bill; I can't imagine Ian Dury being a fan, but maybe he was, some sort of non-authentic Cockney thing maybe. At the start I think there was a lot of the aging geezer equivalent of "Snooker Loopy! LOL!", and I wasn't expecting much, but by the end they'd charmed the crowd. Or maybe they'd just charmed me and I just assumed that everyone else was charmed as well, that seems more likely. They ended with this, and it was lovely, although I could do without the soft focus/sincere look close-ups in the video.

Write things down

2009-09-21T22:28:00.001+01:00

The man from the mortgage company is sitting in my armchair. (Mine as in the armchair in my flat, obviously; I was sitting on the sofa.) He is quietly tapping away on his laptop. I begin to wonder about the man from the mortgage company. I know he's married with kids. I wonder how old the kids are - not very, I guess, if they've broken the lid of his laptop. I wonder how he met his wife. Was she buying a mortgage? Or did they meet in some other social situation? As he taps away I try to imagine him on the dancefloor somewhere, wowing the womenfolk of (I'm guessing) Essex with his moves. He doesn't look like the type, but then how would I know what the type looks like if I've never seen them?

I've been thinking about this sort of thing a lot lately. It's probably not healthy.

The man from the mortgage company likes certainty. He recommends the fixed rate rather than the tracker, because that way you know what you're going to pay. (And because taking out a tracker when the interest rate is low and only likely to rise is plainly a bad move, but that doesn't fit with my my narrative, so sod that.) He recommends the insurance policy that always pays a set amount rather than decreasing because that way you know what you're going to get. I like this. I'm all for certainty.

He taps away quietly. Apart from the two-finger tapping It is deathly silent. I had turned the radio off when he arrived in case it disturbed us (and to stop me from worrying about him judging my choice of radio station). Even the people downstairs seem to have stopped arguing for a bit. Occasionally a motorbike roars down the road nearby, but that's all that can be heard. There are no attempts at small talk. Possibly this is because he is very serious and needs to concentrate, or possibly it's because he's realised that I'm horribly out of my depth when it comes to both mortgages and small talk and doesn't want to have me floundering again. He concludes our business, we shake hands again and I show him the way out.

Also, I seem to be worryingly close to buying 35% of a flat. Fuck!

This is my world of today

2009-09-12T01:00:00.000+01:00

It had been a good day. Things have been rather getting me down of late - talk to me about affordable housing and I'll bite your head off. Possibly literally - and a long walk around some eroding coastline, breathing the undeniably fresh air and then eating chips on the seafront was precisely what I needed. The journey home was swift and I arrived back at the station feeling that if all wasn't necessarily right with the world, then at least the bad things weren't so bad that they couldn't be dealt with. To add to my air of contentedness, the bus came around almost straight away.

A woman had sat in the seat in front of mine. This was not a problem. At the second stop, two young women with a pram boarded the bus. This also was not a problem. One of the young women was holding on to the baby rather than having it in the pram. She recognised the woman in the seat in front of mine and began to talk to her. This was a problem, because when the bus moved off she was in the awkward position of not being able to grab hold of anything to steady herself. The sensible thing to do would be to take a seat.

However, despite the seat next to the woman in front being closer, and despite the seat next to the woman in front being next to the woman in front who she knew and had started talking to, she decided to take the seat next to mine. However, this didn't stop her from carrying on her conversation. Which, this being Essex, was conducted at such high volume that I could hear it over my headphones and, this being Essex, was unbelievably banal, taking in trips to Lakeside, the possible availability of work now that the students have gone back, the child's resemblance to its father, and other details that I really, really, did not want to know.

I tried an exasperated glance at her. It didn't work.

I considered my other options. I could have asked politely why she'd chosen to sit next to me when the person she wanted to speak to was sat in front, but I suspected that this might go down quite badly. I could have pointed out that actually talking over someone in this way was quite rude, but this would also have gone down badly. I could have questioned what was likely to become of the unfortunate infant cursed with at least one plainly rather stupid parent, but this might have resulted in punching from two sides. So I looked out of the window, increased the volume of my headphones to a fairly painful level and hoped one of them would get off soon. They lasted about half of my journey, which was still far too long.

Will there ever be a rainbow (part 12 in a cut-out-and-keep series)

2009-08-29T12:36:00.005+01:00

Yes. Look, there's one now.

Actually, this reminds me that I was going to write something about Famous D Mitchell from TV's First Ep Of The New Radio Series Was A Bit "Meh" Mitchell and Webb choosing Rainbow Connection as sung by Kermit the Frog on Desert Island Discs the other week, only I forgot the programme wasn't iPlayerable and then forgot exactly what he said, so I decided not to bother. D Mitchell's hypothesis was, as I recall, that it was a lovely cheery song which would give him hope while stuck on the theoretical desert island, whereas I've always seen the song as terribly bleak. "Someday we'll find it/the rainbow connection/the lovers, the dreamers and me" sings the frog; he's saying that he is neither a lover or a dreamer, which seems rather sad, particularly when you bear in mind that he's a frog in thrall to a particularly erratic pig.

Also, this version of it once made me blub a bit. There were reasons, honestly. Although I'm not watching it now just in case it happens again.

Me, my dad and a clown

2009-08-16T23:03:00.004+01:00

I realised the other day that my walk to the station in the morning is exactly like the arcade game Paperboy.

Ways in which my walk to the station in the morning is exactly like the arcade game Paperboy

* I see the same people walking along the road each morning. The old man out for his morning constitutional who always wears shorts even in winter; the middle-aged woman with the obviously dyed hair; the slightly odd looking woman with the grey hair who could be any age between 30 and 60; the fellow with the wig walking two small dogs; the cute (if rather large) lass who wears nice skirts; and the woman on the bike (OK, not strictly walking in this case) with the billowing hair and the amount of make-up usually only seen on eastern European athletes. Every morning, invariably in not quite the same place as I saw them the day before.

* The vehicles are also quite regular: the van from the letting agents; the white van with the 'for sale' signs in the window driven by a magnificently-bearded Sikh gentleman (which, having seen it nearly every day this week, was the moment I realised the similarities); the milkfloat which always makes me feel guilty that I buy my milk from a shop even though it would be utterly impractical for me to do it any other way; the van from the carpet warehouse.

* There are hazards! I'm fairly sure that the hazards in Paperboy didn't include discarded fried chicken boxes, shattered glass and dog poo (preferring fighting drunks and remote controlled cars and such), but the principle of nimbly avoiding them is the important thing in this instance.

* There are some houses with windows boarded up, which you can imagine have been boarded up because someone threw a newspaper through them the previous day

* Halfway along there's a road to cross which can sometimes be quite dangerous (albeit that most of the danger is caused by drivers not indicating that they're about to turn left).

* Cars often pull unexpectedly out of driveways, which can prove hazardous for the pedestrian as it does for the paperboy.

* At the end of the road is a training ground. Well, all right, it's the station. The entrance to the station doesn't have any ramps or targets to hit, but you do have to dodge around people standing in the queue for the ticket machine, dawdling by the pile of piece-of-crap free newspapers, struggling with the concept of the ticket barriers and hurtling down the stairs attempting to catch trains that you're not putting yourself out to board, which is at least a slightly different discipline to the walking down the road bit.

Ways in which my walk to the station is not like the arcade game Paperboy

* The business with the bike and delivering papers. But this is a trifling difference and should not be dwelt upon.

This isn't the good version of I Left My Wallet In El Segundo

2009-07-29T22:52:00.002+01:00

Lunchtime. The weather was too changeable for a trip to the park, so I decided that this was the perfect opportunity for a wander down the road to see if I could buy shampoo and mouthwash any cheaper in Boots than in the supermarket, because I really know how to live.

As I perused the shampoo shelf (it seems that smaller bottles of shampoo are cheaper in Boots; I feel that buying larger bottles would be tempting fate these days) I could hear drumming and chanting in the distance. I guessed at a procession or protest of some sort, and as I queued up to pay for my purchases (the mouthwash wasn't any cheaper, but I decided to buy some low-calorie bacon crispies as well) the protest passed; it featured around a dozen or so ladies in various states of undress, accompanied by some drummers. Their chant, backed up by their placards, was "Tease not sleaze".

Some people took pictures. I lack the nerve to take pictures of women in their underthings marching down the street, and so decided to wander further down the road to have a wander around some electronics shops; I also managed to find a branch of Superdrug, where the mouthwash was similarly expensive.

Now, I'd guessed having read elsewhere that this was something to do with Camden Council and their licensing arrangements, but even if I hadn't I would have been able to find this out quite easily as BBC London currently features this as its third most important news story of the day. "Dancers march" they say, making it sound much more fearsome than it was. Had you been walking down the (not particularly wide) pavements of the Tottenham Court Road in the opposite direction, you might have found it mildly inconvenient to avoid the march. As a fearsome campaign to strike fear into the hearts of The Man, it was something of a failure. As a triumph for news values it is similarly lacking.

Moreover, I couldn't help but feel that they were slightly undermining their argument by carrying, in addition to the placards, large plastic breasts (of the style popularised by P Gascoigne but in a singular version) with tassels stuck to them. And this got me thinking, is there really a great deal of difference between the bare nipple and the be-tassled one? It's still a nipple, no matter how much Anita Roddick's daughter might protest otherwise, and I'm not sure that the nipple in either state is necessarily the main point of interest. "Its supporters say that burlesque includes elements of poetry, dance, song, mime and striptease performed with a satirical twist." Can you have striptease with a satirical twist? My handy dictionary claims that satire is "the use of ridicule, irony or sarcasm". So it's all right to watch a woman taking her clothes off as long as there's some mime involved and any erection you may get is an ironic one? I think I can see where the confusion may have arisen. And you can do your own "and that's not all that's arisen!" joke here, if you must.

"It's in fucking C Jerry"

2009-07-19T23:37:00.003+01:00

Thursday evening. I am on the phone. A thunderstorm decides to start directly over my flat. Or at least very nearby, anyway. The initial flash didn't so much as light up the sky as poke a camera in my face and let the flash off, and the thunder that followed a beat later was less a clap and more an orchestra times two rock bands falling down the stairs.

This had two effects: first, I swore down the phone slightly more than was strictly necessary (I was talking to my mum, and I always feel guilty about swearing when I'm talking to my mum) and second I spent the next hour jumping off the sofa every time lightening flashed in the distance, including one accompanied by a reasonably loud clap of thunder which under normal circumstances wouldn't have peturbed me in the slightest but which in this instance felt like a punch to the gut.

And this would have all been very amusing, except that I was spending the next day standing in a field and the weather forecast was for thundery showers, and as such this wasn't a good moment to be developing a fear of thunder/rain/dark clouds/hints that some dark clouds might be along in a minute.

Despite this, and the half hour downpour that coincided with The Blockheads playing Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick (and as such wasn't really a problem until they'd finished), and despite a certain amount of the sort of drunken twatishness that tends to occur when people have been drinking all day, and despite some pillock from Absolute Radio trying to whip the crowd up before Madness came on as if paying thirty-five quid plus extortionate booking fee for a ticket didn't indicate that we actually might be quite excited about the prospect of seeing them, and despite the wonky sound (as bad as anything I can recall from any outdoor thing I've been to, like Reading in a howling gale but even more so), and despite the people supplying pictures to the big screens having clearly failed A Level Media Studies (which had the pleasing effect of focusing your attention on the stage, which is how it should be), it was brilliant for all sorts of reasons.

For a start, there was the crowd. You can people-watch at Madness gigs and never quite get your head around what's going on. OK, so there was probably a larger percentage of aging geezers than in society as a whole (which is just as well for the sake of society as a whole), but aside from them there were, well, all sorts; proper indie kids with their haircuts and mascara and their even better-turned out girlfriends; groups of fake tanned women who may have been commemorating the 30th anniversary of some nightmarish hen party; skinheads in Trojan records t-shirts; people who would have been middle-aged when The Prince came out; gnarled old punks with mohicans that would have looked fearsome before the rain came (and at least one whose hair survived the downpour quite admirably); blokes whose beards seemed to have been modelled on that of Robert Wyatt; those who looked like their days were usually spent running asset management companies and those who looked like they spent their days in the bookies urging on stragglers in the 3.40 at Market Rasen. And plenty of other people who were out with their dads as well. Not quite all human life, as I may have rashly claimed in my post-show excitement, but quite a cross-section nonetheless.

And then there's the band. I'd not seen them for years now - I got a bit fed up with the round of Madstocks and Christmas shows; they were great, of course they were, but by the last Finsbury Park show it felt like they'd got a bit too comfy with it and it just wasn't as exciting any more. I suppose to a certain extent I'd forgotten how good they are. Which they are. Very good, in fact.

The set felt right as well. There's a certain strata of songs that Madness have to play, which is fair enough; I'm all for bands not necessarily giving people what they want as long as they do something more interesting instead, but even I'd feel a bit let down if I went to see Madness and they didn't do House of Fun/Cairo/Trousers/Embarrassment/Bed and Breakfast Man/etc. But they balanced them out nicely with the new songs (I thought they'd only played a few, but scanning down the Norton Folgate tracklisting I realised that they actually did seven of them and I didn't notice, which says a lot about either those songs or my memory); and a few pleasant surprises. I'd forgotten how Grey Day turns into a ridiculous mass singalong; I've heard them do Take It Or Leave It before, but it was a delight to hear it again; and the 30somethings all singing the bit of I Chase The Devil that The Prodigy sampled while other members of the crowd looked a bit confused was so funny that I joined in.

And there were a few oddly touching moments; the bickering between Suggs and Smash and then them having their arms round each other in a brotherly embrace while singing the middle bit of Our House; the way the members of band went over to greet Jerry Dammers when he came on for the encore, and the faffing around while they tried to find out what key Night Boat To Cairo is in on his behalf ("it doesn't matter what key it's in, Jerry"; turns out it's in C); the distinct feeling that they feel quite touched that people are still turning out to see them. I'm turning into a sentimental old foole, clearly. And then there were my dad's reminiscences of dancing to bluebeat records in his youth, which all goes to show that you never can tell.

So, anyway, the point is, despite the outrageous cost of it all and the worry that a bolt from the heavens with my name on it was about to strike at any moment, it was well worth it; I confronted my fears and smacked them all firmly round the chops, sort of. Man, I'm almost as bad at conclusions as I am at describing why I like music. You'd have thought I would have learned by now.

Unfortunate goujon incident

2009-07-01T22:46:00.002+01:00

"'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 (*)

2009-06-28T22:08:00.010+01:00

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.

2009-06-26T23:12:00.007+01:00

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

2009-06-14T22:39:00.001+01:00

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

2009-06-10T23:10:00.001+01:00

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

2009-06-01T23:32:00.003+01:00

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

2009-05-31T23:09:00.001+01:00

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.

It's a crate full of cardboard, of course it's a fire hazard

2009-05-23T13:12:00.001+01:00

ok so i had this dream and normally if i do remember a dream it's not usually worth mentioning but this was strange so what it was was that i was sat at a tube station with my dad and brother in law i think it was euston square but i can't say for sure and anyway we were talking about dagenham signing stuart thurgood and then there was a commotion on the opposite platform and we were trying to work out what was going on and then someone told us that germaine greer had got into an argument with everton's third choice goalkeeper and that they'd both been chucked off the train and then germaine greer was on our platform and because everton's third choice goalkeeper had been dismissed this meant that they had to bring on their fourth choice goalkeeper and we saw their fourth choice goalkeeper walking along the other platform and i said that he looked like a girl and this proves that everton are really feminists and germaine greer laughed and then i woke up and had some toast the end.

I had to find my camera cable for this

2009-05-13T23:04:00.006+01:00

One of my absolute favourite topics of discussion is Frijj milkshakes. Not that I particularly like Frijj milkshakes - they're quite nice, but not quite nice enough for me to buy unless there's some sort of special offer on them - but I seize upon any opportunity to discuss them with a slightly unpleasant zeal. Unfortunately, the world being fundamentally unfair, there have only been two occasions where the subject has arisen in conversations I've been involved in. This is because everyone else is a bastard.

My particular conversational gambit involves the Chief Wiggum flavour milkshake, made from real pieces of Chief Wiggum (lie). It's always seemed to me a slightly odd promotional tie-in; not that Chief Wiggum is an inappropriate character to have on your chocolate brownie milkshake bottle, but it does suggest that the manufacturers' promotional budget didn't stretch as far as licensing Homer. And also, why only the one flavour with a promotional tie-in? Why didn't the sadly shortlived orange and chocolate flavour come with a suitable Milhouse motif? Why did the vanilla flavour have some business with trees instead of Lenny and Carl? It all seemed like a slightly disjointed marketing campaign that would lead in ultimate failure.

(Annoyingly for my excellent observations, it seems that there was a previous limited edition Simpsons Frijj milkshake that I was unaware of until I was trying to find an image of the bottle of the Wiggum flavour. Dratted research.)

And I had this line of conversation ready to drop at a moment's notice, until a recent trip to the supermarket whereupon I noticed that the Chief Wiggum tie-in been replaced with an all-new Homer-featuring Cookie Dough flavour. Fortunately, an even more recent trip to another supermarket which had a special offer on Frijj milkshakes saw me buy some, and here are my important findings.

Note the stuff for taking out and recycling left nonchalantly on the window ledge. Also, I really must clean the window frames.

Now, let's get the unimportant stuff out of the way. The cookie dough flavour is quite good, but really doesn't taste of cookie dough. It tastes of... well, sugar mostly; you can hear teeth rotting away with every gulp, except that ep of QI said that this doesn't happen so what's that noise I'm hearing then? Anyway, the point is, cookie dough probably isn't a good flavour for a milkshake, and hopefully this doesn't mean that they've abandoned the vanilla, but it might be worth a try if you like cookie dough ice cream and have always wondered what it might taste like in milkshake form. Thus ends the milkshake review part of the post.

The real point of interest is the post-Wiggum Chocolate Brownie bottle. Instead of the second-tier cartoon character saying "suspiciously fudgey", we have a cartoon picture of some chocolate brownies. But what's this at the bottom of the bottle?

Now, I realise that serving suggestions have been done to death by those far wittier than me, and then dug up and done to undeath by plenty of others, but I feel this needs to be pointed out. It's a picture of some cartoon brownies on a milkshake bottle. How, precisely, can this be a 'serving suggestion'? Particularly when the bottle also admits that...

... it doesn't contain real brownies, which, to be honest, is something you would imagine that most purchasers would be able to grasp without being told. But still: serving suggestion. Doesn't contain brownies. Serving suggestion. Doesn't contain brownies. This stuff could easily confuse a stupid person, you know. What do you mean, this is another post where I haven't come to any sort of conclusion? Tcha.

The chips you buy in Mile End are the chips of despair

2009-05-08T23:53:00.002+01:00

All right. I think it's safe. I think I can say something about it now. I realise that in such matters the notion of tempting fate or somesuch rubbish is as ridiculous as wearing lucky underpants to your team's important fixture, but my health has been such a mess over the last few months that superstition has taken over from rational thought in a manner that would make Richard Dawkins' beard twirl in annoyance, if only he had one. (Go on R Dawkins, grow one: it'd really excite all the cretins who write articles saying "atheism is the new religion!!!" or similar nonsense.)

So, what happened was this. I woke up one morning and, the thing was, not to put too fine a point on it, avoiding all notions of beating around the bush, the thing was, what was happening was that, er, my balls were hurting. Well, the right one was hurting. The left one was fine at first, but as the day progressed that one began to hurt as well, which did at least stop me thinking that I might have somehow slept catastrophically awkwardly on them.

Walking was a problem. You can probably imagine.

When they still ached the next morning, it became clear that a visit to the doctor was in order. This passed remarkably well, despite the whole bollock-handling nature of the visit; odd how the sort of embarrassment that you're supposed to feel about such matters isn't an issue when your balls are hurting.

The doctor diagnosed epididymitis, and wrote it down on a post-it type note presumably guessing that I would look it up on Wikipedia the moment I got home. Interestingly, the Wiki description suggests that the most common causes are chlamydia, gonorrhea and e-coli; I am fairly sure, what with one thing and another, that mine wasn't down to either of the first two, although I did learn a few things about the latter to think that it might be the cause. But it also mentions viruses, and goodness knows they've caused me enough bother over the last few months so I may as well blame it on that as well.

(This led to me to wonder: why do adverts warning The Kids to, y'know, take care, never raise the whole 'balls hurting' thing. Not that I'm passing off myself as an expert in these matters on the back of one nasty infection, what with having carefully avoided STDs by successfully managing to fail to cop off with nearly everyone and thus not being sure of the symptoms, but I'm sure all of the coy stuff about 'respect' isn't as effective as someone saying "hey, boys, catch this and your balls are going to really hurt. I mean, really hurt. As in, walking's going to be difficult" would be. Or maybe they tried it and it didn't work but I never noticed because my chances of being in a position to catch anything were too remote.)

For the next two weeks I could only sit with my legs splayed open, in the manner of obnoxious men on tube trains who are presumably attempting to give the impression of being extremely well hung but actually give the impression of being an unbelievably inconsiderate bell-end (appropriately enough), because the alternative was too painful to bear. And I followed the doctor's advice about not fiddling. (He'd said this in relation to my pointing out that I'd been checking for any swelling, but I took it to mean that fiddling of any kind was out.)

I completed the course of antibiotics. Initially this, combined with the lack of fiddling, seemed to have done the trick, but after a couple of days a certain amount of ache had returned. Another trip to the doctor had me reassured that some swelling was perfectly normal and would soon ease. And after a couple of weeks it seems, fingers crossed, wood touched, in the sense of my sturdy desk rather than anything else that you might be thinking of, no fiddling remember, to have done so.

At this point there should be some sort of pithy conclusion, but I haven't really come up with one. Apart from 'try not to get any viruses', but then that's rather difficult. And that writing about your scrotum is surprisingly easy, and maybe I should have tried to score some cheap notoriety by doing it sooner.

The pitch for this half time under 12 girls game is farcically small

2009-04-27T23:26:00.001+01:00

On Saturday I had a nice day out in Nottingham. Well, it was nice until just before I left the house in the morning, when I started feeling a pain in my side which persisted most of the way there, eased off for a bit whenever I went to the toilet but would always eventually return, but which thankfully waited until I'd returned home (three minutes after I'd returned home, in fact) to erupt in a big wave of hurty-stomach.

But some of the bits in between were good, especially the bit where I walked the wrong way around a staircase and found myself walking into a wall, and the bit where I came across the bar mentioned in dispatches by various away supporters that I decided not to go in even though I had an hour to kill before the train home because, well, that sort of thing really isn't me.

On the train up, sat next to a girl watching some sort of hospital drama on her Macbook, and with a chap watching an episode of Entourage on his Macbook, and wondering whether I should have brought mine along with me, I decided that this would be a good moment to send an amusing message to the masses (all 14 of them). However, it transpired that in my most recent mobile phone purge I'd managed to delete the number. Later I decided that actually when I felt the urge to send a message I'd just save it and post them in one amusing lump in the evening, except in the evening I had the hurty-stomach and wasn't in the mood for farting about on a computer. So instead, because posting two-and-a-half day old messages to Twitter would be crap even for me, here are my thoughts from my nice day out in Nottingham, cheerfully compressed into 140 character soundbites. This is officially the worst blog entry anyone has ever done ever:

East midlands parkway is possibly the least inspiring spot to put a station imaginable. You couldn't set a brief encounter remake here

Getting a paper cut on a non work day seems outright unfair.

The pitch for this half time under 12 girls game is farcically small

Sat on nottingham station. I can almost see the appeal of trainspotting.

Main advantage of sitting in first class: the dinky curtains for keeping the sun's glare out. (*)

The train manager is astoundingly foxy, even in east midlands trains uniform. Dealt with some choi-oiking daggers well too.

I'd love to go to a game at friar lane & epworth fc.

On the tube home. The couple stood opposite look like something out of phonogram, right down to her human league badge and his half-polished dms (**)

(*) Look, the first class tickets were the same price as the standard tickets, all right? I know, next thing you know I'll be saying that the Daily Mail is right about taxes for rich people and that. I'm sorry.

(**) This one is 144 characters. I was going to do some editing later but, well, sod it.

Bruce Dyer has found God

2009-04-23T23:33:00.000+01:00

I have a spot on my nose.

I've been attempting to take a picture of the spot on my nose, but it's quite a difficult thing to take a picture of. My nose is quite red as it is so it doesn't really stand out, and because I have to hold the camera (well, phone; it hardly seems worth trying to work out where the camera cable might be amid the detritus of my desk just for a picture of a spot on my nose) up so it's pointing at me and thus am unable to see what particular part I'm pointing it at, which means that I'm just as likely to take a picture of my chin or my balding pate as my nose.

I did manage to take an excellent picture in which, although you couldn't really see the spot on my nose, I looked a bit like an extremely realistic android. Then managed to delete it because of my horrible ham-fistedness.

Nobody has commented on the spot on my nose, and I'm not sure if this is because everyone is too polite to do so or because they haven't noticed because my nose is quite red anyway or because they just weren't looking that closely. The last seems unlikely, because if there's one thing Christmas has taught us is that shiny red noses are very obvious and are so bright that they can guide world-travelling sleighs, so surely if I have a red nose even someone glancing in my direction would notice it? In fact, now I come to look at my nose again I fail to see how this whole sleigh-guiding caper has managed to seep into the public consciousness, because red noses really don't stand out. All right, so my red nose is up against my fleshy face, but I refuse to believe that at night a bright red nose could help you see anything. Lots of red lightbulbs against the darkness: maybe. One red nose: no way.

That's not how to remove dust from the carpet

2009-04-14T00:28:00.003+01:00

I always forget that on bank holiday Mondays there will invariably be some group or other who'll be riding en masse down the road to Southend. It wasn't until I reached the main road on the epic trek back from the supermarket and saw lots of bikes racing past that I remembered, and I had little time to consider this as I spotted a bus in the distance and decided to run for it (well, scamper might be a more correct term, what with carrying four bags of shopping and not being particularly fluid of movement at the moment for reasons I'll go into at some other time) on the grounds that there might not be another one along for ages.

As the bus reached the lights, bikes began to pull up around it. Now, I've stood waiting to cross the road while the bikes have flooded past and found it quite exhilarating. However, I've never sat just next to about 30-40 bikes idling at the traffic lights before, and it's quite a thing.

It's the noise more than anything, I think, all of the engines ticking over as they wait for the lights to change, and then the roar as they all move off together. It's not the noise that, say, one lone biker who fancies himself a bit might make as he hares off from the lights; that noise always makes me hope that he doesn't spot the speed camera just down the road. This was different. I'm not a one for getting excited about machinery (I've always been far more interested in what you might do with something rather than the thing itself), but listening to the engines grunting away I could suddenly see (well, hear) the appeal.

I wasn't depriving a wheelchair user of a place, honest. I was only going a few stops, the bus only goes a few stops after I get off, if anyone had needed the space I would have moved, honest. I'm very considerate.

Once again, it struck me that this looks like tremendous fun, albeit fun I'd still be too terrified to participate in. Besides, I'm now too old to start being interested in motorbikes; it would look far too much like the early onset of a mid-life crisis now (I now officially can't buy a guitar for the same reason, not that I was going to do that either). As it stands, the most exciting thing I've done this Easter weekend is to decimate my lists of podcasts to be listening to from 23 to a mere 10. I am the least cool person in the whole world.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a simpering jessy

2009-04-11T11:10:00.002+01:00

The notion of buying a new television hadn't occurred to me. I'd inherited my sister's old one and in the eight years or so that I continued to use it, she went through another two or three televisions as developments in technology and being able to own one too big for your front room for something approaching an affordable price allowed. I was quite content with what I had: I watched things to, well, watch them, not to coo over the amazing intricate detail of the thing, no matter how many adverts for Sky HD with things being shown moving v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y tried to convince me otherwise.

(At the Daggers-Brentford fixture the other week, the PA bloke mentioned that the game was not just being shown on Sky Sports but also on Sky Sports HD. This was a pointless thing to tell people who were already in the ground, but did allow us to speculate on the awesome clarity in which people could appreciate the darkness when the lights went out.)

Here is my old television: note the pleasingly old-skool bulk, which saved the hassle of having to clean behind it.

You will note, however, that the television is on the floor behind the sofa, not a convienient spot for your viewing pleasure, This is because, as technology is wont to do, my television began to fail. First it was the socket where the ariel plugged in, then one of the Scart sockets did the same. By now I had the Freeview box plugged into the DVD player plugged into the one working Scart socket as the only means of getting a picture; when that began to wobble, meaning that I had to switch the television on ten minutes before any programme I might want to watch, I decided that, while this was an excellent way of getting in touch with the golden age of television, I really needed to buy a new television.

And so I bought a new television. It's slightly too big for my front room, but I'm gradually getting used to that (if only because I've moved my sofa back a bit, which makes the room slightly less cosy). When I chose the television (using the important criteria that it was quite cheap and that my parents' one of the same make seems to work properly) I didn't realise the box would come with this slogan:

'Inspire the stylish moment'? It's a television! In which way can it 'inspire the stylish moment'! What is a stylish moment anyway? Wouldn't a stylish moment be a very brief thing, and thus not really worth buying a new television for? The mix of confusion and revulsion this ungrammatical jumble of words has 'inspired' in me has severely diminished my television viewing pleasure, and I'm beginning to regret the whole thing.

An afternoon with me lacks a certain magic

2009-03-29T23:25:00.000+01:00

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)

2009-03-16T23:37:00.002Z

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)

2009-03-15T14:11:00.002Z

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)

2009-03-15T00:07:00.002Z

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

2009-03-13T23:47:00.003Z

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

2009-03-08T23:06:00.003Z

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 (*)

2009-03-05T21:53:00.002Z

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

2009-03-01T00:08:00.001Z

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.

Sybil Ruscoe probably expected better

2009-02-28T14:02:00.001Z

Thursday night, and I was on my way home from seeing Richard Herring (who, although I have nothing whatesoever to judge it against and as such my opinion is pretty much worthless, was good). At Mile End I could hear the driver speaking over my headphones and the late-night hubbub of the carriage; I turned off my iPod, slightly dreading what he might be saying, as what with one thing and another an even later night caused by taking an alternative route home was not what I needed.

"... large gentleman in a blue shirt who is slightly the worse for wear, please could you wake him up before the next station as Stratford is his stop. Train is ready to depart, mind the doors."

By this point everyone was looking for a large gentleman in a blue shirt, but as there wasn't one in my immediate vicinity I went back to, well, whatever it was I was listening to. (From my Recently Played list I reckon it may have been I'm A Slut by Bis, which is fun but isn't strictly relevant to the story.)

At Stratford there was another reminder, with the plaintive plea that if someone didn't wake him the poor guy was going to end up stranded at Hainault. As I was stood near the door and everyone who was going to embark or disembark had done so, I looked out to see if a large blue-clad gentleman was stumbling off the train. There was no sign of him. Had he already got off? Had he put his coat or a nice warm jumper on in deference to the chilly February evening, confusing any potential wakers? The doors closed and I ducked my head back in.

Arriving home not all that much later (courtesy of an excellent old-skool bus driver who waited patiently until the crowd of people leaving the station had cleared before moving off - it was a good night for public transport) I was struck by the need to be as quiet as possible. Before I haven't really bothered about such things, as I've regarded the downstairs neighbours as 'those people who are apparently incapable of speaking at what anyone else might regard as a normal volume and seem to argue all of the time'. But since the, er, incident (which I must write about at some point, if I can bear to go over it again) we've become, if not friends, then at least allies, and they were thoroughly decent about something they could have easily kicked up a stink about, and so waking them up by, say, irresponsibly listening to Paco! by Ladytron by way of tribute to Wendy Richard would have been extremely inconsiderate. So I didn't.

An inexplicable urge to listen to Six By Seven

2009-02-02T23:43:00.006Z

Snow day: when else would having to trample around for 55 minutes trying to find a station where there were trains be tremendous fun? (It would have been longer if a kind gentleman I encountered on the way to the first station hadn't told me that there were no trains, which is the sort of thing people do on snow days.) When else would people on the train look out of the window and smile? When else would you feel genuinely pleased that you made it in to work?

(Well, unless you're whichever organisation releases a made-up figure about how much it's costing, obviously. Of course, none of the Federation of Small Businesses have ever, say, borrowed money that they could never hope to repay in order to prop up a failing business, helping to perpetuate a global financial crisis or anything, so they're in a prime position to lecture the rest of us. And I'm sure the Federation of Small Businesses are capable of generating a huge amount of excitement and happiness among the wider populace and aren't just a bunch of grasping arseholes who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.)

But after a morning mostly spent refreshing the TFL website, it seemed like a plan to grab some work and head home lest the entire tube network grind to a halt. The trip home went relatively smoothly, and as the train approached Newbury Park all that was left to do was to put my scarf on (I'd taken it off when I'd boarded the train, as at that stage it was quite crowded and I didn't want to overheat), make sure that I picked up the bag containing two vast piles of paper for me to perform my editorial magic on, and brace myself for a long walk home. This done, I took great care to avoid standing on a slightly slippery-looking patch of compacted snow as I stepped on to the platform.

As the train pulled away I realised that something was wrong, that there was an unfamiliar lack of weight around me despite the heavy work-bag. And then I realised that this was because the satchel that I usually wear over my shoulder wasn't there: I'd taken it off to put the scarf on and then, so determined was I not to forget the work-bag, I'd absent-mindedly failed to sling it back over my shoulder. I raced up the stairs inadvisably quickly and dashed to the information window, where, fortunately, someone was on hand to listen to my tale and contact the station supervisor at the next stop along the line to see if he could look for my bag as the train came in.

It transpired that the train had been and gone but than a bag had been handed in. I rattled through some items that were inside: lunchbox, wallet and iPod if they were still there, notepad, keys. (It was the keys I was worried about most: there wasn't a lot in the wallet, I could do with an excuse to buy a new iPod, but not being able to get in today didn't bear contemplating.) All checked out. I took the next train down to the next stop and met the station supervisor: he brought the bag out and a quick scan through revealed that all of the contents appeared to be intact. I asked if it had been handed in and he confirmed that this was what had happened: "people are a lot more honest than you might think" he said. It was a lovely thought. I dismissed the temptation to think that it would only happen on a snow day.

So I was slightly delayed on my way home, but then I managed to see the roof of Barkingside station:

and sat in this magnificently-windowed waiting room for a bit:

and then managed to get a bus that wasn't supposed to be running to save me the walk home, so even that had an unexpected upside. Snow day: beautiful in ways I hadn't quite expected.

Listen, the snow is falling

2009-02-01T21:00:00.004Z

I was going to go and see Frost/Nixon tonight. (I'm well behind with films that I actually want to go and see, unusual because there's very rarely that many films that I want to go and see.) However, a trip to the cinema website to check how much it costs to see a film at the Romford Vue these days revealed that the showing was subtitled, and so I decided against it. I'm all for subtitled films, but subtitled films when you can understand what's being said seems wrong somehow, and besides I may have deprived someone with impaired hearing the pleasure of seeing this political pot-boiler.

Had I gone, I would have entered the cinema with the sun going down on what had been, give or take the odd blizzard, a beautiful winter's day, sunny and clear and crisp. Afterwards, I would have returned home to this.

Which would have been great, if a little on the parky side. Moral: always go to the cinema when you're planning to do so.

Extensive musings on events in the month of January

2009-02-01T00:01:00.001Z

Thank christ that's over.

You have abused the spirit of the basket-only queue

2009-01-15T20:36:00.003Z

I'm horribly behind with my entries. Which is annoying, because there never seem to be enough hours in the day to do the other things I want to do as it is without wanting to write entries for an unpopular internet page for nothing more than my own smug self-satisfaction as well. I'm horribly behind because of circumstances too dull to go into, and I suppose I'm going to have to apply that desirable CV quality: prioritising things that need, well, prioritising.

So, first things first: The Astoria. I wanted to get something down about The Astoria and Astoria 2 closing, because, well, I (used to, anyway) go to lots of gigs in London and it seemed important.

I'm slightly torn on the subject of The Astoria. On the one hand, I hate the idea of places where you can go to see bands play (or, perhaps, places where I've been to see bands play) not being there any more. (This is possibly because these things need to be preserved for future generations of gig-goers, and mostly because it makes me feel old.) On the other hand, the part of me that reads London Reconnections and gets annoyed at the crampedness of the entrance to Tottenham Court Road station can see the appeal of knocking down everything in the near area so that they can start again.

(There's also the fact that the Astoria and Astoria 2 aren't particularly good places to see bands. I've always liked the width of the Astoria stage, which means that even at the back you're not that far from the stage unlike similarly-sized venues, but apart from that it never really had a lot going for it. The bar prices (and by bar obviously I mean "can of lukewarm lager fetched from a dustbin of theoretically cold water") were always horribly expensive even by London standards, the steps down to the Astoria toilets were always particularly treacherous due to discarded plastic glasses, the sound was fairly crap and the choice of cloakroom staff almost uncannily terrible. In terms of being somewhere nice to watch bands go I'm far more upset about the loss of the Metro Club around the corner, as, qualms about toilet attendants notwithstanding, the number of places to watch smaller bands that you don't resent visiting is fairly tiny as it is. Probably best save that for another entry, though.)

As I'm obviously not going to draw any useful conclusions about this, time for a list of tedious reminiscences:

* First gig I attended at the Astoria: one of those NME Awards 4-band jobs featuring Dweeb, Kenickie, Bis and SFA (albeit SFA circa Fuzzy Logic, when, save a couple of decent singles and The Man Don't Give A Fuck, they weren't all that good). Favourite memory: standing on the stairs trying to pick my way through an admiring throng who'd gathered around messrs Du Santiago and Montrose, only to have Laverne shouting "Marie! Emmy! We love you!" in my earhole.

* Seeing The Strokes' first (I think) appearance in the UK, on another of those NME shows (with Rocket From The Crypt and ...Trail Of Dead, as I recall). First song: wow, this is as good as they said! Second song: hmmm, bit similar to the first song. Third song: oh, I see. Fifth song: I'm off to the bar, does anyone want any overpriced lukewarm lager?

* Six By Seven around the time of The Closer You Get. The best gig I ever saw at The Astoria, one that might be in some sort of top 10 if I ever compiled one. At this time they were extraordinary and afterwards they went downhill fairly rapidly; shame, that.

* Worst Astoria gig (and indeed, worst gig I ever went to): The Beta Band. Another of these NME things (I went to a lot, but then if you liked more than one band on the bill they were good value) where initially Gorky's had been on the bill as well, except that somewhere along the line they were replaced The Mud Family, who were there to "represent British hip-hop". They came on screaming about it being the millennium (in late January 2000, when everyone was throughly sick of the millenium) and preceded to remind me of nothing so radical as seeing Chumbawamba supporting The Levellers in a previous life I didn't want to be reminded of. The Beta Band then played a few songs that people might like in an extraordinarily perfunctory way before indulging in a lot of tedious nonsense. On the plus side, at least I beat the queue for the cloakroom.

* First time seeing HMHB at the Astoria 2. I wasn't all that familiar with their back catalogue at the time, and the first time you find yourself in a room with a lot of men shouting "fuckin' hell, it's Fred Titmus" is quite the thing.

* Second time seeing HMHB at the Astoria 2. They do a version of Holiday In Cambodia that's so note perfect that in a better world they could have done it on Stars In Their Eyes ("tonight, Matthew, we're going to be a band calling themselves The Dead Kennedys").

* Going to a gig launching a Rough Trade shops compilation a few days after I'd been in a slight accident on the tube. First band up were Pink Grease, whose keyboard sound made me jump out of my skin at least twice. Eventually it became too much and I went off to check that I knew where all of the fire exits were. (Also playing that night: Mountain Goats, Bis, James Yorkston. Good line-up, that.)

* Managing to walk past the entrance to the LA2 on the 10th anniversary of the last ever Kenickie gig without realising that it was the 10th anniversary of the last ever Kenickie gig. If only the people who'd promised to go and lay flowers had done so, eh?

* Last visit to the Astoria (although I didn't realise it at the time): Los Campesinos! and Future Of The Left last year, at another NME-sponsored show as it goes, some years after the last one I'd been to (and some years after I last bought NME, come to think about it). The fact that silent adverts for Skins and hair product played silently above the crowds between the songs was enough to prove that I was probably too old for this, as if nearly blubbing at LC! wasn't proof enough. I think the last time I went to the LA2 was a couple of years back to see The Long Blondes. They weren't very good. Shame, that.

* And others too: Belle and Sebastian, Hot Hot Heat supported by Franz Ferdinand and The Fiery Furnaces (in, cripes, 2003 apparently), Le Tigre (where I was glared at for not taking the issue of lesbians who look like boys seriously enough), Mogwai (who were brilliant despite the rotten sound; I recall standing waiting for a bus an hour later still dumbstruck), Idlewild (where I hurt my leg, which I should claim was down to frantic dancing but was more likely caused by a discarded plastic glass), Sleater-Kinney (extended ending to Heart Factory going into start of Dig Me Out - ooh, it was good), Atari Teenage Riot (who weren't any good, but I'm still quite glad to have seen them), Melt-Banana (a far better use of extreme noise), Ultrasound (just before they split up, as I recall), Arab Strap (Aiden Moffatt was impressed by the sex shop next door, or maybe he was just playing to type), and, goodness, probably heaps of others that I don't immediately recall or have decided to leave out because this list is long enough as it is.

So what am I trying to say? That I remember gigs I went to several years ago in worrying amounts of detail. And that, I suppose, on balance, I'm quite sad to see the place go. Particularly if they don't put enough ticket barriers in the new station.

Curious but tasty Argentinean biscuits

2009-01-08T23:33:00.002Z

I'm not a man of principle. I'd like to be but I buckle under far too easily. I'm swayed by the arguments of others, too keen for a quiet life to object when I disagree with someone. I impose rules on myself and then break them as soon as I get bored/lonely/drunk.

However, one thing I will not do is fucking well watch Hustle. And so it was that I was flicking around looking for something to have on screen while I talked to my mum on the phone (I'm not sure why I like to have some sort of visual stimulus while I talk to my mum on the phone; I think it's because the TV is on at their house all the time, as it was when we were growing up, and it puts me in the right frame of mind. It isn't, I hasten to point out, because I'm not listening; if anything it helps me focus on what I'm being told, useful if conversation lapses into dull stuff that I don't want to know about distant relatives), and decided that the most visually appealing thing would be, er, darts. Well, you can follow it without sound and it's not going to distract too much, which are pretty key when deciding what to have on while talking to your parents on the phone.

Now, I have on occasion got right into the darts but I don't recall watching any for a couple of years now. However, the match being shown was quite good, with Fitton coming back from 4-2 down to level the match at 4-4 against Waites, including a tremendous game where both seemed utterly incapable of hitting a double in a manner reminiscent of my attempts to play the game many years ago. My phone call came to an end and I decided that I may as well see the match through to its conclusion, and on turning the sound up two things struck me.

1. Tony Green clearly wanted Fitton to win, to the point of barely mentioning Waites at all, in the manner of Clive Tyldesley commentating on Manchester United or something. I assumed from this that Waites was some sort of dastardly foreigner, but looking at the results it transpires that Waites is English, making this particularly odd. Presumably he must have met Waites and had reason to socialise with him at the various darts-related functions; if Waites ever sees the highlights I reckon their next encounter will be a frosty one.

2. The noise of the darts hitting the board is absolutely tremendous. It sounds more like missile fire or something. I've just watched some highlights and even through my fairly weedy laptop speakers they hit the board with a pretty resounding thud. Darts hitting a dartboard don't sound like that in real life; I don't know where the microphone might be located in relation to the board, but wherever it is I presume it's one usually used for wildlife documentaries where they're trying to pick up the mating call of some tiny animal or other.

Mobile cage-fighting unit

2009-01-03T23:57:00.002Z

Old-skool readers may recall me proudly boasting about how I'd never fallen asleep on a train and missed my stop. In the (ulp) many years that have passed since then there have been incidents of drunkenness that I've come to regret the next day, but I've always managed to stay awake on the way home.

Until last night.

I don't know why. I'd eaten before I went out, nothing heavy but enough to put a decent lining on my stomach. I drank quite a bit, having stayed much later than I'd been planning such was the conviviality of the company, but no more than I drank after work the other week when I'd got home without any significant difficulties. The only logical conclusion is that I'm becoming a terrible, terrible lightweight, but a wildly variable one.

I knew things were bad when I left. I was babbling uselessly at the other final remaining member of the group, then a couple of (I'm guessing) foreign students made the mistake of asking me directions to Picadilly Circus and had to put up with further babbling all the way to Oxford Circus. (I *hope* that they were going to Picadillly Circus; they're going to think I'm a right shit if they were going somewhere else but I misheard due to my inebriated state.) I had enough gumption to remember to get off the train at Leytonstone, boarded a train that was heading for my side of the Hainault loop, and then...

I'm not sure why I woke up at Hainault, but I was just as well that I did as otherwise I would have ended up at Roding Valley and nobody knows where that is. In my sleepy state I didn't realise that I was at Hainault because I walked the wrong way down the platform before twigging as to what had happened, and then had to sprint up some stairs to catch what I think was probably the penultimate train back home. There was someone else in the carriage: I tried to look as if this was all intended and that I hadn't woken up in a state and was now panicking that I was going to nod off again. Thankfully I managed to pull it off. Well, I managed to get off at the right station, anyway.

I then disgraced myself for staring for slightly longer than I ought to have done at one of the other people who was standing at the bus stop. She was wearing a very smart skirt: anybody in my situation would have done the same. Fortunately I was also now very aware of what a horrible mess I'd got myself in and the circumstances likely to greet me in the morning and thus was in no mood for any further embarrassment, and besides she didn't get the same bus that I was getting anyway.

I'd like to fit the world a sink

2009-01-02T00:20:00.000Z

The second rule of New Year's Eve is that, even if there haven't been any fireworks for over an hour, the moment that you go to bed something will explode nearby. Which is why I decided that 1.16am on New Year's Day was just the time to make a start on the Luke Haines... well, biography would possibly be stretching it a bit, but Luke Haines' book anyway. I'd bought it earlier in the day; I'd been surprised enough that you could buy such a thing in Ilford, and then reading the Contents list (title of Prologue: "Is it ever right to strike a dwarf?". The chapter titles get better from there) and the back cover blurb (a triumph of the art as well) was enough to make me decide to buy it.

(Although I have my doubts about the front cover quote from David Peace comparing it to Spike Milligan. Not that it hasn't been funny so far but I don't really see the comparison, in the same way that I didn't see why anyone thought The Damned Utd was worth reading.)

(The first rule of New Year's Eve, before I forget, is that going out in the centre of London is to be avoided at all costs, because no matter how good the fireworks might be, they're just fireworks.)

(As well as having one of those little staff recommendation cards next to it, the woman who served me said that one of her colleagues had been reading it and had been enthusing about it. Ordinarily I would have taken the opportunity to say that I'd always been amused by Luke Haines even if I wasn't completely sold on his music, but unfortunately I was rendered unable to speak because she was a young woman who worked in a bookshop and as such ridiculously attractive (because they all are) and thus had rendered me incapable of coherent speech.)

(Before I started opening parentheses like some useless, grammatically-slack fanzine kid, you'll recall that I was mentioning my reasons for buying this book, which were because the contents and back cover blurb were excellent and, as hinted at, because I find Luke Haines amusing even if I'm still not quite sure about the music. It's now, ooh, about 1.23am on New Year's Day, and I'm about to have a moment of doubt.)

Or was it? Because it occurred to me that my fondest memories of New Year's Eve concern the person who made me listen to lots of the work of Luke Haines and who once bought me an Auteurs album, and as I read through the opening couple of chapters the annoying thought struck me that actually I'd bought the book because I was subconsciously thinking of her rather than my own amusement. And there's nothing that spoils your enjoyment of anything more than thinking about an ex at such a moment.

On the plus side, I do at least know that she'll be stumped when it comes to the bits about Lawrence from Felt and The Go-Betweens. If only she'd given me a few more months...

Something I forgot to post the other day and is now even more irrelevant than it would have been then

2008-12-29T10:22:00.003Z

I hope you all had a marry Xmas.

I never had my ears pierced and look how I turned out

2008-12-27T23:13:00.001Z

It seems to me that telling your family that you've decided to go home a day earlier than planned is similar to telling a boyfriend/girlfriend that you still care for but don't want to be, y'know, *with* anymore that you're dumping them. (Not that I've ever actually done this - I've never had cause to dump anyone, having always been the dumpee on the few occasions that such a thing has had to happen.) You (and by 'you' I mean 'I', obv) can't give the real reason, because that would likely cause offence and much gossiping about you behind your gap (well, if your family is anything like mine anyway). But at the same time you don't want your family to think that you don't enjoy their company, unless you do and are particularly tactless in the way in which you express them, which I do try not to be).

So you need an excuse.

I came up with mine at about 2.14 this morning, in between cursing my sore eyes and a situation in which the only person in the house who was old enough to smoke but had chosen never to do so had ended up spending three nights sleeping in the room in which the others had been smoking for the last few hours, and wondering if there was anything I could do so that I didn't wake up feeling as if I'd been eating the contents of an ashtray in my sleep (there wasn't). I'd forsaken going to the football on Boxing Day in the spirit of familial solidarity, so I would take the opportunity of going to another match on Sunday to shake out all the angry urges at watching The Queen/various religious figures/twatty sales shoppers who need shooting in their pointless, life-wasting heads on the news by going to that, except that I wouldn't have time to go home first and so would need to go home today. Perfect.

(Not that I have any intention of going to the football tomorrow - I'm not spending a cold Sunday wandering around Aldershot trying not to look at anyone in case they try to stave my head in, dear me no - but coming from me it's a hugely plausible reason to go home early, and I think understandable in the circumstances. All right, so it's an outright lie and such things at this time of year upset Jesus and make Father Christmas cross you off his list for next year, but I decided it was worth it in the name of not causing hurt feelings and allowing me to get a decent night's sleep.)

Except that nobody asked why I was going home early. I think that they must all think that I hate them. I did try to squeeze it in at the last, but I'm not sure the message will come across properly now. Oh dear. So I might have to forsake my planned New Year's Eve quietly watching the telly and going to bed once all of the fireworks have died down to try and make it up to them a bit. It's going to be painful, particularly for my eyes.

I went with her 'cos she looks like you

2008-12-13T23:56:00.001Z

Reasons why I didn't go to see Manda Rin tonight:

1. It's cold and wet and I've already been out twice today, one of which was an ultimately futile trip to a football match. (I said at the time, and will probably repeat ad infinitum, that I don't think it's a coincidence that the time that the floodlights went out would have roughly coincided with every other house in the area plugging in their garish outside light displays. Later, as I made my way back to the bus stop, a man in full Santa outfit, beard and all, and carrying a yellow and blue umbrella crossed the road in front of me. This is of no relevance but adds local colour.) By the time I'd got home from there, warmed myself up and had something to eat, venturing out to deepest darkest Dalston held little appeal.

2. The only really debilitating effect of my cold has been that I've been getting extremely tired at around 9.30 for the last few evenings, and I didn't see any reason why it shouldn't have happened tonight. (This reason would have been much easier to explain had I finished my Christmas Party/Venerable Bede entry, which sits awkwardly in my 'bus' folder awaiting my latest attempt to turn it into something vaguely coherent.) As it goes it didn't happen, and in fact while I feel a bit tired now it's the normal tiredness that you might feel at 11:52pm if you'd been up since 7.30am, not the exhaustion that's been hitting me over the last few days, but I wasn't to know that this would be the case.

3. It was part of something called Club Motherfucker. And I'm not sure I want to go to something called Club Motherfucker. I've been getting concerned enough about my swearing lately as it is (as the chap with the megaphone came around the ground to explain what was going on - the same electrical failure that had done for the floodlights had done for the PA system - I loudly stated of the section of terrace that he was addressing "for fuck's sake, there's only about twelve people still stood over there" and then apologised to everyone within earshot for my language) without having to tell people that I've been to something called Club Motherfucker.

4. The flyer disturbed me.

Frighteningly obsessed by battery life

2008-12-08T23:24:00.002Z

Since I decided that I couldn't do doing with the notion of an internet page about football any more, I've had few regrets. I was never very good at writing about football, and there's surprisingly little to actually write about when you come down to it - you'd think there was all sorts of amusement to be wrung from people who are, by and large, both self-important and odious, but there's only so many times you can call Ashley Cole a wanker before the novelty begins to wear off.

However, over the last couple of days I've had some twinges. First you have Mark McGhee announcing his belief in the reality of global warming (and just two days before similar sentiments are forcefully displayed at Stansted - only a credulous fool would think it a coincidence) and then Peter Reid announces that he's not interested in managing Sunderland, a notion that must have sprung from some sort of amusing prank phone call or something. And given half the chance (and slightly more time, and not being slightly knackered from the cold which is coming along nicely now) I could cheerfully bang on about these for hours, only it seems inappropriate now.

A Very Richard Hammond Christmas on Dave

2008-12-07T23:39:00.002Z

Having decided that the best way to take on the cold that's currently lurking in my throat was to go out and get some fresh air instead of moping around indoors, it seemed a good day for a spot of record shopping.

(It is typical that the cold would hit now. It's been due for a while - everyone in the office has had it; Deskmate has had a cough for around three weeks now; so it stands to reason that I had to get it sooner or later. This week, however, was to be a week of plans and schemes and goodness knows what else, and I fear it may now be scuppered. Although it may be a blessing in disguise, as one of the schemes probably involved getting drunk and attempting to dance with a girl; the last time I attempted to dance, before which I had got drunk (this being the only state in which I would attempt to dance) (although I wasn't trying to impress a girl) (I think; actually I think I may have been, even though I had a girlfriend at the time) (which narrows down when this might have been), I managed to fall over and hurt my wrist. Well, I didn't realise I'd hurt my wrist until the next day when the alcohol had worn off, but you see the point.)

I decided to take a stroll through the market on the way to the record shop, forgetting how busy these places get of a Sunday lunchtime and how useless people tend to be in these situations - the aimless wandering in unexpected directions, the blocking of the way by a poorly-parked buggy, being stupid enough to take your dog with you, that sort of thing. Eventually it became too much, but before I bailed out I came across a stall selling overpriced artwork where you could buy a set of three pictures of Richard Hammond looking progressively more confused for £170. I like to imagine that the photographer had told Richard that not everyone thought he was a brave little soldier for his exploits in the jet-powered rocket car and then snapped his reaction.

The main objects of my shopping trip were half a dozen singles I'd decided that I was going to look for, having decided last night that I wanted vinyl instead of downloads. I managed to locate four of these but decided that no matter how much I like Another Version Of Pop Song, it's not worth 1p more than I paid for Dig Lazarus Dig the other day and so left it on the shelf. I then decided that approaching the counter in a fairly busy record with just three singles, which would almost certainly take an inordinate amount of faffing around to locate, would be a bit embarrassing and so decided to purchase one of the several albums that I like the look of but haven't got round to buying this year. I realise that this is an pathetically crap thing for a man in his early 30s to be doing, but as the chap in front of me in the queue seemed to be buying approximately 30 albums I think it was a wise move. Particularly as they couldn't find the Gossamer Albatross single and the amount of time spent on attempting to locate it caused a big queue to form behind me.

As I made my way back to the station, I noticed that what I'd assumed to be some sort of promotional tent was actually a stage and that loud music was emanating from it. I would have hoped for something seasonal, that might get me in a vaguely Christmassy mood; instead I got a godawful version of The Passenger. I shall remember this next time someone asks why I tend to walk around with headphones on at all time.

Inaugural entry posted from bed

2008-12-04T23:36:00.001Z

Of all the mean tricks the mind can play, convincing you that there's the faintest possibility that someone you're interested in might also be interested in you is the meanest. It's a relentlessly cruel thing for it to do. It's bad enough that some idiot brain impulse causes you to try and sneak a glance at her when you think she's not looking, but to somehow try to convince you that she might be doing the same... that's really nasty.

And utterly irrational. It goes against everything I know about everything. Why would this person who couldn't have less in common with you if.. well, who has so little in common with you that it's difficult to think of any way in which she could have less in common with you be even slightly interested? There's the suggestion that opposites attract, I suppose, but to believe in that would involve putting undue faith in the music of Paula Abdul, and I am not inclined to start doing such a thing now. And I'm too young for a mid-life crisis. I hope I'm too young for a mid-life crisis, anyway.

Last night the hemispheres of my brain started doing battle over this. (NB I'm not sure this is strictly true, but I'm trying to make this sound as if I'm torn by irresistible impulse rather than just acting like a feckless loser. This is not a reputable science blog.) I had a dream in which I became, er, intimately acquainted with a female acquaintance (not the one at whom glances were being sneaked in earlier paragraphs). Possibly fortunately, I do not recall the circumstances under which this coupling took place; all I remember is the disappointment, the phrase "oh, is it in already?" lingering much longer in my mind than anything from my dreams would usually do. If it's not me trying to give me a warning I don't know what is.

It makes children detonate explosives

2008-12-02T23:17:00.001Z

I've been meaning to write about my new computer, but to be honest there's not much to say. I have a new computer and it seems to work, which is all you can ask really. Perhaps the greatest technological advance of the new computer is the camera, which allows me to take pictures of what's rapidly becoming my bald patch.

The problem is that this entails me roughly lining myself up with the camera, turning around and tilting my head back, then fumbling around for the button to take the picture. It's not an easy process.

My mum bought me those curtains for Christmas one year, you know.

The annoying thing about the balding patch is that nobody mentioned it to me. About a year or so ago my mum mentioned that I was thinning out a bit up there, which I was well aware of, but I hadn't realised that it had got to the stage where it looks like that. It doesn't feel like it should look like that when I run my fingers over it. I'd have thought that at some point over the last year someone would have remarked upon how thin it was getting, some ribaldry about noticing that it was raining much sooner than previously or something, but no; everyone is either too polite or convinced that I'm so flakey that even mentioning it would lead to some sort of public breakdown.

The problem now is how to go about managing it. Keeping my hair shorter would seem sensible, but I am on the tubby side and extremes of hair on tubby men never look dignified.

I am a spamblog. Buy more limes.

2008-12-01T00:27:00.002Z

The second worst moment of the trip to Leicester happened in Boots this afternoon. (The branch of Boots, I should point out, was in a town in Essex many miles away from Leicester.) My parents were discussing the merits of buying some half-price Christmas crackers and, feeling that I should chip in, I added the suggestion that "if we don't use them over Christmas you can always hold on to them for next year, innit?", and then "oh god, I've started saying 'innit' again, haven't I?".

The 'innit' thing had started the previous evening outside the station in the minute or so my dad and I spent waiting for a bus. (I realise that the connection to the trip to Leicester may not be readily apparent, but if we hadn't gone to Leicester I would have been at one of the at least three alternative entertainments I might have otherwise attended yesterday and therefore wouldn't have been stood outside the station waiting for a bus.) Two particularly loudmouthed individuals arrived at the bus stop at the same time and stood behind us, talking loudly about how they were going to "'ave it" in Romford and how fortunate the ladies that they were going to introduce themselves to were going to be. As they were close enough to hear any comment we might have made about this, we chose instead to roll our eyes and wince.

When the bus came in I elected to sit at the front, suspecting that they were going to move to the back. However, despite them doing as predicted, their hollerings were loud enough for us to hear them as if they were sat right behind us. The good fortune of the women of Romford came up again, as did one's claim that he was on probation for selling heroin. (Because, of course, if you were running a drug-dealing business, you'd choose a loudmouthed goon as one of your distributors.) Naturally, subjected to this witless prattling, we turned to mockery to get us through the journey; as we discussed the likelihood of the most desperate woman of Romford to engage with these imbeciles and repeated their comments in an ironic tone, the word 'innit' came up repeatedly in imitation of their overuse of the word.

The problem is that when you start deliberately overusing the word, it becomes very difficult to stop. I said it at least once more and had to stop myself a couple of other times as well. I can almost see why the kids do it, and am less inclined to think of them as idiotic cretins fir doing so than I might have been before.

The worst thing moment of the trip to Leicester came on the train home, when I caught the reflection of the back of my head from the window of one side of the train in the other and realised that what I thought was some minor thinning was something that's going to turn into a major bald patch sooner rather than later. Oh well.

I never cared about Cloppa Castle

2008-11-26T20:50:00.001Z

I'm slowly turning into my dad.

I realised this on the tube home tonight. I watched a man flail around helplessly for a bit because he was refusing to hold on to any of the many handy posts and rails that were available to him because he was trying to decide which of the two piece of crap free newspapers he was going to read. And as I watched him, the thought "if he falls on me I'm going to.." came unavoidably into my head.

This is exactly the sort of thing that my dad would say.

And it's rubbish on at least two counts, namely these:

a) the chances of the chap falling on me was fairly remote. Such was the crazy rocking motion of the train that he could have gone in any direction, and while he had taken a couple of steps in my direction he'd also wander slightly in at least two other directions as well. Had he not eventually grabbed hold of something and ended up on his backside, there were at least four other people in the vicinity that he could have fallen on. There was no reason why I should automatically assume that he would land on me. Which is exactly the kind of automatic assumption of the worst that I have to tell my dad off for.

b) Even if he had fallen on me, there wasn't anything much that I would have done. I would have probably given him a hard stare and then gone back to trying not to look at the cute girl at the end of the row of seats as I'd been trying to do before he'd boarded the train.

I suppose that everyone eventually turns into one of their parents. It just seems unfair that it should be happening now when things seemed to be going almost quite well. Well, going almost quite well despite my recent reclassification as a spamblog and various hideous instances of having nothing useful or interesting to say at exactly the wrong moment and all the other calamities I've forgotten about over the last week and a half, anyway.

Oh!

2008-11-26T19:20:00.000Z

Apparently it works if I can decipher the word verication. Wish they'd mentioned that sooner.

Test

2008-11-26T19:19:00.000Z

Getting on for a week and a half since I was declared a spamblog now.

I am not a PC

2008-11-17T22:24:00.003Z

Last week I bought a bottle of orange, lemon and pineapple squash from a well-known supermarket chain. I don't usually buy squash from this supermarket (I'd forgotten that I was running low when I'd done my main shop at the weekend) and was slightly taken aback that the squash only seemed to come in small bottles, eventually realising that the squash was somehow concentrated so that, according to the label, you needed a much smaller amount than with regular orange squash. Which was true; putting more than a tiny dribble of the concentrate in the glass resulted in the juice being horribly sickly. This was quite pleasing: it's not very often a new product lives up to the claims made for it.

Taking the bottle out of my cupboard today, I noticed some text on the side of the label outlining the benefits of this concentrated form of the juice:

Now, I have no knowledge of what '100% recycled PET' might be, but it sounds like it's probably a good thing. I'm less sure of the boast about only using half as much, but I can't quite work out what sums I would have to do to prove that this is a slight bending of the truth/total rubbish. But it's the second claim that puzzles me most; the suggestion that it 'fits easier in the cupboard'.

(Yes, I have three different types of squash. Like him out of The Sultans Of Ping FC I drink neither tea or coffee, and you can't drink water/fizzy pop/lemon Lucozade/lager/gin all of the time.)

Anyway, unless your cupboard shelves are particularly poorly spaced (in which case there are all sorts of other items that might be difficult to fit in there as well - cereal boxes, kitchen rolls, probably lots of other stuff that normal people who don't live mostly on pasta sauce might buy etc) it doesn't fit in easier, does it? The only difference between the concentrated juice bottle and the others is that the concentrated juice bottle is slightly shorter. So this claim is nonsense. Which has spoiled the juice for me; can't they just be proud that they've created this wondrous, hyper-concentrated liquid that requires you to use a fraction of the normal amount without having to spoil it with a tissue of lies?

The problem with having a long weekend is that I end up spending quite a lot of time on my own. I think it begins to show after a while.

Mastery of the Pigeon

2008-11-10T23:00:00.003Z

I had a bad weekend for clumsily demolishing things. I managed to destroy the poppy on my jacket as I tugged it out from behind the bigger coat with the hood I'd worn on Saturday when it was absolutely hammering it down, breaking it down into its four constituent parts (I decided that going out with the stalk protruding from my jacket was probably slightly disrespectful). And the day before, on my way back from the supermarket, I'd managed to tear the little plastic wallet that housed my Oyster card in two.

As I wandered into the station on Sunday I noticed that there was nobody at the ticket window and, realising that in a few months there probably won't be a ticket window and that I should make the most of it while it lasts, I stopped to ask for a replacement wallet. I was given this.

Which made me temporarily annoyed - I've never been to Ikea, I have no desire to visit Ikea, I associate Ikea with the stupidest event in human history, so why should I want to carry around an advert for the benighted place? But I slotted my Oyster card in it and stuffed it in my pocket, not really thinking about it again until I reached the station this morning. It was only then that I noticed more or less everyone else going through the barriers was carrying one of these unpleasant yellow jobbies. I also noticed that on my journey home I became far more enraged with the phalanx of people stood blocking the exits at Liverpool Street than usual, which I put down to the the tiny pinprick of rage caused me by having to use this day-glo monstrosity to get through the ticket barriers gradually building and building and finally erupting unpleasantly, and not because I'd had a terrible day or anything, oh no.

I'm going to buy some marker pens or something to cover it up with. Stupid plastic wallet. I wouldn't mind if they were going something useful like build the DLR Dagenham Dock branch with the money they made from whoring themselves out like this. Pah.

The Klopeks

2008-11-03T23:27:00.001Z

I usually do my midweek run for supplies - milk, rolls, things to put in rolls, that sort of thing - on a Tuesday, as that tends to be when things start running out. However, problems (of the person under a train variety) on my usual route home had sent me fairly close to the branch of Tesco that most of the old page-o-thing used to take place in, and so I thought I may as well pop in while I was there.

On arriving I was surprised to note that a structure has been placed directly in front of the entrance - like a shelter for putting shopping trolleys in, except if you did fill it with trolleys it would block people going in or out of the shop. I suspect it's mainly there as some sort of shoplifter deterrent, as it would hinder anyone trying to make a swift get-away with security guards in hot pursuit, although I doubt it would put off any but the most easily dissuaded potential thief. Perhaps they were expecting ram-raiders and wanted to slow them down. (Do they still have ram-raiders? There's a crime that seems to have had its day, that and driving forklift trucks into cash machines.)

Shopping completed, I tried to find a checkout with a short-ish queue (this branch of Tesco having apparently eschewed the 10 items or less till in favour of more useless self-service machines that insist on you placing items in the bagging area before allowing you to put another item through, even though you've already placed it in your satchel). The queue I plumped for featured an ugly family at the checkout trying and failing to put various items of clothing in bags, followed by a middle-aged woman with hair a disturbingly unnatural shade of brown.

Fortunately the family were out of the way fairly quickly, or at least before I'd had the chance to remember the name of the family in The Burbs so that I could make a really unfair comparison, and the chap on the checkout began putting the middle-aged woman's items through. I was just on the point of getting annoyed with his rather deliberate way of running things through the scanner when he came to her copy of the Daily Mail: he was about to put it through, then stopped and pulled out a stack of cheap greetings cards from within the newspaper. I couldn't work out if this was a deliberate attempt to smuggle items out without paying for them, or if she was merely ashamed of buying bargain-priced cards and was trying to keep them within the folds of a respectable newspaper. I'm sure it was the second.

Four shots of port and a bottle of WKD

2008-10-31T01:22:00.004Z

Director General
BBC
That Building That Roy Castle Did The Tap-Dancing Outside Of
(Although More Likely One Of Those Dull Buildings You Can See From South Africa Road)
Shepherd's Bush, where there used to be a football club and that
London
W12 4WW, or at least it should be anyway

Dear D,

I'll be honest, D, it's been a pretty good week for me. I've been engaging in many of my favourite activities, spent time in the company of some splendid people, and all soundtracked by a new Los Campesinos! mini-album or whatever it is. Moreover, because I've been busy, I've been largely able to ignore this contretemps that's been going on with your lot. Admittedly if I'd actually cared about anyone involved I could have chosen to develop some sort of Opinion about it, but given the characters and the newspapers involved I thought it best ignored.

But now, right at the end (hopefully) of it all, I've become annoyed, and I've ended up having Opinions, and I'm even more annoyed that I've ended up having Opinions about something this feeble.

For starters, I'm really pissed off that I can't enjoy the woman who ruined 6 Music losing her job. What should have happened was for you, D, to listen to George Lamb one morning, think 'what the hell is this nonsense?', look at the Sunday schedule and wonder why anyone would give a show to a bloke whose band have been ignored for about 12 years and lop off half an hour of the Freak Zone to do so, and then boot her out without references. If that had been her downfall I would have bought some bunting just so that I could have brought it out to celebrate. But after this business I'm in the position of having sympathy for her, and that rather palls.

Moreover, D, I'm annoyed at you for your total lack of a spine and the feeble kow-towing to a few thousand shitrag readers and the various elements of the press that don't like you, ie all of them. For goodness sake, if you're not going to call these people out, point out the nasty little agendas at work here and actually stand up for yourself and the people that work for you, then nobody's going to do it. Plus it leaves you open to attack by anyone who might be even slightly disgruntled.

Like me, for example.

You see, this week hasn't all been gravy. On Monday night, for example, I was doing the ironing and, as I only had a couple of items left to do, decided not to watch another ep of Flight Of The Conchords and instead stuck on the new panel game thing on Dave. Now, all right, I should be wary of and panel game but maybe the heavy advertising affected me and, well, I was in a good mood. And so it was that I was treated to two minutes or so of the comedy of Marcus Brigstocke.

Now, I've always regarded Brigstocke as being slightly irritating without being utterly hateful, but actually watching him here didn't so much as tip me over the edge but fling me over screaming. Two minutes of the weakest jokes about politics imaginable, delivered in a manner so poor that it would have killed the greatest routine in the world stone dead. Maybe it ended with him undercutting everything he'd said before; I don't know because I'd turned my television off and was sitting in a chair feeling bewildered. And then angry. So, so angry. The anger of a Daily Mail reader frothing about immigrants and foreigns and the gay mafia and long haired comedians was nothing compared to the anger I felt at that moment.

Now, D, you may be wondering what this has to do with you given that Argumental isn't one of yours. To which I say: the BBC is entirely responsible for Brigstocke's career. Would he be where he is now without the patronage of Radio 4? No, of course not.

And as you've created this monster, D, it's up to you to destroy it. No more appearances on Radio 4, snarky little comments about how crap he is on programmes he might have previously appeared on, George Lamb saying that he's really funny - anything to undermine his 'comedy'. I'm not a cruel man - I don't mind the odd repeat of Giles Wembley-Hogg Goes Off on BBC7 at 3am on Sunday to give him some royalties to keep his family in Waitrose ready meals, if Waitrose do such a thing, but other than that - no Brigstocke whatsoever. And if you don't do it I'm going to ring up Richard Littlejohn's answerphone pretending to be Chris Moyles and leave a message shouting that he has sex with billy goats. So do it now, or else.

Yours sincerely,

MS, BSoI, TAo... actually, this should probably be anonymous, shouldn't it? Drat. Never been good at threats.

Justin Lee Collins' runty little nephew

2008-10-27T23:28:00.001Z

I have an ISA.

(I had a horrible moment of realisation last week, when it occurred to me that not only am I not as funny as I used to be, but that I wasn't funny enough in the first place to get away with not being as funny as I used to be. I mention this now because it seems that anything I write these days is likely to be not funny, thus making this like all of the pages where people sincerely share their opinions on matters of the day, ie loathsome and pointless, until I delete everything I've ever written when I realise what I've become. This still makes me better than Marcus Brigstocke. Anyway, the point is "I have an ISA" is the funniest thing that I'm about to say. It's not funny as such but does at least deserve your derision, in the manner of pelting someone who's been put in the stocks for a fairly minor crime.)

I took it out a few years ago, when I received a sum of money in exchange for not working for my previous employers any more. I went to the bank to ask what would be the best thing to do with it, and they told me about the ISA, with its lack of tax and excellent interest rates. And, because I'm a greedy, easily-led cunt, I signed up. Last year, with quite a lot of money in my bog-standard savings account, they suggested I add some more to the ISA. I, being a greedy easily-led cunt who'd kept an eye on how the ISA had been doing, readily agreed.

(The warning signs were there last year. When I first went to see the man in the bank he mentioned various other products I might be interested in. When I went back to sign the bit of paper there was another, older fellow in the room who was assessing the man's work; when I raised the various other products he swiftly passed them over as if they were a crazy idea that I'd just come up with. I ignored this, though, because I am a greedy, easily-led cunt.)

Now, the thing is, I brought up to distrust investments. Partly because we never had much money while I was growing up and so would never have become involved in such a thing, but also because it was the 1980s and any mention of stocks and shares automatically brought up mental images of a lot of braces-wearing Thatcherite cunts with their brick-sized mobile phones. My dad received shares from the company he worked for and he sold them more or less straight away because they were more trouble than they were worth. And when I had money I ignored my parents because I am a greedy, easily-led cunt. Moral: never ignore your parents.

As the markets crashed I didn't panic, because the little booklet they send me every few months to update me on how my ISA is doing tells us not to. "If you had invested in 2000 then sold your holdings when the market bottomed out in 2003, you would have lost a lot of money. If you had left your money invested, by 2007 the markets had picked up again to the level they were at in 2000." There's an authoritative graph and everything, and below the graph the words "past performace isn't a reliable indicator of future results". This last eventually began to nag at me a little, and so last week I went to the bank for reassurance. I went in entirely prepared to accept that this wasn't something to be worried about, and left flustered by the woman I'd spoken to panicking when I brought the subject up.

After speaking to my parents I decided that I no longer wanted to be a part of it, and so this morning I called to get the details of what I needed to supply to them to move what was left to my good, honest, savings account. The man I spoke to tried to dissuade me, and despite him grudgingly giving up the details and fax number I went along with it even though I'd already heard about the Asian markets crashing overnight. I managed to convince myself that I was a bit worried about not getting a copy of We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed and that this had affected my judgement. Of all the spectacular lies I've told myself down the years this was possibly the biggest: I wanted to believe that somehow, eventually, despite the forecasts of years of recession and the apparent cluelessness of everyone supposedly in charge of the economies of the world, I was going to get my money back. This is because I am a greedy, easily-led cunt.

If I take my money out now I'll have made a loss; not as much as it could have been, but, well, enough to have bought a new Macbook anyway. I keep thinking I should take this as my punishment for getting involved in a business which the likes of me shouldn't be involved in, for selling myself out to a lot of greedy self-interested fucks. And the little nagging voice at the back of my head tells me that I'm a fool to myself for even thinking about it and that I should wait it out because there'll be jam tomorrow.

So tomorrow morning I may send the fax ending it all, or if the Asian markets are down I might decide to hold on, or if the Asian markets are up I might decide to hold on, all the while thinking that I'd rather not give a fuck about the Asian markets anymore.