Flush it down the blog

Wednesday 21/12/11

2011-12-21T20:09:00.000Z

I hate shopping and am an incredibly pragmatic eater. When I do shop I tend to buy things in bulk and, where possible, as cheaply as possible. As a result, I end up with lots of big bags of potatoes, metric tons of flour and many, many tins of Tesco Value baked beans. Makes for an inexpensive diet, and allows aspiring vegans to become aspiring scurvy sufferers at the same time, but it isn’t exciting.

After work yesterday I went to Loudwater Tesco to do what is basically my monthly shop. I spend less than £50 a month on groceries and to achieve this I do things like make my own bread, prepare meals that will last a week and generally reduce the art of cooking to that of a chemist trying to get the greatest yield out of as few reactants as possible. I’m the only person in Britain under 80 still writing shopping lists, but I find it is the best way to make sure you get what you want and no more. I’m immune to impulse buys.

Christmas week is not ideal when it comes to doing a general shop and the shoppers of Loudwater aren’t courteous at the best of times. I was cut up on the roundabout into the car park and for some reason my shouts of “fuck you, you blind fucking fuck” didn’t get through. It’s much the same in the store, with trolley control near zero and consideration for fellow customers about the same. It’s frowned upon to scream “fuck you, you blind fucking fuck” so I figured I would just quietly finish the shopping, get home and watch Seinfeld until bed.

I approached the clearest checkout I could see, my trolley laden with such treats as BOGOF strawberry jam, and laid everything out onto the conveyor. I’ve never been called out on my purchases before, but I could see that the checkout assistant was eyeing my groceries with a gaze that incorporated suspicion and bewilderment.

“No offence, but are you a student?”, he asked, reasonably but probably breaking a billion data protection laws.
“No,” I said, as I packed the fourth carton of soya milk and put it in the trolley.
“It’s just that most people who come through here and buy so many cheap beans are uni kids.” he continued.

My free OU course doesn’t qualify me as a student nor excuse my behaviour.

It was at this point that I was probably coming across quite odd, like a mentalist who is paranoid about an impending nuclear winter but still too cheap to buy anything other than no-frills beans and carbonated water to sustain himself during the apocalypse. I mean, who buys these things if you have a job that pays more than the minimum wage? The only way to counter this was to, illogically, invent myself a wife and kids and present an image as a responsible family man.

“Well, I’ve gotta feed the family,” I painfully explained before joking, “hopefully wont have to come back before the new year.”

This silenced the checkout assistant, who was presumably trying to calculate how somebody fitting my demographic could have wife, kids and a smart suit yet not be able to afford some Heinz. And wondering how badly my house must smell of sulphur if everyone was eating all those beans.

Still, I was suitably ashamed. While I thought I was presenting the image of a careful shopper who doesn’t just go for the brands but looks at value for money, I had come across firstly as someone who must budget on whatever the student loans people will hand me and then, having corrected the checkout assistant, as the head of a household who is so mean that I will be feeding my children food that the starving of Africa would turn down.

Obviously, the conversation with the Tesco employee-of-the-month was heading nowhere, so I paid for my goods, said “cheerio” and left to drive home to feed my fictional family on a diet that, if they existed, would kill them within weeks.

Wednesday 30/11/11

2011-11-30T23:47:00.001Z

I took last week off work. I had some days to take before the end of the year and didn’t fancy taking them during the Christmas week. My job depends on being handed work by people who’ve earned the right to delegate stuff down to people of my level (of whom there is only me). If the bosses aren’t in the office then they cannot hand me work. Most of these people wont be in during the Christmas week, so, logically, if I work during the Christmas week then I wont have anything to do because nobody will be in and so I will be able to take it easy.

My parents were away so I briefly moved back home, ostensibly to feed the cats and ensure the house didn’t get burgled but I spent most of the week eating their food and watching hours upon hours of TV. I took the week of work to chill out so didn’t feel guilty for treating a few days in their house as an all-inclusive holiday resort. For some reason I found myself watching too much of the live coverage of the Leveson Inquiry and also episodes of Wheeler Dealers. I am the crossover on the viewership venn diagram of those two programmes.

Because I was only moving back for a week and I couldn’t be bothered to lug more than a bag-for-life’s amount of gear from my place, I ended up taking only three changes of underwear, a pair of jeans and a couple of t-shirts. This meant regular trips to the free (I don’t pay their bills so it’s free) washing machine and tumble dryer. Until you start paying for stuff, and seeing the direct debits leave your account every month, you don’t appreciate how big a treat it can be to use the tumble dryer three times in a day and not have to pay for it. I also put the heating on its highest setting and opened all the windows, just because I could.

I didn’t take my electric razor so I got away without shaving for a week. My facial hair is quick to grow but also annoyingly patchy, so I resemble a 16-year-old trying to impress his mates with a pathetic attempt at maturity. I couldn’t be arsed to trek to my flat for the sake of a razor, so I ignored it and this neglect left me with weird fuzzy patches of hair all over my face, as if I’d been tarred and feathered by a barber.

Surely most 23-year-olds can produce consistent facial hair? I find it deeply unfair, a snide practical joke on God’s part, that while I haven’t been allowed the adult dignity of full beard growth, I have been allowed the adult indignity of a receding hairline. You might have thought that if you’re going to inflict male pattern baldness on somebody, it’s only fair to allow them a moment of unblemished maturity, a sliver of adulthood between youth and middle age, before yanking it away. But no, in my case, God has started taking with one hand before he’s finished giving with the other.

Friday 30/09/11

2011-09-30T20:40:00.001+01:00

Running has got serious – serious like a disease that may very well kill me. In the last few months I’ve been training hard, done a few 10k races and a couple of half-marathons. I’ve even got myself a place in next year’s London Marathon. I feel great – I’ve somehow come through 3 months of exercise without injuries or illnesses – though occasionally exhausted. I stand at work’s coffee machine, like the Cat asking for fish in Red Dwarf, and don’t leave until I have filled my mug to the brim with espresso.

The caffeine comedown annoyingly coincides with my run after work. I’ll get in, fill the iPod and run a few miles while getting odd looks from the public because I’m laughing to a Frank Skinner podcast or I’m being admired for my mental strength. Not that I’m at all inspirational, just because I’m the only person in the UK who isn’t ashamed to wear an Arsenal shirt in public anymore. Even the players aren’t that fussed.

We’re at a point in history where more people have done the London Marathon than those who haven’t, so the fact my first will be in 2012 makes me look like a Johnny-come-lately who’s hopping on the bandwagon. That’s not strictly true, as I’ve applied to run it every year since 2007 and never got through the entry ballot. This year I also failed to get through the ballot (which may be a sign from God that I really shouldn’t be doing it) but determined as I am, I got a charity place. This means I can run the marathon so long as I raise lots of money for a charity before it. It goes against everything I believe in (that running should never be treated as a life-affirming community-spirited challenge but merely something to keep nutcases fit) however I’m so keen to do the run that it feels a worthwhile sacrifice of my retarded principles.

Also acting on my principles, I figured recently that, having seen a fair amount of stuff about it, I’d give veganism a try. In many ways it’s more logical than vegetarianism, particularly given how intertwined the meat and dairy industries are. The tricky bit involves incorporating it into a running schedule.

Like so many of my plans, I failed within minutes when, out for an early evening jog by the river, I unwittingly consumed dozens of flies, creatures I consider of equal value as humans, as I breathed in. This isn’t good for my asthma or my attitude of moral superiority. I may as well have eaten a live cow.

Wednesday 10/08/11

2011-08-10T21:37:00.001+01:00

My asthma’s getting worse. On top of pumping antihistamines directly into my blood stream, I’ve graduated from the blue inhaler to the brown one. I’m not sure which comes next. Red possibly. Black? A skull and crossbones? They’ll probably just prescribe me a pack of cigarettes with the warning message crossed through and replaced with “well, you might as well dig into these now, they can’t do any more damage. By the way, write a will”.

It’s not just my body that’s given up, my brain is quickly going the same way. At the very least it is when I’ve had a few drinks. It started showing itself as a problem at the new year before last when I thought it’d be a good idea to walk 6 miles home, through the snow, at 3 in the morning. Since then, virtually nothing will stop the drunken me from succumbing to the overwhelming urge I feel to immediately leave wherever I am and go home to bed. It’s not a comment on the company I keep, nor particularly on the amount of booze I consume, but a suggestion of how poorly I rationalise ideas (and that one idea is all I tend to consider) as they pop into my head. My brain and enough motivation, usually based on how tired I feel, tend to convince me it’s the best thing to do.

It routinely happens when I’m out in Wycombe of a night with mates. I could have 8 Jagerbombs in the Antelope, so I’m full to the brim with booze and Red Bull, and still feel the overwhelming urge to stagger back up the hill home and go straight to bed, even if I’m so beaked up on caffeine that I’m buzzing like a bee using a dildo.

It’s why I approve of eugenics. Years ago, people like me, with our crap lungs, odd personality disorders and dodgy knees, would’ve been herded up and euthanized for the good of the species. If humanity can do anything with its immense brain power before the introduction of wide genetic modification, it’s to stop the weak from carrying on. The people of the future would be grateful that there would be nobody slowing down the system. My leech-like reliance on the NHS alone is surely a big enough reason. And just because the Nazis did it does not make it a bad idea, per se.

Wednesday 27/07/11

2011-07-27T21:50:00.000+01:00

This month I started a new job. It’s a bit frightening because my CV is starting to resemble that of someone who has a career - and I’m not certain it’s a career I want. But it’s the one I’ve been dealt and if I have a problem with it then I should go back in time and tell the 18 year old version of me to do some work and get better A Levels.

As a professional I got myself a new suit, something I really resented doing because it’s the only outfit you can’t really buy on the Internet and meant I had to go shopping in Wycombe for only the 3rd time since I moved a year ago. It’s not that Wycombe’s a bad town, it’s just full of cunts on a Saturday afternoon. And those people do my head in, with all their shopping bags and haircuts.

I went into M&S, tried on one suit and bought it. If I’m going middle aged prematurely then I’m glad.

At work itself I’ve nearly destroyed my kidneys simply by being insanely bored. It’s not really anybody’s fault, all new starters have nothing to do until they have functioning email accounts and access to the stationary cupboard. Work’s great when there are things to do and stuff to keep you occupied, but when you’ve been assigned nothing but a load of training documents and introductory information to read you start to lose the will to live.

To counter this I’ve spent a lot of time going to the coffee machine, ostensibly to get a drink but in actual fact it’s to keep me from stabbing myself with my pen as I read another set of guidelines on good clinical practice. So a dozen times a day I will stroll over and get an espresso, hot chocolate or a cup of something that’s marked as tea but is so unpleasant it couldn’t hope to pass for tea if it stuck itself between ‘s’ and ‘u’ in the alphabet.

And because of this, another dozen times a day I will wander to the toilets, sometimes on the other side of the office for variety, and wee out the last-but-one drink. It passes the time and before I know it I’ll have obliterated my heart with caffeine and burst my bladder with pints upon pints of drinks I only got because of my poor attention span.

Saturday 18/06/11

2011-06-18T15:58:00.002+01:00

On Friday afternoon I got a text telling me that my parents’ house had been burgled. Not an anonymous text, of course – it was from my mother who had only just found out herself. While I don’t live there any more, it’s nice to know that they thought I should hear about it immediately. Unless they suspected I was the person who had broken in and nicked their possessions without their consent. Obviously, I wouldn’t and didn’t do that. What I take from them is done brazenly, in perfect view of them and often amounts to little more than coffee and sandwiches. Which barely constitutes criminal behaviour, as the judge said himself.

The thankfully small list of stolen items throws up a bizarre picture of what the actual criminals who took them were like. Clearly they were fond of laptops, since they took two Macbooks, but only if they were made by Apple as there were another three Windows machines in the house that they could’ve taken with them. The taste for Apple goods is the first suggestion that they are stupid – as anyone who wants Apple products is.

Next they took an iPod Nano. A broken iPod Nano. A broken iPod Nano that was sat in a cupboard next to two perfectly functioning Nintendo DS’s. They left the DS’s but took the Nano - they also ignored the Wii console in the lounge. Clearly not fans of Nintendo, or gaming, these robbers.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be listing all my family’s electronic devices on here for the world to see. The temptation to steal was enough for some burglars who weren’t sure what was inside. Any potential thieves reading this may get inspiration when seeing what’s on offer. It could spark a mass ambush of my folks’ house. Never mind, it won’t happen again.

The last thing that was noted as missing was my mother’s asthma inhaler. Clearly proving that these are some ambitious big-time crooks, drugs must commonly be a massive incentive to commit criminal acts, but Ventolin? Seven quid for a prescription at Cherrymead Surgery is hardly a massive effort and it’s not as if it’s a difficult drug to ‘score’. If there were tonnes of cocaine drugs stacked in the hallway it may be easier to understand – as far as I know, cocaine is pretty difficult to get your hands on and it ain't cheap, unlike asthmatic relief medication. Luckily, the paracetamol in the medicine cabinet was left untouched.

I’m no detective, but these choices are so idiosyncratic that the list of suspects cannot number more than three in the whole of the south east of England. There can’t be that many criminals with penchants for Apple goods (whether they work or not), breathing complaints and no interest in gaming. Monk would surely work it out, although it’s not a million miles away from describing Steve Jobs.

A forensic investigator came round to dust for prints (the coolest thing I’ll ever write) and we’ll wait to hear back about that. To eliminate our own family as suspects for when the results come back, we were instructed to send off our own fingerprints to the ‘lab’. My dad, in his element as a policeman for the last 25 years, took great care to ensure that transferring the ink from our fingers to a sheet of paper was done with immense accuracy. It was pretty cool, as far as being victims of crime goes.

Monday 30/05/11

2011-05-30T21:50:00.002+01:00

I made the most of this long weekend. Busy at work and with OU work to catch up on, I took Friday off as an opportunity to rest and get on with something productive. As good as my intentions were, my body didn’t agree.

I was sick early Friday morning, my guts not knowing which end required evacuation quicker. Following a headache so painful it woke me up combined with nausea, the agony culminated in me projectile vomiting into my sink, a surprisingly recognisable half-digested spaghetti bolognese that stank more than the poo I had just hastily deposited into my toilet. Fortunately, I have a waste disposal function on my kitchen sink (yes, I’m boasting) that can handle even the most bilious of contributions. Anyway, post-sick I felt fine, headache gone, and went back to bed, happy that I had won and not brought up any blood in the process.

It’s a damning impression of my body that since I moved house (haha… house, if only) 9 months ago I’ve been sick about half a dozen times and on most of those occasions I’ve not been drinking. Nobody my age should be being ill, flu excepted, unless they’ve consumed literally pints of vodka. When I later told my parents about this all they had to say was that “it didn’t sound healthy at all” and that I may have a brain tumour. Not to worry, then.

The rest of the weekend ended up being remarkably productive for me. I’ve never had any discipline with education, either at school or with the OU work I’m involved with at the moment. As a kid I would be distracted from homework and revision by computer games, sport or making bastard pop albums using loops of my friends shouting superficially offensive phrases (http://www.last.fm/music/DJ+Joey-C/_/Freeman+Is+A+Problem+%28Fuck+You%29). Ultimately it cost me, and now I’m paying, doing a job that trained chimps would turn down because it would lack any intellectual challenges for them despite the frequent tea breaks.

But this week I completed a hefty piece of coursework with over a week to go before the deadline and all I had to do was block all and any access to the internet. I found a Chrome add-on that I could use to block the Guardian sports site, Facebook and whatever else I could use as an excuse not to get a move on, leaving me zero option but to be single minded and to concentrate on the lava flows of volcanoes in the Galapagos Islands. It’s boring but it seems that complete sensory excision is the best thing for my education.

Saturday 02/04/11

2011-04-02T21:38:00.002+01:00

March was pretty boring. I got a year older and the ageing process upped a gear. I spent the first week of my 24th year of life off sick and one of those days was spent in hospital with all the other geriatrics. I don’t know anyone who succumbs to disease as much as I seem to and given the increasing rate of illness I’m experiencing, everyone else is going to have to catch up.

My trip to hospital wasn’t directly caused by illness, actually.

As normal as any other evening, my mates were round and we were playing Fifa. Mid game I started to feel unwell (caused, I subsequently discovered, by a virus I'd caught). I paused the game, legged it from the sofa to the bathroom and emptied the contents of my stomach into the toilet bowl. By the third wretch, however, there was no food coming out any more, only blood. Aside from the nasty Texas Chainsaw look to my bathroom this caused, I didn’t immediately consider it and was only grateful that I wasn’t nauseous any more.

Bush and Freeman made their excuses and left (I think they were slightly offended at my inaccuracy – I had spewed blood over as much of the floor as the toilet). Feeling empty and, I recall, much healthier, I decided to check NHS direct to see if puking blood was indicative of anything dodgy. It turns out it was and so I put my coat on and made the short trip to Wycombe Hospital A&E. I got put on a bed (for lack of a better word) and had my blood pressure checked about a billion times.

Since I’ve got arms like Mr Burns, though sadly not as much money as him to allow me to go private, it was easy for the nurses and doctors to find suitable veins to prod, poke and penetrate. And it seems that if you’ve got easily accessible veins, they’ll make the most of it. I had half a dozen sacks of saline hooked up to a drip, multiple blood tests taken and all manner of painkillers and sedatives pumped into my arms. Bear in mind I was only in hospital for about 18 hours, this is an incredible amount of bother to be put through in such a short period of time.

The worst thing, and I imagine the most unpleasant medical procedure anybody could be put through, was the endoscopy which is when a camera is used to see inside your body. They wanted to have a look at my stomach, to make sure it wasn’t bleeding and I didn’t have a life threatening ulcer, so they numbed my mouth and throat, gave me a sedative and proceeded to force a half inch thick cable down my throat to have a look around my glorious insides – my oesophagus, stomach and duodenum (which is my favourite word).

It was truly horrible. I couldn’t stop wretching from my gut, my gag reflex had given up since the back of my throat had been forced open. I don’t know how sword swallowers do it. My sinuses dispelled any of their contents so my nose and mouth became drowned in snot and dribble. A nurse with a suction hose poked it around my mouth to clear the mucus, like a cross between a dental assistant and office cleaner, to allow me to breathe again. And this is a procedure that takes only 5 minutes. It’s like injury time at the Emirates.

Thankfully for me, there was no damage to my stomach, only a couple of cuts to my oesophagus, which repairs itself. One of the cuts was caused by the strength of my wretching when I was originally sick. The other was caused by the endoscopy itself, the cable had nicked the inside of my food pipe and caused as much damage as it was designed to see. But curse me if I hadn’t already signed the waiver, absolving Wycombe Hospital of any blame.

I went home later that day. I was fine, I didn’t even have a real problem, just a minor viral illness, but I’ll allow myself the freedom to make it seem as though it was a genuine medical scare. I had better be careful in my old age.

Wednesday 02/03/11

2011-03-02T22:37:00.001Z

This time last week I was within a few minutes of putting a quid on Arsenal winning the quadruple, at generous odds (I thought) of 200-1. Luckily my easy-going attitude to risking money (even a pound) was overcome by the realism of the event and I never followed through with the idea. Smartly so, it seemed. I should’ve bet that Arsenal wouldn’t win the quadruple, which probably wouldn’t have had such long odds but at least my cash would’ve been guaranteed. Still, there's always the Emirates Cup.

If the depression brought on by the Carling Cup final is getting to me, it’s the joy-inducing thrill of competitive 5-a-side that can get me out of it. It’s about as grassroots as it gets (before you have to start playing on grass) and much more fun than seeing Arsenal get spanked in embarrassing circumstances.

I don’t think I’ve played any sort of competitive football since the age of ten when, in year 5, my school team was drawn against a local year 6 team in some cup competition and we were roundly beaten. A year is quite an age difference, developmentally, when you’re ten and it was pretty stark that the opposition were older, stronger and less well off than we were (in our green private school football kit) which gave them the hunger to tear us alive.

We lost, comfortably. I don’t recall the scoreline but we conceded perhaps half a dozen goals. My attitude then, as a forward, reflects now in that I’m sure if I was given sufficient service I’d have bagged a fair few in reply to the kids (or men as they appeared in comparison to us) whose knackers had dropped. I imagine it’s how Niklas Bendtner would feel if he didn’t get half a dozen chances a game to score. I say that on the evening he scores a hat trick, but it was against Leyton Orient.

No disrespect to Orient. Actually fuck it. If Bendtner can score a hat-trick against you then you, as a club, should be ashamed of yourselves. I have no respect for a team that lets him do such a thing.

It’s comforting that 12 years on I can now keep up with most adults and play almost as an equal. As a footballer, I’m arguably more petulant and selfish than I was as a child. If we were playing with my own football it’s probable that I’d have picked it up and gone home with it in protest to a poor pass or rubbish finish. It’s not though, so I’m obliged to stay and given I pay good money to participate it is important that I get my money’s worth.

Tuesday 01/02/11

2011-02-01T20:35:00.002Z

While it’s annoying to spend money and realise your bank balance is perilously low, it’s worse when that situation is entirely a) preventable and b) self inflicted. Last week I conspired to scrape the wheel arch of my car against a concrete pillar in the work car park. It was an obvious, if not dramatic, nick that was more annoying than anything else. If I had caused it to my old Citroen AX or Peugeot 106 I could’ve ignored it and gotten on with my life but since I haven’t even had the car a year, and I bought it brand new, it felt right to correct the damage at a cost of £150.

Additionally, I’ve arranged a holiday that is probably going to be a little more expensive than I would’ve thought reasonable. My friends and I have decided to rent an apartment in Barcelona for a week in the Summer and we expected it to probably cost as much as a festival like Reading or Glastonbury. By my calculations, it’ll cost as much as going to Reading after buying a ticket from a tout and eating from the ridiculously priced burger vans for a week. This means I’ll have to start saving money elsewhere.

To kick-start my improved attitude of austerity, I’ve had to cut back on a few things. There’s no beer in the fridge right now. I have cheap vodka and orange squash but it’s not the same when all you want to do of an evening is chill with a pint and watch the football. Speaking of which, there’ll be no Arsenal matches for a while. Although it’s often a great time (apart from when I saw them play West Brom in September) since all games are available on Sopcast I think I’ll stick with the more illegal option.

In the flat, I’m saving cash right, left and centre. I’m cooking, making roasts, lasagnes and macaroni cheeses. All fairly unhealthy and a piece off piss to make.

On the topic of piss, I’ve discovered the virtues of weeing in the sink. Not the kitchen sink, obviously. That would be both unpleasant and tricky given the height of the counter. I’m talking about using the bathroom sink. Hygienically it’s neutral - urine is sterile (mine is probably healthier than water, like Lucozade Hydro Plus). You could wash your hands at the same time if you wish. I don’t. It saves water, too, as a quick splash of the tap to rinse the dregs away will always be more efficient than flushing the bog itself. Particularly given how often I urinate.

Saturday 01/01/11

2011-01-01T22:40:00.001Z

It’s been a blinding week off work. Christmas and new year can suck it as far as I’m concerned, the greatest thing about this break has been the dozens and dozens of hours I have spent doing nothing. The last proper time off I had was for Glastonbury and that was less relaxing than doing my usual 40 hour week at work. I’ve earned the bedsores my inactivity caused me this week.

I had meant to design a database for work, but that got shelved. There’s a decent argument I was told around which it is said that if you put effort into work when you don’t need to, it may be noticed and you will be rewarded as a result. This is something everyone else is perfectly aware of but it never clicked with me. I don’t want to take the chance that my efforts may not be noticed. No way am I risking doing something for no remuneration. It’s the same reason I couldn’t keep up with piano lessons, athletics training and school. The only reason I go to work is because I will definitely get paid at the end of each month.

My greatest achievement this week is probably to have seen all 36 episodes of Community, having never watched it before, between Monday and Thursday. That works out at a little over 12 hours over 4 days. Community is worth chain watching (it’s a real phrase) though. It’s about as close as I get to watching anything hip, with it’s cool, young American attitude and clever pop culture references (though I miss as many as I understand) and for some reason, probably to do with how US shows are designed to draw you in to keep you wanting more, I couldn’t resist watching episode after episode. If Eastenders is crack cocaine to my mother, Community is Eastenders to me. It’s just a shame the next episode isn’t on until the 20th of January – I should’ve paced myself.

Back in the office next week, the first of the year, and likely to be, in my post-Community refractory period, my least productive of the decade so far.

Sunday 19/12/10

2010-12-19T23:17:00.002Z

Holy crap, it’s that time of year again. I’ve mellowed on religion so Christmas doesn’t piss me off as much as it did a year or two back, but that was probably just a reflection on my mood at the time. If I believed in god I wouldn’t have been so grumpy, I’m sure. I’ve not really noticed Christmas this year, despite being roped into the office secret Santa against my will, and I’m mainly grateful for some time to chill out at home, watching TV and playing game after game of Fifa. It’s also time for end of year reflection.

Stuff I experienced this year:

- I got into Seinfeld after far too long. It really is as funny as anything. Given it’s one of those shows that’s referred to by basically every comedy show at some point I probably should’ve made the effort before but I think I was overwhelmed by the 200-odd episodes to see. I’m currently half way through and really enjoying it. Plenty more on the to-see list for next year including Larry Sanders, Cheers and the American version of The Office. Anything to stop me seeing repeats of Peep Show and the Simpsons over and over again.

- I finally saw Butch Walker, Cheap Trick and Barenaked Ladies live, all for the first time. After seeing Less Than Jake for the 13th time and Green Day for the 8th time it was nice to see some shows that were new to me. Barenaked Ladies were pretty good, but miss something since one of their lead singers left. Cheap Trick were a pleasant (and expensive) surprise since I don’t really know much apart from the greatest hits, but they really were fantastic. I’ve been waiting to see Butch Walker since 05 or 06 and it was worth the wait because he and his band were marvellous. It may have been the smallest gig I’ve been to, with maybe a couple of hundred people there, which helped create an intimacy between band and audience you don’t get when you see Green Day at Wembley. Well worth the wait.

- Butch Walker also released my favourite new album of the year. There weren’t many though. Now I’m over 21 I have completely closed my ears to new music and have resolved to not listen to anything I’m not familiar with ever again. It worked for my parents, who listen to nothing but Steely Dan, Genesis and Elton John as they did in 1985. I intend to do the same, but with music with marginally more credibility (apart from McFly, of course).

- I saw one film at the cinema this year, my first since the Simpsons Movie in 2007. It was Four Lions and wasn’t bad at all. Not good enough to make me visit the cinema more than once every 3 years but enjoyable enough.

And, of course, I moved out this year.

If I had known better when I was twelve, I never would have started playing The Sims. The similarities of my current life and the computer generated people I controlled are so annoyingly close I think I wasted my time in getting them to wake up, have breakfast, go to work, have dinner and go to bed every day. It would only be a short (frighteningly short, in fact) ten years until I would have the honour of performing those tasks for real. The only differences between myself and my Sims are that I cannot cook myself anything that doesn’t contain either pasta or rice, I routinely piss in the sink and my Sims did not get post addressed to previous occupants. And I could turn the PC off when I got bored.

Sunday 12/12/10

2010-12-12T19:28:00.001Z

I’ve been housesitting for the last couple of weeks, which would be an odd job were I not looking after the place I moved out of 12 weeks ago. My folks have now returned so there’s no use going round there to break in while I’m at work because you will be caught. Not that you’d want to take anything given the state I left it in.

You’re generally supposed to, when looking after something for friends or family, keep everything in order and as nice as when you came across it. It’s just common courtesy. I failed spectacularly. Between the cat litter tray and the dishwasher, anything that required the part of my brain responsible for chores was left incomplete. If cats were so domesticated they would clean their own shit out.

I did take even more liberties on my own part by emptying the cupboards of anything edible. Living on your own (and without the buffer of a student loan or maintenance grant to keep the cheese toasties coming out of the grill, fucking leeching students) makes you realise how much can be spent on things like food and orange squash.

So I slobbed about for a couple of weeks, watched all the things I’d set to record on the Sky Plus box before I moved out and then left again. It was the least exciting all-inclusive holiday I’ve ever been on.

I’ve not been hugely busy for the last couple of months. I moved into my new flat in September and that’s been the sole concern of mine. Logistically, it’s very dull and has taken ages to get my head around utilities and whatnot, with lots of bills to pay for things I’d never considered before (Council tax? Surely Wycombe should be paying me to live here, not vice versa?).

Also, the commute from Wycombe to Maidenhead is such a terrible journey compared to the dozy trip from Flackwell every morning . I’m used to and can now, after much practice, cope with anger and tension at the Emirates Stadium each Saturday afternoon. I’m not used to those emotions while driving up Marlow Hill at 8am. How people can work themselves up into such a frenzy at that time of day leaves me genuinely confused. To my right and left, in front and behind me there are cunts undertaking, flashing their headlights or making obscene gestures as I merrily plod along in my 1.2 litre hatchback.

How people manage to be consistently late for work baffles me. Everyone knows, after a few years of school and work, how long it takes them to get ready in the morning. If you’re too much of a dense cunt to fit that around the time you must start work then you must be eliminated. It’s harsh, but if it means I can keep my pulse rate below 60 in the morning then so be it.

Monday 19/07/10

2010-07-19T23:31:00.003+01:00

I’m not up to much at the moment so it feels right to piss myself off with some good, old-fashioned masochism. Normally I make myself suffer psychologically. Stuff like screwing up my A Levels, trying to play Fifa 10 online or watching Lee Nelson’s Well Good Show. Now, though, I’ve voluntarily put my body in physical pain without the promise of any gain. I’ve agreed to do a half marathon in September. A half marathon, despite the ‘half’ prefix (as if to soften the blow of the ‘marathon’ bit) is still 13.1 miles.

For me to do a half marathon, I need to train. I went online to find a decent schedule given the limited time I have and the currently terrible physical state I’m in. The training consists of basically running 6 days a week, every week, until the day of the race. I will average 50 miles a week, meaning over the 10 weeks I will have run the equivalent of over 38 half marathons in the training for one. Its like feeding somebody 100 wedding cakes a day for 100 weeks in preparation for an eating contest that involves eating a Mr Kipling jam tart. By the time the race comes around, I’ll be so used to running long distances that I shall barely feel it. I should imagine.

You can judge somebody’s athletic ability in one simple way; by asking them the minimum distance they would run for a charitable cause. If they replied with 5k, you can assume they are not great at running. If they say they wouldn’t want sponsorship for anything less than 20 kilometres, you have a good runner who feels he has to earn the right to be paid to run. If they won’t take sponsorship and would be happy to run a whole marathon without being paid on behalf of Scope then you’re into keen-o Paula Radcliffe territory. Conversely, anybody who wants sponsoring for the Sport Relief mile will probably die of obesity-onset diabetes by the age of 50.

Of course, I’m only one day in so any motivation I have at this stage is likely to disappear the moment the hard work comes. So far, I have only done a solitary 5 mile run and am already in pain. I got out of bed and managed to pull my calf muscle and earlier got cramp while sitting on the couch so perhaps balancing the running with some stretching and decent nutrition might help. It’s a learning process.

Wednesday 14/07/10

2010-07-14T23:18:00.001+01:00

As a kid I loved the summer holidays, and I still do. I can’t wait until the 6 beautiful weeks of freedom. There’s little-to-no traffic on the roads when I go to, and return from, work. Fantastic. It literally takes minutes off my commute.

I'm was holiday last week and I did nothing after returning from Gastonbury but watch Frasier and My Name is Earl, while occasionally playing Football Manager. It's about all I want from a break and having been at the hottest Glastonbury ever the weekend before I am certainly not complaining. The tan I developed there, though it was mostly dirt, is fading fast with each shower and I'm looking forward to returning to my lazy, pale and indoor self. Sometimes the comforts of home beat the excitement of a major music festival.

The only exercise I've done at all in the last couple of weeks is five-a-side football. Although it’s good exercise, it served only to remind me why I never try to save any shots. Putting my hand out to make a save from a powerful and well-aimed shot, the ball connected and, while I stopped the ball going in with unexpected agility and vision, it bent my elbow slightly too far the wrong way leaving me both proud and in pain. I followed this up by ducking when the next shot was aimed at my head, pathetically conceding a goal I'd worked so hard to protect. I truly am an English goalkeeper.

Festivals, the likes of Glastonbury and Reading anyway, have probably seen the last of me. I just can’t cope with the intensity of the situation any more. At my first Reading, aged 16, I could drink my way through a crate of lager, eat a metric ton of super noodles before going to the arena to skank maniacally to whatever ska band was on in the Lock Up tent. Now, of course, my lungs are crap, so I get a cough within a day and a nasty cold for the rest of the week. My knees ache and creak after the first time I’ve gotten myself pissed and tripped over a guy rope. I’m also tired and dehydrated once I’ve been forced awake at 8am due to the stifling heat in my tent. Surely I’m above that by now.

Berlin, in 2007, was probably my favourite trip as it was essentially a festival with luxuries you miss when absent, like comfy beds, daily showers and meals that didn’t come on plastic trays with wooden forks. We’d go get drunk at a bar or at the beer festival, move on to a club and return to a room that allowed you to sleep off the worst of the hangovers between freshly laid sheets. It’s not even as if it’s more expensive. Cheap flights, hostel accommodation and food/drinks for a few days probably matches the cost of a Glasto ticket. Need more of those, I think, and fewer holidays that feel like I’ve been shipped out to Vietnam for 6 days.

Tuesday 15/06/10

2010-06-15T22:42:00.002+01:00

Although it allows the net police to see exactly who I am, what I'm up to and with whom I do such things, I am a member of a couple of social networking sites. Firstly there's Facebook, who I'm becoming less and less impressed with every time they modify anything. Everything they seem to do pushes me one step closer to closing my account, whether it's the bodged way the news feed works or whether it's the fact that I'm alerted to the information that ten thousand (probably many many more) people think that the governments wants to ban flags in pubs. The only thing that has kept my page open is the fact that a box saying I have an IQ of over 140 is on it, and I'd like to keep the evidence of it there. Which probably proves my IQ isn't over 140 (and that it barely reaches 40).

I'm also a member of Last.fm. I don't use the social side of it too much, only for it to log all the tracks I listen to. Free websites such as this use advertising to make money, often using information the users have provided, in this case the music I listen to, to make it more personal. In my case though it'll take a smart advertiser to work out what to sell to someone who's top 25 listened to artists include McFly, NOFX and Genesis.

As of last night I have seen every single active band in my top 25 list. There are a couple of exceptions. McFly are one as I imagine them to have a terrible live show despite many good poppy songs, which is largely based on the assumption that thousands of screaming girls would not make it an enjoyable gig. The other is the Brian Setzer Orchestra, who would never tour in Britain. Setzer can barely afford to tour here in his 3-piece solo group let alone carry a 17-person strong brass section on the plane as well. I've pretty much accepted I wont see McFly or BSO, so don't cry for me.

Yesterday I saw Butch Walker, who has over 3000 played songs on my chart in the last 4 years or so, which makes him my second favourite act. He is chuffing brilliant. By day he's a producer who writes crummy tunes for fairly crummy pop artists but in the evening he rocks out properly with his band the Black Widows (formerly the Lets-Go-Out-Tonites). I missed his last UK appearance because I'd not heard of him (it was in 2006) but I was determined not to miss out this year.

They played at the Highbury Garage in front of one of the smallest crowds I've ever been part of. There's something about the intimacy of a small show that you don't get at larger venues, theatres or stadiums. The band feel more connected with the audience, and they showed that last night by rocking out for well over 2 hours, though starting with some ponderous solo ballads and ending the set with a glam rock thowback tune called 'Hot Girls in Good Moods' and culminated in Butch Walker standing in the middle of the crowd, having got them all to sit on the floor and calling an Polish man a dick for not joining in. It's not a very good description of what happened but never mind, the memories are there.

On Saturday, I'm going to see Green Day at Wembley Stadium play in front of 80 thousand people. If Butch Walker were to play in front of the same sized crowd as last night, every day, it would take over a year for him to play for as many people as Green Day will on Saturday. And I would rather see Butch Walker perform every day for a year.

Thursday 10/06/10

2010-06-10T23:37:00.001+01:00

I've had a busy last month. Despite it seeming like a slow plod through this particular period of my life, I've done and seen a few things that I can cross off my list. When I eventually write a list.

I went to the cinema for the first time in 3 years. Films are not made for me. I don't have the attention span to concentrate on a story for the length of a film. A 20 minute American sitcom is fine, as everything is explained and tied up in the length of time it takes for a Pot Noodle to be hydrated, sufficiently cooled and eaten. My general routine when watching a movie at home is that I will invariably watch it in two halves over the course of a couple of days. It suits me as I go back for the second half fresh with the storyline still in my mind. You can't do this at the cinema so that's why I've not been back since I saw The Simpsons Movie in 2007.

I saw Four Lions, which was a decent enough film with plenty of laughs to be had. However it wasn't fantastic and even with the Orange Wednesday ticket I still felt a little bit ripped off. I'm used to the blatant and unapologetic piracy of media through places like Rapidshare and torrent sites. To pay for something I am not certain of enjoying is a bizarre concept. For this reason you should not expect me back in the Wycombe Empire before 2013.

I was certain to enjoy another trip out of the house, this time to the Emirates Stadium where I was to do some 5-a-side on the home pitch of a side that has never won a trophy since playing there. I did enjoy the day, even though it involved getting up at half 5 in the morning to make the 8am kick off time. The place really is exciting to be in, though there is something eerie about playing football in an empty stadium that is capable of holding 60 thousand people. I didn't score and our team went out at the first stage, which was disappointing, and I spent the rest of the day being sick through hyperthermia, but it was an experience I'd be happy to repeat.

A day and a half later I was to visit another of the world's great stadiums, but this time it would be full to the brim with Italians and Germans, something of a culture clash. We (me and my mother, who is the second biggest football fan in the family) were in Madrid, soaking up the heat and the spirit of the Champions League final, which was held at Real Madrid's Bernabeu, a venue that would dwarf the Emirates despite being sited right in the middle of a bustling city. It was great fun, and though a bit worried about the structural strength of the stand as 25 thousand Bayern Munich fans jumped up and down in unison around us it really was the greatest atmosphere at anything I've ever been to (and I've been to the Rebellion Open Day).

It's not all been football, although saying that I did go to see Baddiel and Skinner's live World Cup show in London this week. They were very good and performed a great version of Three Lions for the crowd. Once they left the stage it was announced that there were to be some special musical guests. I wasn't strictly there for any music, only to see the comedy, and I didn't particularly fancy staying, but I did, and the bands who turned up were Keane and James. Now don't get me wrong, and taste is subjective, but Keane and James are possibly two of the blandest, most middle of the road, sub-Coldplay, wanky shite I've heard. Anyone who enjoys them needs immediate castration for the sake of the species. I stayed until the end on the off chance that Baddiel and Skinner would return for another few minutes, and the fact I'd spent 40 quid on the ticket, but that never came.

Aside from that I've done fuck all.

Tuesday 11/05/10

2010-05-11T21:57:00.003+01:00

My Xbox has died. It reached its allotted lifespan of just under 2 years (something of a veteran in the incredibly unreliable world of Microsoft). Summing up my electronic abilities, I took it apart, tried to fix it and ended up making it worse. So now I'm without Fifa as I refuse to buy another (paying Microsoft to fix it isn't worth it) until new ones come down in price. So, thanks to my free time I managed to find half an hour and do my bit for the general election.

Although I live in one of the safest Conservative seats in the country I still felt a weird moral obligation to vote, thanks mainly to seeing Richard Herring's Hitler Moustache show. One of his arguments for voting is as much to keep out the fascist BNP candidates as it is to vote for the person you want. Saying you can't be bothered because 'they are all the same' means nothing if the racist homophobes actively recruit voters. Apathy amongst the masses allows the extreme parties to thrive. This is as powerful an argument as any for me. Especially since the polling station is no more than 200 yards from my front door.

As it was, the BNP didn't have a candidate in Beaconsfield but I didn't know this until I entered the booth. I voted as I did in the European elections last year and crossed the Lib Dem box. The Lib Dem candidate was John Edwards, and it took a quick post-voting google back home to clarify that I hadn't just voted for the American John Edwards who, after running as Vice President in 2004, had an affair with an aide and fathered a child out of wedlock while his wife was fighting breast cancer. Still, is his behaviour any less moral than that of David Cameron?

Ok, it is at the moment, but give Cameron time.

There's nothing like democracy in a country where the BBC will be told off when 75 people complain about a Frankie Boyle joke but nothing happens when two million people march against the Iraq war.

Monday 12/04/10

2010-04-12T23:08:00.001+01:00

I've played a lot of football this week. Twice a week is a lot for me. Last night was a casual affair with mates during which I scored (not itself extraordinary given the scoreline must have finished about 13-all) an uncharacteristically courageous diving header. Reluctance to fling myself into the physical side of any sport is a remnant of playing rugby as a ten year old for school. I was quick but had a BMI in single figures so whenever I was tackled I had no ground impact protection in the form of muscle or fat. Bruises were common and painful. Still, I overcame this profound psychological barrier (which may just have been me not wishing to jump into dirt) and assisted my team with my graceful goalhanging and falling over into the path of the ball.

I also played football last Thursday with people from work, including my boss's boss and his boss. I'm too professional to humiliate them because of this association, so I just played awesomely and made them look bad for no reason at all.

At the end of the game we were told that there would be no football this week because there would be workmen in the sports hall. All well and good until we were told that they were coming to remove asbestos from the roof.

I'm asthmatic so my lungs aren't 100%, and because of this I think that I deserve a few more goals, or at least some sort of handicap, for playing in an environment where asbestos is prevalent. I'm not totally sure my inhaler is capable of handling that sort of challenge. I can barely breathe when I have hayfever so I can't wait to see how I cope when the lung cancer kicks in.

I'm grateful that the summer appears to be on its way. You aren't forced to breathe lungfuls of unpure, sweaty, asbestos tainted air in a crappy sports hall and can move out onto the astroturf pitches. It's possible to play football outside and people who are resistant to sport, for seemingly no other reason than it gets dark early, from October to March come out of their holes and join in with a casual kickaround.

Another welcome arrival when spring hits is the booze. I don't know why but drinking on a park bench all afternoon and evening in winter (unless at Christmas) doesn't have the same attraction as sitting in a pub beer garden and chilling with a pint in the sun. You're wasting time, talking bollocks with your friends and slowly killing your liver, but the heat and sunlight justifies it.

Monday 29/03/10

2010-03-29T22:33:00.002+01:00

Wehay, I'm on holiday. A week off work and a chance to relax and not think about anything. Not even think about not being at work, in some sort of 10 day coma. I've come to Germany, to a town called Memmingen which is about 100 km from Munich and where my mother currently lives and works. I do like Germany and have been here a few times before but this is the first time I've ever been somewhere as south as the Alps, which I saw on the flight in.

I flew in on Friday morning, after 5 hours sleep having been to see Reverend Horton Heat in Camden on Thursday evening. While the gig was great, its effects weren't handy. I was to lose an hour simply by going to Germany, and then another hour on Saturday night because of daylight savings. My weekend only lasted 46 hours.

Packed it was, though:

- I visited the Deutsches Museum, twice. There are four floors of exhibits and on the first day we barely made it through up to the second floor before feeling the ache in our legs and having to stop and grab a break at the cafe. It literally is the biggest museum you could possibly imagine so you pretty much have to visit twice to take it all in.

I returned on Monday to visit the planetarium, which consisted of a 25 minute show about the stars performed entirely in German.It was only 2 Euros though, so for that I was perfectly happy, staring at constellations and planets in a darkened room with no idea of how they're being described or explained. It was like school all over again.

- For all the tourist attraction visiting, I've sat in the flat and watched more Premier League football than any other weekend this season. Because all the games are live on telly, its perfectly possible to see all the matches you wish, and I have. If the results weren't so depressing it would've made for an awesome opportunity. Commentary is all in German, with no Andy Gray or Jon Motson in sight. So it has its upsides, too.

- There are folks in London who stand on a box in Oxford Street and shout about Jesus. They have nothing on similar people in Munich, who do the same job but in German and with increased physical expression, making their proclamations about the forthcoming apocalypse even more frightening, like if the Pope had presented at the Nuremberg Rally.

That's basically all I've been up to. I don't do shopping, see art galleries or take photos of things I'll never see again so tourism (of European cities, at least) doesn't really fit with me. I've enjoyed it but will be grateful to return home for a peaceful Easter break, live football aside.

Wednesday 17/03/10

2010-03-17T23:41:00.000Z

I've been pretty busy for the last month. My parents have been away, which has been pretty nice. My mother has taken the decision (or had it foisted upon her, I don't care) to work in Germany for 6 months, coming home only occasionally to do some ironing or something. So my dad has been over pretty often to help her out as she is living there pretty much permanently for the next few month. He's spoken less German in his life than our cat, but I'm guessing it was more an emotional need than anything. Either way, I'm not complaining.

While they're gone, I have been cracking on with my own work. I started an Open University course, off the back of having little to do in the evenings that is stimulating and slowly realising that my prospects at work are not good. I knew there would be a glass ceiling in my job, but hadn't realised it was barely any higher than my head. It's been fairly good motivation so far, but we'll see how it develops. And without the nagging of parents to make me resent studying I'm getting on pretty well.

Because I'm poor I also don't have to pay any fees for the course. In fact, I get the course fees paid off and a grant for study materials. This is better than breaking even. The knowledge that I'm hundreds of pounds up on the deal should be reason enough for me to pursue it. All I need to do is invest hours of my time into learning and all should come together. It's like asking a cocaine addict to put down the crackpipe for 10 minutes an evening. I know I should and God knows the body is willing but the mind is weak.

The downside to this independent study has been the neglect of the house around me. If I'm to move out I'm going to have to learn how to live alone. I didn't manage it at uni. I'll have to do my own chores, meals and be generally self sufficient. The training begins now.

I've mastered cooking. I can do three dishes; lasagne, macaroni cheese and toad in the hole. Lots of carbs and lots of fat, indeed, but it's so chuffing cheap I think it's worth getting fat for the price. I've also mastered the washing machine/tumble dryer combo, but ironing is a non-starter in that there are two sides to every garment and when I iron one side the other gets creased. It's incredibly annoying but I'm determined to learn.

It's a wonder I'm still single. I'm highly educated, civilised and domesticated. Aside from washing myself and being a nicer person I can't think how I could achieve further self-improvement.

Wednesday 03/02/10

2010-02-03T23:14:00.002Z

I've been really busy lately, not that my personal situation would suggest so. You may have thought that by now I'd have moved into the flat I made an offer on in the summer, settled in with maybe a wife and a couple of kids by now. This isn't the case. I am still at home, no closer to living anywhere else.

I'm nearly 22 years old. In the olden days, you used to die at 30 (Jesus, in fact, outstayed his welcome). That's why kids started working up chimneys at 8 years old, so they got some income in, enabling them to move out shortly after hitting puberty. They'd get married at 12, have kids at 13 and retire at 20, so they could enjoy their twilight years properly. By their standards I am a pensioner.

Even though none of that is true, I still feel too old to live at home.

Basically, the flat I wanted (because it was cheap) in Slough had too many legal obstacles to overcome. In the 6 months we took to wait for the process to take its course, once I had signed the mortgage application and made a formal offer on the flat, the company who own the flat provided one solitary piece of information. That wasn't enough, so I pulled the plug and decided to think about something else.

Thankfully, 6 months of expecting to move out meant that I hadn't spuffed my monthly income on frivolous crap (aside from a Wii and new laptop). Nearly 6 months of salary, minus the newly purchased electronics and a few drinks at new year, is enough to add to the deposit I had in July last year. This meant, somehow, my budget of affordable places just increased by 20 grand, opening up a whole new world of properties; places where the bedroom, lounge and kitchen don't share the once space. Comparable luxury.

So now I've made an offer on somewhere in High Wycombe and am determined not to emotionally invest in the flat at all (shouldn't be too difficult, what with it being a flat in High Wycombe). The whole experience of being a first time buyer has stressed me to the point of wishing just to live somewhere so long as I never have to

Work has kept me busy, too. In a give-take sort of way, my team were told of the glory of achieving a decent bonus for our hard work over the last year. This was balanced out by being told that they would be more than grateful for us to do some probably unpaid overtime, to catch up with the current backlog of work going on. This and the corporate M&Ms (yes, you read that correctly) everyone in the company was given, emblazoned with the operating profits of the company, has got to put them in the Sunday Times top 100 places to work for.

Still, I'm de-stressing by getting back into 5-a-side football with colleagues on a Thursday evening, which is always fun, so it evens itself out.

Sunday 10/01/10

2010-01-10T01:49:00.000Z

I didn't make it into work this for a few days this week. Not because of the snow. No, I was ill. And to prove I was ill, it was the first week back from my Christmas break. I am always sick when I return from annual leave. If I never took any breaks I would be the peak of physical health. Instead, I have the body of a slightly decomposed AIDS victim.

If I had stayed at home because of the snow I would have had to make the time up. As it was, I was sick and did not have to make up any time. And that is true. I was sick. Not sick enough, though, apparently.

This weekend I went to see Arsenal play at the Emirates. I booked the ticket a while ago, so wasn't really to know about the weather, but given the price I was pretty much obliged to sacrifice my health for the sake of 30 quid.

Anyone who saw Match of the Day can vouch for how snowy it was. My phone said that when I got to the stadium it was minus 1 degrees. Soon, though, my body was to lower its own temperature to that of the air as I sat, generally frustrated, for a couple of hours. I don't normally give more money than the cost of a ticket to the club, especially given none of the money I spend on Arsenal merchandise goes towards player purchases, but I did give in and buy a hot chocolate.

The guy sat in front of me must've had a little more than a hot chocolate because he was hilarious. He was as much a cliché of a drunken football fan could be. He was gesturing, from 10 rows back, towards the defence as if to tell them to move up. How the players themselves would receive this information is your own guess as he was perfectly silent during this mime, simply waving his hands from side to side. He then got distracted by the big screen. This didn't stop him though. He just continued to wave while staring at the teamsheets on the screen.

Later in the game he became particularly vocal, making up for his reserve in the first half, expressing his anger at Armand Traore;

“Get him off, he's shit.” he screamed towards the pitch. He repeated, “take him off. Bring back Ashley Cole, all is forgiven.”
“Shut the fuck up,” replied a very cockney bloke from a few rows back, “give him a chance, he's our third choice left back. He's only a kid.”

This was enough to put the man back in his seat, leaving him to gesture toward the defence again. That cheered me up on an otherwise disappointing day. Like live music, live football is much a much better experience than seeing it on the television or dodgy internet stream simply by living the atmosphere of it. And this reaffirmed my belief.

Thursday 31/12/09

2009-12-31T13:18:00.000Z

I've done nothing this week. It's fantastic. I finished work on Christmas Eve and can't have walked more than a mile in total since (and that was to the pub). Last year I was quite down on the whole festive thing, thanks in no small part to being made redundant, but this week I am guaranteed work when I return so I am making the most of it and wallowing. I've done little but sit, unwashed and not properly clothed, on the couch. On the Xbox I have progressed well on Forza and have also caught up on a few episodes of Monk. These haven't taken up most of my time, though. Mainly I have been sleeping.

I am loving waking up when I wish. Fitting in 8 hours sleep but then having the pressure of getting ready for work is infinitely worse than sleeping for 8 hours then doing nothing but chilling on the sofa. I love the easy going lack of stress. I'm also going to bed later and later and this has pushed back the time I wake up.

This has inadvertently prepped me for the stamina required at New Year. Most Friday nights at the pub I am exhausted by 11pm , a consequence of spending all week waking up at 6:30am. This week I should be ready to party (hmm) until at least 1am, giving me ample opportunity to celebrate the arrival of my, and my friends', fourth decade.

I haven't even thought about my colleagues in the office, who are compelled to do my work as I stick Fifa into the disc drive. It's been the perfect week to end a year that I can't really have any complaints about, but I'll try anyway.

Things I liked and didn't like in 2009:

I liked Glastonbury – I'd not quite understood, having been to Reading every year since 2004, why those who go to Glastonbury rave about it so much and hold it in such high regard. Going there brought me round to the idea; it is so well executed as a festival. OK, it's muddy as hell when the rain falls, the music doesn't fall squarely into what I like and it's such a mission to get to but you get there and it makes sense.

I didn't like getting swine flu at Glastonbury – This sucked.

I liked watching the Living End play in Manchester – It was something like the 7th time I've seen them but the show in April, in a tiny university union venue, was probably the best gig I've watched them perform. Because of the intimacy (there can't have been more than 300 people there; minute compared to watching them on the Reading main stage).

I didn't like the Saturday or Sunday nights at Reading – If one thing convinced me that Glastonbury was the superior festival experience it was this. The cunts whose antisocial behaviour led to the destruction of my eighteenth gazebo just destroyed my faith in Reading as somewhere with good nightlife. I will return next year, because the music is always great, but there's no chance in hell I will camp again.

I liked not getting made redundant this year – I was in 2008 and that made me miserable.

I didn't like not moving out – This has been going on for 6 months now. I found a flat I could afford to buy in July, put an offer on it and it got accepted. I applied for the mortgage, which was also accepted. The time since has been spent wrangling with companies who want money out of the person who lived there before. It's doing my head in. And so are my parents who I am too old to live with.

Albums I got into this year:

NOFX – Coaster

NOFX have essentially released the same album for the last 25 years. Luckily it's bloody good punk music. 'Eddie, Bruce and Paul' is a fantastic backhanded tribute to Iron Maiden which has the tradmark Maiden solos, falsetto screaming and lyrics which do nothing but take the piss. The rest of the album is much the same, with lots of catchy riffs and insincere lyrics about religion and mainstream culture.

Brian Setzer Orchestra – Songs From Lonely Avenue

This is really good fun, and it's where Setzer's solo work and the orchestra meet. It has the jumping swing tunes along with some unusually grimy guitar solos. The instrumental tracks make this album and if I had more discipline they'd be the kind of guitar licks I would spend my life trying to learn.

Reverend Organdrum – Hi-Fi Stereo

This wasn't released in 2009 but I didn't listen to it until this year. It's a blinding jazz-rockabilly album by the Reverend Horton Heat guitarist and singer Jim Heath. The album consists basically of him performing awesome guitar solos alongside a drummer and a Hammond organ player. It's the sort of music that would be played in my ideal pub.

I could have mentioned Green Day, but that was a patchy album let down by some abortions which they were daft enough to release as singles (Know Your Enemy, 21 Guns).

Sunday 06/12/09

2009-12-06T23:52:00.000Z

I’m always keen to try new things and do stuff I wouldn’t normally do, expanding my horizons and becoming a more open-minded person as a result. This week, however, I didn’t do anything new. Rather I saw The Living End, who hail from Melbourne, for the 4th time this year, and the 8th time in total. I know real fandom doesn’t normally begin until you hit double figures of gigs, but I’m rather a fan of this lot. So, unfortunately, is every ex-pat Australian in London.

The gig, at the Kentish Town Forum, was great. The only thing to let it down was the obnoxious, mainly Aussie, crowd. More than simply drinking too much and barging into folk in the crowd (which is to be expected at any gig), in the toilets they complained about the ‘fucking poms’, which I considered a bit unfair. If Great Britain is so shit, why the hell did they fly 10 thousand miles to live here? Clearly the Australians care more about rats than they do the country of their ancestors.

The gig, though, knackered me out. I had to work the next morning. Going to the toilet and then Cramer getting his coat from the cloakroom after the show meant we hung around outside the venue waiting for much longer than we had hoped. All this resulted in getting home at about 1am. I got up for work the next morning at half 6. I was not much use at work. Christmas is still weeks away and haven’t given myself the opportunity to look forward to the new year break. Because I’m lazy I haven’t booked the time off yet. That can only come back to haunt me.

Also pressing are decisions about my future in general, further than the new year. The flat purchase is still going, though painfully slowly. I should work in the mortgage business as they are clearly shit at acting on decisions, too. Judging by the progress, I’ll have a wife and 8 kids (6 from previous relationships) by the time it all goes through. And I’ll then have to sell it immediately because my catholic-sized clan will be too big for the first floor studio flat.

I also need to decide about education. I realised a while ago that I would get nowhere, or no further, in the world without some further education of some sort. This was in juxtaposed to my brief experience of university, which left me fairly cynical towards degrees and students in particular. I think I’ve solved one of these issues by going for a home study degree, something like OU, I’m unsure I have the discipline nor do I know exactly which course to do. However, it wouldn’t cost me anything and may further my (somehow already interminable) career, though would take half a decade to complete.

It really is confusing and a darn sight less trivial than which pub I can go to in Maidenhead next. At least it would be something different.

Sunday 22/11/09

2009-11-22T23:39:00.001Z

There comes a point after which, when events have conspired against you so painfully, you think that the world is officially taking the piss out of you. The final shot has been fired at the HMS Maidenhead Nightlife, and it has officially been sunk. The clever ones have jumped ship. And those who stayed, for reasons of honourable obligation and pure blind stupidity, have been held to ransom by the pirates known as JD Wetherspoon.

My history with Maidenhead’s nightlife isn’t great. It seems we only go there as it is pretty much the only place in the home counties where everybody can reach and get back from without too much trouble (which is a bad sign when deciding where to go out). Firstly, it was Smokey’s, the place you go when you’re 18 and so is your IQ. Next, Wetherspoons, the place you go before Smokey’s because it’s cheaper (provided you wear long trousers). And then we found the Bear, where you go if Smokey’s doesn’t even fit into your plans.

For literally months, the Bear has become a home to us. Ok, so we may have been there only about a dozen times in the last year making it a home for somebody with little need for an actual home; somebody who lives in a caravan most of the time but enjoys sleeping inside brickwork at the average of once a month. We still felt immense loyalty to it. It has a booth, the sign of true class, a pool table, with a fair £5 cue deposit, and two bars, although I have never seen the second bar in use, ever. That doesn’t sell it well, but trust me. It has charm.

But not for long. It closes this week because it’s being sold to Wetherspoon, who already own one place in town. The Bear was where we went to get away from Spoons. It’s like being a football fan, watching your favourite player being tapped up by Real Madrid, who also bought your favourite player last season but let him rot in the reserves. You get disillusioned with football, and write Real Madrid off as a bunch of wankers.

You can try to make sense of that analogy.

Maidenhead just needs to be written off, from the giant plant pots on the high street to the morons in the skate park. The terrorists would do well to forget about attacking London and direct their attentions towards Maidenhead. A bomb in the high street would not necessarily be a bad thing. For starters, there are more white people (who, let’s face it, are the terrorists’ targets) than in London. A good explosion in Queen Street would see off more religious folk than an Auschwitz shower room. Secondly, the catastrophic destruction would hasten a redevelopment of the town, something much needed. And thirdly, it would convince my friends to go to High Wycombe for a change, with the exodus convincing Wetherspoon that there is no market for them in Maidenhead. At which point we return.

Come on Osama, do it for us!

Tuesday 10/11/09

2009-11-10T21:38:00.001Z

This weekend was a chance to unwind. Work's been really busy lately, the flat purchase is still going through (albeit as slowly as the solicitor can make it) and thanks to the cold, dark and generally horrid mornings I'm pretty sure my seasonal affective symptoms have kicked in, so I'm more tired and grumpy than usual. I'm trying to look on the bright side; there are only 5 weeks or so until the days start getting longer so if I can get my head down until Christmas all will be well.

I went for a night out in Marlow on Friday. It's been a no-go area for a few years as far as nights out go. Not because we're not welcome there any more but because it's generally accepted that there is nowhere for anyone to go unless you are a) over 35 and b) more loaded than an American in a high school. Yes, my demographic is not welcome in Marlow. We were hardly welcome when we went to school there but transport and a realisation of a wider world took us away, toward the delights of Maidenhead and High Wycombe, much to the delight of the locals and the tender of the Higginson Park shelter, I'm sure.

We went to the George and Dragon, which doesn't want to be a pub and behaves more like a restaurant with a bar. It doesn't want to be a pub so much it charges anybody who dares to ask for a pint so much that they certainly wont get drunk in there. That said, it's a nice quiet place and the management didn't seem to mind too much when we knocked a table over and I ended up with a pint of beer on my previously bone-dry crotch.

We moved from there to the Ship, which also doesn't want to be a pub. Unlike the George, however, it wants to be a nightclub, not a restaurant. I hate places like this. I think I hate pubs that pretend to be nightclubs more than I hate nightclubs. I wouldn't enter a nightclub volitionally and I'm happy with that. I know what a nightclub looks like and what to avoid.

That is unless they are clearly hundreds of years old and called things like 'The Ship', which gives off an air of 'old man, dark, quiet and rustic' pub-ness. I'm not to know that it is not a real pub until I enter, by which time I've committed to it until the majority of the group wants to leave. Blasting out of the disproportionately large speakers is what fans call dance music but clever people call offensive and the only place for peace is the beer garden, but that may as well be called the smokers' hole and as I'm asthmatic (and not a loser who takes his inhaler out with him on a Friday night) I can scarcely manage two minutes out there before reluctantly going back inside for some fresh(er) air. I drink until my stomach feels a little unsettled and fail to communicate with anyone because it's too loud and they have blamed me enough for accidentally spitting at them trying to shout.

Then we leave, go home and feel rubbish in the morning because we forgot to actually drink the pint of water we poured the night before.

That was it. I enjoyed it more at the time. I know that alcohol is a depressant but I wasn't aware that its effects were cumulative to such a degree.

Wednesday 21/10/09

2009-10-21T22:16:00.001+01:00

I'm not as miserable as this blog, or meeting me and having a conversation, would lead you to believe. I love as many things as I hate. Although I do hate the Compare the Market/Meerkat adverts as much as I love all of my favourite bands, comedians and TV shows put together. That's for another day, though.

This week has been bookended by seeing two of my heroes; Stewart Lee and Green Day. I probably listened to more Green Day as a teenager than could be considered healthy. I saw them when I was 14, the first gig I went to, and the die was cast; I was hooked into their admittedly simple but catchy pop punk. While they have become something approaching a parody they still hold a place in my heart, which is why I went to see them on a whim in Cologne earlier this year and shall see them a few more times in London this week.

I'll probably be let down this time as the best Green Day show I've been to was at Reading Festival 2004 where they played a greatest hits of their pre-American Idiot tunes along with a load of other covers. They played a massive set because 50 Cent had just been bottled off and had me hooked for the 2 1/2 hours they were onstage. As I said, they will probably let me down this time with too much emphasis on their excellent/shit (I can't decide) new album and the crowd will have more screaming girls than a party hosted by Ian Huntley.

Stewart Lee is a more recent addition to my list of idols. There's not a lot to say about him because I couldn't do him justice. So I'll leave it there

I also hold a great amount of respect for Brian Setzer. Not only because his is probably the greatest rock and roll guitarist I have ever seen (and yes, I have seen Status Quo), my opinion of him went up massively when I read this week that he has paid his 17 piece orchestra from his own pocket when times have been hard. He puts his money where his mouth is and has consistently played music that he likes and has a passion for (whether there's commercial interest in it or not) with the Stray Cats, the Brian Setzer Orchestra or his solo stuff.

There we are; a 21 year old idolises rock stars and comedians. Somebody alert the media. I'll be really blowing your minds and telling you I masturbate next.

Which I don't, because my family may read this.

Actually, they may be worried that I'm mentally ill if they think I don't. So for peace of mind, you can be assured that I do.

Wednesday 07/10/09

2009-10-07T21:45:00.000+01:00

It's taken 6 weeks without a day off work (apart from weekends, but hush) for fatigue to kick in. I've done no exercise apart from occasional low intensity after-work football and I'm still more knackered than a narcoleptic on a caffeine comedown. What I really need is a bank holiday.

Because of the nature of my work, I communicate frequently with those in the India office. Or at least I would if they were in the office. India has an incredible amount of public days off, compared with the puny number of UK holidays, celebrating all sorts from the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi to Independence Day, something we can never have because the UK has never had to gain independence from anyone. Our innate national ability to see off invasion and fairly secure political history has ensured, that we will. The USA is much the same as India, only with more flags.

Back in Britain, between August and Christmas there is no bank holiday. This is crazy. People aren't tired in the spring, when everything (at Easter and seemingly every Monday in May) stops. If anything, people should have more energy; enthusiastic and encouraged by the growing of life and longer days. They should be refreshed after the New Year and be raring to go, not taking days off because the post-Christmas hangover still hasn't shifted. I went to Glastonbury and Reading in the Summer, catching swine flu in the process, so I went back to work after this more tired than before. I've used up all my annual leave so I can't book any days off.

What I really need is a career that involves about 25 weeks holiday a year and money from the government to 'help' me to do what little work I actually manage. Oh yes, I remember, I tried being a student but didn't like it. I am never satisfied.

To counteract the tiredness I have tried going to bed earlier but, unfortunately for my body but happily for my mind, I have dozens of books in my room. I must've read Frank Skinner's autobiography 9 times, and I've only ever read it before I've gone to sleep (though never the whole thing at once); never on the train, at work or during an Arsenal game. Because of this compulsion to read I stay awake far too late ruining any benefit getting into bed might have lead to. The next morning is difficult and the whole process starts again.

Some things, however, I do have to finish before I sleep. Like this.

Monday 21/09/09

2009-09-21T23:11:00.000+01:00

I don't watch much television as it's shown; I'm a bigger fan of downloading shows and choosing when to see them, but I've broken this habit now that Peep Show is back on. I spent my teens watching little but Men Behaving Badly and Red Dwarf, with my worn out videos of those proving how into them I was, and there is every chance I could spend my twenties wearing out my hard drives with the amount of Peep Show I watch on my computer. I do love Peep Show, like most normal people.

There's a new series on now, as everybody knows, and since I don't have the patience to wait to download the new episodes and watch them I went all 20th century and saw the first episode as it went out on Channel 4 (albeit in HD). As odd as it was to see the show on a normal sized screen, while sat on a sofa, I really enjoyed it. As farcical as the show gets, it's still relatable, although my experience of being made redundant differs slightly from Mark's.

There are some shows I really enjoy, but make no attempt to download or record because I know for a fact that it will definitely be on some channel or another when I turn the television on. I love Road Wars. I'm a pretty big fan of Street Crime UK as well. I like to see the bad guys of society getting caught (unless it's fictional, when I am more than willing to kick the crap out of a policeman in Grand Theft Auto). It has added excitement when you see the police flooring it behind a Nova through Slough in a car chase that relies on recognition of areas that are local to you to make it all the more realistic and thrilling. What's better than watching a robber get decked? Watching a robber get decked outside a pub you drink in, while you stay comfortably rooted to the couch at home, safe.

In the show the police don't seem to be half as restricted as the press, or my father, would have me believe. Happily, they'll beat a suspect to floor or tell them to shut the fuck up on national television. It's purely aspirational television, as a skinny (according to Al Murray) guy who's closest achievement to inflicting deserved physical punishment was when I kicked the cat out of the house for shitting on the floor.

Friday 11/09/09

2009-09-11T21:32:00.000+01:00

I've been planning the rest of my year now that my Summer breaks have passed. Reading Festival didn't go without a hitch (there were enough cunts there to convince me that slipping out on Sunday night was a good move) but it was still a 9/10 year for the music, where I saw some old (Mad Caddies, The Living End), some new (Aggrolites, Them Crooked Vultures) and some odd (Patrick Wolf). Ignoring the clear problems in the campsite, the arena was much better organised this year than in the past.

I get quite claustrophobic in crowds I'm not comfortable in (which is why I can cope with a sweaty Less Than Jake mosh pit but started stressing when I was in a busy Lougborough nightclub) and the NME tent has been rotated to accommodate more people around the tent and generally allow easier access into it. I'm a lot happier near/in it and, as a result, this year I managed to quadruple the number of bands I have seen in that tent (from 1 to 4) since I started going to Reading.

I have already ordered my ticket for next year in the hope that they can keep the standard of lineup high (if only in the Lockup tent) and am pretty sure I'll only go for the days, sneak through the campsite in the early afternoon to get to the arena. The camping part holds very little attraction any more. The fact the festival is little more than a GCSE results pissup was a lot more exciting when I was there to celebrate my own GCSE results. I expect the only GCSE most of the campers achieved this year was some sort of Advance Explosives with Mindless Vandalism GCSE. Most shocking of all is the fact that antisocial behaviour has gone up in the years that Sam Carr has not attended.

I didn't get ill afterwards. In a crazy turn of events, I finally think I've caught and developed immunity to pretty much every upper respiratory infection I could expose myself to. Swine flu was the final assault the viruses could attempt, and as that didn't kill me (it was touch and go during the ill-advised Steely Dan gig) I must now be unconquerable to any chest-based infectious disease.

Wednesday 26/08/09

2009-08-26T10:12:00.000+01:00

It's Reading Festival time again, and judging by the number of people who are selling tickets via my Facebook News Feed, it's not as popular as it used to be. I haven't given it a whole lot of thought personally; I've already been to Glastonbury this year, and as it's only really possible to think about one festival at a time, Reading has taken a back seat. It's down to more than just keeping my attention, though, as there is a distinct feeling that I've had enough of it, too.

I'm into my twenties now, which is starting to feel too old to be going to Reading, where most of the overpreened youths are there celebrating their GCSE results. Indeed, that's what I did when I was 16, although I didn't actually go to collect my results, what with being sat in a tent at the time. It seems to me that if you're too old for school exam results, you're too old for Reading. And perving on the 16 year old girls in trendy hotpants feels more wrong every year.

Much of the behaviour there comes from kids who wouldn't know an exam if they were raped by a maths A level. Mindless violence and destruction of communal facilities really puts me off and makes me feel much older than I am. That said, if you can enjoy listening to what passes for most of the mainstage music, senseless vandalism probably makes sense as a nightime occupation.

I've packed the car with 78 beers and enough vodka to blind all of my eyes, in the hope that it'll keep me from being permanently offended by the children around us. If you keep your head down, chill out and just drink yourself into paralysis at night, while managing to avoid tent ropes when going for a pee in the hedge, and during the day sit in the lockup listening to bands you've seen a million times before at the festival, you can have a bloody good time. Albeit at a cost of at least 200 pounds.

Wednesday 19/08/09

2009-08-19T23:22:00.000+01:00

I've so little clue about the property buying process that I could be either a day or a year away from moving in to the flat I have set my mind (rather than heart) on. All I know is that there is a solicitor and mortgage provider who seem pretty keen on taking my already meagre account balances and reducing them to bare hollows. It could all fall through and I may end up staying at home until I can afford somewhere with separate kitchen and bedroom, but God willing I should eventually be able to eat breakfast in bed every day, if only because there will be nowhere else to eat it.

The flat isn't decorated and this wont be a great leap should I move, a culture clash I should be able to cope with. I haven't showered in 2 weeks. However, rather than prepare me for the squalid conditions that await me, this hygiene sabbatical is, reluctantly on my part, down to redecoration in the home I currently occupy. It's no wonder, with the equal opportunities immune system I possess, that I get ill so often. I probably don't have asthma, I expect I probably just have mould of the trachea.

My father has removed the bathroom, taken it to the skip and has yet to replace it with a complete, working facility. As a result, I've resorted to washing my body parts in the kitchen sink and occasionally driving 5 miles to my grandparents' house for a well earned, and required, bath. Nobody should go to this much effort to get clean. If you've ever thought that Lynx had an unpleasant fragrance, you'd happily spray me with litres of the stuff it it meant that my natural body odour was masked for at least a few hours.

I have lived in over half a dozen homes during my life, on each occasion my parents have intended to redecorate the place and not once have we stayed to see the results of the renovation efforts. From Maidenhead to Temple, Frieth to Flackwell and various in between the intention has always been to make the place pretty and stay there until the mortgage has been paid off. This has never happened. Mid-way through the process of decoration, either of my parents (though 99% of the time is my mom, who has never had to actually raise a paintbrush) has been frustrated by the lack of progress and insists we move somewhere else that is more comfortable.

The process repeats and has done for the last 21 years. I now get the hint that it was just an elaborate long term ploy to make me move out by causing as much personal stress as possible (such as moving house during my AS exams and then my A Levels a year later).

Tuesday 11/08/09

2009-08-11T22:40:00.001+01:00

I am almost certain I haven't got AIDS so either my immune system is faking the symptoms or I have genuinely caught it. I only recovered form swine flu 5 weeks ago and I've already been struck down by another cold. They say that there are only a hundred or so different mutations of the cold and once you've had one you are immune to it and cannot catch that particular strain again. Fortunately that means I am likely to have contracted, recovered from and acquired immunity to pretty much every cold virus by the age of 24.

It is true that I bring these illnesses on myself. Swine flu was caught at Glastonbury, which doesn't have a reputation for being sterile (apart from Status Quo's set... boom tish), so I couldn't really complain, after a week using only wet wipes and not changing my underpants, about spending the following few days in bed as the room span around me.

Now I'm ill having caught a debilitating cold at the only place less clean than a music festival, a student house. While sharing a house with the Young Ones would be dirty, it wasn't soley the environment that finished my prematurely geriatric body. Over the course of less than 48 hours I ate more fast food and drank more alcohol than I have managed all year.

We only arrived in Huddersfield, where Cramer's buddies live, at 9:30 pm Friday evening and within an hour we had a buzz going, thanks to some turbo catchup drinking, and were happily digging into our delivery pizza. The beers continued to flow until around 4am at which point I don't remember going to sleep, a full 22 and a half hours after I woke up for work the previous morning.

Saturday wasn't much healthier. The better part of 5 hours sleep meant it was to Wetherspoons for an early morning coffee before barbecue for lunch. This is when vegetarianism probably saved my life. I'd be dead, or at least have a cholesterol number approaching my IQ (and an IQ declining toward my cholesterol figure), after this weekend if I'd consumed the meaty version of the meals I managed. Saturday night emulated Friday only swap the delivered pizza for a sit in McDonalds meal, which I continue to visit despite being ill when I had their chips in Wycombe. More booze glugged and I woke up groggy Sunday morning, when we visited the Chinese for an all you can eat buffet. I wouldn't be lying if I said I was sweating during that.

How students manage it is baffling. If bachelor degrees took 4 years rather than 3 years then nobody would graduate because everybody would have been killed during their course, thanks to a diet of fast food and faster drinks. I feel like I nearly died after a weekend of it, and I have a lazy stress-free 9-5 job. It's like an even more dangerous version of Supersize Me.

Thursday 30/07/09

2009-07-30T23:12:00.001+01:00

July has been a blur. I started it in a post Glasto haze, the refractory period spent recovering from a festival in which I inevitably got very ill and moped around until it was time to do something productive. I was injured too, having sprained my knee ligaments, so couldn't exercise. The swine flu had made its trotter shaped mark on my body.

Smash cut to now and I'm wondering how I'm staying awake. Before, I woke up and strolled into work pretty much when I felt like it because all I'd do when I got home at the end of the day was masturbate and watch Peep Show (though rarely, if ever, simultaneously). Such behaviour is now impossible, has to be postponed or at the very least performed in slightly less time than before. I have responsibilities and probably some growing up to do.

My parents have decided that despite me not really having saved enough money and although I'm earning less than a tramp who had recently been made redundant because his tramp work had been outsourced to India, I can now afford to buy a flat. Now, they say, is the best time to get on the property ladder, because prices can only go up. They're probably right, but this premature exit from home means that my options are slightly more restricted than if I'd saved more money, rather than spending it on now neglected Xboxes, drum kits and foosball tables. In short, all I can afford is a craphole.

I found one that was affordable, in an uncharacteristically pleasant street in Slough, and to say it has a troubled history would be a little unfair on somewhere that has such a rich story to tell. Apparently the flat was occupied by the ringleader of an Islamic terrorist group and was raided by police in 2004 who found all sorts of fertiliser and other bomb making paraphernalia in the tiny property. At least if I do move in the neighbours can't complain if I make a little noise because there is no chance in hell that I'll be worse than the folks who lived there before, unless Sam Carr turns up.

The flat is tiny, with the lounge doubling, wait, tripling, up as bedroom and kitchen. All this can do is encourage my laziness. The one flaw is that the toilet isn't in there too or I'd never have to move. God forbid I'm ever allowed to work from home. Which brings me to another point; when did the phrase “studio apartment” replace the million-times more accurate word “bedsit”? Studio apartment sounds like somewhere Radiohead go when they want somewhere intimate to record their latest CD, when in actual fact it's somewhere you can sleep, fry an egg and play Fifa without having to budge an inch.

Nothing is set in stone, and despite the encouraging sounds of the mortgage people, it could all go down the toilet before long but it's nice to finally be able to start the moving out thing, even if it is to a terrorist's former residence in Slough and is all happening at the speed of light.

Sunday 12/07/09

2009-07-12T23:09:00.001+01:00

I go back to work tomorrow. I would’ve gone back last week but it’s taken me so long to recover from Glastonbury that the return to employment had to be put back a week. I should’ve seen it coming, really. I have enough trouble recuperating from festivals anyway, so I was sure to get ill, but to do it during a flu pandemic was just irresponsible. Nobody with an immune system like mine should even have considered sharing a farm with 170,000 other people. It was worth it though.

The only festivals I have been to before are the Reading Festival and Benicassim in Spain. Glasto compares well to both of these: Reading because the average age at Glasto is over 18 so not everyone is on a mission of mindless destruction while still happy to have a drunkenly good time. It’s better than Beni because the average temperature is pleasantly under 30 degrees, allowing for some sleep during the daylight hours, although the admittedly infrequent rain torrents that were dropped from the sky definitely weren’t nicer than the sometimes oppressive Spanish sun.

We left for Somerset early on the Wednesday morning fully loaded with camping gear and what we believed to be enough alcohol to last several festivals (but actually only enough to get Freeman pissed until Friday evening; we had to ration it after we realised quite how quickly it was going down). I had the roofrack on the car, with the rucksacks held down in a highly professional manner, with elastic bungees and an old curtain I found to stop it all flying off the car while crawling along the M4.

We had nearly reached the village of Pilton by midday, with Freeman prophetically claiming that “we did really well with the traffic”, before hitting a queue of post office proportions. It took another 90 minutes to get into the car park by which time Freeman had taken the wheel and the burden of the Peugeot’s supposed ‘new’ clutch. Bushell had spent the whole trip on the back seat trying to realign his body clock, having been woken at the ungodly hour of 8am.

Once parked, we lugged the gear to a camping spot we felt was pleasant enough for us and cracked open a couple of beers and chilled until bedtime. James arrived later on (about 2am), having spent something like 15 hours on the coach from Leicester. I had been asleep for a few hours by this stage and awoke for a quick wee (which is generally encouraged to be undertaken in the toilets, not freely on the grass, unlike Reading) and to welcome him, before going back to sleep.

I don’t remember a lot about Thursday apart from going to the toilet only to hear that Michael Jackson was dead (not that it stopped me urinating) from some girl who clearly wasn’t a fan. Not the greatest thing that could’ve happened, it encouraged Bush’s stupid friends to text him weak jokes about it that he relayed to us until he lost interest, which happened quite quickly.

The music began on Friday, when everything starts blending into one and it requires a cursory glance at the lineup for me to recall who I saw that day and the rest of the weekend. From memory I saw mainly bands whose lineup doesn’t match that of their peak (The Blockheads without the dead Ian Dury) or bands who’ve been riding the same hits for 30+ years (Status Quo, Madness etc). That’s not to say they weren’t good fun though, I could dance along to Baggy Trousers forever, it just doesn’t seem quite right that they should be 50 year old men singing about getting up to mischief at school.
Before Fleet Foxes, Freeman went to the campsite to collect his box of pear wine, to quench his thirst while seeing the band. When we met him at the Pyramid Stage for the Specials, he was drunk as a skunk, incoherent and utterly unresponsive to our statements (so what’s new). During one of the band’s many bouncy two-tone ska songs, he started nodding off. I left him, in the laziest possible way, with Bushell. This, and the resulting hassle in waking him up for Animal Collective, led us to ration the dwindling supplies of beer.

I’ve never been that bothered about drinking during shows. I find dulling the senses also dulls the experience so getting pissed watching music or comedy doesn’t really do it for me. Because of this, the late finish of the bands and my inherent tiredness at festivals I only got drunk once at Glastonbury. It’s difficult to start drinking at 1am and get a really good buzz going before nodding off. I thought I’d fight this on the Friday night by having 3 Pro Plus tablets. Within 10 minutes of popping them I had fallen asleep.

This wasn’t quite the most irrational thing to happen in our campsite over the course of the weekend, though. James ‘Beer Noodles’ Ellison wins those particular prizes. As well as eating toothpaste with the aid of his finger because he forgot to take his toothbrush, he wore Tesco bags on his feet for use in the substantial Glastonbury mud having forgotten his wellies. He also convinced himself that, after drinking a total of 4 pints between 2 and 11pm, he was legitimately drunk when he saw Franz Ferdinand headline the Other Stage. Luckily for him, he behaved pretty oddly at all times so it was difficult to determine how pissed he was at any one time.

I went to the Cabaret/Comedy tent on the Sunday and realised all-too-late that I could’ve spent the entire weekend in there. We only stayed for Robin Ince but I could quite happily have spent three days sat in there watching every act. It would’ve been a lot better for my back than standing for 4 hours while waiting for and eventually seeing Bruce Springsteen and, for me, arguably better entertainment. I expect I shall return next year and I have vowed to spend more time going to the comedy when I have nothing to do, rather than wasting my time reading the Guardian at the campsite.

We left mid-afternoon on the Monday, generally fed up and looking forward to returning home despite the whole festival seeming to have happened in a matter of minutes. The drive back was done with a gritted fatigue, a deja-vu-ey, eye twitchy sort of tiredness that can only be caused by genuine exhaustion and weakness. This was probably the sort of limit past after which my body just gives in to any illness that may be in the air. In this case, swine flu was in the air.

Getting worse before I got better, I spent 2 or 3 days in bed, my haziness testament to quite how much I slept and how poor I felt. I only got up to expel mucus or a bright yellow syrup that would’ve been urine had I not been incredibly dehydrated. I got myself on Tamiflu and the whole thing passed in about a week, about the same length of time as I spent at Glasto, but felt like considerably more.

Tuesday 16/06/09

2009-06-16T22:07:00.001+01:00

I think I need a new hobby. I have only three, maybe four, and what spending nearly all my free time outside of work alone in my room or the car (I am atypically fond of solitude), I’ve exhausted my mind’s ability to conjure up things to do outside of business hours. I think I’ve seen so much Peep Show that I’ve gone from being able to quote it off by heart to pointing out even the tiniest flaws in direction or continuity. I’m turning into Mr Skin for sitcom mistakes, and there is no demand for that. Even if there is, I want no part of it.

I’ve grown weary of music. I’ve seen all of my favourite bands live, a few who are definitely not my favourites (enter Enter Shikari) and I’ve little interest in expanding my already bloated music collection. I have enough to keep me entertained and a band as good as TLE wont come along any time soon so there is little point investigating. Reading comes around with such regularity I’m pretty sure I could take up the festival lifestyle fulltime, almost existing as a sunburned tramp with a penchant for rather derivative punk rock and indie.

Incidentally, live events, such as gigs and festivals, don’t come cheap and I am by no means a rich man. Arsene Wenger himself would struggle to afford an Arsenal season ticket, especially if he wants to sit so close to the pitch. Since Arsenal’s home form has been less consistent than my poo after an Emirates Stadium pizza, as committed a fan as I am, spending over £50 on each game (sometimes including travel) cannot be justified as week in-week out entertainment. Plus Soccer Saturday is often more entertaining.

Live comedy is another of my interests, but I get the impression that this area isn’t the comedians’ best friend, particularly Stewart Lee who summed up his 2008 tour by saying that there was ‘silence in Maidenhead’. All lies, particularly as I was at the gig with Bushell and we were both laughing pretty heavily throughout. Mind you, Lee does say he’s partially deaf so maybe he mistook his own aural degeneration for public displeasure. It’s possible, and I can imagine Lee Evans getting the opposite feeling when he performs. He is crap. Anyway, there aren’t many comedy shows locally so I have to go to London if I want to laugh in public, which is expensive.

So what could I do if watching football, music and comedy is getting more difficult and losing its appeal? Well, I could become more than a passive observer and actually play football, but I’m currently injured. I tried some keepy-uppys in the garden last night and felt a twinge so I’m far from fit enough. I could play some music, as I have been meaning to do. Writing the second Freeman Is A Problem album is it’s own problem, mainly because I have to actually write it this time. No wonder all rappers do is steal loops from 1980s pop songs and talk over the top of it, its hard work making music. I haven’t done myself any favours by not buying any equipment yet, waiting until the time feels right to buy a microphone.

I could do something out of my comfort zone, like going to nightclubs or taking up folk dancing, but I feel as though I’d be lying to myself if I did that just to get out of the house. I think I’ll just stay in and write desperate letters to Channel 4 urging them to write more series of Peep Show and continue my current unfulfilled, but quite relaxing, life.

Sunday 14/06/09

2009-06-14T22:42:00.001+01:00

Rather than getting old before my time, there is increasing evidence to suggest that I never grew up in the first place, like some odd Peter Pan tribute but without the stigma that Michael Jackson has assigned him.

Alternatively, and as it fits me more accurately, luckily, I could be like Benjamin Button, only somewhat sped up. As time presses on I seem to be getting a less mature outlook on life. 4 years ago I would’ve spent many of my Friday nights in an old man pub (though only because they didn’t ID us when we were 17) and even on a couple of occasions played darts. The weekends may be spent at Scazz’s learning a Steely Dan song on the bass.

This weekend, at the ripe old age of 21, I played Age of Empires and Fifa 09 on the computer, and watched the child-aimed (and bloody awful) film Monsters v Aliens. It doesn’t bode well for the future; it’s not a trend I like the look of. I even went to a fancy dress house party last week and really enjoyed it. Something’s not right. When I was 17 I hated Karma Chameleon. Last week I was singing along to it as though my life depended on it. Fortunately for me, my life didn’t depend on it and I survived to feel embarrassed about it from then on. I’m sure it’s character building.

One reason for murdering the Culture Club classic (it’s always on VH1 Classic so it must be one) may have been that I was diagnosed with asthma this week, generally never developed at the age of 21. I’ve probably had it for years, letting it slowly scar my lungs as I train for 10k runs and collapse during school cross country races. It fits in with the Benjamin Button-ism, too, as it’s a sign that I’m approaching childhood from the wrong side. If you’re between 6 and 46 and you get asthma then something is wrong.

If this is the case then it’s not that handy. My body isn’t regenerating itself or anything. I still have dodgy knees, which relapsed last week at the party as I twisted my left leg, briefly tying my meniscus in a knot before leaving me near tears on the floor. My weariness and lackadaisical attitude to my knees was evident when I walked home from Beaconsfield (a brisk 5 mile hobble) the morning afterwards.

On reading this back, I take retract all I said. It doesn’t look like I’m getting less mature at all. It looks more like a premature mid-life crisis, with my body giving in and brain misfiring to the extent that I now enjoy such crap as Karma Chameleon. Oh well, Glastonbury next week, I should fit in just fine there.

Tuesday 26/05/09

2009-05-26T22:41:00.001+01:00

Summer arrived this weekend and within seconds I had remembered why it pissed me off so much. Give me rain any day of the week if it means I don’t have to suffer from hayfever again. When I was 11 my reaction to pollen was so bad my eyes puffed to the size of a chameleon’s, which made me look like some weird half-human half-lizard with a runny nose. I don’t think I ever recovered from that reaction and my annual relapses have been irritating since.

I’m a sweaty person, naturally. I don’t need to do any exercise to work myself into a smelly, moist stupor. I can happily sit inside on a cold winter’s night, but turn the thermostat above normal room temperature and I will lose pounds of weight in lost skin effluent. This makes me incredibly prone to dehydration, and that’s annoying when you fancy a beer in the warm summer sun because before long I will be left with a headache that makes a hangover seem mild. So for every pint of lager I consume, I need to down about 4 litres of ionised water to compensate.

The heat goes to my head, too. I spend most of the year growing an impressive thatch on top of my head. This has to go when the sun pokes through, too. Firstly, I start playing sport and I haven’t yet got the guts to wear a Robert Pires-style headband while playing office football so it has to go or I wont see the ball, let alone kick it. Secondly, my body temperature will rise to a point where I am certain to pass out if I don’t cool my head down. I could just douse my head in water, but this is flawed as it just means I’ll have wet hair that’ll warm up and drip slightly diluted sweat and hair gel into my eyes, which stings like a mo-fo.

So I get my hair cut for the first time in months. I never like going to the barbers or getting a haircut anywhere. If you grow a fringe as healthy as the one I had you feel as though it may never return, particularly when your hairline is revealed and you begin to work out if it has receded at all since the last time you visited (I’m still unsure and a tape measure is excessive). It’s essentially paying somebody to highlight the threat of male-pattern baldness to you.

So fuck Summer. Apart from Glastonbury and Reading, which will be great fun.

Sunday 17/05/09

2009-05-17T20:03:00.000+01:00

So I went to see Green Day in Germany last weekend, but it took me until now to have the energy to actually write anything down about it. I’ve spent the entire week in a dozey trance, working at about 20 percent of my usual productivity (which must itself be a staggeringly small figure), needing a rest from a trip which involved waking up at 4am on a Saturday morning, when most people my age are just getting in, and trying to comprehend the map of the Cologne rail system, which looks like somebody has taken the London Underground and put it in a blender.

You don’t often get the chance to experience something special, which is completely subjective but does not detract from its personal value. For me, the opportunity to see Green Day in a German 1000 person club (something they never seem to do outside of California) that used to be a factory for free was one too great to turn down. I won the ticket in a draw on Green Day’s fanclub so that saved me what would normally be around £40. The flights and hotel weren’t free, though, and it took a bit of welcome generosity from my parents to lend me some cash (I had only just spent most of that month’s salary on tickets to Green Day’s tour later in the year) enabling me to go, which was nice.

I did go budget, though. I may have been making an experience of it but I certainly wasn’t going to be flying on BA or checking into Das Ritz or whatever the German equivalent is. I found a last-minute flight on Germanwings (yeah, I’d not heard of them either) and a hotel in what I later learned was the crappy side of Cologne. Who cares, though, when the flight is only an hour long and I was awake for about 30 minutes total in my hotel room, spent watching CNN on the smallest television in western Europe.

The whole journey took less time than it did to get to Manchester for The Living End gig in Manchester a week or two back. That’s not to say it didn’t feel like a tedious flight/train ride. On the S-Bahn there were two blonde female twins. Unfortunately they were pensioners with BMIs greater than their combined age. Also on the S-Bahn, I noticed that Germany also possesses ‘Toys R Us’, which is nothing if not an example of rampant globalisation. Something that hasn’t reached us yet, though, is the store next door to ‘Toys R Us’, which is called ‘Babies R Us’ and, unless it doubles as a maternity hospital, is hopelessly misnamed. This is the sort of crap that kept me amused. I am my own perfect travel companion.

Eventually the show rolled round after I had checked into the hotel, had a beer in the bar, failed to communicate properly with the ‘no speakee ingleese’ staff and gone to buy toothpaste (because the cunts at Stansted don’t let people with decent dental hygiene onto aeroplanes) and it was exceptionally good fun. There was no crappy opening act to resent while waiting for Green Day and there was an odd moment where everybody in the crowd turned around to cheer a German celebrity (apparently a comedian so I’m dubious) who was sat on a balcony. People were getting genuinely agitated at the sight of somebody I had never seen or heard of before in my life. I imagine the same was true when foreigners saw the news of Jade Goody’s death.

The crowd itself seemed to be either a) female and teenage or b) middle aged and male with teenage daughter, so I didn’t expect a huge reaction from the audience and thought it wouldn’t get moving very much. I found a space in the middle fairly near the front and expected to be able to stand comfortably and watch Green Day play (my knee pain means any sustained dancing is really bad for the joint and will ache for ages after). It didn’t happen, though, and I was bouncing around like a man without shoes on hot coals. The new songs sounded fantastic, even though I’d never heard them before and the classic tunes they shared were played as well as ever, even if there is something slightly off at the sound of a German crowd singing ‘Longview’ in a noticeably affect accent. Still, it didn’t put me off.

Naturally, going to a gig abroad, aside from the travel, is a different experience to that in the UK. Germany is no different and there were some odd customs I picked up on. Folks over there don’t really do queuing. Lining up for something doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily get in first and as I sat down, because I was so early, in the queue for the show people were quite happily walking over me to get closer to the entrance. This wouldn’t happen in the UK, and I’ve been to shows at Brixton Academy where the queue goes around the whole venue, with everybody lined up in single file.

The gig finished and I slept soundly in my hotel room for about 10 hours, even though I had been provided with one of those shitty square pillows the Germans seem to adore. The trip back was something of a daze and despite a short delay on the flight, I got home just in time to see Arsenal get beaten (then bent over and raped) 4-1 by Chelsea. If there is one reason for having many hobbies, it’s that one of them will be there to keep you happy.

Monday 04/05/09

2009-05-04T22:37:00.000+01:00

All I’ve really had a chance to think about for the last couple of weeks are live music concerts. First it was The Living End, and the hassles of getting to Manchester, finding the motivation to drive from there to London and the physical repercussions I felt because of it.

After the TLE gigs, I started to think about the Lockup Stage announcement for Reading Festival. This is pretty much, most years, the only thing about the Reading Festival line-up that I care about. The mainstage bands are average groups I’ve probably seen (or ignored) at Reading before, I don’t really dig the Radio 1 tent stuff and don’t know enough about independent music to be a fan of bands on the Carling Stage (or whatever it’s called this week). I know, and like, just enough about punk and ska to grab my interest in the Lockup Stage and as a result it is the only thing leading up to the event to hold any value to me.

This year I was slightly disappointed. They seem to be getting a bit samey, as a whole. Radiohead aside, who I don’t really like anyway, there is little that seems different from the last couple of years. Anti Flag and Bloc Party will turn up every year but playing to (from my perspective) ever younger audiences, who in turn go and trash the campsite when it’s all over. Maybe I’m getting a bit jaded by it, but I said that last year and immediately went out and bought this year’s ticket. I’m nothing if not a hypocrite.

Someone I’ve seen longer than I’ve been going to Reading Festival is Green Day. I first saw them at the age of 14 at Wembley Arena. I plan to see them at the same venue this autumn and lots of fun it should be. Unfortunately, the tickets are £45 (including fees) which is hardly punk kid prices but they put on a show so it’ll be entertaining. More entertaining, though, is the prospect of seeing them play this weekend. As a member of their fan club (The Living End don’t have one, incidentally, but there are only 3 of us) you’re given opportunities to win things and generally have greater access to the band than you otherwise would. For me this meant winning a competition for the first time since I won £10 on the lottery last year (my luck has really been coming in lately). I have won a ticket to see them play live in Cologne this weekend.

I still vaguely hold to the “you only live once” mantra, so I decided to ignore the hassle and financial implications of it and just go for it. I’ve booked flights and accommodation and all that’s left for me to do is turn up at the venue on Saturday evening. It does involve waking up at 4am to get to Stansted, and the last time I went to Cologne (on the German exchange at school) I thought it was a horrid, grubby and tedious place but this time I intend to make the most of it and worry about all consequences later. I’ve listened to things like the Ray Peacock Podcast and realised most of the joy he feels comes from totally spontaneous events and decisions, and I hope this could be as joyous for me.

Work on Monday will be a struggle, though. Somebody put the bank holiday in the wrong place.

Sunday 26/04/09

2009-04-26T20:52:00.000+01:00

Either I have the dangerous new virus on the news (did you hear about the highly unlikely central American pandemic scare? The Mexican pig flu) or I overdid it this week. I feel like complete crap. I can’t breathe through my nose, sounds are dulled because my ears are blocked and my sinuses ache like a bitch. I had a solitary pint (on a full stomach thanks to the Noodle Bar lunch I had) at the pub after work on Friday and was genuinely affected. Not drunk or tipsy, just felt odd. A 20 minute break didn’t seem to help, but I had to drive to Cookham and was probably under the limit. Still, Bushell was never to know and I got him home safely. I think (I’ve not seen him since).

Since then I’ve felt horrible, a weekend of feeling sorry for myself, made worse by Man United but slightly improved by Arsenal. Football is the drug that is impossible to tell whether will work or not.

The Living End, however, have a 100% efficacy. Like weed without the psychosis or obsessive masturbation without the blisters they are a positive virus (to reference Red Dwarf) that provide adrenaline and utter contentment. I saw them twice in just over 24 hours, once in Manchester and then in London the next night, and for about the same time afterwards I was as happy as a clam. They played as well as I’ve seen before and it was great to hear the songs they released on their new CD. All is well.

I overstretched myself logistically, though. The sleep, time and driving required was somewhat at the back of my mind before I did it. The furthest I’d driven before was either Birmingham or Loughborough (whichever is further) and to double that was to be particularly difficult in my potentially unreliable Peugeot 106. I took Billy along and he was to read the directions I’d printed off. Thanks in part to Billy but mostly Google Maps, on the way up we were told to get off the M1 at junction 38, go entirely around the roundabout and go back on the M1 in the opposite direction for 4 miles before getting off and heading towards Huddersfield, where we stayed. Essentially 8 miles wasted and I don’t know how it happened but it didn’t slow us down too much. The fact we’d been on the road for 3 hours 55 minutes was enough to make me a little annoyed, though.

Cramer suggested I kept my duvet on the parcel shelf of my car when I parked it, so as to hide the speakers and prevent them being a target for thieves. If anything, this just made it look as though I had something to hide. It also meant I was left with a broken sleeping bag and Reading Festival-worn pillow to keep my warm and comfortable when I slept. It was when I woke up the next morning that I realised I probably was going to be ill. Tough, I had the second leg of the cross country drive to perform.

4 hours and a vegetarian Burger King meal later I was back in Bucks. I noted on the way up to Huddersfield that there was a point near Sheffield where the Sun just disappeared behind grim northern cloud, evidence that God hates the north (rightfully). My belief was vindicated as we drove down the M1 and the Sun started gleaming on us, albeit in the crappy 14 mile roadworks that would’ve kept us at 50mph if we had the chance to go that quickly. By the time I was home the weather was beautiful.

Later on, around the time I got on the train to London and to the venue I was essentially a zombie; the travel and poor sleep having finally caught up with me. I was wise enough to knock back a couple of Cokes which perked me up just long enough to wear out my vocal chords along to the Living End. Before I got on the train home I lost my ticket so I bought a coffee and a replacement ticket. I was clever enough to take Thursday off but by Friday I was still feeling a bit crap and the weekend has just made it worse.

They say there are only a certain amount of cold viruses out there and when you’ve had one you cannot get it again. I have a feeling I can’t be far short of completing the set and ready to live a live free of colds, because I have had one every week since I was a toddler. Mind you, I would happily have one every week if it was caused by an awesome couple of days with friends and The Living End.

Sunday 19/04/09

2009-04-19T22:03:00.001+01:00

I went out for a meal with my friends last night. The most civilised we get is when we go to a proper restaurant, where decorum and respectability are fairly important (but never crucial). We have a regular haunt, the Chinese in Lane End, which makes it safer to disrupt and disturb the other patrons. It’s like a regular at the pub who’ll never be barred by landlord no matter how he behaves because there is a 100% chance he’ll return and spend more of his hard-earned money in the future.

We don’t censor ourselves too much though, as we’re never far away from making some offensive (if taken out of context) remark that could probably be prosecuted under some archaic blasphemy law; just too much Nazi or Madeleine McCann based humour, really, for a well meaning public place. In the end, we only say fewer hateful things because we spend 20% of the time with food in our mouths.

Or at least we would if the food ever got served. There are two ‘all-you-can-eat’ buffet menus, one £10 and the other £15, but because we’re cheapskates, we go for the budget buffet option. Although the courses for both menus are pretty much the same, I’ve come to the conclusion that the £5 saved comes from the chefs and waiting staff intentionally taking their sweet time to bring your order. Or, as a place with poor track record on public health, maybe they don’t wash their hands for people who are eating the cheap buffet.

Incidentally, the buffet has a crispy duck course. As a vegetarian, this could be a waste of a course but the folks at the Chinese (I forget its name) kindly rustle me up an unconvincing alternative when I ask them for a duck substitute (you’d think they might instinctively know after the 12th time of asking in a couple of years). As kind as the gesture is, and as grateful I should be for the effort, it always takes longer to cook than my mates’ duck. It also tastes saltier than the semen of a man with high daily sodium intake. Unsatisfied, back I go to the cucumber, which I simply dip into the sauce, stick-by-stick, until the next course comes around.

The mains are pretty crappy too; I didn’t even have one last night. We got another buffet plate of assorted bits and I tucked into a couple of spring rolls, paid the bill and went to the pub next door for a packet of crisps. Ultimately, I go for the company, not the food, but I do feel it should be called ‘all-you-can-stomach’ rather than ‘all-you-can-eat’.

Sunday 12/04/09

2009-04-12T22:32:00.001+01:00

If people were like their cars I would be unreliable, often grubby and not good to be seen with in public. Luckily I am totally unlike my car. For a start, I just spent nearly £200 on new parts for it. When was the last time somebody spent that to keep me going every day? And I’d be grateful. That Peugeot just doesn’t give a shit.

I got it a new clutch, something I didn’t know needed replacing until my father drove it and had diagnosed a problem I didn’t know existed within 5 minutes. It would make sense to scrap the car and buy something newer and less French. I am nothing if not tight-fisted, though, so with the 106 I stay. It’s not even my first car, so I am most certainly not sentimentally attached to it, just mentally it seems.

As immobile as I am without a car, the Saturday spent without one didn’t really affect me in any great way. It could have been an Easter sign to take time away from mechanical objects and return to a more spiritual, less material existence, if only for a day. In the end I watched the football on the sofa and then watched the football on the computer. I later returned to the sofa to catch highlights of the football I missed earlier in the day. There was only one crucifixion I cared about this weekend, and it happened to Wigan Athletic.

I was pleased to get the car done despite not needing it this weekend. Next week I have to (emphasis on ‘have to’) drive to Manchester to see the Living End. Now, I would walk 500 miles (and I would walk 500 more) to see the band, but as I have also arranged to watch them in London the next evening it makes more sense to have a vehicle to get me there and back. It will be a timing nightmare; how I intend to fit driving, sleeping and watching the band into a really short timescale I’ve not yet considered.

All this doesn’t matter, though, because I hope to get by on pure undiluted adrenaline until the band leave the stage in London. Give me hundreds of bands at Glasto or Reading but literally nothing could beat, musically, the excitement of seeing your favourite band twice in two days (unless it’s five times in five days – but should’ve been 6 - as I managed in 2007 for Less Than Jake). The only thing that could possibly let me down would be my car.

Tuesday 31/03/09

2009-03-31T22:24:00.001+01:00

I went to Oxford last week to see Richard Herring’s new show, which is about his teenage years and whether they’ve had an effect on his adult life. He kept meticulous records of the events of his youth and is able to draw odd conclusions from his teenage diaries, which express all of his darkest thoughts at the time, as flawed as they were. He says in the show that he always thought he would be a comedian and, while sacrificing much of his education, eventually he would achieve success as one.

I don’t have any teenage diaries from which I could draw unfulfilled premonitions (I didn’t write in my homework diary, let alone a voluntary daily thought journal) but I’m pretty sure that if you’d offered the 16-year-old me a life, at the age of 21, where I sat at a computer all day and played Football Manager and watched old sitcoms in the evening I probably would’ve taken it, because that’s what I was doing then. Unlike Herring, though, I’m in a position where the Football Manager computer game does not translate into any career path. Even real life managers do not have to play it in order to take charge of a Premier League club (which is a bit narrow minded of the club owners if you ask me).

5 years from now if I’m spending my days at a computer and all evenings playing FM (which probably wont even be in English the rate the Premier League is going) I may be a little jaded but it would hardly be a surprise since I’m hardly making an effort to do anything else. I’m not entirely sure, and I’ve not been convinced that doing anything else would be any more fun or rewarding. There’s little that compares to the joy winning the Premier League at home to Man United on the last day of the season, even if it is animated by 2 dimensional computer generated blobs.

Herring’s show works by ridiculing almost everything his teenage self believes in and does. I know I don’t have the benefit of 20 years of hindsight but I can see that the 16-year-old me was lazy and unproductive. The fact I’ve not changed is merely a worry at the moment, but come back to me when I’m 26 and it may be a more pressing concern.

Sunday 22/03/09

2009-03-22T22:41:00.000Z

Finally a period of time I actually get to do nothing but chill out and rest. I haven’t had more than a day off since Christmas and the weekends have been full of priorities but this weekend I had literally no plans, and not much interest in doing anything. The most I did was go to the new, but really really shit, shopping centre in High, but really really shit, Wycombe to buy myself a new, and really really nice, suit. I can actually feel myself getting old.

Both mornings I wanted a lie in and nearly managed it until the sun beamed it’s way through my windows at 8am. I still don’t have curtains in my room because I am yet to measure the windows, and should be used to it after nearly 3 years here. Unfortunately I’m not able to stand the sight of the bright red insides of my eyelids for very long so I got up and played Football Manager until I got bored of it (normally after about 4 hours of tutting, gasping and displaying symptoms of schizophrenia).

The good weather didn’t really interest me; there was enough to keep me amused inside the house. I recently acquired (which may or may not have been illegally) all 6 series of One Foot In The Grave and have been slowly working my way through them, with surprising efficiency (I’m midway through series 2 after this weekend). Thankfully it’s funny enough to justify such obsessive behavoiour. I recently saw all 3 series of The IT Crowd in a matter of days. It passed the time well enough, but I can’t say I laughed more than 6 times over the course of the 18 episodes. Sometimes I seem to do things just to cross them off some sort of internal list.

When the sitcoms dry up (and they rarely do) I invariably find something on proper TV. And when I say proper TV I mean Sky Sports. I’m also subscribed to Setanta (against my better judgement) which gives me access to Arsenal TV, a channel so devoid of content even a fan so dedicated as to tattoo the club’s crest into his neck and change his name by deed poll to Arsene Wenger would have trouble keeping himself interested. So back I go, if there is no live game on, to Sky Sports News which, if there is no news of interest, allows me to gawp at their presenters for hours.

I make such inactivity seem dull and a waste of our limited time on earth but it’s impossible to be at 100% all the time. That said, if I started spending many weekends like this one it would be time to question a few things.

Sunday 08/03/09

2009-03-08T22:09:00.002Z

I went up to the Emirates Stadium today, to see Arsenal play for the first time since mid-November. It was a good day out, a comfortable win against a team whose fans never stopped singing and put the majority of the admittedly quite sparsely distributed home supporters to shame. Even if Burnley FC were made to look average, the support they were given could have won them the World Cup. But they lost, so tough shit; fuck off back to Lancashire.

The reason I haven’t been overly keen to return since November was that last time I went to watch Arsenal play at home they lost to Aston Villa, something I considered impossible. I mean I’d paid 40 quid, naturally there’s no way the players wouldn’t put 110% effort into the game and blast a few past Villa’s keeper. Of course, it didn’t turn out that way (they lost 2-0) and in my mind I had spent good money, the better part of a day’s wage, on something that achieved nothing than making me miserable. Then I got philosophical about it and saw it as a natural, expected event, as painful as it is.

Football, and spectator sport in general, is an odd thing to become engaged with. You aren’t guaranteed success (unless you spend 30 million each on Wayne Rooney, Dimitar Berbatov & Rio Ferdinand, and ‘acquire’ Carlos Tevez through undetermined means) which makes happiness not necessarily a given, and in some cases rarely, if at all. Nobody would spend good money on going to the theatre, cinema or a gig if you knew there was a 3/1 chance that you would be disappointed and your day ruined. And if you would, you’re some sort of perculiar masochist, or a fan of Keanu Reeves.

And it’s not just a case of risking the disappointment. Peoples’ affiliations to their football clubs are engrained at a young age. The team a person supports becomes as much a part of them as their name or religious persuasion. I takes a real born-again moment to reconsider what you have, no matter how much your faith is tested. Of course there are those who call themselves believers but they tend to move on when the limelight shifts, and are generally known as ‘glory hunters’.

Also on the douchebag spectrum, along with glory hunters, are the England followers who mask their ignorance of football by being extremely nationalistic whenever their country plays, wearing England shirts down the pub every other summer (apart from 2008) and hanging JJB Sport flags in their bedroom windows. They are the same folks who suddenly form opinions on national team players they’ve only seen on the telly in the pub during the World Cup, despite showing no club loyalty or any apparent fondness for the sport previously.

You have to wonder what you can get out of the sport if you only watch 5 games a year. Tennis, and Henman and Murray along with it, means nothing to me because I’m only exposed to it for 2 weeks in the Summer. The fragility of emotions in sport makes the victories so much sweeter. I will keep following Arsenal because when, even if it’s in 3 months, 3 years or 3 decades, they win a trophy I will be delighted, and rightfully so because I will have invested into them and deserve the dividends of their success. And this success starts with a comfortable win against Burnley.

Friday 27/02/09

2009-02-27T18:23:00.001Z

Slowly but surely I think I’m growing up. Three years ago I was still at school, and determined to leave on the ring of the bell, if not hours before, and go home or to Pizza Hut. Nothing could keep me there. The problem seemed to be, in perfectly clear hindsight, that I just wasn’t mature enough to pay attention or have the motivation to do any real work. It was probably true at uni as well. Like most 18-year-olds, I was just a tall 9-year-old kid with pubic hair.

Now I’m at work, I feel like a proper adult who’s treated with the respect I have sought and deserved for a long time. People come to me and ask pertinent questions, rather than me being the one asking my teachers inane questions, such as seeking permission to go for a piss, which would’ve been some breach of my human rights if they had refused. I have returned the respect, even if it’s nothing but a veil in front of hatred and loathing, by offering them my own time. To prove it I made the ultimate sacrifice of going in to work on Saturday (the day Jeff Stelling keeps me company all afternoon). Nothing could’ve made me go into school at the weekend, even if they were offering cures for cancer and I’d recently developed leukaemia. I’d

Scarily I may repeat this again this weekend. If I have enough time I shall go in and work even though I don’t need to, an alien concept to me. I have other things to do; I need to get a haircut, there’s an Arsenal game to watch and I have a new year’s resolution to fulfil, which is looking pretty shakey at the moment. I said I’d make a whole follow up EP (because albums take ages) to Freeman Is A Problem, full of songs I’d written. Sadly, I’ve not got far at all, only having chosen 3 songs I’d quite like to cover. I’ve also written a vaguely offensive song (only lyrically so far) that would make Freeman Is A Problem, and telling him to go back to India, seem accepting. It’s an ironic song about Judaism and nothing I truly believe in. It’s probably not smart enough to be considered a satire, and if it was about Islam I wouldn’t expect to last the week, but I’ll share the lyrics. If anything it should encourage me to work at the weekends, evenings and overnight if it keeps me from writing such things.

--

(verse 1)

are they a race or just a religion
america provides them with ammunition
this time you have no gaza strip
we're in britain and i've got my whip

i hope that you're not circumsized
if you are there's every chance you'll die
if your nose is bigger than an encylopedia
and if you secrectly run the whole western media

(Verse 2)

we'll make them go to the desert for 40 years
assign them some more mortal fears
banish them from jerusalem
for saying the messiah wasn't born in bethlehem

We’d do it to Jesus and make sure he sees us
A crucifixtion with no restrictions
The gaping stigmata, no help from his father
Who forsaketh him once again

(pre chorus)

Replace the stars of David with the stars round your head
Because you’re gonna be dead
Yeah you’re gonna be dead

(Chorus)

‘cause I’m Jew bashing
yeah I’m Jew bashing
you’ve got a small hat, so we’re gonna hit you
Let’s go and fuck up some Jews

‘cause I’m Jew bashing
yeah I’m Jew bashing
Help me out, you can join in too
Let’s go and fuck up some Jews

(Bridge)

but we wont do it to muslims
‘cause they’ll blow themselves up

we wont do it to Christians
cause they’ll picket my funeral

we wont do it to hindus
because they like cows

only you, the jews

--

I’m definitely not growing up.

Wednesday 18/02/09

2009-02-18T22:51:00.001Z

As I get older and more experienced in the ways of the world I’ve started to find that nobody really knows what they’re doing and that most of us are just blundering and bullshitting our way through life, whether personally or professionally. Because it’s such a cack-handed way of going about things this can have serious repercussions, such as the current financial predicament everyone is suffering from. The fact that a whole bunch of people, who presumably saw that nobody knows what they’re doing, have supposedly been defrauding us all via the banking system over the last few years suggests as much.

Partly as a result of this incompetence I was made redundant towards the end of last year. It was a bit of a bugger as finding work is difficult at the best of times (it was enough trouble just getting the job in the first place) let alone when Christmas is approaching and the biggest recession in decades is about to kick off. It’s also a kick in the nuts, emotionally, and it’s a rather depressing experience when you feel as though you’re completely dispensable. This sort of worked itself out, obviously not without the further effort and stress of applications and interviews, after I secured a job at the same place doing something so similar that my daily routine only changed in the podcasts I listened to while doing the job (which is irrelevant to the tale). All that the incident, which took place over about a 6-week period, seemed to prove was that I could perform in interviews.

This makes a fair amount of sense so far, the company was just restructuring the department and making it more efficient and cost effective. What struck me as odd, though, was being given a bonus this week for high quality work and proving myself as a valued employee over the last year. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for some cash that will go towards my savings or car insurance (especially as my salary wouldn’t entice even the most desperate media studies graduate), but how valuable can I be to the company if they were seemingly happy to make me redundant 3 months ago? Maybe I should ask for a promotion, they may install me as CEO. Mind you, if I was CEO then there’s no chance I would’ve received a bonus.

But I’m not so I’m going to take whatever I can out of this so-called world while I’m still able to. Hell, maybe there are even more stupid people out there I haven’t yet found who could give me somewhere to live, money when required and occasional happiness (and aren’t called my parents).

Wednesday 11/02/09

2009-02-11T23:11:00.001Z

I was absolutely knackered last week, after I couldn’t get into the office, or out of my drive, on Monday morning because of the snow. I know it was pretty pathetic as far as meteorological distasters go but it was enough to keep me inside playing Fifa so I was happy to go along with it. It wasn’t a sick day, nor a holiday, though, so I was required to make up the nearly 40 hours between Tuesday and Friday, which pushed my stamina to the very limit. I didn’t have football on Thursday night because of the weather and probably just as well, because I would’ve passed out through exhaustion just getting to Slough Power League.

I’m not really one for doing anything more than the bare minimum so to spend 10 hours at work for 4 days straight was the clerical equivalent of water boarding. My mind, which can only handle so many BBC podcasts per day, hated it and my body was aching after sitting down for so long. If ever somebody starts a marathon for people with no motor function I feel suitably trained now to compete effectively and possibly win any competition. So my mind was fading and my body was weak; I needed something to reinvigorate and perk me up.

I was in bed on Friday night by half 10. I was also in bed on Saturday by around 11. These are bedtimes for children and the elderly. However, to recover I had to sacrifice a bit of self respect and it was worth it. I slumbered around all weekend, forgot to get a haircut (because the barbers is an unnerving place to go, if you’re me) and tutted at the Arsenal game. Come this Monday I was refreshed but I was to get the biggest shot of mental caffeine that evening when I went up to London to see an evening of comedy. I was so revived by the experience I wrote a bit in my notebook, on the train home, about the experience,

“I’m on the way back from a gig that shows value for money if ever the phrase needed anecdotal evidence. With travel to it costing 70% more than the ticket to the event it was more a case of justifying the 50 mile round trip than having to make the experience a life affirming event, which, if I had bought the ticket on Ebay as many did, would have to be the case.

“Fortunately, for the price of a tenner (plus the obligatory and not-totally-insignificant SeeTickets booking fee) I got to see Al Murray and Michael McIntyre alongside Frank Skinner, who were all excellent despite the risk of them not giving a shit because they wouldn’t get paid much. In fact, I think a female comedy duo (not strictly true, as I didn’t recognise anything that could be described as comedy in their act) called Anna Crilly and Katy Wix were trying their best to make everyone feel like they’d paid well over the odds for the night, as their abortion of a sketch show failed to garner laughs from even the most retarded (or retarded looking) of audience members. They are the kind of people who perpetrate the myth (and it is a myth) that women are inherently unfunny).

“In spite of the testicle-free acts, who only made up about 20 minutes of the 3 hour show, the evening was pretty much fantastic and I can’t wait until I return next week, and then again every Monday until March.”

This pumped me up and I went into work the next day with a smile and a spring in my step. So the best recovery from a week of sleep deprivation and winter misery is an evening out to a show and the adoption of sleep patterns normally reserved for the old and infirm.

Wednesday 04/02/09

2009-02-04T23:19:00.000Z

I’ve ordered a few books recently, including the autobiography of Barack Obama (since I shouldn’t base my opinion on him just because of his skin colour, in a good way, as I’ve been doing up to now), in the hope that I can read as much as I can this year. Reading and watching TV comedy probably rank as my top 2 favourite out of work (because I only listen to podcasts at work) activities but both rank miles above watching films. Films annoy me. I can watch 3 hours worth of episodes of Father Ted in a row, so it’s not like I have a poor attention span, but stick me in front of a generic Hollywood flick and I’ll be itching to turn over to the paint drying channel after 30 minutes. It’s the same reason I haven’t been to the cinema in nearly 2 years.

The other day I watched Zach & Miri Make A Porno, an average film. I turned the film on at 7pm and by 8 I had turned it off. I went into the lounge and watched a whole football match I had no interest in. I then reluctantly ambled back into my room to see the rest of the movie, out of duty as much as anything. It wasn’t an abortion of a movie, just nothing that could keep me intrigued for more than 60 minutes. There must be something inherently offensive to me about films that would make me watch a whole bottom of the table game from La Liga rather than a Hollywood blockbuster.

I haven’t really thought too deeply about it but I think the problem ma be that I just don’t care about characters unless I have reason to. I saw the Dark Knight recently and spent the entire film hoping Batman would be killed in a gory and barbaric way, simply because his voice annoyed me. It was, however, inevitable he would prevail so with this knowledge and knowing I had 90 minutes of a 2 ½ hour long film (too long for anything) to go I was about ready to get up and leave. Of course, I was in the company of friends so conforming to social politeness I sat down as the Batmobile implausibly transformed into a motorbike-come-Warthog-from-Halo.

I wanted the Joker to win because he was the most believable character (not necessarily because he was well acted, just because he was the best written). He was a psychopathic monster but his behaviour was a darn sight more believable, given his history than anybody else in it. It’s probably why the Truman Show is my favourite film, and the same goes for sitcoms, my safety blanket of entertainment. I like Hyde from That 70s Show, Tony from Men Behaving Badly and Lister from Red Dwarf. Of course, this ‘mate of mine’ type can be fucked up, or turned into something completely predictable, like any typical 40% on Rotten Tomatoes flick that Seth Rogan’s in.

Because of the high budgets the films have to (with a few exceptions) appeal to the lowest common denominator, either by having mushy love stories, no brain testosterone filled action films or moronic clones of American Pie. TV does comedy much better than Hollywood, so why won’t anybody show Summer Heights High, the televisual equivalent of This Is Spinal Tap, in the cinema?

Friday 23/01/09

2009-01-23T21:46:00.000Z

I went for a run last night to shake off some cobwebs I had allowed to grow around me (figuratively and literally). The first after work 6-a-side football match had been called off due to lack of interest, which annoyed me a little as I had prepared myself for some physical exertion. I decided to channel this in another direction, one other than masturbation, so I went for a run.

I’m like a childhood abuse victim when it comes to running. As much as it tortured me in the past I can’t help but be perversely attracted towards a jog and the regret is compounded and partially justified when my knee inevitably aches afterwards. I can’t deny that, right knee aside, it has made my body feel stronger, particularly as another cold threatens my either lazy or absent immune system. It’s just a balancing act. It was retarded to go from no running to doing proper 10k races and not training like I did last year (so is doing no exercise from September to now but there you are, if anything this proves I’m a retard who can acknowledge his own retardation).

I didn’t go far, only around the main streets of Flackwell Heath as it was getting dark and had only my Barcelona shirt and black tracksuit bottoms, which I’m tempted to wear as an outfit for casual social occasions because it really is comfortable. The chavs are onto something, for once. I didn’t even finish, my shoelace came undone and my lungs gave in about 200 metres from the end but it felt good to have done something, even if my average weekly exercise is still well under the government’s suggested duration and intensity. Well fuck you, government, I pay taxes so I intend to use the NHS as much as I can from being unfit.

Even at the modest pace and distance I was getting happier just scurrying around the village. The endorphins were flowing and cheering me up in a way The 70s Show just can’t manage. A benefit of running is getting away with stuff that would be plain dangerous if you were walking, like running aimlessly across the road. I’ve also found staring at pedestrians to be allowed (or not punished at least). If a pretty girl is making her way down the path in the opposite direction it is perfectly permissible to gawp in her direction, and if she were to ask why I could merely say I was being careful not to run into her (I have it all thought through, like any well planned crime). As it is, they rarely acknowledge me at all so making up peculiar scenarios that will never materialise is just wasted brain energy when it should be directed to the legs.

I intend to go running tomorrow (in between watching FA Cup games and playing Fifa Xbox 360 games) and after work 6-a-side football should be on this week so maybe I can learn to love exercise once again, having said last week I can’t see myself doing any this year. And hopefully I can finally accept and forget the abuse it dealt me as a kid.

Thursday 15/01/09

2009-01-15T22:17:00.001Z

I went back to work last week and immediately got a nasty cold, rendering me more tired than when I finished for the New Year break I’d been waiting 4 months for. I’d intended to go back refreshed and prepared for getting back to the grind until my next booked day off, which looks like it will be in April since skiing (despite my enthusiasm to improve on what I achieved last year in Kitzbuhel) isn’t really viable, either financially or logistically as I’m going to at least two festivals this year and it’s always nice to have days off around those. So not the start I could’ve had.

As a result of the fatigue and money I spent over new year I’ve been cooped up at home trying to regain my energy levels and keep some cash in my bank account so I can afford to go to Glastonbury. Not disheartened, I have been sat playing Fifa 09 (finally getting some value out of the somewhat neglected Xbox I spent so long deliberating over) and watching That ‘70s Show (25 episodes in a week to be precise). I’m well aware we only get one life and this is exactly how I think everybody should spend the limited amount of time we have on this planet.

I’ve also thought about New Year resolutions. It’s too late to consider giving up alcohol (I had two bottles of 6.6% lager last night and a bottle of red wine to myself on Saturday night) so I may be on another fitness hunt as I was for the first half of 2008. Running seems out of the question as I am hopeless with knee injuries and it just gets demoralising (but the opiates help ease the pain, both emotional and physical) when, 500 metres into a 10k race, you feel the joint tighten and seize.

I’m thinking of doing something slightly more cerebral. Since going to see Robin Ince, Richard Dawkins and co at the Bloomsbury last month I’ve an increased interest in science, particularly physics. I may have started studying physics before I left uni but I don’t think I ever had a keenness to enlighten myself about it until now. I’m halfway through reading Simon Singh’s fascinating 550-odd page history of cosmology, ‘Big Bang’, and have just started ‘Bad Science’ by Ben Goldacre. I may be about 4 years behind schedule in gaining an interest in it all but better late than never. It never hurts to be informed. Unfortunately I cannot turn this increased knowledge of the history of physicians into a New Year resolution.

If I’m going to use my mind then I cannot think of many ways in which this can be properly applied. I deliberated for ages (I left my mp3 player at home today and had all day to think about it) and only came up with one idea. I will finally finish writing and recording the second ‘Freeman Is A Problem’ album. I have access to all manner of instruments at home (guitar, bass, drums, piano and even a saxophone should I need it and acquire the ability to play it) and can buy some relatively inexpensive equipment so it shouldn’t be too difficult, I figured (I can be quite blasé about the difficulty of tasks, hence my exam results). The only change I have made is that it won’t be an album, more like an EP.

So by the end of the year that’s what I think I will have achieved. 15 days in and all I have is a bunch of retarded lyrics I wrote 3 years ago. And if it turns out like the Awesome Snakes (look them up) then so be it.

Wednesday 07/01/09

2009-01-07T22:52:00.001Z

It’s been brought to my attention recently that I have a reputation as something of a miserable bastard. I could try to be funny and say this assertion makes me angry (which it kind of does), but instead it’s simply disheartening to have acquired such a status in folks’ minds. I was hoping to be well into my forties before people started calling me a cantankerous git (or the mid-to-late thirties at best). As a result, I’m thinking about changing a few things to make myself cheerful again.

I generally live my life as though it were a Reel Big Fish song. On the face of it I’m bouncy, excited and enthusiastic but deep down I’m seething with resentment and bitterness, angry at the world for not making everything go my way. Yes I have the vocal harmonies and vivacious basslines, but anyone who listens to the lyrics can see nothing but torment and despair. Ok, I’m probably not that extreme but maybe it’s worth tuning over from the ska and tweaking myself onto a different genre. Something less sarcastic, cynical and generally pessimistic.

So what kind of song should I try to be like? I could try to be a metal song, all shouting, distortion and hair. That way I’d be angry whatever way you look at me; not many ironic metal songs spring to mind (unless Iron Maiden were joking when they told me to take my daughter to the slaughter, which, frankly, I doubt). I’d quite like to keep my friends, though, so perpetual rage probably isn’t a great idea in that respect. Neither would the idea of embracing the emo music, which is like metal with the testosterone sieved out. Happiness and contentment seems like it would be the way to go. Complete and total delight.

Which doesn’t leave me anything but the option of being a Disney song, which are by-and-large the most cheerful (and at times depressing) songs on Earth. Something like ‘Hakuna Matata’ from the Lion King, which couldn’t be more positive if everyone who listened to it automatically won the lottery. It seems a good idea on first glance, heeding the advice of a talking meerkat and warthog double act. However, if you lived by the mantra, “No worries for the rest of your days”, it is quite possible that you could get yourself into all sorts of trouble. If you stopped worrying then it may not be long until the end of your days.

Open to interpretation by anyone, even children, ‘not caring about anything’ is careless advice from Disney. It may start with not worrying about seeing Eastenders because it’ll be on Iplayer in half an hour, but it could spiral out of control, with people taking their ‘not worrying’ to dangerous extremes, towards not worrying about red lights, paedophiles or terrorism. Such complacency would be an open invitation to the criminals of the world. So, Timon and Pumbaa, I shant be taking your advice. I’ll stick to Reel Big Fish’s suggestion of just getting pissed and telling people to fuck off. For the sake of Britain.

Wednesday 31/12/08

2008-12-31T10:46:00.001Z

Pretty much all my favourite bands released CDs this year, with only good results. The surprisingly good albums were by Less Than Jake and Foxboro Hot Tubs, Green Day’s newest side project. The unsurprisingly good records were by The Living End and Butch Walker.

Less Than Jake had been on the slide as far as studio albums went, but that was down to record label pressure. They ended up being released from Sire Records and set up their own label to release their newest CD, ‘GNV FLA’, which was something of a return to form. They’ll never top ‘Hello Rockview’ but as long as they release solid music I’ll keep going to see them (13 times and counting now).

The Foxboro Hot Tubs album, ‘Stop Drop and Roll!!!’ was a mystery. Green Day don’t bash albums out every 18 months (it was 4 years between Warning and American Idiot and it’s been over 4 years since then) so I’d almost forgotten about the band I listened to fairly continuously between the ages of 14 and 18. Just messing around drunk in the studio, the result is something that should have been released without the anonymity of an alias. This is a mighty fine homage to 60s rock and roll and it only bodes well for the new GD album which is due (at long last) next year.

The Living End and Butch Walker released expectedly good albums, despite both changing musical styles to do so. The Living End went proper hard rock, riffy and hooky, after Chris Cheney left the band citing lack of enthusiasm towards music. He wrote ‘How Do We Know’ and rediscovered his love for pushing the creative boundaries, which led to a whole album of songs that have sent the band in a bizarre 70s heavy metal direction. The only bad thing is that I had to import the CD from Australia, because no record label in the UK wants anything to do with TLE for some reason. Walker’s new CD, ‘Sycamore Meadows’, was also made after a troubled time during which his house burned down, resulting in the loss of all the songs he’d ever written. Turning this enormous negative into a positive, he created a beautiful album that turned me into a bigger fan of softer, acoustic music generally.

Other mentionable albums that I’ve enjoyed have been the by the King Blues, Death Cab for Cutie (which surprised me) and the weird as hell ‘A Band In Hope’ by the Matches.

As much as these new albums I’ve gotten into music that has been acclaimed for years but I’d never bothered listening to before, particularly stuff from the 80s, a decade I was fairly certain had nothing going for it in terms of musical legacy, save for Michael Jackson and Stray Cats. Happy to be proved wrong, I went out and bought albums by the Pretenders and Joe Jackson. Their new wave style isn’t something I would’ve embraced a couple of years ago but it’s fun music and that was enough for me. Plus I could play it fucking loud without my parents whinging.

I also started listening to Muse. I didn’t, and still don’t, like Black Holes and Revelations as it’s an overblown record that just comes out sounding messy. But Absolution is, in my opinion, a masterpiece. It’s a CD that I have to listen to from beginning to end to get the full effect from. The songs are good on their own but they fit like a sexy musical puzzle when put together. The same goes for Queens of The Stone Age’s 2002 record ‘Songs For The Deaf’. Acclaimed at the time, there’s no reason for me not to have paid attention to it before but I didn’t and it’s only now that I appreciate it for what it is.

Even if I’m 5 years (or 25 years) behind the popular musical scene I will still get into this stuff eventually. There were probably CDs released this year that I will start enjoying come 2013.

Sunday 21/12/08

2008-12-21T23:20:00.000Z

I won a tenner on the lottery this week. I’ve probably spent half a dozen times more than that since I entered the world of gambling, when I decided £2 a week was worth it. I don’t expect, rightly so, to win anything when I take part in it and all I’m doing is buying some hope. Hope and wishing is sometimes all you can do when life kicks you in the proverbial nuts (if somebody could send me a proverb where nuts are referred to) to keep you from complete meltdown. People do say ‘you buy your own luck’ so I’m hoping that me taking this saying as literally as possible will give me a greater chance of actually getting some.

I wasn’t so lucky last night. We considered £22 for a cab home from Maidenhead offensive so it was decided that we would walk home which is6 miles through fields, the eerily quiet Cookham and up the so-called hill (but would probably be better described as a cliff face) up to Flackwell Heath. After some vain attempts to hitchhike, where our outstretched thumbs looked more like signs of approval than displays of desperation, we trudged slowly but steadily home and I eventually crossed the threshold at the ‘not so much very late as very early’ time of 4am, nearly 3 hours after we had left the pub for the taxi office. I’ve done the walk a couple of other times and knew what to expect (pain and tedium once the drunken high wears off and you can only wish for sleep) so I accept no sympathy.

I was lucky to be drunk really. I’m sure that my untied laces (because it’s trendy) and odd walking gait (because I probably have rickets on account of not drinking milk) can’t have done my knees any good (the physiotherapy in the summer did nothing to fix them) so the anaesthetic properties of Foster’s sufficiently numbed the aching. Let’s face it, it can’t have been invented because it tastes good and things that are good for you often taste like crap.

Having only had about half a dozen drinks all evening, I wasn’t totally wrecked and was surprised when I woke up at 11 o’clock this morning to find myself with an absolutely splitting headache. Putting it down to excessive dehydration I went to the bathroom sink to drink. After feebly lapping water with my head upside down below the tap I was promptly sick (a watery ‘didn’t eat enough last night’ kind of sick, but just short of producing bile) into the toilet next to the sink. ‘Fuck it’ I thought, and went back to my room to sleep. I woke up again at 3pm, headache free and actually quite bouncy and energised. My body doesn’t quite feel right, though, and I’m quite drained. That said, it still wouldn’t be worth me spending over £20 just to avoid it.

Maybe if I carry on with the lottery I’ll eventually be able to afford a whole taxi ride home.

Wednesday 17/12/08

2008-12-17T00:08:00.001Z

On Sunday, I went to the new Wembley for the third time this year. Despite being the most expensive stadium in the history of the world ever, it’s not actually that nice. Compared to some genuinely glorious structures, such as the modern art masterpiece that is the Allianz Arena or the (and I’m biased here) beautiful curves around the Emirates Stadium, the arch seems a little pathetic when you actually see it in person. It just looks like an out of place bit of scaffolding that the builders left there after the invoice was paid.

A venue wont be the make or break of a good event, but it can certainly make a good time so much better. When I saw Green Day at Milton Keynes, they played to every single person in that bowl. Now that’s more the band’s doing than the location itself but it wouldn’t have been half as impressive if they’d performed in the Oxford Academy, which was, the last time I went (and wasn’t even called that), a crappy hole above a pub.

Like the Oxford venue, the London Astoria 2 (or Mean Fiddler as it briefly was) possessed the ability to knock down a 10/10 gig to a 9 purely because it seemingly wasn’t designed for human use. The sides of the dancefloor were a foot lower than the middle third, which meant that anyone standing at the sides, far from the stage, would not be able to see anything. And this wasn’t a gradual change, there was just a big middle section that you had to step onto (or fall off if you even thought about dancing there) to get a decent view.

I saw probably 10 gigs at that place and they were all dragged down by the poor audience area, or the sound engineering in the case of Nashville Pussy who had to leave for 20 minutes in the middle of their show because of a power cut onstage. Yes, the LA2 was a pretty crappy place, but unfortunately I was effectively forced there as my favourite bands would often play there. I saw Less Than Jake there 5 days running (and I missed one because of illness). But they wont in the future, I’m happy to say, as the whole building is being knocked down early next year.

I’m less happy to say that this building was also home, as you might expect, to the London Astoria where I’m not sure I’ve seen so many good bands play. Last year I saw Madness play a marvellous intimate (for them) set there. The Astoria, unlike it’s neighbour downstairs, the Astoria 2, has as good an all round view as you’re likely to get. I’ve been at the front barrier singing along to the Donnas, at the back gawping at the ability of Rancid’s Matt Freeman or just bouncing along at the side to any Less Than Jake song, who I’ve seen at at least half a dozen venues but never as good as at the Astoria.

Forgetting the obsession with LTJ, I will miss the Astoria when it’s gone. The upstairs venue because there aren’t many attractive settings for live music that have great acoustics and the downstairs venue because it’ll mean I’ll have to travel further than Tottenham Court Road to be slightly underwhelmed by a band I like.

Sunday 07/12/08

2008-12-07T22:48:00.001Z

‘Tis the season to be jolly, unless you’re a miserable, cynical bastard who can’t stand the gaudy fakeness of it all. Probably 5% of the people in the Christmas ‘celebrating’ world actually enjoy the time, and they all work as accountants for department stores (and even they’ll be struggling to swallow their turkey as their facial muscles spasm, crying about the non-existant Christmas bonus they received). Anyone else who gets excited about it is either a child or has the mental capacity of one. Even a few days off wont cheer you up, as they’re not spent chilling on a beach in Hawaii but spent wasted either in front of the telly or down the pub.

It seems something about Christmas just fucks me off, unless it’s a combination of various offending things:

- There is little worse than Christmas music. This was made perfectly clear while in Asda on Friday. Slade were a shit band who released a pop song that had a theme. Luckily for them, that theme has kept Noddy Holder in retarded hats for 35 years. Only Brian Setzer can record a good Christmas tune, and fortunately he’s made a few of them. So good they are, musically, that I will happily listen to ‘Hey Santa’ by the Brian Setzer Orchestra in the middle of July if the mood takes me. Who listens to love songs only around Valentine’s Day? A good song is a good song, and if you can wait 11 months before listening to it then you probably don’t hold the music in particularly high esteem.

- I don’t hold much regard for tradition. If tradition was so great then slavery would never have been abolished and we’d still have a 3rd rate English manager for our national football team. As a result I have never seen a Queens speech nor wait eagerly by my set for the other important event in the Western Yuletide calendar, the Coca Cola Christmas advert. Big frigging deal. Hold on, Kerry Katona’s adverising Iceland, quick, press record on the Sky+, the kids will wanna see this. After I find someone to have kids with, of course.

- Since I got a job I’ve no need for gifts either. The rest of the year I’m buying every piece of crap I could want anyway (rarely used Xbox 360, drumkit and iPod to name but three) and there’s little that a novelty tie that plays a ringtoney version of Jingle Bells could do to keep me awake on Christmas Eve. If I want FIFA 09, I’ll buy chuffing well buy it myself (and I have).

/end rant

Thursday 27/11/08

2008-11-27T16:30:00.001Z

Since I started this as a diary project, something I could look back on in years to come and read about the events and character of my youth, I figured it was about time I actually wrote a diary-like summing up of my day. I shall only do this once, though, as all other days follow a similar, if not scarily identical, pattern.

I get up early most days. It’s easier in the Summer because the dark mornings of November are really miserable, like waking up in a coffin. The later I get up (and, equally, the more sleep I get) the less time it takes for me to get ready. It’s a phenomenon that means that if I get up at half 6 I wont be ready to leave until half 7, because of the dozy daydreaming in the shower and enternal eating of toast (not in the shower, the toast would get wet). If I wake at 8 I can be out of the door by half past. The extra 90 minutes in bed is like a double shot of espresso and speed.

Living on top of a hill isn’t great. It means you live above the morning mist, and when the sun is blazing just above the horizon and the windscreen in my Peugeot 106 is foggy with breath you cannot see a fucking thing. If the tiredness wasn’t bad enough, the driving to work without being able to see the bonnet is like playing Grand Theft Auto after pouring dog piss into your eyes. Everything burns your eyes and you may kill people in the meantime. But time is short and I cannot afford to wait the 2 minutes for the engine to heat up and evaporate the condensation, oh no.

If I make it into work after presumably relying on sense of smell (what with the rest of my senses rendered useless) to get me through Bourne End and Cookham, I park up the car and walk the 500 metres across Maidenhead town centre to the office. Never is this without incident, whether it’s schoolchildren behaving like kids (i.e. pushing their friends in front of traffic) or like adulterers (i.e. shouting at any girl in the local vicinity to show them her ‘rat’). I recently met a friend from school on the way, which reassured me and concerned me at the same time. He was, at 8am, walking down Queen Street with a can of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, living the life of fucking Riley. Never have pity and awe been so closely identified in someone.

Work brings the already slow pace of the day down a few notches further. When the loudest thing you hear over an 8 hour period is the sound of air conditioning you don’t see what people complain about with solitary confinement because I practise about 40 hours of that every week. Not that I’m left with my own thoughts all the time, however (that would be dangerous). Apple, the brilliant and shameless marketing-over-matter company, have the Ipod, which (thanks to the ubiquity of Itunes) pumps daily fresh podcasts through it’s shitty little earphones and through to my brain. My Iphone is used as a means of accessing Facebook, Gmail and MSN without the bosses noticing. I love Apple, the career ruining idiots.

I spend the rest of the day either going to the kitchen to get a coffee (to keep me alert in a finger-on-the-button, literally, job) or going to the toilet (to excrete the gallons of coffee I consumed). I could stop pissing around and just get a tic tac box full of Pro Plus to keep me going rather than fill myself with diuretics but then I wouldn’t get to move off my seat all day. The fact is, both the kitchen and toilet are more entertaining than work (at least I get the chance to play Su Doku on my phone while I’m having a shit).

When I leave work I wander back to the car. I pass Wetherspoons and look at the sad old fuckers who are downing glasses of their own pensions at 4pm and think ‘hmm, that’ll be me soon’. Driving home, I blast the mp3 player and pump someone like Green Day as loud as I can cope with and sing along. Although lately I’ve found myself singing along to the backing vocals of my favourite songs, which must be a sign of something. I know I’ve not got huge self esteem but to be the Mike Dirnt of my own car is pretty low.

My evenings vary, but when I’m in the house I’ll normally do one of three things, all of which take place around the computer. I may play Football Manager on the PC, in which case there is no way I’m going into work before 9 o’clock the next morning. I may play bass guitar along to tunes I wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of keeping up with (curse you Less Than Jake, with your poppy hooks and over elaborate basslines). I may also watch episodes of a sitcom that I will have seen hundreds of times before but still secretly hope that this time the main character doesn’t do the stupid thing he’s done the previous ten dozen times. After such excitement of an evening I go to bed. But before bed, I brush my teeth lazily and inadequately. But that’s alright because I then floss my teeth equally inadequately and as a result my beige biters remain so.

Monday 24/11/08

2008-11-24T23:29:00.001Z

It took feeling like shit at work (rather than bored, which is more common) to realise that it was a lack of healthy food, fruit and veg mainly, which made me feel as crap as I did. It was months since I’d eaten an apple and even longer since I’d consumed a banana (though bananas are as sickly sweet to taste as they are disturbing to put in the mouth in the first place, not knowing where to look). I’m unhealthy and were it not for the fact I’m vegetarian (and getting more into it; I’ve removed milk and now use dairy free margerine, although eggs and cheese is tougher to exclude from my diet) and thusly immune to massive weight gain I would be sporting a colossal gick (or whatever the male ‘gunt’ is).

I haven’t exercised properly for weeks. Between March and July I had been as active as I’d ever been since school, competing in long distance running races (which I thought I hated but my polar-like opinion flipped back to positive when I realised I wasn’t under pressure to do well, which I’m not great at coping with). Then I got injured, then a bit busy socially, then a bit depressed and as a result I’ve been doing little, sat on my arse for the last couple of months when I should’ve been running or kicking a football. It has marked the lap point that has seen the last 18 months go pretty much full circle.

In July 2007 I didn’t really know what I was going to do in life. I had little intention of returning to university so I was given not-very-long to consider which alternative to take. I chose the most comfortable and a potentially profitable route if I chose to persue it. It seems, in hindsight, that I chose the wrong option but I couldn’t have foreseen the collapse of the banking industry (I decided not to get a degree in economics) but that doesn’t make it any easier to not regret decisions.

As a result I’m where I was when it all buggered up the first time. I’ve not saved enough in the interim and I’m still living at home (which isn’t wholly unpleasant when you have Sky Sports on tap and a fully stocked (with crap mostly) fridge available whenever I choose to get up from the sofa. Life could indeed be a great deal worse but there’s nothing worse than feeling it’s been wasted. You only have a certain amount of time here and you try to get to a ‘comfortable’ level as quickly as possible so it really fucks you off when that gets interrupted.

I had two oranges on Saturday and it wasn’t long before I perked up. If only the doctors and medical advisors would tell us that all this stuff is good for us.

Tuesday 11/11/08

2008-11-11T22:40:00.001Z

I tend to get obsessed with things I really enjoy and appreciate and run with it long after the fun has stopped and the only thing left is a nagging sense of ennui. This manifested itself at uni by watching the entire 10 seasons (over 200 episodes) of Friends over the course of a couple of weeks. I enjoyed it, I figured fairly wrongly at the time, so why not immerse myself into it as much as possible? If this was a one off I could have ignored the issue and just got on with my life, but during my life I have done the same with The Simpsons and Two Guys and a Girl so there was a precedent.

I genuinely enjoy watching Less Than Jake play live. My continued support of them isn’t (although it could be) an odd claim to be in the Guinness Book of Records; given the option of seeing anything musical (short of watching The Living End play a set chosen by me while supported by Butch Walker) I would choose to see LTJ play their usual setlist. I decided to forego seeing the reincarnation of Jesus (often misinterpreted as Rage Against the Machine’s comeback) at Reading Festival and see LTJ for the 12th time instead. For some reason I had more fun at that show than I could’ve done watching Jesus himself that evening. Does familiarity mean there can be less excitement than experiencing something for the first time? I don’t necessarily think so, although Friends does garner limited giggles after the hundredth time on E4.

There are fans on the web of a US radio programme called Loveline, a talk show where listeners (generally teenagers and young people) can ask for advice about personal problems. On the air since 1982 it has a huge fanbase thanks to the comedian Adam Carolla, who hosted the show between 1995 and 2005. Alongside Dr Drew, the show’s addiction and sexual health specialist, Loveline genuinely entertained (and continues to entertain) people and fixed all their psychological and sexual problems. Some problems are frequent queries, normally centred around something like the link between sexual abuse and subsequent fear of anal sex. It’s dangerous, though, as it turns any long time listener into an amateur Freud, secretly diagnosing those around them with strange sexual compulsions and potential drug addictions without having the information necessary to make any sort of reasoned judgement.

Carolla’s popularity led to people recording the show every night between 2001 and 2005 and sharing it on the internet. There’s no other programme, especially in the days before podcasting (oh, those primitive times…) whose fanbase would adore their so much as to upload and share well over 1500 hours (over 10 weeks worth, if played back-to-back) of radio mp3s. While I’m slowing plodding my way through them, one by one, it goes to show that I’m not unusual in becoming an adoring fan of something and running with it.

That said, to get close to hearing Less Than Jake live for 1500 hours, I would have to go to over 1000 of their gigs over the course of my lifetime, working out at one gig every 3 weeks for the next 60 years. I think I would do that.

Monday 03/11/08

2008-11-03T22:45:00.000Z

If I could afford it and could generally cope with the frantic pace of life (compared with the near metropolitan Flackwell Heath, where literally nobody tricked or treated us this Halloween), I would really like to move to London. The main draw would be that most of what entertains me (football, music and comedy) happens in London, and most of what doesn’t entertain me (bland tedium, family bickering, Maidenhead’s nightlife) happens here.

To get to the gigs and matches I take the train. I would drive but it’s an effing nightmare to park and is, frankly, slower. I will go up to Beaconsfield and hop on the next ride to Marylebone, which is a 3 quarter of an hour trip which can’t be spent looking at the surroundings because they are pretty shit (when you’ve been past Wembley Stadium for the upteenth time you realise quite how ugly and soulless it really is). I need some sort of mental stimulus, and books and mp3 players can only get you so far on a long train ride, I find.

For me, reading requires a certain calm, and the atmosphere of a train just doesn’t provide that. I could probably keep it up for about 20 minutes before the little bastards with their mobile phones that barely emit sound yet are somehow treated like a 1980s boombox get so completely on my tits that I just put the book down. If it’s not chavs and babies (who are so loud, incessant and irritating that I’m surprised chavs haven’t started carrying them around to annoy the public; oh wait, yes they have, the pregnant benefit-pilfering twats) then it’s motion sickness. I’m moving backwards on a seat that has had a million commuters arses secreting their million brands of sweat into it trying to read about Richard Feynman, of course I feel unwell. I couldn’t go anywhere, move to another part of the carriage, because the rail system only just allows for people to be inside a train, so for me to give up my seat because of a book would be suicide.

Mp3 players are almost as bad. When you’re squashed like sardines into the coach that’s only slightly more depressing than the line to Auschwitz it is hard to move without feeling like a burden to the other passengers, who must also suffer the experience. I don’t want my mp3 to be stolen so to keep it safe I put it in my inside coat pocket, but to retrieve the device I must contort myself so as not to elbow, knee or in any way contact those around me, because they could take it as ‘starting’ and I like my face in it’s current formation. So having not touched a soul in taking it out I choose a track or podcast and put it back as carefully as I removed it. Of course, the volume isn’t loud enough, as some fucker’s child has started crying so I have to go through the whole rigmarole again, but this time inadvertently kicking the attractive lady opposite who then stares daggers at me and returns to her Heat magazine after my inaudible apology goes unnoticed.

So to save me from the endless train journeys, it seems I may as well move to London. Tube journeys are short enough that you don’t have to worry about finding somewhere to sit or to stand without leaning your head so it looks like someone has untied your neck ligaments.

Wednesday 22/10/08

2008-10-22T23:23:00.002+01:00

Unlike my namesake, Joseph Fritzl, I wasn’t “born to rape”. In fact, I wasn’t born with any future hobbies in mind, which is probably why my life is rather dull right now. Ennui caused by inactivity (or maybe it’s the other way round) is seemingly constant in the background of my life. Thankfully, to break this up I occasionally go on unscheduled binges of overexertion that claw back a slight piece of hope from the increasing depression in my bleak existence.

Every now and again there are moments where I make more effort to do something than I’d have achieved if I’d run a marathon, while holding a washing machine with my legs tied together. I got off my arse and did something this weekend, when I spent 24 hours buzzing round like a blue-arsed fly who lost his keys. It started on Friday evening after work, when all I want to do is nothing and chill, when I saw a message inviting me to London that evening. I was going to go there on the Saturday to watch the football anyway so thought it’d be good fun and save me a trip the day after.

Friday night was a ramble and a shambles. With friends, I went to East London to a house (crappy ex-council flat) party full of people I didn’t know drinking booze I don’t like. Thankfully my festival wristbands, which I’ve considered removing due to their general filthiness after so long (I’ve had one well over 2 years, clinging to my arm), there was good conversation to be had regardless and despite the hurdles, including a real hurdle through a window onto a balcony, such is the way parties go, (from the kitchen, to the bathroom and through the window, it’s a common journey) I had a good time, but the night hadn’t finished, even at 1am.

I’d been up for nearly 20 hours but that didn’t stop us attempting to get into a club (mainly because everyone else had been awake for around 3 hours that day, bloody students) in Brick Lane, which felt like a Tunisian market square, full to the brim in the middle of the night bustling with drunkards and idiots. Naturally, after the long walk through to cold to the club we found it closed. Alas, the night was over, apart from the walk home. I don’t normally whinge when walking home after a night out but it was a poor journey back. I understand late night East London isn’t the most sociable place to go back on the 45 minute walk back we had been accosted by a women who wanted a tenner for a cab, we’d been called homosexuals and were freezing to death in spite of the air pollution.

That night I slept, drunk, on a couch with an awkwardly small blanket to keep me warm. Because of the cold I woke up frequently so put on BBC News to keep me amused (even drunks are interested in current affairs). I continued to fall asleep and wake up again, each time illogically remembering something like Andy Murray had won a hard fought tennis match and that oil prices were steadily falling. And they say you learn nothing from booze.

The next day I had a surprisingly enthused spring in my step. After saying goodbye to my mate at Oxford Street and with time to spare before the Arsenal game, I resolved to walk to the match, which was 5 miles away. I did so, via Islington Sainsburys (as it’s one of 2 supermarkets I know in London) to buy some lunch, landing in my seat in the stadium in very good time. My knee was fucked after the walk but the day was beautiful and was the kind of day that made you feel happy to be alive. Unlike the match, which tried it’s best to give me a heart attack (if sighing indignantly can give you a heart attack) but eventually Arsenal won so I was content.

After the game I slowly (trains’ fault, not mine) made my way back home. I got in the door no more than 24 hours after I’d left and had proven to myself how it’s possible to see and experience new things in no time at all. I could’ve done the easy thing (for me) and ignored the invite and had a comfy night at home but I’d made the effort and all my exertions had been vindicated. I don’t do stuff like that enough.

I like doing stuff, I just don’t like the fact that I’m too lazy to accept more invitations, even if I’m fully aware that I’ll enjoy it.

Wednesday 15/10/08

2008-10-15T23:11:00.001+01:00

For some reason, lately it’s not taken much to get really down. The increasing darkness of the early starts (I go into work late one day a week so I don’t have to suffer it as often), the ever more annoying and claustrophobic climate at home and getting injured at football is enough to drive me to despair. I think I may even be getting more cynical and sarcastic than usual.

When I get miserable and depressed, to fill the emotional void, as many people do, I buy lots of stuff. This is in the mistaken, conscious and still ignored belief that having it will make me happier for some reason. Consequently, I own many DVDs that I don’t really want and have never seen but bought at the time because I assumed it would improve my mood.

Only this week did I buy the 6 season (93 episodes) box set of the little known cop mystery show Monk. It hadn’t been a justified purchase. I could neither afford it nor had I seen enough episodes to make a decent judgement on whether I should buy it or not. I’d only seen 2 episodes of it before ordering it. I’ve seen more episodes of Songs of Praise, and I shan’t be buying the box set of that (unless I need some material for bonfire night).

My purchases aren’t limited to digital media, either. Along with my Xbox 360 (and all manner of goodies to go with it, doubling the price of the machine), to keep me happy I bought, without any kind of reasoning or forethought, a drum kit and a table football table. I’ve had both of these a year and they’ve not seen enough action to justify their place in my room. I don’t have enough space to play the drums and not enough arms to play table football. As a result I’m no happier, but vastly poorer, like an investment banker who put all his money in Icelandic shopping empires.

I say none of what I buy improves my mood but that’s not quite true. I buy plenty of books, normally non-fiction travel writing or memoirs, for tuppence on Amazon marketplace. The books, such as Richard Feynman’s which I’m reading now and am very happy with, are immensely good value for money. I also use the site to buy music albums I can’t find on illegal torrent websites. I can’t have spent more than 15 quid on 5 CDs in the last week, so whether they are good or bad I haven’t really lost anything (compared to Monk, anyway, if that turns out to be crap). I have enough faith in Joe Jackson and Midnight Oil (products, although completely dissimilar, of the 80s, which I’m discovering is a better decade for music than I gave it credit for) that their 5-star rated albums will impress me enough to not throw the soon-to-be obsolete discs away.

I wonder if the route to happiness is through the Amazon marketplace, like an odd sort of backdoor to nirvana. I’m guessing not.

Wednesday 08/10/08

2008-10-08T22:07:00.000+01:00

I think I’m getting some sort of early onset middle-agedness. I don’t really like the idea and would like to be young and optimistic (I don’t recall ever being cynical before, ever) forever but there comes a time when you stop doing things that could be described as youthful and mellow out ready to die, and my time has arrived about 20 years before I expected it to.

Although I may not have been a fan of what was played I used to always listen to music on the radio. I genuinely used to listen to Kiss FM for hours after school, at the clearly confused age of 15, with it’s accessible ‘street’ and ‘urban’ tunes. After that it was Radio 1 which, in spite of playing only 3 songs on repeat, kept me mildly amused while I was working in a dull, shitty factory for the whole summer after GCSEs. These made me realise that while pop music may be good (hey, I dig McFly and Green Day so it’s not a bias against popular music) it is ruined by the ‘we’ve only got 6 songs to play you all day’ nature of it. This also goes for music televesion, too, which had a knack of defiling any song that was pumped through it’s transmitters.

The only music radio I have time for is Planet Rock, which utterly supports my ‘old before my time’ theory. Any station that churns out Steely Dan and Aerosmith should not be listened to by anybody under the age of 35. Weeks of decorating at home with the stereo blaring up meant I had nothing to do but to appreciate the skill with which The Who constructed Baba O’Riley. And then hate it because the intro is fucking irritating the billionth time.

Partly pressured by the difficulty of listening to music at work, I began putting LBC and podcasts onto my mp3 played. I’ve fallen out with LBC, despite it’s accessibility. While I am happy to hear people spout opinions that clash with my own, when they are inconsistent and factually flawed they become less than entertaining, and this is what happened with LBC. So I turned off Nick Ferrari and plugged into the Adam Carolla Show, which is literally the greatest current radio show in the world (that I’ve heard, there are probably better but I’m not going to check each and every one to make sure). He and his co-presenters record 4 hours of material a day and it all goes free on his podcast. It’s all light hearted, borderline offensive (for a morning radio show there are a lot of racial slurs, between presenter insults and ‘fuck yous’) and very very funny. And better than Chris Moyles playing the new Avril Lavigne track to death.

I went to Asda the other day and bought 108 bottles of premium lager. They were on offer so I felt it was fair game to buy as many as I did and didn’t expect any judgement for my entirely reasonable actions. That was until I took the crates to the checkout.

“Are you drinking all that this evening?” said the checkout guy as he scanned them through.
“We’ll see,” I said, but it was probably unlikely, given it was already 8 pm and I would’ve had to drink a bottle every 2 minutes to fit all of them into an evening. He pointed towards an aisle.
“Well, there are some more beer offers over there, if you’re interested,” he suggested.

Now, I don’t have a blotchy red nose nor do I use urine for aftershave so I don’t think I could’ve been easily mistaken as a drunk. I though it odd, and probably against Asda’s policy, that he would encourage anybody to purchase more than a healthy quantity of lager, as if my 9 dozen bottles weren’t quite enough to satisfy my obvious, rampant alcoholism. If I hadn’t left so quickly afterwards maybe he could’ve directed me to the ‘Rusty Rrazor & Aids Infected Syringe’ aisle.

Perhaps I’m not growing old before I should be. My mid life crisis may be realigning itself as my body doesn’t think I’ll live much further than 40. If Asda staff have anything to do with it, I may be dead before that.

Wednesday 01/10/08

2008-10-01T22:55:00.001+01:00

Is a bit of peace and quiet too much to ask? The worst thing about returning home having spent time living away is that any independence and free will you may have acquired is soon stomped into the ground like a loosely held Twix bar. I’ve found this, along with the obligation to get up before 7 every bloody morning, makes me feel like I’ve taken 3 steps back to school having gone one step forward towards a promising future. I shouldn’t moan because it’s my fault but fuck it I will anyway.

When I left home the first time I had absolutely no discipline over my behaviour and I realised I was pretty much useless at living without people around me to guide me. I’d go 2 days without eating just because I wouldn’t be bothered about cooking anything (or just to pick up a packet of crisps) and would go to sleep at 6am because there was no reason not to (and because I’d watch lots of episodes of Friends when I’d get in from a night out). I’d rather not return to that; in spite of the obvious attraction of a nocturnal, anorexic lifestyle.

It was a major shock to the system. I have more respect for my parents than to make a racket and stay up playing loud music until the early hours, but the odd evening when I could just blast the bass amp up and rock out until 3am would be lovely from time to time. Or at least have the choice as I can’t see myself wanting to after waking up at half 6 the previous morning. The worst thing is being nagged. “Do this… do that… stop farting…”. I thought I’d lost that and I’d be treated like an adult after the age of 17 but alas, as long as you’re their child, you’ll be treated as one.

I’ve been offered to move in with friends but I’d be worried about having enough cash to pay the bills and rent without the cushion of a student maintenance loan (do they do ‘lazy bum maintenance loans’? oh yeah, the dole). I have a job which would easily cover the rent but not allow for saving much, which is clearly a priority now the recession has hit the country so badly that Tesco have announced an increase in profits. It’d be utterly retarded to even consider it.

I’d find it difficult to move out if I had to now, though. Although I pay a pleasantly small amount of rent to my parents, I’m far too used to having my washing done and being treated like a hotel guest. I did, however, wait 6 weeks at uni for the chance to come home and get my clothes cleaned. For some reason it seemed easier than walking the 300 yards to the launderette (even now, little under 18 months later I can see that as the laziest thing I could do). I also like having food bought for me, which I’d never be able to manage. I’d end up living off crisps and die, painfully and alone, of scurvy by Christmas.

Thursday 25/09/08

2008-09-25T20:47:00.000+01:00

I’ve started swimming again recently, for the first time in about 10 years. My return to the pool was initiated after a fun visit to a Spanish water park in the Summer, although I did get an infection from it and spent the resulting time in the campsite trying to sleep off the illness. It was worth it, though, and this and a suggestion from my physiotherapist that swimming is good for building and strengthening weak muscles without straining them was a clincher in getting back into speedos.

I never really liked swimming; I remember once hiding underneath a desk at school when asked if I would compete in the swimming gala. It was a question based on false assumptions, and ultimately led to my own humiliation. Being a decent runner, it was assumed that I could swim equally as well but all bets were off once I dived into the pool. And when I say ‘dived’, I mean ‘leaped hopelessly’. I was just shit and the easiest way to not be shit at something is by avoiding it for 10 years.

What metaphorically threw me back in the deep end was my injured knee. Running is too high impact for it and cycling doesn’t stretch the muscles enough so swimming was seen as the perfect exercise for the joint. And it really is hard work on the muscles. The first week, at Marlow’s 10m pool, I literally managed no more than a dozen lengths before giving up due to cramp (worst pain in the world, particularly in a pool, everyone would agree) and exhaustion. Half an hour after leaving the pool I was still sweating like a chubby kid chasing an ice cream van, and no, I hadn’t wondered into the leisure centre’s sauna. If only.

The second time (hey, there’s no backing out of this, I’m committed, much more than kung fu) we went to Maidenhead’s Magnet leisure centre instead, so called because there is no logical reason for you to return yet you are still unwillingly drawn to it. That said, the pool is at least four times the size of Marlow’s, which is little more than an overchlorinated garden pond in comparison. The size increase was overwhelming. I could barely see the other end of the pool, let alone swim to it.

Eventually, after acclimatising to the chilling 30 degree water I swam about a bit and ultimately reached the other end. My confidence grew after a few of these tentative, slow doggy-paddle lengths and I tried doing two at a time. Then the cramp set in (I’ve no idea how to prevent this) and I was forced to hobble through the water to the nearest edge and look pathetic. And the annoying thing about cramp is that it’s incessant and wont stop until you give in, get out and go to the communal showers, where the embarrassment continues when an unnecessarily hairy man showers stark bollock naked next to you. Or maybe it’s just the Magnet.

I should join a private gym. I bet their pools don’t cause cramp. And the showers are probably mixed. Hopefully.

Tuesday 16/09/08

2008-09-16T23:12:00.001+01:00

After going to shows by the Reverend Horton Heat and Stray Cats this summer I’ve now seen pretty much every band I want to see who are still currently touring. Aside from seeing Butch Walker live, who I will eventually get to see even if I have to go abroad to do so, I can’t see myself going to as many gigs as I have done in the past as I’ve simply run out of music to see, which is good as I can’t really afford to go to many more gigs after the thousands I must’ve spent watching the 80+ groups over the last few years. It’s only a shame I didn’t have the foresight to become a journalist for the NME and could’ve got into all those gigs for free.

As I’ve run out of music to see live I’ve replaced it with ‘more-comfortable-in-every-possible-way’ watching live comedy. I spend my evenings watching old episodes of practically every sitcom or panel show ever made in Britain. If I have to see a film, I can only watch comedy movies, as my patience and attention fades after about an hour and unless it’s entertaining me in a very obvious way of having every line a joke then I tend to fade as it goes on. To be honest, I barely had the stamina for Airplane, such is my struggle with films.

Live comedy is entirely different to films and TV, though. It entertains by talking to you and making you genuinely interested in what is going on. Not so much the funny side of it, the storytelling of somebody like Daniel Kitson, who made 2 hours without an break fly by when I saw him in May, engrosses and makes me wonder why more people aren’t interested in this sort of entertainment and instead go to the cinema to watch the latest American Pie ripoff.

It compares well to live music, too. For a start, you get a seat, which is always a good thing especially as someone with a dodgy knee. Secondly, unless the act is really lazy, they will do a different set to the one you saw on their last tour, so there’s no Green Day-esque ‘play-the-hits-until-the-world-stops-turning’ letdown when you hear the same joke for the third time. Mind you, I’d rather see Less Than Jake a dozen times than any stand up comedian so maybe it’s a case of choosing the act rather than the medium of choice.

Thursday 11/09/08

2008-09-11T22:42:00.001+01:00

This week I found out that my grandmother has walked along the wing of a flying aeroplane, carried a live lion down Slough high street and has performed a trapeze from a helicopter. While she hasn’t done any of these things recently it does throw up a thought that I may never do anything as cool in my entire life. Hell, give me 5 lifetimes and I couldn’t match that kind of stuff.

That said, I wouldn’t want to do most of those things. I wouldn’t want to carry a lion down Slough high street; it’s far too dangerous (Slough that is, not the lion). I’m no fan of sitting inside aeroplanes let alone walking down the wing of them and helicopter gymnastics hold no lure. I’d like to have an unforgettable thrill but with no risk or fear, which are pretty much wholly incompatible.

It’s been a thought lately. Not so much pondering the meaning of life as I know that it’s a pointless question unless you’re into religion or other cultish behaviour. I’m more keen on leaving a legacy that’ll impress my celebrity offspring when they appear on ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’. If they discover that I worked in an office from the age of 19 until 70 and dropped dead shortly after there’ll be an irritated moan when they curse their father for not being as cool as their great-grandmother. They’ll probably look at their pet dog and see more achievements. I can’t lick my own nuts.

The fact of the matter is that I am mediocre in almost every way. I don’t really have a skill that I could exploit for self pride. It’s not an attention seeking thing as I am more than happy to take the periphery of any situation. I’d rather be Michael Collins than Neil Armstrong. Not that I’ll get the choice.

Speaking of children, maybe I’ll just live through their achievements. It works for some, sort of. If I have a son I’ll give him a football at the age of 3 (days) and teach him everything about it and try to convince him that the ball is his third testicle and he must take it everywhere with him. If I have a daughter she will start learning to be a gymnast not long after conception and her delivery will consist of her somersaulting down the birth canal into the arms of the midwife. Then, and only then, will I be proud.

Tuesday 02/09/08

2008-09-02T21:53:00.000+01:00

I’ve been in full time work for a year now and it’s yet to get me down, I may even prefer it to university. At uni I had nobody to be responsible for but myself. Sadly I don’t give much of a shit about myself so I drifted rather pathetically into a rut of procrastination and misery. I like the freedom of living alone but not doing anything but watching TV is not what I paid 3 grand to do and isn’t as fun as it sounds after 7 months. I mean that.

Now that I’m working, I enjoy the challenge of feeling like a responsible part of a team (even if my cog is noticeably smaller than the rest and it has to start cranking at half 6 every morning). I’ve learned some really important life skills I wouldn’t get at uni and will probably be better off as far as work goes come 2011 than if I’d gone through and actually got a degree, which is comforting. The boost to my self-esteem has manifested itself in generally being happier, even if I’m capable of being typically sarcastic and cynical as ever.

I never got the student lifestyle. I like a drink but the drinking chants (with some exceptions) are generally retarded and snake bite and black makes me vomit when I so much as smell it. There’s also nothing ironic about liking the Vengaboys. They’re shit and you’re just too afraid to admit to being a fan of them. It might have just been Loughborough, with it’s high jock and nobhead contingent, but it’s the only uni I went to so it stands in my eyes. Hmm, bit ranty there.

I make much more use of my free time. I make sure that I try and fit whatever activities I can now afford into my slightly tighter schedule. I’ve seen more football matches, music (seen Less Than Jake half a dozen times since last September) and comedy gigs in the last year than I managed in my life up to 2007 and have probably met as many new people as I did at uni, And if I can keep this up until I retire I’ll be doing well. Only half a century or so left now.

Wednesday 27/08/08

2008-08-27T19:45:00.000+01:00

If I had known how utterly exhausted I would be after Reading then I may have booked some time off work instead of going into the office less than 24 hours after returning back home. Irritable and apathetic almost as soon as I walked through the doors on Tuesday morning, the only saving grace is that I only had my appraisal 3 weeks ago so my failure to actually do anything this week should be forgotten by the next review in January. I do see it as something of an achievement to have made it out of my front door at all that morning, given the previous week.

The effects were rather instantaneous. Arriving on Wednesday last week, I was asleep at 8pm on Thursday on account of feeling terrible, and I ended up getting 12 hours sleep. I think it may be unreasonable to suppose that I should go to festivals because I could get a decent night’s kip, but I had a similar experience in Spain for Benicassim too. It’s an odd habit as I got around 6 hours sleep on the night I came back from Reading. Maybe I should just sleep in the garden; set up an all night firework display, unroll my far-too-small sleeping bag and try to sleep on tins of Tesco Value baked beans.

When I was awake I saw quite a few bands for once. Nothing compared to my friends, whose music tastes correspond much more to the festival line-up, but I went to see bands they suggested such as Frank Turner and the Ting Tings. The benefit of my music taste, which totally disregards Radio 1 and the like, is that songs that could be considered fucking annoying when played a dozen times an hour by Jo Whiley don’t get more irritating than a skin rash that preaches evangelical Christianity. As a result, I quite like ‘That’s Not My Name” and shall continue to do so until I get the album.

Reading Festival must take a couple of years from my life expectancy every time I go. As healthy as vegetarianism and sport can be, the annual week of loud music, instant noodles and carcinogenic bonfire smoke must undo any of my physical achievements for the other 51 weeks of the year. By that reckoning, and given I’ve been going for 5 years, I’ve lost a decade of my life already and at the current rate I’ll be dead by the age of 36. Oh well, I’d say it’s worth it and there’ll be no need to spend extra on a cremation. Just throw me on the fires with a gas canister.

Tuesday 19/08/08

2008-08-19T23:00:00.000+01:00

I like to think that I prepare for things well and my constant fretting in the hours before going on a trip merely ensures everything runs according to my best laid plans (I think I’d do dress rehearsal if I could, just to make sure everybody knew what was going on). I have a need to know all the possibilities and have potential backup plans should the need arise. Which is why my organisation for Reading has been so utterly hopeless and stressful as a result.

Until last week it hadn’t crossed my mind as a meaningful consideration. I was still living post-Benicassim, where I was only just getting used to being back at work and having that one sole thing to concentrate on. Work is a routine and I liked that. It required little effort to arrange and I could turn off at the end of the day. I figured I could leave it a few days to arrange to go to another festival.

Around 18 months ago I bought a gazebo. Fully 6 months before Reading Festival, when demand for the temporary, pole-based structures is at its lowest. Naturally, that year they banned gazebos at Reading Festival, deeming them inconsiderate to other campers as a gazebo takes up too much space. Seeing the blatant error of their ways (and the weather forecast) they changed the rule and allowed them again. Having been to uni and back since I bought the gazebo, it obviously moved from the space under my bed where I put it when I bought it. So I had to find it, with 2 evenings after work to search.

This was to the detriment of proper packing. My friends kept depositing tents at me as I was going to save them a place at the campsite, but I’d have been lucky to get to the music before Metallica on Sunday night at the rate I was going. I had literally searched the entire house looking for something I’d bought 18 months earlier so I didn’t have to rush around and find every Homebase and Robert Dyas in Bucks, Berks and Oxfordshire to try and get a gazebo 4 days before the festival (which I’ve done before). My innate preference for order and arrangement had gone out the window long before, along with my patience.

Eventually it turned up, after the better part of 5 hours of looking over the course of 2 evenings, hidden at the bottom of a long discarded pile of clothes that even Oxfam would decline because they’ve been out of fashion for so long. The cardboard box had been exposed to the damp that encompasses the room and had developed mould to such an extent that the only comparable smell was that which my car stunk of when I left a packet of Quorn sausages in it(only to find a boot full of maggots a fortnight later).

I just hope it rains enough at Reading Festival to justify using the fucking thing now I’ve found it.

Thursday 14/08/08

2008-08-14T21:56:00.001+01:00

I don’t know whether it’s the fact that I’ve been to a music festival already this summer, the fact that there aren’t many bands I really give a shit about or whether I’m just getting too old for it, but I’m not especially looking forward to Reading Festival this year. If anything, I’m more concerned that I’ll be too tired when I go back to work after it. Last year was something of a turning point where I realised that, after 4 years, there is a time when you probably shouldn’t be sharing a campsite with people who are getting drunk on two cans of shitty lager and celebrating their, unbeknownst to them, meaningless GCSE results.

Benicassim is a much more mature festival than Reading. People still have their fashions to follow and overhyped bands to see, which is entirely fair, but they balance that out with a healthy respect for fellow festivalgoers. I’ll respect an 80s throwback new rave nutcase who looks like an idiot but keeps himself to himself. I wont respect a wannabe emo who screams with joy every time he hears the sound of human mutilation when gas canisters explode 15 feet from your tent. I’d also think twice before leaving my passport, wallet and phone in my tent at Reading.

I am excited about literally one band at Reading this year – Goldfinger in the Lockup Tent. I missed them in 2004 and have been aching to see them since, but does it justify the £170 ticket… nay. Other bands I enjoy who are playing, Less Than Jake and Dropkick Murphys, I’m fairly ambivalent about as they come here so often they make the sunrise look like an occasional event. I will see them again in the future so there is little point in raising a heart rate over a band I will likely see a hundred times before I die.

Then there are the bands I've been told I'd be an idiot for missing. Apparently it's sacrilege to say a bad thing about Rage Against The Machine, who (entirely understandably) wouldn’t be half as hyped up if they hadn’t spend 7 years on hiatus. They’re a decent band who play decent songs but to say they’re the best headliner in Reading’s history (as many have said) will need to be proven to me. But music’s entirely subjective and my opinion is no more valid than anyone elses.

The only thing I do look forward to about Reading is spending time with my mates; I expect I'll spend most of the time at the campsite drinking in the circle of chairs. This has been a really miserable entry, I should probably cheer up before the festival. I’ll put the new Less Than Jake album on.

Thursday 07/08/08

2008-08-07T22:56:00.001+01:00

After seeing Reverend Horton Heat last night at one of the best gigs I have been to for pure good, energetic fun there aren’t many bands in the world who I need to see to make my life complete. For me, seeing a band live enhances (or if they play terribly, destroy) nearly every emotion I’ll about that band in the future. I will never listen to “I Can’t Surf” in the same way after I heard it last night performed by the Rev, even if it only has 2 lines repeated through the song, “I can’t surf, and neither can you”. Profound genius.

The gig last night had a stange atmosphere. The crowd was a mixture of old Stray Cats fans from the 80s who have since put on 5 stone and gone bald (and that was just the women… ha ha) and people who really believe that they are straight from the 1950s, with pompadours, brothel creepers and other gear you’ve seen in Porky’s. It’s a decent look and the women look good but it’s unusual to fantasise about an era that hasn’t been in fashion for nearly 60 years. They’ll be building air raid shelters next.

Also contributing to the odd feeling around the London Astoria 2 (a venue I’ve been to no less than half a dozen times and still dislike intensely) was the fact that the support act, Nashville Pussy, had to go offstage after one song. The power to the bassist and rhythm guitarists amp kept dying. Credit to them, the lead guitarist played a solo for the better part of 5 minutes before giving in and retiring to the dressing room. The band returned, angry at the shabby quality of technicians at the venue, and played a more fired up set as a result.

Then the Rev came onstage and reminded me of why live music is so good. The best bands don’t just play music, they put on a show – a show full of peaks and troughs and keep the audience excited, enthused and immersed the whole time. That was me last night. Because of train times and working early I said I’d leave at 10pm. At quarter to 11 I was still watching the band because they were just so damn good.

Tuesday 05/08/08

2008-08-05T23:03:00.001+01:00

I haven’t done this for a while and if you’re not careful your brain can lose its focus and go off in odd directions. At least mine does anyway, which is why I decided to do this back at the beginning of the year. I like to think of this as more a diary than a blog, so I’ll share some feelings and opinions I have and may wish to re-read in 20 years time.

It is said that two of the best non-sexual sensory experiences are sneezing a huge sneeze and pooing a big old poo. That is, if you mind the pun, crap. The best and most gratifying sensory moment is the feeling of cleaning your ears with a cotton bud. It’s fantastic, like scratching the most irritable and inaccessible itch in the world with a brillo pad. It does the job and then some. On a good day it’s better than sexual relief (and when it also happens to be a bad day for sexual relief).

My finger is too manly and broad (as fingers go, although fish fingers put my mere digits to shame) to fit down the ear canal to clear the wax and cure the itch, so for a Johnson’s cotton bud (which expressly say on the box not to insert down the ear canal - hey ho) to tickle its way towards my brain is blissful relief that can have built up over quite some time. I’m not a grubby person and shower daily so I don’t have an unnaturally high stock of earwax.

Sadly, and as I’m not the person who buys the bathroom supplies, cotton buds run out annoyingly quickly (my family must share my passion) and aren’t readily replenished. It can be weeks before the stocks are replenished (both in the bathroom cupboard and my ear canal) and I can indulge in some good aural pleasure.

The 40-year-old me is in for a lot of trouble. Particularly if he has time to read this rubbish.

Saturday 26/07/08

2008-07-26T01:37:00.002+01:00

I’ve not had the calming and placid Summer break I was looking forward to, as again my body refuses to respond positively to anything that isn’t sitting in front of a computer in the office at work. All fun I’ve had seems to have come with an unhealthy portion of side effects.

Going to Spain last week for a music festival I shouldn’t have expected good R&R; even I can see that 35 degree heat and drunken raving to electro music wont cure cancer. Not even related to the music, we visited the Benicassim water park where, thanks to my ears and sinuses filling to the brim with grubby water full of piss (including my own), I picked up a throat infection that continues to this day and my hearing is working at about 30% volume. Which was actually quite handy given the noise of the overbearing music.

Raving along to Hot Chip and even Death Cab For Cutie (yes, you can even rave to them if you try hard enough) provided a great deal of continuous impact on the problem knee joint, which I had been told to stretch frequently but inevitably ignored in spite of the amount of free time I had. I have since ignored further advice from my physiotherapist and played football, which has made the joint noticeably worse than before. Screw the establishment, I will cure it in my own way – through the unconventional method of agonising pain.

Along with knee issues and ear infections I also have dodgy tonsils that trap food, or so my parents say, so I’m required to take an odd, flavourless mouthwash-type substance called, completely insultingly and equally bizarrely, Retardex. Quite why somebody thought this was a good name for a product that does little more than clear out the throat (and my dentist says I have good oral hygiene anyway) suggests that there was a box in the company canteen for proposed names for the mouthwash and that the expected ‘stupid idea’ got through and the company were obliged to stick with it out of European employment law. I hope they’re proud at calling all prospective customers retards, which is provably untrue.

Apart from those who consider football and raving the best course of treatment from an ongoing knee injury. They probably are retards.

Saturday 12/07/08

2008-07-12T22:13:00.001+01:00

I’ve not had a proper break since New Year. I took time off work to go skiing but getting flu the week after suggests that I was not resting as much as I could have been. I don’t have a physically tiring job (precisely the opposite, the only time I expend any energy is while I strain for a poo in the company toilets) but it can get stressful when you’re asked to do jobs by 5 people at once, 4 of which you have no idea how to complete. You just absorb the stress and release it in the form of crashing in front of the TV for hours when you get home, especially now I’ve been told I can’t do sport.

Since skiing in February, the event that led me to take up running and is thusly the reason I’m in pain now, I’ve only taken odd days off here and there which I normally spend travelling around the country going to visit friends, see gigs or go to watch Arsenal. And watching Arsenal is not the most relaxing way of going about using your free time. It’s probably the most expensive though. I’ve given hundreds of pounds to that empire and yet they still wont spend any of it on star players.

To wind down, and thankfully before the football season starts, I have the peace and quiet of a music festival near the sea in Spain and the comfort of sleeping in a tent in 30 degree heat. It’ll be better than nothing but I can’t imagine myself coming back recharged and raring to go back to work; exhausted, sunburnt and sick of my friends is more likely. Which is lucky as I’ve taken the week after the festival off work to recover.

I know I brought it upon myself, the work life, and if I was still a student I could rest on my would-be fat arse from May until October with the only morsel of stress coming from the decisions such as whether to shower today or not. I don’t really miss or regret anything as far as leaving education goes but I’m a little jealous of those who get nearly half the year to do nothing but watch TV and wank profusely. Still, I can do that when I get in from work anyway, and it’ll feel all the more rewarding as a result.

Sunday 06/07/08

2008-07-06T18:51:00.001+01:00

I probably shouldn’t get excited about stuff. I was pretty much unconcerned with Euro 2008 – I’d catch the games I thought would be the most entertaining but not pay a great deal of attention to it all, mainly because I’d wasted the previous 9 months following Arsenal as closely as I have all my life only for it all to go tits up and leave me an emotional wreck. No, I’d leave Euro 2008 on in the background of my life. However, that was until it all kicked off and some cracking matches were played and I thoroughly enjoyed the event, even with little-to-no passion expended.

The opposite has happened with Grand Theft Auto IV. I’d been waiting for the game for weeks, counting down days and downloading massive pre-release trailers that upped the expectation even more than I’d managed alone. I’d spent hundreds of pounds on consoles and peripherals. Come release week I’d even ordered the game twice because I wanted it so soon – assuming that you’re more likely to get it on time if you cover all the options. I eventually bought it from Blockbuster in Marlow, meaning I’d ordered 2 redundant copies of the game. To Ebay I went, and then the Xbox.

For a fortnight the game was the finest piece of entertainment in history, “wow, it’s so vast, so pretty and so perfect”, but since that 2 week stint I have barely played it. I was wondering why and it occurred to me that GTA just doesn’t have the charm it once had; it’s taking itself too seriously. I’m not going to elaborate, but where’s the fun in mowing rows of gangstas down in stolen buses and never have ‘GOURANGA’ appear on the screen in massive yellow letters (old school fans of the game will know what I mean)?

I have the same potential issue with the new Living End album, which is out in a couple of weeks. I’ve been keeping an eye on the progress to release of it and have heard a few of the tracks but, like Euro 2008, I’m determined not to expect brilliance (though it is a Living End album after all, brilliance is presupposed).

The basic point is that I should be pretty much unmoved by future events. If they turn out to be shit then it doesn’t matter, I haven’t invested anything into expecting better. If it’s great then I’ll be delighted. There’s nothing I could do but wait anyway.

Sunday 29/06/08

2008-06-29T18:03:00.001+01:00

The summer has arrived and I’m really happy about that. Ok, I have to suffer Wimbledon and hayfever, but I have the pleasure of seeing the ugly-in-winter girls as they wear less, get a tan and generally transform from caterpillars into mildly attractive butterflies. They’ll cover themselves up again before I notice though, and it’ll be winter before I can blink; indeed, it seems like only the briefest of moments has passed since I was in a London nightclub counting in the New Year.

We’re past the longest day and it’ll only get dark earlier from now on. The first half of the year was an enthusiastic change in my attitude, happy and willing to do new things on a whim; skiing, kung fu and even this diary/blog some of the things I decided to do as I left my teens, as something to look back on when I leave my twenties and onwards. I hadn’t really achieved anything during my teenage years and as my birthday approached I thought about how much time you get and how it really pays to fill that space up with meaningful experiences. Particularly as I had spent the previous 6 years filling that space up with computer games and masturbation.

My running has ground to a halt, which I fear has stopped the first motivation I had towards the sport for years. I damaged my knee nearly 3 years ago and should’ve had it fixed then, but it calmed down and I managed to ignore it for a long time, even weekly 6-a-side football was comfortable exercise and I barely had a problem whilst skiing in Austria this February. But I then took up running again and eventually the super quick, high knee impact 10k races I participated in caused the injury to flare up. Like a car that goes so fast the tyres set fire and disintegrate, my body just wasn’t prepared for the onslaught and gone were the running and 6-a-side football careers. I’m now on a waiting list for physiotherapy and probably wont manage any sport for a couple of months, which is a disappointment.

I’d be keen not to turn into the slobby teenager I was, but 6 pints, 3 packets of crisps and 10 episodes of The Man Show this weekend suggest I need to find some sort of motivation before the rut gets deep.

Saturday 21/06/08

2008-06-21T14:22:00.000+01:00

Given the current fuel crisis and it costing as much as £1.35 a litre, and will soon overtake the price of those vastly overrated Innocent smoothies (which raises a potentially important question about the feasibility of using tasty fruit based drinks as a means of powering vehicles) it pays to be frugal. And how I’ve been frugal.

The last time I filled up my car, or been to any petrol station, was the first week of May and somehow my car is still running off the vapours that line the fuel tank of my surprisingly-heavy-for-its-size Peugeot 106. It sounds impressive until you learn that I haven’t been over 60 miles an hour at all in the last 6 weeks and have spent most of my driving time cruising (much like a cruise liner; without either pace or urgency) along the country roads at 30 mph in 5th gear, with the engine barely rotating.

This is aided in part by the soundtrack I have to keep me sedate. The morning drive into work is calmer. Gone is Nick Ferrari, getting my blood pumping in anger at the bigoted right-wing shit that he spouts; in comes Terry Wogan who’s mere voice could provide a reasonable alternative to medical anaesthesia, such is the way he pronounces his words and softly recounts humorous anecdotes, like your mind being given a gentle sponge bath.

Not just the talking on the early morning breakfast radio, the music I put on also promotes environmental, Al Gore-worthy road behaviour. Gone also is the hyperactive psychobilly (a cross between punk rock and country music, sort of) of the Reverend Horton Heat, a band who do the opposite to anaesthesia. They could wake a brain dead coma victim who also happens to be incredibly lazy, such is their intensity. In comes Steely Dan, who are so laid back and make everything feel effortless that I may not get to work at all and could have fallen asleep driving through Cookham (the combination of the Steely Dan groove and the tedium of Cookham itself may have such an effect).

So there we are. If you want to save the planet and make sure we don’t run out of the natural resources we rely upon so much, listen to Terry Wogan and Steely Dan. You’ll be late for work, but you’ll afford to get home again.

Monday 16/06/08

2008-06-16T19:58:00.001+01:00

If you’re loathe to pay for a television licence yet still need a fix of your preferred TV programmes then one legal and underrated way is to get into the audience for the show. Obviously, with some shows, soaps and shows where viewer interaction is not necessary for instance, this isn’t possible (though I would love to just stand behind the camera while Eastenders is filmed just so I can shout obscenities at Phil Mitchell. That’d be proper audience interaction). Audiences see all the outtakes from the show, an extended version of what you see but with added swears, and no entry fee.

I’ve been to many over the years, mainly Harry Hill and Frank Skinner’s shows. These were great, particularly Harry Hill as he makes as much effort in getting laughs out of the audience as he does the telly viewers, which is nice given the studio audience are all too cheap to buy tickets to an actual show and instead find free tickets for programmes they could have easily waited to watch 3 days later on the telly. Or 5 months later, as the case was with QI, which I went to see in London last week. The show was good but the most interesting thing happened when we got into the studio.

I need a wee so I find my seat and then head to the bogs. There are two urinals in the undersized gents’ loos, one of which is spare so I walk up to it and start. The bloke at the other urinal, who looks burly enough to not have to worry about unwelcome predators, which is bordered by a ceramic lump protruding from the wall, gets uncomfortable.

“Sorry, I can’t go in public”, he announces. And he retreats from the urinal and queues for the cubicle, as though my rarely threatening presence was affecting his ability to piss, “if there’s somebody there I can’t go.”

Now this was odd for a couple of reasons. Firstly the fact that he decided to make it public knowledge that he couldn’t wee, and secondly that he felt unable to continue his piss once I had stood next to him. I wasn’t staring at him (I can’t help what was in my peripheral vision but my focus was very much toward myself) or making inappropriate comments so unless he decided he needed a poo as well, which is difficult to do at a urinal, then it seems an odd decision to make. However, it’s not uncommon and it’s started affecting me, too, since purely in a sense of adhering to social convention. In a crowded gents I’ll use the cubicle rather than squeeze into the one spare urinal.

So what is it that causes such irrationality (and it is irrational):

- There is something dangerous and sinister about urinals that I haven’t been told about (maybe using a urinal is linked to a higher incidence of MRSA, I don’t know) and everybody else’s behaviour is simply a result of being careful.

- It’s me, and while using the urinal I (subconsciously) do something so inappropriate and offensive that it has spread, globally through word of mouth, to such an extent that no man who values his health would dare use one for fear of me potentially standing next to them.

Hmm, maybe worth asking Stephen Fry about that one. He’d know. Even if it isn’t quite interesting.

Sunday 08/06/08

2008-06-08T00:27:00.001+01:00

Time has a nasty habit of slowing down at the worst possible times completely against your will (England friendly matches, where a single game can last longer than the current age of the universe, to name one such occasion), but I’ve found a way to make time speed up for those moments that drag on forever, and, like the revolutionary piece of modern technology it is, all you need is an iPod.

Sat in the office at work, I had run out of work to do and only 30 minutes before I could leave for the night, I decided to put ‘The Decline’ by NOFX on my mp3 player. ‘The Decline’ is, as fans of the band will know, a monster punk song counting in at a whole 18 minutes 21 seconds. Probably the finest arrangement in the history of punk, ‘The Decline’ tells a story, holds the attention doesn’t get impossibly dull like the work of Peter Gabriel’s Genesis, who aren’t scared of songs over 20 minutes (which feel like several weeks when you listen to them, the opposite affect of what I’m after).

The song kept my interest all the way through as really good tracks often do and before I new it I had only 10 minutes to wait until I could leave work. I can’t explain the psychology behind it but the time just flew by, and I wasn’t even having a whole load of fun. I stuck ‘Homecoming’ by Green Day on and the next thing I knew I was packing up and going home.

I’m tempted to use this for one of the running races I do. It would have dual benefits. Firstly, the time would zip past (there is little to entertain a runner except the maintenance of a breathing pattern) and secondly, I could happily boast that I managed to run 5 kilometers and only played 2 songs in the time it took. Without mentioning that their combined length is well over 25 minutes.

Though clearly not a tactic to use if you have a lot to do (and should my employers read this then I lied about having no work to do and would never wish to time travel to the future and go home), it’s something to note the next time you are bored or waiting for something, perhaps when you are trying to find a good track on the new Coldplay album.

Monday 02/06/08

2008-06-02T23:04:00.002+01:00

I’ve been listening to podcasts lately. Some of them come across as hackjobs, nothing or little more than edited down versions of radio shows that you would already have tuned into if you’re a fan but there are some great ones, such as the long lost recordings I made as a kid. I may not have listened to them in over ten years, now lost the cassette I used and romanticised it far too much in my hazed, over-learned mind but I enjoyed it as much as any Loveline episode.

When I was a child I had an old (old at the time, probably made in the mid ‘80s) cassette recorder, little more than a tape player, speaker and built-in microphone. I had about 3 tapes that I played on loop on that thing; Thriller and Bad by Michael Jackson and a random tape I constructed myself. Between the ages of 7 and 10 or so I’d make my own podcasts/shows on this tape, mix songs I’d ripped off CDs with inane commentary on what I was watching on the TV or simply record conversations I was having with my friends while we played on the Playstation. I’m not sure these would be entertaining as our humour levels were nothing (ahem) compared to what they are today.

My imagination would go wild, as any pre-pubescent child’s would, and I’d pretend to have conversations with celebrities (played by myself, in brief moments where I actually enjoyed acting) or spend ages dissecting and analysing the song I’d just played (usually something off Now 38, the only CD I owned until the age of 9 when I got the Men In Black soundtrack). Some kids went out and built bases in the woods, I hung around indoors talking into a small square of plastic on a tatty old machine. Then, like all those times I tried writing a diary, I just stopped doing it one day, forgot about it (was probably distracted by the first Grand Theft Auto game; how things change) and got on with my life without considering it again until I discovered iTunes’ podcast chart a week ago.

I’ve no doubt that if I had had access to the Internet at that time then I would almost certainly, by now, be considered one of the pioneers of a mega popular medium of entertainment. As it is I vent my exaggerated opinions on the web in text format instead, with no credit for my ingenuity.

Wednesday 28/05/08

2008-05-28T22:40:00.000+01:00

Although I’ve been vegetarian for nearly 10 years, I’ve let myself down mainly consuming crisps and toast; avoiding the more traditional meat-free diet of fruit and vegetables. But as 2008 seems to have inadvertently become my year of health (though still the year of the rat, were I in China. Not sure rats are generally considered healthy though) and I’m exercising much more than at any point since I passed GCSE PE, I figured I should consider some dietary improvements, taking advantage of the blip in my motivation.

Towards the end of 2007 (and for the preceding 4 years) I was drinking loads of alcohol fairly regularly, mainly in the form of lager and wine (not at once, though I have lost a few drinking games where such a drink would be consumed). As with anything that tastes good and makes you feel happy, these are notoriously bad from a nutritional perspective in that they are little more than concentrated, bloating solutions of carbohydrates. Thoughtfully I’ve moved on to more healthy booze in the form of tequila, which at 25 ml a shot can’t possibly be as bad for you as 568 ml of lager. It’s simple mathematics, more alcohol per millilitre so there’s less of the bloating, gassy stuff that makes you fat. You don’t get tequila bellys, and there is a reason for that.

When I’m not slamming the shots down I’m eating more considerately, too, with less of an emphasis on fresh food rather than simply processed food that happens to be vegetarian by chance. I’ve started eating granary bread, which is so much better and so delicious than the crappy Hovis white I was chomping on every day at school for 7 years I feel like I missed out. That’s well over 1000 sandwiches I ate that had the wrong type of bread. I hope I don’t soon find out that margarine is much better than butter or I may have to consider the value of every meal I’ve eaten in my life.

I had a fruit salad (or melon chunks and grapes, it’s not exotic) for breakfast this morning. Also the first time in a long time as I’ve pretty much always eaten cereal or toast (which is better with white bread, don’t ask me why). I’ve kind of given up cereal as I’ve phased milk out of my diet due to it’s general nastiness (can’t help but think of all the blood, pus and shit that was lining the udder of the cow that produced it) and toast is so bland and dull that it’s a surprise I manage to wake up at all in the morning. The melon was pretty nasty (though it had been in the fridge for a few days) and the grapes were turning into wine (the cunning little bastards, sneaking that back into my system) but I’m sure something like an apple and an orange would be inoffensive enough at breakfast time for me to stomach it without getting cramps and spending the morning on the toilet.

So a new eating plan. And it’s given me the energy to write all this crap at nearly 11pm.

Thursday 22/05/08

2008-05-22T23:02:00.001+01:00

Doing things impulsively can be a risk. You’ve lost little if the ‘Greatest Rock Anthems’ CD you got for £3 in the bargain bin in Woolworth’s turns out to be shit, but when a whimsical decision costs a fair amount of money and a takes up a large chunk of your time there is often an all-too-late feeling of regret; fear that you’ll have wasted precious time and money, that it would have been much safer to just sit on the sofa watching reruns of Top Gear on UK Gold.

Last week I saw the comedian Daniel Kitson at Norden Farm Arts Centre in Maidenhead (somewhere probably as undeserving of such a place as anywhere in the world; like giving a WAG a leaflet on frugality). I hadn’t seen him before but he’s got a terrific reputation, the ticket didn’t cost much and was only up the road from where I live. Happily, I loved the night and it put me in such a good mood I immediately booked the next similar stand-up show I could find.

I’d spent the better part of £30 (including train fare, so expensive now that Boris Johnson has got himself a job apart from televisual idiot) on a night of comedy in Hammersmith, West London. It may not sound much, but if you read my wage slip you’d wonder where the missing zeroes were (and so £30 is an awful lot of money for me). On top of that, given the length of the performance and the performance of the trains I was unlikely to get much more than six hours sleep once I eventually got in, which always makes itself noticeable at work the next day (thereby reducing my chance of a pay rise). But I had committed to it now and I may as well make the best of it.

Alas I arrived an hour early, another symptom of my ill prepared outlook on the day’s events. Ok, I smiled at the pretty girl on the tube who smiled back but I could have left an hour later and there would, in all probability given the 8 million people who live in London, have been another pretty girl to make awkward facial expressions towards. As it was, I arrived in Hammersmith with 60 minutes to spare.

I decided I was hungry so I went to McDonald’s, had one of their Spicy Veggie meals and read my book (a book I own, not a book I wrote) to fill the void. People came and went past but I sat there reading intently, looking like I’d been stood up for the shittest date in history. This act of almost miserable isolation passed the time well until the show.

The show was really good and I got home at a not-completely-unreasonable hour, so I felt completely satisfied and glad I made the effort. So the moral of this is, do more things for the hell of it.

Saturday 17/05/08

2008-05-17T19:17:00.001+01:00

I’m not passionate about much in my life but two things stand out more than any other, being music and comedy. I take a great interest in these and I like to think I make an effort to learn more about it as well as merely appreciate it on an immediate, superficial level. It’s nothing I can really do much about. I become interested in things and on occasion this unravels to such an extent that I’d happily travel around the country, sacrificing sleep and company as a result, in pursuit of what is little more than a hobby, and even less justifiable when the concept of financial cost comes into play.

A lot of this devotion comes from not spending hoards of cash but being perfectly happy to go so far out of your way for the chance to experience it that most people would though, “Ah, fuck that, I’m not that bothered about doing it.” Such personal incidents include risking reprimands from work for getting tickets to see Have I Got News For You or getting only 3 hours sleep so I could buy Genesis tickets. Huge fans of Green Day, my sister and I arrived at one of their gigs at 10am, just to make sure we got a decent place in the crowd. We were bored shitless and got sunburn from standing around so much but when the band came onstage at 9pm it was all worth it.

I made it my mission one summer to see, in 6 weeks, all 350 (at the time, it’s probably approaching 5000 by now) episodes of The Simpsons, possibly the greatest show ever. I had failed my driving test and, living in the middle of nowhere at the time, had very little else to do. Maybe it was boredom, maybe it was getting too far into a hobby but I realised one thing that had been noted by others before me; The Simpsons isn’t as good as it used to be.

I know it’s common. You hear about people who go to all Wrexham football matches for 40 years, collect every piece of Rick Astley memorabilia (admittedly only a t-shirt and mug) or get themselves surgically altered to look like Harry Potter. I’d be a little concerned as I can only be a couple of mental breakdowns away from getting the Living End’s logo tattooed onto my face. And there’d be no friends left to stop me after I’d ditched my mates to follow them on tour and sleep in my car for three weeks.

Shit, that’s scarily likely.

Tuesday 13/05/08

2008-05-13T20:33:00.000+01:00

I spent my Sunday a Reading FC fan. I’ve followed football for pretty much all of my life but this is the first time a team’s result could be worth so much to the club and the fans. It’s a shame to lose in the quarter finals of the UEFA Champions League, but emotionally that is nothing compared with the crushing disappointment of relegation from the domestic league. The odds of the two happening to the same club are especially unlikely, so fans are doubtful going to experience the greater misery and be able to make a reasoned comparison of the two incidents. Apart from Leeds fans.

I decided to follow my father’s team, Arsenal, after I was taken to see them play at Highbury on the last day of the 1995-96 season. Arsenal had to win against Bolton to qualify for Europe (it had been a poor season, Wenger hadn’t yet joined the club). Bolton took the lead but, and I’ll always remember this as it was such an exciting experience, Arsenal scored two in the last 8 minutes and thusly qualified for the ever-glamorous Uefa Cup. Relief and, although a pretty crap season, a feeling of achievement.

Almost exactly 12 years later I was in a parallel universe (though I was a bit more pissed than at the game I saw when I was 8) and while it was the best atmosphere I’ve experienced, the Reading fans singing, dancing and generally putting the Derby fans, who outnumbered the Reading lot by about 6:1, to shame (mind you, Derby have had enough shame brought upon them this season without the minnows of Reading piling on another dose), a 4-0 win was not enough to keep them up. It was all in vain, and especially depressing after the passion with which the fans sang. And that Fulham managed to hang on to their survival for another year.

The saddest thing is that the Reading fans are so much more committed to their club than the majority of the fans of the big Premiership clubs. Suddenly not so loyal when the going gets tough, the ‘supporters’ are more likely to protest against the manager/players/chairman (delete as appropriate) than to get behind them, build the confidence of the team and instil the kind of club spirit that a team like Reading should be proud of.

Wednesday 07/05/08

2008-05-07T14:51:00.001+01:00

I was really pleased and rather proud of myself to have finished the 10k on Monday, in spite of the muggy conditions and my own lack of preparation for the event. The odd run here and there and an hour of football every Thursday does not create a Haile Gabreselassie and I should be grateful to my innate stamina for getting me through the last kilometre during which I felt nauseous, had pins and needles all over my body and was so moist with sweat I could hire myself out as a saltwater lake.

I managed to set a personal best (shut up, I know it was my first ever 10k therefore any result would’ve been a personal best) of 46 minutes, some quarter of an hour slower than the winner but I still managed a very respectable 255th out of 666, so 31 minutes to run that distance is very much the exception, and not the rule.

I was a gifted runner as a kid, with relative success at national level, but the training got me down and it was a chore to spend hours running around Eton College’s playing fields. I was once told, at the age of about 10, to go for a run around Maidenhead alone. Now, I’m not saying my parents were terrible, negligent and irresponsible but that comes across as short-sighted, especially when you hear about all the evil paedophiles, necrophiles and Dr Isles (not that they are related in any way) walking the streets. In any case, I got in a strop about being told to run so I walked around town for an hour and half, helping nobody.

Naturally, the faintest form of exercise ruins my immune system and I’ve felt rubbish since Monday, my body unable to maintain vital organs and repair damaged muscle tissue simultaneously. The obvious solution would be to do the exercise more frequently so my body could get used to such treatment; running 6 miles unprepared would be a shock to anyone’s system. Naturally, I’m not sure I’ll have the motivation to do so until 2 days before the next race I’ve signed up for and I’ll end up unwell and with nobody to blame but myself.

Monday 28/04/08

2008-04-28T22:47:00.000+01:00

I’m not a smoker and many of my friends have never smoked, but I found myself spending a night out with a group of mates, all of whom enjoy cigarettes, on Saturday night. I’ve nothing against smokers and it’s a freedom of existence, I’m not going to preach the health risks to them because they would have heard and ignored it all before. I don’t smoke because the effects are frightening, although I have been known to indulge in a spliff (or ‘cigarette-with-a-purpose’ as it should be known) before now. The evening in smokers’ company did make me aware of a couple of things though.

Smokers get a much nicer atmosphere to spend their evening in than those who are perhaps doing more for society by not smoking. Patio heaters, benches and gazebos gave the rather rundown pub a homely garden party feel. Compared to the inside of the pub, a grotty, loud and sweaty hole, the outside was as comfortable a place as you could want to hold a conversation in. Aside from the smoke, that is.

I only had 2 pints of beer over the course of the evening (about 5 hours, so enough time for it to dissipate through my system) so I wasn’t intoxicated by any means, but that didn’t prevent my head feeling like shit the next morning. I had cotton mouth, a headache and was spitting phlegm as though I was about to take it up professionally. Not since the dark ages before the smoking ban had I realised how much my clothes stink after a night in the company of cigarettes.

I don’t really have a conclusion to make from this, apart from maybe that smokers should be forced indoors and everyone who doesn’t smoke can sit outside, warmed up by glowing patio heaters and breathing in the clean outside air.

Wednesday 23/04/08

2008-04-23T22:42:00.000+01:00

You get two for the price of one, for the price of none.

We’re well over a quarter of the way through the year and normally by now I’d feel as though I’d wasted my time and achieved nothing, but I see value in this blog as an aid to memory rather than a means of simply venting my (often unnoticed) spleen. By now I would have forgotten that I’ve played 6-a-side every week, learned how to ski and been to one solitary (and never to be repeated) lesson of Kung Fun since Christmas. And all the drinking, vomiting and general misbehaviour I’ve managed to fit in around those activities.

I’m feeling reflective as we had the company first quarter review this week, which is basically assessing how well the business has done over the first 3 months of the year and how it fits into the projections and objectives that were set at the turn of the year. Or a 90 minute exercise in tedium, depending on your viewpoint. Either way, I thought I’d look back, and I’m fairly happy I did.

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I’ve signed and paid up to take part in a 10k run just over 10 days from now. I was a good runner as a kid, built for nothing but moving quickly. Were I born 100 years earlier, I’d have made a decent pickpocket; quick enough to leg it from the scene and skinny enough to fit my hands into any tight space. Eventually my other childish trait, laziness, took over and I became as ambivalent towards exercise as anybody else. The line would be drawn at football, but everybody in the world plays that, apart from the Americans. But their attitude to exercise barely registers.

Probably wisely, I haven’t taken any charity sponsorship for the run as I’m sure I’d require more resources than I’d contribute towards any charity when I collapse with breathing difficulties. For every 10 pounds sponsorship I’d make, the defribulator would use 50 quids worth of electricity just restarting my heart. This lack of conditioning happened once before at the school cross country. I was in the lead probably half way through the race when I physically couldn’t continue, stopped and laid, , in a cow field for what felt like ages before I got up and walked back to the school. No St. John’s Ambulance to help me on my way though, just a few “y’alright Joe?”s from friends as they jogged past, having just gained a place in the rankings.

Wednesday 16/04/08

2008-04-16T21:49:00.000+01:00

I’ve been using an iPod this week. For the first time ever, that is. I’ve resisted until now but mislaying my mp3 player meant that I needed something to entertain me in the office or I’d go more stark raving mad (and I’ve done some stark raving in my time) than that place has made me already. So I borrowed my parents’ iPod Touch and set about trying to distract myself from the snazzy graphics and heat responsive screen.

I pretty much against Apple as a rule. While there is undeniable beauty in their products, I see them as all style and no substance; little more than functionless fashion accessories. Although a PC user, I live in a household with Macbooks and they are the most restrictive pieces of technology I have ever used. I’m more likely to get a broken toaster playing me windows media file than iTunes. It simply doesn’t think that anybody would try playing one file from another machine. Not only does it not want you to use the alternative, it denies that there is any alternative at all.

Macs are on a loser in my book already then, it seems. They’re expensive and promise more than they deliver (rather like the Arsenal football team). The mp3 player I had already supported everything. I could play dozens of games, recorded radio and I even put a new operating system on it to improve loading times. If Apple found out you did this to an iPod they’d have you in court for trying to hack their product, before hiring you as a developmental programmer.

All said, it does sound beautiful; I had a crystal clear singalong to Genesis on the way home this evening. This might be because it’s the second music player I’ve used in the last 4 years but it’s come a long way sonically since 2004, when I got my mp3 player. It also looks great if a little fragile. I’m scared that so much as farting in the same room as the machine will crack the screen, and the chromy bit on the back has been scratched more than my head whilst wondering why I like the iPod Touch so much.

Sunday 13/04/08

2008-04-13T21:22:00.000+01:00

I’ve been flagging with this blog thing. One update in the last 2 weeks isn’t an indication of how busy real life is (if anything I’ve done as little as possible lately), I’ve simply not had anything inspiring my creativity to write an entry. My mood hasn’t been great, Arsenal have buggered up their season beyond repair in a drastic loss of authority only comparable to Robert Mugabe. But I’ve learnt over the years that to attach one’s mood to the fortunes of their football team would make fans of any team apart from Man Utd and Chelsea wrist-slitting suicidals. Derby’s attendances would barely have made double figures by this stage.

I’m fairly tired of the routine of work, and without a holiday until July it doesn’t look like I have a great amount to immediately look forward to, with only one gig to attend in the next three months. I’m tempted to take a few days off here and there but a good, long restful break may be just a little too far in the future to get excited about quite yet. But there’s always GTA which I can play on my new Xbox 360. Yep, I decided upon that console, as it was so much cheaper than the PlayStation and not because any of my friends’ polar-opposite opinions affected my decision. And that’s a fact.

I’ve started a new book, Dave Gorman’s ‘America Unchained’, and read 200 pages in two days, which was pleasing progress but this book deserved that sort of commitment. I love reading books that make me laugh out loud, grab my attention and I blitz through, especially given the fact that it has distracted me from the insomnia-inducing world of Scrabble DS. The fact that I’ll have finished it by Monday is a shame, but it’s the same for all books. I have another book lined up to read next which may or may not be as engrossing, My Booky Wook by Russell Brand.

I wrote this to the soundtrack of my week, which is The Matches’ great new album ‘A Band In Hope’. Listen to it and love the world again.

Sunday 06/04/08

2008-04-06T15:39:00.000+01:00

I read recently that those who sleep less than the recommended number of hours per night aremore likely to put on weight, and those who lie in are also doing themselves the world of good. How I still have one chin, can still see my penis and possess a BMI under 40 comes as a mystery, as I’m struggling to sleep at all. I’m not burning the candle at both ends as much as I am incinerating the whole thing with a welder’s torch.

I normally sit in bed and read before deciding I’m too tired and can’t understand the story, before turning the light off and waking up 7 hours later at the request of my mobile phone’s alarm clock. But technology has barged in to the pre-sleep moment of literacy and now I spend my final minutes playing Scrabble on the Nintendo DS.

‘All good with that, Scrabble is a taxing and challenging game’ you may think. But it’s such a good game that it is a dangerous cause of the gateway illness to insomnia, called ‘just-one-more-game-before-I- turn-it-off-it-is’. This has meant I’ve gone to sleep an hour later than I had done previously, and about two hours later than I probably should. But it’s worse than that because I don’t lose sleep only at bedtime; I lose it before waking-up time, too.

The curtain is a fine invention for many. Especially those with East facing bedroom windows. I am one of those. More correctly, I have East facing French doors in my bedroom, allowing in roughly 6 times more light than a generic window. Inevitably, as Spring rolls around the Sun rises at about 3am . Normally a curtain would look upon the Sun and think, “you can get up as early as you like, you aint getting in this window, son”. I don’t have a curtain at the moment, though, so I don’t even have the option. I suffer God’s morning glory with a blast of sun and heat so invasive it should require a warrant. And this is at 5am, barely 4 ½ hours since I nodded off. So I lie there with my eyes closed, staring at the blood in my eyelids until my alarm goes off at half 6.

I wore an eyemask for a night but the strap broke so I’m resorted to lying on my front breathing the fumes of my pillow when I sense the day slowly dawning. When I eventually get round to measuring my windows for new curtains I’ll solve the issue, but like any lazy masochist, I choose to live with it and I cannot be arsed to get up and do it.

Saturday 29/03/08

2008-03-29T00:40:00.000Z

I’ve developed earache over the last day or so. Ever since I played football (inevitably proving myself more worthy than much of the England team) last night I’ve felt really unwell, with a constant throbbing pain in the side of my head. It was the first sport I had partaken in since my skiing holiday, and that itself was a cause of the flu I came down with earlier this month. Don’t listen to your doctors, kids, exercise is a killer and I, like Jesus I expect, will have to die to prove the fact.

The last time I had terrible earache was at the age of 10 when I spent a whole night, unable to sleep, crying in agony. Exhausted, I eventually nodded off and woke up to find that my ear felt fine, but that my eardrum had burst; the pain had been caused by the increasing pressure on the eardrum which eventually gave way when the force of the head goo (probably not the medical term) ploughed down the ear canal.

For this reason, despite nearly three offers of Friday night shenanigans, I decided to stay in. I even went so far as to buy beers and vodka from Tesco in the hope that my pain would magically disappear and some energy would sprout out of nowhere, giving me the enthusiasm to drink litres of booze, dance around like the crazy cat I am and generally be silly until the early hours. Didn’t happen though, as the body’s immune system doesn’t generally respond well to the abstract concept of hope. Unless you’re a Christian, in which case God will save you.

Or he already has, supposedly… I don’t fucking know.

That’s the thing about Friday nights. It’s all well and good being excited about the weekend, but for me it barely makes up for 5 days worth of graft, disease and exhaustion (and my God do I put in some hard graft) so I’m always knackered anyway, which detracts from the general motivation of the occasion.

So I stayed in, took some Anadin Extra Strong Flu tablets, drank some beers (which may have cancelled out the effects of the pills) and watched some episodes of the excellent show, Early Doors (which definitely helped, even with it’s borderline maudlin content). And that’s as good a Friday night as I’ve had for a while. Here’s to earache!

Ok, don’t cheer too loudly, that hurts.

Monday 24/03/08

2008-03-24T12:48:00.001Z

We live in a multiple choice world. Or at least we think we do. Those 20 types of bog roll you saw in Tesco aren’t actually any different from one another. They clear the shit from your arse and flow round the u-bend in exactly the same manner as the next brand. Maybe apart from the no-frills budget stuff, but only tramps and those without nerves in the anal region would dare pull their pants down for that. And games consoles are the same as the bog roll. Same product, different packet.

I’ve decided to gather my resources (which are so poor even Zimbabwe would look down their noses at them) and invest in a new gaming machine, pretty much entirely because of the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto IV release. This fact pretty much rules out the Nintendo Wii, a marketing success based on the self-delusion that the users suffer, believing that waving their arms about constitutes some form of exercise. GTA IV isn’t being released immediately on the Wii (or the PC, rather annoyingly), so my now rather basic choice is between the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.

I don’t feel especially drawn to either, and I’ve had previous consoles by both companies, so I’ve no loyalty towards either that would affect my decision. Because I value the opinions of those I hang around with (unless it’s religious or about my eating habits) I decided to ask my friends and see if I could gather any consensus on the subject.

Both groups (or teams, given their behaviour) of owners insist that their console is vastly superior and that nothing on their machines has so much as slowed down, and I’m regaled with questionably verifiable accounts of how Xboxes are much better because they heard that one of their friends’ Playstations overheated, blew up and their house fell down killing all those inside. The boot soon goes on the other foot, however, and I’m told by PS3 owners about how Xboxes have a penchant for emitting a high frequency microwave which melts the brains of all those who play the console. And the Wii owners can’t answer the question because they’re too busy panting. It’s a wholly frustrating decision and there is no discernable difference between the two; the games are the same, the graphics are identical and the prices are similar. And the players are as stubborn and insistent as each other.

After listening to both sets of gamers I’ve decided to buy an air gun and shoot randomly at anybody who owns either console. It would be cheaper, more realistic than any computer game and benefit humanity all in one.

Thursday 20/03/08

2008-03-20T20:23:00.000Z

I’ve been bored this week, getting into a rut of work and early nights. I’ve done no exercise lately, the new year health and enthusiastic momentum stopped in its tracks by flu and I’ve found it far too difficult to muster up the energy to so much as cycle for a few minutes in front of Eastenders (which I hate and anyone who says otherwise is talking crap).

Consequently I haven’t updated this as there has been absolutely nothing to talk about, with no spark for my imagination and no incentive to add a new blog post. I’d considered talking about my birthday (but that was a generic night down the pub), my newfound love of coffee (but who cares) or a story about how myself and my cousin started our first business at the age of 11 (but I don’t remember enough of the details).

But I still feel as I owe it to myself to write a few hundred words, such was the deal I made with my brain that eventually led to this very blog. I decided that I needed to use my brain since I’m out of education (and my job doesn’t really provide the mental strain required to keep my brain from wasting away) and I figured a bit of creative thought a couple of times a week would keep me on the ball. But it looks like the brain is going the way of the body and neither are going to get much use during this period of malaise. And I need to get over that to please the readership of this blog, which I know for a fact numbers over 2.

Maybe the Easter break will do me some good. I haven’t had much rest since my skiing holiday (and that was the hardest, most sustained exercise I’ve done in years) and the illness and busy days at work (yes, sometimes I work hard) have probably caught up with me. Topically, since it’s Easter, in many ways my physical and mental struggle is much like Jesus’. I need to climb this hill (metaphor) and haul my cross so I can get to the top and when I achieve that all will be ok. I don’t know much about the story so the metaphor crumbles here.

I’ll chill out on Sunday, be lazy and watch the football. Though knowing the way Arsenal are playing, I’ll be as stressed as ever and only get myself more exhausted by fretting and sighing at every available opportunity. I have the most difficult life.

Thursday 13/03/08

2008-03-13T18:18:00.000Z

As all my Facebook stalkers (and it takes serious unpopularity not to have some sort of stalker on Facebook) should know, I’m 20 tomorrow. It’s very much the end of an era. Never more can I watch American Pie or listen to blink-182 and relate to the lyrics. No, it’s all Radio 4 and Coldplay from now on…

Carelessly, and as a marked change from last year’s late night drink and drug fest, my third decade will not begin drunkenly and with not a single drug passing through my system. Rather it’ll be spent doing the far too grown up thing of servicing my car ready for it’s MOT. I’ve not been mature enough to have the foresight to book it earlier, though, and if it fails I wont have a vehicle to take me to work next week. I shant grow up too quickly.

I would’ve liked the day off rather than go into work, but too bad for me. Jesus, king of the Jews, didn’t respond to my prayer requesting him bringing Easter forward a week so I could have my birthday off work, as it would double up as Good Friday. The omnipotent child of God decided not to respond though, and his death will be celebrated next week instead. By me more than anyone.

I should've asked Buddha; he certainly wouldn’t have turned down opportunity for birthday cake and chocolate eggs in the same weekend. But he’d be better off spending tomorrow doing his mile for Sport Relief, the lazy fat deity.

It’s not even as though I’m about to die. Genetically my chances are still quite good and I expect to have lots of time left. My parents are still very much alive in their 40s, dodgy joints notwithstanding, so I should realistically expect at least another 20 years before I should start my funeral arrangements. I’d be disappointed with any less.

Monday 10/03/08

2008-03-10T19:19:00.000Z

I returned from Austria, having had a surprisingly successful ski trip, over a week ago but was in no condition to report on my superhuman progress on the snow (snowgress?) as the exhaustion of the week caught up with me the moment I returned and I’ve been struck down (almost literally) with flu since. Probably caused by the woman on the plane with the incessant cough (the woman had the cough, not the plane) I was angry to have wasted the week forthcoming, as I was looking forward to coming home and keeping up the fitness regime.

Feeling better on Thursday morning I thought I’d chance it and go into the office, as I had spent the previous week on holiday and felt I owed it to somebody to go to work. However, my body’s immune system had lied to me, waiting for a chance to prove its mercurial nature towards its owner. Within an hour and a half of arriving, I had to go home, with my head’s mass having increased, feeling as though it were Pluto and blown up to the size of Jupiter. Drove home in a daze reminiscent to being drunk, which has only happened once before, on the perilously stressful A Level results day after which I spent 3 days in bed unable to walk.

The rest of my time was spent sleeping and watching daytime TV, which provided no real entertainment other than in the form of the Wright Stuff, Channel 5’s daytime phone-in, which is a genuinely fun panel debate when you’re dosed up with Anadin’s flu remedy and Vicks menthol nasal spray. Mind you, that was mostly down to Stephen K Amos being a guest all week, who’s one of my favourite stand ups.

I did miss some of the greater entertainment draws this week. I had tickets for Reel Big Fish and Jimmy Eat World but couldn’t make either gig. Having seen both before I didn’t feel too guilty and was probably more grateful for the warm, cosy bed that I had than I would’ve been for the chance to see the music. I did see half a Stewart Lee gig though (thanks to the incomprehensible travel system around North London) which was worth getting out of bed for, which he should consider a compliment.

I’m nowhere near 100% yet but I wanted to write something down today, and I’m pleased I did, so forgive the rusty incoherence.

Thursday 21/02/08

2008-02-21T19:18:00.000Z

For reasons beyond my own control and against everything I stand for as vacations go, I’ve been dragged into going on a skiing ‘holiday’ to Austria next week. It’s too late to get out of now, and the unbreakable attraction of 5 days off from work is far too nice an idea to reject. Even if I’ll be more physically active than I have been for the whole of the last 6 months at work.

Skiing is much like a beach holiday. You go there, do the same thing for a week and come home. It may be different scenery, but it’s not either productive nor a cultural experience on any level. Neither make any sense, aberrant to any normal thinking human (hence it’s popularity with the upper classes), but skiing has the added annoyance of being exhausting. And being in Kitzbuhel, I’ll only be able to afford half a lager to wind down with at the end of the day.

I’m especially reluctant to go as I will end up looking like a complete mental. Not so much because of the gear I have to wear; everyone looks equally ridiculous in their multicoloured winter raiment anyway. No, I will look like a tit because I will be a rambling, sweary and uncoordinated freak compared to the regulars, who were barely formed embryos before their parents fitted them up for their first pair of ski boots.

My physical condition probably doesn’t make me suitable for skiing, either. I’ve been locked in a battle of wills with my knee since the age of 13 and my teenage years have been as unkind to my knee joint as they have been to the rest of my body. From dancing stupidly at a party when my knee bent the wrong way, producing a sort of grind that two rusty poles would make when rubbed together and swelling that was as drastic as the deployment of an airbag, my right knee (my left knee is a whole different story) is probably as knackered as the brakes on my car. I wasn’t comforted either when a colleague explained how their brother snapped a couple of ligaments in his knee within a day of skiing the first time.

And all the week I’ll be learning to keep my balance and not fall on my arse, too tired to go out in the evening what with all the mental and physical exhaustion I will have expended, and then I’ll be forced back on the plane to London to forget everything I have learned.

But it’s free so I’ll risk it.

Tuesday 19/02/08

2008-02-19T21:02:00.000Z

I hadn’t intended to write this evening, but I played Scrabble earlier and figured that the wordy frame of mind I got myself into would make it easier to transpose my thoughts to Microsoft Word. However, the fact that the last sentence took 2 minutes to write is testament to how the game actually did nothing to get my brain in gear for creative thinking.

Though I was generally crap at English at school, Scrabble is great fun as it requires skill but is dependent on making the best of what you’re dealt, like poker, and doesn’t go on and on like Monopoly, which I once played from 8pm until 3am, though I was lucky in that I wasn’t the one knocked out after half an hour. I also like Scrabble because I beat my sister at it, a kid who got A* for GCSE English. It certainly wasn’t a safe result, though, and on another day it would be closer, though I’d still win. I’ve no idea what a good score is but I got roughly 230 points, and that was enough to win, thanks to some good challenging on weird words that my sister must’ve made up because they weren’t in the dictionary.

Still struggling, and Scrabble is a result of this, to find things to do as my car is not in use. It’s currently in the garage being repaired at great expense and it’s inconvenience stretches as far as making me take the train to work. Especially awkward since where I live doesn’t have a train station. That said, if the car was in a drivable condition I’d have gone out this evening, wouldn’t have played Scrabble and ultimately this entry would not exist. And the world, or joeyc.co.uk at least, is a much better place now I've written this.

Christ I’m bored.