Flashback

There’s an awful lot I miss about my student days, but communal living isn’t one them. I was recently reminded of this fact when a friend very kindly provided me with a sofa and sleeping bag following a night of Guinness, Sambuca (and a random whisky-based cocktail).

My friend isn’t a student himself. But after only a few minutes inside his house (which he shares with three or four other people) it was damn near impossible to escape the conclusion that he must at least live with students. My addled brain had just enough Columbo left rattling around inside to enable me to spot the following key signifiers:

1) There was a Jules and Vincent Pulp Fiction poster on the wall above the fireplace (with a poster of A Clockwork Orange on the wall opposite). I dare say there was also a Betty Blue poster somewhere in the house, and maybe one of those Beer ones. You can’t actually study for an undergraduate degree in the UK without owning at least one of these posters.

2) The kitchen was reminiscent of something post-Hurricane Katrina. If I’m completely honest, I felt a little rude turning up without a search and rescue dog.

3) It looked like one of my friend’s housemates had been abducted while preparing a pasta meal, as there was a full pan of abandoned penne on the hob. We carbon dated it to only a few hours earlier, but it had already become weaponised. The pasta could easily have been tipped out of the pan in a solid frisbee shape, with a jagged edge of lethally sharp penne tubes. If necessary, it could then have been thrown like Oddjob’s bowler hat to scythe through the flesh of a hapless burglar. Half eaten (or abandoned) meals and snacks are the mainstay of any student kitchen.

4) Perhaps the most bizarre thing I discovered was one of those origami fortune teller games. (Giggling girls often used to thrust these in my face at primary school, ask me to pick a number or a colour, then lift the flap and announce with glee: “You Stink!”) I’m absolutely certain that the fortune teller game in this instance was the accompaniment to a bizarre student drinking game; conceived, no doubt, at the height of intoxication.

Like no primary school fortune teller game I’d ever seen, the outer options on the folded paper object were: Tits, Bottom, Tounge (sic) and Feets (sic). Each of those options then revealed a number, which mercifully took me back to familiar territory. However, when I then unfolded the object further, beyond the numbers, it revealed a bizarre mixture of insults, accusations, instructions, portentous statements and generally bizarre word combinations, such as:

Shit Yourself
There are some instructions you should obey unquestioningly, but some you should perhaps raise objection to.

You are a Terrorist
I understand that key members of the Bush administration were all issued with paper fortune tellers shortly after 9/11.

You will die soon
At least you know it’s going to be soon.

Mother Bummer
The kind of headline you’d expect to grace the front page of Chat magazine, alongside other tales of depravity, murder and an excitable cover model with a beaming smile.

Wonderful Garland
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that this is some kind of gay reference.

Siamese Twins
This sounds like some kind of conjoined twin challenge, which I’m not sure the world is ready for.

Total Fail
This would undoubtedly be one of the funniest ways to learn that, after three years of higher education, you didn’t even scrape a Douglas. (“So, I bum my mum and I’ve failed my degree? Oh god.”)

Sonic Boom
This sounds like either a drinking challenge or a sexual position….like, say, the Pile Driver. (You can find your own links for the latter!)

This game had “students” written all over it (metaphorically speaking). It certainly didn’t seem like the kind of game that a couple would unveil to their dinner party guests along with a cheese-board and some fine wine. No, this just had to be students.

I was surprised to learn, therefore, that no students lived in the house with my mate all. Not a single one! I was so shocked I nearly fell over (though, admittedly, that could’ve been the sambuca). But even without the students, it was a completely authentic student living environment. And it really took me back to the nightmare of living with other people.

I never quite took to communal living during my student days. When I was in halls at university I had the misfortune of having the room next to the toilets and across from the kitchen (where everyone used to gather in a pissed frenzy after a night out).

I distinctly remember, after a couple of weeks of constant late night disturbance and banging doors, that I decided to use my sleepless night to write an appeal to my tormentors, which I stuck on the kitchen door. When that was subsequently ignored, I then proceeded to write a series of ‘humorous’ threats which I again put up on display. (I recall one in particular which stated that, if everyone didn’t shut the fuck up, I would hang their coagulated arteries like fairy lights along the hall).

I do cringe when I think back to that first term at uni, because I sounded just a teensy bit like a psychopath who’d slipped under the UCAS radar.

Much to my surprise, some of my hall mates actually told me that they looked forward to my notices on the kitchen door and asked if I’d be writing more of them. It felt a little bit like someone asking me to punch them in the face repeatedly because they admired my balletic style of boxing and dizzying uppercuts. I carried on writing quite happily until someone scrawled “Fuck off! You sad bastard!” all over one of my kitchen notices. I then retired them with immediate effect.

Even though the chances of my ever returning to a house-share situation are slim to nothing, the very thought brings me out in a cold sweat. I currently reside in a flat with my girlfriend, but I even find living in the same building as other people difficult. Why? Well, my neighbours’ cars all look like they’ve been valet parked by Stevie Wonder on our small driveway; I’m one step away from announcing a door-closing master class for the idiots who constantly leave the security door ajar; and the new guy downstairs can’t go in and out of his flat without slamming the fucking door every time.

Thank god I have my flat to retreat to.

But if I ever had to live so closely with other people again – with their inconsiderateness and 24/7 homage to A Life of Grime – I just know I’d end up instigating a drunken round of the fortune teller game, where every player would unfold the paper object to discover the message: “You Will Die Soon”. I’d then go mental with a penne frisbee.

I couldn’t thank my mate enough for giving me somewhere to crash after our night out drinking (he’s a top bloke), but the experience took me back to a way of living that I’m glad I’ve left behind. Really glad.

Let’s break The X Factor

I watched John and Edward Grimes’ second live performance on the X-Factor last night, which was a laughably awful version of Britney Spears’ ‘Oops!…I Did It Again’.

The two talentless Johnny Bravo’s pranced around the stage in one of the most confused choreographed performances I’ve ever seen. Dressed in shiny, wipe clean PVC suits, they were pushed around on hotel lobby luggage trolleys by a female dance troupe (who were all dressed like the crash helmet girl from the Zovirax ad). It was acutely random.

In an effort to compensate for the complete lack of any discernible talent, Brian Friedman’s choreography for the twins is becoming increasingly bizarre. I see a future performance when the dynamic duo will be made to wear Spandex leotards, while they strain their little voices delivering a painful rendition of Tiffany’s ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’. Meanwhile, all around them, dancers will slink about dressed like Maureen Lipman (as Beattie Bellman in the British Telecom ads). Viewers and judges will be so perplexed by the performance it will slip under the radar as one of the worst things to ever be broadcast on prime time television.

Still, last night’s busy performance wasn’t enough to distract anyone from the fact that, yet again, it’s blatantly obvious that they simply cannot sing. They’re not even karaoke good. Furthermore, they have all the timing of two people who’ve arrived late to an aerobics class, whereby they’re constantly two moves behind everyone in a fruitless attempt to catch up with the session.

Surprisingly, Simon Cowell, Danni Minogue and Cheryl Cole all described John and Edward’s performance as “entertaining”. Although, I’m assuming they meant it in the same way that watching this is entertaining. To be fair to the judges, though, the veneer of saccharin positivity was delivered in such a deadpan and slightly bewildered fashion, it completely failed to disguise the fact that they all thought the performance was, at best, a ridiculous novelty act. (I love the reactions of this viewer who watched J&E’s performance last night.) 

As usual, it was left to Simon to deliver a brutal (but accurate) assessment of their performance, saying: “In the same way I reacted to the first time I watched The Exorcist, I didn’t like it but I wanted to watch it again. And that’s sort of how I feel about you.” John and Edward both smiled as if they’d just been signed to Sony BMG for eighty squizillion pounds.

When Dermot turned to the boys and said: “It was weird, but did you enjoy it?” John immediately offered what sounded like a serious explanation for the performance, saying: “The thing that happened was…in the middle [of the act], my microphone came off because Edward boxed me in the face.” OK, that explains about half a second of the performance, which few people will have noticed, but how does it explain your basic lack of talent? 

In general, John and Edward’s live performances have been so bad that the judges have been scraping the barrel for ways to respond. After their first live performance, Danni and Louis (the twins’ mentor) both sat on the fence and went with: “The whole country is talking about you.” That may well have been true. But the whole country has also previously talked about things like Dr Harold Shipman and swine flu. Being a water cooler topic of conversation doesn’t automatically make you popular. 

Perhaps one of the most absurd things I’ve heard so far was during the first live show, when host Dermot O’Leary said of John and Edward: “You know what? These are 17-year-old guys, [they've] come over from Dublin. For that, they deserve a round of applause.” Did I miss something? Since when did a ferry journey from Dublin to Holyhead become deserving of national recognition and applause?

The X-Factor’s ‘creative director’, Brian Friedman, is apparently now tipping John and Edward to win the competition (describing them as “so bad that they are good”). Only last week, Simon Cowell said to the twins: “I just had this horrific thought…you winning the competition. What it would do? I mean, it would be a disaster.”

So, I was thinking. Seeing as we, the British public, have the ultimate power to either crush the hopes of X-Factor contestants or deliver them their dreams, can we not do our utmost to keep John and Edward in the competition? In fact, I’m going to go a step further – let’s engineer it so that they win the fucking competition!! Let’s orchestrate the victory of an act so untalented and undeserving of a multi-million pound recording contract that it ultimately makes a mockery of the whole programme. I think we have a unique opportunity here to shake up a boring, repetitive talent show format.

I’m so sick of the X-Factor’s formidable PR machine plaguing us every year, with the competition winner performing vocal gymnastics everywhere we turn (and making Simon Cowell a fortune in the process), that I want to see them scrabbling around trying to market an appalling act like John and Edward instead.

With great power comes great responsibility. So let’s make this happen, people of Britain! Let’s break the X-Factor!

What the hell did I just see?

I recently saw a young girl in Tesco (about 12-years-old) wearing towering, strappy heels, a pink and black basque-style top, belt-sized skirt and diamanté headband. She was also coated – head to toe – in so much fake tan that she may well have been undetectable by thermal imaging camera (she was a sort of Cuprinol ‘rustic brown’).

Far from being a reluctant and visibly embarrassed clothes horse (perhaps dressed for a party by a shameless or partially sighted mother), she actually packed her shopping bags with a modicum of attitude and a discernable smirk. And her slightly older, fatter sister – wearing a similar diamanté headband, but more in the way of elasticated clothing – was grinning so much, I thought a Speedo-wearing Take That had just entered the store pushing a dessert trolley stacked with cake.

At the time, I was waiting for a self-service till in Tesco at nearly 4pm on a Sunday afternoon, so it was like queuing for the last chopper out of Saigon. Consequently, this pre-pubescent party girl had the biggest audience imaginable. And judging from the incredlous looks around me, I obviously wasn’t alone in thinking that we were witnessing something ever so slightly inappropriate.

There’s probably never a good time to gently tap a parent on the shoulder and politely inform them that their daughter looks like a slut, but everyone was thinking it.

When the young girl, teetering in her ridiculous shoes, finally left the store, even the shop assistant manning the self-service tills said: “She can’t even walk in them bloody heels. That was ridiculous.” (For the record, this shop assistant would probably ignore a spontaneously combusting customer in favour of chatting with her Woodpecker Cider-toting chavvy mates, so I naturally assumed that she knew the young girl and her family. But if she was appalled, then things really were bad! )

I was actually quite astounded by what I’d seen. And I couldn’t help but think that the young girl was heading off to meet her classroom sweetheart at a tweenage party (a 12-year-old boy called Simon, dressed in arseless leather chaps and a PVC waistcoat with nipple clamps).

I really didn’t want to come over all Daily Mail about it, but I was genuinely shocked that (a) the girl’s mother let her out of the house dressed like that, and (b) that those kind of clothes even exist in that age range. What happened to just being a kid? Why the urge to dress like WAGzilla at such a tender age?

When my sister was this girl’s age (back in 1987/88) she was still a kid. In fact, she’d only just stopped playing with Barbie dolls. If my sister had been keen to dress beyond her years with what she knew of fashion at that point, she’d probably have hit the school disco wearing a ruffle neck ball gown with a shimmering tulle overskirt and tiara. (Thanks to the frequent involvement of my Action Men during my sister’s Barbie time, she was also conditioned to believe that all afternoon tea parties had to end in a violent siege, where people were executed mid-scone and their lifeless bodies tossed from the penthouse suite.)

I like to think that the young girl I saw in Tesco was just an anomaly and that girls her age don’t really dress like they’re planning to fall out of a club at 3am with the likes of Danielle Lloyd and Jordan (ending up in an undignified heap on the pavement; a mélange of fake tan, cellulite and garotted vagina).

At least, I hope she was an anomaly.

The art of conversation

I’ve never been great at conversing with complete strangers. It just doesn’t come easy to me. I was subsequently reminded of this fact a few weeks ago during a rare taxi journey, when my opening gambit to the sexagenarian taxi driver was: “Your car smells nice.” We then spent the next ten minutes sitting in uncomfortable silence.

The awkward silence was only broken when the driver proudly revealed that several passengers had recently commented that they thought his taxi was a brand new car, even though it’s actually one year old. “Well, you have kept it immaculately maintained,” I replied (dying a little inside). I sounded like a robot who’d just had a brand new formality chip installed. Had I appeared at the taxi driver’s window in the nude, saying: “Salutations! I regret to inform you that I need your clothes, your brogues and your Vauxhall Vectra,” it would’ve been like a mediocre version of Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to talk much for the rest of the journey because my kind comments about the taxi driver’s car triggered a demonstration of the wonders of his sat-nav: “There we are, you see [points at screen]. But if we go right at this roundabout…there you go, the road name’s now changed to the one I’m driving on.”

I’d arrived in Stratford-upon-Avon on the 20:30 train from Birmingham Moor Street, but he clearly thought I’d materialised in a ghostly fog aboard a steam locomotive from 1830. Still, I think I managed to successfully feign interest and gasp with astonishment in all the right places.

I eventually called time on the taxi journey and walked the rest of the way home in the pitch dark, occasionally stumbling over the mangled carcasses of unidentified road-kill. However, it was preferable to persevering with my awkward taxi journey. In fact, it was something of a relief to be stumbling around in the dark (rather than mentally doing so, in a strained effort to generate conversation).

My apparent inability to chat casually with strangers makes me think that, in the [hopefully unlikely] event of my abduction, I’d be completely immune to the Stockholm syndrome. I imagine that after telling my abductor that his car boot smells nice, I’d be fresh out of ideas. Upon my surprise release nearly 20 years later, I’m fairly confident that my relationship with my abductor wouldn’t be any further advanced.  

I went for a hair cut at the weekend, which is always a conversational black hole. I’ve been going to the same hairdresser for about five years now, yet we still converse like two mismatched singles on a buttock-clenchingly awkward first date. At one point, in order to sidestep a moment of deafening silence, I seized upon the fact that my hairdresser has a 10-year-old son. I then embarked on a brief, but alarming, conversation about how swine flu was set to ravage schools again now that the summer holidays are over.

Unless I was unknowingly channelling the spirit of Dr Hilary Jones, I can’t claim to have said anything even remotely factual. However, I did manage to fill at least 35 seconds with something that sounded like a conversation (in spite of suggesting that my hairdresser’s son was on borrowed time).

When there were other painful silences later on during my hair cut, I’m surprised I didn’t say: “Have you heard about the Ebola virus spreading virulently among pre-teens? Yeah, once they’ve haemorrhaged from every orifice it’s pretty much over. Finito! My hair feels so much better now you’ve taken the weight out of it. Thank you.”

My inability to chat confidently with strangers was painfully apparent at a wedding earlier this year. It was the wedding of my girlfriend’s university friend – who I’ve only met once or twice – so the people in the wedding party were a complete mystery to me. At dinner I had the misfortune of being seated next to the most boring man I’ve ever met in my life, so getting the conversation going was like trying to start up a Morris Marina that had been parked under a tree for 30 years - it sputtered a little, but there was essentially nothing there. In the end, I suffered the indignity of the aforementioned boring man making his excuses to escape me! It did make me wonder how dull I must be for this super-dull man to have felt so unfulfilled after an hour at dinner with me.

I recall dying my first conversational death in about 1983, while chatting to the daughter of one of my dad’s work colleagues (who I fancied). She was older than me by about 2-3 years and looked a bit like Elizabeth Shue from ‘Karate Kid’. My most embarrassing moment was trying to woo her with an impression of Megatron from Transformers, which saw me adopt a nasal, faux-robotic voice, then saying: ”My – name – is – Megatron.” (The worst impressions are always the ones where you have to explicitly state who you’re impersonating.) Understandably, she looked quite embarrassed for me. I genuinely don’t think I ever saw her again after that moment.

Nowadays, every conversation I have with someone I don’t know feels as ineffectual as a poor impression of Megatron…and every bit as cringeworthy.

It’s a sad state of affairs when I can chat to strangers more confidently on Twitter than I can in real life. In fact, I’ve often wondered if  it would be possible drag this chatty online confidence into a real-life social situation, and I almost attended my local Twestival this year to test out the theory, but ultimately bottled out. Maybe next time. 

Oh, who am I kidding? There isn’t really going to be a “maybe next time”. Unless, of course, I can hire Dr Stephen Hawking’s speech synthesiser for an evening, so I can hold conversations without physically talking to anyone. Actually, no, scrub that thought. That’s just silly. I’m almost entirely…well, fairly sure that I’d never go to such lengths to avoid conversation with strangers in a social situation. Tempting, though.

Twitter’s just made me feel like a teenager again (and not in a good way)

Between 1989 and 1991 – my formative teenage years at school – I was dumped three times by three separate girls. In 1989, I found solace in New Order’s ‘Technique’ album (I haven’t listened to it since), while 1990-91 saw Joy Division’s ‘Closer’, R.E.M.’s ‘Green’ and ‘Out of Time’ albums, and pretty much everything The Cure had ever written (though, I spent a lot of time with ‘Disintegration’), all acting like a great, goopy musical adhesive to hold together the shattered pieces of my tragic adolescent life.

Not only did I seem to revel in the melodrama and the misery of my break-ups, but I also scrawled every self-pitying word in a diary (which had a lock on it). I didn’t know it at the time but I was a walking teenage cliché, with a face almost theatrically white from the thick coating of Oxy10 I kept almost permanently applied. Still, at the time, being dumped felt like the end of the world. It also caused hairline fractures in my already fragile self-confidence and brought about persistent periods of self-doubt.

Fast-forward 18 years and I’ve been dumped again. Well, sort of. Someone that I really liked on Twitter has stopped following me. And to be honest, I feel like I’ve been dumped all over again.

I started following this person a few months ago and was pleasantly surprised when they followed me back. However, ever since that time I’ve sort of been waiting for them to leave me, which is exactly the kind of behaviour I engaged in during my teens (i.e. too miserable to actually enjoy the moment because, from day one, the end is nigh).

Every time my follower numbers have dipped over the last couple of months I’ve anxiously scanned my follower list to check that this person’s avatar was still present. And, yes, I secretly breathed a sigh of relief every time I confirmed that they were still with me.

But when I checked my follower list the other night, they – she – had gone. Now, I should stress that my affinity for this particular person isn’t anything romantic. I just find them funny, feisty, occasionally quite acerbic (which I like) and wonderfully intelligent. A great person to follow and be followed by. So I couldn’t help but wonder what I’d done to turn this person off. 

Am I boring? Is that it? Did she find me boring? Oh, God, please don’t tell me that she found me boring! I’d rather be appallingly offensive than boring. Maybe she didn’t find me funny? Oh, GOD, was I not even mildly amusing? Not even perfunctory smirk amusing? And do I really have the time to trawl through over one thousand of my tweets in order to confirm or deny these horrendous possibilities? Well, yes, maybe.

Of course, I’ll never know the reason why she unfollowed me. And that’s sort of the problem. It means I’m left with a guessing game, while pangs of self-doubt return. What’s worse is that she unfollowed me after a few months, which means that she actually grew tired of me. I don’t think I’d feel as bad if she’d rashly unfollowed me after only giving me the benefit of a couple of tweets.

I absolutely adore Twitter, but you’ve really got to leave your feelings at the door if you’re a sensitive soul like me. Thinking too hard about why people choose to follow you, and then later abandon you, can drive you mad.

Before I signed up to Twitter I would never have envisaged actually becoming fond of complete strangers (in fact, not even strangers – the words of complete strangers). But I really do enjoy seeing the same people appear in my timeline every day with interesting links, observations, jokes and general musings. I am still following this person (in the Twitter sense of the word; I don’t mean I’m stalking them, keying desperate messages into the bonnet of their car and sending them road-kill in jiffy bags), but I guess I’ll just have to accept that I find her more interesting to follow than she does me. Jesus, that stings.

Right, I’m off to pull my fringe down over my face, apply some Oxy10 (for the purposes of authentically recreating my grotesque, teenage self) and then fish out a suitable album to play while I wallow in misery in my bedroom. Being dumped never gets any easier.

“The aliens are coming!”

Three orange lights travel silently across the sky over Henley-in-Arden (12/09/09).

I went out for a fantastic Thai meal with my girlfriend and her mum and dad tonight, which was absolutely lovely. However, as belt-poppingly amazing as the evening was, it isn’t the reason I’m writing this blog post. Because in spite of the gorgeous food and wonderful company, it was the short walk to the car after the meal that things started to get really interesting.

As we were all walking to the car (up Bear Lane in Henley-in-Arden) we spotted a bright orange light travelling silently across the sky above us. It was significant enough to draw our attention, and we were all baffled as to what it could be. However, what I thought would be a fleeting moment of bafflement – before conversation swiftly returned to the superb Thai meal on which we’d just gorged ourselves - subsequently developed into bewildered excitement, as one…two…three…four orange lights followed silently behind in relatively quick succession.

For the next 10 minutes we all stood in the road, eyes transfixed on the clear night sky, watching several bright orange lights travelling silently overhead, one after the other. (I checked my watch after the sixth light flew over and it was 10:35pm.) All in all, we believe we saw approximately 21 orange lights. My girlfriend’s dad estimated that they were perhaps flying at 1,000ft, but I really couldn’t say. One thing I can say, however, is that they seemed to be travelling at a fair speed, but were completely silent. None of us heard a thing.

To our surprise, at one point, a man pulled up alongside us in a black Audi and announced: “They’ve been coming over all night; all going in the same direction. My mother’s counted around 35. I’m going to follow them.” He then drove off at speed into the night. To be honest, the fact that a complete stranger believed that these lights were something out of the ordinary simply added to the weirdness of the whole situation. It also confirmed that the lights weren’t a side-effect of the Singha beers we’d just drunk. About five minutes later another car drove past us with the windows down, shouting: “The aliens are coming!”

We eventually retreated to our own car and set off for home, while trying to keep our eyes on the 21st orange light as it travelled across the sky above us, eventually flying out of sight.

Unfortunately, all I had with me was my iPhone, which is capable of so much – but taking photos isn’t really its forte. Nevertheless, I snapped away furiously as the orange lights travelled across the sky. Some of the photographic results, while typically inconclusive, are included in this blog post.

Two more orange lights (2 of 21) fly silently across the sky over Henley-in-Arden.

I hit Google as soon as I got home and discovered that there have been several sightings of unexplained orange lights in the sky all across the UK over the last few months. The most recent (and relatively local) report ran in the Halesowen News on September 1st. It’s been suggested in some of these news reports that the mysterious orange lights could in fact be Chinese lanterns, which may well be true in some cases (or maybe in all cases).

Whatever we saw flew in a controlled manner across the sky. The orange lights appeared in twos and threes and maintained a perfect distance from each other as they travelled overhead. They were completely silent, moving at speed across the sky, and they didn’t display any blinking or flashing landing lights that one might expect from a conventional aircraft. 

At one point, I could see four orange lights flying into the distance in a near perfect straight line. They can’t possibly have been helicopters. And in my opinion, they were going too fast to be balloons. As has been suggested, it’s conceivable that they could have been sky lanterns. Who knows, maybe they were flying over from a wedding at Henley Golf & Country Club? They did appear to be flying from that general direction.

I’m not saying that I’ve witnessed extraterrestrial guests arriving at Gordon Shumway’s son’s Bar Mitzvah, but I’ve definitely seen several Unidentified Flying Objects. If anyone has seen anything similar (or even saw these very lights over Henley-in-Arden tonight), then by all means drop me a line.

My birthday by numbers

 It was my birthday today. It was possibly the most underwhelming birthday of my life. Here it is by numbers…

35  My current age. I’m a mere three years away from being officially middle aged. That would be fine if I had something to show for it. But I haven’t. There’s no permanent job, no career and no eye-watering salary. There are no miniature versions of me running about the place. And I still haven’t written the book I always wanted to write. I feel like I’m falling into the neck of the hourglass!  

3  The number of unsightly, protruding hairs I plucked from my left nostril this morning. I say “plucked” but what I actually did was rip them from nose in the same way that one might vigorously de-weed a garden. I think it was David Baddiel who once said that men don’t really lose their hair as they get older; it just falls through their head and eventually sprouts out of their nose and ears.

26  The number of hairs that fell naturally out of my head in the shower shortly before I started on my nostril garden. I’m desperate to be more Des Lynam than Willie Thorn. Thankfully, I think the silver fox has the edge.

10  The number of pounds my grandma places in my birthday card annually. One year, however, she decided to substitute the crisp birthday tenner for a free scratchcard from a tabloid newspaper (already scratched, I might add). Believing she’d hit the jackpot after revealing three gold bells, she noted in my card that I had the opportunity to win a video camera. Of course, the catch was that I’d have  to spend ten minutes on a premium rate phone line listening to a recorded voice slowly informing me that the prize was actually £20-worth of Argos vouchers and a day out at Chessington World of Adventures. Normal service was resumed a year later when £10 fluttered gently to the ground upon opening my card.  

1979  You can find this song on the Smashing Pumpkins’ third album ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness‘. It started playing on my iPod this morning on the way to work and made me decidedly misty eyed. It reminds me of a time when I smoked like a chimney (because I was young and invincible) and when I felt that the world was just there for the taking. Unfortunately, however, the world sort of laughed at me pityingly and told me to fuck off. I duly obliged.

7  The number of birthday cards I received today. Aside from the budget card that my work colleagues hurriedly bought for me (after I bluntly reminded them that it was my birthday) every single card was from family. Without a shadow of a doubt the award for funniest card goes to my sister (below).

The birthday card my sister sent me.

The award for least amount of effort goes to my aunt. I’m 35 years old, yet every year she sends me a birthday card that makes me think the ageing process was all a dream and that, in reality, I’m actually supposed to be playing for the Under-12’s in a crucial football match at the weekend. This year, the card had a pastel drawing of a football sitting next to a trophy which were both being showered with streamers and confetti. Of course, this is the same woman that once bought my sister room spray and a vest for her birthday (my sister was 15 at the time; the vest was sized for a 10 year old). My sister’s excruciating birthday phone call to my aunt went as follows:

Sis: “Thanks for the gifts. [Laughing] Did you realise that you bought me room spray?
Aunt: “Yes.”
Sis: “Oh, well…er…thank you.”

6  The number of Facebook friends who messaged me with birthday wishes. That amounts to roughly 5.66% of my total number of ‘friends’. Still, to be fair, I’ve probably forgotten enough of their birthdays over the years. And we all know what I think of Facebook.

11/9  If I use the British date format to write my birthday it takes slightly longer for the brain to register that my special day is now forever entwined with the terrorist attack that changed the world. Whenever I’ve revealed my birthday to someone during the last eight years it’s always been met with a brief pause of recognition, followed by a searching look into my eyes to ascertain whether or not I’ve realised the significance. I imagine that people named Adolf Hitler, Myra Hindley or Satan will likely have experienced similar reactions when revealing their names. (Driving Instructor: “Adolf? Whoah, shouldn’t have opened up the Eastern Front, eh?” Adolf Hitler: “Please, can we just get on with my driving test. I’ve only taken half a day off work.”)

No other date is burned into the world’s collective conscience like my birth date. So there’s no excuse for forgetting next year.

Oh, Facebook…to think I onced loved you

Once upon a time, Facebook would be my first port of call every day. Have any new photos been posted overnight, I wondered? Has anyone commented on the photos I’ve posted? Did anyone find my status funny yesterday? Have I got any new messages? And most importantly, has anyone added me as a friend? In July 2007, when I first joined Facebook, it all seemed quite new and exciting.

And if the strength of our relationships with social networking sites is measured by the frequency of our visits, then my first year on Facebook was most definitely the honeymoon period. I was quite enamoured. Today, however, Facebook is like the estranged wife I can barely bring myself to look at.

For a start, I don’t care that ‘Friend A’ has recently taken the “Which Serial Killer Are You?” quiz and discovered that he’s John Wayne Gacy. Or that ‘Friend B’ took the “Which war atrocity are you?” quiz and was delighted to learn that she’s the My Lai massacre. But this is the kind of shit I’ve got to wade through every time I log in.

I noticed a quiz the other day that must have been designed by people chained to desks in Facebook’s irony department, called ‘What is Your Purpose In Life?’ The answer to this question for most people is probably: “I’ve lost sight of what my purpose in life is because I’ve been more interested in finding out that my inner Disney film is ‘Condorman’ and that, according to the ‘Which Kitchen Appliance Are You?’ quiz, I’m a Breville Sandwich Toaster.”

I noticed an application on someone’s Facebook profile the other day that displays the user’s current mood with an emoticon (it’s called The Moods Factory). If this application had an emoticon snarling with disdain, I’d probably sign up. It would beautifully capture my expression and general mood every time the masochist in me forced me to click through yet another well-documented TV production wrap party (albums that contain anything between 20 and 1,020 photographs of people essentially taking photos of themselves at arms length).

Facebook is simply not the place to be when you’re having a shit time of things. Facebook is a place for people who can upload photos of their dental appointment for extensive bridge work, yet still make it feel like the party of the year that you weren’t invited to.

Another annoying thing about Facebook is the number of people who tend to update their status on a daily basis whether they have anything interesting or mildly amusing to offer or not. Irritatingly, when such people discover that they’re without a status they will often rely on song lyrics to fill the void. News feeds are then cluttered with updates like: “Katie…is insane in the membrane” or “Rob…doesn’t think it’s fair to blame it on the sunshine. And there isn’t any hard evidence to hold the moonlight accountable either”. This can often snowball, with the entire lyrical content of a song being posted thanks to a flood of comments from bored friends who will happily chip in with the odd line (or at worst, an entire verse).

While scrolling through my news feed the other day I noticed that two ‘friends’ had unwittingly provided me with exhibits ‘A’ and ‘B’ to support this observation. 

What’s worse is that people actually took the time to click on the ‘Like this’ button in order to register their unbridled joy at having read the lyrics to the theme tunes of some 80s children’s programmes. To level things up, they should have a ‘Tedious’ button.

The thing is, I can’t really abandon Facebook completely (even though someone I know already has done) because my mum’s on there. And given that my sister and I have banned her from using Twitter, it’s simply the easiest way to keep her up to date with holiday snaps and general activity that she might be interested in. It’s also a good way for me to keep tabs on my one-year-old nephew (the most adorable and most photographed baby in the whole world).

Aside from these uses, however, the only thing I use Facebook for these days is to keep a few games of Scrabble on the boil. Although, whenever someone destroys a new game with a ridiculously unbeatable 70-point BINGO word, I occasionally lapse into ‘Scrabble rage’ (which used to be ‘Monopoly rage’). So even that Facebook pastime isn’t without its irritations.

Anyway, rant over with. I shall stick with you for now, Facebook. But don’t be under any illusion that I care; it’s just necessary.

My #followfriday ‘channel hopping’ video

 
After my last foray into the world of #followfriday videos on Twitter, I decided to do another one. I subsequently spent several days putting together a ‘channel hopping’ video, where the names of my Follow Friday recommendations were littered throughout random and obscure snippets of TV programmes and films, as if you – the viewer – were aimlessly journeying through hundreds of foreign satellite channels.

As fun as this video was to make, I hold it entirely responsible for frying my laptop. Only three hours after I uploaded the final version to You Tube, the lights went out on my laptop, it was cold the touch, and I haven’t yet been able to revive it. There isn’t so much as a flicker of life. It’s all very sad (and massively inconvenient). 

I originally posted the ‘channel hopping’ video on Twitter on August 7th, which was very kindly retweeted by @danjones101, @Disklabs, @editorialgirl, @willowfieldgirl and @Louisewayman (a big thank you to all). And without a laptop to create anything new the following week, I was left with no choice but to post a link to the video once again for the August 14th Follow Friday (as a one-off repeat). After all the work I put into it, I didn’t think a second outing would hurt.

The second time I posted a link to the video on Twitter I was thrilled to get retweeted by @tylermassey, who did so with the verdict: “Fucking BRILLIANT.” Coming from the man who inspired me to do these videos in the first place, it was high praise indeed.

Of course, nothing I do can ever truly compare to what I think is one of the coolest Follow Friday videos ever, which @tylermassey uploaded to You Tube on July 3rd (watch it here…and check out his channel for his other vids). Still, I like to think that my videos are worthy additions to the growing archive of visual #followfridays. So, enjoy!

Getting back to work

I had to attend a ‘Getting Back to Work’ session at my local Job Centre yesterday, which I was absolutely dreading. In fact, I was fully expecting to end up sitting next to a man drinking a can of Special Brew, with a teardrop tattoo adorning his slightly jaundiced face. And in my nightmarish version of events we would also be instructed to pair up and hug each other for an hour. I would then find myself nestled in the sick-stained bosom of my boozy Job Centre comrade, weeping gently.   

Anyway, when I got to the Job Centre I gravitated towards a group of people who seemed to be loitering uncomfortably in the reception area. We all stood slightly apart from each other, shooting off furtive glances to check out the opposition. It was like standing on the awkward fringes of a school disco as ‘Careless Whisper’ was being cued up.

Then, not too long after I arrived, we were all herded through. The group seemed like a really mixed bunch (and not a can of Special Brew or a facial tattoo in sight!) To be honest, if I hadn’t been wending my [less than] merry way to a first-floor conference room at the Job Centre, I could very easily have been shuffling through an airport departure lounge to board an Easy Jet flight to Malaga.

In front of me there was a lanky student type and a very attractive woman in her early twenties. “Have you been to one of these sessions before?” he asked nervously. “No. Because I’ve never had to sign-on before,” she replied. (His question was like the unemployed version of “Do you come here often?”)

Once we’d all been signed-in (for the second time) we all had to sit round a long conference table, where forms and booklets had been laid out for everyone. There were about twenty people in attendance - including me – and at least seven were aged between 18 and 25. I felt quite sad that their working life had to start in the drab confines of a Job Centre.

There was one woman present that I couldn’t take my eyes off. She was perhaps in her sixties, with her hair cut into a sensible bowl style, and wore a massive eye patch over her right eye. If it’s ever discovered that the Somali pirates are being orchestrated from the Women’s Institute headquarters in London, I expect this woman will be exposed as the Emilio Largo of the whole operation.

She actually looked more bored with the session than the some of the younger attendees. I wondered if her mind was wandering, not with thoughts about whether her damson jam will make the grade at next week’s church fete, but about a Norwegian tanker that will soon be passing through the Gulf of Aden. 

Aside from the interesting people-watching, I don’t really have anything to report about the session itself. It was hosted by the Job Centre manager and one of her deputies, who both seemed to be genuinely nice people. Although, their occasional attempts at injecting humour into proceedings frequently fell flat. I suppose a group of unemployed and miserable people who don’t want to be attending a ‘getting back to work’ session at the Job Centre were always going to be a tough crowd. In fairness to them both, though, they did a sterling job.

Interesting fact of the day was this: (Q) What percentage of jobs are not advertised? (A) 50%

You live and learn.