This is why I've not written anything on here for eons

It's time to apologise once again for neglecting this already threadbare weblog.

I’m truly sorry.

Someone, somewhere, pressed pause on his or her 'Fucked-Up-Small-Town-O-Vision' remote and I found myself freeze-framed, insensible and living in my childhood home with no job and too many prospects.

I regressed.

All that occupies my once overactive mind is my next hit of Diet Coke. I’ve become quite addicted.

I’m now as socially engaging as a dado rail but marginally less decorative.

I hope to write things of minimal importance on here soon.

I'm no Judith Chalmers, but at least I try

Ahoy there. I’m terribly flustered. I’ve also not written anything on here in quite some time. I apologise most profusely, but this blog isn’t really going anywhere. You know this. I know this. Brian Blessed knows this.

Aaanyway, here’s the LOWDOWN:

The rail networks have made a considerable amount of money from me.

I went to Derbyshire for a short while and sat in a cave. It was nice but my cat’s halitosis is getting out of hand. She opened her mouth and everything good in the world died.

I then spent a few days camped alongside a stretch of Welsh sand. It appears I took much of it home with me, stashed away in various orifices. I’d always wanted an exfoliated cervix.

I returned from the beach with a gammy eye and a frazzled red triangle for a nose which people no doubt attributed to a grog addiction. There was just about enough time to don my prole attire before I headed out to London to seek my fame and fortune.

London is a ridiculous place. For London folk, cufflinks are a genuine shirt accessory and not a pointless coming-of-age gift. You learn to love the protective film of filth that accumulates throughout the day. Everyone knows someone famous. You gladly pay eight pounds to enter what is essentially a pub that plays music at an increased volume. Mojitos are a real drink.

I’m now in Cardiff for the last week EVER. I’m tired of living out of rucksacks and gallivanting around here, there and nowhere. I’m a filthy nomad and leave a trail of pants, make-up and despair wherever I go. It’s time to establish some sort of base camp. For practical reasons, this’ll have to be where I grew up: the charming Derbyshire town of Ashbourne.

In Ashbourne, the only thing that punctuates the whistling of the tumbleweed blowing through the empty streets is the sound of locals sharpening their pitchforks. Perhaps I’ll go mad and end my days weaving baskets out of spaniel hair or something. I’m quite frightened that I’ll never leave.

That’s the news so far. To summarise: I’ve avoided reality for long enough and now it’s time to stop being a twat and do something worthwhile.

My life is curiously devoid of socks.

Goodbye. x

I've got a degree. Oh, so have you. And you. And you. And you.

I’ve neglected to inform this blog that I recently obtained a degree in Journalism. I’m not entirely sure of what’s going on in Darfur or what the fuck Marshall McLuhan meant by ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ media (I’ve always found it to be tepid) but still, I can conduct presentations based entirely on the ambiguous sexuality of Spongebob Squarepants and be awarded a 100% pass rate for my efforts. I can’t think of a better way to spend tens of thousands of pounds.

I could’ve celebrated in the usual manner: y’know, a spot of racketeering, blackmail, money laundering, gang warfare, pimping, extortion, bribery, kidnapping and smuggling – the same old shit.

Instead I felt massively underwhelmed and made some underwhelming flapjack and a cup of underwhelming tea and went to bed while it was still light outside and got up the next morning for another day of underwhelming telesales work and then some more underwhelming tea and possibly another piece of underwhelming flapjack.

So yes, everyone has a degree. It’s no big deal. I’ve done nothing worthwhile with my life for four years besides intermittently conforming to various student stereotypes and notching up vast reams of debt. It’s over now and that’s that. I never spent my summer holidays inoculating impoverished children in the third world. Sorry.

Graduation ceremonies are exceptionally boring. I had to walk around all preened and uncomfortable in a silly black dressing gown while my parents took lots of pictures and moaned about the things that people above the age of fifty love to hate. It was essentially a shambles. No one knew where they were supposed to be and my contemporaries and I were shepherded down long, empty corridors like the intended victims of an academic holocaust. Instead we were treated to two hours of eczema-inducing tedium, where the only respite came in the form of a beautiful, inspirational and downright dazzling speech by George Monbiot.

Afterwards, I felt a little teary and stared into space for a while. I believe this is commonly known as ‘reminiscing’. I should’ve worked harder. I should’ve appreciated the opportunity to expand my pitiful knowledge base. I shouldn’t have done that, that or THAT. I should’ve written, drawn and photographed more. I should’ve looked after myself better. Bah.

These feelings lasted about fourteen minutes. Not one to be entirely enveloped by an unfeasibly large jiffy bag of despondence, I went and booked myself the cheapest flights that the internet could muster. Fortunately for me, I was headed to swanky Milano*. It was hot in Milan. I got bitten by flying malaria vessels. I don’t think I’ve got malaria. I can't be bothered to write about my holiday.

And now I’ve no job or permanent abode and I’m going to have to go and live with my parents until I learn how to face up to reality. I aim to be paying council tax within the next five years.

THE END.


*And if anyone even mentions my carbon footprint I’m going to poke them in the ear with something pointy and abrasive. I’ve not left the country for two years AND I don’t drive AND I recycle everything AND I turn the lights off when I’m not in the room AND I only boil enough water for my cup of tea AND I’ve thought about putting a brick in the cistern but decided against it for fear of inducing a plumbing catastrophe. You can just piss off. We’re all fucked anyway.

Pets

Today I very nearly bought myself a pet Quail. We’d deliberated over what type of pet would be suitable for student house full of transients (me), newspapers, wires and men with large beards.

Ferrets: Far too urine-soaked and hyperactive. Animal ADHD and piss don’t make the best of bedfellows.
Chipmunks: Too unpredictable. When was the last time YOU encountered a chipmunk at close range? They look as though they’d think nothing of attaching themselves to your head like a furry woodpecker and gnawing a large hole in your face. Perhaps I’m getting them confused with beavers.
Cats: Too high-maintenance.
Dogs: As demanding as cats, only far more stupid.
Tortoises: I like the idea of watching television with a tortoise on my lap, but they’re slightly out of my price range. Also, I’m not enamoured with the thought of being tremendously outlived by one’s pet.
Various assorted small rodents (Guinea Pigs, Hamsters, rats etc.): Boring, wriggly and potentially life-threatening due to their propensity to chew through electrical cables.

I’ve no idea why I thought it’d be bad news to adopt one of the above as a pet, but a good idea to buy a quail and cherish it like a stunted, mute foster child who just so happens to lay blue eggs every day. I finally came to my senses when I considered my lack of career, permanent abode and financial prospects. I don’t want to have to take a small bird to job interviews with me; I’m just not ready for that kind of commitment.

One day I’ll have a menagerie of weird and wonderful beasts. Until then, I’m aiming to visit a Llama farm in the Forest of Dean and quite possibly sneak one home with me. We could ride through the streets of Cardiff like that naked woman did in Banbury Cross, except I’ll be very fully-clothed and riding a Llama, not a horse. We could throw sweets at children (in a non-threatening, completely unpaedophilic way) or shout messages of support to disheartened drivers as we weave through traffic jams with colourful ribbons in our hair/fur and bells on our feet/hooves. It’d be beautiful, just like a scene from Into the West, only Gabriel Byrne wouldn’t be my dad (shame) and I wouldn’t be an Irish traveller and it’d again be a Llama and not a horse I was stealing AND I wouldn’t ride it to the sea and let it drown. That’d just be mean.

I do quite want a Llama as a matter of urgency. If there's any Llama thievery in South Wales or the West Country it's got ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with me. I can assure you that this post is merely theoretical and I'm not concocting some hideously complex plan to steal any Camelids*.

*I'm going to use this word in polite conversation on a regular basis from now on:

'Janet, that woman over there looks very much like a Camelid'

-OR-

'Damn these bastarding South American ungulates. They come to our country, steal our women and eat our grass. It's really not on. And Llamas are the worst Camelid of them all. I'm almost certainly going to create a petition on the Home Office website.'

-OR-

'I'm immune to your camelidic charms, Llama-face.'

There's an old man snoring somewhere RIGHT NOW

You’ve probably heard Rihanna’s latest single so many times that you want to jab yourself in the temples with said umbrella until you render yourself thoroughly dead. I’ve not listened to the radio, been in a shop or been party to digital television viewing for some time, and am therefore completely out of touch with the chart offerings of today. It is for this reason that ‘Umbrella’ is relatively new to my unfashionable ears and my, it’s a corker. I’m a big fan of Rhianna and her ambiguous and vacant-yet-beautiful face, but she should lose the obligatory and entirely unnecessary rap intro/solo if she’s to remain in my favour. Off you pop, Jay-Zzzz. You were good, once.

Anyone who has had to share an umbrella will know that they’re about as romantic as waking up next to a man wearing verruca socks on BOTH his feet. Rhianna evidently hasn’t ever resided in South Wales. Umbrellas may be a novelty in the Caribbean, LOVEY, but they’re a necessity round these parts. One minute you’re strolling along arm-in-arm with a beau; the next minute a gust of wind attacks you and there are prongs EVERYWHERE and a film of red is obscuring your vision and there’s bits of your face on the pavement AND all you can hear is the echoic screams of passers by. Brollies are evil incarnate. There’s also the power struggle between holder and holdee. Height differences only worsen this potentially relationship-crushing activity.

Oh, I don’t like umbrellas. I wish I was a duck. Scrap that, ducks are wank. I wish I was coated in Teflon, or Clingfilm, or grout. That way I wouldn’t have to bother walking around with such preposterous contraptions on the many occasions when precipitation dilutes the perennial dullness of the Welsh skies.

Let’s assume here, that she’s referring to a figurative rain shelter as opposed to the canopy of doom that we here in (Great) Britain have to contend with on an all-too-regular basis. Would Rihanna grant you hypothetical refuge from the allegorical rain under her metaphorical umbrella?

Probably.

In the hair-frizzing, ankle-soaking, disappointly cold real world, she’d almost certainly tell you to 'FUCK OFF AND BUY YOUR OWN FUCKING UMBRELLA-ELLA-ELLA-ELLA', and you'd put your hood up and try not to let her see you sobbing furiously into the lining of the flimsy cag-in-a-bag you purchased in the Millets' sale because you knew it'd come in handy one day.

Sorry, did I ruin that song for you? I'd better not dissect Whitney Houston's 'It's not Right (But it's OK)' then. Suffice to say: she'll not eat the skin of her baked sweet potato ever again.

Ten Reasons why my Father is Brilliant:

1) He has a big beard.

2) Until I was about fifteen, he used to cut my cheese on toast into small squares and decorate it with a ketchuped smiley face. He also did my homework for me on many occasions. I don’t know how wrong all this is.

3) When I had friends round, he often procured a large bottle of pure alcohol and let us dip our hands in and set them on fire. I don’t think their parents approved.

4) He has tolerated my mother for thirty years. I’m thinking of writing to the Queen and requesting that he be rewarded on the New Year’s honours list for this mammoth undertaking. As an aside, Father tells me that Mother has taken to wearing sunglasses atop her head at ALL times. I witnessed this at the weekend; she never once wore them over her eyes. I think she may even wear them in bed.

5) Despite being the clumsiest man in the entire world, he is seemingly indestructible. Notable examples include the time when he walked into a glass door and split his nose open, and when he severed an artery with a grind saw and hid in the downstairs toilet while he tried to sew himself back together because he thought Mother would chastise him for his afore-mentioned clumsiness. He had to go to hospital after I followed the trail of blood and panicked a little.

6) He likes Kate Bush.

7) He’s a secretive old bugger, but I understand he was in the Mountain Rescue at some point. I’m glad he wasn’t in the Cave Rescue. See, he somehow thought it’d be responsible to break into a closed-off pothole using bolt-cutters and take his children down what was essentially a muddy tunnel of fear. A few months later, the same pothole was featured in an episode 999 when the shaft had collapsed and squashed some cavers. My dad IS safety.

8) He persists in wearing a bright orange fleece while shopping at the local Sainsbury’s. Friends who work there find it hilarious; I think he’s angling for a job.

9) He possesses a vast wealth of knowledge on more or less every subject imaginable, yet still forgets my name and how many children/grandchildren he has and our faces AND all of our birthdays AND where he parked his car.

10) He can make anything out of anything, from industrial-sized refrigerators (from scratch) to silver rings.

He’s never going to see this belated Father’s Day tribute, but my dad really is better than your dad.

So THERE.

There's no Jolly Hostess

Nothing beats the enjoyment of a cup of peppermint tea on a tar-meltingly hot afternoon. Nothing. The sheen wears off somewhat if you have to buy a cup of regular tea from the drinks machine because it fails to serve hot water and you need the plastic cup as a receptacle for the hot water you’re ‘stealing’ from the staff kitchen as you’re too lowly to be able to use ceramic beverage vessels and might get a right ticking off if you’re caught with a prohibited mug. I lead a dangerous life. So dangerous, in fact, that I’ve written about my work’s drinks machine several times on this blog.

At the weekend, I spent fourteen hours travelling. My vast experience of cross-country travel has enabled me to identify three key stereotypical figures always present during a coach trip:

Firstly, we have The Smelly Man. No matter where I’m destined or where I position myself on the bus, there will always be an assault to my olfactory organs seated directly in front of me. I’m evidently a magnet for pungent males. This particular gentleman was so very offensive to my nose that I made an attempt to breathe through my mouth for a considerable amount of time, only to stop when I realised that the aroma was so strong that I could actually TASTE the sweat. Later, he reclined his chair so that his waxy hair was less that forty centimetres away from my face. I promptly whipped out my Olbas Oil and sniffed it with as much gusto as a fifteen-year old experimenting with poppers. It didn’t help.

This leads me to my other observation. I was sniffing away at my smelling salts when I suddenly became aware that a teenage girl was eyeballing me like a crime scene. It wasn’t just a case of my overdeveloped paranoia; there will ALWAYS be someone who stares at you for the whole journey. They’re usually sat on the seat opposite, and seem to find your every breath inexplicably engrossing. Granted, I regularly contort my rather odd face into all manner of strange configurations, but it’s disturbing to discover that during a moment of deep self-evaluation, someone has been watching the way your eyebrows do That Thing. Read a magazine or look out the window, just DON’T look at me. I’m not going to be doing anything more interesting than accidentally squirting myself in the face with Satsuma juice or attempting to sleep by resting my head on my knee.

The third and final coach passenger of note is The Lovebird. This individual is either travelling across the country to be reunited with their paramour or leaving them in a sticky puddle of longing. At Sheffield bus station, I watched this journey’s deserter prise himself away from his pigtailed fancywoman with considerable difficulty. She wasn’t keen on letting go. And as he walked up the aisle to find his seat, she was making all sorts of wild hand gestures, presumably by way of saying goodbye. And then there were tears as he mouthed sweet nothings through the glass. If I was anything other than an emotional leper, this might’ve moved me. Instead, I noted that her shoes were scuffed and unattractive and her handbag had ‘The End of the World is Now’ emblazoned on the side. Perhaps that’s why they were so desperate not to be parted. Perhaps.

I prefer train travel.