Things To Do In Balham When You're Dead

Wankers of the Day

2012-01-24T18:30:00.001Z

Well done to almost everyone in this photo for deliberately ignoring the extremely heavily pregnant woman who was forced to stand on final carriage of a southbound Northern Line train at about 5.15 this evening. I got on at Kennington, along with the woman fourth from the front on the right-hand side. Blonde, glasses, pregnant.

And no, she wasn't just fat. There was no danger of being slapped around the chops for kindly asking if she'd like your seat. That's a natural fear for most of us. I'd accept it if she had been a bit husky. But she wasn't. She was a skinny as a rake, with an enormous baby bump which made it look like she'd swallowed a hot air balloon. She was even wearing one of those "Baby on Board" badges. There was absolutely no excuse whatsoever. And yet unbelievably not one of these fuckers could get off their arses.

Here were my travel colleagues:

Click to enlarge. Do you know any of these people? Well give them a kick in the cunt from me if you do.

I particularly liked (and by "liked", I mean "hated") the way the girl with the brown hair on the right-hand side looked closely, then around the carriage, and then settled back into her crappy free magazine for idiot women. Embarrassingly for her, she then had to spend the rest of her journey sat next to the women she had so flagrantly stared at, decided to ignore, and then got back to another article about pantyliners.

I should point out that the guy front right is utterly blameless. He got on after we passed Stockwell, when a tosser with a silly beard reading a comic secreted in a Forbidden Planet carrier bag (saaaaad bastard) left the train. He had sat, unblinkingly, without a care in the world, like a toad, directly in front of the mother-to-be. And then had the balls to push past her in his hurry to get off and go back to reading a fucking comic. He was comfortably 25. It was presumably one of those horrendous Japanese things rammed with women with enormous eyes and breasts, the ones read by the mentally disturbed wankers as they dance in swamps of their own semen and shit.

The other guy on the right looked like Ming the Merciless. You wouldn't miss him in a crowd, bald bastard. On the left is a woman with nails so gruesome it looked like she'd spent her day digging graves. Next to her, some sort of deeply unattractive elf sporting a Cable & Wireless neck lanyard thing with her ID badge on it. I won't name her. Next along, Red Riding Hood, aged by 100 years of sucking lemons. Then a large chap in an Everton beanie and a suit. And then more, and more, and more complete and utter bastards. You should be ashamed.

And they say using bad language is a sign of limited intelligence, a weak vocabulary. Well at least I give my seat up on the tube, you fucking bellends.

A Penny for Laurie's thoughts

2012-01-19T14:53:00.001Z

Laurie Penny is, whilst I disagree with almost every single position she takes on absolutely everything, a brilliant writer. And I always enjoy trawling through her stuff, one hand pinching my nose, the other feverishly scrolling down the page at lightning speed. You need to read this stuff, you just don't have to believe it. It's like reading a comic. Not a serious piece of graphic art, like Tintin, but just something light, breezy and essentially absurd. Like Asterix. That's it, Laurie Penny is like Goscinny and Uderzo. Amusing, light; readable when you're straining on the toilet, but ephemeral and pointless.

Normally, Laurie's stuff is about riots and What A Good Thing They Are. Stuff like this, which was a sort of middle-class version of the carnage at the Clapham Junction branch of Footlocker last summer. She writes loads of stuff praising anti-social behaviour by feckless students, op-ed balls which is so far off piste it's already been in the hot tub, drunk ten jaegerbombs and danced the night away in L'Avalanche. I devour this stuff, but I hate it - and myself - too.

But today, I've got a new found love for Miss Penny, and not just because I enjoy her mind and sharpened pencils. She's actually written something about the complete paucity of ideas and hubris and mindless bullshit which came with the whole Occupy London-let's-all-camp-outside-St-Paul's too which I've been walking past most weeks, and enjoying its gradual decline from earnest shouting shop, to bonkers conspiracy theorist patch, through to its current iteration, Glastonbury for the homeless. Last time I went past, there were - literally - people doing that bastard poi thing talentless gits do at festivals. You know, where they get two sticks with little tassels on the ends and wave them around. It's like rhythmic gymnastics, but even more shit - and, as a nation, we're already terrible at that. And there was someone with one of those hourglass-shaped things thrown up and down on a string between two sticks. No idea what that's called, other than "sticks connected by string from which you toss up and fail to catch a rubbery hourglass-shaped thing to ensure that you look like a complete bastard in general public". Suffice it to say: arseholes.

Anyway, so today's piece in the New Statesman. Here it is. I can't be bothered to go through it line-by-line, because I've not blogged for so long that I don't really know how to anymore. Just read it yourself, and marvel that someone who writes so well could hold such whacko opinions. And then read it again, and remember that she's the (former) flag waver for these people. And then know that when Laurie Penny deserts you, it's definitely time to leave. That court decision means nothing; this is like the ravens fleeing the Tower of London. It's bound to crumble. No more Laurie with her stentorian tones bestriding the steps of the cathedral marshalling the troops to victory. No more writing about how important and brave and brilliant they all are.

No. Now she's just mocking them. Seriously, could anyone who secretly didn't hate the smell and the mess and the notices attached to Natwest (about how all money is fraud and all private property is a sham and how aliens are coming back to earth and Prince William is a lizard and you can copyright your name) serious paint the remaining rump of knackered, grubby waifs left behind in such an unflattering light. She mocks their generally quite socially-accepted drinking and soft drug use (they're camped out in the middle of the City, so surrounded by others doing similar in more expensive attire).

There's still some of the old Laurie here - "an honest counter-culture", "There are different ways of being on the streets, and all of them are political" - but the killer blow lands in the paragraph on self-styled "tramp liason" Tom, 24.

All the camp beauraucrats will come up to you and say, 'oh, you can't roll a spliff in the uni tent', and I'm like, 'fuck off man, I'm an activist. I've been out fighting the EDL in Barking all morning'."

That is a low blow, Penny. You can withdraw your support, and critique the movement. You can cry salt tears for its abandonment of revolutionary aims, and letting public support slip by holding votes on allowing drinking, rather than stating what are probably partially valid grievances about excesses in the City. But you've made Tom, 24 into David Brent. And that, Laurie Penny, is unforgiveable.

- - - - - - -

postscript

This is the quote I was reminded of:

And if there's one other person who's influenced me in that way I think, someone who is a maverick, someone who does that to the system, then, it's Ian Botham. Because Beefy will happily say "that's what I think of your selection policy, yes I've hit the odd copper, yes I've enjoyed the old dooby, but will you piss off and leave me alone, I'm walking to John O'Groats for some spastics."

"Unlimited income appeals to me"

2011-11-30T12:42:00.001Z

Janice is 38, lives alone in Crumbsville, suburban London, and has paid £4,000 to a variety of dead eyed monsters with nice teeth to coach her on how to become a millionaire. Every morning, she dumps a couple of coppers in a few jars liberally strewn around her bare abode, rubs her earlobes whilst insisting to her reflection that she is both a "millionare" and "an excellent money manager", and then heads out the nursery at which she works. I mean, she's probably got a good defined benefit pension, but I don't think it's going to make her a millionaire. She watched videos of "couples in love", sees Eighties stock camera work of people lounging in hammocks sipping cocktails with little umbrellas, and fancies a slice of it. And why not?

Janice is one of the stars of this week's Most Depressing Yet Watchable Documentary, "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?", the first part of a tryptych on money from the BBC. Make sure you catch it on the iPlayer before it vanishes. The cast of grotesques, cranks and desperate money-worshippers made for particularly edifying viewing; tales of depthless human misery are always enjoyable. A brief dramatis personae.

Maria floats around her large and indecently horrid large property in a hideous faux fur coat. She loves having croissants and cocktails on her balcony, and funding her husband's musical career with the proceeds of her property portfolio. And you don't need O-Levels for that. Given that the husband's career appears to be that of a professional Brian May impersonator gigging in pubs, it's lucky that Maria owns so many rental properties. He doesn't bring much to the party; I bet Maria doesn't even invite him to the endless lunches she says she attends.

Rhys and Sarah are 18, have just celebrated their two year anniversary, and are already thousands in debt to charlatans. They go on bollocks courses on how to invest in rental property, mentored by a couple of grinning sharks. She got into the work of Robert Kiyosaki age 12 (he wrote something called "Rich Dad, Poor Dad", a treatise on the whole pointlessness of education and work, and an homage to buying four hideous cars and living in a bungalow in Phoenix, Arizona)., Rhys can't bring himself to tell his parents about his get rich scheming - presumably because, secretly, he knows that if it waddles like a duck, it's probably good dried, roasted and served in small pancakes with cucumber, spring onion and plum sauce. These silent scream nightmares must come to him as he works at his minimum wage job watering plants at Homebase.

Biblebashing millionaires Shirley and David used to be a nurse and engineer respectively. They've packed in those rubbish jobs now, of course, because they own 29 properties, a portfolio worth about £4 million. That sounds a lot, I was impressed. They've invested well, clearly. But then Vanessa Engle, who's a sort of highbrow female Louis Theroux, asked them how much they make from it. About £36,000 to £40,000, says Dave. £40,000, from a £4 million portfolio. That's a 1% return. By any measure, that is miserable. Still, it's worked for them because some people just lack ambition, and want. And they top up the pathetic return on their assets by telling other people how to be just like them. So if ever you want a course on how to be bald, chubby cheeked and painfully mousey, just call on Shirley and David.

You see becoming super rich and never having to get out of bed again (which, admittedly, sounds terrific) means that you need to create "passive income". You just need to buy enough assets which you can leverage to buy more assets in the hope that you eventually make enough to allow you to stop buying assets. And by assets, these people mean rental properties. There's nothing else to do, simple as. Just buy a property, leverage yourself up to the eyeballs, and keep buying more and more. And pray and pray and pray that mortgage rates don't go up even the teensiest bit, because then the whole edifice will come crashing down around you, and you'll lose the whole thing. But you cannot afford to be negative. Not. At. All. Don't question this stuff, because then you won't make millions. It's like not believing in fairies - every time someone says it, one dies.

And to prove that they still believe in fairies, all the willing all go to Excel to watch the shitehawks flogging their bullshit in person. They're queuing for the gas chambers.

I think it would be fine if this was just an American thing. It's got all the hallmarks of evangelical religion. Repetitve phrasing, call and return, charismatic leaders, phony success stories, a lumpen and unattractive crowd bulked out with stooges and - lest we forget - an impressively bulky bottom line. But it seems we have our very own British versions too. Marcus is lank and horrid looking, desporting the guru's uniform of pug-ugly shirt and testicle-nippingly tight stonewashed jeans. He's a millionaire, natch, and he teaches people how to become millionaries. By "teaching", he means publicly humiliating, making them run up and down a crappy hotel conference room, or jump up and down and clap. He is David Brent, right down to his gimpy little beard. His clearly embarrassed wife looks very sad indeed, although it may be the crotch-displaying pose he strikes whilst sitting on the sofa in their spartan flat (none of these millionaires seems to spend any money on furnishings) whilst being interviewed that causes her to hate him.

It's obvious - obvious to anyone with a brain - that the whole thing is a pyramid. Ask any of these people how they became rich, and the answer is that they got rich charging other people vasts amounts of money to tell them how to get rich. It's an endless circle jerk of hellish proportions. When I (briefly, it was far too tiring) worked as a postman, I was regularly asked by one of the people to which I delivered (they're probably called "clients" or "customers" in Post Office speak) to join his pyramid scheme. You just need to sell household cleaning products to other people farther down the pyramid, in the hope eventually that all the suspiciously branded (never Cif, always Rif or Tif) and clearly dangerous (i.e. "this will destroy your skin")will eventually be sold to a consumer and someone will get some money. The people at the top get rich from the endeavours of the Solylent Green types below.

You're stuck though, aren't you? Once you've paid Robert Kiyosaki your £1,500 - which will just about cover the cup holders on his latest appalling car - and realise that you've been sold a crock, perhaps you have to keep going on the courses in the hope that you do finally crack the old financial success game, so that you can afford to pay off your credit card bill.

The gasman cometh

2011-11-10T16:54:00.000Z

Many things are inexplicable to me. The popularity of baking soda toothpaste. The films of Woody Allen. Strictly Come Dancing. And foremost amongst such baffling issues is the magical system by which services are supplied to my flat. By services, I mean things like electricity and water and, most presciently, gas.

Clearly, there are pipes providing these things (and taking away others) everywhere running beneath London. Along with all the hidden rivers and disused underground stations and unexploded bombs. But they're hidden to view. They're the sort of things you only notice when they go wrong.

My flat was built in 1859. I know this because I have researched its history heavily (I spent nine months in my flat not working, so it's not sad, it was just called "keeping my mind active"). In 1859, health and safety was just something people laughed at whilst poking the Elephant Man with a stick, thrusting a tiny boy up a chimney, or laughingly removing a bloody arm from a girl mangled by a loom. European directives were the remit of mustachioed men barking at each other across map-strewn desks and council operatives were just the men who came by with the nightsoil wagon. Point is, the Victorians had no truck with petty, girlish concerns like safety in the home. Pshaw to your need for fuses on electrical outlets. A high-minded nineteenth century chap would have no truck with fuses. He'd just shove one hand in the socket, another in the charger for your iPhone, and light his pipe on the sparks. These hardy folks spent their - admittedly rather brief by 21st century standards - lives bestriding the globe, thrashing their servants and children and reading books of maps in their clubs (at least, some people did. 99% of the population obviously worked like dogs). And now, goddammit, kids can't even play conkers anymore without wearing metal glaives and safety specs.

The upshot of this relaxed attitude is obvious. When stuff goes wrong in a building constructed before petty little concerns like building regulations, stuff really goes wrong. Things that, if left to fester, could probably blow up my flat in a shower of asbestos and my fancy new carpet. But I've lived there for five years almost incident free. Sure, it's been infested with mice on a regular basis. And I've managed to flood the flat below at least three times. And there was the time a flatmate attempted to hoover up the chunks of under-digested duck breast he had just sicked all over his duvet. But these are minor blips in an otherwise serene existence.

And then it happened.

I was away, playing golf for a couple of days in the garden of England (aside for golf fans: I hit the ball well, especially after a quadruple whiskey mac on the 9th during the second round. Although I was a bit glassy-eyed thereafter, so my putting was rubbish). After a night of fish and chips and some heavy pinting, the last thing I expected was a midnight call from Mrs Webby noting that people had knocked on the door, and the driveway was being dug up. There had been a gas leak.

The first hint of gas, and the gas providing people get very excited. I called them over once when I thought I caught a whiff of escaping gas, and some chappie came rushing over. Although it turned out I couldn't actually smell gas - he thought it was probably just a nest of recently-poisoned mice rotting under the floorboards.

Imagine what no gas means. It's gas-tly. No cooking, no heating. No hot water. I can do without the first - anyone can whip up something razzer speshal in the microwave. The central heating was missed, but with my portable radiator and an electric blanket on the bed, all remained bearable. It's the hot water you miss first. So thank the lord for Mrs Webby's saintly and ever-reliable mother and her ample hot water supplies and roast chickens.

It's now been two weeks since it went wrong, and my driveway is a mess of drilled concrete and men with dogends hanging from their gobs. It's beyond annoying. Or at least it was, until I discovered that not only do I not have to pay for any of this upheaval, I'm actually going to get paid for the inconvenience. £30. Every. Single. Day. And there's one of those exciting little diggers outside my flat, which I might go and have a quick joyride on at some stage.

The gas man already owes me £450 in compensation, which will make up for the freezing cold a bit. Actually, quite a lot. I think I'd rather have £450 than be warm or wash. So as I sit, writing this in fingerless gloves and a hat, here's to the great slapdash Victorian builders.Long may their faults be discovered, but preferably just before they kill me.

Round up the usual suspects

2011-10-26T18:51:00.002+01:00

I walked past the OccupyLSX protest the other night, early on a rather nice, chilly Autumnal evening on my way - capitalist slave that I am - to drink £4 pints of lager in a swish bar overlooking St Paul's. That's the St Paul's which closed thanks to a small crowd of non-specific hand-wringers who have decided that the most impressive way to protest against The Man is to pitch a tent in the middle of the City and sleep there (or maybe not, if thermal imaging is to be believed). Right on. You smash that system.

I paused briefly as I sashayed up Ludgate Hill. A microphone was set up, and the rabble were taking it in turns to step up and spit out their views to an audience of cross-legged fellow travellers. One chap gabbled that without the human race, the world would be full of trees and bees and butterflies. He was rightly shouted down, as was the person who started reading a long quotations from Ghandi about how awful things like money and clothes and medical care are. He was gently ushered back to his tent, and then the whole throng started honking about free speech and process and there were complaints about working groups and the right to be heard. Someone punched me in the arm, twice. Turning, I was handed a pile of leaflets. Take one, and pass them on was the message articulated from beneath a brow of piercings. I passed, exhausted already.

On the steps of the cathedral were the usual suspects. A man - in his forties - in red clown trousers sporting waist-length dreadlocks. The sort of person who's costume suggested he might have sufficient chutzpah to not only profess solidarity with - but also to part of the same movement as - the Arab Spring without a single blush of self-awareness.

Momentarily he looked a bit sad. Maybe he wanted to hear more about the bees and the butterflies or Ghandi. But if his is the face of utopia, I'm out. Still, he was probably having a ruddy good time. Protesting is cool and fun, isn't it? You can camp out with your mates and appear on the TV, whilst hammering over a worthwhile message. It should be simple. But when you don't know what you're protesting about, and your slogans can't really be distilled into a key statement of policy, people really aren't going to get it. When your complaints are so multi-various (money, capitalism, privatisation, Thatcher, nuclear power, Zionism, the cuts, EMA, student fees, Dale Farm, the Dean of St Paul's, the police, Jean Charles de Menezes, Nick Griffin, bankers, profit, haircuts), presenting a united front ain't going to be easy. There's a valid protest about corporate asset-stripping and greed and so on in there somewhere (some of which - for reference - I may have participated in, and enjoyed the fruits of, in a former incarnation), but it's hardly bubbling to the surface, is it.

They've got a website though, which is a step in the right direction. The fuel protestors showed in 2003 that for a really good protest, you need to harness the power of modernity. They managed to blockade a few oil refineries with the power of their mobile phones (presumably Nokia bricks of the oldest school) and the operation I needed on my knee was postponed (luckily, I had gone private, so didn't have to wait six months for it to be rescheduled). The relentless march of technology has made protesting in 2011 all about twitter and iPhones and blogs.

At the very least, you need a website and some email addresses. How else will the world's press know you're in sute, ready for your close-up? You need endless statements. And meetings.

And, for true democracy, the minutes of interminable committee meetings where you decide What Must Be Done About Men In Suits Robbing Our Children Of Their Future. Or as I call them, a shouting match during which a whole variety of harmlessly kooky ideas are barked around as Christopher Wren revolves in his grave. This thing is a red-tape nightmare, comprising myriad focus groups and workshops, group meetings and fringe events. In which they discuss which further work groups and and focus shops they need. The thrust of the camp is "anyone who feels strongly about it" ("it" being anything at all) is to "please form a working group to discuss it. Just talk about it". After all, it's good to talk, right? The problem is that when you've got meetings, you need minutes. Every detail must be recorded for posterity, with aims decided upon, votes measured, solutions offered and debated and the findings published for the whole world to see on your website. Which means anyone can look upon your absurd navel gazing and mock you. Infuriatingly, what was once freely available to all - the minutes of their regular general assemblies - seems to have vanished. So you can't read them - so much for democracy.

Luckily, I took a peek before the Great Purge.

As a former lawyer, I see the value of due process, the importance of note-taking. How vital it is to talk through all your issues before coming to a reasoned and reasonable conclusion. Well done to Brother Tina for writing everything down, including mentions of hand gestures made, the council removing litter and various heckling, shrieking, and gibbering. Clearly having one person in charge is fascistic, so I'm genuinely impressed that John and Venus (really?) - the "facilitators" - were able to keep any sense of order.

But the talking's not about the protest per se, it's all about creature comforts. So whilst it may be OK to daub graffiti on local buildings ("Pay attention of what we’re writing on the walls. But do agree with writing on the walls"), a speaker hollers "Please, no graffiti on the establishments that are allowing us to use the facilities." i.e. stop writing your messages of corporate scorn on the toilet at Starbucks, because I need a poo.

With St Paul's closed, is no-one caring for the spiritual needs of the rag-bag protesting congregation? Have no fear, for there's a "Tent with solar panels. Multi-faith/no-faith tent. 7am a lady is coming to do a led-meditation. If anyone has a faith that has special requirements, come speak to us. It’s a space to chill out and get a little bit of peace."

Marvelously, that announcement was interrupted "by city council taking away our waste." So much for peace.

But religious welfare and the need to do a McShit are secondary concerns. There are weighty matters to be discussed. Mainly, what to do with money, and whether it's OK to get lashed in the tent city. And it's now that the crowd gets interested.

So to bellyaching about money. Now clearly money is inherently wrong. Money = a big bastard. But astonishingly the protest has received financial donations, a bit like giving. They've got £4,000 in cash stashed away. But you can't keep all that under your sleeping bag; they need to do something with it. But, you idiot, money's b-a-a-a-d. And even worse than money is the banks. Fucking banks. The Co-Op, previously thought of as a lovely ethical operation, "gives its money to the Bank of England that puts it in other banks and gives it to the stock market." So that's out of the question. What will they do with it?

All discussion is rendered pointless by an interjection from the throng. A killer line. The game changer: "Are we seriously standing here and talking about the ethics of transferring money? Money is an inherently evil thing. We’re still compromising ourselves politically." How right you are. purity must remain the watchword. And "if we want to go pure, we need to go barefoot. Sneakers are made in sweatshops." Must be cold on the wet paving slabs of Paternoster Square.

And so to booze. Sure, if I was sleeping rough in late October, I'd probably want a nip of something pretty strong of an evening to get me off to sleep. And perhaps a honk on the crack pipe to keep me assured that I was making a valid political statement. But the sight of empty cans and bottles - and a dope-addled miasma piercing the crisp City mornings - doesn't do much for your credibility. As in all true democracies, there's disagreement. And then a vote, in which 75 people vote to ban drugs and alcohol. But 29 are in favour of discrete use. The outcome? "We don’t have consensus", an insufficient majority. Splitters.

There's absolutely justifiable anger about this complete and utter waste of time. If you want to drink, says one, go to one of the many, many pubs nearby. But people are coming back to the site drunk, pipes up a teetotal killjoy - can't we create a sort of "neighbourhood watch" to deal with them? But for others, that doesn't work, because then aren't we "just creating another police state?" And all the while, the machinery of global commerce rolls along untroubled.

A lone voice of sanity reigns: "there’s a real danger we radicalise ourselves out of existence, disappear up our own rectum." It's the most sensible thing anyone has said all meeting. Very well done. What a shame it was then followed up with "Sometimes we have to wade through the shit to get rid of capitalism".

First World problems

2011-09-27T11:30:00.000+01:00

A lesson in the internet:

Spotify is a sort of clever online juke box thing which allows you to play almost any music you could ever think of over the internet, on demand, with - even if you pay zero pounds - hardly any advertising at all. I tried it once. It was fine and clever and exciting, and you can send people playlists, but then I've reached such an advanced age that I only listen to audiobooks nowadays, so it has precisely no relevance to my life at all. Still, nice idea - and the recording artists (I think, although I can't be bothered to do any research) get a minimal financial return, so everyone wins.

Facebook is a social network sort of thing where you can make friends with - and thereafter be bombarded by news from - various people who you're familiar enough to have an electronic relationship with, but probably wouldn't ever want to bump into on the tube. It's free and chances are you've already got an account which you use to look at pictures of your rapidly-balding chums proudly displaying their children or new houses or dancefloor activities at that recent wedding you weren't invited to.

And now it seems that to have Spotify, you also have to have Facebook. Crows, prepare to be stoned.

Clearly, news of such earth-shattering import demands a revolutionary response. Build the barricades, Facebook is coming to take over the world. Some people, it appears, are anti-Facebook. They want the music on demand, on their work computers, in their homes, on their iPhones and myriad other devices, but they're not prepared to play the game and have a Facebook account. Because they expect an entirely free service, all the time, untainted by any display of commercialism or business. Those clever people who invented Spotify, the nerds who came up with the idea to revolutionise online music, shouldn't see any return on their concept. We will not pay. Right on, brother.

Actually, it's not about free-ness. The issue is privacy, clearly. Facebook employees are NOT hipsters who shuttle around their open plan offices on skateboards wearing enormous headphones, drinking coffee all day and then ride a microscooter home. Actually, Facebook is an enormous Death Star of an edifice, in which sinister dark suited bastards roam around collecting data and selling it to arms manufacturers who will send you millions of spam emails and flog you thalidomide and asbestos.

The concern - and maybe it's just about understandable - is that Facebook collects (and presumably then sells) your data. Trust issues and persecution complexes run riot. Data capture means endless shady surveillance from which there is no escape. You might suddenly find yourself herded into a blacked out transit van because you wrote 'lol' as a comment on a phone just one too many times. The Facebook 'Like' button - which appears all over the internet looking all blue and harmless - has some kind of special code which means that it follows you around, makes you wear a yellow star and tosses you onto a cattle truck (that's Godwin's Law after six paragraphs).

Bastard

But just exactly who does this inconvenience, given that there are 750 million Facebook users, who together must create more data every second than could possibly be used before the sun swallows the earth. On an individual basis, do you really think anyone cares? Why are you so bloody special that ephemeral data, like what music you listen to via a site which offers you a service for free, shouldn't be retained? Do you endlessly flick through videos of humorous bestiality or bomb-making manuals? Do you have an embarrassingly wretched taste in music? So awful that you're not prepared to have a tiny bit of text flop unobtrusively onto your Facebook wall to explain to all your ex-girfriends that you do actually enjoy The Kings of Leon?

Will you really be left weeping uncontrollably because you get send a cleverly-targeted message sent to asock-puppet email address you never check (the free hotmail or gmail one you used to register your Facebook account)? An email which may offer to sell you goods or services based on your internet browsing history (more kiddie porn?). Or perhaps suggest a new band which, given what you've already Spotified, you might like. If you listen to endless Coldplay, you may also like similarly challenging music - maybe give U2 a try, or the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. That sounds pretty harmless, right? No more insidious that the 'Customers also bought' thing on Amazon. It turns out I generally buy all of those things, too.

As this tear-stained blog notes, your mobile phone operator can tell where you are, every second of every day. So what. Am I really worried that Mr O2 is endlessly tracking me, checking where I buy my lunch and what time I go for my morning crap. For a moment, I thought I was Jason Bourne. Turns out I'm not, so I couldn't give a toss. I'm more worried about McDonalds sponsoring London 2012.

I get it. It's cool NOT to have a Facebook account. Cool in exactly the same way that it was exciting and interesting to sign up in 2006. The true fellow travellers, the Year Zero Luddites, proudly boast that they don't let Mark Zuckerberg have any of their priceless special pixie dust panda blood amazing data. Well done, big whoop. You're better than all of us. But doesn't that hair shirt itch?

Downton Syndrome

2011-09-21T14:59:00.001+01:00

You probably watched the start of the second series of Downton Abbey on Sunday. Or Spooks. But more likely the former because you couldn't be bothered to flick the channels after the X-Factor. You were engrossed, even if you were pretending to play on Twitter or eBay during it. It can't just have been me.

Mrs Webby is very excited by Downton. I'm guessing this is because she'd ideally like to live in the era, despite tuberculosis, the death of all her male friends and the almost overwhelming chance that she wouldn't actually be the Countess of Grantham.

Fortunately, her colleagues are equally excited. So excited, in fact, that the whole load of them have come up with predictions for the series, written them down, sealed them, and locked them away for a grand unveiling at the end of the run. Imagine the potential for excitement. Just imagine.

Anyway, I managed to source a copy of the survey they all filled in. And, despite not remembering the character names for much of the time, have come up with my own spoilers. Seal this blog away until Christmas and then re-open it to see how I did. It's my premature festive gift to you.

Downton Abbey Predictions

General Family Predictions

Toffs continue as normal, unmolested by enormous social and geo-political upheaval of the era. Toothpaste still squeezed onto toothbrushes by myriad flunkies. Finally brought low by Wall Street Crash (in series three). House bought by upstart American family from Remains of the Day and gardens opened to public, who drop crisp packets in the parterre.

Servants continue to gleefully polish silver.

The Earl and Countess of Grantham – Robert and Cora

Robert belies his class, upbringing and upper-class mores to continue as an enlightened employer, regularly bear-hugging staff and taking an interest in their tawdry personal lives which borders on the prurient. Far too heroic to throw in his lot with well-fed ex-army buffers, he becomes heavily involved in the fledgling dig for victory campaign and turns his house over to the war office for the recuperation of wounded soldiers returning from the Western front (who he enjoys visiting and patronising at length). Is regularly found striding around the gardens staring wisely at sprouting turnips.

Cora continues to be fay and whimsical, bathing regularly and looking thin.

Lady Sybil

Maintains her position as Downton’s foremost Liberated Woman™. Turns out to be a spectacularly amazing nurse after her extensive two month course, although is regularly seen crying alone in a darkened room after changing dressings on appalling injuries. Is regularly rushed off her feet, especially after gas attacks. Is a mother to all the rough diamond mouth organ-playing squaddies and singularly fails to be molested by any of them as they all fall in love with her. An early Suffragette leader, she is instrumental in the successful campaign for the female vote and regularly chains herself to iron railings. Marries below her class and lives in unfashionable Balham to drum home her freedom of spirit. Continues to scandalise society and causes horses to bolt by deliberately and recklessly wearing trousers in public.

Lady Mary

Looks pallid and annoyed for the remainder of the series. Occasionally cracks her porcelain face with a single acid tear. Becomes engaged to the newspaper baron to avoid her pre-marital Turkish delight becoming public. Breaks her engagement when Matthew Crawley reappears clutching a small woollen dog in the stump of his arm. Story subsequently breaks in the News of the World but she is too happy to care about nasty looks from behind fans and it’s the roaring Twenties anyway and no-one cares about that sort of thing anymore.

Matthew Crawley

Has a simply terrific war. He is missing in action, badly injured – and horribly disfigured. News prematurely reaches home of his demise which leads to eugenic crisis within the family. Happily turns out to be fine, and limps home with an eye patch and a chest brimming with medals to many huzzahs from the servants, who delight in the thought of opening windows and lighting fires for another generation of Granthams.

Mary/Matthew/Lavinia Love Triangle

In an extremely neat volte-face, Matthew’s appalling injuries cause Lavinia to break off their engagement. Lavinia shunted out for being too insipid and too trade. Plus – as middle-class – is clearly conniving and only marrying Matthew for his money and position (absolutely unlike Mary).

John Bates/His Wife (Vera)/Anna the Maid

Bates remains stoic and generally heroic, albeit in London exile. His wild-eyed wife continues to wear hats in a threatening manner but is killed in a Zeppelin air raid. Anna the Maid weeps and moans in his absence but continues to make beds and be a comfort to all the other staff until Bates limps back into view at the end of the driveway, after which they satisfy the greatest ambition of all of the serving class by opening a small boarding house in Southend and dying at 56.

The maids –Sarah and Moseley

Cowardly Moseley is shunned by his community and his own father. The shame of it all causes him to volunteer for active service where he is heroically killed running across no-man’s land in an attempt to rescue a member of the upper class who had previously joyfully marched out of the trenches armed with nothing more than a short stick under his arm. We view his grave, amongst many thousands of others, in a field of poppies. A similar fate comes for Jim Henson’s masterpiece, William.

Sarah consorts with the devil at midnight and continues to be simply beastly, a trait manifested by her endless smoking of unfiltered cigarettes. A malign influence within the house, her nastiness is noticed by all except Cora, who misreads the endless bars of soap left around her bath as hilarious British slapstick. She also regularly sprinkles Cora’s left-over hunks of soap around all other bathtubs on the off-chance any members of staff fall pregnant. The new maid who reads magazines and dreams of a better life is probably the first amongst these.

Any other predictions

Serving staff are briefly excited by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and seem prepared to threaten the social order. Much reading of pamphlets is undertaken in the scullery. Nothing comes of it due to the timely intervention of Cora ringing for her bath to be drawn. The Irish chauffeur marches out to fight for the International Brigade in Spain and later dies in hospital under the watchful care of Matron Sybil.

Butler Carson forced to retire to an estate cottage due to ill health and a new butler is sourced from Brideshead. He is hilariously confused by the fish knives but Robert shouts at those who bully him.

Former nasty servant/stretcher-bearer with hole in his hand is to be shot at dawn for cowardice but is pardoned after he saves Matthew Crawley from drowning in a shell hole. A bloody hero, he becomes the new Bates.

New inventions of the age are much discussed – frozen food, penicillin, moving pictures. Somewhat plain middle daughter is horribly mangled in car accident after marriage to Nigel Havers.

Maggie Smith dies.

Is this the real life?

2011-09-21T14:51:00.001+01:00

Gamers 'can't tell real world from fantasy'. Or so says The Metro. Who base their story on an extremely in-depth study of ~~thousands~~ 42 15 to 21 year-olds who play at least ten hours of video games every week.

These boffins, in their ivory towers (Nottingham Trent). What do they know about this stuff. What would happen, for instance, if they were caught in a terrorist attack. Or the remaining Beatles come calling looking for a new John Lennon? Or they need to solve crimes in LA. In the 1950s.

Sadly, I'm not aged between 15 and 21. In fact, it's a decade since I was even close. And I don't play video games for 10 hours a week. At my advanced age, that wouldn't be dignified. And although I probably played Mario Tennis every single day whilst doing a mindless post-graduate law course, the best I can hope for nowadays is the odd late-night half-cut game of Pro Evo. And it's very easy to tell real world from fantasy after that, because it turns out I can't play football. I can't do the Zidane spin and no-one shouts out "CROSSSSESSSS" when I whip in another deadly corner.

And, strangely enough, I don't often find myself driving through Balham, stopping by a prostitute, paying for her services then beating her to death with a golf club before retrieving her fee from the ground, running over her prostrate corpse and then driving off.

Obviously I can only speak for myself - let's just hope this chap doesn't act on his impulses.

Journal of a Tour to Tooting

2011-09-05T15:40:00.002+01:00

The heartiness of my honest landlord, and the desire of doing social honour to our very obliging conductor, induced me to sit down again. Col's bowl was finished; and by that time we were well warmed. A third bowl was soon made, and that too was finished. We were cordial, and merry to a high degree; but of what passed I have no recollection, with any accuracy.

James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, 1773

The Gammorean couldn't keep his bastard arm straight so the endless droning of the alarm on the drip plugged into his wrist drove me mental. And that was in addition to his foghorn snoring. And the fact that he was woken up every four hours to have another several horse syringes of antibiotics crammed into his enormous body.

It's Friday night. 10pm. St George's Hospital Tooting. Accident & Emergency. I'm in Majors. No Minors for me tonight (not like last November, when I hobbled in using an antique golf club as a crutch with an ankle the size of a baby's head). This means that you get: (a) preferentially fast treatment; (b) a better class of horrific injuries and illnesses; (c) a rather more terrifying set of screams and yelps from the inmates; and (d) a dawning realisation that the triage nurse thinks you might actually be worthy of medical attention pretty damn quickly.

- - -

We talked of memory, and its various modes. JOHNSON. "Memory will play strange tricks. One sometimes loses a single word." I mentioned to him, that a worthy gentleman of my acquaintance actually forgot his own name. - JOHNSON. "Sir, that was a morbid oblivion".

19 August 1773

Tonight, for the first time in my life, I've taken a ride in an ambulance, despite my heroic insistence that I could very easily get the bus. I'm still feeling the effects of a big night out on Wednesday seeing Pulp in Brixton. I'm a hipster. I'm a hipster who has felt dreadful for two days. But then everyone has had a hangover before, right? Everyone's felt a bit nauseous and headachy and a bit feverish. I expected these symptoms as I unflinchingly drained cider and cider. What I didn't expect was the enormous elephant sat on me on Thursday morning. An elephant who, dissatisfied with mere crushing, has also wrapped an enormous elastic band around my chest and is gradually tightening it. In short, by Friday night I feel like I'm having a heart attack. And looking up cardiac arrest on the internet, I immediately take on all the other symptoms; pain in the arm, shortness of breath, death. Psychsomatically, this is impressive. Morbid oblivion indeed.

Mrs Webby has doctors in the family who are roused into action for a text message-based medical consultation ("lol" etc). I should go and see my GP, right now, just to be safe. But my GP is miles away in Kennington. Despite living in Balham for five years, I've never bothered to register with someone closer to home. I call NHS Direct to set my mind at rest. They send an ambulance. Well at least that'll give the neighbours something to talk about on an otherwise unremarkable Friday. A few minutes later I'm being largely ignored by harrassed doctors shouting at each other. I am comforted by this; chances are I'm not about to drop dead.

The lights flick on and off as the lights continuously fail. It's A&E, Harare-style. A nice nurse appears, forces four enormous pink tablets down my gob and gives me an agonising injection. In the stomach. I'm not great with needles historically, and am not particularly comforted by the explanation that the blood-thinning drugs have to go into sub-cutaneous fat. Not only am I being stuck like a pig, but I'm being called fat at the same time. My thinned blood simmers.

- - -

His person was large, robust, I may say approaching to the gigantick, and grown unwieldy from corpulency. His countance was naturally of the cast of an ancient statue.

Boswell on Johnson, 1785

I sit shivering on the cold trolley, waiting to be packed off home and told to stop wasting everyone's time. The doctor returns, all jollity and light. There's nothing worrying in any of the tests I've already been subjected to, no quirk or sign or anything suggesting I won't live through the night. But - and I'm assuming it's a result of litigious waddle-arses suing - it's been decided that I am to be kept in for the night. If I agree. But then as I failed to listen to Noddy Hollander "teaching" GCSE biology in 1996, I don't have any expertise to call on to make a decision for myself. So I weakly bow to the opinion of the medical profession.

Another exciting new experience beckons. Even when subjected to a botched knee operation during freshers' week (itself my first experience of a general anaesthetic), I didn't get to stay overnight. But the doctors insist, lending immediate glamour to my complaints. They don't know what's going on, so they're not prepared to take a risk. I'm being admitted. "Admitted", like it's an asylum. I sign some papers which purport to deal with my own responsibility for my belongings. Actually, I fear I may have just sold my body to advance medical testing; they'll be experimenting on me tonight.

- - -

We talked of the Ouran-Outang, and of Lord Mobbido's thinking that he might be taught to speak. Dr Johnson treated this with ridicule.

16 August 1773

Plonked in a wheelchair, I'm led backwards to the lifts like an infirm dolt. The chairs only work when pulled, rather than pushed, so you travel backwards. A design flaw which only adds to the humiliation of being hoicked through a busy public room full of gurning drunks wearing an absurd hospital gown. The sadist who designed these garments really should be shot. It's a peep-bum sort of rag, which is worn back-to-front, like a straight-jacket. Not only are the flimsy bits of pale blue cloth impossible to put oneself (unless you have the arms of an "Ouran-Outang") which is obviously carefully calculated to pacify patients, like smearing butter on a cat's paws before making them move house. It's to keep you confused, discombobulated and so pre-occupied on the fact that you're flashing that you're utterly compliant and freely accept, for instance, injections in the stomach. It's also a social lubricant - moaning about the gowns is a simple bit of small talk to make with everyone. I have the same "banter" with two doctors, three nurses and a porter before I even make it to the ward. It's midnight.

- - -

He fell asleep immediately. I was not so fortunate for a long time. I fancied myself bit by innumerable vermin under the clothes; and that a spider was travelling from the wainscot towards my mouth. At last I fell into insensibility.

31 August 1773

I've been at the hospital for about three hours and the adrenelin has worn off. The ward stinks of disinfectant and rot and cabbage. I am wheeled to a far corner. A window berth. I try to sleep, two wafer-thin NHS pilllows held tight over my head in an atempt to stop of the noises of death, decay and machinery. Snoring, vomiting, the shrieking of the unseen Irish man screaming for Jesus. And the beeping, always the beeping. Especially from the damn Gammorean. Computerised farts and whistles change in tone and pitch throughout the night, rising from rthymic pounding to robotic shrieking and diverse alarums. The nurses roundly ignore them. I'm the only person without an intravenous connection, what a loser. The most exciting intervention of what remains of the night is the couple of seconds when a nurse shines a torch in my eyes, waking me from hard-won slumber to check I'm still alive. There must be easier - and more restful - ways to achieve this. Why not just poke me in the eye with a stick?

At about 1am Admiral Ackbar appeared. With a Caribbean accent that could only be described as "lilting", he attempted to charm all the nurses. His schtick worked; he got a cup of tea. Which he drank noisily, before - after an impressive 20 minutes of hawking - he threw up all over himself, the bed and the rest of the ward. I feel like joining him. Another hour passes as he's cleaned up by two teeth-sucking ladies for whom the term "no-nonsense" was invented. He's picked up and thrown around in a frenzy of mopping and sheet changing.

Dawn breaks. Hospital wards have no curtains it seems, and the light streams in over verdant Croyden onto my window bed. I'm starving and have had two hours sleep. All accompanied by the shallow wheezing of Salacious B. Crumb dying in the bed next door.

The ward is coming back to life. In the harrowing light of day it takes on an even more joyless visage. Thin curtains demarcate the patients, laughably embossed with some sort of privacy message. As all my new hospital friends are deaf and all hospital staff employ eardrum-burstingly loud patronising tones during all patient intercourse, there's a good deal of shouting. Beyond the general professional shouting the sounds are unimaginable. The sounds of humans shutting down. Ackbar (who will be getting his own blog entry in due course) is enjoying some extensive farting, long, wet, squitty posturn blasts which he seems well satisfied with. To my left, Crumb, of indeterminate age (possibly 40, possibly 90) is expiring noisily, inhaling hard on oxygen, constantly rasping his way to the one toilet. He's constantly cold, covered in blankets. My medical knowedge suggests to me that this may be a bad sign.

Diagonally opposite Chief Chirpa is being prepared to go home. An occupational therapist tells him to take his time on the stairs to his bathroom. He calls his daughter on his mobile, dropping into (what I think is) Polish, hopefully telling her that the OT is a fucking moron.

- - -

When Dr. Johnson came in, she called to him, "Do you choose any cold sheepshead, sir?"-"No madam," said he, with a tone of surprise and anger.

22 October 1773

No such luxuries here. The breakfast trolley has appeared. Hospital orange juice, sucrose-free marmalade but full-fat Country Life butter. No fresh fruit, nothing healthy. Ersatz sliced white bread. Instant porridge. The worst cup of tea imaginable. I sip it and leave the rest, but haven't got the balls to tell the server that it's repellent, the worst cup I've ever had. Two hours later she comes round again. My cold tea is still sat on my table, glaring at me, painfully undrunk. I hate myself.

Healthcare. As in shit.

I'm in a holding pattern. Waiting for the consultant. The consultant who will be able to send me home, knackered yet reassured. Until they appear, I can't do anything. I'm not allowed to go and get a prepay card which will allow me to watch TV. I've been sat here for 14 hours, but complaining feels churlish. Medical care free at the point of delivery seems too bloody brilliant to moan about.

At 11am a doctor appears. She's twelve. All my blood tests are fine, all the numerous ECGs show that there's absolutely nothing wrong with me and I'm not dying and I'll be fine. Even my liver function is excellent, which means it must be highly robust, given the pounding it gets. I've got a month's worth of bright yellow pills which rattle when you shake them. And I need to cut down on junk and booze and crack. I sail out the hospital, ripping off my wristband which marks me out as both an inmate and one of those fussy sods who is allergic to penicillin. I'll do this again some time. In another 50 years. But not yet. Not yet.

- - -

And so to my own bed. I just need some rest. It's been a hectic summer.

I have, all my life long, been lying till noon; yet I tell all young men, and tell them with with great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any good.

16 September 1773

My dead dad's suction cup

2011-08-04T13:39:00.005+01:00

Obviously 99% of comments on the Daily Mail website are from lunatics (the other 1% are from me). This means it's often exhaustingly hard to pick between the most mental. Happily, the Daily Mail have instigated a simple rule: the responses with the most red downward pointed arrows are the most normal. They're the ones which Daily Mail online readers have hammered electronically to the bottom of the "worst rated" charts, just before smashing their damp (tears, semen) keyboards with their foreheads.

There's a brilliant website called spEak You're bRanes which I insist you check out, the modus operandi of which is to collate and respond to the most mad of internet frothings. It seems to be updated a little less frequently nowadays, which is a shame, because it often makes me cry with joy. Sadly, they tend not to respond to comments on the Daily Mail, presumably because they're all so predictible - immigrant gypsies stole my dog and only gave me cancer and a drop in house prices in return. Too obvious.

In amongst the stuff about Kim Kardashian and Liz Jones' crusade to Africa, it takes something pretty special to really catch my dispassionate eye. But when these special comments, these hen's teeth, do appear, these special moments of ultra-madness, they're worth catching. On the assumption that it'll soon be lost in the mass of witterings and brain farts, here's a comment (in fact the fourth-best ranked) I was particularly taken with. It comes from a mental, wishful-thinking bullshit story about near death experiences ("science" is one of the great DM bugbears, alonng with "facts"). Obviously most comments are about how lovely it's going to be in heaven and lights at the end of tunnels and how the "boffins" who say it's all a load of balls and you're essentially just worm food are CLEARLY WRONG.

Bethany Rogers of Somerset, however, is haunted by somewhat more graphic images:

I had once a cyst on my left breast which the doctor thought might be malignant. I fainted when I heard that and later on I dreamed in this state of my dead father who was standing over me, holding what looked like a rubber suction cup over my left breast. I looked down to see a beautiful orange light, bathing my chest in a "healing" glow. I know orange is a "healing" and "vibrant" colour. Then Dad said "you will be ok now". I woke up and 2 days later I got the result from the doctor "scan was clear". Since this time I believe in paranormal things. Whenever it is a near-death experience or not, the result is similar, we seem to get "help" from another dimension. People speak of white or bright lights after a tunnel, I saw this orange glow. Amazing. More of these articles please, DM!

- Bethany Rogers, Somerset, UK, 4/8/2011 10:04

Thanks for sharing Bethany. Now back on with the straight-jacket, please.

Out of sight, going out of my mind

2011-08-01T13:40:00.003+01:00

So there was a big dinner party at Château Webby on Saturday night. By big, I mean there were four of us for supper. That's plenty. For those of you who are Web 2.0, you can check out the food options here (well, you will be able to at some stage). As for the details of the evening, suffice it to say that it was excellent and fun and exhausting, and an unqualified success. I judge 'success' by the volume of food and drink which hits my carpet. In this case: none. Thus the success was unqualified.

Obviously before any sort of soirée, there needs to be an enormous clearing up. I say obviously, because it's obvious to me now. Because I've been told. You must tidy the entire flat before any guests come over, or they'll clearly think we live in a complete stink box of filth and dung. This is especially important when it comes to distinguished guests - real VIPs. As our guests were. So clean up, go to Wandworth municipal dump with some favourite possessions, throw away some unwanted soft furnishings (and a few much-loved TV shirts). Do all that, and take out the recycling whilst you're at it.

The flat looked spick and span already; we have a cleaner who comes every week and (to my enormous embarrassment) calls me Sir. But that was on Tuesday, and by Saturday night - despite me tiptoeing around in slippers all week - it's QUITE CLEARLY a tip.

But it's not just picking up my Mini Milk wrappers and shoving everything else under the bed. It turns out that much more is involved. Extensive hoovering. The replacement of all flowers. The dusting of the piano. The washing and ironing of actual cloth napkins (amongst the most ludicrous things in the world). The lighting of thousands of scented candles to give the flat the sickly-sweet stench of a funeral home.

Of particular note was my bathroom. Yes, MY bathroom. The smaller and dingier of the two in the flat. The one without natural light. The one to which I turn for my meditations and re-reading of all my Tintin books. It was tidy and clean. Well, ish (and that only thanks to Connie the Cleaner). But it didn't pass muster when Mrs Webby pinched her nose and poked her head around the door. That was just the start.

Away with that facial wash. Chuck away those towels. Hide that shaving foam. Remove that variety of moisturisers and associated unguents from public gaze. And that special elixir guaranteed to prevent hairline recession? Get rid of it - along with the rest of your hair. All that remains is a small bottle of anti-bacterial handwash. My bathroom looks like the lair of an obsessive-compulsive minimalist. Or a Barbie doll with no need for bodily functions. Hiding everything away is the equivalent of the Victorians putting covers over their tables to avoid their guests being horrified by a wooden table leg. Good god, as our guests didn't say, he has teeth. Which he brushes. Get me a chair, Bartholomew, I feel faint.

Of course our guests "didn't want to see all your crap". Really? Were they asked? Would they be mortally offended by a tube of Colgate? Would they be embarrrassed by that hair gunk (obviously I was to start with, but got over that pretty quickly when I stopped waking up in a pillow-based hair graveyard and when every run of a hand through my receeding coiffeur no longer brought down a torrent of dead hairs). Perhaps they were dirty people who hate the sight of products related to personal hygiene. Whatever the reason, by dinner party time, it all looked lovely. If your idea of loveliness is living in an under-visited branch of Muji.

On Sunday, I gleefully pulled out all my special ointments and potions from various cubby holes and got back to the serious business of using the bathroom. I'd give it 15 minutes before you go in.

If the black cap fits

2011-07-30T11:55:00.004+01:00

Guido Fawkes is a big hitter in the political blogging world. And I liked it when he said that celebrities who don't want to be exposed in the papers probably shouldn't reveal their identity to the prostitute they've just paid to shove a dildo up their arse.

But now he's campaigning to bring back hanging. Hmm. Less good. He's leading the mob with their flaming torches, right to the heart of Westminster. If the e-petition on capital punishment he's backing gets 100,000 signatures, MPs will have to have a debate on it. And so the most important policy consideration of our time - balls to the economy and the war(s) - will be whether occasionally stringing up a convicted murdered will make us all happy. You can read about it in The Sun. You probably have already, if you're an idiot and enjoy some cheap rabble rousing (note: even the Daily Mail seems a bit embarrassed about it, and you'd think the average reader would be clamouring for front-row seats at the gallows, as if it were the 100 metre final at London 2012).

To preface this, it's important to note that the return of capital punishment is impossible. Unless we leave the EU. Which isn't going to happen. Ipso facto, there's no need to keep building that guillotine.

But anyway, why not talk about it? Capital punishment - the bellwether of civility (c.f. Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, the US, other charming dictatorships and tin-pot hell holes). Research (on the back of a matchbox) suggests the majority of British people support it. So let's bring it back, right now. Starting with those heavy-set men who kill lovely blonde children.

Mob rule, why not? Isn't that democracy in action? Problem is a majority of British people would prefer to spend their days sat on their arses surrounded by Lotto scratchcards, wanking and watching Jeremy Kyle (I know I would), instead of working. But does that mean we make it compulsory? Well, the mob says yes. And, whilst we're at it, let's roll back gay rights and have all women back in the kitchen and perhaps hotels should be able to exclude blacks and Irish. All our laws should be crowdsourced. The end.

Jesus people are stupid, just depressing idiotic sheep. It's lucky that MPs don't represent the dismal social sub-stratum, because we'd be back to dung for dinner and death at 35. Give these people an inch, and...well actually they'll take nothing. Because they're idiots. Their tiny lives of ovine prestilence are regulated by Britain's Got Talent, chips and an incessant need to swill cheap cider around their slack jaws. For them, the fact that there aren't gibbeted highwaymen on every street corner is a sign of how "out of touch" our politicians are. People want hanging, they bleat. They love it. They probably won't be happy until they can actually witness the event, they want the angel lust and the struggling and the gasping for air and the defecation. And then they are outraged about the mistreatment of pigs in an Essex slaughterhouse.

Tory MP Priti Patel said "We need strong deterrents to make people think twice about the crimes they commit." But there's not much chance to think twice as you dangle in the breeze, is there? But whatever, let's just string people up on motorway bridges and leave them there. That'll stop murderers, OBVIOUSLY. Thinking's a bit much for Priti. But Guido himself (named after a famously executed political terrorist, well done) prefers the cheap thrill with a perfectly-pitched pandering line.. WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN, he bellows. "Even if we don't win the vote on the floor of the House, we shall see which MPs put the welfare of child killers above the wider community. Let them be counted." Take up your pitchfork, it's time to do some killing.

So who's first for the long drop? People who kill police officers are pretty bad, right (much worse than those people who kill bankers and plastic surgeons) but it's child killers are the worst, obviously. Crucifixion's too good for them, those people who kill children (especially the abovementioned pretty blonde ones).

Why? What's so special about children that anyone who kills one is suddenly to be dangling at the end of a rope. What if the kid grows up to be an illegal immigrant gypsy dole-queuer? What would the moronic readers of The Sun do then? Surely it would be a mercy, if not a work of great social benefit. That child killer would be hoist upon sallow shoulders and carried through Wootton Basset with much fanfare.

Of course Broken Britain, that seedy dump of moral decay, has been going rapidly downhill since the Murder (Abolition of Hanging) Act 1965. You can hardly walk down the street without being knife-crimed to death for whistling by a youf high on meow meow. Personally, I was killed twice last year, and it never used to happen, not in the Fourties when everyone knew their neighbours and left their keys on a piece of string in the letterbox and didn't eat foreign food. Ooh, it's all greasy and garlicky. Ooh that Barry Bulsara must have been guilty, because Jill Dando was so very pretty and she was on TV. And who cares that he wasn't, because he was a bit odd anyway. String him up.

Here's some actual law worth reading. Facts, the very things The Sun hates. Note that - aside from the fact that morally execution is not just uncivilised but also a cause of uncivility - it doesn't actually work. There are executions in the USA. And still people kill. We're not suddenly overrun with murders with piggy eyes and itching stranglers' hands because they don't face the black cap in court.

What's worse, bringing back capital punishment is not only guaranteed to end up in the execution of innocents, it'll also be counter-productive. Jurors, when faced with the potential that their vote may lead to an execution, will become increasingly unwilling to convict. So the very people the Sun readership would kill - possibly with their bare hands - won't be convicted. That's human nature - even the most tattooed shaven ape would have qualms.

AAAH, says the mob, you Guardianista do-gooder. Stop doing good for one bastard minute, and ponder if it were your child? Wouldn't you support the death penalty if it was your kid wot got killed? lol.

Yes, of course. I'd fill the syringe, I'd pull the lever, I'd wield the axe, I'd tie the noose. But British justice isn't based on Biblical revenge. And that's a comfort, not a hanging offence.

Knitting News

2011-07-25T20:02:00.005+01:00

I spent today alone, in my flat, making jam, writing snotty letters to Lambeth Council and sticking a beligerent note on the windscreen of the car parked in my driveway. I also put up a shelf, did some laundry, made the bed and watched the cricket. It was a day of immense productivity, although I didn't talk to anyone all day. Which leads the mind to wander.

Little surprise then that I ended up reading the terrifying (it really is terrifying, bleak and clinical and utterly, utterly mad) manifesto of Norwegian mass murderer, Anders Behring Breivik. Of course. What else was I going to do? I don't want to make light of the tragedy, but I'm sure the best way to beat back these lone wolf wankers is to laugh at them. I read in all newspapers (who've all had their junior hacks pour through the entire thing) that he lost his mind when he was forced to attend knitting classes at school. Knitting for boys is, of course, politial correctness gone mad, and the only way to cope with that is to probably shoot a load of teenagers and detonate a bomb. Bloody knitting (although eventually it all turns out OK for Anders - because he used his hated knitting skills to make his body armour).

So he's written this 1,500 page thing (you can find it if you Google it, although presumably, having downloaded it, I'm now on some sort of list). As a marked man (marked by both nutters and MI5) I had a flick through. His whole life. All his sordid plans. All the details of his deadly rampage. All written down. He's thought about it all a lot, but obviously just before he started his brain stopped working. And instead of writing something useful (like a fascinating history of golf) he's plumped for banal stuff about Islam. And some other bonkers bits about the Crusades and freemasons and the Knights Templar (although I've got to admit it is better written that the Da Vinci Code). And then there's the even more worrying and bonkers stuff about exactly who his mad little organisation of (hopefully somewhat less) mad white supremacists - or however else you'd like to categorise them - needs to kill. Just so you're aware, you sick Marxist appeasers, it's going to be a long war until the true patriotic Europeans (that's the white ones, natch) beat those pesky Muslims. In fact, it's not going to be over until 2083. By which time I'll either be: (a) dead; or (b) 103. So I'm not too worried. Although maybe, by calling Anders Behring Breivik a mental, I'm now one of his B grade targets. Maybe his mates in the EDL will come and get me. Although he thought the EDL were rubbbish because they didn't hate Muslims enough. SPLITTERS.

Anyway, 1,500 pages of spilled mind farts. Mad, but completely, terrifyingly, clinical, entirely matter of fact. How to make bombs, written in the same manner as I write my list for Waitrose but with more fertiliser and less humous. How to stop blood loss with duct tape. Why people with blue eyes are dying out. Why you can blame everything on hip-hop. I guess there are loads of people who think this stuff, but fortunately most of are lazy tattooed oafs too stuffed with chips to do anything about it. They'd rather just froth on internet fora. That's fine by me; frothing is entirely acceptable.

By writing this "manifesto", Breivik is just following an ignoble tradition. Psychos always have dark bedrooms lined with notebooks stuffed with tiny spidery handwriting about lust and revenge and blood and the medals they're going to award themselves, don't they? We've all seen Se7en (except Mrs Webby, who weeps in terror when the title is even breathed). It took him years to get through, years of hard study of lots of improving books. If your idea of improving books are those written by frothing maniacs and you read them through a pair of mad-tinted glasses.

I wondered why no-one had noticed? Someone should have noticed, surely. Why did no-one worry when one day Anders disappeared to his bedroom and started writing (in between spinning classes at his local gym)? What was his excuse? Eventually, I found it. Here's how to keep your friends and relatives quiet whilst you plan mass murder. Just tell them you've become addicted to video games. Seriously.

Of course an addiction to computer gaming is an excuse that's worked for others in the past - I think David James explained away his Calamity years with an addiction to Championship Manager. So a tip to anyone reading this who hasn't seen me for a bit. I'm not actually planning to kill everybody in Balham. It's just Oxford United are on the verge of Premier League football and I need to focus.

Come friendly bombs

2011-07-21T11:17:00.002+01:00

And fall on the 99p Store.

You've done it before

This Is England

2011-07-11T13:19:00.004+01:00

There's a poster at Kennington tube. On the northbound northern line, Charing Cross branch. It's an advertisement asking members of the public to nominate one of their own - a fellow bovine mouth-breather - to carry the Olympic torch. The visible symbol of the Olympian ideals. What an honour, what a lovely day out. Sadly, this is London 2012. Which - whilst I'm actually, surprisingly, genuinely looking forward to it - has been a branding disaster from the second that gawdawful logo appeared.

The new torch looks like it was ripped from the underside of a particularly ugly penis-enlarging sports car. The winning designers - Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby - were just pleased to be taking part. What better evocation of the Olympic spirit could we wish for? The gits who came up with the ignoble lump of crude tat are clearly the Eric the Eel of Olympic torch design. Thanks for turning up. Thanks for your effort. Here's a quick cringing burst of hubristic, patronising applause from a public both pleased and infuriated by its garish failure. Now fuck off back to obscurity. Because it's getting a bit embarrassing. When Konnie Huq and Pipppa Middleton and other such heroes of the age carry this proud non-carbon neutral symbol of modern Britain down the Mall, I hope people rush out the crowd, wrestle the torch from their hands and thrash themselves black and blue with the vainglorious celebration of all that is tawdry, cheap and pathetic.

If ever you wanted to be damned by faint praise, here's the opinion of "renowned British jeweller" Gerald Ratner. Renowned, of course, for destroying the family business by slating his own company's crap products. Still, at least Gerald liked it. He "saw the picture and thought it was very nice, very tasteful. It looks like a piece of jewellery and reminds me of a nice design for a bracelet...Creating a modern piece is difficult. Everyone likes something antique even if it's quite ugly".

That's bollocks, isn't it?

We've got the torch we deserve. Because secretly, everyone always hopes for a dreadful embarrassment - like the Olympic logo. The crushing burden of expectation - all the money and the planning and the rebuilding of east London - means that us Brits are setting ourselves up for a fall. Everyone says the Olympics will be a disaster because then, if it is, we can all look smug. And if it isn't, if it's like Sydney and brilliant, we can look smug about that too. So when it came to the torch, all the snickering about how crap it would be has come to fruition. It's crap, so we can look smug about its crapness. Sick.

Anyway, so there's this poster. Normal people - not you nor I, just people who've "made a difference" - will get the opportunity to carry the torch for a few hundred yards until handing it on to the next serial adopter of street urchins, reality TV star or urban dance instructor. And then, in glorious British style, will expire quietly from the stress of jogging 100 yards (because they've spent too much time patronising McDonalds. Which is - in a match-up which goes beyond irony and actually causes the universe to come apart at the seams - an anchor sponsor to the 2012 games).

Back to the poster. It's a wonderful scene of beautiful Britain. It could have been taken from the pages of Picture Post, or The Lady. It's John Major's Britain, elderly maidens cycling across a cricket pitch on a dew-soaken midsummer morn to post a handwritten letter to a spinster friend into a red shiny pillarbox before reading the Daily Mail from cover to cover and then taking tea with the vicar. When you're selling Britain it's no good being young and urban and spinning on your head to crunk feat. Soulja Boy all the time. Sometimes - just to get the tourists in - we have to be old and rural and go to a tea dance feat. Vaughan-Williams.

I stared at it for a couple of seconds, until I realised I knew exactly where it was taken. The lovely village of Alfriston, East Sussex. A village I know well. A village I've been visiting for every one of my 31 years. A proper chocolate box of a place with a perfect church on the banks of a perfect slow-flowing river meandering under cloudless blue skies through fields of content cattle cud-chewing and staring as ruddy-faced hikers stomp past on their way to the 12th century pub for a pint of local bitter and a ploughman's lunch. And thatched cottages, rural lanes, views for miles and village shops rammed full of homemade quiche, fudge and secondhand books. You could almost live there. Almost. Eventually you'd go mad with all the perfection and quiet and solace and rampage through the Smugglers' Inn with a blunderbuss. It's lovely, you should all go some time.

But here's the rub. Even Alfriston, the most perfect of perfect English villages, isn't perfect enough for Lord Coe. The picture needed to be manipulated to make it even better. Even though it's already the ideal biscuit tin lid. The 14th century church - St Andrews - has at its rear a beautiful graveyard running down to the Cuckmere river, ancient tombs, tangles of moss, grass, silence, the occasional moo of one of those contented cows. But it's all been changed. You can't just have a picture of a church. So the graveyard has been filled with houses. Loaded with them. Not just any houses; the canny Photoshopper has just moved the high street on top of the graves. It's Inception, in East Sussex. Bonkers.

And there's something else. Check out the name which has been photoshopped onto the sign (which is actually there, carved by the former vicar). Obviously you're all terribly urbane Londonites and cool with this sort of thing. But I tell you now: if Ms Mahmood appeared on the Tye (which is the medieval name for the patch of greenest of green grass outside the church), there'd be mutterings in Badgers tea rooms.

And if she brought her ten adopted kids, I'd fancy you'd hear the faint sound of pitchforks being sharpened. After all, perfection requires control.

Nothing much to shout about

2011-07-04T17:08:00.002+01:00

Yesterday, 10am. Just a normal Sunday morning. Exhaustion, the symptoms of a hangover without any of the prior drinking and a bedroom full of flies and stale farts. But it's not just any Sunday. That would be too easy. Instead, it's a Sunday I've been dreading - because I'm supposed to go and see Pulp in Hyde Park at the miserable Wireless festival. Which is - from past experience (Blur, 2009, a week after seeing them perform exactly the same set at Glastonbury - right down to the same "hello moon" audience interaction from Damon) - an execrable, claustrophobic horrorshow of overzealous security-guard heavies, terrifying knifecriming hatchet-faced youths, hideous overpriced food and watery overpriced beer. I bought two tickets months and months ago, in a moment of Britpop nostalgic madness. I didn't think the day would ever come when I'd actually have to go. But, suddenly, Sunday morning finally appeared.

Not for me

What to do. The gig a few hours away, my interest in seeing a shambling stick insect and his balding band from 500 metres away at an all time low. Time to be Web 2.0. I engaged the power of Twitter, found a patsy, and flogged my tickets. Mrs Webby was even less keen than me (and proved it with an extremely transparent Facebook status which got me in trouble). A quick train journey to Victoria and the exchange was complete. I got cash, a more ardent Pulp fan got the tickets. And the enormous Serpentine-shaped monkey on my back was gone. And still - even after popping into Sainsbury's on the way home for cider and Doritos - the day only half gone.

What did I do instead? That's instead of shuffling around on a patch of burnt, crowded grass to a band which recently secretly wowed Glastonbury and has, up its collective sleeve, at least five perfect songs? A band which I don't love, but at least like enough to want to see live at least once in my life. Them, with their amazing run of genius singles. Must be something pretty great, right? Well, check out this selection of cultural highlights which will no doubt stay with me for years to come.

Lunch - chicken sandwich with homemade chutney. Sensational.
Men's Wimbledon final. That's enough tennis to last me until next year. Cider (two cans, plus ice).
Inspector Morse. Clever.
Supper (salmon, new potatoes). Healthy.
Transformers. The mad Michael Bay film version.

Every single one of these activities was better than sitting in Hyde Park fretting about needing the toilet (I have an abuse-style memory of every surface near the scant number of men's facilities being used as an al-fresco pissoir). On Friday, I was out in Belgravia (standard, obvs) and watched thousands of dead-eyed youths wandering past. They'd been to see the Black Eye Peas, so it's reasonable to expect a zombie crowd of idiots. But I was impressed by one particular charmer, who hoiked her skirt and pissed all over the restaurant I had just popped out of. In front of hundreds of others. Sure, the average Pulp fan may be more discerning, but why risk it?

- - - - -

And finally - I have a few questions about Transformers. Have you ever seen this film? If so, please explain it to me. Which is which? Why is everyone so dirty all the time? Why do they go and fight in the city, instead of the desert? What is the cube? The spark? What is that, the thing that happens at the end? I missed out on the cartoon as a kid - we weren't allowed to watch non-improving TV (which means I was raised on a diet of Blue Peter and Newsround, the TV being banned as soon as Neighbours came on - little wonder I went mental at university and spent my days watching rubbish in my pants). Did the cartoon explain it all?

Émin-ence grise

2011-06-16T17:01:00.003+01:00

I'm not a particularly cultured person. I've got in trouble for disliking a play on here - but I don't go to the theatre very often. I like films, but I don't particularly enjoy the experience of going to the cinema. Music's OK, as long as it's classic Britpop from 1993-1997. I don't want to see anything new, but I might enjoy a gig, infrequently. But one thing I definitely don't like is art galleries. All that art. My parents lap it up, my sister does it professionally. Me, I just can't be bothered.

I went (i.e. was dragged) with Mrs Webby to the Henry Moore exhibition at Tate Britain months ago - a big load of blobs with holes in them. Pshaw. I don't take advantage of any of the great cultural highlights which London offers. Nope, I've never been to Tate Modern. To be honest, I'd rather go for a pint and play Pro Evo until my thumbs become uncontrollable and my eyes seal over and the sofa is wet with tears.

The Henry Moore thing was a bit of a final straw. It's not just the art that annoys me. That was my last excursion because of the people; hipster beard-strokers and arty bastards looking down their noses at me because I had the temerity to yawn or not fall into fits of artistic ecstasy when faced with yet another tree trunk with a hole in it. You know, I quite liked the pictures of miners and people in air raid shelters. They were good. Well done, Henry Moore. I liked that. The big lumps of stone with holes in, not so much.

A couple of weeks ago - foolishly tempted by a free bacon sandwich - I went to the Royal Academy summer show, an annual luvvie free-for-all into which hoi polloi are allowed to submit daubings and brain farts. Thousands of people enter in multitudinous ways - lace made from pubes and cobwebs, sculptures made from three primary school chairs stacked on top of each other and coffins made of sand and chicken bones (only one of them wasn't actually in the show, by the way). And then all the best - although "best" is hard to define - get picked to appear in the show and get sold to unsuspecting and gullible members of the public. And the artists get to keep the money. Even better, if you're really famous, you can just do a quick run of copies of your picture - a five minutes in your neighbourhood print shop will do it - and then sell each identical print as if it were something rare ("wow, look Sacha, a limited edition of 150 copies"), exclusive and collectible - for hundreds of pounds each. Possibly thousands.

I thought I'd just share with you a few highlights from the day. By highlights, obviously I mean the stuff which made me clench and unclench my fists the most. Some of it's lovely, obviously - but I didn't want to see that. I wanted to be offended by the steaming piles of dung on offer at outrageous prices (the aforementioned three classroom chairs, bolted on top of each other was £60,000).

I sought out only the most egregious, the most abysmal, those lacking in any kind of talent or skill or effort, the most cynical piles of junk trading off the name of the artist involved, the works so piss poor that the only people who could see any merit in them haven't seen daylight for years - other than the tiny prick which marks the opening of their own arseholes. You've seen them, with their skinny jeans and vaguely ethnic costume jewelry. And here's my guide to the exhibition's highlights.

We start with some works by raddled old nag Tracey Emin. A drug and booze ravaged horse-faced end of the pier nightmare. Of course, by writing that, I'm giving her yet more ammunition for her next show, because she feels persecuted and she doesn't care who knows.

There's a place for you, Tracey. It's in your millionaire's mansion, Tracey. Tracey, I don't want to burn you. I'd just like you to stop. Selling. Bollocks. Like. This. For. Hundreds. And. Thousands. Of. Pounds.

Or this.

Or this. Just look how many suckers had paid £300 for one of the 39 prints of this particular work of loveliness. Sometimes, I wish I could be as good as Tracey Emin. On a graph of effort expended plotted against financial gain, she's one of the greatest capitalists of our age. Superb.

This work isn't by Tracey Emin, sadly. But what a powerful piece. Do you see? It's a garden shed painted white, with a lovely window box of flowers but then. Now hold on to your brain. Everything you believe is rubbish. Are you sure you're prepared for this. WOAH FUCKING HELL - there's a gun sticking out the window. Is nothing holy?

See those sacred cows? Well I'm slaughtering them all, with my sculpture of a dog eating out a bin. Take that, The Man.

Maybe I'm wrong, though. I'm blinkered and philistine and stupid. Maybe all this stuff is actually beautiful and insightful, perhaps it lays the human condition wide open. I searched for the key, and spotted an explanatory sign which put me straight:

"Tess Jaray has hung this room in the belief that it is 'only for people who are sensitive, intelligent and thoughtful. No one else will enjoy it'"

I left immediately.

Would like to meet

2011-05-26T11:13:00.003+01:00

So I was at a big drinking reception thing rammed with champagne and small talk, and suddenly spotted someone I'd never met, but I knew that I recognised. I stared for a long time as he guzzled the European lager, and then realised that it was none other than Andrew Teacher.

That name will mean nothing to most people. You might have seen him on TV, spinning the news for BAA - Icelandic volcanoes and the like. But the likelilhood is you've never heard of him. But for avid readers of Popbitch, like me, he's very well-known. For some (very good) reason, the people on the Popbitch discussion board - jaded thirtysomething PR/tabloid hack intern types to a man - hate him with a real passion. It's worth having a read through these posts to get a measure of the opprobrium he creates.

So why do they hate him? Well, many reasons. His Linkedin profile is bad enough. And then there's his hair, his music, the fact that he goes by the alias 'Andrew Future', his self-aggrandizing shit about being a photographer and musician and not just a corporate drone like everyone else in the world.

And - above all else - his amazing poncefart advert for a new flatmate. This is the full version which gave him a very limited and abusive amount of internet fame a few years ago.

Who would live in a place like this?

Hello there
Two double rooms available in huge party house sharing with two white straight chaps in their twenties.
It's that time of year again when you move house and try to find something nicer, better and cheaper. Except this year, I'm not moving 'cos I found a decent place last year.
I'm a 28 year old musician, journalist and PR and Rich is a law grad and DJ. We're seeking two flatmates for another hedonistic, musical, fun and relaxed house share. My Facebook is www.facebook.com/andrewfuture. Think This Life meets, erm, Shipwrecked, possibly.

The house is a massive six bed room affair on Windsor Road, just off Holloway Road near the Odeon cinema. Only four of the rooms (the big doubles) are rented out, with the other two used for a sofa and a rehearsal space. There's also a tiny little 'decks/slave' room upstairs (delete as appropriate). There's a garden, all mods kitchen, dining room and lounge. Two bathrooms, nice neighbours and tons of space.

I've worked as a journo and been in a band since forever, so music is a big part of my life. I'm into anything from rock and dance to classical and even the odd stint of jazz. Stuff. There's a piano and guitars around and plenty of space to rehearse or play tunes. There will also be occasions when my band practice at home (not with drums, of course), but if that puts you off, now you know. (www.myspace.com/redbluegreenmusic is the music). Have a listen.

I'm also into films, art, reading, fashion and are very outgoing, funny and enjoy drinks, parties, sex, drugs, stealing Evening Standard signs with funny headlines and all the usual bullshit.

Without wanting to appear like Winehouse or Doherty, I should warn you of the likelihood of the odd class A too. No Back To Brown or Crack, of course. But a bit of Prince (Charles) from time to time. Rich is Scottish. This should explain a lot.

The two spare double rooms we want to fill are available from late September but we're keen to get viewing and stuff sorted early, and we have single rooms (which are not rented out) that could be moved into during the interim period.

Given your hectic lives, you probably won't be around that much either, but it is always nice to be considerate, realise that recycling boxes remove the need to block the bin up with pizza boxes and that by simply moving dirty plates into the dishwasher (!) you can make life happier for everyone.

Having not had a dishwasher in my previous flats, having one here is a godsend. Almost as good as slaves, which are now illegal in most boroughs, although liberal Islington seems to have reneged somewhat on recent 'no slave' policies.

We have a fit cleaner who comes once every couple of weeks though although we are adept at using a mop and Mr Muscle.

There's also a Sky contract which will need renewing. So if you're a girl, that means that you can have Sky Movies and we'll have Sky Sports. Yes.

The house is minutes from Holloway Road (Piccadilly Line), Finsbury Park (Victoria and Piccadilly) and Archway (Northern Line), Camden Road (overground) and near a ton of buses. It is around 15 mins tube from Soho and 20 mins to Victoria by tube. Nambucca is two minutes away but is still burned to the floor. The Garage has reopened though and is up the road while Camden is on your doorstep here
.
There's high ceilings throughout, two nice big bathrooms, a lovely lounge, a huge dining room and big kitchen (with everything). It's the perfect party house. There's a range of art on the walls and plenty of space for whatever you have to bring.

We can also repaint it too as the landlord has promised paints for a while. Would be a perfect place to chillout, music room (sofa, spliffs, stereo, etc) and the other, well, a study maybe? Yeah, right.

The garden is large, green and lush and we have a nice big BBQ for it and the house itself is on a plush, residential street lined with Jaguars and trees. Nice.

The lease runs from the end of September but because we have the space, you could perhaps move in at the end of August if it's a help.

In terms of you. AND THIS IS THE IMPORTANT BIT. You should be an English speaker (this isn't a race thing, it's common sense), working not studying (unless you have proof of income), not be a Heat-reading Big Brother fanatic (you wouldn't like us, trust me) and generally be open minded, witty and generally up for a laugh. You should be in your twenties and be similarly laid back and issue free and generally be up for a laugh.
We will be signing a year long lease (THAT'S 12 MONTHS).

No pets, couples or prossies, please. No one who doesn't wash. I've made that mistake before. It ain't nice. Musicians, artists, photographers welcome. Deposit is six weeks' rent and the rent is £575 pcm. Council tax is £35ish and bills vary depending on the time of year.

We look forward to hearing from all you other lovely people that I've not managed to offend in the course of this advertisement. I'm sorry this was long but I hope it perhaps amused you while you bored yourself to death reading most of the other shite on this website.

If you include your phone no on your email I will call you. I have left it off of this add to save myself getting abusive calls from idiots.

Do add my band on on MySpace - www.myspace.com/redbluegreenmusic - I reckon you'll love it.

All the best to you all, enjoy London.

Who wouldn't be excited to meet him?

I'll huff and I'll puff

2011-05-24T13:06:00.004+01:00

It was - of course - the worst kept news in the world. But then hardly that exciting - it's not the first time a high-profile footballer has been caught banging them in at the wrong end (c.f. Wayne Rooney, John "Dad of the Year" Terry and many, many others). It was Twitter - that endless stream of txt-spk, mindless bullshit and celebrity engagement - wot won it.

But today - for the wrong reasons - the law firm Schillings finds itself in the news. And that's not what lawyers want. Schillings dine out on privacy - for its clients and itself. They sue, they win, they collect the fees, have a sip of champers, and wait for the next flawed celebrity's people to come calling. Most lawyers thrive on not being known, other than amongst their own incestuous world. Which is why the legal press doesn't ever get more exciting than turgid stories about nameless suits moving from one faceless firm to another. About as interesting as accountants (but with a more limited career prospects); greasing the wheels, but staying out of sight.

So Schillings doesn’t need this press. This is the firm that (along with stable mate Carter Fuck) "invented" the law (to the extent it's a law, anyway) of privacy. And it has a pretty astonishing track record. But, finally, inevitably, comes the reversal. A client is so famous that everyone's mum has heard of him. This particular Samson started an inevitable chain of action into being the day he met Miss Wales 2003 (in a very Biblical sense). Ain't no-one who could keep that quiet; he had a wife, she had a story to sell. We don't care about Andrew Marr, or actors from glossy period dramas, or famous chefs or Fred the Shred. With them, hacks can only suck us in for a couple of moments; 30 seconds of the News of the Screws on a Sunday morning. There's no critical mass. But this time the firm has buckled under the weight of newsworthiness of its client. A top media lawyer - talking to The Times - said the firm has "made a disaster out of a crisis". But a disaster for whom? Surely not the firm, who will collect those fees, sip that champagne and wait. Commentators say he's a joke; this man who tried to sue Twitter. A footballing Canute, him versus 75,000 people who mentioned his name (although could all still be sued for doing so). I'm guessing a player who's won tonnes of Premier League titles can live with that. He can deal with the chants from the terraces. He can likely live with the tabloid intrusion - because he's had it for every day for twenty years. I'd be more worried about a dressing room hairdryer from Sir Fergie.

What was Schillings advising? Who led this non-ruinous - financially, reputationally - process? Did its esteemed client ignore advice and demand to blindly push ahead with a suit against Twitter? Such a matter may not have been fruitless - Twitter, Inc. has had disclosure orders made against it in the past. Why should it be different this time? But what chance it was the shagger himself leading the process - there can be no doubt that he's PR-ed up to the eyeballs; personally, from his club, from Max Clifford-esque characters. So let’s consider that he might have had very good reason to continue the charade for as long as possible - and will continue to do so. Even if he’s been holding back the dam with a single finger, that’s still prevented every newspaper in England & Wales writing the prurient story. And who knows what graphic details may emerge should Imogen Thomas sell her story? Damn Schillings all you want. Cry bloody murder at the firm's attempt to stop the presses. Call its client a silly boy. Boo to them both.

But more importantly - to this writer - why do we care? Do we still consider footballers role models? Isn't it enough that a left winger can turn his marker and whip in a devillish corner? Why should he be a decent man too? Why are we expected to empathise with a man paid more in a week than most will earn in fistfuls of years? He's not one of us, it's not workplace gossip. Is it really our business who he's shagging? Why do you care? Watch any post-match interview - it's the same stock phrases about a "team effort" and a "great result for the gaffer". Sleeping around is just another cliché. The girls - and the cars and the booze and the weekends in Dubai - come with the job. So why then do we feign shock? Why so self-righteous? Why bother attempting to stop us knowing? Once we've found out, we all stop caring? It's the secrecy which makes the whole sordid event interesting - so much better to rip off the plaster in one, rather than pluck out the hairs from your hairy chest one at a time.

The clamour for information on our clay-footed heroes is press led; we are sheep for a good tabloid story. It's lame, nasty. If it had all come out with it at the very beginning, it would - I'm sure - have blown over far more swiftly - just another NOTW Sunday. As it stands, this morning Schillings look a bit silly (but let's not hold our breath - this is only a single smirch on an otherwise terrifying reputation and the firm won't be short of new clients) and the law looks like it needs a revamp.

And our footballer hero? Well he's still the man who had the affair with Imogen Thomas. And we all knew that already.

Boys on film

2011-05-20T12:18:00.003+01:00

So I saw Suede last night, the great hopes of early britpop. The real arty ones who did seedy songs about sex and stuff, not just country houses and parks, or being a rock and roll star. And it was terrific. Last time I saw Brett Anderson on stage, he was with The Tears - a sadly inferior unit - and resorted to swearing at the audience as the entirely predictible shouts for him to play some Suede hits flooded in - even though he was there with the original Suede guitarist who'd he'd previously fallen out with and now doesn't play with at all. Anyway, it seems he's come to terms with the fact that his fame is largely predicated on (say) three brilliant albums from 1993 to 1996. And I'm sure he's a happier man as a result. Maybe he doesn't even think (superstar producer) Bernard Butler is that much of a cunt anymore.

So this was much better. The band played the whole of the first album - which has at least four unbelievable songs on it (plus at least two moments of woeful chaff), and then the thick end of an hour of (for me, anyway) largely obscure b-sides until Trash and Beautiful Ones at the end. I got my money's worth, especially as Mrs Webby both organised and paid for the entire thing.

Sorry boys, he's married

Brett cuts a worryingly fine figure of a 44 year-old man. Skinny, great hair, great voice, great dancing, worryingly muscular. He's paid no price at all for his 90's drug hell. He's like an extra-young Jagger, probably. The crowd of men - white, balding, rotund, simian dancers, young in 1995 - lapped it up. Brett once said he was bisexual but had never had a homosexual experience - well he would have found plenty of willing partnerss takers last night. The chap in front of me had a particularly exciting time, no more so when he told off a crowd of berks standing close to us to be quiet because they were talking during one of the slower numbers.

Before I reach the absolute bottom of kiss-ass fandom and drone on about how terrific and exciting and strangely moving I found So Young, I thought I'd check out a few clips on YouTube to make sure I hadn't dreamt the entire thing. Because one feature of any gig anywhere nowadays which you can absolutely guarantee without fail bar none is that almost everyone around you will be photographing or filming the band on a digital camera or a fecking mobile phone. Whatever happened to just enjoying it? Idiots.

Haven't you noticed that it's always shit, fool? Technology may have moved on over the past five years, but your jerky video with cracking distorted bass, thumping drumming and high-pitched wailing guitars - even if that is oh-so-very Suede - is crap. I noticed that one particularly keen YouTuber had uploaded eight videos from last night. Eight. Many contain more than one song. That means he pretty much filmed the entire thing. For two hours he stood po-facedly gurning smugly at the people around him (it's definitely a him) enjoying the music entirely for its own sake. Two hours. Did he have a battery pack strapped to his back? Two bastard hours. In the introductory blurb to one video he complains about the people jumping around near him and dancing, shaking his filming arm and interrupting his vital cinéma vérité Michael Moore reportage of the event. I bitched at him a bit in the comments section to one in particular - but he then responded so reasonably about how he wanted people to enjoy it and he gots loads of great feedback from people who weren't able to attend that I now feel like a bit of a bastard. And now I just want everyone to enjoy his rubbish videos. WATCH THEM. They're completely rubbish and it's nothing like being there and the sound quality is dreadful and Brett looks like a ravaged maniac who's just escaped from Belsen and - if you don't know the music - you'll instantly hate Suede and miss out on a brilliant band and you'll think I'm weird for liking them so much.

And what's worse, I think I may be stalking him - looking through his collection of six hundred gig videos, it turns out I have a lot in common with him musically - and have even been in the same room as him several times before, in certain particular cases a room with only perhaps a hundred people in it. So see you next time, chum. I'll bring the tripod.

McJob's a good one

2011-05-15T11:57:00.004+01:00

So the boss of McDonalds - aptly-named Jill McDonald - says students shouldn't worry about going to university. They should accept the inevitable - that there are no jobs - and just take anything they can get their hands on. A job at the bottom rung which you can take pride in and develop yourself and take ownership of and better yourself. And - funnily enough - she knows a little burger joint down your road which provides exactly this sort of opportunity, the sort of job offering stability, a natty uniform and all the fat-flavour milkshake you can drink.

We're snobs, she says, for doing down the great jobs her employer offers. I mean, SHE works for McDonalds and is a big success, so it must be great, right? And no doubt her children would be delighted to pop on one of those nylon shirts and pull a double shift processing frozen patties of 100% ~~arsehole~~ British beef. Someone should ask her about that.

Tasteless, but not as tasteless as a McDonald's burger

OK, so I'm sure that for certain people, it's a job. The sort of job you wouldn't wish on the people who ate the chalk at school or fiddled with themselves in the back of double biology (they know who they are, class of 1998) but still a job, and there are millions without them. It's not a career though, is it. It's a McJob. The sole qualification is an ability to avoid killing yourself whilst serving the stock customer: a feral school kid on their way to class, or a drunken balding twat on his way to bed. But Jill says McDonalds is a big, happy, educational family where no-one ever cries, no-one ever contemplates smashing their dead faces into the deep fat fryer or shoving a hand into the mincer, just to see if it would hurt. And certainly not the sort of place staff are found wanking into the mayonnaise. Has something changed?

I checked the McDonald's website to find out more. Not that I'm unsatisfied in my job, obviously. I just wanted to understand what I needed to do to obtain my Level 2 BTEC Certificate in Work Skills. But the website is crap, it doesn't work. Every time I clicked on a link, I was taken to a ruddy annoying screen which constantly showed me the location of my nearest McDonald's branch.

And that's something I don't need help with.

A couple of months ago, apropos of nothing at all, I did some very hard bingeing. When I wasn't being entertained by Very Important People, I was boozing all afternoon in sunlit pub gardens. The weight which I'd so assiduously lost over the previous six months piled back on, despite a notable lack of food most evenings. Fortunately I've broken my old, aberrant and appalling addiction to misshapen lumps of deep-fried fowl from South London's filthy chicken shops. But, for reasons which surpasseth understanding, I had a couple of Maccy D's after two particularly dangerous nights on the naughty sauce.

There's nothing like the hunger which hits as you get off the tube at 11pm after a swift one pint has turned into a six pint binge. Stumble from the tube, flail Oyster at barrier and emerge into crisp Spring evenings. One needs to eat, instantly, every time.

So what presents itself when you emerge from Balham station? Immediately there's the terrifying place under the railway bridge. A former flatmate used to eat there, despite his claims to be something of a gourmand. There's something worrying about it being underneath a railway. I fancy the frying oil has leaked from the bottom of the Gatwick Express. When you dine sous le pont, you're asking for pigeon. Deep fried, in a southern-style breadcrumb coating. There was an all-you-can-eat Chinese place in my university town which had a similar low-priority approach to hygiene. We called it Al-Qaeda's. How we laughed (and then had another plate of MSG-sodden kung pow chicken).

There's Subway. But I've been to Subway once before. It's not so much the filings - brown lettuce leaf, rubber olives and mystery ham meat - as the bread, which is sickly sweet. Crystalline hunks of extruded packaging foam which looks like it's been squirted out of a can into approximations of bread-shaped lengths and left to dry. It's the sort of bread they serve in hospitals. It's the sort of bread which will put you in hospital.

There's always the chance of a Wetherspoon's surf and turf. But in honesty the society in the Moon Under Water leaves a little to be desired. For starters, I'll tend to be the only person in the pub with a full complement of limbs. The gourmet, freshly-cooked kebabs of upper Balham are just too far away for my desire for instant gratification. So it's over the road to the Golden Arches, open until 3am. An enormous meal of lard and floor-scrapings and a satisfied waddle home to bed, only to wake the next morning with crumbs of meat and streaks of grease littering the bed, and a heavy, hardened heart.

* * * * * UPDATE * * * * *

Turns out that they're going to be replacing the charming smiley counter staff with robots and machines anyway. Shove that up your NVQ.

Every little helps

2011-04-22T11:07:00.003+01:00

There was a big old riot in Bristol last night, resulting in the smashing up of a Tesco. I hold no particular brief for Tesco Express, but I'm the last person to complain when I need late night milk.

There's not a lot in the news yet, but it seems that a bunch of ~~superannuated studenty greebos~~ concerned activist citizens, squatting in a violently-painted building with the filthy name "Telepathic Heights" (ugh), were to be evicted after a long-running court battle. And there were rumours they were preparing to firebomb a new Tesco opposite their house too. So the police stepped in. And because the entire country is aflame and it's like Paris '68 and we're all rushing to man the barricades, it turned into a riot. And Tescos was smashed up. Cue breathy reportage from the streets.

Of course the civil disorder was the fault of the police. Who were - AS BLOODY USUAL - disproportionate in their response (although of course anything other than standing by whilst legal enterprises are demolished counts as disproportionate). The police are always disproportionate. Funnily enough, they're especially disproportionate in self-styled "cultural quarters". Stokes Croft in Bristol is a cultural quarter. I'm guessing - in my terribly blinkered and close-minded way - this means there are a handful of white rastas juggling in the street whilst a couple of downtrodden Laurie Penny public school girls weave daisies into their pubes. I hate cultural quarters. It makes me want to go to Tesco Express in Stokes Croft and purchase every single item made by Nestle, every single bag of non-Fairtrade coffee, every Israeli avocado and then smear them all over myself outside Telepathic Heights whilst screaming and wiping my bum with £5 notes. One git said "the message [of Telepathic Heights] is one of freedom, not just getting stuck in the system or having a 9-5pm job". Yeah well I'd like to live like you too, shit head. I'd like to sit around playing a tin whistle and eating lentils, but - you know what - I don't want to die on the street at 35. Shove that up your system.

But meanwhile Bristol is still drowning in Tescos, probably. So here's a tip for the illegal residents of Telepathic Heights. Although - given they're so telepathic - they'll probably already know it. If you don't want to feed the beast, don't buy your groceries there. It's Tele-pathetically simple.

If Tesco cause local shops to shut down - which they probably do - and you have a problem with it; if people are so angry about local mom & pop stores closing, don't shop at Tesco.

Then it will shut down itself and all the falafel shops and vegan superstores can move back in. It's a very simple bit of economic theory. Build it, and they won't come, because they're too busy shopping for hemp seeds next door. Campaigners have stated that 90% of the local population didn't want the shop to be built and actively fought the council. OK, well talk to the council about that - whilst not shopping there. Sadly, a spokesperson for Tesco said 3,000 shoppers have been through the doors in the week since the shop opened. Using the protestors' figures, that can only be the 10% of the population who didn't boycott the new shop. That would make the population of Stokes Croft 30,000. Really? What is certainly true is that well over 90% of the local population will be against senseless acts of violence against property.

I buy my fruit and veg from the market stall in Balham, when I can - but it's not always convenient, and I'll happily pay a premium for convenience generally - because I have a job (and it doesn't involve teaching performance art or poi). Small, well-run local shops, if they successfully meet a need, will thrive. Chadwicks here in Balham seems to do alright. But why do you think that Tesco head office have decided to plonk down a shop in this precise location? It's because they think there's a local demand for ready meals and emergency toilet paper. There may well be five other branches within spitting distance, but why would you doubt that one of the UK's most sucessful corporates wouldn't undertake some pretty complicated modelling before investing its cash on yet another branch. Here's an insight for you - Tesco don't want the branches to have to compete with each other, they want all of them to make enormous profits. They know there's a need, so get over it and go buy yourselves some Rizlas and Pringles.

And guess what. Plenty of people who walk past your hideously garish squat every day would probably be grateful for a McTesco-job. They're the people who didn't get to go to university, unlike you and Leaf and Tigerlily. It may well not be the greatest employment in the world, but you get a uniform, a staff discount and a salary - and there are 3 million people out there who haven't got that at the moment. What kind of muddle-headed bullshit makes these self-professed anarchists think smashing up a provider of local employment - because they don't like it - is acceptable? Can we really retrain all the checkout staff to make organic soy lattes?

And now my life has changed...

2011-04-18T16:45:00.007+01:00

...in a variety of interesting and perplexing ways.

I wasn't sure what to call this blog, for fear of causing offence. Anyway, point is, my life has changed in the past couple of days, enriched (obviously) by the arrival - on a permanent basis - of Mrs Webby as a regular flatmate, rather than just a weekend visitor. She's happy - I don't make her lug an enormous bag of hair straighteners across London on public transportation (her weekend bugbear - and unfortunately mine is driving). I'm happy, because someone else is doing my laundry and hoovering and dusting and cleaning. You might call that indentured slavery; I prefer symbiosis.

Anyway, the die has been cast for a final time. The tears - mainly mine - have dried and vanished (rather like my collection of framed Oxford United shirts). Let domestic bliss reign. The flat looks amazing - freshly painted, freshly carpeted, freshly disinfected. Who knows - another five years of this and it might be worth what I paid for it. Exciting times. No regrets.

But two days in to The Good Life, let me count the changes. First up, I can no longer sleep like a snow angel from Monday-Friday. Disappointing. Second, I've had to scrap my plans to turn the spare bedroom over to my den, to be filled with an enormous Rod Stewart-esque train set. I've heard people (i.e. men of a certain age) play with toy trains because they can create a world over which they have complete control. Fascistic, maybe - but then remember what Mussolini did for the Italian rail network? That control is now gone from my life. That control has been replaced with the politburo dictat that Everything Has To Go In The Dishwasher Immediately After Use. IMMEDIATELY.

Puzzlingly, my small stock of soft furnishings have disappeared, to be replaced to a myriad selection of thousands of others. My duvet covers have been trashed (or at least hidden where I can no longer find them). My bed now has a suspicious blanket draped over the bottom third. What's that for? And what was wrong with my old duvet cover? It's not like it had Thundercats on it. All my favourite pillows have gone, the lovely ones filled with polystyrene or foam or whatever it was. Gone. My Oxford United clock - which I've owned since the age of six - has been relegated to the hallway. The ticking was annoying, allegedly. I woke on Sunday (the first morning of co-habitation), turned balefully to the wall, and quickly realised that the (admittedly lovely) print of ye olde Balham didn't tell the time.

The sofa, for so long the bain of Mrs Webby's existence (sample quote: "it's so turgid") has been covered with a variety of wooly blankets and colourfully-printed cushions. All the furniture has already been moved around - the room may look bigger, but I enjoyed having all my stuff instantly available for scrutiny. A new coffee table - painted in faded blue and then artfully chipped to make it look "rustic chic" - has been purchased. I'm told the room is still profoundly masculine, although the permanently-lit scented candle on the said coffee table is making me menstruate.

More to follow anon. If I survive the night.

All the gear, absolutely no bloody idea

2011-04-09T13:57:00.001+01:00

I was idly reading the Evening Standard yesterday, fresh from an extensive Lunchtime O'Booze just off Fleet Street with a real life journalist. We were pretending that it was perfectly acceptable socially and professionally to get tipsy at 1pm on a Friday before going back to the office stinking of stale lager and crisps. It was like the 1950s, when the pubs of Fleet Street were constantly crammed with the gentlement of the press, getting wasted before driving home to ignore their wives and thrash their children.

Anyway, so I was reading the Standard, which I think is mainly rubbish - but at least it's better than the utterly woeful free magazines - of which the worst offender is the egregious Shortlist. Every single edition of Shortlist is exactly the same: a 30-word review of an action film on BluRay, a feature about gangsters including a picture of Al Pacino in Scarface, some mastubatory bullshit about cars, an advertorial about post-shave moisturiser and a list of things you need when you go wakeboarding or scuba diving. So that's all the most tedious things in the world, compressed into paper form and dumped into my sad workbound hand by a dead-eyed man in a jaunty kagoule.

Back to the Standard. I was reading it, swaying gently in the lovely Spring air. And there was a feature about anarchists disrupting the Royal Wedding. Obviously, I couldn't give a damn about the Royal Wedding. It's a complete non-event in my life - I'll be enjoying the day off scuffing and shanking my way round Walton Heath (because obviously playing golf makes me a dangerous outsider - just like Laurie Penny). Thanks for the time off, now bugger off and leave me in peace to enjoy it. But these anarchists - the "black bloc" - are excited about it, fresh as they are from smashing up a few dowagers and tourists in Fortnums and writing childish daubings on a few statues a couple of weekends back. They're determined to make a big exhibition of themselves whilst a pair of dim but seemingly pleasant toffs get hitched. It's nice that someone's looking forward to it, and the happy couple will be extra happy to hear that at least someone's having a street party, replete with good luck messages (hilarious graffitti on a statue of war heroes), jolly bunting (sixth-form political placards), fireworks (well, smoke bombs) and gaudy national costumes (hoodies, face masks, moronic sneers). Luckily they're all anti cuts, because with all the cuts there won't be anyone to clean up all the fag ends and put out the bonfires.

It's tough being an anarchist though, or so said the anonymous father of two - from South London (of all places) - in the Standard piece. You need lots of kit, like a claw hammer for smashing banks' windows. Take that, you robber barons. You mustn't forget your sunglasses: even anarchists are hoping for nice weather for Wills and Kate's special day. Definitely pack a catapult - although it needs to be a bit more heavy-duty than the one Just William had. That's for firing ballbearings at police horses. Although in a nicely British twist, the anarchist says that's for his own protection - we can't have people being mean to horses can we? That would be taking anarchy too far.

What else? A bottle of water - it's vital to remain hydrated when you're spending all day blowing a whistle and shouting about what you want - free money, moons on sticks - and when you want it. A copy of that rabble-rousing reactionary standard-bearer of uncomfortable truth, the Guardian. More, too - you're going to need a good rucksack for all this gear. A gas mask, obviously. The bullshit these droogs spout will definitely stink out the air. A notebook - for making notes for your blog. A phone, just so you can update twitter about your kettling hell.

But, with a long day of non-specific and childish protesting to get through, you're also going to need something to sustain you. It's hungry work, all that unfocussed shouting and moaning. Obviously you can't go to Pret, comrade, because that's what they serve at Guantanamo and it's part owned by McDonalds or something and that's part of nebulous global slavery and like total methane producing anti-human Soylent Green machine and they need you to get fat and die young, man to prop up the big pharmaceutical companies which don't pay any tax.

And, as I stared at the picture of a 39-year old prick in a gas mask, I realised he'd brought a loaf of bread and a tube of Primula. And I stopped worrying, stopped being concerned about the Windsors and the police horses. I panicked no more about violence on the streets and the smashing of windows. Because anyone who goes out to get in the face of a democratically-elected fascist government taking a picnic of cheese sandwiches with them can't be all bad.

Twatter snowball

2011-03-13T20:22:00.006Z

I'm all for Twitter. Whenever anything happens in the world - anything - Twitter's all over it. Unsurprisingly, the site has recently been dominated by events in Japan. Appalling, without a doubt. Unimaginable. I don't need to say anything else about that.

Twitter's the place to go. I don't need the news anymore, I just read the platitudes of every other needy child in the world, neatly compressed into 140 characters. Take that, Guardian Media Group PLC. Sod off, the BBC.

As the tectonic plates stopped shifting, the hashtag #prayforjapan (prayer, just what they need) appeared and trended. A hashtag is the subject line of a tweet. If loads of people all tweet using this same tag, there's a chance that the subject may 'trend' - i.e. become one of the most discussed topics in the world (although you can also view what's trending in the UK, or London, or perhaps just in Balham - organic coffee, blonde children, tofu).

So Japan was everywhere. #Tsunami, #Japan, #earthquake and myriad variations thereon trended. #Godzilla had a go, too. And then - understandably, completely rationally, optimistically, humanely - calls for charitable aid. The Red Cross text-to-donate number flew around the world. That's great. Well done all.

I had a look through the tweets racing in, mainly in the hope that I'd find something dreadful and depressing. Excellently, I found Sean Hackett (check him out on Twitter, he's @shackett, some kind of biscuit-arsed independent filmmaker). On Friday, at 9.05 pm, he tweeted:

I will donate $1 to Redcross.org for every person who retweets this message #japan #prayforjapan #tsunami Text Red Cross 90999

Seriously Sean, why bother with this? Seriously, just donate. If that's what you want to do. Just hand over the cash, you twat. Instead of turning the entire thing into a self-publicising crock of shit.

He's playing the old "I love charity work, but I don't like talking about it" card. But by posting it on Twitter he is talking about it to the entire world, like a fucking foghorn. Still, at least every time someone retweets the original tweet, Sean will donate a dollar. That's something, the small gesture of an otherwise impotent bystander. And it's the people of Japan - subjects of the world's third largest economy - who will no doubt be delighted by his munificence.

Sean has a couple of thousand followers, all of whom were notified of the tweet. And so it started to spread. And spread. Within an hour, 200 people had undertaken the great endeavour of retweeting his original pledge (retweeting involves pressing a single button forwarding someone else's tweet to all your own followers and is a gesture about as complicated as farting). So that's $200 he owed the poor bastards of Japan. Within an hour.

But it didn't stop. More and more people retweeted. Every time you retweet, the original tweet appears on your timeline, and consequently on the timeline of every one of your followers. So it's very easy for something to spread, very quickly. If I had 1,000 followers (a number far beyond the realms of reality or possibility), each with 1,000 followers, my maths GCSE allows me to calculate that within 30 seconds, one hundred million billion people could have seen my tweet. This is how stuff goes viral.

When someone called @QBKILLA retweeted the initial tweet (achieved with the lazy unthinking press of one internet button), the shit was on. Cat's out the bag, dickhead.

QBKILLA is also known as Warren Sapp. He's a former American Footballer, built like a house. A house of steroids. The problem for Sean Hackett is that Warren has over half a million followers. Most people who follow celebrities simply exist to retweet their idols' tweets. They smack the retweet button just as soon as the latest bit of flob from their hero's gob is spunked out, possibly in the thoughtless hope that they'll be noticed as the first person to do so. Obviously it never works. Mainly because most people on twitter are LOL-ing retards.

Fact is, when someone with half a million crazed loonies hanging on their every word retweets your tweet - a tweet in which you've pledged to pay $1 for every time that same tweet is retweeted - you better start panicking and hunting down the back of the sofa for loose change. If just one in every 100 of those followers idly hit retweet - it's the knee-jerk action of a split second after all - easy enough for anyone with even the most basic motor skills. A crab, maybe. That would leave Mr Hackett owing the people of Japan $5,000. That's enough for a new nuclear reactor, right?

People were getting excited. @dj_nastynate said:

Whoever @shackett is better have a lot of money he got mentioned 1000's of times

Oh dear, Sean. What do you do now? You've been dangerously successful. Obviously, pretend it's not happening, and change the rules. First, an attempt to draw a line under the whole self-aggrandising endeavour:

Awesome job everyone. You just helped raise $200 dollars for the Red Cross just by Tweeting! Make sure you Follow Me. I'll do on Sunday.

Translation: "fuck. This has been far too much of a hit and spiraling towards to financial disaster. If I don't pay up, I'll look like a prick. And a prick who's just had his name bandied all over Twitter. Although it's all good publicity, so I might as well encourage all these people to subscribe to my tweets."

And then people obviously started complaining. Sean knows that it's starting to get a bit tasty, financially. SHIT SHIT SHIT, says Sean. How to end this onrushing disaster? He tweets to the world.

Thanks for retweets and follows. The pledge was only for an hour where I received 200 RTs. Please inform peeps to txt 90999 #prayforjapan

Of course, it was all our mistake, right? We just missed the point where Sean said it was just for an hour.

Where did it say that, asshole? You've only got 140 characters, but you'd think - if you're going to start this kind of bullshit - you'd make the terms and conditions VERY clear. But - and we all know this - that wasn't the point. You just wanted some publicity on the back of the death of a few thousand people. Hooray for you.

Brilliantly, the tweet is STILL being retweeted, accompanied by occasional abuse for the publicity-seeking shitebag (e.g. alternatively you could donate and not try to gain publicity from tragedy you ass - lovely work (amongst others) from @wiredfire there).

The whole circle of vainglorious bullshit, the power of the internet, and a shamefaced kick in the cunt for a complete prat. I lapped it up.

On cock of the World: Frankenstein at the National Theatre

2011-02-06T19:32:00.007Z

(1) On Saturday night, I left my flat;

(2) on Saturday night, I went to the theatre; and

(3) on Saturday night, I spent 20 minutes staring at Benedict Cumberbatch's penis.

None of these things I do regularly, and none (I trust) are habit-forming. My Saturday night just turned out this way because many months ago I agreed to (1) and (2). So (3) was purely incidental, a side function of the first two. That'll teach me.

I like the ritual of going to the theatre - Wagamama beforehand, organic ice cream at the interval, and middle class smugness throughout. But I'm also pretty wary of the hyperbole and luvvyness that comes with it. And the first night extravaganza world premier preview of Frankenstein at the National Theatre - directed by Danny Boyle - was always going to tick all the necessary boxes. It's all sold out now, I think, so tough luck. So - given that you're never going to see it - you might as well read my completely untutored thoughts.

Benedict Cumberbatch, last seen in the excellent Sherlock (he's not Jeremy Brett but equally no Guy Ritchie) stars as the Creature, the foul humanoid creation of Victor Frankenstein. I was annoyed that he didn't have bolts in his neck, like a proper Frankenstein's monster should have. Even so, his was a performance easily described as brave.

Picture the scene. The lights dim in the theatre. A large circle of material suspended in a frame is slowly revolving on a turntable on the half-lit stage. Underworld's soundtrack plays, sotto voce. Ever so slowly a naked silhouette emerges, encased in the material. It's all very clever. Bolts of light flash across the ceiling, sparking it to life, as the apparition begins pushing itself out the artificial womb. I already needed the toilet; this - coupled with the horror words "there is no interval" - meant I was even more on edge. The nude figure emerges, razor cheekbones and oddly close-together eyes first. It's Benedict Cumberbatch, with his knob out.

I wonder just how long he's been waiting in there to do this. We've been sat down for 10 minutes already and we were amongst the last to arrive. Has Benedict been waiting suspended in this womb thing for the past half hour, winkle shrivelling in proportion to the swelling crowd? What if he suddenly had a dubious thought and came out proffering more than expected? These things to tend to happen at the most inappropriate of moments - double maths, funerals etc. Fortunately for all maiden aunts in the crowd, there was no sign of tumescence. In fact, quite the opposite. I've not made much of a study of the male bits (other than my own, natch), but these were an unassuming set. Perhaps the body stocking which prevented the audience from having a view directly up his bum made them look smaller. In the Olivier theatre, there's no place to hide. Given that the next 15 minutes pass with Benny traversing the stage in the buff, displaying arse and junk like a particularly frisky baboon show that he couldn't care less. Is that wailing and pawing and crawling good? Is that good acting, or are we just all too embarrassed to point at the literally naked stage emperor? I don't care, because I'm creased in silent laughter at the rapt faces all around, thick-rimmed spectacled theatrical types rubbing their educated chins with every buttock thrust.

It's a new Frankenstein. Bright and shining for 2011 with contemporary themes and stuff, about megalomania and creation and god and science and parental abandonment and love and stuff. There's some nasty bits, some death, a bit of rape. The odd neck is snapped. And some tedious quoting from Paradizzzzz... Lost. In parts, it canters along nicely and is pretty gripping. But for periods - all of them when the Creature is hiding in the wings - it's pretty-looking am-dram awfulness. A bunch of peasants represent industry through the medium of modern dance. A couple of dodgy-accented Scottish crofters warble and fart their way through the Orkneys, accents travelling via St Petersburg. There's a terrible turn by a couple of stage school ham types, running and skipping on stage playing a farmer and his wife. The wife in particular is bloody awful, all teeth and prancing and RahDah. Fortunately an old man plays the guitar during this lull, which kept me going. All these things may get better after the previews - but no-one asked me what I thought as the curtain fell. Anyway, before you've slipped away into a coma, the monster is back. But this time - to the disappointment of many front-row ticket holders - clothed.

Danny's given the other major roles to Jonny Lee Miller and Jonny Lee Miller's wig. The casting's charitable, because JLM is quite clearly a shot bolt. He'll always be Sick Boy to me. And possibly nothing more than Mr Jolie to others. He's pretty average (apart from the wig), although when you're sharing the stage with a TV star who's happy to spend a large amount of time on stage alone with his genitals on full display, I guess it's hard not to be upstaged. Excitingly, the leads are swapping roles every night, so next time it'll be Jonny with the birth scene and the al fresco plums. That really must be something to look forward to, luvvy.

Cumberbatch has a set of utterly mental fans. I know this because I sat through a painful showing of an episode of Sherlock followed by a Q&A at the Clapham Picturehouse a few weeks ago. Most attendees were female, tending towards obesity and painfully wrapped up in a boundless Sherlock obsession. Some had special badges, some were in fancy dress. These people weren't just testing the boundaries of acceptable enjoyment of a good TV programme. They were screaming bonkers. Most of them are probably booked in for every night of the run. Reviews mean nothing to them. But, if they did, no matter. It's a safe bet that this will get rave notices, not just because he's on the tele and odd rotund single twentysomethings obsess about him whilst demolishing packet after packet of Hobnobs, but because he plays a monster who just wants someone to love. Contemporary resonance, innit. Plus of course everyone knows that playing someone a bit 'special' (i.e. mongy) wins you lots of praise - see also Rainman, Forrest Gump, Gilbert Grape etc.

Did I enjoy it? I don't know. The stage looks amazing. Really brilliant, and the lights and special effects were pretty. But all I could really think about was that flailing cock. I am deeply limited.

Gossip Girls (and Boys)

2011-02-03T23:11:00.005Z

Have you ever sent your browser over to exciting and popular site Little Gossip?

Of course not. You're not 15. Nor - probably - a sociopath. But - and I know this because I heard about it on the Today programme this morning - it's the latest thing for young people. Those young people. You know the types. They're the ones with hoodies and knives and Meow Meow. Or maybe that was even a few years ago. I don't know. I've only recently discovered the online wankathon of Chatroulette and now that's totally, like, over. Any youngster worth their salt is laughing at me for that reference, as if I'd just referred to the wireless, or a Walkman.

Anyway. Little Gossip. It's a sort of social network, like Twitter. But it's like an extra mean Twitter where anonymous people write brief poorly-punctuated and grammatically-incorrect anonymous messages about people they study with and hate. Conceptually, I like it, this random bile-fueled gossip. But, as with all great ideas, the flaws swiftly emerge.

Obviously, because this stuff is written by hateful youth, their messages appear in the odd pidgin English which passes for language amongst these juvenile trogoldytes (everything below is encircled in an enormous sic). I've just about caught up with 'lol', certainly the most detestable three letters in youthful parlence, but there is plenty which goes beyond this most dreadful of modern-life memes. Chomsky-esque, I thought I could expand myself linguistically, and learn a load of great gossip about the rest of the world. It's got to be worth twelve seconds of anyone's time (that's the average I can spend on any single website before clicking on. It's also the period of time I listen to each song on any new album or before I go silently mental on any crowded Northern line tube).

So, I had a trawl through the site, because I heard that schools want to ban it. Moral panic gives an immediate dangerous, sexy allure. They - The Man - want to shut it down because there are, inter alia, utterly appalling messages about teachers on there. It must be bad, if it's sufficient to warrant hand-wringing from headteachers on Radio 4. Of course when I was at school there were always whispers that certain teachers were drunks, or enjoyed recreational same-sex rumpy. Or were just a bit dim. Or went in for whipping on religious grounds. Or were endlessly playing with themselves through their trouser pockets as they strode between desks (that was blatently true). Anyone who was at school with me should recognise these strange old types. But then in my day, we didn't have the internet. At times I find it difficult to believe I was alive during this time. It's as if I lived in one of those early twentieth century newsreels where everyone seems to be walking around incredibly quickly in black and white. Point is, the message stayed local. With Little Gossip, this stuff can fly.

Predictably, the censors are fighting back with their "rules", the bloody squares. The site's for over-eighteens only; obviously only the most adult and least feckless of citizens can have power of responsible gossip. This rule is carefully enforced by making users click a button saying "yes, I am over 18". I wonder how many people (and by people I mean idiotic adolescents) were banned from access by clicking the button saying "nope, I'm actually not 18". This button could just say "idiot". Although of course the "yes" button could be similarly labelled. Breathing deeply, and with eighteen being but a distant memory, I clicked onto the site.

Gossip - such as it is - is sorted by country and educational institution (and workplace, if you fancy it. As I work in an office with two other people, I shied away from the potential for (even more) awkward silences). Just idly, I checked out my alma mater. The gossip flowed.

It turns out that Joseph Bradley's last girlfriend was "a hazard to shipping". I think that means she's a bit husky. More excitingly, Cameron Clark "likes being bumpoked during sex". But that's probably normal in 2011, right? Everything's normal nowadays, grandad. It's not just sexy fun though, of course not. My old university was of limited value. But elsewhere, there's social commentary amongst the tawdry stuff. At Liverpool John Moores, all the students are "robbing dirty tracksuit wearing scum". You'll get no argument from me. At Anglia Ruskin, Lucy has herpes and there is "no more selfish bitch" than Megan Tyrie. Megan's a bad sort - according to our gossipmonger - "I'm told there's a fiance in her past who she stole a load of money from". That's a sort of third-hand gossip, so I'm not sure I believed the veracity of that. All the rest, absolutely fine. But Megan stealing all that money? I need evidence.

Intrigued, I ploughed ahead with my anthropological study. I picked out Loughborough University, at random. That's the university where all the sporty thick types go to run and jump. The students don't apply, they're captured in nets when recruitment officers go out into the woods and shake the trees. Thus Graham Allinson "thought that humous was a terorist islamic organisation not a tasty chickpea dip". Although of course the person who provided that gossip does display some degree of worldly knowledge, so perhaps there's hope. Bella Grosvenor - a woman of many talents - "sucked off 3 guys in one night. Banged 2 of them. Did anal with 1". And, most importantly, Harry Watts "LICKED HIS DADS BUM HOLE FOR £5, AND HE LOVED IT".

Finally, exhausted, I randomly fell upon Glyn Technology Sixth Form. The gossip posted was of a stark, earth-shattering nature, terrifying in its conception and potential outcome. Prepare yourself for the horror.

"Hitler is planning with the Legion of Doom... to assassinate Jesus"

Just who do I call to prevent this?

Dirty secret - here come the idiots

2011-01-30T12:41:00.010Z

I have Sky TV. Not just the basic sports stuff, but also all the movies, religious channels, E!News (for Mrs Webby), broadband, phoneline, all the live pause/rewind Plus gubbins and lovely high-definition. I've even got all the sports channels streaming all day long on my phone. Only by adding 3D would it be possible for me to give more money to Sky on a monthly basis. This is a bad confession for a Guardian reader.

But I like football, golf and cricket (and darts) and the choice is stark. You can watch the occasional FA Cup game on dreadful ITV, or the piss-poor BDO darts (drunks in a dirty pub). Maybe even the increasingly tragically irrelevant Match of the Day. Should you ever want to watch a big national coming-together - say one of the twice annual meetings of two of the big football teams - you can do it under noisy standing room only conditions in a pub, shouting at your chums, perhaps drinking an overpriced pint. Maybe you can even have fun. Woteva.

Or there's an alternative, hot and fresh for the 21st century. The alternative is to watch sport, religiously, professionally, furtively. All the sport, all the time, all day every day, in beautiful high definition. Watch Andy Murray's wispy goaty facial hair. Marvel at Chris Tremlett's terrifying Popeye forearms. Vomit over Ian Poulter's trousers. Every day is Super. Every single day. It's a non-secret dirty secret - I can watch sport, on twenty different channels, for 24 hours a day. It never ends. And that's an easy price to pay to never have to leave the sanctity of my flat on a Sunday. That's brilliant.

But there's a flaw in that, and even I can see it. And it's not the £100 I throw at Sky every month. Are you ready? Thus: simply because it's on a lot of the time doesn't make it good. Not really. Because although I love sitting on a weekend with the non-specific sport moving around in full colour gaiety in the background, a lot of Sky's presentation is woeful. Take that, Murdoch.

Fortunately, the two biggest arseholes in the Sky firmament have gone, this very week - whilst I was away and unavailable for grave-dancing duty. I hated Keys and Gray, that pair of modern Atlases, bravely shouldering the burden of their own hype. Hairy-hands Richard Keys, endlessly resenting that he was paid less than a third of Gray's salary. And TV's Andy Gray, who's career reached such amazing highs. Wolves. Tek a boo. Obviously, idiocy is all you can expect from boarish overpaid oafs who genuinely seemed to believe that the Premier League is unarguably the greatest league in the world, with all the best players, with all the best fans (i.e. all the best money). And - worse still - they seem to think that they, Richard Keys and Andy Gray, were in some way responsible for that success. So they can say what they like; they invented modern football, so tuck that in. Smash it.

Despite this, I will of course be retaining my completely hypocritical subscription to all Sky channels. Because (well, not really because - there are the 1,000 sporting reasons outlined above) the (surprisingly large number of) clips of Keys and Gray behaving like wankers are - each taken in a vacuum at least - no worse than the current set of Boots adverts.

If you don't want to watch the video above - and please don't - here's what happens. Two hilariously 'dappy' but professionally dressed women are reading a celebrity magazine instead of, gosh, doing their important office jobs. The sort of jobs it's good to show women doing because they're equal, yeah. There they are, gossiping, like all women do when more than one are together in a room somewhere. They should be working on their multi-various computers, obviously. But working is boring, especially for women - who are really, lest we forget, only interested in buttock toning and Ryan Reynolds. They're guffawing over something hilarious. Lipstick. Katy Perry. Puppies.

Suddenly - divers alarums - the boss comes over. Panic stations; surely they'll be rumbled for spending their working day chatting about tits? Fear not. One of the pair of idiots has special celebrity glasses which she changes to talk to her boss, to whom she mouths some serious-sounding "capital asset" bullshit when said boss checks on her progress (with the 'financials', not InStyle). The boss laps it up. I mean, the worker was wearing her serious glasses, so must have been working really hard, right?

Not only are the two lower-level functionaries (although they clearly have some sort of management role, because one is asked a serious question about management) only interested in facelifts and celulite, but the boss is a hilariously 'ditsy' too, because she is satisfied - delighted even - with a clearly made-up instant answer. Brilliantly, we're in on the joke, too: we know the answer is mindless because the pair who came up with it spends all her time reading celebrity magazines. Probably the boss doesn't really want to know the answer; she'd actually rather be off reading Grazia than running the company (imagine if it was a male employee showing such a lack of respect to a female bosszzzzzz etc etc).

Here's what the (all-male) creators of the ad are telling us: women don't really want to work; in fact all that equality legislation and training has been a waste of time, because as soon as you give women iMacs and jobs and the vote, they just become infantilised 'blondes' who would far rather stare at the pictures in US Weekly than actually do their job. But make sure you buy two pairs of glasses at Boots, because as a woman in the workplace you won't be taken seriously if you don't have special 'professional' glasses - which are so magically professional they allow you to get away with pissing away the working day reading about Botox and shoulder pads. Buy these glasses, and you'll still get paid for doing nothing, and you can continue to spend your salary on spritzers and hair dye and fucking glossy magazines.

Back to the start. Thoughts, and especially mine (because as a major funder of Sky operations I feel like I have a stake in what happens next), must turn to replacements for Stadler and Waldorf. Obviously, my own name should at some stage be thrown into the hat. But something even more revolutionary is needed. How about sport that isn't presented by former professionals? Anyone can see that the level of single-minded tedium required to be a top sportsperson - or even a very low ranking one - is enough to make all those who talk about it tedious. Or thick. Or - far more likely - both at once. Only in middle class sports can you expect any kind of coherence or ability to create a thought (less chance still of a credible sentence). That's why the cricket is good and - if I wanted to watch a tedious afternoon of homoerotic mud tussling - the rugby. Where are the gentlemen amateurs in football? Where's the next Des Lynam (Keys could have been him, but fell into the wrong crowd, obviously)? Why isn't James Richardson stepping up? Answer: because he's probably having far too good a time coming up with football puns for the Guardian podcast.

But you know he still has to watch all the games on Sky.

Mellow hello

2011-01-08T14:49:00.004Z

Life is a terminal disease. Every day is a day closer to your last, which could come at any moment. Time is running out of my hourglass, and there's no way to turn it upside down. In five years, I'll be half way through the life I can statistically expect to lead. It's frightening, this living one day at a time. These are not cheery thoughts to be having the day after your 31st birthday.

Yet - strangely enough - they're not really the dark thoughts I'm having. Which is a surprise, because last year I departed my twenties without any semblance of grace, charm or celebration. Actually, I was a real petulant shit about it - for several weeks - as if by being a grumpy bastard I could somehow hold back the tide of rolling years breaking over my receding hair. But this year, all seems well. Maybe because I've just given up on ageing as a concept; perhaps I really am Mumm-ra. Maybe it's just the onset of premature senility. If it is, bring it on - I think this cheeriness suits me.

"You're too negative", say the seven regular readers of this blog (one of whom is me). "Why don't you write about something you like for a change?" So, here's your change. In a rare moment of clarity as the sun peeps out from behind the clouds of my aged existence, I've been having pleasant thoughts. And then I thought I'd write about nice stuff, like flowers and bunnies or the plague-ridden urban foxes which tapdance of the corrugated metal roof outside my bedroom window and bark at each other all night.

I sprang out of bed this morning, fuelled by that odd post-beer restlessness (being knackered + being hungover = complete inability to lie in). I made myself coffee and bacon. All was well. But now to the point. Springing out of bed is hard, and not just because I love sleeping. Every morning is the same: the alarm sounds, Evan Davies blares into my ear, I gulp a rousing lungful of the fetid sous-duvet miasma, roll over and mash the snooze button into 7.01 submission. I reach down out of the bed and push another switch. My bed starts to heat. The electric blanket is on.

There are other things I enjoy doing - silently breaking wind on the Tube, claiming to have read impressive books when I've actually just listened to audiobooks, clipping coupons and then losing them, subscribing to magazines I don't read or understand but like to have peeping out of my satchel (principally the New Yorker) - but my true love is a beige electrified length of thick cloth. I adore my electric blanket, just as much as all the mental badge-wearing pudgy girls who attended the showing of Sherlock at the Clapham Picturehouse (followed by a Q&A with Moffat and Gatiss - written up in insane detail here) love chips.

I bought this great invention of the modern age (first available in 1912, hi-tech fans) last year, when the penury of my unemployed status prevented me from luxuriating in my pants on the sofa, heating on full blast, tropical plants sprouting in the kitchen. Instead, I was a slug-a-bed, content with sleeping through the morning, relishing every single second, sprouting bedsores; practising for my onrushing nursing home dotage. Magnificent, I'm addicted to the heat. Just before bedtime - that's about 1am for no reason other than to have something to blame for my extreme knackeredness in the morning - I switch it on, crank it up to the highest power setting and, ten minutes later, the bed is an astonishing delight. Even getting up in the night to visit the loo (something else for which I obviously have to thank my advanced age) becomes a treat, for even whilst you shiver in the bog, there's always the delightful thought that in a few seconds you'll be foetus-like in a red-hot bed. Get one today, you absolutely won't regret it.

Best of all, the modern ones are guaranteed to not kill you in a raging inferno, or by passing 240v through your body when you accidentally spill your Ovaltine. So I can have it on all night, safe in the knowledge that if I piss myself I won't die; it'll just evaporate quicker.

Needs must, when the Devil drives

2010-12-15T19:05:00.005Z

The setting. Oxford Circus tube, Victoria Line, southbound. Next train to Brixton is seven minutes away. It's 11.30pm on a cold Tuesday night. The platform's rammed with Christmas party revellers. I'm knackered, stuffed (having just rammed down a full tasting menu, plus matching wine, plus a couple of Laphroaigs) and homeward bound.

The train pulls in. We hurl ourselves in, rushing for the few seats. I get one; score. Four stops down to Stockwell, then another five down to sweet home Ala-Balham-a. Twenty-five minutes, tops. I settle down, start listening to Adam and Joe. All is well; I'm fed, watered, suitably tired and ready for Ovaltine and bed. The doors swish shut and I wait to be whisked south on the subterranean iron horse.

The driver presses his button to make the train work. The only control in his cab. He's handsomely paid for this great endeavour. We start to move.

We stop, very quickly. Having travelled eighteen inches.

Immediately, I panic. But not just because I'm not overly keen on the trillion tonnes of London and other lost civilisations pressing on a metal can just above my head. That's just mildly concerning, and no-one can do anything about it anyway.

The problem is that the tube has a Pavlovian effect on my bladder. As soon as I step through the doors, I need the loo. This also happens to me as my flat hoves into view at the end of each day - there's a 500 yard walk during which my need to urinate goes from insignificant to nuclear. And it's exactly the same for the underground. And so at 11.31pm on a cold Tuesday night, I've hit the perfect storm, all my thrashing dreams together at once. I need to pee. I'm sweating already, and the useless bastard of an overpaid driver - the presser of that single button - hasn't told me what's going on yet. I like to know; knowledge gives me power, over my bladder at least.

This has happened once before, on the District Line outside South Kensington. My teeth were underwater. We were trapped, in a tunnel. And then I started to smell burning. A fire, on the tube, with no escape possible. At least the progress of the fireball no doubt hurtling towards me would be doused by my micturation. Others would live. I'd probably get a medal, possibly a statue - Manneken Pis de Londres.

To recap. I'm trapped on a train, underground, we're sat at the platform, the train is making an odd throaty sad-train sound and I'm already crossing my legs. Worse still, the more I try to stop thinking about it, the more fixated I become on babbling Alpine streams and waterfalls. I instantly regret not visiting the restaurant facilities for an extra, make-sure, last minute hose down. But I went five minutes before we left and I don't want my dining companions to think that I have some kind of problem other than my terrible chat.

Hours pass. Well, probably upwards of six minutes. I am drenched in sweat - it seems my body is excreting in a slightly more socially acceptable way. Is it better to perspire pee than stand in the corner of a packed tube carriage, and spray the floor? Is it better to just let go and hang the clothing consequences? They're only Gap jeans; they'll wash. But then what if a stream of stinking, wine infused, yellow liquid appears around my feet - not only will I be wet, but everyone will know. None of these options are particularly palatable.

I start looking for assistance in the depths of my satchel. I have the Tupperware container which held my lunch. I have a Sainsburys plastic bag with holes in the bottom. These tools will surely suffice. I begin to plan a Heath Robinson contraption which will allow a surreptitious funnelling of liquid from bladder to handy sealable receptacle. But then what if someone spots me subtly trying to locate my genitals? What's worse: pissing on the floor, pissing myself, or being branded a transport wanker by 100 honking Londoners? And as I ponder these options, all I can think of is the expanding sack of waste liquid in my guts.

The train continues to be solidly immovable. Action stations. I pick up my bag and head for the door. I need a dark alley, or at least a poorly-lit corner. A quiet wall will do. The doors are shut, showing no sign of opening. People are banging on them, like earthquake victims tapping on a twisted pipe, waiting forlornly for rescue. The platform is filling up quickly with the next set of tube travellers - the people who would have been disappointed to have missed the tube I am now trapped on. I want to be one of them. Instead, I'm a caged beery beast, staringly balefully through the huge glass windows like a stupid fish. I wish I was a fish; they can piss anywhere. The thought of swimming makes me need to go even more.

Suddenly, staff are visible. Thank god for my saviour Bob Crowe - it's thanks to him that there are ample platform workers to save me from a wet trouser patch. The doors open, I flee.

But where now? There are never toilets at the tube station. I still need to get home, it's now midnight, and - lest you forget - I still need to urinate. Obviously that need has abated somewhat now that I've regained control of my own destiny and am no longer trapped in a tin coffin. My options hove into view. I need to waddle, fast, through Oxford Circus to the Jubilee Line, go two stops, then get on the Northern Line at Waterloo. Then I will finally get home (bar the 12 minutes from station to flat, the entire route of which is built for al fresco calls of nature). But more importantly, what happens if the Jubilee Line stops, mid-tunnel? What if the Northern Line, already held together with string and stickyback plastic, crashes. Then I will definitely piss myself. It never rains; it pours. Given the circumstances, exactly the thought I didn't need flashing through my addled mind.

Things the dead do in Balham

2010-12-05T18:36:00.008Z

I've lived in Balham for almost six years now. But I've been aware of the place for a lot longer. Because of Peter Sellers and the whole Gateway to the South hilarity - well, hilarity if you're a taxi driver or a relative of a certain age. It's Balham's own particular calling card. Ha ha etc. There's plenty of real history here, too.

I have lived for the past few years in a flat in a grand old building, built in 1859 on a street which was once - until over-crowding demanded their demolition - a rolling boulevard of huge dwellings (now it's a run-down thoroughfare of light industry and christmas tree sellers). That aside, Balham is - apart from the odd false Luftwaffe-supplied rotten tooth - reasonably attractive and cohesive architecturally (especially the posh bits).

I'm interested in this stuff, unashamedly. And so one fine day, I was idly googling Balham (I'd obviously tired of searching for my own name) and a postcard of the high street in the first decade of the twentieth century popped up, on sale for 50p on eBay. I bought it. And then found there were loads more available. I bought them, for a few pence each and then stared at them. And kept buying them. Whoever these postcard hawkers are, they now know me and my OCD and it's increasingly hard to find any at a reasonable price. But I now have quite a collection.

Yet what do you do with these things? I used one for the banner at the top of this blog. I've got a few artfully displayed on various walls, but most are just in a box, which seems like a shame.

Then I found the brilliant How To Be A Retronaut. It's a sort of clearing house for historical ephemera. Lots of great stuff there - I've watched this Friese-Greene video thousands of times. Amongst all the other oddments are images where people have over-layed historical scenes with contemporary shots of the same location. With a quick bit of Photoshop magic, it's reasonably easy to create a sort of Soulwax-esque ghostly mash-up. And I thought I'd have a go; my Photoshop skillz are reasonably dreadful, but it makes me feel pretty happy, sitting at my shiny iMac playing with professional software for cool people with thick-rimmed glasses - the sort of left-brain people who ride the Charing Cross branch of the Northern Line (like me).

Here's the first result - click on it to get a bigger view and stare at pictures of the long dead walking the streets of Balham. And a tram, which makes me simultanously happy and sad. Happy because trams are excellent; sad because the lines were ripped up in the fifties. I'd love to commute on a tram.

I'm rather proud, even though this is quite clearly rubbish. Fortuantely, there are lots more to come, whether you like it or not. I promise they'll get better.

Shirley Not

2010-11-29T17:59:00.001Z

Leslie Nielsen is dead. For shame. Airplane is amazing, one of the first films I can remember watching over and over again and quoting endlessly, much - I don't doubt - to everyone's amusement. Read the script here.

There's the obvious bits everyone knows - like:

Elaine : A hospital . . what is it?
Rumack : Its a big building with patients, but that's not
important right now.

The every-so-unsubtly over-interested Captain Oever who cracks onto the small boy:

Oever : Sure. You ever been in a cockpit before?
Joey : No sir, I've never been up in a plane before.
Oever : You ever . . . seen a grown man naked?

Would you get away with that now? Especially as he continues with:

"Joey, did ya ever hang around a gymnasium?"
"Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?"
"Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?"

The endless film references - a tradition which continues in stuff like Shrek. There are plenty of time-related quotes, too - from the adverts of 1979, I guess. The drinking problem. Lloyd Bridges picking the "wrong week to give up sniffing glue/cigarettes/amphetamines".The increasingly gory suicides on the plane. The moment where everyone takes their positions for the crash. OJ Simpson. Anna Nicole Smith.

There's plenty which is even more abstract, too. I like the way towards the end old Leslie opens the cockpit door a few times and repeats "I just want to tell you both good luck, we're all counting on you". For no reason at all. There's a moment when the head pilot on the ground walks through a mirror. And, obviously, the jive-talking. She died too, recently. Is it racist?

Obviously most of the credit has to go to Jim Abrahams and the Zucker bros who wrote it, but you can't downplay the leader of the ensemble. The best thing is that we're all in on the joke, all the time. There's another amazing bit I remember elsewhere from his career - must be from one of the Naked Gun films (which I'll now have to re-watch) - where the cast walks into a police laboratory, but the camera pans back to show that it's clearly a set. So while some of the cast use the prop door between the rooms, whilst others just walk across the open front of the set. Fourth wall? There is no spoon.

Not sure how clearly I've managed to describe that, but it's great. It's cheap and silly - but brilliant. Reminds me (slightly more outré this) of Officer Crabtree in 'Allo 'Allo. Hmmm. Stay with this. He's speaking French, badly, which is manifested by malapropisms and a terrible comedy French accent. But it's obviously all really in English. Although we're supposed to believe it's French, because we're in France, right. The Germans speak French in German accents, although actually they're speaking English (although they don't seem to speak German to each other - maybe Gruber is a Vichy collaborator). Then the British airmen and Michelle of the Resistance speak to each other in RP English, but no-one understands them. Because they're French, even though they're speaking English. My brain has now overheated.

Anyway, RIP.

Old Men Forget

2010-11-27T12:35:00.005Z

So I saw Primal Scream play Screamadelica all the way through last night, in celebration of it being almost 20 years old. We all know it's a reasonably brilliant album - apart from the lull in the middle. I need to listen to it again (possibly without constantly just skipping to Loaded) and will force Mrs Webby to do the same. It's good for her and our next car journey will fly by.

It was a fine night out, even though I missed all their first half greatest hits bit because (a) they don't really have any greatest hits other than the best dancey bits of Screamadelica (Rocks maybe. Burning Wheel at a pinch) and (b) my taxi driver took a slipshod approach to navigation from the south to London's Fashionable West End™. So scattergun was his route planning that we had to stop for at a garage en route. Is that OK, a taxi stopping for petrol on my time? Is there an acceptable way to kick your driver up the arse, other than the killer lack of tip?

We arrived late, just in time for the Andrew Weatherall DJ set (he is, history will surely tell, the man who made the 'Scream everything they are today - that's well-respected, genre-defining, epoch-making acid house artistes. Not just a plodding Scotch Rolling Stones covers pub band). And, thus we strode across the threshold - down amongst the musical barbarians - just in time for a scrum for the bar. A bar at which all bartenders were issued with earplugs.

Now we live in a litigious age - I'm always attempting to hurl myself off cracks in the pavement so that I can take Lambeth to the cleaners and reclaim some of my council tax - and, sure, you don't want your staff deafened by Mani's driving bass. But there's something crazy about deliberately making public-facing staff unable to hear their customers. In Alanis Morrisette's terms, it's ironic. They wear earplugs because it's loud when the amps are wound up to 11 for Higher than the Sun. But then thirsty bar patrons have to shout eardrum-burstingly loud directly into those same muffled lugholes when ordering their £4.20 bottle of Tuborg - barking against the volume, the earplugs and the studied indifference of the belligerent beer bottle openers. Square. Circle. Does not compute.

The demographic - as predicted - was solidly middle class, solidly of a certain age. Thirty was young for that crowd - apart from the children of doting fathers who had been brought along in a doomed bid to stop them listening to Justin Bieber for five minutes and to give them a reason to wear that Screamadelica t-shirt that dad bought last Christmas that you never wear because you don't like that old music and prefer JLS and you know he really bought it for himself but it shows off his muffin top and can we go to Pizza Express now. Those sort of people. Our people. People who probably didn't partake too hard during 1991's second Summer of Love because they were too busy with their A-Levels to be listening to house music whilst popping pills like peanut M&Ms. And hasn't it all paid off well now, what with that career in accountancy and the family and the picket fence?

I'm not going to write anything about the music. If you want to recreate the experience, listen to the album whilst watching video of a slightly younger Mick Jagger and then - just when you think one track HAS to end, throw in another four minutes of slightly mindless repetition or maybe even a crappy indie song you wrote before you had your flukey Damascene moment in '91. Take that, Bobby.

So not too much about the music anyway. Instead, try this life-affirming vignette.

At one stage, I lost a member of my small troupe of such men of a certain age in the dark gurning masses of We are the Dead. I looked around with fear rising in my nostrils - lost in a sea of sensible men with goutish toes squeezed into the old Converse and slightly-spreading bodies wrapped up warm in a North Face cagoule. I panicked. My companion was carrying my second plastic bottle of organic cider.

I'm sure he'll mind greatly if I describe him as slightly balding. Perhaps that's over-egging it. Large foreheaded is better. Fiveheaded. I thought he would be easy to spot; the glow from the stage would bounce off his brow, making him stand out like a lighthouse. I couldn't fail to spot lovely cider beacon, he'd be shining like a star. Twelve seconds later and my strategy was already doomed to failure. The lights behind spidery smackhead messiah and squire of, inter alia, Kate Moss - Bobby Gillespie - were bouncing off every widow's peaked rapidly expanding forehead. Ageing: it takes no prisoners. Come together as one.

Has someone left me a voicemail?

2010-11-26T13:42:00.004Z

Anyone want to lay claim to the following, somewhat cryptic, voicemail left on my phone this very cold morning?

Or maybe someone could just translate it for me? Otherwise, who knows what I'll be missing out on.

So far - and I'm on my hundredth listen - I reckon:

"Hello Joanne.

Give me a little call and you'll get it in English.

Psssshhhhgoodlucksshhh"

Firstly though, my name isn't Joanne.

UPDATE:

A second voicemail has arrived. Even more cryptic.

A hanging offence

2010-11-23T13:43:00.002Z

Here (according to Popbitch, anyway) is Anthea Turner's house.

Sundown Cottage in Hascombe, Surrey is currently on the market for an impressive £5.75m. Hasn't she done well? Although I'm assuming she's selling it to cover a tax bill or to otherwise stave off bankrupcy - there can't be that much money in being a former Blue Peter presenter.

I idly clicked through and was immediately taken by one of the pictures. Not the one of the stables or the helipad or the rolling verdant grounds. It was the TV that interested me.

Why did Anthea and Grant decide to hang it on the wall the wrong way round?

Zeroes to Heroes

2010-11-21T21:44:00.010Z

There are no reasons to watch the X-Factor. It's the most repellent, contrived pile of crap on TV. There is absolutely nothing to recommend it at all, other than the fact that if you don't watch it, even in the most detached and arch middle-class non-voting way possible (i.e. exactly like you and me), you're missing out on all the gossip and idle Monday morning chatter. And it's never nice to be excluded. The X-Factor is an early morning sub-duvet fart after a night on the fighting lager. Dangerous smelly, deeply unpleasant but yet roguely irresistible. You just have to lift a corner to get a whiff.

Next year's contestants in utero

But it's still terrible. Compelling, alluring and the most cynical load of shite you'll ever squirm through. This is, obviously, news to absolutely no-one. And - most awful of all - the entire thing is a joke at our expense from Chief Arbiter of All Musical Taste Simon Cowell. Who gets to sit there - all strangely jet black hair, flattened head and shaved chest - gurning as his three 'industry experts' (of the most dubious of qualifications) read from his script. The end goal - another chirrupy cash cow to sweat. But filling 16 weeks (or however many dreadful months it is) with auto-tuned pap would probably be boring for ageless Wizard of Oz Simon - so he fills the time between Genesis and Armageddon by laughing at you, and me and everyone else who watches his idiot conveyer belt.

This week it was the most appalling part of the entire run. The charity single. The bit where Sir Simon of Cowell gets to show what a fine humanitarian he is, and gets to donate to a worthy (if slightly jingoistic) foundation. That's a tiny, tiny propotion of his guaranteed annual income from the exploitation of a mooing and bleating group of no-hopers. It's the least he can do. Even while back at X-Factor HQ, he continues to stare down imperiously down at the idiots who pick up their phones and mobiles and turn on their internets simply to pump more and more money into his bank account. That is the sole purpose of the programme - to allow Simon to buy more of the Caribbean and another pretend fiancé and possibly an even more roomy closet. The charity bit is just another excuse for his club of fisted muppets to sell more records. It's an unbelievable business model. He gets paid for the idea all over the world, he gets paid to stage the show, he gets paid for the running of the show, he gets paid for writing the theme tune, he gets paid by draining every scintilla of talent from a bunch of colourful idiots - and he gets to do it all again, year after year. The greatest confidence trick imaginable. And it all relies on his 'artists' being in the news, all the time. And one way to ensure they get blanket - uncritical - coverage is a dreadful charity single mingled with some platitudinous toss about how seeing a soldier with one leg 'really puts everything in perspective'. Is no-one concerned that X-Factor contestants can only obtain mental clarity after viewing the results of an IED?

Because what can you say? It's for charity, you mean spirited old bastard. Moaning about that is like telling a seven year-old that their parents have just died in a head-on collision with Father Christmas - probably just a bit unthinking, you git.

But then every seven year-old needs to learn. The X-Factor is seven.

Last year, the charity single - which, of course, flew to number one on a sentimental wave of Tween musical ignorance - was some warbling arse by Mariah Carey. That's fine. Feel free to butcher that. Do so with my blessing. Because it's already impossible to make any Mariah song worse (obviously I know exactly none of her music, but I'm going to come to the completely irrational and non-evidence-based conclusion that it's all over-sung R'n'B soft-core toss with a key change - am I wrong?). That's the sort of song I don't mind fools destroying, because ruining that would be like absent-mindedly leaving the gas on. In Dresden. In 1945.

But this year - for Help for Heroes - the chosen charity single is David Bowie's Heroes (they're heroes, yeah - geddit?). A genuine bona-fide classic from a genuine bona-fide musical hero. Now reduced to a vainglorious recitation by an angelic choir of berks (the majority of whom pre-rejected by the public herd) over a backing track from professional wankers U2 on one of those days when Bono couldn't be bothered with either music or Africa. To really rub our collective nose in it, the first performance of this abortion comes the day after the remaining contestants mewled out a 're-imagined' collection of songs by The Beatles. They 'made them their own', which means that it was an occasion of horrific cultural vandalism. Don't 'make it your own,' you little shits - it's not your to 'make your own'. It was already brilliant, and you can only make it worse. As an iconoclastic act, it's like squeezing out an enormous turd in Westminster Abbey and then wiping your arse on Rowan Williams' beard.

David, what were you thinking?

And - if you were thinking of buying it - realistically you probably should be sent to Afghanistan and let loose in downtown Helmand and forced to sing Onward, Christian Soldiers whilst smeared with bacon fat, with a stars and stripes tattooed on your chest and a koran stuck up your bum.

Twee cookery video of the week

2010-11-16T19:54:00.007Z

I don't really like fruit cake. There's something about all the dried fruit and the candied peel and the hard booze and the stodge that doesn't really agree with me.

But I do like spending an afternoon in the kitchen baking. So I rushed out and bought Delia Smith's bag of pre-prepared Christmas cake ingredients at Waitrose. Throw in eggs and butter and citrus zest, mix and bake. Easy. Just need a few people to eat it now... I can promise all takers a nip of amaretto - because I bought a whole bottle for the sake of a tablespoon thereof. Who knows - a couple of snifters and I might even be tempted to eat a slice myself.

Here's the video of the bake-off. I'm hoping that it'll eclipse my other YouTube moments - beating the 35,000 hits for my video of buses, the 63,500 who've watched Dermot O'Leary almost calling Katie Waissel a naughty C-word, or even the film of Gareth deflating an airbed, which almost 2,000 people have enjoyed (lol, as they might say).

Fat chance.

Twit of the week

2010-11-13T22:17:00.004Z

On 6 Janury 2010, as I threatened to greet my thirtieth year, Paul Chambers tweeted the following to his 600+ followers (plus the rest of the world's Twitterers, all 175 million of them):

Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!

Last Friday, his criminal record under the Communications Act 2003 was confirmed at Doncaster Crown Court (Robin Hood Airport is in Doncaster, not Nottingham, obviously). His crime - threatening to blow up the airport. Read that tweet again and tell me - ignoring all joking and common sense (I'll return to that later) - that it's not a threat. All the elements are in place - a demand, a sanction and a deadline. How is that not a threat?

Twitter has - in its typically lazy fashionable way - gone mental. Exploded, you might say, in a multi-coloured fury of righteous indignation. Slogans supporting our hero have led the Twitter world, putting all the other berks and cranks - Justin Bieber, Demi Moore and the like - to shame. The usual suspects have waded in - Graham Linehan, David Mitchell, Jon Ronson, Stephen Fry. All people I admire and like. All of whom - along with millions of others - professed outrage. The unedifying sight of the hordes bandwagon jumping has continued for the past two days. Here's the thought process: Stephen Fry is funny on QI and is REALLY clever - so I'll just re-tweet his every word so that a bit of his intellectual gold dust rubs off on me. I'll do it as I rub off on myself.

Obviously, I can't comment on Friday's judgment - because (along with every other shrieking commentator who wasn't in the courtroom) I've not read it. And it's probable that no-one ever will, because it's unlikely to be published. So why not just sqwark and babble on Twitter from a position of almost complete ignorance. Obviously that's what any rational person would do, right?

Whilst I think that it was wrong that this has gone (and will seemingly continue to go) through the court system and has ended up with young Paul obtaining a criminal record - I do agree (with significant caveats) with the rationale behind the case against him. That - in many eyes - makes me a traitor. Am I losing my middle-class educated mind? Has my endless trawling through the depths of the Daily Mail website rotted my mind? What is going on with me? Unravelling my conflicted thoughts on this may take some time. Please be patient.

Some background. The lamentable history of the matter is included in this useful chronology. An interesting - although legally insignificant - point to note is that at no stage in the beginning of proceedings was the threat - remember, it was a threat - taken as credible. It was passed up and up the chain of low-level command until the police intervened and Paul was dragged away for a good grilling. Jeez, says Twitter, it's like China. Or the Nazis. Sure, that's probably when it should have stopped - if only to save newsprint and Twitter-based RSI. Knacker could have just cautioned him, as if he were a naughty adolescent caught with an eighth of oregano and sawdust infused weed. But aren't some alleged crimes just a little more serious? So, up the legal ladder Paul travelled.

Here's how chains of command work. It's not for the low-level functionary to opine on the credibility of a threat. We have experts who do that, people who understand that it's one thing to laugh off a joke - but that you can probably only do that after you've done a bit more digging - and a threat to blow up an airport, especially when stripped of context, is still a threat to blow up an airport. Twitter is naturally disposed to be ephemeral and fleeting, so not everyone engages their brain before hitting 'send'. And that is why 99% of tweets are dreadful meaningless txt-msg mooing and bleating. But whether written in street patois or not, they are still all available for popular consumption. And Paul Chambers - a heavy twitterer - knew it. This was not your dad bashing out an unpunctuated text message all in capitals. Once it had been spotted - and remember, it had been let loose on the internet to 175 million people - it was always going to be taken seriously.

So, accept that once the fateful button had been pressed, and the tweet - incredibly unluckily - spotted, the die was cast. This is how it had to end. Because - at the risk of endless repetition - this was not an idle threat to 'murder a curry' or 'kill the boss'. It was a threat to bomb an airport. Let's not forget that it's not that long ago that one bunch of nutters did actually try to do that. And were only stopped by their own inadequacies and the actions of a particularly insanely-heroic Scot.

So, if we can accept it's a threat, how might we mitigate? Is this a free speech issue - should Paul be allowed to say whatever he wants, free from censure? No, because the otherwise staunch right to free speech is infringed to prevent people shouting fire in a crowded theatre. Well-refreshed gits regularly tell airport staff - when asked if they packed their bag themselves and the other questions - that they're carrying a bomb. Or something equally hilarious along those lines, the sort off thing which the idiots themselves think is harmless banter but which is actually - rightly - taken rather seriously. Here's a case from last month. And another one. Here's one from February this year. And finally one from last week. Why doesn't Stephen Fry pay their fines? Why didn't they get the support of the Twitterati? (equally, why do these wankers keep on doing it - deterrence obviously has its limits).

Should the security forces be able to apply a weather eye to the internet? "Apply common sense", comes the cry. Sorry, but that won't do. Every day I do something absurd, like put my shoes on the wrong feet, burn my tongue on scalding tea or buy a crap CD the Guardian have given a good review. None of these things comply with the basic tenets of common sense. That would dictate that I should never do any of these things. Point is, common sense is not infallible. And we are cursed to live in interesting times when this simplistic formulation - that we should stiffen our lips and always comply with what appears to be common sense at all times - cannot be expected to always work. It's not common sense to immolate yourself at Glasgow airport. It's not common sense to hijack a plane.

Of course, Paul Chambers is to be pitied. Especially as it could have happened to any of us, probably. He's got a criminal record - which is obviously crappy. He's lost his job, which is a real bugger (but he does now have 30,000 followers on Twitter and I guess he could write the whole experience up). He's notionally out of pocket - although celebritydom has delved down the back of its collective sofa to pay his small fine (and presumably hefty legal fees, if not done pro bono). But the escalation of the case is revealing and important.

Time to brush the dust from my mouldy old lawyer's hat. The relevant sub-sections of s.127 of the Communications Act 2003 (under which Chambers was finally charged) state:

Improper use of public electronic communications network
(1) A person is guilty of an offence if he—

(a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character

(3)A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable, on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale, or to both.

Is it not grossly offensive to threaten to blow up an airport? Is it not potentially indecent, obscene and menacing to threaten human life? The exclamation mark - nothing more than a slightly more eloquent 'LOL' - gives a veneer of humour. But that's a nuance which is likely meaningless to many.

The argument over mens rea (the guilty thought process element to criminality) is proper hard law of the sort I once studied (the relevant case law is here). My precedent-reading skills have faded, but this is the crucial bit.

"[a] culpable state of mind will ordinarily be found where a message is couched in terms showing an intention to insult those to whom the message relates or giving rise to the inference that a risk of doing so must have been recognised by the sender." [para. 11]

So we reach the crux. Did Paul intend the threat to be menacing? Probably not. He repeatedly told police it was jokey; just idle banter. But should Paul have realised that there was a risk that some people might find his threat genuinely threatening, especially given the (occasionally justifiable) pervasive climate of fear of terrorist outrage? Consider whether a reasonable person - the objective man on the Clapham omnibus - might find it grossly offensive, obscene or menacing to threaten to blow up an airport (obviously this takes the tweet in a non-contextual vacuum).

Well the Daily Mail tells me every day that society is broken and we're not far from turning feral and devouring our children - but I'm still pretty confident that most people will agree with that construct. And that, I'm guessing, is why the CPS decided to prosecute - as a deterrent. I don't lie sweating in bed every night waiting for the bomber under my bed to get me - but it's not that absurd to at least give some creedence to the concept that London - and the life I lead - is under threat. And that away from public gaze, there are people working hard to prevent further loss of life.

Now this is hardly a knee-jerk bit of anti-terror legislation. In fact, it's an updated version of a statue which has been on the books for a hell of a long time. This is not a post-9/11 Bliar and NuLiebour ID-cards-and-CCTV percieved attacks on your right to be offensive. The Post Office (Amendment) Act made it an offence to send any message by telephone which is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character. And that was in 1935, before leaders of public opinion could disseminate their raabble-rousing hectoring through the internet.

If Chambers had been brown with a fist-long beard, I very much doubt there'd be any of this fuss. In fact, it would likely be reported as another foiled terror plot. Medals would be handed out. But because he's white and nicely middle-class and he writes well, it's obviously a joke, right? Because he didn't actually blow up the airport, did he?

But then when does a terror threat lapse from serious to humerous? Presumably only when the predicted terrorist outrage doesn't actually happen. So what if it does happen? The redundancy of the false alarm can only arise when the all-clear sounds. Not before. And so we arise with the conviction of a Twittering chap in a grotty regional town. Which sums it up. Time and money has been thown at the case but it seems only I - barking into the hurricane of popular opinion - don't think all of it was too badly spent. If it makes even one person think before they tweet, that alone is a blessing.

If you've made it right to the end, apologies. But thanks. Please help me with my deeply-conflicted mind by telling me I'm wrong.

Middle Class Heroes

2010-11-09T09:19:00.004Z

I thought the trendiness of self-sustainability had faded in the past couple of years. Ever since Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall quit his bijou River Cottage and moved to the subtly named yet undoubtedly corporate River Cottage HQ, I'd really thought the smallholding fantasy had caught in the nation's throat. If Hugh can't do it - without butchering his chickens and/or dying after desperately eating a poisoned toadstool - what hope was there for the rest of us, those of us without British Racing green fingers, boundless patience and an ability to enjoy chitterlings, faggots or other such odoriferous non-foods. Or, rather more prosaically, the endless money to pump into an aspirational lifestyle which - as medieval child mortality rates and life expectancy show - probably really wasn't that much fun at all.

But, following Giles and Sue Live the Good Live, I reckon it's all back on. Soon, we'll all be heading into our back gardens, throwing our televisions away (or at least turning them into conversation-piece flowerbeds), planting chickens everywhere and drinking homemade wine. Sue Perkins and Giles Coren will inspire us all with their new three-part BBC series. In which they drink homebrew and make bread and cheese and get shouted at by the ageless demon offspring of the Two Fat Ladies and meet two lovable old lags who've been doing it for years and have the ill-becoming (is that a word?) knitwear to prove it. What larks.

Everyone's seen The Good Life. Apart from the canned laughter - which in the NuComedy era I find maddening - it was quite funny and quaint. There's prototype Hyacinth Bucket Penelope Keith. Him out of Yes Minister. The boss who's called 'Sir'. Felicity Kendal and her bottom. Other stuff I can't remember. Tom and Barbara Good turn their house and garden into a non-intensive food factory with goats and chickens and pigs and vegetables - that way, they don't have to spend any money - except, I assume, on an expensive mortgage in prime London extra, goat set-up costs and so on. So it follows that the only episode I can actually remember involves Richard Briers (loony liberal Tom) being offered some paid work by 'Sir' just to get them through a cold snap or a broken hoe or something. Even the gentle sitcom occasionally accepts that actually their 'good life' is (a) bloody hard (b) incredibly tenuous and (c) liberally speckled with actual shit. And what happens when your goats get ill or your crops fail or your bread doesn't rise or your milk goes sour? What then - do you starve in a gutter? Are the workhouses still running? Will their be a follow-up? Giles and Sue's Harvest Disaster, where we watch them gibber and moan as they eat all their scrawny goats, then the wizened chickens, then each other.

So why? What is it that makes people want to live this life? Can we really be persuaded by give up the Internet and Call of Duty: Black Ops and iMacs? Or is there some sort of hand-cranked or goat-powered version available? How does it work? How do you wipe your bum? How do you update Twitter? Because the 1920s were fun, right? Apart from the economic crisis. Geddit. I'm not sure - although obviously I'd love to give it a try, if only if it weren't for the 4am starts and the inability to take a day off and the goats eating my hair or the smell of a billy goat with...ummm...the urge. That aroma - and I'm someone who spent many youthful days surrounded by goats - is quite astonishing. Bad enough in the relatively rural openness of the north east; far less pleasant in downtown Balham.

Still, fetid odours aside, Giles and Sue - carrying on from their food and boozeathon The Supersizers - have got 'great screen chemistry'. This is TV shorthand for 'everyone secretly wants them to be a couple' (although I'm aware this is impossible, are we really supposed to believe there's not been a night when the pea pod wine has kicked in and they're lolling in front of the Rayburn, gorged on homemade bread and homemade cheese and wearing homemade pyjamas and have caught each other's eye in the glint of a candle?). They're a very middle class Chiles and Bleakley. Although - unlike Mr and Mrs Daybreak - are watchable - and that's despite my jealous indignation at Coren's family leg-up (I remain convinced he's an arse, albeit one who writes brilliantly - here's some advice I should have heeded earlier). In fact, at times you think that you're intruding on the domestic life of that couple that everyone likes - those people you sort of know who are funnier and more interesting and more clever than you. Which - obviously - is true of them both. Bastards.

So, can this work? Well, not for me. I have a kitchen windowsill which must double as my suburban garden. And goats - although they have a tremendous ability to climb and a solid head for heights - probably wouldn't cope well with the six inches of grazing space that affords. It's probably just too much of a faff. I'll just stick to watching it on TV. TV - that's the real good life.

Quite extraordinary X-Factor moment of the day

2010-10-31T21:24:00.004Z

This is - and I apologise for the background laughter in the video and unsteady filming hand - quite the most extraordinary moment in my personal X-Factor watching odyssey (so that's the odd drunken night). I had to watch it back a few times to make sure I'd heard right. I promise there's been no technical jiggery-pokery here, simply the rewinding of live TV (thanks to Rupert Murdoch, hoorah).

Quite simply, TV hero Dermott O'Leary labels Katie Waissel - a girl far too middle class to ever be expected to 'connect' with the 'public' (no matter how hard she tries or how 'real' she says she is) - a naughty c-word. The worst word in the world - the one that hates women. It's not 'zounds'.

Watch this, and tell me it's not the case.

The laughter in the background is Mrs Webby and me, who have watched this approximately 100 times since it happened this very evening, before the watershed and everything. Hardly anyone else in the entire Internet seems to have picked up on this. Was everyone anaesthetised by Jamiroquai and their mid-nineties soft funk stylings? Or Richie Sambora's ravaged face?

WHERE WERE YOU PEOPLE?

*UPDATE*

Word is that he may have been saying "good luck hon". Well, I'm yet to be convinced.

You can also watch a (somewhat shorter) version of this on YouTube, where people have been much amused by my wheezy cackling.

Would like to meet...

2010-10-29T16:00:00.000+01:00

Now I - like everyone else I know (generally a charming bunch of liberal middle-classers) - read the Daily Mail website avidly. Several times a day, most days. Thanks to all the browsing from wet fish doo-gooders such as me, I've heard that the site actually makes money.

Irrespective of that, it's just incredible. The celebrity gossip is sensational - if you're only interested in the narrow range of celebrities from Kim Kardashian to Colleen Rooney, taking in all reality stars on the way. The news reporting is shrill and parochial and excitable, rammed with foghorn moral outrage yet timid use of facts. I called their newsdesk once, for my job. It was terrifying. And they now have my mobile number - the mark of the beast is on me.

Realistically, it's pretty pointless directing anyone to a story on the site from here, because I'm guessing my entire readership (static at four) has already read every story, possibly several times. I therefore present a comment from the site - in the spirit of my second favourite web location - SpEak You're Branes.

Some background. The story in question is classic Mail fodder. It's sexy (in a paedo-beast way), involves death, prison, retribution, dead children, black and white moral outrage and so on. The sort of story they thrive on. Illustrated with a Facebook-esque snap. Joanna Rutledge, 27, has fallen for Ian Huntley. Although she may well be insane, it's just as likely that she doesn't exist. The comments - always the highlight of any story, range from "EWWWWW" (thanks for your useful contribution, no doubt hammered from your keyboard) to "he should be swinging from the gibbet at the bottom of my garden" to variations on "will no one think of the children" (the latter two both classic and well-worn DM refrains).

My favourite tip when faced with a bank of comments left by habitual readers of the Daily Mail is to check out the 'best rated' (those which have received the most green arrowed - the currency of the home counties housewives and spluttering gouty colonels who read the paper). They usually involve 'Bliar', Cherie Booth, NuLiebour (geddit) and the global warming scam. Once you've tested the wrath of middle England, it's time to move on to a special treat - check out those which have received the most red arrows. They're the comments which the Daily Mail readers hate, and usually involve compassion, human rights and/or gay equality.

Back to Huntley. Here's the sensational worst rated comment (which has still, as of now, garnered two green arrows):

Poor girl, you will end up realising that nobody loves anyone, this man doesn't care about you at all, you have absolutely no value to him for who you are. These sex killers have something powerful about them, I once met one for a drink (from Guardian soulmates) and was totally blown away, yet I somehow knew he was a killer and said he would kill a woman within a year and it would be all over the news, and it happened just as I said. This man attracted women like flies and I was no exception, but when they put his CCTV picture on the media he looked less than prepossessing to any observer who had never met him.

Wonder what makes a woman fall for a guy like that? A lot do.

- anon, UK, 29/10/2010 14:49

"Nobody loves anyone"
"Guardian Soulmates"
"It happened just as I said"

Firstly, why would a Mail reader even contemplate Guardian Soulmates, where you're far more likely to meet an assistant producer of avant-garde puppet theatre for Somali adolescents living in noble penury in Crouch End than a ruddy-faced young Tory.

Second. You are mental.

Listing heavily

2010-10-27T17:25:00.010+01:00

Here's a list of complete showers of shite from little-read (other than by spoddy 13-year olds in blazers covered with badges) muso rag the NME. It's their Cool List 2010. The list which "every musician worth his salt" wants to be on, says the publication. A list of targets, say I.

Obviously, as an elderly curmudgeon, I've not heard of 99% of them. Although I did manage to pick out a few names here and there. But to instruct myself in the ways of the young and interesting and "cool", I flicked through the list. I thought you might find inspiration and hope within it, too.

So here's that list in full:

NME Ranking	Cool Person	Comments
1	Laura Marling	Turn it up Laura, it's all getting a bit fay back here. The definition of cool has shifted since Euro 96.
2	Janelle Monae	Young Janelle: (a) talks about herself in the third person; (b) appears to believe that she is a time-traveller; and (c) is actually fun and quite good. I will let this one pass.
3	Kanye West	Diamond-toothed fantasist with god complex and untouchable faith in himself. I like him.
4	Beth Consentino	The cool person in music called Beth who's not Beth Ditto. May well be better looking.
5	Romy Madley Croft The XX	"Romy". Is this a joke, or just a terribly, terribly middle-class name? Of course, it's the latter. She's in an 'interesting' band of south London lo-fi miserablists who have taken the music world by storm with one-note synth dirges.
6	Paul Weller	Last relevant in 1978. Now wears grey Mekon wig over frazzled skin tanned deep shade of brown on idle riches of previous career. Utterly ruined, one feels, by his nineties association with plodding garbage-merchants Ocean Colour Scene.
7	Jonathan Pierce The Drums	BBC football commentator branches out into new cliche-driven indie by squeezing his not-inconsiderable bulk into skinny jeans and a pork pie hat. Good luck to him.
8	Jack Barnett These New Puritans	Sadly the new reign of the puritans means that all puny guitar bands will be banned. Along with Christmas.
9	Carl Barat	I kicked him in the ribs once, whilst playing a late night football match with the well-refreshed former Libertine outside the Hanover Arms in Oval (London's greatest pub). He hasn't been the same since.
10	Darwin Deez	Quite clearly under-evolved.
11	Marcus Mumford Mumford & Sons	Can't say anything bad here (literally not allowed to by Mrs Webby). The acceptable face of nu-folk - tabors, ear-pulling harmonies and hurdy-gurdies.
12	Simon Neil Biffy Clyro	You were on Later... once. Along with everyone else in the world of any relevance, I have forgetten your performance.
13	Hayden Thorpe Wild Beasts	I'll give you six out of ten, but minus six points for allowing your song onto the Santander advert with F1 mega-tede Lewis Hamilton. Thus nil.
14	Zola Jesus	OMG your name is just like so anarchic. Either that, or it's a bawled refrain amongst the Chelsea Headhunters.
15	Robyn	Cornetto-headed Scandi gloom merchant. Not for me.
16	Yannis Philippakis Foals	We've both come a long way, as OWs. Must admit, I like Foals. They're the acceptable face of math rock (kills self)
17	James Murphy LCD Soundsystem	Yes. I have heard of you. I may even own your first album. Still, no thanks.
18	Theo Hutchcraft Hurt	Runs a useful sideline in building shelters for small domestic animals. Will certainly come in handy when he drops off the end of the Cool List.
19	Kele Okereke	He's the chap from that other band I don't like, I think. My friend Gareth saw him working in a cinema once. Enjoy it while it lasts chum, because you'll be back on the salty popcorn soon.
20	Ritzy Bryan The Joy Formidable	Ritzy Bryan. That is a great name. For a porn star from 1973. Presumably that's the whole point. Jokes on you, grandad. Arse off.
21	Jay-Z	Blank faced gold dust sprinkler with the doleful air of a sad cow who's lost a calf to the veal crate. I enjoyed the video pre-preformance at Glastonbury about 100 years ago. But the rest of his show was utterly forgettable shouty beatzz. Admittedly, he probably is quite cool and will probably be remembered. By people other than me.
22	Jack Steadman Bombay Bicycle Club	Number 39 with a pashwari naan and pilau rice, thanks.
23	Dee Dee Dum Dum Girls	Dumb, dumb girl.
24	Marina Diamandis Marina & The Diamonds	Diamond in the rough? Or just an overpriced lump of carbon allotrope.
25	Jonathan Everything	Jonattan Yeah?
26	Giggs	Lovely to see Premier league stalwart getting the recognition he so richly deserves. Take a bow Ryan.
27	Jenny Lee Lindberg War Paint	Richly deserves to be scalped.
28	Jamie Reynolds Klaxons	Ambient backing tracks produced by pebble-eyed drones. Best listened to when stuck in a lift in Blade Runner.
29	Skream	I will. Until I'm sick.
30	Nicky Wire Manic Street Preachers	A pouting, preening, bouncing forty-something who still wears make-up. Grow up you raging arsehole.
31	Akiko Matsuura The Big Pink/Comanechi	Should learn to stick to one band. Despite playing in two bands - which is already too many for my two ears - she/he/it also has a side project called Sperm Javelin. Literally hilarious.
32	Dan Devine Flats	Do we think this is a clever play on 'divine'? Probably it is. Gosh these youngsters are wise-cracking belly shakers, aren't they? I'm guessing Dan is as divine as adult shingles.
33	Willow Smith	Is that the dwarf out of that film? Nope, it's a nine-year old Will Smith Scientology clone child. Utterly indistinguishable with her brother, Jaden Smith, who I presumed was also a girl.
34	MNDR	LOL. ROFL. etc. Or is this a text-speak reference to classic seventies cop shop Minder starring Dennis Waterman?
35	Win Butler Arcade Fire	Yes, I like these guys. But that's only because I get all my CDs at Tesco.
36	Gerard Way My Chemical Romance	Creepy MOR weirdness, best played at loud volume by tweens weeping underneath a tatty Postman Pat duvet as they pretend to pierce their own ear with a knitting needle and smoke amateurish roll-ups.
37	Alex Heweet Egyptian Hip Hop	Is this a genre? Is this a band? Is it a collective, like the Sugarhill Gang or Sly and the Family Stone? Or is it a set of gits sitting in a flat in Edinburgh wearing Palestinian neckerchiefs.
38	Lee Spielman Trash Talk	According to saintly Wikipedia, their genre is 'powerviolence'. Exactly what they deserve, every waking minute.
39	Orlando Weeks The Maccabees	I think I've heard of these bods. Possibly on an advert for Orange or mouthwash or a car. That is well cool.
40	Ariel Pink	Stay under the sea, Ariel. Until you're dead and bloated.
41	Ethan Kath Crystal Castles	Appalling dying bleeps and wailing farts from an Amiga 500 going through a mangle whilst running Civilization (the original version).
42	Nicki Minaj	Some sort of foul-mouthed underground rap anger merchant. A little too rich for my sensitive mind.
43	Honor Titus Cerebal Ballzy	I've got it. It's like cerebral palsy, isn't it. That really is bloody hilarious.
44	Andrew VanWyngarden MGMT	Probably genuinely quite good. I couldn't get near their stage at Glastonbury once, so surrounded was it by the dreadful youth population of Hampshire. Thus I am in no position to judge.
45	Jack Donoghue Salem	So cool, they wouldn't even burn at the stake. They'd just melt, a bit.
46	Dave Sitek TV On The Radio	There's something in the back of my head which makes me think that I've heard of these chaps. Although it may just be my tumour playing up again.
47	Alexis Sleigh Bells	Very festive. I feel almost cheerful.....it has now passed.
48	Plan B	And his sister...
49	Katy B	Plan B's sister. A family singularly lacking in talent, which they make up for in ineffable, unquantifiable and utterly wanky "cool".
50	Lady Gaga	Yes. But no. Selling lots of records is SO uncool. Everyone else on the list wouldn't possibly want to do that. They're only in it to get their message across, yeah? About injustice and stuff.
51	Josh Homme	Nope
52	Tim Harrington Les Savy Fav	Nope
53	LoneLady	Nope
54	Julian Casablancas	Nope
55	Rose Elinor Dougall	Nope
56	Gucci Mane	Nope (bad run of form here)
57	Daniel Blumberg Yuck	Yuck. The Alanis Morissette-style irony of that name.
58	Jack White	Once a little bit interesting, now a turgid cock rock 15 minute behind-the-head guitar solo turd basket.
59	Cee-Lo Green	Yes. I like you. You do not need to die.
60	Eva Spence Rolo Tomassi	Named after a character in LA Confidential. How very clever. Fun fact: their second album, Cosmology, debuted at 183 in the charts. Thanks for turning up.
61	Ryan Olson Gayngs	Massive crew of tousle-headed berks and gits with big round faces. Although I do quite like some of their ambient shoegazing - because it sounds like an outake from a session by Ride, circa 1992.
62	Glasser	I would love to glass you.
63	Ernest Greene Washed Out	Ernest will, more than likely, soon be living out his washed up life in a studio flat surrounded by yellowing copies of the NME Cool List.
64	Tom Hudson Pulled Apart By Horses	Three minutes in Tom's company, and you're really wishing you did have a shire horse attached to each limb.
65	Elizabeth Sankey Summer Camp	"This one time..." [repeat hilariously ad infinitum].
66	Cher Lloyd	Spotty knifecrimer and X-Factor flake. X-Factor is just, like, so awful it's brilliant, yeah lol. I only watch it ironically whilst at my parents' house in Kensington.
67	Avi Zahner-Isenberg Avi Buffalo	Never heard of you - you'll no doubt be gutted to hear. Although I think I might like them, all the same. Their genre is 'twee-pop'. I like twee pop. I think.
68	Nathan Williams Wavves	Nathan is unable to spell Waves. Although - in a hilarious twist - their first ambum was titled Wavves. And their second - prepare to hold onto your sides - Wavvves. Sadly for posterity, they will never get to make Wavvvvvvves.
69	Matt Bellamy Muse	Tedious stadium pseudo prog rock arse-ache noise.
70	Soulja Boy	Disgusting gangsta who's dog-rough voice is only matched by the eye-stabbingly terribleness of his music. Wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice thanks to a shambling jumpy dance and an inability to spell. See also: Cher Lloyd.
71	Bradford Cox Deerhunter	I wouldn't let this one go. Bang, right between the eyes. Your head and indie antlers mounted on my wall.
72	James Blake	Another rogue choice. The handsome and bald tennis player just sneaks onto the list.
73	Caitlin	Caitlin who? Moran?
74	Lewis Bowman Chapel Club	Described by the Guardian as "big rock meets perversion". Once upon a time, I would have bought anything the Graudniad described as even slightly good. However, they were always crap.
75	Rivers Cuomo Weezer	Did you escape from the Cool List 1994? Please take your millions and sod off.

I may well be wrong about a few, some or indeed all of these people. Please tell me.

I am infuriating

2010-10-26T14:48:00.003+01:00

I know, because Mrs Webby just told me so in graphic detail. Just because I didn't quite do what I was told entirely to her impossibly high standards. And to think - I tried so very hard.

This is the full range of facial expressions I can cause.

Bottom of the morning to you

2010-10-24T17:30:00.005+01:00

I missed X-Factor on Saturday. Shocking - although I've not really engaged with it very much this year, yet. Instead I was at a very lovely wedding in central London (although drank myself out of contention far too early and ended up having to be taken home far earlier than I had planned). The upshot - I missed the 'guilty pleasure' themed episode.

But - thank the lord - I managed to catch up on a bit of it this morning on ITV2. Hoorah. In my hungover stupor, it was all I could manage. It was either that, or become even more transfixed by the shopping channel who had the absolute brass balls to be charging £129 for something called the Ubisurfer - a cheap piece of computerised plastic crap for browsing the Internet on the move. Doesn't everyone - everyone who matters that is - have an iPhone nowadays? Still, the 20 minutes of inane chat the two presenters managed was extremely impressive - even if they did spend as much time talking about what it couldn't do - print, Skype and so on - as they did on extolling the virtues of its operating system (Windows 3.1, I think), its tiny screen and its trackpad - as if it were a veritable box of mystical delights and that people could still be burnt at the stake for producing crappy homespun word documents.

That's an aside. Last night, guilty pleasures. A couple of points:

Firstly, even though I don't particularly like them - and especially hate Robert Plant now that he's lapsed into endlessly lame bluegrass soft jazz wankathons - I'm not really sure people should be that guilty about liking Led Zeppelin. Weren't they actually quite good and important? And isn't Whole Lotta Love actually a genuinely great, classic, hard riffing song of genius? And so not really something you should be too guilty about enjoying?

Obviously not, says Simon and Cheryl and the other national arbiters of all musical taste. It's an ear abortion. And you're probably a guilty paedo for listening to Pet Sounds and Abbey Road and Songs In The Key of Life and Screamadelica.

And second, I had absolutely no idea that 80's New Wave synth-laded hit Shout was from the pen of James "look at me, I'm fat - hilarious, innit LOL" Corden. There was me thinking that it was Tears for Fears (who did quite a lot of excellent other songs - like this one). But no, it was actually James Corden, you berk. James Corden wrote that song. This summer, yeah. For the World Cup, you nonce. YEAH.

If the Daily Mail says it was the World's Favourite Everyman™, who am I to disagree?

Of course, this kind of pathetic - almost wilfully bad - error actually says a lot about the flighty ephemeral nature of reductive contemporary R'n'B shitpop. Why bother with music from a few years ago, because there'll be another pop-tart along in a bit with a whole new batch of auto-tuned four minute ringtones-with-a-key-change. Binman one week, X-Factor winner the next, then back to sweeping the streets the week after. We love them on the way up, their sob stories and their desperation to constantly "be themselves" and promises to make a massive effort on next week's live show. But then - once we've toyed with them like particularly mean cats with mortally injured mice, equally enjoyable is watching them die a death. Take pleasantly-voiced Geordie midget Joe McElderry. What with his single - which isn't even that bad - tumbling (having only climbed to the puny heights of number 6), I'd wager Cowell will soon regret the money spent getting his teeth fixed up nicely and stage-managing his coming out - because surely he'll be soon dropped. Quietly, relatively gently - but from an enormous height - straight into West End theatrical horrors or a cruise ship.

Personally, I think - and I want to believe - it's all part of James Corden's plan for world domination. He's written (well, co-written with someone who is genuinely funny) an enormously popular - and enormously over-rated - sitcom. And then he did a live TFI Friday gone shit World Cup blokeathon, the TV equivalent of drinking eight pints of super strength continental lager and mainlining testosterone naked whilst being smashed over the head with an enormous inflatable cock and balls on a stag weekend in north Wales. In short, the ideal showcase for his vapid, vacuum-sealed personality. And now he takes the credit* for a classic '80's song from a band who - despite selling 22 million albums - are expunged from history**. James Corden and his Stalinesque purges. James Corden - he's actually worse than the Khmer Rouge. Because on the X-Factor, it's always Year Zero.

He thwarts me at every turn. He's my arch-nemesis - it's just that he doesn't know it. My Moriarty, Bowser and Rastapopoulos wrapped up in one enormous package. He may well have eaten them all, just to take on their strength. James Corden - he's our own Idi Amin.

* I appreciate, of course, that it's not Mr Corden's fault that he's been erroneously credited for Shout. It's just that I hate him.

** It may also be the case that I am making a fuss over nothing, because I was half asleep when the show was on and I missed Cher's performance anyway. But I don't care either way. I enjoy fussing.

The demon barber

2010-10-21T21:04:00.006+01:00

Back in the day when I was a thrusting young City lawyer, earning oodles of cash whilst working oodles of hours, I used to spend an absurd amount of money on getting my hair cut - which is an activity I love. I know it was a lot of money because Mrs Webby - forthright as ever on such matters - told me it was. I'm too embarrassed to divulge exactly how much I spent every six weeks on scissor-work, but suffice it to say that at standard Balham rates it would have done me for several months.

But still I loved the whole thing. The cups of tea out of fashionably chintzy teacups with saucers. The unrecognisable - and FREE - bottled continental lagers. The slumbering slobbering pedigree mutts lying on the sofas reserved for paying customers (revolting bulldogs, I think). The sexy honeytrap girls on reception who would - brilliantly - ignore me until I had to awkwardly mumble to them. The pretty mute boys who washed my lank greasy locks and massaged my misshapen bonce without a hint of complaint. The unquestioning trimming of my increasingly-unruly Dennis Healy-esque eyebrows. I used to go - slipping out of the hated office in the early afternoon - and drink a few beers with the charming Drew at Taylor Taylor on Commercial Street, who would tell me - in the most lurid of terms - of the proclivities of his clients, his flatmate, his boyfriend and of the prostitutes who gathered in the alleyway opposite. According to Drew, they would crap into boxes, which would then be picked up in smart cars by smart City gents. So presumably not that smart. I listened, enraptured, as he told me of clubs where men PISSED ON EACH OTHER. I was an urban adventurer. Louis Theroux of the City, discovering lost tribes of sexual behaviour (which may well be utterly mainstream and vanilla to anyone but me) whilst having an otherwise mundane bit of housekeeping done to my head.

And then suddenly (well, not that suddenly) - sans job and any prospect thereof - I was loath to spend all that money. I had a valedictory moment with Drew, packed up my knapsack and was set loose, blinking in the glinting daylight. Free from the idiocy of being a lawyer - which I hated. But also from the totally insanely pricy haircuts I had enjoyed so much.

But now I was in a quandry. Haircutting is a habit, like internet banking. Or Apple computers. Or meow meow. Where to for my next fix?

I pimped myself out for a long time. At one stage, Mrs Webby's mother was cutting my hair. Which was obviously brilliant - and brilliantly free. But I couldn't really be my usual mute grumpy self. Plus there was occasionally wine involved all round, which left me fearing - only a bit - for the future of my luxuriant ear flesh. Seriously Linda - it was great. Thanks. See you next weekend. I'm excited.

And then there were the trims enjoyed at various terrible barbers in and around Balham and its environs - usually at salons with names ending in 'z'. Cutz. Gentz. Snipz. Clutz. And so on. All the same - £14.50 in a sawdust and spit abattoir where you couldn't make an appointment and the entire thing was over in 12 minutes. Not just a different person cutting your hair every time, but entirely new staff throughout, too.

And finally, after my forty days in the wilderness, a breakthrough. For a couple of years the bar at the end of Old Devonshire Road - Snug, I think it was called - had been derelict. Or at least seemed so - it was certainly always empty. Which I suppose tells its own tale.

And then the decorators moved in. It's been given a lick of paint and re-opened as a posh barbers. At Witches Hut - the third of a chain with branches in Fulham and Clapham - you get pampered for your pounds. And there's a bar. There are loads of underemployed staff milling around. They make appointments. They take your coat. Sounds simple, but they don't do it elsewhere in the royal borough of B'larm.

But how else to tell that this is a place of refinement?

Staff with a-symmetrical haircuts wielding the scissors? CHECK
Free beer? CHECK. Mine's a draught Peroni, thanks.
Extensive hair-washing, including scalp manipulation, in a chair raised and lowered by remote control, with back-massaging as standard? CHECK
Trendy music played at a volume just above that which allows free conversation? CHECK
A variety of sweet smelling unguents and potions rubbed into my head? CHECK
More of same unguents and potions liberally displayed throughout the store - sample names: 'Skrewed', 'Retexxtur' or 'Vita Tress'? CHECK
Handsome exotic barber - sample background: Brazilian - with a special trolley containing thousands of scissors and clippers? CHECK
Expensive enough to make you slightly nervous yet just about willing to pay without complaint?

CHECK. CHECK. CHECK.

What a find. I intend to patronise it until the end of time - or at least until my hair falls out completely. Make hay while the sun shines.

So...what have you done today?

2010-10-20T19:35:00.001+01:00

To make you feel proud?

Well, possibly taken your juvenile son out of school for a couple of days so that he can attend a ~~family wedding~~ football match in Milan surrounded by drunken bald men. Well if that's not an education, I don't know what is. WAHEY.

Splendid. Of course I have no doubt father and son will be soaking up some culture on their sojourn. After the game, it's all down La Scala following a light supper of the local Lombard cuisine. Or perhaps they'll be indulging in a little high-fashion shopping - nice to own something which isn't made of polyester.

He may not be able to read - but at least he'll have watched Spurs in Europe. He'll probably write it in his memoirs, signed with an X.

Crumbling ruin in the mud

2010-10-17T12:17:00.002+01:00

In the twelfth century, the average person's universe stretched to their end of village and the next meal. There weren't many upwardly mobile thrusting Guardian-reading types holidaying in Tuscany and eating organic guacamole.

So it's odd that in Channel 4's new blockbusting - i.e. absurd and overblown - Pillars of the Earth, all the key peasants are noble savages - humane, intelligent and highly literate. And it's the educated upper classes who are venal and stupid, obviously. That'll play well.

Our hero is Rufus Sewell. Who clearly just stepped off a plane from LA to dial in his performance - because he has the kind of tan which can only be gained from a season of cavorting in the Hollywood hills. And it's winter in Dunghill-on-Sea, so it's not like he's looking ruddy from working outdoors. At least Donald Sutherland's had the decency to stay indoors for a few weeks before popping up for his cameo.

Strangely, West Country boy Tom Builder - for that is his name (he's a master builder, which is impressive for a deadbeat peasant who can't even come up with an original surname) - is also highly educated (look at him drawing those flying butresses and stone vaults). Although so dirt poor that he can't feed his family. What a deadbeat dad (and attempted baby killer). But then his wraggle-taggle family - comprising a Scottish wife, a Welsh idiot overgrown son and a toothy Roedean and RADA daughter (amazing how they all met)- are useless anyway. It's much better when he starts rodgering the soothsaying frog-potion quaffing sexy former nun with flowers in her hair. It's Haight-Ashbury, lifted to 1120, replete with low-budget CGI - all the computer-generated background buildings are lifted directly from a cut scene in Civilization III. Monty Python were so much better in 1975.

The setting is painfully twee. It's like Maid Marian - the BBC kid's show - mixed with one of those cheapo BBC Shakespeare adaptations from the 1980s - prithee, folderol etc. Period features abound - mud, bastard brothers, bleeding the sick, wise women and dung for dinner. And of course Sumer is icumen in - the Poker Face of its day.

People in this era lived hunched lives, fearing that the next day the sky might fall in and they'd spend an eternity of damnation. There are hints at this - "medicine is sin" is a great line delivered with a stony face as a child prepares to die. But the other Alpha Course-esque religious bits - not featuring any dread and awe and supplication - were unbelievable. Still, no other period cliche stones were allowed to be unturned. So it was all monks, torture, shrieking, witches. Pox. But no grotesquely deformed freaks - sadly. Specious semi-historical tat is everywhere. But because it's got a shiny 'this is serious history' polish, you could watch it and think that you're actually learning something about the Anarchy - all that Stephen and Matilda stuff I've long forgotten - whilst you get a bit of cheap hey nonny rumpy pumpy entertainment. This is the future for historical drama - see also Rome and The Tudors. I don't blame the makers; this is a fundamentally pretty tedious period of history when - for literally centuries - precious little happened.

That Pillars of the Earth cast in full

But apart from the problematic revisionist historiography, the acting is pretty dreadful. Well, to be honest most of the cast haven't bothered - either that or they've mistaken flaring their nostrils and opening their eyes REALLY WIDE for acting. But - talent aside - they're hamstrung by the dreadfulness of the script. Sure, this is a thousand page novel - which was always going to be hard to compress into a few hours. But it's clearly the kind of book commonly available at supermarkets and petrol stations under the tag 'historical fiction'. And that - as you'll all know - is a by-word for shite. For two hours and ten minutes.

The premise - which was pretty hard to grasp - was something about building a cathedral. Tom Builder the Builder reckoned that with thirty masons, he could knock up his new cathedral in fifteen years. They went up fast, those pre-fab twelfth century solid stone eminences. Hmmm. In the same era, Durham cathedral took about forty - and I'd say they probably had a lot more than thirty unwashed workers on the job. There were some good moments, although perhaps not those which Exec Producer Ridley Scott would have picked out. Lovejoy is quite amusingly sinister (his stock part) in his role as Morticia Adamms played by an old leather satchel. He's a baddie - you can tell by the vehemence with which he gives himself a sound thrashing. The sexy nun witch pissing scene was fun. And it was odd that although one chap had his tongue cut out, he still managed to do a good deal of shouting as he was burnt at the stake. Maybe that's possible, I just don't know. And there were a couple of silly sexy bits - lazily thrown in for the late-night onanists. And some odd Oedipal stuff at the end.

A couple of specific complaints though. Firstly, it's obvious that being ginger is a marker for special and/or evil. Wide-eyed trout-pouting asexual ginger pixie Jack - who inexplicably sets a building on fire whilst cleverly failing to realise that he's locked into it - is quite clearly the main event in this thing. The entire plot trajectory can be measured according to his strawberry blondness. He's obviously the survivor from the ship right, because he's clever and strange and can draw on stones and doesn't talk. Thank god I now don't have to watch the remaining hundred hours of the series.

There's a more prosaic problem, too. And it's always the same whenever TV or film attempts something medieval. It's the teeth. They're always wrong. Presumably American audiences would be beyond horrifed if medieval teeth were actually, well, medieval. And by 'medieval', I mean non-existent. So it's shame that Al Swearengen - and everyone else - has such a lovely set of pearly-white gnashers - although they do show that his turn in Deadwood has been a nice little earner. Veneered and terrifyingly symetrical teeth are the portable weath of the movie class. True method actors would have their teeth knocked out for a juicy medieval part.

I am the resurrection

2010-10-13T23:12:00.104+01:00

I'm prefacing this by stating that - lest you forget my common humanity - even I was moved by the escape of the Chilean miners (although more titillated by the stories of their mistresses than is properly dignified).

Now read on.

The word miracle is tossed around a lot nowadays. Which is odd, because we're always told that miracles don't occur anymore - as if people strolling across the water or preparing enormous meals with the most meagre of ingredients used to happen all the time.

So it's no surprise that the escape of the Chilean miners has been called a miracle (© all newspapers). Partly because they all seem like charming affable chaps - but mainly so we get to feel good about ourselves. A day off from self-loathing and riding the tube to press Ctrl-Alt-Del twice.

It's also hugely patronising, obviously. The miners - good Roman Catholics to a man (although some only converted when 2,300 feet under) - describe getting out of their pit as a 'miracle'. So therefore we're happy to call it a 'miracle' too. Awfully well done, chaps. Super stoic effort. Especially good work on the queuing to be last out.

But when the miners themselves refer to a miracle, they're talking about something supernatural, something which surpasseth understanding. Amen. Whereas actually, obviously, prosaically and mundanely, it's thanks to the people from who provided the drill and NASA and the technical gimboids who have delivered these poor chaps from an otherwise terrible fate 600 metres under the desert. We all know this. And, fair enough, perhaps the endless march of technology is itself if not miraculous, the certainly awe-inspiring. There weren't many miracles in an age when we didn't have geothermal imaging or tiny probes to shove down holes. Ah ha, say the dribblers, that's god, too. He just gives men of science a quick tap on the back and off they go to develop special drills and nuclear fission and come up with a unified theory of everything. But then where was god at Aberfan? Or Courrières? Or at any of these?

It's easy for the religious to deal with tragedy and triumph if you don't talk about cogs and gears and pulleys. It was a test of faith. Forty days in (or at least under) the desert, a clash of diametrically-opposed good and evil. And if you can't see god's unseen and mysteriously-moving hand in this whole story, where can you? Well, really it's just solid granite versus that pesky bit of the ceiling that fell down to seal them into what 100 years ago would have been their tomb.

If you do want a miracle, then take a look at Miguel Juan Sebastián Piñera Echenique. He's a Latin American Berlusconi, at once billionaire head of state, 100% owner of the country's third most-watched national TV station and part-owner of Colo-Colo (which will be known to listeners of the Guardian football podcast as the country's biggest football club). Bread and circuses.

From my extensive Wikipedia research, it looks like he's got a slight whiff of insider dealing about him, too. but no matter. He is now untouchable (although they said the same about Churchill in 1945).

You just can't judge it

2010-10-12T23:55:00.002+01:00

I stare at this poster balefully every morning at Balham tube through red dead unredeemed morning eyes, the organic skinny cappucino grasped in my non-satchel hand painfully cutting through the mist of another night of bad-backed restlessness and making me desperate for a crap half way to Kennington.

I know I stare at it every single day, because I always stand to catch the same tube at the same time on the same two square feet of platform every day. I see the same people - the git with the selection of try-hard trilbys; the amusingly short bald man with the double-shouldered rucksack who - as I once noted in Waitrose - is actually unhappily married with kids. There are others. We all see the same people every morning, terrible half-breed colleagues who you're trapped with and have to put up with their onion breath and deafening silence for a lifetime. Or maybe just the 20 minutes of uncomfortable fart repression until I get to the dirty fuss of central London.

So anyway, I see this poster every day. It's been up for ages now. By ages, I mean a time period which may be a week, may be a month. It may actually be a year. Every tube journey is essentially the same time-funnelling nightmare, so it may well have been there all my life.

The important thing to note is that I've realised that we're being fed a lie.

The strapline for Tara Palmer-Tomkinsons's debut novel, Inheritance, reads:

A story even more fabulous than her own

IT'S A LIE. THE ADVERTISERS ARE LYING TO US.

Because surely her life isn't glamorous at all.

Everyone knows who Tara Palmer-Tomkinson is. She's that stick insect off the tele. Who was once famous for being an IT girl, then was infamous for being a drug fiend, noted in chattering circles for appearing on Frank Skinner's not-so-fondly-remembered chat show so horribly out of her tree that she was instantly dragged, comatose, to heavy rehab. A raft of terrible celebrity shows followed. God knows what sort of life she leads nowadays.

So far, does that really sound in any way glamorous? Does that sound like the sort of life you'd really want to lead? Humiliated on a tawdry ITV show by a midlander way past his sell by date. Unlucky in love, too - single at 38, with the Daily Mail gleefully reminding her of it every day. Known, to some, for her piano playing (which is reportedly excellent, like Idi Amin's knitting). But largely unwelcome on TV. Her strange angular face, looking like it's been constructed from Meccano and then pasted over with a thin veneer of papier mache.

It seems that some people do consider her an inspiration, all the same. Although surely these are only desperate PR people who've been dumped with what is - no doubt - an utterly dreadful slice of sub Jilly Cooper droning and wheezing about small dogs, champagne and planes to Monaco - i.e. the sort of life TPT used to live before she pounded her fortune up her nose and pimped herself out all over town for declining rewards. I've not read it, by the way, I wouldn't want you to get that impression.

But I have looked the book up on the internet. The précis is to follow - make sure you keep reading (if you've got this far, you might as well work your ugly way to the unhappy end). Note well, reader, that there is just the tiniest suggestion that Inheritance is...strewth...autobiographical. It worked, of course, for Katie Price - one of Britain's best-selling authors. So why shouldn't it work for a raddled horse-faced old maid? Well, not sure about horse faced. Knackered old nag-faced is probably a little more accurate.

Notorious party-loving ‘It Girl’ Lyric Charlton has it all – the lineage, the looks and the lifestyle. A moneyed upbringing at the heart of one of the upper class’s most well-connected families, a finishing school education and an address book bursting with the world’s most powerful and high-profile people has crowned her the glamorous poster girl for the aristocratic glitterati.

But when her doomed relationship with suave boy-about-town Ralph Conway means she takes the good times too far, she is packed off to rehab by her worried parents, and the public shame and private humiliation that follow means Lyric’s only option seems to be to retreat into sober obscurity.

But what no one can predict is the dramatic chain of events her exile sets in motion. For Lyric’s treatment is the start of much more than a life as an ex-addict. It’s the catalyst that exposes a complex web of deceit and betrayal – and leads Lyric on an increasingly dangerous quest to find the final missing piece of the jigsaw of her life…

Now wherever did she get the inspiration for the first half? The jury must remain out on whether her life now is basically that of a female James Bond

But surely we'll all be rushing out for a copy? Me first. Right after I've finished reading all the posters on the tube.

Argumentum ad hominem

2010-10-11T15:49:00.005+01:00

I quite like Andrew Marr, I think. I'm not sure, because on Sunday morning when he's on TV, I'm generally sleeping off a hangover. So I don't really care about his political analysis and his stentorian semi-Scotch tones. It's all a bit much first thing when I could be pretending to eat a fry up (curse you, Weightwatchers).

So mainly, I like his ears - which are sort of like mine (basically, an enormous symbol of tremendous virility and power).

The problem is, Andrew Marr doesn't like me. And a million billion other people like me. So many people, in fact, that he is (as of 3pm on Monday 11th October) trending on Twitter. And how? Well, he's spoken at the Cheltenham Literary Festival (quite my favourite of all the literary festivals I've never heard of) and complained voiciferously about bloggers.

And he's in good voice:

"A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people. OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk".

He should know, because he writes books about journalism and stuff. Serious things. Long tomes which have sat, collecting dust and dead flies, on shelves in my very own (non-basement) flat. I buy them second-hand, so they look thumbed. Andrew has no time for pointless self-indulgent shrieking about crap TV shows and the taxi drivers in New York.

Well, I'm not sure I fit into his description. Because - as Marr says - bloggers are spotty and boring and live in basements with their mothers. And are relentlessly single and quite possibly psychotic and certainly not as high-functioning as they think they are and - it's more than likely - spend a good chunk of every day dancing naked in their own faeces whilst wanking. The sort of people who paint lead miniatures. Or who don't just read science fiction, but go on to write their own versions of it. And end up penning harrowing sex scenes based on tales of unrequited love in The West Wing (do not read this, especially the paragraph beginning "he couldn't stop himself" and ending "sound like war"). There's an entire blog in that sort of stuff.

It may well be the case that I have occasionally updated this terrible blog having had a skinful. And I might have a spot on my arse. But I just like writing *stuff*, entirely for its own sake; just random shite which pops into my head. I do the whole writing thing professionally nowadays - so I'm not just a "citizen journalist" (barf), but that's on far more tedious topics than: (a) what's annoyed me; or (b) what I've just watched on TV. My little blog is my puny outlet for all the unpretentious bile and vitriol I feel like spewing. People (a tiny number thereof) read it, and - I'm told - sometimes enjoy it (although most seem to get much more of a kick out of telling me how crap it is).

But here's the serious rub. Citizen journalism may well be shit. And plenty of bloggers may well be spoddy sociopaths. But his argument - that bloggers are all ugly drunken nutters - is piss-poor for a (not just self-styled) serious and influential journalist. Doesn't resorting to angry personal abuse completely undermine his argument? Obviously I'm just a pathetic, mewling and drink-addled blogger so shouldn't be listened to. But for equally-immature starters, it's pretty rich (and brave) of Andrew Marr to attack others on the basis of their looks. If I'm "cauliflower-nosed" (whatever that might be), how would he dispassionately describe himself? I'm going for Plug from the Bash Street Kids inter-bred with an African elephant. There you go Marr, right back in your funny ad hominem face. So just what else do I know?

Well, I do know that there aren't many jobs in 'real' journalism anymore, not even for serious people. Nicholas Witchell has to do the fucking royals nowadays and - in my youth - he was the face of the BBC.

And although Andrew's right that blogging relies on having an axe - generally a bonkers or at least mildly unhinged axe - to grind. And that 99.9% of everything you read is shite (including all of this), that doesn't hide the fear behind his googly eyes. As Charlie Brooker has pointed out, the BBC are constantly pleading for input from readers and followers and tweeters and other assorted bellends - and passing it off as insight. Or what they call 'news'. So where does Andy Marr fit into the terrifing new world of puny talking heads and mobile phones with video cameras? Once they've found another piece of sofa totty, you're straight off to the elephant dying grounds. Presenting links on an unloved and unwatched cable chanel, chum. That's the future. If you're lucky.

So can't we both just co-exist, Andrew? You can have your fat BBC contract, and I'll keep on sitting in my pants on my sofa. Undermining you, one reader at a time.

As if it's another country

2010-10-06T14:20:00.004+01:00

And it's been ages since I last wrote anything here. I've been reliably informed that bloggers who get book deals update their carefully-worded and interestingly-themed blogs constantly. Three times a week, minimum. But who has time for that, what with work and sleep and DVDs?

As usual, my life is so shallow and wanting for interest that I simply cannot muster the enthusiasm to hammer away on my keyboard. If I had bought that iPad in New York last week, I probably would be musing away all the time, pondering imponderables and ruminating. There simply wouldn't be enough blue sky for me to think about as I carried round my shiny toy like the Turin shroud made of electronics, blogging all the while.

But then the iPad isn't really anything, just a lovely flat sheet of nothing. It's the worst laptop in the world, lacking useful functionality at every corner of its sleek shape. Instead, it's an enormous stretch of iPhone-shaped flypaper, with idiots with haircuts and skinny jeans clingingly to every sticky surface and weeping with joy as they ping tense emails to each other about naked gallery openings and Guatemalan coffee grinding parties. I still want one, natch.

So I was in New York, anyway. Did you spot that. A treat, a fine city. Things have changed since my last visit. For starters, the skyline was previously somewhat more replete with a pair of towers. And here's some more cutting social commentary: a lot of it ("it" being the entire world) is the same. Globalisation, innit. So in NYC (as I cuntishly never call it), you can still go to Zara and touch the clothes for thin people. There is still a Starbucks on every block. There are some fine bridges and terrible public art and panhandlers and "psychic mediums" everywhere. There's a big park when tourists go to get raped. People pick up their dog shit. So far, so London.

Some things are different, obviously. Top-shelf porn mags at the airport are labelled "adult sophisticates". This nomenclature struck me as odd, as it's obviously a description far removed from the average purchaser, who is obviously unsophisticated enough to: (a) be entirely unaware of the free availabillty of smut on the internet; and (b) not know that wanking on a plane is unlikely to get you upgraded.

There's terrible sport on TV (hunting with a bow and arrow and dragcar racing on ESPN). The latter, astonishingly, is a straight race between two batmobiles going at 260 mph. It sounds exciting - to car people at least. But they only race for three seconds. It's a reaction test, like those battery operated plastic toys you stick your finger in at Christmas. The hunting's a bit better - rednecks trolling around in the wilderness living out a fantasy of military service (which they were obviously too fat and wheezy to actually be able to do) whilst they hunt deer to strap to their trucks and to decorate their log cabins. But then it cut to a panel of men talking about bait for bass, and I had a seizure.

There's more, too. The yellow taxi drivers with the geographical range of a medieval serf. The slavish self-identification of everyone as Italian/Irish/Aleutian/Cherokee. Halloween. Shop assistants still come up to you and demand to provide their pushy assistance. Strange smelly children in black suits ask if you're Jewish whilst proffering a stick and a lemon. THE SLAVISH TIPPING FOR EVERYTHING. Most people have at least the beginnings of an additional and artery-hardening layer of flab above the belt line (AKA, the nipples).

Because - of course - the food is still fattening. No-one seems to eat any vegetables, other than potatoes in myriad forms. I'm hardly Mr Salad, but it's nice to have something on my plate which isn't beige. Example: if I order eggs benedict - as I almost certainly will of a Sunday - I expect two (english, dammit) muffins, two poached eggs, two lovely pieces of ham (possibly a honey roast, thanks) and a buttery, lemony hollandaise. I don't want bacon, yankee doodle. And I don't need an enormous side order of potatoes. Obviously, it turned out that to some extent I did want them, because I ate every scrap - in complete violation of my Weightwatchers dieting (as if such (another) violation was necessary after the long weekend of degustation). More of that, much much more. Some other time. Another killer difference - the endless advertising of heartburn medication.

Basically, going on holiday is like going to a different country. Not a lot, but just enough to make you want to come back and ride the tube.

Don't tell him your name, Pike.

2010-09-19T23:33:00.002+01:00

ITV is bloated corpse of a station. Or a massive spot, always close to bursting and foul the air with pus and decomposition gases. Obviously, they stink out the idiot box every weekend with the X-Factor. But sometimes they try to rise above bread and circuses/public executions and do something a little more worthy. And Sunday night is a fine time to watch something meaty. Or at least as fleshy as ITV will allow, just a bit of cheap offal - an earlobe, perhaps. Or a testicle. As for subject matter, war's always a winner, and if you throw in a bit of human interest - by that I mean sex and violence - then all the better.

So, to Joe Maddison's War, a two hour of WWII, whippets and flat caps. A two hour Hovis advert.

Sergeant Lewis plays a rough and tumble working class Geordie, all creased face and sad eyes. He's dog-earedness personified, fraying gently. He's in his natural habitat here, the north east. As is Robson Greene - last seen fishing in his speedos on a channel even more obscure than ITV4 - back in his element in uniform. All that's missing is his strange moon-faced blonde partner and it would be Soldier Soldier does the '40's.

All the usual stuff abounds. Our hero is ex-Durham Light Infantry. Fought at the Somme - which is lazy shorthand for the whole of WWI (every single dramatised British soldier was at the Somme. It's taken on a sort of glamour because so many people died, which is an odd sort of fame). He's a ship-builder (so doesn't have to go to war), obviously. It's the only possible occupation for a north-eastern hero, and there's even a budget CGI shipyard at the end of his road. But here's the risk, setting a show like this in a location which has such a strongly marked accent (or range thereof). The result is just too obvious - shocking accents abound. Geeeteshead. Haway theyre bonny lad. Awa and have a gayme of doms man pet. When we were awl on the dooole. Cheers kidda. Etc etc.

The whole shebang is filmed in one of those replica villages, run by bad-breathed functionaries who would prefer it if it actually was 1933. In Germany. It's all very nice, like a petrified forest. And petrified is exactly the word - as in solid. And boring.

We start with a wedding (and end with one too). And moves swiftly to a wife running off with a Naval officer - despite being a catholic in 1939. Hmmm. Still, it's an easy device to show a cuckolded man doing all those tasks previously done by his wife. Like opening tins of beans or using the mangle. LOL! (as idiots might say). His daughter's a real brick though, teaching him how to wash up, how to make a shopping list. As if he was catatonic in an old-folks home. But of course - along with the Home Army and his new girlfriend - the war is the making of him, and he has the best time of his life.

I feel bad slating this, because it wasn't really that bad. But there's no fun in that. It was just a bit pointless, like that shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. Curiously British too - about as far from Band of Brothers as you can imagine. Everything was in faces - these are the pick of British acting firmament, after all. Derek Jacobi and Lewis and Melanie Hill.

So just a bit of a damp squib. Too obvious throughout - the officers are useless conniving shits, and obviously effete and useless. Being middle class (or a southener) in a worthy northern drama is like being English in a Hollywood film. EVIL. There's an inate distrust of anyone who doesn't work in a factory - because working class people are lovely and charming and loyal and the backbone of England. Bluddy middle-claarse fairies. Gan to uni-vaarsity. Why do ye want morrre edukaaaation? Folk like us don't gan to uni-vaarsity.

And I just don't believe that in the fourties people actually talked about emotions and being frightened and love. Or maybe I'm wrong - and these people were actually just like us, with wooden Xboxes and brass band crunk.

And I noted something weird about tea making on TV (there was lots in this, obviously). There's never any steam.

The Passion of Central London

2010-09-18T17:57:00.003+01:00

Just a ten second post. I've spent the day cycling around London on a torrid - although ultimately successful - shopping expedition. Forgetting, of course, that the centre of town has been locked down today for the pope. And other assorted tin-whistling and drum-banging whackos.

Fortunately, there were a bunch of more sane people walking the streets - and I watched the protest march for a bit (which stretched a long way through Picadilly, down Haymarket and to Trafalgar Square, where I got bored and buggered off on my Boris Bike). Some tragic professional protestor types with the 'fuck off Nazi' kinda thing, but some excellent outfits made of condoms and a variety of splendid placards.

Although here's the absolute highlight:

Here's the original source material - for you poor sheltered people who don't immediately get it.

Who says you can't beat a bit of entrenched religious madness with humour?

I like the Pope

2010-09-15T10:46:00.008+01:00

Because he has no shame. Well, not much. Aside from the taxpayer-funded 'state' visiting or the manning of a AA battery and being press-ganged into the Hitler Youth (see also: Catholic Church, anti-semitism, WWII, proud history) and enabling the odd bit of frottage behind the choir stalls whilst you look the other way and demand that the police keep their noses out (see also: Belgium, Ireland etc etc ad infinitum) and funding AIDS clinics whilst fundamentally missing the point about just why so many people are infected (see also: turkeys, voting, Christmas) and treating women or homosexuals as profoundly second class (see also: planks, eyes) or wearing absurd red shoes (see also: Dorothy, friends of) or stopping men getting married so that they can "devote their lives to the church" (see also: paedophilia) or decrying Britain's secular sinfulness because only a handful of old crones actually go to church (see also: cake stall, flower arranging, village gossip). Surely these people don't think he's actually god on earth.

Obviously you need to be raddled and bonkers to believe any utterly irrational religious mania, but Catholicism certainly has its moments of extra-special raddlement and bonkersness. Most impressive of which has to be the bit where you actually drink actual blood and eat actual flesh during the mumbo-jumbo raindance of mass. Isn't it odd that these christian types can't even agree amongst themselves on stuff like this? And that people have actually died - horribly - for the right to genuinely think that the wafer they washed down with a sip of wine was actually a bit of Jesus? Still, it sounds like an easy life. Be a complete bastard for all your three-score-and-ten, then just a quick bit of remedial repenting on the old death bed, and you're fine. No weeping and gnashing of teeth for the true Catholics - even if their only moment in the faith was a death rattle (see also: Brideshead Revisited).

Anyway. I'm immune to this horseshit. But it looks like a good chunk of central London will be on lock-down tomorrow, which will - to be honest - impact on me not one jot. Do your worst, rottweiler. Still, I'm hoping that attendances (at his various "gigs") are embarrassingly low. Which - if they were to truly reflect the depth of popish belief in the UK, they should be.

Here's an artist's impression of that state visit in full.

And here's an interesting fact about Cardinal John Newman, who will beatified (which means you'll be able to pray to him to mend your broken leg or re-grow your missing arm - good luck with that) by Benedict on Saturday. In 1863 - that's a mere thirty years after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, history fans - Newman singularly failed to damn the illegal and already-forgotten practice. Because the bible said it was fine. It's just a "condition of life". That's that cleared up then, thanks John.

Party a la maison

2010-09-13T17:32:00.000+01:00

Last week I attended - as an honoured invited guest - a rather lavish affair on the balcony of a huge City institution, with views over London stretching out for miles. It was lovely. I could see my old office, lights blazing out as the non-eager beavers scurried around completing utterly pointless and dreadfully tedious tasks. I miss that job. The oddness of the situation was compounded by the strange Adrian Chiles-a-like playing 80's power ballads on an electric piano on which the setting marked "lift music for the braindead" was firmly engaged.

Unfortunately, I was the sole representative of my publication. Everyone else was out celebrating the new year - it's just passed, if you're Jewish. Funnily enough, it's also Eid. This co-incidence may say a lot about similarities between Abrahamic religions.

I digress. At the bash were lots of people I'd not met before, but who - roguely - knew who I was. It's because they all knew my predecessor, who now works for - gasp - the Grauniad. So, first ice-breaking question - every time I met someone new - was "so you're the new [name removed to protect the innocent]". And yes, I am. That would have been a simple and entirely correct answer. But I found it impossible to give.

Not because it wasn't true, and not because I've been in my new job for nearly five months and don't really consider myself 'new' anymore. And certainly not because I'm embarrassed to be associated with my former colleague. Nope, it was because I'm painfully English and thus unable to give a straight answer in a conversation without an attempt at pathetic self-loathing humour.

So every time, I just introduced myself as a rubbish version of my old work buddy. It was a terrible combination of nervousness, extremely rapid drinking of free red wine and a nationalistic spark which has been bred into me. And which has subsequently mutated into a terrible nervous tic which means I simply cannot have a conversation with someone new to me without mentioning (a) how utterly rubbish I am or (b) the weather.

The worst thing about this wasn't my droopy gurn or shit eating grin whenever I said "yes, well of course she was much better than me". No, it was that I knew I was doing it, and also only I knew that I didn't really mean it. I was saying it to avoid being percieved as a big shot. Eventually, of course, I went over the top. I remarked (in as many words) to almost complete strangers that I, Webby, was in fact nothing more than a turd on the bottom of their shoe. They had nothing to worry about anymore, because the person covering their fuck-ups nowadays hasn't got a clue about journalism or thinking or even breathing really, and should probably throw himself off the balcony, but would probably even get that wrong. Haw haw haw. I was floundering. But, presumably (I don't know the rules to this, obviously, or I wouldn't have screwed it up so terribly), I'm now known as the new guy who thinks he's a bit crap. And who said it so much, he obviously is.

And then, last Friday, the same thing happened again. Another room full of strangers who had knowledge of my existence and who - probably - thought I was a tiny bit cool and a tiny bit worth meeting and chatting to. But who now think I'm a RUDDY IDIOT.

Being English means always having to say sorry.

Last whine of the summer

2010-08-29T20:29:00.005+01:00

It's the bank holiday weekend. Obviously I can't be bothered to go out. The weather's bad - all sideways rain and skin-blistering wind. Plus I feel rubbish after a couple of enthusiastic pre-bank holiday nights.

My general mood has not been improved by Saturday's Times magazine, which has written me off as middle-aged (and - although they don't specify it - terminally middle class). Turns out I tick almost every single box - not only do I want to sell artisan chutney for a living, but I also always consider the original (of almost anything) to be better. I do get excited by my own tomato crop and A-Levels definitely used to be harder. And I do have a breadmaker, wooden hangers, Le Creuset cookware and underfloor heating. My hangovers stink. I bought a new set of Travel Scrabble a fortnight ago. I dream of fresh eggs laid by my own chickens. I want a train set.

So it's increasingly obvious that I've skipped the excitement of my early thirties and settled for a cardigan and slipper clad pre-retirement. This is not a joke: I watched the Proms last night. And I type - glasses perched on the end of my nose - actually wearing both cardigan and slippers. And enjoying the combined sensations immensely.

Time to test myself for dotage. By watching the final-ever episode of Last of the Summer Wine. Series 31, episode 6. It's the world's longest-running sitcom, so missing the dénouement would be an act of cultural vandalism, right?

And I was curious. I've never seen an episode before (as an aside, I've never seen an episode of Only Fools and Horses either - but still I (and others) irrationally hate it). Why would I? Why would anyone under the age of 75? It's squarely aimed at that demographic. People who eat their evening meal at 5pm. Nothing too challenging before a cup of hot milk, sciatica pills and hot poltice for lumbago. You don't need to remember the previous episode - all must be essentially the same. Helpful, if you forgetten watching it by the time the credits roll.

Here's the premise: a gang of extremely old yet completely infantile men prance around a biscuit tin set, eee bai-gumming, Benny Hill-ing themselves mad over large breasts and then have a restorative pot of tea. There was a plot of sorts - about weddings and stuff - but largely it was nothing more than a half hour of aged tweedy buffoons in hats blowing raspberries and being henpecked. Roguely, two of these old men are Russ Abbot (the youngest cast member) and Burt Kwouk (who has all the worst - borderline racist - lines - although this link leaves me unable to breathe). And there's the dead voice of Wallace (as in Gromit). The next-door neighbour from Keeping Up Appearances. Plus assorted other animatronic corpses, varicose-veined ghosts of comedies past who you half recognise from Auf Wiedersehen Pet.

Actually, it's lovely - equally good with the sound on or off (although most viewers must have the volume turned to apocalyptic levels from beginning to end). The countryside is (unlike the liver spots) full-HD amazing, like you asked an Anglophile American to whip up a watercolour of thirties England for John Major's downstairs toilet. Even the music is great - it's Ronnie "Yes Minister" Hazlehurst (who else?).

So, to the final moments. The weight of 294 previous episodes pressing heavy on the shoulders of the writer. How would it be played? A tear-jerking montage like Father Ted? A sudden break of the fourth wall - like at the end of The Hills (you probably didn't watch it, but it was brilliant and dangerously self-aware)? Everyone rushing from a trench into machine gun fire, like Blackadder? Or perhaps what all regular viewers really wanted - a rousing rendition of God Save the Queen?

Sadly not. The policemen weren't wearing trousers. It'll be busy at Dignitas tomorrow.

No fear of flying: Holiday part I

2010-08-23T14:58:00.006+01:00

I've been away - on my holidays, Mrs Webby in tow - for the past week. And this whole Web 2.0 blog thing was looking a bit sparse for the month of August. So I thought I'd subject the three regular readers (Mrs Webby, my mother, me) to a quick primary school essay, entitled What I Did On My Holidays.

In part, this is revenge against my parents, who forced me at a young age to write a holiday diary because my primary school teacher - the fondly remembered Mrs Thorne of Windmill School, Headington (she may not actually be dead) - once told the entire class (as we broke up in June) that it might be a nice idea.

Of course I was the only diarist.

But it's also because I'm too lazy to write about more pressing matters. Like floods. Or the miners in Chile who are alive, but will be stuck underground for the next four months as they're laboriously dug out with - presumably - a teaspoon. Still, out in time for Christmas; that'll be something to cling onto as they sit in sufferating dark silence. I would last four minutes. Or the Australian electorate - trendily choosing for a hung parliament, with the balance of power to be fought over by a bunch of Stetson-wearing Bruce Hayseeds from the vast wilderness of non-urban Oz.

No, instead I thought I'd write a few tedious and trite comments about Ryanair. Because that's not been done to death by far better people. I flew with them for - I think - the second time in my life on my trip. And have now come to a startling realisation.

The problem with Ryanair is that it's cheap.

Well, just on the right side of cheap enough. Another £10, and one might be tempted to go BA. But as soon as you've reached that mental cul-de-sac, you're already just so much putty in un-shameable Michael O'Leary's itching palm. He has you over a barrel, and is far from a generous lover. You've paid for a particularly cheap and grotty whore, and it's entirely your fault if you get a nasty rash.

As soon as you complain (and I don't mean me, I never complain on flights because I'm too busy keeping the plane in the air with the force of my personality and a grimly sweating grip on the armrest) or attempt to moan - or even grizzle gently - about the service and the delays and the sticky plastic seats, O'Leary just has to hold up your credit card bill. Where, amongst all the taxes and the charges and minimum payments, there's a stark reminder that you paid a pittance, so should just suck it up with everyone else. Sit back, chillax and enjoy your flight. The tannoy literally says that. Well excuse me whilst I dislocate my shins to get into my seat. But that's fine, because I'm flying Ryanair. This was very cheap, so feel free to treat me like an idiot. Because that's what I am.

Actually, I like Ryanair's complete lack of pretention. We're shit, and we know we are. You can tell they know this from the food. As soon as they seatbelt signs go off, and everyone unbuckles (not me, I'm still watching my life flash in front of my eyes in fevered anticipation of the inevitable crash and I like to think a short length of belt and flimsy fastening will save me as we vanish into a mountainside), the overworked BO-infused staff are out with the menu cards.

The odd - and oddly gratifying - concept is that the food offering has been made to look wilfully bad. I dare you to eat me, the alleged comestibles shriek. The cheesburger alone was astonishingly unpalatable - two damp rounds of tasteless sugar-sweet bread (see also: Subway) and an off pink lump of once-sentient tissue; a noble farmyard animal of unknown vintage (and species) reduced and compressed to a slab of vivid sickly flesh, topped with a radioactive orange slice of cheese substitute.

I didn't eat one of these, obviously. I'm just inferring from the dreadfulness of the picture. If one was to order a burger, the honks and snorts of derision from the aircraft galley as the box of earlobes and arseholes was nuked in the microwave would likely set off an alarm in O'Leary's office, reminding him to order another burger for the 8.15 flight from LGW to Girona. Heck, food fans, there's pizza, too - a damp lump of water and flour glue topped with vomited cheeseburger leftovers and fungi picked from the toilet bowl. Or a hot dog - actually made of dog.

The message is simple - order me, and you're an idiot. Obviously you're already an idiot for flying Ryanair, you cheapskate bastard. So don't compound matters by eating our shit food - it's only there for a laugh. Like the "meal deals". Buy a coffee - that's 3 Euros. A muffin, 2 Euros. But why not get them together for the special price of 5 Euros? Why not? Because you're an idiot, that's why.

So much for what I actually did on my holidays. I'll relate the rest, what I really did - including the haircuts and the stalkers - another time. This is merely the departure lounge.

Her so-called life

2010-08-04T13:29:00.005+01:00

Everyone knows those terrible magazines that are handed out on the Tube. There's a sports one - full of dreck about Formula 1 and poker and gym routines, bookended by girls in bikinis cajolled into bored poses for calendar shoots. The sort of calendars they have in the Top Gear studio. It's Nuts, but with more words of more than one syllable. Like Collingwood. Or Schumacher.

And there's Shortlist, which is largely the same. Cars, burds, tits and expensive cameras. A feature about gangsters. What sort of guns they shoot in the favelas. How to survive in the wilderness. How to cook an entire pig. How to have sex with loads of girls. In short, textual testosterone. It's a wonder that all the male Tube riders don't strip to the waist, tie their ties around their foreheads and ceremonially slaughter a hapless female commuter every Thursday morning (or whenever it comes out) whilst shrieking like apes and feverishly wanking.

But now - in the interests of gender equality - there's a new(ish) one - Stylist - which they don't hand out to boys. And as such, it has a particular mystique. It's forbidden fruit. And so I wanted to read this magazine. Who knows? It might reveal all the secrets to hair straightening and blow dries and other - unmentionably graphic - girl things.

Last night, my dream came true. Because it turns out that the glassy-eyed vendors in bright cagoules do hand out copies when faced by the average Tuesday night drunk. Who can then read it on the night bus, burping and farting all the way back to Balham.

If Shortlist is an insight into the male psyche - post-shave cooling balm, massive speakers (and tits) and engines - Stylist must, it follows, reveal all you need to know about girls - why they hate me, why they are always doing laundry and why they demand on getting into a made bed (only to immediately unmake it by being in it).

Maybe it does. Obviously I'd passed beyond the level of decent reading comprehension, so the features on lipstick and bras and handbags and fake tan and eye masks passed me by. I did snarl briefly at a sidebar regaring MJ Delaney, a 24 year old staff writer who made Newport State of Mind, a parody of Jay-Z's Empire State of Mind. If I wasn't so furiously jealous of her two million YouTube hits, I might describe it as reasonably funny. As she's already received calls from "talent scouts and record companies and BBC3 and Channel 4", she probably doesn't need my entirely non-constructive ad hominem criticism.

But what really caught my eye was a working day diary piece by Lucy Lumsden. In fact, I was so gripped by it that I found the torn page in my back pocket this morning, still damp with tears (or possibly drool). It followed a standard template: got up in my beautiful home, rolled over to my hunk of a husband, farted out some Chanel No. 5. Made a breakfast of organic Special K, took Jehoshaphat and Aubrey to their prep school and finally rolled into my amazing job in my amazing office for an amazing day of lunch dates, Smythson diarizing and larking about on the Pilates machine.

Lucy's pictured, smiling meekly in her think rimmed glasses and luxurious mop of ginger hair surrounded by scripts. She's head of comedy at Sky.

Initially I thought - top job. But then (to stop myself going mad and rending the magazine from staple to spine) I realised that I've never seen anything funny on Sky. Except perhaps Richard Keyes' shaved hands. I didn't even know they did comedy - except of course the hilarious James Corden celebrity sporting quiz vehicle. Which is like Question of Sport, but for even thicker people. Lucy can't be that good, because a cursory google shows that A League Of Their Own has just got a second series. But who can be surprised, given that Corden and his horrid skinny sidekick have just been voted the best double act ever. I mean, they're just bloody brilliant, aren't they.

That's all off the point (to the extent that this missive has a point - which it doesn't). It's just that there was one particular sentence in the diary of Lucy's workday which attracted my half-shut eyes. As follows:

Next, I spend 20 minutes free-writing, which I learnt from the book The Artist's Way. I write whatever comes into my head then throw the paper away. It wakes up my brain

Funnily enough, that's kind of what I do. I spend 20 minutes writing this shite, but generally singularly fail to throw it away, preferring instead to inflict it all on you, dear reader.

I hope it has woken up - or alternatively destroyed - your brain.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

UPDATE: if you fancy checking out The Artist's Way, here's a million good reasons not to:

With the basic principle that creative expression is the natural direction of life, Julia Cameron and Mark Bryan lead you through a comprehensive 12-week program to recover your creativity from a variety of blocks, including limiting beliefs, fear, self-sabotage, jealousy, guilt, addictions and other inhibiting forces, replacing them with artistic confidence and productivity.

Barf.

Bauxite is not Unobtanium

2010-07-29T11:42:00.002+01:00

Now it's all very well protesting against environmental damange. In fact, that's excellent. Could you do a little protest for me, whilst you're there? Because I'm too busy watching TV or playing Red Dead Redemption or staring blankly at a wall. Or writing this. I don't really care what the environmental damage in question is. It's the thought that counts, so whether it's the ice caps or the Gulf of Mexico or whales, just go ahead and put my name down, in absentia.

There's a protest going on, right now, infact. To which I may well lend my name, just so long as I don't have to do anything. The Guardian reports that mining company Vedanta is planning to dig a big old mine in a special bit of India to get their hands on some Bauxite. I'm not sure what you use Bauxite for. It might well be essential for modern life. But obviously planting a whacking great mine on sacred land is likely to ruffle some feathers. I'd be pretty annoyed if they did it in Balham - it's bad enough that Sainsbury's is closed for the next fortnight.

And so the environmental people gathered outside a meeting of the company to bitch and shriek, which is entirely worthy and this is in no way meant to belittle their effort. Which I'm sure comes with fine intentions and a fine selection of skin complaints, halitosis and free range mung beans.

But unfortunately the Grauniad also includes a photo of some of the beard and sandal wearers. And now, I'm distancing myself from the cause.

If I was from this sacred slice of India, I might be pretty pissed off - if I wasn't busy starving to death - that the entire issue has been trivialised by a couple of wankers who think that a suitable and proportionate way to protest is to paint themselves blue so that they look like a couple of tree-dwelling earth gods/godesses from popular yet utterly banal tede-fest, Avatar. I'd be righteously annoyed to be called the "Real Avatar tribe" by this pair, the patronising gap year gits. I'm assuming they gibbered at the shareholders in Na'vi, then rushed home on their dragon to inter-twine the fronds growing down the back of their necks.

And if that wasn't enough, Bianca Jagger was generously on hand to deliver an impassioned plea on behalf of the local population. Who must be delighted that their cause is being fought by: (a) the former wife of an elderly tortoise and (b) a couple of berks painted blue.

Amish me a question

2010-07-25T21:12:00.006+01:00

I know all about the Amish. Because I've seen Witness.

And so I didn't really need to see Amish: World's Squarest Teenagers. Because I took it for granted that a bunch of bumfluffy boys and head-scarfed girls living in tiny isolated communities amongst their huge closed families (explaining their odd Germanic accents) would be slightly befuddled in London.

And because I - along with everyone else on earth - knew this, I also knew Channel 4 would make this documentary series about a group of them on "rumspringa" (a kind of gap year from tilling the soil and driving sheets through a mangle) utterly predictable and useless. Roll out the soundtrack to Deliverance. Hilarious. Another car wreck from the 'alternative' channel. I didn't need a cipher for broken Britain juxtaposed with a group of unworldly bible bashers. Because it was like boxing run by the Mob. Rigged.

Obviously I watched it all the same.

If I went and stood in a grim estate in Peckham, I might well display some shock at being shown the location of a fatal stabbing. I might not want to watch a bunch of murder-in-their-eyes phony gangbangers wearing comically absurd side-on baseball caps playing video games. That's bloody boring. As is having to watch them do streetdancing - now that's a limitlessly shit activity. Cue open-mouthed horror from the Amish kids - they didn't know if they liked it - bloody liars. Politeness, at least, is instilled. I would have found it almost impossible to give full vent to my feelings.

So what if it was the other way round? What if I was dumped in Pennsylvania and called "english" at every turn and had to drown someone in a grain silo? And strange men in beards quoted biblical absurdities and non-sequitors at me. And everyone had bumfluff and/or chinstrap beards. And everyone stared at me in my v-neck M&S jumper and white Uniqlo t-shirt and jeans and Converse. I'd get embarrassed and walk around with my mouth hanging open quite a bit. I might get quietly shocked about people who believe in a god to such an extent that they have to have beards hanging down to their tits.

I probably wouldn't want to leave school at 14 (even though at 14, I'm sure the reverse was true). I probably wouldn't want to work in a barn all day - not with my allergies. And I don't like horses. But then I'm a little urban achiever, more used to riding the Tube than a buckin' bronco. It's obvious that if you dumped me in the countryside, my crops would wither instantly, my chickens would fly the nest and I'd swiftly die, eyes rolling, mouth stuffed with delicious-looking yet deadly mushrooms. So the whole idea of cultural exchange would be entirely redundant. It would be a useless documentary, although thinking up a title would be fun. "Middle class South Londoner: World's Most Cosseted Tosser".

But then if the alternative was living in Peckham (and the documentary assumes that there are no other options - although I have hopes for the rest of the series), I'm voting for the plain people every day.

Who wouldn't? It's a middle-cass dream. Massive gardens, large rustic houses with bespoke kitchens and wooden floors. Sash windows. Free range children running around in clean home-made clothes. Fecund nature everywhere. Organic food from your own garden. Fresh eggs. Easy access to a foreign language. Having the grandparents on hand for childcare. No violent and aggressively anti-feminist computer games. No TV. Perhaps a touch of CoE religion on the side - none of the nasty bits though - just enough to get you brood into a good school. I mean, you wouldn't be able to watch The Wire or indulge any other stuff white people like, but these Amish fellows should start running holidays to their encampments; the population of Balham would be there in a shot. Even I think I'm Amish.

Tomorrow: Britain's Witch Children. Bad week for religious nutters everywhere.

101 terrible ways to spend an evening

2010-07-10T18:47:00.007+01:00

I'm sick of this weather now. It's far too hot - day and night. And I need to have the fan on in the bedroom - requiring ear plugs to drown out the hrunnn hrunnn of its oscillations. So I'm already a bit crotchety.

I don't want to go outside and frolic in the lovely summer evenings - because it's too hot to move. Too hot to get dressed or walk down the stairs. Definitely too hot to stand in a rammed Balham pub shouting loudly at drinking companions. When I did - last weekend - I got sunburnt to buggery in the back garden of the Duke of Devonshire, and couldn't move my arms for three days.

So it's the height of summer, and I don't want to move. There's football on later; the pointless third-place playoff no-one wants to be in. But - even more excitingly - there's a new dreadful waste of licence fee on the BBC. 101 Ways to leave A Gameshow. Exactly the sort of thing which makes my blood boil. Exactly the kind of thing which should see BBC execs lined up against a wall. Exactly the kind of thing which should result in the franchise being removed from all viewers (except those fuelled with righteous blog-based anger).

Exactly the sort of thing I look forward to.

Here's the programme as pitched by Endemol (my favourite purveyors of pornographically-bad television) to the Beeb. "Well, we strap a bunch of bedwetters and knuckle-draggers to cannons and supermarket trolleys and zip lines, ask them moronic multiple choice questions and then - get this - laugh when they get them wrong - as they obviously will - and are fired into a swimming pool. And we'll drag it out for hours, like torture porn. Funny, yeah?"

Extraordinarily, the panjandrums of Broadcasting House jumped at it. And now I am compelled to watch it.

Steve Jones presents. He's a faded mothball of a matinee icon - famous for rumours of having rogered various women more famous than him. He has a lovely tan, pearly teeth and an accent which if it wasn't Welsh might be described as 'exotic'. A quintessence of dust. He's dis-ably supported by a silly bint with a big hooter whose job is to tell the contestants how stupid they looked falling 100 feet into a pool of water. They all agree with her, nodding like the Churchill parcel-shelf dog. And that - dear reader - is it. No nonsense.

The contestants are factory built. Vorsprung durch moron. Russ, in particular, is a terrible, terrible man. Almost as terrible as Vanda. The rest are the kind of people who must exist (digging roads and tending to livestock), but you never meet. Communications officer Emma is entirely devoid of rational thought. Her only form of communication is jumping and waving her arms.

But what do these people do with their lives - they don't even have the comfort of quiet desperation - it's just day after day until the grave. Their appearance on 101 Ways will be spoken of at their sparsely-attended funerals - the only moment of consequence in their existence.

Snore draw

2010-07-09T13:22:00.001+01:00

I woke this morning - bleary-eyed, parched and hungover - to news that LeBron James is moving basketball teams. On Radio 4 of all stations. Now the only thing I know about LeBron James is that he's called LeBron James. And that his name is ridiculous. Beyond that, he's doesn't even scrape the far reaches of my existence. But some people do know who he is. He plays basketball. And is considered such a valuable resource that he's going to become a billionaire from his hoop shooting.

There's nothing wrong with that, well not really. I don't have much sympathy with people who moan about footballers' salaries - because they're often the same people who pay £45 each week to watch live football. And another £50 every time their team updates its shirt. Nothing like the feel of static on skin in high summer (to say nothing of the terrible odours nylon creates on beer-swilling men who should know better). So if people want to buy LeBron vests and headbands and balls and mugs and trinkets - and consequently fund his lifestyle (I'm thinking unplayed grand pianos, 100" plasmas and dog fighting) - that's their fault.

My only real problem with l'affair LeBron (other than his grotesque stated career aim to become a billionaire) is that basketball is fundamentally crap. Pathetic gangsterism played by people who are rubbish at everything else - just a single step above Ultimate Frisbee. It's sport-lite, completely devoid of any interest until the last second of each game, when someone scores to win. It's like Formula 1. Fans (if they have a moment whilst furtively masturbating over tyres and spoilers) tell you that it's endlessly exciting to watch a bunch of computerised droids whistle around the same track 50 times. Whereas anyone with a conscious mind can tell you that the only mildly interesting bits are the crashes. A game of basketball lasts an hour, when it could easily be decided in ten seconds of mayhem.

Now that sounds counter-intuitive. What - I hear you cry - could be more exciting than an end-to-end hour-long game which isn't decided until the final chuck of the ball? That sounds amazing. And - let's be fair - you might be onto something. But there's no room for fairness here. The problem is that the game is ruined by the mindless and constant scoring - it's ideal for an ADHD generation which can't sit still through a five-day Test match or a round of golf because they need the instant gratification of flowing points. Something impressive happens in b-ball every 10 seconds. A slam dunk or whatever by a shambling lummox in underwear. That's impressive. Or it would be, in a vacuum. But nine seconds later, it happens again. Eventually, the sport is reduced to a thousand moments of finesse. You might as well hammer your head against a wall until you see stars and get tinnitus - that would be equally impressive. The very reason that the sport is popular - its non-stop excitement and limited skillset - is also why it's painfully tedious.

I've been to a basketball match (or whatever they're called) once, in Chicago - an otherwise brilliant city. It was a massive playoff game, played between two teams with equally childish pyromaniacal names - heat or flames or blaze. Shaquille O'Neal - a vast and unlikely structure of flesh and muscle - was playing. I'd heard of him. Also bouncing a ball around on the wooden dancefloor was Luol Deng. He's British - at the very top end of financially-rewarded British sporting stars. A household name in the US. I'd never heard of him, obviously.

It was absurd - the usual end-to-end catching and throwing, the weird harpsichord Addams Family music, endless stopping for no good reason, incomprehensible statistics, dirigibles floating around, endless ad breaks, man mountains of obesity fuelled by beef hotdogs and weak beer. The game itself was a sideshow. And quite right too, because it was wall-to-wall tedium. I'd have gone mad if it hadn't been for the beer and hotdogs.

What a load of old cobblers

2010-07-01T19:37:00.005+01:00

Daisy roots. Boots.

Plates of meat. Feet.

Why not just say feet, you pearly nobbers.

According to the Standard the Cockney dialect is dying out. 650 years of proud history. Gone within the next generation. Because everyone speaks Jafaican now, like Dizzie Rascal - the East End everyman, obviously. Or like the cast of The Wire. Aieet.

Language is a fluid thing, despite what the Daily Mail might tell you about the ineloquence of the younger generation. And in other news, people have stopped eating bananas with a knife and fork. Tomorrow, we'll all be knifecrimed as we sleep. So this is not a big deal at all. And I never understood it anyway. Can anyone really explain why you'd use three words when you could just say "feet"?

Isn't the entire Cockney language just a tourist trap? I mean, who doesn't come to London and want a photo taken with a couple of money-grabbing charlatan idiots in sequinned suits?

Like this bunch of thrupenny bits.

Will anyone really miss people who call their "stairs" the "apple and pears" , no matter how much of a twinkle they might have in their eye? Who could genuinely stand an entire conversation with one of these loveable chirpy eastenders? Imagine, once you'd got beyond "cor blimey strike a light guvvnor Mary Poppins" you'd be exhausted. And as soon as the conversation turned to staircases or the appendages on the end of your legs, you'd be ready to flee. It must be draining - and that's surely why the entire thing is a verbose sham (except berk, which is excellent).

A quaint bullshit tradition - imagined communities where everyone left their doors unlocked and you knew all your neighbours and there were no paedo-monsters stalking the street. It's from the good ol' days, innit. When the old queen mum come raaaand and looked at our 'ouse what 'ad been bombed by faakkkin Jerry. Befffore all them lah-di-dah buggers cum over 'ere with their ruby murries. I was in the Blind Beggar that night. Bish bash bosh.

Romford. That's where they live now, all starter homes and their old muckers from back in the day. Come friendly bombs.

Most people in the East End now are low-achieving public school leavers working (for free) in music or contemporary dance. Would you Adam and Eve it.

Kerry Katona's big house of horrors

2010-06-24T23:12:00.018+01:00

Thursday night in, and what to watch. I've already snored through Denmark's thrashing by Japan. And there's now a choice. A dreadful one. I mean, I could go and read an improving book; possibly a classic novel. Obviously that's literally impossible.

I could choose Mock The Week, but it's bad enough looking at their smug red faces with the sound off, let alone having to listen to their trite scripted bullshit. Haw haw haw, go the audience of drugged idiots. 30 seconds, max.

So how about Kerry "Fat slapper" Katona and the reality show to kill the genre, a sort of brain-dead Osbournes filled with a similar cast of waifs, bellends and wankers. And an obligatory menagerie of dogs and cats, soiling every surface.

It's interesting, in a disgusting way that makes my skin itch. Kerry's consort is a taxi driver-cum-pool table installer, who (for reference) is dumped by text message during the first 10 minutes of the programme. Mark (Maaaarkkkk) allegedly spent £1m of her money on cars. He's loath to admit it, and I'm inclined to believe him - where would she have got a cool million from?

For the rest of the film, he just wants to lamp someone and spends his time staring at the camera through rolling porcine eyes. Everything's a threat. "It's 25 past eight", says Mark, as he bollocks the wide-eyed children. "Do yer know what I mean?" Translation: cross me and I'll smack yer 'ead in. It's textbook character assassination. Which is fine, because Mark's utterly repellent.

And then you're just left with glimpses of Katona's raddled knackered face and black dead eyes. She's a washerwoman, just one who wants better. Sadly she is utterly devoid of talent or ability of any kind. Her "job", as she describes it, is being famous. And she can only remain famous by essentially pretending to be famous. That's a terrible kind of circular hell, the sort of paradox that should make the universe implode. It probably would, if Katona was of any consequence at all. The paps sit around outside her house, smoking moodily (Kerry lights hers on the hob, by the way), hoping that she'll drunkenly fall out of her 4x4. That's her job.

But suddenly - à propos of nothing at all - we meet her "life coaches", a pair of mekon Aryans who - given their standard of living - are quite clearly draining her meagre resources (and quite possibly those of a similar bunch of credulous blights on humanity). They life in a castle - one of those footballer mansions, probably with a cinema room and bookshelves filled with no books whatsoever, just a box set of Only Fools and Horses and an Ibiza chillout compilation. "There's nothing wrong with yer", says female mekon. Is this the worst life-coaching sales pitch ever? Are they gently trying to ditch her as a client?

No, because Katona laps it up. Male mekon, a low-rent Iggy Pop, quotes from Kerry's book - that's pretty lazy life coaching, surely? But of course she hasn't read it, so it flies over her head. It's a highlight - so confident are the gruesome pair of the endless blank cheques from the Katona fortune that they can literally afford to treat her like an absolute moron. Here's their website. Treat yourself to an incredibly cheap laugh (although be careful if you look at the pictures, they'll make your eyes pop out).

Anyone wanting to know what La Katona will look like in 10 years need look no further than her mother. A leaking weather balloon, tattooed from arsehole to earlobe (which is no way marks her out from the rest of the cast), coughing up solid tar from addled lungs whilst wheezily cackling and calling everyone within earshot "shit". She's like the mother in Gin Lane. And it looks like it's catching. Pity Kerry's kids (too numerous to count) - especially the fat one raised on crisps and cake for breakfast. When she splits up with the loathsome Maaarrrkkk, she goes round the bend - even more so than usual, - dancing around to the cameras with the Jackson 5 bleating in the background.

There's some serious mental illness here - how wonderful that Channel 4 have the decency to exploit it. It made my evening.

James Corden's World Cup Bollocks

2010-06-13T22:25:00.005+01:00

I hate James Corden. I don't like Gavin & Stacey, his sketch show was akin to the contents of an abortionist's bin, and his constant revealing of his repellent gut makes me gag. His laddish routine is crushingly dull. And yet he's everywhere, like chlamydia.

Somehow - because he's blokey everyman - he gets his own show on ITV. Boys want to go for a drink with him, girls want ...ummm. Pass. Is this every night, I wonder? Fortunately, like most humans, I only watch ITV under dire circumstances - like when they show England games. Aside from that, there are never any grounds to watch the third channel; it's for retards. But I just caught a bit of James Corden's World Cup Live by mistake, after watching a solid footballing team thrash a country who don't consider soccerball their national game (take note, England).

The programme goes as follows. Corden shouts at his guests (Boris Becker hasn't faced humiliation like this since leaving that broom cupboard in Nobu), dreadful smutty pub wisecracking. I felt even more ill. NO HE'S HILARIOUS LOL, say idiots. FUCK OFF CORDEN. Do you know what I mean? That's what he says at the end of every sentence. Massive spastic. Luckily, he'll have a heart attack soon (obviously I don't actually mean him harm, this is just the natural way of things). He strolls around on various levels, like it's TFI Friday, but worse. A bunch of wankers from each World Cup country appear - it's a living wallchart of shit baggery. Although the Aussie guy is dangerous Mark Philippoussis - he wears a cap covering his ravaged eyes and talks about drinking. Move swiftly on, lard arse.

Corden interviews Gerrard on the golf course. Now Gerrard isn't quite as thick as, say, Ashley Cole. He seems like quite a decent quiet sort (unlike his wife, who is a trashy harridan). There's hilarious footage of Doughboy hitting a golf ball. He misses, obviously. Guffaw. And then - suddenly - an interesting question. "Have you ever voted?" I turn up the volume and bend an ear to listen for a revealing answer. "Yeah, by text. For the kids". They're talking about X-Factor. I smash the TV remote to pieces and rip off my ears (and I'd only just stuck them back on after tearing them to shreds after hearing the corpulent one's World Cup single).

The set of the show is like a pub - because that's what everyone does, yeah. Everyone loves the pub don't they. Everyone loves a pint and a banter. Pint of Stella and a packet of crisps please barman. Three verses of 10 German Bombers. Lager lager lager, vindaloo. Banter. That's what we do in Ingerland, yeah.

Well not me, Corden, you loathsome jabba prick. I don't want to be like you and your mongoloid studio audience. No-one thinks you're funny, the guests think you're a tit, and - most importantly of all - I hate you. This secret passion makes me strong and keeps me young.

Dorian Webby

2010-06-11T14:14:00.001+01:00

The strangest thing. I just went to Pret for a latte with which I could settle in front of the computer TV in time for the World Cup. Can't quite believe that it's finally happening; seems like an age since the last one. This also means that I am an old cunt compared to the last one round. I cannot quite believe there was a time when I was actually 26. Young, fresh of face, flighty of step. Now I'm a crushed man, content to spend the rest of my days staring at the pavement.

And suddenly, through my gloom - which, as stated, has been lifted and yet strangely crushed by the coming of a World Cup - a chink of light.

I got my coffee free. On the house, said the completely unattractive coffee wrangler at Pret. No money changed hands. The £1.95, carefully denominated in ten pences and pennies, returned to my pocket. She grinned, I shuffled out, slightly embarrassed.

Am I suddenly sexually alluring? Has my new job - which makes me reasonably happy and semi-fulfilled - left me with a glint in my eye, a swagger in my pimp-rolling gait? Surely not. Was this a shit old coffee vomited up by a tramp? It tasted fine, like coffee.

Have I got some sort of loyalty barcode stamped on the back of my neck? Will I forever set of security alarms in high-street shops due to the implant under my skin? Will computers light up in Pret HQ whenever I tramp over the threshold? Am I like Lindsay Lohan and her alcohol-sensing ankle band? Is that a meaningless celebrity reference which will only be understood by the long-suffering yet equally non-stoic Mrs Webby? (yes).

In short, am I now a marked man? Will oppressively cheerful employees in white shirts and maroon baseball caps chase me down and proffer free coffee as I walk the streets? What have I done to deserve this?

Has this coffee just made me jittery? Has an injection of cafeine, coupled with a boyish World Cup frisson of tension, led me to hyperventilate? What are these chest pains? Does anyone actually care? My mind's flying. I can't do any more work.

45 minutes until kick-off. Fever pitch.

A home from home

2010-06-10T15:38:00.001+01:00

To Cambridge over the weekend for a thirtieth birthday. It's a nice town, like Oxford without anything going on. All the other usual provincial rules apply. Streets of dreadful chain restaurants - La Tasca, ASK etc - and pockets of depravity, ultra violence and eye-rape - assorted Wetherspoons and the like. Terrifying sets of female fatties waddling down the streets dressed in pink; similarly flaccid men in short-sleeve shirts with earrings and tattoos. And then suddenly, just like Oxford, you escape down a walled alleyway and enter the sixteenth century. Everything is refined, everyone is middle-class and knows about obscure guitar bands. People read the Guardian and drink bitter. In short, it was bucolic bliss.

But then there was the hotel. Dreadful. £75 for the very worst Britain can offer. Shelly behind the desk was a premonition of the service to come. Awful, as if you were somehow doing the staff a personal favour by staying in their cruddy hotel. Funnily enough, on the way out, I did kill her firstborn. In fairness, if I had to wear a grim red shirt fresh from Alan Partridge, 99% crimplene and 100% awful, I might not have been so sunny on a boiling hot weekend afternoon.

The whole place was just terribly English. Husted tones in the dining room as we sat for the continental selection - read cardboard croissants, cheese, lank Mighty White bread and the typically English tiny glasses into which to drink your ersatz juice. Utterly miserable - as if rationing had never ended - and yet people were genuinely pretending to enjoy themselves. OH LOOK, a tiny jar of jam. LOOK, Flora in an individual helping. JESUS, it's a slice of cheese (cheese content: 50%) hand-shrinkwrapped for every customer. It's a hell of a national talent to be able to cope with all this horror, and still enjoy it. It's up there with queueing. It's why British people still sit in their cars in the hammering rain at the seaside and eat fish and chips. £7.95 for the cooked breakfast. There was no-one at all eating that. Spending extra money is beyond the British stiff upper lip.

As usual with hotels, there was a pointless folder full of instructions about what to do in the event of fire, how to iron your clothes, how to order room service (don't bother). A free map of the town (which I pilfered - rage against the machine). And also a menu for the "incredibly popular" restaurant - all the classics - artfully arranged fan of melon, chicken kiev, Blue Nun. Sadly no prawn cocktail.

The most notable thing about the menu was the strict warning emblazoned on the front:

For the benefit of other guests, please return this menu to the bedroom information folder after use. Thank you. Full colour, non-laminated, paper copies of this menu are available from Reception if you wish to take a copy home as a souvenir or to show friends.

Hell, if I went to El Bulli, I migh keep the menu to show my friends. Although perhaps not at Arundel Hotel, Cambridge. They wouldn't be my friends for long.

Are you on Craic?

2010-05-31T20:23:00.002+01:00

Bank holiday Monday. Nothing to do except watch TV and allow tomorrow to catch up. The terrible stalking horse of non-Bank Holiday Tuesday.

There are lots of sports I don't fully understand - kabbaddi, Aussie Rules, Polo. And plenty of others I simply don't see the attraction of - rugby, shooting, horse-riding (of any kind). Cycling. Squash.

But here's a new one. I'd heard of hurling, but had never witnessed it in all my (long) years. I was ashamed for my long-lost Irish blood, which is only otherwise manifested in a strong red tinge to my stubble and an inability to cope in any temperature over 15 degrees. Irish eyes (and cheek whiskers) smiled down on the players. I joined in.

For beginners (and I'm presuming that's everyone), hurling is like a combination of football and hockey, for the hardest men in the world (on the assumption your world begins at Donegal and ends in Cork.

Here's what I was able to ascertain. The ball - which looks like a baseball - is humped forward using a stick and caught in the air by hand. Then the catcher turns and wallops it again between a set of posts. They give it a hell of a belt. One guy scored from 65 metres. They are absolutely brilliant at hitting the ball very hard. But it seems there are two types of scoring. Points and goals (at one stage, the scoreboard noted 2-01: 0-08). Points are scored all the time - it just has to go between the posts, as high as you want. Scoring a goal is considerably more rare; you have to get past the defence and the ultra-nutter, the goalkeeper. Who plays in the same kit as everyone else (which is no padding at all and just a rudimentary face-grill). They are employed, essentially, to wear a rock-hard leather sphere.

The obvious result is as follows:

As regards the mechanics of play, not only can you hit the ball with the strange flattened hockey stick, but you can also throw (or kind of slap it) or kick it. And it turns out you can do pretty much anything to your competitors too. Including throttle them, punch them, kick them up the bollocks. It's all Irish horseplay, perfectly legitimate under the rules (to the extent that they exist). They fight easily, too. Althogh it's frequently difficult to tell the difference betweent the legitimate hooking of sticks or punching of kidneys from the illigitmate thump around the chops. At one point, one rugged man-mountain was knocked clean out by a brutal clothesline. Obviously he played on. Why wouldn't you? I would have been whimpering. Actually, I would have been dead.

During the adverts, there's nothing but road safety public warning films. Wear a seatbelt, or you'll die. Make you you can read a numberplate, or you'll die. Turn your mobile phone off, or you'll die horribly mangled in a mass of torn limbs, smashed bones and grieving relatives.

But not one warning you that under no circumstances should you ever go for a quick game of hurling. Because you'll die.