charlie farlie's boozy thursdays

You don't have to be mad to work here...

2009-07-06T12:42:00.004+01:00

Because sometimes, sometimes, applying for jobs can be fun. Particularly, if by ‘can be fun’, what you actually mean is ‘how far can I push it before they think I’m just taking the piss?'...

I sent this application letter today. I’ve, of course, obscured the relevant details, so as not to utterly scupper my chances.

Dear *****,

My name is Charlie Farlie and I am writing to you to apply for the position of *** ******* ********* as advertised on ***********.

As per the requirements of application, my three favourite websites are, as follows:

In third place: Facebook
Or more specifically, classic Facebook. Before it became saturated with applications and invitations to become a werewolf, classic Facebook represented the social networking revolution at work and, to a newly started university student, as I was, the key to social nirvana. Never before had organising, documenting and autopsying those hazy uni nights out been so easy, accessible and user friendly. Predictably, with fancy dress being the sartorial choice du jour, and Snakebite being the drink in vogue, the ‘detag’ button became a quick and firm friend...

In second place: Youtube
I’m an English graduate, and as such, have studied many of literatures ‘finest comedies’. It is a truth universally acknowledged, however, that people falling over is far funnier than anything Will Shakespeare had to offer. Youtube is my procrastinating best friend, and I am perhaps not as ashamed as I ought to be to admit that many an hour has been wiled away crying tears of mirth at the Grape Lady. If the Grape Lady reference means nothing to you, I suggest you check her out immediately. Wear headphones, and bring tissues.

In first place: Wikipedia
It was Disney’s Pocahontas who encouraged us to learn things we never knew we never knew but it was Wikipedia that put the idea into motion. As a student, Wiki’ing was always there for me when Starbucks had taken precedent over ‘obtaining and reading the set texts’, and now, as a grad, it’s there for ‘see I told you so’ and ‘holy moly I am BORED’. Wikipedia is very close to my heart, even if it does frequently remind me that I couldn’t finish Lord of the Rings, but will happily waste an hour reading about Conspiracy Theories. Nerdy, no?

So, *****, these are my three favourite websites. I like to think they suggest a thirst for knowledge and a delight in society, as opposed to a thirst for procrastination and inadvertent photo-stalking of strangers...

The more professional stuff, as one might expect, is contained duly in my CV, which you will find attached.

I look forward to hearing from you,

Kind regards,

Charlie Farlie

I’d give me a job. But then again, I think being glib and flippant is amusing.

The Tooth Hurts

2009-07-03T12:02:00.003+01:00

Q: What is the best time to go to the dentist?
A: 2:30 (tooth hurty)...

I may have mentioned previously that I am something of a hypochondriac. It’s not my fault – it’s as hereditary as my increasingly expanding hairline and my roman nose (roamin’ all over my face, that is). So it will come as nothing of a surprise to you when I explain that I also possess a rather diminished pain threshold.

So when, last week, the world’s worst hangover™ was unwelcomely and unexpectedly teamed with the toothache to end all toothaches, I was perhaps ill equipped to cope.

I’ve never been a fan of my teeth. They’re bunched and disordered in that typically British way, more ivory than Cowell-brite and due to the excesses of my youth, littered with more fillings than I’d care to publicly admit on the interweb. The offending gnasher, victim of some crappy dentistry in my teenage years and neglected by graduate poverty, was the worst of a bad bunch, and, when the poor blighter was yanked ceremoniously from my gob, it would be fair to say we didn’t part on good terms.

Rattling with ibuprofen, I’d called my dentist and, like calling an old friend when you need a favour, we exchanged uncomfortable, loaded pleasantries. To my horror, and, no doubt, the horror of the immaculately-dentured girl on the end of the phone, it had been five long years since my last bout of chairbound brutality. Five years. My teeth were last checked before I discovered facial hair, that a fringe wasn’t necessarily a good look for me, and I that my ‘hard-earned’ degree was, in fact, useless. Neglect doesn’t really cover it. If I’d been Facebook buddies with my teeth, they’d’ve stopped poking me a long time ago.

I went, then, cap in hand (pun almost intended) to throw myself at the mercy of my dentist, who I of course won’t name, despite the delicious irony of his moniker. We’ll call him Doctor McPain, for story’s sake. Dentists are like plumbers; their assessment of the work needed always reeks of ‘this wouldn’t be so bad if you hadn’t waited so long’. There’s always the tut, the sucking of saliva through teeth and the ominous warning that if you want it fixed properly, it’s going to cost you. Except instead of a dodgy thermostat, you have a blinding, rage-inducing pain in your gob. And unlike dicky heating, you can’t ignore that until winter sets in.

I was presented with two options – lose it, or throw money at it (not, unfortunately, money soaked in morphine) in the vain hope it could be saved. Yet while my rotten little peg of bone had seen me through many a Werther's Original, sentimentality was lost to me. Sentimentality, it seems, comes in short supply when you’re presented with a £450 bill for a porcelain replacement.

£450, you may well cry. I was forced to question: Who was making the bastard thing, Royal Dorchester?

Alas, me and my tooth decided to part ways. And like the best bitter divorces, it promised to be a long and drawn out process. 4-6 weeks on an NHS waiting list, to be precise.

They say that the rewards of being in a relationship are many and varied. Companionship, support, love, and, apparently, a mother-in-law that works in an emergency access dental clinic. Of all the manifold blessings received from The Other Half, a violent and gratefully sudden tooth extraction is up there with the best of them. And, aside from an excess of over-the-counter painkillers, the best pain relief is a surprise to trip to Toys R Us. Trust me; you’re never ever too old for some Indiana Jones Lego and a 2-litre bottle of fat Coke.

Having a grown man yank a molar out with little more than a glorified pair of pliers wasn’t the most fun I’ve ever had, but, as with all life experience there are lessons to be learned; seek relationships with those who can benefit you directly, and save up all your grievances for when you’re in physical pain because, it turns out, no one is allowed to argue with you when your teeth hurt. Brilliant.

So, thanks to The Other Half and the mother-in-law, I’m now devoid of one tooth, a lot of pain and about 3 pounds (the antibiotic-enforced detox did wonders for me). But what was most surprising about the whole affair was the absence of any sense of loss. I thought I’d view losing a part of me a little differently, since as a mewling brat I mourned the loss of my milk teeth with equal force as I welcomed a fat pound coin from the tooth fairy. Perhaps it’s something to do with getting older – you lose your hair, and, somewhat more forcefully, your teeth, and you carry on regardless.

For about three seconds I briefly considered forking out for a shiny new porcelain molar. I thought I wanted the tooth. But, in the (now bastardised) immortal words of Jack Nicholson, I couldn’t handle the tooth... *groan*.

A Bitter Pill - or - Johnny Be Good

2009-03-26T21:21:00.009Z

I’m not proud to admit it, but I’m a real hypochondriac. I blame the internet; my dad’s sister is notoriously health, or rather, sickness-conscious, as is my dad, so medical dictionaries have long been banned from our mutual family homes. The discovery of NHS Direct, or DeathWeb as it could be more appropriately named, then, meant that my every ache, twinge, grizzle or graze could be immediately and falsely identified as either Cancer or AIDS.

Imagine then the fun that ensued when I discovered sex. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a massive fan of safe sex – sex is, after all a messy, squidgy experience at the best of times (while, of course, being an enormous amount of fun) – but while use of a condom may have kept knob-rot at bay, a flimsy piece of latex was insufficient protection for my hormone-addled, paranoid teenage mind. I was 17, and to this day I am convinced I was too much too young, with too much information and not enough knowledge.

That bout of uninvited sharing out of the way then, I read with some interest this week the growing debate surrounding new plans to allow the advertising of abortion – or pregnancy advisory – services on television and radio, as part of plans aimed at reducing the UK’s high rate of teenage pregnancies and sexual infections. This news came, rather unfortunately, alongside a trial scheme at four Oxfordshire secondary schools allowing girls as young as 11 to ask their school nurse for the morning after pill via text message.

It’s easy to jump on the middle-England, chav-baiting bandwagon and say that most teenage pregnancies are simply the by-product of a generation who see babies as the ultimate meal ticket and should be opposed as such. But, snobbery aside, care must be taken to ensure that in advertising these services, and in making the morning after pill readily available, the safe sex message is still pushed, and pushed more often and with more force. After all, pregnancy is not the only unwanted side-effect of unprotected sex.

Genuine crusties will remember the, frankly terrifying, warning adverts when HIV/AIDS became more widespread in the 1980s. If the sight of that terrifying, tombstone-like black slab wasn’t enough to persuade you to practice safe sex, it was certainly scary enough to dilute your mojo. Nowadays, sexual health ads tend to be a little edgier, a little cooler; more appropriate for the Skins generation.

So one can only assume, if The London Paper’s rather frightening article suggesting that two-thirds of young Londoners practice unsafe sex, believing that they had literally ‘no chance’ of contracting HIV is to be accepted, that young people are simply not scared for their sexual health.

This could be explained by the fact that ‘responsible adults’ are targeting their fears in the wrong direction. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that there can be emotional implications for sexual precociousness; if at 17 I felt I was unprepared for sex, it boggles my mind to imagine that 11-year-olds could be better equipped to deal with it. But rather than impotently wringing our hands at the idea that younger teenagers are finding out that down there’s for more than weeing, perhaps it would be useful reminding them that if they’re going to hop on the bad foot and do the good thang, there can be, and usually are, consequences to this.

Adverts for condoms and contraceptives are, if anything, too few and far between as it is. Currently only Channel 4, that bastion of taboo and general naughtiness, are allowed to broadcast adverts for condoms before the 9pm watershed. Were that not bad enough, those that are shown are entirely too mild. Apparently scaring the bejeebers out of us stopped being vogue, so maybe it's time to get gory. Be graphic! Talk about vaginal discharge, or warty bell-ends! If you can’t put the frighteners on young shaggers, then at least try to put them off their dinner!

Because saying something terrible could happen, and seeing that something terrible in action are two entirely different things: I’d suggest taking a similar approach to the warnings on tobacco packaging; emblazoning bottles of Blue WKD with photographs of seeping, cheesy, gonorrhoea-infected naughty bits and the slogan – ‘Wrap it up, dirty dick’. If that doesn’t encourage you to use a condom (or switch to beer) then I don’t know what will.

And treat adverts for emergency contraception in entirely the same way – a 10-minute clip of a newborn baby screaming its lungs out at full volume, pausing every few moments to show close-up HD-ready images of greenish baby shit and milky sick-up. The problem isn’t that young people aren’t aware of what could happen if they don’t practice safe sex, it’s that the consequences simply aren’t frightening enough.

In the Daily Mail’s report Dr Peter Saunders, of the Christian Medical Fellowship said: 'Allowing the advertising of abortion services is not dealing with the real problem. This is the approach of having the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff to deal with the casualties.’ That’s as maybe, though his argument seems a little weighted; I, for instance, know that you can get artificial limbs, but that doesn’t mean I’d do the conga through a minefield.

Making the morning after pill readily available, and making young people aware of pregnancy advisory services can, and should be seen as positive steps. It’s too easy to say that the need to promote these things is indicative of ‘Broken Britain’; accidents happen, and people make mistakes. But Mary Kenny’s argument in the Guardian holds weight – contraception should, and must be the norm. Because yes, accidents do happen and yes, people do make mistakes, but in the case of sexual health, and unwanted pregnancy, these are mistakes that are, more often than not, avoidable.

The real concern here is that young people are not left with, much like me, too much information and not enough knowledge. Our high teenage pregnancy and STI figures show that young Brits know what to do with what they have in their pants. The real trick is to make sure they do it responsibly, because if we fail to do that, we’re all going to be screwed…

Changing Faces

2009-02-11T21:46:00.004Z

Hello there, boys and girls! Like what I’ve done with the place? I should bloody hope so, it took long enough.

So, ahem, without further ado, I welcome you to the new, not necessarily improved, charlie farlie’s boozy thursdays. If you really want to stalk me, you can become a follower on the bar to the left, so do that, ok?

Make yourself comfortable, kids, it’s going to be a grumpy ride…

C x

Gissa Job

2009-02-06T01:00:00.001Z

And so, approximately a gazillion years too late, the government have realised that there is a distinct shortage of graduate-level job opportunities for the hundreds of thousands of chronically-skint youngsters that will be thrust into the real world at the end of this academic year.

It’s a phenomenon that I am painfully aware of; last Thursday saw the completion of my journalism training, and with it, grim and unwelcome confirmation from my tutor that these were not good times for the recently-qualified hack. With 0% of my qualifying classmates (myself included) leaving the course to walk straight into gainful employment, the fact that previous years had seen at least 60% of her qualifying students had done so with jobs secured was ever-so-slightly more worrying.

0%.

Zero. Per. Cent.

Yikes.

You realise you’re up shit creek without a proverbial when the only bright side to your predicament is that at least everyone’s in the same boat. The problem is, the boat’s still in shit creek, and no matter how shitty our hands get, we’re paddling against the current.

No one ever said that getting into journalism was going to be easy; everyone thinks they want to be a journalist, and a great number of people even go so far as to actually try to become one. It’s a tough, virtually impenetrable industry, characterised by incessant rounds of job application and rejection, manipulation and exploitation.

The ‘state of the economy’ doesn’t help. Newspapers are shedding staff quicker than Mahiki chucking out Big Brother contestants on a particularly busy Tuesday night. It’s not a pretty sight.

And yet, once more, here I find myself, standing before the increasingly impregnable obstacle-course that is job seeking. At its best, it is painful, soul-destroying and utterly crushing to one’s self-esteem. At its worst, it is the sort of sick, sadomasochistic practice that is best saved for particularly nasty internet kink-flicks featuring big-eyed schoolgirls with tentacles.

None of this, I realise, is new information – everyone knows how awful looking for a job can be. But it is the one-sidedness of it all that is most frustrating – the impetus on upwards arse-kissing and downwards casualness. It is estimated that the average graduate-level job seeker must send, on average, 70 job applications to secure a single interview. And from personal experience, one can safely expect that from those 69 rejections, only a very small handful will have the common decency to send you any acknowledgement of your brown-nosing, obsequious scrap-begging.

Is it so hard to say ‘thanks, but no thanks?’ Even a curt ‘fuck you’ is preferable to the weight of being ignored. When did it become ok to treat the achievements and successes of others with such utter, mind-boggling disregard?

I know how I sound. I sound like a self-pitying whinge-monger crying for mummy because no one will see me for the superstar I am. But I’m not! I’m not asking Rupert Murdoch to launch himself around the world to nosh me off, using my own flatulent scribblings as a bib – I’m just asking that when broken, broke young people who have busted their bollocks to get a qualification go looking for work, they are treated with ever-so-slightly more respect than a wet fart in white y-fronts.

Perhaps what is most frustrating is that the most appealing roles exist in some sort of employment half-life, offered as internships where ambitious young writers generate revenue for their publications while receiving nothing in return.

There are literally dozens of jobs up for grabs if you don’t mind trawling through an application process that makes The Running Man look like a nice stroll in the park for the opportunity of working for free for six months.

I’m not such a cock as to call it modern-day slavery – it’s not – but what it is, is an utter pisstake, and amounts to the unchallenged theft of intellectual property.

All that the prevalence of the internship system actually achieves is a financially-weighted tier industry – providing the haves with entry-level opportunities that are priced out of the reach of the have-nots. And while I am not suggesting for a second that those who can afford to take these internships, and in doing so work without pay for anything up to six months are in any way less talented than those that cannot afford to do so, it is a bitter pill to swallow that so many are excluded from these opportunities on the grounds that they simply cannot afford to take them.

I’ve done my share of working for free – building up the portfolio of published pieces that were required to pass my journalism training cost me a small fortune. Some publications offer to pay travel expenses – most don’t – up to the point where it actually costs the worker money to work. And while the thrill of publication is something I hope will not quickly fade, it is small comfort when faced with the fact I can no longer afford to take the tube to visit museums I have reviewed, or buy a pint in bars I’ve recommended to my readers.

A fantastic, talented and pro-active friend of mine, who has worked at some of the world’s top fashion magazines, has, now as a fully-trained journalist, found herself once more slogging her guts out for free. It’s absurd, and it’s unfair. The reality of the situation is that the industry needs a shake-up. It’s taken a battering of late, but the solution is not slamming shut the doors and preventing the influx of fresh talent, opening them only to let in those wealthy enough to not need the jobs anyway.

Something needs to change, or, sadly, the writing really will be on the wall…

[Sorry, boys and girls, I realise that was not particularly fluffy, or indeed funny, but if I read ‘this is an unpaid position for a period of 6 months’ once more without letting off some steam I was going to throw myself off a bridge… Phew.]

There’s no business like Snow Business

2009-02-04T23:18:00.023Z

“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”
(Isiah 11:6)

At the ripe old age of 23 I like to think of myself, despite all evidence to the contrary, as a real, bona-fide grown-up. I can tie my own shoelaces, I always pay my phone bill on time and I generally make sure that I’ve got enough cash left in my pocket for a kebab after a particularly heavy night on the Cosmo’s.

I’m also a bit of a bastard. I’m not pre-occupied with rediscovering my inner child, since my outer child resembled a shaved baby chimpanzee and was usually dressed as some sort of epileptic scarecrow. It wasn't a good look for me.

Yet upon opening the curtains on Monday morning and finding that eight inches of all-my-Christmases-at-once had bountifully settled on bonny England, I was all-at-once struck by a peculiar sensation:

I wanted to be a kid again.

It had snowed. And not just snowed, but really, really snowed. So, despite being in possession of the least appropriate footwear the world has ever seen, I determined to go and make the most of it.

There’s something intrinsically magical about snow. Sure, it’s cold, slippy and uncomfortable, but it’s also fun, pretty and, dare I say it without sounding like a right girl, really quite romantic (the new squeeze and I enjoying what will go down in history as the smuggest walk in the snow ever). And despite essentially being the slightly harder sibling of rain, the snow gave London a much needed facelift. Even wheelie bins look utterly gorgeous with a generous dusting of the white stuff.

As a now-trained journalist, it ceaselessly causes me alarm that the industry I am trying so fervently to become a part of is undergoing a worrying transmogrification. What was once an industry driven by the unbiased report of world events is now an endlessly-negative misery-marathon, geared to suck the fun out of every aspect of our lives.

Many publications were quick to report that, according to estimates by the Federation of Small Businesses, almost 6.5million – that’s around a fifth of Britain’s workforce, fact fans - failed to turn up to work on Monday due to the snow. They also say that the three days of disruption caused by the snow will cost the UK economy around £3.5billion. Accusatory nods were, of course, made to those who had said they were snowed in, when in fact they were snowed out.

‘The worst snowfall in 18 years’ was the catch adopted by most reports of the snow. The worst? The bloody best more like! In all my life I have never seen such universal jollity, good feeling and sense of community.

I’ll exemplify: A posh woman nearly clocked me in the head with a snowball, while aiming for her husband. She was, naturally, mortified to have broken that last barrier of class division, physical attack. Did I happy slap her? Or sue her on the grounds of reckless endangerment? Of course I didn’t. I stooped, scooped and threw one back. Turns out all it takes is a well-placed ball of weaponised rain to ease social tension.

News bulletins were peppered with voxpops, broadcasting the malcontent grumbles of those who, unlike all normal people who had seen eight inches of snow as the perfect excuse to escape wage slavery and go outside and play, had struggled on across the tundra to complete meaningless jobs that benefit no one.

And of course, these grumbling whingesocks were utterly indignant at the lack of action from that ever blameable, faceless ‘they’. One grim-faced lady murmered sourly to ITV News that ‘they knew it was coming, but of course they didn’t do anything about it.’

Do what, exactly? Erect an enormous umbrella over London? Switch on every sunbed and kettle in unison in hope that the combined UV and steam power would be enough to thaw the city from its icy prison?

Because the stark reality of the situation is – this sort of thing doesn’t happen very often, which goes some way to explaining why London doesn’t have a crack fleet of snowploughs, skidoos and husky-rescue teams on constant 24-hour standby.

And don’t even get me started on the outcry over closure of schools. For one, keeping children inside when there is something as rare and novel as actual, tangible snowfall in the South-east – proper, snowman-building, sledging, ride-down-a-hill-on-a-bin-lid snowfall – is nothing short of cruel, and more, it provided parents with the even rarer opportunity to bond with their rugrats.

There's nothing quite so unifying, it would seem, as seeing how much freezing, wet snow you can stuff down the back of your dad’s jumper.

Despite being a bit of a bastard, it gave me a warm fuzzy to see people so unabashedly enjoying themselves. There’s not a great deal to be jolly about in these grim, ambling times, so an unplanned icing-sugar-coated bank holiday was just the boost people needed to solider on through the humdrum dreariness of it all.

We’re all-too-often too quick to look on the gloomy side of things; our glasses are more and more frequently half empty, and clouds are less and less frequently in possession of that ubiquitous silver lining. So it’s a little disappointing to see the press, and the however-small proportion of the public throwing grit into Frosty the Snowman’s face.

Yes, the country coming to a standstill is irritating. But a snow day is also very rare, and, by and large, very, very fun. And, wanting to continue a trend for arse-achingly bad puns at the end of these rants, all that remains to say is… shouldn’t we all just chill out..?

[P.S - I realise I have been rather lax (read: shitty) in my updating of this blog. I promise to try harder this year... not including January, obviously... bugger...]

Photographs © Charlie Breslin 2009

Jump on the Brand-wagon

2008-10-31T11:15:00.010Z

Oh, hello again!

You just caught me in the middle of writing a strongly-worded letter to Her Majesty the Queen, demanding that Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand be immediately rounded up and locked in the Tower of London for crimes against comedy, England, HRH Andrew Sachs and the Very Rev. Georgina Baillie.

You see, I didn’t hear Russell Brand’s Radio 2 show when it was broadcast on 18th October, but, like the other 27,000 members of British society who have subsequently and retrospectively thought it fit to complain about Brand and Ross’s stupid and childish behaviour, my detachment from events comes as no obstacle to my fiery, wrathful rage. I’ve already sharpened my pitchfork, and once rent-a-mob turn up I’m off for a bit of burning and looting. You see, I am very offended, and I will not stop until I see justice blunderingly and knee-jerkingly done.

What’s most worrying about the ‘furore’ is that it represents head-burying at its absolute worst. I’m not saying what they did was ok, but having a go at them while the world goes to hell in a handcart seems like something of an overreaction.

While the world still (apparently) faces financial meltdown (the BBC must be shitting themselves, having wasted god-knows-how-much money on the new DownTurn logo which accompanies every financial scare story), fighting rages in the Congo and the US prepares to elect their new president, it is nice to see the British public, true to form, focusing on the grotesque pointlessness of celebrity. Even Gordon Brown has taken a timely break from saving the world economy to have his say on this diplomatic crisis shaking the country to its very core.

And the situation keeps getting worse and worse – heads rolling all over the shop. It’s like a particularly bad wedding reception round Henry the Eighth’s place. Brand has subsequently resigned from his Radio 2 job, and Jonathan Ross’s Friday night chat show, which presumably justifies the enormous £18million he costs the public each year, has been canned until further notice. Lesley Douglas, controller of BBC Radio has also handed her resignation, saying: “The events of the last two weeks happened on my watch. I believe it is right that I take responsibility for what has happened."

When celebrities do something wrong, we are very quick to complain that they don’t get treated in the same way that we do. Yet this situation has been allowed to quickly and dangerously spiral out of control, setting an ugly precedent for what can and cannot be broadcast and what can and cannot be done in the name of comedy. Because, hurtful or not, it is very important to remember that Brand and Ross’s behaviour was not malicious – stupid, certainly – but not malicious. The punishment has, in this instance, far outweighed the crime.

There were two, that’s TWO, complaints about the show following its immediate broadcast. The number quickly spiralled once the papers got their greasy hands on it and milked it for all its worth. The public, whether actually offended or not, realised that they perhaps ought to be and subsequently complained in their droves. After all, a national treasure has been humiliated on national radio (a national treasure, mind, and I apologise for being flippant, who is best known for taking the piss out of Spanish people and being knocked about by John Cleese). Complaining to OFCOM, the regulator of communications and broadcasting in the UK seems particularly rich, when the vast, vast majority of those complaining hadn’t heard the show in the first place. It’s the equivalent of deliberately searching for a nudey pic on the internet, only to then complain that the sight of nipples has offended you.

I understand why Andrew Sachs would be upset – what right-minded person wouldn’t be. But even his reaction to the entire affair has been, at best, sanctimonious and pious beyond all reason. Accepting their apology, tut-tutting and moving on would have been a far more dignified and appropriate way of dealing with the verbal wankery of two silly little men. And in the spirit of fairness, much of what they said was actually true, if Sachs’s fulsome granddaughter, Georgina Baillie’s delightful kiss-and-tell exclusives to The Sun are to be believed.

I, for one, would be able to take Georgina Baillie and her fame-hungry cleavage slightly more seriously were she not quite-so-obviously relishing every single moment. While I am sure that she is royally miffed that these two over-paid gonks have called her granddad and spilt details of her sex life messily onto his answering machine, it’s a bit rich that a self-styled ‘Satanic Slut’ (NSFW) has decided that she can and will take the moral high ground.

It must be amazingly difficult to look both offended and sensual at the exact same time, but Baillie has persevered; her expression like a porn star who’s just noticed her car’s been clamped in the middle of a double-penetration scene.

Calling yourself a slut and then parading around like the Madonna leaves something of a bitter taste in the mouth, and quite how the sight of her tits splashed across the pages of The Sun every day this week is less humiliating for her poor old granddad is an absolute mystery to me.

What we have witnessed is an act of childish stupidity. Prank calls are always annoying, often hurtful and occasionally frightening, but we must be cautious in considering what Ross and Brand have done, to use Miss Baillie’s own words, as ‘beyond contempt’. Her delight at their mutual suspensions in particular smacks more of gleeful hand-rubbing at the fact that they are being punished for airing the dirty laundry that she now takes such glory in. As we increasingly see these days, the media are becoming more and more proficient at not merely reflecting public opinion, but actively influencing it. Brand and Ross are shamed and deplorable, whereas Baillie’s Nazi-esque burlesque routine is branded ‘tongue-in-cheek’. Quite.

This farce has provided nothing more than a scandalous distraction against the constant impotent raging against the bigger issues facing the country today, and, frankly, while Ross, Brand and Douglas’s moral compass may have been somewhat skewed, I’d argue that it was the judgement of the British public that was altogether more Fawlty…

Mayo-Nay-Sayers

2008-07-10T14:36:00.007+01:00

(Note: I wrote this the other week, and then forgot to actually post it – hence the slightly dated Doctor Who reference. But I didn’t have the heart to leave it unposted. So here it is...)

First things first, did anyone see last Saturday’s Doctor Who?

Bloody brilliant, wasn’t it? Slightly mind-bending, in a Sliding Doors meets The Butterfly Effect kind of way, but absolutely awesome nonetheless. The concept that an entire, post-apocalyptic universe could be created on the back of a single decision to turn either right, or left, is something that has the ability to challenge the way we view our own decisions, and the implications and impact of the things we do is brought shuddering to the forefront of our minds.

Now consider this; Doctor Who is aimed at a family audience, deemed suitable for viewing by children, despite the often weighty themes of loss, death, revenge and retribution. I like to think that the reason these themes are allowed to exist so heavily in a programme aimed primarily at geeks (like me) and ten-year-olds, is that the average ten-year-old is not actually that thick, and is sufficiently equipped to deal with such concepts and emotions. It is because of this that I am filled with such apoplectic rage at Heinz’s decision to pull the ads for their new Deli Mayonnaise.

The ad, pulled as a result of over 200 complaints to Heinz, depicts a ‘typical’ domestic morning; kids and husband getting ready for school and work, while ‘mum’, played here by a De Niro-lookalike in chef’s whites and a, frankly shocking, white paper hat, prepares the packed lunches using Heinz’s new ‘delicious’ mayonnaise. The ad concludes with ‘dad’ planting a split-second peck on the bestubbled lips of poor, downtrodden ‘mum’ before leaving for work. Steamy stuff! Pass the bloody smelling salts.

Complaints have ranged from deeming the advert ‘offensive’, to the even more bemusing ‘unsuitable to be seen by children’, claiming that it raises the difficult problem for parents having to resultantly explain the issue of same-sex relationships to children. Aside from being ludicrous and knee-jerk-reactionary, these complaints are displaying a startling lack of understanding of the story the advert is trying to tell.

Forgive me if I’ve completely misinterpreted the ad, but the New York Deli Man in question is not actually supposed to be a man at all – the children call ‘him’ mum, and the husband reacts to ‘him’ as though ‘he’ (I’ll stop with the inverted commas, now – it’s doing my head in) were his wife, not his civil partner. So why on Earth does the question of same-sex relationships even need apply. If the basic premise of the advert is that the mayonnaise is so good that it has transformed mum from a bog standard cheese-and-pickle-peddler to a sandwich savant, then it would be safe to assume that the two little darlings are not actually coming home to daddy and daddy. As a result, the ad can be explained as simply as; ‘that’s not really a man, little Timmy, the advert is making a joke about the mayonnaise tasting the same as mayonnaise in New York, so they have changed the mummy into a New York sandwich man.’ It’s not rocket science, and it’s about as offensive as Les Dawson, dressed as a woman, hoisting his enormous padded boobies over a fence.

Moreover, if anything, surely feminists and women should be getting their knickers in a twist over the ad; poor old mum enslaved in sandwich hell, while her precocious little shits demand extra ham and two different types of mayonnaise, and her hubby neglects even to give her a cursory peck on the way out of the house. It could just as easily be an advert for Prozac.

The ludicrous irony of the entire storm-in-a-teacup is that the advert was already deemed ex-kid, as it promotes a product that is high in salt and sugar. Though I personally can’t remember ever nagging my mum to pick up some caramelised onion flavoured mayo on the weekly shop around Tesco’s, at least it’s slightly more valid to protect children from the evils of fatty mayonnaise than it is to protect them from the evils of a 70’s throwback comedy sketch.

The ad’s a bloody double-edged sword; don’t let kids see the fatty mayonnaise! Don’t let kids see the innocuous same-sex kiss! Don’t let kids hear the word ‘sweetcheeks’ before the watershed! Don’t let kids stay up after the watershed! Good grief. It’s over-sensitive hand-wringing at its absolute worst. But what’s worst of all, is that it treats children like idiots; as if they are totally unable to work out that most basic of concepts, that one person is pretending to be someone else. It’s not rocket science, and it certainly isn’t ‘the difficult issue of same-sex relationships’ sneaking through the back door (ooh err missus, etc...). It’s a mum, masquerading as a New York deli man, transformed by the e-numbery goodness of Heinz’s Deli Mayonnaise.

If we can trust kids with the notions of tri-sexual immortal Captain Jack Harkness, universe-hopping Rose Tyler and the double-hearted Doctor, then why can’t we trust them with a little same-sex peck on the back of a dated joke? In an increasingly over-sensitive and easy-to-offend society, the last thing we need to be doing is tearing apart innocent adverts, finding sex where it isn’t and preaching puritan values where they are neither valuable nor necessary. Adverts are adverts, they’re not real life, they’re not the News at Ten. They’re simply tiny little mindfucks designed to convince you to buy something. And if you’re going to allow yourself to take them too seriously, well, I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t cut the mustard* with me.

*apologies – I was desperate to make at least one condiment pun… so there it is.

What’s the Magic Word?

2008-06-23T13:54:00.013+01:00

‘Can I get a 1664, a Jerry and Coke and a white SoCo?’

Don’t worry if you’re a little confused, boys and girls, so was I. Despite sounding like something barked over the crash trolley of a hit-and-run victim on an episode of ER, the pin-headed dickwipe who had so woefully neglected his manners was actually demanding a pint of Kronenburg, a rum and coke and a Southern Comfort and Lemonade. I’d just started my summer job, and, horror of horrors, I’d found myself in politesse hell.

See, the other day I read I really, really scary story, and it didn’t have a happy ending. It was my bank statement. Weeks of unpaid work experience to boost my fledgling journalistic portfolio had left me with a balance that would have Little Nell throwing coppers into my begging bowl. So I bit the proverbial bullet and got myself a job. I thought that a bar job would be a glamorous, responsibility-free way to finance my summer, get the bank off my back and meet lots of trendy, fabulous new people. Instead, it appears to be an exercise in anger-management and code-breaking, peppered with cocks, cokeheads and braying, empty-headed money-wells armed only with smug slang and a distinct lack of English good manners.

Am I the only one who failed to notice drinks suddenly developing new, trendy nicknames? Without my knowledge or consent, they’ve become the alcoholic equivalent of J-Lo, P-Diddy and M-Dolla, and it makes a mockery of the entire bar service dynamic. You want speedy, efficient service? Then bloody ask for what you want! I don’t go into McDonalds and ask for a B-Macca, with P-chippies and a D-Coca, do I? Then why is it suddenly appropriate for you to ask for drinks in some sort of wankers’ code? Was there a committee? Some Berks’ Fellowship that decided that, given the bad press drinking alcohol has had of late, booze needed something of an image change? It’s not big, it’s not clever, and I don’t like it.

And what’s worse, this same Cocks’ Committee have decided, in their infinite wisdom, that these new, too-cool-for-school nicknames are so hip, so now, that they must be allowed to stand on their own in spoken sentences, unballasted by courtesy or politeness. It must have been around the time that Southern Comfort became SoCo that ‘may I have’ became ‘can I get’, and ‘please’ became ‘right fucking now’.

‘Can I get’ has oozed its way into the national voice in much the same way that ‘like’ has replaced ‘erm’, and what’s most ludicrous about it is that it doesn’t actually mean anything. The phrase turns me into a tooth-gnashing grammar-fascist because it is so bloody STUPID! ‘Can I get’ is contextually inaccurate when requesting something, as ‘can’ queries the ability to do something, and ‘get’ suggests the speaker actually getting something themselves. What these pseudo-American tossers are actually asking is if they have the physical ability to get themselves a drink. Quite possibly they can, but the service industry doesn’t work like that.

It’s easy to blame American TV for this dissolution of good manners; Friends introduced us to the notion of going for coffee in much the same way as it introduced us to the act of demanding it rudely. The difference with American and British manners, however, is that American courtesy doesn’t depend on the pleasantries, it depends on the pleasantness; the logic being that you don’t have to say please if you ask for something nicely. In London, we’ve seen the bastardisation of this concept; you don’t have to say please if you ask for something. Full stop. And it’s an idea that doesn’t hold with me: My mum is a big advocate for manners. Saying please and thank-you in so ingrained on my psyche that it is almost an involuntary nervous tic, like saying sorry to inanimate objects you bump into by mistake or to people who have stepped on your foot. She’s always in the back of my mind when I deal with people whose job it is to provide me with a service. I ask myself, what would she think if I spoke to someone like that in front of her. Or worse, what would I think if someone spoke to her like it?

After all, ‘Britishness’, for whatever the term is worth, is built on manners. A stiff upper lip and an pre-programmed inability to be rude. ‘Politeness at any cost’ is a dying concept, and I for one will mourn it.

If we’re going to assimilate American service culture into our own, then fair enough. I don’t like it, but I’m just one man, campaigning for pleases and thank-yous as politely and unintrusively as I possibly can. But if this trend for pseudo-rudeness is to continue, then could we at least take on the whole shebang – including the American propensity for tipping? At least then when you speak to me like I'm a piece of sticky chewing gum on the sole of your summer flip-flop, I know at least I’ll be getting 10% for the privilege.

So please, London, can I get some manners, right fucking now? Thanks. Sorry. Thanks…

No Man is an iLand

2008-05-26T19:48:00.000+01:00

Not being a crotchety old naysayer, it’s not often that I find myself warning others to be careful what they wish for. Unsurprisingly, it’s even less infrequent that I warn myself – after all, unless what I’m wishing for is a poke in the eye or some sort of debilitating brain disease that makes me soil myself sporadically and without warning, what harm could come from a little wishful thinking? My wishes tend to be small, obtainable, pocket-sized wishes; a gold card, for instance, or world peace, and yet, when I am confronted with exactly what I think I want, it often comes as a surprise just how bloody unsatisfying satisfaction can be.

I was having a whinge the other day, over some fridge-chilled Corona in an air-conditioned Soho bar, how our lives were becoming increasingly dependant on technology. Having some time earlier received a text message informing me that my friend would be late, (seven minutes, to be exact) I thought it prudent to ponder how the mobile phone had taken the place of good timekeeping and, more importantly, good manners. Before mobile phones made almost every social faux pas bar adultery and murder acceptable, when you made a plan you stuck to it; meeting at eight thirty did not mean meeting at nine and bringing Pablo from the post room with you, it meant arriving at eight twenty-five and liking it. Nowadays, lateness doesn’t even enter the equation; the mobile phone has become the electronic get-out-of-jail-free card, and the text message the king’s pardon du jour. Don’t fancy turning up? Sod it, send a text. After all, at least you’ve let them know, right?

Being something of an old romantic, I waxed lyrical about a time gone by when preparing to leave the house meant not forgetting your keys and your bus fare: The halcyon days when cash wasn’t viewed as a relic and not every phone box was a makeshift urinal seemed somehow blissful in the comfortable neon half-light of my temperate London boozery. Growingly increasingly indignant about society’s dependence on technology to excuse good old fashioned rudeness, I reminisced, ignoring for a minute the fact that were it not for my laptop, my mobile phone and my oyster card my little Soho soiree would not actually have happened, of a time before inter-personal contact was so immediate, relentless and detached. And then I told a great big fat stinker of a lie: I could live happily without it all – no mobile, no laptop, no internet. Nothing.

Imagine my surprise then, when, deprived of my broadband connection for a mere eight hours, I was plunged into, not only total social isolation, but also something resembling blind panic.

Dependency is a frightening enough concept when we apply it to people. We all like to convince ourselves that we are strong, independent and driven; standing on our own two feet, after all, is one of the pivotal moments of our early development. It’s even more terrifying when we apply it to things. While I, like most people, am essentially a creature of habit, it came as something of a shock to realise how isolated and, more worryingly, how deprived I felt for the simple fact that I could not access my email. Not having been denied food, water or fresh air, my indignation is retrospectively embarrassing and petty; all I’d really been denied was the ability to sit on my arse having my brain assaulted by a limitless wave of easily accessible nonsense. And yet indignant, to my abject horror, I remained.

No one likes realising what a hypocrite they actually are, or, indeed, what a mindless drone they have allowed themselves to become. Despite my earlier protestation that such technology had made us lazy, isolated and rude, without it I felt quite astonishingly ineffective, isolated and rude. Emails went unanswered, plans went unmade and gossip when unspread. And perhaps worst of all was the fact that I felt the need to justify my withdrawal; claiming that a lack of internet was preventing my from working from home (work which had neither arrived, nor had I any intention of actually doing) was my only means of legitimising what is, essentially, a rather worrying internet addiction.

Three hours and four phone calls to an automated recorded voice telling me that the problem ‘would be sorted later today’, I decided to pull myself together and reacquaint myself with the real world. Sipping a lukewarm hazelnut Americano in an artificially-lit jazz-pumping Starbucks with an old friend might not have been exactly the return to a simpler time I’d been pining for, but it was a distinct improvement on trying to connect with an inanimate, unresponsive grey box.

Going through the seven stages of grief for what is essentially a gateway to donkey porn and videos of women falling off of ladders is something I don’t want to repeat in a hurry. We may live in an increasingly secular and distant society, and emails, text messages and Facebook pokes may be the only way we communicate with people we’d otherwise drift apart from, but at what cost does this maintained electronic contact come? The realisation that my social life still existed beyond a rickety broadband connection was hardly a eureka moment, but it was necessary nonetheless; it reminded me that every second spent exchanging electronic vodka shots with vague acquaintances was a second that could be far more valuably spent cultivating and maintaining real, tangible relationships with real, tangible people. And so I closed the lid, flicked off the switch, and went outside to play.

Technology is undoubtedly a wonderful thing, but a little disentanglement was just the thing to blow the World Wide cobWebs away…

The Name Game

2008-05-05T19:08:00.006+01:00

Moses supposes his toeses are roses
But Moses supposes erroneously
for nobody's toeses are posies of roses
As Moses supposes his toeses to be.

When it comes to the naming of things, there seems to be something of a literary pre-occupation with the rose. If it’s not Moses supposing his toeses are roses (supposing, of course, erroneously), it’s Shakespeare’s Juliet pondering ‘What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.’ But whether we’re talking about roses, toeses or posies, names continue to be problematic; while they are little more than labels for things that are exactly the same without them, without them we are left in something of an existential identity crisis. Without names, all that distinguishes roses from toeses is the very fact of them being distinct, their physical, tangible difference. Without them, things are just that, things. Perhaps this is why we are thrown into such a quandary when names get changed.

I can still remember the nationwide sense of unease when Marathon bars became Snickers, when Jif became Cif and when Opal Fruits suddenly became Starburst. There was sufficient outcry when Coco Pops were inexplicably re-branded as Choco Crispies that Kellogg’s were forced to make a u-turn (perhaps Coup-Coup Pops may have been an appropriate rename in this instance). If Gertrude Stein is right, and a rose really is just a rose, then why do we get so worked up over what things are called?

I ask this in the light of a recent lobbying campaign taking place in East London that seeks to rename the soon-to-be-reopened Shoreditch High Street station ‘Banglatown’, in honour of the Bangladeshi cultural influence in the area. Despite a similar aborted campaign to have Aldgate East station renamed Brick Lane in 2006, supporters of the proposed change are arguing that such a change will make the area more accessible to tourists and serve to cement the cultural identity of the area. It’s a campaign with noble and understandable intentions, and one that poses the question of how important a name is to the cultural identity, or indeed the social relevance of the location it describes. If the clothes make the man, does the name really make the place?

You’d be rightly quick to point out that Chinatown in Soho does just that – labels a place unequivocally with the cultural background that it serves to represent – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a trend that ought to be unquestionably followed. Sure, renaming Shoreditch High Street station Banglatown would make it easier for tourists to locate Brick Lane and everything that comes hand in hand with this particular area in East London, but aside from setting an uncomfortable precedent for labelling locations with such definitive racial and cultural boundaries, doesn’t it also smack slightly of dumbing down? Are we in danger of turning London into one big theme park – a huge reproduction of the ‘it’s a small world’ ride at Disneyland? And if we are, why stop with Banglatown? Oxford Street is confusing enough, so why don’t we just call it Shopland? Soho might literally be dripping with connotative implication, but it could be clearer – Gaytopia, perhaps, or Shagsville?

The labelling of places might be problematic, but the labelling of people is, unsurprisingly, even more so. Somewhat further away, the Greek gay rights organisation The Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece has come under fire from campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos for their use of the term ‘lesbian’. The campaign, spearheaded by Lesbos publisher Dimitris Lambrou argues that the ‘international dominance of the word in its sexual context violates the human rights of the islanders, and disgraces them around the world.’ Lambrou insists that the worldwide sexualising of the term causes daily problems to the social lives of Lesbos’s inhabitants. Now, far be it for me to trivialise the embarrassment of 100,000 people, but with all the problems currently facing the world today, is that really the biggest thing they have to worry about?

The term lesbian entered the English vocabulary at the start of the 20th Century, and originates from the poet Sappho, who expressed her love for other women in her 7th Century BC poetry. This in mind – and all fatuousness aside – doesn’t it seem that the Lesbians have taken rather a long time to be offended about the lesbians? I mean, a really, really long time. I’d try to defer my offence next time someone calls me a dickhead for a hundred years, except I’d probably be dead, and that would be really, really quite petty.

Perhaps the most ludicrous part of the entire campaign is the reported intention to combat the use of the term worldwide if their campaign is successful. Talk about keeping your eyes on the bigger picture - Mary Whitehouse must be positively spinning in her grave that she never held such ambition.

It takes some stretch of the imagination to believe that insurmountable confusion arises from the duality of the term, even more so to believe that this duality brings the people of Lesbos disgrace. Are the Lesbian people really so soft-shelled? And if a capital letter isn’t enough to distinguish the terms (Lesbian referring to someone from Lesbos, lesbian referring to someone from Channel 4), shouldn’t some degree of maturity, acceptance and the common sense to rise above what is, frankly, puerile schoolboy humour provide sufficient defence against this perceived embarrassment? Frankly, if the Lesbians think they’ve got it bad, they should probably give some thought to the people of Fucking, Austria. They may find that the grass is actually greener on their side of the fence.

There is a fine line between using names as a means of identification and using them as a means of implication; I’ll concede that Shakespeare and Stein had something of a point, but I’ll venture that were roses in fact called shitblossom, we wouldn’t be in so much of a hurry to shove our schnozzes into them. But the responsibility must be placed firmly at our own doors – words only have as much power as we let them; the continued taboo surrounding the word c*nt is evidence enough of this, so perhaps if we just remember that a word is a word is a word, just as a name is a name is a name, we’ll be better defended against the damage the labels we create can do.

After all, sticks and stones may break our bones, but names will never hurt us.

From Rush Hour, with Love

2008-05-01T20:46:00.003+01:00

I’ll start by admitting a personal weakness of mine: I have a pathological, nut-shrinking phobia of lateness.

Some might say that I’m a pessimist, but I am a firm believer in the old adage that anything that can go wrong, will. It’s not that I’m a glass-half-empty kind of man, it’s just that I am convinced that life, society, shoelaces and embarrassing splashes on your crotch from over-zealous taps are all lurking in the wings, waiting to strike me down and delay me in my mission to arrive at any given destination at any given time. It’s sod’s law – you’re running slightly behind time, and bang, you can’t find your keys. Oversleep and the Jubilee Line is almost guaranteed to be out of service due to an exploding rat or some selfish loon throwing themselves in front of the 7.59 to Stanmore.

I’m not even sure where this fear comes from, since I am in the unenviable position of being in a social circle with people whose idea of punctuality is remembering to turn up at all. My closest friends are all habitually late to everything, and despite being aware of this fact, I am utterly, unbreakably obsessed with arriving exactly on time.

So it will come as no surprise to you that I am no good when it comes to travelling. Actually, more accurately, I am probably the world’s worst traveller. When it comes to wandering, I am a pro; I can meander with the best of them, and strolling, well, what I don’t know about strolling doesn’t need knowing. But travelling, actually journeying to a given destination and, more worryingly, a given time, transmogrifies me from a reasonably level headed man to Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit on speed.

My obsession with tardiness frequently puts me in a negative, neurotic light. I remember a particularly awful, blue-faced screaming row I had in Central Park, terrified of missing a flight that wasn’t leaving for eight hours with the same discomfort that comes with recalling my six hour ‘power nap’ on the floor of Birmingham station, thanks to my conviction I’d miss my connecting train, and thus a job interview that was so chronologically distant that it had a different zodiac sign. Lateness brings me out in a cold, panicked sweat, and the fact that so frequently my arriving on time is placed outside my own control is something of a bone of contention for me. Not to put to fine a point on it, boys and girls, but I’m a terrible, terrible traveller.

So as a Londoner, and a commuter, ‘rush hour’ is some kind of Kafka-esque nightmare; some kind of perverse torture, geared entirely to my personal terror of lateness; the sort of sick game Jigsaw might think up for one of his victims in Saw. But it’s a necessary evil; as much as I hate getting from A to B via some as-yet-unnamed circle of hell, I happen to love money, and the myriad joys it can bring. So if all that stands between me and a margarita or a spangly new top is the relentless indignity of a London rush hour, then so be it. What really, really troubles me about rush hour is that no one appears to be in anything even resembling a rush.

The poster for Simon Pegg’s critically acclaimed Shaun of the Dead depicts loveable anti-hero Shaun on a tube, surrounded by the teeming undead. Beyond the obvious nod to the relentless mindless shambling of the commuting masses, I think Pegg has something of a point. There’s plenty of shambling to be seen; there’s even a great deal of shuffling, creeping and trundling, but rushing? Don’t bet your life on it.

Most of us have had the misfortune of taking a packed bus or tube to work, so it would be self-indulgent of me to describe it… actually, sod it, I’m going to. It’s just one soul-crushing indignity after another: if you’re not spending the journey avoiding the eye of some old soak screaming at his own sleeve and stinking of vomit, you’re crushed, crotch to sweaty crotch and face to armpit with someone whose idea of personal hygiene is to turn their pants inside out and clean their teeth with a dead rat. In short, it’s grim. So very, very grim. The daily commute is madness, and I, for one, don't want to go among mad people.

So why aren’t we in more of a hurry to get away? Why are we constantly stopping? Why can’t we stand to the right on escalators? Why can’t we walk in a bloody straight line? Why, London, why? Why are you all always in my bloody way?

I could continue to rant forever, but because I like to think I’m something of a well-rounded individual, I’ll put it into perspective: removing the need to work, to earn money, to survive and to shop – were we faced with the offence-to-all-five-senses that is rush hour outside of the daily grind, wouldn’t we be in some sort of hurry to escape it? Of course we would. So take that logic, and apply it to rush hour; stop pausing and looking around as if the scenery is suddenly going to stop being a beige seventies nightmare and somehow transform into that scene from end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit when the wall collapses and all the cartoon animals run in – it’s not going to. Stop standing to chat on the escalators; there are dozens of beautiful parks and a hundred million Starbucks, go to one, and chat beyond the smell of stale air and hostile aggression.

What we need to do is stop stopping, and start bloody rushing. Get your skates on, Londoners, and discover your inner White Rabbit. Trust me, you’ll get to Wonderland far quicker that way.

Misspeak when you’re misspoken to

2008-04-06T20:58:00.003+01:00

The other day my brain swallowed a word. Completely swallowed it.

I was on the phone, trying to make plans for the weekend with a good friend of mine, not famed for his flexibility, when I completely, utterly and irretrievably forgot the word ‘provisional’. The word had gone from the tip of my tongue right down my gullet, and now sits somewhere in-between my mind’s intestines and its arse.

I know what you’re thinking; how bad could it have been? It was only the word provisional; How often do you use that, you empty-headed bumpkin? And that’s as maybe, but have you ever tried to explain your intention to work out a provisional plan, without using the magical P word? It’s not as easy as you might think. My conversation ran thus:

Him: So, shall we say one o’clock then?
Me: Yeah, but can we make it a…
My mind: …
Me: One of those plans that you make, but probably might not keep.

Probably might not keep? What was my brain thinking? Of all of the infinite combinations of words our beautiful, ridiculous language offers us, I couldn’t think of a more sensitive, or indeed accurate combination than that? Not only had I made myself sound phenomenally thick, I’d committed one of life’s most fatal social sins: I’d spoken, when I should have misspoken.

Now we like to think that misspeaking is just a nice way of saying ‘lying’. And while I’m inclined to agree, I don’t think that makes it a bad thing. A misspeak is generally a gentle little appeasement, a way of making someone think they’ve got their own way, when really you’ve got yours. And what’s more, it’s a victimless crime: Just like saying ‘I’ll call you’ or ‘we’ll have to go for a coffee sometime’, when what you really mean is 'I never want to see you again' or 'I really, really don't want to ever see you, ever, ever again', making a ‘provisional’ plan is just a get-out-of-jail-free card for poor organisational skills. A misspeak, if anything, is a gentle way of presenting a slightly harsher, if more accurate, truth.

Hillary Clinton came under fire recently, ironically enough, for not coming under fire. She claimed that the welcoming ceremony of a 1996 official trip to Bosnia had to be abandoned due to the somewhat unwanted attentions of a sniper and his boomstick. Hillary said: ‘I remember landing under sniper fire […] There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.’ Unfortunately for Hillary, whose pants were well and truly ablaze by this point, there exists plenty of television footage of the ceremony: We see her arriving, smiling, and waving. There’s even a sweet little girl reading her a poem and giving her a bunch of flowers, and categorically not trying to take her out with a well-placed bullet in the noggin.

Rather than throwing her hands up and admitting that she’d spun a yarn to make her sound a little more hardcore, Hillary explained that she had mis-spoken; that the fatigues of a long campaign meant that she had misremembered, obviously confusing her own life with that of Jack Bauer.

We all do it, misremember our past; its just a way of cutting out all the boring stuff and making the slightly-less boring stuff palatable to the minds and ears of others. Misremembering is just a recollection of bog-standard real life, but directed by Steven Spielberg; the dull bits cut out, and the interesting bits stretched to their exciting, rock-and-roll star capacity.

An example: Another friend of mine and I were in a club a few weeks back, when she fell victim to the amorous intentions of a man old enough to be her really pervy uncle, yet we both recount the story entirely differently. When I tell it, I rescued her with casual bravery and brute strength; when she remembers it, I panicked, flapped and squeaked while she admonished Uncle Kissyface ‘til he fled, confused and distraught. But that’s what misremembering (and cans of Red Stripe) will do to you; it puts you centre-stage in your own cognitive drama: Nobody wants to be an extra in the soap opera of their life, they want to be the star.

My mum always says that honesty is the best policy. Of course, I agree. And I’m not saying we should go around telling great big whoppers all day, making ourselves out to be Superman when we’re really just Clark Kent, but there’s something to be said for adding a little drama to the proceedings. Thankfully for we mere mortals, there are rarely camera crews following us around to expose our little mis-remembrances. Unfortunately for Hillary, when the eyes of the world’s press are firmly upon you, it doesn’t pay to be the presidential wannabe who cried sniper.

Misspeaking is fine in the real world; friends and family expect, nay hope, that the boring minutiae of your tedious little life is peppered with some interesting titbits, but when you want to become president of one of the world’s most powerful countries, it might be prudent to keep it simple, and save the tall tales for brunch with the girls.

A misspeak - to misquote Carrie Bradshaw – might just be a lie in a cuter outfit, but frankly, I’d prefer to see Hillary trussed up in a boring, honest business suit. Joe Bloggs is at luxury to accessorise the ins and outs of his life with embellishment. Presidential candidates are not. So, Hillary, leave the sartorial stuff to the plebs, eh?

The S Word

2008-03-19T12:03:00.011Z

Okay boys and girls, I’m about to tell you a scary story, so you might want to read this with your eyes closed. In fact, if you’re under eighteen, might I suggest you don’t read this at all, or at least get your parent/slash/guardian to sign a release or something; if you go bonkers and start clubbing baby seals to death, I don’t want the blame. All sorted? Are we sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin:

Once upon a time, people smoked. And they lived, and died, happily ever after.

What? What do you mean that’s not that scary? It’s bloody terrifying! You’re telling me that the fact there’s smoking going on out there doesn’t make you fill your pants in the most pooey of ways? See, there’s a new swear word in town; it begins with S, and appropriately enough, it rhymes with joke. I refer, of course, to the new initiative set out by anti-smoking group SmokeFree Liverpool, who are pushing, with support from the city council for all movies with smoking scenes to be given an automatic 18 certificate. Call me alarmist, but doesn’t that seem a bit strong? It called to mind a story I read all the way back in 2003, when some unnamed US poster companies airbrushed a cigarette from the hand of Paul McCartney (yes, him again) on the iconic cover to the Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover. It’s one thing trying to promote a healthy smoke-free future – but denying a hoarse, phlegmy smoke-fuelled past is another kettle of fish altogether. People smoked. It’s a fact that’s not going to change with a fancy photoshopping job, and until cigarettes are banned outright, forcing them underground and turning nicotine immediately into the most-used illegal drug in the UK, people will continue to do so. It’s already illegal to advertise tobacco in the UK, which is directly promoting it, but in censoring the very act of smoking, are we not setting a rather dangerous precedent of not only what it is legal to do, but also of what it is legal to see?

SmokeFree Liverpool’s argument is that viewing smoking scenes at the cinema encourages the young to smoke. Dr Stacey Anderson, who carried out the new pilot study for SmokeFree Liverpool claims that ‘[i]n 2006, around 1650 11 to 17 year olds in Liverpool started smoking because of exposure to smoking in films’. Are young people in this country really so muffin headed that the sight of some Hollywood bimbo chugging away on the big screen is enough to whip them into a tobacco-hungry frenzy? Cigarette packets now come adorned with health warnings that take up around 50% of the packaging; why isn’t that enough? Does our every waking experience really need to be protected from the great smoky threat? Are we really that weak-willed, knuckle-dragging and downright thick? The smoking ban in England came into force in July 2007, forcing those who choose to smoke out of bars, clubs, cafes and bus shelters out onto the streets, and that’s just fine. Were it not for the smoking ban we wouldn’t have smokalising, or smirting, and nightclubs wouldn’t smell of wee and farts. I suppose the idea behind SmokeFree is that it paves the way for a genuinely smoke-free society, as opposed to a society where smokers are just the smelly grey elephants stuck out in the corner. In the rain. But unfortunately for those who seek to slap an 18 certificate onto films with smoking scenes, it’s a lot harder to censor real life. Take a walk through any given street in London today, and you will see swathes of smokers, huddled for warmth and acceptance, the new social pariahs, making their vice visible.

Disney have apparently declared that smoking scenes in their future family films would be ‘non-existent’. And why not? – no one wants to see Mickey and Donald sparking up after a heavy night on the tiles any more than they want to see Minnie’s drink getting spiked or Daisy Duck being slapped with an ASBO. That’s just common sense. It’s one thing declaring to cut smoking out of our future, but to censor it from the past is an entirely more scary prospect. Ignoring famous Disney chugger Cruella De Vil for a moment, let’s think back to a little puppet boy who made some stupid choices. The 1940 Disney feature Pinocchio features a scene where the little wooden boy turns sickly green after a puff on a huge comedy cigar. Why not replace all smoking scenes with that? It’s hardly glamorising smoking, and, if I remember rightly, within the next five minutes, poor old Pinocchio sprouts a pair of ass’ ears, while his more nicotine-hungry chums go to full hog (so to speak) and transform into braying little donkeys. Daniel Craig commented on the fact that smoking scenes had been cut from the latest Bond movie Casino Royale that ‘I can blow someone's head off but I can't light a good cigar.’ But you can, Danny Boy, just as long as after that first puff you turn green and grow donkey’s ears, highlighting your foolishness and appeasing the hand-wringing anti-smoking apologists.

But why stop there? Mr. Craig has a point; why should we be able see him blow someone’s head off, but not see him enjoy a snout? Cut the bloody lot of it out. The violence. The swearing. The sex. The god-awful, unforgivable smoking! Sure the SAW films would be a lot shorter, and more than a bit pointless, but Bambi would have a far happier ending.

It’s a tough fact for the anti-smoking lot to deal with, that some people smoke, and some people look cool doing it. Some people look cool riding motorbikes, and some people die doing that. And, much like smokers, they have to do that outside in the rain, too. Here’s a suggestion, stop selling cigarettes to under eighteens, ask for ID if necessary, because the last time I checked, James Bond wasn’t working behind the counter in my local Sainsbury’s…

Whatever, Heather

2008-03-17T21:08:00.006Z

And so the Heather Mills Anger Circus trundles ever on, reaching yet-another pseudo-conclusion outside court today, with the perpetually-outspoken Ms. Mills (appearing somewhat appropriately as a fashion-conscious power-dressing clown) declaring her intention to appeal not the generous award of £24.3 million with which she will walk away from her four-year marriage to Paul McCartney, but rather the publication of the full ruling, claiming she is doing so due to security concerns for her daughter. Call me cynical, but considering that dear old Mucca was originally angling for £125 million of Thumbsaloft’s widely-overestimated £800 million pound fortune (the real figure according the court is closer to £400 million, which more than explains his widely rumoured stinginess…), I find it extraordinarily hard to believe that she is ‘very, very happy’ with the decision to award her only a fifth of what she believed she was rightly due. And beyond this, considering that one of the reasons cited for the 2002 Mills-McCartney marriage split was media intrusion into their private lives, it smacks as a tiny bit hypocritical that Heather so lengthily lapped up the media scrum as she left court earlier today.

Try as I might, there’s something about Heather Mills that makes me completely unable to feel in the slightest bit sorry for her. I can happily accept that Paul McCartney was not a particularly wonderful husband, and that the continual media intrusion into their marriage may have contributed to their split. But even with these facts in mind, it is almost impossible for me to view her as a sympathetic character. The much-viewed and talked about GMTV interview, which I am convinced Ms. Mills believed would drum up enormous amounts of sympathy for her and her obscenely rewarding divorce settlement, made her look exhausted, yes; fed up, certainly; but a victim? Not on your nelly. The problem with Heather-as-victim is that she’s too gutsy for the role she seems determined to cut out for herself. We know that she’s done tonnes of work for ‘charidee’ for the last ‘twennyeer’, and we know that the media would have us believe that she is a wicked, grasping old witch trying to wring the last pennies out of good old ex-Beatle-national-treasure Paul McCartney, but for the love of god, woman, give it a rest! Do not rattle on about the enormous amount of charity work you do, and then go on to complain that the £35,000 a year your divorce settlement grants for your daughter’s upkeep means that she will no longer be able to fly first class. Be annoyed by all means that you might not have got as much dosh as you wanted, but crikey Heather, don’t be such a hypocrite!

We all know the uncomfortable duality of womanhood in the media – you can be a virgin or a whore, a bitch or a victim. That’s just how it works. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s how it is. And unfortunately for Heather, you can’t be both. You can’t spend twenty years acting the all-action heroine, the model doing charity work in the face of her own personal tragedy, raising awareness for landmines, for animal welfare and for disability to then turn around and cry in the face of the big bad media for depicting you as an evil, money-grabbing whore. What on earth did the woman expect? The UK media have a certain fondness for the aging rocker and a perverse fascination with the kiss-and-tell gold-digger – just look at the rose-tinted way tree-bothering Keith Richards is portrayed in the press in comparison to the way Pete Doherty (disgusting and shiny though he is) is demonised. Or the way the papers saw to it the spud-faced trollop who shagged Ashley Cole despite his vomiting all over her at the terrifying prospect was financially rewarded for ruining his marriage, only to guiltily wring their hands at poor Cheryl’s resultant plight. The media is a cruel mistress, and it is courted at your peril.

No one is going to believe Heather Mills when she claims that she is happy about the decision to award her a meagre £24.3 million, why would they? She spent eighteen months building up a portfolio against the media, the press, the paparazzi who hound her, her neighbours and the dog they accused her of killing, but she seemed to overlook one thing – she wasn’t in court against them – she was in court against mean old McCartney, all deep pockets, short arms and rigor-mortised thumbs. If they lie about you, Heather, expose the lies, but do not go into histrionics on breakfast television; it is unseemly, and it gives those that are more than happy to present you as a raving, lying lunatic only more ammunition. Where has all the class and dignity gone? The Heather we saw in between the bit where you got your knockers out and the bit where you went a bit Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction? If you really are happy with how things turned out in court, then have the balls to let go of it all. Go back to your daughter, and your charity work, and move on with your life. Start making good use of the money your apparently joyless marriage earned you, and enjoying the comfortable lifestyle you now have the luxury of.

The gagging order on the personal trivialities of the case will see to it that the press will never stop Heather being presented as the woman who tried to gold-dig a Beatle out of his hard-earned fortune and lost, the woman who advocated drinking rats’ milk (though the quote was taken ludicrously out of context), the liar, the mad fantasist who bit off more than she could chew, overly-confident in her own abilities. Not, that is, until she makes a turn-around. Come on H, change from a bitch to a real victim – chuck out your ring-binders and marry a young slip of a thing, who in four years’ time will divorce you, blaming press intrusion and fleece you to the tune of £1.5 million (which translates, roughly, to about the same proportion of Paul’s money she will soon be enjoying). Or, more appealing, just go back to being a gutsy bitch. No more raving, no more tears. Not even you can put a positive spin on what has been the most unnecessarily drawn-out, speculated-about and rumour-mongering divorce of recent years, so stop trying. You’re the villain in this soap opera, so maybe it’s time you switched channels.

Crikey, I got through all of that and didn’t make a single shitty Beatles pun… I won’t even try to squeeze one in – I’ll just Let It Be… oh bugger.

Between a Roquefort and a hard place

2008-03-15T19:24:00.004Z

As children, we’re often told that if we don’t have anything nice to say, we shouldn’t say anything at all. Now, as far as philosophies go, it’s a fairly inoffensive one, but it’s boring, and it’s restrictive. There’s nothing wrong with saying something that offends, so long as we realise that offence may be taken. Why aren’t we encouraged to say what we think, but to do so with sensitivity? Or to speak our minds but be prepared to be challenged, and to view conflicting viewpoints with humility and respect? Surely that makes more sense than sitting in resentful silence?

I ask this, predictably enough, sitting in resentful silence. See, I’m embroiled in a cold war, and it shows little sign of thawing out.

The reason for this clash of wills? Cheese. I’d opened some cheese, and with it a bloody enormous can of worms. Who knew a block of innocuous yellow moo-fat could cause such turmoil, such frostiness, such dismay? Winston Churchill is often quoted as saying that ‘To jaw-jaw is better than to war-war’, and, while I’m in no way comparing the Second World War to a block of Tesco mature cheddar, I can sort of see his point. Now don’t get me wrong, a hot war I can deal with: I’m a big fan of the old-fashioned barney, I always have been. Even when the bone of contention is cheese-coated, nothing blows the cobwebs away quite like a nice, irrational slanging match; a few badly-chosen words, some unmeant insults and one or two less-than-glamorous swear words, teamed with a slammed door here and there are wonderful for releasing tension. But the cheese debate seemed to be unwinnable; my opponent is convinced that I ate the cheese as some sort of passive-aggressive dairy-based warfare. How can you logicise an argument about cheese? What debate can make it seem in the least bit worthwhile? I fall at the first hurdle; that being the fact that it’s just cheese. It’s. Just. Cheese. Say it aloud. Say it aloud ten times. Bask in it’s smallness, the farce of it all.

But the cheese debate just wouldn’t die. Still it sits between us, all cheddary and frustrating.

Of course we’ve all argued about things that seem retrospectively ridiculous. Sweating over the petty stuff makes a lot more sense when you’re pumped full of adrenaline and screaming blue murder. I remember a particularly hideous row with a friend over the theme of a fancy dress party. Or the time my brother got drunk and raised his voice in the silent quad of an Oxford college (It was embarrassing and no, raising my voice to illustrate this point was not just as bad). Heated arguments are silly, but they go at least some way to getting that silliness out in the open. The real problem arises when the hot war turns cold.

It’s a cliché, yes, but the thing with grudges is that the longer you leave them the worse they get. They fester and grow mouldy and unsalvageable, like cheese that no one will eat. Like cheese that everyone is pissed off about, and so leave, out of principal, to go bad and become useless. And they turn you more than a little bit mental. Every little thing your grudge does annoys you. Just look at them, you think. Look! The smug tosser; partying, having friends, making large charitable donations to starving children. The nasty prick. And they’re only doing it to spite you! They are! The cold war is fuelled by paranoia – I once convinced myself that a friend I’d fallen out with was taking a long, expensive and by all accounts stressful trip halfway across the world just to prove a point to me. She wasn’t, of course, that would be absolutely ridiculous, but I was cross and she was in Japan. And we weren’t talking.

That’s the problem with cold wars. The silence. It’s a lot easier to see things from your point of view when no one is telling you just how ridiculous you sound. So talk about it. By all means stop fighting; hot wars end in pain, anguish and upset, but don’t let it go cold. Or silent. All silence does is allow what’s annoyed you to be overtaken by the very act of being annoyed. And it’s all very self-indulgent. Almost as self-indulgent as writing about it for all the world to see.

The harsh fact of the matter is that it’s impossible to walk away from an argument about cheese without getting egg on your face. So I suppose its time I accepted that, and took some of Mr. Churchill’s advice. I’ll stop there, before it all gets too cheesy to stand. I’ll be vitriolic next time, I promise…

Oh and I know I’ve more than mixed my food metaphors, but that’s a mere trifle in the face of things, no?

What if starting at the very beginning wasn't such a very good place to start?

2008-02-27T20:56:00.008Z

I find there’s something intrinsically terrifying about a blank canvas. (This one, thankfully, is no longer blank, so I can stop writing this from behind the sofa). And I don’t mean terrifying in the same way that clowns are terrifying, or white tights on fat girls are terrifying; I mean a more practical, corporeal terror; the sort of dread I feel as a left-hander when presented with a greetings card and an inky pen, or my sartorial panic in the face one of those little pots of UHT milk, or a sachet of mayonnaise when I’m wearing black slacks. My fear of blank canvases is one that I’ll stand by, so you can stop your scoffing right there; It’s the practical terror of a mistake not yet made – a protectionist fear of the inevitable cock-up. Because a blank canvas isn’t just the physical manifestation of potential to be realised, you simpering hippies, quite the opposite; a blank canvas is the grim-faced, stone-hearted mother of all potential fuck-ups. Like offering Amy Winehouse the keys to your local Superdrug, it’s an accident, just waiting to happen.

Now of course I don’t just mean canvas canvases; I’m not Rolf bloody Harris. I’m equally troubled by a new notebook, a blank Document1, with it’s blinking, expectant cursor and that smug cartoon paperclip raising its eyebrows at me and thinking ‘illiterate tosser’, an exercise book before its been spoiled by my pre-teen handwriting and penchant for smudgery. And more importantly than all these things, I’m troubled by that most chronological of exercise books; time. What if that blank canvas is an hour, a day, a career, or, even more terrifyingly, a life? Lao-Tzu gave us the philosophy that ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.’ I’m not thick, I see the beauty of the sentiment, but something tells me that had Lao-Tzu’s first step been straight into a gigantic, steaming dog turd, he wouldn’t feel quite so optimistic.

A recent graduate, I am acutely aware of false sense of security university blankets its mollycoddled inhabitants in. When your greatest worry is where your next flaming sambucca is coming from, and why fat Tracey hasn’t called you back, (it’s probably because you’ve given her Chlamydia, you dirty little bastard) the real world, and the endless array of blank life-canvasses it presents you with, seems like a distant, fictional future. A future based on real events, but fictional nonetheless. Now a reality, my inability to pick a path no longer represents romanticized loucheness, the embracing of a bohemian lifestyle of gin and formation dancing more akin to a Baz Luhrmann film. To the contrary, it marks me out as a lazy tramp; the sort of coasting unreliable lowlife that would rather sit in eggy tracksuit bottoms and try to sneak out a cheeky wank in-between Richard and Judy and Loose Women. The oft-repeated promise that the world would be my oyster now hangs heavy over me, more a blood-curdling threat than a heart-warming reassurance. The problem with oysters, see, is that you crack one open expecting a nice shiny pearl, and more often than not you just end up with a mouthful of fish snot.

When everything that could go wrong might, starting at the very beginning suddenly seems like quite a shitty place to start, so Julie Andrews can shove that sentiment right up her arse, the smug cow. Starting in the middle, or more importantly, seeing through to the end, seems like a much nicer idea from where I’m standing.

I like to think this discomfort with the newness of it all is because I’m one of life’s ditherers – treating every tiny decision as though the world depended on it. Yet in reality, I am acutely aware of the fact that the fate of mankind isn’t balanced on the timing of my next fart; the intricate workings of the world, nay universe, couldn’t give the tiniest of fucks what colour socks I wear in the morning, or whether I should go for hazelnut or vanilla syrup in my latte. I am inconsequential; a freckle on the bum of humanity. And yet still I dither, in continual fear that my next mistake will be the one that tips the balance and sends it all to buggery. The problem with making mistakes is that, however fixable they are, it’s impossible to un-make them. Like the ghost of rubbed out pencil, they mark out your failures, jeering at you from the sidelines like the annoying superhero’s sidekick you wish would just get killed off.

Gondry, Kaufman and Bismuth’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was on the right track – though a mind-wipe smacks just a little-too-much of a papering over the cracks, if you ask me. What we need is some sort of Autosave for life; an existential System Restore acting as a get-out clause for fuck-ups. We’ll call it Mistakeaway, as in 'Ooh heck, I’ve just dropped my baby down a well – I’m popping out for a Mistakeaway. Want anything?' Those leaps into the unknown wouldn’t be half as scary if you were only a flick-of-a-switch away from innocence. Stuck in a job you hate? No problem – just alt-control-delete yourself back to school – Play-Doh is much more fun than telesales! Cheat on your missus? Just beep-beep-delete that guilt (and genital herpes) away! Let’s do away with mistakes, and culpability, and responsibility! Let’s do away with all that bloody dithering.

Of course, it’s entirely possible to do away with dithering without Mistakeaway. A friend of mine recently faced a potentially enormous, life-changing decision, and he explained it to me thus:

The fact that it’s so hard to decide just shows me that there isn’t a right answer. Whatever I choose will be right in it’s own way.

(I know what you’re thinking – self-righteous tosser, right? No? Just me? Tough crowd…) But I think he was onto the right idea. Sometimes you can’t always see the bigger picture, and every now and again the box is a little too large to think outside. So you weigh it up, and you take a risk. Fail, and you pick up the pieces and you start again. Different canvas. Different picture.

Before you go thinking I’ve gone all soft on you before I’ve even begun, I’m just easing you in. It is a blank canvas, after all. Now where did I put that Tipp-Ex..?