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

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

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

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

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

There’s no business like Snow Business

“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

No Man is an iLand

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…

From Rush Hour, with Love

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.

Between a Roquefort and a hard place

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?

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..?