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*.

Gissa Job

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

“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

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…

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.

The S Word

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

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

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?