Vacant Mind

Stephen………….

2011-09-24T16:53:00.001+01:00

Around the start of April I had someone new move in.

It was early one morning and I stumbled half asleep into my bathroom to take a shower. As I stood there with the water hitting my face, muttering, “You can do this” and trying not to fall back asleep under the soothing warm flow, I turned around with shampoo in my hair to see a tiny spider building a web in my open bathroom window.

Now my normal reaction when seeing any spider is to let out a non-manly scream, run around for a bit with flapping hands, and then find the nearest rolled up magazine to twat the little bastard into oblivion, and this was the exact same reaction I had when I saw my new housemate for the first time. So as I stood there with a bottle of Lynx shower gel in my hand, ready to unleash furious, yet great smelling, vengeance on the home intruder, something magical happened that made me stop and actually watch him.

The effort that this tiny creature was making in creating a new home for himself was phenomenal. His little body was contorting left and right as he spun little threads from himself, hooking others with his legs and connecting them up, building something beautiful right in front of my eyes. I must have lost myself for at least five minutes in just watching this amazing feat of nature taking place before me, until the sudden realisation hit me that I was in fact standing soapy and stark bollock naked in from of my window for all my neighbours to see, and quickly ducked down out of sight before they called the police.

As I dried myself off, the spider was still building and I just simply didn’t have the heart to destroy it and the new home it was making. The almost superspider effort that it took to even get the basics of the web up and running was almost too pure and good for my stupid and ignorant hands to tear down. So after wishing it: good luck, I got ready for work and forgot all about it.

When I returned home, the web was complete and the small spider was sitting proudly in the centre, tiny legs splayed out around it to detect the stirring of anything stupid enough to fly into its strands. The web swayed gently in the Spring air, a monument to hard work, unwavering self belief, and the heart rending beauty of the natural world.

There was no way I was getting rid of it. What right did I have? When had I ever creating anything half as beautiful as this?

“I shall call you......... Stephen,” I said with awe in my voice, feeling as if we were going to live together, he might as well have a name.

So Stephen he was.

Stephen and I began cohabiting in an almost serene sense of bonhomie. Every morning I would jump into my shower after wishing Stephen a “Good morning” and upon seeing me he would bounce up and down in his web, shaking his miniature body into a blur of motion. Now those of you armed with “facts” will tell me that spiders do this in their natural habitat to warn off predators when they get too near their webs. This is false. Stephen did it because he was pleased to see me every morning. That’s what it was, yeah? Deal with it.

As I showered every morning, Stephen would dodge steam, flying droplets, and the sight of my naked body (easy ladies). He began to see me at all stages of my daily routine. When I was half asleep in the morning, just before I went to bed sleepily at night, getting ready to go out, coming in tired from work, coming home drunk, he saw it all. And he never judged, nor passed comment like others would. He either hung there, getting fat from all the insects that passed near the open window, or would retreat to the tiny crack between the window and wall, where he would sleep, the only evidence of him being tiny legs just sitting on the threads of his home.

He also became part of my home.

I had never formed a friendship with an insect before (there was one time when I got close to a woodlouse, but in many ways, neither of us really want to talk about that much anymore), but this arachnid became a regular staple of my daily life. He was something constant, always there in the background, and it surprised me how OK I was with this and how quickly I accepted it.

And then yesterday, something happened.

I got into my shower and did my morning ritual of turning to see how Stephen was.

He wasn’t good.

H e was moving sluggishly in the centre of his web, fumbling to latch onto the different strands with weak legs. It was obvious something was wrong, but there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t help him; all I could do was watch.

After giving him one final glance, I left for work. When I returned home, the web was empty. I peered into his little home in the gap by the window, but could see any evidence of him.

Stephen was gone.

When I got into my shower this morning, Stephen was back. He hung silently in the centre of his web; body a tiny husk, devoid of any life. I stopped and blinked for a few moments. I actually felt a bit, sad? I’d seen this tiny creature grow and mature over the last few months and now I was privy to his death, it didn’t feel right. It felt stupid to be sad over an insect, but it was such a short life for any creature.

I opened the window wider, pulling apart his ever familiar web, and a gentle morning Autumn breeze caught his frail body and carried it away like a dead leaf as I watched it tumble away.

Having such a close proximity to something that would normally exist far outside my life has taught me two things.

1) That all life, no matter how small or insignificant, plays out in exactly the same way. You’re born, you struggle to make a home for yourself, and then you try and survive the best you can before you die. So it’s up to you to try and make the best of every single opportunity that takes place throughout that journey. No one else will do it for you; it won’t be handed on a plate. Stephen taught me that.

2) I really need to get out a bit more and talk to real people. I made friends with a spider.

Stephen, it was far too short, but it was an experience knowing you.

What's All This Ear Then?………..

2011-06-19T14:44:00.003+01:00

Ever since I was born I have always suffered from problems with my ears.

Now, when I say problems, I don’t mean with the actual ears themselves. They aren’t deformed or grotesque or anything like that. In fact they are quite cute. Tiny little things with pointy up ends, they look like elf ears. Maybe not so hot for the ladies, but if I ever decided to join up with those weirdo's who like to decamp to the nearest forest and re-enact the complete works of Tolkien, then I have a fairly good idea whose side I would be forced to go on.

No, my problems stems from what goes on inside the actual ears themselves. I’m a bit deaf you see.

I was born with a perforated eardrum in my left ear. Now when you normally get a hole in your eardrum it slowly closes over time. Sadly, mine wouldn’t, which resulted in a fair bit of hearing loss and an almost pathological fear of getting water in it, as it hurt like a bastard afterwards.

Being deaf sucks.

I lead a normal life, don’t need a hearing aid or anything like that. My hearing borders just on a level where I can function perfectly with what I have. But it does mean though that I miss out on certain things that go on around me. Certain environments are a nightmare to circumnavigate as I quite often won’t have a clue as to what's being said. I struggle with certain pitches, more so with female voices than male, and I definitely struggle with large groups, as it is sometimes hard to pinpoint certain voices over others.

One of the worst places for me to be is nightclubs. I realised that when I attempted to be a weapon of mass seduction in my teens, the art of seduction is virtually impossible when you have absolutely no idea as to what is going on.

“So, are you going to buy me a drink then?”

“WHAT?”

“I said, are you going to buy me a drink?”

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, WHAT DO I THINK? WHAT DO I THINK ABOUT WHAT?”

“No, drink!”

“YES PLEASE, I’D LOVE ONE!”

Nightclubs weren’t the best place for meeting the ladies really.

Even now I still get myself into awkward social situations, quite simply because I can’t hear what's being said to me. I get fed up with saying “Pardon” all the time as it makes me feel like a complete tool, so my normal method to try and get myself out of these situations is to try and bluff my way through of them. This normally takes the form of either of these scenarios.

1) I just stare blankly at the person who has just spoken to me, inwardly praying that I can process some of the words that did actually penetrate my brain and form them into some basis for a coherent sentence. This normally results in me just looking a tad retarded, and the other person swiftly moving away to talk to someone else.

2) This one is more common and usually gets me into a whole area of new, fresh trouble. If someone has been speaking to me for a long while and I haven’t understood a single word that they have said, I will normally scrunch my face up into what I believe is a really interested expression and then say something which hopefully might fit in with what they are saying. This is normally something like “Really?” or “Yeah?” As you can guess, it doesn’t really work most of the time as quite often I would be so far off the mark it was unreal.

“Dan, I can’t live with how closed off you are, the way that you never talk about your feelings or problems. You’re like a closed book, and that's really something you can’t base a relationship on. I’m leaving you Dan.”

“………….yeah?”

It always used to take me about three days to figure out that I had been dumped. It would be brilliant if relationships came with subtitles.

I’ve had a few operations during my younger years to try and fix the inside of my useless ear. These took the form of skin grafts that would be placed over the eardrum to make it whole again. The first took place when I was about 11, but sadly didn’t work. But I did have the satisfaction of when I came out of the operation, still heavily under the influence of the anaesthetic, I apparently tore my surgical gown off and laid on top of my bed, stark bollock naked, causing the nurse attending to me to exclaim, “He’s a big boy for his age, isn’t he?” to my shocked family.

It a strange feeling to be absolutely shamed, and yet strangely proud of something at the same time.

Still, even heavily sedated, always a playa.

The second operation I had when I was 14, there was no exposing my genitals to nurses this time round, and the operation was considered a success. So for a time I had good hearing and felt a bit normal again. But over the years scarring has built up on the eardrum and the hearing is getting worse.
I went to the hospital a few weeks ago and was given the choice. Get fitted out for a hearing aid, if I really wanted one (which I don’t), or we can go in for surgery again as apparently things have moved on a tad since I was a kid and they can do some more things within this area. The only downside is that if the operation goes wrong, I will lose all the hearing in my left ear completely.

Was a bit of a tough choice, but I have decided to go with the operation. I’m tired of always feeling like I’m five seconds behind everyone else. If it goes wrong, I virtually feel deaf in the left ear anyway.

But it won’t go wrong. I know it won’t.

And I might get stark bullock naked again.

There’s always that.

Alright?……….

2011-04-22T19:37:00.001+01:00

Hi. How are you?

Shhhhhhhhh, don’t spoil this. Its been too long. Let me just look at you, just to see if you’re how I remember. Yes, its exactly how I remember you. The dreamy eyes, the hair, the fire behind your expression, the sloping forehead. I’ve missed you. Its good to be back. Just hold me.

Look, I have a valid excuse for being away for so long.

Now when I say that this excuse is valid, I am being genuinely honest with you. But I’m also being honest when I say my reason can also be considered a bit retarded as well. If you want me to be more precise, I’d say its around 25% valid, 75% retarded. But lets not quibble over facts. I’m back. Deal with it, yeah?

So, why have a been away? Well, numbnuts here forgot his password to log on to Blogger.

Yeah, lame or what, huh? But I swear its true. About a month ago I had a blog post to write that was so amazing it would have made your underpants explode. I went to log on with literally shaking hands due to the excitement of birthing this literary concoction of awesomeness out into the world, but yet when it came to entering in my password, my mind went blank and I ended up staring at the screen like a geriatric looking at the microwave and wondering why the news hadn’t come on yet.

I flicked through my minds database, past all the useless information that I have stored in there, searching desperately for the correct combination of words and numbers that would enable me to write, but all I kept coming up with was the year that Jaws 2 was directed in and the memory of my sixth birthday party when my parents hired an entertainer for me whose breath smelt like whiskey and who has now consequently made me have a phobia of balloon animals. But no password.

I honestly think that the last few weeks I have tried every known configuration of words and numbers known to man. I have probably inadvertently stumbled onto the mystery behind quantum physics with some of the equations that I came up with, but none of them actually allowed me to access my emails or Blogger, and since my amazing brain thought it would be a fantastic idea to set up my password reminder email under a default account, I was really up shit creek on a canoe made of shit which was passing under a bridge where even more people were shitting over the sides on me.

So I gave it one last try a few nights ago. I sat at my computer and emptied my mind. This took quite some time as I couldn’t shake off the thought of: Do ants feel happiness? which troubled me for at least 20 minutes until I decided that they probably could, and then I finally reached an almost Zen like state where I was nothing and nothing was me, and I just typed a password in on my computer without even thinking what it was.

I was in!

The first thing that I could see was that I have now hit 160 followers. Party time. Welcome to anyone new by the way. Its very nice to have you here. You look very nice by the way. Respectable. My kind of people. The kind of people who I would like to sit down and have a nice meal with. Can I come round for dinner? Whens good for you? I can’t do Tuesday as I have my salsa classes. Wednesdays good. I’ll bring a bottle.

So, you may not care, but I will give you some updates anyway.

Few things happening in my personal life, which obviously I am not going to talk about on here. But there is also the strong chance that I may be made redundant from my job, which is something that I found out about last Monday. This is happened to me so many times now that I’m starting to take it personally. I’m really pissed off to be honest, but there is not much I can do about it. Although its not a guarantee, I have more chance of keeping my job if I go to work in Essex in either Grays or Basildon, which as a choice is kind of like being asked if you would like a warm bucket of piss or liquid shit poured over your head. But as I love my job its probably going to be something I have to seriously look at.

But in the midst of all this depression and grimness, at least there is one beautiful and amazing thing that is coming up on the horizon that will whisk away all my blues like a breeze cooling your sweat on a warm summers day. I am of course talking about the upcoming marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton, or as every single fucking paper here in the UK insists on calling them, The Happy Couple.

Honestly, they are everywhere. On every front page, on magazines, on mugs, t-shirts, pizzas, happy meals and in my nightmarish feverish dreams. Its got so bad that I have now developed a Pavlovian response of yelling out “STOP SMILING AT ME!”every time I see their gormless, rich faces staring back at me from whatever thing is proclaiming their glorious union.

One good thing has come out of their upcoming nuptials though, and that's the fact that we get a day off for the wedding. Its their wedding present to the nation, and like most weddings, I am going to spend the day rowing with those close to me before falling into a drunken heap under a mound of sausage rolls and cucumber sandwiches.

I feels its what they would have wanted.

So anyway, that was me. Now over to you. Is everything OK? Is there anything that you want to talk about? You know I’m always here for you, don’t you? If you don’t want to talk about it now, we can always chat when I come round on Wednesday.

I like chicken by the way.

Just saying.

Back To The Future…………………..

2011-02-27T18:23:00.006Z

If I could build myself a time machine (and believe me, it wouldn’t be in an old Delorian, but probably a toilet, one with flashing lights and smoke that comes out the back when the flux capacitor gets turned on), I would zip back in time (which is all you can ask for a time machine really) and give my younger self some much needed advice.

These are my future pointers:

1) Fashion.

Firstly I would sit my younger and very much dumber self down and give some much needed advice on my upcoming fashion disasters. I would veto having long shoulder length hair during my indie days, as that was a faintly ridiculous look and made me look like a knobber.

I would also nix the shellsuits that I wore as a kid in the late 80’s (American chums, Google them. It’s not pretty).

And finally, during my hedonistic early clubbing days in the mid to late 90’s, pinstripe trousers combined with a waistcoat (a fucking waistcoat!) did not make me look like a sex god, it made me look like a waiter. I even had, at one point, a white suit that I used to wear on a funky night out. I mean, this suit was white. At some points, when the strobe lights hit me and created a white nimbus around my flailing body, it looked like Jesus Christ himself had decided to pop down to some dingy nightclub in Romford to dance very badly.

Not good.

Now though I am very much a style guru. I don't just have my finger on the pulse of fashion, but I'm checking its temperature, eyesight, and got it bent over for an extensive rectal examination.

Its not easy looking this good.

2) Education.

It’s almost cliché to say to someone younger that you have to make the most of your education, but it’s definitely true. The standard response to this is a muttered, “Yeah, all right granddad”, but it’s incredibly powerful advice. I would sit myself down, and then explain how I really needed to knuckle down and actually try and do well at all my subjects.

Seeing as I was a massive know it all tit at that age, I would probably just agree with my future self and then just completely ignore what was being said, as my want during those teenage years.

The annoying thing is that at the time, no subject interested me at school, but now I am fascinated by history, English, science, and basically everything else. Be much better if you could do all your education at an age where the subjects might spellbind you, such as your late 20’s, so when you are younger you could just run around playing war games and snapping girls bras.

3) Combine your career with your passions.

Everyone hates their jobs, so wouldn’t it make much better sense to actually combine the things that fascinate you most in the world with an actual paid role? Too often we end up slogging our guts out in a role that, in fairness, most of us would never have foreseen us doing when asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

My normal response to that question, at the tender age of ten, was a marine biologist, because that was what Matt Hooper was in the film Jaws and Matt Hooper quite clearly rocks.

Couple of major issues with this role as a career though. Allow me to run through them.

Can’t swim, can’t get water in ears, scared of the water.

Other than that, ideal role, dontcha thunk?

So what would I advise my younger self to do?

i) Writing- I would advise my younger self to sit down every day and write something, anything, so over time I would get used to writing every day and it wouldn’t be the chore that it is now, plus the practice would turn me into a multi-skilled author over the years, so by the time I reach this age, I would be a bestselling writer with numerous classic titles to my name, and film offers flying through my letterbox, plus chicks hanging off every limb of my body. Because there is nothing more that gets the ladies going than a writer. Forget film stars and football players, we all know that every girl’s ambition is to bag themselves a writer. Writers are cool.

ii) Animals- I love animals, so why not combine a career with them? I could become a circus performer? Or a lion tamers? Or even a vet? I know that to become a vet you need to study for years and years, but the end result is that you get to see a lot of dogs every day, and that’s a happy thought, no? Only downside I can see is that as a vet, I would be required to put animals down, and I can’t really be doing that. It wouldn’t make a very good impression on the owners if I was striking their pets on the chest whilst doing CPR and screaming, “You’ve never given up on anything in your life! Now live!” Especially if they had only just brought their tortoise in for a check up.

4) Let people in more.

People aren’t the annoying, self centred arse monkeys that I probably take them for. In fact I’d hazard a guess that some of them may be very nice. Trouble is that, if I like you, then I have all the time in the world for you. If I don’t like you, then you’re dead to me. Do you hear me? DEAD.

This probably isn’t right and I would advise myself to love all people, no matter what idiotic things they say, or how stupid their haircuts are. In fact, I would tell myself that every time I met someone new, don’t just shake their hands, but hug them and hold them tight, then whisper in their ears about how much you love them.

I’m sure there is nothing wrong with this suggestion, and it may even lead to some new and interesting friends.

Or prison.

Either way, could be fun?

These are just a few ideas as to how I could go back in time and improve my life, I have hundreds more. But the main problem is that my younger self probably wouldn’t listen to any of them. Even more so when he takes one look at the bloke sitting in front of him and then runs away screaming, “I turn into that!!!!!”

Precocious, know it all little fucker.

Abscess All Areas……

2011-02-06T16:12:00.001Z

So, this lump thing I have on the base of my spine. After my last post railing against the injustice of getting old, turns out that I didn’t in fact have a bad back, but instead had a lovely abscess making itself at home.

Mmmmmmmn, abscess.

Early Thursday morning the pain was just too unbearable. I woke up about one after rolling over on my lump and getting woken up by a short, sharp jab of pain. Walking into my bathroom, I tried to look in my mirror at my back to try and see my lump. After getting myself into positions that a contortionist would be proud of, I still couldn’t get a good look at it. I then came up with the wonderful idea of using the video camera on my mobile to film it.

Genius, no?

I have to say the footage was great, it was almost like a film as the camera swooped slowly over my lower back, Spielberg would have been proud. I almost considered posting it on YouTube with the 2001 soundtrack playing and a Morgan Freeman voice over. But I still couldn't get a good look at my lump to see how bad it was.

Sod this, I thought. I need to get to a hospital. So at around three in the morning I booked a cab to take me to Romford A&E. When I arrived I knew I was in Romford because there was a drunk guy wandering around mumbling bollocks into his beer can, which he kept clutched tight to his chest with a Kung Fu grip, while a trail of blood splattered the floor leading up to the reception desk.

“Hello,” I said to the tired looking receptionist. “I have a large lump at the base of spine which is really hurting, I think I need to get it looked at.”

She motioned me to sit down and I waited to see a Doctor, all the while hoping that the Doctor wouldn’t be female, hot, or Brazilian. The chances of there being a hot Brazilian Doctor working in Romford A&E were slim, but knowing my luck this would be the time when one would be working on a secondment, traveling to the poorest countries to see how Third World Healthcare operates, and I would have to drop my trousers in front of her.

Lucky for me my Doctor was male. For some strange reason this made me feel better about dropping my trousers in front of him. I somehow seem to have got my priorities all wrong on this, haven't I?

Upon seeing my lump the Doctor made a kind of “Hmmmmmmmmn” noise.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“You have an abscess I’m afraid, and its quite a nasty one. I’d like you to see the surgeon today if possible.”

“Surgeon?”

“Yes, we have to drain it and then remove it.”

“Oh.”

Now I’m not a great lover of operations. Due to my hearing problems, my whole life has been a session of operations and procedures to keep my hearing at a good level. So I try and avoid them whenever I can. But this Doctor was adamant that i would have to have this done.

Eventually I was led up to a hospital ward where I was given my own bed. After waiting around for a few hours I eventually saw a surgeon. After examining me he told me that I probably wouldn’t be able to have the operation today and would have to stay over night. Now this really wasn’t an option for me as I had no overnight stuff, hadn’t showered, and there was no one there to feed my cat (all poor excuses, but they are the only ones I have), so I asked him if it was possible to come early tomorrow to have it done as the operation would only take about half an hour.

The surgeon agreed to this and then suggested that he drain the abscess to make my night a little bit more comfortable. After lying me on my front, he then pierced my lump with a needle, causing a small jet of fluid to arch prettily from it like a delicate water feature. It wasn’t very nice.

The best thing about being able to go home was that I was given Codeine to take home with me. I like Codeine, it makes everything better. I could have had small pixies emerging from my lump, playing fiddles and dancing merry jigs, and I was so high that I probably wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. Codeine rules.

When I got to the hospital early next morning I checked in at reception like I was told to. And brilliantly for me, the guy behind the desk failed to tell anyone that I was there. So for four hours I was sat in a hard plastic chair, my lump leaking and hurting, and my mood getting steadily worse. When they finally realised that i was there for a reason, a young intern took me aside and began to question me as to why I was there, not having a clue who I was, why I was there, and what was wrong with me. Now she was obviously new and didn’t really have a clue what she was doing, and therefore scared the shit out of me. She unsuccessfully tried to take blood from me about five times, missing veins, spilling the blood over me, and jabbing me more times than a pincushion. She then tried to put a tube in my hand for a drip, fucking this up about three times as well. In the end I snapped, stood up and told her not to worry about it, and walked out the hospital, aiming to get the treatment done privately through my work.

So now I have to wait until tomorrow to find out what hospital I am going to. Luckily the lump seems to have gone down quite a bit and isn’t as painful as it was, but I still need to get it opened up and cleaned out otherwise it will just come back again.

I don’t like abscesses very much. I have given it a name though. My abscess is called Colin, and with luck, by tomorrow Colin will sod off and leave me alone.

Tick Tock. Tick Tock. Tick Tock……………

2011-02-01T14:14:00.001Z

I’m bloody annoyed at the moment.

In fact I’m so annoyed right now that I’m not in fact typing this with my hands, but instead I’m headbutting each key and saying slanderous things about each of their mothers with each slam of my forehead (which means its taken me ages to write these last few sentences, and has given me an awful headache as well).

Why am I annoyed, you’re not asking?

Well, I’m off work today.

Why are you off work today, you’re also not asking?

Well, I’m off work because……oh this is so hard to say…….I’m off work because…… I’ve done my back in.

Quick, somebody throw a blanket round me and stick me in an old peoples home.

I don’t know what's wrong with it. I woke up on Sunday and it was tight. Come Monday it was on fire, and when I woke up this morning I couldn’t move. After doing some medical exploring with my fingers (mmmmmmmn, filthy) it seems as if I have a small lump at the base of my spine that hurts to touch.

Now this could mean either one of three things.

1) I have pulled something and its really swollen.

2) I have a real deep spot and its in the most awkward of places.

3) I’m starting to grow a tail.

Now naturally out of those three things, its the tail one I’m hoping for. How cool would that be? I could use it to fan myself if hot. If I’m ever giving directions I could use my tail to point the way instead of my finger. And it would be a brilliant aid to gauge what mood I’m in ( Swishing around: Angry. Hanging between my legs: Scared. Pointing up in the air while the end makes a “Come here” motion: Horny), the possibilities are endless. Tails are cool.

But nevertheless, my back is in tatters and its resulted in me hobbling round like a geriatric who has just soiled himself. This isn’t right. I’m 32. not 82. The fact that I have just rung in sick due to a bad back was something I was hoping to avoid for, say, oh I don’t know, another 15 years?

Is this it? Does this mean that I’ve reached the summit and the only way to go now is down? I mean, I’m half deaf as it is, and I’m borderline incontinent anyway, so what other delights are coming my way? Will I start to grow hair from my ears? Will II start to buy jeans with elasticated waistbands? Will I take up line dancing? I’m nothing more than the rotting carcass of the man I used to be.

Growing older never really used to bother me. OK, I’ll admit that the passing of another 12 months and a move up on my age bracket did sometimes play on my mind a little. But in my head I’m still the same idiotic bell end I’ve always been, but now as I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I find that its been transported into the body of a slightly stupid looking adult, one who constantly wears the bemused expression of someone who is desperately trying to remember where he has left his keys.

When did this happen? And more importantly, how can I stop it?

How will I feel when I start getting my first grey hairs? What if its in my pubic hair? My only option will be to shave them all off. So then I’ll be a man in his 30’s with the genitalia of a toddler. That can’t be right? (though I would imagine it to be very bracing). Can you dye your pubic hair? What if I try and dye it and it goes wrong and I end up with green pubic hair? I’ll look like I’ve gone mouldy. This is a pubic nightmare. I need to do more research.

Maybe worrying about your age happens at all stages of your life? When I was in my teens, thinking of being 25 seemed ancient to me. Now that I’m in my 30’s, the thought of hitting 40 is terrifying. Most likely when I’m in my 40’s, I’ll look back at my young and care free 30’s with a wry smile. I’m never happy, me.

The only plus point I can see about getting older is that I will now have an excuse for being rude and not caring what I say, where as now I have none.

I know they say that you should enjoy your life, no matter what your age is. But how can I enjoy it with a bad back, non-functioning ears, and the future onset of pubic Armageddon?

I’m Your Whore……….

2011-01-15T13:33:00.001Z

*Warning: This blog post does contain some aspects of self psychological prognosis. Its pretty stirring stuff so I would advise sitting down and strapping yourself in whilst reading. Things could get bumpy*

During my brief hiatus from blogging (if you can call a month brief, it was more like a weekend city break away really), I was idly reading through some previous posts trying desperately to come up with something vaguely interesting to write about that didn’t involve some form of warm, wet bodily function, when I suddenly had a rather disturbing notion fly from the screen and hit me straight in my mindscape, whirl around for a bit, and then settle in my stomach like a big fat worry baby. You see it suddenly occurred to me that for the last year I have been laying out my bare psyche over the internet for literally anyone to come along and have a good old rummage round.

Now for most people this probably would really amount to much. Maybe a pair of raised eyebrows and a shrug and then nothing more would be thought of it. But for a normally intensely private person such as myself, it really does seem like a strange activity to have been involved with. In person I can be guaranteed to give nothing away, something that has been commented on frequently as I am often referred to as a closed book, and yet on here I have been offering up massive slices of my experiences and thoughts with almost blatant disregard for any kind of self censorship. I have even written about when I pooed myself in the middle of London, miles away from home and with an almost uncontrollable urge to suddenly commit suicide, which is a strange thing to offer up to a complete stranger and isn’t normally something I bring to the table when I first meet someone. I at least normally wait a day or two before giving that one up.

So something's not quite right here.

When I first started this blog my main intention was to just write about things that were happening in the world in a wry and insightful manner, just to get me into the habit of writing on a weekly basis. I wasn’t going to be someone who would regularly write about themselves, as in my opinion that would be about as interesting as listening to someone go into minute detail about a really wacky dream they had the other night and how they soooooo had to tell me about it. But I soon realised that my attempts at commenting on the big wide world were as insightful as a blind man who was required to do something that involved…..er….sight, so I found myself writing things that were a little closer to home. I began writing about me, like the big self obsessed freak that I am.

And yet you came, didn’t you? You came, and you commented, and you joined up, and I became drunk with the power of it all. I wasn’t just writing blog posts anymore, I was standing on top of a mountain, arms stretch wide as you, my children, my flock, came from miles around, from different lands and cultures, to gaze in wonder at me, to swim in my words, my rapture. You had come to see me, what I was doing, what I was feeling and thinking, it was all about me, wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it?

Regardless of what it was, you’re here and it rocks, take my hand and everything will be okay, we can do this, you and I, we can do this together. But as a rather unfortunate side effect, in order to fill these pages I have had to plumb my very depths and offer up stuff that I may not normally do in person. Some of it may be obvious if you knew me, other bits you may not have known about even if you had gone into my subconscious armed with a map, a torch, and all-over protective clothing. And yet I’ve just given it all to you on a plate, haven’t I? I’ve whored myself out to you with no form of self-regard whatsoever. I feel so cheap.

And yet for myself, rereading over the things that I have written, it paints a pretty disturbing picture. I’m not right up there, am I?

Lets break it down, just for old times sake.

1) People Person.

I don’t like people. Obviously I like you, you’re great. We’ve always gotten along, me and you, ever since we first met really. I think it was your smile that did it. But its all the others, those with their haircuts and skinny jeans and stupid opinions and inability to navigate anywhere without getting in my way, its them that do my nut in.

2) Sentimental.

Despite the cynical outlook there also seems to be a sentimental streak in the things that I have written that is a mile wide, which therefore must be in me. Most people think that the pained expression on my face is when my Irritable Bowel Syndrome is really bad, its not, its just these two conflicting emotions battling themselves out in me to finally claim my body. I’ll either end up alone in a gutter, drinking myself to death with whisky in a brown paper bag, or end up a pipe smoking hippy who just wants to hug everyone and talk about “feelings”. I am unsure if I like either to be honest.

3) Whore.

I just want to be loved. I just want to you come along and smile at something I have written, tell me that you like me, and then never leave my side. That's all I want. Is that to much to ask?

4) Over Analytical.

This blog post is a prime example.

5) Self Indulgent.

See above.

6) Odd.

I have some odd hang ups, don’t I? Ranging from OCD through to odd phobias. Its amazing that I can actually leave my home without crumbling into a massive pile of quivering jelly, shitting myself and mumbling about germs.

So I’ve just literally splashed all of the above over the internet like an elephant with explosive diarrhea. Well, not anymore. I’m keeping all this crazy stuff in from now on. This blog is now going to undergo a transformation into a political one where we can all debate political philosophies and how they relate to society and each class as a whole.

There will still be poo jokes though.

So, to start us off, a question for us to discuss:

Should ties among individuals composing a group form a bond that takes precedence over the needs and wishes of the individual members of the group?

Please feel free to leave your thoughts and opinions on the above question.

I look forward to the cut and thrust of intelligent discussion that the new direction of this blog will no doubt bring to us, rather than the puerile and infantile stuff I was writing before. I look forward to taking your hands as we all head out into a bright new dawn. It may seem scary at first, but you will like it, I promise you that you will.

And you will always have me there to stroke your hair.

Wearing gloves, obviously.

Germs.

Germs everywhere.

So, That Was Christmas Then?…………….

2010-12-29T15:08:00.001Z

I always get a little down just after Christmas. Nothing to serious mind, its not like I’m going to suddenly hang myself with sparkly tinsel or anything. I think its more a combination of having a solid two months of literally everything screaming at you “Its Christmas!” and then the day being over quicker than the space between two heartbeats. Its bound to leave you a bit blue, and all those decorations and lights always serve to remind you that its all over and there are no more presents to unwrap. Which sucks.

Have to say though, I have just had the best Christmas I have had in many a year, and I have also got some great gifts as well.

Here is my list:

A range of Dermalogica products (which also includes hand cream)

A funky new scarf

A funky new man bag

Pants

The Thick of It book

Inception Blu Ray

Expensive hot chocolate and a mug

Scented candles for my flat (this list is not showing me in the best of lights)

Aftershave- Hugo Boss Energise

Chocolates

Shower gel

Socks (Partially eaten)

£20 HMV voucher

Now from that list you can probably get a fairly good assumption of who I am. By the looks of it I am a metrosexual male who loves scented candles, man bags, Leonardo Dicaprio, jaunty scarves, hot chocolate and who really, really smells. Oh, and I need lots of pants as well. And socks.

Yeah, I can live with all that. In my defence though, a lot of that stuff I really need, especially the hand cream as I have been getting really dry hands and have had to suffer the indignity of borrowing hand cream off the girls at work. But with this new stuff my hands are now silky smooth and feel divine! They are all going to love me when I return and start letting them use it occasionally. I will finally be one of them.

My Christmas started on Christmas Eve where I do my normal tradition of going round to Kates mums for dinner. This year was to be different though as normally I would go home alone for Christmas Day, but this year Kates, and her dad and brother, were going to come back with me to spend the day round mine, me being the genial host and everything. Check me out, I’m well adult now.

When I arrived at Kates I was greeted by the sight of her dog Peggy, a lovely staff, running round dressed in a Santa outfit. I couldn’t tell if she was pleased about this. She looked happy, but to be honest, she always looks happy, but she was dressed in a Santa outfit and did look pretty stupid. She also looked a little shifty as well and I soon found out why.

“There's been a bit of an accident with your stocking,” Kates mum told me as I took my coat off.

“Accident?” I replied.

“Yeah, Peggy had been down it and eaten all your chocolates and some of your socks.”

I looked down at Peggy who was by my feet, tail wagging and a lopsided grin plastered all over her face.

“You’ve eaten my Christmas socks?”

Now anyone who knows me knows how I always need new socks. Christmas was my one time of year that I get to restock. And now this little garbage can on legs had just eaten them.

“Its only one pair,” Kates mum said after seeing the crestfallen expression on my face.

“Its okay, honestly. These things happen,” I said with a fixed grin plastered all over my facehole, mentally plotting on how I was going to get my revenge on the little furry shitbag.

When everyone was out of earshot, I leant down to Peggy and whispered in her ear, “You look absolutely ridiculous in that outfit,” and then got a big wet lick up the side of my cheek for my troubles. It was hard to stay mad at her.

Once we were settled then the feasting began. Kates mum is a fantastic cook and this year decided that we weren't going to have a sit down meal, but lots and lots of nibbles. And believe me, there were a lot. Plate after plate came out, a never ending parade of delights that all looked delicious. The next few hours were lost in a sea of Brie and Cranberry parcels, honey and mustard glazed sausages, tiny Indian and Chinese bites, and many, many more. By the end of it I was half slumped on the sofa, tears of defeat running freely down my cheeks and the meat shakes hitting my body from overindulgence.

“Who wants homemade Chocolate and Peanut Butter Cheesecake?” Kates mum said breezily, not noticing that I had slipped into a food coma. “Dan, I know you’ll have a big slice,wont you?”

I could only smile weakly and make a buh noise that was supposed to resemble, “Yes please, I’d love a huge slice, and also a stomach pump as well if you have one handy?”

Still ate it though. I’m hardcore me.

Eventually it was time for bed and to wait for Santa. The feast did leave me with terrible wind though, I’d like to say it was very Christmassy and sounded like Jingle Bells when it came out, but it didn’t. It sounded evil, and that's because it was. But as I was sharing a bed with Kates AND Peggy (who always sleeps under the blanket with us), I got my revenge on the sock eating little shit by farting on her head all night.

After present opening in the morning, me, Kates and Peggy went to pick up her dad and brother so we could head on back to mine. I was a little nervous as I would be hosting and cooking all at the same time. I had never done this before and was conscious that I could screw up everyone's Christmas if it went wrong. When we got to mine, I opened the door and was greeting by my cat Dotty running up to greet us as she always did. When she saw that her favourite dog had come round to visit once more, she quickly did a mid-air somersault and ran off to spend all of Christmas asleep on top of my fridge.

I got everyone settled, poured out the drinks and passed the nibbles, and then went into the kitchen to start the cooking. I looked at the huge turkey sitting there and it looked back at me. I will tame you bitch I thought to myself, and then began to cook. We had enough to feed a small army and I only had a small oven, so it became a hot game of Jenga trying to figure out ways to fit all of the trays and whatnot into it. I had a momentary panic when I thought that my stuffing balls weren’t cooking, but that passed in time. I’m pretty sure it was me whispering, “ Cook you tiny bastards” at them. I felt like a safecracker as I was hunched over the temperature dial, just teasing another little extra bit of heat and watching for things that might be burning.

“Is everything going okay?” Kates asked me as she popped her head into my kitchen.

“YES! EVERYTHING IS FINE! GO HAVE FUN IN THE LIVING ROOM! FUN! GO NOW!”

“Whoa, okay kitchen Nazi,” she said, backing out slowly with her hands raised.

Eventually everything looked as if it was cooked. To be honest I was so stressed out by then that I couldn’t care less if I poisoned everyone and I was mentally planning on where I could bury the bodies in my communal gardens if it all went wrong. I dished up, served up, and sat down to eat, nervously watching as people took their first bites.

“This is delicious.” Kates.

“This turkey is really good.” Kates dad.

“Pass the cranberry sauce.” Kates brother.

And I looked round in amazement. It was a Christmas dinner. A proper Christmas dinner that I had prepared and that everyone was enjoying.

I felt like a God.

And on the 12th day Dan said, “Let there be food!” And the food was good.

After we ate and nobody died (which is the hallmarks of a successful meal), we sat in the living room to play Goldeneye on the Wii. After a stressful 25 minutes trying to figure out how to set the bloody thing up, we were all ready to play the multiplayer, which basically involved running round shooting each other, something every family wants to secretly do at Christmas. Me being the ubergeek that I am, I immediately got the hang of it and was stalking the others through the level. Others weren't so quick to adapt.

“Which one am I and why can’t I move?” asked Kates dad. I quickly spotted him as the one facing the wall, trying to run through it, and put a bullet in his head.

Oh, someone's dead,” Kates dad said.

“That's you Gary,” I replied.

“Oh.”

Kates was also struggling to work out the controls and I found her in a corner, jumping up and down relentlessly, so I thought it best to put her out of her misery.

“I don’t like this game,“ she cried.

“You just can’t handle my mad skills,” I said.

“I can’t handle you being a massive geek who knows how to play these games, loser.”

To be fair, she was right.

After another ten minutes playing this we all realised that it was actually a bit poo and called it a day. By now everyone was feeling the effects of all the drink and food and was getting sleepy. I stuck on the film Avatar for everyone to watch and we slowly slipped into that post dinner semi slumber.

About halfway through the film, Kates dad woke up sleepily from his doze, looked at the screen and said, “Blue people on the telly,” and then slipped back into sleep again. A pretty fair summing up of the film I think you’ll agree?

Once it was over it was finally time for everyone to go home. After saying goodbye, I found myself alone in my flat to take stock of the day. Now normally, for reasons I won’t go into, Christmas is a hard time of year for me and something that I don’t really get into that much. But this year was different, this year I had the best Christmas that I’ve had in a long time. And I think it was because I was with people that I cared for, and that cared for me back. Which if you think about, beneath all the presents and the sense of occasion, is all what Christmas really boils down to.

Plus I didn’t kill anyone, which is always a massive bonus.

So now the final part of the holiday to get through is New Year. I am lucky in the sense that Kates hates New Year just as much as I do. All the pressure to go out and have fun, screw that. I’m not paying the best part of £40 to go somewhere that would normally cost me nothing on any other day. We always have an anti New Years Eve by having a nice meal in a restaurant in the early evening, take a stroll around London, and then go home to glare at people out of our window.

I know whose the winner in that scenario.

Happy New Year to you all!

Merry Christmas To You All………

2010-12-23T22:24:00.001Z

I know. I know.

He stays away for a month, doesn’t bother posting anything and then saunters back in whistling and smiling, pretending like nothings happened. I am an awful human being, I really am. I’m not even worth these words that I’m writing for you now. I’m scum. Sub human scum, and I deserve the scorn and indifference that is coming my way. But in fairness, its not like I haven’t thought about you in this last month. I have. You’ve constantly been on my mind. Its been your face, floating in front of my mindscape, looking at me, pleading, that I’ve seen everywhere I’ve looked. Its been there when I’ve slept, eaten, walked down the street, and even when I’ve been bathing. I liked that, it made me feel dirty. Naughty you!

I did try and post. I sat down, fingers on my keyboard, just waiting for the words to come…….and they didn’t. I was dry, the muse was gone and all that remained was the theme tune to The Banana Splits going round on a continuous loop. That wouldn’t make a good blog post, that would be ridiculous. So I just sat there with a thin line of drool running from my bottom lip and felt like a failure. Not only did I let you down, in some small way, I let myself down. And I’m sorry.

But now I’m back, freshly energised and raring to go. I even have a blog post in the chamber that is so deep, powerful and profound, there is the strong possibility that it could actually change you world views and rock your very being to its core. But now is not the time to unleash this beast, no, not now, just before Christmas. Once the New Year starts though, that bad boy is being let out of the blocks and will be coming at you like a rabid chipmunk (plus by then, that should have given me enough time to actually think about what the hell its going to be).

No, now is all about this time of year and what it means. For many it means family, and I hope that you all have yours with you and the day is everything it could be. For others it means loneliness, and if your in that situation, I hope that your 2011 is a better one for you. For many it is the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ, and if your that way inclined, I hope you and the big JC celebrate it in style. And for most of us, its just a chance to gather our loved ones round us, take stock of the year and just be in the company of those that care about us the most, and that's pretty tip top in my view.

So I would like to wish everyone who reads, follows, comments, passed through, looked on in horror and then felt the urge to bath in scented rose water, and those who have simply enjoyed this blog, a very Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year. Its been perfect having you here and our paths will cross again soon. I have made one of my New Years resolutions to be fully committed to my writing, both in blog and my personal stuff, so lets see how long I stick at it.

I’m loving you all right now. Each and every one of you (even you doing that weird thing with your nostrils, don’t think that I can’t see you).

And to round this short post off, this is my new favourite rendition of my most loved Christmas song. I hope you enjoy it.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Things I Wish Would Happen……

2010-11-14T17:15:00.003Z

There are many things that I would like to happen to me in my life that sadly probably will not ever take place due to many different reasons. Here is my definitive list of them.

1) Karaoke God.

I would love to go out one night to a bar or club and there be, to our surprise, a karaoke night going on at whatever place we decide to visit. So after listening to an assortment of people get up on stage, microphone in hand, and butcher some well known classic song, it would then finally get to be my turn.

Everyone will nudge each other and smirk as I take the stage, looking forward to the car crash that is about to take place in front of them, when I raise the microphone to my mouth and out of it comes forth the sweetest sound anyone has ever heard. The crowd stops what they are doing and stares with stunned expressions on their faces.

Women turn to their boyfriends in the knowledge that these aren’t really men they are with, the bloke up on stage, he is a man. All the men in the place will wrap their arms round each other and weep as my sweet singing voice takes them back to their childhoods and the innocence that they feel they have lost forever. After I have sung the last final note, a note that sounds as if it has come from the very choirs of heaven itself, the place erupts with clapping and cheering as I slowly walk off the stage, possibly with flowers being thrown at my feet.

Now the choice of song for the will be essential. Patrick Cassidy’s Vide Cor Meum would be perfect. Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Baby Got Back, not so.

Either way, not gonna happen. I have a singing voice that resembles two sperm whales mating (Snigger. Sperm)

2) Monkey Hugger.

I love animals me. And I have always wanted to get nose to nose with some of the more exotic animals that can be found in far flung countries. I have longed to scratch behind the ears of a lion, to swim in the deep blue oceans with whales, and above all else, to hug a monkey.

I love monkeys. They make me laugh. And I have always wanted to get up close with one and give it a hug. The nearest I have been to any primate was one time when I went to London Zoo with Kates. It wasn’t a monkey I encountered, but a gorilla in the gorilla enclosure. We rounded the corner to find a huge glass window, with the great beast just sitting behind it with an air of almost unimaginable sadness. I looked into its ancient and wise face, a face that had seen its gorilla family grow up around it, deep in some jungle, facing everything that mother earth could throw at it, and to then be captured and put on display for us humans to look at. And as I stared, I became transfixed by the wisdom and kindness that I could see in its beautiful expression. And as my green eyes locked with its warm brown ones, I liked to believe we had a connection as we stared at each other through the window, and perhaps we both wondered who the animal really was out of the two of us.

Admittedly this wonderful scene was somewhat spoiled when the gorilla began to smear its own poo all over the glass, but it stayed with me nevertheless.

But yeah, I would like to hug a monkey.

3) Stand Up To A Bully.

I have never been bullied, nor been a bully, but I have always wanted to stand up to one, preferably in front of a crowd of people, maybe in front of the heroine I was trying to woo in my own private high school comedy that would be playing out in my mind.

It would be set in a diner where everyone is hanging out on a weekend, burgers and laughter everywhere and a jukebox playing in the background, and I would just be minding my own business, maybe drinking a milkshake, when all of a sudden the bully and his gang of retards would come up to me and start giving me grief.

I would stand up slowly, safe in the knowledge that I was better than the person in front of me, and just stare back at him with no fear, which would make the bully uncertain as he was used to people cowering in front of him. He would say something about me in front of his friends, just to show he was still in control of the situation. I would counter this with some smart comment that would make everyone else laugh and hopefully make Mary Beth (the heroine) take notice of me for the first time. The bully would then not like his authority being challenged in this way and would then threaten me with violence. I will not rise to this for I am above violence unless it is really necessary, and I want Mary Beth to see this. I can feel her eyes on me, judging my every move.

The bully isn’t having this and is itching for a fight, so with a sigh, I knock him out with one punch and the diner erupts with cheers. Mary Beth sidles up to me and takes my arm and asks me if I want to go for a walk.

As we step outside, she asks me, “How comes I have never noticed you before?”

I smile back at her and say, “Because you never looked hard enough.”

And then we walk off arm in arm into the sunny afternoon as the credits roll.

Pretty good, huh?

Now this is what really will happen.

The bully comes up to me and says something rude about my face. I come back with an insult that possibly involves his mother (that part I am good at). He then hits me hard, knocking me off my stool and leaving me crumpled on the floor in a puddle of my own blood and shit, while Mary Beth goes off with the bully to sex him up a little.

I hate high school comedies.

4) The Returning Hero.

I have always wanted to have someone run to me at the arrivals gate of an airport after I had been away for a long while and wrap their arms around me, crying with happiness that I am back, while everyone around looks on and goes “Ahhhhhh”

Perhaps there will even be cheering? I like cheering. I wish it was mandatory that people would cheer every time I entered a room rather than the slow air of disappointment that normally happens.

I don’t like that.

5) Stand Up Comic.

I have always been impressed with Stand up comedians. To actually have the nerve to stand up in front of a crowd of strangers and then have them eating out of the palm of their hands with funny material that they have written. That sounds like such a blast to me.

There is a slight drawback in me doing it though for two reasons. 1) I am not brave enough. 2) I am in no way funny enough.

My stand up comedy would probably consist of me standing up on stage going, “Cor, cats eh? What are they all about?” and then just stand there sweating while everyone starts getting uncomfortable.

To be honest though, I have to run workshops for our clients in the place where I am currently working, so I know what it’s like to stand up in front of a group of strangers and have them instantly hate you.

6) Action Hero.

I would love to be the hero in my own action film. The plot? It would probably be something like suave European terrorists taking over some office block that I am in. As we realise what is happening, panic spreads as no one knows what we are going to do. One person suggests that we give ourselves up to them to try and negotiate our safety.

The camera then pans over to the man standing silently by the window, gazing out with an air of nobility, heroism, and a little bit of sauciness (Hint: This man is me).

“No,” the man says, turning round and taking off his shirt to reveal a pristine white vest underneath. “We never give up. We fight.”

The crowd of office workers look on in awe at this suddenly imposing figure who they had never noticed before. Men want to be him. Women want him. This is the hero.

And then I would basically kick the ass of all the terrorists. Snapping necks, using machine guns (possibly with one in each hand whilst diving through the air in slo mo), and fashioning weapons out of office equipment (staple guns, paperclip garrotte wires, forts made out of office desks).

Now if this actually did happen in real life, I would probably hide in a room and pull my jumper over my head and keep muttering the mantra, “if I can’t see them, they don’t exist. If I can’t see them, they don’t exist” until found by Alan Rickman, like the big coward that I am.

7) Dancing King.

I can’t dance. I can do the one dance that every bloke can do, which involves shuffling from side to side whilst clenching your fists and biting your bottom lip. I can do that pretty well, to be honest. But actual rhythm, forget about it.

But there are two dancing scenarios I would love to happen to me at one point in my life.

Firstly I would like to be a club with a huge dance floor. I strut out onto the middle of it and start laying down some moves. We are talking about pure poetry here. Me at one with the music. The Lord of the Dance. A huge crowd forms round me, clapping and cheering me on, shouting, “go white boy, go white boy, go” while I do the worm across the floor. And yes, you guessed it; women want to sex me up.

The second scenario is that me and Kates are at a swing night in the 1950’s. I’m in a zoot suit, she looks stunning in that classic vintage style, and we are jiving our little hearts out. And as the brass kicks in, I am literally flinging her around the dance floor in time to the music, not missing a beat. That sounds like absolute heaven to me.

I really want to take dancing lesson.

So these were a few of the things that I wish would happen to liven up my little life. I basically wish I could live my life in pop culture heaven.

But in all seriousness, aren’t we all just living our own little movies?

How To Survive A Zombie Apocalypse…..

2010-11-07T16:00:00.007Z

I am a 32 year old man.

And because of my gender and age range, I have amassed much knowledge over the 32 years that I have lived so far.

I have learnt how to put up shelving. I have learnt how to change the fuse on a plug. I have learnt never to trust a woman with a tattoo of a dolphin on her shoulder, but probably most importantly, I have learnt how to survive a zombie apocalypse.

It’s all to do with the plan, you see.

From a very early age, probably around about the late teens, every man at some point will have formulated a strategy on how to survive a zombie uprising. And this plan will have many revisions and changes over the years, which are all dependent on the lifestyle of the person creating it.

When you are a young buck, with no responsibilities to speak of whatsoever, your plan is to try and survive at all costs, no matter what. It’s just you, and you alone you look out for. When you get a girlfriend, your plan then changes to include you travelling across the rioting and corpse strewn cities to try and get to her, all the while looking all butch and manly, just in case she may want to sex you up a little when you get there. And finally when you get married and have children, the man will then update in his head the zombie survival plan that will account for his family’s safety and nothing else. He is expendable. Only they matter. For he is man.

Now you may think this is silly and just something I have written to amuse myself, but I can guarantee that every single man at one point in his life has thought over in his head what he will do the moment the dead start dragging themselves out of their graves.

Don’t believe me? Ladies, ask your man the next time you see him. Sit him down and ask him the question, “Have you ever planned what you would do in a zombie outbreak?” and watch his face carefully. Now some of your men may just lie outright and say, “No, don’t be stupid. Why are you asking me such a ridiculous thing?” But watch his eyes. He’s lying ladies. He has a plan. He most defiantly has.

Other men will just come straight out with it. “Yes I have. I have written it all down on a bit of paper in my man den. I’m actually going to pin it up on the fridge,” and will then go through in intricate detail all the aspects of this manly and wise plan and how you fit in to it.

I am quite lucky in many respects with Kates. She puts up with all of my stupid childish things on many occasions, but what she doesn’t screw around with is my zombie survival plan. She knows exactly what to do the moment the dead come to life. I have drilled it in to her.

We first started speaking about this many years ago when we first got together. We were watching the remake of Dawn of the Dead, when at the end she asked me the magical question that every male wants to hear.

“So what would you do in a zombie outbreak?”

After a two hour presentation that involved flip charts, marker pens, diagrams, and an almost unhealthy obsession with pie charts, she had a fairly good idea of what I would do. She also had a pretty good idea that it was probably best not to ask me that question again.

So what would I do?

Well, the first thing I would do, depending on location, would be to try and make my way to wherever Kates is.

This is for two reasons.

1) I love her and need to make sure that she is safe. Only my superior zombie survival skills will ensure this. I am her hero.

2) I can’t drive and she can.

Now, laws of average will dictate that the outbreak will occur while I am at work, which is going to pose a rather difficult situation as I work in London, and that will mean hordes of the undead chowing down on the hordes of the living and me smack bang right in the middle of them. Things could get a little messy.

Another problem is that the moment the slow dawning realisation the this is actual, no shitting around, zombies we are dealing with, takes place, all the men in London will suddenly snap into survival mode, mentally checking off their tick lists of things that they have to do, looking around for the nearest weapons and then making their way to their safe houses. As the ladies of London are in no way sensible enough to think of their own zombie survival plan, they will immediately latch on to the man with his tie wrapped round his head, the blade from the paper cutter gripped tightly in his hand and an almost calm, “I have always expected this to happen,” expression on his face.

This man will be me.

Now the first rule of thumb in a zombie outbreak is to go it alone. You hook up with anyone they will only slow you down or get eaten. Another major issue with this is trying to explain to Kates, when I eventually manage to meet up with her, what the hell I am doing with around 15 hot London ladies, all with tastefully ripped clothing (like it always does in the movies), and all of them looking at me adoringly because I had managed to save them.

Believe me, I would rather face up to an army of the undead, all with an uncontrollable urge to use my testicles as hors d'oeuvre’s, than try and get that one past her. I know which one is scarier.

Sorry ladies of London. You’re on your own.

I have informed Kates that whenever the outbreak happens she is to stay exactly where she is and I will come get her. She knows all about destroying the brain, safe houses, blah blah blah. All she has to do is wait for me to turn up. “No matter what occurs, I will find you.” That kind of stuff.

When I eventually battle my way over vast cities, slaying everything in my path, maybe just wearing a vest that is artfully dirty, I will stand outside whatever building she is holed up in and shout out her name, so when she looks out the window, I can pull my hero pose, tired, embattled, but yet with a hint of raw animal sexuality. Maybe I will fall into her arms, her sobbing with joy that I have made it, me all half dead but showing how butch I am in actually making it to her. Who knows? I will play this one by ear. Nevertheless, it will look bitchin when I do it. She will definitely want to sex me up a little when I get there.

After about 20 minutes of, “I bloody told you this would happen one day,” we will then find a car and go collect her family. We will definitely pick up her mum and dad, I’m massively in two minds about collecting her younger brother, but I suppose I can always use him as bait if things get hairy.

Once all the family are together, we will drive to Southend to find a boat. Zombies are notoriously bad swimmers, so my aim is to sail to Lundy Island, which is just by the Bristol Channel. It is very tiny; you can walk around it in a day, but close enough to main land for raiding parties.

One slight drawback with the sailing is that I am afraid of the water due to the fact that I can’t swim. So that me out of sailing the boat. I will probably be below deck weeping. Kates may not want to sex me up anymore. Plus another drawback is that neither I, Kates, nor her family, know how to sail. But that’s not a problem; I have bought Kates dad sailing lessons for Christmas. He has never given any indication he wants to learn how to sail, but he bloody will. It’s not like you can turn down a Christmas present, is it?

I’m always thinking, me.

Once we hit the island, and I have recovered from my girlie, scared of the water, hissy fit, I will then get the chance to earn some proper man points by making sure the island is clear of zombies before everyone else comes on shore. Once this is all done, we will then set up a commune, of which I am the head of, and everyone calls me, “Grand Master Flash.”

And that is my zombie survival plan in its most basic form. Obviously there are many sub-versions, slight tinkering depending on different scenarios. Kates has been informed that is she gets turned, I will take her down in a heartbeat; there will be no weeping and wailing, just BANG! I have asked her to do the same courtesy for me. She has told me she might even do it even if I’m not bitten. I think she was joking.
If any of you are reading this and you haven’t got your own survival plan, please feel free to steal mine.

Though please don’t go to the same island as me, because I don’t think there will be enough room for us all and it will just end up in all out tribal warfare.

And I haven’t got a plan for that.

Here Comes The Fear Part 735

2010-10-25T20:21:00.003+01:00

In honour of Halloween rolling at us like a pissed up witch on rollerblades, I thought I would update my list on things that scare me.

This list is in no way a reflection on my masculinity, and I remain the testosterone filled slab of man meat that all you all know and quietly admire.

1) Scorpions
Scorpions, like their cousins, the spider, are absolute bastards. Quite a bold statement, I must admit, but look at them. Armour plated, huge pincers waving around at the front of them, bastards, and behind them, a massive arse stinger filled with death, just to complete the whole “Spindly death machine” package.

My fear of scorpions started, as most fears do, from a very early age. I was about seven and watching one of David Attenborough’s amazing wildlife documentaries. If memory serves me correct, it was about when animals invade your home. So you had cameras following spiders, ants, and other assorted nasties mooching around a re-enactment of somebody’s house.

And then they focused on the scorpion.

I have to admit, it wasn’t as scary looking as the ones that I had seen before. It was a tiny little one, all orange coloured but still with a whopping great stinger at the back. The camera followed it as it trundled along someone’s bedroom floor (the whole show had actors moving around the beasties, putting mugs on top of them, and reaching in cupboards with fingertips brushing over cockroaches as they reached for the jam) and then the little shit decided to crawl into a ladies slipper.

This didn’t look good.

And then the lady, who was lying on her bed, then decided to put her slipper on.

You saw her wince in pain, pull her foot out, and then collapse on her bed convulsing.

This was on at seven in the evening while I was eating my dinner. I sat there opened mouthed with a fork full of macaroni cheese wobbling in front of it.

My tiny little mind was now warped beyond repair.

From that moment on, shoes were turned from safe, comfortable things that you wear on the end of your feet, to dark caves of death that were filled with evil bastard creatures, whom that the moment my vulnerable toes went anywhere near, they would sting like mo fo's, causing my head to swell up and I’d actually start shitting out of my ears.

I haven’t worn shoes ever since. I have tried to put it down to my free love, 60’s hippy sensibility. But in reality it’s because I know that there are scorpions living in them.

2) Nightmares
I have suffered from bad dreams since I was about 16. Now these nightmares aren’t your everyday (or night) terrors, but full blown epic horror spectaculars, complete with state of the art special effects and a plot straight out of a David Lynch film.

Now my mind is not a safe place to be during the day when I am in charge of it, when left alone at night, and with me not being in full control, it then decides to start really messing with me. I have been known to have surreal images of pure terror that wouldn’t be out of place out of one of Dante’s paintings.

And yet if told back in the warm light of day, they don’t sound that scary.

Take this one.

Now this is the scariest dream I have ever had. I was living back at my old house, which had a staircase that curved all the way down to my hallway. In my dream I was slowly creeping down it in the pitch blackness, the only light provided was some strobe lighting that was coming from something in my living room. As I crept down the stairs, I could see that my front door was open. I couldn’t see outside, as the door opened inwards, so all I could see was the back of it. As I got near the door, I knew that I didn’t want to look in the doorway.

Whatever was there was quite possibly the scariest thing I could ever imagine. It was just a presence, something evil. As I got nearer and nearer I just didn’t want to look round the door and see what was causing this feeling of terror, but I couldn’t stop myself from doing so. When I got to the door, I put my head round it to look outside, and was immediately blasted with a gale force wind and something screaming.

I don’t know what this dream means, but I’m pretty sure that it’s something to do with the fact that I might have a few issues.

These night terrors have been so bad that I have been known to wake up screaming sometimes, which always makes it a bit awkward if I ever had anyone round.

“I’m just off to bed now. There’s a chance I might wake up screaming at four in the morning. Night!”

This is probably the reason why I was probably never allowed sleepovers when I was a kid.

3) Nutter (A cat)
When I lived at my old house, for about three months I was attacked by a killer cat. Now I love all animals, but I could have quite happily toe punted this little fucker in front of an articulated lorry.

It started one winters evening, I was walking home one night after a long day at work, when I saw a raggedy looking cat sitting on a wall. Being the soft, animal loving bastard that I am, I did what I normally do whenever I see a cat; I leant over to stroke it. The cat ignored my outstretched hand and immediately leapt for my face, trying to claw out my eyes.

“OW! What the hell!” I cried, batting the cat away.

It landed on the floor, turned, and then hissed at me, and then swaggered off like an original gangsta, while I could only watch it saunter off with thin trickles of blood running down my face.

Every night for three months, this little tosser waited for me. He would hide in bushes, behind walls, under cars, and the moment he saw me, he would attack me. Now I know you think that a cat isn’t really a match for a grown man, but this wasn’t a normal cat. He had developed the taste for human blood. He was a killer. When he attacked, he would leap out, climb up my legs, and then try and claw at my vulnerable bits, which included eyes, cheeks, hands and genitals. There was never any provocation from my side, I never touched him, talked to him, and I eventually would end up avoiding eye contact with him when I saw his luminous eyes glaring at me from whatever attack point he had positioned himself on.

I used to take a different route, change over what side of the road I walked home on, but he soon wised up. I think he could smell fear. He always knew where I was.

My lowest point was actually running down the street with him chasing after me. Yes, that’s right. A man in his late 20’s was being chased down the road by a cat.

Form a queue ladies. Form a queue.

I don’t know what happened to Nutter (for this is what I christened him in the end). I sometimes think that he has followed me to my new home and is out there somewhere. Watching. Waiting.

4) Superman 3

This one scene from Superman 3 messed with my head for years afterwards. If I ever saw it on TV and knew it was coming to this bit, I would always make an excuse and go to the kitchen to make a drink.

You have to admit, for a kid’s film, it is pretty fucked up.

And that another small collection of things that I am a big girlie man about. Be curious to hear some of your fears. Drop ‘em in my comment box and let’s have a look. I bet they are not as screwed up as mine.

Happy Halloween my chumlets!

Routine Life………..

2010-10-16T18:06:00.001+01:00

We human beanz are ridiculous creations. All we are is just a collection of neurosis and strange habits, all piled up on each other and topped by hair. All of us have these weird things that we do every day, tiny little routines and motions that define us and prove just how crazy we all are.

Here is my list of crazy.

The “Shower Hand” Crazy

When I wake up every morning and stumble to my bathroom half asleep, I have a little test that is the barometer to how my day is going to turn out. As I stand in my freezing cold bathroom, all crazy hair and grumpiness due to another day in my own skin, I reach into my shower area and turn it on. Now my shower comes on like a fire hose, so I have to be quick to get my hand out of the way, otherwise it gets a blast of icy cold water, which first thing in the morning actually makes you want to stab someone.

So the test?

Hand gets wet= I’m going to have a bad day.

Hand doesn’t get wet= My day is going to rock.

Yeah, I’m weird.

The “Toilet Roll Is Comforting” Crazy

There is one thing in my life that pleases me and makes me feel safe no matter what, and that’s having plenty of toilet roll stocked in my apartment. You can forget food, heat, and all the other comforts that life holds, seeing those stacks of white poo roll nestled snugly beside my toilet makes me feel like everything is going to be alright.

Basically Armageddon could occur, but as long as I have something to wipe my arse with then I can face anything.

The “Pepsi Max” Crazy

Pepsi Max is my crack. I’m addicted to it. Every shopping trip I take I have to pick some up. My fridge is constantly packed with as many cans as I can fit in it (cans, never bottles, they lose their fizz once opened). My bins rattle with my empties. If I have run out I start jonesing big time and start mugging old ladies to get the cash to feed my habit.

Pepsi Max- Don’t do it kids.

The “Shopping Nazi” Crazy

Don’t go shopping with me. I’m a horrible human being when I’m food shopping. We are not here to have fun, talk, or muck around. We are here to shop, and if we miss anything, well, then the world will end. That’s right; we will all fall screaming into the abyss because you thought it would be funny to start juggling aubergines in the fruit section.

Kill the laughter. Stop the joy. There will be none of that shit on my watch.

The “I Have All Day To Do Stuff, But Then Decide To Do It All Just Before Bed” Crazy

When I get in from work I have around four and a half hours to do everything that I need to do before its beddy byes time. So why do I find myself running around doing it all just before its time to hit the sack? What do I do for the other four hours? Does time vanish? Do I fall into a black hole? The twenty minutes that I plan on surfing the internet stretches out into an hour and a half. That quick bath I want to take is now an hour (Lavender oils and vanilla candles just relax me, okay?). A reading session that I have on my sofa takes me through most of the night. So right before bed time, I am buzzing around like a fly with the shits trying to get everything done.

The “I can’t Handle Mess” Crazy

Everything has to be neat around me. I can’t just veg out if my flat is a mess. I could be sitting comfortably on my sofa, watching something on the TV, and from the kitchen I will hear my dishes speaking, “Daaaaaan, we are just stacked here, all dirty like. Look at us Dan, we’re disgusting. Clean us,” and will have to get up and load the dishwasher. I will then notice that the floor needs a hoover. And the skirting boards are looking a bit dusty as well, now you mention it. Actually, so does the TV. And before you know it, it is midnight and I’m standing there, all dirty and dusty but with an incredibly clean flat. And then I realise that I am dirty as well, so I need to have a shower. Then I see that have just made the bathroom unclean, so I have to clean that as well. Then I have a nervous breakdown and get collected by the social services, and when they come to take me away, I am trying to wash their dirty faces with a sponge, muttering to myself, “Filthy creatures.”

The “I Have To Pet Every Dog I See” Crazy

It’s been established that I like animals, especially dogs. So every time that I see one, I have to make friends with it, no matter what the breed, size, or temperament of the animal. So you will see me going up to Dobermans and Rottweiler’s with my arms wide open and a big dopey grin plastered on my stupid face, just wanting to be best buddies with the growling monster in front of me.

“Oh look, he’s so cute.”

Chomp

“Oh look, he’s bitten my limbs off and is drinking my blood. How adorable!”

Chomp

“Can somebody please get my leg off him?”

The “I’m Not Expecting You So I’m Not Answering The Door” Crazy

I know what I’m doing every minute of every day. I plan things to the letter. So if I hear my intercom buzz to say that there is someone at my door and I’m not expecting you, well, that door is not going to be opened. Don’t surprise visit me, you ain’t getting in without a prior arrangement. And if I’m not expecting you, chances are it won’t be anything good anyway and I probably owe you money, so you definitely ain’t getting in bud.

The “I Get Tourettes And Swear At You If You Get In My Way” Crazy

People annoy me on a level that is sometimes quite dangerous. And one of the ways in which they annoy me is those folk who walk around this earth with seemingly no idea of where they are going. Those brain dead zombies that just stumble around with blank expressions on their faces like they have never been outside before and just dawdle along, gazing with dumb wonderment at all the pretty lights and fast moving cars.

I always know where I am going. That’s because I am an anal OCD mentalist and have everything planned (see above). I never just walk along and “see what happens,” so those idiots that do and get in my way, well, be prepared to be sworn at under my breath. But the problem is that I am a bit deaf and have no idea of the volume of my voice, so that muttered insult actually might as well have been me coming up to you, grabbing you by the shoulders and saying directly into your startled face “Move out of my way, numbnuts before I chuck you under this ice cream van.”

For this I am sorry (I’m not. I hate you)

This is only a small collection of my oddness; I could give you much more. But to be honest, reading all of this back, it seems to me that maybe everyone else is fine and it is me that is slowly losing my grip on reality. But that’s fine, I can handle it.

I’m now off to polish something.

The Romford Redemption………

2010-10-10T15:50:00.004+01:00

Every year I get sucked into a netherworld, a vacuous void where all life is distilled into various levels of human liquid shit, each one more noxious and vile than the other. This normally happens around the June/July mark and finishes just before Christmas.

I am of course talking about the return of the TV show, The X Factor.

It’s like some form of unholy prison sentence that I have to serve at the end of each year. In retrospect, I would actually probably prefer to do physical time, being vigorously bummed up the arse by a tattooed skinhead (as long as he held me afterwards) than sit through this festering pile of bat droppings that sums up everything that is wrong about human civilisation in these worrying times.

As I have many non Uk readers, I will sum up what the show is about, so we are all up to speed. Simon Cowell picks 16 mentally unstable people with delusions of fame, gets them to perform in front of a baying crowd like those performing bears in Russia, and then periodicity dispatches them one by one whilst rubbing great fistfuls of cash all over his leathery genitals.

This year I have avoided all the build up, the selection process, and most importantly, the horrendous faux tear inducing back stories that make me want to flay off my own face so I can actually feel something that resembles a form of human emotion, all in the aim of hoping to avoid all aspects of this blight on the form of human culture.

Sadly Kates wasn’t having any of it.

“I’m so excited the X Factor starts tonight,” she told me when she came round yesterday. “Do you mind if we watch it?”

Of course, me naturally being the kind and sacrificing kind of boyfriend that I am, I immediately relented.

“Of course we can my darling; you know I would do anything for you. More canopies?”

“You know I don’t like Wotsits. A whole two and a half hours of The X Factor, how exciting!”

Hang on........

“Two and a half fucking hours? Are you kidding me?? That’s almost as long as Titanic but without the funny bits with the people falling off and hitting the propellers at the end.”

She gave me a look that made me knew I wasn’t going to win.

“Brilliant,” I replied, putting on a fake smile. “I honestly, literally, can’t wait. This is going to be so good. I’m excited to be a part of it.”

The minutes to when it started counted down like the timer on a nuclear device, and in many ways, the complete and utter oblivion that a 16 megaton nuclear blast would have provided was in some ways more preferable to the hell that was coming.

Aural Armageddon.

I didn’t even know the line-up of the constants this year, but as the show started in a blaze of pyrotechnics and flashing lights that subliminally spelt out: give us all your money, they flashed across my screen in a parade of head turns and hair spray. And like Pavlov’s Dogs, I was conditioned to bark out every time one appeared.

Girl group.

“Slags”

Skinny hip hop girl.

“Chav”

Perma tanned duo.

“Gay”

Androgynous weird bloke.

“Cunt”

Scary hairy bloke with chains and porno tash.

“Top lad”

This year they the show was going for the subtle, less is more approach. So with “O Fortuna” screaming out with almost ear splitting volume, and the stage suddenly exploding like the birth of a new solar system through 4 bazillion lights, all over the nation, hundreds of kids suddenly pitched to the floor in epileptic shock, legs twitching and faces dribbling like they had just stared into the face of God.

Less is more, remember?

And then the entertainment started.

To be honest, I think I blacked out after the 25 minute mark. If I try and think back to last night, it just remains a swirl of colours, screeching and bongos. Yes, bongos. That does stick in my head for some reason.

I know there was a boy band that looked terminally ill. I know there was a skinny hip hop girl who apparently has a habit of making her own rap sections in the middle of songs (I also know I released a stream of expletives at this point that flew across the room and hit my TV like warm dog shit). I know that the aforementioned camp duo was racing around inside my TV in a blur of day-glo colours that actually seared my retinas. I know there was an awful girl dressed up like a space whore whilst wearing 12 multicoloured sun visors on her head.

But getting back to the bongos.

The one overriding image that I still can’t shake is of the hairy bloke with the prono tash standing on a podium, banging away on a set of bongos screaming “SHE BANGS! SHE BANGS!” while explosions roared beside him and half naked dancers groped and rubbed their breasts. I think if you were going to run a holiday advert for one of Dante’s seventh levels of hell, then this is surely the image that you want running on a continuous loop. I was expecting a pair of horns to burst out of hairy porno tash guys head, and for him to lean back and cackle manically whilst stamping cloven hoofs.

Eventually the two and a half hours was over and I emerged from it shaking and teary eyed. Even Kates looked a bit stunned, like she had just witnessed a bad traffic accident. We both looked like we had just come back from a tour of ‘Nam.

“Same time next week?” I asked meekly.

“I need an aspirin,” she replied, holding her forehead. “Or vodka. Do you have any vodka?”

I keep thinking to how long it is until Christmas and my sentence will be up.

Man’s got a choice.

Either get busy living, or get busy dying.

Get Down With The Sickness……………

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

I’m not very well at the moment (sad face).

It’s common knowledge that men, on a whole, don’t handle illness very well. It’s some kind of genetic makeup that we have which prevents us from just sucking it up and carrying on with our day like you ladies do. Instead we men flop around like fish that have just been yanked out of a lake, loudly proclaiming to anyone in earshot about how shit we feel and how this is no normal illness, but a serious one.

Big girlie men.

Of which I now find myself joining the club.

I started feeling rough at work on Thursday.

“I think I’m coming down with something,” I told my friend Elise, who I share my desk pod with.

“Oh, that’s not good,” she replied absentmindedly from the mound of paperwork that always seems to surround her like an administration Himalayas.

“Do you have any vitamins or aspirin?”

“No, sorry,” she replied as my weak, pathetic ill voice distracted her once more from her work.

“That’s ok, “I told her, vowing to just suffer in silence. But of course, it didn’t last.

“I don’t feel very well,” I would continuously tell anyone who wandered past my desk.

The lack of sympathy I got was heart warming.

When I got home, I was soaking wet from the rain, shivering, and starting to get a sore throat. This didn’t bode well at all.

I gave myself an early night in the hope that when I woke up, I would feel a whole lot better. But when my alarm went off in the morning, I awoke to find my throat on fire, my lungs clogged with nasty shit, and my body alternating between hot and cold.

I could see me not making it in today.

So I now had to do the thing that I hate most in the world, phoning in sick. I always get incredibly paranoid about doing this because I always imagine the manager at the end of the phone just shaking their heads and not believing the fact that I wasn’t very well, when in truth, there was a strong possibility that I was going to die. That’s right, die. Because this naturally wasn’t just any kind of illness I was feeling, but a life threatening serious one.

I always try and prepare myself when I have to phone in sick. No matter how shit I feel, I don’t want to sound too ill, because then I always worry that it sounds too false, like the fake ill voice that you used to put on to get out of school. But if you go too far the other way, you might not sound ill enough, and just sound like you couldn’t be arsed to go in to work. So with this dilemma weighing heavily on you, it causes your flu ravaged body to start feeling even more shit, until that worrying thought that you actually might die suddenly starts looking like it might be a grim reality and you have nobody to moan to about it.

When I rang my manager yesterday though, I got her voicemail. I didn’t know if this was a good or bad thing. I left my message saying that I wouldn’t be in, hopefully sounding as genuinely ill as I felt, and resisting the urge to ask her pass on my goodbyes to my work colleagues as it didn’t look like I was going to make it through this one and could she share out my stationary with them all.

With work informed, I now lay in my bed, making sight moaning noises and proclaiming to the empty flat, “Urrrrgh, I feel ill.” Somehow this felt as if I was justifying everything to myself.

I now had to tell Kates, so I sent her a text.

ME: Feel rough. Not gone in today.

KATES: Go out, stock up on soup, medicine, and sausage rolls.

I have no idea why she wanted me to stock up on sausage rolls. Perhaps it was an age old tradition of her family? As soon as someone gets ill, you crack out the flu capsules and pastry covered sausage meat.

Kates has been with me long enough to know that when I get ill, the best thing to do is leave me alone. When we first got together, if I ever got sick, her first natural reaction was to look after me, mainly because she loves me and because I also live on my own as well. She now knows that if I get sick to just to let me get on with it. This is for two reasons. The first is because I loath to take help from anyone, even my girlfriend. If it sounds ridiculous, well, that’s probably because it is. It’s not even stupid male pride; I just never accept help from anyone unless it’s a dire emergency. I don’t know why I’m like it; I just can’t bring myself to do it. I think maybe it’s an offshoot of having to fend for myself from such a young age. I did all that by myself and now I will never take help from no one. It drives her batshit and I totally understand why. Maybe I will change, or maybe I will always be this annoying?

The second reason is a little bit more understandable, I turn into a grumpy sod when ill. Now normally I am not the sunniest of individuals, but man, when I’m ill, I hate everything. So it’s probably a good thing that I’m probably left alone, otherwise I could end up getting a force fed an overdose of lemsip.

I dozed off in my bed for a bit before being rudely awoken by the sudden sneezing fit that overtook me. I don’t know if any of you have sneezed in your sleep, but it’s disgusting, it goes everywhere. My bed sheets, clothes, and one rather startled cat, were covered in it. I had turned into a 360 degree mucus machine.

“Oh, God, “I moaned, strings of it covering me so I resembled something from the set of Alien. “What’s happening to me?”

After removing myself from my cocoon, I gathered up my bed stuff and stuck it in the washing machine. My cat was winding her way round my legs, the fur on the top of her head stuck up in a crazy Mohican style from the huge wad of mucus I had fired at her.

“Sorry Dotty,” I told her, wiping it off with a wet tissue. She just glared back at me.

So I now had the whole day ahead of me, but to be honest, all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball somewhere and make an occasional “Meh” noise.

So I did.

And that’s what I’ve been doing since. I still feel like shit. This could possibly be my last blog post, because I’m pretty sure that what I am suffering from is actually fatal, not just your everyday common cold, but a life sucking vital bitch that no man will ever escape from.

Overdramatic? Maybe. But if you’re a man, well, you guys know where I’m coming from, right?

Sniffle.

Home……….

2010-09-26T17:56:00.005+01:00

Hello you. Let me take you by the hand for the moment, for you see I am about to guide you through my world. You may want to put on this waterproof rain mac and slip on these boots; it can get a little bit sticky at some points. And whatever you do, please don’t look down to see what you’re stepping in, not unless you want to eat in the next few days.

There, now don’t you look spiffy? Now, are you ready? Let’s go........

When I think about home there are a whole swirl of emotions and images that flow through my mind that are linked to that particular connotation. Home to me represents warmth, lamp light, the smell of cooking, chaos, the sound of life when you open the front door, black night pressing against cold windows while you curl up in front of the TV, and most of all, the feeling of security, of actually belonging somewhere.

And yet, in reality, you only get this feeling at two stages in your life, firstly when you’re a child, and secondly when you have you own family. For nearly everyone, there is this huge section of your life where technically you don’t actually have a home; you just have a base of operations. Normally this section of your life is based around the periods of when you leave home for the first time, right up until the point where you meet someone and decide to set up your own home together. Then your base of operations gets upgraded from base camp to starter home. When you get married it then upgrades further to a home in progress. Finally, when you have your own children, it morphs into an actual home and you then suddenly realise that you have taken the place of your own parents. Then your own mortality hits you round the face, screaming “My god, we’re old!”, and you then start growing your hair into ridiculous styles and start thinking about wearing leather trousers, all in the hope of regaining the youth that has snuck out the back door without you even realising it.

But anyway, I digress.

I like home. I like the whole idea around home. It pleases me. Even writing about it pleases me. I’m smiling now in fact. But that whole chunk of your life where you are just at base camp level. Don’t really like that much. That sucks.

So what makes the transition from a building just being a collection of rooms for you to just store your belongings in, to a place that is filled with memories and laughter and makes you feel like you are actually a part of something. Is it the amount of people living there? Would two people make a place feel more like a home rather than one? Does the relationship between these people make a difference? If you lived with a friend rather that someone you were in a relationship with, would that lessen the feeling of home? In all honestly, it’s all very confusing and is making me want to lie down and have a seriously long and hard think about it all.

I myself have been at base camp level for as long as I would like to remember. I guess you could call me an institutionalised man now. You stick me in an actual home and I start freaking and start wondering who all these people are and how the hell did they get in my living room? And yet I like the trappings that a home provides. I like the warmth. I like the sensation of being a part of something and try to replicate it at my own place. Kates totally understands me and my need for things to be “cosy.” I like the winter and the heating being on, I like there being lots of things going on around me, I like cooking meals in my kitchen. I think I like all of these things because maybe, and I could be totally wrong here, I’m trying to replicate my own home life from when I was a child.

And yet, me being the total contradiction of a human being that I am, I also like living on my own as well. But that is growing less and less now as I am getting older, and I think that pretty soon the urge for me to start me own home will become unavoidable, which in turn makes me wonder if it’s the same for most people. Is there a point in your life when you stop living in a base camp and actually have the need to build something of your own?

Now this is where this blog gets interesting (no, seriously, it does!) I’m going to take you on a journey around me own base camp (or man cave as Kates called it-which I love). This section may contain flashing lights and scenes that may disturb some readers.

I live in a place called Romford. I’ve lived in Essex all my life, just on the outskirts of Romford to be precise, but sold my house last year and bought a little flat near Romford town centre.

Now how to describe Romford? To be honest, words can’t really do it justice. Romford isn’t really a place; it’s more like a state of mind. If that mind in question was suffering from some quite server mental deficiencies. It’s filled with strange looking people that scurry around like parasites, cramming junk food into their gaping red mouths whilst trying to have sex with each other. This is exactly what its like. Totally. All the time.

Okay, I may be exaggerating slightly here. It’s not that bad, that’s just the roaring snob in me speaking. As much as I hate to admit it, and try to hide it, I come from these parts. These are all my people

*Spreads arms, Christ like*

My childhood was spent around these parts. I grew up in its parks and schools, took my first drink in its pubs, kissed my first girl on its streets, its part of me, and no amount of pretence is going to hide it, no matter how hard I try. But it still doesn’t stop me from sometimes pulling a face like a man who has just licked his own shit when I see a huge fat hefferlumper waddle past, gigantic arse spilling out of a pair of low slung tracksuit bottoms, so her tramp stamp tattoo that she has had etched above this monument for obesity bursts forth from her waistband like the flapping wings of an eagle, desperate to break free, but locked for all eternity to her quivering back fat.

Yeah, that’s a bit grim.

Anyway, my man cave is based here, a nice little block of flats.

I moved here about a year ago and it’s only now that it is starting to feel like something to me. I wouldn’t say home, but whatever it is, it feels like mine.

Wanna have a look inside?

Course you do, nosey.

This is my living room

This room is good for many things. Watching films. Chilling. Monging.Notice the film geek posters? Yeah, I rock.

Here is the kitchen.

Now most days you will either find me trying to do one of two things in here.
1) Cooking a fancy meal from one of my many cook books
2) Making beans on toast

Now ladies, please try to contain yourselves. This......is where the magic happens.

Yes, this is the room I like to practice card tricks in. I was going for a slightly gothic ambience, as quite frankly, I could think of nothing better to wake up to at half six on a Monday morning than all that blackness.

It’s the only way I can feel.

I was going to stick up my study (ohhhhh, get me!) and bathroom, but then thought, do you really want to see that?So I didn't. Its a bathroom. Use your imagination.

So that’s my man cave. I wouldn’t go as far as to call it a home as such, for me it’s just purely my base of operations. I feel no warmth there (mainly because the heating is fucking terrible) and certainly no real connection to the place. It’s just a few rooms for me to sleep and store my things.Thats all it is to me.

And if I’m entirely honest with you.

I really miss having a home.

Babe Of The Day…..

2010-09-14T20:34:00.002+01:00

There are many reasons why I have a great girlfriend. This is just one of them.

About three weeks ago I was lying in bed with Kates, indulging in some pillow talk. Well, me being an insomniac, I was indulging in pillow talk, she was just grunting into her pillow.

After uttering some inane question that was playing on my mind at the time, probably something along the lines of: When spiders die, can they come back as ghosts, she realised that I wasn’t going to allow her to drift off to sleep and begrudgingly joined in with my chattering.

The conversation freewheeled its way round various topics, as a conversation often does, when somehow we ended up on a topic that I hadn’t planned, or wished, to stumble into.

The topic being what type of woman I go for?

Being a man, I immediately knew that I was on dangerous territory. I suddenly had my head talking to my heart like a gruff army sergeant talking a wet behind the ears soldier through a minefield: Careful son, one false step and this could blow up in your face, sending your ass to Kansas.

“I bet I know your ideal type of woman,“ she told me.

“Oh, is that the time? It’s late, we really should be getting some sleep,” I replied, rolling over and snoring loudly.

“I bet I do,” she carried on, shaking me roughly by the shoulder. “I bet I can picture your exact perfect woman.”

I wasn’t going to win this one.

“If you want to picture my perfect woman, then all you have to do is take a look in the mirror baby,” I said, taking my hand and stroking it down her cheek.

“You’re such a twat,” she replied, swatting my hand away like an annoying fly.

I sighed. “OK, well, whatever you are going to say, you’re wrong. And whatever happens, it’s not my fault. Remember that. Its. Not. My. Fault.”

“I’m going to prove it to you. Check your work email tomorrow. I’m going to send you a picture of what I think is your type of woman.”

“OK. Now can we just snuggle?”

We snuggled.

Just as I felt her drifting off to sleep, I whispered in her ear, “Can you make sure she has really big boobies?”

Kate has very sharp elbows.

I totally forgot about our conversation the next day, but when I went to log on to my work email, I saw her name nestled amongst the rest.

“Bugger,” I muttered to myself. This was only going to end in one way. Me in the wrong. I didn’t know how, or why, but I knew it was going to be.

I opened up the email and was confronted by the picture of what Kate thought was my perfect woman. Brunette. Dark skin. Tall and leggy. Basically the complete opposite of Kates.

“Shit,” I mumbled into my hand. “This could be bad.”

Later on that night I got my phone call from her. The one I was expecting.

“So was I right? Brunette? Leggy? Dark skin? Totally not like me at all?”

“I....er..I....I love you? Is that the right answer? That’s normally the right answer, right? I love you?”

“Bye!” she replied, and the receiver went clunk as she hung up.

And she was basically right. My “type”, if you want to give it a label, is nothing like what she looks like.

Now let me get one thing straight, my girlfriend is gorgeous. Not in a kind of “well, she’s my girlfriend so I have to say it” kinda way, but actually gorgeous. Whenever anyone sees me with her, or sees a photo, I normally get the same reactions.

Wow, how did you get her?
What’s she doing with you?
Where do you get your rohypnol from?

And I like that. It makes me feel special. But if I’m honest, Kates is nothing like what I am normally attracted to. I do like brunettes, and she is blonde. I do like dark skin, and she is very fair. But I do fancy the pants off her. I can’t help it, I just do. Imagine a blonde with the prettiest face going and the body of Joan out of Mad Men. Without sounding like a sexist pig, what man wouldn’t like that, regardless of whatever constraints you place upon yourself on what “type” of person you allegedly find attractive?

And it’s not just looks either, it’s the whole package. She makes me laugh, like, really laugh. And that’s a very hard thing to do. She puts up with me as well, which is also a very hard thing to do. Basically she ticks all the boxes that I need, and all without dark skin and brunette hair.

But, naturally, it’s very hard to convince someone that you like them if they are the complete opposite of what you apparently like. So she is always thinking about this mysterious brunette who is just lurking in the wings, just waiting to pounce. I have tried to use the terminology of the fact that I like pepperoni pizza, but if I was told I could only have cheese and tomato for the rest of my life, I would love that, because I like cheese and tomato as well.

It was only as she sat there opened mouthed did I realise that I had just compared her to doughy, cheesy pizza, and was now officially the worst boyfriend in the world.

I am amazing with words, but only if I keep them in my head. If I let them loose on the world then they mutate into evil little shit bastards whose sole purpose is to get me into bother.

I was having a conversation with a work colleague about this exact same topic, and she was in the same position as me. Her boyfriend is totally the opposite of what she goes for, but she loves him more than anything. And that’s where I find myself today. In love with someone who transcends looks and ideals and goes into something that is a lot deeper.

Plus with really big boobies.

It’s a challenge convincing my other half that she is the one for me.

I like challenges.

But if there is one good thing to have come out of this situation, it’s that I now get, freshly delivered to my work inbox every morning, my own babe of the day.

Every day I get a fresh picture, with an accompanying funny message, which always makes me smile. I have had a whole range of smoking hot babes delivered to me and it’s the perfect way to start your morning.

So now I throw requests in. The night before I will ask for a girl next door type, or a sexy sports person, and I will get one delivered to me. At this moment we are now going around the world, Thursday will be a sexy oriental, Friday a hot Indian. But I’m quite excited for tomorrow. As it’s my birthday, I am getting a birthday surprise. I don’t know what it will be. I have a feeling it will be Gemma Arterton, as she is my type, and I have asked for her.

I’m hoping I will get a surprise and it will be one of Kates.

A Genius Plan…….

2010-09-05T18:39:00.005+01:00

(Megan Fox Soapy Tit Wank) As I am a friend to all my fellow blog writers, I am now going to pass on an amazing tip which will enable you lovely people to get many more visitors to your blogs.

I know it has been a feature for awhile, but I have only just had (Anne Hathaway looking all sexy like) a little look at the stats section of the Blogger dashboard, which is a veritable mine of information as to when, where, and what, the readers of this blog have been looking at. One of the best sections is the one that informs you of (Jessica Biel in a leather catsuit) what posts have been getting the most views during the last week. It threw up a rather interesting surprise for me. Interesting, and a little disturbing.

Now on average my blog posts have been getting about 50 views a week. Not astronomical, I know, but it’s enough for me. But there was one post that I wrote that got an eyebrow (BOOBIES!) raising 392 views last week. And it was this one here

Now naturally the egotistic side of me automatically thought (Scarlet Johansson is a dirty bitch!) that this was due to the powerful, and quite frankly, life changing brilliance of the words that I wrote on that very page.
Sadly I was wrong. When I clicked on the traffic source section, which would tell me what link my readers clicked on that led them to my blog; at the top of the list was the link that led to this little lady’s photo (eyes left).
Hmmmmmmn.

And right underneath, in the keyword search, i.e. what people typed into their browsers that led to the link that led to my blog, were the search terms: Gemma Arterton, Gemma Arterton’s cleavage, and Gemma Artertons Big Tits.

So the popularity of this blog post was nothing to do with the writing, but more to do with ( Mila Kunis and her filthy sex tape!) the photo displayed on it, and people clicking on the link to get their perv on.

Now this could mean either two things.

1) There were an awful lot of teenage boys who really, really liked Gemma Arterton.
2) There was actually only one person who had a serious fixation on Gemma Arterton, and has just spent the last week tugging himself around his bedroom with my blog displayed proudly on his PC monitor. 392 times!

At first I was pretty horrified. I felt defiled and used for someone else’s sexual gratification. Now some men would pay good money for this feeling, but they would normally be (dirty bitches play fighting for you!) chained to the wall in some suburban fuck den while a rather bored and listless woman who is dressed as a Nazi kicks them repeatedly in the balls and tells them that they won’t amount to anything. It won’t be from an amazing piece of writing that they have quite literally poured their heart and souls into, and was now being used as a gateway for masturbatory fantasies.

But after my initial disgust had faded, I came up with a rather spiffing idea (why not watch Kate Beckinsale and Salma Hayek wrestle!). Why not use the power of the internet perverts to gain some more readers?

Picture the scene. Little Johnny is sitting at his computer, box of Kleenex at one side, Johnsons baby oil at the other, and is getting into his groove. All of a sudden his eyes twitch from the photo displayed on the screen to the words surrounding them. His is distracted from (Elisha Cuthbert playing volleyball) the beautiful, porcelain features of Gemma Arterton by the amazing sentences that I have created.

I’m torn, thinks Little Johnny. I literally have balls the size of cantaloupes right now, but I can’t concentrate on anything else but finding out how this blog post actually ends.

Visibly shrinking, Little Johnny pulls up his trousers, his heart ruling over his neither regions, and finishes reading my post. Like a crack addict jonesing for their next fix, he has to read more. So he does. Before you know it, he has joined up, thrown aside his favourite past time of (Ashley Dupre-Spandex-Need I Say More?) seeing how many times he could jerk off in one hour, and has now immersed himself fully in my writing. Who knows, perhaps I could even inspire him to start up his own blog?

He could discover a fire in his belly that never knew existed and eventually becomes a bestselling novelist. And it would all be because of me. All of it, all down to me, because I am great.

Now naturally I would never dream of taking sole responsibility for his sudden change in life, nor the success that would befall him. Maybe a dedication in his first book perhaps: Dan, you were a hero and an inspiration to me. I would never have done it without you. You are more God than man.

Something simple like that.

Now in order to harness the untapped potential of the pervert market, I am now going to pepper my posts with pictures of hot women, and subliminally insert the types of search terms (Alison Stokke and her lovely watermelons!) that these sexually frustrated individuals would use to get their rocks off, hence making them flock like moths to a light bulb to my blog.

Genius, no?

Now you may say this is cheapening my blog, but in all honestly, guys, you have been reading the shit that I put out, right? Seriously, it can’t really get any lower than this. Just think of it as natural progression. And my soul was screwed years ago, believe me.

So please feel free to use this plan for your own blogs. I expect to see each new post literally plastered with smoking hot babes, and hopefully contain sentences that would make a sailor, who is just on shore leave, and hasn’t even seen a womanly shape for about nine months, but is now faced with a hot lady who is making sexy eyes at him, and is making “come here tiger” motions with her hands and jiggling all her lady bits in his directions, blush.

There is only one major drawback to this plan though. Anyone who now joins up to my blog after this post is now going to be singled out as an internet masturbator and will have everyone pointing at them and whispering “We know what you do”

But hey, no one said that you don’t have to make some sacrifices in life, right?

(A pair of gigantic enormobooobs literally bursting out of the screen at you and waving about in your face. You want that, don’t you?)

This Is Me.......

2010-08-31T16:28:00.000+01:00

Something amazing will happen tomorrow. Something so profound and earth shattering that it could actually tip the axis of the Earth by 10%, so we all fall screaming off the world and into the cold, empty blackness of space, never to be heard from again. And when mystical and benign archaeological aliens visit our silent and lonely planet hundreds of years later, all that they will find to document our entire existence will be a Miley Cyrus CD playing on continuous loop as someone didn’t get a chance to turn it off before they fell off the world. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? And then the aliens will then nuke the planet from orbit, as it’s the only way to be sure.

Er, where was I?

Oh yeah, this amazing thing.

My blog turns one year old tomorrow.

A magnificent achievement, do you not think?

Well I do.

Now some of you will have been with me from the start as I took my first few faltering steps into the world of blogging, very much like a new born lamb learning to take its first few steps, not having a clue what it was doing and quite possibly defecating on itself every 20 minutes. Some of you stayed, many of you buggered off when you realised that it actually doesn’t get any better than this, but I know who the hardcore faithful are, and as always, I am blessed by you all.

But I have also picked up many new readers as well, and for many of you, all you know of me is from whatever blog entry you started from, so you may have missed anything relating to my background and who I am.

So, to get all you lovely new people up to speed, I thought I would write up a personal CV for you all, just so you get an idea of the man behind the words (for those of you who can’t be arsed to read all the way through this, I can give you the abridged version. Dan=TWAT)

Dan

Some shithole called Romford

Tel: 017- Yeah, right!

Email: IknowthatifIgiveyouthislotsofladieswillstartstalkingme@gmail.com

Personal Profile
I am a narcissistic cynical bastard who literally hates around about 99.9% of the human race. Chances are that if you are standing there talking to me, my face will probably look like it’s interested in what you are saying. I will be making all the right notions, nodding, smiling, making the “Hmmmmmn, good point” noise when its needed, all that kind of jazz, but in reality, in the centre of my mind, I am probably thinking of the best way to kill you. That is not a joke, I am fantasying about murdering you. But please, tell me how your day was.

I don’t know why most people annoy me. It could be the fact that I am getting older, or it could be the fact that most of the world is populated by idiots whose sole purpose it seems it to get in my face, make a really high pitched annoying sound, and then astound me with their own stupidity. It has resulted in a form of Tourettes where I have no qualms about swearing at complete strangers when they do this, and will more than likely get me beaten up very severely one day by a big man with a tattoo which reads: Mother. In many respects, I will probably deserve it when it happens.

But I can be quite nice as well. I have a slight sentimental streak that can sometimes be evident in my writing, so in between the bitterness and bile, these small nuggets of sweetness make me feel like less of a grumpy dickhead.

As you may have gathered from my last blog entry, I am a bit directionless and don’t really know what I am doing with my life, but to be honest, that is probably the same as you right now who is reading these words with your own very two eyeballs. So we are the same, you and I. You poor, poor bastard.

Key Skills and Achievements
· I am an amazing writer who can create sentences so brilliant that they could probably make you black out from their power.
· I am an expert liar.
· I once ate a whole packet of milk chocolate digestive biscuits on my own and felt strangely proud afterwards.
· I have a sense of humour that is often called “Dry” and can normally result in people never knowing if I am being serious or not. I like this.
· I can geek out quite often. I am comfortable with this.
· I can decide within 30 seconds of meeting you if I am going to like you or not.

Life and Employment History

Boyfriend to Kates, All over the place 2004- Present Day
· Kates is an OCD mentalist who has no control over her emotions and can explode with the ferocity of a volcano in a bad mood. I am a repressed, emotionless male who can only express himself through anger and quiet rage and finds it almost impossible to connect with most people. In many ways we are the ideal couple. We balance out each other’s crazy until we actually resemble “normal” people. I am lucky to have her. I can’t quite say that I could reverse that statement.
· My duties include offering sage and excellent advice that will always be ignored, providing genuine and heartfelt comments to combat insecurities that will also be ignored, arranging curries to be brought to wherever we are, being an emotional support, making Kates laugh after a shit day (either with or without clothes on, normally laughter increases without clothing), hugs, perplexing her with my many flaws and strange behaviours, owning a beard because Kates told me she likes it, being a mystery to her even after six years of being together, trying to be a better man.
· This is a full time position, it can be very hard work, but the rewards are limitless.

Cat owner to Dotty, Romford 2006- Present Day
· Dotty is my cat who I live with (man that makes me sound gay) and who is probably about as hard work as my girlfriend, if not more.
· My duties include feeding, cleaning out the litter tray, feeding, being a Dan shaped cushion for her to lie on at night, feeding, object of fun, feeding, thing to stare at, normally at around four in the morning, which will then result in feeding.
· It is very hard having two demanding women in your life.

Employment Advisor, London 2010- Present Day
· My current job and the only thing that I have done work wise that I actually enjoy and think I am any good at. That’s all I have to say on the matter.

Bank Bloke, London 2006- 2009
· My worst ever job, working for one of the UK’s largest banks. No word of a lie, this job very nearly resulted in my losing my mind and health. It’s very hard to get fired up about something you have zero interest in. I quit one day, just took off my tie and walked out with Simple Mind’s Don’t you forget about me playing in my head. It was the coolest thing I had ever done. I was then out of work for seven months, which resulted in it being the stupidest thing I have ever done.
· My duties included staring at clients as they babbled compete bullshit to me over the reason why they were overdrawn, and then wondering how many years I would get inside if I just leant over and smashed them over the head with my PC monitor, feigning fake enthusiasm when the newest interest rates were released and how I was going to apply them to whatever product I was selling, thinking of ways in which I could end my own life.
· I didn’t like that job very much

Hobbies and interests

I love to write. It is the only thing I feel that I’m any good at. Don’t get me wrong, I know I’m not brilliant, but I know out of all the things I can do, writing is what I am best at (to be honest though, seeing as how some of the others things I can do consists of reciting all the lyrics to Rupert and the frog chorus, insulting people, and telling you who directed what film and the year it was released, the writing thing probably isn’t the boldest claim in the world).

I love football and support West Ham, the team the fits my psychological profile perfectly, and I actually met Kates through them, so that’s even more a reason to like them.

So that was a brief little potted history of me. Please feel free to ask any questions that you want and I will try and answer them.

And on a final note, after one year of doing this, I would like to say a massive thank you to anyone who has signed up (and even left), given advice, left nice comments (of which I am shit at replying to lately, please don’t think they are being ignored), and just generally made this whole experience the fun that it has been. It would be very lonely and pointless writing a blog if there weren’t people like you out there reading. So thank you.

Existential Crisis In Romford......

2010-08-20T20:49:00.007+01:00

Alright? Been awhile, hasn’t it?

During my brief hiatus from blogging, quite recently I have had a nagging thought buzzing around in my head like a pissed up bluebottle.

This nagging thought has been flaring up in my mindscape during really odd moments. It’s happened when I’ve been lying in bed at night, trying to sleep, when I’m walking home after a long day at work, and when I've been staring, brain-dead with drool hanging from my bottom lip, at the rows of food in Tesco’s trying to fire up my tired mind into deciding what to buy for dinner that night.

Do you want to know what that thought is?

Actually, probably not. But it wouldn’t be much of a blog post if I didn’t tell you, so here goes.

I have absolutely no idea who I am.

Now this rather profound, and dare I say it, little bit pretentious thought could be the result of two things.

1) It could be due to the fact that it’s my birthday in a few weeks time; so it is purely the natural response to being another year older and still being in exactly the same position in life as to where I was when I was 21.

2) Or it could be the early onset of Alzheimer’s

And seeing as at this precise moment in time I still have most of my marbles rattling around freely in my head (though I did find myself standing in my living room last Wednesday, stark bullock naked bar one black sock, and not having any clue what I was doing or why I had entered the room), my guess for the cause of this thought is purely on number 1.

You can kind of get a good angle on where you a positioned in life from the greeting that is printed on the front of your birthday card. So at the moment my position in life is boyfriend. Something that I am not displeased with, mind you.

I’m not a husband, a son, an uncle, a father, nor a brother. So is that really enough for me? Is that where I should be at the age of 32? Shouldn’t I be more by now than just “Boyfriend”?

Though saying that, if Hallmark suddenly started making a card with a pure white front and the single word TWAT printed dead centre, then I would definitely be getting that mailed through my letterbox. I wouldn’t be able to leave the house due to the huge pile that would arrive every morning and not just be confined to birthdays and special occasions.

I could live with that.

I remember when I was at my primary school and it was in my last week of being there before I left to join secondary school. I was sitting on some steps with my best friend Stephen O’Brian, and a strange, almost melancholy feeling was coming over the pair of us. I know, mental, isn’t it? Two ten year old boys feeling melancholy. The only thing I should have been melancholy about was why I never got picked for kiss chase. But melancholy we were.

“I can’t believe we are leaving in a week,” Stephen said to me.

“I know. I can’t believe I’m 11 in a few months,” I replied. And we both shook our heads at how life can pass you by so quickly.

We were ten!

And yet at all the landmark ages in life, this feeling of everything slipping by too quickly has always plagued me.

When I turned 18, I was sat in the pub with my friends, celebrating my ascent into manhood, and it scared me. Things were slowly revving up and adulthood was just on the horizon. Looking back now that I am in my 30’s, it amazes me that I couldn’t just enjoy just being really, and I mean, really young, rather than worry about what was coming up. But I have always had this fear that I wouldn’t amount to much and just screw everything up, because that’s just simply what I do. I know that I will probably look back to my 30’s when I’m an ancient and decrepit 40 year old husk of a man and think they were the best years of my life.

My mind is wrong, I know.

Admittedly the only thing I can remember about the next landmark age reached, the grand old age of 21, was having a four hour conversation with a lampshade. How and why I was having a four hour conversation with a lampshade is probably not something I should go into now. But I did. And it was weird.

But when I turned 21, there was one set of digits to me that signified getting older, and that figure was the age of 25. I don’t know why, but to me that was old.

25 wasn’t just being a young person anymore. 25 was crossing the threshold into something else. It was that slipping and sliding sensation of being at the top of something huge, and then hurtling all the way down with no way of stopping yourself.

And do you know what, I was only bloody right.

25, 26, 27, 28, 29. All of them past me by in a blur, each year getting shorter and shorter, until one day, when I woke up and found out that I was 30, it was then that I realised that I really hate being right all the time. My alarm went off that day and I just stared at it and mouthed the word: bollocks.

Now I know everyone hates the thought of getting older, but I’ve always assumed that for most people, the passage of time always comes along with progression as well. You change as a person and your lifestyle changes with it. You get married, you have children, you start up your own families, and then set out on the same adventure that your parents did when they were your age.

I haven’t done any of that.

I’m still the same as I was when I was 21 (minus the inclination that having a deep and meaningful with a lampshade was a rather brilliant idea). I’ve never married. I’m childless. I have no family of my own to speak of. And I also have no urge for any of them right now either.

Is that right?

Now I’m not saying I never want them, but at this present moment in time, I have no desire for them either. And yet I feel this tremendous pressure that I should at least be considering them. I’m getting older, that’s a given fact (plus I have been pissing and moaning about for the last 20 minutes, if you haven’t noticed?). Next year I will be at exactly the same age as my dad when he had me. By then he was married to my mum, had a mortgage, and wasn’t some stupid twat with a beard like me.

He was an adult.

And a much better one that I will ever be.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t want to be lying on my deathbed when I’m old and wrinkly and have any major regrets about wasted opportunities.

What I would like to be doing, when lying all wrinkly and old on my deathbed, is to be wearing a skin-tight white sparkly catsuit that is slashed to the navel revealing wiry man hair, coupled with huge 15 inch platform shoes, simply because I think that would be a rather cool and befitting way to remember me by.

But I digress.

I know you have to take things at your own time, but surely I’m not alone in feeling this pressure to be moulding myself into something that I’m clearly not quite ready for just yet?

Well, I’m throwing it over to you dear reader. What’s your experience of this? And am I alone in what I’m feeling?

And who else thinks the catsuit thing rocks?

Oh, it’s good to see you again by the way. I’ve missed you.

Private Dancer.....

2010-07-22T21:09:00.005+01:00

As I have mentioned on this blog at least, ohhhh, I dunno, about a hundred times already, I am not a manly man. I cry at films, I coo over kittens, and every third month I lactate. But there is one thing that I have done in my life that does give me a few man points.

I’ve been to a strip club.

Not once. But twice.

Yeah, check out this playa.

Now let me make this clear from the off. I’m not a pervy, lecherous bloke who leers at women whilst making inappropriate comments. So the whole notion of joining the sweaty ranks of men in ill fitting suits who stare lustfully at half naked girls was a bit of an alien one to me. But yes, I have frequented a strip club. Was it enjoyable? Not really. Interesting? Yes, a little.

The first time I ever visited one was about ten years ago. I had planned a night out in London with a very close friend of mine one Saturday night. We had a few venues we wanted to visit and a loose plan for the evening, but to be honest, the idea was to just see where the night took us.

So after hitting a few bars and clubs, it was getting close to chucking out time. Fuelled by a mixture of cheap amphetamines and vodka, we stood outside a club in the West End and tried to decide where to go next.

Almost by osmosis we both agreed at the same time.

Strip club.

It just seemed like the most logical choice. We were young. We were smartly dressed. We had never been to one. The night was about to get massive.

If you want any kind of pervy thrill in London, then Soho is the place to go. So we did. And ended up at a place called The Windmill.

Now please bear in mind, my only experience of strip clubs are in 80’s police buddy movies where the two mismatched cops finally bond over tacky 80’s music and women with really big hair. So to suddenly find myself standing nervously outside one of them with my friend was a very weird feeling.

I’m James Bond. I’m James Bond. I’m James Bond. I kept repeating in my head as the bouncers let us pass and we walked into the dark interior of the club.

Well this is new.

That evening we were the only two white customers in there. Two very young, scared looking, white customers. All the other patrons were either Chinese or Arab looking, and they all had about three or four half naked girls round them.

“Go grab that table over there,” I told my friend. “I’ll get us some drinks.”

As my friend went off to the table, I walked up to the bar and ordered two beers. Suddenly I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned round to find a rather nice lady standing there in her underwear.

“Hello.” She said.

“Hello.” I squeaked back.

“Would you like some company tonight?”

“Yes please.” I replied.

I am, and always ever will be, this smooth.

She beckoned one of her friends over and dragged me back to my table where my friend was.

“If you want to sit here you have to buy a bottle of champagne.” She told me, sitting down next to me while her friend started chatting to mine.

“Oh, right.”

She called one of the waiters over who brought a tray with the bottle and glasses on. As he began pouring, he said “That will be £70.”

Shit.

“That’s okay, you can pay when you leave.” My new companion told me.

“Wonderful.” I sighed.

So we sat and made idle chit chat. Where have you been tonight? Do you like my bra? That kind of stuff.

“Would you like me to dance for you?” she suddenly asked me, sipping on her drink.

“Er, yeah. Why not?” I replied, my smoothness increasing with every breath that I took.

“It costs £20 per dance. You can pay everything when you leave.”

“Will you be dancing here?” I asked, looking at the tiny area around our table.

“No silly. Come with me.”

She took my hand and dragged me to one of the private booths that lined the sides of the club and almost threw me on the little sofa there. And then she took of her underwear and began to dance in front of me to the music.

Now this dance was costing me £20, but I ended up, out of some misguided form of respect, looking everywhere but the areas I was meant to be looking at. Mainly her.

I don’t know why I suddenly came over all chivalrous. It was two in the morning in a Soho strip club and I had just paid for someone to take their clothes off in front of me. But I just couldn’t do it. She was putting her heart into it, bless her, but I just didn’t find it a turn on. I ended up gazing around the little booth I was in, thinking: Ohhh, those crushed velvet curtains would really go well in my living room.

I could see by the look on her face that I may have hurt her feelings by my lack of interest. I looked to my left and saw a rather swarthy looking business man having a dance next to me. He looked like a pig in a tie.

Did I look like that?

I decided that for all the effort she was putting in to her dance, I had better put in a bit of a performance myself. So I tried to arrange my face into an expression that signified pure animal lust, but then swiftly tried to change it, as she suddenly stopped dancing and looked at me terrified as if I was suddenly going to rip my shirt off, shouting “WE DO FUCK NOW, YA?”

When my dance was finally finished, she asked me “You like?”

“Yes, lovely thanks.” I replied, resisting the urge to pat her on the shoulder. I mean, what the fuck do you say to someone who has basically been gyrating her bits in your face for about 10 minutes?

We spent the rest of the night just chatting away at the table. She asked me if I wanted another dance, but I politely declined. I was pretty drunk and the amphetamines were wearing off and all I wanted to do was go home.

When the club was finally closing, and it was time for us to leave, I was escorted by the girl to a cash machine.

“That will be £500.”

What the fuck!!!!

I mentally tried to add up the drinks, and then my brain decided that it wasn’t having any of it and just basically shut down for the night. Everything was dark and fuzzy and I started to feel a bit ill.

“£500, No problem, “I said, putting my card in the machine and entering my pin number.

PIN NUMBER DECLINED.

I entered it again.

PIN NUMBER DECLINED.

Bollocks. I entered it again.

The words: YOU’RE ENTERING THE WRONG PIN NUMBER, NUMBNUTS blinked back at me in green letters from the ATM machine.

I couldn’t remember my PIN number.

Suddenly a rather large bouncer came over.

“Is there a problem here?” he asked the girl.

“He won’t pay me.” She replied.

“No wait, “I said in a panic as he loomed over me. “I want to pay, I really do. It’s not working!” This was followed up by frantic jabbing of the buttons of the ATM machine. “Look!”

“You’ve got five minutes to pay the girl or me and you are going to have an issue.”

He’s going to rape me! He’s going to kill me, then rape me!!

Suddenly four magical numbers exploded in my head like bursting fireworks. My brain, sensing imminent danger, had suddenly come back to life.

“I remember!” I cried, blinking tears away from my eyes. “I remember the numbers!”

I jabbed them in and the blessed, life saving money came out.

“Here! Here is your money!” I said, waving the notes in the bouncers face triumphantly.

The bouncer grabbed them in a hand the size of a shovel.

“Get out.”

We got out.

So I must say that it was to my surprise, about six months later, that I found myself in Spearmint Rhino strip club with Vanessa shaking her bits at me.

I didn’t want to be there. I had gone out for the evening for one of my friend’s birthdays and somehow got roped in with three others to visit the club.

“I have no money.” I moaned as we queued up.

“Don’t worry mate, I’ve got tonight covered.” my friend replied, waving his credit card in my face.

When we walked in, I immediately sat down at one of the tables and tried to give the impression that I didn’t want to be there.

Didn’t work.

Suddenly someone jumped on me and sat on my lap. It was Vanessa. Sadly, as she sat down, I also had my phone in my pocket, which her arse then proceeded to mash into my testicles.

“Oh my god, my dahlink.” She said in a heavy Eastern European accent “Did I just sit on your peppers?”

I didn’t know what was worse, the fact that I had now turned white and was flopping around in my chair like a half dead fish, or she had just called my testicles “peppers”

“No,” I whispered hoarsely “Your fine.”

As the girls could see we were young and had cash on the hip, we were a fair draw. Suddenly all of us had girls on our laps.

“Do all you boys want a dance?” One of them asked us.

“Yeah!”

“Most definitely.”

“Ah, go on then.”

“No.”

Everyone looked at me.

“Yes?” I replied meekly with a shrug.

Vanessa took my hand and led me to one of the private booths. I was getting to be quite the veteran of this now. She removed he clothes and pushed me back on to the sofa I was sitting on.

“You’re going to enjoy this dahlink.” She said seductively.

I’m bloody not I thought.

So I sat there and watched while she danced for me.

She was good, Vanessa. She danced and moved in time to the music much better than my first experience did.

“Do you like my tits?” she said, thrusting them in my face.

“They’re very nice.” I replied to her nipples.

She then straddled me and covered my head with her long frizzy brown hair. I have no idea why she did this. I ended up looking like this man.

And then she started doing something very odd. She began blowing in my ear.

Now as I am deaf, my ears are very sensitive to me. So I certainly bloody didn’t like this at all. Every time she did this, I flinched away.

Finally my dance was over.

“Thank you,” I said. “That man over there will pay you.” This was followed with a point to my friend with the credit card, who was sitting back with a dumbstruck expression while a lady with breasts the size of my head
waved them in his face.

I sat down at our table on my own, my friends still away having their dances. About five minutes later, a blonde dancer sat down next to me.

“Listen, “I said. “I’m gonna be honest, I’m absolutely potless right now and I just want to sit here and have a drink.”

“That’s alright,” she replied. “I’m bloody knackard anyway.”

The next 20 minutes were my best experience ever in a strip club. We spent the whole time talking about our favourite books.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“Go on.”

“Why do you do this?”

“Why shouldn’t I? The moneys great, I have some good friends here. 50% of the blokes here can be alright, the other 50% get chucked out when they turn twatish. I’m proud of my body. I like the job. So why not?”

“I guess. What’s the question you get asked most by the blokes here then?”

“Why do you do it?” she replied with a smile. “Have a nice night.”

And she left.

So how can I best sum up the whole experience? I guess some people like it; they wouldn’t be so popular otherwise. Not really for me to be honest.

And what was with that thing with the ears??

New Chums…….

2010-07-03T17:48:00.009+01:00

I have rewritten and reread this post many times and I still can’t stop it from sounding a bit gay. But you know what; I’m actually okay with that. In fact, I’m going to test the gayness of this post by adding pink points to the gayest parts (represented by this symbol ) followed up by a rating on my gayometer.

As I have been working in my current job now for around six months, our little team has grown by many numbers and has now added a pair of men to the equation, which has helped me out no end.

Now please don’t get me wrong, I have loved working with the group of lovely ladies on my team so far, but being the only bloke on our programme has, at some points, left me feeling very isolated. So it was a great relief that I immediately bonded with our new additions and can, I hope, count them as friends.

Nearly everyone I am friends with in my life has always said that they hated me when they first met me. Apparently it’s because I am as about as approachable as a burning fireworks factory that is surrounded by landmines, velociraptors, and fundamental Christians. Which is, of course, not very approachable at all. But I totally get where they are coming from.

But once people actually get to know me, they find out that I am actually a lovely person and immediately take me to the bosom of their hearts where I will remain for the rest of their lives. Always there. Lurking. Watching. Waiting.

In many ways, becoming friends with me is very much like taking a trip to Ikea. At first you really don’t want to be there, but after having a good look around, you find there is a lot of interesting things going on in all the nooks and crannies and realise that this is the best place you’ve ever been too. But then as you leave the store, filled with the joy that this new found discovery has brought you, this feeling will then fade in time to be replaced with bitterness and despair until you are left alone, crying silent angry tears into the instructions of a shattered Rutundra coffee table and wondering where it all went wrong?

Actually that is a really shit metaphor. I have absolutely no idea why I just included that. I am nothing like Ikea.

When you were younger, making friends was a simple as going up to someone on the school playground, kicking them in the ankles and pulling a mong face at them and then asking “Do you want to go look at some worms?”

Unfortunately you can’t use this approach as an adult (though it would make meeting women much more interesting), so making friends is a lot more difficult when you're older. It always helps if you have something in common, which is most definitely what I did have with the new addition to our team (a really funny bloke with the dryest sense of humour going), that thing in common being playing childish practical jokes on one of the long suffering girls who we work with (who, I hasten to add, has taken it all in very good spirit and has only threatened to mutilate our genitals only once).

So far we have managed to pretend have an argument, stuck hundreds of small furry toy creatures all over her desk when she wasn’t in, and most impressively, prised off the keys on her PC keyboard and rearranged them, so when she came in the next day she thought she had turned dyslexic overnight. All incredibly childish and immature, but that is most definitely the level I operate best at. And it was a great way to become good friends with the new guy, which I hope I have done.

*Note- When I am actually doing these practical jokes, in the thick of it so to speak, you will normally find me giggling away to myself like a schoolgirl. When the recipient of the joke finds out, and the cries of “Who the bloody hell has done this?” rings round the office, you will then find me at the back of the rapidly forming crowd with my arms crossed, shaking my head in disgust at how some people can be so childish. Now you may call this the coward’s way out, I just call it cunning.*

My other new BFF is a guy who works in our sister office in Stratford. He actually reminds me of a younger, cooler Woody Allan, which is in no way a bad thing. For some reason we clicked straight away and I am comfortable enough in actually counting him as a good friend already. Although everyone else that we work with has now started to rip the piss out of us by saying we have a bromance going on, so we have had to stop things like holding hands on the office and calling each other “Babe”.

They just be playa hating.

The good thing is that we have a very similar sense of humour, which basically means we just laugh at each other’s jokes while no one else does. No one. At all.

We have all been out for teams drinks and so forth, which is really good, but now just me and him are arranging to just go out for a drink after work on a “Man date.”

Now the legendary “Man dates” have to follow a set pattern. To prove that two blokes going for a drink alone are in no way gay for each other, there are only three topics of conversation that are allowed.

1) Football.
2) Boobs.
3) Personal insults.

So a simple line of a conversation would be: Went West Ham last night, saw a bird with really big boobs......You massive twat.

So just keep rearranging those sentences anyway you want, and keep repeating them until drunkenness kicks in, and by then you are allowed to go a bit gay anyway because you normally end up slurring: You know what mate? (hic) I bloody loves you.

What you most definitely don’t want to do return to your table with both hands pressed to your cheeks just after putting a song on the jukebox and then proclaiming loudly “Oh my God! This song is sooooo about me!” and then spend the next three minutes miming the lyrics to ABBA’s Dancing Queen as it plays out around the pub.

Believe me; I’m not making that mistake again.

I once went on a man date with a bloke from a football forum I go on. We arranged to meet up for a drink before the game, and, as I had never met this bloke before, I was actually pretty nervous. I kept on having random thoughts running through my head. Will we run out of things to talk about? What if he thinks I’m a dick? Will he think my hair looks pretty?

Lucky for me, we actually got on alright and just spent the afternoon playing pool. But the whole notion of making new friends is still a personal minefield that can sometimes blow up in your face spectacularly.

But that is, I guess, what friends are for?

GAYOMETER RESULTS

9X =

Here Comes The Sun……..

2010-06-26T15:34:00.004+01:00

I, by rights, am not really a bright and cheery soul. In fact, if you wanted to be pedantic about it, I am in fact a pathologically cynical anti-social bastard who views the world through a permanent sneer and would quite happily baseball bat every idiot I meet round the head until their legs start twitching. I am also quite cuddly though, so I’m not all that bad.

So because of my natural disposition, I normally hate this time of year.

Summer.

Urrrrgh!

Now don’t get me wrong, when I go on holiday I am like a sun god. I bask in the rays like a sunbathing turtle, trying desperately to turn brown because chicks dig brown dudes. And I am, of course, naturally all about the chicks, man.

But summer in the UK is a horrible, horrible thing. It truly is.

We just don’t know how to deal with it.

Us Brits are a pasty bunch on a whole. For most of the year, the only exposure we get to any harsh light is when we stand stupidly in front of our open refrigerators trying desperately to decide what to have for dinner, bathed in the heavenly glow from the light at the back of the fridge that is just hidden behind the cheese and that suspicious looking yoghurt that has been in there for what seems like forever and has now become a sentient life form. That’s sunbathing to us.

As most of the time the UK is plunged into almost perpetual gloom, the moment the sun decides to peek its bastard glowy yellow face from behind a cloud, we all go metal. Literally mental.

Clothing is shed faster than you can say “Oh my God, put them away!” as any form of social constraint is thrown out of the window. Fat men seem to be in the understanding that it is perfectly alright to waddle around in the tightest shorts imaginable and nothing else. So on any street, you are suddenly confronted with the sight of a huge red wobbly torso looming towards you with pendulous breasts like shopping bags filled with sausage meat swaying hypnotically in every opposite direction. Women seem to view themselves in an almost alternative reality and wear clothing that is ten times too small for them on bodies that really shouldn’t be wearing clothes that are ten times too small for them, so they end up looking like swelled up books that have been left out in the rain.

I’m not a prude. I like looking at half naked folk (the Judge at Snaresbrook court said I was particularly good at it), I just wish there could be some kind of social reality filter where you could tell people: This is what you look like, now wear clothing that is appropriate. By all means wear clothing that shows a bit of skin, flash the flesh, and so forth, just please don’t wear stuff that makes me want to blind myself with two Cornetto cones when you shuffle past so I don’t have to look at you again.

And one other thing, don’t wear fucking Flip-flops.

Feet are evil. Two slabs of calloused, dry skinned meat. And most women (and far too many men) seem to want to get these out for the public. Feet should be encased in concrete, never to be seen from the moment you are born. But not in the summer. No. It’s a flip-flop party in summer.

Two things wrong with this.
1) The noise. Swish. Flap. Swish. Flap.
2) No one wants to view your big wedge of cheesy foot heel flaking bits of dead skin everywhere.

So don’t do it, please.

The moment the papers start reporting: PHEW! WOT A SCORCHER! All over the UK people start running outside, smearing themselves with chip fat and screaming “Burn me!” It’s amazing that with all that sunlight hitting pale, pasty flesh, there isn’t some kind of massive solar flare reaction that incinerates the surface of the world until everything is burnt to a crisp.

But after three days of extreme sunbathing, the Uk’s populations starts to change. Supermarkets are filled with shell shocked red people with skin that looks as if it has been sandblasted, all of them looking for the aftersun lotion to put on their boiling flesh.

That bronzed brown god/goddess look you were going for, well, the maroon based skin with peeling bits isn’t really a good compromise, is it?

If you stop and wait outside any suburban street, just under an open bedroom window (which once again, the Judge said I had an almost unnatural talent for) all you will hear being cried out is “Don’t touch me Jason, I’m on fire!”

How is this fun?

Another way in which the UK is crap at summer is with the heat.

I hate the heat.

Every time I have been abroad, every single country handles their heat perfectly with air conditioning, fans, open areas, all just plain simple common sense really.

Not here.

Our heat is different to other countries heat as it has nowhere to go. So it just clings to you like a wet shower curtain. And we’re just not prepared for it. It’s like we forget what normally happens during summer, and the moment the mercury starts rising, we just look around with a dumb expression on our faceholes. “What do you mean it gets hot?”

Nights are spent lying awake in a puddle of your own sweat, while a pathetic floor fan blows air on you with all the power of a flatulent hamster. Offices are filled with workers that have been fused to their computers as the management once again forgot to get the air con fixed. But that’s not the worst thing, not by any shot.

This is.

Public. Fucking. Transport.

Tell me this, how hard is it to get some form of air conditioning on a train? Well, very bloody hard apparently.

As I only deal in cold hard facts, here’s one for you.

It is a legal requirement that if you are transporting livestock, the temperature in the mode of transport MUST not exceed 85 degrees. Last summer, the temperature recorded on the central line was 96 degrees.

Countries gone to the dogs, blah, blah, etc, etc.

I used to regularly travel on the central line but gladly stopped when I moved home. I took the delight of a journey on it the other day. The tube was packed, and I mean, packed. The sweat was literally dripping from the ceiling. I was wearing a pair of cotton trousers that shrunk in the heat to cotton hotpants. I thought at one point we had taken a detour from Bank to Liverpool Street via the seventh level of Hell. I half expected that the very Devil himself was driving the train in a London Underground uniform. When we finally reached our destination, and the doors opened, none of us could move as we had all melted on the floor into fleshy pizza shapes topped off by two madly staring eyeballs, and all of us wondering if this would affect our travelcards as none of us looked anything like what we did in our photos anymore.

So you can basically stick your summer right up your poop chute.

Give me dark days, snow, biting cold, and many, many layers of clothing.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Megaton Poo Explosion………

2010-06-09T17:08:00.001+01:00

I awoke this morning at around 4am to a horrendous rumbling noise that resembled a freight train hurtling through my bedroom. It was only after a rubbed the sleep from my mind that I realised that the rumbling noise was actually coming from my nether regions.

Being the medical genius that I am, I immediately knew that something was wrong.

I shot from my bed and ran to the toilet just in time before my rear end exploded in what can only be described as “Hells gruel.”

My Irritable Bowel Syndrome was back and it was in a foul mood (it had gone past irritable and moved into incandescent rage).

I have suffered with IBS since I was about 18. I fecking hate it, I really do. It’s not an illness, it’s not a virus, it’s just an evil thing that won’t leave me alone.

For those who are lucky enough to not suffer from this let me try and describe the sheer agony that it can bring. Many people believe that it is just having a dicky tummy, it’s not. Imagine someone grabbing your lower bowel with both hands and slowly twisting it. Couple this with bouts of constipation, or sudden explosive mega poo bombs, and you have got yourself a regular toilet based party going on.

Certain foods can trigger an attack (pizza kills me), but the main source of kick starting a session of me sweating and rolling around in agony is stress.

As I am male, and also British, I don’t emote. I have emotions, but they are carefully locked away, buried deep within my subconscious to be unearthed many years later by my therapist, or to take shape in the form of a big pissy ulcer, gurgling away in the centre of my stomach like an evil baby. So on the outside I am a picture of calmness, while inside, all my rage, fear, frustration, and general negative emotions sit astride my digestive system, banging away like the cast members of Stomp.

So, this morning. I ran to the loo in about 2 seconds, and sat on it with a relieved sigh. I then began what I call my “Irritable Bowel Dance” which basically consists of me wriggling like an eel on the toilet, banging both feet on the floor, and using language last seen in The Exorcist.

Liquid hot magma was expelled from my body, causing the lower half of my body to feel as if I had flames shooting out of it. I felt like a firework. So naturally my cat felt this would be an ideal time to wander in and see what all the commotion was about. I don’t know if any of you have tried to pass rocket fuel through your anus whilst being observed by a cat. It’s very disconcerting.

“Get out!” I hissed at her, resisting the urge to follow that up with “Run!”

She naturally took no notice and decided that this would be an opportune time to clean her genitals. It was nice to see that my searing pain was causing her some concern. She ran out after I threw toilet roll at her head.

I have taken the day off work today. The combination of no sleep and having an arse that resembled the Japanese flag meant that I couldn’t face sitting in pain at my office chair. So I have just been lying round with a hot water bottle clamped to my lower belly like a menstruating teenager.

My Irritable Bowel Syndrome has caused me one of my most shameful episodes in my entire life. I debated if I should include it in this blog, but then thought that I am never going to meet any of you, and if you judge me from the one thing I am going to tell you about, well, that means you are all bad people. All of you.

Oh God, here goes.

I once shit myself in a Subway.

There, I said it. I can admit it.

I. Once shit myself. In a Subway.

It’s not as bad as masturbating in a charity shop (what a weekend that was!), but it comes pretty darn close.

Everything was fine. I had no indication of the nightmare that was to come. My IBS was sleeping like a well fed dog. I was standing at one of the side tables with Kates, eating my sub, when all of a sudden I turned white.

“Something terrible has happened.” I whispered to her, my sub half raised to my mouth.

“Have they put mayo on your food again?” she asked me.

“No, this is much worse than that.” I hissed back.

“What’s wrong?”

“We have to leave right now.” I said, walking towards the exit.

“But what about your food? And why are you walking funny?”

We stood outside on the cold London street.

“Will you tell me what’s wrong?” Kates asked me.

“I’ve pooed myself.”

“WHAT?”

“I’ve pooed myself.”

“What do you mean you’ve pooed yourself?”

For a moment I was a little confused.

“I don’t know how to make it any clearer than I have. I’ve.....pooed myself.”

“Oh, what are we going to do?”

And there was the rub. I was stuck in London, miles from home, with no money to buy any replacement clothes, and my trousers had just exploded.

This was my walking nightmare.

Kates suddenly realised that Selfridges was just around the corner (regular readers will know that this was the very posh department store that I temped in over Christmas) and suggested I could try and sort myself out in their toilets.

So began the slowest and most uncomfortable walk of my life. I don’t know if any of you have tried walking anywhere after you have just soiled yourselves? I seriously wouldn’t recommend it.

Finally I arrived at the store and hurried my way in to the public toilet. It was a vast cavernous hall that was thankfully empty. I nipped in to one of the stalls and surveyed the damage. If my reaction was anything to go by, I am so going to be rubbish at changing nappies. I poked my head out of the stall and looked around. Still empty. I dumped my underpants in the trash can used for paper towels (and may I apologise to the man who had to empty it) and tried to clean my trouser in the sink. My thinking was that I was pretty far away from the door, so I would hear it if anyone came in and I could pop them back on so no one had to see my testicles.

Did I mention that I’m deaf?

I know the chances of you reading this are slim to anorexic, but I would also like to apologise to the gentleman who came in with his young son to find me hopping around on one leg trying to hastily put my trousers back on with my “bits” resembling excited puppies that were happy to see me.

No one needs to see that.

No one.

The train journey home was “interesting.”

There is something incredibly liberating about standing on a packed train in rush hour wearing trousers filled with your own effluence. Social niceties generally go out of the window. In the end I just didn’t care anymore. All I wanted was a shower, clean clothes, and my bed.

It takes me an hour to get home.

A whole fucking hour.

So there you go. There’s nothing more you need to know about me. That’s my most embarrassing moment, laid out for you all to read and take on board.

Judge away. I don’t mind. I shit myself once. Who hasn’t?

No, seriously, who hasn’t?

Right?

Right???

I hate my life.

Feels Like Heaven.......

2010-05-31T17:06:00.002+01:00

Many thanks to the lovely Cat for giving me the idea of my next post as I was struggling a little bit. But it totally makes natural sense to write about Heaven soon after a post about death.

So here it is.

I am not a religious person by any stretch (cue mass gasps of surprise and the sound of millions of people hitting the floor in what can only be describe as catatonic shock). So the very notion of a heaven and a hell is an amusing one to me.

We silly little human beings are obsessed by ourselves, we really are. Our entire lives revolve around our own being as we feel we are the centre of each of our own universes and nothing in the world will ever change that. So the very idea that when we, the lords of all creation, die, well, that's it folks, shows over chums, turn off the lights, feed the cat for me when I’m gone, etc, etc. Well it totally freaks our minds out because it kinda confirms that we aren’t really that significant and the world will in fact keep on turning after we pop our clogs.

You mean to say that when I die in 60 odd years, that's it? That's not fair! I’m too important!!!! Surely there must be a way round this?

And there is my scared and worried little friend. There is a way in which we can prolong your magnificence and make you feel as if there is an actual point to the massive accident that was all of your atoms colliding and forming the slightly odd looking humanoid with the vacant look plastered all over its stupid face. We will invent religion, and in turn, heaven and hell, and make you believe that your wondrous existence will carry on for the rest of all eternity if it means that we can control you all by brainwashing you into believing in this new thing called “religion.”

Sounds interesting, I’m listening. What do I have to do?

It’s simple my friendly, all you have to do is follow this list of rules, easy things like don’t make sexy eyes at your neighbours wife, even if she is a hottie, don’t steal…..er….cows and stuff, don’t suddenly find another God, even if he is offering a free X-Box if you join up, don’t kill anyone, no matter how annoying they are, and there is some other stuff that I will throw in later, but you get the general picture, right? Do all this and we will make it worth your time, you will get in to-quickly Barry, crank up the celestial angels CD-heaven. Fail to do this and you will end up in-Barry, the Mariah Carey CD!-hell. And you don’t want that to happen.

And if I do all this I go to Heaven? What will happen after I die then? Do I become a star in the sky or something? Is that heaven?

What? No. That would be ridiculous. No you will go upstairs into a magical land of unicorns and free ice cream.

Really?

Possibly, I’m kinda making this up as I go along. There are a few things that need ironing out but it’s gonna be really good. Seriously, well worth the hundreds of years of slaughter and general heartache that is going to come once your tiny little pea brains fully grasp what crap we are spoon feeding you.

Unicorns? I’m in! What's a unicorn?

It’s a mythical made up being very much like our new God-SNIP! (Better stop there before I get some fundamental Christians hunting me down via my IP address).

So, that's my view on religion and heaven. I thought I would water it down a little. Wouldn’t want to be controversial or anything.

But a part of me does like this idea in a really perverse way though. It’s a bit like an exasperated mother dangling the promise of sweeties to her screaming child as it screams its head off in the local supermarket. Please be good and you will get this yummy treat. I mean, who wouldn't want to live a better life if it meant our shining stars could burn that little bit brighter for that little bit longer. Shame that we have to be tricked in to doing it, it’s not like any of us might actually want to live a good life off our own backs, is it?

The whole idea of the clouds and the harp playing and the general smugness of heaven does kind of depress me a little. The traditional notion of the celestial plane being like an Ikea catalogue, with everyone sitting around in white rooms just laughing their tits off at all the heathens in hell below, just sounds like a dinner party that I really would want to try and avoid.

Here my alternatives:

The “Gemma Arterton” Heaven.
Quite simple this. When I die, every single cloud up in heaven will have Gemma Arterton sitting on it, each one representing the things that I would like to do.
(On one cloud)
Gemma: Hi Dan, I can’t decide what underwear to put on today, can you help?
Me: I can spare a few moments.
(On another cloud)
Gemma: Hi Dan, would you like to play some Call Of Duty?
Me: Do I!
(On another)
Gemma- Hi Dan, would you like to watch me and all the other Gemma’s have a pillow fight?
Me: Yes, yes I would actually.
PRAISE BE TO JESUS!

The “Do What You Want Heaven”
Human existence is one of guilt. Every single day we are told not to do this, not to do that, don't eat this, don't drink that, and don’t smoke this, basically because everything that is pleasurable in this world is in fact bad for you. So wouldn’t it be nice if heaven took away all of these boundaries and you could just live the way you wanted too? As long as you weren’t hurting anyone else what is the problem in shooting up heroin whilst face first in a six foot pizza while a midget shoves vibrating dildos up your bumhole? (This is, of course, just an example, not my own personal heaven. Ahem).

The “Be Surrounded By Everyone You Love” Heaven
This would actually be mine.

And what about hell?

The “Relive Every Single Fucking Mistake You Have Ever Made Until You Are Trapped Within Your Own Personal Hell” Hell
Every single fuck up, embarrassing faux pas and humiliating thing you have done in your life, played out over and over again for the rest of eternity in front of a laughing and pointing crowd until the only option is to flay your own face off so no one will recognise you and your shame, but this being hell, it always grows back the very next day. Try that one on for size, huh?

The “When You Die You Come Back As Me” Hell.
Terrifying, isn’t it? It’s enough to make anyone want to live a pure and simple life. WELL I’M STILL STUCK IN ME!!!!!!

The “Hell On Earth” Hell
There is a popular theory that none of us actually exist at all and that we are in fact just a conscious stream of thought made up by some cosmic being, and in fact we could all be actively living out some alternative version of hell right here in this very little world. It kind of makes sense considering everything that goes on outside of our windows every day. I have often thought, when confronted by the brain dead mouth breathers that often stand before me with barely enough brain power to motor their own life support systems (i.e. breathing), that I must have done something incredibly evil in a past lifetime to warrant being surrounded by the folk that I am lucky enough to call “my fellow humans.” It’s obvious to me now, people aren’t really people, they are in fact demons in human form, I am in hell, and this is my eternal torment.

Let us pray.

Death......

2010-05-15T15:05:00.010+01:00

Hello to you all! On this bright and beautiful day I thought that I’d gather you all round and have a little chin wag about death.

Before I start, please don’t panic and think you have suddenly stumbled in to some sort of Emo blog where I will wittering on about the latest angst filled band who sing songs that are, like, totally written about me (and I if I had to listen to that shit on a daily basis, well, it’s no wonder they all end up cutting themselves. I’d have topped myself long before the first chord began playing), or worry that I will spend this entire blog moaning about how no one gets me or understands me because I'm soooooo deep (but seriously, they don’t. And it really bums me out man).

Nope, not gonna do any of that. But I am going to talk about death because it is a bit of a taboo subject. No one likes to talk about their own mortality and yet it’s something that we just can’t really avoid. You’re going to die. That's right, you, reading this right now, you’re going to die. And that person over there, they are going to die as well. All of you, you’re going to die. Even me (and seriously, can you believe it? Me? What a pisser!).

Most of the time we go through life blissfully unaware of our own mortality until it suddenly hits us right in the centre of our mindscapes and blows out our gaskets. Normally this happens about three in the morning when you suddenly sit bolt upright in bed and shout “Holy fuck, I’m going to die one day!” and then hide under the bedcovers whimpering.

As the months get pulled from the pages of our life calendars and the years start rushing by faster than you can hold on to them, you start having a nasty thought running round your head: Need to do more stuff and make it count. So you end up bungee jumping from bridges, leaping out of planes strapped to a stranger called Steve with a fake look of fun smeared all over your screaming facehole, or just simply start getting parts of your body pierced that really shouldn’t be. You start to cram in all this living in to whatever time you think you have left because you feel you have too. Everything must be done right this minute, otherwise you will just end up hurtling towards your own demise and the only thing that you would have really acheived with your life was assembling an Ikea Runtra coffee table.

All that new found life living sloshing round in your life like piss in a bedpan seriously sounds like hard work to be honest. Rock climbing, scuba diving, watching the sunrise in Kenya, nipple piercings, I mean, what's wrong with having a nice cup of tea on your sofa? And if you really want to live on the edge, crack open the McVites chocolate digestive biscuits every now and then, you only live once, right?

How I Would Like To Go Out.

1) Heroic.
Picture the scene. A burning building with a huge crowd outside. A woman screaming that her kid is still inside. Suddenly I stumble out, kid in one arm, Mr Fluffy the kitten in the other. And as I pause heroically with the flaming building burning behind me in a cinematic way, and the kid saying “Oh my god, you rescued me, you are like, such a hero!”, I collapse on the floor dead.

Cue all the men in the crowd to shake their heads wistfully and mutter “What a guy” whilst fighting back manly tears. Half the women in the crowd fall to their knees in agony and wonder why there wasn’t time to sex me up, and the other half get so turned on by the thought of sexing me up that they start to lesbian up on each other.

So in amidst this maelstrom of suppressed male emotion, free flowing female emotion, and quite frankly, pretty graphic lesbian porn, you would have my crumpled body laid out heroically on the ground with my hands on my hips and a small smile on my lips and Mr Fluffy meowing sorrowfully to the heavens.

Now that my friends is the way to go.

2) Old Age And In My Sleep.
The way we all want to go. I would shuffle across my warm and cosy bedroom, surrounded by my memories and things, to climb in to my huge comfortable bed for my final sleep. Maybe I would even take a moment to ponder and think: I’ve had a good life. And then I would close my eyes for the final time and sleep forever.

That's my ideal way to shuffle off this mortal coil and what I am aiming to do. Though I would have to make sure I had someone to check in on me every morning otherwise I might not be found for six months and then I would just be a skeleton wearing a nightcap, and that would look ridiculous.

3) Death Bed Scene.

Tradition dictates that on your death bed you have to do something profound. Those that know me well and read this blog realise that I can’t really do profound. I can however do childish and immature, so if I ever end up in this situation, that's how I’m going to play it out.

So as all my loved ones gather round for my final words, I might just say something to mess with their heads: I just want to state for the record that you’re all bastards, or if I disliked the woman that my son married, I would point a shaky finger at her and say: I know about the poison and then snuff it as the rest of my family look at her with evil eyes.

What? They would all laugh about it in the end. Oh Dad, he was such a kidder……

Ways In Which I Wouldn’t Like To Go Out.

1) Hit By A Bus.
When you die you shit yourself. Doesn’t matter what way you leave this world, its a given fact that at some point you will soil your undercrackers. So in the morning when you are running for the number 62 bus and end up getting run over by it, that attractive redhead that you make sexy face at every morning as you sit opposite her, she will see your pathetic body lying on the ground, most probably with pants filled with poo.

That really how you want to be remembered?

2) To Be That Man Who Dies In The Incredibly Stupid Way.
You know the one? You read a report in the paper about someone dying and one half of your brain thinks: Oh no, that's terrible, while the other half goes: What a moron.

Normally it’s a question of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A local man was killed today when was caught between a collision between a lorry carrying oats and a milk tanker. He died under two tonnes of porridge.

Or you could be the idiot who breaks into the lion enclosure at London Zoo, walking over to the pride with arms open wide and saying “I want to hug the pussy cats.”

No dignity in that. No dignity at all.

I myself had the 3am wakeup call many years ago. It suddenly hit me that I was going to die one day and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Freaked me out if I'm honest. So I made a vow to myself to grab life with both hands, shake it around a little, and then maybe even give it a little affectionate pinch on the cheek.

My philosophy now is to live life to the full, to maximise every opportunity, carpe diem. In fact I am so pumped up right now just writing about it that I want to storm something with my shirt off.

I am of course lying.

Chocolate biscuit anyone?

Here Comes The Fear......

2010-05-01T15:02:00.003+01:00

I am a manly man. Hairy, virile and so testosterone filled that I can make things explode just by looking at them with one arched eyebrow.

But even this perfect specimen of human evolution has phobias and fears. It doesn't make me any less of a man, more like when those sculptors in those olden times used to knick the plaster of their creations because they couldn’t handle all that perfection staring them back in the face. The flaws made them better in their eyes and that's more or less the same with me.

That's what I tell myself anyway.

Here are my fears.

1) Clowns.

This all stemmed from walking through Covent Garden at the age of about six with my parents. Now in Covent Garden you always get street performers doing their, frankly shit, act whilst being surrounded by crowds of tourists at any given opportunity. On this particular time there happened to be a creepy looking clown juggling. So of course, the moment he saw me wandering by, he had to pull me out of the crowd and make me part of his act, the absolute bastard.

So what did he make me do?

He made me dance for the crowd.

That's right, the creepy clown made me dance on the spot for the baying masses. I don’t know what exactly I was dancing too, but dancing away I was. This was my first taste of abject humiliation and has kind of mapped out my entire life since then. Even now I have reoccurring dreams of lots of people clapping their hands and urging me to dance faster and it all stems from that fucking clown. Or I might have got it mixed up in my head from the time I got drunk at Spearmint Rhino strip club and ended up half naked on stage gyrating to Aerosmith's Love In An Elevator.

Either way, clowns freak me out.

2) Spiders.

Spiders are bastards. There is no clearer way of putting this. The little ones are okay, I can handle them. Some are even quite cute in a spindly “Oh my god I must get away from this giant human” kinda way.

But the big tossers, those with fangs, a million eyes, and long legs that are made for wrapping round your head while you sleep so it can plant its eggs in your brain, I hate them.

I used to love spiders as a kid. I would collect them and make homes for them in shoeboxes. I had a house spider called Dave for about seven months. He was my friend. I made him the coolest condo ever. It had a bottle cap filled with water for when he wanted a drink, a little compartment where he would live, and the rest of his box for his web, which he filled in about three days.

Dave was brilliant.

The he escaped and I never saw him again.

I won’t lie to you. I was very cut up.

But I don’t think my fear of spiders has come from some sort of arachnid abandonment issues. I mean, it’s not like I go into dank garages, peering into dark corners whispering “Dave?”. No, the fear just seemed to spring up overnight. Suddenly spiders freaked me out. I would get the shivers and shakes every time I saw one in real life or on the TV.

Last year I was in Florida, wandering around the Animal Kingdom at Disney, when I saw a nice looking lady with a Perspex box standing idly by and it pricked my curiosity.

“Hello, “ I said, wandering over. “What do you hav- JESUS CHRIST?”

i suddenly found myself pulling a ninja stance in front of the startled lady due to the fact that she had the biggest fucking tarantula ever sitting in the box that was staring evilly back at me.

“Its….it’s a Goliath tarantula.” she stammered back, more afraid of me than the fact that she had the Devils very own pet in her hands.

“You should warn people what's in there before they come over,” I replied crossly. “Standing there all innocently with a box. Bad woman. BAD WOMAN!”

And still pointing at her, I walked away.

I don’t like spiders.

3) Flying.

The middle bit I am okay with. It’s taking off and landing that do my head in. It’s just not natural. During these moments you can find me whispering to God “Please big man, just make it take off. Just get it in the air safely.” Then I realise that I don’t believe in God and feel a tad foolish as I have just been whispering to a make believe person when I could have been grabbing the person next to me by the lapels and screamed in their face “HUMANS AREN’T MEANT TO FLY!! WE ARE GOING DOWN!!!!!!”

My one biggest fear is that during the take off, fuelled by adrenaline and fear, I force my way into the cockpit to find a six foot brown recluse spider flying the plane with a pilots hat perched jauntily on its head.

Now that would probably finish me off, truth be told.

4) Claustrophobia and Vertigo.

So that tiny little elevator that takes you all the way to the top of the Eifel Tower? Well, that was like my own personal nightmare and the water was very, very warm. Going up it I almost chewed my way through the walls of my metal prison in fear. By the time we got to the top, I really wasn’t in the mood to see the whole of Paris spread out magnificently below me.

“Ah mate, it looks great, doesn’t it?” my friend Mark said, looking around for me. “Dan? DAN?”

“Yep, its brilliant mate,” I replied from the floor where I was spread-eagled, hugging the metal with my cheek pressed firmly into its cool surface. “Can we go down now?”

I can laugh about it now.

Actually I can’t.

It was fucking horrible.

5) Tidal Waves.

Huge mile high bodies of water, towering over you with no escape.

Are you telling me you wouldn’t be scared of that?

6) Chickens.

We used to visit some friends in Lincolnshire that used to live on a farm. One time (I think I was about nine) I went to feed their chickens in their coop. No lie there must have had about 50 chickens, all running freely in their chicken like way. I went in with a bucket of feed and began to chuck it around like I had been shown.

Chicken frenzy.

Now I don’t know if you have ever been ganged up on by 50 chickens, but at the age of nine, it’s terrifying. They knew I had food. They knew I was venerable. Chickens can sense fear. They began pecking at my ankles, getting in my face and clucking. I panicked and just threw the feed up in the air.

Bad mistake.

Chickengeddon.

The coop exploded in a mass of feathers, clucks, and one screaming boy.

I staggered out of the coop covered in bird shit, feathers and with tiny pin pricks of blood all over my body from their beaks.

Did I mention that my favourite food is chicken?

Yeah, peck me now bitch.

I will stop there with my fears, there are many more, like my fear of older women with gold handbags and matching shoes, sideburns, tuna, ABBA, and the colour beige, but to list all of them would surely make me seem like the world’s biggest wimp.

And I’m definitely not that.

ARRRGH!

And When A Hero Comes Along.....

2010-04-25T14:55:00.010+01:00

Disclaimer- This blog is going to be about football. Some of my lovely lady readers may find this about as interesting as a seminar on toenails, so in light of this, I aim to pepper this post with a few pictures of this cute kitten, just so you can all make it through to the end. See, I’m always thinking of you.

A few posts ago, I discussed my views on religion in a hackneyed and pretty shit way. I basically summed up my position by saying I was a diehard atheist and believed more in tiny hobgoblins than the existence of an all seeing, omnipresent, and benevolently kind supreme being that watches over us.

I have now changed my views.

I now believe in god.

I am now a fully paid up member of the religion of Parker.

Scott Parker.

I’m a Parkerist, and to be frank, my god is the god to end all gods.

Who exactly is Scott Parker I hear you ask in a frankly bored and listless tone?

That's a good question.

Who is Scott Parker?

Scott Parker was made on the eighth day, after the holy deity rested on the seventh (because he/she needed to rest before completing the herculean task of making this superman in human form), and is made from steel, nuclear waste, fairy dust and moon juice.

Scot Parker plays for West Ham (my football team) and has singlehandedly kept us up in the Premier league for another season (Cue a mass sigh from the readers that sounds like a breeze whispering “I don’t care”- bear with me, please).

Being a West Ham fan, for most of the time, is not a very enjoyable experience. We aren’t very good. That's not to say we are terrible, just very, very mid-table. But occasionally we can pull something magical out of the bag, something so deep and profound that it can make up for all the years of stress, anxiety and nail biting tension that being a supporter of this great club provides. It’s kind of like having a rectal examination by an incompetent doctor with really fat fingers who suddenly pulls a £50 note from your arsehole with a grand flourish like a magician pulling a rabbit form a hat (Wow that was quite possibly my most bizarre metaphor ever. Go me.).

We have eons of deep seated history amongst the annuls of football lore. We won the World Cup for England in 1966 (the spine of the national team consisted of West Ham players and we tell everyone that. That’s why other supporters hate us. That and the fact that in the 70’s and 80’s our supporters used to go round beating all the other supporters up, the rascals). We have a reputation for playing football the right way, even though it never gets us anywhere or wins us anything. And most importantly, we produced the greatest captain of the England football team ever in St Bobby Moore.

So there is a lot of claret and blue blood running through the veins of English football history, but that still doesn’t disguise the fact that for most of the time, we are the perennial underachievers, promising so much, but always failing to deliver.

West Ham is also engrained on my family history as well. My dad and uncle were die in the wool Hammers, and every weekend, all it would be was West Ham this and West Ham that. I couldn’t escape it.

I was never into football as a kid though. Never really appealed to me. My dad tried to get me into West Ham from an early age, but I always resisted it. To his credit he never forced me, but let me made my own decisions. Plus there was always the fact that trying to get your young son to support West Ham can actually be construed as child abuse in some sectors of UK law.

After my dad died I started to try and seek some kind of connection with him, mainly because I felt as if I didn’t truly know him. We liked the same music, films, and books, so I had that, but there was one massive area of his life that I knew nothing about, West Ham. So I decided to take the plunge and immerse myself in that world to make a connection with him.

It started slowly at first, catching a few games on the TV here and there, but before i knew it, something ignited in me, like some huge flare going off in my head, and all that family history with West Ham was suddenly all I wanted.

I was hooked.

I started going to games regularly, eventually acquiring a season ticket. Every weekend would now be based around our games, every evening would be spent on the internet, reading forums and checking news about us. I even met Kates through West Ham.

All in all I’ve properly followed this team for about ten years now. I’ve seen some terrible lows, but also moments of pure sublime joy as well, sublime joy that has actually left me close to tears.

So, that's me and West Ham.

But what about Scott Parker, I hear you ask? (Still in that bored tone, but with an underlying edge of: Well, I’ve come this far, let’s see how the twat is going to end this).

This season has been awful. I won’t make you want to hang yourself by going into detail, but we have basically been lurking down the bottom of the table, wearing slutty makeup and flirting outrageously with relegation.

The team just hasn’t been at the races, and combined with a rookie manager and farcical boardroom antics, it seriously looked as though we would drop down a league and face financial Armageddon. Nearly every player has underperformed and let themselves down.

Well, apart from one.

Every game we have played this season, Scott Parker has put his body on the line to try and save us. While others wilted and faltered under the immense pressure of trying to stay up, he has stood tall, grabbed the team by the scruff of the neck, and virtually carried them on his broad and manly shoulders. Sliding into bone crunching tackles with all the grace of ballerina sweeping across a stage, he has fought harder than I have seen any West Ham player fight before. Every defeat etched onto his face, every rare win expressed with pure joy, he has pushed and harried, taking his body to breaking point to try and save us.

If it sounds as if I have man crush on Scott Parker, then there may be some truth in that. I am actually comfortable in with that in fact. I like girls and boobies, but I also love Scott Parker as well. It’s a bit confusing to be honest, and has left me sitting awake at night wondering what is going on with me, but love him I do.

Scott’s dreamy.

So, yesterday was crunch time. We were playing Wigan and if we won the match, we were virtually guaranteed to stay up.

It didn’t start well. We were a goal down after a few minutes after one of our players put the ball into our own net.

The West Ham way.

But we got back into the game, scoring two goals and looking like we were going to win the match.

And then it happened.

Wigan scored.

Bollocks.

We were level on goals and the match was ticking down with only about 15 minutes to go.

But Scott Parker wasn’t having that.

Scott Parker wasn’t having that at all.

After a lovely little flick down from Franco, Scott had the ball at his feet and launched himself towards Wigan’s goal, pulling his strong and manly (and dreamy) leg back, he unleashed a thunderbolt of a shot that screamed past their hapless keeper and made it 3-2, saving the club from relegation, because he is Scott Parker, and that is what Scott Parker does.

When that goal went in, I shot of from my PC chair (as I was watching it on the computer) and screamed out “GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! GET FUCKING IN!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SCOTT PARKER I WANT YOUR BABIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” and then realised that my windows were open and all of my neighbours had heard what I had just yelled out.

But I was okay with that.

I mean, this is Scott Parker we are talking about here.

This is what the goal meant to him.

And this is the goal itself. Look into the face of the god that is Scott Parker.

Scott Parker goal v Wigan
- Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

All over the land,, West Ham supporters were suddenly having a serious debate about their own sexual orientations. On my West Ham forum, posts like this were springing up:

There's not much to add, apart from that I love him more than any girlfriend I've ever had.
I would definitely let him bum me if he wanted to.

Just got home. At the moment, he could bum me, my wife, my cat, dog AND gerbils.

There was a lot of talk of bumming going on. Too much talk of bumming to be honest, but suddenly we were all debating whether you could actually have a womb implanted so we could carry Scott’s babies.

My West Ham supporting friends on Facebook have changed their status to variations of: Scott Parker Will You Marry Me?

Here is an excerpt of comments from a status update my friend Steve had.

Steve: wants to tickle Scott Parker’s dangly bits
Dan: You’re feeling the man love as well Steve?
Steve: I think the only word I can currently use to describe my utter respect and love for that man is: 'swollen'.

So there you have it, one man has turned us all in to a bunch of screaming queens.

But he is Scott Parker, so it’s totally, and believably, understandable.

Extra Disclaimer- Reading back to the disclaimer at the front of this piece, it could be construed as being a bit sexist saying that all my female readers would be happy if I just peppered this post with pictures of that cute kitten. I realise that not all of you lovely ladies are transfixed by kittens, so to balance that out; here are some shoes and handbags.

There, I feel we have all bases covered now.

Love Letter To The One I Lost…..

2010-04-08T20:42:00.001+01:00

Hello. I pray that somewhere, somehow, you are reading this.

This is not an easy thing for me to write. A bit like cornucopias, that's another hard thing for me to write. Along with filicide and cooptation. But I digress.

We started off happy, you and I. Free to laugh and smile and wonder what the future held for the both of us. Everything looked shiny and new when I had you beside me. The world was freshly unwrapped and sat there gleaming like a freshly shined coin. We had our whole lives together and I knew that I could make it with you by my side.

And then I woke up one day and you were gone.

I don’t know how it happened. I suppose I could reel out all the same old tired excuses. I never paid you enough attention. I was too tired from work to even look in your direction. The age old story told since man was birthed onto this little rock that we call home. But however you choose to dress it up; you were gone from my life, never to return.

Well, that sucks.

I suppose I have gone through the five stages of grief since I woke up one day and found out that instead of having 121 followers, I somehow have 120 since I lost you. I have been walking round in a daze, staring into mirrors and sneering at the looser that faced me. But if you really want to know how I feel, then let me describe it for you.

Denial: I had to check time and time again. Were you really gone or had I just misplaced you somewhere? Surely my eyes were wrong? We were good together, weren’t we? No, you weren’t really gone. This was all some kind of sick joke and the next time I looked you would be there, just like you always were. Everything was literally going to be alright now.

It wasn’t.

Anger: So, it was true! You had left me! And how long had you been planning this? Was it right from the start? Was I some kind of rebound blog? In fact, I had noticed that you seemed kind of distant, always as if you were five seconds out of my grasp. And to be honest, how sure am I that you weren’t making sexy eyes at other blogs while claiming to be a follower of mine. I feel so cheap.

Bargaining: I can change! I know I haven’t been the person that I was when we first started. I know I have been posting less, commenting sporadically, but it’s not my fault! I’m going to work every day trying to make people’s lives better. There is only so much of this man to go round! But come back, just come back! I’ll do anything if I could just see your chirpy little avatar sitting where it belongs, nestled like a tiny dormouse amongst my amazing followers.

Depression: This low I feel, like someone has pulled out all my insides and worn them for a novelty scarf, is horrible. I waited outside your blog last night, holding up a boom box playing Peter Gabriel's “In Your Eyes” for about three hours. You never poked your head out once. That cut me deeper than any knife ever could. I tried calling out your name but it was lost over the laughter you made as you read your new blog, the blog that should have been me.

Acceptance: So, I guess it is true. You left me. I suppose I can understand why. I mean, why would you want to be in an electronic relationship with someone who paid you no attention. Who ignored every comment that you made. I don’t blame you for leaving, I really don’t. I won’t deny it hurts, but no more than I have probably hurt you.

If you do decide to come back, I can’t deny I can change, but I will promise you that I will always be here for you. Always.

Just thank god I have 120 friends to help me get through this.

You were the best.

Love Dan.

Lights. Cameras. Action!…….

2010-03-27T18:15:00.007Z

I have discussed in part on this blog how I can be described as a bit geeky. I wouldn’t come out and say it forthright. If you asked me “Dan, are you geeky?”, I would probably reply by sneering in a cool way, flipping up the collar of my shirt and trying to do a passable impression of the Fonz, because quite simply, Fonzy is cool and in no way resembles a geek. A bit like me.

But the one area of my life in which I am quite happy to hold up my hands and say “Yes, I’m a geek. Guilty as charged. Deal with it.” is my love of cinema.

Ever since I ran screaming out of Romford cinema at the age of three as fast as my stubby little legs would carry me due to my mum taking me to see Sleeping Beauty and me having the shit scared out of me by the wicked witch, a passion for film was seared into the very fibre of my being. A passion that grew more and more as time went by.

I love the whole notion of cinema, and also Hollywood as well. I don’t mean the plastic version that we have today, but the classic version of the 40’s and 50’s, where film was still a fairly new mainstay of popular culture and it slowly began to engrain itself into public conscious. The lights, the glamour, the largeness of it all. The simple fact that for a completely made up medium, it’s amazing how you can just lose a few hours of your life and go somewhere you have never been before.

That sense of anticipation as the lights go down. The collective hush from a complete group of strangers sitting together to share the same experience. The twat behind you who is also a massive movie geek, but won’t shut the fuck up about it, and keeps trying to impress the girl he is with with a load of facts that he actually hasn’t got right in the first place (Yeah, you know who you are buddy! Your film knowledge is no match for mine!).

Here is a list of my top five favourite films.

1. Jaws.
2. An American Werewolf In London.
3 The Blues Brothers.
4. Ghostbusters.
5. Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

Now some sniffy film snobs may look at that list with a slight air of disdain. A simple list of huge blockbusters that are pure popcorn fodder. I can almost hear the tutting and sighing.

These aren’t classics, these are populist trash!

So, what's wrong with that?

I’ve immersed myself in cinema all my life. I’ve watched most of the true so called classics and the first early pioneers in the medium because I wanted to experience everything to do with film.

I’ve enjoyed Citizen Kane (though I preferred Welles Touch Of Evil. That ten minute tracking shot for the planting of the bomb, Scorsese so got the inspiration for the Copacabana scene in Goodfellas from that),

I’ve devoured Hitchcock's entire catalogue and marvelled at how he created all the techniques for creating suspense that are copied to this very day (the only other person to fall within that category is John Carpenter. Seriously, watch Halloween now. Not scary at all, been done too many times. But imagine seeing it for the first time? Amazing).

I've sat through both Nosferatu and the original Friz Lang’s Metropolis, wouldn’t say I enjoyed them, just sat through them.

I’ve watched Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Didn’t understand any of it, but I think it’s because I don’t understand chess?

I’ve watched Battleship Potemkin after learning De Palma based the whole Grand Central Station scene in The Untouchables, with the baby falling down the stairs in its cartridge, from those famous six minutes in Eisenstien’s film (and this is the main reason why I have watched most of these early classics, a sense of duty to see where the later homage's came from).

So I understand all the history and all weight behind titles like these, but in all honesty, when you strip away all the pretensions and graces, I believe films should be about losing yourself for two hours in a world that makes you happy, and most importantly, and takes your mind off reality for a little while. And that's what my list does for me. If I’m ever down or upset, or if I just fancy spending a few hours with something that feels like an old friend to me, I’ll stick on a film from my list and I’ll know I’ll be in good company.

When I was a kid, my love of films spilled out into the games that I played as well. My friend had a huge climbing frame in his back yard, so when I went round there to play, that naturally became the Orca and we would play Jaws. And the strangest thing was, as I hung from the bars of that climbing frame, the green grass of his lawn changed into the murky waters of the sea and I could see the dark shape of the great white lurking menacingly beneath it. I can still remember it vividly to this day. How we would both be looking in the same direction, pointing at the same imaginary shark, with its mouth like an open cave filled with teeth like carving knives, just waiting for us to fall into the water so it could eat us. It’s amazing how potent a child's imagination can be.

If I was playing alone in my house, I would pretend to be Indiana Jones. If my dad was sleeping off a long nights work, I would make it my quest to try and steal something from his bedroom as he slept. So I would creep around, trying not to set off any booby traps and awake the great god Mick, as all the natives were incredibly afraid of him when he was grumpy from a lack of sleep. So with my trusty sidekick Benji, my pet dog, we would crawl up the stairs, avoiding all the poison arrows and trapdoor steps, to reach the temple door of the great god Mick, where I would open it with the magic amulet (a piece of my mum’s jewellery) and try and sneak in the bedroom to steal something from there. Sadly, my plans would always go awry, as Benji would then leap in the room and on the bed, licking my dad’s face so he awoke. I always wished for a better sidekick like a monkey or something.

Every Wednesday my mum and dad would take me to our local supermarket for our weekly food shop. As soon as I stepped through the door I became James Bond, Superspy, and would spend the next hour stalking them through the aisles, hiding just out of vision, but always keeping my targets in sight. You never know what those Russian defectors would get up too. They may look like they are buying semi-skimmed milk, but in reality, all just a ruse. World domination was their plan, and I was the only one who could stop them.

Now I am older and more mature, I’ve ceased playing games and pretending to be characters out of a film (Well, there was the one time where I was Batman and Kates was Catwoman, but to be honest, we probably shouldn’t talk about that). But the film loving person inside of me still relates certain moments in my life to the cinema and the big screen. And that is purely down to the invention of the mp3 player.

Having an iPod is like having your own personal movie soundtrack in your pocket, and for a cinema obsessive, it can sometimes do weird things to your daydreams.

You could be walking along the street on a beautiful summer’s day, a bright and bouncy tune playing in your ears, and suddenly it’s the opening credits of a feel good comedy. You can almost picture the titles scrawling across the screen as you walk, the camera tracking you as you take the route to wherever it is that you are going. Everything bright and cheerful and happy as you nod and smile every time you pass a complete stranger.

Or you could be travelling on the train home on a dull winters evening, purple light pressing hard against the window as you rest your head on it, watching the rain run down your reflection in the glass. Suddenly a sad and melancholy song comes on your iPod and all of a sudden it’s the heartrending scene in a movie where the hero is leaving the one he loves, the pain and sadness etched on his face, visible to see as the train puts even more miles between the two of them. No one on earth can truly understand the anguish the hero feels, its immense, but saying that, most people that travel home from Liverpool Street station at six in the evening have pain etched all over their faces. Even more so if you can’t get a seat.

So all through my life, I have always daydreamed at certain odd moments that I have had movie cameras on me (Come on, surely it can’t just be me?). In the middle of emotional snapshots of my life, could be an argument, or some deep and meaningful conversation, a tiny voice at the back of my brain would whisper: This is where the Coldplay song would kick in.

If I am out with friends and a particular good time was being had by all, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy would suddenly spark up in my mind with Go Daddy-oh and I would be slap bang in the middle of a scene from Swingers (Top tip, if googling Swingers for images, real good idea to turn the safe search on. Mmmmmmmmn, filthy).

My one main worry is that this merging of film and real life will become too confusing. Do I really want to be in the middle of McDonalds to be told that they had run out of Banana milkshake and then find myself on my knees crying “Nooooooo!” with arms aloft like in that scene from Platoon while Barbers Adagio For Strings plays mournfully around me?

Actually yes, I probably would, just to see the expression on people’s faces.

So my little collection of favourite movies have been with my nearly all my life. They have entertained me, comforted me, kept me company when I have been alone, been shared amongst friends and partners, and above all, been the one constant thing that I can rely upon. I know what I am going to get from them every time I turn on the TV and settled down to watch them.

And how many things can you say that about?

A Treat For You All……

2010-03-21T13:09:00.011Z

Being the literary genius that I am, I get on a regular occasion at least two people every three or four years asking me if I have written my novel yet. So due to this unprecedented public demand, I have decided to give the followers of this blog something back as a thank you for all the support and love I have received from you all since I started it.

An extract from the half completed manuscript of my novel.

Yes, you just read that right.

My gift to you.

This is a few short scenes from my searing and heart rending expose of the English class system. It encapsulates love, loss, and all the things that happen in-between. The writing is very layered, so it will take considerable brain power to read between the lines and to fully grasp what I am really writing about.

So, if you are ready to begin, let me take you by the hand and take you into another world.

______________________________________________________________

Mimi Demure slowly sipped at her lukewarm tea as she gazed wistfully out of the window of the parlour room, watching the ice melt slowly from the bare fingers of the willow tree that sat melancholy outside. She gave a small sigh and stirred the muddy brown liquid in her cup once more.

From the other side of the room, Roger noticed her discontent and looked up from the spreadsheets and plans that he had laid out all over the parlour room table with concern on his handsome face (I don't mean he spread them out over the table with his face).

“Mimi, what’s wrong?” he asked her, worry mixed with love swirling around in his dreamy brown eyes.

“Nothing Roger, “she replied in a voice that sounded tired and worn like the face of their groundsman, Calder, “Just go back to your work.”

Roger rolled up the sheaths of paper, filled with diagrams and equations, and tied them up with a lace ribbon.

“Mimi, my love. I have watched you now for the last year in despair. I feel as if you are slipping away from me and I don’t know how I am ever to keep hold of you.” he asked her, pain creeping into his rough, but yet warm face.

“Do you love me Roger?” she asked him, staring into those dreamy brown eyes with her own ice cold blue ones.

Roger rose from his table and walked over to her, falling to his knees and taking her hand within his own.

“My darling, of course I love you. You are my world, my light, my everything. If you were not in my life, well, I wouldn’t know what to do. My heart would be torn asunder, split like the firewood between Calder’s lumber axe. Why must you ask such silly things?”

“I’m tired Roger, tired of this life that I lead. I am like a buttercup in spring, I need love like the buttercup needs sunlight and water, and at this present time I feel as if I am in a desert, parched and dry.”

“Mimi, I don’t understand?” Roger replied, feeling the slow lurching sensation within the centre of his chest at the slow realisation that the person he loved most in the world was slipping from his grasp. Slowly.

“Do you remember when you took me to Paris Boulevard Roger?”

“I do, we danced naked by moonlight so the black light slid over your skin like oil. I remember that night more than any other in my life, it was the night that I knew I loved you.”

“I can’t remember ever feeling like that again Roger. You have been so wrapped up in your work that you have hardly noticed me, noticed my despair. I longed for you to look up from your blueprints, your plans and schemes, and just see this woman, this flesh and blood, sitting before you, just hoping for a smile, a simple glance that would prove that you still feel the same way about me. But it never came Roger, it never came.”

This last part was said in a wistful whisper.

“Oh my darling!” Roger wailed to the oppressive weight of the parlour room as the grandfather clock ticked slowly behind him. “What have I done to you, what torment have I placed you under?”

He beat his fist upon the hard wooden floor with every word he uttered.

Mimi slowly removed her hand from his.

“I’m leaving you Roger. There is a plane leaving tomorrow for Cairo. It has a one way ticket. I won’t be returning.”

Roger remained silent on his knees; the only flicker of emotion was a slight twitch under his right eye that flickered like the wings of a hummingbird.

“Do you have nothing to say Roger? Nothing to ask of your love as she tells you that she is leaving you and won’t be returning?”

Suddenly Rogers forehead split apart like the teeth of a bear trap, exposing his trembling pink brain, a brain that had a six foot red tentacle sprouting from it with a luminous yellow eyeball on the end.

“Oh Roger, what’s wrong?” Mimi cried as the tentacle moved towards her face so she could see her own reflection in its shiny, slimy surface.

Roger opened his mouth as if to speak and a guttural voice spoke without his lips moving.

“Sub human creature, I am Xanther from the Planet Mugathra! All humans will be enslaved!”

Mimi shot from her seat and pressed both hands against her shocked face.

“Oh Roger, why did you have to be the first Englishman to ever set foot on Mars? Damn the space race! Damn it all to hell! How am I ever going to explain this at the tennis club?”

She pushed herself backwards from her chair as the thing that used to be her husband shed its human skin and sat in front of her in a quivering red mass of blob like tissue with many more tentacles whipping around its obscene body.

“Blaaaaaaargh!” the blob cried as it wobbled towards her. “Destroy all humans!”

Mimi quickly ran out of the parlour room and down the hallway towards the armament display. She grabbed the Sword of Punarbrula from its display case and turned to face her jelly like husband as he rolled glisteningly across the floor after her.

“I promised myself I would never use this again after what happened in the Congo,” she cried, holding the sword in the position her sensei, Muturgo Barringturo, had taught her, “But it seems to me that the Sword of Punarbrula is the only thing that will kill you now Roger, that and........love.”

She waited until Roger was only a few feet away.

“I will always remember Paris.” she whispered as tears rolled down her face.

The sword flashed down.

An inhuman scream was heard.

Followed by a pop.
___________________________________________________________

Pretty powerful stuff huh? I think it really dissects the human condition and lays out all that emotion bare for us all to see. I sometimes look at the things I write and can understand how people say that it is some form of a blessing the talent that I have, but in reality, it is really some kind of a curse. If people keep expecting you to write stuff this good, this powerful, what happens if you have an off day and write any old crap that just looks as if you have just cobbled it together in about 20 minutes?

Lucky for me, I’m still waiting for that day to come.

Thank you for joining me on this journey.

You can let go of my hand now.

Disclaimer- This is of course not an extract from my latest manuscript, but merely a piece of crap I concocted. I don’t have manuscript. I have ideas for three novels, that if published, would actually change the face of books forever, but I just haven’t got round to writing them yet. This is due to the fact that I am lazy and suffer from crippling self doubt.

All of these books would be about Vampires. I like Vampires. I had an idea about ten years ago to write a book about a teenage girl who falls in love with a Vampire. It would be filled with sexual awakening and that heady rush and heartfelt yearning that only teenage love could bring. I was going to call it “My Boyfriends A Vampire, But I’m Actually OK With This.” but decided that there would never be a market for shit like that.

So if anyone out there would actually like to do the writing for my novels for me, I can dictate and stuff, I will sell the rights 70/30 in my favour, and even let you have some say on the obligatory Tim Burton film adaption.

Just let me know.

Extra Disclamier- It's amusing me (and worrying me in equal measures) that folk think I was actually being real with this.......

He Talks To The Animals….

2010-03-14T17:16:00.008Z

Apart from writing, I can safely say that my one and only other real passion in life is for animals. And not just the cute and fluffy kind, but even the really ugly ones as well. Those with teeth and pincers and eyes on stalks, all kinds of animal life fall within my love radar, I'm not all about the hot ones, you know?

I am just fascinated by the natural world. How it adapts and thrives to fit its surrounding. How they care for their young (well, most species) with a dedication that puts us to shame. And just how amazing it is that such things of beauty actually live on the same planet that I do. I have made a vow with myself that when I am older, and work and money are no longer a priority in my world, I will see out the remainder of my days seeing as much of it as I can.

I want to visit rainforests. I want to hug a monkey. I want to see the sunrise in some far flung country as its inhabitants drink from watering holes. I’m going to do this, sooner rather than later. I’m just going to do as much as I possibly can. To me, all of it is a gift and it is up to me if I am going to take it or not. And I will.

As most of the animal world I encounter now is mainly based here at home, I still can’t help but go all gooey with any kind of animal I meet..

I can’t pass a dog without bending down to pet it and make best friends and then try and steal it if the owner isn’t looking. If I go over to somebody's house and they have cats, rather than spend any time with the person I am meant to be visiting, I will be rolling around on the floor with their feline pets, rubbing faces with them and bonding. It is a common sight to see me sitting on someone's sofa with cats lying on me like I am some Dan shaped cushion.

And I love it.

I donate money every month to animal welfare charities, I get teary whenever I read of any form of cruelty to any animal, and I have even adopted a silverback gorilla called Ndahura from a charity called Friend A Gorilla.. Its brilliant. You get monthly updates on how him and his family (who are called the Bitukura) are doing in the jungle, and you also can log it and get satellite updates via GPS as they move across the land. Its awe inspiring stuff. My only worry is that one day I get a knock at the door and find a huge silverback sitting there with an overnight bag and a handwritten sign that says “Daddy”. That would be a tad hard to explain to the neighbours, and more importantly, my cat. But on the plus side it will make me 70% more attractive to women as it’s a proven scientific fact that women like men who have gorillas for best friends. And you can’t argue with scientific fact. I think that was proven once by scientific fact or something?

My love of all things animal started at a very early age at home. Apparently when I was a toddler, I would enter a room holding our cat Tibby by its tail and wearing a huge smile on my face. That cat never did like me much though. I could never understand why?

After I began living on my own, I ended up sharing my house with my family cat called Tinker (I didn’t name him, blame my mum for that one). Now Tinker was a strange cat. The most loving and people friendly animal you could imagine, he also had the rather unfortunate habit of being a little bit…..well, shall we say, dirty? He just didn’t know how to clean himself like cats normally do. He was a longhair and would regularly come in covered in leaves and grass so he resembled one of those tumbleweeds that you normally see rolling across the desert in westerns. His unhygienic ways earned him a name change from Tinker to Minger, and then finally it just settled on The Ming. He lived to the ripe old age of 23 and I miss him like crazy.

The cat I have at the moment is Dotty. Long term readers will know that I have spoken of her before, and even included pictures because that how I roll. Now Dotty is a high maintenance cat. She hates everybody but me, and even then she doesn’t like me that much unless I am feeding her.

I delivered Dotty about three years ago when her mum Holly got pregnant. I didn’t know she was pregnant. I came home from work and found her trying to get my attention by literally meowing right in my face. I got her a pillow to lie on and about five minutes later her lower half convulsed and a beautiful little kitten popped out. Being the stupid man that I am, I was elated with joy whilst fighting back tears and also not trying to throw up at the same time.

Now it’s just me and Dotty living in perfect harmony together. Unless she is getting fed or demanding some form of attention, she can normally be found cleaning her genitals somewhere in my flat. And the weird thing is (and maybe those who live alone with animals can back me up on this) after a long period of time, you end up speaking to your pets like they were another human being. Every night when I come home, I always have her rush to the door to greet me and I end up asking her how her day was as I hang my coat up. I mean, why????????

Me: Hello Dotty how was your day?

Dotty: Was OK actually. Mooched around the living room for a bit, had a snooze in your sock draw for about six hours, then took a massive shit in my litter box. You can probably smell it now?

Me: My day was good as well. I ended-

Dotty: That's all very nice but feed me.

Me: OK.

The thing that amazes me most about the animal world is how much better they all are in comparison to us. True, we may have invented the Big Mac, instant coffee, and Kanye West, but if you match up these monumental achievements with anything within the animal kingdom, well, there is no contest really. And yet we humans, in our infinite wisdom, decide to rape and plunder the natural world until its inhabitants are fighting for their very survival.

We have all this wonder, all this beauty round us, and all we can do is destroy it bit by bit. It really makes me sick to my stomach and makes me think that we really don’t deserve it. We really don’t. It’s such a huge planet and yet we can’t find a way for every living thing to live in harmony with each other. I’m sorry for ending this post by turning into a hippy tree lover, but in all honesty, as I species, I hate us, I really do. We are like toddlers, just going round smashing everything up just because we can. It amazes me to think how much better the world would be if we just weren’t on it? We hunt things to the brink of existence, we destroy habitats as we spread out across the land like a virus, and one day it will just turn round and bite us so hard on the arse we will just look up with huge stupid expressions on our faces and shrug our shoulders and just go “Wasn’t me? Wasn’t my fault.”

Bloody was though. All of it.

Especially Kanye West. For that there is no excuse.

Sorry……….

2010-03-07T15:47:00.001Z

I’m not very good, am I?

Been a little lax on this blogging lark lately.

Believe me when I say, the intention was there, but the flesh was very, very weak.

Every night as I sat on my train home from work, I would think to myself: Yep, tonight I will catch up on my comments, make a new post and see what everyone else is up to. And then safe in the knowledge that this is what I was going to do, five minutes later I would find myself slumped half asleep against the train window, so from the outside I resembled one of those stick on Garfields that you would normally see looming back at you from some car windscreen in the mid nineties.

I know.

I’m crap.

Don’t hate me for this. I love reading comments, I love reading new blogs, it’s just at the moment I’m soooooooooooooooooooooooooo bloody tired. It’s not just the fact that I am now back in the rat race, but my new job is incredibly full on (in a fun way) and by the end of the day all I have the energy to do is crawl home, run a bath, have some dinner, and then decide if the insomnia is going to keep me awake for most of the night.

Anyways. Me.

Things are going really well at the moment. I have settled in pretty well in the job and feel that i am slowly getting to grips with it. I have already got someone into work, which was a brilliant feeling, especially when they told me and I could see how happy this person was. So the desire to get more results like this is strong, which is only a good thing I guess?

The team I work with are brilliant, though seeing as I am the only male in the group; I was worried this might be a problem at first. But I have been made to feel really welcome, and by some kind of social osmosis, I am now technically one of the girls. I know all the new fashions, all the best make up tips, and next week everyone is coming over to mine so we can have a Sex in the City marathon and eat ice cream whilst talking about boys, and then finish the night off by having a pillow fight in our negligees (this is what you ladies do during slumber parties, right?).

All in all though things slowly seem to be moving in the right direction for me for the first time in ages. And this pleases me immensely. But that still doesn’t excuse the tardiness in my blogging or replying to those kind enough to leave a comment.

So, in order to address this, I thought I might spread a little love.

I’ve been doing this for about six months now. And during that time, I have stumbled across some little gems of blogs that maybe some of you may not have seen before. So I would like to point you in their direction. Seriously, these are some brilliant writers and if you get a chance, pop on over, have a look and then click on that follow button. You seriously won’t be disappointed.

First up is aladdinsane12 at She Don't Make False Claims. She first popped over and commented on my porn post, leaving the comment of “You had me at meathole" It was at this point that I knew we would get along. I am always interested to see what her mind will throw up next. Always funny, always interesting. Go check her out.

Next is Millions of Atoms Man at Millions of Atoms. To say I am envious of him is an understatement. This is one seriously funny individual and will often leave you scratching your head and wondering where the hell he gets it from.

If you are ever feeling a tad down and need a quick pick me up, go and say Hi to Jacque at A Quirky Girls Thoughts. She is like a walking form of prozac and you will leave her site with a smile on your face and a new found love for the world. Seriously, she is that good.

If you like your humour a little rough and ready, go check out Mr Tony Spunk at Lounging Around With Tony Spunk. No topic is safe from this very funny writer and he always gives us an impressive look into his own life, his loves, and some of the very scary ladies that he has encountered on his travels. Apparently there was once an altercation with a six foot transvestite called Trudy, but he doesn’t really like to talk about it.

I am quite new to Kato and Pandora's Box but what I have read so far I love. She really has an ability to draw you in to her world and has a perfect warm writing style that is like sinking into a nice bath. Plus how can you not love someone who loves Ghostbusters as much as she does? Pop over and say hello, she will make you feel really welcome.

And last but no means least, the lovely Miss Overthinker at Life Uncensored. I’ve been reading Miss OT’s blog for a while now and she has shared some hard times, but some good as well. She has sometimes mentioned that she doesn’t believe herself to be much of a writer, I think that when you go over and visit and actually read some of her stuff, you will see for yourself that this is the biggest pile of steaming donkey poo going. She is a fantastic writer who can make you feel like she is actually having a conversation with you, rather than reading words on a screen. I always look out for her next post when I’m on here.

So that was a few little personal sites that I love visiting and thought others might like to check out as well. If you do go over there, tell them I said hello (though seeing as I haven’t visited anyone in ages, they might just go “Who?”).

So to round off, I’m sorry for being a crap blogger. I will try to address this best I can. But thank you to anyone who has visited and commented, I do read them, I do love them, I will do better.

So until next time.

I’m high fiving you all.

The Plan……

2010-02-28T13:58:00.005Z

For some strange reason I have seemed to amassed the reputation of being a grumpy bastard who hates the world.

Now I don’t know if this is because of something I have said in the past, or due to the fact that I normally glare back at the world with the expression that an astronaut has when he farts in his own spacesuit, but I guess this assumption is pretty much correct.

I have a list of things in my head that annoy me and I am updating it all the time. Do you want to know what is right at the top at the moment, right in front of that god-awful cover version of Journeys Don’t Stop Believing by the cast of fecking Glee?

Timekeeping.

I am very big on timekeeping.

Now I am never late. If I say I am going to be somewhere at a certain time, then I make sure that I’m damn well going to be there at that time. I hate tardiness. In fact I hate lateness so much that I always arrive at my destination early, just so I am never late. If I say that I will meet you Wednesday at 2.00pm, chances are I will actually get there on Tuesday at 4.00pm, impatiently tapping my foot and checking my watch, wondering where the hell you were.

And yet everyone else I know seems to be on a different time zone to me. Everyone is late.

EVERYONE!

I swear whenever I arrange to meet someone, they will get there 20 minutes after our arranged meeting time with an apologetic look on their face and a really shitty excuse, wondering why the hell I am looking like I want to kill them with a knitting needle.

There is a reason for my obsession with timekeeping though and it boils down to my weird OCD mind.

Now I plan everything down to the finite detail, I really can’t help it. Every aspect of my life has to be controlled down to the letter. In fact I could probably tell you what will be doing on Sunday the 21st March at 3.00pm (making a cheese and ham sandwich and a cup of tea, I was going to add some pickle to the sandwich, but I probably forgot to get some when I went shopping the day before).

But I just don’t plan; I need to have THE PLAN.

Whenever arrangements are made, I will always ask “So, what's THE PLAN?”

I need to know times, dates, temperature, moon cycles, the whole shebang.

The worst response to that question you could give me would be: Let’s just see what happens?

That sentence is like a red rag to a bull to my odd little mind and it will wake up the OCD imp within my head, where it will scurry to the front of my brain, with its claws clicking on my shiny mind floor, and then it will leap up and down, desperate to get my attention.

“Let’s just see what happens?” my OCD imp will ask me after I finally notice it. “But what about THE PLAN?”

“Do we really need a plan? Can’t we just be spontaneous?” I ask it back.

“Spontaneous! Do you know what spontaneity brings?” it screeches at me with its little impy voice.

“No……..” I mumble shamefaced.

“CHAOS! That's what it brings. Do you want chaos, Dan?”

No I bloody don’t!

I shake my head hard, feeling the imp lose its balance so it has to hang on to my cerebral cortex for dear life with its tiny little hands.

“No, I thought not, “The imp says, dusting itself down after the mindquake stops, “I’m going to have to make some adjustments to THE PLAN now.”

And so it will scurry off to its little office inside my head and sit at a big drawing desk, where by lamplight its sits hunched over a massive timetable with the words THE PLAN written on the top in huge letters, a timetable that maps out my entire life, and it will sit there happily making adjustments here and there, updating little bits of info that I gather, always with a happy smile on its scaly lips, and when it really needs to concentrate, like if I’m trying to decide if I should have my bath at 7.00pm rather than 8.00pm, meaning I then get to read for an hour longer, then it will hum a happy tune to itself and stick its little green tongue out of the corner of its mouth in a distracted manner as it weighs up the pros and cons and then updates THE PLAN accordingly.

I’ve grown quite fond of him to be honest.

But that means in the real world, as opposed to the really bizarre one that lives in my head, I constantly need facts. If someone says they are going to pop over and see me at my flat, I need to have a time. It can’t just be whenever, it needs to be a real time that you can see on a clock, otherwise my whole routine gets thrown out of whack and I just end up standing in the middle of the room like a geriatric, looking confused and wondering what the hell I am meant to be doing next.

Holidays are fun for me as well.

Last year I took Kates to Florida for two weeks. By the end of the first night I had done a detailed little timetable of how we can maximise our trip on my iPhone.

“Look at this.” I said to her proudly, showing her the screen.

“What is it?” she asked me, squinting at the tiny little timetable.

“Its our holiday fun timetable, look, it even says so in bold at the top of it” I reply like I am talking to a five year old.

“Are you serious?”

I give her a look as if to say: It’s THE PLAN, of course it’s serious?

“Can’t we just take each day as it comes, just have some fun?” she asked me.

“This is fun?” I reply meekly, waving the timetable at her. “I’ve got everything mapped out here. When to eat, what theme parks to visit, I’ve even got a two hour slot on Monday where there is nothing booked in, so we can just relax.”

“You will probably just spend it updating your stupid timetable” she replied with a snort.

I hadn’t thought of that……..

I sneakily moved my fingers over the screen to change the two hour relax slot into review timetable.

“What are you doing?” Kates asked me.

“Nothing……..”

“Give me that phone!” she snapped.

I handed it over.

“I’m deleting this and we are just going to plan stuff as the day comes and you’re going to like it.” she said, her finger hovering over the big fat X that would delete the next two weeks of my life.

“Can we just not keep it for reference?” I cried, but by then it was too late, she pressed X and it was gone.

She could never delete the timetable, or mindtable, that was in my head though.

So for the entire duration of our holiday, I was constantly referring back to that like some mental Nazi Gestapo officer.

“Are you having fun?” I would ask her.

She would smile and nod back at me.

“Of course you are.” I would reply in a smug little voice, safe in the knowledge that this was all down to my holiday fun timetable, “Now let’s go have some fun over here……”

Everyone has their own inner demons and imps. Rather than fight some of them though, why not try and make friends with them? Once you get to know them, they can be quite funny, and if you ever got lonely, stop every now and then and have a chat with them. It’s better to live in harmony with some things that spend your whole life in conflict with them.

Oh, and I have named my imp Sean.

He likes that.

The Witching Hour…….

2010-02-24T20:25:00.006Z

When you suffer from crippling insomnia like I do, the bedroom becomes more like a battlefield than an actual place of rest. As the hours draw later and you end up closer to the time that most normal would be preparing for a good night’s sleep, you know that you yourself will be staring into the darkness, willing your body to finally switch off and get some rest.

Doesn’t happen.

The hours stretch out into an endless procession of time that results in you checking your clock every five minutes in a disbelieving way, while your body tells you: Yep, still awake. While you’re here, what shall we go over in your mind now?

When I was a kid, sleep came easy. Though my sleeping position was a bit different, if I'm truly honest. I used to scrunch under the covers into the tightest foetal position going, unwilling to let any part of my body hang over the edge purely for the belief that if it did, a rotting cadaverous hand would reach out from the blackness beneath my bed and drag me into the space where the monsters lived.

I’m a 31 year old man and I still do this.

Seriously, I do.

Even at this age, I can’t let any part of my body hang over the edge of the bed, and even though I am old enough to know that monsters don’t exist (apart from Sharon Osbourne), I still have the night terrors engrained on my psyche from when I was young and stupid to have: Yeah, there are no such things as monsters, but I’m not fecking chancing it! running through my mindscape.

But in all honesty, the only monster I have to deal with during the night is insomnia. And it is a scaly and nasty beast that I am at a loss as to how to defeat.

I do sleep better when I am in bed with someone, but I only see Kates a few nights a week, so the rest of the time I am left to fight my demons on my own. When we are together though, we have a sleeping position that can be deemed a little odd. We have something that we call headlocks and basically consists of us spooning while I wrap my arms around her head and neck in what looks like a really poorly executed wrestling move. And for some bizarre reason we both seem to like it. Though what that says about our relationship where I can only get to sleep if I’m basically throttling her, I don’t know…….

But even with my girlfriend in bed with me, and us re-enacting the best moves of Bret The Hitman Hart, sleep is quite often unable to be found for me. So I normally spend a very lonely night lying awake next to my lovely sleeping lady (my lovely sleeping lady who can annoyingly drop off as soon as her head hits the pillow) and read by lamplight until the early hours.

As Kates is a light sleeper though, either the light from my lamp or the sound of me turning a page, or even the sound of me daring to take a breath, will rip her from her sleep and cause her to rise from the covers in a tidal wave of blonde hair (seriously, bed hair doesn’t come close to describing it. I sometimes feel like I have to brandish a chair and a whip at her, screaming “Back beast, back!” when she wakes up in the morning. And yes, I am going to die when she reads this. Painfully, and probably involving some form of blunt instrument to my testes).

She will blink at me with sleepy eyes, taking in the sight of my lying there, lamp on, book in my hand, and ask, “Are you still reading?”

Now there are many ways in which I can reply to this. My normal sarcastic side usually screams out in my head: No, I’m crocheting. What are your measurements again? But to be honest, a combination of tiredness and a fear of bodily harm prevent me from saying this, and I just normally shake my head and switch the light off as she cuddles up beside me, while I stare at the ceiling and wait for the birds to start singing. And if I finally manage to snatch a few moments of sleep, the alarm will then go off for me to glare groggily at it and scream.

Insomnia really affects you during the day though. As the days roll by, a lack of sleep presents itself in a deep seated weariness that you can feel in your bones. Everything becomes washed out and faded; all the edges are smoothed off from the world until you feel like a half drawn animation, struggling through your own personal cartoon.

Over time, if the body is deprived of sleep, it can do strange things. My coordination becomes sluggish, my reactions poor. I’m struggling to write this even now, as my sleep has been terrible for the last few weeks. I have to keep reading everything over and over again for fear of making mistakes. I always feel as if I am about ten seconds behind everything else as everything is dull and listless for me under the fuzzy cloud of tiredness.

As per the cycle of this shitty routine, after about three or four weeks, my body will just give up and I will just fall to sleep at the drop of a hat, regardless of place or situation.

I remember one time I came home from work, literally dragging my arse across the floor from tiredness. I was too shattered to cook so I ordered myself a pizza. When it came, I took it to my sofa and lay down. Within minutes of doing so I was asleep face first on my pizza, where I stayed until the cold early hours of the morning. When I awoke, I didn’t have a clue where I was and sat up with a pizza slice stuck to my face, looking for all the world like some cheese based Phantom Of The Opera.

Another time when this embarrassing incident took place was when I worked in a photo lab. I entered our darkroom to change some photographic paper. I sat down in the pitch black on our work bench and due to a combination of the darkness, the quiet, and the lovely warmth, I was asleep in seconds. It was only someone banging on the door about half hour later that woke me up. Sadly I forgot where I was and thought I had gone blind.

Wasn’t funny at the time……..

I can feel that time creeping up on me now. My body feels like a clapped out old motor with barely enough juice in the tank to make it another few miles. But I know what will happen, I will crash at some point, my body not able to go any further, and I will forcibly have a good night’s sleep, waking up the next day to feel like I have been reborn. Everything will take on a brighter hue, be sharper and more defined to my fresh eyes, and I will feel what it really means to have a good night’s rest.

And then it will start all over again.

I hate you insomnia.

Seriously, if you had nipples, I would really twist them until you started crying……………..

Praise Be To Hoff………..

2010-02-20T17:58:00.019Z

As a man, I am pretty crap.

I lack all of the so called traits that men are supposed to have.

I have no skills to speak of whatsoever. I can’t put up shelves. I can’t wallpaper a wall. If you handed me a hammer, a saw, and a socket set, and then asked me to do something manly with it, more than likely I would just look back at you as if you had just handed me a new born baby and then asked me to raise it as my own, teaching it decent values and morals and how to be an upstanding member of society.

Then I would probably begin sweating.

I can’t drive and know nothing of cars, so I can’t gather in a circle of men and begin to debate the merits of the new Ford Megabollox 5000, with its horse powered bastard fast engine, which also comes with shiny alloy wheel things and a pair of airbags, that when inflated, resemble two huge testicles being squashed into your face so you feel like you've fallen headfirst into Meatloaf’s lap.

I don’t go out and get shitfaced drunk with other men and then start to letch on women in that charmingly enduring way that only drunk morons can, where in their own heads they believe themselves to be the suave reincarnation of Dean Martin and Jack Nicholson, but in reality they actually resemble sad and lonely figures who are only going to go home alone, covered in speckles of their own vomit and chip grease, and masturbate furiously in dark and silent bedrooms. And with each bitter stroke, their eyes will moisten from the sheer emptiness of their lives as they face up to the fact that their best years are behind them, and they have absolutely nothing to show for it other than the dull ache that sits in the place where their heart used to be and the crumpled up jizz covered tissues that actually represent the only form of relationship that they have right now, one which happens to be with their own right hand.

I don’t do that obviously.

In fact the only allusion to manhood that I actually follow is the fact that I like football. But even then, when I go to a match, I probably stick out like a man who gets turned on by heights doing a bungee jump due to the disdain I normally feel for my fellow supporters as they bellow out the inane drivel that passes for support in these enlightened times.

Kick his fucking legs!

You’re shit Cole!

(Upon when pointed out that was actually Illunga that miss kicked the ball and not Cole)

Cole, Illunga, who fucking cares?

Sort it ouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut!

Sigh………

But saying that, if you replaced the whole crowd with exact replicas of me, rather than cheering as the team marched out on to the pitch, all you would have would be a slight air of disappointment and 36,000 people wondering if you could buy shoes for monkeys, so maybe its probably best if things stayed the way they were on that front?

So, as you can probably tell, as a man I lack any sort of quality whatsoever.

I suck.

When I was growing up though, there was one person that epitomised manhood in all its glory and also gave me something to hope for as well, the hope that I too would grow up as hairy and virile as this God amongst men was.

That man was David Hasslehoff.

For about two years, The Hoff was a god to me. During my Knight Rider obsession at the age of about eight, I too wanted to wear leather trousers and walk around with my shirt undone, looking for all the world like I had a tranquilised possum stuffed down the front of it who was just starting to wake up and wonder where the hell it was. But sadly for me, my mum wouldn’t let me buy a pair of leather trousers, and at the age of eight, my chest hair was a little on the lax side.

But make no mistake; the man was a living legend to me. And Knight Rider was my church. I tried to copy the way The Hoff walked, how he got the ladies, and how he oozed effortless cool.

But most of all, I tried to copy the relationship he had with KITT.

The fact that The Hoff was so cool he actually had a talking car basically sealed the deal for me. I too wished I had a talking car, and on occasion, if left alone in my dad’s car, I would whisper to it “You can talk to me if you want?”

It never did though.

But this obsession with talking cars spread out into other household objects as well. I overheard my parents talking one time about if they should send me to a child psychologist after they had caught me having a one sided conversation with the washing machine in our kitchen. I tried to explain to them that if Michael Knight could have a talking car, why was it so silly if I had a talking washing machine? True, our crime fighting prowess would be a tad limited, but at least my leather trousers would always look clean as I did it.

Now though, The Hoff has been relegated to a clownish figure to be laughed at and ridiculed. The king of cheesy moments, drunken antics, and bizarre behaviour.

And then there is the music.

Upon preparing to write this love letter to all things Hasslehoff, I realised that in all honesty, I hadn’t really heard any of his music. Whether that was a good thing or not I am still to decide. I’d heard of it, but just not the actual music itself. So I popped over to Amazon to listen to a few snippets and found quite possibly the funniest selection of reviews I have ever read.

Pop on over and have a look yourselves, but here are a few choice selections:

“Once in every generation you have gifted musical and literary geniuses who create bodies of work that can only be described as sublime transcendence. Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Tolstoy - this pantheon of greatness can only be complete with the addition of none other than Davis Humpinhorse. I was depressed, lonely and spiritually empty until one day, I listened to "The Best Is Yet To Come", and my eyes were opened - I was thus convinced that God not only exists, but we are all ensconced in his presence. If you truly love music and poetry, you must have this CD in your collection. For those who have grown world-weary and cynical, I challenge you to listen to gems like "Do the Limbo Dance", "Highway To Your Heart", "I Believe" and the particularly good song "Hot Shot City" (THE MASTERPIECE which exquisitely describes and defines the human condition) and tell me that life still has no meaning! In terms of his contemporaries, forget clowns like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits. The Hass-man blows them away. People will be studying and enjoying his poetry and music for generations.”

“I was a cynic, I'd done it all, seen it all, produced legends such as U2, Madonna, The Beetles, Tim Curry. As you would expect, I had grown weary of the wild world of the music industry. The constant parties, dealing with drugged up losers hawking what scrap of talent they had left in their war ravaged bodies to the highest bidder. So it would be no surprise to you folks that upon receiving Dumphil Hampersoft's "Very Best Of" album for Christmas from my great granddaughter Clarisse, I had almost chucked it out.

Almost.

But something about the man on the cover intrigued me. A quality I had seen before in others, John Lennon, Jimmy Hendrix, Elvis, Jesus. Overcome with, well, I can’t really describe it; I placed the compact disc tenderly in the tray of my 1993 original PanMax ghetto blaster and pressed Confabulate. The effect was instantaneous. As if caressed by the most serene of angels, my eardrums responded by rising in sweet symphony to the crests and troughs of His vocal sirens. Knees weak, I managed to make it to the couch where I slumped as I seen junkies do years before. Slowly my life force was being sapped, but not in a bad way, I was becoming...I was seeing for the first time, hearing for the first time. Then Hot Shot City started to play. As if sitting on my father’s lap for the first time, Dammerhingers voice tenderly trailed the length of my neck, raising each hair on my body in an organic ode to greatness. It was done. I had found what I was looking for. The chase for the white dragon was over and I have only one person, one being, to thank.
Thank you Drupil Handlestroff. You are truly great.”

"Magnanimous....serendipitous...cornucopias....none of these words have anything to do with this album....at least one of them probably doesn't exist...but they are big....VERY big...and big is exactly the size of Mr. Hasselhoff's talent, as displayed so proudly on this greatest hits CD. You will curse your parents for not playing this music while you were still in the womb, for you might have grown up to become a well adjusted individual instead of the worthless heathen you are."

And finally……

"If you're indeed looking for the best of David Hasselhoff, one could do no better than this nearly flawless collection. In "Looking for the Best", Hasselhoff selects 18 songs spanning a back catalogue of 1 previous album. Actually, I'm not sure how someone compiles a best-of album when you only have 1 album, but Hasselhoff is not concerned with semantics here; Hasselhoff is here to rock you.

LFTB starts of earnestly with "Looking for Freedom" in which Hasselhoff rages against western materialism. The synthesizer solo rails against your senses, reminding you what it's like to be young again.

Our second offering from this collection, "Wir Zwei Allein", Hasselhoff takes aim at the Jews, denying the holocaust as a "jüdische Bengellüge". From his pulpit, Hasselhoff rains down blazing synthesizer rage that will remind you why they call him the "Der Gasraum Kommandant" in Germany and "Meister von Auschwitz" in Poland, where he's feared as a devil.

On "Do you Limbo Dance", Hasselhoff raps --
"Who's afraid of my big bad weenie / Rub it and see if it's got a genie / Gonna make disappear this 10-inch zucchini / Just like
Houdini / Big Dave Hasselhoff rappin' / Wanna see yo' butt cheeks flappin' / Hoff want the honeys with the big back doors /
So drop them drawers, whores. Unh."

Like most albums that start off so strong, when Hoff takes it down a notch, the album sags in the middle. In "Save the World" Hoff rattles off about the Jews again, and in my opinion, it gets a little repetitive.

Fortunately the album picks up again with a rousing gorgeous "Je T'Aime Means I Love You", in which Hasselhoff softens his Arian manifest with clever French wordplay wrapped into a bilingual love-song. Hasselhoff sings "I love your hair and as the french say 'adorez mon pénis, vous putain de parasite'". I'm not sure what that means, but it bleeds with the romance that only Hasselhoff can conjure.

All in all, this is an extremely strong collection of songs from an underrated singer. Move over Bob Dylan, the torch has been passed."

I could spend hours reading those…….

So Hoff, even though your place in the annuls of entertainment history have been sullied somewhat by the fact that you a clearly a deranged mental bastard, in my heart, you will always be the coolest of cats, with your tousled hair, your leather trousers that reflect the sunlight so much that even your crutch seems illuminated, and the very fact that you had a talking motherfunking car!

To this eternal eight year olds heart, you were, and still are, the very best.

I’m In Print!!!!……

2010-02-05T20:45:00.008Z

Ever since I discovered I had the amazing talent of putting words together and making them barely legible, it has been a dream of mine to find myself within a written publication.

Well, that dream finally came true today.

Some of you fellow bloggers may know of a website called The Blog Paper. If you haven’t heard of it, then allow me to give you the skinny.

Here in London, we used to have a collection of free newspapers that were handed out every evening by strange looking people whose sole aim, apart from handing you free papers, was to get in your way as you tried to get home from work, and thus made you so angry that you wanted to roll up two copies of said newspapers and then insert them slowly into their eye sockets due to the fact that they had made you missed your train for the umpteenth time.

These papers died a death sometime last year. So that left a rather large amount of printing presses just sitting idly by, not really doing anything at all. So some rather enterprising folk came up with a novel idea. A user submitted newspaper. You contribute the articles to the website, and the readers of said website voted on what should be printed in the monthly paper.

I submitted my blog article that I wrote about porn as a sort of “Let’s see what happens” kind of thing and awaited the outcome. I did consider posting on here asking for votes, but a part of me wanted to see if the writing would stand up on its own (or at least stagger around half cut like a Glaswegian drunk), so I left it be and waited.

I started to get a few votes here and there, and then things started to go better and better. Better than I could have ever hoped for to be honest. If you look on the website under highest rated articles, I am currently at the top.

I got printed today.

I am very happy.

Very happy indeed.

I went down to one of the stations that the paper was being handed out at to pick myself up a copy. Sadly I think I must have missed them, as the only papers being handed out by the time I got there was the Evening Standard. I must admit to being a tad deflated as I was so excited about holding something I had written in my own hands, but then I saw it, a copy of The Blog Paper lying dropped in the gutter (and yes, the delicious irony was not lost on me). With happy thoughts, I picked it up and flicked through the pages until I saw my article.

My article.

It was my words with my name attached to it. And people could read it.

I know that what I put up on here is happily accessible to anyone who stumbles across it (and god bless you all for doing so), but there is something about the printed word that I find so amazing that having them replicated on a flickering PC screen really can’t do them justice.

This is seriously a big thing for me, even if for others it may seem small.

Coming home I had a bit of an odd experience. I was sitting on the train to Shenfield opposite a rather nice lady with glasses. About halfway through the journey she pulled out a copy of The Blog Paper and began to read it.

Immediately my eyes were drawn to the paper as I stared at her intently, trying to gauge where she was up to in the pages. Was she at my article yet? Was I actually going to have it critiqued in front of me, with her totally unaware that the author was sitting right opposite her?

Suddenly she looked up and saw me staring. I then realized that to her eyes a slightly desperate looking beardy bloke was staring in growing excitement at her. I have never actually seen my presence cause a woman to suddenly look terrified. It wasn’t very nice. I wanted to quickly flick through the pages and point out my article, shouting “I WROTE THAT! THAT WAS ME! THAT'S ALL I’M LOOKING AT! PLEASE DON’T FEAR ME!”

But I didn’t. I just got up at my stop, glancing down to see that she was about three pages away from my piece. Perhaps it was for the best? She might not have even smiled once, and that would have killed me.

So very nice lady with the glasses, if by reading my article you have ended up here, then you may remember the strange bloke sitting in front of you staring in your direction like he had just seen a baby elephant hatch out of your head. That was me. I’m so sorry if I freaked you out. I wasn’t trying to sex you up or anything. I was just happy to see what you were reading.

If anyone is reading this and did vote for my article, can I just say a massive thank you from the bottom of my heart. It has really meant something to achieve this. I think only anybody who writes can fully understand what it means.

It’s brilliant. So thank you.

If anyone wants to have a look at the article, you can find it here. I am on page 14.

My article.

Yes!!!

The Birth Of The Cynic.......

2010-01-29T23:58:00.007Z

Being a grumpy cynical bastard is, at most times, incredibly hard work.

You happy-go-lucky folk, you really don’t understand how much of a bind it can actually be to live under this terrible affliction. Nothing is black and white with us cynics. Everything is just a hazy shade of shite.

That smile we got from somebody who just walked by us, well, that was obviously because there is something wrong with our face and they were just laughing at us. Hard.

The lovely surprise cake that our closest friend brought us, well, obviously it contains some form of terrible bomb that will explode the moment we cut it and send flaming nuclear goo directly onto our heads and cause us to run screaming from the room with our hair on fire. That is why we cynics fear cake. It’s a scientific fact.

To us cynics, every good thing that happens always has something horrible that will be waiting just around the corner to go and royally screw it all up, and make us just sit there with a I told you so look plastered across our smug, stupid heads, while we weep tears of frustration onto our cheeks that drip down and stain our shirts with the wetness that only bitterness provides.

I know, I know, you are probably just thinking “Chill out man, cease the cynicism. Just stop every now and then and smell the flowers. It’s all beautiful dude.” But us cynics know that if we were to stop and smell the flowers, there will definitely be a rabid squirrel with an unhealthy sex addiction lurking within, so the moment we bend over to take a lungful of that fragrant aroma, the little bastard will leap out like a furry ninja to claw out our eyes out with its little rodent claws and hold them triumphantly aloft over its shoulders like little squishy pom poms, whilst simultaneously trying to have vigorous squirrel type sex with our screaming faceholes. This is a fact. This will definitely happen and is in no way the inane ramblings of a man with far too much time on his hands. So there. Deal with it.

They say that our emotional and psychological makeup is created and formed during our teenage years, and I can certainly see some truth in that. You want to know where my cynicism was birthed. Just take a look at my teenage years, they were awful. And this was due to the fact that whatever holy deity that created us decided that he would have some fun with me the moment I hit the age of about 14.

So what did the holy one inflict upon me? Well, firstly he gave me spots. A normal thing amongst teenage boys, this is true, but he gave me the most impressive spots around. I mean, these things were real beauties. If there was some kind of gooey spot award, mine would have taken first, second, and third prize, and possible some kind of special achievement award as well, just for being extra spotty. And these spots had friends and family that they invited to my face for a party and it was many, many years before they left. The stubborn little shits laughed in the face of every form of medication that I threw at them, and this was a lot. Pills, facial washes, creams, all were mocked by my little spotty chums as they cried out from my cratered visage “Come on! Is that all you’ve got?” whilst forming new chums to join in the fiesta.

I remember one form of cream I was issued by my doctors called Quininderm. This stuff was the equivalent of smearing boiling hot magma on my skin. The first night I applied it, I could hear my spots scream “It burns!” in terrible agony. And it did. When I awoke the next morning, the cream was so powerful it had taken out all the dye from my pillow from where I had been lying on it the night before. I could see a perfect replica of my face imprinted on the fabric like the Turin shroud. I rushed to my mirror in hope, thinking that my chums were finally gone, but they weren’t. They were still there. All red and defiant.

Bastards.

So, I had spots. Not so bad, who doesn’t have spots? So what else did Buddha inflict upon me then? He gave me stupid hair, that's what he did. Hair that had a mind of its own and wouldn’t do what I wanted it too. All I wanted was a fashionable haircut so I wouldn’t stand out and be mocked by my peers. Did it happen? Did it bollocks. My hair and I had a six year battle where both of us refused to listen to the other. Curses were made, tears were formed, but no stylish hair was ever found. All I wanted was something to distract everyone from my face. I wanted to swish into a house party and go “Yeah, the face is a mess, but check out this bitching hair!” and people would gasp and then reach over to touch my lovely locks.

Didn’t happen.

Hair went mental.

Another infliction that I had to put up with was an odd sense of humour, something that regular readers of this blog can certainly attest too. My sense of humour was so dry that the moment I attempted to try and say something amusing near a naked flame, the words themselves would catch on fire and disappear in a puff of black smoke. Basically people just never got it. So when I said something dry and sardonic and hilarious, the normal reaction was an odd look, and then a quick excuse, as the listener scuttled sideways to talk to someone a bit more normal.

Anything left? Oh yeah, what about this? I was socially awkward. Socially awkward around whom, I hear you ask?

Girls.

Yep.

Girls.

Those mysterious and wondrous creatures that were like goddesses to my hormonally imbalanced brain. But with the combination of my spotty face, mental hair, and the odd sense of humour, I felt like I was so introverted around them that I would end up looking so hard inside myself that I would come around in a complete circle and end up staring at my own startled face, and no one wanted to do that. Not with the spots/hair combo.

So I would remain mute around the ladies, maybe throwing in the odd (and I mean, odd) comment here or there that would stop a conversation dead, make everyone stare at me for a few minutes, and then carry on like I had never said anything at all.

So quite often I ended up saying nothing. I felt it was the best thing to do. To fade into the background until it felt like I was made out of wallpaper and could blend into anywhere.

Wasn’t very nice, but what could I do?

I remember vividly being in a pub once with a friend called Steve when I was about 17. Steve was a loud, confident bloke, who could quite easily converse with any female he came across. During this particular time he was holding court with two girls at a table that he had just got chatting too. He was being loud, and in his own mind, witty. He was also being a tit. I was perched at the end of the table like a spotty mute with weird hair, listening to him babble complete shit to these two girls, and for some reason they were lapping it up and looking at him like he was some flash god with gold plated nipples. Across the floor on another table were two older women who were watching us.

For some reason, Steve got up with the two girls and left me alone at the table. Well, I was never alone really. I had my spots, my weird hair, and an almost crushing sensation of self loathing.

I always had that.

Suddenly one of the older women spoke to me from their table.

“You’re too quiet, do you know that?”

“Sorry?” I squeaked back, shocked that somebody had noticed me and had actually used their mouth to say words towards me.

“You’re letting that idiot do all the talking. You can talk as well you know, girls don’t bite.”

I didn’t really know how to reply.

“Steve is just like that. He’s very confident. I’m not like that at all.”

“He’s a wanker.” the woman said with a little shake of her head.

Well, yeah, I had to agree with that.

“Look, you’re not bad looking, just talk to them. It’s easy. Girls like it when you’re just straightforward and honest. The wrong kind of girls like pricks like your friend Steve. Just be yourself, if a girl doesn’t like that, then they ain’t worth knowing, are they?”

I could feel the redness creep over my face over this strangers sudden interest in my wellbeing and I hurriedly made my excuses to leave. But something made me pause halfway across the pub, and I turned around and went back to them, causing them to stop talking and look back up at me.

“Thank you.” I said.

And I meant it.

I’d like to say that from the moment of my mysterious older lady intervention, my social awkwardness disappeared and I became a walking Casanova (with mental hair), but it was a lot more gradual than that. But eventually I guess I blossomed a little, gained more confidence, and grew into the adult that I am today. The cool, hip slinging motherfunker whose skin has cleared up, who made some kind of peaceful truce with the mental hair, and who has honed the sense of humour into something more socially accepting, and can also make the ladies melt with one arched eyebrow (Okay, I may have lied about the last one. Actually, sod it, I may have lied about them all, but this is my tale and I will tell it anyway I want too). And I would like to think that my path to self acceptance was started by a few kind words from a complete stranger.

So I may be a helpless cynic that was given a painful birth because of my terrible teenage years, but maybe, just maybe, I will try and ease up on it a little bit and actually stop once in awhile and smell the flowers. But rest assured, I will be carrying a baseball bat as well, just in case that squirrel is nestled within them.

If he tries to hump my face I will twat the little fucker.

So, What's Been Happening Then?…….

2010-01-23T15:43:00.002Z

Hello you! My lovely reader type person, you. I’ve missed your eyes over here, how have you been? I see that rash has cleared up, and you’re walking better now, which is nice. I’d lose the eye patch though, that's so last season darling.

Anyone want to hear how my week went?

Just to recap, I started my new job on Monday. I am working for a Government funded programme that aims to aid the unemployed gain entry back into the job market. It has been a really long and intense week, and I was pretty surprised to not find my brain leaking out of my ears on Friday like warm pink porridge, but I have to say, I have really been enjoying it so far.

The small group of new starters are a really friendly bunch, so that kind of made it a bit easier at the start due to the fact we all were in the same boat and seemed to bond pretty quickly. So far my odd sense of humour hasn’t got me into any awkward situations yet, but I’m sure there will be a moment where my mouth will be two steps ahead of my brain, and I will say something that will make the other person stare at me intently and suddenly start looking for the nearest exit.

The training itself has been excellent. Each day has left us with more and more of an understanding of what the role will entail, so at no point have I felt like I was fumbling around in the unknown, and the people that work there couldn’t be any friendlier and accommodating, which is a great help for slowly blending in.

It’s been a pretty varied week. I have sat in on some of the workshops/classes that I will be running, rung potential employers, practised appointment techniques, created pitches that will be presented to local job centres, and all of it totally out of my normal comfort zone. In fact it’s felt like the equivalent of being chucked stark bollock naked out of an aeroplane without a parachute and with two angry scorpions super glued to my testicles. But that's the exciting thing about it, where it is so new and alien to me, it’s a totally new challenge, which is exactly what I have needed after stagnating for the past seven months. I really can’t wait to get started to be honest.

I finished the week off by meeting up with some friends last night and going “Mega Large” in London. Though to be honest, as I was so tired, they would probably have had more fun if they dug up a two week old corpse, stuck it on a motorised scooter, and then made it do lazy figures of eights round the club we were in, dropping various rotting body parts as it wove between the usual collection of pisssed up mongs that you find out on the town on a Friday night. Plus it would have looked more alive than I felt as well, which is always a bonus.

But it was good to catch up with them, and plus it also gave me an opportunity to do one of my favourite things when I go out with this particular group, which is watch my friend Chris do his slow deterioration through the evening from normal bank worker to inebriated Party God. The last image I saw of him during the night was him dancing towards the exit with his arms round the shoulders of a bald black man. No one has heard from him since. I wouldn’t be surprised if he woke up in a ditch in Scotland with a sex toy up his arse, a woman's handbag that only contained a passport made out to a Mrs Geraldine Pumperhoosen, and a new tattoo that simply said “Mother”. But that's why I love him.

So that was my week. Really enjoyable, really hard work, but off to a great start with this new job.

Couldn’t ask for any more really.

Back To The Rat Race…..

2010-01-17T16:48:00.006Z

Those of you that have been reading for awhile will know that after being out of work for some time, I finally managed to land myself a really good job a few weeks ago.

Well, that job starts tomorrow, so I will probably not be around much this week (I always feel self conscious writing stuff like that, I know no one will really notice, but I wouldn’t want anyone thinking that I was being rude by not popping over and saying hello).

Once I am acclimatised to the idea of actually working again (Oh God, noooooooooooooo!) I will be back and filling you all in on how it’s all going, and also catching up with everyone else as well, as I know there will be a lot of writing to catch up on.

I would also like to thank everyone who has been kind enough to offer words of encouragement and wishes of good luck when I have written about the unemployment thing over the last few months, you may not think it, but it was really appreciated at this end, so I thank you from the bottom of my heart/bowel for that.

I’m pretty sure that once I know what my routine is going to be, I can balance work and writing, so at no point will any of you miss out on the inane drivel that passes for thoughts within my brain that gets zapped via laser beams into your computers.

In a way, I am very much like God, you may not see a lot of me, but I am always with you……..

Disclaimer- At no point am I referring myself as God. I am non religious. Actually it would probably be a good idea if I wasn’t God, for there would be a hell of a lot of smiting going on. There probably wouldn’t be that many people left. Just me and about 15,000 monkeys, which in its own way sounds like a little piece of heaven. I’d rename earth Monkey Land and become their ruler. They would carry me round on their little monkey shoulders and teach me monkey ways.

I have no idea where this is going either.

Anyway, back to reality. I hope your week is filled with everything that you desire, and may we all cross paths again soon (hopefully next weekend).

I’m literally high fiving everyone who is reading this.

Love And Hearts....

2010-01-14T14:32:00.012Z

As a celebration of the fact that I have just hit 100 followers (are you all mental?!), I’d like to get all touchy-feely with you all now and have a little discussion about love and also the heart.

In order for this to feel right though, I’d like you all to take the hands of the reader each side of you, and then give them a good old squeeze.

There, doesn’t that feel nice?

Though the OCD side of me is hoping none of you have been to the toilet recently and not washed your hands.

That would be gross.

Now, love.

We silly humans adore linking the emotion of love with our hearts. Greeting cards, silly stuffed animals, balloons, posters, all display the wonderful feeling called love as a huge heart, probably with an arrow stuck through it.

This notion is engrained on our psyches. You think of love, you think of the heart. And yet out of all the parts of the body that actually get affected by love, the heart is realistically the least noticeable. Certainly when I met and fell for my girlfriend, it wasn't my heart that was noticing it, it was my legs, mainly because they wouldn’t stop shaking after I left her on our first date. But a pair of legs with an arrow going through them certainly wouldn’t sell that many Valentines cards. It would however make an ideal signpost in the Wild West to warn you that Indians were nearby, so, swings and roundabouts and all that.

Presumably the idea that the heart is linked to love is due to the fact that our hearts are meant to beat that little bit faster when the object of our affections is near. That may be true, but there are many things that make the heart beat that little bit faster. Running. Getting out of bed. Walking up the stairs. They don’t all mean that we are in love; they just mean we are unfit.

What about the stomach? That gets affected by being in love. You don’t eat because you don’t need food. You get butterflies when you know you are meeting this one person who means everything to you. When your affection is returned, and you know that this person wants to be with you as well, you suddenly feel like you are in an elevator shaft and dropping rapidly. A wonderful out of control sensation that feels amazing and that you notice most of all in the centre your stomach. So why isn’t that linked with love? Could it be because your lower intestinal tract isn’t really considered sexy? You wouldn’t really say “I love you from the bottom of my bowel.” would you?

And when love goes wrong, once again, the heart may feel it slightly, but there are other parts of your body that feel it worse. The back of your throat contracts as you swallow hot salty tears. Your eyes throb and your head hurts from the emotion. And yet again, it’s always the poor old stomach that bears the brunt of it though. That's where I think you feel love the most, through good times and bad, smack bang in the middle of your guts. And yet when we think of love gone bad, it’s nearly always the image of a heart, probably with a huge crack running through it.

So let’s take it as such that love=heart. And because of this, we all try to protect our hearts as much as possible, fearful of getting it broken, like it was some delicate porcelain figurine that would shatter at the slightest contact, rather than the tough mass of muscle that is so strong, if a human body were to be on fire, it would be the last thing to actually burn (I saw that on CSI).

So we cradle our hearts with tender care, trying to avoid all notion of it getting smashed. Those of us who have never been hurt in love won’t know this fear, and will dive into a relationship with all the vigour of someone jumping off the highest diving board at a swimming pool, making the biggest splash possible, while others who have been hurt in love, tenderly pick their way through a relationship like someone who is wearing skis trying to traverse a minefield, each careful step taken slowly, just in case it blows up in their faces.

* Man I do talk in metaphors a lot. I can’t help it. I seem to have one for everything.

Kate: Would you like a cup of tea?

Me: I would like a cup of tea so much that I’m like a man who is crawling through a desert using only his lips, looking for water that isn’t there.

Kate: You’re really weird.

Me: I’m so weird I’m like a two headed clown who keeps honking both his noses.

Kate: I’m leaving you now.

Me: I’m so being left; I’m like a man…….

Ah, you get the picture.*

And yet if I were to look at my own heart, what would I find there? I suppose it would be one that is slightly bruised from life's experiences, but one that is still hopeful for the future. I keep it at arm’s length from people, and if I’m honest, the person I am with now probably has more of a hold on it than anybody has ever had in my entire lifetime, but there is still that fear, that idea of it getting broken and smashed beyond repair, that will always make me feel that little bit cautious of handing it over fully, as tough and stubborn as it is.

My stomach is battered and useless and no good to anyone, but my heart? Well, let’s just say it’s still beating strong. And I intend to keep it that way.

And Introducing.......

2010-01-13T11:59:00.002Z

A few days ago, one of my lovely blogger chums emailed me with a rather excellent idea. That blogger chum was Matthew, and he suggested that I partake in a blog swap. I post on another's blog, whilst that person blogs on mine. That sounded interesting to my tiny little ears.

The deal was struck for me though when he suggested the person I swap with, the lovely JenJen. Now many of you on here will know of JenJen, but many of you may not as well. So I urge you that once you have finished reading her excellent contribution, hop on over to her blog and hammer that follow button hard, for you will be joining up in a holy union to one of the best kept secrets out in the land called blog. Always hilarious, yet able to combine the amusing with the serious, you will certainly not be disappointed for doing so. She always keeps a welcoming and friendly place over there, and you will soon become one of her many frogs. Which in its own right, is reason enough for doing so.

So for today only, I'm lurking over there, and JenJen is kindly posting over here. And I know everyone will make her feel royally welcome.

Anyway, enough of my chit chat. It is my pleasure to introduce to you………………..

JenJen.

Erect Stingers Suck When You’re Prissy.

I want to open by saying I am not the outdoorsy type. At all.

You could say I'm more of a girl who likes her creature comforts: crisp linens atop a down covered mattress, lots of pillows, carpet under my pedicured toes and a glass of water beside my head on my nightstand. I don't own boots for anything other than show. My coat is from Victoria's Secret (one in pink and one in black) and is decidedly not for lingering out-of-doors. I have a white hat and white gloves for when it's cold in the garage.

Damn I sound prissy. Well, here's more to add to that bucket:

So probably not a giant shocker that I despise camping; I think God (or Mr. Hilton) made hotels so I wouldn't have to sleep... outside.

*shudder*

Friends have invited us to go ~~to hell~~ camping with them, and at first I was gracious and declined using busy words like, "oh, w-e-l-l we don't have any...sleeping bags" or "oh hell darnit, we're already out of town that weekend, drat!" Hoping, of course, they didn't see the fear and loathing behind my batting baby blues and angelic smile.

After a while they gave up but ended with this gem: "You know, JenJen, you're depriving your children of the experience of camping!"

For real.

Deprivation by Lack of Camping.

News at 11.

You can't win this argument with me. I will not camp or step foot in a tent. I tried it one time years ago, and I was not loving the outdoor shower and considerable lack of plumbing equipment. I didn't particularly care for the mosquitoes, the smelly bug spray or the less-than-comfy beds, either. Okay, the outdoor shower would have been sensual and sexy had it been at a fab Caribbean resort and not at the KOA in the middle of NowhereNearTropical, Michigan and swarming with unsupervised children and bees.

Oh god, the bees.

I used to have a FREAK OUT reaction to any black and yellow striped flying bug with a stinger on it's butt. I would run and scream like a girl (k, because I am a girl) when one of those effers would even flirt with my bubble. I heard that bees don't like the water, so run into the ~~ocean~~ pond when one comes near you, butt stinger erect.

Turns out that is not true.

A falsehood, as it were.

They will follow your ass into that water and buzz around you until you cry and gallop out of the water, knees high (have you ever tried to run in the water? You can't. It's called galloping. Google that.). I galloped right out of the water, across the sand and into the car and shut it up tight. That little overgrown gnat laughed at me and wiggled it's stinger tush at me.

Then my son was stung at the playground down the street from my house. Minding his own business.
And I waged holy chemical warfare on those assholes. I got all "mama bear" and started thrashing about with a can of RAID, giant shoes (for the stomping once they fell to their deaths, just to be sure they were goners), and screaming GET OUT OF HERE. SAVE YOUR SEEELLLLFFFF!

I'm cured of the bees.

Bring it and your stinger asses...I dare ya.

But

I won't be using these boots to stomp them, no. These boots....they're for show.

Its Sexy Time…….

2010-01-07T13:35:00.014Z

Well I seem to have amassed a few new followers to my little blog in the last few days, something that I am always happy and delighted with. So a big hello and thank you to anyone that has decided to stick around, you are all very welcome here.

You may be wondering if all of the posts I do are as heartfelt and poignant as my last one. In answer to that question, I am now going to write about porn (So that’s a no). It will be a light-hearted look, but may cause offence to some. So if it does, I apologise right now.

Sex is a beautiful thing, a wondrous connection between two human beings that is a combination of attraction, desire, and the simple notion of sharing yourself so intimately that nothing can separate two souls as they join together in one of nature’s most special gifts.

Or if your British, it’s a soul sapping slog that only goes to highlight your many flaws and insecurities, and makes you physically want to flay off your own skin and wear somebody else's so you don’t have to spend another waking moment trapped within the walking carcass that is your own miserable body.

But on a whole, most people quite like it.

And pornography is an age old offshoot of the notion of getting down and dirty that has been around since the early cavemen first learnt to draw on their cave walls, even if it was only stick women with really big boobies.

I have a confession to make though. Porn and I don’t really get along. Instead of finding it titillating, it only amuses me to dangerous levels. Which I think is just missing the point entirely.

Quite a shock though, I’d imagine? I’m a man. I live on my own. I should have porn spilling out of every nook and cranny of my flat, right?

Nope.

That's not to say I haven’t partaken in porn, who hasn’t? It just hasn’t invaded my life like most blokes that I know.

I saw my first porn film at the tender age of 12. It was a stonewall classic called Deep Inside Vanessa Del Rio that one of my friends had on video and was passed around our little circle of chums with fevered breath and shifty eyes.

Eventually it was my turn to take the video home. I stuck it in the back of my wardrobe and waited for an opportune time to take it out and watch it. When that day came, and I was alone in my house, I put the video in our player and with shaky hands, pressed play.

My internal monologue played out something like this.

Yeah I’m gonna see some people have sex. I can’t wait. I’m gonna see some boob and some sex. I like this films theme tune. OK, here's the lady. She's sexy. Yes, she's getting naked! Alright! Boobies! Ohhhhhh, so that's what it looks like. She’s hairy. And here's the man. Now he’s naked. I feel weird. And now they are- OH MY GOD! WHAT ARE THEY DOING? THAT’S HORRENDOUS! I HAVE TO DO THAT? I’M NOT DOING THAT! WHYS HE PUTTING IT IN THERE??? NASTY!!!!!!

Lucky for me, someone had part recorded over the tape with an episode of Knight Rider, which put me out of my shocked misery and made me eject the tape pretty quickly. But I now have the psychological problem of immediately getting an erection and a sense of shame whenever I heard the Knight Rider theme tune. Just thank god that pavlovian response doesn’t happen every time I see David Hasslehoff. That would take some explaining.

As my own world views widened, and my 12 year old self was replaced with an older and semi-adult self, my experience with porn began to change as well. When I began to understand all the “Ins and outs” (snigger), porn films began to take on almost depressingly predicable scenarios in the way they played out.

They would basically centre on the star of the film, a woman who’s “Sexploits” (double snigger) would be the plot of the movie, as she generally shagged her way through a procession of men.

The protagonists would always seem to be cut from the same cloth. The men would be perma tanned slabs of meat, so pumped full of steroids it was amazing that their balls didn’t resemble two frankly startled grapes with a huge swinging dick like an out of control fire hose lassoing around them, and they always had the same befuddled expression on their faces, like they were continuously trying to remember if they had left the gas on at home.

The women quite often seemed more like mannequins than real human beings. Everything nipped and tucked, with fake breasts that seem to defy the natural laws of gravity. And vaginas so hairless and smooth, that every time the man went down to administer oral sex, he would recoil in horror on seeing his own face looming back at him from her reflective nether regions.

So once whatever contrived set up had taken place that would get them in a position to start having sex, you could almost start playing porn bingo as it was almost so predictable as to how it was going to pan out.

Right, she’s blowing him. I got that one. Now he’s going down on her. Tick that one. Now she’s riding him. Yep, that's on my card. Any minute now they will change position. Is it doggy? Nope, it’s the praying mantis. Now it’s doggy. And here comes the cum shot. HOUSE!

It’s basically about as erotic as slapping two cuts of raw steak together.

But the thing that sets my, frankly rather odd, sense of humour off, is the “Dirty talk”.

Sex instantly makes us stupid. It’s unavoidable. Now I don’t know if any of you kinky souls have ever recorded yourselves, but if you have, play it back with just the sound and no image. You sound like an idiot.

Sex takes up so much brain power that what little is left is only our most basic functions, so when we start doing the dirty talk, we sound like we have just had a very powerful frontal lobotomy.

And porn films seem to be under the impression that we like this, so they go all out to give us more of what they think we like. Idiots talking gibberish during sex.

Ohhh yeah, fuck me hard.

Pound me with your hot meat.

You like my wet pussy?

One thing that seems to be repeated often is the fact that the couple can’t quite seem to believe that they are having sex.

We’re doing it.

Yeah, we’re really doing it.

We’re doing it hard baby.

We’re really doing it hard and fast.

It’s like some odd form of philosophical debate amongst morons. If two idiots fuck in an office, are they really there? If the woman really wanted to freak the man out, during mid thrust, she could grab him by the ears, look him deep in the eyes and say, “But are we really doing it?” causing the man to suddenly doubt his own existence, which in turn will make him lose his magnificent erection and go in sit in the corner to contemplate who exactly he really is.

One of the most soul destroying pieces of dirty talk I have heard in a porn film was this little beauty.

“Stick your big fat cock in my meathole.”

Now let me break that down for you.

Stick. Your big fat cock. In my meathole.

I don’t think in all of the history of the written literature has there ever been a more awful collection of words placed in one sentence. That one statement has basically reduced something that is beautiful, life affirming, sensual, and just generally amazing, and turned into donkey shit. Plus it has also shown porn up for what it really is: just two rapidly decaying sacks of flesh, pointlessly and joylessly grinding away at each other in a pathetic attempt to stave off the rapidly approaching spectre of death lurking menacingly on the horizon.

Well I’m horny now, how about you?

With the explosion of home internet use within the last 15 years, all the porn you want can be beamed directly into your homes at the click of a mouse button. You want to see someone with no hands trying to fuck a chicken? (and let’s face it, who wouldn’t?), have a little search around and I’m sure you will find it somewhere.

Websites like youporn, spankwire, redtube, all provide a never ending stream of folk doing the wild thing for you to consume at your pleasure.

And yet these sites don’t really appeal to me either. Unlike porn films, these sites cut out the story and just show endless clips of people getting down to it. But whenever I have watched anything on there, being the stickler for narrative that I am, rather than get turned on, I just seem to be asking myself loads of questions.

Whose kitchen are they in?

Is that the baddie?

Why is he dressed like a pirate?

So instead of getting my juices going, all I end up doing is desperately trying to fill in a back story for something I’m not really interested in anyway.

I’m sticking to my imagination in future. In that I am always amazing, have endless stamina, and I never cry halfway through.

Which is always a bonus.

A Bedroom Full Of Stars….

2010-01-04T17:40:00.016Z

When I was about ten years old, I saved up all my pocket money for about three weeks for something that had caught my eye in our local knickknack shop, just round the corner from my house. It was a packet of glow in the dark star stickers that were sitting on some dusty shelf, right behind some cheap and nasty plastic toys that were obviously made in some sweat shop in China.

These stars pleased my ten year old eye immensely, and I had these had grand visions of where I would put them once I had saved up enough money to buy these wonderful things. So I pestered my dad for household chores that my ten year old self could actually do (washing up, polishing, that kind of stuff), and eventually saved up enough money to go with my mum to the little store and buy my stickers.

I was so excited that day, my head filled with that childish glee that only something stupid and tacky could provide. I walked in with my £2.50 burning a fiery hole in my pocket and walked straight up to the shelf where they were. Now, I don’t know why she did this, but my mum could see how excited I was about getting these, frankly, pretty crappy stickers, and just as I picked a packet for myself, she then grabbed another three and bought them for me as well.

How cool was that? I had a whole galaxy sitting in a brown paper bag.

So I rushed home and immediately ran up the stairs to my bedroom, spilling the contents of my freshly bought wares over my bed. Now this was going to take some planning. My aim was to cover the entire space of my bedroom ceiling with these amazing things and turn my room into the deepest, darkest, space imaginable.

So I carefully unwrapped the stickers and placed them into little piles that corresponded with what they were. I had moons, shooting stars, planets, and hundreds of tiny little stars that would fill out the surrounding areas.

I grabbed a chair and began to carefully stick them to my ceiling. I wasn’t putting them up haphazardly; there was real care and attention that went into this little endeavour. I made clusters of planets, around which orbited a moon each, and then I created bursts of stars around them as well. Constellations formed, amazing nebulas were birthed right before my eyes, and a whole universe was taking shape with each sticker that I placed with my excited hand.

After about three exhausting hours, I was finally done. My entire ceiling was covered with the stickers. And as the light began to fade, I switched on my bedroom light to charge them up so they would glow brightly during the night.

When it was eventually time for me to go to bed, my dad did his normal ritual of tucking me in during the night. He would gather me up on his back, piggyback style, and then run up the stairs to my room, always making a point to pretend to be falling backwards on the top step, something that my younger self used to delight in, that sensation of nothing behind me, and me holding on to my strong father for dear life so I wouldn’t fall, but he never let me. He carried me as always. I always used to love this moment, that one small snatch of time where it was just me and him. That’s how I always remember him the best, us laughing, me clinging on to his shoulders, half in terror, the other half joy.

God he was a good man.

My dad was also a bit of a workaholic unfortunately. He would spend long hours away from us working, so any time that I could spend with him was always a bonus to me, my nightly tuck in being one of them.

He had watched me spend the day placing my stickers on the ceiling (and I swear I heard him muttering darkly something about “Gonna take the paint off”, but I tried to ignore that) and he knew that I had been waiting for this moment all day.

Once he got me into my bed, he gave me a little kiss on the forehead like he always used to do, his stubble tickling me, which always made me squirm, and the scent of his aftershave filled my world in a way that always makes me think of him to this day if I smell it elsewhere, and then walked over to my light switch and paused.

“You ready?” he asked me.

I nodded.

He turned off the light.

It was beautiful.

The walls of my bedroom seemed to fall away as my room exploded in a sudden burst of light. In front of my eyes, a never ending swirl of universe glittered above me, shimmering and gleaming like real stars.

“Bloody hell!” my dad said, upon seeing the wonder I had created. “Are you sure you’re going to be able to sleep with this?”

“It’s brilliant!” I replied.

And I meant it.

As he left my room, I lay on my back and just stared straight ahead. My bedroom window was open slightly and a cool breeze blew in, which further enhanced the idea that I wasn’t in some suburban bedroom, but was in fact drifting through the cold and empty upper reaches of the stratosphere. I almost felt that I could reach out my arm and touch the universe I had created as it was that close.

That night I slept deeply amongst the stars.

For the first few weeks, my favourite time of day would be that brief pause, just before I turned my lights out, and I knew that my room was going to be instantly transformed and take me to another place. I used to daydream about that moment all day, as to my child's mind, it was the most perfect thing ever. And it was.

Every kid at one point wants to be an astronaut; I got to do it every night as I lay on my bed.

As the weeks rolled on, as time does, my love for my stars began to gradually change though. Whereas before it was something fun and exciting to me, now, as each night drew in, I began to like my universe less and less. Instead of making me feel as if I was floating in space, it began to make me feel incredibly small and insignificant, like I was nothing more than a speck of dust, drifting through an infinite darkness and lost forever.

As I closed my eyes, I could feel these stars pressing against my eyelids, the glow from them invading my head and preventing me from sleeping. I would toss and turn in my bed, burying my head under blankets and trying to find an angle where I could find some peace, where I would be allowed to finally drift off. But no matter what I did, the sensation of all these stars pressing against my tiny body always stopped me from doing so. The moment when I turned my lights out at night grew later and later, until finally one day, I had enough. I got a ruler from my school bag and began to scrape the stickers one by one from my ceiling, ruining the paintwork, just as my dad had so wisely guessed I would do.

Being ten years old, I couldn’t really articulate in my mind why I suddenly began to feel highly uncomfortable in my room at night, why the sensation of being something so small, tumbling though something so huge, gave me such a feeling of vertigo that it almost made my head spin.

It was about 8 years later, as I was leaving Romford hospital one cold December morning, the morning that I had just seen my mother pass away, that I thought about my ceiling full of stars for the first time in years and how miniscule they made me feel, and I think I began to finally understand why.

Having lost my father three years before, a whole maelstrom of emotions were raging through my head as I blindly walked through the hospital, with its aroma of disinfectant and the sounds of the patients in the wards, but the one thought that played out over and over in my mind was that the moment that I left this building, everything would become real. Right now, hearing my footsteps echo along the corridor, it all seemed dream like, flimsy and unsubstantial, but the moment the automatic doors closed behind me, then I would be facing up to a whole new world with all my safety nets removed.

I had my best friend with me at the time; he had spent the whole night sitting up in the hospital, making sure I was OK. He may have been holding my arm for support, I can’t really remember. The only thing I can really remember is thinking, leave this place and everything changes. That was the only thing that filled my mind. Not the fact that I was now alone. Not the fact that I was going to have to grow up faster than anyone should have a right too. But the simple fact that everything that had gone before, all my past, all my history, had now been ripped apart in the space between heartbeats.

As I stepped out into the weak winter sunlight, it felt as if I was just about to take a massive leap into the unknown, and for some strange reason, I was reminded of lying on my bed at night as a child, with the weight of all those stars pressed upon me, and how so small, helpless, and utterly alone they made me feel.

I don’t think I have ever been so scared in all of my life.

I don’t know why I have written about this to be honest. I guess I have found myself in a reflective mood of late. Maybe it’s because of the New Year? Or it could be totally unrelated, just something that has been plaguing me lately. What I do know is that in a few days, I will probably look at this and feel highly uncomfortable about writing something so personal and take it down. I hope I don’t. It was certainly a lot easier writing about it than speaking it. I guess it’s the separation between a blank page and looking somebody in the eye. I can’t really talk about it in real life, but the act of sometimes writing about it somehow makes it that little bit easier.

There is no real way to finish it as well. I can’t wrap it up with something trite and simple, stick a little bow on it and round off with the sound bite that normally ends some stupid teenage movie.

After that summer, nothing was the same again.

Well, after that winter, nothing was the same again for me, obviously. That 18 year old kid probably wouldn’t recognise the adult that he grew into. I’m a lot harder now, so many things in me are now closed off that shouldn’t be. I don’t like that. I never have. I spoke about change and regret in my last post. I suppose these are mine. I’m just often at a loss as how I am to tackle them.

Don’t worry. Normal service should be resumed next post. Probably poo based.

New Year Manifesto…..

2010-01-02T17:05:00.020Z

As a species, we humans really do amaze me sometimes.

Now I don’t believe in God, but if there is some kind of holy deity that one day, in its infinite wisdom, decided it would be a rather spiffing idea to create us wonders of the universe, then surely the biggest mistake he or she ever made was giving us the freedom to make our own choices. Mainly for the fact that we humans are all incredibly stupid and will surely always make the wrong one at any given opportunity. That's a proven fact. Give an idiot freedom of choice, and we will surely pick the worst one every single time.

The second huge mistake was giving us emotions.

Oh boy, the holy one really screwed up when he gave us emotions.

We live our lives based solely on what our emotions tell us to do. As emotions are far more potent than any rational thought we have in our brains, they drown out any notion of reasonable thinking that we may possess. You suddenly have what you think is an amazing idea, one that is fuelled purely by some great big green spurt of emotion that explodes in your head like a firecracker, and your sensible side is going “Hang on a mo, are we sure about this?”, but you naturally, of course, choose to ignore it. Sensible sucks. Emotions rule. So your rational side is left by the wayside, waving its arms in the air and trying to get your attention but failing miserably, like someone with a sore throat who is shouting at you the middle of a tornado, you just don’t hear them as it’s far too faint. And by then it’s way too late anyway. That great idea you had, in the cold light of day, not looking so great now, is it? Yep, you screwed up again.

So if you combine freedom of choice with our complete inability to separate our emotions from our rational side, you basically have a whole species that is making mistake after mistake every single day, and then hating themselves for doing so.

So this time of year, we all strive to change ourselves. We set out detailed plans on how we are going to mould ourselves into something different. To not make the same mistakes that we made last year and to emerge into 2010 like the beautiful butterflies that we are, all shiny and new, with our freshly created diet regimes, our firm belief that we are forging a new path for ourselves, the breaking dawn of a pure and wonderful life. It’s truly going to be something amazing. This is it everybody! Hold on tight! New life coming right up!!!!

It’s not going to happen.

Sorry to prick your bubble, burst your balloon, piss on your parade and any other well worn simile you care to fling at it.

We are human beings. Our one concrete notion in life is to be a fuck up. It’s what we do best. You give me someone who can confidently tell me that they are happy with every aspect of their life and I would probably be looking at a liar. Nobody is really happy with every aspect of their life, they wouldn't be human otherwise.

We are never going to be truly happy because we will never allow ourselves to be happy. We are bombarded on a daily basis, from every single angle; with people telling us how useless our lives are, how if we did this one thing, everything would be better. Buy this car, cut your hair like this, wear these shoes, loose a stone in weight, go on holiday here, belong to this group, not that group over there, put down that cake, and get a new career, change, change, change. All of this is pounded into our subconscious by all aspects of the media, and our own social circles, until we are almost breathless and dizzy from it all, and with an almost underlying sensation that we are missing out on some wonderful and elusive life. This life that everybody else is having and one we seemed to have mislaid the invite too.

We spend so long reaching and yearning for the things that we think we need, we sometimes fail to actually stop and look around at the things we actually have. Great things. Amazing things. People that love us, a whole network of folk who, when things go wrong, will be there to carry us through it. What about health? Most people that are reading this will hopefully have had a fit and healthy 2009. That's something to cherish, isn’t it? And those that have had brushes with ill health through all of last year, they will probably have grasped this fact a long time ago, the things we have far outweigh the things we think we need. There are so many things for which we should be really grateful for. But no, not us, we think we need to change our lives because somebody, somewhere, has said that what we are doing is not good enough. That we can be better than what we are.

We will probably attack the month of January, with all our new resolutions tucked firmly under our arms, with all the gusto that we could possibly muster. But over time, as our stupid little brains start thinking “Bloody hell, this is hard work!” our steely reserve will start to falter, and one by one, these resolutions will fall by the wayside. But is that such a bad thing? Should we really beat ourselves up over it?

And once again it all boils down to emotions. Mainly one called regret. Next to unrequited love, the worst kind of emotion there is. Regret can seep into the very fibre of your being and poison you with its reedy little voice.

Ohhh, but what if you had done this?

Ohhh, your life would have been so much different if you hadn’t of done this.

During a lifetime, you build up a whole catalogue of regrets. A list of moments that if given a time machine, you would pop back and play the cards you was dealt a whole lot differently. But time machines don't exist, and to live your life plagued with the regrets of the past is a total waste of time. And yet that it seems that is how we like to live.

Now I am certainly not advocating that you do nothing to change your lives. If you have the willpower and the strength to actually see out your convictions, then I truly applaud you, I honestly do. It really takes something special to be able to follow through like that.

But if you suddenly find yourself faltering, and that all these promises that you have made yourself are not quite working out, then for the love of Morgan Freeman, don’t beat yourself up over it. Chances are the life that you are currently living isn’t as bad as people would like you to believe. So, you screwed up? YOU’RE A HUMAN BEING! WE DO THAT!

Just stop, take one really good look around you, and realise that no matter what shit things have happened here to lead you to this point, you are alive and you have the rest of your life to change things, if that's what your heart is telling you to do. Why cram it all into one year? Why suddenly feel the need to change things right this very second? Is it all honestly and truly that bad?

You may not have the right car, the right hair, the right shoes, you may be carrying a few more pounds than society deems to be ascetically pleasing, your furniture may be a few seasons out of date, your career might not be what you hoped it would be, but bottom line is, fuck all that. Serioulsy, fuck it. It’s a truly wonderful world out there that contains far too many beautiful things that you could ever see in a lifetime. If you want to do something, maybe try and see a few of them before you die? Or just sit at home eating cookies. It’s up to you. Don’t let some twat, with this so called, “Perfect life”, tell you how you are supposed to live yours, because chances are, they are still probably weeping into a giant tub of Hagen Daz every midnight, ruing over missed opportunities, just like the rest of us poor simple sacks of flesh.

It’s your life; you do what you want with it. And if anyone tries to tell you any different, just twist their nipples and run off laughing.

Happy New Year!

I am available as a speech writer for weddings, Bar Mitzvah’s and children's parties. Contact me via email if interested.

Oh Danny Boy, The Pipes, The Pipes, Are Calling…..

2009-12-28T15:34:00.015Z

I warn you now; this post is full of shit. Might be best to not eat whilst reading.

So, how was your Christmas then?

Fun I hope? Filled with good company, great food, and more nibbles than you can shake a tiny cocktail sausage at.

I must admit, I am feeling the effect of it at the moment. After a few days of nonstop excess, I am more bloated than a bullfrog right now. And my Irritable Bowel Syndrome is bloody killing me at the moment.

So all the above is more than likely going to lead me down a path which I thought I wouldn’t be visiting for a long, long, while.

The path called colonic irrigation.

Due to my IBS, I have often flirted with the idea of having a colonic for many years now. And about six months ago, I finally decided to take the plunge(r).

But I wasn’t alone on this………

I was talking to my mate Andy at work, just shooting the shit and stuff, when I mentioned that I was thinking of having it done. Immediately his eyebrows shot up.

“You know, I’ve always wanted to have that done as well. I’ve heard you feel great afterwards and I suffer terribly from bloating sometimes. Can I come with you?”

I have to admit, I was a tad surprised at this.

“Seriously? You want to come with me?” I asked him.

“Yeah, why do you ask?”

“Well, isn’t it a bit weird, two blokes going together?”

“I’m pretty sure we won’t have to share the same pipe or anything.” he replied.

I had visions of us lying on a bed each, holding hands, while massive tubes left each of us and formed a giant Y shape as it went into a huge shit collecting machine.

I tried hard not to shudder.

“Well, if you really want to have it done, of course you can come with me.” I told him, pretty glad for the company to be honest.

And the weird thing was, as soon as you mentioned to anyone that you are planning to have this procedure done, whoever is listening always proclaims that they want to have it done as well. It’s like we all have this underlying urge to stick a pipe up our arse and be cleansed. It just takes someone brave enough to admit they are having it done for everyone else to start coming out of the woodwork.

Eventually the day of the great bum cleansing rolled round. I met Andy up in London and could tell immediately from the look on his face that he was worried.

“I’m worried.” he said.

I’m good, aren’t I?

“What's up mate?”

“Well, I’m about to have a pipe shoved up my bum. That's not right. This is so wrong. Will you come in with me?”

“Do what?” I asked him.

“Will you come in with me? I don’t know if I can do this on my own.”

“Right, so you want me to come in with you, while you get half naked and have a pipe shoved up your anus?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Please. Can’t we just ask if that's allowed?”

I sighed and rubbed a hand over my eyes.

“Alright, if you really want me to come in with you, I’ll ask them if that's OK. But it is seriously fucking weird and we are never telling anyone if I do.”

“Deal.” Andy replied with a small note of relief in his voice.

As we walked through the door of the clinic, we were assaulted by the sound of new age music and the scent of incense hung heavy in the air. It was all very posh and very exclusive.

We stuck out like an erection in a church.

“This is…..nice.” Andy said, too afraid to touch anything.

I walked over to the reception with more confidence than I felt.

“Hello, me and my friend are here for some bum…I’m sorry, I mean colonic irrigation.” I said.

“What's your names please?” the receptionist asked me.

“I’m Dan Keenan. The pale and sweating man over there is Andy Newlands.”

Andy gave a weak little wave.

“OK then. Mr Keenan, your session is at six. Mr Newlands, yours is after at seven. Please take these health questionnaires and hand them in to your technician.”

I took the forms off her.

“Listen, this may sound like an odd question, but is there any chance that I could sit in on my friend’s session? He's a bit nervous.”

She looked at me like I was a complete mental.

“He is very nervous.” I followed up with a weak smile. We both looked over towards Andy, who was reading a poster about the best ways to align your auras with your moods. Admittedly he did look incredibly nervous. Whether it was from the ordeal we were about to go through, or the simple fact that he was totally unaware that he had an aura until now, we’ll never know.

“I’m sorry, each session is private I’m afraid. We can’t allow anyone else to sit in on them. Plus, why on earth would you want to?”

I have to admit, she had me at that one.

“Your right, of course. Sorry, silly question.” I tried to give her one last reassuring smile, but she looked at me like any minute now I was going to tear my shirt off and start trying to receive radio signals through my nipples.

I walked over to Andy.

“Do you know that our auras are visible to all animals?” he said.

“I didn’t mate.” I replied, handing him his form. “You’re on your own I’m afraid buddy. They won’t let me in with you.”

“Shit.”

“Yep. And soon to be lots of it. Shall we?”

We sat down on a comfortable couch.

“So, you gonna be OK waiting for an hour while I have mine done, then I will do the same for you?” I asked him.

“Yeah, that's fine.” he said, eyes running down the huge list of questions on his form. “It says here ‘Have you ever had discharge from your nipples?’ I've never had that, have I?”

“I don’t think so? We never really talk about your nipples to be honest. I think that's if you’re a woman though, the leaky nips.”

“Oh. I’ll tick no then?”

“Probably best.”

Suddenly I heard my name being called out.

We looked at each other.

“Well, this is it then.” I said.

I resisted the urge to hug him and just settled for a manly handshake.

“Good luck” he said.

“You too.”

It was all very British.

I walked over to the treatment room, took a deep breath before I entered………

Please don’t be attractive. Please don’t be attractive. Please don’t be attractive.

………..and then pushed the door open to find that my one and only true fear- that I would be dealing with an incredibly hot Brazilian nurse who would get to see a side of me no woman should ever see- was gladly not going to come true. A middle aged woman with a warm reassuring smile was sitting waiting for me behind a desk.

“Hello.” I said, and immediately started to remove my trousers.

The woman sitting behind the desk looked a little shocked.

“Oh no Mr Keenan, I have a few questions to ask first before you do that!”

“Oh.”

Zip goes back up.

Face goes red.

Epic fail.

We went through my questionnaire and I explained my reasoning for wanting the procedure done. Apparently many IBS sufferers have a colonic every few months and it greatly eases the discomfort. If it could take away a little bit off the pain I often felt, then it was all worthwhile in my opinion.

“OK then Mr Keenan, if you would like to pop your trousers and undergarments off and put on this gown, we shall get cracking.”

Once I was changed into my gown, with my arse hanging out in the wind, I hopped onto the treatment table.

“Now you probably have a good idea about what's going to happen, but I will fill you in anyway. I will be inserting a tube up your rectum, don’t worry, it is very small and will be fully lubricated, so you won’t feel any discomfort, and we will begin to pump a warm saline solution into your lower bowl. You may feel a certain sensation like you are going to defecate, but please don’t worry, you won’t!”

She laughed at this. I could only nod like an idiot.

“It will feel like a rhythmic motion, you fill up, and then you will drain, removing all the compacted faeces and trapped gasses. It should take about a half hour to complete, and then you will be free to go home. How does that sound?”

“Sounds good. I’m psyched. Let’s do this” I said, clapping my hands together.

“OK then, if you would like to lie on your side and draw your knees up to your body.”

I did so as she busied herself behind me.

“I’ve lubricated up the nozzle…………”

And then she said the words that no man should ever hear.

“……and I’m now going to insert it into your anus.”

And she did.

Hmmmmmmmn. Different.

It didn’t hurt. It just felt very……..impersonal?

“The nozzle is fully in now, you’re doing great. I’m now going to start pumping in the solution.”

Whoa! HELLO! What's this?????????

Imagine you really need to poo. Multiply that by a thousand, that's what it felt like as my bowl slowly filled with warm solution.

“I think I’m going to shit myself!” I said in a panic as images of a warm jet of bottom water spraying everywhere like a fire hose filled my mind (I did warn you not to eat!).

“That's OK.” the doctor replied reassuringly “The tube will drain it all out in a minute.”

Just when it felt that I couldn’t hold it in any longer, the flow stopped and began to reverse out of me. I could feel the solution slowly, and very fucking weirdly, begin to leave my body.

I felt like a milkshake.

“This is so weird.” I said, staring fixatedly at the wall.

“Would you like to see what is being expelled from your body?” she asked me in a voice most people use when asking you if you would like to view their new conservatory.

“Nope, your fine” I replied curtly. “I’m just happy knowing it’s out there.”

So we carried on like this, solution goes in, evil comes out. All the while she was rubbing my belly and making soothing noises. It wasn’t half as bad as I thought it was going to be.

The whole process was over pretty quickly. She gave me a little pat on the shoulder and said “There. All done now. You can hop off.”

I woozily stood up, not really caring that my arse was on display.

“How do you feel?” she asked me.

“I feel pretty-“ I stopped when my backside started to make a noise like water going down a drain.

“Ohhhhh, that doesn’t feel good!” I said in alarm.

“Quickly, use the toilet down the hallway!” she said with urgency in her voice.

Odd things were happening to my nether regions. A build up of pressure was growing and I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to hold it in any longer. I scrabbled at the door, yanked it open and began to run.

“Mr Keenan!” I heard the nurse cry out behind me “You have to……..” But the rest was lost on me as I legged it down the corridor; head down with gown flapping behind me like Batman, as I ran towards the heavenly sanctuary of the toilet.

I shut the door, sat on the loo, and waited.

I didn’t have to wait long.

I won’t go into too much detail, needless to say, jets of molten lava shot out of me, combined with wind that wouldn’t sound out of place if it were howling round the very gates of hell.

“Ow! Ow! Ow!” I cried out, my arse reduced to tatters in seconds.

It was relentless, a never ending stream of evil. The small toilet began to fill up with a noxious stench that began to make me gag. My left leg was involuntarily kicking the door in front of me as each spasm pulsed through my violated body.

“Make it stop! Please make it stop!” I moaned to myself, sweat pouring off my forehead.

Finally the evil began to slow down and I shakily got to my feet. That sudden movement must have dislodged some well hidden evil in some cosy nook in my body as my bottom started doing the hippy hippy shake once more.

“Why won’t this end?” I cried out, as the toilet began to fill up once more with the smell of death and my bumhole began to sound like the Philharmonic Brass Orchestra. I half expected to see blue sheets of flame shoot out of my arse like I was some form of human Catherine Wheel.

Finally, after what felt like I actually passed a kidney through my poop chute, I gathered up my gown around me and opened the door to be confronted by a waiting room full of people, all looking at me in disgust and horror as the foul stench and green fog began to billow out from the toilet behind me. I hadn’t realised that the waiting area was right in front of the toilet I was using and they had all heard every last detail of my 15 minute visit.

My face was burning as much as my arse was.

Trying to muster up as much dignity as I could, I proudly walked back to the nurse’s office, trying to pull the gown round my backside, but naturally leaving a foot long gap between the edges.

It’s a good job I have a nice bum……..

The nurse was trying to hold back a smile as I walked back in.

“You went in the wrong toilet Mr Keenan. You could have used the one right outside the treatment room. I did try to tell you.”

Epic fail part 2.

After making my goodbyes to the nurse, I gingerly sat down in the waiting room, avoiding everyone else's gaze. After about 40 minutes, I saw Andy taking little baby steps down the corridor towards me. He looked white.

“You OK mate?” I asked him as he reached me.

He gave a little shake of his head and said nothing more.

After we paid at reception, we both walked slowly down the road towards the station.

Finally, Andy broke the silence.

“I feel like I’ve been fucked by a horse.”

“Me too. That wasn’t nice in the slightest.”

“I’m never having that done again.” he said, shaking his head. Then he spotted a pub in the distance.

“I need to poo.”

“Me too.”

We pooed.

I have to admit though, that afterwards for about a month, I really did feel so much better. My IBS was under control and I hardly had any pain at all. So it definitely did do something right on that front. Just not a very pleasant procedure to go through really.

So due to the Christmas excess, and the fact I have been suffering lately, I am thinking of going again. Sadly, Andy isn’t with us anymore. I don’t mean he has died, he has just moved to Jersey (which in its own way is probably the same thing). But he called me the other night and said he will be over soon.

I got my poo buddy back……

Merry Christmas Everyone........

2009-12-22T20:36:00.003Z

Eggnog anyone?

As this is going to be my last post before the holidays, I thought I would have a Christmas party themed last entry and take the opportunity to wish everybody who has followed/commented/laid eyes upon this blog, a very Merry Christmas.

It seems really weird wishing this to a load of people who I have never actually met, but through a combination of getting to know folk through their kind comments on here, plus also reading some amazing insights into people’s lives that they have been kind enough to share on their own blogs, I feel as if I know many of you pretty bloody well.

Cheesy nibble?

I’ve been blogging since early September and in those short few months it has amazed me how open most of you are in sharing your own lives. I count myself to be an intensely private person, I don’t really share anything about myself even with the people I am close to, and yet I come on here and read some amusing, sobering, informative, heart wrenching, and yet always brilliantly written snatches of your own lives that you always seem happy to allow others to be a part of.

Anyone for a dance?

Dunno how you do it, but God bless you for that. I am happy to share the stupid little things with you, but try and get me on the big stuff and I would clam up faster than Clam Clamberg, King of the Clams. So I admire you all, and admit to having a slight twinge of jealously at how some of you can do this.

I hope all of you are awaiting the arrivals of your families, wrapping presents, stocking fridges and freezers, breaking up from work, ringing up old friends, writing out cards, settling down on the sofa with a wine or a whisky, hugging each other that little bit more, the one time of year it feels acceptable to do so.

Ohhhh, mistletoe.

If you have children, I hope that they are running round with more excitement than any human being actually has a right too .Ever. If you are children, then why the bloody hell are you reading this? Go play with some toys or something?

If this is your first Christmas with a loved one, I hope it’s the most memorable one of the lot. If this feels like your 1000th Christmas, I hope none of the magic has rubbed off.

And if any of you are reading this are sadly going to be alone this Christmas, then you are in my thoughts. You really are.

And that's really it from me. Other than to say I wish you all the Merriest of Christmases.

God bless us, everyone.

The Death Of Till Monkey…..

2009-12-21T18:48:00.015Z

The till monkey is dead. Long live the till monkey!

I quit the temp job today. I only had a few days left, but I weighed up the pros and cons, cost of getting to London vs. hourly rate, my sense of sanity vs. rude customers, that sort of thing, and decided, enough's enough.

I woke up this morning and I wasn’t in the mood in the first place. I had been out for a few drinks with some old work colleagues on Saturday night, which made a nice change to be honest as I really hadn't had a chance to go out for ages.

Now a combination of me not really being a drinker and also not having gone out for some time, it left me feeling a little worse for wear yesterday. I felt fine coming home. Found my flat ok. Managed to get the key in the lock the first time. And didn’t even have a 20 minute conversation with my cat in the hallway. I even had a normal phone call with the missus who said I sounded fine and not drunk like she expected.

And yet when I woke up the next day I felt terrible. I also had the indignity of looking in the mirror and finding out that my face was as white as milk and my lips had turned purple from the red wine I had been drinking. I either looked like the world’s oldest emo kid, or a slightly hairier, less effeminate, and certainly less punch able version of that bloke out of Twilight.

So thinking I would be fine for work today, I woke up to still find that I was feeling the effects of Saturday.

What a Jessie!

So my long and freezing cold trek to work, plus the slight nausea I was feeling, really didn’t help me get into that retail spirit.

So when I arrived at reception to speak to the beautiful people that organise the temps, my mood was a little on the dark side.

I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this.

I walked over to the head beautiful person, someone who I really didn’t like very much. She was one of those people that spoke down to you without even hiding it. Plus she wore far too much make up. It coated her face like plaster on a plasters radio. It was so thick that if she were to turn a corner, her makeup would be coming at you first before her body was.

“Hello Dan. We didn’t expect you in today. We thought you weren’t working.” she said, with her normal flat tone.

Yes! I can go home!

“But I’m sure we can find you a place to work.” she finished off, noticing the happy look fade from my eyes.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Curses! And I would have got away with it if it weren’t for you pesky beautiful people!

“Oh good.” I replied in my most sardonic manner.

It turned out I was to work in the shirt and ties section. That would be fun, wouldn’t it? Shirts. Ties. Yeah, that could really get me through the day. Shirts. Ties.

WAYHAY!

I was led up to meet the head of clothing section. A stereotypical camp man who sort of looked me up and down and said “Yeah, you’ll do.”

Ohhhh, get you, bitch.

“Walk this way.” he said to me, and then minced off flouncy like past the Calvin Klein section. I resisted the urge to mimic his walk, but settled for a butch manly stride in case people thought we were together.

“Right, wait here a moment by the Armani section, and I will get someone to come and collect you and take you where you are supposed to go.” he told me.

“Will do!” I replied, with more energy than I felt.

So I stood there like a lemon. All the people that worked in the Armani bit looking at me oddly.

Ten minutes passed. No one came.

Another five minutes passed.

No one came.

Eventually one of the Armani people came over to me.

“Are you meant to be working here today?” she asked me.

“No, not here,” I replied “Someone is meant to be coming to collect me.”

“Well you are confusing the customers, they think you work in this section, could you stand over there please.” she said, pointing at a spot that was probably about two foot away from my feet.

“Are you serious?” I replied.

“Yes.”

I took one step over to the right.

“How's that?” I asked.

“Perfect.” she replied with a little smile.

“Excellent.” I replied back with as much sarcasm as I could muster (which is a lot).

So I stood there. Right in the way of the flow of customers. Which with my shiny name badge on, immediately screamed out STAFF WHO KNOWS WHERE EVERYTHING IS.

“Excuse me, could you tell me where the baby section is?” someone asked me.

I had no idea.

“Er, I think that's on level 2?” I bluffed.

“Thank you.”

Another customer came up to me.

“Could you tell me where the gloves are?”

“Level 2.” I said, thinking I might as well stick with the same story.

“Thank you.” they replied, heading off to the escalator.

All in all I must have had about nine people come up to me asking where various things were, and each time I sent them up to level 2, which by now in my head, had grown to the size of Narnia and contained literally everything in the world. Bugger doing the stock take up there I thought. I could just picture the whole of the department store empty apart from the mythical level 2, where crying customers milled around like bewildered sheep, wondering why nothing was meant to be where it was.

By now, about half an hour had passed since my camp friend had left me.

This is getting stupid. Where the bloody hell were they?

Eventually another ten minutes passed and it was plainly obvious they had just gone off and left me.

A simple word formed in my head. And that word was:

ENOUGH.

“Screw this.” I muttered, and went off to the locker room to get my bag and coat.

Once I got my bits, I headed over to the exit and the beautiful people that ran the temps, the one I spoke to this morning was actually putting more makeup on as I came over!

“That bloke you left me with has just gone off and left me standing like an idiot for about 40 minutes. I’m off home as my day has been wasted. I think this will be my last day here.” I said, trying to avert my gaze as she tore hers away from her compact mirror. I feared if she looked at me I would turn to stone, like she was some kind of Medusa after a makeover.

“Oh no, that's awful.” she said with fake sincerity. “I will definitely have a word with them about this”

We both know full well that she would do no such thing.

So as I left this place, I knew in my heart I was never to return. I have my nice new job coming up in a month, and the world of retail should hopefully be nothing more than a distant memory to me. As I walked through the door, I thought about raising my fist in the air, Judd Nelson style from The Breakfast Club, but to be honest it was snowing and I didn’t have any gloves on.

I was till monkey.

Till monkey no more.