Next year will be the perfect year

Well there greetings hello and welcome to this my bloggerific world, I trust you all had a pleasant and bountiful Christmas, well if you didn’t at least you’ll now have a full 12 months of bitching about Auntie Ethel stealing the last mince pie or Granny ending up comatose on the fumes from the cooking sherry. Anywho it is customary at this time of year to be looking back over the past 12 months and what exactly you’ve learned, has the past year made us a wiser individual or just more depressed and determined to get out of our rut and try something new. Well whatever it may be I have decided to use this weeks blogging space to review what happened to me in 2010, the highs, the lows, the wibbly bits in the middle, and what were my personal highlights. So without further ado I introduce to you….. 2010:

Book of the year

Well I thought I’d start with the biggy, as you may well know I do spend a rather disproportionate amount of my time reading various books and that’s what makes this category in particular so difficult. I have read a number of brilliant books this year (Honourable mention must go to the wonderful Norwegian author Jo Nesbo and his hard drinking detective Harry Hole which has brought me innumerable hours of pleasure this year) but I would say without doubt the best book of this year has to be “The Slap” by Christos Tsiolkas. The premise is a very interesting one – at a suburban Australian barbeque a bratty child is dismissed at cricket and refuses to leave and starts waving the bat around, a father steps in to protect his son from this bat-wielding brat and slaps the child, is it ever morally justifiable to slap somebody else’s child? Now while this initial brilliant idea is never fully explored it does offer a quite brilliant insight into modern suburban Australian life and the quite horrific institutional racism that prevails. It never, like Lionel Shriver’s superb “We need to talk about Kevin”, leads an ambiguous situation for the reader to decide for themselves, the characters one on side of the divide are so utterly repellent you are left in no doubt on which side you are supposed to be, but as a character study it is very moving, if a little too sexually graphic in places than I felt it needed to be. Well worth reading though.

Movie of the year (Mainstream)

Anyone who has ever been to the cinema with me will know that I am very difficult to please when it comes to movies, if it doesn’t have subtitles chances are I won’t be enjoying it. There have, however, been a few movies this year that I really have enjoyed and worth my hard earned time and money. The one that everyone has raved about and will (In my opinion) quite rightly take the best picture Oscar is “Inception” but for me the film of the year was actually Leonardo Di Caprio’s other offering “Shutter Island”. While Inception had all the graphics and the clever plot twists and whatnot it was Shutter Island that, for me at least, lived longer in the memory. Those who have read the book all say that the ending is far less ambiguous than the film version but I enjoyed the ambiguity of the film and it was one of those rare things a film where you genuinely afterwards wanted to sit down and discuss it rather than just admire the pretty explosions.

Movie of the year (Arthouse)

Again as those who know me well will be aware I spend a lot more of my time watching independent foreign or arthouse films than I do the major blockbusters, generally I just tend to feel that if they’ve made it to another country in a foreign language there must be something special about them, and that is certainly true of the quite brilliant “Of Gods And Men”. It’s a French film set in Algeria in the mid 90’s and tells the true story of 10 French monks living in an Algerian community during the conflict there and how eventually they are taking hostage by Islamic militants who demand a hostage trade for the monks and the monks are eventually found beheaded (Though there is some debate still about who actually murdered them). The film is quite frankly an incredible piece of cinema and makes you question the entire basis of organised religion, how can any truly loving god allow ten people who have spent their lives praising him and helping others die in such horrific circumstances. For an atheist like myself it was an incredible vindication of my own beliefs but also just an incredibly emotional two-hours because you see these peaceful monks helping others but you know how it has to end. Well worth seeing if you do enjoy a good think.

Play of the year

I was expecting this category to be filled with one line “Kim Cattrall in Anthony & Cleopatra” but I’m sorry I just can’t do it. While she was superb and if there were a “Performance of the year” category she’d win it hands down but her supporting cast let her down (Also I spent the night with a large red wine stain across my shirt due to the fidgeting of my companions, you know who you are! Which dampened it a bit for me). No the play of the year has got to be Alan Bennett’s wonderful new play “The habit of art” which I caught in April. Not as sentimental as his masterpiece “The History Boys” nor as bittersweet as some of his brilliant talking heads but frankly brilliant. It tells the story of a fictional meeting between Benjamin Britten and W H Auden where Britten is writing a new opera “Death in Venice” and wants his old friend Auden to write the libretto, but the clever part of it is that the whole thing is a play within a play because what the audience is actually watching are two actors rehearsing for the play we’re about to see so as well as being an examination of two very interesting historical characters it also becomes a chance for Bennett himself to exorcise some of his own acting demons and it actually does become a very moving portrait of an actor “Fitz” played superbly by Richard Griffiths which while containing many moments of genuinely laugh-out-loud humour (One brilliant scene comes to mind where Auden meets his future biographer and mistakes him for a rent-boy) it also has scenes of great drama and hubris, an absolute triumph from our finest living playright.

Comedy performance of the year

I have seen an awful lot of comedy over the past year and have seen some truly talented comedians but the one that really stands out was Dara O’Briain at the Southport Theatre. Whether it was just because the whole night was so much fun exclusive of the gig (A genuine highlight being a restaurant owner taking our coats as collateral in case we ran off – not sure what kind of people he thought we were) or whether it was because it was a genuinely brilliant gig I’m not sure but it was one of the best nights of my year, tremendously good fun.

Gig of the year

I actually have been to see shockingly few bands live this past 12 months, though not so few that this category isn’t a bit difficult. I so want to say that the best gig was the wonderful “Kerfuffle” doing their last ever performance at a stiflingly hot tent in Shrewsbury in which I almost passed out from the heat but sadly they have been beaten by a band who must surely be one of the best live acts on the planet at this moment in time, “Bellowhead”. I’d heard a few of their tracks and hadn’t been all that impressed but I saw them live closing the Shrewsbury Folk Festival and they were impressive and then I saw them again towards the end of the year and they just blew me away, so few bands with a full brass section and they really can just get a room moving like no other band, if you get the opportunity to see them live get there, there is absolutely nothing like it, tremendous.

Moment of the year

Those who know me well (or indeed just read this blog) will know that I do tend to complain an awful lot about how terrible my life is sometimes but when I came to think about the one moment of the year I truly was at my happiest I actually was stuck for a long time thinking on it, and that is mainly thanks to all of you lot. So to anyone I have seen, spoken to or in any way communicated with this year my thanks to you, I am really privileged to have so many amazing friends, I don’t really deserve you but thanks for sticking with me. As for the moment of the year well a few come to mind, one was sat on the banks of the River Severn in Shrewsbury just lazing around on the August Bank Holiday weekend watching a red kite in the sky and really relaxing, another was the weekend I spent away in Newcastle with work, walking across the Tyne Bridge was the culmination of a lifetimes ambition. However, without doubt the moment of the year came in April when we were sat looking over the racecourse at Aintree just after the Grand National. We had just watched Tony McCoy finally win the race and I had won a fair bit of cash and it was just in that moment we were sat there with the sun setting and a bottle of champagne shared amongst us that I actually realised that at that moment life was pretty prefect for me. Thanks so much to those who were with me that day making it so perfect and thanks again to you all for your continued support through the year. I love you all dearly and here’s to a brilliant next 12 months!

Plugging the leaks

Well guten tag mein lielinsblogees and welcome back to my too long inactive blogging world, sincere apologies for my u nforgivable absence from the world of righteous indignation but rest assured I’m back after my rest and have a whole variety of things to grouse about (People in restaurants taking large tables for two people, why????).

Anyway the idea of todays capsule rant has been fermenting away for a little while now and it regards one of our most major news stories that of the wikileaks scandal. Now those who festoon our newspapers and other optical and audio media with these scandalous things would claim to us that they are exercising their rights to freedom of speech and freedom of the press and that society as a whole has a right to expect such important things to be brought to light and those responsible taken to task. I suppose though what sits uncomfortably with me is whether or not this genuinely should class as “In the public interest” or not? The defenders of the wikileaks scandals would certainly claim so, they would presumably claim that we have a right to know about the relationships between the major heads of state and what each thinks about the other but I would exercise caution with this.

Okay if they have a wikileak that shows George W Bush and Tony Bliar Blair sitting at Camp David in canvas campaign chairs smoking massive cigars with a relief map of Afghanistan pushing crowds of soldiers of cliffs to their deaths that might be a story but I’m afraid that the fact that Kim Jong Il is not a pleasant man or that Silvio Berlusconi might have a slightly overactive libidio is not, in this minor bloggers view, news.

I suppose what it smacks of, to me at least, is the descent in “X-Factor politics” the idea that regardless of who is best for the job the media friendly star will always win out. Now this is not always a bad thing, David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s superior media image did, at least, spare us five more years of Gordon Brown steadily trundling our economy into the Irish Sea but is it a healthy precedent? These wikileaks are almost the sort of thing one might expect to see on the pages of a political version of Closer or Chat magazine, you can almost see the glossy news-stands declaring in garish colours “Angela: “What I really thinks about tiny Nick Sarkozy”” or “More Silvio!: nubile Italian temptress Yelena tells us all about Berlusconi’s infamous Bunga-Bunga parties!”

Now we may as a public have the right to know about certain decisions that impact upon us and have changed the world but that is not what these wikileaks are. These leaks are almost the equivalent of one of the tech guys in an office IT dept choosing somebody’s inbox at random and printing the sent items list and passing it around the office on the flimsy pretext that it is in the interests of the office to know what this person has said. Now I would say that anyone who has ever worked in an office can feel something of an affinity with those caught up in this wikileaks scandal because their private thoughts are now being made public, I would hazard a guess that most people at some point in their personal or professional career will have been invited to a meeting or other gathering and had a sly look at who else has been CC’d into the e-mail and seen a name and just sighed or maybe even sent a reply to another of the group saying maybe “Ogh god that awful sweaty bloke from human resources will be there” or “Christ they must be desperate they’ve invited that woman from IT who spends the day crocheting cats out of rubber bands” or some such thing. Now what right does anyone have to know what you have said in a private message? Much less what right do they have to start forming judgments and pillorying you for saying these things? Quite simply the answer is none. While it might be fun to find out what political leaders think of each other behind their backs it certainly isn’t in “the public interest” as Julian Assange and his wikileaking cronies would have us believe. By all means read the wikileaks and enjoy them but while you’re doing so just imagine what could happen if that bitchy text you’re about to send were made public and you’ll realise just why these private conversations really should have the right to remain just that.

This week Matt:

· Realised that he still hasn’t done a quite ridiculous amount of Christmas shopping.

· Tried in vain to locate his recipe for egg-nog, this may have to be a nog-less yuletide!

· Watched “Rare-Exports” a quite brilliantly subtitled Finnish film with such gems as the main characters saying “Fiddlesticks” as they stared death by naked octogenarian santa in the face!

Human Vs Cat

Well hello there my dear friends and welcome to yet another instalment of random vitriol against the world that I hate so much. To be honest given that I’m just back off holiday you might think that I have less anger than usual but don’t worry, my angerometer was sent flying off the chart lately – over a cat and a wheeliebin.

Now I know many other commentators far more erudite than myself have put forward their views on the Mary Bale vs Lola the cat debate and pointed out the rampant hypocrisy of the Great British public frothing at the mouth over this incident and yet when a serial killer wanders round Tyneside then shots himself they quickly declare him a “hero”. Clearly middle England would seem to think “I can see you looking at that there tortoise, don’t you dare put him a shoebox (except for hibernatory reasons) be a good lad and go kill the police instead!” which just seems wrong to me. Anyway I’m not going to go into the whole sorry saga of that because, as I say, there are other bloggers far wittier and more urbane than myself to do that just go and look it up, no what I wanted to reflect upon was why the public felt that putting Lola in a bin was such a crime. Now don’t get me wrong I’m not advocating the recycling of cats in any way (given the reaction in cyberspace I wouldn’t dare) I’m just wondering what it is about that action that makes people rather than do the very British “tsk” over their cornflakes and turn the page actually go to such lengths as to post across the internet their desire to physically kill the person responsible. To quote the wonderful Don Corleone; “That is not justice, that is vengeance”.

I suppose really what it comes down to is that it was a cat that was being attacked – though it would help to point out at this juncture that supposedly the only reason the couple had the CCTV camera installed was because people had tried to hurt Lola previously so it sounds to me like it was just a bloody unpleasant cat and maybe we should pity Mrs Bale a bit in this whole thing. But, if the coverage showed Mrs Bale walking down the road and seeing a badger sitting on the wall or a swan (To quote Adrian Mole; “I’ve heard they can break a mans arm with one blow”) and she had flung that into the bin I think a lot of people would probably be saying “damn right they’re ferocious buggers, now pass us that shovel so we can finish it off!” and yet because it’s a cute cat everyone has suddenly had a funny turn and started getting all Old Testament on Mrs Bale.

However lets just look at a few stark ideas, if that cat had attacked Mrs Bale who’d have won? I tell you the cat would win every time humans just aren’t designed to fight any more. Case-in-point I’ve just spent my weekend in Shropshire and yesterday morning I was taking a bit of a hike and decided to stop for my lunch on a nice hill looking over the River Severn. Now while I was sat there I noticed a bird was circling overhead and anyone who’s ever seen a bird of prey in the wild you can tell right away by the movement that it’s some kind of bird-of-prey but I just watched it for half an hour so circling over me fascinated before it flew off. It was only later I started to reflect on what I’d done, I had just assumed I’m far too large for it to prey on it only wants voles and mice and things, but if it had chosen to attack me what would I have done? I had a pretty substantial novel I was reading that I could perhaps have tried to club it with or maybe jabbed it in the eye with the biro I had been using to do that mornings Sudoku puzzle but more than likely I’d just have screamed and fled for my life into the bushes and hoped it left me alone. I mean if you go round any zoo in the country you can guarantee any animal in there (with the possible exception of the giant African land snail) could take a human in a fight easily, we have become complacent with our place at the top of the food chain. Now obviously should all the buzzards in the world decide to unite en-masse and try and take over from the humans we as a united species could beat them but that’s no use to me when I’ve lying scattered about the Shrewsbury hillside as the human form of tagliatelle!

I suppose what I’m getting at is that Mrs Bale is just an animal like all of us and we all have animal instincts to bully weaker animals, and while putting a cat in a bin is not a particularly nice thing to do perhaps on a basic level it’s a reaction in all of us to protect ourselves as a species, and god help us if one day the cats rise up and decide to take us on – you’d be bloody glad of a wheeliebin then I can tell you!

This week Matt:

• Had a cracking time in Shrewsbury with the folkies, though has a sore head from all the low tudor beams.

• Discovered a passion for walnut and honey ice cream - literally I'm addicted!

• Tried and failed to find anywhere that can sell me a bradawl, does nobody do light carpentry anymore?

Young people today......

Well bonjour mes amis and welcome once again to my world of bloggy fun, after our last outing in which I got a bit heavy about mortality and creationism I thought an altogether lighter tone would be appropriate this week.

As we all know I tend to use this blogging space to talk about fairly abstract concepts and don’t tend to discuss specifics of much, however with the return of one of my absolute favourite TV shows last night, “Young, dumb and living off mum” last night I just couldn’t help myself from writing about it!

For anyone not familiar with the show it essentially takes 8 very spoiled kids in their late teens or early twenties who have absolutely no concept of what life is actually like and makes them work for their money and look after themselves in a house in London, think sort of supernanny but with adults and you will sort of get the idea. It’s also narrated by a suitably sarcastic Robert Webb who performs his role with good spirit but you can’t help but think it would be improved with a few lessons from that doyenne of sarcastic narration Dave Lamb off Come Dine With Me.

Anyway yesterday saw the curtain being raised on the second series of this show which generally just acts as a way to get your blood nicely raging before bed on a Sunday evening. This years contestants seem all to be pretty nondescript this year with a few exceptions such as the bizarre Levi who has a hairstyle that makes him look like a black Edd-The-Duck, Harri a strange young woman who appears to have flounced to bed depressed just so she could entice ladies man Marc to come and share a bed with her despite telling the world she has a boyfriend (though I’m guessing not for much longer after this airs) and my personal favourite Chloe who was sort of like a pitbull on haribo getting bizarrely angry at Harri and Marc for sharing a bed without ever really explaining why or, to be honest, what it had to do with her.

Anyway our show started with our young miscreants have to go to a local supermarket to get their shopping in but refusing to pool their money and eventually deciding that rather than pay for food that they couldn’t afford they’d just eat it in the shop instead. That was until possibly the worlds doziest security guard caught them and made two of them pay while casually ignoring the rest of the group who were doing the same thing, top quality work there!

As much as food shopping seems to be beyond these kids household chores are undeniably funny, there was one wonderful scene where rather than doing the washing up they decided to try and wash plastic placemats in the washing machine using washing up liquid. The resulting foam that engulfed the kitchen was rather amusing but you did sort of begin to wonder how these people live not realising that putting washing up liquid in a washing machine is not the brightest thing you could do.

Following the debacle of work and chores came the worst challenge so far the idea of work. They were set a challenge of working in a florists and were told they’d need to be up at half five the next day so of course they all got an early night……. Well except they didn’t they just got hammered, and how! Now I know almost all of us will have at some point gone to work hungover but these kids were still drunk when they got to the florists having only gone to bed an hour earlier. Unfortunately the florist they were to work for didn’t really seem to realise quite what he’d let himself in for but after admonishing them for being drunk/hungover he set them to work to find him some specific flowers in the market a task that didn’t go so well with one of the girls (It may have been angry Chloe) looking stunned when she was told the red tulips she was holding weren’t lilacs for the simple reason that….. they weren’t lilac “What’s lilac then?”, clearly massively intelligent girl there! Also Marc decided to be ingenious and get his stallholders to give them a discounted rate but get them to make out their receipts for the full amount allowing him to pocket the change, his mother later called it “Clever” I just called it theft personally but this is the joy of the show it makes you hate the kids and then hate the parents even more for creating them!

Anyway having got their flowers our intrepid kids were set the task of converting them into bouquets to be delivered to paying customers. Adam (a very annoying and incredibly camp individual) decided that scheduled cigarette breaks were not for him and to take a break whenever he liked and made a bolt for freedom along with Harri and Coran this ended with a quite hilarious scene where Adam had a standoff against the florist who was looking murderous and carrying a pair of pruning shears (the temptation to stab the grinning imbecile must have been immense) after a scene reminiscent of something from a camp remake of “The good, the bad and the ugly” the miscreants were punished by being made to wash vans rather than partake of floristry except for Adam who sat on a step wailing about how not being allowed frequent breaks was a violation of his human rights, seriously get me a pair of pruning shears and I’ll stab him myself.

The remaining five kids were tasked with delivering their bouquets again with hilarious results, Iman (Whose idea it had been to use washing up liquid in the washing machine) was paired with Marc who, as usual was more interested in flirting than anything else but they did at least deliver their bouquet which got the ringing endorsement of “It’s very green” from their client who then proceeded to slag it off behind their backs. Danielle (Who’s partner Adam was presumably still crying about his fag breaks at this point) was forced to deliver her bouquet alone but for some reason seemed absolutely terrified at this prospect and delivered it with the immortal line of “Yeah it’s not very good” you sell it girl! Still she did better than final pair Levi and Chloe who got hopelessly lost before giving their bouquet which ad been destined as an 18^th birthday gift to a random Chinese herbalist, well done kids!

They were given a second challenge to help the florist decorate the royal box at the Covent Garden opera house but taking no risks the now rather flustered florist decided to set them to making decorative napkin rings while he did everything else before presenting the kids to the guests of the box rather like a workhouse owner introducing his orphans, with a certain amount of distain before flouncing off presumably to do some more schmoozing.

The best was, however, yet to come as angry Chloe walked in on Harri and Marc in bed (top & Tail I may add) and gave a wonderful “I knew it!” sounding not particularly angry and more like Jessica Fletcher off Murder She Wrote. She decided this clearly wasn’t the experiment for her and tried to make a bid for freedom not realising the producers has bolted the door which she then proceded to charge out sounding rather like that bull off the Covonia advert, actually it was genuinely terrifying!

In the end Harri left presumably fed up of insane Chloe and before her boyfriend noticed that she’d probably been copping off with Marc and Chloe was kicked out for being…..well…… mad really, hopefully she’s been safely sectioned now for all our sakes!

Either way it may sound terrible but it is compulsive viewing, nothing in the world makes you so angry, so incredulous and yet laugh so much at the same time, more please!

what are the chances?

Well good evening to you all and welcome once again to my blog, my slow, ponderous rant against the various foibles and fallacies that I face in the daily hell that we chose to call existence.

Now as you know I am one who loves a good ruminate but more than that I like to discuss my ruminations with others, rather like an intellectual cow that’s now sitting alone in a field chewing its cud and wondering “Why do we eat this vile cud? And what insane deity created me to have four separate stomachs so it takes hours for me to be able to digest anything?” but having no fellow cattle to discuss such issues with. However my pantheistic bovine does neatly bring me into my discussion for today and it’s one that I think may well cause a little controversy, it’s the creationist principle or perhaps, as I prefer to call it the creationist myth. Now as we’re all well aware there are, in general terms, two camps regarding the creation of the world the sciency one that says we’re basically one giant mistake so just enjoy yourself while you’re here and the creationist principle that says a divine deity be it god, Buddha, Allah, Zeus or that annoying blonde creature from the Rice Krispies box (Crackle? I think) has decided billions of years ago that you were to exist.

The major complaints regarding this seem to be the general lack of evidence to support such a theory after all the scientists do have evidence nothing conclusive yet but who knows what this giant world-destroying machine they’ve built under Switzerland is capable of but nevertheless at least the scientists are trying. Even today we find they’ve uncovered an ancient fossil which links us to our primatical forebears and I rather like the idea that the Stepehn Hawking of the ancient ape world decided ona better way of doing things, e.g. standing upright and talking and whatnot and created us whereas the Wayne Roney of the ancient ape-world (Who ironically enough probably looked a lot like Wayne Rooney) decided to just sit in a tree scratching it’s scrotum. Yes indeed we human types, or so the scientist would tell us, are the most intelligent creatures ever we developed over millions of years to become an elite species capable of mastering complex skills like surgery, ironmongery, dentistry and that thing some people can do where they can bend their fingers right back all these wonderful things created because we are the best of the best. But none of this would be available to us without exhaustive sc ientific research undertaken by men in labs wearing holey tank tops and with breath that would make a toucan flinch. As for the creationists however they just seem lazy by comparison I mean there is so little evidence out there to support the theories espoused by theologians the world over but this just does not get mentioned or assessed. Now the “evidence” of a creator myth is interesting because it isn’t evidence as such the general idea seems to be that we should look at the world and see the fact that our planet is the only one capable of supporting life and it’s a certain distance from the sun that makes it habitable and this cannot be a coincidence but this is quite simply a self-destroying idea the reason this planet supports ife is because, as the religious types have already pointed out it’s the only planet CAPABLE of creating life. If I get 9 pads of cotton wool dampen them all and put cress seeds on one of them then come back to them a week later and bellow “Behold, this cotton wool pad is the only one that has grown cress it is clearly the evidence of divine provenance at work!” no it’s just that that the only one that is capable of growing the cress. Alternatively we could put cress seeds on all the pieces of cotton wool then put one in the freezer, one in the oven, one in a boiling kettle put one underground and leave one on the windowsill and come back again in a week and say “Lo! This piece of cotton wool has grown the cress seeds and none of the others have, fear my wrath!” apart from getting carted off to a hospital for the clinically insane for talking to cress you have to accept that the conditions for the other cress seedlings were not ambient, who’s to say life never existed on Mercury but, like our cotton wool pad in the oven, it was simply too hot to support life or maybe life existed on Pluto but, like the frozen cress pad, it was too cold to support life, we just don’t know. The simple fact though is that these ridiculous statements that the religious zealots of the world espouse have no basis in fact they’re just truisms that can’t be disproved.

Personally I find the whole idea of creationism also to be ridiculously pressurised how can anyone who truly believes live under such conditions. If we take all the humans on the earth and we use the latest figures that suggest the population is about 7 biliion people and you add in all the animals and plants and other living flora and fauna on the planet the number you get would be uncalculable. I mean there are about 24 billion chickens in the world which means you were four times more likely to be born a chicken even more fun there are over 10 QUINTILLION (18 0’s I believe) insects on this planet so you are over a billion times more likely to have been born a beetle than a human (that’s just a beetle not even an insect in general) even with the luck of that German octopus you are talking incredibly slim odds and yet some higher power has decided that you were to be born. Even of the world was just insects, humans and chickens you’re still talking about a 1 in 1,428,571,433 chance of being born a human how can you possibly live with yourself knowing that god has forsaken that many lives as insects and chickens not to mention the thousands of sloths, giant pandas, blue whales out there just so you can sit there eating an éclair?

The alternative is to think of it in the scientific way to say that no-one has decided that you were going to be born it’s just a glorious mistake. Bear in mind that the chances of winning the lottery are about 1 in 14,000,000 just by being born human you have basically won the lottery 102 times now isn’t that a nice thought for your evening?

This week Matt:

• Discovered a very pleasant bottle of red and inadvertantly drank it all in one evening.

• Had an amazing time listening to some wonderful jazz in amazing surroundings.

• Decided he officially needs a holiday before he goes mad(der)

Did you hear????????

Well greetings all and welcome to my bloggiest of worlds, I was all ready today to launch into a tirade about that vile snake Piers Morgan, though I’m sure that blog will get written at some point, be longer than war & peace such is my vitriol reserved for him. However while browsing through the online papers (Except for The Times Online, you’re go to charge me for the news now????) I noticed a story about an office in America that has decided to ban gossip!

Now anyone who knows me well, or indeed vaguely, will know that there is absolutely nothing I love more than a nice gossip, I mean to be honest I think anyone who’s ever worked in an office knows that all anyone there wants is gossip. Honestly if you’ve never had someone come to you on the pretext of offering you a cup of tea just to ask about who was seen going home with who the previous night then you have absolutely no right to say you have existed!

Now for me there are some absolute golden rules about gossip, first of all you have to accept that people are going to gossip about you, if you’re under some misguided impression that the second you leave your desk people aren’t instantly sniping and bitching about you and that also even at your desk there will be, at a rough estimate, at least 5 people in that office bitching about you at that exact moment. If you can’t live with this then you should not be in an office because quite simply gossip is the only thing that keeps any work place going. The second major gossip rule is to be very careful who you are gossiping to, if someone makes a good gossip buddy you can be damn sure everything you tell them will get disseminated to their circle of other gossipers (particularly if said is gossip is particularly juicy), so be aware that if you spread gossip the liklihood is that the gossip will reach the person you are gossiping about so just be careful!

Anyway I seem to have moved somewhat off topic as this blog was supposed to about the practicalities of running a gossip-free office. Well this American firm that has outlawed gossip has brought in a three strikes and you’re out rule, though does this apply to when someone gossips to you? If that was true you could just arrange for three separate people to e-mail a not very well liked colleague with gossip and that person could be sacked before they’ve unpacked their coffee mug and Newton’s Cradle! Though maybe if you were particularly ruthless that could be an excellent way to get promoted by getting everyone else sacked! It just strikes me that should any British company ever introduce such a gossip ban by the end of the morning they’d have no staff left, I mean generally the British office is based on tea, bitching and a nice custard cream, sometimes all three simulatenously and if you ban gossip chances are you aren’t going to have staff for very long. Maybe it will be like when offices started banning smoking and set up dedicated smoking rooms, could we have a “Kvetching Room” or something where for ten minutes four times a day staff just go there and vent their spleens about their colleagues!

More to the point how does one go about policing such things? Are employers going to employ “gossip scouts” to sneak around reporting all evidence of gossiping to their superiors? Would we all be forced to become like Winston Smith looking for a convenient antique shop with a loft we can use for private gossip and then finding that, like Winston, the antique shop owner shops you for gossiping? Maybe Orwell actually forsaw all this and that’s what Nineteen Eighty Four was really about?

Could we perhaps get around this system by maybe developing some kind of in built code? For example rather than running across the office to say “Oh my god Anne is having an affair with that guy in the kitchens” we could perhaps say, “Did you hear that Anne is considering a career change and going into gastronomy, but she’s only able to learn in five minute sessions” or maybe rather than saying “Did you know Jimmy’s stealing staplers?” perhaps say “You know how that Theo Paphitis from Dragon’s Den owns loads of stationary shops, I think he might want to look at hiring Jimmy” see you can still gossip freely but it’s a bit more subtle and is not likely to get you sacked!

I suppose though this is all a moot point anyway because, as I have said, should any office over here even try to reduce gossip let alone ban it they’d be forced to sack almost their entire workforce within the hour, gossip is just simply a staple of British office life. Whatever happens with the world you can be certain of a few things in life and one of those things is simply if you work in an office you will gossip and be gossiped about, it’s just what being a British office worker is about!

This week Matt:

• Made his first, and last, trip to Birkenvegas

• Made a bakewell tart for the first time.

• Celebrated the return of University Challenge with a glass of red and some cheese & crackers.

Hotel Etiquette

Well hello to all of you and welcome back to my blog which has sadly been a while in being added to but heck I’m sure you all found something to entertain yourselves in the meantime, I believe that world cup thing might be on, or there’s always one of those heartwarming chanel 4/5 documentaries about deformity that we only watch to gawk guilt free while pretending to be interested scientifically!

Anyway as some of you I’m sure aware I was recently sent away for work to the North-East which basically meant spending a fortnight living in a hotel and tonight I want to talk about hotel etiquette. Now I spend a lot of time in hotels I think I, like pretty much everyone else, love that first moment in a hotel room where you take a quick look around to see what’s not bolted down that you can nick, not that I’m condoning such behaviour of course! However during the mength of this latest protracted hotel stay I began to develop a strange reticence to bothering the staff. My first night there I noticed that my room was not equipped with the compulsory trouser press (Naming no brands here of course, unless Corby wish to send a free press in which case I would be delighted to include them). Now I had just travelled the best part of 300 miles on a train and was stranded in a strange city without Radio 4 and pretty much all I wanted to do was collapse into a hot bath then make the mandatory call home to advise my dear mother that she shouldn’t worry I hadn’t been attacked by bears or inexplicably found myself in Peterborough or any of the other billion and one things that mothers seem determined will happen to us the instant we leave the house, however I needed to iron my shirt for the next day which meant calling down to reception and requesting an ironing board be sent up. Now I know hotels stock these items as once in a Welsh hotel I actually asked for one having had a glass of wine to much in the hotel bar and was told somebody would be up with it shortly and indeed they did arrive and presented my with a “Bord smwddio” (Pronounced: board smoothio) which is one of the few bits of Welsh I can actually still recall!

Anyway I’m rambling again which I’m apt to do, anyway I was on Tyneside and was in need of an ironing board so eventually I plucked up the courage to go downstairs and very shyly asked if they happened to have such a device which of course they did. It was only later while ironing my shirts that I began to wonder why I had been so reticent to ask for something that logically any large hotel would of course stock. There’s a pretty much constant flow of businessmen going through hotels in freshly ironed shirts and as we all know no matter how well you pack your suitcase you’re going to get creases. I suppose it’s a derivative of what I call “Crescent syndrome” which is basically designed on a small crescent of houses where everyone knows each others business and you desperately try to not cause any kind of stir but just stay out of sight as best you can. Even the next day going down to breakfast I could swear one of the girls on reception was giving me a look as if to say “There’s that dickhead who wanted the iron”, which I know is patently ridiculous, there are of course plenty more valid reasons to refer to me as a dickhead than that!

But as the week progressed I found myself needing more and more things and getting more and more embarrassed about asking for them. At one point I actually ended up buying teabags from Tesco rather than ask for the free ones from reception just so I didn’t have to converse with the staff and possibly draw attention to myself which is just patently ridiculous. Strangest of all I even began to get a bit paranoid about the maid coming in every day. As anyone who’s ever lived with me will know I’m not known as the tidiest person in the world but I found myself at times doing the maid’s job for her and cleaning the room and making the bed praying that every day she’d just come in change the towels, leave more teabags and replace the cups but why? What would the maid possibly be doing? Rooting through the desk casting aspersions on my inability to complete the Guardian quick crossword the day before? Maybe going through the bedside cabinet and discovering I like to keep a bag of chocolate raisins to snack on while I’m away? Or worst of all discovering I use herbal essences shampoo I’m not sure.

I suppose in the end it comes down to the fact that it isn’t your own home and an existence in a hotel after more than a few days does tend to become a bit tedious. However should I be staying in a hotel again I do like to think I could feel a touch more confident about asking for tertiary services, despite the accusing glances of hotel reception staff!

This week Matt

• Regretted his use of the phrase "Tertiary Services" in the blog above, sounds very seedy!
• Discovered the music of Thea Gilmore via facebook stalking and has been playing it on loop ever since
• Passed the first round of tests for his graduate scheme, phew!

the romance department

Well my friends guten abend (Quiet pedants I can’t find the umlaut key!) and wilkommen once again to the veritable Oktoberfest of grouchiness that is my bloggy world. So pull up a stein of hoppy German ale, tuck into a bratwurst and enjoy my wailing against this grossly unfair world.

Tonight I thought I’d talk about something very close to my own heart and something that is surely at the very epicentre of all of us, the pursuit of a mate. Now the in-built desire to procreate with anything that moves is a perfectly natural desire in any creature but the idea of monogamy is one that is peculiarly unique to humans (and apparently swans, who knew?). The problem is that unlike the swans we feel the need to lecture others on the best ways to find that special someone in your life, I can hardly see the swans that I so enjoy watching on a lazy Saturday afternoon in Birkenhead Park are busy calling out to each other “Oi Gielgud! (10 points to anyone who gets that reference!) look at the pen I’ve got!” – for anyone a little concerned that swans are mating with stationary a lady-swan is actually called a pen. It just seems to me that if you are a single person, especially in a group of couples, it seems everyone is busy trying to set you up with some equally desperate person. To me all it ever seems to show is quite how little the person who’s setting you up seems to know about you, why of course I’d love to meet a girl who’s interested in cats and needs to be home by 10 to give her elderly mother a sponge bath or some such nonsense, no I’d far rather you and your partner just sat there sniping at each other while I down a bottle of merlot and snigger!

If I did want to find a lady friend of course though what would be my options? Well it seems the vast vast majority of us meet our life partners while very drunk indeed, no problem there of course as I spend a considerable portion of my life a few sheets to the wind. Sadly the kind of establishments I frequent such as the symphony and the opera tend to look down on you a bit if you try drunkenly flirting during them “Sir I’ll have to be quiet and stop trying to convince the woman next to you to dress as a valkyrie” that kind of thing. Sadly the only places where getting drunk and picking up a partner are the norm are the kind of vile clubs and bars that I despise so much, and my chances of finding Miss Right in such a place are slim to say the least.

The other major area of soulmate searching, though I hasten to add not one I’ve ever tried or attempted to try, is the lonely heart column or dating service. To be honest I actually do rather enjoy getting the Guardian on a Thursday just to look through the personal adds just to amuse myself with some of the declarations, genuinely last Christmas there was one for a man who was after “help stuffing the bird” – would any woman seriously be even tempted by that? Particularly a Guardian reading woman. Another claimed he had bought a goose and had no-one to share it with, which is rather sad but also a little foolish in my eyes, I know how pricey a goose is, why would you buy one just on the off chance someone reading the Guardian would like to share it?

Another of my favourites is the old “spotted” column in the local metro. Every so often on my way to work I find myself leafing through it wondering if anyone on the train is using it (Okay I confess it’s just in case the hot girl has left me a message – nothing yet but I live in hope!). Some of them are very generic I find though “You were reading a book I was listening to my music, write back” for example. Now on my way to work I tend to listen to my mp3 player and on the way back I’ll usually read so anyone reading that particular add could well think I was trying to flirt and yet I’m simply trying to avoid having to talk to anyone!

However badly all these methods work to be honest as long as there’s couples out there they’re going to try and set up their single friends and who knows maybe one day such a set-up will work. I fondly dream of the day when I’m told I’m being set up and the person who meets me is not someone who’s just temporarily managed to remove her arms from a straightjacket but a cultured woman who enjoys The Guardian, Talk Radio, folk music and foreign cinema (yes I delude myself she’s out there!). Until then of course as long as the wine is flowing I’ll try and make conversation while trying desperately to work out an exit route!

This week Matt:

• went and salivated over the lovely suits in Debenhams - not literally I hasten to add!
• went a bit OTT and ordered a lot of tea online.
• Started listening to Roddy Woomble's new c.d. and now is unable to do anything without humming the brilliant "into the blue".

A vote for real change!

Well hello there my friends I do so hope you’re keeping well. I, if I’m honest, am a wee bit frazzled at the moment but I’m presently rocking out to The Jam’s “Down in the tube station at midnight” I’m no Paul Weller fan but considering he wrote it at 17….. he was a talented little oik!

Now talking of oik’s segues rather nicely into todays capsule rant, or at least if you’re a little dyslexic and think “oik” read “oink” it does anyway! Now unless you’ve been living in a cave or just happen not to watch the news you can’t help but notice we have an election coming up which, thanks to our quite frankly bizarre electoral system, could finish up with the party who comes third in the vote being in power, work that out if you can! Now all parties are advocating electoral reform of some kind or another, most favouring some kind of proportional representation system, though why advocate this when you’ve got parties bleating about the horror of a hung parliament – when proportional representation leads to a constant hung parliament I’m not certain. Anyway I thought rather than just going for the boring old “regular” voting systems maybe if we have a referendum we could actually vote for a properly fun system, several variants of which I shall lay out for you below:

1. Celebrity Top Trumps

Now this genius idea came to me today while reading the wonderful story that a Labour party press event featuring terrifying children’s character “Peppa Pig” had to be cancelled on the grounds of impartiality (You know how the under-two’s are absolutely massive voters!). I say embrace these celebrity endorsements but make the leaders play off against each other, for example Gordon Brown could play Peppa Pig and choose “scariest face” for his category (One Gordon himself could win hands down if we’re honest!), now Peppa is pretty creepy with her strange non-moving eyes (Again just like Gordon!) but of course Cameron could trump that because he has Gary Barlow (Aaaargh! Avert the children’s eyes!). Maybe Gordon might instead like to play Peppa on the “Least safety conscious” category, after all Peppa was recently rapped for being in a car without a seat belt on. Though of course Cameron could again trump that, after all he has Sir Michael Caine who risked his neck saving all that gold in “The Italian Job”, makes Peppa’s stunt look like an advert for Mothercare! See what I mean, hours of fun!

2. First past the post – literally

Now bear with me on this one, if anyone has ever seen the glorious spectacle that is the Mascots Grand National run at Huntingdon every year the week after the actual Grand National will know how fun it is to watch creatures ill fitted for the purpose trying to run a steeplechase course. My suggestion is to make all three cabinets compete in various races to see who is the best. I mean really who wouldn’t want to see George Osbourne, Alaister Darling and Vince Cable trying to leap fences or a 100 metre dash between the prime ministerial candidates being won by Nick Clegg because Gordon has no depth perception and inadvertently charged straight into David Cameron?

3. Retro games night

Forget leaders debates, who wants to watch that? I’d far rather watch a game of prime-ministerial Monopoly! Just imagine the fun that could be had watching someone like Gordon who has always prized his handling of the economy having to open his frugal Scots purse to hand Nick Clegg £1,400 for landing on Bond Street with a hotel and then next go landing on David Cameron’s Mayfair and having to fork out £2,000 all the while cursing his decision to buy The Angel Islington which, from my vast experience of Monopoly, nobody ever seems to land on! Or even better to watch that creepy smile come onto Brown’s face when he finally gets the “Go back to Old Kent Road” card when he already has Whitechapel and just completes the Brown set. Alternatively how about prime-ministerial trivial pursuits? After Christmas lunch the pursuit of that final wedge gets intense, imagine how much more fun it would be if the first to get all the wedges became PM and both Cameron & Brown were stuck trying to get that elusive pink “entertainment” cheese-wedge and trying to decide between having a guess at what they think is the correct answer but being concerned for the humiliation of it not being the right answer or the worse humiliation of admitting they knew that Harold and Madge from Neighbours released a song called “Old fashioned Christmas” in 1989!

4. Debates with better hosts

I mean so far we’ve had Alaister Stewart bellowing like Roy Hattersley after too much Pernod “MR BROWN! SHUT UP MR CLEGG! MR BROWN!”, Adam Boulton with quite simply the most bizarre tie I’ve ever seen and this week David Dimbleby who I enjoy though mostly because he chooses someone to ask a question or give a comment because he’s noticed something strange about them like a giant beard or electric blue hair but can’t identify them by that characteristic so tries playing it safe by saying “The lady in the….erm…. the red blouse yes you there, oh I’m so sorry sir!” which admittedly is funny but come on we have got a chance to put these men really out of their comfort zone. Now for me there are only two men who could really host a great debate like this, they have already shown they have the skills to put off even the most professional of people in the most intense environment, I speak of course of the brilliant Masterchef hosts Antipodean human-greenfly John Torode and Gregg Wallace the Peckham greengrocer who you get the impression would really love to wander round the kitchen with a rolled up wet tea-towel just flicking the contestants for a laugh then bellowing “FIVE MINUTES!” in their faces. Now come on can you seriously tell me you wouldn’t like to see the prime-ministerial candidates say trying to write a speech with those two buzzing around like they do in the Masterchef kitchen whispering conspiratorially about how terrible the contestants Boef Bourginon is but whispering just loudly enough so they know the hapless contestant can hear them and feels terrible. Or even better setting those weird tasks like identifying obscure root vegetables (How can you fail someone for failing to identify a French Breakfast Radish? If they don’t know what it is they just wouldn’t cook with it would they! People don’t tend to come into restaurants and then tell the chef to cook something that’s not on the menu!), but in our prime-ministerial debate we could have some fun like making them try and identify some back bench mp’s: John: “Ah now of course this is Margaret Moran the Mp for Luton South who claimed the bill of treating dry-rot in her husbands flat (in Southampton) on expenses!” Gregg: “It is John but given that Gordon defended her will he know who she is? FIVE MINUTES LEFT! (I believe he adds that to most of his sentences)”

Now come on people who could really fail to be enthused by electoral reforms such as these?

This week Matt:

· Watched “The bad shepherds” live in Birkenhead, incredible gig, their version of “Up against the wall” by the Tom Robinson band is incredible – and on youtube in fact, check it out!

· Saw Alan Bennett’s new play “The habit of art”, if you ever get a chance and you have any kind of acting experience just watch it, Richard Griffith’s performance as the tetchy “Fitz” is just perfect.

· Has been shockingly organised and saved £15 by booking my train ticket to Aberystwyth a fortnight early!

Scrabbling for ideas

Well evenin' all as my idol Andrew Neil might say were this the Daily Politics/ This Week, please pull up a stool put on your favourite comfy slippers enjoy a glass of vintage Blue Nun and purvey my latest installment of fruitless ranting about the world.

Now if you run in the same circles as I do (And I mean run strictly in the metaphorical sense here having not run since the great Guardian shortage of 2002) you cannot have failed to notice the shocking news that has torn the world of board gaming asunder. I talk not of the idea of a pornographic Cluedo (Though how fun would that be, always thought that Mrs Peacock had a naughty side!) but for the new Scrabble rules that have been brought in allowing gamers to use such hideous proper nouns as "Jedward" "Beyonce" and maybe even the ancient Persian king "Xerxes" (Though obviously only if you have a spare blank, we're not cavemen you know!) - For anyone wondering who Xerxes is he was in the hit film 300 leading an army of rhinos and elephants against Gerard Butler whilst wearing only a bejewelled codpiece.

Anyway back to the rule changes, this new ruling has inevitably led to an outcry from the dedicated Scrabble fanatics..... erm I Mean "Devotees" rather than fanatics obviously. Many are threatening to boycott the game, though given most of them play as I used to, after downing a very pleasant bottle of merlot so your vision is a bit squiffy anyway (it's amazing the words you can come up with when the letters are all sort of smushing together and you have to turn your head on one side and close your right eye just so you can focus on your tile rack (And no that is NOT a euphamism for the filthy among you!)) it's not really going to make a huge amount of difference if somebody puts down "Zambia" on the triple word score other than to increase the risk of violence which, lets be honest, would improve scrabble no end. Who wouldn't like to be sat watching the national scrabble championship and suddenly see somebody put down "JayZ" (I believe he doesn't punctuate) across the treble word score only for his opponent to thwack him round the head with the tile bag and proceed to try and gouge out his eyes with a tile-rack.

I mean why even stop there, Monopoly has thousands of permutations (Hotel on Brixton gasworks? That'll be £250 plus parking charge please!) so why shouldn't Scrabble move with the times as well? They already have Welsh scrabble with extra L's and D's why not, say, have dyslexic scrabble with additional Y's and X's and penalties for anyone spelling a word correctly. Or maybe have reverse Scrabble whereby all the values on the tiles are reversed once the bag is empty so suddenly A's become worth ten points and the Z only one, it'd be great to see the smug git who has the Z towards the end saying "Oh bollocks I got the Z" and actually bloody mean it rather than knowing full well he only needs a blank O and he can just get Zo (Tibetan cattle breed) or worse the smug git with the X who has loads of options, lets see how he reacts under my rules when the bag empties and I have 60 points worth of vowels sitting in my grid!

Maybe even have a variation whereby once the bag empties you have to switch tile racks with the person in last place getting to choose which of his opponents racks he wants first, then we would even see who really was right to be groaning over a bad vowel hand and who was just bluffing, or even more hilariously maybe has a great word like my favourite "Azulejo" (Portuguese tin art and 119 on a triple word score if you were wondering) and hadn't realised it. I reckon if Hasbro take my suggestions on board we can really make Scrabble good fun, although the purists might try and stone me with Scrabble tiles for my heresy!

This week Matt

• Inadvertantly wiped his mp3 player and had to spend most of his Sunday re-adding songs manually.
• Finished his final easter egg (Oh the humanity!)
• Wrote his first letter of complaint to my wine club for smashing my wine two months in a row and leaving me short a bottle both months!

The gift of gifts

Well hello my friends and welcome back to my bloggy world, I should start by apologising yet again for my shocking lack of updates of late, though as anyone who works in an office can tell you when you’ve spent all day working at a computer it’s difficult to motivate yourself to then come home and work on a computer again, not that I call this work of course, it’s just bile!

Anyway for those of you who didn’t forget (looks around with an accusing glare) this week saw my birthday, 24 years of depression and boozing, but while I was at my desk pretending to work while surreptitiously dismantling a bar of mint aero I got to thinking about birthdays and how we deal with them. Now don’t worry I’m not going to end up going into a discourse of the pain of ageing and how depressed I am about ageing because, to be honest, I enjoy getting older and more crotchety! No the thing I hate about birthdays, and I’m not going to shock anyone here, is the presents.

Now as any of you who have nothing better to do than facebook stalk me (and you know who you are!) will know this year I was really amazed by how thoughtful some of the gifts I have been given are but buying gifts is something I absolutely hate – and am terrible at!

Now I’m fully aware that my policy of only buying presents for ladies I wish to “Get to know better” (which is why one day I will buy the hot girl on the train a gift!) annoys a lot of people and I do hope people have realised that for the last few birthdays I have rescinded my “No chance? No gift” policy and bought a few gifts but I really do hate it. I have spent a while thinking about what it is about gift giving that I hate so much and I think I’ve come to a realisation. I am not slightly opposed to gift-giving what I dislike is the regimented fashion that we’re forced into it, nothing else in life is so regimented. For example if I have to go and see my dentist and don’t feel like it I can call up and feign gout or something and just simply re-arrange having my dental areas prodded for another time but can you imagine calling someone and saying that you haven’t been bothered buying a gift for their birthday and would you mind moving your birthday to a different day?

Maybe I’m being a little facetious but I have always found that the gifts I have enjoyed giving the most have always been spontaneous ones that I have got for someone purely because I thought they’d like it not because I felt under pressure to dash around Liverpool One desperately searching for something suitable and just in the end grabbing a voucher, the gift that surely just says “I couldn’t be arsed getting you a gift so I just found the shop with the biggest collection of stuff you might like and essentially put some money behind the counter for you”

Anyway I came to a realisation whilst musing on this thought and I have a new plan for the future of gift giving. Instead of having a situation whereby you have set days for birthdays why not just have a rolling birthday and that way you can spend the whole year looking for a gift someone would like? Of course that does sort of come unstuck when you need to have a rolling Christmas which frankly sounds a hideous idea where you are constantly bloated with too much turkey or in an egg-nog induced haze for most of the year!

I am, however, certain I can’t be the only one who feels this way, I mean who among us can honestly say they’ve never told someone “Oh no I did buy you a present but I……. left it at work” or something? The whole thing, however, is totally pointless because you know full well that person hasn’t bought you a gift yet but you let it slide because you know full well that at some point you’ll end up doing the same thing to someone else and like the proverbial flatulence in a lift nobody ever wants to confess to having started it and even if they did there’s no point because we’ll all have done it sometime and if we haven’t we’ll do it at some point in the future.

So my friends (and casual acquaintances) I say to you embrace the idea of gift-giving but don’t feel so pressured, buy that voucher but at some point in the year you’ll find a perfect gift and buy that too because nothing in the world is better than the feeling you get when you give someone a gift that you know they absolutely love!

This week Matt

• Had an exhausting week of work but a brilliant birthday thanks to you all!
• Realised University Challenge, Only Connect & Masterchef have all finished and wept.
• Almost flung his new Macbook out of the window because the bloody caps lock needs beating before it comes on!

5-for-life

Well good afternoon to you all, I’m spending a lazy afternoon of my leave writing to you all from my blog, though I want it making clear I am not on strike like certain others who just fancy a long weekend (not that I blame you!) I actually am taking pre-booked leave.

Anyway to the business of the day what has been happening with my life, well this morning I was strolling down to my local video-rental store (no product placement in this blog thank you!) to rent a copy of “An education” (Okay that’s product placement but even so it’s a great film, watch it!) to watch this evening after University Challenge and Only Connect – I know my life truly is lived on the edge! Anyway the video shop was closed and wasn’t due to open for 15 minutes so I was stuck with something of a quandary over what to do for a quarter of an hour, after all walking home only to turn around and come back out again seems somewhat frivolous. Eventually I decided that I would use the time to get a badly needed haircut since I was starting to look a bit “Hells-Angelly”, not a look I am keen to cultivate! I considered using the closest barber but I always think he gives the impression of a man who even Sweeney Todd might have raised eyes at the ethics of so I settled on a new barber I’ve never used before – quite a traumatic experience as any man will tell you which is why we often stick to the same barber for years (I usually use “Blow your top”, please feel free to insert your own childish joke at this point!). Anyway the point is that while waiting to be seen I was flicking through one of these dreadful style magazines (sadly no copy of “Take A Break” my usual barber fare to be seen!) in which they suggested that in times of stress you should think about losing everything in the world and what would be the last five things you’d ever give up. To be honest I’m not exactly sure if the magazine still hires this psychologist, I’d hope not given that if I’m stressed being asked to “Imagine you’ve lost everything” is hardly likely to help me! Anyway while I was in the chair I was thinking about this problem while Phillip Schofield and Holly Whatshername were rabbiting on about Yorkshire Puddings to distract the hairdresser and this is the list that I came up with:

5. Tea

Some who know me well may be surprised to see tea so low on my list given how partial I am to our national beverage, however do bear in mind I’ve lost everything almost but still chosen to save tea. Tea to me is surely one of the greatest inventions of all time and of course politically important over the years. Depending on what you believe supposedly one entrepreneurial chap when in Hong Kong to oversee Britain’s newest acquisition was so shocked by the opium trade that was existing alongside the tea trade he paid a small fortune to have some tea seeds smuggled to him whereupon he took them to India and set up new tea plantations free from the stigma of opium and supposedly made an awful lot of money from it. I’m not sure exactly how accurate that story is but whyever he did it I’m glad he did because to be honest right now I couldn't even comprehend the idea of getting up or getting through a day in work without my tea habit. Obviously it can get a bit out of control, one guy on a recent episode of “Come dine with me” confessed to drinking over 30 cups a day which is a bit much but even so tea remains one of the most vital parts of my life.

4. Business wear

Perhaps a little strange to have this so high up my list but I can’t help it I just love my suits. I know people who absolutely hate having to wear a suit but if I had my choice I’d wear it every day. I don’t know why maybe it’s just that a suit belies a sort of arrogance and elevated social standing that I want to pretend I have and maybe there is a certain truth to that, I think everyone would confess that there is a certain snobbery to me, but I prefer to think I just like to look neat and I think cufflinks are just beautiful! I think actually if there was a fire at my home I would dash back and leave everything except my cufflinks and ties, yeah I’ll confess that even writing that sounds quite weird!

3. Arthouse Cinema

This probably is my most recent innovation to this list because a few years ago I’d never seen a foreign film except for Amelie but just of late I’ve suddenly gotten a bit of an obsession with niche film. Now to quote a recent conversation “Don’t you like any normal films” and I’ll admit that it sounds a pretty fair criticism to make but I think it needs to be qualified a bit. After all I’ve seen three stunning mainstream films this year in the English language (“An education”, “Precious” and “The soloist”) that would make English language films still second in my Great Films Of The Year By Country list (France has four in there). My point is simply that if a foreign film gets across here then it must be pretty good, I’m equally certain that if I lived abroad I’d still only see a few great films, and they’d be same ones I love when I watch them here. Quite simply there are some stunning foreign films out there (Watch “Sin Nombre” for an example of arguably the greatest film of the last 12 months) and you shouldn’t deprive yourself of them just by stigmatising subtitles, to be honest these days I find I actually prefer subtitles, but then again I’m weird!

2. Savings & Financial Advice

I think this is probably still the most obvious one on my list, especially if I’ve had to loose almost everything, knowing how to save money is probably of vital importance. I do know that financial talk bores a lot of people but to be honest I don’t think I find anything more important and fun to talk about! I never fail to be stunned at people who either have no idea what their bank balance is or who have no kind of savings plan, even more surprising are those who do have savings but are not doing anything with them. I will rarely go a week without checking on what sort of rates are going let alone leaving my money for years without doing anything with it. Amazingly there are other people who won’t change their bank because they’ve “Always used them”, so???? Do people honestly think that they owe a bank some kind of loyalty? I would say if I could declare advice to anyone it would always be to keep an eye on your money and make sure it works for you because saving is one of the most fun and beneficial things you’ll ever do! – Well maybe not fun but definitely worth it!

1. Wine

I don’t think there will be any surprises with this choice; I have a lot of things in my life that I love but none quite so much as my wine. One of my greatest hatreds in modern life is the “anti-wine” brigade who think that people like my good self who have real wine standards are just being fussy, but anyone who has tasted really good wine will know exactly what I am talking about. There is sadly so much poor wine about in the world, and even poorer people who will order, say, a bottle of “White zinfandel” or something – URGH! Why would you possibly order such a thing????? And yet when you hit upon a good wine, and I mean a really great wine, there is nothing like it in the world, wine truly is an absolutely unique creation, if, for example, you order a bottle of Budweiser at a bar somewhere no matter when it was made (unless it was brewed in the last 1860’s or something) it’s always likely to taste pretty much the same and it won’t taste much different to any other beer in the world. And yet if you buy yourself a bottle of wine (well as long as you’re paying at least £5 a bottle for it) you’ll never have the same taste twice it’s an absolutely amazing creation is good wine and to be honest if I lost everything else in the world that I’d ever owned, the one thing I’d want at hand would still be a good 2007 Montepulciano!

Anyways that’s my list of five and to be honest it was a nice exercise and surprisingly easy to do, of course if it was my list for Room 101 then I’d probably still be sat in the barbers chair now trying to whittle down my list of things I hate from about 16,000,000 things!

This week Matt:

Had a lovely weekend in Leicester, especially with the mad lady at the rugby!

Bought his ticket to “Exit through the giftshop” the first film by Banksy, so looking forward to that one!

Got his tickets to the Shrewsbury Folk Festival……. I’ll get me coat!

Well hola my friends, I am back from the sun-kissed shores of Espagne feeling fighting fit and refreshed (if a bit woozy from all the sangria and cheap Spanish plonk) and, due to popular demand, have returned to the blogosphere.

While away I read a column by one of my blogging idols, Charlie Brooker, which almost made me choke on my paella (though that may have been a prawn it’s hard to tell sometimes!) in which he defended the idea of E-Reading. Now for those of you who perhaps live in a cave or, like me, are a bit dessicated and don’t follow the technological news an E-Reader is essentially a device that allows you to store up to 1,500 books on a single electronic thingy (look at me getting all technical), it’s sort of like having an MP3 player rather than a discman. Now to be honest that’s a pretty good argument in itself which is often used by the pro-E-Reader brigade, after all I’d estimate that almost all of us now have an MP3 player of some sort that we can use whilst commuting and undeniably it’s a lot easier to store all your music on little box rather than a device the size of a dinner plate and a small stack of CD’s to go with it. However I think this fundamentally misses the point of a book for several reasons:

Firstly, and I may be alone in this, I don’t tend to carry around an entire library around with me and nor would I desire to. Generally I will choose a book, read it and then read another. I don’t as a rule choose a book, read a chapter and then select another chapter from an entirely separate book to read – and if you do I suggest you seek medical attention at the earliest possible opportunity!
The obvious counter to this would be a holiday or long trip, on many occasions during a holiday you will take several books along with you, I, for example, took five books with me on holiday but I still only read one at a time. It seems to me the main advantage of an E-Reader in this situation would be simply to either limit that incredibly annoying two minute walk from the beach to your hotel room when you finish your book to change it for another and to leave more room in your case for cheap wine……. Actually that’s suddenly become rather a compelling argument!

Another joy of a book, for me anyway, is to read whilst having a bath, now if I’m, for example as I am at present, reading a nice Thomas Hardy novel while having a soak and I reach to change the radio station (maybe some cretin has in a moment of piquancy changed the channel to radio 1 to vex me!) and inadvertently knock “Far from the madding crowd” into the water the worst I’ve done is ruined a £2 book and may never find out what happens to Bathsheba Everdene.
If, however, I am using my E-Reader in the bath and knock it accidentally into the water I have not only destroyed a piece of valuable equipment, I have destroyed 1,500 books (more than my local library has these days!) and more to the point I have run a significant risk of electrocuting my genitals!

The final point to make is the undoubted romance of a book. I am still waiting for the day that the lovely young lady on the train each day will come over to me and say “Ah I see you’re reading Dostoyevsky’s “The Gambler” what a searing vision of addiction and corruption that is, would you maybe like to split a bottle of expensive wine sometime?” (Hey I can dream can’t I?), okay that’s unlikely to happen but I do get a bit of a frison of excitement every time I see an attractive young arty type reading, okay it’s usually a bit of Sophie Kinsella or one of those books from the ASDA cheap range with titles like “Daddy please no!” or whatever but even so it shows a modicum of intelligence – unless of course it’s Harry Potter or a Dan Brown when I just feel an urge to throw things at them!
However I suppose the argument could be cancelled out by the fact that if, as I was, on holiday, you’re reading a trashy novel – in my case it was “Sphinx” by T.S.Learner (Think Dan Brown in Egypt but competently researched rather than just making it all up, basically poorly written thriller but at least you’re not spending every page going “well that’s a lie for a start!”) – your E-Reader conceals what you’re reading so for all that sun worshipping Iberian beauty across the beach knows you’re reading something mind-blowingly romantic instead of just reading about sexy archaeologists (surely a typo!) and ancient Egyptian cults!

I, however, believe that a compromise can be reached could we not develop covers for E-Readers rather like the sleeves for passports so that you can be reading your trashy Egyptian adventure novel but the sleeve around it makes it look like you’re reading something more worldly like Alexandre Dumas’ wonderfully romantic “The black tulip”. Of course you’d have to be careful that you made a careful note of what the cover was, after all what could be more embarrassing than your longed for beach beauty collapsing on the sand next to you and asking how the book is going and you mistakenly think that your cover is Anna Karenina or something and say how sad it is that she’s about to be mowed down by a train only to realise that the cover you actually have is Pride and Prejudice or something!

This week Matt:

Invested in the stock market for the first time – I feel the need to buy some spats and braces!

Flew home from Spain with a hangover, not recommended!

Spent two hours with Tim watching an Eastenders “Duff duff” countdown, gloriously trashy!