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!

The blessing of homonymity

Well good day to you all and welcome to an installment of the wonderfully bloggy account of my life.
Many have come to expect this place to be just a general bitching ground where I rail against a world that, I feel, is designed pretty much entirely to piss me off. However, I do occasionally come across genuinely interesting nuggets of information that, just for a while, distract my attentions from things that irritate me, but not for long. Towards this end of this blog I have prepared a short piece about the Norse god “Tyr” who I am going to guess no-one has really heard of, even though we all use his name at least once a week and we certainly will see it written down at least once a day, but Tyr brings me very conveniently to the subject of todays rant because he was also known in old English as Tiw (as many Norse gods were such as Odin/Wotan, Freya/Frygg (the schoolboys favourite), etc – and that’s the last hint to Tyr’s identity you’re getting!) and homonyms are something I do particularly enjoy. Now I have come to realise over the years that my somewhat puritanical attitude towards spelling, and more particularly towards grammar and punctuation are not something that everyone shares. In fact I’d probably go as far as to say that in linguistic terms I’m probably bordering on the autistic, or certainly aspergers at any rate. Anyway I love language I think English is a stunning language and anyone who mangles it deserves to be stabbed with a set square.
As I stated earlier I love homonyms (or words that are spelled the same and have different meanings) a well placed homonym can often bring the bookish language lover a genuine smile on a dreary day, I’m reminded of the wonderful Sandi Toksvig anecdote where she tells about smiling at a sign saying “Enjoy Reading” and wondering why a sign declaring the joys of the county town of Berkshire would be at a fair in Suffolk when actually the sign was instructing the studious among us to actually “Enjoy reading” though in fairness as she claims the huge tent of second hand books behind it ought to have been a hint. Now for the pedants among you I know that’s technically a heteronym rather than a homonym but if you picked up on that to be honest you should close this blog down and book yourself into the local remand centre for the safety of the rest of us! Anyway what I am trying to get to in my roundabout way is something linked to a homonym that greatly angers me, I call it an “Idionym” myself. For example if someone came to me in work and asked to “Borrow your compass” I would look at them with a look of mock incredulity before casually informing them that sadly I have left my crampons, ice axe and other mountaineering equipment at home. If however they would like to draw a circle perhaps my “pair of compasses” could be of some use? Equally if for example I was playing a nice game of “Trivial pursuits” (well it is the season) and granny asked to borrow the dice I would take the singular of that item and insert it viciously up her nostril until she realised that “dice” is plural, what she would like, I believe, is “The die”, it’s not hard people! To be honest I think I just have anger issues, I’m not certain what would happen were I ever on a date in a seafood restaurant and my date asked to “Borrow a piece of scampi”, to be honest I’d probably stave her head in with a lobster hammer! Firstly how can you borrow food????? Secondly NO! You may take SOME scampi or A scampo, scampi is the plural for gods sake, but you know I’m a bit on the cranky side also possibly making threats against my dining companions with various pieces of speciality cutlery for not knowing the plural and singular of their dish is perhaps one of the main reasons I am still spectacularly single!

Now I’m fully certain you’ll all be sat there sniggering at my rage and thinking it’s unimportant but to me it’s vital. Now you probably don’t care what I think, and all power to you, but be aware if you do come to me and ask for the dice or a compass obviously I wouldn’t really react angrily, I would just give you the pair of compasses or the die and end up venting my spleen via a blog, but I will also judge you. Now if you can live with a 5.5ft man with a dodgy beard judging your grammar then go for it, god help us all should there ever come a time when some other arbiter of intellect is chosen such as wrestling a bison to the ground or some kind of physical exercise, should that happen to be honest I’d be screwed (more than likely by the bison!), but until that day comes embrace our beautiful language and use it properly!

Now as we end just a word about the wonderful Tyr who I mentioned earlier. Now I’m almost certain you all worked out that he is the god who gave us the fine day of “Tuesday” but relatively little is known about this god who is so important that we use his name on a daily basis. We don’t even know if he was Odin’s father, Odin’s son or indeed just Odin’s right-hand man. All that is known of him is that he is the god of battles, heroism and swords, deeply ironic given that he only had one hand, to be honest you’d think that they’d at least have chosen someone to be god of battles that wasn’t forced to fight southpaw. What’s even stranger is the manner in which poor Tyr lost his hand. Loki, the all-round bad egg of Norse mythology, had a son called Fenrir who took the incarnation of a wolf and he must have been quite a thick wolf to be honest because he kept letting himself be chained up by the other gods before breaking his shackles and going on a killing rampage. Obviously the gods were slightly concerned by this feral wolf wandering around and so they commissioned some helpful local dwarves to create them a ribbon made of some of the rarest things in nature such as fishes breath, bird spittle, mountain roots and (most bizarrely) a womans beard (clearly the Scandinavians like a gal with a bit of bristle!). Anyway the ribbon was created and the gods went to tie up Fenrir who in a fit of bizarre piquancy agreed to be tied up but only if one of the gods would place their hand in his mouth as a gesture of good faith that he would be released. Only Tyr was brave (or in my opinion stupid) enough to place his hand in the wolfs jaws and when Fenrir was secured by this “Gleiphnir” ribbon they all just laughed at which the angry Fenrir bit down hard on Tyr’s hand severing it, which, by all accounts, the gods found even funnier, clearly a slightly masochistic bunch! Fenrir of course would have the last laugh finally escaping his chains to join the final battle of Ragnarok (Armageddon) on the side of the giants against the gods and would ultimately kill Odin before being killed himself by Odin’s son Vidar (keeping up?). As for poor Tyr who has now been cruelly cast into history, he and his stumpy right hand were there at the final battle where he is killed by Garm (a dog not incomparable to Cerberus in Greek mythology, some versions say he is the brother of Fenrir interestingly enough). Along with Odin, Thor and Freya he has been given his own day so next Tuesday just give a little thought to brave stumpy armed Tyr the only god stupid enough to put his hand into a feral wolfs mouth and sadly consigned to history.

This week Matt:

• Struggled with the demands of his man-flu and drank a small lake's worth of Lemsip.
• Every time he had cough mixture felt the need to bellow "Covoooooooonia!" at the bottle, which really isn't advisable if you have a sore throat.
• Had an argument with a chemist, perhaps I'll make that the first blog of the new year.....

going off track

• Well hello my friends and welcome back to the bitching record of life, now I know what you’re thinking; you haven’t had two updates so close together in quite a while, however something happened this morning that irritated me so much I couldn’t believe I was yet to record a blog about it, I am going to talk today about Railway Station (and to a lesser degree Bus Station) etiquette.
  
  The thing this morning that annoyed me so much was when I got to the station for my usual commute to work. And those of us that work (Looking at you with jealous eyes students and unemployed people!) know how traumatic this time of the morning can be, it takes all your wits just to avoid getting mowed down on the zebra or toucan crossing (New word I’ve learned by the way, a toucan crossing is one where bikes and people cross simultaneously “two-can” you see, isn’t that clever!) and you’re not entirely certain you’ve managed to get that last crescent of toothpaste off the corner off your mouth so you’re trying to surrepticiously lick the corner of your mouth but anxiously avoiding eye-contact with the hot girl lest she think you’re making lustful advances towards her (which in fairness you are but you’ve seen her boyfriend and he’s built like the proverbial outhouse!). Anyway it’s that kind of time of the morning and all you want to do is buy a ticket and get on the train out of the cold but no there’s somebody at the front of the queue arsing about with something. People trying to buy on card who haven’t read the sign saying Maestro and Electron not accepted, or is paying off a fine and grumbling loudly about it, or they’re not sure where they want to go and are planning their route and you just find yourself thinking “WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE AT THIS TIME OF THE MORNING! THERE ARE PEOPLE HERE WITH JOBS TO GET TO AND YOU’RE HOLDING THEM UP!” And then begins that most wonderfully middle class language, the communal tut, it’s a beautiful thing, when the whole line just thinks as one “what a ****”.
  
  Other train station related things that annoy me include people coming off (or down to) platforms where one of the escalators is broken and you can tell which one it is because the other one works and shows which way it’s going so by simple deduction you know which side is broken, and yet some people still think “Well if it’s stopped surely anyone can use it” and when you come sprinting down/up it and inadvertently maim their toddler/spouse/pet camel or whatever it may be that this cretinous person has in tow they look accusingly at you as if its your fault, no you absolute pillock it’s your fault for going up/down the wrong escalator, maybe if both were out of order I could forgive you but yours is working fine so don’t use mine!
  
  The final real irritant to me comes from these new electronic barriers they seem ever so keen on installing at stations these days, you can guarantee you will always end up stuck behind someone whose ticket isn’t registering and the desire to take that latest Dan Brown book that they’re obviously reading (this type of idiot always reads Dan Brown!) and beat them senseless with it is overwhelming. You just have the desire to say “For gods sake you’re either senile, an idiot or a criminal, whichever it is I don’t care but your ticket doesn’t work and mine does so would you please move yourself and your filthy tracksuit (too snobby?) out of my way so I can get on to actually do some work and depress myself just to earn more taxes and keep you in white lightning so you can keep on not buying tickets for trains and acting surprised when that ticket you picked up off the floor of the carriage isn’t valid!”
  
  This week Matt:

• Had a wonderful time watching the Alan Bennett Season on BBC 4, he has such a lovely soothing voice!
• Got very annoyed with incompetant staff at the Greek Taverna who insisted I didn't have the money on my credit card to cover the transaction..... what a suprise it was because he was trying to charge me £16,000 for my £160.00 bill, put a decimal point between the dots you cretin!
• Lost his favourite set of cufflinks, if anyone sees them please let me know, they're silver set with faux-diamonds.

The slow walk of death

Well hello to you all my friends (and casual acquaintances who just want to know what I’m complaining about today!) and welcome back to my, recently lapsed blog. Now you may be forgiven for thinking my lack of updates of late were to do with a lack of things to be angry about, oh how wrong you ate! Anyone who knows me knows that every day brings fresh things for me to complain about (like adverts for lawyers during daytime TV, that’s a whole rant right there, but not for today.

What I thought I’d talk about today is something of great personal anger to me, slow walkers! Now if, like me, you are a lover of walking there is nothing more irritating than being stuck behind a slow walker, or even worse a group of slow walkers! I think the main irritant about it is that there’s a certain etiquette to the subtle passing manoeuvre that must be performed to pass these people who have not got a clue about the speed a normal person walks.

The first situation, and probably the most common, that you may find yourself in is trying to walk somewhere and seeing in the middle distance a person of, shall we say, a certain age that you know before long you are going to have to try and pass and you are now left with an internal dilemma. Do you slow your own pace to a ridiculously slow pace and hope the old dear takes a side road leaving you free to continue your journey at the correct pace unobstructed. The problem with this idea however is that if the old dear does not divert her path however slowly you are walking you are going to end up catching up with her because even your slow walk is faster than her. And so we find ourselves approaching her and she is not going to be diverted from the same course as you and you know you are now going to have to perform a tricky pass because do you suddenly walk at top speed and just rush past her knowing that you will have to maintain that pace until you are out of her sight? Alternatively you can subtly increase your pace so it looks like you are just naturally faster, a perfectly reasonable assumption given her age, however there’s going to be a time when you’re walking side by side which is always an awkward situation. Another option is to cross over the road and walk on the other side but you’re then on the wrong side for what you want and you know full well that you will have to cross again at some point and what happens if there’s traffic and you then rejoin the correct side still behind the old lady the whole idea has been pointless!

Another situation could be getting trapped behind a group of slow walkers, if there’s a group, particularly one which expands across the whole pavement, you can’t use the time honoured tactic of simply speeding up and passing them subtly to one side (for some reason acceptable with younger people but not older people). Therefore quite often you’ll get stuck behind the group zig-zagging back and forth waiting for them to notice you are walking faster than them and want to pass. The only other alternative is to walk in the gutter to go past them, but perhaps this is a sign of the times in which we live I always feel very unsafe doing this almost as if at the first opportunity the group are going to push me in front of a passing motor-vehicle just for having the temerity to walk past them! Even worse if you do get past them at a faster a pace and then come to a pelican crossing (incidentally why are they called that anyone know? No? I’ll wiki it!) you find yourself being absorbed by them, and uncomfortable position because you suddenly look for any gap in traffic to try and get across the road to relieve yourself of the socially awkward situation!
My personal advice to anyone like me who likes to walk but finds themselves personally irritated by slow walkers is to walk at all times in a cycle path if available because no-one slow goes in them and if the cyclists complain (well my hatred of cyclists is well known already) blame the old dears and the slow walkers and tell them if they want you out of their cycle lane they should petition the council for fast and slow walkers lanes, the only possible solution to this socially awkward situation!

This week Matt

• Re-discovered the wonders of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, I do like a bit of inappropriate racism!
• Had a mild heart attack at his credit card bill
• Found out that a a pelican crossing is so called because it is a contraction of the phrase "Pedestrian Light Controlled (PELICON) Crossing", isn't that fascinating, god love Wiki!