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!