Chainsaw Zombie

Matthew Horne and James Corden present: Horne & Corden (a sketch show)

2009-03-27T01:26:00.010Z

“Fast becoming the UK's favourite young comedy double act, writers Mathew Horne and James Corden will be performing in front of a live studio audience, as well as leaving the studio to play a host of brand new characters - including a socially awkward spin on the meeting of Spiderman and Superman in everyday situations. Oh, and watch out for Xander, an old boarding-school chum who is the most hideous, foul-mouthed, but well meaning man to ever rear his head from a person's past. Unfortunately, Xander specialises in turning up at inappropriate times to remind people of embarrassing moments they'd rather forget. Not like Horne & Corden - the memories of which you will hope to retain forever.”
--- the BBC official writeup

* * *

A television studio. An empty stage. A door. A crowd left over from Top of the Pops. A sense of electric excitement that fills the air like tear gas; we realise that we are going to see something special here. Coming off the back of their mega-hit genre-busting deconstruction of post-wave feminism ‘Lesbian Vampire Killers’, Matthew Horne and James Corden are the saviours of British comedy which has stagnated in a quagmire of Stewart Lee/Ricky Gervais/Simon Pegg/Chris Morris old-boys-club nepotism. But no more. In a matter of seconds our heroes will walk through that door and dazzle millions with half an hour of pure comedy gold. I’m shaking a little bit in the knowledge that I am about to see two television De Vincis paint their Mona Lisa with paint made from comedic sketches.
There is a hiss. The crowd gasps. The door slides open and our two maestros enter. One realises straight away that these guys are professional comedians who know the first rule of live comedy – bigger is better. Deadpanning = dead AIR-ing. They go STRAIGHT for the lulz, pulling funny faces, leaping about, howling at the crowd, gurning at each other and drumming up excitement until the audience is so excited they literally can’t stay quiet. We're like children on fizzy lemonade. Eventually the applause dies down. And the show begins.

MH: Hi guys! Wow, it’s great to be here. I’m hermaphrodite straight-man scarecrow twat Matthew Horne!

The crowd goes MENTAL

JC: And I’m smug yardie manchild James Corden!

Both: And welcome to meltdown comedy turkey ‘Horne & Corden’!

More applause; one can immediately see the influence that their apparent years of work as Butlins Reps had on these two young comedians. They start off with some patter that immediately wipes all memories of Morecambe and Wise from our minds. Corden speaks to a wheelchair-bound member of the audience; one immediately begins to suspect that there’s some trickery afoot when Horne disappears. The young girl claims that she can’t afford an electric wheelchair, but being physically (and possibly mentally) disabled, she’s such a big fan of the two comedians that just coming to the show is enough to cheer her up. ‘But wait’ says Corden. ‘We’ve got a surprise for you… a new electric wheelchair!’ We cheer - but then Horne comes in with the new chair. Oh no!- he hasn’t got an electric WHEELCHAIR, he’s accidentally got an ELECTRIC CHAIR from a Texan prison!

He’s accidentally got an ELECTRIC CHAIR from a Texan prison!

He’s accidentally got an ELECTRIC CHAIR from a Texan prison!

He’s accidentally got an ELECTRIC CHAIR from a Texan prison!

(This is funny because ‘electric wheelchair’ and ‘electric chair’ are two terms that, despite being different, sound sort of similar. It’s like a visual pun. Because they sort of sound the same but really mean totally different things. The comedy comes in the mismatch between the expectations of the audience and the reality. After all, electric wheelchairs and electric chairs are like, absolutely not the same! They are different. And therein lies the comedy. This respectful and witty approach to dark subject matters like child disability and the death penalty is a promise that the show makes with us, and when we launch into the sketches we see that this promise is more than kept.)

SKETCH ONE: “The Gay Newsreader”
JC: Hello, I’m a straight newsreader in the studio! Oh no! There’s some kind of obviously-serious state-of-affairs (terrorist attack, hostage situation, etc)! Such a serious situation obviously requires an equally serious register of response. Now let’s go to our reporter out there in the field who I can only assume will be treating this situation with the reverence it deserves.

MH: Heya guys! Look at me! Being the androgynous member of the pair, I’m dressed and acting like a mincing homosexual predator stereotype from a 1950’s Christian fundamentalist propaganda leaflet!! But I’m presenting the news! How wacky! I wonder what kind of crazy antics I’ll get up to!!! Now the thing you should remember about homosexuals is that they (“we”) are all obsessed with fashion and having sex with other men.
Gunshots are heard
Oh look, a terrorist! Actually he’s quite fit you know, maybe I (being a gay man) can go and offer him my number!!! Then I can have sex with him! And we can go buy shoes! BECAUSE I’M A GAY MAN!!!!!

JC: *pulls a funny face*
MH: Well, gotta go, there’s a sale at Prada! Toodles!!!!!!!!!!
JC: Oh, you gays! What won’t you try and have sex with? (well, other than women, obviously)
End of Sketch
(Repeated week-to-week in a variety of different situations)

The joke here is that nobody would actually act like this (other than the gays). This sketch is making a satirical point, raising questions about the public acceptance of homosexuals into public roles, with the obvious implication that no, they probably shouldn’t be. Because they’ll be too interested in singing karaoke and talking about Jean Paul Gautier to do a proper job.
The sketches have started off well and don’t you worry – the quality never wavers.

SKETCH TWO: “Olympic Games"
Horne and Corden are taking part in an Olympic sport
MH: Being skinny and lithe, I’m quite good at this Olympic Sport!
JC: On the other hand, being big and fat, I tend to not be very good at this Olympic Sport!
End of Sketch
(Repeated week-to-week in a variety of different situations)

This sketch revolves around a common theme that runs throughout the series – the fact that Matthew Horne is skinny and lithe whereas James Corden is big and fat. This realisation is pretty important – without it, many of the show’s sketches (such as the one where Corden takes off his shirt, grabs his belly, shakes it about while screaming ‘WHERE DID THIS COME FROM?!?!?!?’ for four and a half minutes) are liable to simply fly over the head of casual viewers.

SKETCH THREE: “MAN BEING PUSHED OVER”
MH: I am a posh-looking businessman doing some middle class, in this case buying paté at a posh supermarket.
James Corden runs into frame and pushes him over.
JC: I pushed you over!
MH: Oh no, I fell over! I do look silly!
JC: I did it!
End of Sketch
(Repeated week-to-week in a variety of different situations)

Many sketch show precursors to Horne & Corden threw in a number recurring in-jokes for eagle-eyed viewers to spot; the exact same throwaway reference (for example, the lemon drink in TMWRNJ) would reappear constantly throughout a season, often with minor variations. What's great about Horne & Corden is that they do the same thing, except they push it another step further and more or less fill every episode with the same seven or eight sketches rotated about with minor cosmetic variations for the entire season; therefore if you liked the posh-looking businessman being pushed over in the supermarket, you are likely to LOVE the posh-looking businessman being pushed over in, say, the gym! Or the toilets! I’m looking forward to tuning in next week to see where the posh-looking businessman gets pushed over next (I hope it’s a posh gallery opening!!!). Sure, “people” may say that familiarity breeds contempt but did those people star in the Catherine Tate show or write Bafta-winning comedy 'Gavin & Stacey' or flirt with with Keith Allen’s daughter Lily Allen? No. No they didn’t. So they don’t know shit about comedy.

SKETCH FOUR: “Big Penis”
Horne is working in an office when Corden walks in
JC: Hey, Matthew Horne, guess what?
MH: What?
JC: I just had that penis enlargement surgery that you can have.
MH: Wow! Is your penis bigger?
JC: Yeah a bit. Want to see?
MH: Yeah!
James Corden unzips his flies, at which point a huge long prosthetic penis falls out of his crotch and lands on the desk
JC: Look, I had penis enlargement surgery and now my penis is bigger.
MH: Yes.
JC: We sure presented an cause-effect relationship in this sketch.
MH: Yes, because the penis is bigger. And there it is.
JC: So we’re happy with this sketch, then? This it is. This is what we’re going to broadcast to millions.
MH: Yes. Yes I am. I think that this sketch is the best that it possibly can be. We’ve written something to be proud of here. I’m going to lie on my deathbed in sixty years and think fondly back on that time when we did a sketch where the punchline was a large prosthetic penis. The joke being that you had surgery to make your penis bigger, and it was a success, and now you have a big penis. Which we’ve presented here on screen. That’s the joke. A penis. We’re getting paid thousands of pounds for this.
End of Sketch

At this point we realise that Horne & Corden have produced not just a sketch show, but an incredibly sophisticated post-modern deconstruction of the sketch show format as a whole. Just as in Alan Moore’s ‘Watchmen’, where the author presented the various tropes and trappings of the superhero as nothing more than a series of arbitrary nominal moral distinctions, in ‘Horne & Corden’ our two clown visionaries have dragged the sketch format down by not actually including any punchlines, jokes that aren’t puns or non-sequiteurs, or humour.

SKETCH FIVE: “Xander”
MH: I’m a posh man.
JC: I’m an obnoxious person. My name is Xander. I do obnoxious things.
MH: Oh no!
End of Sketch
Repeated week-to-week in a variety of different situations

SKETCH SIX: “Something About Superman And Spiderman”
MH: I am a posh superman.
JC: I am an obnoxious spiderman.
Both: We are doing normal everyday things that superheroes do not traditionally do.
JC: I act obnoxiously.
MH: Oh no!
End of Sketch
Repeated week-to-week in a variety of different situations

SKETCH SEVEN: “For Whatever Fucking Reason They’re Buying Clothes From A Shop”
A shop. MH or JC comes out of the front door holding a bag. He holds it aloft, proudly.
MH/JC: I HAVE JUST BOUGHT SOME INNOCULOUS-LOOKING CLOTHES
End of Sketch
Repeated week-to-week. No variety of situations. seriously thats it

SKETCH EIGHT: “Horne and Corner dress in stupid clothes and do a comedy song making fun of the Christians in which the main jokes appear to be that if you sing words really long, then sometimes the beginning of the word sounds like a swear-word (for example CUNTTTTTTTTTTT-RY), and also the fact that saying ‘touch me heavenly father’ in reference to the hymn also sounds a bit like asking your paedophile father to molest you, and concluding by singing the names of a list of celebrities (no, that’s the joke), so they repeat that four or fives times and then the show’s over and this is broadcast to the entire country”

This sketch ends the show every single time.

* * *

All in all, on my cultural barometer I would probably place 'Horne & Corden' into the same pigeon-hole as I do Robbie Williams and Rupert Everett’s performance of ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’ from Robbie’s 2001 Sinatra inspired album ‘Sing When You’re Winning’, especially the bit when Robbie and Rupert start riffing with each other and playing grabass, which is basically equivalent with me saying that it’d probably be a good idea to tie Corden and Horne to a chair and keep hurting them until they promise to never release anything they produce into the public domain ever again.
-- My Official Writeup

Oh u just mad cause I’m stylin on u

2009-01-31T17:09:00.004Z

Ok so the other day I learnt that my former secondary school had received an official complaint about my facebook conduct. Because that’s a thing now. Facebook conduct. That’s a thing that exists. That’s something that can be complained about to educational establishments. Yes. The complainant was a woman who we’ll call ‘Jane Simpson’ (name changed to protect the reactionary and moronic), who was absolutely outraged about a poem I’d reposted onto a group about famous dead baby ‘Baby P’ (it’s like a codename to protect his real identity, like Captain Scarlett. Or Prince).

The group itself was a satirical group called JUSTICE FOR BABY PEA. Now let me explain: the joke in this case is that the ‘P’ in ‘Baby P’ sounds very similar to the word ‘Pea’, referring to the small green vegetable. So it’s like a pun. You know, satirical, because a lot of groups are all like ‘Justice for baby P!!!’ and this one is ‘Justice for baby Pea’, and then there was a picture of a baby dressed like a pea as well, so frankly the whole thing was a nice idea, cleverly put together, a perfect combination of opportunity for verbal wit followed up with the correct brain response and satirical nous to successfully carry through the idea, andYES I KNOW IT’S NOT VERY CLEVER and neither was the poem I reposted, which was the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air lyrics but instead of talking about a young rapper being relocated to his stuffy posh Aunt and Uncle’s house in Florida, and I’m willing to accept that fact.

However.

This was the email sent.

Dear *mr headmaster*
I thought you might like to be aware of the above student's idea of a joke, as I presume if he is to be believed a student at your college. He has joined a Facebook group which has been set up to mock the death of a 17 month old baby after months of torture and has very kindly added a poem for other members' amusement. Perhaps you may not feel that this is anything you would wish to be involved with, but it may be interesting to you that this sick individual happily states that he is student at your school - which is something I presume you would not wish to be linked with. Several of the members are students at various universities - it is sickening to think that these are some of the young adults that are supposed to be also our privilaged ones.
I leave it with you to deal with as you deem necessary
Regards
Jane Simpson (a sickened campaigner for tougher measures against child abuse).

See, I like this. I like the way it’s structured. I like the way that Jane plays with conventions of language – such as in her premodifying of ‘joke’ with ‘the above student’s idea of a…’ to imply that she, indeed, doesn’t think a poem about child abuse written in the style of the theme music from a Will Smith sitcom from the 90s is any sort of thing to be laughing about. I like the dark, biting globules of sarcasm that drip like tar from ‘has very kindly added a poem for other members’ amusement’. I like the three different variants on the word ‘sick’. I like the use of dramatic irony – the build up of describing my crimes, then the sudden thematic u-turn as it hinges, swivelling the sights of criticism purely on the school who have been made guilty by association of my own misdeeds. I like the places where it formally parts company with fact. I love the fact that Jane describes herself as a ‘campaigner’, as though there’s a huge political movement dedicated to preventing ‘tougher measures against child abuse’ and she’s the one solitary firebrand left to stand up for the kids, waging a ceaseless war against the twin evils of ironic poetry and no-good beatnik teenagers, using well-aimed molotov cocktails of passive-aggressive emails and tattling to old schoolteachers.

I like to imagine the creation of this email. In my mind’s eye I see Jane surfing Facebook in the middle of the night, her jowls glittering in the darkness of her empty flat, going through every dead-child related group one-by-one until by some horrific mistyping she inadvertently lands on an ironic group. I can imagine the look on her face. It would be somewhat similar to this smilie:

D:

I can imagine the thoughts that flowed sluggishy through her mind. ‘This is it. I’ve seen moral standards slipping in my time. I’ve seen them letting homosexuals give heart transplants, lesbians drive buses, blacks present Blue Peter, and I’ve said nothing. Because things move on. But no more. NO MORE. For too long I've made myself a sacrifice to the altar of progress, but this is it. These little bastards have gone too far. I’m drawing a line in the sand HERE.’ And then I imagine her pushing the eight cats off of her computer to write the email, laughing derisively as she poured forth her bitter and unrelenting scorn, thinking ‘yeah that’s how privileged is spelt’, then concluding with the frankly bizarre linguistic and orthographic gymnastics of “these are some of the young adults that are supposed to be also our privilaged ones” and sending the email off to a schoolteacher. JOB WELL DONE. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. THE CHILDREN ARE NOW 6% SAFER THANKS TO JANE SIMPSON. YES

Now let’s get something straight. I am All For small children not being tortured to death. I think that what happened to Big P was horrific and naturally as soon as I heard, I sprinted to my computer, logged onto Facebook and joined “Justice for Baby P”, “Remebrance for Baby P”, “Baby P' .. we want justice!!”, “SIGN BOOK OF CONDOLANCE FOR BABY P”, “Baby P Killers should be hanged Drawn and Quartered”, “PETITION GROUP TO GET " BABY P" A MEMORIAL PLAQUE” “'Baby P' another child left to die by our so called public services!”, “Join The Petition To Get The Parents of Baby P Life In Prison!” etc, just to clarify my righteous sense of morally-absolutist anger. And yeah, I do believe that there are certain things that shouldn’t be laughed at, such as the mental image of thick craft-paper papercuts on the head of an erect penis, the increasingly-unhideable nature of the scars on my legs from my rampant self-harming, and – indeed – the sadistic murder of small children. Now my longtime blogging audience might find that last one difficult to reconcile with my output so far – after all we all know that there are some epic lulz to be gotten out of dead baby jokes HOW DO YOU MAKE A DEAD BABY FLOAT TWO SCOOPS OF ICECREAM ONE SCOOP OF DEAD BABY LOLolol, and yes, I’m unlikely to win an award for not inadvertently saying offensive things to girls and the disabled, but you have to realise that what’s funny in these jokes is not the actual act of the baby being cut into pieces. You idiots. What’s being mocked is the sense of disgust felt by the listeners; in imagining these perverse acts of horror, we’re transported out of our comfort zones and forced to react. It’s either LAUGH CRY FIGHT OR RUN and the easiest option is to laugh. We’re turning round and laughing at our inabilities to reconcile the horrors of the world with our own delicate sensibilities. Which is where the entire point of shock comedy comes from, and it’s why Jimmy Carr still has a career. And so we made a facebook group to make fun of the Baby P Facebook groups and we had an ironic laugh by combining the banal with the horrible. My natural reaction was to laugh. But laugh ironically, which means that I had to do air-quotes and actually pronounce the individual ‘ha’s.

Jane Simpson’s natural reaction was to cry. Actually her natural reaction was to throw her hands up in the air in an ineffectual display of horror, fall of her chair, and, in an act of self-righteous morally convenient rage, spasm every muscle in her body and suck her crusty tampon up through her uterus into her poisonous and fetid womb where it will hopefully give her some kind of ulcer. And then write an ineffectual email. And then my school formally asked me to cut all public ties to them. And my mum said that she was disappointed in my lack of morals. And you know what? All this makes me sort of wish that that baby hadn’t even been killed at all. Seriously.

This all raises a question though. Why does this sort of thing always happen to me? I’m not the only person I know who has a blog or who is on facebook but I’m the only one getting accusatory hatemail and being called ‘sick’ by middle-aged women with millipedes crawing out of their vaginas. The other kids have blogs that are objectively of a lower standard than this one, and THEY don’t have get 50 comments accusing them of massive self-harm and of having ‘less than below average looks’ which to be honest is such a diss if you think about it. Perhaps all of this is just the beginning of the anti-Tom backlash. It’s not like I haven’t expected it coming; after all you can’t fly as high and burn as brightly as I’ve been doing without being aware of the sword of Damocles hanging ever more dangerously above your head. I just guess that I’m one of those people who makes other folk Sit Up and Take Notice. I’m not like Darfur: you can’t ignore me and hope I’ll go away. I’m like Israel – people are on the streets protesting both for and against me. Arabs are dying in foreign countries over my right to exist. It’s the best and brightest flowers that are the first to get picked, after all, and if you’re a young agent provocateur like me you are BOUND to get in the face of ‘the man’ and the rest of his fat-cat blood-for-oil cronies. They’re all like ‘what do you think you’re doing’ and ‘you young rebel, put on a tie and get a job in an office and be a nine-to-five wage slave like the rest of the corporate drones!!’ and ‘you’re self pitiful, self loathing with less than below average looks and a childish attitude towards life’ and I’m just going by on my fixed wheel bike with my keffiyeh and an my American Apparel hoodie and my sweet Nikes and I’m like ‘chill out man, anyway gtg I have some more bourgeoise power-structures to deconstruct with my cutting wit and inflammatory prose’ and they’re all left wearing their brown raincoats standing in the terraced streets of Brixton and waving their fists ineffectually after me while I go off and probably hook up with some babes or something.

And really I won’t consider myself any sort of success until I’m officially branded ‘sick’ and possibly ‘vicious’ by the Daily Mail, and I suppose that this is a good start. Overall a good day’s work, all told.

* * *
in other news
SELF HARM UPDATE
so I was in the kitchen and was pretty drunk on gin and the crashing inadequacies of my life were pressing down upon me from all sides and I didn’t know what to do because my cutting blades were downstairs so I just leapt into action and took a cheesegrater to my calves for like twenty minutes until the back of my legs looked like Ronald Macdonald’s hairdo

OXFORD UNIVERSITY: Just publish whatever the fuck you want

2008-12-07T23:22:00.002Z

Shite Magazines of Oxford Part 1: (OH) Magazine
"Because if I'm blogging then at least some good is coming out of the crap that gets released every term"

(OH) Magazine was formed in 2008 by some students, apparently to fill the aching creative vacuum in their CVs caused by the fact that they hadn't been allowed to edit anything yet in their Oxford careers. As far as I can tell, the magazine's main remit is to serve as the backup 'sexy arts magazine' in the few times when there isn't a copy of the Isis directly to hand; I imagine that there was once a tragic incident when a student was having a stroke or something, but could have been saved if only there was a brightly coloured edgy student publication filled with unreadable opinion pieces about drugs or sex or indie music, but all of the copies of Isis were taken so the student tragically died; and so to prevent such a tragedy every happening again, a few brave undergraduates from Oriel College took it upon themselves to produce an emergency backup magazine and charge JCRs £100 for it; kind of like how nuclear power stations have an extra layer of lead-sealant on all of the radioactive chambers, just on the off-chance that the first breaks open, spewing white-hot chemical waste over the countryside and melting the tissue off any living organism in a 10 mile distance.

With such noble aspirations, it's difficult to imagine how (OH) could fail. After all, they cover all of the key bases of student life - with segments such as 'Music, Books, Film, Fashion, Art, Gay, and Misc' - it is safe to say that whatever your hobby is, there will always be something to interest you. For example if you are particularly into your music, you can read the section on the history of Reggae, if you like fashion you can check out the photos of girls wearing Topshop dresses in a field and if you were interested in being a gay you could read the gay section, specifically written for YOU (wow!) which includes such highlights as 'Tinsel Flakes', an article written by somebody who has recently read Irvine Welsh's 1993 novel 'Trainspotting': mop up the remnents of pish on an already urine encrusted lavvy seat with the last two sheets of wafer thin toilet paper. Shaking away last night, I gave a bit of thought to words and...eh...language. At least, words that a cannae say. Don't get me wrong, it's not like etc, for two pages.

Reggae. Topshop. 'The gays'. As you can see, (OH) Mag is adept at hitting the marks with the kind of inyerface no-nonsense, no bullshit journalism of the type that made Russell Brand such a popular MTV presenter in September 2001. (OH) takes our standards of what to expect of a student magazine (in terms of content, presentation and readability) and throws them right the fuck out of the window. You want edgy? How about AN ARTICLE ON PORN told from the POV of somebody having a wank!!! How about a 'Introduction to (OH)' Section that on one hand offers you the chance to Have Your Say by casually inviting readers to 'drop us a line' before metaphorically Pulling The Rug Out From Under Our Feet by adding 'But we think its fucking brilliant' !!! How about printing the word 'shit' in a title. Twice. SHIT. IN A STUDENT PUBLICATION. WHAT IS GOING ON. Hey guys look at this. It's the line.

--------

and Look at what (OH) is doing

----(OH)----

That's right IT'S CROSSING THE FUCKING LINE. I read somewhere that at (OH) HQ (which is probably some awesome den filled with fetish gear and bongs and vintage typewriters) there's just a huge rasturbation of Hunter S Thompson and Banksy and Kurt Cobain and other people that anti-conformist idiots idolise charging into riot police with FUCK YOU, SYSTEM spray-painted underneath and stuff. I have also read that one of the editorial practises is to take all articles and add the word 'fuck' or 'bastard' somewhere in the central paragraph. The result is sentences like this: 'The frames that resemble camera-work only make it clear how much closer to an aesthetically powerful film this is than most actual films. Basically, it's fucking brilliant'. woahhh, were you knocked for six by the cussing at the end there? I know I was when I first read it. My thought process was like "Hmm, frames, interesting, aestheticism, interesting, basically, hmm, OH MY GOD THEY SAID THE F WORD'. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Because that's how people talk in real life, isn't it? Swearing and that. It brings it closer to MY demographic and makes me understand and sympathize with it as an article. Clever work, (OH) editors. People say 'What's the point?' or 'It's a lazy crutch to be 'down wid da kids' and inject shock value' but to those people I say chill out, niggers! Are you retarded or something? It's the goddamn (OH) magazine! You know why its called (OH)? Because that is the shocked sound that you make when you read it (in parentheses). The shoehorning of swearing and stupid popular culture references into Every Single Article is an unorthodox editorial decision and while some may call it irritating and patronising, I do as well.

Apparently other unorthodox editorial decisions involve making up words - "the plainly repugnanty", more-or-less disregarding the concept of grammar or consistent orthography, repeatedly spelling the names of the contributors incorrectly (sorry, non standardly), neglecting to credit whole segment editors and generally aiming to make the whole thing as UNDREADABLE AS FUCKING POSSIBLE. The result of this is that actually reading a copy of (OH) magazine is a strange, often unsatisfactorily frustrating battle against the English language. Reading an article is like wading through a strong wind, walking to a distant house that may or not be filled with angry bees. That's in the highly unlikely case that somebody actually reads an article. Flicking through it, the urge to Not Read is almost overwhelming. You look at the pictures. You read the headlines. You admire the pretty colours. Maybe-JUST MAYBE- you'll read an opening paragraph, say 'oh', then drift off into a catatonic coma, pass out, keel over and accidentally stab yourself in the eye with a fork. It's physically impossible to continue. It's like the literature equivalent of staring at the Sun or listening to The Kooks or drinking a gallon of listerine.
But of course that isn't the point is it? The point was never to produce anything interesting. The point is have something to look at, to admire as an Object, place on the table, absorb, lean back and then slowly, loquaciously, masturbate slowly over its matte finish and street styling, ejaculate over the five-page cartoon about the evil teddy bear, smear the resulting sticky mess all over your face and upper body and then lean back gasping desperately as it dries into a waxy dandruff-like scale and flakes off all over the double page about the Voynich Manuscript before hurling it into the nearest roaring wood fire and slinking off to read something better, like Atlas Shrugged or the safety instructions that came with the kettle.

I can't pretend to be Objective about this, by the way. I admit that I know three people who write for this magazine, and I produced a cartoon to go in it, and it wasn't included in the final press. My main excuse is that I was specifically sought out and asked to produce the cartoon, which I obligingly did. I say 'obligingly' because I'm not going to lie, I've already reached the point when I know that writing things for most publications in Oxford is more or less beneath me. And I was giving them a break, to be honest, I really thought they'd be grateful. I was dragging the average quality of the rest of the magazine, kicking and screaming, up. There would be at least two pages that would be worth reading. And they blew it, to be honest, an action that was confirmation more than conception of my disregard for this magazine. It's just the perfect confirmation of my theory that students shouldn't be allowed to produce anything. Reading it is plain painful. Like your dad rapping at a funeral. Your mum's funeral.

I know that this post is controversial and is probably going to lose me some friends. I mean, I'm not blind, it's obvious how meteorically popular (OH) magazine has become in its first two issues. One of my friends from home saw it and said 'Hey is that a picture of some guys wearing tshirts on the front cover? Jesus this thing looks amazing I wish I went to Oxford!' and he was so impressed he dropped out of Cambridge and applied here for next year JUST so he could read it. It's already gotten so big and popular the wikipedia entry for 'Oxford University' automatically redirects to the (OH) page. In the weeks leading up to the release of a new issue of (OH), the tension in Oxford rises to unbearable levels. Fights break out. Women go into labour early. The night before an (OH) is released, the air crackles as though anticipating a thunder storm. The common room is abuzz with people who simply cannot sleep, such is their excitement at the thought of a fresh new copy of (OH) sliding through their letterbox. They drink cups of cocoa and speak of their hopes and dreams for what the new magazine will bring - possibly four pages devoted to samey doodles of farm animals by some girl who doesn't even go to Oxford any more, possibly an article on Slagsmålskubben, possibly a page with just the word 'GAY' on it in big letters. Who knows?

So maybe I'm wrong. In the wake of such overwhelming public support for (OH), perhaps I should give them another chance? Perhaps, if what I've just said is true, they truly represent the dawn of a new level of student journalism? If THIS MANY PEOPLE love and adore (OH) and think that it is the best thing to ever be released ever then maybe I should just shut up for once

...

(oh) wait

Maybe I’ll be asked to speak at the Union

2008-11-11T18:10:00.003Z

I was ambushed last night. I was walking along the road, contentedly gazing into the abyss, when I passed a group of students, amongst them a few acquaintances. Now you know me, all social interaction terrifies me (eg: my college mother described me as ‘borderline autistic’ last week), so I sort of murmured ‘Hello’ as quietly as I could and scurried towards my den; but before I was five feet away a voice yelled my name. I turned round to see a stylishly-dressed man I didn’t know sprinting towards me with a manic glint in his eyes. I was in the process of deciding whether to turn and flee or kickbox him in the throat, and I had just about reached my decision when he leapt upon me, enveloping me in a tight bear hug. I literally didn’t know what to do. Attractive strangers were throwing themselves at me in the street; this was a new experience. The thought ‘This must be how Russell Brand feels’ floated momentarily through my brain.

“I’m sorry, that was probably inappropriate,” sang my attacker jovially, releasing me. My response was to take a big step back and squint suspiciously at him.
“Tom, James is like your BIGGEST FAN!” enthused one of the girls. “He’s like obsessed with your blog. He linked it on his site. He gets 600 visitors a day.”

Right. Firstly, I’ve seen ‘Misery’. I know what happens the moment you meet your ‘BIGGEST FAN’. You wake up tied to a bed with a three hundred pound woman smashing your ankles with a sledgehammer. Secondly, the fact that random people are now coming up to me in the street calling themselves my ‘biggest fan’ forces me to confront the fact that has been staring me in the face for weeks now: I am now a Minor Internet Celebrity. Naturally it’s not a complete surprise. I’ve known for a while that I’m a bit of a hero-figure amongst a wide subsection of the Oxford community (and beyond!). People look up to me. People read this blog and take it as gospel. In many cases I am become a beacon of light in the dark and cold existences of the people that fill this earth. I mean last night wasn’t an isolated occasion; in the past months a number of people – some friends, some complete strangers – have begun conversations with ‘Tom, your blog is so good’ or ‘Tom why haven’t you updated the blog’ or ‘Tom why haven’t you blogged about me/my party/the American election’ yet?’ or ‘Tom you are literally the coolest guy I have ever met’. Now usually I don’t trust people who bring stuff from The Internet up in real life. I still sort of think of this blog –and really the internet as a whole- as a guilty secret to never be discussed out loud, like masturbation or incest. I mean last night one of the girls said ‘blogged’ and ‘Chainsaw Zombie’ out loud and I physically winced – but the strange thing is that not all of these people are morbidly-obese-basement-dwelling-neckbeardy-goon-types. In fact very few of them are. Indeed, some of them are – dare I say it – ‘cool’.

For example it turns out that I may have met ‘my biggest fan’ at a house party held by his girlfriend (one of the girls) the other week; I don’t know for sure I was p drunk. Now this was a Party with a capital P. You know it’s going to be good when the Facebook invitation comes mass-mailed from a future ruler of one of the larger democracies on Earth (although the ruler in question wasn’t actually anywhere to be seen at the party itself which was a bit of a letdown). Anyway I showed up wearing a pink shirt and trakkie bs and everyone was dressed in suits, eating birthday cake with spoons, listening to music I didn’t know, and hanging out in a tent that had been set up IN THE LIVING ROOM. That’s how cool it was. Some serious Skins shit. I ended up talking to some dude in the living room who had to stop what he was doing to rub cocaine in his gums at which point I nodded into space, slipped on some imaginary sunglasses, and said ‘I.have.made.it’. Later on I was pushing stoned students onto the floor in a futile attempt to find my ipod which had fallen down a crack in the sofa when one of the girls wandered into the room, absolutely fucked on horse tranquilisers, saw me, hugged me, then cried ‘TOM I LOVE YOUR BLOG DO ONE ABOUT THIS PARTY’. Which leads me to suspect that this blogspot address and the words contained herein is the only reason I got invited to the Cool Party in the first place.

Not that I care about that. I mean in person I’m average at best. Many of my fans are far more likely to succeed in life than I am. Indeed it seems this blog is opening doors for me more than all of my aborted attempts to interact socially have thusfar. It gets me invited to parties and lets me hang out with the cultural cream of Oxford society. It gets me hugged in the street. It makes me new friends and reaffirms old relationships. And I’m sure that I could probably use ChainsawZombie to seduce a young starlet if I wanted to, in a kind of ‘Sure I’ll blog about you baby, I’ll make you INTERNET FAMOUS TOO letshavesex’. But I don’t really feel the need to. So it’s cool. The future ruling cultural elite of this country think that this blog – and probably me by extension – is literally the greatest thing since sliced bread. I shall try not to let it go to my head.

But before you start thinking ‘Man I wish I was like Tom’, be warned: there’s a drawback to being as internet popular me. The thing is, now that I HAVE all the fame and power I could possibly want I don’t know what to do with it. I’m reminded of the Spiderman quotation ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. I just don’t think that I’m responsible enough to bear the weight of the massive social kudos that has fallen upon me.

The thing is, I always wondered what it would be like if I was famous and well loved like my heroes Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Ricky Gervais. I mean, despite the occasional bouts of self-loathing and the whole crippling insecurity thing I kind of assume that I will be when I grow up. I’m just too talented and clever not to be. But I also realised the other day that in my imaginary picture of myself as a famous man, I am a completely different person. In my imagination I’ve suddenly metamorphosed into being about 18% more handsome, being the defi-defi-ition of a bad-boy, rocking an ice-dry wit and being able to seduce famous women (aim: whoever the Alexa Chung equivalent is in five years time) with a raise of an eyebrow. Other factors of Imaginary Famous Me include: wearing a trilby, sweet Nikes, constantly swinging into rooms on a rope. Whereas I realise now that if I do suddenly become a living legend my reaction to screaming fans and girls approaching me in the street will not be to wink casually, grin, sign book covers/boobs and then bed them. It will be to react exactly as I did when hugged by My First Biggest Fan – freeze solid like a rabbit in the headlights, rictus grin, narrow beads of sweat down the back of the neck, chattering teeth, immediate verbal constipation/diahhrea. I mean here was my perfect chance – a young man, a COOL INTELLIGENT YOUNG MAN, was staring up at me with love in his eyes, the love of somebody who has just met his own personal hero. He was expecting me to be wise and what did I do? I croaked ‘I write things on the internet yay’ in a silly voice and stared at him. “It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes,” said Maugham “They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved” and I worry that my underwhelming personal presence absolutely disillusioned little James’s faith in the world – and worse – his own faith in himself. Who knows what the repercussions of meeting me might be? I can see him going home and just tearing up all his books and slashing his wrists. Which would suck. Oh god I used my presence massively irresponsibly. Should I have been wackier? Should I have made a quip or something? Should I have been cool? Oh God being mildly internet famous is so hard no wonder Kurt Cobain shot himself. DAMNIT JAMES you have caused me to reinterpret my entire existence you fucker

Oh shit I just realised that my biggest fan and co will probably read this post. Well I guess it’s nice to have your personal hero writing 2000 words about meeting you. He’ll probably print this out and frame it and put it on his wall and tell people who wrote this post about him and then they will say ‘who?’ and he’ll try to describe me and completely forget what I look like because I am so nondescript. But this p much sums up the problem I have – I completely disassociated the Tom On The Blog with the Tom In Real Life. Which is a problem because people expect to see BlogTom (you know, cool sophisticated ladykiller) when in reality they get RealTom (quiet moody sarcastic borderline autistic). But how can this problem be solved? Do I change the blog to suit who I am in reality? No because then it would just be a few mumbled full stops and me typing ‘its fine Its Fine ITS FINE’ like the guy out of the The Shining. Or do I change myself to suit how I am on the blog? But surely that is worse!! It brings to mind the Updike quote ‘Fame is the mask that eats into the face beneath’. Or perhaps the Mel Brooks quote about being disappointing in person because ‘you can no longer be the edited essence of yourself’. See, I know quotes. I know quotes on the internet. But if you asked me for a quote in real life I would look blankly at you. Do I not really know any quotes? Am I just a quote blog poseur? oh fuck

I worry too much.

IN CONCLUSION What I have learnt from this experience is that Fame Is Hard. It’s really difficult to juggle artistic loyalty to yourself with a personal life while still respecting the wishes and dreams of your fans. Especially when you have Great Fans like this:

This is Tom who is my rowing pal. He always asks me when the blog will be updated. Last night at the bar he looked sadly at me for five minutes with his big puppy eyes because I hadn’t yet given him a little mention. So to please him I have included his photograph at the end of this post. I hope that he will be happier now.

Hey Guys If You Want Me to Include A Picture Of You On One Of My Posts Then Please Get In Touch Via The Comments Section. Also If You Have Any Requests For Things For Me To Write About Then Please Let Me Know And I Will Get Right On It!!!!!

Oh Fuck!!!!!!! i can’t believe I’ve started doing requests.. I always tell myself ‘don’t do anything that the fans ask you to do, they are all morons’ but no the taste of fame is in my mouth, now I just want to be loved regardless of the consequences. Please love me. Love me love me love me. Oh no Already I’m selling out artistically. Im like ricky gervais in the extras Christmas special. shit SOON I’LL BE DOING ADVERTS FOR NESCAFÉ AND WRITING WHOLE POSTS ABOUT THE GREAT TIME I HAD AT MACDONALDS this sucks

Ok time to go out and buy some milk. Holy shit I hope I don’t get mobbed on the way there *slips on dark sunglasses*

* * *

P.S. guys there’s news I HAVE A NEW GIRLFRIEND that’s right suckaz tom is hooked up that’s your news for today ☺ oh god I hope she won’t read this blog and think that fame has changed me and say ‘Tom it used to be about the blog’ and I’ll say GET OUTTA MY FACE and hurl a bottle of whiskey at her and she’ll run crying from my dressing room. Because that would be awful

OH MY GOD I’M SO FUCKING AWKWARD

2008-10-07T23:59:00.005+01:00

I started thinking about this writing this post a few days ago when I had a really terrible stop-and-chat street conversation with a vague acquaintance. As soon as I saw him I was like ‘shit’ as I knew that he’d seen me and that we couldn’t just ignore each other (which is my standard procedure), so as we approached each other I sort of waved and said ‘Hello’ unenthusiastically; he returned the greeting. We looked at each other. I thought that was it – what else did he want from me? – so, without bothering to stop walking I played my power-card of ‘Well, see you in the bar later on!’ and started to walk off. LITTLE DID I KNOW THAT HE STILL WANTED TO MAKE BANAL SMALL-TALK and so he started talking to me when I was already well on my way out of earshot. ‘So, when did you move back?’ I clenched my fists in utter fury, stopped, turned round, nearly bumped into an old man, and yelled down the street – ‘Mid September.’ He pulled a face (?). I sort of stood there in space feeling awful, then pulled history’s most aggressive grin, gave him a thumbs up (?) and then ran off down the road.

So the post in question was basically going to be a humorous retelling of the above conversation, perhaps with some funny pictures of myself looking angry and it would have been serviceable and forgettable, but then TODAY came a revolution in social awkwardness that basically confirmed my suspicions that I must be borderline mentally defective when it comes to meeting new people; either that or a brain tumour. It was during a ‘get to know you’ tea-party for the new English Freshers in one of the third year rooms. This was pretty much my best and only chance to make a positive and lasting impression on the new year of English Students, who were all infuriatingly perky and passionate about poetry, but frankly it didn’t go so well. For one thing I was hungover and tired (and seeping blood from my thumb following an unrelated washing up accident) and thus wasn’t my usual sparky self; for another I don’t really know how to make conversation. I have like four questions I can ask in rotation and then I just say ‘well that was nice’ and then zone out, stare into the middle distance, start playing with the mechanical corkscrew, whatever means I don’t actually have to interact with another human being.

So I was standing there frowning into space wondering if it was possible to sleep standing up, when a nice-enough looking fresher girl wandered up and said something like ‘Hey, can I get you a drink’. I was surprised, panicked, blacked out, and made a snap decision with my answer. I mean, what was going through my head was that, as a member of the second years who were meant to be hosting the party to make the freshers comfortable, I should have been the one offering to get her a drink, maybe pour her some nice wine, sit her down and in a non-predatory way soothe her fears and anxieties about moving out of home for the first time and assuage her worries about the reading list, lectures, become her friend, offer her a friendly face to talk to, etc, etc. What I actually did was yell ‘DON’T SMILE AT ME I’M NOT A FRESHER I’M A SECOND YEAR’ and take two or three steps away backwards looking fierce. Apparently. ‘Apparently’ because I don’t even recall saying or doing that, all I remember is staring at a confused looking fresher, wondering what the hell was going on. This is worrying because it means that I must have literally just blacked out for a few seconds and allowed my subconscious to joyride my response, which is kind of depressing once you think about it. I mean when other people black out, their ids turn them into serial killers and rockstars; mine is just borderline rude to people. Luckily I soothed the situation over by gabbling ‘Oh, sorry, I’m Tom, hello’ about fifty thousand times and trying to shake her hand; she sort of backed away looking scared and then sat on the other side of the room shooting accusatory glances at me. I heard later that the phrase ‘serial-killer eyes’ was being bandied about. I was thinking that I’d go and apologise for being a borderline-autistic weirdo but then I reasoned that there are lots of other new freshers who haven’t even spoken to me yet, I might as well persuade them that I’m not a complete psychopath and accept that trying to salvage a friendship with this girl is a lost cause. Anyway sorry, girl.

[ninja edit: turns out that the 'fresher girl' was in fact a Third Year who everybody knew but I had just never seen before in my life. That does explain a number of things, including the expression on her face when I said 'How you finding Oxford?' and asked her what subject she was studying. I am not sure if that makes things better or worse. Anyway, sorry Third Year girl]

So anyway after that debacle I was walking home glaring at pigeons and I realised that even though the party was pretty much a confirmation of my complete inability to converse (I spend much of the rest of the afternoon sitting on the floor and squinting at anybody who tried to speak to me), it really was just a standard example of my ineptitude with people. That shit happens every day (52% ranking for my customer service at the Wine Shop woop). Because when it comes to awkward conversations – and when I say ‘awkward’ I mean ‘welp I guess I can Never Speak To You Ever Again’, I am a master. A terrible terrible master. For example who wants to hear about

The Time That I Told A Girl That I Had A Manageable But Incurable Disease In Order That She Would Let Me Go Home
So through some pure fluke I managed to meet a female, talk to her, buy her a drink or two, take her to a club, and be taken back to her room, all within one night, without accidentally insulting her appearance, kneeing her in the eye, letting her walk into a lamp-post, sending a text message about her to her, calling her sister fat, or any of the multitude of terrible things that are well within my social capabilities; anyway after being in her room for a bit I was tired and bored and kind of wanted to go back home; she turned out to be a bit creepy and kept saying things like ‘I’m fucking gorgeous’ and ‘You’re so lucky’ (no). So anyway the following conversation occurred.

Me: So, I think I might head back now.
Her: What? Why. No, stay, stay stay here, you can go in the morning.
Me: No, no. I have to get up early to do an essay.
Her: Stay here! *sits on me*
This continues for four or five more minutes until I decide that the truth won’t work on this crazy broad
Me: No, I need to go back you see. To get. My. … medication.
See I’d had like four glasses of wine, I pretty much thought that this would be fine, she’d accept my excuse and I would be on my merry way.
Her: Medication? For what.
Me: diabetes
Her: Diabetes?
Me: … yep.
Her: My grandfather died of that last week.
FACEPALM but yeah right so how was I supposed to know about that. I mean at this point the romantic mood was gone and she was glaring at me and I couldn’t be like ‘ho ho ho just joking japes’ and I just had to keep digging.
Me: Oh. What sort of diabetes did he have?
I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT DIABETES
Her: Type two. But I assume that you have Type One.
Me: yep
Her: So you’re going home to get your INSULIN?
Me: Yes. *leaves*

Yeah that was pretty awkward. But still not as bad as

The Time That I Tried To Win Back My Ex By Quoting A Speech From Rocky IV
There had been a somewhat messy breakup and I’d decided that that wasn’t working for me and that I would seduce her back using the power of Clever Rhetoric. So I dressed in a nice suit and I showed up unannounced on her doorstep and I took her into an empty room and I poured out my heart and soul in a Speech. I was semi-convinced that as I spoke, passionate music would suddenly fill the room and angels would sing and she would tear up and towards the end she would just passionately throw herself at me and all would be well. Well that was the plan. The first part went ok, like I got her alone in the room and she was listening to me expectantly. Then. I made my main error.

Basically, in the film ‘Rocky IV’, the hero (Rocky) is forced to travel to the USSR to fight Ivan Drago, the huge soviet super-boxer trained on drugs in a fancy gym (Russia!!) who killed his best friend. In one scene Rocky is lying in bed with his son (not gay) and his son is all ‘Oh Dad don’t you get scared that you are gonna die in the ring’ and then Rocky breaks out this tasty speech:

When I'm in that ring, really getting hit and my arms hurt so much I can't lift them, I'm thinking, "God, I wish this guy would hit me on the chin so I don't feel nothing anymore." Then there's another side that comes out that isn't so scared. Another side that wants to take more... that wants to go that one more round... because by going that one more round when you don't think you can… That's what makes all the difference in your life.

So I’m not entirely sure why I thought that this bit of macho father-son bonding would be an appropriate way to win back the affections of an eighteen year old girl. This was about three weeks into my campaign of winning her back through making a nuisance of myself so I guess I was running out of inspirational wooing metaphors but as soon as I said ‘Have you ever seen Rocky IV?’ I realised that this was probably the worst idea I'd ever had. But at this point I was more or less locked into the speech and I just kept speaking. Words kept coming out of my mouth. And as I said ‘we just always have to go one more round’ I realised that I’d been mistaken; this wasn’t the stupidest thing I’d ever said this was the stupidest thing that ANYBODY HAD EVER SAID IN THE HISTORY OF ORAL COMMUNICATION. Like even if some primordial cavemen who just knew the words for ‘mammoth’ and ‘rape’ had been watching me through the window, they’d still be all ‘Damn that’s one inarticulate motherfucker’. It was so bad that I trailed off halfway through, staring slackjawed into space, random vowel sounds dribbling pathetically out of my still-moving lips. I kind of tried to fill the cavernous silence by half-heartedly misquoting some Mint Royale lyrics but at this point I think the game was more or less lost. Girls just don’t get turned on by quotations in the same way that men do.

The Time That I Actually You Know What Let’s Go Back And Talk About The Rocky Thing Some More Because Seriously
I just thought about it and I honestly thing I’d never realised how monumentally terrible that conversation was until now. Like at the time I was running entirely on adrenaline and so I didn’t particularly realise the fallacious nature of using the rhetoric of a punchdrunk brain-damaged ex-bodybuilder as primo seduction material. And I didn’t pick up the non-verbal communication that the lucky object of my affections was sending – a worried expression when I mentioned Sylvester Stallone, slight pity when I tried to compare our relationship to an organised fight, a shying away and a glancing for the nearest exit as my voice grew shrill and tinny when I started to realise that maybe not everything was going to plan. All of these clues as to the true awkwardness of the conversation were instantly lost in the sullen and icy hush that fell over the room when I’d finally run out of steam with my boxing allusion. I mean bless her she tried to save me some embarrassment by halfheartedly saying ‘but um I don’t want to go…one…more…round’ so perhaps I interpreted that as being ‘Job Well Done On The Metaphor Front’. And for some reason when I finally got up and left the room I ended up STILL thinking to myself ‘Well that wasn’t the worst conversation I’ve ever had’. No. It was.

To be honest I suspect that what happened was that my subconscious mind took a step back, examined objectively the outcome of the conversation so far, said ‘Hmm’, piled all of the memories into a metaphorical dustbin, doused them in petrol, flicked a match onto them and nudged the burning mass off a ledge into a dark and forgotten corner of my consciousness. It was such an awful terrible abomination of a social interaction that my brain didn’t even try to process it. It’d be like if you opened a bottle of milk one day and found out that it was full of pustulant maggots and mewling bat-babies with the heads of snakes. You’d just hurl that bottle into the nearest tarpit and never ever mention it again. This is what I think happened to that conversation. I’ve never even thought about it up til this night and I had to actually crawl under my desk and moan in shame and horror. Seriously it was like two years of self-loathing an embarrassment reversed over my spine.

Do you know what I think that I might have repressed post-traumatic stress disorder. Could it be possible that the Rocky Incident is responsible for of my complete inability to form a coherent sentence in the presence of somebody I don’t know? I mean I went from being a happy-go-lucky little elf, merrily telling girls that they looked like newts and speaking at political rallies to shouting at freshers who startle me and making up pathetic lies about diabetes. And the tipping point may well have been about the time when I said “and its like, you have to always go on for one extra round, if you get what I mean”. It was as though my brain was like “Well we gave you the ability to enunciate long speeches and look what you did, you made us all look stupid. This is why you can’t have nice things.”

Fuck I’m going to take a vow of silence.

SERIOUSLY THOUGH.
ROCKY FOUR.
ROCKY. FOUR.
NOT EVEN A GOOD ROCKY FILM
THE ONE WHEN ROCKY ESCAPES THE KGB THEN RUNS UP THE SIDE OF A MOUNTAIN.
DRAAAAAAGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
THERE WERE LIKE SIX MUSICAL MONTAGES.

JAMES BROWN WAS IN IT

IT WAS THE ONE WHEN ROCKY ADOPTED A PET ROBOT FOR CHRIST'S SAKE

More Intellectual Discourse

2008-08-18T00:20:00.010+01:00

I would like to think that my first year at OXFORD UNIVERSITY has changed me for the better, both academically and as a person. After a year living alone with interesting people having my mine blown wide open, I have lost so many of my preconceptions. I’m more open-minded. I’ve stopped judging people based on factors which I do not understand. I now own a Trilby. I eat poached eggs. I occasionally listen to Radiohead [which I sometimes enjoy, usually when I am hungover or asleep, which I suppose means that my appreciation of music has increased exponentially].

Basically what I’m saying is that now I am so much more grown up and mature, I think that my blogging (although I feel that I have outgrown that word too, so from now on I’d like to refer to this as ‘Web-Logging’) should follow suit. So from this post on, I will devote my web-logging to the higher pursuits – literature, opera, the arts. Food for the soul. Perhaps that is what this web-log should be renamed – ChainS-oulFood Zombie. Now I know that this announcement may raise concerns in the (lardy, clogged, emotionally dead) hearts of my vast internet readership, which according to recent statistics is exponentially escalating towards the lofty teens – after all, you guys [I will not flatter myself to believe that any good-looking girls actually have time/inclination to read this] ‘log on’ every day to read my hi-larious musings on gays, racial prejudice, zit fetishists, paedophiles, the lead singer of Crazy Town, and the obese. You live in your parents’ basements and masturbate more or less constantly to poorly animated loli-porn. You poop into socks. You probably wouldn’t enjoy details of my thesis on the heroic poetry of Spenser, or discussions of the role of Christian iconography in The Dream of the Rood, or anything mentioning Philosophy that isn’t directly connected to Harry Potter. And that’s fine, but I think that, as a student of OXFORD UNIVERSITY it behoves me to shine a light of truth into the dark fetid sliming pits of ignorance that people you call lives. But I know that change is hard, and many of you have been so enmeshed in your ruts that getting out of them is terrifying, so, rather like an animal trainer teaches a dog to beg using Pedigree Chews, I discuss fine poetry using the only thing that you idiots understand: bands I don’t particularly like.

I will also use pictures. Like this one, which is of a the English Poet Matthew Arnold:

Now Matthew Arnold is famous for a couple of poems, including ‘Dover Beach’ and another one about how we’re all floating in the sea. I probably could have written a blog about them but couldn’t be bothered to link them to Limp Bizkit or Panic! At the Disco or whatever it is that you retards listen to, so instead I’m going to briefly talk about his ‘Memorial Verses, April 1850’. The poem, a typical example of Arnold’s role as the 19th century’s answer to Emo, is a long sad bit of froth about the death of English Poet William Wordsworth, Arnold’s personal poetic hero. Kind of like how when the lead singer of The Cartoons died in a plane crash and the cast of the Fast Food Rockers released the twelve minute long instrumental version of Witch Doctor on vinyl, it acts as a kind of ‘greatest hits’ of both Wordsworth’s life, as well as mourning the passing of other poetic greats who you haven’t heard of and simultaneously mourning the fucked state of the world. For reference, here’s the poem in its entirety:

GOETHE in Weimar sleeps, and Greece,
Long since, saw Byron’s struggle cease.
But one such death remain’d to come;
The last poetic voice is dumb—
We stand to-day by Wordsworth’s tomb.

… blah blah blah something about an iron age blah blah blah isn’t poetry great blah blah blah I’m going to go cut myself in the toilets, blah blah blah hey guys I just used the word ‘furl’d’ I’m a POET motherfuckers blah blah blah…

Keep fresh the grass upon his grave
O Rotha, with thy living wave!
Sing him thy best! for few or none
Hears thy voice right, now he is gone.

Moving. Very moving. No, it doesn’t matter what Weimar, Goethe, Byron or Rotha are, don’t worry. Now, the few of you who actually read the above carefully, instead of just seeing verse form, instantly panicking, flailing your sausage arms in the air, flicking your Li’l Rascal Motorised Obesity Cart into reverse and careering madly into the huge stack of crumpled Diet Coke cans and empty pizza boxes in the corner of your rooms and knocking yourselves unconscious, you MAY have noticed something a little bit odd about the final words of both stanzas. That is, they don’t really rhyme. The first rhyme progression goes ‘Come -> Dumb -> Tomb’, and the second ‘Grave -> Wave, None -> Gone’. Now I don’t care where you’re from, neither ‘Dumb’ and ‘Tomb’, nor ‘None’ and ‘Gone’ have ever sounded alike eeeever. But so what. It seems in both cases that Arnold has ruined a perfectly nice bit of verse by jammin’ a word in there that sounds JUST about like enough that reading the verse aloud makes you either pause and go ‘wtf’ or, worse, twist the pronunciation to make it fit in with the last line. But its not like it was impossible to think of another rhyme. I mean the man managed to rhyme ‘eternal law’ with ‘reverential awe’, I think he’d have been able to come up with two words that rhymed with ‘dumb’ and ‘none’:

…
The last poetic voice is dumb—
And now all I can do is stand here and hum.
…
Sing him thy best! for few or none
Hears thy voice right, Wordsworth was my number one guy

see, that took me like two seconds of thinking to find rhymes that fit. Does that make me a better poet than Arnold? Probably, but the fact remains that even though MA was a total emo, he was a pretty good poet and the words he actually used, the ones that kind of rhymed, were used for a REASON. And that reason was purely for the effect that I mentioned earlier – the ‘wtf?’ and stumble over the timing and pronunciation of the rhyme. The INTENTION is to do an ugly bit of poetry, and why – because of the context of the line – Matty is presenting a new, bleak world, a world in which Wordsworth has left. The damage of Wordsworth & co’s passing is so great that it has damaged the poetry of the poem itself. I mean I can’t really believe I’ve spent this many words discussing half-rhymes, which are a pretty simple concept, but this is a very nice little bit of poetry and a concept that is seen dotted throughout the English poetic corpus. I could get very clever here and talk about the self-reflexive point of poetry, using the language and expectations of the fabric of the verse itself to support the themes beneath, bloating it to creating a narrative-structural dichotomy with the real meaning floating somewhere in between, but I fear that I would bore you and already your attention is drifting away from this lecture on half-rhymes and back onto Bittorrent to see how the download on those bikini photos of Kate Mulgrew from the beach scene of Star Trek Voyager S2E15 is going, so I’ll stop there and will introduce the MODERN YOOF CULTURE RELEVANCE to all of this, which is what got me thinking about this all over again.

Here is your second picture, which is of Mike Skinner, lead – well I want to say ‘singer’ – of the popular – well I want to say ‘band’ – “The Streets”:

Now Skinner is best known for a couple of songs, including ‘Dry Your Eyes’, ‘Don’t Mug Yourself’ and (sigh) ‘Yeah Yeah You’re Really Fit But You Know It’, but for some reason I couldn’t find a way to tie any of those to the work of Sylvia Plath, so instead I’m going to concentrate on his ‘Blinded By The Light’. In essence, this presents a quasi-Eliotian dramatic monologue (sometimes even I hate myself) detailing the onset of a narcotic stupor; the main character enters a nightclub, pops a few pills, and the rest of the song follows his slow garbled descent as his voice is drowned by the music; this is underlied with a bubbling and dangerous undercurrent of romantic infidelity and fear. Sounds pretty good eh. Unfortunately the song is blighted by some of THE WORST lyrics I have ever heard which makes me wonder whether Skinner was writing it with his feet while hanging from a rubber tyre in a tree and throwing poo at schoolchildren. This is a standard verse:

I hate coming to the entrance, just to get bars on my phone,  
You have no new messages, so why haven't they phoned?  
Menu, write message, so where are you and Simone?
Send message, Dan’s number, where've they gone?  

“Seriously. Could you not think of better words to rhyme with ‘Phone’ than ‘Simone’, ‘gone’, and ‘phoned’ again? I know you aren’t the brightest head in the shed, Mr Skinner, but COME ON”.

^ that was my initial reaction to hearing that verse. Lazy, I thought. Lazy lazy lazy. Lazy Mike Skinner, an accusation that is more-or-less compounded by the more-or-less mentally defective rhyme scheme that runs through the rest of the poem/song. But then I remembered Matthew Arnold’s apparent inability to rhyme anything with ‘none’ and I think – is Lazy Mike Skinner actually Clever Mike Skinner – is the breakdown and repetition in the rhyme scheme an intentional construct built to directly mirror the breakdown of comprehension, paranoia and addled nature of our narrator’s mind? WAS RHYMING ‘DAWN’ WITH ‘SURE’ INTENTIONAL? IS MIKE SKINNER ACTUALLY A GENIUS. IS HE THE MODERN MATTHEW ARNOLD?

DID I JUST BLOW YOUR FUCKING MIND

Ok so maybe that goes a bit overboard but it raises the question of the amount to which we credit our Artists with intelligence. I mean we only assume that Arnold’s half-rhymes were intentional because, you know, it fits in perfectly with the theme of the poem and, whatever, he’s Matthew Arnold bitchiz, he does what he wants. But they could have been a total mistake; he could have been writing his Memorial Verses in an opium haze at 3 in the morning to a deadline to get paid and fund his crack habit and simply didn’t notice them. Equally, Mike Skinner could be a dipshit who thinks that rhyming ‘beer’ ‘idea’ ‘appear’ and ‘here’ all in the course of four lines is really Neat. We have to sort of figure this out for ourselves. Which on the surface is ok because analysis and self-determination of art is an important part of our appreciation of it. I GOT NO PROBLEM WITH THAT YOU HEAR.

Unfortunately, allowing our own –often quite intelligent- interpretations of music or art to ‘pardon’ or ‘interpret’ the mistakes and failings of our artists as either intentional or ironic opens the door for a whole host of abuses, the greatest of which is the crediting of praise to certain singers who probably deserve to be strung up and tortured with weevils for their crimes against music. This naturally raises the third Popular Artist of this post, the musical group who go by the name of ‘Nickelback’, and their lead singer Chad Kroeger, and their song ‘Next Contestant’:

I can’t really be bothered at this point to detail the song, but whatever, here’s the first verse/chorus, make of it what you will:

I judge by what she's wearing
Just how many heads I'm tearing
Off of assholes coming on to her
Each night seems like it's getting worse
And I wish she'd take the night off
So I don't have to fight off
Every asshole coming on to her
It happens every night she works
Is that your hand on my girlfriend?

Is that your hand?
I wish you'd do it again
I'll watch you leave here limping
I wish you'd do it again
I'll watch you leave here limping
There goes the next contestant

Right-o. The rest of the song pretty much goes on like that – there’s some dude who is possessive about people coming onto his girlfriend, people come onto his girlfriend, he gets well angry and beats them up and they leave his girlfriend alone, his girlfriend is well happy, etc, etc.

Now when I first heard this song I thought ‘This HAS to be ironic. They have to be joking. There must be some clever twist; perhaps Chad has BROKEN UP WITH his girlfriend and he’s just a possessive and loserish ex-boyfriend. Perhaps the girl was never his girlfriend and he’s just a crazy stalker, sitting alone in the club night after night taking out his repressed macho pulsations on imaginary fights with combatants who he’ll never have the guts to fight. Perhaps this macho image that he portrays of himself is some kind of reflection on the modern condition of us as Modern Men, emasculated in a world that has moved on beyond us. Hey, this song is pretty good.’

But then I realised something: Nope. I’m wrong. It is literally just a song about Chad Kroeger being a big manly man and beating up guys who attempt to score with his fit girlfriend. That’s it. It’s just another ‘Chad Kroeger is a prick’ moment, which for some reason my inherent trust in the artistic form and my own freedom of interpretation has changed into some deep and meaningful discussion of modern man. But we know that’s not what it is. Chad Kroeger is a cock. Does that make my interpretation any less valid? Of course not, even though there’s not a shred of proof in the song itself to support it. But just because I happened to credit the song with some depth doesn’t mean that it actually has it. And it doesn’t mean that Chad Kroeger is less of a cock.

But this is the problem. I refuse to accept that Kroeger is being clever and witty just because, well, it’s Chad Kroeger, fucking look at him:

what a cock

… but at the same time I kind of automatically credit Matthew Arnold with cleverness for his half-rhymes just because he’s Matthew Arnold bitchez and he does what he wants. This isn’t really a good basis for judging poetry. We can’t really let our personal opinions of the writers interfere with how we understand their work –AFTER ALL, REMEMBER GUYS WE ANALYSE THE POETRY, NOT THE POET sez Wimsatt & Beardsley. And thus by that standard, we have to accept that the chances that Nickelback MIGHT have been being incredibly witty and have written a modern anthem to manhood in ‘Next Contestant’ are about equal with Arnold having intentionally failed to properly rhyme the last words of ‘Memorial Verses’.

…
hmm
…

You see this is why I fucking hate Intentionality. You end up inadvertently proving that Nickelback are geniuses.

'yay'

oh my god no

OMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOM

Okay allow this, fuck blogging about the arts, next post will be about zit fetishists or horse porn or something, ok guys WHO'S WITH ME

The Seven Stages of Failing at Clubbing

2008-08-11T14:53:00.001+01:00

Taken from the last time I went clubbing. Although, these stages being a universal and time-honoured feature of every time I’ve ever been clubbing, this article should probably be better named ‘The Seven Stages of Going Clubbing With Me’.

Stage One: Pride
The stage of Pride is tied fundamentally to two basic concepts: hope and self-deception. These concepts are in turn firmly linked to the act of preparing oneself to go clubbing; getting washed, dressed, and mentally prepared. In my case this usually involves staring at myself in the mirror from different angles for ten minutes. This is important. I’ve recognised that my face and hair and head is a weird shape and, rather like one of those works of art that looks like a big pile of dildoes but when you shine a light on it, the shadow on the wall is a smiley face, they really only make sense from one angle. So anyway after perfecting the angle in the mirror and doing the point ‘n click seven or eight times, I decided the tshirt selection; in this case I’d gone with the old standard green one that has ‘Similes are like metaphors’ written on it in bubble writing hahahhaha. I tell you what, every time I bust it out at the clubs at OXFORD UNIVERSITY (whenever my ‘Algernon Charles Swinburne is my nigga’ one is in the wash) it goes down a total storm and I was looking forward to Rocking The Worlds of the Kingston Ladies with my cute literary joke. I finished the look by slinging on my awesome nike kicks and my slim (NOT SKINNY) jeans, checked myself out, said “I have turned into quite.a.man,” then louchely slinked out of the door into the world – which was, at this point, my oyster.
[nb: I decided not to wear the fedora on this occasion]

Stage Two: Fall
The Fall in this case was the falling of my heart upon , my entrance into the nightclub. I immediately realised that not only had I misjudged the Literary Joke tshirt, but I had also misjudged my chances of being the Coolest One In The Joint. Guys, I don’t want to make excuses for myself but I am afraid that it was indie night. There were hipsters as far as the eye could see, wearing the skinniest of skinny jeans, Retro Lenseless Sunglasses and their dad’s pullovers. A girl wearing a ballgown with a huge flower in her hair and matchbox tattooed on her shoulder wandered past, hand in hand with a man in a jumpsuit and a checked shirt wearing a tiny top hat at a jaunty angle. I just wasn’t dressed right. In the interest of being able to see out of both eyes, my hair was in a quiff and not combed rakishly over my face. I felt a fool. DAMNIT, I thought, why didn’t I wear my Fedora? THIS WAS MY ONE CHANCE TO IMPRESS THE FASHIONATI AND I RUINED IT. My non-hatted head was a mark of shame. I felt that every lazy eye on the place was fixed on me. I needed booze, so hit the bar and nursed a lager. But even this highlighted my Otherness; to either side there were harpies drinking pink drinks that had shotglasses of blue stuff contained within. I felt like Luke Skywalker the first time he wandered into the Mos Eisley canteen. But even that metaphor was a mistake – DAMNIT I SHOULD HAVE QUOTED PROUST OR PERHAPS LAUREN LAVERNE or whoever it is that Indie people like. The situation was dire.

Stage Three: Optimism
I went to the toilet and pepped myself up. Come on Tom, I reasoned. You aren’t THAT offensively dressed. The witty English witticism isn’t immediately obvious on the tshirt and in this light it could be easily mistaken for either a retro advertisement for oranges or perhaps an ironic picture of genocide – two themes that seemed prevalent throughout the club that night. As long as you maintain the Angle, your face looks pretty much normal. And frankly you are taller than many of the midgets in here. Go get em tiger. So that’s what I did. I boldly karate-kicked the door to the toilet into splinters and leapt out into the ravaging hordes of pierced indiekids and venomous hipsters. It was no use trying to play them at their own game, I reasoned. They already have the laid back “Hey babe, whats up? Oh this? It’s just a cotton-weave potato sack that craftsmen in Paris have fashioned into a smock and a tattoo of Beth Ditto’s face on my ribcage, no I don’t support any war for oil, George Bush is Hitler, and the Russians should leave Georgia alone, want to go take heroin and ironically rutt in my WV Camper van?” schtick all tied up; no, it was time for me to pick up women in my own idiosyncratic style.
After ten minutes of standing blankly in the middle of the room hoping that a few girls would just come up to me and start chatting I realised that my own idiosyncratic style sucked. But I was still not defeated. I was still optimistic. So I bit the bullet and strode confidently up to the most confused and vulnerable looking blonde I could find and said hello. She said hello back. And we Got Chatting. And I realised that I had done pretty well. DING DONG she was a ballerina (ballet student, whatever). And blonde. And pretty fit. And she was studying dance and art at some uni I’d not heard of which meant that frankly my credentials as an English Student at OXFORD UNIVERSITY was enough to blow her little mind. And I tried, I really REALLY tried to seem interested in what she was saying about dance class and hand positions and I did a cute ‘Hey, show me a ballet move’ thing and she laughed and I was like yessssssssssssssss i rule at flirting at girls in nightclubs maybe I won’t die alone after all I AM A FUCKING PIMP, maybe I can find a fitter girl than this one to talk to

Stage Four: Disappointment
The Ballet Dancer’s friend came along and said ‘We are going dancing’ and I was like ok and then they left and didn’t come back. I considered going to find her, or just following her about for a bit smelling her hair and dancing near to her an ‘accidentally’* brushing her skin but then I thought ‘hey, you’ve already got to talk to a beautiful ballet dancer for a while, just be happy with that, it’s better to aim high and fail than to have to talk to any boring ugly girls’ so I was kind of pleased with that. Later on I saw her talking to a fat guy. A bittersweet ending. I had another drink.

Stage Five: Denial
The denial in this case is the denial of the steadily encroaching fact that the night is wearing on and nothing massively fun has particularly happened. This stage can also be called “Pretending that I’m really only here for the music”, in which I go onto the dance floor and am like ‘Oh yes, awesome, MGMT is on! WOW DAFT PUNK! AND NOW THEY ARE PLAYING MIA THIS IS LITERALLY THE BEST NIGHT OF MY ENTIRE FUCKING LIFE’ and I madly dance ironically (I think this is best achieved by pretending that I’m having an epileptic fit), do bodypopping, the robot, hop about, hug everyone, leap into all the photos people are taking, hug my mates, grin a lot, high five, sing loudly along with the chora, etc, etc.

This stage lasts at most for four minutes.

Stage Six: Despair
I know that I’ve reached Stage Six when Stage Five wears off and I wander off the dancefloor and then go to the toilet, even though I don’t need to, for no reason other than that I can’t really think of anything else to do. Also, some variation of the following internal monologue is observed:

Oh my god I am going to die alone. Why is that guy so happy? He looks like a fucking frog yet he has that girl hanging off him. No, wait, she’s a dog Damn all of these smiling happy people. The thing about clubbing is that you need to go with a large group of people you already know, preferably fit single girls who want you. But I don’t know any fit single girls who want me? What we need is for loads of people to break up with their boyfriends and then I’ll just be like a rebound wall. Alternatively I’ll just wait until I’m well famous and important and then I’ll be beating off the girls with sticks. But what if they only want me because I’m rich and important and as soon as they leave they sell their story to the News of the World or something? I’d never truly be able to trust any girl who I got with while in a nightclub if I was rich and famous at the time. This is a terrible catch-22. Actually, no it’s not, I’ll just have a string of one-night stands with beautiful but shallow women and then marry my beautiful but sane and down-to-earth PA who knows exactly what’s good for me and will make a good wife. Yes.
I actually had this conversation with myself the other nightI’M NOT EVEN RICH AND FAMOUS YET

Stage Seven: Giving up and searching the floor around the bar area for loose change
I found like three quid on the floor the other night, it was awesome

Moral of the story: drink more, learn how to do coin tricks, be indier, wear the fedora

*!!!!!!

This post starts off a bit intellectual but don't worry

2008-07-19T15:51:00.012+01:00

For our Paper 1 (Theory of Criticism) course at OXFORD UNIVERSITY we do this module called ‘Authorial Intention’. The basic point of the module is to decide the extent to which an author’s intention in writing a piece can be used to either decide or prescribe our understanding of it. To be honest, this seems like a bit of a DUHHHHHHHRETARD question at first – fo'example, Thomas Hardy wrote his 1913-14 poems directly after the death of his wife, and they seem to be about a narrator who has lost somebody close to him, so it seems to directly follow that the poems are biographically about the loss of a loved one. No Shit Sherlock. But on the other hand, giving the Biographical Imperative of the author the Full Power of God to decide on an evaluation of a piece can be dangerous – after all, it opens the door for a bunch of over-entitled nerds clutching greasy biographies in their sweaty smegma-clotted hands to utterly shut down any imaginative reading of anything.

“I think there’s a definite Freudian reading to Hamlet’s relationship with his mother…”
“HURR SHAKESPEARE DIDN’T EVEN READ FREUD YOU SUCK YOUR THEORY SUCKS”.

Of course if we go the entirely opposite way and argue that every possible reading of a text is as valid as any other, well that just opens the door for a bunch of over-entitled nerds clutching greasy copies of The Waste Land in their sweaty smegma-clotted hands to make up all the bullshit rubbish interpretations of a text that they feel like.

“HAMLET IS ABOUT GEORGE W BUSH’S WAR FOR OIL POLONIUS IS CHENEY HUZZ.”
“What the fuck are you talking about.”

… and frankly, I think the one thing that Web 2.0 has shown the world is that the last thing we need is for the uninformed opinions of Normal People being given any sort of credence or public standing. Of course the real answer to the question lies somewhere between the two poles, but apparently the Paper 1 syllabus doesn’t appear to support the “Meh… it depends who really cares anyway” school of thought (WHICH I MYSELF AM A MEMBER OF), and so the weight of scholarly approval appears to have been thrown by the “Intentional Fallacy” theory purported by the critics Wimsatt & Beardsley:

Wimsatt & Beardsley: Fucking Lads

… who basically decided that we should totally ignore everything about the author – his intentions, political viewpoints, personal history, biography and social standing – and concentrate simply on pure analysis of the text, while at the same time trying not to be a total dipshit. And to be honest I more or less agreed with those two serial-shagging coke-fiends, especially over the pussy-boy waste-gash “Validity in Interpretation” shit of Ed Hirsch:

Hirsch: Full o’shit

It seemed to make sense. We judge any work of art – be it poem, novel, short story, painting or song - entirely on its own merit. It shouldn’t matter if the writer is black, white, gay, female, drunk, adulterous, from the sixteenth century, donkey-fucker, neo-nazi satan-worshipping doll-fancying pederast wolf-furry, or Stephen King. And that was the argument that I put across in my exam, an exam that netted me a very respectable 68% ☺. And that was the argument that I have followed in the majority of my reading thusfar. However. A discovery has been made in recent days, a discovery so shocking and unexpected that it, to be honest, ROCKED MY SOUL TO THE VERY CORE. What discovery? A photograph of the lead singer of the late nineties band Crazy Town.

I have been a closet Crazy Town fan for a while now. At first I simply enjoyed their megahit club anthem ‘Butterfly’, but in recent months have progressed into a fuller understanding of their poignant ‘Revolving Door’, is a subtle and underexposed elegy to the alienating affects of a lifestyle of excess and hedonism. The unnamed narrator boasts of his life of sexual conquests “I live a life these playa haters // Would love to be living. // Since a kid, I’ve been surrounded // By beautiful women” and his own material wealth, identified with the sexually charged image of the ‘revolving door’ of his fabulous mansion – “a door that spins. // Goes in and out, // Out and in, // ‘Round and ‘round again.” Yet, despite his seemingly utopian life, the narrator hints that it is essentially hollow – “Still something’s missing” … “I’m suffering from a lonely heart condition”. It is a song that is plays with wildly pro- and anti-feminist conceits; on one hand our narrator tortures and plays with his sexual conquests, by, for example, dropping “hot wax on yo’nipples, while on the other he realizes that a woman is the only thing to save him from his current existence of penury and grimace. It is truly a song of contrasts.

Now. I thought the singer (our narrator) was a black dude. Call me racist if you want but if a dude (“homie”) is using any of the following words in a song in non-ironic relation to himself:

1. playa haters
2. flyest
3. skills
4. sprung

as well as claiming that he don’t need to brag about the way that he’s hung (cuz he got the 'skills to get the flyest girls sprung' whatever that means), I DON’T KNOW BUT I tend to think that he might be a fellow brother like Jesse Jackson. But like I said, Wimsatt & Beardsley etc, it shouldn’t really matter, we analyse the song on its own merits, blah blah blah blah look at the picture of him:

for fucks sake

This man is not black. He’s pomegranate. Despite his attempt to look hard by squishing his boobies really hard together and shuffling up his shoulders he still looks a bit like a girl. He has ‘Make Aubrey’ inked in a curly cursive script across his chest as well as a safety pin in one of his nipples and tribal tats across his ribs. I mean I’m not even really insulting him here I’m literally just stating facts about his physical appearance. However on closer inspection he does look a little bit like a ghetto troll doll [just my opinion you are all welcome to compare him to whatever retro children's toys you want].

Having seen this picture, the song is ruined. It is now impossible to reconcile this twisted little frog-man with the well hung super-shagging Shifty Capone motherfucker that the lyrics of “Revolving Door” promised us. He’s like the antithesis of a COOL BLACK PLAYA. He’s like a little weedy virgin (real name: Bret) who cries himself to sleep every night and then repeatedly wets the bed and gets his nipple piercing rusty and then his nipple gets infested and puffy and his entire boob gets all filled with swelling and badness and infection and his mum has to pick him up early from the recording studio and take him to the doctor and the doctor’s all like ‘You’ve not had a tetanus jab for some time, young Mr Town’ and his mum’s like ‘Yeah you’re right doctor, in fact I just remembered that he hasn’t even had a prostate checkup for years’ and the doctor’s like ‘cool well I can do that here’ and then he gets bent over the table and anally probed by a doctor with big sausage fingers for twenty five minutes while a team of acne-ridden student doctors take notes and photos with their camera phones and giggle and then he accidentally shits himself right there and then in the doctors room and has to go all the way home with a big brown stain on the back of his underoos and frankly even though it was horrible it was still the most intensely sexual experience he’s had since that time he accidentally kissed his cousin at a family reunion when he was twelve and then had an erection and brushed against his grandfather by accident and everybody saw and thought that he was gay and his parents made him go sit in the SUV and he didn't even get any cake WORST BIRTHDAY PARTY EVER.

post-shitting self

Basically what I’m saying is that it robs the song of some measure of its credibility. Frankly I can no longer listen to it without laughing. Which is a shame because I quite liked it before. I guess this highlights the danger of allowing the Biographical Imperative and extrinsic facts of the author to interfere with interpretation of a work of art.

IN CONCLUSION WIMSATT & BEARDSLEY WERE FUCKING RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING. Crazy Town have also proven the worth of my degree.

Seriously guys just look at him

shifty? the only thing you are shifting is not your records from the shelves of record stores ooh ice burn

In next week's blog I will analyse the impact of Jazzy Jeff on the changing attitudes towards feminist criticism of post-colonial texts

ps hi jason paul

Ok seriously

2008-07-08T00:33:00.002+01:00

I haven't blogged for months, this is getting kind of pathetic.

Am going on holiday tomorrow for a week. To Scotland. Yeah I know, Holiday in Scotland lol. When I mentioned it to my bank manager today, she pulled a face and said 'Ugh, that's not a holiday' which More Or Less Sums It Up.

Anyway I will probably have something interesting to say when I get back but at the moment I am tired so I bid you good night.

I wish that I was black, gay, or from a war-torn country

2008-05-31T17:36:00.009+01:00

In recent days I have written at length about my irresistibility to girls. I mean, to be honest that topic has been done to death and really I don't think anybody's going to want to argue any more either way about it. But for some reason, as time scrapes on, its becoming increasingly obvious that being charming and good looking (with great hair and dreamy eyes) is starting to wear a little bit thin. Yeah yeah I know that a lot of people would KILL to be like me and I'm well aware of the gnomic "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth"; I am in no way ungrateful for the lavish gifts that God has already bestowed upon me. However, at the same time I am equally aware of the phrase "Never rest on your laurels" and, to be honest it's becoming painfully clear to me that in order to continue to function at the same high level of general desirability in this new and exciting world that we live in, I'm going to need some sort of gimmick. Just a little personality quirk or USP that'll really make me stand out of the crowd of handsome, intelligent and wittily stubbled men that form my peers.

At first I considered acquiring a serious drug addiction like my friend Skaghead Steph. After all, if I'm hooked on heroin I can be excused for doing all sorts of crazy and kooky behaviour. I could wee myself in the bar then throw up on the barman and then get permanently banned from Filth and all people would say is "He's skating so close to the edge, it's ripping him apart in an explosive downward cycle of orgiastic excess". And they'd look at my shit poetry and would be all like 'That is DEEP, you can see the pain ingrained in every word'. However I was put off from this plan mostly because of the terrible state that my friend Skaghead Steph is in right now; I mean her poetry was never great but its now positively awful. And I dunno, she smells pretty bad (all of the veins in her arm went septic and so she had to shoot up directly into her vagina which is now even more fetid and pitlike than it was when she was just Penis Safari Steph). Plus the last I heard, she gave up on getting a proper education and instead went to FILM SCHOOL... I'm not sure if I'm hardcore enough to tear apart my life quite so completely.

So anyway that gimmick got throw into the bin, as did "Purposefully becoming disabled" (I suspect that I would quickly tire of walking past attractive girls, falling over and not being able to get up, then screaming 'DAMN THIS DISABILITY WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME GOD' at the sky and punching the wall so hard that my fist breaks), "Reading Poetry for Fun While Writing On A Typewriter in Starbucks" (poetry is Not Fun and neither are typewriters) "Emo" (that Black Parade shit scared me) "Scientology" (apparently we don't actually get given ray-guns in order to incinerate the Fair Game which basically soured the whole deal for me) and "Tofu".

Basically after some serious thought I settled on one of three possible conversions. Pretty soon ladies and gentlemen I will Officially switch into one of the following three lifestyles: BLACK, GAY, or FROM A WAR TORN COUNTRY.

A few thoughts on each, followed by some pro/cons:

GAY
Pretty standard to be honest. There are a couple of gay people at my college and I reckon it's probably the easiest lifestyle to take up (probably because its the only one that doesn't involve some form of extensive surgery and/or needing to retcon my entire life). I don't think my parents would mind. In fact my mum asked me if I was gay when I was younger, mostly because I'd turned fourteen and had yet to show any interest in women whatsoever. I WAS A LATE BLOOMER OK MUM???!?!??!? Mostly though it seems that the gays at Oxford can do no wrong as everybody treats them like Cute Novelties. Like every time we see one of the gays pulling, all of the girls coo and say 'THAT'S SO CUTE' like they're ducklings or something. I could do with some of that action. Every time I've kissed anybody at Oxford I end up getting shouted at. NOT FAIR.
Here are some other thoughts that I can't be bothered to adapt into prose:

Pros

Hats. As a lame white person I've never been able to wear a hat without feeling inadequate. However, once I'm gay I'll be able to flounce about wearing berets and little bellboy hats and sombreros and people will be like "oh my god you look so gay- but wait a second you are gay! That's an intentional look! Your sense of fashion is so unique and awesome!'. I could also finally get away with showing up at bops with the nipples cut out of my tshirts.

Ditto with tights, short shorts, scarves and leather jackets.

I'd have an excuse for avoiding vaginas. I just don't trust the way they move ok?

I reckon it'd really help with getting girls. They'd be all like 'Oh, Tom's no bother' and would be happy to get changed in front of me ask me to bra-fitting sessions and stuff, and then I'd be like "YOU CHANGED ME letshavesex" and they'd basically be forced to have sex with me for the bragging rights

Simon Amstell would want to be my friend.

I'd be allowed to cry in public and everybody would just think I was expressing my emotions and would go 'Aww' instead of taking me aside and asking me to leave the nightclub.

Cons

Kissing another boy? Ew gross NO THANK YOU.

I think that I'd have to go and watch the new Sex and the City Film. I can't imagine anything worse than watching those four vapid bitches flouncing around on screen having sex with things for two and a half hours. SERIOUSLY GUYS ITS TWO AND A HALF HOURS LONG. IT'S AN HOUR AND A HALF LONGER THAN THE LION KING. I'd rather die.

It'd probably in some way affect my long-term career trajectory of being Pope.

Elton John would want to be my friend.

Probably AIDS or something.

BLACK
Being black is kind of the connoisseur's choice of personality gimmick in Oxford. Plus I have spotted a gap in the market; there are very few Properly African People in the college and as such my prediction is that I would automatically become the 'Black Opinion' in every single topic of debate. Like I can imagine two of my friends (or 'homies') having a discussion about which actor is better: Mike likes Robert De Niro, but Jim is a fan of Al Pacino. So then I roll up drinking my Cherry Daquiri and they're all like "So Tom, which actor is better?" and I'll just be like "Martin Lawrence you fools" and that'd be the end of that. This is a definite step up from the current situation in which my point of view is ignored in terms of people with more interesting gimmicks (short, female, foreign). Being black would definitely tip the balance of debate back in my favour and it'd mean that I'd be much more likely get my own way in restaurant choice, movie selection and nightclub categories (KFC, Big Momma's House and Anywhere That Plays Jive).

Pros

Hats. As a lame white person I've never been able to wear a hat without feeling inadequate. But finally I'll be able to break out that fedora or perhaps a beanie or something and not only would nobody bat an eyelid, within a week everybody else would be wearing the same thing! awesome

I could grow an afro and store those retractable pencils in it

I'd automatically become good at hiding at night

I'd finally non-ironically be allowed to say things like 'sup' and 'bro' and 'hood'

Eminem would want to be my friend

I would gain fame and popularity by being automatically included somewhere in every single photograph in the College's yearly prospectus (hanging out with my good friends Asian Person in Wheelchair, Attractive Blonde Girl and Midget).

Cons

I don't think I'd be allowed to listen to Morrissey, Simon & Garfunkel, ABBA, Andrew Loyd Webber, Damien Rice, My Chemical Romance, Sufjan Stevens, or Prussian Blue any more. And I'd have to swap my MacBook for some spinnaz or something.

I'd probably have to give up my membership to Stormfront.org (and we're only two weeks away from the big rally just outside Bicester aw maaaaaaan this sucks)

My penis is already pretty big, to be honest I'd be scared of tissue tearing if the rumours are true

A sense of vague disappointment if the rumours turn out to not be true

If I've understood my black culture right, I will definitely die third if a serial killer shows up and starts murdering people. The other option is that I'll come out of a disadvantaged neighbourhood and will work really hard at college but then will be tempted back into gang culture after my best friend (who will have a one-noun name like "Stringy" or "Clippers") gets murdered in a drive by over some drugs or something, and then it'll be up to my ballet-dancer girlfriend to save me from definitely Wasting My Life. Either that or I will become a mysterious and semi-magical old man and will end up doing a voiceover. As far as I can tell, these are the only three career options open to me.

Sterotypes

WAR TORN COUNTRY
I'm specifically thinking a shithole in Easten Europe here, like Kosovo or Sarajevo or somewhere like that. I'm imagining that all of my family got killed by militia or something but I'm so obviously intelligent that I get hired to be the General's lead biographer but I mess that up and somehow escape to be transported to Oxford in the back of a container truck with a load of chickens with only a battered suitcase and a small wallet filled with grainy overexposed family photographs which I have to get out, mutter a prayer over, then kiss before going to bed every night. I suspect that my torso (heavily muscled after months of stone-breaking and log-moving at the labour camp) is covered in shrapnel burns, whip-scars and home-made tattoos, and I'll have a mind that's both disturbed but also desensitized by the whole hellish experience.
Basically I think that this sort of upbringing would really allow me to really smoulder sexily. I'd also probably be able to pull off stubble (and possibly even a small moustache) in a way that doesn't make me look like a tit. I'd definitely not give away my whole history at once but instead would constantly affect a thousand yard stare that turns all of my fellow male-students into mere boys in the presence of my vast life experience, and transforms the girls into hunks of putty to be moulded by my pliable but callused hands. I'd then just occasionally drop hints of things that went down (perhaps when drunk, which I would do only through the liberal use of vodka which would be bought for me by other people). Like I'd just mutter 'This music, the banging, the sceaming, it reminds me of the guns at the bank of the Drina...' and then I'd stare into space a bit before jerking back into existence. Man that'd rule so hard I would literally the most Interesting person at the college.

Pros

Hats. As a lame white person I've never been able to wear a hat without feeling inadequate. However I think that, as a war-ravaged refugee I'd be pretty much allowed to wear whatever I wanted on my head (flat cap, paperboy hat, one of those big shapeless things that the mouse wore in 'An American Tale', helmet) and nobody would say anything. They'd just be Happy I Was Still Alive.

It's basically a carte blanche to just be a total dick. I could punch annoying people and then say 'I'm sorry but the way that you laughed reminded me of the lead Inquisitor back in the camp, sorry my friend'. I could throw chairs at bouncers and everyone'd be "Post traumatic stress". I could run naked through the quad screaming anti-semitic sentiments and the general consensus would be 'Cultural differences'.

The Oxstu/Cherwell would send authors to to write articles on my life and I could chase them away with a broom.

I know I've already mentioned the thousand yard stare but seriously, I think I'd just use it in every possible situation. Don't know the answer in a lecture? Thousand yard stare. Haven't done the essay? Thousand yard stare. Girl says 'I really like you, what do you think about me?' Thousand yard stare, motherfucker.

I could automatically win any British Foreign Policy/War debate by leaping wide eyed onto the table and screaming I WAS THERE YOU FUCKERS until they admit that indeed, the Faulkands was probably not a good idea.

I could automatically win in the 'gallows humour' stakes. Like somebody would make a joke and I'd laugh uproariously and say "That reminds me of the time a guard burnt me with red hot wires and then snipped off one of my nipples... I guess you'd have to be there lol" and everybody would laugh really nervously.

Cons

It'd be an effort sorting out guarantor forms if I wanted to rent an appartment in my second year. My friend Signy's parents are rich and live in a well established country and the Estate Agents still made a huge fuss about it. I can't imagine what they'd say if both of my parents lay in a mass grave in the Vučitrn woods and my passport was for a state that no longer technically existed.

Constant flashbacks would probably get annoying.

The Daily Mail would Not Be Impressed With Me and would probably write a front page article about how I was coming to their country and taking their PPE placements

* * *

Hmm. Well we can see from above that the Gimmick Market is one that is both saturated, and filled with both positives or negatives. It's really hard to decide. Do I become Gay? Or Black? Or From A War Torn country? Oh god I don't know. And the more I think about this issue, the more it dawns upon me that maybe - just maybe - I don't need a gimmick. Just maybe people look up to and like me for Who I Am, and not just because I do something crazy like always wear a silly tie or speak with a really deep voice or have sex with men. Maybe, just maybe, there's one option left to me...

Just Being Myself

...

no

i'll start a band

A List Of Reasons Why Girls Find Me Irresistible (abbreviated)

2008-05-14T18:47:00.003+01:00

I’m getting tired of these girls mobbing me all the time at nightclubs and cinemas and in the street. It’s both exhausting and annoying. But for some reason all of my close male friends do not share this viewpoint. In fact from where I am standing it almost sounds like they are ENVIOUS. ‘How do you do it, Tom?’ … ‘Why do all of these beautiful and nubile girls just throw themselves at you?’ … ‘Teach us your ways, Tom, PLEASE!’ At first I didn’t know what to say, but after a bit of thought I came up with a list, which I present in an – admittedly edited down – form here:

My Personality
I have a really fucking awesome personality. Seriously, if I had to make a graph of all of the compliments I get daily, compliments for my personality would definitely form the largest part of it. It really does seem sometimes that people just can’t get enough of me. I don’t complain. I can’t help it and neither can anybody else. It’s just a fact. I’m simply somebody that people Want to be with. They just tend to go up to me and just… bask. Meeting me in the street is the sort of thing that will put a smile on a guy’s face for hours afterwards. You know that saying ‘It doesn’t matter what you look like, it’s your personality that counts’ ? That shit is totally true. Of course…

My Looks
… are pretty fucking bingo too so frankly I have all of my bases covered. I’m forward thinking like that.

My Muscles
I’m not gonna lie, after all of the weights I lift and rugby I play, at this point in my life I am pretty fucking built. I can bench press two and a half cows and when I flex my pecs all of my clothes explode (a bit like the Incredible Hulk except less green and more Gorgeous Bronze). Case in point: the other day I asked my gay friend (who is cool) who he thought was better, me or my friend Max. To be honest it was a rhetorical question but I just needed it answered so I could humiliate Max a bit (he was getting pretty uppity and needed his spirit crushed a bit). Anyway my friend was thinking aloud and he said ‘Well, Max has a nice personality, but Tom has muscles’. THAT WAS A GAY GUY TALKING. Gay people spend a lot of time at the gym and so usually have muscles of their own but he still preferred mine. It was basically akin to him saying ‘I like Tom’s handlebar moustache, leather cap and crotchless jeans’. I have the gay vote. I think that the facts speak. For. Themselves.

My Chat-Up Techniques
The other day I was in our college bar and for some reason it was filled with beautiful women. Like, as far as the eye could see there were leggy blondes and tousled looking brunettes and a few obligatory ugly redheads to make up the numbers. This is not to say that our college bar is not USUALLY staffed with the finest female talent this side of Brasenose – indeed, the girls who I know who are likely to read this blog and recriminate me for my blatant chauvinism are all unparalleled beauties – but this night was particularly impressive. Frankly my eyes were like saucers as I wandered through. But then I realised that all of the girls were talking to boys. And the boys were trying really hard to be charming and to make the girls laugh. And they were succeeding. I went up to one and coughed quietly to get her attention but I don’t think she heard so I returned to my table and nursed a beer and rethought my game plan. And then I started to re-evaluate myself and my own chances with these girls. And I realised that being funny and charming to amuse girls is not my forté. It is not something that I am adept at. I really have to be On Form to be funny in a format that other people both understand and find amusing and 'get'. Usually I have to explain the joke and then, y'know, they're still LAUGHING pretty hard but it's not the same. And I thought to myself – these women, with their long hair and their bounteous breasts and their loose ways – they are not worth it at all. They don’t deserve to talk to me. So I stood up on the table and shrieked NONE OF YOU ARE EVEN WORTH MY TIME! and threw my packet of crisps on the floor and stomped angrily out of the bar. I saw on the looks on their collective faces that my ‘Play hard to get’ technique had hit home hard. It was one of shock, dismay and – yes – pain.

My Hair
IT IS CURRENTLY WORKING FOR ME. I realised that washing it makes it go all fuzzy and lame so I tend to just let grease and sweat build up on it until I can mould individual hairs like sculptors’ wire. Once it starts snapping off and blood begins to ooze from the base of my follicles, THEN I know its time to give it a cheeky going over with the Pantene Pro-V. Currently I have a wicked little quiff/fauxhawk thing going on which accentuates the rapidly spreading thin patches on the side of my scalp. I was thinking about straightening it the other day but it's a bit short at the moment so perhaps that plan will have to wait for a few months until it gets to shoulder length. And then I might tint it pink. Perhaps then I'll be 'cool'.

My Face
It currently smells so good. In the holidays I had loads of dry skin on my cheeks and nose. It was all itchy and peeling off and to be honest I basically resembled The Mummy except without his bandages. Anyway I took one look in the mirror and ran bawling to my Mum and she let me use her facial moisturiser, which sorted the problem right out. And then when I went back to college she bought me a little bottle of it. It’s pink and had ‘Oil of Olay – for beautiful skin’ on the side, but I peeled of the label and now it’s just a pink bottle of moisturiser. And now I smell like my mum. I am told that girls like that.

I am really cultured
I am one of those rare people who knows how to cut right down to the bare bones of any cultural morsel and get to the real MEAT inside. For example, I recently read popular cult novel “Trainspotting”. When I finished it I was like ‘I am so not going to do heroin’. It’s like the time I read “Germinal” and swore off coal mines for a whole month.
Also I have THIRTY FIVE Radiohead songs on my iTunes and I swear I will get round to listening to them and appreciating them any day soon.

My Eyes
Yeah, if I had to rate my eyes on a sliding scale going from One to Dreamy, I would be forced through necessity to rate them as ‘Dreamy’. I have been told that gazing into their transparently opaque depths is akin to sinking into a deep azure pool of the finest honeyed wine. Last term, the Cherwell voted my eyes to be amongst the Dreamiest in all of Oxford. This made news headlines back at home – “LOCAL BOY HAS DREAMY EYES – HOUSEWIFE SWOONING UP 40%”.
Also my eyelashes are pretty fucking badass too.

My Charity Work
I am a very charitable person. Today my friend Matt who is the president of some charity or other in Oxford asked me to help him make a poster advertising some sort of week of fun for charity. He gave me some sample pictures and then left me to think up some poster ideas while he went to get us some cokes. Imaginative and kooky guy I am, I arranged all of the logos at random across the page, and then wrote ‘thirsty? Some African kids sure are!’ at the top, and then a bit of clipart of a tap, and then ‘yay water’ and then at the bottom ‘GIVE US YOUR FUCKING MONEY’ in HUGE red letters. Like the letters were so big you couldn’t even see the picture of the tap. It was badass but for some reason Matt didn’t think it was suitable because he isn’t as forward thinking as me. So then we made a better one and he was like ‘Thanks Tom you’re the best’ and we high fived. I was so pleased with myself that I went for a walk. On my walk a guy from Water Aid came up to me and started giving me chat about African kids dying of thirst. I was like “I’ll stop you there,” and explained that I was assistant co-director of a major pro-water charity in Oxford and thus had already contributed more towards the whole water issue that morning than he would in the entire day. Then he tried to get me to sign something and I facepalmed him, screamed ‘NOT. INTERESTED’ then went to Sainsburys to buy apples.

That X Factor
I can’t explain this. I guess I just have it. You can’t fake that shit no matter how you train and practise. The women obviously just see something in me that they find irresistible. Perhaps I give off a compelling musk.

I have loads more reasons (I mean I could probably write a small novel on my ability to wink roguishly) but I'll leave that there for now.
...

Are you a woman? Do you know any women? Do you have any idea why girls find Thomas so irresistible? If so, leave a comment and perhaps Thomas will breathe into an envelope and send it to you.

The Following Five People Can Fuck Off

2008-05-02T11:16:00.006+01:00

^ see the title for the general gist of this post.

1: Martin the Liberal Democrat
There have been some local elections going on. To be honest, I don't tend to follow politics - I'm a student and thus have more pressing things to worry about, such as Why Have All Of My Clothes Shrunk Three Sizes Oh Man Stupid Washing Machine, but this is the sort of thing that you can't really ignore. I don't know who (if I did, then that fucker would be right on this list) but somebody has put me on some sort of list which means that my mail box is clogged up with about seventeen trillion electoral manifests. Usually I carefully read all of these to build up an accurate picture of the pros and cons of each candidate's policies (throw them directly into the bin) and, having thought through the issue, make an informed and well-considered decision as to who to go to vote for (either forget, or only vote to cancel out the vote of somebody voting for an Evil Party, like the BNP or Kilroy). However, one electoral manifest caught my eye, and then proceeded to annoy me so much that I was physically compelled to go out and vote just to be awkward and annoying. It was from this guy called Martin and took the form of a scanned hand-written letter (so it was meant to look like he had written it specifically to me). Martin was exhorting me to vote for his pal Steve who "really does care about students". I didn't know you could now make electoral sheets for your mates but anyway. What tipped me off to the utter cuntworthiness of Martin's letter was really the first line:

"Hiya,
Like me, when you think of May Day you most likely think of all-night drinking, Magdelen College Choir and idiots throwing themselves into the river."

lol u r totally rite! Idiot. Firstly... "Hiya"? This indicates to me that Martin, far from being a "2nd Year Lawyer", is in fact a thirteen year old girl. I bet his room is filled with posters of Orlando Bloom and Troy from High School Musical, and he has those shiny stickers all over his mirror, and he's a girl. Secondly, he definitely doesn't immediately associate May Day with all-night drinking. I mean, I'm a total lad but I don't associate May Day with all night drinking. To be honest, I don't think that Martin's even ever stayed up all night drinking, unless you count that one time he had two Archers-and-Lemonades and then stayed up til 2 in the morning watching a High-School-Musical-Princess-Bride-Mean-Girls MARATHON and eating a whole packet of Haribo Tangfastic (but not the sour rings because the sugar hurts his teeth) and talking about BOYS with his girlfriends Sally and Mischa and then practising kissing on his hand and bogling to Aswad in front of the mirror with a hairbrush as a microphone. Secondly, I really really hope he didn't just try to be my best friend with his little quip about 'idiots throwing themselves into the river' because right now I can think of only one person who should be thrown into a river (that person is Martin).
The other thing he did that annoyed me was he assumed he knew my political stance (lol students all h8 the government) and wrote the damn letter like he was giving me some little confidential tipoff about the political stock market - the final sentence was a little PS about how the Lib Dems and Labour are the only ones with a chance, and so 'Voting Lib Dem is the best way to give Gordon Brown a headache this Thursday'. I don't want to give Gordon Brown a headache. He seems like a Thoroughly Nice Chap:

Anyway, the upshot of this letter is that I actively decided that I was going to put on some clothes, get up and go out to vote for somebody else, just so that I was damaging the Lib Dems as much as possible.
Seriously, he started his letter with 'Hiya', what a complete twat.

The Greedy Hobo
On the way to the voting hall to vote some hobo came up to me and asked for some money. Now usually I don't give money to the homeless, mostly because there's no immediate return on my investment, but for some reason I decided to treat this guy. Perhaps it was because he looked pretty clean and there were no obvious running sores. Perhaps because the prospect of voting had awakened my political saliva glands. Anyway, I dug about in my pocket and gave him 50p. Pretty pretty generous, if you ask me, and I was expecting a little bit of gratitude - I mean the other night I gave a homeless woman 30p and she nearly had an orgasm she was so grateful at my philanthropic nature. 'You, sir, are an angel' she probably said, a tear running down her leathery cheek as she sank deep down on one knee and kissed my offered hand. 'Not at all, peasant, I exist not as a master to take out, but a servant to put in' I proclaimed beneficially, casually waving my silken handkerchief behind me as I minced off amidst a cloud of fine perfume. So I was expecting this hobo to at least humbly take off his flat cap and wring it between his hands in subservient deference to the obvious class distinctions between us, and the huge leap of generosity it had taken for me to jump off my feathery parade horse and bless him with a charitable donation. Instead he looked at the 50p with obvious disgust and said 'Boss, not gonna give me a quid?'.
Now I appreciate him calling me 'Boss' but frankly I wanted to ask for my 50p back. Nobody seems to get that people give to the homeless in order to see the looks of shocked gratitude on their dirty little faces. That's the return on the investment. This guy wasn't playing by the rules. Greedy. And because he wasn't satisfied I'm going to take the £3 I was going to donate to a homeless charity and instead spend it on a novelty salt cellar. HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT. Fucker.

Facebook Status Girl
I think maybe two or three blogs ago I mentioned how I detest people who have COMEDY FACEBOOK STATUSES that are all themed. Especially people who use the theme to whinge about something. And people who talk incessantly about their gap years. Anyway, this is the shit that I've had to put up with for the past three weeks from this girl:

Katharine watched sunset whilst chainsawing down trees in the Aus outback,and needs her fella. 9:18am
Yesterday
Katharine can now drive a tractor and wants her fella. 10:06am
April 28
Katharine is on a ranch and wants her fella. 11:30am
April 27
Katharine sunburnt and wants her fella. 10:36am
April 26
Katharine went to Steve Irwins zoo and wants her fella. 11:49am
April 24
Katharine is in Brisbane and wants to be with her fella. 1:28pm

Firstly it's spelt 'fellow': "Katharine is in Brisbane and wants to be with her fellow". Secondly fuck off.

The Hugging Couple in the Dining Hall a few nights ago
I know that the title said that there were only five people who could fuck off, and this one features a couple which is technically two people, but seriously, these two operated so successfully as one entity that I'm fairly sure that there must be some biological symbiosis going on, at least at a molecular level. Anyway I was waiting in the queue in the dining hall and these two knobheads rolled in. Now you all know me, I am a respectful person who understands and will fight to the death to defend the love of two third year students, but at the same time, there's a line to be drawn in the sand. And these two crossed it so many times. Firstly, they were hugging - AND WALKING ALONG - like this:

The man's arm seems remarkably long and bendy in that picture but it gets the idea across: the guy was like embracing the woman from behind, holding one hand clutched to her crotch, while she held his other hand tight to his side, allowing them to whisper sweet nothings into each others' ears at will. I'm as big a fan of public displays of affection as the next guy but I won't pull my punches here, they looked like a fucken crab, sidling along the hall with that horrendously smug 'Look at us, we are in a fucking RELATIONSHIP' look that drives sane people into fits of apoplectic shrieking rage. Honestly, unless he was blind and she was his seeing-eye girlfriend (which I, to be honest, find unlikely) there was no need to walk along like that. What was especially annoying was that they ended up standing directly behind me in the queue. it seemed that the guy hadn't quite sorted out his 'girlfriend steering depth perception' because they were squished right up against me so I could hear all of their inane whisperings which were by the way IN FRENCH. At this bit I was furious and starting to take out my impotent anger on all and sundry around me.
For whatever reason, the hall happened to be filled with random asian people, including the chap who is known far and wide amongst me and one of my friends as 'Slow Asian Man'. The queue is designed so one person gets served at a time, and for some reason this guy in a little bobble hat takes absolutely hours to do anything: select his meal, choose a desert, pour custard on his sauce, pay for his meal (WHICH HE ALWAYS DOES IN CASH FFS JUST GET A LUNCH CARD) and everybody else has to just sit patiently waiting for him to sort his life out. Anyway I was behind him (that's right, slowy mcbobble hat on one side, the crab couple on the other) and so by the time we got to the custard I was fuming with barely compressed rage. I mean, the crab couple ordered exactly the same thing and shared both of their food ON THE SAME PLATE AND TRAY jesus christ. Anyway the chinese guy was taking roughly fifteen hours to pour custard on his pudding. Ahead of him everybody else paid and left and stuff started to bottleneck. Unfortunately, that's how the queue is built and it only works if you accept that the retard will always hold you up. So I was waiting patiently for him to sort his life out, when THE CRAB COUPLE SKIPPED AHEAD OF ME. That's right, they left the queue and rejoined on the other side of the chinese guy, paid (in change, naturally) and left to eat their food.
I was so angry I shat myself.

Hitler
Seriously. The Holocaust? You complete knob.

6 Degrees of Annoyingness

2008-04-08T23:29:00.001+01:00

Here is just a short list of some things that I have found annoying in the last month. There are six of them, befitting the title of this post.

1: The Olympic Torch Relay Protesters
Look at me! LOOK AT ME!!! I’m being topical. In the news: The relay of the Olympic torch through London was beset by angry protesters who were annoyed about Tibet or something. Things reached a head when ex Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq, who was carrying the torch at the time, was accosted by an angry gentlemen and knocked sideways. The torch toppled to the floor and was nearly extinguished while the angry gentlemen was unceremoniously bundled to the floor and stepped on by some policemen. God, when I saw that footage I was furious. Firstly – and really I’m going to use the platform of this blog to make an open plea to future protesters – leave the Blue Peter presenters out of it!! I can’t emphasise this enough - Konnie hasn’t done anything to deserve such terrible treatment (unlike that dastardly Mark Speight) and to be honest once the hosts of Blue Peter get dragged into the hostilities, it’s the beginning of a slippery slope. I mean, sure, you can push Konnie Huq if you want, she’s small and Asian, nobody’s gonna protect her – but what you gonna do when Zoe and Andy bundle into the fray with the dog, and then Richard Bacon jumps in, coked up to his eyeballs and frothing at the mouth, and frankly before you know it Anthea Turner will roll up – and once Anthea Turner rolls up you might as well sweep all the chess pieces off the board because IT IS GAME OVER, MAN.
The other reason I was disappointed was in the way that the police handled the demonstrators. Clearly none of them had ever tussled with a dog over the possession of a slipper before. If you act like the torch/slipper is really precious and stop anybody from getting near it, of course the protesters/excited dog are gonna want to come and take it! They’ll think it’s a game. What they needed to do was just let go of the torch like they didn’t care, let them have it and act totally unimpressed; after five minutes the protesters would’ve either lost interest and given it back, or gone off to chase after some other equally shiny global symbol of peace. To be honest I’m not sure what the protesters were planning on doing with the torch once they got hold of it; the plan seemed to be ‘grab the torch then leg it’. Seems pretty poor for such an important political issue.
Frankly I think they should take the politics out of it altogether and just make the object to steal the torch just because it’s a fun challenge and it spoils all of the hard work the Nazi Party put into setting up the torch relay in the first place. I mean, I’d quite like to completely hijack the Olympics but for no reason other than to be a knob. Like, I’d bribe all the right people, hack into the security systems of the big chinese stadium, ninja rappel in, take over the intercom system, disrupt the opening show and then just swear really crudely:

SHITCOCKERY WANKSTAIN
CUNTY BLOWJOB MASTURBARATHON
SPERM-ON-A-NUNTASTIC ANALBOOTS

…etc, until somebody dragged me away to a death camp. That’d be sick.

2: People who use a full stop at the end of their sentences in MSN/Facebook conversations to make a point about how serious they are being
At some point along the line I’ve stopped using any form of standardised punctuation whatsoever in my Facebook/MSN Messenger communications. I don’t know why, I guess it reflects what a laid back and relaxed guy I am in Real Life. This includes not adding full stops at the end of messages, and as the majority of Facebook messages don’t need to be more than three sentences anyway, my writing style tends to be in the form of:
“this is quality 24 Season 2 The Musical
especially good is that you can listen to all the songs online
Kim vs The Couger
Hahahha”
(for example)

Anyway I’ve noticed that everybody pretty much uses the same style, except for certain people who, when they’re annoyed, add a significant full stop to their sentence, which I suppose has the purpose of either clipping it or drawing it to your attention. For example, if I was to make one of my many hilarious jokes, and one of these people happened to get offended, they would respond with

that’s really funny Tom.

NOTICE THE FULL STOP THERE. That specifically implies that not only does the writer not think the joke is funny, they are also made actively angry by it; this implication is missing from the alternate version:

that’s really funny Tom

in which the ironic implication of ‘I don’t think that’s funny’ is still present but it is nowhere near as annoyed – the lack of punctuation allows the reader to come to his/her own conclusions as to the feelings of the writer, allowing a much more ambiguous and thus narratively satisfying Facebook wall post. It’s like typing ‘Hahaha.’; the implication of the full stop is that the laughter is cut off suddenly, or curt, or entirely lacking in authenticity.
Anyway, now I’ve explained precisely what I mean by this issue, can everybody please stop it. Basically this use of the IMPORTANT FULL STOP is the grammatical equivalent of eating sushi by pounding it into a sludge with your fists and then licking it off the little roundabout thing NOT VERY SUBTLE AND NOISY AND IT ANNOYS THE OTHER USERS OF THE SUSHI RESTAURANT AND THEN I’M ASKED TO LEAVE.
Basically, stop trying to cleverly use the English language to subtly get across your message, you aren’t nearly clever enough, to back to your lolcats and porn.

3: 11-13 year olds who are more fashionable than I am
Now this isn’t hard, it’s generally accepted that I have the dress sense of a guy in a coma. There was a period (lasting about a year and a half) where I would wear nothing but heavy-duty hiking boots, green kharki trousers, a black ‘All Your Base Is Belong To Us’ tshirt and a gigantic grey fleece. Luckily those days are long gone; now, instead of being blissfully innocent of all concepts of fashion and style, I seem to have instead acquired a basic appreciation for what fashion does and its intended purpose – I just have no real conceptual understanding of how it works. To put it another way, instead of gleefully driving past any sense of style as I did in yesteryear, now I simply ram into it at full speed, mangling it and myself in the process. It’s pretty heartbreaking to watch me in a clothes shop – my furrowed brow as I examine rows of pointy shoes and colourful dress shirts shows that I understand what they are well enough to know that I will never fully co-habit this world comfortably with them – when I purchase a pair of shoes from a shop, it’s like a retarded kid writing ‘I just want to be like all the other children’ on his letter to Santa (case in point: I just realised that as I type this I am wearing a tight brown and pink striped polo-shirt, purple boxers, big white socks, and huge flowered board shorts).
So anyway the other day I was walking through a ‘mall’ looking for a shoe shop that sold mauve Converses, and I suddenly came across these two little girls. They must have been eleven, twelve at the most. Now I make it a habit of staring intently at small prepubescent girls in public and therefore I was immediately struck by the clothes they were wearing. One was in some exquisitely fitted black blazer thing, with these skinny jeans and pointy shoes, and the other was rockin’ a big furry coat with some polkadot dress and strappy shoes. They both had their hair permed or curled or whatever the devil it is girls do to their hair, and it was at this point that I realised that they were both staring at me with what can only be described as disgust. Seriously I wasn’t even that bad that day – striped grey/black hoodie, grey jeans, white shoes WHAT WAS WRONG WITH THAT? Whatever, they both stared at me in a kind of ‘get out of my sight, you fashion abortion’ kind of way. Although thinking about it, it could equally have been a ‘leave us alone you creepy staring weirdo’ look. Whatever, the point is they were miles more fashionable than me and they were only eleven. They didn’t even have boobs yet (I looked) and so dressing up nicely was essentially a pointless endeavour, and frankly I’m annoyed at God for giving those eleven year old girls such perfect fashion sense when it’s taken me until the age of 19 to realise that tshirts with League of Gentlemen quotes on them were never cool.

4: Famine, disease, war, injustice, prejudice
Fucking famine. It’s well annoying. Disease, war, injustice and prejudice are shit as well. Man, if I had to rate all the annoying things I’ve seen in the last month, I gotta say that all of those are probably top of the list of annoying things. Seriously. So bad.

5: Skins – bolism
^ it sounds a bit like ‘symbolism’. Clever eh. Anyway I’ve been a bit of a closet fan of Skins – Cool Channel 4 Show About Teenagers – for a while. And as the second series grinds to its conclusion, I’ve been getting more and more annoyed with it, to the point that at the end of the last episode I was literally shaking with compressed rage. The reason? The stupid fucking surreal symbolism that filled the last 20 minutes. I know that the point of Skins is that it’s a bit of a trippy show that gets inside the heads of the characters and shows them their own unique interpretations of the world but seriously – Cassie has a picturesque breakdown when her friend Chris dies (spoiler) so runs all the way to New York, meets a handsome photographer (whose name I am currently incapable of typing without shaking with rage so perhaps I’ll get to that later), lives in his room for a bit, has a few cryptic conversations about his photography, goes to see a band, runs off, returns to his apartment, turns over the mysteriously backwards photographs in his apartment, sleeps in his bed with him before he mysteriously vanishes, leaving only a cryptic note and an apple, which she takes a bite of, and then runs back to Bristol and sprints through the streets… this is of course all taking place after the scene in the exam room when Cassie and her teacher have an improbably cryptic conversation about love and self-harm, then do a little boogie to some funky disco music then the headmaster comes in and joins in then there’s a mysterious taxi driver and STOP IT. STOP IT. FUCK OFF.
I mean, I have forgiven Skins a lot – and I mean A Lot – in the first two series. I mean, a lot of the time it’s like it’s been written by a guy who once caught a documentary on Radio 4 about teenagers and thought ‘hey, these guys sound cool, I wonder what wacky adventures they get up to?’ at best; the narrative arcs and dramatic relationships between various characters are murky and badly-drawn out – often they just randomly have sex with each other to move along the plot; it veers wildly and unevenly between sub-Carry On/Benny Hill innuendo and super-serious Issue Based Drama – such as the classic Russian episode in which Anwar and Maxxie face up to the inherent cultural clash of a stringently Muslim boy being friends with a homosexual before they all sneak into the house next door to get with the sexy girls, get chased by her angry husband and are rescued by the Russian army, I wish I was making this up – but still it’s been oddly enjoyable, in a kind of ‘what the fuck is this shit’ kind of way. But the shoddy SHITE that I saw last night made me seriously want to reach through the screen, grab the writer, and shake him to death. This ‘is it real, is it not?’ shit was partially entertaining in the first season when it had a real narrative point – Cassie imagining text messages from Sid, and her imaginary Taxi Driver friend was both interesting and upsetting. But at least two episodes in this season have been entirely composed of dream sequences – not including all the ‘this gold coin is lucky’ bullshit in Jal’s episode and crazy deus ex machina Effy and I’m sorry but it’s too fucking much. The reason that people watch this show is for the characters – not for the screenwriter’s sub-Goldman ‘Hey look at me I got a third in my English degree at Slough Polytechnic but I still know what a metaphor is, hey look its all surreal and the apple that Cassie bites is symbolic of her coming to understand that she has to face the outside world – it was given to her buy a guy called ADAM, remember? ;)’. Jesus just thinking about it actually makes me angry. She was given an APPLE by a mysterious guy called ADAM. AaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAARGrgh I’VE ACTUALLY BEEN ANNOYED AGAIN BY HOW TERRIBLE THAT WAS its so painfully, PAINFULLY excruciatingly badly written and conceived it’s like some kind of ‘Dummy’s guide to analysis of poetry’ especially when you read the internet message boards that are just BUZZING with stupid fucking fifteen year olds pushing their square lenseless glasses up their noses and eulogising about how DEEP and CLEVER the whole turgid affair was: ah, ‘The apple clearly relates to the Genesis Tree of Knowledge’ ‘Oh really? I thought that the fact that it was a reference to the Big Apple’ ‘Hey guys I think the apple reflects her decision to start eating again and take control of her life’ and of course there’s always one retard who’s like ‘How did she even get to New York without her passport THIS SHOW SUCKS?’ and then some other dude comes along and is like ‘I didn’t get it guys, I want to know what happened to Chris’ and the others are all like ‘PSSHAW you just don’t GET it it was far too DEEP for you just go back to watching GRANGE HILL until you’re ready for some adult discussion about imagery and surrealism’ at which point my brain heammorages anger because it’s so fucking STUPID, THERE IS NOTHING TO GET YOU RETARDS, the emperor is wearing no clothes, the screenwriters are just playing with the fact that you dickheads like to pretend to appear so much smarter than you actually are by acting like you give a flying fuck about the use imagery when really all you want is to see if Michelle and Tony end up screwing and whether or not Jal’s gonna keep the baby, but NO, INSTEAD WE GET CASSIE FUCKING AROUND WITH A GUY CALLED ADAM WHO GIVES HER AN APPLE.
A CHARACTER CALLED ADAM GIVES HER AN APPLE, I STILL HAVEN’T GOTTEN OVER THAT, FOR FUCK’S SAKE, FUCK OFF, TS ELIOT AND IBSEN AND DICKENS AND ANYBODY WHO HAS EVER WRITTEN A WORD IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARE SPINNING AROUND IN THEIR GRAVES SO FAST THEY’VE JUST DUG A NEW SUBATLANTIC TRENCH, JUST SHUT UP, STOP WRITING DRAMA FOR TELEVISION, JUST FUCK OFF, DIE IN A DITCH YOU WASTE OF TIME

STUPID FUCINSTPU
adam
ASDFSDFHSDFJSAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaa

6: A Fat Kid Driving a Car
I saw him when I was driving home from work. His face annoyed me for some reason.

Freaks, perverts, paedophiles, morons, children

2008-04-05T15:25:00.004+01:00

I suppose that it should come as no surprise to the longrunning readers of this blog (all three of you) that I have seen some pretty bad shit on the internet. Ask me about these things that I have seen on my long nights of surfing and I’m likely to adopt a thousand yard stare and drift off into my own private hell, a dark and shadowy level of consciousness filled with exploding fecalities, mutilated flesh, obsequiously prolapsed orifices and lavishly-detailed .gif animations of shiny-transparent furry pig-creatures swallowing terrified anthromorphised lion-men. While graphically masturbating with their tails (Seriously - damn you DeviantArt). And although all of these examples of human degradation are both horrifying and dehumanising, there is some primal corner of my brain that is still, for some reason, subtly impressed. Just as Victorian circusgoers paid their tuppence to go and throw roasted chestnuts at caged siamese twins, sometimes I find that a completely scientific examination of the perversions fetishes and weirdness that the sewers of the internet nourish can be both enlightening and illuminating. I mean, conventional standards of morality and decency, and hygiene, and ‘Oh Jesus Christ why the hell are you doing that’ may censure the tub girl, or the cup ladies, or the anus man, but at least these people are suffering for their art. They had a dream, and they followed it through to the very end. Sure, that dream may have been to vomit into each other’s rectums, but who are we to judge them for that? Aren’t all human beings, in their own special way, just as unique and perverted as that guy who has the HIV+ fetish?

The answer to that question is no. The majority of human beings fall far short of the achievements of those donkey-jerking self-castrating incontinent Olympian Titans who rule the darker, stickier corners of the web. The majority of human beings are boring. And personally, I find these people - the boring wastes who fill the forums and the discussion boards of the net - to be a thousand times more depressing than the goatses of the world. Because really, they don't add anything. They don't push no envelopes, they just repeat boring opinions and spout pointless bullshit about their favourite anime characters. These are people with nothing to offer anybody. People who just write words to fill space and get a bit of attention. Attention whores with none of the verve and style of the lemonparty.org chaps, people who think that just by flashing a bit of boob or poorly-worded political comment they can suddenly gain internet stardom. People who say LOOK AT ME I'M UNIQUE with nothing to offer.

Naturally, if we follow the line of breadcrumbs left by attention whores and pointless commenting on worthless issues, we of course naturally end up on Facebook. More specifically, Facebook groups devoted to people posting photographs of themselves for public consumption. There are loads of these floating about, mostly with names like ‘Man I love boobs’ or ‘Hott Grrlz post ur pics here’. Of course, these groups swiftly become choked up with white trash and fat fucking women posting horribly posed pictures of themselves with lots of cleavage showing, for example:

NB: Before you look at the pics: I wasn’t sure of the legality/privacy issues of using photographs of random people, some of them possibly minors, without their permission, for my own amusement on my blog. I think it’s ok, but just to protect my own ass, I replaced all of the faces on these people with that of actor Matthew Broderick:

Why Broderick? Firstly, I think he’s a good actor, ok? Secondly he’s handsome enough that even if you don’t like the pictures, you at least get to look at a lush man. Thirdly I think that appearing on this blog could give his career the boost that it undoubtedly needs. Anyway here are some pictures so you know the sort of thing I am talking about:

;)

This one was titled ‘me and muscly men’

o hay i didnt see u there

Pretty awesome, huh? All the boobs you could possibly want, coupled with Broderick’s handsome visage = prime masturbatory aids. Anyway, I’m sure that all of you are wondering what exactly I was doing cruising a ‘Girls post ur cleavage’ group on Facebook at two in the morning. The answer of course is that I was reading the comments posted to the photographs. They are literally some of the funniest shit ever written, and come in two lolsome flavours:

1: The girl in question/her friends saying OMG UR SUCH A SLUT LOL NICE BOOBS!11!!
2: Random creepy guys doing the internet equivalent of wolf whistling

Naturally my personal favourite is the creepy guys, who always seem to either be German or African, and who always write stuff like DAAAAAAYUM and I WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOU NAKED PLS and TAKE IT OFF! etc, etc. you know, the sort of stuff that an eloquent retard with a boner would say to Carmen Electra. It’s especially good when the girls get flattered by these inane comments and comment back which can often lead to some of the most inept and socially-retarded flirting ever known by man.

This brings us neatly to the tale of Mike and ‘Kelly’. Mike and Kelly are a beautiful internet couple that came together over this picture of Kelly, posted on one of these groups:

Pretty hot, huh? The resulting conversation, a seduction of almost Shakespearian proportions, I have transcribed below, with the addition of my own comments in brackets:

Mike wrote: (12:14am)
beautiful

[You can’t see her face in the above picture, but, err, not really. She has like the most HURRish face I’ve seen for a while, plastered onto a round bowling-ball head thing in combination with supremely shiny face and horrible squinty eyes – basically she looked like the Michelin Man ugly turtlefaced retard sister]

Kelly wrote: (11:26pm)
thank you very much... i try i guess... :D
love always & forever,
♥kelly♥

[First point: She clearly doesn’t try that hard, she’s a mess. I winced when she appeared on the screen. Also her actual Facebook picture is a snapshot of her taking a photograph of herself in a mirror with an inane grin on her face HURR. Also she appears to end every single one of her facebook wall posts with some combination of ‘love always and forever, HEART Kelly HEART. die]

Mike wrote: (11:31pm)
lol. you're so cute. : ]

[no she’s not]

Kelly wrote: (11:34pm)
thank you again... hey so how old are you??
love kelly♥

Mike wrote: (11:48pm)
14
you?

[Woah woah woah. Woah. Re-re wind. Stop. Let’s just stop this for half a second and do a tiny little bit of GCSE science.

AN EXPERIMENT TO CONFIRM MIKE’S REAL AGE
Aim: Decide whether or not Mike is actually 14
Hypothesis: Mike is 14 as he says so
Experiment: look at Mike’s facebook profile picture
Result: vvv

Conclusion: Mike is not 14 ]

Kelly wrote: (11:49pm)
oh my goodness.... :D lol im 15... :D your a cutie.
love always & forever,
♥kelly♥

[:-|]

Mike wrote: (11:51pm)
lol. thanks. so are you.
yeah.....birthday in august, then i'll be fifteen.

Kelly wrote: (11:54pm)
thanx lol my sisters birthday is in august too... lol
awesome! lol
love always & forever,
♥kelly♥

Mike wrote: (11:59pm)
haha. that's cool.
so how are you?

[At this point, Mike’s one-man Creepy Guy party is unfortunately crashed by Frank and Eric who totally muscle in on his girl, bastards]

Frank wrote: (12:56am)
marry me?

Eric wrote: (1:37am)
sleep with me?

Hurray for Frank and Eric! They know what they want and they do not fuck around. I think that Mike was annoyed at them and so left because there were no more messages between the two lovebirds after that. Alternatively they moved into a more tender setting – that of the facebook inbox. Who knows? Mike could be pounding Kelly’s tender vag into lasagne with his massive greasy schlong right now. Hmph.

Frankly I don’t know who I am more depressed by in this situation. On the one hand you have Mike, who is literally the World’s Crappest child groomer. Not only did he not bother to change either his profile picture OR educational information to make it look like he was, in fact, fourteen, he also chose some monumentally ugly girl to chat up on the internet (with chatup techniques that were frankly sub-Oli-Gill). I mean for fuck’s sake, at least ineptly seduce somebody partly hot. I had the same problem with those guys who kidnapped that Shannon girl. Seriously, all the children in the world and you want to have sex with that? Pathetic. So frankly Mike has made a laughing stock of the entire previously serious issue of child abduction and internet grooming.
But on the other hand, we have Kelly who ACTUALLY FELL FOR IT. And on reflection, I’m actually more disappointed in her. Seriously what a dickhead. Recently, there have been all of these worries in the media about children posting too much personal information about themselves on Facebook or Bebo or MySpace, and it seems that the main response that the children give is that ‘It’s a case of common sense, children are a lot more self aware than adults give them credit for’. No they’re not. If Kelly’s any indication, children are fucking stupid. So she’s ruined Facebook for everybody under 18. Whore.

In conclusion: children should get the fuck off my internet. Stupid, boring and unimpressive people should get the fuck off my internet. In fact, the only people who should be allowed ON my internet are freaks and weirdoes. At least the Meatspin.com guy knows exactly what he’s doing.

I discovered a button that lets me delete people from my Facebook friends list

2008-03-28T21:19:00.008Z

I don’t know why I hadn’t discovered this before. I mean, it’s not like it’s something I haven’t longed to find for months. I’ve often wished that I could press a button and make certain people vanish into the ether, and although my rudeness, inability to show empathy, lack of interest in personal problems, slovenly appearance and raw pulsing apathy is often more than enough to put people off, there are some unwanted specimens who persist in following me about and telling me all about their uninteresting social lives. On Facebook. Now I know that once somebody is my friend on Facebook, they can’t help it that every single minute detail of their uninteresting and pointless life appears on my News Feed. They can’t help it that every morning I’m forced to scroll through the fifty billion pictures of them pretend-lesbiangrinding their fat greasy mates at Oceana. It’s not their fault that I’m obliged to endure every ‘I LOVE YOU!!!XXOXOXO’ comment that they post on their equally hambeastish best friends’ walls. And it’s certainly through no wrongdoing on their behalves that from time to time I get quality insights into their lives emblazoned across my computer screen in the form of photos like this:

I DON’T KNOW EITHER OF THESE PEOPLE.

I understand that there’s no problem with any of this. I understand that there are people out there other than me who have fun and rewarding lives and to be honest, good luck to them. Good luck to all of you with your adventures and your parties and your drinking and your active social lives. But the thing is, I just don’t want to know about them. There are some people who are interested in the human zoo, in widening their understanding of the world, seeing things through the eyes or camera lenses of other people. Not me. I’m quite content with pretending that Lauren Furbank (seriously who are you and why were you ever on my friends list?) doesn’t exist and never did. But for the longest time I didn’t know how to stop these people from spreading their shit onto my Facebook account and I had to put up with clicking ‘ignore’ every time Verity or Emily posted another photo album full of blurry off-centre shots of them drinking Bacardi Breezers. But that was just a temporary cure. Sure, I was shooting the Viet Cong guerillas, but I was coming no closer to reaching the communist slanty-eyed supercomputer.

I guess there was the pride issue to face too. When you first join Facebook or MySpace, there’s a temptation to garner as many friends as possible, to go on a kind of Pokemon-style collectathon. Except instead of Snorlax it was Cassie and instead of Alakazam it was Rose and instead of Scyther it was that boring anorexic girl from Guildford I met at that party in 2006 and instead of Ekans it was Tiffin Girls. It was like, the more friends I had, the more of a man I was. It was a caveman pissing competition between me and my friends to become as Facebook popular as we could possibly be and I’m sorry that it ever got that far. And I paid for it. I swapped quality of friends for quantity. And then I paid for it with the reams of crap I had to sift through every day to get to interesting gossip about people actually gave half a shit about. It all got too much. It nearly tore me apart.

But then came the fateful day when I realised that I’d gone too far. It was after seeing four announcements that a series of people who I didn’t know were breaking up with their boyfriends who I didn’t know, then idly clicking on the aforementioned people’s walls to read several sympathetic wall-posts from more people I didn’t know, and then getting so depressed I read a wall-to-wall between two people who I didn’t know discussing going out to Oceana to get wasted. That was rock bottom for me. I was like THIS IS IT I’VE HAD ENOUGH and in a fit of mad rage I scrolled to the bottom of the profile and for the first time saw that strange and beautiful button ‘Remove from friends’. My eyes were opened. Dare I do it, I asked myself. Dare I no longer be privvy to Jessica’s most intimate and heartfelt thoughts and personality? Dare I cut myself off entirely from the source of gossip about Fit Dave and her mum who is like totally a knob? After a minute’s hesitation I bit the bullet and deleted her.

:o

And do you know what? It felt GREAT. Cathartic. Exhilarating. There was a mad rush of adrenaline that flooded my system and turned me, just for a second, into a God. I was almighty. I was banishing people from my life with a click of a button. I was taking matter and reducing it to nought. I had the power to say to somebody ‘I have no interest in ever hearing from or speaking to you ever again, Begone from my sight and from my life’. For those of you who haven’t experienced it, it is a Rush. Not only does it cleanse your Friends List – it cleanses your life. It’s like burning a diary, or hurling a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow into a furnace or mincing a corpse or shovelling a puppy into a furnace. I AM LEGEND you scream as you the sensations grip you and you go mad with power, dancing through the galleries of your social life, ripping a painting down here, torching a small book of annotated drawings there, throwing ancient statues to the floor and kicking over exquisitely carved models of ex-girlfriends and old acquaintances into shards of easily-discarded memory. Then you pull yourself away from the Friend List and fall back, panting, exhausted, feeling both cleansed and exhausted. Post Coital.

Anyway, just to keep you all informed, I’m about to go through my list again (you understand, this isn’t the sort of thing that can be achieved in one deleting session, there are a LOT of worthless people on my list) and I’m going to be deleting the following subspecies of people. Don’t say you weren’t warned:

Anybody who I don’t know. And when I say ‘don’t know’ I mean ‘I look at your name and as much as I wrack my brains I can’t remember ever meeting, or speaking to, or hearing about you, and I can’t picture your face, and then I look at your profile picture and I don’t know who you are, and you aren’t even hot enough to keep around as eye candy’.

Anybody who has stupid ‘themes’ to their statuses. Like writing them with square brackets or adding an ‘x’ at the end of them every time. Yeah very clever, fuck off.

Anybody called Georgie (or any orthological variation thereof). I’m sorry but I’ve never met anybody called Georgie who was worth knowing and it’s frankly put me off the whole name.

The above also goes for anybody named Callum.

Anybody who uses their profiles to keep me updated in intricate detail about their cyclical social lives, eg: ‘Susan can’t WAIT for tonight!’ ‘Susan is getting ready!’ ‘Susan has the best friends ever last night was AMAZING!!’ ‘Susan is bored’ ‘Susan can’t wait for tomorrow night’ ‘Susan can’t wait for tonight’.

Anybody who in any way references Soulja Boy in their status.

The majority of people who answer the 'Political Views' section of the profile seriously as though it'll make some sort of point.

Anybody with an ill dog who keeps me updated on how ill the dog is, whether or not the ill dog is going to make through the night, the relative illness of the dog compared to how ill the ill dog was yesterday, and predictions as to how ill the ill dog is going to be in the upcoming days or weeks.

On the same lines as the above: Horse Updates. No. Just no.

Anybody who joins political/environmental Facebook groups, esp. those who seem to believe that having a group list full of 'Save Darfur' or 'Come on guys stop Global Warming' will make a mosquito's precum's worth of difference.

Friends of friends who I have met her a few times, and I have nothing against, but frankly they’ve had ample opportunity to prove to me that they have the capacity to write a status message that isn’t entirely inane (‘Catherine actually has a side to cheer for in the boat race now..bizzare’ … ‘Catherine is wondering what it is with people called ben and the wednesday adams joke..’ … ‘Catherine is truly surprised how much she enjoyed the children of bodom concert’ … ‘Catherine is singing 'rabies mouse', to the tune of spiderpig, with a 10 year old. sweet. (does he foam at the mouth? yes he does, he's RABIES MOUSE’… etc). Sorry love, you didn’t make the grade. Come back next year.

Anybody with an emo Facebook status. Wow, you quoted either a song lyric, or a poorly written bit of poetry about how the world is a dark splintering hole that fractures your blood oh shit I deleted you by accident.

Anybody who uses their status message to advertise a shit club night – this is usually accompanied by using an @ sign to replace the word ‘at’. IT DOESN’T LOOK COOL, YOU PRESS THE SAME NUMBER OF BUTTONS AND FRANKLY THE @ SIGN IS MORE EFFORT TO TYPE.

Anybody who keeps me constantly updated on their awesome Gap Year. Fuck off, I hope you catch AIDS and tigers eat your shoes and monkeys wee on your face.

People who continually upload photo albums that are literally 40 photographs of the same eight faces in rotation at the pub, club, park, etc. Hey wow another photo of you Hannah and Dave? Sick, I'll add it to the collection.

People who constantly upload photo albums that are just them and their bezzie mates messing about on Photo Booth. Wait, you say there’s a fun warp feature that makes you look like you have two faces? That’s pretty cool I guess, but what I’m really craving is 55 pictures of two people exploiting every single possibility of two-facedness while pulling silly faces. Can you sort that out for me? You CAN? BRILIANT you’re deleted.

Jews. Only kidding, I didn't have any Jews as friends in the first place. Only kidding, I love all races and creeds equally.

People who have the same moronic posed smile in every single photograph. Ditto for anybody whose profile picture is themselves facing to the left and pouting. Ditto for anybody whose profile picture is a clearly posed, carefully lit and made-up glamour picture of themselves.

Offensively Ugly Girls who are just a little bit too fat but haven’t quite caught on to how fat they are and so still think they aren’t too fat to wear flesh coloured boob tubes and stick their sweaty armpits all over my facebook pictures.

Anybody else who invites me to that fucking Facebook Forest group.

Anybody with more than seventeen applications on their profile (esp. two or three forms of 'Superpoke'). This isn’t MySpace you fucktard. In addition, anybody with that application that loads a picture of every single one of their ugly beatnik friends in one long block that takes the page twenty minutes to load but also ironically means that it’s impossible to delete them as friends because the ‘Remove from Friends’ button keeps moving down as the individual lines of photographs load ONE BY ONE. Cunts. AND THEN THEY INVITE ME TO JOIN THESE APPLICATIONS. I CLEARLY DON'T WANT TO HAVE A VIRTUAL FISHTANK. AND IF I WANTED TO BE SUPERPOKED BY HANNAH 'THROWING A COW' AT ME THEN I'D LOOK UP THE APPLICATION MYSELF. DON'T KNOW YOU. LEAVE ME ALONE. FUCK OFF. FUCK OFF. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE.

Negative people who bring the whole communal spirit of the social network down.

Righto I think that should cover it for the moment. By the way this list is not exhaustive and there’s a good chance I might delete you just because you stupid added-time-multi-chin face pisses me off. Also I only delete a few people at time to stop myself from becoming drunk on power so there’s a good chance that even if I haven’t deleted you, you fit into one of the above categories. Consider yourselves incredibly lucky. You’ve managed to escape the sword of Damocles this time. You’ve been spared the executioner’s axe. Now is your second chance.

Clean your acts up or next time I’m coming for you.

* * *

OMG GUYS WE HAVE A LATE ENTRY INTO THE LIST OF PEOPLE WHO I WANT NOTHING TO DO WITH ON FACEBOOK: THIS GUY

Who the fuck is "Gavin" and why did he just poke me on Facebook? He isn’t even one of my friends. He isn’t even friends with any of my friends. Why is he poking me. Plus he lists his Religious Views as ‘Girls Aloud’. What a knob, get away from me.

FrankBlackFrankBlackFrankBlackFrankBlackFrankBlackBLACKFRANCIS

2008-02-12T01:00:00.000Z

I saw Frank Black live in concert the other day. Yes. THE Frank Black, of Pixies fame. For those of you who aren’t intimately acquainted with me (losers), Frank Black of Pixies fame has pretty much been my musical idol for the past five years. I have a Pixies poster on my wall. There’s a stencil of his face taped to my bookcase at home. His songs constantly burn themselves into my iPod. I have a picture of his face (drawn in the style of Bill Patterson) tattooed onto my shin. He got me through teenagehood. So to say that I was excited would have been an understatement. I was essentially running back and forth through the corridors of Oxford, squealing ‘FrankBlackOhMiGodFrankBlackImGonnaSeeFrankBlackHolyShit’ like a little piggy, for literally days on end*. I counted down the days on my calendar like a small child waiting for Christmas, or possibly a Frank Black concert. Every other hour I would phone up my friend Ella. “Is it time to see Frank Black yet?” I would ask. She would respond with some drugged up drunken mumbles, pass out over the phone line and hit her head on a lamp. That would be enough to tell me that it was not yet time to see Frank Black – for even ELLA would stay sober for Frank Black. I was sure.

The day arrived. Doors opened at 7. At 6:50 Ella was drunk (we know Ella is drunk when she has a drink in her hand and is waving her arms about in the air, slurring, and doing her ‘sexy face’ which basically resembles everybody’s else ‘Oh God I’m having a stroke’ face). At 7:05 we concert goers were still sat in the college bar waiting for the rest of the girls to sort their fucking lives out – apparently they wanted to ‘eat dinner’ before going out. Bullshit. They shouldn’t have even attended. I was far too excited to even contemplate swallowing a morsel. Eating? Pah. You would have sooner seen me, I dunno, NOT attend the Frank Black concert. And that is a shorthand way for saying ‘not bloody likely’ because I bloody love Frank Black. Anyway they all took a sacred age to get changed. Frankly I don’t think it was worth the wait, because they were wearing the same clothes they usually wear on going out days, and their hair was only mildly more jazzed up than usual. POINTLESS. I’d got myself into the frame of mind by wearing the cool tshirt that my little brother bought me for Christmas. It had an amplifier for a guitar on the front, and on the side written in gold lettering were the words ‘Turn on Tune in Rock out’ which I frankly think sums up my entire life mentality. I’m just chill. I don’t stress about anything, I’m too busy ‘rocking out’ and ‘sticking it to the man’.

By the time the bloody females (I say females I mean LIABILITIES) sorted themselves out, I was getting so het up and stressed that we were going to be late that I was actually shivering and getting hot flushes. I thought they were reserved for women going through the menopoly. That was how stressed I was at the thought of being late to see Frank Black – I grew sixty years and swapped sexes and then had a symptom. I was dancing about being all high pitched and saying ‘COME ON COME ON COME ON’ and they were all ‘Do we even know where the concert takes place?’ and ‘What bus do we get?’ and ‘We suck, let’s walk slower so that Thomas misses the bitchin’ awesome concert’. Frankly the fact that we got there at all was a miracle. Luckily Tall Matt has a friend with red hair who knew the way to Oxford Brooks (don’t ask me what that is, some kind of polytechnic university as far as I can tell). Towards the end I was like ‘Forget this noise’ and just sprinted away from everyone towards the concert centre. It was dead romantic, I just imagined BURSTING into the concert hall and then Frank Black looks up and he sees me and he’s like ‘Tom, you came!’ all happy and then I get to join the band as a Bez-style backing maraca singer. That’d rule.

As it was, I BURST into the hall at 8:13 only to find some shit student band called Bono Mango or something – can’t remember – on. Turned out that Frank Black didn’t even come on until 9:45 and he was supported by shit student band 1, and some other band called Art Brut. ‘Oh yeah’, said one of the girls ‘I only came for Art Brut’. At this point I saw red and stapled a ‘loser’ sign to her forehead. Going to a Frank Black concert in order to see Art Brut supporting is like going to a Live Jesus live sermon in order to see the Scientologist Equivalent of Jesus (which is, as far as I can tell, one of the Martians from “Mars Attacks”) supporting. Anyway I quietly drank while Art Brut were on. And to be fair, they were not bad, singing songs about being drunk, not being able to get over your ex-girlfriend, being quietly unimpressive in bed, and being crap at dancing. Frankly though none of it really resonated with me, and I was far more excited about Blacko and his songs about incest, birth defects, bizarre arthouse films and retarded Mexican tramps. I was so excited, in fact, that I went to the toilet four times. This was because I didn’t want to need the toilet when Frank was on stage and I was terrified of having like, a tiny bit of wee left in my bladder that was insistent and irritating. The main paradox is that once I’ve been to the toilet enough times I start to get stressed about being thirsty, and worry that I’ll have an insistent thirstiness that will be offputting, so I drink three and a half pints of water and thus need to go to the loo again.

The result of the past three or four sentences about my water-retention problems was that I was in the toilet when Frank Black came on. I know this because suddenly the sound of bored crowd buzz died briefly down, before erupting in cheers. I stopped weeing and sprinted out of the toilets, desperately trying to force my penis back into my trousers, wailing ‘I’M COMING FRANK’. I returned to the front of the crowd, where I was met by a white dude with dreadlocks and some fat bald guy who I very briefly thought WAS Frank Black. But this was clearly nonsense because FRANK BLACK WAS ON THE STAGE. I WAS LITERALLY METRES AWAY FROM HIM.

And oh, he was beautiful. His bald head shone gorgeously. His belly was fat, but not like grotesque fat, just fat enough that he looked like he could take me down by jumping up in the air, making the ground shake, and then jumping on me. His fingers were plump and healthy. He was wicked. And then the music began!

It was all stuff from his new album. Which was ok, because they were all really good tunes that I had listened to it before and so vaguely knew the words. I guess it was all for the best actually because if he had suddenly launched into Mr Grieves or Hey or – heaven forbid – Debaser, myfavouritesongofalltime, I would probably have had a heart attack of excitement and died right there on the dancefloor. The current album was, in Blacko’s words, “a rock opera about a dutch impressionist”. YES WE HEARD HIM SPEAK. I heard the voice of Frank Black, the voice from Tame and Wave of Mutilation and not Winterlong and Monkey Gone To Heaven and that mildly irritating studio skit ‘You Fuckin’ Die’ from Surfer Rosa (which I still listen to). Firsthand. It was good. It was especially good when he bantered with the audience. I mean, Frank Black isn’t like the king of audience interaction – mainly because he’s singing a ‘rock opera about a dutch impressionist’. However, after he started playing the accordion, some knobheads in the crowd started shouting ‘get on with it fat man’. Frankly I was appalled – that’s like going to see Jesus live on stage and being all like ‘Oi, braceface’. It’s not even that clever of an insult: He’s a fat bald guy. That’s kind of his Thing. I wasn’t standing for it, but FB was all cool – “Yeah, I know in England you have, a sarcastic sense of humour” he said, and then played on his harmonica. It was badass. And he took the – admittedly insulting – crowd heckling so well that I though I would have a go. Not to be insulting, but just to request a tune. So when he’d finished his last song and was tuning up, I yelled ‘PLAY DEBASER!’ well loudly.

This possibly wasn’t a good idea. The fact is, I love Frank Black dearly as a god and as a friend. However that doesn’t change the fact that he really hasn’t improved much since, say, about 1993. Requesting a song from that period is likely to annoy him. It’s akin to going to see TS Eliot live on stage. TS wants to perform his latest poem, which is an interpretive piece of dance-poetry about racial disunity in Harlem, but then some drunk guy at the back of the crowd yells “Oi, do The Waste Land! April is the cruellest month, bitch!” He’d be annoyed. I would be. It’s like pointing out his failure to move on after The Pixies. I knew this, but I shouted “PLAY DEBASER!” all the same. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Possibly for him to be all like ‘Ok, I’ll play Debaser, but only if you come up on stage and sing it with me’ and then I go up on stage and sing Debaser with him and then I crowd surfed for a bit, and then we went back to his dressing room and did some blow and took turns with Elisha Cuthbert, or whoever the hot nympho starlet happened to be at the time. This didn’t happen. Instead, there was a silence for a moment. Frank Black stopped what he was doing (tuning his harmonica) and looked at me, for just a second. Our eyes met. We understood each other. And do you know what he said? “Shh”.

Shh.

I GOT SHH’D BY FRANK BLACK.

THAT’S RIGHT.

All of a sudden I started to glow from within. It was a glow that lasted me through the next week and a half. I walked on air. I danced with the angels. I was so happy I decided at that point to be good and kind and polite to everyone. My musical hero had told me to shut up. That was It. That was fucking It. I could die happy.

That was a happy day. :D

I love you Frank, and to prove it I drawed a picture of us:**

Do you like it?

*NB: all claims of literality may be falsified
** NB: I’m totally not gay

I'm a rentboy!

2008-02-01T20:44:00.000Z

I’m constantly amazed by the amount of female attention I get. For a man who spends the majority of his day lounging on a chair, wearing grubby blue pyjama bottoms and reading Something Awful, the number of girls wanting to make sweet love to me or go out with me or make me cups of tea or drop in for impromptu visits or give me correct change or tell me to repeat myself because the bar is very loud and they didn’t hear my order or say ‘excuse me’ when they pass me in the street or dance in my general vicinity at nightclubs or give me a half-hearted wave across the JCR… it’s pretty staggering. I mean I’m fairly sure the other day this hobo woman was giving me the eye, and when I went over to check to make sure she asked me for a bit of change in a voice that was frankly dripping with lust. I mean I didn’t give her any money but I think that pretty much proves my point – if it has a labia, it probably wants me*. I don’t know what it is; I guess I must just exude some kind of woman-friendly musk from my hair and groin. Yeah that’s probably it. But the fact of the matter is, I’m beating the women off with a stick (the stick has a nail in it). And do you know what? Frankly I’m getting sick of it. Sometimes a man wants to just go to sleep without horny 19 year olds banging down his door at all times of day and night and climbing through his window. And sometimes a man wants to walk down the street without seeing literally every female he passes going week at the knees. And sometimes a man just wants to have a pint in a pub without the barmaid constantly making eyes at him and asking him for ID or else he’ll have to leave. I tell you, men, the life of a pimp-ass fly ain’t what Snoop Doggy Dog makes it out to be on his documentary show. It’s bloody awful. It got so bad that I had to take emergency measures and so last Tuesday I briefly became a rentboy. And let me tell you, it felt goooooood.

It all began when a large law firm (I don’t want to mention it by name, because I’m sure they have people paid to just Google them 24/7, and I don’t think that they’d be that impressed at finding out that one of their Top Men is a mincing boy-hungry gaybody) held a recruitment drive at a nearby church or something. I don’t think that anybody came, and so a load of the lawyers happened to end up at our college bar (don’t ask me why). Anyway the bar was hustling and bustling like it usually does on a Tuesday, due to the special 75p shots – a promotion that is known as ‘Fuck, me liver’s fallen out’ Tuesday’ to all of Oxford. I was quietly drinking my triple Jack Daniels coke at the bar. I don’t actually like Jack Daniels that much, and I dislike coke, but I’d bought it as an experiment, and it was so cheap that as I forced the disgusting fluid down my throat, I just had to close my eyes and think of the profits (I think that this is what drives Catherine Zita-Jones LOLROTFLLMAO!!1!). Anyway this little bald chap was wanting to reach the bar, and being the gracious little man I am I let him have my space.

“THANK YOU THANK YOU!” he yelled, well and truly ella’d, (fyi, to be “ella’d” is my new word for that state of drunkenness in which everything seems like a good idea, and time and space start to quietly mutate in the corner of your eyes). “YOU ARE A GREAT MAN!”
I looked modest and wiggled my foot in a circle. Aw shucks.
“I KNOW WHAT!” he yelled, “I’LL BUY YOU A DRINK! FINISH THAT, WHAT IS IT? JACK DANIELS? NOT A VOD-QUAD? EVERYBODY SEEMS TO BE DRINKING VOD-QUADS NOWADAYS, I JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND IT.”
I was going to understand the principle of calling a quadrule vodka a vod-quad, and also point out that at no point in my life had I ever heard anybody say ‘vod-quad’, when I realised that he was indeed buying me a new drink and I should just shut my pretty little mouth and let myself be plied with it.

The little bald man, who turned out to be named… Paul (ish) then put £100 behind the bar, which started a mass orgy of students throwing themselves, lemminglike, at the taps, trampling each other, throwing punches, bottling their girlfriends, stabbing their friends in the back, etc, etc. I was already forcing down my new pint of Jack Daniels and coke, tears streaming down my eyes at the terrible taste, but the thought of the £2.25 it would have cost me had I not met Paul kept dancing through my mind. Paul, by the way, was talking to me some shit about how he was going to be elected head barman but missed out by one point. Then he surprised me by screaming ‘BY THE WAY I’M A HUGE FUCKING POOF’ at the top of his voice. I was eating an ice-cube at the time, and inhaled it, filled my bronchii with ice, and then started coughing wildly. I was somewhat unsure as to what to say – frankly it was akin to the first time I met a lesbian, and I accidentally said ‘lesbian’ in the first sentence and a half. However Paul did notice, being busy telling me how he used to bum the Organ Scholar, loudly slagging off the darts players, and eyeing up my fellow undergraduates.

“So, which of these is a queer?” he asked, slapping me on the back. I started choking again. Then I saw Max walking past wearing a brown shirt, and I pointed him out. Max isn’t gay but I saw comic potential. Paul’s eyes lit up a bit. “Oh, cool, cool. So, Tom, what say you get a group of friends and we all hit a club?”

Ok so I should have thought a little bit before inviting seven of my close personal associates – none of whom were gay – to go out clubbing with the most predatory gay man ever. I saw that somebody was going to have to take one for the team and probably end up being gayraped. I saw that it could all go tits up. However I also saw that Paul was probably the richest person in the entire college, and we would be set for the rest of the night. So I won’t lie. I rolled my eyes a bit, minced slightly and said “Oh Paul, that’d be wicked!” and batted my eyelids a bit. I then sprinted around the bar screaming A RICH MAN WANTS TO TAKE US ALL OUT AND BUY ALL OF OUR DRINKS FOR THE REST OF THE EVENING, HE’S ON EXPENSES IT’LL BE WICKED.

As it was, everybody was going to The Bridge. I have already expressed my disapproval at The Bridge in a previous blog – lame white people, girls with faces like a ham, the entire place makes me want to commit suicide, etc, etc. However, just as the horrible horrible Jack Daniels was easier to swallow knowing it was free, the ugly dancers, shit music, terrible décor, and fact that Lucia was on the dancefloor all paled into insignificance when it was all bought and paid for by a rich man with a company credit card. After covering the £5 entry fee and buying drinks for all nine of us (as more and more people started to cotton on and join in and slap his back), we all hit the dancefloor, at which point Paul and his gay mate who had also shown up started manically groping and grinding anybody who came near.

I admit it. I felt like a whore. I felt like a dirty dirty rentboy whore. I knew I should have stopped doing what I was doing. I knew it was wrong. But I also knew that girls do this shit all the time. I also knew that drinks at this club cost like £4 for a single, and it was so much easier to kind of rub Paul’s arm and then say “Pauuul, shall we get some shots?” and then he’d wink and kind of rub my back and buy everyone more drinks. SO YEAH I SOLD MYSELF FOR THE CHEAP THRILL OF FREE DRINKS. IS THAT SO HARD. TO TAKE.

As it was I didn’t take full advantage of the situation anyway – I’m pretty sure that we could have all been bought a suite at an expensive hotel had one of us decided to bite the bullet (you’re up, Maxwell). As it was, two things happened that meant that I left the club fairly quickly:

1: Paul like grinded me hardcore on the dancefloor. I realised at this point that I wasn’t cut out to be a fully functioning gay member of society and have an adult relationship with another man, so I kind of leapt sideways with a yelp and ended up:

2: … nearly bumping into Lucia. I tried to hide behind my friend Rich, but she saw me, and I saw her, and she sort of waved. I wish I had responded more gracefully, but as it was, I realised that I wasn’t cut out to be a fully functioning straight member of society and have an adult relationship with another female, so instead I started laughing hysterically, turned around, and sprinted out of the nightclub. According to my friends, Paul stormed angrily out of the club about five minutes later.

Maybe he realised that he’d overcharged the company card roughly 8 times the recommended limit. Maybe he suddenly understood that a load of greasy students had been taking the piss all night. Maybe he became disenchanted with his entire mode of life and went back to his hotel room to blow off his head with a shotgun. Maybe he realised that his favourite episode of Scrubs (seriously, gayest tv show ever) was being repeated on e4, and he simply HAD to rush back home to watch it.

Whatever. We all knew that he went off looking for me. Me and my fine-ass booty. So that’s another heart broken, Thomas. Seriously what is it with me? People just can’t help but fancy the pants off me.

*this is definitely true

The first rule of Fight Blog is that you do not talk about Fight Blog

2008-01-19T01:06:00.000Z

A few days ago we got in a fight. It was exciting and sexy because I personally did not get that badly hurt. The situation was that it was Matt’s birthday night and I was standing outside of a club with Matt and Max and JJ (who is a small Liberal Democrat who has a beard) and Ella (who was monged off her face on horse tranquilisers and thus posed no threat to anybody), when this dude wearing a suede trenchcoat started on us. I would like to reaffirm the fact that he was indeed wearing a suede trenchcoat. He also had a perfectly ovular head with fuzzy hair and reminded me of some dude I met ages ago who I nicknamed ‘Coconut Paul’. Because of this he is referred to in this blog as “Trenchcoat Paul”.

I think that Trenchcoat Paul thought that wearing a suede trenchcoat to a nightclub was a good fashion advice and because of this I reckon that he must have been in a lot more fights than we had. This put us at a disadvantage because were all a combination of drunk (me Max Matt JJ), short (JJ) jewish (JJ and Max) tired after a danceoff (me) or The Birthday Boy (Matt) and were in no mood to be pummelling each other into meatballs. But Trenchcoat Paul – as well as being dressed like Neo – had clearly had some kind of martial arts training and I think was probably in fact hacked into the Matrix the entire time. At one point he bended time and ran around the sides of the wall just to prove he could. And then JJ stabbed him in the head with a cigarette.

But I am getting ahead of myself. We had previously met Trenchcoat Paul back in the club itself. Detail: the club was the union official bar and was called the Purple Turtle. People who go to the union mostly tend to be 40 year old men who look like dentists and who go onto the dancefloor with their shirts tucked into their pants– the future politicians of the future. I have to describe this to you so you understand how just god-damn outrageous we all were by going there. I mean, we were all YOUNG and we didn’t even care about the standards of acceptable dress. I mean, it was really dark inside and I was in fact wearing a pair of huge white sunglasses that I had stolen from a girl! That’s right, sunglasses indoors! How absolutely absurd! When the bartender saw me he went WHAT and his monocle fell right off into his vermouth. But I didn’t care. On the dancefloor – which actually played quite good tunes, beeteedoubleyou – there was this dentist looking guy with a long square head who looked absolutely monged on something or other, and was performing a dance that I can only describe as ‘Dad-thrash-sambo-fusion’. Anyway after watching him in action for five minutes I decided to start imitating him; every single kick jump twist twirl and shimmy I copied to perfection. When he tugged at his sleeves, I stroked my arms (I was wearing a tshirt because I am young and rebellious). When he paused for breath I paused for breath. When he jumped up and hung onto the ceiling I ran around in circles as I couldn’t reach. As it turned out, I was actually bloody good at this mimicry, and after ten minutes there was a huge empty space in the middle of the dancefloor with just me and him shimmying in some kind of cosmic display of awesome duplicity.

This continued for about twenty five minutes, all said (in case you were wondering, the answer is ‘I was drunk’); it got to the point that it was a matter of pride for me to beat this guy at dad-thrash-sambo-fusion, and nothing else mattered – not the cheers of my friends, not the fact that I was nearly passing out due to dehydration, not the fairly ok looking girl wearing a hat (A GIRL WEARING A HAT IN A NIGHTCLUB HOW ABSURD AND I WAS WEARING SUNGLASSES: MENTAL) who walked past, and certainly not Trenchcoat Paul, who started kicking me about halfway through. I don’t know whether it was because my dancing partner was his friend or because he was just a cock, but for about two minutes he started kicking my quite hard in the bum while I was doing a shimmy. He then stole my sunglasses and ran off until Matt went and got them. In the meantime, my dance-partner finally gave up and left the dancefloor; I did three rounds of the Macarena and thirty seconds of the funky chicken to show my utter domination, and then I staggered sideways towards the bar. We went outside to get some air as I was pretty much a sweaty wreck.

BUT WHO SHOULD SUDDENLY LEAP OUT OF THE SHADOWS? That’s right, Trenchcoat Paul our Ninja adversary. When I saw him I was like ‘Ohh shiiiit’ as he looked a right badass in his coat that was buttened right up to his second chin. When he saw us he started saying ‘oioioi’ or something similar and kind of rotating towards us. Things were said and he suddenly thrashed out and hit Matt in the eye. Matt was understandably annoyed at this and started shouting ‘WHAT WAS THAT ALL ABOUT EH WHAT’ and then everybody started pushing everybody else and talking loudly. At this point Trenchcoat Paul’s mate, who was a lot more strong looking than Trenchcoat Paul and was wearing a tshirt and had stubble, jumped into the fray and started swinging his arms about. I believe he called Matt a ‘posh wanker’ which I think is funny because Matt is basically working class scum and if it wasn’t for the fact that we both did English I probably wouldn’t even talk to him. Anyway Stubbly Frederick swung out and he punched me in the side of the head. It wasn’t that bad really, kind of like having a small hard piece of bread being pressed really hard against you, momentarily. What was terrible though was that my sunglasses fell off. I saw this and I was like NARGH and I leapt into action and kind of touched him, although at this point he was off punching Max in the face. Eventually the bouncer, who was a fat dude who had watched most of the events from the sidelines, stepped in and squished Trenchcoat Paul, and we all grabbed Stubbly Frederick, who pinched my arm and gave me a bruise. After that they fucked off and we all wandered home, going on about how shit they were and how awesome we all were and about how swollen up Matt’s face was (he looked like the stay puft monster). We also had to drag Ella back as she was pretty much comatose herself and hadn’t even noticed what was going on, even though she’d been sitting on a step directly opposite (lol, drugs). I was feeling quite pleased that I managed to avoid shaming myself as I had always assumed that had any threat of violence ever come up I would have taken one look, my eyes like saucers, and then turned 180 degrees and run off into the night, arms flailing. However not only did I not run away, I also kind of walked back and forth during the battle and yelled a bit. I sure am a badass. Anyway I compiled a small dossier documenting the various damage levels dealt by both sides:

(by the way if you are wondering about the relative ugliness of this picture compared to Every Other Picture I Have Ever Made For This Blog and my use of the IMPACT font, essentially it's because I have realised that I am indeed a caged fighter at heart, not some wishy washy poncy artist and thus I can't be bothered wasting my time on aesthetics - I HAVE A WAR TO FIGHT)

Of course, being male, after the fight itself comes the most important and – some say – difficult task; that of exaggerating it to the most cinematic, heroic and exciting levels of danger and derring-do for our captive audiences back at college. This isn’t as easy as it sounds as girls are actually quite good at noticing that we are talking shit and there is an innate sense of honour within men that states that we can only really stretch things to realistic levels. So we weren’t allowed to say that they were packing knives or that we managed to beat them to the floor. However we are totally allowed to play up the degrees of our injuries and then say ‘No, it’s fine’ modestly and limp off when women say things like ‘Oh you poor dear’. That. Is. Allowed.

For Matt, who had a huge shiner, this is easy. This task it somewhat harder for me because my wounds are at worst superficial and at best non-existent. This issue is summed up best by the fact that I was just informed that our resident nosy student hack Leila is already ‘writing an article’ on our awesome fight for the ‘newspaper’ the Oxford Student. Disregarding the utter pointlessness of it AND the fact that this blog probably has a wider and more attractive readership than the Oxford Student and thus the incident is already covered, she hasn’t even bothered to interview me! Lazy journalism. I guess a small red bump of sore skin underneath the hairline isn’t sexy enough to make in the Oxford Student. But just because you can’t see the wounds doesn’t mean that they aren’t there. The mental trauma I have suffered is a thousand times worse than all of the small faint forearm bruises in the world.

Ever since that fateful night I have been too afraid to leave my room. Stubbly Frederick’s gravelly face, the horrific death-scream he used to lull us down, the smooth horror of Trenchcoat Paul’s trenchcoat thing… they haunted my nights. I dreamt that I was walking along that same street, wearing that same tshirt and those same sunglasses, when suddenly a bull with the Frederick’s face leapt out of the darkness and chased me. I tried to run but my legs had been replaced with small Korean children who were too busy making Disney wallets to move and so I crawled along with my hands but my fingernails were ripped out by the pavement and then my entire body started to glow with PURE FEAR; then I turned round and I saw trenchcoat Paul and he wasn’t just a man with a trenchcoat any more, he was motherfucking NEO and then he looked at me and said ‘There is no spoon, and I’m gonna KICK YOUR ASS FOOL’ and then he jumped in the air and the entire universe revolved around him and then I woke up in a cold sweat. I spent days on end sitting in my room in a wifebeater and greasy jeans, drinking whiskey from the bottle and watching reruns of ‘To Catch A Predator’. Their faces haunted me. My friends tried to pry me out of it; ‘You gotta pull yourself our of this slump, Tom or else they’ve really won!’… ‘You’ve changed, Tom’… ‘Please, for your family’s sake, stop this, you are destroying yourself and everything that you stand for’… but I wasn’t listening. They just didn’t understand. I threw a bottle of whiskey at Ella’s head when she tried to make me come shopping with her. After licking the walls a bit, she too fled in fear. I was alone. And as I lay on the floor, throwing up and semi-comatose, at my very rock bottom, alone and unloved, suddenly a ray of light streamed through the window and struck me. It was a revelation; it was rapture. I had to take my life into my own hands.
And so the next day I got up early and went into training. I did I think about 10000 pressups and then just to prove to myself that I could do it I did another 10000, and then I did some skipping for a bit and then I pretty much hit the gym and pumped iron for about eight hours and then I hit the punch bag so hard that it exploded, and then I ran all around Oxford, and all of the children in the streets saw me and chased after me cheering, until I got to the steps leading up the main hall and I ran up them and danced about with my arms in the air cheering to the soundtrack of ‘Hearts on Fire’. The day after I went back to that bar and I found that guy. “Matt,” I screamed into the air “I WILL AVENGE YOU!” I was strong. I was unbreakable. I was A MONSTER. I think that the results speak for themselves frankly.

Yeahh I rule

Christ

2008-01-05T17:23:00.001Z

I need to blog soon, don't I? Otherwise I risk alienating all of my ardent fans.

...Meh.

Good Will To All Men

2007-12-24T15:38:00.000Z

The other day at work a guy called me by my first name. I was wrapping up his bottle of wine in tissue paper, humming a festive Christmas tune to myself, waiting for the credit card system to dial up and take his money, when suddenly he leant over the counter, looked me in the eye, and said “Thanks a lot, Tom.” He definitely said ‘Tom’, not ‘ta’ or ‘um’. Tom. My name. What. The Fuck.
The whistling stopped. Well, it had to; my breath was literally taken away for a second. My throat constricted. My pupils dilated. The tissue paper ripped in my hands. Then, slowly, I looked up and stared at him in what can only be described as abject and utter disgust. I was horrified. I felt sullied. How dare this man, with his weird grey-black mullet and his big jowly face, how dare he just walk into MY SHOP and call ME by the name that I use when I’m not at work? He might as well have pissed on my children. It was an offensive blasphemy. I threw his wine bottle into his bag, snatched and swiped his credit card, then thrust it in his face with a look that plainly said ‘Get the hell out, your kind is not welcome here’. I swear if he’d spent more than two point five seconds picking up his bags and shuffling off, I would probably have put my halberd through his head. As it was, he was fairly rapid on his feet.
I know, I know, I have a name badge that says ‘Tom’. Not important. I think that people who buy alcohol from me sometimes misread our relationship. They seem to think that they have some level of power over me. Authority. They think that I exist to serve THEM. They think that it gives me pleasure to do what they say. I think that sometimes they think that they’re in charge. And that somehow gives them a right to call me by my first name, to violate MY personal nominal space without any emotional obligation on their parts. I mean, if the guy had said, “Hey, my name’s Norman, mind if I call you by your first name?” that would probably have been cool. Of course I wouldn’t have let him. In fact probably I would have seized up a bottle of Cointreau ® and a Clipper Lighter ® and sprayed a ‘unique spirit combined with the subtle harmony of bitter and sweet oranges’ over his stupid plaid shirt and then set him alight, and then put out the fire by pummelling him with the broken end of the broom that we have in the backroom. But at least that would have shown the level of respect that I’m pretty sure I deserve.

What’s that, anonymous internet complainer?

“But Thomas, you’re doing a job of selling people things, surely you have to be polite and treat them with some respect! That’s what you are paid to do! HURRR.”

Ok. Hmm. Two points.
1: Shut the fuck up you virgin, you have stupid blonde hair and a dumb shirt. Nobody wears three fucking shades of blue. Every heard of layering? Jesus. Die in a fire.
2: I AM polite and I DO show the mouthbreathing neckbeard alcoholics who come to the shop plenty of respect. However I only show respect when it’s due. And most of the time, people get it. I’ve said before that I love the majority of people who come into the shop. They are usually Dear Old People who want some wine and are very polite about it, and when I say ‘Do you know if you buy another bottle of wine then you get a third one free? Go get another two. Now,” they are too nice and English to say ‘Nah, I’ll leave it’ but instead say ‘Oh really? Lovely’ even though they’ve been to the shop day in day out for the past three months. They understand that at the time of our conversation, there is nobody else on the entire planet in a position to give them the three bottles of Fiordaliso Pinot Grigio and the packet of Malborough Reds, and as such they need me more than I need them, and as such they should shut the hell up and do what they’re told. They play the game. And that’s all I ask. In a way, I’m like the whores in Sin City: play by my rules and I’ll make all of your dreams come true, but mess with me and you’re a corpse. I’m a sexy murder whore. And the customers are my customers.

Most people are good. But there always the people who mess with me. The utter unrelenting wankers who think that I’m there for their own personal amusement, the drivelling scumbags who assume that because my name is on a name-badge, they have a right to use it, and because it says ‘Sales Assistant’, I am there to assist them with their sales. NEWSFLASH, PEOPLE: I know nothing about wine. I have no idea where the merlot is. I don’t even know what merlot is. Just because I stand behind the counter doesn’t mean that I’m going to be able to help you in your equiries. ‘Sales Assistant’ is doublespeak for ‘They pay us because we understand how the till system works’ (no mean feat). Nothing else. So stop talking to me. And don’t a: expect me to be able to make decisions on wine, or b: know where anything is.

Perfect example. This woman came into the shop the other day with her boyfriend (I assume it was a boyfriend, either that or she was a skinhead lesbian with stubble and an Adams apple). The woman was fairly young, with a head shaped sort of like a pair, smart looking glasses on and a trouser suit. She had this gaping expression and a frown on and the moment I saw her I thought to myself ‘Shrew’. I think that Chaucer wrote one of his pilgrims tales on her, the Merchant’s Tale, the one that begins with the immortal lines “I have a wyf, the wurst that maye bee,” (there we are, a literary reference which goes to show that my education has NOT been wasted) and I immediately knew that she was going to be a bitch. As it was, she asked ‘Do you have any Cambo Maria?’ (I made up the name of the wine because I can’t remember what it was, frankly I forgot a second and a half after she said it). So I did what I usually do which is to leave the till and go and pretend to look for it, then say “I don’t know, let me check the system… how do you spell chardonnay?” The system said that there was none left, so I was like sorry, and she was like ‘well what am I supposed to do then? When are you getting more in?’

I stared at her. Seriously what am I meant to say to that. What a prick. As it was, I grimaced and then waved vaguely at the shelf and fell into a sullen silence, which she enthusiastically picked up. This lasted for ten seconds until a guy came up and cut in front of her and asked to buy ‘Nordsk Vodka’. I assumed that it was some kind of speciality vodka that we kept on the upper shelf and so I climbed up and then the guy was like “no… no… left a bit… LEFT…. Down one, there you go no you went too far… right… there you go well done!”… turned out he wanted Smirnoff Blue. Who the fuck calls Smirnoff Blue Nordsk? What especially rankled was the fact that I had to apologise for HIS mistake, right after having to apologise for the fact that someone else had bought all of the wine that the pear-faced woman wanted. The amount of completely insincere aplogising I have to do at that shop is mind numbing. I have lied to more people in two months at the Wine Shop than I had in the previous 18 years of my life. Frankly I was so annoyed I refused to serve either of them and closed the shop early (Not really, I just apologised lots while mentally imagining kebabbing the both of them).

Some people. Fuck’s sake. In fact while I’m at it, and I’m on a soapbox, here’s just a list of ways in which you people, as potential customers of my shop, have annoyed me:

If you don’t have ID, I won’t serve you. I know that I say that it’s because they are filming me on cctv and I get fined, but my main motivation is that I’m sick of putting up with your shit and if I have any opportunity to screw you over just a little bit more, I will take it. Why? Fuck you, that’s why.

On the subject of ID: If I do ask you for ID and you don’t have any, saying “Oh, but can’t I just buy it and go?” is NOT an acceptable excuse. Frankly it’s not an excuse at all. It’s the equivalent of a bouncer refusing you entry to a nightclub, so you stop, think about it for a few seconds, and then run head-first into his leg.

Once I’ve started to scan stuff into the cash register, that is it. You don’t get to change your mind. Saying ‘Can I be really annoying?’ doesn’t exclude me from being really annoyed when you decide to swap the 45p packet of peppermint chewing gum at the beginning of a £60 order for an identical 45p packet of spearmint chewing gum, thus obliging me to scan every fucking thing through again. You remorseless bastards.

It’s not my fault that you misread the pricing on the shelf. This guy came in, wanted to buy three bottles of champagne that he thought cost £30 each, and they ended up costing £36 because he was looking at an entirely different price, and then he said ‘HAY WAIT A SECOND THEY AREN’T WORTH ANYTHING NEAR THAT’ and then he frowned at me as though it was my fault. Wanker.

I WILL GIVE YOU A BAG IN MY OWN GOOD TIME YOU DON’T HAVE TO SPECIFICALLY ASK ME AND THEN LOOK WELL PLEASED AS YOU HAVE BEATEN THE SYSTEM WHEN I GIVE YOU ONE ANYWAY

A guy knocked a bottle of ale off of the shelf and it broke and then I had to clear it up.

If I’m reading a book, wait until I’ve finished my page until you ask me to actually do anything. As it is I have to keep stopping mid sentence, slamming the book angrily onto the desk and then selling some chav Malborough Lights. Can’t they see I’m trying to read Joyce? Morons.

When I’m in charge and there have been no customers for three and a half hours and I decide to close the shop at 9.50 instead of 10, that’s my own prerogative and it’s because I want to go home. Standing outside the window at 9.57 and insistently tapping your watch at me is not going to make me turn on all the lights, refloat the till, put my money into the computer and unlock. No apologies.

Man loads of people who buy alcohol from my shop are retards. I’m far too middle-class and well educated for this shit. I should work for a library or something. Except then I can’t listen to Interpol so loud that I can’t hear what anybody’s asking me. ‘What? You want a bottle of Fameusgrosse? Do we sell that? What? No I can’t turn down the music wait til the song finishes… there. Oh, Famous Grouse. The big one or the little one? I can’t hear you.”

Pfft. Humanity sucks. Anyway MERRY XMAS GUYS!!1! Here’s my cake for this year:

The Ball (or: How To Alienate People And Fail In Civilised Society)

2007-12-19T02:04:00.001Z

I’ve never really made any secret of the fact that I’m only going to Oxford to make contacts and set myself up for life, either by marrying into money or extracting blackmailable details out of future world leaders. To that end, my life is one constant networking trip. When I’m not lying motionless in my bed digesting fried cheese, I’m effortlessly schisming through the social crowd, expertly locating the future rich and powerful dons of the planet with a kind of Terminator style eye-mounted scanning device. I Am Essentially Facebook.

After two months of this, my constant attention whoring paid off and I was afforded a ticket to “THE SNOW BALL”. Whatever urbandictionary.com might say, the snowball is not a disgusting sexual act. In fact it is quite the opposite. As the official website puts it – it is “the final date of the year in the London Debutantes Season diary” the most glamorous and festive ball of the year, organised by the crème de la crème of the London social scene to raise money for charity, filled with celebrities like Des Lynam (I think he’s a footballer or something) and royalty like the Queen of Oman (?). Thinks about that. Picture it in your head. Now imagine someone like little old me there. Just imagine it. CRAZY EH. What an insane mismatch of social classes there would be! It’d be like something out of the OC. And in this case, I’d be Ryan and not Seth for once, a crazy kid from the wrong side of the tracks, ready to bloody some noses and upset the social order with my wild and rebellious ways! Just imagine that. AND NOW STOP IMAGINING BECAUSE IT WAS A REALITY.

I went up to London deciding that I would act like a gentleman and fit in with the Aristocracy that I was soon to be joining. The essential plan was to be effortlessly charming for the entire night, woo some kind of beautiful heiress and live as a Kept Man for the rest of my life, lounging voluptuously from a velveteen pouf and eating grapes peeled on the thighs of virgins or something. Therefore I got into character by acting as chivalrously as I could. I stopped to let a woman get on the train before me (and she wasn’t really even that hot so it was an entirely selfless act on my part). When I was listening to my iPod, a song by Eminem featuring extremely anti-female lyrics came on and I skipped song without even a thought. And when I was sitting on the train, this heavily pregnant Chinese woman hobbled on. Everybody else stared at her blankly and didn’t get off their seats, so I, after a few seconds of meditation, jumped up and gave her my seat. I settled back on my haunches with a very satisfied ‘Fuck the rest of you, I am going to motherfucking heaven’ expression on my face. I didn’t have to say anything but they knew that I was the moral victor. The Chinese woman’s husband then came on with a massive pram that crushed everyone else on the train and caused three other people to stand up. Then the Chinese woman proceeded to do scratch cards for the entire journey. Seriously she must have done seven or eight scratch cards. Frankly I didn’t know what to make of the whole thing and so I gave up being chivalric. I mean there was a big muddy puddle on the ground outside the station and there was a woman about to cross it I didn’t even take off my jacket and cover the puddle with it to stop her spoiling her shoes. In fact I pushed her into the puddle and then threw my sandwich at her before running away.

Anyway I met up with Matt and Max and changed into my tux. I’m not going to lie, I looked the sharpest of all three of us – Max had just come out of mouth surgery and so half of his face was yellow, and Matt had brought the wrong suit, which was just half a size too big, something that he complained about for the entire journey to the hotel. THE HOTEL oh yeah. We were worrying that we wouldn’t be able to find it, but such hopes were entirely unfounded when we got off the train. It was lit with so many lights that I’m fairly sure that I could have seen it from space (had I happened to be in space and looking for a hotel). It was also massive – the size of an entire city block, and when you looked at it from the bottom you couldn’t see the top. I would say that it was roughly the same size as my ego although in all fairness my ego is probably a bit bigger.

We went in and as soon as we were inside, I knew that I would never have to put any effort into anything I ever did again. I had Made It. The place was a palace. Plush velvet carpet for as far as the eye could see leading to beautiful walls covered with gilded mirrors, magnificent flower arrangements, gorgeous portraits and a fire extinguisher. Our eyes as wide as saucers, we wandered into the main hall area to see a bravura crush of men in suits and women in sparkly dresses who toasted and serenaded each other with the songs of sirens. Waiters darted about giving out glasses of pomegranate champagne (I had a glass) and miniature sausages and delicious little toasted cheese things that had ham in them (jewish Max had two of these before I pointed out the pork content). Minocher, who was wearing a pair of dashing tartan trousers, suddenly rolled up and leapt onto me. I peeled away and sauntered through this glen of beautiful people, feeling like a hobbit in the land of the elves, and I suddenly realised how many gorgeous girls there were. Seriously there was TALENT there. One of them caught my stare and I swear to god there was a quarter of a second when our eyes locked and the chemistry between us was enough to set fire to Belgium. Unfortunately I went off her almost immediately when I noticed that her nose was well ugly and bumpy and flat, like someone has hit her in the face with a shovel and then I was distracted by an old man who was WEARING A MONOCLE NON-IRONICALLY and that promising love affair was vanquished. As I walked through, I realised that I, with my firestarting political opinions and my working class ethic, had nothing in common with many of these people. What knew I of diamond mines and polo? Nothing! I knew of simple fare, like coal mining and digging trenches in the hot hot sun, all day long. I started to feel smaller and smaller and more out of place and when I reached the end of the hall I was all hunched up like a little Gollum type freak. I looked left and right. Where were my friends? They were gone, replaced by a girl with a giant shaggy head of hair, clad in diamonds and a figure wearing tartan trousers who was not Mino but a man with wrinkly ears. I had a headache.

I took another glass of champagne. Then a man started to play the bagpipes and the Head Matriarch (this TERRIFYING woman who looked a bit like The Wise Owl from Winnie The Pooh) told us all to go into the dining hall. Dazed and confused, I followed the crowd and bumped into some other Balliolites.

We went into the dining hall, through a passageway filled with fake snow (I won’t lie, I stole a handful later on the evening and was disappointed to find out that it wasn’t even snow, just cocaine). I say dining hall, I mean DINING PALACE. The tables were all set up fancy with these giant feathers and sparkly cutlery. The sense of isolation and confusion that had been engendered by the champagne reception was increased when I found that I had been assigned a seat far away from the rest of the gang. A tear ran down my cheek as Matt and Max floated off, balloonlike, to the other side of the hall as I was trapped in one corner, surrounded by people that I didn’t know.

We all know me, I’m a touchy and confrontational person and I dislike meeting new people in person. I find the effort actually maintaining a conversation in real life both painful and boring and I would much rather either talk in a series of internet-MEME style clichés such repeating ‘no your mum’ to whatever the previous person has said, or just making up shit about how I played Optimus Prime’s stunt double in Transformers, or sit in stony content silence [this is probably why I’m not very good at speed dating]. Therefore, the idea of having to actually talk to people I didn’t know for long periods of time was nerve racking and so I downed my champagne and kind of slumped in the chair.

My two neighbours were these girls. They were actually alright looking and for a few seconds I perked up, fiddled with my bow tie, played with my cufflinks and sat up straight. They proceeded to ignore me for three solid minutes, until one of them swung round violently. “Hi I’m Sizzy,” she said enthusiastically. She had one of those voices like Peaches Geldof probably has. I stared blankly at her and then blindly gesticulated at my name card. I was so impressed by my smoothness that I made a mental note to take up self-harming when I got home. And I had some wine. “… Thomas?” she asked.
“Um… yes.”
We got chatting. It was evident that about thirty seconds into the conversation, she had come to the conclusion that I was a: A complete social retard, and b: A little small-time Englander who was unused to the Big City Lights. To be fair, I did start coughing halfway through an anecdote about working in a wine shop and I nearly choked on my own tongue. Then she said that she had a boyfriend who was an elite rower and I was like ‘forget you, clown’, and turned to talk to the other girl. I forget what her name was, I think it was Catherine or something, but for the purposes of this blog I will call her ‘blonde girl’.
She really wasn’t that much better than Sizzy, although she did have slightly more comic potential as she said ‘Top Form’ a lot. The first time she said it I started laughing and then I realised that she was being serious so I put on a straight face. And had some wine. It was like:
Me: I’m going to Oxford
Her: Oh, Top Form Top Form, what are you studying.
Me: English.
Her: Top Form.
Me: *Has some wine*
It was amazing, especially as she seemed to think that I was some kind of Wild Boy, a bit of rough from the country who spent his days shooting policemen and sniffing glue with Elizabeth Barret Browning. She actually said ‘It’s not often that we see someone outside of our social sphere’ and then looked at me as though I was probably about to start a brawl. I shrunk beneath their gaze and drank some wine. I had a nagging feeling like both of them were mildly condescending me, entertaining me like some kind of exotic zoo pet. Then Blonde One said that she had a boyfriend so I was like ‘forget you, clown’ and turned back to Sizzy, before remembering that she had a boyfriend too, so I just had some wine instead in the brief interlude while both girls were being chatted up by boys from Eton. The waiter game round and topped up my glass, so I had some more wine.

The problem was that there were these little serving imps that kept going round the table in circles filling up the glasses of wine as soon as they were drunk. I was unaware that there wasn’t some kind of implicit challenge and frankly I don’t drink wine that often. This I would class as ‘the beginning of the end’.

I had some more wine when the first course arrived. It was a long square plate that had the following things on it:

A leaf of spinach

A red thing

Something that looked like a scotch egg but turned out not to be full of pulped fish

A kind of weird root that looked like a limp leek, placed damply on top of a red mushy star

A small bowl of what I can only guess was pea soup

I stared blankly at it, and then gingerly stabbed the spinach with my fork. I raised it to my mouth and it fell off the fork and left a greasy stain on the tablecloth. I raised my eyes to see both Sizzy and Blonde One staring at me with what can only be described as pity in their eyes. I thought about it, realised there was no way to recover, then slowly stabbed the spinach again, placed it back on the plate, put my fork down, crossed my hands in my lap, and stared into the middle distance. Then I had some wine. I got hungry again and ate the rest of the food which was ok. However the ‘eating of the rest of the food’ was tempered with ‘drinking almost constantly from the magical wine glass’. I felt a bit like Odin in that legend when he’s drinking from what he thinks is a beer horn but it’s actually the sea and he can never empty it, except instead of partially draining the ocean and thus inadvertantly causing the tides, and learning an important life lesson, I simply failed to get to the bottom of the wine glass and instead got utterly smashed.

I honestly can’t remember the last two and a half hours of the ball and when I came to, I wasn’t lounging voluptuously from a velveteen pouf and eating grapes peeled on the thighs of virgins. I was sprawled sideways across Max’s bedroom floor in, my tongue swollen up to four times its usual size, in an agony of remorse that took an entire week to fade away. I was also topless. Apparently during those two mysterious hours hours, amongst other things, I pushed a woman off of an auctioned motorcycle and nearly got Matt beaten up by a South African rugby player before falling down the stairs. Several of my friends refused to speak to me for several days after the event. ☹

That was my entry into civilised society. How do you think I did?

I don’t think that I’ll be invited back.

Alcoholism is Not Funny (yes it is)

2007-12-10T01:22:00.000Z

I am well aware that the majority of the readers of this blog are members of the aristocracy. There’s something about my wry wit and verve that makes me a favourite of the royalty of the world: the kings, the noblemen, the earls and (at a push) the viceroys – my well informed and incisive commentary on the ills of society (mostly, the poor) makes me a court jester of sorts. And as it stands, I’m writing in the implicit knowledge that you are most likely reading this on a laptop made of rubies and ivory, draped across velvet bedclothes, swaddled in nappies of gold and pantaloons of platinum, suckling on the teat of untold luxury probably drained out of the udders of some kind of metaphorical diamond cow. Well, it might surprise you to know that NOT EVERYONE WAS BORN WITH A SILVER SPOON IN THEIR MOUTH. SOME OF US have been raised in the school of hard knocks. Some of us have earned their lumps. Some of us have actually had to (whisper it) work for an honest crust.

Yes, it may shock you, but I have A Job. I’m no longer a layabout callow youth like the rest of you, I am a young motivated go-getter. I’m a member of the working men, the proletariat, the simmering classes. I’m a non shit Étienne Lantier for the modern day. And I don’t even work in a coal mine. The job that I do have is in a wine shop (it’s the same job that I had before I went to Oxford, but after two months in Halls, I now have a much more subtle and intricate understanding of the social hierarchies of Albion).

When I got it, I recalled the famous Oscar Wilde quote ‘Work is the curse of the drinking classes’; then I suddenly realised that he’d actually gotten it wrong (probably all of the bumsex going to his head) and that it was meant to be ‘DRINK is the curse of the WORKING classes’. Other way round, dipshit. Silly Oscar Wilde, I bet he’d feel prettttttttty bloody silly if he’d been around to see me correct his mistake today. Prettttttttttty bloody silly. For a few seconds, this realisation knocked me off. Was my new mission of dispensing alcohol a subtle betrayal of my working-class brethren? Was I somehow abandoning the struggle of the waged people by dispensing the poisons that so destroy and damage the squalid ruts that they call their daily life? I resolved the question by asking my Marxist friend Julian (who went to the same private boy’s secondary school that I did) whether my job was Marxist or not. “Are you employed or employing?” he asked. “Employed.” “Fine then.”

Brilliant.

So I got to work. The fun thing about working in a wine shop is that Drunks really really bloody appreciate and respect you. And I like that. It doesn’t usually happen. As a hardcore 4 lyf member of the Middle Classes, usually the only real experience I have with Drunks is when they beg me for money, viewing them at the circus, or when I’m having my shoes shined in the street. Other than that, we tend to stay out of each others’ way. But the fact is, if you hold the keys to the liquor cabinet in a Wine Shop, you better be pretty bloody sure that those Drunks will come crawling out of their caves and their brothels and stagger up to the front counter. They’ll rear up suddenly, like irate ska-listening bears, and will open mouths that put all of British dentistry to shame, and will crash back down, bringing with them such a terrible overwhelming truckload of stench that I recoil in horror and disgust. I’ll suddenly pull back, half expecting them to vomit on my new shoes, half expecting them to pull out a knife and steal my kidney, when they’ll meekly get out a small purse and mutter “Can I have a half-bottle of Imperial, please? Thank you.”

I’m not going to lie; I like to revel in the power I have over these foolish oppressed people. Is this the correct Marxist viewpoint? I dunno; I was talking to Marxist Julian about this. We discussed my political leanings in details and he pointed out that, based on what I’d told him, I most fitted the profile of ‘a fascist, or at the very least a really cynically right-wing person’. Whatever. I feel that I don’t get enough respect from scary homeless people on the streets at home, so I guess it’s nice to have the scary homeless woman best known for screaming at traffic and spitting at random pedestrians politely and quietly asking me for a Frosty Jack’s, and then thanking me emphatically for it. I LIKE TO REVEL. So sometimes I hold the drink just out of reach, or I wave it around in little circles and I watch their beady little eyes follow the bubbles in the bottle without missing a beat. Sometimes I ask them to dance for me before I give them the sweet sweet Special Brew (nb: I do not ask them to dance for me).

Of course, now I’m a member of the working class, I don’t like to torture just them. Don’t think that. Don’t think that all of the Drunks are homeless scum. I mean, most of them, but in reality Drunks come in all shapes, sizes, and social classes. The amount of money you haven’t doesn’t ultimately have any influence in determining if you’re pathetic drunk. And not even the amount that you drink. Frankly it is more of a state of mind than anything else. And it’s not really funny. These people are sick individuals. They need help. They are depressing, pathetic, heart-rending and – most importantly – hilarious. So with no further ado I present

SOME VERY FUNNY DRUNKS WHO HAVE COME INTO MY SHOP IN RECENT DAYS

Frog Woman
This little short foreign-looking old woman hobbled in. She looked like a fucking frog. Her eyes bulged out of the side of her squad little head and she sort of hopped along. When she arrived at the counter, she turned sideways and fixed me with one shiny eyes. “HELLO” she said “CAN I HAVE THE BELL’S WHISKEY ON SALE NINE NINETY NINE”.
I stared at her. What, I said.
“BELL’S WHISKEY ON SALE NINE NINETY NINE.”
I was like ok, then I got down the Bell’s and I scanned it in, it was like twelve quid. Oh. Already, a nauseating sweat crept over me. What you don’t realise is that every sale is like an elaborate theatre, a dance routine that requires the use of a series of increasingly convoluted and difficult steps, a gym routine of scanning and card-swiping and maths and button-pressing. And when something doesn’t work properly, it is like I’m corpsing on stage, or I’m tripping over my feet, or I’m falling off the high-beam and cracking open my vagina. And the worst thing is, it isn’t even my fault. It’s the tills. I don’t like our till systems. They don’t work properly. Special offers don’t get scanned through properly. Occasionally the computer gets unplugged and an entire days’s takings can just be lost in the system (nobody notices). The customers don’t realise that this is the shit I have to put up with every day. For some reason, they just ASSUME that everything works properly. Idiots.
‘Uh, it seems to be, uh, twelve pounds here’ I said calmly.
“NO IT IS NINE NINETY NINE” she replied stolidly. “IT SAYS SO ON THE BOARD OUTSIDE”.
I fucking hate that board. Nobody ever changes or updates it, and I’m pretty sure it still has special offers up from like, last year. And even if the offers are relevant to nowadays, I can guarantee that the computer system doesn’t know that. I panicked. And so I did what I always do when I panic – I asked my supervisor, who was reading Plato in the back room.
“Just… tell her that the offer’s expired. That’s what I always do.”
I went back out, where the woman was still standing there. However, she’d turned round and was now gazing at me with her other eye. This was offputting.
“Uh, sorry madam, but the offer has expired.”
“IT SAYS ON THE BOARD THAT IT IS A CHRISTMAS OFFER. TODAY IS THE EIGHTH OF DECEMBER. WHY DO YOU SAY CHRISTMAS OFFER WHEN IT ENDS NOW.”
I really had no response to that. There was a small queue of customers building up behind Frog Woman. Directly behind her was an actually fairly hot (in comparison to the rest of the ugly shoe-faced scum we get in the shop) young girl. Suddenly, my supervisor magically appeared out of the back room and started serving – the rule is that he only serves when the customers are hot. In the meantime, Frog Woman was slowly muttering to herself about the fact that if they had an offer on a board, they had to honour it. I wasn’t really paying attention, to be honest I was selling some other guy a packet of Bensons. However my supervisor – after sorting out Fit Girl - noticed Frog Woman and engaged her in conversation. They then chatted literally the next twenty-five minutes. Topics of conversation included:

Why the shop shouldn’t put up a sign avertising Bell’s Whiskey for £9.99 when inside the shop it didn’t cost that much

Why the whiskey was a present and she didn’t want to break the ten pound price range

Why it would probably in fact be a MUCH better investment to in fact but a seventeen quid bottle of whiskey (my supervisor’s input)

How the woman liked Christmas but didn’t like buying presents

About where they were spending their holidays

About life in Bangladesh (turned out they were both Bangladeshi)

About the history of Bangladesh (no offence, I don’t want to sound racist, but how come every time two Asian-type people start talking to each other, they invariably refer to “The Troubles”, look grave, and then change the topic? I need to brush up on my Asian history I think)

A Bangladeshi folk-tale about a king who was really wise and had a mythic flying horse or something, I can’t remember, I was too busy serving all of the other customers, restocking the soft drinks fridge, lugging around crates of beer AND adding change to my till. All while my supervisor was having a chin wag. FUCK HIM. Lazy shit

Anyway, she finally left about an hour after she came in. I can’t remember if she bought anything, but she looked happy when she left.
And my passion is to serve people, and so to me, that was a job well done.

Red-Face Man
Red-Face Man came in and my Inbuilt Crazy Drunks Radar went WOOGA WOOGA and then exploded. Last time I buy an Inbuilt Crazy Drunks Radar from Wilkinson’s, I tell you. There was just something about the way he walked that was Off. So I knew something was up, but I wasn’t going to let it phase me - I’m a professional, remember? By the way, I refuse to call the customers “sir” or “madam”. I mean, I’m a humble working man and all but I frankly draw the line at actually BEING humble to anyone. I think I’m better than that. So my standard greeting is a subdued ‘Alright?’ which I think does the job while simultaneously saying “I don’t really need this job so don’t mess me around or I WILL kick you in the head” which is what I’m going for.
Anyway, he came up to the counter and I said ‘alright?’ and he fixed me with a devastating glare and said ‘No, not really to be honest’. Seriously, what are you meant to say to that? I settled for ‘Staring blankly at him and then slowly stepping away from the counter’. And then I looked at him and saw that his eyes were all shiny. Had he been CRYING?. Oh, shit. I rolled my internal eyes and expected him to order a bottle of vodka, or whiskey, or Frosty Jacks, or that turpentine stuff that we keep under the sink in the bank room to disinfect the floor every time someone drops a bottle of Pinot Grigio in the white wine section. Anything to numb the pain.
“I’ll have twelve bottles of champagne, please.”
I was like what. I mean he didn’t look like a hobo, so the fact that he had money was no surprise, but seriously, who just walks into a shop and buys twelve champagnes, especially when they look like they’ve been crying? Fucking weirdo. Except, you know me, I am a humble servant, so I hopped to it.
He turned out to be a knob. He didn’t request any particular brand, so when I aksed him, he gave me a withering glare and spat ‘Whatever’, and when we were trying to load the champagne into boxes for him, he was like ‘I want a bigger box’ which wasn’t useful. Frankly I’m only in this job for money (sorry, but fuck you, proletariat brothers) and being talked down to by some dickhead man wearing stained chinos and a huge pink linen shirt is not my idea of acceptable. I don’t do turning the other cheek, so I was well resentful. However eventually we manged to sort him out, and my friend Dave carried the boxes to the guy’s car, which was RIGHT OUTSIDE (on a disabled space).
I was glad to be rid of him. To be brutally honest, when Dave came back in and said that Red-Faced Man had revealed that his daughter had narrowly survived a serious car accident that morning, I cheered and high-fived one my supervisors. Then I started wondering why, if his daughter was seriously injured, he was buying champagne? It Was A Mystery.
“That’s Karma”, said the supervisor solemnly. “The other week he came in and bought ten bottles of champagne and was a cunt to me. Karma. His daughter deserved it.”
That is the kind of crazy logic that we in the wine trade like to live our lives to.

Old Men
These two old men. Both of them looked about 60ish. Both were dirty, leathery, smelly, missing teeth. Both wearing cheapo trainers. I managed to catch a glimpse of their conversation.

OLD MAN 1: Hey, you on Facebook yet?
OLD MAN 2: Yes, until I committed suicide on it. I don’t like it much.
OLD MAN 1: Yeah?
OLD MAN 2: Yeah, the other day I was woken up by it chirping, and it said that I’d been bitten by a vampire zombie application and it had sucked away my blood on Facebook.
OLD MAN 1: Yeah that’s the thing I don’t like about Facebook, you keep getting emails for every tiny little thing.
OLD MAN 2: That’s what I like about MySpace, you can turn off the emails which I think is handy.
OLD MAN 1: Do you still use your MySpace? Nobody goes on MySpace any more.

THESE GUYS WERE LIKE EIGHTY. It’s bad enough that my dad is on FaceBook and he keeps making comments about my various statae and blogs (“Who do you think that Anonymous commenter was?”).

But now random tramps? Life is fucking mental.

* * *

So that is a brief whirlwind tour through the life of a working class stiff for my audience of intelligentia, royalty and jews. I bet it was fun, eh? Like an exciting little safari into the lives of the scum? You people make me sick. I’m gonna go protest against the capitalist conspiracy against me and my brothers. We’re onto you. ALL OF YOU. Somebody give me a sign to wave.

Man, I am SO a bit of rough. I might buy a flatcap and grow some stubble.

Panic on the streets of London (although in this case I am referring to Oxford so the reference doesn’t really work)

2007-11-28T15:08:00.000Z

Nick Griffin and David Irving came to speak at the Oxford Union on Monday. For those of you reading this blog who are unaware of the facts of the matter, David Irving is a Bad Historian who chats a lot of shit about the Holocaust not happening. Nick Griffin is the head of the political party the BNP, which is some bunch of jokers that spend their time smoking fat blunts and capping bitches. I was curious about them so I went on their website and the slogan was “People just like you making a difference” and then their first news story was “BNP call to ban Muslims from our skies” which I think pretty much tells the whole story. To be honest the entire BNP website is filled with such jokers – including high quality comedy like this:

(HAHAHAHAHHA brilliant)

… and frankly maybe it is a topic for a later blog post; I don’t want this post to get bogged down in complicated political discourse (and we all know that when I start talking about politics, the finely balanced and incisive analysis can go on for hours). But just to set the scene a bit more, here’s a picture of the two men in question:

You might not be able to tell, but that picture isn’t actually a photograph. In fact it was originally a WW2 propaganda poster (which explains why David Griffin and Nick Irving are destroying the Statue of Liberty which for some reason is bleeding); and I have cleverly photoshopped it to suit my purposes, for example, by adding the names of the two men in the place of ‘Hitler’ and ‘Mongolian Looking Bloke’. If you look carefully, you’ll also see that I replaced the word ‘PRODUCTION’ on the big spanner with the word ‘DEBATE’. This is because Luke Tryl, the greasy little Head of the Oxford Union who invited Griffo and Irvs in the first place, said that he was confident that Oxford Students would be able to “crush these men in debate” and so I have tried to reflect that viewpoint with the Nazi Beast being scared off by the spanner of Good Debate. I’m not sure exactly what Trylby was expecting, like, some philosophy student to make a really good speech and then both of these guys who have spent their entire life talking this shit to look at each other and then be like “You know what, mate, that is THE BEST ANALOGY that I’ve ever heard in my ENTIRE LIFE, and, wow, I’ve never heard that particular argument put before me so eloquently and I don’t believe it, my mind is totally changed, I’m gonna quit this job, marry a black man and open a kebab shop. In fact, come over here. High five, soul brother, high five.” I don’t know, call me a cynic, but in my imagination, the entire debate was always going to boil down to a bunch of spluttering undergraduates going “buh-buh-but RACISM IS WRONG!” and then the Griffmeister-Jay just reciting a list of facts and figures that don’t make any sense but sound impressive, and then everyone would go away feeling pleased with themselves. Pfft whatever.

Anyway so the situation was that these men were coming to speak about free speech, and like half the university had a massive hissy fit about it and essentially decided to have a protest outside of the Union; then when The Racists showed up they would be Shown The Error Of Their Ways by some students waving placards. I quite like the irony of having a forum about free speech with some people who want to crush the free speech of other people and so the only retaliation of the people who are pro free speech is to attempt to stop the free speech of the people who are anti free speech. Free speech was absolutely the phrase of the moment and I’m not gonna lie, I got fucking bored of hearing it being brought up every ten seconds. Personally, I think that the issue is that Luke Tryl can’t see the difference between ‘oppressing someone’s right to free speech’ and ‘not inviting random lunatics from off the street to speak in front of hundreds of people’… I pretty much think that THAT’S where the issue lies. Right, so I’ve put that one to bed.

Seriously, though: free speech is a big issue. I have thought it through, and on consideration I would probably describe myself as both a hero and a martyr of free speech; because of my adherence and commitment to it, I am forced to just sit back and watch as people post horrible horrible comments about me on my blog. And those hurt, y’know? The anonymous spittle-flecked rantings of someone I don’t know who posts how mean I am on my blog at three in the morning is something that will haunt me to my grave. These anonymous writers don’t know what it does to my ego to see the number of comments steadily ticking up to the highest numbers since February. But it’s bad, I tell you. So you can see that I’ve suffered dreadfully in my quest to uphold free speech, and so I felt personally invested in this debate and I knew that even if I couldn’t get tickets inside the chamber, I would BE THERE OUTSIDE to cheer on/boo (depending on what everyone else was doing). Plus, you know me, I’m a sheep, I’m an experience junky, I just want to be where the action is, so I was like ‘let’s go!’ and then I pushed over a chair to show how rebellious and anti-conformist I am. Matt, who was well up for it, got really annoyed with me and said “Look, if you’re not going to take this seriously then don’t even bother coming” so I had to put on a really stony poker face. In fact I let him go off to the debate first on his own so I wouldn’t embarrass him in front of his new protester friends.

But after a bit, I got bored of hanging around in the bar and so we rolled up. Being out on the streets were bizarre. We’d been warned for weeks in advance that all of Oxford would be in security lockdown, and now the day itself had come. It was very exciting, actually: there was definitely a thrill in the air, a sort of buzzing electricity that said “Something is happening tonight”; the atoms in the atmosphere were glowing faintly and the sky was screwed into a little ball of anticipation; even the trees were holding their breath and the birds had stopped singing. There was also a load of police horses wearing riot helmets and shinpads, which was neat. The real action of course was taking place on the street outside the Union building, which was crammed to the fore with angry people. There was barely space to breathe, and the police had formed a cordon around the outside of the door and had stopped letting people with tickets go in. There was also some guy with a drum who was playing the Macarena or something, which I felt gave the entire scene a quite festive atmosphere. I mean, the reporter on the BBC website summed it up best when he wrote “there was not a gown in sight”. This was true – nobody at all had chosen to dress up in their sub fusc which – as everyone who has never been to Oxford will know – is what we wear seven days a week. We also travel everywhere via punt. Because we are the height of civility. OR SO YOU WOULD THINK. One look at the crowd instantly quashed that idea. This was no time for sub fusc. This was time for angry white people holding these signs that said “UNITE TO STOP RACISM”. The funny thing was that the signs were designed with these stick figure characters on them clutched arm in arm and the only way that the designers had to distinguish the two was to give one of the stick men a square head:

What does that represent? Black people with square heads? Mongoloids? I thought it was weird. Briefly. But really I had no time to sit and ponder as I swiftly got caught up in the moment, what with all the shaking of fists and yelling of GO HOME BNP with the rest of the crowd. There was lots of jostling and whatnot and I’m not joking, at one point someone started a chant that was just ‘oggy oggy oggy oy oy oy’, except in this case it was ‘Nazi Nazi Nazi out out out’ which I honestly thought was one of the best things I had heard in my entire life. It’s a pity that nobody else agreed with me and so we went back with the failsafe OUT OUT BNP. Which was nice.

It didn’t stay nice, though. The thing with large groups of self-righteous people is that after a while, they start to believe their own legend, and then they decide that as they’re all yelling something that has moral superiority, that gives them the right to act like utter penises. So pretty soon people were climbing on the wall and abusing students who were trying to get in to watch the debate; and then they started to stop people going in – “we’re defending our right to free speech by not letting you go in and watch this man speak” and then some other people broke into the building itself and ran up and down playing the piano. The guy on the wall found out and was like ‘I HAVE CONFIRMATION THAT 50 PROTESTERS HAVE ENTERED THE BUILDING’ and then everyone WHOOPED and roared and high fived as though suddenly they were part of some huge anti-conformist letz take down de system rebellion. It was like in Star Wars when they blew up the Def Star and everyone was like chest bumping Admiral Akbar, but in this case the rebellion high command was just a bunch of randomers. Basically it got to the point where I was so sick of everyone acting like dickheads and going on about FUCKING FREE SPEECH that I set about making a small petrol bomb and then I just set fire to the entire street. Luckily my moment of madness was averted by the fact that I didn’t have any petrol or bombmaking equipment, so instead substitute ‘built a small petrol bomb with ‘said “fuck this”’ and ‘set fire to the entire street’ with ‘went to the bar and drank like eight Fosters and then tripped over the stairs’.

Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way pro the BNP (their banter is atrocious and Griffin has a tiny penis). On the other hand, I don’t think that being anti-BNP means you have to be pro-knobhead. I’m sure it’s possible to protest without turning into a utter twat. However, life hasn’t really taught me different. You might not know this, but I am an old salt when it comes to ripping apart authority in demonstration form. I once marched in protest against the jews or something, I can’t really remember , and honestly I wasn’t that impressed that time. Large groups of shouty self-righteous people always piss me off. Protesters, free-palestine guys, anti-animal testing, pro-free speech, hippies, treehuggers and vegetarians. They constantly turn me off the particular issue. If you want me to be pro anything, just show me some protesters and I will automatically support the other side, just because I want to annoy the demonstrators. This is why I’m a member of Seal Clubbers of Canada. Anybody who complains about anything is lame.

The irony of course is that it’s all two sides of the same coin: people who want free speech, people who want free speech as long as it doesn’t offend them, people who write anonymous shit on the internet, people who want free speech as long as it gives them the right to be utter cocks, the BNP and the OUSU, racists and anti-racists… they all believe they’re in the right. But being in the right doesn’t automatically give you the right to do whatever the hell you want. Everyone likes to just sit back and feel self-justified to act like enormous penises and it’s both annoying and headache-inducing. Rights and responsibilities, people.

I don’t even know what I’m talking about now, but I think that I can conclude by saying that I’m pretty much the only entirely blameless person in this entire situation.

Ella

2007-11-25T00:14:00.001Z

I have written about some pretty controversial things on this blog. I did a treatise on paedophilia during which I invented a reality tv show called “YO, MOLEST ME!”. During the Danish Cartoon beef a few years back, I made a series of comical pictoral oronyms of Mohammad (‘toehammad’ and ‘emohammad’ and ‘Ric Romerohammad’ etc) and inserted them at the end of every blog post for a month. I wrote a post that was basically a series of pictures of small animals getting flamethrowered/squished with a hammer/run over with a steamroller. Y'know what? None of that ever really got that vociferous a response. I think it was because I didn’t know where people’s hot buttons lie. Racism, paedeophilia and animal cruelty: not enough to get people het up any more. You people are too desensitised to violence and shock tactics and suchlike. Yet I write a post about being unable to open a tin of tuna and suddenly the switchboards light up.

…

After my last blog, the following comment was posted:

Anonymous said...
so you slept with this bitch Ella yet? You keep bringing her up, constant kind references. If it weren't for the fact that youra complete failure I'd assume your allready fucking her, But we all know your not, partly down to those deep down feelings of underconfidence and unwantedness that were made oh so much worse when you got cheated on. I bet they don't really help your confidence around girls. I guess thats why you praise them on blogs, because you havn't got the balls to say anything in real life.
Your a joke
2:17 AM

Right. Ouch. I’m a decent kind of guy and I appreciate healthy criticism as much as the next gee, so I didn’t delete it. I just left it up there. In fact, I’m barely going to discuss the actual content of the comment itself for fear of appearing pricklike and/or snipey – and we know that I’ve turned over a new leaf and am trying to curb my internet overreactions. Just rinsing every section of that and making a load of unjustified value-judgments on someone I barely know would be a really knobbish thing to do. It would seem like I was playing the role of some kind of internet tough-guy and posting horrible and unwarranted things about someone from behind the safety, anonymity and security of my keyboard. And frankly I would never do anything like that. In fact, I will just make a few general points about it and then we will be able to move on with our lives. I have some, just read them, note them, make of them what you will.

Point the First:The comment was posted at 2.17 in the morning
Point the Second: “allready”
Point the Third: The writer commented on the fact that I ‘haven’t got the balls to say anything in real life’
Point the Fourth: It was posted as ‘anonymous’
Point the Fifth: I am not ‘fucking Ella’ yet and if I was it would be no cause for sadness; in fact frankly it would be a cause for joy and dancing in the street. I also don’t constantly mention her for no reason (pfft, the idea)
Point the Sixth: "underconfidence and unwantedness". Neologistic.
Point the Seventh:You’re. You’re. You’re. YOU'RE.

THAT’S IT THAT’S IT. That is it. Those are the only real statements that I have to make about the actual content of the comment itself. Well, I have one more but I think that it can wait until I have finished the rest of this blog.

Of course, once that comment was posted, the message board/comment section/facebook/JCR/Oxford Journalism Scene/my parents became AWASH with speculation as to whom the writer could have been. After intense discussion and not a little bit of internet detective work, I tracked some IP addresses, and hacked some sub-servers and found out that I didn’t really know anything about computers. I then fell back to the wisdom of popular guesswork and thus, in no particular order, here are the most likely suspects as chosen by the mob. Ironically, I think that the beginning of this list could fit quite snugly in with the whole ‘people who hate me’ list which I have also been compiling:

Mike and/or Lucia
For some reason, Mike has been the suggestion offered by the greatest number of people. I don’t see where this has come from. This is not his style. Mike’s style is being overbearingly friendly and nice. I haven’t seen him being horrible to anyone ever (other than that one time when he got obsessed with my friend Joe’s girlfriend Kaitlin and then went out with her when they broke up, but that was strictly a one time thing). And frankly I don’t see why either of them would be that mad with me. Especially about Ella (even though Ella is more of a man/woman than Mike/Lucia will ever be). Plus they aren’t vindictive. Plus I haven’t done anything to hurt them at all. Plus why would they care enough to be blog-cussing me at 2.17 in the morning. That kind of behaviour is absolutely for social pariahs and people with skin complaints. So I want to officially cross them off of the list. But it was gratifying the number of people who independently decided that it was him and called him a knob. That was good.

Lucia’s Sister
She had detested me since I accidentally called her ‘fat’ three years ago and then she screamed me out of the house and my only response was to sing at her. Could she be the one who wrote it? Thinking about it: No. Not her; firstly I don’t think she reads this blog as much as she used to do, and secondly because I don’t think her fingers are thin enough to type individual letters yet. “Ho ho, a return to vintage early 2006 humour! Wahey!” [clam]

Anyone From King’s
You know when you cause someone so much hurt, and they do enough bad shit to you, and you two hate each other so much, that eventually you think to yourself “Seriously, Tom, you have burnt literally all of your bridges with this girl” and you essentially cut off all communications and never speak to each other again? Well that’s pretty much the situation between me and this independent boys school in West London. At this point, I honestly think that King’s College School and I can have no more to do with each other. I can’t even remember all of the reasons, but, following certain incidents and happenings, I’m pretty sure that there’s an entire year group that hates me. What’s really good is that there are still untapped wells of resentment out there. People who I don’t even know occasionally send me hate-mail. It’s brilliant and I know that I should be upset, but really, it takes a certain level of anti-conformist skill to make an entire school full of public schoolboys hate your guts (with the exception of my friend Pete and some dude called Alex Watson who apparently thinks that I am ‘cool’; cheers dude). So yes. There is a decent chance that the writer of that comment is from King’s.
But hey, joke’s on you, buddy, you got screwed over by the IB system whereas I did A Levels which are progressively getting easier every year, got all As and now go to Oxford! Gutted.

A Girl
I hadn’t even considered that it might have been a girl until Aime pointed out to me that both sexes can indeed operate keyboards. I was like woahhhhh. Although I do guess that that kind of makes sense; I mean what with all the stuff about my relationship with girls, perhaps the anonymous really is writing from a female point of view. Especially as the main attack seems to be along the lines of ‘You are too shy to talk to girls’ which to be honest I think is kind of cute and endearing and Seth Cohen-esque. OOH I KNOW perhaps it’s a girl who like, secretly loves me and is getting increasingly frustrated that I’m not picking up on her really obvious signals! Yes! I’m in there again!
Mmmmmmaybe not.
I mean, I’m an optimistic guy at heart and to be honest given enough alcohol I can translate absolutely any female signal into a booty call, but even I see the weaknesses in translating “you’re a complete failure” (my grammar) as a come on. Maybe I’m wrong and frankly, babe, if you want a piece of the Phizzle, you have to do it take a ticket and stand in line, I’ll move on to you shortly. Maybe just send me some money?

Someone who hates Ella
They did call her a ‘Bitch’. But who could hate Ella? That’s like hating the Sun or something. And when I say the Sun I mean not The Sun the newspaper. I mean the star that gives us warmth and light. We all in our own special way orbit around Ella. She is the ground under our feet and the air in our lungs.

nb: when I say ‘we all orbit around her’ I am NOT saying that Ella is fat because she isn’t, in fact she is perfection carved into a human form.
nnb: thinking about it, I want to retract the statement ‘Ella is the air in our lungs’; seeing as she smokes so many cigarettes that the air she exhales turns the end of the filter black, I don't think any of us should be inhaling anything when in her general presence

To conclude, I’m not even going to consider this as a possibility. You might as well say that Bigfoot wrote it.

Nick Griffin and/or David Irving

(I love how that is the picture of Griffin that the BBC decided to use on their story; the one with him staring with his weird mismatched eyes like someone out of a Gabrielle lookalike competition)

Griffin and Irving are these two brers who have been invited to speak at the Oxford Union about Freedom of Speech. Griffin is the head of the political party the BNP, which as far as I can tell is like the Boy Scouts except they don’t like uppity black people and immigrants, and Irving is some historian who says that the holocaust didn’t happen. Frankly, as a blue eyed blonde haired white dude, they technically should have no beef with me and I don’t really understand them bonding together to write mean posts on the internet about me. However, when it was announced that they were speaking, the whole university collectively weed its pants, threw its toys out of the pram, had a tantrum, etc, and since then there have been innumerable vociferous arguments, marches, rallies and newspaper columns protesting the obscenity of having these two angry young men speaking at Oxford. Today we were all sent an email warning us that Griffin was quite likely to bring “group of extremist party members who are violent against people who look like they aren't straight white caucasians” who would run through the streets and set fire to black people and threaten Hassan’s Kebab Van and stuff; like I said, I’m aryan as hell so I’m not that bothered (in fact I might join in, just for jokes) but I guess with all the rivers of hate that are unleashed wherever Griffin and Irving go, there is a chance that they probably could have had the evil inside them. So, uh... let’s give them like, a 6% chance of having written it.

My Mum
For: She has been getting pretty annoyed that I’ve not called her from University for the past four or five weeks. Against: I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know how to use a computer.

This dude

I don’t know why. He just looks pretty angry. And also kind of like a virgin, which would explain why he’s posting stuff anonymously on the internet at 2 in the morning. Hmm. On second thoughts, seeing as I got this picture off google images by typing “angry pathetic virgin”, it’s probably not him.

Someone Else
Ah, the magical Someone Else. Guilty of pretty much everything that is wrong in the world. I’m tempted to pretty much ascribe the culprit to being a member of this group. But still doesn’t answer the question… WHO? WHO? WHO? Because, as much as I wrack my brains, I honestly can’t think of anybody who I have pissed off THAT much in the past four months. I’ve been remarkably good. An angel, to be honest. Perhaps it’s Satan who is getting annoyed that I’ve stopped on the downpayments for my minifridge. That could be it. Why do I have a secret enemy? That's a bit worrying.

* * *

So the situation was that there was a mean comment on my blog and I wasn’t sure what to do about it. Respond, or not? Or turn the other cheek? Hmm. Well the fact was, I’d thought to myself previously “I should be less of a cock on the internet to people” after the whole debacle of, ooh, the last 9 months of my life. And so I was torn – respond, or give up the sweet and peaceful internet lifestyle I had adopted and grown to love?

In fact it was kind of like one of those Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, when Jean-Claude had quit the marines to be a fisherman or to whittle chairs or whatever, and then his old army captain comes along and is all like “Jean-Claude these guys have kidnapped the president” and JC is like “Sorry dude, you know I don’t do that any more” but then the army dude’s like “Yeah but they also kidnapped your sister” and then JC stands up in slow motion and throws down his fishing rod and ties a bandanna around his head and is like “This time it is personal” and then he roundhouse kicks a tree until it falls over (by the way I can do that now that I am a red belt at kickboxing).
Of course in this case it was more like “Tom, some guy wrote a mean comment on your blog comments, we need you to redress the balance and write a horrible blog about THEM", and I’m like “Sorry, I don’t do that any more” but then they were like “But the commenter called Ella a bitch” and I’m like “RAAAWR PLAYTIME IS OVER BITCHES” and I kick over a table of playing cards.
So I tied my metaphorical bandanna around my metaphorical head and settled down to write some kind of ribald and no doubt HILARIOUS rejoinder to that comment. But lo and behold, to my surprise I saw that other people had already been there and done it for me!

“At least put your name to it, you vicious bitch.”
“Only a moron would spell 'already' with two 'l's.”
“lets be honest we all know who that comment is.... hes a nob.”
“Hey anonymous cocksucker, put your fucking name on your piece of illiterate shit. You're the skidmark of a worm-ridden dog dragging its arse along the floor.”
“Anonymous,if you dislike this blog so much why did you go through it and count how many times he mentioned Ella? Get a life.”
Etc.

I have to say I was touched at the number of people coming out of the woodwork to leap to my defence. I’m not even joking it was absolutely worth having some anonymous dude insult the pants off of me, just to see all anonymous internetters leaping to my defence and saying how much they liked the blog! I love you guys.

xxx

ONE MORE THING. My final point to note about the content of that letter.
Point the Seventh: The whole thing about me being shit with girls. I’m sorry, anonymous friend, this is the only point that I’m gonna have to disagree with you on. Frankly, I am dynamite with the ladies. In fact, I might as well take this opportunity to wipe that smile off of your face with the news: I HAVE A GIRLFRIEND. That’s right. I really do. No joking. Somebody who was totally a girl (I know because the comment was highlighted in pink) wrote on my facebook Honesty Box wall that I was ‘fittttt’. Notice all the ‘t’s. There are five ‘t’s. That is how fit I am. Five times as fit. As a normal person. It’s getting pretty serious now, actually. I reckon she’ll tell me her name in a couple of weeks. So stick THAT in your Bacardi and sip it, Mr Anonymous.

I hope that it was Ella that Honesty Boxed me. Man it’d be so wicked if Ella and I fell in love and then we got married and lived in a little house with really good ventilation. Mmm. Ella Ella Ella. ELLA. She has now been mentioned 18 times in this post which, according to my official Ella-counter, is some kind of a record. 19 times now.

We have a Code Red situation, people

2007-11-20T00:05:00.001Z

My can opener broke the other day. Yes. I was just beginning to open a can of tuna – scritch scritch scritch* - when there was a sudden creaking noise. Something pinged off the can opener. The can of tuna fell out of the clutches of the can opener and toppled artistically into the sink, which was filled with yellow water and cutlery. Man, you should have seen my face. It was somewhere between :|, :S and :’(. With a little bit of 8-() thrown in for good measure. Had I been able to speak, I would have described myself as speechless and for a few seconds I could do nothing but gape, utterly aghast, at the now useless can opener that I still clutched in my quivering hand.

I mentally choked (rather like Eminem at the beginning of the film ‘8 Mile’, a tome that I base a lot of my lifestyle on). But I couldn’t even begin to react. As Marshall Mathers said, I only had only one chance to save this tuna and still have a delicious lunch (I was planning to make a tuna toastie). This was my one shot, my one opportunity, everything I’d ever wanted for– was I going to capture it, or just let it slip? Even as I sat there staring, my tuna was getting soggy and useless. THE CLOCK WAS RUN OUT, OVER, BLAM. I was rapidly blowing and it and all I could do was look lamely at my emasculated can opener. Luckily William Shatner was walking past the window and happened to look in and noticed; his reaction was both esoteric and shattering:

(NB: did not actually happen, is more of a description of my mental state)

However, the metaphorical William Shatner was enough to crack me out of my reverie, and with no further ado I leapt into action. The first thing to do was to rescue the tuna. I threw the can opener to the floor and plunged my hands into the murky depths of the sink, which contained a week’s worth of dirty washing up, as well as all the waste fluids that are necessarily produced by a busy teenager (I’m talking spat out toothpaste, phlegm, dregs of coffee/tea that never got drunk, bits of paper, ink, seaweed, manky vitamins, beer, etc etc etc). Frankly the water was congealing to the point that it was nearly solid in some places, what with all the oils and bits of bread and marmite floating about in there. However after stabbing myself with a concealed submarine breadknife and probably catching Veils Disease from the fluid, I managed to fish out the tin of tuna (get it, ‘fish out’, eh eh eh brilliant I’m wasted on you people). I examined it critically. Well. There was good news and bad news. The good news was that the hole made by the can opener wasn’t big enough to let the magically delicious tuna float away into the murky bottom of my abyssal sink. The bad news was that the hole made by the can opener wasn’t big enough to let the magically delicious tuna float away into the murky bottom of my abyssal belly, as, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t fit a fork into it to scrape the tuna out. This was bad times.

I turned to my desk, swept the complete works of George Eliot onto the floor, placed the partially opened tin of tuna onto the centre of my workstation, sat down on my chair, crossed my legs, made a little pyramid with my fingers, leant forward and glared at it. I don’t know what I was expecting – the can to open itself out of embarrassment, maybe? – but it just sat there, oozing delicious tuna smells and being infuriating. The more I stared at it, the more I wanted it. To understand the full scale of this calamity, you must start to understand my common nutritional intake as a student. It’s tea, coffee, and bread. That’s it. I have my bread toasted, I have it with marmite, I have it with melted cheese I have it with Philadelphia, but it’s pretty much the whole staple of my diet. And I don’t do meals any more. Today I got up at 930am and my sole solid food intake was a six-piece bread binge at 8.30pm, along with about four cups of tea. I’m hoping to just start not eating at all and just not notice the difference (which I think will do wonders for my Hustings application to be the college anorexia councellor – I’ll have some inspirational stories to tell the girls). So you can imagine that a desire to actually eat some tuna (in a toastie, with cheese and bread) was not just an idle wish – it was an all-encompassing quest, bitches. So. I got out a bit of paper and made a list of options (in fact I wrote them over my photocopy of the poem “Grief” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; I know it’s a devastating insight into the power of bereavement on people, but at the same time fair’s fair, and tuna comes first).

OPTION ONE: TRY AND FIX THE CAN OPENER
I picked it up and cast a keep technical eye over it. I put it down and made some calculations on a bit of paper, along with a small sketchy diagram of the mechanism of the opener. However I realised halfway through that I had no engineering understanding whatsoever so the can opener mechanism blueprint turned into a sketch of Top Cat, wearing a nazi uniform and doing Jessica Rabbit.
I screwed the paper into a small ball and threw it at the bin. I missed.

OPTION TWO: TRY TO SCRAPE THE TUNA OUT OF THE TINY HOLE USING SOME SORT OF SPATULA
The “Some sort of spatula” turned out to be a pen – the only thing small enough to fit into the hole. After two and half minutes of frantic scraping I managed to get out a flake of tuna that was about a square millimetre long. I eagerly gobbled it down and despite the overwhelming taste of ink, it was still the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten up to that point. However my pen nib was bent and leaking ink everywhere. So I threw it at the bin. I missed.

OPTION THREE: RENT ONE OF THESE HUGE SAW THINGS FOR A DAY AND TOTALLY POUND THE CAN OF TUNA INTO SUBMISSION

I realised pretty early on that this scheme was not only expensive, it was also impractical and unworkable. So I screwed the loan contract into a ball and threw it at the bin. I missed.

OPTION FOUR: THROW THE TIN OF TUNA AT THE WALL
It left a greasy sunflowery-oily mark on my Shaun of the Dead poster, sprayed gunk all over my bed, bounced, and landed perfectly the bin. I reached into the aforesaid receptacle to retrieve my lunch and I accidently put my hand into an expired pot of jam that had blue mould growing off of it. I experimentally licked the jam to see if it tasted anything like tuna. It didn’t. It tasted like Ella’s room, and did nothing to assuage the hunger pangs. I was getting increasingly desperate for the tuna, the sweet smell of which permeated every molecule in my room.

OPTION FIVE: LEAVE THE ROOM TO BORROW SOMEONE ELSE’S CAN OPENER, OR SOMEONE ELSE’S TUNA, OR BUY ANOTHER CAN OPENER, OR BUY SOME TUNA THAT DOESN’T COME IN A CAN
I was about to do this when I suddenly stopped. The first reason for my stoppage was that I was wearing only a pair of boxers. The second – and more pressing - reason was that I was highly wary of leaving my beloved tuna alone in the room. Knowing my luck, one of my friends would probably come along, see that the tuna was there, get obsessed with it, spend all the days and nights of the year obsessively going on about it, become the tuna’s best friend and be the popular one amongst all the other tinned fish products at the supermarket then buy his own can opener and eat it. It’s happened before, you know, and this time I was absolutely not letting Mike have sex with my tuna. It was time to take decisive action. MANLY ACTION. And of course, when I say “MANLY ACTION”, what I’m referring to is “STABBING THE CAN TO DEATH WITH A PENKNIFE”. That’s right, I did the patriotic thing and brutally rent my way in with a huge bloody blade. Truthfully, if I was writing an English Literature essay about the manner in which I opened that can of tuna, I would have to comment on the PHALLIC way that I repeatedly PIERCED the previously virginal lid with the big long PHALLIC knife so that the sweet fishy juices gushed forth. Bluntly it was pornographic. Aime would have written a good essay on it I think. When I was done I threw back my knife and leant back in my chair and accidentally knocked the wrecked remnants of the tin onto the floor. I cried out in horror, weighed up my options, and decided that a few hairs/scraps of paper/plasters/ants wouldn’t impede the taste too much, so I scooped it up and mashed it all back into the tin.

There was a heavenly moan of glee as I held my fishy snack aloft in both hands.

YES! I cried.

YES! cried passing neighbours of my room who looked in and saw what was achieved

YES! cried the tweety birds in the trees

YES! cried the clouds in the sky

NO! cried my tuna… but it was too late.

I put that tuna in some bread with some cheese and made a tuna melt. And frankly it was pretty nice. Not the best thing I’ve ever eaten, and candidly I think that the tuna detracted from the overall experience a bit. I mean seriously, putting tuna in the toaster? Bad move gee. But overall I’d rate it 7/10. Possibly not worth the effort. But the main thing was that I got to stab something and use creative visualisation, and to be honest, does anything else matter?

The answer is no.

*scritch scritch scritch is the sound that a can opener makes when it is busily opening a can of tuna

We’re not in Oxford any more, Toto

2007-11-16T20:55:00.000Z

I went home the other day. For a brief visit. To be honest, the main point of the visit was to pick up some prizes that my school had chosen to honour me with. I also felt like popping home and visiting my dogs and/or family and being like ‘cool sup gees’. So that is what I did, I bought a ticket and boarded a coach and set off on my way.

I began to feel nervous about ten minutes into the journey. Has anyone seen that film Sleepy Hollow with Johnny Depp? There’s this bit at the beginning when Johnny leaves his hometown on this horse-drawn coach and then travels into the middle of nowhere. And then as the opening credits roll you see him looking out of the window of his coach and seeing all this bad shit; like he sees this scary lake and then these creepy trees then these weirdo scarecrows then like these severed heads on sticks or something and you see his face being all ‘Hooooooly shit, dude’. That is kind of what I felt like as I travelled back to London on my coach. Except instead of scary lakes I saw a street with four kebab shops in a row, and instead of creepy trees I saw a guy in a tracksuit walking a mangy pitbull along a dual carriageway and instead of weirdo scarecrows I saw a burnt out car and instead of severed heads on sticks I saw Ashford. Frankly, Ashford is what kind of hammered the final nails in the coffin. I don’t know if anyone from the Ashford tourist board is reading this (probably unlikely) but seriously dudes, sort out your fucking town. It looks like something from a geography textbook about urban decay/tsunamis. The people there have a kind of hopeless look of desperation that clings to them as they crawl and stagger and gibber through the filthy stain-coated high streets and die quietly next to abandoned laundrettes with only the rats to mourn them. Frankly, the stench of death and rot hangs over Ashford like a smog. It’s kind of what I imagine Stoke-on-Trent to be like.

This was all especially shocking to the system considering that I was coming from Oxford, city of gentility and niceness. I mean, we have a lot of beggars at Oxford, who are a bit annoying, and many ugly people clogging up the streets, but equally all of the beggars have pet dogs wearing capes and we have loads of one-legged people hopping about the streets, which for some reason evens it out for me. I love Oxford, I really do. A lot of people in my year are all like THIS ISN’T A REAL PLACE I WANT TO GO HOME and are all fighting against the general levels of weirdness that fill the town, but frankly people like that are oddballs. I frankly like the fact that I can go outside and see a guy dressed in woman’s clothing listen to a bunch of Indian midgets cover Oasis on pan pipes, and then go and buy a venison-and-fig pastry from a covered market that also sells entire deer. It’s good. The worst thing that can happen in Oxford is that your tutor frowns at you. This I like. The worst thing that can happen to you in the outside world is that you get robbed, beaten up, peeled, skullfucked and then sold into slavery and death at the hands of slave traders. They probably make kebab meat out of you.

Anyway eventually after a long-ass bus journey, I arrived home and expected to be treated as some kind of conquering hero. I anticipated that my dogs would go mental and probably run into the walls; as it was they looked at me, wagged their tails, then walked off. I was like oh. The rest of my family were ok, though. My sister was happy enough to talk to me for about ten minutes and my bro was cool. Everyone admired the top that I'd bought from Primark for £6 and my parents both said that I looked very healthy and handsome. This was tempered somewhat with "you've gotten a bit fat" and "Do you know, when you look down your nose bends off at a weird degree?" but y'know, gotta take the ups with the downs. But overall going home was wicked. It’s amazing being back at your house, as it is basically like a huge hotel. There is always FOOD in the fridge and all the surfaces are more or less CLEAN and you can just click your fingers and my mum will make you cups of teas whenever you request them and you get to watch TV (which started to properly fuck me off after 45 minutes as I realised that for the first time in 6 weeks, people were talking down to me; I was like “dude, I’m going to Oxford University, you don’t need to talk down to me when you attempt to sell me ice cream…knobhead”).

Anyway after a bit we went to the prizegiving. I’m not really going to go on about it as I do every time I go to it (which is like three years in a row now). It’s usually the same; old men talk smugly about how good the school is and how proud they are of us, then somebody attempts to make some kind of political point about independent schools being the best – this year the headmaster had a kind of “fuck da government, we is INDEPENDENT TO DA CORE” thing going on which was cute, although he portrayed the school to be some kind of free thinking hippy community of joy and butterflies which to be honest it frankly is not.

Anyway, after that groovy love-fest I went to the pub with Curry and Julian and Joe and Patrick and Tom and Joe and Jack and some other people that you do not and never will know. It was really nice to talk to some people who were slightly less intelligent than me (I’m joking I’m joking) and catch up on old times, which mostly revolved around talking about me and the fact that I am studying English at Oxford. Frankly everyone was so impressed with my educational superiority that their eyes were like saucers and they kept asking if they could touch my skin. I generously said that they could. Because I am a nice guy at heart.

I nearly had a heart attack when I went to the bar to get a drink though. “How much is your cheapest drink?” I asked (I am a catch); and she said ‘Fosters, it costs £2.85’. TWO POUNDS EIGHT FIVE PENCE. IMAGINE HOW MUCH DRINK I COULD BUY WITH THAT ON CRAZY TUESDAYS (75p shots… I can’t even work out that sort of maths). I am not joking, I started to cry softly as I handed over my money and took my pint of weak-ass Australian shit beer. Every sip felt like acid in my throat (and not just due to the levels of sulphur used during Fosters’ production line) as I imagined all of the money I wasting. Kind of like in one of those cartoons when the really hungry shipwrecked sailor imagines his friend as a big juicy chicken, I was looking at my pint and just imagining the pound coin ten p that I’d lost on the deal. However I still needed to drink so I went to the bank, earnestly pleaded with my bank manager, worked out a small fixed interest loan, came back then bought another few drinks.

That was bad. What was worse was that, upon my exit from the public house, absolutely broke, I discovered I’d missed the last bus. BUSES. BUSES. WHAT IS THIS SHIT, I cried out aloud. Buses are not an issue when you go to Oxford. In Oxford, everything is at most ten minutes walk away. Anything more is simply obscene. I was thinking about phoning my mum and getting her to pick me up but then I figured that I couldn’t actually be fucked with that shit so I set off on the 4 mile walk by myself. Oh, did I mention that it was cold? It was fucking cold. It was so cold that when I had a wee against a fence, the coldness of the metal froze the stream of wee and it went inside my belly and I nearly bled to death.

As it was, I luckily had my iPod and so I listened to some absolutely superb hardcore music while kind of dancing along the road (nb: yeah I was a bit drunk). Even so I was steadily getting more and more cold. I am sure if I was a better writer I would be able to come up with a better set of similes than something along the lines of “I was as cold as ICE locked in a FREEZER made of ICE in THE SNOW” or something similar (Tennyson aint got shit on me). I got so cold that I briefly tried to hitchhike. As it was, nobody was in the mood to pick up a dishevelled looking 19 year old in a suit and a monkey tshirt who was randomly jumping up and down and hollering. Bastards. I couldn’t help thinking “In Oxford they would have seen that I was a fellow student and then picked me up”. As it was, as I trudged on through the arctic temperatures I got more and more annoyed with being home. The television was patronising, the alcohol was expensive and the drivers were mean. Frankly, fuck it all.

Eventually I got to within 5 minutes of my house and yeah, I was feeling low. But then something happened. Something amazing. Debaser came on my iPod. Now, if you don’t know me you won’t know about me and Debaser by the Pixies. It is frankly my most favourite song in the history of the world; that song has direct hardwires into the centre of the happy part of my brain and when it comes on I can’t help but go insane. So it came on. And I started running. I started sprinting down an empty country lane at 1 in the morning, steam rising from my skin, screaming the lyrics to Debaser into the night air. I ran past a horse in a field and frankly, it was astonished. Two foxes bounded joyfully out of a thatch and ran around me in little joyous circles. When I was running along I saw a puddle in the pavement and instead of just sidestepping it I launched myself into the air and did a little Billy Elliot style pirouette before landing. And all of a sudden it all made sense. It was amazing. No matter how shit the world, no matter how many twats and knobheads and Mike Younises that clog the streets and oil their way through the system, Debaser by the Pixies will always be here and this street will always be here and I will always be able to run down this street screaming this song and that is just awesome. And I like Oxford, but you can never run down a road screaming the Pixies at the top of your voice. Only at home. It is only when you have silence that you can break it. And I sprinted all the way home screaming these lyrics and just being happy that I was alive. Of course, I was so cold when I got in that I got chilblains on my legs. Seriously, fuck that shit. But it was worth it.

Anyway, I am back in Oxford now. Literally thirty seconds after I got off the coach, I passed two tramps wishing each other Happy Birthday. Fried Gold.

BEHOLD THE POWER OF BLUE BOLT

2007-11-09T06:17:00.000Z

I am so tweaked right now. I’m tweaked like a cheek at a granny’s picnic. I’m on edge. I’m on edge like Sylvester Stallone in the moderately successful mountain climbing action movie “Cliffhanger”. I’m wired like a bad kettle. I’m buzzing like a bee on crack. I’m bouncing off the walls like some sort of rubber egg. Man I’m tripping out; I look at the clock and I see that it’s 5.04 and I’m like “But shouldn’t it still be light out, it’s barely evening” but then I remember that it’s like 5.04 in the MORNING and I am like WOAH DUDE. I AM TEH HARDCORE. Hardcore like a peach.

But maybe I should backtrack. This day began, as most Thursdays do, with me needing to produce an essay. This week I had chosen to do one on the famous poet-lady Elizabeth Barrett Browning (or as I like to call her, Lizzie-B). If you will cast your mind back to the last essay I had to do, I likened the famous poet lady Christina Rossetti to an emo girl who cries in the toilets and cuts herself. If we take this metaphor (say that all of these female Victorian poets went to the same high school in California or something) and apply it to Lizzie-B, I would say that this week’s essay revolves around one of the Cool Girls in school; possibly head cheerleader, or at least a preppy girl with big boobs who all the men wanted to dry hump (figuratively; I am of course talking with reference to her poetry). Lizzie-B is going out with the head quarterback of the Football Team. Of course, you must recognise that I am talking in the fluent language of metaphor; I highly doubt that Robert Browning would really be any good at American football. Pinball, perhaps. Maybe, just MAYBE he’d be a dab hand at Air Hockey or even Water Polo - and I reckon that once his team won, he’d probably air-thrust his groin into the face of the defeated team and say something like “BOO-YAH, that’s how we do things down here! Welcome to Milano, bitch!”. However, in terms of poetry, Browning’s up there throwing the American football around and tackling people, and then locking the nerds like Matthew Arnold or Tennyson in lockers (and then Tennyson would write a 133 canto elegy to the woes of being stuck in a locker all evening called “Ad MermorIAmGettingThirstyComeOnGuysPleaseLetMeOutOfHere”). Ok, I think at this point I have officially lost roughly 96% of the readership of this blog – ie anybody who doesn’t have a basic knowledge of Victorian Romantic Poets, and thus I am going to make a smooth transition into the long and complicated story of how I got completely buzzed on caffeine.

Basically I had four or five coffees in quick succession.

Well, that was easy. No, I’m joking. Basically, the night beforehand I had decided to stay up til past 2 reading riddles on the internet (seriously not a joke). After that, I was so pumped and awesomed up by my own sense of rugged individualism that I didn’t really get to sleep til about 3. Then I woke up at 930 and I was like “Right lads, time to write this essay”.

I think that this week’s preparations have to set me some kind of personal benchmark so far for the least pre-preparation for doing an essay. Originally I was going to do my essay on Middlemarch, which is about 800 pages long. I’d decided to get an early start and catch up on loads of reading and do loads of work and write an amazing essay, so on Tuesday I got loads of books out about MM and George Eliot. Unfortunately, for me, ‘Getting the books out and then looking at them proudly’ constitutes a hard day’s work; I cycled to the library, got the books out, went home, balanced them on the desk and looked at them. Proudly. “Yep,” I said to myself “I am prettttty good at this whole studenting lark”. Then on Wednesday morning I realised that I hadn’t done anything. I took a long, long look at my copy of Middlemarch, which I was using to do step ups on, then sighed and threw it onto a roaring fire and looked for something else to write my essay on. In class, ONE POEM by Lizzie-B was read out and I was like “Meh, she’s ok.”

The good thing about English Literature is that you can pretty much set your own essay titles, so that meant that I could do a really easy question for myself on Lizzie. However I didn’t exactly know what to write my essay on as I had only read one poem; I checked me list and it told me to read this poem called “Aurora Leigh”; I was like cool so I opened the book, saw that AL was 322 pages long, and nearly threw my copy onto a roaring fire. However I decided against this as my roaring fire was already clogged up with the complete works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Middlemarch, a couple of back issues of the Oxford Student, a framed picture of me and Mike playing Frisbee in the park, several small waxwork models of my own penis, every Bryan Adams record in Oxford, my signed photo of OJ Simpson, three boxes filled with children’s letters to Santa, and some coal, and so frankly there wasn’t much room left in it. I then noticed that Aurora Leigh was split into nine parts, and the first part was quite short, so I swiftly changed my title from “…the works of any Victorian poet” to “in Book One of Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning”. Then when my tutor asks me why I didn’t read the rest of the poem, I could just say something like “Well essentially I was a bit restricted by the question”. I was like wicked and high fived myself, then played air guitar for a bit.

Fuck, this is turning into a post about why I wrote my essay on Lizzie-B and not on me drinking Blue Bolt. Ok, so the fact that I was constantly drinking coffee is sorted, yeah? No problems with that? GOOD. Basically the idea was that if you drink coffee, but then stop drinking it, then you crash and fall asleep and that’s no good; so the best thing is to drink loads of coffee and then worry about crashing when it is time to go to sleep. Which is what I am doing now. After about my third cup I was literally shaking. I don’t just mean that my hands were quivering a bit. It was like my body had been plunged into icy water. The skin and flesh next on my shins was literally quivering. It was amazing and slightly frightening. It also made typing my essay difficult and I started to write utter bullshit. I still don’t know what a “oxymoronic dichotomy” is but I still used it and I think that that is something to be proud of. I was about to pour myself another cup of joe when I glimpsed something silver peeking out from under my desk.

“Of course!” I bellowed. “The Blue Bolt!”

For those who don’t know what Blue Bolt is (you freaks), it is an energy drink manufactured and sold by Sainsburys. It is essentially a knockoff version of Red Bull, and probably a bit stronger, with the added attraction that a litre of ‘Bolt costs the same as one can of ‘Bull. So that’s what we drink. I was the one who got the Balliol Bloc onto the ‘Bolt and I feel that is something else to proud of; anyway the day previously I had bought some for jokes and forgotten about it. But then I saw it and I remembered it and I thought to myself “This would be a pretttty good time to have some Blue Bolt, don’t you agree Thomas?” and then I was like “You are right Thomas” and as I was congratulating myself on being so damn clever, I sat down on the edge of my chair by accident and scraped all down my leg and it really hurt, but luckily nobody saw or will ever find out about it, which can only be a good thing. To celebrate this act of good luck, I poured the entire bottle of Blue Bolt into a pint glass and drank it. I topped this off with another coffee and some cheese toasties, then got back to work on the essay. I then started spasming madly due to the massive caffeine rush, fell off my chair, banged my head on the desk and then landed awkwardly on my Batman action figure and stabbed myself in the elbow with his ears, but I recovered my poise with – I feel – a sense of intense grace and precision, and got back to work.

I’m of the opinion that I write a lot quicker and with a greater sense of fluidity when I am utterly monged off my head on taurine. My previous essays have been around the 2000 to 2500 word length, but this one rapidly swelled to 3700 words of pure fried gold. As well as taking up my old hobby of playing hundreds of games of internet minesweeper in a row without winning a single one, I made lots of very good points about femininity or something (I can’t remember) and topped it off with a brilliant conclusion – essentially, Lizzie-B didn’t really care either way. Then I edited it a bit and sat back and thought “You know what, Tom, that is probably the best essay ever written about this subject ever. It’s so good that the tutors will be jealous and want to steal it. Frankly if I was you, I’d go back and add in a load of redundant points, pointless shit and utter rubbish to make yourself look more like your fellow English students”; so that’s what I did and if I’m with you in my tutorial tomorrow, trust, my original essay was much better.

After that was done, I went for a walk around college. As - at this point – it was like 1 in the morning and raining, I decided to put on my black wifebeater and parade around showing off my biceps like a kind of puny English Ryan off the OC. After a bit, I ended up hanging with Ella who – lest we forget – is my Queen and yours. Ella was playing on her guitar, however she only knows how to play the Libertines’ “Music When The Lights Go Out” really badly, whilst singing in a voice akin to a three year old pretending to be a grumpy ex-army gentleman. With throat cancer. So we walked up and down the corridors, Ella in her long coat and cigarette bouncing off the walls and squealing, me playing the two or three chords on the guitar.

We went to visit Aime. Aime was having a really bad essay crisis and had apparently already broken down and cried for about an hour while staring at the wall and self-hating. Due to her inability to write an essay on Middlemarch. However, she then drank an entire bottle of Blue Bolt (seriously bad move, Aime). If we consider that Aime is a lightweight at the best of times, her reaction to Blue Bolt was the same as Ella’s reaction to a bag of cocaine. She was literally insane; cackling, bouncing around the room, laughing for about thirty seconds at anything and everything, before suddenly plunging into fits of anger or sadness or panic. Me and Ella were both in that state of caffeine buzzage (Ella had also had about eight coffees, although hers were ‘mexican coffees’ which means that she just put 20% Kaluha in them) when you’re just chilled and enjoying life. So we lay on the best and were well amused by Aime for a bit, until she started getting stressed about her essay. At this point – about three thirty AM - Ella remembered that she hadn’t even started her one yet so we went back to her room (on the way we visited Matt who was writing an essay on John Ruskin and drinking Blue Bolt). There we HAD SEX. No I’m joking; in fact I think it’s on the verge of blasphemy to suggest such a thing. What we actually did was: she sat at her desk and smoked and swigged Blue Bolt from the bottle and wrote her essay and said that Descartes was a twat for being born in the 15th century or whatever because it made her complicated conclusion (which was, I think, something along the lines of “language is shit”) slightly less watertight. I lay in her bed and drew two pictures. The first was a picture of a giant robotic spider with a man’s head quoting the poetry of Wallace Stevens to a small girl. The small girl was Ella and she was saying ‘oh fucken mint’ which is what Ella says a lot. The other picture was a picture of a scary looking clown with the words BEWARE FIDDLER THE PAEDOCLOWN on it. I was really pleased with these pictures and then The Mighty Ella told me that they would both be put on her wall and I was pleased.

Then I realised that it was nearly five and I made a mad dash back to my room to catch some Zs. Of course I realised that I was not in the mood or state of bodily stimulation to even attempt such a foolish act, so instead I listened to The Smiths and The Pixies and The Kings of Leon and Ryan Adams and Rufus Pinwheel and other famous bands and I wrote this blog about how I am too wired up on Blue Bolt to sleep.

There is no real moral to this blog post; it’s not like I’m trying to make a point about anything. I mean, it’s 6 in the morning and I haven’t slept, you’re just lucky that I’m still typing words. Hmm. Moral moral moral. I guess the moral of this story is related to 24. In 24, Jack Bauer stays awake for a fucking long time; like, at least 24 hours but seeing as the day began at like midnight, probably much much longer as well. I always wondered how he stayed awake, but now I realise that it is probably because he was drinking Blue Bolt constantly. Also this blog shows the effect of drugs on people not designed to take them – Aime’s life was completely torn apart by the Blue Bolt, which turned her into a paranoid shit talking self hating gibberer, whereas me and Ella just stayed cool and stylin’ off our Blue Bolt. Of course I won’t be cool and stylin’ when the caffeine wears off and I crash – and judging by how things stand now, I reckon that could very possibly be at 1.25 (my tutorial is at 1.30). But oh well.

I think that maybe the caffeine is affecting my brain in strange ways, as well. I was looking on BBC news and I saw this photo, and every time I look at it I crack up laughing for no reason, to the extent that my sides actually hurt and I have to force myself to start coughing so I can get some exercise in. Look at the photo and imagine that it's 620 in the morning, you are fucked in the head on Blue Bolt, and you are generally too clever for your own good:

DOGS. WEARING HULA GARLANDS. BRILLIANT.

Another snapshot into the crazed academic pressure cooker that is Oxford University.

Writing an Essay on Christina Rossetti

2007-11-05T00:39:00.002Z

The other day I had to write an essay on Christina Rossetti. For those who don’t know, Christina Rossetti is a Victorian woman poet who wrote a load of poems about how miserable she was and how she’d much rather be dead because the world was rubbish. I would say that she was probably the world’s first major emo poet (other than Jesus probably) and I reckon that when she wasn’t writing poets with titles like “When I’m dead nobody’s going to miss me and I don’t care anyway” she was probably either doing poppers or dying her hair black or cutting things like “THE PAIN SETS ME FREE” on her thigh with a quill. For reference, here is a picture of Rossetti next to an emo girl:

Rossetti. Notice the whistful expression and sense of youthful melancholy.

Modern emo girl. Notice the whistful expression and sense of youthful melancholy.

Of course, as is usual, I hadn’t done any research before sitting down to do the essay and so I only realised how fucking miserable Rossetti was when I was about halfway through, at which point I was too invested in the essay to say “Actually, this is fucking depressing, screw this, I’m off to chase squirrels around the back quad and then write an essay on Browning” (two intellectual experiences that amount to pretty much the same thing OOH NONSENSICAL VICTORIAN POETRY IN JOKE). As it was, I’d only decided to write an essay on the Rossettster after reading one of her poems, called “Goblin Market”. In fact, I didn’t even read the whole poem, my mind was pretty much made up when I read the following few lines:
(yes, I’m making you read poetry on my blog now, I am now 100% an English student)

She clipped a precious golden lock,
She dropped a tear more rare than pearl,
Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red:
Sweeter than honey from the rock,
Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flowed that juice;
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She sucked and sucked and sucked the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore,
She sucked until her lips were sore

I’m sorry. Critics can talk about this passage in terms of gender relations, the impact of the innocent female on a male dominated market world, the fall of Christ, corruption and redemption and all sorts of clever jazz, but when we get down to brass tacks that is clearly just an eleven line description of a bloody big blowjob. I mean, CHRIST, consider the context… this girl is SUCKING the GLOBES of these goblin men who are feeding her fruit. What is an example of a fruit? Why, a banana, nature’s most phallic non-cucumber related piece of vegetation. This is really a schoolyard banter layer of complication here and I am of the opinion that any interpretation of this passage as anything other than oral sex is missing the point. But anyway, I was like ‘cool, she’s a pervert perhaps all of her poetry will be filled with pornographic references’; and the rest of Goblin Market didn’t fail to deliver, featuring both bukkake:

Lizzie uttered not a word;
Would not open lip from lip
Lest they should cram a mouthful in;
But laughed in heart to feel the drip
Of juice that syruped all her face

… and lesbianism:

Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices

… so basically I was like COOL essay time. BZZZZZZZZ. However. I think that Rossetti must have been totally tweaked off her nut (I think probably from sniffing glue in the park with Elizabeth Barrett Browning) when she wrote Goblin Market because everything else of hers that I read was just BORING. By the way, I’m allowed to make judgments like that on the entire life’s work of a woman because I study English at Oxford University, which I think technically makes me a world authority on this type of poetry. But where was I. Oh yeah, BORING. I mean, I guess it didn’t help that the title of the essay was: “How do waste and shapeliness feature in the poetry of Christina Rossetti?” I do not like this title. My main issue is that titles usually feature two opposite poles, like “How do fire and ice feature in Frankenstein?” or “How do the concepts of sanity and madness play a role in Jane Eyre” or “How do heterosexuals and people who do English and Spanish joint schools at Oxford influence events in George Eliot’s Middlemarch?” But… shapeliness and waste? THESE ARE THINGS THAT DON’T GO TOGETHER. When I realised this, I’m not going to lie, I despaired and I seriously considered committing suicide. Just end it there and then. I started listening to Papa Roach and trying to slit my wrists (with a spoon) and ODing on Immodium (the packet said take 2 capsules, I bloody had three) and everything.

However, after about ten minutes of this I got bored and I manned up. I’d decided that I was going to do Rossetti, and we all know that once I’ve made up my mind to do something, I carry it through to the VERY END. I’m very much like Ian Huntley in that respect. But yes, I’d made a promise to myself that I was going to write this particlar essay on Christina Rossetti and god damnit, even if it killed me I was going to do it. Plus the only other option I had was one on Gerard Manley Hopkins. I opened his book and had a look at a random poem, saw the line “O feel-of-primrose hands, O feet // That want the yield of plushy sward”, closed the book, and threw it onto a roaring fire. No, Rossetti it was.

So I typed the title down and looked at it. Good start Thomas, I told myself. That looks wicked. I then stared at the other 97% of the blank page. My mind matched the page for blankness. Then I had a brainwave. “YES!” I cried triumphantly. “YES!” I spasmed with inspiration, then made the title both Bold AND Underlined. That looked REALLY neat and I was so pleased that I rewarded myself with 25 minutes of surfing Facebook. But then I realised that I was just refreshing the same page over and over again and stuff so I got back to the essay.

Here’s a tip: the first thing to do when writing an essay of this sort is to totally ignore the title and tell the readers that you’re going to write about whatever the fuck you want. This is the key to a good essay – show the examiner whose boss and that you won’t put up with any of his shit any longer. “The thing about the word shapeliness” I merrily typed “Is that it’s basically a word connected with women, as you wouldn’t have a shapely man, unless he was gay, and even then the implication is that he’s probably a bit female, and the other thing about the word shapely is the fact that it implies a sense of judgement, as you wouldn’t have someone say “I look shapely”, you’d have a bystander – probably a man – say “Hey, she has a shapely ankle” or something like that, and therefore the word is directly connected to the social and political gender class struggle of the late 19th century… as for waste, it has something to do with prostitutes, who were an important figure in female politics at the time.”

I stopped typing and looked at what I’d just written. I read it with a sense of satisfaction. Then I re-read it with a sense of mild annoyance. Then I had a sudden thought.
“OH MY GOD!” I cried, sitting up suddenly. “THE MIRROR IS DIRTY!”
I leapt up off my chair and busily scrubbed the mirror above my sink until it was clean. Then I thought “this room is a pigsty, no wonder I can’t work!” so I tidied up all my notes and alphabetized my jeans. Then I decided that I was hungry so I had some toast while reading through my notes on Rossetti. I say ‘reading through my notes’ I mean ‘using Rossetti’s powerful and shattering poetry as a small tray to store my toast on while I was buttering it’. Then I made a cup of tea and settled back down to the essay.
I typed about two words when Minoo came in. HOW ARE YOU DOING ON THE ESSAY he cried, and I was like WELL I WAS JUST ABOUT TO TAKE A BREAK ANYWAY SO COME ON IN AND TELL ME HOW YOU ARE DOING ON IT so he was like COOL.
That was another hour gone. Then I decided to go and see if I’d received any post. Then more Facebook. Things happened, and the entire day passed and I’d written about a page of utter bullshit about a poet who I was being made increasingly aware was a: depressing, b: massively boring, c: a bitch who probably molested children (nb: probably a lie, but if it turned out that Rossetti was the one who took Madeleine McCann, well, I won’t be that surprised).

Eventually I realised that I just had to remove all distractions, both bodily and mentally, and GO FOR IT. This explains why, at 2 in the morning, I was sitting stark naked in the middle of my room writing an essay on the feminist poetry of a dead Victorian while listening to Scooter. I’d had a couple of glasses of fruit punch and a strong coffee and had ingested far too much poetry and yes, I was beginning to hallucinate.

There was a knock at the door. “Wait, don’t come in” I said, but the door opened anyway and Jesus came in. “Hey, Tom, can I borrow a bottle opene – oh fuck dude, sorry, I didn’t know you were nude, lock your fucking door next time man”. He retreated, swearing loudly, covering his eyes with the palms of his hands (this didn’t really work so well). More time passed.

The thing about me writing an essay is that I don’t really know what angle I’m gonna take until I’m about two thirds of the way in. The first bit is usually me just throwing as much intellectual fecal matter at a wall until I find something that sticks. So it was only after about another hour that I realised that Rossetti was the most miserable bitch on the face of the planet and it was her own bloody fault that nobody wanted to go out with her. Unfortunately, my reverie was broken by another interruption.

There was a knock at the door. “Wait, don’t come in” I said, but the door opened anyway and my ex-friend Mike the Cunt swaggered in. “HI TOM IT’S ME, MIKE, YOUR LEAST FAVOURITE PERSON IN THE WORLD! REMEMBER ME? I’M DOING LUCIA!” he boastfully cried out in a cuntish “Hey look at me” voice that was specifically calculated to both annoy me and remind me of the fact that he was indeed, The Winner (nb: he had actually phoned me up and said pretty much exactly this earlier on in the day). I was about to suggest that we should all be friends again and hang out more, when there was a gurgling sound. Luckily, the bowel tumour that was hidden in Mike’s lower intestine chose just that time to implode and he fell over in agony, blood streaming from every orifice, before vanishing in a puff of poetic justice.

Time passed, and my typing got more and more laboured to the extent that I was essentially hacking words, letter by letter, out of the overworked surface of my brain.

There was a knock at the door. “Wait, don’t come in” I said, but the door opened anyway and Christina Rossetti came in. “Thomas,” she moaned, “I am a ghost, an insubstantial shade, forever trapped in a liminal hell of unfinished business and typically anti-female Victorian social values. You are the only one who can help me. You must tell the story of my life, the tragic tragic story, you must personify it in the form of an essay about shapeliness and waste in four of my more well known poems, and only then will I be freed from limbo and allowed to go to heaven with Tennyson and the rest of the posse. Only you can soothe my suffering.”
“Fuck off Rossetti,” I said “I’m sick of you and your whinging,” and she was like “Fine then I’m gonna go cut myself in the ladies with my keys” and I was like “Whatever”.
Anyway, I finally got the essay done. I was so happy that I pretty much punched the last sentence onto the computer and then leapt into the air about two feet and went to bed.

The next day I had to read the essay out to my tutor. He said it was “depressing”.

Duh.

The Bridge (another nightclub)

2007-10-31T17:22:00.001Z

The Bridge was really filled with loads of really lame-ass white people tonight.

I don’t want to appear like I’m being racist, or that I specifically watch out for the racial composition of a club, but seriously, if I had to come up with an adjective and premodifier to describe the club goers of The Bridge tonight, I am sorry but I’d have to use the words “Lame-ass” and “white”. That’s just the way I roll. I don’t really know why this was so noticeable; I mean it’s not like Oxford is renowned for its lack of lame-ass white folk. Maybe it was because the last time I went to The Bridge it was filled with lame-ass black people. Seriously, once again I don’t want to be racist but the last time I walked through The Bridge I felt like a serious Odd One Out; like the one jellybean in a coalmine, the lego brick in the Duplo, or the heterosexual in Panic! at the Disco. I was walking through with my mouth open thinking to myself “Is this some kind of rally? Have I missed posters and emails? Am I even allowed to be here?”… but then luckily I went upstairs that time and it was filled with jews and fat white girls and I was like phew, I fit right in.

Not so tonight; TONIGHT the club was filled with the ugly white girls and knobheads in suits (as well as, of course, the people who go to my college who fully deserve their denotation as ‘the beautiful people’). I think that once a week The Bridge has a remit that says “We have to let in all of the girls who look like their faces have been hollowed off and replaced with bark, fat people, and boys who give the general impression that they have fallen out of the dickhead tree… and Balliol students,” and that one day a week always happens to align with the one week that I happen to go.

Anyway; for once I was in a good mood going to a club because, before going to The Bridge, we’d visited this bar thing called Thirst, and when I was there the first song that they played was Debaser by The Pixies. Now, for all of the people who do not know me, Debaser by The Pixies is my favourite song ever in the history of humankind; seriously I am of the opinion that of all of the music that mankind has produced since that magical day when Ug the Cavemen first knocked a bone next to another bone and played a C sharp, Debaser by the Pixies is actually the best thing we have produced. Frank Black catawauling is the pinnacle; it’s all downhill from there. So anyway, they were playing that song which made me well happy and I was all dancing around the bar singing along with some other drunk dude and it was all happy; after that (and another two Mexican Sunrises) people were TOM YOU COMING TO THE BRIDGE and I thought to myself “I have some money in my pocket, I have some legs, I might as well go to The Bridge”, so I did.

This, I realised pretty much as soon as I set foot inside, was a mistake. The first thing was that it cost six pounds to get in. SIX POUNDS I said. That is a rip off; think of all the cheese I could buy for six pounds !!! nb: I actually did say that; as cheese is £1.99 from Sainsburys, I could have either purchased three cheese and had a party in my room, OR go into The Bridge. However, the deciding factor was that I was two cocktails, two doubles and a triple down at the time of purchase and thus sound ecumenical logic was not enough to sway my decision. So anyway, I pulled out a tenner from my wallet, folded it in two and slammed it on the desk with a little wink that I figured looked both wry and cool but now, I realise, most likely looked like a frog trying to swallow a particularly large Lego brick. Anyway, after that we moved onto the dancefloor.

Enter the lame-ass white folk. Seriously. It was like a huge sardine tin filled with lame-ass whiteness in their; wall to wall vanilla honkey cracker motherfuckers and like I said, I’m no racist, but my first ten second glance of the dancefloor was more than enough to show me why some people still are. There were fat girls dressed like witches ‘shaking their booties’ to the sound of Snoop Dogg (you know he’s cool because he spelt ‘dog’ with an extra ‘g’) and all these guys wearing suits with their bow ties strategically undone, laughing loudly, showing far too much gum, and slapping each other on the back while pretending to bounce. I was like, you fools, you can’t bounce, that is why I don’t even try.

We slowly pushed through the crowd towards the dancefloor. The four metre walk from the door to the dancefloor was torturous. Somebody elbowed me in the eye. I got hair flicked into my mouth. And then I was accidentally violated by a fat girl wearing a wig in ways that make me not really feel like a real man. Then the DJ (who, it must be said, had a good ear for irony) started playing “In The Club”, and everyone went WHOOO and started grinding and doing moves that should only really be seen either displayed on a street somewhere or in a music video for Jennifer Lopez (who is still Jenny from the block, y’hear? I’ll hear nothing against her). Like this ginger guy in a pastel shirt and slacks started doing that “I’m driving my car” move when you bend back and wave your arm in the air as though you are driving a fictional car. It was so unbelievably lame that I threw up a bit in the back of my mouth. Then something clicked in my head and I looked across the dancefloor at the non-Balliolites (who were of course awesomely dancing and showing up everyone else) and I thought “These people all look fucking stupid… and that guy looks like Brain off Thunderbirds” and then my next natural thought was “Fuck this”; so then I headed to the toilets.

Of course, this was impossible; the throng of Vanilla Ice wannabes that had flooded the club made movement quite impossible. Eventually I switched into what I like to think of as ‘Terminator Mode’ in which I just use a combination of breast stroke (the swimming thing, not a covert molestation manoeuvre, you perverts) and barging to reach my goal; in Terminator Mode, NOTHING IS SACRED YEAH, I split through couples in mid-pull, push people over and then step on their heads, karate-chop cripples and scare old people until the route in front of me is cleared. It was brilliant and everyone was too busy pretend drive-by shooting each other to get that annoyed; although one pink-faced chap in a blazer hissed “fuck off, nigga” at me as I went by, which pretty much summed up the evening.

Eventually I reached the toilet door. But look at the sight that greeted my eyes!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Unfortunately the way blocked by huge dark figure dressed in a full scale suit of armour. As I approached, I saw red eyes glowing like unholy coals within the confines of the iron helmet. He stopped me from going in, drew a mighty broadsword from his sheath and pointed it at my gizzard.
“HALT!” he cried, “THOU SHALT NOT PASS. FOR I AM CORNHOWEL, GUARDIAN OF THE TOILETS OF THIS BRIDGE.”
I was like, what.
“YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” he boomed again, somewhat redundantly, “UNTIL YOU ANSWER MY QUESTIONS THREE! QUESTION THE FIRST: WHAT HAS EYES, YET CANNOT SEE?”
I was like fuck this so I left the club.

On the walk back I listened to HEY by The Pixies on my iPod. I would say that that is probably my second favourite song ever (after Debaser by The Pixies). It was well good because I was drunk so I got to do a kind of cool DANCE WALKING where you sort of bounce from foot to foot as you go down the road, and occasionally you stop and bounce around in circles. A couple of guys driving past in cars started laughing at me but I didn’t care because I was, frankly, stylin’. It was also good because I saw all these Really Cool Dudes walk the other way wearing SHADES (EVEN THOUGH IT WAS NIGHT TIME AND THUS ALREADY DARK WHAT LARKS), and I just thought to myself “You fools, this song is far more awesome than you will ever be” and I think that they caught my vibes of pity because not one of them even tried to sell me any drugs, which made a nice change.

Then I bought a kebab, then I ate it, then I went to my room, then I watched some videos of John Cusack kickboxing on youtube, then I visited my friend Leila, then I went to bed, and then I fell asleep. The End of another thrilling night out at Oxford.

Filth

2007-10-28T01:16:00.000Z

So I went to this nightclub Filth the other night. Before you get confused, let me clarify something: that was the name of the nightclub. Filth. When I entered, I figured that they’d either named it ironically, and inside would be all gleaming surfaces and shiny mirrors, or they’d just used the name as a replacement for ever needing to clean the place.

Guess which of the two options the management decided to plump for?

Well, there was what appeared to be brown seaweed growing out of the urinals, and when I rested my elbow on the bar when getting a drink, the surface was so sticky that it actually took off a layer of skin. Plus, there was a protozoan moss and a microsystem of small mushrooms growing out of one of the ‘leather’ bound benches around the edge of the dancefloor. So decide for yourself.

To be fair, nightclubs in Oxford aren’t renowned for being classy places. From the thrills of Oceans & Collins (the dancefloor smelt like cold sweaty vagina and they played an hour and a half of cheese to really bring the night to a slammin’ close) to the wonders of Escape (a bottle of Corona cost £3.80, the dancefloor was a small room roughly the size of a religious man’s anus, and they played an hour and a half of cheese to really bring the night to a slammin’ close) to the throbbing ecstasies of Coven (the floor was literally two centimetres high in rancid water in which I slipped over and badly bruised my bottom; then I walked into the girl’s toilets by accident and found a discarded eyelash curler and it didn’t even make my eyelashes look like Kate Moss’s did in that advert… and they played an hour and a half of cheese to really bring the night to a slammin’ close), Oxford is going to be more remembered for its sleepy spires than for its temples to the House of Drum and Base.

But I think that Filth just manages to push it over the line, into the realms of ‘they’re just taking the piss now’ by being located inside a shopping centre. Yep, the first thing you see when you walk up the steps is not a snappily dressed bouncer, not a long queue of the rich and powerful, not a pair of burning incense torches to really make the night go off well, not even a small poodle being carried triumphantly aloft inside Paris Hilton’s vagina; nope, you see a closed Curry’s Digital. And a washing machine, just inside the Curry’s digital, mocking me, just because I didn’t know how to use the washing machines in college and they made my yellow tshirt go a bit grey.

I guess perhaps all this would have been funny if I was to take it in the right tone of mind, but as it was I was in a bad mood when I walked up to the gate. I’d walked down with Aime and Max, and had essentially had some sort of argument. I can’t remember what it was about, and I’m pretty sure that I was in the wrong, but the most important thing was that I was in no state to argue back properly (due to the miracles of incompetent student bartending, I’d managed to get a triple vodka lemonade for the price of the single, and greedily drank it as fast as I could to avoid the long arm of the incompetent student bartending law). And anyway, I was annoyed because they both suddenly turned on my like vicious little chickens and if there’s one thing I CANNOT STAND, it’s people who act like chickens in an elongated metaphor. But WHATEVER, I get it, they were both a bit drunk and silly, I forgive them, we can all try and get on with our lives ok. I’ll get over the undue wounds I have suffered at Aime’s malicious and barbed tongue. But the sitch is, I was in a mood when I went in, a bit drunk, with a headache. So imagine my reaction at seeing THIS waiting for me inside:

Ha ha ha. No, not really. Instead, what I saw was more along these lines:

That is to say, it was crammed with people. None of whom were wearing hats or looking at a tram. In fact, quite a few of them were GIRLS and I was like “hmm” to myself. I mean, I withdrew the “hmm” and replaced it with a kind of “strangulated vomiting inside my own mouth” noise once I saw some of them up close. Like, seriously, there was this one girl who was offensively ugly. It was like somebody had set fire to a bulldog and then put out its face with foam latex mixed with acne and braces. I actually recoiled, screaming YEUGH when she came close to me to go to the bar or the toilet or the stables, whatever, I don’t want to know. The encounter actually left me with a cold sweat. However, after I bit I realised that there were actually quite a few hot girls there (the ugly-hot ratio was still like 70-30 BUT that’s a damn sight better than most of the rest of Oxford).

This raised a problem.

I don’t really like nightclubs filled with hot girls. That sounds counter intuitive but it’s true because then it’s like HERE IS A DELICATESSAN OF DELIGHTS FOR YOU, THOMAS, A BUFFET OF BUFF, AND NOW JUST MAKE A CHOICE and this is difficult because I am a picky person. Like if there was only one really hot girl and the rest were all dogs, then I could just quietly admire the hot girl from afar. But as it is, there are so many hot girls that I’m always like “Come on Thomas, don’t break out the A-Material yet, there could be an even HOTTER girl around the corner”. So I keep strolling in little circles like a deviant. This is, of course, ignoring the fact that I essentially have NO A-Material; I just have to hope that the girl in question falls for my natural charms and good looks.

This is exacerbated by the fact that Slightly Drunk Thomas is like an eternal optimist when it comes to girls; if a female happens to look at me for more than two and a half demiseconds, I pretty much say to myself “Ok, we have a connection here, there is undeniable chemistry, she has spotted you amongst all others; she may be grinding that 6ft4 rugby player with the mullet and the huge biceps, but her heart is set on you”. And then I’m like cool, that’s the eighth girl tonight, I’m a magnet today. But then, if the girl in question does actually start dancing vaguely in my direction, I’m like shit. She wants to dance. Perhaps she likes you. Fuck. What are you gonna do? Look at her. She keeps looking at you. She’s clingy. She wants to pin you down. She’ll probably try and curtail your swinging bachelor lifestyle, make you stop staying up til 1 writing your blog and stuff and instead force you to go WALKING THE PRAM IN THE PARK and IRONING STUFF and SEWING. SHIT. And is she really worth it, REALLY, Thomas? Look at her; one of her eyes is a bit square and her left nostril is bigger than her right. Is THIS the girl you want to give up all of your freedoms for? Get out, now. It’ll be crushing for her now, but in the long term it’s better you do this now than in two hours’ time, when she has had a chance to fall too deeply for you.

The upshot is that, twice last night, I was dancing with one or another random girl from another college, then I stopped stock still, gazed at her with an expression of undiluted terror, mouth agape, skin clammy, then did a swift 180 before sidling off into the undergrowth of writhing bodies and flagging bosoms like a spooked guerilla. Eventually I decided that I was getting a headache and couldn’t be doing with the whole ‘girls’ thing and figured that I’d just go cruising for chicks at a poetry contest or something and went to dance with Matt and da kru.

Time passed, and before I knew it, it was 2:45. IN THE MORNING. The club was thinning, and the clientele had thinned somewhat. Gone were the hot girls, probably off with their rugby players and their suckers who didn’t know that they were gonna end up married before they knew it. What was left was the pathetic losers and the cheapskates who wanted to get the full value out of the £5 entry fee (AKA us).

I find the last few minutes of nightclubs fascinating, you always see the odd characters. Such as the 40ish year old man sitting on one of the sofas (the one with all the mushrooms, actually), staring blankly into space, his sunken eyes displaying a labyrinthine tale of pain and emotional torture that belied the seemingly waxen placidity of his face. Or the couple – both dressed in formal clothes – who were doing a slow waltz to Bloodsugar by Pendulum (including a little sojourn into doing the Charlestown and that weird ‘climbing a ladder together’ move). It was pretty much The Whitest thing that I’d ever seen, and it made me a bit glad that I wasn’t that particular man. If so, I think I probably would have killed myself. True fact.

I was watching them, but then I got distracted by this other guy who made my blood boil. For absolutely no reason, it wasn’t like he did anything to annoy me, anything at all. But just looking at him made me so annoyed. Perhaps it was the way he looked; he had a fucking stupid blonde bob thing; kind of like King Henry V of England, but of course wussier and more female; and the way that he wore it I knew he was well proud of it; like his mother had said “Come on, James” (or whatever his name was, he looked a bit like a James or a Richard or some cunt name) “Why don’t you get it cut?” and he was like “NOOO MUM I LIKE IT LIKE THIS” and then she relented and he was like “I’m well cool”, really pleased with his one little rebellious win, and he thought that he was well cool and he couldn’t fail to pretty much get off with all of Oxford now, which would be a wicked way to make up for the fact that he’d gone 18 years without kissing a Single Girl. And that was definitely because of his haircut, not the fact that he was an ugly roundfaced shit with a stupid roly-poly doughy body; he was shaped like he used to be a proper tubby kid but then the puppy fat melted a bit and now he’s just DOUGHY; like he had mantits but they aren’t so much tits as shallow cones and he reckons that if he wears them well enough in the cool SKATEBOARDING IS NOT A CRIME tshirt his aunt bought him from Quicksilver or Vans or wherever, they almost look like pecs. Except they don’t, he just looked like a guy who wasn’t quite fat any more but was still a good step and half off being ok. And anyway, James was dancing with this ugly girl (she had bad teeth and looked a bit moley; kind of like a mole, I guess) and like, every time she tried to say something to him he would entirely embrace her in his slightly flabby arms and like, gently caress up and down her back and I just wanted to grab him and yell, SHE ISN’T GOING TO SLEEP WITH YOU, LOOK AT HER, SHE LOOKS LIKE A FUCKING RODENT, I KNOW THAT BEGGARS CAN’T BE CHOOSERS BUT DO I HAVE TO WATCH TWO BEGGARS ON A DANCEFLOOR WITH ONE OF THEM CONTINUALLY ATTEMPTING TO MOLEST THE OTHER AND PROBABLY EJACULATING A BIT INTO HIS TIGHT FIT BOXERS THAT HIS GRANDMA GOT FROM NEXT, JUST FUCK OFF AND DIE IN A FIRE.

I didn’t say that though, because I’m not a judgemental person. I love all of God’s creatures, fat and thin and handsome and ugly and Christian and Buddhist and Muslim and all of those other religions too, and, y’know, ugly doughfaced wannabe mummy’s boy rentboys.

Pfft.

I was going to look at more people and think of mean descriptions of them, but suddenly the DJ started playing “Man in the Mirror” and the words ABORT ABORT ABORT started flashing in big red letters across my vision, and I was like “Aww, hell no”, Will Smith stylee, so I turned around and left.

All in all, not a good night. Fuck Filth.

WHO’S UP FOR GOING PARK END ON WEDNESDAY?

People who do English

2007-10-22T18:04:00.000+01:00

This may surprise you but I am not the only person clever enough to get into Oxford to study English; indeed here are several other chaps who have also managed to be clever enough to do the same thing (get into Oxford and study English). In fact there are loads. However I am just going to list the ones who got into Oxford to study English in the same college as me, or else it will be a list of about 180 people and frankly that will be far too many to write a decent blog post on. So. Here they are.
(BY THE WAY GUYS THE AMOUNT I WRITE ON YOU IS IN NO WAY RELATED TO HOW MUCH I LIKE YOU… THIS IS PROVED BY THE FACT THAT MAX IS GETTING A LOT WRITTEN ABOUT HIM AND FRANKLY I HATE HIS GUTS)
I’ve also included some of the ways in which I have annoyed these people. This is risky as my mother is probably going to read this and I am going to get an email from her saying THOMAS WHY DO YOU DO THESE THINGS TO PEOPLE THIS IS WHY YOU NEVER HAVE ANY FRIENDS and I can to be honest not be doing with it. But I’m including reasons anyway.

Matt: The Ladies Man
I have listed Matt first not because I like him the most but because he features in the majority of my other anecdotes. Matt is very tall and pretty and all of the girls like him. I am of the opinion that this is because he mostly just hangs about with me and thus anybody who keeps that kind of company can’t really escape being a magnet for the women. I don’t really know how much I’m allowed to write about his tangled love life at college but suffice to say on pretty much the third night he got with Signey (who will be introduced later) at a club called “The Coven”; only later did it transpire that she had previously tripped over and banged her head and so was partially CONCUSSED and thus unable to remember a thing about it the day afterwards. Probably brain damaged.
Matthew is very funny and has a good sense of humour; he does these little comedy ‘bits’ which he likes to repeat regularly and often. Like he has a fear of cucumber so he says “Cucumber? You’re not a food! STOP PRETENDING!” really loudly – as though he is talking to imaginary talking piece of cucumber! Oh what larks. He doesn’t like blogs though, and when I said I had one, he affected a high-pitched squeaky voice and said “Oh, I blog, look at me I am so UNIQUE”. Whatever, he comes from LUTON he can’t be expected to know anything.
I like him though and am considering making him my official Mancrush of Oxford.
Ways in which I have annoyed Matt:
None, really, except by telling everyone that Signey was unconscious in a pool of her own blood and vomit when he was getting off with her. Possibly by including the following picture as he is a bit vain and likes to untag photographs of himself on Facebook if they do not match up to his expectations.

Minoo: The Eccentric One
I really do not know how to describe Minoo. I really don’t. I guess the best thing I can do would be to say “Imagine your stereotype of an Oxford student… and then triple it”. He is literally the craziest thing I can imagine, a half Iranian (Persian, as he says), half scottish Zoroastrian with an encyclopaedic knowledge of English literature and a ‘unique’ understanding of social constructs. He tends to run left and right like a chicken and can be guaranteed to loudly say something confusing at any point in time. The first night at the bar he got drunk (he only drinks gin, whiskey or brandy) and started loudly screaming Shakespeare at the top of his lungs. At a karaoke evening he did Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” by simply screaming unintelligible bellowings. For our fancy dress party (theme: “Icons of our Time”) he went as the Virgin Mary, complete with huge rings, a giant pregnant dress, and a scarf. He wears trenchcoats. He has a man living in the shed at the bottom of his garden, as well as two twins in his basement and a dog called Bysse (after Percivald Bysse Shelley).
Mino is… you have to meet him to be honest. He is a king amongst men. A KING.
Ways in which I have annoyed Minoo:
Nope. Minoo is impossible to annoy and frankly he provides so much enjoyment by just being in a Good Mood that I see no purpose in annoying him. Also I fear what Angry Minoo would be like. I imagine a Tempest of Shakespearean proportions.
Photograph of Mino: (I didn’t take this but it frankly sums him up to a tee so there we go)

Josephin: The Genius
Josephin is a genius swede who knows more about literature than any of us (with the possible exception of Minoo), and gets really excited about things like Professor Christopher Ricks. Frankly she makes me feel bad about the fact that I’ve sat in this library, FULL OF BOOKS, and have instead spent the past hour and a half typing this shitty blog. Shame on you, Josephine. She is an ex goth; also, she only wears black (which made her attendance to the rave bop a bit problematical), does not drink, and goes off on long mysterious bike rides into Oxford. The current betting is that Josephine and Minoo will get married and have the most intelligent babies ever.
Ways in which I have annoyed Josephine:
I think that she is in a mood with me NOW because I said that she should go to the icons bop as Anne Robinson. I don’t see what the big deal is, she has red hair and she wears black clothes THAT WAS ALL I WAS BASING MY SUGGESTION ON OK. But at the time she didn’t know who Anne Robinson was and in the meantime she found out; then at the bop when I saw her and I suggested it again she said “You know what Tom, you are really NOT that nice a person to me,” and then she stormed off. I felt well bad because I hadn’t even tried to annoy her, it was an actual suggestion. And annoying Josephine is like kicking a puppy. A highly intelligent puppy that could rape you at all sorts of English literature but a puppy nonetheless. I’M SORRY JOSEPHIN. I bet she’ll get annoyed at this blog post as well.

Aime: The Mumsy (… but achingly hot) One
I LOVE AIME. Which is good because her name is French for ‘love’ (YEAH I WENT THERE). She is my welsh friend and she has a hilarious accent and she is nice in a kind of trustworthy but angry way. I met her at Reading, I did. The festival. So that means that I know her better than everyone else. She tends to get annoyed at me and then say I AM GOING TO THE LIBRARY TO DO SOME WORK and then do no work and get all worried about it. Because she is so nice and trustworthy I naturally use her as my bitch, to get her to teach me how to use the washing machines/dryers, drink tea with me, bitch about people, spy on people cheating on their boyfriends, amuse me, cheer me up, etc etc. Aime I would say is trustworthy and is like the Balliol version of Rose.
Ways in which I’ve annoyed Aime:

ME: “Aime… Aime… Aime… Aime… Aime…” AIME: “WHAT?” Me: “…nothing.”

Randomly reaching out and squeezing her head really hard

Telling her that I approved of her lesbian lifestyle and trying to get her to go out with Rose (she claims she isn’t lesbian)

“Aime… Aime… Aime… Aime… Aime…” AIME: “WHAT?” Me: “HELLO”

Burping at her

Ella: The Cool One
I have written a few blogs now about my friend Steve. This is a picture of her doing drugs:

Steve was always my druggy friend who SMOKED ROLLUPS and DRANK ALCOHOL and WAS CONVENTIONALLY COOL IN WAYS THAT I WOULD NEVER UNDERSTAND. Like, I’d talk to Steve and I’d think “One day I will see a blurry black and white photograph of you on the news next to a reporter talking about the latest hopped up bloated drug-carcass to float up the Thames and get partially eaten by rats and/or beetles,” and then I smile to myself, safe in the knowledge that the world will always somehow make sense and that there would always be people averaging out the ‘too cool for school’ balance to make up for the fact that I was spending time sitting in a library writing a blog about people’. But now I have met ELLA, all of that has changed, because now I realise that Steve isn’t cool. Steve is sad. Steve makes me feel slightly ill at the pit of my stomach. ELLA is COOL. In fact I would say that Ella is not the natural successor to Steve, Steve is in fact some kind of proto-Ella. Ella is who Steve WISHES she was.

Ella is little and short and wears HUGE sunglasses and is constantly smoking rollups and is usually drunk; like it’ll be eight and we’ll all be sipping our pints of weak lager in the bar, then suddenly Ella will roll in with a bottle of wine and a pleased expression on her face, dragging a slightly moody looking gay guy with her. “I’ve just been at an art exhibition with him,” she’ll probably slurr, pointing at the chap, “APPARENTLY I was embarrassing”. The upshot of the story is that she got into an argument with the artist about the nature of art and then won. The scary thing about her is that she is blisteringly clever which means that people get into arguments with her, thinking she’s just the drunk one, and then she will own them and rip out their spines and beat them to death with them (intellectually). This is why I do not call her “Drunk Ella” like many of the other alumni as I feel she is too dangerous a character for that. She is simply Ella. Or “The Girl Who Is Always Right”. You can conclude any argument automatically by saying “Yeah but Ella is on my side”; and she will nod wisely and the other participant will have to simply agree that you are correct SUCH IS THE POWER OF ELLA. It’s like paper scissor stone Ella. Ella also loves Hassan’s Kebab Van (across the road) with an obsession that is getting slightly worrying.
Oddest thing I’ve seen Ella do:
When drunk, say: “Tom, I know you have a hole in your tshirt, but even if the rip gets so big that it encompasses the entire WORLD, you won’t need to worry, because Hassan’s will still be there to show us the way!” – and then order us to carry her to the van. Which we did.
Ways in which I have annoyed Ella:
Ella doesn’t get mad. Or annoyed. She simply gives an order and you disappear one day. I have not annoyed her.

Signey: The Girl
Signey is a half blood (AKA she does English and Spanish). Frankly she is very nice, although she does come from Canada and she does go on about a bloody lot. Ooh, its always Canada this, Canada that. We get it love, you’re an American. Other than that, I can’t really fault her. The other night when my fake moustache fell off at the fancy dress party she drew a new one on for me with an eyeliner pencil, which I think is nice.
Ways in which I have annoyed Signey:

I couldn’t remember her name. I went through a long list of potential names which included: Shigley, Sigourney, Sanique, Shiggers and (my personal favourite) Shaznog. I called her all of these things earnestly.

I wrote “Easy” on her arm in UV pen on a dancefloor. She got really annoyed with me and I think that this is unfair as the UV pen scrawlings that other people were doing on each other included: “Slut” “Ugly” “Ian Huntley” “I kidnapped Maddie” “Myra Hindley is hot” “I wank to the Queen’s Speech” and (my personal favourite) “Actually, I thought Hitler was kind of cool, y’know”. So frankly, suck it up, Shaznog

Me and Minoo once showed up at the door, banged it loudly, then screamed Italian verse at her. Well, Minoo did.
A photo of Shaznog looking jolly:

Max: The Comic Relief
Max I would say is the ‘Karl Pilkington’ of the me Matt Max triangle. We tend to spend our time together either tormenting him or thinking of ways in which we can torment him. It isn’t because he’s Jewish (although yes, that has gotten a lot of playtime in recent days, to the extent that I am bored of the whole thing). It isn’t because he is probably gay (he claims he’s not, but on the other hand Matt and I said that he was, which I feel is an equally valid argument), and it’s not because he has one of those weird stretchy faces that means that he looks like Feivel the mouse from An American Tale, the Cat in the Hat, DangerMouse, an owl, Mr Burns, Chucky the baby from Rugrats, a moomin, Ash Ketchum, the MAD Magazine boy, AND the Cheshire Cat, amongst others. No, I think that the reason we torment him is because he deserves it and he needs to be taken down a peg or two. The latest thing we were doing was to join in a conversation with him and then every time he started talking, scream SHUT THE FUCK UP, MAX as loudly as we could.
Thing is, we do love him really and it’s all banter. And frankly he starts it. Even so, I am not entirely evil and a few days ago I said to Matt “Do you think we bully Max too much? I don’t want to scar him,” to which Matt responded “Don’t worry, it’s fine” so we moved on to phase two, which was to tell him that we’d decided he was gay AND that we didn’t accept his religion and would he please convert to something more sensible, like Islam or Scientology. He got a bit moody and had a bit of a go at me and frankly I was considering just beating the shit out of him just to show him who was top dog (can I point out that at this point, Matt, the puppetmaster, smoothly sidled away leaving me to deal with the 61 kilograms of angry jew). We had a bit of an argument. Then I realised that he was probably right so we hugged and I gave him some chips and we agreed that we’d cut down the relationship from 100% meanness to Max to a more healthy 97% meanness, 3% niceness split. “That’s all I ask, Tom,” he said solemnly. I patted him on the head because I love him really, despite all of his faults. MAD LOVE MAX XXXX --^-^---
Ways in which I have annoyed Max
See above.
Here is a photo of Max doing what he does best, acquiring money:
(Also pictured: Random people who mean nothing)

Mysterious Henry: The Mysterious One
Nobody has ever seen Mysterious Henry. He is a myth. He is an enigma. He is THE WIND. He barely exists. He is the phantom that stalks through the night. He is the winged demon of the dark who haunts your dreams. He is DARKWING DUCK.
I met mysterious Henry on the first day of term. We shook hands, as gentlemen are wont to do, and I said ‘whats your name?” and he said “Harry” and then I went on to meet 60 other people and so I pretty much forgot what he was named, and so when the rest of the English posse (affectionately known as the Balliol Bloc) met up later, everyone was like “So who is this other guy who does English?” and I was like “Yeah, he’s called Henry”. So now every time we see him we call him Henry as he is never around long enough for the “Harry” moniker to stick. But that’s the thing - we never see him. He appears at lectures and then BLAM – as quick as a flash – he is gone again. Nobody knows where he goes. Some say he travels to the depths of the Antarctic sea to catch Narwhales. Some say he bareknuckle fights in a thai ring for beer money. Some say he goes to the library and reads the complete works of Arnold. Me? I think he does all of these things and more; I think he goes where the wind takes him and where the moon and the stars are his guides and friends. For he is Mysterious Henry.
Ways in which I have annoyed Mysterious Henry:
Telling everyone ACCIDENTALLY that his name was Henry when in fact it was Harry.

No picture exists of Mysterious Henry. One was taken once, but the photorapher chose to burn himself alive rather than spoil the mystery of his mysteriousness. But this is the nearest picture we have, based entirely on an artist’s impression of the words of the few witnesses who have glimpsed MH:

So there we go. These are the people. I like them all, they are all nice, I am lucky to be a member of such an upstanding group of men (with the exception of Max but then perfection is impossible and he does English and Spanish so I don’t have to see him so much). I would probably consider myself to be the “Wry, sensitive, whistful” member of the group. Possibly the Seth Cohen.

WOMEN WANT ME, MEN WANT TO BE ME

The A-Z of two weeks of University

2007-10-16T12:56:00.001+01:00

Yes, yes, I know what you are thinking. Tom has forgotten us, he’s stopped blogging forever, he thinks he’s too GOOD for us now he’s going to Oxford, he has forgotten the people who put him there.

And yes, that is what I think. Now I go to Oxford and study English, frankly I should be charging you to read this blog and I think that the fact that I’m condescending to blog at ALL is something that you should all be grateful for. Anyway.

Well.

I have been at Oxford for two weeks now and frankly too much has happened. I can’t even begin to fit it all into some sort of coherent exciting narrative that encapsulates everything. So I won’t try. Instead I will just do what I did about a month ago and write a badly-formatted A-Z of random things that have happened to me and continue to happen to me. And then you can read it and think highly of me.

Alcohol
Right. Now I’m a student, I have decided that it is my god given right to drink alcohol and act like a bit of a tit. YOU CAN’T TAKE THAT RIGHT AWAY FROM ME NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU TRY. So yes, I admit, I’ve fallen off the wagon and have taken up the demon of alcoholism again. It doesn’t help that my college has its own bar that sells drinks at very affordable prices. It gets to the point when I reason with myself “With drinks this reasonable, I would be LOSING money if I didn’t have another one”; so then I do. To be fair, I haven’t gotten embarrassingly drunk yet, unlike my new friend Max who was so wasted the other night he was squatting in a gutter, gnawing on a kebab like the little ratboy he is and shrieking “IT’S KOSHER, IT’S KOSHER” at the top of his squeaky little voice. The most drunk I have been was on about a Tuesday ago, a night that shall forever be termed “The Eve of the Eight Sambucas”. But don’t think that the eight sambucas were all that was drunk; they were also balanced out with beer and WKD and other narcotic fluids; but at the club we kept looking at each other and doing that ‘glass tipping’ motion thing and going to the bar and ordering sambuca and then drinking it, except one time when Max bought the round and then dropped his on the bar and instantly began lapping it up off the bar surface like a fucking little mongrel dog. This anecdote doesn’t really go anywhere, but I want to just let you all know that yes, I have been drinking and no, I haven’t woken up face down in the middle of the back quad with a cone on my head. Yet.

Big issue
Oxford is full of tramps. I don’t know why. Maybe they are ex students who fell on hard times and figured that they might as well beg next to their old stomping grounds. Maybe they are thought vampires who gain strength off the cleverness of the students… actually on second thoughts, that’s a stupid idea. Thought vampires? Retarded.
In order to get them to leave me alone, I bought one copy of the Big Issue and now I carry around with me; every time someone offers it to me I hold it aloft and kind of shrug apologetically, as if to say “Listen, yeah, I’m on your side but I can’t be throwing money away; I’m not a lunatic… anyway, I’m off to read the thought provoking articles about homelessness and the plight on homeless people and on about the fact that not having a home is a bad situation to be in” and then they wink and high five me.
Actually, that’s a lie. I didn’t buy the original copy. My friend Rose bought it and then left it in my room and I figured out that I could somehow turn the situation to my advantage.

Clubbing
I think I’ve been to pretty much every club in Oxford now; they are all uniformly dire. The problem is, they are too small. In fact, no, that isn’t the problem. The problem is that they play shite music. After about ten minutes of R&B, perhaps the DJs will kick it up with some Bon Jovi before taking it down town with about an hour and a half of cheese. I get it, people like to dance ironically to the Spice Girls. On the aforementioned Eve of Eight Sambucas, I would say that my moment of epiphany came when I realised that I was arm in arm with five or six other people, in a small huddle, singing along to “Don’t Stop Me Now” and lurching left and right to the tune of the music.
On the other hand, at the club last night, the DJ was doing shout outs and we got him to go “Happy Bar Mitzvah to Max! Good on ya Max!” which was pretty funny, as it wasn’t even Max’s Bar Mitzvah that day (obviously, as he is 18).

Dough
“Dough” is a colloquial term for “Money”. I have spent a fucking lot of money so far. For the first week, I tried to keep a record of my expenditure on Excel (check out my steez, this is student livin’). Between the 1st and the 10th of October, I managed to spend a total of £324.70!!!!! That’s like thirty two quid a day!!!!!! Insane. I bet Jay-Z did the same thing when he first went to Gangster University.

English
I study English, which is a better subject than Maths or PPE. I will do a full rundown of my fellow English students in a later blog.

Friends
Is it wrong that I already like the people at University far far FAR more than I like anybody at home? No offence guys but you are mostly shit.

Girls
Oxford is a place full of geniuses. Or genii, as might be the correct plural form. I DON’T KNOW. But this means that the girls are all highly brainy, which means that they either have superior DNA to everyone else OR they are social rejects who have no friends and thus spent their childhoods reading. So thus, in conclusion there are three basic classes of female at Oxford, all of whom cause varying reactions in me.

Class 1: Unbelievably hot

Class 2: Ugly as sin

Class 3: Lucia

Hall
We eat our dinner in a big hall that looks like the Harry Potter hall. It is nice and wooden and we are surrounded by portraits of wise looking men in wigs. Nothing more to add.

I…
… can’t think of anything to go in the “I” letter slot.

Jew
My new friend Max is Jewish. When he first told me this, I was like ‘cool’; because he isn’t like one of those orthodox jews; he eats non kosher meat and doesn’t seem to do many Jewish things. Of course, after about a day and half, every single conversation between me Max and Matt revolves around the fact that Max is jewish. For some reason, jokes anti-semitism has become the order of the day. I don’t even know how it starts, but last night concluded with me and Matt solemnly informing Max that we didn’t accept his religion and offering him some leaflets to convert to Christianity, or “Y’know, any other religion”. Can I say that this is not bullying as Max usually starts it. Like, he isn’t even that Jewish but he’s started drawing Stars of David all over the place. Just to get back at us.

Joke’s on him though, because he looks like the Cat in the Hat.

Kebab
HEY GUY’S LET’S GO TO HASSAN’S KEBAB VAN AND GET A KEBAB.
The other night I was drunk and I was so hungry that I had two kebabs in a row. About ¾ of the way through the last one I started to slow down. And I was like “WHY AM I EATING THIS?” but then I ate it anyway because I’m now a student and I can’t afford to just go about wasting money.

Latin
Everyone speaks Latin here. It’s like Spanish in Spain. What a fucking trek.

Milk
There’s no fridge in my corridor, so when I arrived with my big bottle of milk I just left it on the window sill to dry. Two weeks later it was yellow with a huge bukkake of white goo at the bottom. I eventually threw it away when I realised that it was making the whole corridor smell like Dairylea.

NO SPLASH NO GASH
This black dude in the toilets of Oceans & Collins (nighclub… shit… dancefloor smells like vagina) loudly sings this song to whoever comes in. It goes like this:
NO SPLASH NO GASH
NO SOAP NO HOPE
That’s pretty much it. Then he sprays me with perfume and asks for a quid but I’m like go to hell. But then I gave him 50p and took a lolly.

Old English
We have to study Old English, or as I call it, Ye Olde Englishe (because I’m funny). Here’s an extract from the notes that I made. I actually wrote this down:

“long stemmed dissyllables eg sawol 'soul' and ceaster 'city' take 'lar', but lose medial vowel in trisyllabic forms. Some abstract nouns ending in -pfu and -u can remain unchanged in the oblique cases (ie any other than the nominative)"

I have eight pages of that shit. I’m meant to understand it. Nuff said.

Poetry
We study it.

Queen’s
Another college in Oxford. Rose goes there.

Rave
Our first “bop” was of a “rave theme”. Note: it wasn’t a rave. It was a raved theme bop. That is an important distinction. I wore a yellow wifebeater, a pair of bright blue Primark jogging trousers with I LOVE LA on the bum, big sunglasses, a big necklace, rave face paint and A FLUORESCENT JACKET. Which I’ve now lost. Shit.

Smiths
Good band. I got into them because my friend Matt played then in his room and I was like woah. So in conclusion: Good band.

Toast
A staple of my diet. I have a toaster in my room and in the past few days I must have eaten a couple of loaves of bread’s worth of toast. It’s fucking good. When I first tried to toast something in my room it set off the fire alarm. Fact. But I managed to waft the smoke away from the alarm and now I only toast stuff out of the window. This is true.

Unintentional racism
We’ve already covered the anti-semitism. That’s in the bag. However, since I’ve arrived at Oxford I have apparently turned into one of those accidental racists that you see on TV. For some reason I am completely unable to get the names of any of the Indian/asian students right. It’s not me being a twat, it’s just me being forgetful. Or assuming. I don’t know. Here are some examples:

At the first night at the bar, me and Matt were wondering around meeting people, and then there’s this Indian guy called Andy. And neither of us could hear anything as it was all noisy. “What’s your name?” asked Matt. “Andy!” said Andy. “Mandeep?” asked Matt. Then I walked up. “What’s your name?” I asked. “Andy!” said Andy. “MANDY?” I asked incredulously. Thinking about it, his name was unlikely to be Mandy but at the time I didn’t know that, I was pretty much going on the basis that he’s Indian lookin’, he could pretty much be called anything.

At formal dinner, the head of the college said – as he is a JOKA - “Everyone has to swap round seats so you can get to know each other better”; so naturally I ended up sitting next to Matt, who had two glasses of wine. I was also sitting opposite two white dudes and an Indian looking guy. “Can I have some of that wine?” I said to Matt. “No way,” he replied, “My mate Hassan gave it to me.” I turned to the Indian guy and said “Hassan, can I have some of the wine?” … he was like “WHAT my name isn’t Hassan its Kieron.” At that point I could have just cut my losses, said ‘sorry, mistook you for someone else’; but instead I gesticulated madly at the three people sitting opposite us and said “LOOK AT THEM… OF ANY OF THEM, WHO IS LIKELY TO BE CALLED HASSAN?” Later on in the conversation, to prove that I wasn’t racist, I told the Mancunian guy that I couldn’t and refused to try to understand his accent; and then told the other guy that his hair was shit. In other news, everyone now calls that Kieron guy Hassan, so really I come out looking prettttttttttttty good.

There are these two Indian looking girls called Nehaal and Sanam. I call both of them Shanam. This isn’t an affectation; they think I’m joking, but I honestly just do it by accident. Like I see them and my brain freezes up. Maybe its not a racial thing; maybe it’s just a ‘weird name’ thing. I mean, there’s this other girl called Signey at the college and I started calling her Shaznog, Shigely, or Shatner. Hmm.

Vibrating floor
THE FLOOR OF MY BEDROOM IS VIBRATING. Nobody knows why but when I put a glass of water on my desk it looks like the approach of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park. Fact.

Work
Haven’t done any. It’s getting to be a worry.

Xylophone
No.

Yes…
… I have lost interest in this endeavour.

Z
What’s black and white and eats like a horse?
A ZEBRA

My life is to busy to bother blogging

2007-09-30T22:32:00.000+01:00

I am going to uni tomorrow. That uni is Oxford. I am therefore cleverer than you and thus, blogging is a bad idea.

(In other words: I'll blog some time this week)

Steph’s 19th at Planet Angel (14/09/07)

2007-09-16T15:54:00.000+01:00

My friend Steph the Crackhead had her 19th birthday the other week, so she invited all of us to come to a nightclub called Planet Angel. What sort of club is Planet Angel? Well, firstly consider the fact that I referred to Steph as “Steph the Crackhead” and use that as your clue to the basic emphasis of the club. To continue this point of view I would like to hypothesise that the club would more accurately be named ‘Planet Angel DUST’ (angel dust is another word for PCP). Yes, it was one of those fabled ‘drug clubs’ that I read about in the Sunday papers under headlines like ‘look what the young people are up to now’.

Of course, the owners of Planet Angel do quite a good job at disguising the fact that it is basically a neon covered opium den; well, the website describes it best:

“In 1997 Angel and Pete were working in the IT industry, disillusioned, craving the company of other like-minded people and unable to find any gatherings where they felt they could truly relax and be themselves. As an antidote to some quite negative realities of their lives at the time, they both had dreams… Angel’s dream was of a 24-hour location full of creativity, entertainment, good friends and surrealism... Pete’s was of a fun, creative, permanent and sustainable natural lifestyle; one free from the bounds of negative profit-oriented rules…”

When I read this, I was like ‘COOL’; in my mind it would rather be like the Chelsea Hotel in New York; a hothouse of ideas and philosophy, full of intellectuals and poets – the intellectual masters of tomorrow. I had half a mind to bring my vintage typewriter, a battered copy of The Island and a beret along with me, as well as some menthol cigarettes. I didn’t. But I wanted to.

Assumedly, in order to protect the rarefied intellectual atmosphere of the club, it was more convoluted to get into than a 747. Firstly, it was necessary to ‘prebook’ our tickets online beforehand. This involved going onto the internet and finding the Planet Angel website. According to the site, it was a ‘not for profit’ organisation, which made the fact that it cost about £15 a bit ironic. However, I sighed to myself, thought ‘THINK OF THE PHILOSOPHY’ and signed up and got emailed. Then we had to go to the club itself. For some reason I traveled with a load of drunk girls who were all talking about how much sex they had at the Reading Festival. There was one called Cassie (who is my spiritual guru, my own personal Beth Ditto); and one called Fran and one called Leyla. Unfortunately I was unable to tell them apart, even though they looked utterly different. I was also convinced that one of them was called Beth and so when I spoke to them I tended to just call both of them Beth, Frayla, or You There. When we got to the club, we had to talk to a man with a clipboard who would ascertain whether we were on the list, then we had to show them our printout of the emails.

This blew my mind. The night before, at 11.20pm, I had sat in my room and typed my name into my laptop. AND NOW MY NAME WAS WRITTEN ON THIS MAN’S CLIPBOARD. For some reason, this entirely basic example of the information age blew my mind; and I thought to myself – if I am this mind-blown BEFORE I enter the club, imagine what I’ll be like when I’m inside! I was well excited at that point and so I eagerly got frisked by the big black security guard (THERE WAS MEANT TO BE A NO-CHEWING GUM POLICY AT THE CLUB BUT I HAD SOME IN MY BACK POCKET AND THEY DIDN’T EVEN NOTICE IT! FUCK YOU, SYSTEM!!!). Then we showed our tickets to another man and we got our hands stamped and we were thrown into the club itself.

I have to admit that I felt a little let down. Inside was cramped and sweaty and filled with people who were vibrating. Slovens lounged on sofas playing with Lego and probably smoking crack. A midget wearing a day-glo jacket ran past, followed by a fat elderly woman. AND THEY WERE PLAYING MADONNA. We passed through this first room into a ‘dance hall’ which was a flashing UV wonderland replete with gyrating sweaty people and several disk jockeys; here we met Steph who was probably on some drugs. “HI GUYS OMG IT’S SO GOOD TO SEE YOU” she shrieked excitedly, and then started dancing. Steve is a good dancer and she was really getting into the monotonous beat of the hardcore; she had a nice sort of ‘shoulder shuffle head waggle hand wiggle’ thing going on; she was literally waving her hands about in the air like she just didn’t care; and if I was forced to place a temporal description of her actions, I would probably have to say that she was partying like it was at least 1999. Anyway, we all ‘got jiggy with it’ for about half an hour. I have to say I’m a well good dancer. I was cutting some rug up. However, when it comes down to it I think that the ‘dancer of the night’ award goes to the figure who was joking it down in the other dancefloor.

Firstly, she was about 70 which I think in itself is a reason to applaud her. Secondly, she was wearing some white rhinestone-covered jeans and a crop top. Thirdly, she was doing a weird dance in which she was positioned exactly two inches away from the wall (facing it) and squatting up and down while waving her arms around in the air (but not in a manner that said she just didn’t care; indeed there was a level of bemused seriousness to her spasmodic jerkings). After doing this for about three minutes she started waltzing around in circles, rather like a confused zombie, but with a dead serious expression on her face.

At this point I had realized that this club was not going to be the intellectual domain that I had so hoped it would be and I resolved that I was unlikely to take this evening as seriously as some were. And when I say ‘some’ I mean ‘pretty much everyone else on the dancefloor except Cassie who was also laughing at the weird pillhead woman’. I also refer to the woman who showed up wearing a bra and stringy pants and sucking on a pacifier. For some reason, there is nothing so utterly unappealing as a scantily dressed woman in a nightclub. It’s like seeing a Big Mac in a puddle; or watching an episode of Frasier in a bathtub (I had no idea what those analogies mean but they seem oddly appropriate to me). After another hour of having weird sequined boobs rotated around me, I got bored and went and sat outside with Cassie. Outside was filled with people smoking pot and most likely engaging in other illegal activities like sharing needles and downloading pirated music and broadcasting FM radio. I watched two men snorting some self-raising flour from a playing card and pondered. “Cassie” I said, “Why are we not on drugs?”. She looked at me with her sunken piggy eyes and looked confused. I was going to suggest that we cruise for some Triple-sod or Yellow Bentines and get totally mashed off our noggins like a couple of fortnights in a bad balloon, but then a better idea hit me like a bolt of inspiration.
“WAIT A SECOND!” I cried triumphantly.
“What?”
“I just had SUCH A GOOD IDEA.”
“Yes?”
“Basically, if I opened up a shop selling DVDs and do some sort of promotion when I sell them really cheap, I am totally going to call it a DVDEAL!”
She stared at me blankly. I am constantly having amazing ideas like that, but nobody ever takes them seriously. Especially when I am saying them at 2 in the morning with a triple-jacked 19 year old passed out on my foot. That wasn’t even the best innovation I came up with all evening; after talking to Steph about how many drugs she was on: “ONE AND A HALF ECSTASTY, TOM” she replied with a lazy grin that nearly disguised the flecks of blood on her gums, I came up with “EXTRA-SY” which is like ecstasy but just a little bit stronger. We agreed that it was a really good idea and that I was a genius.

Ok, so we were bored at this point. Going to a drug-club and then not taking any drugs is probably missing the point; but it wasn’t like we were even offered any which I frankly think is a bit lax on the behalf of the dealers. I thought that I found a whole sheet of pills on the floor but then it turned out to be a bit of Lego. When I was in the toilets a man popped out of his cubicle said “Excuse me my dear, can I borrow a bank note?” while pointing at his nose. I thought that he wanted to wipe his nose on it and frankly I didn’t have any money left anyway so I was like NO GET AWAY FROM ME and fled the toilets. Thinking about it, he probably wanted it to buy drugs with and I’d been a bit cleverer perhaps I might have gotten in on the deal.

As it was, no narcotics were procured and after the alcohol wore off and we realized that none of us was rich enough to buy any more (the drinks at the not-for-profit club were so expensive that buying a round of beers would have required me to get on the property ladder, slowly move up through careful work and investment until I owned a small 5-room studio flat in London, and then get a mortgage on it). The first train wasn’t for three hours and we were bored, so we sat down on an upper walkway and made snidey comments about the druggers who staggered past.

“Man, I saw her vagina.”
“I like his tshirt.”
“Her boots are fucking stupid.”
“That guy only has one arm”.

Finally, Nat heard us and sat down. Nat is a boy who goes to Kings school. He and I have had a checkered past with regards to this blog (I think I called him a puny little pink virgin flower-boy after he tried to steal my girlfriend, and he called me a pussy, but that is pretty much water under the bridge). “Listen yeah guys” he said to me and Cassie. “Just because you aren’t taking drugs doesn’t mean that you can look down us yeah? Just because you haven’t done it doesn’t mean that you have a RIGHT to look down on people who choose to do so”.

I stared blankly at him. I wanted to point out the moral issues with making moral judgments on people who are making moral judgments on you, but at this point I was still a little bit drunk and it was three thirty in the morning and I just couldn’t persuade my mind to make the correct mental calculations so I said the first thing that came into my mind, which in this case was ‘Yeah, well I have never been Madeleine McCann, but I don’t look down on people who are her,’ and then I sat back and looked pleased with myself. Nat looked at me. Cassie looked at me. I picked up my shovel and started digging. ‘… and anyway…’ I continued “…how do you know we are not on pills? I took two Neurofens and a Vitamin C tablet before coming out’. There was a second of silence.
“Hey, is that eczema on your arm?” asked Nat, pointing at Cassie’s arm, which did indeed have some eczema on it. She stared blankly at him. I stared blankly at her arm. Then I TWISTED THE FUCKING SCREW.
“Hey, just because you have never had it doesn’t mean you have a RIGHT to look down on people who have.” I snapped. I was actually quite annoyed about the whole conversation. To be honest, I have literally no opinion about the business of taking pills for the purpose of moving about really fast and twitching a bit. But I’ll be jiggered if I won’t be allowed to sit in the corner and make sarky comments about anybody who chooses to dress in rave goggles and piss themselves in the corner of a dancefloor. This is my human right as a satirist of the younger generations.

Anyway, we left the club and caught a train home. It was a sad reflection on the world that we’d been out at a nightclub until 5.30 and we were still not hardcore. It’s a bit of a worry that I have managed to miss such a fundamental part of being a teenager as injesting narcotics and rolling about on the floor for eight and a half hours. I also caught a cold on the walk home. That was the worst party ever.

AND I HAD TO WORK THE NEXT DAY. That sucked.

We need to stop these people, Norm

2007-09-14T11:16:00.000+01:00

I got my first bit of hate-mail for a long time the other week. It was from a woman named Adrienne, which is a french name originally derived from the roman "Hadrian", from the Northern Italian town that gave its name to the Adriatic sea. The hate mail was in the form of a comment on this blog, and it read:

"You're a vile cretin to spew such hatred. I hope someone treats you with the same disregard as you treat others. Karma's a bitch."

Ouch. Hmm. Interesting. I have a few problems with this. Firstly: I really can't see why she's so upset. I mean, the post in question was entitled Fat people are annoying>, and featured the sentence "If fat people are to be made thin, and therefore non-annoying and quiet, all is needed is to point a gun at them and keep them running until a: they die or b: they get fit enough to outrun the bullets"; but really, it was clearly ironic. I was secretly on the SIDE of the morbidly obese people and was cleverly satirising the size-0 debate with my incisive wit and intellect, which is why I made the photoshop picture of the fat man being chased by the little boy with a rifle. I was frankly being postmodern and the fact that Adrienne was unable to realise that 'copying and pasting extracts from the Weight Watcher website in order to poke fun at the suffering of the unforunate women' was meant in a metaphorical, subversive way... well, frankly I find that slightly offensive. And more than a little racist, to be honest, especially coming from a frenchwoman. I bet she's really fat.

My second main complaint about this comment as a piece of relevent biting criticism is that it was posted on a blog-post that I originally wrote in April 2005. APRIL 2005. That is 2 years, 5 months and 2 days ago, or 885 days, or 76,464,000 seconds. She is kind of behind the times here and frankly I think that SHE is the vile cretin for not giving me an opportunity to GROW and MATURE in the 21,240 hours I've had to think about my behaviour since writing that blogpost. I might have grown up a bit... gained a bit of maturity and an increased respect for the female form of all shapes and sizes; I might now be a sober responsible adult who listens to U2 and comments on the fretwork and who shops at John Lewis and thinks that Myleen Klass is a jolly swell lady. Just because I haven't and I'm not doesn't mean that I'm not offended that she has simply made these assumptions about me. If anything, I'd say that SHE is the bitch, not karma. Or me.

But really, what do I care what some anonymous fat bint named after a wall thinks about me on the internet? I'm still a hellraiser, baby. I'm tearing it up. I mean, here I am, sitting on the sofa with my laptop balanced on my lap at a precarious angle - I was told that actually holding it on my lap would cause me to get cancer BUT DO I CARE? Hell no - I don't intend to be alive that long! After all, it is the brightest spark that burns out the soonest, and frankly, at the pace I'm going I'll be surprised if I make it to October. I mean, just think of some of the adventures I have had recently. The other day I went to a pub on my bike and I nearly got hit by a car (this was because I tried to bisect a roundabout). And then I didn't get up til 9:45 the next morning. THAT'S NEARLY TEN. But then I went totally mental and downloaded the entire audiobook of 'Great Expectations' onto my laptop and LISTENED TO IT FOR TWO AND A HALF HOURS. I did this because my reading list for Oxford is so fucking long, and I don't like reading at the best of times, so I decided that it would be a better idea to just find as many medias of taking in literature as possible. If I could find a way of liquidising a book and injecting it directly into my spinal cord, like my friend Steph does, then I would (although, she tends to eschew 'literature', instead choosing to go down the 'highball of turpentine, carpet cleaner and crystal meth' path). The main problems with the audiobook approach is that:

a: It is narrated by this American dude who - every time somebody refers to the protagonist Pip as 'boy' - pronounces it like a deep-south confederate talking to a slave during the 18th century
b: It is 16 hours long
c: It takes up 1.1 gigabytes of disk space and means that I can no longer update my iPod; the chapters are not saved as audiobooks but as individual songs which means that listening to my library has a high probability of being hit by Pip and co

However, it beats reading and it means that I can do my sit ups while taking in literature, thus allowing me to more effectively manage my time and fit more scholarship into the day. YEAH LIKE I SAID HELL-RAISER.

Oh man. It is telling that my first bit of hatemail for months is for a post that I wrote two years ago. I think maybe that I have blunted myself somewhat in my old age. Maybe I have gone down the John Cleese route; once a tall gangly Fawlty Towers firespark, now doing cameos as the new husband of the annoying chipmunk bitch on Will & Grace. Oh shit, I'm married to Karen. That's awful. I think that I need to go back to being gratuitously offensive. Hmm.

Hmm. Well, I could just call my ex-girlfriend's sister fat. That usually gets some responses. Or I could write some sort of thing about paedophilia.
OK I KNOW. I heard this joke the other day.

KNOCK KNOCK.
'Who's there?'
NOT MADELEINE!

Hahahahaha. I told this one to my boss yesterday while we were spinning around on the chairs in the stockroom, and he started laughing hysterically. We then got to talking about the McCann case. The whole thing is pretty fascinating to me. But it only got so when the parents were accused. Beforehand, when it was only "hot blonde girl gets kidnappd", I frankly didn't give a shit. But now the evil mother has come in, it's gotten well good.
Me and Jerry (MY BOSS) are both in agreement the mother is as guilty as fucking sin. Apparently, according to Jerry's reliable 'inside family sources', she's a psychotic bitch who had some screaming fit at her wedding and marches around yelling at people and probably has a collection of sharp axes in her house for kiling homeless people with. She also probably listens to Crazy Town which in my opinion is so hardcore, it'd turn even the most mild-mannered doctor into a serial killer.
After about three minutes of extensive criminal deductive investigation, we've come up with the theory that the 'rents probably didn't mean to kill her; either she overdosed on sedatives, or she fell down the stairs or something; so they hid the body inside a crypt at the chapel, before moving it in a hire car 25 days later in order to bury it somewhere, and that the wife wrote a confession in her diary because - as Jerry said with a wise pause that showed off his years of study of criminal psychology "people like that are narcissistic... they just want to be caught". He gave me a wise nod then stubbed out his rollup on the wall. I thought about it. It does seem that there's a lot evidence against them; the hair in the car and the blood on the stairs and the fact that the mother claimed that her daughter's last words to her were "Mummy, I've had the best day ever. I'm having lots and lots of fun." WHAT SORT OF THREE YEAR OLD SAYS THAT. Has nobody ever watched Supernanny? Young children are shits. My experience of three year olds tells me that she probably said "BUY ME SOMETHING," or maybe "MUMMY, WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH THAT CHAINSAW?".

The thing is, I want them to be guilty. Or at least her. I dunno why, but I've had an aversion to her from the beginning. Not because of any sense of justice or decency or to restore my faith in the power of civilised society to deal with its criminals, but simply because I think it'd be fucking cool twist. Narratively, that is brilliant and I absolutely approve of it. I'd like all of life to be like a cheesy fiction and frankly, this is the only answer that makes sense. And imagine the film adaptation. Dakota Fanning is: Maddie. Tamzin Outhwaite is: Kate McCann. Paul Burrell is: the dad. Actually, with that cast it'd probably be direct to tv on Five.

I don't know what the point of this post is. Originally it was about hate mail, then there some stuff about me not being a firestarting rebel rockstar any more. And then I started talking about the McCanns. What a load of shit. This a very Joycian post. Brup.

Cordial Shelf

2007-09-07T10:21:00.000+01:00

So, I am a working man at last (hurray!). Yes, that's right, I have gotten myself some gainful paid employment. In a SHOP.

What I do, right, is I sell alcohol and cigarettes and chocolate. Mostly to the working class. I like this, because in my previous role as a useless layabout middle-class callow youth, the working classes of this country were a dark force to be feared. With their slovenly (but, in opposition to the opinions of the presctiptivist linguist wanker John Honey, NOT INCORRECT, MERELY NON-STANDARD) use of language, their shabby dress, their beady little eyes and their angry 'We work for our crust and read The Sun' outlook on the world, they were a scary mass with which I had no rapport, rather like terrorists, crackheads, and orks. But now, we have something in common. No - scratch that - we have a reason for communication. They want the fags and booze (it numbs the pain); I am the only one who can give them the fags and booze. In a way, it is like they are the Balrog, and I am Gandalf, and Frodo is a 20 pack of Benson and Hedges Silver. They come in, slavering at the till, and I'm like "YOU SHALL NOT PASS... until you give me £5.35" and then they do and so I give them their death-sticks and everyone is happy.

I guess what I'm saying is that, being a dealer of mind-numbing toxins really gets you respect from the working classes. They basically do whatever you say. GIVE ME SOME MONEY I cry, then they give me money. And they are ultra polite to me, saying 'Please' and 'Thank you', with their shiny eyes fixed on the bottle of Gin clutched in my hand and the box of Malboroughs clenched in my fist. Let me expemplify. Yesterday, a man dressed in painters overalls said "Cheers fella". I am going to repeat that. A MAN DRESSED IN PAINTERS OVERALLS SAID "CHEERS FELLA". If that doesn't cement my place in society, I don't know what will. And, I mean, it isn't just men in painter's overalls. Having the key to the drinks cabinet brings you into contact with all sorts of exciting people from every walk of life, to weird looking 14 year olds with fake IDs - whom I cast away from the door with my fiery rod of justice - to nervous alcoholics - such as the woman who sprinted in, asked for a litre bottle of vodka, paid in cash then ran off without taking her change - to happy drunks - such as the chap who comes in every day to buy a Heinekin and a Tenants and who gave his son's mobile number to Rose the other night.
Oh yeah, my lover Rose also works at the shop. She is going through a bit of a straight phase and is going out with the manager, whose name is Jerry. YES JERRY. HIS NAME IS JERRY AND MY NAME IS TOM.

Fucking classic, you can't write that shit.

The fact that Rose and Jerry (HAHAHAHAHA) are kind of seeing each other had nothing to do with my getting the job, by the way.

Anyway, I think that J-Dogg can sense the huge and inescapable sexual chemistry between me and Rose, because yesterday was the first day that we got to work a shift together (from 4-10); this was only because Jerry couldn't get the train in. PERHAPS HE WAS EATING A PARTICULARLY BIG PIECE OF CHEESE AND THEN HE GOT STUCK IN HIS MOUSE HOLE! So it was me and Rose. And Rose's friend Yuko who is japanese and was there for no discernable reason. Anyway, when we arrived I said to Rose 'Now, just because we are friends it doesn't mean that we can't do a thorough, professional job with absolutely no messing around, no silliness and no playing the goat; I respect you as a colleague and co-worker and I think that we can keep the working environment both friendly, but also respectful and sensible'. I did say that. I think some of the message was lost because I delivered it while attempting to joust her head with a broom while propelling myself around the stockroom on the swivelly chair. But anyway, we got on with it; counted the float money and started serving customers.

My biggest problem with this job is counting the float. The thing is, when you first log in you get given £100 in - basically - loose change - and you have to count every penny to make sure that it is all there. Now, we all know that maths is not my strong point. On reflection, I would not describe myself as a modern-day Steven Hawkings. Counting 2-3, or in twos, or every five; it does not work for me. I lose count. Therefore, I have to count every single coin INDIVIDUALLY and then double-check it to make sure that I have the right amount. Then, at the end of the day, you see how much money is in the till, remove the exess, then count the leftover to see if you have 100. If you do - HURRAY YOU WIN. If not it causes a headache. I know that this system seems to be old and archaic and the answer is that the machines that we use to take the money were made in the 70s. They still think that the shop is called Victoria Wine. I hadn't even HEARD of Victoria Wine which means that the chain must have changed their name before I got interested in alcohol. And then the machines pre-dated that. They are fucking old, and my till is somehow WELDED to the desk which means that nobody can move it. The drawer also kept getting jammed shut which meant that I had to rescan things twice. REMEMBER THAT INFORMATION, AS IT IS USEFUL.

Anyway, the day I was working with Rose, there weren't many customers. Except for one old guy who showed up at the door and loudly read out what I assumed was the writing on a poster on the door. Like, he listed wine prices and special offers then screamed WE'RE GOING TO HAVE A SPECIAL TIME TONIGHT, YOU AND I EH to Rose, then scampered off. When I looked at the door, there was nothing posted up there. Other than that, no customers. So we decided to restock the shelves. We haven't had a delivery for two weeks so there was no stock to put on the shelves. There was literally nothing to do and - as the old saying goes - the devil makes work for idle thumbs.

Ten minutes later, I was lying on the floor, with Rose perched on my knees and a fluffy purple fish (called Phillip, store mascot) on her head. She was talking to Jerry - CLASSIC - on the phone. He told me to vacuum the carpet. There isn't a carpet in the store, except for the two squares of gummy green felt behind the till. So I vacuumed that. Ten minutes later, I stapled a bow to Phillip, tied him to a broom, and made him swim back and forth in front of the CCTV camera mounted to the ceiling. Meanwhile, Rose was watching me on the video monitor, drawing a green afro on the screen where my head was. We were both wearing hats that I had made out of the tissue used for wrapping the wine bottles. Yuko was sitting on a chair, staring blankly at the wall. After making Phillip swim for a bit on tape, I had a thought.

"Rose?"
"Yes?"
"Does anyone ever watch the CCTV camera tape back?"
"Nah. Well, only if the till is down, money's missing from the safe, or a load of stock has been lost."
"Oh, ok."
I returned to making the fish swim.

Three hours after that:
"My till is down twelve quid."
"And there's forty quid missing from the safe."
"Oh."

This was worrying. Every single penny in the shop needs to be accounted for, and here we were missing loads of money. The thing about the safe was that you never go into there unless you have a good reason - such as taking individual bags of change, or stealing to pay for your mother's kidney dialysis. I went in there only once to get change, and neither of us had mothers who needed dialysis, so there was no explanation for the missing forty quid. Meanwhile, I was running around the stockroom in a panic about the loss of £12 from my till. THERE WAS NO EXPLANATION. Or was there? Yes there was. It was because the till drawer kept sticking so I had to scan stuff through twice. Rose sorted it out for me because she is a hero and I will marry her one day. But what about the missing safe money? SAFE. Neither of us had any explanation or even knew why it was gone. To be fair, it had probably been missing for days and so we decided that the best thing to do would be to blame is on Yuko, who was going back to Japan anyway in a few days. NO NOT REALLY. I think Rose left a note for Jerry (tee-hee) and then we went home.

On the drive home I nearly ran over Rose's cat.

Hmm.

I'm not sure what the point of that story was. There was no real drama, no real intrigue (the worst case situation would be me having to pay £12 to cover the loss), and the resolution was pretty much "I asked Rose and she figured it out for me." It wasn't exciting or funny or gave any insight whatsoever into the human condition. Oh well. Maybe, then, it is a good metaphor for life itself? Who knows? Not me. I do worry that, by selling alcohols and poisons, I am simply now a proponent of the vicious circle of addiction and death that so many people find themselves trapped in; I mean, as I make a living from them, should I now be anti the anti-cigarette movement? Should I paint out the 'Please drink responsibly' sign on posters for booze? Am I selling my soul to cigarette and alcohol companies for £5.50 an hour? I don't know. As the scottish man Thomas Carlyle would have said, I am now a part of the machine. My job is to keep everything lubricated by making the cogs happy and oiled with nicotine and vodka.

That is a sobering thought.

GET IT, SOBERING THOUGHT? I SAID THAT ABOUT EIGHT TIMES LAST NIGHT. IT IS FUNNY BECAUSE I WORK IN A SHOP THAT SELLS DRINK THAT MAKES YOU THE OPPOSITE OF SOBER. lol

Wine in the fountain and blood on the walls

2007-09-03T15:55:00.000+01:00

No, that is not the title of the latest song by some sort of new-fangled 'emo-rock' ("eck") band like 'My Chemical Romance' or 'Panic! At the Disco' or 'Take That'. No, those are amongst the things that I had to clear up in the aftermath of MY NINETEENTH BIRTHDAY PARTY! Woo. And this is what I am going to talk about in this blog post and we will forget that I only wrote two posts last month...

I decided that it was necessary to have a birthday party for several reasons. The first is that Nineteen is a shite age. I was thinking about this the other day and I realised that for every teenage year, I have a mental image that personifies that age. So thirteen is a boy in a baseball cap and a scummy screen-printed Offspring tshirt, fourteen is a girl wearing lots of layers and possibly cut-off tights, fifteen is a slightly burly chap, sixteen is a wiry but cool-looking kid in a ruffled school uniform, seventeen is a high-school jock making out with Leigh Cabot from the book version of 'Christine', and eighteen is a man with stubble driving around in a car. Those images are OK. They are kind of cool in a wry way. You know what I have for nineteen? A wiry, gangly, nerdish looking Jewish student (I don't know why the jewish is important, but it just seems to be) with whispy hair, big silly glasses, a grubby linen shirt five sizes too big for him, clutching a camera and running around New York saying 'GOLLY'. I'm thinking a stretched Woody Allen, or maybe sort of like Will Ferrier on crack. That isn't meant to be a cuss at Will Ferrier, by the way - I, like the rest of the world, have nothing against him - but every time I see a picture of him on Facebook, I think to myself 'Holy shit, that boy personifies my already existing image of what Nineteen is".
Where was I? Oh yeah, the lameo student. Basically, nineteen is not a cool age. You've pretty much finished puberty (unless you are a eunuch, or possibly Daniel Bedingfield); all of the cool allowances have been given to you. SIXTEEN: SEX. SEVENTEEN: CARS. EIGHTEEN: ALCOHOL. NINETEEN... THE ABILITY TO GET MARRIED WITHOUT YOUR PARENT'S CONSENT IN NEBRASKA! FUCK YOU, SYSTEM! I'd say that Ninteen is the first age at which birthdays become less about getting awesomely excited about presents and stuff, and more about being depressed because death is another year closer. This put me in the mood for a bloody good party.
The second reason was that, at the end of the summer, the social group that I have known and loved and grown up with will be officially SHATTERED into a thousand fragments as we all go off to our respective universities to study our various courses, such as English at Oxford, or one of those mickey-mouse courses like Outdoor Adventure and Philosophy at one of those mickey-mouse universities like West Sussex or Durham. The thought that I might never see some of my fondest friends ever again... people like *looks at Facebook* "Jonathan Doyle", "Emily Brighton" or "Elena Lynch"... a mental scan of their names comes up with a blank but apparently they were all at my party so we must be friends... the idea that I will never see some of these people again is enough to PUT ME OVER THE EDGE. So I threw a big party and decided to invite all of my friends. Well, most of them. I also had to invite the people who are only friends due to habit, and then I had to invite the members of the various clique just so that I had collected 'em all, and then I invited this one guy who I actually forgot had existed throughout Summer. All of this was done on Facebook, and being the responsible person I am I said "If anyone wants a plus one, just ask me and it will be OK". Naturally all of the people who I only invited out of a desire to make a set complete wanted plus ones; and at one point a plus one wanted a plus one, at which point my unified view of the universe collapsed around my ears and I burst into bitter, self-pitying tears before cutting myself with a broken bit of glass for three and a half hours. Then I said "NO". Actually I don't even think I said no; I think that the plus one who wanted a plus one broke up with her boyfriend or something so didn't even come to the party at all! So really, the joke is on her. Sucker.

As it was, when I was ambling through the crowd of blood-stained extras about forty minutes into the party, I realised that I only knew about 70% of the people. I was like WHO ARE YOU to one girl, and then she shot back WHO ARE YOU back and I thought to myself 'Hmm'. But then I realised that we were both covered in fake blood and thus we should just get on with everything. Oh yeah, the theme of the party was "Zombies and Cheerleaders". This was because I like zombies and because, in the words of my estimable companion Kit "Girls won't want to come all covered in blood". Naturally, all of the girls came slathered up in blood and gore, and most of the boys showed up wearing girl's clothes. This is the way that the universe works.

I think the last time I wrote a blog about a party, I gave up trying to write a coherent narrative and just started listing stuff that happened in no order. This was because it was easier to list than it was to string together smoothly and professionally. Of course, a year on from that, I have become a more accomplished writer, have gotten into Oxford and am more secure in my literary skills; therefore, I am going to do exactly the same thing, except this time I will use co-ordinating conjunctions (I learnt that term in English Language A Level!) to bridge the gap between the points:

Amy showed up carrying a bloodied baby doll; we then threw it onto the barbeque and its head melted a bit and went conical; then its body split open and beads came out so I drop kicked it across the lawn
and...

Kit showed up dressed in black face paint and an afro. When I first saw him, I said "Who is the black guy?" then I realised it was him and I nearly split open my liver laughing."I thought that dressing up as a zombie was boring so I decided to come as a black guy" he confided in me
and...

I was given a bottle of champagne. I popped it open outside and hit a girl in the back of the head. I then wandered around swigging from the bottle but then I lost it. Then I thought I found it again but it turned out to be white wine
but...

Cassie had a bottle of absinthe. She offered me some and I had a swig. I do not like absinthe, I realised as it trickled down the back of my throat. You know how when you sup a really strong alcohol it makes spit just spontaneously well up from different parts of your mouth? Well, that was still happening to me TEN MINUTES LATER
however...

Tom "LJ" Kempner showed up and gave me a Sean Young hip-flask which was well good. Then he drank a 2L bottle of Diamond White - the 7.5% Tramp Juice second only to Frosty Jacks (I should be an advertising executive) - and fell over. He locked himself in the toilet and fell over again. We phoned his mum and made her take him away, but he had lost his phone. "WHERE IS YOUR PHONE, LJ?" we asked. "In the middle" he said, so I kicked him and ran off.
but...

I had some red paint in my shed which I used for making zombie blood. My good friend Ogg told me to paint something "Really offensive" on his back. I was annoyed with him so I wrote "I LUV STEVE" and then ran off. THE JOKE IS THAT STEVE IS HIS EX-'GIRL'FRIEND AND THEY BOTH PRETEND THEY HATE EACH OTHER TO COVER THE UNDERLYING SEXUAL CHEMISTRY, AND SHE WAS AT THE PARTY TOO! Ah, jokes.
meanwhile...

Apparently there were about three massive arguments, breakups, breakdowns and fights. I didn't notice any of them as I was too busy not caring
however...

My friend Pete, who from this point on I will refer to as 'DJ Pete', said that I could borrow his speakers for the dance room. However when he showed up, drinking Argentinian herbal tea that looked an awful lot like drugs (and I should know, I saw some drugs at the Reading Festival), it turned out that he was a: An actual DJ and b: under the impression that the speakers were to be positioned OUTSIDE. So they were basically bigger than my head and - DJ Pete assured me - would kill small insects that flew in their vicinity. I was like COOL so we set them up. Nobody went in the dance room.
Unimpressive Photographic Summing-Up of the Soirée:

Hey, I'm blogging again

2007-08-17T21:01:00.002+01:00

This is a surprise. As it is, it seems that I took a slightly unanticipated sabbatical from blogging to sort out certain personal issues in my life. I really feel that I've used this time for a combination of meditation and personal reflection in order to solve some of the deeper and more cutting issues of my life - who am I? what do I want to achieve out of my existence? what is my purpose on this revolving sphere we call the planet earth? WHY? And I dunno, I think that maybe I came to some interesting conclusions when asking myself these questions. Conclusions that may shock and amaze you. They did me.

ONLY KIDDING I pretty much spent two weeks spinning around in my revolving chair, holding XXXX-treme drinks parties and basically having one hell of a good time... meh. Like the other day, I had a free house, so I said to myself "I'll invite some friends round, have a few civilised drinks, kick back, enjoy ourselves... it'll be lovely". About eight hours later, I was sat around a table, playing a drinking game that apparently seemed to be called "Clap lots, then if you clap wrong, have a shot". We didn't have enough shotglasses so I found some egg-cups. The shots themselves were made by all the other players of the game, out of the contents of the table, which at that point in the evening was a veritable cornucopia of bottles, cartons, and glasswork. One member of the circle proudly boasted "I haven't lost a single round yet, I'm much less drunk than all of you!" We wiped the smile off of his face by banding together and cheating at the game in order to make him take a shot that was 60% sambuca, 20% bacardi rum, 5% vodka, 5% mango and passionfruit smoothie, 10% milk, with a bit of cereal thrown in at the top to finish the effect. Yeah, we wiped the smile off of his face good.

About eight hours after that, I woke up. The thing about waking up at a house party you've hosted is that you examine the damage and it's like various jigsaw pieces of some enormous puzzle or - to put it more accurately - reading a pulp crime novel. You get the feeling that all of these seemingly random and unconnected events will somehow add together to form some bigger picture; that it would all make sense if only you didn't have such a fucken hangover. Then there's the added confusion of - do I really remember all of this properly? If I had a video recording, would I in fact find out a: The reason for this damage, or b: how the damage came about or c: I'm actually the one who caused the damage in the first place?

It was all very confusing and slightly ominous, and as I progressed further into the labyrinth, my heart sunk. Someone had thrown up red stuff into the toilet. And also on the bottom of the toilet. How do you vomit UP? There were a load of crushed berries inside one of the sinks. Down in the kitchen, all of the chairs were piled up against the front door. There was a hat pinned to the ceiling. Someone had gotten out a breadboard and had covered it in large blobs of Marmite. About a quarter of the kitchen table had gone blue (seriously). There was broken glass all over the floor. There was a crumpled up bit of paper in the middle of it. Gingerly picking it up and unfolding it, I saw that it was a picture of the actress Michelle Monaghan wearing a Santa Claus outfit (if you've seen Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, you'll know what I'm talking about HIGH FIVE); someone had outlined her, drawn a smiley face over her belly and written ANDY ROBERTS in a heart next to her face. I think that ANDY ROBERTS relates to a rowing coach at our school; either that or it was relevant to a former West Indian cricketer, and the evening was a hell of a lot weirder than I gave it credit for. But that wasn't all. Going outside, I found that my little sister's wendyhouse was filled with grafitti. Notable was a picture of a jewish star with the words 'Jewz 4 Life' (nobody at the party was jewish). I stared blankly at it, then accidentally sat on a jar of olives that had been left on the beanbag. How confusing.

Also, somebody poured italian seasoning in my car. Yes. I looked at the car, looked at the tin of italian seasoning, then looked at the guy who was busily trying to erase 'Stocker is gay' from the roof of the wendyhouse (there was nobody at the party called 'Stocker'). "Did you pour italian seasoning in my car?" I asked. He looked sheepish. "Yeah, I thought it'd be funny. And all those berries in the sink were because I picked up some berries and was showing off my flexing abilities by crushing loads of them". He had a point.

After about a month of scrubbing, the house was clean, and I learnt a valuable lesson: You can pretty much do whatever you want when you have a free house, as there will always be enough chemicals under the kitchen sink to hide the evidence from your mother when she comes home. And you shouldn't write a blog explaining the damage that you did to her house. Whatever, I got into Oxford yesterday and got all As in my exams, I'm untouchable. For the moment.

Oh yeah, I got into Oxford, and this - in a roundabout way - explains why I'm blogging right now. Not to show off or boast about the fact that I'm pretty much going to the best uni in all of the Empire (would I do a thing like that?). Mostly because I am going to Oxford THIS OCTOBER. YES THIS OCTOBER. Argh. Thing is, I'd previously been given a gap year. Which I didn't want. So basically I kept pestering Oxford to let me go this year and then FINALLY yesterday I was like "OMG LET ME IN UR COLLEGE I HAS THREE A'Z" and they were like "STFU UR ALREADY ON THE LIST INNIT" and I was like "Wait a second, you say I'm already on the list for 2007 entrants? Yet you've been perservering all this time that I'm going in 2008, a viewpoint that has cost me my girlfriend, my happiness and my sanity?" and they were like "WTF MY BAD". So that was annoying. But the upshot is that I'm going in October. The up-upshot of that is that I have to read the entire reading list in about a month.

The reading list is long. It is hard. It is filled with Victorian authors and girls books (Bronte... boringgggg they should've filled the list with pirate books and, like, porno comics, that'd rule). Added to this is the issue of my reading style. My reading style is that I read two pages, and I fall asleep. I wake up, struggle through another paragraph, then I fall asleep. This has happened with every book I've tried to read since getting into Oxford, and frankly it's beginning to become a teeny bit of a worry for me. This is especially an issue if the book in question begins with the sentence:

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?

This book, by the way, is "Middlemarch", by "George Eliot". Unfortunately, the "George" is actually a woman pretending to be a man, or a 'trannie' as they are known in the business. Although, actually, looking at a picture of her, I get the idea that her pretending to be a man wasn't as much as a stretch as you'd originally think...

She is actually a woman pretending to be a man to gain credibility, though. Not the other way round. That's a bit annoying, actually. Like, you look at the list and think "Heyyy, lots of male writers there, this is gonna RULE, lots of testosterone and gunfights and stuff! YEAH!... but then you read it and it turns out its just loads of women in drag who are all like "Oooh, Jamie Statton wants to marry Dot, but she likes Eddy, and then maybe Jamie will like her little sister" AND ITS LIKE FUCKING EASTENDERS. Boo.

Therefore, in order to put off starting to read the reading list, I have been doing many exciting things. Such as:

Starting a logic puzzle

Watching "Only in America"

Getting stuck on the logic puzzle

Watching "Newsround"

Getting briefly unstuck on the logic puzzle, then getting stuck again

Watching "Neighbours"

Filling in one more square on a logic puzzle, realising that it's wrong, and scribbling it out

Watching "The Simpsons"

Drawing out the logic puzzle again on a piece of A3 paper, in a sliiiightly different format, realising that it does nothing to help the situation

Watching "Hollyoaks"

Finishing the logic puzzle; writing YEAH I FUCKING WIN on the page in big letters, then tracing around a metal bottle opener and colouring it in, just to prove my mastery of the logic puzzle.

Going on Facebook and joining the Oxford Facebook Group, writing a resumé of myself, cataloguing and replying to every single one of my facebook messages, drawing grafitti messages on people's walls

Getting a glass of coke

Reading the first sentence of the book out to my little brother in a high pitched voice

Drawing this cartoon:

Working out my mathematical percentages of all of my exam results

Performing a marriage between my Shaun of the Dead and Catwoman action figures so that they are no longer living in sin.

Walking around in circles saying "OK, I have to start reading now, lets go, lets jump into it, lets go"

Sitting down on the sofa, leaping up, chasing my dog around the room until she got dizzy and ran into the wall.

Writing the beginning of this post, up to this point BUT NOW I'M ACTUALLY GOING TO GO READ

Eventually I managed to force down a few chapters. Oh my God. "Force down a few chapters".

DO YOU PEOPLE REALISE THAT I'M MEANT TO BE READING FOR PLEASURE HERE. I'M GOING TO DO THIS FOR THE NEXT THREE SOLID YEARS. I SHOULD NOT BE STUDYING ENGLISH AT OXFORD. I SEEM TO LACK THE FIERY PASSION THAT IS INHERENT IN AN OXFORD ENGLISHER.

Oh well.