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

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.

Holy shit guys guess who I bumped into at The Bridge the other night (semi-ironic depression itp)

2009-01-23T23:42:00.014Z

(I’ve re-read this post and have realised that it’s fairly easy to pinpoint the exact time when I lost interest in writing it and instead began to stare listlessly into space and contemplating my own bitter loneliness, I have marked it with an asterix, also I apologise for it in advance)

The other night I grew weary of sitting by myself in the darkness of my bedroom, listening to ‘Against All Odds’ on loop, softly weeping for hours on end and carving <3 <3 ROSIE <3 <3 on the inside of my thighs with the blade of a pencil sharpener, so I decided that the time was right to Go Out and Get Hammered at The Bridge (the twat’s nightclub of choice); the aim being to quench the agonising eternal pain of the flaming ginger train wreck that is my life with a long cooling stream of gin and tonics, tequila shots, Jaegerbombs and cheap cheap nightclub wine.

To be honest, when I put on my purple shirt and my Trendy Trousers From Topman, I thought it would be Just Another Night Out. I thought I’d just get a bit drunk, loudly out myself as a racist/homophobe/human in front of my fellow students, dance ironically a bit, pull a girl (pulling technique: stare unrelentingly into the face of the target in a neurotic attempt to achieve eye-contact for twenty five minutes, ‘accidentally’ brush up against her on the dancefloor, follow her about her like an indie Barry George), buy a kebab I didn’t want, eat half of it, throw up on myself, reconsider my circumstances, decide that my life really is an unending black pit of despair and loneliness, start listening to Linkin Park on my new iPod, and possibly conclude the night by bursting into tears and toppling over into a gutter like an ancient mossy crumbling statue of Troilus, screaming incoherent bellows of rage and loss into the chasmic depths of cruel and remorseless night sky against which my pain and heartbreak is little more than an ephemeral mote of dust.

To be honest my best-case scenario was to stand in the corner and glare at kissing couples for an hour and a half and then walk dejectedly home and lie to my diary.

But what I didn’t realise was that the night had bigger plans – and bigger surprises – in store for me! Because guess who was at the nightclub… none other than Ali Bartlam!

!!

!!!!!!

[Hmm. I guess that my problem here is that a lot of my new fans (if you define ‘fan’ as ‘any random weirdo who has come up to me out of the blue and started talking to me about my online diary’ then I have Six) don’t really know the general history of my life or the literary heritage of this blog; they won’t get my many examples of reference, allusion and implicature. It’ll be like writing a 2,500 word long essay on Milton and not having ever read the Bible (imagine that); all of my comic references to spadeface, Gnat Bell, clamclamclam, Tiffin, Hampton, SWPS, Kings, Lois the batfaced Newtgirl, The Adventures of Emoboy, MYSADDO, Steve’s all-encompassingly cavernous needle-filled vagina, rooooose, Greg I want to be bad Stoddddddart, Marios, the Oli Gill Rape Technique, The Flask, The Fleece, The Hiking Boots, KrisMas, Cassie my favourite whale Bowman, Alex nice but dim Patrick, etc, etc, will just fly over your heads. You will be sitting there and wondering what I’m talking about, who these people are, and why bumping into my exexex-girlfriend’s little sister at a shite Oxford nightclub was so significant. I mean it wasn’t really THAT significant in the general scheme of things, it’s nothing compared to the bombing of Gaza or orphans with AIDS or being powerless to stop your combined romantic hopes and dreams for the future being throttled into unconsciousness and then dashed into bloody scraps on the unyielding concrete floor of apathy and resentment, but for the purposes of this blog, and to my drunk drunk mind, meeting Ali was the most significant thing that had ever happened in to anybody ever up to this point.]

Perhaps I’d better explain.

Basically Alz and I share something of a chequered history; a united enmity that I guess could possibly be a cover for some simmering inter-sororal sexual desire but is probably more accurately described as ‘mutual unrelenting loathing’. To be honest, it’s one of those weird historical oddities like the Sharks/Jets feud; the Ali/Tom Friction been going on so long now that I don’t think anybody even remembers how it even started in the first place! If I really stretch my mind back into the cavernous darkness of history, I recall that there was some sort of disagreement at somebody’s birthday party; certain people may have inadvertently referred to certain other people as ‘the fat sister’ at a in a fit of drunken insanity madness, and then certain other people found out and screamed me out of the house party, and then the next year and a half was filled with certain people shooting certain other people murderous glances unsuccesfully hidden behind gritted smiles every time Lucia was out of the room, but really I can’t quite remember what happened. Suffice to say, Ali was one of those people who I’d really have liked to get to know better, but the fact that we both despised each other with all the heat of the sun made it difficult for us to remain in the same room for longer than ten minutes without laudanum. Like, I was trying to decide who I’d least like to be trapped in a telephone box with for a year, and decided that it’d be a tossup between Paul Flemming, Hitler, our primary school music teacher who dragged me into a bush and molested me to the rhythm of Three Blind Mice, and A-B :)

To be honest by the time we arrived at the club, my attempts to drink myself into a blissful state of comfortable numbness were going fairly well; I couldn’t really feel much of my face and the dried blood oozing from my ear canal had more or less stopped, and I was halfway through listening to Pictures of You, and at the back of my mind I was fairly sure that I still wanted to lock myself in a cupboard and never come out until the world made sense again and so I was unable to muster up any emotional reaction to seeing that the club was filled with my ex-ex-ex's friends from back in the day and was quite an anti-tom place to be, all told, and frankly by the time I actually came into contact Ali I was so elephant’s trunk that I just have this image of her in my mind as some huge totemic vision of sunglasses and glaring, looming above my puny form like something out of Lovecraft. Cthulu Bartlam perhaps

It was weird. I wasn't even sure if we were supposed to loathe each other any more. It felt like we'd both teleported in from different yet subtly connected dimensions of existance that were intrinsically opposed to each other. When we clapped eyes on each other, it was a bit like a scene in a time-travel film when the dude goes back to the eighties and meets himself as a child on a space-hopper or whatever and they look at each other and, and like suddenly the universe and the entire consciousness of chronological space-time suddenly snaps out of it and realises that this is physically impossible, it can’t happen and there’s a brief flash of light and a tiny inter-dimensional wormhole opens up inside the brains of these characters and their perception is raised to like some eighth level of Karmic Nirvana just so they can envision the myriad spectrum of quantum infinity that their co-existence has breached and suddenly all of the knowledge of matter and everything is laid bare in an endless parade of subatomic magic. It was a bit like that except instead of understanding the intricate clockwork mechanisms inside every atom I started choking on a bit of lime and some of my drink went up my nose.

*

We tried to blank each other, there was absolutely no way that was happening, then there ws a fairly awkward conversation I think and the rest of the night passed in an alcoholic blur of Jaegermeister, wine, taxis and a dark instrospective sense of unstoppable onrushing hell comparable to the dizzying sense of dread felt by the soldiers in the D-Day landing boats mere seconds before hitting the beaches, but I’m reliably informed that after having some more drinks I re-approached Ali and attempted to have a chat which I guess went well because my spine is still attached

and

yeah

alex pearce was there too, for those who don’t remember her, she made me cake once, I vaguely remember me being impressed at meeting her and her scoffing ‘why don’t you go write a blog about it’ in an ironic way and then I said ‘actually I probably will’, thinking on my feet and then she said IF YOU DO I’M GOING TO SHIT

so

err

THE END

i wonder if its possible to salvage this post by adding 'lol' at the end as some kind of semi-ironic comment on something, i was joking about the pencil-sharpener bit

* * *
~*~*~*~in other news~*~*~*~

TOM’S GIRLFRIEND UPDATE
well,

Fat people are annoying

2005-04-14T22:13:00.000+01:00

They just annoy me. Bloody fatsos.
Firstly, they take up valuable space, which could be better filled with statues to me.
Secondly, they eat all our food and sit on all our pets/children.
Thirdly, they act like it's 'ok' to be fat. IT ISN'T OK TO BE FAT. YOU ARE NOT CURVACIOUS AND SEXY AND APPEALIING. YOU ARE FAT AND UGLY AND ARE FORCING ME TO TYPE IN CAPITALS. And stop saying that you are 'real women'. So what are thin people... fake? Are we made of carboard? Pwaharh.
Also, all the time they don't spend going on about how happy they are that they're fat, they whinge about how all the thin people are anorexic nazi fasion obessed bigots. Yeah, well I'm sure that thin people look anorexic compared to you, lardo. It's just the laws of comparison. Hell, green probably looks red when compared to BLACK.

Being the mean bastard I am, I immediately decided to check out the Weightwatchers Website, with the sole intention of making fun of the lardos who post there. Hey, that makes me think. How did they manage to type proper words without sounding like me typing with my fist? Perhaps they use special dialing wands (a la The Simpsons). OR PERHAPS FAT PEOPLE HAVE LARDO SIZED KEYBOARDS. The buttons are the size of bricks. Hmm. But anyway, on with the insulting of the fat.

Yopamhere says: Does anyone know if nutritional yeast is allowed on the Core program? I put it on popcorn instead of butter but now I'm wondering if there could be a problem with my method.

Well FORGIVE ME IF I'M WRONG, but if you're trying to lose weight wouldn't it be a GREAT idea if you CUT OUT the buttered popcorn and snacks of the sort, PAM? And what sort of retarded posting name is 'yo, Pam here'. You are not a DJ. Well, you might be. I doubt it though.

Amy says: I don't know why I did it again.. this morning I started the day off good.. with soy milk and cereal.. tuna fish and an apple for lunch.. and then I went insane and binge ate the rest of the day.. What is wrong with me.. all I can do it set myself up to do better tomarrow

Shut up Amy, I don't care.

tfalkner says: I had a small list of goals for myself when I started.

1. Ride a roller coaster with my son
2. Draw my knees up to my chest
3. Have my thighs rub together

I know that # 3 sounds strange because this is what most people DON'T like. But for me, my thighs were so big that they didn't rub, they stuck!
Today, I went to walk up the stairs and my thighs rubbed together. I was so proud but didn't have anyone that I could tell!

Hahahhahahhahahha. Hahahhahahhahahaa. Hahahhahahhahaahaa. Wait, why is she having a problem with riding the roller coaster? I don't get it... if she falls out she's going to bounce, anyway. Or spat. Ooh, that could be nasty. Well, I guess they could harpoon her into the seat. Or something. I don't know, watch Moby Dick.
And I haven't even mentioned the thighs thing. But really, it's too easy. Just insert the insulting comments yourself.

At this point, I lose interest. Ah, well, here's the obligitary bit of Photoshop goodness. It's my idea for a weight-loss system that will DEFINITELY work in the long run.

Silly exercises? No.
Complicated diets? No.
Points counting? No.
Lots of congratulatory back-slapping and blow-job giving for dropping half a pound? Hell no.

My system has none of that bullshit. The Chainsaw Zombie Weight-Loss system relies on a 'carrot and stick' style method. In fact, it's even simpler than that. Two words: Run, fatty.

Now, I know what you're thinking. That guy doesn't really look that fat. Well, I guess I could have photoshopped him to make him look a bit fatter. But have a look at THIS:

That's what he looks like under that rather natty red jacket. The reason that the image is so small is that any bigger would corrupt my blog from a brilliant piece of literature into a slutty whore of internet pornography. Also, it would have corrupted/destroyed the ENTIRE INTERNET. And we wouldn't want that, would we.
In conclusion: 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. Either way, the weight gets dropped eventually. Either dropped metaphorically. Or literally. Into a hole.
Wicked. Oh crap, I just realised. This is an internet blog. Who is going to be reading this? Fat people. I just insulted my entire audience. Whoops. Sorry, fatsos. Keep buying the Chainsaw Zombie tshirts! Size XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXL is selling well.

An Islamic cow? Moohammed.

One more thing... am I the only one who finds the esure insurance adverts HILARIOUS? The idea of Micheal Winner in a dress is funny. Ah, dear, I'm easily pleased.

A Google Image Search Story

2007-02-06T19:00:00.000Z

Once upon a time, there lived a "brave young warrior"...

He lived far off in the mythic land of "Middle Earth"...

... in a small but prosperous "farming town"...

... spending his days practising his swordsmanship, fencing, and archery in a small hut in the middle of the forest, at the tutlelage of his "wise mentor".

After many years, the wise mentor said to the young warrior "Young Warrior, you have indeed worked long and hard, and I feel that it is time for you to head off into the big wide world to seek fame and fortune. I have packed you a lunchsack with provisions and will give you this trusty pony so that the long roads and harsh terrain will not "hurt your feet".

The warrior thanked his wise mentor, and climbed on the pony and set off to lands far away. On the way, he had many "exciting and dangerous adventures":

However, after many months of travelling and killing beasts like some retarded World of Warcraft geek, he thought to himself "Perhaps I will stop in a town and find myself a girlfriend". So that is what he did - he shouted "HUP" to Clancy (his pony), and rode full speed to the nearest town, which was called "Safetyville".

Safetyville was known far and wide as being the safest place about - the perfect place for any warrior to rest and recuperate from a long hard day's fighting of identikit demons. After saddling Clancy up at the local stables, he headed straight for the tavern to find a suitable lady. And lo and behold, what did he spy working behind the bar? Why, a truly lovely barmaid! Her name was Eric, and she was truly a "busty wench"!

He fell immediately in love, and danced up to the bar to order a pint of Carling Edge (with extra citrus). She was so immediately enthralled at his "handsome face"...

... that she too fell deep in love. After a night of whispering sweet nothings to each other, they vowed to get married. However, her father - the barkeeper - was a very overprotective man who "disapproved".

On the other hand, he realised that the young warrior could be a decent potential mate, so he thought up a cunning plan to test his mettle. "Young lad!" he cried. "In the woods near here lives a mighty dragon. If you slay the dragon, I shall let you marry my daughter!" The warrior thought about it for a bit. It seemed quite a lot of effort just to get his leg over. However, the rest of the girls in the pub were "damn ugly"...

... so he thought "What the hell I'll do it". After another few pints of dutch courage, he uncertainly climbed back onto Clarence and rode in the deep dark woods. On his journey towards the dragon's lair, he saw many a "scary sight"...

Finally he reached the dragons lair, which was, like, an old mine shaft all covered in goo and stuff. It was really horrible and to be honest the brave warrior considered packing it all in. However, he thought for a bit, built up his courage, did a few vodka jelly shots and went into the dark abyss. Inside, he came upon a huge cave. Inside the cave was a pile of treasure. And curled up on top of the pile of treasure, sound asleep, was the "evil dragon"!

The warrior was so scared he nearly peed himself. However, he bravely overcame his fears, wrapped his thick fleece pullover around him, crept up the pile of treasure without waking the sleeper, and, before the dragon could react, kicked its head in with his thick manly "hiking boots".

When the dragon was dead, the warrior took some photos and, in the interests of ending this story quickly, teleported back to the pub. Hearing that the dragon was dead, the old man was "very happy"...

... and blessed the marriage. Then the warrior and Eric got married and had lots of "beautiful children".

Unfortunately the warrior got bored after a few years, and there was a very 'bitter divorce'.

THE END

Hahahahhahahaha... I have far too much time on my hands. This isn't even the limits of my creativity today. I spent half an hour drawing pictures of what my girlfriend would look like if she had blonde hair. I can tell you, the results were H O T. She looked like she had a cheese omlette on her head. Hahaha. Is it obvious that I am off school sick and buzzed on Lemsip and Under-3s Calpol? I am. Hahahaha well making that made me laugh, even if nobody comments on it. I love the internet.
And I didn't even get to use the best picture of all, which I came across during the making of this piece. I could think of no convenient place to slot it into the main narrative, so instead I will insert it here as a convenient coda - the equivalent of the "Extra Scene" at the end of the credits of such films as Pirates of the Carribean or Bug's Life. It makes me laugh.

Enjoy:

Today's Crapic Crossword Clue:
Waggle a weapon, writer! (11)

Google Image Search Rap

2007-02-16T10:23:00.000Z

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN... FROM MEMORY... THE FRESH PRINCE OF BEL-AIR THEME TUNE... GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCHIFIED!!!

Now, this is a story all about how
My life got "flipped-turned upside down"

And I'd like to take a minute
Just sit right there
I'll tell you how I "became the Prince" of a town called Bel-Air:

In West Philadelphia born and raised
On the playground was where I spent most of my days
"Chillin' out maxin' relaxin' all cool"

And all shootin' some b-ball outside of the school
When a couple of guys
Who were up to no good
Startin makin' trouble in my neighborhood
I got in "one lil" fight and my mom got scared

She said 'You're movin' with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air'

I begged and pleaded with her day after day
But she packed my suitcase and send me on my way
She gave me a kiss and then she gave me my ticket.
I put my walkman on and said, 'I might as well "kick it"'.

I whistled for a cab and when it came near
The license plate said fresh and it had dice in the mirror
If anything I can say this "cab is rare"
But I thought

Seriously, what the hell am I doing? I just double-checked myself and I did not like what I was seeing. Kind of when the alcoholic realises that he is licking spilled turpentine off the floor of a pub, I just realised that I am typing out the full lyrics to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme tune, copying random phrases from it, then google-searching those phrases to hopefully find amusing photos, and then linking those onto my blog. On a Friday evening at seven o' clock. Seriously, dude, WTF.
There must be something more productive I could be doing. I mean, I spend my days at school patrolling the corridors like Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, glaring at all the morons that make up the lower classes of my schools. I look balefully at them with their fashionably long hair and their unique ways of tucking their ties into their shirts and their non-standard shoes and I think to myself 'Oh, if only I had a high-powered hunting rifle. Or sufficient testosterone or wit to be sure of defeating all-comers with either blistering comebacks or the blistering powers of my fists'. Then I think about how much I hate 99% of my school, on the principle that they are probably younger and happier than me, by which point the original culprit (who to be honest had only performed the crime of walking past me looking happy and/or young) has already escaped my riteous conquering fury.
The only thing that stops me from jumping off the top of the school onto my head, and thus killing myself, is the thought that somehow I am filled with bare skillz that I will somehow explode onto the world, when only I have a chance. I'm not sure what these skillz are, but in past weeks I have been thinking 'Writer', so I have been planning the day when I will be The Best Writer In The World and I will get bare respect and do bare magazine interviews and have bare groupies. No shit - I am seriously picturing myself as like "The Rock-Star Short Story Writer - Women want him, men want to BE him, he walks about looking really cool in a long leather jacket and with a minimum amount of stubble". Yeah, that would rule. And what am I doing now to further my writing career and become king of the scriveners? Why, I am writing down the theme tune to a fair-to-good 90's sitcom starring black people in order to pick out certain words and phrases which an anonymous internet searching program will associate with pictures which I find amusing.

This is actually quite worrying; I now think that I do not have the correct artistic temperament to write the next great novel. I fear that Oxford Interviews in fifty years will not concern the above blog post ("So, Miss Small-Clever-Indian-Child, what do you think about the semantic usage of the word "chillin" in this context?" "Why, I think that it raises some important issues about the position of women in modern day America, especially when one considers Tannen's opinions on the Dominance vs Difference Gender asymmetry inherent in contemporary phallocentric society" "Facinating. Is it true that 'phallocentric' is to do with penises?" "Yes" "Hee Hee you said willies.")

The above parentheses and the entire post that it followed are, I feel, not the sort of thing that TS Eliot would have spent his days creating. Or Danté. I was bored with feeling like a complete intellectual pear so I went to the library today and got out The Divine Comedy, Danté's bare long poem. Its pretty good so far. Basically, this guy is wandering through this forest trying to climb up a mountain, when he gets attacked by wild animals. He runs away, and then meets a Long Dead Poet called Virgil (when I say 'long dead poet', I mean a poet who has been dead a long time. Not a dead poet who happens to be very long, although who knows?) who is from Hell.
Virgil is like "Yo Danté, you can't get past the wild animals because they represent your sins and this is a very allegorical poem, you get me?" and then Danté is like "Yeah fo-sho bruv you my wizzly but I wanna be climbing this bare big hill, can you send me some aid, yo?" and then Virgil is like "Well check it my homes I can take you on a drive-by of Hell and then you'll be able to go up the hill for some reason," and then Danté is like "Nah blud Hell aint my deal, you wizzle?" then Virgil is like "Check it there's this chick in Heaven who wants you to go, she be called Beatrice" and then Danté is like "Woah fo shizzle, B-eatricizzle? Take me away, pimp daddy," so then Virgy and Dants walk to a river where some old guy on a boat yells at them then takes them across, but for some reason Danté falls asleep (which leads to my theory that the last line of the poem will be "He woke up and it was all a dream", although that was my expected ending for Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series, and anything that Haruki Murakami has ever written). Danté wakes up and they go through Limbo, where everyone is really fed up and naked and being stung by bees, then after that they hit the 1st Circle of Hell, which is full of naked people being blown about by some cold wind and that is as far as I have read to.

It is a truly gripping read and I encourage anybody with a hankering for some Italian Allegorical Punishment Poetry (IAPP) to give it a go. I also discovered that the sign "Abandon hope all ye who enter here" which is mounted on the door of my room, is actually a little motto written above the door to Hell. You learn something new every day.

See, this post has been both entertaining and educational. And I didn't even have to look anything else up on Google Images to get a cheap "laugh".

GOD DAMNIT THAT DOESN'T EVEN HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH LAUGHTER

Today's Shockingly Craptic Crossword Clue:
Shoes blocking pipes (5)

A turning point

2007-03-29T13:03:00.000+01:00

I think that I am a more mature person now. In times gone by, following a break-up with certain members of society, I would be inclined to write long angry blog posts calling such members names and making nasty, demeaning comments about their morals, intelligence, appearance and general bodily odour. And while I could probably quite easily do one of those about Lucia (seriously, she smells of rotten hammers and I think she probably molests children in her spare time), I have decided to turn over a new leaf, forget the problems that we have and talk about a subject that is totally not-related to the Tomcia Break. I want to forget all the tears, the infidelities, the throwing of cutlery, the squabbling over who gets the toaster and who gets custody of our friends (I totally want Alex for her cake-making skills… Lucia can pretty much keep Sarah and Ali) and move onto an topic which we can all agree on. That area, of course, is how WRONG Lucia is in her choice of preferred bands and (almost by definition) how RIGHT I am. Man Lucia is so dumb. I’m totally going to set fire to her dog.

(NB: Kidding! I love Lucia really and there is no beef between us whatsoever. Not even a small cow, and all insults towards her are intended as affectionate teases. She is aware of this. Fucking bitch.)

But let’s have some background information. Both me and the woman have purchased ticket to an event that is known as the ‘Reading Festival’. Now, before you leap to assumptions, this is NOT – as the name would indicate – a chance to sleep in tents and catch up on our reading, maybe with complimentary pipes, glasses, Ovaltine and Chocolate Bovril, but – in fact – what is known as a ‘Rock Festival’. I have read in the periodicals that in such ‘Festivals’, young people stay up very late, then sleep in muddy tents before partaking of – often illegal – narcotics and then listening to ‘modern music’ while ‘dancing’ with each other – often using very inappropriate and sexually suggestive dance moves. To be honest, it sounds like quite a headache to me. Things have certainly changed since the Music Festivals of my day:

However, I have decided to give the entire thing a try as a kind of anthropological experiment – like watching monkeys cavorting in their native environment. Therefore, I will play along, but plan to bring a clipboard with me and make notes on the revellers as the debauchery continues. I was quite excited when the line up for this festival came up on the internet (Could I, in fact, refer to it as a ‘Reading List’? AHHAHA), because I was kind of hoping that The Pixies would be playing. It wasn’t really a hope tbh, but like, a far off dream of paradise. I mean, if they had been playing, I would probably have eaten my hat, then plasm’d myself. (I have no idea what plasm’d means, but I assume it’s probably quite messy and/or painful). Well, I would have been pretty excited, anyway. However, when I DID look at the list, I was somewhat consternated to find out that not only was there no Pixies, there appeared to be a whole load of bands that I hadn’t even heard of. :o! Equally, they all had stupid-ass names. Like, who or what the hell is a ‘Biffy Clyro’? Sounds like slang for a really excellent tampon - "Man, this Clyro is so BIFFY, it really sucks up all of the leakage!" That is what a girl would say. There was another band called ‘Enter Shiitake’ which I think sounds like a bad idea. Why can’t they have sensible names like in the good old days, such as “Alvin and the Chipmunks”? You know where you are with “Alvin and the Chipmunks”. There’ll be some dude named Alvin, and then some chipmunks. If that band was named “The Twang” then you’d have no idea what to expect and if you were wearing some pants made out of chipmunk food then you might be in for all sorts of pain.

[At this juncture, I have to point out that a typo of ‘chipmunks’ is ‘chimpunks’, which is basically only a small step away from ‘Chimp-punks’, and if that doesn’t pave the way for an awesome new genre of music I don’t know what will]

However, I suppose that I’m not completely clueless, as there were SOME bands playing which I’d heard of. For example, the band ‘Razorlight’, purveyors of top-quality boring music since 2004, or whenever they were formed. Equally, the band ‘The Klaxons’ were playing a ‘set’. ‘The Klaxons’, yeah, I’ve downloaded about ten or so of their tunes, so I'm well aware of their awesome musical range. Ummm… well, at least they they did ‘Golden Scans’, so I guess if they play that four or five times in a row, each time singing the chorus a bit louder, that ought to fill their slot with room to spare.

However, the band that has caused all this beef – and is the reason for the writing of this post – is ‘The Red Hot Chili Peppers’, which from this point onwards will be affectionately referred to in this post as “RHCP”, “Chilis”, “Reddies”, “Peps”, or “Chilipeps”. Haha Chilipep is a great name for a band. I can just imagine Chilipep playing a set right after The Chimp-Punks. That’d rule. I’d pay good money for that. But to get back to the beaten track, basically Lucia was, like, melting with excitement at the point of seeing the Peps, and I was just, like ‘Meh’. This has caused some beef. She thinks that I don't understand music, and I think that she is a knob.

The fact is, I think that RHCP is just a really boring band. Now I reckon that this might be quite a controversial viewpoint as apparently the Chilis are like the band that defined my generation – and yes, I can’t remember the last party I’ve been to that hasn’t featured some of their patented blend of Non-Offensive Plastic Rock blasting out of the stereo. And to be honest, I don’t mind their music much. There is nothing particularly offensive about any of it. I quite like a lot of their songs individually. Under the Bridge, Saviour, Dosed, Venice Queen, Don’t Stop, Fortune Faded… these are all good songs that I can quite happily sing along to. But the fact remains that I could quite happily never listen to any of those songs every again for the rest of my life, and not only would I not be that bothered, I’m doubtful if I’d even particularly notice or care.

To the modern teenager (of which I am one), RHCP have become almost embarrassingly ubiquitious, to the point that everyone knows every drum-beat, every word, every bass introduction, every annoying whiny note of the singer’s voice. It’s got to the level at which they all blur into one samey mush of alrightness. The reason that people like any specific song is because they can associate it with a particular event or emotion in their lives. Like, I associate the song "Where is my Mind??" with cycling down Weybridge high street, or the Theme to "The Flumps" with that time we formed that vigilante gang and beat that hobo to death with pool cues. I can’t do that with the RHCP because THEY HAVE BEEN CONSTANTLY BEEN PLAYING THROUGHOUT EVERYTHING. They are the elevator music of my generation and thus I don't associate any of their with anything. It’s like associating your first love with ‘carpet’ because you happened to be standing on a carpet when you first saw her. They are too overplayed. They have lost all significance. I mean, can anyone - from memory - remember the difference between “Throw Away Your Television” and “On Mercury”? Can anyone even REMEMBER those songs off-hand? It doesn’t count if someone plays them to you and then you go ‘Oh yeah’ and sing along to every note. Anybody born after 1987 can do that. Not a talent. Even their new stuff has the same problem – we all know the Peps so well, we all know the singer’s voice so perfectly, we all recognise the way the band sounds, we all can figure out what’s going on in like the first two lines. So while I might quite like ‘Tell Me Baby’ as a tune, I’m not going to care about as much, as, say, Debaser, which actually IS the song of my teenage years. I listen to the Pixies, and I’m still caught out sometimes, and I’m still picking up new things about the lyrics and the way the songs are played. Not an issue with the Peps. They can’t surprise me. Screw them.

To be brutal, the Chilis aren’t cool any more. They aren’t rebellious or ‘out there’ or represent a way to release emotions. Maybe they did once, but not now. Mums listen to them. Dads sing along in the car. They are used as the ‘cool music’ that the rebellious teenage brother listens to on CBBC Children’s shows. I bet Summer from Neighbours listens to the Chilis and thinks they are really cool. Twat. They have now reached the cultural level of cream. Everybody knows what cream is. Everybody thinks it’s kind of ok, I guess. Nothing offensive. Wouldn’t be particularly upset if our bedroom walls were painted it. But nobody could distinguish two shades of cream apart. And nobody goes and looks at a cream wall when they want catharsis. And to be honest, I wouldn’t be that impressed if I went to a gallery, and everybody was really excited about going to look at some pictures of cream because ‘There are so many different shades of cream, and, like, they are all so well painted!” Screw cream, I want to listen to some red. Or even maroon. Turquoise would be pretty ass-kicking.

And THAT is why I’m not jazzed about seeing the Chilipeps at Reading.

AND WHILE I’M AT IT, STOP WRITING SONGS ABOUT CALIFORNIA. We get it, you’re from the West Coast, it’s a really crazy fun place, shut up. The same goes for drugs and sex. Write a song about something crazy, like a badass mofo of a turtle (it could be called Yertle!) or cake or something. Or cover a Pixies song.

Rub-a-dub-dub

2007-04-16T18:21:00.000+01:00

"So," I said, forcing joviality into my voice, "I bet when you first met me you didn't think we'd end up like this."
There was a swish of bathwater as Curry turned and looked at me quizzically. He fingered his lycra.
"That is true."
There was silence, punctuated only by the nervous dripping of the faucet. I tried to think of something to say.
"So," I said, slowly brushing some bubbles off my chin. "I bet when you got up in the morning you didn't think that we'd end up at this point."
"Oh no," he said wisely, "At this point in our relationship, nothing comes as a suprise to me."
There was silence again.
This was shattered as Carl and Julian sprinted, cackling, into the bathroom and vaulted bodily into the bathtub. Opaque water sloshed liberally over the side and soaked LJ's shoes. Carl is a lithe norwegian with flaxen hair. He was wearing bright pink Y-Fronts. Unfortunately they were already sodden when he entered the bathroom and had entered a phase of semi-opaqueness. It was like one of those magic pictures; stare too closely and an all-too-familiar shape begins to emerge out of the darkness. Fortunately I was unable to stare too closely, even though my eyes were unavoidable drawn in that direction, for Julian chose to leap into my half of the bathtub and I got a faceful of armpit. Julian is kind of tubby and covered in a fuzz of wavy body hair. He skin is all bumpy and weird. His nipples are misshapen and they look like they could fall off at any point. He was wearing boxer shorts; however he is one of those greasy little people who, when you look at them, you can't help but imagine them masturbating furiously into the early hours of the morning to badly-drawn Pokemon porn (Misty getting buggered by a Squirtle or something), and as his briefs were gaping and soaked through I was getting a far too vivid view of his stubby little choad. Chode? Choade? Who knows.
To make matters worse, Julian was holding a foam dart gun. He shot Paul in the head with it. Oh yes, there was a guy called Paul in the bath too. Paul was eating nuts and he dropped some of them into the water as he attempted to dodge the incoming green bullet. He splashed water at Julian, who naturally leapt sideways. I had just extricated my head from his armpit when suddenly I was bodily impelled downwards by the whiplash effect of Julian's meaty side-flab.

For a brief terrible second my head was plunged below the surface of the water. Underneath... oh God, it was horrible. The water, which was scoldingly hot as we were unable to figure out how to get the tap to emit anything but "Ice" or "Magma", was a murky shade of grey, what with the amount of sweat, blood and suncream that we had on ourselves when we first climbed in. Equally, there hadn't been any bubble bath at the hotel, so we'd improvised by squirting two mini-bottles of shampoo, some shower gel, a bit of sun-cream and a bit of deodorant into the throthing water while running it. This potent concotion had, indeed, been fragrant and had resulted in a not-bad level of bubblage, but I discovered - to my horror - that it also doubled as a horrible eye-acid that melted my retinas and scarred my conjuncivas. Thus, my sight was blurred and I think that I am glad that it was; for there were sights under that water that no man can see and live to tell the tale. There were all sorts of things flapping about under there, hairy legs, floating nuts and weird blobs of stuff that I just hope was suncream. I opened my mouth to scream in horror and the water flowed in. It was not pleasant tasting, I'll tell you THAT for free.

With a cry, I burst back into the relative comfort of the surface. The bathtub was only really designed for one -two at a push- so I was forced to slide out between Julian and Curry's slippery torsoes rather like a cow being regurgitated by an anorexic snake. I tried to rub some of the foul gunk out of my eyes, and no sooner had I opened them, then I was dazzled by the flash of a camera clutched by LJ, who was busily taking photographs of our slippery bodies, probably for blackmail purposes. I wanted to cry "What happens at Rowing Camp stays at Rowing Camp!" but I was choked by Julian, who got me in a half-headlock and raped my forehead with his armpit hair. LJ took another photo.
"You look HOT, Phipps".

[Quick note: LJ was not his actual name. His actual name was Thomas. However, at the beginning of the week, we decided to nickname him 'LJ' as he is a Lying Jew. He is a Jew because we think he kind of has a jewish face, and he loves money. He is a liar because he claims that he is not Jewish. He carries this rediculous fallacy on to extraordinary lengths; he eats pork, chomps bacon, observes no Jewish rituals or holidays, isn't circumsised (we asked his weird-looking but LOVELY girlfriend) and worships the Christian god. Basically, he is pretty unjewish. However, on the other hand, he bought Harvest Moon at the shopping centre and was really good at jacking up the prices. We also asked him whether he was for or against the Holocaust and he said "against". Sounds pretty jewish to me, m'lud. Oh man we were so mean to him. It's because we love him. IT WAS ALL IN A SPIRIT OF FUN. We love you Tom. You are probably the best rower in our boat too. xxx]

I thrashed about in the water a bit like a confused fish and decided to cut my losses and flop out of the bath. However due to the fact that I have literally no hair on my legs whatsoever, I was unable to get any purchase on the tub and I slipped deeper into the mire. Oh God, I thought, how had our pleasant shared bath turned so ugly so quickly? Only an hour ago, I suggested to a few pals that we all strip down to swimming trunks and jump into a bathtub together. It would be a good crew-bonding opportunity. And when it had been me, Paul and Curry, it was fine. A bit awkward, but fine. NB: Curry is a person. Not the delicious indian meal. I think that a candlelit ethnic meal for two in a bathtub could be misinterpreted as, you know, just a tad gay. As it was, it definitely wasn't gay. We are ROWERS, manliest of the manly men. We see danger and we laugh at it and then bite off its ears. The fact that we'd spent the past three days listening to Take That and Vanessa Carlton on pretty much a continuous loop had NOTHING to do with it (listen yeah, I made that mix-cd in the belief that we'd listen to it once IRONICALLY and then throw it into the lake and listen to proper music from somebody else's CD collection. How was I to know that nobody else was bringing any fucking CDs to the camp, and thus we HAD to listen to my Take That/Blue/Celine Dion ETC heartbreak mix on loop for ten days? Gah).

And so that's what we did. We ran the bath and we all sank into it. And yes, it was just a little bit awkward. And Curry was wearing yellow lycra. And we were just hangin'. And we were thinking about getting out. AND THEN CARL AND JULIAN RAN IN AND JUMPED ON US.

And it was horrible. We had such a beautiful dream, and it was ruined by Julian's stubbly back. That just goes to show that there is nothing too beautiful that humanity cannot find a way to utterly wreck it. I think that our bathtime has raised some really important and scary questions about mankind's future. It could be analagous to global warming. Because if three grown boys can't have a bath together without it being torn about by the warring conquests of some greasy little pot-belly and his blonde little twat sidekick, what CAN humanity achieve? I think that the apocalypse is coming.

Fortunately, Julian and Carl ran away again when we threatened to pinch their thighs, and LJ got to take some really good photos of us making badass motherfucker poses. Like, I was doin' rock'n'roll hands and Curry was looking damn seductive and Paul was just tonk. Unfortunately when the picture was uploaded onto Facebook it also appeared that he was fondling himself, but that takes NOTHING away from the power of the photograph. And the fact that we managed to achieve those awesome bathtub snaps shows that maybe that might just be hope for humanity after all.

It wasn't gay.

Seriously.

NOT GAY. Why can't three boys bathe together without it being branded gay? Let's ask rowing pin-up and official manliest man around Donald Macdonald what he thinks about communal bathing:

Fuck off. People who live in glass houses, mate. You were showering NAKED with a bunch of men in True Blue! Gay as Moby? What does that even MEAN? You're full of shit, Macdonald! You and your dumb bean-bag face.

Amy's Bunny Rabbit Party (20/4/07)

2007-04-21T19:15:00.000+01:00

This party got off to a good start when I ran over a cat on the drive there.

Actually, I don't know if I was the one who actually hit it. There was some confusion. Basically, I decided that I'd be a nice boy and pick up Cassie from her house, as I thought she deserved a lift for being a lovely jolly person. Also, I didn't know the way to Amy's house and frankly couldn't be fucked to look it up on Google Maps. Cassie therefore subsituted for a little fat TomTom with legs. So I arrived at Cassie's street, which is filled to the brim with cars that are inconveniently parked at distances that are JUST SLIGHTLY TOO SMALL to park into. I mean, I tried. I saw a gap and tried to reverse park into it. However, following my driving test in September, I have only been called upon to reverse park once, and thus I couldn't remember how to do it properly and I crashed into the kerb. Some old people drove past and looked at me. At that point I thought 'fuck this' and phoned Cassie to inform her to sort her life out. While I was doing this I drove into a little cul-de-sac to turn around. I wasn't really paying attention in the drive into the cul-de-sac, as a bad song came onto my iPod and I was fiddling with it. However, I was also only going at about 3mph and the road was clear when I entered it so we're not talking A BOY RACER here.

When I reached the end of the cul-de-sac, I turned around and drove back, and there was this cat spazzing out in the middle of the road. At first I thought it was just doing that thing that all cats do, after they've hit the catnip or the crack or something and they just go mental for a few minutes and roll about on the floor waggling their feet in the air. I figured, hey it's a nice day, perhaps it's just enjoying the sunshine. This figuring was stumped when I drove up to the cat and saw that, not only did it not get out of the way, its movements were, to be honest, nuts. It was arching its back and kicking the air and flailing about like there was disco in its soul and fire in its heart and funk in its blood. Unfortunately, this blood-based funk was being liberally splashed all over the road, as its head appeared to be squashed by some car. It was rhomboid. "Oh God" I thought, "This cat is fucked. This is not good." This thought was followed about half a second later by "Wait, that wasn't me that did it was it? I do not need THIS."

I honestly didn't know if it was me or not. I mean, I felt no collision whatsoever, and a forensic examination of the car later proved that there was no blood or gore splashed onto the front of Nora's bumper. Equally, the cat was directly in the centre of the road, and thus I would have passed smoothly over it instead of squashing it with a wheel. However, on the other hand there was nobody else around and surely I would have seen spazzy McGee the cat on my first drive through. It was just confusing. And to be honest, a bit annoying: for if there is one thing that cartoons have taught me, it is that cats are made of rubber; every time Tom gets run over by a car driven by Jerry, he just squishes really flat and then has to use some sort of pump to re-inflate himself. This was clearly not the case in this situation, and makes me wonder what else in the cartoon world is a lie. I mean, can pelicans REALLY be used to mix cement? Do the animals of the serengeti HONESTLY have a huge party led by a wise baboon every time a new baby lion is born? CAN MONKEYS LAUNCH SPACESHIPS? Oh God... I don't know what to believe in any more.

These thoughts flashed through my head in an instant, but were instantly vanquished when the Cat rolled over a bit and looked at me. Our eyes met and for a splitsecond we understood each other perfectly. Its eyes, which, I swear to God, were GLOWING BRIGHT YELLOW, bored directly into my soul. It gave me a concentrated glower of pure undiluted malice that said, quite clearly and succinctly "YOU DID THIS, THOMAS. MY BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS. YOU WILL PAY FOR SLAYING ONE OF THE CATS. WE WILL FOLLOW YOU TO YOUR GRAVE." It was literally the most horribly traumatic thing I have seen for so long. My face was like :-o. The cat was more like ::(:-3, except obviously angrier. And a bit flatter.

For a few brief seconds, time halted. The cat stared at the car. I revved the engine a few times. It was a facedown. The universe held its breath as I tried to decide what to do - to get out and help the cat, or to wuss out and just drive off. Well, to be honest it wasn't much of a contest. I didn't know if I was even the one who had hit the damn thing, which was still flailing miserably about on the road like a fish with cabin fever, and there were a million worst-case-scenarios that could arise from getting out of the car. I could step out and, just as I bent to look at it, a group of young children run crying into the road screaming "TIDDLES! YOU MURDERER!" and it'd look like I was totally guilty. Or the cat could be beyond help and then I'd have to stamp repeatedly on its head to put it out of its misery. Or I could get out and look at it, and then the bleeding shattered wreck could just LEAP horrifyingly from the tarmack and, like, attach itself to my face and just hang on grimly. Or it could have just been a diversion to lure me out of the car; as soon as I got out of the car a load of other cats hiding round the corner would just leap out and jump on me, beat me up and steal my car, my iPod and my lunch money. It just wasn't worth the risk and to be honest I was in no mood for this shit and so I figured, fuck this, and drove over it again. I think passed clearly over its body without touching it. Well I hope so. Oh God, I just had a thought... what if the cat, like, grabbed the bottom of the car and was dragged along, being slowly ground down as I drove along? What if it was only FAKING an injury to get attention, but I then actually ran over its head for real? What if it saw my licence plate, and with its last breath told a passing feline? Oh God.

The fact that I had probably just killed a small animal and had fled its body like a coward put me in the mood for a party and so me and Cassie rolled up to Amy's house bare excited. Well, I wasn't really as I'd only been invited on a whim four hours earlier by Fati, and I didn't even know whose house it was. I thought she was called "Chloe" for the entire evening. I also realised when we arrived that I in fact had been to one of Amy's parties before, and they are unique because they all take place in ONE ROOM OF HER HOUSE. Everyone sits in the attic IN THE DARK and listens to rave music, dancing ironically and getting drunk with their friends. I was up for doing this, except I couldn't drink because I was driving, and I only knew two people. I was also reminded that parties are properly boring when you are single. This one basically featured me sitting on the floor with Cassie and Fati and Roxy and taking hilarious photographs of myself wearing bunny ears. Oh yeah, the theme was 'Bunny Rabbits' for some reason, and so everyone was wearing bunny ears. I of course went one step further and brought a massive full-scale rabbit mask made out of foam rubber that was about twice as big as my own head. I wore this for about twenty seconds and then remembered why I had relegated it into the back of my cupboard; it is literally the most cumbersome uncomfortable thing ever. So I threw it at Fati's head and stole her ears.

Another interesting fact of the party was that everyone had drawn whiskers on their cheeks to imitate rabbits. Of course, they all also looked a bit like cats to me, which was a lovely reminded of the writhing creature that I had left on the road behind me which even now was probably shudderingly crawling towards the house party, inexorably drawn by my scent of guilt and fear. I wanted a drink.

To be honest, as parties went, I wouldn't recommend it. Everyone pretty much left by 11.30 until there were five people sat in the room. In silence. Only person was drunk. It was great. It really reaffirmed my faith in the teen spirit. However, then this jolly fat bloke (not Cassie) showed up and said funny things and I was amused again. You can just imagine the laughs we had. Oh man, I can't even pretend to make this party sound exciting. Well, I say party, I mean 'Sitting in room in dark with camera and rabbit mask on trying to drown my sorrows with Coca-Cola and chocolate'. Sigh. I think that this is as good a time as any to implement something which I hope will become a regular feature of my party reviews, the

Horribly Unimpressive Photographic Summing-Up of the Soirée

Yep. That sums it up.

The party ended on a high note, however; I dropped off Cassie and we went to the cul-de-sac to see if the cat was there. It was gone. However there was still an obvious and huge pool of blood. I figured that the cat was probably found by someone and was taken immediately to cat hospital and is probably right now making a full and frank recovery. Perhaps. Who knows?

This Party Review was Live and Kickin'. Tune in next time!

(Oh God, I just had a thought. What happens if, when I finish typing this blog and I press post, I turn around, and THE CAT IS STANDING IN THE DOORWAY TO MY ROOM? Just glaring at me with those glowing orange eyes.
I'm actually afraid to turn around and check now. What was that creaking noise? Oh God. Ok, I'm turning around to look... now)

I'm on a roll

2007-04-25T18:33:00.000+01:00

This hasn't been a good weekend for me, vis-a-vis animal fatalities. On Friday I ran over a cat on the way to a bunny party (I'm sure that is somehow ironic), and on Sunday the boat I was rowing in crashed into and killed a duck. I'm not feeling so guilty about the duck as my responsibility was lessened. I was not steering the boat. And it wasn't my oar that hit its soft, supple body. So I'm going to count myself as being 'less responsible' for the goose's death than I was the cat's, even though I don't know if I was the one who mashed the moggy's noggin. However, on the other hand I have been directly involved in the deaths of TWO cute animals in the past week. It isn't good for my karma.

As it was, we were rowing along at our usual RIPPING rate of 36 strokes per minute. Our lycra was sweaty. There was juice flying in all directions. We were nearing the end of our pulse-rate-recovery piece and to be honest we were all feeling pretty tired; however there was also 45 seconds left to race. Unfortunately, we were running out of river to row in, as in about 200m there was a waterfall. So it was exciting and Indiana Jones stylee - would we finish the piece before flying over the edge? Would we have to stop early? WERE WE GOING TO MAKE A HOLE IN THE BOAT? Man that'd be cool I kind of wish we had done now. But as it was, it was a tricky situation that required a delicate touch. Therefore, our cockswain, Andrew 'Felix' Curry (that isn't meant to be a funny nickname, he just calls himself 'Felix' for jokes), was pretty busy concentrating on the rapidly approaching dead end. EMPHASIS ON THE 'DEAD' DUH DUH DUUUH that's foreshadowin'. A little too busy concentrating on it, eh, as he failed to notice the long-necked duck (in FACT it might have been a goose) that happened to be swimming into our path.

Well, I say 'happened to be swimming', I just have decided that it was fully intending on ramming our boat as some sort of revenge for the cat. I believe that all animals have some sort of mental telepathy, which allows them to plan and scheme against us humans and will result in our eventual downfall. So when that cat lay smasming in the road, with its last ounce of strength it managed to twist its torso round and take one long good look at my face. And then it sent out a pulsar-wave of concentrated hate with my face attached to all of the animals in the world. Kind of like a mass facebook note, except instead of "How Gay Are You? Take This Test 2 Find Out!", it was just a snapshot of my traumatised face with the words KIL HIM like, scratched on in blood. And so the duck picked it up, saw me rowing along and thought to itself "FOR THE FATHERLAND!" and dived in head first.

Unfortunately, the thing about rowing boats is that while the carbon shell itself may seem vulnerable and thin and easily broken by the swift bill of rough Duck Justice, and. Wait a second there. I'm sorry to suddenly bring the narrative flow of this post to a crashing halt but... DUCK JUSTICE? What a combination of words! I'm sorry, but does that not sound like the BEST idea for a show EVER? It'd be a bit like Darkwing Duck, except with a load of ducks solving crimes like fraud or malicious letter-writing... that would rule NOBODY STEAL IT. Duck Justice. Featuring A Duck in the role of Officer AJ "Wild Cannon" Mallard, a street-smart duck with a dark history who has to balance a balls-to-the-wall job of kickin' asses and takin' names with fighting the beurocratic bullshit from those office ducks back at Whitehall, as well as tackling the impossible task of being a single father to a cute teenage gosling. With celebrity guest appearances from William Shatner as Wilkins, Mallard's closest human ally, and Tom Sellick as a shady fisherman known only as "DASTARDO".

DUCK JUSTICE: THE POND SCUM WON'T KNOW WHAT HIT IT.

Duck Justice. Awesome. Ok, where was I? Oh yeah. The thing about rowing boats is that while the carbon shell itself may seem vulnerable and thin and easily broken by the swift bill of rough DUCK JUHUSTIIIIIIICE, it is actually protected by a load of fast flying carbon oars which scythe through the air at high speeds. The duck, to be honest, never stood a chance, and before it even got a chance to bother me, our bowman's blade schismed into its long thin easily splinterable neck with a piercing whistle that brought a tear to my eye.

In an instant, the duck's life flashed before its eyes. It recalled long lost rainy days paddling in ponds and splashing about in puddles, dancing uproariously under the fog of a winter's morn and circling the island in the darkest recesses of the night. And in that instant, the duck realised that all was lost and that it had given up its life for a puny ordeal. "Oh, mercy!" it squawked. "Why have I done this? I should have just lived my life! But no! Alas! Now I am slain, and for what? For a cat? Nuts to cats I should have died for something more exciting!" It would have gone on more to repent its lifetime of cardinal sins, but unfortunately it suddenly remembered that it was a duck and was thus unable to speak. The fact that it had said as much as it had done was, frankly, a surprise.

As we rowed away, I kind of lost interest in the boat, and watched it. Usually when we hit a duck on the water (which to be honest, happens about once every two months), it will submerge a bit, then come back to surface, look a bit embarassed, ruffle its feathers and then sail off as fast as is dignified. Not this one. It returned to the surface. And it ruffled its feathers. And then it tried to pick up its head. Didn't happen. Was NOT going to happen. The neck was fucked, frankly, and its head kind of flopped about from side to side pathetically. Its wings fluttered and flapped randomly back and forth. Its neck swung from side to side. It started to rotate in the water. Its neck continued to flop from side to side. It gave a soul-tearing final squawk, and died. But not before flopping its head over, taking a long look at my face, and then sending out another mental-wave of anti-Tom hate. Oh God. My face was like :-o NOT AGAIN. Everyone else was like :-D lol@that. Then a load of tiny ducklings came out of the bank and carried the corpse to the bank, singing the funeral dance of the fallen. That was sad.

But, oddly enough, NOT THAT TRAUMATIC. Because I suppose that I'm used to crashing into birds in my boats now. I mean, the most obvious example had to be at the finale of the biggest race of the year back in June 2006. We had to come in the top 3 to qualify, and with 250m of the 2k course left, we were about half a metre down on 3rd. It was exciting. It was close. And we were about to take it back with an awesome finish. Unfortunately, what should happen but a FUCKING SWAN just crashes into the side of the boat. My face was basically like this :-o again. The swan's face was like >:@. You know how swans are essentially cunts? Just because they're white and the Queen digs them means that they can do whatever they want. Well this one was being an extra big cunt, it purposefully got tangled up in the rigger and flapped its wings about and just generally made a knob of itself. And it was the rigger next to me so I couldn't even ignore it and hope it'd go away. So I was like PISS OFF SWAN, and it was like HEY FUCK YOU BUDDY, I'M A SWAN I CAN DO WHAT I WANT. And I was like GO TO HELL so I dropped my blade, leant over, and donkey punched that cocksucker in the back of the head. It responded by pecking me in the nipple and I was right, screw this, so I kneed it in the jaw and then totally got it in a headlock and chipped its beak on the bottom of the boat. It let go and I gave it an extra clout with my blade as it fled in a flurry of feathers. Unfortunately at this point I was bruised, bleeding, and the race was over. We ended up coming 4th. But the important thing was that the swan was gone and I maintained my dignity. Yes.

(NB: For the records: I did not actually donkey punch a swan)

Oh God, maybe all of this animal death is just a punishment from my brutal beat-down of that swan back in 2006? Because we all know that swans are Barons of the River Fowl. The Herons may think they're in charge, but the swans are the ones who really call the shots.

So, maybe I DIDN'T run over the cat, it ran up to my car and headbutted it in an attempt to harm ME. I mean, I have noticed that animals have been a lot more hostile to me in recent months. My dog barked at me the other day. A sparrow pooed on my windshield. A squirrel ran into my leg and ate my Babybel. A pony stole my hat. Two inebriated mice followed me down the street yelling racial epitaphs. It was horrible.

Oh God.

This is just going to get worse, isn't it?

Oh God oh God.

What if I turn around after watching this, and both the cat AND the duck are waiting at my doorway? The cat, slightly more mangy and worm-eaten, riding on the back of the duck, which is dripping with algae and slime and dragging its head behind it like some foul appendage. And their eyes all glow orange. And then they approach me and peck and claw and bite and nibble me to death. OH GOD.

This has all got a bit horrific. And I really don't think it's suitable for my younger readers (yeah, like young people really read this blog. Even if they managed to navigate here by accident with their Dad, I think the words "Swans are essentially cunts" might have alerted them to the fact that this blog is not suitable for anyone). Perhaps I should summarise what I've been saying in pictoral form, using well-known characters that my Junior Demographic can appreciate?

You know, I act like I find this really funny, but to be honest I don't. It's kind of grotesque and horrible. And it makes me depressed.

And hungry. Is there any of that hoisin duck left in the fridge?

A Horror Story

2007-05-04T12:44:00.001+01:00

The handsome rower looked down with disgust at the crumpled body that lay at his feet. It had been there on the landing stage when he arrived back from his rowing session, slumped flat over a blanket that a helpful biology teacher had provided. There was no blood, but the shape of the neck (too many corners) gave the impression that it didn’t have much time left before it shuffled off this mortal coil.

“So,” said the handsome rower musingly, “We meet again, eh?”

The duck – or was it a goose? - rolled over slightly and froze him with cold, black eyes that brimmed with hate and promised vengeance. The handsome rower stared back and for a second, the balance of nature shifted. Before his eyes, everything was transformed and he saw an entire eonic cycle of death and biology spin madly around inside this malevolent creature’s eyes. Evolution had given the goose feathers, webbed feet, and made it hungry for bread scattered by small children, but at its biological core it was still a dinosaur, plain and simple. These were the same eyes that had sat comfortably within a velociraptor, and the handsome rower, just for a second, was transformed into a spineless protoceratops, happily munching on grass one second, looking up and seeing those unworldly glowing lizard eyes bearing down on it the next. All of his previous confidence sluiced away through his feet and he shivered noticeably. He took a step back.

The goose shifted slightly, possibly in an attempt to reach round and bite off the rower’s uncovered toes, but it seemed too weak. It flopped back. The eyes glazed over. The handsome rower tentatively leant over and peered. Silence. Stillness. A small insect walked across the beak. The rower leant closer. Suddenly the goose jerked up and he leapt back with a cry of horror. Something grabbed him from behind.
“Hey!”
The handsome rower screamed. His legs suddenly pulsated weirdly. He fell on the ground. The duck fixed him stoically. “Now”, it said silently, “We are on the same level. And so help me God, I will gorge on your intestines before the day is out. I will dance on your face and I will spit on your grave.” The handsome rower scrambled to his feet, next to the second handsome rower who had joined to peer at the corpse. The second handsome rower was not as handsome as the first, but he was still not bad, as far as the general population is concerned.
“That can’t be the same one, surely?”
“What?”
“You know, the goose we hit on Sunday? I mean, it looks the same. But that was a week ago! Surely it would’ve died by now. I mean, look, its neck is screwed.”
The handsome rower was in no mood to argue. His mind was taken back to the previous week and a series of images flashed across his cranium. The hardcore rowing piece they were doing. The flash of the oar. The crunch of bone and feather as it collided with the goose. The weird way it flopped over and then flopped back. The look of confusion and hate splayed on its face. It was a look that vowed revenge.
“Yeah… I guess,” muttered the rower, then took a step back. The broken thing on the floor unnerved him. He knew that it was the same goose. It had waited for a week, patiently biding its time until the river carried it to the boat club. So that it could have its revenge.
“They phoned the swan sanctuary to come and pick it up. But it’s not a swan! They’re gonna feel dumb. Anyway, Mark wants to talk to us about the session. Let’s go.”
“What? OK.”
Not taking his eyes off the goose, the handsome rower backed away to where Mark – the coach – was waiting with the rest of the crew to discuss the session.
“Right, boys, now we’re all here, I think that was a pretty good session really, but…”
The goose rolled over once.
“… looking very tired, though, you really need to concentrate on getting your catches in and…”
The goose’s neck flopped over. And then back over again. It looked like some horrible primeval tentacle, wafting at the bottom of the sea to catch angel fish and those weird toothy fish bastards.
“… and Robbie, you need to sort out your back, you are basically just upright all the time, really think…”
The goose violently thwacked its head against the ground with a crack. The rower flinched. It did it again. Then fell still. The post-outing talk finished with no other event and the assembled rowers and coaches scattered. The handsome rower was alone on the landing stage. Alone with the goose. It lay prostrate, staring at him from afar with splayed wings and a come-hither expression on its face. The rower came hither, tentatively, one faltering step at a time. He could not fight the urge to approach one more time.
He reached the goose. It was silent. It was still. A thin trickle of brown stuff came out of its beak. There was some seaweed on its foot.
The rower sighed with relief and turned away. It was dead. There was nothing left to fear. He got two steps when there was a sliding, crunching sound from behind him. He kept walking. There was movement. He took another few steps. There was a deathly squelching sigh, like a sponge having a apoplectic fit. The rower broke into a jog, reached the door of the boathouse, then looked round.
The goose was moving. It was on both feet. It was chasing him. Well, ‘moving’ seemed too vanilla a word to describe the motion going on in the frame of this creature. It was hardly movement as we know it. It was almost as though the limbs and neck and muscles and sinew of this creature had ceased to exist in the traditional sense, and rather every appendage of the animal were now being used as purely muscular leverage to heave it onward. Its wings, legs, neck and torso were being used to propel it forward across the landing stage at an ungodly speed, sideways, backwards, upside down and back to front. Although ungainly and inelegant, this movement was terrifyingly fast, and in a matter of seconds it had covered half of the distance and was getting faster; inside the terrified alarm bells and buzzers going off inside the handsome rower’s stricken mind, he was vaguely reminded of those old vintage movies in which all of the action seems about half a second too fast. They were funny. But this wasn’t.
It looked like a large feathery crab. And the rower was terrified of crabs. He was terrified of crying reanimated geese even more, so he turned tail and fled into the boathouse as far as he could. The duck followed, crashing into a wall as it went and leaving a bloody imprint of itself (rather like that guy with the hat in Cabin Fever).
Where to go? What to do? The rower had no time to think, as he sprinted wildly though the boat bay. Already the flopping screaming behind him was catching up. The back of his ankles started to feel very vulnerable and due to the open-plan nature of the boathouse there were no doors to simply lock or cupboards to hide in or stairs to climb and oh God it was getting closer and there was a dead end coming up and it was going to catch him and then he would be that protoceratops again and they’d find him the next day in a pool of blood with his tendons ripped out and his eyes pecked out and his body savaged to death. It was pretty bloody scary and he waved his hands about in the air madly as he sprinted through the deserted boathouse.
Suddenly, a proverbial lightbulb went on and he took a left, a right, and then launched himself into a toilet cubicle with a cry of fear. Just as the goose was about to leap at him, he slammed the door shut and bowled it over with a feathery crunch. It gave a strangled squawk of muffled pain and fell silent. The rower clambered onto the top of the toilet and pulled his legs up as far away from the floor.
For a few second there was nothing but a snuffling scraping from outside the cubicle, the hiss of the cistern and the terrified gasping of the handsome rower. Then there was nothing. For a long five minutes nothing happened. The rower’s panicky breathing faded to nothing and his heartbeat slowed. Very slowly, he climbed off the toilet bowl and nervously bent down to peer under the door.
THE GOOSE SUDDENLY FUCKING WENT FOR HIM FROM NOWHERE. It actually bit his unprotected toe, sheared through his skin and drew loads of blood. The rower squeaked, leapt onto the bowl and stared, terrified, as this fucking goose bastard attempted to squeeze its entire body under the toilet door. Its neck flapped madly back and forth, spraying brown stuff everywhere and emitting a mad croak that sounded like a whistful giggle. Blood from the rower’s toe landed on its head and made it all gross and bloodlusty and stuff. It was well scary.
The rower was like fuck this and sprang theatrically from the toilet bowl onto the top of the cubicle partition. He awkwardly hung from it for a second and then heavily fell over the other side with a crunch that winded him. The goose immediately scrabbled back from under the cubicle door and leapt at him with a war-cry, slashing open his leg. He squealed and totally sucker-punched it in the head, kicked it back, attempted to leap to his feet, got halfway up before it bit down on the tendon on the back of his ankle with a razor-sharp death rattle, screamed, fell over again, tried to protect his face from its bite, felt it shear off half of his ear, threw it bodily against the wall again, then scrabbled onto all fours and fled the toilet. The goose followed. Covered in blood and mangy water and moving like a boneless brakedancer, it looked like something rejected from Silent Hill for being ‘too patently fucking terrifying’. The rower peered, terrified, over his shoulder and realised that it suddenly had a beak full of sharp teeth and a long forked tongue. The skin revealed by its moulting feathers was scaly and slimy. It suddenly stood up on its two legs, flapped its wings, and flipped its broken neck up in the air like a yo-yo. It roared.
The rower came to some stairs and desperately crawled up them. The goose followed sedately. It knew that there was no escape now. Its prey was injured, bleeding and hobbled. It was just a matter of time.
The rower reached the top of the stairs, turned round the landing, and realised, with horror, that it was a dead end. He scrabbled at the wall for somewhere to hide, spreading gore over the beigeness, but there was no escape. There was just a blank wall, with a ceremonial rowing oar attached to it. He pressed himself against the wall as flat as he could, but there was no escape. There was nowhere else to run.
The goose turned the corner and saw its quarry. Its head – dragging on the floor behind it – twinkled blankly. It squawked. The rower stared at it, and in that instant he realised – this was it. There was no fleeing it now, no anaesthetic from the facts of the truth. His faced was pressed into the grinding cogs of the evolutionary fight for life. Questions sped through his beleaguered mind. When it came down to it, would humanity ever be able to survive? Were we ever truly deserving, ever truly equipped to come out top of the evolutionary power struggles that defined how this world was to be? Had Mother Nature had enough of us, had she simply decided to squeeze humanity out of existence once and for all? Why the fuck had the architects who designed this building constructed a staircase that led to a dead end?
The goose’s head flipped round and they gazed at each other again. There was a sense of mutual understanding. All of the questions and the fear faded. He knew what he had to do. There was no point fighting it.
The goose took a step forward. The rower came to a decision. He climbed to his feet. It was time to prove that humanity still deserved to exist on the planet. It was time to assert his right to exist. He certainly wasn’t going to led this feathery little twat decide that he wasn’t going to live any more.
He grasped the rowing oar. It was too long to get a proper swing – there was barely enough room in this corridor to swing a cat. He’d have one chance before the goose was upon him. Suddenly, a clever line occurred to him.
“Hey,” he said solemnly. The goose stared blankly at him. “Hey, goose. Duck.”
It didn’t. He brought the oar slamming down with a piercing whistle that reminded him of a rowing outing that now seemed a million years ago. The animal almost BLURRED around the blade, twisting like pasta. It popped with a dull crunch, spraying feathers and goo all over the shop. It thrashed madly about, squealing like a pig in frustration and pain. The rower let go of the blade and it remained where it was, deep inside the unholy thing that now spasmed and twitched on the floor. Its mouth opened a few times and its wings flapped weakly. It stared balefully at him.
“Oh, piss off, cunt”, sighed the rower, then stepped over the animal and staggered downstairs. As he went, the goose attempted to bite him. He tripped and stumbled to the bottom of the stairs, where he lay in a little pool of blood, exhausted and beaten by his encounter with the goose. He passed out for a few minutes, until a voice awoke him.
“Hey, what happened to YOU?”
It was the second handsome rower. The handsome rower looked up wearily.
“Goose,” he said “Attacked me. I got it with an oar. Up the stairs. Make sure its dead.”
“But I just came from up there… there’s nothing but a broken oar, a load of feathers and some blood. The goose is gone!”
The rower looked up and his face was literally, like :-o !!!!!!!

THE END???

Man that was fucking intense. I should totally write for Hollywood. If any movie producers feel like taking “The Goose” or “The Feathered Demon” or “Quack Quack You’re Dead” (whatever I end up naming it), and producing it into some kind of multi-billion dollar horror franchise (I’m thinking that I get played by either Kevin Costner or that guy from the Natwest adverts), please get in touch. And the incredible thing about the story is that every word of it was true. Well, up to the words “…nothing left to fear”. After that I kind of started taking some artistic liberties. Man that goose was fucking terrifying. I’m shivering just thinking about it. Look, I made a picture of it:

Well, I say 'Made', I mean 'Cut out a picture of a goose and stuck it onto a floor image on Photoshop'. I would have added some blood or something, but look, it's terrifying enough as it is. SERIOUSLY. Geese have TEETH. And fucking tongues! That's some bad shit, right there.

A list of 8 Excellent things that I have seen in recent days (in no order)

2007-05-08T12:00:00.000+01:00

1: The new banner to this blog. I know that I technically made it before seeing it, but frankly every time I clap eyes on it my breath is taken away by how simply Excellent it is. It's well cool innit. In fact, it is more than cool. If somebody put a gun to my head and told me to come up with one word to describe it, would I say it was cool? NO I WOULD NOT. In fact, I would totally describe it as 'Hardcore'.
Man, just look at it. It is so hardcore I can barely breathe. Its more hardcore than Steve, my hardcore friend who goes to clubs and dances really hard and then takes drugs and then is so happy on the train ride home that she just can't stop herself from CRYING and then she is so hardcore that she gets thrown out of her house. It's more hardcore than a bunch of guys from an anonymous private boys' school in Wimbledon starting their own alt-indie-wuss-rock band and then playing to a packed concert hall filled with more guys from an anonymous private boys' school in Wimbledon. It's more hardcore that that slashy-faced guy in Ichi the Killer. It's even more hardcore than how hardcore the centre of the earth would be if the centre of the earth was made out of diamond, or reinforced concrete, or possibly Vinnie Jones. That's how hardcore it is.

2: The other day, I was driving down the road. I was stuck behind a bus and was a bit annoyed as buses move at about -1mph and stop every time a leaf blows across the road. However, fortunately the bus stopped at a bus stop and I thought to myself "AHA, time to make a cheeky little overtake". So I quickly pulled out. But then all of a sudden, a group of like 6 little chavvy kids leapt out from behind the bus stop. They screamed and jabbered in their native tongue, and then, with lethal force, violently hurled something at the back of the bus. It was a spherical object. Brown. It splintered and shattered upon impact, covering the bus and the road with yellow and white material. As I overtook, I managed to catch a brief glimpse of what they had thrown.
It was a scotch egg.
I really wish I had some sort of secret camera into the mindsets of certain people. I would just like to be a fly on the wall at the executive meeting when all of those chavvy kids sat around a table in leather chairs and made the decision to go out, buy that scotch egg, and then throw it at a bus. Why a scotch egg? Why a bus? What were they hoping would happen? What is the best possible outcome from throwing a scotch egg at a bus? And why a scotch egg? Why not an oatcake? Or a black pudding? Or some tapioca? Or an entire box of Sunny-D? So many questions, so little time. Humans are interesting.
But it was Excellent.

3: This picture:

NB: This was not the cat that I ran over. Well, I hope not.

4: There was a bee at the Boat Club today. It was just chillaxing on the floor and its legs were covered, COVERED I SAY, in pollen. It looked like it had little MC-Hammer Stylee Bee trousers on. It was really Excellent. Naturally we all laid down on the floor and peered at it. Everything was going nicely when suddenly the bee moved and, being the manly men we are, we all screamed hysterically and like, THREW ourselves backwards as though pulled by little invisible bungees. Our cox, who is a hardcore motherfucker called Andrew "Felix" Curruzzlywuzzly, was not impressed. "Boys, you are meant to be the 2nd VIII, you have to be harder than that. You can't let a bee push you around or else you'll just be letting ABINGDON push you around." Our cox likes to relate everything to Abingdon. But this was enough to pump us up so we leant back and really gave that bee a verbal battering the likes of which it had probably never experienced before.
"Stupid bee!"
"Twat!"
"Your yellow legs look dumb!"
"Knob!"
"Your dad's a coward!"
The really Excellent thing was that, due to the amount of pollen on its legs, the bee was unable to fly away to escape our verbal rinsing of it or attempt to verbally cuss us back. Of course, there is no real comeback to "Your dad's a coward" (except for, possibly, "Your mum's boring!"... however luckily it was a bee and thus incapable of articulating speech). However, we were distracted for a second by Northern Mark from the North, our coach, and when we looked back the bee was gone.
All of the above actually happened, by the way. And it was Excellent.

5: I went up to London with Rose on Saturday to buy an esoteric CD. We wandered through Covent Garden, which was filled with those mime guys whose job it is to stand really still dressed in silly costumes. There was a woman in a dress with a big camera who was paying them money to take photographs of them. Now forgive me if I am wrong, but if the entire gimmic is that they stand still, not moving, for long periods of time, taking a still photograph (in which everybody is standing still) will surely not capture the whole effect of the stillness. Maybe if she had taken a video it would have gone some way to capture the essence of the moment. I quite wanted to go and reason with her, but I figured that I really could not be bothered. So instead I chuckled to myself at the Excellent nature of this circumstance.

6: Gimmicky tourist postcards in the shape of Princess Diana's face, the hilarious and Excellent possibilities for comic tomfoolery inherent in such objects, and thus the following photograph:

How exciting, this is the first photograph of me to ever appear on this blog. When we were taking it, people looked disapprovingly at us. I think that it is ironic that you get frowned at for using Diana's image to spread joy and laughter, but not for printing it out on cheapo cardboard and then letting people write on the back for 50p a pop. Very ironic.

7: My excellent new T-Shirt, which I am modelling in the above photograph. It is blue. It has mountains on it. It says "KAZAKHSTAN". I look like quite a catch in it. Yesterday, I caught myself modelling it in the mirror and thinking to myself, "I have turned into quite a man in recent weeks." I like T-shirts. They give me hope. You wouldn't get that from a cardigan.

8: This little fanzine that we found in a little indie record shop. It was named "SYNTAX ERROR CRABS IN THE UK", and was like a little pamphlet. In it, some clever wag had cunningly cut up and rearranged headlines from newspapers next to the faces of prominent politicians. Thus, for example, a headline ORIGINALLY about the levels of obesity in Britain was thought-provokingly placed next to a picture of fat-pie Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. "Ah," I thought to myself when I saw it "John Prescott is indeed fat. They make a good point." As I read on, I was amazed to find more and more of my previous misconceptions and beliefs about our political system simply TORN TO SHREDS. There was a picture of George Bush next to a headline saying "He flies in, flaps about and leaves a mess behind". The Labour party was juxtaposed with a headline describing how some chavs had broken into a house and smashed all of the things and then probably thrown a scotch egg at the owner. It was horrific.
Then on the final page it turned out that "SYNTAX ERROR CRABS IN THE UK" was actually NOT an accredited political journal, but in fact a flier advertising a combined art/rock show. On the back was written "Art Exhibition + Live: Tiger Force and Optimist Club and Abi Makes Music! Plus - ART!" I love the Plus- ART! Imagine if that was the Tate's new marketing drive. 'An overpriced coffee shop, loads of esoteric books on style and a big metal slide! Plus - Art!
Thinking about it, I really want to go. I literally cannot imagine anything better. OH NO IT'S TONIGHT I MISSED IT. Grumble. It kind of makes me a bit sad that the only place that flier exists is in the hearts and minds of the people who made it. And me. There is no history of it anywhere, no recording of its existance. Once the combined art/rock show is over and the flier reduced to landfill, then, to the collective consciousness, it never existed.
How sad.
But equally, the fact that it exists at all is Excellent.

Take that, Kilroy!

Abi and Georgie's Barn Party (15/05/07)

2007-05-16T10:23:00.000+01:00

I do not have good luck when it comes to my car and parties. Last party I went to, I may/may not have run over a small kitten. This time, I got a parking ticket about three hours beforehand. Eighty bloody quid for parking on a road I have parked along dozens of times with nary a drop of complaint! It was bloody annoying. Although I guess I was bang to rights - not only was I parked across TWO clearly marked residents parking spots, I wasn't even properly parked there, and was kind of sticking out across the road. And as it happened, it turned out to only be £40; they halve it if you pay within two weeks. However, the cheeky knob who gave the ticket folded it over inside the little plastic wallet so when I picked it off the windscreen I could only see the £80. I think that this is all part of a cunning ruse; they hope that people will see the ticket, only see the eighty, and then be like 'SCREW THAT' and throw the ticket on the floor and drive away. Then when the time rolls along when you are forced to actually PAY the fucking thing, you have to pay eighty instead of the forty. Clever, Kingston Borough Council, very very clever. So I was annoyed about that for the entirety rowing session we had beforehand. However, my head coach gave me some good advice which really made me feel better about it.
"I once got a parking ticket for £50," he solemnly told me. "I ignored it and then it went up to £100!" He looked really pleased with himself. Then he added "But that's ok, because I was at a GIRL'S house! Having sex!" I think expected me to yell "BOO YA! HIGH FIVE!" and do that jumping chest-bump thing with him. As it was I kind of glared blankly and then slowly, silently, turned around and walked briskly off.

I'm not sure how this parking ticket actually relates to the party in question, other than the fact that this party will forever be known as 'The Party When I Got The Parking Ticket'. I also started to relate everything to how much it cost compared to the parking ticket. I had a shower and got dressed. The clothes I wore were some socks and boxers I didn't pay for, the KAZAKHSTAN tshirt that cost me £11, some awesome jeans that cost me £40, some shoes stolen off my little brother that probably cost about £29. So in monetary terms, the option was 'Park on a road illegally for an hour' or 'Buy the clothes that I went to the party in'. Not gonna lie, I preferred the clothes. Oh yeah, I also wore my amazing Boat Club hat, which I will discuss later.

The party itself was held in a big-ass barn thing at a golf club. According to a poster on the wall of the toilet, to rent the golf club for the evening cost £200. So the option was 'Park on the road', or 'Rent an entire golf club for an hour'. Not impressed.

Inside was filled with smoke and the hideous writhing bodies of nubile teenage girls and the ironically bouncing spectres of far-too-cool-for-this teenage boys. I'm going to estimate that 80% of the boys were wearing stripy shirts. I'm also going to estimate that, other than one knob wearing a flat cap, and a wifebeater OVER his stripy shirt, I was the only one wearing a hat. The hat in question is from a limited run of Hampton Boat Club hats produced by our school shop about ten years ago. They were so ugly and hideous that they couldn't sell them and ended up shifting them at cost of about £2. Naturally, I bought two. They are literally the biggest ugliest hats you have ever seen. Formed of some weird foam/cotton hybrid, there has not been a person born who has managed to wear one of these hats and not look slightly ridiculous. The only real way to carry it off is to just place it at an angle on the side of your head and pretend that you are being ironically gangsta. Therefore, I kind of bounced sideways into the party, walking with that 'My pelvis is jelly' swagger that typified the gangsta genre, singing some ghetto music and ignoring any greetings that came my way.

"Tom! Hello! How are you?"
"Ladies come, ladies go through my revolving door, some ladies never come back - most come back for more."
"What?"
"Aint no need for me to brag about the way I'm hung, lets just say I got the skillz to get the flyest girl hung."
"What?"
"I'm gangsta."
"... yeah."

It is imperative not to underestimate the impact of wearing a huge ugly black hat at a party. For reasons unknown, people at parties are fascinated by hats. Frankly, my hat had a bigger impact at the party than I did; I must have had about 20 conversations about it over the course of the evening. It was constantly twisting through an endlessly repeating cycle of being stolen, placed on my head, rotated, flipped, argued over and reclaimed. At one point I thought I'd lost it for good; some random chav was wearing it and was refusing to give it back. However, I managed to rationally defuse the situation by calmly explaining that I indeed had purchased the piece of habidashery for £2 several years before, and thus the hat did technically belong to me, and as he was not a member of the Hampton Boat Club, there was no call for him to be wearing it anyway; he understood my argument and returned it without any quibbles. Nah, joking, I just got Rose to jiggle her boobs at him, then when he was distracted got Amy to steal the hat. Then when he was trying to get it off Amy I stole it back and ran away. And so I bought her and Rose a lemonade in thanks. That's teamwork, right there.

Frankly, I can't really remember much more about this party. It wasn't because I was drunk, it was just because not much really happpened. Kris got really drunk, I guess, and started doing imitations of people and animals. "Do a chipmunk!" we cried, and she started acting like a gorrilla and making a stern face (?). "Do a mouse!" we yelled, and she just closed her eyes really tightly. "Make some sunglasses with your hands for your eyes!" I suggested, and she sort of punched herself in the face. Then she picked up a chair and started waltzing with it, at which point the burly black security guard stepped in. There was a brief tug of war for the possession of the chair, but fortunately the black security guard won over the 5ft pissed Kazaksthanian (KRIS IS FROM KAZAKSTAHN! I pointed this out to her in relation to the tshirt and she kind of stroked the picture of the mountains on it) and order was restored.

That was pretty funny.

In conclusion.

Horribly Unimpressive Photographic Summing-Up of the Soirée

Sorry

2007-05-25T07:33:00.000+01:00

For the lack of blogging.

I am going away over the weekend but will write something on Monday.

Just call me Jimy Hendricks

2007-06-06T15:19:00.000+01:00

I have wanted an electric guitar for about four years now. I don't know why. It isn't like I have a single musical bone in my body. Although, thinking about it I DID play the recorder for two years. Got to Grade 2 thankyouverymuch. There wasn't a finer player of 'Au Claire De La Lune' in all of Twickehnam. And then I played the clarinet for a bit... but we don't talk about that particular stage of my life. Let's just say, I was going through some dark times, it was generally a low patch, I turned to the clarinet for comfort and... well... things happened.

I don't even know what I'm talking about now. In recent posts I have been blogging like I have Alzheimers. Every two paragraphs I have to mentally climb out of my head, put on some big clompy boots, then kick myself in the back of my skull - thus re-BOOT-ing my brain (oh, ha-ha) and getting myself back on track. And in this case, the track is the hardcore chord track that I be layin' down with my new electric guitar.

Whoops, I skipped ahead a bit there. Basically - yes - I have wanted an electric guitar for a while. It's just something that appeals to me, like being able to bodypop or growing a moustache. Well, after certain events in my Lower 6th (fucking Asians with their powdered glass and their mocking laughter), the bodypopping is out of the question. For now. And if you have met me you will be well aware that I am simply incapable of growing proper facial hair. I have like two long black hairs on my chin and a load of blonde hairs that are invisible to the naked eye. Blonde hairs do not an impressive moustache make and so I have pretty much had to cross those two dreams off of the list of things to achieve. Luckily, though, getting an electric guitar does not require any particular level of dance skill or testosterone, and so that was definitely ON the list.

So I decided to myself 'I am definitely getting a guitar, and hell to all who oppose me'. This basically consisted of two people. The first was Rose, my little Jimmeny Cricket, who's dad MAKES guitars and who was basically 'Do you know anything thing about guitars, why you want one, or even the first thing of how to play it?'
My answer was a resounding snort of derision. Do I know anything about guitars? Do *I* know anything about guitars? Me, Thomas Phipps, with my two years of recorder training and all the practise I've had on my baby cousin's brightly coloured plastic guitar that has all the buttons that you press and it makes farmyard noises? The way she asked me implied that she thought my knowledge of chord progressions, seventh barre scales, chops, licks, hammering, harmonics, tuning, strings, tremolo bars, artificial dead string or arpeggios was somewhat lacking. To answer her question, I simply laughed heartily and clapped her on the back. Metaphorically.
"Oh Rose, you do make me laugh! And as far as I can tell, it's all pretty simple... you just plug it into the amplification bellows, put your 50p into the slot, then you press one of the sound-strings and to the best of my knowledge that makes it play the solo of Sweet Child of Mine. Or a sheep."
That shut HER up.
The other person who was offended at my attempts to enter the musical spectrum was my good friend Steve. Don't let the name fool you - Steve is not a boy. She's a girl. I think. Well, biologically she is, but you wouldn't know by looking at her. I swear she has more facial hair than me. And the boobs are about comprable. Anyway, Steve is quite the new romantic arteest. I would describe everything about her as either post-ironic or quasi. She goes to the beach and watches the sunset and writes bad poetry about it. She likes to go raving and take ecstasy and then cry on the train home just because life is so... damn... beautiful. She then goes on the Stanley Kubrick group on Facebook and types clever messages like "The man was an innovative genius". Her interests include "pursuing the absolute heart of the poem of life". She once read a poem by Ginsberg. I think that she thinks that anybody who cannot flawlessly quote reams of poetry is a philistine. She also plays the guitar so I made the mistake of asking her for advice - "Which type of guitar is better, red or black?"
She was actually offended that I'd decided to get a guitar. I think her exact words were "YOU ARE JUST LIKE ANOTHER NU-COOL WANNABE WHO ONLY WANTS A GUITAR TO PULL THE BRAINLESS BIMBOS THAT YOU GET INTO YOUR BEDROOM!"
That kind of offended me. Firstly, because... nu-cool wannabe? From somebody who lists "psy-rock" and "psy-trance" amongst their favourite music genres? Secondly... if there's any brainless bimbos in my bedroom, I won't be needin' no guitar to be pullin' them. They don't call me 'Fifteen Second Phipps' for nothing.

NB: The 'fifteen second' is the time between me meeting the girl and me getting off with her. It does not refer to anything else.
NB: Nobody has ever called me that.
NB: It's not a nickname that really sums me up, to be honest.
NB: Hey guys, everyone's calling me 'Fifteen Second Phipps' from now on! Pass it on.

Thirdly, I feel that somebody who is meant to be such a free spirit should not be trying to cut down my talent in the prime of its life. Imagine if someone had told the young Leonardo Da Vinci "That's rubbish, that"; do you think he ever would have achieved greatness? NO. THAT IS THE ANSWER. So, in mocking my burgeoning talent, Steve is essentially breaking the young Leonardo Da Vinci's paintbrushes and stealing Richard Ashford's lunch money that he was saving up to buy a guitar and not letting Lassie go to rescue-dog school. But did that thought deter Steve? No it did not. She then proceeded to confirm that I know nothing about music. She asked me if I knew who Bob Dylan was. I said 'Who?' She said, had I heard of Jimmy Hendrix or Bob Marley. I thought that they were the same person. I actually did. Well, to be honest how many Jamaican singers do we NEED? Seems like we're doubling up on a lot of them. I bet they were pretty samey. She then confidently told me that I'd get bored of it in a week. Yeah well. I GOT BORED OF HER FACE IN A WEEK.

Anyway so I then thought of what guitar I was going to buy. There were so many options, there were Les Pauls and Fenders and Stratocastsers, basses and electrics and classicals and multiple pickups and nylon and steel and second hand and autographed and jazz and blues. After a lot of deliberation, I finally decided on the model I wanted: Cheap. I'd already figured that the height of my guitar career was likely to be me sitting on a mattress on the floor twanging it to the beat of a hippy playing one drum. I certainly wasn't blowing 300 of my hard-woogas on some twanger. I figured fuck it and bought a cheapo one off eBay. This was pretty exciting as it was my first eBay purchase ever. It became even more exciting when I realised that I had bid on a guitar with only twenty minutes left on the clock, and I hadn't bothered to set up PayPal or even find my credit card yet, so there was a mad panic when I thought that I'd be jailed for bidding on an eBay guitar with no financial backup. Fortunately my total lack of knowledge didn't appear to matter, as what did my feedback for the sale say? "Quick response and fast payment. Perfect! THANKS!!" Check it out, "pemburytrading" digs me. I got TWO count em TWO exclamation marks. WHOOP. I especially like the way that the feedbacker yelled the word THANKS. Like it was only at that point that he had realised just what a GREAT ebayer I was and just had to shout about it to the entire world.
After a long and nail-biting wait, my guitar arrived. It came in a box packaged with an amp. The box had a picture of some flames and a guy playing the guitar and shooting waves of pure concentrated cool onto an audience. I was like woah so I excitedly got it out of the box.

There were lots of things attached, including wires and springs. I plugged it in, then searched vainly for the slot in which to insert the money, or - indeed - the cranking lever at the back to wind up the bellows. There was nothing. There wasn't even an activation switch. I was somewhat annoyed as this meant that either my understanding of how a guitar worked was severely flawed, or they had simply not come included. Fortunately I looked it up on the internet and it turns out that this particular make of guitar was neither steam nor kinetic powered, so that was a relief.

After about a day of casually twanging wires at random, singing a song that I'd made up called 'Look At Me I'm Playing the Guitar and Twanging the Strings Oh Yeah (acoustic mix)', I decided to learn how actually to play it. I allocated an hour, after which I was going to put my name in NME and book myself into a tour of Europe with my new band, 'Just Thomas'. It's like Just Jack, except in this case, the name is more literal. There was some stuff about tuning it at the beginning. I couldn't find a 'tune' button on the bodywork so I just figured - hey, it's making a sound, I'm musically deaf, who cares if its tuned or not - then turned to page one of the internet site. "Playing Scales". Scales? Scales are for girls who play the clarinet, not wicked hard awesome legends like me. I laugh at your scales! So I thought fuck this then skipped at random to about lesson seven. This is the sight that greeted my eyes:

I was like wtf. Guitar sucks.

After some more excitement, I read another lesson. After a bit of practise, I have now learnt some chords. For those not possessing the same musical talent as me, chords are like small groups of notes that when played together buzz and go mute. The chords I know are G Major, C Major and D Major. Interestingly, every time I play them they sound different. I also am unable to switch from one chord to another without stopping, looking up the chord in the book, slowly changing fingers one by one, then twanging again. This makes me playing "Leaving on a Jetplane" a long and tbh arduous affair. It basically sounds like I am anally raping John Denver's mushy corpse. After about a week of this I figured that the noises I get basically sounds a bit like a guitar, so I can get away with just playing G major over and over again and singing tunefully over the top. So for about five minutes the other day I sang Wonderwall in G Major, just strumming in time. What's good is the fact that my fingers aren't exactly adept at staying in place so every time I strum it sounds a bit different. It didn't sound GREAT tbh. But then I reckon that Leonardo's first stick figures were a bit shit.

However, I persevered and every day I learn a new and exciting skill on the guitar. For example, today I figured out how to attach the strap. Then, as my mother had gone out, I wandered around the house in just my underwear and my Hampton Boat Club hat chasing my dog and madly playing C Major over and over again. The dog got so stressed that she ran into a door.

My mother was out buying my little brother - who is 16 - his birthday present. It was a skateboard. I am so totally gonna steal it so then I can continue my mission of annexing, lameifying and belittling every single teenage sub-culture that I have missed out on during my formative years. I have already ruined rave music, spray-painting, hoodies and the guitar for my siblings. I'm working on clubbing: "IT'S JOLLY LOUD IN HERE, AND WHY ARE THESE GIRLS RUBBING THEMSELVES AGAINST ME? THIS SUCKS." I reckon that pretty soon I'll move onto piercings, drugs, and 'rap music'.

ROCK AND RAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWL *Does rock and roll fingers*

I reckon that there are probably really good guitarists out there who are reading this post and getting actually angry about the fact that I own a guitar. Me owning any sort of musical instrument is giving a hungry korean guy a new puppy. They're most likely thinking 'There's probably a nice Mexican boy out there who would really LOVE a new electric guitar and who would really put some effort into learning it and getting good, while here you are just not even bothering and frankly taking the piss.' NOT TRUE. If I was taking the piss, would I have thrown a stapler at my little brother when he tried to pick it up and made a little dent below one of the pickups? I'm not taking the piss. I'm just uncaring.

Katya Kalling

2007-06-26T11:08:00.000+01:00

"So," said the mysterious stranger. "I'm South African. I'm 5ft7. I work out three times a week. And I have an HUGE nine inch long cock."
There was a few seconds of placid silence as he let this information sink in. I was stunned. I tried to think of something to say back. Only one thought sprung to mind.
"I'm actually taller than you."
There was another few moments of silence, punctuated only by the slow drip-drip-drip of rain against the window. A young boy cycled along the road outside. He was wearing a hat.
The hat was blue.
"Cool," said the mysterious stranger. "Want to have sex?"

* * *

Well, that is exciting. There's a cliffhanger for you. Another exciting example of the zany situations I get myself into. And I bet, having read that, you are now full of questions. What was I doing talking to a mysterious but well-endowed South African stranger? Why did he want to have sex with me? Did I consent? How did I get myself out of THAT situation? I am not going to tell you! Yet. You will just have to wait and see. But bear in mind - there is a twist in the tale. Let's see if you can figure it out. But I warn you - it's pretty cryptic. SOLVE MY RIDDLE.

I have spent some time this week on internet chatrooms, pretending to be a girl (oh, shit). Now you may think that this is a pretty sad thing to be doing with my time, but if you bear in mind that the other option was revising critical approaches to gothic literature (everything reflects contemporary anxieties, I get it already Kelly Hurley) I think that you will agree that the whole transgender thing was a much better way to pass the time. In fact, while you were all revising your surds and relative fractions, I was having the time of my life on teenflirt, so actually I'm pretty sure that that makes ME the cool one here. ALSO don't think that I was doing this off my own back; like I got up one day and thought "I know I will go onto an internet chatroom and pretend to be a girl,". Oh no, I was actually double teaming with my newbestfriend Emily. THAT'S RIGHT, A REAL GIRL.

I think I should briefly mention Emily for a bit as a large part of this story relies on understanding Emily's mentality. Which I don't. Of course, I don't really understand any girls at all, but I really REALLY don't get Emily. She is a mental person. She has piercings on her face and a pet hedgehog and she sends people mysterious letters with slogans like 'Today is the first day of the rest of your life' written in blood. I like her because she is interesting. Every single one of her stories or anecdotes end with some sort of weird twist, like 'Then he went off with my lesbian friend' or 'Then I got molested' or 'Time to purge!'. So it was no suprise really that when I started talking to her on msn her first words were along the lines of 'HEY TOM I AM BAITING PERVERTS ON THE INTERNET'. Of course, my ears pricked up at the words 'perverts', 'internet' and 'Tom'. We all know of my interest in internet perverts - after the Perverted Justice excitement of last year and the paedophile post way back in 2005 I have pretty much made my bed visavis the paedophile/pervert issue.

So after about a ten second consideration, I quickly loaded up the 'teenflirt' chatroom and set about getting myself some virtual cock. While it was loading on the computer Emily set out the groundrules. I should give myself a kind of slutty name - I wanted to go with Mildred but that was turned down so I settled with Katya, after everyone's favourite spoon-faced Neighbours character. Secondly, I should tell everyone that I was a virgin as apparently this turns on men. Thirdly, when somebody says 'asl' to me, I should not say '18, male, London' as apparently this blows the whole thing wide open and spoils the fun.

So with no further ado I entered the chatroom. It was jolly exciting, there were lots of bright colours and flashing lights. In the main forum bit, a chatter called like, 'Lady Japan' or something was talking about kimono dresses. I was like wtf is this WHERE ARE ALL THE PERVERTS THAT EMILY PROMISED ME. But then I realised that the kimono conversation was sandwiched in between about eighteen thousand pleas for cybersex. So it was like:

Lady Japan: I like kimono rags
Bob: ANY 15YO GIRLS WANNA CHAT
big_meaty_gregory: yo girls any 18yo girls wanna do some chattin
Lady Japan: But it's really hard to tie the knots on the back of them
IRVING: any hairy girls into pee and poo please talk
blackman: who wants to go on msn i have a webcam
Lady Japan: I like things

It went on like that. So I typed 'lol my names Katya' into the box. Did you see my clever use of 'lol' to blend in? Usually I would not write 'lol' ever as I consider 'lol' to be pretty much the most retarded acronym on the face of the planet. I HAVE SERIOUS RESERVATIONS AS TO WHETHER OR NOT YOU ARE ACTUALLY LAUGHING OUT LOUD you fucken dipshits. However in this context I figured, what the hell, might as well go mad and say lol and elide the possessive apostrophe in 'names'. I tell you I was like a man possessed, it was fucking scary how non-standard my grammatical formations were.

About three quarters of a second later, about four requests for private chats popped up. I was like woo I have never BEEN so popular. I decided to only answer three of them as I felt like turning somebody down for no reason just to slightly make him question his own sense of superiority. Plus, Katya is no slag who talks with four men at once. She is a LADY. An internet lady.

The three guys I had conversations with were vinnie_bruklyns_most_wanted, sexy_guy_hot4u and jamesuk. I chose vinnie_bruklyns_most_wanted because - seriously - how often do you get to chat to the most wanted guy in Brooklyn on the teenchat message boards? Hardly EVER and I wasn't going to let that opportunity just pass me by. I went with sexy_guy_hot4u because I figured that his name, rather like Polonius's "comedy pastoral religious" comment in 'Hamlet' was a satiric poke at the naming traditions of contemporary theatre genres, was like an ironic pastiche, a satire - if you will - on the common naming traditions of internet chatrooms. Turns out it wasn't. Finally, I decided to chat with jamesuk because I liked the cut of his gib. His name was James. And he comes from the UK. Simple, effective, gets the job done. I approved.

Well about ten seconds in I realised that these chaps were not interested in making small talk. I mean, I TRIED, I TRIED to engage them in conversation. I talked to jamesuk about Hamlet - asked him if he thought that the wordless submission of Ophelia and - to an extent - Gertrude was indicitive of the lack of sexual equality in Elizibethan England. His response? "lol i dunno much about that i know a lot about sex tho". I don't see why he was lolling, Ophelia is no laughing matter. Seriously. She's like the least amusing Shakespearean character of all time. I'd rather spend time with CANNIBAL than Ophelia, and Cannibal is like some little pig monster dude. At least he dances and beats up those drunk guys. But I'm digressing; the beautiful soliloquies of Shakespeare are tangential to the point in hand.

sexy_guy_hot4u told me about his penis in his second message. We then had the conversation that you read at the beginning of this post. Do you like the subtle way that I like, depth charged him in my response? He expected me to be really impressed that he did did all this working out and stuff but I managed to beat all that with the whole 'I'm taller than you' thing. I bet it really bugs him that he isn't quite 6 ft fall. No matter how much weight he pumps or how big his penis is, he's just a little short guy.

Although, talking of penises, it appears that nine inches isn't actually that impressive. If I was to believe what I was being told, in the three conversations I was dealing with a whole twenty seven inches of penal matter. Seems that nine inches is the new standard. Things have certainly changed since my day and I have to tell you, it did kind of make me feel a little ashamed of my paltry two and half. But then I realised - they all believed me when I said I had 16DD boobs ("What are they like?" "Well, my dad likes them")... maybe, just maybe... THEY WEREN'T TELLING THE TRUTH.

LIARS? ON THE INTERNET? I DON'T BELIEVE IT.

So maybe vinnie_bruklyns_most_wanted wasn't actually the most wanted man in Brooklyn. I mean I kept asking him what his crimes were and he was just like 'not tellin u lol u sound like da police'. And maybe sexy_guy_hot4u didn't really like eating cats (well, that's what I thought he said). Once this horrible realisation crushed down upon me - that the people I was talking to weren't nubile young bodybuilders - to be honest I couldn't get into the cybersex. I mean, they tried. sexy_guy_hot4u informed me that his 'cock was wet'. vinnie_bruklyns_most_wanted told me all about his huge balls. And as for jamesuk, the things he wanted to do to me *blushes and fans self*.

But really, I just couldn't get into it because I kept imagining that they were a bunch of bespectacled thirteen year old virgins with braces and really skinny chests who wanted to be strong so they borrowed their father's weights set and did bench presses with 7.5kg on each side and then drank that bodybuilder protein mix and then flexed in front of the mirror for about twenty minutes every day before squeezing their spots and wiping the pus on the shaving mirror and then going to their rooms to download jerky jpgs of Gwen Stephani and cruise teenchat for pussy before going totally mental and playing three or four hours of Halo online under the username of 'darth sauron' and then getting really mad when their mums come in and tell them to go outside and then they go outside really moodily and they kick over a flowerpot then their mums shout at them so they go to their rooms and check eBay to see if they're still top bidder of that signed picture of Courtney Love and then going back on teenchat in the vain hope that somebody will agree to have phone sex but nobody's on so its back to the Gwen Stephani jpg search before going to bed at 9.30 because they have nothing else to fill their lives.

It's not as sexy when you think of it like that. But some of them are SO CONVINCING; like, I asked jamesuk if he had ever kissed a girl and he was like 'Yeah loads lol' so I asked him what the hell he was doing on teenchat at 340 in the afternoon and he was just like 'i'm bored of the girls i Know so i wanna meet nu ones'. That's pretty convincing and I found myself getting sucked back into the web of lies, so I made a picture which I have pinned to my wall to remind me NEVER TO TRUST PEOPLE I MEET ON THE INTERNET. I think that it sums up the issue pretty well:

Anyway. After a bit I got bored of them trying to persuade me to a: talk about my boobs, b: give them my phone number or c: stop talking about Chaucer's use of extended irony, so I told all of them that I was eight and closed the private chat windows. Back in the main room, Lady Japan was still talking about kimodos to herself. Emily - or shall I call her by her chatroom name, Kirsten - was also there, so we decided to pretend to be lesbians and talk about our boobs IN THE MAIN ROOM. I got kicked out literally five seconds later for saying 'My right boob has swelled up to about eight times its usual size, you really shouldn't have injected it with all that bacon grease' (it made sense). Apparently such behaviour isn't tolerated in the teenchat main forum. I GOT KICKED OUT OF TEENCHAT FOR BEING TOO SEXUALLY EXPLICIT.

That's how rock and roll I am, man.

I should have gone back in and talked to that pee and poo guy. I bet he'd have some interesting tales to tell.

A-Z Henley 2007

2007-07-10T11:15:00.000+01:00

I was at Henley for the past week, from Wednesday through to Saturday. It was fit. Here are 26 letters that vaguely correspond to things that happened at Henners this year.

Asahi Boat House Bar
Right. Sorry to start this list off with a negative but WHAT THE FUCK IS THE ASAHI BAR? Along the towpath (the long muddy stretch next to the river) there are a load of expensive-ass bars and pubs and places that sell overpriced fish and chips. The majority of these change each year; HOWEVER there are a few that are well known and have become landmarks in their own right. The Barn Bar, for example, near to the start, is possibly the most excellent of these; however close on its heels is the Bud Bar, which is right at the end. A good walk down the towpath involves visiting the Bud Bar, purchasing a beer, drinking it slowly while walking down the course and then finishing it in time for arrival at the Barn Bar at which point you trip over a picnic table and slash up your leg. Which I of course didn't do... However NOW the Bud Bar has GONE and been replaced by this Asahi Bar shit. And it's all japanesey and stuff and I was just like WOAH when I saw it. And that wasn't a happy amazed "Woah" of impressedness or a Keanu Reeves style 'Woah' of 'My mind has just been blown'. It was more of an angry confused WOAH, like "WOAH. Woah. Woah. Stop one second here. Re-re wind it, flip it, reverse it. WHERE IS THE BARN BAR?" I mean essentially it was exactly the same, except with a different sign. BUT IT WAS THE PRINCIPLE. Because now when I say 'Let's go to the Bud Bar', people would be like 'The Bud Bar?... don't you mean THE ASAHI BOAT HOUSE BAR?' And man, that would get annoying.
I tell you I was confused and I very nearly didn't buy any beer from there at all.

Becca off Hollyoaks
BECCA OFF HOLLYOAKS WAS IN THE BARN BAR ON SATURDAY NIGHT:

Becca off Hollyoaks

I tell you it was jolly exciting. I was star struck at seeing a demi-ex-celebrity drinking alcohol. It was pretty surprising actually as the last I saw her she was dead in a bed, having been bare stabbed up. It really shattered the whole illusion of reality created by the production designers of the Hollyoaks crew and for a few minutes I was unable to process what I saw. Eventually though I plucked up the courage (read: drank some more centurions) and kind of rolled up. I chose my best chat up line.
'BECCA!' I cried smoothly. 'I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD!'
She was impressed by my new tshirt, I could see, and so she turned on her seduction rays. "Uh, no."
"BUT YOU WERE STABBED, BECCA!!!!!"
"It was just a flesh wound," she shot back. Man Becca off Hollyoaks is clever. I was taken aback. I was going to ask her if the rumours of her forcing all of her friends to refer to her as "Becca off Hollyoaks" was true but then her boyfriend showed up. I steeled my eyes at him and we were going to have a fight but then instead someone took a photo of me and Becca off Hollyoaks together.
BUT THAT'S NOT IT FOR MINOR CELEBRITIES. While I was walking down the street, some guy who used to be on Big Brother apparently walked across the road. I mean, I didn't recognise him because I'm too busy having a life (writing blogs about seeing minor celebrities) but the drunk girl in front of me did.
"ALEX OFF BIG BROTHER!" she screamed. He turned around and waved. "LOSER!" she responded. He looked really sad. I tell you, I loll'd.

Centurion
Centurion is this drinking game that I was taught at Henners. It is like the most fun thing ever. Essentially it boils down to having 100 shots of beer, one a minute, for 100 minutes. Me and Joe decided to play it on the Saturday night so we bought lots of ice to make my crate of beer really ice cold and then we sat next to the campfire where they were cooking sausages (which was being lit using gin, by the way) and played. We also decided to make a different toast for every shot. I tell you about 30 shots in we were running out of people to toast. I can't remember the exact number we got to but it was about 65 before we ran out of beer/money and at that point we were like "TOAST TO THE BRIDGE!" Man drinking is fun.

Dog
One of the women walking down the towpath had this cute dog.

Entrepreneurship
Basically I have started my own tshirt company, selling stencilled tshirts to members of the public (read: suckers). I brought five tshirts to Henners with the intention of selling them. DID I SELL THEM. Yes I did. I also charged £8 a pop when they are - to be honest - not worth that. Tasty profit to Thomas. Tshirt to my many adoring fans. Everyone's a winner!

First Eight
Our First Eight showed up at Henley and raced a bit. They lost.

Girls
OH MY GOD THERE WERE SO MANY HOT GIRLS AT HENLEY. I think it was because they were all rich. Thus upper class. Thus they had better genes. But every few steps along the course I was like :-o, :-o, :-o hot hot hot hot. It was bloody annoying because I had decided that I was going to avoid females of the female persuasion for the whole of Henley (it turns out that every time I kiss a girl and then don't immediately enter in a sham relationship, Lucia SOMEHOW finds out and gets annoyed and I can't be doing with it). BUT still, you don't have to go into the sty to admire the pigs and so frankly I spent the entire week saying WOAH. And in this case it was a good woah. There were also NO fat girls at all, which was a bonus, as the path was pretty narrow and I don't think the many wheelchair users at the regatta would have appreciated a lardy.

Henley
Is the place where I was at.

Injury
For some reason I spent this entire Henley getting injured. I am literally COVERED in cuts, bruises, bite marks and scrapes. On the Thursday I was sat in a pub and was frankly kind of gone with the absinthe fairies. Close to hand were a kitchen knife and a fork a spoon and I decided to pretend that my leg was a tasty steak (I was hungry) and so I busily started sawing at my shin. The knife was ACTUALLY SHARP and like sliced open my leg. I squealed and dropped the fork. At that point my friend Joe arrived and saw me slicing open my leg with a knife and so now everyone thinks that I am a self-harmer. This image was not improved by the fact that on the FRIDAY night I needed a wee so I went into the forest, tripped over a branch and landed in a patch of brambles and got two HUGE cuts up my leg. Added to the bruises on my thigh from the time I stabbed myself with the spoon from the pub (made sense at the time) and the cut on my shin from the Saturday morning, in which I got out of my tent, bought some yoghurt from Waitrose, walked to the Barn Bar, sat on the picnic table, fell backwards off the picnic table and caught my shin on a sticky out bolt, I LOOK LIKE AN ABUSE VICTIM. Facebook should show pictures of ME to get donations for the RSPCC. I also have some scratches on my back, which I have literally no concept of. I can't even understand how those got there. Oh man.

Johnson (Boris)
BORIS JOHNSON IS THE MP OF HENLEY. I didn't actually come into contact with him at the regatta but Curry did and said that he got into some really beaten up car with a fat girl who may have been his daughter. So that's good. But the thing is, me and Boz both go to the same Oxford College. And by that logic, if we say that Henley is a timeless regatta in which everybody has an equal share of History, which means that technically, I am the future MP of Henley and thus I already practically own the regatta. Morally. It's just that time hasn't caught up yet. Yeah. With logic like that I still don't see why they didn't let me into the Steward's Enclosure. I mean I TRIED, I explained it in detail and drew a little diagram of timelines and stuff but did they listen? NO. Bloody fascists.

Kebab
I HAD MY FIRST KEBAB EVER ON THE SATURDAY NIGHT. It was pretty nice. Although this was after the centurion so I think that anything would have been nice. As a bonus feature, while walking along we found an empty Pimm's jug on the floor. Steal.

Local Celebrity
The local celebrity in this case is me. Basically on Saturday I was walking along in my board shorts, surreptitiously stealing food from the parents' picnic when suddenly I had a tap on my shoulder. I looked round to see Thomas William Kempner's mother, a woman with whom I have had literally no contact in my entire life, except to see her picking him up from rowing and cheering at the bank, and the occasional 'Your mum' joke. She said something like "Tom, I would like to say 'Nice board shorts', but I think that would mean that I have read your blog!".
I was literally like WTF. Turns out that like half of the rowing mothers are avid readers of this blog. This is a worrying development, right. MOTHERS READ THIS BLOG. And not just MY mother, but random boat club mothers. Actually that's pretty annoying. Why do the hot teenage sisters/nieces/aunts not read the blog and come up to mollycoddle me? I would appreciate some mollycoddlage from hot teenage sisters. But no. All I get is the mothers. Sigh. I suppose we must work with the hand that God deals us.
Of course, I immediately scanned back to previous posts to see if I had said anything incriminating. The most recent one was about death and illness and buying board shorts. Fairly serious topic. Ok. That's good. The mothers think I am a deep thinker and interested in eternal issues of mortality and death etc. Not bad. What was the post before that? Oh yeah, that was the one in which I talked about going onto internet chatrooms and pretending to be a girl in order to get perverts to try to have cybersex with me.
Shit.
Oh well, in retaliation for mothers reading my blog, I am going to fill it with disgusting semi-pornographic references to their sons' sex lives. That ought to make for some amusing after dinner reading.

Midgets
So I walked into the toilet and saw Tom Kempner having sex with a midget. ONLY KIDDING. Sorry, Mrs Kempner. No. But for some reason, this regatta was filled to the brim with little short people of all shapes and sizes (assuming that the 'all sizes' means 'small'). There was a little umpire fella on a bike and another little man walking along the towpath then another little chap walking along in a snazzy suit. When I saw him I was like "If we both rush him at the same time I reckon we could take him" to Curry in my ironic way. Actually thinking about it, this year at Henley will be remembered in my mind for being filled with midgets, cripples and weirdoes. Like there was this old woman who just went up and down the towpath in a wheelchair. There's this one bit that is quite a steep bridge so she got this tonk rower to push her up the incline squealing DON'T LET GO DON'T LET GO. And then when he got to the top she was like LET GO LET GO and she whizzed all the way down the path at like 20mph, bowling people out of the way. I have to say that at that point I was like 'Woah, lucky bitch' as I had been walking for ages and my feet hurted.
I think I saw more disabled people this year than I did black people. How funny and indicative.

Naughty
I am a mischievous little scamp, I am. Oh I am IRREPRESSIBLE with my infectious sense of fun. Don't try and pin me down, I am just a whirlwind of naughtiness and wit.
Basically on the Saturday night Curry and I unpegged Kempner's tent while he was asleep in it. AND IT WASN'T JUST HIM. Annawood his girlfriend was in there too. We all know my thoughts about Annawood so lets not get into that here. But I was pretty sure that they were asleep, and not doing anything else, but you know how these teenagers are nowadays, eh Mrs K? Frankly I wouldn't trust them.
But anyway as me and Curry like, wandered into the campsite after all the centurions and Pimm's and kebab and fun, one of us was like 'HEY LET'S UNPEG KEMPNER'S TENT WHILE HE'S ASLEEP!' and then the other was like 'YEAH LET'S DO IT!' and then we did like one of those jumping chest bumps that you see fat kids doing at preview screenings of action films. Of course, to achieve this naughtiness we needed to be crafty.
"Ok Curry," I whispered conspiratorially, "We need to be silent, silent like two NINJA SNAKES!" To show off what I meant by this, I attempted to vanish into the darkness and tripped over a guy rope. It was bloody embarrassing, I'll tell you that for free. Boy was my face red. But anyway we unpegged the tent. To be honest neither of us were sure of what the intention of this exercise was. We more or less expected it to just, like, stay unpegged and be fine. But instead THE ENTIRE THING COLLAPSED with like a sad pofffffff sound. Curry and I were like wtf and ran away. Unfortunately Kempy and his little Gestapo squad tracked me down like the dog I was. Kempy then unpegged MY tent yelling "IS THIS FUNNY TOM? IS IT? I'M LAUGHING. HA HA! IS THIS SO FUNNY NOW?"
Frankly I was in no state to be fighting back so I was just like "Aww maaaaaaan don't do THAT don't take it out on the tent, that is NOT NECESSART unpeg me instead. Oh now it fell over, that's a shame."
It was bloody exciting.

Old Blades
The name of some garden where all of the parents rock up and have a big picnic. Basically when that happens all of the rowers descend, eat all of the food and steal the Pimm's and then fuck off again. It rules. That is what happened this year. HOWEVER later on that night, at about eight, I was walking up the towpath towards the Barn Bar by myself (after the 50 centurions), like completely drunk as a skunk, and I saw that there were still some parents there, tidying up. Being the kind fellow I am I kind of clambered over the fence and helped with the tidying operation. Then apparently I said something sexist to a mother, stole a load of chocolates, and fled the scene. I then gave the chocolates to handsome women that I saw along the riverbank. NO WOMAN CAN HATE YOU WHEN YOU GIVE HER CHOCOLATE.

Pimm's
Ah, Pimm's. Drink of Henley. I must have consumed about two bottles of the stuff on my own, probably because of my practise of mixing it in about a 40-60 ratio in pint glasses. I am now sick of it. But that's ok, I should be in the mood for Pimm's about this time next year!!! Yeah!!!!

Queen Mother Challenge Cup
This is an Open Men's category for Coxless Quads, which are sculling boats featuring four rowers, and no coxswain. Nobody cares about coxless quads. I don't think I watched a single quad race.
On the other hand, the Queen Mother Challenge Cup begins with a Q.

Rowing
The sport wot iz done at Henley. It is jolly exciting and I have lost count of the thrilling races I watched this year. Oh wait, I found count again. It was about 6.

Stewards
The special place where only la crème doo la crème of the rowing world can enter (read: those wearing a shirt or tie). Naturally I figured that nobody would want to go there so I rolled up wearing jeans and a bright green BARRY tshirt. Naturally in the first day everyone else IN BLOODY HENLEY was there for the racing. So I sat hunched by the river looking like quite the fool. I was literally like, the only man in the entire town not wearing eveningwear. I looked like hired help. I kind of wish I had some fat gloves and a spade so I could pretend to be digging a hole or whatever it is the working class does, and the rest of the posh totty would respect and fear me.

Tent
I STAYED IN A TENT. It was so good (except for the regrettable moment when it fell over due to THOMAS KEMPNER'S influence. Knobhead (Sorry Mrs K). I decided to pitch away from everyone else in case I scored (hah), and so that I could just run away and hide when I lost interest in speaking to other people. This worked PRETTY well. However unfortunately at about the same time as I arrived, these two girls in the pitch behind me also rolllled up. Now they were actually pretty hot so I was ding-dong. However THEY WERE LITERALLY THE MOST BORING BITCHES EVER. They both woke up at about, I dunno, 740am EVERY DAY and would just discuss absolutely NOTHING in loud piercing voices. Like, one morning they discussed the order in which they would pack their bags for TEN SOLID MINUTES. I was just not impressed so on the final night I whipped up a lynch mob and we burnt their tent to the ground: FACT.

Upper Thames Rowing Club
This is a club on the Henley course. It begins with U. It also has a really expensive fish and chips stand. BUT A FREE GIN AND TONIC ONE. So it evens out.

Violence
Henley is a violent place. However, the violence is of a 'Gentlemanly' slant. Even the pikeys are slightly sophisticated. Let me give you an example. I was walking back to the campsite by myself on the Friday evening. I was in a bit of a bad mood. Anyway as I crossed Henley bridge, this group of four or five 'pikeys' on the other side started yelling at me. It was rather obscene and I know that there are mothers reading this so I shall not repeat what was said (it was 'fuck'). Anyway I was in no mood for this, like I was in my bad-ass-mofo mode so I was just like LEAVE ME ALONE YOU INGRATES (in slightly coarser language). Naturally they were all like "wot? wot dyou say?" but I strolled off down the bridge without giving them a second thought or glance.
About a minute later I got a tap on the shoulder and I was presented with a load of pikeys surrounding me. They must have been so offended by my language that they stopped where they were going, climbed over two barriers, crossed the road and pushed past all the people on the bridge. The lead pikey was wearing gloves. He had some nice hair.
"Oi, why you swearing at us?" he enquired.
"Because you were swearing at ME," I responded.
"No we weren't."
What exactly do you say to that? It was a filthy lie and he knew it. Anyway what exactly else would they have been saying? "Wayhey!!! Did you see the racing today? Radley were bloody good weren't they!!!" NO THEY WOULDN'T.
So I was basically like "Yes you were."
I think he saw that he wasn't going to win this battle with reasoning as I was clearly far more intelligent than him. DAMN IT I just realised - if I'd told them that I'm gonna go to Oxford they would probably have like, apologised, admitted their mistake and gone on their way, realising that I was their better. Stupid Thomas why didn't you think of saying that? Anyway, I didn't say anything more, and so he settled for the tried and tested "Mate, if you swear at me again I'm gonna BITE YOUR FUCKING FACE OFF."
For about three seconds I just stared blankly at him trying to work out this threat. I am not sure of the practical possibility of this. I mean Curry when coxing occasionally breaks out a "YOU TRY TO UNDERTAKE ME AND I'LL BITE YOUR FUCKING NOSE OFF, SUNSHINE" which is a more realistic threat. But my FACE? I mean the guy had a big mouth but surely not that big. Unless he was going to bite it off in lots of smaller bites, which could work, I guess.
I mean I was in such a bad mood that I felt like getting really beaten up anyway. So I very nearly just reached over and poked him really hard in the centre of the chest. Unfortunately I was not QUITE that drunk yet so instead I was like "Well if you don't swear at me, I won't swear at you, then nobody's face gets bitten off."
He thought about this proposal. He repeated the face-biting jibe.
One of his friends obviously saw that I was HARD and probably armed to the teeth with Hamlet quotations so was like "Hey Quentin, leave it mate" (I couldn't remember the actual name).
"Look, I'll cut out my swearing if you cut out your biting," I said. Quentin narrowed his mongoloid eyes at me. Then he was like "Ok safe" and we shook hands on it.
Let me repeat that.
WE SHOOK HANDS ON IT.
This is how sophisticated and gentlemanly Henley is. Even the pikeys conclude their drunken scuffles in the street with a firm handshake and a mutual understanding. It was brilliant.

Water
Water. Like the water I dropped my mobile telephone into on the Friday. Basically me and Curry had made ourselves a little picnic by the bank of hummus and bread and tortilla chips and chicken and a whole chorizo sausage (the chorizo was a bad investment). Anyway, when we were finished one of the midgets ran past. I was like 'That's exciting' so I LEAPT to my feet to get a better look. With a milquetoast little sliding sound that was almost disappointed, my phone tumbled out of my pocket. It fell to the bank, bounced OH SO SLOWLY, and then plopped into the water. I sadly watched the Nokia sign disappear into the depths.
"Oh, that is a shame," I said solemnly, then STRIPPED OFF and dived into the water to fetch it (read: reached in and found it almost immediately). It did not seem to be doing that well. The screen was all washy and throbbing and every time I dialled a number it gave a really weird gurgling noise. Although tbh I don't know if that really made a noticeable difference in the functionality of the phone - the Nokia N73 is a piece of SHIT. You get a text, press 'Read text', then you might as well go downstairs and make a cup of tea while the fricking thing loads properly. It frequently freezes up, randomly stops working and pressing 'Answer message' will usually force the camera to load up. NOTA BENE: NEVER BUY A NOKIA N73. I don't even know why I bothered going into the water to rescue the damn thing.
Water? Like the water I fell into on Saturday while walking to the Barn Bar (this was after my visit to Old Blades, before meeting Becca off Hollyoaks)? I was trying to be sneaky and avoid the slow moving people traffic so I attempted to leap balletically over a hillock. Didn't work and I fell into the water, next to an old lady. She looked at me inquisitively and I gave a cheeky wink as I climbed out with a fish in my ear and a frog on my shoe. The frog was smoking a cigarette and playing the guitar really well. It looked very nice, but slightly dim.

Xylophone
"The xylophone is a musical instrument in the percussion family which probably originated in Indonesia. It consists of wooden bars of various lengths that are struck by plastic, wooden, or rubber mallets. Each bar is tuned to a specific pitch of the musical scale. Xylophones are tuned to different scale systems depending on their origin, including pentatonic, heptatonic, diatonic, or chromatic." (Wikipedia)

Young people
Lots of young people about this year. Too young. No babies, though, which was a plus.

Zebra
No zebra to be seen this year. Which was a shame.

THAT WAS HENLEY. Now I have to find something else to fill my empty and pathetic life with. I KNOW. HEROIN.

Job Applications [and cocaine] [and Harry Potter]

2007-07-17T18:26:00.001+01:00

Yes. I'm back to looking for a job again.

And yes, I am coming against the same seemingly unsurmountable obstacle: I don't really want a job. I just want the money. So basically my job search involves wandering up and down the street, seeing a 'Staff Wanted Sign', deciding that I don't really have what it takes to work in Monsoon, and then continuing to walk on. Occasionally I will say to myself "Thomas, you need the money, so bite the bullet, be a man, and ask for an application form to work in Mothercare." Then I walk in and give them my CV and pick up - sometimes - a little form offering employment possibilities. I never ever fill in the form. I add it to the little drawer in my desk that is filled with chocolate, love letters, and photographs of my own head, taken from various angles. This is the final resting place of any application form I am given. As for CVs... I feel that they occupy the bin. Although thinking about it the other day a guy had a long look at my CV and said "Wow, you have a string of As and A stars here, chum."
He called me chum! I was like yessssssssss. Then he said he'd call me. He never did. I SAT UP THE WHOLE NIGHT WAITING FOR HIS CALL. I cried.
Thinking about it, this is like a repeat of what happened last year. At least this time I am being a bit proactive and have started my own stencilled tshirt company. So far I've spent about 70 quid on fancy paint, shirts, envelopes etc. I have only taken in £40. This means that I'm LOSING money, despite the fact that I am charging extortionate (if you are a potential customer, read the word 'extortionate' as 'low low low') prices. However hopefully more money will come in when I get PayPal to work. I hope. Dear God I hope. By the way if anybody wants a tshirt please get in touch and I will sell you one for a reduced price.

So while I slowly but surely corner the tshirt market, I'm meanwhile on a search for more gainful and easy employment. This means that I have a fucken STACK of job application forms. It's great. I like the wording on all of them. I mean, here are some frontrunners:

Sainsbury's Checkout Assistant:
You’ll make sure customers receive a great service at the checkout. You’ll do this by:
- ensuring goods are scanned, packed and paid for without delay
- being friendly to customers
- helping out store colleagues
How will I do a great job?
Providing an outstanding service at the checkout is one of the most important roles in the store because there’s nothing that irritates customers more than a long queue. Working on a checkout means dealing with shoppers all day, so telling the difference between people who want to chat and people who would rather not is a handy skill. There are set break times, so you’ll have to be happy sitting down for extended periods.

I like this because it tell me how I'll do a GREAT job. I looked but there wasn't a section on how to do an acceptable job, a slightly substandard job, or even a plain shoddy job. And I DID look. "You'll be rude to customers, molest their children and spit in their soufflet when they aren't looking". I don't think that this job would suit me. Firstly, because I find it difficult to tell the difference between people who want to chat and those who would rather not. This is a major problem with me and one that is almost running my life at the moment. I mean, I'm ALWAYS trying to pick a conversation with people at the pub and stuff and frankly it gets pretty wearing. As people go I wouldn't rank myself as being top of the list for 'tact' and 'noticing that other people don't want to chat and just want their shopping packed'. I once tried to get a deaf and dumb boy to play snap and frankly he was RUBBISH so I span him in circles and moved all the furniture in his house around. That was the worst birthday party ever.

My best friend Sarah K used to work as a checkout girl for Sainsbury's. She didn't like it very much. However I cheered her up by visiting her now and again and I tell you, the look on her little face when she saw me every day was worth the 59p I spent on the chocolate reighndeer.

Starbuck's 'Barista'
I do not know what the FUCK a barista is. According to the websites, all baristas are asians who are having a hell of a time playing with shiny coffee machines.

ASIAN

ASIAN

SLAVE

I am not asian so I don't think that the job is for me. Equally, I would not consider myself to be an "adaptable, self-motivated, passionate, creative team player". I'm more akin to one of those old cars that won't move until you get out the front and wind it up with a crank, and then when it does move it goes at about ten miles an hour and the steering wheel goes about four degrees to either left or right and it won't stop or change speed once you've set it going and it ends up crashing into a barn and breaking the metaphor. My other best best friend Stephanie is a barista. She makes coffee (when she isn't too busy snorting cocaine off of the floor of the shop). I think that she only got the job because she saw the letters 'co' on the menu and her drug-addled brain thought that all they sold was cocaine. They gave her the job because she has big cheekbones and so looks a bit like an elderly asian man:

... and she keeps it now because it funds her habit and means that she doesn't have to turn so many tricks under the table during the school prom to get her next fix; and anyway the FOOLS at Starbucks HQ mistake her being monged off her crank-noggin for being a self-motivated and passionate team player. Little do they know that she is actually just completely buzzed like 24-7. Has anyone ever seen Scarface? You know that bit at the end when Steph (sorry I mean Tony Montana) has just a huge pile of cocaine on his desk and is snorting it by burying his head in it? That's like an average night out for Steph. Actually fuck it that is like an average night IN for Steph. Seriously. When she sneezes, white stuff comes out of her nose. I guess that explains why she professes a love of 'intelligent rap' in her Facebook profile; her brain is nothing but a mushy apple core of wasted dreams and broken neural connectors. I mean I phoned her the other day and I was like "Hey Steph do you wanna go out for a bike ride?" because it's been a while since me and Steph went for a bike ride and visited the orchid where we spent our childhood together, but she was just like "NARGH TOM I'M TOO BUSY DOING LOTS OF COCAINE AND BEING HIGH" and I was just like :-o
You know what? This isn't even a blog any more. It's a motherfucking INTERVENTION. Steve. Please, put down the dirty syringe and the spoon. All of your friends love you and want you to GET HELP. I mean, we've all been in your situation - many times I have looked in the mirror and said to myself "Tom, your choice of poetry and music is woefully and purposefully esoteric and elitist; time to take some drugs" BUT DO I? NO I DON'T. I quietly sit in my room and colour something in. Sometimes I do a dot-to-dot or, indeed, a word search. Why don't you just do the same? You have too many beautiful dreams to let it all end like this, in a tidalwave of vomit and bad cheekbones! We can help you! What would Koyaansiquatsi say if he saw you today? He would feel let down, Stephanie. YES HE WOULD. PUT DOWN THE SPOON.

Maybe I should just get hooked on drugs instead of getting a job. That would be an interesting life-affirming experience.
[Maybe for legal reasons I should say that for legal reasons, Steph's drug addiction is only a rumour and definitely not based in any way on truth. Wink]

Or I guess I could just work for Oxfam. I saw a sign on an Oxfam shop in Kingston that said "Are you honest, reliable or hardworking? Volunteer for Oxfam!"
I like the word 'or' in there. It implies that I could be honest and reliable, but lazy as fuck. Or I could work hard, and be constantly relied upon to lie to customers and steal stuff. Or I could be really honest and work hard. When I show up. Which is like a 50/50 chance from day to day. Man that'd rule I should totally work for Oxfam. I could steal all the good stuff for myself and eat all the Aid parcels and stuff. Mmm, nourishing. Then I'd take photographs of myself eating the food and include it so when the Africans open their parcels on Christmas day it's just photos of me enjoying all of their food.

I think I'm going to lose interest in the whole job search idea soon.

* * *

It's that time of year again, so here is my prediction for the last few paragraphs of Harry Potter 7:

"So you're telling me," said Harry disbelievingly, "That you have all been taking the piss for the past seven years?"
"Yeah!" said Ron, sniggering. "I can't BELIEVE you fell for it."
"So I'm not really a wizard?"
"No chance!" said Hermione, taking off her wig and revealing herself to actually be a heavily made-up man in drag. "Wizards don't even EXIST, you tit."
"My parents?"
"Oh, they're alive," said Dumbledore, walking past smoking a rollup and clutching a greasy back issue of FHM. "They've been watching the whole thing on CCTV with me and having a right laugh."
"But... HOGWARTS?"
"Made of polystyrene. Everyone's an actor. We've all existed for the past seven years to make you look stupid."
"WHY?" said Harry, whose bottom lip was quivering unstoppably.
"I dunno. Bill Gates fancied a laugh I guess. He's the one who paid for it."
Suddenly, inspiration struck Harry. "Wait a second! I don't believe you! I have seen so many wonderful creatures and monsters, things that can't POSSIBLY have been real! Like Dobby the house-elf! I remember his weird bulbous head and shiny brown skin and stubby little legs! He can't have possibly been anything OTHER than a goblin."
Dumbledore rolled his eyes and took a deep drag of his ciggie. "Harry. Do you know what a 'black person' is?"
Harry stared blankly at him.
Dumbedore sighed, then pulled a photograph out of his pocket. "Here's Dobby pre-makeup."

Harry fell to his knees. "This doesn't make any sense!"
"No Harry," spat Ron balefully. "I'll tell you what doesn't make sense! In book two of the Harry Potter series the Chamber of Secrets is accessed through an opening hidden inside a sink, however on page 500 it also clearly states that the chamber was built by Salazar Slytherin around 990 AD, many centuries BEFORE the introduction of indoor piped plumbing! Eh? DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE! THAT'S ANACHORNISTIC! BUT DID YOU SEE ME COMPLAINING AT THE TIME? NO! Now fuck off."

Scar.

The End.

Now let's all wait and see for when the book comes out to see if I'm correct.

"Sophia's" (???) Party (Saturday 4h August 2007)

2007-08-06T00:23:00.000+01:00

Oh God it was horrible. You know those cabinets you get at the museum that are basically there to amuse the weirdoes, and they have all of the weird mutated stuffed animals; like two headed cats and penguins with giant lips and duck-billed platypuses? Right. This was what this party was like. It was as though some wealthy twisted billionaire had collected all of the odd looking people in the Ashford area and then forced them to all sit in a room somewhere and nervously look at each other while sipping warm alcohol.

I know what you are going to say. 1: 'Judge not lest ye be judged' and 2: 'If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. You are being shallow' and 3: 'Well YOU were at the party too so that surely makes YOU a freak too Thomas'. And my responses to those statements are:

1: You are not allowed to simply quote from the Bible to back up your argument, which is in this case 'Be nice to ugly people'. I mean, I could do it too. Like, uh, you know that bit in the Bible when Jesus cures all of those guys with leprosy? I dunno how, he probably looks at them really hard and a beam of red light comes out of his forehead like in Firestarter or something. But anyway, Jesus is the only guy who goes near the lepers, the rest of the villagepeople are like woah get the hell away from me man, and they make the lepers go and sit out in the cold outside of the town. Do the villagers get PUNISHED by Jesus for shunning the lepers? I don't know, but I'll make an educated guess that he doesn't napalm down their town or something, so they more or less get off scott free. Jesus probably says 'Look, you have to be nice to the lepers, and if you have superpowers like me you can cure them and then they can be fine!' and the villagers are all like cool jesus, my bad. I guess my point is that, if the people at these party were lepers, I'm more than willing to be one of the villagers who shuns them and writes mean blogs about them and makes them wear bells round their neck and live outside the village. I'll happily stand in the crowd and cheer as Jesus comes and cures them of their general weirdnesses, and then I will be their friends. HOWEVER I'm not gonna USURP Jesus's role and try to cure them myself. What am I, some kind of blasphemer? Pfft.

2: I am shallow, yes. Shallow as YOUR MUM. I am also immature. Your MUM is immature. Your MUM doesn't have anything nice to say.

3: I WASN'T PROPERLY INVITED. I kind of tagged along with Amy [who is my new sidekick] as I was bored. Now some of you might say 'Well you were a loser that even the freaks didn't want you', but I say that I think of it as more akin to a scientist tagging along with some soldiers on an expedition into the middle of the jungle to study rare orchids or spiders or something. I don't know.

What I DO know was that within three seconds of entering the house with Amy I was being asked to sign a cake.
"Go on!" enthused the hostess lady, who was actually very nice (although she had a bit of a square head and bore an unpleasant resemblance to a fatter version of my ex...), "It's for Chris's birthday!"
"Who. Is. Chris." I mumbled, staring blankly at the homemade cake, which looked like an unleavened green brick.
"It's his birthday today! This was meant to be a small surprise party but someone told him so I just invited LOADS of people!" she gestured madly around the room. There were three people there, all of whom were staring quietly into space. Other than me and Amy where was nobody else in the house.
"... a few more people might come later," added the hostess, who was called Sophia (I think... it might have been Sonya thinking about it). "But let me introduce everybody!"
There were three people in the room to meet, all of whom had utterly forgettable names, but who were all fascinating to look at due to their various oddities. The first was a guy called. I can't remember I think it was Paul. But his head was shaped EXACTLY like a coconut. And his hair was short and spikey, so he looked like a combination between a cartoon Steve Pemberton and a monkey. He was like grunt. The second was a really really fat guy who was wearing a glasses, a volumous faded pink polo-shirt that was pooled with sweat, and khaki shorts. He also had a haircut that looked like two toupees glued together. He told us all a fascinating story that was along the lines of "Well my cricket team was due to play here today... AND THEY DID!", and everyone cheered and high fived and did jumping chest bumps and then talked about how great it was to all work at Thorpe Park. Oh yeah this was a party filled with people who worked at Thorpe Park. Unfortunately, none of them knew my crazy friend Emily which was a shame.
The third was a girl and she was actually alright looking. Now, we all know me - THE VAGINA HUNTER, and I was like heyyyyyy EVEN THOUGH I HAD COME WITH AMY - that's what kind of a cad I am! Anyway, the hostess introduced me as "Uhh... Tom?" and then introduced HER as "Paul's Susan". I made up the names because I instantly forgot them the instant I heard that but you get the drift. The fact that EVEN WHEN SHE IS INTRODUCED she got paired with a guy meant that frankly I was like 'Sorry babe but nothing can happen between us'.
After that everyone stared blankly into the air. I picked up a plastic wrapper for some balloons and read the safety instructions. "Are there any under eights here? Because if so, they shouldn't be allowed to hold this bag."
Nobody said anything. Amy giggled nervously.
Then there was a commotion, and THE GROTESQUE walked in. I call her THE GROTESQUE (in capitals) because I never caught her name, and frankly, because she was fucking grotesque. The thing about fat teenage girls is that usually they know how to deal with it. Either they have a natural flair that lets them carry it. Or they dress well and you don't notice. Or they have pretty faces. Or, failing all of that, the fatness at least means that they have MASSIVE boobs that kind of distract you from the "Eugh" of the cellulite-infested legs and big round bellies. These things are true. Unfortunately, THE GROTESQUE had none of these things going for her. Firstly, she was fat. Not like BALLOON fat, because then you can say "Well being fat is like, her thing, her modus operandi, so she can't really be disappointed"; not big enough to fulfill the desires of some fetishist. But just tubby. However, her choice of clothing was like some peach coloured strappy top thing that was like half a colour shade away from her flushed pink cheeks so she looked like a big peach - Veruca Salt's long lost Downes Syndrome brother. She also had no tits, which I feel was just a piss-take on God's behalf. Secondly, she was ugly. She had a baby-face with thinning old-lady hair and one of those craven smiles that show teeth that are all slightly pointed and slightly too far apart. Oh, and braces, which topped off the whole Quasimodo effect perfectly. I wouldn't describe myself as particularly HOT STUFF (although, girls DO dig my "Ask me why Dairy Farming matters" badge, so hmmm...), but seriously. I looked at this girl and I thought to myself 'Jesus Christ. If I had to get up and look at that in the mirror every day, I honestly don't know if I'd want to go on living'. She honestly reminded me of like, some queer monster kept in the basements of some Russian abbey far off in the mountains and every year they take it out and lead it around the village on a lead to show the townspeople the dangers of temptation to Satan [yeah right... what do I know about Russian culture? Pfft]
Of course, I could be accused of being shallow and just concentrating on her visuals. I know this, and so I'm going to add the rider that she had the ugliest fucking voice I have ever heard. It was like pure on nails-on-a-blackboard screech. "SONYAAAAAAAAAA! SONYAAAAAAAAAA! SONYAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!" she cawed into the air, cackling and scratching her head. She had some sidekick who didn't do much but had one of those faces that SHOULD be hot but for some reason just isn't. It's like when you see those pictures of hot looking women on the internet and there's always something odd about them, then you find out later that it's just a photo of Myra Hindley photoshopped with different hair and lipstick. Eugh.
Anyway, THE GROTESQUE and MYRA (yeah right, like I even bothered to get HER name in the first place) 'kicked off' the party by bursting in and demanding Malibu, which they proceeded to guzzle down with Dr Pepper.
"AHHH SONYAAAA I'M SILLY INNIT!" gargled THE GROTESQUE, probably hawking up the half-digested remains of the raw pigeon she had murdered and eaten for her supper. "WE'RE GONNA GO GET A KEBAB!"
And so off they went, followed by coconut-head Paul, who looked smitten. Well, horses for courses, I guess. When she was gone, I breathed a sigh of relief and allowed the utterly horrified expression to leave my face, just for a second. However, at this point, the circus (sorry I mean 'party') had JUST GOT STARTED! YEAH!... and so in trooped a collection of new fun faces, such as...

TALL SIMON
This was his actual name. His name was Simon. And he was very tall. His hair was like, three shades of blonde and kept waving and interlooping. He also kept attempting to awkwardly flirt with Amy. Like he'd poke her every time he walked out of the room. And then he tried to hug her and she just stared at him. It was great as Amy basically does whatever I tell her so I was like AMY GO AND HUG THE MAN. So she did which left me free to wander into the other room and look at the party snack table.

It was, I suppose, in line with the rest of the party, serving - as it did:

Ale flavoured crisps (yes)

Rasberry jam tarts

Ground Cumin.

Ground Cumin, for those who do not know, is (according to Wikipedia, that Mecca of information) "the dried seed of the herb Cuminum cyminum, a member of the parsley family... a key component in both chili powder and curry powder." It is NOT, tradititionally, a tasty party snack. However it had been placed on the table next to the party poppers and party blowers. However, pride of place on the table went to the small model of a long nosed gnome/elf/goblin monster that had been placed lovingly next to the crisps. It was probably one of the more hideous things I've ever seen (and I have seen my best friend Steph throwing up her own stomach after a four day mescalene-ether binge); its glassy eyes and weird dead hangdog expression cut directly into my soul and made me want to throw up. So I stole it and put it in the fridge:

Unfortunately, Myra and THE GROTESQUE saw me through the window (they had been hiding behind it and then jumping up and roaring to scare people). They kind of tottered into the kitchen and were like WE SAW YOUUUUU HA HA HA LOL. As they walked towards me it was honestly like Resident Evil 4 and I kept hoping for a green 'Suplex' button to appear above my head. Unfortunately no such thing happened and I was saved from having to actually respond by Sophia/Sonya/Whatever coming in and introducing some new people - "This is JP and Amstill!"
They were cool dudes. Unfortunately, I was like WHAT? and she was like JP and Amstill and i was like WHAT and she was like John and Amstill and i was like WHAT and she was like john and james :(. They looked a bit annoyed that their veneers of cool had been shattered and so they all trooped off to the garden. At this point the rest of the party had filled up with ugly people who were all talking about how great it was to work at Thorpe Park. I sank down next to the sink, feeling emotionally exhausted. THE GROTESQUE suddenly popped up at the window and leered at me like something out of the Shining and I tell you I nearly had a heart attack. I fell to the floor, feeling defeated. Amy came back into the room. Tall Simon poked his head through the kitchen window. "HEY AMY COME OUTSIDE WE ARE ALL PLAYING NEVER NEVER WOULD I EVER!" he said joyously. Amy gave a kind of half-laugh grin thing that clearly said "Never never would I ever go outside to play never never would I ever."
I sat on the chair. I looked at Amy. Amy looked at me.
"Shall we just leave without saying goodbye?" I asked without much hope - girls NEVER agree to this.
"Yeah."
I was like :-o woooooo. So with no further ado, we drew a penis on the cake, hid the gnome thing in the coffee maker, then fled the house. Unfortunately, as we were driving away, a horrifying sight greeted our eyes. THE DENZIENS OF THE PARTY WERE TOTALLY CHASING US! Kind of like in the film 'Freaks', they were all like, sliding on the floor and stumbling and lurching and moaning, trying to make us one their own. My heart dropped - would we ever escape?

(Ten points if you can identify them left to right)

Ten minutes later I was scraping the brain matter off of my shoe as we sped into the distance.

We had escaped the party of freaks for now - but who knew what lay ahead?

The End.

(To be fair, I am probably being over the top harsh as I did actually drink her alcohol and steal her ale flavoured crisps, and everyone WAS very nice. The hostess girl was luvvvvverly. On the other hand, I am never going to see any of these people ever again. So fuck em)

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:

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

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

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

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?