I am livid

Yesterday was Saint George’s Day.

I didn’t actually realise it was Saint George’s Day until the afternoon, as it tends not to be celebrated with any form of street carnival or fireworks. Which is a shame for Saint George. If indeed that is his real name.

You see, Saint George was from what is now called Turkey. I have been to Turkey. Twice. And I never met anyone over there called George. This is why I believe that some tinkering with the history books has occurred.

“Thank you for saving us from that terrible dragon! What is your name oh dark stranger with a funny accent?”

“I am Ibrahim of Anatolia, slayer of of the quite-big-for-round-here lizard!”

“Thank you, George.”

“No, you must have misheard me, it is Ibrahim of Anatolia.”

“Yes, but George is such a nice….English name.”

“But…it’s not my name.”

“I know that, it’s just we’re going to have such trouble getting people to celebrate this day in the future as it is. If people thought your real name was Ibrahim, and that you were from Turkey of all places, then even the skinheads would start ignoring your day.”

“Right. In that case, I am George! Slayer of the giant lizard!”

“And can we call it a dragon? It scans much better.”

“Sure. Whatever.”

I am livid - Giving you the stuff they don’t put in our history books.

I was shocked to see that John Prescott announced over the weekend that he was a sufferer of Bulimia.

Not shocked that he had it, more that the qualification criteria to be defined as a bulimic is so much lower than I had thought. I was always under the impression that bulimia sufferers would sneak off after every meal and make themselves sick. I did not realise that you were also bulimic if you threw up after every six hundredth meal. I would prefer to concentrate on the many MANY meals he consumed that were allowed to fix themselves to his ample waistline. I suppose we finally have an explanation for his second Jaguar, it was nothing more than a mobile larder.

I always thought that one of the nice side effects of being bulimic was always remaining skinny. How are we supposed to spot them now? We could always look out for traces and smell of vomit, but I do not wish to tarnish this country’s binge drinkers with the bulimia label.

There is of course the possibility that he came up with the story to help sell his book.  I am not saying that he definitely did, but it is a possibility.  It would be pretty difficult coming up with a believable and sympathy-earning failing after being part of that government.  David Blunkett bagsied the blind thing, and Jack Straw got the familial drugs shame, so I guess he had little left to work with.  He tried the adultery angle, but that didn’t seem to work, so I suppose an eating disorder was a logical choice.

I just want to know how big he would be if he had never thrown up a meal in his life?

…Is Greg Rusedski a mental?

I mean a proper window-licking mental, not just a bit ‘wacky’. I only ask after recently watching Dancing on Ice, or whatever it is called, whilst visiting my folks.

As he stumbled across the ice in his lycra one-piece, he looked about as comfortable as Abu Hamza during a piano lesson.

All the while grinning like a complete and utter spaz.

Apparently the contestants were asked to do a ‘jump’ this week, and our Greg delivered by leaping across the rink with all the grace of a man in a chicken suit. Then he fell on his arse, on live TV, and got up grinning like an idiot.

Now, I understand it is difficult not to grin when you have a set of teeth and lower jaw like he does, but come on man, have some fucking shame.

Any normal person would be racked with embarrassment, but not our Greg. He positively revelled in his dismal failure. Clearly being an adoptive Brit, our celebration of glorious losers has rubbed off on him a bit more than perhaps he had hoped it would. Perhaps he should spend some time back in Canada to remember what it should feel like when you lose.

Oh, and he should learn to skate while he is there.

I stopped in my tracks.

Which is something I rarely do in Tesco’s car park, as I tend to try and escape that particular pit of despair as quickly as humanly possible.

I did a double take, followed by a treble, then quadruple take. It could not be, surely?

Yet there before me, loading his Fiat Punto with the weekly shopping, was Doctor Harold Shipman, granny-slayer extraordinaire.

Now, like you, I believed he had died four years ago after hanging himself by a bedsheet, but clearly not. There he was, bold as you like, in the middle of the day.

The only other explanation is that this person just happened to look exactly like one of the most notorious serial killers in the modern age. And this explanation does not stand up to scrutiny.

Imagine, if you will, that you bore a striking resemblance to a mass murderer who received unprecedented media coverage in the early noughties. What would you do? Would you continue to cut your hair in the same manner, grow the same beard, and forgo changing your glasses for contact lenses?

Or would you make an effort to change your appearance so you did not look like the most unpopular man amongst the pensioner demographic since the CEO of Gala Bingo increased prices by 20%?

Now, if the person you look like is famous for a good reason, then you have every incentive to retain the same appearance, obviously. In fact, I have a friend who is the spitting image of Will Young, and during the Pop Idol competition that Will Young ultimately won, he willingly received the adulation of people in pubs and clubs who assumed he was the real Will Young. Of course, the day that Will Young ‘came out’ is probably the most unhappy day of his entire life, but that emotional pain is countered by the fact that most of his friends and I found that day, and every single one since, truly enjoyable.

So, after much deliberation, I am left with no choice but to assume that this simply can not be a lookey-likey, as no-one would leave their appearance so similar to that of the prolific Nan-silencer, therefore it must be the real Harold Shipman, back from the grave, and making the most of this week’s Clubcard offers.

Why do people make them?

I know why people watch them, obviously, I would probably have started watching Big Brother if the celebrity versions did not exist, but why would you want to make one? Performance anxiety before the event puts you under enough pressure as it is. The last thing you need is the added pressure of potentially appearing camera shy.

Have you noticed that you never see a sex tape where the bloke suffers from a touch of the Peles? Or ‘arrives’ a little early. I would like to watch one, just once, for the inevitable ego boost it would provide. Surely they must be out there?

How about Brad and Angelina starring in “Sorry. It’s not you Ange, I’ve had a bit too much to drink and it’s been a really long week.”

However, if you did have a sex tape of you and your partner, when would you actually watch it? It’s not like you don’t know what’s going to happen, so there is no suspense. There is no element of surprise to be had. It’s not as if you can tuck a home-made sex tape away with recordings of the wedding or family birthday parties.

“Shall we watch our wedding video again?”

“Nah, I’d rather watch that slightly disappointing shag we had two years ago, you know the one where you do that thing with that wotsit.”

Let us be honest here, no-one likes the way they look on camera, so instead of watching the frantic rutting, you would be making notes on how to improve the lighting in the bedroom. So it is sort of pointless to watch it with your partner.

Of course, you certainly can not watch it with another partner. Imagine going round to your new girlfriends for dinner. She has cooked for you, there is some wine, the atmosphere is pretty fucking romantic. Then she suggests putting on a film.

“What are you thinking? Love Actually? Another romantic comedy perhaps?”

“No, I was thinking we could watch a tape of me having sex with my last boyfriend, there’s a really good bit an hour and twenty minutes in…”

The last thing you would want to see is your new girlfriend getting nailed to the bed by her last boyfriend (this is why I will never date Paris Hilton). Except perhaps her getting nailed by her next boyfriend, but that is a whole other post right there.

People who claim that God talks to them are proper weird.

These people absolutely love their God, just because he talks to them. Whereas I talk to people all the time, and most of them hate me, it is truly unfair.

It is not like they even have great conversations. I could sort of understand it if one of these God conversationalists told me that He was one seriously funny fucker, the life and soul of the party.

“Fuck me that God is an absolute hoot. Seriously. We had a chat yesterday and it was like spending a night in Jongleurs. Without all the stag dos and that.”

But no, it is nothing like that. Instead, He talks to them in ‘mysterious ways’. I am not entirely sure what this means so I assume they mean that He talks a bit like a spy at the height of the Cold War. Does God inform them that the Black Dove is hovering above the cage until the elderberry grows mouldy? Because that is not really having a conversation, is it?

Sometimes, on the incredibly rare occasions when something good happens to you, you may think, “Man, I have got to call ’so-and-so’ because they are really going to love this!” But what about the avid God botherers? I have always wondered if the God whisperers try and call God there and then, or do they have to wait for him to get in touch?

“Fuck me God, you took your time, I’ve been sitting by the phone for ages, you’ll never believe who I bumped into at the Supermarket today…”

I would also like to know what happened the first time God spoke to them, because I have to admit, I would fucking shit myself. Then I would test him, what with me not being in the slightest bit gullible, so I would want to know Elvis’s middle name and why Jade Goody is famous, the things that only God himself could know. But clearly these folks just take it as read that it is him they are speaking to.

I would love to think that there is some radio station out there making all these prank calls to random people telling them that they are God. In fact, I might just start making a few of my own, as I quite like the idea of having an army of followers doing my bidding.

We are critically dissecting Saturdays World Cup final defeat in the pub.  It is just minutes since the final whistle.

“It’s a stupid game anyway.” I point out.

“It didn’t seem stupid all those years ago when William Webb Ellis picked the ball up at Rugby school and ran with it.”

“Well, clearly William Webb Ellis didn’t go to a Comprehensive.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you picked the ball up and ran with it at my school, it would almost certainly have resulted in a severe shoeing from about twenty other kids.”

“But he invented a new game when he did it.”

“No, he cheated. You can’t invent new rules halfway through a game. That’s not how it works.  I bet he was the fat kid who was rubbish at football, and he probably wanted to invent a game he might be good at. Pie-eating had probably already been invented, so picking up the ball and running into other people with it in hand was his next best option.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Yes it was. The story isn’t that William Webb Ellis called a school meeting and spent an hour at the overhead projector outlining his plans for a new game with an egg shaped ball. It was that he picked up the ball during an existing game of football. In fact he probably gave away a penalty, and I’ll bet his team mates fucking hated him. You do realise, if he hadn’t cheated, we wouldn’t be sat here being miserable right now.”

“True. The cheating little fucker.”

Those of you who like football probably saw something in the news about the match between Celtic and AC Milan last Wednesday. The result was unexpected, but that was not what made it newsworthy. In the dying moments a fan made his way onto the pitch and tapped the AC Milan goalkeeper, Dida, on the shoulder.

What struck me in the immediate aftermath was that the Met Police could have saved themselves a few years of hassle if they had known that the best way to take down a six-foot Brazilian man is a tap to the collar bone.

Dida’s immediate reaction was to chase the fan, but then he fell over clutching his face like he had been shot. It was disgraceful. I have always said that if you are going to dive you should try and make it believable. Everybody knows that if you do not go down straight away then there is no point. I see better diving during Sunday morning parks football. It was amateurish.

The trick to believable diving is practise, and there are opportunities to practise your diving everywhere. After the guy bumps into you in the corridor? Take a dive. The restaurant waiter hands you the menu a little to forcefully? Take a dive. Your change from the corner shop weighs a bit more than expected? Take a dive.

There really is no excuse not to be really good at it.

“It really looks like him!” someone says.

“Don’t be silly, why would he be in here?” replies another.

They argue for a few minutes about whether he would come to a place like this. My attention is otherwise engaged.

I am only in here because it is the first place we came to serving beer at two in the morning in Cape Town. It is only day one of my holiday so I am still looking to party after normal bed time. I can be quite rebellious when I want to be.

I will admit that upon arrival at the bar, the initial sight of near-naked dancing ladies was a somewhat unexpected, yet entirely pleasant, bonus. It makes a change to be duped for a good reason. I am surprised that more bars to not provide this type of entertainment instead of jukeboxes and skittles.

I had expected a place called Mavericks to be some sort of Top Gun themed bar. There was not, however, a single Goose in sight. Which is why I could only assume that the guy I was looking at was actually just a lookey-likey of the Captain of the England 20-20 World Cup team.

I get home to England two weeks later to realise I have missed Collingate.

Todays blog entry is from guest blogger Andy Tilley. If you like what he has written, there is a link at the end to his new book (which I have not read, nor am I being paid to ‘advertise’ it. He simply offered a guest blog entry, which was not rubbish, so I am happy to post it. This applies to anyone who wants to send me to stuff to post. Unless it is really, REALLY good, in which case I will steal it and pass it off as my own).

Where I work there’s isn’t much to do in the evening. The Algerian Sahara is spectacular to look at but you can only say ‘oooh, look at that sand dune’ so many times before it starts to get on your tits. Entertainment wise it’s about as gripping as a Steve McClaren press conference. So more often than not I fill the time just before my night’s kip, lying down and unwinding with a film on the box. That was until last night, when I was forced out of my bed time after time to bugger about with the volume setting and try to find a sound level that would allow me to hear what Nick Nolte was saying. In the end it was too much so I turned the saggy faced grunter off completely and lay in the dark seething. How the hell does someone whose job is supposedly to articulate a script for the benefit of the viewer, maintain a career with a gob full of gravel? Cough for Christ’s sake man! He must be the most Heimlich manoeuvred man on the planet, total strangers grabbing him round the sternum and jerking him up and down every time he says hello. And he isn’t the only one. That Lucy Loo or however you spell it, absolutely trashed Lucky Number Slevin for me. Great film, absolutely no idea what she said in it.

Now I fully understand that directors want to create a piece of work that’s convincing and that it wouldn’t be credible if alcoholic private eyes pronounced perfect English with impeccable grammar, but it is possible for a character to be believable without having to resort to ridiculous accents or them husky tones that require subtitles isn’t it?. I mean, look at Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. The dialogue between Jules and Vince is staggering but only because we can hear every word of it. But the fact that the actors talk crisply and clearly doesn’t make you doubt for a moment that if you jumped the queue at MacD’s then they’d pop a cap in your ass.

If you’re writing a book, the issue of how to handle gritty, regional dialogue is even more of a challenge, mainly because you don’t have the luxury of any supporting action to carry the dialogue through. I’ve tried to read books where the author has stayed true to strong regional accents (Scottish for example) and find it difficult to keep the momentum in a scene building because trying to decipher the speech takes too bloody long. For example, if I was to try write and express, as best as I could, the sound of an excited young Liverpool lad seeking confirmation from his mum that firemen actually do put out fires, then I would have to write something like,

‘but dee doo doo dat don’t dee doh, mam.’ Tommy said from inside his hood.

What’s the bleedin’ point in that? Or suppose there’s a scene where someone from the Caribbean is ordering bacon at the Tesco’s meat counter. If the strict tone of the dialect is to be maintained he should ask for some ‘beer can’ shouldn’t he? I think that to write this would be wrong. You don’t want your reader having to stop and think about why the hell the bloke is ordering a six pack of Stella when his missus specifically sent him out for a pack of Danish, now do you? By the way, try saying ‘beer can’ without sounding like a Jamaican asking for bacon. You can’t.

Personally, I think trying to strive for too much realism in the passages of dialogue that connect action (and so enable it to flow) can really damage a scene. Pretty much all the stories I tell are set in Manchester and I must admit it is tempting to pad out the exchanges between characters, fill them with ‘mad ferrets’ and ‘blue noses’ but to do that would be wrong. After all, saying something that only you and Liam Gallagher can understand isn’t the best way to communicate an idea is it? Juno wot a meeeen arr kid?

Andy Tilley

Author: Recycling Jimmy

Publisher: Kunati Inc. (September 1, 2007)
ISBN-10: 1601640137

So Owen Wilson has tried to commit suicide. Allegedly.

I realise that ‘You, Me and Dupree’ set a new all-time low for the cinematic genre we call ‘comedy’, but I am surprised by his actions. I thought he was made of sterner stuff. You can not spend 38 years on this earth, with a nose shaped like a human penis, without developing some sort of coping mechanism in the face of adversity. As coping mechanisms go, I will admit that have sex with Kate Hudson is a pretty good one (it is a bit better than my own favourite, Back to The Future DVD marathons and booze).

Apparently they split up recently, and I imagine that if I could not have sex with Kate Hudson (it is only a matter of time people) ever again, and had a nose like a human penis, then I too, would feel a little blue. But if I wanted to kill myself, I am sure I could do it properly, with none of this ‘failed attempt’ and ‘cry for help’ rubbish.

A gun in the mouth, a poorly timed walk along the train tracks, or wearing an “I prefer East 17″ sandwich board at a Take That reunion concert are all ways to guarantee your death.

Of course, maybe he was not actually trying to shuffle off this mortal coil at all, and in reality he is just looking for a sympathy shag from Ms Hudson? If this is true, then I suppose it is possible he is actually a sexually-deviant evil genius. In which case I take my hat off to old penis nose.

I can assure you that if this leads to some form of reconciliation between him and Kate Hudson (i.e. he gets a shag out of it) you can expect to see the headline in the Windsor & Maidenhead Advertiser, “Top Blogger in death bid!”

Only really fit and morally questionable well-wishers will be welcome at the hospital though, just to be clear.

Kanye West is currently at the top of the Hit Parade singing about the fact that “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”.

These are clearly the words of a man who has never spent any time with recovering stroke victims. Well Kanye, I have, and I can tell you now, I have never won so many arm wrestles in my life. Even with my bad arm. Stronger my arse. I almost felt guilty taking the money off them, but a bet is a bet. I would have paid them if they had won.

After listening to this song, the following track was by Gym Class Heroes and has taken the Jermaine Stewart song that goes, “We don’t have to take our clothes off, to have a good time.” and changed the lyrics to, “We have to take our clothes of to have a good time.”

Do you see what they did there?

Perhaps it is a sign of the times we live in, and final confirmation that fully-clothed fun is a thing of the past. Or maybe they are just utterly desperate for a shag and think that singing about going nude will offer them a better chance of getting off with a woman. They are probably right thinking about. Honesty is the best policy after all (unless you have done something really really bad, in which case, get an alibi, quick), so asking for, and subsequently getting, a woman naked is normally a pretty good sign that you are going to have the sex.

Anyway, this song has got me thinking. Which classic songs should we change the lyrics to, given the chance, so that they better reflect the society we live in today?

Marvin Gaye’s - I heard it on Facebook?
Hot Chocolate’s - It started with a Poke?
Culture Club’s - Do you really wanna (MSN) block me?
Duran Duran’s - Girls on memory-card?

“Hello [Angry’s home town] police station.”

“Jesus. Jesus Christ.”

I got on the busy train and fought my way to a seat. I do not like brushing up against the general public, but needs must.

I took my seat and I noticed, almost immediately, that sat in the seat opposite me, or rather directly behind the seat opposite me, was Alex James off of Blur.

To his eternal credit, he did not react like some people do, even though I am sure it is not every day that he finds himself on a train with a blogging superstar.

As we trundled towards London I chose not to engage him with conversation over the shoulder of the lady sat opposite, even though I am sure he would have been happy to reminisce about our last meeting. This was back in September 1993 at the end of Freshers week at Aston University, where Blur had headlined. My flatmate John had ‘accidentally’ got into their tour minibus and demanded a lift back to his halls of residence, mistaking it for the student union bus. I think Alex’s exact words were, “Get off the bus you fucking twat.” Oh how we laughed as they tried to kick him in the head.

But this was not the time for a trip down memory lane, we both had important commuting to tend with, and I am sure that if I engaged with him in conversation that would lead to lots of people wanting to talk to me about the Internet. I do not have time for that.

I also chose not to share my story about how I had paid 4p less for my water than anyone else at Slough station, as no-one likes a bragger. When we arrived at Paddington we went our separate ways.

I am quite sure he was on the phone to Damon Albarn within minutes to tell him he had seen the guy from that gig in September 1993 with the drunken mate. I am glad I provided the opportunity for them to renew their friendship, it made it a good day, for a change.