Paranoia paranoia

I like to run. Along the Thames path. Across Wimbledon Common. Along the Embankment into London. And round Richmond Park, until last weekend that was.

You occasionally get heckled, usually by fat ugly chav women in the back of Ford Escorts (ok, that one only happened once, but she pissed me off). Usually it’s along the lines of knobhead 17yr old boys just making loud “mental” noises or purposely throwing their cigarette butts into my path to impress their “intelligent” other halves (after all, Chanelle is most likely on for a grade D or above in her HVQ in media studies). I’m not fussed about that. However, last Saturday I was running through Richmond Park, happily listening to ELO’s Mr. Blue Sky, when a little girl who can have been no older than 6 or 7 turned to her dad, pointed at me and shouted, “Look at his stupid legs daddy, they’re so thin they’ll snap. Ha ha ha ha.” Little bitch.

Since then I’ve been somewhat paranoid. I’ve always known that I’m not the owner of a set of tree trunks protruding downwards from my pelvis (just the one middle tree trunk, wahey…) but I didn’t think I was in the same league as the man from the Mr. Muscle adverts. Driving to Sainsburys with Alice the other day I noticed a bloke on the pavement in a pair of shorts with bizarrely thin legs.

“My legs aren’t as thin as his are they?”

“Do you think the cigarette lighter is on the other side in Swiss cars?” Alice said keeping her gaze safely within our Fiat Punto. She isn’t good at changing the subject subtly.

“Well are they as thin?”

“Yours are about the same length.”

“And?”

“Well I like your legs the way they are.” That’s like her asking me if she looks good with dog shit smeared on her face and me replying that her eyes are blue.

Since then I’ve caught myself looking at skinny men’s legs and wondering if I look as stupid as they do. I’m sure one bloke thought I was coming onto him on the tube.

I suppose I could start taking nandrolone, like many of our finest Olympian Superheroes do / did, although I bet it’d just work on my upper body and therefore emphasise my skinny legs even more.

Good job I don't have a lot on my plate at the moment. If I was carrying the world on my shoulders you could bet my legs would fucking snap.

Ich fahre in die Schweiz

“So Herr Pearce, where are we?” asked Herr Rimle, the Swiss HR manager I was phoning so that he could tell me whether I had got a job or not.

“Stockholm?” (Well I was.)

“No.”

“I am in Stockholm.” I wasn’t going to shift on this one. I was definitely in Stockholm.

“No Herr Pearce. Where are we with regard to the position with us?” I was confused. He was supposed to be telling me whether I had a job.

“I was impressed by your company,” I offered.

“Yes, very good. That is good. So where are we?”

For fucks sake. This had the potential to go on all day. I wasn’t about to let that happen as the call was costing me a fortune. Getting a job in Zurich was getting harder (and pricier) by the minute.

“Do I have the job?” Perhaps blunt was best.

“I beg your pardon?” Blunt wasn’t best. Maybe, I thought, if I hypothesise enough and confuse him with the vagaries of the English language, he’ll cut to the chase.

“If you were to offer me a position with you, I would accept.”

“Excellent. In that case I would like to offer you a job with us.” Bingo. God bless the much-underused subjunctive tense of the English language. I was almost tempted to ask if he felt like offering me a reimbursement of call costs.

So there we are. I’m off to live in Switzerland, home of cuckoo clocks, nazi gold and the highest number of firearms per capita in the entire world. I suppose all that nazi gold needs protecting somehow.

Mighty Forest

For a League One team Forest have a hell of a lot of fans. The standard of football played most weeks at the city ground is poor; no game can possibly highlight that more than the humiliating 5-2 defeat to Yeovil (population: a few hundred farmers and a handful of barely professional footballers). Yet there are so many fans.

I’ve bumped into Forest fans in the Australian outback (apparently lots of Northern Territory shopkeepers in Tennants Creek on the Stuart Highway have a soft spot for the “Tricky Trees”); in a Cambodian internet café in the form of Chad - a dangerously obese American who was there to take photos of temples; on the streets of Berlin running the marathon in sweltering conditions wearing their Forest shirts with pride, and about 5 years ago I saw a septuagenarian French farmer sporting a Forest shirt with “Shipstones” on the front as sponsors.

And I am now sat on my hotel room bed in Zurich watching England against Estonia on Eurosport having spent a pleasant hour or so in a Swiss restaurant talking about Nottingham Forest to a 40-yr old Singaporean real-estate person who was seated right next to me by some over-keen waiting personnel. He’d never been to England, let alone Nottingham, but was a follower nonetheless. He’d even got a friend “with contacts” in Malaysia to record the aforementioned Forest-Yeovil game and then to courier it down so he could watch it the next day.

I was impressed with his in-depth knowledge of Forest’s monumental ascent to double European champion status and the subsequent monumental downfall to League One also-ran status. A lot of the time he was talking about events that occurred before my fourth birthday so I had to nod and smile and assume he was right, but the rest of the time I felt a sense of shame and as if Mike, 40, from Singapore was telling me off. It was as if he’d been waiting for the last 10 years to speak to someone from Nottingham so he could get to the bottom of why the Forest of yesteryear have become the Forest of today who now can’t even progress past the second round of the Johnstone Paints Trophy (and believe you me, if you meet a Singaporean who is more annoyed with the Johnstone Paints trophy than Mike, then you’re doing well).

He was able to lecture me at length on why Forest should be a better team than they are, on how their performances are inconsistent at best, which apparently in League One is “just a bad joke I don’t laugh at”, on how David Johnson is an overpaid sissy, and more importantly, on how Forest were able to beat Chelsea 7-0 not all that long ago.

I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t actually my fault, but I don’t think he would have listened. He was letting off steam at a rate of knots, which thinking about it was fair enough. A lot of my friends are Forest fans so I get to complain most days if I feel like it. This guy had a decade, if not more, of annoyance to get off his chest. When he got up to leave he commented sadly, “when I was 15, all of my friends decided to support Barcelona and I laughed at them. They’re idiots.” I didn’t have much to say to that.

The Cultural Melting Pot that is the Costa in Putney

Alfonso, the unfortunate, simple looking Venezuelan with a nasty limp and equally nasty “ethnic” facial hair: “Yes guv’nor”

Me: “Medium black Americano please”

Alfonso, directing an unusual amount of anger at his Polish colleague, Agneszka: “Americano, now. Do it please”

Agneszka: “You do it, I do last one. You are a rude boy.”

“I am a Venezuelan gentleman, I am not rude”

“You are very rude”

“You are very wrong”

“You think you were in Backstreet Boys group.” Nice insult, I thought.

“Not again”

“Yes”

“No”

“Yes”

And so on for about a minute. Enter Jaroslav, the Slovak supervisor.

“Alfonso, Agneszka, not in front of the customer”

“We are not arguing, we are friends” argued Agneszka.

“Not true; she said I’m a backstreet boy.”

“You are!” laughed Jaroslav, cracking up, “Venezuelan backstreet boy, ha ha!”

“I’ll have my lunch break now.” Alfonso knew when he was beaten by the better man/woman.

And to top it all off, they gave me a large black Americano for no extra charge. As I walked to my seat I’m sure I saw the two Eastern Europeans high-five. Turns out it’s not just the Eurovision song contest where they stick together.

The black basketball player within me

Get me. It’s only taken a couple of hours of practice but now I am able to stand on a swiss ball. My core stability rocks. I knew I could kneel on it and do lateral shoulder raises, but hell yeah, now I can stand, albeit for short periods of time.

At 13h40 this afternoon I would have never thought it possible that my core would stand it. I’d only just mastered bicep curling in a kneeling position. I look back at that point around lunchtime where that would have satisfied me with pity. Talk about a lack of ambition. Perhaps it was something in neighbours that inspired me to go the extra yard. Perhaps it was Lou finally getting over his fear of flying that made me believe that I too could confront my fears. Perhaps it was Lolly deciding she would stand up to her stepmother who had been slapping her about a bit. Whatever it was, it allowed me to break free from my self-imposed swiss ball related shackles and reach deep into my soul.

At first it wasn’t easy. My footing was all over the place. As Doctors reached its dramatic conclusion I was managing a good ten seconds. Thinking about all the motivational speeches I have heard from films over the last 27 ½ years I could feel a foreign energy in the room every time I gingerly let go of the wall and journeyed into the unknown. I was pushing the limits of my core stability. For one afternoon I came to understand the feeling that 18th century gold rush pioneers must have felt as they travelled across the vast plains towards a new life. In the same way their existences were fraught with danger, I was all too aware that a small slip in concentration could have brought me crashing down onto the mattress I had positioned nearby.

As a toddler eventually sheds their stabilisers as they learn to ride a bike for the first time, the mattress was re-stowed under my bed - I felt as free as a bird. As the episode of Peep Show I was watching ended at 15h15, I knew time was against me; I was using all my physical and mental capacity to master this trickiest of core stability related goals so once Countdown began at 15h30 I would have to stop. It was now or never (or after Countdown I suppose).

The first time I withdrew my hands from the wall and placed them in a funereal pose across my chest I could feel the result of the 1h25mins’ practice. It was like my hard work was being rewarded at last. That was my Waterloo; with the Napoleonic swiss ball back in the corner of the room it was time to return to Apsley House and become prime minister of my sofa in front of Countdown.

You can't call me, Al.

Weds May 9th, 17h42. Neighbours is on. I’m watching it. With interest given the amount of lesbian action it has featured of late. The last thing you want is the phone to ring, but hey, it might be important.

“Good evening sir, how are you this evening?”

“Fine”

“Just to let you know, my name’s Alan. How was your bank holiday weekend?”

“Fine”

“That’s great, hope it was good, you didn’t drink too much? I know I did, ha ha ha, I always do!”

Twat.

“No, I don’t drink. I’m a Muslim.”

“Oh that’s great - just want to let you know, I’m not trying to sell you anything - just a friendly call to see if you’ve heard of the Hertz Foundation?”

“No.”

“Ha ha ha, good that’s means we’re doing our job right!!”

Twat.

“Can you tell me if you gamble a lot - playing the lottery, that sort of thing?”

“No. The Qur’an forbids it.”

“Well ok, what it is, is that I’m just wondering if you’d be interested in playing the British Heart Foundation Lottery - buying a few tickets? It benefits a lot of good causes and you could win up to £1,000!!”

Twat.

“No thanks. I said I don’t gamble”

“Ha ha ha, that’s great sir, well while I’ve got you on the line…”

I hung up. If someone can make me think “twat” three times in such a short period of time you’ve got to wonder. Still no sign of the lesbians on Neighbours but.

Diagnosis: Murder

What a program. It has everything. That is if murders count as everything. Apparently Diagnosis: Murder (the colon appears in the official series title apparently) lasted for 178 episodes, most of which I seem to have seem over the last few weeks when I’ve been doing nothing but waiting for my exams to start before I can get a proper job. It lasted for 7 ½ years. That’s 7 ½ times as long as Eldorado.

That’s a lot of murders - it makes you think that everybody gets murdered all the time. Quite literally. But how many?

I’m no statistician but I’m fairly sure I can come up with some pretty damning evidence that everybody gets murdered all the time.

In my experience, the “murder” mentioned in the title often means “murders”. I’m assuming that there are on average 1.5 murders per program that occur, 90% of the time happening to either a friend of the Sloan family or to a patient in Mark Sloan’s hospital department. According to my reliable internet source, there are 139 hospitals in LA, each with 1,048 consultants (based on the assumption that each LA hospital employs the same number of consultants as their Northern Irish counterparts circa 2005). I also assume that each and every consultant in each and every hospital in LA gets involved with investigating as many murders as Mark Sloan.

So this gives us:
178 episodes x 1.5 murders per episode = 267 murders
90% of these to do with Dr Sloan = 240.3
240.3 / 7 ½ years = 32.04 murders a year
32.04 x 139 hospitals x 1,048 consultants = 4,667,330 suspicious murders that only a doctor (rather than, say, the police) are able to solve in in LA per year.

The population of the Los Angeles Metropolitan area is 12,923,548. That means that every year, approximately 1 in every 2.77 residents of Los Angeles fall prey to a murderer who could have got away with it were it not for a team of highly trained doctors choosing not to spend their time on their patients, instead of which opting to dedicate hours of their time to helping the police.

That’s shit loads. Even if the murder rate in Britain is half that, it still means more than 18% of us will be done in by some crazed lunatic (but obviously not by the obvious crazed lunatic we all assumed did it; rather the younger jealous brother / the disgruntled business associate / the doctor in Community General who strangely appeared at the beginning of one episode but who it turns out had a connection to you, the victim, twenty or more years ago).

So there - be careful.

How not to be nice

Having spent last weekend at home in sunny Nottinghamshire to attend Perkins’ “Goodbye, I’m moving to Florida shindig” and seen the abundance of people who turned out to bid him farewell I realised that if I moved to Florida, the turnout for my “Goodbye, I’m moving to Florida too” shindig would be considerably lower. I wouldn’t even be able to count on Perkins’ attendance given he’d already be in Florida.

“Well you don’t come across at first as being very nice,” said mum the next day. Alice nodded in agreement.

“Really?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it Mark,” added dad, assuming that by avoiding answering the question all would be well. Great.

Given that Alice and I are thinking of moving to Switzerland later this year I decided that I need to be nicer. At the moment I can count on the fingers of two hands the people who would turn up and that’s nowhere near enough people buying me a free drink to send me on my way.

I decided to start by smiling more. Indiscriminately so. As I was sat on the tube I tried it but accidentally caught the eye of a girl opposite who clearly thought I was a newly released sex offender and switched seats. Then carriages. Then I’m sure I saw her getting off the train and waiting on the platform for the next one. Perhaps smiling isn’t for me.

Then in the afternoon I went to the running track. Usually I’m fairly single-minded whilst doing a track workout and get fairly pissed off with anyone else even being near the track. Not anymore I decided. I turned up and saw a load of kids in some sort of youth group using a bit of the track - usually I’d just run straight through them. Instead I asked the receptionist if the track was open (knowing full-well it was - good turn #1). He said yes. Then I asked if I’d be getting in the way of the kids playing (they weren’t even using the track for its proper purpose - definitely good turn #2). No he said, he’d ask them to move. He reliably assured me it’d be no problem whatsoever. Excellent.

Doing up my shoes sat on the outside of the track, the youth group leader approached me.

“How much space do you need?”

“Not a lot, just one lane” (there were seven others after all).

“Suppose that’s ok. But you should just watch out when you run past us.”

He said what? I only wanted one fucking lane. Shouldn’t he be watching them? I’m no lawyer but I’m fairly sure that if I ran into a kid straying into my lane it’d be his fault, not mine. I was getting pretty pissed off with this.

“Yeah, I suppose,” I said pretty nonchalantly. After all, it wasn’t like they couldn’t be controlled because they were mentally disabled or anything.

“Well they are mentally disabled,” the youth group leader pointed out. Bollocks. He was right as well. “I’ll try but they are pretty excited this afternoon as it’s the only time they get to do any exercise all month.”

Shit, me being nice was going out of the window. It’s not like I’m going to invite any of these kids to my “Goodbye I’m moving to Switzerland” shindig so technically my inadvertent bastard-like actions wouldn‘t have any effect on turnout, but still. One of the kids even apologised to me for being in the way (when he wasn‘t). I felt like a right fucker.

Nonetheless I’m still going to try and be nice. But probably not by smiling or trying to be nice to disadvantaged youngsters. That’ll never work.

There’s no accounting for (those with good) taste

“Why do you want to be a translator? You’ll get bored and regret leaving accountancy,” advised an ex-colleague of mine shortly before I prematurely left my Big-4 accountancy firm of choice.

“Why do you think? I hate accounting; doing any job whatsoever that isn’t accounting might help me regain the pieces of my soul that I assume have probably been lost forever. Most likely in Slough or Bracknell.”

“You say that now, but you’ll look back on working here fondly.”

I ran through what he could possibly be referring to when he said “look back fondly”. Could he have meant getting up at 6.30am to drive 55miles in the sleet to sit in a windowless room at a book warehouse on a trading estate in Swindon and then spend 9 excruciating hours speaking to moronic purchase ledger clerks, who I could have sworn I saw working as extras in The Office, asking them why they thought a copy of Jamie’s Kitchen was worth £5.31 rather than the regular £5.34 trade price?

Or perhaps he thought I’d miss making sure I arrived at a client’s office before any managers to ensure I could sit with my back was against a wall so I could spend 7 hours playing solitaire, buying things I didn’t want from Amazon and wondering how pornographic a website I could access before the website got blocked (for reference fhm.com is fine but nudecelebs.com falls foul of most firewalls)?

When I joined, I was promised a varied and challenging role, where no two days are the same. It turns out that indeed no two days were the same, but that was more down to society’s tendency to designate each day a specific name (e.g. Monday April 2nd 2007) rather than the type of work offered. The only challenging aspect to my job was a) being able to think of excuses why I couldn’t / wouldn’t work the unpaid overtime managers seemed keen to let you work, b) how to hide my contempt for every aspect of my job and c) how I could continue to make up numbers and pass them off as the actual numbers I had been given by a client.

I didn’t bother answering his question in the end – I just put my head down and got on with inventing the prior year’s sales figures. After all, it had to be done quickly; my car was due its 4th MOT of the year at 4pm and I wouldn’t be in until midday the day after – I absolutely had to go to the doctors to pick up a prescription for some Strepsils.

Mother Russia

When people find out that I met my girlfriend in Siberia, they automatically assume I have a tall blond mail order bride in tow, who keeps my house clean in return for large handouts to buy Louis Vuitton products. Likewise when Alice tells people she met me in Siberia they automatically assume that I am a bad mannered, heavy drinking, uncultured, ill educated, malodorous mysogynist. She always jumps to my defence and points out that I’m doing a masters, so fuck them.

To be fair to the stereotypes of the Great British public, when I was in Krasnoyarsk (the only city I truly love in Siberia) most Russians I met were a little strange and often were heavy drinking (although not necessarily yellow).

The family I lived in consisted of the father (67), who it turned out shared his birthday with me. The fact he was Russian, male and amazingly still alive at 67 was a source of immense pride for the family. He attributed his (relative) longevity to allowing himself to smoke five or ten or, following my arrival and subsequent rent money, forty cheap filterless cigarettes a day. He never drank, confiding in me one day that “alcohol is a plague sent by Jews”. At the time I confused the word for Jew (yood) with the word for south (yoog) and happily went about informing anyone who would listen that “the alcohol was sent from the south”. Worryingly most people just nodded in agreement with my accidental anti-Semitism.

The mother who was the head of the house told me on the first day that I would accompany her to the supermarket to buy some food and drink. She asked me if I wanted any coffee. I said yes. She said that all English people like tea. I said I didn’t. She accused me of not being a proper English person. I showed her my passport to prove otherwise. She told me that she couldn’t afford coffee as she had to spend the money on buying her husband a bottle of vodka. Lying bitch.

Son #1, Mikail (41) was an obese, stinking policeman, divorced and child living with mother, heavy drinking, owner of many fine guns. He would sometimes come in drunk after a night shift and make me late for school by telling me that his ex-wife was a whore and not letting me leave the house until I high-fived him in agreement. I never argued as he was always armed.

Son #2, Dimitri (35) was a successful lawyer and the opposite of his older brother. He would often take me on fun outings such as a visit to a leisure centre car park and to look at the disused ski-lift 45minutes’ drive from the flat. He told me that he took his business contacts to these choice spots in Krasnoyarsk and he always got business off them. I’m not sure what he meant by that but I gave his broken English the benefit of the doubt as I hoped he would have done when I first chatted to him about southern alcohol.

Siberia is fun. But I can say that with hindsight. I spent most days just making sure I didn’t hurt myself or accidentally get into a fight with a gun-toting band of Rabbis wanting to know where the local vodka came from.

Ralph

Amongst my friends there are some interesting people.

Take Berry for example; he used to go out with a girl who apparently broke up with him to become a man. Nice work there Berry.

Or Project, who accidentally helped rob a house when he was drunk with a Geordie he met in the street who persuaded him that they were going to a party at a friend of the Geordie's. That evening was topped off by walking into a bedroom in said house and finding the Geordie's girlfriend having sex with someone.

Ibbo once had to cancel a holiday to Berlin to come and visit me and Project because his testicles had both swollen to the size of tennis balls and he wasn't allowed to fly.

However, without a shadow of a doubt, the most interesting of us all is a certain Ralph Watson. In no particular order he has:

• Got off with a 45yr old at a barn dance in Ripon when he was about 18.
• Amassed the largest collection of Genesis and Phil Collins cassette tapes I've ever seen.
• Got a job as a janitor in Oxford which is ace as "there's Internet access".
• Got off with an overweight lesbian (possibly also at a barn dance).
• Officiated in a 90minute unofficial amateur backyard wrestling match.
• Told an old female stranger at a tube station one night that if she gets off at the wrong station she'll be "literally fucked". In his defence he claims he was giving directions.
• Sent off an application form to join the WWF as an apprentice wrestler (lightweight division) but then had to withdraw it after his mum found out.
• Said live on radio that he would like to "club a prostitute to death with her high heels" and when challenged claimed his comments were taken out of context.

If you should ever get the chance to meet Ralph (if you haven't already) you're in for a treat. He's the one on the left in the photo above by the way, performing in the critically acclaimed Oxford-based theatre romp, Memories of Water. The look of confusion on his face stems from the fact that the girl with him is neither a lesbian, overweight or indeed over 45.

Where even the king comes on foot

Dunny. Khazi. John. Loo. Shithouse. Call it what you will, the modern flush-toilet is here to stay. Apparently, or at least according to wikipedia, the toilet is considered the great equaliser (for those of you familiar with WWF wrestling in ca. 2000-2002, you will be forgiven for thinking that Triple-H’s sledgehammer was the great equaliser). The Poles have a term for the toilet I learnt last week in class: gdzie nawet król chodzi piechotą, literally, where even the king comes on foot. However, the idea that everybody treats going to the loo in the same way is not necessarily true.

Take this conversation from yesterday.

“I’ll be ready to go out in a minute, just nipping to the loo. Err…” I ponder, glancing up and down my designated bookshelf in the living room. “This one will do.”

“What?” says Alice.

“I need a good loo book. Loads of facts in it. Look – it’s got the top thirty fastest ODI innings listed, both by balls taken and time taken. This is good shit.”

“For fuck’s sake, stop reading books on the toilet.”

“But I need to.”

“We’ll be late to get to my parents though.”

“They’ll understand.”

Or at least one half of them will. Since living with girl(s) I learned that the greatest difference in toilet habits isn’t between nationalities or classes but between sexes. The idea of reading on the toilet is alien to every girl I’ve spoken to about this - about 8 in total, including a couple of girls at uni who thought I was some kind of strange shit-obsessed pervert for asking. In my view, a house is not a home until there’s a well thumbed copy of a) a Wisden cricket year book, b) The Economist / Private Eye / Runners World, or at the very least c) a film guide of some variety balancing precariously above each toilet in the house. And it must be a fact book. The only use for a fictional book in a bathroom is as emergency toilet paper.

How do girls think boys gain their superior knowledge of all things factual? We’re not born with it, it has to be absorbed. And reading fact books has to be done on the toilet – we are simply too busy to cram it in anywhere else in the day. If boys had to have an evening out where they were banned from using any information they had learnt whilst sat on a toilet, it would be hell. And not to mention pointless.

No wonder the Poles just talk about the king coming on foot - most likely the queen would turn up and get confused by the copy of “Top 100 Tallest Building in Warsaw” lying on top of the cistern.

The power of hate

Huey Lewis may have waxed lyrical about the power of love in what was, for me at least, an excellently constructed song; verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle 8, guitar solo, briefoutro . However, in my opinion he didn't think enough about the flip side of his 1985 Oscar-nominated Back to the Future based smash-hit coin. Namely hate.

In attempting to find people to come to a cocktail party that myself, Levermore, Mark Williams and Dave were trying to organise, we hit a stumbling block:


-----Original Message-----
From: Williams, Mark
Sent: 14 March 2007 11:23
To: Mark Pearce; Lucas, David; Levermore
Subject: RE: Koktayle par-tay?

Given that the proposed party is on Saturday and it is now Wednesday I am slightly concerned that as yet nobody has been invited. I have visions of four sorry men sitting in a living room drinking copious amounts of spirits and talking about why, and by how much, they hate various people.

--------------------------

This could be considered a bit harmless email banter, but when we thought about it, it turns out it's true. Most of our time is spent discussing how much we hate not just people, but things also.

For example I can't stand people who go to gyms and just WALK on treadmills.

Dave practically starts shaking with rage when he hears the main tune from American Beauty being used in anything but American Beauty.

Levermore can't stand people who watch football in pubs and air their opinions on the referee's decisions in his earshot and will bottle up his rage for the full 90 minutes before making a quiet comment behind thebloke's back he can't hear anyway. Very British.

Tony Weeny's temporary hatred of the person in a round who happens to be the last in the round to buy drinks (even when there is only two people in the round) is matched only by his love of a nice bong in the morning to calm his nerves.

You could try to explain hating things by saying that in order to truly like something, you have to hate some things in return. It's no good saying you like everything as then there's no way of differentiating between those things you just like (e.g.Levermore and porno) and those things that you really like (e.g. Levermore and girl-on-girl porno).

I'd imagine that the truth is that hating things is fun. Where's the fun in sitting down and talking to a friend about how much you liked the person on the bus in front of you having a conversation in a hushed voice on their mobile phone about a subject close to your heart which you found interesting? It's surely far better to begin an anecdote with "there was this twat on the bus today..."

Sunday afternoons

Whilst it is said that it is children that have creative imaginations, I challenge anybody who was present in my friend Dave’s front room yesterday afternoon to say that it’s the kids who have the monopoly on “thinking outside the box”.

“Do we have to watch this shit?” asked an acquaintance of ours, Levermore, referring to Plymouth vs Watford on the TV.

The general consensus was such that Dave turned it off. We needed something to do. After a bit of questioning it turned out that he didn't possess one solitary board game. The matter was then taken into our own hands – we agreed to play an imaginary one.

“I roll a six,” I began, referring to an imaginary die.

Our nemesis Mark Williams thought he had the measure of us; “I roll double six,” he laughed. Little did he know the imaginary game only used one die. Instant disqualification from that round followed much to his annoyance.

Levermore followed with a seven (we were using an imaginary seven sided die apparently). "Seven means the person to my left misses a go," insisted Pete.

“Oh,” said Dave on his left, a little disappointed.

Play passed to Keiko. Not being a nob-end, she decided not to get involved and play returned to me. All of us were pretty satisfied with the first round of play so we moved onto the second round, this time involving cards.

I took the imaginary dragon card. It was universally decided that this would slay any card Mark Williams could take. He was getting pretty annoyed by this point and claimed the rules were flawed. His was a lone voice.

Play passed to Levermore who drew a miscellaneous card. We never actually worked out what the imaginary card depicted, but it was unanimously decided that it meant the person on his left missed his turn.

“Oh,” said Dave again, still disappointed.

It being Dave’s house, he decided that the TV would go back on. We put the imaginary game to the backs of our minds.

In what was a first, none of us had ever been so glad to see Plymouth vs Watford.

World Cup Fever

The World Cup's nearly upon us once more and even though I don't have Sky to watch any of it I'm still looking forward to it. I'm sure it will be pretty good, but for me, the most memorable game played in world cup was in May 1999 at Trent Bridge. England vs Zimbabwe. Described by Cricinfo as "a dog of a match, an absolute shocker" and "possibly the least interesting one-day international staged in this country" I still remember it.

I can’t remember the score (I assume England won), but this was a day littered with disappointment.

Fans had been condemned by everybody at that World Cup for the post-game pitch invasions and subsequent pile-ons in the middle of the batting strip. Everybody was subsequently banned from going on the ground at any time, but for one glorious summer, you could enjoy the simple pleasure of sprinting into the middle of the pitch as soon as the game was over, along with up to 1,000 other like-minded fans, and trying to grab a stump and piling on.

We’d spent the lunch break sipping beer and studying the plan of the ground on the back of the ticket, trying to work out which part of the boundary was closest to the batting strip. After much heated debate we decided that fine leg at the Radcliffe Road end would be our best bet. With a couple of overs left, we made our way there, draped in an England flag on which we’d written something witty about Alan Mullally (he’d upset one of us the summer before by making the universally recognized “wanker” sign at him).

The excitement of the forthcoming pile on was growing; we were taunting a couple of like-minded Zimbabweans when the final runs were hit. Immediately we bolted. We were steaming towards the square, sure that we have the honour of being the lucky ones, the heroes at the bottom of the pile-on with the stumps stuck firmly in our hands and our ribs stuck firmly into our kidneys. Our faces and spirits dropped as soon as we got into the fielding circle – a bunch of Pakistan fans were already there. They had taken the stumps. They were at the bottom of the pile. They would be the ones manhandled like demigods by the overzealous stewards. Bastards. Their team wasn’t even playing.

As we reached the batting strip things got worse, the pile-on had already reached such a size that we would have needed oxygen masks to climb onto the top. We stood around for a while, looking in vain for a way up to the top of the pile. There was none. It was all too much and we headed out of the ground.

As it turns out, it was the Pakistan fans who needed the oxygen masks. As we disappointedly drifted out of the ground for the long walk into the centre of Nottingham for a curry, we saw them being walked into the back of an ambulance, barely able to breath.

“Just think, that could have been us,” said Ant. He looked sad.

How is that?

Jeez, I'm bad at cricket. I mean, I’ve tried some things in my life that it turns out I can’t do, but to persist at a sport for so damn long without any tangible results in my favour, what the hell was I thinking? When I stop to think of all the things I could have done whilst I was spending up 7 hours a day “playing” for East Leake Second XI in Division H of the South Notts Cricket League, I begin to weep and shit blood.

My lack of ability as a batsman makes me fucking livid. My shit-ass useless forward defence combined with a discernible lack of attacking shots in my piss-poor back foot repertoire fucks me off like nothing on Earth. I’m the sort of fucking useless bats-fuck who can’t cut, cover drive, hook, pull or sweep for shit. Fuck, I’m more likely to hit myself in the face than I am the ball past any fielders inside the circle. My footwork when a ball is pitched up is like some sort of dick-ass awkward dance on some hot fuck-coals. I’d sooner eat my own shit than even think of the fuck-off huge swipes I’d take outside off stump at some short pitch shithouse delivery from an ageing spinner who turns the ball about as successfully as I’d turn any passing hot lesbians who were turned on by any cricketing shot that wasn’t a fucking disgrace to the game.

And what fucks me off even more was the ignominy of having to fucking bowl. Fuck, I was fucking shit at that. I’d bowl to a crowded slip cordon who were there only to field the turds of deliveries I’d often throw down 6ft outside of off-stump. On the rare occasion of one going straight, the poor fucks in the next field would more likely be picking up their teeth after being hit by another fuck-off huge six as I would a single fucking solitary wicket. If I heard the death rattle of the bails, I was safe in the knowledge that it was either a fucking windy day or that I’d slipped like a fucking fuck-off fuck-face and kicked the fuck out of the stumps at the non-strikers end.

Jeez, if I could go back and talk to a 13 year old me, I’d bash the living shit out of the deluded kid and tell him to spend less time being a fuck-awful cricketer and more time addressing his Tourettes.

Paul Danan, I presume?

Yo, Danan – I see ya. Yeah, you got that right punk. Well I’m callin’ yo out, yo got that?

Danan, thou wouldst eat thy dead vomit up, and howl’st find to find it, you dig? Yo just a fobbing swag-bellied ratsbane, yo a cockered rough-hewn clotpole, why if yo ever come in my hood dissin’ my homeboyz again, I'll spurn thine eyes like balls before me; I'll unhair thy head, thou shalt be whipp'd with wire, and stew'd'in brine, smarting in lingering pickle, capiche?

Why thou globe of sinful continents, what a life dost thou lead!

I’ve been watching yo sorry ass Danan, why yo so ugly in Hollyoaks, that thine horrid image doth unfix my hair yo got it? Thou hast nor youth, nor age, But as it were an after-dinner's sleep dreaming on both.

And Love Island man, what was dat homeboy? Yo brain is as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage, thou map of woe. And when you tried to shop lift da poontang of that hottie with the big rack, man, you could tell she were thinkin’ that thy kiss is comfortless as frozen water to a starved snake. I tell you Danan, thou whoreson mandrake, thou art fitter to be worn in my cap than to wait at my heels.

Test Drive My Girlfriend? Admit it Danan, your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth: If I have to watch thou vain scurvy-valiant whey-face on one more episode of Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway I’m gonna puke my mofuckin’ guts up.

So Danan, yo go on a road trip with Calum “shard-borne apple-john” Best and Fran “weather-bitten pigeon-egg” Cosgrove in some mofo-assed pootie-wagon? All the way through, me and my homiez were sitting watchin’ E4 thinkin’ that you should be women, and yet your beards forbid us to interpret that you are so. Why, your bedded hair, like life in excrements, start up and stand on end, you dig?

We have a saying in Putney Danan: Your virginity, your old virginity is like one of our French wither'd pears: it looks ill, it eats drily.

Dig it.

Oskurs season

It strikes me how easy it is to write reviews of films – just take what somebody has said about one film and then use Word’s “find and replace” to put your film title in and then adjust the character names accordingly. To prove this, I’ve used the wikipedia analysis of Buñuel & Dali’s surrealist 1920’s masterpiece, “un chien andalou”, to provide my opinions on the classic porno “Butch Lesbian and the Lapdance Kid”.

“American film critic Roger Ebert called Butch Lesbian and the Lapdance Kid "the most famous short film ever made, and anyone halfway interested in the cinema sees it sooner or later, usually several times."

Critics have suggested that Butch Lesbian and the Lapdance Kid can be understood as a typically Buñuelian anti-bourgeois, anticlerical piece. The lesbian dragging a piano, donkey and priests has been interpreted as an allegory of the lapdancer's progress towards her goal being hindered by the baggage of society's conventions that she is forced to bear. Likewise, the image of an eyeball being sliced by a razor can be understood as the lesbian "attacking" the film's viewers. Also, Federico García Lorca viewed this film as a personal attack on him.

Some scholars argue that Butch Lesbian and the Lapdance Kid might be the genesis of the filmmaking style present in the modern music video. Others say it is among the first low budget independent pornos.”

See? It’s seamless. The above template would also work for Rear and Present Danger, A Tale of Two Titties, Ball the President's Men and In Diana Jones and the Temple of Poon.

Why so much popping?

Am I the only part-qualified white middle class ex-accountant out there who appreciates there's more to life than just bodypopping?

I mean, yeah, at one point a few years ago I'd live, breathe and eat that shit - I'd wake up in the middle of the night thinking, "Shit Pearce, how are you ever going to match up to "Boogaloo" Sam Solomon, Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers or Paul "Cool Pockets" Guzman-Sanchez?" Their shit is so slick man, that I was losing weight worrying about the shear audacity of some of their dime stopping and ticking. And that's not to mention their strobing ability!

I feel that my obsession with body popping robbed me of a small, irretrievable section of my mid-twenties and I thank the Lord that I am now able to wake up in the morning, stick a bit of Grandmaster Flash on the ghetto blaster in the corner of my crib, lay down some rhymes on my girlfriend and then get on a packed tube knowing that all those around me, particularly those who work in the financial sector, are wracked with guilt that they are going to spend all day in front of a computer thinking about how best to master their "krazy legs" and "liquid dancing".

Jeez, I hate to think how the productivity of our city workers might be increased if they could purge their mind of all thoughts of popping, locking or even hot-funk breakdancing and concentrate on the auditting the third quarter results of a medium sized software company just off Cavendish Square. I'm sure some of these city hot-shots who have been stuck for the best part of a decade in a middle management role in a Big 4 accounting firm could have made partner had they spent a little more time consolidating those subsidiary companies' accounts instead of surfing endless bodypopping websites hoping they can glean any training tips that might help them get some shit over their opponents in any upcoming battles.

Whilst I still enjoy a little robotting in the privacy of my own home, I'm happy knowing that I am now able to walk past the bathroom section in John Lewis without wondering what sort of tight headspin the linoleum floor covering in that nice cream suite could offer me. I just hope others will realise that having outside interests does not exclude them from keeping their shit tight and their moves kick-ass dope.

Amen to that!