A Coffee Called Julian Lives Young Forever

Life is good. My girlfriend has taken up baking. Her gingerbread men are almost as delicious as her banana loaf. Everyone said she’d have a bun in the oven within months of us living together, and they weren’t wrong.

Baked goods go well with coffee, but one of the biggest disappointments a man can bear is that coffee never tastes as good as it smells. It mismanages your expectations. Coffee tells you it’ll be with you in 20 minutes, then turns up an hour late. If coffee was a person, it’d work in advertising. Coffee would be called Julian and he’d have the word ‘creative’ in his job title.

Maybe it would be responsible for those disturbing Evian adverts with the skateboarding babies, which, incidentally, uses the VERB NOUN formula I was talking about a couple of months ago. (‘Live young.’)

Same ideas, over and over. Like the talent shows with Simon Cowell on the panel. Is there any end to this? The phenomenon of mawkish sentimentality and gratuitous cruelty would peak if someone managed to combine Britain’s Got Talent, Strictly Come Dancing and Children in Need.

The show would be called ‘Strictly Undergoing Chemo’. Each week, a number of cancer sufferers, ideally children, would receive a dose of radiation live on stage, and then return the following week for Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan and Cheryl Cole to judge their recovery. They would have to sing and dance, and maybe play violins. Davina McCall would present it. It would be sponsored by Evian. Live young!

Simon would say things like “You know, Timmy, I’m not convinced you WANT to recover. You’re still very jaundiced. I’m not getting much positivity from you.”

Oh, Mickey

Last week, on the first sunny day in a long time, I was lucky enough to have meetings in Farringdon, London Bridge and then Westminster. I walked from place to place. I love walking around London. Even after 11 years of living here, I feel joyful and blessed to call London home.

Apart from the South Bank, which depresses me. What has to happen in someone’s life for them to decide to paint themselves silver and stand on a box all day? Then there’s the professional punks: the guys with the green mohawks and the studded jackets who pose for photos with credulous tourists. The saddest sight of all is the old man in the costume shop version of a Buckingham Palace Guard’s uniform, with a miniature Bearskin hat. The poor old sod.

There’s always a couple of blokes dressed as Mickey Mouse on the South Bank, which puzzles me. What does Mickey Mouse have to do with the London? As I walked past, a bloke in a suit said to one Mickey, “You’re a blight on the landscape!”

Blair and his cosy chat with Chilcot

Three things struck me when I watched footage of Blair appearing before the Chilcot stich-up Inquiry:

1. Tony Blair makes me itch on the inside.
2. When he said he was sorry the war was so divisive, he meant he was sorry people opposed him.
3. He is a psychopath.

The traits of the psychopathic personality:

>> glibness and superficial charm
>> callous lack of empathy
>> mendacious and manipulative
>> criminal versatility
>> failure to accept responsibility for their own actions
>> lack of remorse or guilt
>> pathological lying
>> grandiose sense of self worth
>> parasitic lifestyle

Does that sound like any ex-prime ministers you know?

Addicted to pain

Someone told me Aerosmith were planning to tour without Steven Tyler, who is recovering from an addiction to painkillers. This makes no sense. Aerosmith without Steven Tyler would be like a park flasher without a dirty mac.

Speaking of painkillers and bad ideas, I registered with a new GP this week. My new local surgery told me I needed my NHS number to register. I phoned my old surgery (which I visited once in three years) to ask them for it.

They wouldn’t tell me. Computer said no. The woman on the end of the phone answered every argument by citing the data protection act.

For the benefit of anyone considering a career in the diplomatic service, I have learned that asking “Which specific clause of the data protection act prevents you from telling one of your registered patients their NHS number?” in a condescending tone is no way to establish trust and mutual understanding.

They said they could post it to the address they had on their system. “But I’ve moved! That’s why I need to register with a new GP!”

This was all supposed to lead to a bad joke about running out of patients, but I haven’t got the energy; it turns out my blood pressure is low. That’s what the nurse in my new GP’s surgery told me once I’d beaten the system by getting an appointment. She said it in a really snotty way, too; she might as well have said “You’re feeble!”

Even my blood is lazy. It can’t be bothered to flow all the way around my veins and arteries when it knows its only going to end up back in my heart.

What are you supposed to do about low blood pressure? Eat more salt, and cut down on fruit and vegetables I’d imagine. Maybe I need to go back to being a news junkie.

Sucks to be 30

You know your extended adolescence is over when you get excited about a vacuum cleaner. I bought a handheld Dyson this week: the DC30. (Hey, isn’t that a plane?) You have to charge the battery for 210 minutes before you can use it. I’d never looked at my watch so compulsively before.

My skirting boards witnessed nothing short of a dirt holocaust. I ran around my flat sucking dust up and laughing maniacally like the helicopter gunner in Full Metal Jacket: GET SOME! GET SOME!

There are other signs of age: I had a meeting with the CEO of my company, a grumpy Irishman who makes Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary seem a cheery philanthropist. Normally when I have jobs and I meet senior people, I’m waiting to be found out. Something along the lines of: “You, boy! You’re not old enough to be in charge of this! Find me a grown-up!” That feeling has gone.

Infinity snooker and the elf scale

A character in a David Lodge book says this about infinity: “Think of a ball of steel as large as the world, and a fly alighting on it once every million years. When the ball of steel is rubbed away by the friction, eternity will not even have begun”.

It’s a great line, although I would swap ‘eternity’ for ‘the game of snooker I’m watching’: It’s the deciding frame of an 11 frame snooker match. The players have been at it for 48 minutes, safety shot after safety shot. (A safety shot is when you don’t try to pot a ball, but you leave it so the other player won’t dare try to pot a ball either.)

The crowd is bored to tears. They’re all looking at their watches, fidgeting as if their shit is itching, anxious about getting the last tube home. Girls are glaring at the idiot boyfriends who dragged them to a snooker match on a Friday night.

I enjoy snooker like I enjoy any sport: I like the spectacle of a clash of egos. It doesn’t even have to be professional; the most compelling sport I’ve witnessed was a game of table tennis between my friend Ponycunt and a Belgian junkie.

The trouble with snooker is the time it takes to settle a game. We’re living in an age when a webpage taking longer than five seconds to load is a source of frustration, yet this frame of snooker has been going on for, well, 55 minutes! Neither player has POTTED A BALL FOR NEARLY AN HOUR!

Kill me. Kill everybody.

Well, no-one killed me, and somehow I didn’t kill myself, so I watched the conclusion of the match. Everyone was so happy when it was over: players, crowd and referee were united in celebration when they realised it was finally finished and they could all go home.

As the crowd formed a scrum around the emergency exits, the TV commentator said: “And the crowd have enjoyed a fine evening’s entertainment” and my heart broke a little bit more.

Ah, TV. The alternatives? Bravo are showing ‘1,000 Ways to Die’ followed by ‘Most Shocking Fights and Riots 3’. Or there’s Jonathan Ross.

---

Health and Safety – The Elf Scale

When I started my current job, I had a safety induction. The potentially hazardous nature of paperclips, swivel chairs and computer keyboards were explained to me at length. I signed a form to say I’d survived the health and safety briefing, but it didn’t stop there: I had to write my own assessment of the office to demonstrate I was able to regurgitate the jargon.

It struck me that in these times of concern for safety paranoia about legal liability, it would save everyone a lot of time if every working environment was given a rating on a health and safety scale. It could be called the Elf scale.

Everyone understands centigrade, right? Water freezes at zero and boils at one hundred. Well, the Elf scale would work the same way. It would measure how easy it would be for a determined individual to deliberately kill himself in any given environment. Thus, a gallows with a noose ready and waiting would have an Elf rating of 0. A padded cell would have an Elf rating of 100. A room with furniture made out of razor blades would rate about 5. An air-conditioned office with a desk, a swivel chair, a computer and a telephone would be 90. Good idea, right?

---

iHateYou

I was upset to discover iPhone apps have to be sanctioned by Apple. I thought I was on to a winner with iHateYou. It would have been a voodoo doll for the web 2.0 generation. You could have uploaded a photo, then subjected your digitised enemy to all manner of unpleasantness by way of your delightfully tactile touch screen. Take that, boss! Suck this up, ex-friend! If you’d opted to shoot the target, bullet holes would have appeared in the appropriate places, with tasteful and timely sound effects. If you hacked at them with a samurai sword, screams for mercy and the viscous evidence of arterial wounds would spurt forth from your screen. But Apple had to come along and ruin my plans with their control freakery. A man can dream.

The iHateYou app would have come in handy for Alastair Campbell’s appearance before the Chilcot inquiry. He was demented enough to make me think he’d read Catch-22 as a manual for mendacity. Specifically, the line: “You know, that might be the answer – to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail.”

Season’s greetings from the Bramley family

Dear all,

This year we thought we’d jump on the Christmas letter bandwagon, as it seems such a charming way to keep in touch.

Harry’s prospects looked grim at the start of the year. ‘Too big to fail’ is our new family motto – thank heavens for the bailout! The other bank executives had started to move their funds to overseas accounts, but Harry took a more dignified approach by trusting his assets to the British property market.

We moved the family home to Bedfordshire, but Harry’s retaining a little 3-bed place in Docklands to save money on commuting. He sleeps there Monday to Friday, although he says it’s nothing more than a ‘crash pad’.

No wonder he’s had to take on a girl to keep the place clean. He says she’s expensive, but she’ll come round at short notice. In fact, he said that if everyone was as flexible as Lithuanian girls, Britain would be in much better shape!

Harry economised further by taking advantage of that new
car-scrapping scheme: he handed over the keys to his old BMW and picked himself up a new Mercedes. He made some cost projections, and it turns out we’re saving money in the long-run, as the fuel consumption is lower.

At first he was happy to have done something for the environment, but since that business with the fraudulent university scientists, he’s taken to lighting both patio heaters for thirty minutes every time he hears the words ‘global warming’. “On principle”, he says!

But the new family home is lovely, even if I do have it to myself much of the time. So nice to be out of dreadful London once and for all. The lifestyle is so much better in the country, and the children have a greater chance of enjoying a ‘white’ Christmas (nudge, wink).

Speaking of the children, Sebastian took up his place at Griffington Boys’ School in September. He is showing considerable academic promise, although there’s no indication yet whether he’ll gravitate towards law or accountancy.

I suspect law. He possesses a fierce sense of justice. Apparently, there are some boys in his year who won scholarships on no basis other than their ability to string a tune together on a musical instrument!

Sebastian isn’t one to suffer freeloaders gladly, so he and some other boys have developed an informal priority system for the dining and bathing facilities which they implement at their discretion.

Jemima has finished her media course and is considering her career options. Her end-of-term project was to write and produce a ‘pilot’ episode of a television programme. She came up with something about fashion, in which she interviewed all her friends! The project turned out so well that she’s pitching it to one of those new digital channels, but it’s still early days. There are reasons to be optimistic though; her tutor said it was ‘an astonishing piece of work’, and that in 20 years of teaching, he’d ‘never seen anything quite like it’!

Not only that, but she’s thought up an iPhone application called iWear, which cross-references images on the Perez Hilton website with the BBC’s weather application to suggest the optimal outfit for any given moment.

Well, that’s the latest from the Bramleys! Better sign off now. Wishing you a very merry Christmas and best wishes for the new decade.

Love,

Jan x

Deck the bells with walls of holly

No internet in my new place yet. I caught a heavy cold just in time to move house for the 15th time in 30 years. I almost enjoyed the extra misery. I am a man for whom the assembly of shelves rarely happens without a stream of blasphemy.

My new neighbours have heard me cursing the figureheads of all the major religions, as well as some of the more obscure ones. I have cursed everyone’s God. My mouth is an equal opportunities employer.

My best temper tantrum came at the end of a short car journey during which I’d been reading a chapter of a book I got at a Buddhist monastery in Vietnam. The chapter was about achieving peace and calm no matter what the circumstances. Two minutes later I had a messy sneezing fit at a critical moment in the removal of a bulky tv from a small car while a thunderstorm broke around me, as a result of which I said some things that would have offended Jimmy Carr.

Moving is rubbish, but the end result is the reward. My new flat is a triumph of modernity, all wooden floors and white walls. Everything is unpacked; I’m home. I have nothing to move, remove from a box, assemble, plug in, tune, straighten, hammer, configure, or dial for the foreseeable future.

---

Curb

I think Larry David has raised comedy to an artform in season seven of Curb Your Enthusiasm. The final episode is a masterpiece. It exists in stark contrast to the utter shit that the BBC commissions, but that’s another story, and in the time-honoured traditions of Asian travel veterans, I’m trying to eliminate negativity from my life. Speaking of which:

The News

Did the media ever get more mileage out of a non-story than they got out of the British sailors detained in Iran? The coverage was ludicrously over the top. The sailors were sent on their merry way a few pounds heavier after a couple of days. What did they think was going to happen?

Of all the possible scenarios discussed ad nauseam by the talking heads, the question I didn’t hear asked was this: What would have been the likely outcome if the situation was reversed; if five Iranian sailors had inadvertently strayed into US waters? Something tells me they wouldn’t have emerged well-fed and smiling a couple of days later.

Eggs in the morning

I’m always getting the song from that Tropicana advert stuck in my head. You know the one? It’s a call-and-response duet, as if improvised. Girl sings ‘How do you like your eggs in the morning?’; Guy sings ‘I like mine with a kiss’.

I kind of wish he sang ‘I like mine with an orange’. That would bring the song to a swift conclusion and make it less likely to inhabit my subconscious for the rest of the day.

(Nothing rhymes with ‘orange’, right? Apart from maybe ‘door-hinge’.)

Recoding

Me and Guy got started on a new recording session. We’ve put down building blocks for four songs, all of which sound full of life. The session was fuelled by a keg of German beer, although I was tempted by a drink called Scotsmac.

It’s three quid! It’s a blend of wine and whisky. It literally mixes grape and grain. The vintage is irrelevant, its sole purpose is to provide a quick and cheap solution to alcoholics.

Maybe I’ll try it next time… but anyway. There will be some new music on this site in a few weeks. Yippee, right?

Listen to the new Down I Go song, a Christmas treat on Ben’s blog in which I’m happy to have played a small part.

Mr Kleenex and social tourettes

I’m always blurting stuff out that I immediately regret, but I may be showing signs of improvement. One of my quieter, shyer work colleagues was telling me about getting free tissues outside a train station (yes, that is the level of conversation in my office) from a handsome man dressed as Mr Kleenex.

It was obvious my colleague had been sexually aroused by Mr Kleenex. I started to say ‘Well, Mr Kleenex is, in a sense, fuelled by your bodily fluids’, but managed to edit it into something more innocent at the last moment. Progress.

As Chef Made It

Twitter confirms what you have always suspected: the lives of wealthy, successful people are just as futile as your own. It’s reassuring. But it also confirms the old adage that money is wasted on the rich.

If I had serious money, I would get jobs with the sole intention of seeing how creatively I could get fired from them.

If I was a secret millionaire waiter, I would deliver plates of half-eaten food to rude customers and offer them a deadpan reply when they complained.

“That’s as Chef made it, sir.’

‘Gordon Ramsey was here last week, sir, and he responded most favourably to his half-chewed steak.’

If someone ordered a side dish, say a plate of olives, I would give them a photograph of some olives clipped to a paper plate. Then I’d add an 80 per cent service charge to their bill and ask them why they hadn’t touched their olives.

My ideal fake job would be working in a booth in an amusement arcade. Whenever someone passed me a 20 pound note and said ‘Change this for me, mate’, I would tear it in half and hand it back to them. ‘Changed!’

I might need to wear a stab vest for that one.

I would go to job interviews and light a cigarette the first time I was asked a stupid question. I would feign surprise at the ensuing outrage.

Once I’d got all that maliciousness out of my system, I’d turn to philanthropy.

I would hang out in coffee shops, waiting for someone to be unforgivably rude to a nervous, depressed barista. I would offer the barista the gift of freedom: I would slip him or her an envelope bursting with 50 pound notes, and the suggestion that they quit on the spot, and take whatever remonstrative action they deem reasonable against their obnoxious former customer.

---

Comments challenge! Come up with the funniest comparison you can. For example:

• Damien Hirst is to art as a park flasher is to interpretive dance.
• Dan Brown is to literature as sewage is to raw shellfish.

What have you got? Make my eyes bleed.

Swinging Lead

If I had the balls, I’d work freelance. Three problems with that:

• Insecure income = constant fatigue and anxiety = no quality work done. Vicious circle.
• It’s tough out there unless you’ve sucked the right dicks.
• I don’t possess enough joie de vivre. If I was asked to edit a piece on ‘How to Taste Wine’, there is every danger I would reduce it to just one sentence: You pour it in your fucking mouth.

When it comes down to it, I write for pleasure and edit for money. In that effort, I am a passenger on the gravy train. Not in first class with the MPs and bank executives, but I have a reserved seat in the ‘quiet coach’ near the buffet car. Looking busy is my primary function.

In my ten weeks of employment, the desk next to mine has been unoccupied. My absent team mate has been off sick the whole time. The reason? A broken finger.

I designed a web banner for someone a couple of weeks ago. The person was a senior communications manager. He couldn’t tell me the pixel dimensions he needed, but he’d measured his computer screen with a tape measure and thought that would be enough.

In the subsequent exchange of emails, he revealed that he didn’t know the difference between width and height.

At least thirty thousand pounds a year of public money drops into the bank account of a man who does not know the difference between width and height. A happy thought to accompany your next tax bill. To quote one of the good guys I work with: ‘You have to think for them.’

Certain sectors of employment are like a kind of benefits system, except instead of dole they provide a taxed salary in return for shuffling paper around and talking about ‘providing an exemplary user experience with value for environmentally friendly money and equality while protecting the children with passion and integrity.’

---

On the train from London Bridge to Gatwick:

I was sitting in my seat chatting to my sister when I saw the ticket inspector coming. She was wearing a t-shirt with ‘I taught the devil everything he knows’ on it. Her arms were covered in prison tattoos. She had short, spiky hair and multiple facial piercings. She would have benefited from losing a kilo or two.

My only thought as I handed over my ticket was that it was good of the train company to employ people of such unconventional appearance in a public-facing role. As she moved into the next carriage, I could hear her singing ‘Crazy Train’ by Ozzy Osbourne, which is his one good song.

My sister and I fell back into conversation, which was broken a moment later when I saw another ticket inspector coming towards us. He looked a lot more conventional – navy blazer, navy trousers, polished back shoes. He had a credit card machine strapped to his chest.

I had an epiphany.

“Wait a second. That woman – she wasn’t a ticket inspector! She just rides the train all day checking people’s tickets! She plays at having a shit job!’

When the official ticket inspector reached us, my sister offered him her marked ticket. He said, with a wink, ‘Ah, you’ve already had your ticket ‘checked’, haven’t you, love?’

Thick as a Plank

A question I get asked a lot: ‘What was your degree in again?’

I don’t have a degree; I’m not a graduate. I’m as thick as a plank. I did badly at school, worse at university, and dropped out as soon as I could summon the courage. Then I moved to London with two friends, a sleeping bag and a guitar and didn’t look back.

My lack of academic prowess is masked effectively by the fact that I am a compulsive reader. I read everything. I don’t remember much of it, but gradually, in the same way that cliff faces are formed by the steady assault of ocean waves, I start to do a convincing impression of an intelligent person.

It works in my favour, but it’s not the real thing. To illustrate the depth of my Homer Simpson stupidity:

The company Carex sells two types of handwash. One is a plastic container of handwash gel with a dispenser pump. The other, on the right, is a refill bottle. The refill bottle is about 50p cheaper, but has no dispenser pump.

Here’s what I did with Carex containers for most of my domesticated adult life until remarkably recently: I would buy a refill bottle, and pour the contents from the refill bottle into the old, empty container with the dispenser pump. It takes ages, handwash gel flows so slowly!

I had an epiphany just a few months ago: ‘Wait, why don’t I just screw the dispenser pump into the refill bottle?’

I’m the smartest guy you know. But I’m unedumacated. I think it’s time to put that right. I intend to get myself a degree from the Open University, in the career-accelerating discipline of English Literature. I start in February, wish me luck, I’m going to need it.

The arts – not so much a way to make a living, more a way to make a living worthwhile.

The Biscuit Game

Someone told me my boss went to boarding school when he was a child. I replied that it confirmed my suspicions: he looks like the kind of bloke long accustomed to buying biscuits in bulk. My colleague didn’t get the reference; I had to explain.

Polite and well-spoken I may be, but some of my new colleagues are beginning to suspect that many of the conversations I have in my personal life are characterized by uncultured simplicity.

If my remark about the alleged tendency of certain types of teenage boys to masturbate together in a collective effort to add to the nutritional value of a McVitie’s Digestive didn’t give me away, it was my reaction when the same colleague asked if I went to private school: I spluttered ‘You must be JOKING!’

They took me for posh. They couldn’t have imagined, say, the state of the clapped-out Vauxhall Cavalier that dropped me off at the gates of my comprehensive school.

It’s the accent, I know. Early exposure to Blackadder and Jeeves & Wooster will do that, and, well, I suppose I’m as posh as you can get if you’re from the west midlands. It’s not saying much. Wearing glasses is posh in the midlands. Imagine a brummie accent: ‘Look at that cunt, fookin’ reckons he’s something, don’t he, mister flash wants to see more than ten feet away, don’t he? I’ll fookin’ give ‘im something to look at!’

I must have been asked the ‘what are you fucking looking at?’ question a hundred times. The best answer I ever came up with – while intoxicated, in the company of a 6′5″, 16 stone friend – was ‘Your girlfriend. What’s she doing with you?’

He tried to punch me, and missed.

I couldn’t wait to move to London, where people are civilised, right? Well, no, but my self delusion was nice while it lasted. London is the place where some bloke in his 60s got kicked to death by teenage girls a couple of weeks ago, and the place where two friends of mine were followed from a gay pub and beaten up last week.

It’s a spiritual struggle to move from wanting to blast such people’s kneecaps off with a shotgun to pitying them for being such a waste of space, but I managed it.

If you’re capable of kicking the fuck out of someone for no reason other than their sexual orientation, you cannot have experienced joy or love. You cannot have a sense of humour. You don’t have empathy. You are lacking in all the qualities that make life (just about) worth living. You keep your kneecaps, you’re already missing too much.

There, I feel better.

The other thing that challenged my new era of positivity this week was all the talk of Tony Blair being the first president of the european union.

I hate the focus on ‘intelligence failures’ when talking about the invasion of Iraq and its predictable aftermath: The intelligence was fixed around the policy, it was plain to see at the time and it’s even more obvious now. Arguments that countered the American neocon narrative were ignored, supressed or discredited.

Blair has no use for reality, he ‘only knows what he believes’. His truth is whatever serves his ego. He’ll tell you that black is white, and when you protest, he’ll tell you he ‘took a different view’.

Blair as EU president? It’s not so much that I don’t think he’s suitable, it’s more that if I think about the reality of his contribution to the world for long enough, I become suicidal. So, I feel quite strongly about it. But then I understood! I’m not alone! Just look at the 650 comments on this article published on the Guardian website! It’s a red herring! We’ll all be so relieved when Blair ISN’T pronounced president of the EU that we’ll forget to take to the streets with pitchforks, in protest that no-one asked us about it in the first place.

The start of the 21st century in Europe will be remembered as the time when the ruling classes stopped even bothering to pretend they had a democratic mandate.

The Big Drop

Cage Fighters

This story caught my eye, not just because it’s heart-warming to hear of a drunken asshole getting humiliated, but also because the words ‘cage fighter’ jumped out at me.

What is it with cage fighters at the moment? I feel as if I hear about cage fighters a lot. Maybe I’m naive, but I had no idea that fighting in a cage has become such a popular activity.

I’ve seen it on tv a few times, and it’s impossible not to comment that after a couple of punches, cage fights end up on the mat, with a lot of crotch-sniffing and general substitution of violence for sex.

I think cage fighting would be better if they got rid of the macho dudes. It should be skinny intellectual guys! Fighters must be over six foot and under 11 stone! The loser’s the first guy to get his glasses broked and his book ripped up! I reckon I could be king of the ring.

TGI Friday’s WHAT?

I went to TGI Friday’s last night, or, as I named it after finishing one of their main courses, TGI Over. It’s the cage fighter’s cuisine of choice. Poached salmon and mint tea are not options.

I would advise caution towards any restaurant with laminated menus. You start to wonder about certain types of people who frequent such places. All the evidence suggests a lot of them need to be protected from themselves before they’ve even ordered a starter.

You ask yourself, ‘why is this menu laminated?’
Well, so you can rinse it under the tap. Rinse it of what, though? Also, you don’t get papercuts from laminated menus. A laminated menu is a limited liability menu.

I had the pork ribs with cold fries and cold onion rings. The ribs were ok, but the sauce? I’m not sure of the exact recipe, but this is close: take a full bottle of vinegar, empty half of it into your eye, then fill up the bottle with a bag of sugar and a tablespoon of bourbon. Stir in the collected fingernail dirt of a thousand tramps, leave it somewhere warm for a couple of days, then absolutely saturate your meat with it. Make sure the meat has absorbed so much of your sticky brew that even an internationally respected food critic couldn’t tell what type of animal your meat used to be.

Look, I’m not saying it didn’t taste good: it did. But as soon as it was sitting in my stomach, I couldn’t wait for it to get the hell out of my digestive system before it could do any permanent damage. I think I know how the pilot of the Enola Gay felt before the big drop. I feel like I ought to write my guts a note of apology on rice paper and send it down there with some steamed fish and vegetables.

That’s not to say I didn’t have a good time.

In a World….

I think the guy behind the new Dixon’s slogan – ‘The last place you want to go’ either had a nervous breakdown or a moment of clarity. It is absolutely true: Dixon’s IS the last place you’d want to go. Maybe he’s also worked on the new Gervais movie, the one that looks so awful you feel like you might give up on life forever if you saw it.

As ever, it’s the tagline that kills me: ‘In a world where everyone tells the truth, he just invented the lie!’

I mean, the concept makes me cringe enough as it is, but the lack of imagination in the ad copy! Someone got paid for that! Someone thought it was a job well done! How many fucking movies are going to be sold as ‘in a world where [parameter], one man just [parameter]!’?

It makes me think creativity only exists to be stifled. If your movie can’t be pitched using the above template, forget about it.

Here’s a few more I think we’ll see come out of Hollywood soon:

• In a world where people defecate from holes in their neck, he just bought a cashmere scarf!
• In a world where everyone’s hyper-sensitive to pain but also annoying, he just invented a remote-control cattle-prod!
• In a world where most people look, sound and act like Simon Cowell, one visionary high court judge is selling immunity from prosecution!
• In a world where everyone’s a little too dry, he just got damp!
• In a world where everyone has a camera, he just became a highly skilled but completely unnecessary draughtsman!

Any more for any more?