What Was The Name Of The Mother?

Thanks to a bout of unwellness that may or may not be pig-related, I've spent the day on the sofa like the unemployed layabout I already was. Of course, the natural thing to do in this situation would be to watch daytime television, or at the very least CBeebies, with a hot fruity drink, but we've run out of Lemsip and the novelty of the former is rather lost when you're at home all day looking for jobs anyway. Our still-novel broadband offers untaxing amusement for the nap-gaps, but by teatime I felt I really hadn't done enough detached gawping to do my role justice. Flicking through iPlayer, The Cell and Only Connect seemed a bit ambitious for my germful brain – but if there's one programme that should only have been enhanced by it, it was the new Shooting Stars.

Now, I don't want to say it was terrible. That wouldn't really be true and, worse, you'd have read through a fairly dull paragraph about how I'm a bit poorly with nothing to show for it but the usual moaning about ill-advised comebacks. In fact, it seemed to me to be up to pretty much the same standard as it always was (although I did miss my old favourite running gag, Vic Reeves's bombing joke). But I wasn't laughing.

Shooting Stars started when I was five and finished when I was nine and I don't think I've grown up that much in the years since. But for me, that means that the show feels as old as any comedy but Danger Mouse. Perfectly able though I might be to arrange the Lumberjack Song, Four Candles and the "The Stripper" breakfast sketch on some hypothetical Timeline of Hilarity, I had heard songs in the club style before I saw any of them. So when Reeves and Mortimer bounded back in HD, really no better or worse than they always were, their very distinctiveness turned back on them. To my mind, and unfairly, they don't sound like comedians: they sound like the tedious friend who thinks quoting Monty Python is immediately and unquestionably funny, or Joe Pasquale.

I worried about this realisation for a little while. Have I been too harsh on the last decade of the Simpsons, on Red Dwarf VIII or on The Krypton Factor's Super Round?

Don't be silly. I'm not that poorly.

How To Win Friends And Influence Hooligans

Sir Steve Bullock, Mayor of Lewisham, isn't terribly pleased about the Climate Camp setting up shop near him. He has every right not to be, of course, though given that the whole reason he's commenting on it is that the camp is on his doorstep, he'd be a more credible commentator and politician if he'd go and visit before using his position to assert a vague, unfounded prejudice. Come to that, even making a reasoned argument would win him a few points; sadly, he seems determined to assume that the Camp will wreck the site and upset the locals, against all evidence to the contrary.

In truth, it's probably fair enough that he didn't bother with even those token efforts: given that his jumping off point was an insulting and unjustified comparison of Climate Camp to the West Ham/Milwall hooligans. Fairly obviously not a winning move, but of course Mayor Steve didn't mean it like that. Those of us who weren't impressed had "missed the point"; Steve had made himself "very clear". Inevitably, he his sorry that "[his] views may have upset some readers" but considers himself wholly inculpable in the matter. After all, what possible reason could readers of the blog post "Football and Climate Change" have had to think he was making a direct comparison?

Oh. Right. Despite his failure to respond to criticism directed to his Twitter account, our dear mayor is "really quite keen on all this modern cyber communications stuff", so I'm sure he'll be pleased to learn how good the internet is at preserving ill-advised remarks.

Moving to London

Those who know me are probably well aware that I wasn't dancing the merriest of jigs over moving to London. The tube would be sticky and unpleasant, the pubs sometimes trendy and always expensive. People in shops would make me repeat things because they couldn't understand my perfectly-enunciated Queen's English. I'd be accosted in the street by Apprentice contestants trying to convince me to pay Combobulus Jacket-Buttering five quid to butter my jacket. Possibly, just possibly, I'd be beaten by the Met or knifecrimed by a freesheet distributor.

In reality, my clothing remains dairy-free and my body has the same number of holes in as it did a month ago. My other expectations, however, were all too accurate, and while they've emerged in much lower volume than I had foreseen, that's largely down to the fact that I've been far too busy having extensive dental work and (only marginally less enjoyable) dealing with 3 customer services to leave the flat. On the other hand, I can work out how to get pretty much anywhere using one piece of paper with some pretty lines on it instead of seven different badly-designed websites. I can easily sample a pretty hefty range of delicious ales, and come to that, buy just about anything I could possibly want in an actual, physically manifested shop. There are lots of nicely kept parks, the review sections of the papers have suddenly become relevant (or will once Edinburgh's out of them) and apparently there are some jobs somewhere, though I've yet to get a sniff of them.

All in all, and with the disclaimer that I've yet to be affected by the regional pricing of Boots Meal Deals, I'm pretty satisfied with London. And if I ever get homesick, there's a manhole cover down the road that was made in Brighouse which I like to think of as "the embassy".

Venerable Beads

Chrissy tells me occasionally that I should start blogging again. Who am I to argue? And I suppose, given the fact I haven't written anything in this space in over a year (I was scarred by that macaroon dream, you see), it's fitting that I should write about the Milk Bottle of Motivation.

The Milk Bottle of Motivation sits on my shabby-looking makeshift desk, and when I move back down to Cambridge it will sit on my handmade mahogany desk and be carefully polished by the Boy that all scholars of the college are assigned to see to their every need. It is simply a Dairy Crest milk bottle with the terms of its use written on the outside with a permanent marker. The rules are simple. For every hundred words that I write in a day (excluding filthy filthy degree-related stuff), I put a green glass bead in the bottle. This act is often accompanied by a vague thought of John Ruskin that does nothing to improve my day; it is always accompanied by a pleasing little "plink" noise that improves my day immensely. If I write a thousand words in a day, I get a bonus bead, this time in blue. The bottle slowly fills up until a day comes when I write less than a hundred words, at which point I tip it all out and leave the empty bottle to publicise my shame, except it doesn't publicise it very much because it lives on my makeshift desk and not in the Upper Crust in Birmingham New Street.

Now, a hundred words is really nothing; you can bash that out in a few minutes. It's very difficult not to feel silly rewarding yourself for such a paltry achievement. That's why the Milk Bottle of Motivation is serving me so well. It's so easy to pull a hundred words out of whatever part of your anatomy seems most appropriate that there's never any excuse for having to tip out those beads. And while there are often days when I sit down planning nothing more than to knock out a quick century to cling on to my hard-earned bottle filler, most of the time I end up writing substantially more than that. The first hundred is enough to get you sat down putting words together; moreover, because a hundred words is so tiny, by the time I finish the thought I started with I'm usually well into the next beadsworth. And you wouldn't want to waste those words, would you? Not when the next "plink" is so close...

Before Going Into Politics, He Had Been A Pro Wrestler

Last night, I had a dream in which Gordon Brown body-slammed a macaroon.

Needless to say, my support for the Labour party has dropped enormously since I awoke.

At Least This Time It Wasn't My Fault

There are lots of things you don't want when you're halfway through an essay. The discovery that all your library books are overdue, for example, or the crushing realisation that the one key assumption on which all your arguments rest is fundamentally flawed. I think I would happily have taken any of the essay-woes I've been treated to in the past, though, over the point yesterday - round about the seven hundred word mark - where Windows decided that actually, on the whole, I probably didn't want any of the data on my hard disk and it would save everyone a lot of hassle if it just wiped the whole lot. After all, a little modification to the casing and I could easily turn my freshly-bricked laptop into a fully-functional garlic press, and that would save an awful lot of fiddly chopping when making stir-fry.

It's possible that it just thought it would be appropriate, while I was writing about Ovid, to transform my laptop into an attractive doorstop. Thoughtful though that was, I do already have a very nice doorstop with a little wooden duck named Trinculo perched on top of it, and as I currently only have one door that's really all I need.

On the plus side, I managed to get a lot of reading done while Linux was installing.

Chavs Do Not Think Things Through

When my hair is quite long, they shout "Get a haircut!". But we both know that if I did, they'd just shout "Ginner!" instead.

It pains me to see breath wasted like that.

If You Want Something Done Properly, You've Got To Do It Yourself

Really, Mark, if you don't want me to clandestinely muck about with your blogger account, you shouldn't let me know your password and then not update for four months. Despite both these things I still feel rather guilty (I'm sorry, I am bored, largely because I have lost one of my procrastination tools due to the fact that YOU NEVER BLOG ANY MORE)... so feel free to delete this post once you've read it. Really, the main thing that's compelled me to post despite feeling rather guilty is the curiosity to know how long it will take you to actually notice this exists...

I've sat here for a little while pondering whether to make a vague effort to be anonymous and mysterious. I've decided that I will, futile as it may be, mainly because I can't think of a way to sign off after this little paragraph without looking silly.