Lazy Bastard

It's come to my attention (i.e, I remembered) that I haven't written a blog in ages. Though that is in part because I couldn't be arsed, it's also because I've been rather busy, what with all the work, holidaying, footballing, burning my face lots of times in the sun, sitting, watching films, eating, pointlessly doing other stuff and generally just not bothering to write anything outside of work. Since I last wrote I've driven nearly 2,000 miles in a foreign country and eaten approximately 7 croissants. That could well be a conservative estimate. So, just to bring you up to date with what I've been up to, here is a list of facts and figures detailing my life since my last blog:

+ Driven 1,900 miles to the South of France. If anyone has ever done something similar, you'll know that French motorways are something of a double-edged sword. Yes, the sheer lack of other cars makes them a joy to drive on between cities, but their road signs are so shit-smearingly awful that you could easily find yourself flying helplessly past your exit and ending up in the centre of Paris going round and round on the busiest road in the world. Cretins.

+ Eaten lots of croissanty type goodies. They might be rubbish at signposts, but they know a thing or two about building pastries.

+ Visited Barclays Bank twice to use their coin deposit machine without managing to deposit any coins. I finally got round to emptying my Bell's Whisky jar of coppers and silvers and quite simply would like to pay them into my account. By my reckoning I must have about £100-worth just sitting there. Weighs an absolute ton, let me tell you. But, much to my annoyance, both times I've gone to the branch the machine has been full. WELL BLOODY EMPTY IT THEN!!! On sensing my annoyance, the kind staff suggested I go to Morrison's, where I will have the pleasure of paying a supermarket to put my own money into my own account. They should have just slapped my face and kicked me in the shin.

+ Seen roughly four naked people that weren't me or my girlfriend. Turns out folk like to tan their genitals in the South of France. But hey, with a ratio of three slender twenty-something ladies to one baggy old codger, it could have been far more unpleasant.

+ Burnt my face three times. Will I never learn? Massive globe of furiously burning gasses in sky + one pasty-faced Englishman = idiot with a head the same colour as a freshly skinned salmon. With my track record of facial burning, it's a good thing I don't subscribe to the French 'sans pants' sunbathing technique.

+ Killed something close to 1 million flies. No shit. I was driving home along the M3 last night and must've gone through a swarm of midges or something. I honestly thought it was raining at first because of the amount of splodges on the windscreen. I now have a car that looks like a giant bogey from the front.

+ Watched one film that genuinely made me laugh out loud. The Hangover is great. Especially the hairy guy.

I'm gonna stop now. To be frank, I wasn't jotting down the amounts of everything I did over the last few weeks and my memory is far too poor to recall any more. I'll try not to leave it so long next time. Adieu.

View From Not On The Sill

Well, it's been a while since I was last on the sill, but don't think for a second that I've stopped learning valuable life lessons. Here's what I've learned lately from not on the sill...

+ You are NOT what you eat. But, if you eat several pounds of meat on a Monday night, you will inevitably have to deal with the substantial consequences on Tuesday.

+ Despite the fact that advertisements are supposed to encourage you to buy a product, it is possible to produce an advert that is so abhorrent people will actually promise not to buy that product ever, ever again. With that in mind, I shall not buy another Pot Noodle as long as I live. That's at least £3.79 they've lost out on each year. Gutted.

+ Computers will, whenever possible, violate you by any orifice available given half a chance. Digital rapists.

+ Buffy the Vampire Slayer and spinoff series Angel are the best TV programmes ever made. It's strange, but I'm convinced it's true.

+ When asked "What do you miss most about your childhood?" the correct answer for an 80s child is "The sound of concorde."

+ If you go to Staines town centre on a Sunday afternoon, you are guaranteed to see at least two 14-year old girls dressed as whores.

+ Magpies eat other birds. Especially little fluffy chicks that were minding their own business.

And that is all. For now.

Really high

I flew to New York over the Easter weekend. It was lovely, but I won't bang on about the exceptional time I had in the Big Apple. Instead, I'd like to discuss the matter of flying.

Now, on the way from Heathrow to JFK, I had the choice of about thirty films to watch on my own little screen. I watched three movies in total. One was an Oscar winner, one was a mildly humorous buddy movie, the other I can't remember. Oh, wait, it was the first half of a movie I'd read the book of. I love movies, so this whole setup was a dream. Furthermore, there were quizzes, games, great TV programs to watch and recent albums to listen to, all at the press of a button. Entertainment-wise, I was the equivalent of a christmas turkey. I was being fattened up on entertainment until I was a wobbly, entertained mass, ripe for the digital oven.

But it didn't end there. Within an hour of taking off, I was given a warm ham, cheese and egg wrap to shove in my gob, complete with refreshing beverage. I like ham, I like cheese, I'm a fan of warmth and I even like eggs. It was like a perfect welcome in a floury tortilla.

I barely had time to digest my last meal, when the main course arrived. Pasta, bread, cheese, crackers, chocolate. All served with a cool beer. Was this some kind of sick joke? I was being treated like a king! Food on tap, free beer at the click of my fingers, moviefilms being beamed directly into my eyeballs and some kind of special, not altogether comfy chair. I felt like an over indulgent Stephen Hawking.

More beer soon followed, and all I had to do was ask politely! In fact, I probably could have asked slightly impolitely and I'd still have got it! Crazy fools! I was even given a choc-ice before the flight was through! I didn't even know they still existed.

Before I knew it, I was in New York, fully fed, suitably quenched and utterly entertained. Planes eh?! Faaantastic!

Well, that is, they would be if they weren't essentially a hollow tube of steel, hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, thousands of feet off the ground, with my squashy pink body rattling around inside it. And in that respect, they're immeasurably fucking horrible. Can't win 'em all I guess.

Man's best friend

Dogs rule. I'm pretty sure that's just a fact. I've done extensive research into it, made pie charts, produced Power Point presentations and drawn pictures with a pencil. All the results said "Yes". That's as conclusive as it gets in my book.

You really can't beat chilling out with a dog. They're always around for a bit of companionship, they're always happy to see you (and not just because they're hungry), they scare off intruders and they're just really bloody great.

Admittedly, little rat dogs like chihuahuas are rubbish. If you want something that small and pointless, buy a guinea pig. At least guinea pigs don't look like their eyes are about to do a runner.

And don't get me started on cats. I'll be honest, I've not taken the time to meet every cat in the world, but those that I have met have all been sly little buggers with three things on their mind: 1) food, 2) scratching something/one, and 3) more food or I'm fucking out of here. Seriously. Spiteful, selfish little buggers. There's a reason they're always mean in Disney films. Big Walt knows his shit.

I've just spent much of this evening hanging out with a Great Dane called Megan. Lovely, well-behaved, gentle animal, despite being 6ft tall on her hind legs and probably capable of destroying and small town if she wanted to. Just a smashing young lady.

Yeah, I'm a dog person. It's official.

++Update++ I forgot, I do actually know one nice cat. Misty. Seems remarkably docile and even owns a cocktail bar in Hove.

It's come to this

I used to quite like television. You could pretty much guarantee there'd be something on worth watching. Now you're lucky to get a handful of David Attenborough documentaries a year. Even Match of the Day is on when you're either out for the night, or, in the case of the early morning repeat, out for the count. And you can't even watch that on iPlayer. What an enormous load of rubbish. Maybe Sky+ is the way forward. Who knows? I'd probably only ever record the footie and Harry Hill's face anyway.

All I do know is that tonight I watched various blooper reels on YouTube as an alternative to TV. Shocking. It's come to this. Scrap the license fee I say. Load of chuff.

(Incidentally, if you've got a few minutes to spare, I can heartily recommend the bloopers from 'Step Brothers' starring Will Ferrell, and the UK version of The Office. Gervais laughing is pure gold...).

Irrational fear of photographs

Google Street View was launched in the UK last week and has been all over the news ever since. Sadly, it's been hogging column inches for all the wrong reasons. No, it hasn't been there because it's a genuinely useful and bizarrely interesting tool. It's not clogging up the front page of the Metro because people are applauding all the hard work and effort that has gone into making it possible, nor is it attracting comment after comment on internet 'Have Your Say' forums because of it's clever use of technology, bringing mapping storming into the 21st century.

No, it's making headlines because, it would seem, there are an awful lot of mumbling buffoons out there.

It's become apparent that vast swathes of the British public are somehow of the opinion that Google Street View is an infringement of their civil rights. A dastardly breach of their privacy! Another weapon in Big Brother's ever-growing arsenal against poor old Joe Public. A giant, map-shaped probe, ready to bum the bejesus out of all and sundry. A big special digi-paedo, waiting to pounce on innocent children like a rubbish, electric tiger. Or maybe it's the latest tool by which those terror folks will torment our brains.

Of course, if you've got the slightest hint of intelligence, you'll realise it's none of the above. In fact, it's just a load of photos of stuff that anyone could go and look at whenever they like at any time of day. Public stuff. You know, stuff that's in public. Stuff that anyone with fully-functioning eyes can look at as much as they like. Stuff that anyone can take a photo of whenever they like. And that's all it is; photos. It's not a live feed. It's not like CCTV. No, that kind of coverage would require millions of large spherical cameras to be permanently placed at five-metre intervals in the middle of every road in every major city in Britain. And last time I checked, that wasn't the case. They'd get in the way of cars and stuff.

So if you think Google Street View should be banned or shut down, you must logically also believe that human beings with eyes should also be banned, just in case they look at stuff. In fact, better safe than sorry, we'd better wipe out the animal kingdom too. They've got eyes and you never know what the shifty fuckers are thinking. They look at stuff all the time. They probably even bloody remember it too!!! Burn them all at the stake, then ban fire incase anyone took a photo of it. Then ban cameras. Sod, it, nuke the planet, there's no telling what people might have casually glanced at and not given a second thought to!

People have complained that images of themselves in compromising situations are available to the general public, even though their faces are blurred out and the only people who will recognise them are the friends and family who already know what a cretin they are. Here are some simple rules: if you don't want people to see you being sick in the street, don't be fucking sick in the street. If you don't want people to see you going into a sex shop, don't go into a fucking sex shop. That's what the internet's for! And if you don't want people to see the front, public-facing wall of your house, go and live in a fucking cave in the middle of nowhere.

And, most importantly, if you really must complain about something, make sure you at least have the tiniest shred of a clue what it actually is that you're moronically whining about. One guy actually complained that criminals would now be able to watch his house continuously, learn his patterns and know when he's out so they can rob his house. Quite apart from the fact that no-one gives a shit about his "patterns", apparently they can tell all that from a single photo taken almost a year ago. My contempt for that person can not be put into words. Instead, I'll leave you to make a deeply angry guttural noise of your choice.

I'm going to have a lie down...

Quadra-spazzed

Last night I made my long-awaited return to the football pitch after three months laid up with an ankle injury. To cut a long story short, during a match last December I was involved in a tackle that basically resulted in my foot going from a standard twelve o'clock position, to the rather more uncommon quarter to five stance. In other words, my ankle was molested very publicly by a complete stranger in broad daylight. Yes, I screamed like a flimsy lamb, but, thankfully, the pain was so bad I couldn't have managed "embarrassed" if I'd tried.

Over the course of the next 24 hours, I went from having two fully-functioning ankles to having one standard ankle and one life-size replica of Joseph Merrick's head at the end of my leg. Pretty annoying really. Not only did it cause considerable discomfort, but it also earned me the nicknames "Simple Jack" and "Full Retard".

Several physio sessions and just over three months later, I was ready to test it out and get back on the pitch again. Cue an hour-and-a-half of high tempo five-a-side football on a spangly next generation artificial pitch. Lovely, glorious and wonderful to be back.

Today, I'm glad to report, my ankle seems to be holding up just fine. Sadly, however, the rest of my body feels like I've been attacked by an overly hostile clan of barbarians, intent on working over all of my major muscle groups with wooden clubs. That's what happens when you sit on your arse for quarter of a year I guess.

It's great to be back.