Some people take a book into the toilet whereas I am to be found, in our shrine to the Thunderbox, with wallpaper. I’m neither short of reading material nor pushing the vanguard of the mystical readings of wallpaper runes “ no I’ve been decorating* This is a continuation of a worrying trend; first trellis, then grouting and now wallpapering have spookily accompanied a dribbly descent into my middle years.

We have no wallpaper anywhere else in the house, and neither Carol or I have ever attempted anything legal with a decorating table and paste before. That’s probably why she’s chosen the smallest room with its dearth of natural light and shortness of occupation. It’s unlikely anyone will spend enough time in there to gaze perplexed at the innovative use of Tippex and marker pens. Especially now I’ve removed the library shelf.

There’s a reason we’ve never felt the urge to subscribe to Wallpapering today encompassing Dull As Fuck DIY Tasks?. The apparently simple task of cutting, pasting and hanging is analogous to placing an angry octopus into a paper bag. Firstly shooing the kids off their impromptu hop scotch game as we rolled out the paper, then finding a table big enough to start pasting and then finding you can’t actually paste it without it either tearing or making a break for freedom. Applying the paste with a Creosote brush led to two off table and one on cat excursion. We’ve been onto the Cat Club about our new breed The Pissed Off Tabby now white with blue squares?.

Once wrenched off the table, it then sticks to absolutely everything including, on occasion, the wall. During one moment of hilarity, I wallpapered myself and ran around the kitchen shouting wooooo I am the ghost of wallpaper? which impressed everyone in the house under the age of eight. In my defense, this childish act was performed to relieve the tedium of the whole endeavour. It seemed to take bloody ages to line up, hang, re-hang, swear, re-hang, brush, roller, cut, self harm and scream give me a tin of paint? – I was expecting the Red Cross to be shipping in emergency food rations.

The instructions “ when did wallpaper start coming with instructions? “ insisted, that to maintain the pattern, you were obliged to chop off and discard many expensive inches. We soon saw through this thinly disguised marketing guff, instead applying the paper through the power of random. The result “ as you’d probably expect “ is magnificent. I would not be surprised if passing strangers are directed by guides to our smallest room, as a vignette of the old Grand Tour. It’s almost a copy of the Sistine chapel roof in there only flipped sideways, and with admittedly more paste than Michelangelo may have used. And less angels, but you get the idea.

I’m seriously considering charging admission and selling postcards.

Having completed this decorating Magnum Opus, a rather unsavoury fact has come to light. A depressingly vast acreage of house needs similar treatment starting with the Kid’s room, for which they have a design even Lawrence Flounce about like a great Poofta? Bowen would struggle to create. As ever being a results driven, self starter, thinking out of a box?** kind of guy, a solution immediately presented itself.

I’ll be paying someone else to do it. Some people apparently enjoy shopping for architrave and cricking their necks to paint the ceiling. I enjoy beer and laziness so playing to my strengths seems the way forward.

* That may be overstating my contribution.
** I read this somewhere, I don’t know what it means but it sounds like it may merit a pay rise so I’m giving it a try.

A while ago I whittered on about a state I’m now thinking of as Schroedinger’s Hamster* while waiting for my appraisal. Kind of not sure what’d happen next and wondering if noxious gasses may be involved. However, the complete strangers that most of you are got me through it, although I’m still not sure if the chicken suit AND chicken were not showing rather too much keenness.

Anyway, connected by the most tenuous of threads to that is this. We’ve all been subjected to those motivational posters with such dreadful propositions such as “There is no I in team” and “To see far lands, you must lose sight of the shore“. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking why isn’t there a “The Drugs Don’t Work but they get us through till 5pm” or “My boss is a big fat fuck of an arse but I’m licking it as I need the cash“.

Well there is. And it’s here. Welcome to a firm that has spent many hours devising anti-corporate posters of which a goodly percentage will – I promise you – end with your breakfast sprayed over the monitor. My personal favourite, as a man with something of the night about him, is:

Honestly, I could post them all but in an agony of picking just one more, this one had to be the winner:

They ship them from the US for not much cash and as a Christmas present will provide far more longevity and enjoyment that a rainbow jumper or novelty tie.

Go and support these people. There cannot be a free marketplace that doesn’t allow such genius to survive

* Name changed because I was tempted to do a necrophiliac pussy joke and nobody deserves that.

Middle age has not crept up in a raging against the dying of the light” kind of way. No, instead it’s come equipped for GBH, bashing its’ way through once flexible joints demanding cardigans and low impact exercise – otherwise there will be trouble. Trouble of the non reversible and ruthlessly painful kind.

So licensed muscle pummelers of various denominations have been working their black magic on my aching bones for the last few months. During this time, the provenance of this rambling pantheon of pain givers has been established though no little questioning and quite a lot of elbow biting misery. Firstly, Massage Therapists are not those angel dressed, ethereal beauties wafting into expensive hotel rooms. Fellas, their soft hands attending to your hardening pleasure centres have almost nothing to do with physical therapy, but absolutely everything to do with prostitution.

Continue reading “Back, Crack and Whack.” →

It cheers me to see that Microsoft have been forced to abandon their masterplan of uploading IE 7 whether you wanted it or not. It’s a shame the choice you’re offered isn’t a little more real world honest though. Instead of some anodyne “Internet Explorer 7 is ready to install, do you wish to continue?”, surely it would be better to offer “Do you want yet another piece of bloaty Microsoft code on your machine or would your rather load up a proper browser instead? Click OK to load Firefox or “I’m a bloody idiot” to continue”

Maybe it’s a change for the good. Do you think we can look forward to, for example, Powerpoint asking “shall I stop trying to be fucking clever and just let you draw a box?” or Word presenting an option “Before I randomly reformat your entire document ruining two days work, would you like to save?”

For a proper, reasoned discussion on the whole subject of Microsoft Windows, please take a minute to visit the wonderfully abusive unencylopedia. It’s kind of work safe if you’ve an understanding boss.

I’m with Bob on this one but if I may be allowed to live his 80s lyrics in the moment, it’d be more I bloody hate everyone on Monday’s’. Agreed it doesn’t scan quite so well, but factually it’s a hit.

Last week the electronic ticket machine greedily gobbled down credit cards without coughing up anything other than an electronic parp. The human equivalent performed lamentably in terms of queue management, instead choosing to restore the machine to a working state through a violently escalating troubleshooting technique ending in him kicking the shit out of the door.

This week they’ve gone one better and neither the machine or the ticket inspector/computer repair man was working. The repercussion was an obvious hundred grumpy and ticketless travellers arriving at the Marylebone terminus. Well obvious to anyone with the thinnest slice of intelligence, which instantly disqualifies Chiltern Railways, who instead blindly worship at the altar of revenue.

Rather than admitting their enterprise class fully resilient IT systems were in fact undone by a ˜hygiene operative’ inadvertently plugging in the vacuum cleaner and sending us on our way with an open turnstile and a forthright apology, instead they queued us like cattle facing the abattoir. The tailback was queued so far up the platform, geographically it was in the postcode of South Harrow. A single Butlin’d uniformed employee of the bank of railway wickedly traded his poisoned chalice for a heavily thumbed notebook and a blunt pencil.

Yes, customer service soon became customer irritation as this one poor lad licked, frowned and consulted several notebooks everytime a frustrated passenger asked for a single from Stoke Mandeville. Still help was at hand as the arthritic ˜B’ team parachuted in from their extended tea break with electronic copies of his desperate notebook. Sadly they’d received neither the requisite braincells nor training to operate them and entire epochs passed as they failed to navigate the complex menu system dreamt up by a descendant of Columbus’s navigator. That’ll be a single from the East Indies and to hell with the specifics.

Continue reading “I don’t like Mondays.” →

To paraphrase George Best, I’ve spent all my money on sport and beer and the rest I’ve just wasted. Right now it feels like a tax on the stupid and I must be due a rebate. Here’s the reasons:

Cricket

Australia aren’t beating England. Because in being beaten, the losing team is at least competing. In the last three days, England have managed one session in which they aspired to parity. And every morning, a brief Internet surf shows that somehow last night was even worse that the one before. We score a meagre 157 with all our players, while Australia lope easily to 188 losing just one man who appeared too apathetic to run. Still fair play to the fella, we were clearly never going to bowl him out and he fancied some time out fishing while his colleagues smacked the cherry around.

Some of this is undoubtedly the fault of our crowing media that labeled the Australian team as too old to compete at the highest level. Last time this rather high risk strategy saw ˜Dad’s Army’ steal the Rugby World Cup from under the Australian’s noses. But our team “ even shorn of a couple of key players “ looks undercooked, overawed and heading for an embarrassing capitulation over five matches.

Rugby

Still at least we’re losing to the best team in the world playing the only game which breaks for lunch. On the Rugby pitch we’re losing to anyone who turns up in West London looking for a game. First the Puma’s deservedly won their first ever match at Twickenham and now the South African’s have slayed their St. Geroge’s dragon in a rather more unworthy manner. Last week, we had much possession but few ideas during the last twenty minutes, and sneaked a win by hiding the ball up our jumper.

This week, we threw away an eight point lead through a larcenous combination of indiscipline and incompetence. South Africa have their pub team touring the UK and Ireland showed quite how rubbish they were. But, and I feel a surge of pride at this, England made them look fantastic.

The coach will be sacrificed, the team will move on” and come the Six Nations and latterly the World Cup, every team will see us as a home and away banker while we’ll trade on fading glories.

Football

Okay, I accept that Sheffield United never pretended to be world beaters or even any good. But hanging onto the thinnest of thin slivers this weekend, I deludedly banked my sporting happiness on us crafting a draw against a London club which isn’t bankrolled by a few squillion. Oh, I see checking the web that indeed they now are. Anyway we had our chances but didn’t take them and are left languishing at the arse end of the table hanging precipitously over a huge revenue drop to the lower leagues.

And that’s to be expected but it was like the grim reaper receiving an early Christmas present of a nail gun. Which he’s enthusiastically applying to the coffin of English sport.

I really wish I didn’t care. It’s not as beating your head against an unyielding desk can in any way change matters. But it’s the manner of defeat which rankles, we’re either chicken in the face of an opponent who’ve mentally bested us off the field of play, before we crumble once upon it. Or we’re headless chickens running around chasing the ball in a perfect parody of seven year olds playing football.

It really doesn’t matter does it? At the end of the day, sport is just nationalism dressed up in a track suit, and surely living in a country with a healthy economy, supplying allegedly well funded public services and cosseted in a generally risk free environment matters more.

Well that should be the case but it isn’t. We take all of that for granted while sport offers us the chance to bask in reflected glory, but with that comes the responsibility of feeling impotent and angry when our team gets stuffed.

We may have invented most of these games but unfortunately every other nation subsequently punctured the myth that arrogance and birth right in some way determine the result, before actually strolling out onto the pitch and giving a shit. There are many problems with English sport ranging from apathy through misadministration and ending “ as these thing inevitably do “ with money. Too much of it to the wrong people rewarding the wrong things.

Still it could be worse. Much, much worse; you could be a citizen of a nation with fantastic weather, superbly confident sporting teams and a chip on their shoulder the size of Manchester. I’m sportingly depressed to be English right now but the alternative would be to have born an Australian or a South African.

You see, I told you there was reason for optimism. If I can institute a media blackout over the next month and pretend to enjoy the cold and dark, Christmas will be here and that’s a reason to be properly miserable.

My Antipodean friend is encouraging me to write a standard we were crap” article lambasting the English Rugby team who have turned Fortress Twickenham into Fill Your Boots, Twickenham. I cannot spin any positives when it’s obvious that we lost the 15 a side Falklands rematch, due to our highly paid team missing some basic skills such as Catching” and Throwing”

But I thought I’d wait until the triple whammy of Rugby League and Ashes Cricket crank up the humiliation and mental pain of any fool supporting English sport.

Until then, enjoy these cheesy nuggets of humour retrieved from the rancid remains of the Internet bargain bucket.

The English rugby practice was disrupted today when an unknown white substance was found on the practice pitch by some player. Head coach Andy Robinson immediately suspended practice and called the police, after a complete analysis by forensic experts the unknown substance was found to be the try line.
Practice was resumed when the RFU decided the players were unlikely to encounter the substance again!

Andy Robinson takes the England team for a training session, first up he tells the players to take up their normal positions, so they all go behind the posts to wait for the conversion!!

The RFU set up a helpline for disappointed fans after a disastrous season the number is 0800 10 10 10.
That’s 0800 won nothing, won nothing, won nothing!

There are two man made things can be seen from space,
The Great Wall of China and the hole in the English defense

What’s the difference between English team and an arsonist?
An arsonist would not waste 17 matches

Although the last one is mildly amusing. We’ll be fine tomorrow, beat the boks a million to nil and all shall be right with the world. Until the first Ashes test “ someone pass me a blanket and a large drink.

POST MATCH EDIT:
Result never in doubt then 😉 And there was even scant consolation for being stuffed in the RL match with the Aussies after the bog trotters gave them a good stuffing in the fifteen man game. Right, Ashes then, I’m feeling confident but it’s been said – and by professional people who know their stuff – I’m deluded.