Better than today.

Cliff made some interesting writings the other day about bloggers and writers and creative-type thinking their best days are behind them. I can sympathise – in many ways my golden years on ALBOWIEB are behind me, along with those halcyon days when bloggers were cool and got book deals. (Cough – would happily sign a contract, I’ve got ideas. Call me.) But creatively? Hells no.

If I thought my writing was getting worse I’d die, I’d stop straight away. I read posts from years ago, months ago, weeks ago, last week...and I just cringe. What utter shit, tripe, balls, do I come out with day in and day out. What was I thinking? And the hair.

I want to consistently up my game, be thought-provoking, amusing, occasionally (every 6 months or so) hilarious, invariably witty and consistently stylish. I know that if I had a resident sub lots would change, but my voice is my voice. What I say on here doesn’t come from the heart – what a mistake that would be – but I should hope that it might come from the soul. And my soul never yearns for yesterday.

Eau de toilette.

I enjoyed the HS1 experience, though. Some light turbulence was to be had as we trundled under Bethnal Green – the best way to see it, in my humble experience. I actually grabbed my phone off the little seat table at one point, and I put it in my pocket. I wanted to have it on my person, should we crash and I was called upon to document the scene for Twitter, or the BBC News website.

For the futuristic and terrifying experience of being on the high-speed line, I found the toilet singularly unimpressive and a distinctly depressive portent for the future of 21st-century travel. I have yet to perfect the art of weeing on a train at full tilt, but this, I suppose, is my problem and not Network Rail’s. Washing my hands, though, is like being spat on by an angry tramp and then having him fart your fingers dry.

It’s a thoroughly edgy experience, though. You never know whether you’re to inadvertently expose yourself to an innocent fellow passenger because you haven’t pressed the right combination of buttons upon entry. I was on a Pendolino once, and the Blind Date screen moved back to reveal contestant number two reading the paper and having a shit. No joke, he just looked up and then carried on reading.

I was only gone five minutes.

When you don’t post to your blog for a while, is that falling on or off the wagon? I felt like I was a part of society for a week or so there, but never fear kids, I’m back. There’s that eternal paradox, which is definitely not eternal and probably not that great as paradoxes go, but you don’t have anything to write about unless you do something, at which point you cease to have the time to write about things. Life’s tough, eh?

Not as tough as being behind the times, though. As I type I’m watching Gavin and Stacey on the television – I’m only five episodes into some random season, where Gav and Stace get married and live together in Essex. I’ve never seen it before, but Nessa is my new favourite comedy character, vying for top spot as Empress of Hilariousness with Sue White from Green Wing. What’s occurrin’?

I had cause to travel down southwards the other week, almost to the end of the country. It involved getting a train down to London, travelling arduously across a painful sliver of our fair capital city, and then getting one of the new High Speed 1 trains from St. Pancras International, the most pretentious station in all the world.

Not only is it painfully unaware of the faint ridiculousness of its international status, sending trains to Paris and Brussels (they don’t count as international, France and Belgium – they’re really just huge motorway service stations on the way to somewhere much better), its collection of gastro-cafes, sushi bars and patisseries makes me twitch in the face. Nothing wrong with a WH Smith and a Marks & Spencer ‘Simply Food’ in the great British train station. No use trying to couch things for all the sensitive French folks that might be grumbling off the Eurostar.

What really makes me sick.

I like going through the NHS Direct website when I’m feeling a bit under the weather until it tells me to call an ambulance. That’s just one of my things. I don’t often get ill, I’m not a sickly person. Some people get abscesses and ulcers and cancer in awkward places. I get the odd cold sore in easy to reach places, despite my moaning. I get this cold/flu thing when I’m really tired and run down, that’s no fun. Sore throat, fever, headaches, etc, etc.

That’s good, though, getting ill a little bit every so often – you just keep your hand in and that. I’d hate to be totally healthy for ten years and then suddenly keel over with a heart attack or a stroke or something. That would, of course, suck.

I find that the good times are better when you’ve got some bad times to balance them out. Can you imagine if you had chips every night for dinner? Chinese every day at lunch? I think I would be gone within a week for a start, but these things would lose their fun, their edge. You might wish for an easy life, but how can an easy life be appreciated?

And there’s always that thing where there’s someone worse off than you. There’s probably some skanky Ethiopian prostitute kid with AIDS and no legs rolling around somewhere going ‘no there’s not!’ whenever someone says that, but play the numbers game as a westerner and it’s almost 100% there’s someone worse off than you.

Which in many ways is why I go through the NHS Direct website until it tells me I need an ambulance. I don’t need one, but at the same time someone somewhere is desperately trying to click through the internet with their bloody, stumpy hands and a jigsaw stuck in their shoulder. ‘Call an ambulance’, the website says. I’m definitely better off than that person. Cough, sniffle.

Yet another haircut...

I had a haircut the other day. Haircuts have always been a rich seam for me in my blogging. Fertile ground, flourishing seas, etc, etc. You can probably chart my life by going through the past five years of blog posts and measuring the haircuts. I can tell you without looking that they have got quicker and more expensive. But such is life, eh?

They are becoming not just a measure of passed time, but creeping decrepitude. Your neck, your ears, your nose – these things start to get hairier as the top of your head gets thinner. Seriously now, give it another ten years and the barber will be reaching down the back of my t-shirt to finish off my hairline.

This is a depressing thought and immediately brings on a splurge of pre-life crisis.

If I had any money I would at this point consider the judicious purchase of a cabriolet to soften my mood, bring it in line with my softened waistline. Only the problem with that (apart from the I couldn’t possibly afford one in the next thirty years because no-one wants to hire me problem) is that I would get terribly sunburned on my pate.

It happened last summer for the first time – and that realisation, that you’re going to have to start putting sun cream on the top of your head...it’s enough to make you consider doing something drastic at the next hair cut...

Such warm weather. Sigh.

I know it's hateful when British people moan about the weather, but still - I'm sure it's our birth right, or something. Winter's too cold, autumn's too rainy, spring's too whatever and summer's all hot and that.

But goodness me, it's stuffy today. Hot, sunny, uncomfortable.

Whatever are we supposed to do? I can't sleep at night when there are double-figures' worth of celsiuses knocking about the place. I just lie there, all sweaty and awake making useless life plans that will come to fruition.

I think I've said before that I like to be able to imagine myself doing the next thing, or seeing the current thing out to its fullest extent - it's how I keep myself concentrated, I'm a visionary, you know. I like the future to be one of possibility and excitement, it's the most fun way to live.

The problem, of course, is that when you're lying there in the middle of the night, uncomfortable and unsleeping, the future can seem such a long way off. It's the long dark night of the soul...

It's all in a good cause.

There’s a guy at work doing the Great North Run for diabetes. I find this odd, seeing as he already has diabetes himself. It seems a bit selfish, if he was an MP he’d have to put that in the register of members’ interests. I felt that he would have been better off running for the bald kids, or something,

Is there an etiquette to these things? I wouldn’t be able to ask for money for myself, tragic and expensive disease or not. I think if you’ve got something you should really leave the fundraising to other people – it diminishes the dignity of your condition, having to do the legwork yourself. Far better to suffer in restrained silence and let someone set up a foundation in your honour.

That’s not even to mention the craziness of doing a run. That’s so last month. Oh no, wait, I’m thinking of the London Marathon. That was last month. My dad does runs – half marathons, as if a half measure of an arbitrary and supposedly historical distance is anything at all. I mean, don’t get me wrong – 13 miles is long whichever way you look at it, unless you happen to be the Milky Way.

I suppose it’s nice that people like to do crazy shit for charity – but I don’t think I’m so keen on the rationalisation, the cutting out of the middle man. If we don’t clamp down on sufferers of things doing sponsored stuff themselves, there’s going to be a whole strata of society left unemployed in charitable actions every week. And that would be a disaster, in these straitened times.

My great book: ultimate edition

I was thinking the other day, as I watched some turgid scenes that had been removed from a film but deemed worthy enough to stick on the DVD in order to justify the extortionate recommended retail price, that you’ll never have deleted scenes from a book.

Wouldn’t it be odd, if the chapters the author thought were too crap to put in were included at the end of the book, something a little extra for you to read. If the writer added 750 words after that about his desk, interviewed the man who sold him his pens. Why don’t we get that added value from the printed word?

In many ways a book remains valuable in itself – I think there’s still much to be said for the tangibility of the touchable – you can’t reliably evaluate a DVD until you stick it in a special decoding machine, something that will turn shiny reflections into cinematic pleasure. A book is just a book, it’s there, the words are sitting, waiting for you to observe them. The way one sits behind one word, in front of another, like they were fated to be there, it was meant to happen. No wait, it was.

I find deleted scenes a really odd concept in our new DVD society. They didn’t exist as a concept when the VHS was still around. It’s a fanciful notion, that you’d have too much space to fill so you’d scrabble around to find things. I cooked dinner the other night, but I didn’t empty the dustbin onto people’s plates to fill dead real estate.

And so ends another post – give it a couple of months and maybe I’ll post it again, with a director’s commentary.

It's a mad, mad, mad world.

The weather has been lovely over the past few weeks. So I’ve heard, at any rate – there was something on News 24 about the weather between shotguns in the face and money getting taken away from everyone everywhere.

I try to avoid going outside when I can - something is bound to happen if you are so bold as to venture out of your front door, through the gate and into the dangerous world beyond.

You could get mugged, stabbed, beaten, left for head, abused, attacked. You could get run over crossing the road, you might fall down an open manhole or bitten by a stray vicious dog. You could get stung by a bee or bitten by a vicious bug and discover at the last inopportune moment that you have an allergy you weren't previously aware of. I wonder how many people die each year of allergies they weren't previously aware of...

And yet, thinking about it, staying at home you might just as likely have an aeroplane land on the house or something equally and unspeakably awful. It's a dangerous game, this thing they call life.

Getting hot under the collar.

Someone said ‘vice-a versa’ on the telly the other day. My mother looked mildly frightened, perturbed we might say, by my apparently apoplectic reaction. You see, this sort of thing drives me insane - it actually sends a shiver down my spine when I hear it. Vice-a versa? It’s just not right. It’s close, but completely and utterly wrong. Doesn’t mean anything, or make any sense.

It’s like Tescos, Marks and Spencers, Lidls. I think I go on about these things a little too much, but I find it’s far better to get these things out of your system than to find yourself suddenly out of prison after a short spell and chasing around the north with a shotgun and half the police in the country after you.

Anger is a funny thing. As in, strange, it’s clearly not that amusing that some bloke’s on the run and wants to shoot people’s faces off. It’s an odd emotion. Is it really that useful to us? It has a dark side, but in many ways it is a proper superhero. It fights against injustice and stands up for the oppressed. If we didn’t have righteous anger the Nazis would still be in power.

Actually, the Nazis only got in in the first place because the Germans were such angry little people. And they were only angry because everyone had been mean to them after the First World War, which was basically everyone getting angry about some minor contretemps in Serbia. I can’t remember my point. Oh yes – anger can be good, but it can’t teach you good grammar.

And vice-a versa.

I watch a documentary. About rain.

I was watching a documentary about rain that I'd taped last night. Well, I'd PVRed it. I still haven't decided what the word for that should be - recorded off the telly would work, I suppose. Isn't it funny that words linger in our consciousness like that? Taping something is so late-90s. It's like totally at least two generations ago of recording stuff.

But anyway - there I was, watching a documentary about rain. It was interesting. Fine, really - it was about rain. They did a bit of schtick about some flood somewhere that was really devastating because it rained loads and houses and that got washed away. The sewage came spilling up out of the ground like so much Godzilla, stinking out all in its path.

A brewery got taken over by extreme damp (condensation being not extreme damp - there's probably a damp scale somewhere, like Richter but more ripply and less wobbly) A brewery worker, one of those people who makes beer, was interviewed for the documentary, giving us a blow-by-blow account of the tension and the excitement as the rains came down and Incey Wincey started to freak out.

"We evacuated the brewery, but we stayed to the bitter end..."

Not even the merest hint of a smirk or smile.

I clean my car.

I decided just now to take my car to the supermarket jet wash for a bit of a clean up. Like my room, I was embarrassed by its state, like it was an extra in a Blue Peter film on Romanian orphans, or something that Matt Damon would go undercover in in his hit Iraq-based film...oh, I can't remember what it was called. But it was good. Loads of explosions and that.

Unlike my room, everyone could see this. There's that saying, isn't there - a healthy car is a clean mind, or somesuch rubbish. I totally agree. The state of your car is reflection of your own state. In my case I'm a 17-year-old Swede with electrical problems and loads of empty bottles lying at the foot of my back seat. And bird crap all over the roof.

It seems that two or three, or all the birds in Coventry have taken a dislike to me, covering the roof of my car in a fine layer of shit that looks like a funky plastic covering Mini might sell to you. Only the black and white bits didn't make checkers or a Union flag. And I wasn't going to actually touch the stuff by going outside with a sponge and bucket for fear I might get AIDS, or whatever other virulent diseases might have been contained therein.

The counter experience at the supermarket petrol station was unusually humiliating - I stepped up to the counter and asked for three minutes on the washing machine, which obviously gave the middle-aged women behind the tills carte blanche to take the piss out of me for the rest of the exchange, which seemed like 23 minutes, but was on reflection probably only about 11 seconds.

And so I washed my car. The shampoo brush appeared to be suffering from some kind of projectile dysfunction, the cleany stuff just leaking out dejectedly. Impressively however, I managed not to leave a 5-inch gouge in the paintwork with the jet spray this time - that mishap down, no doubt, to my meagre upper body strength. It's a little known fact that I can't drink two cups of tea in a row. I just wouldn't be able to cope with it, unless they were very small cups.

And I soaked my shoes.

There is more burning on our street.

There is a man down the street who has been burning stuff in his back garden for three days solid now. Who owns that much combustible material? I feel I should get in touch with the authorities so that they can check on his wife and dog, or something. I mean, he can't possibly have any furniture left, and he must have torn up all of his floorboards. It can't be pretty in there. Although in many ways he may as well have just torched the house.

I only mention this anti-social behaviour (does that exist anymore? It was quite the Labour thing, I thought perhaps the Tories might have got rid of it. To Conservative MPs anti-social behaviour is not getting a round in) because I had washing out on the line. There's nothing worse than putting your stuff out to dry and it comes back in stinking of smoke. There really should be zoned days for this sort of thing - Mondays and Tuesdays for drying your washing, Wednesdays and Thursdays for setting your house on fire. It's only civil.