I cooked a chicken.

The thing is, I hate raw meat. I’m not even a massive fan of cooked meat, but if someone has done it for me I’ll make a half-hearted attempt at scraping whatever gristle I can off the plate. But raw meat? It makes me retch.

Chicken in particular is a real upset for me – perhaps because you have the whole body in your hands as you tease and poke and rinse and rub the corpse into submission before subjecting it to really rather obnoxious levels of heat.

As I fondled a fleshy skeleton just the other evening I realised precisely what it was that upset me about handling the chicken: it feels like a baby. There, that’s it. But crap, it was tasty.

I eat some chips.

Potatoes are my favourite vegetable – they are so versatile. Mashed, roasted, crisped, boiled, fried…they have more faces than Madonna, or something. There is so much you can do with a bag of good quality potatoes, I almost consider myself a connoisseur.

My greatest love, of all the possible permutations of potato, is chips. I had some chips the other day when I was out for a drive – for me it’s the logical pinnacle of a good drive somewhere. I love chips. Whenever I move to a new house, one of the first things I do after unpacking is find out where the best chip shop is nearby.

I have to say though that the selection in Mitcham (for this is where I live in south London) has rather outfoxed me. The best one I have found so far is a Chinese takeaway that has made a surprisingly good stab at emulating the work of your traditional olde English chippe shoppe. Normally such efforts are unsalted, chewy disappointments unworthy of the name.

These are good chips – unexceptional, in the grand scheme of chips, but decent nonetheless. Because a not-so-good chip can be extremely upsetting. Take the chips I had on my drive out into the countryside the other day: undercooked, too big, far too small a portion. Potatoes might be versatile, but they just can’t tolerate mediocre cookery.

I count my shoes.

I was tidying my room recently (it’s a seasonal thing, I try not to bother myself with being able to see the floor too often) and checking under the bed I found five pairs of shoes covered by a thick layer of dust that I had forgotten I owned.

This horrific discovery (horrific in the mildest sense, not like finding a dead body under there, or a collection of laminated used celebrity toilet paper) led me to count up the number of shoes that are currently in my possession, and as I began to tick through my fingers for the fourth time I had a flash of condemning self-insight that struck to my very core.

Well, for around 30 seconds. I love shoes, who am I kidding? But even trying to justify the fact that I’m a budget Imelda Marcos by reminding everyone that I never spend more than £20 on a pair of shoes (usually in TK Maxx, often in a sale somewhere) I was reminded by my landlord that this still mean I owned almost £700-worth of footwear. I should at the very least keep them in an air-conditioned room and have them insured against fungal infection.

Back to the old future.

The weird thing about films is when they set them in the future, but the future is really just a straight line from now to then, as if nothing has ever really happened in-between.

With the new Alien film, which is set before the old Alien films, how are they going to make the future look suitably futuristic but enough like it’s set before the future in the old films without looking old-fashioned? It’s a minefield.

Up until the new Alien film you could believe that the future shown in the films was full of grimy green-screened computers and monitors that make Teletext look high-res, but as soon as they show a more modern future in the new film, it’ll make it harder to watch the old films. See? I told you it was weird.

The difficulty with making a film set in the future is that the future has to be believable to contemporary audiences, because otherwise you spend the whole time having to explain what everything is and what it does. The alternative is to fill the future with crass product placement masquerading as antiques, like they did in I, Robot.

They say the future is unwritten – but perhaps you’d go further, and say that it’s simply unwriteable.

I am getting old.

It’s my birthday soon, and I am getting old. Well, definitely older at any rate, firmly ensconced in the latter portion of my twenties. In fact, I am almost at the age where it’s rude to ask, where if anyone inquires I can legitimately (but not amusingly) joke “21. Hahaha.”

The problem with the pre-life crisis that I have been having for many years now is that I am really by default now not in any pre-life situation. I’ll be having a pre-mid-life crisis any year now, but I’m still not sure whether I’ve successfully completed anything I set out to achieve. Actually, I don’t think I ever had the presence of mind to sit down and decide what I was going to set out to achieve.

But I do have a blog. Yay.

Ed 4 PM, eurgh.

People keep saying that Ed Miliband could be prime minister. I hate the thought of Ed Miliband being prime minister. Whatever happened to his nice brother David? He would have been great.

I hate the idea of any race winner being the guy that everyone went for because they didn’t want that other guy, especially the race to become prime minister. It should be something you have to fight for and earn the right to become, not simply lapse whining into after several years because enough people got annoyed at the bloke in number 10.

It’s distressing. Not least because Miliband has said nothing of weight, or profundity or even much of interest since he took over the leadership last month. No wait, he’s been doing it for nearly two years. Good grief. I’m sure he’s a nice man, but he has the people skills of a drinks vending machine and slightly less charisma.

He’s the sort of person, if you were talking to him at a party you would try and drag someone else into the conversation so that you could count to 30 in your head and then pretend to go to the toilet or say that you had to go and get another drink. You would say “I’ll be right back, I’m just off [mumble]…” but you would never be back. That’s definitely not the sort of person you would want to be running the country.

I finish a book.

I have been reading a book, but now I have finished it. I get upset when I finish a book – there’s a grief there, at a world that took up swathes of your time, something you had elaborately constructed in your mind, simply coming to an abrupt The End.

I have been trying to read more books this year though. Up to now I have not been reading enough books, but my book buying levels have continued unabated, which has left me with rather the awkward problem of so many books that much of my desk and a swathe of my floor have been rendered rather unusable.

Since the beginning of the year I have made a concerted effort to read more books – unfortunately it has led to precisely the same problem with books but with magazines (I keep buying more! It’s an illness), but they don’t take up as much room. I’ve read 18 books so far this year, which is good. That’s very nearly a book a week – if I could get through 50 books this year that would be a faintly marvellous effort. But oh no, think of all of the books I’ll be finishing.

I actually like to travel.

Lots of people moan about all the travelling they have to do, but I really love it. I don’t know whether this is a phase and I shall grow to love it in time, but I think given my childlike outlook on life that I shall forever enjoy a little frisson of excitement at another takeoff, or a cheeky hamburger in a service station, or the surge of freedom you feel as a road unfurls of you.

Of course, I still hate loathsome and unnecessary security checks at airports that instantly criminalise anyone who wants to go anywhere on an aeroplane, I gag at the deeply unsavoury toilet conditions at any motorway stop you care to mention, and the depressing thunk in your spirits as you turn a corner and see a winking trail of red lights signalling the queues ahead.

Do you know what would make it all better? Crayons and colouring books. I don’t know why they don’t give out more of those to children these days. Because they should, and then I would have to find a child to carry round with me all the time so that I could take the crayons and colour with them.

They tell me there’s a drought on.

It’s not that I’m too bothered about the rain (actually no, I hate it), or the drought really, but I’m running out of shoes, they’re all sodden. The jokes are wearing thin too. People like to point out that it has rained practically every day since the hosepipe ban was announced and that. But the joke’s on them – why would you even want to use a hosepipe when it’s raining so much?

Even more annoying than the jokes about it raining so much during a drought is the fact that the jokesters are forcing the experts to endlessly explain things about the water table and ground saturation and average rainfall levels and bleurgh.

I don’t even know what counts as a hosepipe – why aren’t showers banned? I don’t understand what’s to stop me watering the flowers out of the bathroom window. It’s such an abstract concept, a water shortage, when the stuff comes pouring out of the taps whatever happens. Perhaps they need to turn off the water completely for a few hours a day just to stop us using it. It’d be just like 1990s Romania. Aw, crap, it’s raining again.

Oh no, somebody famous has died.

People go a bit crazy when famous people die. I’m not entirely sure why – perhaps we feel a deeper connection with them than simply strangers-who-have-appeared-from-vast-distances-away-on-our-telly-screens. Like we’re actually friends with them and they wouldn’t take out a restraining order if you popped round their house for a cup of tea on a Saturday afternoon.

I never really know who all these celebrity-types are when they die. Sometimes people get briefly more famous because they’re dead than when they were actually famous. Perhaps there is some sort of irony in this, I don’t know. I thought that when Donna Summer’s demise was announced that perhaps she was instrumental in inventing summer, or had done something equally profound that would warrant all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth, but it turned out she had wailed breathily near some microphones and waved her arms about on stage the other decade.

I’ll wager she reminded some people of their misspent youths, snogging the wrong people in discos and getting drunk on cheap cider, because however rich she might have become from wailing breathily near microphones I’m fairly certain she couldn’t have afforded a house big enough to hold that many people for tea on a Saturday afternoon.

A short thesis on the Greeks and the single European currency.

Will the Greeks leave the euro? I think this is the question on everyone’s lips at the moment. Well, only if they are reading this post right now and need to trail a finger along the screen, mouthing the words to themselves as they go. In which case, that question is definitely on everyone’s lips. Although not so much by this point in the paragraph, now this sentence is on everyone’s lips.

I had a Greek flatmate in the first year of university, lovely girl, and she said that in Greece they had to call the single currency the evro, because euro sounds a lot like a naughty word for breasts. She may have been having a little fun at my expense, but she didn’t seem like the sort. This one time, she shared her bergamots in syrup that her grandma had posted over to Wales for her.

Experts say that if Greece leaves the booby (that is, euro) it will plunge the UK into a devastating economic tailspin that will leave us dizzied and plunging towards the ground. Not that we are currently in such a wonderful position, but obviously economic experts really know what they are talking about, and I for one am desperately worried (I am not desperately worried). Actually, what does worry me is whether access to hummus will be cut off if the Greeks exit the single currency stage right. Now that would be terrible.

Celine Dion, rain and taxes.

It's a thing, perhaps it's irony, that you think of something to say at the least opportune time to be able to express it. Like when people always say that they are great at thinking up a wonderful retort five minutes after their oppressor has departed. Useless. Ironic? Possibly not. I keep thinking of the most wonderful things to blog about, but it just so happens that I am then unable to transfer them into a durable format (brain waves are so fleeting and unreliable, not like stone tablets or a decent notepad) that will eventually become blog.

Perhaps it's just one of life's inevitabilities that we should be so thwarted. Celine Dion sang once about rain and tax being the inevitables in life. Certainly a sight more cheery than death and taxes, which is the standard aphorism there. It's certainly a cheery little song, a faintly R&B number with a wubby beat buried somewhere underneath the icepick-to-the-ears vocalistics. Sadly the only inevitability about rain and taxes these days is that people will take to twitter to moan about them both. Which, perhaps ironically, does solve that problem of thinking up something to say at the least opportune time. Although all my best tweets come to me when I've left my computer somewhere else. Odd, that.

Oh look, it's May.

Oh look, it’s May. Didn’t that just sneak up on us in the middle of the street wearing a balaclava and demanding our money. Just me? I read a thing by some scientific types not that long ago that said time actually does go by quicker as you get older – not because the clock ticks any swifter, as it were, but every day gets a proportionally smaller part of your life with every other day that passes.

It’s true – a little baby friend of mine recently came back from a three-week trip abroad, and it meant that he had spent nearly 10% of his life away over there. Every day is a voyage of discovery when you’re a baby, learning new things and constantly growing and developing. It’s amazing to see, the complete opposite of our clock-watching, almost-the-weekend, what-am-I-going-to-do-this-evening culture of pinning our hopes on the next thing.

I’d love to have the eyes of a child (although they’d fall out of my head, that thing about a baby’s eyes being the same size as an adult’s is a myth apparently. They start at 50-75% of full size depending on who you listen to…) and view the world with that inquiring innocence. Perhaps May can be the time to change things. Except I just don’t have the time.