Cher is being a dick in that song! “Does he love me, I wanna know, how can I tell if he loves me so?” she asks, pleading with her friends for help. Then each time they offer help and try to answer, she barks back at them “OOH NOOOO THAT’S NOT THE WAY!” and then proceeds to, smugly with great volume, show off that the she knew the answer all along!
“If you wanna know, if he loves you so it’s in his kiss”
YOU WERE THE ONE ASKING, CHER! NOT THEM! I don’t show up at your house asking you how to make an umbrella and then when you answer I go “SHUT THE FUCK UP THIS IS HOW!” and then make you say “ooh yes” every few minutes while I complain at you for not listening. Of course they’re not listening to your lunatic ramblings!
The fuck are you playing at, Cher?! Nobody is impressed!
I recently had a short play I wrote on at the Bush Theatre, and while I was waiting for the show to come down though, I took a book out of the library. It’s called Mr. Clever by Roger Hargreaves.
In this book, Mr. Clever is the cleverest man in the world, and he lives in Clevertown where everything is very clever. But one day he accidentally wanders away from Clevertown, where he meets many new people, and they all have questions.
“Mr. Clever, why am I so short?” Asks Mr. Small. “Mr. Clever, why am I so hungry?” Asks Mr. Jelly. Mr. Clever doesn’t know! He doesn’t know the answers!
Mr. Clever undergoes an existential crisis, and begins to doubt how clever he really is. Is his whole life a lie? What does he truly know about himself?
In the climactic scene, Mr. Clever is so distracted by his self doubt that he forgets where he lives, and the other characters all laugh at him.
AND THEN THE BOOK JUST ENDS! They just leave him there! No happy ending, no lesson in personal growth. No “he learns he is still clever but that it’s not good to be smug” or anything like that. They just laugh at him for being thick and then it’s over.
Tough book.
The inscription reads “To Jimmy, I thought you might like this book because you are clever at everything. Love Jasmine.”
Has Jasmine read this book? Jimmy is going to freak out when he reads it! What is she trying to say? That he’s not as clever as he thinks? That people are secretly laughing at him?!
Fuck her, Jimmy! She doesn’t know what she’s talking about! You’re doing fine!
To the guy asleep in the park wearing a plastic subway bag like a boxing glove,
I’m sorry.
It was us who took your empty coke can,
filled it from the fountain and placed it
like gyroscopes or jenga on the flat of your forehead.
I wasn’t around to watch you wake up and spill it,
but I’m sorry for how much I would have laughed.
To the dog who walked past us,
I’m sorry I said the line on your head made you look like a shit zebra
(she called you a wank badger, which is better, but she can apologise for herself).
To the boy playing with his friend, he was in fucking bushes! Couldn’t you see his feet?
To the girl watching the boy, your shoes were untied.
And to the wobbly paving stone I used to see-saw on years ago,
I know that was you! And fuck you for getting fixed!
To the two women who got wolf whistled by that guy who announced he wanted to
“dip his wet in you both”.
I’m sorry that I thought you shouldn’t have left.
I’m sorry that I just thought you should have laughed at him,
or thrown something,
or taught bees to hate the sound of his voice.
But then the woman who bought me chicken noodles told me what it’s like.
That it polices her sometimes.
It decides where she can go at what time.
And that when she’s out in town and a guy walks up to her…
And here’s the thing, I’m still trying to flirt with her.
I’m that totally inappropriate guy,
I haven’t given up.
I said “you must feel like you’re watching dice walk a tightrope,
hoping he’ll be worth talking to but needing a double six.”
And she said “No.”
I said “you must feel like you’re playing musical chairs
with all the nearby women and
just praying it won’t stop during your favourite bit of monster mash.
‘I don’t want to sit down yet. Let some other girl sit down,
I’m doing the fucking monster mash!”
And she said “No.”
And I said “then how does it make you feel.”
And she said “frightened…”
And so to the woman who bought me chicken noodles,
and sat with me in the park, and made fun of that shit dog and those dickhead children
I’m sorry that I saw you and wandered over
I had no idea,
I’d never even considered that I could be frightening.
You were on your own,
and you looked bored,
and I had an hour to kill,
and I thought it would be fun,
and I didn’t think that I could be frightening,
I didn’t think
and I’ve never thought,
and worst of all,
I might not think again.
Because it was fun.
It was fun when you threw that ball
to try to make the dog land on the coke can balance man.
It was fun, watching you remember that “Holy shit, short circuit!”
And yes, I’m now really worried
that you bought me chicken noodles because you were frightened of me,
but more than that, I just really hope you had a good time.
I could tell you that I wasn’t trying to pick you up,
that I wasn’t trying to “dip my wet in”
but I don’t have to.
The reason this isn’t a love story is that
you shouldn’t have to care what my intentions were,
you shouldn’t have to care whether or not I’m just talking,
You shouldn’t have to care.
I want to say that most people aren’t a threat.
And I want to say that trusting people is good.
That there’s fun to be had and that you’re in control,
that you are the don,
and that you don’t have to care whether I mean what they say or not.
But I’m not sure I can say that.
Because I’ll never know what it’s like, really.
I join in with these feminist conversations,
they’re important to me, and they hurt, they do.
What men like that do to women like you makes me absolutely crazy.
But I also have to acknowledge that I’m a man.
And I might even be that kind of man.
I can’t really swim in it.
So I’m sorry that I can’t know what it’s like,
and I hate not knowing that.
Over the course of this experiment I have learned many things. You will always forget something critical, some people just won’t get what you’re doing, cork gets EVERYWHERE. I’ve learned that walking from the shop carrying two clothes dryers two brooms and two bags of shopping is harder than any other aspect of the building. I have learned that sellotape is slippery, the joy that comes from getting to say “reverse engineered” and, most controversially of all, that “MORE BLUETAC” is often not the solution. I’ve learned about perseverence, the power of a hackneyed solution, and the power we have to overcome any challenge.
More than that though I have learned how to build an umbrella.
THE EQUIPMENT
Where the magic begins
I used:-
2 corks
2 clothes horses
2 shower curtains
1 broom
6 metres of copper wire
superglue
sellotape
My first step was to take one of the corks and drill through them. Only dick’s have drills, so I stuck a knife through the cork then twisted it a bunch until the hole was made. If you’re going to try this, I found it helped to wrap the cork in sellotape first so that the tape absorbed some of the tension and stopped the cork from breaking. I drilled through one of the corks fully, and halfway through the other.
Snapping the spokes off the clothes horses, I attached wire to the spokes and then threaded another wire through them, and tied this off around the cork, creating the six spokes that would become the dome of the umbrella.
I repeated this process with the fully hollow cork using spokes half the length, and attached these to the main spokes at a poiunt 6 inches from the centre, using sellotape and blutack.
I then thread the broom handle through the two corks and secured the cork dome with superglue, leaving the other cork free to slide up and down the handle and operate the mechanism.
It’s ok to be impressed
The idea was to attatch the shower curtain tightly enough to not give the spokes room to move from side to side, but I couldn’t manage to get this right with the shower curtain, so I cut the bottom half off a water bottle and cut six strips out of it to act as tracks for the spokes, using more superglue to stick it to the dome cork.
I placed the whole mechanism upside down on the shower curtains, double layered for thickness, and tied the edges around the spokes. A little more superglue and blutack and the the sheets were attached.
It was then that I realised I’m completely forgotten something. The locking mechanism. I hadn’t planned anything that was going to keep the cork up while the brolly was being used. On the brolly I FUCKING REVERSE ENGINEERED WOOH it was a lock stuck to the pole that slid down and popped out under the cork to keep it in place. I didn’t like my chances of recreating that using my broom handle and cork, so instead I just attached a metal hook to the cork dome that dangled down and hooked onto the spoke. This is inelegent and rubbish but without restarting the whole thing it was the best I could do.
Finally I used the trimmings of the shower curtains to make flower petals and made decorative flowers for the outside of the brolly.
When the time comes to present this, I will describe these flowers as “rustic”.
Of course the whole thing is horribly unstable and will almost definitely implode at a gust of wind, but if you were expecting anything else from this whole thing you were always going to be disappointed. But thank you for thinking I am someone who actually has a skillset that isn’t steeped in the word “ridiculous”.
Final cost of production, £9.34. Order now to avoid disappointment.
Recently, someone who TOTALLY GETS ME challenged me to build an umbrella from scratch before Christmas. My guess is that if you’re a reader of this blog and I asked you to come up with five things you’ve learned about me, three of them would be “builds shit, loves umbrellas and responds to challenges”, and the other two would be filthy.
In other words, yes. I will do this.
TERMS OF THE CHALLENGE
1: I do not have to mine the ore or smelt it into shape. HOWEVER, I cannot use any part of another umbrella for any purpose other than research.
2: It must have a working opening and closing mechanism.
3: The challenge must be completed before December 25th 2012.
So first thing’s first, how do umbrellas work? I decided the best way to start it off would be to reverse engineer an umbrella I already own.
Sacrifices must be made
This is an umbrella that was given to me at the press night for a musical written by the guy from Busted. Luckily I was given two, so I can take this one apart without having to cry. Do not attempt to compare your lives to mine, results may be fatal.
It hurt to do this. But not enough.
It’s actually not easy though, they’re pretty solidly put together. My five minutes of attacking the mechanism with a tiny saw left me with cut gums and no results, so I decided instead to use the better look I’d got to make a guess at the inside mechanism.
I wanted to create a prototype of the mechanism. Not a fully working umbrella, but just one of the struts. I took out my box of k’nex (think Lego is better? FIGHT ME, YOU FUCK!) and set to work until I ended up with this.
This is basically just a device that converts the up and down motion of sliding the base, to the opening motion of the spokes. All I would have to do to make a working K’nex umbrella is replicate this model 8 times, once for each spoke, and then fasten them together.
The next step is to recreate this mechanism using real materials. My guess is it’s going to involve a stick of bamboo and loads of wire coathangers. This is where it will likely get fiddley, but now that the groundwork has been done I’m confident I’ll be able to make a prototype and then use that as a model for the real thing.
At the Alfred Hitchcock pub, the lake through the window frosted with the moonlight. I clutch in my hand the clues of a treasure hunt never undertaken. Sitting opposite me is the girl. She doesn’t know what she’s about to become part of. But I’m not sorry.
She orders herself a drink, and while the staff away I lean over the bar to take a whole lemon from beside the serrated edge of the knife next to it.
“No! Someone will see!” She cries. “Stop! For the good of us all!”
But we both know I never will. I’m hungry still.
When she stands up a second time to order another drink, she rests her arm on the bar, leaning on it.
The staff turn around once more, and I roll the lemon slowly behind the cover of her arm. Placing the drinks in front of it to cover the view, we smile and pay. When the coast is clear, I quickly roll the lemon off the bar and catch it with my other hand.
One lemon (whole)
Then we must hit the leave, before our souls catch up with us. We’re different now. Our shoes are strung together from songs about roads and desert tongued clay.
We’ll be back for more. Maybe not from here. But we’ll be back for more.
Morning all!
Some of you may know I’ve been doing a little bit of performance poetry around London, and sometimes I make terrible animations to go along with them. Well the new video is up, right here!
Anyone who knows me knows I don’t have any kind of problem with Pop music, the more plastic the better, but really I just don’t like this idea that the head and the heart are, or should be seperate. If anything, it’s your heart that’s afraid of breaking, your head knows that you’ll be fine. Thinking things through is not unromantic.
Anyway, hope you all like it! More coming in a week or so!
Several exciting pieces of news have come about writing wise, so I’ll plough through them now.
1: I recently did an extremely fucking not safe for work guest post on blog called “BookCunt”. This isn’t the most exciting thing going on at the moment but embarassing stories being what most of you visit here for I thought I’d lead with it.
2: I have landed my first feature contract! I’ll be working with Starfront Pictures LTD on a found footage horrot film and I’m very excited about it. This is a big step for me and an unexpected shift in genre of choice from rom com to horror. Speaking of which…
3: My site specific horror zombie play Not Long Now is picking up steam and getting funding. The writing competition is still going on so writers, enter your scripts by 3rd September to get a chance to be part of the project.
Everyone else go to www.notlongnow.net and read all about it, and please spread the word. This is an ambitious idea and I need your help getting people excited about it.
4: Comfort Food, my rom com recipe web series is in editing at the moment and hopefully a trailer may be coming out very soon. If you haven’t watched the pilot yet you can see it at www.comfortfood.tv it involves fruit.
5: I recently did an interview with James Burrough for 100 day Screenplay challenge about writing and pop music and a lot of stuff that might have been irrelevent to the questioning.
Thanks for reading and for all your support getting to this point! Hopefully some more articles on stupid shit that’s happened to me coming soon to make it all worth it.
In the garden of a small pub in Old Street, I see a single raspberry growing on a plant behind me. I wait until nobody is around and pluck it from the green. I try to put it in my pocket but worry it’s going to squash everywhere, so I use two receipts from the pub to build a tiny origami cage.
A woman on the street near where I live seems to be dressed as a World War II pilot. This makes me smile and she sees this. She walks over and asks me for directions to the station. As I begin to tell her, she puts her teso reusable bag down on the floor and pulls out a map. I point the station out on the map and show her the quickest way to get there. As I bend down to pick her bag up for her I take two grapes from an open bag.
This isn’t the first piece of fruit I have stolen, but it is the first since I decided to begin chronicling them. From here on out, you’ll know all about them.
Small slice of lime
This lime was taken from a pub. There were two barmen, so it took some skill and timing. With patience though anything is possible. I carried on my conversation, and when barman 2 went round to pick up empty glasses, I waited for barman 1 to be serving someone and pounced. Sneaking behind the bar, I took a single slice of lime and quickly ducked back out of the way. The collection begins.
Not Long Now is an immersive theatre project taking place in London 2013 in which the audience find themselves trapped in a large building while the early hours of a zombie apocalypse rage outside. The audience may join any of several groups of survivors and attempt to survive the onslaught as the creatures fight their way inside, or may be already there.
We are looking for a team of writers to join the project and we are open to submissions. So if you’re interested, send your scripts along to submissions@notlongnow.eu along with a short paragraph telling us a little about yourself. We’re looking for between four and eight writers.
Submissions do not have to be zombie themed, nor do they have to be theatre scripts. Just send us something that you feel shows us why you’re suited to the project.
A shortlist will then be prepared from the most suitable candidates, and they will have the opportunity to tour the building. We’ll then be holding short interviews to talk about your ideas for the project.
Those who are finally chosen will be asked to produce a plot skeleton of their ideas. From here, ideas will be joined together so that the different groups of survivors will interact and key events are factored in. From here, writers will have free reign over their characters, plots and ideas.
Unfortunately due to the collaborative and site specific nature of the project, we are unable to accept submissions from overseas writers, or those who would be unable to travel to London to view the location.
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch, you can email us at submissions@notlongnow.eu or head over to our twitter or facebook page and join the conversation.
Get submitting!
You feel a dull but sharpening buzz in the back of your head as a sticky trickle sneezes you back into consciousness.
With your blurred vision and unknowable circumstance, you resort to a default set of perceptions, so when you feel the hot weight of a body against you you assume this is the morning after, that the figure is marsupial in its affection.
You feel a tickle of hair against your open gums and the pneumatic taste jolts your eyes wide open. You are immediately choked by the bad sweet yellow and Lego brick red of a squirming head, torn, and creased with jellied blood.
The body grinds against you, trying to escape the gnashing teeth of a man. It shakes itself free and detaches from the man’s mouth, letting it fall directly onto your cheek. You feel the lamprey hunger for skin as you roll, sliding the body out from between you.
The man spits chewed lips from his bleating red gasket and you drag yourself on to war torn feet. You pull the vomiting, stunted body with you and throw open the nearest door.
As you seal your entrance with a splintering avalanche of furniture and finally feel the pulsating thaw of a well taken breath, the screaming body crumples toward the floor and blushes red from its open wounds.
Outside, a thousand cannibals fold themselves in half. Scratching, and right at your door.
It was around this time last year when I pleaded with the general public to stop being grumpy and enjoy Valentine’s day. Those who know me know that I do love a bit of nonsense, and every year I send out something stupid I build from things I find in what I lovingly deem my “cupboard of useful things.” This cupboard currently contains bamboo rods, a huge amount of C batteries (the most useless kind of batteries around) and limited edition Pirates of the Caribbean sun tan lotion. These things and many more come together to make some object of affection for someone that I think is surprising.
This is the tale of one of these objects.
The ingredients were as follows. Old wrapping paper, emulsion filler, an empty glass jar, a polystyrene cup and some of those little things you get with freezer bags that wrap around the end to keep things fresh.
And of course, the girl. Full disclosure, though strictly speaking Valentine’s day is supposed to be about love, I was not in love with her. It was better than that, (people fall in love with people who beat them, what good does that do?) I liked her. She made me laugh, and she wasn’t afraid to make me feel like an idiot, and as a total idiot I really appreciate that. I’m also to be perfectly honest with you, a vicious arsehole. Especially on dates. Seriously, a girl was boring me once so I told her I had to get home to a chicken breast in my fridge that was about to pass it’s sell by date. One upon looking at the statues in Trafalgar Square a girl once asked me “is that how big real lions are?” and I just left.
And why is it looking after all those tiny people?
So when I like someone I like to savour it. I turned the jar upside down, made the freezer bag things into a stem and made a flower from the wrapping paper and the cup into a plant pot. Then I stuck the whole thing to the inside of the lid with emulsion filler. It looked a bit like this.
Unfortunately due to the miracle of the postal service (honestly, how does it even work? It’s fucking mental) the whole thing got bashed about. By the time it arrived it looked more like this.
The grey shit at the bottom is polyfill remember. In cast my art is so beautiful it distracts you from the truth.
With no note, no name and nothing to place it, the girl had no idea what this was and naturally assumed that thing in the middle there was a fuse. Knowing just enough about herself and her housemates to know they were not fireproof, she called the police. Who I’m assured, were fucking baffled.
“I have no idea what this is, but I’m scared of it” Said hypothetical policeman 1.
Hours later I got a phone call “Oh my god it’s you! It’s Sandy! It’s fucking you, Sandy!” screamed at me for ten minutes.
And we didn’t fall for each other. But that’s ok, because it made her laugh, and she makes me laugh.
The truth is I might not get it. I’m overweight with bad skin and I live in the kind of conditions that inspired a girl I went out with once to write a song called “fuck me so I can’t tell how shit your flat is” but for whatever reason, I get asked out. I get the cards and the phone calls. I get ex’s asking me to give them another chance and I get myself into a whole load of shit. And maybe I’ve gotten to a place where I don’t appreciate that as much as I should, and I should lean off people that moan at this time of year. But honestly, no I shouldn’t. It’s not about who likes you, it’s about who you like. If someone sends you something back then that’s great. But if they don’t, that’s still nice. Don’t be greedy.
Her next birthday present.
Honestly, this whole thing is a lot more fun than you think it is.
My web series Comfort Food has officially just gone live, and our campaign to fund the remaining five episodes is go. If you want to support, you can go to
If you don’t want to support financially, or just can’t spare the money (we’ve all been ther. Actually most of us are there now) please just spread it around, link to the indiegogo page, show people the pilot on youtube, follow us on facebook and twitter, just spread the word as wide and wild as that blue yonder.
Thank you to everyone for your help getting us this far, and to everyone who I know will help push it even further.
Comfort Food is a new six part web series about a long distance couple who attempt to keep their relationship alive by learning to cook desserts together on the phone. We follow them as they tackle the obstacles that come from maintaining a long distance relationship, and take an honest and heartfelt look at two people finding a way to make it work.
A web series about romance, relationships and recipes.
Today was the day of filming for the promo video for my new web series Comfort Food, so my expectation for the day was that it would be full to the brim with talking about myself and self consciousness. But doe to some really rubbish directions from the producer, I found myself once again, on an adventure with destiny.
Lost on a road somewhere near Charlton, I managed to find my way back to a bus stop, and I knew how I could get home. But I also knew that the journey would be a very long one. I took out my phone and demanded entertainment from the people I usually text in these situations, giving a break to someone I’ve been working too hard lately, but while looking though my contacts for people to harass, I found a name I did not recognise.
Her name was Myanna, and not only didn’t I know who she was, I was pretty sure I’d never heard that name before. And so it began.
These photos are 100% authentic photographs taken by me on the night of the 25th September 2011. Be prepared.
This is pretty unusual for me, I don’t drink so forgetting people is pretty rare. But so far so good, seems like it could be entertaining. Until I spot something in the corner.
After a few minutes the driver immediately pulls over and tells everyone they have to leave the bus. I don’t know why, it might have been to do with the packages, it might not. But I ended up being kicked off the bus in a place called Crossharbour, which looking that up now, is absolutely nowhere near the place I was getting the bus to, according to google maps it’s approximately 7.7 miles off course. What were we doing there?
Surely it was destiny! I had got lost, got on a bus going somewhere it wasn’t supposed to, been kicked out in the middle of nowhere, next to a giant open farm. Who was I to say no?
Many of you will already know, but I shall tell you anyway, that my short film Comfort Food is being turned into a web series, directed by William Scothern of Box Room Films.
The series will follow Luke and Liyana, a long distance couple who attempt to keep their relationship alive by learning to cook desserts together over the phone.
We’ll be releasing the pilot along with a funding campaign on indiegogo.com, and you can bet that I’m extremely excited.
Anybody with any questions, comments, or suggestions can get in touch on the facebook or twitter accounts, where we’ve already had a tremendous response. I hope you’ll all enjoy the series when it comes out!
I’m also working on another web series, The Adventures of Public Johnny, a project which goes way back with me, and will be turned into an animated series about a young boy for whom the rules of reality just don’t seem to apply. The show will attempt to answer the question, what if God didn’t know he was God?
So it’s an exciting time for me! I hope you’ll all watch along for updates, and let me know what you think of both shows.
Obviously this character needs to have the looks and star charisma of a leading lady. We need to believe that she would have been cast opposite REPLACED NAME OF IDENTIFIABLY HANDSOME CELEBRITY. It says in the script that she is dressed as ‘an adventuress’. She needs to have good comedic improvisational skills as the scripts might be developed further in the next few weeks. Also, she needs to be A List beautiful as the bar is being set rather high on her looks.
There are several ways we might go with this : she could be the Megan Fox type – staggering beautiful but poisonously dumb, she could be the Penelope Cruz or Eva Green type – fiery, bright and a bit foreign. It would also be good to have some more ethnic variety in the submissions particularly asian or even eurasian actresses.
Please give this your best ideas – very fun part for the right actress.
This is a casting call for an advert. An advert for quite a big company, and with quite a big star, so this wasn’t written by an amateur, this was- NO FUCK IT I’M FUCKING FURIOUS!
I was going to try to remain calm and composed about this like a real journalist or something but sometimes you’ve got to get mad don’t you?
Role model.
Where to start? Somewhere in this cacophony of flakey shit there must be a place to start right? Personally I’ve always despised the categorisation of people, types of men types of women, that whole thing makes me feel like I’ve just drank battery acid, but for casting purposes I can to a certain extent see the usefulness in it, if only to link actors together. Children have to be the right age for the part etc. fine, I can be persuaded of that, but here are the three categories of “leading women” according to the advert.
“she could be the Megan Fox type – staggering beautiful but poisonously dumb” [sic]
Poisonously dumb is actually a selling point for our leading male. The script doesn’t call for her to be poisonously dumb, oh no, I read it to make sure. But if she’s staggeringly beautiful she’d better be thick as frogspawn to go along. Hot.
Now, I don’t like Megan Fox. Nor am I attracted to her. In fact I don’t really know any men who are, she seems to be the epitome of the kind of person that people fancy because they’re told they do. And there’s plenty of crap to say about her, but stupid? Her presence in films is almost universally decorative but her characters are never stupid. In Transformers she’s the tough one, she’s the one who knows about cars when our hero doesn’t, she’s the smart one, or at least the Transformers’ universes version of the smart one, and that’s in a film so disgustingly misogynist that the audition process she went through was to let him film her washing his car.
But now we have this, a legitimate casting call, which have deemed her to be stupid SPECIFICALLY because she’s pretty, and then labelled that as a selling point. This advert which is encouraging women to get in touch and be part of something, which is in itself more sexist than Michael Bay, a man whose view of women resembles that of a serial killer.
This genuine advert is also an artists rendition of what Michael Bay sees when he closes his eyes.
“She could be the Penelope Cruz or Eva Green type – fiery, bright but a bit foreign”
If she’s going to be fiery and bright, she’d better have something to balance it out, like being foreign. She’d better be just exotic and mysterious enough that we’ll put up with her having a soul.
“It would also be good to have some more ethnic variety in the submissions particularly asian or even eurasian actresses.”
Or EVEN Eurasian! Maybe even them! Those ones!
I’ve said before, but it’s worth saying again, that I’m not saying I’m immune to this sort of stuff, I like pretty women a lot. I have a healthy appreciation for pretty women and in the past, I’ve even had an extremely unhealthy one, so I don’t want to feel like I’m above it all or shaming people who do fancy Megan Fox, but come on… can’t we all get together on this? On there being more than two types of women that REPLACED NAME OF IDENTIFIABLY HANDSOME CELEBRITY would be interested in?
If you are an actress and have ever had to read one of these adverts and then actually apply, please, please make yourself known to me so I can apologise. It was nothing to do with me, but I just want to be able to sleep at night.
“Please give this your best ideas – very fun part for the right actress.”
DISCLAIMER: If you want to stop reading here you can do, I think that’s a suitable ending to an angry article. On the other hand, if you’re actually interested in the sociological trends of attraction and how this defines how the media portrays women, then you are my kind of person, and should read on.
So there’s always been an extent to which the media, or popular opinion defined what we deem as attractive. It used to just be based on the hardest thing to achieve. In times of famine, the fat people were the sexiest, in times of glutton, the average says the opposite. But there’s an interesting phenomenon occurring at the moment which is changing the shape of the way we define women, and the different “types” of leading lady. In my opinion, it’s pretty much as disgusting as the old way, in fact I might argue more so. No… I WILL argue more so!
Regular readers might remember the theorem I wrote on proprioception and its effects on a simultanagnostic model for attraction. Upon writing it, I did a lot of research into dating websites, particularly ones which allowed for someone to be rated on attractiveness. Now, I despise people who refer to women as numbers, to the extent that during a congratulatory drink upon being hired, I told my boss he was being a vicious arsehole for doing so. I’m still employed by him, but only just. Unfortunately though this was quantitative research and so numbers had to be devised somehow.
In the past there has been a pretty solid correlation between score on attractiveness, and the amount of messages that women were sent, which makes sense. This is no longer the case. The women who got the most messages sent to them were the ones for whom there was the most difference of opinion. You were more likely to be contacted if some people gave you a 2 and some gave you a 10, than if everyone gave you a 9.
This is because in the past, it’s all been about competition. TV says this is the kind of woman who is pretty, if I can get with her then I’ve beaten all the other guys, and men would buy into it because they felt like they were supposed to. The amount of times I’ve met people who have taken out their phones and shown me pictures of naked women, only to shoot me the most terrified hopeless look when I tell them I don’t care. “You… you don’t care? Am I not doing it right? THIS IS HOW MEN TALK?! RIGHT!?!?”
Please high five me or my years of training in male bonding will be wasted.
But no, that’s no longer the case. Now, it’s not about that, it’s about “who do I like, who I think nobody else will like?”
Some people interpret this as being simply practical, you just have more chance of achieving fruition with someone who only you like. But I disagree. Practicality has never come into it before, if practicality was an issue we wouldn’t fancy celebrities at all. No this isn’t about that, it’s about smugness.
It’s about who you fancy because you’re better than everyone else, you’re different, you can see what they can’t see. And therein lies the new breed of leading lady.
“She could be a little bit kooky, a little off centre but pretty in her own way. Above all else, she should be adorable.”
And here is where we get Zooey Deschanel, who isn’t the only person to be doing this but she’s the one who spells her name as though it’s ZOoooOoOOOeeey so she’s the one I’m going to pick on.
There’s nothing wrong with her, she’s perfectly fine at what she does, I asked around before I wrote this to get people’s opinions of her and it’s pretty solidly agreed that she’s a good actress, who’s had some good roles, and some terrible ones.
No, I’m not mad at her. I’m mad at you, man who fancies her. YOU!
Above all else, she should be adorable. She should in no way challenge the leading man. She shouldn’t be witty, or clever, she should instead be delightfully odd in a way that only you, the intelligent and refined male viewer, can see though, because you’re open minded. The rise of kooky leading women is just as much about making a woman an appendage to the man as the decorative heights of Megan Fox, except that you’re also showing off about how tolerant you are of such oddities.
Look at those men who try to change her to make her more attractive to the people in the show! Not like you, YOU like her just the way she is! A fucking IQ score stapled to your massive forehead full of brains.
Isn’t that good of you?
Of course, this is a simplified view of it. Hope is not lost, there are plenty of great leading ladies, and obviously characters on film are not just there so that members of hte opposite sex can be attracted to them. But with casting calls like that one at the top there promoting it that heavily and that offensively, it’s easy to feel like it’s a system based on who people want to fuck. If that’s the case then that’s terrifying, but only as terrifying as the actual choices we seem to be making about who that is.
Ok, so the Emmy nominees have been announced, and I know I shouldn’t care but part of me sort of does. This year there are some acceptable categories, and of course, some things maddeningly overlooked. This year I have decided to create my own tribute to all the great TV of this year. Why should you care? Fuck you, that’s why.
This is The Sandys!
The opening ceremony…
Our budget isn’t that of the Oscars.
The Emmys
Swearing
The Sandys
Best Drama
Boardwalk Empire
Dexter
Friday Night Lights
Game of Thrones
The Good Wife
Mad Men
Cock off! Dexter? I mean it’s perfectly fine but it’s not up there. There’s a few interesting bits, mutilated beyond any merit by a pointless, overwritten voiceover which was written by yourself as a teenage poet.“If I had a heart it would be breaking right now…”Really? That’s our top quality writing now? It might be good enough for the Emmys but not for me!
The Good Wife took me a while to get into due to a poor couple of first episodes, but this season it has been shitting excellent. Nurse Jacke calls itself a comedy but it isn’t. It’s funny, but the comedy comes second to the drama, so I’m putting it in here whether they like it or not. This season started slow but got very good indeed (Eve Best, I love you). Parenthood I love so much, it’s got a great ensemble cast, it’s really funny and really horrible at times, and much of the writing is extremely good (although I was annoyed that a character wrote and had a play given a professional run in about 2 weeks. Some of us are jealous writers you know!). Mad men I’ve grown to really enjoy but opinion is pretty solidly there that this season wasn’t the best and let’s say what I’m all thinking… it’s just not as good as Breaking Bad, which was left out of the Emmys this year because of scheduling. Not here! But is it time to rectify that?
THE WINNER: In Treatment. One of the best dramas ever, and also the show with the least jokes of any show I’ve ever seen. Incredible character development. Yes this season wasn’t as good as the last, which wasn’t as good as the first, but really with a show this good that’s completely irrelevant. Congratulations!
Best Comedy
Big Bang Theory
Glee
Modern Family
The Office
Parks and Recreation
30 Rock
I’ve never really got Modern Family, or the Office, or Parks and Recreation, but I’ve always felt that was more my fault than anyone else’s. But I am fairly confident in one thing.The Big Bang Theory is the worst show in history. It’s like being slapped by a guy who’s copied the first paragraphs of Wikipedia articles onto his hands so he can read them and claim he’s intelligent. And at first you find him really annoying, until you notice what’s in the other hand and suddenly it’s scarier than it is shit.What’s in the other hand? Penny, whose entire character can be boiled down to a single facial expression which reads “I don’t understand, it’s ok, you’ll fancy me anyway!”Penny is an image crafted from what a serial killer sees when you ask him to imagine his dream woman. She is nothing. She is nothing. She is nothing. And they fight over her. Because she’s pretty. And I’m not being all “this is a role model blah blah” about it, no she’s not. She’s just incredibly boring and soulless and that’s treated as being adorable, and it pisses me off.“A massive, insulting distillation of what we consider intelligent, horrible sexism, and we get lots and lots of really bad jokes!”Put that on your fucking poster, you feckless thugs.
The first season of The Big C was really very good. Really funny, extremely moving, to the point of tears at least once. Such a pity this season has been a disappointment, but at least we had the big hitters to fall back on. I’m a huge fan of both 30 Rock and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and both delivered this year (though I’d say 30 Rock more consistently). I also found a British show called Him & Her which deserves some real mention. Extremely funny, minimalist dialogue comedy. It sells itself as being all about the filth but really that isn’t it’s strength. The two actors are really warm together, and their petty squabbles are really funny, and really endearing, and I’m glad to hear it’s coming back this year.
THE WINNER: But I’m afraid the clear winner is Community, an INCREDIBLY funny, warm, inspiring, heartfelt often quite poignant series. It is all of these things but most of all it is simply joyous. A real pleasure to watch each week. Often called a parody show due to the number of movie spoofs it undertakes, but to call it such, even while acknowledging its being hilarious is a dismissal. It is so much more. Not a SINGLE Emmy Nomination across the board. We’ll fix that won’t we.
Best Actress in a Drama (combined)
Kathy Bates – Harry’s Law
Connie Britton – Friday Night Lights
Mireille Enos – The Killing
Mariska Hargitay – Law and Order: SVU
Julianna Margulies – The Good Wife
Elisabeth Moss – Mad MenKelly Macdonald – Boardwalk Empire
Archie Panjabi – The Good Wife
Christine Baranski – The Good Wife
Margo Martindale – Justified
Michelle Forbes – The Killing
Christina Hendricks – Mad Men
None of this offends me. Though plenty I haven’t seen.
Anyone who’s read earlier posts knows who is going to win this, but I just want to point out exactly how good Amy Ryan is as Adele, the intricately detached therapist from Season 3 of In Treatment. At once conveying masses of strength, intimidation, and a sense of immense loneliness buried under professionalism. A really beautiful depiction of counter-transference, so subtle and yet so clear that they didn’t even have to mention it in the show.
THE WINNER: My hero. Eve Best. She’s pathologically likable in Nurse Jackie, despite her character on paper being extremely annoying. She’s hilarious, warm, and clever. But where she really comes into her own is in the dramatic moments. Watching Eve Best have a moment of private grief or anger is like standing on dry land and just panhandling at the ocean. Eve Best I love you like a Sunday Porch I could do nothing on.
Best Actor in a Drama (combined)
Steve Buscemi – Boardwalk Empire
Kyle Chandler – Friday Night Lights
Michael C. Hall – Dexter
John Hamm – Mad Men
Hugh Laurie – House
Timothy Olyphant – JustifiedPeter Dinklage – Game of Thrones
Josh Charles – The Good Wife
Alan Cumming – The Good Wife
Walton Goggins – Justified
John Slattery – Mad Men
Andrew Braugher – Men of a Certain Age
Again, fuck Dexter. But other than that, yeah fine.
Alas, it’s a hard one, because Josh Charles is perhaps my favourite actor. His work in Sports Night, In Treatment, and now The Good Wife have all been exceptional. But I’m afraid this year, for this performance, he’s going to be beaten. Sorry Josh! You would have earned it any other year. And your work on the other two shows would have earned you it seven times a year, but this year, you missed out.
THE WINNER: Alan Cumming! I had never heard of him before this year, but he’s really impressed me! He came into the good wife filled with just enough smarm to love, embodied with rage, and fun, and the fun of rage. But when it was needed he also melted me with his guilt, his sincerity and his misbegotten romance.
Best Actress in a Comedy (combined)
Edie Falco – Nurse Jackie
Tina Fey – 30 Rock
Laura Linney – The Big C
Melissa McCarthy – Mike & Molly
Martha Plimpton – Raising Hope
Amy Poehler – Parks and RecreationJane Lynch – Glee
Betty White – Hot In Cleveland
Julie Bowen – Modern Family
Sofia Vergara – Modern Family
Kristen Wiig – Saturday Night Live
Jane Krakowski – 30 Rock
Just because it’s funny, does not make Nurse Jackie a comedy! Some people would say the same about The Big C, but that at least is built in warmth, it’s a fun show. Nurse Jackie is grim.
You think I’m going to go for Community again don’t you? Well I’m not. Though Alison Brie is really funny. And despite finding her just a little bit wonderful, I’m not going for Sarah Solemani either. But seriously, watch Him & Her it’s excellent. I’m a fool for a good bickering couple. But no! This year, it’s going to…
THE WINNER: Laura Linney, for giving a desperate warmth to a difficult character, and for making me smile.
Best Actor in a Comedy (combined)
Alec Baldwin – 30 Rock
Louis C.K. – Louie
Steve Carrell – The Office
Johnny Galecki – The Big Bang Theory
Matt LeBlanc – Episodes
Jim Parsons – The Big Bang TheoryChris Colfer – Glee
Jesse Tyler Ferguson – Modern Family
Ed O’Neill – Modern Family
Eric Stonestreet – Modern Family
Ty Burrell – Modern Family
Jon Cryer – Two and a Half Men
Both the actors from The Big Bang Theory? People don’t get this about me, but I actually really love the world, and you two are RUINING IT!
Ok so Community have crowded the plate this year, and I’m ok with it, because all three of them are exceptional. Very different roles, perfectly squashing together. Charlie Day has always been the thing that made It’s Always Sunny from a good into a great, and Adam Pally playing gay offensive slacker is just extremely watchable and fun. Also I read an article suggesting that portraying a gay man as a slob offensively dismisses the clear differences between gay and straight people. So thanks Adam Pally for allowing that atrocious moron to make himself known.
THE WINNER: As much as Community has worked to make itself more of an ensemble show over its run, it’s still Joel McHale as Jeff Winder who I want to be given as much screen time as possible. I’m equal parts jealous of and full of pity for Jeff, the pathologically charismatic smarmy ex lawyer. It’s been a pretty dark year for him too, and I’m really looking forward to seeing him circle the drain a little in the coming season.
So there you have it! This was self indulgent to the point of a fetish, but there’s some fucking good TV in here that I hope you’ll check out. I do feel kind of disgusting for spending so much time writing it though.
I wonder how many times I will have to link to GR7, my favourite thing distracting me from becoming “the female version of Aaron Sorkin”*, before they notice how much traffic is coming from my site? Maybe I’ll even get an emotional response!
Not a response which is full of emotion, I just want them to feel something about my existence.
My guess is, this isn’t going to do it.
*The reviewer didn’t know I was a guy, but it’s still the coolest thing anyone’s said about me since that one girl told me I was going to be trouble. I’ve also been called the Dean Martin of UK scriptwriting, so that balances out the emasculation, right?
I don't own photoshop. But if I did my skills would pay the bills.
On IMDB there are recommendations at the bottom of each page, “if you liked this, you might like…” sort of thing. Well these are the results it generated for my film Comfort Food.
Read ‘Em and Weep. Not because the selection is that good (it is) but because you’re not.
This thing reads like a page out of my subconscious! It’s not perfect, I really didn’t like Mysterious Skin myself, but take a look at the other ones.
Closer: Unbelievable script, I’ve got four real influences that I can pinpoint, and this film is one of them. I went to Sorkin for my warmth and I went to Marber for my rage and this film is what rage has as it’s facebook picture. There’s a break up scene in there that is fucking catagory five. Like finding your own bones between your teeth. I love it.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Unluckily for me, I think everything there is to say about this film has been said. Ingenious, perfectly acted, heartfelt, interesting, funny. Charle Kaufman gets some flack and a lot of it I get, especially some of the newer films, but honestly he just makes me walk a little faster. Magnificent.
Network: Embarrassingly, I’m really bad at keeping up with the classics. There are so many I’ve never even been near. I asked some friends of mine to draw up a list of classic films that can’t justifiably remain unseen. It’s got about 60 films on it and they made it some 3 years ago, and so far there are only 12 names crossed off it. One of them though, is Network. I don’t care about how this is a biting commentary on the television industry, I really don’t. I just care that it’s incredible, it’s so funny, and extraordinarily well written. In fact I care so little about satire that in this film, I am one of the people being sold this stuff. I watched it and I wanted to stick my head out of the window and shout “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” I fell for it. The synopsis says he’s a deranged lunatic who they exploit for profit, well I’m one of the people having the cash sucked out of me by this madman and I love it.
In Treatment: And here we are, back at television. My home. I am one of those people you throw rocks at because I think TV is better than film. Give me 2 episodes of The West Wing over The Social Network any day of the week and twice on Sundays. But even if you don’t agree with me (and statistically, you probably don’t), I challenge you to point to anything even coming close to the depth of the characters on this show. They are intricate and expansive and constantly surprising. They’re beautifully acted and they’re annoying and wonderful and jealous and poignant and they feel real. Plus, if you want to see how a furiously strong woman should be played, it’s hard not to crumble at Dianne Wiest the sleepy spider, listening quietly, genuinely sure that nothing anybody says will ever get to her.
The only thing missing...
In truth, my film has almost nothing in common with any of these titles. It’s a short, warm, simple romantic comedy about a long distance couple who try to keep their relationship alive by baking an apple crumble over the phone. Nothing more than a nice warm way to spend 10 minutes, and nothing like the things listed here. I have no idea how IMDB generates these lists but if there’s any truth to them at all (and in my experience there isn’t) I’m going to naively take it at its word and jump around for a few hours.
Now, I consider myself a romantic guy. If you ever want one of your Valentine’s day gifts to be inspected by a bomb squad, I’m the guy to go to for advice. That’s right, I’m so romantic it’s dangerous. I like romantic films, I make romantic films, I like big romantic gestures, I even wrote a theorem attempting to prove the existence of love. It’s not as succinct as I’d like, and it doesn’t actually prove that love exists, it just disproves that it doesn’t, and says that if it does, then it must necessarily be non computational, but it’s still something!
Ok so I know you probably don't care enough to read that but if you knew me, you'd trust me that it's actually really sweet.
However, when I got to work today to find that we’d been signed up to an advice line we could call, I thought, that’s nice, until I went to their website, logged on with the fancy new code we were given, and was treated to the following article. Someone was paid, by the council, to write this.
17 Activities for Long-distance Couples
Buy a copy of the ‘Person of the Year’ issue of Time magazine and paste a picture of him or her on the cover. Write an article about why they should be the person of the year and send it to them.
And immediately I knew this was either going to be dreadful, hilarious or both. This years person of the year was Mark Zuckerberg, and who doesn’t want to be pasted over his face.
I decided not to choose Julianne Moore as I didn't want to give her false hope.
Is that romantic? Really? And yes if I was going to send it to the real Dr. O’Hara from Nurse Jackie (she’s real to me) then I might have put more effort in, but still. It’s not an activity, and it won’t draw anyone closer to anything other than the burns ward. This one kind of speaks to the heart of the point I’m going to make here but I won’t spoil that yet.
Every night for a week write down 10 things you appreciate about him or her. By the end of the week you will have written over 70 things. Send them the list in a romantic card.
First of all, ten times 7 is not “over 70”, it’s 70. Secondly, the advice is to tell them what you like about them? Because “I wasn’t sure how to like another person. Every time my long distance girlfriend comes to visit I just cry and run full speed into her, clawing at her and poking her in the ribs, what is it I’m doing wrong?” I think if someone doesn’t know that they should be nice to their partner, then they probably won’t be reading articles about how to make it work.
Before you leave give them a jar containing the same number of M&M’s as days you will be away. Instruct them to eat just one a day in your absence.
Buy a box of chocolates. Under each chocolate place a short note.
Send a ‘chocolate attack’ of one sweet bar each day for a week.
Three “activities” about chocolate? You know what will keep you and your partner together, all the open communication you can fit under a quality street.
Although if you're actually going to do it, this is the most romantic message you can fit onto a box of chocolates.
Make a list of five things you can do to be more unselfish in your relationship and then do them!!!
Even if we let go that they probably meant “less selfish”, that’s only one fewer exclamation mark than you use when there’s a volcano erupting outside.
Go on virtual dates together on the internet. A few ideas include attending concerts, going to the zoo or museums.
Actually there’s nothing particularly wrong with this except how do you go to the zoo online?
Yeah so... I don't actually have photoshop...
Build a webpage celebrating his or her accomplishments and send the web address to them.
This article is aimed at the kind of people who otherwise, would have built that website and not sent it.
Buy a nice picture frame and send it to them with your picture in it. Write a special note to them on the back of the frame.
Damnit, when I sent Eve Best that picture of a foetus tornado I was so close to dead on.
Have a calendar made with pictures of the two of you.
You’re that person aren’t you! That one who walks around with pictures of himself and his girlfriend because he fell in love with the first person who beats him like his dad did.
Buy him or her a teddy bear that when squeezed will repeat a personalized message in your voice.
So many of these suggestions seem to be finding new vapid and ridiculous ways of not actually talking to each other. Apparently in a healthy long distance relationship all conversation is done in whatever form requires the least response. Feeling lonely? Missing me? All the affection of a soulless robot, but with a voice whose familiarity slowly decays over time.
"Show me on the bear where you wish you were touching me."
Have a favourite photograph of the two of you made into a jigsaw puzzle. Send them a few pieces with every letter.
No! See no, they don’t get it! Real romance isn’t having a jigsaw puzzle of the two of you together, real romance is sending them all but the few pieces, and then laughing at them as they complain at you for having made them put it together.
Send home a pair of electric warming socks with a note saying that since you couldn’t be there to warm their feet that you were sending these to take your place.
What!? The thing I miss most about you is when you would… warm my feet? Is this something couples do?
Oddly enough the socks seem to be able to communicate without the use of empty platitudes.
Send a ‘Heart Attack’: Cut out heart shaped pieces of paper and write on them the things you appreciate about him or her. Place all the hearts in an envelope and send it to them.
Why are so many of these about attacks? This is just a repeat of a bunch of the other ones, but more threatening.
Use a video camera to give him a virtual tour of the place you are staying and the things you do during the day.
So… talk to them, right?
Share with them some of your goals for the next five years.
Not like you would in a normal relationship though. This is a new kind of talking.
Be the change you want to see in your relationship. Make a list of the things you can do to improve your relationship over the next year. Refer to it on a weekly basis.
And finally, the final suggestion on a list of ways to improve your long distance relationship is to MAKE A LIST OF WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR RELATIONSHIP AND THEN DO THEM.
There was another, much more offensive article about how men shouldn’t pursue married women because women are emotionally vulnerable, and therefore can’t be expected to say no to men, it’s men’s duty therefore to not ask. Apparently men should stop taking advantage of frail women by finding them attractive. Reading this made me say words I could have been fired for, but really I think it’s obvious enough that there’s no point writing an article on it. Suffice to say a good relationship cannot be based on the dumb luck that no-one else ever came along who fancied you/you fancied, it has to be based on that they did come along, and you said no. So as far as I’m concerned, if you like someone, tell them so.
But to focus on 17 ways robots think people behave, it just makes me a little bit sad. I’m not someone who has a strong opinion on long distance relationships, I think some work and some don’t just like anything else, and they require work just like anything else. If you want some real advice on your long distance relationship then chances are you’ve come to the wrong place, but here it is. Just act like a real person. Argue a little, be a little petty, be a little jealous, try a little too hard, be a little vulnerable, make fun of them a little, make them feel as bad about themselves as you make them feel good about themselves. Real human interaction is really quite something. There’s really nothing like watching two people realise they’re not done yet. Usually it goes the other way.
This is a park bench I found which was designed for couples of different leg length. This one I actually do like.
I think really romance isn’t about making them feel like Time Magazine’s person of the year. They aren’t as important as that person. They just aren’t. But you love them. You love that they are a real person. And that’s exactly as romantic as thinking they are going to save the world.
Everyone has a different writing process, and I’ve seen a few articles about different people describing theirs. I shall briefly describe mine here, but only as a flimsy pretext to show you something brilliant in a minute.
Firstly, my walls are littered with charts about character arcs, plots, timelines etc. These are devided into two sections.
Printed charts for ongoing work that I’m not currently adding to. This is mainly for television series’ as it means I can immediately look and see if an idea would fit in as soon as I come up with it.
And here we have my giant whiteboard, for whatever script I’m focussed on at the moment. I can wipe it clean I can scribble over it I can change things, it’s perfect. Except that everything I write on it I have to write in really cryptic notes so that my flatmate doesn’t read them and mock me. It’s ok though, he’s dead inside.
I then have a collosal “Notes” foleder which contains unsorted lines, ideas, vague fragments, words I like or anything else I feel like writing down. A lot of it makes no sense. The phrase “breakfast at every hour” shows up at least 6 times for no reason other than it sounds vaguely poetic to me.
Then when I decide what it is I’m going to be working on, I look all the way through this file and copy out anything that might even slightly be relevent to what I’m talking about, and put it in its own notes file specific to that project. Then it’s time to start writing.
When it comes to 2nd drafts, I save the original, print it out, then open up a totally new file and just type the whole thing up again. Forces me to read the whole thing again and think about every single line. I know people who do the same thing but just type it up from memory, the idea being if you don’t remember it, it wasn’t that important. Which makes sense really, but I also find it insane.
Finally the bit I actually wanted to tell you about and the reason I actually wanted to write this. Music.
So I love music, I write it, I arrange it, I play it, I listen. Off duty, I listen to anything massively complicated, technically ambitious and basically a bit wanky. When trying to write though, I get distracted by all that good music. But I don’t like the silence either. The solution? Listen to the worst music I can find.
I’ve got Westlife albums, B*Witched B sides, and most recently old 90’s nu metal I have cut up so that there are no chorus’s. Just the verse, over and over, on repeat, for hours.
Anyway, the point is in my search for something truly horrible, I’ve created something wonderful.
This is a version of Billy Ocean’s “When the going gets tough” cut together with the superior saxaphone solo from the otherwise inferior Boyzone cover. If anything’s going to make you work faster, this is it.
My new film Comfort Food got its first screening on Tuesday at the Braine Hownd short film night. This is a new event which will be held on the first Tuesday of every month at the Hideaway bar in Archway.
I was lucky enough to have my film put in for the first night, and it went really well. Plenty of laughs, plenty of “Awwwwww”s where appropriate. In fact, a lovely lady even bought me a banoffee pie because she liked my film. So that’s a result and a half!
I also actually enjoyed the other films, which is pretty rare for someone as frankly unpleasent as me. Roll on next month!
I have never used an umbrella before. Which I guess is surprising because I’m 24 and a half (today) and I live in England, but it really doesn’t come up that much. I’ve made use of umbrellas being held by other people but for the most part I made my way. For the most part, I just get wet.
It just makes me feel really uncomfortable, like I’m… mocking the sky. Don’t mock the sky, ok? The sky will murder you. It is very tall. But you’re fine, because you’ve got cling film on fallen branches. The sky thinks you’re an idiot.
But tonight I’m going to have to face it, because I have a date with a girl so forcibly beautiful that I found myself doing ridiculous things, like filling my wallet with the business cards of other women who had asked me out so that if she noticed she’d know that I picked her over them. An act so embarrassing that I’m only revealing it now in hopes that you’ll laugh at me until I never do it again.
Of course I don’t own an umbrella. But I remember finding one in the cupboard when I moved in that belonged to someone who used to live here. Probably either the Latvian transvestite named Girtz Berzs, or Mei Lee… the woman who never cancelled her Matalan subscription and still gets valentine’s day cards…
On the wall of my flat I have a tree of all the
people who lived here before me, made from the letters they receive.
Sometimes there’s an old birthday card that I find in a cupboard
somewhere. I like trying to piece together who is who from the
photographs they left here.
For a while my favourite was Girtz Berzs, because how can’t you
love someone called that? He left a bag here, which contained Latvian
currency, old cassette tapes of surf music and a pair of size 14 knee
high white leather boots.
But two years ago , on valentine’s day, a card
came through the post addressed to Mei Lee. From my wall charts I’ve
discerned that Mei Lee lived here maybe five years ago, which is a long time to be pining for someone. I normally don’t like to open them, the contents are nothing to do with me. But this time I gave in.
Whoever sent it obviously hasn’t spoken to her in five years, and I really wanted to know what it would say. So I opened up the envelope. It was incredibly simple. Just a folded white piece of paper with her name on the front. And inside it said…
“My heart is so full of you.”
Now those of you who know me know, I have a totally
justified love of valentines day. So maybe that’s why this little
message got to me but it did. I went into a kind of daze and did
something I don’t really understand. Like one time when I was driving
home to Manchester and started thinking about something, then pulled
myself together and I was 2 miles away from Edinburgh. I don’t know the way to Edinburgh when I’m conscious, I have no idea what happened that day, but I didn’t waste it, I went in and got myself a pie from a fish and chip shop. This was the kind of place where the garnish they put on the pie was two chips in a cross position. Then I drove home.
But seeing this plain white paper folded over with
the little crumples down the side, like it was folded by arthritic
fingers. I went fucking barmy.
I picked up this piece of paper, went into my own
stash and pulled out a blank envelope, stuffed the paper inside, ran
outside without my shoes on and pushed it back into the post
box.
What was I trying to do? I have no idea. Just get
rid of it? Hope somehow it would get to her? Something equally idiotic.
But maybe I just wanted it to be sent to some colossal pile of
undelivered post somewhere. Is that comforting? I never can tell.
I pull out a bright yellow umbrella from under my spare bed and see that it’s covered in adverts for Schweppes lemonade for some reason. I briefly consider turning it inside out but decide that’s a fucking stupid thing to do.
I set off on my journey and I’m 2 minutes out of the door when calamity strikes! There’s a small alleyway that leads out onto the road that’s too small for the umbrella. At first I try lifting it above the walls and walking through anyway but soon find myself stuck there, arms in the air as high as they can go, desperately clinging on to the thing keeping me from getting soaked, unable to walk even a step further.
A reconstruction
And suddenly, as it does in these situations. A song came into my head.
“Guess miiine is not the fiirst… heeart brooookeeeen…”
One day a few years ago, me and 3 of my friends sat
down to watch a film called [REC]. I’m not normally someone who gets
scared by films, and I know a lot of people who were completely
unaffected by this film, but for me it was utterly terrifying. So much
so that when my friend let out an audible yelp at one point in the film,
not one of us in the room mocked him for it.
In the dark I started to become really afraid, I
couldn’t sleep properly. So I decided to take matters into my own hands.
Rather than replaying the climax of the film, I would replay, the least
frightening scene in the world. The scene I chose was Kristin Chenoweth
singing “Hopelessly devoted to you” on Pushing Daisies.
It worked, I calmed down and went to sleep. But as
I repeated this over the coming weeks, this became a Pavlovian response
to fear. Every time someone turned the light off I would hear the song
come into my head. This got worse and worse, eventually replacing fear
within me altogether. I would be walking along the road and the song
would come into my head and I would have to scramble my head around and
look for the thing I was afraid of.
The height of these experiences was when I was up a ladder doing a bit of filming for a friend of mine. My job was to hang bunting on a lamp post while looking
like a member of a fascist overruling organisation, so I was wearing a
blue jump suit and a beret, up on a lamp post on Holloway Road using a
ladder we borrowed for a book shop because the university wouldn’t lend
us one, claiming it was a health and safety risk. Like a good boy, I had
someone at the bottom holding the ladder as I reached up to hang the
decorations. But for some reason. I can hear her sing.
You know I’m just a… fool who’s willing…
I looked around, what’s happened to trigger it? The
person holding the ladder had dropped one of the decorations they were
holding and passing up to me. They saw it starting to blow away and
couldn’t reach it to stop. So as our flags flew away, my assistant let
go of the ladder and ran after them. I looked down at the road and saw a
bus approaching in the distance as my ladder started to tip over in the
wind.
I leaned to my right to try to counter it but it
was too late by some way. The ladder slid over its centre of gravity and
started plummeting into the street as the bus made its way towards me.
There wass nothing I could do anymore to stop the ladder from falling, but I
remember taking the time to look at the person who had let go of the
ladder as I fell into the street.
Hopelessly devoteeed…
I leapt off the rung of the ladder, pushing it into
the street with the pushback as I grabbed onto the lamp post and hugged it tightly. Looking out into the street to see the bus screech to a halt before it hits the ladder, I slide slowly inch by inch down the lamp post, before falling off just before the bottom, just a few minor scrapes and bruises.
Who knows though, if I had been scared instead of
just singing, would I have thought quickly enough to do that? Did the
grease soundtrack save my life?
“Probably not.” I thought, as I took the ladder
back to the book shop, bleeding from my arms, and set it down in their corridor. I shrugged my shoulders at them and left without saying anything.
And here I am in an alleyway, in no danger at all with the song in my head again, while my neighbours, obviously well practiced at using umbrellas, are laughing at me. I push upwards and walk back to the entrance, and make my way through with a closed umbrella. But me and my umbrella have bonded now. We went through something together. We’re a fucking TEAM!
In recreating that moment, I cable tied my clothes to coat hangers and then to the umbrella, and walked out to the alleyway. As I fastened it up to the wall and started taking photos a 12 year old child walked past and had to walk underneath my experiment. I waved at him.I like to think that child is now going insane trying to figure out what I was doing.
I carry on walking to the station with my new best friend. Passing by, I decide that one of my favourite things to see is people in really expensive looking hats in the rain trying to smile. If I had the spare digits I’d take a photo but I’m hand in hand with my brolly.
On the train, there’s a man sat opposite with his daughter, who pulls out a map from his pocket. It’s soaking wet, and disintegrates completely as he passes it to his daughter, who laughs at him. They are lost now. But it’s funny.
I think to myself, what will I do when I get there? What’s the proper umbrella etiquette? I know I’m not supposed to have it open indoors, but where do I put it? Won’t it make the seats wet? Do I hang it up with my coat? As I enter the pub I decide instead to just carry it around and use it like a cool walking stick. I use it to prop myself up and check the business cards in my wallet are organised so the prettiest girl is at the front. And I grin as I realise how nice it is that someone makes me realise I’m a fucking moron. And I let myself think what I would write on a folded piece of paper if I was forced to. Probably something about a sandcastle. Or a trout recipe. I like trout.
But she doesn’t show up.
Which under the circumstances (which I won’t explain) is completely fair, and probably the best thing that could have happened. I spend the evening talking to some other people in the pub, and make a lot of new friends, and have a genuinely great evening actually. There’s a girl who’s a film director who wants me to send her some ideas or short scripts. I think about plots that involve umbrellas.
One of my favourite things to do on the tube (there are a number) is to try to “Sherlock” the people sat opposite me. By this I mean, to observe closely and try to figure out things about them. That guys left shoe is more worn down than his right so he walks with a limp. That sort of thing. The problem is of course, I never know whether I was right or not. There’s no way of telling if I was just talking shit.
A woman gets on. She looks to be in her late 20’s,
and has dark red hair and freckles. There are seats there but she stands
anyway. Her hair isn’t wet but she doesn’t have coat so the rain must
have stopped. She looks as though she is about to cry. She puts her hand into her pocket and pulls out a pink envelope which has been carefully opened, not ripped, meaning she has read it before, and it probably meant something to her. As she slides her finger inside she pulls out a card and begins to read it. She does not look at the front, only the inside, which says “Well done”. She closes the card, and then folds it into quarters, putting it back into her pocket. A different pocket than the one she took it from. She does not intend to look at it again.
She scans the train for other people, noticing the
seats. She still stands. Her cheeks are red and flustered, but the red
is generalised, not the shape you get when you’ve been crying. She
notices a man across the carriage eyeing her up, and immediately closes her coat to cover herself. She does not turn away from him though, she faces him, her coat held closed in a single fist, she wants him to stop, but she doesn’t want him to think she is intimidated. He turns around, and she lets go. She holds the envelope in her other hand and looks at it again, there is no name on it. She crumples it up in her fist and drops it on the floor, before turning to look out of the window at the darkness.
In between Angel and Old street there is an
abandoned tube station, where the diggers gave up halfway through. If
you watch the pipes for when they disappear, you can see the abandoned
shovels and wooden boxes for a few seconds, before the pipes return.
She notices me writing notes on a plain white piece
of paper, folded in half. She looks up and down the carriage to check
no-one is there, and then looks up at me. She smiles as though she
really needs it.
“What are you writing?” She asks.
But I can’t be bothered.
When I get off the train, the rain has stopped. But I put my umbrella up anyway. I can claim I never noticed. I decide I’m going to try to start up a new greeting, whereby instead of waving, I raise my umbrella. If you look interesting, I do it twice in a quick, popping motion. I walk back to my house and see how many people I can get to acknowledge me, or respond with a friendly gesture. Three do.
The “too slow” variation of a high five occurs when one appears to be engaging in a high five initiation; however, the initiator succeeds in pulling their hand away before anyone can make contact.This is the only known “five” that may be used as an insult as well as a compliment, and, as early as 1971, was commonly followed by the taunting expression “too slow, buffalo!”
There are many variations on this theme, with additions of “at the side” and other hand positions for the partner to contact the initiator’s hand, and thus a greater number of opportunities for the initiator to deceive the victim.
"Up high."
"Down low."
Victim misses.
"Too slow!"
Can’t take any credit for this, but it’s what may well be the greatest wikipedia article out there, so I had to save it before it gets taken down. I love that the woman clearly got dressed up to take the photos, and yet looks genuinely pissed off. Serious acting chops.
This since deleted picture from the “Humpty Dumpty” article is the other contender for best wiki.
A friend of mine is in the top 10 for the Cannes Short Film Corner competition, run by the National Film Board of Canada, with his comedy zombie movie called “I Am Lonely”. So mozie on over and check it out.
He also writes for the Tin Can Podcast, who have brought you such delights as this.
While we’re on it though, where did the whole zombies brains thing come from? I can think of no film, tv show or even story where a zombie has expressed a preference for the brain over any other part of flesh. In fact if destroying the brain is the only way to kill them, then zombies would have an evolutionary imperative to eat ANY OTHER PART of you than your brain, so you could live on to kill again!
To the best of my knowledge, this is an attribute of zombies which exists SOLEY in jokes about zombies, and not at all in any “serious” depiction of the phenomena.
And if a joke is primarily a passage that subverts an already present expectation of it’s outcome, then are jokes that revolve around phenomena only present in jokes, still jokes? HOLY SHIT.
Anyway watch the film. It has jokes. And doesn’t mention brains. I just went off on a tangent.
My winning entry for the Tin Can Podcast’s “My Big Fat Royal Wedding” is now available on their website, that’s two wins in a row from them, so let’s thank the guys at the Tin Can Podcast by DESTROYING THEM with popularity!
We did it before (briefly) we can do it again (probably).
It’s just something I’ve never been able to do. There are times when I want to cheer, but I just can’t make that noise. Wooh! WOOH! It eludes me. When I try it I sound utterly ridiculous. It comes from the back of my throat, like a seahorse trying to imitate a condor in a tunnel. I’ve practiced. I have a friend who tried to teach me once, we went to see a band and every time they finished a song I got to have one more go. I’m generally someone who has a pretty decent relationship with ridicule. I’m confident, I’m relaxed, I don’t mind it. On occasion I’ve even sought it out. But when the band themselves begin to break their pathetically morbid persona to laugh about the kaleidosquawk noises coming from the back row, it gets to you. I gave up that day, and ever since I’ve clapped just a little bit louder than everyone else, I think as a defence mechanism.
I’ve also tried to replace it with a loud, raspy “YEAH!”. I have a YEAH that can make a dog go ape shit. I have a YEAH that can wheel fog around like it’s a circus bear. But it’s not the same. I don’t kid myself.
WOOH! Is more versatile. It can mean so many different things, a cheer, a commendation, encouragement. YEAH isn’t good for any of those things. What it is good for though is celebration, and celebration is something I’m often criticised for. I was once in a sort of writing competition, where we were given a story, and then had 20 minutes to re-write the story in our own voice. I walked away that day with my first trophy for something I had written. That trophy was a book. This book.
And you can fucking bet I got it signed.
But as my name was called out, I jumped from my seat. I was happy! Hamster Rampage wasn’t much, but I wanted it. Luckily, my training to suppress the instinctual WOOH had not failed me here, but did I let out a yell? I most certainly did.
And I was mocked.
Not just by the others, but by the person running the competition. I laughed at it, and I didn’t care. But I did find it strange that it was frowned upon. I’d won things before and done the same thing. I won at a pub version of play your cards right. I won at a basketball shooting competition. But when I won for writing something, I was expected to celebrate with a degree of humility.
I’m reminded of this today because after watching a bunch of episodes of Only Connect, a ridiculously hard quiz show, I noticed that the winners never celebrate. They grin smugly, and they’re obviously happy about it, but nothing like the noises I’ll make when I destroy you at monopoly.
WHICH I WILL
I started looking around at other “smart” quiz shows. This is what I found.
Watch those videos closely. One of them shows a guy almost raising his arms and then there’d a really gratuitous cutaway. I’m sure it’s a coincidence but I couldn’t help but laugh at the idea that we weren’t allowed to see them celebrating.
In the eggheads one, the people in the background who aren’t playing jump up and down and hug each other. The three who answered the question? Composed, cool, smooth.
In one of them, a guy really goes for it and lets his feelings out… by patting his teammate on the shoulder. It doesn’t even look like a “well done” pat. It looks like the pat I give my grandma when she tells me that black people were invented by the government to give us cancer.
Even the overall super mega winner of University Challenge, when she was given her trophy, this was the face she pulled.
Yeah... This isnt bad I suppose.
In comparison, watch this video of someone winning at Deal Or No Deal. A show where the contestants have to choose boxes at random and see what happens, in which there is no strategy or intellect required whatsoever.
The screaming and jumping around goes on for so long the crowd themselved get bored and take a break from it, then start it up again. For this reason, I decided to speed up the video. Also it’s funnier.
And if you think that’s just because of the amount of money they got for winning, you’re wrong. Here’s a guy winning a million dollars on the American who wants to be a millionaire.
There’s an inverse correlation between the level of intellect required to win something, and the amount that the winner is allowed to celebrate. Is that because as a society we value luck more than we do intelligence? Possibly. But I think it ties in with something a bit more fundamental, and a lot more ridiculous. The idea that in order to be clever, one must be miserable.
This is something that’s always annoyed me. Brooding miserable people who think they’re cleverer than others simply because they’re brooding and miserable. The idea that if you enjoy life it’s only because you haven’t thought it through. It’s utterly ridiculous. There are things to be happy about, and things to be sad about, and neither response makes you any dumber or smarter than anyone else.
So why shouldn’t we celebrate? I’m not saying be obnoxious about it. In this matter, I’d perhaps even advice against being me. But there’s nothing wrong with enjoying yourself, or letting anyone else know you’re enjoying yourself.
In the past few weeks I’ve entered five different writing competitions, one of which I’ve already been shortlisted for, so my pledge as an upstanding member of society is this.
If by some luck I manage to win any of them, for each one my response will be as follows.
But I will not shout wooh.
Not ever.
UPDATE: In comparison, watch how people react when I completed this simple obstacle course years ago.
It is finally put to bed. Today, on the one year anniversary of my stumbling out of the cave, I put to rest the Julianne Moore Saga. In the most anticlimactic way possible.
Yes, after a years worth of build up, mystery, investigation and speculation, today was to be the day when the whole conspiracy was either proved or disproved. Today, I would call up the phone number she gave me, and simply ask.
“Hello. Is Julianne there?”
Yes or no? “Yes, this is Julianne?” “No, my name is Hilda.” Either way, I had to know. But instead I was met simply with the three ascending beeps of futility. The number no longer worked. All hope was lost.
In celebration of this unbelievable disappointment, I have decided simply to offer an attempt at an objective overview. I will present evidence for both sides and allow readers to conclude for themselves, what, if anything, transpired.
If that image is too small, the above link should take you to a PDF of it.
A series of coincidences, where a woman identical to Julianne Moore and cautious about giving her name, who is in London at the same time as Julianne Moore is, promoting a film featuring a character called Sandy, who is Julianne Moore’s age, who falls for a man my age, who studied the same subjects as me, and over the course of the film volunteers at a women’s centre and then begins to work with children (both of which I do), meets and goes out on a date with a man called Sandy.
OR… a carefully executed, long thought out plan to get his wife to leave him?
Which one is really more likely?
Yes, the series of coincidences is still more likely. But is it that much more likely?
However upon examining valentine’s cards for clues, I can see no reasonable evidence that any of them came from Julianne Moore. This combined with the phone number I have becoming defunct, I feel it is time to file this saga under X.
And Julianne, if you’re out there, It’s time to move on.
So I was going to write something about this method I’ve discovered for ordering a KFC. If you narrow your eyes a certain amount and use a certain tone of voice, and keep your hands in your pockets, the person at the counter somehow thinks you’ve already paid. It’s really bizarre. Now I’m not claiming it’s flawless, but the last 7 meals I’ve bought from there I’ve paid for 2 of them.
BUT NO! Not this month. You haven’t earned it? You know why? Because I fucking love valentines day, and statistically speaking, you probably don’t.
That's you. That's how dumb you look. (This is a message to women too, but none of the women on google images looked ridiculous enough for you to feel as ashamed as I want you to).
“Valentines day is so commercial man. I can’t believe you buy into all that.”
OH! Is it? Is it really? I can’t believe I missed that! I wish I could be like you, you saw through the whole façade because you’re tragically brilliant and brooding. You figured it out because you dared to question authority and search for the truth DAMN THE COST! God I wish I was you. I once saw you smoke a cigarette and everything! You’re a fucking ARTIST!
This is not you. That photo you glue over your mirror is a lie.
Maybe, maybe you’d be right, if you hadn’t just taken yourself out of the equation altogether. Well fuck it, I’m going native.
It’s only as commercial as you let it be. If you go out and buy roses that have tripled in price, or chocolates that they’ll only like half of then yes, you may well be a silly fish. But every year I send stuff out, it’s always stupid and kind of feeble, and more importantly, it’s always made only from shit I find in my house the week before. I’m not allowed to plan it or go out and buy anything. It’s like a gesture, crossed with a puzzle, and I love it. Spend as much as you want, spend nothing at all. You’re the one making it commercial, not anyone else.
I present: A pop-up, foldable house of cards...
“It’s stupid to celebrate it on one day, we should be doing it every day. That’s why I don’t send anything.”
I’d really like it if we could do this all the time, but that’s not a criticism of this day! It’s a criticism of the other ones! That’s like saying “I don’t give money to charity because really there shouldn’t be any world hunger at all.”
“Yeah well, it makes me feel like crap.”
No! YOU make you feel like crap! Grow up.
This is not a day for couples. Couples already tell each other how they feel, all the time. Or at least they should. Nor is this a time for you to feel shit that you’re not with anyone.
No, this is a day to celebrate that you think someone is pretty. To celebrate that you like someone at all. Forget about whether they like you. Don’t give a shit. That’s not important. This is about who you like. So let yourself, just for one day, get ridiculous about it.
I present: An old pillowcase, ripped up and dyed using food colouring, then sewn up around a drinking straw and put in a can...
I just don’t understand why this day gets so much more flak than any of the others. What’s really wrong with it? Chocolate? Flowers? Compliments? Going out for a meal? Stop me when I say something that isn’t great.
It doesn’t even have to be a real love or anything! Just find someone you think is pretty and then make sure they know it! Some days I’m as shallow as a roulette wheel, but at least I roll my eyes in all directions, because gorgeous does not have a weatherman, and if I think you’ve got a way about you you’d better be looking through your post for something that doesn’t make any sense.
P.S. If you’re good, maybe I’ll show you the KFC secret.
decorations would just fall off. How did this happen?
This bit is brown.
That is not a lie.
This bit is really
actually brown.
The truth finds
a home here.
And in a way, that’s what I like about Christmas. As bizarre an idea as I find it that somehow we as a people have collectively decided to draw this tree upside down, and that this is utterly unquestioned, that is basically a microcosm for the true meaning of Christmas itself. We all, somehow, by an untraceable trajectory, decided that Christmas would be meaningful.
And it worked.
For the most part.
I am fully aware that Christmas is consumerist and ridiculous and shops up their prices to make extra money. I know what Christmas started off as, and it’s origins and a whole load of stuff that’s completely interesting, but utterly irrelevant. Jesus was born in April or something and the celebration was moved to December to compete with some other holiday celebration blah blah blah. Father Christmas’s image as we know it was designed by a man named Hayden Sunbloom in 1931 when he was commissioned by Coca Cola to do a portrait of Sinterklaas blah blah blah and in describing Mary the original Hebru text uses the word “alma”, which means “a young woman of marriageable age”, not the word “bethela”, which means “virgin” blah blah blah.
That being said. Who gives a shit.
These things are all correct. In the same way that that guy you know who’s obsessed with zombie films is correct when he says “actually they’re all allegorical. They were written to be metaphors for consumerism and communism and blah blah blah” and while yes, he is technically correct, everybody still hates him because that’s not what they’re about anymore.
They’re not metaphors for capitalism or the spread of ideas anymore, they’re metaphors for metaphors. Metaphors that keep coming, they just keep coming at you, long after they’ve stopped being meaningful or interesting. They are figures of speech that have become predatory, long after their meaning as figures of speech has left the stage.
Christmas is the same. It’s not secular OR religious. It’s not consumerist OR about purity and giving. It’s a compound of shitting everything, just like all the best things are.
The true meaning of Christmas is that we have given it a meaning. The meaning might be being grumpy and complaining for a few weeks for all I care, it is still there. We have, by some convolution, decided that it is meaningful and in doing so have given it meaning.
I like Christmas for the same reason I like that we draw our Christmas trees upside down. Because it shows us that we are not a product of out environment. The meaning didn’t come from anywhere. We created it. And it worked. We get together and we have fun, or we sit with our families. We laugh about the stupid shit we did this year or we get depressed because nothing happened the way it was supposed to. We do whatever the shit we like to do on Christmas and we do it for ourselves, and that’s a more powerful idea than any kind of tradition.
My winning entry for the Tin Can Podcast’s “12 plays of Christmas” is now available on their website, so go have a listen to it, and the other 11 winners. Hooray for festive victory!
My popularity with Australian gossip whores continues!
I was recently interviewed on an Australian radio show about my strange relationship with Julianne Moore and her husband. HOWEVER, soon after, they decided not to air the interview. Were they bribed? Were they under preassure from Bart? I can only speculate.
However, I was able to find an interview with Sandy Nicholson, a photographer. Recording over the parts where he spoke, I was able to reconstruct the interview myself.
I will not be silenced!
Interestingly, according to urban dictionary, “Sly grogging” is either a casual fart, or bum sex. What has JM been saying about me? Who knows.
Seriously, it is. And now I have the proof. I noticed something earlier today when making a worksheet for my class. I’m hoping this isn’t just a Rorschach test style thing where I’m seeing evil and nobody else will get it. But we’ll see.
What the shit? Is that a pickled eye staring into the sky, looking for cavities in the souls of birds it can infect and slowly eat away at. Is it a decaying hot spring filled with frogspawn and topped off with the ejaculate of a thousand perpetually dying tadpoles?
No, it’s neither of those things. Look closely. Some of you may have figured this out, but it’s actually a jacket potato.
Seriously, it can not just be me. Look at this!
Tasty right? Looks good, doesn’t it? Nice bit of tuna, some sweetcorn, a thoroughly clean plate. Nice right?
No! Take the edges away, and suddenly it’s not a jacket potato anymore, it’s a dried up kidney that’s bleeding flatworms. This thing is genuinely unnerving to me. They all are!
A strange submarine, covered in dried warts, and topped off with spongiform brain disorder. Or at least what I imagine a visual representation of that word would look like. It’s a treasure chest filled with the ghosts of millions of barnacles that died of heartache after being scraped off boats and now they want revenge.
This one is a lepper’s hairbrush. You can still see the remnants of a face, scraped off and stretched around the brush, with only the flakes of puss and… strangely enough cheese. That’s definitely cheese up there on top of all that horror.
This isn’t just me is it? There are thousands of photos of them on the internet, and they all look reasonably tasty when surrounded with absolutely anything. The universe itself, acts as a pacifier for this thing. But as soon as you take it away, you’re left with a very real sense of unease. I’m going to be on the lookout now for previously comforting things made terrifying by the absence of an environment.
They should make these things star in horror movies. Or at least as the posters.
That is fucking MUCH scarier than most of the things I see on the side of busses. I see that when I get off the tube I am going to see that film, and I’m taking my clones with me.
That’s a still taken from the trailer to Saw 3D. That’s not just me is it? That’s the same person at least three times. Are horror movies cloning their audiences to sell tickets? And why is that revelation still less frightening than this fucking potato?
A short radio play I wrote has just won a competition for the Tin Can Podcast, and will be being recorded and put out for all to listen to in the next few weeks, so I’ll be sure to let you all know soon.
Would you be more, or less likely to go to a restaurant, if you knew the serving staff were obligated to flirt with you? Before you answer… consider your loneliness.
So the word on the street is that the things at Pizza Express are changing. I received an email (that’s right, I get emails about pizza. So what? Who are you? You’re nobody!) informing me of a change in initiative. Now the staff are being trained to flirt with their customers. Aside from the moral outrage I’m choosing to bracket, as it can really go unsaid, or said by people more important than me, I know what you’re thinking. “A class on flirting that Sandy isn’t teaching? Way to fuck it up at the starting gun!”
Yeah that’s pretty much what I was thinking too. And with this in mind, an experiment was born.
So just how well trained are these people? If I was incredibly hostile/forward, would they still be forced to carry on flirting with me? Now I can’t afford to go to pizza express a whole bunch of times so I had go for both routes on the same day, with the same waitress. I realise this makes my results difficult to standardise, and definitely falls under qualitative research, but sometimes those studies are the very best!
I'm what she goes to school for.
WAITRESS: Didn’t I see you in here a few days ago?
ME: Yeah you served me, and brought me the wrong juice.
WAITRESS: I thought it was you! Small world eh?
ME: No, it’s a very big world, with 4 billion other men in it. Good luck.
So far so good. She laughs nervously to herself and I order an apple and raspberry juice and a ham and mushroom pizza. She brings me my drink.
WAITRESS: I brought the right one this time!
ME: Haha! Well thank you. Although this does remind me of last time I was in a hotel.
WAITRESS: Yeah? Why?
ME: Well, I was there, and so was someone spectacularly beautiful!
She laughs again. Not repulsed? Check. With an equally flirty comeback? Fuck no. She just grins at me and walks off! Amateur. Still, she’s not backing off. Going to have to step this up a little.
WAITRESS: Here you go. There’s your pizza.
ME: Well I’m glad I was sitting down for that fucking revelation.
WAITRESS: … There was a nice guy here just a minute ago.
ME: He’s in here. Hold me tight enough, you’ll feel him.
Yes! She’s looking uneasy. Neither of them on their own seem to be off-putting to her, but a rapid fluctuation between the two may be just what is required.
WAITRESS: Was it good?
ME: It was actually.
WAITRESS: You sound surprised.
ME: Yeah I thought I was going to have to pretend?
WAITRESS: Why would you pretend?
ME: Oh please, I would bite the label off your apple if you’d let me.
WAITRESS: (Laughing) Well, I don’t actually take that much pride in my work.
ME: Maybe you should take pride in fucking something.
WAITRESS: Sorry?
ME: Are you?
WAITRESS: Does your personality have a remote control or something?
ME: Oh I’m not even remotely controllable.
She walks away to get me a dessert menu and I see her chatting to one of the other waiters and surreptitiously looking over at me. Is she going to ask her friend to come and serve me? No no, she holds her ground and heads up with the menu.
WAITRESS: What do you fancy?
ME: A fucking challenge.
WAITRESS: Excuse me?
ME: The banoffee pie looks good.
WAITRESS: It… it does look good. I saw someone else eating a piece it looked amazing.
ME: Do you think they spend ages making it look good?
WAITRESS: Probably.
This is taking ages. Time to lay it on really fucking thick.
ME: What do you think the mathematics behind aesthetics is anyway? Because me plus, charismatic, for example, does not equal gorgeous, and I should know! I shave me! And I scribble “stunning is only skin deep” on those little scraps of toilet paper I use to tend my blemished face, my blemished face has bled enough. You on the other hand… You look like… a waltz. I just want to paint your picture on a coffee mug, fill it with a crab and 7 different types of salt. You stand there offering me a banoffee pie, and it feels like I’m standing on dry land and just panhandling at the ocean.
WAITRESS: Fuck I wish I could meet someone who would say things like that to me for real.
ME: You’d love that guy?
WAITRESS: I’d do my best.
ME: Yeah well, love is like the holocaust, except unfortunately for you, you won’t get thinner.
WAITRESS: What?
ME: That one I felt bad about.
WAITRESS: Does the guy from quantum leap keep jumping in and out of your body?
At this point I just had to stop and shake her hand. I couldn’t really compete with that. Annoyingly, at that moment I kind of fancied her. Fuck.
Looks like they were actually trained pretty fucking well, but I think out of a sense of respect for that waitress, I won’t expand the study by comparing the staffs of various restaurants. There’s a fair amount of guilt stuffed in there with that respect too. But no-one wants to hear about that. She’s a pro though, I’ll tell you that much. I should have asked her if she wanted to take part in my game show “So you think you can fuck?”
Still, point proven. Any management which asks you to stand there and flirt with a shit like me has to be a pretty vicious one. So I urge you to be extra nice to the serving staff next time you’re in a Pizza Express. Their job isn’t an easy one.
Breaking and entering. Vandalism. Password theft. Just some of the crimes I will have barely committed by the end of this tale.
The last time I committed a crime was when a friend of mine made me pick up some marijuana for him while I was away for a week. I’m someone who doesn’t even drink coffee, so this was fairly terrifying to me, as I had to call someone I’d never met, meet them, and do the transaction. When the dealer arrived he was nervous, asked me to tell him somewhere quiet we could go so I directed him to a nearby church. He got out of his car and walked over to a wall with some blackberry bushes on it. Carefully, he placed the product on the wall and walked off. Only I didn’t see that, I just assumed he was pretending to look at the blackberry bushes to give passers by a reason why he had stopped and got out of the car. So I’m stood there, trying to look casual. I think I might have even picked one of the blackberries and inspected it, thinking that was something people do for some reason.
He got back in his car and I paid him, then just as he was about to drive off, I asked him to give me the stuff. He of course replied that he already had, and I found it on the wall. But he and his girlfriend both laughed derisively as they turned the key and sped from my life.
It was humiliating.
And I will never be that cool again.
Or so I thought…
Now in most walks of life, right or wrong don’t really exist, and almost all interactions with the world involve various shades of gray. However. Surely one thing we can all get together on is that 50p is too much to pay for photocopying a single piece of paper?
And what’s worse. I would have had to take out a ten pound note to pay for it, and the only machine near me charges you £2. So that’s £2.50 for photocopying my passport. It was in this state of desperation and a righteous sense of entitlement that, I too, turned to crime.
It’s bank holiday Monday, and the school I work at is closed. Empty. Quiet. And with a photocopier.
I casually walk up to the gates of the school. Damnit! Locked! I knew it couldn’t be that easy. But I won’t be beaten. There’s a particularly impatient receptionist in one wing of the building who can never be bothered to wait for people to buzz her in when she arrives. More often than not, she leaves one of the padlocks open, and gets in through one of the small side gates by using a stick to shift the sliding lock. I glance around me to make sure none of the windows in the houses opposite me have people in them. The coast is clear, and I slide open the lock. My intelligence gathering has paid off.
I enter the building and head cautiously to the photocopier, when I hear a sound. Footsteps, and the unmistakable first four bars of Paul Simon’s Call Me Al, hummed by a tone deaf man with a cold. It can only be the caretaker. Or Site Manager as he once shouted at me for not calling him. Actually site manager sounds more menacing anyway so let’s go with that.
I duck into the supply cupboard and wait for him to pass. As soon as I’m clear, I slip out of the corridor and make my way quickly to the photocopier.
But as I power up the machine, the grim realisation dawns on me. When the photocopier is powered on in the morning a code needs to be entered before it will work. A code I do not know.
I think back over my months at the school, frantically trying to remember the code. I fail. But I remember that same impatient receptionist once telling me that when she was deciding what the code should be, she simply put in the last three numbers of the schools phone number backwards, followed by her extension. Oh Carol, I knew befriending you would pay off in the long run.
I check through my phone book for the schools number. Of course, I don’t have it. I’m a criminal, what do you expect? But there are posters down in the main wing of the building which have the number on them. I continue my mission.
I spot the poster down the hallway. But in-between me and it is another caret-site manager. I thought I was done with these guys! His back is to me, and more importantly, to the poster, and he is sat on a chair which is unmistakably taken from the year 2 classrooms. I know this because it is purple, and he doesn’t fit in it. Why has he chosen to sit in a child’s chair when adult chairs are nearby? No Sandy! There’s no time for psychology right now!
As slowly, and quietly as possible, I creep into the room and peel the poster off the wall. Someone went to a great deal of effort to keep this poster up, using a full on overkill amount of blu-tack. Eight pieces. One for each corner, and one in the middle of each side. I can’t risk the noise it would make to pull it down in one go, so I carefully ease each individual piece from the wall using the classic pinch and roll method. Finally, the poster is mine, and I creep back into the photocopier room.
As I punch in the code, the machine lights up, and finally my mission is coming to a close. I reach for my passport from my left pocket.
“If you be my bodyguard…”
Damnit! Him again! Why won’t he stay where he’s supposed to! Where do I go? Nowhere to hide. This is it. I have no choice but to go into the corridor and confront him head on, hoping my bluntness will distract him from realising I was in the photocopy room, and the machine is turned on.
INTIMIDATING SITE MANAGER: Oh I didn’t know anyone was in today.
FEARLESS SANDY: I’m not really, Jess just asked me to come pick something up for her that she forgot on Friday. (There is no Jess)
SUSPICIOUS BUT POWERFUL SITE MANAGER: What was that?
MANLY AND STRONG SANDY: Just some resources for the SEN kids. (I don’t know what that stands for)
KUNG-FU SITE MANAGER: Jess doesn’t have any SEN kids does she? (Obviously there is a Jess, but I don’t know who she is)
CUNNING AND COOL UNDER PREASSURE SANDY: No… Honestly, on Friday she got me a birthday card and I left it here by accident. I mean, I know it’s not a big deal or anything but I didn’t want her to find it and think I was being ungrateful. I mean I only live 2 minutes down the road and I just remembered this morning.
MIGHTY BUT ULTIMATELY UNWORTHY ADVERSARY SITE MANAGER: Haha, alright then, be quick though.
I walk off in a random direction which I hope Jess’s room is in, and wait for him to leave the corridor, before running back over, sliding the passport out of my pocket and getting my copy. There’s no time for stealth any more. Get the job done and get it done quickly. I take my copy out of the machine and pick up a pink piece of paper from the side of the room and fold it into the shape of an envelope, placing my newly photocopied passport inside.
I walk down the hallway holding the “envelope” in my hand and hold it up as I walk past him, giving him a knowing grin as I exit the building.
A short play I wrote is being showcased next week by a company called London Artist Anonymous, and will be performed along with several other shorts, in front of an audience, and a panel of judges who do something intimidating.
If you want to come along, it’s on the 8th October at…
Marvelous news, I have a new website! It’s full of samples from all the scripts I’ve worked on, some information, and all the things you’ve come to expect from these sorts of things. So head over and have a look, unless you are reading this on there, in which case, hello!
In a previous article (ha, article) I chronicled my romantic history with the actress Julianne Moore. It’s a daring story of romance, intrigue, mystery and deceit, and you can read it HERE if you need to catch up.
To sum up though, I went on a date with someone who was probably Julianne Moore, who it turns out was unconsciously living out the plot of her husband’s latest film, The Rebound, by trying to seduce me. He may also have been in on the plot, I’m not sure. I don’t know exactly where he fits into this strange sequence of events, but obviously, I know a code when I see one.
Is the the player? Or is she being played?
Anyway, the film in question has just been released, and I felt it was my duty to watch the film, and review whether it was an accurate portrayal of my life.
My name is Sandy Nicholson. And this is my life, as depicted by a jealous, desperate and/or not at all jealous but actually greedy and malicious husband.
And so it begins…
Bart, the writer, has gone for an interesting stylistic choice here. Rather than making up an entirely new name for me, he has given my name to the female lead, played by Catherine Zeta Jones. From this, am I to take that parts of my life will be portrayed by both the leads in this film? Perhaps to save the writer the anguish of having to depict his wife’s true personality as she pines for me? Must investigate further as the film goes on.
Revealing the first instance of likeness, Sandy reveals herself to be a basketball fan. More importantly, she also finds her husband cheating on her on a video. It is interesting to me that in his fictionalised version of the story, he is the one who cheats, rather than his real life wife, Julianne, seducing me. Is this out of some desire to still see her as a good woman, placing the blame on himself? I wonder how I’m going to react!
That's right... he went fucking METHOD!
I have to say, Justin Bartha, the guy playing me, has clearly done his homework. He’s got the Sandy look down to a tee. We’re both the same age, we both studied sociology, and we both volunteered at a women’s institute. I’m impressed with the detail they’ve put into this, and also slightly frightened by it. However, hearing the guy playing me, tenderly whispering my name, is a little bit unsettling. Also, the best he can come up with is “You have a face that might look good on TV”. I’m cooler than that, right?
Unrelated to me, but Catherine “Sandy” Jones has just demonstrated that she’d make an excellent fact checker by showing a Venn-diagram she made. The interviewer seems incredibly impressed by this.
Black people are apparently unfamiliar with circles
Sandy “Justin Bartha” Nicholson it turns out is Jewish. That might not seem important, but this is in fact a sinister clue to these events. You see, one day I had to move out of my house, and so I had to find someone else to take my place in the flat. I woke up and realised, my parents aren’t going to let me give the flat to someone who isn’t Jewish. They’re going to want me to keep it within that mould, and how am I going to advertise only to Jewish people? Am I going to have to post it on Jewish websites? I spent the whole day fretting about this before it suddenly hit me that neither I, nor my family, were Jewish. I’d been ill for a few days, and somehow hallucinated an entire back story for my own life. So when Bart wrote this character, he must have done his research on me on that day when I thought I was Jewish. But… that was three years ago! Just how deep does this rabbit hole go?
As the film draws to it’s close. I think I have finally managed to crack the case. Be warned. What you are about to read may shock you.
Three years ago, Bart Freundlich had an idea for a script where Catherine Zeta Jones falls for a younger man. He then meets me, and thinks “Yes, this is the kind of guy Catherine Zeta Jones would fall for”. He goes away and comes up with some ideas, then comes back to me and asks if he can base the character on me. In my hallucinating fevered daze I tell him no, because my parents won’t let me work for someone who isn’t Jewish. Bart cannot let his dream slide though, so he spends the few months researching my life in secret, then writes his script. He changes my character’s name to Aram, so I won’t suspect.
Three years pass. Julianne Moore, his wife, has been unhappy in the marriage for a while now, and in fact only married Bart on the advice of her therapist, and for the sake of her children. She wants out. In a desperate attempt to discover what she had initially seen in him, Julianne turns to his latest script. The Rebound.
Upon reading it, she finds herself strangely drawn to the character of Aram. She finds herself suddenly more fond of her husband, after all, somewhere in him is this man Aram! If only he would come out from the cave!
JULIANNE: Sweetie. I just read your new script. It’s fantastic. Where did you get the idea from?
BART: Well, actually the character is based on a young man I met in London by the name of Sandy Nicholson.
BART tells her the story of his meeting with Sandy, and JULIANNE is obviously moved. Initially she is simply intrigued, but gradually grows more angry.
JULIANNE: How could you do that to Sandy? You stole his life for your work, even when he denied you permission!
BART: Oh he’ll never know! It’ll be fine!
JULIANNE: You have denied him the choice to abstain from this. You sicken me!
Bart, in his guilt, decides to change the name of Catherine Zeta Jones’ character to Sandy, so I might one day uncover the truth behind all this. Unbeknownst to him, Julianne is now determined to meet the man who inspired the character that won her heart. She finds herself in London, seeking him out.
“But wait!” You say. “There’s one thing that doesn’t make sense!”
You’re a sharp one reader. You’re right. Catherine Zeta Jones would never be attracted to me, I’m 23! Bart would have to be an idiot to base a character on me, which would try to appeal to her. Unless… something all the more cunning is afoot. Yes readers, the above story is not in fact, the whole story. Only the story that Bart wanted his wife to know.
Bart too, has been unhappy in his marriage for years now. He’s sick of her fame, and the way she goes to interviewers and discloses insulting information about him to the public. But he cannot leave her. He is shrouded in cowardice. Or perhaps something to do with a pre-nup. If only there were some way he could make her leave him!
Bart, finding himself in London, meets me somehow, and he knows, in his gut, that I am the kind of man who his wife, Julianne Moore, would fall for. And this time, he’s right! (As evidenced by the fact that she went on a date with me). So he flies home, writes the script, and makes sure to leave it somewhere she will find it. Hoping it’s romantic tale of an older woman who falls for a much younger man, will capture her heart, and inspire some misdeeds.
He set her up from the start! But he didn’t bank on my mystery solving intuition/incredibly picky second date policy brought on by ridiculously over inflated sense of self worth, not likely helped by the fact that Julianne Moore wanted me.
Another case solved. If any of you go watch the film, I hope you enjoy it more now you know it’s context. Now my only fear is, with his attempt failed. Will he try again? What unsuspecting person will he attempt to load his wife onto next? I’ll be keeping an eye on his IMDB profile.
Another gem found on the floor of the photocopy room. I think I’ll start a collection of found graphs which mean nothing.
So as you can see from this graph...
UPDATE: A theory
The X axis represents the level of despondency the participants felt when faced with the realisation that they are not magic. From this we can see that while most people surveyed were slightly disappointed, but carried on with their lives, two unlucky people were enveloped in level14 despondency.
However, the project has been criticised on a methodological level for attempting to make relatable claims about humanity based on a sample size of only 29 people. And in fact the amount of research and planning which went into this survey has been lampooned by experts for being simply the phrase “let’s make a graph.”
I work in a school. And there was this small boy at playtime whose entire 30 minute break was taken up with a single task. To hit the ground, with a stick. This boy isn’t mentally impaired or anything, he’s not the top of his class but he’s definitely not the bottom. But he sat there silently with a smile on his face, and every few minutes, just… WHACK!
I don’t know what his motivation was for hitting the ground with a stick, but I know he looked like he was having more fun than anyone else there.
We had sports day recently, and I was the one in charge of holding the ribbon, and shouting out to the winners, “Congratulations! That’s 20 points for you!” so I’ve seen them run. I’ve seen them when they’re really going for it. And now when I stand there in the playground, with my first aid box with the missing bandages, it’s so different. The race and the chase.
The boys and the girls run around after each other. And at first I was comforted by the sheer joy of just running as fast as you possibly could, for no reason. Just running in a group. But by my third week of playground duty I start to notice. They aren’t running as fast as they can. At first I thought this was because often when they do, an adult will step in and shout “slow down!” but it isn’t. I’ve never told anyone to slow down. And I can still see it.
It made me think of water fights when I was little. I fucking loved water fights, everybody did I think. I even still love the idea of a water fight, every so often I get the urge to put one together in the park outside my house. But when I think about it properly, I remember the grim realisation…
That water fights are only fun if you pretend you’re scared.
There are no rules in a water fight. Nobody wins a water fight. And getting wet doesn’t hurt. It happens once and the damage is done. But you carry on playing for hours, pretending you’re afraid of getting wet. If you’re not afraid, then where’s the fun? The kids are doing it too, they run slower than they need to. They know they can outrun that girl with the grazed knee, but they have to pretend they don’t in order to enjoy themselves.
And the teacher is doing it too. That teacher across the playground, with the laminated colour cards, doesn’t give a shit about the kid running around. And if she does, she’s definitely not angry about it. But she has to shout “slow down!” like he talked about her sister. I’ve spoken to the other teachers, and they don’t really care if you have an apple in the classroom. They just pretend to be offended by the flecks of juice on the table that you wipe up with your bare arm. And nobody seems to care about messy houses, but still everyone assumes that everyone else will care. You’re not disgusting. We’re just pretending you are.
So is romance the same? Do we only enjoy the flirting because we pretend we’re scared of it? There’s fear of loneliness, there’s fear of commitment. There’s fear of rejection, and I once knew a girl who was afraid of being considered attractive. But she still went out there. They all did. They all do.
I know people who tell me that if someone asks them out they’re no longer interested. I tell them they’re idiots, but that’s beside the point. People sometimes say it’s the challenge of it, but who are they defeating? The other person who’s probably as happy about it as they are?
I sometimes wonder, what would my classroom be like if the kids just realised that truth we hope they never figure out. That it doesn’t really matter if we tell them off. What does it do? It does nothing. If they ever figured out that the worst we can do (and should be able to do, by the way, this isn’t me advocating anything else) is to give them an arbitrary, meaningless sentence, they’d run the place.
Being told off hurts. But only if you take it at the surface and don’t think about it. And rejection hurts too, but for the same reason. It’s not like if they reject you you’ve missed out on that loving committed relationship you’ve always dreamed of, if they reject you it means it wouldn’t have worked out anyway, because they’re not interested. You’ve not lost anything, you’ve actually gained the months you would have spent discovering that.
So does rejection only hurt because we pretend it does? In order to make the endless crossing off of potential names more palatable? More fun? I don’t know. Maybe that is part of why you always wonder what would happen if you talked to that guy on the train but you never do. Maybe that’s why it’s fun to flirt with that girl you know you’re not really interested in.
But I’m not a cynic. I think there are some really wonderful people out there, I think love is real and I think that the love that actually happens, to real people, is exactly as romantic and interesting as the love we cook up in our teenage brains because there’s nothing else to think about.
And if you’re reading this thinking I’m an idiot, then you’re not alone. There are plenty of people who think I just don’t get it and that life is chaos and misery. But I’m fucking telling you, there’s a boy over in the corner there, who doesn’t seem to be pretending anything. He’s just hitting the ground with a stick, and smiling.
Breakfast Epiphanies 
