Happy New Year

According to the media, this is the time of year to make changes to your life.  The newspapers are ironically bloated with ways to lose weight and undertake other activities designed to better you in a socially improved manner.  Brave indeed would be the glossy magazine that proclaimed ‘fuck it, 2014 is the year when it’s OK to spend the entire day in your pyjamas - you can combine a lie-in with an early night so you only really have to rationalise the late morning early afternoon hump’ or, ‘want to de-clutter?  Throw out those cook books – takeaway leaflets use up so much less space’.

Other ideas revolve around walking, cycling and fresh air.  Handy if you live within walking distance of a coastal path, not so great otherwise.  Often there are walking routes which culminate in a charming country pub.  The reality is that for most of us our walking route is the shortest route to the nearest pub, where charm is balanced against convenience.  The only time the gym is mentioned in 2014 is in the money pages, where the advice is to quit your membership as studies show that when you did go last year, you spent most of your time in the hot tub.  Fatty.

Unlike a landmark birthday, which often prompts one to consider starting to do something and stopping doing other things (starting to make old man noises when rising or sitting for instance, or stopping being able to tolerate Radio 1), the New Year is a collective experience and so there is much greater support for starting juggling and stopping smoking.

Last year, I rested the blog.  Not the result of a resolution or even really an active consideration.  I could write that like a farmer I wanted to leave the area of my musings a fallow year to recover and come back more fertile than ever.  But that’s bollocks.

Anyway, unsurprisingly, the world continued to produce events that were worthy of comment.  Popes retired, former Prime Ministers and Presidents passed away and oh my suffering Christ Operation Yewtree caused the greatest amount of retrospective damage to cherished childhood memories since the release of Star Wars Episode I.

At times like this, Twitter just doesn’t cut it.  The problem with tweeting is that you can’t build up a full head of steaming rant in 140 characters including spaces and grammar.  If you read Twitter posts about events, it’s like watching a conversation between people learning a language at elementary level: ‘The Pope has resigned and it is a shock.’  ‘I am shocked that the Pope has resigned, this does not normally happen.’  ‘Has the Pope resigned because of Operation Yewtree?  LOL.’  ‘Don’t say that about the Pope, the Pope is a great man’.  ‘Now he’s not, he wears a dress.’

And so on.

So, time to blog again.  About what, I have no idea, but my New Year prediction is: food, drink, social media, social irrelevances and that firm favourite - minor issues that outrage me to the point of incoherence.

100 days of Flickr

Certainly, there’s never any shortage of things to blog about. Pick up a newspaper, turn on the telly or even go for a walk and it’s a pretty good bet that there will be something that will push my outrage levels up from their background state of about 30% of outrage well into the red (quite an achievement to keep things in the visible spectrum I think). At the moment the trees are turning and it’s a gorgeous time to walk through the park. I could do that and try by best to describe the glorious golds and ambers of the autumn and how walking on a carpet of fallen leaves makes the same sort of scrunching noise you would expect from balling up paper with a poem about autumn written on it and flinging it into the bin. The post would probably end with a rant about dog poo.

In order to counter this predictability I wanted, for the next 100 days, to write 100 words a day based on a totally random image. I’d go to Flickr, click on the ‘uploaded in the last minute’ photograph and write 100 words on it. A story inspired by it, or an observation, or maybe just a whole load of questions. Maybe even caption it, like a photo and accompanying piece in a newspaper or magazine. At some point I fully intended to be faced with having to mock somebody’s wedding photographs or make hil-hairy-arse bestiality comments about pet photographs.

So day one, I go on line and the first photograph is this one:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/39909087@N03/4061342088/

It’s from this person’s photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/39909087@N03/

and has, basically, derailed the whole thing. First of all I feel like some sort of cross between a groomer and a stalker for looking at pictures of an adolescent girl who appears to be either in some medical facility or an eccentrically furnished home. Also, writing anything about that could not possibly be as interesting as the truth. Finally, inventing things about women is a great way to start a career not as a lovable Walter Mitty style character but the sort of fellow you see eventually being banged up for breaking into Meryl Streep’s house and insisting that you have been secretly married to her for years.

If it had been a picture of a sulky looking kid standing outside Graceland, I’d be up to 2,000 words by now, so one way or another, I don’t think I’ll be pursuing the idea.

Eat up - it's good for you

A chap known only as ‘Traction Man’ has been blogging about NHS food for some time now.

http://hospitalnotes.blogspot.com/

The blog is funny and also makes one wonder about ones own morality as the posts when he’s faced with something that should be disposed of in the sluice room are more compelling than when he actually gets decent grub.

In terms of visitors and comments, he actually draws some abuse! Astonishing as I don’t think any of his posts are malicious or even complain that much about the atrocious stuff he’s served.

It makes me wonder how, after years of telly being dominated by chefs telling us how to cook decent food and how to have fun with it, institutions can still regard decent food as a luxury.

Food should be a positive and sensual experience. Eating food that somebody else has prepared for you should be pleasurable. This is probably not something we consider on a conscious level very often, partly because we don’t want a sensual connection to the pimpled troll shoving our burger across the counter at us, and partly because for some people such a thought has unpleasant connotations because many years ago a stranger putting something sensual in their mouth led to them having to leave scout camp early.

Advertisers however are acutely aware that over the last few years, ‘food porn’ (that is, making food sexy for an advert, rather than doing something vile with a cucumber) has come more and more into the mainstream, the most perfect example being those M&S food ads where a woman’s voice purrs about cake while said cake is drenched in cream.

Those M&S ads were the equivalent of one of those high-budget dirty movies where the ‘actors’ are buff, well lit and all their tattoos are spelled right – classy!

Traction man’s food photographs show something that is the equivalent of armature porn filmed in a Croydon bus shelter on a mobile camera, while a pensioner sits on adjacent seat and pretends not to notice anything; in short, horrific, disturbing and after seeing it you wonder if you can get some sort of therapy or drug that will remove the memory. Failing that, there’s always booze.

A couple of years ago I was oop north and happened to stop at a KFC for a coffee. This KFC was just outside the grounds of a hospital and I was amazed to see somebody in what looked like a hospital gown trundle in there on one of those mobility chariot things. At the time I put it down to some sort of Northern thing where the bloke pitched a fit if he didn’t get a fist full of junk food every few days and I watched with unmasked distress as a frail old chap effectively demolished a family bucket of mechanically recovered chicken.

Now I realise why. Bustin’ out of the hospital in that mobility chariot to get those bits o’ fowl must have made him feel like Steve McQueen jumping the wire in The Great Escape and actually making it to Swizerland.

Flushed with irritation

I think I can finally see the attraction of web places like myfacebook, mysite, oursite, shitesite and so on - they allow you to shriek at the telly and for the telly to notice. I’m becoming more and more selective of my viewing of television recently - one reason for this is that I’ve stopped drinking, so much, during the week, and as a consequence my ‘entertain me’ threshold has not been dropped, at a drunken angle, so I no longer find the home shopping channel amusing in a post-modern ironic way. Rather, I find a lot of stuff irritating. More precisely, I find certain personalities irritating. More precisely still, I find arseholes on the news or on reality programmes irritating, and so shout at the telly.

Entertainment is no problem, you can’t get upset about entertainment - if you find yourself screaming ‘but they didn’t have ruffs in 1642’ at a period drama, it’s time to get back on the horse tranquilizers. Finding yourself irritated by modern life is, I suppose, part of the modern human condition - at least for those of us that live in an information-saturated age, drink too much caffeine and think yoga is at best a waste of time and at worse some sort of evil eastern plot we should be all be suspicious of.

I bet those guys in the Greenpeace dingy buzzing the coast of the resort where the G7 summit was being held were irritated…but not half as irritated as they were when the security forces parked their rather bigger dingy on top of them! I laughed my arse off when I saw that, not just because it was a clear case of ‘well, really, what did you expect?’ but because the picture of two inflatables knocking hell out of on another was a little bit ‘it’s a knockout’ - if Greenpeace were serious troublemakers, they could have punctured the security forces boat with a corkscrew and been on their way, laughing.

The blogosphere is an environment where you can have a spirited debate with like minded people (or, much more fun, unlike minded people) and not worry about consequence, much. At worst you are exposed for all the world to see as an idiot holding unfashionable views who can’t hold an argument together (try starting a blog entry with ‘say what you like about Hitler…’ and see how far you get. But at least it allows you to vent and then vent at those who would close your vent.

For all that people write about irritants, there must be stuff lurking under the radar, minor irritants, background irritation. Like your local McDs, you know it’s there but you can’t be arsed to do anything about it, when you know that ten minutes with a flamethrower would make the world a better place.

In my case the minor irritant is the loos in our new office. The new office is, itself, spacious. Using the loo, you realise what they sacrificed to get all that space. Okay, the loos in our old office were not huge, they were not the sort of superloos that increasingly one is reading about migrant families living in (rather than tramps spending the nights in a stall at a local public loo on, as it were, a B&B basis, we seem to have a case developing of poor people using loos as cottages almost, much to the alarm of people wanting a pee and homosexualists wanting to cruise for sex), neither were they vast ceramic and mahogany palaces of the Victorian era, where a diet low in fibre required a loo to match - a seat comfortable enough for long sittings and a space wide enough to open up a broadsheet newspaper to read cover to cover, all concluded with a flush like the Zambizi in spate.

Our loos are rather cramped. Whatever architectural genius thought them up obviously never used them. Because of the positioning of the way the door opens and the loo-roll holder, in several of the stalls one has to basically stand in the cistern to open or close the door - hardly a boon to relaxation.

The other issue is that the stalls are in pairs rather than trios. Trios of stalls are important. With none occupied, you take the one on the left or right. One occupied, take the one on the other extreme left or right. Middle one occupied? Exit the toilet, the man in the middle stall is obviously some sort of pervert.

Research has, however, paid off. One of the stalls is easy to gain entry to and rush from. This is good because it means that I now have a favourite stall, which, I think, is something every chap needs, but a minor irritant when it is occupied. Naturally because this is real life and not a blog or television, I do not yell as a result of irritation, rather, I tut softly and plan revenge.