It's a Wonderful Blog!

Well Christmas came and went in much the same manner as losing ones virginity. Loads of build up and anticipation and then the actual event is over in a flash. At least no one got pregnant (which in Crawley is a minor miracle), but I feel as though I have a 6 month old child residing in my stomach, such is the ridiculous amount of food I've eaten this past week. Actually Christmas was really fun this year. I spent it with my two flatmates and their respective families, and laughed more than I have in ages. We watched 'It's a Wonderful Life' on Christmas Eve. Such a brilliant film, if you've never watched it then do so, it's the best advert for life you could watch.

Who the Blog are Blackburn?

Went up to the Emirates Stadium for my third Arsenal game of the season, against Blackburn Rovers, yesterday. It was a bitterly cold London afternoon. I got to London early on, having left at 9am fearing the worst over the trains, but it was plain sailing and I got there ridiculously early. Took a stroll around London, which on those cold, foggy winter days, manages to combine both the monumental and the mystical. What London does do better than anywhere else I've been is pubs. Warm, dark, bustling and friendly, a good London pub is an experience in itself. Found a nice one just off the Charing Cross Road and had Sausage and Mash and a couple of pints of Kronenburg. Lovely. Then headed off to Ashburton Grove.

It was a fantastic match which we won 6-2. Yes...SIX-two. Cesc Fabregas completely ran the show, he will be the best footballer in the world in a few years time. Robin van Persie scored two, the first one an absolute peach. I had a running commentary from the little old guy next to me, who generally told our players to fall over when they got touched in the opposition box. Don't believe the cliche about old people hating diving. All the way through the second half he was asking 'where's the boy? where's the boy?' The boy being young Theo Walcott. He got his answer in the 88th minute when he came on as a late substitute - still didn't cheer him up though!

Blog Party!

Just back from my former workplace's Christmas Party. A party it was, but Christmas, as usual, had very little to do with it. It is a tradition, but a more appropriate way of describing it would be 'the end of year piss-up!'. And so it was. It was also incredibly good fun. I saw alot of people for the first time in a long while. People I had been used to seeing day-in-day-out for nearly four years. It's funny how much you can miss a job you hated intensely. It was lovely to take a step back at one point in the evening, and watch everyone having fun on the dancefloor. No cares, no troubles, and no office-politics. Well none that I could detect, though if past-history is any guide, then they were bubbling-under. I was slightly apprehensive about attending beforehand, but I'm very pleased I went. It was the people that made Barclaycard in Crawley a great place to work. They're still a great bunch.

Jingle Blogs.

Christmas is in full swing. Sixteen days to go and all it's hallmarks are omnipresent. Every advert on TV has a festive angle to it. Only at Christmas could Argos use the word 'magical' in relation to itself. A small shop with an underground warehouse, magical? Year on year the decorations people put up outside their house become ever more elaborate. When done well it is truly spectacular, and surely beyond the wildest imaginings of Thomas Edison. What Energy-Crisis? Suddenly, from the first week of December, there is an abundance of chocolate and crisps and peanuts and any manner of snackfood guaranteed to reduce one's life-expectancy. It is literally impossible to end December the same weight as you began it, no matter how much you plan to. It's better just to accept it and eat as much as you want-you've got eleven months to get back down to where you were. And the older you get the more time you need.

But for me, the one signifier-over and above all else-that Christmas has arrived, is the music. A stockpile of 30-40 songs recorded over the last fifty years that get played to death for a month every year. They range from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the great to the awful, with a fair amount of mediocrity in-between. You just cannot escape, nor resist their charms. 'Fairytale of New York' by The Pogues has the sublime element covered by itself. A bitter, twisted song of love and hate with an uplifting, skyscraping chorus that screams New York as surely as does the Manhattan skyline. Wizzard's joyous 'I wish it could be Christmas every day' is, like no other song, guaranteed to make me feel seven years old. It has to be the happiest, most carefree 3 minutes of music ever committed to record. Though 'Merry Christmas Everybody' by Slade can't be far behind. And anyone who isn't moved by the childrens choir singing 'War is over, if you want it' on John and Yoko's classic has a heart of stone.

These songs fix you at a certain point in the year, transporting you back and forth through Christmas' of the past. It's hard to hear them and not reflect on the last twelve months. What you've done, where you are and where you might be next December. That's what Christmas is really all about. Time standing still. Workplaces gear up to their Christmas party, then they come down from it. People forget about being 'productive' and write cards, buy presents, stock up on alcohol and plan what they'll be watching on TV. I can't wait to eat, drink and be very, very merry. Then I'll turn my attention to 2007.

Pissed as a Blog!

Oh good God! I'm drunk! Went to the pub tonight, The Punch Bowl, with a few people I used to work with. In the years I was at Barclaycard, it became the de-facto pub of residence. We nearly had a permanent reservation on the big table near the small beer-garden at one time. Was a good night, apart from having to answer the inevitable 'what are you doing?' question with: 'erm, well, nothing at the moment. I watch alot of TV, and drink alot of tea!'. There's no way of making that sound productive. None whatsoever. And that's the key, sound productive! Had I created a convincing narrative beforehand, now that would have been so much easier. 'I'm sending out CV's left, right and centre!', 'I'm visiting agencies willy-nilly'. It's not true though. I'm still as lost as I was when I quit.

The trouble with alcohol is that it makes you feel a strange combination of forceful and vulnerable at the same time. In this context it probably wasn't the best timing to have received an email from my long-ex-girlfriend, asking how I was. Not to put too fine-a-word on it, I didn't respond in the most civilised of manners. I mean, had she not spent the last few months of our relationship making me feel like crap then maybe such an email would have been better received. Now, to be honest, I am going to wake-up tomorrow morning with the most profound regret for the email I sent to her, alongside a very dibilitating hangover. It was hardly that bad, but good-form, and the fact that I've barely spoken to her for three years, means that it's going to appear like a bolt from the blue, when I should have just ignored her message like I generally do. The recent rise in alcohol consumption coinciding with the boom in instant communication technology is unfortunate, and no doubt responsible for the break-up of many relationships. My advice would be to incapacitate all methods of communication before embarking on a drinking binge. No matter how good an idea a message conceived at 2am may seem, it almost certainly isn't!

The thin Blog between love and hate.

WHY LIFE IS GREAT: Cheesecake. Pubs. London. The Beatles. Woody Allen movies. Fish and Chips. The Simpsons. Summer. Arsenal Football Club. Pete 'n' Dud. Christmas. Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Practical Jokes. Kirsten Dunst. Spaghetti Bolognese. Jimi Hendrix. Beer. Tea. Reminiscing. Seinfeld. Friendship. Friends (TV Show). Curry. Cricket. Comedy. Love. Sex. The Bluetones. Peep Show. Jack Daniels and Coke. 24. Harry Hill. Cameron Diaz. Grosse Point Blank. George Orwell. Chinese Food. Stevie Wonder. Texas BBQ Pizza. The Magic Flute. Brass Eye. Sundays. Chilli con Carne. Laughing 'til you cry. Black Russian's. Sleeping-in. Friedrich Neitzsche. Roast Dinner. Alan Partridge. The Office. Venice. The Hoff. Jessica Alba. Red Wine. Mashed Potatoes. Jacket Potatoes. Maria Sharapova.

WHY LIFE IS E*G: Westlife. Hangovers. Chelsea Football Club. Horseracing. Bigotry. Tomato Soup. George W. Bush. Rejection. Brussel Sprouts. 2 Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. Kenny G. Chris Tarrant. Horsham. Chris De Burgh. Big Brother. Louis Walsh. Blue Peter. Lemon Meringue Pie. The Daily Mail. The Fast and the Furious (and all related sequels). Top Gear. ITV. The Flu. Unrequieted Love. Religion. Posh Spice. Mondays. Insomnia. Hollyoakes. Jealousy. Charmed. Phil Collins. Dirty Dancing. An Audience with Take That. Credit Cards. Vomiting. Celebrity-based Reality TV. Pineapple on Pizza. Jordan.

Blog to the Future.

I watched Back to the Future earlier on today. What a great film! It's near enough impossible to imagine that type of film being made nearly as well today. It also spawned those rarest of things, great sequels. I wonder what I'd do if I could travel back in time myself. I'd probably go back to myself at 10 and tell 'me' to learn the guitar, really well...and the piano. And to work harder at school, but I doubt I'd really listen to that. I'd kneecap Hitler, go watch The Beatles in Hamburg, audition for Shakespeare (a small part), chat with Socrates (and before you say anything I don't speak ancient Greek-like I don't have a time machine) and get a straight answer out of Nostradamus. Actually, how much fun to go back to being myself at middle school, with my mind as it is now, and completely mess with my teachers' heads. I could ask Mr Redgrave why he still teaches Newtonian physics when it's been totally undermined by General Relativity, or offer an existentialist critique of 'Goodnight Mr Tom'. At the very worst, I could take a Kalashnikov and an armoured-car back to ancient Rome and become Emporer.

As fun as much of this would be, the inevitable effects would be to change history, and thus the present. Now, my life is far from perfect-very far in fact. But I'd not want to swap it for anything else (I'm not sure I even convince myself of that one). I certainly don't want anything I've done to be wiped from the universe, or from my memory. I could easily have decided to take a course at university with career prospects (as interesting as Anthropology was it hasn't proved useful), but then I'd be in that career now. I hated my last job as much as anything, but I made some great friends who are important to me, and I wouldn't want to lose that. Had I taken a different course, or worked harder at school and gone to Oxford, then I wouldn't have gone to Roehampton, and all my experiences and friends there would be lost to me. I suppose I should be more grateful for what I've got really. Many of us bemoan our situation in life all too easily, me included. But when push comes to shove, how much of it would we really want to trade in?

Thus Blogged Zarathustra

I love watching God TV. It angers and amuses me in equal measure. Very few comedians are capable of conceiving anything so sublimely ridiculous. Especially good are the made-for-TV movies the channel shows. Truly awful. The acting, direction, writing and production values. They really wouldn't see the light of day if they didn't have a bizarre storyline, where the power of prayer affects a miraculous turnaround in someone's otherwise luckless life. The preachers who talk such utter rubbish as: 'God's always transmitting, it's us as the receiver who is broken'. What the E*G? If God made us, then it's his shoddy handywork with which we're not picking up his signals. All the products that these cowboys sell cost such a ridiculous amount. Books, CD's, DVD's. If they're that helpful, you'd think the almighty would help subsidise the cost. Then there are the embarrassing attempts to 'speak to the kids' with MTV style 'Christian Rock' shows. Why is it that every single Christian Rock song is about Jesus? All of them. I'm a staunch Darwinist, but a whole album about Natural Selection would just be weird.

It would be easy from the vantage-point of 21st Century England to believe that such nonsense is on the way out. We're supposed to believe that 'God', having created the universe, earth and life on this planet then spent the proceeding 4000 years meddling in mankind's affairs (well those in the Middle East anyway). From Noah to Abraham to Moses. He then sends his 'son' along and has a massive change in personality, going from 'an eye for an eye' to 'turn the other cheek', before going AWOL for the last 2000 years. Not a peep from him in so much as 2 millenia. Where did he go? Maybe he finally got round to talking to the Aborigines, or the Aztecs, or maybe the Polynesians? No chance. However, the craziest thing is, this nonsense is not yet in it's last throes. Globally it is expanding and getting everywhere, like sand. It's even trying to infiltrate science with the complete and utter nonsense that is 'Intelligent Design'.

I remember at work a few years back, someone who had called me tried to convert me, in a rather over-aggressive manner - he also prayed to God that my cold (which he called 'the devil') would clear up. It didn't, the E*Ging thing turned out to be flu. During this it occurred to me, why oxygen? Why lungs? If God created us, and our spirit/soul defines us, why did he need to bother with over 100 elements. Why did he need to make us dependent on oxygen and construct such elaborate things as lungs for us to breathe with? Totally pointless. I also recall a Jehovah's Witness who came calling once. When I asked why God created the animals, she responded that the animals were created to serve humanity. So I asked about the dinosaurs. Why on earth were they created? She thought for a second with a look of slight puzzlement on her face, before answering 'to plough the land for our arrival'. What? 65 million years before we got here? Rather than use his own infinite power to do it himself, he creates and then destroys thousands of species of dinosaur to 'plough the land'! Even the tiny ones? Even Pterodactyls? The woman's fellow 'witness' (they always hunt in packs) even burst out laughing at that one.

I'll leave the last word to Friedrich Nietzsche...to find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.

A Blog's Life.

Well, this is my very first Blog. I am a blogger. I've entered the blogosphere (a bridge too far). It's close to 3am and I'm still awake, drinking tea, watching the Discovery Channel (which has severely dumbed down over the last few years) and writing this. I've just had a myspace friends request from a band, which is a real let-down. You see 'Friend Request' and think ''Wohoo, someone wants to be MY friend'. Bollocks do 'Bobby Cool and the Okey Dokes' want to be my friend. Maybe I should turn up at a gig and ask them where my birthday present is. Might get a tambourine.

Anyway, why am I up so late? Well, I'm currently unemployed. I quit my soul-destroying job in a call-centre a few months ago. I was there for three years, and I met loads of great people. Away from the work it was great fun, but the job was horrible. I was in Customer Services, which I'm crap at! I couldn't care less about the customer. They're all soapy-arsed E*Gers. Maybe that's a bit strong, but when you talk to 100 of them a day, trying to apologise for something Barclaycard themselves have messed up, you begin to care less and less. Especially when you see how the bonuses are divided up...!

So, I'm up late because I'm unemployed. When you're unemployed, you go to bed and get up whenever. Time has much less meaning. I have no schedule to keep to. This sounds great, but is in-effect the opposite of what I'd hoped to achieve. I hoped that by leaving my job (I'm still going to the Christmas Party) I'd get some direction in my life, finally discover a career. All it has done so far is give me infinite time to watch TV, worry about money, eat fishfinger sandwiches and discover that websites claiming to offer 'Career Advice' are E*G! Unless you're interested in accountancy. I seriously need some direction in my life. If anyone has a map I'd be very grateful.