#oneaday, Day 123: Kiss My Ass, World Cup

So there’s some sort of football tournament soon. Those of you who know me well will be aware that I have tried and failed several times to be the slightest bit interested in football. People I tell this to normally respond with “Oh, well, there’s the World Cup coming up. Everyone enjoys that. Even people who don’t like football.”

Well I beg to differ. I don’t like football and therefore the World Cup or similar tournaments are a vision of Hell on Earth for me. It seems for weeks at a time the entire nation except me goes absolutely insane and shows levels of supposed “patriotism” that they’d never normally show, only to get all grumpy and depressed when the England team inevitably comes to a crushingly embarrassing defeat at the hands of someone that the pundits say we “should have beaten”. Well no shit. Of course we “should have” beaten them. That’s how you win the tournament.

Anyway, fuck the World Cup, and here’s why:

That horrible shouty-singy-chanting that drunken men do, inevitably in the middle of the night outside my window when I’m trying to sleep.

As a musician and someone who actually recognises good singing when he hears it, there is no sound more loathsome to me than the sound of football chanting, except possibly that horrible sound that polystyrene makes when you scrape it against something – ugh, it gives me goosebumps (in a bad way) just thinking about it. But yes. Hearing some drunken twats shouting “EN-GUH-LUHND” in a discordant manner is not musical. Nor does it make me particularly inclined to think that Enguhluhnd is a place to be especially proud of.

Not only that, but these chants are often “sung” with such aggression that I find them genuinely threatening. I guess that’s the point – to try and intimidate rival fans and the opposing team – but I don’t particularly like it when I have to walk past or near people who are doing it. It gives me a sensation remarkably akin to panic. I fear for my own safety. I’ve never had any problems with football fans (normally because I stay the hell away from them) but the point is, I don’t feel safe around shouting people as a general life rule.

The racists come out to play.

Police are going around to all pubs andclubs saying we cant wear our england tops for the footie and we havetotake our england flags down as it is offending ppl that aren’t fromengland !!now im NOT RACIST..BUT this is taking the piss!! THIS ISENGLAND & we need to make a stand!!! would u remove ur turban if itoffended me??? we need to stick together repost this as ur status andmake ur stand!!!! ENGLAND !

Seen this on Facebook recently? Leaving the appalling spelling, punctuation and grammar aside for a moment, it’s also not true. The England flag only ever comes out for football tournaments and people get very precious about it. Particularly racists. As a result, they make up bullshit like the quote above which quickly spreads itself around Facebook as one of those interminable copy-and-paste-this-as-your-status-if-you-don’t-have-a-mind-of-your-own-and-anything-interesting-to-say pieces of nonsense. It always comes back to the same few lines, too. “fuk of bak where u come frm” [sic], “wud u remove ur [turban/burka/sari] if it ofendid me” [sic] and numerous others. I’m sure you’ve seen them before.

The trouble is, the World Cup gets people into such a flap about the England flag that being racist about defending it suddenly becomes just peachy. Any excuse to blame the Muslims in particular is jumped on by the sort of people that support the BNP’s ideology. And that’s an ugly, ugly scene.

Pubs become a no-go area.

Sometimes you just want a quiet drink. Sometimes you want to chill out with friends. But at World Cup time, you try finding a pub that isn’t filled with 1) braying idiots and 2) a giant TV showing a match… even the ones that England aren’t involved with. It’s not easy. There are some out there, sure, but they’re not always easy to find. And should you find yourself stumbling into a pub which is showing the football at the time… well, I certainly find it a threatening environment. Light-hearted banter that “oooh, there’ll be riots if England lose” doesn’t help matters.

Forced joviality.

I hate hate hate it when people tell me what I should be excited about. I feel like a tool when I do any sort of “celebration” at the best of times, so there’s no way I’m going to make a twat of myself in front of the general public by trying to fit in with one of the communal bellows when one of the players does something that is apparently good. I feel like a fraud if I try (and I’ve tried) – so I’d rather not bother. I’d rather not be in that situation in the first place at all, thanks. But if I am forced to watch a football match, I’d much rather sit quietly with my drink and ignore what’s going on as much as possible, preferably with anyone who feels the same way.

Footballers.

Last of all, I really can’t get excited about something done by people I don’t have any interest in or even respect. I hate footballers. They’re overpaid prima donnas who can kick a ball around and get paid inordinately huge amounts of cash for it. And they are the most boring people on the planet. I can’t watch a footballer being interviewed. I have to switch over, because their droning voices and complete lack of personality make me want to summon a dimensional portal in my TV in order to let me slap them in the face until they wake up from their doziness.

“Oh, it’s jealousy,” you may say. Well damn right I’m jealous. I’d very much like to be paid hundreds of thousands of pounds a day for playing a game. But I’m not. So yes, I’m jealous. As are, I’m sure, many people out there who feel they make more valid contributions to society for a relative pittance.

So that’s why I hate World Cup time. I must confess, I don’t even actually know when it’s happening. This post was prompted by the fact that World Cup-themed adverts have started appearing on television, reminding me to grit my teeth and ride out the storm as I always do. And pray that if England do manage a successful bid to host the one in whatever year they’re trying to host it in, that I manage to emigrate or at least be temporarily out of the country while it’s on.

So, fuck the World Cup, and fuck football.

#oneaday, Day 122: Wencock and Wankdeville

So not satisfied with a logo which looks like Lisa Simpson doing something that she’s really rather too young to be doing, the Olympic organising committee now have some stupid mascots to go with it. Unveiled today to a combination of indifference and disbelief from various corners of the Internet, the mascots “Wenlock and Mandeville” are apparently designed to appeal to children. Because, after all, what is the Olympics but a big kids’ party?

“They connect young people with sport,” said Lord Coe, chairman of the organising committee. “And [they] tell the story of our proud Olympic and Paralympic history.”

Do they? Do they really? Let’s go and watch their “story” together. Ready? Click here. Go on, I’ll wait.

Right. So apparently our proud Olympic and Paralympic history involves some retired steelworker from Bolton nicking two pieces of discarded steel and fashioning them into a likeness of Captain Fwiffo from Star Control II before a rainbow bursts through the window, brings them to life, gives them irritating squeaky voices and a desire to mimic every photograph they see nearby. The clearly able-bodied Mandeville mimicking a wheelchair race is a particular highlight.

An actual proper author – Michael Morpurgo, to be precise – was paid to come up with that bollocks. Well, I assume he was paid. I wouldn’t churn out something that shit for nothing. Or maybe he churned out something that shit because he wasn’t being paid anything.

The point is, they’re rubbish. But as Claire Balding’s report on the BBC site says, Olympic mascots hardly have the best reputation. How many of them can you remember? I certainly can’t remember many. Thinking about it, I can’t even remember having seen them at the time the Olympics were actually on the television, leading one to wonder what on Earth they were doing during the Games. Probably face-down in a pool of their own sick at the nearest bar.

Anyway, do the Olympics even need a mascot? I always saw the Olympics as pretty serious business. Having some irritating computer-generated twat jumping around all the time surely cheapens the achievements that the world’s best athletes are busy accomplishing, doesn’t it? Oh, but it’s for the children. Because computer-generated twats that have nothing to do with sport (oh no, wait, his head’s shaped like the stadium, so that’s all right then) are exactly what we need to get children interested in sport. They can get interested in sport while they sit on the couch watching the Olym… wait a minute, there’s something wrong with that theory there, but I’m not quite sure what it is. I’m sure it’ll come to me.

Still, they’re here to stay now and we’re promised more movies in the run up to the Olympics. I’m sure they won’t get annoying at all throughout the course of the next two years. Particularly as you can follow them on Twitter, too. Should you really want to, here’s Wenlock and here’s Mandeville. Why not go and ask them a few offensive questions and see how child-friendly they manage to remain? Not that I’m condoning the abuse of a pair of silver buttplugs via the medium of Twitter of course. No no no. I simply provide you with links to their pages as a courtesy, should you wish to stay up to date with their tour of the UK in the run-up to the Olympic games.

Yes, tour. You know what that means. Some poor sods are going to have to dress up as those bloody things, and probably have to drink the official drink, eat the official food and insert the official suppositories up their rectal cavities, all in the name of publicity.

I weep for the world. Can’t a sporting competition just be about, you know, sport any more?

#oneaday, Day 121: Janet Street-Porter Is A Dickhead

“Well sure, Captain Obvious,” I hear you say. “What else is new? Gordon Ramsay swears a lot? Brian Blessed is a bit shouty? Graham Norton is gay?”

Wait, Graham Norton is gay? Seriously?

Stop it, ethereal readers who aren’t there really. I’m trying to make a point here. And my point is that, yes, Janet Street-Porter is a dickhead. Why do I say this with such authority though? Because of this.

For those of you too lazy to click on that link, or indeed those of you who are terrified of clicking on any sort of link that leads to the Daily Mail for fear of aspiring middle-class racist viruses infecting their otherwise happily multicultural computer, she wrote an article about depression under the title “Depression? It’s just the new trendy illness!”

Not a good start. As someone who has suffered depression and stress to varying degrees throughout the years (with right now being one of the “more” rather than “less” periods) I found the title by itself offensive. But I clicked on anyway, just in case she had anything enlightening to say on the subject.

The misery movement has rapidly gathered momentum and in recent months it’s become apparent that, along with the Sam Cam handbag, the latest must-have accessory is a big dose of depression.

Oh no. No no no. Fuck you. Seriously, fuck you. Depression is not a fashion accessory. Whether or not it’s been diagnosed and/or treated (mine isn’t and hasn’t, for the record) it’s serious business, and to put it in the same category as a bleeding Samantha Cameron handbag? That’s just the tip of the bell-end poking through her forehead right there. She continues:

I am not denying that clinical depression is a real mental illness, or that it can be debilitating for sufferers. But let’s take a moment to consider whether depression is common among the poor or the working class?

Oh, she doesn’t deny it’s a real, debilitating illness? How big of her. Is it common among the poor or the working class? Well, I don’t know, Janet, you’d better get the SCIENCE! out and let us know.

If you’re a black South African woman growing up in a township, or a mum in a slum favela in Rio, or a supermarket shelf-stacker in Croydon, or one of the band of low-paid female workers who go to work at 3am to clean the offices of the wealthiest and most powerful people in Britain in the City of London, you probably aren’t afflicted by depression. What you’re more likely to be suffering from is poverty, exhaustion and a deficient diet. You will have bills you can’t pay and a struggle to feed and clothe your kids.

Right. Because you can’t have depression and poverty. That would just be ridiculous! Hah! Look at the poor black people. Don’t even have enough money to have a debilitating mental illness! How pathetic they are! PATHETIC, I SAY!

The death of my own sister reduced me to rage and despair, and the sudden death recently of a close personal friend rekindled the same feelings of hopelessness.

But my life goes on, I haven’t retreated under the duvet with a bottle of pills. I refuse to accept this notion that a whole generation of women are being laid low by an unexplained epidemic of depression.

Ahh! “Life goes on!” Of course! All these people who are suffering with depression should just get up and get on with their lives! Silly me.

Of course, she does sort of have a point, albeit one expressed in the most obnoxious manner possible. The worst thing to do when suffering depression is to sit and wallow in it. That just makes it worse and worse and worse until you get to the stage where there’s seemingly no way out of it. For some people, that leads to seeking professional help. For others, an intervention by the people who love them. And tragically, for some that ends in the taking of their own life.

But different people deal with things differently. We can’t all be as strong as she apparently is, and for her to put down the efforts of those who are genuinely struggling with the condition as being somehow weak is both repulsive and wrong.

The truth is, we’ve got fatter and flabbier. Obesity is a medical condition too many of us are suffering from – but you can’t claim time off work because you’re fat. You can, however, suddenly find you can’t ‘cope’ – and stress has become, in our work-orientated society, almost a badge of honour.

If you’re stressed, it implies you are a busy person with plenty to do. Nowadays, women who’ve never been in a war zone or experienced an act of terrorism are claiming they are suffering from stress, when all they do is run a home and get the bus to work.

Stress has become so acceptable, the last government decided that the NHS would make counselling available for a whole variety of mental illnesses, from stress to depression to panic attacks and low self-esteem, totally gratis.

Oh, keep going, Janet! Have a dig at the fatties too! Go on! Especially if they’re black! And poor! Poor black fatties! I bet they’re gay too!

I’ve been stressed – reduced to midnight panic attacks with it, in fact. It’s not pleasant. And I certainly didn’t wear it as a badge of honour. I was ashamed of it. I was terrified on the one occasion I got myself signed off sick with stress. I dropped in the doctor’s note when no-one was around and then got out of the door as fast as possible so no-one could witness my shame. It was an awful experience, and I’m by no means proud of it, as Janet seems to suggest I am. You don’t have to have been in a warzone or have experienced an act of terrorism to suffer from stress. It depends on the sort of person you are. If you’re someone with self-esteem issues like me, one single hurtful comment can trigger a depressive episode.

Needless to say, the article continues in a similar vein for a considerable number of words, with a particular highlight being Janet’s “laughing out loud” at the prospect of men having low self-esteem. Her justification? Men have been in charge of everything for so long, so it’s “karmic revenge”. Well, as a man with low self-esteem, I say again, Janet, fuck you. And may the men in the white coats never come for you.

Of course, by posting this I’m probably doing exactly what was intended by the article – drawing attention to the Mail and it’s “Oooh! Controversial!” columnists. Does Janet Street-Porter really hold such objectionable opinions? I don’t know and right now I don’t care. The Mail has long had a reputation as a filthy rag barely fit to wipe the arse of the country with. Every article like this that appears in it is a little worrying, because there are people out there who will read that and believe it. And that’s a problem.

[UPDATE: The comments on that post are remarkably coherent for Mail readers, with all of the visible ones expressing concern or outrage over JSP’s article. The Mail have closed comments on the article.]

#oneaday, Day 120: Education, Edducaytion, Eddyukayshun

Schools are “failing our children”. So say various government watchdogs, quangos, hypocrites, rhinoceroses and jabberwockies. But aforementioned bodies (some of which I may have made up a little bit) don’t take into account that it’s their fault in the first place that schools are “failing our children”. Not to mention the fact that there’s also a lot of blame to lay at the feet of both the parents and the kids themselves before you start pointing the Finger of Justice™ at the hard-working teachers and other school staff who are trying very much to make the best of a bad lot.

I quit being a full-time teacher. Twice, in fact. I’m not going to make that mistake a third time. Fool me once and all that. Currently, to pay the bills, I am enjoying the life of a supply teacher. This means that I can choose whether or not to sleep in every morning or maybe be woken at the crack of dawn by a phone call saying some festering scumhole school in the very armpit of Southampton is short of a teacher for today and could I possibly go along with a chair, a whip and a net and see if I can do anything with them? There are two very simple equations to bear in mind here.

1. sb = 0(£) + 100(j) where sb is “staying in bed”, £ is money and j is joy.

2. nsbapcdtvfssvas = muchos(£) – 5000(j) where nsbapcdtvfssvas is “not staying in bed, answering phone at crack of dawn, visiting festering scumhole school in very armpit of Southampton”, £ is money and j is joy.

So while equation 1 leads to a gain in joy, it does not lead to a gain in money. Indirectly, in fact, it tends to lead to a decrease in money, as staying at home often leads to wandering out in search of coffee. However, while equation 2 leads to an increase in money it leads to a substantial hit in the joy department. And no, that’s not a euphemism for your dangly parts.

But I digress in talk of made-up maths. I was about to tell you what is so very wrong with education. Particularly primary-level education, as that’s where I’ve been spending most of my time recently. So let’s do another list, shall we? Good. I know how you like lists, particularly if they’re illustrated.

1. Overcomplicating everything.

I remember when I was at primary school. A tick meant “correct” and a cross meant “wrong”. If you were lucky, you got a brief comment, like “Good.” or “Lazy work.” depending on whether you’d done good or lazy work.

In the school I was working in today, they had a “marking key” on the wall. A squiggly line meant “look at this”. A straight line with a “sp” meant “spelling mistake”. A circled letter meant “you should have used a capital letter”. A circled empty space meant “you have missed some punctuation”. A caret meant “you’ve missed a word out”. And then and only then did the key reveal that, yes, tick means “correct” and cross (or dot, now) means “wrong”.

Seriously? These are eight- and nine-year olds we’re dealing with here. Some of them can barely read, and you expect them to decipher that babble? Not only that, but then every book is expected to have a comment in there which, at the very least, says something inane like “Well done! You have shown me you are able to use connectives to join sentences together!” or “Congratulations! You successfully subtracted two things using the written method!” or “Super! You were able to recreate the entire Nutcracker Suite through the medium of rectal flatulence!”

Which brings us nicely on to…

2. Using unnecessarily high-level language.

Remember: eight- and nine-year olds. Do they really need to know terminology like “learning objective” and “success criteria”? I am yet to meet a child who actually knows why they write down the learning objective and success criteria other than “it’s the stuff we copy at the start of the work, innit”. The sole purpose for it is so when the inspectors come to play that the teachers can point proudly at the various learning objectives and say “Look! They’ve done this!”.

Bollocks.

3. Making unnecessary work.

Oh silly me. I made a mistake. The children shouldn’t be copying the learning objective and success criteria. The teacher should have prepared them all in advance, trimmed them to size and stuck them in the children’s books for them. Bear in mind at this point that a typical class has about 30 kids in it, each with at least five books (literacy, numeracy, “topic”, science, art) and each day typically has four or five different things going on throughout the course of it. So hey, with all that to plan, what’s a little extra cutting and sticking into ninety different books?

4. Dumb-ass theories that make no sense.

There are too many of these to count. Phonics is one. Anything involving behaviour management is another. Take a quick detour and go and watch this, including the stupid interactive part. The first shot of the class and the obnoxious children in it is the most accurate depiction of what it’s actually like to be in a classroom. However, the supposed “strategies” for dealing with the class are complete bollocks. Giving the teen who thinks talking about fucking his classmate’s mother a “positive note” if he sits down and gets on with his work? Don’t make me laugh.

5. Pressure, pressure, pressure!

I was talking to someone the other day – I think it may have been Rhiarti – and talking about how the imagination of young people is stifled these days. UPDATE: Yes, it was definitely Rhiarti, right here, in fact. So yes – the imagination of young people is stifled by the fact that they’re expected to learn all these million-and-one different techniques which there’s no way in hell are going to stay in their tiny heads. I remember “writing” at primary school being all about writing stories. Now, they’re expected to write Reports, Explanation Texts, Instruction Texts, Recounts, Narratives and all manner of other things (all inevitably capitalised, too) rather than, you know, just being able to sit down and write to express themselves. Even when they do get the rare opportunity to write a story, it’s inevitably got such a long list of completely arbitrary success criteria for them to fulfil that any semblance of creativity has been battered out of them by the end of their school career. Which is sad.

All this is the tip of the iceberg. Don’t even get me started on the “three stage lesson”, on “thinking skills”, “thinking hats”, Bloom’s Taxonomy, starters, plenaries and all manner of other shit.

So, in summary, a lot needs to change. But unfortunately, all of the things above, which are quite obviously and clearly dumb and stupid, are the sorts of things which men in suits with clipboards think “get results” and “show progress”. Well hooray for progress. Somehow we managed without it for a long time. Why can’t we go back to those days, for the kids’ sake and for the sake of the poor, anxious teachers constantly on the verge of nervous breakdowns?

#oneaday, Day 119: Things I Thought Were True, But Aren’t

When you’re a kid, you pick up what you think is “knowledge” from somewhere. God knows where – probably a combination of things you thought you’d overheard your parents saying (but had inevitably misheard or misunderstood), things you’d seen in the media and things your friends had told you were absolutely, positively 100% true because their big brother said so and their big brother knows everything about the world because he has got a girlfriend and a car and goes to secondary school and you don’t.

Some of these things are myths perpetuated by society to give more meaning to particular events. The Tooth Fairy. The Easter Bunny. Santa. Jesus. (Sorry.) But others are just plain wrong, and sometimes you don’t get corrected on them until much later. And sometimes you don’t ever get corrected on them.

Take these five examples. I know they’re all nonsense, but there are at least three of them I haven’t seen compelling evidence against. So if you’d care to set my mind at rest about any of them, please feel free.

1. Car crashes always cause explosions.

Hollywood can take full responsibility for this one, since almost any movie involving a car crash inevitably ends with one or both of the cars exploding into a ball of flames while our intrepid hero manages to get out just in time. So when I was being driven to a piano lesson by my mother one night, and a car misjudging a peculiar junction bumped into the front of our car at less than 20mph (hardcore, right?) I was terribly surprised to not suddenly be engulfed in flames and smoke and be battling for my life. Pleasantly surprised, I might add – even more so by the fact that we could drive off after the accident, because the second thing I assumed about car accidents at the time was that they caused your car to immediately die. However non-severe the accident was. Scrape a lamp-post? Uh-oh, better start walking!

2. Someone throwing a cigarette out of their car window and it passing underneath your car will cause your car to explode.

I am genuinely quite paranoid about this to this day – not unreasonably I feel, as we’re taught quite early on that cars run on quite flammable materials and as such probably shouldn’t be in close contact with anything that is, you know, on fire. To this day, any litterbug smoker flinging their fag-ends out of their window hasn’t been successful in detonating my car behind them but surely it’s only a matter of time.

3. Using a mobile phone anywhere in the vicinity of a petrol station will cause the petrol station to explode.

It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that three out of the three irrational fears so far have involved explosions. I don’t have a particular explosion phobia – although like most people, it’s not something I would choose to stand next to – but it occurs to me that no-one gives you a particular education in the things which do and do not cause explosions. This is clearly a failing of the current education system and should be rectified with a new section of the National Curriculum immediately.

Oh, right, mobile phones. Well, there are signs everywhere in petrol stations telling you what you shouldn’t do because petrol is flammable and blah blah blah. And the instruction to switch off one’s mobile phone is always right under the instructions to switch off one’s engine and to not light fires or smoke. Therefore, it’s a natural assumption that the mobile phone thing also has something to do with fire. It probably doesn’t. But to tell you the truth, I don’t actually know why you’re not supposed to use your mobile phone in a petrol station. It’s the sort of thing I think of every time I see that sign and then never bother to ask anyone about.

4. Having been to the place depicted in a TV show makes the TV show approximately one thousand times better.

Okay, sometimes this is true. If you saw Jack Bauer storming a hotel you’d stayed at, that would be pretty cool. But having suffered through many, many episodes of pensioner-based “sitcom” (and I use the term loosely) Last of the Summer Wine when I was little, and then having visited Holmfirth, the Yorkshire village where it is set, I can state with some confidence that this is simply not the case. In fact, I recall being rather disappointed when I discovered that the café in the series was actually a hairdressers in reality. Oh, and the programme still wasn’t funny.

5. Noel Edmonds is watching every house in the country.

Bearded light-entertainment twat Noel Edmonds (now in charge of the utterly pointless Deal or No Deal) used to have a show on Saturday evenings called Noel’s House Party. It was a variety show of the type you don’t really get that much any more, unless there’s some sort of charity gig like Comic Relief or Children in Need going on in which case they draw the format out over the course of approximately fifteen hours. One of the segments on the show was called Gotcha, where Noel would look right at the screen and start talking, then click his fingers and suddenly on everyone’s TV screens, there was a family sitting together on their sofa looking all “OMG!” while Noel was all “LOL!” and the audience was like “ROFL!”

I can’t even remember the point of the segment. I think it involved Noel talking to the family through their TV set and possibly they won a prize or something. The only effect it had on my young self was inducing a state of almost total paranoia while this show was on. As soon as the Gotcha segment started, I started looking around to see if I could spot any hidden cameras. Leave aside the fact that we clearly hadn’t had any visitors from a TV crew to install said hidden cameras at any point. I always wondered why the family was surprised. Maybe Noel’s team broke into the family’s house in order to install the hidden cameras, which just makes them even worse, given the fact that I know I’d be utterly terrified in a break-in situation. But you never saw that in the papers, did you? “Noel’s House Party team in hospital after shotgun break-in incident”.

Fortunately, I no longer think that Noel Edmonds is watching me. Probably for the best.

Super-Important Edit!

[EDIT: “Mike” in the comments below has graciously pointed out that the segment in question was not, in fact, called Gotcha but was actually called NTV. I apologise profusely for this gross failure to check my facts properly before writing. But, to be honest, the prospect of trawling through footage of Noel Edmonds was so repulsive to me that I couldn’t face it. So consider this an official correction and apology. Thank you, Mike, you’ve done the world a service by remembering Noel’s House Party so we don’t have to.]

#oneaday, Day 118: Homecoming

It is like a ghost house. Haunted by shadows of the past, and yet at the same time pristine and new, full of possibilities, like it once was so long ago.

In through the door, into the hall. A door, usually shut, stands open, looking in one direction. Beyond the door, the darkness of the night creeps in. The other doors remain steadfastly shut, waiting for me to reveal their contents, be they painful, joyful or wrathful.

Passing through the open door, its inviting portal beckoning me within. Flashes of terrible possibilities scream through my head and I wonder if any of them are true, but none of them are. Everything is as it was, only with a layer of meaning removed. Floor once well-trodden with hard labour stands pristine and new as if nothing had ever been there. There is space, empty space, but imperceptibly, outside the gaze of reality, the memories are still there. There they sit, watching stoically, not judging, just being. But then they are not there and there is just space again.

The space we once shared together forever changed, only a discarded sleeping bag and some crumpled cushions holding memories of what once was and what eventually came to be. And the silence. The silence is deafening.

Back into the hall. Hand trembling, I open a door. A door I feared to open. Inside are nothing but spirits. What the room once was there is no trace of, not physically. But the memories are here too. Standing in the corner. Stretched under the window. Sitting in the single lonely chair. They are here, looking at me, not a trace of judgement in them. Do they have faces? I can’t see, and then they are gone again.

Back to the hall. Hand trembling, I open another door. Another door I feared to open. Inside it is like the room behind the open door, everything as it once was but with a layer of meaning stripped away to reveal – what? Is there deeper meaning left beneath?

I sit. Two crystallised memories stare back at me, in physical form this time. I wondered if they would remain strong or shatter like everything else. But they are here. It fills me with great sadness and great joy to see them, for they represent the good times. They were alive, and took in everything that once was. Do they still live? They do, but they do not understand. Part of what gave them life has gone, but the other part remains. Do they still live? They do. And they bear a missive.

The message should make me weep, or wrathful, or sicken with heartbreak, but it does not. Something about it is calming. Perhaps its words merely float on my surface to be absorbed at a later time. The meaning is there and was already there, but right now I do not feel it. I feel little but reality loosening its bonds on my mind and my soul.

I rise off the ground and float through this home, this place of memories, stripped and gutted of part of that which made it what it was, and I feel…

#oneaday Day 117: Justifiably Short Post

Hello. I’m not at home. Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know exactly why I’m not at home right now. It’s, shall we say, a difficult time, but I have been graciously put up for the night by the lovely Amy Walker and her family, who have helped distract me a bit from the unpleasantness rattling around my head. Said unpleasantness is largely due to the fact that the crystallised memories in my flat were exploding in my face and making my eyes leak almost constantly. I was so angry, then so upset, then upset and angry. It was impossible to focus. Having got away from that for a little while, though, it’s marginally easier to face everything. So thank you, Amy, for being awesome and taking me out of a situation that was sending my mind down some dark alleyways.

Someone else I need to thank for being awesome is Allie Brosh, who left a really, really lovely comment on this post. I’ll let you go read it (and my gushing, emotional response) at your leisure rather than recreating it here. I knew that today was going to be unpleasant (I underestimated quite how much, but that’s beside the point) but Allie’s heartfelt gratitude for my post (and a similarly gushing email I sent her) truly made my morning.

Difficult times come and go. Sometimes really, really difficult times come and feel like they’re going to stick around forever. That’s how I feel right now. But when the difficult times go away again, all you’re left with is awesome.

So to everyone who said something nice to me on Twitter today, to everyone who sent me a text message or an email of support today, to Amy and her family putting up with me coming over, talking crap, drinking their booze and sleeping on their sofa, to Allie Brosh for making me smile, to anyone who comments on this post – to all of you I say one thing.

Thank you. You are the things that make it worth not giving up. You are the things that give me at least a little hope for the future, even as dark as the place I’m in right now is. And once all those crystals have finished shattering, once I’m reborn as someone new on a brand new path, you are the ones who are going to still be there for me.

Keep being awesome. Good night.

PS. Sorry this post is so disjointed and stream-of-consciousey and doesn’t include any stickmen. (Yet.) But at least a few of you understand exactly how I’m feeling right now. Others of you are sympathetic, empathetic, whatever you want to call it. Whatever. You hopefully all understand that my brain’s a mess right now.

So on that note, I’m going to stop talking. Good night.

#oneaday Day 116: Dear The Internet

Dear The Internet,

I am writing to you to express my concern about several people who spend their time on you. Not in a sexual way. Actually, sometimes in a sexual way, but that’s beside the point. The fact is, there are people out there who do annoying things. I am aware that this is not your fault, nor are they doing it specifically to wind me and only me up. However, the fact is, I am wound up by them and I would like you to stop them, please.

People who comment first on things should be applauded for their tenacity. Assuming they have anything worthwhile to say. However, unfortunately, the sort of person who enjoys pointing out the fact they are the first to comment on something rarely has anything useful to say. This then has the knock-on effect of causing the following commenters to assume that the thing that has been posted is the sort of thing only enjoyed by twats and, by extension, is not something over which a reasonable, thought-provoking or entertaining discussion might take place. Please see what you can do to stop this happening.

The immediacy with which information is available on you is astounding. During the last paragraph, I was able to quickly look up the word “tenacity” to ensure it was, in fact, the correct word I was thinking of. (It was.) However, this does not mean that more lengthy prose no longer has a place in society. Whether on a message board, a blog post, an online news article or a Wikipedia article, the saying “less is more” is not always true. Consider these two sentences: “Pete is a dude.” and “Pete is an awesome dude who likes video games and music, and has also recently taken to punctuating his blog posts with MS Paint stickmen representations of himself and numerous other anonymous people.” Which of the two sentences tells you more about Pete?

As an aside, however, this does not mean you should ever allow your denizens to use text-speak in order to cram more information into less space.

Laughter is the best medicine, but it is not punctuation. We already have some perfectly good punctuation marks to use. Here is one: a colon. And a full stop. And oh look – a dash! And an exclamation mark. But what about a question mark? Or some sort of slash/”quotation marks” combination? All of these things are fine and serve to make our written communication more clear.

“LOL” is not a punctuation mark. It means “laughing out loud”, something I genuinely doubt people are actually doing every time they type “LOL”. I’ve heard a lot about privacy concerns around you, so could you make use of some of these loopholes to watch people through their webcams and squirt deodorant in their faces if they type “LOL” and they’re not actually laughing, please?

I’ve bought things in the past. I once bought a copy of Oasis’ first album Definitely Maybe the day before their second album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? came out. I didn’t know any better at the time, as I was just getting into popular music, but I wasn’t annoyed, because Definitely Maybe is a good album too. I was quite impressed that my friends at the time didn’t feel the need to take the piss out of me for this, because they too knew that Definitely Maybe was still a worthwhile purchase even though the next album was on the way.

So if I buy something these days, could you see if it’s possible to stop people saying what I’ve bought is not very good and suggesting something better instead? I happen to like the thing I bought. That’s why I chose to buy it over the thing they’re recommending. Maybe I spent a little more. I’m fine with that – I can deal with the consequences. I’m sure their thing is really good too, which is why I’m not suggesting that they buy the thing I bought instead of the thing they bought. Do you see?

Finally, Internet, I believe that one of your most exciting features that you told everyone about when you first appeared on the scene was the ability to bring the whole world closer together. Terms like “information superhighway” and “global village” were coined for us to all imagine one big happy family holding hands and enjoying things together.

I like this idea. Happy families are nice. We can enjoy things together. So would you mind doing something about the people who feel the constant need to say something sucks because the thing they think sucks does almost the same as the thing they think doesn’t suck but maybe not quite as well in their opinion? Because that just invites other people to show up and say the thing that the other person thinks sucks actually doesn’t suck because they think it doesn’t suck and the thing that the other person actually thought didn’t suck really sucks instead because the other person is a douchebag and their mother is a homosexual?

I have all the things that some people think suck and others think don’t suck, and I don’t think any of them suck. Could you spread a little bit of this love around please?

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter, Internet. I’m sure it will provide you with some helpful feedback on how to make yourself work better. You might need to fire a few people, though.

Yours sincerely,

Pete Davison

#oneaday, Day 115: Change the Script

I popped out earlier in an attempt to 1) clear my head a bit and 2) get something done. Specifically, I went out with the intentions of 1) giving my CV to a temp agency to get a crappy job so I can actually earn some money, since the supply teaching agencies are being useless right now despite repeated poking, and 2) getting something to eat.

Within the space of five minutes, three separate people in three separate establishments had proven themselves to be absolutely useless. In the world’s constant drive to be more efficient, the introduction of “scripts”, turning real people into walking, talking robots, has made even the simplest of tasks an ordeal.

First I walked into Reed, an employment agency. There was no-one at the front desk, which wasn’t an immediately good start. I looked around a bit and eventually a middle-aged woman appeared out of an office at the back.

WOMAN: Hello, can I help you?

ME: Yes, I’m looking for short-term temporary employment.

WOMAN: Oh? How temporary?

ME: Erm… temporary as in “not permanent”?

WOMAN: Tell me about you.

ME: I’m Pete. Here’s my CV. Do you need me to register with you?

WOMAN: (ignoring proffered CV) Here’s what you need to do: You need to go online to our website and register. Then apply for a job and go from there! Okay, thank you! (disappears)

ME: MAAAAAAAAAHHHHH.

Point number 1: I know you can apply online. But via their website, you have to apply for a specific job. I wanted to make myself available for short-term temp positions that I could quit at a moment’s notice in the event of something actually good coming up.

Point number 2: If you want people to apply online, why on Earth do you have a high street presence? It seems that having a publicly-accessible office is completely redundant if the staff refuse to actually do anything for you.

Next, bewildered, I wandered over to Burger King as I fancied one of their sweet chilli chicken sandwiches. I was confronted by a girl who looked about twelve.

ME: Hello. I’d like a sweet chilli chicken sandwich by itself please.

GIRL: I can’t do that.

ME: What?

GIRL: I can’t do that.

ME: No, no, I heard you. Still, what?

GIRL: I can’t do the sandwich by itself.

ME: Sure you can. You just don’t put it in the same bag as some chips and don’t pour me a drink.

GIRL: No, I mean it’s more expensive to have it by itself.

ME: What? That goes against every law of nature.

GIRL: But I can’t do it.

ME: But it gives a price for the sandwich by itself on the board up there. And it’s cheaper.

GIRL: Oh, you mean the sweet chilli Royale? I can do that.

ME: Right. Then let’s do that, shall we?

GIRL: MAAAAAAAHHHHHH.

Pro-Tip, BK: don’t have two things on your menu with almost identical names. It confuses your sales staff. And your customers.

After that, I fancied a coffee. I didn’t get a drink from BK because I specifically wanted a decent cup of coffee. So I wandered over to Costa. Inside, a lemon cupcake glared at me from within the glass case and I decided that yes, that might be a nice accompaniment too. So I wandered up to the counter, only to be confronted by another girl who looked about twelve.

ME: Hi. A medium latte and a lemon cupcake to have in, please.

GIRL: Any cakes or pastries?

ME: I just asked for a lemon cupcake.

GIRL: Oh, right. Is that to have in or to go?

ME: I also just asked for it to have in.

GIRL: Oh, right. A medium latte, right?

ME: Right.

GIRL: And a lemon muffin?

ME: No. A lemon cupcake.

GIRL: MAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH.

When I finally got my coffee, it was accompanied by a lemon muffin, not a cupcake. I didn’t complain, as muffins are more expensive than cupcakes and she only charged me for a cupcake. Take that, The System!

My point is, though, all of these incidents could have been easily avoided by the above people acting like actual human beings rather than robots. It’s unnecessary to have a script to ask people whether they want a cake with their coffee. I have never heard anyone reconsider whether they want a “cake or pastry” after being asked that question. If someone wants a cake (or pastry), they’ll generally ask for it. If they have already asked for it, you don’t really need to ask it again.

The drive to make the world more efficient by standardising everything – including the things employees say – is actually making it more inefficient. So the next time you get asked a stock question by a drone behind a counter, try responding with something they don’t expect. Like this:

COFFEE CHICK: Any cakes or pastries?

ME: Do you like badgers?

COFFEE CHICK: Uhh… is that to have in?

ME: The surreptitiously-garbled mongoose is flatulent in the willow tree.

COFFEE CHICK: Leave before I call the police.

ME: MAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH.

#oneaday, Day 114: Social Peril

My good friend Mr George Kokoris had this to say about people and social media earlier. Go read it. He has some very valid concerns, especially in light of Facebook’s increasingly cavalier attitude towards personal privacy.

I used to like Facebook. I used to like it because it wasn’t like MySpace – I remember saying this to several people. I tried MySpace and didn’t really get it. It seemed to be a friend-collecting competition with some of the most hideous web design you can possibly imagine. Facebook used to be different, though. It used to limit you to people you actually know. In fact, you used to have to say how you knew the person you were adding as a friend, much like immensely boring but practical professional networking site LinkedIn still does. As a result, it became a great way for keeping in touch with family and friends. Everyone felt confident and secure in the fact that your information was yours, and that the only people you were sharing it with were people you had specifically approved. In short, it felt like a secure means of communication. I liked it for this.

As time passed, we all know the story. Groups. Applications. Pages. A dwindling sense of security. Employers using employees photographs of drunken nights out as grounds to mistreat them. Until we reach today, when a large number of people I know are seriously considering ditching their Facebook accounts altogether in favour of alternative, more secure means of communication. Or, ironically, Twitter, one of the most open and public means of communication there is.

But at least on Twitter it never claims to be anything other than public. Your profile on Twitter consists of your avatar, your username and 140 characters of “bio”. Your conversations are public (unless you specifically choose to protect your tweets, which kind of defeats one of the main objects of the service) and anyone can chip in at any time. It’s a simple, effective means of asynchronous communication which means that people speak frankly, briefly and candidly.

This gets people in trouble. Sometimes, a lot of trouble. Paul Chambers found this out the hard way.

“Robin Hood airport is closed,” he tweeted as his trip to Ireland to meet a girl he’d been talking to on Twitter looked threatened by the UK’s complete inability to deal with a bit of snow. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”

A flippant, offhand remark. But a flippant, offhand remark that recently landed him with a thousand-pound fine and a criminal record on the grounds that his message was “grossly offensive, or of indecent, obscene, or menacing character”. A flippant, offhand remark that gave him the dubious honour of being the first person ever to be convicted of a “crime” (and I use the term loosely) in connection with remarks made on a social networking site.

I mean seriously. His comments weren’t in the best taste. But by successfully prosecuting this case, it sets a dangerous precedent that has made everyone rather more conscious of what they say. In effect, it’s stifling free speech, a concept the Internet is built upon – not to mention the fact that the life of Chambers, who was training to be an accountant, has now been devastated.

See also: Gizmodo’s behaviour with regard to the new iPhone that was left in a bar. Gray Powell, the engineer who misplaced the phone, lost his job, perhaps understandably, given that he left an immensely valuable trade secret just lying around. Gizmodo reported on the new iPhone. They ripped it open and looked inside it. Perhaps not the best thing to do when Apple were already pissed off. Then they ripped open Gray Powell’s life, using information from his entire Internet presence to make him a global laughingstock. Was it not enough that the guy fucked up and lost his job because of it? Apparently not.

George points out that there are people out there who hate success and will do anything to destroy the efforts of people with ambition. It makes me sad to think that in a world where our exchange of information should be free and open that incidents like the above can happen. Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done. The fact that we can communicate instantaneously with anyone in the world should be a wonderful, life-affirming thing that brings the global community closer together, builds bridges and draws us closer to a peaceful sci-fi utopia. But instead, shit like this just gets people paranoid and worried, until we’re going to find ourselves even more closed off and isolated than we were before the whole social media thing started. And that’s sad.

Is it just human nature to use things that should be positive for evil, deceitful purposes?