“Take that thing off, you look like a homeless pencil!” (Hello!)

Fall semester, you just got interesting. Now, it’s been a huge old while since one of these landed on your mat, and with reason: this has been one of the more difficult posts for me to write, and it’s proved difficult to know where to begin. But one thing I do want to do is warn you straight from the off: it does get a little dark and gloomy in places, because this time out I’m looking principally to write on the theme of evil. And one difficulty I’ve had is that there’s been quite a lot of it about, and often quite intense news at that, the comprehensive reportage of which has provided a quite grisly underscore to the past couple months – the phrase “that toll is expected to rise” is something I’ve been hearing on an almost daily basis. So, over the next few paragraphs I’ll pick apart and pick up on some of the many, varied and complex themes which have presented themselves before me in recent months: I will, though, as ever, be able to offer little in the way of genuine solutions. Still, I need to release, and given the world won’t stop to allow me a breather, now’s as good a time as any to fling another wrist-cracker into the purple ether. The strongest of heart may well make it to the end. Let’s do this.

So my decision to scrawl at large on the subject of this world’s most vile and evil behaviour was sparked not all that long after my last screed stumped up here, when a shocking and needless assault on two young British women brought back memories of assaults past and caused me no little end of worry. Without wishing to rake up too much a story on which the dust is now apparently largely settled, I refer to the case of Katie and Kirstie, two eighteen-year-old British ladies who were attacked with acid on the street in Zanzibar. There does appear to have been a degree of religious intolerance in the area in recent times, and for some reason participants in the dispute feel that it is necessary to use the brutal and barbaric tactic of the acid attack to make their point more permanently than is necessary – a few weeks after our girls were wounded, an elderly Catholic cleric was also abused with caustic fluids in a separate spat. But it did concern me that our young lasses would potentially face a difficult struggle, coping with the significant life changes that I am aware being burned can bring. Perhaps, given much-documented previous acid incidents, I was too worried about these girls’ future, and became too attached to the story: perhaps I should take comfort that, yes, it is possible to rebuild your life and work after being the victim of brutality, and certainly our ladies are not willing to be held back: having taken their A-levels prior to their incident, Katie and Kirstie have since recieved their results and both apparently plan to go to university: it’s unclear what impact, if any, the burn injuries suffered will have on their uni courses, but if our ladies are able to hold their heads up and walk proudly in the light, it is all to the good, and I will continue to offer support and encouragement, should any be needed, if the opportunity to reach out to these fine girls and show my admiration were to present itself. Of course, these still-in-their-teens survivors may just want to go about their normal lives and not recieve any further love and good wishes from me, and if this is the case then I’ll, albeit reluctantly, fade back into the pit and let them crack on with it. Whilst I know, from what I’ve seen of certain other cases, that bouncing back from burns can be a long and frightening road, I hope Katie and Kirstie’s recovery is steady and fair, and that they can rebuild their lives to become the good and strong ladies I know they can be, making a positive contribution to the world. They didn’t deserve to be treated like this, and let’s hope that they can rise above the anticipated trauma to enjoy as far as is practicable the lives they were meant to lead.

The Zanzibar case struck a chord perhaps because it involved British ladies being subjected to the sort of blunt, violent treatment that most right-minded Brits would consider beyond the pale, but in the past few weeks and months the international news has been at points deliriously grim; there have been far too numerous a string of cases of brutality, abuse, assault, intolerance and disaster, and very often it’s difficult to tell, from my limited vantage point sat here in the UK, where to draw the line. It’s gruelling to see the red button news pages each day flooded with hundreds upon hundreds of fresh deaths, knowing there’s nothing I could have done to prevent the circumstance and precious little I can do to resolve the situation in a healthy manner. The reasons for the disputes are many and varied, and only a tiny fraction are driven by factors which it is within our power as individuals to resolve. There have been cultural and religious difficulties in many parts of the world, including Egypt and Syria, with the former proving it’s not yet ready for democracy by ousting its first freely-elected president Morsi less than a year into his tenure amid protests and street violence, and the latter state now moving towards a more peaceful resolution, agreeing to talks on turning over its chemical weapons, after a period of considerable unrest including the much-debated gas attack which indiscriminately killed swathes of civilians. Some say the country’s Assad-helmed regime was behind the brutality whilst others deny this was the case, and as someone with little foreknowledge of the Syrian dispute I can’t say with any clarity for myself who is in the right here; all I can hope is that, after such agony and rage, the more peaceful path of international cooperation which now appears to be being pushed towards holds steady. However, I’m aware that the news moves quickly, and I won’t say too much further on Syria in case I’m accused of flaming tensions, and in case the situation evolves further in the time this soggy word-dump is sitting atop my reverse-chronology. Elsewhere, there have been several incidents in Pakistan, where a combination of bomb attacks in the streets of Peshawar and natural disaster from earthquakes elsewhere in the territory have left scores dead, children among them. While there’s little I can do about the vibration of the Earth’s tectonic plates, and no peacekeeping force can enforce action against such quakes, there is work which can be done I’m sure to protect those who would be victimised by those of differing ideology, and whilst I’m aware of the peculiar circumstances and heightened emotions of Pakistan – such a delicate situation that every time the impartial BBC covers the story it recieves complaints that its output is biased one way or the other – I’m hopeful that in time those involved will come to realise that the terrorist killing of civilian targets is not going to be considered an appropriate way to make a political point, and is something which should only be viewed with contempt from all angles.

Sadly Pakistan is just one place where intolerance and anger has led to needless death and destruction; just recently we’ve seen an apparently Islamist assault on a Nigeria school, a deadly attack which should be looked down on as a needless assault on those too young and socially undeveloped to really defend or represent themselves. And then of course there was the story which dominated news reports of recent weeks and from which not all the bodies may yet have been recovered. The violent and aggressive siege at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi certainly had me gripped and worried for the period, largely because of the scale – this is the sort of brutalism and mass terror rarely seen outside of Hollywood’s most fantastical scripting. There was a religious undercurrent to the atrocity – it seems Muslims were allowed to leave unscathed whilst those of other faiths and creeds were picked off by the invading force, and it appears the mall was specifically targeted because it attracted a wide clientele including Westerners and non-Muslims; al-Shabaab, which claims responsibility for the assault, stated that its motive was retaliation for Kenya’s role in the battle against the group in Somalia. What really upset me about Westgate-gate, though, was the scale of the killing – people of all ages and nationalities were scythed down, including children and pregnant women: from acclaimed poets to skilled journalists to ordinary working people, dozens of unsuspecting folk who had presumably set out for a job of work or day of retail therapy suddenly found themselves caught up in a nightmarish set of circumstances which left them or those around them dead or maimed through no fault of their own. Those who survived will have seen such horrors as to never be the same again: certainly, the relevant authorities should keep an eye out for PTSD among the survivors. What’s also got me looking over my shoulder is the fact that here in the UK we have large retail malls that are potentially terror targets: could such a disaster be visited upon, say, Bluewater? What if I set off for the centre to attend, say, a job interview, only for the Greenhithe supercentre to be swarmed by militant invaders who have taken advantage of the megamall’s free customer parking and easy-ish public transport links to sweep into the building and claim it in the name of whatever deity they say they’re acting in the name of? It’ll certainly give me second thoughts about setting foot in that particular near-Dartford shopping hall. In case you think I’m being illogical and facetious, I would point out that religious intolerance is sadly alive and well in the UK, as evidenced by a swathe of attacks on Britain’s mosques in recent times, ranging from firebombings through to the mailing of Islamophobic DVDs to the centres by short-tempered thickwits. Pavlo Lapshyn, a Ukranian student who had come to the UK, engaged in a campaign of hate almost immediately upon touching down in the UK: he planted a series of bombs outside mosques, and on only his fifth day on our turf fatally stabbed an elderly Muslim man on the street. In court, Lapshyn admitted that he was motivated by racial hatred, and the fact that he hadn’t had time to integrate into society and make friends and connections in Britain before starting his campaign initially helped him evade detection, as very few people knew Lapshyn well enough to report him up to the Bill. Then of course there’s the undignified scuffle between the EDL and those opposed to the party’s activities: a conflict that has seen the League become so militant and extremist that its not-entirely-popular leader chose to distance himself from the organisation. As someone who tries to be open-minded towards all faiths, it’s certainly a troubling time to be me, with vastly differing ideologies in constant conflict to be seen as the one true path. But then, as someone who follows no one faith myself, should I just roll over, grunt “they’re all wrong!” and try to go about my business as calmly as I can? Or should I take it upon myself to bring peace to the globe? It’s a difficult dog to collar.

Even leaving aside terrorism and race-hate, the world’s been a tough place to live in lately: in Chengdu, China a crazed bus passenger went on a fatal stabbing rampage – and this is one of those terrifying moments of chaos which could easily happen in Bexleyheath, as prior knife-wielding events have proved. Mumbai, meanwhile, has seen several fatal building collapses: clearly lessons from the clothing factory crash in Dhaka have not yet been rolled out to pre-existing dangerous premises: in addition, some retailers have been frustratingly slow to sign up to make life better for those in poor countries who meet our need for cheaply-available clobber (River Island have now, belatedly, signed up to the accord after pressure from internet users, meaning you can go back to shopping there, whilst others including Matalan and Peacocks are still holding out at the time of writing, perhaps fearing they’d have to pass the cost of improved worker conditions onto already-tightly-pursed customers.) There have been disputes over elections in Zimbabwe, with dictatorial leader Robert Mugabe keeping a taut grip on control of the country despite local and international concern about his power: many around the world now see that he needs to go, though unfortunately Mugabe himself is not among them. In Russia, which has taken a lead role in defusing the Syria situation, there were concerns over new law which it’s said is homophobic: Stephen Fry wrote an open letter calling for the Winter Olympics, due to be held in Sochi, to be withheld or relocated in response to the new laws, though the IOC and David Cameron refused to act, and Sochi 2014 will go ahead as planned despite the row. Putin has also been showing his pimp hand in the art world, with Russian state heavies storming an art gallery which was showing unflattering works. Is there strong enough check on his power? It appears not. There have also been continued assaults, killings and jailings of journalists around the world, in countries where there are elements – either in the state, or among powerful figures such as drug cartels – who are opposed to being exposed by the free press, and feel the need to engage in a culture of intimidation. Meanwhile, the lure of metal items in public places being accessible to thieves who steal and sell on the metals for profit had a fatal consequence: magpie-eyed thieves pinching bolts from the rails were blamed for a Mexico rail crash in which a number of those aboard the locomotive were killed. When will this selfish disregard for others’ lives and wellbeing be tackled effectively? The evidence suggests never, or at least not in this phase of my lifetime… It’s not solely outlying territories where criminality is rife, and there certainly seems to have been an upswing in selfish, antisocial UK behaviour – for instance a spate of vandalism and arson at a suite of allotments which ultimately led to the death of sixty pigeons when the shed next to their bird-loft was torched, the fire then spreading across; there have also been raids on trading premises bringing bloodshed to the pages of the retail press, including a machete attack on one store-owner, and the needless demise of a cash-and-carry owner who chased a group of robbers out of his store, only to be fatally pushed under a lorry by his assailants. There are no words to describe such violent, thuggish slime as would impart these acts, or at least none I can use publically on this blog at any rate.

Abuse of and violence towards others is very hard to avoid, and if you know where to look, which sadly I do, you can absolutely drown yourself in the horrors. America’s right to bear arms has blown up in its face twice in recent weeks, with a gun-toting student killing a teacher and wounding two classmates when he opened fire on school grounds, and just days later another teacher, a young woman, was found slain, traced by blood discovered on the premises, shortly after demanding that the pupil who now stands accused of her killing stay behind after class. Certainly a shock to the system: in my schooldays it was rare for my classmates to respond to the issue of a detention slip with acts of brutal ultraviolence. Has US education culture really descended into a game of who can fire first? The continued presence of school-based shootings, many perpeterated by disgruntled shootings, suggests despite rhetoric and bluster from all sides of the debate, too little actual action is being taken, perhaps as politicos are cowed by the powerful NRA lobby. The rest of the world’s no angel, either: In China, for instance, a six-year-old boy was binded for life when he was snatched from his area and had his eyes gouged out before being returned: after initial concerns a brutal stranger was on the loose, an aunt of the boy was later linked to the case, and she was subsequently found dead, having supposedly killed herself. Was she conducting some bizarre rite, or was she just an utter nutcase? She’s taken the truth to her grave, sadly. India, meanwhile, saw the ‘honour killing’ (a misnomer, there is no honour in killing in this way) of a man and his lady partner: they had planned to marry despite opposition from their families. Meanwhile, still in the subcontinent, it seems that despite the sentencing of several men involved in last December’s fatal gang-rape attack on a bus, some men still seem keen to use sexual violence as a form of control, with the rape of a journalist just one of the more recent incidents in a city where the guidelines for ‘acceptable behaviour’ are clearly in need of review. However, this lady was not the only woman who was targeted for speaking out: the Taliban have continued to make their mark in blood, and recently carried out the brutal killing of a woman who had earlier written about her time under their rule; having previously moved away from the area and started a new life free of the oppression, she was targeted following her return to her home town and executed by a violent and brutal regime that is founded on inequality and unfairness, and rules with a bloody fist.

Thankfully, it is possible to strike back against the Taliban: I’m cheered by the continued success and strength of the lovely Malala Yousafzai, who having survived the attentions of weapon-toting Taliban insurgents, is now resident in the UK alongside her father, and since last I wrote has opened a major new library in Birmingham, tying in with her desire to improve girls’ access to education and self-betterment, and met President Obama and family at the White House. As I’ve said before, in this particular collision of wits I’m firmly on Malala’s side, and not afraid to say so: whilst I am generally a fearful, cowardly, young-ish man who has a tendency to sit on the fence and a desire not to offend, I’m clear that the attack on Malala was an attack on good order and common decency, two values we take very highly here in the UK. Well, most of us do, but sadly not all: the courts have been dealing with a procession of hateful arseholes in recent times. As a for instance, a nasty chap by the name of Karl Clay was finally hauled before the beak after violent and sexual attacks on women and children over a period of twenty years. Being in a position of public trust doesn’t make you any less likely to be a brute, mind: Dunfermline MSP Bill Walker waged a thirty-year campaign of domestic abuse against his three wives and a then-teenage stepdaughter, battering and brutalising these ladies in a thoughtless and selfish way, something which was totally wrong and should not have been allowed to continue. Thankfully Walker has belatedly been hauled before the beak, jailed for a year. His sentence was not long enough to trigger automatic defenestration from his post, but after initially clinging to his seat he eventually stepped down amid huge public pressure. Elsewhere in politics, UKIP’s dangerously out-of-touch and deranged Godfrey Bloom followed up his earlier ‘Bongo-Bongo-land’ clanger with his appearance at the Eurosceptic party’s conference, where his comments on ‘sluts’ and slapping of C4’s Michael Crick with a brochure after being challenged over the all-white cover stars thereof led to the removal of the party whip. Perhaps his enforced withdrawal from the political sphere to spend the twilight of his days somewhere where nurses are on call 24/7 would be the next suitable move.

We’ve also seen chaos on the roads, with the hit-and-run killing of a police officer in Sutton (hometown of the PhoneShop if you’re keeping score), a Bradford crash in which a car collided with a hair studio, with a 19-year-old cancer survivor among those killed (in one of those life-eerily-imitating-Final Destination moments I hinted at last month, a suggestion that when she kicked the big C, fate felt it had to find another way to tell this lady her time was up). In similar skein, we’ve also seen the death in a road crash of a young woman whose brother was killed by a falling football goalpost in 2011. Some families, it seems, can’t shake off tragedy no matter what they do. But a story that really freaked me out was when British pedestrian Sian Green was caught up in a taxi-based incident in New York, which ultimately led to the loss of part of her leg. Our poor representative was innocently striding the sidewalk and didn’t realise it was the last time she’d ever walk on her own two feet. I’d love to send young Sian my love and support, because I know she’ll have to go through huge emotional stages to cope with the changes in her life. She’ll have to change the way she lives forever – not least having to have half her house demolished so they can put in big trenches, or whatever it is they do to make a home habitable for someone who’s been left hopping (though remember I’m still baffled about how Keeley off Big Brother put her life back together after breaking her foot in a BB task – I’ve mentioned this on the blog (and the old one) several times now and still no information has been forthcoming). Our Sian will have to adjust emotionally to the impact of looking down and seeing a scarred stump where once one of her naturally-grown limbs once sat. She’ll never even have the womanly thrill of going to the shops and enjoying the retail therapy of buying a new pair of shoes (I assume this is what women like doing; I’m led to believe teenage girls and young women spend their weekends going giddy in shoe and clothing shops in similar manner to how I and other music fans used to do back when there was HMV.) Sian – who in the lengthy time it’s taken me to burp this post out, has been released from hospital – needs the help, assistance and warmth of those around her to help her feel good again after the huge trauma she’s suffered, and I hope that when she does return to the public highway that people don’t gawp and point out her injury, and instead welcome her as though she was any normal person. I just hope there’s people out there who can provide support and advice when it’s needed. Is it OK to say that when I heard of her injury, I considered asking a Channel 4 presenter – no, not a certain Ms. Piper, but The Last Leg’s Adam Hills, born with one leg more existent than the other – for advice? And is it wrong that, when the driver involved in the NY crash was blaming a cyclist for the incident, I started to hate the likes of Wiggins and Pendleton a little bit? The theory being, cyclists don’t care who they hurt? Maybe I should stop looking for blame and let Ms. Green’s legal people eke out a resolution from those ultimately found responsible by the US justice system. Maybe if I just shut up and let her get on with this and the recovery process, her life will be better as she won’t have my screeching prolonging her pain: but Sian, if this noisy nonsense does somehow reach you, be aware there is a kind hug for you here: I want to be a caring and supportive guy, which is why circumstances like this grab my attention so much.

Elsewhere, there have been countless scenes which have proven that those who really should not be free to walk the streets have been able to enact their horrible vengeance against innocent civilians, leaving a raft of individuals whose lives have been wrecked forever by violence, crime, greed, anger and disorder. Since last I spake, there has been a torrent of despicable behaviour, which thanks to the lead-time of these leaden posts can’t be detailed individually, but the raft of shootings, stabbings and car-based disasters thrust onto my newsscreen in the past weeks have, amongst others, included the shooting of a young mother, a nursery worker, in London’s Kilburn area whilst out on a birthday celebration with friends: it appears she was ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’ and got caught up in a local feud, though her death leaves a hole in the lives of her own children and those she cared for professionally. An Australian student in the USA was gunned down by a group of teens who had apparently been toting guns just for the fun of it, with no concern as to whose life they snuffed out. We’ve seen an aspiring rapper fatally stabbed in Birmingham, ironically after his attendance at a memorial event for a teen slain in the city a year earlier: clearly the Midlands has yet to shake off its image as a crime hotbed. Then there have been the assaults, abuses and abductions, for instance the carjacking in a Stockport Tesco car park of a mother who was shopping with her young child, the abduction of a teenage girl from the family home by would-be thieves who snatched the youngster after finding little of value to sieze in the premises (the raiders also shot and killed the family’s dog after it began barking at their presence), the permanent facial scaring of a woman in Kent, dragged along the ground outside a nightclub after asking a fellow patron for a ciggy, and the brutal physical assault on a woman in her early 20s near CentrePoint in London, which is set to leave her blind in one eye. All these people and their loved ones have been brought to the brink of terror, and there’s little I can do to support those in trauma, given my limited personal involvement in the cases, except to hope that at some point in the coming years, those responsible will be given their medicine, and that those affected are able to find peace one day. I’d like to hope, for instance, that the woman attacked and blinded in our (un)fair capital is able to get the counselling and support she needs to rebuild her life after the physical and emotional trauma that has so damaged her body and spirit. As we know from Katie Piper’s case and others, the mental scars of abuse can be just as hard to heal, if not more so, than the physical wounds; thankfully as Katie, and Malala, and other strong and intelligent women have shown, it is possible to put your life back on the rails and prove to those who would harm you that you can rise above their cruelty.

Of course, fame is not in and of itself a protection from violence and abuse, as we’ve seen in the last few months with a brutal attack on The Calling frontman Alex Band (and I’ll spare you on this occasion the gag about the guy who inflicted ‘Wherever You Will Go’ on us deserving what he gets), a break-in at the home of lovely water-athlete Rebecca Adlington (thankfully her Olympic golds survived the raid) and Tony Blair’s daughter Kathryn being held at gunpoint (and whatever your views on ex-PM TB’s politics, you have to agree his family don’t deserve that.) Meanwhile, Leicester has seen multiple incidents of fire chaos. Yes, there was the hideous blaze in which a mother and her three teenage children were killed, an already hideous fire the investigation of which faces an additional level of complexity with suggestions it may be connected to the death of an unrelated man in an attack in a nearby area of the city several hours prior. However, this wasn’t the only nasty case Leicestershire’s fire and rescue had to tackle recently, with an earlier arson attack wrecking the home of a deaf couple in the city. Such intolerant hate crime should not be tolerated in this or any day and age. Sometimes, if belatedly, those who are responsible for bad behaviour are pulled up and punished, and that’s a good thing, and I welcome the recently-announced plans to build more jails in the UK (I once suggested, possibly on the old blog after a particularly harsh season of crimes, that the retail units be ripped out of Bluewater and the mall converted to prison cells: though that’s unlikely to happen, other slammer openings, closures and refits have been confirmed by MPs). However, some of the people committing these crimes had a position of trust and power that they chose to abuse, causing huge damage to the victims who thought they could trust their abusers: we’ve recently seen a doctor jailed for abusing female patients, and a police officer convicted of sexual conduct with victims of crime. The actions of these individuals harm trust in these professions, jobs which the vulnerable should feel able to rely on, and when cases like these occur it can only make people who need to seek help worry about what will happen to them if they do.

We need to do more to find out how and why people turn to crime and abuse, as we continue the fight to make people’s lives better. Thankfully, some research has been done which could help us get to the bottom of what drives some of these people to the edge. According to the BBC website, a team of criminologists writing in the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice studied 71 cases stretching from 1980 to 2012 of men who killed their families, in a bid to determine if there was any underlying reason why these guys decided to take the most ghastly step (and, in four-fifths of cases, kill themselves, or attempt to, as well). The growing tide of family breakups, driven by ever-more-empowered women feeling more able to refuse to stand by a man they once loved but now dislike, was blamed for some of the killings, with splits in the family the most commonly-cited cause of the father’s wig-out, followed by financial pressure – which can only have got worse in the last few years as the austerity has cut the pound in people’s pocket to a trickle. The influence on Britain’s multicultural populace of those cultures with less openminded attitudes towards women can be seen with ‘honour killing’ named third most common trigger-point. The study suggested men’s need to reassert power and control, having swallowed the stereotypical image of the ‘strong’ husband and father and felt unable to provide to this level, could be a key driver of the slayings, with men apparently taking a very black-and-white view that isn’t up to speed with the more dynamic role women can play in the home and society today. The report also notes the particularly manic and histrionic ways in which some of the killings were carried out, with some of the slayings being in the form of insane stunts which wouldn’t look out of place in a TV soap. The study identified four core types of ‘family annihilator’: self-righteous, a traditional ‘breadwinner’ dad who blames the mother for the breakdown of the family; anomic, where the killer links family life to economic rises and falls; disappointed, where the father believes the family members have undermined him or let him or their culture down; and paranoid, where those who fear an external threat (such as social services) kill their family in a twisted form of self-defence from this percieved invasion. Revenge, which has cropped up as a potential cue in prior studies into family-killers, did not feature heavily in the new study, t hough. The case studies suggest there is no one unequivocal cause for fathers to flick the switch, and we need to get better at spotting the signs and getting these families to safety; however, these men are among the least likely to reach out for help, as it is their increasingly insular and self-centred worldview which is keeping them from seeing and taking up the help and support which is available. It also seems family killing is becoming more commonplace, with half of the cases studied having occurred since 2000 and just six taking place in the 1980s. Perhaps we need to speed up the tackling of the deep-rooted problems which drive people to ice their relatives, in order to help slow the tide of blood. We also perhaps need to look at reshaping the school year: the month with the most family-killings reported was August, with the report suggesting long summer holidays contribute to parental worry about how they’re going to keep the family going, and push parents to the edge. (Cutting school holidays would also make it easier for childless nurks like me to go about their business, letting me have a quieter bus journey to my interviews or giving me the chance to sit in the park and eat my lunch without looking like a total pervo.) It should be pointed out that some academics have said that this study, based on secondhand reportage rather than direct analysis of the killers themselves, is a series of assumptions and inferences which may not be academically rigorous, but in my view anything which can point us towards finding a cure for the illness that leads to murder has to be welcomed.

Of course, the shock and stigma attached to mental illness remains good copy for the popular press. Asda and Tesco withdrew mental-patient themed Halloween costumes after a backlash about the stigmatisation of those with poor mental health, and the Sun recently ran a shock-and-awe frontpage splash about the number of murders committed by those with mental health issues. This did give me rise to wobble, as the report chimed with my own fears about the impact on society caused by those who are not entirely in control of their own actions, though the stark bulletpoints of the Sun article were later put into broader context by a Guardian analysis of the digits, which the Sun calculated from a University of Manchester report covering 2000 to 2010. The Sun stated that over 1200 people had been killed by individuals who had been patients in contact with mental health services in the year preceding the incident, or who had exhibited symptoms linked to mental illness – as the Guardian, and the original UoM report, pointed out, the symptoms of the latter group may not have contributed directly to the slaying and stripping them out almost halves the number of cases. The Guardian also notes the trend of decline year-on-year since 2006, suggesting that the mentally ill are in fact becoming, statistically at least, less dangerous. Indeed, mental health charities say that people with mental problems are more dangerous to themselves than to others, with 90% of those who kill themselves suffering from some form of mental distress, and when compared to the overall homicide level, the number of killings carried out by those featured in the Sun report is only a small percentage – the Guardian pointing out that, when those caught by the Sun/UoM report were stripped out, 95% of murders in the 2010-11 reporting year (the last year covered by the research) were carried out by those not covered by the Sun/UoM definition of mental health problems. A further wrinkle in the datasheet came when the Sun report was published almost simultaneously with a separate and unrelated analysis which indicated that the mentally ill were three times as likely as the population in general to be the victims of crime, perhaps seen as easy pickings by criminals who take advantage of their marks’ limited skills. As someone who is himself not entirely all there mentally, what side should I take? Should I fight the demonisation of the mentally ill and assure the nation we’re not all psychotic butchers? Certainly more needs to be done to clear the stigma, with an earlier NHS survey revealing that a one-in-ten proportion of the respondents said it would be frightening to consider that people with mental issues were living in residential areas, and a similar proportion said ‘ woman would be foolish to marry a man who has suffered from mental illness’. So while the mentally ill aren’t exactly innocent angels, nor are they the demons that scaremongering like the Sun report would have us believe. The difficulty is, though, finding where to draw the line – do I call for more tolerance of the mentally unwell, even if some misuse this freedom to carry out socially unacceptable acts, or do I call for a harder line to be taken, potentially criminalising those of us who have done nothing wrong, in order to prevent continued misery being wrought by the section of the populace who can’t control themselves appropriately? It’s a difficult call to make for someone who is keen to do the right thing by society and help fix our badly-broken nation.

Sometimes it is possible to be taken to the brink of disaster, even by those who you should be able to trust, but in time come away alive and start to rebuild your life. There have been a number of cases of survival and escape in the news in recent times, perhaps the most globally notable being the case of three women abducted north of a decade ago in the US and kept in the home of one Ariel Castro, where they were imprisoned against their will and in some cases forced to bear children. Thankfully, Castro’s watch lapsed briefly, thus the women were at last able to raise the alarm and engineer their escape, and three ladies long thought lost to the world can at last begin to regain their lives and return to some kind of normalcy, even if the media spotlight will continue to glare on them in the short term as the case continues to attract comment such as this one. The ladies won’t, sadly, see full justice, as Castro killed himself in the cells, but at least his evil cannot be meted out to any further women. Elsewhere in the States, one case which caught the media’s, and from there my, attention since my last entry was that of Hannah Anderson, a US teen who was taken hostage by a friend of the family in a harrowing attack in which Hannah’s mother and brother – and the family’s pet dog – were killed. Hannah must have been frightened beyond all belief at the heart of the chaos, and since the event – which ended with the attacker being shot down by police – the innocent girl has had to readjust and rebuild her life. Thankfully, this being the internet age, Hannah did find a way to reconnect with normalcy, turning to online friends to discuss her feelings in an impromptu, lengthy online Q&A following her release. She seemed streetwise and headstrong, declining overtures made towards her by media outlets in favour of talking over her feelings with local pals over the net, and hopefully the strong support and friendship network she has – her chat apparently stretching long into the night – will help poor Hannah get her life back together smoothly and fairly quickly, such that the vile incident which so scarred her teenage years not be allowed to intrude too far into her adult life and impede the strong and solid young woman I’m sure she can become over the coming decades. Of course, just as the internet can help lives, it can also take lives, as we saw just about the time my last post went up, with the death of British girl Hannah Smith after she’d recieved nasty comments on the web, likely on the selfsame sites (or types of site, at least) that subsequently provided kind support for US-based Hannah A. Our Hannah’s passing has led to some sites pledging to strengthen their spam-reporting techniques, which is all to the good, but I do have to admit being a bit choked up when I heard what colour young Ms. Smith’s coffin was: the funeral reports revealing that a fellow fan of purple has bitten the dust. So, having suggested last time out that, being I wasn’t in Hannah’s circle of friends, I couldn’t have done anything to help her, I guess I had a connection of sorts to this fine young lady, albeit not enough of one to intercede in her fate; and while it’s always a great shame to see a member of our lavender-hued family go to the grave, it’s particularly harsh when the deceased is barely half my age, taken far before her time. We’ve been here before, too: on the old blog I spoke about a teen taken too soon (in a road incident, if memory holds up) who was sent to her maker in a mauve casket.

It’s not just ordinary girls who get abusive comments online, of course; Lauren Mayberry, who fronts the marvellous Chvrches, recently spoke about the vile and nasty comments that some have been making about her via the band’s social media platforms. Now, whilst there is no need for me to fight Lauren’s battles for her – she’s a strong, intelligent lady who is capable of standing up and speaking out about the situation – I do feel I should plant my flag in the internet and order the hounds who have been bugging this fine young woman to hold back their attack. I could say lovely things about Lauren all day – she is a talented and beautiful woman, and Chvrches are one of my very favourite groups of recent times, having put out some absolutely magnificent material – but Ms. Mayberry insists she wants to let her music do the talking, as it were, and not be judged in a sexist or misogynistic manner. The article I saw suggests Lauren will, though, as far as is practicable, continue to marshal the group’s social media output herself, to retain a connection to her real fans. Taylor Swift, meanwhile, has indicated that she doesn’t really look at online commentary about her – neither positive nor negative – in order to remain ‘balanced’. It’s a good point to make – too much adulation, no matter how well-intentioned, can warp your view just as much as too much unneeded hate can leave you bereft. Case study? Be Here Now. After two groundbreaking LPs, Oasis were constantly being told they could do no wrong, and so they made the record that represented their worldview at that point, with the fans who had adored the band to near-slavish extent ultimately left disappointed when they finally heard what the soared-too-high Gallaghers dropped for number three. The disconnect between what had been expected and what actually emerged was vast. Maybe if the response to the group had been a bit more realistic at the time, and they’d been cheered as good rather than exalted as empirical, they would have produced a third album that continued along the lineage set by Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory. Though as I’ve said before, in hindsight Be Here Now isn’t the disaster some say it is, it’s certainly a lot better than many non-Oasis albums… But, as my frequent shuddering at the news reveals, constant exposure to a negative angle can also be very damaging, leaving you with too nasty of a taste in your mouth. Perhaps if I took a leaf from lovely Taylor’s book and took a step back from the cliff face, I’d have a more well-balanced worldview. One suite of online commentary I can say with certainty that I disapprove of completely is the wave of abusive and horrid comments left online after Nina Davuluri of Syracuse, New York became the first contestant of Indian descent to win the Miss America pageant. The tide of foul utterances left on the web in the wake of her win ranged from cheap racist jibes about convenience stores to accusations that this ‘Arab’ was supposedly ‘Miss Terrorist’. Has racial tolerance and unity – as fought for by great American heroes such as Rosa Parks – devolved so badly that it is impossible to hold an Indian-American up as a paragon of beauty without inviting boorish, blinkered comments invoking 7-11 and/or 9/11? It’s about time people realised that the colour of someone’s skin isn’t a reason to disparage someone who is trying to do something positive with her life. For instance, witness the fine writing and performing talent of Mindy Kaling. Now, whilst I’ve said in the past that I’m not particularly keen to watch the screechy, kooky sitcom of hers that E4 seems to want to force upon us in the UK, I should perhaps be more positive about the bold steps that have allowed this skilled young lady to create and anchor her own production. It’s probably not wise to watch a show I’m not overly keen on just as a form of positive discrimination, as I should really choose my telly by personal preference, but I should at least show more respect for the Project’s existence than I have done thus far. If I don’t at least encourage others to use it, the world will lose it.

There are some celebs who have found themselves on the wrong end of the internet petard of late. One that found his web persona particularly backfired was an actor from Coronation Street (it’s some Manchester-based drama serial on ITV on weekday evenings, apparently), Chris Fountain, who found that some particularly harshly-worded raps he’d posted ages back under his masked alias The Phantom came back to bite him in the ass after the popular press dredged up the vids and splashed them on the front page (well, the story, not the actual videos, it’s still technically very difficult to embed YouTube clips into a printed newspaper.) It’s been a difficult old time for the cobble-dwellers, with several members of the show’s cast facing legal action over various allegations. One of these, Michael Le Vell, will be returning to the Street now that the case against him has been thrown out of court, but with many other cases against public figures (including non-Corrie folk) still pending, it’s hard for me to be any more committal than that. Sometimes these cases do have wider repercussions for those the accused work with, though, with the remainder of Lostprophets recently announcing their split in the wake of frontman Ian’s still-to-be-tried child sexual abuse allegations, which saw the Welsh rockers’ tracks ripped from radio playlists across the country, and my MP3 player when I remembered they were on there. Of course, not all personal problems stars face are legal in nature, and again we turn to Weatherfield, or at least to someone who recently fled the Rovers: Helen Flanagan hasn’t been far from the headlines in recent weeks, posing for increasingly provocative photoshoots, playing out her on-off relationship with footie’s Scott Sinclair across the front of newspapers and magazines, and participating in low-rent reality shows on crappy Channel 5. As I’ve said in the past, growing up in Corrie (in which she starred from age nine) has meant Flanagan’s had to do a lot of her growing up in the public eye, and clearly isn’t sure who she is yet – is she an actress, a model, a presenter, all of the above, or none of the above? Even Helen herself seems not to know – and perhaps she needs someone a bit more steady in their own shoes to take her under their wing and guide her to make more sensible and reasoned decisions. Though the press won’t say that out loud, as dizzy Helen on the front helps shift papers and mags, and the press barons need this budget boost at a time readers are migrating almost as one to the internet. There are other celebs who need a guiding hand, of course – Lindsay Lohan seems to be getting back on track with a reportedly relatively warm festival-season response to her latest project, but the likes of Amanda Bynes and Miley Cyrus are still a cause for concern – I reiterate that someone needs to look Amanda in the eyes and try and dig back to the fore of her mind the witty, talented girl we used to adore back in the Nickelodeon days, and Miley’s recent online spat with Sinead O’Connor, in which the twerker belittled the Irish singer’s mental health history, can only really be described as a dick move – but sometimes concerns can come too late. Since last time, the death has been announced of actress Lisa Robin Kelly. As someone who used to watch quite a bit of now-long-axed youthy comedy/drama channel Trouble TV back around the turn of the millennium, I remember blonde Lisa well as Eric’s spicy, sassy sister Laurie in then-excellent US retro-hued sitcom That 70s Show. This was the sitcom that also piloted Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis into stardom, if you’re struggling. Anyway, in her later years LRK didn’t quite live up to the potential that her 70s Show role had initially marked her out for; the role of Laurie was recast in later years as Ms. Kelly slipped into drink and substance problems. Sadly she didn’t get the help needed to get back on the right road, and the once-sprightly blonde was taken from us, a shadow of her former self but still only in her forties, far too young an age to go in this day and age. Maybe the likes of Bynes need to look to Lisa’s sad demise as a warning call – a message to these troubled souls that, if they don’t pull their fingers up, they too could find themselves staring out of the obituaries page far too early on, and nobody wants to see that.

I want to be the sort of guy that says nice things about women, to help them find peace and happiness within themselves. I want women to feel comfortable and confident in their own skin. The difficulty with this is, outside of the blogosphere, I’m not exactly in a position where I could make such positive comments without coming off as a bit of a creeper. I’m not particularly liked or wanted – in part because of my physical deficiencies, one notable moment recently coming when a lady coming out of a shop just as I was walking down the road noticed me and said “Oh, that’s where it’s coming from!” as though she’d noticed a bad smell and had been looking for the source (the smell, should you care, is coming from inside of me, as my increasingly-troubled guts become more rotted and gangrenous by the week.) I’m not a pleasant-looking sucker – my gummy, reddish eyes and snuffly nose on one occasion getting me stopped on Bromley’s High Street by police who assumed I was drunk or drugged-up (I had to explain that the baffled, puffy look was completely normal, for me at least.) But maybe I waddle about the area on autopilot too often and don’t take a second to stop and look around me. Despite technically being south-east London, there are lovely-looking ladies dotted around the area, as a for instance a lovely pretty blonde who happened on one occasion to get on the same bus as me. Now of course I didn’t say anything to the lady in question in situ – she was trapped on a bus with me, and I didn’t want to make the journey uncomfortable for either of us, and although she was travelling alone there’s a likelihood there was a partner somewhere down the line who may have been less than enamoured with some hairy git trying to hone in on their lady. I think staying quiet was, in that circumstance, the best policy. Then there was the case of the Superdrug staffer who happened to serve me a drink when I stopped into the store one bank holiday; I found this particular lady to be very beautiful and attractive, and perhaps I should have said something. Trouble is, in the few seconds of service, it was a tough call to make. I could have just said something factual and walk away (a “You’re very pretty!”-type comment) and there’s a 50% chance it would have made her day (“Aw, that guy said something nice!”) though equally she could have taken it the wrong way, particularly had the comment been launched at her by a fella not particularly touched by the beautiful stick himself. And as a shop-drongo myself (when someone can hire me, at least), I’m aware that customers making untoward or unnecessary comments is a key bugbear of the retail employee. So the moment passed, and now I’ll never have the chance to tell this lass how I feel about her sparkling beauty. Unless I get thirsty again, or if she’s reading this ponk, which is unlikely. And of course, you have to be careful what you say to people these days, and who you say it to – at the height of the summer I was treading very carefully given that it was the school holidays and I had no desire to entangle myself, however accidentally, with someone who subsequently transpired to be unacceptably young. Ironically, once the kids were back in school the heatwave was over almost simultaneously, and as anyone who has worked as a chugger would know, people don’t respond kindly to being quizzed on the street when they’re all wrapped up and in a hurry to get indoors out of the cold and rain. But I’d certainly welcome the opportunity to cuddle up to a lovely lady and compliment her beauty. As I’ve said many times, I want to be the kind of guy that says sweet, kind things about women.

Of course, I have on occasion had impetus to be less than pleasant, and pass sometimes quite harsh judgement on certain categories of people, in particular the not-always-clever participants in reality-TV shows. My second ever post back on the old blog, back in the summer of 2006, was a coruscating bellow about the participants in that year’s Big Brother, bellowed long before I really knew anything about the participants outwith that which Channel 4 had thus far broadcast (my opinion towards Nikki Grahame, for instance, has eased considerably since the quite hard line I took back then, given that I have discovered, in the fullness of time, more in-depth detail about her off-camera mental and physical health struggles over the years, and also that she was a 6Music fan.) The third post was a repent of sorts, but that didn’t stop me ploughing into other TV participants later down the line, their presence on a screen divorcing them from reality in my mind and leading me to judge them as monsters rather than real people. Quite often, after taking time to recalibrate my opinions and come up with a more tolerable way of looking at the situation, I’ve taken a different view from that originally posted. This gives me pause to wonder whether it’s worth reposting some of the old content. Having retained a copy of the old posts from my intermittent 2006-10 blog run, I’ve found a way to whack up the old posts on here and backdate them to the original posting date (that was the reason for the sudden appearance, then disappearance, of a ‘testing stuff out’ post up on here since last time.) But the fact is that a lot of my views, thoughts and opinions, particularly in the earlier period, no longer reflect what I think, and probably shouldn’t be dredged back up, at least not without some kind of appended preamble in the guise of a disclaimer. The presence of reality TV in society over the last few years has, though, caused disruption and disturbance to my previous, perhaps overly black-and-white worldview. People, rightly or wrongly, choose to put themselves through this sort of thing, and presumably expect themselves to be judged in the public sphere.

I’ve always had a distaste for reality shows and their participants – I bullied myself into watching the second, third and fourth series of Big Brother after swallowing the media hype that suggested I’d missed some kind of TV-event-of-the-millennium by not bothering with series one, but when it all kicked off bad style in series five’s now-largely-forgotten ‘fight night’, I decided to kick such shows to the curb and decry all reality participants from thereon as slime not worth the spit from the bottom of my shoe. But am I in the wrong for judging them, seeing the monster before I see the person? Or are these folks themselves wrong to inflict themselves upon us? Do these people perhaps need help and advice, supporting them to make better choices? Or should I just let them get on with things the way they choose to, and let those who continue to suckle on the reality teat have their day in the sun? It’s a tough call to make. However, today I don’t let the shows drag me down as much as I did; I’m helped by the fact that, whilst in the past shows like Big Brother got massive multi-media coverage and felt suffocating, today the show is hidden away on Channel 5, which I hardly ever watch anyway, and only the Daily Star (again, fairly easily avoided) only really bothers with press coverage. There are still some all-conquering, media-choking reality things going, of course – I find media guff about The X Factor really hard to dodge, for instance – but I do a lot less screaming and crying about the shows than I had done in the past. In my first couple of years on Twitter I’d rant and rail about Big Brother stuff that I’d heard and seen, to the extent that some good and decent people cut me out of their lives in anger at my constant upset, but I’ve learnt more recently to just not let the BB tools burrow into my brain: they’re doing one thing, while I can just look the other way and do something else.

Of course, reality shows have started to eat themselves, with people who found fame on one show pitching up on another, with boozy Geordie Shore floozy Charlotte Crosby being scraped up into the recent Celebrity Big Brother, and going on to win. I find Charlotte’s win a little sad, as it legitimises the sort of behaviour that the Shore folks apparently get up to – drinking, fighting and sleeping around if the stuff I’ve read is accurate. I’m also led to think less of Charlotte now she’s becoming a regular darling of the lad-tops in similar vein to how Big Brother’s Imogen Thomas used to be back when she was famous. Given some of the behaviour Charlotte’s been up to isn’t what I’d reccommend to impressionable young ladies, and I want people to look up to stronger and more positive role models, there is a disconnect between her public image and the morals I’d like society to uphold. But perhaps I’m wrong to consider Charlotte’s output illegitimate – given reality shows have been part of our ecosystem for some fifteen years or so, this is the way young people live now, so do I need to start being more positive and welcoming to those who choose this as their way of life? I’ve said that I want to be more helpful and decent in assisting young people with their issues, and the likes of Ms. Crosby do have problems and concerns which need resolving: for instance, when Charlotte appeared on Celebrity Juice (which for some reason I do watch, even though it’s a Keith Lemon vehicle broadcast on that hateful citadel ITV2: my opinion towards Juice having softened when I decided to just treat it as Shooting Stars for the new age), the not-actually-Geordie starlet (she’s a Mackem, if you’re keeping tally) expressed one particular concern about her appearance – she was disparaging about the shape and structure of her breastbone (well, the actual word she used was ‘uniboob’, but you know what she meant). Should I assure Charlotte that this is perfectly normal and healthy, and doesn’t in itself make her unattractive given it’s entirely commonplace for people to have this body shape? Or should I stand aside and let someone else, someone better-placed to comment than I, give Charlotte the confidence boost her needy behaviour indicates she requires? Or should I just let Charlotte herself continue to spiral on the vine, without any assistance, until she descends to the sad, inevitable decline? Sure, her behaviour on crappy reality shows isn’t something I’d condone, but does that warrant hatred? Perhaps I should just let her be the person she wants to be and not let her get under my skin too much. Railing against her could, after all, be just as bad as not interceding at all.

Sometimes people from these shows try to better themselves and society, and perhaps it’s right to focus on these for a moment: for instance Billie Faiers from The Only Way is Essex, who has established her own fashion retail boutique, Minnies, and after success in Essex (perhaps driven by the shop featuring heavily in the ghastly ITV2 show) the firm has opened a second store in Manchester. At this time of terrible difficulty on the High Street, it’s right perhaps to celebrate those small British businesses which are developing and expanding. It’s good to see someone investing in their future, too – too many reality folk try to cling onto the limelight far too long because they don’t have anything else to go back to or something else to fall back on once the bubble dies: hopefully Billie will continue to grow and develop Minnies such that, once the lights go out on TOWIE, she has a successful trade to carry on with away from the limelight. Moving into proper business is also a sign that the participant is growing up: Big Brother bruiser Charley Uchea, if comments on t’internet are to be believed, is now working in a ‘shabby chic’ furniture shop in sodding Bromley, having previously perhaps been best known post-BB for falling out of nightclubs and/or her clothes and having moody/drunken punch-ups. I was preparing to consider Charley as having grown up, but a Challenge repeat of an 8 out of 10 Cats from five-plus years ago did threaten to stunt my repentance when it reminded the nation of her belligerent old ways. Returning to the Faiers enterprise, Minnies is a relatively small concern just now when compared to the beefier fast-fashion megachains, but from small acorns huge empires have grown, as a recent BBC documentary showed. Three-part retail history tour Robert Peston Goes Shopping saw the BBC reporter, as recently punted across the bench to replace the outgoing Stephanie Flanders as Economics Editor, document the rises and falls of the British retail entrepreneurs who shaped the way we shop. The series was an interesting and informative look at the shape of shopping today, and also included some brilliant archive clips as it traced the rises of the names we know, from Marks & Spencer to Tesco to Topshop, and also included talking-head interviews with some of the key players of the trading world, such as Dixons founder Lord Kalms and Arcadia Group (Topshop, Dorothy Perkins, Burton) head Sir Phillip Green.

The retail landscape is, of course, forever changing, and as the Peston series showed, the retail store environment is reforming itself periodically to adapt to customer needs and demands. One example of this is the changing shape and nature of stores at Bluewater. In the last couple of years the Greenhithe-area supermall has made a number of significant alterations to adapt to the evolution of customer and retailer behaviour, with the opening of the Glow entertainment venue, the redevelopment of the Wintergarden food area, the relocation of stores including WH Smith to free up a large space for US retailer Forever21, which is expanding its UK presence, the relocation of H&M into the former Zavvi premises, and the enlargement of the prior main H&M to form a store for Japanese fast-fashion giant Uniqlo. We’ve also seen a bit of musical chairs as Superdry has expanded by moving to a store vacated by rival fashion retailer Choice’s relocation. Most recently, Arcadia Group has reshuffled its deck, relocating Evans from its long-held upper-mall position to free up space for a major redevelopment, which will see a relocated and revamped Topshop/Topman store opening on the upper level, with the lower-mall store which was Topshop’s berth since the mall opened to then be reallocated to Victoria’s Secret thereafter. On the level below the new Topshop is the preexisting berth of Arcadia’s Miss Selfridge, Burton and Dorothy Perkins brands, which have also been undertaking a major refreshment and restyle of their store environments, presumably tied in with the changes above. This brings the stores up to date (to the style as seen in more recent openings such as Westfield Stratford) and is the first major replanning of Arcadia’s space since Bluewater’s opening in 1999. (In a separate move, Arcadia’s Wallis is also relocating, to the space left by Superdry’s move, to free up its prior slot for a Clarks move, and more changes are likely to follow in turn.) It’s not the first time Arcadia has reshuffled its store estate to best suit the needs of the retail environment: in Bromley, when Primark moved to the former Allders site a few years back, Topshop and Topman moved to the prior Primark space, allowing for a reshuffle of the previous provision, and we’re now nudging the 20th anniversary of a major Arcadia deck-shuffle in Bexleyheath, when Burton, Dorothy Perkins, Evans, Topshop and Topman were shuttled around, with Burton and Perkins taking their current sites; the Topshop/Topman and Evans stores have since closed, however, their post-93 locations now playing home to Clinton Cards and LoveCoffee respectively. In fact, a little touch of the ’93 reshuffle still exists, if you look closely: in the 1993 revamp, when Topshop/Topman took up their new home (for the record, previously Burton’s), the youth-skewing store took on a ‘grungey’ design, as was the style at the time, with a plaster effect on its walls which gave the impression of bare brickwork in patches. This was painted over, but not removed, in a later refit of the store, and repainted again (to a ‘cloudy sky’ format) when Clintons took up the store. OK, so I accept that’s a pretty odd thing to notice, but the fact that a little touch of 90s style is still existing, albeit fairly hidden, is a sign that despite evolution, not everything has to be obliterated.

I’ve always had a bit of an affinity to the shopping world, which today manifests itself in my admittedly failed attempts to work within the sector. Maybe my fondness for shops came from family trips to the stores in childhood – I had a much more positive image of stores back then than I do now, given that since I started doing more of the family shop myself I’ve started getting the pressure shakes in supermarkets. Or perhaps it came from the telly I used to watch, from the parsimonious Arkwright’s corner shop in Yorkshire-set sitcom Open All Hours, through to the quirky antics of the staff in the traditional-toned Grace Bros. department store of Are You Being Served? The role of shopkeeper as sitcom star continues today, with Happy Endings’ Alex running her Minnies-style fashion boutique Xela in the axed-too-soon US series, though unlike in the vintage UK series, the retail business isn’t the sole focus of the show. Open All Hours, incidentally, is coming back, we hear, with David Jason returning as a now grown-up Granville in a one-off likely to take a Christmas slot somewhere on the BBC’s network. Happy Endings, though, won’t get such a revival, I fear, though maybe in a few years time, once web-TV has made enough of an inroads to challenge the traditional linear broadcast world, fan pressure could instigate an Arrested Development-style online revival with the ‘Endings sextet reconvening to mull over the offbeat things which have happened in their lives in the intervening years. And at least the axe of Happy Endings frees up the cast to take on other roles, with Adam Pally (Max) and Damon Wayans Jr (Brad) to remain on E4 by migrating to roles in The Mindy Project (uh oh) and New Girl respectively, Damon notably returning to the role of Coach, which he played in the NG pilot episode before skipping out on the series to instead join the Happy set. And, to complete the circle, if you want to see what Minnies owner Billie Faiers and her Essex-based buddies are up to, you can see new episodes of TOWIE on ITV2 this winter, sadly not alongside that station’s own kooky US import Ben & Kate, which I much preferred to TOWIE, but which has been cancelled by its Fox network paymasters in the States. As in retail, though, the vacation of previously-held space frees up berths into which a new project can be slotted. That, at least, was the reasoning given by the BBC for slapping away That Puppet Game Show and I Love My Country after their recent run-out on Saturday nights underperformed. But then Saturday night TV’s dead to me – I don’t watch the X Factor or Strictly, so months on end of watching ancient 8 out of 10 Cats episodes looping round on 4Music and Challenge awaits me this winter unless I grow a pair. Or unless a Brit remake of Ben & Kate is punted – it’s not impossible to generate a Brit sitcom from a Yank one – The Upper Hand from Who’s The Boss?, for instance – but several high-profile failures in this endeavour (Brighton Belles, Days Like These) may have coerced programme-makers to shy away from such remakes.

Maybe my avoidance of Saturday night’s talent shows is misguided, given their scale in the media landscape, but keeping my eyes largely off the events that have taken place in X Factor and Big Brother has been healthy – whereas in previous years I would, when confronted by media tattle about these shows, become upset, confused and angry, as of this year I’ve started to let the shows rattle on in the background without letting the coverage hurt me. I know to avoid the sort of websites, TV shows and newsrags which would cover such shows extensively. But maybe my attitude could be better. I don’t want to be a bad person, but some of the things I’ve said and done in the past now with hindsight seem unnecessary, nasty or wrong. Whereas these days, with the likes of Twitter, I can repent as quickly as my deranged brain can shift gears – at one point, half my tweets were apologies for the content of the other half – sometimes I’ll write something and not realise until many years later how wrong I was. This is why I’m starting to have second thoughts about reposting some of my past content from the old blog up on here – some of the diktats espoused by me upwards of seven years back no longer tally with my current views. It could be something relatively minor, such as my now-rescinded slagging of E4 sitcom PhoneShop after viewing solely the pilot, for instance, or it could be something more sinister such as my rattling and railing against glamour girls and reality-show contestants who I really shouldn’t have let under my bonnet to the extent that I did: I continued screeching for far too long at people whose imprint on the multinational footprint was, in the grand scheme of time, far smaller than their ubiquity in the media at that moment indicated that it might have come to be. You’ll have seen over the past couple years that this blog’s been running that there’s been a softening of the stance towards, say, the Kardashians (despite their continued front-of-the-mags battles of the heart and body) and Little Mix. When the four-girl pop-group first formed, for the X Factor, I berated their existence, particularly when it emerged that their original pre-LM name had been purloined from a blameless charity. However, I’m today more able to accept these ladies into the pop spectrum, and when I recently saw a report which cited the quartet as stating their upcoming single ‘Move’ was “quirky” and “a risk”, I felt duty-bound to give it a listen at least, given my past appreciation for the quirkier and less normal quadrants of the media (Shooting Stars, Adam & Joe and so forth). And actually, as a bit of pop, it works – quite chirpy, bouncy, twirly pop that’ll put a smile on a lot of young’uns. It’s not my usual sort of music, in fairness – it’s not even the best song called ‘Move’ that I’ve heard in 2013, thanks to Mausi – but it’s not something that I feel the need to hate, either. We could yet see X Factor alumni factor in my chart-of-the-year thing for the first time. Actually, we will – Amelia Lily’s ‘Party Over’ was a phat banger earlier in the year, and I’m no longer ashamed to admit that.

On a ‘quirky’ telly tip, I should point out that, when a placeholder for a new Channel 5 subsidiary called ‘5 Later’ popped up on Freeview recently, I did hold out momentary hope that it’d be the home for quirky, unusual, offbeat, surreal and edgy programming, much in the manner of the 4Later strand that ran on Channel 4 for a bit in the late 90s/early 00s – Freeview being badly in need of something challenging and unusual. However, the prosaic likelihood is that it won’t be – current recieved intel indicates that when fully launched it’ll be a catch-up shuffle channel – 5Seven, essentially. Alas. But maybe someone will surprise us with something innovative and challenging: it’s certainly possible for people to prove themselves far better than I’d earlier been led to believe; for instance, tabloid target Katie Price proving herself to be a fairly decent person in her Celebrity Deal or No Deal appearance, and her former Sky Living protege turned X Factor contestant and Big Brother spinoff host (the trifecta!) Rylan Clark proving himself to have a sense of humour in his appearances on shows such as Celebrity Juice and Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Indeed, even some Big Brother contestants have proved that they’re not evil – Sam Evans (no, me neither), who apparently won this year’s Channel 5 series, not that I was paying attention, was born with partial hearing loss, and is to donate a portion of his BB winnings to a hearingcare charity. He’s also keeping his head screwed on – rather than clinging on to a media career, Evans is going back to his day job in Debenhams – yes, like me he’s a retail gonk. Actually, he’s more of one than I am, Debenhams having never taken me on, and having succeeded in his trade without being held back by his ear issues. And sometimes people who’ve had hardship recieve support from an unlikely source, with rappers Drake and The Game recently raising money for an Ohio woman whose boyfriend and children were killed when their mobile home burned down. I’ve slated Drake on my pages in the past, mostly for his role in the whole Chris Brown/Rihanna farrago (which culminated in a massive glass-chucking pub scrap), and on one occasion considered walking out of McDonald’s mid-meal when ‘Take Care’ was piped in over the PA, though I eventually stayed, completing my burger and enjoying a quick go on Fruit Ninja on the in-table tablet to boot. And in fairness I’m not exactly best placed to pass judgement on others given my circumstances, and those visited upon me by others. At one point since last update, I calmly (well, as calmly as I can muster) heated myself up a fish pie for dinner, only to burn the roof of my mouth on eating it; it was sore and tender for several days, but at the time I was worried that it’d be permanently scarred and painful. Have I learned nothing about burns survival over the last few years? I should at least remember that very little is truly forever and not undoable, no matter how end-of-days it feels at the time. Another blunder enacted upon me was when a balls-up in the provision of my discount travel pass (no hate mail please, I’m legally entitled to it) led to me recieving one month less discount than I was supposed to recieve. I probably shouldn’t kick up a fuss though, most rightthinking people would correctly believe I don’t deserve travel or food, given I am for large part reliant on public purse or family handouts to retrieve them unto myself. Maybe if I found reason to live and purpose in my being, and lifted myself to a level where I was above the need to claim the discount, I would feel more settled and rational. Debenhams don’t have a vacancy, as BB’s Sam is returning to his post, but someone somewhere no doubt will. I’ve just got to keep my ear to the ground, if that’s not offensive terminology in the circumstance.

And maybe I’m too quick to brand every mistake as wicked and sinful. It is possible to do something which is either well-intentioned but falls flat, or which seems like a good idea until being exposed to the cold light of day and found to be a bit of a silly idea after all. These blunders can be big and life-threatening – like the Australian miltary training exercise which sparked massive bushfires which have razed hundreds of homes, leading to upsetting images of devastated families turning up on newscasts this side of the hemisphere, or the London skyscraper originally known as the ‘Walkie Talkie’ but later referred to as the ‘fryscraper’ after the sun refracted off the building’s glass windows and became a superheated bolt, damaging nearby cars and shops (it would most likely have caused death or injury to anyone who had happened to stumble into its laserlike glare). There are also the little, perhaps less damaging but still noticeable, balls-ups by the media – Radio 1 made its own contribution to the death of the BBC with unwise sexist Twitter banter around new band London Grammar’s singer Hannah, whilst The Sun’s showbiz account made its own X Factor boo-boo by conflating a shoplifter contestant with the snatching of little Madeleine McCann, a comment rightly followed swiftly by scorn. Another dead-tree organisation recieved an online berating following the recent (well, it was recent when I started writing this) summer heatwave: the Telegraph, unwisely, ran a series of surreptitious and stalkerish paparazzi photographs of young women who happened to be sunbathing in London parks. I think we can all agree that this was a creepy invasion of privacy that, had it been carried out by an individual not acting on the instruction of a media giant, would have resulted in criminal charges. In slightly-related, publishing-photos-of-women-in-a-state-of-undress news, we’ve seen continued and sustained campaigning against men’s magazines, with supermarkets demanding a clean-up or cover-up, and the Co-op dumping the mags outright after publishers refused to blink to their demands. But it’s difficult to say if lad’s papers are genuinely evil, or just making a series of poor judgement calls driven by a feeling they’re giving the audience what they want, coupled with an avaricious demand to make sales in a cramped and declining marketplace. The infamous Zoo Danny Dyer incident of 2009 (“cut your girlfriend’s face”) was probably driven not by genuine hatred of women but by an incorrect assumption that pub-bound blokes want their media to be delivered in cockney gangster wideboy format. It’d be interesting to see what, if anything, Dyer’s upcoming onscreen wife Kellie Bright (they’re joining EastEnders shortly) thinks of her new co-star, though perhaps that’s itself been driven by my recent viewing of repeats of The Upper Hand, featuring a much younger Bright, on ITV3. And then seeing the now-adult (in age, keep your trousers on) actress – more recently in The Archers – on Pointless a few days later. If that doesn’t warp my view of the passage of time, nothing will. While we’re in the TV universe, one lad’s mag has axed its TV outpost, and the demise of Loaded TV does, along with the cutback of Tuune slots on Propeller, mean smaller bands and undiscovered music once again has little to no TV outlet:I was an avid viewer of Loaded’s music series Dial M until its abrupt cessation, for instance, and Tuune gave oxygen to artists whose promos don’t get anywhere near 4Music and Viva.

4Music’s parent, the Box TV network owned by Channel 4 and Zoo publisher Bauer, may have recently made its telecasts more freely available, but it certainly isn’t interested in launching emerging and fresh talent, favouring to run channels based on the familiar and well-trodden, as their recent scuttling of the Smash Hits and Q radio stations in favour of Kiss brand extensions indicated. Bauer have themselves, as it goes, been at the centre of a media row, after calls were made for the firm to be stripped of their broadcast licences – and prevented from buying Absolute Radio – because of their German parent company’s ownership of Der Landser, a magazine accused of glorifying the Nazi organisation. Bauer insisted that their magazine was compliant with German laws on the matter and did not celebrate war-criminal actions; the firm eventually closed the magazine down at the peak of the chaos, citing a review of their publication operations rather than directly pegging the shuttering to the complaints of Bruce Fireman and others. I wouldn’t advise Ofcom to weaken Bauer though, as they’re now the only competitor with significant scale to compete with Global Radio; without a strong Bauer in competition, Global would basically have almost total control of UK commercial radio. And anyway, Bauer can’t be all bad – they also publish the UK’s nicest magazine, Total TV Guide.

On the subject of decent people, it was pleasing to see some of the people I adore placing highly on a list of the most inspirational Britons, with Katie Piper and Stephen Fry placing second and third behind nature-show legend David Attenborough. It’s good to see that, in this age where fly-by-night nobodies can make the papers just by taking their top off and Instagramming, the British populace still has an appreciation for thoroughly decent people. Of course, Katie’s been keeping herself busy since last time I belched one of these up, filming for her still-forthcoming (they told us it’d be on in September, but that was a lie) new series ‘Undo Me’, though I’m slightly unsettled by the suggestion that it’ll have a conflict element, pitting the surgery-addled head-to-head against the untainted but considering it, in the manner of ‘Supersize v Superskinny’ or ‘Beauty and the Beast’. I’ve never walked out of the room during one of Katie’s shows before, and I don’t want to start now. Katie’s also announced that she’s expecting to deliver the next generation of intelligence and beauty – after long wishing to become a mother, Katie has announced that she’s pregnant by her long-term partner. It’s brilliant to see our sainted Katie finding continued love and happiness in her life, continuing to shape her story and take control of her life (it’s probably the baby news that’s held up ‘Undo Me’, to be fair) and I’m sure she will be a loving, caring and intelligent mother. Certainly she’ll be a breath of fresh air compared to some of the grunting, selfish, drunk and drugged-up scum that are bringing up screeching, arrogant brat-kids – or maybe that’s just my prejudice having been frequently overexposed to the underclass in recent years – I spend a lot of time in grimy public places, forced to rub shoulders with the sort of people who use ‘bear’ as a superlative rather than an ursine nominative, and that can become tiring. I need, though, to remember there are good people out there – for instance, the fella on ‘Surprise Surprise’ who gave up much of his life to look after his girlfriend and fundraise for her medical care when she was left in a wheelchair after breaking her back in a fall from the wall she was sitting on after a party. I’d like to think wouldn’t abandon my theoretical future partner if she recieved lifechanging news, and I’d like to think any such girlfriend I had would afford me the same respect, in the unlikely event that the stagnated rut that comprises my life ever throws up a curveball of similar hue to that faced by Holly’s featured folks. Of course, particularly post-Paralympics and Piper, I’d have no problem dating a lady with disabilities or disfigurements, but regardless of her own issue she’d have a problem with me, not least with my lack of finance, my household issues, my general looming unattractiveness and gunkiness, and of course that grotty bowel smell, which I really should have looked into given people are driven to comment loudly on it in the street. Maybe one day I’ll have the confidence to compliment one of the beautiful ladies I see about town on her radiance, and whilst she may well fling it back at my face, it’s at least worth a try; it could help improve her day, after all, to recieve a compliment rather than a complaint.

I’ve long determined that I’ll never be someone inspirational and successful to Attenborough/Piper/Fry levels, and I’m very aware that my moment in the sun has passed – I’m past my best, and any attempt to be, say, a radio DJ will be met with a brick wall – but perhaps I’ll be more engaging in future years. I could easily at least try to see some light amid the sooty sludge that comprises much of my general day, and look to see beyond the usual media rubbish for to find something worth talking about. I have a lot of untapped potential – I could, in theory, be more fun and interesting. Maybe one day a more lighthearted tone will be possible here – a lot of my favourite blogs and sites over the years – TV Cream, Dustbury, BrokenTV for instance – have been those with a defter, lighter, more pleasant batter than I’ve thus far been able to muster. I’ve got a fairly lighthearted piece in the pipe for posting in the near future – regular readers, if I have any, may be able to predict what it comprises – and maybe once my general spirits have lifted sufficiently, or my pressure/peace balance has been improved, I’ll start writing for pleasure again: I’m considering starting up a second WordPress, to feature pop-culture commentary on the lines of the stuff I scrawled for the previous version of OffTheTelly back in 2009, but given it currently takes me months to blart out a blog post – at one point the old MySpace page was getting shorter, written-on-the-day, almost-daily posts – it’ll take me a wee while to get up a head of steam to whisk out scripts for that at a reasonable lick. But maybe if I enjoyed what I was pasting onto t’internet, others would enjoy reading it, certainly more so than you’ve enjoyed putting yourself through the above paragraphs at any rate. But to start writing that, I’ll first have to finish writing this. It’s been quite a tough one to write – hence the long wait to get it out here – and if you made it through, I thank you. You may now return to what you’d normally be doing at this juncture. Stop – Nikki didn’t say.

“And that’s enough out of you, you human platter!” (Goodbye!)

“I’m gonna be a sexy tall dwarf!” (Hello!)

Welcome, or similar. You’ll know by now that these big purple buggers take me a hella long time to write – you’ll see shortly what I’ve been doing in recent weeks instead of this – and in the intervening days the news has kept steps ahead of me, necessitating many rewrites and resulting in what’s sure to be an absolute wristbreaker of a piece both to write and to read. But I have to get this lot out of me before I collapse, so take a week (or less) off, put some calming music on and ready yourself to watch me weep. And, occasionally, cheer. Spin it, let’s begin it…

So, I was all but ready to sit my Brit-ass down and start writing this digital rubbish when the Beeb imploded again, and once again our once-proud national broadcaster is on the back foot, which is never pleasant to see. It does seem that in recent years, spurred perhaps by the sizeable and swift changes the media has been through in modern times, that the BBC is never more than a few days away from collapse, as the tall tower of broadcasting fingers it holds up sway in the fast-swirling media wind in a quite ungainly manner. And when you’ve got as many enemies as Auntie has, the vultures are never more than a short-hop bus ride away. Pity George Entwistle – he had barely set foot in the Director General’s new office when white-hot scandal and serious abuse allegations, many dating back decades, began to cause ructions, and amid the ensuing row over the governance of the BBC, tainted George was shown the door less than two months after taking over from Mark Thompson. It’s always painful for me to see the Beeb convulsed in the death throes, and there is a real fear that too many more of these nasty scandals could kill the broadcaster altogether. The commercial media is rubbing its hands with glee, ready for the payday which will come when those viewers who currently choose the publically-funded BBC as their news and/or entertainment provider are forced into their grabbing hands by the demise of the BBC empire, and sadly every day is now one day closer to the edge. Farewell, Only Connect. Farewell, 6 Music. Farewell, local news. Farewell, Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Farewell, Horrible Histories. It has to be said, if the Beeb had imposed a tighter grip on the activities of its stars back in the 60s and 70s, when celebrity culture was very different to how it is today, then maybe the years of abuse now clouding Broadcasting House would never have happened; however, the landmines left in the BBC carpet by past activities have now begun to blow up and kill today’s staff. I’ve somehow managed to outlive Ceefax – the blocky but brilliant text service has bowed out alongside digital switchover in Northern Ireland, completing the UK’s move to all-digital TV – but now there’s a real danger I’ll live to see the BBC itself die. The Sun was particularly nasty in its glee over Entwistle falling on his freshly-unwrapped sword (‘Bye Bye Chump’, indeed – I could have whipped my schlong out in the middle of the shop and pissed all over the papers on display, were it not that to do so would get me an unwanted reputation). Maybe this is revenge for Leveson – earlier in the year the excesses of the commercial tabloid media were laid bare and the largely-blameless BBC was able to report and digest quite comprehensively the near-implosion of the press barons (it was pie in the face, both literal and metaphorical, for Murdoch). Now though, the nasty redtops are back in the driving seat, extracting their pound of flesh, and the already cowed and wounded Beeb is hanging on by a thread. The Beeb is still making silly, paranoid decisions even now, though – the daft decision to declare Robbie Williams too old for Radio 1, as the station is now slavishly chasing the teen One Direction/Nicki Minaj audience, was proved foolish when the Grimshaw-scorned single Candy bulleted to number one. I guess that the station believes anyone who’s old enough to remember when Robbie was in Take That first time round is too old to be listening to the station. Again, listeners are just going to roll their eyes and retune to commercial radio. Radio 1’s current paranoia will only be manna to the everpresent Heart machine – soon to expand to ruin the areas currently served by Real Radio – and turn ever more listeners off the BBC. You’ve got to wonder if anyone other than me would mourn if the Beeb actually was killed off. 2012 was supposed to be the Beeb’s big year, with events such as the Olympics, but the panning of the Jubilee coverage was perhaps a portent of how the year would actually go for Britain’s (former?) public media service.

It has been a month of falling heroes, though: it seems there’s nobody left we can trust anymore. The BBC-wrecking scandal kicked off when, following his death, the once-feted presenter and DJ – and the man who invented the concept of two turntables and a microphone – Jimmy Savile was exposed as apparently being a serial fiddler of the kiddies. Much has been made of the fact that Newsnight (1980-2012?) canned a planned report in the wake of his demise just as the BBC’s entertainment staff were preparing to pay tribute with a string of specials. Shamefully, I watched some of the Savile celebrations – at the time, we the audience were unaware of his hidden tendencies as few legitimate official complaints had been made at the time the attacks took place; seemingly believing they wouldn’t be heard when it was their word against a national hero, Jim’s victims kept quiet and waited; only after he’d passed and couldn’t defend or explain himself did the apparent extent of his proclivities become public knowledge. In a further ghastly twist, it’s been alleged that some of the fondly-remembered telly that Savile helmed – such as chart-hits series Top of the Pops and dream-come-true hit Jim’ll Fix It – were deliberately concieved by Jim as a way of getting youngsters into the BBC and into his web of trap. This probably doesn’t bode well for the survival of the traditional Christmas TOTP, which has until now continued as a yearly-roundup format despite the demise of the weekly show in 2006. With Fearne Cotton pregnant and Reggie Yates leaving Radio 1 at the end of the year, there wouldn’t be presenters for it, anyway. A shame – during my many years as a music fan the festive ‘Pops was a must-see. Guess I’ll just have to make do with Wallace and Gromit from now on. And it’s knackered BBC Four’s 70s Pops reruns too… I should also admit I did enjoy a dose of Fix It when I was a lad (I didn’t realise I was his type…) because it was lovely to see the smiles as people’s long-held ambitions and dreams were being made real. Of course I regret watching it now, but back then I believed, like almost everyone else, that JS was just the wacky bloke in the tracksuit on the box of a weekend.  But why, when Savile was at the Beeb for so many years, was the whistle left unblown? Seemingly the Beeb didn’t want to crap on their own doorstep – they missed many chances to expose Savile both during his life (then Radio 1 controller Derek Chinnery asking Jimmy, then a DJ at the station, about the then-extant rumours and taking the presenter’s word for it when he said the comments were ‘all rubbish’) and afterward – it was an ITV documentary finally giving voice to the victims silenced by Newsnight that swayed public knowledge and finally, belatedly spurred the BBC into what passes for action – though as we’ve seen many times before, when backed into a corner the Beeb has a habit of running around headlessly, allowing its rivals to take easy potshots. Away from the BBC, Justin Lee Collins executed the perfect career suicide when he was convicted of harassing his former partner. It seems the shouty, bearded Bristolian lieutenant of Channel 5’s failed attempt to televise Heads or Tails hid a violently aggressive homelife. Certainly, those who once found his particular brand of “good times” agreeable have now viewed their man in a different light; hopefully, this will mean an end to the reruns of the Friday/Sunday/Whatever Night Project on the hideous 4Music, though sadly that does leave more room for Balls of sodding Steel and the Kardashians. With one hand the Lord gives, and with the other… Also finding his name muddied in recent months has been former cyclist Lance Armstrong. Mere weeks after cycling became a new national obsession thanks to Wiggins, Hoy, Trott and Pendleton at the Stratford velodrome, the sport of two wheels was being besmirched by the news that seven-times (well, technically zero-times now) Tour de France winner Armstrong was stretching his performance skills with banned-in-sport substances. And so the supposedly wonderful world of cycling comes crashing down into the ditch again, much as Bradley Wiggins himself did when he was involved in a thankfully minor road collison. Let’s hope that the new generation of young cyclists – including pedal-power-couple Jason Kenny and Laura Trott – can rebuild the shattered image of the two-wheeled sport. And as first-ever British winner of Le Tour Wiggins has pointed out, he can now claim more victories than Armstrong, which is only right in the circumstances.

Some of these recent news stories, and others, have reawakened some nasty ghosts from the pages of the past. Much as I still get a frost shooting down my spine every time Lockerbie or Dunblane are mentioned, even where not in connection with the infamous deaths and disasters therein, the reminders of past evils continue to haunt us. During the reportage of Jimmy Savile’s dark arts, it was suggested that he could have been involved in abuses at Haut de la Guarenne, the Channel Islands childrens’ home (and sometime setting of TV’s Bergerac) which a few years ago hit the headlines when a major investigation into historic abuse shocked the nation and led to a period of heavy grief. Elsewhere, a birth-damage case stemming back to 1994 was finally settled, but the name of the hospital where the mistake had been made back then sickened me: it was Stepping Hill, the vile northwestern dump of a hospital which has been much in the news in recent times over a saline-tampering case. The new development hardened my resolve to wipe that horrible hospital off the map, but sadly I wield too little power over the NHS to demand it; unless I go native (maybe turn up there with a JCB and a loudspeaker, and give the staff and the infirm a period of hours to clear out before I start smashing the place) this beast of a building will go on besmirching the image of the nation’s health service whilst its few remaining staff attempt to get on with the job of curing (or, in some cases, killing) the sick. Sometimes, those in positions of care who don’t care are caught, however: we recently saw the sentencing of six staff of the thankfully-closed Winterbourne View care home (don’t-care home, more like) which – having been exposed by BBC journalists, as it happens – had been the scene of terrible abuse of the residents by macho staff, who mishandled and bullied those in their care, and would still be doing so now if the Beeb’s secret filming hadn’t sparked outrage. Hopefully now these scum are behind bars the standard of care work will improve in the UK: hopefully, more of those who would do harm to those in their power will be taken out of service. I think I take these sort of stories too personally, even where they don’t directly involve me, because I care about people (some would say too much), and that lends itself to suggest I should get involved in care/social work – after all, with retail in the dungpit, my chances of carrying on my preexisting career as a shop assistant are slimming wildly. However, I’m concerned about how unsuited to care work I’d be. Whilst I’m capable of handling requests from a broad range of retail customers, I do frustrate easily, and being shackled to someone whose condition made them difficult to get on with could lead me to blow my top. I’m simply not emotionally strong enough to be around the vulnerable – and I’m a blunderer, too: I would worry too much about the consequences if I let the quality of my care slip: if I was responsible for someone’s wellbeing, and as a result of a simple error on my part they were harmed or killed, I wouldn’t be able to cope with the aftermath. I’ve said before that I’d struggle as a father, not that being one is on the cards given my lack of partner, and I still believe that at this stage, still technically fairly irresponsible despite my advancing age, it’s too early to give me any real fatal responsibility. But I’ll never stop caring about the sanctity of human life, which is why I won’t actually be turning up at Stepping Hill with a bulldozer – I’d far rather see the hospital ceased by peaceful means.

There have also been a number of young women in the news for various reasons and, whilst not wanting to sound like a creepy old Savile, I’d like to offer my support with the issues these beautiful ladies have faced. Sadly, in one case it’s too late to offer a hand of friendship to one of the girls involved. Canadian teen Amanda Todd hit the headlines when she posted an online video relating her tale of modern bullying (she’d sent flirty photos to a fella online, the snaps then went viral and the young lass was subjected to extensive taunts as a result.) Days after the morose YouTube video hit screens, though, Amanda was dead: apparently taking her own life, unable to cope with the vicious hatred she’d recieved in her community. I wish I’d been able to offer comfort to the poor lamb – or as much comfort as a bloke twice her age on t’other side of the Atlantic has any right to offer, anyway. I could have saved her life, had I actually been in contact with her at any point prior to her passing (I was not); it’s always a huge shame to see such a young life so needlessly snuffed out, particularly when a little friendship and kindness could have been enough to pull her back from the edge. I do have something of a random affinity of Canadians – some of the first people I became friends with on Twitter when I joined up and grabbed followers from wherever I could happened to be from the land of the maple leaf, there are plenty of Canucks in my CD racks (Amy Millan, f’rinstance), and I’ve seen more episodes of the awesome 6Teen than a guy my age has the right to have done; and although I did make a slightly tongue-in-cheek slamdown when the Canada team punted our ladies out of the Olympic football tourney, I still have a fondness for the maple-syrup munchers; I guess I just have to accept that I never had the chance to be the voice of reason Amanda in particular needed. It’s a great shame to know she will never now achieve the potential she presumably had to blossom into confident adult life. Another teen who was in the media glare recently was Malala Yousafzai, the teen shot point-blank in the head by a Taliban gunman in retaliation for her speaking out in favour of women’s rights, including on a well-regarded BBC international blog. Now, I don’t wish to attract the ire of the hardline Taliban (not that any of them are likely to see this rubbish), but I’m in favour of young women having the humane rights and freedoms they deserve. The Taliban are, given their conservative Muslim background, concerned about the potential intrusion of Western values onto traditional Muslim countries, and so decided to take action, as is their way; however, the wanton shooting of an innocent, intelligent teenager rightly shocked the world. Malala was flown to the Birmingham here in the UK for part of her treatment and, whilst the circumstances of her arrival were not what I would wish upon anyone, it was at least a pleasure to have such a sweet, smart lady on our shores. Thankfully, doctors say the damage done was relatively slight, and Malala’s recovery has been fairly prompt and comprehensive, meaning she’ll most likely be able to continue to fight for young women’s rights in the ever-changing modern world. Democracy is an important thing, and even if more conservative countries don’t want to introduce Western values, politics and styles, all countries should recognise the will of the people, even if they go on to use that freedom to make mistakes. Human life and wellbeing should be seen as sacred in all religious and cultural environments.

One young woman who made a choice which turned out to be more harmful than anticipated was Gaby Scanlon, a young Lancashire lady who, out at a bar to celebrate turning 18, took delivery of a cocktail to which liquid nitrogen had been added to create a flashy smoke effect. Whilst noted for its many exciting and innovative qualities – as anyone who’s been watching Challenge’s repeats of Brainiac will know well – the substance is harmful if ingested, and poor Gaby glugged down two of the danger-drinks, causing perforation to her gut, and ultimately having her very stomach itself removed by doctors. Whilst Gaby will be able to return to a fairly normal life fairly quickly – the operation was similar to that undertaken by gastric-band patients – she will forever be associated with that one misadventure. Of course, the bar is perhaps as much at fault for offering up poison in a glass as Ms Scanlon is for drinking it, and investigations and a potential lawsuit are pending, but one thing I’d like to do is offer a comforting arm around young Gaby’s shoulder and tell her things are likely to be OK. Of course, she’s perfectly within her right to push me away and ask who the hell I think I am, but all the same, the offer of support is there. One lady I hope to offer more support for over the coming days is a gorgeous young Scottish blonde who you may have seen in The Human Mannequin on Channel 4 (or 4seven) in recent weeks. Louise Wedderburn is hoping to take her passion for beauty products and fashion into a career, and is in the process of setting up her own blog (which would most likely be a lot more fun than this one, even for the non-fashionistas among you). What you may also know is that Louise suffers from FOP, a rare and incurable genetic condition causing her bones to lock up (excess bone develops, which can clog up the joints and lock the body in position). Sweet, pretty Louise is working hard to make her dreams come true, as we saw in the film, and whilst many FOP sufferers currently don’t live to see their 40s, research is ongoing which could lead to new ways to tackle the disease and make life longer and easier for those with the gene. On her Twitter page, Louise has been promoting the work done by FOP charities, and also responding to the ever-growing network of supporters who have been touched by her story and her good heart. I wish this wonderful lady nothing but success; and maybe young people today will be awed by Louise’s story in the same way I and many others were touched by Katie Piper’s first film almost exactly three years before; we’ve seen Katie blossom into a strong, confident, gorgeous young woman over the past few years and I have faith Louise can do the same: she’s genuinely very lovely. I’d like to say nice things about pretty Louise online, though the rubbish-at-Twitter phone I currently use means I haven’t been able to converse with her in depth, and in any case the poor girl’s been snowed under with messages by her fresh followers since her documentary aired. If you haven’t seen it yet it’s repeated on More4 on 20 November at 10pm, if you’re reading this before then (or indeed I’ve finished writing it by then), or the film’s available on 4oD, should you be able to access that. You may as well watch Katie Piper’s shows while you’ve got 4oD open, if you haven’t seen them yet. They’re well worth your time.

Whilst there has been some light coming from my crinkly old CRT, we mustn’t forget it’s been a pretty horrible month for those who follow the news (as ever, if you don’t like reading my news bit, scroll down ’til I start whining about myself). We’ve had the hideous situation in Harlow where a doctor and all five of her children were killed (three of the kids died at the scene with their mother, the other two passing away later in hospital). Only the kids’ father survived, and will likely be haunted by that dire day forever. Truly this was a devastating day. There was also a fatal fire in which children were among the dead in Prestatyn – though again, with investigations ongoing, I’ll hold back on giving forth my full opinion on that case, except to say that clearly action needs to be taken to stop these kind of despicable, deathly attacks. The Prestatyn fire hasn’t been the only horrible thing to have happened in Wales lately, with the disappearance of young April Jones also gripping the nation for a time, as viewers sat aghast that such a young and apparently innocent girl could vanish without trace so suddenly and completely. With legal proceedings ongoing, and action having also been taken against those who have discussed the case online, I won’t speculate or conjecture on the matter, but it was certainly horrible news to hear, particularly given that here in London I could do little to aid in the search for answers. Meanwhile, Cardiff saw carnage as a white van driver went on a horrible half-hour rampage, killing a young mother (who died protecting her children from the maniac’s wheels, the ultimate sacrifice) and maiming many others as he barraged his way across the Welsh capital. What a truly gruesome act. One wonders what pushed this maniac over the edge? Speaking as someone who myself is close to the edge mentally (of which more anon) I know that the simplest straw can crush the camel’s back, but this was way over the line. Maybe, though, this will be the disaster which finally gets those nasty white vans and their horrible occupants off the roads – or at very least, spells the end of laugh-free Will Mellor sitcom White Van Man. Well, the ban on smoking indoors wiped out the actually-fairly-good The Smoking Room, didn’t it? There have been other road crashes and fatalities in recent weeks, as ever sadly too many to name individually but with one notable case being in central Bristol’s Passage Street (which, given that it happened almost literally on the doorstep of the former GWR studios, would have meant comprehensive local radio coverage of the horror, had GWR not been subsumed into the London-based Heart hive-mind.) We’ve had the death of a 73-year-old man in an apparent burglary in southwest London, the demise of a woman who plunged from the third-floor balcony of the Bullring shopping centre in Birmingham, and perhaps most horribly the stabbing of a pregnant woman in the grounds of a school in that crime-ridden city of Liverpool. Thankfully both mother and unborn baby survived the assault and are recieving hospital treatment; however, it’s certainly a sign of how low society has sunk that brutal, thoughtless attacks like this still take place in broad daylight. More needs to be done to take evil off the streets, before those who would do wrong wipe out the good in society. We must not let evil win. Sometimes, of course, disaster is wreaked on the innocent not by the hand of others but instead by the finger of fate, as nature itself continues to rain punishment upon us for our callous and sinful misuse of its resources, so I’m led to believe. I speak of course of the ‘superstorm’ (downgraded from hurricane, you see) they call Sandy, which sent shockwaves up the seaboard as it killed many of those in its path and devastated homes and businesses right across a sizeable quadrant of the massive USA. The power loss caused chaos in a world so dominated by technology, and again we saw needless loss of life – for example, people who required assistance breathing died because the powercuts stopped their oxygen machines working – and seemingly uncontrollable devastation in a country too far away for me to be of any practical help. Of course, we’ve been here before – Hurricane Katrina trampled New Orleans a few years back in similarly galling fashion and it has taken the area many months and a lot of gut strength to get back on its feet – but clearly something has to be done: we need to change our ways now, lest these insanities of weatherfront continue to strike the world and, potentially, the UK – much has been made of the recent 25th anniversary of the 1987 storm (“A woman rang the BBC to say there was a hurricane on the way. Well, don’t worry, there isn’t”) which ripped the roof off southern England. As they say on Friends Like These: it can happen, it has happened, and it could happen again.

Whilst my problems are a piddle in the ocean compared to those above, my own life hasn’t exactly been a barrel of kittens lately. I’ve not had means to moan about my life all that extensively on Twitter given my weak-ass phone, but I need to let this anger out somewhere, and so here it goes here. It’s been a month-or-two of feeling fairly rough and frustrated, with occasional positives. Being ill for much of the period hasn’t helped – at one point I was huddled over in the jobsearch centre shivering like I had ice running through my veins, and I spent the next few days mostly choking in bed, only venturing out briefly to keep my jobsearch up (I’m hanging by a frigging thread here) and pick up medical supplies and soup, noodles, crumpets and other warm and easy-to-swallow stuff for lunch. I’m now better than I was at my worst, though the cold winter weather at this time of year is not entirely friendly to my chest. I have been piling on the pressure in my jobsearch in desperate attempt to better myself, and with festive opportunities opening up I have on occasion been required to be in two separate places on the same day (and have had to have the bold nuts to ask for a reschedule on those occasions where I’m expected to be in different places at the same time.) One such occasion came when two separate interviewers wanted me in different places on the same Tuesday morning: having already committed to one interview following a phone call, I then later recieved an email asking me to a different location at around the same time. Not being a Timelord, I had to defeatedly reply-to and advise the emailing employer that I wasn’t available at the given time, but that I would be available on future dates should they ever consider inviting me: they offered me a slot later that afternoon. And so it was that I had a full and fulfilling Tuesday of effort – excitingly, the second interview of the day was in a hotel (not for a post therien, alas, but for a retail store job) and as it came just days after Channel 4’s Hotel GB it was quite fun (ooh, they’ve got hotel rooms, like the hotel rooms on telly… ooh, they’ve got teacups like the teacups on telly.. you get the drift) Despite the insane amount of travelling and walking about needed (neither interview took place in the store I would have been working in, in one case because it hadn’t been fitted out yet) it was quite a bracing and fulfilling day, and I got home happy in the knowledge that I’d made a real effort. Sadly, it seems, my best still wasn’t good enough, as neither interview (one group, one solo) resulted in a job offer, but at least I hadn’t wasted the day sat on my back and/or side watching trashy telly (which these days is just about any telly). Oddly, the day after the double-decker interview I felt really unfulfilled and bored, possibly because that day’s duty was to kick my heels until my afternoon visit to the jobsearch centre. Since then, I’ve had a few more double-appointment days, and these have been even tighter for time – real panic and worry that I wouldn’t make it given the distance to be travelled and the time required to get there, only to actually just about manage it. It’s certainly quite a way to spend the day, and it felt good to make the effort, but I’d really rather just have a job, such that I have more certainty about where I have to be and when. I have been getting really frustrated in the jobsearch centre actually, sat in front of a computer feeling rejected and stressed – a lot of the emails I’m getting are reposts of ads for jobs I’ve already seen, or rejections from posts I’ve gamely applied for, and on one occasion I sent an email to one job I’d seen advertised in a shop window only to see the mail bounce back undeliverable: I rocketed out of the centre and down the road to recheck the address and I’d correctly filled out the address as given in the window, suggesting the error was a misprint on their part rather than a mistake on mine. On one occasion, caught in the mire of stress, I simply let out an anguished, primal squeal. I really need to calm down and rethink: I can’t keep feeling like this. You’ll recall that I’ve previously expressed an interest in having a lengthy discussion about my future options with my task-centre advisor. Her response to this request? To wash her hands of me and palm me off to a newly-arrived colleague. To be fair I’ve been at that centre longer than most of the staff, and it’s one of the few regular appointments I keep (unless I have an interview, which takes preference) in my frantic and ever-changing week. But clearly something needs to change: I’m able to put the applications in and also attend interviews I’m being invited to, but my chance of getting a job is slim. Maybe it’s my age: a lot of the entry-level stuff I’m going for is designed for pretty, fresh-out-of-school 16-year-old girls, and when a wheezing (some weeks more than others) bloke in his admittedly-early thirties turns up the employer’s likely to turn a blind eye. I’m also hamstrung that my CV to date is mostly retail at a time when the shopkeep is in little demand – with the retail industry still in manic flux, there are still more holes in the high streets than strictly necessary, and as such my chances of employment are very reliant on a recovery in the sector. One firm I applied to for an advertised post went into administration mere days later – am I really that hated that the firm would rather fold than hire me? Of course, that particular retailer’s soon-to-be-redundant staff, with their retail experience more current than mine, will shunt ahead of me in the queue for work, just as thousands did when Woolworths went under. I’ve tried to expand my horizons, and have been applying for a wide range of locations where customer service and/or stock handling experience could be applied, such as cinemas, bookmakers, beauty parlours, bingo halls, banks and hotels with almost no success – my retail-heavy CV indicating I’d need extra industry-specific training, when someone who already has the relevant experience could be hired with lower cost and effort.

I’ve definitely got to get out of this charade and into something proper: the Government are making it harder for those of us between the cracks to survive, both with the impending welfare-budget cuts designed to get us abandoned souls off the books and with further hoops to jump through as though they enjoy mucking about with us for their own amusement. I recently had to update my jobseeker’s discount travel card – it’s useful for enabling me to get around to appointments, errands and interviews, so I’m not gonna knock it – and, whereas previously I’d been able to renew it in a local post office, on this occasion I was told I had to go to ‘the station’. So I trotted round to the local rail station, only to be told “it has to be a TfL station – Woolwich [DLR] or [North] Greenwich [tube]”. So, in order to get my bus pass updated I had to get a bus first to Woolwich – where I (re)discovered that Woolwich Arsenal DLR doesn’t have a manned ticket office; the on to North Greenwich, which does. Two bus jorneys to renew my bus pass: only in Britain… But I’m not going through that rigmarole again; if I’m not in work by April 2013 – and I hope I am – I’ll have to reconsider my entire life and operations. This is one of the things I wanted to discuss with my TC advisor, not that they ever have time to talk to me at length. At least the chaos did give me the opportunity, albeit at short notice, to take a walk in Woolwich for the first time since before the 2011 riots. And a lot of my worries and fears about the town post-chaos proved to be unfounded: Powis Street, or at least the bit I was on during my rather rushed visit, was recognisably still for the most part the Powis Street I remembered from prior years: the shops were open and trading (apart from those which had closed in the intervening period: goodbye to Bonmarche, Gamestation and Clinton Cards – all scuppered by corporate collapse – along with Vodafone, Pizza Hut and Nationwide) and some newcomers had even opened (welcome to Deichmann and CEX, who both also recently landed in Bexleyheath). Card Factory and Noir Menswear had moved to new locations, and Blue Inc had reopened in the old Ethel Austin to replace their burnt-down prior store. The Great Harry, as previously mentioned, is back, and Superdrug was even having a refit as part of a rollout of a new store style. Aside from a couple of still-boarded-up stores near the now-reopened Wilkinson, and the construction work on the former Blue Inc site, you’d be hard-pressed to tell anything untoward had happened a year ago at all. I even got a look at what had replaced the landmark No. 27 – previously Bay Trading, before that the legendary Our Price from where I’d purchased my first-ever single, and many years before a butchers. Designer Kidz have even been good enough to make their sign white-on-red, so it looks from the outside almost identical to how it did back in the glorious Our Price days of the 90s. (I did get one scare, mind: walking past Nando’s I heard a loud bang and nearly jumped out of my chinos: it turned out a sudden gust of wind had upended an A-frame outside the restaurant just as I passed. The drilling for the Superdrug refit also spooked me until I craned my neck around and actually saw what was going on.) And more is coming soon – a big new Tesco is nearing completion as part of a long-planned major regeneration. Not sure if getting a job there would be wise – a prior placement at Asda confirmed I’m not very good at supermarkets. And at least the Government have the good grace to give us all a transport-related laugh sometimes, with the George Osborne ticket balls-up proving that the nasty Tories are just as out-of-touch as ever: having purchased the standard-class train ticket he was entitled to under expenses rules, the toffee-nosed chancellor decided he simply couldn’t stand sitting amidst the oiks and instead plonked himself down in the first class carriage he felt he was entitled to. Cue a dispute with a just-doing-his-job member of rail staff, during which Osbo’s shrill aide attempted to insist seating her MP employer in normal-people seats simply wouldn’t do, and eventually the man with the red box paid up out of his own pocket to retain his place in his preferred carriage. Coupled with the Andrew Mitchell police/’plebs’ incident, it’s clear that the current Government, or at least those squad members in the blue shirts, have little respect for those who lack the necessary plum. Of course, some or many of those on benefits are slime – witness the case of a mother who pretended her son had cancer (shaving his head to ape chemotherapy) so she could claim the higher benefits available to carers of sufferers: this sort of garbage gives us all a bad name. Whilst I’m not entirely a Jeremy Kyle viewer and in fact am keen to better myself, stretching almost to breaking point to do so, I would be hugely unpopular with the Tory-led coalition, should they ever deign to discover my existence. But they won’t: to the government I’m just a number, one of those faceless, hopeless berks they’re keen to stop funding the continued survival of because employers clearly aren’t interested.

Whilst on my travels to various appointments, meanwhile, I did notice that the Wintergarden foodcourt at Bluewater – closed for much of 2012 for rebuilding work – has now reopened; whilst some of the old kiosks have gone for good, McDonalds and Harry Ramsdens – the two I frequented most frequently, owing to their being among the cheaper options for lunching whilst embedded in the centre – have returned, alongside several newcomers including Tortilla, Square Pie, Tossed, Indi-go and Giraffe. It’s good to see the more affordable options haven’t been left out: as a fairly (or unfairly, depending on your view) impoverished fella who’s usually eating alone, I’m not in a position to visit any of the large sit-down restaurants. It’d be nice to have someone to travel with, but with no girlfriend and few friends in this area I’m destined to stalk the malls like a loner. That said, I did clock shoppers’ Twitter reports that Katie Piper had been spotted snaking around Bluewater on a recent expedition – on a day I happened not to be there! So I missed the one and possibly only chance to accidentally bump into a lady I really care about and interrupt her day by telling her how fond I am of her, as some of those who were actually there presumably got to do. Ah well, it’s probably for the best that I didn’t rub one or more shoulders with the prime Piper, as I’ll explain later. But I have been keen to get away from Bluewater – all the work-related stress I’ve been under of late has left me needing a getaway from the norm, and so one day when I didn’t have any other appointments pending – and now that the Olympic chaos which kept me away from there during the summer is over – I took myself over for a look at that big Westfield centre in Stratford. Because that’s the closest I’ll get to a holiday this year, OK? It’s too far away and too big of a faff to get to to go there daily for work reasons, but given I’m getting so sick of the places I usually bang around in, I wanted to take time out to take a trip somewhere that was out of my usual loop. And as the places people usually go on holiday are out of my time and/or price range, I had to settle for Stratford. There are some things Westfield’s eastern centre does better than Bluewater – its New Look has menswear, its H&M has homeware, many of its comparable stores are proportionaltely larger – but there are still some things Bluewater does well (the triangle shape is easier to shop, and Greenhithe’s centre has a third department store – House of Fraser, actually – which ‘WSC’ does not). Being on the south side of the river, Bluewater’s easier for me to get to, and so that’s where many of my job applications will be going, but it was nice to have what passes for a day off; I’ve desperately needed it what with all the frustration. And I haven’t had a holiday in best part of a decade. So cut me this one slack, yeah?

I do need to get into work and then down to the shops because I’m currently trapped in a technology K-hole: I’ve spoken before about the death by drowning of my in-hindsight-OK previous phone and its replacement with a slow-moving, poorly-featured, barely-working piece of cack which was the cheapest phone in the nearest shop. I still use that, and I’ve got more used to it since last time, and have resigned myself to accept that I’ll have limited access to online services for the immediate future – this has made it difficult to use the web, as I’ve had to squeeze all my use into the limited time I can get at the libraries: I used to be able to clear unwanted entries from my Google Reader by mobile during the course of the day, leaving the big stuff that I wanted to keep to be collected when I was on the big-web: now I have to dedicate a huge chunk of my limited computer time to cutting down the forest of stuff that builds up between visits. I am no longer able to use Twitter anywhere near as much as I used to: I can no longer offer warmth and hugs to my beloved and much-missed Twitter friends or communicate with my followers in a prompt manner, as I no longer have anytime, read-and-write access, though I can still – at fairly heavy cost – SMS in messages to go up on my feed when necessary, whilst being unable to read any responses these generate. With web time also required for jobsearch, it’s become a chore trying to fit it all in and some of the Reader feeds I find most useful may have to be given the elbows in order to leave me less to do. And now I’ve got more tech to worry about. I’ve spoken last time about the tube on my mid-Nineties bedroom telly going a bit wobbly, and now it’s even nearer the end of life: the hold is now so loose that when I watched The Human Mannequin up there (my brother was watching Russell Howard in the living room, that’s why) poor Louise looked ruddy corrugated! In addition, even though the telly still does, after a fashion, pony up a picture, I can’t watch any DVDs as my purple DVD player (as mentioned here many times here before, and purchased as you may recall some years back at the now-being-refitted Woolwich branch of that electrical powerhouse Superdrug) has decided to pack up – whilst power still goes to the switch-on, it’s no longer actually playing DVDs, which for a DVD player is a pretty major failing. At least I won’t have to replace it if I don’t replace the telly: and with the tiny amount of TV I now watch, there’s not really much point replacing it just now. And then there’s my chunky old Nintendo DS – bought cheaply second-hand a few years back, and already in a pretty blotchy state when it came to me, it’s now completely unusable thanks to a series of accidents: firstly, my brother fell asleep while playing a game late at night, as he occasionally did, and dropped it, cracking one of the hinges. The console was still usable, however, but I was mindful that handling the now-loose-lidded device too harshly may have caused further damage. As a result, when next playing the unit myself, I held it very lightly: too lightly, in fact, as my unusually-loose grip led to the machine falling from my hands as I attempted to switch it off and remove the game, breaking further as it hit the hard floor. I’d been getting on quite well with my Brain Training up til that point, and I dread to think what digital bollocking Dr Kawashima will hand down to me should I ever resume my brain-play. I looked into getting a DS or DS Lite (ideal as they have the Game Boy Advance slot, meaning we can still play our old GBA games) secondhand again, but didn’t feel confident when I saw the prices being charged in the shops I looked in – most places had prices north of fifty quid, and when looking online the only one I found below forty notes was one which was “water damaged and not switching on” – a paperweight, essentially, or something a solderer could scavenge for parts. In arguably worse condition than the one I have now, at any rate. But this technical cock-up coinciding with my continued job rejection (and thus the news I won’t soon be earning enough for fresh tech, or anything more important) did make it feel like I should just give up – is it worth replacing, as cheaply as I can, these items of worthless consumer tech when – if my stomach succumbs to the gaseous, acidic explosion it’s been threatening to, or if the job depression finally drives me under the train – my life isn’t really worth prolonging? Or do I take the death of my below-average gadge as a sign that it’s time I stopped being so silly and just left myself to go to rack and ruin? Or is it a sign that my tactic of buying the cheapest possible tat available is a false economy and that I’ll have to invest, when money is available to do so, in allegedly better-quality stuff? Or should I just go back to living the way I did before these digital timewastes existed? I spoke last time about buying 100 Classic Books on a DS card, and had barely got into Emma (so to speak) before the DS crapped out – maybe I should go back to the analogue way of reading, trot down to Waterstones and spend a fraction of the price of a replacement DS on some printed-on-trees Austen! I should also mention here the recent changes Amazon has made to its MP3 download service, which makes it almost impossible to buy MP3s from the library computers now: it’s a good job I don’t like music as much as I used to anymore!

One thing I did manage to order online was a lapel badge now being offered for sale as part of a range at the Katie Piper Foundation’s recently established online shop. However, whilst the charity appear to have recieved the three quid I paid for the thing, no badge adorns my outerwear: when the envelope arrived from the KPF HQ, it had a huge hole in the back and contained solely a blank KPF compliment slip: of the badge, there was no sign. Either it had fallen out somewhere in the postal system and the Royal Mail had pointlessly delivered me the remains, or the badge had been squeezed out during its wedging through the letterslot (though the absence of badge around the doorstep, inside or out, put paid to that theory); maybe someone had been on the thieve, light-fingering my badge at some point along the way, or maybe the item is/was left jangling around at the bottom of the postie’s sack. Or maybe the KPF squad didn’t put it in in the first place, maybe in an attempt to dissuade me from exposing myself as a supporter of the charity despite the fact that I actually am. Either way, I’m not big enough of an arsehole to actually raise a complaint or demand a refund: I don’t want to deprive a charitable trust of the pathetic sum of three pounds, and I’ll just have to accept that, unless I fling another three down the tubes and take the same gamble on it actually arriving, I will have no badge to display my support for Piper’s fundgathering endeavours. However, the badge-based incident did bring clarity to something I’ve been considering. I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s time for me to stop being such an ardent fan of wonderful Katie. She’s always been mentioned in glowing tones here and on my Twitter, ever since she fell into my life three years ago with the broadcast of her first film. Indeed, it was Katie who inspired me to come back to blogging and networking such that I could spread the word about her lovely glow. However, I’ve noticed that whereas Katie’s moved on with her life, I really haven’t: whilst young Piper is in a better position now than when her road to recovery began, I’m still in much the same mire I was when first I saw her footage. When I first got in touch with Katie following that debut broadcast, I saw her as someone who needed love and support – I wanted to tell her everything would be OK and that there were people out there who cared about her feelings. I wanted to be one of those guys who helped her get back on track and rebuild her life. As Katie joined Twitter herself (some time after I did, just so you know), I made clear that my support was there. Katie knew I was fond of her and welcomed the support as she built up her charity and continued to blossom into the magnificent woman we see today. I’m proud to say that Katie and I even had a couple of lengthier chats – I recall for instance one morning, during the period last summer when I had that part-time, half-hour-from-the-bus-stop job, that I turned to Twitter to help ease the boredom on the long, slow march to the middle-of-nowhere warehouse and responded to some comment or other which Katie had made about early starts: this turned into a cheerful chat which I only terminated when I was approaching entry to my workplace. Katie is a sweet lady and really lovely to talk to. More recently, though, neither Katie nor I have had as much time in our lives for big Twitter stints: me because of the mushy new stopgap phone, Katie because she’s got a lot more to occupy her time with – she has a boyfriend now, so no longer needs my hugs, and with her charity work, TV gigs and printed book publications, she barely has time to put her feet up and chat! In addition, Katie’s now often using Twitter to promote her books and other projects, making her pronouncements less chatty and more commercial, and Katie herself is also presumably wary of the increasing likelihood that people’s Twitter comments could be taken out of context and published by media outlets, given that this is easier for lazy, overstretched hacks than actual journalism. Couple this with the fact that Katie’s made no secret of the fact that positive thinking and upbeat affirmation is her stock in trade today; it’s no wonder that someone whose own page is mostly moody screeches (hello) and is increasingly-rarely updated at all (it’s the crappy phone) deserves to be frozen out of her purview.

So Katie’s changed (most would say for the better) and I haven’t – I’m still the shrill weirdo who’s desperately in need of support, whilst Katie is soaring onto a new plane of celebrity and no longer needs my shoulders to stand on. I’m still slavishly keeping an eye on Katie’s comings and goings, like some demented fanboy, as and when I can, because I still care about and support this delightful woman; I still read her books when I need a pick-up, and I still sit up and cheer when I see my most-admired lady on TV: overall it’s clear, though, I need Katie more than she needs me. I don’t want to be one of those ghastly hangers-on that keeps badgering celebs with nonsense and desperately tries to get noticed by the stars as a way of filling their empty, drudgey lives. You see a lot of that on Twitter – many famous names (whose Twitter pages are often marshalled on their behalf by management staff, such is the scale of the problem) are bombarded almost constantly with inane gibberish from wannabes who don’t actually posess the power to string a sentence together (hey, maybe that’s why they can’t get a job and so just sit on Twitter all day!) I don’t want to be that guy. In fact I criticise that kind of guy/girl – I have little time for the deluded likes of Big Brother’s Tashie, whose brief stint in the house led her to believe she was (a) famous, (b) popular and (c) Pamela Anderson’s best mate. None of these were true outside of Tashie’s warped little mind, and today the hook-nosed wannabe can be found scraping cheap modelling jobs in a desperate and (mostly) naked bid to keep herself in the public eye. I can’t be like that. Maybe Katie’s just decided that, as she’s in a relationship, she will engage with her male followers less; maybe she’s decided that she can’t cope with my needs and I should seek redemption elsewhere; maybe it’s just that, with the various time commitments and constraints that apply, we just haven’t had the chance to be on Twitter at the same time. Or maybe Katie just plum doesn’t like me any more. I don’t know for certain as it’s never been explained directly to me why things between myself and Katie have soured – if indeed they have at all – but I am driven to think: is it time for me to be the bigger man and turn my back on Katie? She doesn’t need a ringpiece like me clouding her otherwise-sunny life. Her charity has much wealthier supporters who can make more of a difference; her books sell by the buttload with or without my stupidly-swift Amazon preorders; her columns are in women’s magazines I shouldn’t really read (and usually don’t); and, as my being unable to tweet much during Hotel GB showed, her TV and Twitter projects are the same – no, better – without my involvement. I’m too reliant on Katie but am now utterly useless to her. It’s time to cut off the teat. It’ll be really hard to stop myself being a fan/supporter of Katie – I still care about her, I don’t plan to unfollow her on Twitter or stop watching her lovely programmes – but I’m clearly too obsessed with this one person and need to move on. It will be hugely sad to say goodbye to someone who’s been such a huge part of my life through what has been a really difficult era for me; however, I am nothing if not realistic. Katie was never really my friend, barely a conversational acquaintance, and whilst she is the sort of sweet, kind woman I’d love to be close to, the likelihood of her actually becoming my partner is and always was nil. We don’t move in the same circles at all – she’s mingling with the champagne set at awards bashes in swanky celebrity dresses, I’m sat stuffing myself with cheap lasagne and watching crappy repeats in ratty old clobber. So, in a rare example of me actually making a decision, I’ve decided that, unless she does anything particularly writeup-worthy, like bringing out a new book or TV show that I want to push your way, this edition of the blog will be the last to mention Katie Piper on these pages. It’s for the best. I need to step out from behind Katie’s strings and start looking for someone else to hail as a hero in my life. Though there aren’t many heroes around these days, which is perhaps how Katie was allowed to become so special to me in the first place. So farewell, sweet Katie. Long may you continue to be happy and successful, and thank you for always making my day brighter with your ever-beautiful smile.

One difficulty which has exposed why I can’t be nice about Katie Piper any more is that I also need the freedom to be critical of that media fireblanket that is The X Factor. Every year, despite not being a viewer of the programme, my mind gets clogged by the media rubbish pumped out around the Cowell-created media frenzy. Whilst I cheer the news that X Factor ratings are continuing to decline – that’s what you get if you try to present that nasty chav Tulisa as some kind of arbiter – Katie Piper remains on-message (Simon Cowell being a patron of the Katie Piper Foundation): when asked on Twitter recently if she watched Strictly Come Dancing (X Factor’s big Saturday rival), Katie said no, she was watching ITV’s Take Me Out instead. She’s also posted updates from her visits to the X Factor studios, too. Clearly, I can’t despise X Factor and also like Katie – if I love one I have to love the other! But there’s been a lot of media clogging by X Factor controversy in the last few weeks, to the point I know who’s taking part and why I hate them, but just as last year I’m judging them when I haven’t heard them sing a note. There was the controversy over Lucy Spraggan, who was asked to remove previously-released music from whatever iTunes is after she made it into the live shows, then withdrew from the competition herself claiming illness (though there have been enough cases in pop history of fake illness covering for legal spats – Geri Halliwell, anyone? – that I always raise an unconvinced eyebrow when a singer claims to be unwell). No idea whether her old stuff will go back online following her withdrawal, or whether Cowell’s people still contractually own her ass until long after the winner is crowned, mind. Then there’s the Chris Maloney case – some have said that boss man Simon, despite not personally being on the judging panel this year, is worried that Maloney could win and become a new Steve Brookstein, and has allegedly instructed those on screen to rubbish Maloney to reduce his chances of winning. In X Factor, the winner isn’t who the public choose, it’s who Cowell chooses. I saw a headline online saying Little Mix were ‘not fans’ of Maloney – those girls aren’t yet ready to bite the hand that feeds them, it seems. Jade’s exit from the series was hyped up by fans and the press as a disaster, and I had to remind myself not to care and that I’d had no idea who she was to begin with – again, I’d heard the moaning of fans but not the vocals of the actual singer herself. Then, of course, there’s the simulant media wormhole that needs little introduction: Rylan. He’s been this year’s controversy-magnet, and early on caused one of the big strops this series when his remaining in the contest at the expense of someone called Carolynne caused massive ructions: Gary Barlow threatened to walk off the show (he should have done, it would have been the brave and noble thing to do, but presumably he returned as Cowell had his knackers in a vice contractually), and there was controversy when it appeared Louis Walsh – whose vote could have sent Rylan home and instead saw him continue – was seen to be recieving direction from a member of show staff before casting his ballot. And then I discovered Rylan had appeared on Sky Living’s sleazy modelling show Signed By Katie Price and the pennies began to fall into place. Rylan (born Ross, if it matters) wants to be a brand rather than a man, a male version of Price in terms of media ubiquity. How the hell do I avoid him if ditching ITV1 (and 2) alone is not going to be enough? I get like this every time stuff like X Factor is on, swallowing all the hype and garbage that the hyperactive media pumps out in a bid to hang on the coattails of the horribly massive show – apparently, this year the recieved wisdom is that a boyband will be anointed winners such that Cowell can groom them (in the non-Savile sense) to One Direction-style international commercial success. But then, that’s what music’s about today – sales will always win out over substance.

X Factor isn’t the only reality show running at the moment. At least Strictly has the good grace to have the lovely Victoria Pendleton (hey, a cyclist!) among its lineup. ITV’s got I’m A Celebrity up and running, and two of this year’s jungle rats have been particularly high in the headlines – blonde MP Nadine Dorries is this year’s contestant chosen to get the chattering classes and formerly-broadsheet papers talking about IACGMOOH, and given she’s known for her needling of David Cameron she’s been one of the most prominently-discussed personalities immediately prior to this year’s run going live. Meanwhile, the red-tops have been able to feast on the needy Helen Flanagan. Having been in Coronation Street since she was so young only Jimmy Savile would crack onto her, Flanagan recently left the soap having become something of a sex symbol, her now-curvaceous figure a popular target for tabloid crowing. Helen was apparently depressed and suffering panic attacks around the time she decided to quit the soap – it seems that having spent so long acting as someone else, the poor lamb perhaps wasn’t sure where Rosie ended and Helen began – and the sudden rage of attention from the sleazy media can’t have helped her health. However, now she’s no longer in a regular gig one does have to ask what her motives are for going in the jungle – does she crave a return to the spotlight? Is she keen to market herself as available to new productions? Is it just some ITV contractual thing? Or is there some sort of backroom deal with the tabloid press to give them plenty of uncovered Flanagan skin to coo over in return for extensive fawning coverage of the series? The media has sunk into such a sleazy pit that I no longer know what to believe – showbiz is built on so many lies, shady deals and self-serving brown-nosings that it’s impossible for the lay reader to identify what’s real and what’s fiction concocted to tantalise fans and sell tickets. Not that the exploited (or self-exploiting?) Helen has been the only celeb in the news for her body lately. Rihanna has become known for flaunting her figure in various photoshoots, web posts and music videos, but a rekindled relationship is reportedly set to cause a change in her physical appearance: the Barbados-born chart-dominator has reportedly reconciled with her former flame Chris Brown – the gruesome R&B hitmaking fella who sickened the pop world when he violently pounded Rihanna in a car the night before the Grammy Awards – and is said to be planning to impress him by undergoing an enhancement to her assets of the breast area. Now, clearly Rihanna has forgiven Chris much sooner than I have, which is awkward, and she is entitled to do so, I guess – when challenged on the reunion by Twitter followers, she posted up a Bible verse on forgiveness – but hasn’t that cruel man done enough damage to the lovesick girl’s body? Is Rihanna that unhappy or lacking in confidence that she needs the closeness to Brown and the approval from him that fake chebs would bring? There has to be some way we as a people can convince her to think again (maybe we can – Rihanna’s is one of the few celeb Twitter accounts operated by the star themselves, and I’m told she gives as good as she gets), but ultimately we have to accept Rihanna is in control of her own mind and body, and that it is ultimately her decision what she does with these. I just wish she was able to make a clear-headed judgement – in her current clouded-by-Brown state, there’s a danger she may do something she later regrets. Elsewhere in modern urban culture, it’s reported that Kim Kardashian, famed for her curves, feels under pressure to keep her weight down and slim her famous figure because, according to some trashy rag’s screeching, her current/former (I can’t keep up) partner, Taylor Swift-interrupting rapper Kanye West, prefers his girls skinny. Now, I’ve never previously been moved to side with the Kardashian media empire, having previously slain the clan’s 4Music-clogging reality show for swallowing slots which should by rights have gone to Adam & Joe and the like, but I feel the need to step in here and say something, So Kim, listen up. Don’t change your body for any man. Be proud of yourself and the person you are. Have the confidence to stand up for yourself, keep your weight and figure at exactly what you’re comfortable with, and if Kanye doesn’t like that, tell him to go stuff an egg – there are a great many men who would love and appreciate you for the woman you are, and wouldn’t try to crush you down into something you feel is unhealthy. Your wellbeing is more important than the College Dropout’s opinions. If you want to be your most beautiful, be true to yourself and natural, in the shape you’re most happy with, and don’t bend to others’ demeaning demands. There we go. I just said something nice about a Kardashian – I guess the old rules don’t apply anymore! Of course, sometimes reality microstars and media celebs do things I actually approve of and reveal hidden depths: as previously mentioned here, Rebeckah Vaughan does a fair bit for the Katie Piper Foundation, and her fellow Big Brothering blonde Nikki Grahame is a 6 Music listener – so maybe I shouldn’t judge people purely on the cackling of the glossy media.

There have been a few media landmarks to celebrate recently: although at current pace it’s sadly unlikely to see the 100th, the BBC did take a break from Savile-gate to celebrate the 90th anniversary of its first 2LO radio broadcast, with a unique synchronised transmission that only an organisation like the Beeb could pull off. See, they are still capable of doing something good! Elsewhere, Channel 4 turned 30 in what has been one of the station’s biggest years – it’s had all manner of headline-making chaos going on this year, with big-bidget event broadcasts strung through the year, such as the C4 Mash Up, Drugs Live, House Party (those were three separate events, not the same thing), Funny Fortnight, the Plane Crash, Hotel GB, Stand Up to Cancer, and of course the magnificent Paralympics – this has really been the year C4 bellied up to the big table and showed it had balls. That said, there was little mention of the anniversary on the birthday itself – a throwaway mention on Countdown was just about all that we got on 2 November – and outside of these special stunt events C4 is still a little too reliant on a few big hits – Come Dine With Me is now making multiple appearances (you can normally expect at least a couple hours a day of it now, plus even more on 4seven and More4) which is leaving the cookery contest looking a little overheated, and the nasty habit of tugging something off the main channel mid-series and flinging it onto a digital station, replacing it on C4 with CDWM, is still very much alive, Gok Wan’s Friday night dating show Baggage being the latest victim. (I should point out that, whilst it was no Blind Date, Baggage was at least more enjoyable than the muttony meat market that is Take Me Out, and was also the first bit of proper shiny-floor entertainment C4 has done in bloody ages.) At least new-to-channel episodes of The Simpsons have finally, belatedly, turned up on C4 as a break from the relentless repeat cycle, but these editions (the 20th season, if you need) will soon become tired and unfunny from endless looping around. C4’s paranoid slicing-up of Simpsons scenes (which began in earnest after the station was slammed for allowing U2 to say ‘wankers’ at 6pm) hasn’t won the channel many friends, either – a segment featuring Ned Flanders and Snake in one of the new eps was so horribly butchered by C4’s censors as to be rendered pretty much meaningless, and the channel has admitted being overly cautious when it ripped an offhand Carl comment from a Sunday lunchtime rerun of an earlier show simply for daring to include the word ‘gay’. After the Simpsons of course comes Hollyoaks, and it’s been tough to avoid chatter around the wedding-day carnage that is a central storyline in the show at the time of writing. It’s wedding-day deaths, disasters and divorces in TV shows which have spooked me from getting married – drama and documentaries have me so worried that some sort of murder, fire or punch-up will blight my future partner’s special day that I’m nervous even to think of it. Although quite how I’m going to find a girl to love me is unclear – a manky jobseeker with no real social skills isn’t going to attract many takers, and in my declining years I may be reduced to crawling along Powis Street or around the still-largely-triangular Bluewater armed with some kind of net-based mechanism. Or perhaps I should just shark Twitter for phrases such as “I wish there was a nice guy around” or “Why can’t I find a fella who’s into Biffy and Muse?”, and then respond, if it’s technically possible to do so, should any such combination turn up on the searchbox. Although with today’s young women largely being followers of folk like the above-mentioned Kim Kardashian and Rihanna, there’s likely to be little love for a fella who knows his Two Door Cinema Club from his Bombay Bicycle Club – that’s also why I can’t get a job in ‘music’ stores, as with CD sales on the high street in decline most entertainment retailers would rather hire someone who knows about iPads and Kinect rather than someone ancient enough to remember a time before MP3. Maybe I’ll get lucky and in the course of scouting around on my usual scruffy roustabout for jobs, food and reason to live I’ll happen to stumble into some sparkly, charming indiegirl who can put up with my foibles (or reattach them when they fall off) – though as I’m usually scurrying around almost on autopilot, nervously avoiding eye contact with those who would do me harm, it’s unlikely I’ll spot a sexy lady in the street unless I blindly thud right into her whilst escaping some store in a baffled state, by which point a date would largely be out of the question. As I told Kim above, I don’t have too many hang-ups on looks – I’d rather be with a lady who was comfortable in her own skin than some botoxed and overpreened confidence-vacuum – though if truth be told I do like blonde hair, possibly because my mother is a brunette, and very few single lads would want to date their mum. (Pro tip – if you look like, say, Kiri out of Bid TV, you stand a chance of catching my eye…) If I did get a girlfriend, though, mum would probably relax a bit, as I’d finally be able to move towards emerging from under the apron strings and letting her get on with her own life…

Some of my, and the nation’s, favourite ladies – and gentlemen – were celebrated publically at the recent Daily Mirror-backed Pride of Britain awards, as screened on ITV1. I don’t usually watch a lot of award shows (though I did used to watch events like the Brits back when I was a music fan) – however, on hearing who was involved this year I decided to tune into the POBA and, well, it was brilliant. One of the people I was watching for was a certain Ms. Piper – her award win was the culmination of all the hard work she’s done over the last few years, not only rebuilding her own life but also laying the groundwork for an organisation through which many others may benefit in the future. Katie’s journey here started with pain and agony, but finally here was the celebration, the moment when our girl was finally rewarded for her courage and strength of spirit. Elsewhere, another lady I was delighted to see on the show was Alice Pyne. The girl behind the Twitter-phenomenon “Alice’s Bucket List”, beautiful Alice has been through a lot of pain and struggle in her young life, but here we saw her smile – particularly when she was handed her award by one of her very favourite pop stars, Robbie “too old for radio” Williams. Alice has, like Katie, decided to use her experience and support to build a better life for others, launching her own charity – Alice’s Escapes – to raise funds to help young people whose days are too often filled with pain have fun, memorable days that they’ll enjoy. I do adore Alice – not in a Savile way but because she is a kind, sweet young lady who has a lot of warmth and sparkle – and you should know by now I admire that in a lady, as you’ll have seen from my comments on other girls above. Also honoured at the POBA was a girl who put herself in the path of an oncoming car and barged her sister out of the way, wrecking her own leg in the process but crucially saving the younger girl’s life – now there’s heroics – and also a woman who has become something of a figurehead for justice in my section of the woods: Doreen Lawrence, mother of Stephen, the teenager fatally stabbed in Southeast London’s very own Eltham back in the early 90s, back before many of today’s teens were even born and when I was only about 11, has spent the subsequent two decades fighting to see her son’s racist killers put behind bars, and has seen through the establishment of an architecture scholarship in memory of her wannabe-architect son. And, in a neat bit of synch, both Doreen Lawrence and Katie Piper have delivered Channel 4’s Alternative Christmas Message, albeit in different years. The highpoint of the POBA for many though was the mass-honour for those sportspeople who did Britain proud at the Olympics and Paralympics – and seeing them descend en masse onto the stage in a peer group so rampant they even persuaded HRH Sir Prince Charles to do the Mobot was the champagne-cork moment at the end of a mighty year for them and their supporters. It was lovely to see the athletes I’d become suddenly fond of over the summer being celebrated, and indeed themselves celebrating, having done so much for us. Although dragging on Heather Small (we’re not related – her voice is far deeper than mine, and I’m as white as the driven winter) at the end was perhaps milking it a bit – but hey, they needed a big powerful finish to the show! It was good to see decent people being celebrated, although slightly odd to see it being done on ITV1, a channel which revels in the vile and the mucky (from Jeremy Kyle to X Factor) on practically all the other days of the year. Incidentally, the day after the POBA, Katie Piper attended as a guest the non-televised Cosmopolitan awards, at which winners included Tulisa and the Kardashians. It’s sad to see the normal order so swiftly being restored. But at least for one day I was able to smile.

I did enjoy a little bit of a titter the other day when I saw that kicked-out X Factor contestant Frankie Cocozza had made a stumbling entry into the singles market when his new release – his first post-X serving – was reported to have landed at that fantastic chart position of number 89. This was in the week that the supposedly too old Robbie spent his second week at the top of the modern-day pops with Candy, and also hit the album chart number one. Who’s popular with ver kids now, Grimshaw? Still, I did enjoy the opportunity to smirk at someone’s downfall given that I’m usually so preoccupied with arresting my own! At the time I saw the report I hadn’t heard the song, though on seeing it described as ‘indie pop’ in one report I did wonder whether, given my heritage listening to Supergrass, Sleeper and the like, I would actually have enjoyed the song. When I did eventually stumble across Cocozza’s tune – ‘She’s Got a Motorcycle’, apparently – on Chart Show TV of all places, I found out what it actually was like – and found it to be cheerful scruffy-pop fairly reminiscent of 90s/early 00s guitar-led boynoise – if you recall the likes of Catch (y’know, the ones that did that song Bingo, remember that? Well, if you’re young enough to know who Frankie is, probably not) and their ilk you’ll know about where Frankie’s tune has landed. So whilst it’s no ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’, it’s probably preferable to forcing young people to listen to Chris Brown. And of course, today’s guitar-led pop listener is potentially tomorrow’s rock listener. But then, who am I to force my musical tastes on anyone? If people would rather listen to Drake than Biffy Clyro, I just have to accept that and find fun where I can. And whilst it would suit me to seek out something outside the mainstream – it would be nice, should I ever find a few minutes’ break in the rushing-around I tend to have to do, to spend some time sat listening to the 6 Music I fought so hard to save, for not only myself, not only Nikki Grahame, but for all those who want something of quality amidst a mass of mainstream mush. And I perhaps shouldn’t be so quick to judge people on their media message – there are real people behind the headlines, and we need to remember that these people have insecurities, worries and feelings which the screaming gossip can sometimes mask. And while I’m far too old to chat to any of Cocozza’s fans without looking like a massive Savile (last one, I promise), it would be nice to see young people’s day being brightened by positive role models and good-natured, kind-hearted folk – for instance, on the recently-revived dream-maker show Surprise Surprise, a wheelchair-bound teen girl arranged for her able-bodied sister, who had done so much to support and help her over the years, and who she clearly adored, to meet their favourite pop group (The Saturdays, as it turns out, minus blonde Mollie) in a shopping mall for the show. You should’ve seen the smiles on the girls’ faces when Frankie (Sandford, not Cocozza, as it goes), Rochelle, and, um, two others (alright, Una and Vanessa then) appeared before them – now that was one of the genuinely prettiest (in a good way) TV moments of the year. Maybe in future, with X Factor and the like in decline, and the growing influence of good people across the schedules, Britain could in the longer term return to the spirit of happiness, positivity and friendship it enjoyed back in the days when the original Surprise Surprise (and other such shows) were still on the box. And then we’ll all have some fond memories which hopefully won’t be dashed in years to come. How’s about that, then, boys and girls?

“When he grows up, I want to be like me!” (Goodbye!)

“We’re going to take a big risk and go for excretion…” (Hello!)

Boy howdy, it’s been a rough few weeks since I moved among you last. While you were hopefully chuckling over that bit of filler I punted up about search strings – having been inspired by similar posts on other blogs, since you ask (although technically you didn’t) – I’ve been having a less-than-pleasing few weeks. Not only have I been slightly ill, my inner systems weakened by the recent damp (or very damp) weather, I’ve also had the multi-storey depressions of the job hunt drying up, the world of technology deciding to vote against me, and the news in general being pretty damn miserable now that the positive influence of the unusually-sporty summer has begun to wear off. So, then, there is room now for me to bleat on, in what will be one of the bleaker posts here, about how worn down I have been by recent events. Sometimes it’s like society wants me to fail, but this past month has been particularly difficult to stomach. September, take a bow – you’ve almost killed me.

Regular drinkers at this toxic waterhole will know that my chances of gaining employ are so thin they could feature on Supersize v Superskinny, and not as the Supersize. As I’ve mentioned many times, Ms. Naegle, I’m in an awkward position – the career I ‘chose’ (well, had thrust upon me by dint of the availability of placements) many years ago, when the economy was rosier, has now dumped itself irretrievably down the toilet, and career opportunities for someone with the retail-heavy CV that I have are now essentially nil. (I have now essentially given up completely on my longer-term dream of getting into something involving music/radio, as the original plan, which involved getting myself a grounding in something regular and steady like retail, has stalled so badly). I have had some brighter periods – there was one particularly frantic phase which I refer to as ‘Super Sunday’ for some reason, under which I had consecutive interviews for different firms on a Friday, the next day (Saturday) and the following Monday; just getting the employers to respond to my initial enquiries and haul me in for a further microscope is an achievement, but unfortunately none of the interviews resulted in employment. Why that was the case I’m not sure, but it is something which plays on my mind. Perhaps it’s the impression I create in person – I don’t cut a particularly impressing dash when physically in the presence of other people. Worse was to come, however: having applied for a job online, I was called in for an interview a few days later, only to be told when I turned up that the job I’d applied for had in fact been taken and thus the vacancy had been closed. Not sure how far down the chain my application had got before the decision was taken, or who dropped the ball by hauling me in for a no-longer-existent post, but I’d made the effort for nothing – and, worse still, had to go home at kids-coming-out-of-school time, which is never a pleasant journey. And sometimes there are unique balls-ups: two separate jobs I’d applied to both came back offering interviews – in different locations but on the same morning, meaning I had to bin one of them off simply due to my physical inability to be in two distinct places simultaneously! I can’t afford to throw away too many chances over time-space relativity blunders like that! I swear I’m becoming a pawn for sullen HR bods, being punted between towns like I’m taking the role of ball in some giant game of jobseeker tennis – retail businesses clearly have no interest in actually hiring me, so what more can I do? One of the things I do like about doing my initial applications online, incidentally, is that the employer can’t, unless they’ve asked for a photo, see my contorted face, nasty hair, or weak body, or hear my shrill, nasal, creaky voice. (Some employers do ask to see an image in the initial phase, usually stylish firms which judge potential employees on their looks – needless to say, I rarely apply for these!) But I have to recognise that unless I undergo serious facial surgery, a job is likely to be unlikely – employers simply won’t hire someone who looks like me: I am the opposite of handsome. And with JJB Sports shedding most of its stores and disgorging two thousand retailers onto the dole, I’m now a couple thousand places further away from getting a job than I was before, and with one fewer chain to apply to, although in fairness most of the perenially-troubled JJB’s outlets around here have already shut as part of previous scalings-back (Croydon being the nearest branch to me at the time of the chain’s final collapse). It’s been a really tough time to be me – I have to remember not to give in to the dark thoughts that are never far from the surface when I’m going through a miserable patch.

The hideous weather lately hasn’t done much to lift my mood. The summer is over, and with relish – catastrophic wind and rain have underlined that the ‘good times’, if any, that the public have largely enjoyed over recent months are comprehensively over. Not sure whether I should rank the recent weather as some kind of celestial punishment, or evidence of climate change, or simply the natural ebb-and-flow after a start to 2012 which was so dry water companies had to impose hosepipe bans. I’ll talk later about how the rest of the country suffered, but the pinnacle of the weather woe for me personally came when I got caught up in all sorts of wet chaos trying to bring the dinner home. I’d left the house to minor drizzle, which I could manage, but by the time I’d done the shop it was coming down quite heavily and I had only the slim comfort of the bus shelter to protect me from the increasingly-grim elements. However, one thing that didn’t come down was the bus; after a lengthy wait, one eventually turned up which was being curtailed early for reasons unknown, possibly weather-related; on checking the TfL site using my in-hindsight-OK mobile phone’s Opera browser, I discovered there would not be another one within at least half an hour. So, I had to do what I call a Wanker’s Triangle – getting to a given destination by taking a pointless extra bus journey to a third location which I had no other reason to visit. The third wheel was, on this occasion, the much-derided centre of Bexleyheath and, by the time I got there to make the connection, the already-heavy rain had become an absolute squall – the Broadway was in places starting to resemble a river – and again checking TfL, I found my wait for the bus home from here was an epic nineteen minutes. 19 minutes of standing – without even the aid of a shelter, which was packed – in absolutely tipping rain, becoming increasingly wet and cold to the extent that I could barely keep the increasingly-sodden shopping aloft in my freezing, arthritic hands (though unable to put it down due to the saturated pavement). But worse was to come. In addition to checking the TfL bus times, I’d also been using my phone during the storm chaos to recieve words of comfort from my Twitter associates. However, I was aware that using the phone in heavy rain was a risk – having drowned the phone in rain once before, then revived it in a bag of rice as suggested by Twitter friends and The Gadget Show, I knew that exposing my electronic device to the rushing water was a risk – I even said, during the course of my soggy rant, that the rainwater risked killing my phone, and this then came to pass moments later, with my communicator freezing up mid-tweet. Another stint in the rice couldn’t save it this time, however – many of the buttons no longer function (to be fair, prior to the storm some of them needed a bit of a thump to work, but now they were dead completely) and after its stay in the rice it suddenly started suggesting, at every switch-on, that I reformat the phone and wipe its entire memory (luckily I managed to run off a backup before wiping everything, so I haven’t lost much, and the SIM card was unaffected). So, the phone was essentially dead – even the time/date setting was wiped, and with only the 4, 5 and 6 keys functioning I couldn’t even bring it back into 2012. It was, essentially, no longer functional.

This put me at a disadvantage – I needed a phone, to stay in touch with potential employers (should they ever deign to call me, maybe), family and online friends. With this in mind, I decided I had to get a new one, but my limited time and financial means meant I had to rush to the nearest shop that had phones in its offer – not a proper phone shop but a national catalogue retailer – and buy the cheapest one they had. This particular firm had a little Alcatel – at £20, the cheapest phone in the shop – or more advanced phones from £70 and up into three digits. No prizes for guessing what I bought: your clue is, think budget. The description for the £20 phone said it had dedicated Facebook and Twitter apps: this was untrue, it does not. It is also unable to run Java, meaning it is unable to run the (by comparison) slick and speedy Opera Mini browser my previous phone had; it only has the crumbly WAP browser which runs slowly and has trouble running sites I use, such as Google Reader and Twitter – Google Reader becomes very sluggish to clear, to the extent I may have to unsubscribe from news feeds I actually want to read, whilst Twitter is so difficult to read and write it’s become virtually impossible to use: sending a tweet takes nearly ten minutes, and reading involves such lengthy and slow scrolling that it’s barely worth responding, which defeats the point a little. Even the login process for these sites is slow and unwieldy – and even Google Search is difficult, not bringing up the mobile version of the search page and only letting me highlight ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ and not the main search button. As a means of accessing the web, this phone is worse than just about any other device I’ve ever used. The cheap phone also has no Bluetooth and, unlike the old phone, is not compatible with USB, meaning there is no way to get the backgrounds and such that I’d saved from the old phone onto the new one, save for a period of faffing about with SD cards, and it’s also not possible to filter content into folders as I could before. The new phone has the same weather app as the old one, but whereas it worked on the old one, it has been difficult getting it to bring up the info on the new one, and whilst the new phone does have an alarm clock option, it doesn’t work – I set it to wake me up on the first Thursday (bin-day) after its purchase, and it remained silent – I nearly missed the bins thanks to my cheap purchase – and it again stayed quiet the following Thursday. Oddly, the phone alarm has now started going off, but on completely random days which I didn’t ask it to! Looks like I’m going to need to copy Radio 1 and find a new way to wake up. In fact, radio may be the answer – the only other device in my bedroom which has a working alarm clock built in is my DAB reciever. Which still, signal reception permitting, works.

This new phone simply isn’t good enough, though. I’ve basically bought some hobbled piece-of-crap, presumably (going by its slim styling) one of those phones hassled mothers buy for their impressionable teenage daughters, so the girl can have the kudos and self-belief that comes from phone ownership, but without the dangers of actually being able to use the bloody thing to communicate. It is essentially an overpriced posing toy. I bitterly regret buying it at all: with a need for a speedy solution, and the weather still being none too pleasant on day of purchase, I’d opted for a piece of rubbish sold to me on a lie (the misleading comment in the catalogue that the phone could access a Twitter app) at the nearest shop available rather than making an especial journey into a big-town with a proper phone shop wherein I could have had a better range of mobiles to consider. (I could also have looked online: I later saw a phone with Bluetooth and Java on T-Mobile’s website, for less than I’d paid for the crappy one, though that doesn’t include delivery charge, should one apply.) I don’t want to be wasteful and become one of those flash sods who just buys loads of overly glamorous stuff needlessly, but nor do I want to be saddled with this rotten and frustrating piece of crap for too long; a judgement call will have to be made. I’ll just have to carry on with this stumpy cell until I find the bargain that feels right, or I feel confident enough to commit to something more solid. Or maybe I could make money for a new phone by sending my various broken old ones away for recycling, though punching the model numbers of my past-it mobiles into Envirofone revealed the firm would gladly take the devices and recycle them for free, but with no payment made to me. I would point out here that the little telly in my bedroom is also playing up – the tube appears to be going wonky, and it’s becoming increasingly wobbly in its warm-up, but I’m not looking to replace that immediately – the little amount of TV I now actually watch means it’s barely worth worrying about just now, and in any case I’m not exactly in a position financially or socially where buying a TV set would be considered acceptable, so I can put that on the back burner until I’ve got my many other problems sorted out. I’d also like a bigger-capacity MP3 player for my journeys (well, the music I listen to thereon, at any rate), but that’s the least-pressing issue given I can just take overplayed songs off the machine I have now to free up room for a fresh playlist.

As regards life’s problems in general, however, I’ll need to get something sorted out quick smart. The coalition (driven by the posh boys in the blue sector) are planning to rewrite the welfare book to make being stuck on benefits less attractive to those layabouts who’ve built a life off the state, and cut the amount of tax income dished back out to support the poorest, in a root-and-branch shakeup designed to root out those stuck in the cracks and put ever more pressure on us stragglers. Remember, I’m keen to get off benefits and get into steady work, but I’m struggling because whilst I’m a perfectly adequate employee, if I say so myself, the employers always seem to find someone better. But I want to better myself. I know benefit claimants have this image of slovenly, selfish, lazy scrotes who just want to smoke drugs, drink cider and watch Jeremy Kyle, and in my time out of work I must admit I’ve briefly met across a crowded course centre more than a few of that type of loser, but I am not one of those. I refuse to be. The government’s drive to paint us all as scroungers only strengthens my resolve to get out of this world. However, a lot of it is out of my hands – I’m keeping up my end of the arrangement, filling in the forms and going to the interviews – it’s just when the employers make a choice, they’re not choosing me. I do at least have the basic transferable skills and qualifications which could impress an employer – many jobs look for those with at least Maths and English GCSEs, which I have. However, in a sign I am getting older, even GCSEs themselves are soon to be killed off, in favour of the new English Baccalaureate. The news of the move came just weeks after the hotly-debated fall in the exam pass rate after many years of rising success levels. Over past years, the number of pupils getting top grades has gone up year on year, and there has been much debate over the ages about whether this is due to pupils getting smarter or exams getting easier. The likelihood? It’s a bit of both. Exam setters, having noted the feedback to their tests, had over time got their eye in and knew the sort of standard and style the questions should be pitched at to ensure maximum understanding, whilst teachers, aware of the sort of questions likely to turn up, were teaching to ensure pupils could call on the appropriate response, and pupils, knowing what was expected of them, were better able to adjudge how to attack their paper. So there has been a settling on a common standard which has enabled more to reach the appropriate balance to pass. This allowed those involved in education to crow about the ever-rising pass rate, though this has also caused anger with employers and universities, who’d previously been able to use students’ exam grades as a way of sorting the wheat from the chaff in past years, found that now a much larger pool of leavers had picked up high gradings, and that binning off those who were, on paper, less-educated was no longer a way to guarantee you’d only be left with the truly qualified: as a result, there were calls from these institutions, apparently partly heeded by Government, to make the exams tougher and return to a more restrictive banding, with more students to be considered ‘failed’; however, this was soon matched by opposing views that we shouldn’t deliberately move the goalposts at the cost of de-rosying our children’s future. Now, however, and with exam boards and the Education Department criticised in the wake of the downgrade scandal (with Welsh papers now to be regraded, but Westminster refusing to budge on the English equivalents), the powers that be have decided to make another big break and wipe the slate clean just as was the case when GCSEs themselves replaced O-levels in the 80s. Whether this will actually improve society in the long run remains to be seen, but in time those of us with GCSEs among their qualifications will be considered dinosaurs, just as those with O-levels are today. I’d better be in work long before the EBac comes in; the first students start reading for the courses in 2015, if you’re keeping count…

My schooldays were, it seems, comparitively easygoing compared to how kids today have it, though. My schools didn’t have metal detectors at the doors and G4S guards X-raying kids’ bags on entry – but then, back in the 80s and 90s knife and gun crime wasn’t as rife among the youth as it is today, even in south London. I recall usually having a fairly well-stocked pencil case containing a variety of useful tools at various points in my educative career, including pens, pencils, sharpeners, erasers, rulers, protractors, compasses (the drawing kind, not the directional kind, this isn’t Look Around You – though the navigational tools may have helped my orienteering), staplers and even scissors. Half of that stuff kids wouldn’t be allowed to be anywhere near today. (Admittedly, walking around with half a Rymans stuffed in my bag – albeit legally – wasn’t entirely cool, but at least I could get on with my work with minimal fuss and without needing to constantly badger stuff from other people.) Kids today also have a much more stringent choice of what they eat, thanks to Jamie Oliver shocking and shaming the nation into giving kids healthier choices, and packed lunches are discouraged. I, of course, normally brought a lunch with me, and I can vaguely remember what it contained – usually a sandwich, a soft drink (usually juice of some kind), a bag of crisps (or, if lucky, Quavers or Skips), an apple, a nut/oat-based bar (your Trackers and suchlike) and a chocolate biscuit bar (often a Penguin, Kit Kat, Breakaway or Club, or if I’d done something particularly naughty, a Gold) – a fairly balanced mix of food types and groups, covering various nutrients, proteins, carbohydrates, vegetables and sugars. Good luck getting that lot past the lunchbox censors today though, in this age where any fats, salts or sugars are viewed as evil, and where bringing stuff into school that others may be ‘intolerant’ of is frowned upon. My bento was a fairly good grounding, though – even now I’ve continued to apply a similar tonal balance to my lunch purchases, although rather than packing one up in advance I’ll usually be running around a supermarket in a panic trying to pull one together from what’s available on the day; there have been some changes to the actual content too: hard biscuits and crisps I’ve largely given up on thanks to my teeth, which began collapsing long after I’d left education because, whereas while in school daily I’d had reason to care for them, since coming out of regular routine and schedule I’ve been tending them less. But I still like to get a range of flavours and nutrients.

Something else that kids had back in my day but don’t have today was better telly – CBBC and CITV were properly-funded, dedicated zones of often-new programming delivered within main channels on weekday afternoons, Saturday mornings and during the holidays: today, shows made for kids are ghettoized to repeat-heavy, largely careless, underfunded little channels, with ITV in particular having ended almost all investment in children’s output largely thanks to competition from pay channels which, bankrolled by big-name US-based parent companies and advertising from big corporations, have drawn kids’ attention away from the traditional broadcasters. I get the feeling CITV channel is there because it has to be (it allows ITV1 to screen almost no kids’ programming at all), rather than because it wants to be. But then, the recieved wisdom is that kids today don’t want TV, they’ve got the internet. Which, given my cruddy new phone, is more than I’ve got. I know I’m too old for kids’ TV now (though I still watch the likes of The Slammer, Dani’s House, Tricky TV and Horrible Histories – mainly ‘cos most other shows, including those made for my age group, are awful just now – that’s why I’m not replacing my soon-to-be-broken bedroom telly just yet!) But shows like The Slammer, Globo Loco and Tricky TV would probably go down quite well with family audiences in Saturday night slots (the Total Wipeout/TV Burp/Don’t Scare the Hare type of slot) if they were given the chance, rather than being stuck away on digital-only channels down the butt-end of the guide. Even dear old Blue Peter is going digital-only next year, after over fifty years as the almost-literal flagship of BBC One’s output for the young, with the BBC looking to follow ITV in making their primary channel an adults-only affair (albeit not in the Playboy TV sense of the term). The inclusion of a mix of kids’ content in the main channels was a good thing as it enabled kids to move through the schedules at their own pace – trading up from tots’ shows to general childrens’ content then on to older kids’ shows and ultimately to the main evening schedule at their own pace. I was quite a fast developer and by 12 was already watching the likes of The Day Today but also still enjoying shows like Spatz and Knightmare, for instance. Now, however, everything’s very compartmentalised, and only now are the problems of that approach becoming apparent, the BBC recently admitting it was looking to commission some content which would ‘bridge the gap’ between CBeebies and CBBC, with the aim of encouraging kids becoming too advanced for the Tweenies and Rastamouse to trade up to the Beeb’s older-kids offering. It would be a shame if kids were told to stay away from the top of the guide, but the ‘big five’ channels all seem to be on the move towards a homogenous serving of the typical adult viewer.

Conversely, however, radio is getting younger and younger. Heart has had to make its playlist fresher to accommodate the expansion of the brand onto various former local CHR stations’ frequencies, whilst the dance/urban Galaxy station group has dumped the specialist dance shows (which tended to attract older listeners) in favour of round-the-clock pop under the Capital brand. Meanwhile, Smooth Radio, which went to an over-50s easy listening format after absorbing the Saga stations, has now evolved into a classic-pop station for the over-40s as the 40-50 bracket is more popular with advertisers. Real Radio, likely soon to become Heart following a takeover, has dropped football phone-ins in order to narrow the station’s focus to thirtysomething women. Indeed, local radio has become very ghettoised and tightly playlisted – years ago, the independent (and largely independent of each other) stations would have a much wider range of content and shows, including specialist content and magazine features, which you’d be hard-pressed to find today. In the BBC’s public portfolio, Radio 2 has continued its drive of sweeping across presenters considered too old for Radio 1, with Jo Whiley among the latest to make the switch (Sara Cox currently appears across both stations, having covered some shifts for R2 in addition to retaining her Sunday show on R1, for the moment at least). And then of course there’s the big recent news in radio – the move of Chris Moyles away from Radio 1’s breakfast show in favour of modern day hipster kid Nick Grimshaw. You’ll recall that I once used Grimmy as a yardstick for measuring how far past-it for Topman clothing I was – when I realised the clothes in there were the sort of modish chic you’d see Grimshaw being snapped in alongside his showbizzy chums, I realised I was too old for that particular arm of the Arcadia group, and that they wouldn’t be taking any more of my meagre money offshore. And now Nick’s on breakfast at R1. I guess the departure of Moyles – who was the voice of R1, for better or worse, for a decade and a half, including nearly nine years at breakfast – is a sign that, much as when older DJs were cleared out under Matthew Bannister in the 90s, the station is regearing to pick up a new breed of young listener who Grimmy’s generation is more in tune with, and looking to tell longer-serving listeners they can’t stay tuned, no matter if they like the tunes. It’s telling that in one of his final shows, Moyles referred to having recently met 6Music’s Shaun Keaveny (with the inevitable ‘we haven’t heard your show, you’re on at the same time as us’ quip), as though pointing in the digital station’s direction those older listeners binned off by the change of R1 more in the direction of One Direction.

Referring back to my own schooldays, several of which I missed through genuine ill health (again something which would be slammed like a ton of bricks today by the truancy police), I often used to listen to the radio while wrapped up in bed, and in particular Radio 1, where, in the days long before I had access to music TV channels or DAB stations, I developed my love of music and entertainment, and particularly enjoyed the likes of Mark & Lard, who mixed music with comedy and conversation in a very subversive, unique broadcast. Later in the day, I also listened to the likes of the Evening Session, though often had to interrupt this for my evening meal, and even bought a little radio so a family holiday wouldn’t stop me listening to Mansun’s appearance on the first-ever Lamacq Live (though, tired from the long journey, I did in the event manage to sleep through most of the show.) I even contributed to the station – on one occasion Steve Lamacq read out my ‘fantasy festival’ lineup, which as it was the late 90s was topped by the then-still-a-going-concern Mansun. Mark and Lard’s departure from Radio 1 in 2004 was something of a watershed moment for me – it was the sign that R1 was starting to move away from me, an eight-year process that, with the departure of Moyles, has now been largely completed. I will admit that I was not a regular Moyles listener, as radio has not been part of my morning habit – on most days I don’t have reason to be out of bed at breakfast time, and on those days I do have something to do, I’m usually too busy doing whatever it is that may be to require radio entertainment – but his departure, in my 30th year, is a mark in the sand that it’s time for me to say goodbye to a station which has, rightly or wrongly, been something of a soundtrack to my life, in part because it’s one of only a few stations, even this close to London, that I can pick up on FM. Since Mark & Lard’s departure, however, I’ve now got more ways to listen to the radio than on a crackly FM stereo: as I’ve mentioned before, I now have DAB, having bought one some years ago thanks to one of the all-too-few months of paid work I undertook, and can listen to whatever older or younger music takes my fancy, should broadcasters deign to make it available digitally. Admittedly, I can’t afford a portable DAB, and so outside the house am limited to what’s available on FM, but then I don’t really deserve too much of a good thing, now, do I? Of course, many of those I used to listen to on the not-entirely-wireless are still around, with Mark Radcliffe (now paired with Stuart Maconie), Steve Lamacq and Marc Riley (the former Boy Lard) now making up the afternoon-to-evening lineup on the sainted and thankfully salvaged 6Music – indeed, Radcliffe is now back in the afternoon slot he and Riley once occupied in their halcyon days on R1, after he and Maconie were shunted sideways from Radio 2 to release a slot there for Lamacq’s erstwhile R1 sparring partner Jo Whiley – but as it happens I’m not usually available to listen to ‘RadMac’, given that my afternoons are usually taken up sorting out my life – going to interviews, job hunting, picking up family food – even if I’m feeling under the weather (such as when the recent damp storms gave my throat a good seeing-to), I can’t take a day off to recuperate without risking a breach of my jobseeker’s agreement!) Maybe I should make more time to listen to the radio, but fitting it around the rest of my life is going to be a challenge; however, now I’m going to be watching telly less, perhaps this is the point at which I make the decision to switch to sound-only broadcasting. It could help rekindle my appreciation of music – I’ve spoken before about how my purchase of tunes has dried up, not solely for financial reasons but also because of the state the charts are in. Another indication that I should leave modern music to today’s teens and slowly walk away…

Of course, being able to access the full internet occasionally means I also now have, albeit admittedly brief, access to some online radio and podcasts. When Radioplayer launched – you know, the multistation UK web radio interface at radioplayer.co.uk – I dabbled in listening to snatches of stations from other areas of the country, stations which I couldn’t pick up on any of the radio or TV platforms I have at home, simply to hear what these stations were offering – Boogie and Dingo, who appear on various Scottish stations of a Saturday morning, seem quite entertaining, for instance, but I’m rarely lashed to a computer at that time of the weekend so can’t listen in every week, whilst it’s also been good to hear what all the fuss is about regarding The Breeze, which has been hoovering up small radio licences in the south and west of the country (though there’s no real reason for it to hit London given the likes of Smooth and Magic have the melodic angle sewn up in the capital city). Online downloading has also allowed me to collect up radio clips from the past, primarily from websites set up for that purpose (such as aircheckdownloads.com), and also podcasts containing material from programmes, particularly if they’re discussing a subject I’m interested in. For instance, I was able to download Katie Piper interviews from BBC Radio 5 Live and Glasgow-based RNIB station Insight Radio (I’d also listened to the 5 Live feature going out on air), and also picked up, thanks to Twitter, a feature from Welsh station Point FM on which a Katie Piper Foundation supporter spoke about an event she was planning to hold to fundraise for the charity. (It took place at the end of September, so you can’t go now!) Whilst, due to the lack of a scheduled Bexleyheath-to-Rhyl bus service, I wasn’t able to attend the gala myself, I did promote the shindig on Twitter in the hope it would help the word spread and that the sweet young lady’s event would be a success, given the huge amount of effort she’d put in to make it happen. (One of the star guests taking part in the event was former Big Brother contestant and KPF supporter Rebeckah Vaughan, and those who’ve been reading this blog since the early days will remember that name.) And I always like to find ways to support Katie and her projects: hey, much like Katie and her supporters, I like doing things to help others! Which is why having little-to-no practical access to Twitter until I pony up for a decent cellphone is going to be such a problem…

It also means I haven’t been fully able to join the tweet jamboree around a bit of stunt Channel 4 has been doing. Hotel GB, the latest big event in what has been a pretty huge year for Channel 4, sees a group of the channel’s presenters – yes, a certain Ms. Piper among them – running a real hotel and training up young unemployed people to release their potential, should they happen to have any, for hospitality careers, with income from hotel guests going to charities which help the unemployed. Hang on, those exist? That’s information I could have done with ages ago… Still, I always support anything Katie does to help others! Stripped across a week, and with non-participant C4 presenters Sara ‘Born Sloppy’ Cox (hello again!) and Tim ‘Sunday Brunch’ Lovejoy as Twitter cheerleaders for the period, the heavily-promoted show does come across as a bit Big Brother-meets-Crossroads (even the sponsor, printer firm Brother, seems to have been chosen with a nod to the longrunning series which once delivered C4’s high ratings watermark), but it’s good to see the unemployed portrayed as willing to better themselves and take on new tasks and challenges, and they do, in the main, come across as fairly decent people, which is a rare thing to see on telly these days! (It’s clear the chain-gang also have access to the outside world, as one member of the group remarked on the show about a comment on his appearance that he’d seen on Twitter.) It’s also good to see that across this, the Funny Fortnight, the Paralympics (of which more later) and other big shows, Channel 4 is finally starting to find its confidence again; since the departure of Big Brother’s chicken-runs and Friends reruns to apparently-lesser channels, C4 has been somewhat rudderless, and (the beloved Katie Piper aside) hadn’t really had anything fresh or challenging to offer for a good while, becoming too reliant on a hatful of big-hitters (Come Dine, gypsies et al) and losing almost all of its firebrand mojo from its early years. Maybe now the uncertainty of digital switchover is nearly over, and the dust kicked up by the Burns/Abraham/Hunt new-broom is starting to settle, C4 can rediscover a bit of its legendary creativity.

Incidentally, in addition to taking part in Hotel GB, Katie Piper’s also brought out a new book, a library of affirmations, quotes and inspirations under the collective title Start Your Day With Katie. I desperately need some kind words and soothing messages to get me through my rough days, and once again the Piper has delivered! It won’t tell you anything new about Katie or her life that hasn’t already been reported elsewhere, usually by Katie herself, but if you need peace in your mind, this is definitely one to grab should it fetch up in your district. Although, given it’s called ‘Start Your Day With Katie’, I do have to dock points for not making the book jacket look like a cereal box, as per the original printing of Phill Jupitus’ ‘Good Morning Nantwich’, or Sleeper’s ‘Inbetweener’ cassingle. As you’ll see here. it’s been a pretty grim time for me lately and I’m desperately in need of positivity and uplifting words of comfort, and this new book is as close as you’re gonna get to having lovely Katie whispering uplifting mantras into one or both of your ears when you need cheering. Unless you’re her lucky-sod boyfriend, who sees Katie as often as he likes, or at least in those precious moments when she’s not rushing around working on a new book, TV project or a scheme for her charity. See, she does a lot – a lot more than I do, at least…

Although Piper’s been a particularly busy little beetle these last few weeks, another Kate-lady has dominated the news-sphere lately, largely thanks not to her work but to her recent holiday with her husband. You might have heard of him, given that he’s Prince William and his wife – the Duchess of Cambridge, officially – is the lady who’s been in the media spotlight since marrying the about-the-same-age-as-me now-Duke in that big nuptial jamboree everyone was billying on about last year. As you’ll probably have heard, unless you’ve been holed up in a hotel for months, this young lady decided to sunbathe topless – nothing wrong with that in principle, provided you keep a watch out for nipple-burn – in what she felt was the privacy of a fairly secluded villa, only for some enterprising snap-jockey with a superzoom lens to start clicking pics from a road some metres away, in the hope of raking cash from those media organs obsessed with the figures of public figures. Whilst no British-based land publication has (at time of writing) run the shots, the images have begun to infect Europe like a virus after the vile French garbage-rag Closer (a brand-licenced version of the nasty British title, though with separate editorial content from it) broke the seal and defiantly splashed the shots across its spread. This wasn’t the first Royal scandal of recent weeks, of course, with the family name already burnished by Prince Harry’s bare and ribald antics in Vegas, which after much hype on the internet finally broached the pages of the Sun, thanks to Flt Lt Wales’ cameraphone-toting party pals. Now, I’m neither royalist nor anarchist – I accept the presence of the feted family in the same way I accept the presence of a branch of Superdrug in a shopping mall, say, but nor am I a flag-waving monarch-lover who’d kick someone out of my tearoom for not standing at the National Anthem. However, the fact that the once-revered royals are now subject to the same prurient prying as other famous figures says something about the way the media has sunk in recent years, and that’s a topic which keeps bouncing back to these pages; clearly, things are only going to get more evil before they get better, if they ever do – and given the print media is dying out, the chance of improved behaviour is now nil. I’m hopeful that the brand blowback from the K-Middy (yes, they actually call her that) scandal kills off the otherwise non-guilty British Closer, a part of the same toxic empire which farts out the likes of Zoo, Heat and FHM. Whilst the death of the Bauer media group would sadly spell the end for most of the music journalism still ongoing in the UK (well, Q and Kerrang!, at least) and the otherwise-blameless and even occasionally usable Total TV Guide, it would send a message to those remaining practitioners of print that sleaze will not be tolerated any more.

The Kate row, coupled with the ongoing post-Leveson bad blood towards the Murdochs, could yet kill off a 40-year tradition of nudes in the British newspapers: many years after the Sun slammed MP Clare Short for attempting to bring in a ban on Page 3, the models could soon be given the marching order thanks to a new campaign set up by a young woman and supported by an ever-enlargening group of celebrities and political/social spherepersons (both male and female). The new campaign calls on current Sun editor Dominic (yes, really) Mohan to pull the plugs on third-page dollybirds, the campaign establisher pointing out that on a day when women had achieved a phenomenal amount of Olympic sporting success, the largest photo of a female body in the Sun was that of the topless model. This upstanding woman also spoke in her dossier about how the permatanned P3 pretties had given herself and other young ladies a distorted view of body image. The red-top’s ambivalence and double-standards regarding women doesn’t end on the third page but spills over to the back pages too – Private Eye recently pointed out that on a day when the Sun itself had carried a piece by Clare Balding calling for more coverage of women’s sport, the paper’s own sports pages had carried no mention of several women’s sporting achievements in the preceding 24 hours. After the success of Ennis et al, the populace are hungry for strong, heroic ladies to look up to, and after the linen-washing of Leveson the public are wise to the dirty tactics used by publishers to keep their nasty papers in print. Let’s hope that some sense is knocked into the media soon. I don’t want to see Zoo and Nuts reaching the milestone 60th anniversary, as the NME recently did. The weekly music paper has itself been struggling, its once powerful position weakened by competition from the mass of music news and reviews available elsewhere at a much faster speed. It would be a shame if proper music journalism in the UK died, killed off by the twin evils of commercial avarice of publishers and ambivalent indifference of audiences, but with Melody Maker now twelve years gone, and the likes of Select and the Word punctured in the years since, it’s sadly increasingly hard to see NME – which has already shed its digital TV channel – publishing a celebratory 70th-year edition in 2022. If even the Dandy can’t survive, shuttering its print publication later this year after 75 years on the shelf, what hope is there for the actually-younger New Musical Express? I used to read the NME at the height of my hunger for new music in the 90s, and should maybe start picking it up again once my financial fortunes are more sturdy – spending north of two quid a week on a bit of paper probably isn’t the wisest thing for someone in my situation to do, but it’d probably help me enjoy the week a lot more, and like 6Music could point me in the right direction to avoid the rap and RnB which is clogging so many other media avenues.

Something else which has been in the headlines of late, and which a blast radius including but much wider than the print media, is the publication of the long-demanded report into the Hillsborough disaster of 1989. The report has had fallout for the Sun, again – which has been paper non grata in the Mersey lands since its inflammatory initial reportage into the incident; only in the new report does the source of the paper’s allegations emerge, a press release put out by a Sheffield news agency which was based on – as it turned out misleading or doctored – testimony from police looking to shift the blame away from themselves. Despite the paper’s current contrition, the scars still run deep. Of course, the relationship between the police and the press is already in the spotlight thanks to the Operation Elveden investigation into corrupt payments to police and public officials by journalists, which has seen serving and former cops and current and retired journos from papers including the Sun being spoken to by, well, police, with the first charge now issued (though as proceedings are ongoing, I won’t say anything further). There has, as it goes, been quite a lot of discussion of police misbehaviour and corruption lately – for instance, the officer involved in the death of blameless Ian Tomlinson at the 2009 G20 protests has, after being cleared of any offence in court, been dismissed by the force after being found to have breached professional standards – but should he have been on duty at all? This officer, it emerged, had prior black marks including a road rage charge against him, but after an earlier suspension was allowed to rejoin the hardline TSG unit. Meanwhile, a probe by the Independent Police Complaints Commission found over 50 alleged cases of police ‘taking advantage sexually’ of members of the public, presumably by using their position to coerce their victims to comply. Now I’m loath to speak out against the police – those who do question the force are often hauled up before the beak on trumped-up charges – but it’s clear that some of those in the blue are clearly placing themselves above the law, and this needs to be rooted out. Of course, sometimes the police are the victims, and like many others I was shaken by the needless death of two WPCs in a gun attack in Manchester. These officers were doing their duty and had been sent, unarmed, to reports of an incident, only to find they had been lured to their deaths, with the incident apparently linked to a gangland crime feud in the city – though again, with legal matters ongoing, I won’t say anything prejudicial. I will say, though, that after all the bad press the police have had lately, it was pleasing to see there are still good eggs in the police basket, going about their mission without fear or favour. More publically-spirited officers like these, and less like those who only look out for themselves, would improve the public image of the police and reduce tensions, potentially making the officers’ job easier (better relations between the old bill and the great unwashed would, for instance, have defused much of the anger which led to the 2011 riots.)

The deaths of these two constables were just one small part, though, of one of the most gruelling and gruesome months we’ve had to live through in recent times. September, as you’ll probably be aware, is always a bleak month, and not just for those kids who are, after their long jolly, rounded up and parked back in school until at least Christmas. Memories of past tragedies still ring true, and eleven years on the shadow of 9/11 still hangs long in the air, even with reconstruction at Ground Zero itself well underway. Most still hold 11 September in reverence, but not all – in the US, NBC failed their audience by, rather than airing a silent tribute to those lost in the attacks, instead screening an interview with Kris Jenner, mothership of that media-choking evil empire that is the Kardashian klan, on subjects such as cosmetic surgery. This was the same NBC which fouled up their screening of the Olympics and Paralympics by placing their own commercial concerns above the requirements of the sports output – timeshifting Olympic events to air in primetime rather than screening them live in less-valuable slots, then shunting Paralympic coverage to out-of-the-way packages to avoid taking time from shows more desired by advertisers. I’m glad I live in a country that actually gives a damn about sport, even if I didn’t myself until recently. But September 2011 will go down in history as nothing short of a disaster, for many and myriad reasons. The storms which drowned my phone (and nearly took me with them) on my way home did far worse elsewhere: the rains in fact causing massive volumes of devastation around the country; a New Zealander living in London was killed by a storm-loosened branch at Kew botanical gardens, the bodies of a young couple who’d apparently been walking their dogs were found in a river in Wrexham, a boy in Wiltshire was struck by lightning and injured, and a number of people were left homeless as a block of flats in Newcastle was left unstable by flooding, with York also among the areas where roads and homes became rivers. Still nature keeps punishing us, and still we continue to sin; when will we learn?

Elsewhere, there was a staggeringly massive amount of death and disaster flashing up on the news sources during the September just gone: the plane crash in Nepal which killed 19 people (including seven Brits) capped a month which had also seen three generations of a family (a woman, her teenage daughter and the teen’s baby girl) killed in a blaze in Cwmbran which was allegedly started deliberately; a young woman killed in a car fire over which her boyfriend was later arrested (again, legal procedure is ongoing); we had an Irish rugby player killed alongside his father and brother in a slurry-based accident on the family farm (the player’s sister, injured in the incident, led mourners at their funeral). And we’ve seen shocking incidents here in the south east, such as the case of a baby being given a bottle of corrosive substance to drink from in that apparent pit of evil, the Eltham branch of McDonalds. Thankfully, these days I’m rarely in a McDonalds – I’m far too old for that hamburger crap – but if this is the sort of thing that the mentally-ill residents of south London consider acceptable behaviour, then maybe I should review whether I ever set foot in such a place again. There has also, in what’s sadly become a bit of a recurring theme on here, been a slew of death on the roads, too much to analyse in detail, but briefly the fatalities included the death of a driver and two passengers returning home from the Bestival event on the Isle of Wight (I would ask what this means for the future of Bestival, but reports last month suggest that quite a lot of music festivals are set to go to the wall, so there’s only at most a 50% chance of Bestival happening again even had this crash not taken place); elsewhere, two Wiltshire sisters in their 20s died in a road crash on a sadly too literal ‘trip of a lifetime’ to Morocco; a woman in her 20s and a 14-month-old boy were killed in Norfolk; a 20-year-old woman from Leeds was slain in a hit-and-run in that horrible city of Manchester; two separate incidents in Derbyshire claimed lives – one crash killing two including a 16-year-old boy, and another led to the deaths of a five-year-old girl and another aged just 22 months, with a seven-year-old girl and a woman (one presumes the girls’ mother or carer) injured. At the other end of the age scale, a 77-year-old woman was killed in the car park of an Epsom shopping centre. Nobody, it seems, is safe when someone gets behind the wheel. And, again to bring the tragedy closer to (my) home, an 18-year-old woman was killed in Dartford, and her face peering up at me from local papers really brought home how tragic things can turn out if you get mixed up in that hideous drug called motoring. This blog has called many times for more to be done to tackle death and injury on the roads, and still the bodies needlessly mount up; how many more have to die needlessly before someone does something to make our roads safer?

I have been out on the road a lot, pushed from pillar to post by my various demands, and have bleated about the road-based rage from which I’ve been suffering; the above-mentioned Wanker’s Triangle being the pinnacle of my travelling daftness. After one such bellowing session, one of my long-suffering Twitter friends reassured me that journeys tell a good story, and referred to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. As it turns out, I have recently picked up several Austen books, along with some Dickens and Shakespeare, and numerous others – 100 books in all, and they only cost me 4p each. Now that’s a bargain even The Works can’t beat! How did I do this? Well, several weeks before my drowned-phone disaster, I spotted a preowned copy of the ‘100 Classic Book Collection’ on Nintendo DS being offered for four quid in a videogame shop. I’d had my eye on the cart for a while – a quick and convenient way to own a stack of legendary literature in one payment, and without having to reinforce my arms or bookshelf to carry them. However, as a penny-pinching tight sod, I’d always previously talked myself out of actually buying the thing on price grounds. However, when I saw the thing going for under £4, I felt the fiscal cost was now low enough to justify. I got something of a pride from walking around town knowing I was carrying 100 books around with me, and that I’d finally be able to do some reading again, having neglected the printed word along with albums, movies, videogames and other longform entertainments as my life became increasingly fragmented and bitty – I’d just not made time to sit down and do something indulgent for myself, relying instead on squeezing the short-burst blasts of fun provided by TV and, when I could access it properly, the mobile web in around my appointments and home duties. I really should read more books – I haven’t sat down with a big block of fiction for a while, my recent reading matter consisting mostly of Katie Piper’s two books so far this year, and short-shot humour collections (among the likes of Colemanballs, Heroic Failures, and the web-derived Signspotting and Texts From Last Night). So, now I find web-use sluggish and frustrating, maybe I should rediscover my lost love for reading, albeit in part aided by a digital device. Hey, I could even start writing – these blog belches are already approaching chapter-length chunks, which suggests if I flesh out my thoughts a little more fully, one day my pitiful whines may be voluminous enough to find themselves bound between boards. And maybe there’s scope for me to pick up, when time and money allows, more former-tree versions of books, should there still be bookshops available to do so in. I’ll have to grab the print version of one particular tome – as Northanger Abbey isn’t among the Austen works listed in the DS book collection, though Emma – which inspired the oft-mentioned-here Clueless – is present on the card, which is something of a win. And, assuming my chunky old second-hand first-generation DS doesn’t crap out at some point like most electrical gadgetry tends to do in my care, I now have enough reading matter that it’ll take me some years to chew through it all. Wonder if I’ll live long enough to read all 100? And maybe, once I can justify buying a non-wobbly TV, I could get my hands on a DVD of that recent adaptation of Northanger Abbey, which flew past my head on original transmission, given – and my love of Clueless should have been a clue to this – I commonly prefer modern-era movies to period pieces.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, sport is also something which many others enjoy but which has not previously held much truck with me. I mentioned in an earlier post that I’d followed the Summer Olympics with a scale of devotion which surprised me given my previous general ambivalence towards sportive endeavour. And, just a few weeks later, the gold rush resumed with the Paralympics, which again offered a superlative board of activity for me to dinner on between my other bits of rushing around. The lead-up to the opening of the Games saw an event at Stoke Mandeville, the home of the Paralympic movement, at which the flame was hoisted onto stage by a procession of people including one Ms. K. Piper. Which I guess I found a pleasing circle as I’ve been carrying a torch for her for years! But awkwardly Channel 4’s coverage of the event ended due to the next show in the schedule starting partway through the event, sending me scurrying to Sky News of all places to watch the rest of the procession, including Katie’s bit. Still, once the torch had landed in its berth in Stratford, the sports could properly begin, and we were in for a treat. Although the coverage was on a smaller scale than that of the Olympics (just three extra channels rather than 24), there was a pleasing depth of sport available during the period, and it proved something of a test for Channel 4, which pleasingly threw out its daft original plan to break off from sports coverage for several hours in the afternoon for regular shows such as Come Dine with Me, Deal or No Deal and Hollyoaks, instead exiling these to digital channels for the period (for the first time in eight years, you could go a whole day without seeing The Simpsons, a show I have become very tired of given its unending repeat cycle, on Four.) There were criticisms – while the livestream channels were uninterrupted, the main channel’s output was accused of being a rolling highlights show, preferring long slugs of discussion to live output (possibly as studio banter was easier to break into for ads than live events would be) – indeed, the placement of breaks became something of a bugbear for viewers, with one such case I myself saw go out live seeing C4 take its leave from a wheelchair rugby match with just a couple of minutes left to play, so they could fit in an ad break before cutting across to swimming coverage. Of course, some of the discomfort with ads may have been because the earlier Olympics had been broadcast on the commercial-free BBC, and working out how to keep everyone happy – advertisers, viewers, and regulators who monitor the amount of ads in an hour – is an inexact science during unpredictable live shows. But for the most part, the coverage was well-recieved and professional, and certainly did a lot to improve the image of disability sports – and if I’m honest, of sports in general – in the UK. There are many competitors (and in some cases entire events – Boccia springs to mind) for whom the Paralympic shows were their first significant TV exposure, and many fine sportspeople’s careers will have been nothing but enhanced by the output. And it was pleasing to see Britain continuing to celebrate and get behind its athletes just as the country had done for Wiggins, Ennis, Farah and so forth a few weeks prior. There were some astonishing GB performances right across the Paralympics, with storming results from Sarah Storey to Richard Whitehead and from Hannah Cockroft to Ellie Simmonds; Britain has much to be proud of this summer. There were stumbles and awkward moments – the Jason Cundy tantrum for instance (though he later apologised in words, and also atoned in his actions by picking up a medal in a subsequent race.) And, yes, being male, as in the Olympics I found the female athletes not only talented and spirited but also hugely attractive – basketball player Amy Conroy being a particularly beautiful blonde, for instance. All told, the athletes have done a fantastic amount to showcase the breadth of sporting talent this and other countries can offer, and collectively they can be justly proud of their medal wins and the many record-breaking times secured during London 2012’s second phase.

The Paralympics also brought one British woman’s traumatic journey full-circle: Martine Wright was injured in the July 7 2005 bombing on the London Underground, which tempered the mood just a day after the Olympics and Paralympics had been awarded to London. However, after losing her legs Ms. Wright rebuilt her life, and eventually took up seated volleyball, going on to become part of the team representing Britain at the Games. This fine woman’s success proves that trauma can be overcome; if I need further proof, over and above my regular drinking from the well of Katie Piper, that troubles will pass and better days can be built, then Martine is certainly someone to look up to as a hero: in seven years she’s gone from representing the legacy of one of the most destructive acts of evil ever committed on British soil, to representing the great leaps that can be made with strength, self-belief and athletic endeavour. Channel 4’s Paralympic coverage also offered something which was lacking in the BBC’s more deferential output: a comic review, with The Last Leg, the nightly humourous look at the quirkier side of the Games, fast becoming a regular fixture of my evenings thanks to its irreverent and unpretentious style, anchored with some flair by Australian comic Adam Hills, who, as you’ll already know if you’re a Mock the Week viewer, wears a false leg. A leg which, during the course of the series, was emblazoned with the Ghanian flag after the Last Leg team decided to throw their weight behind the African Paralympic underdogs, and which at the end of the series recieved a Cundy-style Union Jack paintjob as a result of a bet with the destined-for-great-things co-host Alex Brooker. Here was a good-natured show, laughing with the athletes rather than at them (indeed several Olympic and Paralympic athletes appeared on the show to poke fun at their own universe) and being all the better for it. This tied in nicely with C4’s remit to be challenging and take an alternative view of the world. Compare this attitude with that of the BBC, where – aside from a couple of Now Show specials slipped out quietly on Radio 4 – comedy was largely absent from the BBC across the period, with Russell Howard recently complaining that the Beeb had effectively neutered comics during the Olympics, his own Good News and his former berth Mock the Week being among the shows, along with Have I Got News for You, that were put on ice over the summer period.

A sector which didn’t enjoy the Olympic/Paralympic period much was the retail sector, which reported low trading figures during August as the expected Olympic bonanza to the flagging high street didn’t come, with most people watching the sports at home, in the pub or live in the Olympic park, and not bothering much with the shops – aside from bolted-to-the-Olympic-entrance megamall Westfield Stratford City, of course. (Incidentally, shortly after the centre opened one media/fashion person whose name evades me revealed on Twitter that they’d been singing the centre’s name to the tune of Tina Turner’s ‘Nutbush City Limits’. I’m cooler than that. I sing it to the tune of ‘Gainesville Rock City’ by Less Than Jake.) However, most centres reported sluggish sales, and despite the strong London 2012 ratings, some Olympic merchandise was left littering the shelves long after the athletes had gone home. The situation in some areas wasn’t helped by the systems put in place to herd event attendees safely and promptly to venues – traders in central Greenwich who hoped for a sales bounce from events held at Greenwich Park were upset that barriers were put up to ferry foot passengers from the station straight to the park, which meant fewer visitors stopped to use the shops in the centre than had been hoped for. Meanwhile, TfL’s scare tactics to get non-Olympic passengers off the public transport network to avoid causing gridlock for those attending events worked too well, with Oxford Street reportedly a ghost town in the opening days of the Games. Elsewhile, as part of the flinging-open of Britain’s doors to celebrate our Olympic host role, there was a temporary lifting some of the restrictions on Sunday shop opening for the Olympic/Paralympic period, and it has been reported that the Government are looking at the pros and cons of relieving the restrictions permanently. Now, as a job-needy retailer I should be all in favour of anything that may make additional shop-work shifts available for grabs, but I can see both sides of the argument in what is something of a political potato. The “keep it special” brigade, driven as ever by religious fervour, are keen to see the day continue to recieve special dispensation, and while some businesses are seeing the potential windfall from expanded hours, some – including Sainsbury’s, as it happens – are against the move, feeling funding extra hours will add to the costs of running their business. Convenience stores, which currently have a freer hand on Sundays due to the restrictions on larger stores, fear the introduction of a free-for-all will rob smaller firms of the one day a week they have the upper hand, whilst politicians are keen to get the private sector to put more people in work and get the still-stale economy growing again. Now, I’m not religious myself, but can see that some would prefer if Sunday was set aside for observance and non-commercial affairs; however, I’m also aware we’re in a multicultural, multi-faith society with each group having their own standard as to what constitutes religious observance and when/how it is undertaken. Additionally, some individuals are more strict than others in the manner they express their faith: personal choice is much more powerful and prominent than it was when the rules were enacted; and the move would make life easier for those whose schedule means Sunday’s the only day they have free to shop. Online retailers are not subject to the trading restrictions and so an easing of the red tape for land-based retailers would help them better defend against this web competition. And of course, much as 24-hour drink licencing didn’t lead to a rash of pubs opening all ’round the clock, so the new move won’t see shops flinging the shutters open willy-nilly; it’s likely that a shop open from, say, 9am to 6pm on weekdays and Saturdays would simply introduce similar hours at weekends; only a few very large stores currently offer round-the-clock opening on Mon-Sat, and it’s probable that only those which already do this would consider expanding to near-permanent opening should Sunday be relieved of its burden. So, in the main I’m in favour of the relaxation of the blocks, to enable people to have the personal choice of how to spend their day, provided that sufficient latitude is left on the books to allow those who wish to use the day as a day of rest or observance to continue to do so. That would be a fairly steady compromise. Maybe, in lieu of a full removal of the rules, a slight relaxation to allow more flexibility could be considered: perhaps a trial scheme upping the allowed hours, from six to eight, say, could be introduced as a stepping stone, to see if retailers and shoppers would welcome such expansion of choice in a normal trading period not skewed by the Olympics, even if the rush and crush predicted ahead of the games didn’t come to pass.

Maybe, perhaps, my slightly bitter September was in part fuelled by the knowledge that, having enjoyed a multi-week banquet of freely-available sporting action featuring the best of the world’s best, it would be four years before I could see sport on TV again, the majority of live sportive action being locked away on pay-to-view channels. Maybe, perhaps, after what had been a fairly pleasant, if rushed, summer, I let the crunch back into a gruelling autumn of bad news, bad weather and bad luck in the job hunt hit me too hard. Maybe, with my advancing age and incoming changes to my income breathing down my neck, and having made too little time to relax, I’d shut out the positive and peaceful voices in favour of those urging me to hurry along and get on with it at too great a speed. Maybe I should take more time to stop and relax. I don’t want to be one of those lazy dolies that just sits around watching trash TV and smoking da ‘erb, I want, much like the jobseekers in Hotel GB, to get out there and make a difference, or at least build myself a more respectable standard of living. And OK, maybe I haven’t got Mary Portas, Katie Piper, Gok Wan and the presence of a C4 camera crew to haul me up to standard, but I could make something of myself if I take a better, more nurtured approach rather than just butting my head rapidly against the crag of opportunity, like a deranged woodpecker trying to burst through a wall in order to unseal the fuel behind. There will be more interviews – the recent rash of appointments and opportunities is why I rarely have time to sit and update this! – and let’s hope they’re not often going to fall on the same day (although it was inevitable, given the high number of jobs I apply for, that something like this would come along at some point.) And it’s not just my job chances which will improve. Although, for the moment at least, reading Twitter (or indeed pretty much any other website) is near-impossible, there are some improving things I can read, such as Start Your Day With Katie or the legendary books on the DS card. I don’t particularly want to go back to reading magazines, which is an evil thing to do, but I could always make time to listen to the radio – we didn’t lose 6Music, but we’ve now got to use it, and if sufficient gap in my rushabout opens up to do so I will do! And, of course, October’s a month to celebrate some of the greatest ladies who have inspired and influenced my life: as I loved Treasure Hunt in the 80s and Clueless in the 90s, it tickled me to discover two of my all-time favourite ladies, Anneka Rice and Alicia Silverstone, share a birthday, 4th October (I would have mentioned this on Twitter on the day itself, but crappy-phone lost connection and didn’t send the tweet, so it’ll be 2013 before I can tip the hat to those ladies, sadly), with the always-adorable Katie Piper’s birthday falling just eight days later on the 12th. October babies are clearly the most beautiful. (I was born in March. Go fig.)

Of course, I could sit here and whine all day about my problems (in fact, I just have), but there’s always someone who has it worse – and even if that’s not true right at this moment in time, the likelihood is your ancestors, who had to live through all kinds of hideous situations, would consider your modern-day troubles a piddle in the ocean compared to their trauma. Whilst life-altering war and conflict is a near-continuous part of our world, most of the worst atrocities are not taking place in the western world, which gives those of us who only see these events on screen something of a separation, a distance, from what’s going on on the ground, the emotion only really hitting home or the headlines when it’s one of our own noble fellas, having done the ultimate and finite tour of duty, being solemnly flown back to Brize Norton in a military coffin. But of course, in the 1940s the war came to our front door, with death and destruction causing untold misery and huge disruption to daily life; only those who lived through it can truly understand the horror. One project which aims to bring the wartime experience to our modern eyes is the BBC Two series Wartime Farm, which has co-opted a Hampshire farm to run it pretty much entirely as it would have been in WWII, silage, land girls, pig clubs and all. And it really brings home how good we have it now – even those of us who are far from millionaires have it far too easy, I have far too free a choice of what to do, where to go, what to eat, what to spend my meagre pittance on. Watching the episode on rationing, I became convinced such a scheme should be reintroduced today, to give the state more control over what people eat and reduce overconsumption and cut our Earth-destroying reliance on fatty convenience foods. But then, would that be a step too far given our victory in the war (sorry for the spoiler if you’re following the show in realtime) allowed us the very freedoms we today squander? Wartime Farm also has a high emphasis on make-do-and-mend, with everything from bedding to toys to farm machinery made from scraps lying around, given much of Britain’s production capacity had been turned over to the war effort. Today’s Primark-to-Poundland buy-cheap-and-throw-away culture has created waste mountains and a lazy populace who don’t really care about durability. OK, it’s a lot harder to sew together a broken mobile phone and get it working again, unless you’ve got specialist equipment, than it is to rebuild a ripped pair of trousers, but it’d be nice to see Brits today learning a bit of humility and honouring their fallen forebears by being that little bit politer and less selfish with their use of resources.

And maybe, whilst I’m not a wartime baby, I could take the hint and live in the past a little bit more – by going back to the way I used to be in my gangly history before I had access to mobile phones and the internet. Whilst Ceefax isn’t coming back as a means of getting the news – it’s been unavailable to me since switchover from Crystal Palace in April and dies altogether with Northern Irish switchover at the end of October – I could maybe go back to the me-against-the-elements, mano-a-mano days I used to have before I had the web in my pocket, when I’d be waiting for the bus to school not knowing when it’d come, with no access to the latest headlines, no ability to chat to people on the other side of the region, nation or world, and no music to listen to on the journey. (Well, actually, my MP3 player still works, but I could always leave it at home for that true 90s experience…) I’m a spoilt brat now compared to my childhood – I didn’t even have the means to get my thoughts and feelings out to the wider world ’til I started blogging in 2006 – and perhaps dropping back to only having the fewer media options available to me in my youth will teach me to be less wasteful with my time. Perhaps it would be wrong to buy a new phone right away, and I should keep on using that crappy one that doesn’t work properly and can’t even ruddy wake me up in the morning – it may be frustrating, nay near impossible, to use, but it’s what I’ve earned. Anything better would be wasted on a rapscallion like me. So I’ll see you around – just don’t expect too many tweets from me for a while. And, as I probably won’t get to say this on Twitter, happy birthday (for the 12th) Katie Piper, and thank you for being the sweet, kind, pretty lady you are and always have been. (And no, I’m not just saying that to get a free Hotel GB-style massage, even though I probably quite badly need one!) And that’s enough!

“How could you eat that goo? You don’t know what galaxy it’s from!” (Goodbye!)

“The sun’s out and we’re in an opticians – it doesn’t get any better than this!” (Hello!)

Mark’s got one and Ulrika’s in the lead with two! Today I want to talk about how I’m moving towards improving my life. Thus far my journey’s been half a step forward and ten steps back – every time I try and fix something, yet more falls apart, and it’s been a real struggle just getting up in what passes for the morning. But now I’m starting to see some light through the cracks in the tunnel wall – better things may yet be on the horizon, and once again a certain oft-mentioned lady has been helping me brighten my vision.

So, you’ll recall that last month (May, bro) I told you about a book I was eagerly awaiting (well, technically, by the time the post went up the thing was already on the way here, but you get the idea…) It’s a self-help book, and as you should know by now folks, I desperately need help! The book in question is authored by someone who has, thanks to her prominence in my life, been getting a helluvalotta mentions on this purple page since it started, the one and unfortunately only Katie Piper. (That’s not strictly true – there is another young lady named Katie Piper on Twitter, who gets substantially fed up with people who can’t tell them apart sending her congratulatory comments whenever ‘our’ Katie turns up on telly.) But, returning to the book at hand: it’s called “Things Get Better”, and that’s clearly something I need to remember given how difficult I’ve been finding life lately. The book is crammed with intelligent affirmations and quality advice for living more happily and building oneself back up from even the worst of troubles, and is packed with the kind of warm and welcome advice I’ve been desperate to find from somewhere. If you’ve been on here before, you’ll know I’ve been looking to improve my faltering lot in life, and maybe the coaching hand of someone I trust and admire will help drag me over the turnstile.

I should admit I’ve not really put much faith in self-help books before, because I wanted a more solid solution to my problems, and I’d swallowed the recieved wisdom that these kind of books would be a bit of a hippy-dippy, happy-clappy way of handling my business; they were the sort of thing other people read, but which I swerved. But I decided to dip a toe into the water for the one with Katie’s name above the door, and I’m glad I did; on initial reading, it seems this could be the solution I need, or at least a way of opening the door to it. I don’t know how the lady does it, but once again Piper and her self-helpers (in this case, publisher Quercus) have hit the nail on the head, and found a way to really speak to the root of my problems. Obviously the things I’ve gone through aren’t quite the same physically as those Katie herself has had thrust upon her, but a lot of the underlying feelings are the same – in 2008, following her assault, Katie was sat in hospital feeling depressed and in pain, as she has revealed in this and her previous book; whilst at the same time, I was out of work, unwanted, failed and alone – I really couldn’t see a positive way out. Back then I could really have done with help and support, kind words and advice, but I had none – I wasn’t yet on Twitter and had largely given up on MySpace, I had few friends I could turn to, and I hadn’t yet discovered the benefit of allowing myself to accept self-help books or professional advice into my life. I’m one of those people who doesn’t really admit to my issues to anyone in power – I haven’t been to see anyone medical in years, despite my declining health – and so around 2007/8/9 I was really at the depths of my despair. With hindsight, maybe I should have done more at the time to sort my life out, but back then I wasn’t spending much time thinking about the future, I was just trying to get by day to day. It was only after Katie had entered my life, by way of sharing her journey of recovery with the viewers of something called Channel 4, that I chose to reclaim more of a place in society for myself – I reopened my MySpace for long blogs before subsequently transferring that operation to here, and I also joined Twitter to share comments, observations, fun, links, jokes, affection, admiration, and latterly relentless discordant shouting, with my flexible pantheon of followers. I’m not exactly the best at Twitter, but being around a larger group of people more often has been a positive step for me, and has helped me get involved in positive actions (most visibly when I got involved in the march to salvage BBC Radio 6 Music from the chopper’s block).

Hopefully, over the coming months I’ll be able to use the Piper book as a way to work through my issues and face up to my problems. A lot of my worries are quite petty, or things I shouldn’t really have a problem with if I was a normal human, as anyone unlucky enough to be a regular reader of this thing will know. But with the advice offered in “Things Get Better”, I can finally start to piece myself back together and confront some of the things I’ve been doing wrong. Once again, Katie’s going to help make me a better person. What a superstar she is! Since Katie fell into my radar in late 2009, thanks to her striking Channel 4 documentary of the time, I’ve been making changes to my life: I’ve become more respectful of women, and have massively reduced my consumption of magazines, those evil, spiteful media products that exploit and endanger women for profit; I’ve also expanded my intake of media and begun watching more documentaries about inspiring people and difficult situations: you’ll have seen me mention the various shows on here and Twitter (and previously the old MySpace blog) around the time of their broadcast, but it’s fair to say that Katie opened my eyes to people with a story to tell, most recently Terri Calvesbert, a now-teenager severely burned in a house fire shortly before her second birthday, who featured in a recent Channel 5 documentary as part of their Extraordinary People strand. You can probably still look it out on Demand5 if you’re quick – though by the time this post goes live, Terri may have dropped off the on-demand listing (or a new ice age may have begun, I really don’t have a regular schedule here…) Terri has in fact been featured on TV before, but this was the first of her films I’ve seen in full. Prior to Katie Piper’s case being chronicled by C4, I’d again followed the herd in assuming these kind of documentaries gawped at and exploited their subjects, not helped by their usually frank and off-putting titles (designed to catch the slow-witted slackjaws who choose their TV viewing based solely on the first few words of the programme title, the modern equivalent of judging a book by its cover.) Now, though, I’m more open-minded. My opinions, personality and judgements have evolved in the time that Katie’s been in my life; although I already had a pretty broad, welcoming, inclusive view of what beauty and quality were, my scope was further widened by the light Katie shone on the world. I am undoubtedly a better person because of this wonderful lady. So I trust her completely and unequivocally, and so, despite having previously dismissed self-help as a hippy fad, I accepted Katie’s latest book into my world – and it’s proving to be something I could find very useful! I need to rebuild my confidence and be a stronger person, and “Things Get Better” is going to help me. So, yet again, thank you Katie – once again you have proved yourself to be a lifesaver!

One way in which we can all be blessed by the warming words of wisdom from the electronic text-mouth of young Katie (and yes, she is younger than me, albeit slightly) is over the much-garlanded social conversation network Twitter, where she shares her wisdom, her latest projects and the events of her daily life with her ever-swelling band of followers. Her following is now so extensive that it’s common for the poor lass to be overwhelmed with feedback (though to be fair it’s not difficult to accidentally overlook Twitter messages, I have one-onehundredth the size of Katie’s fanbase and I’ve missed the occasional one on first glance…) However, it’s proved to be a good way for wonderful Katie to mobilise her adoring fanbase in a positive way, as proven by the recent Katie’s Army campaign, where the gorgeous one has been dishing out tasks to her followers, who then respond with the ways they’ve contributed to the campaign. Lovely. But it must be admitted I’m not conversing with Katie much myself – though often this is because I’m simply not on Twitter at the same time as she is! Of course, Katie’s got other things to occupy her time, such as her charity campaigns, her books, her public speaking, her documentaries and her personal life – I’m single, so I have time to spare on electronic frippery, whilst Katie actually has real-world friends, a strong relationship with her family, and, as she’s revealed in recent interviews, currently (at time of writing, so don’t snap at me it changes) has a boyfriend. Brilliant to hear that Katie is getting the love and affection she genuinely deserves – she’s a warm, kind person and I want her to enjoy the very best in love and success; the only thing I could be upset about is that the boyfriend is not me! But, y’know, I’m not ready to be tied down yet, I’ve got a lot of irons to sort out before I deposit myself on the desk of the dating game, as you’ll have seen here previously. Anyway, as you may know I’m looking to cut my Twitter use down quite extensively, so in future the chances for my joining the Piper-fuelled good-deed jamboree may be limited. One of the reasons I want to be a Twitter quitter is the return of that truly evil television event, Big Brother. I’ve been deliberately trying to avoid this year’s recently-opened civilian series and the housemates therein, because I don’t want to make the mistake I’ve made pretty much every year of getting overly upset about their behaviour and ranting about it. I’ve frequently savaged Big Brother and its participants in the past; I now need to recognise that this is not right, and that I should instead simply seek to remove myself from the arena; if that means largely avoiding the internet, or at least those parts of it where the horrendous show is likely to be discussed, then so be it; I guess I can rejoin my lovely followers, and of course the gorgeous Katie, once Elstree’s been cleared of wannabes.

That said, is it right for me to take a total-aversion strategy? I do need to find a way to get on with my normal life when circumstances dictate otherwise: this summer, the Olympics will turn Britain upside down (though I’m far enough away from major Games venues that I should, concievably, be able to continue with my normal daily operations in some form); however, with this, Euro 2012 and Wimbledon among the events ongoing or upcoming, it’s not a good summer for those who choose to not be a sports fan, and I may have to suspend myself from access to the web for most of the season in order to allow space for those who wish to talk about the sporty stuff to do so. Or maybe I should just carry on, let people do their thing and let myself do mine, and let those comments and issues which don’t interest me pass by without pressing my buttons? I’ve already, as noted before, learned to stay well clear of Twitter during the Saturday-night talent shows, but now I’m going to have to figure out how to strike a balance. Staying off Twitter for days or weeks at a time may be good for my health, but it may also mean I miss out on the friendship and companionship the site provides. Mind you, ranting and getting upset also drives people away, so I need to reach the happy medium – retain a visible presence in the lives of the lovely people, but reduce the level of needless upset. It’s going to be a difficult balance to call, but hopefully once I’m in a better mental state (with the aid of “Things Get Better”, obviously) I’ll be better placed to make the judgement. I’ve been too quick to judge people in the past, slamming those who’ve taken part in the likes of X Factor and Big Brother solely based on offhand Twitter comments or breathless tabloid garbage, and I need to remember that when this is going on, it’s OK for me to take a step back and not OK to get angry or frustrated. So if it takes me a while to answer your Twitter message, don’t worry, I’m not ignoring you, just avoiding Big Brother/sport/X Factor for my own health and the safety of the wider web community. It’d also be wise to give magazines a wide berth: around this type of year men’s mags and tabloids feed their pages with recycled shots of half-dressed Big Brother wannabes, and steering myself away from Smith’s is probably a smart move in the circumstances. I even had to stop reading women’s magazine Reveal (which I’d started reading for its weekly Katie Piper page) because too many (in my view) of its non-Piper pages were taken up by reality shows and celebrity pap. It’d be nice if there was some printed product you could buy that was all-Katie, but that won’t happen unless she brings a book out or something…

It is quite a frustrating life I lead, though. The job hunt is still a bit rotten for those of us who’ve made the with-hindsight stupid mistake of pursuing a career in retail. Two of the three firms that have at some point employed me for money have recently gone into administration and closed swathes of their branches. (The third is likely quaking in its boots. Although it’s not Boots, which was one of the many hundreds of stores to turn me away.) With the economy still not really recovered from the slouch it’s been in since 2008, employment opportunities in my sector (or, if you’re American, sect-OR) have withered away to almost nothing, and yet there’s little scope for my retail-heavy CV allowing me to shift sideways into another field. Maybe I should look into expanding my horizons – but in the current climate, when even people who are qualified for jobs aren’t getting any luck, should I waste time trying to achieve something it’s plain to see I’m not yet qualified for? And then of course there’s a lot about the hunt which is in the hands of employers, many of whom would rather save money by overloading their existing employees with tasks (to the extent, warn experts, that the amount they’re taking home to do in their supposedly-free time is becoming a hazard to their health) as this is cheaper than hiring in the current climate. Added to that, the current (at time of writing) Government, not noted for being particularly fond of those of us struggling on benefits, is looking to make it even harder for those of us clinging to the arse of society to survive, whilst also making it easier for employers to cut loose the deadweight employees who are clinging to their posts by their fingernails. I already have to do a lot of rushing about just to keep the job-hunting wolf from the door, applying for whatever happens to turn up, and I can’t afford to be too discerning. Even applying for jobs can be difficult – limited library opening hours restrict the times I can actually carry out job hunting, and even sending an application by post isn’t an easy thing, as I found when I wanted to send a CV in an A4 envelope, and it took me two days to find a shop that sold the large-letter stamps. That was the source of one of my needless, should-be-cauterised rants on Twitter recently, when I made the mistake of thinking it was OK to try and buy stamps at 6pm on a Sunday. Unless you’re looking for regular-size ones, it isn’t. I feel I’m being forced into making stupid choices and bending too far backwards when it comes to the hunt for a reason to live. How do I find some way to prove my existence isn’t completely futile? When will I ever get away from spending ninety percent of my day surrounded by the infirm, criminal, teenage, elderly or mentally ill people I currently have to liaise with at every step of my day – from the bus, to the library, to the jobsearch centre, I’m not exactly rubbing shoulders with ambassadors here…

Away from the jobsearch, I’ve also taken on more duties at home, and the pressure I’m now under has frequently brought me close to collapse. You’ll recall how, over time, various failings and failures around the house have conspired to limit my ability to make food choices when buying for the family – the problems with the oven meaning our food has to be microwave-friendly, and a moody freezer meaning everything has to be fresh, chilled or canned. Now there’s been another balls-up. As you’ll know if you’re up early of a Thursday, I’m now usually responsible for putting the bins out; thus far this year had gone without a hitch, but suddenly at the start of June we fell out of step with our neighbours in the cycle of collection; I’d put out our non-recyclable waste, which is taken fortnightly (with recyclables collected weekly) in accordance with the house calendar, which my mother had put together; when it transpired that something was amiss with the collection schedule, I initially worried that the council had, without informing us explicitly, swapped around the collection weeks. I was really worried about how I’d break the news to mum that I’d messed it all up, and (much as with the power outage in the last update) considered extreme solutions such as running away from home in order to dodge the drama. When mum got home and reviewed the situation, however, it turned out to have been her fault – she’d missed a week off while compiling the calendar, and as a result I’d been working to duff information. Whilst the calendar problem was easily rectified, to put us back on the correct cycle from the following week, there was the issue of our missing a collection, meaning we would be overflowing with waste by the time the next pick-up rolled around. So for the next few weeks at least I’ve got to be even more pushy with myself than before when shopping, buying as little as possible of items in disposable packaging, and limiting my purchases solely to items in recyclable containers such as cans. Whilst this could be a good habit to get into – keeping it up would help us send less garbage to the bin in the long-term and reduce our environmental impact (albeit not by as much as stopping eating altogether) – it does add further restriction to my already-difficult food-buying technique. I’ve told you before that I suffer quite badly from the shakes in supermarkets – horrible, nasty places full of evil, anger, resentment, petulance, arrogance, selfishmess and, if you’re lucky, a bakery counter. That probably sounds a bit strange, but I genuinely fear others – I’ve led myself to believe that other contestants, and even sometimes staff, are intent on harming and destroying me – my social anxiety means that I can’t walk past other, younger, louder blokes without assuming they’re going to flip out a knife and slice me up like a ham shank. I’m not good at being around other people, as you know, and having to be in a big supermarket virtually every other day (and sometimes more often) is draining my energy to the point that I’m not sure I have the ability to carry on. I’m a little back-to-front, you see: when I was younger I was actually more fearless and adventurous than I am now, and now I barely emerge from a few super-local towns. There are loads of places I used to go to back in my teens that I haven’t been in years: the cinema… the dentist… Croydon… I used to want to push the boundaries, see how things were done in other towns, roam around absorbing the culture (or at least the hamburgers) of wherever I could get to within the day using my bus pass. Now I barely leave the house. I desperately need to remember that things could get better: here again, instead of taking the daily grind to heart, I could instead relax and rely on the advice given by Katie Piper in her new book. Best investment in my life? Probably…

Of course, my problems are petty and trivial compared to the horror faced by people around the country and the world. (Yup, it’s this month’s news-bit. Sorry.) There have, yet again, been a string of attacks, assaults, accidents and incidents which have proved just what a nasty and devious little world we live in. One story which proved particularly difficult on the old heart-valves was the Oxfordshire crash involving a vehicle in which two sisters were travelling with their husbands and father; the three men were killed and the two women severely injured. Their lives are in tatters – not only do they have the agony of their own recovery to come, they also have to cope with the anguish that the men they loved and the man who raised them are all gone. It is possible to bounce back from the deepest tragedy, as Katie Piper has proved, and perhaps when I get bogged down into stories like this I need to return to Piper’s publications to remind myself that there is a way back from trauma. I’m not mentally well and do tend to wallow in horrible stories – I’ll often spend a time wading through news websites and TV text services, primarily as a way to fill time, and also to keep up with the news to the degree I feel required to by society – much of my disquiet with Big Brother in recent years has come through obsessively keeping up with what’s happening, despite not watching the actual shows! Maybe I need to keep telling myself it’s OK to hold back from immersing myself in the sour side of society; it’s important to keep up with what’s going on in the world, but I’ve been taking it too far and pushing myself to worry about things I have no control over, events on the far side of the country I can’t prevent or help with, incidents which I have no input to, problems I’m not able to solve: you’ll have seen some of them mentioned here in the past. Maybe I need to learn how to disconnect myself from the mayhem and focus on those things I can do more about. For instance, I shouldn’t get upset about this Chris Brown / Drake bar-brawl in the US – the two R&B singers apparently getting into a scrap involving beer bottles, bad blood between the chart-storming idiots having presumably been brewing given both had previously dated media empress Rihanna, someone who is herself never all that far from the headlines. Even baseball or basketball star Tony Parker (you know, the one who was married to one of the Desperate Housewives) was caught up in the glassy crossfire! Needless to say, my boycott of Brown’s music continues – and now Drake’s been added to the ban-list. With my continued ill-feeling towards those British rap dweebs N-Dubz, maybe I should try and cut urban music out of my life altogether? Of course, that’s almost impossible – almost all music TV channels and radio stations are dedicated exclusively or principally to playing RnB and hip-hop, with supply of rock and alternative having dried up to almost nothing. (There are reports Global Radio and GMG Radio could be merged, presumably largely so Real Radio and Heart can be combined, and it’s likely that GMG’s Real XS and/or Global’s Xfm may be sold off or closed down to appease regulators if opposition to the deal on competition grounds is raised, sacrificing unpopular and commercially unviable rock licneces so that the enlarged firm can trade primarily from mainstream stations. A deal has yet to be done, though, and could still yet be blocked…)

Maybe I should get away from music and the media entirely and enjoy a different kind of song. I’ve mentioned before how I’d like to relax and listen to the birdsong, and even that requires a decision: having been looking up stuff about birds, there’s a lot of conflicting advice – some suggesting food and water should be left to enable birds to survive when natural food sources are limited, others indicating that humans should not interfere with natural feeding patterns or locations lest the avian friends become too reliant on human provision of sustenance and unable to fend for themselves. I’m not a birdwatcher, but it’d be nice to know I’m doing something that recognises the requirements of a species. I could of course look online for information on our chirpy garden friends, though last time I typed “looking out for tits” into Google, let’s say it didn’t end well… I’m not sure I could become a full-line twitcher, but maybe I could do more for our feathery chums; Challenge has recently been rerunning Sky1’s series “Bill Bailey’s Birdwatching Bonanza”, one apparent benefit of the channel’s acquisition by Sky, and maybe I should tune in next time the show turns out on the gamey channel’s schedule; alternatively, I could pick up some kind of basic birding book or magazine to see if I have a future in beak-spotting. I did spot a bird-themed book going cheap (low in price, not vocalising) in Asda during a food run, but wasn’t able to buy it as it didn’t have a barcode – I’d have had to make an especial trip to the entertainment desk specifically to buy the tome with a tit on the cover, and my family would probably not want to go without food for two days as a result of my newfound respect for our chirrupy mates. Maybe instead of wasting money on magazines that are too fixated on the wrong (i.e. human) kind of tits, I can help support a different kind of bird by flinging the RNIB a few quid occasionally, so that I can feel I’m doing something worthwhile; however, I won’t be able to commit to a major financial outlay on nestboxes and feeding trestles, either my own or in kind through a charity, until I’m in a proper sturdy job; that’s why I don’t give as much to the Katie Piper Foundation as I’d like to. (Instead of firing cash at Katie’s charity myself, I support her work by promoting Piper’s activities and fundraising missions, such as Katie’s recent charity run or the charity cover version of ‘True Colours’, on Twitter and elsewhere.) But I do want to help protect the non-golf birdies – there’s a real danger that in a few years time, the only time those of us living in Britain’s excessively built-up areas will hear birdsong is if a digital radio station goes out of business. I did find something fun while looking up bird-related information: the collective name for a group of goosanders is a dopping. A dopping of goosanders. Sounds brilliant, doesn’t it? Actually, it sounds like an old-time crime – you can imagine a judge bearing down on the defendant and bellowing: “You are charged with wilful dopping of innocent goosanders. How do you plead?”

I should plead guilty, incidentally, to being party to, if not always personally responsible for, the demise of several of nature’s more slimy creatures; no, I haven’t been going around killing Big Brother contestants (well, not while I’m awake, anyway) – I refer to our slow-moving garden companions, snails. The recent damp year we’ve endured (it’s been the wettest 2012 on record, so far) has brought a frequent supply of snails to our front steps, and while I myself do try to avoid flattening them, mum and brother are not so delicate and tend to steam right through: many a day, I’ve picked my way down to fetch my lunch and been greeted with a trail of cracked shells and carcasses left behind by the various boots of my relatives. Indeed, while I try to dodge those that I spot, occasionally one tucked in a corner catches me by surprise, or one happens to get in the way of the wheels while I’m dragging the bins out at still-technically-asleep-o’clock of a Thursday. I do feel a little guilty, even though the needless massacre of these sluglike invertebrates is so commonplace as to have been featured in television adverts (remember that ad where the human woman stepped on a snail in full view of its heartbroken partner? I do, and it may or may not be on TVArk or YouTube if someone’s bothered to upload it…) I just need to be able to square my desire to protect the sanctity of life with my desire to carry on about my own business. On similar skein, the recent brief heatwave that interrupted the start of May led to a baby boom in the ant’s nest which seems to have sprung up under our house, and this in turn led to the kitchen being almost insanitarily crammed with the beggars for a couple of days. Making the dinner was a real balancing act then, I can tell you…

I’ve also been trying to get to grips with the balancing act of communication. As you’ll know if you’ve been reading this post rather than using it as a coaster, I’ve been trying to weigh out the correct degree of Twitter use, but I’ve also been trying to widen my communicative operations, such that I can express myself in more than the overcompressed and shrieky 140-character medium. I try and bark out beefy posts here, but the tough time-juggling I put myself through means I can only crank out one of these chewy panels a month; I’d like to do more, but when would I write them – and can I really demand any more of your time to read them? You’d be much better off reading a certain Channel 4 broadcaster’s new self-help tome, that provides much more useful information to the world than this embossed turd of a blog ever could! Elsewhere, I’ve recognised that I’ve been neglecting one of my non-Twitter friendships; a longstanding chum that I’d met, almost by chance, on the then-very-basic mobile web back in the early days of my mobile phone ownership (phownership?) and who I’d been sharing texts, letters, presents and suchlike with ever since. However, in the days before I was using Twitter and blogging, the poor lamb who had mistakenly agreed to be my closest friend also had to cope with being a soundboard for my increasingly-frantic panic and confusion as I tried to deal with my increasingly-difficult life. As my life’s steadily and slowly fallen apart, I was reliant on this person to help coax me down from the roof when things I didn’t like (and remember, this was me, so it was all sorts of petty, needen’t-worry-about crap) happened to happen, and I could tell over time that my reliance on her as a problem-solver was starting to make her weary, and our friendship weakened (though has always remained civil). We used to have nice chats – either via a series of texts, or via occasional handwritten letters (which presumably she’d barely have been able to read, given my spindly scrawl – let’s just say if this blog was handwritten, it’d be even less readable than it is now), in which I shared comment about my life and events, whilst also professing my admiration for her continued friendship and affection. Since I joined Twitter, of course, I’ve not needed to abuse this person’s friendship as a means of problem solving, and as a result, and given that the lady herself is not on Twitter, my communication with this chum of more than a decade has begun to drop off as I’ve spent more of my ‘free’ time online (albeit, as I’m unemployed, none of my time is technically free, I belong to the state) and less time on texting and postal communications than I once did. I’m part of that drive online that has put up the price of stamps, led to cuts in the postal service, and killed off retail on the high street, as, usually, the only things that come through my letterbox aside from job rejection letters are books/CDs that I’ve had to order from Amazon because it’s cheaper than buying them on what’s left of the high street! So I’m killing the postal services and music stores that I once relied on. Fantastic!

But anyway, in the fullness of time I realised that if I didn’t try to reconnect and rebuild non-Kevin bridges with this particular chum, our friendship may lapse and I’ll lose someone I continue to genuinely hold dear. It’s happened before: one of my earlier good friends, that I met (while we were both kids) on holiday and kept in touch with for a while after, by post as this was the pre-mobile era, has long since disappeared into the fog of history, because I stopped writing to her (most of my friends have been female, what of it?) The reason I stopped getting in touch was because I felt I didn’t have much to say – my daily routine back then was wake up, go to school, come home, watch the Krypton Factor, go to bed, so I didn’t have interesting new things to share. Eventually the supply of things to talk about dwindled to the extent that this friend ceased to really be one, and I was alone again for some years, until my subsequent more recent friend emerged from the bowels of my then-fairly-new phone. Now I have Twitter, there are quite a lot of good people in my life, more than I’ve ever had around me before, who offer support and kindness, but that good feeling is tempered by the sadness that if I don’t do more I could again lose someone who’s been a huge part of my life, from before Twitter, before blogs, before Katie Piper, before practically anyone else. So I decided it would be good to send this lady a proper big letter for the first time in a long time and explain in no uncertain terms that I still wanted her to be part of my life, should she wish to reconcile. I’d been planning the letter for a while, but as you’ll know from the roughly-monthly appearance of these digital missives, I have to squeeze my longer writing in around my other rushing about, meaning I had to cram the massive letter into a late-night weekend scrawling session, making it even more unreadable than my postal communications would usually be. Additionally, my gesture was somewhat trumped by the actions of one Katie Piper, who – between me deciding to send the letter and actually getting around to writing it – set her followers the task of getting back in touch with someone they hadn’t spoken to in a while! Get out of my brain, Piper! But while I’d already had the will to write, maybe this “Katie’s Army” task was the push I needed to actually dig the lined A4 out from wherever it was and start scribbling on it with ink (nothing fancy, just some cheaply-sold ballpens). Incidentally, while I had the pen and pad out, I also wrote a nice letter to Katie Piper, sent via her charity’s premises, thanking her for her lovely book and explaining the impact it’d have on my life, in a far more verbose way than I could put across on Twitter.

And now technically I’m writing again, to you, my technically unknown (as it’s not a dialogue) but still very welcome reader. I’m not good at writing these things, as you’ll know having waded through what you’ll be pleased to hear is the majority of this one, and potentially one or more of my past entries. But how should blogs be phrased? Should they be fired out in short, specialised, daily bursts or thundered out as big, swirling, monthly trout like what I do now? Should they be presented as letters, personalised diarised entreaties to a notional individual, or broadcasts, beaming out a continuous stream of generic babble that the available audience can tune into (or, more likely, out of) a segment at a time? The way I currently structure these are essentially a mix of the two – they’re basically broadcasts, where I start barbling on at the top of the page and carry on bellowing the news, facts and opinion until I eventually run out of steam and switch off the keyboard, but they’re also rather personal – not to you per se, as these are posted for the world (or a portion thereof) to see rather than being addressed to an individual, but to me – they include the sort of highly personalised admissions and confessions that most normally-balanced people would save for one-on-one conversations with a friend or medical professional. It’s basically Channel 4’s ‘Embarrasing Bodies’, but presented in text rather than video, and examining my flaky, painful life rather than some poor sod’s mouldy genitals. Although as the EB website probably gets more hits in a week than this violet bleating gets in a year, I think the telly-docs have won this one. In any case, I just hope Channel 4 does some more shows with Katie Piper; they’re bringing back The Undateables for a second bounce, which is good, but nothing says it’s gonna be a good week like seeing Katie on the broadcast schedule! More4 did recently repeat three-quarters of the series of “Katie: My Beautiful Friends”, and the whole whack is available on 4oD if you’re one of the few women or men in Britain who hasn’t yet seen the show.

I’ve mentioned before how I once tried to get myself on an admittedly much more local broadcasting schedule, when I signed up to get involved with a voluntarily-run local community station in my neck of the area, only for the station to run out of funding and close down transmission before I could get my finger to the live fader. My long-held long-term ambition to do more creatively and intelligently, and use my knowledge of and passion for music and communication in a positive way, has had to take a back-burner in order for me to devote time to the hunt for paid work in the heavily-bleeding high street, and my only real flirtation with anything semi-professional in the media circus was my penning in 2009 of five-and-a-bit articles (five of my own and a contribution to a collaborative piece) on the now-no-longer-updated TV commentary site http://www.offthetelly.co.uk – if the archive’s still up, which it may be, click on Features and look for my name. I’ve always been fond of the media, but always been realistic enough to know that my chances of working therein are slimmer than a Rizla designed by Kate Moss; you have to know the right people to get into the highly competitive industry, and as I’ve explained I don’t even have enough friends-on-high to get my foot into a role as a retail drone – a job I actually like doing! (I enjoy shops much more when I’m that side of the counter than when I’m a customer!) Even HMV is cutting back, meaning my chance of working there – I’ve already been turned down several times – are tiny! I do know my chances of ever being a DJ or otherwise involved in music media are pretty much dead, with major radio operators cutting back on programming and introducing more networked and automated content, allowing stations to be staffed by a much smaller roster, in turn diverting more of the income from the stations into the pockets of fatcat owners: as the station I auditioned for found out, you can’t really go toe to toe with the big boys. But now another attempt to give it a go is being brought into the cramped online radio space: a new community station for my region, the north-west of the south-east, is just starting up, initially on the web but potentially on FM in the future, again staffed largely by unpaid volunteers doing it for nothing, and I was considering throwing my cheap hat in the ring and putting myself forward to do whatever stuff they see fit. However, I don’t really have time: I need to find paid work, and keep up my home duties to sate my family’s desires, and also need time to relax and socialise should I ever figure out a way to do so. Maybe a bit of schedule-juggling and compromise will free me up a slot to head down there and make some kind of contribution to the history of British radio broadcasting, however minor, and in the process do something which might actually make me feel good? (If you did want to imagine what my radio broadcasts would sound like should they ever somehow happen, just read passages of this blog to yourself in a nasal South London twang, occasionally interrupting yourself to stick on an Ash or Keane record.)

The consolidation of radio is only one part of the media mayhem going off just now. The Leveson Inquiry has rounded off its third mode of evidence gathering, hearing from the politicians as they attempted to defend their relationship with the press barons, and it did lay bare just how vicious an influence the media, as presently constituted, has on society. Ofcom, meanwhile, is looking at the future of mainstream public-service broadcasting in the UK and is considering how the upcoming expiry of the existing ITV network and Channel 5 licences to broadcast would be handled. (they run out in 2014, so a solution is needed in time for it to hit the ground by then) Options on the regulator’s presumably well-made table include rolling over the licences, thus extending the term of the current operators (ITV plc, STV, UTV and Northern & Shell’s Channel 5), or readvertising the franchises entirely, potentially redrawing the ITV region map in the process to take better account of the actual editorial affinities between areas than was taken when the regions were originally knitted together in the 1950s and 60s around the old black-and-white transmitter areas. It’d be nice to see if a new operator would be willing to do something more worthwhile with the currently-largely-dire Channel 5 slot (remember, I hate any programme on that channel which doesn’t feature Terri Calvesbert, and particularly despise past-their-prime reality shows in which a bunch of wannabes waste months screaming at each other and demeaning society itself whilst cooped up in the second-least-convincing housing arrangement at the also-home-to-EastEnders Elstree studios). It’d also be nice to get a little bit of regional identity and programming back in the now-almost-entirely-networked ITV chain: many of the best-loved programmes and presenters in ITV’s history came out of the feeder league that was the regional system – Blockbusters, for instance, was commissioned by Central, whilst Fern Britton, for instance, used to work at stations such as TVS – and nowadays anything that doesn’t catch the eye of London (or occasionally Manchester) is passed over. However, the degree to which the ITV franchise network and the technically separate entity that is ITV plc are reliant on each other suggests Ofcom will probably not sanction wholesale change, not least because that particular quango doesn’t want to rain down powerful legal eagles upon its skull. It’s likely that ITV plc will continue to wag the channel 3/103 tail in some way, then, albeit with either more, fewer or the same commitments as currently required. It’d be nice to have proper public-service broadcasting back on air in the UK, but the power of the commercial counter-argument is such that if you want to watch quality, well-made, intelligent telly, you don’t need to buy a digital box – you need to buy a time machine and go back to the days when programme-makers gave a damn.

Something which long ago gave up editorial public service content to focus entirely on commercial operations is Teletext Ltd, who ripped their once-mighty text-based news and information service from the air back in December 2009, but who kept their hand in on Freeview with the continued operation of the Teletext Holidays text-based shopping channel (on Freeview 101, if you can afford to get away). However, it’s now been announced that the holiday shopping service will itself bite the silver bullet later this year, ending the last association of Teletext with telly-delivered text-based services. Their videogames magazine, Gamecentral, essentially lives on as the only editorial sector to survive the cull, although not long after going it alone the games pages were absorbed into the website of then-sister publication Metro, where they now reside. It appears that Daily Mail & General Trust, formerly a shareholder in Teletext, may be preparing to fill the holiday-shopping gap with Mail Travel TV (a placeholder for which has pitched up on Freeview 106), but although Teletext Holidays was an entirely commercial service useless to those looking for news, sports or weather updates, it’s still sad to see the last remnants going, with the remaining ghostly fragments of analogue-era Teletext (now a few scant holding pages) vanishing as part of the digital switchover. In the days before I had a phone which could access internet-based information and communications content, TV-based text services were something I adored using – they helped me keep up with the news and facts, that’s true, but they also had their own unique flavour – witness the passion for music shown by the Planet Sound pages, or the wilfully disruptive humour of Gamecentral’s predecessor, the still much-hailed a decade after its demise Digitiser, the always-good-fun Bamboozle! quiz, or even the proto-Twitter communication microclimate that was the Mailbox section of Paramount Comedy Channel’s text service. The text service is now gone (indeed Paramount itself is now Comedy Central), and Mailbox itself nearly died with it (today surviving as a far-more-erratically updated service online at http://www.newmailbox.co.uk – it publishes new editions even less frequently than I do here, which should be worrying to anyone who knows how the internet usually works!) But one thing Katie Piper’s new book tells us (look, I’m nearly done talking about it, OK?) is that all things must pass: nothing, or very little, is ever truly permanent, and with a little thought we can work towards making big changes in life.

Things do change over time. The plans, ideas, careers and thoughts we have at one time in our lives may fall apart at the hands of others, as Katie’s apparently promising modelling career did when that bloke bunged something corrosive at her; or alternatively, the original intentions we have may prove in time to be unsuitable and in need of adjustment as we grow and develop: so, while there may be some things about my life that haven’t changed greatly since I was 20, there are other things I look back on and wonder why, given my current feelings, I ever felt/acted the way I did back then – for instance, taking an example that often crops up here, I used to read magazines when I was young and impressionable enough to believe that was a good thing to do, and now can’t imagine anything worse than chucking money at some sod in a tabard in exchange for a cheap, slutty piece of purported reading matter! But maybe that’s too extreme a counterreaction – maybe, in time, aided by working through the tips in “Things Get Better”, and perhaps also by moving towards taking more time out to relax and find inner peace, I could find the strength to make the right choices and become a better person, someone who makes more of a contribution to society and to improving my own life at the same time. I’m always inspired and awed by the strong and positive work Katie Piper has done in the past few years, and now it’s time for me to drag myself out from behind this eye-straining screen and actually do something, anything, to put what passes for a smile somewhere near my actual face. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll be able to stand up and say I’ve actually done something worthwhile with life. I know I’m not going to be an international superhero, but perhaps I can make at least one person smile. Who knows, that person could even be you. In fact, after subjecting you to this parade of bleating, I’m pretty sure I can cheer you up simply by adding two further words. The end.

“Fleeing somewhere?” (Goodbye!)

“You can pretty much hit anything and it counts as music!” (Hello!)

Gatsby! So, you’re probably wondering what’s been chewing up my mind-ropes during the course of April. Well, aside from the usual generic worry, with the job market still dirt-dry and the economy still struggling to fly, like a jumbo-jet full of bumblebees or something, there have been, as you would expect, a lot of wriggles and niggles which have been making me uncomfortable over recent hours and decades. As ever, my perpetually-declining band of Twitter followers have been party to some of the more shrill whines of the period, but I’ve saved the more over-driven analysis for those poorly sods who’ve chosen to join me here on WordPress. That’s you that is. So here goes – and this time I’ve decided to experiment with the length of my paragraphs; you may therefore have to amend your break-pattern accordingly. Let’s play!

Buying food doesn’t… get tougher… than this. You’ll know by now I’ve been tasked with purchasing much of the household scran, and there have been problems. As I shop alone, I can only carry a couple days’ worth of stuff at a time, meaning I typically have to spend every other day running around a noisy, crowded supermarket, and tackling that anxiety has really depleted me – trying to avoid other customers, particularly those with children, is hard to do when my own family situation means I have to throw myself to the retail lions on a regular basis. It’s particularly hard at weekends, when stores become increasingly crowded and difficult to shop in, and often I have to make flash decisions: do I continue to suffer the pain as I struggle to get something suitable, or do I panic-buy the nearest available things just to get myself out of the store more rapidly, albeit with stuff that doesn’t meet my needs? Additionally, having already had to avert myself from purchasing anything which couldn’t be microwaved, given our elderly gas oven is in poor health, I’ve had further restriction applied on my purchasing power; now the freezer is also on its last/only legs – opening and, particularly, closing the door is now more difficult than can reasonably be excused, which defeats the object of having the ruddy thing in the first place, which now means frozen meal deals are off the table, meaning I’m left to pick suitable meal options from the very limited range of chilled and tinned products available in store. Whereas, aside from one previously-discussed bollock-drop involving toad in the hole, I’d been getting by, just about, with the microwave-led narrowcast, this latest twist leaves me precious little wiggle room, as well as committing us to almost daily beef – cattle-based products being the primary affordable option in the non-frozen mealpacks, with other meats, say chicken, largely absent from the tubs which are within my budget. The freezer situation has meant I’ve also made another unlucky break – my mum happened to have recently put some large ceramic fridge magnets with slogans on onto the fridge and freezer doors, having presumably been given them by some friend or colleague; however, one day, whilst trying to force the freezer door to actually stay closed for once, and in full view of mother at the time, I dislodged one of said weak magnets and cracked a corner off it. Not deliberately, of course, this was another of my lengthy litany of accidents, and the ceramic was easily fixable (though mum seemed as though she couldn’t be arsed to do so); it’s certainly proof that nobody can have anything nice whilst in my company, and it’ll be a while before I can let this slip slide. (Incidentally, the other, unbroken, magnet has also vanished from the kitchen, as though mum’s decided they’re more trouble than they’re worth – indeed things do have a habit of ‘disappearing’ if they cause a problem; for instance, I bought one of those V-bladed mandolin slicer things from a shop somewhere – Woolies, if I recall – after seeing an ad on TV and thinking it could help me chop up food in order to eat it more easily; not long after making the purchase, I attempted to dislodge a chunk of apple that had become stuck in the blade, and nicked my thumb in the process – but after repairing my digit, the device was nowhere to be seen, suggesting mother had deemed it so dangerous it was worthy only of the bin, or perhaps squirreled it away in a cupboard somewhere in order to be used only by someone with better spatial awareness than mine.) The magnet-cracking is another example of the nearly continuous bad luck I’ve been having these last few years. I’m still not over that whole wine glass thing in 2003, and even if I’m supposed to have got seven years’ bad luck off it (or is that mirrors?) wouldn’t that have expired in 2010? I remind you that the people whose wine glass it technically was forgave me pretty much on the spot, and admitted that they had overstuffed the cupboard, but it still plays on my heart: I broke a wine glass, and I’m not going to be able to go back in time nine years and un-break it. Incidentally, only a couple of days after my magnetic hell, having cooked my brother’s dinner and my own, I heard a ceramic-sounding crash from the kitchen as mum was preparing her meal; when I was next in the kitchen I noticed one fewer plate in the rack than had been there previously; I didn’t raise the spectre of broken dinnerware, for fear of extending the wedge between us that already exists, but I would assume that at some point in the medium term I may be sent down to Wilkinsons or Argos or something for replacements, were it not for the fact that this would conflict with mum’s preexisting plan to empty as much as possible from the house to facilitate her dream of one day being able to box up her few remaining belongings and flee somewhere else, leaving her decayed sons twisting in her wake. But at least it isn’t just me that has the ability to break stuff. In a non-Limp Bizkit manner, of course.

Elsewhere, I’ve also had something of a brush with the law – no, this gabbled mauve-hued idiocy hasn’t yet been made illegal, you’ll be saddened to hear; the legal activity which clouded me for much of the month was in fact an invitation to apply to do my civic duty and serve on a jury. Now, anyone who has had the iron will to wade through any of the previous worry-posts that have been isolated here will know that judgement calls are not something I am mentally prepared to make. However, there is also a degree of willingness on my part to do more to help society, and this courtroom stint could thus be my key to feeling like I’d made a positive, non-bellowing difference to the world, helping either an innocent person to reclaim justice or take a guilty person off the streets. I recalled, for instance, the Katie Piper situation, where the successful conviction of her attackers helped lift the weight of worry off Katie’s mind and helped her move on with her life and build her successful charitable empire. I could be one-twelfth of a hero, which is better than being one hundred percent of a loser as at now. However, this invitation also triggered a lot of fear; in first case, I worried what would happen if I made the wrong call, or encouraged others to do so, and convict the innocent/release the guilty. I’ve heard of miscarriages of justice, and don’t want to be one! Elsewhere, I also shivered as I recalled past reported cases of jury intimidation and witness tampering – the case I would have been sat on was to be heard at Belmarsh, the Alcatraz of Thamesmead, and I was concerned that the crim’s associates and accomplices, seated as they may well be in the public gallery, would be taking the names and identities of the jurors with a view to enacting the sort of brutal, hammer-assisted revenge you are likely to be familiar with if you watch a lot of post-watershed TV drama serials. Of course, there’s every chance that the person in the dock would be not a hardened, violent career criminal with dangerous colleagues but a nervous, bookish bond-trader whose first-time dabble in creative accounting landed him up before the beak. The very fact that I’m so easily able to be prejudiced in this way – to start making conclusions about the person I’d be trying months before I even set foot in the courthouse – would suggest that a stint in the legal system probably wouldn’t be something I could adapt to. I was also worried about my own jumpiness, impatience and intolerance, again things which will be familiar to my regular reader, and concerned that I would, in willingness to close the trial early, leap up, confess to the crime myself, grab myself by the scruff and haul myself down to the cells to serve an indeterminate sentence for something I didn’t actually do. Also, of course, committing to a lengthy trial would mean little to no time available to me to continue with the other duties that currently occupy the bulk of my time – principally hunting for a job and shopping for my family – with the jury application form stating that the job centre would only continue to pay me for a certain number of weeks whilst I was on the panel, and I would therefore recieve little to no money, bar my juror’s expenses, into my account thereafter. Despite all these misgivings, I felt duty-bound to respond in the manner supplied, to avoid hoisting myself into legal trouble – you’ll recall I jump through every silly hoop the job centre put in my eyeline, even those that contradict the other tasks given, in order to avoid being accused of shirking my responsibilities – and so filled out the form as presented. There were spaces on the grid to fill out medical and mental issues which may impair my participation, and in the name of honesty I disclosed both my vision problems (wonky left eye, as mentioned here before) and the mental health condition I had been diagnosed with in my younger days. There was no box to tick for “would you become jumpy and flail around in a panic when placed within a courtroom environment?”, but if there had been I would have ticked this, as it too would have been the truth. I’m more frightened of the court than many criminals are – and I’m an innocent (well, mostly) citizen! Anyway, I began to prepare myself for the inevitable call-up, and assumed that it was my destiny to serve the public and learn from such an experience, when subsequently I got a rather blunt and brief (about a minute in length, if that) phone call from someone at the court service, who said that they were considering withdrawing me from participation on the grounds of my disclosures, and gave me seconds to confirm whether I wanted them to drop me from the pool. Flustered and ordered to make a snap decision, I muttered something about my mental condition making it difficult for me to make judgements, and that was that. I didn’t have to refuse as such – I’d been excused! So the fear and fright was lifted from my shoulders, but it was then replaced with doubt and concern – was I wrong to turn down the opportunity to serve my sole remaining civic function? Have I committed some form of gross misconduct by agreeing not to step up to the plate? I’d assume that my portion of the seat will be taken by someone of stronger constitution drawn from the same general area as I would have been, and that the trial would proceed much more smoothly without my dizzy involvement than it would do with; but still, my opportunity to do something good and potentially save the world, or a smallish quadrant of England at least, has now passed; it’s difficult not to feel like I’ve failed you ‘all’.

Of course, I’m never far from crime and disorder, either in my personal life or in the news, which I continue to absorb like some sort of grey, decaying sponge that’s been thrown into a muddy, bloody puddle. Indeed, I was a victim of a kind of minor, unreported crime myself. You’ll recall that since last time I belched out one of these brainfarts, we’ve had the Easter school holidays, or at least those of us young enough to still be in school had them, anyway. I do try and avoid contact with children, in part because I don’t want to be accused of something untoward by the News of the World, and in part because I don’t particularly like being bullied by noisy, arrogant little brats a third of my age. I’ve long had a self-imposed ban on entering Woolworths or McDonalds during school holidays, and although only one of those bans is now required, for a couple of weeks I wasn’t able to step outside my door without risking conflict. It became difficult to use the library computers without wanting to complain, with screaming infants freewheeling around the building bellowing at the top of their lungs having completely failed to understand the concept of a library. I got sick of all the petulant, arrogant screaming and stomping around – to the point that eventually I’d have to stop doing it! Anyway, one day whilst walking from a sullen library stint up to a local Tesco (sorry, but I refuse to starve myself for your own political gain, and it was the nearest thing to a shop that I could reach on foot), I was encountered by a wall of youths, strolling the other way along the pavement, and taking up its entire width in the process. There was literally nowhere to go but back – the kids were between me and the nearest crossing, and so the only options I had were keep my head down and try to pass them without attracting ire, or turn and run back towards the town centre, attempt to stay ahead of them (which in my physical condition would be near impossible), and find somewhere to hide (Wilko’s?) until the youths and the danger had passed. However, rather than fleeing like a frightened lamb running from the slaughterman, I chose to walk on, incorrectly believing I had as much right to walk to Britain’s most evil supermarket as any other innocent civilian. Needless to say, it was a naff effort. As I passed, the youngfolk became rowdy, and started catcalling. I sought to ignore them and stepped out into the road at my own personal risk in order to bypass them. This displeased them further: one of the kids stuck an arm out for an Obama-style fist-bump greeting, but not wishing to escalate the situation I marched on as though I couldn’t hear them. They took this as disrespect, of course, and I was physically assaulted – they threw a still-perfectly-usable pink hairbrush, presumably grasped from the hipbag of one of the female girls in the group, at my back as I trotted onward; it caused no discernible damage except to increase my fear of the outdoors, and they ended up down on the deal as they presumably had to buy the stroppy girl a new brush, given that the one they flung at me bounced off my spine and landed in the roadway as I continued my solemn march towards Stockwell and Cohen’s store, unhurt externally but dying inside. So now I’m being physically abused by people I’m legally too old to even be in the same oxygen-space as. I think you’ll find they win. To be honest I’ve been getting depressed about how nasty and chavvy this area has got lately, it’s genuinely a dangerous place for someone as weak and unthreatening as me to live, with every bus journey potentially being fatal to me. Do I go to the streets and run to freedom, plead for sanctuary from someone who lives in a nicer part of the island, or just accept that I am my region’s doormat, and let the louder, stronger, more aggressively confident people continue their vile rule over me? I also face having to replan my operations to account for the difficult situation South and East London will be landed in this summer – namely the hosting of the Olympics. I’m sure armed officers will be out in force over the summer months to prevent myself and others going about their business lest we interfere with the operation and security of the biggest sporting event to have taken place in England’s capital for some decades. How I’ll be able to get on with my day with the Olympic restrictions, regulations and policing in place remains to be seen, but it’ll certainly add to the stress that living in this concrete cacophony already brings. With powerful missiles apparently armed and ready from the top of towerblocks (causing great concern to the residents within) intended to guard Fortress London during Games-time, woe betide any luckless blunderer who strays into the secure zone by mistake, triggering some kind of armed scramble which blows East London apart in a bid to protect it from the percieved threat. Now do you see why I want to stay at home this summer?

Elsewhere in the country, though, may not be as nice as I believe; there’s been masses of death, crime, misery and disorder news around the nation, with the economy still stuck in reverse and the ever-familiar parade of road crashes, stabbings and house fires flickering their way across the web and the red button, which I then devour to fill the odd-shaped empty spaces between hunting work, feeding relatives, squeezing out these breezeblocks of text, and finding something calming to watch or listen to (I’ve increasingly found myself having to tune to Real Radio or Gold or similar, during breaks between run-abouts, in order to relax myself and stop myself becoming agitated).  We now don’t have time to recover from one tragedy before another hits. We’ve just had a family of five in Essex made homeless after a blaze in a building which had been converted into flats – there’s a group who’ll be living out of boxes and eating out of bins for months to come, and loath as I am to say nice things about that portal-to-hell that is Essex (ITV2 twice-weekly provides evidence as to why that hideous county must be destroyed) it does seem harsh to drag a family through what will be many years of hell and insecurity. I would say ‘blameless’ family, but they must have done something criminal or evil, as they were in Essex – and you see now why I couldn’t be on a jury? Elsewhere, someone who did have a previous conviction plummeted seventeen storeys to her death from a flat in the frequently-mentioned (in this blog at least) town of Woolwich after police officers made an early-morning housecall – we don’t know whether this teenager was trying to escape fresh charges or simply slipped her footing, and she has taken at least some of her decision-making process to her grave, but this case did prove to news-viewers nationally that south London residential towers aren’t all Only Fools-style japes. Meanwhile, following the earlier conviction of a rioter for their part in the arson at Woolwich’s Great Harry pub, the criminal behind another of last August’s looting hotspots has been hauled before court, as the laptop-pinching sofa firebug who levelled long-standing Croydon furniture retail landmark House of Reeves was convicted on the basis of CCTV evidence, and the fact he told witnesses at the scene “that was me!” as he fled the soon-to-be-enflamed store. He clearly hasn’t read chapter one of the criminal handbook… However, whilst some hellraisers have been slapped in clink, others remain on the loose, and the recent news that a violent double killer, who had previous convictions, had absconded in the north of England and shown willingness to move around at speed, killing with some abandon, has filled me with the sort of trepidation one feels when presented with the news that someone who could end your life in a single blow is freely on the streets and could, M1 permitting, have been heading for London with a view to beheading some luckless Londoner, had he not been picked up by the police mere hours before this babble went live. The roads, of course, have become adept at claiming their own victims – in recent days three generations of relatives – a 75-year-old man, his grandson’s 18-year-old partner and her baby of just 14 months old – were wiped out in a County Durham crash which is going to resonate through their relatives for many decades to come, and this was followed in short order by a fatal collision a shade further south, as Burton-on-Trent hosted the death of two women and the serious injury of a number of other road-travellers, including several children/teenagers; there was the Sheffield ski village arson (clearly someone in Yorkshire has a grudge against winter-sports), and there have also been a series of mysterious and violent shooting and stabbing incidents, though in several cases police aren’t looking for anyone else in connection thereto. There was the mysterious and unhinged incident which marred Tottenham Court Road in London, where some apparently disgruntled chap excercised an overly aggressive revenge against a commercial premises which had, we’re told, angered him in some way. Then there’s been the mystery of the MI6/GCHQ fella who was found dead locked inside a bag. Now, I’ve seen enough episodes of Chuck and Alias, or at least of those episodes broadcast free-to-air in the UK, to know that something is afoot here. How, exactly, does one padlock oneself inside a holdall? There’s clearly been some kind of secretive cover-up, and in the name of national security we’re unlikely ever to know the honest truth (and because I don’t want this blog picked up by the secret service, I’d better not espouse any further theorems). But then, thanks to the conspiratorial media my grip on what’s true and what’s a lie is so loose I could appear on Rob Brydon’s BBC panel show without damaging the overall format. There is an awful lot of crime and hatred in the world right now, from petty local disputes to life-ending street warfare, enough to keep Crimewatch UK on screen year-round, and I need someone to calm me down. I need a Katie Piper figure blowing on my ear and whispering that things will get better, or a Nick Ross-style reassurance not to have nightmares. Unfortunately, as much of my rushing around trying to sort life out is done alone, with no girlfriend or good local chum to turn to, there isn’t anyone to take me by the hand and soothe me when the pressure of living amid Britain’s horrible histrionics gets too weighty to bear. Won’t some lovely soul please be my Nick Ross, before I end up going the same way as Jill Dando? (And yes, I know Kirsty Wark and/or Young hosts CWUK now, but I’m a child of the 80s, to me Neil Buchanan is still presenter of Art Attack…)

Politics has also been in the news, as it ever tends to be, with the continuing media soap opera of the Leveson Inquiry continuing to blow all sorts of gaskets off my MediaGuardian feedreader, as politicians and press barons confirmed the cosy relations they had enjoyed in a frenzy of back-scratching which was designed in part to boost the profitability of the press but mostly to boost the egos and careers of political figures. See for instance the Murdoch-sucking soon-to-be-former culture secretary and gift to rhyming slang Jeremy Hunt, whose snuggly relationship with NewsCorp has left his political career in tatters, as the dodgy alliance between Sky’s billionaire tyrant and the prissy Tories begins to unroll; looking further north, there was the greedy SNP-Murdoch alliance under which vain Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond agreed to ring down from Holyrood to lobby his governmental colleagues in Westminster to rally support for NewsCorp’s BSkyB takeover bid, and in return the Scottish version of the Sun swung its might behind getting the SNP reelected, giving the party its first Scottish Parliament majority, which wasn’t welcomed by all in the political spectrum, not least because it raised the spectre of Scottish separation from the UK, something the central government is keen to avoid, in order it seems to protect Westminster’s access to North Sea fuel lucre. The Murdochs and their workdroids know their papers can change minds and lives, with their huge readership enabling the firm to essentially seed its point of view into the national conversation, and the posturing politicians know it helps their ends to get NewsCorp onside and keep the media mafia sweet. So we end up having policies which slam down the BBC and hand more of the media power to Sky, and in return NewsCorp encourages its mass of sheeplike readers to keep its political friends in power. This all wasn’t news, of course, anyone with even the slightest knowledge of how the media and/or politics work will have figured this out for themselves decades ago, but to have it confirmed that those we elect and those we rely on for news are acting not in our interest but in their own is still galling to know. How warped is our landscape because of these machinations? We will never know. Elsewhere in politics, we’ve had another petrol crisis, after ministerial blundering and petrol-industry jitters led drivers to panic-buy at the pumps. This had a tragic human cost when a woman was burned decanting petrol in her kitchen. Whilst having petrol near the oven was a pretty dim move, and so the victim does have to take a portion of the blame, it’s certainly true that if the price of fuel continues to cause consternation there may well be further disasters as drivers look for ways to bypass the chaos. And then there’s the hideously-badly-handled attempt to claw more money away from the public and business to refill the country’s coffers just as the public and business are in dire economic straits – there’s the wave of tax rises and benefit cuts which the government outwardly hope will force people, no matter how unemployable, into work, but which will simply plunge more people into poverty – for instance, see the awkwardly-applied ‘pasty tax’, aimed at getting the likes of Greggs to ratchet up the amount they pay into the Treasury to be more in line with what sit-in restaurants pay and presumably a back-door to introducing VAT on more foods (many of which are currently exempt the tax) in order to compel those who want to eat to put more pennies in the Chancellor’s piggybank for doing so, and the potential crash of the free school meals system when some of the benefits which currently entitle children to free food are rolled into a new universal credit which won’t, potentially leaving poorer parents much worse off. (I could quote Karen Taylor here – “can’t afford a car, can’t afford a baby” – but it does seem a great many kids these days are born unexpectedly as the result of an alcohol-fuelled grope round the back of a nightclub, and then given an ear-piercing and a name like Rihanna or Tulisa before being let loose to run around the library screaming and annoying me. And so the circle continues…) And then there’s the mass layoffs in the public sector, which will hit services, and cuts/selloffs in schools, libraries and the NHS in an attempt to get these services out of the public purse. So the Coalition want us to pay more to recieve less service, something which British people aren’t keen on (the national sport being paying less to get more, as the popularity of BOGOFs, coupons and looting prove) – it’s a tough sell. And, of course, those on benefits will continue to be demonised, meaning until I can convince some luckless employer to hire me and break their wine glasses, I should expect many more hairbrushes, and probably substances much worse, to be flung at me in the street.

There are some truly horrendous people out there – and it’s even more gruelling when these hideous monsters are placed in a position of care. I’ve lost any and all respect I may once have had for the nursing and caring profession after a series of scandals, crimes and revelations. There have been numerous court reports of unscrupulous, clumsy or careless nursing staff being brought to book over callous mistakes which have in some cases severely harmed a patient’s quality of life. Recently, though, things have got worse. You’ll probably have seen on news reports and current affairs shows the scandal of care home workers almost universally mistreating and abusing their often elderly and/or infirm patients – have a look on the BBC website, for instance, for material from the recent and previous Panorama investigations into such situations. It seems care providers aren’t learning from past investigations into such maltreatment – except possibly learning how to treat their inhabitants in a foul manner. Suspicious relatives’ secret filming only confirms what we all knew all along – bedside manner is a myth, nursing and care staff only smile and speak politely as long as they think someone in posession of power of attorney is watching; as soon as the relatives are out of the room and the door is closed, the fangs come out and the ‘carer’ (I spit that word with real venom) shows their true, disgusting colours. There have been some truly hideous nurses on television recently – and I don’t just mean the blonde “representation of a nurse” from the toothpaste ad, who in any case looks far too much like Billie Faiers (ick!) to actually get a job as a real nurse. Why, for instance, have Bovis or Wimpey or whoever not turned up at gateway-to-Hell Stepping Hill hospital in Stockport and levelled it to rubble yet? Clearly that building has gone way beyond what would be expected of NHS premises, and the saline saboteur may or may not still be on the loose. If I were a resident of the Mancunian region, I’d refuse to be treated there – I’d rather suffer and die from whatever debilitating illness or injury I’d suffered that week than set foot in the foul cathedral of hate that is Stepping Hell. Why can I not give the staff 24-48 hours to remove all patients to a safe place, then fire them all, and then step forward to blow the building to pieces with some form of non-Napoleon dynamite? Blowing that facility off the OS map would certainly give myself and those impacted by its evil ways a form of closure, and it’d be nice to destroy something deliberately rather than, as is usually my way, accidentally. Why does this hospital even exist? Can it not at least go through some kind of root-to-branch makeover under new management, akin to the Windscale-Sellafield rebranding? That would, at least, be a start, though broadcasting the destruction of the entire hospital on national television would give a much starker sense of closure (and it’d piss directly on Holby City’s chips, which is always something I’m keen for television to do.) It would also give me a rare chance to bellow hideous obscenities at medical staff, something I very rarely get the opportunity to do given I haven’t yet myself sought medical treatment for the many and various things that are wrong within and around my body and mind. Or, on the other hand, have I misjudged and prejudiced an entire profession based on the actions of a visible, irascible few? Is it actually the case that those proportion of nurses who haven’t been featured on Crimewatch and/or Panorama have been going about their duties with the required level of care and attention? I don’t have enough inside knowledge of the nursing profession to have a genuine statistic as to the ratio of good to evil practicioners therein, but am I wrong to believe that a majority of nurses are the children of Satan? I’ll need to start being nicer to nurses and doctors – my declining health means I’ll need them sooner rather than later, and I don’t fancy being slapped about by a supposed carer keen to jack in the career…

One genuinely evil organisation which is, thankfully, currently dormant is that hatred-spouting tower of terror that is/was N-Dubz. The warring threesome have turned their burners on each other as fame has eaten the north London trio alive and appears to have, for now at least, spat them out. They are genuinely horrible people – well, two of them are, Fazer seems to have kept his head largely under the waterline and not caused any significant beef; his erstwhile bandmates have, however, found a string of ways to keep themselves needlessly documented in the sadly-all-too-popular papers. Professional scrotebag Dappy, fresh from ruining Never Mind the Buzzcocks forever, seems keen to get involved in all manner of scandal, with a rap sheet longer than most of his rap songs, and nary a week passes without the hat-clad ballbag being caught smoking/snorting/slapping/spitting at/shouting at someone or something, and the event then being splashed all over the media. Then there’s his actual relative, the gargling gargoyle that is Tulisa, who has begun to believe herself to be something of a celebrity, appearing on the front of newspapers and magazines on an almost permanent basis, to the point where her image is virtually burned into our national retina as well as the walls of Smith’s. The horror really began when she signed up for a judging post on that carnival of the grotesque that is the X Factor, becoming another pawn in the Cowell power-game, and since then she’s become something of a darling of the presses, popping up constantly and needlessly amid the breathless babble of the weekly rags and redtops – she was even in the Guardian (yes, the actual Guardian) the other week, and I nearly deleted the MediaGuardian feed from my reader in protest – and now she’s releasing a solo single I’m unable to watch any music channel for more than a few minutes without having to scream and shut the telly off in disgust, much as I had to when Dappy’s solo video was doing the rounds. How far Brian May has fallen. Speaking of disgust, the terrible Tulisa has joined the ranks of stars who have released a rather different, less telly-friendly kind of video, and references to that are if anything even more difficult to avoid in the grotty papers and on the horrendous cesspool that is the internet. Even the Channel 4 announcers have been taking the mick out of her. But I don’t want that slaggy wannabe to inflate me, I’m too busy worrying about how to deflate her – can I not go one day without any reference to Tulisa in my life? The really horrible thing is the huge influence that the N-Dubz monsters have on today’s young people – teens idolise these terrible beasts, and there’s nothing I can do to stop that, and we face bringing up a generation who think it’s OK to behave like Tulisa and Dappy do. Parents, as we’ve seen, have little to no control over their kids these days. It’s also horrendous to think I used to have respect for these devils – I’ve spoken here before about how I’d first spotted them on tiny channels back in the early days and followed their trajectory as they marched up the programme guide, their beats, videos, outfits and performances getting slicker as the trail rolled on; I even bought their first two albums, keen to cheer on and support new UK talent, even in a genre I wasn’t perhaps as regular a consumer of as I was of, say, indie rock. Now, though, they have become famous and nasty celebrities, proved themselves to be just like the rest of the showbiz cattle, and as such I regret bitterly ever having aided their ascent. For tightness-of-money reasons, I didn’t get around to buying their third (and as it turned out final) studio set; I now probably never will. And, having already deleted all digital N-Dubz tracks I had on my crappy MP3 player, I’m left wondering what to do with the N-Dubz CDs I wrongly own. Do I grind them into some tactile silvery powder and scatter it into the wind from a hill, damaging the environment almost as much as their music tends to do? Do I go around in a horse-drawn cart bellowing at parents to bring their kids’ N-Dubz albums to my vehicle for a book-style burning (with CDs instead of books) out on some kind of heath, and during the pyre bellow rhetoric at the gathered jeering crowds through a megaphone? Do I simply get on board a train, slip a CD onto the seat, and walk away as though I’ve forgotten it? Or do I do what I did to my copy of Damien Rice’s Cannonball after the Tulisa-mentored Little Mix runied/covered it as a result of winning X Factor, and sit the CDs to side for a few decades until the half-life of my current hatred has subsided? Or do I simply take the CDs down to a charity shop and continue the evil cycle by allowing someone else to buy the CDs, albeit with a good cause benefitting from the sale? Maybe if I did do the decent/horrible thing and donate the CDs to charity, I could take the sting off by bundling the discs in a package also including some of the pairs of trousers that actually fit me (leaving me with the horrible, rotten ones which don’t), and maybe also some new wine glasses which I’ve bought from somewhere specifically to give to charity, with no intention of using them myself. It’d help me get over 2003, at least…

Simon Cowell’s grip on pop culture has been long – he was responsible for Robson and Jerome’s pop domination of the mid-90s, when the Soldier Soldier stars outsold Blur and Oasis combined, and continues to his current ownership of the conversation around Saturday night (to the extent I no longer use Twitter on weekend evenings, in order to avoid people who talk about his shows and similar productions). He’s been in the news over the last few weeks thanks to a new semi-authorised biography which sees author Tom Bower reveal some of the skeletons hidden around castle Cowell, most sickeningly to the public gut his brief romantic dalliance with sometime X Factor judge Dannii Minogue. I’ve always been more of a Kylie man myself, to be fair (I refer you to the previous post in which I revealed what the first album I ever bought was), but it was also interesting to see the claim Cowell was mesmerised by Cheryl Cole. This lady is one who has somehow managed to become something of a national superstar, even though she deserves no more or less adulation than any other member of Girls Aloud; the grip Cheryl has over media and the public is simply bizarre and, sadly, she too will make a comeback soon, having been given time to lick her wounds from the stumble she took when she wrongly believed she’d be able to sucker the Americans in the same manner as she did the Brits, principally by cooing at them about hair in a Geordie accent. Then, of course, there’s been all the blather about Cowell’s other show, Britain’s Got Talent, and the media’s continued hunger for conflict led the press to invent a fictitious dispute between Amanda Holden and newcomer Alesha Dixon over who gets the screen time, a row defused by Holden herself claiming there was no bad blood. Unless, of course, this itself is a lie. I could take some comfort from the knowledge that Cowell’s shows are in decline – ratings for X Factor and BGT have been in decline and Talent has been given a kicking around the schoolyard by incoming BBC song-contest The Voice, leading to much gnashing from the ITV camp about overlaps between the shows, which have thus far generally been won by the Beeb. As I’ve screamed before, particularly around Big Brother time, it’s very difficult to avoid these kind of mass-audience shows, and I wish there was some kind of magic button I could press to give myself a version of the press, TV and internet that didn’t have any Tulisa, Cheryl, Alesha or similar – similar to the button some Norwegian websites have installed for those readers who want to avoid the blanket coverage of the Anders Breivik case. But no media business with pound and/or dollar signs in its eyes would ever give its audience the option to avoid the retina-scorching celebs of the day, so my aim for a Cowell-ites-free day will forever remain a pipedream. One of Cowell’s pop-show creations have, after charming UK bedwetters, bafflingly become a global phenomenon. Largely thanks to their fans flooding Twitter with OMGspam, One Direction have become a jetsetting flag-carrier for British popular industry, storming America and Australia in a voluminous manner few other stars of these isles have been able to manage. Whilst I have no personal grudge against Niall, Zayn and so forth, it would be a shame if the globe felt that all Britain was capable of creatively was a radio-friendly, teencentric melodic pop band. Thankfully, the selfsame new technology which has allowed the 1D virus to spread also gives us the opportunity to flag up a wide range of quality talent in seconds, and allows people in territories other than our own to punt up their own country’s tips for the top, thus narrowing the cultural difference between us. As a for instance, I’ve got Twitter contacts residing in Poland, Canada and some other countries, allowing me access to a world of influence and experience I could never physically reach without finding some way to transport my body across the waters. The connected web has also allowed us to have a hearty chuckle at 1D’s expense – one of the quirkier recent showbiz stories, of the boys getting caught up in a chlamydia scare after being piddled on by a koala, was certainly fuel for the punmasters, mentioned on shows including Million Pound Drop and Have I Got News For You as well as attracting many chuckles on Twitter. However, 1D have also been involved in one of the more petty media scuffles of recent times: if you listen to stations such as Heart or Capital you won’t have heard much of the Directioners, and that’s because of a petty pouting match by the stations’ parent Global Radio. Apparently, while accepting an award at the Brits back in February, 1D bigged-up the BBC’s pop station Radio 1, which would be all fine and dandy had it not been Capital listeners who had voted for the boys to get the gong. In some kind of vindictive retailiation for the lack of Global shout-out and the bigging-up of its publically-paid-for competitor, Global’s bosses have stripped their stations of the X Factor band, leaving more room on the playlist for rival groups such as The Wanted (who just happen to be signed to Global’s artist-management sister company, and are also the band with potentially most to lose from a successful 1D… Just putting it out there…) A canny radio operator would have brought the offending band back in to big-up the station on-air in a stunt broadcast which enhanced the image both of band and station, but Global appears to have decided to use this as a crafty means of elbowing out a group who would otherwise have pretty much a guaranteed presence on Global’s network of mainstream pop-led stations. So we end up with a case of a large broadcaster cutting off its nose in order to shoot itself in the foot. But then, showbiz and the media has got really petty and nasty of late, as has society as a whole, and you’ll have learnt that by now if you’ve bothered to read much of this blogfodder…

Elsewhere, the plug has, it appears, been pulled on two programmes that previously attracted comment from me. Harry Hill’s TV Burp was something which could delight, confuse and irritate me at turns – some weeks it was the funniest thing on screen, other weeks it was ghastly and unbearable, with an overreliance on soap clips and cheap gags. I really could not make the call; now, however, the curtain has fallen, or so it would seem, with an apparently final edition being broadcast earlier this spring – though ITV are being unusually cagey about whether the show has been canned entirely, with conflicting reports suggesting either (a) the show would continue with a new host replacing Hill at the helm or (b) Hill would take the format to another channel after the end of the ITV run. Neither plan, though, yet seems to be growing much traction. One potential thorn in the demise of Burp is the voice of ITV’s god Simon Cowell, who is apparently nervous the loss of ratings banker Burp will harm the Cowell-generated talent shows it has typically provided a healthy lead-in audience to. Whilst the loss of one of TV’s more quirky mainstream shows is not entirely good news, I’m glad TV Burp dissipated before it went completely flat – increasing numbers of people, latterly including Harry Hill himself, had openly wondered how much longer the format would be able to carry on repeating on us before it became exhausted. I could also mention a cash-strapped BBC Three binning acclaimed but underperforming drama The Fades after one run to concentrate spending on the more popular Being Human, but as I watch neither show it doesn’t really require my input. Perhaps the biggest piece of TV cancellation news to have emerged since the last time one of these big guffy ones went up is the very welcome announcement from the BBC that after one final run later this year, Total Wipeout will have breathed its last. Given what I’ve screamed about the show previously, you can only imagine the relief I felt when the oafish visual cartoon was put to death. I won’t re-roll my opposition here, you can interrogate the archive for that, but it’s safe to say I was greatly cheered by the demise of this series, which has really burnt out very quickly – with two series a year since it was vomited onto our screens in January 2009, and seemingly commissioned because the BBC wanted to give Richard Hammond more to do (in 2009 he also hosted two series of Blast Lab and co-hosted two series of Top Gear, as well as appearing in the acquired-from-National-Geographic Engineering Connections series) it would always loom somewhat larger over the schedules than it deserved to, and with the goofy show’s worrying near-permanence it’s been almost impossible for someone who doesn’t approve of it to avoid. Whether the Wipeout’s regular berth was due to a BBC desire to pander to the dim, demented lowest-denominator audiences usually catered for much further down the programme guide, or whether it was a well-intentioned attempt to get a slot filled on the cheap with a repeatable, internationally-reversionable format, we don’t know; all we do know is, only one more series to go and it will, CBBC reruns aside, be out of my greasy old hair forever. Based on the show’s past record, it seems the final run may not have many successful women – two female participants in regular shows, and Danielle Lloyd in a celebrity edition, are the only non-male lifters of the trophy to date, and I am concerned at the fact the show considers Danielle Lloyd a celebrity of high enough status to warrant an appearance on BBC One (she isn’t, under normal circumstances, but Wipeout specials did seem to have a lot of barrel-scraping microstars and reality-show regulars, as though bigger stars rightly considered leaping off the rubbery balls to be beneath them…) Still, Total Wipeout is dead, and thankfully the actually-enjoyable bit of comic ITV fluff Keith’s Lemon Aid is much more like the sort of Saturday night telly that used to be on when I was a nipper, mixing good-natured fun, money-can’t-buy dreamweaving and corny jokes, albeit with slightly sharper innuendo than would have been allowed back then, such is the nature of the current century. Meanwhile, he telly-clogging reality show which puked the likes of Mark Wright and Amy Childs into celeb culture, The Only Way Is Evil – or …Essex, whatever – has sadly returned to an ITV2 and again is a show with too much glitter in its eyes to see the futility of its actions. It seems the days of polite telly are on the back foot. Needless to say, I’m trying not to watch it, but the fact it’s relentlessly promoted in just about every ad break on any ITV channel suggests the depth to which what was once one of our national broadcasters has sunk. Is this the limit of our conversation? Have British people become so shallow that TOWIE – I shudder even to type it – is now the peak of civilisation? Let it not be! This is why we need to preserve the BBC – to protect us from the dangerous and nasty tripe ITV now broadcasts! At least The Cube is back, to show us what ITV can do when they can be bothered to. I guess I just need to have faith that there are still some good people working somewhere in the bowels of the media industry.

Elsewhere on the rectangular pail, I’ve spotted an influx. In this case, an influx of romance and dating. Perhaps buoyed by the joys of spring, and not put off by the wildly-fluctuating weatherfront, several shows with a romantic/relationship theme have fetched their way across the LCD (or plasma if your posh, or CRT if you really ain’t) in the recent months since this blog last happened. Whilst you’ll know from my last blog I love a romantic comedy, the line between romance and comedy has been willingly trampled on, with thankfully largely good-natured results, by a recent BBC Three commission. World Series of Dating features apparently real blokes gathered together for a speed-dating session with hired ladies (mostly models and promo girls, it seems) at that most romantic and luxurious of destinations, Pacific Quay studios in Glasgow, with the ladies able to buzz out boring, bland, blunt or boorish blokes with a Take Me Out-style red button. However, the comedy element comes from the presentation, with the dates run not as typical romantic endeavours but as a sporting event, with sportscaster-style commentary and interviews (Balls of Steel’s Thalia Zucchi and The Daily Show’s Rob Riggle are among the cast), a striped-shirted referee calling out the infractions, and a medal for the bloke who can charm the ladies for longest. WSOD is essentially a comedy show with dating as its theme, and everyone, including the ladies, is playing a part. Imagine if Beadle’s About and Blind Date had a baby, but one which grew up glued to ESPN, and you’ll be there. It’s an enjoyable show as long as you go in with the right expectations. Romance also made its way into the documentary world with the Channel 4 series that seems to have replaced Katie: My Beautiful Friends on the channel’s roster. The Undateables was a three-parter about people with various physical and mental conditions who were looking to find love and companionship. Needless to say I adored the series, and it resonated with me – as someone who finds it almost impossible to engage with others and who has resigned himself to a life alone, Undateables was a warming and welcome insight into the lives and hearts of people one may well walk past in the street on a typical afternoon, if one is not trying to avoid contact with others as I do. It’s always good to see decent people on what passes for the screen these days, and in the main the viewer was essentially cheering on the good souls in their quest to gain someone special in their life. There were complaints about the tone and title/marketing of the series, but C4 was being deliberately provocative with the marketing in its quest to attract gawkers who would otherwise ignore a more prosaically-named series, as it has done with Big Fat Gypsy Weddings and other shows, and on the whole the programmes themselves and the people therein were broadly well-recieved. Ashamedly, prior to 2009 this is one show I may well have bypassed myself, but since Katie Piper’s heartwarming shows I’ve actively sought to watch more shows about people coping with difficulties in their lives; maybe I could well in time learn how to overcome my struggles by monitoring theirs. I hear Channel 5, already known for its gawpy ‘shock-docs’, will in June join the people-show jamboree with a documentary about young burns victim Terri Calvesbert; I’m hoping the piece will be similar in tone to last year’s BBC Three film about Kellie O’Farrell, but knowing what I do about Channel 5’s largely-ghastly output, I’m concerned Terri’s film may well be more uncomfortable and exploitative than I am capable of viewing. Remember, this is the channel which brought us Big Brother, which has sadly been recommissioned to 2014. There will be at least two more years of me whining at people I shouldn’t even know or care about. On the subject of cheap tat, ITV’s recently wrapped up another run of Take Me Out, the show where wannabe glamour models pout for the attention of sheeplike male boors in front of a cackling hen-night audience. At least, I assume the show’s still like that, I managed to largely dodge the series as broadcast, though the media and magazines continued to attempt to ram Paddy’s people down our national throat for some demented commercial reason. Thankfully I don’t recieve slimy Sky Living on my telly, so I’ve been spared the full horror of the Chris Moyles-addled (alongside Stacey Solomon, for completeness) confection The Love Machine, but that didn’t stop me being bombarded with trails whilst trying to innocently watch Challenge (well, as innocently as one can, anyway). From the seconds of snatches I saw, it does seem to be a gaudy, flashy Take Me Out-like celebration of gimmicks over romance, and I’m saddened to believe that in a couple of years, once its Living run has run its course, the epsiodes may well be shipped over to clog up the Challenge schedules cheaply, much as prior Living commission Four Weddings is now doing to Pick TV, home of many not-much-cop shows (and, for that matter, many cop shows). Still, at least Challenge are bringing back Blockbusters next month (now set for the 14th of May, after the original 8th May launch was shunted back for unstated reasons), with Simon Mayo stepping on Bob Holness’ recently turned-up toes to host. Given Blockbusters’ previously-discussed place in my cultural history, its imminent return means I’m almost having a P with excitement. Watching various dating/romance shows, seeing couples in real life and on telly, and generally spending a lot of time around married and dating partnerships given my increasing age is really opening up to me how empty my life is, though. I’m undateable, to an almost unbelievable degree, and am in no fit state to begin romancing. My chances of finding love are stone cold zero, and I’ve accepted that. There are lots of reasons why no girl’s gonna date me – my hideous home situation, living in a dilapidated crapshack with moody relatives, rendering any privacy or intimacy minimal; I wouldn’t be able to show a girl a good time – I can barely afford to feed myself, having a lady in life to lavish with gifts and day trips would bankrupt me; I don’t have any of the things that the movies and mags claim girls find attractive, such as a job, a car or muscle definition; health-wise I’m disgusting – my body is in the latter stages of decay, and women struggle to talk to me publically, never mind kiss me in any prevailing attraction-based scenario. So, yeah, seems I’ll take my bachelor’s tunic to my grave. Unlike in the job market, where there’s no guarantee of a place for me – there are fewer jobs in the marketplace than there are unemployed people, so even with 100% of jobs filled we’d still have in excess of a million people in the UK with no hired work to go to – finding a woman should technically be a case of picking off the numbers, given that in the UK there are more women than men. Even accounting for the fact that the figure includes those too old or young for me morally and legally (principally the elderly and children), as well as the already married and attached, and same-sex lesbians, there should, numerically at least, be someone out there who has drawn my tag from the global tombola and is simply waiting for me to stumble upon her should I happen to wander into her eyeline. That would, of course, require me to leave the house and put myself at risk of murderers, revenge attacks by wronged members of urban hip-hop trios, and screamy hairbrush-armed noise-kids. To be honest, staying in and watching Simon Mayo-helmed quizzes does sound preferable to that, but I guess one cannot find reward without risk. A life of watching gameshows should have taught me at least that. Whilst, post-Piper at least (and in all honestly beforehand too), I don’t have too many hangups when it comes to the appearance of a lady (I’d be willing to date an ‘Undateable’, in Channel 4 terms at least, lady with a prevailing health or social issue, should one enter my airspace), I’m quite picky, as you’ll have seen previously, when it comes to attitude. I’d rather not date a glossy, preening, permaglow trash-talker like the sort you’d see on cheapy ITV2 fly-on-the-bar-wall shows, and would like to be with a girl who is sweet and caring and intelligent, which are qualities in short supply down here in skanky South London. There are good people in existence: as a for instance, for instance, Kayleigh from Katie: My Beautiful Friends recently got engaged to her not-seen-in-the-show partner, and many bottles of my equivalent of champagne (7-Up, if it matters) were popped in her honour that week; but what I want to know is, where is my equivalent of Kayleigh? Do I have to dredge the nation for available sweetness, or is the sweetheart I crave sat right under my nose? It’s going to take a portion of my entire supply of bravery to find out.

Whilst it did sometimes seem that the only women who I’d ever be inviting into my home were those ladies who appear on the pages of the no-longer-popular printed magazine format, I do latterly sometimes feel quite guilty for associating myself with such exploitation. I’ve spoken at great length before about my growing hatred of magazines and the damage they do to women and to society in general, and my regret that in my younger (you may scoff) days I blithely bought printed periodicals with no thought to the evil that they’d do. But now I can refloat that particular putrid vessel thanks to one lady who used to be part of the problem, not herself in front of the camera but instead from behind the scenes – journalist Terri White spoke out to the Observer on how she built her career on the back of exploitative ‘real-girl’ features as she rose up the ranks of Nuts magazine. White speaks of how, at the time, it didn’t seem so vile – the magazine was at first a success (though more recently is in decline), her own career was rocketing and the featured young ladies were willingly participating and submitting themselves to the publication’s whims. With hindsight, though, White has noted that her work contributed to the sexualisation and vileness of modern culture. Young women look up to slime like Katie Price, Kerry Katona and Amy Childs, and Nuts, as part of the whirling storm of early-21st-century terror that also whipped up the likes of Big Brother and womens’ babble magazine Heat, helped fuel that terrible boom. I used to read magazines – at the time I didn’t feel I was doing anything wrong, but now in hindsight I realise how stupid and inhuman I was being. Terri White’s article sees her explain how the initial high ideals – putting the featured ladies on a pedestal – declined into boorish crowing at purely physical attributes as the battle for readers became more intense; only after leaving did White see the wrong she did. The article also sees White meet up with girls who took part in the shoots – who oddly largely don’t regret doing so – and feminists who discuss how this culture has become dangerously normalised. White also reveals what the culture inside the Nuts hacks’ HQ was like, and it seems it was not as bawdy as one would initially suspect from the tone of the mag… If you want to see White’s piece for yourself, and believe me you’ll need something more intelligent to read after all this tripe, find it on the Guardian site at http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/apr/22/nuts-magazine-lads-mags-women – and I guess I am glad I didn’t delete my Guardian feed after Tulisa-gate after all! The lad mag culture has me conflicted: I don’t like treating women like objects, and many women have been abused, insulted or assaulted by people who have judged them based on looks alone or thought of the lady as a disposable commodity; however, I also support women’s right to have free choice as to what to do with their body, and I don’t want to impose Sharia-style must-cover-up legislation. So it’s a tough call to make: do we crush the innocent dreams of honest women in a bid to rid the world of the gruesome machinations of the evil, largely (but, as the existence of Terri White and others proves, not exclusively) male-dominated media? Or do I just let society make its own decisions as to what’s right and what’s wrong at macro-level, and leave my own decision-making sequence solely to which bit of papery tripe, if any at all, I personally choose to pick out of the mag-rack of a Tuesday? Then there’s the legal case in the US where a woman went to a bar with friends, was forced by a (female) producer to flash unwillingly for a Girls Gone Wild video that happened to be filming there that night, and who has had strain in her marriage and family life as a result. Do I carry out a sustained bombing campaign of those shops over here stupid enough to stock GGW discs, or just let the Yanks iron this one out between themselves and pass no further judgement? It’s things like GGW that have harmed our perception of women globally. Post-Piper, I’d like to see more charming young women being celebrated for the good things they do in life. One lady who sadly won’t be able to continue her own caring work, but whose good deed is being carried on in her honour by folks around the globe, is one Claire Squires. Now, I’m not keen on those instances where tributes to the deceased are hijacked by those who had no known connection to the individual in life, so I’ll save the eulogising to those who actually meant something to this lady and her next of kin, given my knowledge of her work was entirely posthumous. However, it was a striking story, a young and apparently healthy woman giving her all (more, in fact, as it sadly turned out, than she actually could) for a cause she believed in – in this case the Samaritans. While I didn’t know Ms. Squires personally, what is known is this: her passing away around a mile from the finish line of London’s annual marathon (the race’s first death since 2007, the eleventh overall and apparently also the first female fatality in the event’s history, I’m told) did spark an outpouring of global support which showed the positive side of life on the internet; within hours of the sad news being confirmed, well-wishers from across Britain and latterly the globe chipped in to her JustGiving fund, wanting to ensure that the good work young Claire had so clearly wanted to support could continue. Whilst it is always a shame to lose someone, particularly in such circumstances, at least we can say something positive has risen from the ashes, and that the lady would most probably be proud of what people have committed to in her name. I do tend to mourn and mope – you only have to see how upset I get about car crashes hundreds of miles from my home and in which I had no hand whatsoever – but another thing I learned from Katie Piper is to appreciate the positives, and to be aware of how to build positives out of terrible negatives. Piper herself has, as we already know, taken the assault that could easily have destroyed her and used it as platform to build a thriving charitable concern which is making the world a better place, and not a day goes by when I’m not proud of everything Katie has created. Although that was an awkward double negative, which I should probably be a bit careful of. Anyway, do feel free to tip the hat to the clearly-loved-by-those-around-her Claire Squires, and if you’re that way inclined to, and it is your choice to do so, pop a few quid in her charitable tip-jar, and ensure that the society Claire was so keen to help can itself carry on helping those in need. Should I find myself able to release my iron grip on my purse-strings, I may well do more for charity at some point soon – not as a kneejerk donation to respond to an individual’s passing, but as part of my wider aim to make the world better. However you choose to do it, let the circle of love keep shining on – it’ll make the world smile and that’s a good thing to do in these dark, evil and twisted times.

Skirting into the issue of charity and young ladies brings me to something I want to close my ‘article’ with this ‘month’. I have needlessly mentioned Katie Piper and her works (televisual, charitable and printed) in virtually every one of the posts here, largely because she is often relevant in some way to my life and activities, and in the wake of my discovery of her story I have frequently been applying the life lessons I’ve learned from Katie to assist in the analysis of my own horrible existence. I do (well, did) try and limit references to Katie here to only those places where it appears necessary to do so, but because the young lady in question has become very relevant, probably too much so, to my existence I’ve ended up lazily referring back (or occasionally forwards) to things Ms. Piper has done (or is about to do), where these had some kind of portent or mirror to situations I myself found myself in. This has meant the blog has sounded somewhat obsessed with one individual, and I recognise how this could appear threatening or damaging if taken the wrong way or viewed out of context. I do talk about Katie a fair lot, but that is in part because of the quite significant impact she has had within my life over the last couple years; the last thing I would want to do is abuse or damage her in any way. I will try and cut back on the Katie comments over the coming editions, in order to avoid creating any needless bad feeling, and attempt to restore the protocol of only bringing her into the debate when strictly necessary. This month, it is vaguely necessary to refer to Piper-related activities given that the lady herself is actually doing some new stuff – her latest book, Things Get Better, is less than a month away from arriving on yourselves’ shelves, and yes, I preordered it on Amazon a lot earlier and at a more stalkerishly-timed point than I probably should’ve. But hey, I get the lowest-price guarantee with that, which always helps when my book-budget is tight, and the book itself appears to be one which will prove helpful – it is, don’t forget, a Piper-helmed guide to coping with any agony, anxiety and trauma one may find oneself in. Katie herself will be doing her first ever signing event at WH Smith within Selfridges in London to tie in with the release, though it’s not clear if those of us who have already bought the book online would have to buy a second copy at the scene in order to qualify for the signing; I’ll probably stay away, in any case, as I don’t want to get caught up in any incident or cause embarrassment or damage to myself or Ms. Piper. I’ll spend the day sat indoors reading my unsigned but legally-sourced copy of the tome, thanks. Mind you, it’d be nice to have the rare chance (if you don’t count Twitter) to tell young Katie exactly how important she is to me. As it happens I went to a Terry Pratchett signing at Bluewater a good few years ago. He made a cheery comment about the hat I happened to be wearing at the time. If I’d been less socially awkward, I could have made a return-riff on his headwear. Maybe I did and I’ve forgotten it in the mist of time. I was just jazzed about having met an actual author. He signed a Discworld cookbook for my mum so as I could give it to her as a gift. No idea if she’s still got it, mind. Maybe it’s gone to the same place as the ceramic magnets and thumb-murdering mandolin slicer. Or it’s up on a shelf someplace. Anyway, we’re getting off the subject. Returning to the (much more solemn than it was prior to the Claire Squires incident) subject of sponsored charity athletics, Katie Piper is also soon undertaking a 10k trek, the first she’s done herself for the charity known as the Katie Piper Foundation (though other races, including the recent Squires-clouded London Marathon, had previously played host to sponsored KPF runners). As part of my wider drive to support Katie’s aims, I chipped in a slice of society’s money to support Katie’s efforts, and if there’s something you want to donate to back Katie for the jog, do so at http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/KatiePiper – I know you all have it in you to support someone! Of course, the Squires case has got me slightly prickly and panicky at the prospect of losing our beloved Piper, but I need to remind myself that Claire’s sad passing was the exception, not the rule – Katie is in training for this and wants to take it seriously, and I’m backing her all the way. Or at least, as far as is safe, logical and legal. I don’t want any trouble. The one thing I won’t be doing is running any races or marathons myself – I’m that out of shape I can barely make it to the bus and back! It is quite gruelling to know that people are making efforts to help others and save the world, whereas I struggle to get food back from Morrisons just to feed my own brother. But I guess everyone has their own battle to fight. I may be in poor general health, but I wish you all nothing but the best in whatever endeavours you undertake: I just wish I had the social skills, money and support to put more weight and action behind society than mere words. But hey, words are better than nothing at all, and if you like to see someone use a lot of words then hey, you just did.

“I now pronounce you man and blah. You may blah the bride.” (Goodbye!)

“I’ve been crowned, bestowed, licenced and blessed in all aspects of onion rings” (Hello!)

You’re cute. Now, if you’ve been following this messy little tower since its baffling inception, you’ll know that there are a few topics that keep bouncing back onto these horrible violet pages with absurd regularity, usually because between posts I’ve found some new or alternative way of looking at the situation – topics like telly, music, women, my own failings, South London and the trouble with society have all provided crisp, ripe fruit for this nonsense-page. And, whilst I have pledged under some kind of bilateral agreement to expand the scope of this mush over the coming months, the ebb and flow of life as we know it means I’m not as yet short of material for the current terrible format. This month, I’ve been asking myself some questions and probing my viewpoints, in an effort to determine whether I’m wrong, very wrong or unforgivably wrong in some of the things I’ve said here and elsewhere; I’ve recognised my mistakes and want to attempt to atone for them. Yep, it’s time for another flat, ponderous pile of prose which once again sees me construct an overweening verbal rotation and contradict almost everything I’ve said previously, for no immediately discernible or relevant reason. If, however, that sounds like your sort of thing, (1) do read on, and (2) you need help…

Sometimes I make mistakes. Such as including the ‘sometimes’ just there. One of my recent blunders, however, was to avoid Winter Wipeout because of my perception of male bias in the production (if you’ve read almost any of the previous posts here, you’ll have seen me slagging Wipeout for its supposed sexism, and I’m not going to repeat my wild accusations here when you could just scroll back.) This bewildering disdain for the series has seen me go to whatever possible lengths I can to avoid the current run of the series, and not let the programme cause me to become angry. However, this avoidance tactic has come back to bite me in the ass. Having spent months, nay years, being relentlessly upset at the paucity of female victors on that oafish gameshow, I happen to have found out by chance that one of the episodes I deliberately averted myself from viewing was in fact won by a woman! So, something which could have restored my faith in fairness and balance was broadcast – and I deliberately chose to override it and pretend it wasn’t even happening! This strong, talented lady gave her all to storm the course and I didn’t even give her the courtesy of watching her run! That was a massive failure on my part. (I won’t question her mental faculties, except to state that, male or female, one would have to have some portion of one’s brain missing to agree to appear on Wipeout in the first place…) But should I celebrate this young woman’s success, dismiss her as champion of something irrelevant, or just let this moment pass into the ether forever to be remembered by those that were there to see it? Should I find some demented and quite probably illegal way of seeing her footage, given it’d be one of the few uplifting things I’d be likely to see this year? Or do I just summarily congratulate her and then move on with my life, in an attempt to find positivity within some other, more generally agreeable, format? Regular users of this paper will know what I usually cry at this point – it’s a judgement call, and I’m not good at making those!

Then of course there’s Big Brother. Recently closing its latest celebrity run, with a new almost-real-people version almost sure to despoil your screen come the summer, and Channel 5 set to sign up for further series thereafter, the house-set fly-on-the-gameshow has been one of my real fury trigger-points over the years. One of the first things I ever posted back on the creaky old MySpace blog (dunno if the page is even still up, to be honest) was a slamming of that year’s main-run housemates, followed a few posts later by a profuse apology once I’d cooled my gaskets and realised that these occupants of Elstree were probably not actually the spawn of a Satanic entity, they were just being painted as such so that Channel 4 (where it then was) could sell adverts on the back of their fibrous discourse. But despite this, every year the incoming Big Brotherers find ways to push my garrulous buttons. The sickening behaviour of the sort-of-famous-in-the-right-light people who ruined January by appearing on Channel 5 has been much-discussed elsewhere, and I’ve since been trying to wash these people out from under my skin. How do I safely get the likes of Frankie Sex-Pest Cocozza and Denise Drunk-Naked-Mess Welch out of my life? I never want to see these horrible people again, and yet every time I open a magazine/newspaper, switch on the TV or use the internet, there they are, towering over me like some kind of grotesque old church. I try to avoid Big Brother and yet, year in year out, it’s rubbed under and around my nose like a particularly rotten and unspectacular egg.

All in all, it’s difficult to see how I’m ever going to get rid of the kind of people who rely on Big Brother and the like for employment. They cling to the media like cockroaches – to the extent that a housemate from the second-ever series is now hosting the entire show – and the media, too scared of lawsuits and Leveson to hassle genuine celebrities, stocks its larder with layer after layer of needless, scary gossip on these microstars, which just feeds the cycle of horror. There’s no way to protect myself, and that’s why I’ve lashed out – threatening to throw fireworks at one participant or to slash others with knives – it was in self-defence, while scared and confused and finding myself unable to escape their dark grasp. What do I have to do to get these nasty people out of my life – pour something corrosive in my eyes and ears? Or am I in fact in the wrong – is it me that is evil for not agreeing to swallow the media muck? Am I wrong, for instance, to assume that all twins are nasty people just because the twins that were on telly are? Should I take some kind of ridiculous legal action, like trying to have myself banned by law from ever seeing anything involving Denise Welch again, or having Channel 5 HQ declared unfit for habitation by their local council? For instance, a recent issue of slimy tossrag Nuts had on its cover the Shannon twins and, in thankfully much smaller type, Cocozza – not only did I not buy the magazine, I enquired into the legality of burning down the entire shop. A viable reaction? Or do I just try to avoid these people as far as I can, by refusing to enter a newsagent or use Twitter whilst the series which I despise are on the air? Other people, after all, have the right to discuss these shows and it’s not my place to let my misgivings ruin the party.

One Big Brother personality I’ve started to have second thoughts about now she’s out of the house is – and you’ll sigh heavily on hearing her name mentioned here again – Rebeckah Vaughan. As I’ve said previously, my vitriol toward her abated once the pressure-cooker of last year’s BB was over, and I’ve since become disgusted at the level of hate meted out towards her. Now, though, I face a new Vaughan-based challenge – she’s actually doing stuff I want to get involved in, but I can’t because of what I’ve said previously about herself and other BB participants! I’ll elaborate: Rebeckah has been openly discussing mental health issues (including her own) online, and has become involved in awareness-raising campaigns; she’s been posting Twitter messages about depression and bipolar disorder, and the problems these can cause for sufferers. This was brought to my attention via someone else’s retweet, and on reading the content she had put forward, it really hit home how likely it is I’ve got some kind of undetected but clearly visible mental problem. It got to the point where I was considering jumping in and asking the table-dancer for advice, along the lines of “I recognise these symptoms, I think I may have something wrong with me, and I could use your advice and support!” (I think that’s under 140 characters, but you get the idea!) However, such an approach would require me to embarrass myself royally given that, with bone-destroying irony, BB as a programme is one of my many mood-swing triggers! So I’d be asking a former contestant for advice on how to cope with the anguish and pressure I suffer when people are talking about the show she was a contestant on! B’oh!

Maybe if I root a little deeper around the galaxy of Twitter I’d be able to find mental health support from someone who wasn’t on Channel 5 last autumn, but the fact remains: it was Rebeckah who opened my eyes to this – I need treatment, or at least support and advice, because from where I’m at my mental condition can only worsen, which would be bad news for… someone. So I do now, albeit belatedly, have respect for the lady – though even now she’s still recieving hate from the less-enlightened members of the Twitter community, those even less willing to let things go than I am. I should also flag up here that Rebeckah has been getting behind charitable causes including the NSPCC and, brilliantly, the Katie Piper Foundation. So there’s something that myself and Ms. Vaughan have in common – a desire to support and contribute to the success of the “KPF”, as it’s known. (And no, I didn’t come up with that acronym, I’m just using the one everyone else does!) So, after much confusion, someone who I’d been led to believe was horrible is in fact a nice person! Shows how bad my judgement skills are! So now what do I do – swallow my pride and speak up on Twitter in support of Vaughan, mutter quietly to her that we may be able to assist each other, or stay silent and let her get on with her day without my involvement in her cause? It’s a tough call to make.

And then there’s the X Factor. You’ll recall, if you will, my various misgivings and mutterings about the ITV pop series over recent months, and my less-than-friendly (but, unlike others’ hate, never directly abusive) comments about Little Mix and their mistake in covering Cannonball as a single. But I’m now wondering if I misjudged the X Factor people and need to give them a fairer hearing? A lot of my unpleasant comments were based on a distaste for the media hooey that surrounded the series, rather than on actual performances – indeed, as a non-viewer I’d hardly heard them sing a note, and was instead basing my harsh judgements on their behaviour and portrayal in the wider media. Essentially, I got upset about X Factor media stuff so much that I just wanted to get the people involved out of my life at any cost. But maybe I was wrong. I realised this when I happened to hear XF contestant Marcus Collins’ version of White Stripes classic 7 Nation Army, apparently coming out as a ‘single’ (should they still exist) in March. And, whilst nobody reasonable would claim it betters Jack and Meg’s version, it actually sort of works – the Rizzle Kicks/Mark Ronson-style trumpets and the lounge-bar hip-hop feel give Marcus’ version its own feel whilst still recognisably being a fairly faithful rework of the track. I do quite like to hear cover versions, and I find it interesting when someone puts a different take on an established concept – one of the last things I bought from Zavvi, when they were in their dying convulsions and flinging out anything they had left on the shelf, was an album of Radiohead covers by a solo female singer. (Yeah, really – “She Talks In Maths” by Eliza Lumley.) So with this in mind, I had to reevaluate Collins’ potential future contribution to the music medium; after all, the likes of Lemar and Will Young managed to parlay a launch in reality-pop-vote shows into fairly solid music careers, with initial covers soon being succeeded by original material. With that in mind, should I re-assess the other XF performers? Or at least try and snoop out some footage of them actually singing? I swallowed all the media bitching about Misha B, Kitty and Little Mix and became exceptionally grumpy at them, yet aside from Cannonball and the M&S ad I’ve barely heard any of these ladies sing a note. I maybe should now believe this was wrong. At a time when Britain’s cultural scene desperately needs a variety of new voices, it’s wrong of me to sneer down my nose at something that could save pop music itself from oblivion. It could well be that while I’ve been sat here sulking and listening to Bombay Bicycle Club, young Misha, say, could be the best new singer I’ve never heard. Should I just open my ears?

I have been a little rattled by the changes to pop culture in recent years – the death of music shops, the rise of downloads, the chart dominance of R&B/hip-hop to the virtual exclusion of any other genre, the evolution of the radio world and the and music TV market, the death of kids’ Saturday morning TV and TOTP, the rise of reality shows – the entertainment world’s a very different place to the one I grew up in! But I shouldn’t let this unease with the modern age lead me to make snap judgements about people based on incomplete, biased or inaccurate information. I’ve become so sick of having people from reality shows and suchlike being forced down our throat that I became too quick to violently swat them away if they tried to enter my landscape. I’ve been too eager to let myself listen to them shout before I’d listened to them sing. (Literally, in the case of X Factor). I was too quick to lash out in self-defence – if I’d actually taken time to listen to what Little Mix, Rebeckah Vaughan, Denise Welch or Amy Childs had to say, rather than simply wafting them away, I’d probably be in a better place right now – for instance, my comment in the previous post here that Amy Childs’ participation in Sport Relief would lead to me boycotting the charity was itself an unwanted piece of rubbish – it’s quite possible that Amy’s willing to give up her time to help others by participating in charitable endeavours, and I got the wrong end of the stick and thought her participation was a means of boosting her own publicity! And as for Welch, is she the villain or the victim? Yes, her drunken sexual endeavours were a bit… misguided, say? – but the problems in her personal life need calm and rational treatment and caring support, not stubborn and mouthy bullying. We live in an age where it’s almost impossible to tell right from wrong, good from evil, and I made the wrong call just about every single time the option was presented to me. Which leads us to these confused, rambling posts where I try to decide what to believe. I’ve had very little help and support myself – at time of writing this blog had only ever generated two comments, both on “Jesus and bin Laden on the same day” (see it in the archives), and my rants on Twitter are met with a mix of ignorance, supportive comments, pull-yourself-together barks and unfollows – maybe I need to find a better way to have my mental anguish treated? How and where do I ask for the help I clearly need?

It’s possible that the contribution, such as it is, made by reality stars to our overall landscape is amplified by wider changes in our media. It appears that in the face of intense scrutiny from the increasingly-tabloid news media, the internet and social media, A-listers are pulling back their media exposure a little and being more selective with their appearances; conversely, many of the smaller stars and reality bodies are willing to turn up for any media event going, filling the vacuum created by larger names’ reticence and in the process increasing their own showbiz ubiquity. The reduction in coverage of big stars could, of course, be in part due to major celebrities being more able and ready to call on teams of high-powered, expensive Hollywood attorneys if a media outlet besmirches them (that’s why this blog has always been cagey of suggesting exactly what Tom Cruise does with hedgehogs, for instance). However, the microcelebs, often going into bat armed only with Max Clifford, are more likely to play ball, as it benefits both themselves and the papers (the wannabes want to be written about, and the press wants stars to write about) – and with newspaper bods laying bare their methods at the Leveson inquiry, it is a great shame to see the depth to which our once-proud press has sunk. Though I don’t know how, exactly, we rewrite journalism to cut off the bloated corpse of celebrity tattle without destroying the freedom of the media to produce genuine investigative and serious articles – that’s a circle to be squared by more mature minds than mine. If we over-regulate, you see, we throttle the proper journalists needlessly, whilst if we don’t take a firm enough hand, celebrity slop will be allowed the oxygen to live on. It’s a judgement call too finite even for this blog to muster.

Away from Leveson, another media analysis which has made waves recently is the new report into the representation of younger and older people in the media, which found that young people were often demonised as evil aggressors, and that older people – women in particular – were underrepresented on TV (though there was a mixed picture as to the tone of the representation, with depictions of older people as dotty/doddery offset by those pieces positioning the elders as wise and knowledgeable). I’ve raked and re-raked over the issue of sexism several times on here, so I will add little new except to say that the media depiction of young people may be contributing to myself and others having a general fear that anyone under 21 is a patois-spouting, heavy-drinking, knife-carrying, stereo-stealing layabout, and that the issues with older women could in part be resolved if the macho broadcasters – in particular the BBC – could feel able to stand up and admit their mistakes and apologise, such as in the Arlene Phillips case – it’s possible that when making the change, the Beeb didn’t realise the error they were making until people started pointing it out, but the fact that in over four years they haven’t properly said sorry for handling the situation wrongly probably does stick in people’s craw a little. I also feel at this point I should perhaps point out that some areas of the BBC are quite inclusive of women, of all ages – BBC Three giving young documentary makers Stacey Dooley and Cherry Healey an outlet, and BBC Radio’s roster boasting names like Vanessa Feltz, Jo Whiley, Edith Bowman, Annie Nightingale, Fearne Cotton, Annie Mac, Rachel Burden, Nemone, Lauren Laverne, Sandi Toksvig, and one of the UK’s foremost and most-admired broadcasters, Woman’s Hour legend Jenni Murray. So the BBC does know how to get a range of female voices on air – it just has to know how to make them a bit more visible and prominent, and give them material with genuine meat to work with, rather than token sops.

Maybe the next Director-General of the BBC would find it easier to work with women. Hey, maybe the next DG will herself be female, which would literally be a first. Yup, since the last big mouthy one went up here, Mark Thompson confirmed one of the leakiest secrets in broadcasting and confirmed he’ll be ending his awkward period at the helm of the national broadcaster at some point within the next year or so. It’s good to see Thompson finally go – he’s at times been a fairly weak and ineffective leader – presiding over missteps, refusing to cut his own pay packet even as the walls of 6Music burned – as the BBC has spent the last decade lurching awkwardly between crises and collected numerous reprimands from the Royal household, Ofcom and the government. Indeed, Thompson’s arrival (from Channel 4) was at a difficult time in the Beeb’s history, coming after his well-regarded crap-cutting predecessor Greg Dyke had been uprooted by the Hutton report, and since then it’s been an inclement environment, with programme-makers complaining of an increasing level of red tape at a BBC fearful of taking risks, and viewers left bemused by a series of easily-avoidable blunders which suggest that when something does go wrong, as it often does, a period of buck-passing and blamemongering is now the corporation’s usual response, rather than giving those generally responsible for the blooper – usually either someone very senior or someone very junior – the opportunity to stand up, accept their error and collect the opprobrium required. Be they male or female, then, the BBC’s next DG will need to be made of stern stuff to bring about change in an organisation weakened almost to death over recent years both by problems of the Beeb’s own making and by cultural shifts elsewhere in the media mix. We deserve better from our public broadcaster! Hopefully the new DG will be able to bring out a stronger BBC that will weather the changes in the wider media landscape which have so far only badly damaged the organisation. At least in the run-up to his departure Thompson was willing to play to the crowd, writing in the Daily Mail that the Beeb had, as reports put it, ‘got it wrong on women’; should I hope that he can, as one of his final acts in the chair, start to put the wheels in motion for his successor to repair the cracks?

Given the imminent regime change at the Beeb, I could here draw parallels with events in Woolwich, where the Director-General – which in this case was a pub – has been replaced, in this case as part of a wider development which, inevitably in this day and age, includes a Tesco store. As I mentioned last time, it’s good to see new investment in this often-troubled town, though the loss of another pub could leave locals gasping for a cheeky pint as it’s not the only boozer to fall lately – the historic Pullman next to Woolwich Arsenal station was pulled down to make way for the more recent DLR station, and the Great Harry, just down the road from the DG (and which had presumably expected to pick up its displaced regulars) was torched in the August 2011 riots – though, continuing the theme of reinvention, Wetherspoon have said they’ll reopen in Woolwich, which should help slake the locals’ thirst. This isn’t confined to SE18, however – right around the country, pubs have been disappearing – converted into betting shops, restaurants, supermarkets and other premises, or pulled down entirely for new developments – and whilst a reduction in the volume of drinking establishments may go some way to helping tackle the much-documented drunken misbehaviour seen after chucking-out time in towns nationwide, we have to ensure that those which remain are fit for purpose, and that as with journalism, reality TV and the BBC, we don’t destroy the positive aspects, and damage the socially and economically beneficial things pubs and social venues can bring, in our quest to put right a few earlier wrongs.

Something else being cleared out is my Twitter library. You may have noticed, if you notice these things, that the baseline number of people I follow on that site has recently dropped, by close to a hundred names in all, and there are several reasons for this. First of all, I have for some time been bumping around the 2000 mark for a while now, and Twitter has a limit disallowing those who have less than 2000 followers themselves to follow more than that many accounts: this meant that I could not add new people without booting out some of those already on my line. This dearth of new followees and followers, when coupled with my own somewhat terse use of the site, did lead to my Twitter becoming somewhat stagnant  – with little change in those I was following, there was little chance to attract potentially useful new people to follow me in return. (Though perhaps if I posted better tweets, that would at least help…) One problem with the clearout was that I don’t particularly like unfollowing active users, on the grounds that it can seem like a bit of an insult. However, some of the people I followed on Twitter some time ago are no longer tweeting or are no longer relevant to my needs, and so a clearout was needed. I undertook a very thorough scrubbing of my followed-users list, focusing in particular on removing those who hadn’t tweeted in some months/years, those who mainly posted links/retweets and little of their own content, some corporate and spoof pages, those who had little prospect of interacting with or responding to my own comments due to their own Twitter agenda, and those who mainly talked about shows/celebs who infuriate my anger (if I spotted their timeline was full of X Factor and Big Brother, I hit the killswitch). It wasn’t an exact science – the quite difficult and labour-intensive task of scrubbing through thousands of Twitter pages to weed out the keepers from the dumpable options was highly fraught and the limited time available meant I almost certainly made errors; however, I did try to make sure I kept hold of those who had made the effort to communicate with and support me, and I did not (deliberately) unfollow any of those who were most prominent in my Twitter universe. There is scope, should time and energy allow, to potentially do another shakedown – I want to cut my lineup down to a more manageable size to prevent me smashing into the barriers again – but while it’s fairly easy to find new people to follow, it’s quite difficult to choose who to leave out!

Something else given a fresh lock of paint lately has been More4. Set up as an intelligent factual and culture channel, the service has been given a zesty, rainbow-hued new look in order to build audiences with a more populist mix of home, lifestyle and reality shows. I’ve mentioned before how this move away from serious factual runs the risk of damaging the wider landscape of digital TV; also, whether we really need another channel offering round-the-clock Come Dine With Me and Big Fat Gypsy Weddings is a topic for discussion elsewhere in the media. It does appear Channel 4 is fond of travellers, with their much-complained-about film on the darker side of gypsy life. Gypsy Blood, being the first True Stories film on Channel 4 following the relocation of the documentary film strand away from More4. One twist in the refocus of True Stories is that although there will be fewer films in the strand, there will be more original commissions among them – on More4, four of the 40 annual TS films were commissioned originals (10% of the strand’s output), whilst under the new regime ten of the 20 films will be original (50% of those shown). The ten acquired pieces are set to play on Film4, but will presumably not have the 10pm slot they enjoyed on More4 and will instead be buried in a post-11pm position after the film channel’s headline 9pm blockbuster. Elsewhere in Horseferry Road, a further replays channel is being put together for a proposed launch later this year; the ‘Project Shuffle’ project (don’t worry, it’ll be given a better name, most likely with a 4 in, by the time it makes it to your box) will see popular recent C4 shows replayed on a catch-up basis, to provide viewers an alternative chance to see key programmes. The current recieved wisdom is that it will operate on a similar basis to the former FilmFour Weekly channel, screening shows every night for a week, with alternative and archive content taking the place of shows that aren’t shuffled. This seems a slightly awkward plan to support – whilst it would be a useful tool to drive viewers to shows they may have missed, and along with C4 +1 helps to avert programme loss in schedule clashes, it’s likely the new service will focus on popular revenue-driving shows and eschew the more esoteric output (should C4 still have any lurking in the schedule) and the required-by-public-service content. Essentially, Shuffle will be another channel of wall-to-wall Kirstie-n-Phil and Gypsy Weddings, which seems a wasted opportunity given how many channel slots C4 already dedicates to this type of content. It’d be nice to see C4 launch something genuinely alternative and challenging – they have a reputation for edgy entertainment, comedy and drama, for instance, and are using almost none of this experience in the digital space, save for Balls of Steel on an unending loop on 4Music – but it’s money that talks and as the aspirant lifestyle shows keep the advertisers pouring into C4 HQ, that’s what we’re gonna get. Still, I can’t knock a channel which may, possibly, potentially, screen Katie Piper programmes on a nightly basis – if the ‘nightly shuffle’ reports are true, and if Katie gets another four-part series in the future as part of her C4 deal, the shuffle would mean on-air Piper every night for virtually an entire month. Now that’s a possibility which is hard for me to refuse…

The sands do appear to be shifting in digital TV just lately. Following on from the close of NME TV at the start of the year (as whined about here previously), more channels are losing their slots over the coming weeks. Runt of the Sky Living litter Sky Living Loves becomes the latest of the former Virgin Media channels to be dumped following BSkyB’s purchase of the channel group, and will follow Bravo and Channel One down the dust-chute shortly, leaving only Sky Living, Sky LivingIt and Challenge surviving from the lineup – Loves, of course, having come in prior to the takeover to fill the slot vacated by the closure of the youth-skewed channel Trouble. Meanwhile, the acquisition of Comcast by NBC Universal has led to collateral damage in the combined UK lineup – NBCU already operated Diva TV (in addition to Universal Channel, Syfy and Movies24) in the UK, whilst Comcast ran E! and Style Network. Whilst the UK-founded Diva format has been rolled out to other territories (often as ‘Diva Universal’), the UK original is to be stopped up, its programming shuffled over to its newly-acquired sisters (most likely Style). There is potential for further rationalisation of Universal’s channel lineup – for instance, in the US Universal operates Cloo (formerly Sleuth), with a similar crime format on air as ’13th Street’ (or a local version thereof) in various territories (but please not the UK – we already have more than enough channels based entirely or heavily on crime/police/mystery drama). Similarly, there is scope to further integrate Style and Diva internationally (and the US Oxygen service). As long as the lineup which emerges from any restructure is strong and provides subscribers with real choice and diversity of output, viewers will be the real winners. Elsewhere, new channels are starting to creep through the mat; Sky are to launch their first channel dedicated to one sport (if you don’t count At The Races), with the March launch of the much-promoted Sky Sports F1 channel (most likely what Liv-Lov is closing to free a slot for); whilst the focus on Formula One is presumably a sop to the egos at the top of the sport, it remains to be seen how long it is before Sky states that a piece of other sports content that won’t fit the schedules on their existing four stations will be squeaked out on the F1 channel in the off-season (as already occasionally happens on Sky Sports News) – surely launching a Sky Sports 5 with F1 as its centrepiece would have been better than a specific channel, a luxury which even the FA Premier League – on which much of Sky’s sporting success has been based – doesn’t yet have? It’s possible launching a dedicated F1 channel also means Sky can, as with Sky Atlantic, withhold content so that only those who sign up to the Sky satellite system can see it – though a deal to carry the F1 channel in SD only on Virgin Media has now been reached, and there are suggestions that, schedules permitting, the main F1 races may be simulcast on Sky Sports 1 or 2 to allow viewers of the reduced Sky Sports provision on BT Vision/Top Up TV to access these, with qualifying/practice laps – which the BBC largely filed away on the red button for their coverage – forming the bulk of pre-race output on Sky’s new channel.

One channel Sky viewers will most likely not be able to see for much longer is Current TV. The documentary channel is currently provided as part of a subscription package on both Sky and Virgin Media, but not for long: after mutterings around Virgin planning to drop the channel in favour of services that would offer their content on-demand through Virgin’s VOD platform (Current only offer theirs on Virgin on a linear basis, and only have on-demand viewing via their own website) came the news that Current would be booted out of Sky’s subscription packages. There is previous form here – a planned gay entertainment channel (likely to have been similar to US service Logo) was scrapped when Sky refused the channel admission to its subscription pack on the basis of not allowing adult-entertainment services to be included – Sky apparently believing any programming based on sexual orientation would land the channel in the 900+ range, where, incidentally, several gay-leaning adult content channels have and do reside, independent of Sky’s subscription lineup and instead purchased by viewers as standalone services. This. incidentally, is an option open to Current – they could stand alone as a solus subscription channel or a free-to-air channel on Sky’s programme guide. However, this is not ideal; a standalone pay channel requires viewers to opt-in and pay additional charges on top of their current subscription, which few viewers would choose to do (see how Film4’s viewers spiked when it swapped from standalone subscription to free broadcast); the alternative, going free-to-air, would require the channel to be funded entirely by advertising and commercial activity, which for a channel providing edgy documentary content would be difficult, as More4 has found. So it appears Current will simply walk away from the market in March and hand its channel slots over to another broadcaster – most likely ITV on Sky (for ITV4 +1) and Channel 5 on Virgin (for C5 +1). There are rumblings that Sky’s move to force Current out was politically-motivated, following the controversial revocation of Current’s Italian offshoot from Sky Italia, apparently (if you believe the reports) for political reasons imposed by the Murdoch mafia. Either way, and even though as a pay channel I wasn’t able to watch it, it’s not good to see a channel doing its own thing given the boot in favour of more of the same old same old. I did see one notable film on the Current website though – a documentary your very own Katie Piper made before her traumatic face incident (though shamefully I didn’t see it until afterwards), here seeing Kate (yes, that one) give up the filthy British and international habit of smoking, whilst her non-cigging male co-documentarian took up the cancer-sticks for a short while, and monitored the resulting impact on his health. (I like watching documentaries fronted by Katie Piper – take the hint, More4!)

Channel 4 has just screened a new Katie-helmed filmproject, one which was not announced with much fandango and which screeched out onto the schedule too late to be included in my last big meaty blog (though I did big-thoroughly-up the film on Twitter, once I’d found the relevant information). “Katie: The Science of Seeing Again” followed our No. 1 Piper as she looked into the scientific and moral issues around stem-cell surgery, having discovered it as a potential way of restoring sight in her scarred left eye. Now, I’ve had a lot of eye issues in my time (and I’m not referring here to Lord Gnome’s organ) – most prominently, fuzzy and hazy vision out of my left (left) eye throughout my life, which led the optician to prescribe me spectacles right through my schooldays. Eventually, when I hit my teens and it became clearer that my vision wouldn’t, I was allowed to bin the bins (keeping a final pair back in case I felt the need to look at stuff) and since then I’ve carried on peering at things through my increasingly-rusty right eye, much as sexy Katie has had to do in the four years since her assault. Of course, I don’t know if my vision problems are due to a fault within the actual eye itself or a difficulty within my brain, as I’ve never been told the full story of my skull. I know I suffered severe damage whilst a toddler when I smashed my head open in a fall in a shop – the only visible remnant of the incident is a scar in my eyebrow (oddly, above the other eye) but it probably mashed me up quite badly inside – it’s probably the reason my head’s such an odd shape, and could well be the reason behind my social and reasoning disorder. I would have to go for a brain scan to find out the truth; my mum’s never openly admitted what’s wrong with my brain, though I’ve never specifically asked! The most galling thing is that because the topple happened when I was so young, I don’t have any direct comprehension of how it affected me as a person – I don’t remember how messed (or unmessed) my personality was beforehand, and I don’t know how different a person I am from the person I would’ve been had my ladder-face interface not occurred. Anyway, my vision issues meant a more thorough look inside the function of the human eye was, for me at least, an eye-opener. As it were. It was also illuminating to see a show that balanced the scientific and religious viewpoints before coming to a reasoned conclusion – whilst on her hospital bed, Katie (Piper, that is, keep up) found faith both in Christianity – which gave her the inner peace and strength in belief to hold on and recover – and also in science, in the medical skills, techniques and equipment that helped rebuild her smile. So if anyone’s well-placed to balance the delicate tightrope between moral and factual correctness, Katie is that woman. And of course, it’s always good to see her sunny smile on our screens!

The film also caused a long-dangling penny to drop: a few months ago, Katie revealed on Twitter that she was giving up alcohol for nine months, without stating a reason why. This led some of her Twitter followers – and shamefully I was one of them – to jump to the conclusion that we had a pregnant Piper in our midst (well, what else do women do for nine months that advises them to avoid alcohol?) Katie denied she was up the Hilary, and we all just assumed it was some kind of detox, or summat. In the new film, however, the truth was revealed: Katie was on medication related to her eye surgery, and presumably couldn’t mix this with alcohol, so therefore was off the grog for three-quarters of the year. Penny? Dropped. Still, it’s not like staying on the soft drinks will stop our girl socialising and supporting her charitable endeavours, and it’d certainly help her stay safe on the roads – though having seen, in the film and on Twitter, what Katie can get up to behind the wheel of a car, I’ve torn up my theoretical membership card to the Katie Piper Driving School – let’s just say that motoring is one of the very few things beloved Katie sucks at… Anyway, if you managed to miss the “Science of Seeing Again” when it screened on Channel 4, you can now access it on 4oD at http://www.channel4.com/programmes/katie-the-science-of-seeing-again/4od – yes, I know I could have made a horrible crunching pun about “seeing again” at this point, but there’s some things I don’t need to turn into jokes. Katie Piper is one of them. Well, technically she’s one of us, but you get the idea…

Katie’s also coming back to the bookshelves. On the back of the heaving success of Ebury-published ‘Beautiful’, which rocketed to become one of the best-selling paperbacks of 2011 following its release a year ago (in 2011, keep up), publisher Quercus (no, me neither) has snapped up our golden lady for a three-book deal, the first of the three being a self-help tome of sorts, in which Katie shares the wisdom and patience she’s learnt on her journey through life, and the lessons she learned on her road to recovery. “Things Get Better…” will be released in May (2012, come on now) and if this blog is anything to go by, that title alone is advice I need! I’m too quick to get upset and angry about the now – be the problem at hand a massed riot, a crime, a disaster, a bus journey, a job rejection, a shopping blunder or general anger at the volume of Big Brother/Denise Welch coverage in the media, I’m always too ready to panic and become upset, rather than playing the long game and waiting for the problems to iron themselves flat. Katie’s soothing words of advice and kind smile have been a great comfort to me these last couple years, and she continues to give and give. (If you want to support her and give something back, your first port of call should probably be the recently-retrimmed http://www.katiepiperfoundation.co.uk where you can help Katie help others.) I have, in principle, made one long-term commitment – I’ve pre-ordered the book on Amazon in the hope of devouring its content (with my functioning eye, it’s a book after all), and provided my home, my blog and myself are still in existence come late May I’ll report back on the book’s contents thereafter.

Aside from fresh Piper, there does seem to have been a spring wind of renewal blowing through the schedules lately, with new programmes (such as Alexander Armstrong’s Big Ask on the still-aiming-high Dave, and Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy on E4) joined by returnees such as Roger & Val Have Just Got In and 10 O’Clock Live to give February quite a strong hand (we’ll gloss over C4’s recommission of Big Fat Gypsy Weddings for now…) Celebrity Juice, which gets a mixed response even from me alone (is it brilliant, awful or both?) is also back, and breaking records for ITV2 – the first episode of the show’s new series beat every other programme screened in the slot apart from BBC One’s ten o’clock news, and Keith Lemon is to branch out further with another primetime Saturday night show for ITV1 (the in-development “Lemon Aid”) and a movie, which will be in cinemas this summer despite having Kelly Brook in it. Bang tidy. All told, it’s true what Katie Piper says – things get better. It’s shaping up to be a more smooth ride than the horribly depressing January (and 2011 before it) that has haunted me so. Although it seems our grand overlord isn’t done punishing us for our wrongs yet – is the cold snap which has iced up Britain’s streets recently some sort of moral judgement upon our activities? Or is it just global warming live and in action? We remain untold. Maybe someone who understands both religion and science can explain it to me. *ahem* Katie…?

I have tried to show more restraint myself. As posted previously, I revel in anything which knocks or damages the shows I dislike – Take Me Out, Big Brother, X Factor and so on – and whilst seeing reportage of the cretinous behaviour of the people involved can send me into mentalspin, I do crow over pieces which help demolish this little world. I did at one point chance upon a Digital Spy article about someone whose idiot behaviour on TMO met with derision and threatened to derail the show, and ordinarily I’d have linked to that on my Twitter page with a snobby, crowing comment about how I hoped such missteps would bring about the demise of the series. However, having done just this in the past, on this occasion I held back. I spent some time rolling over the possible implications and moral alternatives, and decided not to stoke the fire. Just because I want Paddy’s dating show taken round the back of ITV and shot in the footage, doesn’t mean I should tread on others’ enjoyment. There may well have been followers among my 1200 who were well looking forward to a bit of TMO and wouldn’t have responded well to my hatchet job. Anyway, it’s not my place to control what people watch on TV, as the almost completely nil response to my earlier “let’s make 4Music better” post here (“Music and then some – of these?”) proved. The closure or relaunch of channels I once liked – from Play UK to NME TV, from Lava to Virgin1, from Trouble to p-rock and from Soundtrack Channel to More4 – seems to suggest that there is one person British TV doesn’t want to serve, and that’s me. Or am I wrong? Maybe my tastes are simply so different from the general public’s to result in a disproportionate disposal of stuff I want to watch in favour of shows a greater number of other people would want! And it’s not all bad news – QI’s still going like the clappers, The Cube’s been recommissioned (alright Schofield! Whoo!) and of course Channel 4 keeps getting Katie Piper, surefire winner of the “she’s really lovely” award if there was one, to host her lovely documentaries. So as long as nobody mentions Denise Welch, I’ll be OK. (You can probably guess which Loose Women presenter and loose-clothed Big Brother camera-magnet is mentioned by name in Piper’s book Beautiful – all I’ll add is, now there’s someone who could do with staying off the alcy-hol Piper-style for at least a few months…)

I’ve been quite stressed lately, as you’ll know, with job hunt panic (still going to interviews and filling in the forms, with no result) and home pressure (including having to rush around collecting foodstuff from various large supermarkets and racing it home on troubling buses), and it’s not been the most pleasant time to be me. With all the back-and-forth in the present, it’s no surprise I’ve again been regressing into the past. If you unwisely allow yourself to look at photos people have posted on Twitter (a move so unsafe that even the library computers now consider Twitpic ‘pornography’), you’ll have seen something that I posted the other day – an old photo of me from a travel photocard from when I was not long out of school/college (so probably sometime around 2000/2002, when I was 18-20). It’s frightening how different I look now – my face has changed for the worse in the last decade or so, with years of depression, lasagne and exhaustion having taken their toll. I had crappy hair then and still do now, so that’s one thing that won’t change without specialist attention, but it’s shocking to see just how bad things have got. The guy in the photo was brimming with potential – fresh out of the educational establishment, ready to take the world on and get down to business in the world of work. That guy didn’t know that by 30 he’d be desperately lonely, struggling to find work, with no hope of love and with only occasional glimmers of good news in his murky, decrepit world. I do sometimes get angry with myself when I look back – I acted like such a child when I was at school, and some of the things I did and decisions I made back then I wouldn’t now make knowing what I now do about myself and the world, so I have plenty of generic regrets, but there were some things about life that were better when I was young; it seems my appearance was one of them. I’ve never been handsome – I’ve always been a chewer of the ugly stick – but my grim decade of glumness has turned me from a mildly unattractive, slightly mentally awkward young man into the ill, unkempt ogre you see (or try to avoid seeing) today.

I have found ways to relive the positive side of my youth, by revisiting music from my childhood; this was in part aided by my discovery that free retro music channel Vintage TV (Sky 369, Freesat 515) has begun showing 1990s music videos – I watched a programme block titled “There’s No Other Way: The 90s” and lapped up an hour of glory from Pulp, Blur, Oasis, The Las, Happy Mondays, Dodgy and Ocean Colour Scene among others. That takes me back to my schooldays, to the era that I was just becoming the music fan I am now. Young people today have a wall of urban pop from the likes of Bruno Mars, Rihanna, Jessie J and Chris Brown drowning their ears, but I happened to begin my proper commitment to music with the likes of Sleeper and Supergrass, and from those British popular acorns did my breadth of music grow. Through the course of the 90s and beyond I developed my collection, taking a similar attitude to music to that I had elsewhwere in life – if I like it, it’s in. So, yes, now, in my collection the likes of A1, Billie Piper, Pixie Lott and Kylie Minogue rub shoulders with Deftones, Funeral For a Friend, Biffy Clyro and Hell is for Heroes, who nudge up against Underworld, Roni Size, Freemasons and Apollo Four Forty, with The Beautiful South, The Human League and The Cooper Temple Clause all disc-jockeying for position. It’s as eclectic as I want it to be, maybe even more so. Perhaps I should have a clear-out, like I have on Twitter, to scoop some songs I no longer want to hear out of my CD storage bags, but I want to maintain my spread of sounds. However, returning to the 90s is always comforting and along with Vintage TV’s 90s block I’m also often to be found dipping into my 90s CDs – either those bought on release duing the decade, or more recent compilations I picked up to fill some of the gaps left by tunes I didn’t purchase at the time. I am also. of course, a fairly regular listener to digital radio station Absolute Radio 90s – woah, it’s unbelievable – and there’s been a lot of opportunities to revisit the telly I watched in the 90s too, thanks to the likes of Challenge. Aw c’mon, The Crystal Maze is brilliant and I’ll disagree with anyone who doesn’t agree. In hindsight, I actually had a lovely childhood! Well, OK, passable at least!

But would I be a lovely parent? It’s difficult to tell. I struggle to be a son, grandson and brother, that’s already well-documented. Fatherhood may just push me completely over the edge. It certainly wasn’t pleasant for my own father, and the many broken relationships I’ve seen in my own world and in the wider news and media has led me to be somewhat shy about ruining someone’s life with my presence. In any case, no woman would want my unwashed genes swimming their way into her family line: any child that got a hit of my DNA would be fated to struggle with mental and physical difficulties that would almost certainly make their lives impossible. For similar reasons I wouldn’t even be comfortable donating my man-gravy to be used by some ill-fated childless couple, although that would at least check me the box of helping others. So it seems that the rickety, troubled family line I crawl along will end altogether when I disappear from this existence, something which with my advancing years will happen sooner rather than later. I’m already almost double the age most blokes become fathers (albeit often unwittingly) these days. So it seems I’ll never see my son and/or daughter grow up: never walk them home from school, never take them for meals in McDonalds or better, never see the glow on their faces when they recieve a beloved gift, never be able to educate them about life, wisdom, tolerance, music, nature, literature or Samurai Pizza Cats, never congratulate them on academic achievement or see them off down the driveway as they rumble off to take their own way in life. I’d never be invited to their graduation, or even to their collection of, say, a BAFTA or an OBE if things were to go particularly well. Of course, not everyone has a happy life; it’s quite plausible I’d have to go to the morgue and identify my child’s corpse, just as my mother may well have to do for me once my own body gives up the fight. It’s increasingly possible that one of my progeny will shack up with someone who is a brutal attacker, thief or killer, as quite a lot of people these days seem to be, and I’d need to be able to cope with bringing this person, and the results of their activities, into my life; indeed my son/daughter could themselves fall into a bad crowd and come home covered in scars – their own or someone else’s – and I’d need to be able to respond to that in an appropriate manner. I’m not sure I’m a strong enough person to cope with the pressure fatherhood would bring.

I would need great stability and strength of mind before I could consider bringing a child into this world – I’d need a steady permanent job, a home of my own, a better and more positive attitude, a better health prognosis and a stronger, braver spirit. (A girlfriend/wife would also be useful, actually…) As a result I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the fact that there will be no continuation of the crudline – I’m the last in the series, the end of the production run. My children will be neither a success nor a failure – they simply won’t exist at all. A great shame, of course, but I’m nothing if not realistic. However, whilst briefly flirting with the idea that one day some luckless lass would allow me to squire her brains out, I did choose names for my theoretical potential never-kids: if I had a daughter, she would be named Piper for reasons which should be obvious if you’ve bothered to read the rest of this post (and it can be a first name – thank you Ms. Perabo – so I’m in no immediate danger there!) A son, meanwhile, would be called Carlton: as mentioned previously, I watched a lot of telly during the 1990s, and there were quite a few significant and notable Carltons therein – and hey, at least it’s better than pledging to name my son Thames or Will-Smith… However, these youngfolk are to remain a pipedream. Carlton and/or Piper will never be. It’s a depressing thought, I agree, but if there’s one thing this blog is designed to do, it’s tell the truth. I may not know the full truth about what goes on in Big Brother, Winter Wipeout or the X Factor, or what really happens inside the BBC, the tabloid/showbiz press or More4; we may never hear what really goes through the minds of Frankie Cocozza, Denise Welch, Amy Childs, Rebeckah Vaughan or even Katie Piper; but one person whose truth you will hear on these purple pages is mine. And the truth is, even I don’t even really know who I am. Though you could probably have worked that out hours ago. I just wish I’d figured out that’s where I was heading, and how to avoid it, years ago. Who knows what I could’ve achieved if I hadn’t spent so many years being who I am now?

“And the feeling coming from my bones says find a home” (Goodbye!)

“You know, the closer it gets, the more it looks like a piano…” (Hello!)

Slowly, steadily, the posts continue to mount up…

So, recent events in Japan have given me something vaguely topical to hang a post on, one that I’ve been sitting on practically since I started this thing off. It’s a subject I’ve most likely touched on before back on the old blog, but now it’s time for a fuller review of the situation. You see, I can never get anything right. I’ve always had difficulty judging the mood of the moment. I’m constantly apologising for the somewhat fragmented things I say on Twitter, in the fear that some of the stuff I say would upset people, derail their good day or drown their timeline in my needless-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things views.

The problem is, I’m very aware that I don’t matter. Look at things like the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, or the similar Indian Ocean disaster which struck on Boxing Day 2004. On that day I happened to be at a relative’s house, celebrating the season with food and music and with little access to the news; I only found out the severity of what had happened after I’d arrived home. And ever after I felt guilty; I’d been bacchanalian while lives were literally being washed away. It’s situations like this that mean I’m now very frequently and frantically checking the news on the devices which allow me to do so, such that I can adjust my behaviour to suit the circumstances the world finds itself in.

I do take certain days very seriously. I always try and make sure I stay indoors on 11 September every year unless I have a specific appointment to go to, and get very eggy if that date is mentioned in connection with something – I remember being aggrieved that one year the BBC started a series of Dick and Dom in da Bungalow on 11 September simply ‘cos that year the date fell on a Saturday; and my love of the truly magnificent QI is tempered by the sad knowledge that the first ever episode was broadcast on 11 September 2003, though again that date was chosen by the BBC purely on the requirements of the schedule rather than for deliberately contrary reasons. Since 2005, I’ve added 7 July to my list of ‘banned’ dates: on 7/7 itself, the day terrorists blew apart the notion London’s transport system was safe, it just so happened my Oyster card was due to be topped up: I knew that going into a shop and updating my travel ticket on the day the network had been blown to a halt made me look callous and heartless. I was shaking so much I could barely tell the shopkeep what I was after; that newsagency most likely still smells vaguely of my metaphorical bum-poop.

However, I also know that immersing myself in the news without respite can harm one’s view of the world. I have been known to bury my head in stories too deeply, to take things too personally, and to worry I’m not doing enough to fix the problems that are ripping this planetoid apart on a daily basis. My limited circumstances – I can barely afford to feed myself, let alone anyone else – means I can’t contribute to everything I’d like to; and the huge number of problems in the world means that if I gave a single pound to everyone who deserved it, I’d bankrupt myself in mere minutes! I want to do more for others, but I’m so busy trying to fix my own badly-buckled life I don’t have the freedom to commit to helping others! It stings to see things going wrong in the world and knowing I can do very little to help from where I’m sitting, and knowing that my life’s only narrowly above being a charity case myself adds further uncertainty to the gloom.

The thing is, I’m too aware that I’m insignificant in the world. Whilst my life is, by comparison to other people of similar ilk’s everyday lives, a failure – and don’t try to tell me it isn’t – I’m not in the worst possible position. I have, at the time of writing at least, the bulk of a roof over my head; I have access to what passes for food in the south of England; I have clothes (albeit awful ones) on my (albeit awful) body; and I can still sort of breathe if I try hard enough. I don’t live in a dry, tepid wasteland with little access to sustenance unless Lenny Henry organises a food drop; I don’t live on a faultline or flood plain which threatens to swallow everything I’ve tried to build at slightest provocation; I don’t live in a wartorn citadel constantly at risk of being shelled to within an inch of my life by forces battling for control of the dictatorship; I’m not curled up in a ball under a railway bridge, up to my teeth in dog-crap and cheap drugs (but give it time)… So I can’t really complain about my situation, but nor can I cheer about it. My age is also stuck in the middle: at 29 (as of earlier this month) I’m too old to blame being young for my inefficiency, and too young to moan that I’m getting old. I should have moved my life up a gear literally a decade ago; I’ve thrown my life away!

I fail at a lot of things. Not for want of trying – the reason why these blog posts take a month at a time to write is ‘cos I’m so busy rushing around trying to fix my life, find work and improve myself that I don’t really have long enough of a time to sit down and write this crap; that’s why a lot of my rants end up on Twitter, where I can whinge in short bursts in between doing other stuff. So, technically I fail at blogging; I also fail at job hunting as no matter how much effort I put in, I’m still unwanted – in 2010, an entire year of legwork looking out for potential paid posts resulted in my being rewarded with just one day’s paid employ – and this lack of use means I fail at all things in life one would need money for (due to my limited financial squiggleroom, for instance, I had to buy the cheapest available mobile phone, a plastic clump of chud that barely functions at all). I struggle to make friends on a face-to-face basis, in part because I’m so scared of other people I constantly seek ways to avoid them. I fear that, being a dweller of the urban jungle, any attempt at making cheerful eye contact with a fellow resident will fetch me only a furious clout to the nose from the bullet-headed booze-botherers who principally occupy said region.

I take things way too personally, too. There are many TV shows I can’t enjoy either because of the situation I’m in or because of the situation the onscreen persons are. For instance, an attempt to watch The Inbetweeners had to be abandoned because the image of a secondary-school loser being picked on cut a little too close to my real school experience back in – bloody hell – the 1990s; and I become probably a little too upset at the Bruce/Tess/Vernon skits in The Impressions Show with Culshaw and Stephenson. I don’t know why I find Jon and Debra’s take-off of the TV-hosting trio so distasteful; maybe it’s the portrayal of Brucie, a man who’s been a fixture of light entertainment since long before I was born and featured in many of the shows I loved growing up, as an at turns doddery and imposing fool who refers to Vernon as ‘Roland’; maybe I feel sorry for “Vernon and Tess” having to put up with the faux-Forsyth overweening upon their young and well-regarded relationship. Strangely, despite finding these sections almost unwatchable, I don’t have problems with other Culshaw & Stephenson stuff – the Katie Price/Ronnie Corbett bit was genius, despite the two personalities themselves eliciting widely differing reactions in me (Price I despise as she stands for all that is wrong with Britain; Corbett I adore with a passion as a hero of a sadly now defunct age of entertainment).

At least TISwC&S is supposed to be funny. The same can’t be said for a lot of output – the relentlessly grim tales of EastEnders or Hollyoaks, for instance; if these shows represent real life, as they are widely said to do, then I’m glad I don’t tune in, as these would warp my grip on reality even more than it already is; or the endless procession of reality/talent shows, designed to take ordinary people away from their normal lives, burn them harshly in the glare of publicity, then dump them onto the scrapheap once they’ve delivered the financial boon sought by the commercial obelisks behind the programmes. The creation of Big Brother is one of the worst things ever to happen in British history, and had Channel 4 not already axed it I’d be railing against the series here at every opportunity (I lost a lot of Twitter followers, and was blocked by more than a few people, over my comments about the 2010 series; a rabid critique of the 2006 run was one of the first things I posted on MySpace.) The problem seems to be that I’m out of kilter with the rest of the country – the things I dislike tend to be those shows which get huge ratings and run for decades, while shows I actually enjoy tend, QI aside, to be buried in the middle of nowhere in the schedules and/or disappear after a handful of episodes.

There is one show currently running I’d heartily reccommend, though it does involve mentioning someone I’d promised not to mention here: she’s now been mentioned in two out of the four posts here, so that’s one resolution I’m failing at right there. I speak of course of the saintly Katie Piper, who has at last returned to our screens in “Katie: My Beautiful Friends”, which you can see on Tuesdays at 9pm on Channel 4. It’s fantastic to have the lovely Katie back on screen, of course, and in this new show she finds herself meeting others who have been affected by an altered appearance – either through injury or through medical conditions/surgery – and who, like Katie in the aftermath of her assault, found it difficult to reintegrate into society. The first episode – now available on 4oD at http://www.channel4.com/katie where you can also access other material related to the programme – featured Chantelle (who required surgery on a medical condition) and Adele (scalded after collapsing in the shower). These two young women opened their hearts about their concerns and fears, and their hopes and ambitions, and just as with Katie’s original film it was hard not to be moved: seeing Chantelle in severe pain was really quite striking and certainly set my tone for the rest of the evening: after Katie’s show, I was so emotionally drained that I had to abandon an attempt to watch Will Mellor’s new BBC Three comedy series White Van Man (which began the same night and is, if you’re quick, still up on iPlayer) due to the quite loud and intense nature of that show – lots of shouting and punching and running about was not what I was in the mood for after Katie’s fine programme: a bit of comedy to lighten the mood before bed was called for, however, and Dave delivered a QI rerun which helped send me to sleep with a smile. I’m not going to slag off White Van Man after one viewing, though – I learned my lesson with PhoneShop (which I slated on MySpace after its first pilot screening, only to give it a warmer reception on catching a later episode of the resulting series). It may well be that it was a good show, just seen at the wrong time. I was still too raw from seeing poor Chantelle go through the mill during the documentary to appreciate the sitcom, which I know is pretty pathetic of me. I do, though, hope she and Adele can smile again soon – we saw flashes of happiness, such as Adele performing on stage, and I would encourage her to keep on down that road.

Anyway, Katie’s looking well and happy, and if you want to help her make others feel good about themselves you can offer your support to her charitable campaign at http://www.katiepiperfoundation.org.uk – there’s more information about the organisation there than I can legitimately cram into this already-too-long blog post. However, one thing Katie’s case does allow me to bring to light is my own battle with body image. I’m not heavily disfigured – a minor scar over my right eye aside, the bulk of my scars are on the inside. However, I am aware that I’m not entirely suitable to be seen publically by the elderly and infirm; I know I have a face like an upturned mushroom and a voice like a cat trying to puke up a satellite dish it had earlier been forced to swallow. (There’s enough photos of me on various websites now to allow you to confirm I look like a drugged hedgehog, though you’ll have to take my word for it on the voice as I’m yet to embrace the Audioboo and my radio DJ career died when the station I’d auditioned for permanently closed its faders.) I know people burst out laughing when they see me; very often it happens while I’m still in earshot (assuming I’m not wearing my horrid MP3 player at the time). Very few men other than me have been called ‘Jesus’ and ‘Bin Laden’ on the same day. I know I’m not handsome: some men have tailored suits, chiselled jaws, sturdy abs, bleached hair, tanned skin and a glint in their eye; I just waddle around in the cheapest available shirt trying to hide my lasagne-and-donut-assisted waistline, sporting whatever hair my head has deigned to grow, with muscles that can barely keep all my limbs upright and skin like a map of a particularly unpopular housing estate. I think it’s fair to say that while I can and do appreciate the beauty in others, I’m still some way off appreciating myself. Looking the way I do does cost me jobs – my face is a square peg in the round hole that is the job interview, even when I have shaved and smartened up specifically for the purpose – and also leads to it being difficult to make friends; people don’t tend towards fondness for a purple-clad poltroon who hobbles around looking like Mr Bean after a gas leak. I now have over 900 followers on Twitter: this outnumbers the number of face-to-face friends I have by a factor of over 900. I lack confidence – always have done, I’ve been a lone fox since my primary school days. I have, quite simply, never known any different. That’s why footage such as Piper’s is so eye-opening for me – it shows a world behind the shock-and-horror headlines and reveals the real human pain that people can go through. And I want to help take the pain away; I wanted to show love for Adele and Chantelle just as I had for Katie on transmission of her previous piece.

All my failure makes it quite a novelty for me to be part of a community. That’s perhaps why I was so bowled over to become part of the huge pro-6Music movement which sprang up when the now-rescued radio service was under threat of the BBC cash-cutting cosh. Here was a group of people who were standing up for what they believed in, and amazingly I was part of the solution for once – unusually for something I’m involved in, we were successful! I want to get things right more often, but there are a lot of barriers. First off, I have to figure out what it is I actually want to do with my life, given that a lot of the things I once thought I’d do are now unpossible (the radio DJ thing, for instance). Then I have to find some way of getting myself in the careers door, difficult at a time when unemployment is high and thus competition for the few available jobs is severe. After this, I know I need to take better care of myself – my body is in a great deal of difficulty, in part because I’ve spent 29 years not giving a crap about my appearance and basically using my body as a carrier bag to cart my existence around in. Hopefully once I’m in a regular paid job I’ll be able to afford clothes that look like I’ve spent a bit of money on them, and to go to more events, gigs and other places where I may be able to find a kindred spirit. I’ll be able to get the things that most blokes have when they’re virtually half my age – a home of my own, a girlfriend, maybe a car (though my judgement and fear issues mean I’d be a nightmare on the roads – I refuse to drive because I don’t particularly want to kill people! Well, OK, I want to kill some people, but only because these particular people made the mistake of being in The Only Way Is Essex…) And of course, if I make sufficient cash to actually have a spare disposable income, I could dispose of some of it in the direction of charities and causes I want to support, such as that established by the above-mentioned Ms. Piper.

I want to be a good person. I want to be able to hold my head up high (well, as high as I can given the bend which has grown in my neck following eighteen years of near-continuous bus travel and related eye-contact avoidance). I want to have a voice – well, one that doesn’t sound like Steve Lamacq after a nasty insect bite, at any rate. I want to make more contribution to society. And I want to make people happy. And I’ve got many years of failure to atone for at the same time. So if you’re wondering why I get so frantic and panicky, now you know: I’m trying to make myself a better person at quite frightening speed, and sometimes I forget to put the brakes on. Hopefully being around good people will help me know when to stop, as much as where to start!

That’s enough of your day swallowed into my introspection: may you go forth and carry on. Thanks for bothering.

“If it’s up there, I’ll give you the money myself!” (Goodbye!)

Well, I said I’d be back, and here I am, only a few months late – and this isn’t even a full post! OriginalPurple’s still treading water ’til I have time to put the boat on it properly. Thing is, I’ve been so busy racing around trying to sort my life out that I just haven’t had time to sit down and write anything at length, preferring to fire off shouty Twitter diatribes in any spare couple of minutes between appointments and events. I’ve been in so much of a rush that when one of my good Twitter chums came over to the London area from her native Euro-country for a break recently, I wasn’t able to take time out to romp off up West to give her a hug, a fact I’ll most likely regret to my grave.

But I wanted to keep this afloat, in part ‘cos I’m determined to make a ‘success’ of this blogging thing (even though, on past evidence, success is an alien concept to me in almost all strata) and in part ‘cos there’s something out that I wanted to post about.

Now, if you were one of the people who read my old blog, you’ll know that there was one person who got rather a lot of mentions, simply based on the huge impact she’s had on my life. And, having been reluctant to mention her on here for fear of sounding like an obsessive or stalker, the time has come to promote this same person on these purple pages ‘cos she’s got something out that I think you should read!

I speak of course of the lovely Katie Piper, and would like to gently encourage you all (all?) to buy her new book “Beautiful”, which is on shop shelves and online now. It’s the tale of how Katie built herself back up after being hauled through pain and suffering, and is a gripping, at points devastating but ultimately uplifting read.

But why do I put so much faith into this young blonde, lovely though she is? Well, the truth is, she’s made my life a lot better. Before Katie hopped across my radar in late 2009, my life was going nowhere. Out of work for several years, I’d given up blogging due to having nothing new to say, I’d given up going out ‘cos I didn’t have anyone to party with, and I’d basically virtually given up on life itself, stuck in a rut from which I saw no escape. Added to that, I’d see stories on the news of lives being ripped apart and feel helpless at not being able to offer anything tangible in assistance. I was, in short, nothing.

Then came Katie. Her Channel 4 documentary (see it at http://www.channel4.com/programmes/katie-my-beautiful-face/4od if you haven’t yet done so) really made an impression on me. Here was a warm, lovely person adjusting to take her life in a new direction and step past the obstacles in her way. And Katie’s sunny smile really brightened my life – here at last was the positive influence that I’d lacked, the uplifting touchstone I needed, someone who I could look favourably on to provide the uplift my damaged soul needed.

In the wake of Katie’s film I decided to revisit my own confidence issues and stop hiding away in the belief that I was worth nothing. I resumed blogging with a further year of MySpace long blogs, culminating in my crashlanding on here with this stuttering screed, and I also joined Twitter, which has enabled me to connect with others in a way I’d not really tried on this scale before. Although I am still rushed and still prone to mind-bending rants about the various things in my life which fail to go well, I now have more love and peace in my heart than before, and it was all driven by Katie. Her sunny smile lit up my world in a way I never thought anything ever would. She’s my idol.

Seeing Katie continue to flourish in the subsequent months has continued to cheer me. She’s now launched a charity to help and support other disfigured and disadvantaged people – a worthwhile and noble cause and one that I would in time like to continue to get behind. So again, here is something to aim for – if I do well in life I’ll be able to contribute more to those who will genuinely appreciate my support. Success in life will not only benefit me (by allowing me to tell the job centre exactly where they can stick their claim forms) but will enable me to be a more valuable part of society, rather than feeling like a greasy stain that needs to be done away with!

If you want to help Katie achieve her aims, then more information is available at http://www.katiepiperfoundation.org.uk – people will have a great deal of respect for you if you help out, and if nothing else, it’ll make a beautiful woman smile!

As for me, I’ll be back over the coming weeks and months (depending on how long it takes me to sit down and write these things) with upcoming pieces likely to include a more detailed look at my failures and neuroses, and how I feel about myself. Yeah, sounds like a cheerful read (!) I’ll see you on Twitter in the meantime…