As I kneed myself in the face yesterday whilst trying to sit down on a North American toilet, I came to a startling realisation about why North Americans know very little about the world. In the spirit of international relations I am going to share this with you so that now, rather than pointing at them and laughing, you can just weep a little to yourself about their plight. This is a tragic tale.

It’s quite simple really… North American toilets just aren’t made as a comfortable place to read. They are too low and it seems offputting and potentially perilous to be quite so physically close to all that water in the bowl.

In England people have traditionally retreated to the bog to sit and read and get away from the other people in the house. It’s sometimes the only privacy they ever get. People started to read on the toilet because we tended to use ripped up newspapers to wipe our frozen botties in outside loos. It gave us something to do whilst we were trying to shiver out a poo in the wind and rain and even though now our toilets tend to be inside and somebody invented Andrex¹ the reading habit has carried on and no English toilet² would be complete without a pile of toilet books. The upshot of this is that North Americans have never been exposed to books like “The Book of Heroic Failures” (volumes 1, 2 and 3), “The World’s top 20 Serial Killers”, “Not a Lot of People Know That” (by the esteemed Mr Caine) nor in fact, any Gyles Brandreth books at all.

You know… This is probably why Americans don’t have pub quizzes too. It’s all starting to make sense now.

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¹: Does anyone else still object to the slogan “240 sheets per roll”? It’s not true, at best you can get about 30. If you are a vegetarian, your mileage may vary.

²: Note, toilet, not bathroom, the toilet has the throne position here not the bath - And come to think of it, most American bathrooms don’t even have a bath, especially the ones in cafes - What sort of a rip off is that? Grrr!

³: Did you spot that I moved from they to we mid-posting? I can’t be bothered to correct it since it amused me.

I spotted that Dixons have packs of 20 Maxell C60’s on sale at the moment for £4.49 so I am going to buy about 10 packs this afternoon.I’ll get the decks up and running tonight and all being well I’ll be able to do you those Manic Miners you wanted at a quid each. I have Jet Set Willy, Monkey Island and Pimania buried under this mess somewhere too but I’ll be charging £1.50 for them.

Ok Man, see you later.

There’s no point me harping on about this, you know full well my assumption is that it will be a disaster best avoided. That said, I am prepared to let someone else have their say and Dave Kellett summed it up rather nicely in today’s Sheldon Comic.
‘Nuff said.

For once, the British Government has impressed me. It’s not much but it’s so rare I thought it worth a mention.

Their new training site is called “Train to Gain” and of course, given my general despair of the world as it is today, I would have assumed they’d have named the website “train2gain.gov.uk”. But no! It’s actually called “traintogain.gov.uk”.

Well done that department! Credit where it’s due.

I am not sure I can deal with the idea of Suggs being the new Captain Birds Eye.

Apparently this posting (and I guess a few of my others) are unreadable in Internet Explorer. I am afraid there’s not much I can do about this. Sorry.

For a long time, a few people have been reminding me that I promised to write a posting about the top ten ways I have nearly killed myself.  I keep meaning to do this but I am easily distracted by Youtube videos, kittens and dust which makes me a very unreliable narrator.

On the plus side, I am congenitally stupid so I have a wealth of events to chose from; on the down side, I have a crap memory so when it comes to putting them on paper - I simply forget.

I was tempted to do this as a list, you know like that Letterman guy does but then I would have to rank them and that takes real thought. I am also none to happy with the concept of “nearly killed myself” since most of my more amusing (after the event) mishaps would not have involved my death. I rarely get embarrassed so dying of embarrassment would not have been an option.

With this in mind, changing the title to “A random babble about some of the most stupid things I have done, most of which would warrant me inclusion into the Darwin Awards” not only makes it a lot less snappy but also puts less effort onto me to come up with the goods in a concise and easy to read form.

Be warned, this will be a long babble so I am putting one of those click-to-read-more thingumys here now.
Read more »

It’s been about a week and I have already given up watching UK’s Big Brother.

They just voted out the only one I actually liked; she was relatively sweet and quite cute (not that you could tell from her glamour shot in today’s Star) and the rest are utterly boring and generally intolerable.

Ah well! That was easy.

For various reasons, I am in a reflective mood and I finally have a few weeks in which to relax. This creates its own problems in that when I have time to relax, I have time to think and when I have time to think, that’s usually not a good thing.

As a means of procrastination and to keep myself busy for a while, I thought I would talk about me! I know, it’s something of a digression in this weblog, but it had to happen one day didn’t it?

I am not very good at spelling and I am generally dreadful at punctuating. I don’t have a clue about grammar although I have read every edition of Fowler as though it was talking about some sort of foreign language. But I come across as relatively literate and clever don’t I? Even if I did just start a sentence with “But” - I mean I occasionally write for a living, I should hope that I do.

The problem is in two parts, both somewhat unrelated. Sit back whilst I tell you a story if you are interested. The dates will be screwed up and some things may be in the wrong order but who cares?

I started school at age one and a half. People these days seem to find this somewhat barbaric but I don’t think it was considered particually abnormal then. I was a day-boarder at a small, private boarding school in St Annes. I remember parts of this life; I remember the little red/pink uniforms we had, I remember having to march every morning for half an hour. The boys marched, the girls did ballet practice. I always remember wanting to do ballet too but then I was odd that way. They didn’t have assemblies and there was no concept of religion there. This latter part I feel was a very good thing. I have read some other people’s memories of this school (which is now closed) on friendsreunited and they tally somewhat with mine. I remember liking the school nurse whom the boarders put across as a tyrant though; maybe this is because I never suffered from being forced to wear my soiled bedsheets all day as punishment for wetting a bed. Damn those under fives for their inconsiderate behaviour hey?

They taught me to read and write there pretty much as soon as I started in a curious mixture of phonetics and real language. I remember being taught my alphabet as phonetics and to this day I spell words out when people ask me in this way. Ah, ber, ser, der, eh, eff, gur. I have to translate to normal alphabet in my head later. I can read phonetic books without thinking about it still but then I also remember copying out endless cards saying things like “Mummy, daddy, Bill and Anne, are standing by their caravan”. Why they operated in this mixed way I have no idea. I am tempted to think that they enjoyed screwing with kid’s heads but I enjoyed my time there a lot so I have no complaints at all.

When I was about 7 my family lost a lot of its money when my Grandfather died. I had to move from that school because we moved away and for a few weeks I was put into a state infant school. That was terrifying! It wasn’t terrifying because the kids were bad or anything, they were just all so utterly dense. They couldn’t read, they couldn’t write. I had consumed most of Enid Blyton’s entire output by this time and they were struggling with the fact that Peter liked Jane and the dog had a ball. Luckily, I didn’t stay here for too long and we moved to the Isle of Man where I started in a junior school there. Within about 2 weeks the teachers had complained bitterly about me and they moved me up a couple of years to a class that I may actually get something out of. I was still far too ahead of them but at least there was something that interested me. It is something of a tribute to the Manx school system that they were happy to do this. I don’t know if they still do but I hope so.

Of course… At some point we lost all our remaining money and we moved back to England where I was soon to discover that the English school system lacks a lot in terms of progressieve thinking. I started at a new school and they put me back in the year appropiate to my age. I did the entire year’s maths text book in a lesson, I did the same with every other class. They had no idea what to do with me so they just left me alone. The only lessons I got anything at all out of were History and Religious Education; the former because I had never really studied any British History and the latter because religion was entirely new to me and fascinated (and still fascinates) me in the way that watching Big Brother fascinates me now.

I lost the ability to learn completely. I had nothing to do for a couple of years, I had no challenges and teachers just avoided me. We moved around a lot and I went to a few schools; all with the same issues and all I really learned in the end was to pretend to be like the rest of them so I didn’t have to do any work at all. I managed to miss learning to spell, I managed to miss learning any formal grammar and anything about punctuation. I never did manage to learn to handwrite, I had learned to write in print at age 2 and never learned any different. Teachers would tell me off for printing and not doing joined up writing but none of them ever thought to teach me. I tried to learn from a book once, trust me the results are somewhat amusing. One plus point at this time is that I had been thrown out of games lessons for being a monumental pain in the arse and I had to spend every games lesson playing with computers instead as an alternative. Mostly I spent 1980 and 1981 playing Colossal Cave on a 380Z. It seemed like a good thing to me.

Eventually I think I discovered that during my few years of hiding the world had caught up on me. People around me were being taught stuff I didn’t know and I was falling behind. I was no longer the cleverest person in the school, not by a long way in fact. Of course by this point I was not only behind in a lot of things, I also had no clue how to learn any more and was far happier in the middle classes than in the top ones anyway. I coasted and blagged; I got the smallest amount of O-levels required to get into college after school and then got the absolute minimum qualifications that I needed to get into University. It wasn’t quite all coasting; I enjoyed things like photography and at this point I still wanted to be an Archeologist, something I was never allowed to do in the end because I hadn’t studied classics - In industrial schools in Central Lancashire they don’t tend to study Latin and Greek.

At University I pretty much coasted. I got the worst maths mark ever at the end of my first year. When they made me resit it they kindly told me that I had to double my original 4% to be allowed to come back and just in case I couldn’t work it out, that was 8%. I slept through all my psychology exams (literally) and failed that as well. In my second year I attended just under 20 of the few hundred lectures I was meant to. I had no intention of coming back for a 3rd year by that point but I had to stay till the end so I wouldn’t have to pay my grant back. I had a job to go to, my Supervisor, one of the very few members of staff I liked was about to leave and I had zero respect for most of the members of staff and students on my course. I did no coursework at all and I guess my faculty got sick to death of trying to nag me. I had been suspended more times than I care to think about. They hated me, I hated them. The exams were hilarious because I didn’t have a clue what most of the papers were about but I guess there were some I already knew a lot about so somehow, to my horror, I passed the year. This was a problem now - I didn’t expect to pass, it was never on the cards. The job I was going to take fell through so I decided to take my third year and eventually graduated with a Third which was probably the best I could ever have got at that point really. They did make me do my second year coursework before they awarded me my degree. They really didn’t want to make it easy.
Leaving University with a Third Class Honours degree doesn’t usually allow you to take up a funded postgraduate but I had a friend, David Stretch who was looking for some students to take up a European funded postgraduate in Psychology at Leicester University in the Hospital’s Psychiatry Department. I had nothing else to do so I decided to go. That was when everything changed. I was 21 at this point and although it was a little late, I finally met that “teacher that changes your life”. David didn’t push anything, I don’t think he ever really tried to teach me much but he did suggest things and set seeds of things that interested me and then allowed me the freedom to explore and learn in my own way, with support when I wanted it and without criticism. From then, I went back to my old University to work much to the horror of my former faculty and carried on learning. It’s amusing really, looking back that most of what I have learned academically I learned myself after I was awarded my degree. My writing style I have discovered I owe to Cassandra; I fear he would cringe at how I occasionally butcher it though.

So that’s it. That’s why I can’t spell. Now you know so am I forgiven now?

Here’s an interesting new scam I had never heard of before.

The scammer breaks into a hotmail, gmail or other free-email account and then sends the following email out to everybody in their contact list:

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• Hi
  I am in a hurry writing this mail. I had a trip to Nigeria visiting the tinapa opening ceremony. Unfortunately for me all my money got stolen at the hotel where i lodged from the attack of some armed robbers and since then i have been without any money i am even owing the hotel here,So i have only access to emails,my mobile phone  can’t work here so i didnt bring it along.Please can you lend me 1000 pounds so i can return back and settle the hotel bills i would return it back to you as soon as i get home, I am so confused right now.You can have it sent through western union.I have already spoken to the hotel manager, please let me hear from you so i can collect his full name and address where you can send the money tomorrow please or if possible today. I am waiting for your reply.Thank you.
  (Person’s name)

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It’s an interesting one in that it may actually work (provided the person is usually illiterate anyway). A whole new clever little twist on the traditional 419 scam. I shall watch this one with interest.

I am not writing very much at the moment but as an additional aid to my procrastination I have decided to write a few weblog entries. In the public interest I should mention that they will mostly be nothing but self-indulgent, procrastination-fuelled intellectual-masturbation and I will warn you when I have passed this brief phase and return to my normal sardonic ranting. If it helps, I will flag them all with the tag “Masturbation” so you can safely ignore them.

Apropos nothing; today I smell of Cherry and Almond and as I was putting this gloop of a shampoo on my hair earlier I started to wonder what had happened to The Body Shop’s dewberry range. Back in the early 90’s, White Musk and Dewberry were the Body Shop’s two original smells and the country stank of them. I am fairly certain that this was the thing that introduced our obsession with smelling like berries but the original source seems to have vanished from our memory altogether.  Bring back dewberry! Just not quite as much as before.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/sep/12/genderissues is quite a sweet article on Body Shop dewberries.