Sometimes it’s the little things….

I've just stood on my banana. Happy days.

 

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QotD: If I Had Guaranteed Success…

What would you attempt to do if you knew you could never fail? 
Submitted by BeckyPink. 

Win the Euromillions jackpot. That way I could give up work and do something more interesting instead.

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Another A-Z Entry, this time it’s ‘O’.

My brother sent me a link to an interview that Bono gave to the Sunday Times which sparked off another entry for my A-Z of Life's Little Irritations. So, here is:

O is for Overly Political Celebrities

There was a day when celebrities who were in at the time and fairly intelligent wrote a book or became a patron of a charity. They appeared from time to time at charity balls and it was all very nice and very civilized. How things have changed. Now if you are famous and want to be up there with the A-Listers they way to get in is to rabidly jump on the ‘Help Africa’ bandwagon, which is being towed from the front by Bob Geldof (sorry, SIR Bob Geldof). Now don’t get me wrong, Sir Bob has done plenty of good work for Africa but you have to ask yourself if Africa hasn’t done a lot of good work for Sir Bob. After all, he has only had one single that anyone has heard of and, not to put too fine a point on it, it was shit. Where are the Boomtown Rats now? Quite probably touring local fleapits on a Thursday night after the pub quiz has finished and wishing they’d thought of organizing a big charity concert in the 1980s.

 

Then you have the likes of Chris Martin from Coldplay. Coldplay are a band that have made an awful lot of money from creating songs that all sound the same and all make you want to jump in front of a bus just to escape the tedium. This evidently (in his head anyway) makes him qualified to solve the problem of world poverty single handed. And the best way to do this? Write ‘Make Poverty History’ on your hand in biro before a concert so everyone can see it while you play the piano. Absolutely Chris, that should sort the problem and no mistake. Hundreds of years of shoddy infrastructure, drought, famine, civil war, corruption and feudal fighting can all be overturned by someone who looks like a badly dressed mature student writing on the back of their hand. Now Mr Martin (who is probably hoping to eventually become SIR Chris Martin) has shown that he thinks poverty is nasty and not very sporting, everyone currently living in a Malawian hellhole is going to wake up to find they are a Funds Manager living in a 3 bed semi in Surrey and they drive a Lexus. Pillock.

 

The Award for Most Obnoxious and Overly Political Celebrity however has to be handed to Bono of U2 fame. This is a man who in a Sunday Times interview claimed that President Gorbachev only realised that things couldn’t continue in Russia as they were when he dropped by for Sunday lunch and while they were eating, in walks a small girl on crutches with no lower legs thanks to the radiation from Chernobyl. His realization had nothing to do with the fact that Russia had no economy, there was no food in the shops and their only international exports were vodka that makes you go blind and prostitutes then? If Gorbachev hadn’t twigged that things weren’t really going all that well in Russia before this point then he was obviously a lot more pissed than anyone gave him credit for and really shouldn’t have been left in charge of one of the world’s largest land masses. Bono could have done an awful lot for the financial wellbeing and public services of Ireland by not moving U2’s publishing empire to the Netherlands in order to pay a near zero rate of tax but that would have affected his personal fortune. Evidently in Bono’s house charity begins at home as long as it isn’t funded by tax.

 

All of which brings us to the biggest problem with Overly Political Celebrities, the fact that they do moronic things like writing on their hands but despite the fact that half of them earn more than the GDP of Guatemala they spend their time demanding we donate a sizable portion of our £20K a year while not actually dipping into their own funds. Tell you what Bono, if I give a grand, a twentieth of my yearly income how about you give a twentieth of yours. No? Ah well then, just thought I’d ask. What’s that? Oh, you won’t donate all that cash but you will invite George Bush round for a fondue and Babycham evening complete with photo opportunity. Right, that should help a Nigerian farmer whose entire yearly crop has just been eaten by locusts. The cause is being pushed by people who have spent enough on crack and champagne (or in Chris Martin’s household, designer organic tofu-mung protein pellets) in a lifetime to send half of Ghana to Harvard. When Chris Martin, Bono and their ilk donate their entire personal fortune to dragging the poor out of deprivation and start buying their clothes from Asda instead of Armani then I’ll listen. Until then I’ll wait with bated breath for the media coverage of Bono’s next wine and cheese party for the rich, famous, influential and irritating. 

 

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House Crap

How is it that in a relatively short amount of time you can accumulate the most staggering quantites of random housecrap? I was summoned (in that voice she used to use when rollocking me for leaving teaspoons on top of the dishwasher) by my mum yesterday to remove the boxes and boxes of random housecrap that ended up being stored in one of her spare rooms during our last housemove. So off I go, armed with binbags on the grounds that surely if I've managed to go without this stuff for 3 months I don't need any of it. But I made the fatal schoolboy error – yes, I decided to go through the boxes to see if there was anything I should keep. So now I still have 5 boxes of housecrap to find a home for (I suspect they'll end up in the loft) and 2 binbags of stuff to go to the tip. In my random housecrap I found 17 cigarette lighters. This concerns me for 2 reasons:

1) It clearly means I am some sort of mentally unstable hoarder who is going to end up in a house packed to the rafters with the detritus of 5 decades of housecrap collecting, surrounded by cats and sporting an egg stained grey dressing gown. This was not in my life plan and is going to have to be addressed before I end up as a feature on 'Life of Grime'.

2) I only ever remember buying 2 lighters in my entire 10 year smoking career which evidently means I am not only a mentally unstable hoarder, I am also a thief. Oh dear.

I wonder if hypnotherapy could cure me of this bizarre compulsion to store everything I come across 'just in case I need it'? And if they give a discount for a double booking because while I was under they might as well deal with the spider issue as well.

 

In other news:

• I accidentally sent a text message meant for a collegue to my ex boyfriend this morning. How an I such a complete arse? It's a mystery to many. I bloody well knew I should have erased his number because it's not like I've spoken to him in the last 3 and a bit years, ever since his girlfriend barred him from having any contact with me. I am indeed a complete pillock. Fortunately I only signed it 'Vik' so I don't hink he twigged it was me. That's what I'm going to keep telling myself. And the reply "You've sent a a message to the wrong person" doesn't give me any further clue.
• I am trying to decide whether to have a party at mine for my birthday. On the good side it's cheap and I'm skint plus you always end up with masses of booze left over so I won't have to but any iwne for a bit. On the down side it means I'll have to clean the house (i am no domestic goddess) and I don't have a dishwasher.
• I have finally come to the conclusion that the solution to the odd and disturbing noise that my car is making is not to keep turning the radio up but is to take it to the garage. Time for another round of "oooh, (head scratch, sigh) we'll have to order the part love, it might be expensive".

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What to do? It’s always a tough one….

As this is the first entry I should write something very profound and wise but seeing as it's Wednesday morning and I'm at work I have all the brain activity of Jade Goody so I own't even try. I'd probably only come out looking like a pretentious arse anyway.

 

I'm thinking of writing a book. I think i'd be ok at writing a book (or to be more accurate, at starting to write a book, my chances of finishing are a bit dicey as I have the attention span of a gerbil). I've even had a good idea for my book but the problem is this: it's based on my in laws. My inlaws are fascinating in a car crash, mentally unstable, you wouldn't believe it if I wrote about it sort of way. Have you ever seen a 62 year old woman throw a tantrum? I have. Have you ever seen 2 people take 45 minutes to prepare to go for a walk around their own garden? I have. Has anyone ever threatened to cut you out of the family and never speak to you  or darken your door again because of the name that you have given your new dog? I have been down that road. If I write about them and tell people I've written about them it's going to be blatantly obvious who I'm taking the piss out of but it would be such a good read, everyone says so (that is everyone who would not end up on the wrong side of a very angry bunch of nutters if this book was ever written). Maybe I'll write it and just never send it to  publisher, let my closest friends read it and no one else. Who knows. Or maybe Ill write my 'A-Z of Life's Little Irritations'. This was an idea a friend and I came up with when in a particularly stinking mood, if something has annoyed you, write it down. Strangely cathartic (and is also not tackling the earth shatteringly, brain-meltingly dull pile of work that is in my in tray) What can I say, my parents sent me to a girl's school, I was always going to come out with a world class ability to bitch. So for your reading pleasure here is little insight into the strange and bitchy place that is my world (special mention to go to Cass who who wrote the first paragraph):

 

C is for Cars

 

Cars are one of those things that are cunningly disguised as something that is a useful thing to have, something that once you have you could not possibly live without, when in fact most of the time they are the things causing the problem. “Pass your test! Pass your test! You won’t regret it! The independence!” they all crow. Well you pass your sodding test, at considerable expense and four weeks later the brakes on the car are making an alarming grinding noise. This is of course on the day you’re making your first foray into the terrifying vortex that is a city centre one way system in rush hour traffic, the week before the Labour Party conference. You don’t know where the hell you’re going, you’re in utterly the wrong lane and the car is complaining very loudly and attracting anxious looks from other motorists and passers by. So into the garage it goes. After much tutting, rubbing of chins and shaking of heads,  the mechanic announces that the brake pads are shagged, you need new disks and the suspension is bollocksed. Well that’s just great sunshine, how much then. Three hundred bastard quid, that’s how much. See also S for Skint.

 

The other thing about cars is the utterly ludicrous things that people do to them in the name of ‘customising’. ‘Customising’, it appears, involves taking a perfectly normal car, adding the wheels from a Massey Ferguson tractor, the speakers used at Live8 to reach the back of Hyde Park, some odd bits of plastic at the back, headlights like the searchlights of Auschwitz, blacked out windows and some sort of gadget that attaches to the exhaust and makes it sound like an elephant after 15 pints and an extra spicy vindaloo. Then all the identifying badges are removed, as if by adding all this expensive crap and taking away the badges people aren’t going to notice you’re driving a chavved up Vauxhall Corsa and will be fooled into thinking your car is a mini Suburu Impreza. Vroom Vroom…..tosser.

 

For hundreds of years kids have walked the mile or so to school and back or they have caught the bus but now it seems that this is no longer safe enough for mummy’s little soldier, no, now he requires driving the 450 yards in a quasi-assault vehicle designed to cross the Rocky Mountains without jolting the passenger. Yes folks, it’s the 4×4, this year’s must have for anyone with more money than taste. These are cars that can cross deserts, go through water up to the bonnet, drive through thigh deep mud and tow a fully loaded horsebox so why the bloody hell do you need one on the fully surfaced roads of Kensington? Why? Even if you ignore the fact that they use fuel faster than a Boeing 747, and unless you get the ‘Sports’ version (an even more pointless invention than the standard model) they have all the acceleration of a slug on Prozac, they are in the main driven by women with no spacial awareness whatsoever. Driving past a primary school at kicking out time is more dangerous than trying to climb Everest in carpet slippers and a thong, as 84 Range Rovers, Land Rovers and Lexus 4x4s jostle for position outside the gate and vainly attempt to squeeze into the space that’s reserved for the school bus. The argument is that they are safer for taking the kiddies to school and yes, I suppose Junior is safe in the 4×4, he’s certainly a damn sight safer than the other kids and the crossing lady as Mrs Jenkins in a Range Rover Vogue attempts a 3 point turn in the middle of the road while simultaneously removing toast from little Sammy’s front and finding his homework under the seat. They are Satan’s vehicles and legislation should be introduced to restrict ownership of these bastard space-takers to those who tow stuff, drive through stuff or carry a lot of stuff. Under no circumstances should they be given to women who had trouble parking the Fiesta, men with the attitude that they own the road or footballers. Ever. End of.

 

 

 

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