Going to the pictures becomes a tricky business

While it was no secret that Roman Polanksi was a fugitive child molester, I’m repeatedly shocked at the number of people in The Business who are this week happily holding their hands up in support of the guy now he’s finally been arrested. I just found out that Gael Garcia Bernal is the latest in a long line of rape apologists. GAEL! GARCIA! BERNAL! What a fucktart he turned out to be.

Check out the current list of pro-rape morons. See what kind of pockets you’re lining with your cinema tickets and DVD purchases. Think about how paying to see anything these people have made means you’re basically saying, “You’re alright, you. Sure, you think it’s okay to rape a 13-year-old girl and then make a break for the border before you have to serve real time for it, but hey, your film looks good. I’ll forgive you for your sickening loud-and-proud support of a child molester.”

Alternatively, you can just keep shovelling popcorn into your gob and forget that all those people think raping a child is basically a-okay because gosh, it was so long ago. One option is far easier than the other, but I’m not so sure anymore that enjoying films involving any of these people is worth the knowledge that I’m basically supporting their fucked moral compasses with my dollars and cents.

Which means I’ll never get to see Fantastic Mr Fox or find out who killed Laura Palmer. FUCKING HELL.

Like I said, it’s easier to enjoy stuff and ignore the moral implications, but sometimes the bigger picture is much more important.

Snap Judgements For Funsies

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that I love Big Brother. It won’t be the same without the lovely Dermot O’Leary on BBLB every evening, and Big Mouth has never really recovered since Russell Brand left, but I’m still entertained beyond all belief by the main show.

The contestants went in tonight. Here are my earth-shattering and ridiculously judgemental first impressions.

Dennis, a 23-year-old dancer, is this year’s Token Gay. He looks like a bloated Pete Wentz. He combines his sexual preference with being exceptionally loud and smug. As such, all the women in the house are taking turns to drape themselves all over him so he can squeal how “hot” they are and how he’d totally snog them if he liked girls. I bet a fiver they’re showing him their tits by Sunday – it’s okay, you see, he’s gay. I bet another fiver he’s not actually gay.

Dale is the Token Misogynist. In his intro film he said, “If there’s fanny in there, I’ll nail it”. To be blunt, he’s the kind of guy you wish knob-rot on within minutes of meeting him.

Michael is the Token Disabled. Being blind, people are invariably dragging him around the house to make themselves look good or asking in braying tones if he’s “touched things with his hand”. I hope that he grows weary of this treatment and starts touching everything in far more antisocial ways, just to see how far he can push their tolerance. I especially look forward to the day he wipes his knob on everything, starting with the toaster and finishing with Dale’s horrible little face. Loses points for coming dressed as a goat herder. There’s no excuse for a poncho, not even profound blindness.

Darnell is the Token Psycho. His entrance to the house was, quite frankly, terrifying. He stomped around the walkways like a furious toddler denied a multipack of Yazoo at the supermarket, flinging his belongings at the crowd. I give him four days before he smashes the place up.

Kathreya is the Token Wacky Foreigner. Dressed as she is in a hot pink lamé romper suit and gold stacked trainers, she looks like a demented baby from the planet Disco. She carries around a jar of cookies everywhere and everyone seems to be avoiding her. She seems all right, apart from the fact she’s clearly a lunatic.

Then we have the Token Idiot Women. Jennifer, Rachel, Sylvia, Alexandra and especially the vomit-inducing Stephanie are the type of girls that make you ashamed to be female. In fact, they make you feel ashamed to be human. They all think they’re eminently fuckable and their smugness hangs around them like fuggy clouds of yuck. Dale has already ranked them in shag order. They all want to shag Dale.

Mario is the Token Dogger. His real name is Shaun and he wants his girlfriend Lisa (also in the house) to lose weight and have bigger tits. Oh, and to stop caring about her looks so much. Everytime I look at him I hear Alan Partridge in my head talking about the big barns farmers have that we’re not allowed to go into because they contain chickens with giant beaks. Mario looks like an experiment in the genetic modification of Matt Le Blanc gone wrong. He lives in one of Alan’s imaginary big sheds, confused, enormous and, because of his charming opinions on wife Lisa, utterly hate-worthy.

Lisa seems all right, as do Mohammed and Rex. BORING. Luke is clearly meant to be the Token Weirdo, but his I-Wear-Suits-I-Don’t-Drink wackiness is already tedious beyond belief. He’ll be out within a fortnight, as will Screamy Nutpiece Rebecca.

I bet all of you a shiny penny that Mohammed wins.

I like to move it, move it. I like to move it, move it. I like to move it, move it. I like to… watch something not moving for about an hour.

A friend of mine works in the art industry and takes me to openings now and again. The opening is usually a prelude to a night in the pub, and despite my complete lack of art savvy I’m usually happy to tag along. To her credit, the friend in question never outwardly shows her embarrassment at my scrunchy faces and whispered But-I-Don’t-Get-It protestations. She just lets me chug down the free booze and smiles benignly at my idiocy.

Last night she took me to see an opening at an old fire station in Marylebone. The place was decrepit and dark, decorated mainly with signs saying ASBESTOS! DEATH! DOOM! But it did have a pole, which somehow made up for the poison lurking around every shadowy turn. I don’t know why.

One of the artists had brought in a couple of mediums. They seemed like nice enough ladies, cuddly middle-aged delusionals who spent a lot of their time blessing people and telling us about protection spells they’d put around the place. Fred West and Hitler wouldn’t be ruining this party, no siree.

The medium session was rather fun. They announced a spirit wanted to make contact, giving vague enough details for it to have related to pretty much anyone in the room and then using all those Derren Brown-esque body language techniques to move things along once some sucker stuck their hand up.

“I have a woman. She’s a sister.”
*silence from room*
“No. She’s like a sister. She’s sisterly.”
*silence from room*
“Anyone?”
*silence from room*
“She wants me to talk to you (points at woman in front row). Had you a sister, or anyone who might be considered sisterly?”
“No.”
“Well, she says she felt sisterly towards you, so there.”

That was the general progression of things. Eventually they’d hit on something that rang true enough and they’d run with it till their luck disappeared (sorry, the spirit ‘moved off’). Brilliant.

Later on they held a séance in a tiny room downstairs. It was suitably creepy. The door creaked, they’d turned the lights off in favour of a lamp with a red bulb and there were a couple of flickery candles. There were even spooky noises floating through from the room next door, thanks to another artist’s piece that featured people in fire-fighter gear bumbling around a room and breathing heavily.

They were joined at the table by some right keenos who clearly believed very much in the whole thing. They laughed heartily at every nervous joke the mediums made to try and cover-up the fact nothing much happened. The planchett spun around a bit, the names Flnp and Tojgy were spelt out, and that was about it. Not exactly the ghostly experience I expect most people there (myself included) hoped might happen.

Let’s face it, if you go and check these things out there’s only a tiny part of you that doesn’t want something to happen. A ghostly visitation is far more exciting than watching a couple of mums bullshit about non-existent orbs and portals for an hour; we all like to be spooked, whether we choose to rationalise it afterwards or not.

Before the whole thing began, the mediums asked if anyone could feel their hair being pulled or their nose itching. If so, spirits were letting you know they were there. This was a fun little ruse, but surely everyone knows the power of suggestion when it comes to itchiness. You put the idea of an itchy nose into someone’s head and the nose will immediately become itchy. It’s just one of those things. They also said that there would be fluctuations in temperature, fluctuations that only the mediums themselves felt when they happened, strangely enough. I scoffed internally every time they whispered about feeling hot or cold. And then, right out of the blue, my own temperature began to rise.

At first I just cursed the room for becoming stuffy. Then the hot flush spread over my whole body. I started to tremble, my knees became weak, and things started to ripple in my vision. Nausea took over and I wondered what I would do if I did actually need to vomit.

Seconds later it passed. I felt normal again, if a bit shaky. Phew.

I realised straight after that I could read it two ways. Had I spoken up, no doubt the sickly spell would have been put down to some sort of spiritual intervention. Had I been a firm believer, I probably would have swallowed it and remained spooked forever. After all, on those ghost hunting shows there’s always *some* member of the crew who has a funny turn. I was haunted, right? My body was haunted. IT WAS DEFINITELY HAUNTED.

Except it clearly wasn’t. In truth, I had been stood very still for a very long time. It was getting on towards 9pm and I was tired. The room was very dark and it disorientated me briefly, helping the nausea, and the strain on my eyes from the poor light affected my vision. There was no way I could slip out without making a scene, adding to the edge of panic the feeling of imminent puke gives by default. And I’d only eaten a packet of prawn cocktail crisps all day. Oopsie.

It’s safe to say I came away from the experience even more aware of how suggestible a person is when they put themselves in that position. Derren Brown would have had a field day, truth be told. In fact, I went to see his show in London a couple of weeks back, and the second half was devoted entirely to old-school séance techniques. He did a bit of table tipping and it was bloody brilliant watching it float. I have no idea how he did it, but the whole thing was clearly not real. It was an illusion, an example of how easily people would have been fooled back in the day.

With my near-puke experience I can only thank my lucky stars I was able to rationalise the entire thing as it happened and not allow myself to get carried away with all the occult-dabblation* (which, admittedly, is a lot of fun when you’re a dirty cynic and can watch with a sardonic expression on your face and a ‘pfft, yeah, right, whatever’ in your head).

Otherwise, I would have looked like a right tit. And, as we all know, there’s no bigger tit than a tit at a séance.

*I think I made this word up. Feel free to take it and use it. It’s a gift from me to you. Enjoy!

Hey, Uncle Sandro, how we don’t really know, but seems like politicians can be only wrong.

If you had a vote yesterday I really hope you took some time to read the mayoral manifestos on the London Elects webpage. I did so last night, realising I had no idea who to award my second vote to, and it was both terrifying and hilarious. Here are some of my favourite political jackasses.

Matt O’Connor
English Democrats
First off, this is not a man. This is a creation. Somewhere in this world, Dr. Fox has secured the funds to build a lab deep in the earth’s crust, and in that lab he built a man based on his own image. Foxy gave him a rudimentary history lesson, made him angry about kilts, named him Matt and released his creation into the world.

This is what the leader of Dr. Fox’s master race has to say about things:

“We all remember a country we called home. A green and pleasant land that gave the world the English language, Democracy, the Mother of Parliaments and the Magna Carta.”

Seriously? That’s his political angle, to make people feel nostalgic for the days of the Magna Carta? This particular piece of English legislation hasn’t crossed my own mind since I studied it at school circa 1992, and I struggle to think of the last time it came up in any sort of conversation.

…apart from when Hugo, Toby, Rupert and I went boating at Toby’s divine family estate and discussed all manner of bloody brilliant English things over ginger beer and hard boiled eggs. We made a top ten. The Magna Carta came third, beaten only by cricket and the Queen. What ho!

Matt is also Very Angry About Scotland. You get the feeling he’d start stabbing the place up if you so much as offered him a piece of shortbread. He probably spends his days writing letters to the ASA complaining about that Wine Gums advert.

Alan Craig
Christian Choice
Say hello to your friendly religious fundamentalist candidate! I don’t know about you guys, but in a diverse city like London we DEFINITELY need the person in power to bleat on about Jesus. You know, just to bring the community together. Well, the Christian community, anyway. Just ignore the fact London is made up of Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jews, Rastafarians, Atheists and more religions than I have time to think of. In short, there’s loads, and the vast majority don’t give a toss about Luke or what he had to say in 22:26. For that reason, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that ‘Jesus said “The leader is the one who serves”‘ has no place in a political manifesto. Also, if it’s a direct quote Luke had poor grammatical skills. Wanker.

Beyond that, here’s the first three points on Craig’s winning manifesto:

The Christian Choice priorities:
- Promote marriage and stable family as a long-term solution to youth crime, educational under-achievement and child poverty
- Stop the mega-mosque at West Ham near 2012 Olympics proposed by a controversial Islamic sect (MegaMosqueNoThanks.com)
- Champion London’s most vulnerable – the unborn, the elderly, the refugee

Which essentially translates as:

- Continue to blame single parents for all the crime on our streets.
- Pretend that racial and religious diversity doesn’t exist in London. Also, ensure even more hostility between The Good Guys (henceforth known as ‘Us’) and the Muslim community (henceforth known as ‘The Terrorists’).
- Ban abortion.

Cunt.

Finally, let’s go see what everyone’s favourite neo-Nazis have to say.

Richard Barnbrook
BNP
You see this chump? See his wistful face? Guess what he’s thinking. I’ll give you a little time to construct an answer.

…

If you said, ‘Our wonderful party is so inclusive! YAY!’, you’d be wrong.

If you said, ‘I hate it when people think we’re racists. It makes me have sad face. ‘, you’d be wrong.

If you said, ‘I think I’ll have a wank over the Stephen Lawrence thing later… no matter how much time passes it still makes me stiff as a board!’, you’d be closer, but still wrong.

What this absolute cockend is thinking is:

“Remember London the way it used to be? Clean, friendly and safe.”

No, Richard. No, I don’t remember that. What you’ve done, right, is confuse London, the sprawling capital city of our dear nation, with a rural idyll somewhere in Cornwall. You know the one – it’s where all the nice, non-threatening white people live.

London has never been clean, London has never been friendly, and London has never been safe. It’s a fucking capital city. It has eight million people living in it, not to mention all the commuters and visitors. Nowhere this big, this busy, this exciting will ever be clean and safe. As for friendly, why not try being a little less terrified of anyone who doesn’t share your dour pallor? It helps breed the wacky things like friendship you crave so much.

You know, I could lay into this asshat for days. Look at some of his policies!

- British jobs for British workers

British jobs? What exactly is a ‘British’ job? Tea maker? Yorkshire pudding chef? Stout landlord at the local free house?

- Build a better NHS

That’s something for the MPs of the House of Commons to deal with. Unless you have something to say about LON-DON, get off my land.

- Scrap the congestion charge

YEAH! DOWN WITH ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN! Fucking PRICK.

- Better education for all our people

Again, not your fucking concern, matey. And don’t think for a second that any of us are stupid enough to miss ‘our people’. That’s right, keep the immigrants down where they belong – uneducated and too underqualified to do anything but sweep our dirty, dirty streets. That’s progress, that is. That’s what it’s all about. Ooh, I’m feeling rigid.

What do things like ‘build a better NHS’ and ‘Better education’ mean, anyway? They’re just words. We all want our free healthcare to survive – it’s a wonderful ideal. But you can’t just say it, you have to say how you’re going to do it. Or don’t, since, y’know, it has no place in this election anyway.

The worst thing the BNP does is use quotes from people ‘just like you’ to try and convince you it’s okay to be a racist these days. Here are the ones they picked this time:

People Like You Voting BNP

HOUSEWIFE – Lorraine Henry
“I’m terrified about my children’s future. Knife and gun crime are out of control and paedophiles are released back into the community. Only the British National Party have policies which keep our children safe.”

BUILDER – Ken Seager
“I vote BNP because I’m proud of my country and our heritage. We should celebrate things like St. George’s Day and other Christian festivals like St Patrick’s Day instead of other festivals such as Ramadan and Eid.”

STUDENT – Samantha Winter
“I’m voting BNP because I’m Irish and the BNP are the only party that cares about the indigenous peoples of these islands. Our jobs are under threat from economic migrants and only the BNP will protect our interests.”

Now, these are clearly made up. Any halfwit can see that. But doesn’t it make your skin crawl? Take this fictional Ken Seager character. His major concerns when it comes to governing a city is whether or not we celebrate St. George’s Day. He doesn’t want to be celebrating Ramadan and Eid. I can’t even summon up the words to describe now sick this kind of rhetoric makes me.

Oh, and notice the insidious inference in the title? People Like You Voting BNP. Read it again. Poor grammar? Bad English? Maybe. But you can read it two ways and both offend me.

So what did people have left? The UK Independence Party, another right wing wankathon that’s desperate to remind us how bad Europe is; Left List, whose candidate seems fine and dandy with a solid background in feminist and anti-racist political work, but clearly has no hope of winning; and Winston McKenzie, an independent with a grainy photo and no manifesto.

Then there are the real front runners: Ken, Boris, PC Brian and the lovely Sian Berry, representing the Green party. When you look at his competition outside of those three (and Left List), Boris almost seems like a warm, fluffy option.

How terrifying is that?

This pin used to hold a pearl the size of your eye. Look at me now! LOOK AT ME NOW! I’m wearing a cardboard belt!

Unless you’re one of those tiresome people who bleats on about the merits of ‘never watching TV’, it’s likely you’ll have seen the new Davidoff ad featuring Ewan McGregor. If you haven’t and want to carry on thinking Ewan’s an alright sort, I would advise against clicking on this here YouTube window.

Horrible, isn’t it? The first time I saw it I was left with my head in my hands, feeling layer upon layer of treacle-thick shame by proxy. ‘Why Ewan?’ I whimpered. ‘Why did you do it?’

I’ve since seen colleagues and netlings alike react in exactly the same way, and rightfully so - Ewan has ruined himself for years to come with this thirty-second folly. Rainwater must have been trickling through the knackered ceiling and directly into the bed of his infant child for him to have been this desperate for cash. Right? Right?!

Truth is, it probably wasn’t. Maybe he just fancied some new saddlebags for his motorbike, no doubt fashioned from the skins of one-hundred-and-one dalmations. Those pups don’t come cheap, you know.

Anyway, here’s the real point: why do I feel such disappointment in Ewan for selling out? Sure, he’s a fine actor and terribly good looking, but what has he done film-wise to elicit such horror over his unwise ad deal? Let’s take a look at his IMDB for a second. Ooh, Shallow Grave, that was a good ‘un. And Trainspotting, no-one could say that wasn’t a fine film. Little Voice, Brassed Off - excellent Sunday fodder if you like your Film4 productions about it being grim oop norf, and all that.

After that his CV starts to look a bit shaky. We’ll pretend Velvet Goldmine never happened, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say those Star Wars films weren’t as ace as people hoped for.  What else? Moulin Rouge (irritating beyond all comprehension), Down With Love (pelt him! pelt him in his plastic face!), Robots (piss-poor animation by numbers), Miss Potter (kill. me.), Scenes of a Sexual Nature (the worst film of 2006)… What has Ewan McGregor done that’s worthy of respect in the last twelve years?

Ridden around on a big motorbike, that’s what.

The Long Way Down (or Around, or Up, or About) was a fascinating series, for sure, but when all Ewan has to his name is a reality show and two great films from the early nineties, why are we all so horrified when he makes a dodgy ad?

It’s because we remember the good days. We still embrace the likes of Renton and Alex in our memories and pretend that Ewan McGregor is as good at making professional choices as he is at acting. The sad fact is, it’s just not true – he was a lost cause years ago. Little cartoon dollar signs have been flashing in his eyes for the last decade, whether we’ve noticed it or not.

On the upside, there are always plenty of clever dicks who make wonderful parodies for our amusement. This is how it should have gone:

At the other end of the scale, there are the beloved celebs who you know really are doing it to fix the leak into little Pippa’s crib. What’s on the end of the stick, Vic? Oh look, it’s this month’s mortgage repayment in exchange for your dignity!

For shame.

The Borrower – part two

One of the highlights of my life is the arrival of my annual statement from the Student Loans Company.

For those not in the know, the beloved Tony Blair and his Labour government introduced student loans for anyone starting university in England and Wales in 1998. Tuition fees replaced the privilege of free education, and grants became loans, repayable on your entry to the adult job market. Essentially, the gravy train had puttered into Education Station and booted you unceremoniously onto the platform without so much as a bye or leave. Charmin’.

Of course, when you’re a wide-eyed eighteen-year-old the last thing you’re thinking about is repayment. Grown-up job? Get lost, grandad! I have missed lectures, traffic cone-theft and misguided dye jobs to be getting on with. Another Snakebite, anyone?

I entered university education with exactly this happy-go-lucky (read: utterly twattish) attitude to money. As a country girl heading down to the big smoke, I smugly grabbed at that extra grand of London Weighting offered, taking out a loan of £4,500 for every year I remained in education. Due to a balls up at A-levels regarding my ability to remember historical dates, I changed my course at the end of the first year and stretched my degree out to five long, long years.

I graduated from Brunel University in 2004. I had a 2:1 in Politics and Sociology, two proud parents and a shit-eating grin from the knowledge I’d somehow got away with writing my dissertation on the Manic Street bloody Preachers. Oh, and a statement from the Student Loans Company saying I owed them 22,500 beans… at some point.

Fast-forward to 2008 and that figure has risen to £25,518. I’m currently paying off the standard monthly rate for my salary, which doesn’t even cover two-thirds of the interest. Can I afford to pay more a month? No. I’d quite like to have a little money left after all my bills and debts are covered, thanks. You know, to piss away on a normal social life and that. Will I ever pay my loan off? I doubt it. I suspect it’ll just keep on growing until it matches the national deficit of the average Bush administration.

But it’s not all doom and gloom! I called the SLC this afternoon for an informative chat, and a nice Scottish lady told me that if it wasn’t cleared by the time I hit sixty-five the loan would be written off. Imagine that. Sixty-five. The most worrying thing is I think I probably will get to sixty-five and still be making those damn payments, and still only paying off some of the interest at that.

So the question I need to ask is this: was it all worth it? All that time I wasted watching Cash In The Attic in my pants rather than getting on the bus and attending another mind-numbing lecture on Bullshit Statistics For Pointless Studies II – could it have been better spent getting a job and working my way up whatever slippery ladder seemed right at the time? Probably, yeah. But it’s not stopping me seriously considering putting my limp excuse for a career on hold and seeing if I can somehow afford to do a Masters in screenwriting at the London Film School. I’m pretty sure we’ll all have been blown to bits by some sort of nuclear holocaust way before I hit sixty-five, so why the hell not?

That said, I suspect the Student Loans Company will somehow manage to survive even the most gargantuan mushroom cloud and, accompanied by an army of cockroaches and Twinkies, continue to bust my decomposing ass for many years to come for daring to want an education.

Bastards.

Doctor, Doctor! My colleague has no concept of shame!

I’m horrified by the general public on a regular basis. We’re not talking about the bad stuff here, the murder and the rape and all those terrible doings. I’m horrified by the really petty insignificant things.

Take this guy I saw on the tube last night - I’ll call him Bogies. Bogies was a reasonably smart looking bloke who sat on the Jubilee line reading something on his way home from work. He was wearing a suit, his shoes had a shine and his haircut was tidy. Pretty average looking commuter thus far.

What made Bogies stand out for me was his seemingly impossible-to-resist thumb. Every time he starting reading his document he raised it in front of his face and stuck his thumb in his mouth for a little suck. We’re not talking ‘I’m concentrating here, I need a little nibble on my nail’ stuff. Oh no. Bogies sucked his thumb like a three-year-old. All he was missing was a blankey.

Bad enough, right? A grown man sucking his thumb in public? Well, it got worse. After a few seconds of suckling, Bogies used the index finger on the same hand to rootle around in his nose. He was really going for it, excavating that nasal cavity like he’d heard it was full of gold nuggets.

Thankfully, he never stuck at it for long – he needed to make notes on his reading material, and this required the liberation of his thumb from his hungry little lips. But oh, for shame! Once the note was made the papers were back up and he proceeded to investigate the other nostril with renewed vigour. And this time whatever he found, he ate.

This man, this professional well-dressed working man somewhere in his thirties, was sucking his thumb, picking his nose and eating his bogies. In public. In a packed tube train. And the best thing was that he held up his papers in front of his face to do so, like it made him invisible.

I have news for him – it didn’t. I could not look away. My mouth was hanging open, my stomach was turning and my eyes were trained against their will on the entire gruesome spectacle. I. Could. Not. Look. Away. At one point the woman next to him glanced at me and I just stared back at her, gob open like a chump, eyes wild. She looked scared. I’m hoping that she realised I was flailing internally at Mr. Picky beside her; after all, she must have noticed his weird cycle of behaviour. Right? RIGHT?! Knowing my luck, probably not.

Thanks, Bogies. You made me look like a tube mental. THANKS.

Blog off, blogface

I feel remarkably cheerful today. The sun is shining, the working week is in its death throes, and a nice man from the tourist bus tour company around the corner approached me in the street to tell me I’m beautiful, which is the kind of compliment I receive around once a century. The only thing cheesing me off is my inability to think of a better word for this shindig.

I hate the word ‘blog’ with unreserved passion. A friend of mine once described it as ’shudderingly naff’, and I have to agree. But what other option is there? It’s not a journal; journals exist to record the minutiae of everyday life, and this is rather somewhere to post the product of my frothing bile now and again. It’s not a diary for precisely the same reason. If I were recording my published work I could refer to it as an archive. Sadly, my only published piece of writing appeared about six years ago in monthly music rag Rock Sound, and it was treated with such contempt by the editorial team that they saw fit to riddle it with typos that weren’t there when I submitted it. Rubbish. So no, it’s not an archive.

This leaves me with only one choice: blog. Blog. Even thinking the word makes me cringe a little inside, and speaking it out loud makes me want to jump under a bus in order to rid the world of my stinking blog-saying self.

In my mind, there is no way blogging will be a truly respected art-form until a better word is found for it. Writing is a wonderful art; I write for a living, albeit throwaway pieces of hundred-word nonsense; I write fiction that no-one will ever read; in my head, I write epic essays on music that are published in respected monthlies. I love writing. But when it comes to the word ‘blog’, I find myself devoid of synonyms that will make me feel good about the whole process.

I need another noun for this space. I need that noun to be a verb, too, so I can feel warm inside while in the process of using this page. Until then, I fear that the act of blogging will make me feel like some sort of SugarApe employee. “Yeah, I’m like, blogging. Here’s a link to my blog and shit. I’m blogging in the blogsophere, yeah? It’s totally Mexico.”

An easy-peel M&S satsuma to anyone who can think of a better word.

V is very, very hungry Kiera Knightley…

If there’s one thing that makes me twitch like South Park’s screwy-faced caffeine addict Butters, it’s that fucking horrible Chanel advert that Kiera Knightley is running around giggling like a tit in.

Firstly, it combines two women I could happily blast off into space without a second thought: the aforementioned Ms. Kiera, and that greasy-looking barefooted honk-machine Joss Stone, who entertains our ears with the curious sound of an elephant seal in the throes of death. Or, as she charmingly calls it, singing.

Secondly, what exactly is going on? I seriously do not get the plot of this ad. I don’t care if it’s ‘arty’, there’s clearly meant to be some sort of story told in this promo. So here’s my attempt to explain what’s going on:

[0.00]
Kiera walks in through an unlocked window at dawn wearing a white shirt, a bowler hat and an ankle chain. She flings off the shirt and hat and catches sight of herself in the mirror. Far from being horrified, she thinks, ‘Gosh, but I’m lovely! I should go out on the town and find a scrummy fella! Tee hee!’ She then tarts herself up, pouts at herself in the mirror, thinks about how bloody yummy she is for another decade, and then hides a bottle of perfume behind her back in a sneaky fashion.

[0.23]
At this point I start to wonder if she’s either (a) broken into some random’s house; or (b) she’s playing dress up in Mummy’s spiffingly ginormous wardrobe. Mummy would be terribly upset if she found Kiera playing with her Very Expensive Perfume… Either way, Kiera runs her finger up her calf and then gurns at the camera with an umistakable look that says I’M GOING TO EAT YOUR BRAINS. Or maybe I’M GONNA SEX YOU UP HUH HUH HUH. I reckon it’s a combination of both. She’s going to coax a shameful ejaculation from your reluctant but untimately weak penis, and then she’s going to EAT YOUR BRAINS.

[0.34]
Anyway, she has strutting to do first. ‘Strut strut, gosh, I look so foxy! Good job Mummy didn’t see me steal her perfume! I have a man to mark!’ See that? See what she did? She marked that man with her death scent, and then she LAUGHED. She’s labelled him and his posh chums as potential brains for later. She’s gonna munch them all down, just you wait.

[0.47]
BUT WAIT! What’s this? There’s a black and white Kiera staring at us from every angle, looking deeply perturbed. You know what that is, don’t you? THAT’S THE REAL KIERA. This perfume-smearing, pouty gimp is merely a monster who has possessed the Real Kiera’s body and is using it in order to snare men, ride them with boney determination and then EAT. THEIR. BRAINS. The Real Kiera is trapped in some odd dimension that reflects her from every surface, but the reflection only appears to the Demon Kiera.

‘Save me!’ Real Kiera pleads. ‘Someone, save me!’

‘HA HA HA HA HA!’ laughs the Demon Kiera. ‘Save your pleas, you tiny fool, for I have men ensnared and brains to eat. Away, away to your miserable life trapped within the walls of every building, invisible to all but ME! AHAHAHAHAHA!’

The end.