Choo Choo Pain

I was on the train up to Edinburgh enjoying peace and quiet when a 4 year old started talking into a plastic phone behind me.

"Yes Mr Hippotopamus. Yes Mr Hippotopamus. I will tell mummy that you are coming to supper. Mummy will make fish fingers because I know how much you like them."

I turned to him. "Hey, what's your name little boy?"

He looked up eagerly. "Thomas"

"And who are you talking to Thomas?"

"Mr Hippotopamus. He's my best friend!"

"Yeah? Well, I have an idea. Why don't you tell Mr Hippotopamus that this is a designated Quiet Carriage and you're not permitted to make your call here, okay?"

Cute kid, but a real attitude problem. I find it best to nip that in the bud at an early age.


Unbelievable.

In which I get the better of my brain (for once)...

I run a comedy night every Tuesday and (like it or not) the amount of stress and adrenaline involved generally comes back to haunt me when I’m trying to sleep. Generally the same scenarios will play out over and over again in my fevered, fatigued brain like a malnourished, sleep-deprived hostage being strapped to a fairground carousel by demented, whirlwitzer-loving terrorists. Think Adam West's Batman, but on acid...which he probably was.

Last night, however, I didn’t bother going onstage. We had too many acts as it was, and you can only push an audience so far, particularly when there’s only 10 of them and they’re going to the toilets in shifts. Tag team weeing, if you will. As a result, the night was admin. Not unstressful, but I didn’t have to make the mental shift from organiser to entertainer, which makes the same grating noise as the gear change on my poorly maintained bicycle. (My level of general concern over my bicycle makes me convinced that I'm not ready for children, as I'm sure I'd continually spray them with WD40 and then just hope for the best.)

Strange then, that my brain decided to concoct some half-assed dream about a comic (who wasn’t even at the night) cruelly critiquing my routine (which I didn’t do) to pieces. As far as stirring up paranoia, it was a pretty weak effort on the part of my subconscious – half-baked, poorly researched, plot-holed, scare mongering. Apparently the self-sabotaging part of my psyche has restructured its business plan around the Daily Mail. Tonight, presumably, I will wake up in a terror sweat over the fact that vampire immigrants are nesting in trees; carrying off nuns and orphans by the hand-basketful. Or maybe I’ll get my wires crossed and wet the bed over the fact that a dog has adopted a squirrel (or something) and now the squirrel is barking and dragging blind people around.

The upshot was that I was able (after a cursory inspection of reality) to say “Shut up brain” and go back to sleep, comforted by my long-term sense of intangible dread over fly-by-night phantasms. If this was something that we could all master, the world would be a less problematic place.

A Royal Weddink...

The media seems to be astonished that the fiancée of the heir to the heir to the throne should have been plucked from the 'umble middle classes. Afterall, Catherine nee Kate Middleton is from a humble village in Buckinghamshire and attended the local comp, AKA Malborough College public school.

What mighty social barriers have been broken! To think that some posh person might marry a much, much posher person. What barriers come tumbling down in the name of love...First black president my arse. Change the record, Obama.

Kate Middleton has described both William and herself as "very down to earth". It's just that the piece of earth they are down to happens have palaces built on it.

Old Etonian David Cameron responded to the news in a manner befitting Her Majesty's Chief Toff:
"When the news was announced during the cabinet meeting, a great cheer went up and there was a great thumping on the table...then some oik threw a bread roll at me."

Animal Facts

1) Flamingos are attention-seeking whores. In fact they're basically just transvestite penguins on stilts.

(Also a transvestmite is like a transvestite but hangs the other way).

2) Giraffes have no natural predators, except for lions on stepladders. Fortuately for giraffes, there are very few BnQ outlets on the African Savannah. If they relocated to Swindon, it would be a different story.

3) Nobody really knows what a bear is. It has the body of a monkey and the face of a dog. It's the cut n shut of the natural world. Basically it's nature's way of ringing the doorbell and running away.

4) In the same way, a lion is pretty much a cat that is the size of a fridge. This is why when a lion opens its mouth a light comes on. Whether the light stays on after the mouth is closed puzzles scientists to this day.

5) Grey squirrels are merely red squirrels who are unaware of the existence of 'Just For Men'.

6) Lizards are flood proof snakes.

7) Female wasps are irritable and can sting. Male wasps are limp, infertile drones. The favourite wasp publication is The Guardian.

That's all I can think of at the moment. Either that, or I've covered all of the animals. Yes, that sounds better.

Generation XXL

I rarely just turn on the TV and channel surf, but last night that's what I did. The relationship between the 'box' (though it is flatscreen so 'oblong'?) and me is a frosty one, particularly as someone who wants to encourage more highschool killing sprees at Channel 4 has stopped running Fraiser repeats on weekday mornings from 8-8.30 and replaced it with Celebrity Big Brother footage. Presumably the same person then spends 8.30 - 9 a.m. at the Andrex puppy orphanage with a flamethrower.

I am often forced to turn over to BBC1's Breakfast News, which is a wonderful combination of islamic fundamentalist fat cats stuck up property ladders and social awkwardness. The banter between the co-presenters is a wonder to behold. Distil the most dismal, witless, perfunctory office banter you've ever heard down to a heinous licqueur of uncomfortableness and you'll start to get an inkling of just how bad these people are at what they do. At any point where they're not reading directly off the autoqueue, you can sense the raw stench of terror. Their inepitude is to such a degree that it leaves me with the only possible conclusion that there must be an interconnecting door between the BBC's presenter training scheme and a labotomy centre.

"That was John Ball talking about the boating craze in Norfolk. Susanna, have you ever been boating?"
"B...o....a...t...i...n...g?"......drool.
"Ha ha. Great stuff. Over to Bill with the weather."

Anyway, I digress.

Last night I saw a programme called Generation XXL. Naturally, it was on Channel 4. Channel 4 is worryingly similar to Fox, yet at the other end of the political spectrum. Both have schedules which place surprisingly brilliant TV right next to the kind of dire, desperate shite that you wouldn't play to your worst enemy. Generation XXL isn't brilliant TV, by the way, but that's immediately clear from the title. It's one of those titles that you know some researcher at a piss pot, bottom feeding production company shat out during a mind diahorrea session.

"How about Generation XXL?"
"Good title. What's it about?"
"I don't know....fat kids?"
"Yeah! I love it! Edgy!"

It's one of those 'documentaries' that paints itself as a social awareness/ "Come on guys, we're addressing a problem here" type of broadcast, rather like 'The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off' or 'Embarrasing Illnesses' but really is more a case of "Ha ha! Look at the FAT fuckers! Look how FAT they are. Aren't you glad you're not like these losers. I know I am!"

The sad thing about the programme was that, despite diet, there was a clear theme running through each of the three obese children. There was one uniting factor which you felt may have contributed to their phenomenal masses: they were all bone idle. In fact two out of the three ten year olds were actually obsessively concerned with their diets (one was even on Weight Watchers) but it doesn't take a trip to a Sports Science Nutrition Centre (which it did) to suggest that these children are fat because they do not fucking move! But the programme makers knew this, and they were obviously urinating themselves with delight when they asked the boy (a behemouth weighing 17 stone and standing at 6 feet tall despite being ten) what he did with his day:

"I play a lot on my compuuuuaaaa. First I get a helfy snack, den I play on my compuuuuaaa, den I go toilit, den I play on my compuuuuaaa, den I have veg-tiballs, den I play on my compuuuuaaa"

The camera zoomed in like a ferocious predator to capture the fatty; his big wobbly face so inherently lazy that it couldn't be arsed to construct consonants. No opputunity was lost to have a bit of a snigger. The classic 'walking on the beach' sequence gave us another chance to giggle at lardy when the camera otherwise inexplicably focused on a "Beware: Soft Sand" sign. "Imagine that!" the programme makers were saying, "Imagine fat boy sinking in the sand. I bet he would! Imagine him thrashing and sinking in the sand. What a disgusting, gargantuan fuck!"

Aside from the not so subtle bullying, the programme seemed to stumble on to one valid point, and that was that the healthy eating message had not been entirely unsuccessful. Okay, there was one fat oaf of a father who blamed society for his errant parenting. "It's so easy today. All these fast food places. You can feed the whole family for under a tenner"....I bet you can. I bet you can also blow them all up with a single grenade, but i wouldn't advise you do it.

But this wasn't the case on the whole. Two of the families paraded their vegetable packed fridges as if deflecting all possible criticism. In fact it seemed a huge source of pride to two of the mothers that they didn't constantly feed their children melted butter through a straw. The government has spent so much money forcefeeding the message of healthy eating, that people have become lost in the detail. Guidelines are so specific, that people don't even try and engage a bit of sense. At one point, his equally fat mother was blubbing as if to say "What more can I possibly do?" perplexed that leaving salt off chips and serving Diet Coke wasn't causing the tons to tumble. But that seems to be the problem with food education. It seems to be all right to eat a lard sandwich, just as long as you use wholemeal bread.

I have since learnt that they are planning to follow these kids around for the next SEVEN years. The official blurb says that it's in order to "find out what it really feels like to be growing up fat". I imagine that it's the same as just growing up, except more people point and laugh at you. Now these 3 kids can enhoy the next 7 years of their life with millions of people pointing and laughing. Oh well. In for a penny, in for a kilo.