13-17th Feb: Just floating along

“Love is in the air”, as well as on the floor, the shop windows, the restaurants, the street, the public toilets; it was everywhere due to the vastly over-rated Valentines day being at the start of the week. I could come across as a bit of a curmudgeon due to me being single but even people in relationships dislike the day. Everyone I know seems to celebrate it the day before or after, to avoid paying excessive money for average food and to avoid being surrounded by creepily in love people. This is alright in theory, however, if this is what everyone’s doing then presumably you then get surrounded by all these people on the 13th and 15th. If this is the case then the restaurants should keep their prices high for a three day period. I may well be over-thinking it. Something far more noteworthy happened during the week, which I need to tell you about…

….I went for a Friday lunch with my friend Kai Humphries (Google him and you’ll probably see a picture of his tattooed white arse), who was in town for the weekend with some friends. We went to this very nice but over-priced American diner type place where they actively encourage children to be there and the chef says stuff like “I suggest the chicken pie”; to me this always implies that everything else he cooked, is a bit shit.

I went for a pre-meal trip to the toilet. Despite always being packed they have the rather awkward, one toilet for men and women system. As someone was inside the cubicle and I’m not a weirdo, I waited just outside for them to finish. This does, however, mean you have a two second uncomfortable stare off with the producer of the smell you’re about to walk into. There was now a queue system where a woman was waiting to go in after me, so I was fully primed to be extra quick so there could be no ambiguity about my deployment of a number one. The person that exited before me was a very sheepish looking eight year old girl. Why was she looking so sheepish I hear you ask? Probably something to do with the massive floater she’d left in there for me.

As I stared at this chunky heap of regret, it dawned on me that the woman after me would definitely think this was my handy work. Therefore, I urinated as hard as humanly possible onto this briquette, to break it up: to no avail. I had one saving grace, the flush: no luck. Then instinct took over and I’ve no idea why out of all my options I thought this was the best one: I wrapped toilet paper around my hand, picked it up and threw it in the bin. Feel free to vomit on your keyboard. I then used up all the soap that has ever existed on the planet washing my hands. This cleaning process took so long that the woman behind me probably thought I had in fact crimped one out.

When I returned to the table and told the story about how I had no other option but to do what I did after being stuck between a cronk and hard place. Kai replied simply with “why didn’t you just put paper on top of it? It would have then flushed away”. I did not know you could do this. I wish I had already known this. I wasn’t particularly hungry thanks to the eight year old girl that tried to frame me for leaving a dead body in the toilet. If you’re reading this little girl, thanks for ruining my chicken pie.

6-10 Feb: Slovenly Slovenia

Highlight of this week was that I got to have less than a day in Slovenia to tell some jokes to the locals. By less than a day, I was in the country for 19 hours. It’s the first time I’d performed to a crowd where english isn’t their first language. It turns out they understood and found amusing almost everything. I say ‘almost’ because they didn’t know who Jensen Button was, which meant one of my jokes was greeted by 600 people just staring at me like I’d wiped my jaffas on their doormat.

Flying to a country on your own feels eerily soulless. Whenever I get on a plane it seems like it should be with at least one other person about to embark on an adventure whilst drinking pints in a J.D. Wetherpoons at 6:00am and eating copious amounts of Burger King. It just doesn’t feel right when I’m merely using it as a means to get to work and all I’m consuming is green tea and sushi. I feel like I’m breaking unwritten airport rules. Although, if I was on my own getting MC Hammered whist shoving a whopper in my face at 3:30pm on a Wednesday it might have raised a few more eyebrows. The plastic bag for your liquids still continues to baffle me and now riles me as you have to spend £1 on purchasing 4 bags from a glorified arcade machine. Ironically, the fact I had to buy these bags meant I actually had an urge to blow up my plane. All I’m saying is, don’t be surprised if there is increase in terrorism from prudent jet-setters.

If none of you have been to Slovenia, specifically Ljunljana, I’ll give you a few little things I noticed in the 3 minutes I had to look around the place:

It is very small

the architecture is lovely

it is very cold

the people are friendly


If anyone reading this works for The Lonely Planet, I'd like to offer my services as a travel writer.

zbogom

30 Jan- 3rd Feb: New House, Same Old Shit

I managed to accidentally arrange my diary so that I was in Bristol on the day we had to move house. My co-habiters, therefore, kindly moved all my stuff into the new pad. I like to use the term ‘pad’ because it makes it sound like it’s constantly full of babes whereas in actual fact it’s riddled with mice. They unfortunately didn’t go one step further and unpack all my belongings into various closets and drawers. This may also have been because there were no drawers in my room just mice.

Now don’t get me wrong, the “pad” is cracking, it’s just tempered somewhat by the fact I’m on the ground floor and after seeing a mouse run across the floor I’m now terrified I’m going to wake up with my face gnawed off. I’m not normally scared of mice; I mean I’ve once battered one to death with a bog brush holder (true story). Once, however, you see one in your bedroom, it’s a different story. It’s a story that results in my struggling to sleep and confirming my hatred of cheese. Despite me and Jerry becoming far too well acquainted this house is so much better than my last “pad”. Here are a list of things that are better:

-There is a kitchen on the ground floor and not the second floor

-There are no trains going past my bedroom window

-I can’t hear my housemates bonking

-There is an actual fire place for burning wood and chucking a photo of an ex-lover in (if I was in rom com)

Now I’ll leave you with that list and the cheery thought of my face being bitten to shit. Having said that the maintenance man, Peter, is going to lay some traps down where the mice will stick to a “pad” (not the house), then get destroyed (not by a bog brush holder).

23-27 Jan: Me over the Mersey

I spent all week in Liverpool getting up at normal adult times to go to work. This is because I was doing a cheeky bit of filming. Not sure I can disclose what I was filming yet but it wasn’t amateur pornography and it wasn’t part of a reconstruction for Crimewatch so it was something that was enjoyable to be in and will hopefully be a hoot to watch.

My own stupidity unpleasantly surprised me again. Even though I was filming in Liverpool I stayed with my friend in Manchester because I thought they were just down the road from one another. In fairness on a map they’re about a thumbnail apart but apparently that equates to about an hour on the train. I’m an arsehole. I’d never really seen Liverpool properly before and despite my cliched southern reservations about the place I have to say it’s pretty nice on the eyes. Around the centre there is a lot of nice buildings and less tracksuit clad people than I thought. I managed to win an award for being the most southern man in the world by ordering a Capri-Sun in a pub. In my defence, I haven’t ordered one since I was at my school tuck shop, so it was more of a nostalgic order than a pathetic one (still quite pathetic). The rumours about scousers always trying to be funny are most definitely true. I had one cab driver who thought he was the funniest man on the planet. He managed to coat off everyone from footballers to Hollyokes actors in the space of a 15 minute journey. I’m pretty sure he would have a couple of one liners about his own mother if she walked past us. If you haven’t been to Liverpool before I recommend going but be prepared to have the piss ripped out of you by a complete stranger.

There isn't really much else to tell as filming stuff mainly involves sitting around talking nonsense with actors. The highlight was meeting a guy called Phillip who was in the same scenes as me. He was one of those guys who managed to link anything you said to story about someone he'd had sex with. When the Welsh accent came up in conversation he'd just drift off and go "ahhhh, Newport girls are amazing...it reminds me of a time when I bedded this chick". He literally linked anything. You could talk about the death of a family member and he'd go "talking of funerals...I once met a girl"

People like Phillip are important to keeping you sane when you have to sit around for long periods of time. Thanks to Phil and Liverpool for looking after me and my juice loving tendencies.

Jan 16th-20th: The Utter “Shame”

Trying to find a new house to reside in, is such a tedious and frustrating process I will not pollute your eyes and brains by writing about it. All I will say on the matter is, never try and rent a house of a woman called Anna in the NW London area because she is a massive arsehole.


I did one of my regular day-time cinema visits, which I always look forward to and enjoy but this week was different due to the film I watched. I went to watch “Shame”, starring Michael Fassbender, with my friend Damian Clark (a very funny man you should watch do stand up). Thank God’s arsehole I didn’t go alone! If you’ve seen the movie,you will know that it is not only a excellent movie with brilliant acting and directing but also quite shocking. It depicts sex addiction in a whole new light. I have always thought of it as a some sort of Mickey Mouse made up nonsense but after watching this I can see what a serious affliction it can be. It makes the idea of having sex and watching pornography repulsive. I walked out of the cinema in such a daze that I left my bag there (this bag did not contain a selection of hideously graphic pictures before anyone makes that gag). I don’t want to ruin the film in anyway but he is so warped by this addiction he has to regularly tease one out at work. Unlike me he works in an office therefore the logistics of this are pretty tricky. If I was in the adjacent cubicle I’d be horrified. More than anything this film has reinforced my decision not to have a nine to five job. I’ll be honest it wasn’t one of my early reasons for it but it’s now pretty high up my list: “The constant fear of hearing a colleague cracking one out”.

This film dominated my thoughts for the whole of the week, therefore it is only right it dominates this blog.

p.s. If you’re at work, please keep it in your pants!

9-13th January: Trending Twat

Not drinking definitely has it’s advantages: Not feeling terrible for an entire day, not entertaining the company of people who are in fact tedious arseholes, not passing out in front of Babestation in an upright position. There is however one serious downside: you become very boring (especially when the only thing you tell people is that you are not drinking). This should mean that I’m living each day to the max and being ultra constructive but all it really means is I have even more of the day to try and kill without the excuse of feeling groggy.

This week I lived in the gym. Not because I want to become massive but because there is only so much staring at the wall/internet/phone you can do before wanting to place your head on a laptop keyboard and continually slam the screen down. I’ve essentially become a bored housewife. I go to the gym, do hardly any work, sit in the cafe & then let the most muscly instructor try and do me in the sauna. I know I’m in there for all the wrong reasons as I spend twenty minutes on the running machine trying to get the audio channel for the TV playing, “Catwoman” to work. If I’d got it to work, I’m pretty sure I would have run for the entire duration of that appalling motion picture. Some people get motivated by fast trance music or the desire to look aesthetically pleasing whilst I’m buoyed on by a dodgy story line and and woman in a PVC catsuit.

The one completely pointless thing that occurred from a combination of boredom and my love of films was my top twitter trend. Watching “Payback” bored on Wednesday night I tweeted, “movie thing to do before I die: pretend to bump into someone by accident so I can steal wallet from breast pocket”. This then spiraled into a hashtag (which I normally thing are total horse shit) #moviethingstodobeforeIdie set up by one of my followers, @chrisnumber9. I then got obsessed with trying to write silly and subtle observations from movies. I went to bed at 2am with my brain filled with scenes from movies and when I woke up it was the worldwide top twitter trend. Now although I started this after 5pm on a Wednesday it ended up taking over my whole Thursday, therefore I think it’s worth mentioning in this word soup. It turns out I’d created a monster and the more popular and mainstream it became the further away it drifted from my vision. It seems a lot of people had started to put really obvious movie cliches or in some cases just describe a scene from a specific movie. I guess that is the nature of the beast and ultimately who actually gives a donkey’s dick about starting a twitter trend (I would like this achievement to be written on my gravestone). It was a ll a bit of fun that sort of ruined my life for a day so now I will share with you some of my favourite tweets. Enjoy:

@carldonnelly: Punch a Locker

@carldonnelly: have a barman shout “phone call for you” across a busy bar

@dannymccomic: Emerge from a sewer via manhole cover only to be nearly run over by a bus

@dannymccomic: Get punched in the face, touch my lip, look at my hand, spit, then smile

@georgiedonnelly: meet someone in an empty football stadium...a row apart

@DrsevenG: buy a large paper bag of groceries with green leafy veg peaking out of the top

@truphtooph: Run over a traffic cone while learning to drive

@Bennyboot: Walk out of my house early morning, say hi to Bob; pick up newspaper, get wet by a sprinkler suddenly turned on

@joeWHSG: Drive a limousine with an electric shutter to reveal my identity/view a hottie in the back

@chinafoot: carry a watermelon

@johnfromsoho: Have a barbecue with work colleagues by my pool

@danielclancy: Arrange a date with someone for “tonight” but don’t clarify when or where to meet



There were loads more great ones but those were a select sample of goods ones. If you have 40000 hours to kill look at my timeline @chrismcomedy for some of the dumb ones I concocted. Next week I want to blow up the internet.

2-6th January: The Year of the Admin

Having had fourteen days of excess there was something nice about returning to normality. So much so, the first thing I did on January the 1st when I woke up was to renew my tax disc: ladies form a queue because in 2012 I’m going to be pretty dangerous.

Along with 99% of all the other adults in the Western World I’ve taken the month off drinking. A week in, very little has changed for me except that I feel ready for bed at about 10pm. Not drinking makes you act like a pensioner whereas I guess drinking makes you act like a horny child. The non-boozing meant I spent a lot of my week meeting pals in the day time, which is refreshing because you remember it all and at no point do you get made to drink a Jaeger-Bomb by someone you don’t really know or like.

Carl Donnelly and I spent three hours on one of the afternoons playing darts in a pub drinking orange juice and soda water (a drink I had to excuse to the barmen by pretending that we were both driving). As Carl got a dartboard for Christmas and I received a scarf there a no prizes for guessing who won. However, it’s the taking part that counts as well as the enjoyment in shouting phrases like "and the first leg..." or “Carl you require, 67”.

To continue the theme of me turning into a old man, tardiness has really started to nestle on my tits. I arranged a lunch with some people for 1pm. Now when you arrange a lunch, you have to be on time because unlike a dinner, the middle meal of the day is the one where your belly needs food in it immediately. Carl and I arrived bang on time and two of the other three were 30 minutes late, whilst one was still in bed till 2pm. That is the behaviour of stoned student not of a fully grown woman. The result of all this is we ate at 1pm and then watched two other people eat there lunch. It’s like we got to compete in the semi-finals of an event but didn’t make it through, so had to watch the finals. The moral of this story, is don’t be late or you’ll get slagged off by a coward like me on a blog rather than to your face. Right I’ve got to go as I’m 10 min late for Sunday lunch.

This may have been the most boring blog I've ever written but hopefully next week my detox will go off the rails and I'll be able to talk about getting munted and punching a fox. Toodles