Which Rat Pack Member Are You?

My result was...

Frank Sinatra

You're the leader of the Pack. You call the shots and everyone knows it. You're generous to a fault and a friend in need is never an imposition. Your temper sometimes gets you into trouble, and some of the little people mistake your self-confidence for arrogance, but hey, that's why they're the little people.

Tweedle fucking Dum

I took ten pairs of trouser/jeans/cords to the tailors for alteration yesterday, they're going to cost me £160 when I pick them up. All needed shortening and a couple needed tapering. As I said previously, I have real trouble getting anything off the peg with my 28 inch inside leg. The only trousers available in that leg size off the peg are for grotesquely fat cunts like whoever decides to buy these FIFTY-EIGHT inch waist (28" inside leg) cords that I saw on ebay must surely be.

It seems so unfair that I have to add up to twenty quid onto the cost of every pair of strides I buy as a punishment for not being obscenely overweight. It's not the money as much as the fact that it limits the purchases I can make.

Isn't being way outside the normally available range of waist sizes difficult enough for me?

Seen On E-Bay

Why didn't I buy this? I'm such an idiot.

Is This Sponsorship Part Of The "Age Of Austerity"?

Was given this banknote at the weekend:

Those adverts in full:
davidicke.com 
cpexposed.com
checktheevidence.com
drjudywood.com

Mad.

I Can't Think Of Anything I Want To Buy

I just wanted to note this moment for posterity. I don't remember ever feeling like this before.

Tonight I listed 15 items on ebay (some really great things too, they just never fitted) and- out of habit- I started trawling the usual online outlets looking for bargains but I couldn't think of a single specific search I wanted to do. I've thought of one since, I'd really like an ice-blue fly-fronted mac, but the point still stands that for the first time in as long as I can remember I was content with what I have.

Being content didn't feel as nice as you'd think.

There's loads more going on ebay over the next few days, but here's a couple of things I'm very sad to be giving up today:

Adidas Europa TT (original)

Grenson Brogues

Authentic 60s Beatles-style collarless jacket

Authentic 70s leather jacket (Britpop special!)

Gloverall Duffle Coat

Big E Levis Cord Trucker

Authentic 70s Adidas ringer 

Chance

Had a game of Monopoly last night with my cousin Simon and his girlfriend, Gemma. It was the updated Here And Now edition, so the places and amounts will look a bit mad. Through strategic deal-making and a lot of bloody luck I was in a pretty good position with control of the half of the board from the orange (Marlborough/Vine etc) to the green (Bond Street etc) with hotels on the richer properties. I also had a handful of millions. Gemma had a scattering of properties and a largely undeveloped yellow set. Simon had all of his eggs in one basket with the Mayfair set each with a couple of houses but no cash.

Simon and Gemma were just about to head into my alley when on my turn I landed on Community Chest.

Pay £100k or take a chance.

Now the £100k fine is the equivalent of £10 on the old game and the Chance deck is loaded with "upgrade your properties" fines and so I should obviously have played it safe. But in my mind the only thing I could imagine was turning over the Go To Jail card and sitting safely collecting rents miles from the only dangerous area of the board.

I took a chance and picked a card which advanced me straight to Simon's most lucrative card. The rent was £14million (about £14,000) on the old game.

I'm not moaning, it's only a game. But there is a lesson there about taking a massive thoughtless risk with little reward. And about thinking before you act.

A lesson that I really should have learned before I reached my mid-thirties!

Stiff Upper Lip

I may have posted it before, I received it by mail from Gavro a couple of months back but there are few things I've enjoyed more in recent months than this. There's something very British about the mix of stoicism in the face of horror and saucy seaside postcard humour:



H.M. EMBASSY
MOSCOW

Lord Pembroke
The Foreign Office
London

6th April 1943

My Dear Reggie,

In these dark days man tends to look for little shafts of light that spill from Heaven. My days are probably darker than yours, and I need, my God I do, all the light I can get. But I am a decent fellow, and I do not want to be mean and selfish about what little brightness is shed upon me from time to time. So I propose to share with a tiny flash that has illuminated my sombre life and tell you that God has given me a new Turkish colleague whose card tells me that he is called Mustapha Kunt.

We all feel like that, Reggie, now and then, especially when Spring is upon us, but few of us would care to put it on our cards. It takes a Turk to do that.

(Signed)

Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr,
H.M. Ambassador.

Eyelashes

I seem to be losing loads of eyelashes lately. Can't help worrying that it's male pattern baldness and I'm all wired up wrong.

Kids Today

There are some Horse Chestnuts at the top of my road. All over the pavement lie some conkers that have fallen from the tree and been ignored. Some of them are so big and promising that I'm having a hard time not taking them home to prepare for my own use.

How is this possible? When I was a kid we'd be climbing up to get the best conkers before they fell in case I missed them.

Preposterous!

I Was Thinking Of Growing A Beard

But I think that the last thing I need is to draw more attention to my heavily-laden piggy eyes. I'll continue shaving, having seen the high quality artist's impression below.

Space Research Department

Sticking with the space theme, here's a sign in the building I'm working in at the moment at the University of Birmingham.

Man, I wish I could get through that door!

My Dream Last Night

I rarely remember my dreams but I woke up in the middle of this one and made a note of the details. I had just joined the police as a detective and was investigating a crime which had as its biggest clue the existence of a previously unknown Shakespeare play named 'Ross of Blackburn'. In my dream I joked that it was about a caller to TalkSport.

That's all the detail I noted down, in my fuzzy-headed state I assumed that it would prompt me to remember the rest.

Wayne Rooney paid a prostitute £1000 per visit

He'd be well advised to let his agent conduct his contract negotiations next time out as he clearly has no gift for this himself.

A Cup of Christmas Cheer

I'm temping at the University again (hence yesterday's musings) and have inherited this mug to use while I'm there.

Academia Nuts

Had I been bright enough, I would have liked a life as an academic. A pokey little office overflowing with books, periods of contact and periods of solitude, an acceptance of eccentric modes of dress (I'd go for tweeds, bow ties- maybe a beard- and other eccentrically dandyish touches), a reverence for knowledge and a dogged resistance to overrated concepts like progress, modernity and "the 21st century".

I know it's a romanticised distortion. I know that working among pseudo-intellectual timewasters with a relaxed approach to personal hygiene and a perverse devotion to Jesus sandals in any weather would drive me up the wall. But no more so than the shiny indentikit buzzword droids I worked alongside at the Bank or the lackadaisical middle-aged children who worked for me there.

Redbrick buildings with rabbit-warren corridors, musty wooden fistures, leather-bound books, winter fires, the Bursar, the Dean, the Senior Fellows- these are the things I conjure in my head. I would love that lifestyle. Thirty plagiarised essays on the requirement of malice aforethought clearly isn't part of that lifestyle. I should just work in Porterhouse College really.

The King And I... (and David Miliband)

I mentioned that I might be going for a different haircut the other night. Another good reason is that my current flash of grey:

isn't too dissimilar to the one sported by David Miliband.


And who would want to look like a politician when he could look like the sexiest man in TV history?

Mind The Gap Please

I am such an idiot sometimes. I slipped stepping onto a train yesterday and ended up slipping down the very gap that I have been told to mind (please) probably thousands of times. My pride was hurt more than my physical injuries but they are still looking a little horrible this morning and my second toe (which has been known to dislocate and slip back into place as a legacy of an old football injury) isn't feeling too wonderful. I'm going to have it looked at tomorrow after I leave the night shift if there is no improvement.


By the way the blood below the large toe-nail results from a different incident where my father-in-law ran over my foot last March.

I sound like Frank Spencer.

UPDATE 13 August

Bruising is coming out now:

Silvio Berlusconi

Speaking about the Italian Government's refusal to fund scientific research, the curiously dark-haired megalomaniac and serial user of prostitutes stated "Why do we need to pay scientists when we make the best shoes in the world?".

He may be corrupt, stupid, spiteful and racist but you can argue that he has a point: England might be world leaders in pharmaceutical research but we also have ShoeZone and Brantano.

Self-Portrait (with ineptitude)

The idea of this picture was to see how massive my Vespa Italia helmet looked on me (open-face helmets always look massive but massive is, like everything else, a matter of degree) but I was too busy fiddling with the steering lock to pose in time for the self-timer on my phone's camera. I was delighted with the happy accident that is the almost perfect obscuration in the shot though.

Love, Honour and Obey (2000)

The guiltiest of guilty pleasures. A pointless, childish, shabby, guileless, ugly, cheap film that is little more than a home video of Ray Winstone and some of his mates pissing about. I love it.

The plot, such as it is, involves a bored postman who works his way up the heirarchy of a London gang only to find out that it isn't as glamorous, exciting or dangerous as a Scorcese film and so tries to stir things up a little. But the plot is largely irrelevant. The film is a set of largely extemporised scenes where established British actors mug for the camera and try to make each other corpse. It's as childish as a fart in a lift.

I'm not going to talk about performances, cinematography, continuity errors and logical flaws in the plot. They're all rubbish and miss the point. Instead I'll limit my notes thus:


Top 5 things I liked about Love, Honour and Obey.

Almost every character is given the actor's forename so that they don't balls up any improvised scenes and lose something that looks natural.

The heist scene where they dress like Arab sheiks and pop viagra is staggeringly audacious for the sake of a knob gag.

Sean "Don't mac me off like a two-bob"
Ray (aside) "Mac? What's that some new kind of slang we don't know?"

Rhys Ifans taking it all very seriously even while everyone else is giggling.

"Fix bayonets!"