Oblong Scone

We miss you Sommerfield and all your silly shelves full of all those things, that anywhere else, would never have been able to sit next to each other. Baked beans striking up conversations with Sellotape; cheese crying on the shoulder of Cif after falling out with an obscure Sandra Bullock DVD. It's been three months, and your tears are black ice. Co-op has replaced you and it tries its best: It wears slightly eccentric jumpers and watches films by Mike Leigh. But the flowers in its hair are from a local garage and it sells olives boringly. It will tell you about how it's put bits of blue cheese in with them, but the olives hate this imposter. They want you back Sommerfield. We all do. We're sorry about everything we've ever said.

High-five Jesus – the Gallaries shopping centre in Bristol now has a shop completely dedicated to your birthday. You can buy all sorts in there, as long as what you want to buy is sparkly and aggresively soul-destroying. You might want to accelerate your second coming Christ - get in there and change all that shiny shit into something more worthy. Something that'll make us reflect on the virgin birth and 'love' and why the sea looks so angry these days. But I'm going to take the next exit off this lazy cynicism motorway. For one of my favourite hobbies (listed on my CV) is to listen to people become exasperated by the premature appearance of Christmas related high-jinx. A great place for this is just outside this new Christmas shop. “Re-dic-you-lous,” says the woman with eyes lost behind Dierdre Barlow's spare pair of 'sexy time' glasses; she throws her the palm of her hand downwards in reflex disgust. “It's just so unnecessary,” her friend replies, m

I had nothing to offer the world today. These days happen about once every couple of months. However much I try to muster enthusiasm, intelligence or even just effort, it doesn't come. I sit at my desk, tapping 'page-up', 'page down' – hoping one of them will bring me back into the game, but the hours throw themselves away. Nothing is really getting done. “Do you want a bag?” the girl in Sommerfield asked. I didn't know. I had bought a carton of orange, chicken breasts and two tubes(?) of shower gel. I could of balanced it all without a bag and done my part to save the worldy thing that we live on, on the other hand... I realised I didn't have it within me to make a decision and that it had now been a good few seconds since she'd asked the question. My only option was to just choose one of the two words 'yes' or 'no'. I could spin a coin – but that would be so damningly odd I'd probably have to move flat and grow a beard. I get gin

It will soon be time to start the next module on my OU course. I'm doing an English Literature degree backwards. The harder courses such as 'Twentieth Century Literature' looked more interesting than 'Approaching Literature' and thus I did the more interesting ones first. Trouble is 'Twentieth Century Literature' kind of assumed you'd done 'Approaching Literature' first and thus was a little ridiculously difficult. This is yet another disadvantage to not being what people call 'sensible'. 'Sensible' can be 'washing up as you go along' or parking your car in the garage. I don't have a garage, and washing-up as I go along makes me cry tears that were meant for standing on a cliff-edge staring into the middle-distance. Anyway this new module is the one you're supposed to do first. 'The Arts Past and Present' is its name, or TAPAP as I confidently predict people will become irritated with me saying. It looks to

The woman on the next table is angry about stuff. All stuff. Everything that constitutes stuff has anger aimed at it from this woman. Her husband, also in his sixties, rests back into his chair content to tiredly utter well worn mumbles of agreement. The subject of the day is benefits. Her running through of categories of people that 'shouldn't get a penny' quickly disqualifies anyone who's not white, middle-class and over sixty. “They've all got tattoos of course,” she takes a second to let her whore of an observation parade itself proudly around the pub draping itself all over men with beards and hate, “how can they afford tattoos if they don't have a job?” “We're paying for 'em,” her husband says . “We're paying for 'em,” she says before moving onto fingers, “and they've all got nice nails.” The tone in her voice is now so incredulous, I want to record it; make it a lasting exhibit of 'incredulous'; play it back to anyone who asks

The television programme Question of Sport Uncensored , indicates that someone at some time was sat down watching the standard version of Question of Sport and thought to themselves, ‘this programme is censored.’ Either that or the BBC 1 controllers had half an hour of television to fill and decided the best way to fill it was to have Ally McCoist repeatedly say ‘fuck’. I sincerely hope it’s for the first reason. I love the idea, of the real naked truth of Question of Sport being exposed; the lie that Ally McCoist doesn’t say ‘fuck’ finally demolished so that we now live in a post-innocence-of-Ally McCoist’s potty-mouth-world. What a world: I want to die here and have my ashes thrown over the lush valleys of coarse innuendo aimed at Sue Barker.

Kylie's on the television singing live. She's not miming. We know this because the first thing she does is shout out, 'Hello, how you all doing?'. If she was miming she couldn't have done this. Now she's slightly changing the words of the song to reference the host of the chat show. If she was miming she couldn't have done this. Kylie isn't miming. SHE IS NOT FUCKING MIMING! The thing with buying takeaway sandwiches is. you're going to buy them from the place that serve the nicest ones, no matter how rude the staff are. I know that with this sandwich purchase insight, I've just changed the way you think about buying sandwiches. You don't have to thank me - in fact you can't. You're powerless; just someone reading words on a screen. How did it come to this? I mean really. This is humiliating - for God sake go out for a walk or read a book or something. Anyway, normally the rude bloke in the sandwich shop doesn't bother me. His supe

I sit in the hotel bar drinking my pint of Stella, a beer punched in the face until it agreed to chill-out at a more moderate and conscientious 4% alcohol. My last night in the Holiday Inn Express in Pride Park, Derby. In a sense, it’s the end of a very short era; an era of four days. My era’s too small to be an era. How inadequate it is. I do not mind my own company, but sitting in your hotel room has a loneliness that overwhelms, that empties your entire vision and replaces it with a colour that failed the audition to become beige. And that’s why I sit in the hotel lounge, with my newspaper amongst tables peppered with the tired, who are all having ‘just one more’. The television keeps us warm. The television has dedicated itself to ITV. It’s just finished showing us a programme that had everybody guessing; trying to work it out. What was the concept? All it was (I promise you I’m not deliberately concealing nuance or deliberately deconstructing it in an attempt to piss-take), was c

I am a man living in a small flat who often has to spend five minutes looking for his keys before he leaves it. The mechanics of my brain frequently fails following tasks:: a) instruct my movable arm to put my keys in the same place every time I get home, b) in case of failing ‘a’ store the location of my keys in my memory. This could be because sub-consciously I decide that such information really isn’t worth wasting limited memory on; that all that is stored there now cannot be discarded for such piffling convenience of being able to go outside. But the principle of the brain’s memory holding the most important stuff in it whilst refusing to hold that which is less useful falls down clumsily on its arse as soon as you partake in an afternoon’s tour around it recesses and see just what a load of crap has been lying about there for years. I for example know that eighties children’s TV host Timmy Mallett has had an art exhibition in a place called Pinder Hall; and that’s not a memory b