Oblong Scone

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...

For those who find the regular purchasing of Heat Magazine financially non-viable, the website 'Digital Spy' is there, free as an impact with a lampost to tickle your celebrity gossip feet. Who would of thought such an insignificant, trivia bloated, interweb cupboard would break the biggest story so far of the Anno Domini? ME! I predicted it in my unpublished book 2009 X-Factor Runner Up News Predictions (with a foreword from a now homeless Kate Thornton[she has a flat fee of a bacon baguette, a Cappuccino and a kind remark about her hair]). But I was wrong; the truth is they have done something much more exciting: For the first time ever, a news story has been written that is so inane and unimportant, it actually has less insight than no words at all. 'Uninformation' has been theoretical up to now. Einstein's calculations showed that it was a mathematical possibility but that an incident of it was incredibly unlikely to occur(roughly equivilent to the chances o...

Bristol Harbour festival and the footbridge on the waterfront has been temporarily designated one-way in the most serious three bouncer enforced way . The disbelief created by people who unexpectedly find they cannot cross the bridge is messily scattered and kicked around on the cobbles. The amiable bouncers take the abuse with humour, ‘have a nice day sir.’ A man in his late fifties with more to the right of his bald patch than the left, remonstrates persistently with the bouncer whose head’s a pumpkin. ‘But it’s a bridge,’ the man argues hoping that in light of this new information the bouncer will relent and let him through. To this man wronged, with his most inconsistent hair, this temporary arrangement is a sick perversion equivalent to the cross-breeding a spaniel to a photograph of a spade. The long suffering target of this man’s anger opens his arms as only bouncers can and spots his favourite cloud – ‘there’s nothing I can do.’. He’s right: his only job is to stop people ...

Gloucester Road and a plump, pale, middle-aged man, his shirt bleeding the hungry sweat of a late Thursday afternoon pulls over his weathered BMW sharply and parks on one of those damn yellow lines with a sign above that said you really don’t want to be parking here at this time of the day. On my walk to the shops to get a few essentials, I passed two traffic wardens aggressively pumping tickets at any car that dared to so much as whisper. They'd quickly be upon this BMW, sloshing their foamy penalties over its dirty dirty windscreen. To all intents and purposes the driver appeared to have the arrogance and badly worn aggression that is prevalent in those that choose BMWs. He walked up towards me; nose high in the air allowing the nostril creatures to see the smug cloudless sky. My emotions should have been swaying to satisfaction - this bluster of paunch was to have the nasty shock of a sixty pound fine waiting for him when he got back. But for some reason, just as he was about to...

Yes me, myself did so last night, just to see what it was like. I’m normally a Tesco man (or for laugh Sommerfield), so in effect I’d jumped straight over the orangey head of Sainsbury’s into the arms of this John Lewis off-shoot. The first thing I noticed is that you had to be quite near to any of the women to tell how old they are. All alone, painfully thin, with skirts just above knee height, whispering angrily at rows of expensive canned food. In fact that seems to an unwritten rule at Waitrose – you must not under any circumstances shop with anyone else. This is solitary shopping, the quiet area in the library where the slightest beep from a mobile phone could mean someone challenging you to a duel. This silence does not spread to those that 'work' there: Unlike staff of lesser supermarkets, employees do not appear to see it as their responsibility to actually do any work. The students with name badges, stand in groups of two, unapologetically discussing in booming spooned...

I’ve already previously covered the social goat spoon of how far behind a stranger has to be before there is no need to hold a door open for them. This point was SO well made by me even Jesus took time out from being back alive to tap my head and tell me what a good little creation I was. His dad thought it was shit though – miserable bearded… The whole door thing came back into my thoughts again today whilst following a stranger through a large office block. I was troubled as to how many times I should thank the person for briefly holding each door open for me to grab after they went through first. Every door? A selection? Obviously the first door is a given. You have to say thank-you. This person has put himself out for 1.4 seconds, which could have been used being 2.8 metres closer to his final destination. But then the second door, a brief almost embarrassed ‘cheers’? The third, the fourth? Try not saying anything and the dead air starts to twist its bony fingers around your ungrat...

I’m looking at the sun out of the office window. I can hear it chuckling, barbing ‘Look what I’m doing out here with ‘heat’ and ’light’ whilst you’re stuck in there typing various combinations of keys in vain attempts to produce words on your television. ‘It’s a monitor’ I argue but the sun isn’t listening anymore. It’s laughing with the kids playing football, with jumpers for goalposts and a football for football. It’s studiously serving the slaves to sunburn who lie static along sandy beaches reading novels written by Jade Goody, stuffing greasy chips up their cracks. It’s playing peak-a-boo with the pale, who hide under parasols outside cafes, sucking then end of their beer bottles, re-hydrating their indifference to the rest of the world. I wonder outside at lunch for a walk and the sun notices me again. ‘Ah, there you are, decided to join us again have you?’ ‘Just for half an hour.’ ‘See that’s the problem with people like you,’ the sun says flashing angry hot claws only visible ...

I’m in a spinning class ( group of people on exercise bikes following instructions of instructor whilst music popular exactly four years ago plays loudly in the background. Some times referred to as RPM or ‘why don’t you just go out for a ride on a proper bike’ ). This particular instructor, his name Dave, is very keen on announcing percentages indicating the effort level you should be putting in. ‘We’re going up a hill and I want you all at seventy percent’ he announces. I turn the resistance on the bike up and speed up my legs movement. My effort is more or less at seventy percent I believe, though I’m sure none of us know quite what that really means. I expect to be chastised at any minute for running at seventy-two. Gradually there are further calls – eighty, ninety percent, then in a voice reminiscent of Braveheart with a recently stubbed-toe, ‘ONE HUNDRED PECENT – SPRINT!’ I close my eyes summoning every bit of energy I can find. That last flake of pastry from that dodgy sausage ...

We brave misunderstood balding English, standing in battered bus stops under angry regimental downpours. This courageous underrepresented British minority desperate to reassert our identity against all that…you know…stuff. Them dragons…them dragons… THOSE WELSH ARE STEALING ALL OUR JOBS! Anyway, let me tell you - there was no way I was going to miss out on celebrating St Georges Day like THEY want us to. Them…you know the ones with their ‘Political Correctness’, their endless bullying that tries to curb our lazy hate. And there I was on the great day itself realising well over a minute before half seven in the evening that it was actually St Georges day (I’d walked past a pub that said ‘It’s St Georges Day’ on a sign [it also said ‘Why don’t you come in and slay a dragon?’ which didn’t so much make sense as rather not make sense, but look at me mum I’m using square brackets(probably haven’t done it correctly though[I’m so out of my deapth])] ) I stopped for a minute, watching a Y-reg...

Whilst I’m more than happy to admit that I regularly watch the multi-layered epic Neighbours, I have to draw the line at GMTV. In fact, so important is it to me that I draw a line here, I am going to physically draw a line on a big piece of A4(is it possible to have a big piece of A4?) with a purple crayon. That said, it’s Good Friday and I’m not quite ready to transfer from being awake to doing something useful with my life and I’m bored with BBC News with its narrow insistence on being exclusively dedicated to things that have happened, are happening or are about to happen – seriously BBC, innovate. So GMTV with the weather women who only seems interested in telling us where she’s going on holiday and saying hello to her parents. The entertainments reporter from Los Angeles who looks genuinely upset about Woody Harrelson being bothered by a photographer in an airport (literally never has something happened where so little has happened). Our entertainment reporter Carla goes on to re...

Why should you? Why should you have to interrupt the bounce bounce bounce indie post-indie stride because some car may want to turn ‘left’ onto some road you must apparently cross. Fuck them - why should he throw it all away after all this. All this consciously conscious progress down the pavement with you not caring, the shades in the gloom, the jeans that fit in a way that only one percent of the population are interested in and half of those understand. This is the stage, the paving, walking into the distance, out of sight with out any compromise to practicality. This is all about who you are and nothing about almost anything there...is... and you’re in the middle of the road and nothing hits you - maybe becuase 'nothing' could be bothered, but most likely because it just fucking couldn't. You laugh at the lifeless body of that Green Cross Code Man you remember from school. Is it shallow to put everything into your walk and nothing into your destination? Would this blok...

Looking up he commented that he’d got so much on his 'To-Do' List he didn’t know what to do. A man, not only with a to-do list, but one larger than average, doesn’t know what to do. Overwhelmed by order and identifiable tasks he now sits silently, drowning, tapping at the space-bar as his last struggle peters out. This is the pain and anguish forced upon us: the hellish imperative to consistently make sense. Those hundreds of monkeys bashing away at typewriters for an infinite amount of time write complete works of Shakespeare because they’re under no pressure to do so. ‘How long monkey, will it take you and your friends to type out the complete works of Shakespeare?’ ‘It will take forever - an infinite amount of time.’ ‘I don’t know if I have forever.’ ‘We can negotiate on staffing levels, but I simply must insist on this timescale.’ At the quantum level of things, the entire universe is made up of little angry cats trying to scratch each other’s eyes out, so this pursuit of...

I cannot be blamed – there was nothing I could do. An unpredictable lightning bolt from the left field in the sky. One minute it’s something you couldn’t construct as a whimsical thought from the most fantastical of notions, the next - there it is, stark and crazy. And before you accuse me of gross exaggeration and over-drama, let me reveal to you what has just happened: I experienced listening to a cover version of Something Inside So Strong sung by Michael Ball! This event cannot be subjectively commented upon; the very parameters that mediate my entire life are at the moment spinning wheels in Michael Ball’s fucked-up fruit machine. There’s no categorizing possible in terms of good or bad, right or wrong; all I can do is try my best to avoid the lava – the dark red, bleeding lava. I would be more likely to fathom the origin and meaning of existence than even speculate on what drew Michael Ball to attempt to perform this song. The actual execution breaks so many rules of science th...