Funny you should ask, really – I did go through a phase in my first year at University. I have this theory of firstyearitis, that the heady mix of no responsibility and a distinct onslaught of freedom to do your own thing leads to a sort of mini-breakdown amongst the nation’s 18-year-olds and results in them all getting hanging drunk four times a week in order to bury the pain. You could also look at East Germany around 1993 to back the theory up. Or actually not.

My firstyearitis manifested itself in a certain unwillingness to attend lectures and dying my hair pink. Of course, that doesn’t really help with answering this particular and rather specific question, but I did have to dye my hair blond before dying it pink. In order to be factually accurate, it must be noted that I first dyed my hair orange (it was supposed to be red) and went pink as I felt the orange wasn’t distinctive enough. (It did match very nicely with some shirts I had at the time, though) After the pink I tried to dye my hair white, which failed spectacularly and I was left with a dry thatch of smoker’s-fingernail coloured hair, looking uncannily like an extra from Tom Hank’s Philadelphia.

Next up on ‘Knowing me, knowing you’ - ‘have you ever eaten frogs’ legs?’

The ritual self-mutilation of karaoke is the worst thing ever invented, up there with hydrogen bombs, mushrooms and Big Brother. If I had my way all traces of it would be wiped off this planet. People get ASBOs for playing the efforts of actual professional musicians with talent too loud and yet we actively encourage people with the sonorous qualities of various goods being scraped down blackboards to stand up in public and share their lack of talent with the wider world.

In short, no – I have never sung in public. Unless you count the car.

Coming soon in the unaward-winning ‘Knowing me, knowing you’ series - have you ever dyed your hair blonde?

Son of a gun, I’m so ruddy tired. I am looking forward to a nice wee relax in several weeks. I also believe it is Christmas time, but I have not seen the Coca-Cola advert with the trucks yet, so I cannot reliably inform you as to whether or not the holidays are coming or not. I will need to check whether Coke are on Twitter or something, actually - I don’t have a television, so I won’t even know when the holidays are coming, the holidays are coming.

We’re going to Brussels on Monday. Half seven. We’ve got to leave from the London Eurostar train station at halfseveninthesoddingmorning, that bastion of ‘I only have 15 minutes left in bed’. Still, should be fun. I shall bring pictures back. In the meantime, more ‘Knowing me, knowing you’ to come…

A good question, because as I think back, I don’t think I’ve ever been on the telly in the fun sense – lots of Students’ Union stuff, standing on a picket line, appearing in a crowd, etc. I was in teh audience for the first ever Celebrity Weakest Link, which was fun. There’s the usual Songs of Praise stuff, which is every Christian’s baseline claim to fame. A wee while ago the MP I’m working for did an interview for the television and I had to walk with him and pretend to listen intently as an establishing shot. I’ve no idea whether it was used or not, but that is the closest I have come to my fifteen minutes’ of fame.

I’ve never really had a grand desire to have myself filmed, I feel my humble visage is far better suited to radio than any mass exposure; I don’t even like using pictures of myself unless they’ve had a quick once over with Photoshop, if I’m absolutely honest. I can never quite understand the desperation of people to be on the telly, like it’s some validation of your entire existence to be committed to film. And frankly there’s nothing that pisses me off more than watching a live outside broadcast and seeing a gaggle of chumps gather round on their mobiles to wave at their parents.

Seriously – these people should get a blog if they fancy vain unadulterated exposure to the wider community.

Next time, in the brief but acclaimed series of posts entitled ‘Knowing me, knowing you’ - ‘have you ever sung in public?’

Hello chaps, still here. Very busy, etc, etc.

Coming up: a series of lazy posts entitled “Knowing me, knowing you” (don’t do the ‘aha’, it demeans us all), where I download a series of questions off the internet and answer them. I’m really selling it, no? First up: “Have you ever been on the telly?” Classy.

Does anyone want to go halves with me on Woolworths? Apparently it’s expected to sell for a pound in the very near future, which I think is a bargain, frankly. I know what I’m asking for at Christmas now.

The share prices have collapsed to just over 2p each, meaning the whole company is worth around £35m or so - I think about the same amount as Ginger Spice. It comes to something, doesn’t it, when you’re better off buying the shares in a company than its pick-n-mix. It’s been coming for years, though - and another company I expect to go arse up soon? Boots. Woolies and Boots are the two most aimless companies in the country, they just don’t seem to know what they stand for, having lost any identity they may have carved out for themselves years ago.

The problem I always have with Woolworths is that the things you expect them to sell they don’t, and the things you don’t they do. It’s not good business, either way. Oh well, when I’m in charge things will be a lot different…

You’ve no idea how mad this stupid story made me when I read it first thing this morning. Things must be really slow at the Ceredigionshire Parish Council, when they have time between collecting the bins and sorting out the recycling to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority about gratuitous dog walking in a television advertisement. Someone crack open the unfriendly bacteria. Read it, you couldn’t make it - their complaint said that Sir Bobby Charlton’s dog was irresponsible and probably the reason there’s so much dog crap in our society. Well, no - the real reason they had to have a dog for the advert is that Sir Bob imposes himself on a football game a group of young boys are playing - sans chien he would have been ARRESTED AS A PAEDO. They are everywhere, preying on our youths and they don’t have dogs.

There are signs on parks in London indicating restricted areas where you can’t go unless you have a dog or a kid, this is what the world has come to. Me, as a single man, restricted in my essential freedoms to walk about in public spaces - it’s racist, I tells ya. And now if you show a dog on teh plazma you’ll get COMPLAINTS.

ARRGRHRHRHHHH.

It was mild this morning going to church - and for some reason as I smelt my way to the bus stop my olfactory bits were telling me I was in France. It was perhaps the faint whiff of sea mingled with indifference and a certain I don’t know what. There were lots of smells to behold on the way to catch the bus - something to fall back on when the views are invariably uninspiring outside of zone 2. Isn’t it funny how the same smell that tantalises and titillates on a Friday evening can make you queasy of a Sunday morn? The chip shop shouldn’t be open anyway; there is, as they say, a time and a place for everything.

London is a generally smelly place, though - an inexplicable tang of diesel wherever you go, like the buildings claw onto it to keep it in the streets; the danky pissy pong of the Underground, tagged with a nagging wonder of how many thousands of people that last breath has been through; and on this morning, a chorus of perfumes from the fancily-dressed dames (French version, not the Harvey Keitel one) on their way to the pentecostal church down the road from mine.

It’s the weekend; the body rests but the nose is always on standby.

I’ve just finished watching My Blueberry Nights, a mix of indie roadtrip and girlie wheeze, with a cast of pretty good thesps that add up to less than the sum of their parts. If it were a bar, someone’s nicking from the till. I really do want to like it - the film has a breathy, amiable quality and a certain atmosphere about it, but at the same time the script is clunky and it plays like a teenager’s diary. One suspects the director was rather more ambitious than the writer, who simply wanted a teevee movie and a Christmas paycheck. Rachel Weisz channels Juliette Binoche and my guilty fave Emmanuelle Beart, whilst Natalie Portman shows off more impish charm than a chap can possibly handle. Even Jude Law is passable, and I can’t often watch him without taking an irrational dislike. As the film’s main protagonist and supposed anchor, wee songstress Norah Jones looks curiously ungainly alongside the real actors, possibly passing time between albums, who knows. She should know, however, that no singer has ever made a good film - the real money comes from making the gritty story of their boozy sozzled death, it’s Oscar gold.

There was something very romantic about the film, though - perhaps the best character in the film i s the backdrop of the USA itself, a vast continent into which anyone can lose themself, millions of lives and little vignettes co-existing in harmony. Norah crosses the road, as her character says, the long way round - but why not? I don’t think I would mind crossing the road the long way round if it meant a panoply of characters and things to talk about. I’ve got a roadtrip bubbling inside me, I can feel it - and gosh, to get paid to meet crazies and see things and then to tell people about it, that would be an enormous privilege. That would be the pre-life crisis solved.

So there - crap film, but it poked me somewhat.

I saw some headlines yesterday – ‘Recession bites’. I mean, no-one likes an economic crisis, but that’s a bit strong. They keep closing the barriers at London Bridge to get down to the Jubilee line, but when I get down there the westbound platform towards Westminster is invariably deserted and there are millions of nervous-looking people heaving their way towards the Docklands. I suspect that a novel policy on redundancy has been introduced in the financial sector; anyone who arrives after 8.55 on any given day is sacked on the spot. A more perverse but possibly more fun variation would be to take away a desk each day until you reach your desired number of staff. Now that’s hotdesking.