Posts Tagged ‘this’n’that’

The Great O.

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

I hear that Barack Obama has assembled his cabinet already. He’s having some trouble with the new wardrobes though, the alan key was missing when he got home from Ikea.

I’m here all week folks, seriously - got more where that came from.

An exciting day all round, really.

Monday, November 10th, 2008

It’s a mark of how bad the London transport system is for the soul that I was grinning especially inanely this evening when I managed to get a comfortable seat on a warm train that didn’t appear to be running late. It felt like Christmas, and in many ways it was. These hallowed occasions happen about as frequently - perhaps during Boris’s brief time on earth he might deign to have a brief think about where it all went wrong.

Another exciting point in my day: I renewed my library books on my phone. How cool is that?

Not very, but I was excited nonetheless. Initially quite miffed for having forgotten to go the library in the first place (I’ll miss Autocar magazine this week…sniff) I had a go at getting into their online system and hark! They even give you some recommendations for your next visit based on books you’ve taken out already. Today was the deadline for taking the books back, so I was quite fearful of a little punitary surprise, but the cut-off point was 11.59. Bless those little bookish-types at Kensington and Chelsea, they’ve made a young man proud.

An open plea to Richard Hammond…

Monday, November 10th, 2008

Please get a haircut. This is all.

I do believe…

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

…for the first time in my life at any given point I am in fact stuck for something to say.

Oh well. The GP was great last Sunday, I hear there was an election. Life trundles on.

I went to see James Bond.

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008

It’s nice, what they’ve done with the Millennium Dome - it’s not just Peter Mandelson whose unexpected return could have proven embarrassing for the Government, this olympic fiasco cost hundreds of millions and wasn’t particularly good when they opened it. Now there’s a particularly good reason to go and it’s called Screen 11, the largest expanse of white this side of the Imax and Vanessa Feltz sunbathing. (Sorry Vanessa - why is still culturally acceptable to insult your size for a cheap laugh? It’s not like you’ve even offended anyone with your screen presence a great deal lately anyway.) My glasses weren’t quite big enough to take the full monty in, I had to do a Stevie Wonder-esque sweeping motion with my head during peak scenes of action and suspense in order so as not to miss anything. Important stuff.

And what a good film.

But you can wait until tomorrow for my thoughts on Bond.

22 jobs

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Burger seller, shelf stacker, website columnist, table waiter, bar man, corporate hospitality-giver, toy demonstrator, table waiter, farm hand, shelf stacker, table waiter, bar man, campsite worker, sales assistant, fund raiser, English teacher, dish washer, kitchen assistant, sales assistant, mystery shopper, top dog, programme member.

You are here.

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Hello, you are here. I suspect I have a new reader or two lurking about somewhere and I thought I’d write a little red spot of a post just to let you know that you are here. This is No Added Succour, my blog – No Added Succour because that’s just the way it is. If you want any more it’s 30p a sachet and a certain laissez-faire. Lots of people ask me why I would blog and tell people things – it’s not that I’ve noticed how many people know so much about me having started blogging, rather how many people I have to be more imaginative with when we’re having a conversation because they’ve already heard my best stories.

I can’t believe that this is a dying medium (although someone let Robert Peston know that I’ve coined the phrase blogging crunch already), but it is a constantly getting better medium, approaching a maximum. I like to write, I like to communicate and I like to share things – I can exercise my wordsmithery whilst simultaneously being part of a community of thousands of people who don’t know I’m here, it’s magic. Whilst I excise my internal monologue why not attempt to at least divert or amuse people at the same time? I love to write, I love words and language and rhythm. The fact that one or two people might like to read what I’ve regurgitated onto the screen now and then is frankly mindblowing. But yes – you are here. And nothing pleases me more.

Tell out my soul…

Monday, October 27th, 2008

I have found over the past two months that London is breeding in me a more descriptive inner voice; I sit at a tube station, inconveniently thwarted in my onward progress for whatever length of time, an inner commentary breaking down the world around into metaphors, lines and apposite expressions. A well of thought that unfortunately evaporates before I get to my computer, ironically a laptop that sits permanently on my bed (when I’m not in it). I try to carry a notepad with me wherever I go, but sometimes the narrative just doesn’t present itself, and I’d like to think there was some point to each little post I present here, whether or not it’s immediately obvious on first read.

The one good thing about it taking ridiculous amounts of time to get anywhere in London is the time you get for thinking and for reading. I’ve always liked to read, but never made time in my previously very busy and clearly very important life to contemplate, ruminate and fulminate. Not that I’m making time now, but it’s being impressed upon me and I shall use it while I can. Consequently I’m feeling very literary (which explains the added ponce in my writing of late) and am even considering – shock, horror, etc – that next time I got to the library I shall find myself some high-minded literature and classy poetry to exercise my soul. Any (readable) suggestions welcomed, my fellow connoisseurs and wits…

Who benefits?

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

“And what are you, may I arks?”

A goofy, eccentric black woman is getting on the bus dragging two kids, some shopping and her prodigious personality behind her. She is going to chortle and mumble to herself the entire journey, for now however, my attention is drawn to the right of me for the first time since I got on. It turns out I’m sitting next to an octopus on his way to a party.

A poster at the bus stop in Forest Hill lets me know that whatever sinister government agency that does these things is clamping down on benefits cheats. This raises my hackles straight away – I don’t receive any benefits, the advert is trying to make me feel guilty about something I’ve not only not done, but not even had the chance to do. Rather like the television licence ads, when you get to the nub of it, or rather the snitching number at the bottom, the sinister government agency is actually four people in headsets getting information from concerned Daily Mail readers and passing it on to the police. Instead of looking for the people who are breaking the law, they tell you they’re doing it and get you to do all the work yourself. It’s a great political black hole to find yourself in, expending a great deal of effort to make people believe you’re doing something you could have done anyway were you not trying to tell everyone about it.

What doesn’t help here is the picture on the poster – a large woman with a badly-fitting bra and gold hoop earrings that are supposed to scream a certain affluence and do just the opposite, giving the keen observer a brief but valuable insight into what’s hot in the Argos catalogue right now. But seriously – no wonder the civil servants at the Department for Equality and World Peace have got their work cut out when their own chums are printing identikit posters of fraudsters for people to look out for. Fat bird? Crappy t-shirt? Lock her up.

Not that I would ever be able to report someone for such crimes, my curtain-twitching skills don’t even stretch to recognising that the bloke sat next to me on the bus is wearing an octopus costume.

Do Not Disturb

Friday, October 24th, 2008

I’m absolutely exhausted, absolutely excited about James Bond coming out in a week and absolutely uninspired when it comes to writing anything here. I shall regale you with some non-fiction and quickly repair to the weekend, where I shall have a notepad, a book and an extra hour in which to sleep off any residual overwork I may have picked up this week. It’s got to the stage where I’m having to shirk social engagements I would otherwise greatly enjoy, but I feel myself slipping inexorably into a vat of unmirth and offense, ready to get upset at anything. That and I bawled my eyes out at the end of The Bucket List this evening. It’s a Rob Reiner film.

But anyway - tomorrow I hope to meet some of the girls from the programme to visit one of London’s many and famous markets, what a jaunt. Sunday I will try and get to church on time - it hasn’t happened at all in the last two months, but how can I go wrong with an extra hour? Apart from I arrived at 1pm last week - it starts at 11am. So many exciting things that I can’t tell you about as it would give up my secret alternative identity as a parliamentary drone.

Simon and Garfunkel just came on the old playlist - computers have transformed the way we listen to music, it’s all ADHD, one song at a time. When I were young you had to listen to a cassette until it got to the other side, unless you wanted to wait hours for fast forwarding and fast backwarding. But Simon and Garf - what treasures, eh?

Fools said I, you do not know
Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach you.
But my words like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed
In the wells of silence