Tuesday 12th December 2006

Posted by on December 12, 2006 4:03 PM

Today is the 500th consecutive Pathetic Lot entry, which I don’t know whether to consider some sort of an achievement or just incredibly distressing and wretched. It does seem remarkable that I’ve in some way documented the last 500 days of my life, but at the same time I do wish I had more to write about.

I suppose a life seems dullest to the person who happens to be living it. I’ve been lucky enough in the last 500 days to make a few trips abroad, have had a few good times, and – alright – generally lived the life of Riley (who was Riley and why did he have such a good life? Please write to me about this. It saves me looking on the internet) but I don’t know what could do down as a major achievement… The stand-up has been going well but it’s not like I’m being offered a TV show any time soon. Not that I want one, as I explained very recently, the best medium is radio. But I can’t see anyone offering me a radio show anytime soon either.

The ‘new’ radio, and uniquely the kind you don’t get paid for, is Podcasting of course and I did go through a stage of insisting Pathetic Lot would become a Podcast, as well as buying a really good microphone for the purpose of recording it on as I remember. I did do a ‘test’ one, which was 30mins and I thought was okay. It had some good characters (me, but put through a voice distorter) and I think it might have got something of a small following but was very time consuming. The reason I get so far behind with this silly Blog is that some days I don’t really have the time and it causes a backlog which I try and clear when I do have a free day, which doesn’t make for consistency, and I think trying to do a weekly podcast would be a self-inflicted headache. But it’s still a real possibility. Maybe a monthly one? But the trouble with that is there would never be a regular audience and it’s important to have it come out on the same day every week as something to put into your dull schedule.

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Monday 11th December 2006

Posted by on December 11, 2006 3:23 PM

I have been giving some more thought to how I am going to go about getting the correct presents for people this year, following my new rule of buying people not one gift, but being old fashioned and buying them a gift every day for the 12 Days Of Christmas, whilst being true to the song.

The First Day of Christmas is Christmas Day, and for that you need to get your hands on a partridge, and make sure that it’s in a pear tree. I don’t think you need to buy a partridge for every member of your friends and family, only for your ‘true love’. If you are too rubbish to have a true love, like me, then you should purchase a partridge and a pear tree for the person closest to you, or maybe as a joint gift for your whole family. They can then decide who looks after the naturally wild bird, as well as deciding in whose garden the pear tree will be planted. It would be ideal for the partridge to remain in the pear tree, but let’s get real, that is unlikely to ever happen because the partridge is naturally programmed to fly away if the tree is planted outside and so unless you surrounded it with netting then it’s probably best to keep the partridge indoors and plant the tree outside. After all, the song only stipulates that the gift should be a partridge in a pear tree, not that it should be a partridge that lives in a pear tree. You must pay attention to the song.

The problem with living in Britain, where it is winter during Christmas, is that the pear tree is going to be dormant and therefore not bearing leaves or fruit, leaving it looking very much like any other tree at the time of giving. Damn the Australians for being able to give this precious gift in far more presentable form to us, but no matter. Hopefully your tree will come in a pot with an explanatory tag saying that it is a pear tree and therefore the recipient of your gift will be able to appreciate what you are doing, although to be fair they will be probably more interested initially with the sight of a distressed bird flying around the living room and flapping like a confused idiot against the windows. It’s probably best you are on hand when they unwrap this gift so that you can explain fully what is happening and comfort and children you might be crying hysterically.

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Sunday 10th December 2006

Posted by on December 10, 2006 2:51 PM

Another Sunday in, mainly because I’m going down with a bit of a cold and the best thing to do is pack yourself full of vitamin C and flick though the TV channels in the warm.

Vitamin C is the only one you can’t take too much of, correct? So I suppose it is the nerd of all vitamins because of that, but also the most immediately beneficial. It’s hard to know whether to loathe Vitamin C for it’s happy-go-lucky attitude as a drug, or hail it as the King of vitamins for helping us avoid and get rid of common colds.

I’m sure ‘C’ gets a lot of stick from other vitamins for being a bit of a hippy, with other big guns like ‘A’ and ‘B’ playing a probably more crucial role overall in making sure our bodies operate correctly and being powerful enough to have too much of, but ‘C’, as the humanitarian of the group, probably answers back that it is the most famous and widely taken as a supplement. It’s no doubt a prickly war of words in the vitamin world, but it’s probably not in C’s nature to get too boisterous, seeing as it is essentially a nurse used in times of struggle and illness, and therefore used to difficult patients and obnoxious people who aren’t feeling their best. That is a nurse’s duty.

Does Vitamin B even exist? I’ve got a bottle of multi-vitamins here and the main ingredients are A, C, D and E. Further down the list we’ve got some B6 and B12, but no pure B. Maybe B is so powerful that used in it’s purest form it would harm us, or perhaps it’s so powerful that taken straight it would give us super human powers like Spiderman and therefore it’s not released by the government? I think that this is undoubtedly the case, anyone who suspects anything different is a fool.

I think to be a real player in the vitamin hierarchy you’ve got to have been subscribed a letter. Look at ‘A’ – he kicks butt. D and E and pretty powerful too. C has the fame, even if you can guzzle as much of it’s unpotent goodness as you like without having any detrimental effects. The ones further down the chain (on my vitamin bottle) are then just elements, like Zinc, Iron and Magnesium. Then you’ve got ones that I don’t think are elements like Calcium and Iodine. These are just SUBSTANCES though, aren’t they? Correct me if I’m wrong. These are natural. What is a vitamin?

How do you go about making a bit lump of D?

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Saturday 9th December 2006

Posted by on December 9, 2006 1:36 PM

… And night became day. I hate the cold light of morning after a night on the pop. In summer it’s annoyingly early and it’s no shame to be up and about at 4am, but in the dead of winter it lurks in and makes you feel guilty. Nothing makes you feel more exhausted than it getting light either. I must have seen the dawn in several hundred times, but still the feeling is always the same. Especially when you see shops opening up and people walking briskly to work. And what have you done? Had about twenty beers and talked nonsense to strangers. It’s a strange feeling of guilt. Not that there should ever be any guilt and apology attached to boozing of course, unless you’ve pushed someone in front of a train when the jokes got out of hand at 3am, and I fiercely defend the right not to feel any guilt and apology in an increasingly boring and staid world, but there’s a weary guilt to the sleepless morning none the less.

Some people attack it with the “Hell, we’ll go on right through until tonight and then get a proper night’s sleep” attitude. It’s noble but it doesn’t work. It’s not just the hours that begin to take their toll, it’s the fact that the only thing keeping you going is the sugars in the beer, and if you take your foot off the gas you’ll want nothing more than a pillow. If you don’t take your foot off the gas you’ll be chugging on ineffective beers that have no pleasure or flavour to them. Switch to spirits and they’ll kick you in the head.

So we entered the Lion today at about 11.30am having toured a few early venues in the city. The crowd at Lloyd’s at 7am is a disheartening one, I can tell you. These people haven’t been up all night, they’ve just got up early to come and have a beer and to sit and look miserable with the world on their own. Why get up? Why not come into town at, say, 10am for a beer? Like normal people.

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Friday 8th December 2006

Posted by on December 8, 2006 1:12 PM

Another of my Friday meetings with Forty Eight today which has become the stable and most enjoyable part of the week. They probably think it’s a routine two hour meeting for me, but it isn’t, they don’t know how I spend the rest of my time. I’m really pleased that these meetings are scheduled for the last few hours of the working week because it means that no matter what has gone on in the six days since the last one, I can end on a high note and feel confident about the future.

I was leaving their offices with a spring in my step when Trevor rung and said he was in town if I fancied meeting up for a pint? That’s the thing about the British though… we ask if some fancies going for “a” drink, or “a” pint, suggesting the singular. I don’t think anyone from these Isles has ever gone out for “a” pint in their lives. The only time we’d go out for “a” pint is if we bought one and someone then shot us dead. We are a nation of bingers, too much is never enough.

I drink far less now than I used to, I believe, and I think it’s a symptom of getting older rather than any conscious effort to cut back. The consequences of a binge now are hard hitting physically, often meaning a day or two of festering, when once I could spring out of bed with four hours sleep as if nothing had ever happened and do it all again. The small bonus of this ‘development’ is that I tend to spend the next couple of days holed up indoors getting things done rather than going on a repeat rampage, so in some strange way a hangover is productive. In a very strange way.

So I met Trevor and we went to The Lion. He had the car parked nearby and so could only have one, but as we’ve just established, this is impossible for anyone and not being the sort of person silly enough to drive under the influence, he was soon draining his glass and playing with the possibility of leaving the car here overnight, getting an inevitable parking ticket, and enjoying a few more refreshers. It’s a no-brainer, as I believe the modern lingo states. Within a couple of hours we were finishing off the fifth pint and putting our coats on to go for cocktails.

That is just the way things always tend to work.

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Thursday 7th December 2006

Posted by on December 7, 2006 2:24 AM

This morning I went over to Hope University to be interviewed on their radio station. I couldn’t really see the point in being interviewed on a radio station that would only be broadcast to the rest of the campus and was doing it as a favour (I am a Godsend to Liverpool students, if I’m not recording a TV show for free like last week I’m appearing on their radio shows) but apparently it goes out all over Liverpool. Either way, I like radio studios and talking rubbish on the air and this one looked very professionally equipped and modern.

It was a fun chat and despite me accidentally swearing once I think I am competent now at radio banter. I used to do it quite regularly on BBC London but the last time recently was on XFM (Can’t remember the date but it’ll be on here somewhere) and so it was nice to be reminded again of the feeling of speaking into a microphone and knowing nothing is retractable. You listen to yourself speaking, you know those words are instantly being broadcast, and so you have to control and shape this stream of consciousness as it comes out. Slowing it down, making it concise, not repeating yourself, and on top of that being funny or at least interesting. As I think I said over the course of today’s interview, having your own TV show is for idiots whilst radio really is the best entertainment medium. I’d love to have a radio show. LOVE it.

One other reason for doing this radio programme today was to vainly promote a stand-up show tonight in Liverpool.

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Wednesday 6th December 2006

Posted by on December 6, 2006 12:50 AM

Yesterday when having a look around Scunthorpe I’d started to indulge my latest interest, an interest I’ve accrued at the age of twenty nine, and gone into a video game shop. I only own two games for my Nintendo DS, the brain age training one that told me I was seventy four, and Mario Carts, which I have been playing a great deal and am completely addicted to. You race other competitors in your little card around strange and magical worlds. It’s ace.

Anyway, I’d been into this shop in Scunthorpe yesterday (I am conscious of getting into computer games and so did so with a degree of trepidation) and saw one Nintendo DS title that looked interesting. It was called Contact and I couldn’t say what interested me about it, aside from the screenshots on the back looked interesting, and the blurb said it was a very unique game, the like of which has never been made. Well it was likely to say something positive, I grant you, but even my cynicism was replaced by curiosity.

So this morning I walked around Grimsby having made up my find to find this game, buy it, and become so addicted to it that it would take over my entire life. And in the mean time, it would provide me with some entertainment on the train journey back to Liverpool. I take my Nintendo on trains now, making sure to wear headphones so that I am not the most annoying fellow passengers in the world, only the most juvenile and wrong.

But as I scoured the centre of Grimsby for this game, I became increasingly frustrated that it was nowhere to be found. Indeed, it was the only game that all four shops I searched didn’t have. Perhaps this should have been an omen, perhaps if this game was any good then not only would every shop stock it, it would be at the top of every chart? This seemed to make sense, but the fact that the game was conspicuous by it’s absence gave it an air of mystery, and the fact it wasn’t readily available only made me want it more. I was frustrated and stood in the Grimsby rain annoyed that I couldn’t track down my quarry.

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