Well done, British Electorate, well fucking done.

More specifically well done to you cunting Labour voters who took the chance to register your protest about global events and cross-party national issues on a local stage. You dim-witted dog fuckers each and every one of you. Yes, you heard me, you fuck dogs.

Despite the political climate, the Tories will turn out and vote for a pig if it has a blue ribbon pinned to its arse. The Liberals will Liberal every time because they are psychologically acclimatised to their votes never making a difference. But you Labour cunts, you fucking “Oh let’s all stay at home because that’ll show Gordon Brown we are miffed!” mindless cunts really fucked it up didn’t you.

Across the country you pricks decided to stay at home and in doing so you allowed every single Labour held County Council to fall and those right wing pig fuckers the BNP to get elected.

The far RIGHT got in because the ‘couldn’t be arsed’ LEFT let them. You fuckers deserve rounding up and putting on cattle trucks.

Did it never occur to you that the global financial meltdown can’t be solved by our government (whatever the colour) never mind our County Councils? Oh what? You never thought of that did you say? Really? Never occurred to you?

Did it never occur to you that ALL parties had MPs with their hand in the till. ALL of them you fucking morons. What the fuck has that to do with your County Council? Do you even know what your fucking County Council does? Of course you don’t, you twats.

Did it ever occur to you that electing people to the European Parliament who want to kill it off will do nothing but slow decisions down and create more waste that you will pay for in taxes? NO! It didn’t, did it.

Instead you just listened to the shit on the telly and read the shit in the newspapers and were led by the nose like the dull-eye sheep with brains of shit you are. You listened to the “Gordon Brown rapes kittens!” crap and thought “I’ll show him! I’m not voting for that nice local councillor man wassisname!”.

Well, top marks to you. Gordon Brown is still there. Your County Council’s reserves will be raided to keep Council Tax down for Tory short-term feel-good gains. You’ll pay through the nose in huge Council Tax rises in three years. And you let the goat fucking B-Bastard-NP fuckers in. You total and utter cunts.

Every fucking one of you should have the right to vote removed until you can prove you understand what it is and how to use it, you fucking useless, lazy, brain dead, piss faced twats. Fuck the fucking lot of you, you dumb fucking fucks.

I suppose I best write a post soon then, eh.

I’ve been putting this post off for a long time because I didn’t know how not to make it a personal attack. And I don’t want to make it that. It’s just that watching her *spits the word onto the screen and has to wipe it off* “documentaries” is akin to being trapped in a (very small) lift with a member of the T4 brigade(1) and a Big Brother contestant(2). You can’t believe that the first has pissed away their media degree on this slop and that the second is really such a vacuous hole.

Trapped in a tiny metal box with two braying idiots. That’s the feeling I get when I see her programs. And I’ve never even watched a whole one – not even the lesbian one where there might have been some nudity.

I can’t believe that the TV people have allowed her to make the drivel she does. How much money must one of her shows cost? Fuck knows, but I bet it’s a lot. £100,000 each? Sound about right? Well it doesn’t matter because 50p is too much to see what a bunch of self-deluded media nonces can do when they think people are listening.

But what do you expect from Channel 4, a channel so schizophrenic as to pump out both Big Brother and Dead Set – the later hating the first with such passion as to depict everyone involved (including us the public) as dead eyed monsters who’d rather tear each other apart than take the chance of not appearing on Heat’s cover. And I’m not fool enough to think that 4 don’t get it – they know. They know full well and they hate the Big Brother dumphole as much as anyone. But it makes them money. Money they can both make a program to try and assuage their self-loathing and guilt with as well as throw at Dawn bloody Porter.

Did you see the lesbian one? I’d never heard of her before that. I simply saw my TV telling me some lass was going to try wearing comfortable shoes (but whilst wearing some lippy, of course) for our entertainment. Not being averse to the female form, I decided to watch and charge up the cheap thrill battery that lies just beneath the surface of us all(4).

To say I was disappointed would be an understatement, but probably not in the way you are thinking. I honestly don’t remember if there was any skin. Two minutes in and I didn’t care about that anyway. No, what I couldn’t get over was the pointless, obvious, self-congratulatory tone of the whole piece. And for a documentary that reeked of self-admiration, it was totally empty of meaningful content. It was just some young lass who fancied a fish super to see if (a) she liked it, and (b) it would make her more attractive to men.

To this day I have no idea why the lesbians of Britain haven’t issued an fatwa against the woman for reducing them and their sexuality (not to mention the fucking struggle many of them faced, and face, just to be accepted) down to a hour of giggling, squealing and pieces to camera about how soft a woman’s lips are when she kisses you (“But we didn’t do anything!”).

I half expected this to be a spoof, but when it wasn’t I then expected her to announce she’d be visiting women’s refuges to see just how this plucky young mums go about making themselves look all glam for the fellas of the town they hope will be their kid’s next non-punchy dad(5).

But no. She vanished. I have to say I forgot about her, which is hardly surprising really. Until she suddenly came back a few weeks ago and this time she was travelling the world to see the varied (and no doubt “wacky”) ways that women go about getting a man(6). Cue fours hours (more or less – for me it was four minutes) of documentary that wanted so much to be in the style of Louis Theroux, but came over in the style of a clumsy child pointing at people with disabilities and asking loudly “What’s that?”.

Let’s giggle at some Russian women as they learn how to please their (still-to-be-found) men. Ignore the humiliation of the lesson and call it empowerment. Ignore the shameful state of their country that drove them to this and instead call it a desire for a better life. Don’t look too deep Dawn, you wouldn’t want to find some real misery down there that would get in the way of your wide-eyed Daisy Donovan impression.

There was one about polygamy in the US and one about Japanese geisha. I watched a few minutes pf each and each was as bad as the other. Cheap, vain, back-slapping guff.

And it’s not like there aren’t good reporters out there who could make each of these programs a hundred times better(7) but that’s not what Channel 4 wants is it. They have the Channel 4 news and Dispatches for that. No, what they want is another Daisy Donovan. What they got is Jessica Simpson playing Daisy Duke.

Way to go Channel 4. Soon your audience won’t have brains worth eating and what are the zombies going to do then, eh?

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(1) June Sarpong. Or that muso prat in a hat.

(2) So many. Saskia. Kitten. Charlie. The one with gansta mates. The rapey (3), mad on from Scotland.

(3) Again, not that I’m saying he has raped anyone. Just that he looks like he could. And like he’d know lots of disused industrial buildings.

(4) Zombies, remember.

(5) “Don’t forget that heavy mascara helps cover up bruises. You don’t want to sscare off Mr Right just yet, do you?” *giggles” and/or *looks pensive and bites lower lip, huge sunglasses balanced on top of hair-style that cost more than the running of the refuge for a week*.

(6) Because that is the single most important drive in a woman’s life, obviously. Except lesbians, but they are so lucky anyway because they don’t feel this need for a man so don’t have to look or try or anything and they have soft lady lips to kiss anyway so there.

(7) Two words: Camilla Cavendish.

Why the blithering flip do we need teenagers? They just crowd up the place. Make it smell and talk to you in exactly the way that makes you want to punch them square in their pointless pouting faces.

Like spoiled toddlers in hulking great adult bodies they slouch through our world snarling and yelping and smelling (1). And if that isn’t enough, they are the target audience for Big Brother so it’s their fucking fault we have to watch a bunch of belching empty idiots and frightening wannabe attention hungry roaring machines on our tellies every year.

I’ve always harboured a fear of depression and the unbalancing of the chemistry in my noodle that would stop me thinking in more or less straight lines. I’ve always imagined that the dark circles depressed people think in would be a truly hellish way to live. Never knowing calm and only ever feeling the sort of self loathing only really common to serial killers and the Welsh. They are haunted people loose in a world they can not fully interact with.

Well that’s how teenagers live every single day. Spouting sudden outbursts of the most puerile drivel and morally contradictory nonsense, they explode with the hormone driven mood storms that blast across their world and drag in everyone within bellowing/screaming range. Blessed with bodies their minds are spectacularly ill-equipped to deal with they would either start a fight with, or fuck the brains out of, a hat stand if the mood took them.

Living with them is the sort of joy normally only acquired by laying face down in a tramp’s used breakfast whilst being punched in the kidneys by a violent, foul mouthed baby.

But working with them is even worse.

Teenagers at work are idiots of the highest order. But you can’t hit them (3). You just have to put up with their banal drivel and sex-powered thinking. Their rudeness. Their endless yabbering about social lives as complicated as they are pointless. Their smelly, gross bodily habits. Christ I hate working with teenagers. I now feel so sorry for the half dozen bosses I had in my teen years.

But not as sorry as I feel for me having to work with them now.

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(1) Maybe they are zombies O_o

(2) Or PMS – that seems to be something akin to insanity.

(3) It’s political correctness gone mad I tells ye!

With these simple word’s my tongue dug a hole for the rest of my body and pogoed me in.

I had said them in all good faith and to a long-time friend of mine who, and this is (as far as I’m concerned) the nub of my reasoned explanation against the imagined offence I was about to cause, had recently told me she was sick of wearing so much black and longed to be brave enough to experiment with colours.

She had some coloured heels on (1).

She looked lovely (2).

I told her.

A sullen silence followed.

“So you don’t think I look nice in black?”

“What?”

“You don’t think it suits me or you don’t think I can carry it?”

“Eh? No. I mean yes, you can. I meant your shoes…”

“I’ve worn these before,” the venom of accusation dripping from her lips. And eyes. I remember the eyes. Narrow and hard like being stared at by Clint Eastwood after he found out you have just clubbed his wife unconscious with his pet dog.

“I know, but they are, er, nice, you know and you were saying you wanted more colour…”

“So you don’t think I look nice the rest of the time?”

“Of course!”

“But you’re saying I need colour?”

“No, no I’m not saying that. Look, I was just saying you looked nice. The shoes are nice. The colour. You wanted more colour. It’s nice. I’m sorry.”

This was three weeks ago. I am still getting grief about it.

Women of the world. Take a fucking compliment when offered. Christ knows this world is shit enough without them and who knows when you’ll get another one.

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(1) Leopard print. High. Sexy.

(2) She did – tight black pants – fantastic arse.

I am cursed with this lack of knowledge because of our ICT department. They are, almost without exception, they biggest collection of Aspbergers goons on the face of God’s Holy Earth. Goons, techies, spods, geeks and techno-fuckwads of the highest order.

Have they explained why they are migrating servers? No. Instead they sent out an email telling us it is part of a rolling plan to put the whole organisation on the same server footing, whatever this means. They also said that after the migration (1) we would be able to move file more securely. More securely? Do they mean that we have been moving things in an insecure manner before? And how will this move from one box to another afford us this extra level of security? Fuck knows. The email from IT didn’t say. Either they don’t know or, more likely, don’t think we’d understand. So why fucking tell us? They may have well said that the server migration would allow all users to speak to the dead soul of the last unicorn. Or that once it is done each user will be able to fax their hand to the moon in the USB slot. Or that… oh fuck it, look the point is that information with no context or explanation is just noise.

Another wonderful thing that our highly paid and resourced ICT shower of shite have done is leave the whole organising of folder structures up to us. Why? When I’ve had website hosts tell me they are moving servers, they have never asked me to provide them with a directory listing showing how I wanted it organised on the new site. They just transferred what was already there to the new server. Done and dusted with only a couple of hours downtime. Not our dolts, oh no. They want us to make sure every single one of our hundreds of thousands of filenames are under 128 characters but have provided no list or method of identifying which ones exceed that limit. Result? Hundreds of man hours spent pouring through MS Explorer renaming Word docs and Excel sheets. Why? No one knows.

Total fucking insanity. And all because a group of socially inadequate Star Wars fans are so wrapped up in being the cleverest little spod in the team that not one of the giant anal warts has thought to ask how much of this is either necessary for or achievable by the ordinary plebs who have to put up with this crap.

We should rebel. We should rise as one to light the emergency torches and break out the pitch forks so we can march upon the fourth floor. We should round up the Buffy droolers and make them tell us why they are doing this and why we have to do half the fucking work for them. And for each poor answer we receive we should run one of the Hobbit botherers through and toss him out of the window to cries of “Can you fly, Bobby?”. Pretty soon we will have answers. And less IT spods. It’s a win win idea. Pass me a lighter.

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(1) What a great day is the Glorious 26th when across the land furious office workers armed with airzookers and rubber-band gattling guns from the team joker’s cubicle lean out of office windows across the land and bring down the majestic servers as they migrate south for no good reason whatsoever.

Take the machiavellian Spanish ambassador (played by James Frain) who in this film was made to look like the tanned and greasy love child of Willem Dafoe and The Crazy Frog. His face couldn’t have said “untrustworthy foreigner” more if it had been Hitler’s. The King (Spanish, not Elvis) didn’t get much of a look in this film (they make it up to him in “Elizabeth 2: The Armada Smasheth!”) but when he is seen or alluded to he is outed as gay (1). And so the whole Spanish nation were reduced down to sneaky bug-eyed weirdos and moustachioed chuff avoiders.

The French didn’t fare much better – Mary of Guise (played by Fanny Ardant, a name so suggestive as to require googling to make sure it wasn’t stolen from a Carry On film) was a Helena Boneham-Carter look-a-like with wild hair and a casual streak that extended as much to random cruelty as it did to sex (2). The Ambassador was played by the football (and fan) kicker himself, Eric Cantona, a man so French that he even makes Gérard Depardieu look like an incomer. Unfortunately he was so wooden as to have been all but useless except for huffing, shrugging and puffing out his chest – all well known Franco traits. But the absolute star of the French camp just has to be Vincent Cassel as the Duc d’Anjou who is played throughout in a camp so high that you’d be forgiven for thinking you were watching this in a series of tents atop mighty Everest itself.

He started off prancing about with a pipe after a ‘hilarious’ gag in which he pretended not to be him but to be one of his entourage (3) and rapidly moved to sexual harassment. When I say rapidly I mean within 30 seconds and when I say sexual harassment I mean shouting filthy things to the Queen and grabbing her arse (5) in front of everyone. It was like watching a history lesson as imagined by Paul ‘Rapey’ Danan (6). He spent the rest of the film being a hysteric (and hysterical) sex fiend who would have dressed up as a Nazi and fucked a dead pig three ways to Thursday given half a chance.

All in all the film, whilst looking good and being an enjoyable insight into what made young Elizabeth the Quen we know now, really came over as a “let’s laugh at Johnny Foreigner” fest of mind numbing proportions. The only way it could have got worse was for Richard “God I’m a detestable cunt” Littlejohn and Jim “And I’m not much better” Davidson to have written it. Actually, I bet that would be great fun. I think they should team up to write all of our history for huge blockbuster films – it will be like having an Empire again but without all the hassle of actually having one.

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(1) Not entirely unreasonable as his missus was Kathy Burke.

(2) Her undoing – how very British.

(3) Worthy of Ben Elton (3), I think you’ll agree.

(4) I just depressed myself typing his name. Christ.

(5) Or tits, I can’t remember.

(6) This in no way implies he has raped anyone. Just that his actions in Celebrity Love Island made you think he could. Possible on camera. With a smile.

You must have seen the advert. He’s sat atop a pile of Ikea furniture (I think that collective noun should be ‘dump’) and reading the new catalogue. He starts in shadow and disappointingly the light fail to stay off opting instead to illuminate the dump of flat-pack tat and his own cretinous face. He starts to waffle on about how good this large pile of MFD and glue would look in your one bedroom flat thereby immediately getting my back up on two levels – 1) I don’t have a one-bedroom flat, I have a semi-detached house with three bedrooms; and 2) What is he trying to imply about people who have one-bedroom flats? Are they to be pitied as the parish poor or held as exemplars of some concept he knows but won’t tell anyone? What about the shoppers who make their way (1) to IKEA stores? Can they only buy things if they have a one-bedroom flat? Are people with a bedroom and a boxroom turned away whilst people like me are run off the property by burly loggers throwing inedible Swedish sweets at our cars? What would they do if the Queen turned up? Behead off live on the Ikea website and ask you to guess its weight?

So, with my teeth well and truly set on edge, I grip the settee arm and prepare for a full blown rage-fest to pour out of my mouth. He and the advert do not disappoint. The porky pixie hops down (avoiding tripping, rolling down the dump and writhing in loud agony at the bottom with three compound fractures, a burst lung and an impalement – it’s fucking Health and Safety gone mad I tell you) and with a smirk that could start a fight in a Methodist temperance meeting asks us to guess how much the mound of veneer and leatherette behind him costs.

Who cares? Who the fuck cares? Really? Do you? Does anyone you know? I think the idea is that someone could win it. Yes, get the right amount and some ‘lucky’ (2) sod can win the lot. Quite what someone with a one-bedroom flat would do with a container lorry load of second-hand mis-matched furniture and other assorted shite is never explained by the blond cock. I assume they’d have to pile it up like he did and sit on the top until they sold enough of it off on ebay to see their own carpet again.

So well done Ikea, you yet again fill our homes not only with your flat-packed meh-ness, but also with another shit advert in what is a shameful litany of shit adverts. You absolute clits.

Should you wish to see the grinning scrotum sat atop his throne of dubious wonders, you can find it on here somewhere.

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(1) Dawn of the Dead springs to mind.

(2) Lucky as in saved from being dragged into a car only to discover the ‘rescuers’ are a bunch of hungry cannibals. With hard-ons.

Really. Dumb does not cover it. Calling this film dumb is like calling John Merrick “not much of a looker” or Richard Littlejohn “a wanker” – they just don’t do their subjects justice (1).

This film was so dumb that I felt my IQ rise as I watched it.

This film was so dumb that Scary Movie came in, watched 10 minutes and left sighing about the ruin of modern cinema.

This film was so totally and completely dumb that I wanted time to run backwards, at the risk of losing my IQ rise, just so I could ensure I had never had the very real shame of watching it staining my soul.

And after dumb it was shit. Really shit. It was a movie where logic was not only torn out, line by line, nerve connection by nerve connection, but also then dressed up as Rasputin so it could be poisoned, shot, beaten and finally drowned. The ‘talent’ (some bloke I’ve never heard of who could be anyone of a gaggle of Hollywood leading men and Liv Tyler who simpered her lines through the film like she had been told her character was made of nothing but flowers and bunny burps) were moved around the set simply to allow the director to place them in one scary (cough) situation after another with fuck all regard to the obviously old fashioned and over-used concepts of plot and narrative (logic, as discussed, already having been done away with presumably before the writer set crayon to paper).

Take the following as some examples of this films total and all-encompassing shitness, although it’s by no means a full list as my mind has wiped bits of it from my memory – in some cases as I saw them:

a) Why did the women (Liv Tyler) never put any shoes on? Despite the fact she got changed at the start when things started to get scary. What kind of idiot decides “Ooo, there appears to be a potential rapist and/or murderer outside my house. I will get out of this dress and into some jeans but you know what? I’ll not bother with footwear – after all, it’s not like I’ll have to run for my life, is it?”

b) You know when your mobile battery dies and you can’t use your phone so you have to plug it in to charge it, right? Does that mean you then can not use that phone? No? No? Thought so – mine works just fine with main power too. What an absolute pity that hers seemed to be a special phone that did not. After all, it would have saved a lot of heartache (mine in particular) had she been able to call the cops and end the film 25 mins in.

c) When they baddies rammed their car, why did they not 1) run the fucker stood in front of them over, and/ or b) keep going – who cares about your car’s rims at that point.

d) When the friend arrived (in what has to be the longest and most obvious set up of a “he’s going to get shot accidentally” scene I have had the misfortune of watching) why didn’t the daft cunt ring the cops when a brick was lobbed through his car window, let alone when he got out (you read that right – HE GOT OUT) to investigate and found the ruined car and broken-into house. The twat deserved a 12-bore to the face.

e) After shooting said idiot in the mush, why did they feel the need to run – quite obviously the hidey hole worked, just on the wrong target. Find another place and wait it out.

f) After the strangely-non-working-because-it-is-charging-phone, this next fuck up ranks as the film biggest. Having offed his mate, the man decided to try “an old radio in the barn”. Like we all would at this point. Cos radios are just like phones and dead easy to use. And with the convenience of it being outside where the baddies are I’m only surprised he didn’t try it first. The absolute cunt. Actually, I shouldn’t be too hard on him – after all he was just doing what the idiot writer/director told him too. I bet there was a piece of his mind screaming “This is stupid!” too. Anyhoo, he’s committed to the idea now. Fully signed up and raring to go. But what of his lovely and unarmed girlfriend? She wants to come with him because he has the only gun. He says no saying she’ll be safe in the house. The house that the mask wearing psychos have been walking through since they started their attack. This idiot thinks that leaving her in an open and indefensible house will make her safer than if she grabs some knives and goes with him to the barn where at least she can keep an eye out for the killer while he plays at being Rubber Duck. Jesus H Presley.

It was at this point, dear reader (3) that I gave up on the film altogether. I couldn’t care less what happened to these two just as long as it was soon so I could go home. He was caught on his way to the barn, she hurt her leg looking for him, she hid in the most obvious place in the house (after ‘under the bed’) and was found, both of them were tied to a chair and slowly & repeatedly stabbed in a scene that was less shocking than it wanted to be and far more nauseating than it had any right in being. Oh, and she might have survived and the killers may well try and strike again. Who fucking cares. The only crime of the whole film is that the writer/director is free to do another.

Actually there was another crime. The opening of the film shows a relationship on the rocks and at a crisis point. This part of the film was interesting and beautifully shot and acted. If the writer/director had had the balls to make a film about these two people and this relationship then I have a feeling I would have loved it. As it was, he just went in for 90 mins of torture porn and is the lesser man for it.

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(1) In Littlejohn’s case the only justice I can think of that would fit would for him to be drugged up by crooked foreigners a la Popeye Doyle in The French Connection and then to be sold around rough Turkish gay dungeons where he can spend the rest of his days repeatedly having his miserable little ring stretched by just the kind of racial stereotype he most fears/desires (2)

(2) You know he just protests a little too much in his column, doesn’t he.

(3) As far as I can tell, no one is reading this bar me. Fuck the lot of you then.

If it’s a dinner party(1) with friends then I bitch about it all the way there, have a ruddy good time and then promise the missus I’ll not bitch so much next time because actually it was lovely to see our friends again(3).

If it’s a night out at the cinema or theatre then I’m a little better due to the simple fact I get to sit in the dark and not speak to people – come to think of it, this could be the closest thing to a perfect social event for me.

But if the gods of rampant cuntdom gurn down on me, then there is a good chance I’ve been backed into a corner and had no choice to agree to a night out in town with work mates. I can’t tell you the yawning horror this arrangement opens up in my gut. The rushing about to get ready, the bus and taxi journeys to and from town, the forced fun with people I only ever pass in the corridor with a polite, fixed smile. And then there is the rest of the world… the waddling, vomiting, fighting dickfaced tossers that come out with the sole intention of getting pissed and/or laid with the odd bout of casual violence for mild relief.

I have one of these nights coming up. I’m going to have to take a bus crammed full of barely literate breeders chewing away on their mother tongue like a herd of cows chewing the cud. Cud made of witless prattle and navvy-strength language all at top volume and if not into the ears of their dullard friends (and the rest of the bus) then they are bellowing into the squawking stone they have welded to their face (and the rest of the bus).

Following the shitty bus trip comes the awkward part of the evening – the meet up. This is the part of the evening I hate more than splitting my scalp open on a cupboard door. The problem is I like to be early. This means I have the longest time to spend with the other guests as they turn up before everyone has arrived and the ‘fun’ begins. This means I have the pleasure of making small talk with people who would happily spit on my corpse if I collapsed in the lift. And because I don’t have the brass balls to ruin the evening by telling them to lick said balls, I have to suffer the naked sniding they offer back. Take one bloke – let’s call him Richard, after all that’s his name – who point blank refuses to engage with me on any other level than school yard whispering and pointing. The man is a total turd. Yet because it would ruin the evening for my friend who thinks he is lovely-but-unhappy I have to put up with him rather than: (a) following him to the toilets and ramming his stupid grinning mush into the urinal; (b) grabbing the back of his head and slamming his horizontal bum crack smirk into his food; or (c) taking him to one side and slowly explaining that I don’t like him and if he so much as looks in my direction again, let alone fucking speaks to me, I would be very, very unhappy with him(4).

The meal is a small reprise in this war of mutual hatred. Food means you get to sit with you’d rather talk to. But now starts the next horror of the evening for me. My stomach. My shitty, stupid, stomach that is unable to handle the most basic of foods without wanting the vomit it all back. Through my arse. The doc says it is IBS, whish is a bullshit term. What it comes down to is a combinations of stress, age, level of (un)fitness and genetics(5). What it means is that for me, eating out is a game of Russian roulette in my pants. So by this point of the evening I’m usually corked up the poop shoot with extra-strength shit-stoppers. They don’t always work so I can never entirely relax, and on top of that they bloat me to buggery. Joy.

But to be honest, the feeling of unwell that I get in the meal is but a minor sneeze compared to the full on flu that is the pub crawl. Oh god. Why? What possible pleasure is there to be gained from endlessly walking through piss and blood soaked streets, avoiding being stabbed or puked on only to visit one wall-to-wall cretin den after another. Expensive piss poor beer. Crowds of howler monkeys boozed up to the nines sweating the ever-present threat of random, mindless violence. The pushing competition to get to bars five deep in Paul Smith wearing thugs. The dismal humiliation of trying to catch the eye of the sullen bar staff who are taking this chance to wield the small atom of power that standing on the opposite side of the bar to you has bestowed upon them. The sitting (if lucky enough to get a table – otherwise it become a Survivor-esque endurance event in standing whilst being buffeted by a relentless sea of shitehawks) with colleagues as the conversation flows like dried vomit crawling uphill. The occasional glances at your phone to see that it still way off closing time and therefore hours before you can escape (6). That is as long as the drunkest members of the group don’t decide that what this evening needs is even more booze, some loud music and five hours of sweaty dancing in a local fire hazard.

Oh yes, now comes the truly awful trip to the nightclub. Queuing up with precisely the kind of underdressed, mooing morons I dream of machine gunning to quivering lumps of shattered gristle every day. And for what? So some shaved ape with all the personality of a case of domestic abuse can decide if my footwear presents a threat to the security of the pissed up fighting and fucking machines he’s already let pass so they can part with a tenner for the privilege of gyrating around like imbeciles in a Romanian orphanage.

It is at this point I always bow out. From here I have to negotiate the groups of stalking bare knuckle bastards to get to a taxi firm where I’m forced to wait in a room that would shame the Stazi by some reject sideshow freak in box until some rapist-in-waiting turns up in a Trabant to whisk me off home as spew-inducing speeds and with scant regard for the laws of the Queen’s highways. And charge me a frigging fortune for the honour. Christ I hate taxis.

About now I suddenly realise that I must have eaten one of my trigger foods. My stomach does a panicky dance and my guts turn to liquid fire. If the idiot man driving this death trap doesn’t get me home soon, £25 won’t cover what I’m about to unleash on to his back seat.

Yup. I really hate nights out.

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(1) Not like offathe telly, I’m just not middle class enough yet. I may accidentally get there one day, but my ability to always say the wrong thing at the wrong time(2) has so far ensured I’m merely a lower middle class oik. Obviously I’m not working class. Fucking scum.

(2) On being told by a friend’s friend that they had just narrowly escaped a plane crash: “No, but you must have laughed. All those yanks praying and crying. You must have been all British Reserve and using a cup of tea to put your clothes out.” To some shocked parents on accidentally choking their tiny toddler with a juice drink: “Don’t worry – you can have another.” I have never been invited back to either. I really am a daft twat.

(3) Even though the cooking is usually piss poor. I don’t get that. Why? We always manage to cook nice food – it’s not hard. How come all my friends cook like the rejects from 15?

(4) A surprisingly effective approach I find – so far it has worked every time.

(5) There is a run of poor tums in my family. Ho Ho Ho.

(6) It’s at this point I always remember Douglas Adams writing about an ambassador who chewed his own leg off to escape and I wonder if I could do the same, only with the throat of that smug little twat that’s been annoying me all night.