The Pagan Activist

Ensconced deep within the Midlands of mainland Britain, with his wife, two children and an inordinately large spleen, The Pseudomat lives to complain. Whether it’s about the general uncertainness of the British weather and its tendency to be inclement whenever he has a day off, the lack of functioning technology in any aspect of his life or simply the fact that it’s Thursday and he’s woken up believing it to be Friday, The Pseudomat will find something that irritates him to the point of near-unconsciousness. His ability to be annoyed by the tiniest nuance in a seemingly normal, everyday occurrence is legendary.

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2006:

December / November / October / September / And Henceforth... / August / July

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Well, April has run away squealing, like the girly, pansy month that it is, and May has

plonked itself down in April’s place with all the airs and graces of a month heavy with

the promise of rain, more rain and the odd torrential downpour that have become

synonymous with this time of year. And along with its customary precipitation, May

has, secreted within its voluminous month sized pants, this new edition of WimD

which, while not particularly rainy, may be damp around the edges due to the

accumulated spit that has been flung in that direction during my many and frequent

rants about this month’s topics.

 

So, without further ado (actually, that’s a big fib, because there will be lots of further

ado, but only within these brackets as they pertain to something stupid that my wife

and I have very recently done, so I apologise if you get confused. Essentially, we’ve

been to look at a house. Now, we aren’t looking to move. Not really. We’re happy

where we are and for what we can afford to borrow, it’s the best we can get.

Probably. The problem is that the house we viewed is one that we went to see a

few years ago, before we bought our current place. We really liked it then, but

weren’t in any position to put in an offer. By the time we could think about buying,

it had been taken off the market. Now, like a freshly minted pop star who’s moved

to LA and dumped their childhood sweetheart, it’s back on the market. And, like idiots,

we went to look round it. Obviously, we like it. Actually that’s understating the matter

slightly, so I’ll start again…Obviously we love it and would sell vital organs to buy it,

but are in even less of a position to purchase it than we were last time. That’s not to

say it’s completely impossible, but us being able to buy the house is about as likely as

me winning Pop Idol with my cheek slapping rendition of The William Tell Overture.

We shouldn’t have gone to look, but we did. Yes, we’re stupid.) let’s hitch up the

complaints wagon and roll out. The journey will be long, arduous and will take in such

wonderful sights as the Complaints Plains, Bile Gulch and Anger Canyon. So let’s get

cracking…with breakfast

 

The Full English breakfast is a staple of modern society. I don’t care how unhealthy

it is, there are times in my life when I am in medical need of bacon, baked beans,

hash browns, sausages, fried bread, and a couple of fried eggs served at just above

room temperature, and will go to extreme lengths to get one…like eat in a supermarket

café, like I did a few weeks ago.

 

My wife and I had been on a night out and, as the ‘morning after’ usually calls for, we’d

gone looking for something fried for breakfast. Our usual places seemed a bit full so we

opted to try the café at our local Sainbury’s. We arrive, we sit down, then we play

rock/paper/scissors to see who’s going to fetch food and who’s going to stay with

the children (I stayed with the children so I’m not sure if I won or lost).

 

Roughly a week and a half later (give or take a day) my wife comes back with a tray

laden with boxed meals for the children, a coffee and a large cup of caffeine laced

heavenly with ice cubes which I immediately swipe and proceed to drink like a man

whose spent the last 3 years in a Saharan saw mill. When I eventually come up for air,

my wife explains that as it’s passed 11.30am, Sainsbury’s had stopped doing breakfast.

The scream of annoyance that is ready to hurl itself out of my throat and embed itself in

the ceiling is halted in its escape by the quick explanation that, although breakfast is no

longer being served, Brunch is now being served.

 

I hate the word brunch, it’s one of those horrible portmanteau words that we’ve come to

accept as genuine, like guesstimate, backronym, televangelist or Pseudomat (which stands

for Pseudonymously Matriculated, I swear), but I was prepared to give this incarnation the

benefit of the doubt, due to the loud, shouted threats being flung my way by my stomach.

So I wait and approximately 2 ice ages and a nuclear winter later our ‘mega brunches’ appear.

 

Now, as is normally the way, the Sainsbury’s cafe breakfast, that is only served until 11.30am,

contains the following:

 

2 fried eggs

2 sausages

Bacon

Beans

Hash browns

 

which is an average composition of a cooked breakfast in Britain.

 

So, could someone please explain to me why, for the love of tartan painted crap weevils,

the mega brunch is comprised of:

 

2 fried eggs

2 sausages

Bacon

Beans

Chips

 

CHIPS!! Sainsbury’s in their infinite, Jamie Oliver marketed wisdom stop serving breakfast

at 11.30am, swap hash browns for chips, charge you an extra couple of quid, and call it a

‘brunch’!! Which marketing genius came up with a ridiculous, nonsensical idea like that!?

 

I don’t want f*cking brunch!! I want breakfast! I want hash browns, not bloody chips!!

If the brunch was made up of completely different components, like tofu, vegetables

and toasted marmoset I might be able to spot some logical reasoning for not calling

it breakfast. Or if you needed some kind of special training by Raymond Blanc to learn

how to prepare hash browns and arrange them properly on a plate, I might be willing

to cut the kitchen staff some slack. But to swap hash browns for chips, charge more for

it and call it brunch is, possibly, the most idiotic thing I’ve ever witnessed (and I watched

the original series of Shipwrecked!).

 

Although, I shouldn’t bitch too much about how easy it is to make breakfast as I fry eggs

about as well as I fly jet planes. I just can’t seem to get the temperature right; it’s either

too cold and the egg doesn’t cook right so I end up with that vomit inducing, uncooked

wibbly bit on top, or I have the heat turned up far too high and wind up with an egg the

consistency of plastic. Eitherway, I always break the yolk, splash fat everywhere and have

to refrain from hurling everything, pan and all, through the window (I don’t have an

impulse control problem, it’s more of an egg induced frustration explosion). And

cleaning up is always a pain. At least it used to be. Now it’s easy, and that really

pisses me off.

 

I’ll explain.

 

See, I’m a sucker for anything that makes cleaning easy; rinse off mousses, non-wipe

sprays, washing powder boosters you name it I’ve tried it, basically because I’m a

lazy arse and will as much as I can to clean as little as possible.

 

The problem is, however, that most of the time the products in question are

unmitigated shite. Spray on-rinse off mousses, for example, are supposed to be easy;

spray the mousse onto the area to be cleaned (and the labels always state that the

cleaner should be used in a well ventilated area. Well my bathroom is about the size of

a shoebox and has a tiny window, what do you suggest? Taking the bath into the

garden?), leave for 5 minutes, then rinse off to reveal a gleaming and pristinely clean

bathroom suite that you wouldn’t be embarrassed to let the pope use. But that never

works. You spray the mousse on (which is actually more fun than it has any right to be),

you leave it for 5 minutes (having first punched sufficiently large ventilation holes in

your walls) and, on your return, you discover that the mousse has all but fizzled

completely away. You rinse off the remaining cleaner and, presto!, you now have a

very shiny, but still dirty bath that you wouldn’t necessarily want the pope using

(and, incidentally, it doesn’t have to be the pope, any comparable senile, old-fashioned

and out of touch old man will do).

 

But I continue to buy these ‘quick fix’ things, hoping against hope that one day I’m going

to find one that actually works and I ignore the ones that suggest that they might actually

do the job, but that you’ll have to actually put in a little effort yourself to get the results

shown because, as I mentioned above, I’m a lazy bastard.

 

And, do you know which of the ‘put in the effort’ cleaners I really hate? That’s right,

whoever said that at the back; Cillit ‘f*cking’ Bang. I mean, come on, have you seen

the adverts? Ignoring Barry Scott (the frontman for the ads who sounds like he’s in

an infants nativity and will, at any moment, shout “There’s no room at the inn”)

and the fact that most of the adverts are, for some reason, foreign and badly dubbed

into English, the fact that Cillit Bang alleges that it’s used by millions of women all

across Britain should be enough to have it relegated to the level of a commercial for

athletes foot cream. For those of you who haven’t spotted the part of the sentence that

irritates me, I’ll explain it (though you’ll have to concentrate because I don’t have any

crayons); it says millions of women. Adverts like this seem to be of the opinion that

we’re still in 1953 and men can’t tell the different between Brasso and Shake ‘n’ Vac.

I clean, and I’m a man (shut it!), so why are there never any men in these adverts?

Those men wearing the confused expression as they look in the cleaning cupboard,

only to be rescued by their tutting, in-the-know wife, don’t count.

 

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Just deviating slightly (which will be a wholly new experience for me, as I usually

 deviate wildly), why do we still put up with gender splitting in adverts? Are we not

in the 21^st Century? I can watch films on my mobile and can waggle my Wii-mote,

so I’m pretty sure I passed the millennium event horizon, but several people in the

advertising industry, it would seem, didn’t.

 

Take any advert to do with any form of dieting or weight loss. 99 times out of 100,

every participant in the ad will be female, regardless of how tenuous a link to

weight loss or dieting the product claims.

 

“Do you sometimes get bloated when you eat something? Do you fart like a

string-vested Yorkshireman and often feel like you’ve swallowed an inflatable

dinghy? Then you need the pre-bioluminescence of our latest faddy and unproven

bacteria laden dairy product!! Millions of people have benefitted from it’s effects!”

Millions of people, yet all the participants are women. Why? I’m pretty sure that if

you got some large hairy guy to sit in front of the camera holding the product, saying

something like “By ‘eck. Sometimes my guts feel like they’ve bin attached to an air

compressor, but thanks t’the miracle of Gasgon Yoghurt, even my insides feel great!

If it works for me, it’ll damn sure work f’you!” you’d sell millions of gallons of the stuff.

 

And what about those bloody diet snack bar ads with the women seeing food

everywhere and desperately trying not to touch the chocolate biscuits or sweets.

Why hasn’t someone just tied the creator of those to an anvil and dropped them

into a swimming pool, because I find them offensive and I’m a guy! If I had my

way, the advert would be adapted to my way of thinking and would remain largely

untouched, until the reveal of whichever low calorie, tasteless, cardboard enriched

treat was being touted. I’d then cut all reference to the product out of the ad, and

simply stamp “Eat the fucking chocolate!!” across the screen in huge red letters,

because who really gives a toss? And, again, if you really have to have these

self-denial type commercials, why are there no blokes in them?

 

Do you know my favourite adverts?

 

Terry’s Chocolate Orange, the antithesis of diet ads.

 

You have a large woman (who is in my top 10 of sexy women by the way,

simply because she is), who just eats the bloody chocolate. No pissing about

with, should I, shouldn’t I crap, she just eats the stuff and beats up anyone

who gets in her way. Brilliant.

 

And, heading to the other side of adland (which conjures up an image of a

large magic lion, covered in brand logos for some reason), why is anything

to do with DIY always aimed at men? I’m a man (I said shut it!) and my genetic

lack of any DIY prowess is legendary and has been documented in this here

column on several occasions. I know for a fact that my wife could put up a shelf

better than I could and could probably handle a chainsaw more safely as well

(though I wouldn’t actually give her a chainsaw because, as the fact that she

married me should indicate, she’s mental). I know that there are plenty of

women who do there own ‘oddjobs’; putting up shelves, wiring, plumbing etc,

so why are they never shown? And don’t give me any of this ‘they are’ bollocks,

because adverts for painting and decorating don’t count.

 

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Adverts aside, the claims of Cillit Bang are so audacious as to be laughable:

 

‘Cillit Bang will clean toilets, sinks, baths, kitchen surfaces, cooker tops, pennies,

floors, walls, verrucas, lunar modules and intricate circuitry (that’s not easy to

say) with ease’.

 

But, do you know what really, really buggers me off about Cillit ‘bloody’

Bang?

 

The fact that it bloody works!! Really bloody works!!

 

My wife bought some the other day and I used it as it was only thing we

had that didn’t say “pour on, then scrub until you hear bone on ceramic”

on the label. I used it. It made my bathroom all sparkly (which instantly

made me think that I’d had some kind of mental lapse and had stolen into

my neighbours bathroom), and made me want to curl up in a ball and cry

myself to sleep.

 

I don’t know if I want to live in a world where I can use the phrase “Barry

Scott was right”.

 

Though, staying with bathrooms for a quick second; why do I need a

shower timer? I was offered the opportunity to enter a competition to

win one the other day, and I don’t quite understand.

 

See, I remember being informed, years ago, that I had to take showers

instead of baths as baths used far too much water and if I continued all

the polar bears would die, or something like that. Showers, I was told,

used far less water, would leave me cleaner, and would make me instantly

more attractive to the ladies (I think they made that last one up).

 

Now, however, I’m being told that if I take more than 3 minutes in the

shower I’m evil! What gives!? I know that showers use a lot of water

and that power showers are even worse, but give me a break! Either

acknowledge that people are doing a good thing by showering instead

of bathing, or piss off.

 

I’ll probably get into trouble for saying this, and my readership will

possibly be cut in half (so I lose 3 readers, what’s the biggie?), but I

hate all this ‘save the planet’ stuff and, as I mentioned last month,

am ready to deck the next person who asks me if I’ve thought

about how I’m going to reduce my carbon footprint.

 

I’ll not rant for too long because this is one of those ‘big issues’

(not the magazine) that I try to avoid, but I’m being tipped slowly

over the edge by the insanity on TV.

 

See, I understand that, as a species, we create a lot of crap (that’s

actually the scientific term), and that crap gets dumped everywhere.

I get it, we pollute. But, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to say

this loud enough to reach everyone, but I’ll try: WE’RE NOT GOING TO

DESTROY THE PLANET!!

 

Oh, I have absolutely no doubt that we’ll make it completely uninhabitable

for ourselves and we’ll all die out due to our own inability to live in harmony

with the planet (I’m starting to sound like David Bellamy, aren’t I?), but

uninhabitable for man, does not mean death for the planet. Not counting

the possibilities of getting wiped out by dirty great asteroids or exploding suns,

the planet will survive for millennia after we’ve killed ourselves. It’ll survive,

re-grow trees and animals and go on and live a long a happy life, probably

settling down with Mars to raise a bunch of little planetoids. How do I know?

Umm, essentially because it’s done it before.

 

If you want me to get involved with stuff, engage my interest by coming at

me from the ‘Reduce your carbon footprint or you’re going to die’ angle and

I might just listen, but prodding me with a dirty fingernail and lecturing me

on how the planet’s going to die if I don’t stop spending 5 minutes in the shower,

is only going to get you a black eye.

 

Oooh, that’s controversial. I may not survive that one.

 

Anyway, postbag.

 

Darren from Maidstone (or DarrentheDarren13 as his e-mail suggests) wants

 to know if I’m allergic to anything.

 

Well theDarren, the only thing I know for a fact that I’m actually, properly,

avoid it at all costs allergic too, is people on the high street with clipboards.

People with food allergies carry an EpiPen that they use to inject themselves

with life-saving medicine, and I carry a PseudoPen, which is a cheap biro

that I use to poke anyone stupid enough to ask me a question whilst I’m on

lunch with. If I go out without my pen, and am confronted by one of these

people, then I get irrational, irritable, my face gets all blotchy and I need to

go and lie down. If I don’t get myself away from these people quickly,

then…well, the less said about that the better.

 

Now, here’s an interesting one. Bubblemuppet (a name I think I’ve heard

before, but can’t check as I empty my inbox regularly, and am too lazy to

check old WimD’s) wants to know what made me realise that everything

had the potential to piss me off, and how old I was.

 

Well Muppet, can I call you Bubble? Well, Muppet, I can tell you that I started

writing about things that drove me to the point of hair pulling and gurning in

2002 when I did a job that was less thrilling than a Sunday afternoon in an

old peoples home and I shared an office with someone who should have had

a sticker on his forehead that read “Caution: Do not attempt to drive or operate

heavy machinery whilst talking to this man. Will cause drowsiness” as he was

just the most boring individual ever created (Actually, I’ve mentioned him once or

twice before, which leads me to ask you, Muppet, why you don’t already know

this!?). However, as for when I discovered that everything pissed me off, I don’t

actually recall there being a Eureka! moment. I just remember always feeling

irritated by the little things, the things no-one else notices, that get under my

skin and into my brain and just itch and itch and itch until I’m ready to explode

in annoyed frustration!!

 

Sorry. Little intense.

 

Anyway, that’s me done for another month. All that remains is for me to say

piss off, I have better things to do than sit around talking to you…like hunt

down Barry Scott with a can of Cif Mousse!!

 

Tata

 

Me

 

P.S. Just a quick one: don’t expect to see the wedding special anytime soon.

I’ve come to realise that ever since I wrote it, I’ve experienced no end of

problems and am blaming everything squarely on that particular piece of typing,

so am keeping it hidden. You may see it one day, but don’t hold your breath.

 

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The Pseudomat’s Tried and Tested Tip for the Month

 

When moving a wardrobe down a flight of stairs, always measure it properly to

ensure that it will fit, or dismantle it beforehand. Getting to the bottom and

discovering that it’s 3” too tall and an inch too wide is only fun if the point of the

exercise was to find a situation so aggravating it would enable you to invent a

slew of new swearwords.

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The Pseudomat’s Question of the Month

 

Though it wouldn’t have made for good listening, couldn’t the protagonist in

the song “24 Hours From Tulsa” simply have written to his girlfriend and

said “I’ve met someone else”?

 

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Back to Top

 

In a change from our regularly scheduled programming, the column you’ve turned up expecting to see, read, and subsequently forget, will now be shown next month (hopefully, if my rights as columnist haven’t been revoked, shredded and set alight) due to my own absolute and unmitigated ineptitude and complete lack of organisational ability (contrary to what it says on my CV). A full explanation will be detailed in the following paragraphs.

 

So, then, consider this a sort of placeholder for the column; a columnette, if you will. It will be no less filled with vitriol and incomprehensible ranting as a standard column, but I’ve decided not to tie it down to a particular month. That’s not to say that the things I’m going to mention didn’t happen in March, because they did, but I feel it would cheating if I created an entirely new April column, when I have one all ready to go. Sort of.

 

Here, then, is the March 2.0/Aprilish edition of WimD.

 

Keep reading, I’ll explain.

 

See, I asked for an extension for this column, as I had something else I had to complete for someone else. Don’t panic, dear student of WimD, I’m not cheating on you or moonlighting with another online paper (though I have been contacted by the website Christianity4beginners.god who want me to do a similar column for them, and who say that they will pay me a sizeable sum for my services. Problem is, they want me to include the phrase ‘God Rocks!!’ in every paragraph and refrain from swearing. I told them to piss off), it was simply a leaving present for a colleague (yep, you read that right, I created a leaving present for someone I work with using my bare hands…well, bare fingertips, a keyboard, PC, Laser printer and the services of the print shop, but the thought was there). It was, even though I do say so myself, very well received.

 

With the present finished, presented, cooed over and taken home by the recipient, I could get back to the important matter of finishing April’s column (which contains complaints about shower timers, the irritation I feel at being proved wrong by Barry bloody Scott, and my bemusement at Sainsbury’s and their breakfast timings, amongst other lacklustre rambling).

 

At least, I tried to.

 

I have a condition, a name for which has yet, I believe, not been found. Essentially, I perform better with things like this column, Dead Giveaway etc, whilst at work (at lunchtime you understand) as they provide a distraction from the humdrumary (I just made that up, how cool is that?) that is everyday office life. When I try to complete these things at home, something I‘ve tried on several different and increasingly unsuccessful occasions, they become the work from which I am all too easily diverted by such distractions as:

 

My children

Video games

TV

The internet

My shoes

Seeing if I can hit a certain book on the shelf using only a rubber band and a ball of paper

 

Not that I consider writing this column ‘work’, because I don’t. Nor do I consider it a chore, bind or particularly laborious. As I’ve mentioned before, typing drivel comes as easily to me as breathing, sleeping and texting whilst not getting run over. I am simply a born procrastinator.

 

Anyway, I digress (see!). The fact of the matter was that the 2 days after my colleague left were mental at work. Not in a “Aargh!!!!” kind of way, with the accompanying flailing limbs and dodging of furiously hurled deadlines, but a more sedate mentalness, the kind synonymous with the absence of someone who’s details are hard to describe as they used to move through your office in a blur of speed and cloud of wind blown A4. They had the feel of the last few days of the summer term at primary school, when there was no real work left to do and you were allowed to bring in Connect 4 and call the teacher Judy.

 

Needless to say, I had very little I needed distracting from.

 

After that we had Easter, (which is always fun in our house as my children have so many grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins etc that by the end of Easter Sunday, we have enough recycling to offset our carbon footprint until the 22^nd century (though don’t get me started on the phrase ‘carbon footprint’, because I don’t have enough swear words in my vocabulary to describe my hatred for the term)), which meant 4 days at home and, as I said, my ability to work at home is equalled only by my ability to walk barefoot across hot coals in polyester trousers and a kerosene shirt and not get reduced to a smoking pile of ash.

 

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Actually, as a side complaint, well, more of a huge, jarring divergence, hence the above line to separate this from the column proper, but staying with the subject of Easter…why is the Post Office crap?

 

See, our post has been arriving later and later as time has gone on. When we first moved into our current house our Post Person (what is the PC term for them now? Is it Post Person? Have we moved so far down the ludicrously runged political correctness ladder that sex is now completely taboo when describing someone? I know I have to say Police Officer, not Policeman or Policewoman, so am I not allowed to say Postman? or Post Woman? I don’t want to get it wrong) used to arrive at around 10am, which we considered late as at our old house our post arrived well before 8am. But as the months have squeaked by, the prompt delivery of our post has dwindled to such a degree that it rarely appears before 1pm.

 

However, the Post Office surpassed itself this Easter by miles. It out did itself by such a margin that its previous record of 1pm delivery is but a hastily waving figure on the horizon, crying out to us that we’ve walked off with its car keys. Why? Because on Easter Saturday, our post arrived at 5.30pm. That’s tea-time (no, not Teh-ah-tim-eh. Sorry, Discworld joke)!! It wouldn’t be so bad if we lived out on the moors or on one side of a motorway, meaning that postal delivery required a quadbike or Subaru Impreza, but we live just off a main road. THE main road, in fact.

 

And, if that wasn’t enough to shake my, already dodgy, faith in the Post Office, my recent experience in trying to take receipt of my new mobile was such a debacle that now I’d rather strap important documents to the leg of a wild bird and release said bird from my office window than trust the Royal Mail with it.

 

Basically, I took out a new contract with a mobile operator, and ordered a shiny new mobile phone (it’s very pretty, and it works and everything), and, according to the blurb on their website, they promised to deliver the phone within 24hrs, provided I place my order before 6pm, which I did. The confirmation e-mail I receive from them a couple of hours later, explains that my phone is winging its way to me and will be with me before 1pm on Wednesday (which is actually more like 36hrs, but I don’t complain too much as I’m getting free delivery. Obviously, I complain a bit, but I keep it too a minimum….just a couple of derisive sentences regarding the parentage of the person who’d created the webpage, that sort of thing).

 

I wait, my hands clammy with excitement (this may seem sad, and I’ll admit it is, but if you’ve been paying attention to me over the past few months you’ll know that my old phone was about as useful as Jamie Oliver in a McDonalds kitchen…..Shit! I shouldn’t give them ideas).

 

By 1.30pm on Wednesday my eager anticipation had become mild disappointment and, after a phone call to my mobile operator who told me my phone had definitely been despatched, was fast sliding down a slippery slope into bitter discontent. However, the helpful guy on the other end of the phone (who I like to think was a real person and not a call centre automaton) did give me an item tracking reference number that I could enter onto the Royal Mail webpage to keep an eye on my order.

 

I do so. Item in transit. Fair enough.

 

I wait an hour or so and check again as, by this time, my wife has had to leave the house and wouldn’t be there to take collection of the parcel should it, by some form of miracle, arrive. The item, it says, has been delivered.

 

Huzzah!! Although it won’t actually be at my house as they would be no-one there to take it, I will have a little red card saying that I can pick it up at the sorting office. I text my wife and tell her the good news (because that’s the kind of person I am), and suggest, hopefully, that maybe the resourceful postal person will have left it with a neighbour, rather than taking it away with them.

 

My fleet-footed jig of wonderment comes to a squealing, smoking halt when she texts me back to say that she didn’t, in the end, have to go out, and nothing’s arrived. Not even a little red card.

 

I re-check the website. Item has been delivered.

 

Shit.

 

Being the helpful, friendly company that they are, Royal Mail have on their website a number that you can ring if you need to find out whereabouts in the country they’ve managed to lose your f*cking valuables (it doesn’t actually use the word ‘f*cking’ on the website, I’ve added that for effect, but I feel that if they were more honest about their ineptitude and sheer idiocy, they’d get more respect from the public. If their ‘item tracking’ page said something along the lines of ‘Enter your tracking number here, though don’t be surprised if it’s fallen out of the back of a van onto the fast lane of the M5 because we’re ineffectual cretins who couldn’t keep track of a tortoise in a milk bottle’ I’d be more inclined to cut them some slack.

 

I ring the number.

 

753 menu choices later I am treated to a friendly female voice informing me that my parcel has been delivered and that if I wanted to track another parcel, I could enter the code now. Instead I pound the edge of my desk with the receiver and slam it back ont the base in, what some might describe as, mild frustration.

 

I ring the number again, making different choices this time, (why do companies think that automated systems are a good idea? All they do is make me want to do is march down to Royal Mail Head Office and shit in their foyer. Not that I would, but it wouldn’t take too many more calls to their ‘helpline’ before the grating recordings forced me into such a decision) and by some biblical miracle actually get through to a person. Through a veritable waterfall of grateful tears I explain my situation to the girl on the end of the line who calmly informs me that, yes, my parcel has been delivered.

 

I say it hasn’t. She says it has. I say it hasn’t. She says it has. I say ‘Liar, liar pants on fire’, and she says that delivered was confirmed with a signature that was given by the recipient. Incredulous, I mention that neither me nor my wife, who’d actually been in all day, had taken receipt of a parcel and definitely hadn’t given a signature.

 

Now, apparently, the Royal Mail have this brilliant system. It’s brilliant. It’s light years ahead of anything NASA or Homeland Security can boast. What happens is that, if a parcel has been sent to a wrong address and signed for by theperson at that wrong address then, regardless of how many times I scream down the phone that I haven’t received my parcel, Royal Mail won’t do anything until a copy of the signature is uploaded to their system, a process which, in the 21^st century, takes 72hrs. After that time, I am quite welcome to call them up and say “That isn’t my signature”, after which they’ll take action. And by ‘action’ I presume they mean lose more parcels and stick their thumbs up their arses.

 

Anyway, I’m getting vitriolic.

 

Just to ensure that we’re not being complete idiots, my wife pops to both our neighbours to ask them if they’ve taken receipt of my parcel. They hadn’t. So I call my mobile operator up again, and explain my situation to them. A different, but still helpful, guy puts me on hold and goes off to speak to the Post Office to see if he can get any more out of them.

 

He can’t. They say that it was delivered at 1.15pm (which was, just to demonstrate that they have no shame whatsoever, 15minutes after it should have been delivered) and at that time a signature was taken, but we’d still have to wait 72hrs for it to be uploaded onto the system.

 

I don’t have a parcel. I haven’t signed for a parcel. But the Post Office won’t do anything because I need to verify that the signature they have isn’t mine. As if I might have signed for the parcel and forgotten about it.

 

I hang up and do various mean things to my computer.

 

When I arrive home at 5.30pm, our nextdoor neighbour pops out with a parcel in her hand, asking if this is what we were asking about earlier, only it had been delivered about 10minutes before I’d arrived.

 

So, and I’ll go through this slowly so I don’t wind myself up again and break stuff; the Post Office website claimed the parcel had been delivered, 2 separate people at the Post Office (which I think is the entire human workforce for Royal Mail) verified, to me and my mobile operator that the parcel had been delivered at 1.15pm and a signature had been taken at that time, yet my neighbour, who isn’t prone to lying, says that the parcel arrived at 5.20pm.

 

So what’s the dealio?

 

Oh, and the helpful Post Person, upon leaving the parcel with our neighbour, didn’t think it prudent to leave one of those little red cards telling us so.

 

Bastards.

 

___________________________________________________________

 

 

Anyway, back to my excuses for this column being later.

 

Easter came and went in a shower of chocolate, cardboard and plastic, and the following weeks was filled with all manner of column blocking activities.

 

I took my Gran to hospital so that she could have an operation, which should have been a fairly quick trip, despite the hospital being 40 miles away. However, I should have known that things weren’t going to go to plan when I realised that the car park had been designed by M C Escher. Seriously, it was the most confusing place I’ve ever seen, and that was whilst ignoring the inordinate amount of building work going on.

 

Then, thanks to the efficiency of the NHS, we were left in a waiting room for 5 hours.

 

5. Hours.

 

I couldn’t just drop her off and leave her, so I stayed until she was taken into surgery, which was 5 hours, almost to the minute, after we arrived. And she couldn’t eat anything before the operation because they’d told her not to and I couldn’t go and find a café or drinks machine because I wasn’t convinced I’d be able to navigate my way back to my starting point without a compass and length of rope. So from 10.30am until 3.30pm we sat in, what has to be, the dullest waiting room known to modern medicine. I mean, I’m used to these places being filled with sick people and Readers Digest’s from 1984, but for the entire time it was just the 2 of us and 3 magazines: one on holidays, one on fashion and a Big Issue.

 

Then there was my daughter’s birthday, which was filled with the sound of happy laughter, giggling and my little girl’s melted chocolate voice telling me, whenever I opened my mouth, to “Sha’ up!!”.

 

And then I was ill, which kind of brings us up to date really.

 

Although, I am missing the part where I save the original column onto my mobile phone then can’t retrieve it as the data cable is never in the same place as my phone due to my memory being wanky meaning that I never leave the house with it, and my mobile operator not setting up my e-mail function on my pretty new phone meaning I can’t e-mail to myself or attach it to an MMS, but you don’t need to know that, because it just makes me look like a knob.

 

No postbag this month as it’s on the other column (which I’ll send asap so you have it early for next month, as soon as I drag it off my mobile).

 

Anyway, I’ll go. I have small knitted dolls of postal workers to be mean to.

 

tata

 

Me

 

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Morning, and welcome to March’s issue of WimD, the antithesis of Spring cheer and, according to a recent survey, 37% of people consider reading it more fun than being hit round the head with planks of mahogany.

 

So, what no-fun, pointless things do I have to regale you all with this month?

 

Well, that’s a good question; what, indeed?

 

I mean, obviously, I could rant about the inclusion of glasses on TV characters, who don’t usually wear them, to demonstrate the acquisition of hitherto unconfirmed intelligence, but that would be: a) way too easy; b) simply covering old ground and c) unwise, as it appears to be a device that not even good programmes like Torchwood can avoid using, and is therefore something that, should I begin to vent about it, I would be unable to prevent myself from throwing objects around the room and maiming small animals over. (The sentence does make sense, it’s simply my petty bloodymindedness that doesn’t).

 

Maybe I could discuss the horrific and torturous acts I’m going to visit upon the body of the person who owned my house before I bought it, and the individual from the estate agents who coerced me into buying it who insisted on cooing and gurgling about how wonderfully wonderful the house was, for selling me a property that is less abode and more money pit. Thanks to a large injection of cash the Gas and electricity are now unlikely to kill us as readily as they once were, but the double glazing, that was apparently fitted by a blind 4yr old armed only with a crowbar and a roll of sticky tape, has now taken it upon itself to take over occupancy of the ‘seat of death’, so recently vacated by the other utilities, and is attempting to drown us by letting in more water than it keeps out. The problem with this is that, again, it would involve revisiting complaints of old, and would simply wind me up to the point of combustion, meaning I would need to strip naked and go and sit in the frost to calm myself down, and no-one wants to see that.

 

Then again, there’s always the good old staple of work and the pointless (and seemingly endless) restructuring to get good and het up over. For a start the meetings that have recently been held produced some cracking statements from our CEO that gave a wonderful insight into how his mind works (when asked how he feels about the fact that the entire staffing base was de-motivated to the point of a stress related illness (a comment that got a round of applause for the questioner) the Director’s answer was that “motivation isn’t my responsibility. If you’re de-motivated then it’s your own fault. Motivation comes from within”. And when asked how cover would be provided for any professionals that went off on long term sick leave (professionals who’s jobs require them to have 6 years relevant experience and 2 specialised degrees (one of which is a doctorate)), he replied that they were considering “training up some of the admin to cover”. But complaining about work just doesn’t cut it nowadays. Young people don’t want to here about problems with infrastructure or budgets, they want to hear scathing attacks on celebrities or vicious criticism heaped upon poorly functioning or badly designed gadgetry. But, guess what? I’ve done that too.

 

See, it’s not a lack of things to complain about that is causing the problem, the list I possess on which I mentally scribe the things in this world that drive me over the edge of sanity like a suicidal K.I.T.T., is ongoing and endless, but not all of them make for good reading. And the things that I do type out for all you dear readers to absorb into your daily routines aggravate me on a daily basis, so I wind up repeating myself more times than I should.

 

So, that leaves me with a dilemma. Do I simply reiterate my previous complaints and explain that my mobile is soon going to find itself doing a fantastic impression of a rock at the bottom of the local duck pond due to the fact that it’s absolute and unadulterated shit? Or do I open the door to my psyche a little wider and allow you all a slightly less impeded view of the scattered and badly wired remnants of my sanity by complaining about the less high profile things that make me want to pull off my ears and eat them in frustration?

 

Now, I thought the answer was an obvious one, but we’ll wait a few moments to let the uninitiated catch up.

 

Worked it out? Good.

 

Of course I’m going to make myself look even more of a sprained individual by doing both; opening my psyche a little more by going over old ground, albeit with slightly different details, because that’s just the kind of bizarre and slightly unnerving person that I am. And when I say, bizarre and slightly unnerving, I’m not suggesting that I sit atop taxis wearing nothing but a thin coating of peanut butter and a lunatic smile proclaiming to anyone who hasn’t been able to avoid the reach of my voice that “I am the Potato Master”, nor am I trying to exaggerate the situation by suggesting that I’m interesting when actually I live at home with my mum and her 47 cats and work at a dry cleaners. I’m simply stating fact; some people often find me bizarre and unnerving. As an example, the other evening I was hungry so decided to have a sandwich. I opened the fridge to take out the butter and, since it wasn’t in there, proceeded to call for it, in a similar vein as one might call a cat. Not particularly odd in itself, everyone does similar things when hunting for lost items like keys or cradles of civilisation, but I actually managed to catch myself by surprise when I realised that, along with sentences like “Here, butter butter butter!” I was including taunts about what I was going to do to the butter if it didn’t show itself immediately….in a bad French accent. And I didn’t even realise I was doing it!

 

If I can find myself bizarre and slightly unnerving the rest of the population stand little chance of finding me chock full of reasoned arguments and logic.

 

But I digress. My task this month is to demonstrate that everything, EVERYTHING, has the potential to climb inside the control room of my head and jam down the detonate button, more than once. And I understand that this will involve an inordinate amount of waffle, but sometimes waffle is necessary to ensure that my point has been understood.

 

The problem I face, however, is how to approach this from a direction that will make me appear quirky and oddball, rather than creepy and weird. I mean, I’ve already confessed that I hunt butter using Napoleonic tactics, something that takes quirky and smacks it around a bit, but if I also mentioned that, when out drinking, I can spend minutes ensuring that my pint glass is exactly in the centre of the beermat, and get frsutrated by abnormally shaped beermats, does that tip the scales back towards quirky or tie quirky up with a tow rope and bury it under a motorway?

 

It’s a dilemma, because what’s amusing to one person, maybe deeply and fundamentally disturbing to another. Just ask anyone who’s ever watched anything starring David Spade.

 

OK, so you read this column (and I know there’s only 3 of you) so you understand that I’m the kind of guy who would rather whip himself unconscious with a sock full of beanie babies than listen to folk music, or pour molten lead down his throat before eating anything prepared by Jamie Oliver. And you accept this. You read it, you go away, you come back the next month and read some more.

 

But you’ve come to expect a certain level of vitriol, a measured amount of anger towards everyday things that you, yourself, may have deepseated hatred for, like:

 

Car ads that tell you nothing about the car. The adverts may be chock-a-block with cutting edge CGI, men considered just too manly for Gillete adverts, clever uses of everyday objects like Lego and bananas and inventive advertising strategies like baking an entire car out of cake, but what, exactly, do these ads tell us about the car they are advertising? The message I received from the last one I saw was that “It would be great for zipping around Toyland, but your fucked if you just want to pop down Tottenham Court Road on a Saturday night, because this car’s only decent feature is its ability to out-manoeuvre giant croquet mallets. And will only cost you double the price because you can get it on finance.” One of them I saw recently, actually gave out the price of the car and the fact that you could get 0% finance over 5 years BEFORE telling you its name. And the complete car only appeared in the last few frames of the advert as the majority of the time was devoted to a cleverly rendered chase/race scene involving the cars parts, careening down a corridor to fight for a place in the finished product. Clever? Maybe. But it would have been better if I could actually remember the car it was supposed to draw attention to. The most I can remember about it was that it was yellow.

 

or

 

Beauty products. That’s it. There isn’t really anything I can add to quantify exactly what it is about beauty products that causes my synapses to explode, because everything about them is hateful. The marketing, the packaging, the suggestion that if you don’t use them you’re obviously a sad ugly twat, the endorsements by celebrities, the pointless distinction between mens products and womens products, it all shaves tiny slices off my brain and fries it in garlic whenever I am subjected to any part of it. And the bloody words they use, the vocabulary they invent to make these things sound, not only important, but imperative, are just appalling. What the hell is taughtening? Why not just use tightening, it means the same and doesn’t sound shit. Hair products are actually worse for that sort of pseudowording (that’s words that don’t really fit, not my words) with sentences like “increases shimmer by 37%”, “marked increase in visible radiance” and “multi-faceted colour” actually causing me to violently switch channels, regardless of whether Andi MacDowells on screen or not. The worst beauty product I ever saw advertised actually marketed itself with the phrase “The alternative to going under the knife”. Of course, because that’s actually what we’re all thinking, isn’t? ‘I wish I could afford to have someone hack away at my face with a brutally sharp implement so that I can look perpetually surprised’. Twats.

 

or maybe even

 

Badly designed and poorly constructed websites. I came across one today that perfectly demonstrates the