EUREKA!

I’ve reached an epiphany. Well, I say epiphany, it was more of a creeping resignation to the inevitable: I don’t matter.

I’m not witty, my writing is limited and not particularly coherent, nobody reads what I write and it’s not going to change anything. So, rather than pander to the belief that I need to try really hard in case somebody plucks me from obscurity and hands me a bank account full of author-money, I am just going to witter on in peaks and troughs of time and interest, mainly to appease my own incredible flow of internal drivel and unintelligible monologue. See, even that makes me seem impenetrable and mysterious; believe me it’s not. I just constantly have a merry-go-round of disjointed facts, subjects and profanities inside my mind – picture a cartoon head trauma victim with tweeting birds all around them.

It would be easy to reread the previous crap I’ve generated and delete all but the best bits – but that would be neither honest nor very purposeful. Because my blog has attracted precisely (and I can be exact about this) 0 followers in eighteen months, I don’t feel it would be right to amend or delete with the sole hope that people will start reading it now and discover a witty and contemporary set of word gems. At the very least, it’s not being honest with myself. But then – I don’t matter, so perhaps I shouldn’t worry about it?

Conundrums.

No, no I won’t – I’ll leave the idiocy and poor sentence construction (as helpfully highlighted by Microsoft Word) as is and upload the whole original shooting match. That way, when my kids grow up, they can look at their old dad and start to glean exactly when and where the xenophobia, dementia and dislike of most aspects of life began.

Celebrity Barcelona

I watched Barcelona last night; the greatest football team ever put together (if you exclude the Crystal Palace squad of 1990, natch) playing in a European Cup semi-final against fellow Spaniards and great rivals Real Madrid. It should have been an occasion to bring tears to the eye – the individual excellence of the Barca players as a foil to Mourinho’s tactical nous and cunning.

But it wasn’t.

It was an unending exhibition in tentative, negative football, spoiled only by two moments of brilliance from Messi. Other than his sheer genius, it was as dull and attritional as you can get – think rainy January night game between two dismal mid-table English clubs and you won’t be far out.

However, being neither a football pundit nor a commentator, I want to leave the analysis to the professionals. What prompted this subject was the sheer level of blatant cheating on display, and the rising anger inside me as I think about how much I hate cheats (and, actually, people in general). Puyol, Busquetz (Biscuits?) Sergio, Alves, Ronaldo and Pique were seen by millions falling/ rolling/ crying like they’d been shot in the balls with a BB gun, or bitten by a mosquito so large its proboscis had penetrated their skulls and given their brainboxes a stir up. It was hateful, juvenile and annoying – like a Justin Bieber fan – without the redeeming feature of being a really good football match.

So that got me thinking; who else do I really detest? Here’s a “random” cross-section:

Wayne Rooney. Talented, yes. Strong and tireless, with a good work ethic, yes. BUT: he is an ugly, scowling half-breed with a boiled water balloon for a head and teeth filed out of Werther’s Original. He has an obscene amount of money, far too much for his tiny sprout of a brain to comprehend, and is adorned with so much overpriced cack he looks like the subject of a dire Channel 5 makeover programme for Armenian royalty.

He is also a cheap, philandering bigot with no control over his temper or mouth, and acts like a horny baboon whose dinner has been weed on. In another life, without the talent, he would simply be a scally in a pub, covered in blurred and meaningless amateur tattoos offering out anyone who looked like a threat and spitting on the floor. He is the footballing equivalent of Dane Bowers, being played in heavy, melting prosthetic makeup by Mike Myers.

Jade Goody
Yeah, she’s dead. So what? Are we only allowed to speak positively about the dead? Ok, so Hitler was good at fart jokes, Shipman was a big cuddly bastard and Charlie Manson was brilliant on the harmonica and a gas at parties.

Yes, she was a horrid, pugnacious racist. No, ignorance is not an excuse; but stupidity is some mitigation for her poorly tuned gob. Yes, she was a vapid, talentless nothing with all the appeal of dysentery; but that is true of a large number of slebs [see above, for example]. But what is absolutely, totally inexcusable, in any light, is her choice of partner. She married (remember that, MARRIED) an even greater waste of cells than Jeff Brazier. She took in, loved, shagged and gave her life to a vacuous, oafish nothing with a penchant for rape and sexually assaulting women. He is a gurning, tile-brained semen stain that enjoys forcing himself on women and drinking in Essex nightclubs. If the National Association of Morons held a competition to find the biggest, most cuntiest cunt-brained cunty, he would make Nick Griffin look like John Inman.

You see? Through all the fatuous programmes, books, appearances in Heat magazine and general annoyance that was Jade Goody, the one thing that should always make her a figure of ridicule is her choice of him, among all of us males. Yes, she did incredible amounts of work in raising cancer awareness among young women. But she also MARRIED Jack Tweed. Ying and yang, people.

The presenters of Top Gear
Three frightened, wounded simpletons masquerading as middle-aged ‘blokes’. Probable homosexual, infertile caricatures dressed by C&A (where C&A stands for Cunts and Arselickers).

David Cameron
Sponge-face hooting clam with over-privilege and hatred of the working classes leaking from his every braying orifice.

George Osborne
As above, but the ‘taker’ in the obvious public school order of things. Definite taster of the meat skewer.

Richard Littlejohn
This is too easy.

On cars

On cars
I get very excited about cars. Obviously, not in a rudey ‘hands in the pockets’ way, but I do get excited about cars. I feel I may need to explain myself a little:

I don’t know anything about Supercars, I detest TCC (that c**t Clarkson), I won’t watch the abject self-fellating middle-aged smug pisswater that is Top Gear and I am not interested in top speeds, 0-60 times or who the fucking Stig is. I think F1 drivers are overpaid, British Touring Cars are like watching a one-off banger race organised for day release special needs prisoners with anger issues, and any male driving a Ferrari over the age of 30 has obvious insecurities and a bank balance longer than their flaccid little winky.

My stuff of choice (hell, let’s call it porn) is the small ads for racing car bits. Having dabbled lightly in racing cars in recent years, and with a needy competition car parked impotently on my drive, I feel my fetish is somewhat justified. There is an amazing array of rare, valuable and just plain useless bits advertised online – and one can never tire of trawling through. From ex-F1 carbon wings to pitted magnesium uprights from a 1970s March, it’s easy to get sucked into a fantasy world of unbridled spending and a life sentence of frustrated evenings in the garage.

My own fantasy goes something like this: get a pile of cash (how many people’s fantasies start with that? I bet I’m the first) and just keep clicking and scrolling until a halo of brightly glowing liquid crystals surrounds the holy grail of my perfect project. It could be a saloon car, a single seat racer, an ex-F1 or a homebuild; I’m not proud and I’m easily persuaded, which is a dangerous combination. In the past I’ve fantasised over competition cars called Marrow, Jedi, Terrapin, Atlantic and Ray. I’ve had dark little plots to buy and modify (variously) a Reliant, a Mini, a Land Rover and an Austin 7.

My fantasy then goes much along the line of a football team/ sex partner/ dinner party daydream – gather up as many rare and interesting things as you can, and bolt them together to make something likely to spectators splutter into their overpriced Silverstone tea. I have an ongoing and unrequited desire to touch as much carbon fibre as possible, to handle purposefully angular aluminium machining, to settle for nothing less than aerospace-grade titanium for every nut and bolt. I’ve spent time looking at brakes, tyres, hoses, seats and switches, only to be thwarted by the twin apocalyptic horsemen of lack of cash and lack of actual need. Reality is a sadistic mistress.

There are specialist dealers for this kind of snuff – one is functionally titled “Touring Car Spares” – and some are verging on hoarders of obscure, broken and tiny pieces of racing ephemera. Will you ever need a Van Diemen RF88 rear wishbone? Yes? Good, because I know just the man. Actually, that’s a bad example as FF cars were constantly damaging wishbones, but I’m sure you get the general idea.

So I’m stuck with a longing for carefully constructed, one highly expensive trinkets of limited use. I can’t hang them on the wall in the house (I asked, I was refused) and I don’t have a suitable car to stick them to. I’d love to turn up at a track in a fastidiously fettled race car, engine popping and the sun glinting off the carbon shinies, but the real irony is that it costs so much to go racing that I would have to sell a child before I even unloaded the trailer. And yes, I have asked, and again I was refused.

There are worse things to be fanatical about, not all of them very rational; religion, golf, actual porn, dominoes and Antiques Roadshow. I chose cars – or rather they chose me. Not motorbikes, not Lamborghinis, not the 2011 Ford Mondeo; old, battered, campaigned and tired racing cars. I love them, I wish I could become the equivalent of an unhinged smelly cat lady with a large kitchen filled with leaking Mugen engines and Dymag split rims. And yes, I have asked that too.

Spring breaking point

Spring breaking point
Right, so, my idea to take a picture and upload it every day lasted precisely a fortnight. I think that demonstrates my level of commitment. I am in the process of editing it to make it look like I meant it to be occasional and random (I didn’t) and possibly interesting (it isn’t) as I update it (I probably won’t).

The sun is shining outside and weatherpeople are confidently predicting a mini-heatwave over the next few days. So then, is it any wonder I have two absentees from sickness (in heavily inverted ironic commas) this day before the day before a four-day holiday? No, thought not. I am naturally suspicious anyway, but on a nice warm day in spring just before a bank holiday? Oh please. Don’t worry, sicknotes; it doesn’t look suspect AT ALL that you were FINE yesterday.

Perhaps it’s just petty jealousy on my part – I’d love to be out touching trees or looking at some water – and I envy those that either don’t care or can get away with petty absenteeism and shoddy attitude. Mind you, that makes me seem high-minded and righteous; I’m not, I hate them because they’re out smelling of suncream and radiating smiles whilst I’m in my glazed rabbit hutch responding to emails about dreary contracts, dreaming lazily about eating the bananas in my desk. Bastards (not the bananas, they are innocent victims in all this).

Sometimes I am tempted to long for the days of carefree jobs and days spent outside; remembering the summers working outside, or travelling around London gawping at Knightsbridge show-offs. The lunchtime drinking, 2pm finishes and ‘sick’ days look even more soft-focus on days like this. However… I don’t miss the lack of decent pay, pisspoor career path, 5am starts to get into London, working in dusty bungalows with fussy pensioners making tea of questionable quality and offering Kitkats of equally questionable provenance. I also don’t miss the working outside in the January rain, being alone and poor, an empty house, crap diet and heavily odoured fridge.

It’s a double edged sword, this jealousy. I am in a far better place now (I mean metaphorically, physically I’m in a stagnant pond of a place surrounded by chivvy inbreds) and I have different kinds of satisfaction from life. Don’t get me wrong; I am not railing against getting older (37) or having dependents/ mortgage/ wife/ responsibilities etc; far from it. I like where I am now, it’s just a pity it’s not a great big work-pub-garden-seaside-park hybrid filled with happy people and gently waving trees.

This has clearly got to me more than I thought – having to qualify the idea of calling a banana a bastard and using words like ‘frolicking’ are not my normal fare. I think I’m going stir crazy, sat in here listening to the nth diet conversation while the pigeons outside float around in the arm air, taunting me with their smug cooing. Now they ARE bastards.