Food, Fitness, Fatness and Failure

Food is brilliant. It's the best thing ever invented.

As far as life-sustaining necessities go, it's second to none. Oxygen is alright. Don't get me wrong, breathing is jolly good fun and I'd miss it if I couldn't do it any more...if only because it'd take away my ability to sigh. Sighing is fantastic. A wonderful little action that can quickly and simply signify all of the important emotions. Disappointment, frustration, relief when something awful that's been happening has stopped happening. It's great.

But food is better.

I would quite happily spend 24 hours a day eating. If you had to ingest a cream cake as often as you drew a breath, I would be ecstatic. Left to my own devices, I would eat myself into a coma. I would eat until my head disappeared into my neck, my stomach enveloped my limbs and I became a massive sphere of blubber. And even at this stage, I would still keep eating. I would simply roll face-first onto cakes. I would become a filter-feeder. And I would be happy. At least my id would be happy. My ego and super-ego would be arguing over which one of them was the least happy and the most ashamed. With these kind of deep-seated conflicting natural tendencies it's difficult to maintain a good weight.

My Wii fit cheerfully informs me that I'm obese and that I should probably try to remedy this by swivelling an invisible hula-hoop around my waist or by making spastic jerking movements as I attempt to head pretend footballs into a pretend goal. If there's anything I hate more than real exercise, it's exercise that pretends to be fun. You're not fooling anybody. Like those audio tapes that put times tables to music - putting something horrible in a fun context doesn't make it fun. Painting Auschwitz pink and dressing the SS in squirrel costumes wouldn't have made a stay there any more pleasant.



Exercise + Computer Games does not = Enjoyment. It's still horrific. In fact it's even worse. It's wrapping something awful in something comforting, familiar and wonderful. It's like watching a variation of 2 Girls 1 Cup where the girls are played by Mr Spoon from Button Moon and Bagpuss. It's nightmarish.

In the case of Wii Fit, the playing experience is particularly reminiscent of a nightmare as characters or "Miis" you have created in the console take part in the games. I often find myself heading footballs kicked to me by Hitler whilst my mother referees. All I need to do is look down and realise I'm naked and the picture would be complete.

So Wii Fit can fuck off. Wii Sports is tolerable, but only because I can sit down and eat crisps whilst I'm playing it.



I'm sure it all stems from my hatred of sports at school. I wasn't by any means an athletic child. I was nearly always a good foot taller than my classmates and built like a nuclear chimney stack. I was always more comfortable with moving heavy furniture than moving myself. Shifting my body at any speed was like trying to push a Lancaster Bomber up the M40. This meant that my participation in team sports was not celebrated by my peers.

It wasn't like in other disciplines where your failures could be hidden. There you could hide the "D" on your essay beneath your pencil case and tell your classmates you "Did OK." Not so in P.E. Here your failures were all too apparent. You were naked (not literally...at least not after Mr Parker was fired) and worse still, your shortcomings would impact on the success of your peers.

If you were shit at football, in a 5-aside match your entire team was doomed to failure. It was like writing a joint-essay with 5 other people knowing full well that you were entirely illiterate and didn't know a pen from a peperami. The prose would flow beautifully until it came to your section where it would suddenly become unintelligible shaky scrawls and crayon doodles of farmyard animals. That was how I played football.

Consequently I have no interest in sport in either an observational or participatory capacity. Tell some people that you don't follow football, let alone support a specific team and they'll look at you like you've told them that you don't breathe oxygen.

But fuck them. I'm my own man these days and happily no longer fettered by their asinine standards or expectations. And anyway, I do breathe oxygen. It's my second favourite thing and it's more than enough exercise for my liking.

The Writing on the Wall

It is a sad fact that men seem to be at their most honest, thoughtful, artistic and organised when scrawling their thoughts on toilet walls. Whether overtly posturing their sexuality, posing whimsical philosophical conundrums or depicting their own genitals in crude felt-tip glyphs…it represents a level of expressionism scarcely seen elsewhere in male popular culture.

It is unfortunate that much of this work will be lost to the ages, like tears in rain or pus in custard. Toilet walls are notoriously difficult to collect and compile, largely due to their physical dimensions. Brick shit-houses for instance are renowned for their bulkiness… though it is likely that any collection of toilet wall artwork collected in its original form would be impractically huge. You could not, for instance, realistically transport a book with 8-foot concrete pages to a dinner party and regale the stuffy fuckers therein with carefully-selected drolleries. Certainly not without heavy-lifting equipment or at least an ingenious system of ropes and pulleys.

I shall therefore attempt to recount some of the best examples I myself have encountered during my time spent upon the shared ceramic stinker. This should hopefully prove to be of particular interest to ladies. I have spent reasonably little time in women’s toilets, but you don’t seem to express yourself in the same way. I should imagine that any wall-based musings are written in perfect, flowing prose by a dainty and accurate hand. But overall you seem to favour verbal communications rather than corresponding via text-based kludgie conflabs.

The male scrawlings can be divided into several categories:

THE PHILOSOPHICAL

Here we find such gems as “Some come here to sit and think, I come here to shit and stink”. This displays a cursory foray into existentialism, with a delicious dash of nihilism. It is self-deprecating, yet celebratory of shared animalistic necessity.

THE ACADEMIC

An esoteric off-shoot of the philosophical, this type of wall-writing is largely found in the conveniences of institutions of higher education. I am unsure whether it is still the case, but the walls of the gentleman’s toilets of Southampton University’s Avenue Campus were absolutely littered with dry literary and philosophical comments and allusions. Each of these was properly annotated and footnoted and subsequently proof-read, corrected for spelling and grammar and assigned a grade by the next toilet user.


The walls provided an essential forum for public thought – a meeting of minds. Unfortunately the entire collaborative collection of work was somewhat upstaged one fateful afternoon by the scrawling of “LOL FUCKING STUDENT CUNTS” in crude red marker, presumably by an outside visitor. Or a self-abasing insider.

ART

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. In the case of a picture of a spunking cock, I’d say it’s worth at least twice that.


Nothing affirms privacy of material surroundings than adorning them with a self-penned portrait of the most intimate of bio-functions. It also celebrates the dual-function of the male generative member in a place where it is in danger of becoming nothing more than a lowly waste-spewing appendage. In its other application it is the giver of life, the bringer of pleasure, the funky little giggle stick who longs to venture into the ladycupboard of squishy delights.

SIGNATURES

Similar to “ART”, this is a sub-category of scrawlings that reaffirm the man’s ownership of his private space. It also, however, acts as the most basic of affirmations of existence. A cry of “I AM HERE, I HAVE ACCOMPLISHED SENTIENCE AND SELF-ACTUALISATION.” Their existence will not be forgotten as long as future generations of bog users gaze upon their name as mud drops from their guts.

POLITICS

Quite a rarity, but the few examples I have found represented some of the most incisive and cutting political commentary in our culture today.


I wish I had seen it myself, but a friend alerted to me the following simple yet brutal piece: “FUCK BLAIR (TONY)”. There is no subterfuge here. The writer was not hiding behind allegory and metaphor. This is balls-to-the-wall stuff. Biting satire that doesn’t talk down to its audience and yet eliminates any possible misinterpretations.
There is no way that we could mistake this for an attack on Exorcist actor Linda or dancing light entertainer Lionel. This is a punishing and accurately-guided cry of defiance aimed at the very top. I only hope if this particular artist is still working in the medium of marker pen, he updates the legend to “FUCK BROWN (GORDON)”, lest we think his ire has been sparked by mystical triangular-headed sorcerer Derren, Whitney-buggering triangular-haired R&B superstar Bobby or even the colour brown.

NETWORKING

I work at the Royal Free Hospital, and this is without a doubt the most commonly-seen wall art in our conveniences. It prizes function above form and is largely administrative in nature. There is one person identifiable by his invariably poorly-spelled missives who is continually trying to arrange a meeting for what he terms as "DIRTIE COCK FUN”. If he had a little more sense, he would realise that
1. Toilet walls are not an efficient forum for ascertaining availability of other parties – he would be far better creating a mail-merge of e-mailing en-masse.
2. Appearing as they do on the walls of a men’s rest-room, very few ladies are going see his messages! Silly sausage.

TRUCKER ART

This is confined to the stained, cratered walls of conveniences in truck stops, truckers cafes and the occasional motorway service station. Prone to bouts of insanity and sociopathic rage, truck driver art is understandably dark in tone. Writings may well lament their loneliness, their penchant for prostitution, child homicide or other activities that preclude them from stopping at more civilised cafeterias such as Little Chefs, etc.
Drawings are often Blake-esque and can prove to be useful tools in the retrospective psychoanalytical procedures involved in the criminal investigations resulting from their rampages.

FOOTBALL

As if droning on about it in verbal conversations wasn't enough, men are renowned for recording their opinions on their most / least favourite football teams and players on the walls of their shitters. I am unsure as to why anyone would choose such a public (yet antithetically private) forum to offer the view that "UNITED ARE BEST" as it invariably draws criticism from others who do not agree. They may think that "CITY ARE THE BEST" and "UNITED", far from being the "BEST", are a bunch of "FUCKWIPES".

It seems to be an argument with no scope for appeasement or resolution. I should imagine it's something to do with exercising deep-seated tribalistic tendencies, but I know as much about football as an earwig knows of the Russian Ballet.

Please don't tell any of my fellow toilet users, though...lest they suggest that I use the ladies instead.

Miaow Am Legend

Pussycats are brilliant. And I can prove it. You see, one day they will rule the world.

Last night I had the pleasure of watching a documentary on the extinction of mankind. After watching the latest episode of The Apprentice, I must say it came as something of a blessed relief.

The gravel-voiced narrator postulated that one day humans will disappear into the ether, like a spaceman's fart into the troposphere. Could be 3 billion years, could be a week next Thursday if the pigs keep sneezing.

Once we're gone, the planet will be empty. Quiet. Clean. An Eden without even an Adam and / or Eve to fuck it all up. The world will shake off mankind like a dose of pubic lice and in the immediate hangover period begin to heal itself.

Buildings will crumble. Holy shit, will they crumble. A good 78% of the documentary was dedicated to computer simulations of national landmarks flaking and disintegrating like a chalky dog turd on a hot pavement.

And not just the recognised landmarks that are destroyed in Hollywood action films on a yearly basis, oh no. Everything. Within 1000 years there would be little evidence that mankind ever infested the planet. From your house to my house to Noel Edmonds's garden gazebo. Every last remnant dissolved.

It's around this time that all other life on the planet would breathe a sigh of relief so deep that Mars will be able to smell what each one of them had for lunch.

Life in the oceans will return to its once plentiful levels, hunted species will once again flourish and household pets will...well, that's where it gets interesting. Their fates will be decided based on a readily quantifiable variable - i.e. how awesome they are.

Pets lacking in awesome...I'm thinking goldfish and budgies for a start....will be fucked. Give them a week at most. Fish in particular are so stupid that they can't even figure out how to breathe air. A fortnight of swimming around in their own shit without a kindly sentient being to sprinkle nutritional flakes into their immediate line of sight and they'll go belly-up.

Budgies are possibly resourceful enough to at least think about escaping, but they are notoriously disorganised and the whole affair would most likely fall apart in the planning stages.



Dogs...well, dogs are a mixed bag. I love them to bits but they are fucking cretins. To my mind, keeping a dog as a pet is like having a friend with severe learning difficulties. One minute they're good as gold, the next they're wiping their arse on the curtains, making indescribable noises and dribbling in your crotch. Leave them in a locked room and they'll be stumped. They'll pace up and down, slowly lose any semblance of sentience that they might have once had, lay down and die. Trust me. I've tried it.

On top of this, a high proportion of dogs are genetic freaks. Bred to buggery over the centuries, they've been engineered to have very silly short legs...or squished up noses which make them look oh-so-cute but are about as much use in hunting as a blunderbuss made out of Mechanically Reclaimed Meat.

In a darkly enjoyable case of Survival of the Least Stupid-Looking, most of the dogs you'd see wowing the Crufts crowds or shivering in one of Paris Hilton's handbags would be dead as shit.

The mongrels would last a bit longer, but it'd be an ugly life. Scavenging the dead, drinking from sewers, they would be little better than the Argos Saturday staff.



Pussycats on the other hand would treat these cataclysmic global changes with utter indifference. If the documentary is to be believed (and how could you not believe a documentary on the distant future that has been produced by the History Channel?) they would hang around for a few hours to see if we were coming back, before packing their bags and nonchalantly pissing off to pastures new.

Skyscrapers now overgrown with flora and infested with mice would become their playgrounds-cum-larders in the sky. Like Tom and Jerry infused with the spirit of Mad Max, it would be quite a sight to behold. Legions of cats romping, hunting, possibly even skipping through hectares of office space reclaimed by jungle. They wouldn't even think about us. Not for a second would they get all misty-eyed at memories of those weird bald monkeys who knew how to use tin openers.

And that's why they're brilliant...because they're our friends, our companions...yet deep in those eyes, deep deep down in those glassy animal eyes burns a healthy indifference to our destruction. Which means that they can only ever land on their feet.

The Pleasure of Annoyance

I am perplexed.

I am perplexed as to why I have spent the last 2 hours playing an old NES game - Mega Man 2. The whole time has been spent on the same couple of screens, being killed by the same handful of bastard enemies.

I can’t honestly say that I enjoyed a single moment of it. Yes, there’s the occasional surge of adrenaline as I think that this time….THIS….TIME…I CAN DO IT….ARGH, SHIT IT! Dead again.

The joypad creaks under my frustrated trembling sweaty attempts to break it in half.

Right…I’ll have another go at it. Start again.

Yep…killed that fella. No problem. Memorised his attack pattern. It’s ridiculous that enemies even have attack patterns that need to be memorised this early on in the game.

But never mind. Soldier on. Yep, three little flying blob things. Can’t get caught in their line of fire. Kill them before they get a chance to shoot that green electric shit. DONE. Brilliant. I can feel the adrenaline flowing into my fingers…heightening my responses. I’m a fucking stealth leopard. I’m on fire. Heart is racing. I can do this. I can do it.

Next screen…it’s the tough one. The dude made out of barrels. Have to shoot the top one first. Jump…shoot….my rectum puckers…mouth dries…yep, all good…..shoot again….he breaks apart…w….WHAT? YOU SHITTING COCK!!! I can be damaged by your lifeless disintegrating corpse?

WHAT?

Bloody Japanese bastard programmers from the 80s. Who made this shit? *checks box* CAPCOM. You fucking miserable arseholes. I hope you all died of something horrible. I hope you had pustules and apthous ulcers. I hope they all burst at once and your last few moments were spent agonisingly writhing around and choking on your own fetid discharge.

And the question pops into my head again….WHY am I doing this?

What in the name of all things holy am I doing to myself?

This behaviour goes against the most base survival instincts. I’m like a guinea pig repeatedly licking the terminals of a car battery for no discernible reason. Even though its fur is starting to crackle and its eyes are beginning to melt….it keeps going back for more.

Then comes the “continue” screen and I’m compelled to hit START and plunge balls-deep back into the whole futile, painful endeavour. It’s like Pavlov’s dog salivating at the sound of the bell, even though his last fifty dinners have been plates of nothing but sand, broken test-tubes and cocktail umbrellas.

It makes no sense.

Similar principal seems to apply to television watching habits. Why do I feel compelled to watch The Apprentice? Do I enjoy it? No. Not a moment of it. It’s an ordeal. I only get through it by playing little games in my head – like deciding which candidate I hate the most, and who deserves the most horrific physical punishment…and even better – what that punishment might be.

The best I’ve come up with so far is force-feeding snow globes to the Estate Agent. Imagine it. Him having to chew through the glass, the stagnant water spilling down his bleeding gullet…and him shitting polystyrene snowflakes and tiny plastic reindeer for weeks after. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.


I suppose I’m just a sucker for self-punishment. Maybe we all are. Maybe we all secretly loath ourselves and deep-down think that we deserve it. Even our unconscious mind annoys us. We’ve all experienced getting a song stuck in our heads. Usually the most irritatingly shite song imaginable that we would never listen to out of choice. But it’s not out of choice. Our unconscious mind has coiled around it without our waking consent, like a snake around a snoozing fat man’s leg. And it then it starts to cut off our circulation.

The most recent ditty to turn my brain blue and numb was the theme-tune from early 60s Gerry Anderson puppet show “Fireball XL5”.

A deep-core drilling platform wouldn’t have been able to bore that one out of my skull. Why? No idea. Ask my unconscious. I’m too scared to go anywhere near it.

Maybe it’s the same reason why some people are into S&M. Different strokes for different folks. No whips and clamps for me, though. My little grey square of concentrated pain is jammed in the gob of my NES.

This time I’m going to do it. This time I CAN! I WILL! I…


AAARGH! FUCK!!!!

....That’s SO good.

Blog Off

Well, shit my arse and call me a cunt.

I've decided to write me a blog. Why? In the words of the immortal B. Piper "Because We (I) Want To." No greater reason than that.

Also, the interweb is a barren and faceless place. Heck you're more likely to see an extreme closeup of someone's uterus than you are of having a good face-to-face with them and finding out what makes them tick.

This is my little bit of the web. Welcome. It has a face. Not a particularly inspiring one, but a face nonetheless. Perhaps you'd like to give it a little kiss. Or a lick. Just around the nostrils. But first take your shoes off. And wash your hands. I don't know what or who you've been fiddling with.

So here I am, a reasonably unremarkable individual babbling into the void. Still listening? Fair enough.

I am writing this epistle from the bowels of the Royal Free Hospital. This is where I spend 8 hours a day. For those who may not know, the Royal Free Hospital is an ugly squat concrete bastard located in North London. It sucks in death and shits out birth. Saline fluid and piss run through its veins. It's a hospital.

The corridors are labyrinthine and dark. And some people have been down here for upwards of twenty years. Their eyesight has dimmed and I fear that will soon begin to bio-luminesce. Happily I have only been stuck here for a little under 3 years, so my genome structure remains unaltered.

You may think that a hospital would be a fascinating place to work. You may think that it would represent a microcosm of society at large, all differences cast aside, all imbued with a wartime spirit - united under the common enemy of disease. A place where altruism is a way of life. This may well be the case in most of the hospital. But I work in the admin department.

My suture is the stapler, my scalpel a pair of blunt-ended safety scissors. I spend my days not on the cutting edge of medicine but in the cluttered backwaters of bureaucracy, supping droplets of data from spreadsheets and chewing on the occasional e-mail. Stuck to my desk like a battery chicken in an iron lung.

But, hey....it's a living. Could be worse. I could be scraping dried skin from the corners of a tramp's mouth, collecting it into tobacco tins and selling it to Nazis. Or I could be in marketing.

I do have pleasures in life, though. I enjoy biscuits. Biscuits with creamy fillings. But not custard cream or bourbons. They can get to fuck. Boring.

So this isn't necessarily a place for me to shower an anonymous audience with spleen and spittle. I'm not going to bark futile bile like a hairy mental shouting at a bus queue. This is no place for that sort of shite. This is not Loose Women.

I shall merely endeavour to shower you all with golden observations on day-to-day shit that interests me. Telly. Films. Games. Animals. Politics. Hopefully there'll be some laughs, there'll be some tears. Maybe even, if there's time, some good hard sex.

JOIN me.