Growing old with 'dignity'

People over the age of 40 currently have a monopoly over the right to bitch about getting older. In my self-righteous, bleating opinion, this is an injustice which needs to be corrected. I often complain about the vast swathes of previously unexposed forehead that now prominently mocks me every time I look in the mirror, the noticeably longer time it takes to recover after pathetically brief periods of exercise and, most acutely, the fact that hangovers now have a habit of lingering like a particularly disliked party guest for days at a stretch. But voice these grievances to someone over 40, for instance my grandmother, and they will spit in your face, tell you that you can’t possibly complain about aging before you’ve even hit thirty and order you to go get them a fresh bottle of gin from the corner shop.

This doesn’t seem right to me. Surely the beginning of the path from our toned, sexually insatiable peak towards incontinence, senility and death is the most painful? Ok, those first few hairs left in the comb might be met with overconfidence, but when you first realise that there is a very definite, lonely island of hair forming, it’s a defining moment that has you crunched in the foetal position, crying hysterically, smashing mirrors and screaming at people not to look at you. So I’ve been told.

Similarly, it is the first realisation that the morning after a game of squash you can no longer walk without looking like a man who has had an erotic experience with a horse that hurts the most. By the time you reach your later years you should long have come to acknowledge and accept this. My point, if there is one in amongst this drivel, is that it’s the proximity to the prime you are moving away from which intensifies the snivelling, bed-soiling grief. I should therefore be well within my rights to complain loudly and continuously next week on my birthday, about how I can no longer eat what I want without ballooning into a morbidly obese freak and how I’m older than far too many professional sportsmen. I suspect this will make for an excellent evening for everyone I’m with.

Along with the imminent approach of the next annual milestone to my death, I was reminded of this subject by the fact that midweek I had considered something that had happened in the year 2000 and had instinctively thought of it as being not so long ago. It was only after a worryingly long period of further reflection that I realised this was ten bloody years ago. A decade. How the fuck did that happen? The only logical conclusion is that I’ve been in a coma for at least 6 years and nobody has gotten around to telling me yet.

Gaddafi could win England the world cup

In three weeks time I’ll be on my way to South Africa, where, according to a thousand news reports and gleeful warnings from family and friends, I can expect to be mugged, stabbed, shot and most likely raped within moments of setting foot off the plane. My Dad is clear in his mind that I have no chance of surviving the trip and has not been shy about gravely informing me of my imminent demise. That said, this is the same man who believes that anywhere further than the boundaries of Chichester is some form of post apocalyptic, lawless waste land. Mad Max was a documentary about Guildford in his eyes.

Normally I invest far too much hope and emotion in the England team prior to major tournaments. This has, without fail, been paid back only in crushing disappointment and vehement anger as the latest shower of wasters to wear the England shirt break the spinal column of my hopes and piss over the twitching corpse of my dreams. This time, conscious of prior heartbreak and certain that my physical presence will serve as a poisonous curse, I am solidly expecting nothing but miserable failure. It’s not that I am superstitious. People that genuinely believe in the factor of luck are clearly in the same league as Voodoo shaman, Scientologists and Christians. I just think England are far more crap than I generally believe they are when we start approaching a tournament and I want to set the bar low.

Another factor which adds to the bizarre sense of ominous foreboding that, now I think about it, I wouldn’t normally associate with two weeks paid holiday, is the fact I’m stopping in Libya. Nothing personal against the place, despite the instant connection you’d make with planes falling out of the sky onto Scottish villages, but there is a currently a raging diplomatic bitch fight ongoing between Libya and my country of residence. To sum up the situation, the son of Colonel Gaddafi, the esteemed, self titled leader of Libya and his charming wife, beat seven shades of shit out of a couple of staff in a luxury Swiss hotel. The two were arrested and held, before, as is obligatory for rich and famous people in such situations, all charges were dropped and they were released. Gaddafi, acting with commendable restraint and dignity, then responded by withdrawing billions of assets from Swiss banks, cancelled flights between the countries, had Swiss people in Libya arrested for no reason, shut down Swiss subsidiaries and, as a final, totally understandably flourish, called for Islam to declare a jihad on Switzerland and it’s residents. I shall therefore, in all likelihood, not be wearing my I ♥ Zurich t-shirt during the lay over

...unless of course you believe in fate, luck and the inevitable failure of any team I support in a tournament I am attending. In which case I will happily hand around a petition in the streets of Tripoli, calling for Gaddafi's son to be expedited, whilst eating Toblerones, yodelling and performing any other manner of offensive stereotype you can think of. That should do the trick.

Robin Hood

Spoiler alert. If you have not watched the latest version of Robin Hood I am about to reveal a central and key point of the film. It is a reeking pile of fecal matter. Had I not needed to use the cinema’s toilet, the entire affair would have been a gratuitous waste of time that I’d have still been lamenting on my death bed.

The first words Russell Crowe spoke as Robin Hood genuinely made me laugh loudly from my seat at the back of the cinema. His take on the midlands accent makes him sound like a mixture of Sean Bean with throat cancer and a broken food disposal unit.

There’s really no redeemable feature to be found anywhere. The plot is a fresh take on the story, but only in the way that dropping a bag of saucepans is a fresh take on a Mozart piano concerto. The new angle serves only to provide an agonisingly slower plot route which bypasses most opportunities to provide some form of relief in the form of brutal battle scenes. Those that survive are almost spoof like in the way they disappoint, with slow motion screamed ‘noooooo’s’ producing troubling volumes of spittle and dissatisfyingly little blood.

Asides from a comically bad plot, poor acting and terrible direction, the editing stands out as a monument to awfulness, having been performed, it appears, by an autistic chimp with a chainsaw. Characters appear at seemingly random points in equally random places and previously unmentioned points take on sudden significance, leaving you with the impression that someone has sat on the remote.

All in all, I would recommend that you avoid the biting frustration I felt at having wasted two hours of my precious weekend, and do something more likely to offer a satisfying evening, like pouring lemon juice into open wounds.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is a strange place. Part of my weekend was spent there, in a cloudy haze from which, two days later, I am yet to fully emerge. Dispatching forward planning and foresight with contemptful disdain, I was left a week before the trip with the option of remortgaging or taking a 9 hour train journey. Not having a mortgage, I went with the train. It shouldn’t have been that bad as in a masterstroke of adaptability that would have shamed the bastard love child of Ray Mears and Bear Grylls, I loaded up the laptop with films and programmes and prepared to nest myself in for the journey. Which would have been fine, had I not forgotten the goddamn train was European and the goddamn laptop has a goddamn Swiss power cable. What’s the point really? One additional little prong was standing between me and 9 hours being pleasantly tucked into my carriage, watching films and being brought tea. Now I faced 9 hours of looking out of the window and waiting until I needed to go to the loo again to break the monotony. I hated that prong. The prong was worse than any Nazi peadophile at that moment. In my mind I tried playing out all the political explanations which have kept the Swiss from joining the EU and thus adapting to the uniform plug socket convention, so that I could nurture and dwell on the hate, but realised I knew nothing of the subject so instead looked at my watch, which indicated it was midday, and resignedly headed for the train’s bar.

Once I arrived and joined up with an assorted group of reprobates and degenerates the rest of the weekend took a predictable turn. Perhaps the most interesting point to be made is the astounding difference between a weekend spent drinking and one spent smoking heroic quantities of cannabis and, as a direct result, treating alcohol with the well earned suspicion and caution that 3 years of university ensured I was aware it deserved at that point. I woke after the first night having slept like a corpse, as fresh as a heavily drugged daisy. The rest of the time was spent wandering from one coffee shop to the next, with a wait of at least a few minutes at each junction or cross road as we stood, utterly confounded by this sudden choice in directions, in a futile wait for someone in the group to make a decision on everyone’s behalf. The fact that much of Amsterdam looks the same, combined with the availability of high grade concentrated weed makes the place a perfect storm for getting lost and we ended up covering every inch of the city.

One of the highlights of the apartment we stayed in, other than the proximity to a store full of crisps, cakes and other munchies, was the guest book in which hundreds of the previous guests had left messages. These messages perfectly illustrated the vast spectrum of madness, brilliance and retardedness of people in general, but especially after a weekend in the Dutch capital. I have copied some highlights below:

The philosophers:




This made me sit down and ponder the question for half an hour, before being distracted for the subsequent 45 minutes by a small crack in the ceiling.

The jokers



In case you can't tell, that yellow area which the reader is being encouarged to lick is some form of powder stuck to the page. There is a good chance that this was a small quantity of MDMA or similar drug, but a better chance that at least one person had subsequently rubbed their penis over the area.

The group of 'lads'





I have never been more certain about anything. Whoever wrote this buys Zoo and / or Nuts magazines on a regular basis.

The artist



Smoking, bearded, semi-robot man. You have to love the Finnish.