It was my driving test on Wednesday

First things first, let's have no comments on the fact that it took me over a year to get to the point of actually having a driving test. Yes, I know that it took an obscenely long length of time and the combined cost of all my lessons was probably equal to half the cost of our car BUT LET'S NOT TALK ABOUT THAT. I do have a few excuses, I mean:

• For the first half of the year we didn't have a car I could drive so I was running off 45 minutes of driving A WEEK which is hardly an effective learning strategy. As soon as we got Nora (I named our car Nora) I immediately became the king of the road and zoomed about everywhere drive-buying things.
  
• My driving instructor was a woman. A WOMAN. Everyone knows that woman are intrinsically inferior to men in every way (except for breasts) and thus if I'd had an instructor with a beard I would have got to this point a lot earlier.
  
• I was too busy listening to my favorite bands Linkin Park and Green Day while conjuring up lightning bolts and Arab sheiks to bother about driving.

So let's have no more discussion about the pitifully long time it took me to actually book a test. Although thinking about it, if I'd passed my LAST test it would have taken me less than a year which is a respectable time. I have already spoken about why I failed the previous test (instructor was a paedophile, there were quotas, everyone is biased against me, there was NO CHANCE I was gonna rear-end that car, what a twat). Totally not my fault. But that taught me some important lessons about driving tests: Mainly, you have to hope that you get a nice instructor, and then you have to realise that even if you get a really kind one he'll still probably fail you in the first three minutes for the tiniest of mistakes. It's basically like walking along a knife-edge on a huge steak knife, and if you slip one leg will slip down one side of the knife and the other will slip down the other and you'll fall heavily on a sharp fucking blade and cut off your scrotum and probably shear through your pelvis and then you'll have to book another driving test.

So it is fair to say that I was basically shitting myself on the morning before the test. It's strange; I can do exams and that will determine how the rest of my life (education etc) goes and I just breeze through playing Metroid, but a short-term driving test that can be rebooked at any time which virtually everyone in the country is capable of passing at some point or another? Total wig-out. I was literally feeling like throwing up. I sat through my first few lessons @school.com pale faced, shivering, sweating, staring into the middle distance. I think that the teachers thought I was coming down from a toasty heroin buzz, like I was some sort of disgusting junky fuck. Hah - the joke's on them, I only shoot up once or twice a month, and on a purely recreational basis - fine.

Finally I staggered out of school and made my way to the test centre with my teacher. For those of you who do not know, my teacher is a WOMAN. For those of you who also don't know, the driving test basically takes the form of sitting in a car driving it about doing awesome stunts. Such stunts involve the hardcore wheelspinning mashup of "Reversing round a left corner", or the adrenaline-chugging nitro-whoompage of "Three Point Turn" (although you can choose to take it to the XXXtreme by failing to get all the way round the road and turning it into the super-hardcore "Five Point Turn"). You are rated not by how well you drive, but by how many mistakes you make, which I think is pretty pessimistic. You should get bonus points for doing nifty manoeuvres or wheelspinning or driving down a high street at 40mph and not hitting a single thing. But that is not to be.
Every time you make a little mistake (say, not looking properly before pulling out or going a little too fast towards a junction), you get a 'minor' error AKA a little tick on the sheet. You are allowed 15 of these motherfuckers, but get 16 and BLAM you've failed your mofoin drivin test. However, every time you make a bad mistake (skipping a red light, going 70mph down a 30mph road or, say, I don't know, according to my first driving instructor LURCHING SLIGHTLY WHEN CHANGING GEARS twat) you get a dreaded 'major'. One major counts as 16 minors. They could have just said "One Major is a Fail" but NO they had to fecken turn it into a qualitative amount. This means that I can work out just how badly I failed my last test. Out of a total maximum possibility of 16 points lost, I managed to lose forty. FORTY. I FAILED BY MORE THAN TWICE. If I was to just scrape through, I would have required more than TWO driving tests to fail by the amount that I failed last time.

Man that's depressing.

So as you can see I was eager not to repeat my performance and was thus rightly nerve-filled as I sat in the waiting room and looked at the posters on the wall. One of them had a picture of a car wreck with something like "90% of road accidents happen to young drivers". This was hardly reassuring, and I was quite relieved when my instructor came in to take me up up up and awaaaaaaaaaaaay. The initial relief of realising that I hadn't managed to draw last time's paedo-moustache instructor quickly faded when I realised that I was to be invigilated by a scotsman who had one of those lips that look like it sported a moustache until recently when it was accidentally shaved off in the shower. This sense of dread was cancelled when he accused me of skiving off school and I realised that he was actually pretty safe. So that was good.
My first failure of the test came with my inability to unlock the car. I stuck the key in the lock and turned it. I attempted to open the door. It didn't open. I twisted the key again and the car alarm went off. I panicked and twisted it AGAIN and the door opened. Thank fuck. I got in and hit my head on the rear view mirror. I sat down. Instructor sat down in the seat and got out his sheet of paper. I looked at the rear view mirror and saw a reflection of his crotch. After adjusting it a bit, I started up and off we went!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We had gone literally no more than forty seconds before he make a tick on his bit of paper. Oh holy shit, I thought to myself, I have already failed this test before I have even had a chance to crash at high speed into a pram. This is so bad. I spent the rest of the test taking surreptitious glances at his clipboard. Unfortunately I could only get in half-second glances each time, and for some reason every time I always just looked at the top right hand corner, which featured one minor for observations or something. So at least I knew that my observations were only slightly fucked.
So we kept on driving. After doing a surprise emergency stop (Which was a bit of a failure; Scotty shouted STOP and I drove half a second before responding... to be honest I would have killed the invisible kid that invisibly ran across the road; When we were stationary Wallace said "Well I won't ask you to repeat THAT... let's go" which didn't add to my already-mounting paranoia), an utterly UTTERLY buff reverse park and a fucking orgasmic reverse round a corner (no, seriously, as we were slowly going round the corner my instructor started groaning, squealing "YES, YES, DO IT TOM, DO THAT CORNER GOOD" and spanking the dashboard), we started zooming down a Dual Carriageway.
At this point my nerves were SLIGHTLY more settled because of the goodness of my previous manoeuvres. Plus when we'd stopped following the reverse park I'd taken a sneaky peek at his clipboard and confirmed that I still only had one minor for observations. My nerves became re-unsettled again when, in my attempt to change gear, the gearstick somehow LEAPT out of my hand and disappeared into the ether that is known as 'Neutral'. The car started roaring. A thin bead of sweat tricked down my temple. I desperately tried to get it back in gear before the instructor kicked my face in with a 'SERIOUS'. Because even I would say 'Losing all control of the car while going at 40mph down a busy Dual Carriageway' counts as Dangerous driving. Fortunately I managed to get it back into gear without blowing up the engine. I glanced at Hamish briefly. Well, he wasn't writing anything down on the sheet; perhaps he had failed to notice that I had nearly killed him and totalled the car. I breathed a sigh of relief, then sucked in a sigh of horror as the examiner immediately told me to take the next turning, then pull up behind a car (about a car's length away). Was he going to tell me to get the fuck out of the car and drive me back to the center in disgrace? Fortunately he didn't have a chance to do so because I managed to screw up the parking.
"Thomas, pull up about a car's length away. Don't worry about the driveways."
"Okily dokily" said I chirpily. (NB: I did not actually say that)
I drive forward a few feet.
"Still not a car's length away."
I go forward a bit more.
"A car's length."
At this point I realise that I could fail the test for not being able to stop the car a set distance away from another parked car, going at 2mph in a totally abandoned street. I panic and slowly idle it forward.
"Stop!"
I stopped. He nodded and told me to drive off. I do not like it when driving instructors tell me to do this. I get worried that I have somehow committed some grave error and that he has thought to himself 'Well I was going to tell him he's passed, but due to the utter ineptitude of that park I am going to make him drive and possibly fail for another 25 minutes'.
We drove on. He told me to turn left. I'm not gonna lie, I went right. At this point I was having a 'mare, and there was a little monologuer in my head screaming YOU MORON at me repeatedly. Fortunately, there was a louder voice in my head singing that song "Gold Digga", except it was changing the lyrics to make them more politically correct, ie:
I ain't saying she's a gold degro
But she aint messin' wit no broke negro
Over and over and over again. This slightly calmed me down and made me not actually start crying when Haggisymchaggis told me to make a particularly sharp right turn and I didn't quite make it and I had to reverse down the road in a kind of impromptu "3 Point Turn" dealie... TWICE. THIS HAPPEND TWICE. I nearly cried. I actually did. Finally, we came out into the road that would lead back to the test center eventually (I think I cut up a Citroen by accident in pulling out, but fuck the french; at this point I was so sure I'd failed I didn't really care).

"Ok Thomas, take the next road on the left."
So I took the left turn he advised, the one that would take me safely home.
Well I would have done, had I not taken the left turn directly before it which led into what looked like the car park of a Church Youth group. I stopped the car. I looked at him. He looked at me.
"Well, this isn't a road, is it Tom?".
My internal monologuer tied a piece of rope to the top of my skull and hanged himself by the neck until dead. I nearly slammed my head against the wheel in horror. I can't even remember HOW I got out of that car park but I managed it, and I slowly dragged myself and the car to the test centre again. I slumped in my seat, a defeated and nervously exhausted shell of a man. Tears rolled from my pearly eyes. My chin itched.
"I am pleased to say that you have passed your test!" said the Scotsman.

wft

I felt like grabbing him by the shoulders and asking him if he had even been present for the last half of the test (you know, the half when I lost control on a dual carriageway, failed to steer enough to turn a corner TWICE, was unable to judge distances whatsoever, accidentally trespassed on private land and WENT THE WRONG WAY THREE TIMES). But I didn't. I just assumed that he'd just found his long-lost son or was on acid or something and took my pass with good grace and happiness. I thanked God for His kindness in giving me the one crackhead happy scottish driving instructor on the planet and promised to give some money to charity or something. I didn't.
Later that night I saw Waiting for Godot at the theatre (For some reason the sequels, 'Oh, there's Godot' and 'Hey, where did Godot get to?' weren't on, which was a bit of a let-down) It was a really deep piece of surrealistic minimalistic philosophical no I can't pretend that I understood any of it. I thought it was so boring. AND I'M MEANT TO BE APPLYING TO DO ENGLISH LITERATURE AT OXFORD UNIVERSITY
ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM

One-sentence reviews of ten random songs that came on my iPod

I am sitting here in the school library, staring at the five whole free periods stretching ahead of me, wondering why I can't get it into my heart to actually do some work. I know I have a lot of work to do - to be precise, an eight-page sheet to read and annotate, an essay to write on Hamlet's death imagery, two articles to research, a commentary to write, about ten books to read and research, a first draft of a 3000 word History dissertation that I'm meant to have spent the past three weeks researching (I haven't), preparatory study for a similar-length English language essay and, I'm sure, several other pieces of work. So I have a lot to be getting on with. I'd better get cracking.

Hey look some kids with weird-coloured blazers just came into the library. Losers.
So as you can see, I am a busy man. Yet I am taking time out of my supposedly-packed schedule to write a post on my blog reviewing songs that randomly came onto my iPod. omg im a REBEL for misusin library resources!!1!!1!1!1!1!!!1!!;LKZSJFA;SLKDJ. I should go organise a coup or something.

Why do I do this? Why do I waste my time blogging like this? No, seriously, it's an actual question. I'm asking you people; there's literally no point to my bloggage and nobody except crack addicts and perverts comment on here any more. And MYSADDO, my no.1 commenter, who is actually a crack addicted pervert dragqueen. But I digress.

...

Here are some one-sentence reviews of ten random songs that came onto my iPod while I was typing this. Now, just to warn you, I have about 2200 songs so there is a LOT of crap on my iPod. Every time I turn it on a song starts playing and I'm like "What the fuck is this shit?". I listen to it and I realise that I must just be downloading random shit in my sleep, otherwise what other explanation is there for me having SIOUXIE AND THE BANSHEES on myPod? It beggars belief.
Just to paint a wider picture, my iPod tends to freeze every other song, necessitating me to kickstart it by banging it on the desk (no shit, thats the only way to start it up again), and cause the librarians to glare at me in the charming 'we resent you for still having youth and humanity' way. So far they have not made a move to silence me, but who knows when that'll end? One day the iPod will freeze and I'll bang it against the desk and suddenly BLAM they'll leap from their perches as one and rip me limb from motherfucking limb with their talonous razor-claws. My headphones are also a bit screwy so if I move my head they cut out and the sound splutters and dies. But you don't mind about that.

Ready?

HOLD ON TIGHT PEOPLE OH MY GOD HERE WE GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Song 1: Hounds of Love by The Futureheads
Oh fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck, my earphones just died; no sound comes out of them, except for a few half-second bursts of noise. I mean, they WILL work, but only if I turn my head at a 45 degree angle to my shoulders. This hurts my neck and makes me resemble Steven Hawkings. MUST EXTERMINATE MANKIND. Heh. Crazy little cripply man.
Nuts to this. Abort abort abort.

I'm sorry to let you down but this post is OVER. If you were expecting some pithy comment about the music industry, I am sorry to disappoint you. Let me just condense what I was going to write: Jews and Queers. Make of that what you will. The rest of the post you'll just have to imagine, but trust me it would have been hilarious. I'm laughing just thinking about it! Although, to be honest, I would probably have gotten bored halfway through and, after writing great long essays about the first few songs (Although how much can you write about the Futureheads? They're pretty shit, all told), would have had four or five songs in the middle with one word descriptions. ie:

Song 4: Numb/Encore by Linkin Park/Jay-Z
Shit.
Song 5: Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day
Whiny shit.
Song 6: Eleanor Put Your Boots On by Franz Ferdinand
Fuck off.
Song 7: American Idiot by Green Day
NOT THIS SHIT AGAIN.

You get the idea.

I might post again on Thursday if, by the divine will of God, I manage to pass my driving test.
Never happen. I failed the last one for 'Gears'. HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU FAIL FOR GEARS. How does 'gears' constitute a seriously dangerous breach of driving standards? I mean its not like I bunny hopped down the road and nearly took down an old lady; there was ONE lurch. Plus the instructor was weird; he has a little moustache (you all know my opinon of men with moustaches - not to be trusted) and sounded really bored. "Turn leeeeeeeeft. Turn riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Now stop in this woods so I can molest you." Oh yeah I'm pretty sure he was a paedophile. That would explain why he failed me; I refused to dress up in a PVC boyscout uniform and goatse myself for his viewing pleasure.

Plus I nearly rear-ended a car while pulling up to a junction. But that was only at like 2mph, it would have been a slight bump at BEST, and I was fully in control. I just chose to break a bit later than he would have wanted. Twat.

More soon (unlikely).

This post took an entire lesson and a half to write. I could have spent the time so much more fruitfully.

I went night cycling on Saturday

It was bare fun blud. The End.

No, thinking about it I lie, because the words 'I went' implies that I sat up and thought to myself 'I Know what I'll do, I'm going to get up from my warm bed, pull on some dark clothes, then climb onto my bike (which features no front headlamp, a dodgy cracked pedal which could snap at any point, gears that threaten to fall off every time they're changed, semi-flat tyres and a bell that doesn't even work properly - the last time I tried to 'ding' it, the springy bit caught my finger and I nearly fell off) and zoom off into the drunk-driver filled night wearing no helmet or, in fact, any safety gear whatsoever. For jokes.' And that's not even mentioning the massive amount of pain my entire body was in - what with the return of the rowing year, my hands once again consisted of seeping open sores joined together by skin, my ankle was agonisingly full of tiny metal needles, and to make matters worse I had managed to walk into a wall with my bike previously in the day and had slashed a hunk 'o flesh off my finger. To be honest my hands hadn't had the BEST of days, and my misery was compounded by the fact that I'd got up at 630 to practise the aforementioned river-based sport and I was sleepy.

The point of the previous paragraph was to highlight the fact that I did not choose to go night cycling out of some mis-guided sense of adolescent fun (although I will admit, cycling at night is basically the funnest thing ever), but rather because of necessity. For, you see, I was trapped in some peach-coloured hell hole and I needed to get home ASAP. Where was this peach-coloured hell hole? MY GIRLFRIEND'S HOUSE. Yes I have a girlfriend. I might have mentioned her once or twice. A post.

She is pretty hard to get away from, though; I'd just cycled over to visit for a few hours at 630ish, and before I knew it I'd sat through all of Talledaga Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (crap), had done TWO CLUES on the Telegraph Crossword, and had managed to watch Team America: World Police one and a half times, at which point it was 3.30AM. I mean, I could have just slept on the sofa, but to be honest Lucia's weird bulgy-eyed dog would have probably already taken the good spot and would snuffle at me if I kicked it into the kitchen. Plus I had homework to do the next day and I needed to be bright and chipper if I was to do it properly (I ended up not doing it at all, but that is besides the point). Plus the idea of cycling the forty minutes home in the early hours of the morning was really appealing; the last time I did it was was twoish and Kingston town center was totally abandoned; I cycled about whooping madly. Then I was cycling down the other road and some guy pulled up in a car and offered to sell me pills. It was awesome. I was looking forward to some more excitement which to be honest could not be achieved by bedding down on the admittedly comfy sofa of Lucia.

So I climbed on my bike, said "COP YA LATER" to the gf (which made her swoon and probably monologue about how cool I am) and pedalled off into the night. In order to get home, I have to cycle through the following places in the following order:

• Kingston Town Center
  
• Bushy Park
  
• The long-ass Boat Club Road
  
• The slightly shorter road to my house

There now that should be enough information for any passing paedophiles to track down where my girlfriend lives and rape her to death. Get to work chaps, but give me a bell just before you do it. I just came up with a cunning Fargo-Like plan. Basically, you work out where she lives and then break into her room and get a-rapin', while I cycle up to the house. You can rape her like four times then I'll jump in and pretend to bash you on the head with a cricket bat. You swoon and say "Oh he got me" then run off. The gf'll be too dizzy to even know what the fuck's going on, so you'll get to molest some kids, I'll get loads of brownie points for saving the day, and everyone wins.

But I digress. I was a bit disappointed by Kingston Town Center; the last occasion that I cycled through it (at like 1.45 on a Wednesday) it was all spooky and deserted. But this time, four hours later on in the night, there were loads of random pissheads wandering about, sitting on benches, and generally ruining the ambiance. But I suppose that's to be expected; Kingston is a bustling metropoliton centre, according to the posters. What I like looking at is the random scum sitting outside ASDA or walking down the side roads. Why do you need to sit outside ASDA at 3:50 in the morning? Just go home and sit on a sofa! Weirdos.

Usually I go straight through Bushy Park. This is also quite cool because its all pitch dark and I can see the deer playing on the swings on the children's playground. No shit man; the deer are literally going on the roundabout and playing in the sandpit and stuff. They think that I don't notice them but I see. I see. They always look at me really moodily as I cycle past in the pitch black, and I sometimes scream MWAHAHAHA as I pass them and make them run away. Loser deer.
However, this time I decided to go the long way round the Park. Don't ask me why.

"Why, Thomas?"

Ok, invisible voice, I will tell you why: I couldn't remember if the deer cull was on. The deer cull is an exciting yearly event when the park rangers zoom about in 4x4s in the middle of the night and blow up the deer with grenade launchers. Apparently members of the public are not allowed in the park when this is going on. I do not see the logic of this; I would pay good money to be able to go into the park and watch a heavily-drugged up topless Park Ranger with a bandanna zoom about in a jeep pulverising stags. However, for some reason they lock the gates when this is going on and cyclists can't enter. I suppose I could have checked to see if the cull was on, but come on people, it was four in the morning and pitch black, I was in no mood to cycle all the way to the park gate and check when it was initially much easier to just cycle round the outside without changing direction. Which is what I did.

As I slowly made my way down the long straight road that led past Bushy Park, I thought about how awesome it would be if I could drive, as I was overtaken repeatedly by young men driving flashy cars going far too fast. One guy went so close to me that I wobbled a bit and wove my fist gingerly in the air. This got me thinking about how awesome it would be to get hit by a car and thrown onto the grass verge. I immediately began to compose a plan for what I'd do. If the car driver left me there, I would assess my injuries. If I could walk, I would probably make my way to safety. Or I'd phone my mum. But what if my phone was damaged? I would flag down a passing car and hitch a lift to Ogg's house, which is closer. "Excuse me Mr Ogg" I would say "I was just hit by a car, can I sleep on your sofa? I'll be gone first thing in the morning." And then I'd text Lucia "I got hit by a car," and nothing else, which would make her REALLY worried but then I'd go to bed and wake up to fifty anxious messages on my phone and I would feel happy at being loved so. But what would I do about my bike? I would probably chain it to a lamp-post. But the lamp-posts were too thick to allow my bike-lock to fit! (Seriously, all this stuff went through my mind I am not even lying) I would probably just leave it there and hope it would not be stolen, and would then return with my father the next day to pick it up in our mauve car...

I could continue but you get the idea. I have an active imagination. My imagining continued later on in the voyage as I was cycling along some scary dark road in the middle of a reservoir. "How freaky would it be," I said to myself "To pass a crashed car... like a really recently crashed car... on its side, wheel still spinning, steam rising from the tarmac, a little bit of blood splashed about the place, but there's Nobody Inside. Like it's just abandoned." Just to paint a picture, the crashed car is silver. I tell you, that idea properly freaked me out for some reason, and I started to have visions of being kidnapped and castrated by a passing maniac, so I suddenly sped up my cycling to get past the aforementioned imaginary wreck and turned up my iPod.

Oh yeah, my iPod. When one is night cycling, it is natch v important to have a decent soundtrack which can be obtained from an iPod. Night-Cycling music is very specific; every song must be Significant. Thus, Hey by the Pixies is an acceptable NC Tune. However, "Go It Alone" by Beck is not. Here are some more examples:

Heavens Above (Hixxxy Bonkers XI Remix) Adam Harris = Acceptable.
Trucker Hat by Bowling for Soup = Not acceptable
Under the Bridge by Red Hot Chili Peppers = Acceptable
Anything else we have ever produced by Red Hot Chili Peppers = Not acceptable, ever
Lithium by Nirvana = Acceptable
Lithium by Dilana = Not acceptable
Crimson and Clover by Simon and Garfunkel = Acceptable
Sesame Street Soundtrack by some cunt = Not acceptable
Anything Greenday have ever written = NOT ACCEPTABLE

You get the idea I am sure. And I'm sure that you understand that it is necessary to be constantly pressing the 'Skip forward' button on the iPod to get some decent tunage. What you may not be aware of is that it is also necessary to speak to said iPod, to entreat it if you will, so that it will use its eternal wisdom of the shuffle feature to pick out some sweet cycling tunage. I'm not joking, at 430 on Sunday morning I was cycling through Sunbury literally yelling "Come on baby, come on baby, gimme some sweet sweet sugar... oh for fucks sake... MARS VOLTA? Boo! Why is this even on you? i don't remember downloading it. Ok, next song... Come on, come on, gimme something good... GET IN BRISK & HAM. I love you iPod."

And the iPod rewards me by not freezing halfway through the song and forcing me to bang it against the bike frame to restart (for some reason that is the only way to turn it on now). Or it punishes me for my blasphemy by playing something from Ray of Light. The iPod is a cruel master.

Actually I was getting pretty nervous approaching the end of the journey, because I wanted a decent tune to finish up on (yes, I like to end my cycle journeys in style, sue me). So I started to rapidly flit through the tunes. This is always risky with myPod, which likes to take its sweet time to think about things and punishes a too-swift changing of songs with rapid freezing, unhappy iPod sign, screaming and shutdown. I was getting properly worried as I cycled past Squires - what if I couldn't find a good song? I might have to end my 4:40AM cycling listening to fecken TY UNWIN. Which would be - and I don't think I'm being melodramatic when I say this - a total unmitigated fucking disaster. Who is Ty Unwin, and why the fuck is he on my iPod? Luckily, though, La La Love You by the Pixies came on and, breathing a sigh of relief, I zoomed into the drive whistling loudly at 4.42AM.

It was the latest cycle journey of my life, in which absolutely nothing of note happened. And you just read 2132 words about it. So who is the loser here? You. I bet you were expecting something exciting to happen. You kept reading, hoping that I'd save an injured badger or foil a midnight drugs deal or something BUT NO THE BIGGEST EXCITEMENT WAS ME NOT BEING ABLE TO FIND A GOOD SONG TO LISTEN TO ON MY iPOD. MWAHAHA.

I finally went to bed at 5. Seeing as I had got up at 6.30 in the morning, this meant that I had been on my feet for 22.5 hours. I could have easily lasted the other one and a half. Now I understand how Jack Bauer does it. What a pussy; I was so impressed that he'd gotten no sleep. But it's actually really easy, and I did like twice as much as stuff as he did. Boo. Try rowing for five hours then spending another solid hour and a half cycling to and from the house of an unreadable female Bauer you pansy. THEN you'll se what true manliness is, you gravelly-voiced slowpoke.

The End.

ps. I could have been fixing my Personal Statement or doing some History homework or writing an English essay in the hour it took me to write this. But no.

Who needs wit when you can be pointlessly cheeky? (EDIT)

Does anybody here watch Grange Hill?

Nobody? Good, it's shit now. But does anybody remember back when it was good? And when I say that, I mean about five serieses ago, before they moved the school to the middle of Liverpool and had that twat guy Togger or Tigger or whatever he was with the orange skin turn up and fuck it all up? Yeah? Before the stupid video game style opening? Anybody remember that?

The last proper series of Grange Hill was cracking. There was this evil deputy head guy who hit a pupil and tried to get him thrown out of school and who was really really mean to the kids. I think he ended up blowing up the school at the end of the season by accidentally setting fire to it (how do you blow up a school with a single match? I mean, just showing us a shot of some bottles in a chemistry laboratory is not enough to suspend my belief, but anyway). I can't even remember if it was established if he was killed in the resulting HUGE blast or if he escaped. I like to think he did, and even now I hope that he'll wander back into set, wearing a permanently hood-up hoodie á la Sam in Hollyoaks, and murder a few pupils. Oh I can only dream.

Why am I even talking about this? Oh yeah, well basically I was remembering the second-to-last episode, the one when the good pupils of Grange Hill realised that Mr Von Dastardly was evil and tried to stop him by putting his picture up on the website (I LOVE how I remember all of this but if you ask me who Deborah Tanning was, I'm stumped). Basically, Mr Von Dastardly found out and went a bit batshit. He stole a semiautomatic shotgun from the PE shed and marauded around the school, blasting holes in pupils left right and center. BLAM there goes the history teacher's chest-cavity. BOOM take that token black girl. CRASH oh NO KIDS YOUR HEADMASTER DOESN'T HAVE A STERNUM. It was such a good episode, and it ended with him mowing down a bunch of 11 year olds, straightening his tie, and being like "Stay in school kids... FOREVER" and cackling at his pathetic witticism.



Fucken dog. Ok FINE the shotgun thing probably didn't happen, which makes the previous two paragraphs totally redundant, especially as the rest of this post hinges on the idea of running around school with a shotgun killing 11 year olds. Which is what I would have quite happily spent most of today doing. But let's have a memento-style flashback because I'm smart like Ian McEwan and I understand the basics of non-chronological storytelling.

The day didn't start well. As I walked along the street to school, some little kid leant out of a car window and yelled "ALRIGHT MATE" to me. I don't know why, but I take serious offence at being greeted by people I don't know, especially when it is done in such a flippant manner. It also annoyed me that I looked round while walking to see his ugly little mockingly grinning face. It triply annoyed me that my legs kept walking and I was unable to think of an appropriately witty comeback. At all. I had essentially been outwitted by an 11 year old yelling "ALRIGHT MATE". I mean, that's not even a joke. It's just a greeting. I'm sure Oscar Wilde would have been able to slice that little shit down with a well placed blast of irony. But I was ironyless. I just kind of gaped and walked along the road listening to the Subways.

This happened another two times in the next few hours; small children waved at me and yelled ALRIGHT MATE which annoyingly jolted me out of my intellectual reveries about what it'd be like if there were an infinite dimensions, and the horrifying sense of the vastness of infinity. When you are thinking about an alternative dimension in which the only difference in the whole of human history is the fact that you happen to be wearing a green shirt instead of a blue one on a given day, being distracted by some pimply sugar-hopped eleven year old is hardly welcome.

This just adds to my hypothesis that young people nowadays do not respect their elders. When I was a little third year, I always respected my elders. In fact, I lived in mortal fear of the mighty 6th Formers who could crush me with their mighty strength and wisdom. I vowed that I would be friendly and nice to all the little implings when I was a 6th Former, and would spread peace and light across the galexy. And now, when I'm the oldest pupil in the school and am polite enough to not ram them out of the way, to occasionally hold open a door for them, to abstain from smacking them across the back of the head, what do they do? They take the piss and greet me impudently. Little shits. I don't think they're even particularly victimising me; they seem to just be generally cheekier to everyone. Fuckers.

My only consolation was that these kids probably haven't hit puberty yet and its unlikely that they had ever kissed a girl. This is my only comeback whenever I am outwitted by some dipshit 11 year old, and when the third little kid leapt out at me from the top of the biology staircase and yelled HELLO at me, I was ready.
"Oh yeah, well your balls haven't even dropped yet AND I HAVE A GIRLFRIEND," I yelled. The kid fell to his knees. His bottom lip quivered. He started to cry.
"IT'S RIGHT! I'M A PATHETIC LOSER! I JUST WANT ATTENTION!" he howled. I took no notice and picked him up by his tie. I proceeded to batter his ugly little monkey-head against the wall for like ten minutes before throwing him down the stairs and leaping down to crush his puny little broken body under my steel-capped hobnailed boots and



Ok fine I went up to hide in the library. There's no shame in that, though; our new library is buff. It has new doors and fancy computers and everything. I would pretty much sleep with it if it had some sort of manipulatable orifice. I spent like the entire day today slumped on a comfy chair in the reading room studying a book about Vietnam. Man that war sounded shitty. But the idea of being allowed to shoot innocent children (especially those who say ALRIGHT MATE in a vietnamese accent... "Alwight Matey I love you Longtime Ten Dorrar") is attractive. I might have fallen asleep on the chair, but I eventually got up and decided that it was time to go eat some food. As I left I noticed one particular 4th year who I have named "Kiwi Head". Not because he is from New Zealand, but because his head is shaped like a fucking kiwi. He has black hair, braces, and a permanent shit-eating grin plastered across his face. I basically hate him with my eternal soul.

Kiwi Head was grinning at me. I gave him a glare that should rightly have melted the skin off his ugly little face and strode manfully out of the library.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

What the fuck?

The beeper next to the door went crazy as I walked through the door scanner thing. Almost immediately one of the valkerie-like librarians dropped silently down from the ceiling and grabbed me. "COME BACK" she screamed. "YOU SET OFF THE SECURITY SCANNER". I would have done more to beat her down and flee the library, but I was temporarily reminded of the the last time I set off a security scanner; It was exactly four years ago yesterday, and I was travelling to New York dressed as an arab when the box of grenades I had labelled "For hijacking the plane and killing all the passengers" set off the beeper. I managed to kick one of the guards to the floor and I was running full-speed towards the plane screaming ALLAH when somebody took me down. Man, that took some explaining but I'm pretty sure they were satisfied with my explanation.

"TURN OUT YOUR POCKETS" hissed the librarian. Across the library, Kiwi-Head started sniggering. "Send him to prison!" he yelled. His wit gained a drumroll and a round of applause from a hidden studio audience. Valkerie-woman made me take off my jacket, took all the stuff out of it, piled it up on the counter, jacked my chewing gum and insinuated that I had stolen a piece of literature before finally ripping off a security tag that had been hidden in my pocket by somebody or other. I'm not going to insinuate who. Fucking Kiwi-Headed twat. I can only hope that his Kiwi-shaped head is a result of some huge brain tumour and that he'll be in a coma by the end of the year. Yeah.

Then the librarian made me write MY NAME DOWN on the library naughty book as apparently I like to steal tags from magazines. Ladies and gentlemen IS THAT JUSTICE? Luckily, I managed to track down Kiwi-boy later. I kidnapped him, beat him up a bit, then stripped him naked, suspended him from the ceiling using huge hooks, punched him a bit more, stuck long sharp metal pins through his jaw, then heated up a huge bowl of boiling hot Tempora Oil and tipped the pan over his stupid little kiwi shaped



Fuck's sake. Today has simply proved my totally ineffective position on this planet. I can't wait til I leave school and go on to be ineffective somewhere else. Like prison. Or MacDonalds. I'll have my revenge some day. Perhaps.

This post is the kind of thing that gets mentioned as a possible contributing factor in a follow-up to a news story ending in the words "...before turning the gun on himself."

EDIT: Turns out that it was actually a certain tall gangly stupidly named big-nosed art student in my year who put the tag on my blazer (you can try to guess who he is), and not Kiwi-Head. So sorry Kiwi-Head, you are innocent. But I still think you're a cunt. Fucking twatfaced bastard Kiwi-Headed little shit.

I will blog tomorrow

I WILL

The story of my birthday (+ digressions, natch)

Unless you have never met me before, have never read either of my two awesome blogs, or have been cut out of my life for the past few months, you must be aware that it was recently my 18th birthday. This was a pretty big event for me, being -as it was- the end of my childhood, beginning of adulthood, a realisation of my true existence on this planet as a member of humanity etc etc etc. It also represented my first opportunity to LEGALLY BUY ALCOHOL!!!!!! IN A SHOP!!!!!!! And - more excitingly for me - legally buy SPRAY PAINT!!! Pretty exciting shit.

Ma bday wz on the 1st of September, a date famous for England's historic 5-1 victory against Germany, being the birthdate of Romeo Beckham, and the 355-Day anniversary of the 9/11 Terrorist Joke-Ups. I decided to be a rebel and stay up all of Thursday night so that I could welcome my impending adulthood in style, listening to live rock music in a club full of semi-naked women and sipping dry martinis. I actually ended up watching a repeat of a tv show about pathetic fat englishwomen who still breastfeed their children, drinking three-day-old paintwater from a pint-glass. Oh well, at least I got to enter adulthood looking at some nipples, albeit horribly distended ones with weird albino kids hanging off them. Plus I was talking to the gf on the phone like a real man. So all in all, the transition from boy to MAN was pretty good.

"I'm now a man," I confided to her when Teletext switched from 23:59:59 to 00:00:01 (I swear it managed to miss out 00:00:00 somewhere along the line. I'm sure that this must have some serious moral or scientific ramifications, but I am no rocket scientist and thus the missing second of space-time means nothing to me).
"Very good, she said. "But every second I waste talking to you, I fail to spend working on your birthday card, which is like a third done and is getting more crap by the second. Happy Birthday."

(NB: My girlfriend is some kind of freak who thinks that spending eight+ hours working on an incredibly intricate birthday card is a good way to show her appreciation of my talents. It is, but come on love, effort. When it's her birthday she's getting a £2.99 'Happy Holidays' number from the cornershop with a watercolour picture of a farmhouse on the front to function as both a Christmas AND birthday card... you see, her birthday is close enough to Christmas for it to work! YES!!!! And she will appreciate this card because it Shows That I Care.)

I took her snubbage of me as a hint to fuck off, so I ended the conversation in my customary manner (interrupting her mid-sentence to yell BYE!!! and then slamming the phone down as hard as I could. Then pressing the "End Call" button), and collapsed to bed in the very very early hours of Friday morning (at 12.47AM, exactly... rebél), safe in the knowledge that a: I was a man and that b: My girlfriend was losing hours of sleep JUST TO ENTERTAIN ME. This devotion backfired, however; she woke me up THREE TIMES in the night with text message updates about said card, the final being "It's 6:30 and your card looks like shit, I'm going to bed".

I was awoken at 8 in the morning by my little brother strolling into my room saying "Happy Birthday, I have to go rowing so get up and open your presents, you dirty fuck."

-- (Perhaps I should take a second here and explain why my little brother was going rowing YET I WAS NOT. Basically my little brother is an adorable fellow who wants to be like me in every way. He'll argue against this hypothesis but I'm the older one and I know best about everything. In wanting to be like me, he has decided to embrace the idea of rowing and thinks that going to every training session is the key to promotion. However, he's about a year and a half behind me in his enthusiasm for rowing - I've already gone through the 'keen' stage, followed swiftly by the 'slow realisation of how things really work', 'crushed hopes', 'broken spirit', 'bitter resentfulness', 'jaded cynicism' stages in that order. I have finally arrived at the 'wry, wistful, knowing sense of my own futility' stage. This basically means that there was no fucking chance of me going to a rowing session on the morning of my 18th birthday, no matter how apparently important it was, no matter how little I actually had planned for the morning of said birthday. I was just not going to go out of the principle of the thing. My little brother, who has yet to be crushed by the tedious nepotism of the Boat Club, is welcome to go straight ahead and train if he wants to, though.)

So yes, I leapt gleefully from my bed, wearing nothing but a pair of skimpy sleeping shorts, and gayly ran down the stairs. I ripped open my many presents, rejoyced at the good taste of my family, and then rejoiced more at the sudden influx of birthday cash from my extended family who, after eighteen years of fairly crap presents, have apparently finally realised that all I really want from life is MONEY (for a full rundown of my gifts, please read Hatchet Zombie over the next few months). I have to highlight my trendy new jeans and even trendier new t-shirt for real awesome stylez, though.

After my spirited stand against the evils of going to rowing training, I spent the next hour lying on the sofa in my underwear watching a repeat of the OC before pulling on my clothes and rolling into Kingston to visit the squaw and get the card which had been built up so much in my mind that it would basically be impossible to be as good as I'd imagined it being. But what do you know - it was actually pretty good. The daft bint had painted me a full A4 masterpiece of things I liked and song lyrics and shizzle, all surrounded by kerazy swizzling colours and shit. It was bare good blud. I was quietly impressed, and immediately framed it and put it up on the all in my house just to show all the party-goers later on (I'm not joking). She was embarassed. I didn't care.

Because she's my girlfriend and she gets mortified if people look at her work, I've decided not to stick the picture on the internet so that everyone can pick it apart and mock her for the amount of effort she put in to entertain a dickhead like me. I do this because I care about her feelings. Of course, I am lying. Here it is:


Click for bigger.

HEY EVERYONE LOOK AT THAT PICTURE!!! LUCIA DID THAT!!!! LOOK AT IT!!! Fuck man, that is actually SO GOOD. LSB is pretty talented actually. I can't believe that I was the lucky one who spiked her drink, date-raped and impregnated her and now is forcing her to marry me so that her future brood will be able to go to heaven when they die. Five points to anybody who can identify the song lyric going through this masterpiece (no, not Debaser, you dickhead).

But... WAIT A SECOND... What's that I said beforehand? "Party-goers". WHAT? PARTY-GOERS? HUH? PARTY? Yes, people, I managed to finally succeed having a party at my house. I did this by telling my parents that I would be able to keep the invite list down to eighteen people. This quite obviously was not going to happen, but we all pretended that that was the plan, even while the piece of paper featuring the list of people who had been invited steadily got more and more filled up with small writing, crossings out and addendums and the amount of beer my dad bought grew steadily larger and larger. Eventually the list was more like forty people... and I still didn't invite you!!!! Yes, you, you know you know who you are, you person who conspicuously failed to be invited. AHAHAHAHA. I don't actually know who I am referring to here, but I'm sure that I've planted the seed of doubt in some poor bastard's mind.

Just to really twist the dagger further, here's a picture of some of what you missed out on:



Just to pour some barbeque sauce and flesh-eating HIV ants into the already bleeding dagger-wound, here's a rundown of all the booze purchased especially for my party by my folks (this does not feature the rest of the beer/hard alcohol brought by the rest of the partygoers, which was pretty plentiful)

• 2x 24 crates of bottled Holsten Import
  
• 1x 24 crate of bottled Budweiser
  
• 1x 24 crate of bottled Stella Artois
  
• 2x 18 crates of Smirnoff Ice for the girls
  
• 1x 24 crate of bottled Grolsch
  
• 1x 24 crate of canned Stella Artois
  
• 2x bottles of Pimms

Pretty good, eh? AND YOU DIDN'T GET ANY OF IT BECAUSE YOU WEREN'T INVITED!!!! AHAHAH!!!! Loser.

Is it any surprise that I can't remember much of the actual party? Just fragments, people, fragments. I remember candles. I remember a sudden influx of people at like 10:30, including a guy who gave me an awesome yellow and black Von Dutch hat which I am going to wear to every rowing session from now on. That guy later broke a bottle of beer over the head of someone else, which was pretty funny. I remember being in a hole for like ten minutes. I tried to get out, but I kept getting sucked back in. That was pretty weird. Then a couple of scallywags tried to christen my tent (Which I think of affectionately as the "Tent of Love") with some actual sticky disgusting love. Luckily, the Von Dutch guy (who has some lovely stubble), picked up a passing girl and threw her bodily onto the tent, flattening it and (hopefully) the raging hormones sloshing about within. I remember being given a huge leather jacket by Mike and Ogg. This is like a proper black-man motorcycle leather jacket, which went SO WELL with my new hat. Made me look bare ghetto blud. I doubt I'll ever take either of them off ever again. I seem to remember somebody being violently ill next to my fountain, and then me being forced to drag her by the nose to a car. I'd swear that a load of glow-sticks appeared from somewhere, and some passing cool person gave me a pen that had arms and a little button on the back and if you pressed the button THE ARMS PUNCHED. I recall sitting on a wall with my homegirl and motivational guru Cassie for about five minutes having a deep spiritual conversation about how good I was. She told me a story about the Terminator, if I remember correctly. Then two indians that I had never met before kind of walked into my garden and shook my hand. I was like SUP YOU ARE RANDOM INDIANS I DON'T KNOW. Then they asked me if I wanted to go out clubbing with them and I was like SUP RANDOM INDIANS NO BECAUSE THIS IS ACTUALLY MY 18TH BIRTHDAY PARTY! If my memory serves, I kept grabbing random people by the arm and dragging them to my fridge just to show them how much beer I had stored within. Which was a lot. I remember eating chicken satays. I remember lying on the floor laughing heartily. I remember playin' black music and rapping along like a proper little homeboy. I remember getting a good (but allowably fidgity, considering the surroundings) night's sleep. I remember ice.

You know what I don't remember?

Anybody crying.

MY PARTY WAS THE FIRST ONE I HAVE BEEN TO ALL FUCKING YEAR IN WHICH I DIDN'T COME INTO CONTACT WITH ANYBODY CRYING, BEING OVER-THE-TOP DRAMATIC OR BITCHING HEARTILY ABOUT THEIR BEST FRIENDS. I think that this makes my party pretty much the best event ever.

You are SO jealous you didn't get invited. BTW if anyone still wants to send me any birthday money, please, go ahead. Get in touch via comments. Buff.

Oh fuck, school in two days. Have I started homework? Have I FUCK.

PS: Pretty much every dialogue featured in this post is either embellished, poorly remembered, or totally fictional. I can't remember conversations very well; I just tend to recall the gist of the details. You know, the tone, the mood, etc. And I'm a boy so I misread a lot of moods. So basically, in all likeliness very little of this post actually happened.