Friday, December 19, 2003
Thank Any Passing Deity that this week has ended (me being one of those types that tends to follow the TV listings, so today is the last day of the week and tomorrow the start of the next one (phew, got out of that one)). I don't know why but I've been down all week. The trick has been to try and keep myself occupied. If I can do that then I'm just about okay, such as the usual pre-parental visit clean of the flat to try and cut down on the amount of time my Mum spends just tutting in disgust that I didn't inherit her standards of cleanliness (or crucially, her habit of getting someone to come round once a week to clean her house). The suspected leaking pipe/washing machine now appears to be just a puddle of water from when I last mopped the kitchen floor and I've now got the docking port thing for my digital camera working. If I can just deal with the mindcrushing boredom of my life then I'll be fine (and yes, I say that despite having a computer, telly, DVDs, CDs, books, videos and any other amount of crap. Will I throw it away and become an ascetic? What do you think I am, nuts?). I'm not entirely sure why this is a problem, boredom and I normally get on very well, we exchange cards at Christmas and birthdays, he invited me to his son's bahmitzvah and all, but this week he seems to have turned on me.
I guess my stress levels have just been upped by everyone else being hyped up about Christmas. I don't particularly dislike it but I do find it difficult to deal with people who make a huge fuss over it. The threat of closing a shop or a public building for a day or two over Christmas seems to drive people mental... "Sainsbury's are closed for twenty four hours! Shit! What if we all develop a strange craving for Ryvita smeared with boot polish? Buy the whole stock of Ryvita and boot polish just in case! And all the pet food too! But we don't even have a dog!" or "I'd like to renew my library books please. Are you open on Christmas day? No? Well, can you give me an extra month of my books just in case my house gets sucked into a temporal vortex on Boxing Day and I'm unable to escape for twenty-eight days."
And Christmas adverts... This year they seem to be making a big push of all the pretentious frangrance ones, why don't they just go that little bit further and actually name the frangrances after sex acts, as they use them in the adverts to sell them? 'Fisting' from Jean-Paul Gautier, 'Felching- Your Fragrence, Your Rules' from Tommy Girl. Do you remember those adverts Keith Chegwin used to do in the 80s about how it was a crime to do misleading adverts? Well surely that Lynx advert which suggests that anyone who sprays themself with one of those cans will get sexy page three pin-ups delivering them pizza is liable under that? I tried it and all I got was Gollum with a month-old dead rat. Still, he's got a very flexible tongue. That's another frangrance isn't it? A bottle with 'Rimm' in white letters, then 'el' in red letters and 'ing' in black underneath.
In an enjoyable example of Christmas hypocrisy, during this week the Daily Mail were blasting Chrimbo telly for a record number of repeats being scheduled for Christmas Day (how come 'Only Fools' is on again? Didn't they finish that with the entire cast killing itself in a death pact a few years ago?), then you turn on the telly and they're making a big thing of their X-Mas TV Guide, free with the Daily Mail.
Probably the best thing connected to the festive season so far, apart from the knowledge of the damage it's done to the careers of Julie Walters and Linda 'Always Cutting Prices' Barker, was the X-FM Breakfast Show Nativity Play this morning. Of course it was homophobic as anything, inside happily married heterosexual Christian O'Connoll there's a shy little boy just looking for a Daddy to take care of him, but who thought it would be a good idea to get Johnny Vegas into a pub at breakfast time, give him a few drinks and then put a microphone in front of him and expect him to play Mary in a Nativity Play? The blog entry doesn't even give you the half of it, but have it anyway. Expect the fine from the Radio Authority to be suitably huge, partly for Johnny's swearing but also for Chris Smith's pisspoor impressions.
I guess my stress levels have just been upped by everyone else being hyped up about Christmas. I don't particularly dislike it but I do find it difficult to deal with people who make a huge fuss over it. The threat of closing a shop or a public building for a day or two over Christmas seems to drive people mental... "Sainsbury's are closed for twenty four hours! Shit! What if we all develop a strange craving for Ryvita smeared with boot polish? Buy the whole stock of Ryvita and boot polish just in case! And all the pet food too! But we don't even have a dog!" or "I'd like to renew my library books please. Are you open on Christmas day? No? Well, can you give me an extra month of my books just in case my house gets sucked into a temporal vortex on Boxing Day and I'm unable to escape for twenty-eight days."
And Christmas adverts... This year they seem to be making a big push of all the pretentious frangrance ones, why don't they just go that little bit further and actually name the frangrances after sex acts, as they use them in the adverts to sell them? 'Fisting' from Jean-Paul Gautier, 'Felching- Your Fragrence, Your Rules' from Tommy Girl. Do you remember those adverts Keith Chegwin used to do in the 80s about how it was a crime to do misleading adverts? Well surely that Lynx advert which suggests that anyone who sprays themself with one of those cans will get sexy page three pin-ups delivering them pizza is liable under that? I tried it and all I got was Gollum with a month-old dead rat. Still, he's got a very flexible tongue. That's another frangrance isn't it? A bottle with 'Rimm' in white letters, then 'el' in red letters and 'ing' in black underneath.
In an enjoyable example of Christmas hypocrisy, during this week the Daily Mail were blasting Chrimbo telly for a record number of repeats being scheduled for Christmas Day (how come 'Only Fools' is on again? Didn't they finish that with the entire cast killing itself in a death pact a few years ago?), then you turn on the telly and they're making a big thing of their X-Mas TV Guide, free with the Daily Mail.
Probably the best thing connected to the festive season so far, apart from the knowledge of the damage it's done to the careers of Julie Walters and Linda 'Always Cutting Prices' Barker, was the X-FM Breakfast Show Nativity Play this morning. Of course it was homophobic as anything, inside happily married heterosexual Christian O'Connoll there's a shy little boy just looking for a Daddy to take care of him, but who thought it would be a good idea to get Johnny Vegas into a pub at breakfast time, give him a few drinks and then put a microphone in front of him and expect him to play Mary in a Nativity Play? The blog entry doesn't even give you the half of it, but have it anyway. Expect the fine from the Radio Authority to be suitably huge, partly for Johnny's swearing but also for Chris Smith's pisspoor impressions.
