What made Brian angry today?

In my state of continued mild addledness I thought it better to get the nice warm bus to work again today. What a woeful error, for the more you use the chav wagon, the more chance there is to be infuriated by one of the morons that use them. Today my luck failed me again and I was forced to deal with a crazy old woman, you know the type, gets on the bus, mutters to themselves for the whole journey, blunders about like they own the thing always gets a seat in the end as people shuffle to the other side of the bus just to avoid a conversation.

She started in good form barging onto the over crowded bendy bus and insisting that we all get out the way, because:

“You have to touch in you know, I just need to touch in please, can you move, I need to touch in cause I have to pay”
“Alright already we get it you want to pay, well done, very public spirited of you, even if a little fucking annoying! Thing is, I’d love to move but there is not much room. Tell you what let me just pop this pram out the window, probably shattering the child it contains, so there is room for me to move into, how’s that for you?”

After dispatching the child to it’s death/contorting my body out the way, she touches her clearly invalid oyster card on the reader and pays nothing at all. All that bloody fuss for nothing, Hag.

Having shifted myself out the way I rather expected her to now go back to where she came from so I don’t end up with a twisted spine at the journeys end. How wrong I was, for it seemed she assumed I was making room for her to store her capacious posterior in the space I was bloody standing in not two second previous.

This won’t do, this wont do at all. A mild shove in the lower back gets her to move just enough so I can at least stand up again and see just enough of my book to carry on reading about the sorry tale of Mademoiselle De La Vallière. Only I can’t, as, not content with causing me physical discomfort, now I have to suffer listening to her inane jibber jabber as she mutters to anyone who dares made eye contact, apparently:

“Time looks after it’s self”

Does it now, that’s an interesting idea, a non sentient temporal thing is able to cognitively care for it’s non-being, or something? Is that what you really mean, because if true this could be ground breaking news! Oh no it seems not:

“I used to wear a watch, but I don’t bother now”

Fascinating stuff indeed, no really, here was I thinking we maybe had a new branch of chronological study but in fact you were just letting the poor woman who had the displeasure of standing next to you that you don’t wear a watch.

Dear god is this the most interesting thing you have to mutter about, the fact you don’t wear a watch? You are clearly insane so you needn’t be bound by the usual constraints of public transport chit chat, i.e. it’s verboten at all time, can’t you at least give us something interesting to be forced to listen to? Maybe something about the impending arrival of end of the world and events of Ragnarök that will soon envelope us all, or maybe some tale of how the real rulers of the world are small beavers dressed as children who control bankers and politicians using the power of hypnotism.

Honestly crazy people these days are not what they use to be.

I’ve been feeling under the weather for a couple of days, racked with a terrible ague, struck down with a horrifying case of the pox, cursed with a vile bout of plague! Oh OK, I was feeling a bit ill, probably a slight  cold or something, maybe the dreaded man flu… who knows.

Alas I was struck down with this ailment on Sunday and I was unsure if the local apothecary was open to sell me a trepanning kit to relieve the pressure that my brain was suffering under. Casting aside the idea of physical intervention, I thought I might at least crawl down to my local supermarket and buy something healthy to boost my fruit intake in an effort to help the poor ailing body out.

Ignoring the actual fruit section, far too tired to chew, I sallied forth to the juice section. I’m presented by the usual enraging selection of stupid fruit juices. There is the normal orange, apple and grapefruit type drinks which are all fine and tasty. Then there is the smoothie selection, mango and passion fruit, strawberry and banana and so on, again pretty tasty, but getting to a cost level that makes them somewhat preposterous. Then we get to the section that truly invokes a rage, the superfruit drinks!

Drink that are so super, so wonderful, so amazing and so expensive that sipping no more than a cap full will surely imbibe you with an ever lasting youth. Ram packed with antioxidants, omega 3s, vitamins, minerals, fibers and all manner of other things, making these super juices akin to a modern day ambrosia. Hurray for super fruits, hurray for Açaís, hurray for Mangosteens, hurray for Wolfberries, hurray for Pomegranates!!

Only they’re not really that super at all, they are no better than most of the other juices in the section. They just have stupid names and people have never heard of them so they think they are better and thus will willingly to pay several bushels of gold just the pleasure of obtaining a small bottle of this crap.

That’s all quite annoying but I’ve gotten used to looking at this expensive cartons with disgust as I grab some good old orange juice (just as good for you, but too common to be cool it seems) so it barely raises more than a minor ire these days.

However in the Waitrose where I like to obtain my weekly nutrients, they do an odd thing, right next to the fruit juice section they have shoved the chilled wine section, and next to that is the free wine tasting section. In my state I would normally have sidled past on the way to get some fizzy water to go with the juice to stave off death a while longer, however something attracted my attention.

The woman looking after the stand asked me if I wanted to taste some superfruit wine!!! Yes you can now buy bloody pomegranate wine, apparently it’s very good for you, packed with antioxidants and full of nutrients. Now I thought we, as a nation, were in the grip of booze based destruction but no, the answer is this stuff apparently. It’s better for you than almost everything on earth and will turn us into a nation of super workers, or something like that.

At this point I had stopped paying attention to the health tips she was imparting, and was paying a more immediate attention to the vile taste that was encompassing my mouth. I realise desert wines (which this was supposed to be an example of) are sweet and a bit different from normal wine, but they can be lovely. However this stuff was disgusting, repugnant and truly abhorrent. I would rather have been eating a vat of elephant spleens lightly pan fried in battery acid than drink a bottle of this stuff. I don’t care if it’s good for me, it’s fucking horrible.

I looked about for the spittoon but sadly one was not present, I briefly pondered spitting the mouthful of satanic flavouring into her face as a lesson not to trick the sick with her evil elixirs in the future, but in the end I thought better of it.

The ultimate insult of course was the £14.99 they wanted for half a litre of this offensive substance. Super fruit my arse…

In an effort to keep the ailing Westfield open during this credit crisis I have committed to spending as much time and money there as possible. With this in mind I hotfooted it there again yesterday to throw away some hard earned pennies on an evening of tasty Mexican food and tastier Mexican beer at Wahaca with an old friend. It was quite a pleasant venue, for about 12 seconds, until a rage was induced by the serving staff. Firstly they did that infuriating, I presume American, thing of telling me their name and job title.

“Hello I’m Philomena and I’ll be your waitress for the evening”
“That’s fascinating Phil, good for you on remembering your name and job title by the way, for a moment I thought you might be the head chef. I’m Brian and I’ll be the grumpy awkward customer who’s food you’ll be spitting in this evening”

Is not how the exchange went.

Anyway Philomena (clearly not her real name, you don’t think I actually paid attention do you?) then moved on to infuriating restaurant habit two, explaining how restaurants work.

“Have you been to a Wahaca before”
“Um no”-  but I did once buy a pita gyros from a Greek bloke in Athens so I think I can remember how a menu works thanks, I didn’t add
“Well let me just run through the menu, here we have starters, here is some street food, order 3 or 4 of them each and share, and these are the main dishes for the greedy and those who hate sharing!”

Which was really, really handy cause I totally missed the bloody great headings that sectioned the menu up into starters, street food and mains. Thanks Phil, had if not been for your vital intervention I might have just ordered tub of coleslaw and been left sadly wanting (although as it happened the coleslaw was very nice, just tiny).

Get out of my face damn it.

So we pondered what we might want to order and chatted for a while until Phil wafted back in to commit my super pet hate amongst modern restaurateurs. In a bout of kindness she decided to offer us some suggestions, why don’t we go for some guacamole as a light snack whilst we ponder?

“It’s delicious and homemade”
“Homemade? You mean it’s not made here?”
“Oh yes, it’s made here”
“So someone lives here? This is someone’s home is it?”
“Well it feels like I live here with the amount of time I spend here he he, I’m thinking of having a bed put in the corner, ha ha”
…
“but there’s no bed so you don’t live here now, I mean it’s not your home yet?” is what I felt like adding but decided I was already teetering on the boundary between spit in food and rat poison in food so left it there.

So, first things first, it’s not home made if you don’t make it at home, there’s a bloody clue in the words you are using. I can just about cope with slightly rubbish country pubs coming out with this crap, as there is a chance that even if it’s not homemade in the real sense, at least it looks like it is. However, a professional kitchen, in a brand new chain restaurant, housed in a brand new massive shopping centre, no no and triple no.

It’s not homemade in any shape or form, this is a flagrant abuse of the English language and it must be stopped at once. What wrong with saying “lovingly created guacamole”, “an epicurean delight of guacamole”, “an exquisitely handcrafted guacamole” or any manner of other vaguely possibly factual descriptors. Homemade, to me, makes it sound frankly horrible, lest we forget that most people these days seem to be useless cooks if J. Olivers exploits are anything to go by. Christ, someone out there didn’t even know what boiling water looked like (thankfully they do now, although if I were Oliver I would have learnt them about it by hurling a pan of the stuff into their face, this might be why I am not on TV)

Anyway food was ordered, Negra Modelo was sipped, good times were had. Until that is, Phil returned to once more infuriate me with her vile presence to see if we wanted desert, we did, they were unfeasibly delicious, so delicious that they made me cross as to how tasty yet lethal the chocolate sauce was. Damn you Wahaca!

I got a Christmas card at the weekend, a full 39 days before the true horror of Christmas should really begin. I find this a little early to be honest, that said I would find any card that gets here before the 24th early and thus thoroughly unwanted, unlike cards that come on the 24th that are just plain unwanted.

If this were from some slightly amnesiac friend who somehow forgot that I loathe Christmas, I might just pop it straight in the bin and think no more about it. However it was not from such a friend, no, it was from someone far, far worse. It was a piece of marketing bumph! Marketing bumph that I clearly don’t need and don’t want.

What’s it selling you might wonder, what would warrant such an invasion of my letter box, a cure for smallpox maybe, the secrets of the lottery, tickets for a luxury cruise around scenic Bhutan, well no, in fact it’s not really selling anything at all. You see the bloody thing was from the Royal Mail informing me that I should get my post in early to ensure that the cards I won’t be sending get there intended recipients on time.

Now this is fairly annoying, I find unsolicited post enraging at the best of times, however this had taken a special place in my rage filled heart. The reason you see is simple, on the back of this vile seasonal missive was a small little sign, a sign that was informing me that I should “recycle now”. Adding that, “when you have finished with this letter please recycle it”.

Now call me odd but is it not a little rude to tell me what I should be doing with the crap that you send me, crap that I did not ask for. If I wish to burn it for no reason at all, I will, if I want to turn it into priceless art, I will, well I would if I had talent in such areas, but I digress, if I want to compost it and use it to fertilise a crop of heroine to sell to children, I will.

If you cared so much about saving the planet and thus wanted me to recycle the thing, maybe, just maybe you should just not print the fucking thing in the first place. I imagine that would be infinitely more friendly to the planet and it would definitely be more friendly to Christmas loathing individuals such as myself.

Somewhat luckily there is an address to return this junk to if it’s undelivered, so I’ll be posting it straight back. That’ll learn them!

The tube has been causing much angst in the last two days. Firstly, yesterday I had to suffer the audio atrocity that was a busker at Notting Hill station. Now, as you might imagine, I’m not a fan of buskers at the best of times, they all fall in to two camps, the awful and the very awful. OK, that’s a lie, some of them do have a talent, it’s just a talent I never want to hear whilst whisking myself about Londontown on public transport. This is a fact that will remain true until the day I catch some underground minimal tech house Djing action, a day I never expect to see.

There is a base level of annoyance at any busker, so imagine my shock and horror when I alighted the carriage I was occupying to be confronted by a noise so awful, so displeasing, that I’m immediately tempted to shatter my eardrums with a rolled up London Lite. Yes you guessed it, some bastard was playing the bloody bagpipes. This is an instrument designed to strike fear into the hearts of a foe on the battle field, an instrument so ghaustly that no one on earth can find pleasing to listen to. So why, you might wonder, was he not turfed out of the station by some burly guards for disturbing the peace forthwith and possible given a shoeing for good measure?

Well it seems that not only was he there by permission as an official busker, but I also happen to know, like all of the tube’s buskers, he’d passed an audition to get a licence to be there. Someone actually heard that racket and decided that it would be fun to inflict it on everyone else? I can only imagine that the rowdy piper got his license by threatening to stove in the head of the people conducting the audition with his fascist, jackboot clad, feet if they turned him down. It’s the only explanation…

The next moment of irritation came after a wonderfully ecstatic trip to Westfield, Europe’s largest inner-city shopping centre, a trip where nothing at all annoyed me. The masses of people blundering about getting in my way, the stupid layout of shops, having items in display that you couldn’t actually buy was all brushed aside, such was the warmth of the capitalist glow that was enveloping me.

However, on leaving this Mecca of commercialism I wended my way to Sheppards Bush station, a station that was rebuilt not more than 2 months ago, what was I confronted by? I was confronted by 3 in ticket gates, 5 out ones, a mass brawl of people trying to get in, and NO ONE AT ALL trying to get out. Quite why the tube chap who stood there bellowing like a dullard for people not to push didn’t just engage his bloody brain for a second and swap a few of the out barriers to in ones I don’t know.

More to the point, why did the flaming antipodean galahs that built the bloody thing not think that perhaps the new station might be a bit more popular than it used to be, what with a fucking huge shopping centre they stuck next door, and thus might need slightly more ticket gates.

The whole sorry situation was only made more infuriating by the morons ahead of me in the queue getting an oyster FAIL notice and rather than seeing assistance as advice (although I realise from experience this can be very tiresome), decided to repeatedly jab their ticket on the reader holding me up for even longer. Bastards.

So we have more outrage on the news at the levels of boozing that is going on, people are getting spannered and causing trouble in town centers the length and breadth of this fair land, children dropping dead in their thousands from cognac overdoses, old men are running riot, high on alcopop sugar rushes.

It’s all a terrible outrage I admit, clearly something must be done and the solution is to ban boozing, and if you can’t do that you should make to so hard to buy that only Lords, MP’s and Russian Oligarchs can afford to get their grimy mits on a vat of sauce once in a while.

Only no, that’s frankly a blisteringly stupid idea. It’s clearly not just the availability of cheap booze that turns people into vomiting morons. Why we just have to cast an eye at wonderful mainland Europe to see that (clearly, stop looking once you get past Germany into eastern Europe…They like fun juice even more than we do judging by the number of Polish sounding people I see sipping cans, of Okocim/Lech/Tyskie/Zywiec/other unpronounceable super strong beverage, with fine communist zeal at 8 in the morning by my local bus stop).

Sure we should do something to prevent the streets being awash with drunken morons at the end of the night whilst I wend my way home from a few civilised pints of gin at my local inn. However making all booze unaffordable will clearly effect me as well as yob X so that won’t do, it won’t do at all. No we need another plan. Somewhat strangely I think I’m just the man to craft said plan!

First we should ban anyone under 25 from boozing in public, sure let them get hammered on meths at home or in a local part away from prying eyes, I don’t really care if they batter their livers into submission before they make it to 18 as long as they are decent enough to do it away from view.

Secondly anyone caught fighting, unconscious, vomiting or singing annoyingly loud ditties in the street will get a stern warning from the army of lone vigilantes we will recruit, commit a second offense and you will immediately be killed, liquidised and used to fertilise cider orchards.

Thirdly ban anything from Belgium from being sold anywhere on earth. Why you ask, well a) Belgium is horrible and generally thinking about the place makes me angry so they should be made to suffer at any opportunity, b) I pretty much blame Stella Artois for most of the social ills we are under the yoke of at the moment.

Of course, I don’t really have an opinion about wither people booze too much at all and my policy is clearly preposterous and probably unworkable, I am however sick and bloody tired of stupid news articles moaning on and on about this problem without ever offering a sensible solution other than making is so expensive I’ll have to revert to drinking diamond white (which is just what everyone else will do and thus just exacerbate the situation, rather than solve it). All they have to do is call me and I’ll have it sorted out in a jiffy I assure you…

My body, my brain and I have been at loggerheads of late, I try to mediate between the two but there is no joy it seems. They are determined to stitch each other up at every available opportunity.

All week they have been squabbling over what time to sleep, the brain wants to stay up Monday night to watch election fever reaching a head, the body wants to collapse into a slumber after a long day at the coal face. Tuesday evening both were quite adamant that after getting home very late from work snoozing might be a good idea, hurray agreement.

But what’s this, 4:50 am that sneaky fucker body decides now would be the perfect time to play a trick on the brain and wake us all up, why I don’t know. We lie there for a minute or two pondering whether the world’s ended with the election of Palin (I always assumed that if McCain won he would die of a heart attack from celebrating too much/been shot by Palin in a terrible hunting “accident”). So we get a moments agreement between mind and body allowing the arm to flip the radio on.

This happens just in time to hear Obama’s rather good acceptance speech thingy in Chicago. Maybe the body is not so spiteful after all, maybe it felt a disturbance in the force and thought the brain might like to hear this, it was after all very good to hear.

It’s over, great we can get back to sleep for another 2 hours, wake up and get to work pretty refreshed to make the site I’ve been slaving over live. Only no, now the mind is pissing about thinking about work. What the fuck am I to do here, can’t we just work together, we’re on the same team people, sleep damn it. No fine, in that case we’re getting up, HA take that mind, take that body, I’ve called your bluff!!

So we get to work at 7:30, pretty quickly however we all realise that this petty squabble has gone horribly wrong, we’ve turned into a jibbering wreck, luckily though a swiftly purchased bacon roll helps us hold it together long enough to get the changes done in time. Yay. we can leave early to get some sleep.

However what’s this, the brain has other ideas, it decides that going to bed at 7 and getting a nice 13 hours sleep is not the ticket, no, it hatches a plan to trick the body into visiting the local tavern and imbibing a few pints of fermented apple juice.

At this stage the body is very wary, it knows the past, it knows what’s happened before, it remembers the long nights of abuse it’s endured at the hands of the brain in the company of various reprobates and vagabonds. Sadly it’s powerless to resist, after getting up so early it has expending all it’s defensive energy some hours previously. As you can imagine it all goes horribly wrong and there is another night with about 90% too little sleep. I even had the forethought to turn off the alarm to try and get the extra kippage needed.

Pointless.

Body wakes us up as usual at the normal hour in a further escalation of this timeless battle, another day of feeling exhausted and angry ensues.

One day I will get a peace accord between the two and we can all get along nicely, no more lying awake filled with rabid anger at not sleeping, no more rage inducing hangovers. Till then drunken insomniatic apoplexy will continue I fear.

I hear on the news today that the worlds seems to be in a bit of a financial pickle at the moment Apparently there are a number of people who don’t have enough money, a few nations are short of a herring or two and some banks have stopped giving out free pens to cut costs.

This is all very tragic of course, no one wants to see the world crumbling into anarchy under the yoke of financial ruin, but what I was disturbed to see on the idiot box this morning was a special report about some estate full of people not really copping that well somewhere in the grim north. It seems that everyone on the estate is both poor and an idiot, a pretty bad combo.

Everyone is broke you see, so they are taking loans out to buy heating, then taking loans out to pay their loans, then loans to pay for the loans that are paying for the loans that are paying for the heating and so on and so on.

Now I know what you are thinking, surely you can’t be angry that people are poor and are being prayed upon by frankly awful door step loan sharks? Well no for some reason this did not irritate me despite the blindingly obvious flaw in their loan strategy.

What did make me incandescent with rage was one of the hags they interviewed.

Hag: “The bills in the house are too expensive to make you think about buying Christmas presents, I don’t know how people cope.”

Umm what, leaving aside the poor grammar this strikes me as an odd thing to admit? Your too poor to turn the heating on, but you’re still pondering whether to waste money on presents for a festival that’s so far removed from it’s real meaning we might we well just cancel it once and for all? Frankly if this is true, I’m half inclined to demand that all benefits be removed from anyone seen in Toys’R'Us at once, including child benefit, if indeed this still exists, I half suspect it’s been removed and the funds diverted to repaper the walls of the Queen’s lavatories.

If you can’t afford heating, stop bloody wasting money on utter crap for your urchins. Sure they might be a bit upset for a few weeks, but I imagine it will be more upsetting when they freeze to death one night in dark, cold, January clenching their brand new High School Musical 3 box set in their now frozen fingers.

I don’t mean to sound mean spirited, well OK I do, it’s well documented that I loathe Christmas and wish to see it canceled for ever, but you are choosing to waste money on it, it’s not a basic essential, you could just carry on with life as normal and not throw away all your hard borrowed swag on complete bollocks.

Have some bloody priorities…