An open letter to Joe Rennison, London Student Editor

I sent this to Joe Rennison, this year's London Student editor, this morning. Thought it was worth throwing open for opinions.

Dear Joe,

I’m writing to you not with a view to being published but because I strongly feel that something must be done about the reprehensible behaviour of ULU President Clare Solomon.

I am a graduand of Heythrop College UL and former President of its Student Union. Since I was lucky enough to find full-time employment after finishing my studies in June, I was unfortunately not able to attend yesterday’s protest but followed events closely through both news channels and social networking sites. In common with, I am sure, the vast majority of those who supported the aims of the peaceful protest, I was horrified when a tiny proportion of those attending the march ignored its aims and perverted its message by committing illegal acts of vandalism and assault. NUS President Aaron Porter was entirely correct in condemning the violent agitators and disassociating the protest from their actions.

I was disgusted but entirely unsurprised to hear that Ms Solomon, who has a history of extreme radicalism and was recently expelled from her chosen political party for secret factionalising, had entered the Millbank Tower along with a few hundred vandals and hooligans. What did surprise me was her happiness to admit this on the BBC’s Newsnight yesterday evening, along with her persistent refusal to answer legitimate questions posed by the presenter and her glib assertion that the invasion and criminality with which she was involved was a true and proportionate reflection of the feelings of students. Having spoken to many friends and former classmates who attended the march in a spirit of solidarity and optimism, I am confident that Ms Solomon speaks only for the sort of extremist minority with which she has long allied herself.

All of this, however, pales in comparison to Ms Solomon’s final comments on the programme, in which she explicitly stated that a failure by the Government to heed the wishes of students would result in direct action comparable to that seen in Paris and Athens in recent months. This is nothing less than a direct threat of violence and death, and should be treated as such.

I do not believe that Ms Solomon’s radical politics or her confrontational attitude are consistent with the office which it is her privilege to embody. Furthermore, I contend that her endorsement of of violent, anarchic and otherwise illegal behaviour, combined with her transparent attempts to turn ULU into a vehicle for her own extremist views, render her future in the post of ULU President untenable. Were I still a member of ULU Senate I would certainly propose a vote of no confidence in Ms Solomon, and I urge current Senators to consider this option.

From next month, I will be a graduate of the University of London; it is an accolade of which I am less proud today than I was two days ago. My only hope is that the shame of being associated with Ms Solomon’s comments dogs her CV longer than it does mine.

Yours sincerely,

John M Underwood

Back. Possibly.

So, I'm a journalist now. Like, a real one. I write at Best For Film, which is lovely, but gives me even more of an excuse to neglect this sorry thing. I may yet decide to axe it altogether, but for now it may be used for cross-posting if the powers that be decide I'm allowed. I'll keep you posted either way.

Yep.

Whether or not England wins, society will lose.

I've just seen an advert for this. In very brief, it's for a Nationwide fixed term account which offers a 0.5% interest bonus "if England lift the cup in South Africa".

I would genuinely like someone to explain to me how this differs from gambling. Nationwide is trying to entice people to invest with them, which is fine, but instead of offering particularly competitive rates or whatever else it is promising a wee financial treat if England bucks a forty-three year trend and wins the World Cup. That's not the done thing.

And to add insult to injury, this ridiculous and morally dubious scheme is being advertised by a 'comedy' double act consisting of a person who isn't really disabled and a person who has apparently been modelled on The Sun's expectation of how paedophiles dress and do their hair.

Comme j'ai dit, I'd genuinely like thoughts on this. Am I being hopelessly old-fashioned? It just seems so inescapably grim.

Incidentally, we moved out of our lovely little West London flat today - expect frequent pissed-off updates about my househunting escapades. Pfft.

Capitalist cynicism, doublethink, and plastic nipples.

For about as long as I can remember, I've been puzzling over why shop mannequins are almost invariably crafted in such an inconsistent fashion. Shall I explain? Righty ho.

As the spectre above ably demonstrates, mannequins do not generally display a level of detail consistent with someone wanting to make them look more than vaguely human. To start with, they're either a gleaming Vaderesque ebony or this rather unpleasant zombie grey, neither of which are hues reminiscent of normal people or even of models. They are also lacking in convincingly human facial structure, with very much the best-case scenario being the unnerving and excessively-browed grimace above (cf Doctor Who's positively Neanderthal opponents the Autons, who actually have brow ridges and look like whitewashed clones of Stig of the Dump). The alternative is a featureless oval which irresistibly brings to mind the new Prime Minister.

All of this is fine. I do not expect mannequins to emulate the appearance of an actual human being, other than to whatever extent is necessary for them to have clothes conveniently draped over them. Malproportioned or undecorated heads, improbable colour schemes and occasionally being left in a window devoid of shirt, trousers or arms are all par for the course. What I don't understand is the nipples.

Look again at the photo above, and pay particular attention to the snug fit of the dummy's rather unattractive tank top. As in this case and in thousands of others, it is very rare to encounter a lady mannequin which isn't proudly gesturing skywards through whichever top or dress has been draped over it, its implausibly pert plastic breasts crowned with faintly threatening nipples frozen in a permanent state of dizzying arousal or chilliness. This drives me absolutely mad. Quite apart from the ecological indifference which is clearly demonstrated by our willingness to waste our finite oil reserves on plastic destined for pointless cosmetic teats, 'mannequin nipple syndrome' is simply another example of the incredibly insulting marketing ploys which we are forced to dodge every day in what is theoretically one of the most liberal and advanced societies on earth.

Mannequins are obviously not endowed with nipples in order to make them look more real - there are many more obvious areas to work on before minor anatomical inaccuracies become relevant, and in any event the uncanny valley effect demonstrates that it is actually not advisable for non-human models to too closely resemble us. Why, then, do the majority of plastic clothes-horses persist in being so damn perky?

I can think of two possible explanations, each as depressing as the other. Mannequins are uniformly tall and skinny, usually more so than could be healthily achieved by any normal woman (in fact, in 2007 the Spanish health ministry demanded that all shop dummies be made at a minimum of a size 10 to help combat body worries amongst female consumers). Could the nipples be simply an extension of this? They serve to accentuate the mannequin's unnaturally upright breasts, drawing the eye to just how perfectly the relevant garment hangs on its freakishly slender frame, and doing their level best to convince passing shoppers that this could be THE purchase, the one which finally exorcises any shred of low self-esteem and and lifts your ego as abruptly as the mannequin's nipples lift its significance. Given how frequently mannequins are used for display without having their arms attached, it seems that absurdly prominent nipples are genuinely considered more important (read: more likely to sway a purchase) than ensuring a mannequin has the standard complement of limbs.

The other explanation which springs to mind refers to men rather than women. Given the odd degree to which breasts and nipples have been sexualised and fetishised to a degree far outstripping their sexual relevance, men can reliably be drawn in by the promise of bralessness (cf every lads' mag and tabloid newspaper ever). Could it be that mannequin nipple syndrome is actually a device to get men more interested in clothes shopping? If every aspect of a mannequin bar the plastic nubs artfully deforming its coverings is ignored, I would not be in the slightest surprised to learn that men are more likely to buy their significant others outfits modelled by nippletastic dummies or find themselves happier to accompany their wives and girlfriends into shops where sexual provocation looms large on every plastic chest.

Isn't this just utterly spirit-crushing? As far as I can see it, a small but not wholly inconsequential proportion of our extraordinarily thin-spread natural resources are possibly being diverted to this sordid little game, in which the widespread objectification and idealisation of the female form is cynically manipulated to power the capitalist money machine. Men are taught to obsess over breasts and buttocks just as women are brought up to hate their own bodies, and then their conditioning is exploited through a dazzlingly unpleasant piece of doublethink - although we can rationally understand that shop mannequins are in no way representative of real human bodies (indeed, they are deliberately created to look alien, with their exaggerated or non-existent features and improbable colouring), we are able to subliminate that understanding in order to focus on their ridiculous nipples and think "gosh, if that blouse makes the featureless plastic doll look so pert maybe it'll do the same thing for me/my girlfriend".

During Winston's visit to the Ministry of Love, O'Brien tells him that "The sex instinct will be eradicated... We shall abolish the orgasm". However, the phenomenon of mannequin nipple syndrome is much more reminiscent of Huxley's dystopia than of Orwell's - the trick is not to remove pleasure from the equation, but make sure that nobody can conceive of indulging in it without some degree of financial outlay. In Brave New World, the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning mentions that  in the dark and disorganised daysBefore Ford many games had involved no equipment more complex than a ball, some sticks and a bit of netting. "Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatsoever to increase consumption. It's madness...". This trick has been perpetuated just as effectively in the modern marketplace - the only difference is that in our world the tools employed are fashion and men's magazines instead of hypnopaedia and conditioning, and the beneficiaries are Ann Summers and Simply Pleasure rather than the shadowy manufacturers of Electric Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy.

If both women and men believe (at whatever level of consciousness) that it is a modern woman's job to emulate the absurd and unhealthy physical characteristics of catwalk clotheshorses and glamour models, and that this is best achieved by buying into a fragile dream through which consumption becomes the key to achieving the image which society demands, I daren't think what the future holds. But when you're saving up to buy a nice pair of silicon implants for yourself or your girlfriend out of an inexplicable concern that breasts sitting naturally where they belong is in some way less attractive or appropriate than having them thrust painfully towards the heavens, keep an eye out for nipples in shop windows - and don't say I didn't warn you.

Oh. WHAT.

This, the Internet tells me, is the front cover of today's The Sun.

I think that to say anything at all in an attempt to analyse this image would take away from its raw, primal power. Just take a few seconds to stare at it, and imagine Obama violently vomiting into a drawer in the Oval Office.

Goodnight, electorate.

The BNP are doing my job for me.

Honestly. I don't know why I bother spending time and energy thinking up fresh anti-BNP arguments, when they just go and do things like this:

I appreciate that the boys who get involved don't come across enormously well either, but just look at Bob Bailey and his henchmen - this is a man who's standing for parliamentary office, and he's manifestly nothing but a streetfighter and a common thug. Take time in particular to observe him trying to put the boot into the face of a boy who's lying on the floor, that's a skill which would really translate well to the House.

I've got a horrible feeling that I know what's going to happen tomorrow. But even if (Christ help us) we've got David Cameron PM settling into Number 10 on Friday*, at least the Tories are a moral step up from the filth who have absconded with our national flag.

I'll be out from 7am tomorrow, trying to get people into my local polling station - even if you haven't got time to get involved, then make your voice heard in support of whoever has the best chance of cripping the Tories in your area. With any luck, this is the last time we'll need to vote tactically.

See you at the ballot box x

*To be fair, he is now being backed by the Holy Trinity of morally-bankrupt public figures - Robert Mugabe, Simon Cowell and Jim Davidson. Not to mention Matt from Busted. That election after-party is going to be SHIT HOT.

Gordon Brown: our most credible choice.

Okay, I'll put my hands up. I've been as guilty as almost every other liberal leftist in the country in the past month, temporarily seduced by the charms of the Liberal Democrats and their suddenly-plausible third way.

No longer, kids. Watch the video above, and I implore you to comment if you've ever seen a more credible politician. I've got a book of 'speeches that changed the world', and for sheer passion and honesty there are very few to match GB at his finest - there is certainly nobody else involved in this election who can deliver a speech of that quality. For all that Gordon Brown is media-shy, dour and occasionally prone to gurning, he is the most talented politician to have entered Whitehall in several generations - his record as Chancellor speaks for itself, and he managed to keep the country afloat through the worst recession in eighty years despite inheriting his office practically on the eve of the financial collapse.

Politicians of Gordon Brown's stock come along perhaps two or three times in a century. He deserves to be given the mandate which he has so richly earned - the risk of voting Lib Dem and ending up Tory is simply too great.

Vote Labour. In fact - fuck our evident lack of a presidential system - vote Gordon Brown. Do it.

Intelligent and capable Gordon Brown in disliking-vulgar-woman shock!

I imagine you're all up to speed on what's been going down today regarding Gordon Brown and the abruptly-famous Gillian Duffy. In case you're not, I'll summarise. In brief, GB was approached by the aforementioned pensioner in (Christ preserve us) Rochdale, and after deflecting her rather forthright views on immigration he fled to his car. Unfortunately, he failed to realise that there was a Sky News mic still attached to his lapel, and once in the back seat he let fly a couple of fairly juicy lines about "that bigoted woman".

What're you waiting for? That's it. That's the whole story.

GB has now spent the rest of his day frantically apologising for this tiny gaffe, whilst Duffy has shamelessly milked her fifteen minutes and, by refusing to accept his immediate press-conference apology, actually necessitated a home visit by GB - let us be clear, one of the G8 world leaders had to go and grovel to this silly old woman because she wouldn't let him off the hook for being rude.

More to the point, why on earth ought he to be apologising? I can count on one hand the number of people who I have met but never subsequently been catty about - it's simply to my advantage that the chaps at Sky News very rarely have me wired for sound. And why shouldn't GB mention to an aide, in private, that he found someone's company unpleasant and their views unsavoury? I wouldn't want to have a conversation with Gillian Duffy.

The villain of this piece is whichever unconscionable little shit at Sky or News Corp decided it was in everyone's best interests to release the soundbite - presumably big papa Rupe is so desperate to regain control of the election that he decided to arbitrarily twist the knife in GB's bruised and broken back. I'm also hugely irritated by the outpouring of emotion regarding Gillian - she's being touted as a salt-of-the-earth Northern grandmother archetype, the sort of slightly grubby but possessèd-of-a-heart-of-gold pensioner who holds the country together. Everyone's carefully ignoring her unpleasantly fruity views on immigrants, not to mention the dizzying ineptitude of her question "And all these Eastern Europeans, where are they flocking from?". Last I heard, they were from the West Indies. Sneaky fuckers.

Ooh, there's more! Twitter tells me that apparently Niall Paterson 'broke the story' (read: snitched to the old lady, like a dirty tell-tale) and is now scolding Emma Kennedy for having the temerity to call him a twat. Which he is. Mr Paterson, you're a twat.

Mr Brown, if you want to call someone a bigot, a yobbo or a snivelling pig-faced twazzock, nobody has more right. Sock it to 'em.

Ha!

Well done, SMBC.

Blag Hag

Hello, you lot.

Just a quick heads-up, since I should really be essaying. You may be up to speed with the excellent Jen McCreight aka Blag Hag, who has achieved some notoriety in recent days for suggesting that the ladies of the Western world test the fascinating seismological theories of Hojjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi. In case you aren't up to speed, this inventive cleric claimed last week that women who dress immodestly are directly responsible for adultery, which raises the risk of earthquakes. In response, McCreight has launched a campaign encouraging women around the free world to leave the house on Monday in their most cleavage-enhancing shirts or borderline-obscene hotpants, so that we can definitively establish whether earthquake frequency or severity is affected. Read more about Boobquake (!) here.

While I'm blathering about Blag Hag, this is also well worth a look if you know any of the feckless gonks who claim that homosexualiy is wrong "because the animals don't do it". Do have a read.

Right, back to the essay! Also, if anyone is, by any chance, reading this on account of Emma Kennedy having favourited my blog yesterday, please leave a comment - I'd be interested to see whether it's had any effect on traffic.

Eat your greens x

Pubs, breasts and pipes.

But of a confused post this morning, I fear - even if it goes as planned it's going to end up as a rather muddled review of a) The Drapers Arms N1, b) standing up to cancer and c) pipe-smoking.* Don't worry, all will become relatively clear.

Right, pub review. I'd never been to the Drapers before last night, it not being in my tight circle of approved Notting Hill pubs where I'm allowed to do the crossword in the complimentary papers. I was directed there by a chance tweet from the superlatively talented Emma Kennedy (who hasn't appeared for the one and only time in this post, oh dear me no), who was promoting a pub quiz being held there. The Drapers is pretty much exactly what you expect from a certain sort of Islington pub - its interior is absolutely beautiful, with brass rails and bevelled glass (love a good bevel, me) much in evidence, and it sports a very well-stocked and -served bar to complement its tempting but buttock-clenchingly expensive menu, complete with the obligatory dish or two which turns out to be something inventively mental. My companions and I had never heard of Scotch Woodcock before, and the overwhelming mindfuck induced by ordering something which is assumed to be an inventive woodcock / scotch egg crossover and receiving fishy scrambled eggs is reason enough always to check what you're ordering. Still, everyone was very pleasant and it'd be churlish to buck at the prices - one does not, after all, head to an upscale Islington gastropub for £1 lager and wide-screen football. Actually, where does one head for that sort of action? Possibly Portsmouth.

But I digress. The reason for the Drapers' night of festivities was to raise money for a team of lady writers, actors and so on (spearheaded by EK, above, and featuring luminaries such as the irrepressible Caitlin Moran - do check them out here) who are rather bravely attempting the terrifying Playtex Moonwalk in May. I think I may have mentioned this (in brief, it's a walked marathon, at night, for breast cancer charities) in an earlier blog, but you're forgiven for not noticing it. Since only one in every 1.2 billion people worldwide are currently following me, I don't think this is the time to be springing pop quizzes. Anyway, the point of the evening was to edge the Booby Dazzlers a wee bit closer to their breast-cancer-mullering target of £20k, and since I'd consistently failed to have £10 to call my own for long enough to donate it I thought I'd get have a crack. Happily, the quiz was not only unashamedly highbrow and fun, it also raised £250 which the lovely folk at the Drapers have agreed to match. Cracking fun and lots of money raised, in essence.

Right, I've done the heart-warming story of virtuous folk toiling in face of adversity and amassing significant but ultimately drop-in-the-oceanesque amount of money, In an ideal world, this is whe the 'Donate NOW' number would scroll across the bottom of your screens, but even the most be-moneybagged of rich text editors is not, alas, quite that loaded. Do consider donating if you feel like a charitable ego boost and have it spare, though - Christ knows that cancer's going to foul all our lives up at one point or another, so it's definitely worth getting involved with the fiscal equivalent of ganging up with loads of other people and happy-slapping it. Whatever happened to happy-slapping, incidentally? Whe I was a kid, bullying crazes had a lot more longevity. So donate, and if you pass cancer in the street then kick it in the knees. Twat.

On reflection, I feel that reviewing pipe-smoking in any but the sternest tones would now be a tad hypocritical, so I will content myself with instructing you not to do it, however marvellous it may look. Because it does. It also tastes lovely, goes well with a monocle and requires that you visit marvellous specialist pipe tobacco shops, which are always a joy. On the other hand, it's more dangerous than cigarette smoking in almost every respect, so it's essentially a vintage style/numerous diseases swings and roundabouts situation. Make up your own mind.

That turned out to be even less structured than I was expecting. If you made it this far, well done. If you didn't, I shall have to communicate with you via telepathy. I shan't be pleasant.

John

*Please try not to dwell on the apparent contradiction between the latter items, because I don't plan to and if you don't either then hopefully my mouth won't catch on.

Henry does Charlie

This is the best thing I have ever, ever seen.

Multiculturalism? Pass the cruet.

I saw this on the BBC website yesterday and thought you'd like it. It's mindbending. In case you're too busy to read the whole article, it tells the compelling story of an Australian cookery book which inadvertently listed 'salt and freshly ground black people' as an ingredient in the recipe for, ironically, spelt tagliatelle. As is to be expected, almost the entire print run is being recalled, at a cost of around £12k (for which you could finance two schools in the Third World, natch).

Is there any need? It's not as if there's anything remotely offensive or loaded about the concept of grinding, for heavens' sake. On the scale of oppressive culinary punning, this rates somewhere below that giant in the BFG saying that people from Wellington taste like rubber boots and Swedes have a sweden sour flavour.

I, for one, would love to have a book with a comedic misprint in it. I can't believe that anyone was genuinely worried about some nameless copy editor harbouring secret desires to grind the blacks (why didn't Eugene Terre'blanche ever use that as a slogan?) or that any readers, even in Australia, might take the instructions at face value and start grating Aborigines. Well, maybe in Queensland, but the odds are against anyone sitting in a tin shack in the Atherton Tableland deciding that they need a break from kangaroo steaks and whipping the spelt pasta out.

Crackers.

Mark Watson's Ten Year Self-Improvement Challenge (and me)

Hello, chaps and chapesse (based on current followers).

I've been a little lazy with this in recent days, since I've been alternately jetting around the country and trying to write the twenty thousand words of philosophy I need to get together by May if I'm to receive a degree. However, I'm just popping on to tell you about something that comedian, writer and all-round good egg Mark Watson is up to and which I think it's well worth getting involved with.

Earlier in the year, Mark did some quite grown-up things in a shortish space of time - turned thirty, acquired a baby, all that good stuff. One of the things he did was decide to try and keep a blog every day for a decade, which is a fairly lofty ambition. Some of his other plans for the decade were lumped into a pile which he decided to regard as a Ten Year Self-Improvement Challenge or TYSIC, and he rather endearingly decided to throw the option of TYSICing one's life open to any- and everyone who follows him on Twitter or so on. The only requirement was that you should register what you're trying to do, and then get on with it.

Needless to say, I put in my two penn'orth in the form of a commitment to be making my living writing facile shit like this in a decade's time, having just been published by the London Student and feeling generally pretty positive about the whole zeitgeist-straddling thing I aspire to have going on. Since then, I have made approximately fuck-all progress with this ambition - my main attempt so far has been a hugely effort-intensive application to work for the Dave channel, which crashed and burnt in an unpleasantly undignified fashion.

BUT. I thought that if I wittered briefly on here about the TYSIC, I'd have more of an incentive to keep writing and actually give the whole thing some welly. So with that in mind, I'm basically putting my future career in your hands - please douse me with criticism and praise in quantities you find appropriate and at intervals which do not greatly impede your social lives, and if you think there's something I could be doing which I'm not then for heavens' sake tell me. Max, Becky, Jonny, Will and the one chap I don't actually know in real life (hi!), the ball's in your court. Which collectively means in Kensington, Notting Hill, Oxford, Islington and somewhere else, so that could take some co-ordination.

More blogs soon. Promise.

J x

Lynx vs. Specsavers

Christ alive, not another tedious Lynx advert... ooh!

Specsavers have done an absolutely cracking job with this, I think. As soon as it began playing (shortly ahead of Come Dine With Me, which always puts me in a critical mood) I started badmouthing the boring, predictable Lynx adverts with their bottom-feeder target demographic, and Specsavers kept up the pretence of being frightfully common deodorant vendors (right down to having a topless twat with twin spraycans held akimbo, which is apparently the latest Lynx gimmick) until the last three shots.

I can't imagine it'll get them a single new customer, but the tens of thousands of pounds that must have gone on location, aerial shots and two hundred girls with their vitals swinging in the breeze were entirely well-spent if all they achieved were some pissed off ad men at Lynx HQ. Some tiny, petty, stupid victories are worth any price.

Japanese rival Koreans for most over-the-top method of excess dog disposal

So many Japanese dog owners are abandoning their pets to the mercy of the municipal pounds that the poor buggers detailed to deal with them are at their wits' end. Shame, no?

However, you would think they'd be able to find a less preposterously emotive final solution for the doggy problem than accumulating the unloved (and probably tediously cute) pooches in holding pens before cleverly transporting them to crematoria in lorries with built-in gas chambers, so that nobody has to have anything too closely resembling a canine concentration camp on their doorstep. I hate to use the reductio ad Hitlerum in this or any other context, but what the fuck? First they came for the spaniels; but I said nothing, for I was not a spaniel...

"Very cruel race." - Pamela, Bridget Jones' Diary (2001)

Cheese I Ought Not To Have Bought

The above is a tentative working title for a prospective column about one of the most enduringly irritating aspects of my life. Almost every time I go to a supermarket, I convince myself that we're out of cheese and buy more. Usually, I am seduced by a 2 for £x offer or whatever, so I end up buying substantially more than my elfin girlfriend and I could possibly eat, and then when I get home I discover that there are two full shelves of cheese in the fridge already and that all the mice have killed themselves because the choice made them dizzy.

Think anyone would pick it up?

Gap Yah

This is absolutely brilliant. It's like, so spiritual and cultural, but also kind of brutal and demeaning...

Lizzie and Sarah

This was the only still I could find, because the BBC is scared of funny!

Last Saturday, BBC 2 screened an absolutely cracking pilot by Jessica Hynes (née Stephenson) and Julia Davis. These two ladies were the driving forces behind, respectively, Spaced and Nighty Night, so it's a fair bet that their latest venture was going to be pretty solid stuff. However, whichever soulless gonk at the Corporation decides these things got sufficiently cold feet about the programme's content that it was screened at the viewer-friendly time of quarter to midnight.

In my experience, if you're up at quarter to midnight it's generally because something interesting's happening to you or you're happening interestingly to someone else, not because you're waiting for something to come on the telly - the only people who are up channel hopping are fifteen year old boys hoping to see some nipple on a late night Channel 4 import, or poor sods who'll watch anything to avoid going to sleep because they've run someone over or something. It is not, let us be clear, a prime time slot.

This is particularly frustrating, because Lizzie and Sarah was brilliant. I'm afraid you'll have to take that on faith, because it's already disappeared from iPlayer - we can but hope that the hugely positive response it's got from real journalists (cf. Caitlin Moran's excellent review here) make up for its inevitably low ratings. Hynes and Davis star as the eponymous downtrodden housewives and cameo as perfectly realised archetypal teenage girls - not the sort that actually exist, but what we imagine all the ones we've never met are like. I hope the same can be said of their main roles, simply because the myriad minor tragedies of Lizzie and Sarah's lives can make for desperately uncomfortable viewing - I don't think I'd have been able to laugh without convincing myself that nobody actually has it this bad.

I can't quite imagine how the precise world established by Lizzie and Sarah could be adapted into a series, so Hynes and Davis' intention was presumably to showcase the characters and style of writing upon which they want to expand. This is so massively exciting it's in danger of making a vein in my forehead twitch like a Disney villain - with the exception of the peerless The Thick of It and last year's excellent miniseries Getting On, BBC comedy seems to have lost the knack of making intelligent, unafraid programmes with enough carefully integrated darkness to make my girlfriend protest loudly and bury herself in Grazia. Lizzie and Sarah suggests that Jessica Hynes and Julia Davis could reverse this trend all on their own, but they're going to get nowhere if they keep being given graveyard slots.

AcuTect - the difference is acute.

In which St Cuthbert (above) is gratuitously distracting.

Christ knows who AcuTect are, but there's a Post-It (PostIt? Post-it? I can't stand things like this) stuck on the wall in front of my desk bearing their inestimable logo and slogan. It also carries the following note in my girlfriend's dramatic scrawl:

'Alexandrian - Allegorical

Antiochene - Literal'.

Then it says 'Diatide, Inc. Nycomed. Amersham', but I don't think that's relevant.

I'm so desperately lost with the essay I'm supposed to be writing (into the last half a dozen of my academic career, happily) that I've spent a good twenty minutes staring at this note trying to work out what aspects of whatever schools, traditions or so on can be termed 'Alexandrian' or 'Antiochene', and how they qualify for description as allegorical or literal. I don't want to Google it, because I'll end up link-surfing on Wikipedia for another half an hour and find myself eventually reading about cephalophores or the LHC or something else which doesn't really relate to my neglected academic concerns.

For fuck's sake. I had to check how to spell cephalophores for that last sentence, so I Googled my stab at a spelling (right, as it happens) and I've just ended up reading the entire Wikipedia article on them after all. They were the subject of a group of bonus questions on University Challenge a few weeks ago, and I got all three answers - surely I don't need to know anything more about Saint Cuthbert? He wasn't a real one anyway, he was carrying St Oswald's head rather than his own. Pervert. AND I didn't even find out why the Antiochene something or other is literal.

This is what happens when you sit down to write a blog without deciding on a subject, isn't it?

I very much doubt anyone's reading this, but if you are then I'm assiduously digging around for any publication which wants to give me the opportunity to scribble them an occasional or regular article, byline or column. (Did you notice my use of the A, B, C pattern there? It's a reference to me being literate, although it sort of backfired because I was forced into my choice of words by preordaining their first letters and they're now all a bit redundant). Anyway, if you should happen to know of someone who fancies having an arrogant country boy spewing modernophobic twaddle over their pages, do drop me a comment.

Cheers.

Notes on ankle injuries, oven chips and camels.

Yesterday afternoon, my ankle decided not to play. It does this fairly regularly, usually for just long enough to make me look ridiculous when I'm walking in public and suddenly fall over. However, yesterday it decided to up its game, and when I put my foot down for a step like any other it completely failed to do its job. In fact, it did more than that - although I recognise the improbability of this statement and/or its similarity to Winona Ryder's "there are no bones in my arm!" whingeing in Girl, Interrupted, what it felt like was that my ankle had disappeared completely, leaving my shin free to plough straight into the top of my foot.

Twenty-nine hours, one disinterested nurse practitioner and a lot of swelling and pain later, I have learnt that I'm in possession of a fine collection of shredded ligaments. I also feel that I'm now something of an expert on the proper use of fucked-up ankles. With that in mind, I hope you'll appreciate the following top tips for next time you acquire a similar injury:

1) Try not to live in a flat accessible only by either two handrail-free flights of interior stairs or one rickety and undermaintained flight of outside steps. I realise this will take some forward planning.

2) If, due to a lack of the aforementioned planning, you are without frozen peas, avoid using Tesco Finest frozen oven chips to reduce swelling as they are nattily designed to dig viciously into any areas of tenderness.

3) Do not find the bit of your ankle where you think the pain is coming from and vigorously prod it to see if you're right. There is no best case scenario here - either you're wrong and therefore a bit thick, or you're right and will shortly be in excruciating pain.

4) Definitely do not cross the road except on a green signal - you'll inevitably find yourself in the path of a bus and have to run. This is not at all good.

5) Do not, having wrenched ankle painfully running from bus, immediately drown sorrows in pub and further damage self by slipping on bathroom floor. NB joint pain is apparently unaffected by alcohol.

6) Avoid sleeping, since you will initially awake feeling rested and positive but will then realise your ankle has totally stiffened up and hurts like blazes.

7) Take baths unless you are certain that standing in the shower will not cause your leg to collapse, leaving you a) helpless in the bathtub until you can once more put weight on it, or b) helpless in the bathtub with a fractured skull. (Only one of these happened to me.)

8) If it is necessary to focus the entirety of your day's energy on a trip to your local outpost of the NHS in order to arrange physiotherapy, do not painstakingly hobble all the way there just to find out it's lunchtime and nobody's home.

9) Having returned home after your medical disappointment, do not bravely rally yourself for a further trip and decide to tie it in with a visit to Tesco if you suspect that it may be chucking-out time at the local comprehensive. Twelve year olds are repellent enough when you're able-bodied and capable of imperiously sweeping them from your path. As a cripple, they are as menacing as vultures circling a foundered camel. Do camels founder? It seems likely, if a little sad.

10) Do not persistently and perversely force your foot into painful positions with the vague idea that it might constitute an exercise. Unless it's in the 'Ankle Injury' booklet from the hospital, it doesn't count.

I had rather hoped that the last day-and-a-bit of what is, after all, an extremely finite life might have consisted of a little more than ten foolish mistakes, but apparently it didn't. In fact, I've got a horrible feeling that this has been one of the more eventful days I've had recently.

Take care.

Blogging. Properly, now.

In the last two days I've had a bit of an epiphany, which is always nice. I decided to write an article for a prominent student paper, which I've never done before, and the lovely people who decide these things have seen fit to publish it. As the genesis of this odd little blog (I was going to write 'corner of the blogosphere', but I don't want to be the sort of person who says 'blogosphere' any more than I want to start saying 'sleb' just because Stephen Fry does) demonstrates, I've been writing for my own phenomenally low-rent college paper (that's the college and the paper) for a little while, but this is a completely different bucket of crabs. On Monday, at least ten thousand people will have the chance to scribble on paper copies of my musings, and a whole world will be able to leave caustic comments on whichever dusty corner of the above website is appropriate.

So, there it is. I'm going to be a writer now. If anyone's reading this, I'll publish my first article on here as soon as it's gone up on the paper's own website. I think it's quite good, but I'll be hugely grateful for anything constructive that you can fling at me via the comment system.

I'm also active on Twitter as @J_Marcel, so go there too if you fancy.

Thanks x

Back issue blogs #2: Mark Watson and Avatar (Jan 10)

Happy New Year, criticism-appreciators! You’ll be glad to know, as a direct result of my boundless extravagance and disregard for my financial affairs, I have not one but two reviews for you this edition. Last week I went on an expedition to see the hugely underrated comedian Mark Watson perform a ‘work in progress’ gig in Soho, and when I drifted out of the theatre it was compellingly pointed out to me that an hour or so’s hanging around would put me in pole position for a look at James Cameron’s sci-fi epic Avatar. I stumbled to bed around four AM, having repeatedly dozed off on the bus home, and comforted my aching eyes and buzzing prefrontal cortex with the thought that I’d have lots and lots to tell you. I think I need a decent run-up to babble convincingly about Avatar, so I’ll start with the comedy gig.

Twitter has reliably informed me that Mark Watson’s first stand-up DVD is due out later this year, and I heartily recommend that you keep an eye out for it whether or not you’ve seen any of his previous work. Currently hosting BBC4’s deliciously odd quiz show We Need Answers, you might recognise his beardy Bristolian features from the occasional episode of Mock the Week or HIGNFY, although his most famous endeavours to date have been his deliriously successful and headache-inducingly ambitious 24- and 36-hour stand-up shows at the Edinburgh Fringe. When I tracked him down at the Soho Theatre on Sunday, I had barely stopped chortling from the last time I saw him perform (November), and after a few seconds of late-arrival bullying I settled into the most enjoyable hour of live comedy I’ve ever experienced. Watson just keeps getting better and better – his endearingly shy style, punctuated with ‘um’s and self-deprecating cracks, eases the audience into a pleasant and uneventful journey through his evidently pleasant and uneventful life (the most exciting anecdotes we heard were about those Magners adverts and a chap he met on a train who subsequently didn’t kill himself). Nevertheless, he has the room transfixed. Watson combines the very sharpest observational humour with effortlessly witty wordplay, something that fewer and fewer comedians seem able to do – whilst Michael McIntyre can highlight the absurdities of everyday life (whilst being a twat) and Jimmy Carr can deliver a perfectly crafted line (whilst being a twat), Watson’s fluid and apparently unrehearsed delivery is a delight to listen to, making light work of subject matter with which the audience can readily empathise. I doubt any person or production will garner such wholehearted, fanboyish adoration this year, so unless you want me to keep yapping on and on about Mark Watson then please do check him out.

Moving on to the second half of my evening (I’m skipping for your benefit the hour I spent in a filthy Soho pub waiting for these parentheses to end), I toddled off to see Avatar in three glorious dimensions at the sickeningly overpriced Leicester Square Odeon. I know I promised to stick to our dear Coronet, but it was ever so convenient and I felt I should probably see one overpriced film there and one at the IMAX whilst in London. (The IMAX one was Watchmen, which was jolly good). Once I’d finished vomiting in shock over the price of the tickets and checking myself out in my snazzy polarised glasses – am I the only person who didn’t know they’ve stopped using red and green lenses? – I settled into a surprisingly adequate chair and braced myself.

Mistake #1 by whoever’s responsible for these things was to include adverts in 3D before the film itself – I doubt the number of people who were swayed towards seeing any of the films promoted changed significantly, and the novelty was conveniently ripped out of the 3D format before the film had even started. And believe me, Avatar needs to cling to all the novelty value it can possibly beg, borrow or steal. It’s a perfectly adequate sci-fi film, albeit with a plot thinner than almost anything I’ve ever seen (my viewing companion observed that she’d never been able to follow a regular-length sci-fi/fantasy film all the way through, so the fact that this lumbering three-hour beast managed not to lose her at any point is perhaps distressing), and it is undoubtedly a feast for the eyes – in fact, the imagined world of Pandora is so idyllic that online support groups have appeared for those ‘Avatards’ who can do nothing but pine for the simple lifestyle of their alien heroes. No word of a lie. People are extraordinary.

An effects-heavy, plot-light extravaganza, then? Absolutely. It’s very visually appealing, so long as the specs don’t give you a headache. But can James Cameron really justify having poured 15 years of his odd little life and an estimated $450 million into something pretty? Once you’ve seen one shot of the “big blue cat-monkey smurfs” (Ross Noble, in case you were wondering) riding dragon things over shiny forests, communing with nature by way of their telepathic ponytails (absolutely no kidding) or shooting at the evil humans in their evil human gyrocopters whilst they try to do evil things to lovely lovely Nature, you’ve essentially seen all you need to. The film has a very standard, tiresomely patronising eco message about safeguarding the natural world, so expect to feel demonised for clutching a non-recycled cup of Coke and/or vat of popcorn – although not for craving a cigarette, since even 150 years in the future Sigourney Weaver’s character is almost never without one.

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of Avatar, however, is its insidious and racist adherence to what has become known as the ‘White Messiah’ fable. This is an archetype present within all forms of fiction but especially prevalent in cinema, where an embittered and/or thrill-seeking protagonist (male, white) is plunged into the midst of a culture he initially and ignorantly despises. However, once he realises that its simple virtues (gentle treehugging as opposed to technology and so on) outweigh those of his own civilisation he rallies his new-found family to combat the rest of the white men, who are naughty and impure. This happens time and again – Dances With Wolves and The Last Samurai are particularly obvious examples, whilst Pocohontas and FernGully water the message down for kids (in fact, FernGully is basically a more visually crude version of Avatar, with Robin Williams as a lobotomised bat) – and it is extraordinarily unpleasant. The suggestion is that the ‘natives’, or indigenous persons or Na’avi or whatever the particular film calls them, are little more than children for all their athleticism and connection to nature – what they really need is a big, strong, rational white man to point them in the right direction, because bless them, they can’t do it themselves.

Avatar aspires to be an epic which will change our attitudes towards film and environmentalism forever. That it represents the future of the cinema-going experience I have no doubt – but could Cameron not have made more of an impact on the green campaign by donating those hundreds of millions to charity? That way he could have maybe saved some creatures which actually exist, and he would also have avoided looking like a big fat racist.

Back issue blogs #1: Harry Brown (Nov 09)

It’s very rare for me to see a film which has me babbling excitedly all the way down the street afterwards. Sir Michael Caine’s South London vigilante flick Harry Brown (18) has still got me haemorrhaging ill-conceived conclusions about gang warfare and ineffective policing an hour and a half after leaving the cinema, so I think it’s definitely worth me bending your metaphorical ear about. Harry Brown has been (erroneously) reported as being the last time Caine sets his sights on a lead role, but even if he’s got another twenty years of film-making in him – and who’s to say he hasn’t? – this is not one you want to miss.

Following on from the beautifully crafted dementia comedy of Is Anybody There?, released earlier this year, this film slips Caine into a character close to the role of an enlisted man which he originally coveted in Zulu, playing a widowed ex-Marine languishing in a south-of-the-river estate full of drugs, guns, and youths too keen on both. When his last remaining friend (who it’s hard to pity too much once you realise that he also played that mental caretaker in Harry Potter) falls prey to the gang which loiters in a local underpass, Harry Brown straps on his badman boots and goes after the perpetrators. The rest of the film consists principally of Harry a) killing lots of nasty people, all of whom we are encouraged to condemn in a rather monochromatic fashion unpleasantly redolent of a Daily Mail rant, and b) effortlessly evading the ineffectual gropings of the local police force, almost none of whom can believe that an emphysemic pensioner might be their very own wax-jacketed crusader – the lady DI played by Emily Mortimer (who makes very good use of unfortunately clunking lines) can’t even convince her sardonic sergeant of Harry’s connection to the dead yobs on every corner, let along talk round the supercilious superintendent more concerned with the success of his high-impact Operation Bluejay and its potential effects on crime statistics in the area.

The main attraction of Harry Brown was always going to be Michael Caine’s performance, and he doesn’t disappoint for a moment. Displaying the talent for effortlessly embodying his characters which justifies his standing as one of the greatest living English actors, he single-handedly carries a plot which is unfailingly straight as an arrow and occasionally became predictable enough to need livening up with a gunshot or similar (I baptised my left sleeve with a perfectly adequate Beaujolais-Villages when a half-naked crackhead unexpectedly punched an unconscious, underage girl in the face), keeping the audience’s attention even when his appearances are juxtaposed with a roaring crowd of masked ne’er-do-wells with Molotov cocktails – in a world of deliberately one-dimensional characters, Harry is aglow with personality and is irresistible even when stabbing a beggar by a canal or dispassionately discussing the hole he’s just blown in a dealer’s stomach. I must confess that I left the cinema fretting a little over the potential echoes of truth in the story – the film, partially shot from camera phones and frequently leeched of colour, is presented in such a way as to suggest the ‘gritty realism’ of a docu-drama without claiming to be anything of the sort – but even if the estates of South London are urban utopiae, I can’t pretend Harry Brown has left me anything but shaken and nervous about leaving my W2 bourgeois stronghold. Harry’s nemeses may have been deliberately crafted to deflect empathy, but it’s worth remembering that faceless villains with no character development don’t normally present us with a problem – when was the last time you watched a news report of an inner city stabbing and pondered the background of the murderer? Perhaps director Daniel Barber has noticed that if we’ve got a sideline to boo from, we’re not really fussed.

Introduction etc

Right. The plan here is basically to create a semi-permanent home for the various odd things I churn out for my university paper, plus anything else I decide to scribble down. Let's see how it goes.

I'm John, by the way.

Ta.