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.