This is a rant.

Yesterday I went out in the afternoon to buy a present for my niece’s 4^th birthday, which is today. (Happy birthday, Isobel!) I went to the present shop, then to the card shop, then came home. This took about an hour. After a bit I realised it was coming up to five o’clock and I needed to get it in the post. I wrapped the present, wrote the card, addressed it, and stuck it all together. A nice package.

What about posting it? I didn’t have any stamps. Not a problem, I thought, I’ll buy some. So I went to the Royal Mail website and looked up how much postage I needed. I went out, bought some stamps, stuck £2.50 worth on the parcel, and went to the postbox… where of course the parcel didn’t fit.

This might sound a bit silly, but: I don’t send parcels that often, and I’d forgotten that to send parcels you have to go to a post office. By this time it was 5.20 and, needless to say, by the time I got to the nearest post office – about a ten minute walk – it was closing. That was it. I’d failed. Sure, there was a late collection at a sorting office, but it was at Mount Pleasant in Islington – a good 20-minute bus ride away – and even then, i still quite possibly wouldn’t have been able to get the damn parcel in the slot.

Leaving aside for a second the fact that even a quite large post office in a busy area of zone 2 London closes at 5.30 – which is obviously completely fucking ridiculous. I’m not going to weigh in on the staffing principles of a giant nationalised, heavily unionised utility: I’m not fucking stupid. No, what makes me so mad is something simpler:

Why can’t pillarboxes just have bigger fucking slots?

I could understand how, pre-internet, there was no point it making in possible for ordinary people to post more than a letter at a pillarbox. After all, how would you know how much postage to use? But now, you can look up the amount of postage you need online. There’s even a nifty tool where you can pre-pay, if like me you seem to be always buying stamps but never seem to actually have any, and print off a label to stick on. How sensible! But rendered completely fucking pointless by the fact that, if you’re sending anything larger than a fucking cassette tape, you still have to walk ten minutes (or twenty, or thirty, in plenty of places in the UK) to a post office just to get a fucking slot big enough to put it in.

For fuck’s sake.

The problem, I assume, is that nobody wants to tamper with our precious fucking red Victorian pillarboxes. They’re so old, people coo. They’ve been there so fucking long. The one in Manchester survived the IRA bombing, etc, blah blah fucking blah. Well, you know what? I don’t give a fuck. It’s 2011, for fuck’s sake. We need things to fucking work, not just to look like they belong in a Richard Curtis movie. Sure, keep red pillarboxes in some pretty picturesque places where everyone has a fucking housekeeper to take their stuff to the post office for them. But for the rest of us with normal lives, isn’t it more important to save us all a bucketful of hassle than to retain a false air of village-y goodness in streets of neon signs and giant advertising billboards?

Not that you actually have to get rid of the fucking things anyway. How hard would it be to just add a box on the side with a flap and label it ‘parcels’? OK, there’d be something of a theft risk, but you could put up a big sign saying ‘don’t use this for anything valuable’ and it’d at least give people a fucking option.

The point is, at a time when post offices are closing all over the place, it seems pretty fucking logical to try to reduce our reliance on them. And the main thing which about 90% of people in any post office are there to do on any given day is just to send a bloody parcel. So couldn’t we just make it so doing that didn’t have to involve going to the fucking post office?

In summary: Britain is a decrepit, backward-looking absurdity in a state of irreversible decline.

Thanks for reading.

So here are my thoughts on Saturday’s ‘Doctor Who’ if anyone’s interested

James Corden is basically OK when he’s acting and not being his awful self, isn’t he? As a result, this was quite an enjoyable episode for about the first half an hour. But the climax was completely horrible, RTD/Tennant-level horrible.

As for the foreshadowing of next week (spoilers), I was all like ‘it can’t be next week, he hasn’t sent the envelopes!) but then he totally sent the envelopes. Eep. Nevertheless, this is all, essentially, bollocks: why on earth would ‘tomorrow’ be the day he absolutely positively has to travel back to April 2011 (it was implied Saturday’s ep took place some time in 2012 or 13) in order to get shot? Why tomorrow?

Also: it’s adult River Song in that astronaut suit? That’s weird. So instead of it being the actual child we saw in an astronaut suit at the start of the series, revealed to be one of the early incarnations of Melody/River, it’s adult River, and they just decided to dress her up in an astronaut suit so she could hide underwater and ‘surprise’ the doctor even though the doctor knows she’s coming. Oh, what a load of fanny. Also: was Demon’s Run in the future? If not, how is Judi Dench with an eyepatch still alive?

Basically the show is trying to make three things mesh together: ‘River Song is the impossible astronaut,’ ‘River Song is Melody Pond’ and ‘Alex Kingston is really good.’ It’s that last one that I think is ballsing things up. When we saw Kingston emerge from ‘Mels’ a couple of weeks ago I was like, this is the last we’ll see of her, right? The Doctor is moving backwards through her timeline, as always; we’ve gone from her knowing him and him not knowing her to almost the other way round. That’s it now, and we’ll move on to meeting her childhood incarnations, working all the way back to her birth where we’ve already been OK that bit wasn’t entirely thought through. But anyway, that would have been cool, and made the whole River thing a proper, consistent sci-fi puzzle, and given River Song a marvellous tragic quality: her whole life she tries to save the doctor but she already killed him years ago as a child.

So of course, they fuck it up, determined to bring Dr. Elizabeth Corday back for one last hurrah. So now we apparently have a newly brainwashed adult River Song in an astronaut suit shooting the doctor at a pre-ordained time per the bad guys’ bloody arrangement. How very fucking dull.

Next week is going to be just as bad a clusterfuck of disappointment as the end of the last series, I fear. Why does this always happen? GRR.

My___

My___, originally uploaded by barleyherb.

Pleased to see Myspace’s new branding is taking off in the crucial band-toilet-grafitti space.

Idea for line from imaginary film about a newspaper

‘You did the right thing as a journalist, putting it in. And I’m doing the right thing as an editor, leaving it out.’

This is probably a bad idea but

In the wake of all this Wombles Glastonbury nonsense, the thought occurs to me that the time could be right for an actual return of the TV series. Think about it: it’s about creatures who live on a common (close to nature) in South London (very now) and pick up rubbish for a living. It really couldn’t be more on-trend, lifestyle-wise, could it? There could be a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall cameo.

“Towards a Better Journalism Career Path”

Writer

Ideal Education: Truancy; hoboism; a wisecracking, self-educated college dropout; or, at most, a philosophy major.

Personality Type: Introverted, socially awkward genius (for writing-heavy jobs); or, smooth-talking con man (for reporting jobs. There are always rewrite men).

Makes me laugh every time.

Fac-ing hell

For the last several years, I have watched The X Factor, at least from the start of the live shows (I find the laugh-at-the-freaks elements of the first few weeks depressing). I have done this because I like watching people sing, I like the silliness and costumes and dancing and general joyfulness, and I like the idea of being part of a national conversation about something, given that despite my best efforts Modern Family is not yet in the nation’s top 10 TV programmes.

This year, though, I decided I was going to give X Factor a miss. I’m 30, and frankly I just felt both too old and too young for a show that seems designed for the under-18s, and the parents of those of that age.

But tonight, intrigued by all this guff about it apparently being a fix, I spent an hour on YouTube watching some of this year’s auditions and performances.

What the fuck is going on?! A show that has always been populated with dull-but-likeable shy youngsters suddenly seems full of anguished hipsters, desperate wannabies and – well, I’ll get onto what the hell Cher Lloyd is in a second.

First of all: yes, it’s a bloody fix. I could tell from Katie’s first audition (when I saw it an hour ago, having heard all that’s happened since – I claim no great foresight). Bloomin’ no one gets two second chances at audition, not to mention the fact that Simon would normally have turned down someone that desperate and spoiled and annoying even if they had a voice like bloody Maria Callas.

What’s going on, then? Surely Simon isn’t daft enough to risk the show’s credibility just because Katie’s mum works at Sony or whatever nonsense it is. I suppose we’ll never know, they’ll have to let her go on Sunday now to quell the rumours. I can’t believe they ever made a deal for her to win, perhaps just for her to stay a set number of rounds.

What about the boys? Well, there’s Matt Cardle, the most confusing non-closet case since David Bowie in the 60s. I don’t think he is gay, but if her were in would go some way to explaining why he seems quite so determined to sing girls’ songs. I mean, in girls’ voices. When I first watched him, I must admit I thrilled at the idea of an Essex painter & decorator being quite so girly on TV. Then it turned out he’s actually an upper middle-class theatre school graduate, which explained a whole lot. Anyway, the show seems to be determined to make him so bland people simply forget to vote for him, so I guess we won’t have to think about him much longer.

Then there’s dear old Aiden Grimshaw. Last week I tried to convince a friend of mine that people who wear comedy NHS glasses and have half their head shaved are not necessarily arrogant coke-addled hipsters with media jobs; some are quite shy and lovely, something people my age seem to have a lot of trouble believing. But what better evidence could there be than dear, shy, mad, troubled Aiden Grimshaw? And when I say ‘troubled’, fucking hell, I mean it. Look again at the first 30 seconds of ‘Mad World’ – he looks like his fucking parents just  split up. Like, ten minutes previous. (Ten minutes after my parents split up I was a blubbering mess hiding in the toilet, but I was 9.) What inner torment is he hiding? Why are our children like this?! Is it the Tories’ fault? Please please please can it be the Tories’ fault somehow? I suppose we should be glad that Aiden’s rehearsal duties mean he’s not sitting huddled round a fire on the roof of Millbank right now reading bloody Neitzche.

Back to the girls. First there’s Tesco Mary. I kept hearing people talk about Tesco Mary, how good she is, how much she deserved to win, and there was something not quite right about it. People don’t talk about people like that who actually have a chance of winning. It was like people talking about how the disabled kid deserves to win the sack race.  There had to be something wrong, something clearly deficient about her. Then I saw her videos. Ah, that explains it! She’s 50 and fat! Of course people talk about her like she’s some fucking retarded child.

And finally – I mean, there are others, but I think it’s fair to say no-one remembers their name at this point – there’s Cher Lloyd.

One one level, I actually think the show has handled Cher Lloyd quite well. In that, the judges seem to have clocked immediately that Cher’s alarming ghetto hooker act is nothing more than teenage bravado and that underneath it all she is, as The Sun meaninglessly put it, ‘tough but fragile. (The exception, of course, being Cheryl Cole, who seems to think shy girls from far-off regions of the UK acting like ghetto hookers is perfectly great, as she’s been making a fool of herself doing it for nearly ten years). ‘ They’ve neither exploited it by having her hump shirtless dancers, nor stamped on it and forced her to sing ballads to see how she copes, which is what I suspect Simon would like to do.

On the other hand, this considered reaction has rather glossed over my initial response, which was something along the lines of FUCKING HELL WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS GIRL? What did her parents do to her? She must have been fiddled at the very least. Am I old? Is this normal now? Do most 16-yr-olds from bloody Swansea or whatever now wear ripped-to-shreds jeans and rap about ‘haters’? Is this the new fucking normal? I don’t remember any of this with Rachel bloody Adeji, and she was actually  black. Even that one who lost custody of her kids was positively granny-friendly compared to this. Joe McElderry won last year! Where have these lunatics all sprung from?

Don’t get me wrong, though, Cher’s clearly extremely talented (and when she’s dressed well, like during Just Be Good To Me, looks fabulous) and I sincerely hope she wins. If she doesn’t get kicked off for sneaking into Simon’s bedroom first.

I just hope Aiden Grimshaw doesn’t kick off when he loses and start shooting people.

Dear caller, I’m not available right now. Please leave me a long, rambling message packed with unnecessary information, then say your phone number really fast so I miss half of it and have to listen to the whole message again.

Oops.

Email from our IT guy. I find it strangely affecting.

This video from MGMT poses two questions.

1. MGMT WHY YOU MAKE VIDEO SO SAD

2. ANDREW VANWYNGARDEN WHY YOU DRESS LIKE JOHNNY BORRELL

Thanks, LiveJournal. I’d forgotten.

Though musically the results aren’t world-shaking, the transformation of baby-faced bad-boy rapper plan b to sensitive soul boy had a bunch of potential, crush-wise. So it’s disappointing that the opposite transition, from sweet to bloated and thuggish, seems to have happened in his face

cunt

I was listening to JLS’ “Everybody in Love” in Subway a couple of days ago. It’s a remarkable record. When it’s playing, it’s summery and charming and seems quite memorable; but then, when it finishes, you realise you can’t remember how it goes at all

Random internet hotties, #2

Bless. Underneath his Mitt Romney exterior, he’s all stressed.

Random internet hotties, #1

Check out the enigmatic smile.

The sad tale of “Sex in Helvetica”

I spent much of this morning thinking about making a tumblelog called “Sex in Helvetica”. It would present classic lines of sex in literature, in the cool, clinical font, on a white background. It was to be amazing. Then I realised (a) I couldn’t tihnk of any classic lines of sex from literature; and (b) I don’t have Helvetica.

I managed to cobble together a start post using Coolvetica and Nerve.com’s “The Naughty Bits” column. But it just wasn’t right. So below, as a one-off, you can find the flushed-out fetus of the aborted act of genius that was to be “Sex in Helvetica”. It’s an extract from Athur Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn.

images of boredom

Severe delays on the Circle, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City lines, Thursday

See and download the full gallery on posterous

There are three kinds of people in the world: those who get my jokes and laugh at them; those who don’t get them and look confused; and those who don’t get them, but laugh anyway. Two of these kinds, I respect.