A short ride on he bus around noon has been the highlight of my day. To be fair it hasn’t been a very productive day. I had to go and register at a vet, not me personally obviously. Though my Holloway Road quack is not exactly God’s gift to medicine. I am pretty sure he turns to leaches as a last resort for anything less mainstream than a migraine.
I don’t like public transport. Not being a fan of the public, I don’t see why I should look forward to getting on a stinking great vehicle with them. Today was a particularly bad trip though. One mile and a half of utter horror. A single-mum (I am presuming here, she might have a husband or partner at home, or at least in the Pentonville nick - who am I to judge) got on the bus with her little cherub. A spotty little terror with more street-smarts than I have. He ran to the seat right behind me, jumped in it, and kicked the back of my seat for the entire journey.
She did nothing. She was too busy listening to something without any treble on her ipod. To be fair to the little degenerate, his foot kept pretty good rhythm with the bass. I am pretty sure there was an off-beat that he totally nailed by Essex Road.
There’s two things you can do in a situation like this. I could’ve turned on the pair of them and given them a mouthful. Not a well-considered dressing down suggesting their behaviour was not quite appropriate, that’d be a complete waste. I mean a stream of utter abuse, so front-loaded with profanity it would barely hold itself up as genuine dialogue. Or. I could, and I did, sit there and stare miserably into the middle-distance while working out if its the world or myself that I hate more.
The total sucker-punch is that when I pop my cloggs I have to bequeath a small share of my oxygen to this little shit. I can’t take it with me. He’ll get it. And I’m not saying he’ll definitely do nothing of any worth in his life and therefore shouldn’t get his fair share of the atmosphere’s oxygen. That his lungs shouldn’t be allowed to gulp down the sweet O2 that the rest of us can. I’m not saying that at all. I’m just saying maybe an independent panel would do worse than look into it. Yes, we are all born equal. But kick the back of my seat and I take the lead.
Maybe today will pick up tonight.
I didn’t post yesterday as I was too busy being in an utter and blind panic. Mark Coverdale (find him on Facebook, he loves it when people do that) are performing a ten minute story at a local Burns night – that’s Robbie Burns, not some sort of first-degree Fireworks night support group.
I think we were asked to do it because I run a comedy night and he is friends with someone who runs a comedy night. The coincidence is uncanny. But that’s because I believe most things happen because of me. Wind, sun, the weekly shop - that sort of thing.
I’ve got no idea about Robbie Burns, which is less of an issue than having no idea about what constitutes a good ten minute short story. Mark gets the easier job of drawing pictures that illustrate (illustrations if you will) the words I am saying. I have to write a ten minute story (that’ll take about a month) and read a ten-minute story (that’ll take about 6 minutes). And I have to do this on Burns night, on the 25th.
This is all ridiculous. I know Robbie was a right slag, according to Wikipedia, but that only gets me 30 seconds in. I need another 9 minutes 30. When I’m usually asked to do a 10 minute stand-up spot I can easily fill it up with poorly-received audience banter, long period of silence or curling up in the foetal position and sobbing like a baby. Not on the 25th, this shit had to be loaded with narrative.
So blind panic for the rest of the weekend it is then. For now, I am going to an event in my Google calendar that has appeared as a reminder named ‘Friday night fuck-fest’. And I am 15 minutes overdue.
January is turning out to be a very puritan month. A worrying amount of people have announced some form of abstinence in the past two days. But I have a very busy work and social life, what with me being decidedly important and popular. My calendar is like a pyramid, blocks of activity, piled up, piled up again, and reaching a pointy crescendo at the top, but (as far as I know) without a moth-eaten corpse at the bottom. Therefore, I have little time available to abstain from stuff. Other than going to the gym or eating greens, Abstinences from which I have turned into an art form.
But I feel left out – when everyone else gets to the end of the month and reward themselves with that vodka/cigarette/cake/fondle they have cut out of their lives for the prior 31 days, what am I going to do? I could just double my vice intake? Take one for the team, and toast them while I do. Or, maybe I could just find new ones? Indulging in sillier and more mortally dangerous vices as the months roll-on. To the point that by Spring I’ll be naked and out of my mind, teetering somewhere between a stool and a light-shade?
I’ll probably do neither, and just carry on with the service that saw me through 2011. Ignoring the smugness of abstainers that is scarcely bearable. What’s to be impressed with? They’ve drank/smoked/snorted themselves into a mess so silly that now they are starving themselves of it.
There is of course the option of abstaining myself of the abstainers, till February 1st. When no doubt they’ll be so smug that they’ll be only be capable of talking to me when standing on a plinth whilst being echoed by a choir.
I’m certainly not going to say that some days are actually longer than others. But if they are, the first day at work of the year has to be a fair contender as the longest. Today couldn’t have dragged more if someone had piped the hits of Snow Patrol directly into my skull.
The Mother of all Mondays. And not even technically a Monday. Never has a day lived up to its billing so emphatically. London looked post-apocalyptic this morning. Swirling rain. Gale force winds. People staggering to and fro. All desperately coming to terms with the fact that a long bout of alcoholic excess - punctuated only by regular and shorter periods of utter binge-drinking - was finally over.
I got to work. Where were the mince pies? Where was the mulled wine? The most exciting thing I unwrapped all day was my lunch. I wanted reindeer jumpers and Cliff Richard. All I got was a complaint about my Secret Santa. And I had to work beyond mid-afternoon.
My walk to the bus-stop was a trail of ex-Xmas trees. Each one previously a fifty pound focal-point of festive fun, newly reinvented as irrigation for dog piss. People looked miserable. I sat across from a couple on the number 19. They didn’t share a word. I found it difficult to work out which of them was actually clinically depressed. The girl seemed more likely. A vague sign of a nervous tick, and her complexion gave the impression that a slew of Valium was only a repeat prescription away. He was much harder to read. What with his sobbing and wringing of hands.
The shame is, this isn’t a one-day hangover. London will be this way for the month. It’s here for keeps. I will do my bit to lift the general mood. Definitely starting tomorrow.
I am a brazen-tart for new year resolutions. Last year I had a list on my phone. 2011: A Keith Odyessy. Contributions included slouching less and trying to be a bit more punctual. This year I want to be more productive, so I am going to write on this blog every day (other than yesterday, I wrote my list late - 2011 was an abject failure resolutions-wise).
After I wrote my little list of resolutions (working title 2012: Year of Keith) I went and threw eleven (relatively) hard-earned quid at a roast chicken that looked equally ashamed by her price-tag as defeated in her last remaining function of living up to it. This thing looked like it had spent the winter marching across a desert weighed down by mini ankle weights. I very rarely use my hands when eating in public, but I was reduced to picking every morsel of poultry from this poor unfortunate’s emaciated thigh and eating it back from under my finger nails. I arrived and left with starvation-rating almost completely intact.
It’s handy that the second resolution on my list is to cook more. Partly inspired by getting a Jamie Oliver cook-book for Xmas. Jamie describes a great number of dishes as pucka, I’ll let that (and the fact that he is everything that is wrong with the world) pass. I’ll just concentrate on improving beyond the portly quail that was shoved under me in the mistaken guise of a chicken earlier.
The third and final resolution is to be slower to judge people. Apparently people deserve a chance and I’ve been reliably informed that I judge too harshly and too quickly. I didn’t listen at first as the person reliably informing me was clearly an utter idiot, and is as much use to our planet as famine. But maybe he did have a point. From this point in I am going to let people express themselves before I judge them. I will do this by starting the conversation with an open-ended question then counting down from 10 before dismissing them as utterly undeserving of another second of my time. With this technique I hope to win many more friends in 2012.
The entry price to any good dinner party is what you come armed with, be it good cheer or a summary understanding of the day’s world news. Not that I get invited to many dinner parties. I am categorised by friends as more beer and darts material than dinner guest. Despite clearly having a lot intellectually to give. And not really liking beer or darts.
My annual occasion of being invited to something more civilised than a quiz night left me in a muddle as to what to bring. I’d already planned to take a bottle. But planned to drink it almost exclusively myself, to the point of making a name-badge for it. So, I had to go a bit further. Cheese board, obviously. Who doesn’t like cheese? Not me for a start. Love the stuff.
I wanted good cheese. Proper stuff. So I went to a delhi in Highbury Park with a special cheese shop at the back. Manned by the most judgemental dairy salesman I have ever come across. In hindsight, starting with asking for Babybels might have got his back up. He went on to sneer at my choice of brie, demanded I get a goat’s cheese, and point-blank refused to find me any cheddar. He almost punched me when I made the golden comment about “liking a bit of blue”. I was very happy with that.
He got me back, he sold me 7 quid of swiss cheese (by the way, it is not amusing in the slightest to refer to swiss cheese as ‘fairly neutral’ - save your breath, take it from me). But this was special swiss cheese, with it’s taste on timer. He let me try it. It tasted alright. So I said “250 grammes of that please, young man” (I was on his bad side by that point so had nothing to lose). Little did I know he’d set about a 7-second delay on this cheesy beast. He’d just finished cutting me a wedge so thick it would keep a draft out, when the slither he’d stuck in my gob 8-seconds earlier nearly took my fucking head off. It was like someone had detonated a controlled fungus explosion in the back of my throat. I couldn’t speak for the taste, which was for the best because I was dreaming up all sorts of new profanities that were best left unsaid given the other clientele seemed to be happily testing shavings of nice, mild parmisan.
All in all, the dinner party went off ok. I threw in a couple of quirky (biggoted) observations about the Italian economic crisis and thoroughly ruined everyone’s meals with my funky dessert. I look forward to being invited back soon.
Today has been organised perfectly. Bag was packed. Arrangements made for the cat. And my train ticket was bought weeks ago. Meaning I could take advantage of the super-saver advanced single. £8. Which is as much as I want to pay to travel to fucking Crewe.
I felt quite quite smug as I got to Euston with all the premium-paying passengers. Less so when the self-service machine asked me for a card that I lost last weekend. So, I walked up to the service desk.
“hello, I bought a ticket but haven’t got my card on me so can’t use the machine.”
“ok, have you got your booking reference?”
“yeah, I’ve got my email on my phone - RFX8J20Z”
“right…keith foggan”
“that’s right”
“have you got any ID?”
“ID?”
“passport or driving license, with a photo on to prove it is you”
“I’ve got my work pass”
“I can’t take that, has to be a passport or driving license”
“are you saying I stole this man’s wallet and phone, found the confirmation email for a one-way ticket on a 3 hour slow train to Crewe, and thought that was an opportunity not to be missed?”
“no, but I need proper ID.”
“he looks a lot like me don’t you think?”
“that’s a work pass though.”
“I wonder what he does”
“I am going to have to sell you a full-fare single”
“I don’t fancy your chances”
I am now sat on the train armed with a booking reference and what I think is a pretty solid argument. The woman opposite me has an unfeasibly large packet of crisps and a swallow tattoo on her forearm. I am assuming this is the return leg of her journey.
I went to the theatre at the weekend, a wonderful 90 minute show that I thoroughly enjoyed for the first 60, but had the last 30 minutes ruined by my body being fondled.
What looked like a new relationship was sitting in front of me. The girl spent the last half hour with her arm behind the back of her chair, sliding her fingers through her beau’s mullet. And getting quite a bit of my knee with her elbow into the bargain.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciated the sentiment. But frankly, unless I am getting involved in some shared spooning - I would sooner have the legroom.
I did think about making a comment, but it’s not something you can quickly explain in the middle of a play. Aside from that in the dark they looked a bit aggressive, and I was out-numbered 2 to 1.
So I just sat there motionless, a very obliging and polite gropee. Grimly coming to terms with that being my notable sexual encounter of the week.
It did cross my mind that this was a come on? Maybe I walked away from an equally undesirable yet quite complimentary invitation. Not being a swinger I don’t know the ‘tells’, I always thought it was all middle England keys in a fruit bowl caper. Not that i have a car, the keys to one, a fruit bowl, or a fellow swinger to offer in return. Making my attendance at such a party somewhat less than fair trade.
But it could be that it goes on everywhere. Possibly I have the kind of look of a man who swings. I doubt that. I’m not even sure what ‘swings’ means. I assume it means having sex with someone who under normal circumstances you wouldn’t look at twice.
So, I tucked my knees in, got excruciating cramp and left non-the-wiser of the new-age sexual depravity that quite clearly goes on at the National Theatre.
I think my weekend of mis-shapen sleep may have caused a grey mood to descend on me today, because some part of Monday was invested in my thinking of ways I can avenge people who have slighted me. I’m ashamed to say that the idea of poking dog-shit through letter-boxes did loan out some of my time.
Ambition of my own disappeared backstage, as I tried to work out who I could put in their place to make my day more cheery. I think the problem is I don’t have a genuine nemesis.
All good super-heroes have them. Superman had those reverse-reality do-badders. Emu had Grottbags. And David Cameron has every sentient being on the planet. I feel left out.
It may sound needlessly destructive, but if I could just highlight a willing candidate to be my idealogical opposite I’d be far more personally constructive. I need that sort of motivation. And what could be more motivating than trying to wipe someone from the face of the earth who tends to not completely agree with your world-view.
The search continues - you can stop it all here by emailing endme@thisiskeith.co.uk - with the words “Bring it on keithy” in the subject line.
Leave it a week though, my feline side-kick, Ringo, may have ring-worm.
I am being a bully today. A proper good one too. Dragging Ed kicking and screaming into the world of Twitter despite him clearly not wanting to be there might sound a little selfish on my part, but if I want to re-tweet his personal thoughts then who is he to stop me.
It’s either put legitimate musings down on a registered username or I’ll come up with my own libellous nonsense and attribute them to him anyway. Watch this…
@edcaruana just stuffed a handful of dog-shit into the back of a pensioners shopping trolley
See, easy. At least with the aforementioned being plugged into the world of Twitter, he now has the right to reply. With some people there’s just no gratitude.
See what Ed gets up to next@ http://twitter.com/edcaruana
My mother is an optimist – her permanent mantra to me is “if you think that’s the way it will work out, then that’s the way it’ll work out”. I’ve no idea what this means. But I’m pretty sure that if I think a trip to the Tesco’s will end with me being lofted on to the shoulders of a gaggle of busty cheerleaders, I am going to end up disappointed. 9 times out of 10.
My Dad on the other hand always describes himself as a ‘realist’, which is basically a pessimist who’s too stupid to work out how bleak things are. I’m quite often a pessimist. It’s not that I am a glass-half full or a glass-half empty person – it’s just I believe someone has stolen my glass.
But this is all about to change, the reason I am a pessimist is because quite often things do go unexpectedly and farcically wrong for me on more occasions than are plausible. After some careful thought I’ve decided that my decision-making is the common denominator. If I can remove that, everything will be peachy.
So, from now on I am crowd-sourcing my life. You get to choose the level of tedium I expose myself to from this point in. It’s a big step, but I’m not daunted. I was having a pitiful amount of success with my free will anyway. So, from now on I am handing over the co-ordination of 16 hours of my day to anyone who wants it. I am kind of contracted into something between 9.30 and 6, but outside of those hours my world is your oyster.
My fashion sense rotates through cycles that bare no resemblance to the needs of the season. I saw a man walking down leather lane who had a cardigan on that pretty much rocked my world. I really want his cardigan. I think I actually probably want his girlfriend, who was walking alongside him at the time, but let’s start with his cardigan and go from there.
It’s a lot more straight-forward to have a gut-curdling envy for an inanimate object, in my experience. I bought that transformer (when I was 9) within a fortnight. Susan Tindell still escapes me and I’ve being saving up for her for years.
Maybe the purchase of his cardigan (from a shop or from him, whichever it has to be) will place me in her league. Her league being defined by the type of pullover she dates. At the moment, she is out of my league - and I play in a very respectable division, certainly higher than the idiot she was walking with.
I just need to get my hands on that bloody cardigan, find out where she works (be this by stalking, stake-out or any other method that would get a less discrete obsessive locked-up) and pass through her lobby a few times. I’m assuming she has a lobby (or hope she has, I don’t want to date someone who spends their day doing something manual). Then she’ll spot me, see the cardie, see that we are registered for the same sporting contest - and the rest will be history.
Every day for the last eleven years, my mate Alex has been single. And I don’t mean loner-maverick-type-single. I mean full on-blind panic-last dodo on the island-single.
You can see his sense or urgency when we are in a night-club and towards the end of the night the quieter songs come on. DJ Tiesto, that sort of thing. He bounces round the dance-floor like a wasp in a jam-jar. Ultimately getting nowhere.
He has two great tactics for dating. Firstly, he has business cards printed with his name and mobile number on one side. On the other, the words “Take me to bed, or lose me forever.” Which on the one hand, is a fairly tragic gimmick. But, on the other hand is an amazing way to cut out the bureaucracy of flirting. Cut to the chase. “Here’s my card, here’s my face, what more is there left to say.”
The other tactic, is that he plays percentages. And what that means is he will talk to anyone. His only criteria for a soul-mate is proximity. When he was younger he used to be a romantic, looking for his perfect match no matter what corner of the universe they existed. These days it’s fate if they are less than seven places away from him in the taxi-rank.
Look out for him.
We got a lot of things wrong last night. Principally amongst them was assuming Cabaret Voltaire would be an arty and intellectual place to be at midnight. It wasnt. It was full of plebs dancing like someone had borrowed their spine.
I had genuine doubts on the way in. Maybe it was the look of the bouncers, or the poster on the far side of the entrance titled “DJ Mo’Focker” (or similar). My friends and I are not a DJ Mo’Focker crowd. The bounder saw this, well done him. If I was any more of an actor I would’ve purposefully put on a stagger or a slur - just to try and throw our entries inro doubt.
We did get in. Horrid luck. A very aggressive ‘crew’ inside. The men looked particularly menacing. I’m not. In my case, the ‘First rule of Fight Club’ is ‘Don’t go’. The men all looked like they’d all walked off a scaffold and arrived on the dance-floor, without breaking stride.
The women were only slightly less intimidating. A hen night turned up, and hung around the bar. I was petrified. Which was unfortunate, because hen nights are like sharks - they can smell fear.
It was either crawl up in the corner in a collective foetal position, or get the hell out of there. We got the hell out of there.
Edinburgh has been dreary today. Result, flat-based boredom. I ran so low on things to do I Googled myself.
Nothing.
My Facebook profile, this blog, then a stream of awkward-looking men pretending to be me.
I’m seriously not getting the search results credit my life to date deserves. I once scored the winner in the quarter-final of the Reg Vardy Used Cars and Spare-parts Trophy. Fuck all. Not even a match report.
There appears to be even less clamour to report on the night of two times with Mel Richards back in my uni days. I’m pretty sure browsers of the web deserve to hear that story. Just as much as my sexual prowess that evening deserves some online recognition.
Google is ignoring me. I’m used to being over-looked by people, that’s subjective. But Google has an algorithm, it’s ‘supposed’ to be scientific.
Google, let’s strike a deal. You throw me a bone where publicity is concerned. And, in return, you’ll forever be my engine of choice when searching for smut. I’ll obediently punch in the URLs into your search-bar, when both of us know full well that I’ve got the whole lot book-marked.
