Though I Hang My Head in Shame, I Actually Quite Like La Roux

Now, regular readers of this blog will know that I, by all accounts, loathe and despise everything. I am the very image of the snide, snarky internet blogger, casting bilious aspersions over everything I see from the cold cathode-ray comfort of my keyboard. I should abhor popularity. I should discard commonality. I should by all rights stay on-message and disown the mainstream simply for being mainstream. That's me, Generic Internet Blogger #4,000,001. I'm called "I Hope You Catch Fire", for heaven's sake. So why is it, then, that I consider La Roux's self-titled debut as easily the best album of 2009?

I've spent the last few days listening to it over and over, trying to find out quite what it is about this quirky, be-quiffed androgynous synthpop act that I like. Or, more honestly, desperately trying to pick holes in something I simply cannot fault.

Singer Elly Jackson makes the band. It's that simple. Producer Ben Langmead has done a fantastic job throughout the album, but it's Jackson's dreamlike falsetto - which I admit is likely something you'll either love or hate - and lyricism make it what it is, filling the album with a kind of joyful melancholy, a sound somewhere between Gary Numan and Lily Allen filtered through a mask of all too average twentysomething insecurity. Relationship songs, sure, but ones with impressive depth and introspection in a pop landscape where Lady Gaga is scoring top ten hits singing about riding my disco stick. It really is something of a triumph of substance over style - not that there's any absence of style on this record; it delivers wonderful touches in spades.

You'll have all heard the number one smash, 'In For The Kill', which at current standing is the fourth-biggest-selling single of the year, and hopefully enjoyed it's simple bitpop synth lines and Jackson's unique voice, but underneath that there was some truly excellent use of reverb and vocal doubling. 'Bulletproof', their first number one hit, proved that the band could do a modern mainstream pop sound better than any truly mainstream pop act today. It's not a favourite of mine, but neither you nor I can deny that it has everything a pop single needs.

Then there are two of my favourites; "I'm Not Your Toy", which barely cracked the top 30 but has a hook that surely should have taken it far higher, opens with a synth line that clearly consciously apes the music of the 16-bit gaming era that it's target audience grew up with. If it was up to me, this would have been the La Roux single to get to number one, but it's still not my favourite song off the album, even if it will leave you, if you're anything like me, humming the hook for days after you first hear it. That honour falls elsewhere with, horror of horrors, an album track.

You see, much as I like "I'm Not Your Toy", and in fact most of the entire album, nothing sums up or takes advantage of the dreamlike qualities of Jackson's voice quite like "Armour Love". A microcosm of the album as a whole, it's slow, gentle melancholy carries you into a world where everything's in slow motion soft focus, the perfect musical accompaniment to a teenager lonely in love. It's wonderful. It's beautiful. I know that in this age of digital downloads you can buy album tracks as easy as headline singles, but buy the album just for this track, because it's worth much more than the 79p iTunes tells me it's worth. It's the best losing-love song in ten years, because all of us have had that first love we thought meant everything, and we all lost it because we were stupid teenagers. We've all felt the exact way the song describes, and the song isn't the least bit either pretentious or ashamed in it's depiction. It's perfect.

Are La Roux going to change the face of music? Probably not. Are they going to sell ten million records and dominate the face of pop for the next ten years? No - Elly Jackson, though she has her own vulnerable charm, isn't marketable to the boys-with-posters demographic the same way Cheryl Cole is, and her musical stylings lack the overtly sexual, girl-power element that makes Lady Gaga such a marketable phenomenon.

What they have done, though, is produce easily the best unashamedly pop album in years.

The Battle of Tesco's Self-Scan Checkouts

Now, I know that as a massive luddite and technological Johnny-come-lately what I have to say is likely akin to many of you to a weighty 24-year-old man wheezing through the story of losing his virginity, but I am here today to tell you that I recently had my very first encounter with the peril of self-scanning checkouts. All previous shopping attempts had been undertaken in the comforting knowledge that there would be a teenager to shout at come the end of the journey, and that by shouting at that teenager all my wishes would come true. Not so with self-scan checkouts, and the awful contraptions know this.

They know that you are trapped at their cold, mechanical mercy. There is no recourse to appeal if it decides your wheel of Brie is actually a new Citroën Berlingo, there is no button to tell it the unrecognized items in it’s bagging area are your legs, and there is no indicated way of summoning help when the infernal machine swallows your credit card, forcing you to stand in the aisle, the broken debris of your shopping existence all around you, attempting cashier semaphore with a pair of frozen pizzas. They are horrible.

It was my fault, really. I accept blame completely. It was my fault for taking it into my head that I should do my weekly shopping bored at 4am on a Saturday morning, whisking myself off to Tesco’s subconsciously expecting some unfortunate wage-slave to still be there to bag my fish and not turning back the moment I found only stern-eyed eastern European security staring back at me like this was Srebrenica’s answer to Poundland.

But, dear readers, there was an upside, and I don’t just mean the chicken salad sandwich and the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups - recommended to me by an American friend, and easily the most deliciously unhealthy things on the planet - which I bought myself as a reward. No, the upside of my late night shopping adventure is that I discovered that, no matter how weird you might be compared to those of us who dwell in the daylight hours, we are all great bastions of sanity up to the sort of people you find in Tesco’s at 4am on a Saturday morning. Yours truly disappointingly not excepted.

It’s hard to pick out a favourite, though. Was it the astonishingly red-faced man who’s shopping seemed to consist only of innumerable pepperoni pizzas? Was it the wild-eyed woman wheeling her bicycle adorned with Meat is Murder stickers through the pork and beef aisle, greedily scooping packs of chops and mince into it’s front basket? Was it the screaming children running up and down the DVD aisle, who I now know to be there on such a round-the-clock basis that it must surely be some sort of paid shift work for the under-10s? I have never felt so gloriously out of place.

Perhaps I am being too harsh. Sleep deprivation will do strange things to people and perhaps the man with the armfuls of frozen pizza works such unsociable hours that this is his only time to shop and the pizzas are the only food he has time to cook. Perhaps the children in the DVD aisle are just bored out of their minds that their parents have seen fit for some bizarre reason to bring them to Tescos at four in the morning. Perhaps the woman with the meat-filled vegan bicycle just has an under-appreciated sense of irony. I will never know, I was too scared to look them in the eye.

It did remind me, though, of how much we all worry about fitting in. We all consciously or unconsciously worry about how we look, how we come across to others, and how we could improve. Any magazine you care to read tells you that some eighty-something percent of people are unhappy with some part of themselves, and perhaps it’s just human nature to worry about not fitting in with the pack, but honestly, next time this fear takes hold of you, grasps you in your tenderest place, please don’t go out and buy a £500 haircut, just take an early-morning drive to your nearest 24hr Tescos. You’ll have never felt so normal.

The Best and Worst Transfers of 2009

So, that's the Premier League season pretty much over unless you're Newcastle or Hull after Middlesbrough all but relegated themselves yesterday. West Brom could play themselves back into contention for survival today but as they're at Liverpool, you can't really see it happening. So that's that, then, and for the majority of football fans, it's time for the interest on the pitch to fade away and the shouting and recriminations to begin off of it. Who were the best and worst signings of 2008/09? Who fired their team to glory and who should have just been fired?

Time to look at the five best and worst transfers of the 2008/09 Premier League Season:

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BEST:

Marouane Fellaini (Standard Liege > Everton): Goals, work rate, height, strength, speed, and a big bag of that certain X factor that creates cult figures and takes some of the work of geeing up the team off of Cahill. He might have cost £15m, but he's only 21 and settled into the Everton team right away, becoming one of their most important players almost immediately, something a lot of similarly-priced signings singularly failed to do.

Andrei Arshavin (Zenit St. Petersburg > Arsenal): While I don't quite buy into the hype just yet that Arshavin is the new Dennis Bergkamp despite his heroics at Liverpool - Rafa just has a tactical blind spot to Arsenal attacking midfielders after that absolute donkey Julio Baptista scored 4 past them as well a couple of years ago - the little Russian was certainly the kick-start Arsenal's season needed and the experienced creative spark they were lacking. The difference between Arsenal with Arshavin and without was night and day, plainly and painfully obvious in their lackluster Champions League performances.

Jonas Gutierrez (RCD Mallorca > Newcastle): He might have the haircut of a fifteen-year-old tomboy, but for all of Newcastle's problems this season, none of them have been down to this man. A talented winger with graft, it doesn't matter where he gets played across the midfield, because whereever you don't play him, he'll turn up there anyway. Often playing two positions because of the Toon's bizarre wing-back setup, he's been Newcastle's best player for most of the season. Shame he'll probably leave if they go down; they need him.

Wilson Palacios (Wigan > Tottenham): One of the major reasons behind Tottenham's turnaround in the second half of the season, he added presence where Zokora had previously just stood around marvelling at the opposition and Jenas couldn't see a thing out of his tiny face. Hopefully for him he'll come back fine next season after the killing of his brother, which obviously makes football seem incredibly unimportant.

Robbie Keane (Liverpool > Tottenham): Essentially got around £8m for a six month loan swap. You just argue with the good finances of that kind of deal.

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WORST:

David Bentley (Blackburn > Tottenham): Came in as Beckham's natural successor, went out being kept out of the team by Aaron Lennon's Gay Right Hand. The boy with the million dollar haircut, the billion dollar ego and the FarmFoods workrate spent a few games drifting around the pitch doing very little before vanishing back to the bench to be replaced by a player Spurs already had. What a pointless waste of fifteen million pounds.

Dimitar Berbatov (Tottenham > Manchester United): He's been good, but he's not been £30m of good. That alone wouldn't be enough to get him on this list, but the real reason is that the spending of £30m on Berbatov is the sole reason United can't splash the cash to keep Tevez, a younger, superior and hungrier player, creating the one incident in as long as I can remember that has seen the fans turn on The Big Red-Nosed One. They might regret this next year when Berbatov goes absent without leave when they're 1 - 0 down at Anfield.

Xisco (Deportivo La Coruna > Newcastle): Six million pounds of Spanish striking talent was scheduled to arrive at Newcastle in the summer, only for British Airways to accidentally ship it to Bangalore. Turning up at St. James' with high hopes only to find himself seventh-choice striker in a team embroiled in a bitter relegation battle, you have to wonder just how bad Xisco has to have been in training to find himself behind Shola Ameobi and The Man With 1,000 Haircuts, Andy Carroll. Not what you need when you cost six million pounds, your team's first choice strike force is about as robust as runny egg yolk, and your competition as backup is the player Cardiff didn't want out of Shola Ameobi and Michael Chopra.

Jimmy Bullard (Fulham > Hull): Poor Jimmy, this is through absolutely no fault of his own, but Hull really must be kicking themselves that they paid out £5m for Jimmy Bullard's one half of football. A battling midfielder of just the kind they needed, but not when he's sat on the treatment table, if Hull do go down, it might very well be because they spent most of their January cash on Jimmy's dodgy knee.

Robbie Keane (Tottenham > Liverpool): Essentially paid around £8m for a six month loan swap. You just argue with the poor finances of that kind of deal.

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Goodnight

I Have Discovered the Worst Song in the World

'We Are Rockstars' by Does It Offend You Yeah? is the worst song ever committed to master tape. It's also the most idiotic name in the history of music next to The Ting Tings, but let's not get into that and let's just solely deal with this one song, as if I extend this post to their entire existence I'm going to choke on my own bile and be found tomorrow morning dead in a puddle of my own vitriol, so let's get on with it.

I don't know if you've heard this song, but if you haven't, it's the one that was in the trailer for the new 'Fast and Furious' film. You know that two-second loop over and over again? That's the entire song. All of it. For four minutes. Having had the thing blasted into my cranium at about the same decibel level as standing next to a comet re-entering earth's atmosphere, I'm going to skip any amount of musical analysis or observation and instead dismiss the entire thing as, scientifically speaking, piss fucking awful. A song, clearly, for those who either have no ears to speak of or for some reason hark back endlessly to a time when their Sega Mega Drive would crash and get stuck playing an atrocious two-second loop of discordant sounds, only at fifty-seven thousand decibels. Absolutely hideous in every way, it is less a song and more a collection of obnoxious noises; a four-minute all-out assault on the senses. It rapes the aural canal with all the care and finesse of a prison gang and the vocals, while atrocious, are sweet relief from the aural onslaught in the same way some heavy ball-torture would be sweet relief from six hours of someone trying to push a dog up your arse.

I am not adverse, as I'm sure some of you now believe, to electronic music provided it's actually music. One of the highlights of any evening for me is Pendulum, which I'm led to believe is Australian drum and bass, even though it's actually quite nice and has a trumpet instead of someone talking unintelligibly about having something called riddim which is, from casual observation, a complete lack of rhythm attempting to be made up for with a silly voice and gratuitous misplaced faith in one's own musical ability. I've criticised The Ting Tings in the past for making heroically trite and awful music, but at least it still vaguely passes for music, in that even though he never stops banging that one big fucking drum, we should probably give him some points for trying.

This song, however, does not. If it is trying to do anything, it is, as the band's name suggests, trying to offend people. This must be their aim, it simply has to be, simply because I cannot believe that anyone with any love for the world would willingly create something so absolutely despicable and not immediately burn their Korgs to destroy it. The same two-second loop of awful deliberately discordant noise over and over again for what feels like an hour and a half is enough to drive any rational man to delivering vicious blows to his own face in a desperate bid to make it stop and, if the rumours of Guantanamo Bay blasting awful music at suspected Taliban prisoners are true, the only reason this wouldn't be on the playlist is because exposure to it would probably drive any suspect irretreievably insane far beyond any chance of extracting information.

I'm a rational man, and I do, in all things, try to apply logic and reason to what I see and hear around me. I'm not one to hate, honestly, and definitely one to look for the good side, the merits of whatever it is I'm looking at. Not this. I hate it. I hate it with every fibre of my being. My soul burns and crackles with wicked green flames at the very thought of it. It is a hate that consumes me. Somehow, this song has tapped into a part of my primal sub-brain that had lain dormant for millennia and, much as our cave-dwelling ancestors were likely driven to stamp out and destroy rival tribes, I am possessed with a great need to, upon hearing the very first chord, slam the jagged neck of a broken bottle into both ears and give the subwoofer a good shoeing. I firmly believe that, somehow, this band have discovered the sound that simply switches off our higher brain functions, turning us into dancing, seizing idiots or, like me, into flailing, hateful gibbons. It is aural brain damage, neuron death in musical form, and prolonged exposure would likely reduce rational men to beating the earth with sticks. I hate it, and you, I hate you for liking it.

Now I'm going to have a lie down until I'm all back to normal.

Goodnight.

Hatton Found Out as Pacquiao Reigns Supreme

So Hatton was found out again. With seconds left of the second round, having already been floored twice in the first, Manny Pacquiao floored him with a massive left that kept him down long after the count and well into the pound-for-pound king's celebrations. You can argue that the Filipino should have been more concerned about his opponent and should not have been celebrating until Hatton was off the canvas, but completely dismantling a bigger, heavier man, himself ranked well into the top 10 pound for pound fighters, and with such a dominant performance, too, must be a difficult thing not to celebrate.

How did it happen, though? Defeat against Floyd Mayweather could be excused as the brash American - now coming out of retirement to fight Juan Manuel Marquez - was the bigger man, his shots too powerful for Hatton in the stand-up straight-line fight Hatton brings into every bout. Not so much pound for pound as punch for punch, Mayweather won by being the more physically powerful and having the experience of a career full of heavier hitters than the Mancunian - at least, that's the excuse you could make.

Hatton, this time, was caught out by nothing but his own naivety. The knockout punch, while impressive in power, was not a technical marvel. Hatton walked into it with his hands down and, crucially, his mouth wide open, a target begging to be hit by the lightning-fast Pacquiao. Twice in the first round he had advanced on Pacquiao and been floored by a flurry of lefts and rights flying faster than I could count them, and Hatton didn't learn. He was defeated by his own shortcomings against Mayweather, also. A ferocious hitter on the attack, he has now been defeated twice - counted out on the canvas twice - by flaws in his own defence. This time, there can be no excuse.

Is, as many people say, Hatton's career over? No, of course not. Barely 30 and having lost none of his attacking strength, he can go on for years. As others might put it, he can still bang. His two defeats have come against Hall of Famers and the two greatest pound-for-pound boxers in recent years. There is no shame, so they say, in losing to the best, and at the time he has fought them, both Mayweather and Pacquiao have been the best, of any weight class, in world boxing. I still think Hatton is top ten, but only if he learns to fight like a boxer and less like a street brawler - his trainer, Floyd Mayweather Snr, will, if the rumours are true, be fired from Team Hatton today, and he has been the only one trying to get Hatton to move his head more, to move his body more, to think about his body and his guard rather than just throwing his fists; getting rid of him before he learns - if he indeed can learn - would be criminal.

Hatton's guard was non-existent last night. You could argue that, against a smaller man, he was overconfident and felt he didn't need to protect himself, but he learned a hard lesson last night, and careful observers would have noticed it disappeared against Mayweather as well. Too easily drawn into a brawl with no guard, he will always be found out by top class opposition and that will be the downfall of his legacy - he's 30 now, he cannot take the shots he used to be able to, and the pound for pound kings are there, mostly, because for their weight class, they hit like dump trucks. He's no John Duddy, who's chin is less made of granite and more protected by a Star Trek style force field, able to get pinged in the face all day and come out smiling. He needs to protect himself.

Hatton has the skills, and still has the time to make them count, but he was outclassed last night - he looked for all the world like a bar drunkard taking swings at a master. He would throw and throw and throw, miss, and Pacquiao would wallop him with an expertly-aimed flurry that, more often than not, looked likely to floor Hatton. Men with lesser chins would have been down more in the first and the fight would have been halted, but it was obvious from the first minute that it wouldn't go past the third - that seemed to be what both men wanted. Hatton just wanted it too much, and forgot, if he ever learned, the lessons taught to him by two generations of Mayweathers.

Can he come back from this? Of course he can. But only if, this time, he learns.

On the plus side, the undercard and the bouts in the north-east were also impressive. In Sunderland, Danny Williams defeated John McDermott, this time far less controversially than their first bout last July, but serious questions have to be raised about Williams' career when he has twice been taken the distance - and to a split decision - by a man who is essentially just a lump who Matt Skelton, at the same age Williams is now, knocked out in the first round.

I will go out on not much of a limb here and say I have never liked Danny Williams - for full disclosure, I feel he's a dirty fighter and a cheat who's claim to fame at knocking out a badly aging Tyson was shown up by a classy Vitaly Klitschko and later by the tragically bad Audley Harrison - but no fighter with any claim to a world title shot should be being taken the distance, twice, by a lump from Basildon who's power comes from work on the pasties rather than pads, and they certainly shouldn't need to hold and cheat as Williams was last night to do it.

Tony Jeffries was impressive in front of a home crowd, having his fight stopped after having downed his opponent three times in the first and continuing the onslaught into the second with absolutely no reply, though - whisper it quietly in certain parts of the north-east - the Sunderland boy wasn't the highlight; that honour went to European Light-Middleweight champion Jamie Moore, who's power and skill in defeating Ukranian Roman Dzuman inside two rounds was hugely impressive and surely puts him into the world title picture in a very sparse division.

On the Vegas undercard there was a future world champion on show - Matt Korborov, who might have been only fighting journeyman Anthony Bartinelli, but did it in such style and picked every shot with such poise that I can't think he'll be anything other than a great fighter. A boxer with strength who puts so much thought into his shots is a rare commodity, and you could see him throughout the fight looking for openings, probing for gaps and then striking with serious power. Super-middleweight is such an empty division as well, and I'd love to see him fight Carl Froch.

Other than that, being up until 5 in the morning has taken it right out of me, I'm off for some breakfast.

Good morning.

England 2018? Don't Bet on It

England, it has been announced, are going to bid to host the World Cup in 2018. So begins the usual merry-go-round of political voting and more sniping and kissing up than you'd find in a Big Brother house. Much as a lot of countries will take it upon themselves over the next few months to lavish praise on the English game and say how terribly nice it would be if the country which gave the world football were allowed to host it's greatest competition again, when it all comes down to it, as the rugby lot confirmed a fortnight ago, everyone loves to beat the English. As long as we keep sweeping all before us in the Champions' League, our hopes are doomed - we're winning quite enough already for the democratic bureaucrats at FIFA Central Command.

Some of the stuff coming out about it is already fairly ridiculous - Mohammed bin Hammam, President of the Asian Football Confederation, has come out and said that he believes that "the World Cup belongs to all the 207 nations in the world and it is the right of every country to play it. I believe strongly that this is the time for Asia, not for Europe". That's a very honourable thing to be saying, Mohammed, but it would probably carry more weight if you hadn't talked up your own mob instead of citing some of the 207 countries that aren't from Europe or Asia. If you'd turned up extolling the virtues of playing the next World Cup finals in Vanuatu, you'd probably have more of a case, but as it is, I could do exactly the same thing as you by coming out and saying that the 2018 World Cup final should be staged in my shed.

All talk for fairness against favouritism dies on it's arse when you're doing it just so your mates can win. That and with the far east having already recently hosted a World Cup, China having only just packed off the Olympics and the Indian subcontinent so riddled with gunfire that the Indians can't even stage their Indian Premier League there for fear of being shot dead, it's hard to see precisely what Asian nation looks capable of hosting a World Cup in 2018. We could always go for Hong Kong, but that probably still has enough ties to Britain to get up the noses of the boo-boys, so that's probably out as well.

But why can't England host the World Cup? I know we have the Olympics fairly soon, but I think all of us have more than a sneaking suspicion that that's going to be more than a little bit shit. We know that the only thing most of Britain really gives a toss about is football, and we really do give quite a lot of toss, so why shouldn't we be hosting it's greatest competition? Everyone can get involved, and it's a fantastic way to get the British public united behind something again - we could even find a use for the Daily Mail and the BNP, as they've got figures to show FIFA saying that if Poland draw a resurgent Pakistan in the group stage, they'd pack out any ground in the country.

I know that most European countries see us as stuffy, arrogant pricks who swan around thinking we're better than everyone - even the Irish fans in the rugby a couple of weeks ago came out and said that beating England was worth 'more than life itself'. We are stupendously hated. The French are great cooks and greater lovers, the Germans have gone from efficient ruthlessness to ruthless efficiency, the Spanish and Italians are passionate, fiery and beautiful, and the British are tripe-munching snobs who are afraid of sex. None of this has anything to do with football and our stadia and infrastructure should speak for themselves, but such is the human condition that it does undoubtedly affect our chances - after all, when the cool kids in class are planning a party, they never want to have it at the nerdy kid's house, even if he does have a swimming pool.

That and there is the fact that, in domestic footballing terms, we are better than everyone else. We're sweeping all before us in the Champions League again, Manchester United won the World Club Championship and the European Super Cup this year already, and there is a general growing feeling around Europe that if there's one thing worse than someone who thinks they're better than everyone else, it's someone who is and knows it. Will we get the World Cup in 2018? Maybe, but I doubt it. I doubt we will ever see another tournament on these shores, despite our fantastic history and stadia, until we learn what the other voters would see as a bit of humility. But what they would see as a bit of humility - a few more losses in the Champions League, letting the French win occasionally - I would see as a surrender. Being the best at domestic football , not being the most humble and kissing the most backside, should be the road to bringing international football to your door. Why should we surrender?

Why, because we want to host the World Cup, of course. But you know what? Stuff them, and we will. Who's for another all-English final?

Thats Not Her Name, Apparently

Ladies and gentlemen, I have been inspired to musicianship. I have picked up a guitar and am fully dedicated to the cause of becoming an international rock star by this time next Thursday. Bear with me, though, it's not the idea of snorting suspicious powders off of fresh stripper breasts that has enticed me into the exotic world of axemanship, but the fact that everything in the charts is so rank awful that recreating it really didn't seem too difficult. I have a guitar - two, in fact - lying around the place, and almost limitless free time to faff about with them, so why not have a go at writing the next 'London Calling'?

Well, if you want the short answer, it's because you could pretty accurately recreate my entire repertoire by throwing a guitar at a wall.

The problem was that I was stumped by a real guitar in the same manner as I was stumped by Rock Band; try as I might, I simply cannot get fingers on both hands doing different things at the same time. It's like the pat-your-head-while-rubbing-your-stomach trick, but with added twanging around and well-rehearsed failures at improvised cool. After the fourth time I went for what I thought would be an impressive new lick and dropped the thing on my foot, I went back to bed and had a lie down. Then I got up to have another go and found that the thing had somehow managed to detune itself by magic, and after that couldn't be bothered.

This rock star thing obviously requires more dedication than I had assumed.

This doesn't take away from the fact that the charts are getting worse. I'm fairly sure this isn't just me getting old, and that scientific theory could be employed to empirically prove how awful the bloody Ting Tings are. Almost everyone I know has spent as long as they can remember bemoaning the lack of guitars in popular music, and now they're back, nobody can wait for them to piss off again, as now 'rock' has become the domain of children with floppy haircuts and the wrong gender of jeans. Somehow, this makes it even worse. If popular culture was previously passing us by, it's now walking in unannounced, picking it's nose in the sitting room and wiping it's bogeys all over the furniture. Much as we maligned the fact that good music was seen by the masses as the domain of outcast old duffers, we were those duffers and that music was ours. The next thing I know I'm standing somewhere unpleasant and expensive listening to an 'ironic' rap cover of 'Peaches' by The Stranglers. For the entire first verse I thought the DJ was talking over the record.

I think the key difference is that, last time 'guitar music' was the in thing, you could sit back, listen and say "wow, this guy can play". You were impressed, taken in by the technical and artistic ability on show. Now it seems like things are decided more by the fullness and body of a singer's hair; every time I see a picture of the bloody Ting Tings that awful woman is leaning back just so she can see out from under it. That's not the stuff of rock and roll. Rock and roll should have singers who's hair is the result of being too busy being amazing to bother to go to the barber's. I like to pretend that Ozzy Osbourne only has his hair long simply because he is on such an alternate plane of rock that haircare simply doesn't exist. The idea of someone being paid to trim bits off your head would seem so ludicrous that he'd probably slap you in the mouth then and there. You might as well be asking him to butter a unicorn.

I think it's the crossing of two different eras that confuses everyone; The nineties were the nineties because everyone had talked it out and decided that the eighties were probably left alone and unmentioned, hidden behind the bog roll at the back of the generational cupboard. That's how things were supposed to be done. Then, once the Noughties rolled around desperately seeking an identity, it briefly flirted with punching out old ladies before it rooted around in the cupboard, pulled on it's gold lamé tights and went off 'ironically' dancing to Queen. Thus begins a fashion false dichotomy where on one side you have the old crusties that are taking it seriously, and the fashionistas are taking it seriously as well, but only on an 'ironic' level that, even though they don't actually like it, it's fashionable because it's fashionable - Frankie Goes To Hollywood haven't seen so many shirt sales since 1982, but then I don't think anyone really liked Frankie Goes to Hollywood then, either, so perhaps that's a bad example, but I saw a girl wandering around a nightclub the other day in a Frankie Says Relax shirt and gold lamé tights while Dizzee Rascal played in the background and it all but instantaneously gave me a headache.

Maybe I'm wrong. I am, after all, an idiot of some not inconsiderable renown. Maybe this is all very positive, and come 2010 will be spurring the nation into a repeat of the early 90's 'Greed is Good' boom, thus restoring us all to wealth and health via the medium of old Stone Roses records. Perhaps that's been the plan all along. Maybe in a few years we'll all be swept along on a current of new hope and renewed prosperity, sweeping all before us with grandiose gestures on top of an open-top bus of a new exciting era for Britain and British culture, led eloquently from the front by an ageing and erudite Liam Gallagher. I don't know. I couldn't tell you.

I just wish that awful woman would get her stupid hair out of my childhood.

Triple Figures to Eat at the Fat Duck

I'm sure many of you, particularly those from the UK, will be aware of Heston Blumenthal's particular blight on the British landscape. Famous for his three-Michelin-starred restaurant 'The Fat Duck', he's had several television series dedicated to, as far as I can see, making food pretentious. He is a man who's recipe for baked beans would take up most of this page, and the only person in the whole world so utterly deranged as to think that putting snails in porridge would make for a tasty starter. From this I can only conclude that the people who award Michelin stars and the producers who keep green-lighting his TV shows are either pretentious fops, or simply as I am fascinated by the man's ideas in the same way small children are often fascinated by monkeys picking their own bottoms.

Now, I know that before I even start that someone, somewhere is going to call me out over the fact I'm criticising the man's snail porridge without so much as bothering to try it, and that is a fair point well made, but the only reason I haven't gotten myself down to The Fat Duck for a few courses of bizarre foodstuffs hurled together by some sort of culinary mad scientist is because not only is there an eight month waiting list for lunch, but just sitting down costs you a hundred and thirty pounds. There is nothing on this earth, no matter how carefully prepared, that for a hundred and thirty pounds wouldn't taste exactly like chewing banknotes.

So obviously you'll forgive me if I dissect his menu without waiting the better part of a year to throw money away. It's not like I have an expenses account.

First of all, this man seems to have an obsession with making a gel or a jelly out of absolutely everything. The budding flora and fauna of our planet are reduced, in one A4 side of reckless insanity, to oddly-coloured goops of various shapes and consistencies. His roast foie gras is prepared with almond fluid, and elsewhere, passion fruit, peppercorns and even tea is jellied and gelled by wide-eyed lunatics for your culinary enjoyment. He's even, against all the rules of God and science, managed to find a way to turn a quail into jelly. The man is in league with Satan.

Now, I admit that I am not any great master of the kitchen - I can knock together a decent spaghetti bolognese when the mood takes me, but my greatest culinary breakthrough was discovering putting chopped garlic on my toast - but you surely have to be a little dented to want to pay a hundred pounds or more for a mad-eyed man to bring you toast made from moss. Perhaps once you get promoted above a certain level in the advertising business a strange palsy overcomes you and grips you with a bizarre urge to spend your money in as ludicrous a way as possible. I can only assume from it's continued existence that being rich makes you an idiot; you'd never get a bin man saving up his wages just so he can take his family to The Fat Duck for a hundred pounds a head, because the bin man knows he likes his steak and knows where he can get it for a tenner, complete with chips, peas, one of those dodgy-looking mushrooms and far less risk of it coming out jellified and covered in some mad chef's personal smug.

Maybe I'm behind the times and this is what everyone's doing these days. Perhaps snail bacon ice cream is a culinary wonder my denial of which is doing me a great disservice. That may very well be the case, I will simply never know. I'm not biased, I just don't understand., and how you choose to spend your money is obviously no business of mine. I do think, however, that if you regularly had that sort of money to throw around, and you were a well-adjusted bit of an idiot, then you'd probably get more enjoyment out of buying yourself a dozen or so steak dinners. Or having a Christmas tree surgically grafted onto your face.

You see, it's dawned on me in the course of writing this that Heston Blumenthal is not a mad scientist who's medium happens to be food. He's not even, as the media would have you believe, a master chef, though he is exceptionally clever at what he does - he is merely a genius at selling status. The fact nobody in their right mind really wants to eat snail porridge coupled with the fact it will cost you a hundred pounds to do so is a great way to imbue anyone who shells out for an evening at The Fat Duck with a sense of elitism and exclusivity. His restaurant is the culinary equivalent of a Mercedes Benz - it's extortionately expensive, ugly and backfires on you every four and a half miles, but damn it, all your friends see you driving a Mercedes.

The Fat Duck is a status symbol you put in your mouth, and Heston Blumenthal must surely laughing at all of us all the way to the bank, because he's found a way to get toffs and braying city boys to hand over hundreds of pounds to eat the jellified contents of his fridge. In a way, he's getting a little bit back for all of us who don't have the luxury of being able to eat our status symbols.

The man is nothing short of a genius.

He's Not the Messiah, He's a Very Naughty Boy

Well it looks like Newcastle United's management has finally caved in to the fans and, while stopping short of rehiring the tragic perm, are at least paying lip-service to the holy trappings of one Kevin Keegan, sporting director Derek Llambas going so far as to say "Kevin is the messiah". No he isn't. Discounting the opinions of a few thousand stripy idiots up in the frozen wastes of the north-east, everyone else in Britain is aware of his status as a vaguely-talented bottler.

His teams' football, such as it is, flatters to deceive, and while exciting rarely produces results. His near-winning two titles back in the mid 90s was at the very end of the era of pork pies at half time and football management boiling down to saying "come on, lads" very very loudly. A good motivator, certainly, but a master tactician he isn't - a set of qualities more suited to putting out an exercise video than managing a football club.

The trouble with Kevin Keegan is that, with his motivational skills, he can be a very good coach when things are going well. When Newcastle were charging headlong towards the title, his passion and enthusiasm were infectious enough to keep his Toon army marching single-mindedly towards success. But then enter Manchester United, and their by now trademarked slow march on the title. The minute you see them starting to put a good run together, you start to hear the Imperial March playing in your ears. Keegan couldn't take it. We all by now know of his famous meltdown, and with the quality of his confidence taken away, Newcastle surrendered the title to Fergie's marching men.

Then there was this time around. Regardless of the Geordie fans' opinions, 'Cockney Mafia' and all, Keegan resigned because he couldn't take not getting his own way. He did the same for England and Manchester City - when the going got tough, Keegan got going. Their love for him as a player is understandable, as he was an absolutely superb center forward who made Michael Owen's goal-every-other-game strike rate look positively lethargic, but you cannot pick your manager on the strength of their ability as a player - as wonderful a center-half as he may have been, you find me an Arsenal fan that can say with a straight face that they want Tony Adams in as the next boss at Ashburton Grove. Keegan may also love the club , but that alone does not mean you should manage the place. I reckon that big fat bloke I always see up in the Gallowgate end on the telly jumping around without his shirt on probably loves Newcastle United more than Kevin Keegan, so maybe they should get him in? If I've stood on the Kop amidst twelve thousand screaming Scousers, does that put me at the head of the queue when Rafa does a disappearing act?

Newcastle's trouble is they mistake passion and love for a club as the only attributes needed for a successful football manager. Much as it might not be very Roy of the Rovers, tactical nous and the ability to pick up a down team are so much more important than how much you well up every time you pull on the shirt. A cold, dead-eyed tactician who makes everyone eat a plate of pasta and go to bed at eight every night is, in modern football, going to best every chest-beating lifelong fan blinkered by unrealistic expectations of fame and glory coming to Garforth Gasworks A.F.C. It is simply an exercise in nailed-on fact. I enter as evidence a Mr. Jose Mourinho, one of our era's most successful managers and a man for whom no love is greater than the one he feels for his own reflection.

I've mentioned my West Ham supporting mate before, and I'll do it again, because he is the perfect example of why fans shouldn't manage football clubs; you should see the rages he flies into when his beloved Irons go behind, and his heartfelt extolments of Freddie Sears as something between Geoff Hurst and the second coming of Christ; it's terrible and beautiful in equal measure, like a claret and blue tornado tossing fishing boats just off a Hawaiian shore. You would be hard pressed to find a more dedicated, passionate fan than him, but the big-wigs at Upton Park would be mental to put him in charge because the minute Manchester United went 1 - 0 up, his solution would be to go with five up top, all of them twelve years old and born in the beer garden of the Boleyn pub.

I know I promised I wouldn't talk about this anymore - it was getting very boring for people who don't give a toss about the machinations of the Premier League or Crisis Club Newcastle - but I just can't believe the protests are still going on. What do the Geordies think they'll get if Ashley sold up in this financial climate? They'll get Keegan back for eight minutes, and he'd instantly walk out the door again the minute he realised that, without a billionaire backer who, for once, seems to genuinely like football, he doesn't actually have any money.

Football: January in Review, Two Days Early.

So the end of the January football transfer window is coming up, and Rafa Benitez has gone insane. I don't mean to jump on the man's back after all he's done because a part of me will always love Liverpool, but listening to the things he's been coming out with lately is like being shot in the face by a machine gun loaded with stupid.

First off, you don't win mind games with Alex Ferguson. You just don't. Kevin Keegan learned that lesson when his Newcastle team were in a much stronger position than Liverpool are now, the otherwise unflappable Arsene Wenger has learned to keep his trap shut and talk about the football, and the only bloke to ever go toe to toe with Fergie was Jose Mourinho, a man so confident in his own abilities that whenever he jets off to Dubai with his bucket and spade is probably quite surprised when he gets his Armani trunks wet because he can't walk on water.

This is, of course, saying nothing of Rafa's latest outburst in the direction of a far less wily character, the flappy-faced Harry Redknapp down at the Spuds. If your reaction to another manager suggesting he wished he hadn't sold a player to you is to throw a massive wobbler and throw your toys out of the pram, you're probably not cut out for the unique pressures of being a Premier League manager. In fact, I'd say Rafa is fairly unsuited to the job in general, as the minute he's gotten his team back to playing the way they've always played, they're sliding back down the table again. For six months they were excellent, and some of their football in pre-season was absolutely sublime, but the gaffer obviously gave them all the Rafa Benitez Guide to Overcaution for Christmas and now it's all gone to pot. Robbie Keane, the catalyst behind his latest dummy-spitting escapade, has had his confidence shattered by being chained to the sub's bench for the majority of the season and already looks like being a £20m seat warmer for when Torres gets tired.

Mark my words, he'll be back at Spurs for around half that fee in the summer,which is a ridiculous choice seeing as that probably means that pornographer-looking donkey of a player Andriy Voronin will be back in the side once he finishes his loan spell at whatever German hellhole he's been sent back to. Can you imagine, if Torres gets himself knackered for any length of time, a forward line of Andriy Voronin and Dirk Kuyt? The pair will cover forty-six miles of turf per game and score sod-all. Rafa has an obvious love for the attacking grafter and so his distaste with Keane is strange, especially seeing as the preferred bench choice recently, David N'Gog, is about as good as I am, and I might as well not have any legs.

Personally, and I know this isn't much of a stretch, I think Liverpool's title ambitions are over. If results go against them this week, they will be five points behind Manchester United with Fergie's side with a game in hand. The way they're playing, you're not going to come back from that, and with the red half of Manchester fully aware that Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal are all struggling, it's difficult not to see them steaming off into the distance once again. A certain sense of inevitability is creeping across the Premiership title before we're even out of January.

Speaking of the other members of the 'big four' - although Aston Villa are trying very hard to mix it up a little with prolific goal machine Emile '30-a-season' Heskey - their activity in the transfer window shows that they've probably given up on this year, too - Chelsea's sole activity so far is signing up a 17-year-old Turkish midfielder who's going to go straight into their academy, and the only thing they have lined up before the deadline is flogging unfortunate flop Branislav Ivanovic to Fiorentina for a few quid. Arsenal look like they've finally gotten themselves into gear as regards signing Andriy Arshavin - already being referred to as AA before he's even in the door - but are holding fire on signing the defensive midfielder and center-half they would need to push on this season, and with chairman Peter Hill-Wood already talking about having the money to survive not qualifying for the Champions League, it looks like this year is going to be another of Wenger's dreaded 'season of transition's, of which there's now been about five, each one transitioning into another transition.

Honestly, in the last few years, Arsenal football club have had more transitions than a bad 80s pop video, and eventually any team has to ask itself what it's trying to transition into; rumours that in-form Robin van Persie wants assurances about Champions League football before he signs a new contract fuelled talk of a late bid for Micah Richards - young, versatile, very much a Wenger player - or Charles N'Zogbia - young, versatile, French and moody; you wonder why he hasn't snapped him up already - but Wenger's style has never been to splash the cash, much to the growing chagrin of everyone in the red and white.

Still, stranger things have happened. We could yet see Arshavin, Richards and N'Zogbia lining up for Arsenal next weekend, while Robbie Keane joins Jermaine Defoe on the slow bus back to White Hart Lane and Chelsea, just to show Man City who really wears the daddy pants, snap up Kaka, Pirlo and an organically-sourced clone of Pele in a £500m deal. Anything's possible in a January where the in-form strikers are Carlton Cole and Nicklas bloody Bendtner.

I could be back in two days with a post entitled 'bloody hell', but I doubt it.

Two Weeks in Sunny Passport Control

Tonight I come to you shortly after a long session of railing at the walls over the government's decision to try to charge me eighty pounds to get a piece of paper in nice red binding that will let me leave the country. I'm not of the mindset that the government should be the one to foot the bill for printing the one document that will let me take my money out of the floundering economy and spend it on sangria somewhere on the Costa Brava, but I cannot for the life of me imagine just what about such a relatively simple document could possibly cost eighty pounds. I know the argument is that it pays for the government's crack team of researchers to ring up my guarantor and ask them if I'm really Osama bin Laden, but if I was Osama, wouldn't the government want me to bugger off to the Costas for a couple of weeks and have a bit of a calm down? More importantly, you're receiving my application posted from deep within the home counties, so if I am indeed the world's most wanted terrorist, then I'm already here, and you probably have bigger problems than whether or not I can go to France for the day just by calling myself Steve.

I think my problem is, at it's heart, that I remember the passport service and all it's related arms as being the gateway to the world. There was a time where you paid your money, you got your shiny leatherette little book and off you went, but in this era of every household apparently harbouring at least four illegal immigrants in the ceiling and Islamic extremists setting up home in Basingstoke, the whole government department dedicated to letting people in and out of the country has turned into a soulless, suffocating entity composed of pure bother.

A case in point: A friend of mine, over from China, had to spend fully three hours on the phone to the Home Office trying to renew her visa, only to be told that they had rescheduled the meeting about rescheduling her meeting, and could she please ring back next week. Next week indeed, while they sit in what I imagine to be ludicrously plush chairs with their thumbs wedged firmly up their bottoms and her visa quietly ticking it's way towards expiry.

It wouldn't be quite as galling if the visa served any real purpose, but it doesn't. I know it's supposed to prove who you are and what you're entitled to do, but the fact is that the minute the paper trail leaves these sures it becomes entirely useless. I know even less about China than I do about Scotland, but I fully expect that a country containing a third of the world's population isn't going to be all that hot on census keeping, particularly in more rural areas. She could, conceivably, be anyone. The best we can hope for is stamping her passport and hoping she doesn't explode.

The most ridiculous part of all, though, is the hoops you now have to jump through just to pay your eighty quid. Biometrics, iris scans and so on and so forth all entirely useless and an infuriating exercise in hand-waving in the name of security. Yes, wonderful, I know it's terrible that the militant wing of the RSPCA blew up four airliners somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, but at least we've got nice pretty close-up pictures of their eyeballs. How does this improve things over the old picture-matches-face method? If someone else has got my face, they've probably got my eyes as well, and if they haven't, then the man on the little desk should probably notice the empty gaping sockets fairly easily. Admittedly you could stump this system just by wearing sunglasses, but that would be entering the realms of fantasy.

Of course, if you ask me, and I'm probably wrong, these sorts of insane demands on me just so I can leave the country is all some sort of elaborate government ruse to get the jet-set to boost the economy by holidaying in Norfolk, a childhood experience which still haunts me to this day. It's a scheme set to fail.

Thanks to the miracles of modern telecommunications, everyone now knows everyone else in the entire world. Half the channels on my infeasibly expensive digital TV package are travel programmes broadcasting live from Mauritius and other earth-bound Edens, and thanks to my big mouth and the wonders of the internet, there are people in New Jersey who are aware that they should never, ever holiday in Norfolk, even if they did think I was talking about the one in Virginia. People all across the world are now aware that two weeks in Norfolk is roughly analogous to a fortnight in Colditz. People want to go on holiday and see aszure blue seas and swim with dolphins, and all I can remember from my time there was an oil rig and a miffed-looking seal. It might contribute thousands of pounds back to the British economy if we could all forsake our fortnight in Benidorm for two weeks in a caravan park in Great Yarmouth, but I don't care, I wouldn't inflict that on any of you. It's about as much fun as being drowned in peat.

Holidays? Give me long-haul or give me death.

The Petty Bitch Delusion

I am at war with my radiator. Tensions have been escalating since late last week when I finally made the Herculean effort to bleed and repair the thing, only to be repaid by it intermittently and entirely without cause or provocation racking the heat up to something to rival a smelting plant. It singularly failed to respond to all tweaks and twists and things finally came to a head this morning when, waking up in a puddle of my own sweat in the middle of yet another ad-hoc blast furnace, I took a spanner to it, just to show it who's boss.

I'm not going back into the bedroom for a while, partially because I'm waiting for it to cool down, and partially because I have work to do, and I have a terrible suspicion that when I go back in the whole place is either going to be ablaze or covered in sheets of ice - the thing has absolutely no compromise or middle ground.

Anyway, moving away from radiators, I've decided to get all literary. The only books I ever seem to read lately are training manuals for so many near-inscrutable multimedia tools. Only this morning, the postman saw fit to deliver me my 620-page user guide for Final Cut Pro 6, which is apparently so different from Final Cut Pro 5 that they needed to put out an entire new training manual the size and weight of a coffee table. To counteract this, I thought I'd buy a good novel, to read in betweeen mind-numbing point-and-click exercises and plumped for 'American Psycho' by Bret Easton Ellis, partly because I have friends who have been recommending it to me for years, but mostly because it wasn't The God Delusion. I won't read that book again, even a little bit, just because I feel that doing so would irreversibly lessen my intelligence.

Let me just come out and say that I fully accept Atheism as a theological standpoint. If you choose to believe it, good for you, but it's still nothing more to do with me than if you were a Buddhist, Hindu or a man who believes Godliness stems from putting custard on your head. Atheism is all well and good if that's your choice but the likes of Dawkins and the British Humanist Society need to wake up and realise I care as much for your views on religion as I do for your views on watercress. It simply isn't important.

My ire today stems from the fact that Dawkins and the Humanist mob have started paying to have an 'edgy' adolescent slogan put on the side of London buses, reading 'There is Probably No God, So Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life'. Now, if you think that's big and clever, you're probably fifteen. I would have probably thought that was cool when I was fifteen as well, because being fifteen gives you carte blanche to be a politically unaware idiot. Richard Dawkins, however, is 67 years old, and should probably know better.

See, the problem is that I refuse to believe that anyone has ever had their firm, deep-rooted religious convictions shattered by something written on a bus. Largely because most things written on buses are about what someone called Daz did to something called Shaz on the way home from a gaudy nightclub, but mostly because firm, deep-rooted religious convictions are unlikely to be shaken by anything short of Cthulu rising from the ocean; pastel-coloured slogans on bendy buses just don't cut it where giant rampaging sea-beasts don't. It's also so absolutely petty and childish - I'm not entirely sure what the British Humanist Society has against people having a different belief system to them, but unless they have a physical condition whereby they find themselves writhing in screaming agony every time someone believes in God at them, they're being rather pathetic about the whole thing. I strongly disagree with whoever managed to get some terrible creation called 'Lady Gaga' to the top of the UK singles charts, but I don't put on the side of a bus.

Sadly, for a supposedly respected academic, Dawkins has always gone about advertising his beliefs in a way much better suited to the angry teenage proto-athiest who militantly and misguidedly despises all world religions up until he turns 20 and realises nobody ever gave a toss. If you've never really looked into his book, 'The God Delusion', allow me to fill you in: You pay Dawkins five pounds fifty to call you an idiot for 464 whole pages. It really jumps off the page how much Dawkins wants to take anyone who still harbours any doubts about our being brutally and undeniably alone in a Godless universe, and give them a damn good thrashing until they understand how inquestionably correct he is about everything. If you dare to be religious in the face of what he considers ultimate proof, his prose effectively screams at you from the page as what attempts to be passed off as reasoned debate more than a few times comes down on the wrong side of down-talking and dismissive implications that you're a blithering idiot. Never before or since have I felt more like a paperback was trying to shout me down.

I'm just as qualified to bang on about this sort of thing as he is, if only because my plumbing is possessed by the Devil. If you paid for this book, you paid good money to be called an idiot or to justify your pre-existing beliefs with a book no more advanced than one you could write with nothing more than a long weekend and a mild case of autism. If Richard Dawkins truly wants us to dismiss all religion, he'd probably do well to stop trying to create his own.

Hello Internet, I've Had a Poo.

The internet is a terrific invention. Branching out from Google in any direction is liable to drown you in news, facts or bosomy teenagers inside twenty minutes. It's also been arguably the greatest aid to international understanding the world has ever seen; back when Napoleon was jaunting across Europe, it was very easy to paint the French as a horrific torrent of barbarians, but that's made infinitely more difficult when in a few clicks you can be swapping cocktail recipes with a man from Marseilles. Anyway, it's in this climate of cultural understanding that I came to spend my evening talking to a Serb about war, an act which is roughly comparable to talking to water about being wet, and an act that wouldn't have been possible without the advent of the miracle that is the Internet. Unfortunately, while it has blessed us with boundless communication and endless knowledge, it has also inflicted upon us a terrible scourge of tossers by the thousands.

Few things are less explainable in this modern society than the existence of Twitter, the latest symptom of the sense of hilarious entitlement coursing through the veins of everyone under the age of twenty-five. With this great new technological step forward, we have afforded an astonishing amount of young people the delusion that we are all waiting, poised in front of our monitors, for the latest update on which way they've combed their hair. The internet, two decades in the making and quite possibly the single greatest invention in our modern age, has apparently reached it's zenith in a teenager's ability to tell the world that they're quite sad. Yes, yes you are.

Young people confuse me. Twitter leaves me baffled. MySpace boggles the mind. I have an account on something called Facebook, but I'm completely unable to master the sort of witchcraft used to make it actually do anything, so by the time I get around to calling someone for a drink, they've already been to the pub, taken pictures of it and uploaded a video of two of them arm-wrestling onto Youtube. I've become a technological leper - in the time I've been back working since the start of 2009, I've had at least half a dozen people complain to me about not going to the apparently stunning New Year party they had, and how I could have at least have had the decency to tell them I wasn't going. I would have done, if I knew there was an option. There apparently was, obviously, as otherwise I wouldn't have committed such a dreadful faux-pas; it's out there, somewhere, on the internet. I didn't click it and now all my friends hate me.

I think it's a sign of getting old. I'm trying to keep up, I honestly am, but after I went through the rigmarole of organizing my own New Years invitations on Facebook, it asked for my home address, which is something I don't feel comfortable giving out to what the website vaguely dubs 'my social network', particularly when I still have vivid memories of my MySpace 'extended network' including every single person who ever held an account. Was there ever anyone who MySpace didn't consider to be in your extended network?

It's all a popularity contest, really. Nobody can just have a good night out anymore, we have to put our lives up for review by the internet, just so we can boast that half of Siam have watched us being sick. The MySpace obsession of gathering as many so-called friends as possible to the exclusion of everything else was fine when it was confined solely to the internet, but it's starting to bleed over into real life. Whenever I go out for the evening I get cameras stuck in my face from someone purportedly running a website called 'Don't Stay In', or from people I vaguely know taking four thousand pictures of me leaning against a wall and uploading them instantaneously from their web-camera-i-super-phone. The giggling shouty teenagers who persist in the belief that everyone in a four-mile radius desperately needs to know how wacky their friends are might revel in the idea that they're being followed everywhere by some sort of low-rent paparazzi, but I for one don't enjoy spending my evening with a zoom lens lodged up each nostril.

Maybe I'm just old before my time or just a miserable bastard to the core, but I would like, just for a change, for someone under twenty-five to have some sort of sense, and realise that no, the world does not care that you just had a poo.

Go away.

Football; It's a Greed-Ridden and Prohibitively Expensive Old Game

I have a wedding to go to. It's not mine and it's not for another two months, but it does mean I have to buy a suit. Me and suits are not on speaking terms. They're uncomfortable, they never fit and I'd much rather go everywhere in a T-shirt and jeans, but I'm told that's quite bad form for a wedding, so I get to go and spend an appalling amount of money so I can stand around looking like a gibbon that's been forced into formal wear against it's considerable will. I can't even leer at the bridesmaids because all of them, every single one, are in long-term relationships with professional body-builders. The only saving grace will be an open bar and a DJ set that I helped organize, so by about 9 o'clock I expect to be cavorting drunkenly around the room to the strains of The Peter Gunn Theme. I'll probably also be sick on myself, but that's less an ambition and more a depressing expectation - you can say what you like about the Irish, but their weddings always, without fail, produce a gushing torrent of whisky you could use to crush riots.

Anyway, now the best wishes to the happy couple are out of the way, we can talk about how football has gone utterly bonkers. Sheikh Al von Sourpuss at Man City has opened talks with AC Milan over signing Kaka for £100m and then paying him £500,000 a week before bonuses. It's a daft amount of money when you consider it's only 30 years since the first million-pound transfer, and now we're looking at a bloke from Brazil - alright, granted, he's quite good at football - potentially earning enough money to buy two Trevor Francises a month for the next four years. It's enough to make you sick, especially if, like me, you're a big fat swollen failure with all the sporting prowess of a block of Stilton. I'd be on £500,000 a week, too, if I'd had the good fortune to be born in a slum and without two left feet and the pace, touch and close control of an asthmatic hamster.

£26m a year in wages. We can deduce from this that the Credit Crunch is obviously not hitting the Middle East quite as hard as it's hitting Ruislip.

It does bring back to the fore the whole argument about football descending into a game not of twenty-two blokes in pitched battle, but two billionaires swatting each other with chequebooks. Everyone went mental about Chelsea buying the title, but you could buy their record signing Michael Essien four times over with the sort of money Man City are looking to splash out on a single player. In fact, put Essien, Didier Drogba, Joe Cole and Michael Ballack together and they still didn't cost Chelsea £100m. Kaka's proposed weekly wages would probably buy Chelsea's opponents in tonight's cup game, stadium and all. It's getting daft. City are going to tear the Championship apart next season, that's for sure, especially if Q.P.R. continue to cock up and get themselves relegated, and promptly take League One by storm as Lakshimi Mittal brings Leo Messi in for £500m and £1m a week two days before the league opener against Scunthorpe.

In amongst all of this, however, and highlighted by Chelsea's FA Cup replay opponents tonight, are clubs with a soul. I've stood at the old Clock End at Highbury, I've stood at the Kop end at Anfield amidst 12,000 screaming Scousers, and I once spent a year living within shouting distance of Old Trafford, but I've also been to Roots Hall to watch Southend United, Chelsea's less illustrious opponents, slog it out for League One mediocrity, and once had a long conversation with a man who could tell you every player to turn out for Tranmere Rovers since Jackie Wright was in charge. I've even seen games down in the Isthmian League First Division, and wherever you go and no matter how low down the football pyramid, there'll still be half a dozen blokes daft enough to spend 90 minutes cheering their team on and following them around to whatever concrete hellhole or recreation ground they're off to next. Give them £100m and they'd mess their trousers.

It's tremendously difficult to describe the allure of lower league football - which, in this day and age of about 60% of the population's support extending about as far as 'whoever's winning', is everything below the Premiership - to someone from Wickford who for some reason is wearing a Manchester United top. It's very difficult to explain it to anyone, really. We're all spoilt on football, with everyone from Arsenal and Man United to Barcelona and Real Madrid on the telly every weekend. I took a friend to a local match a few weeks ago and she spent the entire game pointing and laughing at the home wingers' perceived inability to do fourteen stepovers and a backflip in a bid to get past their man. That's just expected now and anything less is boring and blasé. League football is just something you get or you don't, and there's just not enough people getting it anymore. Chelsea, Man United and their ilk chug along happily with their billionaire owners ready to wipe out their millions of pounds of debt at a moments' notice by flogging another boatload of shirts to the Chinese, meanwhile dwindling attendances leave lower league sides chomping their fingernails at the idea of having to buy more mustard for the burger van.

I know the allure and the glamour is all with the Premiership clubs, and that Adam Proudlock swapping Darlington for Grimsby for eight pounds forty and a packet of onion rings isn't nearly as exciting as Arsenal's £20m pursuit of Andrei Arshavin, but your local teams need support too, and they're just around the corner. I was going through the hoarded mass of paper that I keep in my jacket pockets yesterday and came across a ticket stub for my local Football League side, just around the corner - the players might not do quite as many stepovers and the stadium roof may sag frighteningly and be made of corrugated iron, but it's close to two hours of excitement for a little over a tenner, and when you clap the players off at the end, you actually think they might feel something for the club when they clap back.

Buy that United shirt if you want, or hang that mini John Terry in your car window. Far be it for me to tell you who you should or shouldn't support, but for 90% or more of you, those clubs aren't going to be your local team.

Find out who is and go and watch them. It might be worth it.

Everything is Average Nowadays

Before I get started on this rather ominously-titled missive, I ought to point out that I'm no fan of The Kaiser Chiefs. A bunch of distinctly average rock musicians from somewhere inconsequential in Yorkshire averagely bemoaning the average person's tendency towards averageness is possibly the most tedious thing I could imagine, so they in no way deserve any credit for lending me a song title for a post aimed largely at taking the piss out of them. Mockery is no more or less than they deserve, and the same goes for anyone else who goes around bemoaning the state of things and, yes, that probably includes me as well. My status as a largely inconsequential arse has not gone unnoticed.

My complaint is aimed at the sort of people that caused the huge furore over Alexandra Burke's getting the Christmas no. 1 with a cover of Jeff Buckley's 'Grace'. While I accept that Buckley's interpretation is probably the best, the fact remains that it wasn't his bloody song to begin with, and I'm sure there wasn't this sort of fallout when Buckley himself decided to copy it off of Leonard Cohen, or when the several dozen other singers who have covered it before or after Buckley decided to belt out their own versions; Burke's version was pilloried by certain sections of the press and public because it became the scapegoat for a certain set of people who like to make themselves feel big and clever by insisting that everything has been done before and anything that ever gets on the telly must be by extention complete tosh. These people are hilariously wrong.

Yes, an awful lot of pop 'covers' have gone dreadfully awry; Gareth Gates' version of Unchained Melody was easily the worst of the 500 different versions Wikipedia claims have been recorded over the years, and the Sugababes once did something so awful to 'Are Friends Electric?' that it was all I could do to not stab their eyes out with a fishknife, but can the self-elected musical elite please accept that Alexandra Burke can sing and as Leonard Cohen is now 74 and Jeff Buckley has been dead for a decade, neither of them are likely to turn up and assert their rights over it - one probably doesn't give a toss and the other drowned trying to kiss a duck; they are both done and through. Just be thankful that whoever owns the rights and have dished them out so willingly haven't turned them over to McFly or Eminem, and stop making that terrible bleating noise about her trampling all over Buckley's dead face or whatever it is she's apparently done.

I say this not because I'm a fan of Alexandra Burke, though she has got a voice on her and she's obviously infinitely more attractive than Buckley after ten years in the ground, but because if I hear one more loudmouth banging on about how Buckley is proof that the original is always best, I'm going to eat my own shoes. 90% of the people complaining about the terrible wrong Burke has inflicted on the music industry are completely in the dark that Buckley didn't write the bloody thing in the first place. I mention that because I know that, and I know it not because I'm some sort of musical elitist, but because I'm not an idiot. You're not an idiot, are you?

Why Are Pandas So Crap?

Seeing as a couple of days ago I managed to poison myself on an outing to the new Chinese restaurant in town, I've been on the internet, and I've been exploring. In between fighting a losing battle for control over my bodily orifices, I've been trying to establish just why the Panda is dying out; a question that has defeated and embittered the greatest Zoologists of our time could surely be solved in a day or two by a flabby man in a dirty nightshirt, given enough determination and near-fatal doses of ibuprofen. The news is, I've done it; Pandas are dying out not because of the evil visitation of humanity up on the world, despite what certain quarters would have you believe, but because they're so absolutely terrible at everything.

First off, they're a carnivore that, for whatever reason, chooses to solely eat bamboo, and then scientists wonder why they're tired all the time. Feeding a Panda bamboo is like feeding your children rocks - they aren't designed to draw any sustenance from them, so making rocks a key part of your child's diet is a surefire way to get a visit from social services. However, for reasons best known to themselves, Pandas choose to willingly subject themselves to deliberate subjugation of the natural order of things and are, thus, too knackered to get off their fat hairy arses and breed. Scientists suggest that Pandas once preferred a more meaty diet but, when their natural habitat was wiped out somehow - not by humans, apparently, as this alledgedly happened long before we learned to rub two sticks together to make a Volvo - they hedged their bets on a new food source by turning to eating Bamboo, which is the most prevalent thing around.

Never mind that it's about as good for them as eating sand.

So there you have it - Pandas are dying out because, well, they are. They are dying out for the same reason Tranmere would be turned into a ghost town if you took away all the McDonald's - they just don't have any of their natural food sources left. The hippie set will continue to shout from the rooftops about how the existence of Satanic coal-fired power stations make the Panda too depressed to have sex with one another, but they couldn't be further from the truth - Pandas damned themselves long before humanity bothered to start setting fire to shiny underground rocks, and damned themselves through their own stupidity. They have evolved to not give a toss. Even in captivity, where they can get as much fresh meat as they can possibly stuff down themselves and their own private mate to have bouncy-time with, they'd still rather sit on their backsides and eat bamboo, pausing only to attack the occasional Chinaman. Frankly, if a bunch of Pandas locked me in a faux-tropical paradise with nothing but Angus steak and Jennifer Love Hewitt, I'd have scoffed and bonked myself to death by this time next thursday, so the lazy little furballs have nobody to blame for their impending extinction but themselves.

Remember this next time the charity people come to your house or come up to you in the street asking you to give money to save the precious Panda; while they are cute, cuddly and make great stuffed toys for your children, we've given them all the chances we can give. We have established that you can lock the lot of them in a room with nothing but meat and sex from now until doomsday and they'll still be dead by the end of our lifetimes because they will persist in eating the Panda equivalent of rocks. Those of you who aren't hippies, however, can take great comfort from what we can learn from the panda's mistakes - that if we confine yourself solely to the consumption of raw meat and humping everything in arm's reach, humanity will endure. That, ladies and gentlemen, means that as long as we have Basildon, the human race will never die.

It brings a tear to the eye.

Oh, To Be Young Again

It's difficult to explain to someone who still thinks the Ting Tings are the height of cultural experience just how agonizing it is to watch another year slip through your fingers. When you're young, a year takes forever; each one seems to take about four decades of agonizing wait between Christmases and fresh barrages of presents and cake. Put a decade or two on that wide-eyed bright young thing and suddenly his years are passing in what seems about four seconds. If time keeps up this exponential accelleration I'm going to blast into my old age in about half an hour at four times the speed of sound.

Nothing, however, can make you feel older than looking at the state of your closest friends; unless you're Peter Stringfellow, your closest friends are all likely around the same age and probably, predominantly, the same gender, and as hard as it is to see yourself as anything other than the strutting rock God you probably thought you were at seventeen, it's all too easy to notice age creeping up on those closest to you, and somewhere in the deepest reaches of your addled psyche, you know that it's getting to you as well. I have a friend who started going bald in his teens, and for years his retorts to my adolescent jibes have been parried by a simple toss of my thick and lustrous head of hair, but I know that, as I race headlong towards my fifties, which come every New Year feels, and indeed is, that one vast step closer, I'm going to start losing mine as well. My grandfather did, his father did, and his father did, and, as genetics has so cruelly predetermined, so will I. I will also widen, shorten and get angrier, I know this, because the signs are already there; while I'm still the proud owner of a perfectly luxuriant mop of hair, the pink flabby bit underneath is getting fatter, and it winds me up no end.

Evidently I can no longer survive on a diet of Coca-Cola and cheap pizza without inflating into some sort of behemoth. I have a friend who's grown a beard; not the whispy bits of designer stubble you see on people younger and more attractive than yourself going into younger and more attractive nightclubs, but a full sailor-esque beard. Just being able to grow one should be an indication that you've officially stopped being young. My house at New Year's was not filled with flirting, alcopops and rap music, but with the fat, bald and bearded, listening to Led bloody Zeppelin. We're all at it, and the holiday season just beats you in the face with it until you're sick of the sight of yourself. No wonder more people kill themselves at New Year than any other time of year; they, as the very rock-and-roll adage goes, just want to leave a pretty corpse. But can it really be all that bad? Obviously if it wasn't for the wonders of modern medicine and the death of all the sabre-toothed tigers in south-east England we'd all be dead husks by now, but we're far from decrepit, surely? We're all still of the age where we can walk into my usual sort of club with our heads held high - I saw a bloke who must have been at least 70 in there once, and the DJ has to be at least 40, even if he does have a fashionable haircut.

Contrary to popular opinion, the problem doesn't lie with being old. It, despite what the nostalgia-filled yearly repeats of Calendar Girls might tell you, doesn't lie with being young either. It lies with not being one nor the other; with being the sort of person that desperately tries to cling to their youth while it runs mockingly fast in the other direction and you're still stuck on the express ride to urinary incontinence. My friend with the unfortunate hair dysfunction is constantly assaulting his scalp with new French shampoos and snake-oil miracle cures, clearly utterly petrified that baldness equals oldness equals a group of large men kidnapping you and leaving you to die on an ice floe.Patrick Stewart was long considered a sex symbol with his bald head, and back in the early Paleozoic era when he had hair he looked bloody stupid with it, so it can clearly be gotten away with if you do it gracefully, and can even improve things if done right. The idea of Father Time as a terrible lurching zombie bent on claiming your eternal soul can clearly be overcome.

It's certainly not just people around my age - I spent time with my mother over the holiday period, as you do, and discovered she's at it as well - she's not been covering up a bald spot all these years or anything, but she will persist in trying, however vainly, to keep up with what the television tells her is fashionable; she likes Pussycat Dolls and The Ting Tings, even if she couldn't pick them out of a lineup, eats chicken tikka massala, despite an open and quite vicious distrust of Indians, and is forever trying to get her boyfriend to start wearing eyeliner because that's what fashionable boys do now, never mind just how rediculous black eyeliner would look on a bewildered Irishman lost somewhere in his mid-60s. If I was her I wouldn't be desperately trying to understand the reasoning behind Fall Out Boy, I'd be crawling to the government asking for money because I'd lost the use of my legs, not beacuse I had, but because I could probably get away with it. I'm of the age now where I still feel I should be doing something with myself, or learning all the words to a song by someone called Lil' Wayne. As old as I am, and certainly as old as I feel, I'd love to be of an age where I no longer felt guilty and could sit down with a cup of tea with total and absolute impunity.

Actually, that's pretty much what I do spend my evenings doing, and it's fantastic. If you're going bald, it's just less ridiculous hairstyles to keep up with. If you're getting fat, you can finally eat whatever you fancy; you can have that extra-large kebab, or the steak and chips in the pub - you're only going to get slightly more fat than you already were, and it's not like anyone's going to notice or care unless you start pounding down fistfuls of lard in front of the children. And you can finally admit that, deep down, the greatest piece of music ever recorded is probably The Wall. And your friends will all agree with you, because they're all growing old disgracefully as well.

Bollocks to being young.