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.