Hanging loose

This week, my boss joined my gym, making the possibility of this happening a terrifyingly real prospect.

Click on the picture to see what might be behind the door.

The London Weekly – hoax?

Just seen the first edition of new freesheet The London Weekly.

It must, must be a hoax. There are so many staggering clangers on every page, in every article, if it’s not a joke, I’ll be gobsmacked. And a little bit saddened.

I do this stuff for a living, so of course I’m going to notice. But The London Weekly is so bad that, surely, every single person that picks up a copy will notice, too.

Copy finishes mid-sentence, celebrities’ names are spelled incorrectly in stand-firsts. The text doesn’t line up in adjacent columns, and, most glaringly, the London Weekender page features the same ’sell’ repeated in two different places on the page.

Oh, and, as many have pointed out, the laughable lead story about Gordon Brown is a verbatim press release from a rugby club website.

It must be a hoax. Perhaps a comment on how dazed commuters will blithely fill their brains with anything that’s thrust into their hands. If it is, it’s pretty well done and quite funny. If it isn’t, and these clowns actually get that amount of advertising on a weekly basis, we may as well all pack up and go home.

Angry bus driver, amazing hair

The man driving the bus on my way home tonight was angry. About what remains unclear.

Whatever was troubling him, though, it can’t possibly have been his hair, which was without doubt the best quiff-mullet hybrid that I’ve ever seen.

For obvious reasons, I couldn’t take a photo – as I said, he was angry about a problem that at this point remains unclear. So, instead, I sketched out this drawing (to scale) to illustrate just how awesome a barnet he had.

Confusing fact of the day…

This morning, the changing room at the gym smelled of wafer-thin ham.

The worst person in the world today #1

Many reasons. Here’s the latest.

The worst person in the world today #2

Woman on the train this morning:

“I’m in a better mood today. I was in a really stinky mood yesterday. Yep, a real stinker. My secretary bore the brunt of it. But, really, it’s her fault – she should learn how to read people. Anyone with an ounce of intelligence would have just got out of my way and gone and bought me a Starbucks, or something.”

Dig your own hole

“Hello?”

“Hi, I’m standing on a corner in Cambridge Circus in the West End. There’s a sign here saying strictly no digging, and it lists this number?”

“Oh right.”

“Yeah. Thing is, how strict is the strictly no digging rule?”

“Erm… I’m not sure I understand the question. Who is this?”

“Sorry, this is Dave. I’m a builder and me and my mate Tone came down here to do a spot of digging. We’re looking for old metal. Artefacts and that.”

“Right. Well you can’t dig anywhere in Westminster unless you’re a licensed contractor. And if the sign says no digging, there’s probably a good reason.”

“Okay. Thing is, we’ve already dug the hole. It was quite noisy.”

(Silence.)

“Hello? Yeah, I’m really sorry but we didn’t see the sign until after we did the hole. It’s pretty deep. Maybe someone should bring down one of those ‘danger, big hole’ signs?”

“You’ve already dug a hole? In the West End?”

“Yeah, it’s about eight feet deep. Maybe nine. Tony’s down there now. He’s getting pretty wet, actually – I think something may have sprung a leak.”

“Where did you say you were?”

“Cambridge Circus, near Shaftesbury Avenue. A hen party nearly just fell in on Tony. He’s just picked one of their L-plates off his face. Is anyone going to bring a sign?”

“Can I have your name and a contact number and someone will get back to you.”

“My name’s Dave, and my friend’s name is Tony Robinson. He really likes digging, so he suggested coming down here. It was only after he’d got a bit carried away with his little JCB that we noticed the sign.”

“Tony… what was the surname? Are you doing official work for the borough or a utilities company at the site?”

“Robinson. It’s sort of official, I guess – he’s off of Time Team.”

“Right… well tell your friend he can’t dig there.”

“Like I said, it’s already dug. But I’ll tell him. Tony, she’s saying you can’t dig here… What? Hang on, he’s saying something… he says do you know who he is? I don’t think he’s going to get out until he finds something.”

“Erm, is this a serious call? Because I’m going to have to call the police…”

“No, don’t worry. I’ll probably just get him to fill it in now – he won’t find anything. He never does.”

Public order meltdown as salt crisis engulfs Britain

FOOD CAMPAIGNERS today called for the government to make clear its position on salt as the icy crisis plaguing the nation’s streets showed no sign of regression.

As the UK was hit by a salt crisis after weeks of freezing weather and the subsequent gritting of roads took their toll on the country’s salt reserves, health-obsessed busybodies slammed Gordon Brown’s government for sending out mixed messages on the safety of salt.

“For years, they’ve been telling us that salt is bad for us and now they’re saying there’s not enough of it,” said one concerned eater. “As far as policy U-turns go, that must be right up there.”

As salt reserves around the country are left empty and Big Freeze panic grips the nation, reports have emerged from major cities of marauding ’salt mobs’ looting shops, restaurants and bars for any salt they can get their hands on.

In south London, one short-sighted resident faced an unclear future after he was mugged at knife-point for a bottle of saline solution he was carrying for emergency contact lens changes.

“The guy threatened me with a knife, took the bottle and just poured it straight on the ground in front of him,” the victim told police. “He just started laughing, babbling something incomprehensible about terra firma and then kissed the ground.”

As incidences of sodium chloride-related crime escalate, the police have been criticised for a laissez-faire attitude towards the perpetrators. “We’re just going to sit back and wait for them to slip up,” said a Metropolitan police spokesperson.

Meanwhile, religious groups have hailed the crisis and Britain’s ice-covered streets as evidence of a coming apocalypse. In a bizarre twist, many have turned to the song Ice Ice Baby by early-90s rap star Vanilla Ice, believing him to be some kind of soothsayer holding clues to the freeze, and particularly noting the composition’s closing refrain:

“Ice ice baby vanilla ice
Yo man let’s get out of here
Word to your mother
Ice ice baby too cold
Ice ice baby too cold too cold”

“Vanilla’s song was once believed to be a simple, fun little ditty. It now seems oddly prophetic; maybe he has always known something the rest of us didn’t,” said one fan.

Others simply suggested Vanilla Ice may be somehow behind the cold snap as sales of Ice, Ice Baby reportedly soared 2,500%.

Vanilla Ice declined to comment.

Public displays of affliction

The train I get in the mornings is so inhumanely jammed with morose commuters that if someone is looking at something personal, say, a text or checking an email, they may as well just tap a fork against a glass, clear their throat and read it out loud as it’s guaranteed that, due to the combined factors of the space constraints making actually averting your gaze physically impossible and the sheer mind-numbing banality of being faced with otherwise reading the same Metro front cover 850 times over, the information will enter the eyes of everyone in the immediate vicinity and travel straight into their brains, whether they like it or not.

It’s for this reason I don’t do anything like update my Facebook status via my iPhone or BlackBerry while on this train. That’s also because I don’t have an iPhone or BlackBerry because I’ve chosen, like some sort of 21st-century denying pariah, to have a phone that only does phoning, and nothing else. Well, it does texting, and pictures – I’m not actually a Victorian. But you get my point.

Many other people do choose to do things like update their status on the train, however. A guy squashed into my face this week was a prime example of the kind of nonchalantly un-private commuter I’m talking about, and he may be responsible for the creation of what could be my favourite-ever Facebook status update. Here’s what I witnessed him keying into his iDooberry:

“Have you ever brushed your teeth so hard that one of the bristles has fallen off the brush and got stuck in your throat like a fish bone? It’s not good, trust me.”

No mate. No I haven’t. And, no, I’d imagine it’s not.

Due to an unsteady train and unsuitable lack of things to hold on to, I’d been performing some sort of balancing act/slow dance with this guy for about five minutes but I hadn’t formed a single opinion about him. He was even wearing a flat cap, like Arthur Daley would have done, yet until that moment he was inconsequential. But his bathroom revelation made me look at him in an entirely different light, and I immediately had loads of questions buzzing around my head.

Why had he had to brush his teeth so hard? How long had the rogue bristle been tickling his oesophagus? Most of all, why was it so urgent he did the update there and then, in front of an audience on the train? Was the bristle still in there? If so, was his status update actually a trendy, 999-snubbing modern-day call for help? Was he about to cough and splutter to his death right there in front of my face? Would I have to try Heimliching him back to life, shooting the offending bristle out across the carriage to spike some snoozing suit in the eye?

I never found out the answers – I got off at the next stop. But learning of that guy’s aggressive teeth-cleaning mishap has made me more aware of my own brushing technique. And more careful when eating fish. After all, I don’t own an iPhone, so if I ever find myself in a similar situation, how would my nearest and dearest ever find out about it?

A short note to anyone still talking about the Christmas number one

Bored, bored, bored of all this Christmas number one nonsense now.

Here is a quick message to everyone involved:

Simon Cowell, X-Factor fans et al: Stop being so indignant. No one has the automatic right to a number one single just because they’ve spent a bit of their life spinelessly singing tedious cover versions on a never-ending TV show. People who are buying other singles aren’t “ruining poor Joe’s dream”; they’re just making the charts work like they’re supposed to. It’s called competition.

If the smirking little Geordie can’t achieve his dream under the same conditions as everyone else who wants a shot at fame, he doesn’t fucking deserve it.

Everyone else: Yes, it probably would be a bit funny if a song with lots of swearing was number one at Christmas. But spending 79p on a track owned by Sony on Apple’s competition-stifling iTunes website is not an anti-establishment manoeuvre. Organising a “rebellion” on a social networking site used by millions of people around the world isn’t, either. Stop being so proud of yourselves.

Rage’s song is a good one, but hundreds of thousands of people joining an internet group to manufacture a number one to stop another manufactured act nabbing the top spot is inane and hypocritical. Buy some new music that you actually want instead.

And shut up about all this now, please.