Cynical Blog

What has the world come to? Not only do people feel the need to tell me every detail about their life via Facebook and Twitter, now they don’t even need to engage in the thought process about boring me… now they have ‘Funny Status Updates for Facebook’… I think if you can’t come up with anything funny to say in a status, try one of those depressing ones that humourless people write. But worst of all, people that buy this 69p app, are fully admitting that they themselves cannot think of one funny thing to say. It’s basically hired help for the boring.

For an app called ‘Funny Status Updates for Facebook’, what the fuck is funny about “I would rather try to carry 10 plastic grocery bags in each hand than take 2 trips to bring my groceries in”. Trades description act springs to mind.

This is potentially the most depressing dining table in London. This is outside a pub on Hollen St, Soho – A stones throw from where all the crackheads in Soho go to get soup – So no reason to not eat outside then. Plus with the great view of the Crossrail construction site… Perfect.

I never realised that actually being able to see flavour rendered the taste greater. According to this Aussie snack it does.

Some friends leave you a voicemail saying ‘Happy New Year’, others ring you, tell you to fuck off and rub their phone on their balls.

Earlier this week I was walking down a busy London street on a hot day when I walked by a group of people handing out free water…

As I passed, an arm reached out in front of me holding a bottle of water. “Wow, free water” my inner miser said, overlooking the fact I was 100 yards from my office where, from the tap, water is also free. As I took the water I looked up and realised that this was no ordinary man, he was a gym goer. He was on the streets handing out water, not for the good of London’s hydration, but to promote one of the local gyms. People who attend these smug-bunkers are a specimen of person designed only to make the weedy and the pizza lovers shudder with envy, and disgust. Instantly I didn’t want him to know that I thought of myself as any less of a man just because he could probably bend and break me to fashion some sort of hat… So, don’t ask me why, but I began to talk like a cockney builder. For some reason in my head I decided that if you can’t instantly gain three stone along with biceps the size of Beth Dittos thighs…then talk like a cockney and swear, lots. So there I was, chatting to him like I was Danny Dyer, telling him I do “shit loads of exercise”, “love to go for a fucking run” and “fuck loads of birds”….Well, maybe not the last one, but you get the idea the way the conversation was going. After a couple of minutes I began to realise something; he was basically just a muscly salesman. He didn’t really care about his muscles, he just had to look like that to sell the gym. That’s real commitment to a job, I can barely get up at 8:30 to get the tube. I should of guessed he was just a salesman, as when I took the water from him with one hand he directed my other to a pen where I was encouraged to write my name and contact details. He then began asking about when I can come in and sign up etc etc etc. This was when the calls began. “If you sign up today you get the special price”. Everyday. How special is this price that it’s offered everyday? Then, as soon as the texts started I knew I had to deter him somehow.

I don’t have muscles but I do have grammar!

It’s either persistence or stupidity.

For weeks now I’ve had a running conflict with a cleaner..

Now before I start I should point out, I myself do not have a cleaner. I’ve not turned into some upper class twat with a cleaner, ivory slippers and a small Rwandan boy for a foot stool. My office has a cleaner, and he’s a strange one too. He’s a five foot nothing Mexican man with a preference for marijuana. He knocks on the door every evening around 6pm and timidly enters, bleary eyed, holding his hand up to the light like someone who’s just been rescued after being trapped down a well for a month. He works well into the night, and this is where I assume his boredom begins… Which is starting to explain a lot.

To the right of my desk is a mini model of famous London landmarks….

It always looked like that until a few weeks ago…I’d come into work everyday for it to be arranged differently by the cleaner the evening before…

I’ve no idea what this means?…

To be honest you have to admire the determination….

This even included one arrangement that can only be described as ….well… phallic.

No matter how many times I put it back to normal, it was changed again that evening. I realised I was entering some sort of budget re-make of Good Will Hunting so I decided to put an end to it.

Recently I had two weeks holiday from my job. It was my chance to actually do something that wasn’t work and relax… That’s if I could figure out what’s relaxing, what I wanted to do and stop creating false TV concepts…

Two weeks. Two whole weeks. What do you do with that time? I wasn’t too sure what “people” do when they have a holiday from work. I hear about people going on fishing holidays to relax. I don’t understand fishing. There’s something very neanderthal about sitting by a cold river waiting in the hope of catching a fish. It seems only the sickeningly patient and the lonely could tolerate this as a pastime. The other advice I was given was “put your feet up in front of day time TV and make the most of it”. Make the most of daytime TV? But all I do is laugh at the weird and bewildered when I watch day time TV. That, and pray they make a male version of  ’Loose Women’. Imagine the uproar. It’d be called something like ‘Man-Slags’ and the presenters would be total chauvinists. On the panel would be Jim Davidson, John Mccririck and Roy “Chubby” Brown. It seems all these shows that appeal to the masses of idiots throw an American in to give some sort of non-existent credibility, so let’s throw in R Kelly. He can be the ‘misunderstood’ one. The violins will play over his voice as if he was a contestant from X-Factor that once knew someone that died and therefore can’t be conceived of as a twat. Whilst ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams plays, he explains he thought as long as she looked 16 it was okay. Man-Slags will still have the same basic premise as Loose Women; Someone makes an innuendo… There’s a pause… They laugh, the crowd laughs, the viewer laughs, and they all bask in the agreement that they are all very funny because they thought of a rude thing, all by themselves. Aren’t they clever? No, but it still has a chance of being commissioned right?

Anyway, I decided not to take the advice given and booked an impromptu holiday to Spain with my friend James. As soon as I book a holiday I instantly regret it; I hate flying. It doesn’t help when you fly with a budget airline like I did. You don’t know if you’ll make it alive, and when you realise what fat, stinking slob you have to sit next to for the flight you’ll hope you don’t survive the ordeal. This was what happened to me. Ryanair is a ’sit where you like, you may as well shit in the aisle, we don’t care’ kind of airline. To my left, a cockney bouncer type with a waistline capable of engulfing not only both of our seats, but myself also. The only plus point I could think of was if there was a hole in the plane, he would make for a suitable plug. Behind me was a lady guilty of such inconsideration she wasn’t even worthy of the oxygen she was basically stealing from the other passengers on board. She had an inability to balance, or because of the load she was carrying found it impossible to put her feet to any use. Every time she got up she used my chair as an aide. I watched her technique, it was like someone attacking a vending machine for free food. I had to suffer this every time her incontinence kicked in. This peaked at the point when my chair simply wasn’t enough for her and my head was used as a last minute fixture to help her stand. And finally, to my right, a crying baby. Enough said.

I’d not been to Spain before, and I still feel like I haven’t. There were more English people than Spanish. It seemed that every English man there had read a hand book on how to fulfil a cliche of an Englishman abroad. One middle-aged, toothless man approached us in his ‘mockney’ swagger and asked us what we were up to that night. He wasn’t trying to pick us up, he was just one of these annoying pricks that thinks he’s ‘one of the lads’ so can bother anyone. We told him we were going to a pub. He looked at us with utter disgust, as if I’d just used his toothbrush as a tool to help give Michelle McManus an enema. “Couple of young lads like you should be out there shagging everything that walks!” he said. I began to explain we were there just to relax. This wasn’t good enough for him. I then told him I have a girlfriend, this made it worse. He turned to me and stared for a few moments. Then, in a smug tone said “any money she’s sucking someones dick right now”, then turned to look at James as if he’d be nodding along with him. He wasn’t by the way.

I’m now back beneath the slate grey skies of London. My time off work went too fast, it feels like I sat on a beach the whole time. I wish I’d done more with my two weeks off than just sit by the water. Should of just gone fishing.

It’s Saturday night, my girlfriend is at my house and we’re getting ready to make dinner, well, call a take out. This is when it all began…

“Jamie, I don’t feel too great. I keep shivering, but I’m sweating at the same time.” I reach across in a kind of reassuring, ‘I know exactly what I’m doing’ sort of way, and touch her forehead. She is piping hot. It was at this time she looks at me as if she had just seen Ann Robinson perform a naked star jump and ran for the toilet to be sick.

What’s the best thing to do in this situation? I’m not great with being put on the spot to make a decision. Earlier in the week I walked out of my house to find a dead cat just outside my door on the pavement (I should point out, it wasn’t specifically left for me in some sort of rabid revenge plot for another feline related crime). With no one around to ask, I stood there blankly, pulling much the same expression as when I first saw The Jeremy Kyle Show; confusion and anger. What do you do? Do I try and find an owner? Well, former owner. I didn’t know either (I’m assuming you didn’t?), so I called the councils pest control department. They informed me they strictly only control alive pests. They got me on a little technicality there. Just as this was happening, a man from the garage next door came along and took on the role of ‘alpha-male’ and decided to take care of it. . . By take care of it I assumed he meant in a humane way and not so much in a Sopranos ‘take care of it’ sort of way. I guess I’ll never know. Though if you took your car in for an M.O.T last week in Highgate and found new furry seat covers upon it’s return, this all might be making a lot of sense.

Anyway, back to my sick girlfriend. I called my friend Chris who is a paramedic and he advised we went straight to hospital, which we did. This started with an argument with a receptionist. The receptionist could not hear, or spell. Best person for the job. I said “A” She said “F?”, I said “M” she said “What?”. I asked her, “Can you not spell, or not hear?” She said “I don’t understand”. I guess that’s both then. It was getting to the point I would have to sign her in as “Dan” just so she would be seen. It seems that there is something about the vocation of ‘NHS receptionist’ that only attracts frustrated old bags with so much hate pent-up inside them that they are fit to explode at any moment releasing an unholy amount of hate goo.

The ‘receptionist incident’ (as my girlfriend now knows it due to her embarrassment of me) was followed by sitting in A&E near two pieces of pre-evolutionary slime that had decided to constantly laugh extremely loudly and play music off of their phone. Obviously no one else joined in with the inconsiderate cretins as they were either too ill to function, or were bleeding. Maybe this was some sort of new morale boosting project brought in by the new cost cutting coalition: Don’t build new facilities, laugh them better. A laugh a day keeps the cancer away? Or maybe the girls were sort of mavericks of the health world? They travel from A&E to A&E to laugh in the faces of burns victims in a new healing treatment not previously used before; the “cruel to be kind” audio based skin graft.

So, my girlfriend was given a bed to stay the night in a hospital ward as they needed to monitor things and what-not. There were no televisions in the ward, and the most interesting thing to look at was a lady called Sarah that ran up and down the ward screaming, then laughing, then screaming and so on and so on. This got boring after the 4th or 5th time. Though, there was also a lady that resembled Carlos Tevez of Manchester City FC that would walk up and down the ward with her arms outstretched in a sort of clothes line manner. I sat around waiting for the moment Sarah and Carlos would cross paths in hope of some sort of crazy person re-make of “Alien vs Predator”. I waited hours. It never happened, which says to me they took it in shifts to stop anyone getting any sleep.

So, despite the illiterate receptionists, idiots in the waiting room, a moaning boyfriend and crazy ladies in the ward, my girlfriend is feeling a lot better now, and is out of hospital. Surprisingly, you might say.