May 2012
5 posts
3 tags
THE DIAMOND JUBILEE
LUV - Fix up, look sharp - it’s the Jubilee again. I know, I know. You’re sick to the eye-teeth* of Jubilees. Every ten years it’s Jubilee this, and Jubilee that. But this Jubilee is special - you see, it’s not the Golden Jubilee - where the Queen celebrated 50 years on the throne - which sounds like a terrible constipation metaphor. It’s not the Silver Jubilee where she...
4 tags
HOTEL CHOCOLAT
LUV - If Groupon had its shit together, it’d shelve all those “chocolate experience days” where you file into a sterile room and a stern woman shouts at you about the discovery of the cocoa bean then makes you do a bunch of trust exercises using melted chocolate and marshmallows that you’re NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO EAT. If Groupon knew the first THING about chocolate, it would forget all that...
4 tags
BARBECUES
LUV - This summer, barbecues are going to be brilliant. Listen. Stop looking at me like that. YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, I used to be a VEGETARIAN.
Do you know how hard it is to be a vegetarian at a barbecue? To turn up to some stranger’s house and have everything go quiet until finally someone sighs and says “Barry, get the salad” as you try to disappear into the bunting? Because who even HAS a...
3 tags
PINTEREST
LUV - You what I’m sick of? Using my brain. All day long it’s people and words and stress and lists and bits of paper and meetings and books that you don’t remember you’re not really into until you open them on the train home and compromise and reports and SOMETIMES I JUST WANT TO LOOK AT A PICTURE OF A DRESS.
Followed by a picture of some cupcakes.
And then a kitten.
And maybe a tray of...
4 tags
EASTENDERS
LUV - I cop a lot of shit for liking EastEnders, but fuck you. EastEnders is brilliant. It’s brilliant because it knows exactly what a soap should be.
It’s grey. It’s flat. It’s oppressively miserable. It’s full of pallid, squalid, dirty-looking urchins who ricochet from disaster to hopeless disaster and then eventually die of scurvy. Nobody has ever smiled on EastEnders. If they have, it’s...
April 2012
5 posts
4 tags
PASTIES
LUV - It’s hard to trust people who don’t like pasties, isn’t it? It’s hard to look at them, and their tiny mouths and their monocles and their ridiculous cutlery infatuation, with anything other than outright disgust.
After all, these people have never walked to the garage at dinnertime and bought enough Ginsters spicy chicken slices to give themselves a weaponised dose of acid reflux....
3 tags
JEGGINGS
LUV - I have a lot of love for jeggings. In fact, I love them so much that immediately after I typed that first sentence I went online and BOUGHT SOME JEGGINGS. Because, make no mistake, jeggings are way cool. Yeah, I just said “way cool”; yeah, I’m an adult. Get over it, Grandma - jeggings are so immense that they turn the world of social acceptability on its head. COWABUNGA.
But first, in...
3 tags
BAKING
LUV - This is the last fucking thing I want to admit. Mums bake things. Nans bake things. Worse still, awful Shoreditchy internet wankers with blue hair, a fondness for overpriced cocktails and an obnoxious ironic infatuation with burlesque like baking. Baking is for that dreadful woman off the telly who lives in a Parisian shoebox and wears vintage dresses and blinks a lot and only...
3 tags
TOM JONES
LUV - So far, The Voice is a pretty terrible show. If you haven’t seen it, here’s what happens: a blandly competent singer clomps up on a stage and warbles, while Jessie J and an anonymous Irish man take turns to pull faces that make them look as if the deformed mutant puppy from The Fly II has sneezed a bucket of pukey shit right across their chins. This continues until everyone dies. The...
5 tags
KRISPY KREME
LUV - Oh Krispy Kreme. You have ruined all other doughnuts for me. All of them. Sugared doughnuts. Jammy doughnuts. Even those Rolo doughnuts that have a perfect ring of caramel magically inserted in them and come in packs of four that you have to eat all at once, one after the other in quick succession, because you live alone and you never go outside and you’ve managed to convince yourself...
March 2012
5 posts
3 tags
DOLPHINS
LUV - Before we start I just want to apologise for the HAT section of this post - because it’s not HAT, it’s actual hate. It’s a hate paean to dolphins. It’s a shamefully inhumane tract of anti-animal propaganda, even I can barely believe its poison, it sends the tone of this entire site plummeting, and I’m SORRY.
I’m sorry, dolphins.
Because you’re reading this, aren’t you? Oh, don’t...
3 tags
DRAW SOMETHING
LUV - In case you’re one of the three people left on Earth who isn’t glued to their phones playing Draw Something right fucking now, let me ‘splain.
Draw Something is a game you play on your phone. Someone draws something (HENCE THE NAME LOL) for you and you have to guess what it is using a series of letter tiles, then you draw something for them, then it NEVER ENDS. And the most traditional...
3 tags
PEANUT BUTTER
LUV - Thank you, North America, for your generous bounty of peanut butter. It’s delicious. It improves everything it touches – sandwiches, chocolate biscuits, my hair. My hair has never tasted so good. Peanut butter is amazing – and its thick, glutinous, salty-sweet denseness is so versatile. You can use peanut butter for virtually any purpose.
Want to avoid talking to an annoying housemate or...
3 tags
NANDO'S
LUV - It’s easy to spot people who don’t like Nando’s. They read The Telegraph. They series link daytime BBC One shows about cowboy plumbers. They like the theatre, but only if they can read the reviews first and then slap their thigh and shout “HA!” for the benefit of their companions during all the bits they heard were clever.
These people look down their nose at Nando’s. They look down at...
3 tags
MOVIE TAGLINES
LUV - It’s 2012. We are officially living in the future. And the bad thing about that – apart from the fact that the words “trending” and “facetime” have entered my mother’s vocabulary and yet I still don’t have a jetpack – is that too much information is fed to us. Constantly. Facebook and Twitter update every second, TV network promos clog every commercial break and, whenever we check our...
February 2012
7 posts
3 tags
BOARD GAMES
LUV - Right, fuck you, board games are brilliant. Oh, I know they’re not cool like your Jason Beavers and your iPhones and whichever brand of nerdy arrested development with post-teenage entropy and social isolation you currently subscribe to, and your trainers, but board games are wonderful because they teach us so much.
Everyone knows that the best kind of fun is the fun where you learn,...
3 tags
NICOLAS CAGE
LUV - I watched It Could Happen To You the other day. It was weird. It starred Nicolas Cage, but it wasn’t really a Nicolas Cage film. It was like watching an early episode of Come Dine With Me, back before Dave Lamb realised that people like him better when he just shrieks out arbitrary insults like a Tourette’s sufferer hopscotching across an electrified grid.
In the film, Nicolas Cage...
3 tags
SAUNAS
LUV - Deep down, everyone is a little bit self-deluded. Some have delusions of being Ryan Gosling in Drive. They’re the ones chewing on a toothpick in a horrible jacket, aiming for ‘self-contained detachment’ but actually hitting ‘concussed farmyard animal’. Others have delusions of being Joan from Mad Men. They’re often just fat gingers in manky dresses.
I feel their pain. I’m self-deluded,...
3 tags
SNOW
LUV - Everything is temporary. That’s what Buddhism teaches us. Also to, you know, wear orange and look a bit smug. But mainly that everything is temporary - each second that ticks by will never come again, and every sunrise we see takes place 40,000 kilometres spinwards from the last one. That’s not Buddhism, incidentally, that’s SCIENCE. Science also teaches us that, because of the Earth’s...
3 tags
CANDLES
LUV - I don’t normally play the gender card, but bloody LOOK HERE. I am a woman. A hard-working woman who toils all day in an office that smells of carpet and procedure, in a city that smells of BINS.
So, when I get home of an evening, I like it to smell nice. And by ‘nice’ I don’t mean ‘check out this gym kit I’ve worked out in twice this week and it still doesn’t smell like stilton...
5 tags
GIRAFFE BREAD
LUV - Oh come on. What are you, made of stone? How can you not be moved by: a) A three-year-old girl writing to Sainsbury’s to ask why tiger bread is called tiger bread when it looks more like a giraffe (and then drawing a picture of Beaky, HER IMAGINARY DOG, at the bottom of the letter):
b) Sainsbury’s - big, corporate, trundling capitalist machine Sainsbury’s - then replying with...
4 tags
QUIET CARRIAGES
LUV - Fact: Going anywhere on public transport is a billion times better than going by car.
Being involuntarily force-fed tinny phone music by aggressive schoolgirls on buses is how I keep up with what kids like. And no car journey of mine has ever been interrupted by a stranger clambering in through the passenger door to either a) play the trumpet, b) ask for money or c) take his trousers and...
January 2012
8 posts
4 tags
NAPS
LUV - I’ll cut to the chase: if you don’t like napping, you’re probably a monster.
If you can’t derive pleasure from crawling into bed fully clothed at three o’clock in the afternoon and waking up an hour later all warm and muzzy-headed, I’m afraid we can never be friends.
If you’ve never sat in a cinema and decided that, actually, you couldn’t give a flying fuck about The Girl With The...
3 tags
CATS
LUV - Look, I’ve already won this. I might as well sit back and do my nails or taxes because, no matter how many times Stuart Heritage angrily thumps out the word “bellend”, or ejaculates blood from any of his fifteen orifices out of sheer rage, I have won. It’s a no-brainer. It’s cats.
You people love cats. You’re the fucking internet.
Parents and people who still insist...
5 tags
DARK CHOCOLATE
LUV - I am a man of exceptional taste. For example, I am writing this from a bespoke handcrafted chaise longue in my parlour. I am listening to early Serge Gainsbourg. I am drinking champagne out of a glass shaped like a swan and tittering at things that I imagine Noel Coward might have said. I am wearing a velvet smoking jacket, a monocle, a top hat and nothing else. I am all class.
And...
4 tags
WHITE CHOCOLATE
LUV - You know what? I love chocolate as much as the next typical woman, but even I have to admit that sometimes it can be just too damned CHOCOLATEY.
I realise that some of you will disagree. But bear with me. Because the sad truth is you can have too much of a good thing.
For instance, springtime in Paris. Wonderful for a blossom-blown romantic weekend away, but – take it from me – add an...
3 tags
TUMBLR
LUV - This is a Tumblr site. You’d be forgiven for not realising that because it’s not called FUCK YEAH ARGUMENTS and isn’t plastered in photographs of Jared Leto, but it is a Tumblr site. I realise this may come as a surprise.
Or maybe it doesn’t.
Maybe you don’t even know what Tumblr is. Maybe you have a ridiculously outdated sort of life that involves sunshine and people and lingering in...
5 tags
FLATPACK FURNITURE
LUV - Much like Hitler, I’m starting to believe that Scandinavian people are the epitome of human evolution. They’re taller and better looking, for a start. They’re easygoing and trilingual. Their streets are clean, they smile more, they have a brilliant mythology, and they’ve developed a healthy attitude towards sex and rationalising tax hikes.
Plus they gave us...
4 tags
CHRISTMAS COMPETITION WINNING ENTRY: NIGHTCLUBS
LUV - Who invented nightclubs? I want to find that bloke and shake his hand. Well, maybe not; he’s probably in a mental health ward and might try and rip the faces off anybody that goes anywhere near him. Who possibly thought that it was a good idea to shove a load of people in a dark room, with shit music on a constant loop, and incite them to bounce around like they’re having a fit?...
4 tags
NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS
LUV - New year’s resolutions are most definitely a good idea. Who wouldn’t look back at the twisted corpse of the year gone by, see the myriad ways that it made your life quantifiably shittier, and vow to do better? Only an idiot could reflect on the previous year without deciding to halt their perilous slide towards obesity, or try harder to afford electricity, or maybe not keep bursting into...
December 2011
8 posts
5 tags
CHRISTMAS PUDDING
LUV - You’re probably getting sick of hearing this - I’ll stop soon, honest - but I bloody love Christmas. And I think I’ve finally worked out why.
It’s not the shopping (because if I wanted to get repeatedly elbowed in the face, I’d just take the tube somewhere). It’s not the carols (because if I wanted to hear a noise like that, I’d just drag a burning shed into a smoke alarm factory)....
5 tags
BOXING DAY
LUV - If you’re reading this from outside the UK, Ireland, Australia or New Zealand, know that I pity you. Not because I’m a terrible racist – well, not just because of that – but because you don’t have Boxing Day, and boy are you missing out.
Because Boxing Day is wonderful. Let me tell you of it. Boxing Day is a public holiday that falls on 26 December and has a number of glorious...
4 tags
SECRET SANTAS
LUV - I know I’ve mentioned this before, but working from home is pretty sodding relentlessly amazing. I can attribute this to two key findings:
1 - PEOPLE ARE AWFUL.
2 - I JUST HAD A NAP. IT’S TWO THIRTY IN THE AFTERNOON. FUCK YOU.
However, both of these findings have downsides. The naps are nice, but it means I shuffle around with morning breath all day. And as awful as people undoubtedly...
5 tags
CHRISTMAS WRAPPING
LUV - Wrapping Christmas presents is brilliant. It’s brilliant. It’s one of my favourite things about Christmas, up there with decorating the tree and smothering every available foodstuff in cranberry jelly and brandy butter for a week.
Oh, I know you don’t care. I know that, as long as the parcel you butcher open with your clammy meathooks on Christmas morning contains...
4 tags
FESTIVE ICE RINKS
LUV - Oh, hello! I’m British. You can probably tell because if I detect even a single flake of snow within ten miles of me I phone up everyone I know and scream “SNOW SNOW SNOW” and then pop into Twitter to post “SNOW SNOW SNOW #snow” and finish off with a quick whirl round Facebook liking every status I can see all of which say “SNOW SNOW SNOW”, and...
6 tags
DVD COMMENTARIES
LUV - We’re going to have to face facts. The DVD is dead. All those shelves and shelves of films and TV shows that you’ve carefully curated over the course of 15 years? The whole lot’s worth about £3.50 now. Seriously, you may as well have a living room full of VHS tapes. Or wax cylinders. Or cave paintings. Not even good cave paintings. Shit cave paintings.
Nobody needs DVDs any more. You can...
4 tags
ADVENT CALENDARS
LUV - Let’s face it, most aspects of Christmas get shitter as you get older. Going to see the Christmas lights being turned on? Magical and exciting when you were a kid, right? But now all you can think is how it’s raining, cold and the street is packed by gasping morons who all want to be standing exactly where your feet are, and - actually - which celebrity is turning on the Christmas lights...
4 tags
HASHTAGS
LUV - Gord bless whoever invented Twitter hashtags.
Sure, they’ve become an indicator of unmerited smugness in that some people will append “#win” to tweets about having successfully cooked their own dinner, as if providing for themselves past the age of 18 is actually an achievement worth trumpeting. And yes, whinges about public transport/weather/colds will often come...
November 2011
12 posts
3 tags
PENGUINS
LUV - How unlikely are penguins?
No, let me back up. How unlikely are birds, for a start? How contrary is the idea that birds - quick-eyed, tiny, twittering birds that dart through the air and fill the sky with song - were once the cyclopean earthbound titans that were dinosaurs?
Dinosaurs. You know, all teeth and scales and RAWR. Became birds. Let’s all sit back for a second and ponder the...
3 tags
WASPS
LUV - Are you an animal lover? You are? Well, fuck off then. Your lack of consistency appalls me. “I love all living things,” you’ll ineffectively meep on the rare occasion that anyone can bear to look in the direction of your simpering, sallow, wet-behind-the-ears drizzle-puddle of a face. But you don’t, do you?
You don’t love all living things. Oh, sure, you set up a donkey sanctuary once...
3 tags
JUSTIN BIEBER
LUV - You idiots need to get with the program. You kneejerk idiots, hating Justin Bieber just because he’s young and rich and more successful than you’ll ever be. At least Justin Bieber doesn’t spend every day counting down the seconds until he’s allowed to leave his office and return to his awful little empty fart-smelling bedsit so that he can read crappy websites that contribute nothing to...
3 tags
HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL
LUV - Pep! That’s what High School Musical’s got. Pep and spunk (not that sort, you monster, it’s DISNEY, it’s for CHILDREN) and primary colours! Asinine but memorable tunes! Rosy-cheeked, scrubbed-clean smiling faces! Athletically complex, basketball-based dance routines! And buckets and buckets and buckets of youthful exuberance and relentless, brainless, infectious enthusiasm.
And sometimes...
3 tags
TWILIGHT
LUV - Here’s the thing. Adult life is rubbish. Interminable greyscaled rubbish. It’s all knowing your National Insurance number and not putting a pretend gun to your head then going “BOOSH!” when your colleague starts yet another rambling anecdote about their allotment. It’s realising that you may never get your dream job or actually move out of Basingstoke. Worst of all, adult life is accepting...
3 tags
HORSES
LUV - Horses? Horses? Seriously, horses? We’re doing a LUV & HAT on horses? What kind of monster hates horses? What kind of twisted, cleaver-wielding, Barbour-jacket-wearing, stealing-onto-farms-in-the-dead-of-night, stripping-naked-to-the-waist, eye-slashing, genital-mutilationy, played-by-Harry-Potter-in-that-play barbarian hates horses?
Horses are docile, beautiful and majestic...
3 tags
MASSAGES
LUV - I don’t like people touching me. I don’t like people, and their hands might have been anywhere - down their pants, plunged into jars of e-coli, groping through raw sewage for kicks - the last place I want them is on my skin. But masseurs aren’t people. Masseurs are clean and sleek and compassionate and impersonal and utterly, utterly asexual. They’ll neither judge your naked lumpiness nor...
5 tags
MOVEMBER
LUV - Movember! Grow a ‘tache, raise some cash! Ruin your mush, give cancer the push! Super, smashing, great. But…
Let’s put aside for a second the whole “charity” element of Movember. Because let’s face it, while it was borne out of the noble aim of raising money to punch cancer in its wretched bloody face, and all power to it, Movember has now evolved into...
4 tags
STARBUCKS CHRISTMAS
LUV - Do you know why Coca-Cola’s “the holidays are coming” Christmas campaign never really took off in the UK? Apart from the fact that we don’t call it “the holidays” over here? Or that their weird photo-realistic Polar Express-style animated Santa is a bit, well, rapey? Or that, in the UK at least, the sight of a honking convoy of aggressively branded trucks thundering over the horizon isn’t...
NANOWRIMO
LUV - They say that everyone has a novel in them. You. Me. That man in the KEEP CALM AND HAVE A BEER t-shirt. Jedward. Everyone. And given the rich tapestry of human experience, you’d expect each novel to be a literary snowflake: a unique snapshot of the world; multilayered, vibrant and delightfully awry (or in Jedward’s case, one novel full of lobotomised adrenaline and a second, slightly less...
3 tags
NATIONAL EXPRESS
LUV - You know what life is for? It’s for the living. So sometimes you just have to say no - no to sitting on the same old boring tube with the same old boring people reading the same old boring book (Wow, you’re reading One Day? So am I! So is that guy, and that woman, and everyone else on the carriage! Tell you what, I’ll just save us all a lot of effort and read it out. That...
4 tags
SMOKING
LUV - Hello readers. I love to suck on the butts of fags. If you came to my house, I’d even let you bum one of my fags. I love smoking cigarettes. And not just because I can make vaguely homophobic jokes about it. There’s loads of other reasons too. And here are some of them:
There are over 4000 chemicals in every cigarette sold in this country. A packet of 20 of cigarettes cost...