March 2013
1 post
NOSTALGIA
LUV - Cor, the past. Wonnit brilliant?
Trains used to be brilliant. Do you remember? In the past, they made proper chugga-chugga train noises, and had smoking carriages and slam-doors, and this lent the everyday a frisson of danger of death from fire or decapitation. It was a simpler, more exciting time.
Last night, whereas, I was on a packed train, jammed into the armpit of a man who was...
February 2013
1 post
5 tags
CANDY CRUSH
LUV - Modern games are far too complicated. I got Hitman: Absolution for Christmas, and I’ve still only played it once. I got put off by the bit where you have to crouch under a counter for 15 minutes, then kill a chef, then clear up all trace of his murder, then dress up in his clothes, then hang around somewhere else for an hour – by which time you’ve forgotten what all the buttons do, so you...
January 2013
1 post
5 tags
SATURDAY KITCHEN
LUV - Saturday Kitchen is brilliant. It’s absolutely brilliant and I will not hear a word against it. End of story. That’s how this site works, right?
Fine. I suppose if you want REASONS why spending every Saturday morning in a souring bed, watching a shark-eyed man in a peach-coloured shirt chiding minor celebrities for julienning vegetables incorrectly isn’t the epitome of civilisation, then...
October 2012
1 post
4 tags
CHIPS
LUV - I have been alive on this planet for over three decades. I’ve resided in three continents. I’ve met kings and paupers and people from Bracknell and Jeff Brazier. Once I even almost got a TATTOO. In WALES. So I think we’re all agreed that I’m basically a suave cosmopolitan motherfucker.
And yet, through all this rich tapestry of florid human experience, I have...
September 2012
1 post
4 tags
DOCTOR WHO
LUV - Look, I don’t mean to be a dick about this, but disliking Doctor Who is kind of unpatriotic.
Calling him “Dr Who” and not “Doctor Who” is unpatriotic. Filtering out all Doctor Who-related tweets on a Saturday night is so unpatriotic that you might as well give up and just become a French tabloid photographer. And the HAT section of this post is basically Stuart Heritage shitting and...
August 2012
5 posts
4 tags
BACON
LUV - I fucking hate the internet sometimes. It’s ruined everything I love. It’s ruined calling people a dick - now, whenever you call someone a dick, someone from BBC Three comes round your house and bellows the word ‘TROLL’ through your letterbox until their camera crew get cold and go home. It’s ruined You’ve Been Framed - now I’ll never earn £250 from filming myself fall over at a wedding...
6 tags
CYCLING
LUV - I think I’m going to buy a bicycle. This has nothing to do with the Olympics. No it hasn’t. It hasn’t. Shut up.
I think I’m going to buy a bicycle because I just went on holiday and decided to ride a bicycle for the first time in about 15 years, and I quite liked it. This decision had absolutely nothing to do with Team GB’s Olympic cycling medal haul, and the fact that I happened to...
6 tags
MUSICALS
LUV - I am not one of Those Girls. I will not make you watch Dirty Dancing with me and cry into my popcorn because of Patrick Swayze’s cheekbones and tragic death. I won’t get a cat, then put hats on the cat, then put photos of the cat in hats on the internet. Probably. I managed to graduate from my teens without learning a single hand movement to that ‘We go together like wanky-bo-banky-bong...
5 tags
THE NEWS
LUV - Here’s a true thing: I own (and wear) a pair of earrings made from Lego bricks. Yellow ones. Within my line of sight, at this very moment, there is a Moomin, a plush toy snake, four wooden Vikings and a mermaid, and I don’t even have any children.
I am not what you would call one of life’s realists.
Which is why the news is brilliant for people like me. If it wasn’t for the news,...
4 tags
SWIMMING
LUV - YOU SHUT UP SWIMMING IS BRILLIANT. It’s like winning, but in water.
I love swimming so much that I used to swim every day, but had to take it down to once or twice a week because it was JUST TOO MUCH PLEASURE. And also because I was spending so much time in the water that I started to look like Yoda.
More like Yoda, I mean.
Remember the freewheeling childhood joy of messing around on...
July 2012
4 posts
4 tags
THE OLYMPICS
LUV - Oh shut up. I already know that you don’t like the Olympics, and I already know why. “But all the corporate sponsors,” you keep whining into your sleeve. And “But it’ll be so hard to travel around central London”. Fucking GOOD. Have you BEEN to central London lately? It’s DREADFUL. It’s noisy, it’s dirty, all the tube stations play a loop of Boris Johnson repeating the word ‘obey’ again...
5 tags
KINDLES
LUV - Books can fuck off. Books have caused me no end of trouble. I have a wonky little toe from a bookcase collapsing on it last year AND I have a bruised nose from that time I dozed off while reading Infinite Jest in bed.
Books are fucking arseholes.
The trouble is, I love reading. One of my happiest childhood memories is of being plonked in the back seat of my mother’s car with a bag of...
3 tags
SIGHTSEEING
LUV - Here’s a horrible confession - I think I might be the worst holiday companion alive. You see, I’m a planner. You might view your holiday as an opportunity to unwind, to briefly come up for a much-needed gulp of clean air after toiling away in your horrible little sweatbox of a workplace for what seems like an eternity. Nuh-uh. Not on my watch, buddy.
Go on holiday with me and you’re...
5 tags
3D
LUV - Admittedly it’s hard to love 3D. It’s hard to love anything that requires you to wear heavy, uncomfortable glasses then flinch every 3.5 seconds for ninety minutes, which is why I don’t go swimming in goggles when they split the pool into lanes on a Monday morning. And it’s hard to love something that’s constantly being promoted as the next stage in entertainment evolution, but has been...
June 2012
4 posts
4 tags
PED EGGS
LUV - Let’s not beat around the bush, ladies and gentlemen, feet are fucking awful. Basically they’re scaly deformed HANDS garnished with horns and corns and irregularly sprouting hair. At best, feet look like undercooked pancakes full of chicken bones. At worst, they smell like Belgium.
As you might have guessed, I am a fully paid-up podophobe. I fucking hate feet and, of course, the podes I...
4 tags
MEDICINE
LUV - When people see the contents of my handbag, they often exclaim “You’re a walking PHARMACY!” Personally I think that’s a rather high-handed approach for pick-pockets to take, but this is twenty-first century London and I suppose no one has any real boundaries anymore, what are you going to do.
But they’re right. I do carry a lot of medicine around with me, because if I didn’t (dramatic...
4 tags
CONTACT LENSES
LUV - Being a short-sighted child is no fun. Ask anyone. They’ll tell you that, like me, their first memory was of some blurry arsehole barking “Well YOU’LL never be a fighter pilot!” right into their face. And after that, it’s all downhill. When you’re short-sighted, your life becomes defined by its limitations.
But that’s nothing compared with having to wear glasses to school. It’s not like...
4 tags
SELF-SERVICE CHECKOUTS
LUV - Self-service checkouts are brilliant. I don’t know if you remember what supermarkets used to be like before they existed, when you had to run everything by a checkout assistant, but it was rubbish.
Look, supermarkets have always hated you. Supermarkets are basically vast warehouses strewn with signs that say ‘THIS TOWN USED TO HAVE A FISHMONGER UNTIL WE CAME ALONG’ and ‘NONE OF OUR...
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...
