LUV & HAT

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 and again and there are arseholes everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Arseholes in suits. Arseholes with food blogs. Arseholes who don’t know how ticket barriers work because they’ve never been to London before. Central London is horrible. If anything, central London should be harder to travel around. Ideally it should be sealed off, set on fire and drowned in the sea.

And stop this corporate sponsorship nonsense, too. So the Olympics aren’t as inclusive as you thought they’d be. Oh boo hoo. What gave you the idea that the Olympics were about you, anyway? They’re not. They’re about the people who’ve spent four years training and stretching and adhering to ridiculous diets and sleeping in oxygen tents and painstakingly Veeting off every last molecule of body hair just so they can fling a fucking paperweight a third of an inch further than they’d otherwise be able to.

If the Olympics were about people like you, the 100m final would take 45 seconds to finish, the javelin world record would be about three inches and Thinking About Hoovering But Not Actually Hoovering would be an established event. But that isn’t the case. The Olympics aren’t about you. They’re about people who are much better than you.

Now that I’ve rendered your arguments powerless, let me explain why the Olympics are brilliant. You see, they give us something to aspire to. There’s no point wanting to be a footballer, for example, because it means a) spending 15 years of your life running up and down a muddy field while 30,000 dickheads call you a wanker and b) marrying a florescent orange dimwit called fucking Rotunda or something and never experiencing a single original thought in your entire life. It’s hard work.

But being an Olympian? You row a boat once for ten minutes tops and - unless you really balls it up - you’re automatically given a knighthood and a cushy job endorsing breakfast cereal. That’s the life everybody wants.

And, compared to Euro 2012 or Wimbledon, the Olympics offer something for everyone. If you like watching team sports then, fine, watch the football. But if you like your sport to be over in a matter of seconds, there’s the 100m final. Prefer impenetrable monotony? There’s cycling. What about furtive, shame-faced public masturbation? Beach volleyball. Bit of a paedo? Gymnastics.

There. The Olympics are (sort of) great. I’ve won this argument hands down, haven’t I?
- Stuart Heritage

HAT - Imagine for a minute that you didn’t enjoy the music of the artist Prince. Not that he offended you - he’s Prince, not Kasabian - just that his particular brand of high-pitched innuendo wasn’t quite your thing.

Now imagine that you come home one day to find that your landlord is letting Prince put on a gig in your living room. And that he’s inviting the entirety of Prince’s international fanclub. And that the gig will last three weeks.

Your landlord - a portly, flyaway blowhard - waffles on about how property prices in the area will sky-rocket, but you just think “But I rent”, and wonder sadly how you’re going to watch Wallander with a tiny purple man prancing in front of your television.

But you soldier on. You try to live a normal life, even though you discover one morning that Prince’s face has been stamped across all your coffee mugs, and has replaced your face in all your framed photos. The TV shows documentaries about the gig preparations and one night you glance at the screen to find yourself staring balefully at your own pale, put-upon face. The next day you’re told that your living room is off-limits.

You come home from work and all your bedroom furnishings have been relocated to the downstairs loo. A note taped to the loo door says that you’d be really getting into the gig spirit if you entered and exited your new bedroom via the tiny toilet window, as the hall is now reserved for gig-goers. During the night you think Prince visits you, stroking your face and whispering “I only do this because I love you.”

Was it a dream?

At work, the Prince gig is all anyone can talk about. Because you work in comms, you have to write about the gig, but Prince’s branding guidelines are so rigid that ██████ ███ your ███ ████ ██ and you can’t even ██ ████ ██ █ ██ ██ the ███ so you just ███ like a ████ing ██████keyfucker.

Finally you crack. “Fine!” You shout, marching up to Prince. “Give me a fucking ticket to the gig. I’ll come. I’ll dance to Raspberry FUCKING Beret even though it’s the most effete song in the universe. At least that way I’ll get to use my own hall.”

But it’s too late. As anonymous security staff tackle you to the ground for looking Prince in the eye, you learn that one gig ticket is FORTY SQUILLION POUNDS, and anyway they’re all sold out. You are hustled back to the downstairs loo, where you tearfully consider a last-minute city break, but then Stephen Fry comes on the TV and implores you not to holiday abroad, and you realise that it’s futile.

There’s nothing you can do.

Nothing except sit quietly in the toilet while strangers run around your house doing things you don’t enjoy, and wait for it all to be over.

THAT’S what being a Londoner with no interest in sports is like in the run-up to the Olympics and THAT’S why I HAT it.
- Robyn Wilder

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 Pom-Bears and a stack of Magic Faraway Tree books for an afternoon (yes it was sunny, yes my mother cracked a window, it was the 80s, don’t you dare judge her), and I believe I shared this particular book-based fantasy with you on a previous LUV & HAT:

Initially, of course, I was mistrustful of Kindles. I mean, they look like knock-off Soviet iPads from the year 2525 and I’m still not completely convinced that my Kindle won’t start narrating everything in a loud Stephen Hawking voice if I ever read any erotica. But the fact is that – because Kindle screens aren’t backlit and they have electronic paper displays – reading a Kindle is just like reading a book. Only BETTER. Because:

• You can prop a Kindle up against something and read with your hands free – handy for eating, wanking, or some types of murder.
• If you’re reading a book you don’t like but it reminds you of a book you do like, you can be reading that book instead within seconds, and still have change from a fiver.
• Kindles weigh approximately the same as two bags of crisps, so you probably won’t break your nose on one.
• However they are sturdy enough to break someone else’s nose, if they - say read over your shoulder on a train and you have PMS.

When Kindles first came out I’d just spent a heady summer trying to download ebooks (remember them?) onto my PDA (remember them?) and the only ebooks available were copyright-free versions of Moby Dick, Star Trek: Voyager novelisations and THAT was IT. And Cory Doctorow novels. But now you can get most books in Kindle format (including but not limited to Star Trek: Voyager novelisations), and if they’re not available you can use your Kindle to tell the author to get with the fucking programme. That’s right, Kindles enable trolling.

But the best thing – the very best thing – about Kindles is this:

Yep, Star Trek predicted them. Welcome to the future!
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - Right, look, I’m all for Kindles in principle. This is mainly because when I go on a train, it’s harder to tell that everyone’s reading 50 Shades of Grey.

For some reason, seeing a carriage full of sour-faced old harridans visibly reading 50 Shades of Grey makes me want to kick their stupid books out of their idiot hands and scream “Fifty SHITS of FUCK OFF, more like” right into their faces. But if they’re all reading Kindles, I have no way to tell what they’re reading. They’re still all obviously reading 50 Shades of Grey, the dirty sods, but at least now I can convince myself that they’re actually reading, I dunno, Bravo Two Zero or whatever instead. It’s better this way.

So I’m all for Kindles in theory. That’s why I bought one. And buying a Kindle is actually quite exciting. It’s like buying your first computer, or your first iPod. You buy a Kindle knowing that it’ll change your life. So when my Kindle was delivered, I spent an entire evening gleefully unwrapping it like a kid at Christmas, all bright-eyed and full of wonder. I charged it. I named it - Studle (don’t worry, you couldn’t possibly hate me any more than I hate myself for this) - and made sure that everything was just right. I even put it into a special little case. And then, breathlessly, I logged into Amazon for the first time. That’s when it hit me.

It’s a book.

It’s just a fucking book.

You’re not buying anything special. You’re just buying something to read books on. Sure, you get to read them on something that Tomorrow’s World would have jizzed itself blind over, but they’re still just the same books that you wouldn’t normally bother buying in paper form because you’re too busy watching the telly or fucking around on Twitter or seeing how far you can get your index finger up your bum. Browsing Amazon for ebooks is just a horrible reminder of how shit most books are. Who even uses Amazon to buy books, anyway? The two last things I bought from Amazon were a bath plug and a bag of compost. Where’s the Kindle for bags of compost, huh? HUH?

So, no, I don’t hate Kindles because they’re killing publishing or local book shops. I don’t hate them because I don’t like reading from a screen - I spend all day reading things on screens, and I have the cold, dead, yellowing eyes of a man triple my age to prove it. I hate Kindles because they’re just fucking books. And, you know, most books are shit.
- Stuart Heritage

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 essentially resigning yourself to more back-breaking exertion than you could have ever suffered at work. I’ll start poring over the Lonely Planet guides weeks in advance, deciding exactly what I want to do and where I want to eat, before grouping everything into zones and criss-crossing elaborately zigzagged itinerary paths across a fold-out map. Worst of all, I’ll expect us to explore the city on foot. If you don’t come back from holiday with your feet so bruised and veiny that they barely fit into your shoes any more, then you haven’t been on holiday. That’s the rule I like to live by.

And, naturally, I like to sightsee. Oh, don’t look at me like that. You like to sightsee too. It’s just that I like to sightsee things that are actually worth looking at. If I go to Paris I’ll visit the Eiffel Tower. If I go to China I’ll visit the Great Wall. If I go to Belgium I’ll visit the little statue of the boy having a piss. Admittedly I’ll quickly wonder what all the fuss is about and then eat 15 waffles and then die from an exploded heart, but at least I’ll do it.

That’s not your thing, though, is it? That’s a bit too obvious for you. “Ugh” you think as you traipse around India. “I’m not going to see the Taj Mahal. Visiting perhaps the most heartbreaking manifestation of lost love in the history of modern humanity is so touristy. I want to see the authentic India.” And, when you come back and someone asks if you saw the Taj Mahal, you can glower down your nose at them and snort “Phuh! No! I don’t follow crowds, man. I set my own path. But I did see three cows and then contract dysentery, so thanks for asking.”

But guess what? You’re still a tourist. As you’re strolling around these backstreets and villages, trying to soak up the true atmosphere of wherever you are, you still stick out like a sore thumb. It doesn’t matter how much street food you eat, or how many items of national clothing you wear, or how many grammatically incorrect local phrases you hopelessly maul. The locals will still see you with your stupid shorts and your patronising face and your sunglasses that cost more than their house, and they’ll think you’re a cunt. You’ll go home and simper “They had nothing, but they looked so happy”, but they’ll go home and say “Today I saw a cunt. I hope he dies soon”. And they’ll win.

So embrace your inner tourist. See as many sights as you can. Buy the baseball caps and the snowglobes. Those fat Americans, the ones you sneer at as they waddle around in Hawaiian shirts and bumbags, loudly asking each other where the nearest Burger King is, they’re your brethren. Don’t bother thinking otherwise. Give into it. Join them. Join them. Join them.
- Stuart Heritage

HAT - No thanks. I don’t want to go sightseeing today. Look, I’m tired - that’s why I came on holiday in the first place. Plus, I’ve been to places. I’ve seen sights. Ain’t no big thing. And, after over twenty years of going up to icons like the Mona Lisa (really small) and the leaning tower of Pisa (bit wonky) JUST TO CONFIRM WITH MY OWN EYES THAT THEY EXIST, then going home again, I’ve decided that I am over sightseeing.

Because what’s the point? What’s the actual point of sightseeing, given that we have Google Streetview now? I could probably download an HD desktop wallpaper of Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer that’s more immediate and breathtaking than actually looking at it from the ground. For a start, it’s 130 feet tall and I’m not, so the only part of Christ the Redeemer I’ve ever had a really good look at is the plinth it stands on. And I’m not saying it’s not a good solid plinth, I’m just saying that - plinth alone - it wasn’t worth the price of the plane ticket to Brazil.

And, you know what? I’d rather study some historic monument or area of outstanding natural beauty alone, on my sofa, in my sweatpants, with Wotsits dust down my chin. Because then I can look at it for as long as I want, in as much detail as I want, while gleaning background information from Wikipedia and - crucially - without being elbowed in the throat by whooping Global Hypercolor-sporting Italian chauvinists.

And it means I don’t have to suffer the sightseeing anticlimax.  

You know what I mean - that moment when you’ve paid the ridiculous fee, climbed the rocky whatever and shouldered your way past the crushing throng of tourists, and suddenly it’s you and the thing you drove, flew, haggled in pidgin English and got fucking diarrhoea to see.

And it’s shit.

I mean, it’s just a thing. Be it a tower or sculpture or gigantic hole in the ground, it’s just a thing that looks like all the photographs you’ve ever seen of it, only smaller and with more bastards in three quarter-length trousers clustered around it.

It’s there, and so are you. You’re just a person, in a place, looking at a thing, and that’s it. There’s no awe and no magic, especially since a) all you can think of is how hot and thirsty you are, and how far up your bumcrack your pants seem to be, and b) you only get to look at it for a tenth of a second before some Australian barges you out of the way so they can Instagram themselves in front of it.  

So, in summary, sightseeing is rubbish and I’m vetoing it from my holiday. I won’t miss it. I have sleeping to do, a Grisham novel to get through, a minibar to empty and toiletries to steal. So please fuck off out of my room with your bumbag and itinerary. It’s 6am for god’s sake.  

- Robyn Wilder

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 around for your entire lifespan, which is why no one with an IQ above 6 ever watches Hollyoaks.

But 3D is better than it used to be.  

Time was you’d get treated to a 3D movie at Disneyworld when you were nine and, it didn’t matter how many rides you’d been on, how many Mister Frosties you’d tipped down your throat, or how cool you felt in your cyan and orange cardboard 3D glasses, the resulting effect would always be like squinting at a Mickey Mouse cartoon through a swimmy pint of urine.

But now? 3D is sort of awesome.

First off, the glasses are better. Unlike the polarised 3D glasses of our childhood, they’re not made of cardboard, and they come in two styles: fake Ray-Ban and Wraparound Terminator. Even Stuart Heritage looks good in them:

Plus the 3D effect is far more convincing. New 3D actually gives films the illusion of depth, and objects actually look as though they’re zooming realistically out of the screen towards you. Obviously, with technology like this comes great responsibility. You should use 3D only for movies with dinosaurs, robots, aliens or lots of vigorous sex in, not for quirky French films where people shrug and smoke cigarettes and nothing happens. More importantly, you shouldn’t cast, say, Gerard Depardieu or Christina Hendricks in a 3D movie unless you want your audience to spend the entire film cowering and/or drooling on the floor.

But Thor in 3D? Brilliant. Each time he threw Mjollnir into the air, the audience ducked. When Valhalla loomed gaudily into the clouds, the audience gasped.  

And then there was Avatar - glorious, day-glo Avatar - which strapped you in the driving seat of one of those futuristic James Cameron JCBs and threw you into a completely immersive alien world. It was breathtaking. When Sam Worthington’s dimwit jarhead flew a dragon, you piloted it as it soared and spun among the clouds. When he ran through the forest, you felt the lichen beneath your feet light up. 3D Avatar was stupefyingly good. Which is lucky, because 2D Avatar was basically just about some shit blue Ewoks.

But the best thing about 3D? It keeps audiences quiet. No one has time to text their friends or shout WANKAH at you when a T-Rex is poking out of the screen at them. No one rustles through a supersized bag of Dorito’s for the entire film - no one can - because they’re nauseous with motion sickness. And there are no annoying clutches of teenagers clustered at the exits because they’re all at Boots buying paracetamol for their 3D headaches.

So, 3D. It makes shit films better and makes shit audiences more bearable. So, LUV. Just about.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - Going to the cinema is a soul-destroying experience at the best of times. That’s not an exaggeration. It’s genuinely up there with contracting polio and informing a child that their pet has died.

Everything about cinemas seems precision-designed to boot the joy out of you. The grubby foyer. The overpriced sweets. The fizzing buckets of liquid diabetes. The grotty arcade that consists of Time Crisis 2, a knackered air hockey table and a sobbing child. The sticky floor. The slashed seats. The other people who sit there shouting and licking each other and slapping at their phones with their big oaf hands at the same time. The 40 minutes of trailers. The fact that, despite all of this, the cinema STILL insists on playing that annoying ‘HEY! Aren’t you glad you’ve paid money to watch this in a CINEMA and not from that brilliant armchair you love so much?’ advert at the exact moment that deep vein thrombosis starts to kick in.

But 3D? That thumps everything into a different league of hateful shittery. That’s unless, you know, you actively enjoy paying a couple of quid extra to sit in a dark room and watch a murky swamp of a film half-heartedly jut out at you for a couple of hours while you’re forced to wear a pair of glasses that cripple your ears and bruise your nose and give you a headache and - since they’ve already been worn by many strangers before you - probably carry everything from psoriasis to the norovirus. And if that’s the case, go crazy. I mean, I fully hate you, but go crazy anyway.

Because in truth, no good has ever come from 3D. Most of the recent crop of 3D movies have been hastily converted from 2D during the editing process as part of the dying cash-grab of the film industry, which is why anyone who saw Clash Of The Titans will have wondered why Liam Neeson’s head kept appearing to be either three feet behind or three feet ahead of his body.

“But what about Avatar?” you’re thinking. “That was in 3D, and that was brilliant”. The simple response to that is “No it wasn’t, you monstrous dolt”. It was a stupid film, and the 3D didn’t add anything to it, and you’re an idiot for liking it, and I’d imagine that everyone in your family is secretly quite disappointed with the way you’ve turned out.

Look, 3D does have a place. It’s just that that place is real life, not a dimly-lit cash-in version of Pirates Of The Caribbean 4. So if you really love 3D that much, let’s make a deal. You come to my house and give me £15, and in return I’ll jab a fork into one of your eyes. There, you can’t get more 3D than that.
- Stuart Heritage

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 phobe the most are my own. Because I have the partially collapsed, war-torn feet of an ex-dancer run to fat – part barnacle, part monkey paw and part upsettingly mutated Ripley clone in Alien Resurrection.

In fact, they’re not strictly human feet so much as rebellious HOOVES, and taming them (and I must, for Havaiana season is upon us) involves tricking my feet into the bathroom by pretending that I’m going shopping for Converse, then launching a three-pronged ambush with a pumice stone, a foot file and an industrial vat of that vile Body Shop peppermint foot cream* stuff until their spirit is broken.

But all that’s behind me now that I have a PED EGG. I no longer have to balance miserably on the edge of my bath, set my jaw like a stoic lumberjack and saw away at my stumps with sandpaper for a day and a half. With a PED EGG, I buff my way to public-friendly feet in minutes. It’s amazing. It’s so easy. For someone like me, whose rebellious hooves are now gently dozing Andrex puppies, it’s life changing.

And of course, it’s horribly, horribly disgusting.

I mean, you’re cheese-grating your feet and collecting the shavings like some terrible milky sociopath. But you empty that shit and wash it afterwards, because using a PED EGG is one of those disgusting things – like smear tests, like being nice to your mum’s creepy younger male friend who wears a fucking SHARK TOOTH PENDANT - that you get over and just deal with. Because you’re an adult.

Not convinced? Here are five everyday things that are more disgusting than using a PED EGG:

1. Sleeping on dust mite-infested sheets
2. Having poo spores on our toothbrushes
3. Eating beetles in pretty much all red-coloured food
4. Washing our faces with sheep secretions
5. Proctology.

So, bon appetit and sweet dreams! What was my point again? Oh yeah. PED EGG! Get over it, have nice feet. LUV.

* I’m such a podophobe that typing the words “foot cream” triggered my gag reflex.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - Life is basically one horrible letdown after another. We discovered this as children when - after watching the adverts promising that Teddy Ruxpin would be our charismatic new best friend - we realised that he was actually just a hairy cassette player that looked like Michael J Fox if Teen Wolf was a film about a rapist toddler’s battle against progressive cerebrovascular degeneration.

We discovered it again when - after believing that it could revolutionise the world of commerce - we realised that Groupon was actually just a sick experiment to see how many harrowingly inept daily emails about laser hair removal a person will voluntarily read before they die of sadness.

Yet still we believe. Thus, the Ped Egg. The Ped Egg looked like a miracle invention - a beautifully effective way to banish hard skin from your feet forever. Not only would the Ped Egg stop my feet from looking like leathery, yellowing planks of stinking driftwood, but it would help them become as smooth as a silken bag of eels. By using the Ped Egg a few times, I was sure that I’d end up with such aristocratic and velvety feet that I could cause them irreparable damage just by looking at them quite hard.

Better yet, all the dead skin removed by the Ped Egg’s 135 precision micro-files get stored up in a little container. Imagine that! A little container full of dead foot skin! What a wheeze that would be! Maybe I could convince people that it was parmesan, or sea monkey eggs, or makeshift confetti for last-minute weddings. That little container of dead foot skin would be my fortune! The Ped Egg was going to change my life!

And then I used one.

And then I fucking used one.

Turns out that Ped Eggs are fucking HORRIFIC.

First, using one means you have to look at your feet, which is no fun. AT ALL. Turns out I’ve got feet that look like baby elephant corpses. They look like Gollum’s nutsack. They look like sad clowns without any makeup on. Looking at my feet is a genuinely unpleasant experience.

Then you actually have to use the fucker. You’re basically zesting a lemon here, if lemons were big and flat and sweaty and covered in scar tissue and stank like rancid milk. And you can never get all the hard skin off your feet with a Ped Egg. You end up with a foot that’s part smooth, part hard, and part worn down all the way to the bone.

And worst of all, it turns out that a container full of dead foot skin stops being funny the second it becomes a reality. Because it’s not skin. It’s dust. It’s manky beige dust. It looks a bit like anthrax, only it’s worse than anthrax because it’s MADE OF FEET. Looking at a container of your own foot dust is one of the most upsetting things that a human being can do. You want to see what Ped Egg foot dust looks like, don’t you? Don’t lie. I know that you do. Well, fine. Here it is.

Oh, you’re welcome.
- Stuart Heritage

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 pause), I would die.

You know, eventually.

You see, I am sickly. Not stab-me-with-insulin-or-I’ll-die sickly (yet) – I’m more can-we-sit-in-the-shade-please-I’m-getting-a-headache sickly which is in many ways worse than having a proper, valid illness like epilepsy or death.

Because people on trains won’t give up their seat for someone with a migraine the way they would for someone who was pregnant. And THAT’S NOT EVEN TECHNICALLY AN ILLNESS. No emergency doctor would fast-track a really bad case of weekend hayfever, even if you’d been at a great boozy picnic all day but were totally sobering up now, and it was seriously harshing your buzz.

And you can’t call into work sick in the morning because you ate one spice the night before and now have to live in the bathroom for the rest of your life. Apparently.

But that’s okay. Because, if you’re like me, there are MEDICINES which take the edge off and basically stop you malfunctioning in lots of tiny irritating ways every day. And if that means I have to lug round a bunch of pills with me all the time and occasionally have interesting conversations with policemen and airport security, you can bet your sweet bippy I’ll do it.

Unlike Christian Scientists or people like a) my mother, who hangs a dreamcatcher above her bed and uses the word “energies” too often, or b) Stuart Heritage, who tries to purge his body of viruses by drumming his fists on his chest and screaming, I am FOR MEDICINE.

Medicine makes my life slightly less problematic. ALSO without medicine we, as a species, would all be dead in ditches by the time we were 30. But MAINLY it means that I, Robyn Wilder, can eat a curry once in a while and don’t always get wheezy when climbing a hill or stopping to smell the roses, and you can’t put a price on that. At least I can’t, because I’m not a pharmacist.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - Now let’s all calm down. Hate is a strong word. I don’t hate medicine. In fact, I think that some medicine - like the medicine that keeps children alive and the medicine that stops me shitting and puking all over the inside of people’s houses every time I go to a hot country - are actually quite useful. So, no, I don’t hate medicine.

I’m just suspicious of it.

First, look, I’m a man. I can cope with illness. The last thing I want to be is one of those people who flounces off to Boots the second a molecule of pollen gets within twelve yards of their face. Those people are WEAK. I am not weak. I am a MAN. I will accept ANY FORM OF MINOR ILLNESS and then KILL IT WITH MY MIND. Yes, I know that this headache would probably go away in a couple of minutes if I just took a paracetamol, but paracetamol is for BABIES AND GIRLS. I am neither of those things. I am a MAN. I will ENDURE. More than that, I will CARRY ON AS NORMAL during my headache. In fact, I will DRIVE A TRAIN and SOLVE CRIMES and KARATE-CHOP THROUGH CONCRETE during my headache. Taking a paracetamol is the easy way out. It’s for WEAKLINGS AND YELLOW-BELLIES. I WILL NOT BOW TO PARACETAMOL.

And antibiotics are worse. People take antibiotics for everything. But illnesses know what you’re doing. Illnesses have wised up to antibiotics. More and more illnesses are becoming resistant to antibiotics. They’re mutating into SUPER-DISEASES that will KILL US ALL, just because you took too many antibiotics when you didn’t need to, you GREEDY FOOL. It’s likely that humanity will be WIPED OUT by an army of 20-FOOT SINUSITUS BACTERIAS with MACHINE GUNS AND LASER-EYES and it’s ALL YOUR FAULT. This is why I will NEVER TAKE ANTIBIOTICS. Because antibiotics are for CRYBABIES AND SHIRKERS.

But most of all, I’m scared of getting addicted to medicine. It’s easily done. First you take something to help you sleep. Then you forget how you ever managed to sleep normally. Before you know it you’re taking several sleeping pills every night. And then you get fat, and you start to look sluggish, and you keep slurring all your words. You’ve turned into MATTHEW PERRY FROM FRIENDS. Well, NOT ME BUDDY. I am a MAN. I will NEVER TURN INTO MATTHEW PERRY FROM FRIENDS, because I will NEVER TAKE MEDICINE for ANYTHING. Send me a minor illness and I will KILL IT WITH MY MIND. I am the ANTI-PERRY. I will never be addicted to ANYTHING. Not even PARACETAMOL or SUNTAN LOTION or those MULTIVITAMIN TABLETS that come IN THE SHAPE OF DINOSAURS. I AM A MAN! I HAVE NO NEED FOR MEDICINE! I AM THE ANTI-PERRY!

Unless, you know, I’ve got quite a bad headache. I’m not mental.
- Stuart Heritage

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 wearing glasses as an adult, where you can offset them with a tiny hat and an asymmetrical haircut and a 10p Oxfam cardigan in the desperate hope that you’ll be mistaken for an obnoxious Shoreditch fuckpipe. No, when you’re a child your glasses are your worst enemy.

They’re the things that get you called things like ‘Double Glazing’ and ‘Milky Bar Kid’. They’re the things that break when you play football, that steam up when you walk into a warm room in winter, that reduce swimming to a process of blindly flailing around inside a giant wet smudge. And then you get older, and glasses become the things that get caked with foundation on the rare occasion that you’re actually allowed to kiss a girl. And people constantly ask if they can try them on. But they don’t ask toothless people if they can try on their dentures, do they? Oh no. It’s discrimination, plain and simple.

But contact lenses? Contact lenses set you free. True, you might not think that the first time you try them on, after spending half an hour gingerly jabbing at your eyeball until it turns into a livid red jelly of tears and nerve endings, but they do. Slide in a pair of contact lenses and the world suddenly transforms. Strangers start noticing you. Watching a 3D movie no longer involves basically stacking things onto the end of your nose. Best of all, people stop immediately assuming that short-sightedness is your biggest flaw - they’ll have to take time to discover that it’s actually your horrible breath or innate mistrust of women, just like they have to do with normal people.

It doesn’t stop there. You can head footballs without worrying that you’ll have to spend the next fortnight picking shards of metal and glass out of your face. You can wear actual sunglasses, and not those enormous sunglasses that fit over your normal glasses and make you look like a cross between the Terminator and a pensioner with exploding cataracts. You can go swimming. OK, technically you can’t go swimming because there’s a good chance that you’ll spend the next few days so squinty and red-eyed that most people will automatically think you’re a crack addict but, you know, don’t tell anyone.

Best of all, wearing contact lenses is basically a license to regularly spend several hours at a time on your hands and knees, combing through carpets with your fingers and muttering “Oh for fuck’s sake, it must be around here somewhere.” And how many people with 20/20 vision get to do that, huh? None of them. That’s why contact lenses - and the people who wear them - wonderful.
- Stuart Heritage

HAT - Unlike Stuart Heritage, I haven’t been blind since birth – my eyesight started deteriorating in my twenties. Apparently this is quite common, so I think people should warn you about this shit, just the way they should warn you that one morning you may peel back your duvet to find - not a stomach exactly - but a sort of fleshy bunched-up bumbag with a long hair sticking out of it; and that, if you’re female and manage get to 27 without kerflumping a series of sprogs out of your vajayay, anyone older than you is legally obliged to say “tick tick tick” whenever they see you.

Having your eyesight suddenly fail you is very unsettling. One minute you’re all THAT HADRON’S OUT OF PLACE MUM, I CAN SEE IT A MILE OFF LOL and the next you’re blundering through Sainsbury’s wondering how long they’ve had a ‘Breasts’ aisle and why they’ve made all the checkouts smudge together. At which point you’ll have three choices:

1. LASER EYE SURGERY – paying a Bond villain to clamp your eyes open and fire up a WMD while you wonder who the hell is barbecueing pork around here because something smells delicious.
   
   
2. GLASSES – which make you look like your own grandmother or a member of the Gestapo.
   
   
3. CONTACT LENSES.

Obviously you choose contact lenses, because they snap the fuzzy, indistinct world into whining, crystal HD clarity with lines and edges and depth, give you your peripheral vision back and – unless someone examines you very closely – you don’t look like a massive specker. 

Unfortunately, contact lenses are bastards, which is why I hate them.  

PUTTING THEM IN
They’re so FUCKING FIDDLY. You have to balance a lens on your fingertip, pinion your eyelashes open, then sort of lob the lens hopefully at your eyeball, praying that it doesn’t a) have grit in it, otherwise you’ll have to walk around with a sore eye all day, involuntarily winking at probably some very unattractive people, and b) fall on the floor – because if it does, you’re fucked. 

I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever TRIED to find a tiny transparent nothing on a tiled surface when your eyesight is so bad that you genuinely can’t distinguish between a departing bus and a fat woman in a red coat, but it is JOLLY HARD. Never mind the fact that your contact lens might not even be lost - it might be, as I discovered three days after losing one, folded up behind your eyeball.  

TAKING THEM OUT
Having to remove your contacts at night is a pain in the arse. It means that, if you bring a young man home and slip into the bathroom before bed, he’ll expect to see you emerge resplendent in four-inch spike heels and an Agent Provocateur basque. So imagine his confusion when you plod out in your glasses and he doesn’t know whether you’re going to wipe his face with a spitty tissue or reenact several key scenes from ‘Allo ‘Allo at him.

Which is why contact lenses - even though I’m wearing some right fucking now - can SUCK IT.
- Robyn Wilder

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 CHICKENS HAVE EVER SEEN SUNLIGHT AND MOST OF THEM DON’T EVEN HAVE BEAKS’. That’s fine. That’s the ethical trade-off you have to make in order to buy a lasagne-flavoured sandwich at 11pm on a Tuesday night.

But checkout assistants? They were gold-plated, stone-cold proof that supermarkets absolutely fucking hated you. Checkout assistants were trained to greet you at the till with a surly “Spose you want BAGS” that suggested you were entirely responsible for all the dead polar bears in history. If that wasn’t enough, they’d then judge you for everything you’d bought.

Oh, the judging. Buy a readymeal and you’d see them thinking “Single are we? I can’t say I’m surprised, not with that haircut.” Buy a bottle of wine and they’d think “ALCOHOL? But it’s TWO-THIRTY IN THE AFTERNOON, you MONSTER.” And, let’s be honest, anyone who says that they ever bought condoms without being directly vomited on is either particularly good at vomit-dodging or a liar.

Luckily, technology has killed the checkout assistant, just like it killed other useless professions like tube drivers and journalists. Now, instead of having to go through all the poxy rigmarole of human interaction, there’s a machine that can handle the transaction all by itself. It is the self-service checkout, and it is wonderful.

Forget pleading for a bag, because the self-service checkout practically flings them at you. “Take a bag”, it chimes. “Take 12. Fuck the polar bears. I don’t give a shit. I’m a robot”.

And there’s no judging with a self-service checkout. It’s a machine. It can’t judge you. You can buy whatever you like - condoms, Anusol, guidebooks called How To Murder Your Bitch Of A Wife - and the machine just lets them pass without so much as blinking. I mean, obviously all the wires from the machine lead directly to the supermarket HQ, where a fat man in a top hat sees what you’ve bought and barks “CRANBERRY JUICE? I bet your vagina’s ALL FUCKED UP!”, but it’s fine. He can’t look you in the eye while he does it. It’s fine.

So congratulations to you, self-service checkout manufacturers, for making the world a better place. Yes, admittedly you’ve probably just invented the earliest stage of Skynet, but at least now I can buy doughnuts without worrying that the woman on the till thinks I’m a fat wanker. It’s totally worth it.
- Stuart Heritage

HAT - It’s 2012, you know. Twenty-twelve. The sort of date that should flash across your screen in a silvery font and go KAPOW. It’s the future, and as a child of the future I should rejoice in the self-service checkout.

But I don’t.

In fact I’d rather malinger in a 100-person supermarket cashier queue than follow the employee trying to usher me over to the self-service machine. Because I know his game. He’s not really asking me to expedite my twelve Wispa Golds and one low-fat sandwich, is he? What he’s really asking is “Would you like to FAIL today?”

Because everyone fails at the self-service checkout - you, me, Feliks Zemdegs the 2011 Rubik’s Cube record holder, everybody. It doesn’t matter how urbane or technologically adept we are. I’ll bet even the inventor of the self-service checkout starts speed-beeping his groceries through with blithe confidence but ends the process in panicky tears, desperately swiping a lemon across the barcode reader before ED209 stomps out to gun him down if he can’t find his Nectar card in 20 seconds.

The bastard machine dooms me from the outset. As soon as I rock up it’ll shout “START SCANNING YOUR ITEMS NOW” before I can put down my bag. Then it’ll bark diktats as I fling my groceries across the FUCKING SUDDENLY DEAFBLIND barcode scanner while trying to liberate a carrier bag with my teeth.

Then I’ll come across an item - like the aforementioned lemon - which doesn’t have a bar code, so I’ll have to key it in manually. This involves selecting “Menu” on the screen, then clicking “Product” then “Plantae” then “Magnoliophyta” then “Magnoliopsida” then “Rosidae” then “Sapindales” then “Rutaceae” then “Aurantioideae” then “Citreae” then “Citrus” then finally “Lemon”.

At this point the self-service checkout will decide that lemons don’t in fact exist, and also that there is something unexpected in the bagging area. Often this is nothing, or air, or the previous shopper’s aura. Regardless, the self-service checkout will sulk until I call for assistance.

But, as I said, everyone fails at the self-checkout. Even the terminally bored girl employed to fix the self-checkout. She’ll resignedly turn a key in a thing and press another thing, then jab ineffectually at the screen as the self-service checkout machine commands her to “ENTER your pi- PLEASE ask for assista- RESCAN the ite- PLEASE take your shoppi-”, and the only silver lining to the whole horrid affair is that it allows me to tiptoe to the exit with not-technically-my shopping.

Anyone need any lemons?
- Robyn Wilder

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 famously celebrated the cinematic release of the first** Star Wars movie, and it’s not the Paper Jubilee, which happened when the Queen was a bit friskier, and it was just an excuse to get wasted on poppers and snog that Greek fella by the bins.

We’ve all had Jubilees like that, haven’t we, ladies.

Anyway, this is the Diamond Jubilee, which celebrates the Queen’s 60th year on the throne, and just look how excited she is about it!

Just look at those shiny, shiny eyes. Those are the eyes of someone who’s seen the Duke of Edinburgh clenching on a golden toilet. For sixty years. Those are the eyes of someone who knows they’re going to have to sit through at least twenty minutes of JLS.

Those eyes deserve a party, don’t they?

And what a party. I mean, first the Queen is going to Epsom for a spot of horse racing. That’s Epsom, Surrey! Just imagine. Then she’s going to the Diamond Jubilee River Pageant, where she will lead a flotilla of a thousand boats in a magnificent re-enaction of the film Battleship. The Queen will play Rihanna.

Later, thousands of Jubilee beacons will be lit, culminating in the Queen ritualistically setting fire to Piers Morgan on a spit, and finally there will be the concert at Buckingham Palace, featuring acts that are right up the Queen’s alley, like Jessie J and Ed Sheeran. Cunningly, the Queen has arranged it so that the concert faces away from Buckingham Palace. This is so that the Queen can send a decoy queen to the concert, just like Queen Amidala in the fourth*** Star Wars film. Except, instead of defending her planet from attack, the Queen will be retiring to bed with a bottle of Jim Beam and a swan firmly plugged in each ear.

The next day there’s a carriage procession, where the Queen will doze beneath her hat, nibble on the bacon sandwich she’s stuffed up her sleeve and murmur “man, I so caned it last night” to the Duke of Edinburgh.

Other things the Queen is doing for her Diamond Jubilee:

1. Decreeing that we ALL MUST HAVE LUNCH on Sunday
2. Making bunting THE LAW
3. Giving us an extra day off, but clogging up London and most of the thoroughfares so we can’t travel, and not letting broadcasters put anything interesting on TV, so we are forced to stay home and endure CONVERSATION
4. Inventing Facebook.

On yer, your Maj.

* Whatever they are.
** First movie. Episode IV. Whatever, nerds.
*** Oh my god BITE me.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - In a way, the Diamond Jubilee makes perfect sense. A woman has kept the same job for 60 years. That’s impressive by anyone’s standards. And so what if the Queen’s job basically involves travelling the world and eating swans and trying not to grimace too much when dirty-faced provincial children hand her tatty flowers and unconvincingly feigning grief whenever a relative dies? Doing that for 60 years is an achievement. It should be marked.

But here’s the thing: I bet the Queen hates the Diamond Jubilee. I bet she properly bloody hates it. I bet it fucks around with her day something rotten. All she wants to do is sit at home watching the Liz Earle Colour Cosmetics hour on QVC, but no. She has to get on a poxy boat and spend four hours waving at idiots. She has to pretend that she’s never seen a bloody flypast before. And, worst of all, she’s got to host a fucking concert in her back garden.

Last time was bad enough. For her Golden Jubilee, the Queen had to put up with Paul McCartney singing a thirteen-hour-long version of Hey Jude and that hairy twonk from Queen basically just having a wank on her roof. But this year will be worse. Because this year she has to put up with Gary Fucking Barlow as well.

Imagine it. You’re trying to have a nice day and then Gary Fucking Barlow - a man who wants a knighthood so badly that it’s all he can do not to shit himself at the merest thought of it - sidles up.

“Ooh, that’s a nice blouse your majesty,” he’ll say. Or “Do you like this special song I wrote for you, ma’am?”. Or “Mhhng-mmmh-nunnng-mhfhmm?” as he tries to fit his entire tongue all the way up your fucking bumhole. It’d be awful. Gary Fucking Barlow will ruin the Jubilee for the Queen.

But I don’t just hate the Jubilee because of Gary Barlow. I hate it because of all the opportunistic shit that’s suddenly popped up everywhere. You can’t buy a plate that hasn’t got a Union Jack on it. You can’t buy a cushion that hasn’t got a Union Jack on it. You can’t go into a shopping centre any more without feeling like you’ve accidentally set foot inside a terrifyingly sterile BNP rally.

But the worst thing about the Diamond Jubilee - the very worst thing about anything - is this: the Sainsbury’s Mr & Mrs Jubilee gingerbread men. Just look at it:



For the rest of my life, this is what the Diamond Jubilee will represent: a pair of vast, orange, bald, no-neck weirdos staring down at me with their unblinking boggly eyes - her with a tiny dress Sellotaped to the front of her naked body and him in a pair of nightmarish transparent trousers with a colossal wad of jizz splashed across his blood-coloured tunic. I won’t ever get any more sleep for the rest of my life thanks to Mr & Mrs Jubilee. Thanks a fucking lot, the Queen. You idiot.
- Stuart Heritage

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 rubbish and just dump a truckload of starving, premenstrual, unsupervised women into a branch of Hotel Chocolat, shout “THERE ARE NO RULES” through a megaphone, lock the doors and drive away.

And it’d make a fortune.

Because just imagine having the run of a Hotel Chocolat shop. Imagine gorging on – and then building a fort out of - giant slabs of marbled dark and white chocolate. Imagine rolling around in piles of chocolate-enrobed maraschino cherries and showering yourself with handfuls of salted caramel puddles. It’d be wonderful. It’d be a mess. It’d be a glutton’s paradise.

Hotel Chocolat is the closest thing that we have to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

I mean, what do you get the minute you set foot in any Hotel Chocolat anywhere in the world? That’s right, FREE CHOCOLATE. Someone will sidle up to you with a tray of fancy chocolates and offer you one, sadly – as though you’d be doing them a MASSIVE FAVOUR by taking one off their hands and/or you have a terminal disease.

And Hotel Chocolat shops are always so lovely and boutiquey. But not like a beauty boutique where you’re instantly intimidated by the price and packaging, or like Pretty Woman-style Rodeo Drive clothes shops where Julia Roberts tries to buy a dress but the snotty assistants are all I’M SORRY MISS I DON’T BELIEVE WE HAVE ANY DRESSES THAT EVEN FIT YOUR VAGINA. Hotel Chocolat is that rare thing, an INCLUSIVE boutique, and there’s nothing to be intimidated by because, well, it’s chocolate. It might be chilli chocolate, or balls of chocolate that have been dyed a mottled pink and look uncomfortably like human testicles, but it’s still chocolate, it’s delicious, and everyone’s pleased as punch about the whole idea.

Two more brilliant things about Hotel Chocolat:

1. There is actually A HOTEL CHOCOLAT. It’s a luxury spa hotel in St Lucia with an infinity pool, chocolate-themed restaurant and stuff like “cocoa pedicure” on the spa menu.

2. Hotel Chocolat is branching out from chocolate. It does chocolate balsamic vinegar and chocolate olive oil now. It does chocolate mustard. Next: chocolate WD-40, chocolate dildoes and chocolate tampons. What? Too far?

- Robyn Wilder

HAT - Why does Hotel Chocolat employ people to swan around its branches with trays of complimentary chocolate? It needn’t bother. People don’t go to Hotel Chocolat to sample its marzipan ingots, you know. There is one reason, and one reason alone, why anyone has ever been to a branch of Hotel Chocolat.

It’s because they’re shit at presents.

We’ve all been there. It’s your birthday. A friend hands you a gift. You unwrap it in a flurry of breathless excitement only to discover that - oh - it’s a Hotel Chocolat slab. Silently, you make a solemn vow to gouge them out of your life them at the earliest possible opportunity.

Because a Hotel Chocolat slab isn’t just a Hotel Chocolat slab, is it? It’s a sign that your friend didn’t know what else to get you. It means they either don’t know you very well, or they just couldn’t be arsed to think. A decade ago, you’d have got a basket of fruit-scented Body Shop soap, but now it’s a Hotel Chocolate slab. Well fuck them. They don’t deserve you, the shitty gift-giving wazzocks.

You didn’t get this with Thorntons, you know. True, Thorntons chocolate tended to be so stuffed with cream that your heart would splutter and burst after a couple of mouthfuls, but at least they’d write someone’s name on an Easter egg with icing if you asked them nicely enough. It was harder to convince them to ice a cock and balls on anything, admittedly, but at least they put a bit of fucking effort in.

And then there’s that fucking name to deal with. I live in South London. How the tits am I supposed to pronounce Hotel Chocolat? My instinct is to call it ‘Hotel Chocolate’, with an E on the end, but that sounds too deliberately artless. The alternative is to go full-on French with it, cocking an eyebrow and murmuring ‘Oh-teyl Shhocolatte’ in the way that the founders probably intended.

But you know who does that? You know who breaks their normal English accent to pronounce foreign words in a foreign accent? Cunts, that’s who. Everyone you’ve ever hated, that’s who. And that’s why I’ve only ever been able to self-consciously mumble ‘Hotel Chok-o-lat’ in the most noncommittal way possible whenever I’ve referred to it. Why couldn’t they have just called themselves HOTEL CHOCOLATE or CHOCOSHACK or HOUSE OF QUITE POSH ROLOS?

Finally - and I feel that I should address this directly to Hotel Chocolat itself - YOU ONLY SELL CHOCOLATE, YOU BELLENDS. You don’t sell rubies or jetskis or unicorns. It’s just chocolate. Stop being such ponces about it. Stop naming your boxes The Signature Collection. Start calling them Just Some Fucking Chocolate In A Box That I’ll Give To Someone I Don’t Really Give A Shit About or something. Nobody would mind. In fact, they’d probably prefer it.

And that is why I hate Hotel Chocolat. That said, if my dad is reading this, he should probably ignore the third and fourth paragraph. Father’s Day is coming up and he’s really difficult to buy for.
- Stuart Heritage