LUV & HAT

NOSTALGIA

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 10:03:37 +0000

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 watching Mock the Week on his iPad. He was wearing earphones, which meant he couldn’t hear that he was a) giggling girlishly and repeating “oh Frankie Boyle, Frankie Boyle.” or b) producing the wettest, most rattling, snot-filled sniffs I have ever had the misfortune to listen to in close proximity. For about an hour.

This couldn’t have happened in the past. Five years ago we wouldn’t have had the technology. Ten years ago people would have habitually carried hankies, and forcibly offered the man one. TWENTY years ago, he would have been burned as a witch.

THE PAST IS BRILLIANT.

Look, I grew up in the 1980s. I had a hot-pink onesie, day-glo socks, a giant candy-striped hula hoop that, for reasons beyond my comprehension, was scented with peppermint. I also had a BMX, a pair of ACE red suede rollerboots, AND A FUCKING PONY. Of course I’m going to reminisce.

It was a wonderful time to be a child. I got to enjoy Transformers the first time round; Battle of the Planets and the fuzzy-felt Moomins the second time round; AND I had plenty of opportunities to learn to deal with casual and inaccurate racism!

The 1980s made me the adult I am now. I thank them for it, and I often think back nostalgically to these days.

But that’s sort of all I do. I’m not the sort of dickhead who honks on and on about fucking deelypoppers and space hoppers. My ideal nostalgic conversation would go like this:

THEM: “Hey Robyn, do you remember Button Moon?”
ME: “Why yes I do. Thank you for reminding me. Now please go about your day.”

Because I don’t need to endlessly reference the past in conversation. That’s why we have nostalgia TV specials featuring Stuart Maconie and Gina Yashere.

Wait, do they even make those any more?
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - Remember when all your Facebook updates had to be clunky present-tense third-person eyesores like ‘Stuart is wanting porridge’? Remember how funny that was? You do? Well fuck you then, you dreadful nostalgia arsehole.

I hate nostalgia. I hate comedians who’ve built entire careers by remembering what a Rubik’s Cube was. I hate people who walk around with Lomo cameras even though THERE’S A BETTER FUCKING CAMERA ON YOUR PHONE NOW, YOU MINDLESS DIPSHIT. I’d rather cut my eyes out with a pair of garden scissors than acknowledge that Boy Meets World was ever a thing.

I’m quite fastidious about my hatred of nostalgia. For example, I’ve become convinced that my entire childhood was spent eating brown poison in a hole. If I had my way, I’d build a time machine and use it to destroy every single thing that has ever happened in the history of the planet. Yes, that’d mean undoing millennia of human progress – including the moment that I built the time machine itself, ultimately leaving me stranded in a hellish limbo for all of eternity – but it’d probably be worth it never to hear the fucking Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme tune ever again.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that the only person who hates the past more than me is that A Child Called It guy, and he’s probably nostalgic for the time he got rich from writing that book about his rubbish childhood. On the other hand, I’m never pleased with anything I’ve done. I even hate that last sentence I wrote, because I wrote it 15 seconds ago, back when EVERYTHING was SHIT.

Most of all, I hate Facebook nostalgia. Almost without exception, my old schoolmates have grown up to be angry, illiterate, immigrant-hating Uncle Ricos desperate to return to the mid-1990s, because back then they weren’t trapped in a meaningless job to support their loveless marriage that only happened because of an accidental teenage pregnancy. And this has meant that they now spend their days filling up Facebook with guff like this:

Oh boo hoo, now is so terrible because there are more television channels and you can use telephones outdoors and computers exist (even though they existed back then anyway) and sweets are more expensive (but only if you ignore inflation) and kids don’t sing at schools any more (although they obviously do, you ridiculous backwards-facing shithead).

Look, it’s 2013. Everything exists at the same time now. Want to be nostalgic? Knock yourself out. Gladiators is on Challenge TV most days. It’s terrible. It looks like it was filmed in an abandoned carpet showroom, everyone wears nylon and John Fashanu keeps saying ‘Awooga’. Want to buy some penny sweets? Go into literally any branch of Top Shop and you can remind yourself how inedible they are. Miss Cotton Eye Joe by Rednex? Go and watch it on YouTube. Also, you’re a cunt.

And this will only get worse. Soon, people much younger than you will start reminiscing about how Britain was great back when Take Me Out was on television and none of One Direction had killed themselves in horrible jetski accidents.

So you’ll retreat further back into your own past, sharing Facebook posts that say “If you remember sharing that Facebook post about remembering watching Baywatch, then you remember when Britain was not quite as great as it was back then but still better than it is now” and then you’ll all start wearing nappies and pooing a lot because you’ll don’t like the responsibility of being an adult in the present day. In summary: fuck you.
- Stuart Heritage

CANDY CRUSH

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 09:43:00 +0000

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 accidentally shoot someone in the face and then, instead of running away from all the people who are now shooting at you, you just end up crouching down again and again like an angry idiot trying to fart on an ant.

I don’t have time for shit like that, which is why I’ve fallen so hard for Candy Crush. It’s the simplest game in the world. There are no people, just row after row of brightly-coloured sweets. Arrange them into groups of three and they disappear. Make enough of them disappear and you win the level. That’s it. Remember Bejewelled? It’s just like Bejewelled, except there are sweets instead of jewels so it isn’t really the same at all.

The beauty of Candy Crush is that you make order out of chaos. Everyone likes order, don’t they? A place for everything and everything in its place. Sometimes even the knowledge that there’s an app on my phone containing a load of jumbled-up sweets is too much to bear. When this happens, I have to get my phone out immediately and start playing. It doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing. The sweets are more important. There must be order.

And then sometimes I’ll close my eyes and all I can see are rows and rows of brightly-coloured sweets. All they want is to be slid into place. That’s all they want. So, regardless of what I’m doing – watching TV, operating heavy machinery, listening to a loved one tell me something important – I’ll start frantically arranging the sweets. They can’t be left as they are. They can’t. They’ll hurt me if they are. They’ll crawl into my dreams and dance around, dressed up as evil clowns, laughing and stabbing me in the back of my eyes with their flaming tridents of vomit. I have to put them into place. I HAVE to.

And sometimes, just to play a trick on you, Candy Crush will tell you that you have to stop for 30 minutes to, I dunno, wash or eat or something. Those jokers! They know that every second not spent organising sweets into beautiful little rows is like spending an entire lifetime being slit open and sprayed with vinegar in hell. They know that.

Oh, sure, Candy Crush will let you play again sooner if you tell all your Facebook friends that you’re playing Candy Crush. But you won’t do that because you don’t want everyone to know that your entire existence has devolved to the point where you’re constantly alone and hungry and covered in your own shit, fruitlessly shoving a never-ending stream of pixels around with your fingers forever to absolutely no gain at all. Oh god, this is agony. Send help.

HA HA, just kidding! I love Candy Crush! I LOVE IT! HA HA HA!

(No, really, I mean it. The sweets are making me say this. They said they’ll hurt me if I don’t. I can hear them, you know. SEND HELP)
- Stuart Heritage

HAT - Fucking Candy Crush. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. I hate it.

I hate it partly because it’s turned me into a twitchy, swivel-eyed Candy Crush junkie. The sort of person who takes her phone into the toilet, then spends twenty minutes in the loo. Several times a day! By now my phone must be encrusted with poo spores, but that doesn’t matter. Dysentery can be treated. Even cholera can be overcome. But I’ve been stuck on fucking level 35 of Candy Crush for over a week now, and I cannot. Let it. Beat me.

I keep finding myself humming the opening bars of the Father Ted theme, because it reminds me of the Candy Crush song. Even tapping out these letters on the keyboard is difficult, because my fingers naturally want to float up towards the screen and swipe them across the page instead. It is a PROBLEM.

The worst thing about Candy Crush, though, is how neatly it brings home just how stupid I really fucking am.

I don’t strictly know my nine times table, or what a gerund really is (even though it’s sort of my job), but I’ve fudged through life under the impression that I’m at least reasonably intelligent because I can (sometimes) complete (children’s) crosswords, and I read books (or used to, before I downloaded Candy Crush onto my Kindle).

But Candy Crush has forced me to accept my own idiocy. It began so simply – line up three sweets on a grid and they go pouf. Ooh, fun! I remember thinking, Exploding Skittles Tetris! But, now I’m progressing up the levels and have to create longer lines of sweets on boards that are increasingly shaped like Swastikas, I realise that:

1. It’s not Exploding Skittles Tetris at all. It’s Exploding Skittles Chess.
2. I’ve never learned to play Chess.

In Chess you need to think at least two steps ahead, and I don’t have the brain power for that. I’m so ignorant that I think one of the Chess pieces is called a ‘horsie’. I’m so stupid that, if I’d been Harry Potter I would have died playing Wizard Chess at the end of the first film. That’s right, I said ‘film’, not ‘book’ – THAT’S HOW MUCH OF A DUMKOPF I AM.

Genuinely, the lowest moment of my life was when I Googled ‘Candy Crush level 35 cheat’. Then I encountered a lower moment when I watched the video and realised it was made by a bored eight year-old. Then there was a lower moment still, when it occurred to me that I didn’t understand the video or how to beat the level.

I am basically a Neanderthal. I just want to make sweets go pouf. But I can’t because I’m too stupid. That’s what Candy Crush has done to me, and that’s why I HAT it.
- Robyn Wilder

SATURDAY KITCHEN

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 10:00:27 +0000

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 FINE.

I’ll give you reasons.

1. James Martin’s way with people
I don’t know why I enjoy watching chillingly avuncular TV chef and northern lothario James Martin interact unsuccessfully with human beings, but I do, very much. Too much.

Watching him greet his guests – no matter who they are – with a smile that says “you’re late” makes me smile. Watching him visibly bristle if the guest is an attractive male makes me clap my hands with joy. When asks female guests questions about their careers then, as they start yawping self-consciously about how they “gave life to a role”, suddenly starts barking CHOP THOSE NOW and DON’T LET THAT OVERBOIL at them until they cry, I roll around giggling like a toddler.

I realise that this says more about me than James Martin. I think it might be some sort of problem.

2. Rachel Khoo
If you find the excerpts of Rachel Khoo’s Little Paris Kitchen so twee that your jaw starts to hurt, just do what I do – tune out until she’s stopped saying actual words and is just emitting a series of adorable clicks and trills and coos. And then you can pretend that Zooey Deschanel and Pikachu got married, and that this is a stop-motion Claymation show about their daughter.

3. The Wine People
Who are these jolly, intrepid people they dispatch off to Lidls in Basingstoke and the really crap Waitrose in Bracknell town centre to find wines for the dishes they cook on the show? Why are they never in the studio? Why do they raise a glass to the chef at the end of their desperate little comedy vignettes? Why is there such fear in their eyes? WHAT AREN’T WE BEING TOLD? It’s a mystery.

4. The Celebrity Masterchef Voiceover Woman
She is Liv Tyler’s whispery elf from Lord of the Rings and I claim my five pounds.

5. Sally Field
Last week, the actress Sally Field was due to be a guest on Saturday Kitchen, but she got stuck in the snow on the way to the studio. So they just got some bald bloke in a grey jumper to stand in for her, and addressed him as Sally Field for the entire show, THEREBY WINNING MY RESPECT.

6. I’m tired on Saturday mornings, okay?
With its nice food, chef bonhomie, and gentle joshing with guests, Saturday Kitchen is a an endearing, undemanding start to the weekend. It’s basically Take Me Out for the morning-time, before your tolerance levels for fake tan and bullshit are at full capacity.

7. It’s not Sunday Brunch on Channel 4
Thank fucking god.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - Saturday morning TV was fun once. There were shows where you could phone up popstars and call them wankers. There were adverts for toys, marketed so aggressively that your parents invariably ended up feeling like miserable failures because they couldn’t afford to buy them for you. There was The Raccoons, which made you sad even though you couldn’t really pinpoint why.

Now, though, Saturday morning telly is SHIT. And you know whose fault it is? It’s all Saturday Fucking Kitchen’s fault. Once there was Muppet Babies, now there’s a fat dead-eyed bloke with a shit haircut pointing at some meat and nodding at it like it’s the lost temple of fucking Akhmim. IT’S NOT THE LOST TEMPLE OF FUCKING AKHMIM, YOU DOZY WAZZOCK, IT’S JUST SOME FUCKING MEAT.

If you’ve never seen Saturday Kitchen, then a) know that I would happily trade lives with you, even if you’re covered in sores and smell like cat food, and b) here’s what happens in every single poxy bloody shitting episode of it:

1) James Martin turns up in some sort of horrific pastel-coloured sweater and doesn’t immediately set himself on fire out of shame.

2) James Martin asks a visiting chef what they’re cooking and then - regardless of what they tell him - looks at the camera, makes a funny face, says “Beef and chips, then”, pulls another funny face and then pauses for a moment, knowing that if anyone used the same reductive tactics to disparage any of his accomplishments, he’d crawl away and roll around miserably in his own fecal matter for a week.

3) A 50-year-old man rings up and asks James Martin how best to cook fallow venison, even though GOOGLE EXISTS NOW YOU PREENING SHITBAG WHY DON’T YOU JUST LOOK IT UP ON GOOGLE INSTEAD OF GOING TO ALL THE TROUBLE OF LITERALLY RINGING A NATIONALLY BROADCAST TELEVISION PROGRAMME? IS IT BECAUSE YOU CRAVE ATTENTION? IS THAT IT? IS THAT HOW IMPOSSIBLY EMPTY YOUR LIFE IS? JUST GOOGLE IT NEXT TIME, JEREMY CONSTABLE FROM SHROPSHIRE OR WHATEVER YOUR FUCKING NAME IS.

4) A segment of a Rick Stein television programme that consists of nothing but Rick Stein going to another country and then saying “Isn’t it a shame that we don’t do this in Britain? Isn’t it a horrible shame? I hate Britain BUT I REFUSE TO LEAVE IT BECAUSE SECRETLY I HATE MYSELF.”

5) James Martin cooks some food while interviewing someone from Casualty who he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about, by reading out questions and then rendering their answers meaningless by deliberately switching on a blender whenever they start talking.

6) The Omelette Challenge, where visiting chefs have to make something that looks like a xenomorph’s afterbirth in six seconds while James Martin reads out exactly the same egg-based puns as he does every single week and the crew has to groan at every single one of them like they do every single week because they know that, if they don’t, James Martin will do everything in his power to make the rest of their lives an impossible labyrinth of misery.

7) You realise that it’s 11:30 and you’ve just spent another precious 90 minutes of your life actively hating something that you could have just as easily ignored and that, by doing so, you’re effectively just as bad as Rick Stein; the man who you have implausibly started to hold up as a totem of everything that’s ever been wrong with the world. Damn you Saturday Kitchen. Damn you to HELL.

So, in short, no.
- Stuart Heritage

CHIPS

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 09:45:26 +0100

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 never encountered anything lovelier than a chip.

By ‘chip’, incidentally, I mean hot rectangles of deep-fried potato, and not CRISPS which, although excellent, come further down the list of lovely things. In fact the list of lovely things goes like this:

1. CHIPS
2. NEW BEDLINEN WITH A HIGH THREAD COUNT
3. ORGASMS, probably
4. RANDOMLY TURNING ON THE TELEVISION AND SEEING A FRIENDS EPISODE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE
5. KITTENS
6. CRISPS
7. SNOW DAYS WHEN YOUR KITCHEN IS FULLY STOCKED
8. RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS
9. CHOCOLATE
10. LOVE OR WHATEVER

Chips are amazing. There is no comparable joy to eating chip shop chips outside in the frosty air when you’re hungry. The weight of the wrapped chips in your hand, heavy and warm like a delicious baby. The steamy, tangy vinegar smell that SPANGGS your saliva glands into overdrive. Unwrapping the paper and plopping a too-hot chip onto your tongue. Fanning your face as the sizzling potato sears the very meat from the roof of your mouth. Grinning like an idiot as you plonk fat squashy chips into your body, like salty edible friends who hug you from the inside.

And there are so many TYPES of chips:

OVEN CHIPS
Frozen chips you just throw into a baking tray and stick in the oven! And the challenge is finding the uncooked chip on your plate. There’s always one. It is the law.

CURLY FRIES
Mandelbrot spirals of Möbius potato perfection that, at 18, I genuinely thought came from one giant potato. At EIGHTEEN.

McDONALDS CHIPS
Chip perfection. Tossed in a secret blend of chicken salt, ambrosia and devil spunk before frying.

FRITES
Like British chips, but Belgian. So, thinner and slightly more snide.

MICROWAVE CHIPS
Like oven chips, but with extra carcinogens that allow you to go from zero to chip in 30 seconds!

Chips are wonderful. Chips are hot salty slivers of pure sunshine. At least I think they are. I’ve been on a diet for six weeks and haven’t seen a chip for months. Am I confusing them with bananas?
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - I’m not anticipating a very positive reaction here. Because they’re chips, right? Everyone likes chips. Who wouldn’t like chips? A paedophile?

I’m expecting this reaction because I get it a lot. Admitting that you don’t like chips is the same as admitting that you don’t like puppies, or admitting that it was you who decided to start calling Dime bars Daim bars and also you’re Kim Jong Il returned from the dead disguised as Jimmy Savile and you have a giant tattoo of Justin Bieber doing the Gangnam Style dance stretching all the way across the entirety of your back. It doesn’t go down well is basically what I’m saying.

Whenever I’ve told anyone that I don’t like chips, there’s been a uniform three-stage response. First, because I have a bit of a tummy and a near-permanent smear of ketchup across my face, people initially think I’m joking. Then, when they realise I’m not, they get suspicious. “Why don’t you like chips?” they ask. “Are you some sort of murderer? Or Chinese? Is that it? You’re a Chinese murderer?”

This suspicion eventually gives way to outright fury. Somehow, because I don’t like chips, I’ve managed to mortally offend them. I may as well have flung their baby off a motorway bridge. I may as well have shat out a swastika onto Barbara Windsor’s forehead. But it’s no good. They can shout all they like, but I can’t help not liking chips. Because chips, admit it, are a tiny bit shit.

They’re just so nothingy. When you’re presented with a plate of chips, you’re essentially being challenged to take the exact same mouthful of bland, quickly-cooling starchy nothing 30 times in a row. You may as well be eating polystyrene. You don’t get this with other food, you know. With a pizza, every mouthful’s an adventure. When you bite into a scotch egg, you’re guaranteed egg yolk, egg white, breadcrumbs and probably about 17 different bits of mashed-up animal organ. But when you eat a chip, that’s all you get. A chip.

And it doesn’t matter what sort of chip you get. Buying a portion of chipshop chips means joylessly trudging through fistful after fistful of soggy potato until you’re lying face-down in a coma brought about by equal parts guilt and boredom. Buying chips from McDonald’s means committing yourself to stuffing your face with a neverending procession of flaccid, pencil-thin slivers of freezing salt. Even if you go upscale and order Heston Blumenthal’s triple-cooked chips, you’re still getting a plate of flavourless nothing, albeit flavourless nothing that appears to be made of glass.

So fuck you, chips. Daddy or chips? Daddy, every time. Even if my daddy was Jack the Ripper. Even if my dad was Justin Lee Collins. Even if my daddy was you, you big-nosed arsehole. That’s how much I hate chips.
- Stuart Heritage

DOCTOR WHO

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 09:39:56 +0100

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 pissing all over the Union Jack*.

Because, no matter how you actually feel about Doctor who - despite the fact that the dialogue is hokey; you can’t shake the feeling that child Amelia Pond would make a better companion than adult Amy Pond; only sweaty-palmed Forbidden Planet loyalty card holders really like Daleks or Cybermen; it seemed unlikely that Rose, in love with Doctor Who, was happy to waltz off with just David Tennant; apparently every distant corner of spacetime looks like the toilets in John Lewis; and you inevitably find yourself shouting YOU COULD JUST GET IN YOUR FUCKING TARDIS, GO BACK IN TIME AND FIX THIS, YOU TWEEDY BRIXTON HAIRCUT PONCE during every episode - it is your DUTY AS A BRITON to love and endure Doctor Who.

Doctor Who, you see, is the closest thing we have in this country to Superman - and he measures up pretty well:

1. Both Superman and Doctor Who are from dead planets.

2. They both go on and on and fucking on about how they’re the last of their kind. Then people like Zod or John Simm turn up and it gets a bit awkward.

3. Superman has been played by a series of strapping, virtuous-looking actors. Doctor Who has been played by old men, mad men, scarves, Scottish Hamlet, and now a social media intern.

4. Neither has a catchphrase, although Superman’s could be “Mind how you go”; Doctor Who’s could be something about tea and equations.

5. They both love humans just the way we are.

And Britain needs a Superman. Our Olympic glory is already fading, leaving us with a monarch who has to be pushed out of a helicopter before she cracks a smile, and a prime minister who a) looks and acts like a potato and b) walks around with a simpering potato-apologist attached to his hip.

What terrible role models for the British yoot. I suppose there’s always Tinie Tempah and Stephen Fry, but they won’t be around forever, and Doctor Who - thanks to his handy regeneration shtick - will. So here’s my list of preferred future Doctor Whos:

1. Stefan Gates from Incredible Edibles

2. Helen Mirren (feminism)

3. Johnson from Peep Show

4. Brendan Brady from Hollyoaks

5. Bane

So, to sum up, if you love your country you must watch a kidult with attention-deficit disorder dick about with three Welsh aliens every Saturday and at Christmas, and you must love it. And maybe make shitty gags on Twitter when it’s on. It’s your duty.

Unless of course you’re American. Talking of which, hey, Americans jizzing themselves with glee over Doctor Who. What’s that about? You don’t even have to watch it. You’ve got Community.

*Although to be fair, he does this every Thursday.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - Right, bloody hell, look. I know I’ve already lost this argument. This is the internet - worse, this is Tumblr - so slagging off Doctor Who is obviously a huge crime up there with slagging off Sherlock, or slagging off Tom Hiddleston’s face, or slagging off shit fan art of Harry and Niall from One Direction kissing with tongues in the rain. But you know what? Fuck it. If you like Doctor Who, you’re wrong. Doctor Who is a massive puddle of animal bollocks.

There’s a reason why the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, you know. It’s because if you ever found yourself trapped inside an actual police box with Doctor Who for any length of time, you’d end up bouncing his head off the walls as hard as you possibly could until he’d smashed through all his remaining regenerations and was dead - properly, forever dead - just so that you could have some peace and quiet for a fucking second.

Because Doctor Who is basically a gap-year student, isn’t he? A gap year student with a fucking Qype account. All he sodding does is drone on and on and on about all the amazing things he’s ever seen, and all the places he’s ever been that are, like, totally inspiring and shit? At any given moment, Doctor Who is a nanosecond away from showing you a picture of some poverty-stricken aliens and saying “These people have nothing, but they look so happy. It was almost, like, spiritual?” which obviously makes him a colossal shitbag of the highest order.

And, you know, he’s WAY too old to spend his life like this. By rights, Doctor Who should be working in an office now. An office where everyone hates him because he’s the wacky prick who wears a bowtie to work and shouts ‘Geronimo’ at everything and keeps singing the Ghostbusters theme-tune in a Scooby-Doo voice and probably sends out company-wide emails containing nothing but links to photos of cats wearing sunglasses. No wonder Amy and Rory are his assistants - they’re the only two people alive too busy being such self-consciously zany dickpieces themselves to notice what a twonk they’re hanging around with.

But you can see why Doctor Who is such an insufferable attention-seeking git. He knows one day the BBC will realise that his only enemies are bobbly sex-toys, Iron Man’s paste-eating nephews and some garden gnomes - and that he can beat them all in three seconds because he’s got a sonic screwdriver that magically solves everything anyway - and they’ll stop giving him money.

So instead he’s doomed to wander the galaxy dressed up like the presenter of the Open University’s Shoreditch module, getting into tedious scrapes that you can’t hear anyway because the incidental music has been turned up far too high. Truly, Doctor Who is the second biggest arsehole who ever lived, after anyone who gets upset when people call him ‘Doctor Who’ and not ‘The Doctor’. So he’s the second-biggest arsehole after you, basically.
- Stuart Heritage

BACON

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 09:20:28 +0100

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 because everyone’s too busy watching monkey blowjobs on YouTube for free.

But worst of all - worst of everything - the internet has ruined bacon.

Bacon used to be brilliant. Magical, even. It was always there for you, no matter what. If you couldn’t face up to eating another lonely tin of warmed up beans in front of the telly in your horrible little bedsit, you could fry up a couple of slices of bacon, put the bacon on top of the beans and - BANG - immediate feast. If you wanted to impress a woman, but couldn’t cook to save your life, you just had to wrap some bacon around a chicken breast and - POW - immediate declaration of love. Feeling fancy? Bacon sandwich. Feeling SUPER fancy? Bacon cheesewich with a fried egg in it. Bacon was so easy to cook that you’d barely ever get food poisoning from it, not like those dicks pork and bivalve molluscs. God, bacon was magnificent.

Not any more, though. Not since the internet came along and reduced bacon to a punchline. A shit, lazy punchline used by the least funny people in the world; the sort of people who say ‘Nom’ and ‘LOL’ out loud and think badgers are inherently funny and wear chinos and still think that phonetically writing text messages like a fucking Lolcat is something that someone in their twenties should still acceptably do. I’m talking about you here. Literally you. You make me sick, you whimsical internet dickhead. You appalling fucking empty-spectacle-wearing, Moomin-liking, Seven-Dials-shopping, Time-Out-reading cupcake-eating social media BMX perpetually adolescent internet cunt.

You’ve ruined bacon. It was your ironic love of bacon that caused a flood of shitty bacon merchandise, like bacon-flavoured lollipops and bacon-flavoured dental floss and bacon soap and bacon jellybeans and bacon fudge and bacon cupcakes and bacon toys and bacon milkshakes and bacon T-shirts with the phrase ‘I HEART BACON LOL’ written across it in bacon, that has completely devalued bacon as a food in its own right. You made it impossible for me to go into a shop and buy some bacon without thinking “What if people see me buy this? Will they think I’m one of those internet bacon cunts?” And I will hate you forever for it.

But I still believe in you, bacon. I still believe in your deliciousness and versatility. I still love you on your own terms. I will love you until I die. Which, let’s face it, might be quite soon. You’re bacon, after all.
- Stuart Heritage

HAT - Right, I realise that, in your eyes, I’ve already lost this argument. It’s bacon. Everyone loves bacon and anyone who doesn’t is a communist.

But I don’t care if I’m in the minority. I don’t care if it’s just me and this guy. You know why? Because BACON is BULLSHIT. I genuinely believe this. I genuinely 70% believe that bacon is bullshit and 30% have arbitrarily decided to hate bacon because the fourth paragraph of Stuart Heritage’s rant describes me with such depressing accuracy.

Because, look, I’m not a monster. I know that the smell of cooking bacon is the best thing in the world.

Smelling bacon is like falling in love. You salivate. Your pupils dilate. Your brain starts to pump out serotonin like there’s no tomorrow – or rather, like there are lots of tomorrows, they’re all non-work days, and they’re all filled with bacon. And it doesn’t matter whether you are hungry, hungover, vegetarian, on your way home from a fifteen-course banquet, or are in fact a pig – the smell of cooking bacon is going to get to you.

But the problem is that the promise of bacon is greater than the reality of bacon.

The aroma of hot, sizzling bacon promises something fatty, salty, warm, voluptuous and abundant. But the reality is disappointing. In a cooked breakfast, for instance, next to lovely plump sausages, glistening eggs and golden fried bread, two thin strips of cooling, congealing bacon are a mean, greasy afterthought, like Steve Buscemi in The Wedding Singer.

And just look at a rasher of bacon. I mean actually look at it. Thick rivulets of white fat cover two-thirds of its surface area. Which is why sometimes when you eat a bacon sandwich the rind gets stuck between your teeth, and you flail about uselessly like a walrus choking on a shoe lace. It’s why, each time you eat a bacon double-cheeseburger, it’s so bad for your cholesterol that it actually counts as self-harm.

The truth is we don’t need bacon. We don’t need actual bacon at all. We need the promise of bacon.

That’s why we have turkey bacon, which tastes and smells sort of like bacon, but which a) probably won’t clog up your arteries and kills you b) you can confidently put in a sandwich without worrying about breaking a tooth on a knob of gristle.

That’s why salad counters at Harvester restaurants have a vat full of Bacon Bits made of chunks of soya. That’s why there’s Baconnaise. And that’s why 2013 will see the release of my new range of deodorants for Lynx, Promesse de Bacon.

You’re welcome, smelly carnivores of Earth.
- Robyn Wilder

CYCLING

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 09:50:00 +0100

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 spend all of my time on the bike going “NEEEEEAWWWW! CHRIS HOY! I’M BLOODY CHRIS HOY! NEEEEEAWWWW!” is frankly none of your business.

I haven’t always been so keen on cycling. I never took a cycling proficiency test at school, I had an alarming tendency to fall off my bike in front of girls I liked and I couldn’t see the point of the London to Brighton race because the train station is right there and, anyway, Brighton is shit. But now? Now I can see the beauty in it.

Cycling is quicker than walking, and requires a more appropriate level of effort than driving. And you can pretty much ride a bike however you want to. Yes, you can bomb along the side of the road, but you can also get drunk and pootle through a meadow or fling yourself off a succession of terrifying ramps as well. You can’t do that in a car. Well, you can, but only if you happen to be Jeremy Clarkson, and if that’s the case you’re probably too busy being wracked by wave upon wave of desperate gnawing self-loathing about your teeth and hair and brain to bother.

So I’m going to buy a bike. I’m definitely going to buy a bike. I’ve already spent hours looking at bikes online, and I know exactly what I want. I want a hybrid bike because, while I’ll primarily be using on tarmac, I don’t want to discount the possibility of one day using it to escape a gang of vengeful Russian bandits in a forest somewhere.

I want the best brakes that money can buy, because I’m an unconfident and inexperienced cyclist and it’s very important that I can decelerate from one and a bit miles an hour to no miles an hour as quickly as possible. Also, it needs to be massive and heavy and covered in loads of bits that poke people in the eyes and face whenever I take it on a train, because that’s apparently what you’re supposed to do when you take a bike on a train.

And when this bike is mine, I’ll be a proper cyclist. I’ll buy all the gear and spend days dressing up and polishing the spokes and calibrating the height and nuzzling it and looking at it from afar with a sense of unshakable pride. Because then I, Stuart Heritage, will be a proper cyclist.

I’m not actually going to ride it anywhere, obviously. I mean, I live in London. I’d be splattered across the front of a fucking bus by teatime. What’d be the point of that? I’m not mental, you know.
- Stuart Heritage

HAT - Cycling. No. For these reasons:

1. CYCLING KILLS YOUR CHILDHOOD
Nothing – not seeing the lines etched on Philip Schofield’s face, or a moody 3D Thunder-Cats reimagining – shreds your own childhood memories like an adult stint on a bicycle.

Because, although realistically you know you can’t have been some sort of pre-teen BMX Jesus who could do giant wheelies while wearing roller-boots and riding a skateboard, that you were is a harmless lie you tell yourself to distract from the horrific gaping chasm of your own mortality.

Straddle a bike for the first time in twenty years, however, and you’ll be forced to accept a series of uncomfortable truths. The first will occur when you look down at your thighs and realise that you’re planning to propel yourself up a 60-degree incline with what are essentially two hams.

Next you will summon all your reserves of strength, push down on the pedals, and only travel four feet. It seemed so easy when you were a child because children are basically a set of well-oiled pistons powered by Haribo, and therefore perfectly suited to bicycling. You, however, are a set of differently shaped sausages powered by espresso, and the vague free-floating anxiety that you should be eating more pro-biotic yoghurt.

What you are perfectly suited to is sitting.

Finally, and most devastatingly, you’ll remember that you weren’t a pre-pubescent Bradley Wiggins at all. In fact, as a child, you used to keep the rear brake on even when freewheeling down gentle hills, you never really figured out what that sixth gear was for, you smelled of cheese and no one liked you because you always had your hand down your trousers.

2. DANGER OF DEATH
Another thing that will occur to you while cycling is that a) cars are hard and fast and deadly, and b) you are a squishy, easily-endable meatbag. This will occur to you once when you blink and almost serve into an oncoming vehicle, and then every fucking time you pass a sad collection of withered bouquets marking the sites where a cyclist was squashed to death.

3. SARTORIAL UNACCEPTABILITY
Cycling clothes look like Spanx for Teletubbies. And this cycling helmet will make you look like the you-know-what from the end of Prometheus.

4. THIEVES
Bicycle thieves. Do they walk up to railings with bolt cutters secreted about their person? Or do they ride away on their own bicycle, wrangling the spare one like a cowboy taking his pardner’s horse home after he lost in a gunfight?

5. OH FUCK OFF
I can’t breathe. My heart is a great swollen boxing glove pulsing out of my ribcage, and my lungs are two dried prunes beside it. I have sweat collecting in uncomfortable places, I cannot feel my legs, and YOU said we were “almost there” an HOUR ago. I’m getting a cab home and stopping off at the pie shop. Fuck you, cyclists. Enjoy catching Chlamydia from your bicycle seat!
- Robyn Wilder

MUSICALS

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 09:43:38 +0100

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 twatty-do-wop-de-doop’ song from Grease, and if you’ve ever dressed up as a character from the Rocky Horror Picture Show I’m afraid that we can never, ever be friends.

But I do quite like musicals.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve rolled my eyes at Moulin Rouge, harrumphed my way through Chicago and actually said the words “Shane Meadows would never make a film like this” which is perhaps more objectionable than any of the attributes I listed in the first paragraph. In my defence, though, watching Moulin Rouge is like having a full-blown migraine in a Tilt-A-Whirl full of dickheads, and Chicago is just a bunch of glammed-up Robert Palmer video women prowling around snarling about how dangerous and feline they are. But I digress. Musicals have actually grown on me, for three main reasons:

1. I worked backstage at a theatre
And the first production I ever worked on was Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, and it’s either that Into the Woods is witty and clever with some memorable songs, or that the act of helping a woman dressed as a witch out of her bra every night for two weeks while mooing into a microphone left me with severe disabling musical Stockholm syndrome.

2. Musicals have saved my Bank Holidays
I mean, what else are you supposed to do on a rainy Monday afternoon with your other half’s family once Ben-Hur has finished? Have a conversation? About babies? Account for the exact percentile of your Jewish heritage to a borderline racist octogenarian grandparent of indistinguishable gender? Or watch The Wizard of Oz? Yeah.

3. We all love musicals whether we know it or not
We’ve all grown up knowing and loving classic musicals. Even you people with your flinty old hearts must well up when Oliver Twist sings ‘Where is Love’ or when the old lady in Mary Poppins implores the children to ‘feed the bards, tuppence a byag’.

And what would our childhood favourites be without all the singing and jazz shoes? The Sound of Music would be a bleak tale of a woman of the cloth losing her faith, shacking up with a disciplinarian and fleeing the Nazis with a cult of Aryan children - two of whom sit in a gazebo just saying their ages at each other - over the mountains to Mordor. Mary Poppins would be a stark expose into the mind of a delusional, Louise Woodward-style au pair. Annie would probably be about paedophilia. Well, more about paedophilia.

Shane Meadows might make that film.

To sum up, I love musicals. And, while I’m never going to say that real life should be more like the musicals (I was at a bus stop the other day when a girl started singing, and it was horrifically awkward. No one joined in; no one knew where to look. Eventually she just sort of petered out and stared at her shoe), I am now off to watch Burlesque in my pyjamas with a hangover and you are not to judge me.
- Robyn WIlder

HAT - What is love? Poets struggle to describe it. Philosophers struggle to understand it. Scientists struggle to explain it. Even Haddaway - perhaps the most profound mind of the modern age - struggled when he asked himself ‘What is love?’, only managing to come up with “Baby don’t hurt me no more” and the slightly less helpful “Woah woah woah, oooh oooh”.

But I know what love is. Love is sitting on a sofa with your girlfriend on a Saturday afternoon and not angrily farting blood all over the place when she asks if you fancy watching a musical. That’s what love is. You’re welcome, humanity.

As we all know, musicals were invented by the devil as a way to send normal men into bloodthirsty spirals of blind rage punctuated with cries of “WHY IS THEY ALL SINGING EVERYTHING?” and “SHE’S IN HER THIRTIES! WHY IS SHE STILL AT HIGH SCHOOL? HAS SHE GOT A BRAIN CONDITION?”

I’m primarily referencing Grease here, but it’s true of all musicals. I just mentioned Grease because it’s terrible and there’s a fucking flying car in it. In truth, all musicals make me want to vomit spinal fluid into a nun’s face. I hate them. I hate them for wasting my time.

When you tell a story, your characters need need motivation. A good storyteller will imply this motivation. A bad storyteller will explicitly tell us this motivation. And a really fucking shitty storyteller will shove the character to the front and make him spend three minutes singing a song about why his parents never loved him to the tune of My Old Man’s A Cunting Dustman.

The cumulative effect of this is that, once the characters have all barged to the front to belt out a witless ditty about their motivation - or how they’ve fallen in love, or how they might be getting a bit hungry - a vast portion of your life has been frittered away. But it needn’t be like this.

For example, the Can You Feel The Love Tonight segment of The Lion King could be over in about five seconds if it simply cut to a shot of Simba fingering a girl lion by the bins. The I’ve Got A Golden Ticket part of Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory could be Charlie Bucket getting his golden ticket and then just fucking shutting up about it. And everyone would be happier if, rather than wailing out I Dreamed A Dream for a full calendar month, Fantine from Les Miserables just dropped dead on the spot, preferably of a disease that obliterated her face and windpipe at the same time.

But the worst thing about musicals is the fact that all girls love them. And that means that the rest of us are screwed. If you’ve got a girlfriend, you’re basically doomed to spend colossal chunks of your life watching John Travolta pretending to get electrified at a fairground again and again. Actually, I’ve made musicals sound quite good, haven’t I? Drat.
- Stuart Heritage

THE NEWS

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 09:28:23 +0100

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, I wouldn’t know that we’d been dipping in and out of recession for ages. Why would I? Everything on the high street is always on sale! If it wasn’t for the news, I probably wouldn’t have noticed that David Cameron was prime minister. I’d just have assumed that he was Piers Morgan and that I was due an eye test.

And, if it wasn’t for the news, I wouldn’t understand half of Have I Got News for You. I’d have spent the last decade deeply impressed by Angus Deayton’s apparently neverending repertoire of convincing disguises.

For people like me, people who walk around constantly with at least three zombie-apocalypse survival plans in their heads, the news is an anchor to reality.

On the news a newscaster will tell you calmly, and with authority, exactly what the world is about. And you’ll believe them because newscasters are some of the coolest and most composed motherfuckers to walk the planet. Kirsty Wark alone looks as though she could simultaneously disarm a bomb, give birth, and sort out Greece’s debt without breaking a sweat.

The news only gets a bit silly when pop culture enters the fray, and newscasters are forced to disgorge distasteful words like “Pussy Riot” with the clanging gravitas of “referendum”. But that’s fine. Because I don’t want to hear Huw Edwards uncomfortably referencing the Arctic Monkeys. I want newscasters to dispense proper news.

Proper news is reassuring. Even bad news is comforting when it’s delivered in rich, measured tones by someone who looks sharp in a tailored jacket. If Moira Stewart told me, for instance, that a catastrophic meteor was heading for Earth, I’d probably give a wry laugh, fix myself a dirty martini, and toast humanity. And I don’t even like dirty martinis.

If you told me this, however, I’d probably punch you, then myself, then run around in circles, yelping. Then I’d punch you again, just for not being Moira Stewart. So, in summary: shut the fuck up, I’m watching the news. In my Lego earrings.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - Hey, who remembers the news? God, it was brilliant. If you wanted to know things about stuff, it was the best. Turn on your telly at breakfast or lunchtime or teatime or bedtime and there was the news, telling you about all the important events that had happened in the world. And, you know, skateboarding cats or whatever.

And the news wasn’t just about the past. At the end of each bulletin, they’d wheel on a pretty girl in a nice dress and she’d tell you what the weather was going to be like in the future. And sometimes you’d get told the news even if you weren’t really interested. Sometimes someone would just pop up right before EastEnders and shout “THERE’S BEEN A FIRE!” and then just fuck off again. It was brilliant.

Of course, that was all before the Olympics started. Now, don’t get me wrong. I like the Olympics. Luv them, even. I’ve spent the last two weeks shouting things like “HOORAY FOR HANDBALL!” and “SURELY THE RULES OF SPRINT CYCLING NEED TO BE OVERHAULED IN THE WAKE OF VICTORIA PENDLETON’S MEDAL RELEGATION!” and “WHAT THE FUCK IS DRESSAGE EVEN SUPPOSED TO BE?”. I’ve enjoyed it. Except for the dressage, obviously. I’m not a cunt.

But the Olympics have royally screwed with the news. Thanks to the Olympics, the top six or seven news headlines are always ‘HOLY SHIT! DID YOU JUST SEE THE THING THAT HAPPENED IN THE FUCKING OLYMPICS?’. Which would be great, except I did just see the thing that happened in the Olympics, because it was literally just on bloody television. It was literally the only thing on television. I didn’t have a choice, because the Olympics were literally the only thing on bloody television. Except for whatever was on ITV, obviously, but I’m not a cunt.

My point is that the news needs to calm down. Other things have happened too. Just because the studio faces Olympic Park, it doesn’t mean that Fiona Bruce has to keep wiping her vagina up and down on it. Oh sure, sometimes they’ll stop dribbling on about how brilliant canoeists suddenly are to say “Oh, and by the way, Asia’s just fallen into the sea,” but you can tell that their hearts aren’t really in it because it hasn’t got anything to do with the Olympics. And you know what? This relentless fixation on the Olympics is tedious. I miss the actual news.

But this is all superfluous. Next week the Olympics will be over and the news will return to normal. And then we can go back to hearing about missing children and violent crime and misery and gloom and death and I can go back to sleeping with a stick in my hand because I’m convinced that I’ll be attacked by an intruder and that the world is a cold, lonely, loveless place spinning joylessly towards its inevitable horrible death. So, you know, hooray for that.
- Stuart Heritage

SWIMMING

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 09:48:28 +0100

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 the monkey bars? Well, being suspended in water means that you – current, adult you with a bad back – can do somersaults. And you can dive under the water and swim around with your legs together, pretending to be Daryl Hannah in Splash (although you’ll look more like a shiny rotund puffin).

Swimming is also, a little sadly, the nearest thing any of us will experience to zero-gravity. And it’s the only activity in which you can go from zero to freestyle in a day. Imagine trying to do that with rapping, or breakdancing. You’d be rubbish. In seconds you’d fall over your words, or your own feet, and end up in a crying pile on the floor. With swimming, though, you can fudge a reasonably convincing front crawl for at least half a width, even if you haven’t swum for years.

As a form of exercise, swimming is far preferable to huffing away in the gym, because you never get too hot and you exercise almost every muscle in your body. In my case this is particularly true of my tongue, because I have to spend at least a third of my pool session apologising to all the other swimmers for cannonballing into them while rotating my arms and legs like Animal from The Muppets.

Yep, I am THE BEST THING about swimming: the abysmal but aggressively enthusiastic swimmer.

I will career splashily into a patch of terrified geriatric aqua-aerobicists. I will decide mid-length to try the butterfly stroke, then proceed to kerplosh crazy zigzags across ALL the lanes. Ain’t no lane swimmer goin’ unmolested on MY watch. I am EXCELLENT AT BEING SHIT AT SWIMMING.

Perhaps the best thing about swimming – apart from the smell of a swimming pool and that delicious tiredness in your limbs after a session – is the fact that if you do it for long enough, you might start to look like Michael Phelps.

And that’s a good look – all thickly muscled shoulders, skinny child-legs and, because he’s had to pose for god knows how many Olympic headshots, the persistently uncomfortable smile of an arthritic chimpanzee. And deep down, that’s what we all want, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - When Michael Phelps became the most decorated Olympian in history the other night, you might have thought “Good for him”. And that’s fine.

You might have also thought “Maybe now we don’t have to keep looking at pictures of his sodding breakfast all the poxy time”. That’s also fine.

Then, inspired by his incredible athleticism, you might have thought “You know what? Maybe I should go swimming”.

No. Just no. That is not fine.

Look, you’re kidding yourself. You are NOT Michael Phelps. Michael Phelps has won 19 Olympic medals for swimming. You, at best, got a solitary proficiency badge for it when you were a brownie, and that’s only because the instructor took pity on you and pretended not to see that you were crying and walking for most of your length.

And it’s OK that you’re not Michael Phelps. I mean, have you seen Michael Phelps? He looks like a stockingful of chicken knuckles. His nickname is The Human Fish. That’s what people actually call him. Imagine if you were so good at swimming that people named you after something that sounded like an even-worse sequel to Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus. It’d be shit. Your life would be shit. If anything, you should be glad that you’re not as good at swimming as Michael Phelps.

Also - and I can’t overstate this enough - swimming is rubbish. It’s fine if it’s your job. But it isn’t your job, is it? You’re a fucking social media coordinator or whatever. When you walk out of the changing room, you do it wrapped in your ugliest towel, convinced that everyone’s staring at your hairy back or your massive ankles or your harrowingly asymmetric nipples. You slowly inch your way into the pool, flinching as the water hits your genitals. And then you basically just flap about like a seal being tasered by a shark, trying not to get your hair wet or any water in your mouth because there’s probably piss in it. It’s embarrassing.

And this is all before you’ve even paid attention to all the different people in the pool - including but not limited to lane-hoggers, horny teenagers, slow housewives, walkers, loiterers, splashers, kickers, bombers, runners, heavy-petters, farters, pissers, grunters, duck-divers, float-monopolisers, screamers, zig-zaggers, aqua-aerobicsers, lifeguard-flirters, ring-abusers and, worst of all, you.

What this means is that, whenever you go swimming, you basically spend 20 minutes floating in a great big puddle of dead skin and urine, getting angrier and angrier because none of the arseholes in the pool will even let you go three consecutive strokes in a straight line, then getting out, drying off, eating a hamburger, kidding yourself that you earnt it because your skin smells faintly of chlorine now, and then wondering why you never lose any weight.

Well fuck you. Fuck you and fuck Michael Phelps. And fuck water. Especially fuck water.
- Stuart Heritage

THE OLYMPICS

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 09:54:00 +0100

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

KINDLES

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 09:31:01 +0100

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

SIGHTSEEING

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 09:32:17 +0100

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

3D

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 09:48:10 +0100

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

PED EGGS

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 09:44:00 +0100

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:

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

MEDICINE

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 09:05:00 +0100

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

CONTACT LENSES

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 09:48:13 +0100

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:

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.
GLASSES – which make you look like your own grandmother or a member of the Gestapo.
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

SELF-SERVICE CHECKOUTS

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 09:39:23 +0100

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

THE DIAMOND JUBILEE

Thu, 31 May 2012 09:59:00 +0100

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

HOTEL CHOCOLAT

Thu, 24 May 2012 11:17:00 +0100

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