LUV & HAT

LUV - Oh, hello! I’m British. You can probably tell because if I detect even a single flake of snow within ten miles of me I phone up everyone I know and scream “SNOW SNOW SNOW” and then pop into Twitter to post “SNOW SNOW SNOW #snow” and finish off with a quick whirl round Facebook liking every status I can see all of which say “SNOW SNOW SNOW”, and because I have a tea towel that says “Keep Calm And Carry On” and chuckle every time I use it, and because I am unable to show any unfettered emotion without the warm helping hand of my borderline alcohol dependency problem (unless, of course, that emotion is to do with snow).

And because I’m British, I outwardly revel in having a shitty British Christmas full of shitty British Christmas memes. The overcooked sprouts! The disappointing reindeer jumpers! The lack of snow! The BBC Christmas trail that’s so teeth-grindingly irritating, it would make even the most placid peacenik want to build a sealed geodesic dome around the whole of Salford and pump it full of mustard gas because the horrific loss of innocent life would be acceptable collateral damage!

But inside, like all Brits, ALL Brits, I yearn for a better Christmas experience. I want Miracle on 34th Street, Sleepless in Seattle, Santa Claus: The Movie. I’d even go for Serendipity, and that film was so bad I physically ate the DVD after I’d endured it so it would never harm another human again. I want it American-style. Come on, don’t pretend. We all do! That’s why we LUV Starbucks Christmas cups full of over-sugared, over-personalised hug substitute, and the She and Him Christmas album, and the recent urban carbuncle that is Seasonal Ice Rinks.

Because who cares that they require so much power to stop them reverting to their original fag-butt-filled puddle of slush state that they are solely responsible for the destruction of the planet, and all the polar bears now have to live on one tiny patch of glacier, tessellated together like Sticklebricks? Who cares that most seasonal ice rinks are in the beautiful surrounds of a multi-storey car park attached to an out-of-town shopping centre and are the size of three postage stamps? Squelch on those fear-sweat filled boots and ease yourself onto that lozenge of frictionless pearly pleasure, and you’re instantly sweeping majestically through Central Park with Tony Bennett crooning in the background and some adorably be-scarf-and-gloved man/woman/some kind of bloody child (delete according to taste) beaming at your side. The fairy lights are twinkling, you couldn’t feel more Christmassy if Santa himself was garrotting your colon with tinsel, and you can forget you’re just spending half an hour repeatedly stumbling past a couple of dejected, sequin-encrusted mannequins in a Topshop window.

Plus, unlike at your normal municipal ice rink, filled to the brim with sullen teenagers with weaponised feet mainlining Relentless and tonguing each other senseless in the bleachers, the good Seasonal Ice Rink people will sell you copious amounts of mulled booze; enough to numb the inevitable coccyx trauma caused by prising your trembling hands from the advertising hoardings and launching yourself blindly into the melee. Pissed on zero mu. It’s the dream.

And if that’s not reason enough, the one and only time I’ve been to a seasonal ice rink, at the Natural History Museum, I fell over in front of Anthony Head. That’s Uther Pendragon, and more importantly, Giles from Buffy. Extrapolating that evidence, that means every single time anyone goes to a seasonal ice rink anywhere, they will encounter a minor celebrity and nearly pull their trousers down by clutching desperately at their cuffs. 

No-one want to go seasonal ice-skating with me any more. I can’t think why. Despite that - LUV.
- Julia Blyth 

HAT - Every year it’s the same. Every year, regardless of who I’m with, it’s always exactly the same. The evenings get darker, the advent calendars get wrestled open and the suggestion is made. “Hey, do you want to go ice skating at Somerset House/ Canary Wharf/ Bluewater/ some nondescript-looking German plaza?” And I always say yes. I always say yes to festive ice skating, even though I know the parade of genuine fucking catastrophe that inevitably lies in front of me.

Because, really, ice skating is a massive lie. We’ve all been conditioned over the years to believe that ice skating is fun and effortless and graceful and freeing. Celebrities on Dancing On Ice seem to be able to zip around without too much effort, and they’re celebrities for crying out loud. They’ve barely got the cognitive ability to think and breath at the same time. let alone ice skate. If they can do it, it’s probably a piece of piddle. Even Charlie Brown enjoys ice skating, and he very obviously hates everything about this shallow joke of a life. So it must be AMAZING, right?

Fucking no. It isn’t amazing. Because this is what happens when you go to a Christmas ice rink, in order.

PART ONE - Resentfully forking out £20.

PART TWO - Sitting on a drizzle-covered plastic bench for 35 minutes watching that poxy road sweeper thing going round in circles.

PART THREE - Taking your shoes off.

PART FOUR - Immediately standing in an icy puddle and drenching your socks.

PART FIVE - Handing your shoes to a disinterested rink-worker and saying “Size ten, please. Ten. Size ten. Size ten. No, ten. Ten” and showing him ten fingers just to reinforce the message.

PART SIX - Being given a pair of size eight ice skates.

PART SEVEN - Ow.

PART EIGHT - Pathetically clinging on to the outer wall and slowly dragging yourself around while a succession of children and pensioners thwang past you with a look of absolute pity on their faces.

PART NINE - Building up courage. Look, all these other idiots can ice skate perfectly well. Several of them are even girls. That kid over there’s got an elastoplast over one of her eyes. Some of these people are quite fat, and even they’re doing OK. You’re better than this. You can do it. You’re a man.

PART TEN - Finally letting go of the outer wall.

PART ELEVEN - Basically just clomping around the circumference of the ice rink a couple of times, and then getting bored, and then getting off the ice rink.

PART TWELVE - Noticing that less than four minutes have passed since you put your skates on.

PART THIRTEEN - Ow.

So there you have it. Festive ice rinks. Bah humbug. Bumbug.
- Stuart Heritage

LUV - Movember! Grow a ‘tache, raise some cash! Ruin your mush, give cancer the push! Super, smashing, great. But…

Let’s put aside for a second the whole “charity” element of Movember. Because let’s face it, while it was borne out of the noble aim of raising money to punch cancer in its wretched bloody face, and all power to it, Movember has now evolved into a perfect excuse for all those men who really wanted to see what they looked like as a Mexican bandito but were too chicken to ever just grab society by the clackers and scream “I defy your poxy rules that tell me which parts of my face it is acceptable to sprout follicles from and in what combination!” And as a, broadly speaking, girl who approves of facial hirsuiteness of any kind - oh, did someone’s daddy have a beard? Yes, but only through all of my formative years, so you can shut up with your Freudian theories, you don’t know dad you’re daddying about - I can’t help but be a fan.

But enough of my disgusting proclivities. Movember! A hoot for the whole family, mostly because everyone gets to spend 30 days trying to work out if random people on the tube, at work, or reporting on the biggest political and economic crisis the Eurozone has ever seen on the 10’clock news are a) just so all aboard the Movember train b) have been the victims of a toddler solemnly spreading a thin layer of Marmite on their top lip while they were napping or c) are toying with the idea of becoming the sort of man who hangs around fields full of cows and stares at their udders with his flies coyly open. Get your kids involved! Then you can train them to identify a Movember man and, if it’s any other month of the year, run 10,000 miles in the other direction as fast as their little legs can carry them.

Movember! Even inclusive to those men who, try as they might, can’t encourage that keratin to extrude from their face in anything other than an embarrassing patchy mess that spells out in ancient hieroglyphics “My testes are not fully descended”, or those women who are physically incapable of disconnecting themselves from their Nair umbilical cord. No ‘tache, even if it will cure all known cancers in a single blast, hmm? Try taking part in #movemburrrgh, my latest invention that is sweeping across Twitter like a herd of arthritic wildebeest across a pit of quicksand, where you get sponsored every day to do something that makes you feel a little bit like a pervert. Put your socks on before your pants! Eat some cold saag aloo straight out of the fridge using a folded-up bit of cornflake box as a rudimentary scoop! Stare at some cows’ udders with your flies coyly open!

Or you could try Moevember, where every day you harrass the landlord down your local with hoax phone-calls until they have a catastrophic public meltdown, at which point you demand money for charity; Covenber, where you use wiccan powers to ensure mankind is rid of all disease and unhappiness, for which you can then demand money for charity; or Soder-mber, where you try and sit through all 125 leaden minutes of the director’s cut of Ocean’s 12 while choking down the urge to fly to LA and staple-gun a copy of Mary Poppins to each of Don Cheadle’s ear’oles, and if you succeed with swallowing those impulses, writing to him to inform him of his lucky escape and demand money for charity.

Or none of the above. The very least you can say for Movember is it’s a fund-raising appeal which doesn’t involve going for a “fun” run in a luminous pink bra and will at no point feature Russell Brand doing a sincere face at you, and that, my semi-furry friends, is worthy of your LUV alone.
- Julia Blyth 

HAT - Expressing a dislike for something that raises money for a very worthwhile Big C charity is almost literally akin to going into a hospital ward with a flag and singing “I LOVE CANCER, CANCER’S THE BEST, CANCER IN THE CLURB, EY-OH.”

And yet. Guys. Guys. And girls, because you know you encourage them. “Tee hee, if I could grow a moustache I’d have a porn star one, tee hee.” Would you? Would you really? Would you spend a whole month sacrificing your well-groomed appearance for this cause? This isn’t Children In Need, sweedart – this ain’t no congealed bath of beans from which you can climb, shower and totter merrily on your way.

We’re talking thirty dignity-free days here. And bear in mind this could be the month in which you:

• go on a job interview for the position of Babyface [your surname here] at The Mob

• finally land the front cover of Clean Shaven Monthly

• go to court. I don’t know why, that’s your business

• meet your future spouse’s parents for the first time, and the mum has a disorder triggered by the sight of a moustache which makes her, I dunno, vomit fecal matter?

• have to converse with a child who thinks lip adornments are hairy Haribos

Want to take those risks, inexperienced grower?

(If you’re an experienced grower I fearhate you in the same way I fearhate all real men, with their innate ability to talk about cars, put up shelves and get their hands dirty enough to justify a purchase of Swarfega. I’m not even talking to you, because you’ll beat me to a pulp. With a shelf.)

Let’s say you’re one of the facially tonsorially impotent weeds whose ‘tache sprouts in a manner that means you resemble a lettings agent who fiddles with livestock. You’ll know it’s gone wrong by, what, the 11^th? Watcha gonna do, molester-face? Shave it off and shape your mouth to mealy, muttering about how it didn’t suit you? Not allowed. You are going to look like a Foxtons liar who cockwallops lambs for 19 more days, bub.

Meanwhile, if you decide to give Movember a miss – and implicitly give All The Cancer the thumbs-up – you can expect, by the 9^th, to start harbouring paranoid suspicions that your in-the-spirit colleagues are placing hexes on every single one of your innards (and two of your outards).

By the 20^th you’re basically Gene Hackman in The Conversation, overhearing plots and accusations in the most innocent of workplace chats. “Jav a good weekend?” becomes “That man over there; I have cast a cancerous spell on his balls, ears and ankles. Let us incant.”

In summary, then – nobody wins during Movember. Nobody. Not a body. Except the charities associated with it, as if they count.
- Stuart Waterman 

LUV - You know what life is for? It’s for the living. So sometimes you just have to say no - no to sitting on the same old boring tube with the same old boring people reading the same old boring book (Wow, you’re reading One Day? So am I! So is that guy, and that woman, and everyone else on the carriage! Tell you what, I’ll just save us all a lot of effort and read it out. That vagrant that’s just wondered in can give me musical accompaniment on his guitar with one string made of dried-out prophylactics!) Sometimes you have to get away from the rat race, feel the diesel fumes belching through your hair. Sometimes you need to get from one bit of the country to another bit of the country for all the money you can find illicitly feeling up the coin return trays on the self-service checkouts in your local Tesco Megahog. That’s when you need… National Express!

There’s just so many amazing life experiences you only get from giving yourself wholly into the gullet of the blue and red shark. And having a friend who lived in Edinburgh while I lived in Essex in the poverty befitting one who spends all their money on cream horn moulds while being lactose intolerant, I have experienced exactly all of them. Behold the wonders of 60-seater land-based travel…

- Commune with every creed, colour and race in the bustling nexus of all National Express exploits at London ‘s glamorous Victoria Station! Ever wondered what it would be like to be beaten to death in a urinal with a backpack full of rubble by a Benetton advert? Those ammonia-tinged thrills are only truly accessible with a £7.50 return to Newcastle clamped in your fear-sweated hand. Only on National Express.

- I tell you this from goddamn scintillating experience. There’s nothing more relaxing than settling into your journey, having a fellow passenger spot a Red Hot Chili Peppers cassette album peeking out of your tastefully distressed and Tippex-graffittied canvas teenager-sack, and insisting he gives you a tour with full audio commentary through every word of his Kerrang, complete with glossy patina of salt and vinegar crisp spittle. That creepy droning could soothe the most fevered brow. Only on National Express.

- And then, hone your vital survival and stealth skills, attempting to hide from said metal-droner in the urban wasteland of a service station at 3am in a place such as Chafford Hundred, Ashby-de-la-Zouch or South Woodham Ferrers. Remember to eat your own cigarette butts to ensure he will not be able to eventually track down your family with DNA evidence! Only on National Express. 

- Golly gosharoony, did you know such places existed as Chafford Hundred, Ashby-de-la-Zouch or South Woodham Ferrers? Just imagine the wealth of geographic knowledge you could glean from just 12 short hours squinting through your own pallid reflection to try and make out the road signs flitting past in the inky blackness. That’s if you’re not too busy enjoying the roller-coaster-esque joyride provided by the bus driver with divorce papers burning a hole in his jacket pocket and half a bottle of Southern Comfort burning a hole in his stomach lining! Only on National Express.

- Attending to your toilette in a vertical coffin-cum-germ incubator-cum-60 person Ginsters dirty protest at 90mph? Hello, thighs that could pop Frankie Cocozza’s stupid head like an over-ripe ruby grapefruit!

National Express. For when you don’t want to get on a plane because they are a terrifying abomination against the laws of physics, and, you know, the whole dildo angle. For when you want some free cash. Or, maybe, for when you just want to stare at Neil Hannon for four minutes. That’s reason enough for LUV, surely?
- Julia Blyth

HAT - It starts before you even board.

Begin your journey at London Victoria – and most regular NatEx travellers have had to at some point – and you run the risk of a gushing, bill-inflicted wound in your eye, thanks to the pigeon gangs that roam the station. The interior of the station, mind – the bit with doors and a roof, designed for talonless entities. 

That birds flitter-flatter about the already overcrowded terminal is kind of dangerous, kind of unhygienic and kind of rank, and nobody in charge seems to give a hot damn. 

The only possible conclusion: pigeons actually run London Victoria coach station. And I have to say, considering they’re birds with brains the size of Subbuteo footballs, they do a passable job. I would have thought they’d have learned how to extend their “coo”s to “cooach delayed”s by now, though.

Anyway, then you board. With the optimism of a rube you dart your eyes hither, thither and whither, attempting to locate a seat Not Next To Someone Else. These never exist, so then you try and ignore the straight-ahead stares of your already-seated fellow passengers, each internally bargaining with God to try and ensure you don’t sit next to them.

Your priority is to find a seat next to someone who:

• isn’t eating crisps
• doesn’t look like a talker (smiley nans, fresh-faced students desperate for friends, etc), a cougher, a sniffer or a tutter
• is travelling kidless
• isn’t ALREADY on the fucking PHONE
• hasn’t conspicuously placed a bag on the seat next to them in an attempt to dissuade you from sitting there, ironically making you all the more determined to burst their over-entitled little bubble by staring at them, coughing and muttering “zgyooz me”. 

The die is cast from the moment they huffily drag their tote bag towards their midriff. This silent, three hour relationship has soured before it has even begun.

While pilots and train drivers make some concessions to the language of customer service –  “sit back and relax” this and “hot and cold drinks” that – the National Express driver is an entirely different breed. 

It’s not that he’s unfriendly, more that he reminds you of a drunken, oft-avoided friend of your parents. His regional accent bamboozles poor foreign travellers. He has sideburns bushier than any pubic region you’ve ever encountered. You get the impression that at wedding receptions he may get a little “handsy”. 

A National Express driver once convinced me and some other passengers to help him push the broken-down coach we’d been travelling on, in mid-December, at 10pm. He’s that guy.

That I’ve somehow exceeded my word count without even touching on the toilets aboard National Express coaches (like being trapped in a shat-upon doll’s house?) speaks voluminous volumes. HATful ones.
- Stuart Waterman 

LUV - I am so heterosexual that I can’t even see the colour pink.

So I’m not saying I want Ryan Gosling to envelope me in his tanned, oaky arms in the middle of a rainstorm and whisper that everything’s going to be alright while he strokes my hair. God, shut up. I wouldn’t believe him anyway. No, I would violently wrench my doughy frame from his embrace and, voice a-tremble, insist that there’s no way everything can possibly be alright until I can be him.

But that Ryan, you know he’d tenderly reach out and stroke my wrist to pacify me. And I’d gaze into his chocolatey eyes and believe him after all, even though I wouldn’t really believe him. The beautiful prick.

Ryan Gosling was fired from The Lovely Bones because his commitment to the role was such that he lived on Haagen Dazs to become a porker, and the director said he’d gone too far. Now, firstly – this means that as Ryan Gosling is back to his default setting of hunk-o-matic, he would always, always, always, always, always offer you all the Haagen Dazs in his freezer.

But secondly, and most importantly – if Ryan Gosling was willing to commit so fully to a make-believe film role, can you imagine how entirely he would devote himself to the role of being your real, actual boyfriend?

Do you suppose Ryan Gosling would ever refuse to make you a cup of tea? How many times do you think Ryan Gosling would not say “thank you” when you offered him a Malteser? If Ryan Gosling took you away for a weekend, do you think that at the train station he’d become stressed out and uncommunicative because of the sight of the queue at Cafe Nero?

The answers here are: not fucking likely; absolutely zero; and don’t be so bloody stupid, he’s Ryan Gosling, so he’d smile dreamily, hold your hand, make you feel like the queue was paradise and get the barista to create a silky, endless mocha that tastes like rainbows.

I don’t want to spoil Drive for you (as if I could; it stars Ryan Gosling), but suffice to say there are parts of the film where his character does some decidedly un-Ryan Gosling things. And yet tests have shown that no human being has finished watching that film any less than 34% more in love with Ryan Gosling than they were when it began.

In the case of men, this sometimes manifests itself in them creating Ryan Gosling clubs; but mostly, it just makes them want to be a better all-round kind of man. And that man’s name is Ryan Seacrest Gosling.
- Stuart Waterman 

HAT - Cast your mind back to a couple of weeks ago. It was early September. The seasons were behaving themselves and chucking water on our bonces in an ordered and proper manner. The most disturbingly elderly person to have seen Scarlett Johannson’s luvly jubblies was Sean Penn. And no-one, anywhere, had heard of Ryan Gosling.

But now look at the world: sunnier than a CBeebies presenter atop a My Little Pony singing about nuclear fusion, every septegenarian with a working knowledge of popular culture and a perverted streak has oogled Scar-Jo’s googlies, and the streets are littered with men such as my esteemed colleague crying tears of totally sexually unambigious straight joy at the very mention of the great god RG. “Oh my God!” they snuffle, cluttering up the pavements as the weight of the Gos brilliance upon their shoulders makes their very bones buckle, “Have you seen Drive?! CHRIST it’s so amazing I may very well DIE OF IT.”

Well, no, I haven’t seen Drive. Because if I wanted to spend two hours in the company of a man driving silently around a city while a brooding sense of menace made every second more unbearable than the last, I would actually accompany my boyfriend when he tries valiantly to get to Croydon IKEA without ripping his own scalp off or slewing through a bus-stop full of pensioners. But I’ve done my research and found Ryan Gosling is not the rough-hewn chunk of macho sex-meat somehow suffused with the sensitivity of a lumberjack poet that you think he is. And here is why:

1. Ryan Gosling was a Mouseketeer 

In the Mickey Mouse Club! You know, the freaky American mini-pop showcase, a mixture of family-friendly skits and sketches and 13-year-old boys wearing pyjamas in a gale and singing in disembodied adult voices about how much they want to fuck their women and fuck them good, apparently unhindered by their undescended testicles. And here is your hero Gosling doing just that; with extra bonus vile points for an early incarnation of Diana Vickers hand. 

No matter how many low-budget indie movies you do, Gosling, no matter how many Oscar-baiting scenes you are in where you mumble and cry and do some crack and convey a cavalcade of emotions through a twitch of your deep hazel eyes, you will never escape the ghost of a pre-pubescent Justin Timberlake hovering just behind your right shoulder, grinding against an invisible conquest with his smooth, pubeless groin. Sorry. 

2. Ryan Gosling was in The Notebook 

A film I haven’t seen, because I am not a screeching 14-year-old or a bitter 50-something Lambrini-drenched spinster cry-wanking another Wednesday evening into oblivion, yet, but if you can watch the trailer without wanting to engrave “IS IT RAINING I HADN’T NOTICED” onto the moon with epic space lasers powered by your own impotent rage at how bloody saccharine and awful it is, you’re a better person than I. 

3. Ryan Gosling Looks Like A Hitherto Undiscovered Baldwin Brother 

Look. He does. He really does. And never has the adjective “Baldwin-esque” been used in a positive context. Unless it’s “Dude, that cry-wank last night I had was so utterly pathetic in its outcome, it was Baldwin-esque.” 

4. Ryan Gosling Didn’t Exist Before Last Week So Is Clearly Some Kind Of Fake Key Spirit Implanted Into All Of Us As A False Memory Like Dawn Was In Buffy And So Will Bring About The End Of Civilisation As We Know It 

And he isn’t as cute as a real gosling. 

The prosecution rests.
- Julia Blyth 

LUV - Sometimes in this rough, tough, cruel world, with all the aggressive gangsta rap and Nicola Robert’s nightmareish eyebrows and no Friends repeats to cuddle you into your evening any more, you need some comfort. Something that hails from a better time, when men were all made of nicotine and scotch, women all had Christina Hendrick’s mutant planetary tits, and kitchens were permanently filled with the heady musk of a freshly cooling apple pie. And that is where Lakeland comes in. Want to live in a soft-focus Aga-warmed utopia but with a cool, futuristic, tech-loving Gadget Show twist? A world where Christina Hendrick’s boobs have one nipple that when tweaked generates Spotify playlists, and one that can pierce holes in sheet metal with a laser beam? Then you want to get your perverted mind down to Lakeland, my friend.

Stuff enough money into Lakeland’s flowery apron pockets, and you too can pretend that you’re the sort of person who flings themselves out of bed in the morning to lovingly craft your own home-made cream horns for breakfast, with your own cream horn moulds, rather than the sort of person who just sticks a baseball cap, overcoat and plimsolls on over a stained Snoopy t-shirt and huffs their morning breath all over the muffins at Caffe Nero. You can pretend that you actually care about the appearance of your flat by having a cleaning product for every occasion up to and including actual Bog Berocca, rather than just wiping down the underside of the lid with some damp loo roll 10 minutes before your mum comes over. You can pretend that your Christmas will be a magical wonderland filled with twinkling themed tealights and exquisite bonbons, rather than a four-day Baileys binge only interrupted by a screaming argument with your mum about the state of your flat and the occasional creamy vomit.

Only Lakeland has all the products under one roof to allow you to be a domestic goddess, but without all that tedious sneaking around in silken scanties to eat chorizo straight out of the fridge at 3am. Only Lakeland allows you to dream that one day you’ll be a grown-up; you might actually clean the vegetable cupboard out, you might do some research into getting a better rate on your savings account, and you might finally get round to colour-coding and separating all your socks with the chilling precision of an OCD-crazed murderer. Five minutes riffling through a Lakeland catalogue and it makes a perfect home life seem so tangible you could reach out and squeeze its underparts, providing, of course, you have an unlimited bank balance and a pantry the size of Milton Keynes to store your various bean slicers and Madeleine baking moulds and washing-up liquid filofaxes.

Best of all, they’re a tenacious bunch. Ever since I bought an adjustable cutlery tray from them, because by Christ I know how to have fun in a kitchen with slightly non-standard drawer sizes, they have sent me a catalogue through the post, every two months, regular as a Sugababes regime change. Even though I have never so much as flashed a millimetre of my lithe credit thighs in their direction since. They’re just so desperate for my attention! It’s fantastic. They’re like the nerdy fangirl of homeware retailers. If they were on Twitter, they’d retweet absolutely everything I said AND respond to it with some banal, sycophantic agreement, and I’d always ignore them, and then they’d start tweeting me 400 times a day, and then they’d somehow get hold of my personal email address and send me pictures of themselves pouting in tear-and-bloodstained Laura Ashley dresses with self-created peepholes. Holding a reasonably priced garlic press, of course.

And you just know those aloof bitches at John Lewis would never do that. Keep on slutting, Lakeland.
- Julia Blyth 

HAT - If you LUV Lakeland, I must first congratulate you on locating the reserves of energy required to navigate to this web page. It must have really hurt. You must be quite out of breath, given you’re the kind of permanently be-sniffled lambykin who requires a tool to help you pull plugs out of sockets.

Coo, it’s tiring, isn’t it? Have a sit down. Not too quickly! You might bruise your tender little bum-bum.

This is what we’ve become, isn’t it? We can’t even unplug a lamp without a plastic implement to help us, and lethargy-enablers like Lakeland are happy to indulge us for sweet, sweet profit. Do you know what else we can’t do, going by Lakeland’s inventory? We can’t catch the spiders that skitter along our skirting boards. No, never, no. We’ve already established that people who fear spiders are jelly-boned saplings, but there are still nerveless, simpering globules of humanity who insist on spending £10.29 on a specialist arachnid vacuum.

You know how I catch spiders? I use this thing called ‘a glass’. Ever hear of it? I have loads of them, because they cost £1 for 6 at my local Turkish convenience store. Then I eat both spider and glass, but that’s not strictly relevant at this juncture.

Anyway, what kind of obtuse oxymoron names a place ‘Lakeland’? What is a land made of lake? Or a lake made of land? How much land could a lake land land if a lake land could lake land? Nobody lives on lands made of lake, except The Lady of The Lake from King Arthur – and she stank of pondweed and dripped water all through the lounge. By the way, before you go assuming that the company was set up by a person called Ian Lakeland, or Arnold Lakeland, or Graham Lakeland or something, it wasn’t. 

That’s right: there was never a Graham Lakeland.

I bought a dozen jam jars from Lakeland for £6.99 a while back, you know. “Mmm, imagine all the jam!” I screamed as I placed the order, leaping onto my chair and frenziedly flicking my jowl drool all over the library. Lo, when the jars arrived there was not one – not one – bit of jam to be found in the things. And nowhere on the website does it say “Jam not included”. What a confectionarous liberty, Lakeland.

How regular Lakeland customers – who we’ve established are hermetic, emotionally vulnerable hugglebunnies with tissues stuffed permanently up the sleeves of their snot-festooned slankets – would deal with such disappointment worries me a great deal. And how do they cope with the hellish letdown when their homemade crisps, created using the Lakeland Microwave Crisp Maker, taste a quintillionth as good as McCoy’s Mega BBQ Beef Crunch Ripple Ravage Rock Chips?

Maybe they’re too busy caressing their knives that look like dildos, or snuggling up to their sheep-shaped sofa tidies, to care. Caring expends precious calories as well, after all.

I wouldn’t mind something called an Apple Master though. I wouldn’t mind being an Apple Master.
- Stuart Waterman 

LUV - Ah, the moon. The thing about contemplating the moon is it don’t half make you feel all poetical and that…

(Feel free to insert your own magical-funk arty wibbly transitional effect at this point. Maybe you could hold your laptop up near a fan heater and read through the resultant haze, but mind your glistening forehead doesn’t do a sensual drip onto your keyboard and short it with pure sex appeal. Or perhaps huff a load of glue until you half-lose your sight)

O, moon! You big old pearly squire!
For all the beauty you inspire
A list in verse we may require.
Why do we LUV you, moon?

Tidal force at your command!
Without you there’d be no sand
And no HORROR FACE/HAND. 
Thanks for that one, moon!

Zowie Bowie loved your face,
Made Sam Rockwell mad in space 
I’D TAKE HIM TO MY MOON BASE.
Christ! I’m sorry, moon.

What lurks upon your darkened rear?
Pink Floyd gave us their prog idea,
Where that bird’s shrieks gave us the fear.
We still adore you, moon.

Thanks to your Lycanthropic wits,
A cool film scared us all to bits!
Also, Jenny Agutter’s tits.
You goddamn hero, moon.

Just a few of your pale charms.
If I had Mr Tickle arms
I’d streeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetch them out so that they were much too long to fit into a thus far perfectly scanning poem-arrrrms
And pinch your bumcheeks, moon.

Though I haven’t forgiven you for that whole Toploader thing, so don’t get too cocky, you alabaster globule.

FIN

Too Pam Ayres for your sophisticat tastes, reader? Try this abridged version: 

There’s one thing at night that’s a boon;
The transforming light of the moon.
Cos then when I’m pissed
The vagrants I kissed
Are ringers for Orlando Bloom.
- Julia Blyth .

HAT - ”It’s not a planet, it’s a satellite.” That’s what they say, the Moon-people, the people who think the Moon is the best. It’s one of many quasi-romantic notions about this big piece of dust-sprinkled gravel in the sky that needs skewering.

So, let us skewer: it is not a satellite. It does not have cool little reflective metal arms coming out of it, or blip-blip lights anywhere about its person; it does not send back any useful information to us about aliens or potential new dimensions we might be able to pack up and move to; and it is not called something like Intrepid Galactic Forager, like proper satellites always are.

It’s a ball of tightly-compacted dust and rock, and if you went there it would play havoc with your allergies. So stop liking it, stop writing poems about it and stop dancing in its barely-existent light. The best story anyone ever told about the Moon was that it was made of cheese - and that was a lie. People have to make stuff up about the Moon to make it appear less galactically shit.

Look pal, the Moon has got the stupidest name in the universe. All the other spacey places have monikers like “Adyunong 12” or “The Stakuleth Nebulatum”. “The Moon” sounds like a pathetic, wide-faced little character from a translated eastern European cartoon. Look at it, frowning like a cratered sap, crying out for attention even though it doesn’t deserve any. I want to slap The Moon right upside its axis, but I can’t reach. That’s why I howl at it.

It’s not enough for The Moon to just sit there, dripping its puny “moonlight” onto one leaf on one tree each night. The Moon has to dick about with the sea, as well. The sea is about a million times more useful than a floating pebble in the sky, and it offers us food, transport and free, freshly-washed contraceptives.

The Moon, being a lonely, sinisterly glowing outcast, sees all this and decides to mess around with the tides. Our fucking tides! “WEYYYY,” it goes, making our water go all weird. Why? I don’t know why - go and ask the useless, holey cretin. Maybe it got drunk on the power bestowed upon it by the wooden-brained crusties who rut on Stonehenge any time the Moon does anything, ever.

Whatever the reason, the Moon is like the huge, dumb arsehole on the beach who can’t articulate himself using language, so decides to stomp all over your sand-fort to express himself. God, the Moon would fuck up your sandy battlements with nary a thought. You don’t even have a brain to think with, Moon! You massive, craggedy twat! Hahaha! HEY MOON, HOW DO YOU SPELL ‘MOON’?? I HATE YOU AND I HATE YOU AND I HATE YOU FOR NOT BEING EVEN ABLE TO SPELL YOUR OWN NAME, MOON.

In short, sending man to the Moon may have been a magnificent achievement; but failing to blow the desperate, attention-seeking space-biscuit apart with a nuclear bomb after departing was a missed opportunity we should still be ruing the shit out of to this day.
- Stuart Waterman

LUV - Make no mistake: without football, at least 40% of the world’s male population would be mute. The “banter” is a verbal shortcut which allows chaps to bypass all that icky huggy-wuggy nonsense women talk about and immediately erect emotional bonds and/or barriers based on what team they support/loathe beyond comprehension.

While it’s sad that there exist males who are unable to coherently discuss any subject other than how much of a wanker the referee is, it’s worth bearing in mind that without this outlet they would almost certainly become vicious killers.

“It’s just 22 men kicking a ball around a field,” may say naysayers, and naysay they may say. But you could reduce most sporting endeavours in the same manner. Motor racing is just a bunch of men driving around and around at high speed, but that doesn’t mean it can’t enrich the otherwise dreary lives of those who watch it. (Bad example; motor racing is the worst sport ever invented. God, I hate it. “MmmmYOWmmm. MmmmYOWmmm.” Repeat for hours. That’s motor racing, that is.)

Go abroad and football allows you to slash through language barriers. If a stranger tries to talk to you in foreignish, you need merely say “England. Lineker. Rooney.” You will make a new friend with whom you can drink and laugh the night away, communicating entirely using the names of footballers. You don’t like the drink he bought you? Frown and mutter “Keith Curle”. You appreciate the local delicacy? Raise your thumbs aloft and cry “Zbigniew Boniek!”

Children who play football gain valuable early exposure to skills they will need throughout their lives. Discipline. Teamwork. The ability to appreciate the value of a hard-won victory, and cope with the despair of a defeat. So, if you score four goals in one game (as I once did), miss a penalty in a five-a-side shootout (as I once did) and find yourself shown a red card in a pre-season friendly by your own father (as I once was); and two of these three occurrences see you reduced to muddy, humiliated tears in public (as I twice was); then you, my child, have experienced the bewildering emotional impact life has in store for you before you’ve reached the age of 13. That the joy fades while the pain remains as raw as a freshly-grazed knee over twenty years later is without doubt a good thing, and definitely not a reason to seek counselling.

As a football fan, your relationship with the game tends to be longer and equally as rollercoastery as those you have with actual people, with which it shares parallels. The highs are as euphoric (but require less cleaning up), and the lows leave you swearing that you’ll never put yourself through this shit ever, ever again.

And, like real-life relationships, you always end up going back for more even after your heart’s been obliterated as comprehensively as a tea cup flung against a dressing room wall.

Football, bloody hell.
- Stuart Waterman

HAT - Oh, well, bully for you, boys. How lovely it must be for you to have football, such an all-emcompassing fallback in every social situation. Bump into some bloke on the bus - someone who, say, you went to school with but haven’t seen since the last day of A-levels when, drunk on White Lightning and backed-up seminal fluid, you cornered him and told him repeatedly to your own hilarity just how much you wanted to do his mum - and any residual resentment and awkwardness is swept away on a tide of mutual hatred for Wengerson always playing Rooneygas up the middle of the holeback when he’d be far better served hovering gently over the bottom right-hand quadrant of the pitch on a broomstick like in Quiddich. Or something. I don’t know about football, because I’m a girl. And for girls in a similarly awkward coincidental meeting, what topics do we have to fill the gaping conversational void? Shoes? Petticoat lengths? Or maybe we could just listen in silence for the tell-tale sound of our menstrual cycles clicking together like synchronising cogs in a crampy, bloated gearbox?

You know, being a girl (and a nascent alcoholic), sometimes on a nice peaceful Sunday, I’d quite like to go to the pub and have a nice peaceful pint and get nice and worked up over the Sunday supplements. But oh, no. Unless it’s one of the four Sundays in the year that God has anointed as a football-free zone, because He knows that those poor boys need a break to do some Sabbath spit-roasting sometimes, every pub in the land will be filled to capacity with a solid wall of flesh, sweating Fosters and barely-repressed anger through polyester replica shirts. The wall will thrum with the murmuring of analytical bullshit spouted straight from the back pages of the Sun, and occasionally - maybe even two or three times during a game, if you can imagine such a frenzy of constant excitement! - the ball will enter the goal in an entirely unimpressive manner, and the wall will raise up as one and start dousing itself with lager and headbutting itself while crying like a victorious Miss Macclesfield.

Occasionally at this racket my eyes will wander up from Mariella Frostrup patronising the broken-hearted, my teeth will stop gnashing and I’ll watch the 74,000th slow-mo repeat of the goal, whereupon every single time a member of the wall will peel off and huff over me “Just looking at the blokes in shorts, are we? Hyah hyah hyah!” Why yes, sir! You don’t half have me pegged, being a girl and all! Somehow on a football pitch men’s legs, those things that I can be surrounded by all day every day without feeling the tiniest tweak in my netherparts, become mesmeric totems of unending lust! I can’t stop staring at them! I’m agog with passion! I especially like the bit where the man atop the legs closes one nostril and liberally empties the contents of the other all down himself! That’s why I don’t watch football - I’m scared of the avenues of sexual pleasure I would get lost down should I expose myself to a full 90 minutes of it!

Actually, no. The reason I don’t watch football is simply because it is, as a competetive sport, really, really fucking tedious. Oh, and because in year 7 when the boys in PE got to go and gad about outside with their football, we were all stuck in the assembly hall in our knickers doing interpretative dance, pretending to be a chess piece while Miss Lichfield assaulted a tabla and chanted inappropriate vignettes about channelling our inner Queens through our vaginas.

So I hate football. Or possibly boys. Or Miss Lichfield. Frankly at this point, it’s all blurring into one.
- Julia Blyth

LUV - I bloody love birthdays, me. I do. I really do. Now some of you more cynical readers of the internet may well be thinking, ‘Oh, he’s just saying that. It’s a contrived opinion. I know how this site works - two people play devil’s advocate and argue about a subject they’ve probably never even thought about before.’ Well, to those people, I say:

FUCK YOU! WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? YOU THINK YOU KNOW ME, DO YOU? YOU DON’T KNOW ME. YOU DON’T KNOW HOW I WORK. HOW I THINK. I’M A GUEST CONTRIBUTOR ON THIS SITE, DON’T TAR ME WITH THE SAME BRUSH AS THE REST OF THESE PEOPLE. I’M NOT THE SAME AS THEM. I DON’T EVEN LIVE IN LONDON. I DIDN’T GET ASKED TO WRITE THIS, OKAY? I HAD TO BEG. I LITERALLY HAD TO BEG THEM TO LET ME WRITE SOMETHING. WHY? BECAUSE I’M NOT AS SUCCESSFUL IN MY CAREER AS THESE OTHER WRITERS ARE, ALRIGHT? YOU WON’T READ ME IN THE BLOODY GUARDIAN. SO DON’T PRESUME TO GROUP ME IN WITH THEM, OKAY? I DON’T WRITE CLEVER, FUNNY THINGS FOR A LIVING. I WRITE FROM THE FUCKING HEART. I LUV PACKAGE HOLIDAYS OR ALAN YENTOB OR STRING OR WHATEVER THE FUCK THIS ONE’S ABOUT TODAY.

ALRIGHT?

Anyway, I love birthdays. Love ‘em. And for these reasons:

If it wasn’t for your 0th birthday, you lot reading this wouldn’t be alive and the Google Analytics for this site would be bloody embarrassing.

Birthdays are a handy way of helping you work out how old you are. Simply count the number of birthdays you’ve had, then deduct that number from the current year. The number of years difference between that year and the current year is your ‘age’.

Without your ‘age’, The Man would have no way of being able to determine the legality of your sexual partners, leaving him no choice but to put you back on the Sex Offender’s Register.

If everybody’s birthdays were struck off the calendar, it would make using Microsoft Outlook very difficult for planning your diary at work.

Christmas is Jesus’ birthday. Without that, we wouldn’t have those Vicar of Dibley Christmas specials to watch in late December. And what would we watch instead? A regular episode of The Vicar of Dibley? Is that what you’d watch, is it?

Sales of tiny diagonally striped blue and white candles would plummet.

The song, ‘Happy Birthday’ is in The Guinness Book of Records for being the most frequently sung song in the world. Without birthdays, this song would cease to exist and ‘Someone Like You’ by Adele would be the most frequently sung song in the world. Is that also what you want, is it? You want Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ to be the most frequently sung song in the world? Do you? Oh yeah, you’d love that, wouldn’t you? Let’s all just sit around watching a tinsel-free Vicar of Dibley and singing dreary bloody pop songs.

If birthdays didn’t exist, you have no idea what they were and all these words here on the screen you’re currently looking at would be incomprehensible. Even more incomprehensible than they already are.

That’s it. I’m finished now. I didn’t do a particularly good job here, I know that. And I accept it. I’m sure whoever it is who wrote about how much they hate birthdays has done a much better, more convincing job. Good luck to them. Honestly. You go ahead and agree with them. It’s fine. Hate birthdays if that’s what you want to do. If that’s what will make you happy. I done my best and that’s all anyone could ever ask. I’m not ashamed of myself.
- Steve Charnock

HAT - Oh, so you want to talk about birthdays? Well, gather round and let me tell you a little tale… 

Once upon a time, about 23 years ago if you want to be precise - you there, reading this now, with your BlackBerry (for business) in one hand and your iPhone (for the ladeez, and Angry Birds, LOL pun) in the other, I imagine precision with timings is the number one priority in your busy/sexy life, so there you go, it was exactly 23 years and four days ago - there was a little girl. Chubby of cheek and angelic of demeanor, she exuded a sweet little cherub vibe which charmed those types who liked that sort of thing; nans, friendly shopkeepers, creepy neighbours who called her “Lady” and gave her sweets which were always instantly confiscated by her mother and incinerated. All outwardly very pleasant.

But that little girl had a secret. She was desperately, desperately lonely. She didn’t have any siblings, or any friends on her anonymous London side-street, or any animal companions. She knew her mummy and daddy loved her, but her daddy was mostly away shining lights on rock stars, and her mummy had a magic book called a Filofax that cast a spell on her and made her run around busily with really big and pointy shoulders. The little girl got used to filling the oppressive silence of an empty house with both sides of a heated teddy bear debate, but she never enjoyed it.

And this little girl’s birthday was always just as the school holidays started, and her well-off chums would all be on planes to Tuscany and Bordeaux, and every year the little girl would resign herself to another birthday alone, trying to get Big Ted and Froggy to agree to disagree on the whole bedtime kiss hierarchy issue, dreaming of anything with a heartbeat to share her world.

But on the little girl’s 8th birthday, she could tell something was different. There was activity in the house. It was alive. There were people, and there were new smells, and there was a strange scritching coming from a box in the corner. And there was her daddy AND her mummy! And they were saying things like “make sure you clean him out” and “very careful with him” and “think of names” and then there he was: the most adorable bundle of fluff and snuffly nose she’d ever seen. A beautiful little hamster, which she christened Hammy, because she was a bit of a dumb kid, frankly.

The next few hours passed in a blur of insane happiness. She played with Hammy, she talked to Hammy, she fed Hammy pumpkin seeds until his cheeks puffed up to the size of golfballs, she laughed at his cheeks, she watched him running round his little wheel, and her heart swelled with so many unfamiliar feelings - companionship, warmth, love - that she thought it would pop right out of her chest.

And Hammy was scooting happily around the room, and scampering up chairs and down curtains and round people’s shoulders and then it was time for cake, and there was singing, and scampering, and candles, and fire, and more scampering, and sitting down heavily to blow out the candles, and a muffled squeak…

That little girl knew, right then and there, as a tiny life was extinguished underneath her, that she would forever associate birthdays with that plunging feeling: her heart hardening to a spiky pebble, all joy draining from her life in an instant.

Who did that little girl grow up to be?

Someone who HATs birthdays, that’s who.

Now. That story is not true. But the following is: Birthdays are the one day where you can actually see Death grinning at you and tapping on his watch ominously. The one day where the world says “Hey, congratulations! Another year has passed where you have failed to achieve any of your dreams AND you’re another year too old to be in Hollyoaks’ target demographic. Have a bloody cupcake.” You like birthdays? You’re shitting on the memory of my dead hamster. Shame on you.
- Julia Blyth

LUV - OK, sure. Antiques Roadshow used to be a smidgen fusty-dusty. Slightly dessicated and dried-up. Just the teeniest, tiniest bit like an arthritic and deaf scraggy old cat, squatting in the corner of the Sunday night schedule, yowling at the walls, coughing up what looks suspiciously like a Whiskas-flecked Michael Aspel wig into your favourite Converses.

But all that has changed nowadays. A new broom has swept through and the skanky Bagpuss is out on his ear, to be replaced by a sleek new televisual stallion. And who’s astride that mighty steed, carressing its flanks with sensual thighs and raising an eyebrow at the post-roast viewing millions? Who has made the Antiques Roadshow the BBC1 equivalent of Babestation, but without the blank-faced sex-corpses? I’ve got three little words for you, bub: Fiona Fupping Bruce.

There she is, in her skinny jeans, her spiky heels, her little cropped leather jacket, lovingly stroking silver candlesticks, bending over classic cars, flinging a leg over armoires. Her ravishing sensuality has given Sunday night a totally different sheen. There’s crusty old watercolour experts who are now solely powered by the swanny-whistled spinning of their bow-ties as La Bruce struts past. There has been a 470% increase in the analysis of absolutely magnificent jugs to the background of saucy tittering. She has, in summary, turned the Antiques Roadshow into an hour of simmering passion the equal of that chess scene in the Thomas Crown Affair. Sometimes ACTUALLY WITH chess sets. Fiona Bruce, toying with a £5 million chess set. Hear that deafening sound echoing through the late weekend peace like Eamonn Holmes slowly rolling down a ski slope made of bubble wrap? That’s the sound of a nation’s-worth of grandads’ hearts popping.

So what if it’s spawned a whole generation of shit low-rent imitators, from Bargain Hunt to Dickinson’s Real Deal to Car Booty, where the quality of “antiques” is so low, the big-money highlight is when someone manages to flog a VHS of Free Willy with only half the cover because the rest has been ripped out to make roaches for 60p? Does that matter when a red-top can publish some made-up story about Lady Gaga being a huge Antiques Roadshow fan and provide us with the majesty of the headline “Raa Raa Mock Tu-dar”? No, it does not.

And so what if watching the Antiques Roadshow, seeing an exquisite music-box being valued for bajillions to swell the coffers of an already over-privileged horror from the Home Counties, then looking around your own hovel and realising your pink Keypers snail with the key missing and “NKOTB 4EVER” scratched into the side will never pay for a holiday to the Maldives, is pretty bloody dispiriting? It inspired Joe Cornish to produce this. And, you know, Fiona Bruce! 

Fiona Bruce and a stunning lithograph of the Albert Docks! What could be better?

Not convinced? Well, it’s Sunday night. It’s either Antiques Roadshow or you’ll be forced to watch a) your own walls or b) Popstar To Operastar. Yeah. Feel that comparative luv flowing through you.
- Julia Blyth 

HAT - I can’t hear the theme tune to Antiques Roadshow without being instantly transported back to a darker time. Sunday evening, the aroma of recently-consumed roast potatoes fills the air; school tomorrow.

The dead zone.

It’s my turn to do the washing up - and not normal washing up, Sunday washing up. You know what I mean: roasting tray upon roasting tray upon roasting tray. Damn that confounded rota, how do I always end up with Sunday?

I haven’t done my homework. I started it when I got home on Friday. Oh yes, I said, this weekend is going to be different from all the others. Then Blossom came on, and then it was time for Roseanne, and that was that plan shot to shit. Who gives a nob about stamens, anyway?

Whatever age I reach, Antiques Roadshow will forever provide the soundtrack to this spoilt, miserable, regretful state of mind (and you can be sure it will outlive all of us, too). It could be a lovely summer’s day, I could have the day off tomorrow, I could have spent the weekend in bed with Claudia Winkelman. I might even have won the lottery the previous night.

But five seconds of that parpy, rosy-cheeked, quaint-as-balls melody is enough to send me into the kind of depressive panic that makes me want to start practising my ill voice. Antiques Roadshow makes me want to call in sick for my own holiday.

Of course, the “more tea vicar?” vibe of AntiRoad is all a sham anyway. It’s essentially a snaking queue of grasping, desperate pensioners willing to stand on their bunyons all day in the hope of finding out that they’re in possession of an armoire that will cover their nursing home bills. And what are they met with? Bow-tied bastards who, after so many years, are increasingly at a loss for an original way to deliver the good news.

“Well - I’m pleased to say your train fare to Coventry was well worth the expense, Doris. Your armoire’s value could cover it a thousand times over!”

“Sorry?”

“That holiday to Disneyworld with the grandkids you’ve been saving for? I hope you have your travel agent’s number in your mobile phone!”

“M-my phone? It’s turned off, have you been calling me? Let me just turn it-“

“Mavis, what I’m saying is that you should immediately contact an insurance broker with a view to taking out a comprehensive plan to protect your armoire!”

“Who what?”

“FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, YOU’RE ARMOIRE’S WORTH FIFTY GRAND. NEXT.”
- Stuart Waterman

LUV - “HEURGH!”

“eep”

“HEURGH!”

“eep”

“HEURGHAIEEEEE!!!”

Ohhh, the crowd likes that. Lovely backhand there from the Ukranian. Yes, you can tell she’s pleased with that.

Wiping the perspiration from her brow, now, with a towel tossed to her by a trim young lad. Tosses it back to him. She’s missed a spot, there, just above her modest but hardworking cleavage. There it is, glistening ever so slightly in this glorious SW19 sunshine. Her pendant rests atop her décolletage, there,  possibly becoming somewhat moist as a result. Bra strap just peeking out, there.

There she is now, bending over, skirt rising up the back of her well-toned thighs, awaiting the Spaniard’s serve.

Oop! Heh heh, there’s a pigeon, there, just resting on the net cord. Heh heh. The crowd likes that. Heh heh. Imagine that, a bird alighting on an object, here of all places. Remarkable.

Oop! The Ukranian waves her racket at the pigeon there, heh heh. There he goes. He’s in the rafters now. Terrific view from up there, heh heh.

30-15, first set.

Oop! Is that a spot of rain? Yes, I think- yes, it’s shitting it down all of a sudden. Out come the covers, yanked across the court by some trim young lads. Let’s take this opportunity to take a look at the queue of ruddy-faced ladies from the home counties and Kansas, waiting in the deluge to gain access to a court – any court – with blissful smiles on their faces. Marvellous spirit.

And the sun’s back, so off come the covers. Glorious SW19 sunshine here. 30-15, first set.

Glorious sunshine here, SW19. Hope you’re enjoying this at home. Glorious sunshine. You’re on your sofa, there, wondering if perhaps you should be outside socialising and making the most of this glorious sunshine. Don’t think like that, heh heh. Don’t.

Later we’ll be crossing to court number 47, where Britain’s No.18 faces the seeded Australian. Not a hope, of course. Not. A. Hope. But he’ll have the crowd behind him. They don’t know who he is, you understand, but they only need to get behind him for an hour or so and then he’ll be gone. Marvellous experience for him.

The, uh, the umpire’s having a word with the crowd there… Yes, I think a flash went off.

And the crowd applauds. Marvellous spirit. SW19. Sunshine. Glorious.

So the Ukranian awaits service. Rocking side to side, there. Pendant swinging in this glorious sunshine. You can see, there, the perspiration has returned to the spot above the groove between her breasts. Just glittering in this glorious sunshine, SW19.

She’ll want to put this match to bed now, the Ukranian, so she can get back to the locker room. Peel off those damp clothes. Yes, she’ll be looking forward to a shower, I’m sure. Free her hair from that rather, heh heh, rather severe ponytail. Let her tresses cascade down over her shoulders.

Lather up.
- Stuart Waterman

HAT - There’s many fascinating facets to the British summer experience. My favourite is that every year, after two days of middling sunshine in mid-May when everyone gets overexcited and buys a nuclear-powered barbecue that could incinerate a buffalo with one imperious flick of a £4,000 knob, but will only ever see three drumsticks slathered in a half-remembered Jamie marinading experiment conducted when you’re drunk on Magners which renders them utterly inedible, the summer either pisses off to Magaluf for the remainder of the year or goes utterly batshit mental and kills all the tortoises and old people.

My least favourite is bloody Wimbledon.

Here’s why Wimbledon is the most aggravating thing about British summertime if you don’t count the three months Fearne Cotton entwines daisies into her locks and stands in a field shouting AWESOME! every time the scent of a beard with musical integrity wafts by.

1. Child slavery. “Boy! Fetch me a sugary water, boy! Bring me a towel, and after I have besmirched it with my awesome sweatings, recieve the towel with your face! Crouch awkwardly over there, until I foul up what I am, essentially, paid to do accurately, then frantically run around like a messenger in a minefield to clear up the spherical detritus! Give me balls! Not those ones! Despite the fact they are all identical, I judge these to be inferior and I shall hit them back at you at 100mph! I reject your balls, boy!” Christ, it’s worse than a fraught Wednesday evening at Boy George’s house.

2. Ultra-porny slow-mo replays. As my highly esteemed and mildly perveted colleague has pointed out, there is a certain frisson to the HEURGH-ness of the ladies’ game. But Wimbledon coverage notches up the bom-chicka-wah-wah with their fascination with showing every player’s slightest move in super slow-motion, catching every twinge of a calf, every swing of a powerful right arm, every victorious orgasmic grimace in fine detail. Cor, see that fist pump the Lithuanian powerhouse just did because he won a point, or smacked a mumsy line-judge square in the chops with a volley, or whatever? Let’s look at it again. Phrrrooooaaw. Stretch it out over nine or ten seconds. Watch him roar. Watch flesh and sinew ripple in a voyeuristic show of the primeval base instincts of humanity.

Disgusting. My nan watches Wimbledon, and she might have run out of beta blockers, and although when she goes I want her to have a smile on her face, I’d rather it not have anything to do with Andy Murray’s thighs.

3. Celeb fascination. You know when you’re trying to read… (oooh, look! Is that Jemima Khan?) ..a quite serious and scholarly book… (Pippa Middleton, it is, it is her! Mind you, I hardly recognised her sitting down. That face doesn’t match that arse, I can tell you) ..about something very important that you’re trying to concentrate on… (You know, I heard Beyonce was coming today, but I can’t see her. Unless…who’s that sour-faced girl behind the over-sized sunglasses? Is she off Made In Chelsea? Oh, this is so exciting!) ..but someone keeps shoving OK! in front of your face and squeaking like a hamster in a centrifuge?

Oh, hi, Wimbledon. Sorry the actual tennis got in the way  of your endless parade of soap actors and minor royalty moving their heads about.

That’s just three. I haven’t even touched on the annoying Union Jack-face painted and prosecco-pissed braying women on Murray Mound, jackanapes who think saying “Come on, Tim!” is still funny, and that Wimbledon causes the unforgivable removal from Doctors from the daily schedule.

Basically, it’s so egregious, only the most egregious puns will do. So I say unto you - Wimbledon: new balls to it.
- Julia Blyth