LUV & HAT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LUV - Oh shut up. I already know that you don’t like the Olympics, and I already know why. “But all the corporate sponsors,” you keep whining into your sleeve. And “But it’ll be so hard to travel around central London”.

Fucking GOOD. Have you BEEN to central London lately? It’s DREADFUL. It’s noisy, it’s dirty, all the tube stations play a loop of Boris Johnson repeating the word ‘obey’ again and again and there are arseholes everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Arseholes in suits. Arseholes with food blogs. Arseholes who don’t know how ticket barriers work because they’ve never been to London before. Central London is horrible. If anything, central London should be harder to travel around. Ideally it should be sealed off, set on fire and drowned in the sea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was it a dream?

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

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

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

There’s nothing you can do.

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

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

LUV - Books can fuck off. Books have caused me no end of trouble. I have a wonky little toe from a bookcase collapsing on it last year AND I have a bruised nose from that time I dozed off while reading Infinite Jest in bed.

Books are fucking arseholes.

The trouble is, I love reading. One of my happiest childhood memories is of being plonked in the back seat of my mother’s car with a bag of Pom-Bears and a stack of Magic Faraway Tree books for an afternoon (yes it was sunny, yes my mother cracked a window, it was the 80s, don’t you dare judge her), and I believe I shared this particular book-based fantasy with you on a previous LUV & HAT:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a book.

It’s just a fucking book.

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

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