LUV & HAT

LUV - Gord bless whoever invented Twitter hashtags.

Sure, they’ve become an indicator of unmerited smugness in that some people will append “#win” to tweets about having successfully cooked their own dinner, as if providing for themselves past the age of 18 is actually an achievement worth trumpeting. And yes, whinges about public transport/weather/colds will often come accompanied with a mimsy little “#fail”, as if the sentiment of the missive itself isn’t a clear enough indicator that the tweeter in question has fallen into the habit of utilising social media exclusively to document all the dreary inconveniences they encounter (and tacitly assumes that someone, somewhere is actually clicking on these moantags to get an update on all the worldwide bellyaching being spewed into the digisphere).

But listen. If you’re using something like Tweetdeck, the filter function, combined with hashtags about things that make you want to hammer a nail directly through your cornea into your cranium (but which frustratingly come from people you don’t want to/don’t feel you can unfollow), allows you to remove all these nagging annoyances toot sweet.

Let’s say you’re following a web maven who can’t not update the world about every sentence uttered at the “event” he’s attending. You simply filter “#DouchewadBlowhardFest2011” and, jusslikethat, you need endure no more opining on how Gumpr’s changing of their location-based app’s sharing settings is “a game changer”. Bliss.

Ooh, speaking of which – praise Yahweh for the fact that Sundays tend to see a breakout of Sunday lunch-related updates tagged with “#bliss”. Filtering “#bliss” is a terrific way to bypass all manner of smugageddons, such as: drinking in a beer garden with good friends on a sunny day; snuggling up on the couch with one’s beloved; eating a nice piece of cake. What I’m saying here is: up yours with your friends, and your drinks, and your cake. #Up. #Yours.

Wh?? You think I’m jealous because I wasn’t invited and I never get to see the sun or have a drink with people or eat nice cake or do snuggles, and I instead sit in a darkened room in an increasingly filthy onesie leisure suit of a weekend, watching Hollyoaks from dawn to dusk? It’s funny that you think that. It is.

And the hashtag situation just keeps getting better. Now that TV shows have started telling you what hashtags to use when complaining about the programme you’re watching (what does it say about you that you continue to watch the item in question while talking about how shit it is? That’s a topic for another day), you basically just need to create a list of filters based on ITV’s entire programming schedule to ensure that your precious eyes are never again offended by the 140-character mind-dribbles of those who tune in.

Yes, in case you were wondering, my feed is entirely empty because I’ve filtered everyone out. Everyone. Twitter is now my online isolation chamber, and it’s #bliss.
- Stuart Waterman

HAT - If you like hashtags, there’s a very good chance that your Linkedin profile is full of sphincter-wringing buzzwords like ‘community manager’ and ‘web content strategist’. Your Twitter bio probably says that you’re passionate about SEO. When you talk, it’s likely that everyone around you begins to glaze over as they quietly fantasise about pushing you into some sort of acid bath. If you like hashtags, then basically you’re the world’s worst kind of abruptly hopeless arsehole.

The point of hashtags is - or at least was - so you can read everything that everyone on Twitter has to say about a particular subject. So, for instance, click on #Leveson and you’ll theoretically be able to get a snap take on what people make of the phone hacking inquiry at any given point in time. But that’s not quite how it works any more. Now hashtags have almost exclusively become the realm of people I violently dislike. Here are some of the hashtags I hate most:

1 - TV hashtags
I don’t mean organically-occurring hashtags here. I’m all for people becoming so enraged by MasterChef that they leap onto Twitter and bellow “Fond-UNT. It’s pronounced Fond-UNT, Gregg, you inconsolable bellend #MasterChef” because that’s funny. But when TV shows make up their own clumsy hashtags, and then jizz them across the bottom of the screen during its broadcast, expecting people to use them, it makes my soul cry.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe people do like starting tweets with #BBC2011PanoramaSpecialReportWithJohnHumphriesBBC. What do I fucking know, eh?

2 - Celebration hashtags
There are three levels of evil when it comes to marking personal celebrations on Twitter. The first is simply telling people that it’s your birthday or wedding day because - let’s be serious - you’re just some tool off the internet and I don’t know you, let alone care about whether it’s your fucking birthday or not. After that comes linking to some sort of online wishlist, which instantly singles you out as a horrible grasping dickhead. And third, most evil of all, is creating your own hashtag to allow others to join in with your personal joy.

You write #Jenniferis24, I read #Jenniferdeservestodieinafire. And I’m right.

3 - #Justsaying
The fastest way to look like a borderline-inbred Jeremy Kyle subject in all of the internet.

4 - All trending hashtags ever
Never look at the trending subjects on Twitter if you’re in any way feeling even slightly good about the universe. They’re all invariably racist (#ThingsBlackPeopleDo), sexist (#WomenWhoDon’tCook), a combination of the two (#HowWhiteGirlsKiss) or a miserable request to change one word of a songtitle to ‘Pantyliners’. They could replace all of the trending subjects on Twitter with a sign reading ‘Most people are legitimately dreadful’ and nobody would ever notice.

5 - #Nom
I fucking hate you.
- 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 - (To the tune of “Here We Go”)

Ha-ri-bo
Ha-ri-bo
Ha-ri-bo,
Ha-ri-bo
Ha-ri-bo
Ha-ri-BO-OH,
Ha-ri-bo
Ha-ri-bo
Ha-ri-bo,
Ha-ri-BO-OH,
HA-RI-BO*.

I love Haribo, in all its sugary, gnashy-toothed, cloying mainland European glory. Yes, I know that it’s made of the hooves and anal glands of pigs and cows, and I’m all right with that. That’s part of the fun, surely? I like the fact that we’re using up all of an animal, and not only serving up the best bits as gourmet burgers while shovelling the offcuts into Scotch eggs and landfill. 

Plus it sort of harkens back to olden times, when tribespeople would roast a triceratops but throw the spiky bits into the tar pit for the kids to play with, and fashion the ribcage into some sort of primitive lute. Triceratops had ribcages, right? Only I want to be as historically accurate as possible here.

And why are people so down on E numbers? Who have E numbers ever hurt? Apart from that kid who turned orange from too much Sunny Delight, of course, and all those children with ADD, and me, whose throat swells up if I eat anything with E110 in it which is - by the way - fucking everything.

But not Haribo. 

Like Franz Ferdinand, I like the dark of the matinee. Because it means I can reach into my personal ideal-for-sharing bag of jellies knowing that the very worst that can happen is that I get one of those fried eggs and it yanks out one of my fillings. But what I’m hoping for is a fizzy cherry. 

Oh, the fizzy cherry. That initial sparkle on the tongue, then the purply thrill of the cherry syrup, and finally the two broiling together in a glorious gummy implosion like a neutron star collapsing in on itself. A neutron star made of cows’ bumholes and E numbers. Oh my days, I could live on Haribo fizzy cherries. And do.

Things I don’t love about Haribo: 

1. The adverts. Firstly, that cartoon baby with the pudding bowl haircut and dungarees has a touch of the Joseph Fritzl basement dungeon about him, and any kid with a spiky haircut that hands out Tangfastics during any wedding photographs I’m in is going to get a smack. And no Tangastics.

2. Actually, any Haribos that aren’t Tangfastics. Really, Haribo, WATDAPOINT? They’re a bit sweet, and then they’re glue, and then they’re gone. That’s almost not even worth developing type 2 diabetes for. Almost.

But, you know. If you’re offering…

*You must forgive this self-indulgence. You see, I have just had some Haribo.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - I’m not going to say there isn’t a place in the world for Haribo, but I am going to say that that place is near a school sandpit, or within close proximity to some sticklebricks, or at a child’s birthday party. The place for Haribo is not a space populated by actual grown-ups, such as an office.

There’s a reason this stuff is marketed at kids, you know. And that reason is that you can’t handle the Haribo.

You think you can. You think that since you became too old to go clubbing, naughty additive-packed confectionery is a cheap way of picking yourself up after a soul-destroying evaluation by your pit-stained line manager. So you buy a packet of Haribo Jupiter Fruit Wangfasms, or Haribo Jumping Jelly Snakes, or Haribo Fizzing Zombie Anuses, and start stuffing them into your mouth, eagerly awaiting the glutinous rush.

And sure, for 15 minutes there ain’t nobody on the second floor who’s going to photocopy invoices more quickly than you. Your mind fairly effervesces away as the syrupy residue in your gob sinks into your gums and turns your arteries into pulsating conga lines of giggling blood cells. For a quarter of an hour you’re only able to communicate via the “NNGANNG NNGANNG” noises your mouth emits as your jaw convulses in dextrose-induced ecstasy, and in your fever you think they’re the most rewarding conversations you’ve had all week.

But wait. While scoffing the luminous blighters could get you through an afternoon of potato-printing when you were six, now your ageing system requires more to sustain it. And since the only other things you consumed today were three frothy, bloat-provoking lattes and a pot of vinegary leaves, your adult body soon objects.

Suddenly you’re leaning against the photocopier for support. Your head droops, and droops, and droops, until it’s resting on the lovely cool glass of the photocopier itself, and you’re printing out pictures of your own face as it erupts in angry, adolescent-level pustules.

You stagger to your desk, your blue tongue flicking urgently across the film that cakes your teeth; you can virtually feel the bacteria having an orgy on your molars, and the next person you speak to recoils from the stenchy blast of putrid rotting sugar that leaps from your maw. You can barely focus on your monitor because your eyes have gone a bit Kaa, so you figure you’ll just rest here a while, spacing out on a brutal Jupiter Fruit Wangfasm comedown.

But hold up. You can’t rest, because now the devastating starch, citric acid and glazing agent melange has started to batter your weather-beaten bowels. Wuh-woh. You crawl to the cubicle just in time to expel a boom of angry gelatinous bilge from your rear tube, barely-digested smiling Wangfasms staring eerily up at your shocked aperture, and the effort it takes for you not to weep eats through what remains of your body’s energy reserves. “That’s taught me,” you’re just about able to think. “Never again shall I fetishise toddlers’ treats so, for my grown-up, bill-paying, dry cleaner-frequenting body just can’t handle them.”

And you stay true to your word, until Angela uses your mug - and you’ve told her countless times it’s your mug - and forgets to give it back.
- Stuart Waterman 

LUV - I’m no expert on little girls - no matter what anyone says - but if you ask a five year-old what sort of pop star she wants to be, the chances are her answer will contain ideas no more ridiculous than some of those Lady Gaga has already brought to fruition.

“I want to wear a dress made of giblets and a hat made of fish and I want to play a piano in the air and perform inside a giant bath tub and hide in an egg and I want weird alien bones to stick out of my head,” she might ponder, as she works her way through a packet of Percy Pigs.

“Sorry,” you would be within your rights to reply, “but your childish imaginings are simply too hackneyed. La Garg has done all those already.”

You’d have to be a particularly mean-spirited ogre to actually crush her dreams so, but you’d have a point.

Because Lady Gaga, despite her poker face, is having one almighty giggle. Sure, she might dick around with religious imagery and claim to be representing The Gays, but essentially she’s like a kid at playtime.

OK, a kid who whose cock stilletos would probably lead to her parents being investigated by social services, but you get my point.

Lady Gaga inhabits the looks she creates so completely that when I think of her, I can barely picture her face. She’s the biggest pop star in the world, and I’m not sure what she actually looks like. That’s quite an achievement.

(I’m assuming I haven’t developed prosopagnosia, but if I pass you on the street and fail to recognise you I might just need to make a doctor’s appointment.)

The folk who bemoan Lady Gaga’s output as - NNNGGG - “not real music” are the same kind of boring bearded ball-scratchers who would have sneered at Madonna or Michael Jackson in the 80s. Don’t try and convert them, because when they come around they’ll only do so ironically. Leave them to their Kasabian B-sides, and watch their hairy souls rot from under-nourishment.

Not convinced? Snack on these points:

- Judas, from her new album Born This Way, has verses more scintillating than many choruses you’ll hear in 2011.

- Just Dance features Akon - and somehow, unlike 99% of the stuff he touches, manages not to be hateful shit.

- Telephone sees her duet with Beyonce - her only rival for Best Popstar In The Galaxy - and not be overshadowed.

- Please don’t forget that her songs contain bits that go “Rah-za-blah-blah-huzzah, BOO-BARR I’M GAGA.” (I don’t have the lyrics in front of me.)

- That giant bath? £52K. But imagine how clean she is.

To sum up: I would strongly urge you to embrace the little girl inside of you. She knows her shit.
- Stuart Waterman

HAT - In general, I approve of Lady Gaga. I mean, she’s a woman - so already she has that going for her; she’s original - blink and she’ll have broken the mould a-bloody-gain; she writes her own songs; she eats her own dress; she’s educated; she doesn’t care what anyone thinks, and she brought a sheep onto the Jonathan Ross show.

But there are three things that irk me about her. Three things that stop me from, say, paying for her music or watching any of her videos all the way through, or saying “IKNOWRIGHT” when someone gasps “eau my godd, like HOW farbulerz is the new song by La Garg?”

Thing number one: in my opinion, she doesn’t push the envelope enough. It’s her music that lets her down, I think. Sure, she’ll turn up at the VMAs dressed like a Knight who says “ni!” in lingerie, but what’s the point? What’s the point of dicking about in Marlboro Ray-Bans and generally looking like a banana in a wetsuit when you put out songs that sound like Boney M tracks fed through autotune? Lady Gaga should sound like sex robots, like frying bacon, like that blue opera alien from The Fifth Element - not like someone going “rumpy-pumpy-pum” into a kazoo.

Also, her lyrics. Again, Gaga should be singing about crazy, outré concepts like WAFFLES made of supernovas, about go-go dancing ON MARS, or about that existential angst you get a week before a bikini wax when it all becomes a bit unbearable, or other things that Peaches and Uffie have already sung about. Not about CARD GAMES and TELECOMMUNICATIONS DEVICES using lines that Ke$ha might sing were Ke$ha to have anything approaching morals.

Thing number two: in the video for Paparazzi, Lady Gaga kills - kills - Alexander Skarsgard. Wonderful Alexander Skarsgard! Beautiful Alexander Skarsgard who plays Eric the viking vampire in True Blood! Lady, there is just no coming back from something like that.

Thing number three: Lady Gaga inspired a Glee episode. For fully forty-five minutes those preening, tomato-faced self esteem-vampires strutted around in binliners with shoes on their heads and eyeshadow on their cheeks hooting out her songs, and that I cannot forgive.

Mind you, I couldn’t forgive most things that inspired a Glee episode. Alexander Skarsgard. World peace. Bunnies.

In summary, though, try harder, Gaga. Try harga. Oh, and I hate Glee.
- Robyn Wilder

LUV - I would not ordinarily entertain watching TV shows called things like “Humberside’s Knifiest Psychopaths”, or “London’s Tastiest Firms”, but my odd fascination with Danny Dyer means I basically have to. Here he comes with his cockney waddle, collar upturned on his garm, muttering about how some naughty murderer once frew a nonce’s nut frew a windah.

“And nah,” he intones grimly, leaning into the camera, “oi’m abaht ta spend a week seein’ hah the East Soid Terrace Crew go abaht cantin’ veir enemies.”

What follows is invariably Daniel getting up close and personal with pwoper, claret-spilling geezahs. At first you think he’s going to try and identify with them, and trade stories based on his favourite headbutts. But to his credit he usually ends up, however sycophantically he sucks up to them, getting punched in the head or failing miserably to keep up with their punishing training regimes. This pleases people who hate him and fantasise about seeing him punched in the head, but also those who see him as an everyman sort just trying to earn a pahnd note.

Lots of people profess to loathe Danny Dyer, but that that surely involves taking his wide-boy persona seriously. And how can you? In films he essentially plays the same part every time, which tends to require him to:

• waddle
• drink lager
• muller people and/or get mullered himself
• say “swoight as” several times
• shout “YOU CANT”.

And he is great at swearing. You get the impression that as he emerged from his mum’s vaginal canal, he started wailing briefly before swiftly learning how to emit curses from his placenta-smeared lips: “WAHHH, MAM, YOU PUSHED ME AHT YER CANT, YOU CANT! WAHHH!”

At show and tell at school, I fancy the six year-old Danny would entertain his classmates with tales of how, over the weekend, his Han Solo figure boshed his Lando Calrissian figure for being a lying cant. And as he lies on his deathbed, years hence, I imagine Danny will look back on his successful Eastenders career (oh, it’s going to happen, just you wait) and whisper, “That fackin’ Janus was a roight sort. Anus more like, know wot oi mean, san?” Then he’ll wink his final wink, before becoming brahn bread.

Sure, he’s the kind of guy who would sit with legs wide open on the tube. And yes, he probably talks with his mouth full and belches after every mouthful. And we know he accepts money to put his name to ever-so-slightly offensive magazine columns before claiming no knowledge of their content. But he’s also the type of bloke who would secretly cry at Babe, and help your Gran across the road. So give the cant a break, you CANT.
- Stuart Waterman 

HAT - Nah, I don’t buy it.

I mean, on the small screen he might be all wide trousers and hair gel and “WODGE IT YOU MUPPETS OI’M DANNOY DOYAH” but I bet you anything that, as soon as the cameras stop rolling, young Daniel collapses in a flop-sweat, exclaiming “AY my god, I’m like, TAYTALLY bushed”, flaps at his face with a perfumed paper fan and calls for his smoking jacket, monocle and chai tea latte STAT.

I bet that, in his personal life, Danny Dyer listens to Dido, drinks Sleepy Tea of an evening, and uses words like “felicitous” and “yon”. My reasons for this are three:

1. HE IS NOT A HARD MAN
He’s just not. For a start, he’s only about three foot tall and quite plainly buys his clothes from Baby Gap. Also, he can’t grow a proper beard, and he’s cross eyed, which means he probably lacks the depth perception needed to make a fist, never mind land a punch. He was in Cadfael, for god’s sake. Fucking Cadfael, the show about twelfth century Benedictine monks. Can you see him squaring up in a hessian sack and Jesus boots, threatening to slash Derek Jacobi right up his Britney Spears*? No, me neither.

Also, on Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Dannies, or whatever it’s called, he interviews reformed crims about their dark deeds. Reformed crims, this is. Hard men gone soft and remorseful – and yet, every time one of them so much as looks at Danny Dyer he visibly gibbers with fear. “TEW ME BAHT WOT YOU DUN DEN”, he’ll ask one. “WEWW DANNOY,” the hard man will sigh, but Danny will already be up and out of his seat, backing away, crying “NAH MATE ISS OAROIGHT MATE I DUN WANNA START NUFFIN LESSLEAVE IT YEAH?”

And, if you needed further proof, Danny Dyer’s self-confessed arch nemesis is none other than the terrifying FILM CRITIC MARK KERMODE.

2. ALL TV COCKNEYS ARE REAL LIFE POSHOS
This is irrefutable. June Brown, TV’s Dot Cotton, is always wittering on about her theatre career. Pam St Clements - Pat off Eastenders – went to boarding school and is called Pam St Clements. If, in a forthcoming episode of Who Do You Think You Are, Danny Dyer doesn’t turn out to be landed gentry I’m a junkie’s carbuncle**.

3. NO ONE CAN BE *THAT* MUCH OF A JOHN McRIRICK***
Anyone who, in a national lads’ mag, advises a heartbroken reader to “cut your ex’s face, and then no one will want her” is trying too hard, because no one can honestly be that much of a douchebag.

Yeah, I’m on to you, Danny Dyer. You and your cravat.

*Ears
**Monkey’s unkle
***Dick
- Robyn Wilder

Illustration by Philip Martin, who sells rather good t-shirts on his online retail portal.

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 - As we know, poor Batman is forever doomed to try and atone for the grizzly sins of his grandfather, Count Dracula.

So, while gramps flew about piercing human beings as if they were walking Capri-Suns, Batman has evolved beyond such uncivilized appetites. He will eat what we eat (Haribo), drink what we drink (grape soda). And, as he foreswore his forebear’s lust for magic vein juice, so his innate flying powers dwindled until all that really distinguished him was the ability to talk in a gravelly voice and look extremely cool.

To assist him in this, Batman has always compensated for his lack of super powers by abracadbra-ing up a collection of enviable man-toys. Thanks to the millions left by his Grandpa Dracula (stolen when he drank 75% of the people in Prussia), he has unlimited resources from which he can fashion the kind of stuff Kanye West would blog about with his Caps Lock on turbo.

Caves, cars, capes, magic belts, a wardrobe full of (admittedly identical) slick black (bat)suits: Batman, unlike his style-free, primary colour-obsessed pals Superman and Spiderman, can accessorise for shit and then some. If a superhero was to appear in an advert for a masculine yet sensitive eau de toilette, Batman would be the first name on the ad agency’s list. It would be called something like “Knight Moves”, I fancy. Or “Wings Of The Knight”. Or “Get Down Toknight”. Or “Knight Knight, Sleep Tight”.

Because unlike actual bats, Batman has it “going on”. Sure, if you weren’t aware of him and were about to be set up on a blind date you’d think, “Ew! He squeaks, hangs upside down at night, creates shit mountains in a cave, has a fucked up little troll face and can’t see? What’s his five-year plan? To stop looking so rank?”

But if you were able to see beyond your shallow assumptions, you Colby, you’d find yourself embarking on an evening of dark, debonair sensuality (as long as he left Robin at home). Until, of course, the bat signal went up and he had to run off - but being dumped in this manner is still significantly more exciting than being second best for a man who answers his iPhone, looks down, puts his finger in the air and strides away chanting “Yep. Yep. Yep. Good-good. Yep. Yep.”

Yes, if there’s a superhero I want to pointlessly daydream about becoming when I should be contributing to a departmental brainstorm, it is Batman. Witness how early this obsession began, back when the world was made of brown, helped along by my Gran’s sewing skills:

And the rear view:

I don’t have a side-on shot to hand, but I can assure you it would pack similar amounts of KERBLOINK.

The cape doesn’t fit anymore (the mask might), but I have retained an aspiration to reach Batman’s style perfection to the current day. This is why I have attached concealed, easily activated blades in the forearms of all my shirts, and also the calves of my jeans. Don’t ever hug me.
- Stuart Waterman

HAT - The cool thing about superheroes is the way that they’re all aliens, or that they’ve been bitten by radioactive animals, or the way that, you know, they can fly and blow shit up with laserbeams that come out of their eyes and whatever.

Batman is none of these things. Batman isn’t a superhero AT ALL. He’s just some bloke. He’s just some bloke - admittedly a really rich bloke - who likes to dress up as an animal and punch things really hard. He’s rubbish.

Here’s how rubbish Batman is - if you skew his story by even a fraction of a degree, you know what you end up with? You end up with Richard Branson, dressed as a ferret, throwing pebbles at a shoplifter. Is that the sort of thing you’d really want to watch? Is it? IS IT? No it bloody isn’t.

Fair enough, if you want to blow your dead father’s millions on grappling hooks and ninja stars then that’s your choice, but do you have to be such a dick about it? Superman can disguise himself fairly well with nothing more than a pair of glasses, but Batman? No, he needs to pull himself into a full head-to-toe outfit, a mask with little ears on it, loads of mascara to apply underneath the mask and the sort of cape that a four-year-old would wear. It must take him hours to get ready whenever there’s a crime. It must be like living with a girl.

And that voice. Is there any real need for it? You already look like enough of a tit, but that isn’t enough, is it? You have to do your berserk impression of Phyllis from Coronation Street as well, don’t you? That’s why the criminal underworld is so scared of you, you know. It’s not because you can blend into the night or because you’re an omniscient symbol of justice - it’s because when you catch them and incomprehensibly growl “HHURRGHH RUOORGH HUGGGGH HURRRF!” into their faces, they all worry that they’ll catch a nasty case of streptococcal pharyngitis off you. You massive rubbery dick.

And Bat-Mite? You can fuck off as well.
- Stuart Heritage