Feuerwehr - Fire Brigade

As there’s not a huge amount of hilarity related to burning stuff or the people paid to put burning stuff out, this time (a bit lamely, yes) I sought inspiration from Google. Beyond the default top results of almost any internet search (Wikipedia fascinating my face off with the precise military definition of the word ‘brigade’, and MySpace pointing me to the page of some soulless pap-metal act) I thankfully found a couple more comically viable options. When a website labelled simply ‘Girls Brigade’ appeared sixth on the list, the prospect of using something like ’fiery hot chicks’ and it not being overly tenuous got me quite excited. Expecting an Are You Over 18? banner to pop-up before entering a site dedicated to filthy army-clad (or unclad) ladies of the night, it was thoroughly gutting to discover that the Girls Brigade was in fact a Christian youth organisation. It was the downscaled web-based linguistic equivalent of Blue Balls Syndrome. A bit like unwrapping what you were certain was the Girls of The Playboy Mansion DVD on Christmas Day and finding sodding Bambi. Or a Famous Five triple feature. Anyway, unless you enjoy the music of Gary Glitter, there’s nothing remotely appealing about today’s youth, or in fact any demographic brought together by religion. The idea of a militarily-structured religious organisation makes me cringe, even if it is for kids. With their ranks and perceived god-serving, they’re basically Hamas. Minus the guns. Plus some rock climbing. And maybe a little canoeing. Still, based in the Middle East and substituting their motto of “Seek, Serve and Follow Christ” for “Seek, Serve and Follow Mohammed”, they’d have been bombed the fuck out of by NATO years ago. Actually, ragging on Christianity this time of year is like kicking someone when they’re down. Or more like stamping on their face until it looks like a Pound Stretcher Halloween mask. What with their most significant annual celebration being hijacked by several billion people who couldn’t give a shit about Jesus, wise men or donkeys. Unless they’re sharing a stage in Tijuana with a naked, oiled-up slut called Chantico. So no, the subject will instead be changed abruptly to inform you of an incredible site I stumbled across called Sprinkle Brigade. I say ‘incredible’ because I’ve matured to a point I where find the idea of decorating dog faeces in the street very funny indeed. Check it out. Now. The rest of this can wait.

That’s probably it for 2009. Another odd, stupendously fast year full of experiences great and not so great, but all allegedly character-building and all that shit. See ya’ll in 2010 - or possibly sooner if I get time for another entry…if so, prepare for a painful textually-awkward double-goodbye. Ta ta!

Übernachten - Stay Overnight

Yesterday I had to stay overnight at a mate’s place after drinking myself into an embarrassing babbling stupor, somehow reasoning it was a good idea to down a bottle of wine after the beer ran out. It really wasn’t. I recall very little of the wankered pre-passed-out stage, but remember repeating “Beer before wine, you’ll feel fine…what the fuck?” - much to the amusement of several onlookers. It was so confusing, I felt betrayed by the rhyme. How could something that rhymed be so wrong? To my monged brain, the adage suggested two or even three bottles sauvignon on top of the beer couldn’t touch me. This was just one! “But the rhyme… it said I’d be fine…” More laughter. Fade out. I woke up at 8am this morning on a couch, wrapped in a dubiously-stained duvet, with a well-positioned sick bucket on the floor next to my puke hole. Thankfully its services were not required. I needed to walk 2.7 miles (I Google-Mapped it) back home in order to leave for work a few hours later. With a throbbing headache, neither were especially fun prospects. But missing a shift would leave even less money to piss away on other Christmas and new year booze-ups. Unthinkable. Fortunately, about forty seconds from where I flog video games to spoilt, hateful children and chronically virginal males, there’s a KFC. The idea of binging on chicken quickly became an obsession, making the journey home a far less eventful version Harold and Kumar Get The Munchies. Although it was a bit exciting when the guy gave me an extra large chips for no reason. Anyway, it did the job, so I could do mine, despite feeling more spaced out than Jas Mann from Babylon Zoo.

It’s now 11pm and things are getting hazy again. Nausea has returned and draws its power from the scrolling text and blinking cursor. That means it’s time to wrap this piece up more clumsily than a blind, one-armed midget would a mountain bike, but not before mentioning it’s apparently “Beer after wine and you’ll feel fine.” So swapping them round next time absolutely guarantees a state of eternal fineness. One last thing: you’d do good to prepare for more boozer‘s-remorse drivel over the next couple of weeks. You’ve been warned.

Ansprüche - Requirements

The requirements for a New Zealand Working Holiday Visa differ vastly depending on the geographical location you happened to leave your mum’s lady parts. Or in some cases, the geographical location of a parent when they said goodbye to their intrauterine crib. Essentially if a couple of hundred years back your country was rich, had smart leaders, or, more likely ones that were massively belligerent tossers, you get a good deal. Otherwise you might as well not bother. Unless you’re loaded. For example, to live and work in New Zealand for up to twelve months, a Thai passport holder must have a minimum of $7000 in their account, as well as a return ticket or extra funds to purchase one; ‘have medical and comprehensive hospitalization insurance’ for the length of their stay, AND, amazingly have a university degree. Plus there’s only a hundred places available each year. A UK citizen, on the other hand, can get away with having a meagre $350 (about £150) for each month of the intended stay - even if that’s just available credit on a Mastercard. If you are short (on cash, not in stature), the ’intended stay’ for the sake of Immigration could be easily curtailed. Besides the same return ticket stipulation that’s about it. There’s no competition as the number of places is unlimited, and there’s the bonus option of extending it to 23 months if you like. So Britain’s thick and poor have a far better chance of getting approved than Thailand’s relative rich and educated.

It’s almost embarrassing to be so privileged because of something I had absolutely no control over. It’s the international travelling equivalent of being born into the royal family and enjoying a world of unearned benefits. We, the citizens of rich, western countries seemingly have the divine right to go wherever we want, whenever we please. Meanwhile surfs of the undeveloped world can sod right off. That’s unless they flash their cash upfront, because of course that proves their intentions are entirely wholesome.

I propose a new, more succinct set of requirements that don’t give a shit about where you or your parents are from, set funds or specific levels of education. In fact it’s simply two things that should be displayed in huge lettering above passport control: No Wankers and Don’t Take The Piss. Sorted.

Geschützt - Protected

It’s December. It’s 26 degrees centigrade. It’s summer in the southern hemisphere! While they’re freezing their nuts (and whatever the lady equivalent is) off back in England, I’m enjoying Auckland’s bright, ozone-hole-enhanced, skin-crispening sunshine. If you’re not adequately protected here you will, much like an unattended car on a Manchester council estate, burn inside ten minutes. While 26 degrees may not sound that hot, the sun here is so intense it feels way above 30. Sorry, thirty. No, actually 30. Mental note: a pointless internal argument is possibly the least novel of word count-extending methods. As is the transcription of ‘mental notes’. A more interesting mental note would be meeeeeelllllarph. Or a J on the major scale. But neither would be in any way related to today’s strained subject of sun protection, and so shouldn‘t make the edit. Mental note: remember to cut this paragraph before publication. Done.

I’ve always had some ability to place where people are from based on their looks. While this may sound prejudice and a bit racist, I assure you there’s no slurs or swastikas involved, so labelling me ignorant is the worst you could do. I don’t find determining between Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese and Filipino that hard. Likewise between Indians, Pakistanis and those of the generic Middle East to their west. Europeans are more difficult, but fortunately it’s made tons easier this time of year when all Scottish and Irish nationals are conveniently highlighted with an intense lobster-red sheen. Either they don’t wear sunscreen, or their skin is simply too translucent for it to work. I’m not exactly Mr Tan (and thankfully so - he was a strutting fuckwit in my year at school) but comparatively I’m almost skin-tonally Zimbabwean. And not the bludgeoned white farmer kind either. (Although they probably have quite good tans.) Now I’m not having a go - merely pointing out that the Scots and Irish in this country are living dangerously. Skin cancer kills more people annually in New Zealand than traffic accidents, depression, small children with guns, spaceships and Santa Claus. Combined. So for them, covering up is a must this summer, much the same as me ending this god-awful drivel at the next full stop. Or this one.

Befand - Found

I was shocked and disturbed last week when I found a lump. In my mashed potatoes. As a guy, besides in porridge or on your balls, there are few worse places you can unexpectedly discover a lump. One on your head, for example, would be an expected consequence of nutting a brick wall or Mike Tyson. You’d know it‘s on its way. Similarly, it’d come as no surprise to find Jerry Lumpe in a collection of 1950’s New York Yankees baseball cards, or the best-of album Lump in amongst the illegal downloads of any true Presidents of the United States of America fan. However, testicular cancer is no joke, unless of course the afflicted ball belongs to comedian. In that case the tumour is born of laughing stock and so is inherently at least a little bit funny - funnier still (for cathartic reasons) if it belongs to Dane Cook or Adam Sandler. As for porridge: it simply shouldn’t be lumpy. It comes in the form of dry, separated oats that’ll smoothly bind together provided there’s adequate milk, it’s stirred once in a while and you’re not a complete cretin. Lumps are therefore most unexpected and most unpleasant.

Now, with mash you are in complete control. If you’re happy doing a half-arsed job, you can reasonably anticipate the odd or (even) frequent lumpy bit. I, however, spend an average of five to ten minutes decimating my potatoes, not before adding an abundance of milk and Olivio spread. (If you’re wondering, New Zealanders voted a resounding NO! in last year’s Olivio to Bertolli referendum. An important victory indeed for the Keep New Zealand A 90’s Great Britain party.) This combination creates the lushest, creamiest, (non-sexual) goop you’ll ever taste. In my mash I believed there was zero possibility of any chunky bits slipping through to the dinner plate. Until last week. After the initial panic, I had decided to just ignore it. Keep it a secret - what harm could such a small lump do? Fear for loss of mashing reputation clouded my judgement and brought about a full-blown denial. But luckily, and inexplicably (as I’m running out of time) after a few days I came to my senses and sought professional advice. Within minutes, the reanimated corpse of Keith Floyd had some good news. Being soft and squishy, the lump turned out to be benign - apparently it’s the hard (undercooked) ones that can cause the serious problems. Phew. Bottom line: always check your mash, and food-based cancer parodies aren’t funny.

Eigene - Own

I arrived in Auckland two months ago with three bags: a small to medium-sized Berghaus backpack, an average-sized Columbia rucksack, and a Cole’s supermarket plastic carrier containing a half-eaten, full-sized foot-long sandwich. The contents of the latter had to be scoffed down within minutes of landing before New Zealand’s bio-security agents busted me. I envisaged them slapping on the cuffs and renditioning me to Morocco for some ugly snack-based questioning. They couldn’t give a shit about an impending anthrax attack, but if you’re bringing in plant matter - even in the form of salad leaves - you’d better watch your back. You should see the Kiwi version of 24 where Jeck Biwwer (my worst ever textual interpretation of the local accent) spends the day chasing a French tourist who didn’t declare his recent hiking in Switzerland! Nightmare! Jeck soon catches up with him, but only after snapping his neck like a rustic baguette does he find the tainted boots are gone! And so on. Grippingly convoluted stuff. Anyway, to get back on point, everything I had this side of the planet was inside those three bags, approximately 18kgs in total. That’s maybe three stones. Or forty-two pounds. Or three hundred spazloobs. Now after almost nine weeks and feeling relatively settled here, I’ve begun to build up a collection of stuff that’ll almost certainly have to be ditched in ten months when my visa‘s up. A speaker system for my iPod, a printer, books, DVDs, clothes and of course my amazing Egyptian cotton bedding with 500 threads per 10cm squared. It’s sad to think an increasing amount of the stuff I own is destined to part company in less than a year. It’s like a lonely soul buying a terminally ill Labrador retriever. Up to its death/my departure, it/the things will make life a lot more bearable, the joys and comfort brought hopefully exceeding the inevitable sadness and sorrow of saying goodbye. Especially to those Egyptian cotton sheets. Jesus, (it is December so it’s far less blasphemous) nothing can rescue this piece from the shroud of doggy-death downer I just evoked. More depressing still is that god awful (Christmas - not blasphemous) Owen Wilson film Marley and Me is now lodged firmly in my immediate conscious. But I’ve ranted to death about that previously (Mit Dem Schwanz Wedeln - 28/4/09) so will instead simply do the happy dance. Along with plotting when, where and how.

Geltenden - Valid

Forgetting to validate your Oyster card on London’s transport network will cost you an arm and a leg. At the current arm/leg mid-market rate, £4 is approximately one baboon forearm and a fluffy kitten’s femur. So if you care in the slightest about animal welfare, you’ll do good to remember. Such a high tech system - the Oyster fare card, not the creature limb-based fining - is vastly removed from what happens aboard Auckland’s trains and busses. To use a needlessly porn-based comparison, it’s the crude, primitive whacks-works of Victorian times vs. the imminent six-dimensional hyper-sexploitation flicks of the 2100’s. My (often flawed, if I’m honest) logic dictates the more automated a ticketing system, the less staff are required, thus making the fares sort of cheaper. So you’d think that by having an average of three ticket agents on every single suburban train in Auckland, it’d make getting anywhere more expensive than a cashmere sweater where the wool’s been substituted for actual cash, merely for a terrible pun. Not the case! Like the direction of draining water swirling around local plugholes, so many things are backwards here it can get quite confusing. A twenty-minute train journey from my suburb of Morningside costs $2.80, but if I walk ten minutes up the road to the next station, the price is halved. At the current Pound/NZ Dollar mid-market rate, $1.40 is approximately 61p. It feels wrong to be paying so little for what would be over an hour’s walk and cost about four times as much in England. There’s no machines to buy your tickets in advance, so they have to be bought - cash only - onboard. They’re torn out of a book, then hole-punched; a system the Victorians would at best have considered technologically average. How exactly they manage to keep their army of ticket inspectors employed with such an inefficient system is mystifying. Also, they’re somehow able to afford several Dyson Airblade hand dryers in the toilets at Britomart, the city’s main station. These the same toilets in which they’re expecting visits from intravenous drug users - this evident through all the entrancing ultraviolet lighting. I couldn’t help but think were I a desperate thieving junkie, dangling a $1500 Airblade in my face would be asking for trouble. Especially when I couldn’t help but think were I a desperate clean-freak nutter offered a freshly wall-ripped Airblade for $300 outside the station, I’d definitely take it.

So really for none of this I have cause for complaint: valid tickets for next to nothing and the chance of scoring a state-of-the-art, hospital-grade HEPA filter-housing hand-drying revolution for a bargain basement price. I’ll take that over a bleedin’ Oyster card any day.

Notbetrieb - Emergency Operation

Only once have I ever played Hasbro’s Operation in an emergency. A made-up friend at university one day banged on my door like a genuine mental, screaming that if I didn’t play with him he’d wrench out the tweezers and force them inside the next diminutive plastic person he saw. Unfortunately, a dwarf with fake tits called Carrie lived across the way, so I couldn’t in good conscience ignore him. Just in case. Okay, so I’ve never played Operation, but I’ve always loved board games. Ever the bastard little kid, I remember blubbing my eyes out in Toys R Us when my mum wouldn’t buy me Mouse Trap - instead (heartlessly) choosing to spend money on my brother’s birthday present. Of course she caved and cretinous little me got the goods anyway. I was a real shit, but had a game of zany action on a crazy contraption, so didn’t really care. My non-made-up friends at university were obsessed with Risk, and we’d routinely play till the wee hours, getting drunk and flippantly sending wave after wave of plastic triangles to their poorly-rolled-dice-determined deaths. When we weren’t killing thousands of people in a needless global power struggle, we’d enjoy similarly lengthy nights cheating each other out of ill-gotten gains on the London property market playing Monopoly. So essentially our evenings were spent learning that destroying lives physically and financially was not only fun, but necessary. It’s the western way - I’d hope for nothing less. Or more. This paragraph’s all too convoluted to tell.

Recently, however, I’ve hit a board game dry spell. The last time I remember was playing the deeply confusing Seattle version of Monopoly with a toff English twit called Tom and two girls from Orange County who had, somewhat ironically for girls from the land of massive houses, no interest in property. Once all the title deeds were sold, nobody had a complete set and nor did anyone else want to trade anything. This resulted in a meaningless hour spent swapping pittances for landing on each other’s undeveloped inner city greenbelts sites before the girls got distracted by hair, makeup and other sexist stereotypes.

Anyway, I’m thoroughly out of time and this piece has nowhere else to go. I’ve bored (ha!) myself silly and so risk (ha!) needing an emergency operation (ha!) to remove the chronic pun-secreting gland from my brain. Monopoly. Urgh.

Verstärken - Strengthened

Well here I am once again: sat in front of my keyboard, staring at a randomly selected German word and a blinking cursor. After three and a half months without an entry, it’s high time I strengthened my linguistic resolve and devised a less blatant way to shoehorn in today’s word. Another day at work spent with a thousand chronically thick customers irritating my face off (more irritatingly than Nick Cage in Face Off) finally forced me into action. I felt compelled to acquire a German to English dictionary, reasoning it’d help me release some of my frustrations textually before they manifested themselves in a far uglier, but likely far funnier way. While drawing cocks on computer screens or being sick on a plasma telly might not be as extreme or cool as a bloody workplace massacre, it’d still end up costing me money and friends I don’t have. Outputting even a smidgen of cynicism here through the telling of events bearing no relevance to the given German word should help keep that Samsung 42” puke-free a few extra days anyway. So after work I sped over to the languages section of the nearest bookshop, and some frantic searching later relaxed as I found my prize. The only one they had. Phew! Unfortunately though when I spied the $30 price tag, my dictionary-purchase-urge was killed faster than an outed paedo on a Leeds council estate. Fifteen quid for something I could get for three back home. And to clarify, that‘s the number three, not a lispy textprunciation of free. And that doesn’t even make sense, but I like the term textprunciation so much it’s guaranteed to survive the edit. So there. Anyway, not wanting to shell out good money that could have been given to charity, (but ninety-nine [plus one] percent more likely given to the supermarket for booze and cookies) some improvisation was required. I decided to (firstly construct this awfully clunky sentence, but then) head to German Google, click on news, load the top story, and with closed eyes arbitrarily jab the screen to find my word. The only problem was the first time I got ‘Karzai‘, the second ‘Afghanistan‘, the third ‘Karzai’ again. While it’d have been terribly easy to write a piece comprising of hee-larious Helmand Province/Helmann’s Mayonnaise puns and quips about dead soldiers, it wouldn’t have felt right. Thankfully, fourth time lucky threw up a word that strengthened my linguistic resol… no, that’s just awful. I’ll keep trying. Bear with me.

That’s the story so far. Hopefully this entry will serve as a half-solid foundation onto which a flurry of new, largely meaningless writings based on random words can settle. It’s almost possible that the ailing health of this blog could be bolstered, or, sigh, even strengthened by these new Antipodean ramblings. We’ll see. And that’s the best I can do. Pretty weak, huh?

Kommilitone - Fellow Student

I’m so glad I went to university when I did. Seeing so many students around town, on the streets (walking, not so much in a prostitution capacity) and in my workplace, I’m truly grateful I wasn’t stuck living and studying with their kind. Almost all the guys prance around with their ultra-stylish, perfectly messy haircuts, clad in their ridiculous sixty-quid (cun)T-shirts, while their middle-England accents fail to mask their general thick-twatedness. I’ve overheard the most retarded of arguments between two parties, both clearly wrong from the outset, finally agree on an even more wrong common ground. Like most universities, UEA flogs department-branded hoodies, so you can, as I have, snicker loudly as a group of politics students fight over… actually all examples I’ve since typed and deleted were even less funny than Dane Cook, so I’ll simply say they were very stupid indeed.

While the guys seem a million times more irritating than they were in 2001, a much higher proportion of female students are looking dangerously vacant. Of course being a flagrant misogynist, I’m not against the idea of pretty girls learning stuff, but so many look and sound incapable of opening a packet of Farley’s Rusks, let alone shaking a baby and getting away with it. (It is possible the popular child care course syllabus has changed since I last constructed a topical joke about it, so apologies if the previous non-gag isn’t relevant anymore.) So the main point is if these girls were any more vacant, they’d be condemned and boarded up by the council for our safety. (I’ll add, in the spirit of parenthesis-bound real-time commentary that the previous sentence seemed the only way of shoe-horning in that non-joke - attempting to liken vacuous girls to empty properties. So apologies if it didn‘t seem forced.)

Anyway, unfairly ripping on today’s youthful idiots is just further proof that your own academic year is always the best there is. The preceding year groups are full of whinging moaners, constantly complaining they had it tougher without the Internet, Ipods and Hollyoaks, while the young’uns have it so much bloody easier with their faster Internet, better Ipods and Hollyoaks in HD. Oh, and jealously has nothing to do with it - it’s just they’re all bastards for being under twenty and having a real excuse for not having a proper job.

Vor|haben - To Plan

As I’ve only got about five more weeks to plan my departure from life here in Colman’s Mustard-Land (Norwich), you’d think I might try to use that as an excuse for the obvious recent drop off in these entries. And actually I did try for the first five minutes of writing, but it far too accurately portrayed me as a whiny, responsibility-shirking dickhead - totally unbefitting of someone running off to New Zealand for a year. Or two. Looking back at the archive, in previous months I’ve churned out up to thirty pieces, while I managed just four this
May, three in June, and a dismal two in July. On that form, this should be August’s only post. Why? Well the apparent laziness is one of the driving forces behind my exit from Norfolk - I’ve done tons more writing while travelling, and that’s the stuff that, unlike this compendium of triviality, can be sort-of relevant to other people. As much as I love writing pointless bollocks, I understand there’s not a gigantic market for it. Or even a small one. Not that I’m seeking to make a ton of money - just enough to feed, clothe, shelter and frequently inebriate myself. Integrating elements of random bollocks into a reasonably solid travel-narrative seems to be my best bet in the I dunno-term. Where I am right now is making me want to write less and less, which is genuinely scary for me. So, in order to stem any further decline in drive and (sort-of) creativity, I took the decision to give up my income, home and most of my worldly possessions in order to bugger off to the other side of the planet. I’ve been (quite foolishly) approved to work by Immigration New Zealand, so almost any job is a option. Except sales and marketing or surrogacy. Of course something writing-based would be great, but I’m not naïve enough to think it’d be easy to land anything like that. I’ll just see where opportunity takes me, all the while producing as much textual, and as little booze-based output as possible. Maybe that’s somewhere close to an acceptable explanation, if not, tough. I’m out of time and must hurry along with my vital leaving-prep procrastination. See you next month!

Eisenbahn - Railway

Everyone complains about Britain’s trains. They’re never on time. They’re far too expensive. They’re far too crowded. Too hot. Too cold. Too smelly. Noisy, dirty, slow. Full of gays, foreigners and paedos. I should mention that these made-up opinions were gathered outside my local National Front disco, so the margin of bigot-error may be a little above average. I feel it’s my duty (or rather what I‘ve been made to do by default for lack of any other ideas) to rebuke each of these gripes one by one. Or maybe two by one, but certainly not three by two.
So never on time, eh? I blame these people’s watches. They’ve probably just all broken. Next, too expensive? Well if you’re a chump and choose to travel during commuter hours, of course it’s gonna be a couple of hundred thousand per journey. If you have to get to work in a morning and the train is your only option, just call in sick. That or walk. Or even get a cheaper ticket to a different destination. A return ticket from Norwich to Great Yarmouth during peak times only costs £7.80, while Norwich to London is a whopping £82! Why bother working for that poncy law firm when you could be sipping icy margaritas in a deprived coast town? Now, too crowded. The easiest solution would be to buy more tickets. If you’re a moaning space-whore who really cares that much, book out an entire carriage or shut your face. Too hot? Get naked. If you’re worried about sex pests perving their load off, just start murmuring mental-sounding gibberish about your love for rice cookers, cactuses (or cacti) and chomping off cocks. Too cold? Everyone knows the first thing to pack before a train journey is kindling and firewood. If you’re feeling chilly between Norwich and Cromer, getting a small blaze on the go is a basic human right. Exercise it! Too smelly? Making an equally bad smell will cancel out the original one - so stuff your face with pickled eggs, chilli and beans the night before to freshen the air instead of bitching about it. Noisy? Well people just suck, and you can’t blame National Express for that. Even in the quiet coach they’ll shout into their phones about those untapped markets, target demographics, and who got bummed on Big Brother the previous night - you just have to grin and bear it. Or murder everyone onboard operating above twenty decibels. But then that could get tedious five days a week, even if you are partial to a bit of inconsiderate prick-slaying. Another option would be to simply contribute to fuck-irritating sound mix with your own banging Ipod tunes, but of course you’d be running the risk of being caught in someone else’s bloody noise-rage massacre. Dirtiness is next to slowliness, which both have a simple, wordcount-saving solution: drugs. Finally, those troublesome gays, foreigners and paedos. Personally, and rather boringly, I don’t feel in the least bit threatened by homosexuals or immigrants, and as for the naughty men, I’m secure enough in my own age to not give the slightest of shits.

An|weisen - To Instruct

I’m possibly the worst person to instruct anyone in doing pretty much anything. If I had a special power, it’d be Super-Inept Verbal Communication, with a minor in unjustified mid-sentence first-letter capitalisation. I find it difficult to explain anything, from that hilarious exchange with a Peter Sutcliffe look-alike in Tesco Metro, to the plot of that really clever Jonathan Creek episode where the killer time-shifted his murder by cuing up a CD recording of a struggle taking place to play two hours later, but somehow (Mr Creek deduces precisely why when she answers “yes” to the “Do you buy your fish food at the market?” question) an old woman hears the CD in her sleep the night before the offing and convinces herself she can see the future. If that made any sort of sense textually, then hooray! But to get a feel for my spoken-word account, just divide that written comprehension factor by about thirty two. Then down eight pints of Best and a bottle of Cilit Bang. I’m not kidding. Well maybe a little - I am aiming for slightly funny after all. So don’t try drinking Cilit Bang - instead ask yourself, What Would Barry Scott Do? and you’ll be fine, if not still very drunk and confused. So anyway, getting back on tenuous point, even the simplest of descriptive or explanatory things I struggle to get out, like a fat kid from a swimming pool. I’ll open my mouth to comment on a situation without thinking of the inarticulate mess that’ll inevitably follow. After committing to a story I shit myself and usually look for an easy out, like “Actually it’s really uninteresting,” or “Look out! There’s a massive fucking spider!” This works less effectively when there are no spiders or I’ve introduced it enthusiastically by saying “Oooh! An even more crazy thing happened to me this time…” Balls. A Chronologically muddled and disordered heap of monologued turd almost always results, casting an awkward silence someone will invariably break with talk of last night’s TV or girls with big tits.

So (and I’m getting closer to the point of this piece than ever before), when it came to showing the newbie projectionist at work our basic operational procedures and explaining why we do certain things, I felt the same uneasy awkwardness I get with any public speaking. Even though I was talking about a subject I knew very well, I sounded like a bumbling, incompetent idiot. Boohoo. Super-Inept Verbal Communication with a minor in unjustified mid-sentence first-letter capitalisation really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Now, as I’ve reached a particularly sorry and depressing conclusion, there’s clearly no way of ending this entry on an even slightly funny note. Instead I’ll simply say Tits To It All and be done with it.

Während - During

During these tough economic times, it’s important to be incessantly reminded quite how tough these economic times are. Constantly. They’re tough. They’re economic. It‘s economic toughness gone mad! On a scale of one to old boots, it’s a Lidl mutton steak prepared by chimps. Special chimps in special motorised chimp chairs. Actually, that’s probably less tough, more a day round Mary Chipperfield’s house. But hilarious images of animal cruelty aside, these tough economic times have had practically zero perceivable impact on my life (Sooft - 7/10/08 is still quite relevant) - in fact I’ve disposed of more disposable income in the last twelve months than ever before. Well done Andy! You’re helping the UK through these tough economic times with your reckless spending! Well, not quite - most of it has ended up in the hands of foreigners. Before you get all judgemental, I‘ve not been on a trafficked prostitute binge, no! It’s mostly been blown travelling, notching up a healthy carbon footprint with thirteen flights taken in a single six-month period. Ooops. Sorry environment. But contributions to climate change aside, it is a global economic crisis, so spreading my cash across borders can’t be considered that irresponsible, can it? In this country, these tough economic times aren’t nearly so bad as those of Latvia or Mexico, so injecting some foreign currency into their systems can’t be a bad thing. Even if it is just a few nights, a few meals and a (good) few beers, it all helps. Mostly though I think I’ve aided Chinese finances by splashing out on tons of place-branded tat they always seem to have manufactured. Decorative wooden spoon from Tallinn, Estonia - China. Lithuanian flag from Vilnius, Lithuania - China. Novelty Seattle crab from Seattle, USA - China. Fridge magnet from Cromer, north Norfolk - China. I really hope that in the markets of Beijing, alongside the vegetables and tiger penises, they’re selling “I Luv da Great Wall” T-shirts made in Bradford. Or maybe a range of Terracotta Army figurines lovingly hand-crafted in Diss. Think of the people in this country they’d be helping during these tough economic times! It’s about time both the Chinese gave something back, and I abruptly ended this piece without explaining why.

Bereiten - To Prepare

Although I’ve had a good few months to prepare for my impeding homelessness, I still haven’t got anything sorted - and my lease is up in less than two weeks. Piss artistry is one of my strengths, but this is extreme even for me. It’s tough looking for a place by yourself. A flat on your own is out of the question, unless you want to spend most of your wages (if you work in a cinema) on rent and bills. So some kind of house or flat-share is the only sensible option, but finding a place as a single guy isn’t that easy. Girls want other girls to live with so they can do each other’s hair and not get raped, while guys want girls to live with because there’s a slim chance of accidentally-on-purpose seeing them naked. That’s what I read on the internet anyway. But seriously, looking at online room ads, most of the decent-looking places state ‘females preferred’ or (not seriously at all) ‘blokes: piss off’. The rest are either situated in the most ghetto of areas or look like they belong to guests of the Jeremy Kyle show. It’s amazing that for an advert picture the owners don’t even pretend their home isn’t hovel. You’d spend five or ten minutes making it look a bit less council-house sheik if only for the purposes of the photo. They should at least invest in a piece of Ikea furniture and a decorative fruit bowl. Adding to the background a cardboard cut-out of an Aga adorned with flowers and James Morrison albums would show such utter and irresistible class, they’d be beating potential tenants away with a baseball bat and their barely-legal cross-bred terrier. Okay, so not all the places that accept guys look that awful, but the others are almost always populated with the morbidly middle-aged. It’d be like living with my mum again but without the cooked meals and cups of coffee every eight minutes. Moving in with anyone over 40 who isn’t related would just feel weird. But then with eleven days to go it might end up happening anyway. Stuck in a house with a 10pm curfew and a constant Spandau Ballet/Status Quo soundtrack would be hell. That verses a box outside the train station with fleas and a bag of glue is a contest simply too close to call.

Mittwoch Morgan - Wednesday Morning

Check your calendars, I‘m not lying! It is, most aptly, an actual, genuine, bona fide, non-made-up Wednesday morning. Oversleeping as usual, a bleary-eyed me turned on the TV around 10:30 to see the usual selection of daytime turd across the four and a half channels my aerial deems worthy of Andy viewing. Channel Five is mostly static, like a freak snowstorm has blown into the studio, invisible and undetectable by Matthew Wright’s Wright Stuff panel, audience and crew. A bit like a cruddy horror film where everyone else is carrying on as normal, oblivious to the dangerous stab-crazy mental who’s right bloody there. I felt like calling in saying “Get out! You’re all going to die! Hypothermia‘s a silent killer!” But no doubt before I got that last bit out they’d have evacuated the building, rounded up any suspicious people nearby (read: non-white), and called Sky News so they can scare the shit out of the entire country with talk of hyper-mega-terrorism. Within seconds they’d be smashing through my window to treat me to a lovely piece of 45-days-without-charge detention. All because the digital signal to my TV is so diluted I constantly get the psychedelic multicoloured squares with stuttering bits of speech more suited to an early Cronenberg flick than The Jeremy Kyle Show. So the trusty analogue signal has to suffice, causing the constant blizzards on Five, meanwhile sending the other four channels back to the late 80’s, creating an odd futuristic-past feel - al la The Matrix - as grainy presenters talk about high-speed broadband and super-hi-def TVs. Instead of watching BBC News by default, these days I end up catching a medley of Homes Under the Hammer, This Morning, and Loose Women, the latter featuring less eye-candy, more eye-cancer as host and panel guests alike are routinely ugly and annoying. If they weren’t so rich and famous, the only screen time they’d get would be doing ASDA or B&Q ads, being well and truly part of the haggard underclass that I’d assume (most sweepingly) watch Loose Women every day. Except for me. I’m still not nearly irritating, overweight or unemployed enough. Ouch. Yep, I’m a horrid person. Oh well, not enough time to re-edit now, as an evening of cleaning up after Terminator 4-viewing idiots awaits. I’m sure that’ll make me feel less jaded. Or just want to kill all humans. Yeah, probably just wanting kill all humans.

Zufriedenheit - Satisfaction

After selecting this entry and staring blankly at the screen for five minutes, I felt a poo was imminent and so took the opportunity to sit and ponder exactly what I’d write about. The only thing in my head was that Rolling Stones song, but given (quite embarrassingly) I know almost nothing about the band, it’d be a difficult five hundred words to blag. Sure Mick Jagger’s a strutting, womanising, narcissist, but there’s something about him you can’t help but admire. Probably the womanising actually. And of course Keith Richards swaggers around like he’s Jack Sparrow’s father and has a face more wrinkled than a hypothermic ball sack, but he’s still cool as fuck. There’s not much you can joke about without feeling like a bit of a jealous prick. So anyway, I was just about finished on the bog, still struggling to think of anything worth committing to keyboard, when it hit me how completely satisfying my shit had been. Apologies for lowering the tone, but you should have seen where this was going from that opening sentence. You’ve only got yourself to blame. Oh, and me. But it is true: that sense of euphoric relief you get after clearing out yesterday’s cereal, yoghurt, crisps and chocolate fingers (the biscuity variety, not human) is almost unrivalled. It does smell though, and not always pleasantly. Especially if you’ve got a terrible diet consisting of tray-in-the-oven food and sugary snack foods. Although veggies stink horribly too, so you can’t win. Not that there’s much of a game in it - only once have I awarded the Best In Shit trophy after both my housemates made particularly fetid deposits on the same day. One had definitely been eating a Fray Bentos pie, while the winner’s entry smelt more of cheap Asda sausage rolls and burger sauce. A worthy victor indeed.

So while we’re down in the lower echelons of taste, I might as well mention the worst thing about pooing at work. For me, my uniform seems to create what I can only describe as a shit-chimney, where the offending odours rise from the bowl and enter my loose-fitting shirt around the belly area. Then, travelling up the half-flesh, half-fabric vent, they exit by my top button, treating my face to a concentrated faecal gas-cloud. It’s not much fun, and it also makes me stupidly paranoid that my whole upper body smells that way for the rest of the shift. Anyway, the good news for you is I need to leave for work in ten minutes so this is ending right here. I just hope I’m sufficiently emptied for the night ahead.

Sausen - To Buzz

To buzz your tits off sniffing butane gas and glue-based products wasn’t too unusual for a Bradford kid when I was growing up. Fortunately solvents never appealed to me, so I never experienced the joys of a lung-freezing premature death. Although it’d make this entry tons more impressive if I had. However, one girl in my school did suffer such an end, prompting wave-after-wave of insincere pricks everywhere cashing in an extra day or two off, being bullshittingly too upset to concentrate on schoolwork. While I was unduly harsh at the time, liberally spreading my hardcore “Well she sort of got what she deserved,” spiel about the place - risking a severe beating from several of her former vaj-tenants - I never used her death to get an extra day off to play Resident Evil on my Playstation. Now I can’t quite claim the same moral high ground for when Princess Diana died, but in my defence I was on the last level and had a geography project to finish. You’d have done the same. Anyway, solvent abuse: it’s not just a cheap toddler/kiddy high, no! A couple of years back I lived in St Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne with a bit of a dodgy drug and hooker-heavy past. The main pub, restaurant and club area there is Fitzroy Street - a place that still retains much of its quaint, vice-laden character. I worked in a greasy burger and burrito joint at its epicentre and was often treated to the delightful company of the paint-sniffing locals in need of change or freebies. One in particular used to zoom up and down the street on his mountain bike, cigarette in one hand, his silvery plastic huffing sack in the other. It was hilarious. One time he was even getting high on the tram, filling the carriage with his distinctive fumes and, as a result, my immature laughter. There was just something about his complete disregard for where he was and who he pissing off, coupled with his ever-present cheeky grin, you couldn’t help but smile. I think his name was Chris and he lived in a place across the road called The Gatwick Hotel. Not quite as two-star as it sounds, more sort of a one-fifth-of-a-fifth-of-a-two-star place, a fraction so confusing it must equal bad. Outside on an evening, most of his fellow inhabitants (including Mungo Jerry‘s Ray Dorset - or at least his stunt double anyway) would gather to smoke a range of fragrant substances, drink their way through gallons of fish-based boxed wine, and shout abuse at all who had the gall to walk past. It’s worth visiting Melbourne just for that really. So, as it fizzles out without any style, I’m aware this piece is lacking any sort of message other than don’t sniff solvents! Unless you’re making people laugh, in which case you might as well go for it.

Es Bewegt Sich Etwas - Things Are Beginning To Happen

A reasonably appropriate entry as I make my return to these Improvised German to English Writings after posting nothing substantial for almost a month. The usual excuse of writing stand-up will have to suffice - at the risk of being branded a self-congratulatory toss piece, I performed a twenty minute set a few days ago that went reasonably well. Especially considering it was over three times longer than anything I’d previously attempted. And it was only gig-number-four on my CV. Right, this simply isn’t good reading, and I categorically feel like a self-congratulatory toss piece now, although evidently not quite enough to delete this whole ego-boosting opening section. But anyway, the point was/is that things are beginning happen in my possible semi-hobbyist/part-part-time indulgence/slightest of slight money-making prospects - my dabbling in stand-up comedy. If that fails, there must be some cash in heavily-hyphenated/overly-forward-slashed or exclamation-marked (see later) sentence creation. That’d be ace. So what other things are beginning to happen today? Glad you asked, because serious nuclear destruction is potentially on the agenda. The thing that’s really amazed us shockingly-racist westerners is it isn’t those crazy Islamic extremists with suitcase nukes! Or even India and Pakistan ready to annihilate each other over 85806 square miles of fine woollen sweaters! [Although since researching that joke I’ve discovered the spellings of the disputed territory bordering those countries, and the sheep-sourced fabric are not the same, making the gag comically defunct.] So no! It’s in fact North Korea and this time they’re serious! Not only did they detonate a device as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, but followed it up by several short-range missile tests. This of course comes after last month’s satellite launch-come-ICBM experiment that already severely pissed off the international community. Clearly shit-scary times to be living in South Korea, unless you like your summers bright and 300,000 degrees. Oh, and dead. The extra-scary thing is you really get the feeling the UN are ball-less and powerless to do anything about it. Is anyone up for invaded a country with more than a million soldiers and a proven nuclear capability? In any case you sort of have to admire Kim Jong-il. He’s taken the classically over-compensating and aggressive short-man’s syndrome to major extremes, and it’s made him almost untouchable. He’s got the (albeit forced) adoration of his people, and no one outside North Korea can do anything except call him a tosser and say what a very naughty naughty bad bad boy he is. Definitely an inspiration to self-conscious diminutives around the world. Were I short and lacking the perceived respect I deserve, acquiring a small, east-Asian country and installing myself as supreme leadership would be the first thing I‘d do. So come on Joe Pesci, just watch those Oscar-winning film offers roll in once you start enriching your own weapons-grade plutonium. No more lacklustre Lethal Weapon sequels for you, no sir!

Ein|Planen - To Allow For

To allow four people in the back of a minicab isn’t legal. Unless you get one person to either sit on someone’s knee or lie across the other three, striking an alluring pose while eating grapes the entire journey. Actually that’s illegal too. It has to be meat pies. Or a bowl of sick a la Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste. Granted, neither are that appealing, but it’s one of those ancient, unrepealed laws like killing a Yorkshireman with a wooden spoon at thirty paces on a rainy day inside a discount German supermarket - try it out in Lidl or Aldi if you‘re curious. Where is this entry going? Any suggestions? Well, were it in the back of an unlicensed minicab (without the company of four people, meat pies and sick), it could well be subjected to a serious sexual assault. And before uppity-ism forces you to stop reading with disgust, I’m not making light of that - of course it’s a grisly and abhorrent crime when done to humans (and most, but not all other animals), but we’re talking about a written, digital blog entry on the internet here. Textual assault isn‘t quite so serious. What’s the worst he could really do? Perhaps 4cing hmslf + hs txt spk into this sentence, while I struggle to beat him off (tee-hee-hee) to delete and re-edit? And yeah, all rapists must use text-speak because they‘re obviously complete pricks. Go figure. And on that non-bombshell, it’s time to leave this failed entry before it gets any worse.

Hinzu - In Addition

In addition, you add something (often a number) to something else (usually another number) to make something new (generally another, bigger number - unless you’re dealing with a negative number, in which case you may well be adding, but could somehow end up with a smaller one. It doesn‘t even have to be a one. Twos, threes, sevens and sixty-fours are all common too.) Giant bracketed nonsensical asides aside, maths is great. It gives us a mechanism for understanding a multitude of massively important things, like how to work out what time it is in different countries, counting how many red, blue or yellow cars are parked on your street, and even how to divide equally your cut from that cigar heist in Rotherham last week, Steven. I saw it, even if the police didn’t. You and your two little midget helpers. Kept on dropping the boxes? Short arms in a heist scenario? Good idea was it? Why don’t we say it’s twenty thousand split three ways? What? You don‘t count them as halves? Okay then, four ways. No, I can’t work that out either. Let’s just call it three grand.

The trouble is I’m just awful at maths, and can’t remember how to do the most rudimentary pre-GCSE stuff. The ability to perform long multiplication and division ran away over ten years ago. It’s too easy to not bother when a calculator can do it for you in a fraction of the time. What precise fraction I couldn’t say, because that ability is also long gone. I really should try to pick up an old text book and do some maths to exercise my brain at least a little, because I can feel that impeding idiocy starting to kick my door in like an angry estate-based ex demanding child support. Just a few simultaneous equations a day, a couple of mean, medians and modes, a handful of highest common factors! I’d be up to (or equalling) speed in no (distance over) time. On the downside, it would probably open the floodgates to a whole host of similarly awful maths-based jokes within these writings. But I’ve forgotten how to work out probabilities too, so chances are it won’t happen. Thankfully I’m completely out of ideas, so it’s time to end, utterly out of steam and on a definite negative. Death. Ha! Now it’s positive, so there.

Deinstallieren - To Uninstall

It’s about time I got my teeth stuck into something good and relevant to my degree! Software! How exciting! The thrill of uninstalling a program to free up space on your hard disk. Your hard disk. I spent three years studying computing at university and where’s it got me? Making rubbish smutty PC-related jokes on a readerless blog. I don’t see that student loan getting paid off any time soon, do you? So anyway, when was the last time you cleared your hard disk of unnecessary stuff? And not in a Chris Langham or Gary Glitter kind of way? You could make your computer run tons faster - getting rid of those old files (not in a Chris Langham or Gary Glitter kind of way) will definitely increase the likelihood of mechanical legs sprouting out of your CPU and it winning a track-based medal in the 2012 Olympics. Perhaps. No matter how hard I try, there’s very little in the way of hilarity when it comes to circuit boards and software. Web pervs are only funny to a point - then you realise they’re really just creeps who don’t have the balls to be public masturbators or flashers in the park. Hmm. Piracy is a pseudo-necessary evil. I don’t ever download movies, although if I did it wouldn’t make a difference, as working in a cinema I don’t pay to watch films anyway. But as I’m never in to catch the latest episode of 24, and for lack of Sky Plus or even an ancient VCR to grainily capture Jack Bauer‘s ludicrous antics on magnetic tape, I download it every week. I’ll even pretend to delete it after I’ve watched it too, so is that a bad thing? I don’t know, but again it isn’t that amusing. There’s not a huge amount of other material to cover. No wonder most computer science students are humourless and lame. But eventually very rich. Oh well, at least I still have my…..actually I got nothing. Except 24.S07E20.HDTV. So I’m out of here.

Mit Dem Schwanz Wedeln - To Wag Its Tail

It doesn’t take much for a dog to wag its tail. Give it a disgustingly low quality snack with less meat content than the average Chinese man’s undergarments and it’ll get almost as, if not tons more, excited than the racists among you did at that hee-larious joke. Which is ‘very‘ at the least. Stroke a dog’s head and it’ll lick your face, provided it isn’t a pit-bull and you’re a toddler. Chances are though, while administering a bloody mauling, it’ll be wagging its tail like mad, enjoying proceedings right up until the police shoot it’s head off. Working in a cinema, I’ve seen the ending of Marley and Me several times, and it did make me shed a tear. If you’re unfamiliar with the film or preceding book, it’s about a guy, his dog and his worthless-by-comparison wife and kids. The most tragic thing for me was not Marley (the Labrador) dying at the end, but having to look at Owen Wilson’s head in extreme close-up, his nauseating 5ft smashed-to-shit nose in my face as he rattled off some wanky crap about how dogs don’t care if you’re rich or poor, thick or clever, Owen Wilson or not a prick, and so on. How many people do you know like that? While such a cynical view would be in keeping with my general outlook on life, the fact the words are coming out of that face makes me want to instantly disagree. He could be speaking out against child-molesting Nazis, but again I’d still struggle to openly be on his side. It’s like how Bono has turned me off giving anything to charity just because he’s such a massive tit. I’m quite aware of how utterly immature that is, but then I am only 26, and this piece, struggling to go anywhere, needs a new stream of mind-turd to dump and run with. So there. I’d say of all the adverts on TV begging for money, the Dog’s Trust tugs at my unusually tort heart strings the most. They give the narrator mutt a cheeky-and-slightly-scally northern accent as he talks about his dear friend Patches, who was kicked, beaten and abandoned in a gold mine. Roger was also abused - sexually. And poor Spot! He got his legs smashed off by a plastic surgeon. Awful stuff you can’t help but almost donate money toward preventing. But you don’t. Because you’re - sorry, I’m - a bastard. Don’t let that stop you though. In fact, give to charity just to rub it in my selfish, but at least nasally-sound, little face. Take that, Wilson!

Disqualifizieren - to Disqualify

The threat of disqualification from sporting events is enough to make most competitors stick to the rules like Loctite Superglue did my little finger to a door handle. False story. And bonus points if you got the 90’s product reference. Although according to their website, they’re still around. Not quite the giants of the industrial adhesive market they were fifteen years ago, but, well, I suppose domestically people are choosing to break faces over picture frames and china - the NHS is free, after all. So why isn’t the threat of disqualification from society enough to make us, or more specifically, scummy people, stick to the rules like Loctite Superglue did my index finger to a Tasmanian devil? Also false. Well for one, sporting events are watched by thousands, if not millions of spectators both in the stadium (the thousands) and on TV screens around the world (the millions), let alone scrutinized by scores of score-keeping officials. So using, for example, a car in the 200 metres, or a catapult in the shot put wouldn’t be that easy to get away with. Gary from Chelmsford nicking a car from the high street or catapult from some local museum (assuming they have them in Essex) on the other hand, would be, at best, watched by one or two twitchy-curtain pensioners and a grainy CCTV camera. Hardly a global audience. Plus if they were caught, Usain ‘Catch Me In My Subaru’ Bolt would probably be suspended from athletics far longer than Gary would spend behind bars. So either we need to make being busted for crime massively more likely, or introduce much stricter penalties if they get caught. Increasing the number of adjudicators watching criminal proceedings would be one idea. But police cost a lot money and one of them has a tendency to kill one innocent person at one protest, so they’re all bad. A better option would be to get thousands and millions of spectators by making the entire country into one gigantic stadium where we can all sit and gawp at crime as it happens everywhere. Unfortunately that’d end up costing even more than the extra police, so an even better idea would be to install CCTV everywhere and grant free access via the web and digital TV to an enormous global audience. If Gary thought Mr Wang in Beijing could be watching as he heaves his medieval rock-chucking device down the road to his fence (the bloke buying his stolen goods, not the wooden wally thing in his garden), I’m sure he’d think twice. Assuming he had the cognitive capacity to do so.
If these methods don’t work, the other possibility is harshening our punishment of criminals. Extending sentence years isn’t going to help - it just ends up costing tons more in the long run. The death penalty is just too harsh, as cretinous as Gary and his scumbag peers are. Mild torture and humiliation is the route I’d take. My main issue with Guantanamo Bay was the inmates weren’t, on the whole, tried or convicted of anything. Being held without charge and forced to listen to Eminem in a darkened room for weeks on end is simply despicable. Being held, charged with car theft, drug dealing, burglary or rape, with a mountain of supporting evidence, forced to listen to Eminem in a darkened room for weeks on end is simply hilarious. Although we ought to substitute the CD for something a bit less Gary-friendly. Captain Beefheart or My Bloody Valentine would do the trick. If straight humiliation is more your thing, strip them naked, paint ‘I’m a massive bummer’ all over their body and parade them around town in an open-top bus. It’d work and be brilliant, I’m sure of it. Oh, and it was thumb to Loctite bottle lid, in case you were wondering.

Infarkt - Heart Attack

It’s a dark night. You’re walking home from the pub on your own. There’s that quiet part of the city you’ve got to get through before it’s nothing but rape-deterring busy, well-lit roads the rest of the way. Just six minutes of potential danger. That’s it. Be on guard and you’ll be fine. Heavy footsteps some distance behind. Shit. You accelerate. Is that music you can hear too? Footsteps and music. Specifically crappy, soulless, insipid music. Don’t panic. But you’re already at maximum leg-speed. Now you can hear two pairs of feet backed by an embarrassing Enrique Iglasias soundtrack. There’s nobody else anywhere. They can’t be more than ten metres behind now. You’d better start running. NO! Calm it down. Stop being irrational. Pretend to tie your shoe and let them pass. They’re about to be on top of you so you look back. They’ve got fucking balaclavas on, and it’s actually Chico blaring out of their shoulder-mounted, 80‘s-style boombox. Possibly the worst soundtrack to any sexual assault ever. They shove you against the wall and put a knife to your throat. Suddenly it’s me in this situation, so all references to you are gone forever. In hushed tones they argue, presumably over whose going first and whether I‘m worth suiting up over or not. Oddly their voices are familiar, but in an early ’90’s TV kind of way. Anyway, just get on with it you bastards. “Do what you gotta do. I need to get home in time for Louis Theroux. This week he’s meeting sex offending criminals.”
“Can’t you just BBC IPlayer it later?” Clearly the irony was lost on them.
“Actually yeah. Thanks. Any chance you could turn that music off, ‘cos as much as it might attract the attention of a passing good Samaritan, I‘d rather not be getting defiled to the lyrics ‘You can‘t do nothing wrong, In front of the mirror like there‘s a party going on.’ Seriously.”
“Shut the fuck up.” Hmmm interesting, he’s got an Aussie accent. Should I ask him what part he’s from?
“You know, I lived in Melbourne for six months.”
“Charming. Now pull your goddamn pants down.” The other one’s got a pronounced lisp. He’s definitely the lipstick. Wow, if they don’t kill me I‘ll be awesome in the police interview. Chico fades out to be replaced by Luther Vandross in a xylophonically-heavy number. It’ll all be over soon.
“What’s your name, boy?” Really? Rapists wanting to know the names of their victims? That’s dark. Give them a fake one. That’ll teach ‘em.
“Errrr, And.. Andrea.” Real smooth. [internal argument] Yeah, because I’m very concerned about how cool I sound in front of guys who want to non-consensually nudge my fudge.
“Well Andrea, guess what?” This guy’s starting to sound more DJ than night-buggerer.
“What?” Where’s this possibly going?
“You’ve just won a copy of every single we’ve played this evening on HEART FM!”
“That’s right, you’ve been pursued by Jason Donovan and me Toby Anstis on your way home tonight for The Midnight Lurking here, live on Heart 102.4 FM! You really gave it some Heart, congratulations!” They pull off their balaclavas to reveal their tired, once-popular-but-now-strictly-radio-only faces.
“Was the knife and the pants-down, and the heavy sexual overtones really necessary?”
“Of course! Or it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as thrilling for you, our listeners and most importantly - us, would it?”
I guess he had a point.

Sich Den Arm Brechen - To Break One’s Arm

I’ve never broken anything. Bone-wise anyway. In terms of designs, ideas, scripts, improvised German to English writings, go-karts, projectors, beds (and not in a fun way), carrots and guitar strings - we’re into the several thousands. Although arms are one of the most common and non-serious bodily breakages, I’d hate it happening to me. This honestly not being an attempt at lamely crude masturbatory humour, losing my right arm function along with its attached hand would severely disrupt my life, even if it was just for four weeks. I’m guessing that’s how long it might take to magically fix. I don’t know, could be four months or two years. I am certain, however, that everything would get a trillion (or at least ten or eleven) times more difficult. My typing would be severely impeded as would writing by hand, making outputting this type of nonsense almost impossible. Lifting and page-turning a hardback would take even more effort, helping me stay consistently, yet somewhat aptly, unwell read. My working as a projectionist just wouldn’t work either. Dextrous fingers are a must when you’re dealing with small moving parts. So much so I’m avoiding another awful wannabe funny. Not quite sure how sexy ‘small moving parts’ could ever get. If anything it sounds far closer to Gary Glitter territory than anything even barely legal. I’m staying well clear. So not having a job, or being able to read or write very much, I’d fit the profile of a Jeremy Kyle guest within days. And that’s before I’ve even mentioned my inability to wipe myself. Yes, I’m claiming they’re all filthy, disgusting human beings. They should all be thoroughly sterilized in every possible way. Anyway, before this piece gives way to a downward spiral of misanthropy, it’d be rubbish not playing XBox either. Cooking would be limited to stuff on a tray in the oven, and changing channels on TV would have to be done lefty, which just wouldn’t feel right. No guitar, no arm wrestles, no laughing at the physically impaired. When a fully chair-bound quadrasod could potentially retort with a snippy and well-timed “Shut ya face, brokey-army boy!” it’d almost certainly put your initial “Oi! Wheelies suck!” comment to shame. In conclusion, breaking an arm = not much fun.

Now it is possible there’d be fringe benefits I’m not immediately seeing. Hiding a variety of things in your sling, for example, could be a source of both comedic and practical value. Pulling out broken go-karts, projectors, beds, carrots and guitar strings one after the other would be ace in front of an assembled, paying crowd. Not even Jesus could do that. Practical-wise, it’d make an excellent hiding place for that crudely-fashioned shank you‘re gonna use on that web-perv three cells down. Don‘t feel bad - it‘s what he deserves. But before this gets any more strange, I’ll abruptly end by not revealing how I broke that carrot.

Wechsel - Substitution

Sport in school wasn’t my strong point. Poor coordination skills + dorky glasses + bad hair = the substitute that rarely ever got substituted for anyone. Which was fine by me for the most part, until the resident dodgy PE teacher forcibly made a switch so he could empirically rate my lack-of footual prowess. In the same way he empirically rated my classmates’ porn-career potential by watching them in the shower. Seeing through the ruse and not wanting to end up in the back of his white van, I chose to stay sweaty. Which I did get from the very few occasions some form of football playing took place. So lacking any sort of proficiency, I was sent to my team’s defence and spent most of the time chatting to the goalkeeper. When an opponent headed my way, I just charged at them full-speed, often resulting in free kicks, penalties and minor injuries to their lower body. Clearly this didn’t help me get picked next time round, so chosen last and stuck on the bench was the standard routine each week. Right until we changed to having half of our year doing PE at the same time, and all of a sudden there were others like me - guys who were good at English, science and IT. Fellow nerdy and posturally-awkward little fuckers who couldn’t kick a ball for shit. We were ostracised from the main games, left to our own devices on a small patch of land at the far end of the astroturf. Although being best of the worst I’d instantly been elevated to MVP status, cleaving down semi-disabled kids and programming geeks that were even scrawnier and more socially inept than me just wasn’t as satisfying as hurting the arrogant jock-tossers who had the temerity to be good at sport. While it was fun enough running circles around guys playing on crutches and talking about computer games without fear of ridicule - unless of course you thought that Mario was better than Sonic, in which case you’d rightly be laughed off the pitch - I missed being violent to those who truly deserved it. Eventually, during the last PE lesson of the school year, I managed to get back into the bell-enders game and wasted no time wreaking some long-awaited havoc. Gunning for one guy in particular, a special kind of cretin who’d accused me of bullying him all year when it was really he who simply couldn’t take my sickening comebacks to his lame attempted-insults, I managed to perform an especially grisly sliding tackle that took him out of the game completely. Dragged in front of the head of year I just pleaded lack-of-coordination and poor judgement on everyone else’s behalf for choosing me to play in the skilful kid’s game in the first place. I had the glasses, bad hair and awkward posture to prove it. Checkmate.

Herab - Down

It’s rubbish when you’re down. Of course you don’t need me to tell you that. Sat there, miserable, not quite sure why, alone, flicking through channels, then your DVD collection and your books, not seeing anything that’ll raise even the slightest flicker of a smile and becoming increasingly certain that turning to the bottle, needle then eventually noose is the only way to go. Actually, while not meaning to trivialise those last three, they’ve never especially appealed to me or featured that heavily in my envisioned career path. A bit of a drink is fine, but there’s a definite conscious (or perhaps semi-conscious) step up from a couple of beers a few nights a week to the fourteen bottles of wine some guy I saw on BBC News was getting through every day. He was incredibly proud he’d cut back to just eight or nine. One bottle for me and I’m wrecked - see Mitglied (1/1/09), two would probably put me out of action for a few days, a third and I’d be dead. Literally. Drinking alone has terrible connotations - the image I think most people get is of a middle-aged man with a bottle of Bells in a darkened room, intermittently sobbing uncontrollably, popping a ton of paracetamol and shouting garbled non-words at people who aren’t there. My drinking alone, on the other hand, consists of laughing my arse off at comedy shows and movies that become even funnier, or possibly funny for the first once you’re sufficiently inebriated. Adam Sandler movies, for example, are less likely to make me vomit from sheer comic disgust - although luckily the increased amount of alcohol in me equally offsets this, ensuring a nicely satisfying pile of sick on the floor. It sitting there overnight is essential for teaching me never to sit through Spanglish ever again. So let’s not blame booze for anything. Whatever it is, it’s clearly all Adam Sandler’s fault.

Next, turning to cheap, Afghani-sourced hard drugs is something I could never do. I’d be terrible at it. Not only am I far too polite to steal for my skag, but needles terrify me too. I could stop whinging like a little girl and smoke my heroin instead, but I’ve read chasing the dragon can lead to all sorts of other physical and neurological problems that aren’t worth bothering with if you’re down enough already. Finally, suicide is just a waste. I don’t believe bodies are sacred or you shouldn’t end your life for bullshit spiritual reasons, just that it’s such a huge world and there’s so much to experience and potentially output both creatively and charitably (besides vomit) that I really do see it as a waste, especially with young people. If that sounded wanky, sorry. Don’t care. Certainly there are exceptions. If you really gotta go, you gotta go, but personally I think I’ll always have something to write about, make jokes about and have somewhere to travel about, even if it is as a penniless, occasionally down, wandering hobo.

Vorschule - Nursery School

It’s difficult to write about something you don’t really remember. The only pre-school memory I still fleetingly retain is going absolutely mental when my mum dropped me there for the first time. Onto concrete too. Ouch. No, I kid. Poorly. So being left behind. That’s the one. Oh, and pouring water into to the dry sand pit and getting a bollocking for it. It was their fault for putting the water activity thingy so close - what did they think was going to happen? It’s like putting the sugar next to the salt, cling-film dispensers in the boys toilets, or a Jewish state in the middle of the Muslim world: it‘s just facilitating the ability of humans to be massive pricks to each other. I’d love to develop this further, but work is a’calling, so thanks for reading 2009’s shortest entry! Unless I pad it out with useless sentences that go nowhere, but that would just waste both our

Barsch - Perch

I used to have a budgie. Several in fact. Not at the same time - the cage would just be restocked within a week of its previous tenant dropping off the perch. When you’re young, you don’t quite grasp how fragile an animal a small, multicoloured diminutive bird can be, so playtime with Budgie Number Three: Bluie (he was mostly blue) sometimes got a bit rough. I understood that cats and birds never got along, so was careful enough not to let them mingle too much when we let Bluie out of his home. However, I did own a classic piece of late 80’s, early 90’s plastic toy shite in the form of a Big Yellow Teapot - basically a big yellowy teapot -come- miniature home for small figurines and their uncomfortable, but handily (for them, I‘m sure) wipe-clean furniture. Looking back, I’m in total denial it was some form of doll’s house, so shhh. It really wasn’t. Okay, it might have been. The lid came off and you could, for some reason, swivel the central wall around, just in case living in a giant tea-brewing device wasn’t exciting enough. But anyway, putting little Bluie inside (the Teapot) seemed like both an interesting and hilarious thing to do. And it was for a time, until the wall-spinning feature was introduced to the playmix, ultimately resulting in a distressing freak accident that left my beloved pet with his head stuck between the inner and outer wall. Squawking like a bird close to decapitation (it‘s an all too familiar squawk), his shrieking and squirming did more to hinder than assist the rescue operation. It also didn’t help that the others inside the teapot didn’t lift a finger - they just stood there, gawping with their smug that’s-what-giant-birds-get grins plastered across their chops. Eventually, after about an hour, we managed to pull him free, but not before he’d shat almost his entire body weight on Mr and Mrs Teapot’s duvet and chaise lounge. I left it there to teach them a lesson. Given, their home was invaded by what was to them essentially a velociraptor who proceeded to scratch up and stomp all over their possessions, but by not doing anything to help poor Bluie made them just as guilty as whoever got his head jammed in the first place. Anyway, the Teapot and its Al Qaeda inhabitants have long since been pawned, and as for Bluie and his two or three successors, they’re all dead now. He did actually survive an extra year and a half after that fateful afternoon, but cervical cancer got him in the end. Turned out he was a bird.

Aus|buhen - To Boo

To be booed for doing a shoddy job at making people laugh, especially if they’ve paid for the non-privilege, is an expected part of the whole stand-up comedy thing. While most people will just sit quietly, feeling the classic expressionless stare will do enough to register their lack of amusement, if some weren’t willing to vocalise their distaste, stand-ups would quickly get comedically complacent. Given, my experience is limited to two gigs thus far - admittedly a pitiful amount - but the fear of someone finding me so unfunny they’d be prepared to stand up, mid-set to boo or shout out an insult, is enough to make me work a zillion times harder on my material. Actually, the fear of those expressionless stares contributes to those zillion times only marginally less. Even more actually, the fear of silence for even a single punch line contributes to those zillions times only a bit more marginally less. Which is silly, because clearly not everyone is going to find everything funny. Still, if you know the venue, you should be able to have some idea of what to expect in the crowd. Common sense dictates you’d avoid clever jokes in the company of thick people, cancer-based quips at Jade Goody’s funeral, and of course dead, spazzed-up kid jokes at the Conservative Party conference. I’ve mentioned to several friends that during my unplanned fortnight in North America (that should be poorly documented on my blog, improvisednorthamerica.blogspot.com as of next week) I’d love to perform at least one open-mike gig in front of a foreign audience. I’ve got at least ten minutes of mildly humorous crap that could potentially be tailored to work in the US, but I’m not sure. One joke I was going to try out at my next local performance was about me being poor and my mates bragging that they’re more well off. A friend smugly says to me, “I’ve just come into some money.” I say “Man, that’s just ostentatious. I have to come into value bog roll and Nuts magazine,” Working backwards, ‘Nuts’ could be exchanged for any local low-grade tit mag, and ‘value bog roll’ to a cruddy American toilet tissue brand. The main question would be whether they’d use the expression ‘come into some money’ - if not, the joke would die completely, leaving me open to heckle and/or handgun attack. Were the whole gig to go totally balls-up, it’d still definitely be an experience! A ton of rappers make getting shot look well cool, and even when they don’t survive usually end up having distinguished posthumous careers anyway. Which would be nice. But this ought to end soon, and I just wanted to say apologies for turning this into another one of those dull talk-about-me pieces. I’ll try better next time. After all, the thought of you - one of my four readers - booing into your computer screen makes me want to cry tears of salty eye-liquid. That’s basically your standard stuff. For tears of blood you‘d need to be enraged enough to send me a strongly-worded letter bomb packed with sharp, peeper-piercing goodness. That’d certainly teach me good. Or well. Whatever.

Gameboy - Gameboy

Well haven’t I have been awfully lazy recently? It’s been over a week since last tapping out any random German dictionary-based idiocy, which makes me feel as impotent, in textual terms, as a wrinkled, eighty-nine year old set of cock and balls. Whenever there’s been a gap in my writings this long, I’ve had the excuse of being away - either making that obligatory twice-yearly trek up north to slake my family’s relentless attention-hunger, or exploring foreign lands, mostly while drinking my face off. Even then, I usually wrote a large amount of introspective bollocks on a napkin, beer mat or spare limb. This week, however, there’s nothing. Besides watching my usual can’t-be-arsed-to-get-out-of-bed hour or three of the BBC News channel, eating cake, and sticking on the occasional film, I’ve not done much else. Oh, unless you count the several hours of XBox 360 that seems to have, with cold efficiency, stolen every other waking minute. (Not counting heading downstairs for a cakey-refill.) The bastard. (The Xbox, not the coconut sponge.) It‘s just mad how much gaming has evolved since I was a kid. The opiate, the element making today’s games so horrendously addictive is the incorporation of the internet, allowing you to have ‘friends’ who, with XBox Live! become instant piss-taking voyeurs. When you log on, it tells you what game they’re playing and precisely what it is they‘re doing. Microsoft’s villainous masterstroke was the adding of Achievements that give you points toward your Gamerscore - a number that lets everyone know how utterly shit you are at computer games. Say you kill Mr X on game Y, you’ll get an achievement. All your friends can see instantly which ones you have or don‘t have, and therefore poke fun accordingly. This means if you’ve got any shred of misplaced pride, you’ll spend fifty billion hours in a futile bid to get that bigger score, not caring that you’re drying out your contact lenses, giving yourself a painful, George Best-esque bloodshot-eye makeover. Eons ago you could make up all sorts of boastful crap about what crazy Mario or Tetris levels you’d got to on your (I sense you’ve been craving tenuous, so….taaa-daaa!) Gameboy, but now you have to put your control pad where your mouth is and actually do it. With the accompanying microphony-headset, XBox Live! players can also enjoy masses of shit-talking with thousands of more than willing opponents. “Get the fuck off my team you loser, you suck!” These people are not only displaying their base-level anti social prowess by staying indoors playing video games all day, but they’re ramping it up to new heights by being absolute wankers to everyone in a virtual world too! They should have their fingers broken, then sawn off. Then reattached in the wrong places. Fancy your smashed-up thumb as your middle finger? No? Or all ten crunched-to-fuck digits on a single hand? Well stop being such a belligerent bell-end, Mr ILoveKittens93, and maybe you’ll avoid a violent - but in no way sexual - re-fingering. Well, maybe a little bit sexual. Ten on one hand? And this has just got horrible, but thankfully my Gamerscore urgently needs raising, so that’s it.

Vergnügungspark - Amusement Park

As lacking in amusement as such parks in East Anglia are - Suffolk’s Pleasurewood Hills sounding more like, yet being far less appealing than, a low-grade countryside brothel, and Yarmouth’s Joyland, a place that’d struggle to be more miserable were all the rides replaced with Holocaust imagery and used tampons - for me they could never be as depressing as those seedy, teenager and degenerate-ridden dens calling themselves simply, Amusements. Packed to the doors with flashing fruit machines interspersed with the occasional crane-grabbing game, they’re everywhere and always have that same smell: a mixture of stale smoke, disinfectant and futile desperation. If you go to the seaside, they’re a bit more non-addict friendly, having at least a small section of old style, mechanical penny slots and falls where you can happily spend five quid over an hour. You’ll probably win a big chunk of it back too, and, most importantly, walk away with a Liverpool FC key ring from the 2001/2 season or some Lizzie McGuire stickers. The best thing about it is trading in all those cruddy prizes for something bigger and better, like the classy Tasmanian Devil money box I fill with all my shit-small coinage. But back in city centres, it’s all about being serious. Penny falls replaced by silvery ones, 2p minimum-bet machines replaced by 20p Deal or No Deal confusingly high-tech motherfuckers, and tourists replaced by locals trying desperately to button-bash their way out of debt. Not a crappy little prize in sight either, just an abundance of bright white trainers, tracksuits, gold chains and baseball caps. And all the players are wearing them already, so what’s the point? If you’re a bit down and happen to be passing such a place, step inside for a few seconds to take in the sights, sounds and smells. If that doesn’t make you feel a trillion times better about your own life, well there’s always East Anglia’s leading wood-pleasuring site just off the A12, north of Lowestoft. Whatever turns out to be there, you can bank on riding creaky, battered stuff from the 1950’s in dire need of lubrication.

Vordersitz - Front Seat

The front seat, or rather front row of seats on a plane is the only place you can sit to guarantee the prevention of an all-expenses-paid trip to Crampsville for your legs, or to its even less desirable neighbour, Crushedto-fuckville. It wouldn’t be the case if practically all air passengers in the world weren’t the complete selfish cockstains they are. But no, it’s apparently a basic human right to recline your seat to its extreme the second the seatbelt sign goes off, regardless of how shittily uncomfortable it makes anyone else. Now you may think this tirade is based on one or two recent bad experiences on scummy airlines, and that my seat-based luck-tank is simply running dry. Well firstly, the idea of a storage tank for seat-based luck isn’t a bad one - Theo Paphitis will snap that right up, so get working on that prototype! Secondly, and a bit more importantly, I base this on the close to thirty flights I’ve taken both within and between several different countries over the last three years. Everywhere it’s the same. Eastern and western Europe, north America, Australasia, south-east Asia - about eighty to ninety percent of the time it was the default post-takeoff action to be carried out. It’s a xenophobe’s worst nightmare: every race uniting, sharing a common dream to instinctively spread that dull, aching, leg-related pain to everyone, regardless of skin colour, ancestry or creed. In most cases too, when a polite anti-crippling request was made, it was either outright ignored or resulted in the tiniest adjustment, accompanied by a sneering “You happy now?” remark. The prevailing attitude seems to be Well I paid for my seat, I’ll put it how I damn please! It makes me really pine for the days when guns, knives, hammers and lawnmowers were allowed on planes so these conceited tossers could receive the bloody mid-flight justice they deserve. (YouTube ’Braindead lawnmower scene’ this very second if you’re confused). Actually, even if you’re not confused, look it up anyway because it’s brilliant! Okay, personally, were I to want to encroach on the already meagre space of whoever is sat behind me, I’d turn around and ask first. It’s the most basic of common courtesy, even if they’re absolute wankers. Perhaps it affects me more because of my inbuilt politeness chip that engages during any verbal interaction with strangers. It’s the same chip that forces an automatic apology whenever someone bumps into me or stands on my foot, or calls me a fanny face in the street. Fortunately, it doesn’t apply to my textual output, so I can be as openly horrible to strangers as I like. Except you. If you’re bothering to read my words you’ll get a free pass on most things, or at least get let in for student rate. However, please note that if you recline in front of me on the day I do finally snap, I’ll probably slash your face. Or if the plastic cutlery fails me, take a slash in your face. Just so we‘re clear.

Ein|sperren - To Lock Up

Prison life doesn’t look like much fun. Besides the occasional snooker-ball-in-a-sock beating and showery bum rape, it just looks terribly dull. Unless you’ve done something horrendous, chances are your fellow inmates will mostly be a boring mix of relatively sane petty thugs, that may or may not want to subject you to an intense fist or willy-based pounding. In terms of interesting conversation potential, the psycho killers outdo the smack addicts and burglars any day. I’d much rather hear a chilling account of consuming a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie with baked beans and a nice Lambrusco, than another humdrum tale of granny-mugging or car theft. Speaking of criminal chit chat, I was on a train to London the other week and felt I‘d lucked out with an almost empty, very quiet carriage. Running a bit late and needing to pee, I’d decided to do it on the train. In the toilet. Seconds before departure, a band of three shady guys, to whom I took an instant prejudicial dislike, decided to take the table directly across the isle from me. “They’re reserved, mate,” one said to the apparent leader, although using the correct there/their/they’re seems a bit inappropriate. So rather “There reserved mate,” to which he responded by pulling out the seat reservation markers and saying something like “Well, they’re (sorry, their) our seats now!” Within minutes they were guzzling special brews, talking about meetings with parole officers, and discussing the best weed connections in East Anglia. Being an hour and forty minutes from Liverpool Street with a bladder full of ex-orange juice and coffee, you can see my dilemma. While I’d hate to show any lack of faith in Her Majesty’s ability to reform, I didn’t quite feel like leaving all my stuff on the seat to visit the bog. The alternative would be to take everything with me, which to my over-analysing brain would light up a massive flashing I DON’T TRUST YOU SCUMBAG CONS sign - not an overly attractive option either. Moving to a different part of the train would generate the same sign, only in lowercase letters, and more a gentle blinking than flashing. I didn’t fancy losing my Ipod, jacket or chocolate bars, nor being subjected to a retaliatory we’ll-teach-you-for-not-trusting-us bashing, so did the only thing possible: risk damaging my bladder by painfully holding it in for nearly two hours. Which was made all the more difficult by some of the hilarious things they were saying. I’ve not got time to share them all, because I need a wee (and have done every fifteen minutes since that journey), but my favourite was, and I‘ve translated this into relatively proper English, “Ha! Made me laugh. This is the first time I’ve been released from prison where they’ve given me condoms. What am I supposed to do with them? I ain’t ever used one in my life. I take my chances.” I laughed out loud and had to jab my finger really obviously into the book I was fake-reading to make the outburst appear unrelated. But then started to feel awful for the hundred or so illegitimate children and fresh infections he’d almost certainly helped create. Forget giving out free condoms on release - try mandatory castration. Or even a crude, rusty scalpel-based sex change. Turn every male ex-con into an ex-man and the re-offending rate would drop off the chart. They’d be laughed out of drug deals and bank robberies with their uneven tits and hairy legs. What’s the worst that could happen? If anything it’d make crime more of a comedic spectator sport and far less scary. Well, the image of hundreds of badly botched-job transsexuals trying to be taken seriously as proper wrong’uns makes laugh anyway.

Fremdenverkehrsamt - Tourist Information Office

Perhaps there’s just something inherently unfunny about tourist information offices. It’s a struggle to generate anything even slightly amusing about a place you waste precious minutes of your holiday leafing through brochures and getting flogged organised tours by commission-hungry staff. Everything you could possibly need to know is available on a million websites from the second you decide to take a given trip, so unless you’re popping in for a sneaky wee, you shouldn’t really have much cause to enter. Note that’s pretty much the extent of my comic prospects for this piece, although sly slash, crafty penny-spend or stealthy pee-pee are all equally mediocre, so could have been used instead. Essentially it’s only going to get worse from here in. Or at least more dull. In truth, I enjoy looking around a city’s tourist office because I‘ve got a habit of collecting leaflets and brochures for things I‘ve no intention of doing. That and tacky place-branded pens, pencils, fridge magnets and armfuls of other useless tat. Aren’t you glad you learned that about me? Told you there was nothing funny going on in this entry, yet you had to read it anyway. Especially you, Steven. That’s on the off chance one of the four regular readers of this blog happens to be called Steven, if not, please just pretend that’s your name for a few seconds. It’ll make me feel far less guilty about using my linguistic ejector seat to escape this vile textual misadventure. With any luck I’ll land near a building full of not-to-commission-hungry people who’ll tell me a bit about the place. Yep, definitely time to bail. Bye!

Hauptbahnhof - Central Station

Getting from Munich’s airport to the city is an incredibly frustrating experience. Especially if you’re an idiot like me. Having got off the plane and collected my bag, I was happy to find an integrated station with a regular, direct train service into the Hauptbahnhof, a mere five-minute walk from the hostel I’d booked. The queue at the manned ticket desk was huge, while the self-service machines were relatively deserted. Naturally I chose to go with the mechanised option, chuckling to myself and murmuring something like chumps walking past the people in the snaking line. Twenty minutes later, after prodding every conceivable combination of buttons, all the while glancing at the other queue to note where I would have been had I joined it in the first place, I was about to admit defeat. Until suddenly, it happened! I actually did just admit defeat. And no, the machine wasn’t all in German, nor did it have an out-of-order sign plastered across its screen. As dense as I know I can be, it wasn’t my fault. Probably. All I remember is being able to select the journey I wanted, FLUGHAFEN to HAUPTBAHNHOF and the exact time (that had to be continually bumped to the next one as each departure time passed), but that there was no ’Buy Now’ or similar option anywhere. I could even print out a detailed list of all the times and prices for the entire day! But no option to physically purchase a ticket. So seething inside with my head hung low, I shuffled over to the old and thick people’s line for a further ten minutes of foot-tapping and anger. If Hitler had to deal with such shit-useless technology every time he flew into the city, then it definitely makes sense that Munich was the birthplace of Nazism. Spending thirty minutes trying to buy a train ticket had transformed me, a reasonably sane and placid person, into an angry and irritable twat, so the effect on a genuine mental is almost guaranteed to result in awful haircuts and genocide. Anyway, to end this on a slightly lame Bavarian tourism plug, the city’s magic beer quickly placated me. It’s a really fascinating place to visit regardless - historically, architecturally and various other assorted ally-ending words, but ignoring all that, their drink is so pure, you can easily double your regular intake and still not get hung-over. As I say, magic beer. It’ll cost you though. With our current piss-poor exchange rate, for two pints you’ll be lucky to see much change from a tenner. Or a baritone for that matter. But lame jokes that don’t even work are officially legal tender in Germany, so stuff your S-Suitcases f-full of ‘em. Unless you don’t have a stutter, in which case just fuck off.

Bordell - Brothel

Objecting to whoredom on moral grounds is undeniably a twattish thing to do. The idea that our bodies are special or sacred in some way, and that letting people stick stuff inside them for cash somehow makes you a lesser human being is plain wrong. Sure, frown on the drugs it pays for in most cases - dealers are scumbag fucks - but not on the act itself. These uptight people aren’t tutting when they’re at the height of orgasm, so how have they got the right to say shit about anyone else‘s carnal jollies? I share the late, great George Carlin’s bemusement on the issue: “Selling is legal, fucking is legal, so why isn’t selling fucking legal?” Of course there is a big issue at the moment with press-ganged prostitutes getting screwed over by absolute bastard pimps, but it seems unfair to let that taint the entire profession. Some clothing manufacturers use sweatshop child labour to make the cheap shit for Primark, but that doesn’t mean they all do. So brothels in which consenting adults fuck for cash shouldn’t be a problem. But they clearly are. Now I’m aware this sounds like the confessions of sexually frustrated, hooker-using filth cretin, but that’s not what it is. While I’ve no issue with people who choose to do it, it’s still a somewhat grimy business. When each of these girls - pretty as they may be - are getting nailed ten times a night by a cliental of mostly misfits, degenerates and leery tossers, they become as attractive a lay as Jeremy Kyle’s condescending fuck-face. No matter how high class some of these escorts are advertised as being, they’ve received the cock of hundreds, if not thousands (but probably not hundreds of thousands) of the ugliest, tiniest and likely rapiest of other men. So I’m not so much judging a book by its cover, more by who’s grubbily fingered through it in the past. Which isn’t much better really. What about all the girls you almost-sort-of-get-to-a-point-where-you-might-get-some-way-close-to-possibly-pulling on a night out? What about all the ugly, tiny rapists they’ve had sex with for free? Well clearly these girls are far cheaper; my good looks, eloquence and dry wit often succeed in getting me nowhere, so a few pints of snakebite and black‘ll do the trick. Maybe. I might know were I ever in a situation where buying a girl a drink didn‘t seem like a horrifically cynical I-just-want-in-your-pants move. Although I am sure that if it did actually work, it’d cost a lot less than a visit to someone on the street turning tricks for crack and smack.

Ich Hab’s Ihm ImVertragen Gesagt - I Told Him In Confidence

Never tell anyone anything in confidence. Ever. No matter how impeccable their secret-keeping record may be, there comes a point where everyone has to blab to someone. The strange thing is we should have learned this from our earliest years at school, when in reception class you told a close friend you really fancied Gemma Lovell and he went and spread it faster than cholera in Zimbabwe. Actually, that‘s stupid. Cholera takes tons longer to get around than even the most tardy gossiper’s payload. Faster than, say, the time it takes to eat a bowl of soup while watching an episode of Rainbow in your lunch break. Or if I was unlucky, Rosie and Jim, which genuinely made me want to sneak aboard canal boats at night, piling up horrifically dismembered puppet effigies in the hope of scaring the freaks off air. I reasoned the presence of a canal-side marionette murderer might make them think twice about taking any further shit-boring boaty-romps down Britain’s dreary waterways. Incidentally, when telling my friends about this desire also in good faith, within days I was explaining myself to a concerned and quite disturbed child psychologist. After which you might think I’d have learned to keep my mouth shut about everything. But we never learn, and stuff always gets out. Don’t tell anyone anything in confidence. Ever. If you’re a chronic over-analyser too, paranoia always dictates that everyone knows everything already, so that every comment, wry smile or unintentional blanking is somehow related to whatever it is that’s been leaked. Anyway, given that I’m now obliged to post all these entries regardless of how shoddily they’ve turned out, as much as it pains me I can’t just hide this away and never speak of it again. Boo-sodding-hoo to me.