I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, and they were saying that this blog is always positive and full of the good things - but what about the negative? I guess most regular readers would know that I like travelling, pies, and so forth, but not what pisses me off. Well in a week where the Royal Mail have been dicking us about by not delivering mail - especially those of us waiting on birthday cards and important football tickets, they have been quite rightly added to the list. Why do people think "stuff gets lost in the post all the time. Hey, it's unfortunate, but what can you do?" I tell you what you can do, you can stop using the bloody Royal Mail, that's what you can do. I paid £25 for the ticket for Saturday's opening Rovers match at Middlesbrough and it mysteriously fails to arrive. Shower of bastards.
What else annoys me? Pointless film remakes. There. Hairspray is out now in the UK, a re-working of the musical from 2002, that was based on the original film of 1988. Why? What's the point? The new 2007 version cost $75m to make. Seventy five million dollars. If it had never been made, would the world be a worse place, even in the slightest? Not all all. A screenwriter redrafts a 19yr old script, John Travolta parks his 767 at the fat-suit modellers, and 117 minutes of vapid 'entertainment' is lazily transferred onto celluloid. And I don't just mean to pick on Hairspray - do we really, honestly, need a new Superman? A new King Kong? What about a new Evil Dead, a new 12 Angry Men, a new Bullitt? How can they possibly be any better? This is why I don't go to the cinema.
TV adverts that are on every commercial break make me want to throw things. "What do trees mean to you?" I must have seen that a dozen times tonight and I still couldn't tell you what it's selling. I tell you what trees mean to me - clearly they are intrinsic to the functioning of a balanced ecosystem, they provide food, shelter and numerous other products to humans and animals, they look rather nice, sometimes things get stuck in them, I fell out of one once, some of them flower in the summer, and others get decorated in the winter, they make a hell of a sound when they fall over, and I always seem to get my golf ball stuck behind one. That's what trees mean to me, you ponytailed advertising morons. And while we're on the subject, who puts greek yoghurt on their Weetabix? Who?
What else? What about....people talking on phones on public transport? I know many people hate others wearing headphones and tinny music - but I wonder if those people had ever thought that the entire coach/carriage/bus doesn't really care what you got up to at the weekend? I'll be happy to listen to my iPod and forget you can even speak, you vacuous idiots. If you're meeting up with your friends tonight, why do you need to tell them now things you're going to repeat later? And don't read Harry Potter if you're over 20, for god's sake. Read Moby Dick or The Big Sleep, or something. Oh, and if you like to walk out of shops into busy pavements and promptly stop without warning, don't be surprised when you get crashed into by pedestrians who actually know where they are going and yet can think clearly about other things at the same time. And don't have a go at traffic wardens, they aren't the problem. Wankers who park illegally and get annoyed when they get caught are.
I'm going on a bit here, so I'll summarise the rest. Sick people smoking - every day at the hospital I see them lined up outside the cancer centre puffing away, getting ever nearer to becoming a statistic on my database...People who speed up to nip through traffic lights, as if they can't spare twenty seconds of their fabulously important existances...Currys Digital - it is seriously the worst shop known to humanity - I never thought I'd find somewhere that makes PC World look like Selfridges...Fernando Alonso, who left Renault F1 because he wanted a challenge and now can't handle it, nine races in...Charity collectors who come in pubs - controversial maybe, but I give money to charity, I shouldn't be cornered in a pub...Pretentious Edinburgh festival pillocks...Mixing raisins with nuts - fantastic on their own, but who dreamed up the idea of combining them in bags? And in chocolate?...The Premiership 'big four', there are 88 other league teams you know, as much as I like reading about Chelsea and Man Utd every day...Shitty badly talented musical artists landing record deals when far-more talented people I know have not...Anyone who reads the Daily Mail...Rugby...Dogs...I think that's it. Thanks for listening...
[edit - definately not on the list are the good people at Blackburn Rovers FC, who I phoned about my missing ticket. They have faxed Middlesbrough and asked them to print me a duplicate ticket I can pick up at the stadium on the day of the match. See Royal Mail? That's called Customer Service.]
