I don't like sharing my orange juice!

I'm turning into my dad.

2007-07-12T23:26:34+02:00

Fact is, I’m morphing into my dad. Whilst every female dreads the day when she will wake to find her mother staring back at her in the bathroom mirror, it seems I’ll successfully evade that problem…by turning into my dad instead. I mean, I looked far too much like him for it to ever be a good thing in the first place, so the rest is just disastrous.

For example, I’ve found myself a few times listening to a CD of his and doing that strange head-tilt thing that says “I quite like that. Don’t want to say it.” I’ve been converted to many a band from his young era, namely The Cure and Jam to name but two. They’re alright because it’s more than likely that I’d have stumbled on them anyway, but it’s when I can’t help but harbour a secret liking for The Pogues that it starts to go a little wrong.

Let me also point out that this trait itself, my stubbornness, I inherited from said father. He refuses to support England in anything, despite them being the only British team that ever really achieves much, sadly. I refuse to listen to bands such as Brand New, even though they may have the potential to become my favourite band of all time. You get the idea.

However, since I wrote that, there has been progress on this front in that the father dragged me to see The Waterboys last week. Ignoring the fact that I had an exam the following morning, he informed me that “amputation of limbs” would not be accepted as a suitable reason for not going and sat us down in the music hall a full 45 minutes early. When they finally graced the stage, I swear they were there for 3 hours, and an Elvis medley in the encore just tipped us over the edge; we hastily exited the building at around 11. Needless to say, I was so bored I could quite effortlessly have slipped into a coma, but…the band was actually very good, although it pained me to admit this to him.

Anyway, then there’s the comedy. I inherited his attraction to bizarre humour in the form of The League of Gentlemen and adopted his Eddie Izzard as my own. There’s no-one funnier than my dad when it comes down to it though, and I feel like a big person admitting this. But who could resist a small chuckle when your dad looks at your pork-free plate and asks, “what, you don’t dig the pig?”

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Pah! You're all the same.

2007-07-12T23:22:47+02:00

You are unique. That’s what your mum will tell you. But then anti-racism and anti-bullying campaigns will say “you know, we’re all just the same!” They’re right. The truth is that it’s that desire to be different, or to fit in as the case may be, which renders us all the same.

Helen makes people call her Rain, paints a star on her cheek and makes all of her clothes out of recycled junk. John makes people call him Braddaz, puts a Nike Air on each foot and buys all his clothes from JJB. These two might as well be the same person since their huge effort to lie at opposite ends of the people spectrum is common to both. If they truly wanted to be ‘different’, they’d just realise that that’s a stupid idea and opt for the ‘normal human being’ route.
As for a factual, rather than hypothetical example, I recently went to an ‘indie rave’ gig, where more than the odd Russell Brand-esque, bouffanted boys in neon technicolour jeans were to be spotted. So, ok, if you saw one of these spectacles on the street you might be inclined to stare, but it’s surprising how many carbon copies of the same one will gather in one room, in one city, at the first opportunity to brandish a glo-stick.

I mean, really, what is this fascination with being a kook, other than a cry for attention? You go around in a spangled pink jumpsuit and matching hair, and you have to at least expect a degree of staring and whispering. If you expect it, then you must want it at least fractionally more than you don’t, otherwise you’d be dressed like a regular human. Now this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; Gwen Stefani can quite effortlessly pull off the kook-look. The key to this, though, is that she’d be willing to admit that she enjoys the attention, after all, she’s a celebrity.

Not to be a hater, but I hate the indie trend that’s currently burgeoning. Let me explain why the lifestyle ironically labelled ‘indie’, short for ‘independent’, is a fallacy and altogether wrong. Consider, first, that as of 2007 the Brits (awards for popular British music for you uncultured folk) will no longer host an award for Best Pop. Yes, the Arctic Monkeys, as talented as they unquestionably are, have been the death of British pop music. Since the tsunami of Joe Mancs and cockney rakes in skinny jeans and cravats, the boy/girl band has faded into oblivion. Our only hope is that Take That can sing at us long and hard enough to inspire a noughties pop movement. God speed.

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Buses quash my desire to live.

2007-07-11T22:34:48+02:00

Buses. Let’s first consider the fact that the word ‘bus’ is a shortened version of ‘omnibus’, meaning ‘for everyone’. But is it really a case of omnibus by name, omnibus by nature? Well yes, the bus is for the use of all - except those who wish to smoke, consume food or drink, are teenagers or who cannot meet the expense of extortionate fares. So yeah, that’s about everyone, right?

Don’t think, of course, that I disagree with any of those people being shunned from public transport. There are people-a-plenty that I don’t want to share my X2 ride with, namely old people, drunken people (inappropriately drunken people), charvs – I could go on. In fact, at the pinnacle of public transport hell is Other Passengers.

So I’ll start with old people. Not all of them, but a landslide majority of them are the kind that I thought belonged only to Coronation Street episodes of yesteryear. Bitter expressions on shrivelled faces, beige shoes and the odd hairnet here and there. Yes, old people hate buses and other passengers on them but oh how they love to hate them! It’s the ones that choose to travel by bus at the time of day when kids are coming out of school and proceed to talk very loudly and in a very sort of high-born, English peer of the realm imitation, about how teenagers ought not to travel home on buses when they have young legs to carry them. It strikes me as fascinating that these crones have all week to do their shopping in Marks & Spencer – plus an abundance of shops that are much more local – but go on weekdays and catch the school-run bus home. If only kids had the same choice to say “oh you know what, it’s geriatric day at M&S, best not go to school today so as to avoid that rabble on the bus.”

Then there are the charvs that gravitate towards the back of the bus, upstairs, and invariably start a bangin’ bus rave with their phones. More often than not you’ll find evidence of them having journeyed recently, in the form of cigarette burns on the seat, an empty Bella bottle rolling around the deck or infantile and multiple scrawlings of words like “Mobsy”, which I am assuming can only be their names for each other. You’ll also become well informed of who is spending time in bus shelters with whom, information identifiable by the words “luvz”, “4evaz”, “iz lush”, and various obscenities.

There is, however, one advantage to bus travel, and that is the humorous passenger. This may come in the form of a lady with a cat in a carry-cage, asleep, or maybe a hippie-hater. Note: the latter only appear late at night, invariably intoxicated and keen to amiably disparage the group of gig-goers inhabiting half of the top deck. On two separate occasions, being one of these gig-goers, I have been threatened by fag-wielding girls from “The Foyer”, who refused to believe a member of the party was called Thomas and labelled another, a “long-haired hippie”; on the second occasion a drunkard mocked our “sandshoes and plimsoles” - because ladies should wear dress shoes.

Aside from passengers, there are the drivers. There are only two breeds of bus driver: old tyrant or young charv (see above). The former like to overcharge, insult and ignore customers, and share a common vendetta against teenagers. Even the momentary joy of reporting them to the bus company and receiving free bus vouchers isn’t enough to settle my utter loathing of grumpy bus drivers. However there is the odd anomaly, who tends to be much more pleasant than the average bus driver and genuinely brightens up my day – one asked me recently why I chose to wear a tea cosy on my head.

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