My Own Personal Room 101

Think of it as catharsis. To share is to get things of your chest and some things need saying. We all have pet peeves that drive us to distraction, even the nicest and calmest of people. I’ve always been told I’m too mellow. I’d agree. My focus has never been strong enough to end up being the rock star or writer I desired to be. I have short bursts of drive and confidence then lose it in a heartbeat. So yes, I’m a bit too chill but despite this there is a string of things that do drive me to distraction. How high my blood pressure will be after this I do not know but here we go, let’s commence without the aid of any Frank Skinner props..

 

People who read and walk AT THE SAME TIME

They walk amongst us, the book zombies plague our streets like intellectual neanderthals. I have to admire them for one thing: how when the world is going on all around them they don’t have to reread the same sentence ten times over. They stare down at the page on crowded pavements and as they CROSS THE ROAD. I mean, REALLY. Surely a good book is a chance to immerse yourself in that world, paint images of the story in your mind. I can only assume they are all reading really shit books.

See also: People who ride their bikes with earphones in.

 

Fake tans

Pale is natural. Natural is sexy. Orange can be a great thing too.  I wouldn’t want an orange that wasn’t orange. What I’m trying to say in a roundabout sort of way is.. be yourself. If you’re pale be pale. If you’re an orange be an orange.

 

Snails and slugs

Let me tale you a tale of my troubled childhood. Remember the days when the milkman used to leave bottles on doorstep? (or more if you are Mrs O’Reilly)

A far more innocent time I’m sure you’d agree. Such peace was shattered the moment I was eating my bowl of cereal and about to put the spoon in my mouth when I saw a pair of slimy eyes poking out from it. The snail had obviously fallen in from the bottle but it set me on a lifetime hatred and borderline fear of the things. For weeks I was worried I’d swallowed some, that they were breeding inside me and that I’d give birth to snail babies. I had an overactive imagination, ok?

At least snails have the compassion to hide away sometimes. Slugs have no shame, flaunting thier disgusting gooeyness for all too see. The temerity of the slimy bastards. They are exhibitonist snails and love terrifying me. In my first ever flat loads of the bastards kept crawling on the kichen floor, there’d be ten to twenty of the gnarly fuckers most days. I’m not one for cruelty against animals but salt is the only option in moments of extreme terror such as this. I would write a horror movie about them but I’d be too scared to write it and the fact that they exist in the first place is frightening enough.

I couldn’t google image that shizzle so I thought “what is much nicer to see than slugs?” and the answer was Jenna Coleman in her frillies. A bit of a leap to some maybe, but not in my mind.

 

The term ‘Mansplaining’

Let’s try and forget the fact that it’s a horrid amalgamation of two words and focus on the main issue here. I’m not a “not all men” advocate at all. Some men are sexist idiots. some don’t respect women’s opinions or rights and they need telling off for that. I want equality for all sexes and races and unicorns running about in fields and stuff. I get where the horrid term came from but it can’t be used for every situation.

At the start of the year Emma Kennedy tweeted about a scene in a TV show that she claimed was sexist. I replied I didn’t see it that way and why I didn’t see it that way. I wasn’t rude or aggressive, I was just tweeting as if in conversation. She replied with “Well, thank God I’ve got a man to explain it all for me”. I was not talking down to her but her second reply was even ruder. She immediately concluded that because I had a dick my view on something to do with feminism was invalid. Worse still, I checked her mentions and most people were singing from the same page as me. She wasn’t being rude to the women who disagreed, of which there was quiye a lot, only the men. Her stance was instantly sexist in itself. She then tweeted that it was hilarious that men were getting agitated by a women forming an opinion when in actual fact they were getting agitated by her reponses to their opinion. Feminism doesn’t work if you rule out the opinions of half the population, Emma Kennedy as one herself should realise this. It needs men to make it work. Attitudes of men need to improve of course but don’t shout that they’re sexist when they haven’t expressed anything that implies this. If you do, men will stay quiet about more important things because they won’t be arsed with the hassle. By expressing her views that “Sherlock was explaining feminism to a room full of women” she showed everything that was wrong with her brand of feminism.

My friend Laura hadn’t heard of the term before and asked if there was one called Ladysplaining? Thinking about it there probably is, it’s probably women explaining to men that they’re being sexist when they weren’t being sexist.

 

Do you know what annoys me most about hoovering? The Gtech Airram advert This thing HAUNTS me. Not in my nightmares – in my every day life. As soon as I switch on the telly at home it starts. When I walk into the staff room at work the TV plays it a second later as if it’s been triggered by a ‘Mikey alert’ button. I find his voice annoying but I know every ebb and flow of the speech pattern, every bit of dialogue. (“and it shhhackles you to the fLooor”). He brags that it takes no time at all to do the work but there’s two of him! There’s twins doing the job of one person! That’s cheating. He also has twin dogs which is just plain creepy. The Gtech Airram advert is my nemesis. It is my Moriarty. I feel the constant urge to buy one in order to trash the thing when it arrives.

 

Michael Buble

As if you couldn’t get smugger than Robbie Williams? Michael Buble has excelled so much in levels of cheese that he has shares in Cathedral city. There is one true blessing, he only ever appears once a year for Christmas but that just makes Christmas an even worse experience. And you’ll soon know my feelings on that.

AND ANOTHER THING: Write your own sodding songs and stop covering tunes that have been done a million times before. Actually no, don’t even  write your own songs.  Just stop.

 

Printers

It’s a simple relationship. I don’t like them and they don’t like me. My current one (I have a long list of exes I no longer talk to) takes ten minutes of needlessly noisy whirring to wake up. Then it jams. On the rare times it does print at first attempt it tells me the ink is about to run out. HOW?! You rarely let me print anything! Are the ink fairies stealing it?!

 

Small talk

I agree with Roxette about many things. I too, love the sound of crashing guitars and you should always listen to your heart – but it is not the small, small, small talk that makes it happen. Why as a society is silence, or rather not bleating bullshit all the time seen as such a taboo?

For the most part, small talk is saying exactly the same things during a conversation with only slightly different wording, it’s using fifty words when you can use ten. I’ve been in a new job four weeks and everybody has literally  the same conversations every day. It’s like Groundhog Day on a budget, set in a staff room.

Don’t get me wrong, I always try to be polite, say hello and ask how people are. If there are avenues of conversation that flow then I will follow it. Around strangers or people I don’t know that well I don’t rabbit on and on and I know from personal experience that people either conclude I’m a “a bit quiet” or that I’m rude. Or both. It’s neither. I can do the basics but just not for that long. Small talk isn’t small to me, it’s massive. The effort it takes is incredible and it tires me out.

 

Letters from the Inland Revenue

This is your working out based on your earnings from four years ago. For some reason. It is multiplied by pish and divided by loopy la la. The total amount is declared below. There is no total amount. The tax code for the year ahead is listed. Where? There is no tax code. And what’s that seperate figure there? Huh? Do I owe you or you owe me? Why aren’t any of these words in the English language? I wasn’t aware Klingons could be accountants.

 

The Tories

It’s an easy target I know, but hey so are the poor, disabled and needy that they seek to undermine.

Here we have millionnaires claiming to care for “hard working families” while cutting what keeps them going. Quite simply, they know nothing of the lives of the public they serve. Austerity is a fraud, it is designed to keep their rich friends rich and keep the working class in their place. We could be here all day really, it is a neverending spiral of hatred they preach. They push through bills without majority which is an afront to democracy. Speaking of which, they are openly trying to rig the voting system to ensure we always have conservative rule. If they win in 2020 I’m leaving the country. Fuck it, I’ll even hide in my own Room 101 to escape as long as I have the option to kick the Tories out. Kicking the Tories out is always a great option.

 

Coffee

There’s a reason all the coffee Quality Streets are left at the end. They are minging. Yet, blend it up and pour it in a cup and the world goes fucking loopy for it. I think I’ve attempted to drink the stuff twice in my life and it made me gag both times. Even the smell is kryptonite to me. And now you can’t walk into a bookshop or a WHsmith without it infesting everywhere because they all have a Star bloody Bucks attached. People get all elitist about the stuff. It’s a drink. It’ll end up as piss in the end. Get over it.

 

Announcements of announcements

Band on twitter: WE WILL BE MAKING A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT TOMORROW!

Tomorrow at 11am: WE WILL BE TELLING YOU OUR BIG NEWS TOMORROW

Me:

This needs to stop. It won’t of course because the point is to hype fans up and I fall for it sometimes, much to my annoyance. It is social media’s equivilent of small talk. Announce the news or don’t. Ten words instead of fifty. We don’t go into a pub and say to our mates: “I’ve got news to tell you tomorrow, come back here at 3pm to find out”. They would rightly say “No, tell us now you idiot”.  On the off chance they did show up and you announced in your second announcement that the real announcement will be the next day, then you may be getting unwittingly intimate with a pint glass Think about it, that’s three announcements for one bit of news. Short of this band finding a cure for cancer anything else is going to be underwhelming.

 

People who walk out of a shop and stop right there in the doorway

They stop suddenly, as if being blocked by an invisible forcefield as they decide on the most ardous of decisions:  whether to go left, right or straight ahead. You can muti task I assume? You can probably cook and talk at the same time? Read and walk even? So you can walk and think too, yes? You seem to have got confused about what the principle of a doorway is?

See also: Lack of awareness of anything going on around you. People’s lack of spatial awareness in public is staggering, supermarket aisles especially. There’s no other word for it – it’s ignorance!

 

Winter

I think I must suffer from SAD. Make your own jokes. The weather is tough enough but the fact you go to work in the dark and leave in the dark is too much to bear.  What adds to the pit of seasonal misery is the days that seem to have been invented as a way of cheering us up through the gloom.

– Halloween: Happy Halloween? happy what exactly? Happy pretending to be scared about something day?

– Fireworks night:  Two weeks of fireworks and people going “ooooooooh”

– Christmas: The ultimate in winter hell. Three months of build up, hype and enforced jollity. I’m all for meeting up with friends and family to have a laugh but I don’t need for the birth of a fictional character to be the reason.

– New Year’s Eve:  More good tidings and repressed suicidal tendancies. I’m joking. Kind of.

– Valentines day -Like Halloween, America is to blame. I DON’T CARE! It’s all about St Skeletor’s Day. That’s where all the cool kids are at.

– Mothering Sunday: This is fine in itself, it’s just being without a mum is tough and to get well meaning messages on this day is not what I want. That sounds ungrateful but it’s just a generic day. In terms of my mum there’s Easter just around the corner which will be the anniversary of her death, then her birthday, then Christmas. There’s enough days already to feel the incredible pang of loss as it is.

Sure, June has Father’s day but no one cares about Father’s day. Not even dads. I’m being over miserable on this one for a bit of effect but I do find it all a real struggle.

 

Capitalism

It’s a biggy this. I have no answers. I wish I did. I want to fuck the man too. Not literally. Unless his name is Joseph Gordon-Levitt anyway. But I have rent and bills to pay. I am a victim of the system. We all are. Would it be better to live in a hut with no iplayer? I can’t live without iplayer so I guess I’m just gonna have to carry on sucking it up. *sigh*

 

Eastenders

The Corrie theme tune is enough to set me on edge but I’ve come to tolerate the programme if  it’s on in the background.  I can’t offer Eastenders the same indifference. The terrible acting, the painful writing and worse of all – the sodding shouting and screaming makes The Jeremy Kyle Show feel like an episode of Countryfile in comparison.  Isn’t life depressing enough to have to endure this horror show? Why would you choose to watch this four or five times a week?

The storylines are ridiculous and when they do touch on important  issues they are done with the finesse of a Rhino in a china shop. Yes, writers and actors need to start somewhere and it’s a good learning curve for lots of people who went on to greater things (not difficult admittedly). That is not enough reason to watch this macabre insult to intelligence. On a related note I do an awesome impression of Frank Butcher. Which is actually very similar to my impression of Roland Rat. Always got my finger on the popular culture button, me.

 

But before I jump off a building in an over dramatic, soap acting sort of way I will try and find the keys to get out of this hellhole of a room. It’s ok to have pet hates, just don’t let them consume you (THAT FECKING GTECH ADVERT THOUGH). Hard to believe there will even be some people who hate the use of gifs to express emotions. To those I say: