Secret Santa

I'm not one of those people who hates Secret Santa and spends all of December grumbling like a Scroogy Sulkface whenever anyone mentions presents or tinsel or cards. I don't even mind the crappy presents you inevitably get every year because, frankly, what can you get for a fiver these days? The wrapping paper and Sellotape only leaves you with seventy pence to spend on the present, doesn't it?

No, what gets me is the awful moment straight after the opening of the gifts where people try and guess who bought what. Please, for me, this year can everyone pay attention to the SECRET bit and just go, "Aw, a lovely gift from Santa. How nice." And if you end up with my name, I'll have a bottle of wine, please. Ta.

Prerecorded Apologies

"I regret to announce that the 0839 service to London Waterloo has been delayed by approximately 10 minutes. I'm very sorry for the inconvenience this will cause you."

See, the thing is, you're not. Because you're a voiceover artist who spent a couple of days recording all the announcements months ago, and you're now sunning yourself on a beach while I sit here waiting for a delayed train in the rain. How hard would it be for someone at the station to say why it's delayed, and when you can expect it. I don't really need an apology. It's a busy, complicated thing, running train services, and occasionally things won't run smoothly. But knowing that someone has pushed the "apology" button and gone back to their Sudoku puzzle doesn't make me think that they care.

Or that they're sorry.

Emin

Emin is a storyteller whose subject matter comes from Emin's own rich life. Through the poetry of her honest retelling of unique and intimate life-events Emin establishes a generous dialogue between the viewer and the artist.

Or... Emin is the Eliza Doolittle of the art world. Some rich Saatchis found a street urchin with no discernible talent, grooming or social skills and one said to the other "I bet I could have all the Sunday Supplement brigade fawning over her artwork within a year." "I have a guinea that says you couldn't my good man." "Very well, I take your bet. Now let's go to the Ivy." "Capital plan, my good sir. The goose is excellent at this time of year..."

Well look at what you've done. I hope you're happy.

Postcode Lotteries

"...so the hospital near Ethel won't do her hip operation, but the one twenty miles away will. It's a postcode lottery." Barely a day goes by without some poor NHS manager getting hauled over the coals by a knob-end "social affairs" reporter for having the audacity to do their job and decide what they're going to spend their tiny budgets on.

I think the NHS is fantastic. I've used it whenever I've needed to all my life, from being born, to the time when I broke my thumb playing hockey, to helping the injured Mrs John have her sprained ankle treated, to the birth of my son. And I've used it in several different postcodes. At no point has Dale Winton, or Eamonn Holmes, or the Voice Of The Balls Alan Dedicoat (accompanied by bright flashy lights and a hideous, tedious game format) ever drawn six postcodes and a bonus postcode from a machine selected by a member of the public while a taped studio audience clap and cheer like Beatles fans from the sixties at the sight of random numbers successfully appearing in first the order they were drawn, then, in ascending numerical order before I've been allowed to have my blood pressure checked. For that, my friend, is what a postcode lottery would be.

Not some lame journalistic shorthand dissing the highly laudible practice of locally managing limited resources according to the overall needs of the community.

So please, lazy hacks. Stop saying it. And stop reporting on old people with dodgy hips.

Middle Laners

Here in the UK we have lots of motorways, and you're not allowed on them until you've passed your driving test. The problem is, you are allowed on them as soon as you've passed you've it, and therefore you never need to learn how to drive on them.
"Ah," you say, "but I have a shiny photocard licence with a hologram obscuring my face. Let me loose on the fast wide roads of Britain." And that's where things start to go wrong. For many of the hugely useful car handling skills you learn on your driving test (reversing round a corner, three point turns, travelling at 20 mph) are precisely zero use to you when you trundle down the slip road for the first time.

There are lots of hateful things which happen on motorways - but surely the worst is the Middle Laner. They're peculiar to motorways because if you sit in the "outside lane" of a normal road sooner or later something will come in the other direction and hit you head on and you'll be dead. But on a motorway something happens in the brain of the Middle Laner which paralyses their roadsense node and stops them moving in after they've passed whatever it was on the inside lane.

Two things happen when you are a Middle Laner. First, you identify yourself to everyone else on the motorway as a Bad Driver, and therefore open yourself up to all manner of unsavoury practices such as tailgating, fist shaking, light flashing, undertaking... And secondly, by effectively blocking one lane of the motorway, you increase congestion, cause tailbacks and jams, and therefore create more carbon emissions while we all sit behind you waiting patiently for you to get into the inside lane, you selfish arse.

There are a couple of solutions to this problem. Either anyone in the middle lane is forced to pull over and have their car squashed into a very small cube, then made to walk everywhere for the rest of their lives, or they can simply pull in when they've overtaken, like they would on any other road in the world.

I prefer the car crushing option, but only because the prime culprits are normally driving Rovers and it's the best thing that could happen to them anyway.

Other people have other solutions... http://www.howmotorwayswork.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=239&highlight=&sid=d30a4916b6558f0c858c1ba0b86a7f45 but I don't think they're as fun.

So we don't get off on the wrong foot...

To quote Friends Ubergeek Ross Geller "Nothing I say means anything".

That doesn't mean that my words are not vitally important to the future of the planet, civilisation and utopian happiness - just that if you happen to disagree with some of my thoughts on life, just accept as I do that I have a right to say things, and you have a right to read them...

So now you know where you are, where I am and where we are in relation to each other, sit back and soak up the thingsthatmakeyougogrrrr.