Clothes shopping

“Your shoes are worn out, we need to get you some new ones”. Of course what my mum actually meant was that “you should go out and buy some yourself”. I agreed; they were supposed to be a matt finish, but due to several months of wear, as I only have one pair of trainers, they had become shiny, and were grubby from a cocktail of mud and beer. I diligently headed down to M&S, when to my delight they still stocked my incumbent style. ‘Great’, I thought, ‘I don’t even have to try them on’. So I went home, with a new version of exactly the same shoes. I probably should have stockpiled a few more, for future years.

If only all clothes shopping was like this. When you go to the supermarket, you probably don’t go around trying desperately to avoid products people have seen you buying before. When you go to work, you don’t desperately try to avoid roads you have been down before. When you go to a pub you probably don’t try your very hardest to find some obscure drink, like Filfar or Zoco; you will probably just have the same thing as last time. Basically, humans are by their nature very unadventurous, which is perfectly rational – it helps us deter death as we are less likely to discover something dangerous.

So why oh why do we have it drilled into us that we must be so bloody fashionable? I just do not care in the slightest. There are just so many variables. Thinking of getting some jeans? Tight ones might make you look like a ‘townie’ or ‘chav’, or possibly ‘gay’. Baggy ones make you look too fat or thin or something, so you have to get ones which are just right. Maybe a shirt is what you are after? A pink one might make you a bit effeminate, black would make you look like a goth, blue might not bring out the colours in your eyes, stripes the wrong angle might make you look fat. Then you have to think about which brand you want to affiliate yourself with, and consider exactly how affluent you want to appear. You are pretty much paying to advertise a given company, so choose wisely, as you might look like a scally, or perhaps infer that you support third world child labour.

‘Welcome to The Gap’, some woman will crow. That instantly puts me on the defensive. She really has the upper hand now, as there isn’t really a comeback to that. What should you say – ‘thank you, pleasure to be here, thanks for having me’. I henceforth avoid any eye contact with these cretins of the management, and walk around very purposefully, trying to give the impression I know exactly what colour t shirt will match my eyes, and exactly which jeans will distance myself from ‘pikeys’. I get utterly flustered, much like when I was 14, when some cute girl with heaving breasts and strait blonde hair starts asking me ‘do you need any help?’. See, when you look (and dress) like me, such forward advances just doesn’t happen outside the environment of a clothes shop, or possibly a strip club. So naturally I blush, then assert my masculinity by shakily blurting out ‘I’m fine’. What else could I say? ‘I want some clothes because my mum told me mine are worn out’?. Maybe I should just say ‘what should I buy so I don’t look like a pikie or chav? Please be quick, I really want to leave this hell hole and go to Waitrose instead.’, which are my true thoughts. Normally when people approach me to ask if I have Talk Talk or want to donate to Oxfam, I just say I already enjoy the product they are purveying, even if I don’t actually use it. For market research I pretend I haven’t got time. Neither of these excuses works in the clothes shop situation. If possible I would prefer either no staff at all, or motherly old ugly ones, who won’t judge me for being in a state of panic, sweating profusely and breathing deeply.

And what is with the shops themselves? Why do they categorise the clothes by style / brand / range? Surely, jeans for example would be most logically arranged by size, so you can then choose between styles? It baffles me. Not only are they not very easy to navigate, they are very unpleasant environments, with horrible florescent lights, clinical white walls and bare floors. Worse still, there are big windows so the passers by will see my blushing panic stricken mass rushing around the shop as fast as possible, leaving a trail of nervous sweat behind me.

I have found the best solution to my problem is to just go to M&S once a year and buy the entire range in medium. I know it will last, the sales assistants stay their distance, and I probably will look more like an old man than the dreaded chav – something I am far more comfortable with. And hopefully it will stop my mum nagging me.

Colds

I am extremely ill. I have a runny nose, a sore throat, a nasty hacking cough and every few minutes my eyes fill with water: all the ingredients you need to make a convincing Lemsip commercial for the television. So of course all you women out there will now expect me to claim that I have flu. But I don’t. I have a cold.

Flu, I’ve always thought, is a working class invention designed specifically as an excuse for not going down the mine that day. “I’m not coming to work today because I have a cold,” sounds a bit wet and homosexual. Saying, “I can’t come to work because I have flu”, sounds more manly and butch.

But you may as well say you aren’t coming to work because you’ve caught cancer. If you have flu, the American navy will come round to your house, inject you with plasma and take samples of your liver to their biochemical warfare centre in Atlanta.

And when they’ve gone away, men in nuclear spillage boiler suits from our own Ministry of Defence will want to know if you’ve had any contact with Chinese chickens or Vietnamese swans or German soldiers. And then, when they’ve gone away, you will die. Flu is nasty and claiming you have it when all you have is a cold makes you look ridiculous.

Mine, of course, is the worst recorded cold in the whole of human history and I am defying medical science by being here, at my computer, writing this column. Technically I am dead.

Legally you would be allowed to remove my organs and give them to a poorly child.

And as I sit here, shivering and tense with a headache and a tickly cough, I can’t help wondering why there is still no cure. And whether or not we might be on the brink or creating one . . .

For hundreds of years people thought the cold was caused by being cold. “You’ll catch your death out there,” people in 18th-century blizzards would say.

It was in the 1920s that we understood the cold to be a viral infection, a nasty little blighter that invades your body, multiplies and then causes you to sneeze so that millions of its brothers can shoot up the noses and through the eyes of everyone within 5ft.

Since then, we’ve been to the moon, invented the personal stereo, devised the speed camera and created the pot noodle. But still no one knows how to keep the cold virus at bay.

Aids came along and within about 10 minutes Elton John had set up his charity and was rattling the ivories from Pretoria to Pontefract so that now, while there’s no cure, there is a raft of drugs to keep the symptoms and effects at arm’s length. But the cold? Not a sausage.

In 1946 the British government began something called the common cold unit, based close to Porton Down in Wiltshire. It conducted endless experiments until in 1989 it was shut down. And sitting here with two bits of kitchen towel rammed up my nostrils, I rather wish they’d kept it going.

The American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is an immensely well funded organisation. It’s here that they work on ebola and proper flu and all the really nasty viruses that could wipe out the world if they ever got on an aeroplane. And do you know what advice they have for those who don’t want to catch a cold? Wash your hands with alcohol.

I’m beginning to wonder if the sort of scientists who might have been engaged in defeating the cold are now being swallowed up by the exciting and glamourous green movement; that the very man who might have developed a cure for the cold is, as we speak, sitting on an ice floe off the coast of Canada watching bloody polar bears.

Or perhaps he was thinking about taking up medical research but thought that rather than spend his life in a chilly lab in Cardiff with nothing but a pot of viruses for company he’d be better paid and happier if he went to Soho instead to be an ad man for Lemsip.

I worry about this in the same way that I worry about the loss of Concorde. It has not been in man’s nature to just give up on a project, but we really do seem to have given up when it comes to the cold.

Scientifically, it’s not that hard to beat. Back in 1999 British researchers worked out a way to stop the viruses infiltrating human cells in a test tube. But when it came to replicating the tests in the human nose, they all seem to have given up and gone off with Greenpeace to drive rubber boats at high speed round Icelandic whaling ships.

There is, however, some hope because apart from the Groucho club, where people have colds in the summer, most people only catch a cold in the winter. So what we need to do is get rid of it and that, thanks to global warming, does seem to be happening.

In the last weekend of October I was sitting outside in the sunshine wearing nothing but a T-shirt. Only now that the wind is coming from the north have the viruses invaded my nostrils.

If, therefore, we can push the winter so far back that by the time it comes along we’re already into the spring, all should be well. To cure the common cold we simply need to get rid of its breeding season. This means producing as much carbon dioxide as possible. Yup. The cure for the common cold may well turn out to be the Range Rover.

In case you can't tell by the disparaging references to the working classes and tenuous mention to Concorde, I didn't actually write today's blog; I actually stole it from Jeremy Clarkson's column in the Sunday Times. Yeah yeah yeah, plagiarism and all, but I have been busy. Also, even though the rules state that I have to blog 100 words a day, no one said I had to write them myself. Most people just seem to get something from the newspaper and post it in their blog anyway, so why not just wholesale plagiarise it? And this bit of rubbish has been words 108 anyway, so don’t complain.

Crisps

I love crisps. They are great. I especially like how crisps are becoming higher in quality by the year. The best crisps in the world, in my opinion, are made by Tyrrells in Herefordshire. They are just unspeakably good. Walkers Sensations miss the mark somewhat, getting a thin cheap crisp and dowsing it in seasoning. Kettle Chips are much better, but have the opposite problem of being a good quality crisp with inadequate seasoning. Tesco Finest / Sainsbury's Taste The Difference are both better than these, but are no where near as good as Tyrrells. Imagine how much I hate the Veggie Cafe, turn that hate into love, and that is about how good Tyrrells are. Sadly Tyrrells are not available from mainstream stores, with only Waitrose, Selfriges and a selection of coffee shops and pubs selling them. This is not good enough, so today I decided to take matters into my own hands Andrew Jackson Style, with a letter to my supermarket of choice, as stated below. I will let you know the results.

Sainsbury's Supermarkets Ltd

33 Holborn

London

EC1N 2HT

27 March 2007

James Collins

Blah blah blah blah road
BL1 1BLA

FAO The Product Team

Dear Sir / Madam,

I am a very loyal Sainsbury’s customer, and I enjoy the products and shopping experience of the Sainsbury’s Archer Road Sheffield store very much.

However, I am somewhat disappointed with the premium range of crisps on offer in your stores. I feel your offer in this area would be increased greatly with the introduction of ‘Tyrell's Potato Crisps’, which are an affordable yet very high quality product. They are currently available at Waitrose and Selfridges, so I imagine the scale of production is high enough to at least sell them in larger stores. They are priced at under £1.50 for a 150g bag.

They are available in a wide range of flavours, with my personal favourites being Sweet Chilli, Salt and Cider Vinegar and Thai Curry. I can not begin to express how delicious these crisps are, as they are a thicker cut and with real flavourings, which makes them unbelievably authentic. They even claim to be more healthy than regular crisps, due to their thickness. There is also a root vegetable variety available, which I believe would be popular with the health conscious market.

I can assure you that I am in no way affiliated with this company, I am just passionate consumer. I hope you will look into stocking these products in the near future.

Yours faithfully,

James Collins

Vegetarianism

I have nothing against vegetarians, I just would rather not be one myself. A bit like loosing a leg, contracting shingles, having gay sex, etc. – fine for others to do in private, so long as I don’t have to suffer. According to this 'scientific' pro vegitarian website, a vegetarian male can live five years longer than one who eats meat, but I imagine that such people are much more likely to treat their bodies more carefully anyway. And even if they do make you live five years longer, its not like they add five years to the beginning of your life when you are having fun, it is the five miserable years at the end of your life when you are too busy wallowing in your own shit to notice how good the quality of Quarn synthetic meat has become. I really don’t understand why vegetarians eat such products, which are designed to look like meat. I don’t much like the idea of eating a cow, so I don’t go and construct my beef in a cow like shape.

The worst bit about being vegetarianism is the food. Obviously. Vegetarians are always complaining that their choice is compromised when going to a proper restaurant, which is fair enough. Therefore when they set up their own gaff you would imagine they would provide you a wide range of meat free dishes. But instead of the two veggie dishes on offer in any normal restaurant, the Veggie Café at the University of Manchester, much like every other veggie café, offers just two dishes. What’s the point of that? And if you only concentrate on two dishes you would have thought that you could make them to perfection? Seemingly not. They get a small slab of lasagne or ladle of hot pot, re heat it in the microwave, then serve it with some bland cheap salads (think iceberg). You are then dazzled by an astonishing range of oils and dressings, but you then realise that there are actually only three, just multiple bottles of each. The ‘Veggie Café’, or ‘Herbivores’, as they are officially called doesn’t really offer a premium dining experience either. It has all the luxury and style of a road side greasy spoon, without the luxury of grease. You are greeted with the aroma of decaying dust, which is about as warm and friendly as the staff and light fittings (fluorescent). The tables are covered with a thick layer of lino, presumably to make them easy to clean when people die on them. There are pictures of horses on the walls, which just makes you wish you were eating one of them. Fancy a drink to go with your lettuce? A glass of water the size of a thimble may quench your thirst, if you are a quail. The food won’t fill you up either, which is a shame, as it costs £4 a throw. What terrible value for money – for 50p less you can get the largest and finest meal the refectory has to offer. For 21p less you can purchase a whole foot of Subway, which will keep you full for ages. For 49p more you can indulge in all of the Pizza Hut you can eat. For a pound more you can have all the Chinese you want. For just over twice as much you can have a massive two course lunch at the very chic Obsidian. I can’t think of anywhere in Manchester which provides worse value of money.

So when you leave feeling hungry and thirsty, you have to respect the veggies and what they do for their cause. I once tried it for two weeks, but gave up when the vegetarian option available in my school cafeteria was the bun from a burger (complete with meat juices). I made the decision to eat the whole burger and die five years earlier.

Television

Eee TV is great. Which other medium can make you laugh, cry, can educate you, tell you a story, move you, and shape your opinions of the world? Quite a few I suppose; books, radio, newspapers, music.... OK, that was a bad line of argument. But all of these require vast acres of effort. As you might remember from my blog about the theatre, the arts haven’t always been kind to me. But TV on the other hand, requires you to simply suspend some disbeliefs (quite easy) and let it wash over you. The internet comes quite close, but you still have to work quite hard to actively filter out all the crap, such as when your friends keep on forcing you to watch ‘hilarious’ videos on You Tube. They are never funny.

And England does indeed seem to have some of the best TV in the world too. I am not being patriotic here; just go to France or Austria or Germany or Spain or Australia or Luxemburg or just about anywhere else for that matter, to really appreciate it. They just seem to have about seven channels, called stuff like TFR SIX, with one five hour long show every evening, which is invariably hosted by an idiot in an orange suit, with parlour games, singing, dancing, shouting and a whole variety of crap. There will sometimes be dancing girls, with the highlight of the entire being the size of bikini allowed at primetime. This theme is then taken to the next level, with a plethora of soft core porn after 11. That was quite fun on school trips, but these days it just seems a bit depressing that so much of the world lives this way.

And TV really has changed the world. My aunt didn’t see any TV until she was 20, so she consequently didn’t understand a word the American customers said at Butlins said when she worked there. I read an article once (which I can’t find for the life of me) which described crime increasing several fold in after television was introduced in an Indian state (please tell me if you know about this). We read books about TV and base the plan of our living rooms around it. Where exactly would our sofa point otherwise?

TV might look like the lowest rent medium there is. The media equivalent of a house plant or fish tank instead of a dog or war zone. But once you realise you are dragging your sofa ever closer to it and ordering up a fresh batch of narcotics (now with a wheel of health), you might realise you should restore your disbeliefs. At least during the adverts.

The New News

News is a funny old thing. The supply of it is highly erratic; sometimes weeks go by and nothing much happens except some idle speculation about Tony Blair standing down, and other weeks so much happens all such thoughts are buried in the deepest recesses of our collective mind. The demand, however, stays the same, with a finite amount of news space in the papers and room for the same amount of stories on TV. It’s not like they ever decide to publish a supplement because there is too much news to fit in the main paper, and there is seldom an extended 10 o’clock news on BBC, cutting into Jonathan Ross. Another funny thing is how they manage to churn out a full paper on a Monday – what the hell happens on a Sunday worth commenting on? But when I buy the Guardian (my paper of choice on a Monday, due to the Media bit and G2 ‘review of the reviews’) there is always lots of news about a speech Gordon Brown will make about something nothing to do with the economy, or about some radical new plan to shake up immigration.

Does the news matter? Not really. When you are on holiday and don’t read any of it do you feel any worse? I suppose it gives you something to talk about in job interviews and during long days in the workplace. It also informs you of where wars are, so you don’t organise your next human rights convention in Chechnya. Most people seem to use the news as material for their blogs, but I can’t really be bothered to research mine, so I just rant on pointlessly, like this. Generally news is just a bit of a soap opera for us to voyeur over really. Saying that, I don’t know what I would do without it. Get into East Enders and go on holiday in Azerbaijan probably.

A Trip to the Theatre

What is the point of the theatre? The whole point of such performances are surely to move you in some special way, but you are always far too far away to actually become involved in the characters. I just seem to struggle to get past the fact that there are two people on the stage, pretending to be other people. You really are not going to get truly lost in the story line. Even worse are comedies, which either have to be over acted so much you loose any subtlety in the acting to force the laughs out, or worse still are ones which require audience participation. I really hate audience participation – you pay to see a performance then realise that you have to chip in to make it work, so if you pick a bad night the crowd you have been lumbered with can ruin it. And by god do you pay. To go to the theatre in the West End in London will cost you £50 for a normal ticket and £4 for a half time drink (necessary). So for a no frills trip to the cinema for two will cost you at least £110. Then you have to pay to get there, which costs about a billion pounds. For such money you expect to have one of the best nights of your year, but you probably won’t because ‘it was a bad audience’ or you were ‘sitting behind a pillar’.

There are no such worries if you to see 300 at the IMAX, where an actor’s eye lash was about as big as an entire West End stage. It was too big in all honesty; you really have to move your head in order to move from one side of the stage to the other. This wasn’t helped by the fact we were late so had to sit at the front. The sheer bigness wasn’t awfully kind on the blue-screen special effects, so if I were more of a nerd I am sure I would have had a field day. As I was leaving I over heard two such people discussing how the seats should be shifted backwards (sensible) and the screen should be made bigger (moronic). The film it’s self is probably my new favourite film set in the past (which I don’t generally like) but it was a bit over gay in its use of tight pants and lack of tops on males. It also had rubbish music – it was shot in a kind of cool modern action film way but set in the past, something I haven’t seen before, but had the traditional generic dramatic score you get on all such films.

But yeah, better off going to the cinema then and due to the virtue of living in Manchester I only paid £5 for the privilege as opposed to ten times this for the theatre. And thank god 300 required no audience participation.

Clubbing

Clubbing is a bit of an odd thing really. We pay loads for it - seriously, think about it, we stand in the supermarket thinking about which pasta will save us 17p over a week, then go and down £20 before even getting to a club. We have to do so, as going sober would be a bit weird. I have tried it. Getting drunk involves finding a bar which is so busy and expensive that you have to stand up. That is the first rational thing you do I suppose, as it gets you used to the experience for when you get there. Once you are sufficiently pissed to pay even more money (which could have been spent on that more pretty twirly pasta to mix your tuna / ragu sauce with) its time to leave. And if there are girls there, you have to get a taxi, as their hair goes funny in the rain. Which brings me onto my next point, why exactly do women spend so much time doing themselves up? It must be for the sake of other girls, as men really don’t care. Be honest, if a girl is showing any cleavage what so ever, or eluding to the fact that she has breasts, or a bum, or any such organ, blokes are not really going to be looking at her nails. The entirety of the following day has to be spent talking about exactly who went to the toilet when, who went home with who, how awful we all feel etc.

Sorry that was such a crap blog, by the way, I have been busy today and had to write something quickly before I went to bed. But it is over 100 words so I am still on course for my challenge of wring a blog every day for four weeks. Yay.

That Old Excuse

People love excuses. We ‘don’t have the time’ to read the news, only like Take That ‘because it is nostalgic’ and don’t buy free range meat because ‘we can’t afford it’. Just admit that you don’t care about current affairs or animal welfare and only like pop music. Then be happy. There is just something about making an excuse which inherently makes us feel better, even if the excuse is little better than the truth. As wee young kids we suggest ‘I lost my homework on the bus’ doesn’t really make you sound like a much better rounded person than ‘I didn’t do my homework’. It makes us look worse in fact – blatant liars. But somehow obscuring the truth by whatever means possible is always preferable to being open about our failings. I am one of the worst at this, frequently excusing myself from the negative feelings associated with not doing much work by sitting on computers at uni all day, where work is done traditionally done. But I just write blogs and stuff.

The worst case of excuse making seems to be when people feel like getting pissed. Seldom do people say ‘I just felt like getting absolutely leathered last night’ but instead it will be their not very good friend’s birthday, which was absolutely necessary to celebrate. The only groups of people who seem to be realistc about drinking are busy city workers, who ritualistically go for a drink after work, and students, who just don’t have anything better to do.

Which brings us on to today, the biggest excuse of a non event for non drinkers drinking – St Patrick’s day. No one carse about saints, I can not see how it could be argued that you do. Firstly, no one carse about religion any more, at least in the UK. Seccondly, any saint which we actually celebrate is absolutely crap. St Patrick rid Ireland of snakes did he? Well if wiping out an entire species isn’t justification to wear green and a funny hat, what is? But he isn’t half as annoying as St George. Many accounts place him as Turkish, having never even been to England. And he killed a dragon, which obviously was never real. Imagine if it were how amazing that would that be – a big fire breathing dinosaur would certainly spice up London Zoo. The only saint who seemed to be nice to animals was St Francis, and I doubt even he could redress the havoc St Patrick and St George could inflict.

So yeah, live a shamefully boring life, make an entire species extinct if you want to be made a saint and drink as much as you can – that seems to be my moral of the day.

Tap Water

We have developed a number of silly habits over the last 10 years. Most of which seem to link to two causes - consumerism and health. In the past we would have been happy with a nice cup of Nescafé and it tasted fine because we did not know any better. Now consumerism, however, has somehow taught us that that we must drink only freshly ground coffee and having instant would make you mightily uncultured. This sounds awfully inconvenient, but consumerism quickly provided the answer – lots of coffee shops, with crossing the street just being too much of a stress for many. Starbucks have tapped into our demands particularly well, according to The Guardian – “if you stand on the corner of Regent Street and Wigmore Street in central London, you are within five miles of 164 branches of Starbucks”. Brilliant. But I don’t really care that much, as I don’t like coffee and everyone has been banging on about this forever. Sorry to be the last.

Water is somewhat a different kettle of fish. I bet fifty years ago in some meeting someone suggested bottling water and everyone else laughed. You know, bottling that stuff which comes free from the tap. However, we have somehow engraved it in our psyche that we need to drink huge amounts of water. But not any old water – bottled water. What sort of evil genius is that – consumerism and health both rolled into cheap to produce package which no one could possibly object to. It’s just water – how could you not like that?

Until today I thought that I was getting around this problem by simply taking my existing water bottle (not a flask or I would look insane) and filling it up from a tap. I know there are often signs saying ‘don’t drink’, but I just dismissed them as a conspiracy to get you to spend £1 on a bottle of water. I tried to ignore people such as my good friend Amy Jones as merely being too easily influenced by the propaganda attached to the tiles above each sink. However, Ruth, my lovely coffee lady, has suggested that the water in the Dover Street Building at The University of Manchester is checked monthly, and routinely contains legionnaire’s disease. Bummer.