I bet you don't like politicians. I don't. They're so false, aren't they? Lying, cheating, swindeling, corrupt bastards the lot of them. Scum, wrapped in tosser, coated in idiot and wearing a suit. That's what you think of them isn't it? Well shame on you. Shame. Because that description of politicians I've just given- that's you that is.

Not all of the time, obviously. That's the difference between them and you. But, like every good politician, you at some point have popped on a nice suit and lied, cheated and swindled your arse off- like you're a raging diabetic and fibs are insulin. Or at least you have if you've ever had a job interview.

Job interviews are ridiculous things. Think about it, none of the important jobs ever have them do they? Optumus Prime never sat down in front of a committee of three Autobots in suits and interviewed for the top job did he? He never had to answer endless questions such as "Optumus, could you give us an example of when Unicron eating someone's planet has caused conflict with members of your team?" and he never had to do a role-play based on using the Autobot Matrix of Leadership to improve productivity in the fourth quarter.

However, if you want to do something trivial and unimportant, like working in a call centre, in a shop or as the England football manager, then you'll be familiar with the hell that is the interview process. In the latter case, the footballers you'll be in charge of will never have had an interview in their life- other than those conducted in front of a board of sponsors logos by a commentator armed with a microphone and platitudes- which probably explains why they're the way they are.

Think about it- most people nowadays find footballers to be about as trustworthy and wholesome as a Russian nuclear reactor, and with good reason, but they can't all be like that just because they have the ability to propel a sphere around some grass with a degree of accuracy. Maybe it's because they never have to look over their shoulder and worry about the next time that they're after a transfer and they have to tell their prospective employers a steaming pile of horse-poo about working in a team and having never had a sick-day since primary school.

That's my main bone of contention with modern footballers really- sure I envy the job and the money but what I'm really jealous of is the fact that they don't have to give a monkeys about anyone or anything beyond whatever they wish. And if you think that's a disgraceful attitude for them to have then I absolutely guarantee that if anyone reading this was to swap places with a Premiership footballer they'd be just as pampered, whiny, self-absorbed and mollycoddled as them within a fortnight. Admittedly, a large part of the population would hate you but who cares? I wouldn't. I only like people because it's easier and more practical than not liking people- if I had to count the number of people I unequivocally like in this world I'd struggle to reach double figures- but as a footballer I'd have far too much money and ego to bother with any of that.

By the way, everything I've just said about Premiership footballers can also be applied to Morrissey. And I bet he didn't have to have an interview to be a pop star either. That said, if things were to turn sour for Moz and he had to get a proper job and have an interview, wouldn't you love to be a fly on that wall?

Personally, I believe interviews and recruitment should be scrapped and replaced by a part-rotation, part-lottery system. The simple fact is that most people could probably do most jobs if they were given a chance. Some jobs which require a specific talent and which don't usually have an interview process, like pop star or poet laureate should still be filled in the current way but everything else should be assigned completely at random to everybody else. Then we could all do them for a year and have another lottery and another big swap around.

Imagine spending a year as a forensic detective then suddenly getting the call to spend 12 months feeding the chimps at Longleat. Then after than you could have a year on the bins before going on to be a tanker captain for Shell or a television bowls commentator- all assigned at random. Life would be so much more fun and exciting and I reckon anyone could pick up any new job in about three weeks if thrown in at the deep end. Plus no-one would ever know what they'd be earning in the next year so no-one could have a mortgage or invest in anything so financial crises like the one the world currently finds itself in would be impossible! We'd just have to live for today and make life up as we went along.

This system would certainly help me out as I currently find myself in an employment doom loop- basically, I need experience to get a lecturing job and I need a lecturing job to get experience. This, clearly, is a situation that could only exist in a world that doesn't work properly and makes a mockery of me spending a year getting my teaching qualification. If my system was imposed, I'd just have to take my chances and see what came up- which I wouldn't have a problem with as that would be the way of things- and if any of you out there became a lecturer then, trust me, you wouldn't need the qualification I wasted time and money getting. If you were good within two weeks, you'd be good for the rest of the year and love every minute of it- so much that you'd be the best educator your students ever have. And if you were rubbish after 2 weeks then, trust me, you'll always be rubbish but at least you'll know you've got less than a year left in the job.

And just think what it would do to politics! And sports! Football would definitely have to be brought into this system as then there'd be no more closed shop at the top of the Premiership as the players are randomly expelled and introduced to teams every 12 months. No two seasons would ever be alike as Chelsea, for instance, could go from a strong team one year to a squad entirely comprised of elderly, blind women the next- and who wouldn't want to see that?

Plus, with a bit of luck, I'd get the call to be a Premiership footballer myself. Then I could just stop caring.

Climbing mountains seems like bloody difficult work doesn't it? All that equipment, the bad weather, the thin air and the clothing which seems to come mostly in colours that are never found in nature and are instead invented in Japan. The calssic reason mountaineers give for clambering up various peaks is "because they're there", which as self-vindication goes is about as lode-numbingly stupid as eating flannels because they sound wet. But still they do it anyway. And if climbing common or garden mountains (though they rarely feature in commons or gardens) is hard enough, conquering Mount Everest must be, all things considering, a bit of a sticky wicket. It's nearly 30,000 ft up at the peak and at that height you can watch the in-flight movies on passing aeroplanes. And there's something even harder than hauling yourself up the tallest mountain in the world- and that's hauling yourself up the second biggest.

K2 is, in technical mountaineers' parlance, "a rum bugger". For a kick off, it's so remote that it doesn't even have a proper name- the 'K' merely refers to the Karakoram range in which it situated and the 2 is there because K1 already had a title. It's 'Masherbrum' if you're interested, which makes it sound like a real ale. Anyway, back to K2- though it could take a while to get back there as it needs a week of trecking just to get to it's base camp from the nearest village. After that, it's 28,000ft and then some to the top over all sort of crevices, spurs, ridges and other such things that Mother Nature designs primarily to kill idiots in Gore-Tex anoraks and cramp-ons. The bold statistics say that if four people make it to the top, one of them will die trying (descents are more dangerous than ascents- ask a mountaineer, they'll tell you).

Yes, all things considered, there can't be many more difficult pursuits in the world than calmbering up to the top of the 'Savage Mountain' (you can probably guess where it gets that nickname from). And yet, for the past few weeks and months, I've been doing something just as difficult, something just as uncompromisingly tough, something just as life-threateningly dangerous.

Nothing.

Doing sod all is, frankly, nails. Since I finished my PGCE course I've made an effort to get a summer job but, understandably, no-one was interested in employing me in the knowledge that come September I'd be heading back to education. Ironically enough, all Blackburn College's promises of work appear to have been empty platitudes and my return to lecturing has suffered the same fate as a quarter of the people who try to climb K2. The upshot of all this is that, since about mid-June, I've had absolutely nothing to do and it's nearly killed me.

Naturally, I started off with plenty of giddy excitement about what I'd be able to get done during these fallow months- but as Robbie Burns told us "the best laid plans of mice and men aft' gan' a'glay"; though I'm loathe to take any guidance from him as he could only make his poems scan by inventing new words. He was on to something here though as my best laid plans for this summer have been gannin' a'glay like nobody's business.

I wanted to tidy the flat and I just sat about as it got messier. I wanted to lose weight and I just sat about getting fat. I wanted to write something but I just sat around watching things someone else had written. I've elevated procrastonation to a somewhere between an artform and a science. If the chaps at CERN had put the same effort into quantum physics as I have to doing sod-all they'd not only have figured out what happened at the Big Bang, but also come up with a way to use it to paint pictures.

And when you do nothing with the same convinction and determination as I have, you tend to find yourself living on the edge. For a start off, the human brain needs stimulation and, if it doesn't get any, it'll go out and find it's own. Therefore, without the distractions of normal working life, a trickle of unguarded thoughts can easily be allowed to meander and build to the Angel Falls of acute psychosis and mental breakdown in about two weeks. Being without a job for the last three months means that I've gone way beyond this stage and can extrapolate a simple idea, like making a sandwich or a passing bus, into a carnival of nightmares in a microsecond. "Just imagine if this sandwich has e-coli in it. Or salmonella. Or SARS (remember that?). It could kill me stone dead. Or make me faint. Out of the window. Into the path of a passing bus. I'd better just have a packet of crisps. Oh dear, that Wotsit doesn't look orange enough. What if it has e-coli in it?". That's what my day has become. Like those staple science-fiction characters, usually with a beard and a croaky voice, who claim to be able to see all of space and time- that's what I've turned into. Though instead of space and time I can see all hells and terrors leading off from a single thought. I guess this must be what cabin fever is.

Then, to make things worse, I got a nosebleed. In fact, I got 3 nosebleeds in six weeks having gone 27 years without ever hanging a single one. Clearly my body had become bored of having nothing to do and decided to liven things up of it's own accord. Or the whirly-gig of horrifying images I'd conjured up from nearly dropping a glass that morning had sent my blood pressure so high that something had to give. Either way, I was worried so I spoke to the missus about it and, God bless her, she comforted me and told me it was probably nothing and that everything was going to fine but I should see the doctor just to be safe. Then she remembered that as well as being my girlfriend she's also a health care professional and pointed out, for some reason, that the nosebleeds could also be a sign of leukaemia.

You can probably be imagine how my cabin-fevered, nightmare-extrapolating, terrified and ill-distracted brain took that, can't you. Not very well- basically. I've got the doctor's appointment tomorrow where I'm not only convinced he'll tell me I've got leukaemia but also that it's a new special kind, that they're going to call 'Matt Taylor's Disease', that is extremely aggressive, excruciatingly painful and makes Ebola look like a coldsore. He'll tell me that my nosebleeds are the start of a torrent of nasal trauma that will soon develop into a regular stream of blood and then a torrent of liquified organs before my body turns itself inside out via my nostrils. He'll tell me that it's utterly incurable and so virulent it instantly transmits to everyone I simply glance at in the street. He'll tell me that it's too late, the infection has spread and that I've doomed the planet. Then he'll call me a "git".

Or maybe it won't be that bad. Maybe he'll just tell me I've got normal leukaemia and not a particularly virulent strain of 'Matt Taylor's Disease'. That won't be too bad as the survival rates for leaukaemia are now are around 9 in 10. So, essentially, it's more than twice as easy to survive as climbing K2.

And at least it'll give me something to do.

You'll no doubt now be aware that Team GB's perfromance (when did we get that Americanised name all of a sudden?) at this years Olympics is the best in a century. Pretty impressive but it looks like, in terms of historical context, we may have plateaued. While we're knocking on the door of 20 gold medals in Beijing with a few days to go, 1908 saw Great Britain collect a whopping 56 golds. By the end of those games, our entire team must have been blinged up like Snoop Dog in a particularly auspicious mood.

However, there's no reason to think that we couldn't match this staggering success next time- becuase the 1908 Olympics, like those of 2012 will be, took place in London. And, looking back at the old records, it appears the hosts took more than a few liberties with the events that were included in order to tip the balance in Blighty's favour. For instance, that old village fete favourite the tug of war made an appearance, as did rugby union though, intriguingly, the USA took the title and remain current Olympic champions in the sport- remember that for the pub quiz. The shooting events involved killing live deer like a typical country gent andt, best of all, we also included two ancient racket sports; one actually called 'rackets' and the other called 'real tennis', both of which were about as old as Henry VIII and had been for their entire histories played almost exclusively on these isles. We claimed gold, silver and bronze in both events which is hardly surpising as no-one from any other countries even bothered entering.

Clearly, the organisers of 1908 could show Seb Coe and friends how to go about throwing together an Olympics in four years time where Britannia can truly rule the waves. And the pool, the track, the velodrome and, just for the hell of it, the real tennis court (surely it's due a revival- there's still somewhere to play it at Hampton Court apparently). All we need to do is come up with a few events where the odds are stacked in favour of the British, though if we just start making queueing and binge drinking into Olympic sports the rest of the world might twig that we're up to something. Therefore, being a considerate chap, I've put together a few ways in which some existing sports could be tweaked to help out Team GB a little bit:



Swimming: All competitors have to start each race with a pint of Stella in a plastic glass which they must carry with them. While the race will still be timed, penalties will be incurred for the amount of beverage spilt (let's say- one second per 5ml) with the best overall time deciding the standings. Anyone who's seen a British man relaxing with a pint in a pool in a foreign hotel notice some teenage French girls playing volleyball in the deep end will surely have marvelled at his ability to front crawl over to them with his plastic glass between his teeth and not lose a single drop. Surely it's about time this discipline was given the opportunity to take to a bigger stage.

Athletics: For all running races, a newly constructed Primark will be placed at the finish line. When the starting gun goes, the store will open and begin advertising a sale. All British women will instantly be able to charge down the track at Mach 3 just to be first through the doors, though we may need to change the rules so that barging, punching and some stabbing is allowed.

Gymnastics: All falls and bad landings to be accomapnied by hilarious soundtrack of 'BOING!' noises and such like, in order to make everything more audience friendly. British competitors to be drawn entirely from winners of the Pride of Britain award- thereby creating invincible combination of slapstick and heart wrenching sob-stories with the winner of the event not to be decided by professional gymnastics judges but by a phone vote on Saturday night ITV hosted by Joe Pasquale and Fern Britten (note to organsiers- make sure Pasquale handles the funny noises and Britten does the sob-stories or it could all go a bit tits up)

Cycling: British team to just turn up as this is something we can actually give the whole world a good twatting in. That said, deciding that the event should be contested entirely by 16 year old chavs on BMX bikes designed for 9 year olds couldn't hurt.

Boxing: Venue switched to just outside the Adelphi Public House on Blackburn Boulevard. Glassing allowed.

Additional Note: All sports to be accompanied by a looping soundtrack of 'Run' by Snow Patrol and McFly songs played a three times normal speed.



There you go- just a few simple changes and suddenly we're cleaning up every gold medal in sight. However, there is one more thing we need to take care of- we need to stop the athletes shagging. At the Sydney and Athens Olympics, organisers supplied over 30,000 condoms to the visiting competitors and ran out by about a week into proceedings, whereas in Beijing not even a third of the total supply of sheaths has been used and we've nearly hit the fortnight mark. The only reason I can find to explain what happened is that in 2000 and 2004, all the Brits were busy banging their brains out rather than dealing with the sporting matters at hand. They were acting like typical Brits abroad really and I dare say that at those games the phrase 'silver medal' referred to a messy sexual aftermath rather than coming second (though it could have meant both if you think about it). This needs to be prevented from happening in London four years from now

The only way to achieve this spell of celebacy for Team GB would be, as far as I can tell, to get Sir David Beckham (as he probably will be by 2012) to tell the entire nation not to have sex for the total duration of the games. We'll all dutifully bow our heads at his Royal Right-Footedeness and go about our days with our fluids slowly building to dangerous levels. Then, when its all over and Britain has won 40,000 gold medals, we can all celebrate with a great big national shag.

On Saturday night ITV. Hosted by Joe Pasquale (for the funny noises) and Fern Britten (for the sob stories). Accompanied by a looping soundtrack of 'Run' by Snow Patrol and McFly songs played a three times normal speed.

COME ON BRITAIN!

What an Olympics it's been for these isles, eh? Expectations were good to begin with but the performances have been outstanding- full of fire, fight, grit, determination, innovation, improvisation and excellence in equal measure. And the athletes have been good as well.

Various British competitors who were utterly unknown a fortnight ago have done great things to shake off the perenially irritating 'plucky' prefix to the word 'Brit' but, while all American athletes seem to be whoopin', hollerin' winning machines and all Australian entrants are lank-haired, smug and about as likable as ebola soup-, the Brtish victors have refreshingly been a veritable schmorgasboard (or, to keep this whole piece British themed, a 'buffet') of personalities and demeanours. At one end of the scale there's been Rebecca Adlington, the only person to be described as 'bubbly' without being a tosser and who may be a double Olympic swimming gold medallist but recently claimed to be scared of the sea because she "doesn't do fish". At the opposite end there's Rebecca Romero who quit rowing because it was too soft and switched to cycling- all the while going about her business with the sort of steely-eyed determination that either marks out a great sportsman or a gifted serial killer. She looks like she even goes to the shops for a pint of milk with all the relentless drive of T-1000.

But while these sporting folk have been going about their business and giving some pride back to our sporting nation (admit it, even if you think they're just competing in a bunch of obscure sports a glance at an Olympics medal table that has us ahead of Australia is enough to turn anyone into Richard Littlejohn) the real stars of the show for me have been the BBC and their army of presenters and commentators.

I admit that I was so caught up in all the sport it took me a while before I started paying attention to the people talking all over it. But then I stayed up into the wee small hours of Sunday morning to watch the women's marathon and, while Paula Radcliffe was proving that it's actually pretty tricky to win a 26 mile running race on one leg, I found myself absorbed in Steve Cram and Brendan Foster's equally gutsy performance in the commentary booth.

This, essentially, was the problem they found themselves with. In a marathon not a lot happens for long periods and soon the anecodtes about the athletes various histories and chances dry up. Luckily, these events tend to take place in major cities and so the announcers can instead deal with the dearth in action by acting as tour guide- dispensing little nuggets of information and history regarding wherever the athletes tend to be pounding through at that particular time. Just watch the London marathon one year and you'll end up knowing more about our capital than the average cabbie.

But the Olympic marathon this year provided more than a few problems in this respect as the route twice took lengthy passages through Tianaenmen Square. There you go, you've figured out what the problem was haven't you? If you haven't, here's my approximation of what would have happened had Foster and Cram fallen off the commentary tightrope upon which they found themselves.



Steve Cram: "Paula Radcliffe, not looking too bad but we all know she's had her injury problems this year and, of course we all remember what happend in Athens four years ago".
Brendan Foster: "Indeed we do Steve and let's hope we don't see that again this time".

(Pause)

Cram: "Good news for the athletes that the expected smog hasn't appeared this morning, that's great for these competitors."
Foster: "It really is Steve, and it's not as humid as I think we were expecting it to be either so that's also encouraging for this race"
Cram: "They're still not setting a fast pace though, Brendan, it's very cagey so far so I think the athletes are still playing it safe- no-one looks willing to attack as we near the 10 kilometre mark, the runners now heading into Tianenmen square.
Foster: "And of course this is one of the most famous landmarks in Beijing, an absolutely huge space surrounded by a number of very famous buildings- there's the Mao Zedong's mausoleum as well as the imposing Great Hall of the People and the Monument to the People's Heroes in the centre which was completed in 1958".

(Pause)

Cram: "And of course it's here where all those students got shot isn't it?"



Now I defy anyone to have found themselves in the same position as Cram and Foster and not have uttered something similar to that last line. I know I would. I'd also have mentioned how much of the athletes clothing had been made in Chinese sweatshops by children. And how when the Chinese invented football they centuries ago they used servant's heads as the ball. In fact, with the slow pace of the race I'd have had well over two and a half hours of broadcast time to fill so by the time the leader was entering the stadium at the end of the race I'd probably had got on to talking about getting salmonella from a dodgy Chinese chippy in Edinburgh a few years ago.

Becuase when we talk about other nations the bad stuff comes first- check out what I said about the Americans and the Aussies earlier on. But when there's an Olympics on, with it's creed of friendly, unifying competition, that's not really good form and it is within this constraint that the BBC have excelled so much these last couple of weeks. They've had to talk about how well organised the Beijing games have been without implying, as I think we all suspect, that all the helpful and efficient staff and volunteers are all facing lifetime imprisonment if they so much as fail to rake the sand properly on the beach volleyball court. You could tell they were jumpy because Usian Bolt's staggering run in the 100m final was never compared to the only other performance in the event that could match it for notability- Jesse Owens in 1936- for fear of drawing comparisons between two black men runing extrememly fast in front of oppressive regimes. Instead, they constantly compared it to Ben Johnson's mad-eyed and wholly drug-assisted dash in 1988 thereby draping suspicion-by-association all over proceedings, much better to cast a feint slur on the athlete than the nice hosts. It's a good job there's no great Tibetan sprinters or they'd really have been buggered for something to say.

The Beeb have decided to get round this problem, and the issues of having approximately a billion sports to cover, by getting in ex-competitors to act as commentators so they'll only bang on about the sports in question rather than dallying in context. Now obviously this sort of thing happens in football all the time but there's little opportunity for ex-rowers/cyclists/runners/swimmers etc to be given a mic and told to explain what's going on so their performances have been breathtaking in their unpredictability but overall notable for their competence and ability to educate an audience that's more than likely up very late at night and utterly baffled by whatever event is on the screen.

Things got a bit desperate today though when, on a quiet day for British medals, the BBC decided to take one of their ex-sporting commentators out of the safety of the booth and unleash them on the Chinese nation in person. This took the form of a swimmer by the name of Steve Parry taking a cutout of gold medal hogging swimmer Michael Phelps into Tinaenmen Square for reasons escaping anyone's understanding. He was soon mobbed by a sizable bunch and immediately came to the conclusion that they'd all decided that he was Phelps and he'd taken the bizarre decision to walk around the middle of Beijing with a cardboard cutout of himself. And change his face so he doesn't look anything like Michael Phelps. And speak in a Scouse accent. This extraordinary leap of logic is, in hindsight, probably preferable to admitting to yourself that you're losing the battle for attention to a big piece of cardboard.

Parry decided after that to try to explain to the assembled crowd that he wasn't Phelps by using the tried and trusted British method of speaking in English but louder and more slowly. Unfortunately this meant that he was now speaking to the crowd in a language they seemes to not understand, apart from two words 'Michael Phelps'. Therefore, to the Chinese locals he now seemed like a man who'd decided to walk around with a cardboard cutout of the most famous sportsman currently on the planet then wait till he's surrounded by a crowd and then say tell them who it was before repeatedly saying the name, increasingly becoming louder and slower. If he'd tried that at the Edinburgh Fringe this month, he's have probably won the Perrier Award. In the end, this bizarre cultural exchange ended in a stalemate as Parry decided he'd never convince the Chinese he wasn't Michael Phelps and the Chinese decided to ignore the crazy white man and just take their photos of the cut-out instead.

Still, at least he didn't ask one of the crowd if where he was stood was where all those students were shot.

I've prattled on about the differences between the sexes on here plenty of times before but tonight I'm all about the ladies. The fairer sex they may be, Mother Earth godessesses and all that nonsense, but it's recently become clear to me that the best thing to put two X chromosones to use at is sport.

Now, before I crack on, I'd like to point out that this isn't just a piece of Olympic bandwagon-jumping as the British women have got off to a flyer while their male compatriots are lucky to have ammassed a total of no medals whatsoever. I've not suddenly decided to eulogise some women just because they've now got medals hanging around their necks- although their successes are relevant to what I'm saying here. Because on Sunday two things happened in British sports- the football season started up again and two British ladies by the names of Becky Adlington and Joanne Jackson came first and third respectively in one of the most joyously mental sporting events I've ever had the pleasure of staying up till 4am to watch. Oh, and I fell in love a bit as well. Those last two are related.

First, to the football. Manchester United and Portsmouth squared off in the traditional season-opening Community Shield on Sunday afternoon- though you'd be forgiving for thinking football was way down the agenda of things for the two clubs to get up to for a couple of hours on a nice, plush pitch in North London. If you read the papers about proceedings it's quite possible to come to the conclusion that both sides turned up, shouted at a man wearing black, argued with each other, possibly stamped on one another a little bit, then went and met some journalists to tell them that the man in black was a tossclown, that they had good reason to spend good energy arguing with the other team and that they actually had/n't stamped all over each other after all. Overall, twenty-two men took to the biggest stage in their sport to so something thousands would do for free but for which they receive millions of pounds a year and gave the impression that they hadn't enjoyed a single fucking second of the whole thing. Something similar will be repeated up and down the country over the next ten months of 'The Greatest League In The World' as bad losers, bad winners and bad no-score-drawers go about their business. They will only be united by three things- one) nothing will be their fault, two) they won't seem to have much fun at all and three) they'll all be men.

Contrast this with the early hours of Monday morning and a swimming pool in Beijing. In it, the women's 400 metre freestyle final was led for 399 metres by Katie Hoff, an American. Tragically for this young lady, the only metre she didn't lead was the last one- that was the entire period of the race in which a teenager from Mansfield was on even terms and then, in the dying inches, a fingernail in front. If you ever get the chance, and if you haven't already, watch the video of Adlington just as she's finished the race. She turns to the giant scoreboard and there's a second, maybe not even half a second, where her face changes- first confusion, then disbelief then sheer, naked happiness. Then she realises her best mate came third and the whole proces starts again. In a few tenths of a second she gets through more emotion than David Tennant is currently managing in three hours of playing Hamlet. If the Russians and Georgians could only get a chance to watch those few frames of footage they'd realise that the world really isn't worth fighting over and they'd all just hug and kiss and decide to get along. I dare say a few members of the opposing sides would gay up and toast this new era of Adlington-inspired peace in their own most private juices.

Anyway, it was one of the most amazing pieces of sport I'd ever witnessed and was easily the greatest swimming race I'd ever seen. And it maintained that lofty position for, ooooh, about 4 minutes. Then the men's 4x100m relay happened in which the USA, from what seemed like a mile behind in the closing stages, overhauled the French squad in a finish that made the gap between Adlington and Hoff seem like a yawning chasm. 0.03 seconds, to be exact. For an illustration, try blinking and the time it takes you to do it will be about 4 times longer than that time. But whereas Adlington and Jackson had celebrated their medals with smiles, hugs and the potential emotional outpouring to create bum-jousting Russian soldiers, the victorious American men stood on the side of the pool and yelled. Long and hard, fists clenched and eyes bulging (I think their eyes were bulging, some of them still had goggles on) they yelled, screamed and shouted at no-one in particular and everyone in attendance. They celebrated for themselves, they congratulated each other but they never, never once, smiled. If there is such a thing as angry joy, this was it in action because there seemed to be very little happiness in evidence. They looked like something horrible had happened and they'd survived- like a spot of ethnic cleansing or a plane crash. If I'd have been stuck in the trenches of World War One and heard about the Armistice, I'd have reacted like they did. If I'd have won a swimming race, I like to think I'd have been chuffed instead.

And if the men of the sporting world make dreadful winners, they're infinitely worse at the character-building (i.e. shit-eating) discipline of losing. Let's go back to that women's race and Katie Hoff who, and there's no need to whitewash this, shagged it up good and proper. She had the ultimate goal in her sporting existence within her grasp and someone else snatched it away. Forever. I could say it was a kick in the teeth, but at least if you do get kicked in the teeth you can get some dentures. Hoff will never be able to trick anyone into thinking she's anything other than the girl who lead for 99.75% of an Olympic final and didn't win. And she knew exactly whose fault it was- hers. She congratualted the Brits, took full responsibility for her failure and left with grace and humility, even though her post-medal-ceremony lap of honour was often spent alone as photogrpahers clammered for the photo of the two British medals.

Hours later, in the exact same pool, a man by the name of Blake Aldridge had, like Hoff, failed to achieve what he was capable of and, rather than accept what had happened, instead pinned the blame fully and squarely on the shoulders of his partner. Who happens to be a 14 year old boy. The event in question was the Men's 10 metre Synchronised Diving final- a discipline which espouses unity, teamwork and harmony. Until, it seems, you get it wrong at which point it's suddenly every man (it's never woman, is it?) for himself. In the event itself, Aldridge and his young partner Tom Daley had been doing well until the tension got to one or both of them on the final dive which went marginally, which at this level is the same as saying 'horribly', wrong and they plummeted down the rankings into last place. The subsequent interviews saw Aldrdige explain that he'd dived well himself, performed well, not been affected by the moment, not tensed up etc, etc, etc. In other words, he was saying it's a team game and his team had fucked up. It wasn't his fault. His partner had committed the sin of being over-awed by the world's biggest sporting event at an age when most members of the same gender were still sat in their bedrooms listening to apalling music and furiously masturbating like a chimp in a safari park. How dare he? Aldridge proved that men in sports can do anything as aprt of a team apart from the toughest thing of all- lose.

And that's exactly the sort of attitude that caused me on Sunday, for the first time ever, to actually realise that the football season had started and become thoroughly depressed. From now till next May the back pages will be dominated by man after man explaining how- despite what the scoreline or anyone with eyes might suggest- they'd been robbed, cheated and swindled by other men who had the sheer gumption to be better than them at something. How they're 'slaves' because they signed a contract to be paid £100,000 a week for kicking a ball about but have now decided they want to kick a ball about somewhere else instead. How they've slowed an incident down to micro-second frames from a million different angles and realised after painstaking analysis that the man who saw it at full speed on one occasion from one viewpoint got it hopelessly, horribly, irredeemably wrong and should be hung, drawn and quartered as a result. How they played well and "deserved to win" despite failing to score in an hour and a half and being stopped from doing so by a goalkeeper who had the temerity to do what he gets paid for.

They will, basically, be complete and utter twats and I can't help but think that it's purely a product of their gender. But please, whatever you do, don't tar me with the same brush as them. I'm not like Premiership footballers, manic American swimmers or bitter British divers. We may be members of the same sex but I couldn't help it. It couldn't possibly be my fault.

Because I'm a man.

Fuck Tibet. There, I said it. In all honesty, I don't know anywhere near enough about the ins and outs of Tibetan/Chinese relationships stretching back hundreds of years to comment intelligently on the issue (I pride myself on such restraint in this age of ill-informed, knee-jerk, flock-following, reactionary, black-hats-and-white-hats stances and opinions) but what I do know if that if there's one country you don't want to piss off, and one time you don't want to do it- it's China and it's right now. Which makes the recent protest by some people who unfurled a huge flag in Beijing saying 'Free Tibet' utterly stupid on two counts- not only have they riled the local Government they also, as my friend Shaggy pointed out, tried to make a point to China by writing their sign in English when Madarin may well have been a bit more useful.

On Friday, the Olympic Games will start in Beijing with an utterly baffling all-singing, all-dancing, lights show of an opening ceremony at precisely 8pm local time on the date 08/08/08. Handily for China, 8 is seen as a lucky number in that part of the world (though you knew that already, you've seen the HSBC advert) which is all well and good as everyone involved is hoping that the whole shebang and the subsequent 3 weeks of sports goes off smoothly in front of the prying eyes of a curious planet.

As ever the Olympics promises to be, despite what FIFA might claim about the perpetually disappointing World Cup, the Greatest Show on Earth. Entire lifetimes of training and preperation will come to nothing or everything dependent on a tenth of a second; people will do some things better than anyone has ever done those things in the whole history of human achievement; some competitors will just turn up, do their best, be noticed by hardly anyone and go home again. Also, and it's really worth putting a bet on this if you ask me, an American swimmer by the name of Michael Phelps may well earn more gold medals than the whole of Great Britain.

Understandably, the Chinese authorities are a little tetchy at the moment about everything going to plan and, lest we forget, this is a regime somewhat unused to being challenged and not renowned for meeting it's opponents halfway. This, of course, hasn't stopped thousands of people all over the world deciding that the Olympics in Beijing is a good time to highlight a few issues that they have with the world's most populous nation. Mostly this has revolved around the Chinese occupation of Tibet which has meant the little nation suddenly becomeing one of the most (in)famous on Earth rather than just the place where Christian Bale went to in order to become Batman.

Now, as I said before, I don't know enough about Tibet and China's past to really make my mind up (I know what people who want China out of Tibet say about it, but frankly they're the sort of people who are always biased against superpowers so for all I know Tibetans could be a right bunch of bastards whose national dish is Care Bears on toast) but I've really begun to hate the protestors who've doggedly tried to make a nuisance of themselves towards the Chinese at every turn over recent months. This isn't an easy stance for me to take as it makes me feel utterly ashamed for even thinking it- after all these are people who stand up for something they believe in and stand to make little personal gain other than the satisfaction of knowing they've tried to help the plight of a little nation on the other side of the planet. In this day and age, anyone who believes stuanchly in anything other than who their favourite X-Factor contestant is should be roundly applauded, and I genuinely want to be the person clapping them loudest of all.

But I can't, not in this case. Because one of their number did something utterly aggregious, immoral and repellant. Whatever anyone might think of China and Tibet, nothing can excuse what this person, this wretch, this utter, utter shit did. because one of the protestors attacked Konnie Huq. She was carrying the Olympic torch through London on it's worldwide relay from Greece to China when, as I'm sure you saw, a protestor tried to grab it from her hand to disrupt proceedings and instantly cause China to withdraw all froces from Tibetan soil immediately. Either that or he was desperate to light a fag. (Incidentally, the furore surrounding the torch relay has led the London Olympic committee to decree that there will be no relay in 2012- probably terrified that the torch will be constantly attacked by agreived Northern Rock customers).

I'm all for making a point in the name of world peace and unity but there really is no need to make it by assaulting the delightful Ms. Huq. Especially as she has the potential to bring an end to all conflict throughout the world, much like Wyld Stallyns did at the end of 'Bill and Ted's Bogus Jounrey'. She is eminently fanciable in a way that all men and lesbians can appreciate irrespetive of her skin colour or ethnic origin, a potentially vital tool in destroying the spread of always-male-dominated far-right doctrine. Women, meanwhile, who are becoming alienated and frustrated by airbrushed icons of female perfection dominating the world can take solace in the fact that here is an undeniably beautiful woman who actually, on closer reflection, has weird eyes and a mouth that could charitably be described as 'wonky'. A strike against Konnie Huq is a strike in the face of the forces of peace and togetherness.

Manhandling ethnic sexboats aside, many protestors against China's place in Tibet have denounced the Olympics for deciding to host their quad-annual shindig in the country and pleaded with competitors not to attend in order to make a point about the situation. This idea is possibly the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard, and I've heard a Keith Richards solo album. How dare anyone suggest that sport should be an arbiter of world affairs? Can people who happens to be blessed with the God given ability to run, jump, throw, swim, cycle or such better than almost anyone else and then put in the punishing hours to hone their talent to perfection be asked to give up their dreams in order to make a point that, and this is just my opinion, could be better debated and settled by the people who we all fucking well elected to do it?

Why don't we just leave them to get on with the business of sport, with it's refreshing mix of acute drama and utter lack of consequence, and leave the politicians of the world to face the protests about how the planet is run? Though, to be fair, if they were actually any good (or, indeed, interested) in creating hope and unity across the globe, maybe the Olympics wouldn't get dragged down and sullied by a situtation of their making in the first place. It looks like there might only be one thing left for us to do.

The campaign 'Konnie Huq for World President' starts here.

You blew it. All of you. You did. And you. And you. You as well. Not to mention you. Especially you. I gave you a chance and you shagged it up with all the grace of a ski-jumping cow. I hope you're happy.

It seems that practically ever interaction I've had with another human being over the past few weeks has been a shamefully tragi-comic episode of bum-witted incompetence and weapons grade ignorance. My faith in humanity as nature's last word, which was always shaky at best, has now been utterly wiped from the face of the Earth. I now hold you all in the same regard that a whale has for krill.

For example, I've had a front row seat for my girlfriend's recent battle to get her insurance company to pay-out for her car that got written off in a crash on the M6. In this situation, as I'm sure most of you know, the insurers- who you have to dilligently pay money to every month becuase a) you want to guarantee that you always have a mode of transport and b) it's the law- decide on the value of the car, give you the money for it, then you go and buy yourself a nice new motor. It's a bit like the Cosa Nostra, only enshrined in an Act of Parliament and with nicer letterheads.

Well to cut a long story short, the last two months has seen Amy's insurers not only get the value of the car spectacularly wrong when making their first three offers- which is kind of par for the course as they have an engrained policy of trying to rip you off- but they also managed to accidentally steal her car from the accident recovery firm before losing all the contents of said vehicle apart from an ice scraper in the shape of a penguin, and then in a magnificent coup-de-grace of maverick idiocy they failed to successfully send a single letter to our flat in five attempts but instead removed the stereo from the car and posted that to Amy instead. At the end of the bemused phone call Amy made in order to ask why she was now in receipt of the car stereo but no official paperwork she was asked if she was interested in any of the company's personal finance deals- as if the credit crunch would be aided by having loans doled by the sort of people who can't tell the difference between pieces of paper and a CD player. This made us mad.

The insurance company in question is AA Insurance and I can state that you should avoid them like a plague chutney. They are staffed exclusively by cock-wits. I can confidently say that because, on past form, if they try to sue me, the whole process will stretch out for aeons and eventually all I'll end up with is no legal documentation whatsoever and a new radio for my Saxo in the post.

While all this was taking place, I was busy relaising that Blackburn College have failed to pay me for any of the work I did for them since my PGCE course finished and have in fact failed to keep any record of my existence within the institution. Luckily, they have professionally responded to my requests to know what is going on by blaming each other. calling me a fantasist and a liar and then studiously ignoring my e-mails and phone calls. While the fuckwit who caused this mess is probably on their summer holidays somewhere, luxuriating on golden sands with paddling pool sized cocktails while chatting up Amazonian locals of Olympian sexual prowess, I as the innocent party am out cash and accruing bank charges left right and centre. This makes me mad.

The fucker in question works for Blackburn College's Payroll Department, which is populated entirely by chuff-flaps of the highest order. I can confidently say that because, if they try to sue me, the worst that'll happen is that they'll forget entirely to send the writ out in the post, then tell me I never said these things in the first place and then claim I don't even exist.

To get away from all this trouble with colleges and insurers, Amy's parents kindly took the two of us to York for a weekend- whereupon we discovered a beautiful city over-run with tourists getting completely lost (hint: there's TWO rivers running through the city), bar staff who couldn't remember orders greater than 2 drinks, a night porter who didn't tkae breakfast orders off the fill-in-your-own hanging door-signs because he was asleep and 17 year-old 'actors' who deliver their performances as various gruesome characters from York's history with all the jaded, listless emotional intensity of two Koala bears having a can't-be-fucking-arsed contest. This made me mad.

I came to the conclusion that every last person in the city of York is an incompetent yokel of no confirmed ability. I can confidently say that because, if they try to sue me, they'll probably lose their way to their solicitors, only be able to remember two of things I accused the people of their city had done, then fall asleep in the meeting before finding themselves completely un-arsed to turn up to court.

Amy's parents gave us a lift home from York to their house where I'd parked my car at the start of the weekend. I was seething for the enitre journey- my eyes burning with pure white hatred for the sheer shitness of my fellow man (and woman). The people I'd encountered over the previous couple of months had skewed my outlook so much I genuinely believed that every single person on the planet apart from me was a diamond-strength fuck-clump for whom getting out of bed without serious injury was an achievement on par with building the Pyramids. You're all idiots, I thought.

Then I realised I'd lost my car keys.

You know that special person? You've got one- everyone does. They might not necessarily be the person you share your bed with at night, your nearest and dearest. They might be a friend for whom your love is unrequited. They might be the one that got away all those years ago. They might be the mythically beautiful person you see on the bus every morning. You might never have even met them. But there's someone, somewhere who gets your heart pounding and your mind racing. Someone who does for you the best thing anyone can do for another person- they make you feel, for want of a better word, funny.

Think of that person. Now, tell them how you feel. Go on. Do it. Find the way to track them down and let them know, right now, that there's someone in the world for them and that someone is you. Tell them now, I'll wait here for you. And be quick about it.

Because you're about to die.

The harbinger of your impending doom, like so little else in human history, comes from Switzerland and goes by the rather bland name of 'The Large Hadron Collider'. Essentially, it's a 17 mile circular tunnel 100 metres below the Franco-Swiss border which is currently in the process of being cooled to -271.25 degrees centigrade. When this is done, the scientists who run it will then start firing beams of protons in opposite directions round the tunnel and make them crash into each other, thereby replicating conditions that prevailed within a few millionths-of-a-second of the Big Bang. And the reason they're doing all this is to test their current model of particle physics which, as they put it themselves, "is known to break down at a certain energy level".

Let's go through that again. A bunch of men in white coats realise that a very important theory of how absolutely everything fits together at the most minute level breaks in certain extreme conditions. 'Extreme conditions' being, in this case, an alternative way of saying 'The Big Bang'. They therefore have decided to recreate those exact same conditions or 'Big Bang' in a great big underground tunnel and just see what happens. Oh, and it'll all happen at light-speed.

Little wonder then that more than a few people are a tad worried that, since no-one knows what's going to actually take place, it's entirely possible that the experiment will do something like creating a black hole and swallow the Earth into itself.

The scientists at the colider themselves state that this is ludicrous as "there is no basis for any concerns about the consequences of new particles or forms of matter that could possibly be produced by the Large Hadron Collider", which is frankly a bit rich from a bunch of chaps who are basically trying to demonstrate that one of their main theories doesn't work properly.

It's worth getting worried about what might happen when the collider goes online as boffins (a name used by The Sun to describe all those of the ilk of scientists and inventors- a deliberately light-hearted term the newspaper uses to take the sting out of sullying itself with stories of human excellence and achievement) don't have a partcularly impressive track record with health and safety when they're on the cusp of great discoveries. John Logie Baird, for example, managed during one of his early experiments in creating television to blow the entire power grid of Glasgow. In a similar vein a chap called Antonio Meucci- who the United States House of Representatives recently passed a motion honouring as the true inventor of the telephone- only came up with his idea after electrocuting his wife and hearing the sound travel down the wire. If this is what happened with two blokes who were only working on transmitting electronic signals across tiny distances, heaven only knows what'll transpire when those Swiss scientists attempt to recreate the birth of the Universe.

Which is why this is probably a good time to do everything (and, indeed, everyone) that you ever wanted to. Some scientists have postulated that if the hadron collider does create a little black hole of it's own it won't engulf the planet instantly, but rather take it's own sweet time going about it- which means that the whole of humanity will have a clock over it counting down unerringly towards annihilation.

Now if you're a fan of the movies, particularly the glut of disaster films from the late-90s that featured Earth teetering on the brink of destruction from aliens or an asteroid or something, then you'll know the drill. We all desperately try to flee the cities and get stuck in traffic or huddle up with our families by the TV and radio awaiting news of whether Will Smith or Bruce Willis has miraculously saved us all with seconds to spare. Then we all cheer, embrace tearfully and listen to a speech by President Morgan Freeman.

I've got a feeling that, in real life, this won't actually happen. Ask yourselves, is that really how you want to spend your final few hours and days on this planet, knowing that the end of everything is just around the corner? For a start off- and let's not be coy about this- who, knowing that impending armageddon will expunge all awkward consequences, wouldn't want to give mass, unadulterated fucking-on-the-streets a bash? Just imagine a great big, winner-takes-all, grab-the-nearest-stranger, thronging mass of limbs and fluids rolling merrily up the high street and into oblivion. Like Newcastle on a Friday night. That's a fitting way to give life a send-off.

Mind you, I did start this piece by stating that everyone should go out and find their special someone before time runs out, and it would take an extraordinary stroke of luck to dive head first (figuratively speaking) into a mass Book of Revelations orgy and happen to catch hold of your one true soulmate. But then again, a bookmaker once set the odds of Earth getting swallowed by a black hole in the next 50 years at 100 million-to-one. So things going horribly wrong in that reactor under the soil of Switzerland could turn out to be the luckiest thing that ever happened to us all and the chances of inadvertantly porking your spiritual muse seem tiny and easily surmountable by comparison. Or, alternatively, you could just play similar odds by buying a lottery ticket.

Either way you'd be getting screwed.

I have a problem. I have, as I often do, an urge to write- God knows why but I do. This happens to me quite a lot of the time but, as is currently the case, the urge has failed to conincide with actually having anything to write about. That's not to say there hasn't been anything going on in the world on which I could decide to pass comment and judgement from my Ivory Tower (i.e. 2nd floor flat in Warrington).

I could write about Wimbledon, which has kept me nicely occupied for the past two weeks. I've actually kind of fallen out of love with tennis and it's annual jaunt to SW19 in recent years. When I was growing up, it was a fascinating opportunity for my young eyes to witness the horrors of intense, naked psychological meltdown as the likes of McEnroe, Lendl and Connors went utterly mental with every lost point and dodgy line call- raging against the dying of the light in a variety of ill-fitting shorts and tragically misguided hair. At the other end of the court there would invariably be some huge blond Scandinavian or German pumping the ball through the air with ruthless efficiency and detached menace. It was like Die Hard on grass and it was utterly spellbinding.

But, in recent years, those efficient players seemed to totally take over- their domination epitomised by Pete " " Sampras- a man so unremmitingly level-headed he made Tiger Woods look like Genghis Khan. In tandem with him would be a succession of plucky, unloveable Brits ready and willing to disappoint for their country in-between the rain-breaks. When federer arrived on the scene he appeared for a while be even more relentlessly dull than Sampras- he was even Swiss for God's sake. And then Rafael Nadal turned up. Dressed like a pirate dipped in Daz and made entirely out of biceps he pushed Federer close in last year's final and then, this time out, pipped him to the post in possibly the greatest sporting contest ever witnessed by anyone ever. It was so good even the persistent showers seemed to add to the drama rather than just get in the way as usual- it seemed God himself was orchestrating events from the heavens. I always thought seeing Steve Redgrave win his fifth Olympic gold was as good as sport got; but this year's Wimbledon final went a step further as, following over 4 hours of see-sawing battle, Roger Federer collected his runner-up shield with grace and humility all while wearing a preposterous cardigan and, incredibly, not looking stupid. Surely these two are Gods among men.

I could write about all this, but I won't. Simon Barnes, the suspiciously hippy-looking chief sportswriter for The Times, does it much better and you'd be well advised to check out his writing on this and any other tournament.

I could write about Euro 2008, a football tournament for once unsullied by English spot-kick tragedy and instead graced by goals in their thousands and a couple of games that cocked a snook at end-of-season tiredness by not kicking into life until deep into injury time. This was a tournament in which the right team won and Michael Ballack turned out to be a compelling titan who we were all willing to forget, however briefly, mostly earns his crust in West London at the heart of the least likeable team in the history of European sport.

Fascinating narratives abounded throughout. Fernando Torres, looking like a 14 year old schoolgirl in a squad of bronzed Ibeiran galcticos, lead the line with guile and brilliance and still got substitued in every match by his unhinged coach. Luca Toni paid back all his pre-competition hype by spooning an inglorious succession of six-yard-box chances high and wide in a series of increasingly bizarre and desperate ways- as though he was trying to win the Turner Prize rather than the world's third biggest sporting event. Gary Neville, in the ITV studio-cum-bunker, came staggeringly close to allaying all the antipathy usually aimed at him for his shop-steward badge-kissing persona by proving to be the sharpest pundit around- only to spoil everything by wearing preposterous facial hair.

I could write about this, but I won't. As with every footballing shindig there's been acres of writing covering every possible angle there is to cover and therefore there is aboslutely bugger all that I could add.

I could write about Gatley Festival, an extraordinary Sunday afternoon I recently spent in an outpost of Cheadle which could even make Abu Al-Hamza fall in love with the British summer-time. The highlight of the day's proceedings was a parade through the centre of the village featuring various pillars of the community, an assortment of dance troupes, Stockport County's League One play-off trophy and the mandatory terrified-looking Rose Queen. Clearly, many members of the community of all ages had put hours of work, entirely off their own backs, into preparing for this parade and putting on a bit of a show for their friends and neighbours. Moments before the procession was to get underway God, as a bi-product of his work on Wimbledon's Centre Court, felt the need to douse everyone with a shower that verged on the biblical. All that effort threatened to end in a sodden troop through the streets as the friends and neighbours for whom this event had all been prepared sheltered in the nearest pub.

Then, with seconds to spare, the clouds parted and the sun shone through- allowing the parade to set off in front of pavements suddenly six-deep in people and cheer. All was well with the world, all that earnest hard work by the people of Gatley was paying off. Then the Number 11 bus turned up. The bus was surprised to find it's normal, scheduled route through this particular part of South Manchester blocked by a line of dancing teenagers and football mascots- something which the depot had clearly not felt inclined to warn the driver about. Determined to stick to his timetable, he soon figured out an alternative route round the parade and embarked on a three-point turn which soon garnered the attention of the thronged masses who had been nicely lubricated by a crafty pint or two during the earlier shower. Suddenly, the parade which had been months in the planning was playing second fiddle to a bemused and frustrated Stagecoach Manchester employee wrestling with the laws of physics and a vehicle clearly unsuited to compicated manouveurs on a tight road near a drunken audience and a procession of twiddling batons. It was hard not to feel sorry for the organisers as the crowd left the spectacle they'd laid on to roar encouragement at the driver revving up for his latest battle with the forces of Isaac Newton; but not even the worldy might of W.H. Auden could have conjured up a more perfect vista of the summer months in these Isles than these precious moments in Manchester's posh bits.

I could write about this, but I won't. You had to be there, you see. It was one of those moments where the re-telling will never live up to the experience itself. Even if the late, great Dave Allen had been there and conjoured up a 20 minute routine on it.

I could write about job-hunting, the bane of my current existence and the sour taste in the mouth at the end of my PGCE course. Having spent a year gaining my qualification to allow me to show 'A Matter Of Life And Death' to successive generations of teenagers I now have to find an organistaion willing to pay me to do it. This involves a monotonous round of endless application forms onto which I have scrawled my name, address, qualifications and the fact that I have a driving licence and no previous convictions for third-degree murder.

In amongst all of this is the greatest challenge of all- the personal statement. It is impossible to write one of these without sounding like some deluded fuckwit from The Apprentice. You have to bang on about your achievements and brilliance which, as anyone who has ever had to fill in an apllication form in will tell you, immediately makes you sound like a tosser of the highest order. I nearly leapt out of a window recently when I realised that, in the course of cobbling yet another paeon to my invented magnificence together, I had unwitingly used the word 'paradigm'. The desire to trail off halfway through a sentence on why your degree proves you are capable of effective time-management and simply write "FOR FUCK'S SAKE, TALK TO ME AND FIND OUT WHAT I'M LIKE- DON'T JUST READ THIS UTTER BULLSHIT AND JUDGE ME. PLEASE JUSTIFY MY EXISTENCE TO MY EYES. PLEASE HELP ME. HELP ME" is often entriely overwhelming and I believe a knighthood should be forthcoming to anyone who could read their statement back to a roomful of people with a straight face and without slumping to the floor in a deluge of resigned tears.

Maybe this is the reason. Maybe these statements, their inanity, their pointlessness, their in-built default to hoodwinking is the reason why I have an urge to write something but no idea of what to write about. Whatever part of my brain controls writing has been forced, largely against it's will, to peddle reams of written tripe in the hope that it will persuade someone in a college somewhere to meet me face-to-face to discuss my potential ability to communicate to students almost entirely via the completely different medium of speech. Maybe that's why it's itching to write something but the rest of my brain can't think what to write.

Maybe that's why I could write about any of the things listed above, but I won't.

Because I can't.

Think of something. Anything. A cat, a box, a yeti, Lake Titikaka, anything. Right, now you've thought of it, what do you think of it? DO you like it? Hate it? Does it make you smile? Frown? Queasy? Whatever it is you thought of, form an opinion on it.

Done that? Good. Now forget it, you fucking thick mong.

It is my firm belief, and I'm playing the odds here, that your opinion is utterly wrong. It's ill-informed, self-serving, poorly expressed and as far from being correct as Earth is from the edge of the Universe. YOU. ARE. WRONG.

I think this way thanks to the Internet. I also think the Pope cause 9/11 because of the internet but that's another story. When everyone started going online a few years ago various cultural commentators (how exactly do you get into that line of work?) eulogised how democratic the whole thing was. Suddenly, anyone who thought anything about anything could now write about it to their heart's content for all the world (or, more accurately, their friends who they could just say it to anyway) to see. Everyone's opinion could be made to matter.

Big mistake.

Democracy, you see, doesn't work. While we in the Western world like to gaze pityingly upon various countries under the yoke of mental tinpot dictators, all of whom seem to have Steveie Wonder's dress sense, we get to choose our leaders in the polling booth and, frankly, a fat lot of good it's done us. By being allowed a say in who runs our nations we've ended up with a drink-driving cowboy in control of the most tooled-up army on the planet, a British PM with a wonky mouth and no depth perception, a frankly bizarre French president who looks like his own Spitting Image puppet and an Iranian leader who looks like a geography teacher who just happens to have chosen to devlelop a nuclear arsenal.

Let just anyone have a say in deciding anything and you're asking for trouble. Think about reality TV- all the ones that the populous can vote on by mashing their greasy mits on their telephone keypads are all joyless marionette parades of varying immorality while the only one of those shows where the public don't get any say whatsoever, The Apprentice, is easily the most beguiling British television show of the last 5 years.

Giving credence to any two-bit half-witted thought that flickers through the smog of a person's mind first became popular on radio stations that couldn't be arsed forking out for a PBS licence to broadcast music. Even today it's impossible to listen to Jeremy Vine's show on Radio 2 or Six-O-Six on Five Live without praying on bended knees that President Armadhinajad could pull himself away from teaching people about ox-bow lakes for two seconds, enrich some uranium and send it over here on a cruise missile post haste.

After radio, TV got in on the act and suddenly George Alagiyah was interrupting the Six 'O' Clock News to ask the viewing millions, most of whom think Eastenders is the pinnacle of human achievement, to send in their views on the intricacies of the Kyoto Agreement. Now it's impossible to go to any once-reputable news site on the internet that doesn't ask for readers' comments at the bottom of every story- usually followed by post after post of clump-headed pontificating that rapidly descends into a the philsophical equivalent of a hair-pulling contest. With worse grammar.

Even worse are the people who put comments at the bottom of colunists pages about how utterly wrong everything said columnist has ever said is wrong and how, instead of writing about how they see the world, they may wish to take up rotting in hell as an occupation instead. They're the equivalent of those people who scour the TV schedules for something to be offended by and complain about, rather than actually trying to find something they might find pleasing, entertaining or enlightening. For these people, the process of actually creating something people might enjoy is much less noble than dredging the planet for stuff to snipe at. They're the people who write to Points of View thinking that, despite the fact the BBC is funded by 30 million licence fees which makes it unique and still a world-leader in innovative and quality television, it should tailor it's entire output to them and them alone. A bit like Hitler, without the get-up-and-go attitude.

People like this should be rounded up and shot. Twice. They should be forced to sit in a tiny, windowless room for eternity looking at a television transmitting nothing but eye-bleeding static for eternity. Everything that offends them should be metered upon their person a thousandfold. They don't deserve the gift of being alive.

Mind you, they're just my thoughts. What do you think? Feel free to comment below.

Well. It's decision time. I've always, for some reason, had a bit of an obssession with the number 27. I'm always drawn to it if I'm ever asked to pick a number (feel free to remember this information and then, if you're ever in the pub with me, pretend to be psychic) and it's the number I'd put my life savings on at the roulette table if I ever found myself in a casino. It's also the number on the back of my personalised Blackburn Rovers shirt- though the name 'Matigol' above it convinces well-informed football fans that it's an oblique and frankly ill-judged tribute to babyfaced bench-warmer Matt Derbyshire.

27 is also the most rock 'n' roll number there is, because it's the most dangerous age to be a rock star. It's the age at which Hendrix choked on his returning lunch, Jim Morrison checked out in a bath-tub, Kurt Cobain redecorated the garage wall with the inside of his head, Janice Joplin chased the dragon a bit too far and Richey Edwards plunged into the River Severn (any Manics fans who think he's still alive can feel free to comment further at www.forfuckssakegetoverit.com).

And I turned 27 last Saturday.

Maybe my long fascination with the number is a sign that, at some point in the next 12 months, I'm going to come to a very sticky, very messy rock 'n' roll end. This is, of course, very appealing. I don't have a death wish, far from it, but death is something that comes to us all in the end (literally) and therefore it's worth putting an effort into making your particular terminal experience that little bit more spectacular and memorable than everyone else's.

And there's plenty of scope for going about this particular endeavour in a suitably bizarre manner. I could, for instance, pump so many drugs into my system that I choked to death while trying to ingest my own lungs. Or I could lose a fight with a horny elk, fly a tin-foil hanglider into a lightning storm or I dress up as a suspicious package and hang around terminal 4 of Heathrow till the bomb disposal team turn up.

I could even die in a bizarre gardening accident.

The thing is, I don't really want to. I actually want to get a bit healthy. You see, 16 years ago, I started secondary school and met a few people who became, over time, my closest and bestest friends. We're still mates now and along the way we gained some new faces until a rather impressive circle of chums had built up. They have become, to get gushy for a moment, everything a man could want from his pals- always funny, always there for each other, always ports in a storm, always and forever making me a better person just by being around them. And, in the time-honoured tradition of British social convention, we've spent most of our time with each other getting drunk.

We've also gradually spread out across the country. Most of us grew up in Blackburn, then went to University, then a few came back and then a few went away again until this group that spent much of it's formative years in a single living room is now spread across an area between the twin posts of Cheltenham and Lancaster. In a few days another will leave the East Lancashire nest for pastures new in deepest, darkest Bristol.

As is often the case, this move down south is part of a step up the career ladder- a sure fire sign that we're all, irreversibly, growing up. I'm similarly in the process of passing a similar life-improvement mile-post as I come to the end of my PGCE and search for the first career rung that will allow me to bang on to successive generations of teenagers about Powell and Pressburger films. Times they are a-changing.

I've become overwhelmed by this realisation that my closest drinking buddies will soon be that little bit more spread out across the country and going to the pub for a few ales with them will involve a ruinously expensive commute. This has been combined with the fact that I may have to become a bit professional if I actually want to get on in lecturing and has therefore led me to view my 27th birthday not as the green flag for my inexorable slide into debauched rock 'n' roll oblivion but as the time when I start going to the gym properly and doing sit-ups.

A near-decade of fairly consistent drinking have left me, for want of a more flattering word, fat and now vanity appears to have kicked in. I don't like my belly being my largest organ, my belt leaving moderate flesh wounds and my jeans being so tight around my thighs that it's possible (though not advisable) to look at my naked right upper-leg and count how much change I had in my pocket. Also, as summer finally gets its act together and kicks in, I'm going to start spending all day coated in a thin film of sweat which will become a steady presipitation of persperation the moment I undertake any sort of physical activity like walking to the shop or opening a beer.

Losing a few pounds is going to be a hell of an effort on my part- seeing as I'm an inveterate snacker and that my previous attempts to regularly visit the gym have left me broken, battered and strained in a variety of intriguing and innovative places. Only last week I paid a cursory visit to the local David Lloyd centre and got into an idiotic spot of silent one-upmanship with a middle-aged chap on the rowing machines which left me with a neck so sore I've been unable to look even slightly to the left or right without shrieking in agony.

This, in turn, has made even the swiftest of glances into the blindspot while lane-swapping on the M6 a study in excruciating pain. The alternative would be to ignore this little glimpse of what's alongside but, early-morning traffic being what it is, this is inviting probable death.

And, at the age of 27, that wouldn't be near enough a rock 'n' roll enough way to go.

Good news! I've solved the pensions crisis! And the world economic slowdown! And the oil crisis! That as well! Aren't I good?!

Honestly, I get one week off work and without even getting to Thursday I've already pretty much fixed the Western world. I'll have cracked the Zimbabwe elections by Friday lunchtime. It's a shame it's my birthday on Saturday and I'll be busy (i.e. pissed) over the weekend or I'd probably get perpetual motion boxed off as well.

You're probably wondering what I've come up with to solve pretty much everything that's bothering Britain these days. Well, I'll get round to that in a minute. In the meantime- a question:

Which is the superior gender?

Dangerous turf eh? It's frankly reckless to invoke this sort line of questioning- especially at the point in these posts where I usually start banging on about The Battle of Hastings or Prince. But I think it's worth treading all over this particular theological minefield for one simple reason. Something needs to be said.

Men are better than women. We're superior in every way.

I know, I know- it's very easy to make a case for women as the finer sex because, even discounting their physically aesthetic advantages, they're rarely responsible for wars, death and destruction; they seldom get bogged down by trivia, geekdom and sport and they're much more in tune with emotion, feelings and listening. Though, let's be honest, it's possible to make a case for the lionising of the male gender for pretty much the same reasons. We're unlikely to ever get anything done if we aren't willing to fight for it, aren't willing to figure out the minutae with near-psychotic obsession and are all to willing to be distracted by Claire who's just broken up with that bastard from accounts and needs her mates to come round and watch 'Bridget Jones Diary'. Or Eurovision.

And when men do get round to making and creating things the world becomes, generally, a better place for it. When womankind finally tried her hand at the fascinating world of discovery- Marie Curie discovered radiation which killed her husband, then her then helped Oppenheimer invent the H Bomb. She finally ended up giving her name to a cancer charity which, frankly, is nowhere near as cool as getting a statue dedicated in your honour like any decent bloke would.

Women also live longer than men (probably because men kick the bucket sooner as they're all tired out from achieving stuff) and that means they're the lion(esse's) share of the C4 explosive in the pensions timebomb that, apparently, is due to go off any minute now.
Essentially, thanks to the wonders of medical science, we're all living too long these days so there isn't enough money in either the state or companies to support us in our retirements. Everyone from my generation is going to have to work till they're about 120 years old then spend another few decades in utter squalor while slowly recreating that Nazi face melting at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

And yet, the news every day is full up with warnings about what can kill us. There's the obvious ones- smoking, drinking, eating razorblades, the usual- but there also seems to be hardly a second goes by without something new being responsible for giving us cancer. There's been cheese, mobile phones, deodorants and asprin in recent years to name a few- a list so varied it's staggering to think we can get through a day without a gigantic tumour growing out of our heads and killing us stone dead.

This is confusing.

On one hand, we're being cursed for living too long and crippling the economy and on the other hand, we're constantly being told how to survive well into a thrid century by living a pious lifestyle, drinking organic water and going to bed before Deal or No Deal. Surely the best way to solve the crisis brewing over pensions would be to keep every potential danger to our well-beingsecret whilst simultaneously encouraging the populous to smoke cheese and drink their mobiles. And why stop there- if someone's suffering in a hospital from some ungodly illness, why use medicine to bring them back from the brink when we can get them charlied off their nuts and give them the send off they deserve- high as a kite with not a care in the world beyond alphabetising their CDs and fucking anything that moves.

If pubs sold skag as well as Stella, if smoking was not just encouraged but compulsary and if everyone's diet consisted of the sorts of food which are unhealthy yet supremely tasty for no other reason that there is a God and he hates us; then the world would be a much, much better place. Everyone would be happy and content before courteously popping their clogs before they became too much trouble.

Hell, let's go for the full Logan's Run effect and kill everyone who gets to a certain age. I'd be nicer than the people in the film though. Let's say 50 as an age for compulsary termination if you haven't done it to yourself beforehand. And no jumpsuits. Though everyone would get the chance to see Jenny Agutter take her clothes off.

That way, if we all merrily debauched ourselves into oblivion before we hit the half century, we'd have no need to spend money on savings or private pensions which would free up countless billions of pounds to reinvigorate the economy. And we'd all be too mullered to drive so there'd be no need to make petrol from the crude oil which, by weight, currently costs more than Eva Green's breasts.

And there you have it. If do-gooding scientists would just be quiet and the government got round to actually promoting those very great and extremely fun activities it so routinely warns us against then I'd have solved absolutely everything!

Mind you, it isn't surprising I've thought of such a pioneering and insightful solution.

You see, I'm a man. It's what we do.

Perhaps it's all the surfing ninja's fault. Myabe he's the reason that the fun, the play, the sheer joie-de-vivre seems to have disappeared from video gaming these days. Maybe he's the reason that leaps and bounds in technology have served only to make the escapist universe of the games console more and more like the mundane real world. Maybe he's the one that ruined it all. Maybe. But it seems churlish to blame him. After all, he had to fight the mutant robotic T-Rex.

The ninja of whom I speak is the title character of Sega's 'Shinobi' series which ran through the days of the 8-bit Master System and it's 16-bit sibling, The Megadrive. Whilst I don't want to cast bias on the video gaming worlds of then and now, we shall refer to these years as 'The Golden Age'. I've recently returned to those days via the recent trend for retro gaming on handheld consoles, which has led the discerning PSP owner to be able to buy the 'Sega Megadrive Collection' for their little black box. It's 27 games for about 20 quid. It's an instant games library and the bargain of the century.

It also demonstrates more innovation, imagination and sheer maverick insanity than the combined releases of the all three Playstations and every other console since about 1998. For example, there's 'Shinobi III' where, as mentioned above, our star-throwing hero surfs and horserides his way through hordes of dinosaurs, mutants, robots and robotic mutant dinosaurs; or there's Comix Zone where a comic book artist is sucked into his own publication by his greatest villain, who then proceeds to swap place with him- the artist then having to fight from panel to panel of his own comic whilst his nemesis draws enemies onto the pages for our protagonist to fight en route to becoming a superhero.

Right. Stop. Wait a minute.

Go back and read that description of 'Comix Zone' again. Tell me that isn't the best idea for a video game ever, ever, ever. It'd be ripe for porting onto the X-Box 360 but, instead, everyone's busy playing Grand Theft Auto IV. Now, don't get me wrong, the GTA series is great and IV looks like a massive technical leap forward but it's all a bit 'real' isn't it? Sure you get to indulge your fantasies of car-jacking, relentless violence and handbrake turns across a sprawling and meticulously rendered city but, if we really wanted to, we could go out and do that anytime in the street outside. We probably wouldn't get a second go but we'd at least get a spot on the news which Rockstar Games have still to add as a feature to their title.

And if GTA IV isn't real enough for you, wait till next year when the throbbingly gorgeous Gran Turismo 5 turns up. It'll feature 60 squazillion cars all beautifully crafted by legions of Japanese graphic gurus to offer the most pant-tighteningly 'real' driving experience possible. There's a very good chance it'll be pretty enough to make me cry.

But then I'll probably be bawling my eyes out the first time I play it anyway because the Gran Turismo series, before it let's you get your grubby little mitts on most of their precious, photo-realistic cars, makes you take a driving test!

A fucking driving test!

The driving test is one of the most notorious, nerve-shredding teenage rites-de-passage (it's like losing your viriginity, only worse because it doesn't come with breasts) and yet, after shelling out fifty quid for their game, the makers of Gran Turismo then decree that you must earn the right to actually play it by reliving this whole experience again. By the time Gran Turismo 6 comes out, they'll probably just be asking you to bend over.

Something about this doesn't seem quite right. Leaps and bounds in gaming technology is being used to basically recreate the real world and, frankly, what's the point? If you want to see the real world, don't buy a console- just go outside where, chances are, you'll find loads of it. And it's better than the world of games as well cause you can't buy a Greggs pastie in Liberty City. Or watch Q.I.

So here's a thought. The current generation of games consoles have about 300 times more computing power than Apollo 11- and that went to the moon (according to roughly 65% of Americans). Therefore, instead of meticulously recreating the real-life thrill of maxing a Ferrari or extorting a bookmaker, why don't games producers just let their imaginations runs wild? If Apollo 11 made it to the moon, God knows where a PS3 could get to.

In fact, now I've mentioned Him, let's start with God. Instead of cars in Gran Turismo, why not make it Gods that you control? Gods riding flaming steeds. That are actually rocket bikes. With 7 dimensions. That run on colour. Backwards. And you don't race them round tracks- but through dimensions. That look like noises. And that's just for starters.

My ideas for remaking Grand Theft Auto while making full use of modern processing power cannot be amply described using coherently constructed sentences- I am after all writing this on Windows Notepad which is hardly the cutting edge of home entertainment- so instead I have to do my best to explain it but it would basically play something like this:

"BANG!!!.... AIYEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!.... THRAWK, PURPLE....EAGLES, PINCERS, DEATH FROM ABOVE! AND BELOW! AND THE SIDE! AND OVER THERE!.... CRUCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!! 854 OF THEM!!!!!! QUASAR!!!! Bonus Level WIND MADE OF STEEL AND JESUS!!!! Overwrite saved file? YES!!!! YES!!!!!!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

And that's just the first level.

Or you could just play as a surfing ninja. Y'know, whichever's easier.

You may well have been asleep when it happened, but it probably won't have escaped your attention that we recently had ourselves a little earthquake in this country. I was lucky enough to still be up when it hit and jolly exciting it was too as the power of the Earth rattled my light fittings in a touchingly non-threatening way- a bit like having your hair ruffled by Mother Nature herself. If ever a major geological event could be described as 'quaint', this was it.

The following morning I had a look at the quake coverage on various news websites and what caught my eye most of all were the comments at the bottom of every story from people up and down the nation- and what a joy to behold they were! It seemed that everyone who'd experienced the tremor all across this island of ours was united by a common feeling of what a jolly caper the whole thing had been. Testimony abounded of rattling doors, loosening tiles and confused, barking pets but more than that was the community spirit that seemed to be forged from finding out that someone 200 miles away had felt exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. It felt like having a drink in a chat in a huge pub on a lonely hillside when it's utterly snowbound, no-one has to be up for work in the morning and everyone might as well just sit back and enjoy life together. It felt good to be English that day.

Then the Yanks turned up.

By mid-morning, a steady trickle of posts had come through from all over the southern United States written by people who seemed to be dismayed that we could all get giddy about something as trifling as a little 5.2 tremor. "You Limeys!" went the gist of most of them "we get 6.5's three or four times a year. What are you all getting excited about?". Soon the ante had been upped by the good people of California (the ones who created the world's 5th largest economy then put the bloke from 'Kindergarten Cop' in charge of it) who started prattling on about the big quakes they'd had and how they lived on a fault-line that could plunge them into the Pacific at any moment. They seemed to suggest that they knew what real earthquakes were all about and that we should shut up about our little 10 seconds of shaking and stop being so stupid.

Yes. That's right. They live in a country constantly being shaken by earthquakes and yet, in their eyes, we're the ones who are daft. They had decided to live on what is basically a huge crack in the ground where geology likes to have noisy parties, which is crackers enough when you think about it, but then they seemed to feel this was something to brag about! Then I remembered that America's biggest tourist attraction, Yellowstone Park, is just a big volcano that's due to detonate any minute now and yet this is the sort of place most of them liked to go on holiday to. That is when they're not visiting the Grand Canyon which is basically a great big reminder that Mother Nature doesn't like America very much. Obviously, this is a nation with some self-worth issues.

But it's not just Americans that seem to positively thrive on letting the Earth make life as difficult as possible for themselves. Ever since I started watching Ray Mears' 'Bushcraft' (having read the name of the show in the Radio Times and got the wrong end of the stick completely) I've seen a cavalcade of idiots who've decided to eschew such comforts as central heating and toilets to live like their ancestors in desolate forests and tundra eating bark and washing their hair in pine cones. Not only does Ray, who seems like an intelligent chap at first sight, join in with these people and their desolate existences- he seems to positively wallow in seeking out more and more awful situations in which to plonk himself. In his most recent series he stayed in this country and, despite probably earning enough money off the telly to live in Richard Branson's beard with Jodie Kidd, he still spent his time eating soil in a damp Welsh ditch.

Elderly realtives are, of course, the masters at this sort of thing and like nothing more than banging on about how difficult life has been for them- spending interminable hours at Christmas and weddings banging on to the young of the family about how they used to walk eight miles to school through snow, hail, fire, brimstone and slaying of the first-born. Then when they got there they'd eat slate and get buggered by the Games teacher before trudging all the way home whilst being stalked by the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. Nine days a week. Naked.
It really does make you despair for humanity when we've climbed to the top of the evolutionary ladder and colonised the planet for our own selfish benefit and then decided to spend our entire time bragging about living on tectonic raves and watching a man on the goggle-box eat badger droppings while Granny tells us about trooping through hell to a cross between a school and Dachau.

We don't deserve to be where we are. If there'a God, he might as well wipe our ungrateful hides off the face of the Earth with a flood, a meteor shower, a plague; anything really that would stop this planet being populated by a dominant species which seems it rather hadn't bothered evolving at all. Mind you, if that did happen the apocalyptic extinction event had better be quick and thorough. Cause if it was slow, and if anyone slipped through the net, we'd never hear the end of it...

Just under three weeks from now, give or take an hour, there's a good chance I'll be outdoors, naked and unconscious. I'll be in Tunisia on holiday and, since the daytime temperature will have nudged above 20 degrees and the sun will have spent it's day lazily traversing the sky and burning down on my Viking skin, I'll most probably have sunburn. I won't, however, have the all-over, salmon-pink flesh, flakes of skin all-over the bedroom floor, Skinless-Julia-from-Hellraiser-III form of sunburn- I'm told old and experienced with the factor 50 for that to happen.

No, I'll have protected myself throughly by covering whatever flesh I've exposed (which won't be much- I only recently purchased my first ever pair of non-swimming shorts) when sat by the pool listening to Rodrigo y Gabriella with a Simon Schama and some bizarre North African cocktail. I will be covered in so much sunblock that I'll look like as white as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man man getting some R+R but somewhere on my body there'll be a couple of tiny slivers of flesh that will have escaped my attention. Usually it's just next to my watch, or just behind the ears or, worst of all, a fold behind the knees which slips through the net and lets the sun's rays set about crisping up for hours and which I don't notice till I attempt to sleep that night. The only way to get any relief when this happens will be to sleep outside on the blacony, where it'll hopefully be cool, and naked as a newborn so that no clothing touches the affected areas. In short, it won't be pretty, it'll be borderline illegal, and I'll be paying a few hundred quid for the privilige.

Before I even get to this dignity-stripping kip though I'll have had to deal with Manchester Airport on an Easter Sunday. At half five in the morning. Whilst this will mean it'll be quieter it also means I'll have had about 45 minutes sleep and be somewhere between hungover and still inebriated from the Easter festivities. Standing in the check-in queue, barely able to stand, focus or blink-in-unison, I'm pretty sure Amy will be thoroughly cheesed off and eyeing me up for how many camels she can sell me for when we get to our destination.

Assuming she decides against it and we make it to the resort on speaking terms (unlikely seeing as the only way I can deal with the boredom of an aircraft involves travel-sickness pills and whiskey) we'll have arrived just in time for lunch where I fully intend to continue on my quest to eat one of every animal on Earth. The target for Tunisia is goat, a local delicacy apparently and usually served in a curry with cous-cous. I assume, this being Africa and all, that the curry will contain enough spice to power Denmark and I'll spend the rest of the first day of the holiday running back and forth to the toilet in-between getting localised sun-burn and sleeping off a day's beer, burning and bowel-evacuation in the au-naturel, al-fresco way detailled above.

With a bit of luck, by day two, I won't have been arrested for public nudity, the sun-burn will have died down and I'll be three stone lighter from the previous day's curry aftermath. This will be good news as I can then get down to the serious business of enjoying myself. Mostly, as with any holiday, this will comprise relaxing, wandering round wherever's local, trying out a variety of regional delicacies and drinks and trying on lots of hats. It'll be fantastic. Whenever I get the business of the airport and the first day's acclimatising out of the way, I am seriously good at holidays.

There is, however, a danger that I may spend all my time lying on the bed in the room doing absolutely nothing. If you've ever been abroad, you'll recognise the danger I'm talking about. It'll have tried to draw you in before. You'll have been struck dumb by it's gaudiness. Mesmerised by it's baffling output. Terrified by it's colours and shapes. If you've ever visited foreign climes you will, at some point, have been transfixed by foreign television.

It. Is. Insane.

Sometimes, as in the Czech Republic, it's made up of indecipherable variety shows and ancient football re-runs and isn't too diverting after a couple of days. On other occasions, as in France, it's got all the gloss and production values of British television but something's not quite right. It might be the fact that the female newscasters are the most beautiful people on Earth or it might be the that in all the drama or comedy nothing ever seems to happen- no matter how mad-cap the premise. I swear I saw a sit-com once over there that was as if Harold Pinter had written 'Ratatouille'.

However, if you're really unlucky, the TV will be like Poland and you'll never want to leave the hotel bedroom ever again. Obviously, in this part of the world, they're sick of their historical national cycle of popping in and out of existence, interpsperced by being invaded by everybody else, and have instead decided to subdue the masses and any potential insurgents with hour after hour of cheap, mental television. There's the indecipherable variety shows of the nearby Czechs except the Poles fill them with transvestites singing bizarre swing/thrash-metal hybrids and circus acts featuring both clowns and eagles. The news that follows is filmed from a broom cupboard, the weathermaps are drawn by a six-year-old and the station idents have clearly been knocked up on a Commodore 64- it is quite simply impossible to look away from. At some point, a hidden camera show will turn up which inevitably features young women having their clothes fall off near unsuspecting commuters/restaurant diners/priests and very little else. The variety of premises under which they can make this happen suggest Benny Hill simply wasn't trying hard enough.

Then, without warning, at about midnight, all normal programming is replaced by hard-core pornography which is about as erotic as sandpaper and so graphic it's more reminiscent of a More4 documentary than onanistic entertainment. Each vignette (actually, they're more 'tone pieces') lasts only 10 minutes so it's still addictive in the way that The Box or MTV Hits- although rather than waiting through whatever's on in the hope that a good tune will be next, you're waiting for some good-old fashioned three-way girl-on-girl-on-girl naked pillow-fighting in a shower. Instead, you'll get something about as sexy as 'Triumph of the Will' featuring a man with back-hair and a woman with the muscle tone of Geoff Capes.

Since Tunisia's an Islamic nation, it's unlikely to feature much programming of the Polish ilk so I might actually get out and about and see some of what is, I'm reliably informed, a beautiful country. They are, however, not big on public nudity so I just have to hope that I can keep the sunburn at bay or no-one spots me taking some nocturnal relief on the balcony. Mind you, whilst I may be arrested for being 'conkers-out' I can at least tell my captors that I wasn't doing it for any sort of sexual thrill. If they've been on holiday to Poland, they'll understand.