Robots are eating my brain. Actually, it's just even more reasons why I hate computers, but I thought I should give it a flamboyant title. I hate myself.

I have media-induced concentration span diminution. I spend my days in semi-lucidity, never pursuing a thought to any logical conclusion, and staring into space whilst vague images flit in and out of my unfocussed mind, as the pictures from the television reach, but never quite converge on the retina of, my unfocussed eyes. It’s all my own fault. Well, mostly.

My first action in reversing this brain atrophy, which began when I finished my degree, should be to foreswear the internet. The internet serves in many ways to make its miss-users thick. Not that long ago, only a couple of years, in fact, I would have instinctively gone to the bookshelves to find something out. This took longer, but I have always prided myself on the efficacy of my book-research, and had got it down to an art form. Nobody could ever describe a Google search as ‘art’.

Books have several obvious advantages over the internet. Their reliability is infinitely easier to judge than that of a website. Their pigment has a more pleasing and indelible effect on the mind than the transitory pixels of light which assault the brain for milliseconds, before being disposed of in the space/time continuum. You can never step into the same bit of internet twice, but books are there until the dust mites get them. If you write a rude comment in a library book in pen, you can’t just calm down, sober up, and delete it the next day.

The very act of trawling through a book in search of an elusive fact leads to sidetracking, lateral shifts, cross-referencing initially non-pertinent subjects, and general enhancement of the thought process and intellectual curiosity. Whereas looking something up on the internet will most likely end in a frankly juvenile pursuit of the stupidest common searches Google users make which are alphabetically similar to the one being performed – you all know what I mean – or just plain getting distracted by something of no use to one’s research whatsoever. I will demonstrate by taking an entirely random example. Let’s say I want to find out about The Black Hole of Calcutta. After typing only two words, Google suggests that I may be looking for information on The Black Crowes. At this point I probably remember a Black Crowes song I once quite liked, but would, and should, have never given a second thought to, had I been looking in a PROPER BOOK. I will then spend the rest of the day in some kind of Youtube 80s rock nostalgia-fest, culminating in the purchase of a highly priced genuine period Quireboys t shirt from Ebay.

The attempted acquisition of facts from the internet is like Odysseus’s half-remembrance that he probably had some kind of boring thing to get back to which didn’t involve all this lovely lotus-eating. Information from the internet, quickly attained, is also quickly forgotten. (As a side note, I should point out that when double checking that it was Odysseus and not Jason who met the Lotus Eaters, I was inadvertently reminded by Wiki of 80s band The Lotus Eaters, who once had a song I quite liked. I resisted the siren lure.)

On the subject of forgetting, I would like to express dismay at my complete inability to spell these days. If writing by hand, I can still muster up a coherent and syntactically correct sentence. I imagine. But since I haven’t written at any length by hand for six months, I can’t be sure. I was a late adopter of typing straight on to the computer. For over a year of my degree, I wrote my essays by hand, before typing them up. It was only laziness, and a natural love of leaving things until the last minute, which forced me to try my hand at this typing as I went along business. At first I used Microsoft Word only as a word processor – the type available when I sort of learned to use a computer in about 1995 (though it’s now occurred to me that I only passed that course due to a friend doing my coursework for me – you know who you are). I barely conceived of such science fiction capabilities as ‘look up’, ‘synonyms’, or ‘copy and paste’. So I continued to type with a paper thesaurus and dictionary to hand, in anticipation of the inevitable event of my inability to remember a word. It took longer, but was more intellectually stimulating, and the end result was often the retrieval of a more appropriate or apposite word.

Grammar and spelling have been rendered unknowable, rather than being clarified by Word. I know that the green line is trying to tell me something, but I sure as heck don’t know what. Neither does its programmer, I’d wager. The red line mostly provides an excellent service. Apart from its not knowing really obvious proper nouns, and plenty of perfectly correct other words, I appreciate its informing me of my errors. What I do not like is when it doesn’t tell me of my errors. By this I mean the auto-correction of words only slightly misspelt, where there is only one realistic alternative available, the one clearly being striven for by the scrivener. Consistently spell "either", "iether", and you won’t find out about it unless you watch the screen as you type.

My reliance on spell-check has left me a spelling neurotic. I second guess my every word. A sentence I could have confidently written at the age of twelve becomes a minefield of fear. I spend minutes floundering around on Facebook, attempting to compose the simplest status update without the aid of spell-check. I have made this worse for myself by my semi-ironic insistence on pedantically correcting the grammar, spelling, or punctuation of former classmates in their messages/comments. Semi-irony is notoriously difficult to convey via Facebook. Tthe upshot of this is that I now have to be extra vigilant, so as not to leave myself open to syntactic and grammatical mockery. Which is the worst kind of mockery, you know.

I will conclude with a point which my sister would no doubt contend makes me “sound like an old person”. People cannot spell anymore. I’m sure schools still teach that it’s “i” before “e” except after “c” (oh, except not in “their”, they never told me that, and it floored me for years), but as soon as people leave education, and they no longer have need of spelling rules, they forget them. I have difficulty figuring out when to use effect and affect. It’s been explained to me, and I remember in theory that one is a verb and one is a noun, but to my confused and illogical mind, both words seem a bit too abstract to be either. Instead of making a concerted effort to straighten this quandary out in my shrivelled brain, I instead take a stab in the dark, and trustingly rely on Word do the rest. Likewise, homophones, such as stationary and stationery. At one time I would have made up some mnemonic, such as thinking that the “e” in “stationery” looks a bit like a paperclip (yes, I know it doesn’t really, but bear with me, I’m trying to make a point), to aid remembering. Nowadays I wouldn’t bother, and neither would anybody else. Because it’s not necessary to remember anything anymore. Retain something in your head for the time it takes to enter it into the computer, then empty it out of your brain. Because logically, isn’t this freeing up more space for more information, like emptying the Recycle Bin?

Coming up next time, Sky TV, because I’ve nowhere near finished yet!

Lindsay Horne is Unwell. No, actually ill, with a cold.

I am ill, and being ill makes me grumpy. I’m really too ill to write, but too grumpy not to. The most infuriating thing about being ill, for me, is my absolute inability to accept it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of these people who soldiers on through thick and thin, valiantly honouring existing commitments like some massive bloody martyr. By my estimation, about 95 per cent of women (and yes, it’s mostly women), think that they’re oh-so-much-cleverer than everyone else for doing this, as if they’re uniquely put-upon and long-suffering, and have no choice but to keep going, against the odds. Well, yes you have, you have got a choice. I, for example, have chosen to spend the day lying on the sofa in my pyjamas and dressing gown.

No, if you think you’re being heroic for going to work/whatever when you’re ill, then you are, in fact, not properly ill. Because let me tell you, if I tried anything like that, I would pass out. Today, my normal pallor has gone off the scale. I feel like a character from an Edgar Allan Poe story. Perhaps that guy from “The Fall of the House of Usher”, who lounges about the place seeing visions in the curtains. About an hour ago, I think I had a little nap, but could not really be sure, since my brain was just doing its own thing at the time, so I was uncertain as to whether or not I had lost conscious, or was just awake-dreaming.

Anyway, back to the people refusing to lie down and be ill. For one thing, it’s presumably an evolutionary advantage to have a nice rest in the metaphorical cave when you’re sick. You don’t want to get your whole gang of cavemen gored by a mammoth because you slowed them down with your pathetic coughing and hammy sighs. No, better to have a kip by the fire, and get them to bring you back some nice mammoth broth, or whatever they had instead of Lucozade in the olden days. Also, we all know that those who won’t take time off work when sick are just doing it to make themselves feel indispensable. Well, here’s some news: You’re not that important. Nobody is. Just sit still and shut up. You’ll get better much more quickly.

If this has perhaps a touch of hypocrisy about it, I would like to point out that I am typing on a netbook, which is so light, and has such a little keyboard, that I am really not having to physically exert myself at all. I’m supposed to be going to a jobsearch seminar thing tomorrow, but I’m buggered if I’m going to. Shame actually, because there was a free lunch involved. Anyway. I just wanted to make the points that soldiering on through your supposed illness does not make you a superhero, and that being ill makes me even grumpier than usual. But I’m tired now, and my mother’s just arrived with a box of Lemsip and some Flora. The Flora’s for toast – I wasn’t completely delirious when I asked for it. I will be writing more, on a less self-indulgent subject, when recovered.

A rather angry tirade against Jobcentres. Without any jokes. Because that’s the mood I’m in.

If the government genuinely want to see an end to long-term unemployment, the most effective and economical way would be to fire the entire staff of every Jobcentre. Not all of them are terrible human beings, in fact recently I’ve been surprised by the sympathy and humanity of quite a few of them. But unfortunately, this is more than negated by the condescending and supercilious attitude of the few. They clearly believe that since they have jobs, it makes them intellectually and morally superior. Or that everybody should. Whereas the fact of it is that the jobcentre staff should not have jobs either.

The other day I was bordering on rude to an “advisor” (from whom I certainly don’t remember getting any advice), on account of his inflexible and accusatory attitude. I have to pay to travel to my Jobcentre. And for some unfathomable reason, for a six week period I am being made to attend every week, instead of every two weeks. And, yes, that costs me twice as much of my scrounged money (which I’m probably going to spend on crack, anyway), and wastes a hell of a lot of my time (when I could be shooting up with my unemployed friends).

Anyway, I nonchalantly rolled up to my “signing” time 20 minutes late. It having been at 9 am, and my proposed bus of catching being the 8.50. I missed this bus, presumably through its being early, or not showing up. I thought that the Jobcentre would see the reasonable side, and agree that no, there was nothing I could have done about it, and that it wasn’t my fault. Needless to say they didn’t, and to cut a long story short, I was made to feel genuine anger by a civil servant (uncivil servant more like!! LOL!!!) whose job, by his apparent reckoning, is to belittle the unfortunate. I should know better than to let myself be affected by them, but then I’m sensitive like that.

Upon first becoming unemployed, after graduating in June, I was optimistic. In fact, for the first time in my life I felt that things were really going great for me. I had got a First Class degree, through actually making an effort for once, and I had got the work experience placement at the BBC that I had held out no hope of actually getting. Yay, I thought, perhaps I’m not the worst and most useless person to walk the earth after all. Then I suffered three months of visits to the Jobcentre.

It’s called Jobcentre Plus these days. The added bonuses must be the free dream-trampling service, the complimentary feeling of being insulted, and the gratuitous self-esteem-lowering provision on offer. Because I’ve certainly never know these people to go above or beyond their own job descriptions to actually assist you positively. No, their remit consists of stretching their workload out to fill as much time as possible. I know this is the case in many jobs, but in the current economic climate, and especially in a week when a drastic and far-reaching benefit shake up has been announced, one cannot help but feel that the government should be looking at the administrators of, rather than the recipients of, social security benefits.

Politics aside, though, the culture in Jobcentres is one of oppressing the scrounging and workshy. Their regime fails to realise that there are better ways of helping people to find jobs than depressing them into submission until they voluntarily become people of the streets, just to escape being called before the existence-justification panel at least once every fortnight. Of course, on top of this biweekly ordeal are myriad unexpected tortures. The rules will suddenly be changed, leaving one’s seminar of soul-destruction rescheduled at the last minute, just to make sure that you can’t successfully make any plans with the remaining bit of your life, and the pitiful amount of money so graciously bestowed on you.

As you can see, being unemployed has started to make me feel a little depressed. Not the actual unemployment, I can handle that. There is no end to the inexpensive, self-bettering ways with which one can fill one’s time. I feel no embarrassment in telling anybody that I don’t have a job – because I have plans, and I have back-up plans. Trying to force me to get a full-time job at Iceland (this is a budget supermarket, not a country, for my foreign readers), is not going to be helpful to me, or to society, at this point in time.

Injuring people’s sense of sense worth, leading them to be convinced that they are not even worthy of being employed, and generally revelling in the fact that you have a job and they don’t, are not psychologically sound ways of getting people back into work. For this reason, when I’m in charge of the country, all civil servants will be the first to be rounded up and put in the gulags. And that includes my brother. You see what they’ve done to me? They’ve turned me into the type of person who makes plans for their hypothetical dictatorship.

In fact, though, I have a motivation in writing this lament. It may be depressing to write, and it’ll be depressing to read back. But I have to go to the Jobcentre tomorrow, a visit obligated by the aforementioned seminar re-arrangement (by an external agency), and necessitating some complex explaining of the situation on my part, and a tiny degree of flexibility on theirs. So if I’m rude about them today, they’re bound to confound me tomorrow with their reasonableness.

The Internet Thinks That I Have Constipation

According to the BBC’s Technology News webpage, “several hundred thousand” Germans have chosen to opt out of Google Street View. That is, to have their houses virtually demolished for the purposes of the service. Whilst elsewhere in the world one can apply to have one’s face pixelated (insert predictable fetish club joke), Germans wants to take their anonymity one step further. I have no idea why – I’ve been to Germany, and it was already pretty bland. Personally, I don’t care if people want to look at my house on the internet. It’s just a house. I’m not in the habit of standing in the front garden holding up my diary, open at the most salacious page, for passing Google Earth cars to photograph. And yet, like many millions of other self-aggrandising narcissists, I feel it necessary to share my “insights” with anybody who wants to read them, on this very page. So let’s make up our minds. Do we want to publicize every banality that flits through our skulls, or sit in a darkened room, only occasionally peeping through the curtains, in case a spy satellite spots that it’s been a few days since we washed our hair, and that the glass recycling box is getting a bit full for someone who lives alone?

I understand that the issue is one of consent. One can choose not to use Facebook or Twitter, but the idea of somebody photographing your house as they drive slowly past, can seem a little presumptuous on their part. But then so does the council charging you for the privilege of emptying the bin you never asked for, or maintaining the street lights, which are annoyingly bright and close to your bedroom window anyway, and you didn’t ask for them either. That’s the point of society. You didn’t ask for it, but kind of have to go along with it if you want to benefit from its advantages. Such as sewage and the national grid. Likewise the internet: to get the benefits of free porn and Ebay, one must tolerate pop-up adverts inviting you to imiginary poker tournaments, and those nosey bastards at Google.

To reiterate: I could not care less if Google want to photograph my house, so long as they don’t come round trying to sell me a copy of it. In general I take a cavalier approach to internet privacy/security in all its forms. I have one password for everything, and have just attested to the fact in a document accessible by most of the world. If anybody wants to attempt to defraud me, good luck; if you obtain any credit, you’re a better person than I am. Also, when I took up Facebooking, I put my contact details on in the desperate hope that somebody would send me an unsolicited email or make an obscene phone call. They didn’t. There are a limited number of people in the world who want to snoop around the Facebook pages of strangers, and it’s a bit self-regarding to believe that you are somehow that interesting and stalk-worthy. However, the general benevolence of the internet aside, there is one thing which recently struck me as being an intrusion too far. And once again it’s perpetrated by Google.

When Google rolled out their predictive search engine, I felt violated, but could not quite put my finger on why. Then I figured it out. A search which guesses what you want to look at, before you tell it what you are looking for, seems to me just a bit too human. It’s as though Google are compiling a file on every single internet page you may have ever, even subconsciously, considered looking at, in case the government ever ask them for one. And since you were never actually searching for any illegal/subversive/slightly immoral material, Google have handily provided you with some for your consideration. They have begun to succeed in making me internet-paranoid.

But it is not Google’s annoying psychic automaton which has vexed me; I discovered that you can go to the “options” tab and turn it off. What make me cross are the personalized adverts which Google Mail provide you with at the top of your inbox. Unlike activity on search engines or public internet pages, one expects one’s password protected emails to be reasonably private. Now, I know that nobody sits reading my emails, carefully deciding what products to select for my perusal today, but it feels almost as intrusive as if they had. This feeling of violation hit home the other day, when I emailed a link to my sister, accompanied by a reminiscence of an event of sixteen years ago, when a third party acquaintance, during a drug-induced panic attack, was convinced that they were dying of constipation. Google helpfully decided to market me some anti-constipation drugs. To my sister, they attempted to flog feline laxatives (not sure why, she doesn’t have a cat... she must have once mentioned one in an email). Advertising an educational course similar to one I have referenced in an email subject line is one thing, but to boldly suggest that I have malfunctioning bowels, based solely on the evidence of one word in the body of a message, is not on. I wouldn’t dream of opening my emails in public, but if I did I would find it pretty mortifying if a stranger looked over my shoulder in a public library and made erroneous conclusions about the state of my digestive health. So to spite Google, I have just switched my email view to the advert free basic HTML as default. That’ll teach them: openly photographing my house from the street is one thing, but metaphorically hiding in the sewers trying to spy on my toilet is quite another.

Caffeine. Its effects and scientific implications.

I used to like caffeine. A lot. My coffee habit was legendary in both its scale, and its lack of discernment. Tea, I rarely touched. It was just too damn soft. Then, three months ago, after a week’s abstinence (due to being on holiday, and having better things to spend my money on than milk – i.e. ouzo), I discovered upon resumption of caffeinated-beverage consumption, that I had suddenly developed a sensitivity to my former drug of third choice. Before this, I would have put caffeine down as more necessary to my functioning than nicotine. I could have imagined myself giving up cigarettes, but not coffee.

When the caffeine thing first came on, I was in denial for a while, trying to convince myself that it was psychosomatic. But it wasn’t, so I gave up coffee and switched to tea. Lots of tea. I became one of those ‘tea’ people that I had formerly so despised. People who refer to “a nice cup of tea”, and say such dreadful things as “Ooh, I’m gasping for a cuppa” as though they’ve just stepped off the set of 1960s Coronation Street. Tea always seemed to me the drink of somebody who was too much of a lightweight to hold their coffee. I wouldn’t go into a pub and order a shandy, so why boil the kettle and make tea?

Well, as though being punished for my hubristic dismissal of these tea-quaffers, I was forced to become one. After a few weeks, I could no longer drink even tea, having to switch to decaffeinated, since there is no way in the world I was going to be one of those hot-chocolate-in-the-daytime drinking adults. They might as well just suck it out of a spouty cup. So I hang my head, my former fellow coffee addicts (and I mean addicts, not people who think it’s cute to call themselves addicts), and bid farewell to the lovely world of sluggish matinal need, followed by the slurp of sweet, milky joy in a giant mug. Sigh.

I have many fond coffee memories. Among the best, reading between classes at Keele University, with a latte from Vite n’ Eat. Or arriving at a seminar at 9 o’clock, with a flask and a mug (a mug that I actually used to keep in one of the teaching buildings, in some sort of bizarre display of territoriality), and pouring that levels-sustaining sixth cup of the day. The coffee-milk concoction I used to take to work at the MMU, just so I could get some extra caffeine in my system when there wasn’t time for a hot drink. So many memories. Which sets me thinking about my reason behind pondering the subject in the first place. It’s a straightforward one...my mother tried to poison me with regular tea. She swears that she didn’t, but I am not someone who has ever been susceptible to the placebo effect. I read once about an experiment, in which students were given fake-alcoholic drinks, and began to behave as though they were really getting drunk. This is understandable on one level. If in a pub full of drunkards when sober, one behaves differently than when in a station waiting room. Alcohol-induced joie de vivre is slightly infectious. But give me a weak gin and tonic, and I’ll damn well tell you about it. Upon visiting Tunisia, a country with strict licensing laws, I found that ordering beer brings one either real or fake beer, depending upon the establishment. They don’t tell you, but it’s very, very obvious which is which. Because one has an alcoholic effect on you, and the other doesn’t.

But back to tea. Yes, my mother tried to poison me. Inadvertently, I’m sure; it’s easy to get the tea bags mixed up between their containers and the cups. But the result was that I was reminded of exactly why I had quit one of my greatest simple pleasures. Many people overdo it with the caffeine occasionally, but I had become so hardened to it, that it took at least ten cups of coffee for me to begin feeling a little jittery, or to not quite be able to stop talking. Today, though, I was in this state after only a few gulps of tea. And it wasn’t nice. I found myself unable to stop playing the imaginary piano, and my voice seemed to be coming out of my head without my really having told it to. Even now, I am typing with a very uncharacteristic velocity. The result of the unpleasant side-effects was that I remembered exactly why I no longer imbibe grown-up hot beverages, and that I swore never to do it again.

However, every time I drink alcohol, I also suffer from unpleasant side-effects. So why don’t I, and the populous in general, think better of cracking open that third bottle of sauvignon blanc? Because of delay. Aside from alcohol having a really great upside, as well as a downside, it takes a good few hours for the horrible bit to hit. Usually, with some sleep in between. This seems to trick the brain into not directly associating the two events of drinking and being hung-over. Likewise, a heavy night of smoking may cause a little spluttering of phlegm the next day, but by then you weren’t thinking of lighting up for a good few hours, anyway. The reason it was easy for me to quit caffeine, however beloved it was to me, was the immediacy of the unpleasant effect it had.

And this leads me to positing my theorem of the day. If the government wants people to drink less, it has to work on devising a way to make alcohol have an immediately unpleasant effect, not a delayed one. It takes a few sips of Coke to prevent me from drinking any more of it, but it takes many pints of beer. Maybe pubs could serve only neat Malibu or rum, so as fast as a consumer could consume it, they would vomit it all up again; the added bonus being that, never-ending drinking, without drunkenness, would be good for the economy. Or, if some terrible scientist (I can imagine a Hugo A-go-go type in a secret mountain top lab) could formulate a booze, the consumption of which caused the hangover to develop along with the drunkness, I think people would actually have second thoughts about their desire to drink. And obviously, that’s a better way to encourage moderation than prohibitive price-hikes, or didactic lecturing. Yes. Antabuse in the beer-lines is the way of the future. I’m off down to Ladbroke’s to put money on it right now.

The idea that supposed paranormal activity can all be put down to drunkenness on the part of the observer

People who claim to have seen UFOs, ghosts, or other paranormal phenomena are frequently accused of being drunk. To “see” a ghost in a pub is the ultimate expression of this, as is the sighting of a UFO on the way home from a hostelry. I object to this sceptical presumption. As a habitual drunk-getter, I can authoritatively say that being in this state does not cause one to hallucinate.

In fact, in order for one to imagine that one has seen something odd when drunk, it really has to be very odd indeed. I could chat away in a pub for hours with a semi-translucent man without questioning his apparent non-corporeality. And I have more than once experienced displays of inexplicable lights, whilst returning from my local via a disused railway line, which, had I encountered when sober, would have scared me silly.

No, to suggest that anything out of the ordinary can be written off as the delirious delusions of a reveller is the laziest form of scepticism there is. I myself am a sceptic. About pretty much everything. But it wasn’t always so: my interest in all things paranormal started at around the age of ten. It took me twenty years of reading and thought to figure out that, well, yes, it’s probably all bollocks. To paraphrase Dara O’Briain, “if psychic abilities were genuine, we would all have evolved to have them.” Natural selection favours the gifted.

The landlord of a local pub of mine, a Tudor building, recently gave me a tour of his establishment, when I drunkenly expressed an interest in its extensive history. I was escorted to the cellar, which he informed me, used to house the horses, four centuries ago. Even before he told me this, I was overcome by the smell of horses. But I did not assign this to horse ghosts. Because it seemed reasonable to me that a damp cellar might have a slightly equine odour about it. Likewise, on a foray into aforementioned dilapidated railway line, with my sister, we both experienced an odd phenomenon. I was wearing a pair of rubber-toed canvas shoes, and Kezia a pair of white trainers. At a certain point on the path, both sets of our shoes began to glow ultra violet. I was, at the time, engaged in a degree in astrophysics. My sister is a sceptic with a small “c” – an extremely open-minded, but intelligent and educated observer. We did not immediately assume that it was the work of extra-terrestrials, but instead, worked to find a rational solution for the occurrence. We came up with marsh gas, incidentally.

Had I mentioned this happening in public, the nay-sayers would have raised their collective arms in glee, and pointed out that we were drunk when this happened. Well, obviously we were. It was midnight, and we were hanging around a deserted path which happens to lie between the pub and my house. But our drunkness accounts for us being there. It does not account for everything inexplicable that has ever happened to anyone, who, whilst out of doors at night-time, may have experienced anything odd.

I Hate Summer

Today it is the First Day of September, and Thank God for That. A sharp pair of eyes may draw your attention to the fact that the preceding sentence contains a few extraneous capitals, and that is because it deserves them. My name is Lindsay, and I hate summer. There, I said it. It is an opinion greeted with about as much incomprehension as that of, say, not liking kittens (I don’t, they are horrible little scratchy psychopaths), or having no desire to watch Glee (call me slow-witted, but I fail to get the irony). Aestiphobia, it seems, is a word entirely made-up, just then, by me. Typing it into Google directs one instead to research ‘vestiphobia,’ the apparently far less improbable fear of clothing.

To say I have a phobia of summer is certainly over-stating the matter. That would have caused me to chop off my own head many Mays ago. But physiologic and psychological maladies haunt me throughout the Dog Days. The Romans had the right idea, sacrificing a dog to Sirius every year, in the (sensible) belief that this was an evil time, when animals and humans became languid, and indeed, went a bit mental.

Seasonal Affective Disorder is generally held to refer to those influenced by the lack of sunlight in winter causing them to get a bit miserable during these months. I have the opposite form of seasonal woe. Ask anyone. But aside from this, physical weaknesses plague me during the summer. My asthma is exacerbated by heat and humidity, and I have a rather pathetically Celtic kind of photosensitivity, causing an unsightly and uncomfortable rash upon sun exposure. So to avoid this I wear jeans and long sleeves all summer, and have to put up with the consequences. That is, being a bit warm. Not wanting to come across as self-pitying, I would like to acknowledge that I am by no means alone in my suffering. Plenty of people hate the summer, for whatever reason. But to voice one’s antipathy towards the season is running the risk of being accused of trying to ruin it for everybody else. I can hate it all I like – it is not going to go away – so why the hell do I not have the right to attest to my aversion in public?

Newsreaders take astonishingly unoriginal pleasure in complaining, during the summer, about the rain, or the fact that the temperature is nineteen degrees, when linking to or from the weather forecast. North West Tonight presenter Gordon Burns particularly infuriates me on this count. He behaves as though the perfectly seasonal precipitation level is some kind of personal slight to him and his God-given right to be forever basking in the rays of his munificent protector Ra. I encountered Gordon Burns a few times recently, and his supposed solar obsession seems incongruous with his demeanour. He has the deportment of the butler of a haunted castle. Instead of walking, he appears to hover, and with a slight stoop. I just cannot imagine him genuinely wanting to do karaoke to “Club Tropicana” in Benidorm.

No. Summer, and heat, and drought, are not nice things. Ask any desert-dweller. What are nice are the misguided imaginings of the warm season which one experiences during the winter. I look forward to pleasantly balmy days as much as the next person, days I imagine will be spent drinking cool lager in a beer garden, or on medieval cobbles. But then, come summer, I do this about twice. The image of continental pavement cafés peopled with smartly dressed folk smoking Café Cremes is replaced by the reality of the pottery shire horses, and perpetually semi-drunk, unemployed and retired gents of my local. And my invariably getting sun-burnt and sleepy.

Summer is of course a manifestation of nostalgia. Firstly of the individual’s nostalgia for a childhood, in which summer days playing on rope-swings over babbling brooks are all that survives the intervening years of memory loss. The hours of tedium sitting in a hot car going to another castle, or the constant bullying from one’s siblings, go largely forgotten.

Secondly, there is the collective nostalgia of shared culture. I have never been boating with either a man in a striped blazer, or with woodland creatures. Nor have most people. Indeed, the closest I have come to it was a row on Crewe Park boating lake, with a selection of teenagers in Dr Martens and oversized pullovers. Most likely followed by cider in a hedge (quite pleasant and rustic-sounding, I suppose). I suspect to the city or large town dweller, the association of summer and the countryside are of greater significance. Summer suggests a simpler time of Thomas Hardy novels, home-made jam, and picnics of boiled eggs and enormous hams. But, I ask you: Did the Famous Five ever get stung by wasps in their pastoral idyll? Well, no they didn’t, because they too were living in a non-existent world of nostalgia, where the past’s negative connotations could be forgotten. I was dimly aware of this as a child. I knew that my enjoyment of the books was down to some kind of false longing for a life I did not have, but I also realised that even at the time of their being written, they were probably seen as rather wistful in their portrayal of England.

So, one’s individual nostalgia, and a shared, cultural nostalgia get tangled up to make a self-perpetuating myth. When I come out as admitting to hating summer, I am in fact trampling on the collective need to hark back to better days. A need I completely fail to understand, since desperately clinging to a perceived time of former glory, is surely a defeatist admission that nothing is ever going to be as sunny and glorious ever again, so let’s all just give up now. Well, that is the whole point of nostalgia, I suppose. Since it can only be seen in retrospect, can it really do any harm to dwell on it a little too much? As soon as one actually becomes aware that one is in an enjoyable situation, it loses its agreeableness. So, does that make nostalgia the only true form of pleasure? Looking back at a time when we were perfectly happy, without it having been ruined by self-awareness? No, because it is only when in a situation of discontent that nostalgia starts to take over the thoughts. Only some level of current misery can give rise to the need to idealise another time – a time generally limited to the past by the inadequacies of imagination. Anyway, this is digressing somewhat.

The corollary of the argument of the cult of summer being due to collective nostalgia is that I could just as easily be accused of looking at winter with rose-tinted, or more probably frosty-silvery-blue-tinted-glasses. The obvious principal attraction of winter is Christmas, but as an adult this is more of an anti-climax than any sunny day of boozing out-of-doors. However, there are elements of winter that can be pretty much relied on: clear-aired frosty mornings, and evenings which are dark by half-past four (the dark makes me feel like I can go about my business un-scrutinised, which has always seemed hugely comforting. Does that make me sound like a serial killer?) Coats. I love coats. And knitwear, and boots, and gloves, and scarves. (Wow, I really do sound psychotic; just how many layers of disguise do I need to hide behind?) But perhaps the most decadent article of cold-weather equipment ever created is the feather quilt. If the feather quilt is not evidence enough for the superiority of winter over summer, I don’t know what is.

I realise that this is all a little subjective, and self-indulgent. But my point is, that it should not be socially unacceptable to air an opinion expressing a sense of realism about the hideousness of overly-hot summers. When the mercury’s been above 25 degrees for a few days, everybody complains. Some of us just have a more realistic memory of what the feeling of it being a bit too hot is actually like.

A Brief Whinge About Journalism

If I die in an unorthodox manner, am involved in a road accident, commit a crime considered worth reporting, or in any other way become newsworthy, I do not want to be described by the newspaper headline announcing the story. By this, I mean the practice (particularly beloved of North Staffordshire paper The Sentinel), of referring to the deceased, unfortunate, or malfeasant, as “mother,” “pensioner,” or “husband.” Today’s issue ran a story headed: “Dropped cigarette set husband alight.” From this description, one would be led to presume that the man’s wife had in some way been involved, maybe dropping the cigarette herself. But no. She happened to be there at the time, but other than that, the man’s relationship as husband to this woman was in no way relevant to the story.

The practice of depicting people in terms of their relationships to others rankles particularly with me on a personal basis. I am not a wife. Or a mother. My hypothetically newsworthy death would be overshadowed on the page by a woman who died leaving behind four children. This kind of lazy judgment of an individual’s worth, by a hurried hack of a local journalist, is insulting to everybody.

Of course, my personal antagonism towards labelling by status may be due to my own lack of it. I can imagine my own untimely demise throwing up the headline: “Unemployed woman, 31, falls under lorry drunk.” Or: “Dead woman, 31, lay undiscovered for four weeks.” Not: “Tragic mother loses life after night out,” or “Neighbours tell of sadness at pensioner’s lonely death.”

I suspect that the custom of describing a person’s relationship, rather than describing them, is done out of a misguided attempt to humanise the protagonist of the piece, as if the purchaser of a newspaper would wish to read a story about a “husband” accidentally catching fire, but not a “man.” Or perhaps it is a journalistic attempt to bring the reader into the action of the story, as if one might think “Ooh, I’ve got a husband. Maybe he will catch on fire one day, I should probably read that.”

On the Nomenclature of Cigarettes

A recent financially necessitated downgrade in my cigarette purchase of preference, from Mayfair to Windsor Blue, set me pondering the issue of cigarette brand names, and their insistence on trying to appear posh.  Windsor Blue, the lowliest of cigarette brands, actually manages to sound more upper-class than Mayfair, a cigarette for the slightly less down-at-heel.  I may smoke Mayfair, whilst promenading with a cane down Mayfair, but I indulge in Windsor Blue inhalation when weekending in the company of the Queen, in Berkshire. 

Because of this lack of apellatory transparency, it is impossible to judge a cigarette’s quality by its name.  Any fool could ascertain, for example, that Kwik Save is (or was) likely to be a commoner food outlet than Sainsbury’s.  Or that Cushelle is almost certainly going to be a chavier toilet paper than Andrex (the name of which I always took to be from a Greek root, but which is apparently a reference St. Andrew’s, the paper mill in Walthamstow which originally produced it.  Huh.)  But all cigarettes sound posh.  Even ones that don’t, with a bit of marketing, can acquire connotations of aristocracy.  Lambert and Butler, once the tramp’s smoke of choice, had an advertising campaign in the late 90s, portraying a fictitious Jeeves and Wooster-style pairing, with Lambert as a posh-but-thick fellow, and Butler as his...well, butler. One can imagine a similar set-up in the Benson and Hedges household, since, after all, who but a butler would be named Benson?

The ultimate poshos, the royal family seem to have more than their fair share of cigarette brands.  Windsor Blue.  Sovereign.  Regal.  Prince, a cigarette favoured in Scandinavia, and discovered by me in Greece, are presumably intended to be smoked by the prince of Denmark (an actual person, Wikipedia assures me), but I imagine he’s also related to our lot somehow.  So my question is: “Just how many different kinds of fags does the Queen need?”

The answer to this is, as every smoker knows, at least two, and possibly three.  One for everyday smoking, one for best (birthday, unexpected financial windfall, etc.), and one for on holiday.  I, for example, smoke Marlboros when holidaying in Greece (naturally, with His Grace the Duke of Marlborough), but would not dream of such profligacy in England.  Mostly because I’m not credit-worthy.

 The subject of different cigarettes being appropriate for different occasions brings me on to another institution over-represented in the world of tobacco nomenclature.  The diplomatic corps.  After a minor mishap in the colonies, one can kick back in the consulate with a nice refreshing menthol Consulate.  But if more tricky business finds one requiring the services of the embassy, nothing less than the ambassador, with a tray of Ferrero Rocher and twenty Embassies, will do.

English, vaguely posh, and olden-daysy-sounding cigarettes are plentiful.  Mayfair, Dorchester, Berkeley, Richmond.  Places you imagine you may have haunted in your previous-life incarnation as a 1920s moneyed-class layabout.  However, hand-rolling tobacco presents a whole new world of bygone aristocracy.  “Golden Virginia.”  The golden days of Virginia.  It conjures up imagines of the planter class elite, sipping mint juleps, prancing around in toilet roll cover dresses, and keeping the plantation stocked with mysteriously mixed-race children.  “Cutter’s Choice” is perhaps worse.  Are we supposed to imagine a cheerily discerning slave, the Man From Del Monte of the Old South, if you will, stopping for a moment in his craft as finest-tobacco-selector, in order to inspect a lovely fresh tobacco sprig, and thinking “Why, yes, I think I’ll save me this for a nice relaxing smoke later, as I settle down in my basic but homely cabin.”?  And this is why roll-up smokers are clearly all racists. 

America’s attitude to cigarette brand designation is delightfully conflicted.  From an A to Z list, one can identify two major trends.  Firstly, there are the brands which hark back to Old World gentility.  While America may gleefully revel in explosives and corn oil-based snacks at the collective memory of having escaped our malevolent and tyrannical misrule every July the Fourth, they conversely have no qualms about remembering us with fond nostalgia where cigarettes are concerned.  Albeit, to the English ear, with a slightly ill-informed amusingness.  Ashford, presumably sounds delightfully rustic to its purchaser.  Bristol, Chesterfield, and Parliament, are obviously nebulous enough concepts for the American mind to hold no preconceptions about their glamorousness, or lack thereof.  But the prize for greatest Anglo-overkill must go to English Oval.  I like to imagine it being smoked on the streets of Baltimore, or in a trailer park in Kentucky, while its consumers dream of languid, lazy summer afternoons watching cricket with a jug of Pimms.  It is also nice to see that the Queen, on any foray she may make across the Atlantic, is as well catered for as she is at home, by Monarch cigarettes. 

The second trend in fag naming in America is perhaps more predictable.  For those in the US not secretly wishing they lived in Olde Englande, a plethora, nay an embarrassment, of brands can fulfil their slightly closety desire to appear as macho as possible.  Ladies and gentlemen, we have... American Bison.  American Harvest (produced by Truth and Liberty Manufacturing).  Bull.  Cheyenne.  Commander.  Desperado.  Grand Prix.  Kentucky’s Best.  Lucky Strike.  Maverick.  McClintock.  Midnight Special.  Now.  Pulse.  Rave.  Shield.  Sundance.  Wildhorse. 

But my favourite American cigarette brand name?  Smoker Friendly.  This is what you need from your smoking material.  A little empty reassurance, rather than the empty threats found on British cigarette packets.  I’ve smoked for 19 years, and have perfect teeth.  And, all things considered, inexplicably youthful skin.  Warn me about my lovely pink lungs shrivelling, by all means, but do not try to tell me that smoking does things to me which it plainly is not doing.  Because if I think you’re lying about these supposed consequences, I may begin to suspect the cancer stuff isn’t true either.

Why I Hate Shopping

How can anybody find joy in the act of shopping?  I don’t mean buying things, which is obviously an absolute delight (providing it’s consumer electronics, or occasionally shoes), but actually going shopping.  Shopping is an unpleasant necessity, which impinges into your free time, with its only redeeming feature being, once it’s over, that you don’t have to do it again for a while.  The internet is a godsend for the likes of me.  When you run out of a staple, or are compelled to make a purchase of, say, something electronic, or a pair of shoes, you can open up Ebay, and (excluding the time it takes to be sidetracked by the designer sunglasses, or wellington boots the website so thoughtfully attempts to foist upon you), in five minutes you can get it conveniently consigned to your front door.   Usually when you are out, but you can’t have everything. 
    Shopping is made into such a soul-destroying horror show in part by the interaction it necessitates.  I enjoy small-talk as much as the next person, providing the next person’s natural inclination to gregariousness is outweighed by their social and linguistic ineptitude.  And I will often strike up a pointless, frequently borderline inappropriate conversation, in a lift, or when waiting for public transport.  But the till assistant’s failsafe line of bonhomie, in my recent experience, seems to consist solely of: “This is nice, isn’t it?”  And when I reply, deadpan, “Yes, that’s why I’m buying it,” I just look like the sociophobic smart-ass that I am desperately trying not to be found out as.
    My natural laziness means that full-time work and I are not closely acquainted.  But during a recent, brief stint of working five days a week, and getting in late after a long commute, the shining light at the end of the hideous drudgery (even though it was work experience in a dream job), was the thought of getting blind drunk on a Friday night.  The concept of dutifully going to bed sober and early, in order to be fresh for a lovely bout of shopping on a Saturday, seems to me, the ultimate waste of an evening.  A evening on which, since time immemorial, (or at least since the invention of the five day working week), people have got blind drunk.  It’s a lovely tradition which has suddenly become a social anathema. But I won’t start about the hypocrisy of society’s sudden horror at so-called binge-drinking (i.e., anything more than three pints), because that’s an essay for a different day. 
    Shopping alone is a tolerable hardship; one can walk briskly from shop to shop, assessing the goods, before swiftly deciding upon what to buy.   But shopping with one or more other/s becomes an actually painful experience.  Meandering in retail outlets makes my feet hurt.  It is also the only activity known to man which aggravates a normally dormant collar bone injury I sustained at the age of twelve. 
    I recently had to acquire a new shirt for a job interview.  I knew exactly what I wanted; a plain, tailored ladies shirt, with no frilliness, and in a muted colour.  I wanted to appear serious at my interview, and since I am in possession of pale bleached blonde hair, I decided that this called for as conservative a shirt as possible, to go with a grey check pencil skirt.  Black was out, as it gives the impression that one works in a pub.  White, coupled with a grey skirt (and bleached blonde hair), makes one appear slightly too much like a model in a schoolgirl fetishists website.  It had to have at least three quarter length sleeves, to hide a frankly nautical tattoo I had applied to my bicep when seventeen. Not a big ask, but naturally unobtainable in the not-metropolis of Crewe.  In the end I settled for a sensible-ish pink affair, tried it on in Marks and Spencer’s, and was almost moved to tears by the wonderful service of their changing room staff.  “Ring the bell if you need any help.”  No!!! Why would I have the impertinence to put you out like that?  It’s a £9 shirt!  The first one didn’t fit, and when I came out to return the shirt, and suggest that I’d try a different size, the assistant (who actually broke off a conversation with a colleague in order to speak to me), offered to go and get me the other size.  From a rack which was about five paces from the changing room.  I didn’t know with whom I was the most disgusted.  With me, for succumbing to the sophisticated and urbane service of Marks and Spencer’s Crewe branch – almost Saville Row in its commitment to fulfilling the customers tailoring needs  – or with them for kowtowing to my apparent shopping whims.  Me, being so parochial, so provincial, so overjoyed that I found myself feeling special because I was trying on a cheap shirt.  Or them, for their institutional obeisance, imbuing pathos into me for both myself and the people working there.  This is a level of emotional commitment and investment which I do not need from a quick trip to the shops for a shirt which I am compelled to buy, but don’t really want.   And this is why I prefer to shop on the internet.   
    Of course, in the earlier days of Ebay, when it was more a site for individuals offloading their old junk for pennies, and less a marketplace for corporations flogging their shop-soiled or slight-seconds wares, this interaction could be achieved online, in a much more pleasing way.  A seller or buyer might send you a missive to express their delight at their/your purchase.  You could then respond to that message with drunken glee when you happened to be in bed with your laptop at 1 am.  This was the Golden Age of shopping.  Pleasant small-talk on your terms, with a human being, not on hourly pay, whose pleasure at you having made a purchase/sale is genuine.  Internet shopping should not necessarily rule out the human contact of going into a shop.  It should enable the consumer to be civil at their own pace, and in their own time.  And with the aid of alcohol, if they find it absolutely necessary.