Bye Bye Bradford...

Donald Trump’s hair was back on TV last night and the tanned symbiont attached underneath it was tagging along too. The Apprentice US was back on BBC3 and the most recent task designed to perplex the two competing teams of hateful Americans was to invent a new luxury ice cream flavour and sell it on the streets of New York.

I was hoping this largely WASP lot would decide that the Bronx would be a good place to sell luxury ice cream and be gunned down in a drive-by shooting by a bunch of crackheads who felt the sudden need for whatever sickly sweet frozen confectionery these despicable groups had dreamed up. But sadly they all headed to the relatively safe environs of Times Square so my main reason for watching disappeared quickly.

Even worse the show ended with Bradford, perhaps the most self-obsessed man since Narcissus, getting the boot from squillionaire tanned one Trump. The previous week had seen Bradford actually win immunity from this fate because he was a successful team leader but the dope was so super-confident he had performed well that he sacrificed his immunity. Even the fact that he was pretty superb at the task didn’t save him as the mighty Trump axed him for his obvious arrogance.

Poor old Bradford. I will miss his baseball analogies such as ‘Ivana did not take on any responsibility when she stepped up the plate...’ and his utterly pompous statements such as last night’s classic ‘A business loss to me is like Kryptonite to Superman. It just drains me...’ Genius. A career in darts or Cage Fighting commentary surely awaits somebody this inane...

Fortunately the all-girl group Bradford was leading look like they’ll be providing all the fun anyone could want in the next few weeks. Last night this preppy enclave of right-wing hatred and perfectly coiffed hair ganged up on the only black girl in the group in an attempt to boot her out of their little WASP club. Sadly Bradford fell instead but the resentment is simmering and those sculpted, demure little masks are slowly slipping to reveal the utterly evil bitches underneath. Can’t wait...

Compared to this bunch of she-devils the all-bloke and one woman team are now looking pretty decent. OK. They may whoop and high-five and will stab each other in the back over a dollar but at least they won’t be caught eating their young.

Well, unless it’s one of the tasks next week...

Waiting...

I am currently waiting for a phone call to tell me whether or not I’ve got an interview for a new job. I applied for this a while ago and was told I was short-listed last week and had a subbing test to complete over the weekend. This was pretty straightforward and now I’m waiting to see if it’s going to go any further...

Sadly, waiting is something I have never being very good at. Many people say that patience is a virtue but if this is the case then I am the patience equivalent of an ageing dockside whore whose virtue was shot away by a fleet of pox-ridden Russian sailors many moons ago.

Fortunately I have several distractions to take my mind off my current torture...

The first of these is a new game called Real-deal TV where you take an already established TV show and turn it into a more brutal version of itself. My current favourite in this game is my version of You’ve Been Framed! This involved Jeremy Beadle and Lisa Riley going on holiday to Turkey, secretly having their suitcases stuffed with Class A narcotics while they’re in Duty Free then getting arrested, imprisoned and brutalised in a Turkish jail by a variety of wardens even more obese than Riley. It would then be edited down to 30-minute segments and shown over several weeks. If viewing figures flagged a new celebrity, say Jeremy Clarkson or any Tory politician of choice, could be introduced.

My version of Big Brother comes a close second. This would be slightly renamed Bug Brother and the bunch of celeb-wannabes all keen to get their mugs on the telly would enter the house then have to avoid various insect attacks, starting with ants, slowly building up to cockroaches and then ending with a carnage-tastic attack of those flesh-eating scarab beetles from The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. This may sound cruel as everyone dies but it would deprive us of a new generation of no-talents. Think of it as mercy killing and it doesn’t seem so bad.

Away from Real-deal TV I am also getting on with my current play, Trust, about political corruption in a small northern town. I’m close to the half-way point of the first draft and I’m still not wanting to bin it yet which is usually a good sign. I expressed my confidence in the project to my missus yesterday with some comment along the lines of ‘I’m writing some really good stuff here you know.’

She replied with: ‘I’ll be the judge of that...’ I wasn’t at the meeting where she promoted to my script-editor but this seems to be a fait accomplit now so I’ll quietly accept it.

Work, of course, is also taking up some time but I try not to think of this as it reminds me I want a new job which reminds of... Bugger. See how easy it is to not be distracted? Back to my new Real-deal TV show idea, BeastEnders, I reckon...

Hair today...

I’ve just had my summer haircut. This is essentially a number one (shaver length not the slang noun for having a piss) all over my head and it is one of the best feelings in the world. It’s a real sense of liberation having no or little hair and it has the added bonuses of (a) making me look quite hard and (b) being very low maintenance.

I first had this haircut about seven years ago when in my former life as a thespian I was appearing in a play as a septuagenarian suffering mental illness. And ever since that role my wife has hated this haircut as she claims it makes me look like a rapist or an advert for the Terence Higgins Trust.

But still I love it and to celebrate my lack of hair I also shaved my sideburns off this morning too. These are a relatively recent addition and many folk have passed comment on them as they do border on the largely absurd pork chop variety. But critics of my facial topiary will be gladdened to note that these are now gone for a few days and it’s a sort of new-look me. Well, until I get bored and start growing them back...

One of the best bits about new hair, of course, is getting a haircut. I was a staunch barber man for many years and prided myself on attending a barbershop as it was one of the few remaining bastions of masculinity left.

But two years ago a friend took me on a trip to a place near work entirely staffed by peroxide-haired Eastern European lady hairdressers and I was won over by the prospect of not only having my hair cut by a lady (sort of normal) but also by having it washed by someone else (not very blokey, I know) and then having oil rubbed into my scalp (positively brave new world if you come from Goole).

At first I was convinced the place was really the front for a knocking shop for the Russian Mafia but as I am now a regular I can confirm that I have never once being offered sexual favours of any description there. I do get a tissue when they’re done, though, and in some cultures that could well be a come-on – or something to come on depending on your point of view. But male barbers also offer the tissue and I’ve always assumed they don’t want me to crack one out in their shop so I’ll behave with the same amount of decorum with the peroxide ladies.

This may sound utterly horrible but in more than 30 years of going for haircuts I have never figured out what the obligatory end-of-cut tissue is for. Is it a tradition that all barbers and hairdressers learn at barbering college? Or do they all have shares in Kleenex and this is a fantastic way to ensure sales and shares dividends never drop.

I think we should be told. Because if not maybe my first assumption was correct and it’s something that everybody else does and I’m not in on the gag! And there would be something quite typical about that...

Pool The Other One

Saturday was the Region Seven Tour. This is a series of eightball pool tournaments open to amateur players in London, Surrey, Berkshire, Sussex, Kent and Hampshire and I’ve played on it for the last four years with a modest degree of success. One of the main drawbacks to me doing better at these events (apart from the fact that there are a lot of very good players on the Tour and I’m sometimes quite rubbish) is my liking for a bit of a drink.

Because much as I like to compete and play well I also view these events as a chance to let loose and that’s pretty much what I did on Saturday when I got dumped out in the second round and decided to play nineball and support my pals for the rest of the day. This resulted in an early Sunday morning return from the wilds of Chatham Pool Club in Kent via the East End of London thanks to a lift with a friendly Guyanan.

The missus discovered me on the sofa the next morning covered in a makeshift duvet of cushions and, after an hour tending the garden and kicking the hell out of my punchbag and the hangover out of my head, I pretty much stayed there for the rest of the day. The one benefit of this, though, was that I got to watch a lot of the Glastonbury Festival.

At one time I would quite happily have gone camping at these events and enjoyed the vibe and bravely ignored the lack of home comforts like the need to poo in carrier bags if you’re too far from the loos. But now attending one of these events would just scare me. Too many young people and too much time away from my own bed.

A friend of the family once tried to recommend camping to my good lady wife and she said it wasn’t for her. But reading between the lines what she was really saying was:

‘If you think for a moment that I am sleeping under canvas on an inflatable mattress in the wilds of nowheresville with a bunch of outdoor types and nut-munching hippies for neighbours then I’m afraid you’ve got another thing coming. It has to be four star, it has to have room service and it has to have a wide selection of basic amenities like pleasant restaurants, a theatre, a cinema and a swimming pool. In fact if it has none of those things then you can stick your tent pegs right up your...’

And these days I am inclined to agree. I’ll quite happily get the Glastonbury Festival experience from the telly these days. Or if not I’ll just get the boy to charge me £120, spray me in mud, not give me access to the toilets and sell me bowls of noodles for £10 a time while he puts Basement Jaxx on the CD player and waves the case around from the other end of the room so I can’t see the band.

Greed Is Good

I have a confession. It’s not actually as juicy or sexy as coming out of the closet or admitting that I have feelings for the neighbour’s dog. Although the latter would not strictly be a lie as I do have feelings for the neighbour’s dog and these border on sympathy (as the poor mutt’s cooped up in a small back garden barking at passing trains most of the day) and violent rage (as the idiotic hound also has a habit of barking at trains that are not passing, usually at about 3am).

My confession is that I love The Apprentice (BBC2). This isn’t a person but a TV show where a bunch of US wannabe business moguls compete against one another to win a mega-salary job with multi-squllionaire entrepreneur Donald Trump. The English version of this show was, of course, much more parochial and featured little Alan Sugar in the Trump role and featured a collection of foppish, ambitious and relatively unpleasant folk all fighting for the right to be taken under Sugar’s tiny wing. In the end, though, the UK version was won by a decent chap called Tim who won the right to be educated in the ways of business by the only former Spurs Chairman who could also double as Gimli from Lord Of The Rings without the need for CGI.

But episode one into the US version and there seems to be a distinct lack of decent chaps or chapesses. In fact a more hateful collection of self-obsessed egotists you couldn’t wish to avoid. If Phil Collins, Sting, Stalin and Saddam Hussein shared a room with these people they’d all be over-awed by the thrusting egos in front of them. If ever any Brit wanted a control group to demonstrate their prejudices against our cousins across the pond they’d be hard-pressed to beat this lot. Whooping, taking themselves astoundingly seriously, high fives, a distinct lack of irony, etc, etc...

Five minutes into the show and a chap called Bradford (real name apparently) was using baseball analogies when he volunteered himself to head one of the competing teams in the first task. ‘I picked up the bat and ran to the plate and stood up to be counted when the pressure was on...’ He may well have continued with ‘Then I took the bat, rammed it firmly up my arse and danced the can-can in front of that former Nazi who’s now the Pope...’ but I’d switched off by then as my brain stuck up the flood defences against a sea of inanity.

The real star of the show, though, is Donald Trump. He gets to decide who goes from whichever team has failed a task and passes judgement with the immortal line ‘You’re fired!’ Trump’s love for ostentation makes Elton John’s flower-buying habits seem reserved and everything in Trump’s world seems to be gold-plated. Some of the would-be apprentices got to have dinner with Mr and Mrs Trump last night and I was expecting her to descend down the staircase with gold-leaf skin. She didn’t but I bet she has done before.

But it’s Trump’s hair which is the defining feature of the man. Think Max Headroom meets the lead singer from A Flock Of Seagulls and you’re nearly there. It’s a hairstyle that is an accident between superglue and candyfloss and it dominates any time Trump is on screen. It has to be seen to be believed. It’s folicular genius.

Anyway I am hooked. A less mature version of me would once have just hated it and them and wished them all to die horrible, slow and painful deaths just for existing. But I’m a more mature man these days. And this lot are so far beyond irony that any ridicule or scorn on my part is utterly redundant. So enjoy...

The Look Of Love

My wife has a look. It’s like a patronising pat on the head and a kick in the nuts all at the same time and the look includes unspoken words that usually say something along the lines of:

‘You are an idiot. I told you not to do that but you persisted and ignored my advice and now you only have yourself to blame. The fact that you made an idiot out of yourself is never a boon for me either as it reminds me of the fact that I married an idiot which reduces me to the level of partner of idiot. The fact that you also ignored my advice will be noted down for further use and I will take my revenge at some unspecified point in the near future when you are at your least wary. It could be when you’re just dropping off to sleep in bed or it could be when you’re quietly sat on the sofa watching the telly. It could even be in the next 20 seconds as I could be stood behind you. Bet you haven’t checked have you? But rest assured that retribution will come and it will be painful...’

I may be slightly misrepresenting my wife here but the look rarely acts as a precursor to anything good. Even more wonderful the boy has now also perfected his own look which simply says ‘Idiot’ and should I ever be on the receiving end of both looks at the same time I may well just cede the last scrap of self-respect I possess and leave home to dwell in a cardboard box and eat crisps for the rest of my life while smearing myself with my own excrement.

I got the look from the missus this morning when she asked me what time I got in the previous night as I’d been at a county pool game playing like an idiot against Berks. My usual gambit with this is to knock an hour off so a 3am return becomes a 2am return but I’ll call it 1.45am as it sounds earlier and technically that’s a whole other hour we’re into so it may as well be 1am or, at a push, even midnight. But I heard someone go to the toilet when I arrived home and couldn’t be sure if it was the boy or the missus so my usual tactics went for a burton and I adopted a new approach. Honesty.

‘I got into Victoria at midnight,’ was my opening gambit.

She looked interested then confused. The two-hour time lapse was obviously registering.

‘But I didn’t make it home until 2am...’

Bizarrely I wasn’t lying. The trouble was I got a little impatient waiting for night buses at Victoria so I decided to ‘save’ some time by getting a bus from a stop near Victoria to a place near home. Cue two hours of jumping from one night bus to another coupled with a trek across W1 until I eventually found the stop I wanted – and caught the bus I’d originally intended to get.

I explained this to my good lady wife hoping for sympathy. But none was forthcoming.

‘You should have got a cab.’

Then I got the look. My days are numbered...

Scent Off!

One of the hazards of martial arts and all the kicking, punching, blocking, falling and jumping that it entails is that the body needs an occasional trip to the osteopath for a bit of an MOT. This is no great hardship, though, as my current osteopath is a rather fabulous woman who has bent me back into shape after all manner of mishaps.

In fact the only slightly disconcerting thing about my osteopath is that she looks like a more attractive version of the larger of the two women from How Clean Is Your House?

This threw me at first as I always thought the HCIYH woman also looked like infamous madam Cynthia Payne so when I first arrived to be treated and she asked me to take my clothes off part of me was expecting ‘hand relief’ and another part of me was expecting an analysis of my domestic hygiene (this is excellent by the way). Instead I got snapped back into place and could walk again but I wasn’t too disappointed in the end.

My most recent osteopath visit followed another muscle-twanging martial arts class and my back, legs and skeletal structure were soon returned to tip-top condition. So I returned home and showered before going into work.

But later in the day at work I happened to smell my hands and noticed a distinct smell of condoms and I could not work out where it had come from. So I turned detective...

Suspect one... was my ostepoath’s bench. My hands had clung to it earlier in the day. But this wasn’t rubber so I ruled it out immediately. Or was it?

Suspect two... was condoms. But I haven’t been near these little fellas in years and so haven’t had to find amusing one-liners while fumbling around before getting jiggy.

Suspect three... new nice smelling shower gel (ponce). I am a recent convert to Molton Brown (rich ponce) and had that day tried a new type (rich but adventurous ponce). Could this be the culprit?

Suspect four... knee pads. The things that support and protect my knees while in class. But had I touched them that day?

Suspect five... I just smell odd. After all I have ear and nasal hair these days so what’s to stop me also smelling of rubber contraceptives. I’m happily married so anything else is possible.

So, like in all good thrillers, I located and questioned all of the suspects. And, like all good policemen, I beat the crap out of all of them until the knee pads eventually admitted it was them. Gotcha! But they may have been covering for the shower gel...

Rock Bottom

One of the in-laws is an actress and she’s just got a job in a stage version of Little Women. Before she went to the audition I advised her to cut off her legs below the knees and suggest a version entirely staffed by female members of the vertically challenged community to the producers. A Little Women by little women. Brilliant I thought! Sadly she ignored me.

You see women just have a different outlook on things...

In fact I had another example of the strange and mystical ways of women this morning when I was getting ready to go out. I asked my missus if I looked OK in my black linen trousers, green dragon t-shirt and blue hoody and she replied with a rhyme that went like this:

‘Blue and green
Should never be seen
Without a colour
In between.’

I was stunned that my missus was quoting poetry to me before 9am (or before any time for that matter) but this is apparently a fashion rule that all women know – and men don’t know. Ever.

Later in the day at work I was also confronted with another woman mind trap when myself and two work colleagues got onto the subject of arses. I mentioned that my arse and my legs were the features most former girlfriends had most frequently praised and my female colleague said that she had a slightly saggy arse.

At one point I would have walked straight into this trap and replied that she had a great arse and she be proud of it. In fact I would probably have gone so far as to say that it should be the centrepiece of a travelling arse carnival where people could look at it and pass comments such as ‘That arse is lovelier and more wholesome than a breakfast of toasted muffins and jam.’

But I kept my counsel as I now know that any positive response about the state of her arse may have had me categorised as some type of arse-staring sex freak.

So I decided to keep quiet...

But the problem with keeping quiet, of course, is that this can be interpreted as a negative response to her saggy arse comment which would be interpreted as agreement that she has a saggy arse. And in terms of friendly relations this would be the same thing as pissing in her coffee and offering her an excrement croissant.

So I countered with a male tactic and went to the pub. I am a strategic genius.

Unbearable

Myself and the girl went to a matinee show at Soho Theatre at the weekend to see Mancub by Scottish theatre company Vanishing Point. The play was an oddball and very moving rites-of-passage drama about a teenage boy who may or may not be able to turn into animals. The play itself was well written and had real heart to it. It was wonderfully acted, too, with most of the show using a three-person cast to portray 20 or so characters with no costume changes or set.

Even better, for a Yorkshireman like myself, the tickets were £5 each and the missus paid! Cheap date city!

I like Soho Theatre a lot. They support new writers and stage a wide variety of stuff from new drama to stand-up comedy to visiting companies. They were also very positive about a script I sent in and, as I am very shallow and easily bought, they will be getting a large donation when I start making serious money from this writing lark.

We also watched the DVD of Hell Boy on Saturday night. Now I confess to being something of a comics fan and I’ll happily crawl over broken glass and ingest my own and anybody else’s urine if the result is that I can get the latest issue of my current comics flavour of the month. But we both fell asleep about halfway through so Hell Boy is either pretty rubbish or we are both getting old and should be tucked up in bed with cocoa by 11pm these days.

Besides my ability to snooze off, of course, another thing that suggests my ever-passing years is my ear and nasal hair. I have noticed that this has been sprouting in ever-larger volumes over the past few years and shows no sign of abating.

At first I tried to take a friendly and even hippy-esque approach to the problem. I figured if it grows naturally then it must be like a plant so if I talked to it nicely it would behave. Sadly the hair just wouldn’t listen so I’ve now taken the scorched earth option and bought a hair trimmer to cut it out on a regular basis.

This works OK but sadly I sometimes miss bits and so spend Tube journeys fiddling with on-the-run offenders that have escaped my unsightly hair pogrom. But this results in the missus grinding her teeth in disgust, giving me that you’ve-just-shat-in-my-favourite-bag look and eventually hitting me.

I try to explain I’m doing it to beautify myself for her so it looks like she isn’t married to a freak but she just sighs. Then she hits me again – and again... I think she quite likes hitting me.

Anyway the upshot of this is not to bother with male grooming. Spend the money on beer or drugs.

Make ‘em Laugh!

I’m busy writing my stage play in an attempt to break my sudoku habit but I have just heard three jokes which I’ll share to prove I’m a giving kind of guy (as we as a damn funny one, obviously)!

Joke one
A German watchmaker invents a new clock but it only goes tick-tick tick-tick. Then he suddenly hits on a method to make it work properly. He turns off the lights in his shop, dons a Nazi uniform and approaches the offending timepiece and says:
‘Ve have ways of making you tock!’

Joke two
A man working on the dodgems got the sack but successfully sued his employers for funfair dismissal.

Joke three
What do call a Frenchman wearing flip-flops? Phillipe Phillop.

The Addiction

I am an addict. I join the ranks of George Best and Paul Gascoigne and hold up my hands and admit that I am thrall to a vice greater than my will power...

It all started simple enough. I tried a small one and tried to forget about it. But it gnawed away until I tried another and then another and before I knew it I was hunting down a supplier on the internet and now it’s no good. I’m doomed...

Basically sudoku is bloody addictive. For those not in the know sudoku is a Japanese numbers puzzle set out on a 9x9 grid made up three 3x3 grids. You are given a few numbers in their correct place to start off with and then you have to fill in the rest. But the catch is that each 3x3 box must have the numbers 1-9 while each column or row can only have one number 1-9 in it.

I’d dabbled with a few sudoku and made a total arse of them over the past few days as The Guardian and The Evening Standard are printing them on their respective puzzles pages. But last night enough was enough and, after making another hashed effort, I made it back home and went to my office and hand drew the grid and placed the original numbers in and spent the entire evening getting the bloody, sodding, b***!!ding thing right.

About 11.30pm I thought I had it cracked. Then I realised I’d repeated two numbers in the same column. Arse biscuits! It was the gone-to-bed-with-Anne-Bancroft-and-woken-up-with-Anne-Widdecombe feeling multiplied by about 20.

So to prove my superiority over some pesky bit of paper with a few numbers I have now completed four of these sodding things and I will doubtless do more until I get bored or remember that I do have a life.

Pity me...

An Apple A Day...

My good lady wife bought me an ipod for my birthday in April. I had previously resisted the lure of these little fellas because I feared I would be drawn into the whole Apple-marketed lifestyle fantasy world where all your friends look like celebrities from a Gap advert or a Jamie Oliver dinner party and you dream of having exotic relatives called Fabio or Angelique.

Now I actually own one, however, I appreciate the fact that they are rather good gadgets enabling me to download and carry a glut of albums from my CD collection. For the uninitiated my CD collection can best be described as a strange land where Neil Sedaka and Hank Williams sit comfortably alongside Miss Dynamite and the Sisters of Mercy, while Ani Difranco shares a podium with Richard Thompson and Gene Pitney.

My wife (a Clash, punk and guitar band type of girl) is often agog at some of my musical likes and usually asks ‘How did we ever end up together?’ when I play the same Leonard Cohen song for the 19th time. My stepson usually just sneers and leaves the room when I take command of the CD player (although I note my Gorillaz album has made its way up to his bedroom of late). The various artists in my music collection, however, have yet to complain about their ipod bedfellows so I assume they approve – although the introduction of Marilyn Manson may force some of the older residents out very shortly.

My taste in music aside, though, the other thing that often leaves friends agog is my sense of humour. I, of course, am convinced that I am a latter-day Oscar Wilde with a bit of Benny Hill thrown in for good measure. What many of my friends think, however, has yet to be recorded but the stunned silences that sometimes greet some of my more arcane or lewd utterings is probably not a good thing.

But this is a situation I intend to rectify very shortly by proving to everyone that I am funnier than a field full of crucified Daily Mail readers by entering the Channel 4 Comedy Competition. For this I have to write three sketches and a bit of a monologue and then send them in to Channel 4 where I’ll be judged alongside the many thousands of other entrants.

But today I realised that I haven’t written a comedy sketch of any description since I was about 17. Fortunately I have five weeks to think of something funny – and then learn how to fit it into a very small space. Bugger...

The End?

I am sat in the office with my boss. She is talking. She is also shrinking as she talks.

‘And the fact that the magazine is closing is just one of those unavoidable things that sometimes happens, blah, blah, blah... Competitive marketplace, blah, blah, blah...’

I look serious. Internally I am dancing and running around whooping and hugging people. Externally I am trying to maintain a face that looks like a close relative has died and the family dog has been found humping the corpse. My boss is now half her normal size.

‘Of course the company will endeavour to keep its more experienced staff, blah, blah, blah... Full redundancy terms, though, will be offered, blah, blah, blah...’

Internally I am now doing cartwheels and bursting into the cha-cha-cha. Can-can girls enter to the right of the office which is now transformed into a stage. Eight years work at one month’s salary a year. Tax free. Enough to live on and write for 12 months. Maybe 18 months if I’m careful... My boss has now virtually disappeared. Free at last? A chance to live the dream?

I get a tap on my shoulder and wake from my trance.

‘When did Dot Cotton’s first husband die?’

Sigh. Reality bites. Arse biscuits...

Boy’s In The Hoody

I have a new idea for a TV show. It’s about two girls, one’s a very chilled martial arts expert and the other’s a cynical and ill-tempered computer whiz with an acerbic tongue. The two meet, become lovers and together they solve crimes. It’s called Punch and Moody and it may sound terrible but I guarantee it will be funnier than Murder In Suburbia or Midsomer Murders. So expect it on five soon – or on Channel 4 if it ever starts to go upmarket again.

The big news of the weekend, though, apart from seeing Theatre Of Blood at the National (pretty sodding splendid stage version of the Seventies schlock horror film) and watching the new Star Wars movie (less sodding splendid if you ask me) is that I am now the proud owner of a hoody. Yup. I am down with the kids!

I’ve always resisted the allure of these before but if they’re annoying John Prescott then I figured it must be about time I had one. I was actually out trying to buy trainers at the time of this purchase but it all got too scary in JJB and Footlocker so I headed for the more familiar territory of Gap to regain a sense of self and be less intimidated by so many colours and so much choice.

I tried to convince myself that I would look quite cool in one of these but I now know I have failed miserably. I look every inch the type of ‘hip’ adult every teenager dreads admitting that they know. I couldn’t fail to be more down with the kids if I was the poster boy for the Sex Offenders Register.

So please resist if you spot me and want to pass comment on how bloody stupid I look. It was a moment of weakness and it won’t happen again...