I have a friend who only has good luck. He is a good-looking gent (no unlike myself if I may say so) and everything he does tends to turn out really excellent. Annoyingly excellent, you might say. Now, as annoying as it may be when he treads in dog mess and, instead of there just being that, there is a fifty-pound note glued to his shoe (no joke), I much prefer spending time with this friend (and not only because he sometimes buys us a load of drinks with the fifty-quid) than with my other friend (for the record I have more than two but that’s not really the point of this story). For the sake of him not feeling like a terrible human-being I shall call him ‘Derek’. Now Derek, you see, is quite the opposite–

Derek is, tragically, one of those awfully unlucky people who is followed by a black cloud of trouble and unpleasantness wherever he goes. Because of this it’s best, obviously, to keep these two opposing friend-forces apart. The last time we all went for a drink together events spiraled out of control quickly: for every good thing that happened to James, a truly unlucky and deeply unfortunate thing would happen to Derek almost INSTANTLY. While this was hilariously comical at times (like when James won 100 English pounds on the lottery at the precise moment that Derek was hit by a car; don’t worry, fate is having far too much fun mocking Derek to get rid of him in such a way), it makes me sad when I think about how much Derek had to pay the driver of the car for the dent his backside left in it…

So the point is this: if you have two of these opposing-force friends, don’t allow them to meet each other very often. As funny as it is, it really can make you think a bit too much about life, and nobody needs that bummer, do they?

Nadine’s surprise engagement party: I think I know what we should plan. We should arrange some time chalets val d isere for a girly weekend as a surprise.

LOL: for some time I had no idea what on Earth this meant. I thought it could be Lots of Laughing Lunatics or possibly Lolita, Oi, what a Lovely film! Then a friend informed me, smugly, that it actually meant Laugh Out Loud. I was baffled, honestly I was. So I made a pact to myself: I won’t use this absurdity ever, I thought. It’s daft and this email / texting laziness will never replace laughter at the end of the phone!

Fast forward five years and I have used LOL about 15,674 times. I know–I know. The worst thing? Well, I stopped caring. The old saying If You Can’t Beat Em Join Em really is true–

Then, last week I noticed another worrying trend. I was sitting in the pub when someone made a joke and a (usually) very reliable friend of mine, a friend who wouldn’t be caught dead not wearing skin-tight jeans and donning a fashionable hair-do, said, “LOL, that’s funny!”

I exploded! “Just laugh!” I said, “If you think it’s funny please JUST LAUGH!”

He shook his head, thinking I was over-reacting I suppose. “I am laughing,” he said.

“You’re not!” I exclaimed, really putting emphasis on the E, C and D at the end. “You’re laugh out louding!”

Suffice to say I was eventually forced to leave; everyone thought I’d taken it all a bit seriously.

At the bus-stop I was suitably riled enough to bring this up with a total stranger who was drinking booze from brown paper. The man, a vagrant, agreed with me wholeheartedly. By the time I stepped on the bus I was convinced of my mission. To speak up whenever anyone spoke the LOL in real life. It’s only for texting, people! It’s only to be used when you can’t actually laugh!

Before I go, I need to relish in a new purchase. I have just bought the smartest saucony running shoes that I have ever owned. Toronto Marathon, here I come!

I wake up earlier than intended. Last night was a late one and I wanted a lie in today but the cold winter sunshine streaming in through the window seems to have other ideas for me. Reluctantly I roll out of bed, throw on some clothes and go and get a newspaper, passing a neighbour in the hallway.

On returning, I pause for a moment as the kettle sings its song and my bread clicks up from the toaster. This is the best part of my weekend, I think: knowing that I can take breakfast and the newspaper back to bed, reading and eating at leisure.

I flick through the pages, working out which articles I will read later on in the day. Once I’m done, I drain my coffee and manage to snooze for nearly another hour. It’s still only 9:30 am when I wake.

I head into the kitchen and begin melting white chocolate for a cheesecake I’m making for dinner tonight. P is coming over and this is the dessert he’s requested. “Don’t bother with a main course,”he said on the phone, “Just do the cheesecake!”He might not want a main, but I do, I’ll come to that later.

My afternoon is spent cleaning - the living room hasn’t seen the Hoover for a couple of weeks, I’ve just had no spare time at all. A couple of hours later the place is spotless. In between cleaning, I’ve read articles from the paper I bought this morning and chat on the phone with my mate. She is considering getting Smart lipo, I tell her not to.

Just as I’m putting the finishing touches to dinner, the doorbell rings. P is early. But as I open the door he is standing brandishing a huge bunch of flowers for me. I had wanted ten minutes to myself before his arrival, but now it doesn’t matter. I take the flowers gratefully, find a vase and fill it with water.

The World is big. Really big. Forget all these idiots who say, “it’s a small world!”it isn’t. It’s a massive world, and it has equally massive potential to astound and disgust. Not only really big and really brilliant (and bad) but also stupidly complicated. Now, considering that—at a guess—more than half of the world is inebriated at the same time—and the other half is corrupted by the kind of power than would make even an olden-day wizard cry in disgust—how
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Yes people, your eyes do not deceive you. I didn’t say atrocious, or awful, or ludicrous, or diabolical; and I’m on about the National Health Service—one of England’s finest attributes and source of great controversy for a great many years.

Ask yourself, how absurd would this idea sound if you stood up tomorrow in a big hall filled with important people and put this to the politicians at the front behind the microphones: “Here here, I have a wondrous idea–A way to help every man, woman and child in this land for free–”—groaning from crowd, laughter from politicians—“–I propose we invest many millions of pounds in a scheme to allow anyone with an injury or illness to be treated without paying anything!”

Absurd! You’d be laughed out of town. There’s tax on everything these days. You can barely get out of bed without incurring some kind of cost to yourself or loved ones.

And many other countries think the idea of the NHS–a free organization which I believe actually does an outstanding job–is absurd, too: America isn’t the only place where you have no choice but to sell all your non-vital organs and one of your least favorite children to get your teeth looked at; Germany and many other countries also have no equivalent of the NHS and unlikely ever will; health insurance costs in Europe can be as much as 300 smackers a month and in the U.S., grand-daddy of health insurance unfairness since the dawn of time, it can run into the thousands.

Because of this many people simply don’t have health insurance–something which us English take for granted. Those injured in sporting accidents are made to pay back the money for the rest of their life, incurring debts which are handed down to future generations in some cases.

All hail the NHS! Yes, it has its problems, and it has its occasional massive wrong doings, but let it be around for a long time to come.

Speaking of all this, I really need to look into insurance for that Secondary education job that I jot got overseas. Yes, you heard me! America here I come!

The Inbetweeners: a brand new quality TV comedy about teenage life in the sixth-form…And who should they pick to choose to play the young Del Boy in Rock And Chips, the prequel to much beloved English TV series Only Fools And Horses? James Buckley from that show, that’s who! Great, I was impressed! The foul mouthed boy seemed like the perfect choice for the young Del Boy role; and then, stop the press, it was announced that the one and only Nicholas Lyndhurst—yes, lanky Rodney Trotter himself!—was to step into the role of Del Boy’s dad. Could life get any better?

It seemed too good to be true and yes–you’ve guessed it–Rock And Chips is; In fact, putting Good in the same sentence might be a little generous. The feature length ‘comedy drama’ is certainly funny, but the laughs don’t come from the jokes themselves. Mainly because there are no jokes, tragically. Somehow, as impossible as it might seem, the man who made Only Fools And Horses and also its prequel has managed to create an hour and a half long farce which is almost entirely deadly serious.

I didn’t want to admit any of this to myself at first, though; no, I watched and I waited for at least half an hour before I admitted that it had all gone sideways. At the one hour mark I was almost wanting to switch it off. That’s how let down I was.

But there is one saving grace. If you really, really love Fools then you may find some pleasure—absurd pleasure if you ask me—in tying up all those loose ends, such as who did what when they were young and where so and so came from. But, If you’re not someone who would gladly chop their right arm off to shake Del Boy’s hand then I suggest you give it a miss and stick to re-runs of the original.

I was just talking to my sister the other day and she told me that she has just gotten this amazing gig at a brand new Health and Beauty PR firm. I was really surprised to hear that she was interested in that stuff in all that stuff, but looking back at when we were little it does actually make sense. She was always the one who was playing with all the girly toys while I was in the backyard playing with trucks. Thankfully we have each other to balance it all out!

I am one of those people who love to complain even when happy. In fact, you could say I look for reasons to complain about even when I am actually quite at peace with life. You could say this is true for most of the human beings on this planet. Perhaps as a species, we are never satisfied. I think this is what defines us.

The most worrisome part however is that, you will always see that we complain or
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The knock on the door came at that ever-so crucial point in the morning—I’d just poured the milk in to my cereal (choco rice-crispies) and was awaiting that truly wondrous moment when it starts to go all chocolatey–.

On the way to the door my mood darkened considerably; behind the frosted glass I could see bright under-sea colours: bright blue, red, and purple. I couldn’t begin to fathom who or what might be about to accost me, so I steadied my nerves, expecting the worst.

I opened the door and almost dropped my bowl right there and then; standing before me were several break-dancers, behind them the third on his head, spinning to the sound of hip-hop music. Wow! Yeah!

My morning had been saved!

I would never pre-judge anyone who came to my door ever again!

The routine went on through a number of relentless breathtaking combinations of cool; first the white guy with the hat—the one who I’d opened the door to—followed the tall black guy with a killer move, flipping along caterpillar like and then up in to a one-handed hand-stand thing, and then things progressed. Before long I was wanting to put my bowl down and try one of my own special maneuvers–one of those ones at the back of ever man’s mind which has been brewing for just such a special occasion. The move I had in mind was called The Tornado and it involved—

“It is great, isn’t it?” said the third break-dancer dude, the small white guy who’d been silent before, and would make Joseph and his Technicolor dream-coat look somber.

“Yes it is!” I said, unbothered by my ruined choco corn-flakes for the first time in my entire life. “It’s more than great, it’s awesome!”

“The lord thinks so too,” said the lad again. I thought I’d misheard him, so I said, “Sorry? What’s the lord got to do with breakdancing?”

"The lord is great," they chanted in unison…

That was when I saw the small black book out in front of me. Ever since then I steer well clear of break-dancers; the reach of the Jehovah’s witness knows no limits.

Just came across this contest where the prize is chalets val d isere. Everyone should really put your names in, this would be a marvelous way to spend New Years!

It is nice to see that something constructive is being done and that plans for providing us all with an alternative form of power are actually underway. Perhaps I am naive, but I have never been able to understand why so many of the population seem to be opposed to wind turbines being built. There are a lot of people who say that they are ugly and that they spoil the landscape. Others complain that they make a lot of
read more from "The Answer Is Blowing In The Wind."

I wonder if there are still any new styles of music left to be discovered. We have seen so many different forms of each genre that I now tend to believe everything has been done before.

If you think about it, there are no longer any bands or singers doing anything that is unique. This is not their fault (and I’m not trying to be gloomy about it) but when you write a song in the present day, you can’t really do it in a very original way.

But it isn’t so long ago that new styles were still coming about. Hendrix changed things forever by using distortion rather than avoiding it and Rap music was a pretty fresh way of putting words across. But can anyone else come up with something that is genuinely new?

And this doesn’t just apply to the world of music either. What is there left to do in art? We’ve had Expressionism, Surrealism, Dadaism and Pre-Raphaelite; is there room for anything else? I think that if someone does manage to do something new then he (or she) will become a very wealthy person indeed.

I suppose that you could say there are still some new ideas in film. Well, at least ‘Toy Story’ was new until they went and created a hundred clones of it. And James Cameron’s new; ‘Avatar’ is, apparently, a step in a new direction. ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Sin City’ were both original styles of film but, when you think about it, something is now becoming evident. All of these examples of unique movies are dependent on technology; without it they are nothing special.

So, are art, music and film now only reliant on that? Perhaps so. There really doesn’t seem to be anywhere else for things to go. But this is only my opinion; I may be wrong… and I hope that I am.

As a closing thought, it was recently my birthday (if any of you have forgotten), and my friend Aaliyah gave me a chemical skin peels gift certificate. I was plesently surprised that it was actually quite delightful.