Motorway Services: Where the bare minimum costs more

Ah, the motorway service station. A British institution if ever there was one. They are nobody's destination but still, usually thanks to our bladders, on long car journeys many of us can be found prying ourselves out of our vehicles and lumbering into these soulless strip-lighted bastions of aggressive capitalism like Zombies, ready to pay massively inflated prices for, well, everything... like the mugs we are.

Next time you find yourself at a Welcome Break or a RoadChef, take a look around. They're great places to do a bit of people watching. You may just spot some of this lot:

The regular
As you stand waiting for the sweaty, wheezy 'barista' to whip up your large (I'll say 'venti' when I'm in Italy- deal?) latte, this weirdo swans in like a diva onto a film set, with waves and hellos to all staff members, who they know by name, in sight.

Men: Stereotypes that cannot be denied

Men. Despite what some people may say, we're not a complex breed.

Keep us fed, watered and supplied with things we enjoy, be it football on the telly, the poetry of William Blake or tits (we can be quite diverse in our tastes) and we're quite happy. Plonk a lady (or another bloke- we don't discriminate here at TWTN) in front of us and add a vague possibility of having sex with said lady (or man) and we may even produce beautiful music, paintings, architecture and literature.

That being so, it can get a little grating when advertisers portray us as moronic adult-sized babies that without female supervision fuck up tasks the average eleven-year-old can manage to pull off with ease...

*I would quickly like to acknowledge that being British, male and white, I realise that claiming misrepresentation by the media is a bit like Bill Gates crying about losing a tenner, but I needed to pad out this introduction a bit. It's done now, let's all be grown up about it and move on.*

Writing: Moronic statements the profession provokes

Over 60 posts done now and not one of them is about my chosen craft. Time to change that.

Before I decided that dead-end jobs in the writing industry were preferable to dead-end jobs in further education, I lived in South London and mixed with proper blokey-blokes who if they even bothered to work for a living either fixed, built or knocked shit down. If it was revealed that you worked in an office while you were somewhere like a pub you would automatically be labelled as a 'poof or sumfink' by knuckle-dragging fucksticks that pride themselves on their ignorance and lack of education but always know more about any subject than anyone else nearby, or so their super loud voice would lead you to believe.

These are the sort of people that if you let them know that you are a writer, respond in the following ways:

Drugs: Arguments against the end of prohibition that miss the point entirely

Drugs. Apart from 'Big Fat Gypsy Weddings' and whether Lady Gaga is bangable or not, nothing divides opinion more. Unfortunately, no subject seems to bypass rationality and common sense quite like the whole narcotic prohibition debate either.

Of course it makes good copy when some bell-end who can't handle their shit takes something and dies but that doesn't account for the millions of people who take some form of drug every weekend and have what can only be described as 'a really fucking good time'. I'll let Bill Hicks get the point across better.

Anyway, here's some of things people who still deny that fact that drug prohibition has failed screech irrationally whenever the subject comes up:

Parents: Things your folks do that you'll probably end up doing too

I've reached an age where a lot of people I know are settling down and starting families or trying desperately to fend off their girlfriends' maternal instincts by getting a puppy...

While I'm not quite ready to unleash my spawn on society just yet, knowing an increasing number of parents- and having a set of my own- has shown me that some interesting things happen to people when they have a miniature human to keep alive.

This seems like a good excuse to reproduce Philip Larkin's famous poem; This Be The Verse (yes, a poem (Don't worry it's not very long or particularly 'gay'- it even features swears!):

People: More things that will be banned when the revolution happens

Did you really think I would just write a single post about this?

To be honest, I could stop writing about everything else and still come up with a new post every week, but anyone who knows me knows that I'm not bitter and twisted enough to do something like that... Shut up.

First draft of this read like a manifesto, albeit a disturbingly violent one. So all references to 'pimp-slaps' and eye-stabbings performed with shitty sticks have been removed, in keeping with the usual light-hearted banter you've come to expect from this blog.

Anyways, time to point the finger at more behaviour I and many other like-minded folk believe warrants calling whoever does it a twat:

Relationship advice: Terrifying things women are told by magazines

From what I've noticed, a mainstay of magazines that target a female audience is relationship advice. Whether it is a section devoted to answering readers' questions about how to hold on to their man (because it's SO tricky to keep a heterosexual man happy, right?) or tips to help readers work out if their fella is cheating, hiding something or doing something else that we invariably do.

Take Cosmopolitan for example. More than three million copies of this rag are sold each month. Does your missus read it? Is she flaky enough to take advice from a bitter hack? If so, here's why you need to check out the man-hating, sheer fucking horror story of a relationship advice section it contains.

So according to Cosmo...

People: Things that will be banned when the revolution happens

Nobody is perfect. We all have little personality quirks and tics that make us who we are and that's great. Diversity is the spice of life after all... Unless you're horribly xenophobic and racist. If that's the case, diversity is the source of fear and confusion, but that's a different post entirely. However, there are a few traits that some people exhibit that are so obnoxious and irritating for anyone around them that the only logical solution is to punch them in their stupid faces... But of course you can't do that, because you'd end up looking like the arsehole if you did. So instead we suffer in silence, waiting till they are not around so we can talk shit about them behind their back... Damn you, society!

Here's a smattering of things people do that if you have any sense at all will piss you off too:

Overly elaborate air quotes
Sometimes, no matter how much of a dick you feel when you do it, to get your point across you may need to place 'air quotes' into something you are saying. Fair enough, just get it out of the way quickly.

Christmas: Reasons it's rubbish

Right. We've covered the positive side of things, now it's time we looked at why a lot of people cannot stand this festive time of year.

Where the fuck to begin?


Pretentious adverts
Whether it's M&S whoring themselves out to the X-Factor crowd (which stinks of desperation), the diabetes-inducing BBC sing-along, that aardvark looking creature in the Iceland ads trying to flog you suspiciously cheap 'meat', the idealised little gobshite in the fucking John Lewis advert (so Morrissey is tolerable if you get someone else to sing his songs, eh? Who knew!), or the Littlewoods horror story that uses small children in a lazy attempt to mask its message of shameless consumerism, this time of the year advertisers crank the levels of saccharin up to eleven and morons fall for it. Every time.

Christmas: Reasons it's great

Maybe it's because advertisers and retailers have been ramming it down our throats for the last two months, or maybe it's because I can't think of anything else to write about... Anyway, it's high time I did a post or two about Christmas.

Everyone loves Christmas, right? I mean, what's not to love when...

Your classy neighbours brighten up the street
By plastering their home with enough flashing fairy lights and gaudy decorations to give hippies LSD flashbacks and set off even the mildest photosensitive epilepsy sufferer. In mid-November. If you're really lucky, they'll just unplug them after New Year's, allowing the whole street and everyone who visits to see what a cultured household they are, all year round.

While you wait...

Yes, all right. It has been a while since anything was posted on here.

That is all due to change though, with a festive special on the way and the possibility of a whole new post about everyone's favourite social network in the ether as well. You lucky people.

Until then, though- why not check out Music Liberation, for all your musical news and reviews? No youth-obsessed Radio One 'cater-to-the-lowest-common-denominator' bullshit, just music that people with taste will enjoy... and best of all- I've started writing for them.

Go on, give 'em a click.

DO IT.

Ageing: The ups and downs of looking young

Anyone who knows me knows that I look a lot younger than I am. Because I'm not sad enough to spend my life at the gym getting hench as fuck to compensate, I've had to come to terms with it.

There are upsides to looking like a young rapscallion, but there's a lot of things that us baby-faced grown-ups have to suffer through as well.

You will find a selection of both the good and the bad below. Starting with the bad, of course.

The negative:

Birthdays: How they are celebrated

An extra long post today, to make up for the recent inactivity. This time, we look at birthdays- cake, presents, attention... What's not to like, eh?

There's an uncountable number of ways people can choose to celebrate growing a year older. Some people jet off to warmer climes, some people hit the clubs. Here's how some of the people you know do it:

The drinker
This is usually someone you've known since your schooldays. Since their birthday evolved from pass-the-parcel and jelly, their celebration has been an elongated drinking contest. It started that year in the park with cider and every year since you all turned eighteen, every aspect of every birthday has centred around booze.

Adverts: What if the world was really like that?

So since we've covered television, it only makes sense to have a look at advertising now, doesn't it?

If an alien came to Earth tomorrow and stumbled across a working television set before encountering any people (just go with it), just think what kind of messed up impression of Britain and indeed, the whole planet TV shows and especially adverts (or commercials as our American friends know them) would give the unfortunate visitor. Think about it- watch a few ads and you'd be forgiven for thinking...

Only women get constipated
Even with all that Ryvita. Plus, they will happily discuss the fact with their buddies over a half-caff skinny soy-latte. Ladies; ever wondered why your fella isn't too keen to go out with you and your mates? That's what he imagines the evening will be like... That or when they've had a few, your friends turn into shrieking terror-hawks.

But if you do ever get bunged up, fear not, because...

Television: Give us some credit, will you?

In this day and age, getting people to agree on anything is an achievement, but there can be no doubt that television changed the world. Even people who make a point of not owning one can't deny that. The television set was, quite simply, one of the most revolutionary inventions of the twentieth century. It made things like the moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Princess Diana's funeral and the attacks on September 11th 2001 global events...

I take no issue with all that (even though, one could argue, that the live coverage of the riots across Britain in August served to exacerbate the trouble more than anything). My beef in lies within the gumph that falls between these occurrences.

A common argument online is the fact that television tends to cater toward the lowest common denominator (thick people, if any of you are reading this). That's a bit unfair really, but fuck it, here's some ways that they do:

Cats: They're all right, it's the owners that are dicks

I once heard that if you died in a room with your dog, it would sit by your corpse, like the Greyfriars Bobby (look it up) and starve to death. If the same happened with a cat, apparently the little bastard would be eating you as soon as it was dinner time.

Now people who prefer dogs might say the above shows how loyal dogs are, while those who like cats best would argue that it means that cats show initiative and a will to survive lacking in canines...

Whatever. It doesn't matter. The whole scenario is hypothetical and therefore means nothing.

Now I have nothing against cats. They can be quite cute and are responsible for some brilliant Youtube videos (my favourites can be found by clicking these words, these ones and this last bit)  One even helped me find a bag of... herbs that I'd dropped on the way school one time. No, cats are fine. It's those among us who keep them that are the problem... Those who call themselves 'cat people'.

Ever noticed that people who are fond of dogs refer to themselves as 'dog lovers'? Why is 'cat lover' not sufficient as well? And why is it always the most batshit people that consider themselves 'cat people'?

Facebook: Chain message special

I thought I'd drained Facebook for everything it was worth on this blog. In my mind, every feasible behaviour had been documented and ridiculed...

How wrong I was. Only last week, the format of the site changed, causing fuck-tons of people to start whining about this free-to-use, voluntary piece of social media like the slight tweak to the newsfeed was tantamount to a personal violation. There was so much moaning that it even started trending on Twitter. First world problems, eh?

So this post will celebrate the people that fall for those 'copy-and-paste' this if ________' stauses...

Most of the time it's the same few people doing it, but they can be categorised in the following ways:

Dogs: Sleep, eat, crap, repeat

My pet history is not a long one. The first animal I remember my family keeping were stick insects. They bred like mad, escaped and my old man ended up having to vacuum millions of them off the living room ceiling. Next it was a series of hamsters, a pair of giant African land snails (named after runners, naturally) and the occasional tank of fish, but since the age of about twelve, my home has been an animal-free zone.

That's all changed. Now I live with both a dog and a cat. While plenty of people I know own one, the other, or both, this my first time sharing a house with either.

You know what I've found out?

Dogs make you say fucked up shit
Sentences I've found myself saying to the dog in the last week:

Cinemas: Your mobile phone on silent is fine. Just shush

The film industry likes to complain that less people are going to the cinema due to people downloading pirated movies. The same tune the music business has been whining to for some time now too. The truth is, people do still like going to the movies but between the popcorn and watered-down coke that costs a weeks pay and the amount of remakes, prequels, sequels, rehashes and formulaic Rom-Com bullshit you can figure out the plot of before the opening titles finish Hollywood insists on churning out relentlessly, it can be quite an effort to pick out the stuff that's worthy of your hard-earned cash.

If you've got a big-ass telly, you can just wait till the films you want to see are out on DVD (or Blu-Ray, if you keep up with technology), then kick back with your loved one or even your missus (heh) and watch them free from irritating things you can't control... Other people. Such as:

Pubs: Who you'll find propping up the bar

So that's it. My Master's Degree is finished. Goodbye student life. Real world... I'm ba-ack!

Of course, once all my work was handed in there was only one place to go. That's right; the battle-cruiser.

Once the hub of local communities, the public house is a dying breed. Thanks to the same corporate money-grabbing that has infected this country's high streets and nightclubs, rather than warm welcomes, local ales and ciders and proper pub-grub, you tend to get cold stares, mass-produced fizzy-piss and microwaved roast dinners. Thank you, JD Wetherspoon.

Just think, there's a generation of drinkers that have no idea what a meat raffle is. For shame, Great Britain. For shame.