Colours, from young kiddiewinks to elderly wrecks, people pick things by colours.

I mean you pick pets by colours sometimes. Hell, one of the only things separating the livers from the burners on cat death row is their colour.

“Sorry Tabby, I chose for you to die, I’m picking the smoky grey moggy because it matches the curtains in the living room. And that orange one looks shifty.”

No! It doesn’t, it’s a cat, and colour doesn’t represent the emotions and lifestyle of a cat! They’re just genes. Cats on the whole are all the same and colour doesn’t enter into it. Ebony and ivory guys, just get on with it. Anyway, that’s enough about cats; one paragraph is enough.

Remember the grotty little mini person you used to be, colour was vastly more important than substance or use. I don’t care what it is; I want the blue one, the pink one’s “gay”. You pick the nicer cup, not because it’s larger or more comfortable to hold, nope. You pick it because it’s a certain colour. You can get a child to swap a dirty pound coin with a lovely shiny 2p if you so choose. Which I have done. Many times. Pft, there are worse things to do with gullible children.

But colour plays an intrinsic part in our universe. Without it everything would be block, vision would not work and you would be unable to function, let alone organise a flower display. It’s one of those things we take for granted, like escalators and the power to say you have no change to a homeless person when you actually do. Take away these things and you will notice them more, my dad once met a blind man who was born without vision. He had to try and explain colour to the man. It’s only really when you think about it that you notice how hard colour is to explain, it has no sound, smell, feel or taste, well apart from blue power aid, which is known the world over for “tasting blue”.

Colour can draw you towards things, make you aware of them and want to interact and get involved with them. It makes you drool over food and wear extra condoms. Colours link with meanings, sometimes these crossover. Red means danger and blue means cool and chilled. Like glacial ice on some frozen peas. But blue can also mean danger, get it and you’re fucked in the case of a pregnancy tester kit. One line and you’re out, like snorting cyanide.

So do I have a point in all this? Where’s this train going? Anywhere useful? State your conclusion George. Well no, I have nothing to offer. I’ve started with a title and chugged on from there and I’ve been getting away with that for nearly two years, but I feel the time to stop has come. Although I have immensely enjoyed typing at you, I seem to have lost my thread. I want to stop before these things become a hindrance, and to be honest that was October, but I felt it prudent to say bye, to whoever you are reading this, probably nobody. Oh well. So it’s been a good one and a bit years but I’m putting my keyboard away for the last time. Although this site isn’t dead. Far from it. More modern and moving stuff will start coming into play soon enough. But for now this is I, in words saying, “Go find something else to do.”

Ah, the humble club. The joy of sitting in a large, too dark yet too bright room listening to bad music played through bad speakers, surrounded by idiots gyrating to and fro. I’ll point out now that I (as is obvious if you read these posts) am a miserable bugger, waddling around trying to understand this putrid modern hell.

So anyway, a few months back I was cajoled into attending a club outing, or ‘clubbing’ as it’s more commonly known. So begrudgingly I followed, kicking my heels all the way to some club or other. A queue of men and women in tight tops and daft hair snaked out of the entrance like a goldfishes shite. So we entered the stronghold, my own personal hell wrapped itself around me. Lady Shitnuts played loud punctuated by the clack ‘n’ “YEAH!” of shots being shot by groups of men 'onnit' for the evening.

Then through the doors into another (much larger) room: this one essentially a sex cattle market. The formation roughly was a dance floor bordered by long wooden beams to put drinks on. The women all go on the dance floor shake their aged tats at each other and look all sexy sexy. Surrounded by men leaning on the bars drinking wkd's staring and trying to ignore non-justified semi-ons.

All the rooms had themes, although the only one I could see was pointless. I just don't get clubs at all. They just seem such a shallow place to be. Everyone dancing at each other in different ways to try and look hot ‘n’ that “If I dance well I will get some rod ‘n’ hole time”. It’s sad but not in a dead pet kinda way. It’s just all very basic and caveman like to show your wares and see who will buy. Drunken men, drunken women, in the middle of drunken crowds drunkenly dancing to drinky drunky ‘dum-dum-tsh’ music.

But then there is the other crowd, those perverts who go out to dance. That's a main goal for them, that’s the plan. We’ll get drunk then prance around and shout non-existent song lyrics at the DJ, whom would not look put of place driving a coach. No ulterior motive just a night of not caring and pretending the shot you just imbibed wasn't watered down.

But after a while I'll be fully refreshed and I'll sway a bit to bad music to avoid being alone. To try and fit in. That's what I think roughly 30% of the people in these places are. Too scared to say “Hang about, I’m not having a good time. Why don’t I leave?” Surely if there are others we could vacate on mass, leaving the sticky sofas and vomit strewn toilets to the dancing people, the disco nuts who “live for the weekend”. Then we can go somewhere nicer. Somewhere cleaner with less people and more atmosphere.

Like a pub. So we can drink nice things that are not in small bottles and blue. Listen to some music with thought behind it, not the sort of tripe lip synched by the ‘beautiful people’ to advance a model/acting career. Clubs are fun, I know this. It’s a well documented thing that is known. But I'm not fun, so I'm going to go find a seat in the corner and you’re more than welcome to join me.

A woman pushes a traditional pushchair through a busy, hot bus station on a summer afternoon. One wheel is slightly wobbly but not enough to sway it in any particular direction. It just slowly muddles through the crowd. The woman/girl (I can’t tell the age as nicotine addiction has laid waste to the pusher’s face, so she could be anything from 18 to 30) wears a delightful two-piece salmon pink leisure suit, with “juicy” embroidered in bold italics onto the arse cheeks that spill out above an overstretched elasticated waistband. The baby is decidedly quiet and drools over the remains of a pink sausage roll and a small selection of Smarties. Just another event in the world witnessed by me sulking on a bench in the heat.

She trundles past me and I notice the vast array of bags hooked onto the arms of the pushchair. Socks from Primark, fish fingers from Iceland. The usual results of a cheap shopping spree. Not that I am one to stereotype, but sometimes people seem to carry a checklist with them “I have the Nike trainers and the chunky gold plated love heart earrings, now where can I get a scratch card addiction and an abusive relationship”. Immediately I can picture what is going to happen, the girl is grumbling and grunting into her phone so one hand is still on a handle keeping the chair stable. But then with a beep-beep-beep of her phone the tables turn. A text! Can she leave it till she is sat on the bus? Nope. Her hand rockets away from the handle in order to reply to said text.

The baby hurtles to the ground. A few Smarties bounce and fall off the tray, one pinwheels into my foot, the other clicks across the cheap tiles, pirouettes and slinks behind an elderly lady’s shopping cart. There is silence for a moment and in slow motion everyone looks at the baby. Its large eyes look around, look to the mother then predictably it cries. Being the nice guy I am, I bound over to help the woman lift the pushchair up. I don't expect any thanks but it would be nice.

She does the rudimentary tickle of the baby’s chin and a sympathetic look and with that everyone is okay with the situation. She lifts the kiddywink up and checks it like a greengrocer checking peaches for bruising. She holds on to the handle until the eyes move away and everyone gets on with standing silently in lines. As soon as the retinas are away the pushchair is left unheld again, and with a slow crackle of overfilled plastic bags compacting together the buggy returns to the floor once more. The baby (not surprisingly used to the effects of gravity and bad parenting) cries again and attention is brought back to this calamitous woman and her sprog. She looks at me with lazy pleading eyes. I could help easily, I have done before but with mild Pavlovian conditioning if I ignore her she may learn not to be dim and take more care of the evolved spaff stain she’s carting around.

I’m polite and helpful, and I'll try lending a hand. I will open the door, I’ll give up my seat, I’ll let somebody with one item push in front of me in a supermarket if I have more. But if people won’t learn from their mistakes, things are going to get pretty rude round here. And they’re not that great to start with.

It was a clear and balmy evening in the early summer, school was about to finish and the days were getting ever longer, and there I sat, amongst the ruins of an abandoned water mill with the broken stone walls stretching no further than two feet into the darkening sky. I wasn’t there alone, for I was surrounded by a noisy, hormonal, horde of inebriated fifteen year-olds, getting ever drunker and ever louder by the minute.  The air was thick with the scent of smoke and cheap alcohol with a distant hint of vomit. People were having fun and the atmosphere was pleasant.

Perched a top of one of these walls was I and a good friend George, as he sipped on his two litre bottle of White Star cider and I my bottle of Becks lager we discussed the depravity of the situation, wondering why we were taking part in such a ritual when we could be at home, clean and smelling fresh, sat in front of the television. We kept drinking. He talked of a girl who at this point in time he had eyes for, I didn't care, but listened anyway and offered some advice "You're drunk, she is too, why don't you just talk to her?". To which he responds with some sloppy slurred crap about why she'd never reciprocate his feelings, it was time for me to leave him on his own for a few minutes, to stew in his stupor while I talked to other people.

I walked towards a group of people, who in school, I only ever had the occasional conversation with and somehow got talking with them on the topic of space, I explained how the speed of light meant that the stars they were seeing now were actually the stars of many years ago, but this was far too much for them to comprehend. My beer was empty, the conversation was waning, so I used this as a good excuse to venture back to my fallen comrade and make sure he wasn’t dead, and also to grab another beer from my bag which I had left him to defend. 

He was there, now slumped up against the wall with my bag under his left arm, groaning about that damn girl, I reached into the bag and grabbed another beer, opened it, flicked the cap towards him, and told him that he looked as if he was having loads of fun.

Back at the group consisting entirely of people of which I only ever had occasional conversations with I was greeted with the exclamation from below that "He's our Stephen Fry!" to which I quickly and neurotically responded "A tall, fat, well spoken, homosexual?". I was told that that wasn't what they meant and that one of them would marry me. This was a signal that it was time for me to make like a tree. 

I decided that it was a good idea at this point to urinate, so started my short wander towards the bushes, and who should I see on the way there? Cross legged and hunched over, but George! I said hello and asked him how he was doing, to which he answered with "I feel like cra- auooogh" before he could finish the sentence he threw up all over the ground, narrowly missing my shoes and leaving a thick coating on himself, he raised his head to say "Crap! I feel like Crap!" and then vomited again. Another person, maybe even a better person would sit there with him and comfort him, but at this point, I really needed to go, and wasn't fancying adding myself to the growing list of people soaked in their own bodily fluids. So. I used my infinite wisdom to help him. 

"Hey, George."

"What!"

“Got a word for you.”

"Moderation."

From this event onwards, the word “Moderation” has lodged itself firmly in our shared lexicon, now with an added meaning, when one says it, it implies that the subject hearing it has gone too far, and that it’s probably time to stop, creating a memorable point which you will be able to recall later as when it started to go down hill...

It's been a while since I last wrote. I hear no complaints, so I wont apologize. I'm just going to ignore my own absence, grab the bull by the bollocks and carry on. 

So I've been thinking about small talk recently. At this time of the year when holidays are in full swing and the people you see all the time are those close, the people you rarely see are more distant. You cant talk about recent things because there is such a large gap between now and the last time you saw them. You have two choices, talk about all that's happened since you last saw them, which could be anything from a week, till a month or even a full year. Or talk small, keep it simple, a question (which you may ignore the answer to) or a comment “you've changed you hair” and you're done. The interaction quota has been filled, move on. 

But this is just a simple example, there is a far greater more complex aspect of small talk which worries and astounds me in a great detail. For example recently I saw people from school, once friends, now recognisable faces. Lost for one reason or another, but not forgotten. I saw them and as full of questions, “tell me about your year, whats happened?”. The lows, the highs. Tell me all. But there just wasn't enough time, I was doing something or other so the window of conversation was small enough for a few pointless pleasantries “what uni are you going too?” how have you been” none of us where bothered about the questions or answers, simply bridging the silence. 

This is the real shame about small talk, in the most cases you want to talk, you really do. So many things fill your head to say. But usually the only way to fully express yourself is when you are at your worse. When you're pissed, drunk and jaw is slung low like your morals and arms, a drunken sod scuffling around. Your radar picks up somebodies face (but not in a murdery kinda way) an opening gambit forms in your mind (at this stage your drunk so don't care if the person remembers you, or indeed despises you). So off you trot and talk about all times, misremembering events, but it all seems jolly and light hearted. Then you make plans “ should we do something next week?” and you move on safe in the knowledge that a friendship has been rekindled. You never meet up with them, it's sad it really is. But it's just too awkward. 

However these are simple forms of small talk which you volunteer for (well not in all cases, I have been known to refuse to urinate in a pub in fear of being cajoled into conversation by old school friends who happened to be sat next to the gents). In my street lives a man named Mr.talky (I will not use his real name because of the minimal chance he's sees this) who will engage me in conversation whenever he see's me. 

But I need to be in a particular frame of mind if I'm to talk to him. Give him a meter and he wants a moon base (in conversational terms), sometimes he tends to want to talk too much, but he's an older gent and does a lot of gardening so he's simply trying to fill his conversation quota (we all have one). But often I'm not in this frame of mind, I'm returning from work greasy haired, with dark thoughts of leaping over the counter with a Mc spoon and plunging it into the necks of unnecessarily rude customers. And in these moments I need a stiff drink rather than a pleasant man asking me how life is going. Don't get me wrong Mr.talky is a lovely bloke, he just cant pick his moments. If I was drunk I'd talk about my week, and his garden and how the wife's doing till the cows come home (where they spent the night I don't know). 

So yeah small talk is when you talk simply to fill space. To fill a gap otherwise full of emptiness, a gap widening between two or more people who have nothing (or too much) to say. Its a sad universe that we live in, or maybe its only me that lives in this space where I cant do small talk. So if I see you in the street, ill cross and get a gap between us so small talk mode will not be engaged. I just find it stuffy and awkward. I much prefer a nod or wave, they are the simple “iv recognised you and I'm glad” signs that need little to no commitment. But you cant nod or wave to people your stood in front of at a party or social event, it looks weird. Like your an alien toying around with the idea of social interaction, which in a way. I am.

There's one interesting story in the news at the moment and it presents some important and far-reaching issues, we've heard the awful tales of hacked phones and bribed police officers, dreadful events which have further sullied the name of one of the most highly circulated English language newspapers in the world.

The issues at stake are those of freedom of the press and the activities of the tabloid media. Of course the payment of police officers for information and the interception of voice-mail messages are both criminal offences, for very good reasons. The payment of the police for information is illegal due to the obvious possibility of members of the criminal underworld using said il-gotten knowledge to intimidate witnesses and undermine the trial. And the interception of voice-mail for the massive breach of privacy that it is.

While the act of obtaining this data is very much outlawed and by extension the act of conspiring to do so must also be. We have to ask whether being the recipient of said information should also be an offence just like it would be with a television, car or phone. Or whether, with it not being a physical object with monetary value but rather and just an idea, it is different. An idea cannot be given back once taken, once released it is gone forever and punishment for receiving it must surely be futile and immoral as one could be informed unwillingly.

Of course those found to be "hacking" and bribing must be punished to the full extent of the law; as they are quite obviously abhorrent acts. Just as those who commission and condone such activities should punished. However any regulation of the publication of such illicitly garnered material could seriously jeopardise our globally enviable and rare free press. Doing so would make it much harder for whistle-blowers who see corruption and mis-management within organisations to spread the news of this for fear that the publisher could be prosecuted. 

We have seen how the work of organisations like Wikileaks have enlightened us to abuses through the anonymous publication of obviously illegally obtained documents and how this has helped to improve how well informed people in many countries around the world are. A law aimed at protecting the private lives of the stars could easily also protect wrong doers in power. It is very easy in this time of heightened emotion to react in a il-thought out manner and produce legislation and regulation that would indeed quench the public's thirst for blood in the short run, but in the long run be seriously detrimental to British democracy. 

We must not forget that while it was journalists who caused this whole detestable situation. It was also journalists, who through years of hard investigative journalism and perseverance at the guardian that brought this whole awful situation to light. Let us not have a knee jerk reaction, but rather a re-think of how I the member of the public can vote with my wallet to choose what kind of journalistic methods I wish to see used and which I do not simply by choosing which newspaper to buy and more importantly which not to.  

We've all seen the news this week, unless you read a News Craperation rag, in which case nothing of any importance has happened whatsoever. Literally everyone in the country has been chundering harder than a stressed John Prescott after a large fray bentos pie. 

A registered scumopath and convicted criminal working for the "Screws of the World" has literally been breaking and entering into the phones of various murdered schoolgirls, relatives of people killed in terrorist attacks and the families of dead servicemen. If this was any other scandal I'd add another even more sickening victim to the list, but I can't think of any and don't think it's appropriate. 

The "hacking" consisted of using the default passwords of 1234 or 0000 to access voice-mails. Or putting on a silly voice and ringing up the mobile phone company pretending to celebrity. Of course the "hacking" didn't require any real inteligence as there is a minimum I.Q. required to work for the "News of the Hurls".  

Over the past few days the media has being playing a game of one-downmanship with each scurrilous revalation. The only relief of this is that our Dear Leader Cameron is an impartial and fair ombudsman on this issue as he has only previously employed one of the editors in question, and is good friends with the other. So we know there will be just decision there.

On top of the reprehensible snooping, Andy Coulson former lead aresehole at the "News of the Screws" released a statement of "No comment"* on the accusation of bribes hard working and honest police officers in return for top dirt on the latest X-factor "star" or victims of ethnic cleansing. Fortunately the hacking hack has been arrested on suspicion of hacking.   

There may be a bright side to this, in that many companies have pulled their ads from the paper, such as Bayer pharmaceuticals, the company famous for the manafacture of HIV infected blood products and Zyklon B, stating "we do not wish to be associated with scandals of this severity"*. And many others are also hitting the dirty digger where it hurts. But all of this is irrelevant because it turns out that News International has decided to excise the tumour that is the "Poos of the World" by taking a bolt-gun to it's head on sunday. Good riddance.

*Not really 

This is a feeling that is quite heavy in the air at present. Group excitement of a new thing to come. A chance to look back on grades and celebrate the fact your adequate mind is quite happy to spend 9 grand on another 3 years of learning. Although the lessons are rather in the backs of people’s minds, the focus remains solely on the party aspect of university. People are moving away- “Yay! No more mum and dad telling me what to do!” Yes, it truly is time for freedom.

But in a few months when you've worn your pants every way round and the skid mark is no longer repulsive, it’s just another part of life. When you’re in a cold room in clothes that don't belong to you, sat on a traffic cone because all the chairs have been nicked. Eating beans out of the can with a pencil because you lost the forks. And the guys you share with haven't washed up the spoons. Tell me about freedom then.

More time is spent looking into nightlife than what food you can buy. Although in this respect I am a slight hypocrite, as another pint always seems more appetising than a loaf of bread. It’s an adventure, sure, but I love the general haziness of people talking about uni. It will be great, totally great and nothing else but great. I mean what’s not great about scurvy and squalor?

I have felt this collective excitement before, but where? Hmmm. Oh yes, it was just before the end of secondary school when college was on the horizon – flashing it’s tits and uttering about promiscuous relationships and lashings of alcohol.

So how many Skins™ parties have you had then? Because that’s what we were promised, was it not? I mean I had a party where the house got trashed; coal, trifle, ash and alcohol coating the floor. But it wasn't a party. It was a gathering that got out of hand. I’m too boring for parties. Maybe that’s why the lifestyle passed me by.

So uni is coming and some of us are more prepared than others. I'm physically prepared: I have pots and pans. But I'm also mentally prepared; I know it will be good, a new start and the like. But I'm not hedging all my bets on it being ‘super awesome fun fun fun’.

If I know this, I won’t be disappointed when I'm failing my university degree but I can make Pot Noodle like a pro. If you run into a train tunnel without a torch, sooner or later a train will hit you. I'm carrying the torch, but I'm looking forward to the harsh realities the train will bring.

It’s morning. 

I’m listening to overly loud music to wake me up. A woman looks over at me in disgust. My initial thought is to ignore her and with a pitiful teenage “Yeah, fuck you." attitude turn it louder. But then I started thinking about how the older generation see our generation. Piss and WKD drenched fuckwits playing violent video games and knobbing in bus stations; stopping only briefly for a fight, an injection, or a McDonald's. I don't want to be linked with this, but loud music on a bus makes it very easy for you to become pigeon holed. Even if it is good music, in this case Battles with ‘Atlas’. All she can hear is the thump thump thump of the base and that could very easily be misunderstood with toxic splurge generators such as Lady Shit-Bag or N-Twats.

A few weeks previous to this I was listening to Miles Davis rather loudly and received two reactions. Firstly, a child of about 12 years dressed to the nines in polyester supporting an ‘ASBO in waiting’ haircut exclaimed, "Stop listening to dirty mosher music." This made me giggle slightly as I quickly imagined his future of underage pregnancy and rickets.

The second reply was from an older gentleman sat across from me, he nodded in agreement with my choice of music and patted his leg and tapped his feet along with some pretty crazy jazz. Two reactions to the same thing. I’ll only take the older gents reaction as worthy to act upon. The child was clearly a bit if a div.

Now, one of the main reasons loud music through headphones is off putting is usually because all you can hear is the faint ting of a guitar and the dum-de-dum of a drum. Perhaps if it was louder on speakers... No, that's been ruined by young girls and boys sat at the back of the bus polluting the airwaves with the tinny beats and the "Yeah yeah, huh!" of R 'n' B music.

So what do I propose? Well, to start with, I like the idea of having a jazz bus. A funky vehicle of unusually time signatures and epic trumpet. But some people like crap music so they have to be taken into account if I’m going to put this into practise. So as a compromise, I think buses should play elevator music. Well, elevator covers of things in the charts (that have been approved worthy of listening to, so not a lot). This way, everyone has music; it’s a distraction from the journey and a nicer way to travel.

Alternatively there should be seats that heat up, if they sense shit music is being played, to the point of cooking said listener. Alternatively, I could sit with a sniper rifle and pick you all off. One by one.

If you buy a hedge trimmer, it’s probably covered in stickers telling you not to shove your digits, (or any other protruding parts), into the moving sharp bit of it. It may seem like common sense but if they’ve put the sticker on it, someone’s fingers will have become detached, which means that things that are obviously dangerous, still need warnings to make sure that average-joe-retard can still tie his shoe laces.

Cigarettes, while not as obviously dangerous (I mean, who would’ve thought that inhaling smoke twenty to forty times a day was bad for you), significantly increase the risk of developing cancer and various other debilitating ailments. Since those little sticks of carbon monoxide poisoning don’t cause immediate death and blood loss, they really do need warnings.

When it comes to things that aren’t dangerous, doing nothing is top of the list. Sitting still in an empty room isn’t going to cause you any harm, unless you do it indefinitely, because then you’ll die of thirst.

Doing nothing can often be the most dangerous and risky thing you can do, if you’re in the middle of the road with a car coming towards you the best thing you can do is get the hell out of the way and the worst is to stand still. That’s obvious, we all know what happens when a car hits someone: they die. The same thinking comes into play if you feel sharp pains in your left arm and chest. Sitting there and waiting it out is what most people call a very bad idea, but getting yourself down to your local A&E by some means, is widely accepted to be a good idea.

Medicine is good because it stops people from dying. During the 20th century, 300 to 500 million people died because of smallpox, with many more being seriously scarred and blinded. Do you know how many people die now because of smallpox? None. With population growth as it is now that’s probably a billion lives saved by that vaccination alone. Yet some fucking nut-jobs argue that vaccinations are bad, “dangerous”, “unnatural”, cause autism and are there only as a cash cow for ‘Big Pharma’. This is false and very dangerous; with powerful idiots spreading false information on this subject, parents will refrain from vaccinating their children because they’ve been told it’s bad for them. This is tantamount to child abuse; by doing so they put their children’s lives at risk and the lives of many other children at risk through weakened herd immunity. Children will die because of these people.

Some people may say that not taking vaccinations is one thing, but that things like homeopathy and various other flavours of alternative medicine are harmless. Well, they’d be partly right and also at the same time completely wrong. Under the government of Thabo Mbeki in South Africa it is estimated that 365,000 people died due to his insistence that HIV/AIDS could be treated better through beetroot, garlic and lemon oil than antiretroviral drugs, which have been proven to significantly slow down the progress of HIV. The fact that you can’t overdose on homeopathic and alternative medicine is vastly outweighed by the fact that it doesn’t work.

It seems as if alternative ‘medicine’ is gaining popularity in the modern world, possibly from a mistrust of authority and science after how close we all got to being wiped out in the cold war. It’s good to be sceptical and distrust authority, but you do have to accept evidence that proves things one way or another. It’s not good to have your views set against something and keeping them that way, even with a torrent of evidence against you.

Tim Minchin said "You know what they call 'alternative medicine' that’s been proved to work? Medicine." People seem to think that because something is natural it’s better for you but quite often it can be worse. This is why I propose that alternative ‘medicine’ should carry massive warning stickers stating that it’s no more effective than a placebo, because it may not do any harm in trying to treat the common cold but if someone takes it instead of cancer or HIV drugs people will die.