"I really love metal!"

“Work for Bread”

I got really depressed the other day at work and walked all the way to the BT tower, for a bit of fresh air. It was a nice walk, serene even.

Work seems to have become an actual ‘toil’ recently, a word that conjures up images of Russian peasant women, covered in dirt and ploughing away in barren fields grafting for a loaf. Okay, it might not be exactly like that, but it’s been a bit much recently. Long hours and bigger work loads have led to staff morale dropping through the floor. Not that it was ever massively high anyway but I distinctly remember that there was a period where people weren’t randomly bursting into tears in the kitchen and weren’t being as short with each other:

“Let me hold that door for you”

“Yeah, you will wanker”

Its all fun and games though isn’t it, what other options are there around? Not much, although I have toyed with the idea of making extra money on the side by dressing as the late husbands of wealthy widows. It won’t be hard work I imagine, dressing in old suits, going for walks along the pier and listening to the wireless with them at Bridge club. And even if they did want to rekindle a certain carnal fire…I’d still probably prefer it to coding invoices.

21st century disorder

Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution, is warning that social networking runs the risk of making people: "devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance."

"As a consequence," she adds, "the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity."

God, the future sounds grim. I mean it's quite like this already; there are people in my office who have all these traits, plus a really loud voice.

But taking a step back, aren't we already like this? I mean I don't like reading anything longer than a pamphlet, I lie about celebrities constantly (really, ask me about what Cliff Richard does on holiday) and I don't care about almost everyone. I also have a very shaky sense of identity. Well I spelt my name wrong recently.

Maybe I am already one of the first victims of the Internet? Maybe my brain is too far gone, my life just a series of Twitters and YouTube clips of monkey masturbation. Soon we will just be reading electronic copies of Jade Magazine, named in honour of St Jade of celebrity, Facebooking about Zack Efron's nipple extensions and filming ourselves blogging about Bebo. We will define ourselves by our status, Google will tell us when we can shit and Apple will fight Microsoft in a vicious robot war in space. We will pray to the Gods of the little broadband indicator in the top corner of the screen, ordering Ebay vouchers off of Amazon and Skyping all our followers on webcam. 

Or maybe not. Maybe Lady Greenfield should realise people always have been self-loathing, egotistical, vain, stupid, naive twats, it's not the Internet's fault.

Philip

Philip works in London, he loves London.

He wakes up at 6:45, kisses his wife on the cheek and hops in the shower. He dries up and puts on a suit with a shirt a tie - blue shirt, white shirt, pink shirt, grey shirt.

He eats his cereal, drinks a glass of orange juice and reads the Daily Telegraph. He tries to finish the suduko, but he can never get there before 8:15, when he walks down the street, left, right and along the alley way to the train station. He waits halfway down the platform, near the sign post and gets on the 8:28 to Waterloo. He sometimes gets a seat, sometimes not. He reads the London papers, emails some of his colleagues on his blackberry and even listens to his ipod.

He gets off at Waterloo, gets on the underground and takes the Bakerloo to Marylebone, where his office is only a three minute walk from. He walks into the office, waits for the lift and takes it to the third floor. He walks to his desk, usually at about 9:15 and begins his day as an accounts analyst.

At 11am he will have a banana. 1:30pm he will walk down to Regent's Park, call his wife and eat his ham sandwiches.

Philip gets back to Waterloo at 5:45pm, back on the train and then home. He kisses his wife as he gets in, sits down and watches the evening news. He and his wife will eat supper, talk about their day and then go to bed.

Philip takes off his tie, takes off his shirt and brushes his teeth. He returns to the bedroom, takes off his trousers, peels off his garter and stockings, takes off his thong and puts his pyjamas on. He turns out the light, kisses his wife and falls asleep.

Yoghurt on a packed tube train

Yes, dear blog fan, yoghurt on a packed tube train. Just imagine it.

I was on my way to work this very morning and had just bagged myself a seat. Feeling particularly chuffed with myself, I looked round and noticed the woman in front of me pull out a big tupperware container full of yoghurt. It was huge, big enough to fit about 4 hearty sandwiches. Certainly too big for yoghurt.

Anyway, she then opened up the container and began spooning the goop into her mouth. It was smelly, probably probiotic or something, full of friendly bacteria and bifidum digestivum. The train kept bouncing around, as trains hurtling through ancient tunnels tend to do, every bounce and knock adding to the mess on her face. Round this fully-grown woman's mouth, on her hand, her bag and even a little tiny bit on the pole next to her. The more we rolled along, the messier she got.

Our eyes met for a brief moment. I glared, hoping to get across how completely and utterly disgusted I was. I don't think my distain got through as she carried on eating regardless, flecks of yoghurt splashing round her mouth as someone innocently and understandably bumped her spoon-wielding arm.

After a few minutes I couldn't bear to watch the macabre show in front of me, like a sad 'You've Been Framed' clip that has gone on for way too long. Luckily it was my stop and I hopped off, a little saddened by the fact that you can't choke to death on yoghurt, no matter how hard you try.

“I love you so much I want to put you in a little box under the stairs”

So, what better day is there to end up in Victoria Station, tears streaming down your cheeks, looking at a faded ‘If you don’t like your life you can change it’ poster?

Yes, Valentines Day! Nothing quite says ‘Jesus, I didn’t think I’d still be looking at your tired old face’, like being herded into a restaurant and staring at other, more successful examples of functioning relationships. Then again, it can be an exciting time for new love, getting to know the girl you met during that mad confidence trip you had (which oddly coincided with the burning nostril you had the following day):

“Do you want some olives?”

“No, I don’t like them”

“Really?”

“Yes”

"I did not know that. Fascinating."

Electrifying stuff. This year Valentines Day unfortunately landed on a weekend, meaning that people sort of have to be out any way. This led to a lot of blank stares and a lot of couples realising they would have had more fun at home watching blue collar saturday night TV without the cheap flowers, bad poetry and fizzy wine. Because let's face it, if you are in a couple, Valentine's is shit. 

But it also saw a larger volume of lonely, desperate ‘we’re alone and completely not bothered, let's get fucked up! Wooo! Who needs love! fuck romance! More tequila!' crowds that are completely bothered and are weeping inside. Girls dancing to the beat of their biological clock, and boys drinking their way to another evening alone with a kebab and poor quality porno. Because let's face it, if you are single, Valentine's is shit.

There does seem to be something ever so slightly tragic about it all, a day to celebrate all that we strive for and never reach. But I suppose going out and bursting into tears is better than doing it in your own flat, where you’re really near the gas oven.

“Let’s stone the fat one to death”

Who’ll win, the Tigers or the Sharks? I literally don’t have a clue but I’ve just spent an hour wildly glued to the drama of Channel 4’s Shipwrecked, back for a rip roaring 100th series.

I’ve never really seen it before; I think I caught some of the first series years ago. Like all reality TV though, it’s been warped into some grotesque spectacle making the original incarnation look like a Victorian ankle showing in comparison. I remember watching a chap having to drown a chicken in the beautiful ocean; he didn’t resign as a recruitment consultant in Swindon for that. Still, I remember the look in his eye immediately after he did it. It was a fascinating mix of wild eyed masculine emancipation and loss of an innocence he didn’t know he had.

The producers of the show clearly felt the same semi-sexual voyeuristic thrill I felt and decided to take the show in that general direction. The new series therefore takes a finely profiled collection of narcissistic clothes horses and puts them on a beautiful apparently empty (aside from all those wires and production team members) desert island. They then fanny about doing things that they look like they’d struggle with anyway, like washing and feeding themselves which they all seem to have done for them in the real world.

Thus far we’ve been introduced to a selection of interesting folk, none of which you’d trust with anything important, you probably wouldn’t risk putting them in charge of a tin of beans. We’ve had a chap who described himself as being without sexuality, like some sort of giant, Liverpudlian flower. Although, when he says he has no sexuality he really means he’s gay, the panic that flashed across his eyes when he was asked the question was magic. Also, this one’s borderline brain dead, if it wasn’t for his hyper emotional reactions to fairly mundane, obvious things (“Oh my…GOD”) like new people visiting the island then you’d be forgiven for thinking you were watching a pickled foetus in the bowels of the Natural History Museum. Also, on hyper emotional reactions, selecting a leader isn’t the most devastating, emotionally complex and demanding issue, it’s easy, pick the one who has laces that they tied themselves. I’d love to expose this tribe to some real emotion. See how they cope when they find out that a serial killer has battered their family to death (“No...WAYYYYYYYY, wait a minute, I’ve got a text”).

There also seems to be a few posh people on, having not seen it much, I’m not sure if this is a theme. Lot’s of big house, polo playing arseholes who pronounce ‘really’ as ‘ra-AGH-herrrrrr-lay’ and it takes them literally about a week to knock a sentence out. They all see themselves instantly as the leader of the dirty proles. The thing is that they are equally clueless, but in a different, more aggressive way. Y’know, the sort of tone that got centuries of colonial expansion done, and managed to pay off the family of that girl who cried “rape” at Joshua’s polo party.

Anyway, it lit a flame in my chest watching this show and Introversial will be following the heartache, bitching, and incessant conversations about nothing over the next few weeks. I’m hoping that this group of people will be the ones who break reality television. We all know its coming, one day something will horribly wrong and television will have to rely on proper television shows again. Hopefully, this series will end with Mark (big hair, androgynous and a body like a toddler) running wild eyed into the ocean to embrace an icy death after having raped and killed Sonny (literally nothing behind the eyes, could potentially have shredded wheat for a brain).

Twitter

"Shall we put the blog on Twitter?"

"What the fuck is Twitter?"

"I don't know."

"Let's not then."

(If you understand Twitter, please enlighten us. It seems like something we should be doing, but we don't understand it and it scares the bejesus out of us.)

Pitch

"So what's the movie about?"

"It's about a dog hotel."

"A dog hotel?"

"Yeah, you know, loads of dogs in a building, causing havoc."

"Ok....I'm not convinced...."

"Well, you see these kids make a hotel for all the dogs..."

"The kids make this? Oh right, is this a Pixar thing, because that would work. Talking dogs, maybe set in the future? We could really go to town on the fur, maybe get John Cusack in, even Nicole Kidman. It'd be a smash!"

"No, this is real. We use real, trained dogs."

"Ok, so let me get this straight. The kids make a hotel for all these dogs and they just run round for an hour thirty? No talking dogs, just some kids cleaning shit up?"

"Yeah. I call it 'Hotel for Dogs'"

"Get the fuck out my office."

From the wilderness

Do you know what I absolutely hate about London? The immigrants. Wait a sec, not really. If you want that sort of stuff you won’t find it here. Well, possibly from Lee (does every punch line need to be “Yeah, and then they went home”).

I’ve been a bit quiet of late, not entirely sure why. It’s resulted in me being an emotionless drone for the past week or so. A bit like Data from ‘Star Trek’, he knows that emotions exist but can only try to emulate them. Like how he has the cat, he’s only stroking it to but could just as easily crush its skull. Yeah, a bit like that.

A few things have got me recently, brought me round like smelling salts. First off, don’t wear sunglasses on your head at this time of year. I know that solar rays may be present even when it’s cloudy but c’mon, not after Monday’s Ice age.

Second, I just ate two of those Jelly Beans. The brand that are pretty amazing and actually taste like the flavours they’re meant to. They have a little recipe book in the inlay where you mix them to make things like ‘toffee apple’ and ‘fruit punch’. Anyway, whichever ones I blindly put in my mouth, they came together to taste exactly like shit.

Finally, Valentines Day is just around the corner. No doubt my schedule will be as free as a bird that night. I’ve told a friend at work to buy me a card and pretend she didn’t. I also suggested that me and my housemates all stay in, shave our faces and turn the lights off.

Soon...real soon.

down with the sickness

I have some sort of hideous, disgusting disease this week, and I have been advised to blog about it.

It seems to be a stomach bug, because that's where the symptoms and the pain are centered. I won't go into further details, because it's horrid and smelly and has left me eating just banana bread and going to the toilet 12 times an hour.

I probably caught it by eating a) food off the floor b) gone off food or c) from licking a handrail on the tube. I'm joking! I don't eat off the floor.

It hit a peak around 4am today when I became delirious and was sweating profusely. I got out of bed, and was particularly worried because I had pretty bad chest pains to boot, and they are never good. Especially when you are 24 and eat pork scratchings on a semi-regular basis.

So in my panicked state I did what all sleep-deprived, delirious people do at 4am: I went on a web doctor website. I typed in my symptoms (vomiting, diarrhea, fever and a tightening of the chest) and I got up a few diagnosis:

Ebola

Stomach Flu

Legionnaires disease

Pancreatic cancer

In the cold light of the day, I could probably safely assume I have stomach flu. But at 4am you don't think straight, and my chest really hurt. I started feeling for lumps, but realised I didn't know where my pancreas was. I couldn't rule out ebola completely, because I did stand near this guy on the tube who looked like he lived with apes. And I don't know what Legionnaires is, but it sounds like something off of House, and I watch lots of House.

I would go to the doctor, but London seems to be full of people with sickly kids who have booked before me, so I can't visit one until June. So I am stuck with webMD and the unnerving feeling that I have ebola.

It's very cold rain, for fuck's sake

AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Yes, it snowed today. No one died, nothing exploded but everyone acted like it did. I honestly heard someone compare today to the 7/7 tube bombings on an imaginary richter scale of tragedy/amazement/excitement.

London shut down. It was like the 9th circle of hell mixed with 'The Day After Tomorrow'. But Dennis Quaid didn't come and save me, oh no.

The newsreader on BBC London this morning was almost cuming in her knickers she was so excited, she really wanted to smile. Most of the tube lines had delays and the buses were suspended. The buses were suspended, people. They did weather reports every five minutes. They even brought out some weather people who never get air time, they looked as excited as the Farming Correspondants did during the foot and mouth crisis.

London was brought to it's knees. Once the greatest City in the greatest empire this world has ever seen, reduced to a husk because of snow. Last year I was in Kocise in Slovakia. It's a fucking shit hole, like all of Slovakia (don't believe me? Go on, go. You'll regret it) Anyway the day I was there the city saw 8" of snow in 4 hours, it was a proper blizzard. Everyone was working, and my train was bang on time, no one complained.

No one came to work today. I mean it was snowing, you can't expect people to brave the arctic weather can you? I went in, as did all my colleagues, but we have a newspaper to print tomorrow, so we had to. No one else's job seems to matter in London, so everyone else stayed home. I am sure plenty of people could have come in, no I know they could have, because I did and I even got a seat on the tube. But a good percentage of London work in sales, which doesn't really matter. They were not missed.

Oxford Street was packed with shoppers, too. They braved the arctic weather. Finsbury Park was packed, too. Packed with drunk people playing in the snow. Well, it was mainly mud by 5pm. So they were playing in mud, drunk.

Some wit drew a cock on the front of the car outside my house. Bet they didn't go to work either today.

Where's the Gap?

“What’s happening, why can’t I feel my feet? I’ve never seen anything like this before! The endless blanket of white…”

“None of us have. Get indoors, somewhere dry and warm. You can’t feel your feet because you live in London and therefore you’re wearing delicate little plimsolls. Save who you can but if anyone falls…let the blanket of death envelope them”

That’s how today started, with a suspension of tubes, buses and sanity. Bill Turnbull had a mad look in his eye this morning, giggling away. I don’t think he had any trouble getting into work; he sleeps under Moira Stewart’s desks.

I toyed with the idea of not going into work, staying at home with a load of tinned stuff to outlast the winter. However, being a five minute walk from Finsbury Park oddly meant that it was far easier to get to Euston than normally. Also, if I’m being really honest, it turns out I’m naturally gifted in the snow. Like a beautiful snow leopard, you should have seen me bound.

The rest of London seemed mixed up in a flurry of excitement, panic and wonderment. Loads of people were taking pictures, making snowmen, drinking hot chocolate and laughing. I just ate an old skittle from down the back of the settee; “credit crunch”.

Introversial Loves Paul Burrell

The first in our 'Introversial Heroes' series, documenting our favourite human beings on this earth, is Paul Burrell.

For those who are not in the know, Paul was Princess Diana's butler. When she was alive he did really important things like iron her bra, make her some mint tea and pick up after her budgie*. Paul, like all of us, really really loved Diana. But unlike all of us, he stole loads of boxes of her stuff and kept them in a cupboard for years. And wore her underwear.

He made a name for himself, after Diana was murdered*, by going on TV and talking about Diana. This developed into Burrell going on TV and talking about folding napkins and eating bananas with a knife and fork. He wrote about 22 books, all about Diana, and he also had a flower shop, with loads of pictures of Diana on the wall. Oh yeah, he also says he's not gay. While in his flower shop, with loads of pictures of Diana on the wall. And while loads of gay blokes keep telling the papers they shagged him, with documentary evidence of the fact.

Problem is, we don't care about Diana that much any more. We, as a caring nation, have new obsessions to pull at our heart strings, like the skinny one with the big head off of X Factor and Karen Matthews, the fat woman who unsuccessfully kidnapped her own kid for money. So Paul has fallen out of favor, so he's not on TV anymore. And that's bad for Paul, because Paul loves being on TV.

So Paul has begun to tell the world he knows something. We don't know what he knows, and he said he will never say what he knows. He is getting back on TV because he keeps telling people he knows something, but he won't tell what. Genius.

The thing is, Paul doesn't know shit. Paul was a big fairy who was good at shining silverware and picking up corgi poo. He realised he had shot his load soon after Diana's suicide* so he had to keep making stuff up. And he really, really loves being on TV.

Introversial loves Paul because he really believes he knows a secret, a secret that could rock the very foundations of this sceptered isle. He just hasn't thought what it is yet. But while he thinks of something he is going to hold onto Diana's stuff for a bit longer, for safe-keeping.

Remember to tune in next time, blog fans for another Introversial Heroes. Each edition will come with a 'cut out and keep' face of our hero, like the one of Paul, up there. After 36 weeks you will have enough faces to poster a very small, sad bedsit.

*These facts may or may not be true.