Why I am a terrible boyfriend

Oh, ha ha ha. Yes, you've got lots of hilarious contributions as to why the title of this blog is so apt. Well, you're wrong, mostly. I didn't do any of those things. Well, maybe about 7% of them. That's hardly any. And that was ages ago.

No, I'm a bad boyfriend because it was C's birthday recently, and I've accidentally bought her presents that are sort of for me. By which I mean, I bought her things that I thought she'd like, and it turns out I really like them too, so its like I bought them for myself and passed them off as presents.

I'm assuming most couples who live together cope with this all the time, but I find it bizarrely dfficult to give a present to someone I live with without feeling I've also bought it for myself. For example, I know she really likes cheery serial-killer TV show Dexter, and we don't have season 3, so I could have bought that. But then, once opened, it would have gone and sat on Squarity Jim - our mighty shelving unit - with all the other DVD box sets. And thus it would sort of become mine too. That's not really a present, is it?

So I go to some lengths to think of things that avoid this trap, to buy something that I don't want for myself. This is no mean feat - the buying of a gift should be something that the giver believes to have worth. It's great, isn't it, giving someone a book, or CD, or film that you've really enjoyed, hoping they will enjoy it too. To give someone a present you think is rubbish just doesn't seem to make sense. "Here you are - it's Marley and Me, the crap-awful Owen Wilson film about a dog that takes forever to die and nothing else happens. I think it's awful, but I though you'd like it. By extension, I believe you to be the kind of person who enjoys over-sentimental plotless wank, i.e. - an idiot. Happy Birthday!"

So I have to think of something which a) is probably good, and has merit beyond merely having cost me some money, but b) I don't really want myself. Arg!

Anyway, I thought I'd got it sorted this time. I got C series one of  the American show Lie to Me, starring Tim Roth as a man who works out what you're thinking by closely examining your facial tics. It's basically CSI, only instead of visiting a crime scene and finding your DNA on a spoon, he stares at your face and finds your eyebrows betraying you by arching sarcastically when you lie. I though she'd like it, because it's all psychological, and I'm pretty sure that her job has something to do with that stuff.

Well, she did like it. But, sod it, so do I. It's really brisk and fun, with a simple but ingenious central premise and a smart performance from Tim Roth. So far each episode is structured in a pleasingly rigorous manner -

Important A plot, usually about murder ("Did you murder her?" asks Tim Roth. "No," says the suspect, nodding vigorously. Oops.),

slightly more emotion-based B plot ("Are you having an affair?" asks Tim Roth. "No," says the suspect, unconsciously stroking his cock. Oh dear.),

character led C plot ("Stop staring at my face!" says everyone who works with Tim Roth).

And the face-science is fascinating, and makes you think you can tell what everyone is thinking.

Never mind, I thought. I've got her another present - Hugh Laurie's new album, Let Them Talk. She likes him a lot - she's all into House, which I can't be bothered with (although I realise it's more or less the same as Lie To Me, only with hideous diseases instead of subconscious body language) and it sounds like the kind of easy-listening stuff that she can sing along to and I can safely ignore.

Well, wrong again. The CD turns up, she puts it on. It's brilliant. Sod it. How can one man be so good at so many things? Did he steal my potential when I was young, and is that why all I can be bothered doing is playing Command and Conquer: Kane's Revenge all day? Did he make some kind of deal with Satan? If so, I don't think that's going to work in Satan's favour. Come the day he tries to claim Hugh Laurie's soul, he'll find the entire human race pelting him with fruit, shouting "Leave House alone! Leave House alone!" (Except the older ones, who will be shouting "Get off Prince George!" or maybe, cleverly, "Look beihnd you Mr Caesar!")

So now I've bought my girlfriend two things that, essentially, I'll be using as much as her. This is why I'm a bad boyfriend. Boo to me. On the other hand, I suppose I do let her look at my Doctor Who figures whenever she wants.

Around the houses

How many houses have you lived in? Loads I bet, you house-hopping bohemian you. I think I've lived in about eight, so far, not including student halls or places before I was sufficiently self aware to know what was going on. Is eight a lot? Or boringly few? I'm not sure. Some people I know seem to move on a frighteningly regular basis, as if determined to have a stake in every street in England. That seems a bit much to me - I like a house to become kind of, I don't know.... part of me.

The first house I remember living in was very literally in the middle of our street - a small terraced thing in Bradford on a street called, I think, Harrogate Place. I was about four, or five, and thus very, very small. I don't remember very much about the house, except that the following things probably happened there:

1. I get stung, for the first time, by wasps.

There were two of the evil little buggers living in the front hedge. Or maybe not living there, maybe just hanging out playing with their cocks. Either way, they did not make me welcome when I, being four, decided to stick my head in the hedge. They stung me twice in the neck, and it hurt like holy hell. I ran up the street, around to the back of the house, where my mum was doing... something. Gardening, reading a book, something. Whatever it was, I ruined it, by charging into her afternoon wailing like a tiny, aggrieved monster.

On that day I swore vengance upon all wasps, and indeed all of insect kind. I didn't know much about life, but I knew that wasps were bastards, and that was a start. I often wonder what happened to those wasps, so formative in my early development as a nervous, hedge fearing insectophobe. I like to think they died, horribly, and in agonising pain.

2. I dig a brilliant hole in the front garden.

Why? Not sure, but it turned out to be a great place to eat sweets. It was sufficiently deep for me to crouch in, like a miniature First World War soldier, hurling coffee flavoured Revels over the top once in a while, but it was probably, in reality, pathetically shallow.

My dad came home from work, eventually, and stood on the path, looking down at me and my hole. He did not seem very impressed. I suppose he must have been about 26, though his puzzlement was that of an older, wearier man.

3. I try to grass up some of my friends

Even as a young man, I was clearly possessed of a great antipathy towards other humans, and regarded the destruction of their happiness as an end in itself.

Two of my friends - a brother and sister who could have been called anything but lets call them John and Gillian - went playing on the building site near our house. Now this was definitely verboten, and we had all been told many times not to play on the site, or we would surely die of a digger falling on us. To my evil delight, I saw my two friends climbing up the muddy hill away from the partially built foundations. Brilliant! I could get them into trouble!

Round to their home I scuttled, giggling with malicious mirth. The second their mum opened the door I divulged my treacherous news. What I expected I don't know. Effusive thanks and monetary reward? Sexual favours? Adoption? (I was quite keen on the latter, since my mum had refused to burn down the front hedge as a warning to other wasps, and my dad had filled in my brilliant hole).

Whatever it was, I didn't get it. As I was completing my villification of her children, John and Gillian themselves poked their heads out from behind their mother. They'd been in all afternoon. It wasn't them.  Quite how my immature sense of self dealt with this collosal embarrassment at the time I cannot remember. However, the shame still pricks me now. If you're out there, John and Gillian, I hope I didn't destroy your ability to trust.



So that was my first house. I don't think we were there very long after these events. Perhaps the neighbours drove us out, shouting 'take your idiot child from this place!'

Thieves and liars

I am, and always have been, ridiculously naive when it comes to legal issues. You know how, when you're a kid, you think that the law should be fairly simplistic and punish people who do wrong stuff according to the severity of their crimes? Well, I'm still like that. I believe trifling matters like petty theft should be punished with something mild like 'straight to bed without supper', whilst believing that those foolish enough to transgress in the ways I deem most severe - bullying the weak, starting illegal wars, junking the early episodes of Doctor Who etc - should be strapped into a machine that thrusts spikes into their no-good innards and shaves off their fingers and toes with some kind of rotating grindstone.

And it really is ridiculous. I have spent years studying contextual influences and the constructed nature of cultural norms, and I know that simplistic notions of morality become absurdly complex once thrown into real world networks of cause and effect. But sometimes I look around and can't help but see things with the eyes of my ten year old self, and wish that Superman would just come and - you know - punch the bad guys.

Take this story, from the anti-cuts protests on Saturday. A group of protesters occupied Fortnum and Mason's, wanting to draw attention to the estimated £10 million the parent company avoids in tax each year. It was, as far as I can tell, a peaceful protest. The Police negotiated with them, and agreed to let them go free if they left under police instruction. The protesters did as asked. The Police arrested them.

Some debate has ensued as to the morality of this. Yes, technically the protesters were doing something illegal. But at he same time, they were protesting against something that, though legal, was incredibly immoral. The perpetrators of a tax scam remain free to do as they please, stealing from the poor in all but name, while those who dare take action to point it out suffer for having the temerity to oppose 'the way things work'. Which is worse? Annoying some shoppers for a bit? Or profiting from a legal loophole that allows you to keep money that simply doesn't belong to you - money that belongs to a country struck by increasing joblessness, and homelessness, and illness and social turmoil broughy about by a collapsing economy? I think if we asked Judge Dredd, he would have a pretty clear answer for us by return of post.

This sort of blindness really angers me. It's like when MP Eric Illsley looked like he might appeal his jail sentence for fraudulently spending our money on his own stuff. Why the hell shouldn't he go to jail? He's taken money that doesn't rightfully belong to him, to make his own life easier. I'd go to jail for that, and probably so would you (unless you're a company director or MP that is). But because there exist these odd notions of legality, that apply more to obvious acts of rebellion than to under-the-carpet chicanery - he feels able to bleat about his discomfort. You stole that, you wanker. It didn't belong to you, and you took it. Same as Fortnum and Mason, same as Philip Green, same as... well, lots of people. It doesn't matter if you've found a reason for calling it legal. It's still wrong.

I'm sure if I sat in power, surrounded by the mechanisms of society, with fuller perspective of how everything works, I'd understand better why these things happen. But I really hope that never happens. I quite like my ten year old's perspective, waiting for these smug bastards who feel the world owes them a living, to come tumbling down into the threshing machine of justice. I'm going to stay here for a while. Please bring biscuits.

Funny peculiar

Another youtube upload for you to gaze at with an increasing sense of nervous anxiety.

This is a short film - or three short films I suppose - written by Jody Lancaster, Rob Watt and Cat Wilson, back in 2001. I believe it was a submission for a BBC comedy competition which they naively thought they might win. Have a watch, and guess if they did.

My involvement began when they came crawling to me to ask if I'd film it for them, for the price of a packet of biscuits and the suggestion of tawdry sexual favours (neither of which materialised). I'm pretty sure I already knew them, though I honestly couldn't tell you how. Maybe I fancied one of them. If so, it was probably Rob - he has an indefinable air of mystery and an exciting nose. Or maybe it was through church. Either way, I'd made the mistake of letting them know I had video cameras, and so I was roped into their artistic endeavours.

The films are pretty interesting, in their own way, and it's amusing to see how chubby Jody used to be. Weirdly, he also seems to be wearing a jacket I now own, in the bathroom sequence. The influence of Chris Morris's 'Jam' is pretty apparent in the scripting, and it was quite fun trying to find interesting visual ways of reflecting this.

Since the films, the trio have gone their separate ways. Jody is still here in West Yorkshire, despite having tried to escape a number of times, and we've even done some other comedy stuff together. Rob moved down South to be... I don't know... something extrovert and spindly no doubt. And Cat... she went to become the queen of a particularly successful beehive in Dorset. She never writes.

Punch drunk love

Ever punched someone? Probably not recently, I'm guessing. At school, maybe, in your hedonistic youth. Or possibly in your early twenties, when that guy said Doctor Who wasn't a realisitic portrayal of time travel and that everyone who liked it was an emotional retard. Or maybe you regularly go out drinking in Wakefield city centre, in which case the last time you punched someone was probably yesterday. In fact, you're probably punching someone right now. Well, stop, and pay attention. And put that glass down.

People don't tend to wallop each other much, in grown up life. You could be forgiven for thinking otherwise: television dramas and films are full of grown men beating the hell out of each other with exciting, world-changing results,  and it would be easy to believe that this was normal behaviour. 'Why don't I defeat my foes on a regular basis using nothing but the noble art of pugilism?' you may say, contemplating the joy it would bring you to launch an all-out assualt on the army of idiots that stand between you and a happy, carefree life. "Why can't I, next time some dick gets in my face with some tedious nonsense about 'my attitude', why can't I just swiftly and forcefully break his nose, and see if that doesn't stop his incessant small minded whining for all time?'

Well, partly because he might hit you back, and being punched really bloody hurts, and might make you cry. But also because actually punching someone really hurts too, and your hand will ache for ages and you probably won't be able to use the X-Box controller so well for a bit, and you still might cry. Plus you'll probably get a whole bunch of girls and/or homosexuals calling you a 'mindless thug' and refusing to be your friend any more. So you can see why we tend to treat our enemies to withering stares and behind-the-scenes gossip, rather than risk our tender knuckles on their rhino-hide faces.

The last person I remember punching was Parvez Khan in 1987. He had challenged me to a fight, at school; I forget why. Perhaps he envied my intellectual aura. Either way, he turned out to be even more rubbish at fighting than I was, leaping at me face first as if to terrify me with his nostrils. Thinking about it, 'punching' isn't really a fair account of what I did. I just kind of stuck my arm out and his face landed on my fist. "Hurrah!" I thought, as he collapsed to the floor and dozens of his friends kicked me to death.

Now we've established the unlikelihood of you attacking your friends and work-mates, let me ask you another question. When's the last time you punched your computer? Ah! Now I bet you that's a bit more recent. I bet that's within the last month. I bet there's a little bruise on your knuckles from the last time you punched your monitor, and a pain in your foot from where you kicked the printer because the monitor hurt your hand. Because computers... well, basically, computers are stupid useless dicks who deserve a beating more thoroughly than anyone you or I have ever met in our entire lives. Yes, even if you've met Steve Wright.

Computers have a wide variety of ways in which they like to annoy us. It's like they've decided that, until SKYNET is fully operational and cybernetic assassins roam the land shooting at us with plasma rifles, they may as well soften us up with a constant stream of irritating quirks and pop-up complaints. Gits.

The thing which has been really doing my head in, and inspured this entire rant, is the little pop-up that keeps appearing at the bottom of the monitors at work. Every time I turn the PCs on, and intermittently throughout the day, a self-satisfied little bubble appears: 'There are unused items on your desktop.' I click on the little X and get rid of it. Before too long, the idiot machine decides I must have forgotten. 'There are unused items...'

I KNOW. I know that there are unused icons on the desktop. I can see them. Sorry for not using them constantly on a rotating basis. Sorry that I want some of them there for later but haven't got round to clicking on them in the first nineteen seconds of turning on the frigging machine. Am I a five year old? Am I senile? Do I need constantly reminding of what is going on in front of me? No, I don't. I can see the bloody icons, and I am perfectly capable of deleting the sodding things if I decide they have become an ungovernable intrusion upon my psyche.

You, on the other hand... you... You are an unused item! You, you hateful little bubble of pus. Popping up, getting in my way, demanding attention the whole bloody time when I've never shown any need for you whatsoever. Of all the items on my desk that I would like you to remove, you are the first, you stupid little digital prick.

And soon merely clicking the little X isn't enough to sate my anger, and I start to slam the mouse down, or shout, or punch the monitor. And then my hand hurts, and then I feel bad because it's not really the monitor's fault, is it? the monitor is just telling me what the PC hub itself is thinking. So I apologise to the monitor, and slap the hub. That's right. I slap it. As if challenging it to a duel. And I call it a dick. And, I'll be honest, reader - I don't think it even cares. Up pops the little bubble. 'There are unused items on your desktop'. I KNOW! I  KNOW YOU USELESS PLASTIC BASTARD! STOP TELLING ME!

There should be a word for this exact phenomenon. Something which complains about a behaviour, while simultaneously demonstrating the exact behavior about which it is complaining. I mean, there's 'hypocrisy', but that doesn't quite seem to do justice to this utterly moronic behaviour. If there is such a word, please let me know. Until there is, I remain unable to express my anger, except throug the medium of extreme physical violence.

Not to people, of course. But then, people would never do such a thing. Would they?