Man Writes Blog

Caravanning with Prince Vultan

2010-05-17T21:25:07Z

Today was the first day on set for the second series of Henry 8.0 — the follow-up to the online comedy series I co-wrote for the BBC last year. Brian Blessed plays Henry VIII as a boisterous man-child inexplicably transported into the modern day and living with his long-suffering sixth wife Catherine Parr.

In the first series he was firmly rooted in front of his computer in a modest semi-detached house in suburbia. This time we're taking him away on holiday to spend the summer in a cramped caravan somewhere on the south coast of England.

We're rehearsing and filming the interior scenes at Longcross, an ex-MOD facility now used for film and television production, and shooting a few exterior bits and pieces at a real caravan park.

The rehearsals went well and hearing Brian speak the lines out loud of the first time was pretty cool. The scripts seemed to be getting a good reaction of the rest of the crew so hopefully it's funny. We've written seven mini-episodes in total but probably won't have time to film them all so inevitably there was some talk about which we'll drop if necessary.

One of the episodes focusses on Henry's attempts to play both sides of a Monopoly game to pass the time during a rainstorm, and it turns out that Brian has never played Monopoly. Not only that but he's completely unfamiliar with the basic concepts of the game and so rehearsing that one, with some fairly intricate comic business around money, tiny hotels and community chest cards was a little bit of a struggle. Not entirely sure how you get to Brian's age without once hearing the phrase “You've won second prize in a beauty contest. Collect £10.” but there you go.

There were numerous highlights from the day, including trying to keep the owners of the real caravan we were using for exteriors out of earshot for the duration of a cheeky series trailer clip with Brian describing their beloved summer home — at full volume obviously — as a “fucking shithole” (to be beeped in the edit). Also the rather seedy-looking man in a nearby tent who, during an early visit by the production team to the caravan site, apparently said: “Filming eh? I do a bit of that myself. Mainly glamour stuff.&rdquo Oh, and a rather scary-looking bloke on a mobility scooter, who whirred over for a closer look, only to be loudly addressed by Brian as “madam&rdquo.

Tomorrow morning we start actually shooting the scripts themselves so that should be fun. We've moved on from the original conceit of the first series that everything was seen through Henry's webcam and so we've been able to broaden out the action. There's some fairly silly physical stuff this time around including a home-made catapult and some flying foodstuffs which I'm really looking forward to seeing come to life.

Adios Mex y Gracias Amex

2009-11-24T15:27:26Z

Sitting in the departure lounge in Mexico City International Airport, enjoying an unexpected free wireless connection courtesy of the American Express "Platinum Centurion Club" lounge. I don't know what qualifies one to actually enter the lounge, but sitting near it is working just fine for me at the moment. I have some American Express traveller's cheques in my pocket, maybe the lounge has sensed this.

The day is yet young but free wireless is not the first reason I've had today to be pleased. Despite being slightly down on my Spanish ability over the last few days, I had an amazingly competent conversation with my taxi driver on the way to the airport. We discussed what brought me to Mexico, how London compared to Mexico City, and how life was tougher for Mexicans than Europeans. At the airport he overcharged me for the trip, shook my hand and we said a cheery goodbye.

There was no queue at the United desk (which made the last night's efforts to check-in online and find an internet cafe with a working printer slightly redundant).

And I managed to spent all of my remaining pesos (to the peso!) in the airport. One bottle of tequila ($205MX) + one rubbish sandwich ($44MX) + one packet of Doritos ($20MX) = $269MX = exactly what I had left from the cab ride.

So the day has started well. I'll sign off now because we're boarding (on time!) so I just hope my luck continues all the way to London,

Hasta La Vista Mexico

2009-11-24T04:26:00Z

I'm typing this on the fly in a largely deserted internet cafe in the Zona Rosa area of Mexico City. I normally craft these entries a little before uploading them, but the clock's ticking, I'm tired, and I've got an early start and a long day of travelling tomorrow so please take that into account.

It's about 10.30pm local time and I've just popped out from my hotel to upload the "after" video of my Spanish experiment. It's a little dark but the sound's okay. I think I'm probably making as many mistakes as my first video but I'm being a bit more adventurous in what I'm trying to say.

When all is said and done I think I had slightly too high expectations of my (semi-) immersive Spanish experiment. The closest I ever came to speaking a second language was French, and I studied that for five years at school, without getting even close to the point of being able to hold a non-stilted conversation. That said, my Spanish has its moments, and hopefully I can build on them with further study in London.

It feels like with an extra week my Spanish level would have gone up a level, at least the last week was quite frustrating and I hoped it was the precursor to a mini-breakthrough.

I also had rather unrealistic expectations about how often I would be able to upload videos and update this blog while I was away. I must get out of the habit of over-promising and under-delivering but hopefully what I have uploaded has been interesting.

I've really enjoyed my time in Mexico. I'd like to come back at some point but having said that there are so many other countries to see (and many of them speak Spanish).

Random memories I'll take home with me include:

watching any one of the half-dozen very popular novellas (soap operas) that seem to dominate the television in the evening, any of which impressively redefines the concept "over-acting"
being joined in the carriage on almost every journey on the Mexico City metro by someone with a battery-powered speaker embedded in a modified rucksack blasting out tracks from one of several pirate CDs he was attempting to sell
pretending that everything I was served at mealtimes was delicious (which was mostly true) including fried cactus which always had a slimy, gooey texture as if each slice has been recently pulled from a baby's mouth
feeling slightly uneasy at the Saturday morning programme "Disney's World of English" where Mexican children were given cash rewards based on their grasp of my mother tongue
drinking cheap tequila out of a plastic bottle with yellow handles that looked like a bulk-buy bottle of cooking oil

Okay, I'm getting kicked out of the internet cafe, so I'd better cut it short. Buenas noches!

The Adventures Of Platero the Donkey

2009-11-13T23:59:00Z

It's the end of my first full 'academic' week here in Mexico and life has settled into a pleasantly familiar routine here. My alarm goes off at 7am and I spend the next 15 minutes or so wrestling with the concept of getting up. It is usually pretty cold. Not see-your-breath cold, but definitely stay-in-bed cold.

Once out of bed, if I'm feeling sufficiently guilty or worthy I will do a few 'prison exercises'. These are exercises that require little or no equipment and whose name ends in "-ups" - i.e. press-ups, sit-ups or chin-ups. Since my bedroom is not fitted with a load-bearing monkey bar (in contrast to most television and film prison cells) I have to settle for -ups of the pressing and sitting variety...

It turns out that press-ups are way harder than anything I normally do in the gym back in London. Press-ups are proper, old-fashioned, no-nonsense, men-are-men-and-women-better-like-it exercises from a world where upper lips are always stiff and words are strong but softly-spoken. They do not belong in the metrosexual, reconstructed, skinny latte world I'm accustomed to where 30 minutes on an anatomically sympathetic, low impact, elliptical path cross-trainer listening to a the weekly film podcast of a left-of-center daily constitutes a workout.

I usually manage about 50 press-ups but not without feeling like my ribcage has been prised open with a vice to perform some complicated heart surgery. The sit-ups - lying on a pillow on the floor - generally degrade quite quickly into a bit of a lie down.

It is with flushed face and aching upper skeleton that I head into the bathroom wondering whether today will be a good day i.e. one of the few days where the shower is hot. Most days it's at a magic temperature that my hand thinks is luke warm but the rest of my body cannot distinguish from glacial meltwater. On only two days so far it's been warm verging on hot and when this happens it's like winning the lottery. Not the jackpot obviously, but definitely more than a tenner.

At 8am (a las ocho) it's time for breakfast with the other student living in the house (Timo) as prepared by Maria, the maternal figure who runs the house where I'm staying. At school I affectionately refer to Maria as "la mama de casa" but I think this may have connotations I don't understand. There's a good chance I'm telling people that I live in a brothel.

Breakfast is generally a plate of fruit (papaya and banana - we only eat fruit with three a's) with yoghurt, followed by eggs (fried or scrambled) with warm tortillas and salsa. Salsa seems to follow a reverse traffic light system - red is mildly spicy whereas green is oral supernova. I have yet to try a flashing amber salsa but will let you know as soon as I do.

During breakfast I attempt to make polite conversation with Maria. Although my Spanish appears to be progessing well in classes, I now remember that I was always better at comprehension than actually speaking, and for some reason all but the most basic of verbs and nouns seem to desert me. Favourite topics of breakfast conversation currently include: whether or not it is cold (and I'm still not entirely sure if I'm expressing a general opinion about the prevailing temperature, or asserting that some unspecified object is currently hot or cold); whether I have had enough to eat; and how much the food I've just eaten has pleased me¹. Maria must think she is providing shelter for either a dullard or a retard² and quite possibly both.

After breakfast I walk the five minutes to the language school. If there's time before class (there usually is) I play hacky sack (yes, hacky sack) with Timo and possibly one or two other classmates. There is a pure and simple pleasure to be had in kicking this little knitted ball of beans around the patio of the school. I have vowed to buy one to take one home with me and play with it on the local common and thus keep this innocent pleasure alive. I obviously won't do this. Because I'll look like a dick.

Then the bell rings and it's time for class. The first two hours I have a basic language class with one other student - a young Singaporean girl called Christina. In our first class together we were invited to practice some basic adjectives by naming in turn the different colours of the skins of the peoples of the world. The official list, at least according to my Spanish teacher, is white, black, yellow, brown and cafe con leche.

After a short break - more hackey sack, some dodgy wafer biscuits and coffee with sugar but no milk - we then have a conversation class. So far the teacher-led topics have included: what sort of food the people in our respective countries enjoy, what our favourite passtimes are, and why naive Gringas³ who accept motorbike rides from strange Mexicans after dark shouldn't really expect any sympathy from the police when it all goes horribly wrong.

After conversation we switch teachers and have a vocabulary lesson centred around the adventures of Platero the donkey, who seems to be permanently hungry but tender and pure of heart. I have become rather fond of Platero but one of the outgoing students has already told me that Platero dies in the last story so the tales are, for me, tinged with sadness.

After Platero, it's the end of classes and back to the casa for la comida - the main meal of the day. This generally involves more tortillas, some beans (frijoles) some kind of meaty dish and guacamole. It's surprisingly like Mexican food at home but without the nagging feeling immediately afterwards that you've just spent 30 quid a head on peasant food.

In the afternoon, depending on the day of the week, there may be another activity arranged by the school. Monday is a walking tour of different parts of San Miguel. This week we visited a very old church on the outskirts of the town which looked like it was taken straight out of Children of the Corn and quite frankly gave me the willies. Nearby there were some peculiar little shrine-like structures where 'bad magic' is apparently still practiced. And there was an all-pervading smell of pure evil (or sewage) and we were followed by a pack of snarling dogs all of whom had either an obvious injury or an unpleasant skin disease. But unlike a 1970s horror film, rather than decide to stay in the old church and play with a Ouija board, we walked to a bus stop and went home.

Wednesday is 'singing' class which involves listening to, translating, and then ultimately singing along to three songs, usually a kid's song, then some old Mexican standard, and then something by Shakira. ("Only three good things ever came from Colombia: cocaine, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Shakira...")

Friday is cooking class, which is really "chopping stuff up for someone else to cook" class but the food's very tasty and in massive quantities. Thank god I'm doing all those press-ups.

In the spare time I'm either studying (up on the roof if it's hot) or sitting in El Jardin (the main square) catching up on email or uploading these blog entries. Yes, the small plaza at the centre of this historic Mexican pueblo has better WiFi than my flat in London. And it's free.

Other random things that have amused me so far:

Getting on a bus to visit Guanajuato - an hour and a half away - where they chose a two hour movie to show on the overhead television screens. Anyone know how The Illusionist ends?
A chain of KFC-style 'restaurants' called Pollo Feliz, i.e. Happy Chicken. I'm sorry but I'm not entirely convinced that the pollo is all that feliz.
A fairly macho-looking local wearing a T-shirt I presume he didn't understand that read "Proud To Be A Trucker's Wife"

¹ There is a very gentle joke relating to Spanish grammar in this sentence...

² I realise that this term is at best unsympathetic and at worst downright offensive but political correctness is late to arrive here in Mexico (see later) and I might as well enjoy it while I can...

³ American, white, female, cf. Gringo.

Llego en Mexico

2009-11-04T22:23:42Z

I'm typing this on a coach from Mexico City to San Miguel de Allende. It'll take about four hours to cover the 160 miles or so to this "colonial jewel in Mexico's crown". It's supposed to be one of the best places to learn Spanish in Mexico and generally a pretty chilled out place to spend some time, certainly in comparison to the ridiculously populous Mexico City (circa 20 million people!)

My flight from Washington arrived into Mexico's international Benito Juarez airport about 10.30pm local time yesterday which was about 4.30am UK time so I was not surprisingly a little knackered. Immigration was mercifully quick and smooth, certainly compared to Dulles where I once again experienced that annoyingly patriotic policy of marshalling hundreds of non-US citizens into a long queue to wait for a handful of immigration desks while maybe two dozen proud US passport holders get their pick of at least twice as many dedicated immigration desks. But not so in Mexico City and I arrived at customs wth my bags pretty quickly.

Benito Huarez airport, in common with a couple of other airports I've visited, has a genius red light/green light check at customs. Basically you have to press a button which through some random algorithm causes either a red or a green light to illuminate. The idea being that if you've got a couple of kilos of charlie stuffed in your suitcase, it doesn't matter how cool, calm and collected you are, there's still a reasonable chance you're getting searched, questioned and then presumably chucked into one of the world's most notorious correctional facilities. I was irrationally relieved to get a green light - as you press the button it's impossible not to think "Hang on, am I absolutely sure I didn't absent-mindedly put a couple of small bags of heroin in my rucksack while I was packing?"

On emerging from security I had been expecting to run the gauntlet of local taxi touts but the arrivals hall was disappointingly calm and I managed to get an approved cab very easily. After a fifteen minute drive through central Mexico City I was safely at my hotel, and contemplating the twin pleasures of a hot shower and a cool bed in that order.

This morning, after sleeping like 'el morte' and sampling pretty much everything from the hotel's breakfast buffet, my original plan of catching another cab to the bus station seemed a little unadventurous and so I enquired at the front desk (in English sadly) about getting there using the Metro. The tone of the answer in no way suggested it was the sort of journey no gringo should attempt without a personal bodyguard and so full of confidence and refried beans I took the short walk to the Insurgientes metro stop.

The metro was pretty easy to navigate and very cheap (two pesos - about 10p) although the barrier at the entrance immediately ate my ticket and so I couldn't work out it could stop me going further than I'd paid for. Maybe it's just one price to use the whole Metro, or maybe it just operates on some crazy trust system.

On each of the three separate trains it took to get to the bus station there was a (different) man with a rucksack with a speaker in the back playing songs from a portable CD player at full volume. Occasionally a passenger would beckon him over and buy a (presumably bootleg) CD. It was a lot more pleasant than a tonally challenged busker and suddenly the salsa remix of Coldplay song made a lot more sense.

The bus has a number of television screens which are currently showing a Danny Glover film dubbed into Spanish. Danny appears to be playing a reclusive Vietnam vet who by a peculiar twist of fate ends up looking after a young (possibly) Vietnamese girl and by bonding with her works through some of his issues, which are explained in flashback and relate to the accidental killing of a Vietnamese child during the war. So the basic pitch is "man comes to terms with killing Vietnamese kid in his youth by being nice to a different Vietnamese kid later in life". Not entirely sure that restores the balance Danny, but I guess we'll have to see how it ends...

Hombre Escribe Blog

2009-11-02T10:00:00Z

About this time last year I introduced Blovember - a solid month of blogging on Man Writes Blog. This year I'm attempting, albeit with a slightly late start, a variation on the theme I'm calling Hablovember, so titled because I am spending most of November in Mexico attempting to learn Spanish. Actually, let's qualify that - as much Spanish as it's possible for a man two decades out of school to cram into a brain that hasn't had to learn anything genuinely new for quite some time.

If it all sounds a bit random that's because it is all a bit random. I had a stack of air miles teetering on the brink of expiry at the end of last year and ended up booking a return flight to Mexico nearly a year in the future. This was before swine flu had pushed Mexico just below Mogadishu on the list of desirable holiday destinations and it seemed as good a place as any. Also, despite the United Airlines Mileage Plus programme creating the distinct impression that a man with 100,000 air miles could rightfully consider the world his travel oyster, when it came to booking the flights it basically boiled down to North America or Mexico.

Anyway, I've always fancied learning Spanish - and have made a couple of half-hearted attempts in the past - and as the flight dates got closer I decided that rather than jump on the Lonely Planet Mexico tourist conveyor belt I'd instead make a proper effort to get some Spanish under my belt.

So the plan is to try the whole immersive approach - I'll be living with a Mexican family and taking lots of one-to-one lessons at a local language school. Although this would be rather extravagant in London (private lessons I mean, not living with a Mexican family, although importing a Mexican family just to create an immersive environment just round the corner would be quite extravagant) but it's about ten quid an hour in Mexico which makes it somewhat more feasible.

I'm aiming to keep the blog updated fairly regularly while I'm away, and hopefully the "stranger in a strange land" factor will guarantee a few genuinely amusing moments amongst the facile yet sadly inevitable "don't foreigners do the funniest things?" observations.

I'm also aiming to keep a video record of my progress, which you'll be able to check out on the hablovember channel on YouTube.

Waiter, there's a fly in my soup...

2009-10-02T08:35:43Z

The other day I got halfway through a salad in a local eatery before discovering a soggy piece of blue tissue nestling under a previously rather tasty-looking lettuce leaf.

A year or two before that I remember ordering sausage and mash in a gastro pub and almost breaking my tooth on a rust-tinged enamel chip that had been hiding under the bangers.

On both occasions the staff member I informed about the surprise addition to my meal seemed to think that what I needed wasn't an apology, but instead a detailed theory about exactly how the object in question might have got there.

“Ah, well, you see the salad is delivered in boxes that are lined with blue paper and...”

“The sausages are delivered from the butcher in an enamel bowl and...”

So, for the avoidance of ambiguity, if I'm in your restaurant and I'm unlucky enough to find a foreign body in my salad/sausage/timamisu, there are three things I want you to do, in this order:

look mortified and apologise profusely, i.e. give me the impression that this is not a regular occurrence
persuade me that while the object is certainly incongruous, it is nothing to be concerned about (even if this is a lie)
offer to replace the meal with an alternative for free (and no I don't want exactly the same again — I still can't quite shake the image of the toenail/cotton bug/hypodermic stuck to the underside of a tomato)

I do not want to have to sit there with a half-hungry, half-nauseous feeling in my stomach while you present an intricate theory involving a grassy knoll and the intervention of a hypothetical second chef. I don't want a verbal outline of the yet-to-be-written biography of the object in question, outlining key events and eventually culminating in the final chapter with its appearance in my salad.

Because if, for instance, I lift the bun of my bacon and avocado burger and discover a small but perfectly-formed dog turd sitting proudly on a bed of red onion, my first thought will not be “Ooooh — I wonder how that got there?”

If I'd wanted my food to come with a surprise I'd have bought a Kinder Egg (although I fully realise that “surprise” in this context actually stands for the feeling of mild curiosity quickly replaced by a sense of aching disappointment).

I'm not an unreasonable person. I understand that if I order fish, I might sometimes come across the odd small bone. I appreciate if I pick shellfish off your menu I might encounter a bit of grit now and again. And I also realise that omelette, despite the best efforts of the chef, might very very occasionally contain little fragments of egg shell.

But if the meals emerging from your kitchen regularly look like someone's thrown a handful of random shit from the table of a low-end boot sale into your food preparation area, you should probably get out of the restaurant business and into a job where attention to detail and customer satisfaction are less of a priority.

I hear PC World is hiring...

What are your fitness goals?

2009-09-16T10:09:28Z

My local gym has recently had a fresh influx of personal trainers and they're all on the prowl for new clients. This has turned what used to be a fairly relaxing place into a intimidating exercise-themed cattle market.

Personally, I am at my most vulnerable when on the cross trainer. I'll spend anything up to an hour plugged firmly into my iPod, tracing perfect ellipses with my feet, listening to some podcast or another, and trying to burn off my lunch with the least physical pain possible.

And this is when the trainers usually strike. One will suddenly appear in my eyeline, give me a winning smile, and then just start talking, even though they must be able to see I've got headphones in. It would take a level of rudeness that I have yet to master to not remove the headphones and engage them in at least a basic conversation.

The Gym Conversation

“Hi there!”
“Hi.” (Piss off)

“How are you doing?”
“Fine.” (At least I was until some dick interrupted my workout, made me lose my place in the podcast I was listening to, caused the programme on the cross trainer to pause and then reset itself, and then asked me how I was doing...)

“What are your fitness goals?”
“Erm...” (Mind your own business you nosey, polo-shirted twat)

What are my fitness goals? Let me think...

How about: to get fit without paying a private sector P.E. teacher to stand next to me shouting motivating cliches? (“Are you feeling the burn?” “Well I'm certainly feeling the burn in my wallet...”)

Or: to be able to listen to my iPod without getting interrupted for awkward small talk every ten minutes? (If I want to have a shallow, forced conversation with a total stranger who wants my money, I'll get a black cab...)

Or simply: to not have to declare my “fitness goals” to some grinning muppet who has a vested interest in telling me either that they're the wrong goals, or that I won't achieve them without his or her (actually it's never her) help.

So to be totally frank, my short term fitness goal is to get you out of my face so that I can actually do some frigging exercise.

A week or so ago, one trainer was “convinced” that he knew me from somewhere and we spent five minutes trying to establish a connection when deep down we both knew it was just a clever if slightly cynical tactic to engage me in conversation. Sadly it worked — I now greet “Ricardo” by name whenever I see him. Ironically he seems to have forgotten my name.

Yesterday, another trainer interrupted me right at the end of an hour-long session on the cross trainer and asked if he could “try something”.

Well, the truthful answer would be: it very much depends...

If it's gently holding my buttocks while I train then I'd have to say, on consideration, no. If it's stroking my hair during the cool down then, thanks, but no thanks. And if it's joining me in the shower afterwards to help me achieve my “cleanliness goals” then I think the answer sadly still has to be firmly in the negative.

In the end, what he wanted to try was “interval training”, delivering the information as if imparting some great secret handed down from personal trainer to personal trainer and refined over millennia through a long-standing oral tradition.

“You mean going fast for a bit, then slow for a bit, and then repeating?” I asked.
“Er, yeah, basically” he replied, looking very disappointed.

We tried that, and not surprisingly it almost killed me. He looked very pleased with himself. As if the secret to getting this ridiculously hot and knackered had eluded me up to this point in my life.

He wasn't to know that I've broken sweat getting the lid off a jar of cook-in sauce, but it's no great surprise to me that if I run my tits off for 30 seconds then have an inadequate rest and then do it again and again and again, at some point it's going to look like I need an ambulance.

When I regained the power of speech he handed me his card, and I promised should I ever feel like doing anything like that again, I would give him a call.

Mummy, why's that man walking funny?

2009-09-08T08:39:04Z

A few weeks ago I came back from a very chilled out holiday on Gozo (sister island of Malta). I slept lots, walked lots, read half a dozen novels and had some nice food. All in all a very relaxing ten days.

My flight back into Gatwick didn't leave until quite late in the evening and with a couple of minor delays I found myself in U.K. Passport Control with about three hundred other people a little after midnight.

I'd just missed the 12.05am train back to Clapham Junction and the next one wasn't for an hour so I was relatively relaxed about being towards the back of a long queue of “E.U. Nationals” waiting to have their sunburnt faces matched to the paler versions in their passports.

After about ten minutes of standing in the queue I noticed a young lad of about fourteen or fifteen being slowly escorted to the front of the queue by a member of the airport staff who was trying to keep a straight face but not doing a very good job of it.

The lad was still in his holiday clothes: shorts and a loud T-shirt with a wide-brimmed sunhat and flip-flops. He was also carrying a small, inflatable rubber ring you'd be more likely to see wedged around the middle section of a temporarily aquatic toddler than tightly gripped under the arm of young adult.

The reason he was making such slow progress was that he was walking very gingerly indeed, taking tiny pigeon steps, the net result being that he was moving only slightly faster than the queue itself.

He was soon attracting a fair amount of attention from the other people in the queue, who frankly had little else to look at, but he seemed strangely immune to their stares and whispering. His face seemed to say: “You think this is embarrassing? This is absolutely nothing. This is a good day.”

As he passed me, he nodded wearily to the pair of middle-aged women immediately in front of me, and it became clear that he was with them — I would guess they were his mum and an auntie or family friend. They both watched him pass with supportive smiles, but by the time he was out of earshot they dissolved into “I know I shouldn't laugh, but...” giggles.

“Poor lamb. Is he still on the painkillers?” said the Auntie/friend.
“Oh yes. Has to. Four times a day.”

“And how's he sleeping?”
“Not well. He can only sleep kneeling down.”

I'm sorry, he can only sleep kneeling down? He can only sleep in a position you would normally only assume if you were trying to listen to a private conversation in the downstairs flat?

I snorted with involuntary laughter which I quickly turned into a cough, albeit a fairly unconvincing one. But I was now desperate to find out what had happened to this unfortunate teen.

So I mentally reviewed the facts: he was in constant pain, he walked as if his ankles were tied together, and he had to sleep kneeling down like some kind of heavy-faced foetus. It didn't take Miss Marple to work out that we were obviously talking about some kind of arse, or inner arse injury. Probably an accident rather than anything particularly sinister, unless his relatives were being shockingly matter-of-fact about a violent assault...

“Well I did tell him — if you keep hanging around the docks late at night sooner or later you're going to get bummed. But he won't be told...”

And let's be honest, if you had recently been horribly violated in that particular way, the last thing you're going to do it let yourself fall asleep with your bum in the air...

Anyway, I couldn't help listening in to the conversation of the two women, hungry for some clue of what had happened. And for a while it looked like my curiosity would remain unsatisfied until the very last moment, as they were about to step over the yellow line and present their passports for inspection, when Auntie/friend uttered the magic word that completed the painful jigsaw puzzle — “cactus”.

Cactus! It was like a magic eye poster suddenly coming into focus. This hapless teen, probably clowning around in some awkward, youthful fashion, had tripped and fallen on a cactus, and managed to get a least one of its needles right up his bumhole. Not just spiked in the cheeks. That's a bit of Savlon and a plaster, not a dose of morphine and a whole new sleeping strategy. No, not in the cheeks, right up the bumhole.

I pricked myself in the thumb a while back trying to sew a button back onto a pair of combat trousers and that was pretty bloody painful. Well imagine that, but up the bumhole.

What is the correct pain scaling factor? 10? 100? That's like the difference between being hit in the face with an acorn and being hit in the face with an oak tree.

And, of course, when I say up the bumhole, I clearly don't mean exactly up the bumhole. I don't mean clinically navigating adjacent layers of tissue like the well-oiled finger of a tiny doctor. I mean approximately up the bumhole. Roughly up the bumhole. Give or take.

Just imagine I gave you a stack of ten bagels and challenged you to impale them all in a single, rapid movement on an upturned knitting needle without damaging any of the bagels. In theory it should be possible — in theory.

But in practice, even with the best will in the world, there's going to be some bagel trauma. For every bagel whose puckered hole the needle passes neatly through, there's going to be at least two more that get scratched or torn or even completely impaled.

So while most holidays don't go entirely to plan, if your perfect summer break was slightly marred by the odd hitch, you can now surely feel grateful that you at least weren't anally raped by a flowering succulent.

And also take some comfort in the knowledge that you didn't have to spend the whole of the “no frills” flight home sitting on a child's inflatable ring to keep your own painfully inflamed one off the seat.

Man Writes Blog Rebooted

2009-09-01T13:52:43Z

The first day of a brand new month is as good an arbitrary landmark as any to start blogging again after a gap of some considerable time.

It all feels familiar and yet at the same time strangely distant – perhaps this is what it is like to return to work after an extended period of maternity leave.

You may notice a few changes to the blog and more are planned for the near future including the ability to add your own comments.

I was going to brand to the relaunch quite simply Man Writes Blog 2.0, but version numbers are rather passé and so following Apple's model of naming its new software releases after exotic animals, I have decided to call this latest version of the blog, Man Writes Blog – Arctic Weasel.

I did consider other names. “Desert Squirrel” has a nice ring to it but could equally be an operation to quell insurgents in northern Basra. Anything with “Jungle” in it sounds either like a creative racial slur or a tropical fruit drink for kids. “Temperature Coniferous Forest Marmoset” is just too wordy. So Arctic Weasel it is.

There is no fee to upgrade from the previous version of Man Writes Blog (retrospectively labelled Urban Llama) to Arctic Weasel. The update will happen automatically and requires no action from you or indeed even your consent. There will likely be teething problems but to remedy these you will simply have to call a premium support line and wait in a queue.

Of course, the big advantage for me of not blogging for such a long time is that there's lots to write about. But rather than blow it all in one mammoth, rambling entry I will add a number of more focussed posts throughout the week.

In the meantime, thanks to those of you who got in contact to say you missed the blog during its absence. You played no small part in providing the moral and emotional support that has made Arctic Weasel possible.

It's Not Dead, It's Resting...

2009-05-12T21:11:34Z

Despite appearances, Man Writes Blog is not dead but merely lying dormant. I have been crazy busy with this other project and unfortunately lots of other things, including regular sleep and exercise, have sadly fallen by the wayside.

I will still post things on here from time to time but for the next couple of months there probably won't be loads of activity...

Open Letter to Tinchy Stryder

2009-03-16T09:07:31Z

My radio listening habits wander between BBC 6Music (for Adam and Joe), Radio 4 (for feeling smug and cerebral), Radio 1 (a recent experiment to see if I can learn to listen Chris Moyles without wanting to punch something), XFM (to keep up with what the indie kids are listening to) and occasionally Capital (annoyingly commercial and repetitive but periodically worth enduring for Johnny Vaughn).

One of the songs which has been played to death over the last few weeks on Radio 1 and Capital is Take Me Back by Tinchy Stryder, which contains the following lyrics:

Take Me Back
...
I'm sorry I misleaded you pretty lady
I'm sorry I mistreated you pretty lady
...

Now it's a catchy enough little ditty, but the first couple of times I heard it, it left me slightly unsettled and I couldn't work out why. Until I realised that although “misleaded” sounds like a real word, of course in reality it isn't.

Now I can't imagine Tinchy is a regular reader of this blog, but just in case he is, I'll address him directly.

I'm sorry Tinchy, you can't just go around inventing words like “misleaded” — completely ignoring the perfectly servicable “misled” in the process — simply because it happens to rhyme better with “mistreated”. It's lazy and I expect more of you.

And while we're being candid, let's just admit that the only reason “misleaded” sounds like it rhymes with “mistreated” is because you're not really pronouncing “mistreated” properly — that's a ‘t’ not a ‘d”.

One of the creative challenges of being a lyricist is to pick existing words that work together both in terms of metre and rhyme but also semantically. If you can't do that without resorting to made up words it doesn't mean it's not possible, it just means you haven't spent long enough at the computer.

Of course Tinchy, you're the one with the hit single, not me, so maybe making up words is the way to go. Here are some more suggestions for new words you could incorporate into future remixes of Take Me back or possibly your live shows:

Take Me Back (Man Writes Blog Lyrical Remix)
I'm sorry I upsetted you pretty lady
I'm sorry I forgetted you pretty lady

I'm sorry that I losed you pretty lady
I know I should of choosed you pretty lady

I'm sorry what you seed me do pretty lady
I'm sorry what I sayed to you pretty lady

Tell Tales

2009-03-09T07:40:57Z

I've been playing Apple's Texas Hold'em poker game on my iPhone quite a lot recently which features an impressively glossy interface and a host of virtual opponents.

There are two possible views of the game in progress depending on how you hold your iPhone. Hold it horizontally and you get a stylised overhead perspective showing the whole table with current bets, but hold it vertically and you get a full screen view of the player whose turn it is to bet.

The virtual players are clearly actors filmed against a green screen and then transplanted into the virtual world of the poker game to create as realistic an environment as possible.

Apple have tried hard to create a range of distinctive (if somewhat stereotypical) characters for the player to 'interact' with. There's the cowboy-hatted good ol' boy, the wraparound shades-wearing hoodie, the wealthy housewife, the heavily-tattooed biker dude, the cute college chick, etc. etc.

It seems that the actors chosen to play each of these complex, multi-layered personalities was asked to perform a small range of standard poker actions: look at the cards, fold the cards, place a bet, be disappointed at poor cards, be excited at a win, and so on.

The problem is that the range of behaviour and emotion for each character is really quite limited and soon becomes repetitive and sometimes pretty ridiculous.

For instance, one of the characters, a pretty college girl, has a little "stirring two bowls with invisible spoons" victory dance which comes into play whenever she wins a hand. However the same jubilant routine is trotted out regardless of the size of the win and so she'll do it as readily for having a $10 stake returned when everyone folds as she will for a $10,000 win.

Even more comical is the fact that each character has an individual “tell” which betrays when they are bluffing and another for when they are holding a particularly good hand. This is clearly supposed to add to the realism of the game.

The issue here is that once you've spotted someone's tell, it's exactly the same every time and so you then know with 100% certainty when they are fibbing. I now try to ignore these as far as I can because it does give you a pretty unfair advantage.

And to compound things, some of the tells are not particularly subtle. One player actually pulls a pair of shades out of his pocket and puts them on before making a big bet on a rubbish hand. When he gets dealt a good hand I'm surprised he doesn't strap on a drum, stand on the table and do a one man band rendition of “Winner Takes It All”.

To keep players on their toes I think it would be good to change the tells in future versions of Texas Hold'em, so here are some suggestions for the game designers:

After being dealt a strong hand the cowboy could ride round and round the table on his horse shouting “yee ha!“ and firing his guns in the air
When bluffing, the hoodie could pull down his hood to reveal a snake's head with forked tongue
When dealt top pair the college girl could lift up her T-shirt and show the other players her own top pair in a Girls Gone Wild stylee.

Pass The Urban Dictionary

2009-03-02T10:43:42Z

Since the start of the year the my efforts have been largely marshalled against an online comedy project which is a guerilla attempt by me and writing partner Mark to sidestep development hell by writing, producing, directing, performing, and editing our own project without permission or interference from anyone else.

I've been deliberately vague about the the project on this blog because initially we were keen, as far as possible, to make our spoof reality show look real and having stuff showing up on Google talking about it as a comedy was not particularly helpful. But we're slightly more relaxed about it now and I figure if I don't mention it by name it probably won't show up anyway...

In one recent episode we did low-budget spoofs of the five films up for the Best Picture Oscar. Hoping the ride the wave of interest in all things Oscar, and as a viral marketing experiment, I posted all five videos on separately on YouTube, with a link at the end of each to the main series, should people watch all the way through to the end (which is by no means guaranteed in YouTubeland).

The Slumdog Millionaire clip has been by far the most popular, partly I think because of the elevated interest in the film after its massive success at the awards, but also because I posted our video as a response to a more serious one (which was getting several hundred thousand views) about controversy surrounding the film and accusations of “poverty porn”.

By posting these videos up cold and attaching one of them to a non-comedy clip we've opened ourselves up to a much wider church of opinion on YouTube than we've currently reached with the other videos. We've had a mix of positive and negative comments but the most interesting comments are those that I have no idea if they are positive or negative.

A couple of days ago someone commented “hhg” against a clip. The only thing I can find on the internet that this might mean is “Holy Hand Grenade” a reference to the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

If this is the right reference, I'm still none the wiser as to whether it's positive or negative. Maybe I'm reading too much into it and someone just dozed off while watching the clip and they typed “hhg” with their forehead.

My favourite one, however, arrived this morning and was posted on an earlier clip by someone called getsomedonuts:

This guy is fu*king clownshoes.

Now I can assure you that in the clip there is no-one copulating with a circus performer's footwear, so I could only assume that “clownshoes” was being used adjectivally, but was it a favourable comment or not?

Well, I had to fall back on the Urban Dictionary, which delivered the following definition:

clownshoes
1) A hopeless loser. An awkward, unattractive, and otherwise inept individual. Also known as a powertool.

...

So the commenter thinks our main character is a complete loser. Not entirely sure how I feel about that but at least I understand what the comment means.

Not sure I'll be using “clownshoes” in everyday conversation, but powertool, I can definitely see myself making use of that in the coming weeks...

Spoilt Stupid

2009-02-23T09:08:43Z

I was unfortunate enough to watch a few minutes of Paris Hilton's British Best Friend on ITV2 last week.

Now I know Paris by reputation but have never really watched anything she's been in. But a few minutes into this particular tent pole in the ITV2 schedule it became clear that there's so little going on between Paris's ears that if you slapped her head hard enough it would make that "pffft!" noise that an old CRT television does when you chuck a stone at it.

If you haven't heard of it, Paris Hilton's British Best Friend is basically a programme where a vacuous American somebody invites a group of vacuous British nobodies to compete for their friendship, something that no-one in their right mind would want in the first place and which should anyway happen organically if it happens at all.

The closest equivalent I can think of would be a show called Alan Sugar's Who Wants What I've Got? where Alan Sugar has a nasty bout of gastroenteritis and a group of mercenary young entrepreneurs compete for the chance to give Sir Alan a frenchie and thus catch the condition themselves.

When I originally heard about PHBBF, I had hoped it was some kind of Darwinian honey trap where anyone who walked through the doors of the audition room immediately fell through a trap door into a huge pit which would later be filled in with concrete for the greater good of humanity.

During the small section of the programme that I managed to endure, one sobbing wreck of a girl who on the brink of eviction was putting her case to a stoic (or possibly just catatonic) Paris to remain in the competition — “I just want it so much!” she whined.

Which is good because if we look back on our own experiences that's exactly how we choose our best friends, isn't it? Not the coolest, or the most charismatic, or the most loyal, or cleverist, or funniest person that also wants to be friends with us, but simply the person who wants it the most.

This is something that seems to come up again and again in reality shows, particularly the ones like X-Factor based on some loose notion of talent, this idea that if you want something badly enough you have a fundamental human right to have it.

If that were true, I would have spent the last twenty-five years living on a desert island with Janet Ellis playing with a fleet of remote control cars and drinking Slush Puppies every day.

In job interviews, when asked why I thought I was the best candidate for the job, it's never occurred to me to just say because I really, really want it.

“Well John, if I'm honest, we saw a number of people who were far more qualified and experienced than you, but none of them seemed to want it quite as badly, so congratulations! You're our new Client Services Director for Asia Pacific.”

Clearly this won't be the last time we have to endure this barely sentient rich kid on our screens so I thought I'd at least try to influence the precise form in which she might reappear and thus have come up with the following new reality shows for our Paris:

Paris Hilton's ASBO Party Piñata — like a goose destined for a fois-gras processing plant, Paris is force-fed small toys and sweets and a group of blindfolded teenage delinquents has to hit her and each other with sticks until all the goodies are back out in the open
I'm A Stick Of Celery, Get Me Out Of Here — Paris Hilton eats a stick of celery. We then watch the progress of the celery through her digestive system in real time via a series of micro-cameras implanted in her body until it finally emerges at the other end to be greeted by Davina McCall and a crowd of braying celebrity parasites, half of whom love the celery and half of whom hate it
Paris Hilton's Kitchen Nightmares — Paris is given a large dose of LSD and then locked in the kitchen of a grotty council flat and filmed for the next 24 hours as she experiences increasingly intense waves of paranoid hallucinations...
Paris Hilton's Solo Survivor — Paris is taken to a remote, barren island and... no actually that's it. She's just left there. No-one films it and no-one checks up on her.

If I put together a petition to send to ITV2, you'll all sign it, right?