Who ate all the Pukka Pies?

Britain is putting on weight and the evidence is all around. The most cursory of glances up and down the cake aisle at Tesco will reveal a gaggle of bloaters jostling for the cream buns – men with gargantuan T-shirts stretched tightly over a precipice of gut and women so impressively bingo-winged they probably spend their weekends catching thermals off Beachy Head.

The media is gleefully portraying an epidemic of Stateside proportions in which no-one is immune to the lure of the supersize McWhopper. Judging by his ever-widening face, even Jamie Oliver is clearly reluctant to practice what he preaches. Maybe the only reason he’s so militant in his efforts to dissuade school kids from their Turkey Twizzlers is so he can snaffle them all himself when he’s not hovering around the tuck shop brandishing a fiver and emerging gleeful with a fistful of Curly Wurlys.

Even so though, there is an entirely disproportionate amount of programmes about obesity on telly, including You Are What You Eat with Gillian McKeith (who, if the title of her show is true, must spend her days munching bags of spanners) Celebrity Fat Club, Help, My Dog’s As Fat As Me, Freaky Eaters and The Eight-Tonne Teenager (bizarrely, only one of these is made up). I reckon this is to make the rest of us feel vindicated in cracking open that second bar of chocolate or indulging in a second helping of ice cream.

If I was a paranoid conspiracy theorist I might assume that the food marketing boards and TV programme makers are in cahoots in order to make us buy more of their products. But I’m not. So I won’t.

Nice things, happy thoughts...

It was a criticism recently levelled at this blog that the tone was a bit “ranty”. Which is fair enough, given that it seems to be the human condition (unless you’re a Christian or don’t get out much) that it’s generally easier to describe the things you don’t like than the things you do.

So, by way of counterpoint, here’s a list of things I really like, not in priority order (apart from the first one):

- My luverlee faaahmily
- Very strong coffee
- The smell of a bookshop
- Heinz Tomato Soup (with white bread dunkers)
- Viz
- Computer games
- Guinness
- Linen shirts
- Morrissey
- Snowboarding
- London
- Stephen Fry
- Cheesy pasta
- Messing around with power tools
- Charles Dickens
- Basketball trainers
- Alan Partridge

There are probably tumps more, but these immediately spring to mind.

Happy now Dan? ;)

"Don't take money, don't take fame. Don't need no credit card to ride this train [unless you're buying high-calorie snacks from the buffet car]"

I saw a recent unflattering picture of an ageing Huey Lewis the other day. It seems that the power of lunch is a curious thing – it makes one man weep and another man gain three stone.

Bad Matrix looky-likeys

Keanu Reeves is directly responsible for adding a splash of humour to the great British High Street in recent years.

As Neo (a be-shaded, outrageously-cool and mysterious super-human from a cyber-reality) in The Matrix, he's inspired a certain disillusioned generation to mimic an immediately identifiable style. Amusingly though, the individuals he seems to have inspired are the least equipped to pull the look off.

Britain has always had a proud heritage of spotty teenagers and geeks, though a notable proportion now shamble round the streets dressed in bargain-basement facsimiles of Neo’s trademark ankle-length leather coat which look more like they've been constructed from bin-bags than cow-hide.

With Terry Pratchett novels tucked one of a multitude of pockets and a Red Dwarf T-shirt dutifully ironed by mum, they shuffle around shopping centres up and down the land; though rather than flouting the space/time continuum by switching effortlessly between dark reality and an alternative netherworld, these lonely individuals tend to stroll past Dixons, looking glum and glinting toothily due to the fact that they typically have less skin pigmentation than those weird translucent fish at the bottom of the Marianas Trench that never experience sunlight and explode if brought to the surface. They probably work in IT and are able to spell their names in both Klingon and Elvish.

Bizarrely, the coat also never leaves their shoulders irrespective of temperature. It’s practical in the winter months to keep warm, though it can be hazardous in the summer where exhaustion and heatstroke cause the wearer’s shoulders to drop, placing the hem in imminent peril of being scuffed or smeared with dog shit.

They’re harmless enough though. I look on them as I might look upon a five-year old out shopping in Tesco with his mum, dressed from top to toe in a Spiderman costume and emitting high-pitched "Ka-Pow!"s while leaping in and out of the aisles. Let 'em have their likkle Matrix costumes I say. Bless 'em all.

Under Siege (and a bucket)

Steven Seagal was on telly the other night and I’m sure my wonderwife couldn’t have been the only viewer to point out his startling resemblance to Nadia from Big Brother.

Even more peculiar than this though is the shape of his head, which is best described as a semi-regular polygon. It’s the sort of head you might see on a Tom & Jerry cartoon in which a bucket falls on Tom’s head and is subsequently ‘panged’ with a shovel by Jerry, causing it to emerge ‘upturned-bucket-shaped’.

I suppose if you wanted to convincingly create the likeness of a minor Hollywood C-lister in your own home: take one upturned bucket and paste a life-sized picture of a reality TV transsexual onto the front, and hey presto! Watch Steven Seagal appear before your very eyes...

Snippets of news

Some items I saw on bbc.co.uk today:

"Physicist Stephen Hawking and his daughter are to write a science book for children which will be "a bit like Harry Potter, but without the magic"" This can be easily reworded as 'a bit like a bestseller, but without the bits which made it a bestseller'.

"TV shows like Big Brother can humiliate people "for public entertainment", the Church of England warns." Hmm, and the promotion of imaginary rulers who live in the sky and judge our every thought and action with the intention of either allowing us into utopia or condemning us to eternal torture is tickety-boo I suppose? It's a very big pot, and a very small kettle…

Moaning about "the weather"

I harbour an entirely irrational hatred of "the weather". By "the weather" I don’t mean the changing climatic conditions or the segue from one season to the next (I understand that it needs to be both rainy and sunny, and it's foolish to argue either way), but rather the five minute snippet tagged onto the end of news programmes in which some nondescript individual in an invariably poorly-fitting suit drones lifelessly on about "high pressure fronts drifting in from the mid Atlantic etc."

I'm not being irrational. If I tally up the amount of time I've spent sitting in front of a televised map of the British Isles while a gawky nobody waves his arms about like a tired semaphore operator, I'm shocked.

Time on earth is short - ninety years if you're lucky - and "the weather" is collectively responsible for wasting days of my life in which I've learned precisely nothing. That's why I've decided not to watch it anymore. And if, horror of horrors, I occasionally get caught outdoors without an umbrella or end up wearing one layer of clothing too much, then so be it. It's time to throw caution to the wind (drifting in from the mid-Atlantic… etc.)