Sucking Face

I’ve come to the conclusion that I am slowly turning into Russell Brand.

By this bold statement I mean that I have become hyper-suspicious of traditional news outlets and information that can in any way, shape of form be traced back to the Establishment (as opposed to sleeping my way around half of England, marrying Katy Perry and then divorcing her because my own incapacity for fidelity means I am unable to trust anyone ever to forswear all others in my favour).

To be honest, this healthy paranoid belief that we’re constantly being steered and lied to began decades ago. I haven’t bought a newspaper since the early 90’s. Well not to read anyway. Occasionally I have purchased a tabloid to get my hands on a free Lego set promotion but, model acquired, the paper is then dumped straight into the recycling bin without a single headline ever touching the sensitive ears of my conscious mind.

But of late I have even begun to doubt the veracity and the agenda of fly-on-the-wall documentaries and travelogues. Even those on the BBC in whose bosom I was once glad to place my trust without a second thought. I find myself asking: who has commissioned this programme? Why did they commission it? Why spend money on it? Just for my entertainment and to openhandedly inform my mind? I don’t think so.

Lord knows big global corporations, bankers and politicians have been playing commercial tonsil tennis for years but it really feels like the “free press” has become a fourth bedfellow. Information is just another currency to do dirty deals with whilst truth itself is a rare intoxicant who purity is besmirched the closer it gets to street level; something that can he withheld, diced, cut with talcum powder or cleaning fluid and then distributed according to the preferences of those in power, it's potency and power diluted and irrevocably lost.

Which leaves precious few outlets for the little man on the street to acquire credible information about what goes on in the world. Left, right and centre we’re being sold opinion – being told what opinion to have – but most of the column inches and sound-bites are nothing more than the conjectures and bigotry of a few mega-rich old duffers who seek to stroke the world into shape the same way they stroke themselves off in the shower. 

It’s got to the point where my main news source at the moment is Facebook. Or rather various third parties who use Facebook to disseminate information, satire and political criticism. As underground information networks go it’s hardly MI5. And it could be argued that pictures of kittens, half naked celebrities and fake Mensa IQ tests hardly constitute the modus operandi of an all-seeing, completely unbiased oracle. In an age of information overload I’m finding the modern world curiously information-lite.

And that scares me.

In fact there’s too much going on at the moment that scares me: the dangerous dehumanizing rhetoric applied to immigrants and Muslims that is like something out of 1930’s Germany; the war against the poor and the under-privileged that the Tory’s are currently waging under the self-righteous, self-justifying banner of austerity; and the banking crisis that has never gone away but has not ever been adequately looked into… that has instead been allowed to roll on and on over all of our toes if not our legs. Breaking us all with our own money. And then beating us some more with our own money under the guise of fixing the damage.

Who is pulling the strings and pocketing the cash?

Generally speaking it’s not the people posting pictures of kittens on Facebook.

And for that reason alone they’ll get my trust ahead of some faceless corporate mogul running a newspaper empire or a television news channel.

But that paranoid little voice inside my head keeps telling me that even unscrupulous mega-rich media moguls can post pictures of moggies on Facebook…

And they can even write blogs.

Like I said, I’m slowly turning into Russell Brand…

In The Firing Line

As a rule I don’t do reality TV shows.

As a rule I don’t – if I have any choice about it – do reality though being a hyper-cautious moral wuss my flights of escapism are normally fuelled by books and cinema rather than Charlie or H. My highs might only be literary or cinematic but at least they don’t involve kidney failure or brain damage. That said I have got the Withnail & I boxed set on order and there’s always the possibility of playing the traditional 'Withnail & I drinking game' whilst watching it.

The only reality show I do do is The Apprentice. And paradoxically it probably appeals so much because it is so not real.

The premise is real. The tasks are real(ish). The prize is real (though I imagine it to be something of a poisoned chalice).

The applicants are not. They are without fail the biggest bunch of fakers and self-deluded charlatans ever to dissemble across the face of the earth. And they get more fake each year.

Overblown. Pompous. Constantly self-centredly orgasming over their own self-directed, egocentric hyperbole. Totally blind to the way they willingly sacrifice what little shred of dignity they may possess on the televised altar of their own mistaken self-belief that they are “the one”. I utterly loathe them.

But I utterly love loathing them.

And that’s why I watch.

In a real sense The Apprentice is educational. This is how you do not do business. This is how you do not succeed. The dinosaurs and the outmoded concepts that still abound in this grubby little mercantile world are both amazing and appalling. In the first week the leader of the girl’s team urged her female associates to wear heels and a short skirt as it would help them all sell more product. A woman. A woman said this to other women. And could not understand why they objected. I would have loved her to suggest a shorter skirt to Karen Brady. Actually, sod that, I would have loved her to suggest it to Nick Hewer.

Nick is great. His expression couldn't look more sour if he was sucking a Haribo’s Tangfastic that had been soaked in vinegar from Craig Revel Horwood’s left armpit.

Ultimately though the true draw of the show is Sir Alan Sugar. I won’t pretend to like him. But compared to the applicants he’s the lesser of two evils. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, etc. And Sir Alan is certainly no friend to the contestants.

They’ve introduced a new schtick into this current series. Nearly twice the number of combatants but the potential for multiple firings in each show. It sounds like something out of a hard-core porn movie - e.g. last week Sir Alan dispatched 2 twats in one go. One before he'd even made it to the final boardroom stand-off. It’s beautiful; seeing all these plastically confident god-complexes crumble with the sudden realization that Sir Alan could finger them all out of the running at any possible moment.

And it’s good for them too. It humanises them. It strips away their self-erected façade of impervious eternally-ensured victory. Seeing them tramp away dejectedly with their Gucci luggage trolleys we finally get to see the disappointed (and disappointing) little children at heart that, without fail, they all secretly are.

But Sir Alan doesn’t go far enough. I want to see them tortured mercilessly with a constant weight of stress... I want to see them weeping snottily beneath a tonne-heavy sword of Damoclesiastic anxiety suspended by the merest spider’s web of Sir Alan's diminutive mercy... Psychologically waterboarded with the spectre of Sir Alan suddenly appearing at any given moment to kick them off the show with his career-ending fingerpoint of shame. When the telephone rings at the delegate's house at the start of the show to tell them where the next task is to take place I want Sir Alan to suddenly come onto the line and randomly fire whatever pole-greaser has got to the phone first to answer it. When they’re in the middle of Camden Town selling moody spuds from an Amstrad owned market stall I want Sir Alan to appear in the queue in a cloth cap and a Frank Spencer overcoat to hurl their Maris Piper’s back into their faces and tell them they’ve had their chips and the taxi is waiting in the gutter to take them back home to Crapchester. And most delicious of all, I want the boardroom showdown survivors to stagger back to the house at the end of the show, full of anecdotal PTSD and the lone survivor’s raconteur spirit only to have Sir Alan leap out of the wardrobe before they can get their hands on a conciliatory glass of Prosecco and say, ”Ha! Fooled you, worm! You have no right to your smarmy sense of relief! Get out – you’re fired! Fired just because I can do it and the all-sucking vacuum at the heart of my demonic and blackened soul is bigger and far mightier than yours!”

Boom. The ghost in the machine morphs into Frankenstein’s monster. Or a smaller, hairier, coconut headed Godzilla.

Now that, my friends, would be a show.

And true reality.

Because as we all know, that is how real life works.

It tests whether you’ve got balls. And then it kicks you in them.

Welcome to my world.

Now get out. You’re fired.

Privet

I’ve had to take the unprecedented step of leaving the Kate Bush Fan Club Facebook page.

Actually, it’s not unprecedented at all. I’ve left loads of pages on Facebook. When it comes to nixing FB related things I’m like Charles Bronson at the start of Once Upon A Time In The West. Sweaty, bristly, breath like Chicken Fajitas but with a lightning fast trigger finger.

And the Kate Bush Fan Club page, well, they brought too many horses (true Western fans will get that reference).

It was the whinging. The whining. The petty schoolyard arguments:

“I haven’t got a ticket to her live show and it’s so unfair ‘cos I’m her number one fan and all the touts who aren’t fans have got the tickets are selling them for the price of a Heston Blumenthal 3 course meal”.

“I have got tickets and I want to witter on and on about what songs she might sing and what songs I want her to sing and what songs do you think she will sing?”

“I haven’t got tickets and I don’t want to hear about what songs you think she might sing ‘cos I want to die for the entire duration of her shows so that I don’t have to live in a world where I don’t have tickets to see her.”

“Hello I’m new to the group and I want to show you a picture of a Kate Bush 7 inch single I bought from a flea market in Birmingham and ask if it is worth anything and does anybody have any spare tickets to sell, I heard she is going to play some live dates in September…?”

On and on and on.

Now I’m a fan. I’m up there with the most devoted and delusional of any of them. I can trace my Kate Bush pedigree back to the early 80’s – none of this “been a fan since Aerial” malarkey. I have all her records. I have tickets not only to her show but also to the hospitality party beforehand. I’m convinced she is going to personally serve me canapés and share her champagne with me in the toilets. And ask me to help compose the lyrics to her next album. It is meant to be.

But I know how galling it is to not have tickets. For 2 days I was in deep dudgeon because despite having early access to the fan only tickets I still missed out and felt that the general release was merely going to give me a cat in hell’s chance. I can remember the excoriating feeling of “I’m going to miss out on a truly rare event”. I know it came good for me in the end but I still retain the muscle memory of that previous failure. Like Frodo forever feeling the burning loss of his ring. Or something like that.

But joking aside it is not the end of the world or even the start of it. If I hadn’t got tickets I would have felt gutted but I would have moved on. I still have Kate’s music to enjoy and stalking is a perfectly acceptable pastime these days.

But the petty nit-picking and childish sourness of the Facebook group was too much. I know people are just people… but really! I expected more from Kate Bush fans. And I know how stupid and vapid that sounds. As if liking Kate Bush immediately bestows wisdom and first class mental health onto the patron. But it was like being back at school. The old “I’m a bigger fan than you are – no you’re not, I am” kind of thing.

I felt besmirched. I felt like I was a kid again and not in a good way.

Do adults really behave like this without being aware of it?

Plainly they do.

So I did the adult thing. I didn’t castigate everyone in the group for being pathetic; I didn’t lob a sarky grenade into the status box and then run for cover. I just revoked my own membership, left forever and instantly felt calm again.

See, I don’t need the others. I don’t need to be part of a big group or a gang. I don’t need to be part of a happening or “a thing”.

Kate and me, we’ve got our own thing going on. A special relationship.

She’s hired a private policeman just for me.

At least that’s what my lawyer has told me.

To Write About Nothing

2013 has not been a great year for this blog.

Several times I made the decision to stop writing but either through inherent inconsistency or perverse stubbornness (not sure which) I recanted and elected to continue.

In the lead up to 2013 my blog had suffered several attacks from work based sources (as a consequence I can no longer write about work issues) and also, most damagingly, was attacked by a close member of my family. A family member who dismissed this blog as self aggrandisement, self-publicity, a fantasy ego trip and bizarrely as a means of fencing memories and feelings that they plainly thought I had no right to air to the anonymous, fake "sycophants" who read every post that I write [I wish].

The aftermath of all this was that I began to question every flowering of inspiration, every issue that motivated me to write, every idea for a post that happened to impinge upon my brain.

I went from writing three posts a week to barely managing to cough up one.

I accept that for some of you that was a positive outcome.

For me it lead to a year when this blog stopped feeling like it was mine. When my voice was muted, censored, diminished. When it was no longer enough for a subject to be close to my heart in order for me to write about it; I had to somehow justify it to these "other voices" that had insidiously invaded my head and presented me with a list of rules and regulations that I had to obey.

It's taken me the best part 2013 to realize that these voices have no right to be in my head and I have no business at all to be listening to them.

In that sense 2013 has been a great year for this blog.

The blogging landscape has changed enormously since I began writing here in 2006. Many wonderful blogs have fallen by the wayside to be replaced by automated shop windows and market stalls. Blogging has become less about sharing the experience of the everyday (and sometimes the unusual) and more about selling product.

Call me a puritan but I believe the only thing that should truly be sold on a blog is the writing. The words. The language. [So do buy my books.]

The disappearance of wonderful bloggers means less wonderful readers around to comment and bolster the spirits of flagging writers. You few who visit here regularly are very definitely diamonds in the rough. I know there are amazing blogs out there but having tried to find them I can tell you it is like searching for a needle in a haystack that is made of straw pretending to be needles.

But I have come to realize that that too doesn't really matter. Chasing a readership is just another way of obeying a voice in one's head that has no right to be there.

So at the end of 2013 and the start of 2014 - at the end of 1000 posts and hopefully at the start of another 1000 - it is time to rededicate this blog.

Not grandly or overly ambitiously. Not fakely or servilely.

But honestly.

To write as I see fit about things that matter to me and mine. To share and not to impose.

If you don't want to be here then - please, in the nicest possibly way - don't be.

But if you want to stay then know that you are most welcome.

Happy 2014 to you all.

Giff Guff

I really loathe mobile phone companies.

Which, given the ubiquitous nature of the mobile phone and mobile phone technology, is pretty much akin to announcing that I loathe modern day life itself.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my departure from Vodafone when they essentially cut me off without a by-your-leave or thank-you because I hadn’t deigned to make any chargeable calls within a strangely random 3 month period. This despite my original purchase of a £90 phone precisely so I could go onto their  ”pay as you go” service plan which, to my mind, means it’s entirely up to me whether I make any calls or not. Stuff what is says in the small print.

Due to Vodafone’s subsequent offhand treatment of my plight I decided to take my custom elsewhere. I won’t say “valued custom” because, if I’m honest, no one is going to make a million quid out of me if I only make one call every 6 months but that’s not the point. I’m an occasionally paying customer and no business in its right mind should turn down the opportunity to make even a little bit of dosh.

The question was where. Vodafone was the only devil I’d known for the last decade; how did I choose amongst the others?

The recommendation came back: GiffGaff.

It looked promising.

Someone even gave me a GiffGaff SIM card. All I needed to do was activate it online, choose my payment plan and away I could go to not make as many calls as I wanted.

Only it’s been an epic fail.

GiffGaff won’t accept any of my credit cards. Payment is refused every time (I have made 9 attempts to date). There is money in my account. Everything seems hunky-dory at the big banking end. There is no reason for the refusal.

I have left messages online for the gaffers at GiffGaff (ironically there isn’t a phone number to call them on) but their electronic response has been hugely disappointing: “unresolved”.

That was it. That was their response. Unresolved. Well, I could have told them that. What I was looking for was “resolution…”

I put it to you that after 9 attempts to give someone my money and have it thrown back into my face I am within my rights – if not my sanity – to give them the finger.

GiffGaff you have fallen at the first hurdle. Goodbye.

I’m off to Tesco instead.

I’ll bet they take my money and say thank you for it with a nice (but knowingly avaricious) smile.

But that’s OK. That’s good enough for me. That does the job.

As Tesco say: every little helps.

Because at the end of the day they wisely know that it’s the little bit that doesn’t help that can and will cost you somebody’s custom.

Look Out Outlook

Back in my younger days, when I was single and had no care to be respectable, I had a joyous relationship with Hotmail.

So much so I had several Hotmail email accounts.

If I wanted to sign up to a web site or a subscription that I wasn’t sure was entirely kosher I would use one of my Hotmail addresses. When I was laundering money for the Triads I put all communications through my Hotmail account Wishywashy@hotmail.com. When I was gun running for Serbian gangsters deals were done via AK47sRUs@hotmail.co.uk. And when I was maintaining several mistresses simultaneously and patronizing a local escort agency I found totalesxclusivityguaranteed@hotmail.com really useful.

*sigh*

Those were the days. I’d log on, log in and frequently be surprised by the various communiques that were often or not waiting for me (frequently not).

And then things changed.

Not so much the getting married, having kids and becoming a 'law abiding citizen' thing. More the Hotmail mutating into Outlook type of thing.

Suddenly me and Hotmail or (if I must use its Snickers name rather than its Marathon name) Outlook (if you insist) became estranged. Suddenly our theme song changed from Dennis Waterman’s “I Could Be So Good For You” to Cliff Richard’s “It’s So Funny How We Don’t Talk Anymore”. We no longer had a thing going on.

Communication between us utterly died until now we barely even make eye contact.

When I try and log in these days all I get is the “I’m sorry, I’m not available right now” brush-off. Sometimes I only have to type the Hotmail address into my browser and I’m cold shouldered to the point where the log in page won’t even load. Outlook just isn’t putting out for me anymore.

See, Hotmail was fine when it was just an email client. When all I wanted was to send crapola and receive spam. We both knew where we stood and neither of us got ideas above our station.

But now Outlook wants to be the conduit through which I CONNECT to the entire effing internet. It wants to hook into my social networks and my own home computer. It wants me to diarize my life solely through its jealous online portal. It wants to store all my contacts and personal information inside its covetous cloud. It wants me to invest more time and energy into it than I’m willing to give. It wants to own me [man] and I didn’t ever come to Hotmail to be owned.

And I could just about cope with all that; I could just about shrug off all the irritation and irksomeness it causes me…

…if just once, just once the damned thing would load up properly first time and allow me to send just a simple sodding email without crashing on me.

Because that’s all I want:

An email account that sends and receives emails.

An email account that works.

Because the Serbs are getting impatient and the pimps are after me for welching on a deal. I’ve got urgent business to attend to Goddamnit!

The Bookkeeper's Husband Writes...

Some of you will know of the illness that has plagued my wife off-and-on for the last few years. After Karen endured a second hospital stay earlier this year which resulted in her being signed off from work longterm we both realized we had to instigate a major rethink into how we go out to work, finance ourselves, keep the roof over our head, food on the table and the wolves from our door.

Plans are now afoot - for us both. Ideas are being swirled around in the wine glass of opportunity. Most of them are them are still at the very faint bouquet stage. Most of them might not mature into anything very palatable at all. But some just might; some may have legs enough to actually go somewhere pretty decent.

If I could be paid to mix-metaphors all day I'd make a small fortune but until then my wife has taken the brave decision to resign from the accountant's where she has worked for the last 7 years and start up a work-from-home bookkeeping business. Provided we get some regular work it will be an ideal solution for her: she's highly qualified, very knowledgeable but needs to work at her own pace in a relatively stress-free environment. Working for herself is definitely the way to go.

To that end we have spent the last few days placing advertising, printing business cards and designing a web site: http://www.brighter-bookkeeping.co.uk.

By our reckoning we've got 12 months to make this venture work - and then it's a return to the drawing board if it all goes pear-shaped. Hopefully, we're onto a winner, albeit a slow grower... but slow and steady wins the race.

So, cutting to the chase, I am temporarily hijacking this blog to sling a bit of free, totally partisan, completely biased advertising out into the electronic ether.

Please take a look at my wife's web site. Please bear us in mind should you be in a position to require a first class bookkeeper. Please pass our details on to your family and friends and work associates should they be in that same position. Web sites and business cards are all very nice but it is word of mouth that reaps the biggest rewards and we'd appreciate your help.

Here ends the Pearl & Dean advertising. Your feature film will follow shortly.

To DVD or Not DVD

Normally I’d be deriding the shameless consumerism of Christmas.

The special editions, the special offers, the special prices, the special gifts to make loved ones feel special because it is unheard of to do that at any other time of the year...

But this year I am mystified by the sheer bad planning of DVD vendors during the seasonal period.

DVDs make great presents. They make easy presents. But easy in a good way; not lazy. A great movie can be a family treat or just a treat for an individual that they can enjoy again and again. A good movie can be an immersive experience, a flight of escapism. A good movie can uplift and enlighten.

It can also keep the kids occupied and out of your hair for up to 2 hours.

Movies are great.

I had a list of DVDs that I knew would make great presents for people this year.  I’m not going to list them; just take it from me that they were all great, I have superb taste and I would have got you all something wonderful (because, yeah, I was going to send you all presents this Christmas but the vendors have foiled my plans).

I ploughed through my list online, tapping into my usual stockists and suppliers.

About 70% of the DVDs on my list aren’t being released until the New Year. That’s right. A frustratingly whopping 70%.

DVD after DVD crossed off my potential gift list.

DVD after DVD which I am now not going to buy.

To me it seems idiotic. The film industry is being hit by the recession like every other industry. Surely their marketeers must know that Christmas is the prime selling point of the year? The time when their wares fly of the shelves like chestnuts from an open fire proffered by an old bearded man in a stovepipe hat and fingerless mittens?

This is an immense lack of foresight and forward planning. Idiocy on a fathomless scale. It’s like Quality Street not selling their Christmas selection tin until March.

Now I know this is just a small gripe in the bigger scheme of things. Worse things happen at sea. Or even at the BBC. I know this. I’m not getting angina because of it.

I’m just saying, if you’re wondering why you haven’t received a Christmas present from me this year it’s because Debbie Does Derby isn’t being released until mid April.

And that’s it. There's nothing I can do about it. The DVD vendors plainly don’t believe in Father Christmas.

Sorry.

It looks like you’re stuck with Harry Hill’s Festive Burp on the telly.

Devey For Vendetta

For those of you who don’t have access to UK terrestrial TV (terrestrial? Is that even a proper term that can be applied to the HD digital extravaganza that composes most TV channels these days?) Hilary Devey is the multimillionaire business woman with shoulders pads like two US aircraft carriers playing tug-of-war and a voice like Darth Vader smoking stinging nettles through an Alaskan oil pipe who co-fronts the British version of Dragon’s Den.

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the format of Dragon’s Den. Five fat cat business moguls laugh and sneer at the pathetic attempts of various bedsit scientists to come up with “the next big thing” and prise 100K out of their greedily mercantile little paws.

Well, Hilary is one of them. She’s a dragon. She’s the weird mumsy-esque dragon who dresses like an extra from classic mid-eighties Dynasty and talks like Phyllis Pearce from Coronation Street.

She also has a face whose resemblance to someone else has for years been on the edge of my consciousness but has never quite broken through. Until now...

The likeness is uncanny. And I quite like the idea of Hilary practising knife-throwing skills around old London town whilst alliterating huge monologues around the letter V as she blows up the Houses of Parliament to the aural backdrop of the 1812 Overture. This was surely a casting exercise that the film makers of V For Vendetta are now kicking themselves for missing. They needn’t have bothered producing all those masks. Just give her a moustache and a smartly clipped imperial and she’s practically there. I bet she’s even got the hat somewhere in her own wardrobe already.

But for all I’m taking the urine out of this strangely Punchinello cheeked lady I can’t help but quite like her.

There’s something frail and human about her for all she expectorates Piedmont gravel every time she opens her mouth. I quite admire the fact she has made it in the male dominated world of business and made it without emulating (or even emasculating) not only the men but also the other women. Hilary is very much “out there” on her own. She is what people commonly call “a character”. A “personality”. She’s practically her own archetype. The anima of some weird medieval carnival god hand-carved by drunken monks on Lindisfarne as Viking raiders attempted to gain forced entry to their vellum lined inner sanctums. Oo-er.

Hilary appears to emanate her own completely localised biosphere. A Hilary Zone through which we – the denizens of the outside world – are filtered and interpreted before her formidable commerce-based intellect can fully ingest and process us. And if we are lucky, offer us 100K and her worldly-wise business acumen to ensure our new fangled, patent pending self-cleaning pooperscoop gets pride of place at Pets R Us.

Hilary is one of us. Slightly weird, slightly unhinged, more leftfield than Grayson Perry and with the bad dress sense and wardrobe to match. But she don’t care. Hilary is her own woman and does her own thing. She has cut herself adrift from fashion, taste and public opinion. The only thing that keep her moored to the plane of existence that we all share is her uncanny ability to make money. And, I sincerely hope, her unerring ability to throw razor-sharp knives at bent politicos.

Hilary, I salute you.

Long may you reign vainglorious and victorious at the vulpine vanguard of vicarious visual verisimilitude.

Organ For Hire

In these cash strapped times we are all looking for a little extra moolah. Opportunities for additional cash. A bit on the side. The ol’ financial boost.

So I’ve been considering my options:

1) Sell my body. Become a dirty hoo-er.
2) Sell my soul.
3) Sell my writing.

I have to be honest and say that number 1 is a no goer. I’m sure I’d have no shortage of offers but alas most of them would probably be from men and I am just not wired up that way. I know I should view it purely as a business transaction for the sake of my wife and kids but, really, I am just not psychologically / emotionally programmed for such intimate endeavours to take place with the one half of my species that I am just not sexually attracted to. The biggest tragedy is that the other half – the lady kind – would just laugh at the thought of paying me to show them a good time. There’s a sale on in Marks & Spencer and I just can’t compete with that kind of instant gratification.

Number 2 is also a no goer. I don’t consider myself overly religious but the thought of selling my soul sends me cold. I don’t care if it’s not legally binding, there is just something deeply fundamentally disturbing about the thought of selling one’s most essential life essence. I read somewhere that a load of students were surveyed recently to see how many would actually be willing to sell their souls and, surprisingly, even these beered up, coke brained, fashionably cynical young hooligans baulked at the idea of giving up ownership of their immortal soul (whether it actually existed or not).

As for number 3. I’m trying. I really am. Any pointers or snifters of chancy openings would be much appreciated.

One thing I have never considered though is selling my health.

I had an email a while ago from a company called WEGO. I think they’re American. They wanted me to sign up for clinical trials. Clinical trials that could take place in my very own home. More, if I then blogged about the trials that I took part in there’d be additional cash remuneration. And it wasn’t just meds they wanted me to trial either. It was equipment.

My mind boggled. Just what kind of equipment would they want me to test?

An iron lung? A pacemaker? A new Hadron Collider sized kidney dialyses machine? Artificial testicles?

How much money would they pay me to trial some bionic bollocks? I mean, even a one off deal could set me and my family up for life. New car. Cruise in the Med (paid for by meds). And all for the price of a pair of Kevlar kahunas.

It’s got to be worth a gander surely?

But then I reconsidered. I mean, my luck has to be a major factor in this enterprise, right? I’d end up trialling colostomy bags or herpes cream or artificial testicles manufactured cheaply out of the melted down heads of old Action Man dolls. Or they’d be injecting me with weird bacterial concoctions that would just make me feel pants for days on end and not even give me Spidey powers or anything.

And then there’s the exchange rate. Given how things are right now, I’d probably end up compromising my health for a measly £7.54p.

So it’s just not worth it. It really isn’t.

My health is the only saleable commodity I have that I don’t actually want to sell.

That, of course, and my clearly illustrated good sense.