Neurotica

Everyone has their little routines. I have the same coffee every morning, I shower in exactly the same way every day (hair, then face to feet, if you're interested), my Sat-Nav goes to the left of the steering wheel for no other reason than "just 'cos it does", but none of these things could be called compulsions. I do them because there's no need for me to do them any other way. They're idiosyncrasies, nothing else.

It occurred to me recently, however, that I've managed to pick up a worrying amount of ridiculous preoccupations. There isn't a discernible pattern to this madness; the things I feel the need to do are arbitrary, disjointed and nonsensical. I use the same locker at the gym every time I go. It physically aggravates me if I have to use another. I will get annoyed if someone uses my treadmill. I don't like the treadmill. I think running is obnoxiously boring, but I will get angry if someone else is using it. Actual, almost tangible rage builds up if someone dares to run on it when I want to. I recently decided that my elbows were too dry and so have been regularly moisturising them. Nothing else; just the elbows. I will refuse to throw away anything with any personal details on. It must be shredded. Trouble is I only own a receipt shredder. The hole to put the paper in is two and a half inches wide. I have to tear anything I want shredding into strips before I can destroy it and I want pretty much everything shredding. It's not electric. It takes forever. I can't not do it. I used to own socks which had the days of the week written on them. I remember being 17 and going to college in odd shoes because they were all I could find that day. I just didn't care. Six years later and whole days are being wrecked by these damn socks. I flat-out refused to wear them if they didn't match the day it was. I would reuse dirty socks (and I did) before I would wear my Tuesday socks on a Wednesday. I had to throw them away; the novelty wasn't worth all the aggro. I got a new fridge in my little apartment above the pub. It has an egg tray large enough for twelve eggs. I had to go to two shops to buy eggs because the first one only had cartons of fifteen left. There must not be surplus eggs. I could go on with this list for a while and barf up more crazy than you'd want to endure, but I think you get the picture. What I've written above aren't even the weirdest ones. Those ain't for sharing.

The hypothesis that I'm currently clinging to is that this is all a result of spending too much time alone in this shithole town. With nothing new, and nothing challenging, I've fallen into these odd patterns because there's no one around to point out how weird it is (obliquely, what I'm saying is that this is everyone else's fault). Salisbury isn't the hub of social activity that you think it might be. This small town has a habit of breeding feckless, six-fingered twats and I'm happily falling into line. But admitting you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery. Now that I've noticed I'm doing all this weird stuff I can take steps to reverse them. I shall no longer get annoyed if locker 195 has been used by someone else. I will stop moisturising my elbows. I will buy a cross-shredder. The socks are already gone. That treadmill is ideally located for the TVs and mirrors so I think I might continue to get annoyed about that. But the rest is headed out the window.

Oh, and in other news, there's a beehive in the roof above my room and every three hours or so one of the little bastards will fall down the chimney into my room. I'm allergic to Bee and Wasp stings. There's a fair chance that I won't wake up tomorrow because I'm sharing a building with hundreds of tiny assassins.

I have also decided to wed Taylor Swift. Bitch belongs with ME!

Jolly Vlog 5

Jolly Blog 3 - *Insert life-related displeasure*

Hello all,


Firstly, apologies are in order for not having posted anything in a while.  Over the last week or so I've been moving back into my room at the pub and getting ready to go back to work; as a result I've had precious little time on my hands.  Moreover, for the majority of last week I had no Internet connection, making posting a video an impossibility even if I had time to make one.


I genuinely thought that I'd struggle without the W.W.W. (if only by making another W that much less fun).  Truth be told I didn't really miss it at all.  It ended up being a lot like going out somewhere and forgetting to take my phone.  A lot of people would panic, but I don't need to have my phone with me to know that no one is trying to get hold of me - similarly, I don't need the Internet to know that I'm not getting e-mailed or to know that nothing is continuing to happen on Facebook.  Having said that, being cut off from the Internet left me horribly ill-informed: that Japanese Tsunami thing completely passed me by, and I was made to look like a ridiculous nancy when I didn't even know the outcomes of the week's sporting events, let alone the actual scores.


In other news, the refurbishment of my pub is going as expected.  When we closed we were told we'd be reopening in eight weeks.  I asked if the builders were British.  I was told "yes."  I responded, that if that was the case, then we won't be reopening in eight weeks.  This happened ten weeks ago: we're still not open.  Moreover, as with most of these kind of refurbishments, the plans were drawn up by people that work in an office and I now have to figure out ways to work around the endless list of problems they've created.  The guy who we hired to write all our signs has dyslexia (yes, this dyslexic's chosen career was to spend all day every day making permanent and official signage).  A load of new staff have been hired (without my input), and as a result we have employed a load of people who would struggle to win an argument with a Dolphin.  My boss (still) can't stand me and we spend most of our time having passive-aggressive arguments, he spends the rest of his time telling me that he doesn't like my hair, and to top it off, he can't stand his wife so he spends all his time at work.  His work is my work.  My work is also my house.  The prick is always here.  Safe in the knowledge that there is absolutely nothing I can do to make this situation better,  I've spent my time back here fizzing in silent rage... my money is on heart-attack, although homicidal rampage is also looking like a real contender.


I made an attempt to film Jolly Jrinking II this week.  I don't want to give too much away about its content, so I'll just tell you that I didn't manage to finish it but I will do soon enough.


Today my car's odometer rolled over to 60,000 miles.  In retrospect, to label this event as mundane would have been an exaggeration.  I, on the other hand, got so excited by the prospect of reaching 60k, that I kept a camera in my glove-box so that I could commit the whole affair to film.  I'm sure you're all eagerly awaiting the footage


Later, benders!


Joe.

Those f**kin' spastics took our jobs!

On British Television at the moment is a series called 'Beauty and the Beast: The Ugly Face of Prejudice.' Much like everything else it has annoyed me. The premise of the show is to get people with a range of facial disfigurements to spend a couple of days with a beauty obsessive. The advertised ethos is outwardly for two people at opposite ends of the beauty spectrum to spend time together: they argue, they fall out, but eventually they each learn something from the other. Much like my fat-people stories, the actual purpose of the show is to let normal people (and I use the word 'normal' very much deliberately) have a good ol' look at some more ol' fashioned freaks. I believe it does however fulfil a valuable public service. It might be 'freakshowish' but televising these sorts of people highlights not only society's unhealthy obsession with beauty, but also it broadens understanding of facial deformity. I'm sure we've all been guilty at some time of unfounded assumptions about a disfigured person's mental faculties. Channel 4 have very cleverly chosen to feature people who, on first sight, one would assume 'aren't all there', but who are in fact far more intelligent that the 'beauty' they are paired with.

This is all lovely stuff; well done channel 4, we're all very impressed. However, this show has annoyed me in two respects.

First off, all these deformed and disfigured people have been sensitively labelled by channel 4 as 'visually different people.' Political correctness annoys me a lot. I have no problem with language being updated and overhauled.  Within the gamut of the English language there are hundreds of words which have been phased out, replaced or simply abandoned for the sake of preserving people's feelings. 'Spastic', for example, in days gone by was a perfectly acceptable word. After being hijacked by kids on the school playground (by the way, if there's one thing I like about children it's their never-ending capacity to come up with ever new and imaginative words to hurt people's feelings) it was swiftly phased out by the respectable members of society without official intervention. Goodbye Spastic Society, hello Scope.

Political correctness, as I understand it, is the name the powers that be gave to their endeavour to force us all into being pleasant and inoffensive citizens. It is the establishment's attempt to second guess the terms which groups or people might take offence to. Society, however, is clever enough to recognise linguistic anachronisms when they arise and capable enough to adapt appropriately. In theory, political correctness is a fantastic idea, unfortunately it ends up being over-thought, over-analysed and as a result, they get most of it horribly wrong . That's exactly what has happened here with 'visually different.' That label tells us absolutely nothing about the people in question; it's less precise than the words it's replacing and as a result all people with any kind of facial disfigurement or deformity fall under the same generic umbrella. In reality, every person on Earth could be described as being 'visually different' from any other. It may not be a pleasant thing to point out, but disfigurements and deformities are aesthetically displeasing features, which are accidentally or incidentally acquired and (given the choice) are unwanted. Everyone is visually different; these people are disfigured, and re-branding them under a different name is not going to make their disfigurement invisible to those without them. No term or word will ever be semantically perfect – you could, for example, using my definition above describe moles or crooked noses as 'disfigurements' – but I can't see how moving away from fairly accurate terms to a generalised one is in any way helpful or progressive. A shovel isn't a differently-abled pitch-fork – for goodness sake, just call a spade a spade.

Second, there's a segment in this show presented by this guy called Adam Pearson. He has a severe facial disfigurement called Neurofibromatosis; a disorder which it's speculated that the Elephant man may have had and a word which you could only be bothered to skim-read.  In this segment he goes around and challenges society's preconceptions and discriminatory tendencies against disfigured people. He goes to places such as advertising agencies, fashion shows and casting agents and then publicly critisises their policies.

What I don't like is his aggressive finger-pointing; going around attributing blame to these institutions for not being more open and inclusive of disfigured people. He was, for example, told by numerous public service employers (restaurants, shops, etc.) that they had no job vacancies minutes after the fairly attractive control subject was told jobs were available. Obviously, that's not a pleasant thing to have happened to anyone, and it does, of course, highlight a significant degree of prejudice in these industries. I don't like it, but that's not to say that I don't agree with it. Prejudice is often used as a byword for what is actually just unfair. There comes a point where limitations have to be adhered to in spite of those limitation being unearned or undeserved. I could train all day every day for the rest of my life but I am never going to be able to become a professional jockey. I'm too tall and too heavy. I'm not going to cry 'discrimination!' when I'm turned down to be a rider in the grand national. Given the choice, I'd rather not be served by 'Elephant Man 2K' if I go out to eat somewhere, and restaurant owners know this.  It's not fair, but at the same time it's no-one's fault - there is no blame here.

I don't think I'm saying anything particularly outrageous here, although if you haven't fully understood what I've said you may think I am. I don't like inequality – if I had it my way I'd be the tallest, fastest, and generally the best at everything (and to be fair I'm not a million miles away from that) – but unless you'd prefer to live in a world where every race ends in a dead heat, everyone scores the same on every test, and every photo that you see is full of people that look just like you, then we really need to learn to accept and celebrate our differences, however unfair or unjustified, not ignore them on the fallacious pretence that they don't or shouldn't matter.

Jolly Vlog 4

Drawings 'n' that 3