Blogging Uber-Genius In Blog Comeback

Added on 25 May 2010

I haven't written a blog for a while. Suddenly I'm older than the Prime Minister. That never used to be the case. More than likely, I'll never be younger than the Prime Minister ever again. The PM changing so that suddenly you're older than him (or her), is one of life's defining moments. A rite of passage.

I've been writing a novel for the past two and a half months, the lead character of which is a grumpy middle-aged man who can't be bothered with society. They say you should write what you know after all, and now that I've hit the well-defined age bracket of  Older Than The Prime Minister, I think I can slide easily into being grumpy on a more or less constant basis.

Here are five things that are making me grumpy at the moment:

1. The stupid cross-your-fingers Kit-Kat advert. You can see it here if you're lucky enough to have missed it so far. It's a preposterous pile of pish, its worst crime being that it has the feel of having been written by someone who's never watched a game of football in his/her life. (Which is probably the case, as it will have been written by some 23 year-old private school rugby/hockey/cricket player getting paid too much at some absurd marketing firm in the city.)

2. Junior Masterchef. Ordinarily I wouldn't watch Junior Masterchef, but I live in a house with two children, and it has become unavoidable. The worst part of Junior Masterchef is the constant face-to-camera insights, where ten year-old children describe the horror of their souffle not rising. This is an actual quote from a junior masterchef: When I found out I was in the quarter-final, I was like... wow. The clue is in the title. Junior Masterchef. These are children with some weird cooking gene who can make stuff. It's not Junior MasterOrator or Junior MasterEruditeChatterbox. Why do they need to do this on every TV show on Planet Earth? What happened to the days when they used to make TV shows and show them, rather than padding them out with endless hours of how-I-felt-when-my-carrots-overboiled behind the scenes chitchat?

3. The fact that Gillian Duffy was news for more than five minutes. "These Eastern Europeans - where are they all flocking in from?" That was her defining moment on the world stage that got her on the front page of every newspaper in the land. How utterly absurd and stupid was all that? After that I stood at the end of our road waiting for the PM to walk by, so that I could say, "These white cliffs of Dover that the illegal immigrants keep coming across, what colour are they?" but he never came this far south. LibDem/Tory marginal you see.

4. That a thirteen year-old American kid climbed Everest. I'm not sure why this annoys me, but it just does. Maybe it's because my kids are nigh on ten and twelve and they haven't even climbed the highest hill in Somerset, never mind the highest mountain on every continent on Planet Earth, which the American kid has, (apart from Antarctica, and no doubt once his Dad buys Antarctica for him and gets it towed so that it's up off the American coast, he'll do that one too.)

5. The Dalek episode on Dr Who. I said, didn't I? There was Stephen Moffat stating that they'd be back with their deadliest plot ever. And were they? No. In fact, their plot wasn't even slightly deadly. Possibly, it was their least deadly plot ever. The plot was all about creating a new Dalek race, not killing anyone else. So, really, it was in fact their most life-affirming plot ever. That, and Dr Who generally.

Next time, the strange dog dildo situation.