Bus drivers are bastards

Ever since I was about twelve or thirteen, I have always hated bus drivers. Now, there are about three or four separate accounts of things that bus drivers have done that makes me hate them so much, and it's going to take a while to explain. There is a risk that as I relate these stories, and as I try to explain my unadulterated animal hatred for bus drivers, I may get so angry that I have an aneurysm and die, but I'll try not to let that happen.

I think why I am so bitter about bus drivers is because as a rule, they all view anyone under the age of twenty-one as the scum of the earth. There are no exceptions to this rule, I think it must be part of a questionnaire that all bus drivers are given when they sign up for the job.

So, what is your view of people under the age of twenty-one?

a) I quite like them

b) I am ambivalent towards them

c) I think they are the scum of the earth, and I will endeavour to be obnoxious and unhelpful to all of them, regardless of how much politeness and respect they give to me.

Congratulations, if you answered c), then you have passed the only job requirement for becoming a bus driver. It would be helpful if over the next ten years you could become increasingly miserable and condescending, but that is usually a natural result of being a bus driver, and hence it shouldn't be too difficult for you.

One thing that sparked off my disdain for bus drivers was quite a small thing, but it annoyed me nonetheless. I got on a bus once, I think I was about thirteen or so, and very politely (I honestly was a very polite young teenager. These days I brandish my Pleases and Thank yous more sparingly) I asked for a ticket. He printed out a ticket, and before I had the chance to say anything, he said “say thank you.”

This really irritated me, so in reply I said “I find that to be a very patronising comment. You wouldn't say such a thing to an adult. In fact you probably wouldn't even notice if an adult said thank you or not, so it is unfair to target a child out for criticism when you would not do so for an adult. It is mean and predatory; I am obviously of too young an age to retort your comment in an intelligent and articulate manner, and besides, I was about to say thank you, but you rudely interrupted me, now I don't think I'll bother, as you obviously lack the common courtesy that you wish to receive.”

But of course I didn't say any of that. What I really did, was I mumbled a sarcastic “thank you” under my breath, and then when I was safely out of earshot, I called him a dick.

Another incident with a bus driver that really made me angry happened a few years ago, I think I was probably about sixteen. I got on the bus and saw that my bus driver today was an overweight, bald man, who was probably in his forties or fifties. I asked him for a ticket, and in the most apologetic tone I could muster, I revealed to him that I would be paying with a twenty pound note. “Is that okay?” I asked shyly. “Grumble grumble grumble,” he grumbled, obnoxiously, and took my money. And as he gave me my change, he said to me, with nothing but bitterness and disdain in his voice: “get a haircut mate.”

As you can imagine I was slightly taken aback by this comment. I said, “with all due respect Mr. Bus Driver, but I don't really think it's your place to give such advice. Now there are two main reasons why it is not your place to tell me to get a haircut. Reason number one: you are my bus driver, and therefore not one of the select group of people who are allowed to tell me to get a haircut. Those people are my Mother, my Girlfriend and my hairdresser (and even then, when my hairdresser tells me to get a haircut I do usually assume that their comments are motivated by self-interest more than they are motivated by a general desire to see me have nice hair).

“The second reason why it is not your place to tell me to get a haircut,” I said, “is because you have no hair, and as a result, you are not adequately equipped to give hairdressing advice to anyone, unless you are standing in an American military training base, a Buddhist monastery, or a convention for Neo-Nazis.”

But of course I didn't say any of that. What I really did, was I mumbled a sarcastic “thank you” under my breath, and when I was safely out of earshot, I called him a dick.

The most recent incident that made me hate bus drivers even more happened when I came to Warwick University and I got on the number 12 bus for the first time. Now as you may or may not know, the number 12 bus runs between Coventry and Leamington Spa, and you have to put your money in this little box, and you don't receive any change. I didn't know at the time that you don't receive any change, so I got on the bus at Coventry station and asked him how much it was for a single to Warwick campus, and he said it was £1.60, so I foolishly thought I would just put £2 into the box and get 40p change, as thirteen years of studying maths would have me to believe. But no, the box took my change, and the driver dispensed my ticket, and I said “can I have my change please.” He just looked at me straight in the eyes, and shook his head from side to side (the conventionally accepted head gesture for 'negative'). In order to clarify the situation, I said “oh, do I not get any change? I didn't realise that was the case, being new to the area. I don't suppose on this occasion I could have my money back?”And this time he didn't shake his head, but he pointed to a sign above his head that said “our drivers have the right to work in an environment free from intimidation,” and he started the bus and drove on in silence.

Now, I don't know what it was about me that made him feel intimidated. But I took that message as a challenge, so I smashed through the plastic barrier with my face, ripped him head-first through the shattered pane, threw him on the floor and started stamping on his head, shouting “GIVE ME MY 40P CHANGE, YOU CUNT. GIVE ME MY CHANGE. YOU THINK YOU CAN TAKE 40P FROM UNWILLING CUSTOMERS THAT ARE NEW TO THE COVENTRY AREA. IT'S NOT FAIR. TWO POUNDS MINUS ONE POUND SIXTY IS 40P. I DID A-LEVEL MATHS, IT'S NOT NOTHING, IT'S 40P. I HATE YOU. I WILL KILL YOU. I WILL KILL YOU, AND THEN I WILL FIND OUT WHERE YOU LIVE, AND THEN I WILL KILL YOUR MOURNING FAMILY, IF YOU DO NOT GIVE ME MY 40P CHANGE.”

But of course I didn't do that. What I really did, was I mumbled a sarcastic “thank you” under my breath, and when I was safely out of earshot, I called him a dick.

Biscuits for breakfast

Ever since I started a comedy blog, everyone has been asking me what I have for breakfast. I thought I would clear up everybody's concerns once and for all today.

Every day in the morning I have Nestle's Cookie Crisp for breakfast, and it is amazing. It tastes so good because it's basically just biscuits. I get to have biscuits every day for breakfast now, because I'm at university now. THAT'S RIGHT MUM. YOU CAN'T CONTROL MY BREAKFAST CHOICES ANY MORE NOW MUM. I'M HAVING BISCUITS FOR BREAKFAST NOW I'M A BIG BOY AT UNIVERSITY. I'VE GONE OFF THE RAILS MUM. I'M USING WHOLE FAT MILK ON MY BISCUITS TOO! NONE OF THAT SKIMMED SHIT. I'M HAVING BISUITS FOR BREAKFAST! WHOLE FAT MILK! EVERY DAY! I'VE GONE OFF THE RAILS MUM. IMAGINE SOME RAILS. GET A CLEAR IMAGE OF SOME RAILS IN YOUR HEAD. DO YOU SEE ME ON THOSE RAILS? NO. NO YOU DON'T. I USED TO BE ON THE RAILS, BUT THEN I STARTED HAVING BISCUITS FOR BREAKFAST, AND NOW I AM NO LONGER ON SAID RAILS. YOU CAN'T HOLD ME BACK ANYMORE MUM. I'LL HAVE WHAT I WANT FOR BREAKFAST NOW AND I WANT COOKIE CRISP. SOMETIMES I HAVE A BOWL BEFORE BED. IT'S SO DETRIMENTAL TO MY HEALTH. I'VE GONE OFF THE RAILS MUM. IT'S A SLIPPERY SLOPE. TODAY I'M HAVING BISCUITS FOR BREAKFAST AND TOMORROW I'M INJECTING HEROIN INTO MY GROIN BENEATH A SLIDE IN A CHILDREN'S PLAY AREA. I'VE GONE OFF THE RAILS.

But I didn't start this blog post in order to imagine a satirical dialogue with my mother. I started this post today because my box of Cookie Crisp cereal challenges me ethically and emotionally. Now, let's take a look at this box:

Only a wolf with two spoons can adequately tackle the sensory onslaught that is Cookie Crisp.

You've got the wolf there, licking his lips. I bet he's licking his lips, they taste fucking good. Perfectly reasonable front of a box here. Then, turn this box around, and look at this ludicrous side of cardboard:

Okay so here's the thing: I don't actually know how to transfer a photo from my phone to my laptop (that's right I did genuinely take a picture of the back of my Cookie Crisp box in order to demonstrate the follow point.) Now I've just had to recreate the image on Paint. Luckily I have a decade of Paint experience, and I feel I have effectively portrayed the essence of Cookie Crisp. Anyway, you should probably have ignored this and just started reading the next paragraph, because now it isn't going to flow, is it?

Here is where the good people of Nestle somehow try to claim that eating biscuits, chocolate chip biscuits, for breakfast, every day, is in some way healthy. You've got the pictures there, of cookie crisp cereal, and other things that you could have breakfast, and you've got the nutritional information, and the claim that the good, child-fattening, artery clogging people at Nestle are making is that they are somehow healthier than your average breakfast choice. But look, look what they are comparing it too. Okay on the one side you've got jam, margarine and white toast. Lots of people have that breakfast every day. Your being a bit liberal there having both margarine AND jam, but hey, your at university now, fuck it, you can have margarine with your jam.

I'll give you that one Nestle, but look. Look at the other common breakfast choice that they choose to use to demonstrate their point. Crumpets with a shit load of margerine. Crumpets and margerine, that common daily breakfast choice. Let's take a closer look at crumpets (because why not, they're delicious):

Hardly the fruit salad of the breakfast world (which is a fruit salad, obviously).

You thought Cookie Crisp was bad for you didn't you? Well, oh no... you idiot, because Cookie Crisp is better for you than crumpets and margarine. So you don't need to feel guilty about having biscuits for breakfast, because if instead, you were going to have crumpets and a shit-load of margarine, like you usually do every day for breakfast, and like other people always do when they aren't busy downing pints of marshmallows, if you had crumpets and margarine, that would have been worse for you according to the arbitrarily selected hierarchy of nutrients that Nestle values. Marginally worse for you.

Forgive me for being facetious, but it feels a bit like MacDonalds saying “our big Macs are healthy. Look, bear with us. If you took the apparatus of a chocolate fountain, and replaced the chocolate with melted lard, pure melted lard, and you used this apparatus to make a lard fountain, and instead of dipping in strawberries, you dip in rashers of bacon, glazed with bull semen, if you had that for lunch, like you normally did, instead of a Big Mac, then that would be, using the arbitrary hierarchy of nutrients that we have selected, that would be less healthy, than one of our big macs. These are the facts. You can't argue with the facts.”

The amount of times I've been outside MacDonalds with a friend, and I've gone, “hey do you want to get a Big Mac, they sure are tasty,” and my friend goes, “I don't know, what about that new place down there that does that thing with the lard fountain, and the rashers of bacon, with the bull semen,” and I go, “oh that does sound equally appetizing, but I wonder which one is more nutritionally beneficial to my diet,” and my friend goes “I don't know. Neither of us knows which one of the two choices of lunch that we usually have all the time is more nutritionally beneficial. If only the company producing the healthier of the two options could put up a sign, with pictures, detailing the arbitrarily selected nutritional values of both lunch choices, then we would have all the information at hand, and we could then choose, with ease, the healthier of the two options.” and I go, “yeah, that would be great, ever since Nestle did that on Cookie Crisp cereal I have stopped eating crumpets and margarine for breakfast every day.

So I got a bit distracted there and I went off on an irrelevant tangent in response to that innocent and imaginary question about my breakfast preferences. I've been thinking about doing angsty, self-referential OUTroductions rather than the conventional introductions, just to mix things up a bit. But I guess the point of the introduction is to act as comedic foreplay for that hilarious sex we just had. Then usually I would end with a joke or a pleasing turn of phrase that puts an end to the blog post in a nice and satisfying manner. By ending on a weak note that rambles into nothingness I'm only really going to evoke dissatisfaction and unease, which really, if we're going to continue that analogy I started earlier about comedy blog posts being like sex, then this may well be the purest, most true self-reference of them all.

Mumble mumble mumble. Mumble mumble mumble. The end.

Save our homosexual alpha-males from severe depression

So this is my first blog post in quite a long time. I seem to have overdone the hilarity when I started blogging a few weeks ago and the Idea Well has hitherto run dry. I actually tried my hand at a bit of stand-up in a café a few days ago, where I essentially verbalised my Cressida Dick material to an audience that was basically just my friends and a Big Issue man (to his disappointment my routine skimmed over the big issues for the sake of dick jokes. He was irate and called me an 'inane philistine,' before pissing in the milk jug).

Anyway, I have noticed that I have somehow developed some sort of fan-base in Russia, oh the wonders of random internet self-promotion. I say fan-base, I've had about six views from there, but for me that's a lot. So, this ones goes out to my homies in Russia. If you aren't Russian, I'm sure you can still manage to derive some sort of enjoyment out of this post that actually has nothing to do with Russia whatsoever.

Okay, so if you don't know me, and you don't spend all day drooling over me/stalking my Facebook pictures, here is a picture of me:

That's me in the middle next to the Asian man, being molested.

I want you to look at me. Specifically my body. I want you to look at my body. Now, I am a man of a petite frame. So much so that saying the word man in relation to myself feels a bit ridiculous. I'm at that awkward stage really where I am technically old enough to call myself a man, and on legal documents, or if I was horrifically murdered and I was on the news, I would be referred to as a nineteen-year-old man. However I tragically have the frail frame of a boy. A starving, pre-pubescent boy. And having the frame of a starving pre-pubescent boy, I hate every man that does not have the frame of a starving pre-pubescent boy. I mean I really, really hate them.

Don't get me wrong, there is definitely no question of jealousy here. No, put those foul thoughts aside.

What I hate most about them is that they go to the gym. Now, I have never been to a gym (as you may be able to tell), but it just seems to me the most despicable place. I mean, people go there, they lift up heavy objects with their stupidly big arms. Then they run on the conveyor belt of solitude and they cycle on the bicycle of loneliness, it's all utterly ridiculous. They don't even go anywhere, they just run or cycle on the same spot until, satisfied with their failure to move anywhere, and exhausted by their lack of progress, they get off and drive home. Why can't they see that if they just get off the conveyor belt and walk around it they can actually beat the machine?

So while I was vociferating these thoughts of mine to anyone that would listen, someone told me that the purpose of these machines is to simulate the process of running or cycling in a confined environment in order to exert oneself physically in a way that can be artificially controlled. Then I said “I know, I was merely feigning idiocy and being satirical in order to belittle your attempts to better yourself.” Then they said that pretending not to know things that are incredibly obvious is one of the lowest and least amusing forms of comedy, and I said “I know, but I was hoping I could get at least a paragraph or two out of it for a comedic blog post on the internet.”

I don't have many friends.

In truth it's not the running or the cycling that angers me about gyms, it is mainly the men lifting heavy things in a repetitive and monotonous fashion. Who does this? Why? So that you can gradually lift heavier and heavier items until you can one day lift up a small boat or a grand piano or something? Or is it about trying to sculpt your body into something that is appealing to women and (more importantly) gay men?

Okay, so I accept that women are attracted to the body shapes that men try to carve themselves into in gyms. But, and call me crazy (as nobody ever has ever; “distinctly average” or “with a reasonably amiable personality, I suppose,” but never crazy), is there not something about muscular men, wearing very few clothes, lifting heavy things and watching other men lift heavy things as they grunt passionately, that resembles the activities of homosexuals? And when they all get changed together, tacitly comparing bodies with the other men, is there not something inherently gay about that?

Now, I'm not saying that every man that ever lifts weights in the gym is gay. No no no no no.

But... that does happen to be exactly what I think.

And I don't say this out of jealousy, but because I think it is simply unfair that these muscular men are forced to have sex with beautiful women all the time. It must be so difficult for them, being gay, but having to sleep with women that are so attractive that they don't even resemble men in the slightest. They are too insecure to accept their sexuality and pursue erotic relationships with other men (which they definitely want to do). Instead they try to go for those women that are a bit on the manly side, maybe with a mono-brow or with a really wide jaw in order to try and imagine that they are men when they have sex with them, but these masculine women are far too intimidated by the flawless physical appearances of the pursuing men that they run a mile when approached like pigeons being chased by a toddler.

Beautiful women: it is just unfair to have sex with these stunningly attractive gay men. Do you have any idea what you are putting them through? You are forcing them to have sex with your despicably feminine and slender bodies, when all the time they are wishing you were a man. They may pretend to like it, but they secretly hate it. I fear a continuation of this demonic and cruel ritual will only lead to depression and possibly (definitely) suicide among these men. So please, stop hurting these poor people, and boycott any sexual practices with muscular men.

And I don't say this out of jealousy. Definitely not. But if, once you have boycotted all sexual activities with muscular men (that are all secretly gay), you find yourself needing to have sex with a man with the body of a starving, pre-pubescent child (that is totally straight)... one that will not despise you for sleeping with him, and that will not suffer bouts of severe depression and excessive self-harm as a result, then I may be able to help.