When it’s on Freecycle, clearly. I yesterday advertised a rather fetching (if not to my taste) gold / blue pouffe with a “fleur de lys” pattern, which I had inherited with my rental flat. A lady called Nerys responded in the unctuous manner typical of Freecycle offering the pouffe a “lovely new home” and thanking me for my “kind consideration” (it’s apparently quite a tussle between second-hand furniture resellers to secure the best Freecycle items these days, so politeness is all) and, true to her word, she sent round her “husband” (or co-reseller of Freecycle furniture, whatever) to pick it up.

I opened the door to a strapping lad with a fairly broad Glaswegian accent, who said, slightly hesitantly: ”Erm, I’m here to pick up a… erm, footstool?” I looked at him in brief confusion, not having used the word “footstool” once in the advert or my dialogue with “Nerys”, before realising what he meant, giving him the item and sending him on his way. It was only afterwards that I realised he must have been agonising over what exactly to say when I opened the door for his entire journey over here.

To the day I die, I’ll regret not having (loudly) said something along the lines of “Ahh, you mean the Pouffe. YOU’RE HERE TO PICK UP THAT BIG POUFFE YOU E-MAILED ME ABOUT, AREN’T YOU??”

A lot has been said in the media over the last few years about excessive supermarket packaging; it’s supposedly putting up bills, leading to increased waste and damaging the environment.

But what about the bad example the so-called “environment” is setting to us humans on the issue? I bought a box of yellow-sticker-reduced physalis the other day; nice enough tasting, but each one surrounded by a totally useless not-very-degradable-looking outer leaf-thing, hundreds of thousands of which are no doubt clogging up a middle-class landfill near YOU. Similarly coconuts and pomegranates; the amount of breaking, shredding and chucking away of gubbins you have to do to achieve not much foodstuff is ridiculous. And finally, what about shark-fin soup? The fin represents less than a hundredth of the shark’s bodyweight; you have to just throw the rest of the smelly thing away.

It’s a disgrace. It’s about time nature stepped up to the plate on these matters, and stopped leaving everything to be sorted out by the long-suffering council tax payer.

Spent an interesting and entertaining evening in Hastings last night at a friend’s party; the last couple of hours of it involved a fairly pleasant conversation with a girl a) who tolerated my increasingly drunken and muddle-headed bollocks quite happily, and b) knew who Bruce Dickinson and Michael McDonald were (which enabled me to provide a musical accompaniment to said muddle-headed bollocks). During the conversation it emerged in passing that we were both single.  As I headed off for my customary early night (I tend to turn into a pumpkin at midnight), her friend, who had been perched within earshot on the edge of the sofa with her other half, took me aside and said something along the lines of “I can’t BELIEVE you two didn’t exchange phone numbers! You’re both single and you’ve got SO much in common!”

Well, sofa-perching woman whose name I’ve now forgotten if I ever made any mental note of it to begin with and who I’ll never meet again - the reasons why I didn’t exchange numbers with your friend with whom I was conversing were as follows: 1) I didn’t find her in the slightest bit attractive and, despite not disliking her company, had no interest in continuing the liaison, 2) I’m extremely happy with my domestic and sexual-recreational set-up as it is currently, and 3) I already have a sufficient quota of friends. IS THAT OK? Do I venture pertinent improvement suggestions for your life such as “I can’t BELIEVE you’re having that last glass of rum punch; you seem SO drunk already”? No, I mind my own FLICKING business!

Seriously, the most annoying thing about being single is the constant assumption from anyone in a couple - even people who’ve barely met you - that you must inevitably be unhappy / unfulfilled / desperate. And obviously, the angrier and more unreasonable I get about it (as demonstrated in this post), the more these people assume that the elevated level of my protestation is solely down to the frustration and desperation of my singleness.

GAAAAH!

I don’t understand; why is everyone getting so excited about a delegation from an online money-transfer company visiting the UK? (I assume that’s what they mean by the Paypal visit to Britain…)

Guffaw. No, seriously - Benedict XVI, His Holiness the Pope, Defender of Paedophiles and Mighty Scourge of Birth Control in Africa is coming to a town near YOU. (And YOU’RE paying for it, despite the untold wealth of the Roman Catholic Church.) Hurrah!

The radio and television waves have been abuzz with unctuous priests smoothing the way for Big Ben and reassuring everyone that modern Catholicism is open and tolerant (apart from the odd one) - but what do YOU think about the visit? Surely it’s good news that such a high representative of God’s bountiful and endless love is here to bless our country (apart from gays, of course)? Time for some pope ‘n’ poll…

In 1973, esteemed director Monte Hellman decided to film a classic, modern-dystopian-Americana tale of the existential angst of a drifting loner, and, using the medium of the controversial “sport” of cock-fighting (still legal in Georgia at the time) as his subject material, he succeeded in garnering critical acclaim. The one problem? The tagline. For some reason, the film’s promoters went with the following:

“He came into town with his cock in hand, and what he did with it was illegal in 49 states.”

Not helpful. Still, when it comes to subject matter for a film, cocks are famously hard to grasp,  but by all accounts the director managed to pull it off.  (Etc…)

Asil Nadir was in court today; the judge specified that he would charged with theft, and complicity in the cricket spot-fixing scandal. Nadir complained; “But the spot-fixing scandal’s got nothing to do with me!” - and the judge looked at his notes and replied, “Oh, sorry, my mistake; that’s next week’s trial. On spot-fixing, you’re in the clear Asil…”

Oh dear. I have just deleted the entire contents of my Humax PVR hard drive, mostly consisting of about 40 hours of worthy documentaries which I’d recorded and hadn’t got round to watching (despite being totally up-to-date on episodes - and repeated episodes - of “Family Guy”), dating back to February of this year, by mistake. On reflection, this is probably a good thing for my social life, although it’s certainly the last time I’ll approach the word “format” with such gay abandon.

Seriously, “format hard drive”? Surely that means “compress into a new tidy, manageable, streamlined manifestation” rather than “delete every single fucking programme you’ve recorded in the last year”? Surely any normal human (or even Humax) would go with an “erase”, “clear”, or even more Dr Who-y “delete” or even “exterminate” hard drive?

Oh well, I’ll just have to wait for “Effects of Global Warming, Capitalism and Misogyny on the Indigenous Walrus People of Upper Yerbumholia” to come out on DVD.