This Isn’t What I’d Usually Post On Here

Occasionally, I feel like the last person left on the planet. Like a dinosaur. Do you remember how, when you were young, you couldn’t understand that your parents didn’t laugh at the same things as you, or like the same sort of music as you, or eat the same food as you? As the years pass, you come to realise that you have more in common with them than you might have thought, and this is a good thing. However, it doesn’t always feel quite as good.

I am a smoker. There. I said it. It’s not like it’s a difficult thing to say (as anyone that has spent more than half an hour with me will be able to attest to readily), but somehow it is now. I am now the last of the people that I see regularly (I wouldn’t say “of my friends”, because that wouldn’t be true) that smokes. And it’s lonely. It feels it already, and I haven’t even seen any of them yet. And it’s going to get much more difficult before it gets better.  The social side of it vanished during the summer, when the smoking ban was introduced. With an addiction, though, it’s not as easy as, “oh, I’ll just sit in the pub and not smoke”, though. You have to go outside and stand on the street to smoke. But I was never the only one. And now I feel like I am.

Just needed to get that off my chest.

When Dragondude Met Gordon Ramsey

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of having Gordon Ramsey over to my flat as part of my new TV series, ‘Making You Look Like A Cunt Because You Don‘t Know How To Do Something That I Know How To Do‘. He is already well known as a celebrity chef, but could he cut the fucking mustard as a fucking DJ?

His first mistake was turning up exactly on time at my flat as arranged at ten o’clock. He banged on my flat door for more than twenty minutes, before finally rousing me from my dopey torpor on the sofa by kicking it off its hinges. I awoke to find him standing bare-chested over me, angling his middle-aged body underneath the bare light bulb, which was casting a moody shadow across his paunch.

‘What the fuck do you think you are doing?”, I demanded. My mind was still not clear and this allowed me to deliver a stream of poorly constructed swearwords loosely based on a number of cue cards that an assistant was holding up for me just out of sight of the TV cameras. ‘You will never fucking make it as a DJ if you shitting turn up promptly you fucking cock-turd. You are like a pissing wank-sock-pant-pissing Sunday school ma’am, not a show stopping International DJ Gigolo’. Before he could respond I sent him immediately to the kitchen to make us both a pint of gin and tonic and busied myself with turning on the sound system in my living room. Thankfully, his skills in the kitchen paid dividends and he returned with two of the finest G&Ts I had ever seen. I gulped greedily at mine and gestured that he make his way to the turntables.

I explained that I wanted to hear him play what he thought was good music and play it in an interesting way. I asked him to imagine that he was playing at Pacha in Ibiza, that it was three in the morning, and that he had a packed club of 6,000 gurning clubbers hanging on his every move. Ramsey dithered with his hands hovering over the 350-odd 12″ records in front of the decks. I could see already that he was completely out of his depth. I let him take his time slurping thirstily on my gin, waiting until he had made his selection.

When he was ready he turned and grinned idiotically at me, whilst looking expectantly at the decks. I winced as he placed the first platter on the deck as if he were placing a new tile on a bathroom floor. By the time he had put on the headphones (back to front) and got the second record ready I was losing the will to live. He stabbed wildly and impotently at all the controls on both the mixer and the turntables, often sending the needle skidding angrily across the vinyl. He had no idea what he was doing – the amateur. The sound coming from my speakers sounded like two joyriders with their stereos on, repeatedly smashing stolen Renault Clios into each other in a fairground car park.

I got up, slowly drained the remainder of my drink, and walked over to where he was grunting over the turntables. I could take no more. Drawing myself up to my full height I knocked the headphones off his head and shoved him against the wall. ‘What the fuck are you trying to do?’, I screamed at him.’Remember when I said that you should imagine that you are in a nightclub in Ibiza? This sounds more like reveille in Guantanamo Bay! If this is what you want to listen to when you have a good time then I fucking feel sorry for your fucking wife when you are trying to fuck her.’. He gestured limply at the records and the mixer. ‘SPEAK THEN!’ I howled, my face inches from his. ‘The records…’, he started to mumble, still waving his limp hand over the controls before trailing off into inaudible misery. ‘The records?’, I hissed, ‘THE RECORDS? If what happens when you cook is the same as what happens when you try to entertain a room full of clubbers I am surprised that you have not been bankrupted and beaten soundly by gangs of vomiting restaurant customers!’.

(Continues in this vein for several pages…)