27th Birthday

In last year's birthday post I embarked upon a prodigiously depressive diatribe about how my life had become the equivalent of Apollo Creed's ill-fated comeback fight in Rocky IV, a harrowing and dishearteningly pathetic beatdown by glistening, puissant forces, and how I hoped that my 27th year might more closely resemble Rocky's eventual avenging triumph.

Well, shit, like Rocky IV I guess I would rate the last year a 6/10 (though sadly it was 63% less homoerotic). 

MY BOOK IS GETTING PUBLISHED. It is called 'Panther', it is out in May 2015, and if you don't each buy 10 copies upon release you will be doomed to interminable lugubrious blog posts about my dazzling failure as an author. Here is my author website, where you can find more information about the book of which you are soon to own 10 copies.

I went to South Korea to visit friends, where I discovered that quite literally everything in the ocean is edible if you want it to be, I wasn't shot by and/or exploded by North Koreans, and I drank the best damn milkshake of my life. I was also ignored by many cats.

I am seeing a girl who inexplicably finds me charming and attractive. At time of writing she hasn't realised her mistake.

I was shortlisted 3 times for the Games Journalism Prize. I didn't win. 

My face became host to what critics have hailed as 'a spectacular return to repugnant squalor.' In my infinite unemployed wisdom I set aside a couple of months to nurture a depression beard of the very highest calibre and, you'll be pleased to hear, documented its progress in selfies. Ladies and gentlemen, please be sure you have ready access to a change of underwear before you view the following photograph.

Of course, this being me, the year has also had its fair share of troughs. In May I reached the lowest point of my life and found myself, in a roundabout rather than resolute way, contemplating suicide. The reasons behind that persist - self-hatred, joblessness, the ever-presence of my gargantuan head - but, for now at least, I'm doing okay. 

So, here's to my 28th year, which will see the publication of my book, the flat indifference of critics and the UK's reading public, the bank's foreclosure on my brand new helicopter, my descent into Haagen Dazs and coprophagia addiction, and the eventual discovery of my bloated corpse beached in the bathtub with cats feasting on pickled rinds of my flesh.

BUY MY BOOK.

The Guilt of Happiness

Perhaps the strangest thing about depression is how it makes you feel guilty for being happy. Escape the clutches of depression for any length of time and its spectre will stand in the corner of your eye, tapping its foot and tutting disapprovingly.

Depression is the wife/girlfriend character from any Adam Sandler film.

I’m currently having a good spell following a lengthy funk. A bunch of good stuff has happened and it promises to continue into the summer. And I realised that I was embarrassed to talk or write about it. It feels as if so much of my character is predicated on being miserable that I’m ashamed to be anything but.

Depression makes me feel like I don’t deserve to be happy. Arguably its most dangerous weapon is how it convinces me that any morsel of happiness I achieve will undoubtedly slip through my fingers like so much sand. As soon as good things happen I anticipate their demise.

My book is getting published! (It will fail).

My friends are back from the other side of the world! (Soon they won’t need you anymore).

A girl wasn’t repulsed by me! (She’ll come to her senses soon enough).

Eating that cake was a great idea! (Don't look in the mirror).

Looking back, I can see how this attitude has caused me to sabotage good things. If it’s going to crumble anyway, I might as well make it happen sooner rather than later, right? All too often on this blog I play the victim, but for every perceived injustice against me there is a failure for which I alone am responsible.

I’m scared that if I continue along this road I will eventually put up a shield from which happiness will bounce like the cheque I wrote to buy that helicopter. I’m scared that I will never allow myself to be happy.

I can't let this be my fate.

So here I am, on my blog commonly dedicated to romantic failure, narcissistically miserable diatribes, cringe-worthy social awkwardness, and pictures of ugly cats, to tell you that, for now at least, I am quite happy. Maybe it won’t last. But right now it is a good thing.

My Book Has A Cover

You can file this one under 'shameless plug.' PANTHER, my debut novel, now has a cover. Here it is!

The cover is designed by Jon Gray, who is a veteran of designing amazing covers for many venerable books. My book is almost certainly the least venerable of them. But I don't care, because look at the cover! It's lovely! And beautifully evocative of what the book is about.

While I'm in plugging mode, I might as well say that the book might be of interest to some of you who read this blog - it deals with depression and the stigmas that surround it in a way that I hope is genuine and poignant, as well as funny. It's sad but not sentimental, and I've packed in as many jokes as I reasonably can. Here is a shameless blurb:

Panther tells the story of Derrick, whose family is being torn apart by his sister’s depression and her recent suicide attempt. When rumours start to circulate that a panther is roaming wild in his south London suburb, Derrick decides to try and capture it. Surely if he can just find a way to tame the panther, he’ll be able to put his life back together too?

Panther is a funny, touching, and occasionally unsettling coming-of-age story, which deals candidly with the stigmas and misunderstandings surrounding depression.

It's not out for a little while: May 21st, 2015. I may start banging on about it quite a bit before then. I may also start screaming 'BUY IT' at people in the street. I'll let you know as this develops.

Job Hunting Demotivators

I have been unemployed now for what science refers to as 'quite some time.' During this extended period of mid-afternoon nudity and naps I have applied for many hundreds of jobs (I stopped keeping track when the official tally became too lengthy to manage). This mostly involves sending email. In the process of sending applications, enquiries, etc. I often require something from my old computer. The easiest way to get them is to email myself with an attachment.

It began as a few words to simply occupy the body of the email. But anyone who has ever been engaged in a prolonged job hunt knows it is rarely a happy process.

One of the worst parts of job hunting is having to spend a great deal of time on an application that you know will come to nothing. You have to try - there are only so many days you can wile away singing the Game of Thrones theme to the cat - but the certainty of failure looms large.

Soon I was writing emails to myself that didn't even contain attachments. They served only to break up the inexorable tedium of bullshitting cover letters, and made the dearth of replies seem slightly less absolute. For a while, they were even vaguely positive.

It wasn't long before this soupcon of optimism became a trickle of bile, a leaky catheter staining the trousers of hope and decency.

Job hunting cuts the Achilles tendon of your self-esteem, writes your every regret large across your mind, and forces you to panic about every penny you spend, despite your propensity to hypocritically spunk everything you own on ice cream because you're miserable and at least diabetes will give you something to do. 

People will tell you to keep trying. I don't disagree with that advice. But in the festering abyss of the job market, nothing is more exasperating than the false cheer and vacuous enthusiasm of the gainfully employed. 

So I give you unemployment demotivators instead. Give up! Eat ice cream! Watch pornography in the morning! After all, it's a lot more fun than applying for jobs.

Rubicon

This morning I thought very seriously about jumping in front of a train.

I was on my way into London for the incredibly crappy temp job I'm currently working. While I was waiting for the train I found myself working out the best place to jump to ensure I would be smeared emphatically into hairy pate. The ideal spot on the platform where I wouldn't arouse suspicion in the interim.

Then I went and stood there.

I didn't intend to actually do it. I have often idly contemplated suicide, but generally lack the constitution for it. This time, as the rails hissed and the train rounded the corner, I felt in my body the momentum that would pitch me over and take everything else out of my control. It was alarmingly vivid. I could practically feel myself going.

Needless to say I stood my ground, boarded the train, and went about my day as usual. But I've been unable to forget the sensation that gripped me on the platform. I have not been able to stop my hands from shaking.

Where did it all go wrong?

As the beleaguered regular readers of this blog will know, I'm hardly one to bang on about my current mire of depression and my blighted lot in life. So here is a swift summary: 26 years old, jobless (basically), sexless (my current dry spell is coming up on 2 years), riddled with depression, living with my mum, and the owner of a preposterously over-sized head. As a youngster I never had terribly high hopes for the future, but I never thought I would find myself watching the oncoming front of a train quite so greedily.

I often wonder if I could pinpoint a single moment of my past where it all went pear-shaped. Was it during the late '90s when I ate the equivalent of Guatemala's GDP in junk food? Could it have been one of the many squandered romantic opportunities of university? Maybe it happened when I decided to grow my hair and wear tie-dye. Should I not have built this blog on an ancient Indian burial ground?

I can't help but wonder if I am still paying off the ransom of past mistakes. I have tried what feels incredibly hard in the last year or so to improve my situation. Nothing has worked, and a profound sense of hopelessness has set in. Maybe my current failures are easier to take if I believe myself to be doomed by history. Or maybe it is simply my self-hatred going ever deeper.

Tomorrow it will all begin again. I will wake up and force myself to get dressed for this crappy temp job. I will walk to the station and I will wait for the train. As it approaches I will try to believe that there must be a better way for me to escape this mire.

Big Bush

For as long as I can remember (and therefore forever) there has been a big bush at the front of my house. Whenever I have had to give people directions to my house, I have instructed them to look out for the big bush and its ever-changing collection of dog faeces.

It started life as a rosemary bush. A single touch would make you smell indelibly of a potpourri pot. Unfortunately time allowed ivy, ever the Amazon.com of nature, to stage an aggressive takeover that sapped it of all that made it great. In recent years it has been little more than an untameable afro of ivy and fox urine.

This week we are having our drive done. The big bush is dead. Long live the big bush.

Here are some largely uninteresting memories of the big bush:

As a child I took great pride in being the weirdest kid in school. It was an affectation I worked hard to maintain. I went so far as to give my neighbourhood friends ‘mental lessons.’ These invariably culminated in an offensive approximation of disability and a headlong dive into the big bush. Mental.

If I couldn’t be bothered to go inside I would stand on the street and urinate into the bush. I thought of it as marking my territory. The big bush would return the favour: the merest contact made my penis smell of rosemary for numerous hours afterward.

A common theme of my childhood was being hopeless at everything. I trailed even the most basic of my peers’ accomplishments by several years. This included learning to ride a bike. While my friends were zipping about on BMXs I was still safely coddled by stabilisers. One evening I came home to find that my mother had removed and disposed of them. It was an ultimatum. I went straight outside to prove everybody wrong. Many hours and six painful falls into the big bush later, my skin torn to ribbons and covered in dog piss, I had learned to ride a bike.

Over the course of my life the big bush has been the hiding place of vodka, wine, orange squash, eggs, brownies, Doritos, assorted sweets, broken plates, newspapers, pornography, money, myself, and my fragile sense of self-esteem.

Godspeed, big bush.

Nose Problems

My nose is rubbish.

It bleeds like a plague of Egypt, chokes off my breathing if I ever dare lie on my back, and once brought a premature end to guaranteed sex.

My nose is rubbish.

This is why Voldemort got rid of his.

It used to bleed so profusely that it would fill a cereal bowl to the brim (with the cereal still in it), an unsavoury alternative to milk. The blood clots that would squeeze themselves out were like engorged ticks. In hot weather my face was like a game of Buckaroo; the slightest touch or sudden movement would set it off. My sister quickly picked up on this and took gleeful advantage: on a coach to France, in church, in the two-hour line for a rollercoaster, prompting tourists to wrench my head in whatever direction they believed would stem the tide.

When it became too much I was taken to a doctor. He donned inch-thick safety goggles and murmured ruminatively as he gingerly inserted an apothecary’s-worth of creams and ointments into my nostrils.

Actual picture.

It worked, a little. These days my nose has a weekly menstruation cycle, with daily spotting to remind me of its potential for devastation. More of a problem now is the tides of snot it produces if I dare step outside, and how it bungs up like a Russian road blockade whenever I lie down. The nasal spray I use to alleviate the issue insists it not be used for more than 4 weeks straight. I’ve been squirting it up there for 14 years.

What's the worst that can happen?

My nose’s most nefarious crime was its jealous destruction of a promising relationship. I had stayed the night with a girl I was seeing, too tired after a late cinema trip to attempt anything too vigorous that evening. There would be plenty of time in the morning.

When I woke up I felt instantly that tendrils of illness had claimed me overnight. My head was pounding, my chest felt heavy, and my nose had battened down the hatches. But because I am an irresistible specimen of the male species she was not to be deterred.

Who could resist someone who looks this good in the morning?

The problem was that, with my nose having closed its borders, kissing made it terribly hard to breathe. I had to pause every few seconds to take a lungful of air, giving the impression that I possessed the stamina of an asthmatic discus thrower.

‘Give me a second,’ I said, rolling away and plucking a tissue from the bedside table.

I blew my nose as hard as I could. It spewed gouts of thick orange slime like viscous Fanta. It was to be the only ejaculation I achieved that morning.

I arranged the tissue into a hobo’s bindle of luminous sputum and flung it at the bin. It missed, and fell open on the carpet.

I ignored the look of disgust on her face and tried to resume where we had left off. As I leaned in towards her I took a breath, and my nose made a noise like a micro-pig caught in a lawnmower. She caught me by the shoulders and pushed me forcibly away.

‘I’ve just remembered I need to meet someone,’ she said, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed.

It was almost certainly a lie. But soon afterwards she met another guy.

My nose is rubbish.

Saudade

I was recently introduced to the Portuguese word saudade (I am reliably informed that the ‘de’ at the end is pronounced more like ‘je’). It doesn’t have a direct translation in English. To butcher the elegant translation given to me (and to pilfer from Wikipedia), saudade describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic or melancholic longing for things or people that have been loved and lost.

Although the word is new to me, it’s a feeling with which I am intimately familiar. I am a slave to melancholic nostalgia.

I miss going to my Grandma’s house. I would spend an entire summer kicking an air floater football against the garage, smashing Hot Wheels cars against each other on Grandma’s footrest (which she unfortunately called her ‘poof’), accidentally mashing orange silly putty into the carpet, eating Special K for breakfast every morning. I miss creeping out of bed to sit on the landing in the dark and listen to the TV downstairs, sneaking into Grandma’s room with its lurid pink carpet. Those summers were so solitary, but I was so content.

I miss falling hopelessly in love with women who didn’t reciprocate, the intensity of that pain and longing. I miss gripping my phone and begging it to ring, reading more in every text message than was ever present, thinking of her as soon as I woke up every morning. I miss being the kind of person who would get up at 5am just to walk with her to catch her bus, pretending that I had been awake anyway. I miss writing poorly conceived love poetry.

I miss the sense of possibility.

I miss my friends. I long for the time before they moved off around the country, around the world, got married, had kids. I hate that I am becoming less important in their lives. I miss playing Guitar Hero before it was cool, meeting for impromptu evening walks, competing at ping pong in a cramped garage, writing 15-minute songs about Arnold Schwarzenegger, putting our pictures on Hot or Not (my highest ever average was a 5.5/10). It feels like they have left me behind.

Saudade is beautiful, but it is also painful and irrational. I know that I can’t have that time again. It has slipped through my fingers like grains of sand.

For all my best attempts to foster new memories in the present, it feels like my life has fatally stalled. Nostalgia rules me because now feels so much worse than then. In those memories there is joy, and hurt, and curiosity. These days I am empty; an ambulatory chalice for things past.

I miss hope. I miss excitement. I miss love. Saudade is a lifeline to all of those feelings of which I used to have in abundance, and have since lost.

Saudade is a bitch.

My First Story

I've just stumbled upon one of the first stories I ever wrote. It had escaped being thrown away by sliding down the side of a bookshelf. I must have been 9-10 years old when I wrote it and, given that I now call myself a professional writer, I think it's interesting to share it. I shall reproduce it in its entirety below - all spelling, grammatical, and formatting oddities are very much [sic].

WHEN MY BUM WAS BITTEN

By David Owen

Hello, I am a BOFF JOB called Robert and I am a nerd. One day I was walking down the road when a dog with the black plague jumped out of a dustbin and bit me on the bottom. " You binraider " I screamed but the dog had jumped in a pile of horse manure so I couldn't put it in a paper shredder. I walked back home but I went mental and killed my parents with my sock that has not been washed for 2 years. My bum throbbed so I licked it. I ran to the Hospital and jumped on a dead body and threw it out of the bed. It landed in a paper shredder. The next second shredds of skin were flying everywhere. A few went down my throat and I swallowed them. My bum was so swollen that my pants and trousers ripped so everyone could see my private parts. I screamed several swear words then ran into the toilets and wrapped myself in toilet paper. I had a heart attack 6 times but each time it only lasted 2 seconds. I killed a nurse every day and put them in a paper shredder. I played bouncing the Nurses head with the ceiling until I died. When I died everybody screamed " YES ". They screamed so loud that the hospital collasped. 

THE END.

This is not the first story that I ever wrote - I distinctly remember writing about a band of vigilante hamsters that battled a sunglasses-wearing carrot. But this story, if I remember correctly, marked the beginning of my writing with serious intent. From here I continued to write nonsense and continue to do so today.

I must have shown this to my mum, and it's testament to her as a parent that she likely didn't bat an eyelid. It's a clear attempt by a 9 year old to be as risque as his pre-pubescent mind can manage. Perhaps most worrying is that my sense of humour has hardly matured.

I wonder what my 9 year old self would say if I told him that I was soon to be a published author with a book about SERIOUS ISSUES. He would probably call me a boff job and a nerd.

He would be right.

Hot Teachers

When you spend the duration of puberty at an all boy’s school, an attractive teacher feels like a lifebuoy descending from a helicopter to pluck you from a tumultuous sea of dicks. It would also turn every single pupil within a twenty foot radius into a blundering idiot. A school comprised entirely of sexually frustrated teenage males was hardly the ideal environment to hone romantic ability and, these alluring teachers being our only chance to practice, attempts to work our magic tended to go altogether poorly.

Sting knows what I'm talking about.

The teacher that engorged our imaginations the most was unwisely assigned to orchestrate Biology just as the textbook arrived at sexual education. She was young and in possession of generous mammalian protuberances that resulted in the frequent hiding of swollen laps. The entire class would engage in daring flirtatious games such as pushing our pens off the table when she was nearby and jockeying for view, or calling her over to assist us in our work and sliding our hands across the desk as she leaned over it, in the hope of making tantalising contact. It was a true game of chicken, complete with breasts.

The Biology lessons were sometimes mind-bogglingly graphic, including a video of a grotesquely hairy TV scientist depositing his man batter in extreme close up. It was almost enough to put us off the idea entirely. Almost.

‘Miss,’ said a boy who sat behind us, enthusiastically waving his hand in the air. ‘What does semen taste like?’

He was removed from the class. It seemed to be a tipping point. A few weeks later, due to what I can only assume was pent up thwarted desire, we made her cry by throwing balls of paper at her head and then locking her out of the classroom when she went in search of help. My few break-ups since have barely been more mature.

Then there was the geography teacher who, rumour had it, once had her skirt blown up in the playground by an errant gust of wind to reveal she was without underwear. Whenever she was on lunch duty a small cluster of boys perpetually lingered nearby, just in case.

An attractive French teacher, no doubt proudly exercising her English, admonished a boy for chewing gum by loudly insisting that he ‘stop masticating at the back of the room.’ For a long uproarious moment we all feared she’d somehow climbed inside our collective mind.

A special shout-out must go to the seemingly plain teacher who upset our reality by arriving on owns-clothes day in school uniform so mouth-watering to our teenage selves that we spent the entire day clustered outside her office, engaged in a game of verbal brinkmanship describing the things we’d do to her given the chance (the reality of course being shaking with terror and making a mess of our underpants).

I'd like to say it gets easier when you're older, but...

Attractive teachers were such things as dreams we made on. Whereas the idea of a male teacher acting on fawning schoolgirls was repugnant, the reverse seemed the most exquisite fantasy. We imagined how events would conspire in our favour, where we’d go to commit the deed, how we’d live in pubescent infamy. It was unflinchingly pathetic and shamefully misogynistic, and yet, in the dark ages before easily accessed internet pornography, a vital part of our stymied sexual development.

People are frequently shocked when I reveal I attended an all boys school, though with some thought I’m sure it makes sense to those who have ever seen me try to talk to a woman. It is a worthy scapegoat for my many years since of romantic indecency. Here’s to you, hot teachers.

Rut

Well, 2014 hasn’t got off to a flying start.

The current state of my depression reminds me of that period in the WWE when the Hardcore Title was in constant contention, anywhere, anytime. The holder would walk around with a constant lingering awareness of their impending downfall until the Holly family would jump out of a skip and beat them half to death with a plank of wood.

You monsters.

In real terms, this has recently manifested itself as sudden bouts of crying on train journeys. A trapdoor opens and my mood drops so rapidly I can hardly breathe. There is no discernible reason for it. There is no depression championship to take from me. If there were, I would willingly surrender it.

I am entrenched in the deepest rut of my life. I start this year jobless, single, living at home, and carrying about a stone of Christmas weight which is inexplicably not being shifted by sitting around and eating cake.

You could say the only way is up. If S Club 7 taught me anything it’s that I should reach for the stars. But it feels impossible to improve my life without getting a job. In the last year and a bit I’ve applied for over 300 jobs. That has netted me 3 interviews, all of which have resulted in failure.

Last week I interviewed for an exciting job. It was something I would love to do, and for once I was very qualified to do it. I bought a new set of interview clothes (based entirely on Jim Halpert from The US Office), spent a couple of days researching and preparing, and put every drop of energy I had during the interview into pretending that I don’t hate myself. I didn’t get the job.

Fuck you, S Club 7!

It feels like if I could get a job I would be able to move out again, afford to go and do the occasional fun thing, meet new people and make friends to do this with, maybe meet a girl. Unbelievably, girls aren’t terribly keen on unemployed 26 year olds who live with their mother. Most importantly, I wouldn’t feel so utterly worthless. I know that this is mostly wishful thinking. A job is not going to cure my depression. Nothing will. But it might be the gateway to improving my life. It has to be better than spending every day in my bedroom singing Van Der Graaf Generator songs to the cat.

The cat really hates Van Der Graaf Generator

It’s difficult to live in the total absence of hope. I feel like I’m falling apart, and I don’t know how to stop it.

I’d like to try and end this depressive ramble on a more positive note. I often feel very lonely. When I write things like this the majority of people choose to ignore it. I understand it’s not nice to read, and many will think I’m a moaner who should simply cheer up. But despite the silence that greets things like this, I have noticed a few people making indirect efforts to be supportive. I appreciate it greatly.

And to the handful of people who have been willing to talk to me directly about these things, particularly to those who just take the time to check that I’m okay, I thank you from the bottom of my shrivelled heart. It means the world.

A Media Ban on the Word 'Fat' is not the Answer

In the news today is consideration of a ban on television and other media using the word ‘fat’ to describe celebrities and other figures. Much of this stems from the actress Jennifer Lawrence, who has spoken out about some (apparently blind) sections of the media referring to her as fat.

I mean, seriously?

It’s not nice to be called fat. I can tell you that from a decade of experience. And seeing healthy celebrities who, thanks to advantages of their lifestyle, look better than most mortals being called fat isn’t nice either. It is, as this campaign rightly contends, damaging to self-esteem and a contributor to health issues such as anorexia, bulimia, and depression, particularly in young people.

But a blanket ban on the word ‘fat’ would only serve to ignore a number of other problems, and potentially make them worse.

I’m not a parent, but I often consider what I would do if my child began to become overweight. On one hand the last thing I would want to do is berate my child and give them a complex about their looks. That’s equally as harmful as exposure to this kind of media. But simply brushing weight issues under the carpet isn’t the answer either.

I gained several stone in weight between the ages of 10-11 and at no point did anyone sit me down to make me aware that it was happening, and that it might have severe ramifications in my later life.

Me in bigger times.

I lost a great deal of that weight aged 17, and a little more aged 20. I’m now 26, and my self-esteem, body image, and social skills are still catastrophically poor. I still struggle with my weight on a daily basis. Being severely overweight during those crucial formative years casts a long shadow. It would not be different if these kinds of media stigma did not exist. I would still have been unaware that it was a problem and therefore unable to address it. But it might have been different if someone had helped me to understand.

My fear is that simply pretending that being overweight does not hold the potential for harm, or that simply pretending the word ‘fat’ doesn’t exist, will only allow weight issues, and the psychological toll, to run rampant.

It’s admirable to promote positive body image. If someone, whatever their size, is happy with their body, that’s fantastic. I agree wholeheartedly that being overweight should not make you a target for derision or judgement. Undoubtedly what celebrity media considers fat is outright hurtful and unrealistic. There are very few people who wouldn’t agree that Jennifer Lawrence is a beautiful woman. But a blanket ban on the word ‘fat’ is not the answer. What it threatens to do is promote a different kind of ignorance that will only perpetuate or even exacerbate issues pertaining to weight and negative body image.

There are also other issues to consider, such as personal health, financial strain on the NHS, and, as obesity figures spiral in countries around the world, particularly in children, the possible impact on infrastructure. It can even have a negative impact on others. To use an anecdotal example, I have a family member who is a paramedic, and is frequently expected to carry people weighing 20 stone or more down flights of stairs, to the detriment of her own physical health.

It seems to me, in my limited knowledge, that the answer should lie somewhere in better education about nutrition, addressing the rampant poverty that is forcing families to rely on cheap, unhealthy food to survive, and providing better support to help overweight people improve their health if they wish to do so. If there was better education, understanding, and support, these media stigmas would carry far less influence and potential for harm.

The intentions behind this idea are good. But it feels a little like scapegoating, and it is not only simplistic in its approach, but even has the potential to cause further damage.

My Book is Getting Published

For the last decade I have been working towards getting a book published. It has pretty much been my only goal in life. And now it’s happening! My first novel will be published in 2015 by Constable & Robinson, who are lovely and bought world English rights.

This is probably the first time in my life that hard work has paid off. Apart from that time I took a 2 hour round walk to purchase discounted ice cream. That paid off handsomely.

Real handsomely

The book is entitled The Marxist Fingernails of King Richard III, and tells the story of a lonely royal fingernail swayed by the coquettish allures of the capitalist model, and his rebellion against his Marxist nail-mates to achieve the American Dream. Along the way he must battle a nasty case of fungus, avoid his head being clipped off, and endure the embarrassment of having faeces embedded underneath himself.

Okay, so I just made that up as I was typing. It actually sounds better than the real book. You can read about that in the press release via The Bookseller.

Official cover artwork

When I started university I set myself the target of being published by the time I was 30. Although in recent years I’ve known that I was good enough to achieve that, I always thought that another obstacle would scupper my chances, as it does for so many: a book idea that isn’t easily marketable; that doesn’t happen to resonate on a personal level with an editor; my lack of sheer dumb luck; my questionable personal hygiene. So I really couldn’t be happier that I will achieve that goal.

In 50 years, when I am living in a hover house full of snakes, I will be able to shout to the hover children outside the hover window that I will be leaving my mark on the world in the form of some book about fingernails I had published once. And the children will say: “What the fuck is a book? Does it hover?”

And I will be so proud.

Lost in a Hong Kong Shopping Mall

I escaped the neon-soaked Kowloon bustle after my companions dismissed me with a shrug and cloistered themselves in our cubicle of a shared room. A constellation of roadworks led me to the base of the ICC, a fairly innocuous glass monolith at night that is nevertheless the fifth tallest building in the world.

This building, right here.

In this part of the story I ascend 100 floors in 60 seconds, fear I have suffered the bends, and nothing terribly interesting happens.

The lift that returned me to earth deposited me into a shopping mall. As the doors slid open, fear ran its fingers up my spine. Most of the last two weeks had been spent trapped inside sprawling retail arcades that I’d entered whilst trying to cross the road/find the zoo/escape a different retail arcade.

I had to search for an exit, always deliberately hidden so that you might instead scurry inside a shop. I wouldn’t be fooled. My path divided into four. The signage had chosen a non-committal approach to language, opting for pictograms of leaves and what were perhaps intended as animals: an oak leaf, a lotus, a hobbled raccoon, an elephant with shingles. I picked one and hustled past the gaudily glamorous shops until I reached glass doors.

A washcloth of humidity pressed against my face. The Outside. But my relief was curtailed as I realised it was a decoy; a car park that opened onto an overpass with no pedestrian access.

Back inside. Now shutters were descending like emotionally clumsy cinematic fade-outs. Closing time. I pursued Oak Leaf until it dead ended at a desolate food court. Elephant doubled back on itself and left me at an escalator that fell eerily still as I approached. The situation was dire. I accepted my awkward fate and went in search of a staff member. I found her by the lifts that had got me into this mess.

This is her.

“How do I escape?”

She stared blankly back at me. Perhaps she only understood pictograms?

“Do I follow raccoon, elephant, oak leaf, or lotus?”

Blank.

I threw her a thin-lipped grimace, the English symbol of I’m too polite to panic but I don’t want to die here.

She primly walked away as if my existence had elapsed.

I hammered the lift button but it was one way only. I cast around desperately for an exit and saw, tucked away in the corner, a metal fire door. A pictogram of an exploding sun indicated that it was alarmed.

I hurled my weight at the release bar and all but tumbled down the concrete stairs as the alarm spiralled behind me. I didn’t pause for breath until I reached the roadworks that would guide me home.

The Anti-Dating Blog

‘Do you ever worry,’ asked my best friend, ‘that your blog might stop girls from wanting to date you?’

There is indeed a convincing argument to be made that young women aren’t interested in a guy so openly entrenched in depression, so terrified of the sticky exchanges of intercourse, and whose face currently looks like this:

Similarly, I should stress that I’m hardly strapping women down and subjecting them to an endless Powerpoint slideshow of blog entries while I moisten their eyeballs with a syringe. But women have found this blog with alarming regularity.

The very first entry was about my disastrous first kiss. I was seeing an older girl at the time, which cliché dictates made her a font of experience and expectation. I stayed at her flat the weekend after I had posted that entry.

‘Was that all true?’ she asked. ‘About your first kiss?’

When I answered in the affirmative, she blew out her cheeks and quietly went back to watching our inexplicable evening choice of Embarrassing Bodies. I never saw her again.

Because nothing says romance like fungal feet

The next time a girl found this blog she read every single entry in a single day, and told me she thought I was lovely. It was only once she’d met me in person that she lost interest entirely.

So, early evidence is inconclusive.

I’ve brought it on myself since then. The biggest fallacy propounded by this blog is the impression it gives of me as a nice chap blighted by misfortune. I can singlehandedly disprove that with the entry that unfairly insulted a girl I had just stopped seeing. She saw it, of course, and no amount of apologies since have convinced her to talk to me again.

Recently, a girl I was chatting with via a dating site asked me to add her on Skype. I did so with a new account I’d set up for freelance work and anonymous video sex calls. Without my knowledge it had linked with Google and listed this blog immediately next to my name. Five minutes into our first conversation:

HannahK: Aren’t you embarrassed writing such personal things?

Dave: What do you mean?

HannahK: I’m on your blog.

This was particularly bad as the most recent entry was my 26^th birthday post, an entry which Thom Yorke of Radiohead famously described as ‘testicle-stonkingly depressing.’ I immediately went on the defensive to convince her that it was just an off-day, usually I’m an iridescent bundle of raindrops on kittens tied up with string.

Then I smelled my own bullshit. There was no point in lying. She was already looking for a way out of the conversation. So I decided to give her one.

Dave: Don’t worry, you can run to the hills if you want.

HannahK: I’m thinking about it, haha.

Dave: I’d understand. I’m actually thinking about drawing a nice hot bath...

HannahK: I don’t mean to be rude.

Dave: ...break open one of my mum’s leg razors.

Dave: I’m sick of it all, tbh.

HannahK: I hope your [sic] joking.

Dave: I’m riddled with syphilis, too.

HannahK is now offline.

Because why not live up to expectation?

Here's a cat licking my eyeball

I stand by anything I write on this blog, no matter how shameful, raw, or ridiculous. I have a mental illness, yo. My friend was absolutely right; any female with her head on straight should run a mile if she encounters this blog. It is the Anti-Date. Woman repellent. But it’s me. And it’s best they find that out from the start.

Maybe someday one of them will stick around.

5 Observations About South Korea

I went to South Korea last month. It was great! And, in a welcome break from the usual, nothing particularly embarrassing or untoward happened to me. This leaves me little recourse but to write an unabashedly trite list of observations. Don’t worry, you can skip to the (also quite shit) photos.

South Korean food is mostly gross.

I’m not one of those ‘live like a local’ type travellers who believes that sampling the native diet is imperative to any given journey. This is very often because local food is a horrific abomination. South Koreans like fish. Any fish. If a creature has so much as taken a breath of sea air they will eat it. Banks of restaurants are fronted by tanks writhing with octopi and sea urchins and things that worryingly resemble human hearts. I visited South Korea’s largest fish market. At any given moment it officially* represents 97% of the ocean’s maximum occupancy (*not a made up statistic). Koreans eat the fish raw and, very often, while it’s still alive.

Dave’s travel tip: Eat only ice cream. If the milk comes from Korean cows, it’s technically local food.

The North/South border is a pantomime put on by children.

The border between North and South Korea is amongst the most militarised places on Earth, second only to a Millwall FC home game. They like to highlight this fact as often as possible. The empirical evidence (checkpoints, minefields, the world’s most respected barbed wire collection) doesn’t prevent the tour guides hammering it home every few minutes that you might be randomly exploded by a North Korean shell. The border visit itself is a series of fleetingly staged procedural line-ups overseen by soldiers who, due to mandatory service, are barely out of school. Half of them stand for hours in poses of aggression that make it seem as if the biggest hazard at the border is chronic constipation.

Dave’s travel tip: Seriously though, those kids could kill you with their left thumb.

Everyone in South Korea is a model.

I am not an attractive man. My eyes are beady and I walk like a half-witted oaf. By English standards, I am merely forgettable. By Korean standards, I am pepper spray to the eyes. Everyone in South Korea is beautiful. I have never seen such a high concentration of attractive individuals outside of that recurring dream where I’m naked and everyone laughs. This is partly because they have an attitude to caring for themselves that puts much of the world to shame. It also has something to do with cosmetic surgery being commonplace. They even advertise it on the subway.

Dave’s travel tip: Don’t expect to have any sex in South Korea.

You might die of old age at South Korean traffic lights.

South Korean roads are so wide that most English people would expect sponsorship just to cross them. A wait at South Korean traffic lights is like a queue for the world’s worst theme park ride. Chance it, and you’ll certainly be killed on one of approximately twenty-seven lanes of traffic. Bus drivers spend so much time at junctions that they actually get out for a cigarette break before the lights turn green.

Dave’s travel tip: Just stay in your hostel. Sod it.

South Korea is absolutely beautiful.

Capital city Seoul has no globally famous landmarks; there’s no Big Ben or Eiffel Tower or Penge Market. The majority of buildings are identikit apartment blocks. But what it lacks in a focal point it more than makes up for in green spaces, clean and efficient transport, and preserved heritage. Stray out of the city and it’s nothing but stunning mountain scenery in all directions. It’s one of the more beautiful countries I’ve ever visited.

Dave’s travel tip: Or just look it up on Google Earth. It’s basically the same.