Bus Hijack

‘Hang on, mate. Can you tell me where this bus is supposed to go?’

It’s not a request you expect to receive from your bus driver. I was late for my 7am shift, and had made the all-too-familiar half-dressed dash to catch the bus just as it pulled up. Being the last aboard, the driver had singled me out for his confession. I looked at him with some confusion.

‘The thing is, yeah,’ he said, shifting uncomfortably in his seat, ‘I don’t know where this bus goes.’

A number of possibilities raced through my head; the bus had been hijacked by a mad man who any second would order me to pull down my trousers and dance; there was a bomb on the bus which would explode if the urine content of the back seats dropped below 50%. I considered running for the doors just as they hissed closed behind me.

All I could say is, ‘But you’re the bus driver.’

‘They’ve called me in from Southampton. I’ve never been here before. Can you help me out?’

I looked to the other passengers, none of whom would meet my eye. ‘Um, alright.’

The driver waved away my fare and pulled off the curb. I stood beside the cockpit, navigator of the good bus Confusion, and pointed out the next turning. A frisson of pleasure ran its fingers along my spine. I was in control, at the helm of my very own city bus. I could go wherever I wanted; Europe, Route 66, Scunthorpe; the possibilities were endless.

I hear Scunthorpe is nice this time of year

Only, I was still late for work. And after a few more stops the bus was due to turn into a winding housing estate that always took twenty minutes to clear. I glanced back at the other passengers. I usually sat as far back as possible, following the time one of my testicles dropped through a hole in my work trousers and I didn’t notice until I had disembarked. Now I was at the front of the bus. My testicles were safely contained. I could do as I wished.

The bus approached the turning into the housing estate.

‘Where now?’

I checked my watch, puffed out my chest, and pointed straight down the main road. It took every ounce of my self-control to restrain a maniacal laugh as we glided past the crowded bus stop on the corner.

'Truly, this is our greatest victory.'

Now, with a defiant glare, I turned on the passengers, ready to put down an uprising, to seize any mutineers and hurl them bodily through the doors with the bus still moving. They saw the hardness in my eyes and stayed seated, undoubtedly cowed by my fierce authority.

I guided us the remaining distance into town, until the driver recognised the streets from having earlier collected the bus. We arrived at my stop twenty minutes sooner than usual.

 ‘Thanks for that, mate. You’re a real help.’

‘Please.’ I waved away his praise.’ I’m no hero.’

Relieved of duty, I ran from the stop before anyone could exact revenge on my person for having made them miss their stop.

I arrived at work almost exactly on time. The doors were locked. After twenty minutes wait my manager trudged into sight.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said. ‘My car wouldn’t start and the bloody bus didn’t show up.’

Body Odour in Beijing

The Great Wall of China is pretty big. This understatement is brought to you by the pervading, and entirely erroneous assertion that it is visible from space (I’ve been to space and checked). Despite this cosmic invisibility, some sections of the wall remain large enough that they require the ascent of a great many stairs to reach the top. Here, in a needless illustration of the point, is a badly taken photograph of said stairs.

We chose to forego the option of a cable car under the rapidly dispelled delusion that climbing the stairs would be fun. This was despite the 3 hours it had taken us to reach the Great Wall, during which time we had suffered the most amiable kidnap ever seen in China, and the small matter that it was pouring rain. This necessitated the purchase of overpriced rain macs that made it look as if we had smuggled ourselves to the wall inside distended condoms.

There were a lot of stairs. So many in fact that I had no choice but to stop mid-way and have the most venerable bladder expulsion of my young life.

There's a long history of urine on this wall

The problem with wearing a sheet of cling film, beside the sartorial faux pas, is that it becomes very hot within after climbing several hundred steps. Condensation from the sweat quickly built up inside. By the time I had reached the top of the wall, my clothes were wetter than they would have been from the rain.

Empirical evidence has made a strong case that I am a man. Much of this evidence is based on the aroma of badly cooked meat soaked in stale vinegar that trails from my armpits after a mere few minutes of perspiration. I considered this, by and large, normal. Until I learned that around 90% of Chinese people, thanks to a biological quirk, do not smell when they sweat. The unlucky 10% risk becoming social outcasts if the abnormality is not corrected with surgery. Consequently, we stinky foreigners are seen as just that; unconscionably pungent.

Needless to say, by the time we had descended the wall and returned to Beijing both of my armpits were firing on all cylinders. Even my friends found it troubling to stand too close. So imagine the disgust on the face of the young Chinese lady who found herself cornered in her seat, my arms lifted to grip the handrail.

When smell-o-vision is invented this picture will make you vomit

We watched the various stages of disgust play across her features. Firstly came a mere furrowing of the brow, indignation at being blocked in by these bedraggled foreign types. It was obvious when she caught her first whiff; her nose wrinkled and her mouth turned down. Accusing eyes came up to meet mine. I offered a friendly smile met only with steely derision.

After a stop or two she began shifting in her seat, casting about for some means of escape. Finally, she shoved past me and made a hurried exit, probably several stops from her intended destination.

I like to think that one day there will be a knock upon my door, and there she will stand in belated thrall to my masculine musk. To increase the likelihood, I’ve decided to never wash again.

The End of Modern Dating

I have deleted my online dating profile. That noise you just heard, like a chorus of deflating airbeds, was the collective sigh of relief from thousands of single women across the city.

I’m in two minds about this decision. It’s a relief to be free of the posturing, the calculating, the humiliation of online dating. Yet I’m also aware that it made my life more interesting, and that now this blog will be comprised only of uninspired masturbation jokes and all the other unremarkable travails of my existence. If you want to stop reading from now on, I commend your sagacity.

To mark the end of the Modern Dating saga (a saga about as dramatic and meaningful as the Twilight movies), I feel it deserves some kind of summative conclusion. More importantly, I deserve one last opportunity to moan about it. Here’s a round-up of my experiences.

This is how excited people are about my stories

-       The first girl I went out with after a week or so of talking online offered me MDMA while we queued outside a busy bar. When I refused, she simply shrugged and took my dose on top of her own.

-       One date ended early after I accidentally took her to a gay night and she later caught me hugging a pair of friendly lesbians, which, I believe, is something of a faux pas on a first date. You can read about it here.

-       I discovered that it’s fairly standard on a free dating site for women to receive unsolicited pictures of penis’ and for men, at least in my own case, to receive unsolicited pictures of penis’. The only difference is that mine came from cross-dressers.

-       I went out on several dates with the last girl I met on the site. In fact, I rather liked her. Until a small misunderstanding led to her accusing me of faking mental illness to avoid seeing her. Such an accusation was reason enough to avoid seeing her.

I could go on like this for a long time (and I have, in earlier blog entries which I will shamelessly link to at the bottom of this post). The thing is, I have a tendency to play the victim, which isn’t fair to the majority of the people I met. Most of them were perfectly lovely, I was simply not up to scratch when it came to dating them. And, indeed, not up to scratch for dating at all.

Nor do I mean to denigrate the use of dating sites. Since deleting my profile I’ve spoken to three separate people who have found a relationship through online dating. All of them had very positive experiences, and I’m very happy for them. What their success makes quite clear to me is that I’m simply not cut out for dating. I don’t have the confidence, the ease of manner, the ability to develop chemistry. What I have is a taciturn manner, over-active self-awareness, and an unrivalled ability to sit in a darkened room and consume biscuits. These qualities are more likely to result in your corpse being removed by crane via the window than they are in marriage.

We all need something to aspire to

I don’t mean for this post to come across as defeatist or lugubrious. Rather it’s a declaration of pragmatism. And I have been assured from all corners that romance happens when you least expect it. If that is so, it hardly matters just how little I believe that this is true.

The lacklustre saga! Modern Dating, Modern Dating II, Modern Dating III, 

Imaginary Girlfriends

*All girls featured in this blog may be pubescent fantasies. 

There’s been the odd occasion on this blog where, employing tremendous subtlety, I’ve hinted that I’m a tad unsuccessful with women. While this remains a source of great shame to me, I’ve learned to deal with it in a variety of constructive ways; whine incessantly on this blog; lurk outside late-night Pilates classes with a zoom-lens camera; hang myself by the neck from a light fitting while I masturbate. All-in-all, I’ve developed into a secure and balanced adult.

My approach while growing up was a little different. Friends would tell of the girls they’d kissed, show off saucy text messages, laugh at the voluptuousness of my man breasts while predicting how long I’d remain a virgin (none of them were correct – I outlasted even their most outlandish guess). My solution to this was mature and rational: I invented girlfriends.

Phoebe (invented at age 10)

Phoebe and I took long walks in the park and ate romantic picnics, which was one way to justify the armloads of junk food I bought myself at weekends. We had a secret bush within which we would kiss and press together our pre-pubescent flesh. When asked where she lived, I’d suffer sudden and acute amnesia or become distracted by a bird. The relationship lasted until my friends went to a different secondary school. It was an amicable break-up.

Jenny (invented age 13)

Ah, Jenny. My first kiss, hastily invented upon the realisation that each of my friends had kissed a girl and I had not. The details of the kiss were vivid: a duration of over a minute, tongues convulsing like electrified slugs, ending only (I insisted) when I ran out of breath. My presumption was that snogging required commendable breath control, like walking through the perfume section of a department store while being force-fed a plate of veal. Jenny dumped me after the kiss. I must have been no good, I joked. Even in my imagination I doubted myself.

You can read about my real and equally unsuccessful first kiss here.

Rebecca (also invented age 13)

The existence of Rebecca (or her very inexistence) is indicative of an inferiority complex dating back many years. Rather than invent myself a new beau, I conjured a girl I couldn’t have. Even before the tortures of real-life unrequited lust, I felt the need to make myself suffer. There was invented drama, and a cast of supporting characters too. The mother, often away on business. Rebecca’s boyfriend, my own good mate, who had won over the girl I so desired. Such a love triangle would become all too familiar in later life.

*     *     *

I should make clear that I wasn’t quite insane enough to believe in the actual existence of these girls. I didn’t whisper sweet nothings alone in my darkened bedroom while making awkward, arrhythmic love to my favourite Beanie Baby. They existed only in the presence of my friends. The veracity of these spectres was rarely questioned; I spent my weekends alone at home. Perhaps it was entirely plausible that I in fact spent this time cavorting with a harem of adolescent concubines.

My romantic mythology lasted into university, until Valentine’s Day arrived and I was compelled to confess to my best friend who had been with me throughout every imaginary relationship. I took to MSN chat, the pre-Facebook refuge of emotionally stunted narcissists, and poured out my virginal truth. I cried. I expected him to hate me, berate me, perhaps laugh afresh at my breasts.

All he did was laugh and insist that it didn’t matter. And he was right. Once it’s past, everything we think we know is an invention.

The Introverted Extrovert

In primary school, I considered myself the class clown. I often tried to convince my teacher that I was gay, and go-go danced on a chair at the front of the room to cheer everyone up at the end of our final year. Before any of us knew what it was, I’d beckon my friends over to marvel at my erections underneath the table (perhaps giving a little too much credence to my assertions of homosexuality). I always thought that is how I would grow up; outgoing, extroverted, the sort of idiotic loudmouth that most people hate but it doesn’t matter because you’re too loud to notice. 

This confidence lasted for much of secondary school, even after my weight ballooned and I learned that erections in school should really be kept to one’s self. My best friend’s earliest memory of me is with my tie fashioned into a bandanna, headbanging topless on a bench in the gym changing room. Before I moved to university my sister said to me: “You’re the kind of person everyone wants to be friends with.”

I was basically the Fonze.

So it’s something of a shock when I look in the mirror today and see my confidence eroded to nothing. I have a dog-eared back catalogue of excuses for this. In fact, this blog exists as narcissistic testament to exactly that. But the reasons don’t really matter. What matters now is that the only strong emotion I can summon is a fierce self-loathing.

Whereas in childhood I tackled life with enthusiasm, today I feel merely indifferent. If I have something fun coming up, I don’t feel excitement. If I have something important coming up, I don’t feel nervous. The best I can manage is an antagonistic shrug.

There's no way I can write this without sounding like an angsty teenager.

At university I would fall head over heels in love after a few hours in a girl’s company; now I haven’t had even the slightest crush in years. When I have been with a girl, there’s the vague awareness that I should be swollen with testosterone, ignoring everything she says in favour of calculating when best to remove her bra. I don’t feel passion or desire. When this means they get bored of me, I don’t feel upset like I used to. Little by little, my edges have been smoothed down, and now I’m entirely flat.

There are a number of things I could try to rectify this. I could go out on what I believe, in the industry, is called ‘the lash’ in an attempt to fornicate drunkenly and hastily with women in an environment where it’s too loud for them to realise how dull I am until it’s too late. I could take up some kind of painfully affected hipster hobby, like wearing a scarf in August, listening to 1940s gospel music on London Fields, or making collages of Polaroids depicting used condoms discarded in the high street gutter on Saturday morning. I could develop a crack habit.  

By all accounts these should make me a more interesting person, an extrovert rippling with defiant confidence, the kind of person you worry about making a scene at your wedding.

Remember that time I made you look at my erection?

It’s an age-old question: what would the childhood you say to the adult you? Mine wouldn’t say a word. There’d be a short awkward silence before he moved off to talk to someone more interesting. And all I would do about it is shrug.

Videodrome

I’m going to open with a positive and a negative. 

Negative: This is totally a lazy stopgap blog entry because I’m going to Asia for 3 weeks and therefore will not be posting any blogs. In fact, I hope to stay away from the internet entirely. 

Positive: Asia should give me plenty of material to write about embarrassing misunderstandings, disastrous accidents involving dead animals (which may not have been dead to begin with), and sexually transmitted diseases. In other words, the usual.

The purpose of this post is simply to show you a stop motion video I made. Normal guys my age spend their time coiffing their chest hair, hitting the dance floor, and having vigorous sex in alleyways with women who never wear underwear ‘just in case.’

In other words, normal guys my age are Mick Hucknall

Other guys my age pull their curtains and sit in the dark while masturbating to episodes of Hollyoaks. Then there’s guys like me (or perhaps, just me) who pull their curtains and sit in the dark for 3 days making stop motion videos about Vikings launching into space. 

3 DAYS! That is pretty much the main reason I’m posting it here. It took a long time, it’s the first time I’ve tried something ambitious and (mostly) pulled it off, and dammit, I’m proud of it! So here it is in all its glory.

*Contrary to the above preamble, the video is completely safe for work, and, in fact, quite suitable for children.*



(The video was originally produced for My Destination, a wonderful up-and-coming travel site. Check them out!)

This Blog is Filth

Recently I’ve been following the traffic on my blog a little more closely, because I’m insecure and demand attention like a toddler raiding its mother’s make-up. As much as I’m grateful to the internet for allowing me this written exercise in vanity, seeing the range of search terms that have led people to my blog inspires me to rue its existence. Here are some things I’ve learned.

People worry about double chins

A while back I wrote about the expansion of my double chin as a child and the damage choosing to ignore it cost me, much like Hitler’s expansion into the Rhineland. I would hope to act as a cautionary tale to those who searched ‘I didn’t know I had a double-chin’ or ‘Misery of having a double-chin.’ My empathy over their quivering chinsicles is unrivalled. However, it’s hard to be a role model when my salvation was found in starvation, self-loathing, and chronic narcissism. Oh, and speaking of chronic narcissism, another search was ‘George Lucas Double Chin.’ 

Paedophiles read my blog

A disclaimer: I am not a paedophile. Let’s establish that. However, on a singular occasion, I may have made reference to the flagrant deployment of jailbait around DisneyWorld swimming pools. These encounters were pure happenstance, and made with an entirely flaccid penis. So, to those of you seeking out this phenomenon by searching ‘Jailbait at Disney World,’ I offer you a second serving of shame. 

I’m never going into a public toilet again

My fondness for the macabre ordeal of public toilets is already about equal to my fondness for passing olives through my urethra. After my bitter diatribe against them (which is by far my most viewed post, because... it’s about poo and stuff?) some evidence emerged to make me avoid them entirely. It’s my hope that ‘My button popped off in a public restroom’ is not a euphemism. There’s begrudging admiration for whoever searched ‘I pull in public toilets.’ The only thing I’ve ever pulled is a semen-stained tissue from the sole of my shoe. Together with those who searched ‘skidmarks on inside of toilet bowl,’ these people are solely responsible for the lack of public toilet etiquette in this country.

Masturbation is complicated

Masturbation is normal. The more the better, I say, as long as you regularly top up on fluids. When it comes to sex I’m not into anything weird (unless fantasising about being taken from behind by Arnold Schwarzenegger is weird). I’m a saint compared to some people who have landed on this blog. There’s a particular fascination with primate masturbation, with a handful of searches for ‘Baboon jerk’ and ‘monkey circle jerk.’ Whoever searched for ‘we had a circle jerk’ clearly had a party that got a little out of control and isn’t sure how to feel about it. Lastly, perhaps inspired by the Olympics, is ‘I have masterbating [sic] competitions with myself.’ Apparently there’s plenty of men out there who’ll join in, if you want.

What does it say about me if all these terms lead directly to my blog? Maybe I should write about nice stuff like hamsters and rabbits and... wait, that didn’t work out either. Perhaps I should up my game? Imagine the disappointment when these searchers, so expectant of finding partners in crime or justification for their desires, just ended up here instead.