Train Companies...

...actually, not just train companies - bad customer service in general.

Today's rant, just as a bit of a change of pace, was inspired by something that actually happened to me today, rather than anything topical.  I don't usually do this kind of thing, but I reckon that if you can't relate to this theme then you live some kind of charmed life and your address is probably on Christmas Pudding Lane, where you live with your magical puppy that smells like the shampoo at a fancy gym and pisses tequila, because it is fucking ubiquitous.

I have to say, the events that transpired were triggered by me making a cock up.  Basically, I left my wallet on the train on the way to work.  Of course, I wouldn't have got my wallet out if the over zealous bloke who insists on checking your damn ticket (even though the station has ticket barriers, so either you have to have a ticket to get to the train, or you have spent enough time and effort masterminding a way of getting past the barriers without one that you have, in a fair world, earned the right to travel for free) hadn't come to distract me from reading about Nick Clegg and Fergie in the Metro just to check there was no chance of fining me a few grand.  Still, really, you know, mea culpa.   Hey, at least it was my wallet, not, I don't know, a memory stick with your personal details on it, but yes, I am an absent minded twat, and I did formerly work for the government so yes, they do hire the kind of person who could probably end up doing that.

I noticed it was gone when I went to get a cigarette out after getting off the train.  "Bollocks", I said.  Still though, I thought I would just be able to call the train company, get them to radio the guard (AKA "the bloke" I referred to earlier) and tell him to leave it with someone at my local, fairly large station when the train made it's way back through there.  No big deal.

So, at the office, I looked up the train company I thought operated the train.  Southern.  After explaining my situation to a lady with a horrible accent, I was informed that "we can only radio the guard in an emergency".  I proceeded to explain that I didn't actually want them to stop the fucking train, like they do when there is a fucking squirrel on the line or other such emergency scenario, I merely wished them to get a message to the guard.  No.  The guard's work is very important and he must not be distracted with helping people, lest he fuck up and cause havoc by say, not noticing that the guy whose ticket said Reigate stayed on the train all the way to Redhill, which should have cost him 30 pence more.   No.  Instead of having that five second conversation with the guard, the idiot woman instead opted to have a five minute conversation with me, explaining that the best thing to do is call their lost property office in Bristol (which accounted for the horrible accent) in three days as that is how long it takes for lost property to be "processed".  This gave me upsetting images in my head of my poor little wallet in some kind of Bristolian version of Auschwitz for wallets, phones and MP3 players, waiting to be "processed".  My poor little cards, even that Boots gift card I still had seven quid left on, being cut up by some awful jobsworth who talks like a farmer.  I explained that this "solution" would be far less convenient for everybody involved than my suggestion.  Even tried to appeal to her lazy nature by pointing out that my way also meant no paperwork.  But she was having none of it.  It was only after this lengthy exchange that she noticed that the train I had said I was on was not even operated by her company.

It seems two companies run up and down that route, and the one I was on was a First Great Western train.  Well, silly me for not fucking noticing the branding on the fucking train.  If only I had read the fucking safety poster or the free magazine with Stone-fucking-henge on the cover, then I would have realised I was on a First Great Western train, not a Southern train.  It's not as if it's all the fucking same or anything.  It's not as if I don't give a flying fuck about your fucking branding, I am just trying to get from the town I live in to the town I fucking work in and a train is just a fucking train...  At this point I began to feel I could method act the Michael Douglas character in a remake of Falling Down.

So I called First Great Western.  They were even less helpful, and the guy I spoke to seemed to have been in India.  I had said I had literally just left my wallet on one of their trains.  He asked me, when I said the time the train left from my station, if that was "in the morning or at night".  He didn't seem to have ever heard of Reading.  He told me to phone Network Rail and ask to speak to the station at which my train terminated.

Feeling a bit futile, I did that.  They put me through to a man who I think was called Craig (if he was, and you're ever at Gatwick Airport station and you see him, tell him I hate him) who was supposedly the Duty Manager.  This man was a wanksmith, and a master of the trade.  He said the train didn't get cleaned out at his station, it would go all the way back to Reading before that happened.  "Very well," said I, "transfer me to your counterpart at Reading".  I think I actually said something slightly angrier than that, but I didn't call him a cunt or anything so I was reining it in.  He said that he couldn't do that.  "Never mind," said I, "if you would be so kind as to give me his number I will call him myself".  

He said he didn't have it.  He only had an internal number.  Which, as we have established, he couldn't transfer me on. I asked if it would be on the internet.  He said he didn't have the internet.  I said that I did have the internet, I just wanted to know if the number would actually be on their site, or whether it would just be the number for customer bastarding services, who were the ones who had put me through to his worthless self in the first bastarding place, because evidently they didn't know where the train got cleaned, or that he was neither use nor ornament (three days in a row I've used that - there are just so many people for whom it is appropriate), or in fact anything that a customer might find fucking helpful.  He said he didn't know, but he reckoned it probably wasn't on there.  At this point I had gotten a bit sarcastic, much to the amusement of guys who sit near me at work.  But I still hadn't called him a cunt or anything.  He suggested that actually, what I should really do, is call the train company.  Normally I would have had a few suggestions for him about what he should really do, maybe something involving getting dragged behind one of his stupid fucking trains until he either dies or himself gets to fucking Reading, where the fucking train gets cleaned, whichever comes fucking first, but I was too shocked that he had even said such a thing.  "Are you trying to make me have some kind of stroke?" I asked him.  Then I hung up.

I gave up on getting my wallet back.  I cancelled my cards (had to speak to Santander - no article about bad customer service would be complete without a mention of good old Banco Bastardos! "I've lost my card". "OK, what is your card number?"), grieved for my lost seven pounds of Boots credit (now i will have to spend real money on boring old razors, damnit), and felt hungry because I couldn't buy any lunch, but it wasn't the end of the world.  

This is when it hit me.  It would have been better to have just done that in the first place - just written it off.  I would be in exactly the same position, but I would still be at my normal, manageable level of rage and frustration.  I wouldn't have wasted time, meaning I would have been further along with whatever thing it was I was doing at work (I'm not saying that that, in and of itself, would not have also been a waste of time, but you know what I mean).  

And this is the point of today's rant: it shouldn't be that way.  Even if they aren't able to give you any practical help, customer service people should make you feel like they are at least trying to help you, so even though you come away no better off you at least feel like everything that could reasonably be done to help you has been done and that someone out there cared just a little bit about your predicament.  You deserve that - you fund their company's continued existence (in the case of the train companies, because you have to, like some kind of uncapped "getting to the office" tax that they can arbitrarily make to be as much as they fucking like).

Honestly, look at any job advert for customer service representatives, or any other customer facing job come to think about it, and it will be asking for people with "good people skills", or even "a passion for excellent customer service". These qualities in humans must be as rare as rocking horse shit, because instead, these jobs seem to go almost exclusively to surly, arsey, lazy people who will not make themselves responsible for anything at all, or people who are just plain stupid.  When you deal with a good one, someone who actually seems to enjoy helping solve problems and is genuinely sorry when they can't, it feels great, whatever the outcome.  And I can guarantee that the people like that, the ones who are in the right fucking job, never go home and whine about how they get shouted at and called names all day.  Because no matter how much of a bastard you are, or how much the company has pissed you off, you don't call people like that names.  It would be like kicking a Guide Dog.

Microsoft Buying Skype

OK, so this was actually only the second most interesting story I encountered on today's trawl through the news.

The most interesting was a little gem I found in a Metro I found on a train.  I am kind of fond of the Metro, apart from that bastarding Nemi cartoon.  What is the fucking point?  Just don't have a cartoon if it's going to be that ferociously shit.  As this phrase, borrowed from my mum, went down so well yesterday I am going to use it again: the Nemi cartoon is "neither use nor ornament".  Anyway, I digress.  The story was about how one of those fucking people who paints themselves silver and stands still near tourist attractions in London and for some reason think the world owes them a fucking living for doing absolutely nix, you know, one of those worthless codpieces, kicked the living crap out of another worthless codpiece, er, I mean, "street performer", for stealing his lucrative patch near the London Eye.  He got sent down for GBH with intent.  Apparently, tourists looked on "in horror" as a Bulgarian man dressed as a statue attempted to beat another Bulgarian man dressed as a statue to death. I bet they bloody didn't look on in horror.  If they did they are idiots.  The YouTube/videophone combination was invented for shit like that.  A mate of mine reckons he once saw a McDonalds employee dressed as Ronald McDonald beat the granny out of a drunk guy while he was queueing up to get a Big Mac, but nobody believes him because he didn't put it on the YouTube.  OK, so it supposedly happened in 1994, but that is no excuse.

Anyway, that brings us on to the less amusing but probably more important topic of Microsoft's $8.5 billion (which is 5 billion of her majesty's pounds or thereabouts) buyout of Skype, that thing that lets you talk to your bastard friends who have gone off travelling or moved to somewhere nicer than here for free.

For as much as they might say that it is a natural fit for them because it will integrate nicely with Outlook and, I don't know, proactively leverage some convergence synergies to create a new paradigm (they didn't actually say that, I nicked it from a PowerPoint presentation I will be giving tomorrow) this looks to me like a bid by Microsoft to look a bit more cool, because they are being left behind.

Back in the day, the big names in computer technology were Microsoft and IBM.  Microsoft won the day, back in the day, because IBM had this bizarre cultish thing going on where they would hire graduates with certain profiles, all the same, and turn them all into grey suited boring old IBM people, and Microsoft was a lot more cool.

Trouble is, now that the internet is used for everything, everywhere, by everyone, rather than just being logged onto for a bit in the evening to check your email, ask Jeeves about something and look at some pornographic stills that take 12 minutes each to download, the "cool" technology brands are the ones that have paved the way when it comes to how the internet is used now.  Web 2.0, essentially.  Which is apparently in the dictionary, even though I think that probably would require a redefinition of what a fucking word is, given that "Web 2.0" is two words. And one of them is a number.  This could lead to the number of words in the English language exploding to almost infinity as you would then logically have to include stuff like "Speed 2" as well...

Brands that people think are cool now include Google, who so monopolise the world of searching for everything that their name is now a verb, meaning "to search on the internet".  You don't say "he was slacking , off at work, he was just sat there Binging himself?" do you?  Or, "we'll win this pub quiz for sure, I'm going to Lycos all the answers on my iPhone"...  Facebook, which allows us to control the pop charts like sinister puppet masters, and find out whether our old classmates have ugly children.  Twitter, which I'm not entirely sure what the point of is, but which I bloody love (follow me at www.twitter.com/Pony_and_Trap)...  I do sometimes, in my darker moments, suspect that the whole grand enterprise was developed by the British government to allow us to keep tabs on Stephen Fry, so we don't accidentally lose him again.  They know that without Stephen Fry a new dark age will fall on this nation, where all TV shows have to be about people called Kelly or Kerry or Katie who are orange.  Though to be honest they could just have done what they did with "the old Stephen Fry" Oscar Wilde and put him in prison if they're that worried he's going to run off.

According to a report I read yesterday (once again, in the Metro... I'm a bit broke this week) due to social networking four out of five people admit they have online friends they have never met who they feel as close to as their "real world" friends.  Ten years ago you'd never fucking admit to that...  That would be embarrassing.  Even online dating supposedly isn't considered that lame and desperate anymore.  Though, let's be honest, it still kind of is.  The internet is all about being social, sharing stuff, making connections.  Today I joined Formspring, which seems to be this thing where people can ask you any question they want, which I reckon could be a right laugh (if you have any for me, ask at www.formspring.me/PonyandTrap - now is a good time because it's new and I want to play with it).  Could be the next big thing.  But probably won't because, truth be told, it's quite boring after ten minutes if nobody asks you anything interesting.  "Yes, I prefer cats to dogs." "Actually, I can take or leave Marmite." "My favourite dinosaur is the brachiosaurus"...

None of that has anything at all to do with Microsoft.  This is the point.  I am not even anti Microsoft.  In the PC or Mac argument I stand by Windows every time, even though that is not the trendy thing to do, but with each year that passes it gets just a little bit more embarrassing to say "actually, I er, prefer a PC"... And if I'm noticing that, surely they are too?

Thing is, although I use only Windows operating systems, outside of work I never use any Microsoft applications or services.  Microsoft is for Office, and Office is for using at "the fucking place"...  When I'm not at "the fucking place" I don't use anything of theirs.  Not IE, not Hotmail, not Bing, not whatever blogging thing it is they have, because unlike their business applications they are not the best available - Google's stuff is.  I have become just as smug and cuntish about the fact I use Chrome as the Apple wankers that used to piss me off so with their fucking Ocelot OS or whatever the hell it was called.

So yeah, Microsoft isn't cool because it's for work, which isn't cool.  But that's OK right, that's a pretty good niche to fill, every corporate computer in the world?  Well yeah.  But this is where Microsoft get a bit schizophrenic.

All of their advertising seems to be targetted very much at the home user market.  If I recall correctly, their current TV campaign involves scenarios such as a plain woman using her Windows PC to edit a photo of her boring looking family so it looks like her kids aren't ginger, or texting or something.  The catchphrase in these commercials is "to the cloud!"...  It's not what you want.  You want aspirational, not accessible.  Ooooh, if I use Windows, I will be like a woman with three kids who knows fuck all about computers but can still edit her fucking stupid fucking photo because Windows has the most patronising interface known to man and big Fisher Price buttons will tell me what I need to do and then make sure I'm sure with more big fucking Fisher Price looking buttons because I'm a fucking imbecile who is scared they will bring down the New York Stock Exchange by clicking on the wrong fucking thing in my picture editing software.  And "to the cloud" is the gayest catchphrase I've ever heard uttered outside of a 1960's Batman movie.  You can't even say it ironically.

For Microsoft to thrive they need to somehow change their image.  Either go totally corporate, ironically, like IBM, or get some useful offerings and lose the family friendly schmaltz and become cool again.  Maybe the buyout of Skype is supposed to be a step in the latter direction, given that Skype has millions of users all over the world, and that is why they have gambled by paying what looks like way over the odds.  70% of Skype was sold for $2 billion just two years ago, and given that its most popular service is offered for free, it will take some creativity to turn it into a big revenue generator (the same argument used to question why Twitter was valued high when it doesn't appear to do anything that would make money).   If it solves Microsoft's image problem, none of that should matter - they can afford it, much like Chelsea could afford to spend 50 million pounds on Torres in a bid to solve their "our strikers are really old now" problem.

Trouble is, I can't help expecting them to launch their Skype offering with an advertising campaign showing someone in England using a Skype video call to let their kids wave to their grandparents in Australia...  I can literally see it in my head.  Yeah, we know it can do that, and we know that's what most people will use it for, but for the love of fuck, show us something a bit more Minority Report looking and some people with lives that look interesting using the fucker!  

Super-injunctions and Twitter

If you are a Twitter user, you have probably noticed that there are quite a lot of other Twitter users who are morons. Obviously you don't follow any of the morons, so you don't notice it most of the time, but if you ever click on one of the things that is "trending", or on some days, just look at the list of things that are trending, there is quite a lot of shit on there. Not shit like the shit I post, like when I get drunk and decide to type random Bruce Springsteen lyrics, but shit like - and these are just some examples I have plucked from what was trending at the time of writing:

@justinbieber stay strong Biebs. You can do better than get mad and lose your mind with those people. #killemwithkindness

Which was posted by someone calling themselves a "belieber" which sounds like some new kind of menace we really should be concerned about...

can i ask why is megan fox not in the new transformers ?! her and shia labeouf make a gorgeous couple !

Yeah. I think the bigger question is "Why is the new Transformers movie a thing that exists?" rather than why Megan Fox would not want to be involved with such a thing. You know, given that the last one was a total fucking abortion.

#5factsaboutmymom she made her own Dildoe

I assume the hashtag "5 facts about my mom" was trending because yesterday was Mother's Day in America, so American people, who call their mums moms wanted to pay tribute to their mothers - you know, just like we do here in fucking March. So why it is now trending in Birmingham (and why there is even an option to see what is trending in Birmingham in the main part of the interface) I cannot explain. But this guy, who looks to be from Newcastle, well, his "mom" is probably the type of lady contributing to the fact that "MILF" is also trending right now...

Now, hopefully that has established for anyone who doesn't use Twitter that it has been adopted by a large quantity of people who, as MY mom would say, are neither use nor ornament. You need to know that to understand the point I am now, finally going to get to.

Following the news that many, many, possibly all, celebrities have now got "super-injunctions" that prevent hookers, mistresses, rent boys and just about anyone else represented by Max Clifford from speaking out and ruining their carefully cultivated reputations as family men, general good eggs or heterosexuals. Personally I think it's great, because we no longer have to have our news peppered with horrible things like "I shagged Andrew Marr", and whenever you do see a story about a footballer and a hooker you can tell by the fact he hasn't taken out a super-injunction that it is all just an elaborate set up to cover up the fact he is as gay as a daisy. Yes Ashley Cole, we all worked it out a very long time ago. Also, prostitutes will no longer be all over the papers, causing the Daily Mail to become concerned that all of our girl children will decide "Juicy Jenni" was onto something and start hanging around sketchy Northern nightclubs in the hope of making a few quid out of sucking off Rio Ferdinand. Jesus, if we went on Rooney stories alone it might not just be the kids. It might be your nan as well.

Yes, the super-injunction is a good thing. Not because it protects the privacy of people in the public eye, but because it protects the public eye from stories about Andrew Marr's privates.

Still though, some people feel it is a right, possibly a constitutional right, maybe even a human right, to know whether, I don't know, Huw Edwards or Pete Waterman or that bloke that plays Ian Beale, has committed any form of indiscretion ever (disclaimer: I have no reason to believe any of the aforementioned people have taken out super-injunctions, nor am I claiming to have slept with any of them). The super-injunction deprives them of their fix of gossip about people nobody normal is remotely interested in (because all they do is present a daytime antiques show), and that's no fun! Sure, I can see why someone might be interested to know that someone extremely famous, like say, Tiger Woods, or David Beckham, or someone extremely unexpected, like John Major had been up to something juicy, but seriously, what kind of fucking weirdo cares that Jeremy Clarkson might have been photographed with Jemima Khan? I don't, and as you might have noticed, I bloody love Jeremy Clarkson.

But these very weirdos are the same morons I was on about earlier. When a canny Twitter user announced they were going to leak the names of loads of celebrities who had taken out super-injunctions, people who say "OMG" a lot were on it like, well, me on any rumour that Jose Mourinho might be coming back to Chelsea. At the time of someone else writing an article about this which I just read, they had 44,000 followers, despite the fact that most major news outlets (who are, rather ironically, informed of the details of super-injunctions so that they don't accidentally publish them - yeah, so no risk of leaks there then, you can definitely trust those guys not to get coked up and tell some random punter down the pub) are saying most of it isn't true anyway. But then they are always saying Tom Cruise is straight as well, so who the hell knows.

Some of the very best people to follow on Twitter are liars, but what on Earth is entertaining about reading a random list of names of not very exciting people who might have a super-injunction but probably don't.

Still, if you see Katie Price on the list at least then you'll know once and for all that it is total bollocks...

You can follow me on the Twitter if you should care to do so, at www.twitter.com/Pony_and_Trap. I don't out people very often... And I'm not a belieber.

Talent Shows... And People Who Cry at Them

So, my sources tell me that tonight Britain's Got Talent is on the television. I can only assume from the stuff they are saying on the Facebook and the Twitter (follow me at www.twitter.com/Pony_and_Trap) about how astonishingly moving it is, that this programme is a graphic and harrowing documentary about the genocide in Rwanda, Chinese orphanages, or those babies in Africa that get raped because it cures the AIDS (disclaimer - it doesn't).

Oh no, wait, it's not that at all is it? It's that show where people put ferrets down their trousers while David Hasslehoff watches.

The talent show genre is not a new thing. When I was a kid, it was all about Stars In Their Eyes (or, as morons would call it, "Stars In Your Eyes"... God I hate people who do that. See also "Sex In The City"... To be fair, I keep getting the name of that new sitcom Shit My Dad Says wrong and just calling it "Shit Nobody Laughs At", but that may not be quite so accidental. Honestly, a sitcom based on a Twitter feed? Seriously?) where that really tall beardy guy who might have been a paedophile (I think he was cleared of having done anything, but they still got Cat Deeley to do the kids' version instead of him...) welcomed people with mundane jobs (I remember one where a man worked in a factory that made tights, checking that the tights didn't have holes in them. Sounds like either the worst or the best job in the world, depending how "fetishy" you are) who would then be transformed to look "uncannily" like singers they fancied they could do a bit of an impression of. This very occasionally involved the use of blackface. Eventually, someone would win, and they would get some kind of trophy, and then they would kindly fuck off to wherever they came from (usually the Midlands), only to be heard of again if you were the kind of person who enjoys going on holiday to Butlins, where you could see them basking in the glory of their changed lives every night at 7 before the bingo. And that was good enough for them.

It all changed at the turn of the century (I like saying that when I mean 2001, it still kind of confuses people for a second...) with Popstars. Popstars featured a man called Nasty Nigel, who as the name suggests was a bit of a dick to everyone, and a bunch of people who wanted to be, well, pop stars. And they weren't 43 year old shop fitters from Wolverhampton who could do a mean turn as Chris de Burgh, they were young and fresh. And the winners didn't just get a trophy and a job as a redcoat in Bridgend, they got to actually be pop stars. Well, sort of - they got to be more like pop stars than other people are, but less than say, Blue or Atomic Kitten. Popstars was the first, so if you wanted to go back in time and stop Cheryl Cole from taking over the world, you would basically need to terminate this Nigel bloke.

Popstars was followed by Popstars: The Rivals, where a girl band and a boy band were formed. One of them was Girls Aloud who did very well despite having the shittest band name ever, and the other one was... Actually, I'm not even going to type their name, I'm going to let it bug you. Besides, what's the point, nobody is Googling them, not even their mums, so it won't help me any on the traffic front to speak of them here.

Then you had Pop Idol, which launched Gareth Gates and Michelle McManus (I resist the urge to make any "fat people" jokes involving the concept of launching Michelle McManus, but if you want to make any in your head, this would be the right point to do so). And it was here that the phenomenon of the sob story made its first significant appearance.

Gareth Gates had a bit of an affliction, which made the nation sympathise with him and root for him. Gareth Gates had a stutter. It only affected him when he spoke, and not when he sang, so really in a singing contest it was pretty irrelevant, but it was milked and milked and milked with endless footage of him trying to get a sentence out (it stopped just short of forcing the boy to say "I'm not the pheasant plucker, I'm the pheasant plucker's mate, and I'm only plucking pheasants 'cos the pheasant plucker's late" on live TV, but only by a small margin) until he won. He then got speech therapy, which cured him of said affliction, and shagged Jordan, which probably caused him to gain a few much more nasty ones.

I think it was at this point that it became absolutely compulsory for every contestant on the raft of shows that followed (X Factor, Britain's Got Talent) to have something a bit tragic about themselves if they were to stand a chance. OK, so not all of them were orphans, or had overcome leukaemia, because where are you going to find enough people like that with passable voices and who are prepared to shamelessly bang on about it on TV to make two seasons of the awful crap a year for the rest of time, but at the very least they would be a struggling single parent or someone who had been bullied at school or who had a horribly depressing job. I can only recall one contestant, a guy called Rhydian who was on the X Factor, who basically went on there and said " I am a happy, confident person with a good job, a nice family who are all alive, lots of friends, and quite a pleasant life" - I mean, he didn't literally say that, but you know what I mean... Everybody hated him and he went out, despite being one of the best, from a technical perspective, on the show. He didn't have the "ahhhh, bless" factor.

The rule seems to be that you either have to say you want to win to get your family out of crushing poverty, or dedicate each song you sing, even if it's Bat Out of Hell, to a deceased loved one.

I guess I'd pick Mewsley, my cat who died 12 years ago: "She was struck down in her prime, but she loved Toni Braxton and I'm sure she will be looking down on me in heaven where she lives with the angels... It's going to be hard to get through the song, but I'm going to try and be really brave and make her proud"... OK, so it doesn't sound that moving here, but you need to imagine the slight cracking of the voice and the brave, fighting back the tears smile.

Seriously, it would take a lot less than me and my dead cat to make the majority of viewers cry like one of those children you see looking up as their balloon drifts out of sight. Things that have made people, real people I actually know, well up on Britain's Got Talent this week have included "a kid dancing". A kid dancing is not fucking sad, is it? It could be sort of funny I suppose. Could even be impressive, if they are really good. But it's never sad. I asked for an explanation of exactly why people are bawling away in their droves and here is one response, as an exact quote:

"it's the emotional music that gets me. Lol and when you see someone like the kid tonight who has actually improved his physical condition through something he enjoys it's hard not to be a little overwhelmed with compassion and empathy"

What? So, the kid is fit and healthy and loves dancing? A fit, healthy, happy child? Yeah, still not really seeing the sad in there. As for being overwhelmed with compassion and empathy, I don't think a dancing kid on the telly would overwhelm me with anything. This person is obviously someone who flips between emotions quite easily though, given that there was a little "lol" in there for no discernible reason. Cries at children being happy, laughs at nothing. Probably mental.

I just don't get it. If I cried that easily I would be scared to leave the house in case I saw a particularly moving shop window display in Debenhams (perhaps where one of the mannequins had only one arm and three child mannequins to support with no male mannequin in sight) or a really sad queue at a bus stop... I certainly wouldn't be able to go to work because on the way to the station I sometimes see this cat that has a leg missing.

There were apparently a bunch of dog based acts as well, but those won't win, even if they do something really cool like make the dogs bite Amanda Holden's face off, because Simon Cowell hasn't yet figured out a way to make money out of dancing lurchers.

Fernando Torres Struggling in London

In writing this, right before my beloved Chelsea's crucial Champion's League game against FC Copenhagen, I appreciate I am taking a bit of a risk.

If I say that Fernando Torres is crap now, and that the only word fit to describe the sheer scale of the waste of money that his purchase by Abramovich will turn out to have been is one I just made up and it's "Shevchenko-esque", then, should he score a hat trick not only will I look like a damn fool, but I'll have to be pleased about it. It won't necessarily make me like him though - I've been hating Ashley Cole for years and he plays well for us all the time. Shit, he even sometimes plays well for England. The pony is not for turning.

In order to mitigate this risk, I have chosen to focus on an aspect of Fernando Torres about which I definitely can't be proven wrong - how much of a whiny little gimp the bloody manchild is.

As you may have seen reported yesterday, Torres is attributing his lacklustre performance since joining Chelsea to how hard he is finding it having to live in Chelsea.

This is very weird, because I have always held one belief to be true above all others, and that is that Chelsea is a much nicer place to live than fucking Liverpool. Honestly, it's really good - the bin men come three times a week. If you live in Liverpool, chances are the bin men never come, because bin men by their very definition have jobs as bin men, and everybody knows from the football chants that nobody in Liverpool has a job as anything.

Why is he finding it so hard then, if his bins are being emptied three times a week? Do Spanish people not spend as much time obsessing about having their bins emptied as English people?

Well, he claims he is "in awe" of living in the capital. Which is the kind of thing you might expect Susan Boyle or someone to say, you know, someone from some kind of weird, inbred hamlet, but he's from fucking Madrid! That is also "the capital". In that it's the capital of Spain (just clarifying that in case anybody who went to school in Liverpool accidentally ends up reading this).

He goes on to say that if the traffic (which they don't have in Madrid, or Liverpool... Well, they probably don't so much in Liverpool because all the cars are up on bricks and... Oh, alright, I'll stop it) is good it takes him forty minutes to get to training (Chelsea's training ground isn't in Chelsea. Neither is their stadium, actually, but we'll gloss over that), but some days it can take ages. Bloody hell. Imagine that, a commute that takes forty minutes or sometimes, even longer. Sometimes, ages.

Well, you probably can imagine that. You've probably done that. You've probably done that today. Except, at the end of your journey you probably got to do something you hated for shit money, whereas he gets to play football for shedloads of the stuff. And yet, I bet you didn't piss and whine about it half as much as this nancy boy... Imagine if he had to work in a fucking call centre? He'd have a fucking breakdown every morning.

Torres has also complained of the rigours of having to "do paperwork" and "find somewhere to live". Well, yes, those things do suck, too, much like the commuting, but I suspect they suck a lot less when the paperwork is a record breakingly large Premiership contract and the finding somewhere to live involves picking out a fucking mansion. I'd quite enjoy spending a day or so doing things like that. God, I used to just think he looked like a woman (specifically Britney Spears, circa 2001), but now we know he whinges on like one too.

If this is how much these things upset him, imagine how hard Torres is going to cry when John Terry shags his wife?

Good luck tomorrow night though, lad.

Watered Down Booze and Plain Fag Packets

One of the reasons I was so glad the Labour party got knocked out in the last election was that I was under the misapprehension that the Conservatives were less into the interfering in your general business, less keen to be the much criticised "nanny state", and therefore life would be a bit less frustrating for people who like a smoke and a drink and don't wear a pedometer or weigh broccoli before putting it on their plate to ensure that indeed, it is a proper "portion".

But it would appear I was very wrong. More wrong than I was last week when I said, on International Women's Day, that men didn't get a day. Apparently they do, and it is called "Steak and Blowjob Day", and it is today. Use this information however you see fit.

As regular readers will know, I am not a fan of the anti-smoking lobby, and this, I'm afraid, is those bastards again. A few weeks ago it was announced that fags would have to be sold in plain packaging (translation for foreign readers - "cigarettes will be sold in plain white boxes", in case you thought I meant "rent boys will have to dress like accountants"). This is to make them less appealing I guess, but it is bullshit for the following reasons:

1) People buy them because they want or need to set fire to them and inhale the resulting smoke. They do that because it is enjoyable, and because the smoke contains an addictive drug. They do not buy them because they really want a little picture of a camel, or because "ooooh, shiny!".

2) The new packaging actually means you can smoke more, because you can buy one of the cheap, embarrassingly pikey brands and your friends won't notice from the box. It's pretty simple maths - if the fags are cheaper, you can have more!

3) The new packaging is useful. Now, if you want to design something, say a logo for a major sporting event or the Liberal Democrat Party manifesto on the back of a fag packet, you have much more white space.

4) Of course, if you don't like having your cigarettes look all bleak and sad, like they come from some kind of communist nightmare, you always have the option of buying a cigarette case anyway. Or just using an old Marlboro Lights box. I'm saving mine up. Antiques o' the future.

In addition to this pointless new ruling, it was also reported today that drinks companies have made an agreement with the government to reduce the amount of alcohol in the booze, to always display how many "units" there are (because obviously we can't be trusted to work out how pissed something will make us by how strong it is, percentage wise, we have to use the seemingly quite arbitrary system of units, which most people ignore because if you follow it you can only ever have hardly any booze and that is depressing), and also, there will be a 3p "health tax" on those weird super strength lagers.

It seems, from what I've seen, that nobody is happy with this. Alcohol consumers are unhappy because why shouldn't people be allowed to have a pint of Strongbow in 2013 that is as strong as a pint they can have in 2011, or could have probably had in 1975, and because the new weaker drinks won't cost any less, so basically your pants are being had down in the "how drunk can I get for twenty quid?" stakes. Health organisations aren't happy either because they don't think these measures are enough to combat the harmful impacts of alcohol abuse on the nation's health, and because they believe the drinks companies and supermarkets are dictating the terms of the changes. All six organisations in the government's thrilling sounding Responsibility Deal Alcohol Network have refused to partner with the government on this strategy. Drinks companies and supermarkets, in reality, would probably rather things stayed as they are.

There have been many weaker alternatives to popular premium lager brands on the market in recent years, such as Becks Vier and Stella Artois 4, so it's not like there are no options for people who want to drink a weaker pint without having to order the dingo's piss that is Fosters, but essentially, they do taste weaker. Some people do actually drink stronger beers because of the flavour, not because they are in competition with the late George Best. They already made crisps taste all bland by taking all the MSG out of the Skips, why do it to beer, too?

The flavour argument isn't true of course, of the 7.5 per cent plus beers, or "tramp fuels", but I doubt anyone in the grip of a severe enough alcohol addiction that they are drinking that stuff will be put off by a 3p "health tax". Their health is already fucked. This is not how to help them. It's really more of a "piss artist" tax. A tax for being a piss artist. Seems a bit of a bastard thing to do.

Most reasonable people do see that cigarettes and alcohol cause harm, but just making it more expensive and the packaging less attractive won't deter people from doing things that they enjoy (well, it might work with hookers, thinking about it) - are they saying that only poor people ever become alcoholics or die of liver failure? Because that is quite obviously not true. To stop so many people dying you need to make it easy for people for whom drinking has become a problem to get help, and to accept that those problems arise not because alcohol is cheap or strong, or because the people behind Jaegermeister are up to some sort of evil conspiracy, but because people have issues.

And then, to leave everybody else, as in the majority of drinkers, and the pubs and shops who serve them, free to make their choices as adults and as businesses.

Celebrity Mum of the Year

It's actually taken me several hours of trawling the news for anything to annoy me enough to write. It's been a couple of days like that. I guess that this is partly because so much of the news has been devoted to the earthquake and tsunamis, and there's nothing to take the piss out of there, apart from the fact that these events have convinced some people that the second coming of Jesus (who follows me on Twitter now, which is nice) will take place on the 11th of November. Because it's 11/11/11. 10/10/10 and 9/9/09 were all fine. Even 6/6/06 was alright. But 11/11/11 is going to be the one because the earthquake happened on the 11th of March and September the 11th happened on the 11th of September. But I already did the rapture.

Other people said the earthquake was caused by something called an "extreme supermoon". That just sounds like a stunt from Jackass to me.

Horrible global events notwithstanding, even the columnists that usually rile me right up haven't managed it this week. It turns out I only get pissy with Mary Ann Sieghart when she's slagging off men and Richard Littlejohn when he's being really racist. These things happen a lot, but not this week. In the end, I decided that drastic measures were required, so I went on the website of The Sun.

Even as the Japanese disaster was occurring, the Sun still had, under "Top Stories" something about some women from something called The Only Way is Essex mud wrestling, Kim Kardashian eating some carbs even though she had just been to the gym (the crazy bitch), and the highly unshocking news that the ginger girl out of Doctor Who? used to get bullied for being ginger. This happens to all ginger people, because taking the piss out of ginger people is lots of fun. If John Galliano had stuck to ginger people he wouldn't be in all this mess.

I knew The Sun wouldn't let me down, and sure enough, it had a vote on who its readers think should win the coveted "Celeb Mum of the Year Award", sponsored by Foxy Bingo.

That sounded very shit, but it was actually even worse than anything I could have expected. Drumming up some suspense, they reveal that last year the wonderful statuette went to Holly Willoughby, but did she deserve to win twice in a row? I didn't even know she had kids. Admittedly, I only sort of vaguely know who she is, but still. Some of the competition she's got if she wants to hang on to the title (which I'm sure she probably really, really gives a shit about... Wouldn't we all?) is quite amazing.

OK, so Victoria Beckham is in there. She definitely has three kids and appears to be up the kennel with a fourth, so she definitely classes as a mum, and she is definitely a proper celebrity, but that means she couldn't possibly win. Can you see Victoria Beckham coming all the way from LA to collect an award sponsored by Foxy Bingo? Fuck that. The Queen is also on the list, but again, chances of her showing up and making a tearful acceptance speech are nil. They need someone with fuck all better to do, which probably explains why the list includes such colossal non-entities as:

Colleen Nolan (is that the one off the Iceland adverts? Isn't she really old? Are her kids in their thirties? Can you still win for being a good mum to people in their thirties? I guess she's younger than the queen.)
Kym Marsh (not sure, think she might be in Coronation Street.)
Danielle Lineker (apparently that's Gary's wife)
Stacey Solomon (I know this one, she was in the X Factor - finished behind Olly Murs. And he didn't win.)
Danielle Lloyd (nope, no idea - I'm going to go out on a limb and say "some slag".)
Danii Minogue (the shit Minogue sister, who I think Kylie is secretly embarrassed of)
Amanda Holden (cries at everything on Britain's Got Talent. Creeps me out.)
Miriam Clegg (so that's who Cleggyweg is married to)

This is probably the real shortlist, as all the other people are far too famous to win. Actually, the last three on that list probably are too, given I have heard of them. Well, I didn't know Miriam Clegg was called Miriam and I have no idea what she looks like, but I knew there was some sort of wife situation with Nick Clegg there.

So, by dividing up the list into "far too famous" (the Queen, Posh, Samantha Cameron), "a bit too famous" (Charlotte Church, Coleen Rooney, Myleene Klass - no, I don't know why either but she's fucking everywhere) and this lot, we have the full compliment of the best examples of motherhood to be found among our national role models?

Not quite. There are two more.

If I said "Kerry Katona and Katie Price", that would sound ridiculous, right?

No, really, they are in the list. The Celebrity Mum of the Year List. Kerry Katona and Katie Price might be the best celebrity mums. Kerry Katona. And Katie Price. If the contest was to find the Worst Person in the World or the Most Common Person on Television or Hideous Frightening Hell Slag of the Year, sure, they'd be front runners, but Mum of the bastarding Year? Who made this list? Shannon Matthews' mum? Those social workers who fucked up the Baby P thing? Jesus wept...

Ah yes, doesn't everyone look back fondly at the time in their childhood when their dear old mum was on TV, coked out of her bonce? Or when she went out with no knickers on. Magical moments. If anything, I just wish my mum had been a bit more orange and picked me up from school in a Barbie pink Range Rover more often, and I'd had a few more nice "uncles" to whom I was in no way related. Do you not also wish that instead of your fairly normal dad, you'd had a string of awesome male rodels like Dwight Yorke, Peter Andre and Alex Reid? Of course you do. It's what every kid wants.

I wonder if there is an American equivalent and if so where I can stick a wedge of cash on it going to Britney Spears.

"I think the whole problem is, until Cheryl Cole has kids, we can't just give it to her, like we really want to", you can hear whoever is behind this saying to their pointless mate at some pointless PR company. "And everyone else is either shit or wouldn't touch the award ceremony with a ten foot barge pole.".
"Has Amy Winehouse got kids?", the conversation might have continued.
"No."
"Britney Spears?"
"Not British."
"Er... That prostitute, Belle du Jour?'
"Not sure. Billie Piper does have at least one though, and she plays her on ITV."
"Good. Get her. Hopefully it wasn't with Chris Evans though, the ginger kids scare me. No souls, apparently."
"Who else?"
"Kerry Katona and Katie Price. Everyone enjoys those two."
"Shall we do some more coke and play on Foxy Bingo?"
"You read my mind."

Complete pony.

I voted for the queen. Lots of times. For the LOLs.