James Blunt

Mostly it’s just the first two lines of his number one single ‘Beautiful’, which are both: ‘My life is brilliant’. Yeah? Well your song isn’t.

Fish As Food

Put a fish on my plate and pretty soon I will get frustrated. When hungry, I am ill-tempered. When taunted by a complex morsel containing approximately one mouthful of food guarded by an almost infinite number of tiny bone-shaped militia men, I am smash-your-own-skull-and-eat-your-brain incensed.

‘It’s easy’, people always say. ‘Just eat to the layer of bones and then pull them all out whilst they’re still attached to the spine.’ Then they add, ‘there’ll be a couple left, but probably only small ones’.

In reality there are perhaps five percent of the bones remaining hidden in the flesh. On your average fish, this equates to fifty-thousand pointed surprises waiting to either drive a hole in the roof of your mouth or, more likely, lodge in your windpipe making you gag. By the time you’ve fiddled round with every mouthful, dissecting it and removing the bones until you’re left with a pea-sized lump of mashed flesh, fish have evolved to have even more bones to ward off predatory humans.

Fish aren’t food.

Materialistic Boasting

It always comes completely out of the blue, or almost as bad, with the most tenuous link to the current conversation. It is of course the materialistic boast.

One person will be talking about how they’re taking up cycling and a second person/arsehole will suddenly offer a statement such as: ‘My dad’s just got a new car’. Never mind that nobody knows this person’s father, this comment just isn’t relevant. Everybody stops for a second, dumbstuck. Then, either they add to this comment or they wait until the born-again cyclist recommences their story before butting in a second time with: ‘Yeah, it cost fifteen thousand pounds’.

I always like to think that I would do something at this point, like have some witty sarcastic response that cuts to the core of their insecurities and renders them uncomfortably self aware. What I actually do is say nothing, obviously. The confusion and anger seem to be neutralised by the overwhelming urge to sigh and the desire to stop my heart beating, so I remain mute.

Everyone usually musters some sort of complex facial expression in place of words. A sort of: ‘Do you know how obnoxious you are? Please stop talking and start looking embarrassed’ look. These people can’t interpret something so complex, though. They continue to hijack the conversation and say: ‘He earns sixty thousand now’. Only they don’t say ‘thousand’, they say ‘thou’ or ‘k’ or something.

It never fails to amaze me, how long they’ll carry on while everyone else remains silent. If it were you, you’d run away it would be so uncomfortable – they just list objects and prices unaware of the boredom surrounding them. What are you so proud of anyway? It’s not you, it’s your dad. What’s that got to do with anything? It’s always crap stuff as well, like a watch. What do you honestly say to someone who’s proud of an expensive watch? ‘Well that’s a tremendous waste of money for what is, essentially, just a tool.’

I don’t go round saying: “Here’s my new screwdriver. It cost eight hundred pounds. Aren’t I a moron? It doesn’t matter, though, because I’ve got so much money. Seriously. I had to decorate the other day. Didn’t paint. Stuck fifty pound notes all over the wall. Hired Elton John to do it for me. Then I hired someone to resurrect Elvis and paid him to smear shit all over the fifty-pound note wallpaper. That’s how little I care about my money, which I love and would do anything for, but have so much of that I can waste it on any old shit so that you all know how much I have. Only you don’t seem to notice, so I have to tell you and then you’re still not interested, so I have to make it even more obvious by just going on and on about it”.

Gwen Stefani's Rich Girl

Specifically the line: ‘If I was a rich girl, then I’d have all the money in the world’. Richness is all relative. Compared to the average third-world resident, I am rich. Compared to the majority of the first-world, Gwen Stefani is rich. You do not need to have all of the money in the world to be classed as rich.

By the same token, if you are rich, you have a relatively large amount of money. You do not, under any circumstances, have all of it. If you did have all of the money in the world, Gwen, you would be paradoxically poor as without hard currency, people would have to revert to a primitive barter system and your wealth would be meaningless. More to the point, it is very unlikely that anyone would wish to trade food with you in exchange for your lamentable services as a 40-year-old woman dressing as a cheerleader.

Dental Floss

If I ever do manage to get the damn stuff between any two front teeth I don’t have the dexterity to perform the necessary forwards-and-backwards dechunking motion. All I can do is lacerate a gum. Back teeth? Has anyone ever managed to perform a successful floss back there?