I wake up on Sundays and it ain't some kind of perfect young couple awakening where I leave the flat looking slightly unshaven but well turned out to some popular tune that invokes a sense of additional coolness to my life.

I don't nod to a friendly newspaper seller, shake hands with a safe looking local, help a sweet old lady across the road before giving her a roguish kiss on the cheek. I don't go into a superb looking café, order fresh coffee and various awesome breakfast foodings.

I don't get back to the flat to the girlfriend still languishing beautifully in bed with all the good stuff I just bought and we don't end up having a slow-motion pillow fight with our clean bright pillows, surrounded by gorgeous bed linen and awesome-cool-retro bedroom furniture.

No.

I wake up on Sundays and I invariably have a hangover. I make a big mug of strong, sweet black coffee and this is all I see for a good while:

Then, depending on whether I get my eyesight back swiftly enough, I slouch in front of the telly for a bit before putting the Xbox on and giving some aliens a good punch up the bracket.

A bit later Jen awakes and before long it's her turn to indulge in alien bracket punching.

Bacon sandwich.

Pub.

Dinner.

I fucking love those Sundays.

The day started well at least. I woke up! Always a good start, hahaaa! It was 3.30am mind, a time only my younger self was familiar with when he could get away with staying up all night and then going to the pub again the very next afternoon, usually playing catchup too.

6am we arrived at Euston, trainway to the stars, to see that the stars had gone out and were replaced with the across-the-board indication that all transport in the country had been cancelled and used as clothes hangers or something.

Not all was lost. We were a bit though. But light at the end of the tunnel proved to be the end of the tunnel, so we got through that tunnel via about, roughly, ten or eleven different trains and arrived no later than three hours late to the event we've already sold our kidneys just to get to. The SFX Weekender.

We mooched around, had a cup of tea, bumped into familiar faces that we love and cherish and sometimes punish with tough love and elbow grease and we could start to relax.

Time for a beer then! Lovely. Beer. After such a horrendous journey navigating various locomotive companies, traps and peril (and sausage rolls of dubious intent) a beer would be most welcome indeed. Although halfway through said first lovely pint I started to develop what can only be described as a migraine because that's exactly as factual as you can get.

I lasted as long as I could and then went for an early night to die quietly to myself, crying softly into the night until oblivion took me and stuffed me into pain-filled dreams of harsh despair and needles and shit like that.

Saturday saw me struggling to arise but I did it, magnificently too I might be proud enough to add, and I went out to use the alcohol method of migraine reduction (not advised at all... really... but it bloody helped!).

I enjoyed myself, I met more people I knew, I met people I didn't know. I marvelled and goggled at the excellence of people and their creativity and imagination and drinking skills. I had enough change to buy a book I was that taken with it all. Still haven't read it. It seems to be made of paper and doesn't turn the page when you press the side of it. I'm at a loss quite frankly!

The bad side of the event itself was fewfold although the only whinging I heard on the days themselves were coming from my own hallowed gob which, exclusively, referred to the food. The fallout whinging is being done online and quite frankly there are a fair few disgruntled knobends as well as disgruntled righteous heroes. 

There were other troubles encountered of course, a train got derailed by Steven Seagal and Bruce Willis (something about terrorists stealing egg covered diamonds, plenty of wisecracks apparently and also the world was saved) which caused our own travel woes as well as better important people that were supposed to be on stage telling us anecdotes about when they threw up over Paul Daniels or something similar. There was the Pontins Effect which states, in all the volumes of The Life Manual of Life that have ever existed, that it sucks your soul through your urethra, even if you haven't got one, and then spits your hopes and dreams into the anus of a disgruntled toss monkey stuffed up a dead tiger's nose hole. And there was, most heinous of all, the food.

The food, to be fair, was illegal. But also a secret government testing ground for germ warfare and bum tolerance. Also doubling as a rat killing drive as tonnes of infected geek shittings flooded the sewers of North Wales. Still waiting for the results on that one but I reckon they're quite significant.

I conclude with a conclusion: It wasn’t a convention really. Not really, in the end. It was a bunch of great people at a convention-like event that was conventionishly conventional. Everyone I saw (later damning moans and pissing contests aside) looked like they were having a good time and despite my lack of eye patch to shield my raging ocular pain, feeling like the devil’s own testicle was lodged in my eye socket, I had a really, really good time.

Mind you, we had hot water.

"Excuse me, sir, terribly sorry to bother you but would you like me to get you some chips?"

"Fuck off! Those cunts are more evil than I am!"

I'm not an idiot. Mostly. I've done my fair share of idiocy in my life, that's not ever a matter for dispute. I've fucked up, got it wrong, acted the Benny, fucked up some more, ridiculed my ancestry, offended innocent mortals, fucked up even worse and also streaked in front of a couple of teenage girls (so my mother tells me, I was 2 at the time).

Every so often I'm standing outside or by the back door just staring into space while inhaling nicotine into my system and not even reflecting on my past and how much of an idiot I was and then out of the blue there's something like a slide show that *click* damn *click* damn *click* damn well reminds me of completely stupid, idiotic, cringeworthy things that have occurred to me in my life that have been my fault.

Thanks to a friend that has become a sort of official biographer of me and my good ol' core group of college origin band of friends, I won't mention his name (Mike), some of this facepalm cringefest is actually available on video, DVD and possibly now even Blu-Ray.

To be fair to the unmentionable fellow (Mike), over the years he has certainly assisted in filling in a whole hell of a lot of memory blanks! Whether we wanted to remember or not... that's irrelevant...

But, I hear you ask, What's for tea? Well I don't know! Stop thinking about your stomach for a few seconds and carry on reading please. Bloody hell.

You should be asking: Marty, what the bloody hell are you talking about? What's the point of this?

The point is... I guess it takes an idiot to know an idiot. Therefore if I get stressed at the idiocy around me then I'm probably thinking that I was like that once or, at least, I pretty much understand where that idiot is coming from. Possibly. Either way, stop being an idiot, it causes me flashbacks.

Ta.

I would like to state for the record though that Mike is awesome. He's the fella that let me use his music for the intro and outro for The Bearcast (and Lost Bearings, the audio comedy/drama thing) and that without him I would be a lesser man. There. I said it.

He has no business being in a blog post about idiots so now the record is set straight.

Thinking about it... I should have done a completely Mike focussed post to explain that but then all my friends, of which I have at least... some would have wanted their own blog certificates of glory.

Stuff that!

(but I do love you all nonetheless!)

 

 

It's been 70 years coming but finally Dad has reached the number that he can now use as an answer to questions such as: "How old are you?"

Happy Birthday, Dad!

I don't quite remember the first time I met you but I gather you were quite instrumental* in my creation and eventually clothes shopping and feeding me and suchlike and so forth and so on. So - thanks for all that and more!

There have been many times in my life where I've thought that I should have some guidance and listen to a man of experience and thus make the best decision possible for whatever insane situation I found myself in where the outcome could so very easily become somewhat iffy. And in those quiet moments of lucidity I would invariably ponder: What would Dad do?

Obviously then I would do what I was going to do anyway and thus end up in iffy outcomes and jeopardise the planet possibly by putting back the date for World Peace by differing timescales. But that's the way things go.

See if I had acted upon my suspicions regarding what actions you would have taken I would more than likely have ended up un-iffy.

That'll teach me!

Enjoy the whiskey.

* Did you forget the words? Haha! I'm terrible for that...

I didn't mean for this to turn into an advert or plug or owt but I'm very happy with mobile service provider GiffGaff and so now these words are all in your eyes and that. Been testing them out this last month or so and it's been great.

I'm paying a tenner per month for unlimited internet and texts and 250 minutes. I was going to test it for a month to see how I got on with it but went ahead and topped up £10 for the next month anyway.

Why I'm writing this today is because you can earn points for things, like giving good advice in the community section of the website and suchlike and so forth. I don't quite know how but I earned 14 points, which translated to a whole 14p! woo! And there was an option to donate the payback money to charity so off my 14p went.

Got an email through today that said:

The total contributions were matched by giffgaff and we're very pleased to announce we're giving Macmillan Cancer Support £9,708

Even though my pissy little contribution was only 14p the overall total made me do a grin. Nice one, you lot!

If you want to check GiffGaff out then I can really recommend them and urge you to have a go. If you use this link too we earn 500 points (that we can give to charity or to our local pub in exchange for beers even!)

http://giffgaff.com/orders/affiliate/boxroom

Or click that thing below:

Share and Enjoy!

Two things.

First: My hair looked fantastic this morning. I got up and looked at it and it was all straggly and sleep-bombed and I thought, "Flip it, I'm getting this shit cut away from my head." And after a wash and blow-dry, yeah - that's how I roll on Wednesdays, it looked amazing. Stupid bloody mane.

Second: Soldiers of Tangent is starting a second run, recording tonight! 

I bloody love this podcast type thing that we do. By 'we' I mean Danny, pictured here: 

And myself, pictured in all accuracy right here: 

After finishing the incredibly wondrous third series of Bearcast with Danny earlier this year I'm really looking forward to recording a solely Marty and Danny thing and all that. It's very liberating. No, seriously! It is! Not like shopping in the nude, type liberating. Or freeing puppies from evil, mentally ill, fur magnates and suchlike either.

This is pure, unadulterated, tangental freedom and it works! 

So, look out for it or we'll beefsock you. Yeah, you heard.

What happened this morning? BBC Weather reported, in a mildly more middle class accent than I possess, that we are on alert for shit tonnes of stormy LOOK OUT FOR THAT COW type weather.

When I awoke this morning, blundering my way into the kitchen after coffee and nicotine, with the cat only barely escaping my clumsy staggerings (this is how she expects to get breakfast actually, by tripping me up), the outside world I noticed was dark, doom dark. Walls of water, howling wind, thunder, planes crashing into our roof... that sort of thing.

I ignored the screams of those sucked up into the vortex and threw some coffee at my face and went for a shower. When I emerged all clean and fresh, whistling a happy tune about the joys of going to work and the bus full of diseased flu botherers I'd be snuggled up to, I noticed that the sky outside was clear. It was a beautiful, calm morning.

So I reckon my bathroom is the gateway to another dimension and that's the end of it.

 

Just testing!

Please do not look directly at this pin-headed freak otherwise you will soon receive a sales call. Probably regarding print solutions.

I think I may have invalidated my warranty though.
This is my new mind-fart mini-blog space to keep my main blog clear of silly shit that I fancy yelling, possibly through a gob full of marmite on toast.

Follow me if you like. It won't make you popular with people you fancy but it might get you a free drink.

It won't. Probably. Oh how should I know!

Fear of strangers puts nearly half of London children off walking to school, a survey suggests.

So claims that BBC lot. In a timely fashion too as it has recently been unveiled that a War on Strangers is now well into a third season as governments worldwide have all agreed to meet up for a few drinks every now and then to discuss the eradication of the threat.

Strangers have been a constant problem the world over for all of history, it is believed, so it is high time something should be done about this. This has met with cries of "Hooray!" and "Good show!" from many people who know each other well who, by their very nature and necessity, are quite mistrustful of strangers.

"You don't know a chap, you don't trust him. Simple as that," claimed Judge Bamford, castellan of the Warwickshire Gramphouse, under siege from many strangers during the holidays for years beyond counting. "What with the internet and libraries and pubs and the like, there is no godly reason upon this blasted rock for there to be any strangers at all. If I don't know you then that's your fault and you should be shot."

Recently honoured for his work in the field of Tourist Shooting, Judge Bamford is leading a campaign in his local hostelry to extinguish the menace of "People what we don't know."

"It's going rather well," he reported. "Got two of the buggers last week. That'll show 'em, eh!"

It will soon be illegal to be in possession of a stranger, to talk to a stranger or actually be a stranger. If in doubt, don't be a stranger.

Artist's impression of what a stranger might be like.