Sunday, 13 November 2011

Why I Will Never Understand News

Celebrities are bloody fun aren't they? I can't get enough of celebrities. I follow them all on Twitter, then just in case I miss anything that they post either in their sleep or in the other, oh, 20 minutes of the day that I'm not checking it, I can just log onto the website of a tabloid newspaper and find out all about them. I would be inconsolable if these websites stopped letting me know when Amy Childs has gone out partying, when Lady Gaga has worn some silly clothes, when Demi Moore is looking thin and when Brooklyn Beckham is eating Sushi.

I don't understand news. I get confused about which pieces of information are allowed to be put on a website and printed in a paper to become news. The boundaries between trashy gossip magazines and tabloid newspapers have blurred so much that I think it is genuinely affecting my vision. I have a degree in print journalism for goodness sake, and yet when I pick up a newspaper I can only stare at it with an expression that floats somewhere between confusion and utter terror. I didn't realise I spent three years learning about THIS.

In the last couple of weeks I have realised that I do not fit in with the tabloid demographic any more. The first sign was the shock news that Kim Kardashian had split up with her husband after just 72 days. I have absolutely no idea who or what Kim Kardashian is. I know she has a reality TV show, and I know she has a big bum. That is all. I couldn't possibly tell you why she has her own TV show or what gives her the right to have her every move shoved in front of my face in paper form. I must have missed the memo.

Then there is the unadulterated television hurricane that is The X-Factor. Aside from having a Twitter account that I check on weekend evenings, I have had absolutely no contact with the X-Factor this year. Last year was plenty enough for me. The only thing I know about this year's competition is that there was a boy called Frankie taking part in it.

I have read two newspaper articles and seen a few headlines about Frankie and his booting from the X-Factor, and I've come to a few conclusions. HE IS OUT OF CONTROL. He's like every single bad guy in every single action film all rolled into one super-evil warlord, completely bent on ruining Saturday and Sunday nights for absolutely everyone. If Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse had ever made babies, Frankie would be the outcome. He is a monster and he must be stopped.

Basically, Frankie is a bit of a lad. I don't particularly like lads, they are the sort of people who are too loud for my fragile ears on a Saturday night. They are the sort of people who give me abuse when I play Call of Duty online - but older. However, I cannot fault the way he has made the most of his 15 minutes of fame by trying to pull anything that looks at him. Credit where credit is due.

This happens every year during the X-Factor's live show stint. Somehow out of the hundreds of thousands of acts that apply each year, one slightly turdy one manages to slip through the net and make it nearly all the way to the final. Every year there is public outrage that they haven't been kicked out of the competition sooner, and then every year people who don't usually like the show hijack the voting in order to keep the one that everybody hates in the contest and further wind the nation up. Funnier still, it becomes news every single year. I will never understand journalism.

Tuesday, 1 November 2011

The Winter Depression

I know quite a few people who get quite uptight when weather doesn't correlate with the current season. For the last 17 summers I've listened to people moan about the 'Great British Summer', and all it's rain, and it's only 17 because I have no consciousness of those before. I've always been pretty passive about the weather. I don't mind the showers in the middle of July. It's funny to watch tourists look up at the sky and curse as their beige cargo shorts get drenched in the freak rainfall.

In the middle of Summer, I'm quite happy to stay indoors and admire the amazing weather from a safe place, such as my bed. Sunshine is over rated anyway. At least rain doesn't burn your skin, sting your eyes and feel like it's melting your legs. If anything it cleans you (unless of course it rains continuously and the resulting downpour culminates in sea levels rising so high that they will wipe out our tiny little existence. It's not so good then). Well done rain.

In the height of those heat-waves, I always find that it's much easier to be too cold as opposed to being too hot. It's far easier to light a wood burner than sit in a fridge. It's also much easier to keep putting clothes on, on the other hand, if you're still hot when you get down to your bare skin, you're pretty darn stuck.

Throughout all of summer, I will happily stand by the opinions featured in the above paragraphs. At least until we reach the end of British Summer Time - then everything changes.

Whoever came up with the idea of Daylight Saving Time was a lazy little bell-end. It only feels like a good idea when you emerge from your sleep feeling like you've cheated time itself by getting an extra hour in bed. For me, that hour was pointless, mainly because when I know the clocks are going back, I feel justified to stay up an hour later than I usually would. But if you have had your little lie in, Daylight Saving Time ceases to be a good idea as soon as your feet touch the ground in the morning.

For me, the sheer gravity of the situation, like many others, hits me when I get in the shower and actually wake up a bit. I think to myself "It's quite bright this morning actually...oh yeah...that means it's going to be dark by 5.30 though. That is early." That initial thought snowballed in my head until this evening, when I drove home from work to find it was dark. I thought I didn't like the sunlight glaring in my eyes through the summer, but car lights coming towards you on country roads in the dark are infinitely worse.

At least the extremely heavy blow of the prospect of another Winter is softened by the thoughts of Christmas. Maybe the entire reason Christmas adverts appear so early is to remind us that we don't need to spend our evenings curled up in duvets, crying until our tear drops freeze. No, we can spend them feeling merry and giving each other presents, that is until January, at which point we are all very much on our own until that heroic weekend in March, and from then I will never moan about sunshine ever again. Promise.