Bath plugs and bad language

We've just had the hallway, stairs, banisters etc in our house redecorated - what you'd call the 'common areas' in a shared block of flats, for example - and a very nice job has been done too. We're very pleased with it.

It has not, though, been without its drawbacks. It suddenly looks miles better than the decorative order of the rest of the house, and suddenly other parts of the place look decidedly shoddy in comparison. As a result, small things which I've lived with for years - since we moved in eight years ago, in some cases - are really starting to bug me. Stuff I've barely noticed before.

The crappy light pull in the bathroom, with its two-metres-too-long cord knotted up into a bunch to keep it short enough. The rust on the balcony outside at the back. The small bit of wallpaper missing from the corner of the living room. The come-away-from-its-mooring sink plug in the downstairs bathroom.

Now, when I was born, all the handiness, all the ability to undertake physical work requiring even minor dexterity was held back, and put into my younger brother. And
I mean all of it. While he can refit his entire bathroom, doing the plumbing and electrics and reconditioning his old sash windows in the process, I can turn even the simplest DIY task into a labour of Hercules, ultimately requiring the attention of a specialist to undo any damage I may have done in the futile attempt to take anything
on myself.

That bath plug, though. Surely I could manage that, yeah? You just take off the old one and put in a new one, right? So I ordered a new chain and stay (check out the use of professional language... oh yeah...) and set about replacing the thing on Sunday.
For those of you not 'in the know' as I now am *cough*, the picture below shows you what I ordered.

The metal bit with the screw thread is the stay. At least, that's what I'm calling it. 

On the old plug, that bit had its arse hanging out, so to speak - it had come loose from its fitting, the chain had broken, and it needed replacing. The screw, though, was completely rusted and frozen solid, which is why it wasn't quite the simple task it should have been. No problem, I thought - a liberal spraying of WD40 will get that baby moving.

I therefore started this task by applying a thorough drenching of this magical chemical. To my left hand. I couldn't see what I was doing because the sink was so tight to the wall; I was having to 'hug' the sink and work blind. Right hand round, squeeze the spray-can between the pipes, find the screw with the other hand and... shit. Missed. Cue first batch of swearing. It would not be the last.

Eventually, I was able to coat the thing in the spray, and I sat back for a bit to let it do its work. I was naive enough to assume it'd be plain sailing from there; that a bit of patience to allow the chemical to do its job was all that was necessary. How mistaken 

I was. It still wouldn't budge. What followed was an hour of shouting, cursing, wrestling and general bad humour as I tried, in vain, to get the damn screw moving. I even tried to get hold of it with pliers, but working completely blind, I spent at least 20 minutes trying to get a grip on the nut. I'm not proud of my language during that time - I may, 

I confess, even have pleaded with the thing for a short while.

I got to the point where, no matter how much resistance this recalcitrant bastard thought it was going to put up, I was not going to let it have its way. I had a bright, shiny new chain and stay to put in - I could not be defeated. I'll have to cut it, I thought. Think like a pro - you'll need leverage, I thought. So I hunted down the longest-handled pair of garden shears we've got, and with those applied as much force as I could to the thing. The result of another half-hour's shouting, screaming and grunting - God knows what the neighbours thought was going on - was a small dent on each side of the thing, and some moderate scratching to the rusted screw thread.

By this point I was pretty sure the old stay was starting to look smug. It was mocking me. My eyes then alighted on a hacksaw in our tool box. Ha! So I cut the bastard's head off! Yes! Just twenty further minutes of sweat and swearing, and it dropped to the floor, beaten. Now all I had to do was install the new one and... where the fuck has the new one gone? 

I'd lost the new one. Through constant sorting of tools, moving two cabinets out of the way and generally destroying the bathroom in my efforts, it had gone missing. It took a further fifteen minutes of searching to find it, buried at the bottom of the tool box under all the equipment I'd tried and rejected. Who can blame the thing? It had probably seen the abuse I was meting out to its older cousin and tried to hide, terrified. I can report, though, that after no more than three hours' work, some extremely creative swearing and enough sweat to fill the bloody sink that I was working on, it's done. I have successfully replaced a plug chain and stay.

My brother's coming up to install the new light switches, sockets'n stuff. 

Probably for the best.

The Budget: beer, bingo and Mr Flibble

So the budget, then. While it's been lauded in some quarters for its pension reforms - not sure how helpful this will end up being, with so many people turning away from pensions and looking to property to provide for their retirement - it's actually something that happened afterwards that caught the eye. The Tories ran this ad on the same day, crowing about giving 'hardworking people' what 'they' deserve. This is not only patronizing in the extreme, it doubly betrays the Tories' thinking. That 'they', firstly. Talk about give yourself away.

Clearly the Conservatives do not regard themselves as part of this group of 'they'. In fact it may be that they don't even believe that 'they' will be part of the potential audience for the ad - they're evidently talking to rather more elevated people about what they're doing for the poor, downtrodden masses. About as divisive as it gets, and a clear sign that your typical Conservative is quite happy to regard him/herself as rather detached from the 'common' man. Look at what we're doing for these poor, unwashed ruffians - helping them satisfy their working class obsessions. Next up: cutting VAT on racing pigeon sales, capping the price of whippet leads and 20p off tax on a pack of Woodbines.  

Then there's the measures in the first place. A penny off tax on a pint of beer. Cutting tax on bingo. Oh, joy. This is nothing less than distracting the poor simpletons with Mr Flibble the sock puppet with one hand while signing the order to close another hospital with the other. They won't notice - they're too busy getting shitfaced and gambling to care about us cutting the legs out from under their society.

No wonder Milliband, in what was otherwise a fairly weak response speech I thought, called it a budget for the privileged. I don't, personally, vote with my wallet. I'm fortunate - I'm in that large middle bracket of people who earn enough to live on without having to miss out on what in any wealthy country like ours should consider staples. So I'd happily forego a few pennies' tax cut, or even pay a few pennies more, to avoid cuts in public services. I don't care only about where my money goes - I also care about where the country's money goes, and on whom and what it's spent.

The Tories, of course, can't understand that thinking - they will no doubt cut income tax in the last budget before the next General Election. By all means cut tax, and cut it properly, for the lowest paid; the people who will actually notice it. But don't just drop it across the board by a penny or so and assume everyone will vote for you because they're £68 per year better off, or whatever the hell it is. 

And what of the Lib Dems in this? Desperate to take credit for the tax cuts that were included in this budget, they were like an excited kid, jumping up and down on the spot as the parents look at the class project. I made that sheep, Dad! That one! At the back! That one that one that one! Look!

Even if this was their work, it's just another sign of a coalition that's somehow holding it together despite clear idealogical differences. When the General Election date is set, those gloves are going to come off big time, I think. I hope people see the current government for what they are when it comes to it.

How to make enemies and alienate people

Last Friday my girlfriend and I went to a rather nice bar in the shadow of the Shard, by London Bridge station. What a building that Shard is, by the way - you can't walk past the bottom of the thing without craning your neck to catch a glimpse of its full height. It seems to go up and up into the very clouds themselves, and often literally does if they're low-lying. A wonder of modern construction.

Anyway, it being a Friday, and the first payday for many since just before Christmas (myself included – six weeks between paydays!), the place was perhaps not surprisingly absolutely packed. We were lucky to find a small table, recently vacated, and sat down to have ourselves a few cocktails, which my missus had assured me were of the very highest quality in this establishment.

So I went to the bar, which ran the length of the large room itself, and found an unoccupied spot right on the corner from where to try to catch the barman's eye. There were people sitting drinking at the bar, including two young women sharing a bottle of wine, one of whom I'd had to stand very close to in order to get to the bar in the first place. They therefore heard my exchange with the barman all too clearly.

"What can I get you?" he asked, taking my order for the first couple of cocktails (and a bit of grub, just to civilise the occasion further you understand).
"Where are you sitting?"

At this, I turned to make space so he could see my girlfriend, and pointed at her. She sat at the table, concentrating on an email or some-such on her mobile.

"The lady with the mobile?"

It's at this moment that I opened my gob and instantly and indelibly placed myself onto the two ladies' hate lists.

"I'm afraid so, yes," I answered, meaning 'I'm afraid so, she's using that wretched mobile thingy'. Two female heads whipped round and gave me what can only be described as the skunk eye, clearly interpreting my comment rather differently. One can only imagine what scenarios they had in mind – a blind date in which I was less than pleased with the lady's appearance, perhaps. A git of a boyfriend who'd rather be partying with people other than his own partner. Or simply a wretch, not good enough for the good lady at whom he'd been pointing. Who knows what they thought?

I did not hang about to find out. (It was the phone, ladies – honest. The phone!) I had no desire to get whatever they were drinking thrown over me with some force, so hurried back to the table. At this point I realised that there was every chance one or both of them could conceivably come over and tell my girlfriend exactly what they thought of her 'date', so I told her what had happened pretty damn quickly.

She, fortunately, saw the funny side and thankfully no such thing happened. Indeed I can confirm that the cocktails were indeed of the very highest order and a fine evening was enjoyed by both of us. I can only hope that either of those women, through some act of cosmic serendipity, stumble across this entry and realise that I'm not quite the heel, the cad, the thorough bastard I must have sounded at that precise moment.

Having your cake and not eating it.

I was struck at work the other day by a bizarre but extremely common phenomenon. In an earlier post I explained how biscuits are frequently on offer in my office, and the same is certainly true of cake. We're blessed with some excellent bakers, and there's often a cake sale for some cause or other which, purely in the spirit of good citizenship you understand, I'm always happy to support.

A couple of weeks back one of the more renowned makers brought in a Victoria sponge, an impressive thing of several inches in height, looking like something out of a fine patisserie. What followed can only be described as an Andy Capp-style melee, with a big cloud of dust, hands and forks swarming round it like it was the only watering hole left at the end of a very long dry season.

As the dust settled and the victors, for that's the only word to describe them, moved away from the plate with their slices, you may well expect there to have been just a few crumbs on a slightly battered plate. Remnants, nothing, only a suggestion that there was ever cake there in the first place. But that's where the First Law of Cake kicks in, the bizarre phenomenon I mentioned. There was, entirely untouched, standing alone as if on guard over the plate itself, a single slice remaining. The scrum had somehow contrived to contain exactly one person fewer than there were slices available (not that it had turned up pre-sliced - how does that happen?).

That slice stood lonely vigil for much of the rest of the day, for the First Law of Cake is immutable - 'Thou shalt not take the final slice'. Some part of the collective subconscious dictates that it would simply be bad manners. Certain form must be observed, a ritual carefully followed if some curse is not to befall us all:

1) After a decent interval, it's OK for somebody to make some comment to the effect that 'nobody seems to want' the last bit.

2) Later still, it should be remarked that it can't be left there overnight because it'd 'go hard' and be wasted.

3) Finally, somebody shall announce, such that the whole office hears, that they're going to have cake, so there, and help themselves, but under no circumstances must they take the whole slice. They shall cut a piece of it off, leaving a stub. The same shall happen with the next person, and the next, cutting the remains into steadily smaller chunks until the last piece is so small that nobody feels bad about leaving it.

4) The last rites. (I only assume this happens, because I've never been the person responsible for this task). One of the last people out of the office, on the pretext of clearing away the plate and cutlery, finishes it off in the kitchen. Either that or the routinely-blamed-for-everything and possibly mythical 'cleaners' finish it. Or that final piece goes in the bin, that it too takes its share.

This has been the case wherever I've worked, however large or small the cake, however many people involved. People are funny, ain't they?

Methinks the ladies (and laddies) doth protest too much

Got caught up in the demonstration in central London on Bonfire Night, trying to get home from work on a bus. Just as the crowd left Trafalgar Square, so did my bus. The driver tried to nip ahead of them to get clear, but was stopped by the police, and within moments there were hundreds swarming past, down Whitehall, many of them thumping the bus windows as they went. Journey over – after a long wait, I bailed, and had to make my way home another way.

"I don't know, a bit of everything," the woman behind me said to somebody she'd called to tell she'd be late. Clearly she'd been asked what they were protesting about, and she got it pretty much spot on. I saw, variously, anti-fracking, anti-corruption, anti-government, anti-corporate anti-bloody everything else banners. But I also saw some nonsense about a 1066 law being invalid ('No to your feudal system!' - WTF?), the usual Class War banners, Anonymous banners, etc - a motley lot.

I've written on here before of my belief in the right to protest, even of my admiration for people who bother, but this sort of stuff frankly winds me up for the sheer juvenile, unfocused pointlessness of it. Every generation a group of disaffected young people take up this same cause, raging against the system that so down-treads them and promising 'revolution'. Every generation the same result – nothing. Hundreds of those same people were filming the march they'd joined on cameras or camera-phones – hardly the accoutrements of the starving, huddled masses. Glowing torches, if you like, with their myriad lights pock-marking the thousands; standards borne for the very consumer society of which these young ones are so contemptible. Who do they think makes those devices, runs the networks, provides the bandwidth to 'share' the results on bloody Facebook or wherever? Greenpeace?

Similarly, hundreds of them wore the V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes mask which has become so popular as a symbol of this movement. This is, apparently, one of the top-selling items on Amazon and eBay(!) and the best-selling mask in the world. And for every one of them sold legitimately, Time Warner, another business-world behemoth, picks up a few coins. That'll show 'em – well done, all.

This ignorance of these basics is not what really irks me, though – it'd be an odd demonstration indeed if every person who turned up was focused exactly on what were the real causes of our societal problems, and fully availed of all the facts of whatever matter troubled them – who among us is? What irritates me is the plain fact that nobody seems to be offering an alternative among all this naysaying. Down with the system, they cry - to be replace with what? Something else! What? We don't know, but something else.

Even 'opinion formers' seem to have this problem. I listened, last night, to the interview between Russell Brand and Paxman, which has gone viral lately. Brand attended that same demonstration and is one of the more visible speakers of the movement. He has, importantly, access to the mass media to shout about it. I have a lot of respect for him – he's genuinely and extensively involved with charities in the prison/drug addiction sectors, and is an eloquent, passionate, even angry campaigner on behalf of a movement which needs visible proponents like him. But even he fell short during this joust on what form his ideal system would take. Challenged on his never having voted, and asked what the system he'd have would be, he answered only what it would not be, listing again the failures of our present political system. He said there are better-informed, better-educated and better-placed people to make those decisions than he. Where? Who are these people, and why aren't they more visible? Revolution is coming, he proclaimed. The same cry we've heard ad nauseam for generations, with no actual plan for bringing it about.

It isn't coming. Not with the present tactics, at any rate. This system changes only from within. It may well cater only for a corporate and societal elite, as Brand complains, but not voting, marching down Whitehall and hurling fireworks at the Palace of Westminster is not going to change anything. The only real power of the people is the vote, and nowadays our right to withdraw spending, ironically. If you don't like it, you have to work with the system as it stands to change it – set up your own political party, tell people what you will do, not merely what you won't, galvanise voters to your cause and make changes from inside the system. Two World Wars, for all the huge social, political and economic upheaval they wrought, could not change the fundamentals of the way that system works, so a few banners and a mask are not even going to get noticed. Changes may have occurred but the basic structure is the same so you have to work with it if you want to alter it. You don't vote? Then why should the politicians give a fuck what you think? They have nothing to lose in ignoring you.

Even assuming this movement somehow gathered the wherewithal to bring their revolution about, would it do us any good in the long term? The last genuine people's revolution in a major capitalist society was that of Russia in 1917, and look what legacy that left – something so fundamentally corrupt, so vicious, so open to abuse by the power-hungry that it only lasted two generations or so itself before it too crumbled, brought down once again by the people it purported to embody. What do they have now? A capitalist democracy, of sorts.

I can't see it happening here. We're too comfortable – however many people live in poverty, however much inequality of wealth and power still dominates our socio-economic landscape, we've been willing players in this game, and have little excuse in particular since, as a nation, we bought into the Thatcherite 'money is God' ethos of the eighties and early nineties. Nothing to do with those kids on the march, I know, but then many of those eighties voters were the similarly disaffected youth of the seventies. See how this wheel keeps coming round and round?

So. They will continue their marches. Continue their 'broken society' trumpeting. Continue their entirely negative, entirely unfocused, entirely non-constructive message. All they'll achieve is what they did on Tuesday night – piss off a few thousand commuters and maybe get themselves nicked in the process.

If music be the food of love, shut up and let me listen to it

Was at the Aldwych Theatre last night for Top Hat, a reworking of the old Astaire/Rogers film. All Art Deco and 20s-glamour escapism, it was the sort of old-fashioned feel-good stuff that goes down well when times is hard, such as they are now.

I did, of course, greatly enjoy the thing. But my missus is quite keen on pointing out that I'm naturally negative, and she's probably right - there is always something. The audience comprised the usual mix of grey hairs, coach-fulls of tourists, couples and family groups. The sort of decent, normal, working British people that occasionally REALLY BLOODY WELL WIND ME UP! God forbid any group who've gathered in the same place with the specific intention of watching artists who can sing and dance fantastically, should sit quietly and actually watch them do so. Oh no. We had, variously, in descending order of wind-me-upness;

First: mobile phones going off, twice, despite the usual reminder to switch them off. The first one had the bloke fumbling around in the dark, trying to locate the off switch on his own phone, and went on so excruciatingly long that somebody behind him eventually shouted at him to shut it up. The second one was even more unforgivable - directly the intermission happened, vast swathes of the crowd were straight on their mobiles. I can't quite imagine what normal Average Joes and Josephines have going on in their lives that's so utterly crucial and urgent that it can't wait beyond the duration of an evening's entertainment. Clearly one of those secret agents/Prime Ministers/whatever forgot to switch theirs off after said interval, because one went off in the second half right in front of the bloke whose phone had so shamed him not an hour earlier. Evidently this individual learned nothing from the first bloke's humiliation and embarrassment. FUCKWIT!

Second: if you find you're unable to go through an entire hour-and-a-bit of each half of a piece of musical theatre without eating, do try not to bring your sweets in the Noisest, Rustliest Bag In The World™, spend 10 minutes passing them backwards and forwards between your family members, and have taken special care to make sure that each individual sweet within the Noisest, Rustliest Bag In The World™ is then wrapped in extraordinarily loud, crinkly wrappers. That way the people in the three rows behind and in front of you will be able to hear the songs and maybe even some of the dialogue.

Third: once the lights have gone down and the singing begins, the show has fucking started! Shut the fuck up, stop fiddling with the binoculars in the seat in front of you (which will not come out of the holder without a quid going in first) and watch the thing. If even the nice, grey-haired, late-middle-aged lady behind you has to lean forward and tell you to shut up, you must realise you were talking at an inappropriate time. Heed her words.

It was a crying shame because it's difficult to concentrate on what's going on in front of you when you're being distracted by what's going on below, behind and to the left of you.

And relax...

True colours

I've always had, like all the 'bleeding-heart lefties' they so despise, a healthy contempt for the Daily Mail. It's always been a sort of vaguely amused version though, the sort of feeling you get when confronted by somebody whose views on race/immigration/sexuality come straight out of a 70s sitcom. They have, though, these past few days, revealed just how vile they really are.

Last Saturday they ran this article on Ed Milliband's late father, attacking a man who was in no position to defend himself any longer. When Milliband used his right of reply on Tuesday to point out that his father had in fact served this country in the Navy during World War II, and that he did not share the dead man's political ideology, they responded with this. Far worse, though, they printed a picture of the man's grave, with the caption 'Grave socialist', and it emerged they'd sent journalists incognito to infiltrate a Milliband family memorial service, something for which even they have had to apologise, calling it an 'error of judgement'.

Perhaps to bring into sharp focus just how far out of line they are, even Cameron has criticised the piece, saying that if someone attacked his father he'd 'do the same thing' as Milliband, who's demanded an apology. (Cameron, I have to say, has again showed his human qualities with his response to this, just as he did after the rugby player pulled the 'bunny ears' stunt outside Number 10. What a pity his politics are as they are.)

With the exception of that grave shot, the Mail remains unapologetic, and in this whole affair have shown their truest colours in all their infamy. How quick they were to (rightly) criticise people who joyfully danced on Thatcher's grave so recently, and how hypocritical to do so as blatantly as they have on the grave of a political opponent's father.

I'd usually shrink from ever linking to Mail articles on this blog - many of them are simply deliberately provocative, designed to stir up righteous indignation and visits to their website - but these have to be seen to understand the true nature of this rag. I can only hope, in time, that this kind of tactic backfires on them where it really matters; circulation. Regrettably though, I suspect that the type of people who actually buy the Mail wholeheartedly agree with not only the sentiment expressed in these pieces but the way in which they've been expressed at the expense of a dead man's reputation.

Horribly for me, this has resulted in me having to agree with Alastair Campbell, never my favourite Labourite, in calling the Mail 'vile', 'backward' and 'far-right', and suggesting it represents "the worst of British values posing as the best". A plague upon them.


Follow-up edit: An excellent run-down of the generally cheering web-sphere response to this whole thing can be found here. I particularly like the tweets where other people explain how their fathers 'hated Britain' too, especially, "My dad shouted 'Bugger it!' when he couldn't find a car parking space in Hemel Hempstead in 1979."

An offer you can refuse. But don't need to.

The Catholic Church seems to have been sending some rather mixed messages in 2013. Forgive me being rather late to this but I don't keep that close an eye on the goings-on at the Vatican so didn't catch this at the time. It seems that in May the Pope, in a quite startling departure from accepted tenets, came out with this in an open letter to La Reppublica.

It's not exactly a once-in-a-lifetime offer - the head of a Church you don't belong to reassuring you that a God you don't believe in will forgive you and allow you a place in a Heaven which doesn't exist if you 'follow your conscience' - but from any secular viewpoint it's certainly a positive sign of moderation and modernity from the Pontiff. Any kind of recognition, especially from the Catholic Church, that atheists can be good people, is to be welcomed. It suggests at least a man who recognises the shape of the wider world in which his Church's followers live. The Church of which he's nominal leader, though, moved quickly to disavow any such notion.

So much for modernising - central tenets are going to take rather longer to change, it seems, than even the Pope may prefer. There are, though, some areas where the modernising momentum is clear. Check this out.

This is one of the most bizarre examples of mixing old and new I've ever seen; the Catholic Church showing that they can be both thoroughly modern on the one hand and simultaneously archaic on the other. It seems that the Church is now on Twitter [it probably has been for some time, but I'm a) not on Twitter and b) in any case extremely unlikely to 'follow' a religious Twitter feed, so was unaware of this]. I wonder how many aggregate years in Purgatory were saved overall as a result of this offer to the contrite. And who keeps the numbers, if anybody? Is there some celestial logbook somewhere, in which a heavenly functionary marks the time off for those eligible with a Godly pencil, or has that too been modernised, computerised even? I'd love to ask this Sacred Apostilic Penitentiary how they track these things. (Who appointed them, by the way, thereby giving them the authority to pronounce on these matters? Shouldn't they regard this as the exclusive right of God?)

Anyway, the Pope and his modernist tendencies. He may, to use The Tablet's Vatican correspondent's words, be 'seeking to have a more meaningful dialogue with the world', but there's only so much he can do, no matter how determined he may be. This is, after all, a 2000-year-old institution with some 1.2 billion members and a multi-layered, complex organisational structure. His job must be like trying to steer the largest ship on a gigantic ocean - no matter which way he's looking, or which way he turns the helm, the thing changes direction so slowly that it's imperceptible. Any changes he tries to make now are not likely to make the slightest difference until he has, in the eyes of his Church's members, long joined all those good atheists upstairs. Oh, hang on, that was one of the things that hadn't in fact changed after all, wasn't it? Oh well. Never mind.

Taking the biscuits seriously

As a result of a discussion at work the other day, I realised that it's been a good couple of years that I've been writing this blog already, and have yet to make an entry on something very, very close to my heart. There are many things people find important, of course – politics, religion, morality, climate change, music, whatever it is. And indeed I've written on those matters, but I've somehow missed the fundamental subject of biscuits.

Now my capacity to eat biscuits, as anybody who knows me well will tell you, is enormous. I would, quite happily, eat my way through an entire pack of dark chocolate digestives with a cup of tea. Only a sense of shame and a vague awareness that it's probably not good for you to do so prevents me from doing exactly that whenever the opportunity presents itself. And the disapproving stares of others who may have had their eye on a biccie, in the case of a shared pack.

At work there are very frequently biscuits in the offing, so I have to moderate my scoffage for all of the above reasons. Apart from, that is, the occasions where the generous person who's provided them has made the inexplicable decision to buy horse biscuits. Now don't get me wrong, I appreciate that I'm in a minority here, possibly a minority of one, but I regard Hob Nobs (even when they've been disguised under chocolate) as horse biscuits which have somehow found their way into the human food chain. Mixing equine foodstuff with proper biscuits in the same factory is just careless, frankly, and asking for trouble.

That it happens, and people seem to have turned a blind eye all these years, accepting these horsey treats into their homes, is probably down to oats. I'm often asked why I eat flapjacks if I'm so set against Horse Nobs, as they've become known in my office, which is to miss the point. I don't have anything against oats per se – mixed with the right ingredients; sugar, honey, chocolate etc, they're delicious. It's the Nobs specifically I can't be doing with. I can't fathom how people can't spot their error as soon as they bite into one, but it seems I alone in the world can see the truth – everybody else unaccountably regard them as delicious.

Other than that, though, there are just a couple of additional exceptions to my pretty broad biccy taste. One is custard creams - some kind of yellow chemical mix compressed into a mould and dipped in paint, they are neither custardy nor creamy for me, and the taste is... well, yellow, if such a thing is possible. The other is ginger nuts. No, no, no. Biscuits should a) not burn the roof of your mouth like a too-hot curry and b) come out of a cup of scalding hot tea after an indecently long dunk entirely unchanged by the experience. Now a digestive, sadly dismissed by many workmates who regard them as 'plain', a digestive knows how to behave in cup of tea. Get the timing wrong, and your digestive will punish you by falling apart as you lift it out, in protest at its treatment. You have to treat them with respect and delicacy to gain the full reward of their deliciousness.

I fancy that I know how to treat all biscuits, so I'm never happier than with a cup of tea and a tube of them for dunking. I merely ask, dear reader, should you ever be kind enough to come round for a cuppa and bring biccies with you, that you do me the service of selecting a pack made with human consumers in mind.

We're gonna need a bigger helicopter

I don't often do film or TV criticism on these pages - I've reserved that for Wonderlance in the past - but every now and then, a film comes along which completely redefines the boundaries of filmmaking. Sharknado is not one of those films. It does, though, warrant comment here.

For those among you not sufficiently down with the kids to be in on the 'nado phenomenon, it's a made-for-SyFy Channel film about sharks deposited in the streets of Los Angeles. By a tornado. But enough of the plot - I don't want to confuse you. Here was a film which combined the prodigious talents of actors formerly from, among other gems, Beverly Hills 90210 and Saved by the Bell with the sort of special effects budget which the likes of ILM can only have nightmares about. 

The result was both utterly magnificent - a modern-day Plan 9 from Outer Space - and extremely knowing at the same time. Lifting shark-death method and chunks of dialogue from Jaws, including a riff on Quint's legendary USS Indianapolis speech ("So, six people went into the water, and one little girl came out. Sharks took the rest."), it's all too aware of what it is. The tagline alone is enough to tell you that - 'Sharknado', the poster reads. 'Enough said.' Definitely - this is a film with its balls hanging right out, and it ain't afraid of how cheap and funny-looking they are. In fact it knows that's why you're staring.

It became something of an internet sensation after it debuted in the US, so its showing here was keenly anticipated by fans of a certain genre - bad films. So successful has it been that SyFy have already announced a sequel, to come out just next year, set in New York. Enough said.