Take me to the zone

TAKE ME TO THE ZONE shut the FUCK UP oh

god sorry, straight away you’re gonna want context. So look, I generally sleep until 8am every morning. I don’t have to go to an office and I can lie there having tea that’s usually brought to me. I need to be online by about 9.10am which means at 9am I am warm and livid that I have to have a shower even though I don’t have to leave the flat all day so what’s the fucking point?

Anyway every other day or so I emerge to the adult, paying world, but remember I mentioned I get the tea brought to me? Incredibly, there’s a downside to that. The tea bringer is in the living room, the ‘office’, before I am. And therefore she chooses the music. BBC 6 Music.

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The camera hole

Ten huge oafs lumbering about a squeaky school gym, bouncing and hurling a reinforced beachball at each other. They have to put the ball in a net, and that’s made nice and easy by the huge board they can deflect it off, like that motorbike racing where they lean right over, but with stablilisers. To win, you need to be less shit than the other team just once in 48 minutes, which is why every game seems to finish about 190-188.

No, basketball is not for me, but I accept it’s for some people. And two legends of the game were recently linked across time by monumental sporting moments. Michael Jordan won the 1998 NBA Finals with the last shot of the game, as the astonishment of a Salt Lake City Crowd was immortalised in the background of a famous photograph. 

And last year, LeBron James broke the all-time NBA scoring record, and the background again shows a wide-eyed crowd basking in the joy of history in the making. Not that they saw any of it. The second of these two now-classic pictures shows almost every fan beside the court holding a smartphone in front of their face so that they can one day hear a young child say “But Grandad, why didn’t you just watch the fucking game?”

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The Luddite

Last year I disappointed someone in bed.

Not a unique occurrence in my life; the soft hand on the shoulder, the distracted sympathy. But this was a whole new breed of failure. This time, I’d shared a password. Bed’s not the place it used to be.

This simple act had outed me as The Luddite. The old geezer who stares in bewilderment at the new-fangled. Who pines for the wistful days when this was all fields. Who had chosen, in 2023, to commit the most horrific crime: not keeping his online security tighter than a camel’s arse in a sandstorm.

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Aye aye, AI

Fucking Elon Musk. Haunting the sidelines of every argument like a sullen overgrown teenager who recently lost his battle with leukemia, Musk’s interventions are about as welcome as an invite to the Christmas staff party at Yasser Arafat International Airport.

So when he laid out his shambolic, beach-postcard level opinions on artificial intelligence in a discomfiting interview with fanboy Rishi Sunak the other week, imagine my glee when his views matched mine. AI needs to be carefully regulated, and the world should agree to proceed with a sensible degree of collaboration, because none of us wants to be chased up a tree by a robot maid who’s decided your pants need washing, right now, whether you take them off or not.

I’m happy to say that normality has now resumed. Perhaps in part because of the discombobulation of finding myself on the same side of an argument as a man so creepy he makes Charlie Sheen look like Charlie Brown, I’ve had a revelation and completely changed my views on AI.

Fuck it, let’s go all in.

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One for the road

There are plenty of candidates for the title of most persecuted race in human history.

People in Africa and elsewhere sold and bought, dragged across oceans to toil and die at the whim of the wealthy. Jews, victimised for centuries, massacred in their millions, only to find even that’s not enough to stop future generations’ monstrous graffiti. Palestinians, for balance. The elderly, stuffed into wrinkle barns and used by their government as offensive linemen against a pandemic. Gingers, pilloried from playground to playground.

But above them all: motorists.

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Dress trousers

I’ve got a wedding down in the Borders next week, so l wearily had to wearily drag my weary arse around the weary arse-end of the city centre today, to get a suit.

I was up and doon Buchanan Street, as the auld song goes. l was in the lot of them, yer TK Max, yer River Island, yer Primark, both yer H and yer M. It wasn’t too long before l remembered what a drag all these shenanigans are, and l realised that it’s been quite a while since l had to do all this Changing Rooms malarkey – troosers doon, boots aff, hopping aboot in a wee cramped, unhelpfully mirrored un-chaired portacabin, with my pocket change clattering onto the floor and rolling into the next hutch every time my strides come doon. Pre-stroke palpitations sweating from every pore so that every new shirt l try on is instantly now only fit fur the bin.

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The Prawn Insanity

I have a terrible secret to get off my chest. Kebabs are not actually my favourite food.

Oh thank God you’re all right. The hospital, two days, yes, no don’t pull at the tubes, you gave us all a bit of a scare passing out like that, especially your passengers. But as I was saying, it’s long been assumed that my apparent obsession with the humble post-pint kebab thrusts it atop my favourite foods list, every end-of-year poll and the annual letter to Santa, but it’s just not so.

I fucking love a curry, me. And the spicier the better – if I don’t feel the tingle from top door to bottom I feel cheated, like each owner of the new Ed Sheeran LP. Sunday night seems to have become curry night and more often than not it’s a Vindaloo. The anticipation of a little old Asian man at my door, the prickle in the beak at the first hint of danger, the anticipation of the watery eyes and stiff upper lip as the savagery rages from brow to throat. A hot curry is nirvana without the shotgun.

So what the hell is this you’ve sent me, a Korma?

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Stocked and stacked

So, today l decided to organise my record collection.

If l can just maintain any slippery grip I may have on even a wee sliver of your no doubt already shriveling interest, l’ll give you a bit of the back story. l’ve been buying records since l was a Tween, l suppose, back in the dying years of the 1970s. With hindsight, them weren’t the best of years to be a Tween, were they? I was clearing out my loft recently, and as well as uncovering a few old jokes from some lesser remembered comedians, l was surprised when l came across what appeared to be a copy of The Sex Offenders Registry. On closer inspection it was just a copy of the Radio Times from 1974.

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Aeroplane mode

My uncle bought me a computer for my 7th birthday: an Acorn Electron, a remarkable piece of kit. If not state of the art then certainly the most incredible machine seen in Somerset since old Bill Townsend brought that new fangled sheep dipper back from the Bath & West Show and promptly got drowned for witchcraft.

Having my first computer doomed any thoughts of playing outside for the rest of the year, so I have some sympathy with parents who bemoan their offspring glued to screens day and night. We all love our electronics. And they allow us to stay interconnected, always in touch, always online – even when we don’t want to be, because if you think in future you’ll be allowed to unplug and get off the grid, you’d bloody well better think again.

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A lamp’s tale

Light is important.

There’s too much darkness around here. I mean, nearly all the universe is made up of something called dark matter, or so we’re told by people who’ve never seen any of it. I regularly tell my bookmaker my account is made up of hundreds of pounds of theoretical winnings I should be allowed to withdraw, and publicans that they forgot to pour the top half of the pint, but it’s not that easy to get away with making the pretend real when you’re not a ‘scientist’.

For years we’ve had this tall lamp in the bedroom. In recent times it’s had the skeletal remains of a small blue table lamp sitting on top of it to lessen the brightness, and provide a meaningful threat of being brained by a small blue table lamp any time you moved an inch at night or the bloody cat comes in on the menace. I don’t know where the lamp came from and that’s not important; what’s important is it gave out light. Then one day it didn’t, as the trusty ping of a knackered bulb proclaimed.

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