Red Andy's Waste of Space

After much deliberation, I have decided that MSN Live Spaces no longer suits my relatively simplistic blogging needs. Thus I have taken the decision to move Red Andy's Waste of Space to a new home.

 

Point your browsers to http://the-waste-of-space.blogspot.com in order to get your occasional dose of humorous bitterness.

 

This space will no longer be updated, but will remain on the Internet as an archive of my previous blogs.

 

See you on the other side.

 

Revolutionary and ever-changing regards,

 

Red Andy

LOCATION: Darkest Worcestershire.

STARDATE: November 7, 2006.

TIME: Just after dinner.

 

Greetings, Internet travellers (if any of you are still out there).

 

Many things have changed since I last typed among you - far, far back in July. What were you doing in July? For one thing, I had less hair than I currently do. For another, I wasn't intending to take a four-month sabbatical from my bloggery, entertaining as it was back in those long-forgotten days. It just seemed like .... well, everything had dried up. Nothing was funny in the same way anymore.

 

It seemed, to be honest, that nothing was happening worth blogging about. There were no random events, nothing standing out, forcing me to sit down and type. Sure, there were times when something happened and it would cross my mind, "There oughta be a blog about this," but sadly, those times were few and far between. Worse, they seemed to take place when I was several miles from an Internet source.

 

Thinking about it, I suppose that's the other reason for my absence. The Internet on my laptop has been worse than useless these past few months, suddenly deciding to destroy itself and refuse any attempt to connect. Then, just as suddenly, it was repaired one night. Just like that.

 

Anyway, now that my excuses are finished, it's my solemn duty to announce that Red Andy's Waste of Space will - time and inspiration permitting - be returning full-time. Or, at least, part-time. Well, some-of-the-time, anyway. Yes, you can expect another dose of my humorous bitterness at least once - maybe twice - in a blue moon. I would like to begin my newfound enthusiasm for bloggery with a timeless bus anecdote.

 

The other week I was catching the bus home from Worcester at about eight in the evening. This sort of time is usually quite safe for such irritable types as myself - the traffic isn't too bad, and it's too early for the clubs and pubs to be haemorrhaging drunken louts who insist on talking to you for the entire journey home.

 

Well, not this time.

It began innocently. "What time is the bus, mate?" I was asked. I explained clearly that it was leaving at quarter past.

 

"Oh, right," he slurred. He proceeded to withdraw a silver hip flask from his jacket pocket. I didn't know what it contained, but from the smell on his breath I was fairly convinced it wasn't apple juice. Or orange. Or, indeed, any variety of non-fermented fruit. In fact, anything that had once been fruit that was within that flask had clearly been fermented, distilled, diluted with anti-freeze and sold to my unsuspecting associate while he was clearly too drunk to know what he was doing. Or speak. Or see.

 

"Want to see my hip flask?" he asked, offering me the flask. Just to be polite, I took it. "You can't have any, like," he said. As if I would. Give me Guinness any day. I handed it him back, making approving noises in the hope he would get bored and go away. Sadly, he didn't. He sat on the seat behind me on the bus and would not stop talking for the entire journey.

 

The most aggravating thing was that he kept repeating the phrase: "I'll leave you alone, now," and then remain silent for about three seconds before asking me some mindless question, like "What's your opinion on rugby?" Well, Union is a little upper-class for me, but League I enjoy - or "What pubs do you go to?" None with you in, thankfully.

 

The other phrase he enjoyed was, "You must think I'm a right freak."

 

"No," I thought about replying. "I was about to ask you to come round and look after my small children."

 

You must understand, though, that I didn't say this, because he may have thought I was being entirely serious and tried to come round to my house. Then it would have been necessary to deal with him in a slightly more .... unsavoury manner than before. He may also have been surprised to discover that I don't actually have any children. Of any size.

 

Eventually, though, this story ended like so many others: I got off the bus, went home and never saw him again. Until the next week, when he was there again. And the same story was repeated.

 

Revolutionary greetings to those who have returned with me,

 

Red Andy

This week it has finally dawned on me what the cause of much of my grief at work is. I have finally discovered why it is that working in a corner shop causes such stress and anxiety when it comes to dealing with those essentials in consumerist society, the customers.

 

It seems that all people, when they enter a corner shop, suffer a temporary brain fade and become clinically retarded. I have yet to discover whether it is the shelves of capitalist hegemony confronting them, the odour of sterilised shop-floor, or the low, low prices that causes this affliction, but for the moment I have named it CJD (Cornershop Jackass Disease).

 

The way CJD works is, upon entering a corner shop, the moronicrine gland (situated in the same area of the brain that causes the patient to suffer such delusions as an enjoyment of R&B music and an admiration for David Cameron) is motivated to release large volumes of a previously unknown hormone known as cretinone into the bloodstream. The hormone goes to work on the sensory areas of the brain, particularly the area dealing with Common Sense, freezing them temporarily and rendering them useless. One symptom of CJD is a sudden and inexplicable desire to buy cans of watered-down horse's urine, as long as it is wrapped in a label with the word "Foster's", "Carling", "Stella", or "Budweiser" on it.

 

Below, I offer an example of a typical exchange involving a shop worker and a CJD sufferer:

 

CJD Sufferer: Excuse me, these beers aren't cold.

Shop Worker: I only put them in the fridge about 20 minutes ago, so they probably haven't cooled down yet.

CJD Sufferer: But .... I like my beer cold.

Shop Worker: Well, you could always try putting them in the fridge when you get home.

 

The tragic truth, however, is that workers in corner shops also suffer from CJD, forcing them into strange habits such as compulsively dusting the shelves when they have nothing better to do or putting the mop down for two minutes and then spending the next twenty searching for it when they can't remember where they left it. However, most shop workers, after a while, develop an immunity to CJD and only suffer occasional lapses.

 

I am currently researching into a cure for CJD. Although currently the most likely option looks like a swift slap around the face, this could be deemed as assault and result in the loss of several jobs (including mine). As such, I shall retreat into the laboratory and research a drug to treat this distressing, although thankfully non-fatal, ailment. Hopefully the drug will not be toxic.

 

Revolutionary and pharmalogical regards,

 

Red Andy

....on Windows Media Player.

 

But not the iPod.

 

Oh no.

 

I'm still boycotting Apple, simply because I believe that anything in a white plastic case, prefixed with the letter "i," is dangerously reminiscent of a period in the 1980s when plaigiarism was considered the norm in the computing industry, and the kings of said plaigiarism were named after some variety of rounded fruit that plays a big part (I think) in such fairy stories as Snow White and, of course, The Book of Genesis.

 

Anyway, I promised myself before I began that this would not turn into a rant about the evils of Apple. After all, I hate them.

 

Hate them.

 

 

Okay, I'm done.

 

The reason I've expressed my adoration for Windows Media Player's random shuffle feature is because tonight I am using my dad's computer. The Internet on my beloved laptop has broken, yet again, and as such I'm having to resort to actually venturing out of my bedroom once in a while to make contact with the outside world. Anyway, my dad's computer has a massive collection of music I have put on there over a period of a couple of years, and tonight I am listening to it.

 

Randomly.

 

As such, I've been treated to classics such as Billy Bragg's To Have And To Have Not, Stereophonics' Handbags and Gladrags, and Victoria Wood's It Would Never Have Worked, all of which I have enjoyed, and none of which I have listened to in absolutely ages.

 

So that's my advice to you all tonight. Listen to your randomly shuffled music collections, and be amazed at what you've been missing out on, just because you couldn't be bothered to find the CD.

 

But of course, you won't be listening to it on your iPod, will you? Because you don't have one. Because you HATE THEM. Don't you?

 

 

Revolutionary and Apple-hating regards,

 

Red Andy 

Greetings, Internet randomers and dedicated followers. Yes, both of you.

 

I must apologise once again for my prolonged absence. For some reason, my enthusiasm for bloggery seems to have waned recently. This may be to do with the fact that nothing in my life worth satirising has happened in the last few weeks. But people tell me that apparently, you wait ages for a bus and then two come along at once. That's never happened to me - usually they just never turn up. In any case, this is how this satiricable occurrences have come about today. After weeks of nothing, two things happened on the same day that were at least slightly worth blogging about.

 

(Yes, I'm fully aware that "satiricable" isn't really a word, but you know what I mean. Or, for the mentally degraded of you reading this blog: firstly, congratulations for working out how to use a computer, and secondly, "satiricable" means "possible to satirise." "Satirise" means - oh, look it up in a dictionary. "Dictionary" means a book with lots of words in. "Words" means .... this kind of humour is known as beating a dead horse, so we'll stop now.)

 

The first such occurrence happened this morning at college. Today, June 30, was the eagerly anticipated date for the What's Next? programme, essentially a day in which teachers were finally given an excuse not to teach anything for the morning. Instead, the first-year students were crammed into the sauna-like conditions of the college's hall for a speech by some distinguished expert on higher education on the ins and outs of the educationally mandated clusterf**k known as "University."

 

The man began his speech thus: "HELLO MY NAME'S JOHN MORRIS AND I'M GOING TO SHOUT CONTINUOUSLY FOR THE NEXT FORTY-FIVE MINUTES IN THE HOPE THAT YOU LEARN SOMETHING NEW ABOUT UNIVERSITIES SO FIRSTLY I'D LIKE TO BEGIN BY PRESENTING AN OUTLINE OF WHAT I'LL BE TALKING ABOUT IN ONE VERY LONG SENTENCE FOR THE REST OF THIS SESSION SO MAY I ASK YOU ALL TO PREPARE FOR WHAT WILL BE ONE OF THE MOST UNCOMFORTABLE SPEECHES YOU HAVE EVER SAT THROUGH AT A VOLUME AT WHICH IT WILL BE ESSENTIALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO FALL ASLEEP...."

 

John Morris, or, to put it more precisely, JOHN MORRIS, then continued to ramble on in his loud and unstoppable way for forty-five agonising minutes without ever pausing to take a breath or insert what could be construed as the end of a sentence. JOHN MORRIS was possibly the dullest man ever to set foot within Worcester Sixth Form College. Actually, thinking about it, he's some way down the list.

 

Anyway, the upshot of all of this was that we were subjected to a very long speech in which there was precisely nothing we hadn't heard before from Careers Advisors, teachers, parents, tabloid journalists, and drunken men we'd met at bus stops. Those of us who survived were able to filter out to the remainder of the What's Next? programme, which involved listening to current students drone on about how wonderful it was to be a student and how soul-crushingly awful it was to be £37,000 in debt after their first year. So, in all, a highly rewarding experience and one I will soon be repeating. (Prizes for those who detected sarcasm)

 

The second event that deserves a mention in this blog was the It's A Knockout competition that took place at lunchtime today. Essentially this was a warm-up for the "proper" It's A Knockout competition that will be taking place some time in the next few weeks. Those of us who could be bothered to watch saw teachers and students alike being subjected to physical degradation as they were forced to endure a number of games involving giant inflatables, foam and copious amounts of water. Hosepipe ban? What are you talking about?

 

I happened to have a Dictaphone in my bag, because Sian had wanted to borrow it for an English Language project. Being the sensible, rational individual I am, I began to record the event as it unfolded. Myself and Lloydy provided commentary as we watched the game, which we think involved players diving into a pit of foam, retrieving balls and carrying them back to their teams. Below I offer you a selection of the comments that were made during the game:

 

 

RED ANDY: I don't know what the object of this game is, but they all seem to be doing it rather poorly.

 

RED ANDY: There appears to be a man in a Sheffield Wednesday shirt crawling slowly out of the pit. He's quite unfit; he really needs to work on that shape. Especially that upper body strength - very important in this game.

LLOYDY: And that beer belly. He needs to get rid of it. [to Andy] You ought to look at that, as well.

 

LLOYDY: Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the object of the game is in fact to create a boat and therefore navigate it across the pit of foam.

RED ANDY: That could be the case - I mean, it's as good as any of the other ideas we've got banded around here. Has anybody else got any suggestions?

 

RED ANDY: OH! There's more water! There's water and foam flying everywhere, in some kind of water- and foam-related mixture.

LLOYDY: Legs and arms are everywhere at this point; I mean it's just how sex should be.

 

LLOYDY: This may actually be the point of the game. You've got to collect as much foam as possible, and then fall over on your way out.

RED ANDY: This is a critical point in the game, here! Right here, towards the end, where the balls are getting lower in the pit! There are very few to find, and the ones who find those balls fastest are the ones who are going to get them back into their buckets and win the game.

LLOYDY: Yes, the winner of this game is definitely the one with the most balls.

RED ANDY: I think that's the case with most sports, actually.

 

RED ANDY: We're awaiting results here, but there's still some people in the pit. I think they're lost.

 

RED ANDY: Oh, and he's been splashed with water! And he's covered in foam. That's the way to finish this game.

LLOYDY: That's how all games should be. Sweaty and foamy.

RED ANDY: Not in my bathroom.

 

RED ANDY: The tension in this court is so thick you could cut the atmosphere with a cricket stump. And I'm not kidding.

 

RED ANDY: And I think there are accusations of cheating. I hate it when controversy and politics ruin these games, don't you?

LLOYDY: Don't I just?

LLOYDY: I was asking you a question.

 

RED ANDY: Well, that about wraps it up....

LLOYDY [interrupting]: Oh, dear God.

RED ANDY: Listeners at home, I'm very glad you can't see this. We have been confronted with a disturbing image.

LLOYDY: Ian Birth [Worcester Sixth Form senior tutor] has taken off his top! Let us go now! [laughter and screaming] .... RUN! We're lost! Go!

 

Well, when you look at it written down it's not so funny. But it is on my tape.

 

Honest.

 

Revolutionary and commentary regards,

 

Red Andy

The person who invented the AS Level, as a means of putting young people through more exam pressure than ever previously thought possible, deserves to be shot, strung up and have his grave urinated on every day by angry students from now until some time in the next few years when the AS Level is abolished and replaced with something nicer. Like chocolate.

 

Until I have the pleasure of conducting such a deed, however, I will have to put up with knowing that I have just spent another three weeks of my life sitting yet another bunch of exams that eventually make their way - in the form of numbers - onto the application forms one must fill in if one wants to have any sort of a life in this exam-result-oriented state we call the International Capitalist Market.

 

Thankfully, my exam period ended on Wednesday with my Chemistry exam. Chemists and bureaucrats working for the exam board OCR have spent countless minutes compiling their Salter's Chemistry syllabus, designed to be more challenging than a billion Rubix cubes wrapped inside a Fiendish Sudoku puzzle, re-arranged in a 10,000-piece three-dimensional jigsaw, and all hidden carefully within an Enigma cipher of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In a word, it's hard. And the exam was brilliantly written, so as to challenge the reader to not only give the correct answers, but also work out what the hell was actually being asked before doing so.

 

After I left the exam room, and with it the joys of geometric isomerism, full structural formulae and the relative merits of isotactic against atactic poly(phenylethene), I realised I still had a couple of hours to kill. As such, I ambled to the bus stop outside college - this week, ambling has replaced my previous favourite form of locomotion, sauntering - and caught the first bus out of college and into town. It was just gone 11, and I needed to wait until 1:30 before I could do anything. The reason for this was that the charitable soul that is Sian had volunteered to scribe for an exam at the nearby college for the blind, and was thus held up in the exam until 1:30.

 

What does one do in Worcester for two and a half hours? The only real option is to get on a bus and sit in a traffic jam. But I didn't want to leave town - I had to actually stay there. So I did the only other thing I could do - went and sat in a cafe.

 

I went into WHSmiths and bought myself a copy of F1 Racing magazine, then headed to Drucker's and ordered myself a chicken croissant and a coffee. I had been sat down for only a couple of minutes when an elderly gentleman approached me. "Excuse me," he said, "You don't mind if I sit here, do you?"

 

He was pointing to the leather chair opposite mine. "No, of course not," I said.

 

"At my age," he explained, "you have to seek out the comfortable chairs."

 

He had a point.

 

I laughed politely and raised my magazine, the internationally acclaimed signal of "Now, I'm reading this magazine - don't attempt to make conversation with me."

 

However, this old man obviously was unversed in the etiquette of conversation - or lack thereof - when in contact with complete strangers. He also appeared to have ignored everything he had read in OAPs Weekly - or whatever magazines old people read - about how young people are scum and should be avoided at all costs, and if possible sprayed with some kind of pesticide (or, failing that, anti-perspirant.) "So," he said, "I haven't seen you in here before....."

 

And thus I was drawn into a long, and, I must say, rather pleasant, conversation with this elderly gentleman, where I complained about the number of exams I was taking, he complained about how crowded Worcester was getting in the summer, and we both complained - fondly - about our good friends at First Buses. Unfortunately, I never caught my new friend's name.

 

So, to summarise - if you are an old bugger who had a conversation with me in a cafe in Worcester last Wednesday, get in contact. We have more in common than you may have previously realised.

 

Revolutionary and old-man-befriending regards,

 

Red Andy

Well, it looks like it's that time again - time for you to idle away precious minutes of your life reading whatever it is I have to say this time. Turns out, of course, that it's not much, and certainly not much worth reading. But that's the price you pay for reading, as Jamie put it in his General Studies exam, "a raving Communist's blog."

 

Now, that ad hominem approach is a little too extreme for me. I don't consider myself a raving Communist. That would imply a frothing-at-the-mouth placard-waving lunatic carrying a red flag and a megaphone while shouting random abuse about "those Capitalist pigs." You don't see me doing that. Much.

 

Anyway, that particular episode was taken entirely out of context.

 

No, instead I prefer to consider myself a more mild-mannered Communist, maybe even a socialist, if using that word isn't too abhorrent for you - and given some of the nationalistic, pig-headed knuckle-draggers I've encountered through my use of Internet message boards, I imagine that for some of you it would be. Then again, why would they be reading my blog? I'm sure they have better things to do. Like stuffing effigies. After all, someone's got to stuff them before they get burned. Otherwise everyone would be setting fire to a load of flat effigies, which aren't very realistic and also burn up much faster.

 

By now you must be asking yourself - is there really a point to all this? And by now, you won't be particularly surprised to learn that there isn't. However, the amount I've written so far isn't of a length I would call blogworthy, so I will instead fill you in on some of the more notable events of the past couple of days.

 

On Tuesday I sauntered into a pet shop. I was immediately reminded of Tom Baker's comment on Little Britain, about pet shops, pet shop shops and so forth. The reason I had sauntered into a pet shop was not, contrary to popular belief, because I am a regular and obsessed pet shop-saunterer-inner, but because my girlfriend Sian had decided she wanted to buy a hamster.

 

It took all of my powers of conviction to ensure that Sian did not name her new hamster "Gareth," after a certain pop star of whom she is dangerously fond. Instead, I suggested the name "Milford," for no reason other than it sounds quite cool - much cooler than Gareth, anyway - and as such we took little Milford back home and set him up in his cage.

 

We were advised to wait 48 hours before we "introduced ourselves" to the hamster, so that it could have time to adjust to its surroundings. So, today we attempted to get him out of his cage, feed him, put him in his ball and allow him to do all of the things hamsters enjoy.

 

Having rescued him from crawling out of the door, under the bed or under the floorboards several times, we decided to try again another day. "I didn't drop him," I insisted. "He just jumped out of my hands."

 

It's true. He did.

 

The other thing of note that I did this week was take another trip to the Mexican restaurant in Worcester for my friend Laura's birthday. It was a good night out, with the possible exception that the waiter refused to serve us alcohol. This is, actually, the first time I have ever been refused service.

 

I won't be going there again.

 

Revolutionary and unnecessarily ponderous regards,

Red Andy