Yesterday I took part in competitive sport, of sorts, against a large bunch, of what people on the street would call chavs. Or pikeys. Or lowest common denominators. Of course this sounds more middle class than a buttered crumpet whilst planning the village fête, but it’s just that they are intimidating to someone of my lean, brittle, and laughable stature.

I performed well; I did a few ‘trick shots’ and ‘hoofed’ the ball ‘upfield’ a few times. I even slotted a few ‘beautifully strung together passing routines’ together. However after playing for about seven hundred years, two hundred and forty three days, sixteen hours, 49 minutes and twelve seconds, I felt rather tired. This has carried over into today, where I am now too terrified of leaving the bed in case I do a stirling impression of a ming vase and shatter into the proverbial million pieces. There are several ways I feel I could combat this affliction that would be more beneficial than shooting the crap out of Ewoks on a Star Wars based video game. Here are my thoughts.

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Being of sound mind and spirit, I took the adult decision and decided that instead of taking part in sport on a saturday morning, I would partake in masturbation rituals and taking it upon myself to spew unto the world my views upon any subject of my choice. Unlike Perez Hilton, and those insufferable borderline insane camp men on youtube, I do not dress up in ladies clothes or indeed feel the need to film myself from various different angles, unless I was making a porno.

The main turn off is the early starts. No-one should have to deal with 6am trips along the thames apart from the fish slowly choking within it. 6am is only for banging the last of your seven gram rocks with Charlie Sheen, or, for those of us with less glamorous meltdowns, ‘Fuzzy’ and ‘Cuddles’ and a girl with a dick in a particularly shithole ridden area in the shithole that is Brixton.

It’s not so much the competitiveness that puts me off getting up earlier. Although the club mentality of eating fish out of a teapot while being sucked off by a new addition does somewhat detract from the otherwise lovely renditions of club songs while drinking a quad vod and vomit.

To actually become good at a sport obviously takes a lot of training. If I was seen near a weights machine it would be like armageddon had come. I had to beef up to fight the mutant slugs in a string vest while smoking a cigar. There is no place in a mutant slug ridden earth for a slightly nerdy oddball with a penchant for patterned knitwear. Knitwear does not fight slugs. It fights mainstream fashion. I’m going to find you JLS, and when I do, you’ll wish a mutant slug was nibbling on your anus like you do for each other.

You also need a bit of natural talent. This I have in bucketloads of course. My ability to score a goal from The Proclaimer’s favourite distance (which coincidentally is the distance between them and the nearest plastic surgeon) is legendary. My swallow dive below the posts for seven point in rugby is astounding, and my knack for hitting ‘a clean edge out to midwicket for two’ has forever been spoken about in the villages of North Warwickshire. Of course I’m lying, but like Ferris Bueller I am revelling in it. Where he is happy to go out and cause singsongs and kiss very attractive women who have a sex scene as their 3rd item on google, I am much more content with sitting at home, eating super noodles, and dreaming of one day doing something meaningful with my life.

So when it comes to sport, I’m never going to be a star player. Blame it on being lazy, or a lack of commitment, but basically, I don’t want to have a ruck with 15 other men or play with the balls of poncy spaniards. All I want to do is sit at home and scratch my arse til it’s raw. What more could a man dream of? 

There is a legal requirement for children to stay in school until 16. This is probably a good thing. Nobody wants their 9 year old brother being mangled in a factory machine, but what more, nobody wants their child to be unable to differentiate an incomplete fraction. Of course I jest slightly, but I do believe education is useful. It’s not the be all and end all. You can live without school, and you can’t live without water. However water’s a lot less time consuming. You don’t need to revise to drink water. You might need to practice if you’re short of experience, but once you get the knack for pouring some liquid down your throat you’ll get accustomed to it. Don’t do it with acid though. Acid is probably a bad idea. Being alive is fun sometimes right?

If I want to get anywhere in my chosen career, occasionally I have to attend things called lectures. It’s like a big room, where someone with a large ego and knowledge of things that nobody else cares about will talk at you for about an hour. Sometimes it can be interesting, mainly because they have a slight speech impediment or are hilarious to observe; not in the way that watching a drunk man try to dance with a sober girl half his age, but in the way that they have an odd mannerism, like Jimmy Carr’s laugh, but slightly more physical.

What I’m trying to say is they might be a bit odd looking. I don’t like to say hideous because it’s in the eye of the beholder, but if a lecturer is 40 stone overweight and has skin as green as the morning after gift you leave in the toilet, then you’re going to have a giggle.

Apart from this, there is very little fun to be had in a lecture, other than learning. Learning can sometimes be fun. Think back to when you were a toddler, and you played with blocks. That’s learning. For my degree, we play with models of brains. Putting them together in record time. It’s like a big playgroup. Except we don’t suck on bits of plastic (in public, be it vibrating or not vibrating) or wear nappies. I haven’t checked the underwear status of course, but assume that bowel competency is a prerequisite of public appearance. If I was afraid I would void the emergency exit at all times I’d not venture too far from something that would accept my problem, like a toilet, or a ditch behind a bush, or your mother’s face.

Occasionally people fall asleep in lectures. This can be an intriguing observation. You have to keep your eye out for the visible wobble. It’s an awkward back to front method, not like wiping I may add, but more like the stereotypical person in a mental health unit wrapped in their lovely white coats. Then, just like dubstep, there’s a sudden drop, and, much like dubstep once more, a headache occurs, not because of constant mediocrity, but because of brain injury as you slam a pencil through your eye socket into your head as you slump towards the floor.

I remember 6th form as a much more haphazard educational time. Occasionally you’d have a free period, to do very little, other than sit and talk about alcohol, sex, drugs, but never do it. Oh, and what the broadsheets are saying about the ongoing financial crisis. For me this was useful. It would give me time to buy milkshakes or say hello to, scarily, female human beings and have fun. It was in no way skins, they’d buy crystal meth and say hello to, scarily, crystal meth dealers, who may or may not be female, in which case they could combine activity three, copulation, and do all three at once. Of course to have your time so well managed is unlike skins, how those teenagers manage to make a couple of days last only forty five minutes is beyond me. Clever bastards.

So next time you’re learning, remember to remove all sharps, all crystal meth dealers, and look out for me, as I sit on the internet throughout.

The normal response to passing an exam may be to go out and celebrate near to where you live. Not quiet, by any means, you would normally make sure you remembered absolutely none of it, with no idea where you are when you wake up, why there’s blood all over your face or in fact why you’re now wearing a red lace thong instead of boxers. You trudge home, happy in the knowledge you celebrated spectacularly.

I, however, ended up going to Edinburgh, via Leeds. It was kind of pre-planned. Nobody goes to those kind of lengths on a whim. I didn’t just decide to go to Scotland, much unlike the original inmates of Australia, who went there because they had no choice.

I drank a lot of beer, but more jagerbombs than I could imagine. I’m pretty sure I spent about £30 in jagerbombs and managed to pass out. I truly and utterly fucked over all of caffeinekind and managed to do the opposite of what it’s meant to induce in me. I played god, kind of, and now I feel proud. Of course at the time I had no idea I had been so divine, and felt very much the opposite, as I deposited, what could have been a new life form spawned out of life giving abilities, but is more likely to have been the beer and a burger I had had as a meal a few hours before.

To wake up on a coach at 9am, seemingly without your bag and just a phone and a wallet is slightly perplexing. I looked to my left to see a girl with two buckets of sick alongside her and pen on her face. I decided that, she, like me, had had a good night, then she turned slightly in her stupor to reveal a wonderfully ornate and brilliantly drawn Hitler moustache, at which I point I decided she had outdone me in the fun stakes.

I went whisky tasting, which, don’t get me wrong, is lovely, but essentially, it all tastes the same. ‘You should be picking up the scent of bananas’ she says. No. I get the taste of whisky and the death and decay of the insides of my body, not bananas, and anyway how the hell do bananas get into whisky, you distill it and put it in a big barrel. At no point did you say they put half the world’s bananas into the barrel. Either, you’re lying to me, or illegally importing fruit. If you are doing the second option, why the hell did you decide to import fruit? There’s no money in it. Heroin? Yes. Not plums and kiwi fruit.

As I returned to London yesterday, once more I was presented with a wonderful Hitler moustache, this time, the person involved had tried to take the emphasis away from the moustache by colouring in their nose. An odd tactic, but surprisingly it worked. Then as I sat down next to a man with his hands taped to his balls I prepared myself for the hedonistic lifestyle of home. Students, eh?

Recently I’ve been eating a lot of vegetarian cuisine. I’ve still been eating meat, because it’s almost impossible to go cold turkey, when all you want is cold turkey. It’s made me have a think about bits of my lifestyle I could change, but obviously will, in the same manner as eddie the eagle, fail epically, humiliatingly and publicly.

Not eating meat is obviously the first port of call. I think, for a small period of time, I could go without meat. However I couldn’t do it indefinitely. There’s a lot to be said for the crippling disappointment that a lot of vegetarian substitutes taste awfully similar to each other. They taste nice, but I couldn’t just eat the same tasting thing pretending to be something else all the time. It’d be like taking a supermodel home and watching in horror as a small mexican man unzipped himself from the girl’s ample bosom and thrusts his cock into your eye socket.

Christmas dinner would not be the same. Potatoes, carrots, cabbage, peas and stuffing. Where’s the turkey? Turkey is needed. The gravy would have to be different; no meat juices are allowed. Where is the bacon, and the Anne Widdecombes under the sheets? Or should that be pigs in blankets. I’m easily confused.

I know there’s the age old view that turkey shouldn’t be missed. Nobody eats it apart from christmas. I can’t remember the last time I had turkey other than as part of christmas dinner or as part of a sandwich with chips on boxing day. It’s not as if turkey is that horrible, it’s just a lot of other meat is better. Although having a chicken on christmas would be seriously weird. It’d be like having a stripper turn up to the wedding rather than the stag. Awkward, and unpleasant.

Drinking is another obviously lifestyle choice that I would be better off without. However I don’t think I could live without a pint every now and then… and another, and another, and a shot, and a vodka and coke, and another pint, and another, and another…

It’s just the done thing. There is something nice about a cold pint though. It’s a life support, that’s slowly killing you. Mark Corrigan and Beer have now been compared.

Sober nights out would suck. You’d be perfectly reasonable on the tube. Nobody wants that, everybody wants a madman doing push ups on the tube and convincing a borderline gay man to come clubbing with you. That’s what going out is about. It’s definitely not about being orderly. This isn’t a business meeting, this a headache inducing train wreck of a decision, and for that everybody is blessed.

Essentially I don’t think I’m going to be changing my lifestyle. I’m not going to be doing any Reggie Perrin style reinventions. Not just because I don’t want to fake my own death and change my life, but mainly because I think the remake is godawful. Just maybe, maybe I won’t have a fry up with more fresh meat than the fall out from a harold shipman home visits list any time soon.

Parties are great fun. The facilitation of drinking copious amounts of alcohol and doing so in a comical way without the risk of rape, stabbing, arrest, stabbing rape, being shot, being an arse and/or throwing up on someone you don’t really know.

Ah.

It’s just the same as going out isn’t it.

Except going out doesn’t involve madmen bashing down the door and clawing through the letterbox at one in the morning as he screams for us all to die. I’d feel safer in an after school club full of drugged up paedos with iphones and digital cameras, or in a gun shop full of Raoul Moat and OJ Simpson.

Now the premise of someone holding a party is surely the complete opposite of what they set out to do. Have a few friends over, maybe a few drinks, snacks, crisps and dips. Not a food fight, a jagerbomb on the floor, extensive facebook rape and a feeling of massive regret, comparable to, say, killing your mom because she didn’t quite cook the potatoes as well as she used to. Massive regret. In both situations I assume there’s a lot of cleaning up to do, although I’ve only ever done the one, and I don’t host parties.

Sorry mom, the roasties just haven’t been the same since you bought that new oven tray.

Then there’s the sleeping arrangements. There’s nothing fun about sleeping on a sofa, or the floor. But people do it. And when people/I sleep, I dribble. Dribbly floor. Yum. It’s bad enough having raw falafel and chili powder on the floor let alone bodily fluids, albeit the best and probably least disgusting of the bodily fluids. Although there are people who go to parties to do a shit. I mean, it could be fun. I’ve never tried it, but the feeling of relief as your load is let rip into the bowl is probably equatable to the high you get from hastily made and overpriced street drugs.

Those kind of people though, aren’t exactly the kind of people I tend to be friends with. I don’t like party poopers.

Drinks deals are a bad idea. They make you devolve into a complete other being. Where once a fairly upstanding and good member of society once stood, a whole new beast has been formed.

Slurring wildly, the beast walks forward, into a pillar, then a wall, then a person. He talks at great lengths about his love for pineapples, the war, the shade of mauve on the walls…

He has no concept of healthy living. The thought of a salad and a nice apple are thrown to the back of a mind poisoned with the thoughts of kebabs. Dancing kebabs, waving maracas, in the sun. Wrap that kebab in a naan. Chilli and Mayo is another must. Oh, and two of those. 

He knows no social boundaries. A person you looked at once in college is now your best friend. The guy who lives in a house your friend used to live in is now a person you want to share a taxi with.

‘Oh My God! It’s you!’ 

It was them. And now, someone echelons above you in social standing at school has an even lower opinion of you than they did before. They know your name now. You’re a story. A folklore. The guy who was sick on their feet. Twice.