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* To be completely fair, this giraffe does advertise.

Disaster Film Olympiad - Volcano

Los Angeles is a fascinating place. Most of the turbulence that afflicts the city is social - gang violence, racial tension, pro-footballers murdering their wives and getting away with it, etc. - but the potential for far a more elemental catastrophe lurks under every crib, pimp wagon or Ben Affleck's house. The San Andreas fault is responsible, the meeting of the Pacific and North American continental tectonic plates. It makes coastal California ripe earthquake territory and when they strike, they tend to be the sort of earthquakes that do more than rearrange your gnomes.

Of course, Los Angeles is also the home to the American film industry and there is nothing Hollywood enjoys more than occasionally reminding itself that it could at any moment be naught but a smoking crater in the ground, just like Kevin Smith's house. It's all part of that particular deal with the devil that movie stars make with their conscience as the man arrives with the next lorry load of money.

Volcano was released in 1997, part of the brief pre-millennium disaster film renaissance which also saw us clenching our buttocks through Dante's Peak, Twister, Armageddon and Deep Impact. Also notable to anyone who might perhaps be endlessly watching disaster films for no real reason is that the director was Mick Jackson, the Briton who made Threads. Fortunately, Volcano is nowhere near as brutal. Although I don't live in Los Angeles, so maybe it is. The fact that John Travolta potentially considers Volcano to be more frightening than Threads is the take home portion from this paragraph.

Anyway, the earthquake that I had been warning everybody could happen in Los Angeles happens. Our hero, Mike Roark of the city's Emergency Management Committee, puts aside his much-needed family holiday to make sure nothing dreadful has happened: one of the Os in the Hollywood sign may have fallen over, for instance, or Warren Beatty's toilet might be leaking. His decision has long-reaching consequences for some of the city engineering workers, who are cooked to death while inspecting a storm drain. This is an unlikely thing to happen, but Roark takes it in his stride. Roark is an easy man to have sympathy towards. He's middle-aged and craggly, gruff and curt yet possessed of an undeniable twinkly oaky Southern charm. He is a bit like Tommy Lee Jones, so the film's casting director secured something of a coup when they acquired the services of Tommy Lee Jones to essay the role.

The itch in Roark's knickers is Dr. Amy Barnes, a geologist. Being a geologist is comfortably one of the most genuinely perilous jobs that one can have while still being excruciatingly boring conversation at a dinner party, a dichotomy which tends to make them peculiarly strident people. Barnes is convinced that the earthquake has caused the formation of a volcano right under the centre of the city. Roark is sympathetic to these concerns, but he can't just start throwing tax payers' money around without evidence. Evidence that Barnes, to her own frustration and no doubt that of the people who have to talk to her at her friends' dinner parties, is unable to gather.

Fortunately, Barnes has a key ally in her quest: Mother Nature. The volcano that she had been predicting to everyone could volcano erupts right under the La Brea tar pits, causing hundreds of dollars worth of damage to the fibreglass mammoths and also pumping boiling lava all over the place. Wilshire Boulevard, traditionally given over to being the main arterial road for the largest city in California, becomes a regular shit show of burning vehicles, stuck underground trains and fifth degree burns. It's a lawsuit waiting to happen. To her credit, Dr. Barnes continues to work for the good of the Angelenos, where most of us would take to the highest vantage point immediately available and look smug.

There are two ways that this sort of film can go: they either deal with a pre-existing adversarial relationship being reconciled in the crucible of extreme circumstance, or the nascent union between two people being thrown together by events. Volcano is the latter and if the sex is as impressive as Roark and Barnes' teamwork, there may yet be further earth tremors in southern California. Using carefully placed detonations of explosive devices, they manage to channel the lava flow through the city's network of subterranean tunnels and into the Pacific Ocean where it would presumably solidify and form a place even drier, hotter and more exclusive than Los Angeles itself, much to the chagrin of the Hollywood elite.

I don't know enough about volcanology to know whether any of this exotic bill of fayre is likely or even possible, but I know enough about disaster films to say that this is a perfectly serviceable one. It ticks all of the traditional generic boxes - relationships are explored and developed, people are roasted to a crisp and the special effects department get to just go nuts - as well as retaining its own personal charm. Volcano gets SIX out of ten Disaster Points.

Disaster Film Olympiad: The Day The Earth Caught Fire

There are two things of which simply no good can ever possibly come: nuclear weapons and the international dateline. When they combine, the overall effect is inevitably catastrophic for all in its path. Unfortunately, these were the precise confluence of circumstances that were to assail the hard-working staff at the offices of The Daily Express in 1961, on a day... THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE!

For years, man has yearned to destroy the Sun...

Typical tabloid hyperbole, that. The Earth did not literally catch fire, but it was nevertheless sickening for something pretty serious. The Day The Earth Caught Fire is an entertaining and considered Cold War fable that warns that the dangers of nuclear weapons - or not checking your calendar - stretch far beyond the obvious. The United States and the Soviet Union, now both building the spiffiest, most powerful hydrogen bombs that modern technology can muster, somehow contrive to each test them simultaneously on opposite ends of the globe without having first checked to see how time zones work. The overall effect throws the Earth off of its normal orbit and into an inevitable collision course with the Sun.

This annoys everybody. The new jaunty tilt of our celestial home causes havoc with the seasons, as drought, heatwaves, storms and floods beset countries quite unprepared to deal with the consequences. The action centres on the newspaper offices of central London, where to call the weather all to cock would barely do the situation justice. The temperature soars, causing a catastrophic drought, ruinously damaging thunderstorms and freak fogs. To be honest, it's pretty similar to what the weather is like in the 21st Century, although it is best to put that thought to the back of your mind since the upshot of all this is: we're doomed. The hardworking Daily Express staffers - motivated by the possibility of a worldwide scoop and powered only by cynicism, lukewarm Coca Cola and a bar tab that looks like Jeremy Hunt's parliamentary expenses claim - do their best to get to the bottom of the story, even though it turns their newspaper into a shrill, weather-obsessed, catastrophe rag. Which obviously could never happen.

It is an unusual disaster film, but it doesn't suffer at all for it: the main characters are reactive, rather than active; resigned rather than rallying. The film neatly captures the constrictive inevitability of a society that has contrived to destroy itself as we all feared it would. There are no heroes, just people being people. Some bad, some mad, but mostly good-hearted. Of course, a film is still always only a film, so a few compromises have to be made: of course our leading man Peter Stenning would take this opportunity to begin a torrid romantic entanglement with Jeannie Craig, a secretary from the Met Office. And naturally he will end up defending her honour from a bunch of feral beatnik water terrorists by engaging in fisticuffs in her apartment. These are things that happen in every film, no matter what the genre or the stakes.

On the whole, however, it is an absorbing and entertaining way to spend 90 minutes. Well, entertaining when one considers the oddly prescient nature of the subject matter: as I watched the film the sky outside was purple and the hail was falling upwards. Particularly pleasing is its ambiguous ending, as the dual forces of science and irony combine to decide the only way to save Earth from a certain fiery demise is to right its place in the heavens with... more atomic blasts. What will happen? The church bell ringers will be putting in for double overtime, if nothing else. It's hard enough ringing bells in normal temperatures and when adequately hydrated. More important still is that I have successfully managed to write the first ever retrospective review of The Day The Earth Caught Fire that doesn't mention it features a pre-super duper super stardom Michael Caine, playing a copper.

Daily Express journalist Peter Stenning (Edward Judd) in The Day The Earth Caught Fire: what would Princess Diana do?

More worthy of note even than the revelation that Michael Caine has to eat food and pay his gas bill are the special effects. Considering the technological limitations of the time they stand up very well indeed. Particularly stunning are the vistas of London as a sun-bleached, dried out and abandoned husk - all made by the matte painting mastery of Les Bowie. Film making has become less of an art since computers came along, in many ways. Sigh.

The Day The Earth Caught Fire gets a smouldering EIGHT out of 10 Disaster Points.

Everything you thought you knew about dogs is wrong

I have a dog now. People who have been with me every step of this disjointed and increasingly stationary journey will no doubt be pleased to hear that it is the same dog as they have met before on these pages. He is still very much the same dog. I am still very much the same man. Although we are now both two-and-a-half years older, neither one of us has grown any wiser. We both smell a little worse and find standing up more of a chore but we remain, fundamentally, fuckwits.

The last time the dog and me had this association, he was just visiting. But now he is here to stay and we can dedicate ourselves full time to our ultimate goal, which is ruining each others' lives. He is winning and will win, as I was already convinced that my life was in ruin. Plus, you know, he is a dog and therefore pretty contented with his lot.

But even though the enriching life lessons part of pet ownership will almost invariably pass me by, I have nevertheless decided that I must use this opportunity for scientific enquiry and in so doing have discovered a great many things. Among these nuggets (of what are probably dog faeces) sit some pieces of information which will bust myths, explode paradigms and blow minds in equal measure. Everything you thought you knew about dogs, it turns out, is in fact wrong.

1. Dogs do NOT eat bones

Not a single bone. Not a one. Anyone expecting to see my dog sat down chowing into some osseous tissue will be shit out of luck. What dogs eat is in fact dog food, which is readily available in shops. But here's the rub: if you take your dog to the veterinary hospital and have it x-rayed (for example, on a night when there's nothing on the telly), you will find it to be completely full of bones. I do not know how these bones get in there.

Not a bone in sight

2. People who do not like dogs or are scared of dogs will NOT like your dog

Anyone with a caninically nervous disposition has heard this one. "Oh, you'll like MY dog". In fact, you will not. Most people who are nervous around dogs dislike the rush of the approach, the jumping up, the frenzied and slobbery attempts at friendship, the barking. My dog does all of these things. It is, to be fair, only a little dog and as such these tendencies are more potentially adorable than if it was one of those horse-sized dogs. But the fact remains. My dog acts like pretty much all the other dogs and as such, if you do not like dogs you will probably not like my dog.

3. All dogs owners clean up after their dog

I am aware that this is a contentious belief and one directly challenged by the fly-strewn, humming, practically sentient, mountainous egg piles that adorn pretty much every busy thoroughfare and public park in the land. However, I have never seen a dog owner without a sack full of brown swinging, or at the very least the paraphernalia to hand to address the situation.

Hove Recreation Ground, mentioned in the text any moment now

The massive, stinking, steamy curlers that you see everywhere are, therefore, utterly unexplained by science and may even be evidence of extra-terrestrial involvement in Earthly doings. A humbling thought and certainly one in the eye for anyone who has ever walked around Hove Recreation Ground this lunchtime and seen all of the dozens of piles of dog shit and thought to themselves, "for fuck's sake, clean up after your fucking dog, fuck me... Jesus, look at that one, fuck". It was as though the circus was in town and they'd been looking for somewhere to exercise the elephants. Or it would have been, had I not already explained that they were done by aliens.

Some of whom I would advise should probably consult a doctor.

The end.

Eschatological problems

The suicidal, new-agers and Gozer worshippers alike, try not to be too downhearted. It's galling, I know, to still be alive and having now somehow survived the dual threat of both the year 2000 and 11.11 a.m. on December 21st 2012. Common sense dictates that at least one of them must have brought about the end of the world, surely? Does the planet not know what day it is? Nevertheless, be of good cheer: remember that all the governments of the world possess enough weapons of mass destruction to carry out the complete destruction of the planet hundreds of times over any time they fancied. And you might get hit by a bus while crossing the road. Nearer my God to thee, indeed.

However, for those of you having an existential crisis at the prospect of living out the next tens of thousands days of your life without any prospect of end times, I have provided a series of alternative dates and scenarios for those amongst us whose sole ambition is to die screaming to cling on to, like a pissy blanket. This is a free service and, as ever, you are most welcome.

24th December 2018
Father Christmas finds out the truth about his own existence during his annual delivery run, causing a terminal rift in the space-time continuum.

18th June 2026
The amount of cow farts in the atmosphere reaches critical mass as a friesian called Jessop cuts a particularly thick one and all the air on Earth boils.

2nd February 2029
Mars Attacks.

11th October 2037
The planet Earth is discovered to in fact to be subject to the same laws of physics as were depicted in Roadrunner cartoons with catastrophic, if hilarious, consequences.

30th November 2040
Bees.

1st January 2050
A robot Judith Hann arrives from space to reveal that we should have heeded all her warnings from the prophetic Tomorrow's World, which is in fact revealed to have fallen under the remit of religious broadcasting.

16th September 2062
The sun tires of the continual repeats of some programmes but not others on ITV3 and decides to find another galaxy with better telly.

30th July 2066
Everybody in England kills themselves due to the horror of having not won any major international football competitions for exactly 100 years and everything else on Earth dies of grief at the loss.

5th July 2075
Everything just goes to tits.

14th April 2080
My 100th birthday.

20th April 2089
Adolf Hitler reappears from hiding in Argentina on his 200th birthday to fuck us all right up.

Now one of those has got to cover it.

Dog problems

I've become a dog owner by mistake. I'm looking after my girlfriend's dog for two-and-a-half weeks. He is a very nice dog and very well behaved. Naturally, then, he's driving me nuts. I've never had a pet dog before, so all of this is something of a voyage of discovery for me, although I was already aware of the fact that I was nuts.

I always thought that the whole concept of there being dog people and cat people was probably an over-simplification. But actually, it isn't. The demands of a pet dog and a pet cat are such polar opposites that it's surprising that there are any similarities at all. There are, of course. Both dogs and cats are cute and loveable and like a fuss and a play. Both dogs and cats eat food that stinks out of tin cans. And both of them watch you eat your food with an intensity that makes it clear that they kind of wish they didn't. However, after a week of looking after a mutt I now believe that people who prefer dogs to cats must have a chromosome missing.

A dog, yesterday

It is a truism emblazoned on a million bumper stickers that a dog has a master while a cat has a servant, and I think this is the root cause of the difficulties that I'm experiencing. I'm tending to deal with this canine interloper as if it is some kind of firefighting operation. My key concerns are to make sure he gets out to do his excretions and therefore doesn't park anything in the house, and that he doesn't bark because people as highly-strung as I am don't take very kindly to such malarky. It's fairly easy to see why I don't feel that I'm getting very much out of this experience other than a headache. Instead of enjoying it I am largely treating him as if scientists had finally managed to graft working legs onto a piping bag filled with turds.

Although prepared for a few dog things, I'd not factored in quite how much talking in the street dog ownership entails. I spend half of the day in a dialogue with this dog, for at least an hour of which I am in public. They like it, need it and want it. I speak to cats, too, but I've never found it met with anything other than thinly-veiled contempt. I kind of miss that.

And there's the rub: ultimately, cats hate you. They want you to feed them and then leave them be, which is a mission statement not dissimilar to my own. Dogs love you unconditionally all day long, and that freaks me out. But though I am a grouchy bastard with a heart of stone, I am also a creature of logic and reason and logic and reason tell me that this unconditional love means that the dog has no intention of ruining my day. He'd not even have dreamt of it, nor could he even conceive of a way he might go about doing so (dogs are thick). Therefore, if he has ruined my day it can only because I have allowed him to. So the onus is on him to adapt to a new pace of day-to-day life, and on me to be less of a fanny.

There is no prize for guessing which of these is likely to happen first, by the way. Shut up.

Mission to Mars

Here are some dates for your consideration: 20-21 July 1969, 19-21 November 1969, 5-6 February 1971, 30 July-3 August 1971, 21-24 April 1972 and 11-14 December 1972. These are the only occasions that humanity has so far spent on a celestial body other than the Earth. I should probably point out, in the eventuality that anyone reading this is a bit thick, that on all of the above dates the celestial body in question was the moon.

20th July 1969 - 14th December 1972. Honestly. It reads like a hamster's gravestone.

I was born in 1980, which means that I have missed out on all the space fun. Unless you count large scale calamitous failures as fun, which you should not. You bastard. Back on the very Monday that I was born, in the midst of the cold war, the day in July 1969 that man landed on the moon was not yet even 11 years ago. Astronauts and space missions still captured the imagination. It was something constructive to do with all those nuclear bombs. Surely, within days we'd be racing the Soviets to Mars, winner gets all the best rocks?

Goin Mars, BRB

But then Mikail Gorbachev comes along and ruins everything, favouring working on peace on Earth rather than uncontrolled spending trying to blow everything up. In the giddy thrill of the Berlin Wall's collapse, we lost sight of Mars.

Back then I was still only nine years old, though. Plenty of time for a new cold war to begin, surely? It did, of course, but being based around the concept of global terrorism rather than Statehood and political ideology, it did little to advance the space race. Terrorists are unreasonable people at the best of times, very unlikely to be swayed or impressed by the sight of some bloke playing golf in virtually-zero gravity. And all the while I am growing older, my chances of seeing anything interesting at all ever happening in my life - something worth telling future generations about that isn't just about explosions or death tolls - are growing slimmer by the withered, wrinkly, grey-pubed day.

Why did humanity explore space in the first place? We claimed it was in the spirit of scientific discovery and humanity's insatiable curiosity and thirst for knowledge. It seems likely now that these were lies. It was all for political and ideological reasons, wasn't it? How ghastly and smutty. How ordinary. How terrestrial.

Human beings need to go to Mars. Human beings are very stupid and don't know anything until we go and find stuff out. We are completely unable to conceive of how anything works without experiential knowledge of it. On 19th July 1969, for example, we believed that the moon was made of cheese, that Clangers lived there and that cows jumped over it on a regular basis. How foolish we were.

Mars: all the information currently known

And now I want to know all about Mars. What do they have there? History alone teaches me to be wary of thinking it is all Martians scuttling about wearing Roman Armour. But how can I even begin to try and envisage the wonders until a member of my own race gets their candy ass up there and hits some golf balls about and drops a feather? Do they have a Morrison's? Are they Protestants? And what can we learn about the nature of existence and creation?

Humanity not going to Mars is dashed incurious of us, if nothing else. A life half-lived. And I'm going to kick up a big stink about this until some bastard does it.

The joy of sloths

There's a risk that this post may upset those readers amongst you who subscribe to creationist theories, as it is going to make continued references - both explicitly and implicitly - to the theory of evolution and the planet Earth being more than 4000 years old. Sorry about that, but it's arguable that you have bigger problems than just this blog post if that is the case. You maniac.

One of my very favourite things about being a human being is that you get to live on Earth and that means you are sharing the self same small celestial rock that used to be the home to dinosaurs and GIANT GROUND SLOTHS. There's very little that makes me happier than a sloth, and the idea of a giant ground sloth lumbering around the place is simply thrilling. These animals were the size of elephants, plodding around, being sloths. It's a buy one, get 99 free sloth extravaganza. Hitting the sloth coupon book hard.

A giant ground sloth, yesterday. Geologically speaking.

The joy of the giant ground sloth is only just beginning, though. There are two more cherries on this particular delicious fuzzy giant cake.

First is co-evolution. If you've ever eaten an avocado or a mango, you owe it all to these now extinct giant animals. Fruit plants propagate their species, of course, by having their seeds inside their edible fruit pods. Lovely hairy animals come along and wolf down the tasty goodness and then wander off to do a crappins. The seed is therefore spread far and wide and even has its own rich and fertile starter growbag of poo to help it along. But how do you spread your seed (hur hur) far and wide if it is the size of an avocado's or a mango's pit. You need an animal gigantic enough to swallow a your fruit whole (and with a bunghole big enough to plop out the seed hole, too).

The theory goes that this necessary interdependence has led to such evolutionary anachronisms. So, hats off to animals like the giant ground sloth. They did a lot of the leg work (and the bottom work), just for long enough for a Mexican to come along and discover the potency of guacamole, then start to cultivate their own avocados without needing a slotharse. Unfortunately for the sloth, this co-existence with early man is likely to have caused their ultimate extinction. Because, obviously, you can't eat guacamole on its own.

Secondly, Mapinguari. Yes, some people believe that the ground sloth is not extinct at all, and still yomps around the forests of South America, pooing avocado trees out of its bum. Now, it's easy to be cynical here:

"...as a 1937 report from central Brazil claimed a mapinguari had gone on a three-week rampage, killing over 100 cows and ripping out the tongues from their carcasses. However, in all accounts it did not eat humans, although when it smells the presence of people it stands up on its back feet, becoming as tall as two metres, a movement similar to grizzly bears."

Of course, the common sense explanation for this is it's more likely to be a rogue population of bears - a currently existent animal - rather than a hitherto undiscovered pocket of an animal unknown to science beyond the fossil record. Not to mention the likelihood of slothful behaviour from a slothlike creature - presumably a giant ground sloth would need lots of giant ground naps and therefore would be fairly easy to stumble upon in rainforest clearings. Surrounded by dead cows and avocado trees, I would expect.

But I'm not going to be the one to do a avocado poo on this parade. The joy of cryptozoology (which regular readers of my blog will know is a subject that fascinates and excites me in equal measure) is in the fun of speculation, of possibility and of the unknown.

So a salute to our ground sloth cousins. They crapped out avocados and the ones who live in Bolivia shriek like stuck pigs, stink the place out and have great long matted woolly tails. A salute, too, to their smaller modern day cousins, why not. They are awesome.

A visit from the moos

Being a creative person -  much more creative than, let's say, you, for instance - I have always been interested in the elusive Muse, that thing that visits people with inspiration and ideas. I'm especially intrigued by how this works for musicians, because music is something I can't do. Music is the greatest of all the artforms, and anyone who tells you that it isn't is almost certainly a self-deprecating musician.

Richard Strauss, yesterday

Over the long Jubileekend, however, I had a little flash of enlightenment which led me to perhaps understand a little better how the great musicians and composers come by their ideas.

I imagine that Richard Strauss was walking through a farmyard one morning when, all of a sudden a succession of pigs started to appear over the wall of their pen.

Oink.

Oink.

Oink.

Oink.

Then a cow wandered past.

Moo moo.

And with that, 'Sunrise' from Also Sprach Zarathustra was born.

The ballad of Terry and June

Let's talk about Terry. Someone is going to need to talk about Terry at some point. Terry has issues. Terry is a bit of a porker. Terry likes to eat out of bins. There's little hope of his wife June sorting this little foible out - June likes to eat out of bins too.

Terry and June live in Bexhill-on-Sea. I don't know how long they've lived in Bexhill. I've not yet managed to ask them, they're usually to busy with the bins. Terry and June are herring gulls. Their favourite foods are Pringles, nappies and Chinese takeaways. Terry loves the noodles.

Terry at work

Over the Easter weekend I got to see Terry and June at work. It wasn't easy for them as the wet weather rendered the bin lids slippery, but it's in moments of adversity like that where you get to see the real masters at their best. They gave those bins a really good going over. I watched them in some awe. By the time they'd finished with bin one the black bin liner was pretty much entirely absent. I don't know what they did to achieve that or what they did with it afterwards: maybe their nest will be the only one in town with a dedicated wetroom or pond. This morning, though, all the most delicious parts of that bin had been exhausted and they were on to bin number two. This was more of a breakfast bin.

Terry and June look quite well on it. They are of formidable size and their feathers are the kind of feathers you'd see in some sort of feather museum or on Princess Anne's hat for Royal Ascot.

Of course, the socially-minded people are disgusted by the mess they make, flinging bits of plastic (too chewy) and paper (not enough flavour) about the streets in order to get to the best bits. But it's well known that humanity wastes a scandalous amount of food and so Johnny and Sally Streetpride might well consider that, instead of investing in more secure bins, they should perhaps be less keen to throw away a whole roast chicken dinner because Johnny bought the wrong type of potato.

Until that glorious day comes, these exciting urban ecosystems will continue to flourish. I celebrate them! I am full of admiration for the gulls and pigeons and the foxes and rats and how they have adapted and learnt to thrive.

I only really have two reservations. Firstly, I wish that foxes would learn better road sense. Of course, the crows don't, which creates another urban ecosystem in itself. Secondly, I am forever mindful that evolution is a funny old goose. At the moment the sparrow who sidles up to your park bench asking for a bit of crust is a charming little opportunist. But yesterday I watched a sparrow, bold as brass, waiting around a van which sold hot pork sandwiches. If he'd been packing heat, no banger would have been safe.

My friend Moll has already reported to me a sighting of a pigeon in Brighton chowing down on some chicken from a discarded wrap, so it's clear that the birds are moving away from their traditional meaty treats of worms and things with five or more legs and onto the more readily available array of cooked comestibles discarded by us lot. How many long before sparrows form a posse and fly off with a pig of their own? Or maybe they'll evolve one big wing, ready to fell us with a right cross and steal our baguettes?

In so many ways we are living in a golden age. I'm doing my best to enjoy it before two foxes with a snooker ball in a sock mug me for my dinner.

Twelve-inch penises

I'm going to be completely blunt with you all now and I know it is likely to lose me all kinds of followers and readers, but honesty is the basis of all humanity holds dear. Without the truth we would be lost. So here goes. I do not have a 12 inch-long penis.

Now, I am sure that there are some freakishly unlucky people out there who are packing enough meat to be stopped at border posts, but I am not one of them and to be honest I am quite glad of it. The demands I would continually face from entirely fictional women would be far too much just for starters, but I also think I'd have to buy all new trousers.

I can't claim to speak for all women, or indeed any women. This is because I am a man. But I was looking at 12 inches on a tape measure yesterday and it struck me that that is quite a length. I wouldn't want 12 inches of anything, let alone throbbing gristle, inserted in any of my orifices. Moreover, I don't buy into any of this "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" lark, so I reckon the same must be true for the female of the species.

So why has twelve inches become the industry standard for cock? Here are some suggestions.

1. Men are insecure.
2. Men have stuff they need to measure.
3. Men are idiots.
4. Men assume that human vaginas have a depth of a foot.
5. Men feel they'd be more potent if their sperm were delivered right to the opening of the cervix rather than having to swim anywhere.
6. Men are mistakenly of the belief that they could pick stuff up off the floor with it like an elephant's trunk.

Men are pretty stupid, let's face it. Still, if you're reading this and you do have a twelve incher, remember that articles like this one are only written out of jealousy. Even if it's for no other reason than all the free champagne, plane upgrades and broadband offers you get.

Mow

I am pretty buff, as you well know. The reason for this is mowing the lawn. I have mowed acres and acres of grass in my lifetime and as such it makes me quite the expert in the fine art of swearing and complaining and, to a certain degree, mowing. As this is now the internet age and everyone is expecting everyone else to share all of their expertise, channel it into one great interactive repository of skills, I thought that I would commit my knowledge and experience to the ages.

There is something quite righteous about doing this. Like I am some kind of caveman elder. Come gather round people.

Tip 1: Know your enemy

Actually, that's a good place to start. Righteousness and tradition. The other day I was digging the vegetable beds a bit, doing some weeding and tending to my brassicas. There is something which feels so completely RIGHT about doing that. Primal. Fundamental. Tilling the soil to cultivating things to eat. It's what we human beings have done ever since we descended from the trees and headed straight to the garden centre.

Lawn mowing is very much not one of these things. It's one of those prissy and futile things that human beings do to try and make things neat and tidy, to kid ourselves that we're the masters of our surroundings. This is a strategy that always works, at least until the first tsunami or earthquake or giant snake arrives, spiriting your grandmother off and away to hither and yon. So my first top tip is: accept the futility of the action you're about to undertake. Embrace it. And swearing is very much par for the course. It's healthy! Even if it scares the neighbour's dog.

Tip 2: Hazards

There are all manner of pitfalls faced by the lawn mower, not least actual pits that you could fall into. However, these are rather less common than any of the following: trees; moss; ant hills; bees; frogs; brambles and other assorted bindweed; and, of course, fox turds. The key to all of this is to know every inch of your surface, like a golfer studying the green for a vital putt. When it all comes together, it can be quite beautiful - a balletic and rhythmic mastery of the elements. Swinging round that tree, pop a wheelie over the fox shit and give a tonsure to a passing bee.

Tip 3: Equipment

I'll be blunt, you're going to need a lawnmower. There are a number of main types: electric, petrol powered or hand-propelled. I favour the petrol-powered push mower. The petrol-powered remains a pipe dream and nothing but a pipe dream. Everyone should be relieved about that, as me in control of any type of motorised vehicle is a preposterous idea, let alone one with a rotary blade attached to it. People would die. The electric mower is OK for smaller gardens but for anything even approaching reasonable sized, buggering about with power cables will drive you insane.

I currently use a Hayter mower. It is splendid and green. Previously I used a Mountfield, which was very much not. It had clearly been designed by someone who had only ever read about lawns in books and therefore had nothing beyond a theoretical understanding of them. At the merest sight of any organic matter, let alone grass, the thing went to pieces. The petrol tank didn't have a filter, so the engine soon became clogged with stones, earth and wasps. If the motor ran long enough to make it to the lawn, the blade was no match for what it was trying to cut. I lost years of my life to that thing.  The Hayter mower is much better. I particularly like the fact it starts, cuts and works - although after the Mountfield experience, just one of those would have set it apart.

One warning: evolution is always in action. The latest array of petrol-powered push mowers will usually be motor assisted: that is to say, the rear wheels are driven by a motor to help you push it along. Back in the day, this sort of extravagance was far beyond the dreams or budgets of plebs like me. But since it became pretty well standard on all but the most entry-level models, my muscles have evolved to be completely useless without it. I even need rear-wheel drive on shopping trolleys nowadays. Evolution is the lawn mowing man's greatest foe, after cats, bees, frogs, ants and fox shit.

One other warning: no lawnmower has a good enough grass collection box. So don't even think about that. It's clearly impossible to design and will never going to happen. You're thinking about it, aren't you? Well don't. It's never, ever, going to happen. Lawnmowers are designed entirely to frustrate and annoy you. It's to emphasise the futility. Remember the futility?

Tip 4: Regularity

Alan Titchmarsh once told me, via the television, that you should mow the lawn once every 2 days during the growing season.



Hmm.


At best, I might manage once a week, but it's important to accept the fact that several times every year you will end up trying to mow something that looks like a Vietnam war film. You just are. The best advice is to know the wily ways of grass. Like everything else, it grows best when there's plenty of water and sun. A traditional British summer makes for a real bastard of a lawn. Blink and it will be as unkempt as a nun's beaver. Sometimes it will have all grown back by the time you've finished the other end.

If you're lucky enough to get a hot and dry spell, mow it plenty, as short as you can get it. This will render your lawn a sad, dusty and brown thing, virtually dead, which may not need further cutting for a month or more, even at the height of the growing season (which generally tends to be April to July).

5. Conclusions

You're never going to enjoy mowing your lawn. It is stupid and a complete waste of your time. So learn to accept that fact and relish its aching pointlessness. And, in an ideal world, learn to tarmac it.

Oh yes they are

It's the close of the pantomime season and this can only mean one thing. Whilst the rest of the actors disband to their familiar pastures of local radio and BBC 1's Doctors (when was there last a pantomime poster in the UK not featuring the words "... from BBC 1's Doctors"?), pantomime cows disappear entirely from view. Make the most of them this week, folks: you won't see another one until December rolls around again.

For generations, the normally high standards of scientific inquiry have been unusually content to just accept this state of affairs. It's baffling really, considering the investment in terms of money, time and intellect that the British nation are capable of - just look at their input at CERN, for instance - that no-one has ever really tried to study where the pantomime cows all go between January and December.

A lot of people will tell you that they are not real cows.

I say, let's not make any definitive statements until we know things for certain. Facts - DATA - is what we need, not hokey old conventional wisdom.

So it was at this point I decided to catch a pantomime cow. Here's my plan.

To catch a mocking cow

As with all good science, you have to have a hypothesis. My hypothesis is that the pantomime cow is a migratory species. Britain in the months of February to November is, on average, too warm an environment for it. So, my belief is that they majestically sweep northwards once the pantomime season is finished, most likely at night as to my knowledge this great migration has never been witnessed.

Of course, in order to test my hypothesis, I need a pantomime cow, which I intend to capture according to the above in-depth scientific diagram. A basic tiger trap should prove sufficient, although the pit required does need to be large enough to contain a pantomime cow: an animal that is, on average, the size of two adult men. To tempt the cow I'm using food as bait. Again, no-one is exactly sure what a pantomime cow eats - cynics will tell you that it's green room Pringles - so a small amount of trial and error is going to be required. Capturing my pantomime cow could well take some years and a bit of luck, but it's time I'm willing to invest.

Once I have a pantomime cow I plan to electronically tag it so as its migratory patterns may be precisely tracked and traced and we can finally know for certain where the pantomime cow summers. There is a chance that after years of digging holes, testing different food combinations and countless court appearances that my budget won't extend to electronic tagging equipment, in which case I plan to put a small hole in a pot of paint and hang it off the pantomime cow's udder, creating a trail I can then follow.

There's no need to thank me.

Showers are rubbish and for the weak

I prefer baths to showers. I will always have a bath instead of a shower wherever possible. I don't understand the modern obsession with viewing the bath as somehow an extravagance, a pamper or a whole evening's work.

And yes, in the words of Cosmo Kramer, there is an aspect of lying around in a tepid pool of your own filth to it. But I suppose I must just be into that.

The strength of the bath is that it provides me with thinking time. When I'm in the bath, I don't listen to music or the radio or read (the pages get wet, you mad people, what are you thinking of?). I don't watch television or play with plastic battleships and re-enact some of the key naval engagements of World War II. I don't even sing. I don't even wash myself. I don't even put any water in it. OK, the last two things were lies.

So it's just me and some soap and my rubber duckie (which, tragically, I do not have and if I do anything this year it should definitely to be to get one) and my beautiful, brilliant mind. The same mind which conspires against me for the rest of the waking and unconscious day, telling me how rubbish I am and how it would have been better for everyone if I'd died that time, is somehow placated entirely by warm water and the partial immersion of its associated body therein. Bathtime allows me to think with a clarity, constructiveness and rationality of which I simply do not seem capable in any other situation. Standing up brings out the absolute worst in me. I also get all my best creative ideas in the bath, including ideas for blog posts. I thought up the idea for this one and drafted it in my head in the bath this morning.

I've worked through a lot of stuff when in the bath. If I switched to showers I think I'd be dead by now. In fact, that's not even a joke.

You can't think in the shower. You can sink and wank and clean your stinkables, certainly, but you can't think. Ray Mears taught me that. He said that when you're in a survival situation in the rainforest, you should make your shelter before the afternoon downpour starts, because the simple unrelenting pounding of raindrops on your head makes it difficult to think clearly. He's right. Try and do some algebra in the shower. It is hard. In the bath, in the meantime, you are able to start to see the meaning of the cosmos.

You can learn a lot from Ray Mears. He espouses survival, which is a wise thing to espouse. But the key thing he teaches you is humility, an understanding of what human beings truly need. Not what they think they need or might like to think they need. Just what you have to have to get by. A foundation upon which one can then start to build comfort and happiness in time. It's an important lesson, and it's remarkable that we have to rely on a man whose diet primarily consists of ants and wipes his bottom on leaves to teach it to us.

I tell you something: I bet Ray Mears is a bath man.

Hello

Hello. That's what they say. When you are walking, that is. I'm not sure what happens to British people as soon as they get off public highways and onto promenades and footpaths but they seem hell-bent on saying "HELLO!" to people as they pass. Whatever it is I am clearly immune to it. In many ways I would quite like to try it, but never on a footpath on the Downs or along the seafront or in the woods. I'd prefer to try it in central London at 8.15 a.m. on a Tuesday morning.

I digress slightly. Today I went for a walk to Shoreham Old Fort. This is in Shoreham. Shoreham Beach, to be precise. West Sussex. Although by that point you're getting quite close to being in East Sussex, so close that you can smell the refinement. Or you would be able to if it weren't for the diesel fumes of heavy industry.

Anyway, I took pictures of it, so if you are a fucking lazy bastard or something, you can vicariously live my thrilling life. But rest assured that I hate you. Unless I don't. So, that's that cleared up. (Click them to make them bigger)

This beach hut looks like Adolf Hitler.

This bin comes with instructions about what to put in it.

Lonely egret is lonely.

Shoreham in the distance, houseboats in the middle & loads of green stuff in front of that.

Shoreham fort. Designed to keep the Egyptians at bay. It's working.

R.I.P. Harry Ayre, whoever you are. I imagine he drowned.

Shoreham power station busily making power which does not interest seagull.

There's an entire army division in this shed (re: Egyptians)

Shoreham lighthouse and lifeboat station. To prevent deaths (sadly not that of Harry Ayre).

I don't know what this is.

Cormorant. Maximum speed 6 knots.

Here are some boats going to B&Q.

Here is Shoreham lighthouse again BUT! from a different angle.

These boats are a bit knackered. Sort your boats out, people.

BEACH. Looking back towards Worthing. Wherever the hell that is.

There are some hardy souls fishing here. They have caught some birds.

There is Shoreham High Street, where everyone is high. HIGH ON LIFE. And some drugs.

I should also point out that I could have walked past the Shoreham houseboats but chose not to. This is because my photography skills are largely limited to taking wonky pictures of seagulls and falling over. Luckily for you, though, in November I walked along there with my friend Lolly and she is super-blazing-OMG-awesome at photography so you should have a look at her pictures instead. Go on!

There are four types of monkey

The elk of North London: a handy field guide

On how I would capture a runaway panda if it appeared in my garden

Oh hello again. Yesterday afternoon I asked Twitter what I should write a blog about to get back on my blogging megahorse, and I received lots of excellent suggestions. Yesterday's came from @LollyGee and today's is from @betsymartian. If you're on Twitter and not following both of these people then you're no friend of mine, let me tell you.

I live by the sea near the border between East and West Sussex. Prime panda country. Every autumn, the majestic and sweeping panda migrations make parts of Southwick, Shoreham-by-Sea and Steyning completely impassable. Alas, occasionally one will wander off from the herd. Then what do you do?

Well, the first thing is not to panic. They're not actually more scared of you than you are of them. In fact they will gladly bite your face clean off. However, what you need to do is forget that fact for a minute and get some courage. Because a faint heart never got a panda in a headlock yet.

As we all know, Montogomery used to put up a picture of Rommel in his tent and blow it kisses and write it love notes. No, actually, he put it there to size up his enemy. And that's the key here, to KNOW YOUR ENEMY. To catch an errant panda you must understand the strengths and weaknesses of the panda. The strengths include cuteness and the ability to bite your face clean off. What are a panda's weaknesses, though? As we all know, they are twofold:

1. Bamboo
2. Lady pandas (or mandas, if you have a lady panda in your garden)

That's right. Pandas love to eat bamboo and they don't like lady pandas (or mandas, if they are a lady panda). There's nothing a panda would rather do than eat bamboo all day on their own and do nothing about making any new pandas.

So, to capture a panda is a three man operation. (WARNING: one of these three men is going to complain bitterly about having more to do than the others. Ignore them). The first must dress as a lady panda (or a manda, if you have a lady panda to deal with) and just sit there looking coy and flirtatious. The second must dig a 10 foot by 10 foot by 10 foot deep pit and fill it with bamboo. The panda will see the lady panda (or manda) and go, 'uh oh. Don't want to be accidentally be doing any baby pandas'. Corralled by that horrible thought it will gallop into the bamboo pit. Where the second will probably still be stood, sweating and swearing about how unfair it all is.

The third's role is to film all of this and send it to me at the email address in the sidebar. Thanks.

On being in season

Let's talk space and time. You've probably noticed that it's getting pretty autumnal out there. Exciting stuff. Show me someone who is bored of autumn and I'll show you someone who is bored of life, OF LIFE ITSELF. Or maybe they just don't like autumn, who knows?

You should already be reading all of the blogs in my link list already anyway because they are all better than mine, but in case you missed it at the weekend, here's a lovely summary of autumn goodness from Skulls and Ponies.

Now that that's got you in the mood, I'm going to discuss three autumnal things and the personal policies which have arisen from them. You may learn something about me. You may even realise why it's a good idea to hate me more.

1. Seasonality
Anyone who has ever done did some gardening or suchlike will know that certain things only grow at certain times of the year. When I was a child, this fact was reflected in the supermarket shelves. Globalisation has seen to that, rather. I'm always a little despirited to see strawberries on the shelves in January.

Just because you can find a supplier abroad who will send you strawberries all winter long, doesn't mean it's a good idea. For one thing, where's the magic and excitement gone? But on a less metaphysical level, strawberries flown in from abroad are always terrible, because they have to be picked early so as not to spoil on the way. I would rather wait all year for a 6 week window when I can enjoy strawberries, or peaches, or asparagus than sit around in February eating a Peruvian strawberry which has all of the taste and texture of a raw new potato. So I do. It's good. It's nice to have that bit of magic back.

I like to think of it as a soft fruit hairshirt I choose to wear.

2. Spider's webs
Autumn is a pretty spidery time. Look around any garden you see in the street and you're almost guaranteed to see a big fat garden spider in a pristine, due-flecked web. I have a very clear policy of spider's webs. It is this. I will absolutely not destroy them. Not until I learn how to spin a silken web out of my own bum, anyway.

The other day I was getting some herbs from the garden (I am a big ponce like that) and found a spider had slung (probably her, I didn't stop to ask) web in such a place that I couldn't get to the marjoram. Middle class emergency! However, I worked round it and did without. Just because I am bigger than a spider doesn't give me the right to lord it up. That thing just MADE ITS OWN HOUSE OUT OF SILK IT MADE ITSELF. If that's not worthy of respect, I don't know what is.

3. Glut busting
Harvest time is upon us. There'll be many a glut of vegetables to sort out before winter brings naught but preserved summer stuff and huffy brassicas for the seasoned and disciplined seasonal vegetable eater (me). I have nothing much to say about this, nor any great tips. So instead I'm going to use gluts as a jumping off point to explain why I don't like celery.

Christmas 1989 and I am eating celery. There's a big jug full of it. And I'm making merry. Crunch crunch crunch. Crunch crunch. Dip dip dip (that's the salt). Crunch crunch. Dip dip. Crunch crunch. Ooh, stringy bit. Crunch crunch crunch.

I could go on. I did, actually. Nine-year old me nailed that whole jug of celery.

Unfortunately, it being Christmas time there was also a rather nasty stomach bug going around. In the middle of the night, I am being heroically sick. This was, of course, nothing to do with the celery. However, the brain linked the two up and that was the end of that. I am glad it did. It was nature's way of demonstrating that celery is evil and not to be trusted. I have not eaten another stick of celery since.

On woodlice

I think I might be coming out of the fug, which is good news for all you dotfans out there and also for me. There are always false starts with these things. The most common one I find is that you start to define yourself by your depressed state, which is absurd and leads you to think, "uh oh, better not be too happy, everyone is expecting me to be depressed!" It's my staggering stupidity which I think keeps people coming back. Where's the fun in consistency?

And so to not giving my silly arse of a brain the oxygen of publicity. I think I would like to talk about woodlice.

Pictured above is my woodlouse. He is a very special woodlouse. He is the only known example of a pornography woodlouse. My friends Betsy and 5olly gave me him for Christmas 4 years ago. As you may note, my cat is studiously ignoring him. Evolution does not interest the cat. Nor does anything I do, judging by the fact I just plonked a massive woodlouse full to the gills with grumble mags next to him and took a picture of it.

The other day, I am told, my niece (who will be 5 on Sunday) refused to go into the bathroom because there was a woodlouse in there. From my in-depth (two people) research, I have discovered that this is not a particularly rare thing. A number of human beings are scared of woodlice, and where fear exists in the human world, hitting it with a slipper is never far behind.

I live my life by the mantra that I'll never knowingly hurt an animal. Obviously, you have to accept that some things will get stomped underfoot without you ever knowing it. Maybe whole species have fallen by the wayside in that manner. However, if I know it is there - be it an ant, a spider, a bee, frog, dog or polar bear - I will always give it a wide berth and let it get on with its to-do list. So, people pummelling bugs because they are scared of them, because they can and because might is right is something I find rather distasteful. This is especially true of the woodlouse.

A woodlouse is the big daddy of planet Earth, to my mind. The whole 12,000 year history of the planet. The woodlouse has been around since stuff first came out of the oceans and realised that living in the sea was a right faff. Woodlice are a crustacean of a design you can see all through the history of the planet. A simple mouth, legs, arsehole arrangement with a hard protective shell. It is something you'll find everywhere on earth, on sea and on land. Fossil records show lots of examples of it as well, meaning that Iguanodon and his brethren would have been chasing woodlice around with a slipper too. For the Creationists among you, this means I'd put woodlice as one of the Day 1 creations, along with heavens and earth and light and air and water and ham.

I have a lot of respect for the woodlouse. I'm not espousing everyone having a pet woodlouse. If you cuddled one it would probably get crushed. They've not got the same amount of personality as cats or dogs. However, the next time you see a woodlouse and are about to have a freak out, my advice will be to step away and let it get on with its woodlouse shit. They're the Chelsea Pensioner of the animal kingdom!