25 Things Not To Do Before You're 37

Now, as the years begin to slip by there is at least one compensation: you do all sorts of incredibly stupid things which are magically transformed from "mistakes" into "experience" by the mere passage of time. Given that, here are 25 things that, in my experience, are to be avoided ...

1. Never ever swap from your usual party drink of beer to wine on the basis you'll "drink less that way and thus avoid getting embarrassingly drunk".
2. Never think you can hide from a Mormon - you may have turned the lights off and all be hiding among the old paint tins and broken bits of unrecognisable stuff in the cellar, but those guys are like the Terminator - they'll still find you. (In fact, send them tot he Tora Bora mountains and in no time Osama bin Laden will be (a) found and (b) be getting ready to move to Utah with his three new brides)
   
3. Never ever vote for a plausible guy with good teeth on the basis that however bad a PM he may turn out to be, at least he won't take the country to war at the first opportunity.
4. Never mistake a prospective partner's neuroses, insecurity and rampant attention-seeking for charm, wit or "being fun to be with".
5. Never think "these drugs [illegal or legal] aren't working ... I'll have some more and see if that works"
6. Never claim to be able to keep a secret - alcohol, lust, incompetence or the simple need to gossip will always win out in the end.
7. Never expect anyone else to be able to keep a secret - see (6) above.
8. Never leave the result of a tight election contest to a bunch of judges - especially ones chosen by former Presidents.
   
9. Never go for a very long walk in brand new shoes.
10. Ginger people must never hang their suntan-lotion-free arms out of a car window for the whole journey from Cairo to the Red Sea on the hottest day Egypt has seen in a decade.
11. Never go out with someone who won't tell their parents you're going out for more than, say, 18 months.
12. Never go on the fairground waltzer after more than 5 pints.
13. Never turn down the suggestion by three attractive female journalists you've just bumped into in the street that you accompany them to a nearby nightclub, especially when the alternative is realising what you've done halfway through that pint of water you're downing with a couple of Nurofen at home in front of Programmes For The Open University1.
14. Never underestimate the bloody-minded fury of an irate goose.
15. If you smoke, never have fewer than 10 cigarettes on you at any time; stuff pain, suffering, losing your job or - indeed - lung cancer, running out of cigarettes is the worst thing that can happen when you're a smoker.
16. Never become a smoker (see 15).
17. Never try to wedge the door of a tube train open with a bag containing a large selection of fireworks intended for a Bonfire Night party.
18. Never consider going out with somebody who mentions their church within 10 minutes of meeting you.
19. Never try the full ashtanga primary sequence while hungover.
20. Never lend someone a book unless (a) you don't plan to read it again or (b) you've got a spare copy.
21. Never place items which are both (a) fragile and (b) breakable in a precarious precision thinking, "I won't knock it over, I couldn't possibly be that clumsy".
22. Never give in to the overpowering desire for a late-night kebab with extra chilli-sauce if you are unprepared for the inevitable consequences next day.
23. Never shave before ensuring beyond all doubt that your partner hasn't borrowed it do her legs / underarms / oh-dear-lord-it-really-doesn't-bear-thinking-about.
24. Never go into a World Cup thinking, "Finally, this could really be Holland's year".
25. Never let the bastards get you down - unless they're much bigger bastards than you and they look like they might have violent tendencies, obviously.
    

1 Clearly this only applies in the pre-finding your life-partner phase of life.

Too Depressed To Commit Blogicide

Looking back I realise it's been a long time since I last blogged anything on here. As anyone who's read my previous entries will realise, most of my bloggage has been motivated by things that get me so annoyed I have to rant about them. Recently however, I realised that I'm no longer annoyed so much as deeply, deeply depressed by the assorted idiocies that seem to be crowding out the last remnants of "enlightenment" thought in the UK, if not across the globe. So here's a list of some of the items that have reduced me to this state:

1. John Reid's patronising media performances
2. Football fanaticism becoming mandatory for every adult and child in England
   
3. Newspapers that continue to link the MMR jab to autism despite a total lack of evidence and the return of measles, mumps et al to our schools
4. The spread of creationism
5. Melanie Phillips's unquestioning self-righteousness
   
6. Russell Brand
7. The dumbing-down of Horizon
8. Justin Lee Collins
9. Patricia Hewitt's patronising media performances
10. Home Secretaries lurching ever further to the right in their quest for the support of the Sun and Daily Mail
11. The spittle-flecked rantings of the Daily Mail
12. The faux cheeky-chappie rantings of The Sun
13. Piers Morgan's insufferable smugness
14. Ann Robinson's TV career
    
15. Bendy-buses
16. Ministers treating their ministries as their own personal fiefdoms and/or routes to greater power rather than offices of state deserving of respect
17. The British Prime Minister's friendship with Silvio Berlusconi
18. John Humphrys's happy ignorance of all matters scientific
19. The way the fetishisation of the car has transformed Anglo-Saxon society into a collective of solipsists
20. The promotion of faith schools
21. The lick-spittle reportage of the trite and/or idiotic blatherings of HRH The Prince of Wales, Prince Charles
22. Critics who claim "Footballer's Wives" is well-written drama
23. JK Rowling: Enid Blyton for the Noughties
24. Radio 4's "The Moral Maze"
25. Big Brother
26. Being unable to get more than 3 metres away from a Tesco store
27. CCTV on every street corner
28. The confusion between assertion and justification
29. Belief in homoeopathic medicine as anything more than psychotherapy+placebo
    
30. Smug, middle-class types lecturing "the lower orders" on makeover TV
    
31. Parents bringing toddlers to see certificate 12 films
32. The American tourist whose first words at Bayeux were a dismissive "Is this the WHOLE tapestry?"
33. The American tourist who, on a trip to the temple of Osiris at Abydos, asked "What dumb-assed pile of rocks are we gonna see today?"
34. Stephen Poliakoff's vapid televisual meditations
35. The government's failure to insist on the closure of Guantanamo Bay's Camp X-Ray
    
36. The provisions of just about every Criminal Justice Act passed since 1990 you care to mention
37. Gordon Brown's pretence of socialism
38. The hegemony of the soap opera over modern cultural life
39. The "red" states of the USofA
40. Yorkshiremen - no, all that bluff "speak as I find" stuff isn't charming it's just rude. Also, if Yorkshire's so frickin' great, how come so many of you have moved to the South East?
    
41. Chuggers
    
42. Education as training to pass exams
43. Zoo, Nuts, Maxim et al being treated as anything other than soft porn
    
44. Archbishop Rowan Williams's general uselessness
    
45. Belief in the healing power of crystals
46. People who claim Jordan is clever
47. Tony Blair
48. Still not having a date for my Margaret Thatcher's dead party
49. People who think Deal or No Deal is anything other than a random numbers game
50. Spending half an hour blogging out a rant when I should be working