1: Textophobe
I tried to send my first text message the other day. I failed miserably. Holding the phone in the approved manner, and prodding away at the keypad, I achieved the following:
"CR47AL 33HHLX11 9Q PPPPPPPO"
...which apparantly translates as an invitation to partake in a game of scrabble at a well-known dogging rendezvous.
It's no good, I just can't text and I have neither the patience nor the willingness to learn this otherwise simple skill. I gather that it involves parts of my brain reserved for other, far more important functions, such as breathing, hating people in Burberry baseball caps and thinking up new, exciting ways to be offensive.
Utterly defeated by the technology, I instead rang my wife and told her I'd be home in ten minutes, and no - triple word score or not - she can damn well put the scrabble away.
2: Shakespeare was a bastard
God I hate bad poetry. Or specifically truly bad language-mangling doggerel written by old ladies that appears on the letters pages of local newspapers. The English language is ripped apart in the eternal quest for a rhyme in a for verse tirade against dog shit outside the post office.
"Oh dear, there's a terrible terrible mess
As I went to get my pension in my favourite dress
I ask everyone in our town, what can we all do
When the pavement's covered in horrible smelly poo."
And so on, for fifteen verses, featuring a doomed attempt to fit in "I fought in three world wars for people like you." Naturally, this always scoops the ten quid prize for "Letter of the Week", which will only serve to encourage the old bat and inspire other nutcases to do the same.
Stop it. Now. This is the country that gave us Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Ryk the People's Poet and ...err... Andrew Motion, who should have known better to inspire the untalented to set their most trivial thoughts down in rhyme.
And while we're here, let us not forget Bad Poetry's cousin, The Local TV Rap...
"Schoolchildren in Plymouth were so upset about dog mess outside the post office they wrote a rap about it. Dan Prick reports."
And it's a bunch of terribly middle-class thirteen year olds with a pair of bongos and a recorder trying desperately not to swear.
"Yo! It's a terrbile, terrible ting
All this poo outside the post office an' ting
Break it down Sophie!"
I ought to get out more, but there's shit all over the pavement.
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