Snow Stops Play

Oh, look, I'll get it out of the way.

Gratuitous snow porn

I know, I know!  Everybody's familiar with the stuff; it's knocked news from its traditional top spot in the news, and there can be nobody alive in the United Kingdom who still believes that the sky is falling down except possibly a few creationists living in the less accessible suburbs of Dudley.

There's white stuff everywhere you look; the country has become one, big, cocaine-dusted toilet cistern, and you have to admit, everybody's certainly more chatty as a result.  I can't slip or stumble anywhere without being given conspiratorial head shakes and what-is-this-like eyebrow waggles. In the Days Before The Snow Came this would have been reason enough to keep your taser with the safety off.

Anyway, I digress.  This blog is not about snow, despite this;

Snow — hardcore,  full frontal

but rather, the effect it has had on my new job.

Not my new new job that involves long hours hunched over my keyboard like, totally working, instead of blogging.  This is my explanation for the paucity of posts lately, by the way, highlighting the main failing of a capitalist society — that the lazy and work-shy go unrewarded. 

No, not my new-new job, but my new job as

Simon Cowell.

You see, I love writing.  I always have.  I was the annoying kid in class who would ask to do essays, and whose educational highpoint was having to write a 1500 word essay in detention on 'The Inside of a Ping Pong Ball'.  That wasn't punishment, that was careers guidance.

Trouble is, I'm not really qualified to write about anything. 

I haven't had a particularly interesting life, althouth I did almost enter my family to go on Telly Addicts and so conceivably, in an alternate reality, could have met Noel Edmonds.  

I didn't go to university, thereby spectacularly failing to chum-up with future editors/producers/oscar-winning directors with whom to play the nepotism card. 

I basically have no doors in which to jam my foot. 

I've failed woefully in my efforts to initiate sex-romps with useful captains of industry, so blackmailing my way into my dream job looks doubtful, and I'm not prepared to be a war correspondent because

• they get shot at, and
• the desert air would create merry keratin-hell on my hair, no matter how much Frizz-Ease I managed to get through Customs.

A girl always wants to look her best, even under sniper fire.

Trouble with autodidacts is that they know a little about a lot of stuff.  And a lot of that stuff isn't anything to be proud of.  We just sort of pick up useless bits of information like a cat (Felis silvestris catus) picks up sticky-willies (the fruit of the plant you may know as cleavers, beggar lice, gripgrass or catchweed.  Makes an excellent emetic/laxative, if you ever feel the need to purge organically).

I know a little bit about literature, theatre, film, editing, acupuncture, psychology, world religion, quantum theory, car mechanics, biology, chemistry, yoga, the natural world...  Basically, I'm fairly useful to have on a pub quizz team, provided I'm not too drunk and it's not past my bedtime. 

But looking through the newspapers, well, they're all experts aren't they?  Political experts, Middle East experts, financial experts, gardening experts, relationship (ahem) experts, food experts, wine experts, fashion experts.   There doesn't seem to be a place for someone who just, er, whitters, and y'know... rambles on about... erm... stuff.  Vaguely.

I became momentarily excited when I discovered Caitlin Moran, columnist for The Times.  She didn't seem qualified in anything except watching telly.  But then I discovered she had an Interesting Childhood, and was into the Music Scene, and Flirted with Drugs.

How can I compete with that?  My journey to adulthood was strictly lower case.  My parents,with a shocking lack of Bohemian instinct, insisted my brothers and I went to school, failed to divorce or have Interesting People around to the house.  For about a fortnight in my twenties I smoked a bit of skunk, until I realised I got the same result from a big meal. 

Fortunately, thanks to a very angry comment left in response to one of my blogposts, my way forward has become clear.

I will become Simon Cowell.

Q: What is Simon good at? 
A:  Stating his opinion. 

Well, I can do that. 

Q: What else is he good at? 
A:  Letting criticism slide off him like a buttered whore on a fat man. 

I can do that, too, courtesy of being an INTJ.  Which is just a nice way of putting 'Borg'.

I am designed to rip people's dreams to shreds, to cast their hopes and aspirations onto the cold, cruel waves of life so they get tugged away by reality and lost forever.  Basically, I am born to be a reviewer! 

I mean, it started off as something to while away the time, a bit of a laugh but... I could do it for real, and in a Simon Cowell stylie!  Thanks to the support and motivation of Mrs Keira Knightley's Pancakes, my future is opening up before me like an underage sex-pest on Jeremy Kyle.

*Sound of screeching brakes*

I've just heard that the local play I was planning to review this week, that I was itching to review — 'A Celebration'  by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall — has been cancelled due to, oh yes, the bloody snow!

Guess I'll just have to put my dreams on ice...