Hello. I'm a bit grumpy.

It’s my Birthday next week, where I reach a frightening mid-point between two round figures. A bit like being stuck between a naked Eric Pickles and a mirror. Sorry – did I just spoil your sausage dinner?

My Birthday wish list is the usual, sensible, collection of life-affirming items for a man of my youthful years: Bucks Fizz reunion, an edging iron (can’t beat a straight edge! Trust me. I’ve tried.), 10 x 1kg bars of Cadbury Dairy Milk, loud shirts, something to cure my cappuccino addiction, the ability to smile and move on calmly when someone says “Can I get a pint please?” in a pub, column in local newspaper...

Hang on! I don’t remember writing that last one down! (Remembers near-homemade-Damson-Gin-overdose incident and a Star Trek:TNG marathon) Oh. Right. Awkward.

Bizarrely, the jolly nice people at the North West Evening Mail have entrusted me with preparing you for the wonders of the weekend. This is probably an occasion where excessive use of inverted commas is required, as this may not be a ‘good thing’. (I’m ranking ‘good vs bad’ here on a ‘might depress you a bit’ or “isn’t he a miserable git?” scale, as opposed to World War 3, shutting your fingers in the car door or any programme featuring Fearne Cotton saying “I love it” repeatedly. Or a Beadle’s About box set. )

I’m not clever enough to have prepared an extensive list of subjects I need to talk about, and don’t have a good enough attention span to... Ooh! Look at that photo on the other page! Brilliant!

You can, however, rest assured that I will be doing my utmost to try and keep things light and cheery and never stray in to random diatribes about why tourists are annoying. Or how we reached a stage where we all have a drawer full of cables that we haven’t the SLIGHTEST idea fit into what, even though techies keep banging on about The Cloud and how everything is wireless. Or the pleasures of visiting hospital for an MRI scan. Or what the point of Juliet balconies is. Or why food packaging is so damn annoying and it’s impossible to get into anything without it ripping, covering you in yoghurt of showering your slippers with cornflakes. If you can even get into it at all (I’m looking at YOU Crespo olive jars.)

Um.... sorry. I seem to have gone a bit purple in the face – I should probably go and have a lie-down and read my “Anger Management For Dummies” book. Again.

Should you feel confident enough that I won’t appear on your doorstep to take umbrage at your opinion (you’re probably safe – my sense of direction is terrible), feel free to say hello on that twitter thing – I’m @grumpyf1

Now that I’m a journalist, do I have to hack my own phone? (Hacks own phone. Discovers there are no messages. Cries a bit.)

Have a lovely weekend.

If you can.

(This is the unedited version of the column that appeared in the North West Evening Mail on Friday 4th May 2012. You can view the edited version on the paper's website here: http://www.nwemail.co.uk/home/columns and leave comments. Which would be nice. Ta.)

(Gentle Bank Holiday tuneage provided by Murray Gold/The BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Ben Foster and the original television soundtrack for Doctor Who - A Christmas Carol.)

A fisful of change at the shops

A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog