Blogging can be a strangely cathartic exercise. Sometimes you don’t even have to post what you wrote. Just writing it gets it out of your system. As you can probably guess I just wrote something that was, to put it mildly, a but rabid, so I’ve edited out the personal attacks, most of the more obvious slanders and just left the broad thrusts as it were.

I don’t know from ‘kin boiler

How come I don’t have a problem with the boiler. Well it provides me with hot water to shower in and heats up the radiators. What’s not to like? Others however, disagree. Others think it blows itself out, that the hot water suddenly stops, that it makes funny noises. Who am I to judge their subjective experience? So how did I end up having to sort the boiler out? I don’t really mind, it’s more of a philosophical question. You’d think that the one with the mysterious hot water problem would be the one to find, book and pay the plumber, but you’d be wrong, because it’s Pan. Which is odd because the boiler can eject itself through the roof and head for Mars leaving a trail of steam and sparks and 119 bottles of ‘colour confidence’ conditioner behind it for all I care.

Why do otherwise pretty decent examples of humanity sudden loose their va-va-voom and become, for want of a better word, crashing bores. I mean seriously, people who are in bed asleep by 10.30 every night and never go to the pub. I actually asked one of these types for a pint recently and was rebuffed in favour of - the horror - Top Gear.

Which is worse – not wanting to go to the pub because you just don’t want to spend an hour or two in the company of Pan (odd I know but sometimes you just have to accept these things) or because you actually want to watch Jeremy Clarkson standing in front of a bunch of hero worshipping petrol heads over . . . emphasising . . . every . . . single . . . fucking . . . word? Christ on a bike. I have now sunk lower than Clarkson in the popularity stakes. It must be me. I must be doing something.

Eat properly FFS!!!

When people start to bug you, suddenly everything about them is annoying. Eating habits for example. Two weeks ago I cooked a casserole of duck, ginger, garlic, onions, and star anise. Would anyone try it? NOOOO. Last week I cooked a hot pot of chicken, venison sausage, chick peas, butter beans and artichokes. Did anyone give it a go? NOOOOO. I made an amazing salad of tomatoes, ginger, garlic, palm hearts, fennel and sunflower seeds with raspberry vinegar and sesame oil vinagette. Care for a forkful? NOOOOO. Scallops? Niet. Squid ink pasta? Nein. Kidneys? Ne. And let's not even get onto the subject of tongue, pig's trotters and sea urchins. I don’t know what it is about well educated, intelligent and supposedly cosmopolitan people who refuse point blank to expose themselves to anything that they haven’t tried before but it’s certainly depressing.

Linda McCartney pies, macaroni and cheese and cereal does not a proper diet make. Have you any idea how dispiriting it is to offer someone a plateful of nutritious, organic food brimming with care and attention, delicious, fresh, flavoursome and good for you to have them wrinkle their nose and say ‘no thanks’, and then proceed to eat a bowl of carbohydrate, fat and water. BTW I’m not having a go at mac & cheese – I like it as much as the next man – but if you are going to make it, use some proper fucking cheese – Iceland VALU Cheddar tastes like arse. What’s wrong with people? Christ. If you have the means then please just stop buying excluseively from the super bargain left-overs bins at Lidl. Stop buying fishfingers made from ocean floor sweepings. Stop buying 4 packs of no brand pizza. Stop buying white sliced sta-fresh bread. There’s a reason why it’s only 27p and can be compressed into an 800g ball of glue with one hand you know. I know it's cheap, but it tastes bad, and it tastes bad because it's no good. If I sound like a snob then perhaps I am, but if the definition of that is being driven crazy by people who have the time, the money and the opportunity to lead interesting, pleasurable and soul enriching lives but choose instead to spend Saturday night sitting on the sofa watching Stars in their Eyes, and eating a horror pie, then so be it.

What's to 'get'?

Honestly it makes my soul ache – people who seem to wilfully deny themselves enjoyment, not for some real reason, not because of some deep seated psychological problem (hell we’ve all got one of those) but simply because, “well I might not like it, and if I did give in, then I’d have to interact with other people as well”.

I realise I’m guilty of doing here what I accuse other people of – making value judgements based on insufficient evidence. That may be true, but I’m still right. Of course I’m not necessarily the most perfect person in the world either – Opinionated? Lazy? Dirty? Fetishistic? Judgemental? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. But at least I’m not sinking into a quagmire of suburban mundaneity. I may often be unhappy, I may even be 'wasting' my life, but I still manage to have fun once in a while. Sometime I feel that people must derive some kind of pleasure from being as dull as humanly possible whilst simultaneously feeling the need to communicate their more ‘adult’ mindset to the universe in general by being as rude and patronising as they can be to everyone who isn’t quite ready to brick themselves up in the mental equivalent of a Barratt Starter Home just yet. Why are they like this? I just don't understand. Eeesh.

Kill me now!

Actually the Linda McCartney pies are entirely palatable, but you'd still probably be better off with a carrot.