Nothing to say but plenty to moan about

Faced with 1500 words and an empty page, for the first time since I started writing this each week, I am without anything specific to write about. I could write about the anniversary of September 11, my five-year wedding anniversary and my impending thirtieth birthday, and in fact I have already started a piece on this very subject but I can’t find it on my hard-drive right now. I could write about how so many things seem to be changing around me, but I’m saving that miserable topic for the week of my thirtieth birthday. For the record, on that week I will only be listening to Joy Division and Depeche Mode records, will be drowning my sorrows in copious amounts of cheap booze, and sobbing onto my wife’s shoulder.

So what I’ll do instead is have a general moan about things that have been bothering me lately. I’ve been saving up a number of these gripes and here seems like as good a juncture as any to put them all together and get them off my expanding chest.

‘Expanding?’ you exclaim. ‘How can he possibly be getting into shape when they’ve just had a baby? How does he have the time?’ Well, expanding does come off rather macho, doesn’t it? Like I’ve been working out and beefing up despite the squeeze on time just from having a dependent little madam around the place. But alas, my chest – and gut, and waist – are expanding through a complete lack of exercise and a new diet that seems to consist principally of late-night eating and convenience food.

Chez Smith we’ve always been pretty health conscious when it comes to food – no red meat, we gave up chicken a long time ago, we eat oily fish and plenty of vegetables – and we’ve been very healthy for it. We also used to go out for evening walks, Michelle was a member of a gym and I would walk to work. Well, I’d walk the part of the route from car to station and at the other end from Euston to the City – walking from Milton Keynes to London is not really do-able, although I did once think about walking home that way, but it’s a long story. Since Seren arrived each and every one of those things have gone out the window – we eat pizza probably once a week (we even started getting Domino’s delivered which I have previously considered a cardinal sin), throw a jar of sauce into a pan instead of making it ourselves, and the effort of preparing some fresh fish is just too much effort; Michelle simply can’t go to the gym and the crèche there is apparently a death trap for kiddies, and despite my nervous anxiety over catching the tube since July 7 I have found myself reluctantly riding the underground because I’m too knackered to do anything else, or working from home more often where I don’t benefit from any exercise other than the occasional walk along the landing in the house to the toilet.

At the moment I’m reading Morgan Super Size Me Spurlock’s Don’t Eat This Book which outlines just why it is that fast food is so bad for you. This book is practically a horror novel rather than a discursive factual work – you should feel sickened by the fast food companies and the crap they serve up as ‘food’ and make you never want to eat anything again. Except, for the first five chapters or so it actually made me want to eat crap food! What’s that all about? I have destroyed my svelte frame and now just want to eat like an obese hog. Anyone who heard me say in my earlier years that I never put any weight on is now laughing at my burgeoning middle-age spread. On Saturday I ate around 250% of my daily recommended saturated fat intake via a combination of pastry, breadsticks, crisps and an Indian takeaway. If I live to see 40 eating like this I should count myself lucky. (Whilst writing this very paragraph I was contacted by a colleague who said he was overjoyed that he’d managed to get his sat nav device to display the location of all local McDonald’s and KFCs and ping whenever he got close to one; on the one hand I am amazed at this, on the other appalled that someone could get so enthusiastic about being able to precisely pinpoint a source of such unhealthy food. He said that it was a ‘saviour’. A saviour that clogs up your arteries and sends you to an early grave, presumably.)

To fast food I would append the abundance of hydrogenated vegetable oil – a common trans fat which is supposedly lethal – in foods. It’s hard to avoid, and is in pretty much every biscuit or cake you can buy. I recently found it in raisins. Raisins! Aren’t they just dried grapes? Why do they need to be coated in margarine for God’s sake? Even when you try to eat healthily you end up eating processed muck.

What else? I know – travelling to Cornwall or anywhere in the South-West if you don’t live on or near the M5 or M4. That’s a bitch. I do love it in Cornwall, but the journey is a pain in the arse. The last time we did it the journey took us thirteen hours. Thirteen hours! I could fly to New York twice in that time.

The disposable nature of society, that’s something that bugs me. The development of cheap materials and therefore even cheaper garments from places like Tesco, H&M and Gap encourages you to re-buy your entire wardrobe with each and every new season, thus leaving you with the problem of what to do with the stuff you bought that you no longer wear. What a waste. And then there’s the fact that you buy something from these places, it looks great the first time you wear it, but then you wash it and it looks like you’ve owned it for about ten years. Oh, and iTunes downloads. You download that killer, must-have track, listen to it, go off it, delete it. Next!

Crap cars that their owners think could pass as sports cars if they stick on a new exhaust and ‘chav’ it up. Wrong. They’re still crap cars. In Birmingham the other day I saw an old 1980s Astra that had been customised into some boy racer Frankencar; in the front (blacked-out) window he’d added a huge sticker with ‘Astra’ in italics. Astras have never been cool – why do you think that advertising it is going to make it any cooler? Next!

Fat blokes reading lads’ mags. It looks desperate.

Girls who think that wearing ‘quirky’ fashion, uncomfortable shoes and carrying a Vuitton handbag will instantly reward them with the life of Carrie Bradshaw. It doesn’t. You look desperate too. And don’t pretend that High Holborn is like Fifth Avenue while you’re at it.

Applying for a passport and trying to get an authorised signatory from a list that the average person wouldn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of knowing someone from. Do they simply not want you to travel?

Olympic-sized trampolines in small residential gardens, thus affording the trampolinee the perfect view of my wife breastfeeding in the lounge when bouncing skyward. This I could write a whole piece on, but I may be pursuing legal advice on this in the next few weeks and therefore don’t want to weaken my case in case my neighbour reads this. But while we’re at it – balls being thrown wantonly from said trampoline, into my garden, and destroying the few plants that have made it from seed to seedling. That sucks too.

Waiters and waitresses who have the cheek to expect a tip when all they’ve done is served you a drink. And a 12.5% tip at that.

The cost of train tickets in the UK. Are they not aware of low cost airlines undercutting their train fares for the same route by around 75%?

The way that baristas in places like Starbucks or Pret seem completely unable to produce the same drink twice. Is there some great skill to making generic coffee variations that I am unaware of? There must be, as this is the only thing that could explain why it is that you’ll get served a perfect latte one day followed by another that is too strong, or too weak, or too frothy, or too creamy. ‘A bit frothy today my love, sorry about that,’ said the barista in the Starbucks I was in today. Too bloody right it was too frothy. It might as well have been topped with shaving foam.

And finally, those people who just moan about anything and everything. Don’t they hack you off? They’re never happy, always finding something to be miserable about. I mean, how can anyone live their life like that? If I ever get like that you can shoot me.