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Check out the Guardian website blog - they have kindly published my post and linked it to my blog.

Have a job interview next week at Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Other than that, I still have an ear infection and no news.

I am human and I need to be loved...

People are arseholes. Admittedly I have arrived at this conclusion following interactions with my doctor and three people who work in Morrison's, which is not exactly a broad subsection of society from which I can draw a valid judgement, but they are nevertheless the only four people to whom I have spoken all day (bar my mother, and she is convinced that arseholeism is a feature unique to London and if I lived in Somerset everyone would walk around handing out fairy cakes and talking about kittens) so I conclude: people are arseholes.

I am off work with an ear infection, about which my doctor was less than sympathetic. He asked me what the pain was like and I said it was like when you are walking through a strong wind and it makes your ears ache. He looked distinctly unimpressed then said "I've never had that. How odd." I dislike being an oddity, and this was compounded by him deciding he would do my smear test while I was there and then finding something else entirely and asking me incredulously about my sex life, and if it wasn't enough his reminding me I didn't have one anything out of the ordinary, packing me off to a specialist at the Royal Free making me feel like a fourteen-year-old in a GUM clinic, then unceremoniously shooing me out of his office as though I had ruined his entire week by having the gall to turn up to a GP surgery with minor ailments.

As for Morrison's, it apparently takes an hour to make up a prescription (my fault, they implied), and they do not sell gift tags or raspberries, although I recommend their marmite biscuits.

On top of all this it is half-term, which means back-to-back cartoons on tv and not much else. Consequently I am following Rachel's lead and playing Sudoku. "Congratulations!" the online game announces at me when I've finally finished "86% of people who completed this puzzle were faster than you!"

I did however catch a rather scary interview with a US marine talking about a 19-year-old colleague who had been killed in Iraq.

"Well, at least he knew he died to ensure that his parents remained safe and free."

Er...

The interviewer pointed out that Iraq hadn't actually attacked America.

The guy's reply?

"Well, we don't know that. It might have been them."

Following that logic it's high time we invaded Leeds. At least we KNOW the London tube bombers came from there.

Please do post, I am excessively bored...

I don't often enter competitions but this morning I sent off 12 tokens in a bid to win a flat purportedly worth £500,000. Quite why said flat is worth so much I don't know, since it doesn't appear to have much going for it. For a start, it isn't built yet, so if I do win it I won't be able to move in until September 2006. Secondly, it's only one bedroom, and spending half a million on a single bedroom seems a bit daft when for the same amount of money you could have this which has three bedrooms and looks like one of those houses I thought only existed covered in snow in Disney films set in London. Or indeed I could have the same in Primrose Hill or Pimlico, or some other sophisticated part of almost-central London that begins with P.

But no, apparently some people would rather spend that money to live in an open-plan (read "one-room") flat within a building that looks like something out of The Jetsons, offering panoramic views (read "quite a way up a towerblock") over London, whose annual ground rent and service charges etc add up to approximately my current rent. Oh, and it's in Battersea, an area which the Standard inexplicably describes as having "excellent transport links". All this could be mine for just 12 tokens, (and £3.60's worth of copies of the Standard), £4000 a year extra fees, a year's wait and the promise to sell my soul to a franchise of the Daily Mail for "publicity purposes".

That said, if I could flog it to someone who hasn't yet spotted the flaws in the above, maybe that chocolate-box red-doored Disney terrace wouldn't be so far out of my reach after all. Ooh, I hope I win...

Margaret Thatcher has made a big impact on the current Conservative leadership contest. Apparently:

"Lady Thatcher, who endorsed William Hague in 1997 and Iain Duncan Smith in 2001, has no plans publicly to support anyone this time."

Hmm. Because both of them went down a treat.

She is 80 on Thursday.

She'll be dead soon.

This article appeared in "The Onion" in 1998, so I'm sure most of you have een it before. If you haven't, here's a short extract:

"VATICAN CITY—In a historic reversal of its nearly 2,000-year-old pro-meek stance, the Catholic Church announced Tuesday that it is permanently rescinding the traditional "blessed" status of the world's meek.
"Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ once said, 'Blessed are the meek,'" said Pope John Paul II in a papal bull read before the College of Cardinals. "However, there has always been a tacit understanding between the Church and the meek that this 'blessed' status was conditional upon their inheritance of the earth, an event which seems unlikely to happen anytime in the foreseeable future. Our relationship, therefore, must be terminated."

"Screw the meek," the pope added."

Worrying thing is, I seem to be coming across more and more Christians who have the same attitude for real.

This new Racial and Religious Hatred Bill looks a bit rubbish. Apparently it is meant to protect people who hold certain views related to their faith. According to some bloke on the Today Programme (who I'm sure is very important, but I wasn't interested enough to remember his name) it will protect people from holding certain views but we can still disapprove and condemn those views. So taken to its logical conclusion, Christian Voice's nutbar spokesperson Stephen Green will be allowed to go around saying the Police Force is evil for going on gay pride marches, and gay people are solely responsible for any degredation of British Society, and, though he will not be arrested under any kind of "incitement of homophobia" clause we can nevertheless rest assured that we can say "tut, tut, I really don't agree with that opinion."
John Humphreys did ask the bloke whose name I can't remember what would happen if someone was inciting terrorism from a faith standpoint. Would he be protected under this Bill, or arrested and detained at Paddington Green for inciting terrorism? The bloke said the question was irrelevent. That is, he didn't know the answer.

Last night I did something painful: I was chopping chillis and I then I picked my nose. That hurt.

And now I am in a bad mood because after writing my blog for the last half hour (I don’t get out much) an error message came up on my blog. BOLLOCKS! (and I can say that, because the Daily Mail published research today that proves that swearing is good for you. Something to do with chimps, apparently.)

Anyway, as a result of watching “The Unteachables” (like I said, I don’t get out much) I have finally found something mildly interactive to put on my blog. This test assesses how “intelligent” you are over 8 possible areas by asking you questions about what interests you and how you learn. Interestingly there isn’t a question that says “do you get bored and easily distracted when slogging your way through pointless internet quizzes”? Anyway, these are my results: shockingly, the welfare adviser with the English degree has high linguistic and interpersonal skills, though I am reassuringly crap at maths. What are your results?

Profile for user 305919:
Linguistic 41

Mathematics 19

Visual/Spatial 23

Body/Kinesthetic 30

Naturalistic 21

Music 47

Interpersonal 41

Intrapersonal 32

One of the points that is made in the programme is that kids don't learn well sitting still for five hours a day as this is simply not natural to them (I don't reckon it's natural to anyone.) This made me feel rather smug. A mate and I used to tutor kids in a primary school in Tower Hamlets, and we spent two terms writing and producing our own play. The results were amazing. Then some clever person thought it would be better if our activities were more regulated (fair enough, we were nineteen and had been given free reign over a load of over-excited six year olds for an hour a week.) We were dumped in the library and told to "read quietly" ("quiet" was not a word in these kids' vocabulary). From the first session one kid was scaling the bookshelves throwing copies of "Topsy and Tim" at us, one was running around pretending to be an aeroplane, one was telling me how big his dad was and the fourth was just looking bemused. We did our best - we were untrained volunteers - but we stopped going at the end of the term.

Remember, the test is here. Have a go and blog your results - I am feeling lonely and ignored on the blog front at the moment :-(