Three Ways In Which To Become A More Impressive Man

Herewith follows an email that I wrote to a friend over a year ago. It was always intended that this become a blog post but I dared not publish it for fear of my tactics, which I was keen to employ myself, becoming known to those that I wished to use them on. I thought it best, for the sake of transparency, that these now be made public.

1. Walk about eating an apple. Walking about eating an apple is not only impressive but stylish. It is hard not to be impressed by a man who is eating an apple. A man who walks about eating an apple is in illustrious company: in one episode of Hugh’s Chicken Run Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall eats an apple whilst inspecting the hall in Axminster that he uses to launch his Chicken Out campaign. In a podcast, Joe Cornish says he sometimes walks down the street eating an apple and that when he does this he feels superior. You should munch through your apple as if it had the consistency of butter; like a cartoon character would. In reality, people often wear an unsightly grimace when they bite into apples – this is unattractive. Method Of Consumption For The Man Seeking To Impress: pluck your apple from a convenient tree and bounce it deftly off your elbow before taking a crescent shaped bite all the while serenading your lady-prey with an old-timey number such as Just Around The Corner. Later, you will be able to ravish her in a crepuscular setting.
2. Use of the word ‘delight’. As in, “To see you was a delight,” and, “I delight in your eyes.” Or advice, “Let small things delight you: a bright, very clean, check tablecloth; some flowers standing in a blue and white striped mug on the table; that big marmalade cat that came and made confidence to you; the excellent omelette and the carafe of rough wine. How good it all was.”
3. Not wearing a rucksack. Wearing a rucksack encumbers a man. The apple eating is all of a sudden more prosaic. The rucksack-wearer is already too awkward to have the confidence to use the word ‘delight’. Rucksack-wearing has its purposes. If, for example, you have risen early and exercised before heading off to work in a library or wherever you will amplify the feeling of industriousness by wearing a rucksack. Suicide bombers, presumably feel this way when they wear heavily laden rucksacks on the way to Underground stations.

Narcissism Watch

I am growing increasingly aware that my persistent going on about my article in Student Direct, its sub-editing and the response to it fairly stinks of self-obsession. However, before I stop talking about it, I thought that I would put another link to my article on the Student Direct website because it has some comments now. The College Media Matters blog has also mentioned my article. I now feel very exposed and want to retreat into a cave.

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The warm feeling of life on Twitter knows no bounds. I was recently honoured to have a few exchanges with the sublime Fred Deakin of Lemon Jelly fame. I hadn't listened to this Make Things Right B-side before but I plan to make amends now by listening to it all afternoon.

Sam Hill

What in the Sam Hill is going on here? Tom Meltzer, a 21 year old, has a column in the Guardian's G2 supplement today. Apparently, he is doing work experience at the Guardian and he has been allowed to fill in for Charlie Brooker this week (Charlie Brooker has a herniated C7 disc and cannot write his column at the moment).

The more keen-brained among you will have realised, upon discovering this blog, that I have some ambitions in the direction of being allowed to write things for newspapers. Opening G2 this morning to find that a 21 year old had written a column was galling. I felt much like what I imagine an Olympic sprinter would feel like if while he was wandering around behind the starting blocks with his trousers still on and doing a bit of stretching, another runner set off three minutes before the gun, jogged to the finish line and was declared the winner. Here I am putting my toe in the water with a little blog and pathetically grateful to have garbled versions of my articles in the fucking student newspaper, and there he is swilling around the Guardian offices gayly tossing off columns for national consumption.

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The student newspaper's campaign to ruin my embryonic Reputation As A Journalist continued this week. I wrote into the paper following the publication of my article last week: "Dear Student Direct, [Fouls] has obviously not being watching the same The Wire as me otherwise he wouldn't have called it 'a typical US drama.' Yours faithfully, [Fouls]." I later regretted this but thought that anyone who read it would, at worse, dismiss it as nonsense spouted by a misguided eccentric. It did not feature as a letter. Instead it cropped up in the "Text Us" section minus the "Yours faithfully, [Fouls]" bit. This, you will realise, removed the point. My attempt to make a mild jibe at the paper's overly alteration-happy sub-editing and make clear where I stand on the subject of The Wire has been deflected back at me. Student Direct is like a bully who, having grabbed my hands, is asking me, "Why are you hitting yourself Fouls? Stop hitting yourself," while pummelling me in the face... maybe over-egged it a bit there, but perhaps you see what I am trying to say.

I was more pleased to discover that there was a letter of complaint about my article from someone other than me. My article was described as "almost comically cynical". I had to read this a few times but I think that we are meant to understand "comically cynical" to be a bad thing.

What is your Purpose Target?

During the course of my research today I came across this diagram. First class nonsense from the Scottish Government. In context here.

Also, Serafinowicz. He is funny and for some reason and I never have any trouble spelling his name even though it looks like the sort of name that it would be hard to spell.

Enjoying Twitter far too much. If you follow both Limmy and Stephen Fry you get this kind of shit happening...

Dr Gillian McProfiteering Bitch and Other News

She actually seems to have dropped the doctor bit; her preferred form of swindling is no longer charlatanry. Look at this:



Here it is closer:



£1.69. Steep for a little health bar thing bearing the face of someone who is best known for plumbing poo out of people and then smelling it; Gillian McKeith's Cacao Bean Bar. It is made entirely from organic matter, apparently. The ingredients are a list of the sorts of things Gillian McKeith recommends we eat; brown rice, apple juice (that explains the price then). It is almost as if it is a little block of stuff that Gillian McKeith has herself eaten that has then been reconstituted through some sort of system. Gillian McKeith's Cacao Bean Bar. Gillian McKeith's Own Brown Bar. Gillian McKeith's Ideal Poo. Gillian McKeith's Cacao Bean Bar.

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Around the time people were using Napster I used to say, "Eventually you'll be able to listen to any song you want wherever you are as they'll all be able on some global network." Unfortunately, absolutely nobody disagreed with me so the advent of Spotify does not allow me to wallow in the glory of my unique prescientness. Wikipedia tells me they're developing a Spotify application for the iPhone making my dreams of all those years ago a reality. Or, at least, it would if I had an iPhone.

Isn't it good that the people at YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter, and Spotify haven't demeaned themselves by using the copycat 'i' prefix. Unlike those fools at the BBC. Why iPlayer? (Why aye). Why not Watch Again or something?

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Because it's gone all sunny I have been listening to some of my usual summer music. I have been dismayed to discover that it's gone off since last year. Come summertime I listen to Groove Armada and Bob Marley. This is how it has been for many years. Time was I associated Groove Armada with blissful sunny afternoons, the start of the summer holidays and so on. Now it sounds like the music of a polywristbanded wanker who thinks he would like to be a ravey toff but doesn't want to stray too far from Keane. He would probably listen to Bob Marley too and then go to Cornwall and drink Magner's like a cunt.

By my estimation, nothing after 1993 has yet become retro cool. We have perhaps five or six years until Groove Armada achieves retro cool. What's Marley's excuse? Well, these things are probably cyclical; Marley is on a low right now. Maybe his listenableness follows the economic cycle. Or maybe it presages the economic cycle. This could be powerful knowledge. Look out for a pick up in the sales of his records; green shoots they are. Green shoots! How appropriate! Har har har har har! (As in cannabis cos he liked cannabis didn't he).

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That thing on the right of this page is not an advert for Virgin Media; although it's doing its best to look like one. It is in fact an advert for my friends' band Sea Bass Kid. You can play one of their songs on it. You should have a listen; it's good. They have a page on the Road to V website where you can vote for them. They have a MySpace too but I'm not going to link to it again lazy people; there is already a link over there–> somewhere. Under 'Links' in fact.

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I've got Twitter and like so totally get it now. There's no point following me on it because I don't say anything but if I do start saying things I will warn you.

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By the way, there is another new post under this one.

Update: I've put my Twitter up over there under Prattle. I'm going to start saying stuff now: get ready!

Grand Début de Fouls!

Today is the day that I, Fouls, have had a thing printed in the student newspaper. Without further ado, here it is for you: my great blog reading public – without you none of this would have been possible.

The CV Piece

I have written this so that I can write “wrote for the student newspaper” in my CV. It may also mean that under “Early Career” in my Wikipedia entry (no such thing currently exists; an astonishing lapse on the part of my fans) you will see the sentence “At university he wrote for the student newspaper” rather than “At university he watched all of YouTube”. I think that it is important that I make my motive plain now and remind you that you need not read any further.

I had toyed with the idea of filling up the rest of these 650-750 words with a load of aimless wittering about how I had thought even when I was in school that it would be a good idea to write for the student newspaper. Other, as yet unfulfilled, ambitions included becoming really good at tango, becoming really good at capoeira, ditto photography, acting and directing, and developing enormous muscles. But I am not going to waste your time (at least not in that way). Prepare instead, dear reader, for your world to be upended by my incisive and damning examination of The Whole Sordid Business Of Writing Stuff For The Student Newspaper Just To Say That You’ve Done So In Your CV itself!

It would not be controversial, I think, to claim that the CV-bolstering instinct accounts for much of what is written in this paper. People write and submit pieces for all sorts of other reasons — many of them noble, I’m sure — but career prospects must be at the forefront of many a student writer’s mind. Is this a bad thing? After all, this pursuit of self-interest ensures that every issue of our student weekly is well stocked with articles. Arguably, it would be a skimpier publication were this incentive absent.

Self-interest, it seems, is the central issue here and in what follows I present for your delectation my little treatise on the subject based on stuff that I have seen on the telly. The Wire (kind of a drama) is a programme that hates careerists. It tells stories of institutional dysfunction and more often than not change is obstructed by characters’ desire for self-advancement. In another television programme, Adam Curtis’ documentary The Trap, an alternative take on self-interest is presented in an interview with economist James M. Buchanan who suggests that public servants who are motivated by things other than money (cited alternatives are job satisfaction and a sense of public duty) are dangerously unpredictable and “zealots”.

“So,” you say, “what does this mean for Student Direct? Please enlighten me further.” I say, “Open your mind. Let us not look solely at student journalism let us look also at student politics.” That’s right, sit up; we’re talking Politics now. I have no figures to hand but I’m not going to let that hold me back from claiming that a large proportion of Manchester students don’t bother to vote in the union elections. I’ve certainly never bothered voting. In my first year I went along to the union to vote but the queue looked to be several orders of scale larger than the shit that I gave about who got elected.

The main reason that I tend not to vote in these elections is the spectre of careerism that I see hanging over the whole event. Many of our national politicians start off in student unions; often it is the beginning of their political careers. Both Tony Blair and David Cameron have been marketed on the basis of their not having been involved in student politics; it seems that their strategists identified that the British public has a distaste for cloistered political careerists. I share this distaste; you may not. So I hope that if you voted in the union elections recently you thought about your political convictions, your partisan leanings and all that good stuff, but you might now spare a moment to think about think about how you would feel in twenty years time if you saw the face of that person you voted for turn up on Question Time pontificating about welfare-dependence or equivocating about immigration with Paxman or pretending be on first name terms with the UN Secretary-General in smarmy conversation with Andrew Neil. Could you live with it? You helped them on the way. Think about it.

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Now, far be from me to bite the hand that slightly enhances my career prospects, I have some problems with the sub-editing. This was the cue for much Eastwood-in-Gran-Torino-esque grunting: grrrrrr! I realise that I have this in common with anyone who has ever written a thing for printing in a bigger thing but who's going to stop me having a moan anyway? It's not going to be you, that's for sure. What you see above is how I originally wrote the article. It is not perfect and in fact I am quite embarrassed by it for all sorts of narcissistic reasons; we needn't go into that as there is plenty of self loathing elsewhere on this blog (particularly in the early posts, if you are interested). However, some of the things that got changed were weird. There was some editing for length; this, I am fine with. But in the first paragraph the word "lapse" was joined by the words "of judgement" for no reason. Later on the the word "spectre" was Americanised. The word "wittering" became "twittering"(!?). Worst of all, perhaps, The Wire became "a typical US drama"... I'm sorry The Wire, very, very sorry. This is just a taster; there were other changes and I imagine that were you to see them you would be just as scandalised as I was. As such, I will post the altered version as a comment on here as soon as it goes up on the paper's website.

Despite all this, the fact of this thing's being printed is basically good news. Hurrah!

(Should also mention some of the Good Changes: condensing some of my nonsense and a great title: This Will Look Good On My CV. Thanks).

Update: this is the picture of me that was used:



In the cropped version in the paper I looked like I might turn into Brian Blessed at any moment.

New Book

The new Alain de Botton book arrived in the post today. First impressions: surprisingly heavy for its size and smells very good. I'm already reading a book; it's some important fiction and I've been enjoying it. That will stop now. Reading it will become a chore. I will yearn for accessible de Botton wisdom while I drudge through some of the remaining chapters before giving up 150 pages from the end. De Botton – despite his many insights – did not foresee this. In this careless act of publishing (that is like a bolt of lighting cast down upon the world by one of the Greek gods he probably uses in many of his own analogies) he has destroyed something rare and precious in the life of this mortal – a readable and enjoyable important book. How much he still has to learn.