I really hate picking a title...

Television can do so much to instruct and inform the mind. From groundbreaking series such as ‘The Ascent of Man’, to David Attenborough’s exhaustive and beautiful ‘Life’ Series it has helped us to make sense of the world around us and our place within it. This noble tradition continues with ITV’s ongoing exercise in its articulate and philosophically inclined debate show, ‘The Jeremy Kyle’ show. Here the foremost issues of our time are discussed in somber tones as that paragon of reasoned debate, the afore-named ‘Jeremy Kyle’, gently guides his carefully selected guests through such moral quandary’s as whether Lisa is a slag and if Damian is the father except he said that he never done her except that one time but he was drunk so she can’t be knocked up with his kid because of gravity and stuff.

Debate as noble as in the days of the Roman Republic

Yesterday’s episode was a sterling example. Here a young man, called Dave or James or something…was involved in a bit of a romantic dilemma. He was an interesting young man; his main pre-occupation seemed to be cultivating the exciting variety of skin diseases which lived upon his face in some sort of greasy utopia. He had grown, perhaps in an attempt to soak up some of the grease, one of those bumfluff moustaches on his lip which just looked like a misplaced shadow and would have made him look like a stereotypical paedophile if it wasn’t for his obvious youth. I grew one of those myself when I was younger, and remember the pride I felt at this sign of my growing physical maturity. Of course I looked ridiculous; no amount of mousy facial hair can hide your all powerful combo of acne, greasy skin and soft, childlike features, but at the time you feel like you’ve passed some sort of milestone, and you are now entering into the realms of adulthood, never to return. Though your notions of adulthood then are of drinking in pubs and vague but excitable notions of sex, rather than the crushing tedium of adult life with it’s bills and taxes and everyone wearing fucking suits and talking about their bullshit job and that Linda in accounts, and everything is suddenly serious and if it’s not serious it’s safe and if it’s safe you can bet your arse it’s boring. Anyway enough of that, let’s push those distressing thoughts to one side, or even better, push them deep down into our gut to bubble and fester until middle age, and carry on shall we?

So it turned out this child, who was so slimy it seemed he’d only just be born, was a bit of an unlikely lothario.

No woman can resist

Now the question has often occurred to me, as I walk around Britain’s hallowed streets and I spy some young mother pushing a pram, her belly fat and distended and her face screwed up like she was sucking a lemon soaked in piss, I wonder who is fucking all these people? Well now I know and the truth dear reader, did not set me free, but made me realise we are on course for some sort of HG Wells ‘The Time Machine’ scenario, which is doubly annoying because it means the future is plagiarised, and badly so.

Anyhow, this man-slug had managed to fuck some child girl called Jade, who had then got pregnant and had a child, who was probably his. This Jade had then become a lesbian and was now engaged to another girl…also called Jade. The man-child had also screwed with the other Jade, probably because of his love of continuity, making the entire love triangle rather laughable. Two rubbish lesbians and a human drip tray.

This is the image i got when i searched for '2 rubbish Lesbians and a human drip tray'

To avoid confusion (and increase the surrealistic feel) they were referred to as Jade 1 and Jade 2, which I quite enjoyed because in the dystopian future we’re inevitably heading towards we’ll all be identified by a number. It seemed that our Jade’s were raising the child themselves, and didn’t want slugboys assistance in little baby Darcy’s (yes Darcy…for fucks sake) future.

What is it with people and naming their kids? If you call your child Jade you just know she’ll grow up wearing tracksuit bottoms that say ‘juicy’ on her arse, she’ll have a gut and a piercing in her cheek which will just look like a shining, silver spot. She’ll drink industrial strength cider and puke over herself so often that her stomach acid will burn off her tits.  God that sounds vicious, where did that come from? Do I really harbour such a malicious intent towards these people? Probably not, I’m a pretty Zen person nowadays, but there are many sides to us all. It’s not just me and the Steppenwolf is it? That would be terribly limiting.

However this little tangent about names has got me thinking. To say that we are the victims of our names, that they will somehow have an influence over our future life and development is obviously ridiculous. However the following conclusions are irrefutable and utterly true.

Connor – If you call your child Connor, one day I will be in a pub and I shall move my elbow slightly as I gesticulate and it will nudge darling Connors drink and he will gently turn me round and smash his glass into my face. As I collapse on the floor blinded by my own blood and the fleshy remains of my face he will stand on my larynx and slowly choke me to death, probably whilst reciting Adam Sandler quotes. So if you call your child Connor I shall have to pour petrol into his pram and drop in a match in self defense.

Chantelle/Crystal etc – She’ll become a stripper, end of.

George – He’ll have red cheeks and make ‘harrumphing’ noises a lot. He’ll repeat opinions he read in the Daily Mail and mistake them for his own original thought. He’ll be the very representation of what is ‘proper’ and ‘decent’, but in some secluded part of his soul he wished he danced in drag on the tables of a premier gay club. One day he’ll say something interesting but nobody was there to hear it.

Paris - I have met several men and women who have claimed to be called Paris. The only thing they had in common was that they wished they had been called Paris, rather than Sarah and David etc. An entire life spent playing catch up for something they believed they were missing

Mary – A good name to call your child if you wish no one to ever notice her

Darcy – By fuck you better have good genes, because to call a child Darcy and for them to come out as anything but a new standard in beauty and class is a cruel burden they will always bear.

Gary – Fuck off Gary

I just had to scroll up to see what I’d started writing about. I better wrap it up a bit, start, middle and end and all that. Anyhow Jade 1 stormed off back to the hotel after Jeremy Kyle got in her face and began calling her a vicious little shit or something. Ah fuck it; I’m kind of bored about writing about this program. I just went to make a cup of tea and I got the last tea bag so I’m currently on a minor winning high. Now I’m waiting for it to cool which is my favourite part, the expectation of the tea is a lovely feeling.

For fucks sake! My goddamned spellcheck keeps defaulting to US English rather than UK…it’s driving me nuts.  I keep looking up and finding that ‘U’s have been magiced out of words and ‘S’s have been replaced with ‘Z’s. You are trying my patience America, I hold you all collectively responsible for this. Ah that’ll do…I can’t bothered to write anymore so I’m going to peg on a piece I did on facebook ages ago and didn’t post because I thought it was balls.

I was thinking recently about Facebook. Here are my thoughts. I have a few hundred friends on facebook but obviously most of them aren’t real friends, they’re acquaintances or colleagues or people in whose orbit I briefly floated before drifting off in search of some other emotional and social kick, but were added or added me out of a vague curiosity or some dull urge to formalise the connection. I don’t know, I have people try and add me whom I’ve never met, what they hope to gain out of E-friendship I don’t know. We never exchange messages or anything or take the virtual friendship any further than pressing the ‘accept’ button on the friendship request. It would be like them inviting me to a party and then pointedly ignoring me but without the advantage of me getting drunk and then demanding to be noticed

'Demanding' to be noticed

Anyway it doesn’t matter, that was all just facebook related fluff to pad out this piece and blah, blah, blah. Christ, writing about Facebook is so redundant it’s almost painful. You all know what it is and I know all you cool kids like to flap your stupid little fish mouths about how lame it is but hell, we all use it. Anyway I was thinking about my friends list, and realised that most of my friends, with few exceptions, are within a couple of years of my age. This of course makes sense, most of the people I meet in pubs and at parties and through friends of friends are generally speaking of a similar age, even the colleagues I’ve met and befriended are usually of a similar age because these are the people we expect we’d share interests or view points with. As I age with decreasing grace I’ll probably continue to add people who are of an equivalent age and so on and so forth until computers are redundant and facebook is beamed directly into the backwards engineered alien technology implants that will be hammered into our brains on-mass as soon as the future is at the ‘All in one Black Jumpsuits’ stage.

Typical Husband and Wife of the future

And eventually my friends will start dying off. One by one hereditary illnesses, accidents, murders and monkey attacks will start to kill them off until my Facebook page is more of a memorial for a generation of background extra’s and also-rans. Perhaps there’ll be a new app which will send me minute by minute updates on my friends impending kidney failure or they’ll collate all of their profile pictures over the years so with one fun click I can watch them age and wither and decline. And slowly but surely the status updates which are so important into making it seem like a fun and lively social place will start to disappear and I’ll be left with an empty news feed apart from the occasional sad updates of the final stages of people’s Leprosy or the mad mutterings of the last few survivors, ridden with dementia and suspicious that the nurses in the Nursing home are stealing their socks. And if by some fateful chance I am the last one left I will log on and see an empty page, its silence a reminder of the passing of my generation. Maybe I’ll try and type one last status with my arthritic fingers, something to sum up my life and the time I lived in, but that’ll be a near impossibility, so maybe I’ll just do a smiley face, log off and quietly piss myself for the 12^th time that day.