Citizenship

Lunch breaks are an oasis of calm and time to myself during the working week. Some people don't take lunch breaks, preferring to work through and reach the end of the day a little quicker, but I don't. I need a lunch break (as, incidentally, do most of the people who "work" through theirs. I have often wished I had the sort of temperament which would allow me to shout "look, you festering arsehole, just because you haven't left your desk, doesn't mean you're not having a lunch break. You're not working, you're wiping the juices from your sandwich from your chin while catching up on whatever bilge the Daily Mail website has on offer today. Prick."), and I take one.

Unfortunately, lunch breaks don't always pass by in the calm and recreational manner I prefer. Sometimes they include things which leave me prickling with rage. Today was one such day. The reason? Shopping trolleys.

Shopping trolleys bring out the worst in people. Dutifully, they provide transport for our supermarket purchases, accompanying us down the aisles as we select the various foodstuffs which will sustain us for the coming days. Rarely do they complain; the occasional shake of a wheel in protest at their life of servitude, little more.

Such a loyal piece of equipment, you would think, ought to draw some respect in return? No. The car parks of the land are awash with discarded trolleys, their contents transferred to the boots of Fords, BMWs and Volkswagens and their naked, wiry frames left stranded.

I will say this just the once: if you are the sort of person who leaves a trolley in the middle of the car park and drives off I think you are a total, utter, absolute fuckbean of a wankstain.

This simple action, to me, says so much about who you are: you don't care about anyone but yourself, you are immeasurably lazy, you have no thought for the property of others, you may well have a shady sideline in tearing limbs off kittens for fun.

The trolley park is over there! *points* It is not far! Never more than thirty metres I would guess. How long would it take you to get there and back? Are you so busy and important that you can't afford that time? No. You are not.

What's that? It's raining? Boo-fucking-hoo. You poor, poor bastard. Are you the Wicked Witch of the West? No. You are not. In fact, you're already wet, so just go and put the trolley away.

Today, I saw a man about the same age as me (which is to say: not a member of the unfathomable youth) run a few metres with his trolley to gain speed before letting go of it and watching it speed away across the tarmac. He hadn't even pushed it in the direction of a trolley park. It very nearly made it as far as a parked car. Not that he'd have known, since he was in his car and away by then.

I would have liked to ask him this question: what would be your reaction if, upon returning to your car, a trolley had been pushed away and put a nice, big dent in your driver side door? You would want somebody's blood, I am sure of it.

But this behaviour does not stand alone. It is just one example of a vast array of twattery which occurs daily. Another example: people who use the last teabag in the caddy at work and don't refill it. WHY THE FUCK NOT? There are literally hundreds of these things, seemingly small, which simply serve to make me think that we are moving toward a society where we all just don't give a solitary shit about one another.

I try to live by a simple maxim: don't be a dick.

Sometimes I get it wrong, but it usually means I don't do things like leaving a trolley in a car park, or not replenishing the tea bags.

Life is far nicer if you're nice to other people. Be a citizen. Don't be an über-selfish muppet.

Am I overreacting? What are the tiny bugbears which will you with despair? Should I just stop giving a fuck and join in?

Losing

I am rubbish at losing.

Really bad.

When I was a little boy, my parents threw a birthday party in my honour. There were games. Oh the games. You know the ones: Pass the Parcel, Sleeping Lions, Musical Chairs. That sort of thing.

Pass the Parcel at this birthday party went like this: parcel is passed, wrapping is unwrapped, the eventual prize grows tantalisingly closer with each child, the parcel goes to one of my friends, the parcel looks TOO SMALL, there are surely NO MORE LAYERS to be removed, the prize is REVEALED, is grasped in the sticky hands of my (soon to be former) friend, is NOT IN MY HANDS ON MY BIRTHDAY.

I forget what happened next. It's difficult to remember anything bar the unbridled fury of my childhood self. The misplaced feeling of entitlement that my birthday had given me. Surely it was my RIGHT to win on this day?

No doubt mortified, my mum carried me away to explain the intricacies of pass the parcel (the game's not rigged, you grumpy little git, etc...) while my friends continued with the party.

I'm better at that sort of losing now. Several years of playing for an exquisitely mediocre basketball team has given me a fantastic familiarity with losing. Also, I'm English so, in terms of sport, losing is pretty much hard wired in.

The losing I'd like to be a bit better at just now is losing weight.

Me and food have a great relationship. I love it. It loves me. We are as near to symbiotic as it's possible to be without actually relying upon one another to continue existing.

Before we had The Creature in our lives, I mitigated my food intake with enough exercise to ensure I did not pile on too many pounds. I ate what I wanted, and enjoyed it. Hours of (mediocre) basketball and plenty of cycling were the antidote to my obsession with carbohydrates.

Since The Creature, I've cycled probably ten miles in total and played just a few hours of basketball.

I've been in denial about my growing mass. But this weekend I decided to weigh myself.

Purveyors of the ugly truth

Error.

Not the scales. I didn't break them. But they did confirm I'd certainly been worshipping at the calorie altar a little too frequently in the last few months. I then added to my feelings of weight based woe by placing my details in this delightful "How much of a fat bastard are you?" calculator, courtesy of the BBC. The answer, somewhat depressingly, is that I'm a fatter bastard than 84% of the world's population.

Fuckeroo.

That's pretty grim. The bitter icing on that particular cake was the little bit of extra information: "You are most similar to an American in your age group". Oh good. In terms of BMI I'm most similar to the nation which is the poster child for gluttony.

The Enemy

As you may have seen already, I'm on holiday this week, and EVERYBODY knows there's no point trying to diet/ration myself while that's the case.

Therefore, as of next week, I'll be making some changes to the food intake and the effort output. Because, apparently, it's not just the ladies who need to shed so-called "baby weight", it's me too.

Top tips welcome, leave them in my comments box, along with any spare cake you've got lying around.