Wild animals are just that – wild. Their undomesticability (I’m sure there’s a proper word for this) adds to their allure.

Over the years, I have drawn up a list of non-human friends who I’d love to come and join me in my happy fantasy world. Included would be:

All on that list are achievable with the exception of hares and bats. These majestic creatures just are. They can’t be persuaded to live in a habitat designed by stupid humans. They are wild and free.

I once had the privilege of witnessing a hare running along a country lane up in the Northumberland. It was about 10pm, but the proximity to the summer solstice and the latitude afforded levels of light that would normally be preserved for much earlier in the evening. I drove a beautiful car (obviously not mine) at high speed (for me) along country lanes and suddenly, he was there, darting out from a field, running along the road in front of me. Such grace and speed, accentuated by his magnificent ears. And no sooner as I’d seen him, he’d gone again.

From that moment on, I wanted to be amongst the hares. They’ll never be domesticated, their ears are too good for that. Having a hare as a pet would be akin to trying to tie down a cloud or taming the sea. Futile.

So I shall remember my encounter that June evening a few years ago, and I shall regret not being able to slow him down to ask whether I could friend him on Facebook. Imagine that. Just imagine being friends with the magnificent.

I don’t think I’ve got lung cancer; I’m not a smoker, so I can’t have it. Actually, I stopped smoking last Wednesday evening when I decided not to buy any more fags after finishing a packet: I reckon it’s the best way of giving up: no prolonged reliance on nicotine through the various interventions that make you want to pull your own skin off or that taste like minty earwax, all the time, tying you to the drug that you’re trying to escape from.

On employing the power of Google to help me decide that I probably have a terminal malignancy, I started to feel a burning pain in my left lung. This is it, it’s DEFINITELY cancer. I convinced myself, especially also because I’m off for a chest x-ray on Wednesday evening (in a Ford Transit, at a Library). Anyway, over the course of the weekend, the diffuse pain on the left side of my thorax has concentrated somewhat… to my stomach. So it seems that a case of indigestion probably isn’t cancer afterall.

In all fairness, I have been in a lot of discomfort with my foodbag, and I am a hopeless doom merchant (I have my mum to thank for this) so it’s sort of understandable that I’d expect the absolute worst while not being particularly bothered about hoping for the best.

Anyway, more blood tests tomorrow that will probably show that I’m absolutely fine and that the machine that does the analysis at the hospital has had a clean and a calibration.

I’m really hot.

Probably pancreatitis.

But my temperature’s only reading 36.4! This is what happens when you have a brain tumour.

As much as I joke about being slightly Asperger’s I know that I am not. It’s like saying you’re slightly pregnant or slightly dead. I just have certain way about me that might make people think that I have difficulties in certain situations that people take for granted.

Here’s a frexample: personal space. I am not happy having any social interaction when somebody is within one arm’s length of me. Any closer than that equals a) FUCKING WEIRDO ALERT, or b) this is getting a bit whatsit, brace yourself!

This does not mean that I have Asperger’s syndrome, it means that I am normal. Unfortunately, my reaction to people invading my personal space might not adhere to standard operating procedures: whereas some people can deal with it, knowing it’s only a temporary discomfort, I find myself backing away, even reclining in my stance or undertaking evasive circular movements to avoid any further breaches of those very important twenty or so inches. In extreme circumstances, I’ve had to hold out my arm and tell the perpetrator that “this” is my limit “back the fuck away from me!”. It doesn’t go down too well on a first date, but it worked quite effectively with a Celtic colleague who was just simply very affectionate and at ease with everybody he met (until he met me).

But why do people invade others’ personal space anyway? Surely those who were brought up in the same society have the same sorts of tolerance limits to what’s acceptable. Any encroachment on this indicates that they were brought up by elves or that they’re just not quite right in the head. Why don’t they realise that people are backing away from them? This indicates a total lack of social awareness that might be attributed to somebody with Asperger’s, but somebody with Asperger’s would never get that close to somebody – they’d be in a different room, texting their way through a conversation so as to avoid any sort of personal contact, just like I do.

I’m going to reintroduce my “Experimentals” series, whereby I test stuff out.

I shall take a statistically, proper group of weirdos participants and measure how close they are when they talk to people in stood-up conversations. This shall be measured against a number of other factors:

It is hypothesised that there will be a high correlation between distance from victim and other stupidly annoying habits. I will publish my findings in Nature Gossip, You Magazine and Take a Break. I think a meeting with the PM is in order too because let’s face it, celebrities who are stupid enough not to change their voicemail PIN then complain when they get hacked by the newspapers who give them the publicity they crave can get a meeting in Number 10 and they’re just whinging fuckwits. Millions of people are affected by personal space invasion on a daily basis, yet our plight remains ignored. It’s a huge, huge problem.

The Killing
It’s over. I can’t believe it. One of the best crime dramas ever to have graced our screens and it’s all over.

In tribute to Sarah Lund and her magnificent jumpers, here’s one that I have my eye on in the Scandinavian jumper store in Keswick.

She never got close to anyone either,

It’s very hard not to correct one’s mistakes. Try it while typing. That’s if you type stuff of course.

I recall once in the original blog, I composed an entire post without correcting my typing or spelling errors. I’ll attmept to ecopy it here.

Difficulty eH?

ArrrghhH!

Anyway, getting a grip, I shall contiune. Of course, it doesn’t help that my fingernails are slightlu too long for typing (the just one of the consequences of not hainv g a girlfirend and the moment). Meh, ths is rubbish. I m shattering an illusions here that I’m an impeccable typist.

Ok, back to normal now before this whole thing becomes illegible.

While performing the simplest task such as composing an e-mail, or a blog post, we subconsciously continually correct what we’re doing to produce text that makes sense, that conforms to the rules of grammar and spelling (as best we know how to interpret them) and to show respect for the recipient or intended reader.

Even though there are loads of mistakes in the paragraphs above, the reader can still sort of make sense of what’s going on, they can navigate around the typos and get the gist. With this being the case, why bother with language rules at all? So what if people don’t follow the rules?

What if people make different errors, such that one doesn’t know how to form sentences, another doesn’t know the rules of apostrophes, somebody else is consistently poor at spelling, others communicate in txt spk lol? What becomes of the written language then? It fragments into lots of sublanguages that nobody understands. Nobody would be roflmaoing then, would they?

Or maybe people just wouldn’t give a shit.

Rules and guides are in place in societies to provide a framework for acceptable behaviour. (I’ve not used that particular ‘F’ word since I worked in the NHS *flashbacks to writing bollocks for a living*). People start deviating from the rules and others start to get irked, angry, jealous, vengeful even.

With the final push to Christmas coming, I foresee the manners of many being pushed aside by a few who don’t think that queuing is for them. These people are the equivalent of those who don’t care that plurals don’t have apostrophes, that pens and paper are stationery and c u l8r is just plain fucking lazy.

In keeping with the Christmas spirit, it’s OK to let these people be, forget about them and mount our own moral high horses and proclaim that we’re better than them. But they pushed in and got the last parking space at the supermarket, they filled their trolley with all the bread rolls just in case, they bumped you out of the way in the booze aisle then, with their trolley overflowing, jumped to the till that was just opening when they could see that you only had a few bits.

Is it right that these people should get away with it? Hell no! I’d like to call on all decent folk out there to become intolerant of rule breaking, to amass a virtual army of red pens, striking lines through the poor grammar and spelling that blight our society and putting an end to lazy apostrophe’s. (It really hurt me to do that)

I’m ever so slightly quite pissed. This should be fun!

For some reason, I fancied having a drink tonight and ended up finishing off a bottle of rather nice port that I was supposed to be saving for Christmas.

Note for future: do not buy booze unless intended recipients are no more than 18 hours away. I have a legendary lack of self control.

It was very nice, and although my head seems to be working ok at the moment, my eye to hand coordination has gone to poopy. I will want to die when I wake up sometime tomorrow morning.

I was going to watch a film via the wonders of internet tellyboxviewing this evening, only the film I wanted to watch was on the LoveFilm service that you can’t play through your telly pile of shite waste of money. I ended up watching a film that I’d seen at the cinema with my ex ex ex Jo and her sister and brother-in-law a few years ago. Odd that this was on since we’d been engaged in a text exchange about certain friends of mine who insist on send Christmas cards to her place, despite the fact that I’ve told them of my new address on a number of occasions.

This got me to thinking about Christmas cards that I receive. I am very thankful of all of them and of the sentiment around them, however, the senders’ style standards don’t often match with mine, because I receive so few, there’s not enough Christmas card ‘noise’ to drown out the really hideous ones. I’d rather just put a card up of my own choosing instead of certain ones I receive through the post.

Oh I’m so tired and drunk, I really must sleeep or I’lll spend all of tomroww regretting this.

Karen Carpenter was blessed, and blessed us, with one of the purest, resonant singing voices that I’ve ever heard. Its flawlessness made it one of the most distinctive of our age. I spent much of my childhood singing along to the Carpenters’ greatest hits album on stereo 8 track and even at school, we sang along to Sing.

Goodbye to love, Yesterday once more, Top of the world, We’ve only just begun, For all we know… Jambalaya. The music rang out and as I grew older, I gained an appreciation of Karen’s voice as well as songs… most of the songs, the good ones, not the shit ones that Richard wrote when he was off his tits on booze and drugs.

On her death in early 1980s, the world knew that it had lost a star whose voice was unique and would never be emulated… until Rumer came along a few years ago.

This imposter woman sings with exactly the same voice as Karen Carpenter, it’s uncanny and ridiculous. Listening to her sing, it’s as if she’s even using the same mic setup that captures not only the voice, but the sounds made by her mouth and lips in much the same way as you could hear in the Carpenters’ songs.

And yet she complains about being compared to Karen Carpenter. She should stop trying to sound like her then.

Rumour has it
I heard last week that one of my office colleagues gets slightly freaked out when the toilet lid is left down; she probably assumes that people do this to hide unmovable bad deeds in the pan and to be fare, I think most of us have come across the situation where we’ve lifted the lid to find armageddon in there.

After a terrible bout of some sort of food poisoning a few years ago, I got into the habit of closing the toilet lid before flushing. The last thing you need when you’re infectious is to have all those shitty bugs being vaporised into shitty aerosols when the toilet is flushed and them being dispersed throughout the entire bathroom, landing on taps, towels, the lot. I’d also noticed that the flush in ladies’ at work is so powerful that it sends splashes from the pan as far as the cubicle door. I don’t want faecal particulates landing on me at the best of times, but especially not those of others.

When it transpired that my colleague had mentioned in disgust that “somebody had left the toilet lid down in one of the cubicles again”, I realised that it was probably me who’d done it.

This could, and maybe should, have provided a good opportunity to discuss bathroom hygiene and to regale once again my story of the Karen Silkwood shower, but I was feeling a bit devilish and proceeded to close the lids of all the toilets on the floor. Childish, I know, but maturity has never been one of my strongest attributes.

The thing with gags is they’re supposed to have punchlines, this one doesn’t. It was just my pathetic attempt at giving me something to giggle to myself about for five minutes on a Friday afternoon.

It’s an important matter though, infection control, especially at the time of year when people are catching all sorts of vile vomiting and diarrhoea bugs. What if I happen to be in the ladies’ at the same point as somebody with some sort of poo-borne, shit yourself for ten days, virus flushes without closing the toilet lid? I’ll literally get showered with shit. This is the sort of thing I lose sleep over.

And quite rightly so.

Springsteen
This has been hovering in the back of my mind for a while, but get too distracted by poo.

I hate Bruce Springsteen. I can’t listen to any of the drivel he’s produced, I don’t even like to see photos of him.

His music is dreadful, dire, crap. I think one of the first songs of his that I heard was “Born in the USA”, from the album “Born in the USA” – you know the one where there’s a picture of what I assume is his denim-clad arse with a Stars and Stripes bandana in the pocket.

Just think about “Born in the USA”, the song for a bit. In no particular order, the things I find most annoying about this are:

Mr Springsteen, The Boss, I wonder if anybody has ever told him that he can’t sing, or write songs. I listen to his music and, 99% of the time, it sounds like some geriatric stroke victim just shouting out and slurring utter rubbish. He also shows his armpits too much and this is unforgivable. I hate armpits.

And yet he’s so highly rated, especially by BBC Radio 2 presenters and BBC Radio 2 listeners. I suppose it goes with the territory, but you can guarantee that you’ll hear Born in the USA or Born to run at least twice each week on this station – and I only listen to it for about ten hours a week.

I wish I knew how to hack into computer systems if only so I could get into Radio 2’s music files and delete all the Springsteen tracks. And while I’m at it, I’d get shut of Van fucking Morrison too, miserable bastard. As for Rumer? Need I even go on?

You can guarantee that the all request Friday drivetime show will have Born to run/Born in the USA and Brown eyed girl. If you happen to be listening, you may cheer yourself with thoughts of me shouting at the radio.

I spent much of my life as a scientist measuring things. To quantify stuff within a mix of other stuff, you measure the [stuff]unknown against a standard curve of [stuff]known – I’d put the “unknown’ and “known” in subscript if I knew how to. The measurements were quality controlled within and between assays using other samples of [stuff]known and the whole thing would be ditched if it fell short of expected minimal standards for precision and accuracy.

Standards are great: without much thought, we assess each other and things against our own standard curves, but those things or people that fail the assay can simply be rejected rather than promoting further investigation to gain further insight into why they don’t fit within the acceptable normal ranges for “stuff”. Life isn’t a scientific study, thank goodness.

In many aspects of my life, I’m difficult to please, so I like to surround myself with things and people that fit within my own narrow normal tolerances for stuff. Maybe I don’t have narrow normal ranges, but I do have high thresholds. No, that’s incorrect. I have high thresholds and low tolerances.

When I consider the things in my life, they have to meet certain minimum criteria. Foodstuff aside, these are:

You can apply these standards to any range of things, from gadgets, to houses, cars, even girlfriends.

Certain things in life can be compromised on. So for example when it comes to my car, it’s useful, affordable, it does what I want and it’s reliable. It also sort of makes me happy because it means I have freedom of movement whenever I like, but ideally I would prefer it if it had four doors, that it was black, had a bigger engine, was newer and that it had height-adjustable seatbelts.

My house is another good example, and this ticks nearly if not all the boxes.

When it comes to romantic partners, who knows? As I get older, and carry deeper emotional scarring from previous encounters with evil bitches from hell women, I think I’m just not willing to compromise at all. Should I ever find myself in a relationship again, and at this point in time it’s looking unlikely, I’m not going to settle for somebody who doesn’t meet my expectations. Why should I? Why should anybody? Anybody apart from any future girlfriend of mine of course. She will have to meet the following criteria:

In addition to these though, she’ll need the patience of a saint, the ability to deal with my strange obsessive habits and have no personality disorders of her own.

I’m expecting a long wait.

I always claim that I detest “going out”, maintaining that the thought alone of leaving my home for a few hours to be in the company of others is enough to give me a fit of the screaming ab dabs. On reflection, I realise that it’s just the thought of going out that gives me an anxiety attack, rather than the actual going out and spending time with people. I love spending time with people, I revel in it. Being with people gives me the opportunity to… do what humans are supposed to do: interact with each other; share stories, conversations, experiences; recall misguided features on Blue Peter about people with cerebral palsy; get silly; be serious; have fun.

The stress of going out stems from the days when going out was something special that meant dressing up in a frock. Dressing up. In a frock. Being somebody with a very negative self image, I’d always shy away from things that attracted the attention of others, be it an outfit that was unusual for me, a new haircut, or a dazzling sombrero (even thought sombreros are the ultimate in high fashion, we all agree). Any situation that stimulates the “what should I wear?” conversation with myself = BAD. Very bad indeed.

Considering the recent adoption of American-style school proms here in the UK, I am so very glad that I grew up in the 1970s and 80s. Putting somebody like me in that situation would have had me in therapy. It would have been like Carrie, only so much worse, in my own mind at least.

On the other side of the coin, put me in a situation with friends, where I’m allowed to carry my usual appearance of somebody who’s just crawled up an embankment after a train derailment, and I LOVE IT. I do not excel at introducing myself to new people and I find it uncomfortable to strike up a conversation with a total stranger unaided by the presence of a mutual friend. There’s that strange awkwardness of the first few minutes while you try to suss them out, well for me the strange awkwardness of the first thirty seconds in which I suss them out, decide that they don’t interest me, and try to find an excuse to leave that particular conversation and move on to the running buffet.

Then there are the conversations at parties that you strike up with total strangers about fridge freezers. To come across somebody admiring a fridge freezer (substitute with any appliance, gadget, car) with their partner automatically sets the “this person is safe and normal” lights flashing and I feel at ease enough to throw in a banal remark that will either go nowhere but cause no offence, or help to strike up a conversation and a booze-fuelled interaction between my then girlfriend and the female partner in the fridge-freezer couple. And thus a friendship was born.

Because I feel uncomfortable with myself, I think I hide behind a multitude of layers in social situations. The top layer is generally “tit”, which allows me to act the goat and act as if I don’t really care whether people like me or not. Do I care whether people like me or not? Probably not actually, but not in way that I’d be deliberately offensive to a complete stranger, just a little odd I suppose.

It’s just about the anniversary of the breakup with my ex. It hit me terribly hard and I guess I’m only just about at the acceptance stage of the grieving process, it’s taken so long and I still yearn for revenge. Saying that though, I’m OK. I’m actually OK when I never thought I’d get through the year. Mine is not the sort of family that talks about “feelings” and things, we just shout at each other a lot most of the time, but Mum engaged me in conversation this evening. I didn’t really listen to what she was saying because my instant reaction to that sort of thing is to go into a blind panic, cover my ears and “la-la” to myself. One bit I did hear though was her suggesting that I join some sort of social group in the area. “There’s lots of stuff going on around you,” she offered, “the church magazine advertises all sorts of activities”. Yes, like setting gay people on fire, which actually might be interesting to see whether they scream more about their clothes being ruined or being in agony from dying on fire.

Even in obvious jest, I’m probably not supposed to make comments like that. I should save them for the next party I go to in Chorlton, but that would hardly provide a mixed demographic for measuring offence levels since people in Chorlton are humourless lefties who take everything so bloody seriously. They actually believe in the Guardian and the BBC in much the same way as young children believe in the tooth fairy and Father Christmas. And I certainly don’t think any mention of Blue Peter would be wise: “Blue? Tory, more like! Tory and sexist too! Why not just call it Thatcher Rapist? It should be non-gender specific like Rainbow Bod. Actually, I’m going for artificial insemination next week and I was going to call my child Sky Mandela, but I might go for Rainbow Bod instead.” Still, I’d like to see their reaction to the mention of the word Joey.

But at the other end of the scale, what sort of social activities might be on offer in the suburbs of Bolton? EDF “knit against Islam” evenings? The Radcliffe “Ooh, I’m really not sure I like the sound of that” club? The Prestwich “Let’s fill all the parking spaces at Tesco with trolleys” collective? Or maybe even the Bury “Drive your way around Bury without getting lost and/or writing off your car” society.

I like going out, the being out bit of it… so long as I don’t have to get dressed up… or meet too many new people… or do it more than four times a year. I’m also happy staying in. Surely this comprises a healthy balance of social interaction?