Lloydie’s Blog

It happens to the best of us. You’re sat on the tube when all of a sudden, the Arctic Monkeys stop singing. Great, you think to yourself, I’ve got another 30 minutes of silent tube hell. Faced with this nightmarish concept, your mind starts to wander. You’re thinking, what can I do to occupy myself? In such a grave and depressing situation, it’s amazing where the mind ends up.

You begin to look around the tube train, desperately seeking something to pacify your overactive brain. You start to look at the other passengers, it’s rush-hour so the train is quite full. After about five minutes of playing “which one of you smells of cabbage?”, you run out of games to play in your mind. Whatever you do, you can’t be seen to be staring at anyone, for therein lies danger. So you’re subtle. You casually glance around, not concentrating on any one person for too long. Yes, whatever game you come up with it can’t involve any sort of deep analysis. You’ve already aroused too much suspicion trying to sniff out the cabbage-man. You need a game that deals with split second decisions. And so, pint-or-punch is born.

Your new mission is to divide up the inhabitants of the carriage, given a single cursory glance of each, into two groups. People for whom you would buy a pint at the pub, and people for whom you would give a punch in the face. The groups are exclusive and there is no middle ground. You cannot waiver, you must make an instantaneous decision.

As you start to play, you begin to feel guilty. Sure, this isn’t life-or-death, it’s pint-or-punch, but should you really be deciding that you’d punch someone based on their looks alone. You remind yourself, for the sake of your own sanity, that you are in no way going to start punching people on the underground. This is just a thought experiment. You are, after all, extremely bored.

Your conscience is rattled even more when, having categorised an old woman as having what you’ve deemed to be a “punchable face”, you realise that a girl you’d singled out for a free pint moments before is actually her daughter. You begin to see the similarity in their faces, stumbling upon the rationale that you would have bought the woman a pint had she only been 20 years younger. Shockingly you then realise that, by your very own reasoning, that young girl is about 20 years away from a punch in the face.

Having scared yourself into intellectual meltdown, you stop playing and pickup a loose copy of the Metro.

I was telling my friend Alun about something that happened to me last weekend and I realised I might as well share it with you people too.

So, I go into this department store and they were playing Christmas songs. Just to put this into some sort of perspective, it’s last Sunday - October 28th - and they’re playing bloody Christmas music.

It took every ounce of my strength not to grab the nearest salesperson and shake them vigorously by the shoulders, shouting “Is it Christmas? Is it? IS IT!? NO! No it bloody isn’t! It isn’t even bloody Halloween yet, you bastards!”.

In retrospect that may have been a little harsh, so I’m glad I kept my usual cool exterior.

My experience in the department store, like a visit from the Ghost of Christmas past, left me with somewhat of a crisis, questioning my harsh attitude and what might lie ahead in the Christmases to come. By morning I had renewed vigor and was alive with the Christmas spirit. I flung open to window of my apartment and shouted down to a small street urchin, “You boy! What day is this?”. He replied, in an appropriately jolly manner, “Today sir? Why it’s the 29th of October!”, before adding a heart felt “Merry Christmas sir!”.

ok, so that didn’t actually happen. My windows are locked and I lost the key about 3 months ago. Still, if I was able to open them, that’s how I imagine the whole scene would play out.

Anyhow, as Halloween has now safely passed us by, I’ve decided it’s time to fully embrace the (now even longer) “Christmas season”. I’m embracing it so much so that, from today onwards, I shall start saying “Merry Christmas” to every salesperson I see in town. And then, when they look back at me in utter bemusement, I’ll shout at them “See! SEE!”.

Or maybe I’ll just walk off and remain smugly quiet, I haven’t quiet decided yet.

In a shameless attempt to win an iPod, I here-by announce my belief in the truth.

Thing is, even if there wasn’t a free iPod involved (and, let’s face it, who doesn’t like free iPods), I’d still be telling you to believe in the truth too. You see, that’s the funny thing about it. It is actually true (the clue was in the name there).

To be fair, I am inclined to believe pretty much anything from The Science Creative Quarterly, being genius science types and all.

They’re also backed by the Order Of The Science Scouts Of Exemplary Repute And Above Average Physique, of which I am longing to be a member. I think it has something to do with my unfulfilled ambition to be a scientist.

No. Wait. I have a BSc. That makes me a scientist! Excellent.

Twice this weekend I have been approached by little kids, around 5-7 years old, wearing cheap plastics masks and asking me for cash. I’m sorry, but since when did Halloween start 2 weeks early and involve down-right begging?

I may be a bit old for trick-or-treating now days, but I’m still pretty sure the rules of engagement haven’t changed. Correct me if I’m wrong but I thought it went like this:

a) get dressed up for Halloween

Wearing your normal clothes and a 99p mask from the joke shop does not constitute a costume. If you come up to me, like one girl did, failing to even wear a mask, expect a frosty response. We asked her where her costume was and, as if it was a perfectly acceptable trick-or-treat strategy, she replied “it’s in my bag”. Yeah? So is my money, now piss off.

b) go trick or treating for sweets

In a moment of undeserving charity, my sister gave one small girl a sweet from her handbag. The girl removed the sweet from her McHallowee n “collection cup” and looked at it as if we’d just wrapped up a turd and asked her to eat it.

Kids used to settle for sweets. Now it appears that they just want cold, hard cash. You have to wonder if there is some Dickensian mastermind behind all this, sending hordes of children out into the night to lighten the purses of the populace.

c) go from door to door, not pub to pub

What happened to the image of children walking from door to door, down pleasant tree-lined streets (or other such clich�d locations from the Americana of my youth)? Apparently it is gone, replaced by gangs of children roaming from pub to pub at 11 o’clock at night. Children all under the age of 10 by the way. Although I didn’t see their parents, I’m assuming they were stood outside the pub, smoking a fag and picking the next target for their Halloween begging squad.

d) do all of that actually on Halloween

Halloween is on October 31st. That’s at the end of the month, not now. Sadly it’s on a Wednesday this year, which I’m guessing will make trick-or-treating more difficult for the children of today, as most people will be tucked up at home and not down the pub with a pocket full of cash.