I’m not the first person to write down their tedious New Year’s Resolutions on a Blog, but I’ve used this to write a lot of tedious shite for the last year so might as well continue

Resolution 1 – to learn more languages.
My two new languages from 2012 were German and Hindi, with first phrases being:

German: ‘Quick, quick Potato Head’.

Hindi: ‘Not in front of the Chickens’.   The only Hindi speakers I know are at work and it’s a hard one to use seamlessly in a business context.

It would really only be useful for people planning a depraved act and with access to easily embarrassed Hens – which is an unusual condition in the Avian world.

Resolution  2 – limit length of Posts

These tend to be around 1,000 words each and I’ve conducted a straw poll on ideal length for them. Quite a few people read these and consensus was that less would be more here.

Votes tended to be either that they should be reduced by around 500 words or by around 1000, although the number of people in those two opinion groups was not even

Resolution 3 – Blatantly Capitalise on Famous Friends

I mentioned on a previous Post that my wife’s best friend from school, Lizzie Price had morphed into Elisabeth Price the artist

She has now actually won the Turner Prize for Art, a prize won by Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst for pickling sharks and so on.  

When Elisabeth was nominated for the Prize, I left Emma up in the loft searching for some of Lizzie’s school artwork that she thought was still up there. Could have been worth money in future, in the same way that uncovering an early Hirst pickled flipper might be.

The deal I reached was that she could not come down until she either found the art, or agreed to the depraved act of my choice.   Not much of a choice for her but an unlosable deal for me.

Having said that, the amount of time she was prepared to spend up there in the circumstances was kind of disappointing.

I have however, remembered that Elisabeth came to our wedding and we still have her Wedding present of a box of plates (still unopened as we got a lot of plates) in a small cupboard under the stairs.

Could be that she signed them and, hence they could also be valuable in future.   Even if not directly valuable, a small financial contribution for dinner served on plates from a Turner prize winning artist wouldn’t be an unreasonable thing to ask from friends.

Sadly, the apparently no-lose agreement I reached on the loft search means I hurt my back and can no longer get in the cupboard.

Not a problem I’d foreseen, but I am at least suffering for my art

I’m writing this on a plane and experiencing my normal involuntarily action on flights, of looking out of the window and humming ‘Wonderful World’ by Louis Armstrong.

I’ve no idea why it happens – and nor does the person sitting beside me who seems to be shuffling nervously. I guess anyone would if they have found themselves settling into a 9 hour flight beside an unstable, easy listening enthusiast.

I thought writing might reassure him that I’m at least partly stable, although this Blog doesn’t have a perfect history of demonstrating sanity.

Now, to the point – I have read in a magazine on the plane that Sri Lanka has just advertised for and recruited two new state hangmen.

I could blither on about capital punishment indefinitely but just let me say that if you think killing bad people is OK, you’re just stupid or wrong or both.  

Even if we did accept the premise that capital punishment is a just a neat way of tidying things up, consider that a number of capital killings were subsequently found to have been mistakes, and innocent people were killed.   

The US, which seems to maintain an enthusiasm for the death penalty that is almost childlike, spends more on the legalities and process of killing people than it would just to keep people on full life sentences in prison.   You can’t even justify it on the grounds of generally thriftiness.

Not sure what to call mistakenly killing innocent people, but since Republicans seem to be keener than Democrats they should do the spade work here and come up with a name. They also seem to combine a fondness for slaughtering with a tendency to elect startlingly stupid presidents, from Nixon onwards. I can hear the great George Bush, the younger/stupider coming up with Errornasia or something.

You can probably think of much better terms for it than that but I’m not presidential material you understand.   Mind you, using the term spade work in that context would have made George W proud.

Anyway, the Sri Lanka hang men news came across at first glance as bad news. However, it turns out they are just replacing the two current hang men who have been in office for decades.  One retired and the other was promoted.

Sri Lanka though has not executed a single person in the last 30 years. This is a good thing, but it does beg the question of how you justify a promotion – and what they were promoted to.

Having a position of senior hang man would seem a bit unnecessary in the circumstances. My Corporate experience does tell me that promotion isn’t universally based on results – but just having spent a few decades doing nothing apart from sorting your syringes and polishing your electrode does seem an easy ride by anyone’s standards.

I just re-read this before publishing and you must believe that I honestly didn’t plan any double entendre in the line about polishing your electrode.

It was all just part of the charming naivety that readers of this have mentioned in the past.

In fact the phase they used was just bloody stupidity, but that was a double entendre I think.

I haven’t updated this Blog for quite a while now, due to a sequence of holidays and general Summer happiness.

I need an underlying level of misery as a trigger to write this stuff. That way I reach a decent state of empathy with anyone that reads it.

I could move to Slough I suppose to artificially trigger my creative juices but decided just to wait until the dark nights arrive to do my work for me.

In any case, I was  lured out of retirement by two things:

i)                    I have received a notification that the domain name this Blog uses will automatically be renewed at a cost of $26 for the next year.  In fact it calls it an ‘upgrade’ and says it will happen unless I advise otherwise. The upgrade being, it seems from a domain that is disappearing to one that isn’t, but with all the same features as the $16 one I paid for last year.

Market forces would suggest I could just make them a lower offer for it, as demand for www.davedawsonhaswaytoomuchtimeonhishands.com must surely be pretty bloody small.

That’s not how it works though apparently.

I’ve paid now and my attempts to change this Blog into a subscription service have been something of a disappointment, so I thought I might as well write something.

Inexplicably, the stats I get for my current $16 suggest a lot of people read it (in addition to those that just get it automatically Emailed to them whether they like it or not).

They don’t tell me whether they are the same people coming back repeatedly, or a larger number who stumble on it once, then click the Never, Ever, Ever Again button – and run away making the same high pitched whimpering noise that dogs make if you kick them as they keep snuffling around your legs every time you walk across the bloody park

Apparently

Maybe my extra $10 from next month will tell me that.

ii)                   This is the big one.

As you may recall, I have an ongoing campaign to re-establish the name Dave in common usage. Offers to impregnate someone so that I have a realistic vote about the baby’s name have been like pearls before swine

Which I admit is an unfortunate metaphor in the circumstances

Anyway, I went past a milkshake shop called Shakeaway recently where you choose the ingredients and they grind up your selected fruit, biscuits, car hub caps or whatever into a milk shake.

On their selected list is a Milkshake called DAVE.    Not Dave Banana milkshake or something, just DAVE.

I reached a level of excitement normally only experienced by Welsh people coming across a vowel

A good sign for Dave enthusiasts you might think but I worry this will leave a whole generation who are no more likely to call their babies Dave than they are to call them Mivvi or Raspberry Finger.

I toyed with buying a DAVE but discovered it contains ground up Ferrero Rocher and I couldn’t order without a reference to the ‘ Ambassador you’re really spoiling us’ line. The  staff wouldn’t have laughed as it’s not funny and also as they were all teenagers and hence too full of hormones and self loathing for even a titter.

So there you have it – no Dave Milkshake, no Dave baby, no daylight after 7pm. I think there could be a flood of Blog Posts coming up.

I  am from time to time subjected to a fascinating range of medical diagnostic tools and am treated using drugs prescribed by learned medical people following a huge amount of research. This seems a good thing and, in general gives me a warm contented feeling.

However, I might also be prepared to consider alternative medicine on the basis that it could be worth trying some unconventional things occasionally, as long as they’re not actively harmful .  Even though often developed by a pointless hippy in a Kaftan with no medical training, I wouldn’t automatically rule them out

I have just read yet another explanation of Homeopathy though and that’s a very different thing.  I could write a long and reasoned explanation of the many obvious flaws in the whole thing.

Instead though, just  refer to my simple mantra

Homeopathy : Bollocks

OK – maybe a bit of  reasoned explanation. The whole idea revolves around the thought that by taking infinitesimal amounts of chemicals, some poisonous,  it will cause any general peakiness to disappear.
I have just returned from the garden, having spread around a small amount of weedkiller. Water companies advise that we have a drought at the minute, partly as heavy rain, like that which has just started tends just to end up in rivers. From the South of England it flows out to the channel and onwards to France.  Against all my better instincts, I may therefore have contributed to the well being of the French.

I like France – lovely country, fantastic food and natives with a level of grumpiness matched only by the British. Nevertheless, I’m not about to give away a few femto grams (look it up homeopaths) of my weedkiller to perk them up.

That may seem an exaggeration, but it’s not. The dilution of ‘health giving agents’ in some homeopathic remedies is literally at that level. In this example, there will be a point somewhere around the South coast beaches at which point my John Innes Death Treatment morphs into John Innes Miracle Cure.

I was once given a homeopathic hangover cure by the bride-to-be after a stag night. I was made carefully to tip a tablet directly from the bottle into my mouth, to avoid corrupting it with bacteria from my hands. Now, mouths contain vastly more bacteria than hands at the best of times, and mine was far from its best that morning.  She seemed very nice though and hopefully they are still living a happy life together, albeit presumably with an infinitesimal amount of corrupting going on.

The one thing I will accept though is the powerful force generated by mixing a small measure of placebo with a larger volume of half wit.

It may well be that any of those halfwits reading this are consumed with rage right now and there will be comments to this Post  from people that had untreatable diseases cured, had amputated limbs grow back and so on.

At least I’m not the one selling made up stuff to innocent passers by.
That does give me an idea though – if this has made any of you feel even a bit better, add a comment to say that.

I may set up an on line payment arrangement

It’s possible this Blog is becoming fixated with my wife’s old school friends, but that must continue, as news has reached me that Lizzie-Price-the-school-friend, has morphed into Elizabeth-Price-the-artist and, more importantly now one of four Turner prize nominees.

That prize is the one won by Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and other famous producers of unusual or just plain weird art, depending on your point of view.

The prize for Damien Hirst was won for a shark, cut in half and pickled in a large tank. Now, I’m pretty open minded about art, but in my view, things not suited to pickling are large marine animals and eggs.

Admittedly I’ve never seen the former but I once tried the latter as there was a habit in some pubs to have a jar of them on the bar.

The purpose those serve is to gauge whether you have drunk too much.  Shouting, dribbling and talking crap is a good clue, but not a 100% reliable indicator in my case.

A better flag of drinking too much is the point at which pickled eggs start to look delicious, you order them and they taste OK.

I once did, then did, and they didn’t

Tracey Emin’s was either the unmade bed or a tent affair with the names of everyone she has ever slept with written on it – haven’t bothered to check which.

My bed is mostly unmade, so I fit in with the artistic community nicely there. Fabric with the names of all the people I’ve ever slept with though would be more of a small windbreak than a tent – and even then, only if written in the same size font as MCDONALDS or HARD ROCK CAFE signs.

My wife Emma was actually in the same art lessons at school and Lizzie  used to help with her drawings from time to time. The key point here is that we may still have some.

In the event that she wins the Turner prize, these could be worth good money so I’ve sent Emma up to the loft to see if she can track them down.

In an encouraging sort of way, I have told her only to come back when she either has the art or feels – as recompense for a missed opportunity – she can concede to my every demand for the next month, sordid or otherwise.

No result yet and not looking good on either front. She has asked me to bring her dinner to her up there.

There is a HARD ROCK CAFE in New York incidentally that the Band Terravision, who are from Yorkshire in the frozen wastelands of Northern England once took a disliking to as it sounded all soft and Southern.

They scaled the outside of the building and removed the H to leave a more appropriate sounding ‘ARD ROCK CAFÉ sign to fit in with their Northern dialect.

Now that is Art

Those people in the Corporate world and in the habit of joining round table meetings will be familiar with approaches to ice-breakers at the start. The most common of these is for everyone to give one interesting or unusual fact about themselves.

I normally go for this:

• I was once deliberately electrocuted by the most senior person in the UK judiciary for crimes against his daughter

Interesting, but rarely believed – and there’s never time to explain. A number of people that get this blog will have heard this before, so here is the explanation:

As a child, a man called Igor Judge was a lawyer in a small town near my parents and lived in the same Northamptonshire village.

He had an interest in Victorian gadgets and memorabilia. One of these was an electrocution device with a winding handle and 2 hand grips through which it gave a sequence of electric shocks.

It was used to treat nervous disorders and, later on, as an attempt to treat shell shock.

When I was around 7, there was an open gardens event in the village during which I was chasing his daughter around his garden. He thought that sort of behaviour was best treated with that device and electrocuted me.

Igor Judge was rapidly promoted, and for a period actually became  Judge Judge.

Most people would have been so overwhelmed by the comic potential there that they would have stopped.

He didn’t though and is now Lord Chief Justice Baron Igor Judge – head of the Judiciary for England and Wales (but not of Scotland I notice)

Of course, this entire story is reliant on my 7 year old memory and, whilst my father remembers him having the gadget, he can’t be certain he was the one that actually wound the handle. As such, there’s a risk this Blog is actually libellous.

I read the story of someone who was imprisoned recently for saying something offensive on Twitter about a footballer who had a heart attack on the pitch.

I assume he said something really quite offensive, but nevertheless it does ring alarm bells for someone who has just accused the Lord Chief Justice of a crime.

He has significantly more legal muscle than me and, on legal matters, I believe answers only to the Queen.

I thought I would adopt a pre-emptive defence and send a message to her explaining my bona fides, as I think legal folk say.

Twitter was the obvious method to communicate with a busy woman like her.

The Hash Tag #HRH didn’t work though and #QUEEN did work but not in exactly the way I’d anticipated.

As you may remember, my various previous campaigns have not always gained the level of support I’d hoped for.

This time though, the campaign is Justice for the Northamptonshire One – and it could really matter, so please provide your support as comments on this Blog

Further to that, I plan to fallback on the following new armoury of campaign approaches to strengthen my case:

i) Ask Steven Fry to Twat about it on his Twitter page. Everyone else with something to whinge about asks him to do that

ii) …this one hurts… ask my wife’s ex-boyfriendRichard Wiseman to provide his support, since he has become influential in the media

iii) Break for the Scottish border and taunt Baron Judge from there. I don’t imagine the Scottish in general like me much either but if I just put on a Tartan dress it should be enough to get them on my side and stop me being extradited.

They are generally simple folk after all.

There has been something of hiatus in Posts on this blog following the death of my mother and resulting writer’s block – at least writer’s block for the sort of drivel I write here.

Like several people I know that have lost a parent, I think of many things I should have said to her. In my case though, she never saw this Blog so I at least have the comfort that she was never persecuted with it in the way you are.

After a writing gap, TV sitcoms tend to launch with an update/resume of previous episodes. Admittedly, that approach relies on the previous content having been good in the first place, at which point the similarity disappears

Nevertheless, I thought the time was right for a progress updates on previous campaigns:

• CAMPAIGN 1   Revitalising the name Dave    STATUS:GREEN

As I mentioned, the name seems to have fallen into disrepute at some point in the last 30 years. As such I have been lobbying people to get on with impregnating/being impregnated so they can buck the trend and name their child Dave.

Positive news on this is that my first success is now around a month old and doing well.

His father, I believe follows this Blog, although his mother does not. As such it may come as a surprise in future for her to learn that her new son was named Dave Masid and not Amaan Shah Masid as she had instructed.

• CAMPAIGN 2 Increasing my popularity above my wife’s ex boyfriend, Richard Wiseman    STATUS:RED

This one has been an active disappointment. I have seen no evidence at all of greater popularity.

My family are doing little more than tolerating me.

The Joker I was playing was my local Greek Doner Kebab shop liking me on the basis that I was the main force subsidising their living.      That has fallen flat.

I tried to order one last night, and they have stopped serving meat products. Seems impossible to believe they could make that mistake, given that their cuisine is based entirely on a giant elephant’s foot affair on a spindle, with just a few bits of grass to go with it.

That kind of business acumen seems alone to illustrate the problems of the Greek economy.

Admittedly, as a child there was a fish and chip shop in a village near me that used to shut for lunch. Not the whole of lunch admittedly just 12:30-1:30 or something, but an act of similar stupididity, and that shop still survives to this day apparently

Richard, conversely is doing even better. I was watching TV the other day and a question started on University Challenge:

‘Who is the British Psychologist….’

(starting to get anxious here)

‘ that wrote the books the Luck Factor…’

( getting one of those horror movie feelings now, along the ‘for God’s sake don’t go into the room’ lines)

‘and 59 seconds.’

(It’s him.  Not only is he on TV all the time but he’s actually the answer to a TV quiz question)

CAMPAIGN 3   Uncovering Psychopaths    STATUS:AMBER

1 in 100 people are clinically Psychopathic – at least in a Nursery Slopes kind of way

I have spotted several of these in the last month.

Some actually follow this Blog though so I can’t really get them independently verified – hence just an Amber status

And now, my new campaign:

I understand the name Susan is also now extremely rare in the under 30s. I know several Susans/Sues of around my age but nothing younger

Although an invitation to be there seems unlikely, I’ve discovered that I quite like the idea of people engaging in sexual congress at my command.

As such, you must all do your duty and start to breed a new generation of Susans now.

A man called Andrew Fleming on Biddeford Council in Devon has mounted (and won) a campaign to stop prayers being read at the start of council meetings. This used various legal arguments, including his human rights having been violated by having to listen to them.

Now, I’m not a religious man, but human rights? Surely even in Devon, there are more important things to fret about – shortages of cream tea ingredients, being adjacent to Cornwall or something.

I have a weak basis to form a view on this as my religious exposure has been fairly small. My wife was brought up as a Catholic though and we did marry in a service called Disparity of Cults, intended for Catholics who have fallen by the wayside and are marrying a non-Catholic.

My active participation in the religious side of that was pretty limited, aside from the regular ‘do you take this woman… ‘ and so on. At one point, the priest waved his hands over my head dismissively and muttered Beelzebub or something though.

There is also, I discovered, a point in the regular Catholic service at which everyone turns round and shakes hands with the other people around them. That’s all very well in Rome, but this is Britain – some of these people are strangers for God’s sake. It’s only a small step from that to making eye contact with complete strangers and that must surely impinge on our human rights a little.

All a bit odd, but what I didn’t do was the act of the fool from Devon and decide to whinge about it. He was, however, egged on by Richard Dawkins, the humanist with a mix of high intelligence and stupidity which are rarely seen operating in tandem. Enoch Powell was another with the same mix.

Most obvious feature of both is that they are/were just profoundly tedious, humourless gits.

Seems to me that benign slightly religious people are generally a good thing. They do no harm, and periodically one of them will find something good to do.

Conversely, religious fundamentalists tend to blow people up and fundamentalist of the Dawkins/Fleming ilk just drive us to end it all ourselves.

If you really feel strongly enough to protest about them, at least make it interesting. I refer you to the genuine case of a man in the Midlands a few years ago. He was prosecuted for common assault on a Jehovah’s Witness who had knocked on his door to spread the word.

He was seen to floor the unfortunate Witness then stand over him shouting ‘did Jehovah witness that then?’

That is the way to do it

I discover that in France, cats say Wrillow and not Meow.

That is clearly just wrong.

Demonstrate by simply making the noise yourself now and at the same time, visualise the way cats move their mouths. You never see a cat making the face shape needed to make an ‘R’ sound.

Conversely an ‘M’ face movement is naturally associated with saying Meow, drinking milk, and licking your own bottom.

Hopefully you’re not reading this in an office and I didn’t inadvertently trick you into making a Meow noise at your desk. If so, it’s best just to turn around now and explain. As per my last post that is plausible evidence of psychosis and worth setting the record straight before rumours start.

If you had replicated the other cat behaviour points I mention, best just to say nothing

All this is just a minor quirk of national differences. A more major point surrounds names and specifically the fact that in the UK, the name Dave appears to have fallen into a state of disrepute. It’s common in Australia and a few other countries but at some point in the last 30 years it quietly fell out of fashion in the UK. You now never come across a child with a first name of Dave.

I have attempted to use this blog to launch campaigns previously with limited success. In particular, the one to join my wife’s ex boyfriend in the Independent’s list of ‘100 people that make Britain a better place to live’ had disappointing results.

However, my next campaign could be the big one – it is to re-establish Dave as a fashionable name across the nurseries and pre-schools of the UK.

What I need from any of you planning or expecting a child is to think of me, and consider this noble moniker as the perfect name. It just takes a few dozen people to kick this off and it could go viral as on-line marketing folk say.

I’ve already started by lobbying for a colleague at work to name his child (due in a few weeks) as Dave.

He’s from India where the name is not so much in decline as never really having got underway in the first place.

Dave Masid though has a noble sound to it, plus the cachet of being even more rare than here.

Just to be clear, I’m not asking you actually to impregnate/be impregnated by your partners in support of this campaign. If you are prepared to take that step though, be sure not to mention during the act that you’re thinking of me.

That could really be misunderstood.  There is some evidence to suggest that even my wife isn’t thinking of me all that much during these events, so for you to start doing it seems wrong.

While you start doing your duty in aid of the campaign, I’ll think of other marketing ideas.

Maternity clothes with ‘Dave Inside’ labels, along similar lines to Intel could be a good start.

You may have heard that Bob Holness, presenter of the long running Blockbusters  TV quiz show in the eighties died yesterday. For the few  people who receive this Blog and are too young , or were not in the UK at the time, it was a word game involving various ways of guessing words or phrases from the starting letters. Contestants were school sixth formers around 17-18 years old.

I read through a few snippets of tribute to his career, which were all  very nice and included the fact that he also once played James Bond in fact.

On the Blockbusters front they all gave the much quoted line of contestants asking to ‘have a  P  please Bob ‘ to riotous applause from the studio audience.

One better quote did not make it though. A friend of mine was actually a contestant on the programme and heard this exchange:

HOLNESS:  What ‘F’ comes before Sex…

CONTESTANT (Buzzing to interrupt):  Foreplay

AUDIENCE: A full minute of laughter

HOLNESS:  No

HOLNESS (repeating the question): What ‘F’ comes before Sex, Play and Weather

OPPOSING CONTESTANT: Fair

HOLNESS:  Correct – Fair Sex, Fair Play, Fair Weather.

That should surely be the one he’s remembered for

I’ve just returned from a very nice, but very middle class feeling evening of Christmas Drinks with people from my village and, in particular members of a few choirs my wife is associated with.

I guess I’d place myself as middle class if that just means University educated and having a respectable office job.  However, there’s middle class and midde class. There were multiple company owners there and one Lady – a Countess more accurately, in fact

My brushes with aristocracy have really been limited to overtaking Princes Charles on a motorway some time ago. He was driving an open topped Aston Martin which may not tie in that well with his green credentials although, to his credit, saving fuel by driving at 55mph – and the two unmarked escort cars trailing him were a necessary evil I guess.

Encounters with Countesses have been pretty much zero. In fact it had not occured to me that we even had Countesses in this country. However, whilst I knew quite a few of these people and they’re all very nice, I did find myself dithering for some time about what I should wear there.

My experience is that the confidence people of this ilk tend to have is demonstrated by wearing obviously clashing clothes – bright red corduroys and bright green shirts for example. Those colours are normally only worn by presenters of young children’s TV shows – as they feel confidently superior to their viewers and by those well into the tiers of the middle classes as they feel confidently superior to everyone.

This led me to thinking we should have some standard dress code to remove the smart casual dilemma altogether. I’m thinking of  something along the lines of tartan . You can have a standard with your own regional variants but everyone knows that on Burns night, everyone will be wearing a kilt and will be unencumbered by underwear.

We could have other country variants on the same theme. The French could wear their own colours of stripy tops and onions, the Dutch different coloured clogs and culottes, or whatever those trousers that only reach down to mid-calf are called.

The English – God Help us – would wear Morris Dancer outfits with different coloured ribbons to flail about to differentiate themselves.

I accept all of this sounds ghastly, but it does at least mean we’ll have no fashion qualms before this sort of social event.

All this, I think you’ll agree has some merit, but does need a suitable body to administer this new social standard.

Let me propose Belgium as the owners.

Pretty independent, no discernable characteristics of its own (if we leave aside their habit of putting fruit into beer – where by rights no fruit is required) and most importantly a proven track record led by Brussels in administering standardisation where, by rights no standardisation is required.