Dancing the night away...

I am addicted to Strictly Come Dancing. I watch the Saturday night, the Sunday night and the tea time partner show if I can get away with it. This is, I know, somwhat sad. But it is nice watching people who have no idea whether they can do something get up and give it a go (desperate attempts to start off the next stage in their media career aside, of course).

What does make me laugh about it is the fact that it has helped to start off a dancing craze across the country. The new alternative exercise option is a dance class. One can only assume that people think they may come out of that class being the next Aleysha Dixon or Mark Ramprakash. The essential difference, though, is that they are getting one-on-one tuition with some of the country's (nay, world's) top competition dancers. They aren't being taught by Pablo (honest, I have Spanish ancestry) Wrigglesworth in the PE hall of their local primary school along with twenty other people with only the aid of a dance tape which has carnival nits on one side and 'Viva La Spainia' on the other.

I have been to a salsa class. The experience is not one I'd like to repeat. You could smell the waves of middle-ages singleton desperation wafting from between the double doors. Then, of course you have to stand in lines and copy the basic steps (all the while being highly conscious or your bottom- because we are British). This is actually ok. We can cope with that bit. This is despite the extremely bossy other pupil who should clearly be in the intermediate class, but likes 'helping' and the intermediate class clashes with her pottery class. This has nothing to do with her clear passion for Pablo's latin trousers.

It is the moment when you have to start dancing with someone that is utterly terrifying. The choice is not great. I had the guy who constantly rotated your arms as if he were trying to wind you up. One can only suspect that he thought the women there were a more complicated, clockwork, independently moving version of his last girlfriend (who he had to blow up). The other set were three very suspiciously adolescent lads- one of whom had an Iron Maiden t-shirt and who looked a little out of space. Two of them where clearly there to meet girls and pretending to everyone else in the room that they liked the dancing. The other clearly liked the dancing, but was trying to pretend to his mates that he was there to meet girls. Because pretending you are a virgin at twenty is less in embarrassing in British society than admitting you like to boogie.

I don't know how I got out of there alive. Bruce has got a lot to answer for- and it's not just the golf.

Drugs and driving

I think drugs are a bad thing. They can get you into some tricky situations. I have a mate who, when away on holiday, was challenged to snort the coast of Cornwall to scale. However, he didn't realise that 'to scale' means that you can make it smaller and he basically did snort the coast of Cornwall and ended up in A&E. Who says it affects you?

Which might sound judgemental, because when I say that he was a mate, what I mean was that he was my driving instructor. Please picture the scene when this little anecdote was given to me. I know I should have been suspicious when I realised his eyes had no pupils. And I should have gotten really suspicious when I was asked if I'd mind if Dan 'the Ripper' Harris sat in the back. However, when I was asked to drop said 'Ripper' off in Manchester because some high speed motorway work is a good way to round off your first lesson, I really should have twigged. I don't know if you have ever tried to outrun the Manchester Metropolitan Police in a Ford Fiesta with L plates, but it isn't easy. I didn't pass my test. On the upside, I am now known as Lynne 'Thunderbolt and Lightening' Crook in the North West underworld.

Home again...

I've been really rubbish at keeping this blog up, but I've got my excuses at the moment. I just moved from Lancaster back home to Liverpool, thus straddling a few miles and several decades.

It is a little bit odd moving back, not least because it doesn't feel that odd. Whenever I was away and told people that I came from Liverpool, I had to explain why I didn't have that accent, for a start. Strangely, people who live here seem to know that not everyone does.

This is a fact not always noted by those who live just outside the city boundaries of Liverpool- who often seem to sound more like scousers that scousers do. I've lost count of the number of bartering competitions I've got into with people from the Wirral who find a desperate need to prove that they are far more scouse than I could ever be.

Let me explain a little. I come from Crosby, which is quite a nice area on the northern edge of Liverpool. They are right- I'm not strictly speaking scouse. I don't come from near enough to the centre of Liverpool, and to be honest I don't give a toss about football at all, never mind which team you support. This is like being the only atheist at a christening service in the American bible belt.

So saying I'm not scouse is fine. Unless, of course, you come from that peninsula across the Mersey which I can see-opposite me- from the beach in Crosby. So distance from Liverpool is pretty much out.

So what makes you more scouse? It might be the accent (although as half my family is from Anfield and have no accent, I'd say not). Apparently, it pretty much depends on how near the stereotype that everyone else appends to Liverpool you are. Did you go to a rough school? How rough is rough? Like, a bit scruffy rough? A bit fighty rough? More fighty than the Eastenders Christmas Special rough? Are we talking fistfights? Are we talking any added extras to help the matters along? Before you know it you are into ridiculous tales of bloodbaths in the maths class and anarchy in the drama room (actually, the last one might be true).

There is also the famous Liverpool predisposition towards labels. Is that a label? Is it a genuine label? Even better, is it from the market and still a genuine label? Does it still have the label in it, or has it been obliterated by some marker pen? If you are going to barter with me on that one, by the way, I'll win.

That said, don't even talk to me about the one about scousers being thieves (the above does not count as thievery. That counts as a bargain. And they aren't usually off the back of a lorry). Seriously, my surname is Crook- I've heard them. All of them. Repeatedly. And strangely enough- despite this image that many Liverpool public figures like to join in with (because we have to prove we can laugh at ourselves)- I never heard it here. No one ever said 'Your name! How hilarious! You must become our emissary!'. So, all-in-all, it's nice to be home.

Toilet humour.

I was having a discussion with an office mate yesterday which made me think of this. I'm not normally scatalogical as a rule. However, I think that this is an important social comment, so I think we have to forge bravely ahead into this area.

I have discovered, laydees and gennlemen, what truly drives the two sexes apart. It's not the planet that you come from. It's not whether or not you want the lights off or on. It's not breast fixations, commitment issues, nagging, jokes, football, shoes or chromosomes.

It's wee.

We have a uni-sex toilet at the end of our corridor (by which I mean a facility which may be used by both sexes, not a toilet with an identity problem). There is someone- we won't make any accusations- that has some trouble a) with aim and b)with the use of the flush.

Now, it could be a particularly gymnastic woman who is using the opportunity to practice her late-night caberet impression of the Trevi Fountain, but I don't think that it is. I have a strong suspicion that it is a male of an older persuasion that hasn't quite grasped the fact that other people may need to sit on the damn toilet after him and also quite like shoes that don't smell of urine. Not that I go around sniffing shoes, and anyone who says anything to the contrary is a liar.

Now, I know men have to sit on the toilet (although I don't like to think about it. And anyone who says anything to the contrary is still a liar). I know men also possess shoes. I also know, for the injured expression on my male office mate's face, that not all men have a problem with aim or flushing.

Unfortunately, however, logic dictates that if I didn't have to share a loo with the aiming, clean-living males in my place of work, I also wouldn't have to share it with the skank-meister. That's why, wherever possible, men and women don't share toilets.

Think of the barriers that throws up. The ridiculous air of mystery that still hangs around the ablutions of the opposite sex. The chances for those strangely bonding social interactions you lose- such as passing paper under a cubicle wall or holding the door for someone when the lock's knackered.

That's it. A nation divided for the sake of a short-sighted bloke with a shaky hand.

Open spots...

I'm sure there are a fair few people who have done these out there, but my god, this must take the biscuit...

I booked myself to do an open spot (the name of the organisation will remain anonymous to protect the guilty). It wasn't a comedy night, but in the past there have been plenty of people doing daft poetry, funny songs etc etc...

Oh lord. Not this night. I was preceded by a woman who had written a piece of prose 'bearing witness' to the 1953 flood down South (n.b. you weren't bearing witness, dear. You have to be there to bear witness- you just made some stuff up). She'd written it (and spoke it) in the style of an eight-year old girl in danger of drowning who had an asthmatic mother and a disabled father. Picture it... "I had to be brave and hold on to my daddy's hand. Mummy had left her medicine in the house and her chest really hurt..."

And then me... 'So... bovril as sex aid then?'

Followed by some poetry about child abuse and my phone going off (to the tune of 'Dangermouse').

Why do I do this to myself? I really don't know...

Networking

Does anyone else have to do this in work? More to the point, does anyone else think it is a hideous way to view social relationships?

Now, I know that when I ask 'Does anyone else have to do this in work?' that in many ways, we all do. We all have to speak to other humans (unless you are on a long-term oranguatan observation program in deepest Peru) and get on with them to a greater or lesser degree. However, it is the pallid way of seeing this not as normal social interaction, but as an opportunity to weigh up how useful people are to you that really bothers me.

Obviously, this kind of thing existed in the past. We used to call it nepotism, or the Old Boys' Network or whatever. At least then there seemed to be some element of disapproval to it. It isn't really right that you are employed because of who you know rather than what you can do. In employing the term 'Networking' we haven't rejected this, we've basically said that we all want a bit of it. We all want the opportunity to step a bit harder on the person who just made the mistake of acting like they wanted a chat for the sake of it, not a job opportunity. Bleurgh.

Networking: like social skills, but for people with no personality.

Boris Johnson

What can you say? I mean, really, what?

The man is an idiot. Yes, he is very funny to laugh at but is that really someone you want running a city? A whole city! It makes me want to cry.

People have been wondering who voted for him. I think, unfortunately, that I have an answer to that one. A good proportion of the comedians in the country live in London. Let's face it, Gordon Brown is a bit crap, but he's also really boring. That's difficult to make jokes about. Are these facts unrelated? I think not.

Only in Britain could a major public figure be elected for a laugh.

Hello

I'll be amazed if anyone actually reads any of this, so thank you if you are. I borrowed the idea for the blog from a successful comedian called Richard Herring, who apparently writes his blog everyday in order to see if ideas have legs or not. He is successful; I am not. I decided that there is a clue in there somewhere.

If you find any of this funny or amusing, or at least vaguely interesting, then I;d really like to know. I have no idea what any of it is going to be, so we'll just have to sit back and find out...