Alan Coleman

I love Christmas, always have done. I can remember vividly getting worked up into a frenzy as Christmas came closer, school finished and family started to congregate in houses far too small for the purpose.

Looking back, it was all about the build up as the day itself was always, for some reason or another, a bit of an anti climax. The waiting,  the familiar smells and tastes, The Poseidon Adventure on our portable black and white TV, the old man disappearing up the pub and Mum struggling to cook all that food for all those people. Happy days.

As I got older and started going out and drinking myself, the focus seemed to turn towards Christmas Eve as the pinnacle of the season’s excitement. Finishing work, a few days off, beering it up in decorated boozers and round people’s houses. The continuous soundtrack of Slade and The Ronnettes blaring from juke boxes and Halfords aftermarket car stereos. More Happy days.

One particular Christmas Eve I came home shitfaced and vomited on the sofa, couldn’t be bothered to clear it up so just turned the cushion over hoping nobody would notice. It was my Grandma who came back from church the next morning and bubbled me to the old man. Very fucking Christian Grandma, cheers.

By that point Christmas Day had become one big blur, the whole thing mired by an unearthly hangover and paranoia about the previous nights activities.  Being uncontrollably drunk in front of the family, warm cans of lager, steamed up windows, shitty moods and dried up Turkey. The reality of Christmas.

Tomorrow will be Christmas Eve and as usual I can’t wait. In a couple of weeks I’ll have forgotten the tears, hangovers and the shit presents and will be wishing it was Christmas all over again.

Happy Days indeed.

It’s only been a few days since the it was announced that NOW was finishing with its last edition today, it all coming  amid the phone hacking scandal that is currently gripping the nation. My Tweet Deck has been working overtime trying to cope with the amount of  tweeters and bloggers feeling sorry for the workforce and bemoaning the end of 168 years of British media history.

Which raises question, is the end of The News of the World really such a big deal? It’s not as if we’re losing a great tradition of fine writing, insight and social commentary. No, nothing of the sort, because The News of the World has always been a pile of utter shit.

It doesn’t even look very nice, its overtly aggressive design has changed little since the 70s very much like the conservatism it champions. Awful. All this talk of justice and high level reporting, really? This is the Newspaper that has a history of taking the moral high ground on practically everything, whilst at the same time dragging the conscience and morality of millions through the gutter. Should we really be mourning the passing of an institution that has a morbid fascination with with sexualising both violence and young women at the same time? Sex, children, violence and women, in no particular order and preferably at the same time. Anything to boost circulation, to sell copy,  make money and titillate the nation.

The only aspect of this whole debacle I feel sorry about is that The News of the World didn’t have to face the humiliation of going bust. As for the people who worked there, they’ll have to join the dole que. Just like everyone else who loses their job, like the Miners had to, the people The News of the World demonised back in the early 80s whilst licking up to Thatcher.

Nothing ever lasts for ever.

Tea. Nobody in this country can make a decent cup of tea, the only people that can come close are myself and my mother, and even she doesn’t bother to make a proper cup any more.

The worst place to get a cup of tea in this country is at any kind of ‘Great British’ establishment that would pride itself on serving up a nice cup of ‘Rosie Lee’.

A truck stop at the side of the road for example. A white caravan on the A road heading out of any satellite town, grubby Union Flag and dirty looks, fat blokes stood around chuntering and bacon that tastes oddly of fish.  Re boiled water in a polystyrene cup, a cheap tea bag and far to much full cream milk. Utterly Foul.

What about the Great British Café? Slop some warm water into one of those massive steel pots with a week old A4 size tea bag and pour the tepid liquid into the same amount of skimmed milk for a truly vomit inducing beverage. “Sit yourself down love, I’ll be straight over”. Properly disgusting.

But by far the worst cup of tea anyone in this country could ever consume is served up by the British Army. The organisation itself is so unbelievably tight that it buys the cheapest of everything in massive bulk, including tea bags. ‘The Brew’ is usually knocked up in large green plastic insulated containers that smell faintly of mould, diesel and urine in equal measure. The fluid is mixed with UHT milk until frothy and left for at least 45 minutes to cool before being poured into paper cups  with two heaped tablespoons of sugar (plastic spoon with no handle). The resulting slop is referred to lovingly as ‘NATO’, a drink that is so far removed from anything consumable to beggar belief. Soldiers drink gallons of this shit, they simply can’t get enough of the stuff. Why? I just don’t know.

It’s a fairly sad indictment on this country when the cheap refreshing drink for which we became world famous is almost impossible to obtain on a daily basis. In fact, the only place to get a half  decent cup of tea is at MacDonalds.

A few years ago I wrote about The sanitisation of war, how our media have come to depict warfare in general as not only just, but as a simple story of good against evil in the manner of a Commando comic.

On page 47 of today’s free Sport magazine, the Royal Air Force have taken out a full page Commando comic style advertisement for staff. It’s taken us a while to get to the point where this is an acceptable depiction of something quite terrifying, but I think we’ve been prepared gently and can now relax, safe in the knowledge that war is not only fun reading, but is also something to aspire to.

The advert features the handsome Flight Lieutenant Sean Langrish, an epitome of the well rounded young man, complete with steely determination and well rehearsed student sneer. (In another advert he’ll be seen relaxing over a few beers with an orange juice swigging colleague, however everyone knows that not drinking in the forces is paramount to homosexuality).

The story is as follows. The lads on the ground in Helmand are cornered, brave Sean calls in some Laser Guided Bombs, he keeps his promise, the enemy is eliminated and he’s got 24 new bezzie mates. No really, that’s what happens! Then we’re ‘all good’! Fucking superb! If only I wasn’t so old!

There’s money to waste on misleading adverts though isn’t there? We know that because there’s cash to be spunked on teaching the country’s two most over privileged brothers to indulge in learning to be Search and Rescue pilots. The Palace must be getting wet thinking about that little number when it comes to fruition. All the tabloid glory, none of the risk, everyone’s a winner! Essentially, it’s this week’s hobby, a well deserved break from playing football with six year old African children with no legs, or from getting cunted in China Whites.

This is nothing new though, The RAF, like the military in general, has a history of outrageously misleading adverts bent on showing that in War, there’s something for everyone. Remember the ridiculous Cinema adverts of a few years ago that suggested that young people could progress from delivering pizzas on a moped to piloting a Harrier? Yes, that’s going to happen isn’t it?

No need to worry too much about it though, when the reality of the cartoon like battle against evil ends up with no arms to have a wank with, there’s always Help for Heroes.

Royal Air Force. Be part of the story.

It’s happened very quickly, in the last couple of years it seems that the way that we speak has changed more than in the last four or five decades.

It’s like an epidemic has taken hold affecting everyone between the ages of twenty and forty, and what’s more I’m sure people do it to annoy me specifically. Is it a fashion thing? It must be, it’s not like we’ve started using the word ‘get’ and ‘grab’ instead of ‘have’ just to make our request a little clearer. Also, people of my generation didn’t talk like that when we we’re at school, so it is, fashion.

I wouldn’t mind so much if it was teenagers that adopted this slang and carried it on into adult life, which would sort of make sense. But hearing adults using these teenage Americanisms sounds a little like being down with the kids. And there’s only one thing worse than an adult who thinks he’s down with the kids, that’s an adult that actually is down with the kids.

I almost want to get a job in Pret A Manger so that I can correct those thirty something’s who pretend to be too busy to ask me for a coffee properly.

“No, you can’t get a coffee, I can get one for you and you can have it.”

“No, you can’t grab a receipt, you can ask me for one and I’ll give it to you.”

The whole ‘Can I get a coffee’ culture just reminds me of Radio One and that ‘Too cool for school’ slurred middle England accent. It’s everywhere from T4 to Sarah Cox, which is fine provided you’re younger than twenty. Otherwise, it’s simply time to grow up.