Triumph and Failure
November 5th, 2005 at 15:51

As is fast becoming regular, I went to my “local” with my friends last night. For the sake of backstory my friends are: JD, Gina, Heggs, Charlie and her (new?) boyfriend Will.

As usual, we decided to have a few games of my favourite sport, Pool.Unlike usual, I owned everyone. Even Will, who sort of sneered at me in a “I bet you’re rubbish” sort of way. I was on fire. Figuratively, I mean.

This was the high point of the evening. Last week, I was musing over why “pub” Coke tastes better than “normal” Coke- and this isn’t a subject I take lightly. As you may well know, I’m a big fan of Cola drinks, and I consider myself something of an expert. I was somewhat horrifed to discover that the so-called “Coke” The Greyhound was selling was in fact Pepsi! Does this mean that all along a superior soft drink has been quite literally right under my nose? Was this “blind” taste test essentially a rehash of the Pepsi Challenge? It’s this sort of thing that keeps me awake at night. That, and helicopters.

I used to pride myself on being able to identify colas of the world. Will I ever live this down?

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Freeway Cola
September 16th, 2005 at 13:39

I’m leaving behind the unpleasantness of this morning, and remaining upbeat and full of caffeine!

As some of you might know, I consider myself something of a connoisseur in the field of cola drinks. I’m trying, aided primarily by Heather, to kick my so-called “Coke-habit”, because it’s eroding my teeth- much like how Tapman erodes metal. (That’s your obscure reference of the day).

I’ve sampled many of the great world Colas in my time, and none have yet managed to surpass Coca-Colas supremecy. Now the time has come to see if Freeway Cola can stand up to the Ant & Dec of the populist cola drink world.

From what I can tell, this cola is exclusive to German Super (market) chain Lidl. If you’ll allow me to make a racial slur, no doubt it was packaged efficiently/hypernationalistic/something about Nazis.

Spoiler: it’s Timmy Mallet.

The first thing I didn’t like about this drink was the name. FREEWAY Cola is almost adding insult to injury, when consumed by someone who has JUST FAILED THEIR DRIVING TEST.

Vaguely interestingly, today wasn’t the first time I’d encountered ‘Freeway‘, or indeed, mentioned it on this very blog. I actually spoke about it briefly back in June, in the same post where I explained about the minor driving error I made on Christmas day. How ominous it has turned out to be. I made the same xenophobic jokes back in June, too.

But what did it taste like? I took photos to show you what happend when I tried it.

In the above picture I take a sip. You can tell I’m an expert at this sort of thing because I taste it with my eyes closed.

And this is how I reacted immediately. It was certainly a shock to the system- and I’ve had ASDA Cola in the past. The memories of that are horrifying.

So what’s the verdict?

Not good, not horrible. I managed to empty the glass, and I wasn’t being polite, as I was the only person in. As such, in terms of thumbs, I give Freeway Cola the neutral thumb rating. The taste actually reminded me of Panda Pops. That’s right- the cola that the primary school “tuck shop” always sold, rather than the products of evil multinationals.

Factor in the price, 39p for two litres, then I think its safe to say “not bad, if you’re a cheapskate”, but if you’re a real cola drinker like myself, and you like your “black & water” to taste like something you’re used to, stick to the traditional Coca-Cola.

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XVIII
June 3rd, 2005 at 16:34

Yesterday, it was my birthday! I’m now 18, and adult, and a man! I can now commit child abuse and be prosecuted as an adult, I can legally drink alcohol, and legally complain about kids today. I can shout “get off my lawn!”, “bloody kids”, and “back in my day…” to my heart’s content.

I WANT TO BE YOUNG AGAIN!

The most exciting thing that happend yesterday was a massive party that I hosted. I didn’t think I had that many friends! 17 people turned up overall. They were…

Heather (oh, and the rumours are true), JD, Emma, Soph, Matt, Stephen, Heggs, Craig, Dundas, Andy, Danny, Scot, Bailey, Kim, Chris, Bouff, and Teb.

Of course, this probably isn’t very interesting if you don’t know them.

I think the general consensus is that everyone had a lovely time (based on a survey of me). To get the obvious out of the way: the Coke intake was at six. Two before the party, four during it.

The one unfortunate thing that prevented my wild teenage rave from being as house destroying as it was, aside from the lack of “hard house trance” or whatever, was my parents were in the other room. Whilst this helped with the general management of the festivities, my mum insisted on showing everyone a baby photo and trying to embarrass me. I swore at her a bit and she continued un-phased.

Despite it being a birthday party, I wasn’t expecting any presents- some of my friends got me one anyway! This was horrendously nice of them. Heather got me this amazing “20 questions� gadget. You, the player, thinks of anything, and it will, almost without fail guess exactly what you are thinking of. For example, “is it an animal?�, “is it a mammal?�, and so on. It’s weird, I’ve no idea how it works. Is there a database inside with billions and billions of objects and their descriptions listed? It got Guinea Pig, it got napkin, it got electricity, it got candle… it was amazing. Does it use the GSM network to connect back to base, where there are thousands of people tapping away at keyboards asking these questions? Either way, it scared the crap out of me. (Not literally).

JD & Emma got me the League of Gentlemen box set, which I’m greatly looking forward to watching, and Matt got me In Love and Death by The Used. From the songs I’ve heard of theirs, they’re an upbeat lot full of positive messages. I love optical media!

Excitingly, Danny got me a little device that keeps the fizz in bottles, somehow, which was perfect apt for Chris & Kim’s present… a bottle of coke! (She also got me some Cadbury’s Miniature Heroes, which I think everyone agreed were very nice indeed). I was delighted. Bailey, Scot and Ben (who wasn’t there, but I spoke to today) also forced money on me! I tried to refuse but they insisted! Everyone who got me presents: thank you very much!

Also excitingly, my good friend Michael, who’s a northerner, phoned and texted me from Wales, where he was on holiday to wish me a happy birthday- which was a very nice gesture. I attempted to ring him back to thank him, but due to the wildness of the party, it was largely incoherent.

Describing a party is actually really difficult- we didn’t so much do anything as just sit about and slack, which was lovely, but isn’t very easy to write about. As such, here’s comments and observations on some of the photographs I took:

We did some real life photoshopping!

Yes, these are “Bratz� party hats. I didn’t buy them, my socially and culturally conscious mother bought them in her ignorance. I’m eighteen and male, not nine and female! I managed to remove them before most people turned up, thankfully.

Matt has had his face disfigured. He should have mounted a flag on a cocktail stick or one of those little drinks umbrellas in it.

Something that was nice was that six of my friends who I’ve known since early primary school were here to celebrate my birth with me. It was very old skool.

Heather really dislikes having her photo taken, for some reason. This is similar to my sister, Lucy. Women, eh? (Ignore JD).

Matt looks a bit like Devvo, the chav from Fat-Pie.

Bouff and myself paid tribute to B3ta. (I was recently 26th best question response in the question of the week.)

Overall though, it was a bloody lovely evening by my standards, and went fantastically well. I hope everyone who came enjoyed themselves- they seemed to. Even Dundas, who’s arguably my fiercest critic couldn’t bring himself to criticise my party.

Thanks for coming, everyone!

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It’s all a big skive
May 20th, 2005 at 19:37

The lack of updates recently has been due to a lack of things happening. That seems to be the trouble with blogs; everyone isn’t superman.

The big “thing” at the moment is revision, due to imminent exams. It’s weird, when revising, everything else ever becomes infinately more interesting and appealing as an activity. Why else do you think I’m desperately trying to update about nothing? I’ve found myself taking an interest in my mother’s TV diet… that is to say, Property Ladder, House Doctor, Weed ‘em and Reap, and every other intellectual holocaust on TV. It’s just preferrable to revising.

I’ve got a retake of my Pure 2 Maths exam on Monday morning… can’t wait. I used this as an excuse to take all of today’s lessons off as “exam leave”. I didn’t inform any of the teachers though. Whoops. Instead of doing some exciting ICT revision, I stayed at home and watched a documentary about irrigating the Hanging Gardens of Babylon on UKTV History. Whilst I didn’t stay for the end of the programme, it appears that they used some sort of clever corkscrew instead of a shaduf to raise water. Exciting stuff.

When I finally made it into school… damnit! This isn’t interesting! I’m not going to continue with this, as it is insanely dull. The only other interesting thing to come out of all of this is today was my first zero coke day since counting began.

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And this is where blogging slips into tedium…
April 27th, 2005 at 21:54

Now I’ve started this blog and got some positive feedback from people I know in real life, I’m dying to post yet more about a new, exciting, adventure that I’ve had, wanting to jump on the “James is cool at writing stuff” bandwagon. Unfortunately, nothing much has happened.

The potential for adventure only seems to occur during the day time, as that’s when I’m at school, socialising, casually swearing and acting all elitist. In the evening I spend night after night, searching, looking for an answer. It’s the question that drives me (etc), “why is IT coursework so lengthly, boring and tedious?”.

In school, the most exciting thing that has been happening has probably been the continuing saga of my coke intake. It got to the stage yesterday when there was effectively a hostage taking, with my friends all working against me to prevent me from drinking any more of the lovely searing acid. It was resolved in the end after careful negotiations and the bell for the end of lunch going. This said, I have been good this week- sticking to 1 coke per day for the past three days.

The other exciting revelation this week has been local (former) MP Edward Garnier, who came into promote himself in a bid to get re-elected. We discovered that out-arguing a socially liberal Tory MP is actually more difficult than arguing against a deluded lunatic fringe party who have no grasp of the real world. We challenged him on all sorts, the mental economic policy, fox hunting, but he responded quite reasonably. The problem with being socially liberal is that we couldn’t get him on Conservative racism in regard to gypsies and foreigners. Vaguely interestingly, Garnier is the shadow Attorney General, so if William “14 Pints” Hague had rigged the 2001 election, it could well have been Garnier going “it’s illegal.. oh, alright, it’s a bit legal then”.

Fingers crossed I’ll have another big adventure soon, so stay tuned.

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