Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

Having remained sanguine and even optimistic about the casting of Matt Smith as the eleventh Doctor from 2010 onwards, I find myself rather less enthusiastic about this report that has appeared on MSN, suggesting that Lily Allen could be the new assistant for the Steven Moffat era.



This is the sort of casting that plagued the latter years of the John Nathan-Turner era in the mid to late eighties. Still, it doesn’t appear on either the BBC News website or the Who website, so maybe it is just idle speculation.

(Can you tell I'm bored yet?).

My right knee is definitely giving me gyp. It’s not so bad when I get out of bed in a morning, but it doesn’t take much effort on my part for it to start getting achey, particularly if I am standing around rather than walking. Add to this the general creakiness I get from sitting in this excuse for a chair I have in the office and I am wondering whether I might not be better off using my kneecap as an ashtray and having my leg welded straight so I can stump around like a cross between Long John Silver and Frankenstein’s monster. Given that the kneecap feels loose, for want of a better word, perhaps First World War style puttees extended up and around the knee would help, but then that would start a strange transformation into Mummy movies.

Someone has been splicing time and space in North London again. You rarely see many operatives in the Totteridge & Whetsone area using nuclear accelerators to weld reality back in place¹, so there tends to be more obvious outbreaks of oddness on the extended reaches of the tube network than there are in the centre. Or rather, they are less controlled. I guess it’s a Men in Black thing.

Anyway, there was a woman on the tube this morning who looked like she had been assembled from various elements of Eastenders, Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and Abba, circa 1976. Imagine a middle-aged elf wearing a silvery circlet on her forehead and trying to arrange something over a mobile phone in an Essex accent and you’ll get a portion of the picture.

She disappeared mysteriously at Camden Town, just where the reality operatives start congregating in earnest, so I feel my point is made.

Creepy Swedish Guy was on the train this morning, too. First time I’ve seen him for a while. He has new reading glasses that make him look like a goblin watch repair man.

¹As a regular reader, you will recall that sometime back in the summer, it was suggested by some one in my comments section – I have it in mind that it was either jfs or littleonionz - that tourists with wheely cases are actually disguised space-time engineers who repair and maintain the fabric of reality in central London and other major cities, helping to combat alternate reality leaks that let through the occasional pieces of the past, mythology or other dimensions.

I can confirm that the blender makes soups as well as alcoholic beverages. I can also confirm that a decent veggie soup contains far more vegetable matter than you might think and takes forever to digest. It sits in the tum for a very long time indeed.

But hey, vitamins.

Being a football spod and a proud Englishman and what with the World Cup just days away, I have been investigating the possibility of spending too much money on a replica England football shirt. Happily a lot of places seem to be selling them at half price or thereabouts, which is good since official merchandise is generally heavily over priced. I may well wander home via Lilywhites in Piccadilly Circus where I am led to believe they have infinite supplies.

Reassuring too, to see that replica kit manufacturers have finally woken up to the fact that Wayne Rooney excepted, the average England supporter is about three times larger than the average England player. This means that they are available in a lardy boy enhancing XXXL. Fantastic.

With a couple of minor alterations, the red “away” shirt for 2006-08 is suspiciously similar in design to the shirt worn in the 1966 final. It is particularly noticeable if you get hold of a shirt without the numbers printed on (This time around they will have the number on the front as well as the back, which rather upsets my purist sensibilities, but there we are. At least the national team doesn’t have a honking great advert across the chest like all club shirts do these days). I have been trying to decide whether or not to get a plain shirt (probably), or one with the number 8 on it. Not because I am a particular fan of Steven Gerrard¹, you understand, but because I could replace the name with “All The Pies” (Geddit?), which would be a laugh.

Well, it appeals to me, anyway.

I am sloping off early this afternoon and will make my decision then.

If I keep up with the soup, come the European Championships in a couple of years’ time I may be able to go for a less lardy size.

See the pigs barrel-roll in formation over the river.


¹I’m guessing he’ll be in the number 8 shirt, like he is at Liverpool. Though it may be the number 4, which screws the joke somewhat – or would, if I was having that name on the shirt.