What about Larry?

The Elf on the Shelf smiling and looking cheeky, with the lights of a Christmas tree blurred in the background.

Recently, late at night, as my wife and I peel ourselves from the sofa to clear away our empty gin glasses and extinguish the Christmas tree lights (by jabbing at an inaccessible switch with a mop), one of us will grumpily exclaim: “Oh God. What the fuck are we going to do with Larry?”

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My gaming life

I’ve had a creeping longing for a return to some kind of normality recently. And by ‘normality’, I don’t mean tombstoning at Durdle Door, where the few seconds of free-fall you experience as you plummet towards the shimmering waves below is, quite ironically, the safest way to socially distance yourself from thousands of lobster-skinned beachgoers shitting into burger cartons and iceboxes.

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My dreams from the last 10 years

I realised recently that I’ve been using Twitter as the unofficial repository for scraps of my dreams over the last 10 years. Whenever I’ve woken from a dream worthy of note, my first act has usually been to inform my few hundred disinterested followers on social media. So here are the raw recollections of a decade of dreams, all neatly encapsulated in 140 characters or less thanks to Twitter’s original tweet limit.

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Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of Anxiety Over Social Distancing)

Award-winning playwright and novelist Marsha Norman once said: “Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.” If that’s true, then my book is destined for an inconspicuous bargain stand in WHSmith, clumsily stacked next to some shop-soiled Toffee Crisp and a collection of incongruous 10p advent calendars.

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This pandemic is killing my cynicism

I’ve cried a lot recently (more so than normal). While driving to work one morning in the week before lockdown, I welled up listening to The Leisure Society’s ‘The Last of the Melting Snow’. There’s nothing particularly unusual about that – plenty of songs get me in the throat – but it’s the fact that I was sobbing uncontrollably even when the song had finished. Inconsolable at the wheel and completely overwhelmed by the creeping, all-consuming nightmare of a deadly pandemic. Yesterday, I cried at the kitchen sink listening to the The Smiths’ ‘Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want’. If we’re in this for the long haul, I may cry myself to the point where my entire body becomes as withered, cracked, and desiccated as my excessively washed hands.

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Teenage Brexit Fanclub: The Grant sisters one year on

When I eventually call time on this blog and reflect on the fine body of work I have produced over the years, I will likely have to conclude that it wasn’t my writing about gardening, Peppa Pig, or moronic YouTube vloggers that proved popular; it was two posh, pro-Brexit sisters from Kensington that drew thousands of visitors to my humble little corner of the Internet.

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WAR IS OVER! If You Want It

In the 1994 ‘Itchy & Scratchy Land’ episode of The Simpsons, Homer and Marge visit T.G.I. McScratchy’s Goodtime Fooddrinkery, where it’s constantly New Year’s Eve. “It must be wonderful to ring in the New Year over and over, and over,” Marge says to a glum-looking waiter, as a live band plays Auld Lang Syne for the umpteenth time. “Please, kill me,” he replies.

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Content

A friend once described me as a “Premier League raconteur”, which, to this day, is the best compliment anyone’s ever bestowed on me (even if not entirely true). Anyway, here’s a self-deprecating little anecdote about a terrible moment in my life that I’m not proud of and for which you should definitely judge me. I have nothing else to write about, so this is just meaningless ‘content’.

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We’re all fucked

It’s just over a week since the General Election result cemented our darkest fears, which saw unkempt pathological liar Boris™ returned to Downing Street as the country’s Supreme Leader. A whole week since I drove to work in oppressive silence, unable to bear the sound of gloating Tory Brexiters congaing through the Today programme’s studio.

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