I love it when things just go wrong somewhere inside your brain and you end up saying something which exclusively makes sense to you.

I decided that I'd play a little game with someone who was a little bit trashed last night, when they told me that they'd left their key in their bedroom and were waiting for me to let them into the flat.

Baring in mind that the locks on our rooms do not automatically lock when you leave, I wondered if I could fool him and his alcohol-filled head.

"Whoops - left your key did you? Did you lock your room?"

I was watching him think. He answered and said that he thought he did.

"Ah, shit man!" and off he ran to find that he couldn't get into the flat.

I just sat and giggled to myself.

One thing that has struck me is that a lot of people at university probably shouldn't be here.

Away from the argument that if you haven't got a degree you'll be a bin man, or will never find work in any industry worthy of talking about that teachers at secondary schools and sixth form colleges seem to like to spread around, a lot of people seem to go to university as some kind of ritual.

It's like passing go in Monopoly, but instead of collecting £200, you collect a debt of £20,000. And while a game of Monopoly that lasted 3 years might get a bit tedious, it's nothing in comparison to the administrative farce that university is, with only 9 hours of teaching some how making up a full time course, I often dread to think how people who were studying part time might not suffer some kind of horrific injury and end up dying of some kind of self-inflicted injury.

It would seem irrelevant of this boredom factor, many people appear to have given drugs to the admissions tutors in order to gain their places, and I'm certain that the person who provoked my rant today probably had to provide far more than I could possibly allege in order to get a place.



The only response I could think of to this speech was that I wanted to throw the person out of the building, and let them fend for themselves like an animal would. In the wild.

Of course, thanks to the eco-warriors in the world of architecture, I would of course have to find a door to throw them out of because the greens have decided that windows kill cute little penguins.

Even then, thanks to the fact that doors allow things to come in and out - there aren't very many of those, and where they have been installed they are camouflaged and made into a national secret.

Having overcome those problems, once I'd actually managed to get them outside then my only option would be to place them on the eco-roofing surfaces and hope they caught something from an exotic plant that they'd never seen before, which is slightly less exciting than hiding some kind of land mine in their bed.

And even then, having suffered all of that possible brain damage and contamination from the threatening dandelion - they'd probably be welcomed back into the classes in order to make comments on things they don't understand and be awarded a pass for it - but most definitely with a stern look of disapproval.

For two weeks prior to being contacted by anyone about the problems that some people had with what I'd written, I did get some hint that something was becoming a little bit popular and wanted.

I'm not going to pretend that I spend my life with my nose stuck into web statistics. In all fairness, I often have no idea what's going on from week to week, and if I'm honest, I'm not too bothered about how many people are or are not visiting the site and reading this pile of crap that I continue to talk about every single bloody day.

I did, however, notice that during July the site was eating through bandwidth like a fat kid at a birthday party. Unusually for the modern website world, this site didn't have much of a bandwidth allowance up until July.

According to the hosts I use, having little bandwidth is a USP. It's a bit, to me, like advertising the fact that your car can only travel 3 miles before it breaks down as being an excellent way of ensuring you never get lost while driving, or a breakdown recovery package which is cheaper if you don't own a car.

During July it most certainly was not an advantage, however - and we eat through over 5GB of data in a little over 2 weeks. How the hell did we do that, I hear you asking?

Well, there were 18,891 unique visitors to the nicparkes.com site during July 2009, with the majority of the visits coming after the 9th July 2009.

In comparison to anything, the post in question was first published in April 2009 - and only came to light as the result of a search on Google for the term "A****** Ma**** Rubery" (name removed), a term which is still regularly searched and brings people to my site - despite having no relevant content on the topic.

The second offending article was published towards the end of June 2009, again making no direct link with the rise in visitors other than the spreading of the word by a group of people after it was first found.

After the 9th July 2009, 13,160 people visited the /blog/ section of the site which gave them The Daily Nixx. At its peak, the blog was receiving 2210 requests an hour for the posts that were causing the problems.

At this point, a new search term develops into the picture. One I don't have to obfuscate - "arses". It still puzzles me why I am on a search result for arses, but then - in this case at least - it's a description of what people were looking for, in some people's view.

Simply because I'm a geek, 38% of the people who read the blog were using IE6, with the next biggest 15% using Mozilla Firefox 3.0 meaning that people who use IE6 are more likely to be offended when visiting nicparkes.com.

30% of the visitors who viewed the site were using Virgin Broadband from the Blueyonder host names in King's Norton and in Harborne (making most of the people relatively local to the place where the offended were).

At the peak of the visits, the site was using 151Mb/day - a shockingly huge figure for this site.

What a shame most of the people never actually read the retraction and apology then? About 4500 unique users read the apology, as opposed to 18,000 unique users who visited the site when the proper articles were on line.

Back in July 2009, a lot of the regular readers will remember that I offended some people - mainly by 'being a bit channel 4' and saying that shops that sold things like cards and little gifts sold "various rubbish."


Obviously, I've never set out to offend anyone - but unfortunately, as is life when you write as a fictional character about some things organised by people, you sometimes get caught and get told that someone's going to sue you. As unlikely as actually being sued is, it's normally easier - particularly when you're in the middle of a huge load of work anyway - to fall over and accept what they've asked you to do.

And if we're being fair - I still consider shops that sell cards and little gifts to sell 'various rubbish' in exactly the same way that I meant at the time. 'Rubbish' being used as a replacement for the word 'shit'.

And for those people who are still confused (fetch me the syringe), I mean shit in the 'general' sense as replacement of the word 'things'.

It's the evolution of language. Keep up.

During July I spoke to people over the phone, in person, and by email - and the vast majority of them were certainly not happy with what I'd said.

The words "cocky" "twat" and "little" may have come from one side of the argument, and the words "I can only apologise that you were offended," and "I have apologised for causing you offence."

Unfortunately, despite having a full time job and various other commitments as well as doing some of the first stages of organising my life in time for university, I did spend an afternoon of my time listening to this kind of thing, from both sides, with a number of effects on me - including a severe lack of sleep.

Of course, I wasn't apologising for anything that was my opinion, and although I'm not going to repeat the thoughts I expressed (I'm taking the Nick Griffin stand, and Jack Straw isn't here to cover my arse) and I stand by them, I was apologising for causing offence to these people.

I don't think there is ever a situation where people come out and think "I want to cause you offence". And I think that partially, the reason no one does that is the offence is subjective. My opinion says this. Yours says that. That sign says that there's delays on the M25 and another might say "SPRAY. SLOW."

So while I might think that what you think is silly, I'm never going to try and take you to court in order to extract your opinion, change it to match mine, and then carefully place it in your lap like some kind of baby sheep wrapped in a blanket.

Thing is, nothing actually happens when you're offended. It's like being a bit sad. Nothing actually happens. Maybe a few tears, but there's no actual effect on anyone or anything other than you that means that the person doing the offending has actually 'done' anything.

Everyone wakes up the next morning and finds the sky has not become blood red, with grass suddenly a nice shade of mauve. Pigs still make pork, we still have Turkey for Christmas dinner and "Pigs in blankets" aren't some kind of sexual reference.

Of course, there is the argument that offence does cause people genuine stress. One of the people involved in the little incident I'm talking about did ask me to think about what her children would have thought, had they read what I'd written. And I certainly suffered from the effects of stress - mainly on my sleep and eating patterns, which were reduced to nothing.

I did think about that, and decided that they might have shown the intelligence to see what I was actually trying to achieve through what I'd written. They might have seen that, in fact, I wasn't trying to berate the people behind the bad points of my post - but instead, I was celebrating the success of the good points.

Tomorrow: the effect on web stats.

I found this by accident, but it's been making me laugh. Although quite why he says 9EM I'm not quite sure - as it's certainly 9AM.

As I went onto the ITV Player website last night to find the episodes of Corrie that I'd missed in my old age, I noticed that everything had changed.



And, of course, having written a letter both to ITV and the local newspaper expressing my disgust at the waste of money, time spent, and the general changing-ness of the changes that were made to ITV Player tonight, I sat down and watched Corrie only to discover that nothing much had really changed.

Aside from developing into what looks like version 2 of the BBC's iPlayer website, the ITV Catchup service has little changed - it still doesn't really know its name - and it still insists on making me sit through various adverts that I don't understand the content or placement of.

The geek inside me remembers the days when it didn't matter that there were advert breaks on the programmes sent out by 4 on demand or ITV Player since advertisers were scared of the internet - but, of course, now I am faced with the prospect of looking at why smoking is bad, or why I should be using a glade plugin.



Two ideas that are juxtaposed surely? But aside from that, what I don't understand is that both 4 on demand and ITV Player/Catchup insist on showing you adverts AFTER they've finished showing you the programme you turned up to watch.

I don't understand why anyone on this earth would sit and watch these adverts when, even if they're going to watch something ELSE on ITV Player, they have to sit through the pre-roll adverts of the next programme anyway.

I similarly don't understand why the flash players can't be clever enough with the advert playing to realise that although I've skipped into the second section, after another of your forced 'advert breaks', i haven't watched any programme and therefore don't need to watch two sets of identical adverts one after another.

We need some regulations and a standardised player.

And LOVEFiLM to realise that using a non-standard port for their flash viewer isn't good for people like me behind a proxy server that judges you for going on the BBC website, and let allows you to download anything you want - including viruses.

You might remember that I had issues with not exactly knowing where the Postbox is here in Brighton.

Once I found it, I was happily using it when I discovered that actually there was another post box on the route from my flat to where the postbox I found was. I was most concerned, mainly because the postbox was bright red.

Not that I expect them to be yellow or green or anything, but because being bright red made it pretty much unmissable.
And now I am using it. Every other day, pretty much; the box delivers my LOVEFiLM discs back to their rightful place in Peterboughrough (no people want to live there, clearly, just DVDs).

But I do have an issue that every time I walk past the post box, or walk anywhere near it – I have to take a very sneaky look to see if it’s still there.

Walking past, head flies around and OH MY GOD. IT’S GONE. Only, it hasn’t – and I am just an idiot who missed it in the first place.
Oh well, heh.

From what I can tell, people do their utmost to avoid guaranteeing being anywhere at any single point.

I’m beginning to see another one of the unwritten rules of life coming into place. One of those things that just happens: like boys being afraid to touch one another, while girls are snogging at school. Like it raining when you put your washing out. Or like Jeremy Kyle.

It doesn’t matter how not busy you actually are, as soon as someone asks you “So, are you free?” – everyone feels compelled to make themselves sound busier by saying “ooh, I’m not sure.” “I’ll have to check,” “I might be cooking broccoli then”. Anything, in order to not commit to doing something at a certain time.

Why can’t you just say “Oh, I will but frankly, I don’t really want to because I’m not interested in doing anything. You could just – well, could you just email me? That would most deffinately be the best.”

“Infact, don’t even email. I can’t bare to see your name for that long. Like, on my computer screen. I think I’m gonna hang around in my pants and avoid you all together, to be honest. So urm, yer – could you leave please?”

“But this is my house?”

“Yes, but I’m here at the moment. Go. Just go.”

In all honesty, I can see why people now talk about “tying people down” – since it is the only way you can gurantee attention.
I’m off to buy some rope.

Following my last post, I’m wondering if perhaps I am a little bit insane.

Most people order products from somewhere, and expect them to turn up. The people they buy the things from say it’ll be delivered within the next 3 months and they sit back and wait.

Particularly with this – an extra battery that I don’t require in order to live my life, but which just improves the current situation – it really doesn’t matter when the package pops over from Hong Kong to England, and yet I still insist on having it trackable.

I still want to know where the item is. I want to know it’s EXACT location now.

I must know, as soon as I can, when it’s going to be sent to me. I want to know when it will turn up. I want to know where it is.
But does anyone know why I want to know in so much detail? Because I certainly do not have a clue.

If you or I owned some land that had, say, an old metal house that smelt slightly of urine and was in desperate need of replacement, then we would – or certainly I would – hire someone to do it.



Who knows, you might be a builder. Although the chances of a builder actually reading my blog is quite slim: hello if you are a builder. Please look away for the next 23 seconds while I spout some crap about metal (no, I don’t know which one) and wood (no, again, I don’t know which one).

Go and make yourself a cup of tea, Mr Builder and come back in a little while when I’ll be talking about stones and cement or something which you’ll understand. Go on, off you go.

I don’t even like tea. What a crap builder I would be. But I have been distracted like a woman who likes cardigans walking accidentally into a Marks & Spencer store that's having a cardigan sale.

If your builder then decided that he was going to take down the building, and leave it – in pieces – alongside the new building, along with perhaps a couple of those bags that builders love to hoard to collect ‘rubble’ in filled with just a little bit of something that builders need, and a few pieces of stray plastic which have been broken into shapes which render them not only useless but also completely feckless, like a teenager with 34inch waste and 7ft arms.

These pieces of plastic have no place in society, and should certainly not be allowed to take up any space in the world.
You’ve got to say that the situation I have described would probably lead to you being sued by someone for something like causing stress in a confined space, or for negligence against the builder who created the mess injuring themselves on a piece of plastic which the prosecution found no direct use for within 50 miles.

And yet, Network Rail seem to get away with this every day. You only have to travel on a train to see that when Network Rail’s contractors replace a bit of track, they leave the old bit by the side of the new one. Whenever they put some more stones down, they leave the spare there in a bag.

I suppose the stones, at least, might get used by some trespassing youths to break a few train windows, but other than that – I don’t get why.

I have been told I should stop worrying, but all I can think of is how irritating it is that the rail network needs a good hoover. I want to do it. Can I do it? Can I do it? Can I do it please?!

Orange, the mobile phone network, are wonderful and I love them. I've never before had anything bad to say about them - but they may have gone down a tiny little bit in my mind recently.

It all started on November 7th when I left Orange because they changed their terms & conditions to a degree which voided the contract - meaning I was free to leave 5 months earlier than normal. Having moved on lots since taking out the contract, I thought... "Yes, I shall" and went off and looked for the best offer away from my contract.

Fact is, the charges were an increase on the out-of-bundle costs - and I was significanlty exceeding my bundle on minutes each month - meaning things could have got expensive. I needed more minutes, and I got them. Double, in fact, for the same price.

But what I got was back on Orange again. There was nothing bad about that at all - in order to leave Orange I ported my number out to a temporary phone on o2 and then back into Orange.

But, apparently, in the process I deleted my notes and they thought I owed them a "buy out" of my contract. £198.27 and nothing less.

But because I'd got on-line billing switched on, and had no access to my previous account because I'd "left" according to them, I never actually got to see a bill - meaning I never paid it, and had it passed on to a company called NDR.

I called NDR to be told that I needed to make a payment on the account as soon as possible. I had waited 35 days after them sending the letter to respond and they could not hold my account any further.

So I called Orange and explained to a lovely person - called Peter - the situation. He took the initiative to put himself into a conference call with Orange's collections department and NDR and sort the situation out. It did take 45 minutes though, but it restored my confidence in Orange's ability a little.

But it does strike me as a little shocking that account notes are sorted by a phone number and not by account number when the numbers can be moved about freely. My number has already been ported 5 times - and plenty more in the future I'd imagine, so I must be causing recording problems everywhere!

We live in a world now where we can post ourselves a letter.


Once we’ve done that, we can track it as it reaches our local sorting office and then track it on its journey back too.

We can download our own signature from the internet a couple of seconds after the parcel has been delivered.

And we transfer data around the world almost instantly, every single second of the day.

And that’s all great. I’m not going to deny – it’s great. It’s really great.

But why, having a parcel number for an item which is coming from Hong Kong can I not track the item on the Royal Mail website, to see when it’s likely to turn up?

The parcel numbers issued in each country end in a country code – so that shouldn’t be a problem.
But no.

Having left Hong Kong, for all I know the parcel could be sat in the home of a grumpy old woman in Hull.

She may have unpackaged it, wondering what it was, only to become confused and try and include it in her famous casserole.

Would I know? No i wouldn’t. I’m going to go and post letters to myself.

I’ve watched this programme on BBC THREE for two weeks now and one thing has struck me about it that wouldn’t normally about programmes like this.


We all know that, to an extent, programmes have agendas. We all know that if you start showing a programme called “britain’s really disgusting food” you’re not going to see pictures of happy sheep being lead around a field for the fun of it by little happy men in green suits with bells attached.

20091112-b00d1gzh_640_360.jpg

No, you’re going to see a pig’s arse minced up and made into soup that’s sold as ‘chicken broth’. We all know that. We start watching the show with the knowledge of that. And although I didn’t, if you’ve seen Alex Riley’s previous shows then you’re likely to know what they’re going to contain – he is, after all, the self-proclaimed “Crap Food Connoisseur”.

But even after just 20 minutes of watching the first episode I’m already starting to see through how this programme has been put together. Outside all of the places they turn up to “protest” with a song (as seems to be becoming a theme for the show) they have made no attempt to contact the people before hand and alert them to the fact they’re going to be turning up. Or at least that seems to be the case.

Outside Lidl, which I was pleased to hear Alex pronounced properly, and not as Lidl themselves do as if they have suffered some kind of horrific dental accident over the weekend before the voice over recording, Alex raised money for medical training for members of Lidl’s staff.

The idea being that as, at that point, they were still selling food which contained hydrogenated vegetable fat – something linked with heart conditions – which might have given their customers heart issues while shopping.
However, upon phoning the press lady at Lidl – Alex was told “maybe if you’d have told us yesterday or this morning we may have been able to help you.”

Upon turning up at Mars, he was asked to leave – and had clearly not informed mars that he would be coming.
And if anything wanted to take any seriousness out of the show at all – the pitch with ASDA for human breast milk, where the ASDA Buyer clearly knew what was coming and was told to take it seriously, despite serving no real point whatsoever.

In all, the programme has some interesting things in it – like learning that milk contains puss in the USA, and that it can be imported without restriction, and that you can buy a lamb shank that doesn’t need to be refrigerated or anything for 12 months. That’s just freaky.

And the most shocking thing is, it clearly doesn’t have a small budget either – Alex travels to the USA simply to talk to a couple of people but, it’s not exactly wonderful representation of anything at all. And while it’s a good bit of fun, it just makes me shake my head at what it could so easily have been.

The most interesting thing you learn is that, actually, a lot of people involved in the less than ‘honest’ food production practices actually refuse to talk about the issue. Mechnically recovered meat is disgusting, but I eat it – and I’m fine with eating it. I know what it is, but I don’t see how it’s any worse for you in limited quantities than anything else.

And as for burgers with beef heart – I see less problem with eating heart than I do with eating liver. Or even worse, kidney. Kidneys filter urine. Heart pumps blood. And I’m happy to eat blood when I eat steak.

Whatever I’ve said, you need to watch the show if you eat food. And as far as I’m aware, you eat food – on the link.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nxcf3/episodes/2009

As I’ve said before, life at university is a little bit empty when you’ve not got much to do, especially when you’re on a campus so far away. A side effect of that is not really having much to talk about, or even much to make into fiction, because you’ve not actually done anything.


So what I’m doing is stretching the work out. Much like a fat person might stretch out some butter across an entire two slices of toast.
A fat person is not allowed much joy, like I am not allowed too much work. Yet.

Although according to something I read the other day, I should be doing a 63 hour week including the work I am doing independently. All well and good when you know what you’re supposed to be studying – but the terms “media” and “grammar” are not exactly specific enough for this.

Almost as if it’s a poke of irony, because of this I am eating a lot, I probably will end up having to be one of those people who do actually spread the butter thinly on their Ryvita.

There was recently a reasonably large argument for the fact that Britain’s first £1000 train ticket has been put into the big computer that sells train tickets.

It’s remarkable that such a long journey needs to cost so much, when by car the journey could be a lot cheaper and yet we are promised that public travel is cheaper, easier and a lot less hassle than driving anywhere, and therefore we should use it.

However, what amused me most about this story is that on the BBC article for the story, a person from one of the three train companies that sold the ticket (they’re all involved in a part of the journey) is that the ticket was available cheaper when booked in advance, and that actually no-one had ever booked the £1000 ticket, nor were they ever likely to.

Surely this completely destroys the idea of a price setting scheme of any type?

In my mind, prices are set based upon what the market will pay – the iPhone for example is a lot more expensive to buy, and on a lot more expensive tariffs than other phones which do similar things. However, people are prepared to pay (as much as they moan about it) the price that Apple want.

But Apple set that price knowing that people want it enough to pay Presumably, they did some kind of market research and discovered that it was fine. And I’m damn sure that if anyone were to come along and say “you know what, we’ve not sold a single one – but we could sell one!” they would be shot, removed from the company, cored and sold as some kind of juice.

If every business operated like the train companies selling this ticket did – surely business would stop working and the world would collapse? I forsee piles of rotten fruit costing £334 after they’ve gone off, and a golf ball covered in mud and smashed into many pieces, collected by a particularly slobbery dog and then packaged into a sandwich bag purchased from Tesco popping onto the market for about £17.

Just stop it. It can’t COST you that much to run that train. Are you simply taking advantage of the fact you wanted the publicity for posting the first £1000 train fare?

In the mean time, I’m sat on a train that goes 15 times as far as a train I get for £1.85 each way, for £4 return. Thanks guys – you’re doing a good job.

Sat here right now trying to use one of these so-called devices I am not convinced that this tradition of calling these devices laptops is entirely sound.

I mean, aside from the arguments that they heat up your testicles and make you infertile, and the argument that they heat up and cause the insides of the computer to break – there’s also the fact that human beings aren’t desks.

It might come as a slight shock to laptop developers everywhere that laptops, do indeed, not fit on laps for the simple reason that laptops are flat – and rigid – and laps are not, being laps and made of lap.

This makes them entirely uncomfortable, as what you’re actually trying to do is balance something rock solid and really hot on your lap. Which, although for some people might equal a good day – when you’re sat on a train trying to write a blog about how laptops aren’t laptops – isn’t really ideal for me.
Thinking about it though, it’s almost certain that with the advent of all these technologies we are certainly going to have an issue in the coming years.

Taking it from fact that the geek attributes (sweaty, greasy hair and acne) are all considered to be genetic ly inherited, we are going to be in a little bit of a problem in the coming years, as technology will stop advancing and instead of being able to reach the moon, we will instead be struggling to reach anything but our own rectums in order to scratch them, constantly moaning at our purple-haired wife in order to change the TV channel.

Why? I hear you ask, confusingly. Well, for two simple reasons: as computer power increases, so does heat, and in order for this to continue to advance, geeks need to travel while they work – meaning that they will heat up their testicles.

Secondly, having developed a wireless solution to everything in spite of the fact some nut jobs have decided that it’s bad for humans to be exposed to radio waves, scientists denying it and yet using the very same technology to kill of cancer cells (of course, when it’s doing good killing it’s worth admitting that it works – a bit like only admitting you broke the pope if you’re told the insurance will buy you a new one), the geeks will have been exposed to so many different strong radio wives from their laptops that they will simultaneously have been attacking their little army with heat and radiotherapy.

Geeks will become infertile, and we’ll all have to make do with a washing machine that can’t tell us how long it has left on its current cycle; doors that have to be opened by hand and a tube season ticket that has to be inserted into something.

Right now, I'm sat in the Starbucks store in the centre of Brighton. It's quite quiet, but then it is a Monday when the majority of people have gone home for something called "reading week."

This isn't something I get completely. Not because I don't understand it: the concept of a week spent reading is one I asm just about able to grasp and talk about, but instead because I do two degrees chopped in half and welded together by a Surgeon who has almost certainly not managed to pass any of his exams yet.

So in my haste to find something to do this afternoon, and to perhaps get some work done I decided that I would come here. I would do an Alex Trafford and sit with my caffiene-containing beverage and take in the world while writing a blog and producing something about the Public Sphere, whatever that is.

But I was almost fooled by the building site that I live on.

In fact, I was fooled - to the point that it took several weeks for me to figure out exactly how to get to the station and resulted in one of the most amusing phone calls Nick has ever recieved from me, as I tried to navigate through areas which said "danger, keep out, construction site" but were actually the correct place to go.

And why am I telling you about this, I hear you ask? Well, in honesty I'm not totally sure. But I know for certain that Nick will be writing about it on his blog since he found my actions to be quite hillarious.

Particulally the idea that someone who had to ask the security guard where the train station had gone might have snot running down their face and a carrot sticking out of their left ear while dribbling a little.

Almost as amusing as the idea of introducing some kind of Anti-Louis into the X Factor today, or that delivering that my digital media production tutor reckons he has the musical ability of a drugged, deaf, blind, dumb rat with a disease.

Drum and bass music is a little bit odd.


I’d never really considered what it was properly until I moved to Brighton and realised that – actually – it’s incredibly difficult to avoid it, since it’s actually everywhere, pulsating away like some kind of tumour on the face of a very pretty person who’s just a little bit sticky from all the drinks she’s had spilt on her.

To be honest, the only way I can explain to you what I think of drum and bass is to put it into language that I understand – and that is to compare it to language itself.

To me, drum and bass is the punctuation. When you listen to a normal music the beat is there. It’s there thudding away. It’s the old woman down the street who’s always there, filling in her little cards every time you go out so that if the Police ever need the information – it’s there. If you ever need to talk about the beat of the music, it’s there.

Meanwhile, you’ve got the bass – it’s there too. It’s the old woman’s husband. She’s in the window, staring and writing things down. She’s still going. She’s cutting the hedge, but all the time she’s watching. She might go inside for a while, but we all know she’s there. The man is a bit grumpy, and just grumbles along in the background.

Meanwhile, we get everything else over the top – and sometimes, if we’re very lucky – we get some lyrics. In terms of language, drum and bass is the punctuation.

And for some reason, probably because they forgot to go to school, the people who developed drum and bass decided that it would be perfectly OK to form a sentence like this:

!!!!.....,,,,,,,......!!!!......;;;;;;;;;;,,,,,,,,;;;;,,,,;;;;;,,,,!!!!!!!!!////////!!!!!!!!,,,,,,,,!!!!!!!

And these people claim that drum and bass music has deep meanings. I had someone explain a song which to me was a series of beats on some kind of home made drum as a ‘romantic story’.

In all honestly, unless a the I can't believe it's not butter container was having a deep and meaningful relationship with a Petit Filous yoghurt pot then I can't really see this collection of banging noises with the occasional claxon as being that deep.

It would probably be safe to say that the semantics of that sentence are, rather, lacking in their presence, let alone their clarity.

Pretty much, they’ve started off trying to make a cheesecake and ended up making soup. And I really don’t like soup. Or tomatoes.