In this highly selective and meticulously thought-out guide, I shall describe some of the jobs that I have always dreamed of doing. Hopefully, you too can share my dream and take away a new, special aspiration from this essential guide.
1. THAT PERSON WHAT NAMES NAIL VARNISHES ETC.
While waiting for interminably late friends in Bristol, I developed the habit of popping into Boots and looking on the undersides of nail polishes to see their special names. These ranged from things like ‘sexier than sexy’ to ‘emergency red’, but it wasn’t until I ventured into an Auckland mall and came across a red titled ‘don’t Socra-tease me’ and a green dubbed ‘at your Que-beck and call’ that I truly fell in love with this profession. Ideally, the new names would be delivered to the boss in a Bond-villain-esque Russian accent – imagine, ‘Da, Boss, this milky-white polish I call “lactating just 4 u”, you like?’. I certainly do like.
2. ICE CREAM VAN MAN/ ICE CREAM VAN WO-MAN
Yes, obviously, we can all understand the allure of tempting little children out into the street with the promise of tasty goods. But what could be more enjoyable than pulling up beside a school, ‘Greensleeves’ blaring away, then as the delighted, chubby-cheeked youngsters flooded out of the gates, just eating all your ice-cream in front of their piggy little eyes?! Excellent Schadenfreude! Probably less excellent karma though, but we can deal with that when we’re all beetles in our next lives.
3. MASTER PUN-STER FOR DREADFUL PUBLICATIONS
Because, really, we all want to write a Cheryl Cole/ Jordan/ assorted footballer/ Simon Cowell – based headline for ‘The Sun’. If in doubt, just use the word ‘gate’ instead of a pun to produce sufficient scandalous effect – e.g, ‘TITS-GATE’.
4. FRONT-PAGE EDITOR FOR TRASHY ‘REAL LIFE’ MAGAZINES
‘I was raped by a transvestite ghost!’, ‘My ex-boyfriend cheated on me with a marmoset!’ ‘I’m addicted to marrying fences!’ and ‘I am very egg-rieved: the story of an egg irritating me and ruining my confidence with snide asides’ – all titles we love to see on the front of ‘Pick me up’. But we’d love to write them even more!
5. JESSICA FLETCHER
Yes, it’s everyone’s favourite mystery-solver, the sexy sleuth followed by light-hearted and tastefully un-graphic gruesome murders. We too want an address book that seems to include a million relatives, including those special Irish chums of hers that have such believable accents. We too want to solve murders in the same way every week. We too want to throw our heads back and laugh at the end of every episode, usually for no apparent reason. And we too DEFINITELY want her wonderful wardrobe.
6. AGONY AUNT
Why oh why can’t we do a B.A in agony-aunting yet?! This is what’s really turning our once great society into the degenerate mess that we’re in now, with no real morals or......(for rest of sentence, see any ‘Daily Mail’ article). Basically, I want to give advice!!!!!
7. HOST OF ‘JEREMY KYLE’- STYLE SHOW
In running with the theme of the last utterly desirable job, why not take your gentle counselling to a whole new level?! We’re in England guys, there’s millions of useless people out there – we should be taking advantage of their misery by putting them on TV and making MILLIONZZZZ! Since we all know that all Jeremy Kyle is qualified in is being a massive tit, surely we can be tits too?!
8. AUTHOR OF ‘MILLS AND BOON’ –STYLE ROMANCE NOVELS
Because all of us could literally piss out at least one of these novels in about thirty seconds. For those of you less enlightened than I, every one follows this formula: girl meets boy, thinks he’s a prick but for some reason can’t stop thinking about him. Girl and boy get together - cue lots of adjectives and talk of nipples. Girl goes a bit mad and suddenly imagines boy is cheating on her/ about to move to Peru/ actually a mass-murderer and breaks up with him. Cue the abundance of the word ‘wrenching’. Girl stops being mad, girl and boy get married/ have kids. Expand on that, throw in lots of words like ‘thrusting’, ‘pulsing’ and ‘phallo-centric’ and Bob is literally your uncle.
And so ends this definitive guide to jobs we will always dream of having, but won’t ever know how to get. Yes, our lives will always be empty if we cannot find our deserved niches in one of these honourable professions, but cheer up guys! With your trusty BA in hand, there’s always teaching!
Monday, 15 February 2010
Saturday, 12 December 2009
Star Wars!
In a recent bid to improve my seemingly endless affliction of ill-health, I decided to take it upon myself to endure a week or so without alcohol. Misguided, you might think, but I thought I’d experiment with these ‘medical’ ideas doctors and the government expound upon alcohol being detrimental to well-being. Therefore, it was on a sober Thursday night this week when I sat down to watch the final Star Wars movie – Return of The Jedi. Now don’t get me wrong – on a scale of science-fiction geekery I remain firmly entrenched in the ‘I like Alien 1 to 3, but show me a Predator or Star Trek episode and I’ll probably try to poison you. And definitely don’t ask me to fix your computer, I barely know how to plug it into the mains’ camp. However, Star Wars has always held a certain fascination for me, and it’s this that set me wondering about why it is that we so enjoy fantasy fiction – in all its forms.
Perhaps it’s that, as an ex-fencer, lightsabres represent possibly the most fun toy ever conceived. Swords are obviously wholly exciting and cool in themselves (I feel I should re-assure you at this juncture that I am definitely not some sort of anarchic mugger that assaults people with a full-sized samurai sword...promise!), but a sword that can slice through anything, make humming noises AND glow in the dark truly puts my array of dashing sports-swords to shame. On top of that, the idea of using ‘the Force’ would make life both far easier and much more enjoyable – from eradicating the necessity of getting off the sofa to fetch a beer (you can just pull it to you with your intense mind-powers, dontcha know) to the amusing prospect of insisting to anyone refusing you entry to some venue that ‘you want to let me in, you don’t need to see my name on the list’ just opens up a world of delight to be had by the blossoming Jedi.
And then there’s the possibility of using your powers for evil! Sure, normal human beings can be quite evil. Hitler and Stalin certainly had a good go and definitely made their way up several rungs of the bastard ladder. But surely the idea of being able to demonstrate your general pissed-off-ness by sending thousands of volts of lightning through your fingertips elevates you into a whole new stratosphere of evil. The ability to build a whole star dedicated solely to fulfilling your darkest desires and wontonly destroying any planet that even considers looking at you in the wrong way is also something that human fascists could merely dream of. Although that’s probably a good thing – without those furry little Ewok-things on our side, we’d be well screwed if Nick Griffin suddenly took to the skies and started destroying seaside towns all day.
However, it’s all this wishful thinking that draws me to my real conclusion. Whilst of course fantasy fiction allows us an escape from the humdrum vie quotidienne, surely it ultimately leaves us more depressed at our lack of special abilities? What child didn’t read Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials and then glare malevolently at the vague centre of their bodies, trying to transmit to their ‘soul’ their deep disappointment that it didn’t jump out of their ribcage and assume the form of a cuddly, talking beast to accompany and advise them throughout their life? And who didn’t gaze out into the night, hoping for an owl to swoop down and present them with an invitation to Hogwarts after the Potter opus? For any kid that spent hours trying to knock over a glass with their eyes or scrabbling at the back of every wardrobe they could get their hands on, fantasy fiction serves to reinforce the unpleasant idea that we are not as special as we think. And perhaps it’s that masochistic aspect of humanity that leads a 21-year old student who definitely should know better to wish once again that I also could have a special, humming, glow-in-the-dark sword to throw around as I run about saving the galaxy.. or even just on a trip to the pub - I’m not fussy if anyone’s got a lightsabre going spare...!
Perhaps it’s that, as an ex-fencer, lightsabres represent possibly the most fun toy ever conceived. Swords are obviously wholly exciting and cool in themselves (I feel I should re-assure you at this juncture that I am definitely not some sort of anarchic mugger that assaults people with a full-sized samurai sword...promise!), but a sword that can slice through anything, make humming noises AND glow in the dark truly puts my array of dashing sports-swords to shame. On top of that, the idea of using ‘the Force’ would make life both far easier and much more enjoyable – from eradicating the necessity of getting off the sofa to fetch a beer (you can just pull it to you with your intense mind-powers, dontcha know) to the amusing prospect of insisting to anyone refusing you entry to some venue that ‘you want to let me in, you don’t need to see my name on the list’ just opens up a world of delight to be had by the blossoming Jedi.
And then there’s the possibility of using your powers for evil! Sure, normal human beings can be quite evil. Hitler and Stalin certainly had a good go and definitely made their way up several rungs of the bastard ladder. But surely the idea of being able to demonstrate your general pissed-off-ness by sending thousands of volts of lightning through your fingertips elevates you into a whole new stratosphere of evil. The ability to build a whole star dedicated solely to fulfilling your darkest desires and wontonly destroying any planet that even considers looking at you in the wrong way is also something that human fascists could merely dream of. Although that’s probably a good thing – without those furry little Ewok-things on our side, we’d be well screwed if Nick Griffin suddenly took to the skies and started destroying seaside towns all day.
However, it’s all this wishful thinking that draws me to my real conclusion. Whilst of course fantasy fiction allows us an escape from the humdrum vie quotidienne, surely it ultimately leaves us more depressed at our lack of special abilities? What child didn’t read Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials and then glare malevolently at the vague centre of their bodies, trying to transmit to their ‘soul’ their deep disappointment that it didn’t jump out of their ribcage and assume the form of a cuddly, talking beast to accompany and advise them throughout their life? And who didn’t gaze out into the night, hoping for an owl to swoop down and present them with an invitation to Hogwarts after the Potter opus? For any kid that spent hours trying to knock over a glass with their eyes or scrabbling at the back of every wardrobe they could get their hands on, fantasy fiction serves to reinforce the unpleasant idea that we are not as special as we think. And perhaps it’s that masochistic aspect of humanity that leads a 21-year old student who definitely should know better to wish once again that I also could have a special, humming, glow-in-the-dark sword to throw around as I run about saving the galaxy.. or even just on a trip to the pub - I’m not fussy if anyone’s got a lightsabre going spare...!
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