The power of muesli

Along with quiche, salad and tofu, muesli is frequently portrayed as a food that is inherently effeminate and in some way shameful for real men to eat.

Well, I have been eating muesli for breakfast since the New Year (it’s T-325, in case you regard this as another harbinger of the apocalypse) and let me tell you: in the immortal words of Discharge, muesli ain’t no feeble bastard.

The Full English satisfies more, but it leaves one greasy, crapulent and feeling guilty. Fruit and yoghurt...come on. People only eat that (i) in hotels and (ii) for the sake of appearances.

Muesli alone has the power to keep me from feeling hungry until lunchtime without making me want to go back to bed. It is a freaking miracle food.

So why has it become so closely associated with bed-wetters and Liberal Democrats? Maybe it’s the Swiss thing.

So the story goes, muesli was invented in 1900 by Swiss doctor Maximillian Bircher-Benner to feed to the patients in his hospital, after he had been fed something similar by a mystical mountain-dwelling peasant on a hike in the Alps.

We like to think – don’t we? – of the Swiss as a bunch of effete bankers and diplomats, concerned solely with manufacturing clockwork devices and helping criminals avoid taxation.

And yet, this is a nation of hard-ass do-it-yourself mothers who:

1. Have seen off pretty much every challenger to their political and religious independence (apart from Napoleon) since the 14^th century.
2. Created the first ever democratic multilingual and multiethnic state.
3. Were, for much of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the go-to mercenaries for anyone wanting their enemies crushed underfoot, impaled on sea of pikes or chopped to pieces with a halberd. They were the goddam Chechens of the time.

And look at them now. Sat in the middle of a collapsing Europe, winding their cuckoo clocks, eating their Toblerones and telling the rest of the world it’s too poor to come in.

THAT is the nation that gave the world muesli. So mock my breakfast at your peril. 

Further developments in mind control

Some days I feel like I’m the only person in the audience of War Horse who just sees a load of people waving bits of Meccano around inside a pair of tights.

When I see advertising copy, I don’t think “I will buy that” or even “I am going to ignore that” – instead my mind is thrown into a paroxysm of trying to work out precisely why the hidden persuaders have chosen those particular words.

For example: for most people “better than half price” just says the same thing as “less than half price”. But if that’s all it means, why not say it in the simplest way? Are we so prone to influence that we will think negatively or your product if we associate it with “less than”?

“Better than half price” is the plain clothes copper at the rave – it almost fits in, but ends up standing out by trying a little bit too hard.

Previously, I wrote about the infuriating apologies for “any inconvenience this may have caused” issued by so very sincere automated railway station tannoys – but in the toxic aftermath of Xmas, my current least favourite phrase is “own it now on DVD and Blu-Ray”.

First of all, even if I had a Blu-Ray player, I wouldn’t buy it on both formats. Like 99.9 per cent of the rest of the population, I’d buy one or the other.

Oh, but if we say “on DVD OR Blu-Ray”, then we are telling you NOT to buy both. Which you might do. If we hadn’t told you not to.

I can assure you, that you telling me not to would not affect whether I did or not.

However, my real hatred in this sentence is reserved for the word “own”.

“Buy it now” is just soooo vulgar. Emphasise benefits not features. It’s not “hand over your cash”. It’s “Martin Laurence’s hilarious ‘Big Momma’s – Like Father, Like Son’ could be yours to treasure and cherish until the end of time, and to have buried with you, clutched in your loving, dead embrace”.

Why not just say “buy it now”? That’s what you WANT isn’t it?

However, the prize has to go the above-pictured description of Clover Light.

As a way of saying “this is not butter” while giving you the impression that it is saying “this is like butter” it is absolutely unsurpassed.

I even went to their website, and I still don’t know what Clover Light is.

Doesn’t stop me eating it though. 

Downton Abbey is not real

Many apologies to the in-house staff psychiatrist at the Daily Telegraph, but I’m going to have to break it to them, no matter how far back it sets their and their readers’ collective therapy: Downton Abbey is not real. 

There is no such place. The people in it are made up. None of this actually happened. 

In fact, Downton Abbey is an ITV Sunday evening drama. Like Wild at Heart, or Heartbeat, or Where the Heart Is, it is designed to send you off to bed, all sleepy, cosy and nostalgaic, rather than wallowing in the usual end-of-weekend black pit of despair.

You must let go of the tragic delusion that it is the most important thing happening in Britain. 

Thierry Ennui

God, I hate football. Well, allow me to clarify slightly. Football itself is ok as far as it goes I suppose.  I’m not completely averse to the attractions of kicking a ball. What I hate is as follows (in Miss World order):

3. Professional football.

2. People talking about professional football.

1. People talking about professional football like in a way that supposes it is any more important than – say - what happened on Coronation Street last night.

It's not.

Listen - talking about football and footballers is no different from talking about wrestling and The Undertaker. Having pictures of footballers in and amongst your personal effects is no different from having a poster of Edward Cullen on your wall.

It IS a soap opera. Have you noticed that the media spends more time reporting on managers' complaints about referees' decisions, "will he won't he" transfer stories and the humorous off-field escapades of "characters" than the actual results of matches?

There’s nothing that makes me want to chop off a nut more than the prospect of going into a pub that says “Big screen Sky Sports” on the outside. 

Here’s a little suggestion for newspaper sports editors. Why not rename your football supplement “Shouting Men”? That is invariably what you are going to put a picture of on the front of it.

Oh, and here’s a second suggestion – next time you think about how to make a pun using the word “Roo”, why not throw yourself in front of a train instead? 

The Second Seal is Opened

T-343: Isn’t it warm for January? Usually, West Yorkshire is frozen under an inch-thick carapace of ice at this time of year. COINCIDENCE? I don’t think so.

Well, if this is the end of the world, I must say it’s preferable to another winter of (i) being unable to drive up or down our road and (ii) having to walk everywhere very carefully, looking like I’ve bobbed meself.

I've not spotted any other portents of the end times, bar the unusually mild weather. 

I did see a seven-headed beast rise from out of the sea the other day. But when I thought about it later I realised it was a seagull trying to lift a plastic bag out of the canal. 

Dooooooh!!!

Mayan Apocalypse Liveblog

T-350: According to the Mayans, the world is going to end later this year. Specifically, on December 21 – so we will at least get to watch the Olympics first.

And so, as this final year progresses, I will be the first to you know about all the portents of doom as they happen, right up until the big moment when the planet is destroyed. At that point, I will hand over to the aliens, evolved dolphins or whatever that humanity will be passing the baton on to.

Either that, or I will turn to any remaining Mayans at that time and describe to you the look of intense embarrassment on their faces when it turns out that the conclusion of a 5,125 calendar year cycle since the date of their creation myth means nothing at all.

And when that happens, I will have very little to tell you – because there aren’t any Mayans to speak of and haven’t been for some hundreds of years, they having notably failed to predict the collapse of their own civilisation in the 10^th century.

Still, that major omission notwithstanding, I plan on taking the idea that the earth will crash into an as-yet completely undetected planet called “Nibiru” on a specific date later this year – despite the entire balance of astronomical evidence being against this hypothesis – 100 per cent seriously, and I will keep you updated accordingly. Only 350 days to go!