A few things I need to do before I get round to watching 'The Crown' on Netflix


  • Watch all of Adam Sandler's films in reverse alphabetical order
  • Read Infinite Jest, twice
  • Vote Conservative in a general election, as an act of protest against UKIP
  • Change my dating profile to say I love going on long walks, but also staying in
  • Do an M.A. at Birkbeck on Drake and memes
  • While my son and I are having breakfast one day, stab myself in the elbow with my knife and look at him with tears in my eyes as blood seeps into my sleeves, while saying to him, "What is the worth of a person, in this life? In this world?"
  • Write an article for BuzzFeed ranking all the episodes of Carpool Karaoke to date
  • Get a steady girlfriend
  • Catch up on Glee
  • Post that birthday card to my grandmother
  • Hang up my Keep Calm and Carry On poster in my bedroom
  • Change my Twitter handle to something spooky in time for Easter
  • Enjoy a little getaway to Uganda with a coterie of fuckbuddies
  • Accept a knighthood, for services to finance
  • Watch a TED talk on 3D printing
  • Watch every single piece of filmed work featuring anyone who appears in The Crown except for The Crown, including all of Matt Smith's episodes of Doctor Who and whatever Claire Foy has done
  • Watch It's A Royal Knockout again
  • Write and star in a sitcom that's as good as Arrested Development
  • Become a farmer!
  • Grow a moustache for Movember
  • Give Katie Hopkins a retweet, bless her
  • Learn all the words to 'The Personal Wrapper' by Lou Reed, and perform it in New York on his birthday every year until 2042, when he would have been 100. Sample lyric: "Herpes, AIDS, the Middle East at full throttle/Better check that sausage before you put it in the waffle"
  • Check out what this autoerotic asyphyxiation business is all about
  • Read Rachel Dolezal's autobiography
  • Finally write my book, "Famous Gay Deaths"
  • Travel back in time and relive Princess Diana's greatest hits - Carling, the Taj Mahal, landmines, Bashir. You know what, she was bloody good value
  • Make a raft and sail it down the Mississippi
  • Invent the cronut
  • Pretend to die but actually still be alive, so I can attend my own funeral and scream at people for not crying enough, or failing to mention in their tributes that I was physically very attractive 
  • Go to Las Vegas on holiday
  • Go to Australia to live, for a year
  • Meditate
  • Go viral, but not online, just contract a really horrific disease, like in the film Twelve Monkeys
  • Tell a man a series of captivating stories every night for one thousand and one nights in order not to be decapitated, then become his queen
  • Get a selfie with David Dickinson that receives precisely 48 likes
  • Watch Hamilton, the famous rap musical
  • Make out with George Galloway to raise money for Children In Need
  • Plant a tree whenever someone mentions the number 13
  • Have an introvert explain introversion to me, again
  • Have a synesthete explain synesthesia to me, again
  • Teach my mum a choreography to Shake It Off, that we would perform for my father's 70th birthday
  • Read 'Pickled, Potted, and Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Preserving Changed the World'
  • Something with bagpipes, TBA
  • Explain feminism to some women while getting Mary Wollstonecraft's name wrong
  • Slip into a 50/50 coma 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Luigi Mangione

The Luigi Mangione thinkpieces have begun and most of them sound so lamentable and out of touch to anybody who has followed his story without immediately pursing their lips, uttering ten Hail Marys and shielding their children’s eyes, as to be practically laughable. For the Evening Standard, Mangione stands for a divided America; a thinkpiece in the Independent considers the online comments “less helpful than salacious”; France’s traditionally leftwing paper Libé published an op-ed calling for an end to the hero worship of Mangione.  On Instagram, the comments under this article immediately went hog-wild: “How legitimate is it for bourgeois newspapers to take part in this debate when they spend their time legitimising social violence?”; “Lol, Luigi rid us of a deadweight. While income gaps keep widening, you should expect us to revolt against those who benefit from the system”; “Good evening - no.” You can’t understand the phenomenon of Luigi Mangione if you aren’t online; indeed, ...
Read more

Thoughts on It's A Sin

Perhaps the biggest gotcha in cinema - or the most famous - comes in Pretty Woman, after Vivian (Julia Roberts) has been refused service in a high-end shop. Returning to the shop the next day, she decides on a whim to confront the snooty saleswomen who had spurned her, showing them the money that they missed out on. “Big mistake. Huge!,” she crows before waltzing off again, leaving the two women gobsmacked. Pow pow! It’s a little like a scene in a western, where the cowboy disarms an enemy and then saunters off into the sunset.  Russell T. Davies’ new TV show, about five friends in London at the height of the AIDS crisis, features what feels like dozens of these scenes - big heartswelling moments of characters smartly putting people in their place, before walking off, leaving their antagonist open-mouthed and speechless. One such moment comes when the gang employ a lawyer, Lizbeth Farooqi (Seyan Sarvan), to get their friend Colin out of medical imprisonment. At this point, the prog...
Read more

On getting older

Last week I was lying around on my bed with my kids, nattering about this and that, occasionally boffing one another with a pillow, and grabbing them for a kiss or a stroke of their hair. These are the times in which you see each other intently; when it isn't rude to stare at someone and drink them in. (I suppose those moments also happen post-coitum, when the intimacy of somebody else's presence makes you see them in another light, and you can revel in the curl of their eyelashes, the purr of their breathing and heat of their limbs.) The children seem to appreciate these sort of listless playfights we have, and of course I also cherish these times: the miraculous softness of their skin; their hair, bed-curled and gleaming; and the rot they come out with, a rag-bag of references, overheard opinions, absurd hypotheses and nonsensical babble. The intensity of their gaze can be ferocious, and they often poke at me, feel my moustache, jiggle my earring, and observe something unbidd...
Read more