So January's finally drawing to a longed-for close, praise ye the Lord and all his works. Ah, sweet January; grey, dull, grimly unpleasant weather to accompany the month-long feeling of nagging disquiet caused by one's inappropriate antics on New Year's Eve, that annual anticlimax of note only for the crushingly predictable loss of your dignity, memory and mobile phone.

As if that weren't bad enough, every year the hangover isn't just a day but a month – ghastly, po-faced, self-denying January, when suddenly everyone is cutting back or quitting or signing up or, I don't know, atoning for their sins through autoflagellation and mortification of the flesh. Forgive me, father, for I have binged. Honestly, there's nothing so distressing as watching the people you love - or at least tolerate - steadily letting withdrawal symptoms replace their personalities; particularly when you all know, deep down, that the quit-the-fags resolution will be doing well to make it to February, they'll spend £400 on a year's gym membership that they will use six times, and the month-off-the-drink thing doesn't actually do them any good, it just makes them give off a faint whiff of sanctimony and self-righteousness. It's as though London has suddenly filled with hundreds of Moby or Madonna or Gwyneth Paltrow clones, a whey-faced, shambling procession of bloodless, macrobiotic killjoy zombies.

The worst thing about all this is that I could tolerate this if there was at least some way to distract myself – something good on at the cinema, maybe, so I could stay out of the way of the abstinent hordes and their incessant weeping. But no, January is the month for jettisoning those not-quite-straight-to-video simpleton-flicks on a public beaten into corpulent submission by Christmas excesses of food, drink and Home Alone movies; hence being stuck with such timeless gems as The Holiday (Jude Law and his increasingly implausible hairline meets Cameron Diaz's village-idiot grin in Surrey-based saccharine-fest; have mercy, oh Lord) or Employee Of The Month (a spectacularly knuckleheaded comedy, the entire marketing strategy for which seems to be "you might get to see Jessica Simpson's tits!" You won't, by the way. I personally guarantee it). No, there's no comfort to be found at the multiplex.  Thank God this thirty-one-day purgatory is nearly over and ordinary life can start again. There's only one thing for it, really; next year, I'm buying a large bottle of own-brand gin and a box of jam doughnuts, checking the broadband connection's working, and locking myself in my room until February 1st. In fact better make it the 3rd, just to be on the safe side.

One of those days... you know, when you wake up with your heart singing hymns of glory and your mind filled with cosy domestic possibilities, a life with a comely and unspoiled 20-year-old medical student stretching before you like the Yellow Brick Road, and by eleven AM you're just one more washed-up superannuated loser with nothing more than a broadband connection and his right hand for company. "I'm a man of constant sorrow," sang Bob Dylan, "I've seen trouble all my days". Exactly, Bob. Exactly.

Food is as cinder and ash in my mouth; the happiest tune is a funeral dirge, and Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps feels like a Merchant Ivory adaptation of something particularly depressing by Kafka or Dostoevsky, although that is, of course, a wild improvement. Too numbed even for tears - which is a good thing as I don't want to short out my keyboard - I sit here empty and bewildered, waiting either for the sweet merciful release of death or for the Friends double bill to start at five. Whichever comes first.
 
Essentially, a (very) brief liaison ended this morning, in case the subtext was too cleverly concealed for our more crashingly literal readers, which has annoyed me somewhat. And the Starbucks banana muffin I ordered was insipidly horrible. Bad day all around so far, really. Never did get the hang of Mondays.

Like I say - this tends to be an argument that I stay out of. It's women's bodies/right to choose vs the ever-thorny problem of when a foetus becomes a baby, and I don't profess to have all the answers. I do, however, profess to get royally pissed off when people behave like a bunch of cretins. And this, I'm afraid, is one of those times. What the hell did you expect the pictures to look like, you fools? An inflamed appendix?

Right, background story first: I'm a student again. This will be less than a surprise to people who know me, and who know that I tend to shrivel up like a salted slug if removed from the academic environment for more than twenty minutes or if asked to work for a living. For that matter, people who've never met me and who stumbled across this page while searching for donkey porn probably won't be that surprised either, since they never knew I left university in the first place. Or went there. Look, I'm digressing.

Anyway, the reason this is backstory is that the other day I was in Morrison's at noon on a Wednesday. There are only two types of people who are in Morrison's at noon on a Wednesday: one, students; and two, scum*. Corduroyed students, wandering the avenues buying endless cans of tuna and baked beans with student loans and trust funds, and wheezing plebeians stumbling to the kiosk to blow their hard-earned gyro pennies on Lambert and Butler, own-brand gin and scratchcards.

I dunno, it's not much of a point, but this saddens me. Far from throwing off the chains of their capitalist oppressors, the modern proletariat are using their meagre resources to buy bigger, better, more addictive chains, with the tax revenue going straight back to their capitalist oppressors. Karl Marx is buried up the road in Highgate Cemetary, less than two miles away; I'm half-tempted to go up there and listen to his grave, to check whether I can hear spinning.

If only they were all nice middle-class types like me, eh?

*Those of you who question the distinction between the two, now is not the time, okay? If it helps, let's say "student scum" and "unemployed scum". Happy now? Good.

Well; after yesterday's horrible moan about how terrible I feel and how much my legs hurt, here's an update. Essentially - now that I can walk unaided and mount my bike without whimpering like a kicked puppy - it has become clear to me that I am an unstoppable man of iron, a whippet-swift athlete who has claimed a place among the prestigious top 11.6% of all Run Londoners (and that's official) with a time of 46.01 minutes. My body is a temple. A slightly ramshackle temple, yes - a run-down Welsh Methodist chapel eight miles outside Oswestry, perhaps, with a leaking roof and cheap pine pews - but a temple nonetheless. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Still hurts a bit, mind.

You people - you know who you are, with your lithe, athletic physiques and limitless stamina and unshakeable sense of self-worth - sicken me. Yes, you, the ones who take all this "exercise" and play "sport" and stuff without suffering twinges and cramps and unending background achiness. I bet you never pull a muscle in your arse going on some poxy training run for a feeble 10K and have to limp around like a gout-ridden septuagenarian for three days. In fact, I bet all your injuries are proper, sporty-type injuries involving hamstrings and quadraceps or anterior cruciate ligaments and such. I bet you can walk up and down stairs unaided the day after you play five-a-side for a couple of hours with a bunch of overweight cloggers, instead of clinging to the bannister as though it were a life-belt and hauling yourself up like a rock-climber.

Basically, I did this Run London thing yesterday and I'm having real difficulty with the staircases in the library. Damn my creaking body.

Oh, the joyless task of searching for gainful employment. I managed to put it off as long as I could - I left school nearly seven years ago now and have at no stage been in any danger of finding a career - but I suspect that, two degrees and two gap years down the line, I'm running out of things to hide behind.

I don't want to bore people with the usual self-indulgent blog crap - I can usually bore people in far more inventive ways than that - so I won't blither on about all the various jobs I've applied for; either insultingly shite or hilariously overambitious, in the main ('Vacancy: editor, The Guardian', that sort of thing. Why not aim high, eh? Eh? Oh). Nor will I bemoan the fact that there are very few adverts in the jobs pages saying 'Philosopher Wanted', because a) I knew that when I started the course and b) they used that joke in Friends about nine years ago.

I will, however, point out something I consider to be discriminatory employment practice of the most flagrant kind. You never see adverts saying 'The ideal candidate will be a white middle-class male between 25 and 35', do you? No; and rightly so, because it would be horribly bigoted. And yet companies still feel able to publish adverts saying 'The successful applicant will be outgoing, sociable and go-getting, with a can-do attitude, a strong work ethic and a proven ability to work to deadlines'. Pah! I thought Britain was a grown-up, civilised country, proudly free of such discrimination. Where are the high-paid jobs for indolent, apathetic miserablists with time management problems and no friends? I tell you, it's a glass ceiling for us workshy bastards. I'd start a campaign, but (and I'm sure you can all see where this lazy punchline to a lazy piece is going, so: all together now -) I can't be arsed.

I don't remember much about the Highway Code or anything to do with my driving theory test, despite having to (shamefully) take it twice, as it is now the better part of a decade ago and, as I have driven a total of maybe thirty miles in the last five years, I have not had much occasion to recall it. However, one item sticks in my memory as it came as such a shock. Car horns are, apparently, only meant to be used to alert other road users to your presence.

I know, it still sounds funny after all these years. Only to be used, do you see, to alert other road users to your presence. My seventeen-year-old self was surprised because - in his youthful naivety - he had rather assumed that car horns were used largely to vent impotent anger in traffic jams or to frighten pedestrians, like all the grown-ups seemed to be doing.

Why, then, has this undeniably useful and important tool become such a noise-polluting weapon in inter-automobile disputes? It's not just a feature of road rage in general. After all, cyclists - among whose number I am generally proud to count myself, except when my lycra-clad brethren go hurtling through a red light at a crossing, scattering dazed schoolchildren like so many uniformed skittles - are just as aggressive and thoughtless on the roads; even the most mild-mannered find themselves snarling profanities through taxi windows or at retreating exhaust pipes when they perceive themselves to have been cut up. However, you very rarely find one ringing his handlebar-bell repeatedly when stuck behind a Dyno-Rod van at a junction. In fact they are almost only ever used when pedestrians walk out in to the road without looking, to alert them to the cyclist's presence. Used, in fact, just as car horns should be.

Here we have a discrepancy. These two items, the bell and the horn, are both designed with the same goal; that of announcing the user's presence to the world around them. Yet only one gets used by macho idiots as masculinity boosters in traffic jams (and yes, it is mainly the men who overuse their horns. Read into that what you will). Why? Because the cycle bell sounds ridiculous. That's why. Can you picture the scene? 'Look where you're (ting!)ing going, you (ting!)ing (ting!)! And you've got (ting!)ing indicators - (ting!)ing well use them!'

The car horn, on the other hand, is a blaring, roaring noise that can be heard two streets away and doubtless makes the driver feel like a great big alpha-male Man With A Capital M, with vast bubbling torrents of testosterone surging and frothing through his arteries. I'm sure if bikes were equipped with comparable penis-extension machinery, cyclists would be just as obnoxiously inclined to think of themselves as battle-hardened road-warriors or whatever and honk everyone who doesn't actually bow and scrape before the wheels of their mighty ego. In fact, look at those Hoxton idiots on wildly cissified scooters called Piaggios or Vespas - you'd think they'd be too embarrassed to call attention to their bloody glorified lawnmowers, but no; give 'em a horn and they'll honk away like they're driving a Sherman tank, despite their mode of transport being more Alexander McQueen than Steve McQueen. It's not the vehicle - it's the noise.

It seems, then, that the answer is clear. All new cars should be required, by law, to have car horns that sound stupid. Americans sometimes seem to do this voluntarily by having them play the first two bars of The Star-Spangled Banner or somesuch, but this doesn't go far enough; and besides, self-regulation never works - ask the Press Complaints Commission. No. We must call for legislation that says every car built after June 2006 must be fitted with a horn that either a) makes a loud farting raspberry noise, preferably a slightly wet one that squeaks a little at the end; b) does something irredeemably girly, like playing the theme music from Dawson's Creek or reading the driver's horoscope for the month; or - and this is my personal favourite - c) shouts to the rooftops at ear-splitting volume 'THE DRIVER OF THIS VEHICLE HAS HILARIOUSLY SMALL GENITALS.' That should make sure they only get used when necessary.

It is one of those facts of difference between the sexes that regrettably begets friction, but should, really, be celebrated. Men (broadly speaking) see the point in watching sport - women (broadly speaking) do not. By comparison men struggle to see the purpose in low-carb diets or hoovering beneath sofas (I mean - who sees it? Aside from when you hoover there, of course. A problem easily avoided, in my view). This is not a scenario where one side is Right, and one side is Wrong; each side contributes its own tiny coloured tiles to the glorious mosaic that is human life.
 
However, some women - from a standpoint, no doubt, of generosity of spirit - seem to think it their duty, when their bedraggled menfolk stagger home from the pub or match with beer-drenched breath and impaired tandem walking, to enquire after the game. "Who won?" they may ask, or "What was the score?" or - in worst-case scenarios - "did they play well?"

It is important to stress at this point that many women genuinely care about sport. And, likewise, many men care not at all. But the men who don't care are far more likely to be willing to tell sport-likers in no uncertain terms how resolutely uninterested they are in the antics of 22 men they don't know scurrying around on a green rectangle for an hour and a half. Hence, I aim this at women who don't care but feign interest.

Showing an interest is not, as seems to be generally believed, a Good Thing. It is the very reason teenagers cringe every time their mothers start trying to nod appreciatively along to Screaming Incomprehensibility or whatever popular beat combo the kids are listening to these days; people who don't care about something pretending that they do is invariably obvious and mortifying to those who actually, genuinely care. But, because we are not all surly teenagers any more, we do not have the easy option of shouting "I hate you and I never asked to be born!" before storming out of the room to avoid the offending impostor. Instead, we find ourselves having to engage with them, which is why the following conversation is so distressingly common in households nationwide:

M (visibly intoxicated): "Hi (hic) love"

F (brightly): "Hi! How was the game?"

M (evasively):"Er... you know..."

F (failing to read signs): "What was the score?"

M (downplaying his disappointment as best he can to avoid the inevitable): "3 - 1 to them in the end, but..."

F (ruthlessly trying to be supportive): "Oh dear! Did they not play well?"

M (cracking under continued questioning and making fatal mistake of giving in-depth answer): Well, frankly, it was an absolute robbery. The first goal was five yards offside if it was an inch and how [x] stayed on the pitch I don't know; they'll be picking his studs out of [y]'s femur for months. Didn't even get a foul! And the handball in the box was so obvious myopics facing the wrong way in row Q should have spotted it, never mind the linesman. Add that to them throwing themselves to the floor like gymnasts on the mat every two minutes and..." (voice tails off in face of sudden, freezing temperature)

F: I want a divorce.

No-one wins in these situations. The man has to either relive painful defeat or cheapen glorious victory by explaining it as though to a child; the woman has to listen, at length, to a diatribe in which she has precisely no interest. It is comparable to a man asking after how a woman's horoscope is that week - he cares not at all about such obvious piffle, she knows he cares not at all and (if he has any brains whatsoever) he knows she knows he knows. Why ask? It often seems to be a seductive technique by whichever sex employs it: but men are baffled by women who pretend to enjoy football (we're not going to play you at it) and women seem to find men who know what Scorpio is currently doing to Neptune a little effeminate and creepy.

Hence my new campaign - Honesty in Intersexual Conversations. Not all intersexual conversations, obviously - time-honoured dishonesty regarding bums looking big, size mattering, hair thinning and dresses suiting is absolutely vital if we want to coexist peacefully - but if we start with football we can out the rest of the details later.

Yes, yes, this is an unlikely title for a blog of mine. Yes, I am a Guardian-reading beard-wearing* liberal and proud owner of several pairs of muesli sandals. Yes, The Mail on Sunday is Britain's favourite mid-market poisonous weekend hate rag. Yes, I disagree with the editorial line on such policy issues as precisely how high to string up the asylum-seeking hordes (it's the only language they understand, you see. Apart from Romany, or Kurdish) and whether the coming Apocalypse will be presaged by spiralling house-prices, doubtless caused by a collapse in family values and the horrible bottom-sex that the homosexualites get up to, or so I'm told and I don't want to know any more about that thank you very much.

But, you see, I work for it. It's a two-week temp placement, I have marginally less responsibility than the Sellotape dispenser (in that people actually get quite worked up if they can't dispense Sellotape, whereas I could comfortably disappear for three hours before anyone so much as noticed) and it would be a vast glorification of my role to describe it as "bottom rung". But nevertheless...

...it's fun. I haven't had a job that was fun since I was in in my teens. Admittedly I have nothing to do - I'm writing this at work, for instance - and what work does sporadically come my way could be done by a well-trained Mynah bird or, in this age of technological marvels, an answerphone; but what of it? I get to hear tales of the Glory Days of British journalism, when all the newspapers were on Fleet Street and "you'd wake up at 7 on the pavement outside Associated Press and be drinking again by half eight". I get to see tomorrow's news today, quite literally, as I was once (highlight of career highlights) entrusted with a bit of proofreading. Best of all, I got to watch the Merseyside derby at work with my feet up on the desk while eating upmarket bangers 'n' mash from the in-house restaurant. It's the perfect job. So what if I can hear the cher-ching of my soul being run up on the Devil's till (9.08 per hour plus holiday pay; I can't complain, it's a good price for a soul in as bad a condition as mine)? You envy me. Yes, all of you. Admit it.

*not literally. Those who know me may remember my ill-fated flirtations with beards in the past, which came in various guises but were all centred around a basic theme of gingerish-pubic-hairs-on-underside-of-chin. I looked like a bellend and I realise that now. But in my heart I'm a beard-wearing etc. and so on.

It doesn't matter, to these black-winged storm-crows of popular culture, that their incoherent banter fails to stand up to even the most cursory of cross-examinations. After all, if you believe in this bollock-wash, you're unswayable. It's true. No-one in the history of the world has ever been persuaded away from their daft bloody astrological security-blanket. Children should be accepting of what others tell them (it's important that they are, and that they don't go and test statements like "don't talk to strangers") - grown-ups should be sceptical and questioning. Instead a depressingly large number of otherwise-intelligent people continue to throw money at Grant and Cainer and other cynical abusers of other people's credulousness or need for reassurance in a confusing world. Three hundred years ago during the Enlightenment, there was a hope that the time for supernaturalist explanations of the world was on its way out; that religion had largely had its time and that Reason and Science would replace it. Now science has enough in its armoury to explain almost everything - human consciousness, the nature of sub-quark-scale physics and what originally caused the Big Bang are, I think, the proper big questions remaining and it is possible that they can't be answered. And fewer people in Britain describe themselves as "religious" than ever before. But instead of these people joining the cohorts of the Enlightenment, instead they gather under banners of Zodiac signs and healing magnets. I sometimes wonder if it's time for a new Inquisition.

People who drive to the gym. Or take the bus. Surely this is the daftest thing in the world? Particularly those cretins who drive (or take the bus) to work, drive (or...) home and then drive/bus to the gym where, almost without fail, they will go on a God-damn exercise bike for an hour before driving sodding home again. Admittedly some of them will go on a treadmill, but this makes not the blindest bit of difference, let's face it. Why? Why bother? Now I don't want to be one of these cyclevangelists you get who go on about the health and environmental benefits of riding your bike, but sod it. I am one. So it's too late, really, and there's bugger all we can do about it. Anyway. Observe.

1. Drive to work. Poison the atmosphere, grow yet fatter, and spend money for the privilege.
2. Drive from work to home. Ditto.
3. And then from home to the gym.
4. At the gym, hand over more hard-earned cash in exchange for the opportunity to stand sweatily in a room full of fat middle-aged people in ill-advised lycra desperately trying to make up for half a lifetime's self-neglect by running on a glorified sodding hamster's wheel for an hour. Develop a yeast infection and chafing down your thighs from your Aertex micro-shorts.
5. Shower. Catch a verucca, and cop a disconcerting eyeful of an elderly man's genitals peering out bashfully from under the fleshy apron of his gut.
6. Drive home. Poison atmosphere etc. and so on.

Alternatively:

1. Cycle to work. It's free. You get fit.
2. Cycle home.

This has never struck me as a complicated decision to have to make. Perhaps I'm missing something.