Now we've kicked into 2008, I think it's time for my annual review and my ideas for 2008

2007

Bad things from 2007:

I lost my job and have been unemployed since November.

My beloved Fiat Cinquecento got written off by a complete bastard, and now I've got to go to court because of his lies.

Gordon Brown, the world's most grotesque Scotsman, became Prime Minister

Eurovision was a complete farce.

The England football team were crap, something which really showed itself when they failed to qualify for Euro 2000-and-whatever.

The Harry Potter series came to an end.

My goldfish Freddie died.

George Bush is still in power, even though he is a complete half-wit.

I still live in Croydon.

Cliff Richard is still alive and making music.

Good things from 2007:

The smoking ban came to England, making a trip to the pub all the more pleasant.

I got a new car (a Ford Ka).

Lewis Hamilton bought a little bit of fun to F1 racing.

Top Gear was hilarious in every way.

I saw the Stereophonics live.

Richard Hammond returned to Top Gear fresh faced and ready to get back into fast cars following his high-speed crash in 2006.

I dressed as a pirate for my birthday.

I went to Egypt and saw all the cool ancient stuff.

I went to Rome and saw even more cool ancient stuff.

After a shaky start to the year my health improved, and has remained in a pretty fancy state.

What I want to see in 2008

Better weather. Another heat wave would be nice.

A new job – I'm fed up with being unemployed.

Cliff Richard announcing his retirement.

A big fat lottery win for me.

Moving away from Croydon.

Further improvements to my health.

A cap on immigration and the destruction of the something-for-nothing culture, so that hopefully the chav population will start to go down.

A real progression in my life.

Hello Friends,

I have decided to quickly pop my latest thinkings on here, before I forget about them.
Some of you may be thinking "I bet she rants about immigrants like usual" but have no fear, that crazy musing will come later. The rant has been written (in my new shiny notebook) but may be deemed just a tad too mean to people from 'Elsewhere' so I'm going to tone it down a bit first.
Instead I will be introducing my latest thought - where do hippies get their excuses from? I'm fed up with watching TV and seeing hippies telling people that they do drugs because they "have loved and lost", or were "unloved as a child and turned to drugs for comfort". How fucking boring! If they're as high as they say they are, surely they'd have come up with better excuses than that!
Here are my new Hippy Excuses, that I believe should be used -
- "I've been depressed ever since the guy at the beach told me I was too big to ride the donkey"
- "My buddy told me that dope warms you up, which is just what I needed after the funky pink elephant took my coat...and my trousers"
- "Marajuana makes you see better in the dark, like carrots and glue"
- "Smoking joints is cool...my mum said so"
- "I find things funnier when I'm high - it's like the ASBO and the court appearance are as jolly as a visit to the circus"
Hippies try to bullshit their way out of everything; surely they've got enough brain cells left to do it well!

And that is the end of that.

When I heard the news that my home town of Croydon was to be blessed with a Primark I practically jumped for joy; finally I could buy all my cheap clothes without having to go to Bromley or Lewisham.

Why didn't I see the problems back then?

Having a Primark in Croydon has destroyed me. There are so many things that have gone wrong since its opening, all of which have killed a little part inside of me.

Firstly there's the fact that Croydon plays host to the Home Office. This means it is full of people from countries that I've never heard of, and probably only existed for a year or so before it was taken over by President Bush. They might as well be paying for their stuff in cattle cos they sure as hell don't seem to know what a Pound is (until the government starts filling their pockets with them – then they have more money than me).

It's also meant that my cheap fashion cover has been blown. I used to be able to stroll round Croydon in the knowledge that not many people would be able to tell where I got my constantly updating wardrobe from, but now everyone has it and I will be shown as the cheapskate I am.

I could go on about how packed it is in there, and how you can't turn around without seeing a small child being dragged around by their hair by their own mothers (who will then no doubt start stealing shoes by hiding them in the child's buggy), but that would just be petty.

In fact, Croydon Primark has one good thing about it – Bromley Primark.

If you go to Bromley on a weekend now, you can peruse the Primark shelves at a dignified and leisurely pace. It doesn't look like a jumble sale (all the clothes are still on the rails) and you don't have to queue 3 hours to get served by someone who looks like they skipped a few stages in the human evolution process.

So you'll still have the problem of people knowing where your clothes came from, but if you got yours from Bromley there's less chance of it having a footprint on it.

Or you could always just go to Peacocks.

For those of you who wonder what I get up to in my spare time, I will now tell you. My life is pretty much the same as ever before; I still work in Self-Storage, and I still write ridiculous pieces of chatter and post them.

However, activity in this blog has been noticeably sparse and there's a very good reason for that. A columnist comrade of mine told me that to get the best out of your writing your feedback should come from stranger, as your mates will always feel obliged to bend the truth to avoid telling you when something is rubbish. Apparently, friends tend to avoid saying bad things about your work in order to remain your friends, just like how you have to tell people that their bum doesn't look big in that particular item of clothing (listen fellas, girls always know when you're lying).

So I listened to him, and posted my new stuff elsewhere, where random people picked at my dodgy grammar and my use of the word 'lush'. And this has been super-useful, as I realised that - except for when I'm really bad - my stuff can be quite good. Some bits and bobs even escaped the interweb world and got put on paper!

And that, my friends, is what I have been doing with my time!

I wrote this piece in the middle of last year, and with the end of university mere days away I figured it was an appropriate time to post it!

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At the end of the September 2005, I begin my third and final year at Greenwich University. If I get through it ok they'll put me in a curious-looking smock, hand me a piece of paper with 'degree' on it, and send me on my way. However, having a degree doesnt seem to be quite as useful in the real world nowadays - when everyones got one, what makes them so important?

Across my life there have been many different ideal career phases; I've wanted to be an airline hostess, a nurse, a pop star, a racing driver, a television/radio presenter, a director and a journalist, to name a few. Unfortunately, I'm too short to be an airline hostess, too angry to be a nurse, too tone deaf to be a pop star, not socially attractive enough to present, and too stupid to be a racing driver. The other two items on the list - director and journalist - are both things on the 'working on' list.

My degree had me directing some documentary bits-and-bobs, and right now I'm writing yet another slice of social commentary (you're reading one right now), but the main branch in the career tree happened when I was 16, and involved in a good old bit of breakfast show radio.

This all came about by accident, one morning I was listening to the Bam Bam Breakfast Show on Kiss 100, when the subject about what you have managed to blag for free in your life came up. My ability to over-exaggerate events that were pretty ropey in the first place nabbed me my first appearance on a popular public broadcast service, under the name Kinky Kim of Croydon. I was encouraged by the breakfast crew to go out daily and record further stupid stunts (to save them the effort of doing them personally, no doubt), making me look stupid in public places but boosting the opinions my school peers had of me.

So, all of a sudden, I was cool. I'd never been cool. In fact, the things I knew about being cool in high school involved the necessity of having nice hair, decent fashion sense and being good at netball; I possessed none of these traits, and therefore sat in the corner quietly bitching about the popular people, when subconsciously I knew that I was just jealous.

So what could I do with my new-found secondary school super-status? Enjoy an entourage of fans asking what the presenters looked like and asking for me to get them the presenters autographs (but obviously not mine; I wasnt famous enough yet)? Exploit the fact that people now wanted to be in my crew until I was the most powerful girl in school?

Well, no. In fact my fame was cut short by my abrupt removal from my lifestyle by a illness, which took me out of show business and away from the little bit of cool I'd recently gained. I was out of school for more than 3 months after a struggle with a brain virus, and when I finally returned I was no longer famous only for being the girl on the radio, instead I had become the girl who was in a coma. For a 16 year old, this is a crushing experience.

From then on I gave up on radio presenting. I knew I could do it - I'm very good at talking continuously - I'd just lost my chance and my will to get back into it. This also happened to the television presenting thing; my experiences at school made me realise that I was too uncool to be on TV, and that it was a lot of effort just to be squashed half way through the process.

So I went to college, got some pretty irrelevant A Levels and scraped my way into university with the help of a good old fashioned Disability Allowance (I guess being ill 3 years previously was finally proving its worth). I started university with a clear career path in mind - music video producer. That was it. I wanted to leave uni with the ability to get into that business, and I wasn't going to let anything stand in my way. But I started my degree and realised that there were lots of things that I could, and couldnt, do. So I dropped my career dreams and started from scratch.

So here I am, sitting at my computer, drinking a cup of tea and eating a Breakaway bar, thinking to myself, what the hell am I going to do when I wear my smock and get my piece of paper with 'degree' on it?. Because, after two years of studying a handful of different subjects my brain has become a big fat mush of confusion. Do I go to a video production company and say, look, Ive got a degree in Creative Industries and I can use a camera so can I have a job please? Should I go to a radio station and tell them I was a kid who did some stupid stuff on a breakfast show? Or should I stay here, perched on my swivel chair, and write rubbish for magazines and newspapers?

It seems that, although the term degree might look good to an employer, it cant answer your questions about where to go next. It's like an expensive agony aunt who doesnt reply to your letters, but instead puts you through years of arduous written papers and empty bank accounts. It messes with your head until the life path you planned becomes a pile of cotton wool.

So maybe its time to replant my career tree, and see where the new sprout will take me.

I just hope its not in France.

In honour of the fact that tonight I am going to an 80s themed party, I figured I'd talk about my feelings about the past. To quote from a James May article in the April Top Gear magazine - "time has a fantastic knack of throwing away the bits that were no good, and preserving the stuff that deserved to endure. It's why the past looks so appealing: you only ever see the best bits."
This is such a great statement, and so very true right now. If you switch to a couple of digital TV's music channels you will be greeted with 'Best Number Ones of the 80s' etc, when we all know that the 80s were, in fact, terrible. The only way we can look at the 80s without wishing we could erase them from history is by cutting them down to 'best of' lists and ignoring the rest.

The 80s are having a bit of a revival at the moment (Duran Duran's new album/'I love the 80s' t-shirts), and everyone's saying "wow, we had such a great time back then," but then they get out their photo albums to mull over their fond memories and scream when they see their old hairstyles.

To get inspiration for the costume Im wearing tonight, I watched the marvellously cheesy film The Wedding Singer with Adam Sandler in it. I was appalled! Did the 80s really happen that way, with mullets, tight perms and the moonwalk? Who thought that flamingo pink and mint green would look good together? The 80s had a few decent fashion statements; puffball skirts were not one of them. There were a few decent developments in music; 'Take On Me' and the 'Thriller' album for example but as soon as musicians got their hands on synthesizers the world was turned upside down.
Cars from this period have the same effect - I remember the xr2, the mk2 Golf GTI and the cool chunky Porsches, but bar a few more what else was there? A load of 'killer' angular rubbish. You know I'm right! Frankie no longer "Says Relax", I'm afraid.
Stuff is history because it has no place in modern life. I've got an orange hairdryer from the 60s that looks like a ray gun; it looks fabulous, but it burns my hair and smells like the insides are melting. I've even got a pink typewriter from the 1950s, not because I want to enjoy the retro experience of using it (it makes your fingers tired, and gives you a headache) but because I see it as an interesting trigger as to why things change. In its heyday it was great, but I wouldn't use it now because there are better ways to do the job.
Tonight I'm wearing a luminous pink t shirt with a green vest underneath it. My hair will be in a tightly curled pony-tail on the side of my head, and my eyelids will be garbed in neon green eyeshadow. I will look terrible. But thats what makes it worth the effort; its like a reminder to never look that way in real life again. Ever. Look back in time for a laugh, look forward for improvement. Cos tonight were gonna party like its 1985.

But thankfully its not.