I Don't Like Transformers

I have been meaning to do a blog post about my thoughts and feelings on Brexit and the possibility of a second referendum for a long while now, but as it seems to be still such a divisive issue I've instead opted to tell you about a 2017 trip to the cinema...

You see my generic and fictional mate Dave got on the What'sApp group chat and posted "Does anyone want to go to the cinema tonight?" Gotta say I was well up for it. My equally generic mate Tom was up for it, Dick less so, Harry really hates the cinema, Tim not a fan but felt it was better than just lazing in front of the TV all night thinking about how his Polish girlfriend has left him, Doc up for it, Barry never text back. Terry meanwhile did not want to go to the cinema at all. So just about, most of us decided we'd go to the cinema.

Dave immediately left the What'sApp group and made Terry the admin.

Few minutes later Terry texts the group chat again. "Ok guys, I've got tickets to Transformers: The Last Knight at 6:30."

Woah woah woah! I know I was up for going to the cinema but now I have to see Transformers, that's fucking mental!

"You have to respect the will of the What's App Dan!"

Harry is fuming. He doesn't even like films and now he's got a ticket for fucking Transformers. Tim is fine with it. He says the film is shit but anything is better than that whore of a Polish girlfriend who dumped him. Barry's like "well if I knew it was Transformers I would have text back 'no' and then we wouldn't have gone" No one cares Barry, you had your chance! Tom's still up for it, but oddly Dick is coming around to it as he's heard Anthony Hopkins is in this one so it's got to be good right? (Spoiler: its really not)

Guys, settle down. This group chat is getting out of control. Terry! What the hell do you think you're doing? There's so many good films out at the moment, why did you pick Transformers?

In this very simple of circumstances you'd think deciding to go to the cinema is one question, but if people say yes, you should find a list of the films on and then ask what film people want to see.

And here's the thing...what Tom? Yeah I know the ticket prices are stupid and popcorn is a rip off...well we've got the tickets now because you said you wanted to come to the cinema. You knew the price of popcorn before you texted back 'yes' that information was readily available, there's no point in complaining about it now.

Ooh, new message from Tim: "If we're going to the cinema tonight, I guess we're not going to Mick and Larry's joint birthday party tonight." No chance. We don't mind Mick but we don't really like Larry tbh. "Oh, ok, it's just Tam, who is organising the party, says we still have to pay for our share of the cost of the stripper because at the time we agreed to all put money in, we hadn't decided to go to the cinema instead...is that unfair?"

"Look we're going to see Transformers: The Last Knight at 6:30 ok!" texts Terry.

That's really soon Terry, doesn't give us much time to get in and eat after work. Why did you just arbitrarily decide to get the earliest showing? Surely we should have decided on the film before you just randomly set a time to go.

"6:30 is fine, there's plenty of time. By the way, is everyone happy with me as Admin of this group? I think we should spend at least an hour deciding if you're all still happy with me as Admin."

Christ Terry we don't have time for this! You're wasting time that could be spent getting a refund and tickets to a better movie.

Turns out most of us don't want Terry to run the group but we now have to run for the bus because he's pissed about with his stupid popularity contest this whole time. "Ok guys," he texts, "I'm going to make Patrick an admin on the group too."

Not racist, homophobic Pat! He's racist and homophobic and only has like 2 friends!

"None the less, I need him to give me a lift to the cinema tonight, so he's a group admin. Also is there a money tree/cash point en route guys as I owe him £100 for petrol?"

I thought you were skint! Mate you should have just cut across that wheat field out the back of your house, you'd be at the cinema in minutes.

"Oh Dan, you're so naughty."

I have to say Terry, I really think we should have been told you were going to see Transformers when you asked about the cinema and let us choose the films.

Here's the thing Terry, if there's no good films out, it might have been better for us all to stay at home watching a repeat of Mock The Week thinking about Tim's ex-girlfriend.

"You have to respect the will of the What's App Dan, we wanted to go the cinema!"

Yeah, I do, and even if I didn't want to go to the cinema, I would say "hey it'll be a nice night out, I'll get behind it, if there's a half decent film on offer, but if it's Michael how-can-I-fuck-up-ninja-turtles Bay the cost is too damn high. None of us voted for Transformers. Deciding to go somewhere and deciding what you do when you get there are two different things Thers---Terry!" Asking a follow up question doesn't ignore the first question or insult the people who asked it, it just gets us closer to choosing a film that everyone is happy with. I don't understand how you've managed to make asking the What's App group "Is everyone happy with the film I've chosen?" sound like it would be an insult to the What's App group members.

It's not a best of three situation. We accept that going to the cinema is what most people want to do. But I really wish we could all have chosen a film together. Wonder Woman and Baby Driver were both out that week, and I just realised the first series of GLOW came out that week too, something I didn't know at the time Dave asked the original question because it turns out as time moves on we learn more things, so I really should have stayed in.

I should say in all of this Jerry was on my side, but since his argument seemed to basically be "Well, we let all of our granddad's in the group and it was them who chose to go to the cinema and not to be nasty but they'll probably be dead before the end of the trailers," I thought, wow Jerry is a real cunt and I don't want him on my side.

Has anyone seen Dave by the way?

MAN DEVELOPS REPETATIVE STRAIN INJURY AFTER TAPPING ‘NEXT PAGE’ ON CLICKBAIT STORY

Frank Davies claims that as his day started he hadn’t even thought about 1999 teen romantic comedy She’s All That once this century.

But when one journalistic website offered him the chance to see what the cast of She’s All That looked like now, Mr Davies said “I just had to know.

“I knew that it would be unbelievable, because it said it would right there in the link to the article, so how could it not be?”

Upon clicking the link, Mr Davies was disappointed to discover simply a picture of what Freddie Thingy and The-Woman-Whose-Name-He’d-Forgotten looked like on the original VHS cover. After scrolling past the image and several adverts, he found hope for more with a ‘next page’ button.

Mr Davies pushed the button only to find a brief summary of the film’s plot, and all of the same adverts again. After closing the large advert that covered the majority of the page, he uncovered another ‘next page’ button.

The following page just contained the same advert multiple times over and a ‘next page’ button. “By now, my interest in what they looked like now was well and truly piqued. This was a mystery I had to get to the bottom of,” said Mr Davies. “Of course, it occurred to me I could have just googled it at any point in the last eighteen years, but I was too deep now,” he said so he clicked a ‘next page’ button again only to find a brief and factually inaccurate summary of Rachael Leigh Cook’s career outside of the film.

Mr Davies first became aware it was a problem when his wife returned from work to find him glassy-eyed and tapping at an iPhone whose battery had long since died. Mrs Davies took the iPhone from his hand and lead him to bed. Only to find his hands doing the same series of motions in his sleep.

“It was the perfect pattern,” she said, “Close the pop-up, scroll, click next, close the pop-up, scroll, click next.”

A statement on New-Media Advertising Corp website reads, “There’s one simple change that you can make to rid your life of clickbait.

“The simple change takes just two minutes [read more].”

The cast of She’s All That look around two decades older than they did at the time of the movie.

The Proposal

PARENTAL GUIDANCE: As this blog is on a personal matter, I'm sure there will be some mums, dads and nans reading it, so to avoid offence later on, I should say I swear a bit in it. Please ask your young children if it's ok for you to read this

I doubt anyone reading this will not already know by now but back before Christmas, I got engaged! Continuing the tradition that I think dates back to Victoria and Albert's wedding, we have a website and a blog. So this is my first entry in the story of planning the wedding: The Proposal.

First question that comes up often - it's the first thing that many people ask and it's something Leigh has asked me too - is "when did you decide to do it?" and in all honesty I don't really know. I couldn't put a date on it. I guess in my head around the age of 27/28 is when I think of people as getting married but that's clearly not a thing. Looking at The Independent's figures on it, apparently 32 is the average age, (but then The Independent has repeatedly told me I wouldn't believe what Lisa Kudrow looks like now on Facebook and I always have). The Independent is quick to add that that's the average for their first marriage too.

So over the course of about a year, it just gradually crept into my mind that I might get married. There's a couple of milestones in the last year too. We'd been living together a year and not killed each other, we'd got a cat and that hadn't died either, by now we've met most of each other's friends and family, been on a few holidays and been to a lot of weddings. That's just what happens in your late twenties. This is the first year that we have not been able to attend all the friend's weddings we were invited too as there were just too many going on. And driving home from weddings we always end up discussing what we liked and what we would do differently. So it just got in my mind that this might be a thing.

So The Plan, First thing we needed was the date, for a proposal. Being modern lefty types, we both flip the traditional gender roles in that I always remember the anniversary of our first date while she forgets until the day itself arrives (It was Thursday 21st November 2013. It's hard to forget the anniversary of what you love most in the whole world, so I do Doctor Who's 50th Anniversay - 2. I missed a very good biopic of William Hartnell for that date. I definitely don't regret it, but it makes me sad to think of all the couples who were perfect for each other who never got together before iPlayer). So our anniversary would be a nice surprise (option #1) and I'd also started dropping hints that we should go away somewhere around her birthday next year (option #2).

The Problem I have with option #1 is a proposal on our anniversary seems to me a little bit like saying "Well, we've been together four years...we might as well..." Like, "your four year free trial of relationship has now expired. If you wish to continue please hand over your credit card details." or "to be honest, it's been four years and Tindr is now huge, is Tindr even what the kids are using now? Let's face it, it's far less hassle for us just to get married now. It's been too long to be single." I didn't really fancy that subtext. Anyway, Leigh got a tour of the Harry Potter studios for her birthday and started planning to book it for our anniversary. Now, I like Harry Potter as much as the next man, but I don't love Harry Potter and I'm certainly not linking a huge moment in our lives to the franchise by proposing in the Chamber of Secrets. So that was that out.

Option #2 around her birthday on holiday was a nice idea. But presented problems. I know people who did the whole weekend-in-Paris proposals and you ask them how they proposed "Oh, it was perfect. We went to Paris............" Oh. That's the end of the story. Paris is the story. I didn't want the reaction to my proposal to be "oh, that's great. I hear Bruges is lovely." Yes, Bruges is lovely, but I am lovelier. This story is supposed to be about me!!! and to some extent about her too, I guess.

Plus the thing about a holiday is, to be honest, you then have to do it somewhere special and public. Getting engaged in the Premier Inn round the corner from Notre Dame is just shit, and if you're going to do that you may as well just have a long weekend at South Mimms service station on the M25. But I am not a fan of the public proposal. Some lad got engaged on the telly during the Ashes around the time I proposed, and it seems like the question there is less "will you marry me?" and more "how prepared are you to have everyone in this stadium think you are a dick?" You should never propose in front of anyone who doesn't know the full context of your relationship to date. So either do it somewhere private or take documentary and video evidence to share with the audience.

So with these options buzzing around in my head and the anniversary date coming close, I still hadn't made a decision. But I began reading a book by one of my favouite comedians Alex Horne called Wordwatching, in which Alex Horne tells the story of how he tried to get a word added to the dictionary. One such word he invented is Tkday. It means your ten thousandth day alive. Alex Horne also mentions being twenty-seven at the time of writing - the same age as us. I had very little time left before I turned 28, but I found a website that calculated these things, put in Leigh's date of birth and found out that her Tkday was 1st December 2017.

This felt like a perfect date. Alex Horne is one of my favourite comedians. And on an early date in our relationship we went to the Curzon cinema in Soho to see a documentary made by one of her favourite musicians Nick Cave documenting a day in his life when he was 54 years old - that film was called 20,000 Days on Earth. So it had relevance to our relationship and to each of us individually and it definitely still held the element of surprise. It seemed like it would be something nice and significant that I knew about her that she didn't know herself. And so it was decided.

It was decided near the start of October, giving me a little under two months to plan it. So the plan. As I said, I didn't like the emotional blackmail of a public proposal. So if we went out to 1) The pub we had our first date or 2) a fish restaurant she likes in St Albans. I'd either have to wait till I got home to do the ring or find a quiet, out-of-sight spot on the way home, but I worried that asking Leigh to follow me into some bushes or a graveyard at night might seem like I was proposing something very different (at best sexual intercourse/at worst murder (I wonder if in a post-wedding blog, I'll reverse those)). Although once I realised that there was a graveyard near both the restaurants, the temptation to rewrite the song Damnit Janet from our mutual favourite musical Rocky Horror was strong. Sadly I skipped all the poetry bits of my Creative Writing degree and so "fuck me, Leigh" was the best rhyme I could come up with. So at home it was.

My first idea was...I got her a make-up revolution advent calendar for Christmas the previous year which fell down behind the bookcase at some point on the 1st December 2016 and so still had 23 unopened doors. So plan A was to fish the advent calendar out and remind her of it in December 2017 with a 'replacement item' in Day 1. When she opened the door the ring would be cellotaped inside. Yep, that's right plan A involved buying the most expensive piece of jewelery I will ever purchase and cover it in cellotape, bluetac or even glue to get it stuck. I told you I was a genuis (not in this blog, but if you know me I've probably mentioned it).

Then I had a pretty evil but funny thought. That I should open up that advent calendar, stick the ring in day 24 and reseal it. Then when she opened the door on 24th December 2017, pretend I'd put the ring in it in 2016 and completely forgotten about it. I would pretend I'd been waiting for well over a year and had had to cancel some kind of flashmob at the last moment the last year and pretend to be horrified like the last year had changed my mind. As tempting as this was, Day 24 remains firmly shut until 2018 at the earliest.

In the end I decided to go with a simple, 10,000 day mock-up birthday. I got a hand made/decorated photo frame from a Christmas craft fair at work and put in my favourite picture of us and I stalked her Facebook to find an old photo of her in her goth-phase and photoshopped it into a mock up of the 20,000 Days on Earth film poster, which I sent off to Moonpig. 

(Sidenote*: have you seen the Moonpig advert where the woman is like "I love that you can write in it yourself"? Congratualtions on spotting the one thing that isn't remarkable about Moonpig cards, now go hang around with the woman who "didn't even know Oral B made a toothpaste." What did you think they did?! She's getting a lot of work off the back of that advert "I didn't even know Apple made an iPhone!")
*Sidenote means "stand-up routine not quite funny enough to tell an audience"

My favourite photo of me and Leigh by the way. It looks posed for but actually I had been drinking Whisky and couldn't keep a straight face to pose. The blonde hair dates this happiness as the early part of our relationship.

So then I had to go and buy the ring. In order to keep my plans secret, which was essential in case she said no, I had to go somewhere outside of Welwyn Garden City, because I always bump into her parents whenever I go to Welwyn Garden City shops. Her family are decent and lovely people, so I made the assumption that I wouldn't bump into them in Stevenage new town, so that's where I went. I found one of Leigh's rings in the house and borrowed it so I knew the right size and had a look at a few pictures of rings online to see what styles I liked and that Leigh might like too. She doesn't wear much jewelery and the ring I had borrowed reflected her inner-goth and supposedly skulls are not appropriate at weddings.

When I got to Stevenage town centre, I quickly realised I was out of my depth. When I went into the first Jewelery shop I found all the rings I had liked in my reseach were dirt cheap. In other words, I have no taste whatsoever. Apparently you are supposed to spend three months' wages on a ring. Sorry Leigh, but fuck that! If I had three months' worth of wages just lying around I wouldn't have got the bus to Stevenage, I wouldn't be renting I'd have put a deposit on a house, at the very least I wouldn't be drinking Co-op Own Brand Cola ("Co-op Own Brand Cola: Pepsi for people willing to overlook that their urine is that colour" TM). So yeah, we are generation Rent, because our age group is obsessed with that musical and generation Andrew-Lloyd-Webbers-Chess fucked the housing market for us. So I figured three months' wages was unlikely, but also £32 - which the rings I liked cost - wasn't likely to get the answer I was hoping for. So I compromised on roughly a month's worth of rent - I went over that budget a bit but that was a nice guideline. For those who don't know: a month's rent in Welwyn Garden City for a two bed house is £1,000,000, 4 pounds of flesh, 4 pints of your blood, sweat and tears, and a human soul + £6billion or 2 bitcoins in council tax (extra if you want your recycling bins emptied).

I eventually found a ring that suited and went in and asked about it. The fella showed me it close up and I was speechless. I mean that I was literally too awkward to know what I should say when looking a ring. "Erm...that's nice." I should have paid more attention to this stuff on the Antiques Roadshow. I honestly had no idea if it was a good ring or not. It was round. It was shiny. But then so were the evidently shit rings I had liked before. He measured the goth-ring and said that he'd have to order in the ring in the right size - and that I had got lucky, the ring was more expensive online but he hadn't got around to updating the shop signage yet, "excellent news if the value ever comes up in conversation," I said. He said I should come back in about a week to 10 days (29th November, worryingly close) to collect the ring and that they would put it in one of these little wooden ring boxes for me. That was the moment! I was too stupid to know the quality of the ring but that box was pretty stylish. I don't know what I would do if someone proposed to me with that ring, but I knew that for anything that came out of that box I would say yes.

So I handed over my money, and took the receipt. In a way, it was quite comforting that the ring wouldn't arrive until a day or so before December first, because I wouldn't have to hide the ring around the house. I wouldn't be spotted looking nervously at the top of the kitchen cupboards or in the attic. All I had to hide was a simple paper receipt. NINE DAYS LATER...Where the hell did I put that receipt? It's not on top of the kitchen cupboards. It's not in the attic. I'm hoping Leigh hasn't noticed that I occassionally open a drawer and rummage around and then close it and walk off again. Where is that reciept? Let me think. Ah...habbit is a fucking awful thing isn't it? Unless you're a nun on a cold day. Whenever I go to Stevenage, I visit HMV, CEX, Comic Book shop, Primark and come back with bags of shopping and pockets stuffed with receipts and train tickets and I always grab everything in my pockets and dump it straight into the bin at Welwyn North station. I have just thrown away a recipt for the most expensive single peice of jewelery I have ever purchased. On the one hand I hate what a fucktard I am. On the other hand, I'm so glad they didn't give me the ring that day and I hadn't put it in my pocket. Fortunately I warned the fella who phoned me to say the ring was ready that I'd done something stupid and got served by the same guy who had served me in the first place. I made sure to wear my Doctor Who scarf too, so he would remember it. I can't imagine he served many men in Doctor Who scarves. I can't imagine many men with Doctor Who scarves knitted by their mums are in long-term relationships with anyone but their mums to be honest, and that's from a guy whose got one.

So then the day itself comes around, and Leigh had to work on Sunday the 3rd which meant she got Friday off. Excellent news for my plan. Once again, advent calendars were a spanner in the works. Specifically the cat's advent calendar which contained catnip treats. As I prepared for the most romantic moment of my life, the cat got high as a kite and went absolutely mental at the crucial moment of asking, and began tearing around the house and jumping all over the furniture.

People keep asking if I was nervous. I wasn't really at first. I had planned what I was going to do and had a rough idea what I would say. We'd been to weddings a lot in the last couple of years and discussed this kind of thing and not to be unromantic about it, but I suspect 90% of men know what the answer will be when they propose. A relationship that's got to that stage is pretty close and hopefully you feel the same way about each other. So I asked the question and THEN started shaking. About halfway through "do you want to ma..." I thought...what if I'm in the 10% who don't know the answer to that question? And the question was asked. And the cat was mental. And there was tears. And she said "are you joking?" Which wasn't terribly reassuring. She asked if I was serious, she asked why, she said she was overwhelmed, all of which was very very very nice but none of which was definitively 100% "yes." Eventually like a less well paid John Humphries I pushed her for a definitive yes/no answer and got the one I was looking for. And I assume after all that hard work that's the end of the planning and big decisions and huge expenditue of honk...