TV beds are a relatively new innovation that combines two of our favourite things; bed and television. With that in mind, it’s quite surprising that no one thought of moulding the two things together before.
Although more popular in the United States, they are an innovation that is quickly taking the bedrooms of the UK by gentle storm. So, without further rambling, here are seven reasons to buy a television bed!
1. Toe Saving Technology! One curse of the allotted television/bed separation is the cold, lost and search mission that you must undertake every night in order to turn the television off. Never before have so many toes fallen stubbed to misplaced bedroom items and unforeseen furniture. Now, thanks to tv beds from the TV Beds Centre, you can simply turn the television off via a soft button next to the bed wherein the television folds sleekly away into the recesses of your bed.
2. No more intrusive wires! Thanks to shelves found within the sides of many television beds, you can now store your Xbox, Playstation and DVD player underneath the bed and out of sight as you never again have to fiddle with all the medusa-esque wires that dominate so many bedrooms.
3. Two For The Price Of One. If you’re moving house, the great news is that you don’t have to worry about buying a television and a bed to go in your room as some television beds come with a television already installed! Not a bad thing to no longer worry about!
4. No more nails! That’s exactly right, if you’re like any regular man who simply cannot fathom the easiest of DIY procedures then you no longer have to worry about IKEA cupboards or television stands.
5. A Man’s Home Bed Is His Castle. If you want to be really lazy, then you will take pride in knowing that you can endure a whole film marathon (LOTR anyone?) without ever having to get out of bed. Anyone who enjoys a good hangover will know that lying in bed all day watching mind numbing programmes is truly the best way to recover.
6. The iBed? If you think the television beds of today are great, then just think about what they shall be like tomorrow. Maybe then they shall look after all our needs (microwave tv bed?) so that we never have to move anywhere on a weekend. The lifestyle in Wall-E never looked that bad anyway…
7. Build a base. We’ve all done it; thanks to the large foot and head boards, they would make perfect walls for you to drape your bedding over. Even if you find that you are a tad old to do that these days, television beds do come in child sizes too!
We’d be lying if we said we didn’t keep anything under the 7 Reasons Sofa Bed. In fact this is where all our unwanted guest posts go. According to Drew Davies though we should really be putting it all into storage. Here’s why:
1. Feng Shui. In feng shui, the principle of proximity means that the closer something is to you the stronger its effect will be. Which is probably why you keep having those trippy dreams about Grandma’s old cardigans.
2. Ghosts Feel Shame Too. We know you only used it that once on Valentine’s Day in 2007, but what if you died unexpectedly and your parents discovered your Vibronator XL Delux?
3. Increased Value. Potential homebuyers are always looking for roomy underbeds and so with more space, the price of your house will rocket. Ask anyone. It’s, like, science.
4. Self Preservation. With all that junk under your bed, will your toy boy be able to dive underneath it when your husband arrives home early from work one day?
5. The Ace of Base Fallacy. That box of old CD’s that you’re always planning to burn onto your laptop at some point? Never. Going. To. Happen.
6. Well Hung. With your things in storage, you can finally get rid of your bed altogether, buy that hammock you’ve always wanted and get into “swinging”. That is what swinging means, right?
7. Lumps ‘n’ Bumps. You’ve heard about of the Princess and the Pea, but what about the Princess and the Playstation 2??? Yes, we just made that up.
With rooms from 9 sq ft to 400 sq ft, and leases starting at just one week long, you can store just about anything at Big Yellow Self Storage for as long as you need.
It turns out that today is the perfect day to have your second birthday. Here are seven reasons that you should.
1. Because You Can. You might not think you can have a second birthday on June 10th, but you can. You probably think that only the Queen can have two birthdays, but you’re wrong. The Queen doesn’t have two birthdays, she has three. She has her birthday, her official birthday and today, in the Solomon Islands – but nowhere else – it’s the Queen’s official birthday there. Is it really fair that the Queen should have three times as many birthdays as the rest of us? Of course not. No one would mind if you had a second birthday on June 10th, least of all the Queen who’d still be one better than the rest of us.
2. Because The Weather’s Right For It. The date of June 10th falls during the month of June, you may not be surprised to learn. This means that the weather is guaranteed. Because on any birthday in June, it will rain. This will make the weather on your actual birthday – unless that too, falls in June – seem positively glorious in comparison.
3. Because It Can Only Improve Your Day. Today, I was woken at 5:30am by my wife announcing that our son had wet the bed. “Never mind”, I said, “you can put him in our bed for a couple of hours”. “I can’t”, she replied, “it’s our bed that he’s wet”. You need a second birthday to get over that sort of news. I’m sure that many of you have also woken up to similarly bad news or had unfortunate experiences today (possibly involving rain). It’s not too late to have a second birthday. Have it now, you deserve it.
4. Because Tomorrow Is World Gin Day. Tomorrow, in its infinite wisdom, the world – or gin – has decided that it’s World Gin Day. If you have your second birthday today and request gin, tonic, limes, Angostora bitters, ice and glasses (because receptacles are important), you’ll be perfectly equipped for tomorrow’s festivities. And you’ll have got the cake-eating out of the way, because if there’s one thing that gin doesn’t go with it’s cake*. Have your cake today. And eat it.
5. Because Something Good Needs To Happen On June 10th. Sometimes, when writing about a particular day we do actual research via the medium of Google. Having researched June 10th, I can confirm that it’s one of the dullest days in history and can disclose that the two events with the most humour potential from this date are that the first public zoo was opened in France in 1794 and Elizabeth Hurley was born in 1965. It’s not just that you need June 10th for your second birthday. June 10th needs you.
6. Because It’s The Right Time Of Year. If you have a birthday in February or November, you probably lose out presents-wise because of your special day’s proximity to Christmas. That’s right, Jesus was born too and he’s far more important than you. June 10th is almost in the middle of the year and is as far away from Christmas as you can hope to get**. So, with your second birthday on June 10th, you’ll get better presents and you’ll foil Jesus. It’s all win.
7. Because It’s Jon’s Birthday. Today, June 10th, is my writing partner Jonathan Lee’s birthday. If everyone else had a second birthday today then he would age at half the speed of the rest of us (though anyone that saw yesterday’s post might say he’s making rather a good fist of that already***). We’d all become world-weary and cynical and while, in the Autumn of our lives, our minds had closed to fun, tomfoolery and japery, Jon would still be merrily frolicking away, committing acts of piracy in his garden. The world’s a much better place for that. Happy birthday Jon.
*If there are two things that gin doesn’t go with they’re cake and cycling.
My wife and I are trying to train our child to recognise the difference between day and night at the moment and the latest weapon in our armoury is a blackout blind: a blind which prevents any light coming through the window. This, we not unreasonably thought, would prevent our six-week old son waking up at 5am when sunlight streams through our East facing bedroom window and would help him get into a settled routine of sleeping at night. So far, it has proved effective (after a fashion).
1. Fitting. As the member of the 7 Reasons team that is competent at DIY I envisaged that there would be no problems installing our blind, and I was almost correct. It was incredibly simple to fit, with only a bit of light drilling required. And it was simple right up until the moment – while I was balanced precariously atop a step-ladder – that everything went dark. Not just dim, you should understand, but dark. Preternaturally dark. Darker than spending a dark night in the darkest room of the Prince of Darkness wearing a sleeping mask. Darker than anything ever. There was no light. “Help!” “Help!” I called until my wife came up the stairs and opened the door, flooding the room with light from the hallway. “It all went dark”, I explained to a sceptical wife who couldn’t comprehend – or didn’t believe – that something as insubstantial as a piece of material could block out all light. I climbed down from the ladder with my reputation for DIY prowess, if not my dignity, intact.
2. Baby’s Bedtime. In the evening our son fell asleep before we expected him to and, rather than look a gift horse (or a sleeping baby, which is a very similar creature to a gift horse) in the mouth, we decided we would put him to bed right then. We gingerly carried him up the stairs and swaddled him in his cot. We began to sneak out of the room and paused to close the blind on the way. Everything went black. We couldn’t see a thing. We partially raised the blind again so that we could find the light switch and turned on the light so that we could see the door and find our way out. This woke the baby. Bugger.
3. Mummy’s Bedtime. Eventually, we were able to get our son back to sleep and, quite soon after, my wife snuck up to bed. I have little idea what happened, but after a couple of minutes, from my position in the room below, I heard a loud bang, followed about thirty seconds later by the noise of the baby crying. Then I heard the sound of my wife trying to placate the crying baby with a cuddly toy, before my parental selective deafness kicked in and I returned to what I was doing.
4. Daddy’s Bedtime. Eventually, the baby became quiet again and, having spent the remainder of a fascinating evening reconfiguring the 7 Reasons W3 Total Cache plugin and our email servers*, it was time for me to go to bed. I went up the stairs and changed in another room, so as not to disturb anyone. Then I snuck across the landing into the bedroom and closed the door noiselessly behind me. Where once there would have had been some residual light filtering through the blind to aid my navigation across the room, now there was none. I knew roughly where the bed was though, and I took several tentative steps toward it before stumbling over something and letting out an involuntary scream as I lost my balance and landed in a heap on the bed.
5. “AAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!” Shrieked a lump in the bed from beneath me as, in the pitch darkness, a screaming and unknown assailant pounced on her. I groped around for the switch to the bedside light and, finding it quickly, turned it on. I looked behind me to see what was on the floor. “Are you drunk?”, the now slightly calmer lump in the bed enquired. “I fell over an owl,” I replied.
6. “WWWWAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!” Said a tiny voice from the other side of the room reacting to the sudden light. Eventually we were able to get him back to sleep.
7. Sleep. I was unaware of what occurred during the remainder of the night. I have since been told that the usual cycle of the baby waking up and requiring feeding and changing carried on unaltered by the loss of the light. I was told that this morning when, after what I can only describe as the most blissfully tranquil sleep of my life, my rather tired looking wife shook me awake and informed me it was 11am and that we were going to be late for our lunch appointment. “But it can’t be”, I replied, “It’s still pitch black”.
So there you have it. Blackout blinds do work, and you can use them to lull the unsuspecting into sleeping longer and later. They just don’t work on babies.
*I had hoped to watch a couple of episodes of Bergerac. We sacrifice a lot for 7 Reasons.
As can sometimes happen I forgot about my 7 Reasons duties this morning. In something of a panic I asked the whole of twitter for requests. The one reply I got was, ‘7 Reasons Not To Forget 7 Reasons’. I started but it soon became obvious that there were plenty of reasons to forget 7 Reasons and only one – a Marc shaped one – not to. Thankfully, lady luck was on my side as regular guest writer, Dr Simon Percy Jennifer Best, updated his twitter feed with, “I’ve just found a spoon in my bed”. Dr SPJB went on to question why it was there, but he didn’t need to. The doctor, as with all doctors, is a genius. There are many reasons to take a spoon to bed. Here are just seven:
The Philosophy Of Beds & Spoons by Dr Simon Percy Jennifer Best
1. Have Your Cake And Eat It. That’s right, with a spoon as your bed companion, not only can you take cake to bed, but you can eat it. I’ve never quite understood this idiom. Who has cake but doesn’t eat it? That would be stupid.
2. Defence. All sorts of things can happen when you are asleep as anyone who has seen Fantasia will confirm. The last thing you want is to be attacked by a collection of broomsticks while you are unarmed. Good then to have a spoon to defend yourself with. Threatening enough to help protect you, but not dangerous enough to destroy the house when you swipe at imaginary buckets. Or a shaved lamb.*
3. Self-Esteem. We all have times when we go to bed and can’t sleep. More often than not this leads us in to a state of worry. Women worry whether they are too fat or too thin. Men worry about relegation. While a spoon won’t help keep Aston Villa in the Premiership, it will certainly help a woman sleep peacefully. Think you’re too fat? Look at the back of the spoon. Think you’re too thin? Look at the front of the spoon.
4. Uri Geller. Quite why our bodies feel the need to wake us up in the middle of the night is anyone’s guess, but sometimes we find it impossible to drop off back to sleep. Indeed, the harder we try, the harder it becomes. In such situations the TV becomes our sole-mate. In the good old days Channel 5 used to show live baseball. Now they just show rubbish. Including Uri Geller. Still, at least if you’ve got a spoon in bed you can join in.
5. Dribble. If like me, you dribble in the night, having a spoon in bed would be really useful. Instead of turning the pillow over and letting the dribble seep into the sheet, you can spoon it into a bucket. Yes, you’d have to take a bucket to bed too.
6. Tent. We’ve all gone to bed with a torch and a comic and hidden under the duvet. I do it every Sunday. It’s pretty realistic to camping on Mount Everest. Just fewer yetis. The one thing I always lack though is something to prop the tent up. For any length of time at least. Assuming I take a big spoon I could use that. A big spoon would also be helpful if I wanted to reach something that I otherwise couldn’t. My girlfriend’s perfume for instance. I don’t wear it, but spraying a little bit on the fire really helps it. Obviously I don’t let it get out of control. If it starts burning the mattress I spoon a bit of dribble onto it. Usually does the trick.
7. Waterbed. I’ve never quite seen the attraction of a waterbed, but I could be tempted if I was allowed to take a spoon with me. Let’s be honest, the bed could quite easily burst. Floating out of the bedroom and whitewater rapid rafting down the stairs is not my idea of fun. If I had a spoon though at least I could use it as a paddle.
*The shaved lamb wasn’t in Fantasia. Just my bedroom.
Last week you found out that my girlfriend and I discuss potatoes in bed, well today you are going to discover that she elbows me in the neck whilst sleeping. But this post is not so much for the benefit of her as it is for everyone. The simple fact is this: elbowing people whilst sleeping is bad. Here’s why:
1. Sides. Like most couples, my girlfriend and I have dedicated sides of the bed. I am on the left with 80% of the duvet, Claire is on the right shivering. Now, if like me you never venture from your side of the bed, it means your fellow sleep partner must be breaking bed protocol if her (or his) elbow is making contact with your neck. In such situations you do have to wonder why you had to nominate sides in the first place.
2. Damage. Of course, before you wonder about why you agreed to nominate sides, you need to inspect your injuries. In my case I had to check I was still breathing. Thankfully I was, but an elbow protruding into my trachea made it much harder than it usually is. Still, I am one of the lucky ones. Other injuries you may suffer from being elbowed in bed include: a black eye, a broken nose, a fat lip, a dislocated jaw and a wobbly tooth. And that’s just on your face. If you sleep upside down it could be a whole lot worse.
3. Reflex. Generally when people feel pain, their first reaction is to react. This probably isn’t news. If you are asleep and someone disturbs you by elbowing you it would be very natural for you to instinctively punch them in the face. Satisfying, yes. Sensible, not really. Especially when you consider that a reflex of being punched in the face is to kick out. You could quite easily end up having a pillow fight. Without the pillows.
4. Retaliation. Maybe you manage to avoid reacting instinctively though. Possibly because you are already awake. You can’t let your partner get away with it! They’ve just whacked you in the face. This is when you start turning to dark places. (Unless you switched the light on to work out what the bloody hell just took your head off.) Thoughts turn to revenge. Should you kick them? Knee them? Pinch them? Poke them? Slap them? Chances are you won’t do any of them, but thanks to your partner you stay awake all night thinking nasty thoughts. Then you’re cranky all day. You snap at people. You argue with people. You put salt in people’s coffee. Then, come 6pm, you have no friends left. And all because the ladyloves Milk Tray elbowed you up the nostril.
5. Moving. In something of a design flaw, when someone elbows you whilst they are asleep, they rarely move their arm back to its rightful place. As a result you have to move it for them. Which is not as easy as it sounds. Joints were only designed to move in certain directions and usually the only direction it wants to go is further into your eye socket. Generally speaking, the only solution here is for you to move. Probably downstairs to the sofa bed.
6. Dreams. As I do on most nights, I was dreaming in my sleep. Last night’s adventure was particularly exciting as I was unbeaten on 245 and Shane Watson had just pulled a hamstring. It was a pleasant change to his usual trick where he pulls a hamster from a Tesco carrier bag. So there I was watching Shaun Tait jog in from the Michael Jackson Statue End (we were playing in Fulham) when I lost sight of the ball. Next thing I knew it had smacked me in the throat. Which is when I woke up with a start and realised that not only had I been dreaming, but Claire had been the one to spoil my moment with a viciously placed elbow. Pathetic.*
7. Petty. If you have an issue with someone, elbow them in the face when you are awake. That way they’ll know exactly how you feel. Doing it while you are ‘asleep’ is childish and, as detailed above, helps no one.
*When I did get back to sleep, Janet Street-Porter yorked me first ball. One of us were also naked. That’s the stuff nightmares are made of.
At 7 Reasons (.org) we like to think of ourselves as lifestyle writers; authors of a self-help guide to modern living. But occasionally, something so calamitous occurs in one of our personal lives that we can think of nothing other than that event and are compelled to write about it, even though we’d rather be thinking and writing about something (anything) else. Such an event has occurred. In the past week, my wife purchased a new duvet. It is one of the worst things that could have happened. Here are 7 reasons why.
1. Light. It’s dark under the new duvet. Whether it’s actually dark or not. It’s so dark that the exterior of the duvet could be next to the sun, or next to something as dark as the sun is light (the unsun? The un? ). It wouldn’t matter. Because underneath the duvet, it is always pitch black: Unless I was to take a torch under there. Though possibly even then. There is nothing darker than being under the duvet, except for being inside Piers Morgan’s soul wearing a black hat, a bin liner and a pair of sunglasses. Though how you would find yourself in such a situation, I don’t know. It would be quite unfortunate.
2. Weight. The duvet is heavy. It’s heavier than…well…everything; and it’s definitely the heaviest thing I’ve ever been pinned to a bed by. It’s like an enormous weight is pressing down on me all the time I’m beneath it (which may be slimming, who knows?). When I tried to complain, what I said came out as gibberish because of the heavy weight pressing down on my face. But that didn’t matter, because…
3. Under The Duvet, No One Can Hear You Scream. There is no sound under the duvet. This is bad, as I like to listen to the radio while in bed – it prevents me from thinking, which is what usually gets me into trouble, so it’s quite essential – but the moment I put my head under the duvet, all sound stops. All of it. Which would be handy if I were in a room with James Blunt, but I’m not, I’m trapped in a room with my own thoughts. Which is much like being back in Piers Morgan’s soul again but I can wear what I like and there’s tiramisu.
4. Heat. It’s hot under the duvet. Hotter than anything. I have no idea exactly how many togs the thing contains, but I know this: Togs are hot, and the new duvet has bloody loads of them. I have actually broken into a sweat just by lying under the thing, not moving, in a cold, draughty house in the winter, when the temperature outside was -13. It was then that I decided the remedy to my overheating would be to lift the duvet to let some air underneath.
5. AAaaaaarrrrrrgggghhhh!!!!! And that turned out to be a sensation like being punched in the solar-plexus by an angry ‘roid-enhanced snowman. Twice. It turns out that there was at least a thirty degree difference between the temperature in the room and the micro-climate beneath the duvet. Still, at least my screams didn’t wake my wife, as my head was beneath the duvet and her head was above it, so she couldn’t hear them.
6. Time. Under the duvet, you have no inkling of what time it is. None, whatsoever. There’s just no way of telling. I can’t hear the radio, and there’s no way of telling that it’s time to get up (alarms, bin-men, toasters, a hungry cat etc), nor is there any daylight or any climactic indicators (it’s just always the temperature of boiling stuff). I could take a timepiece with me, but who wants to roll over on a clock in the bed, or get the bracelet of their watch caught in their hair and have to cut it loose? I don’t want to make that mistake again, thank you very much. Because doing that for a third time would make me look foolish.
7. Air. It is impossible to breathe under the duvet, which is a shame, as it’s something of a hobby of mine. No air penetrates the dense, heavy material that the duvet is constructed from (some sort of downy molten concrete?) and all air that was originally there is forced out by the sheer weight of the thing pressing down on the bed. I’m not sure if this lack of air counts as a vacuum, but the new duvet certainly sucks.*
*7 Reasons (.org) will return tomorrow but may not be back the following day as I may die a hideous death under the duvet of doom.
The new Anton Corbijn film – The American – starring George Clooney is out in the UK right now. I saw it on Saturday, here are seven reasons that you shouldn’t. (and don’t worry, there are no spoilers)
1. The Unconcious. The pace of the first half of The American is slow. It’s so slow, in fact, that if anyone had said “so slow”, it would have come out as, “sssssssssssssssssssssssssssooooooooooooooooooooooooo sssssssssssssssssssssssllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww”. Someone may even have said it, but I’m not sure, as I was dozing. Not a deep and satisfying slumber, but the fitful sort where you find yourself alternating between brief bouts of consciousness and unconsciousness, with occasional forays into semi-consciousness and thoughts of what the hell is happening to me, is this what old age is like (ness). So, I’ll sum up what I saw in the first half of the film (without spoilers). I saw George Clooney living the soporifically mundane daily life of a hit-man. In a series of slowly cut shots with no dialogue I watched him: Counting his bullets, drilling a series of small holes in some tips, oiling his mechanism (not a euphemism), polishing his barrel (nope, nor this), adjusting his sights, rearranging his small change on a table, lining up his fish fingers in size order, adding up all of the telephone numbers on his mobile and dividing them by four, testing the accuracy of his oven timer against his wristwatch (an Omega Speedmaster Professional with a black dial and black leather strap: model number 3870.50.31, I had time to note), comparing the shapes of his fingernails with his toenails, dusting his light bulbs, and staring into an empty fridge while over his head a strip-light buzzed (I may be wrong on some of these, but if they weren’t there, it felt like they were).
2. The Conscious. That’s not fair, you’re probably thinking, if you’d been awake, it probably wouldn’t have seemed that dull. But I wasn’t the only person that was sleeping during the first half. Because when I was in the toilet after the film, a man standing behind me said, “You were asleep during the first half” and, as I prepared to answer him, the man at the urinal next to me replied, “I know, it was really slow”. It turned out that they were friends and that I wasn’t being addressed at all. So there you have it. Based on the available evidence, there are two distinct types of human-behaviour that occur during the first half of The American. There are the Sleepers, who sleep, and then there are the Sleeper-Watchers who, while they have remained conscious, aren’t watching the film either; they’re watching people sleep so they can tell them about how they slept later, in great detail; “You kept leaning forward, and then you fell back, and then you leant forward, and then you fell back, and then you leant forward, and then you fell back, and then you said “chopsticks”, and then you fell back…” was my personal Sleeper-Watcher’s epic account of my movements. So, during the first half of the film, 50% of the audience are sleeping and the other 50% are watching them sleep and compiling a dossier on their movements, their utterances and their dribbling. Which means that 100% of the audience are not watching the first part of the film. That’s how dull it is.
3. Lust. And then the second half of the film begins. It begins with Violante Placido in bed with no clothes on and, in the words of my personal Sleeper-Watcher, “…you sat bolt upright and stared at the screen while breathing rapidly, remaining in that position for the rest of the scene, before you settled back in your seat and stayed awake for the rest of the film”. So not only do you get a full report on how weird you are in your sleep, you get a full report on how lecherous you are when you’re wide-awake too.
4. Clooney. And then there’s Clooney. Now I understand that George Clooney’s playing an emotionless, calculating and reserved man. But we see his bottom in The American, and I can state categorically, that his arse has a greater number of expressions than his face in this film. Here is his full range of facial expressions in The American (sorry if you were hoping for an arse montage, though we do have one of those on the About Us page):
7 Emotions : 1 Face
5. References. During the film, in a scene where Clooney is counting the grains of salt contained in a salt cellar before he thinks about Switzerland for five minutes in a bar with formica tables, something distracting happens in the background. There’s a film on the television. It’s Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. God, I love that film, I thought. It’s in my top ten films of all time. Why aren’t I watching that? Why in God’s name would you taunt the viewer by placing an iconic piece of cinematic brilliance within your own, not brilliant, movie. So, he’s made me fall asleep, he’s made me appear lecherous, he’s made me watch a man iron his vast collection of handkerchiefs with a lukewarm spoon, and now Anton Corbijn is actually taunting me. He’s showing me a bit of a film that I love that’s better than the one he’s made and that I’m watching, I thought. While screaming inwardly.
6. ThePants. And then there are the pants. Violante Placido, for reasons I won’t bore you with, decides to disrobe (except for her pants) and go swimming in a river. But why would anyone take all of their clothes off except for their pants? Then they’d be wet once they got out of the water. And they’d have to go home wearing wet pants. And who wants to wear wet pants for an afternoon? And I know that you’re thinking that it was for the sake of modesty, but it wasn’t. Because they became completely transparent the moment they got wet, a fact that my Sleeper-Watcher noted later, before he informed me that I, “…sat bolt-upright and made some sort of involuntary tongue noise. And didn’t blink for eight whole minutes” in reaction to this scene. Three days later, after a great deal of thought, I still can’t fathom the pants.
7. The Ending. Again, I won’t tell you what happens, but there’s a moment of awareness when someone alters the thing. And when that person – whose gender I won’t digress – alters the thing that I won’t name, I had a moment of clarity. I knew, in that instant, that the character that was going to do the deed would be thwarted by the one that altered the thing and that the other character that I also won’t name would eventually have to do the deed – not with the broken thing that had been altered, but – with another thing but that we hadn’t been introduced to, and that the deed would end badly. Not only for the character who had been forced to do the deed with the new thing, but also for the character to whom the deed was being done, that countered the deed with his own thing, having previously sparking this chain of events by altering the initial thing in the first place. And it was just bloody obvious that was going to happen a long time before the end.
So, to summarise: During the first half of the film you will fall asleep or resort to watching someone else sleep to keep you entertained; you will then be branded a pervert, be partially baffled by facial expressions, taunted by the director, and then wholly baffled by pants before eventually spotting the blatantly obvious ending many minutes before the film ends. I don’t think ungoing is an actual thing, but I want to do it. Right now.
It’s Thursday! And to celebrate the day we present you with our third and final piece that was destined for the shelves inside Esquire, but didn’t quite make it.
1. Own Bed. No sleeping on the roughest terrain in history in a sleeping bag that is far too small for you. After the last act, you can just pop upstairs and collapse onto your dry, comfy mattress. And of course you won’t be woken by fifteen drunken idiots tripping over your guy-rope at 4am.
2. Bad Weather. If the British Summer decides to stick with tradition and deposit large amounts of water upon us each weekend, you can just move your festival indoors. No one gets wet, your girlfriend won’t moan that her make-up is running and you won’t spend the rest of the evening warning off blokes who have just noticed she isn’t wearing a bra.
3. Lost Belongings. There is nothing more sickening than waking up in your tent and realising that you lost your wallet and wedding ring last night. If you have your own festival though, there is no need to panic. Your wallet will be in the flower bed and your ring will be in next door’s cat. Your ring never ends up in next door’s cat at Glastonbury. Never. Though sometimes it is in next door’s cow.
4. Toilets. A customary hazard at festivals. You’re going to drink large quantities of lager – even if you don’t like the bloody stuff – and that means ending up in queue for the temple of bacteria that is the portaloo. What’s the point when at home you can use your clean bathroom? A bathroom that smells of your partner’s potpourri and doesn’t have 100 people waiting ahead of you. Unless you accidentally left your front door open, of course.
5. Prices. Let’s be honest, the admission price to stand in a field for three days is excessive. You could have driven to Estonia on a small motorbike for the cost of a burger and chips. And you always end up spending £10 on a novelty blow-up dolphin that has a slow-puncture. All in all, a waste of money. Have your festival at home and you can charge yourself sensible prices. And there’s more chance of having a puncture repair kit to hand too.
6. Better Yourself. Music festivals – despite the name – aren’t just about the music. There are workshops and craft stalls and clowns and people trying to get you to take part in yoga classes. Have a festival at home and you can do all these yourself. You can have a woodwork workshop that will involve you putting up those shelves that you have been meaning to do for six months. You can set up a stall and try to flog all your rubbish from the attic to unsuspecting neighbours. And you can take part in your own yoga class. Which will involve bending down to pick up another beer. And relax.
7. Dreadlocks. Most of the people at your home-festival won’t be pierced and be-dreadlocked. Unless, that is, you have dreadlocks and a piercing. In which case, what are you doing reading this bit? Go to the Fashion & Grooming section at once! In fact, did you steal this magazine?
1. Avoid The Sun. Spending an extra hour in bed in the summer means that you avoid an extra hour of exposure to the sun, This is a good thing. The sun gives cancer; the sun gives burn; the sun can cause blindness. It’s a hazard. When people are exposed to the sun, their skin warms and darkens like that of a chicken in an oven. This is because the sun is slowly cooking us, though for what nefarious purpose, I cannot begin to speculate. The sun is evil: Stay in bed and avoid it.
2. Regress. Being a grown-up is not always fun – I am told – and sometimes a return to more infant-like-state is just the tonic that an adult needs. Being in bed is oft compared to being in the womb; naked, yet protected, insulated from the outside world by the smothering, security of the duvet. It’s better than that though. Being under the duvet is also like being in a den. And what better place is there for your inner-child than a den?
3. Mornings. The morning is the wrong time to be up and about. It’s the time of day when you stumble around bleary-eyed trying to pour coffee and multivitamins into yourself in an attempt to feel vaguely human, and usually fail. The morning is full of dull events like selecting a shirt; commuting; the consumption of muesli; junk-mail; conversations about last night’s television. If you lie-in though, you suffer less morning and you’re more alive and alert when the best part of the day comes; the evening. All of the best, most glamorous and wondrous things happen in the evening; award ceremonies; parties; dining out; gigs; owls; theatre performances, they’re all things that happen at the better end of the day that you shouldn’t be too tired to enjoy.
4. Plans. People plan things, it’s what we do. You probably had today already mapped out before you went to bed last night. But plans aren’t a good thing: The CIA planned to assassinate Fidel Castro; Hitler planned World War II; the VCCP agency planned the Compare The Meerkat advertising campaign; an idiot planned Milton Keynes. If you spontaneously decide to lie-in, you say “no” to plans and liberate yourself from their fiendish tyranny.
5. Toast Avoidance. One of the hazards of mornings is toast which, for some reason, doesn’t exist after 11am. Stay in bed: Avoid toast.
6. Romance. You don’t have to lie-in alone, you can share your den…er…bed with someone else. You can even have breakfast-in-bed together. Not toast, obviously, as the crumbs will get everywhere and could be physically painful: Imagine trying to sleep on a toast-crumb covered pillow. But, even if there is toast, it’s still quality time with a loved one, and that must be a good thing.
7. Health. Sleep debt is the name for a cumulative lack of sleep. It is said to shorten life. So, logically, for a longer life you should be in sleep credit. A lie in will help with this. You can also become immortal by sleeping for 24 hours per day – though modern science is yet to cotton on to this – which, ironically, would make immortality almost exactly like death, but without the flowers. Or I may have dreamt that last bit during a lie-in, I’m not certain.
