Tag: Books

Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Believe Harry Potter Exists

As you may have noticed, here at 7 Reasons we have a habit of belittling other people’s muppetry. The question, ‘Is Harry Potter Real?’, for instance, would have us stampeding towards our pencil cases. As indeed we did when we discovered this. However, when today’s guest post dropped on our inbox mat, we had to take a step back. And question ourselves. Because today we are confronted with seven compelling reasons that suggest maybe, just maybe, we were too quick to judge. Perhaps, just perhaps, Harry Potter does exist after all. So, with that in mind, let’s get to the post. Written today by massive Harry Potter nerd, Rachel, who went to boarding school and Oxford University just to have an education as close to the Hogwarts experience as possible.

Come on, admit it: at least once in your life, you’ve fantasised about what it would be like to go to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Depending on the level of your Harry Potter obsession, you might even have gone as far as to have a careful think about which House you’d get put into by the Sorting Hat (definitely Ravenclaw for me). If you’re still waiting for that Hogwarts acceptance letter to drop down your chimney, check out our seven great reasons why you should hold out hope that the magical world of Harry Potter really exists…

1. Online Stores. Anyone looking for a reason to believe need search no further than their computer screen. A decent Google session later and you could quite easily purchase yourself a wide array of wizarding accessories. With anything from school supplies to apparel, time turners and hand carved wands available, any budding witch or wizard can easily stock up for their first day at Hogwarts. Just order your acceptance letter (again, available online) and head on down to platform 9¾ at King’s Cross Station.

2. Muggle Wear. When wizards attempt to dress in ‘Muggle clothes’, the result is notoriously hilarious: slippers with pinstripe suits, a middle-aged man sporting a flowery dress and a bowler hat, or unusual patterns and colour combinations, the ensembles that they come up with are anything but normal. I’m sure everyone has seen someone whose outfit garners a second glance or a funny look, someone who doesn’t seem to understand that you shouldn’t wear a dressing gown with skinny jeans. Maybe they were just cold? Or maybe they were an undercover wizard.

3. Supernatural Sightings. Yetis in Tibet, the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland or aliens in Roswell: hundreds of unbelievable, supernatural sightings and occurrences are reported every year. What’s easier to believe: that a UFO sighting is proof of alien life from space, or that it was just a glimpse of Mr Weasley’s flying Ford Anglia? Or even a small bespectacled boy riding on a hippogriff.

4. History. Ancient records are littered with references to the occult: Merlin in Camelot, witch hunts in Salem or stories of immortality elixirs – tales of witches and wizards permeate the fabric of our history. There’s no smoke, as they say, without fire.

5. Sweet Stuff. Sugar Quills, Fizzing Whizzbees, Butterbeer, Exploding Bonbons, Liquorice Wands, Jelly Slugs, Chocolate Frogs, Cauldron Cakes, Pumpkin Pasties, Firewhiskey, Pepper Imps, Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum, Acid Pops and Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans. I don’t know about you, but I’m not prepared to live in a world where these sweet treats don’t exist.

6. Quidditch. The strangest of games, Quidditch defies the laws of logic. Not only is this school sport played in mid-air (health and safety anyone?), but unless one of the teams is able to gain a lead of at least 160 points, the whole match, and subsequently the final score, rests on the shoulders of the Seeker. You can’t make this stuff up, so it must be real.

7. The International Statue Of Wizarding Secrecy. This may be the most obvious reason of all, but the only reason for not believing that Harry Potter is real lies in the absence of proof: why would we have proof? These are not wayward sorcerers who cast spells at random; the Ministry of Magic has rules about that sort of thing. Officially established in 1692, the Statue of Secrecy was created to “safeguard the wizard community from Muggles, and hide their presence from the world at large”. With such a law in place, I’m sure that any Muggle with proof would find themselves on the wrong end of a memory charm pretty sharpish.

If you have any further reasons to add, please leave a comment below – we are the believers!

December 15, 2011
Russian Roulette Sunday: It’s Cake!
Hello 7 Reasons readers! It’s Marc here and today, dear readers, we would like you to make a cake. This cake.

It’s Oxfam’s Easy Lime and Ginger Cheesecake, the recipe for which comes from my local Oxfam Bookshop’s brilliant blog . The recipe calls for the use of Fairtrade Stem Ginger Cookies and, when you go to your nearest Oxfam shop to buy them, you’ll be giving money to a worthwhile cause. That’s right readers, by making and eating an ethically sourced cheesecake (unless you buy mascarpone sourced from warmongering cheesemongers) you’ll be helping a good cause in an ethical way. In fact, if we can all make and eat enough cheesecake, we can probably save the world, and I’ll be trying very hard. Here’s the achingly simple recipe as published by Oxfam Books, Petergate York:

Easy Lime and Ginger Cheesecake
- Serves 4
- Prep time: 15 min
- Chilling time: 30 min
- Basically, in 45 minutes you’re in business.
Ingredients
- 200g pack of Fairtrade stem ginger cookies, crushed
- 50g butter, melted
- 500g mascarpone cheese (they usually come in 250g tubs, so get two of these)
- 40g icing sugar, sifted
- Finely grated zest and juice of two limes
Method

1. Mix together the crushed biscuits and melted butter (I also like to add a bit of sugar to my cheesecake bases to make them a bit jazzier) and press into the bottom of an 18cm (7inch) spring-sided or loose-bottomed cake tin.

2. Place the mascarpone cheese, icing sugar, lime zest and juice in a bowl and beat together. Spread this mixture over the biscuit base.

3. Put it in the fridge and chill for 30 min! That’s really it.

That’s the entire recipe. It’s basically spreading cheese on biscuits and it’s so simple that absolutelyanyone should be able to make it. And now we’re going to demonstrate that even people with no food preparation skills, knowledge or aptitude can follow this recipe. I’m going to hand you over to my writing partner: A man whose culinary education began and ended with learning how to boil water for tea: A man who – before he moved to Kent – was known as The Fulham Poisoner: A man whose litany of culinary disasters includes failing at defrosting a chicken and the hospitalisation of a flatmate*. He’s going to make a cheesecake himself and feed it to his fiancé Claire – a renowned and accomplished maker of cakes – who will judge it on appearance, texture and taste (should she survive). Here’s Jon.

“It was only when I was standing in the queue that I realised I had been well and truly duped. The idea of making a cheesecake and then eating it had originally sounded like a good idea, which is why I had agreed. Marc had, after all, said all it required was a spare half hour. In my book, that’s a fair exchange for cake. But as I stood there I realised it had already been twenty-five since I had left home and I hadn’t even purchased the ingredients. There was no way I could make a cheesecake in five minutes. Not there. And then I got to the till. Which is when I realised this idea was also going to cost me money. Just short of £5 in fact. That’s a lot to spend just to have something to write about. I couldn’t help but think if I had managed the past year and a half writing without having to pay for the privilege, why did this have to change? I trudged home.

Having spread the ingredients in front of me and read the recipe, I realised this was the exact same cheesecake that Claire makes. And she makes it very well. Brilliant. So I’ve had to walk all the way the shops, spend the best part of a fiver on ingredients and now I am challenging my future wife by making one of her specialities. Perturbed, I carried on. Twenty minutes later I was left staring at the following creation:

Making it was something of a doddle. What was not a doddle was the washing up. I don’t know how often you zest a lime, but cleaning the zesting part of the grater is quite possibly a harder job than watching England play cricket. Still, an hour later I was done. I also had lime poisoning from licking the bowl.

The next part of this project – and that is very much what it had become – was to get Claire to profer her opinion. These are the results of the Claire survey.

On Appearance: “That looks nice.”

On Texture: “It’s nice.”

On Taste: “That was very nice”.

So there we have it. I make nice cheesecakes. I am sure your Sunday just got a whole lot better with that news.”

*Which he denies.**

**Falsely.

***As Oxfam Books, Petergate York would (and actually did) tell you themselves, remember the whole point of this recipe is that it is a Fairtrade recipe. So help the global community during this Fairtrade Fortnight (and after) by buying Fairtrade goods as much as you can.
March 6, 2011
Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Read The Thursday Next Books By Jasper Fforde

Today, the 7 Reasons sofa sees the return of former guest writer Rachel Simmonite. She has many important things to say so I won’t keep you long. Just to say, when you’ve read today’s post head over to Rachel’s blog. It’s full of interesting things about rugby. Right, here’s Rachel.

My guest posts for this blog seem to come about on an annual basis, but I’m determined to make them more like buses. So, in the first of what might or might not be three guest posts, I am writing 7Reasons to read the Thursday Next books, which are written by the genius that is Jasper Fforde.

It was a trip to Hay-on-Wye, that place of the second hand bookshops and delicious Welsh Cakes, and a trip to the Guardian Hay Festival where I first spotted the first book in the Thursday Next series: The Eyre Affair. I don’t know why I was drawn to it, there were loads of other (brand new) books in the makeshift store. Maybe it was fate? I picked up the book and read the blurb, followed by the first paragraph. I always do that, if it passes the blurb test then it has to go to the first paragraph test and then I will buy it. I noticed that it was a series, I think only a couple of them had come out by then so I went and bought both. I do like to stick with a series. Unfortunately the only series error I’ve made was with the Twilight books, and that was a serious series error. But I digress.

I got home and started reading. I was hooked. Two books read in two days (it was the school holidays, it’s allowed). And if that’s not enough persuasion to go out and buy them I don’t know what is. Well, apart from these seven reasons obviously. Here they are:

1. They make Swindon look cool. I’ve been to Swindon. I’ve experienced Swindon. (Okay so I’ve only experienced a pub there) And it’s not cool. But the Swindon in the Thursday Next books is really really cool. It’s the epicentre of all the chaos and activity that happens in the books, a change from those great literary destinations such as London and Oxford. For such a plain place, Fforde brings out the fun that Swindon could still yet have. Who knows, maybe the parallel Fforde Swindon and real Swindon could merge and we’d get this…

2. George Formby is the President. Yes, he of Leaning on a Lamp Post and playing the ukulele fame,is the President of England. Oh and the Crimean War is still going on. In 1985. Wales is a socialist republic. You have huge taxes on cheese (I don’t know how I could have coped with that) and illegal smuggling of it across the country. There are dodos and Neanderthals too and even the odd mammoth migration too.

3. The Debate Over Who Wrote Shakespeare’s Plays Is Bigger Than The “Who Shot Phil Mitchell?” Storyline In Eastenders. Did William Shakespeare really write all those plays and sonnets? Or was it Christopher Marlowe? Could it have been Francis Bacon? How about the Earls of Oxford or Derby? All have good claims to Shakespeare’s plays. Some people in the Thursday Nextbooks are obsessed with this to the point that it can cause violence. Shakespeare is not just the scourge of the English student in these books, he’s extremely popular, and not just when well known actors are acting his plays in the theatre!

4. If You Don’t Watch Out You’ll Miss The Puns. You have to read the Thursday Next books very closely as they’re full of puns. There are character names like Landen Parke-Laine (London Park Lane) and Braxton-Hicks along with the more obvious Agents Chalk and Cheese. Millon de Floss writes Thursday’s biography. I’m not telling you all of the other ones; you will have to read the books to find them out for yourself! I might not have found them all! It gives you an excuse to read them again to try and spot more of them, that and the books are just great so you’ll want to read them again anyway.

5. Despite The Weirdness It Still Has All The Typical Generic Subplots. There’s the romance between Thursday and Landen, which has its ups and downs and general drama. Thursday has eccentric family members from the father who doesn’t really exist, the fussy mother, the religious brother and the aunt and uncle who out smart just about everybody. There’s the big bad guy, Acheron Hades, an even bigger bad guy with a huge corporation behind him. Plus there’s the multi-coloured Porsche. Eat your heart out James Bond.

6. There’s An Alternate World In The Parallel World. Yes, I’m being serious. So Nextian Swindon is a parallel world of real Swindon, but also in Nextian Swindon, our main character can go into the world of books. Pretty mind boggling, but you’ll get used to it. You might even get used to the thought of Miss Havisham from Great Expectations breaking land speed records, or the fact that the characters aren’t really allowed into the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Having studied Poe this can only be a good thing. The book world does come across as being really fun, it makes you wish that books are really written that way, maybe they are? Who knows?

7. Your celebrities? Not Reality TV Stars But Literary Figures Or Figures In Literature. It’s like the good old days, people aren’t famous for being famous, they actually have to do something first. In the case of the celebrities in the Thursday Next books they have to be written. The hero worship never seems to be stopping, with people changing their names to their favourites, but they have to have a number afterwards due to the multiple numbers of them. You don’t see people nowadays changing their names to Jordan or Kerry Katona, but you will see Anne Hathaways in these books.

March 5, 2011
7 Reasons That You Shouldn’t Read (on the toilet)

This is a subject that totally divides the sexes. For some reason, reading in the toilet is something that women just don’t do, and they’re right. I agree. I read a lot. I’m also a man. To some people, this could mean that I might reasonably be expected to be found reading on the toilet, or would be, if people were in the habit of finding other people on the toilet which fortunately – for the most part – they’re not. But I won’t be found reading in the toilet ever, because I won’t be reading on the toilet in the first place – unless I’m dealing with some sort of emergency that requires me to use the toilet and read important instructions simultaneously. Like coming face to face with a self-assembly lion. Other than that, however, reading while using the toilet is something that shouldn’t ever be done. Here are seven reasons why.

This: Don’t do it.

1. It’s Disgusting. We’ve all seen those shock-docs in which restaurant toilets are subjected to ultra violet/infra-red/magic-poo-seeing light, and they don’t make comfortable viewing. They show specks of faecal matter (close your eyes if you’re at all squeamish) spattered (you can open them again now) on far walls, high ceilings, behind sinks and well, just about everywhere, and the nearer to the toilet the surface is, the more bottom-mud there will be on it. So if you’re reading a book while you’re using the toilet, or even leaving a book near the toilet, it’s going to get faeces on it. That is an undesirable trait in a book.

2. It’s Disgusting Multiplied. Having left your excrement all over your book, once you’ve finished it you’ll return it to your library or lend it to a friend or a colleague who’ll probably read it in a normal place like a chair or a bed or something. So not only are they taking your shit with them into their bed, they could well become ill while reading it. “I seem to have picked up a horrible stomach bug,” your colleague will tell you as they call in sick,” still, at least it gives me some time to read the book you lent me.” You’ll have poisoned them. And you’ll probably end up covering their workload at the office too, while they lounge around at home. The only winner in this scenario is Jeremy Kyle.

3. It’s Just Weird. Well it is. Why, out of all the things that men do so brilliantly well, is the only example of their multi-tasking prowess the ability to poo and read simultaneously? Is it that the very act of sitting down on the toilet feminises them and renders them suddenly capable of doing more than one thing at once? And why don’t women read on the toilet? They’re always telling us they can do fifteen things at the same time (often while they’re burning something in the kitchen or standing on the cat’s tail) but put them on the toilet – where no one can see them – and they suddenly become mono-taskers. Does this mean that the multi-tasking stuff is all for show? If you put a toilet and a book together in the same place and you get more questions than answers. Unless, of course, the book is a book of answers. They can only be trumped by a toilet of questions.

4. What If Someone Else Wants The Bathroom? There are other people in the world too. Other people that might conceivably want to use the toilet for the actual purpose of using the toilet. It’s no fun for someone to have to hang around outside the bathroom crossing their legs and screwing up their face while shrieking, “I need the toilet! I need the toilet!” with increasing desperation (well, it is, but not for them). It’s like Superman. Does he ever think about people that need to make a phone call when he’s using a phone box to change into his costume? No he bloody doesn’t. And their phone call might be an emergency. He’s an inconsiderate bastard. Essentially, if you read on the toilet you’re just like Superman.*

5. Health & Safety. It’s not just about books any more. There are hi-tech reading devices out there that the hapless and misguided might conceivably try to use while in the smallest room. Kindles, for example. But no one knows what possible effects would occur if they dropped an electronic book into the toilet (I googled it**). It would stop working, that’s obvious, but it also contains a battery so, I assume, it’s possible that it could short-circuit and send a small electrical charge through the water in the toilet bowl if dropped. Now if you were connected to the water in the bowl in some way (by a stream of liquid perhaps, you are in the toilet, after all), you’d get an electrical shock. Right in the very last place you’d want one. They’re not even allowed to torture people like that at Guantanamo Bay. They’re restricted to water-boarding them there, or forcing them to spell Guantanamo. The monsters.

6. What If You Run Out Of Paper? Outside of Kerry Katona, is there anything more tragic and desperate than someone that has just discovered there’s no toilet paper once they’ve completed a movement? Probably not. At that moment, people will use anything that’s near to hand (perhaps even their hand). If they’re reading a book, there’s no question that they’ll tear a page or two out and use that to wipe themselves with. But what if they’re reading the Bible? That would be blasphemous. What if they’re reading the Encyclopedia Britannica? They could end up ignorant about aardvarks or Zurich. What if they’re reading Dan Brown? That would be hopeless as the pages are covered in shit already. It’s just better not to have a book within reach in the first place.

7. Pity The Writers. At 7 Reasons, we’re generally just happy and flattered that people read us at all. But we’re also British and, as such, feel duty-bound to uphold notions of taste and decency and to urge our readers toward decorous behaviour. So we have to draw a line. And that line is at the bathroom door. We can’t write while imagining our readers on the toilet and you probably don’t want to be imagined using the toilet by us while we write***. For our sake, as well as yours, you should never – even though you probably weren’t considering it anyway – read 7 Reasons in the toilet. You should, of course, continue to outfit yourself in your Sunday best before settling down in your parlours and libraries to read us, just as you’re doing now. Nice hat, madam, by the way.

*This argument hasn’t gone well.

**I did find many instances of people dropping their iPhones down the toilet but that just made me laugh a lot. Or is it lAugh?

***That sentence took nine rewrites before it even made partial sense.

February 22, 2011
Guest Post: 7 Reasons I Don’t Want a Kindle

It’s Saturday, and the 7 Reasons team are taking a well-deserved day off, but fear not: In charge of the 7 Reasons sofa today is Roger Williams; a Manchester-based writer, lyricist and owner of a full and luxuriant ginger beard. Here are seven reasons that he doesn’t want a Kindle.

1. Fahrenheit 451. The primary definition of Kindle in my whopping great Collins English Dictionary (a tome so weighty and downright bookish that while it would be impossible to swallow, it would be entirely feasible to use it to, say, smash a Kindle to smithereens) is ‘to set alight or start to burn.’ Mmm. You don’t need the Enigma machine to decode the sub-conscious desires of the Satanic device’s inventors here. They clearly want us to burn books. That’s right 7 Reasons readers. Biblioclasm! Libricide! Buying a Kindle is tantamount to supporting the book incinerating activities of the Spanish conquistadors, the worst McCarthyite zealots, the Nazis and the Dove World Outreach Centre church in Florida.

2. If it ain’t broke don’t e-fix it. Books are the perfect marriage of function and form. They have a quality of soul which an electronic device could never match. The volumes you gather as you travel through life are a story in themselves. The spine creases of the well-thumbed volume; the stain left by the coffee you spilt when you first saw her; the enthusiastic underlinings of well-loved sections and the page corner-foldings of inspiration; the sheer sentimental, colourful, characterful accumulation of books. You can’t furnish a room with a Kindle. Unless it’s a room for a hamster. That hates books.

3. Books smell good (musty second hand bookshops in Holmfirth don’t count.) I’ve never smelt a Kindle but I imagine it would smell of evil.

4. Books have done the job perfectly well for hundreds of years. The more complicated you make something the more likely it is that something will go wrong. At no point in the annals of history (beautifully preserved because they’ve been written down, on paper) has anyone ever complained “This book has crashed” or “I wish this book would go faster.” No one has ever advised you to turn a malfunctioning novel off and on again.

You can still read a book that’s hundreds of years old. You can’t watch videos from the early 1990s. The written word is timeless, but technology moves so fast that by the time you’re two thirds of the way through A Suitable Boy your Kindle will be in museum for obsolete things. Being bullied by a Sinclair C5.

5. There’s a physicality to books, a reassuring heft, a presence, whereas Kindles by comparison are…spineless. Books are transferable. How many times do you read something you love then lend it to a friend you know is going to share your enthusiasm? There’s no room for that in Kindleland. You either have to loan out your Kindle, and all that it contains, or they have to buy the f-ing e-book themselves.

6. Bathing. I admit this isn’t really an issue for me because I’m male and therefore genetically unable to multitask, but word is you can’t read a Kindle in the bath. I plagiarised this point from a letter written to The Guardian by a woman. I wasn’t doing anything else at the time. She was probably cooking a three-course meal and reading the paper when she wrote it.

7. And alright, I admit it, I woke up one morning and realised I was a Luddite.

Now…I’ve heard a rumour they’ve just installed one of those new weaving machines at a mill along the turnpike road in Bolton. Anyone want to come and help me smash it up before the idea catches on?

November 13, 2010
7 Reasons You Should Choose Your Holiday Read Carefully

There’s so much to think about when choosing your holiday read and so much can go wrong. Here are seven reasons that you should do it carefully.

1. The Cover. People say you should never judge a book by its cover. But they do. Which is why everyone who sees your choice of book will automatically form an opinion of you. And it will probably be the wrong opinion. Take Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange for example. The Penguin Modern Classic version depicts a glass of milk. If I see someone reading a book that has a cover featuring milk I immediately think, ‘Cows. The reader likes cows’. They probably don’t. In fact, had I asked them, they would have probably shrugged with indifference. But that’s the peril of the book cover. To me, that person will always be a cow lover.

2. Trilogies. These are a big no-no. No one reads more than one book on holiday, so never start on a series that is going to take you a further two holidays to finish. By the time the second holiday comes around you’ll have forgotten what happened in the first book. This means you’ll have to read it again, only for the process to repeat itself on the next holiday. Basically, you’ll spend the rest of your life holidaying with the same book. And you’ll never find out who kills who or what the wizard said to the pixie or why the girl next door is so addicted to sex with vampires.

3. Love. Lots of people meet the love of their lives (or their night) on holiday. The last thing you need – having plucked up the courage and charmed a beautiful lady at the bar – is for her to come back to your suite and see your copy of How To Talk Women Into Bed resting on your pillow. That kind of behaviour is strictly frowned upon by the fairer sex. Apparently.

4. Language. When you take a book abroad, it’s disrespectful to your hosts to read an English translation of a book originally written in their language. In Barcelona, several people were upset to see me reading a translation of Lorca’s Yerma, but that was nothing compared to the reaction of Berliners to my English version of Mein Kampf. Never read a translated work. They were livid.

5. Practicality. The Da Vinci Code is the ideal book to take on holiday. If the weather takes a turn for the worse you can use it as kindling; if you spill your drink on the table, it’s quite absorbent; if you need to hold a door in your villa open, you can fashion a papier-mache doorstop from it; if you find that people are trying to engage you in conversation, you can pretend to read it (they’ll soon leave you alone). There’s almost nothing that this versatile book can’t be used for. Except as reading material, obviously. That would be stupid.

6. The Lord Of The Flies. If you have teenage children, do not take this book on your island-break with you. Okay, so it’s pretty unlikely that they’ll put down their iPods and PSPs for long enough to read it, but if they do, they may descend into savagery before you know it. And savages do not make relaxing holiday companions. As anyone that has vacationed in Ayia Napa will testify.

7. Airports. A copy of Frank Barnaby’s How to Build A Nuclear Bomb and Other Weapons of Mass Destruction would be a particularly poor choice of holiday read. It’s sobering, serious and thought-provoking; none of the things that are conducive to the holiday mood as you attempt to relax and get away from it all in your detention cell at Heathrow Airport.

September 8, 2010
7 Reasons These Opening Lines Are Not Classics

It is said that the following seven opening lines are some of the best written. I disagree. In fact I believe them to be vastly overrated. This is why.

1. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen. 1813. I think one only has to look at the case of Sir Elton John to realise that this is not a truth universally acknowledged at all. Nor is it acknowledged locally.*

2. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 1984. George Orwell. 1949. Bollocks. I suppose the sundial was pointing to half-past twenty-seven too.

3. “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” The Old Man And The Sea. Ernest Hemmingway. 1952. If the old man doesn’t have the sense to move to a different location after eighty-four days then I fail to see how I am going to be inspired by his intelligence for the ensuing chapters. Nor his fishing technique.

4. “It was love at first sight.” Catch-22. Joseph Heller. 1961. Now I am a romantic. I know this because I have Notting Hill and Love Actually on DVD, but I can’t believe in love at first sight. Lust, yes. Nausea, certainly. But not love. This wasn’t love. It was just a deep attraction to this person’s physical appearance. I assume it was a person. I didn’t get beyond the line to find out. It could have been a new toaster. But even so, it wasn’t love.

5. “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” Dodie Smith. I Capture The Castle. 1948. I suppose I should have had an idea what to expect when I read the title. This book is about a drug addict. Who owns a large sink. Not for me.

6. “When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventyifirst birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.” The Fellowship Of The Rings. J.R.R Tolkein. 1954. How the hell did this get made into a film? In fact, how the hell did it get made into a book? For two years I have been trying to get my book published and I can guarantee you my first line makes more bloody sense than this rubbish. The next 10,000 lines maybe not, but the first line definitely.

7. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” Charles Dickens. A Tale Of Two Cities. 1859. I don’t know whether Mr. Dickens is being hypocritical on purpose here or just can’t make his bloody mind up. Poxy fence sitters. I bet this was on the Liberal Democrats reading list in the pre-Nick Clegg days. It’s probably been replaced by something with a nice cover now.**

*This is not a subtle attempt to come out. I’m not coming out. Because I don’t need to. And that’s not because I have come out in the past. I haven’t. Mainly because I don’t think like Sir Elton John.***

**The Conservative Party’s book of choice is, Slaughterhouse-Five, while Labour’s is, The Catcher In The Rye. You can look up the first lines.

***So, to sum up, I’m straight.

May 5, 2010
7 Reasons You Shouldn’t Share a Bed With Me

Hi, I’m Marc. I’m half of the 7 Reasons team – the one with the feet. Some of you probably imagine that after a long day on the 7 Reasons sofa, in the manner of Laurel and Hardy or Morecambe and Wise, Jon and I put on our jim-jams and nightcaps and retire to the 7 Reasons bed for some hard-earned slumber. This is not true, please un-think it. The reality is, in fact, more bizarre than that.

I would just like to make it clear that today’s 7 Reasons post is not 7 reasons that you shouldn’t share a bed with our website, and it isn’t 7 reasons that you shouldn’t share a bed with Jon (you’ll probably have your own reasons for that), it’s 7 Reasons that you shouldn’t share a bed with me – sorry if that upsets any plans.

1. Reading. I read in bed. My bedtime reading matter of choice is often a large, heavy, hardback biography or a similarly weighty historical tome. Consequently, holding a book tires my arms – especially when I’m fidgeting (I do a lot of fidgeting) between positions. At some point I will use the nearest person as a book-rest – their head is the most practical place to rest my book as it is at my eye-level. I’m told that this is annoying.

2. Decapitation. I like to have two pillows to myself – one placed on top of the other. In my struggle to get comfortable/block out sound/block out light/keep my head warm/move into the night’s eighty-third position, I often place my head between the pillows. I find this position comfortable. If you wake up sharing a bed with me, you will briefly believe that you are sharing the bed with a headless man. This will startle you. Every time.

3. Radio. I listen to the radio in bed – BBC Radio 5Live’s Up All Night programme – it keeps me informed, educated and entertained while I am failing to sleep. This is fine until 2:40am on Wednesdays. That’s when Cash Peters is on. That’s when the sound of my (poorly) stifled laughter will wake you up. You will probably wonder why tears are streaming down my face; you’re likely to wonder why I’m biting the duvet (this is for your benefit, you’re welcome); you may wonder if I’m having a funny turn; you will definitely wonder if the spare bed is unoccupied.

4. Soft toys. If I should find a cuddly-toy in, or even near, the bed, I feel compelled to tuck it in. If you are not expecting to wake up flanked by a slumbering bear, a recumbent penguin, a sleepy elephant or a dozing handbag (I get confused in the dark), it can be quite disconcerting.

5. Curling. Not everything I do in bed is annoying. I often curl up into a tiny ball under the covers. This hampers my breathing somewhat, so I fashion myself a small air-hole in the side of the duvet and poke my nose out through it. This, I am told, is one of the cutest things in the world. And it probably is, right up until you try to move my painstakingly-positioned sheets. Then you’ll find yourself involved in a life-and-death tussle for control of the duvet. And I always win.

6. Experimentation. During the night many important questions will pop into my head, prompting me to experiment on the nearest sleeping person. What if I poke my finger in her ear? What if I blow in her eye? What if I drip water on her forehead? What if I tie her hair to the headboard and shout “Boo!?” What if I loudly mimic her breathing pattern for several minutes then stop abruptly? What if I coo like a pigeon and flap the top of the duvet around? The possibilities are limitless.

7. Sleep. Eventually, I will wear myself out and fall asleep. Don’t think that’s where the fun ends though. It’s then that I think up entire 7 Reasons posts that make no sense at all and get chased around the house by a horse. As I flee the dream-horse my legs will flail and I may emit noises – I might even say, “Crikey, a horse!” again. I have also been observed barking like a dog and trying to dig a hole in the mattress with my front paws…er…hands. I meant hands. By this stage, you may not know what time it is, but you’ll probably decide that it’s time to get up, which is great as I’d love a coffee.

March 4, 2010
7 Reasons You Should Be Able To Quote Eleanor Roosevelt

1. “There are practical little things in housekeeping which no man really understands.” For use when your wife returns home from a bit of shopping, to see that you have tried to do the dusting as she asked, but you have just dusted around all the objects on the mantel piece. She doesn’t think this is a good enough effort.

2. “If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavour.” For use when your friends ask you why you don’t just settle down and get a normal job instead of being the perennial dreamer. A man who longs to catch one hundred buses in one night would fall into this category.

3. “I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.” For use when you think that to make a sex joke funny you must include crude and vulgar language or demonstrations.

4. “Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyse may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life.” For use when you are in Waterstones trying to work out what to buy your wife for her birthday. This should be enough to drag you away from anything that has Jordan’s face on it to something like Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About The Bike: My Journey Back To Life.

5. “Friendship with ones self is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.” For use whenever someone suggests you may be getting a little narcissistic. Or when you are fourteen and your Mum has just found a photo of Posh Spice under the mat in the bathroom.

6. “A woman is like a tea bag – you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.” For use when you are the producer of The World’s Strongest Woman.

7. “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along’.” For use whenever you switch on the TV to find one of the following filling your screen: X-Factor/Britain’s Got Talent/The Persuasionists/America’s Next Top Model/Britain’s Next Top Model/Piers Morgan/Kerry Katona/Katie Price/Harriet Harman.

February 3, 2010