The Bloke.co.uk | Life After the Lad

This has obviously taken many many hours to complete by CassetteBoy.  Very funny - a labour of love. Well worth it.

I first came across this teeth grating phrase when I went ‘travelling’ as a youth.  I use the inverted commas because although it’s called travelling it’s really a massive pub crawl up the east coast of Australia with a stop over in Thailand undertaken by late teen kids who want to get away from mum and dad but don’t fancy entering the world of work just yet.

So you save up some money working in a gastro pub and you go travelling.  And you spend 6-12 months living almost exclusively amongst fellow brits and the odd Dutch person (who you tolerate because they always have drugs on them for some reason and are the only other nationality that gets british humour) in backpacker hotels that sell Marmite and Boddingtons to make you feel at home whilst you reverse charge call your Dad every week to see if he can wire you more money to do white water rafting.  Then you come home and proudly declare you’ve been travelling and your mind is broadened and your granny thinks you’re great.  She has visions of you as a sort of Benedict Allen figure trudging up the skeleton coast in 60 degree heat surrounded by dead bedouins.  Incidentally, apparently Benedict Allen was faced with hunger and near death in the Amazon and took out his machete and killed his loyal dog that had chosen (unwisely) to follow him on his trip and then ate him.  Now thats bloody travelling.  Not going to some pubs in Queensland and shagging a girl from Gerards Cross.

Anyway, went on this island and asked to borrow some mosquito stuff from this hippy guy.  Who says ‘no worries’ in that sort of stoned hippy speak that people who went to Public School and go to Queensland to find themselves and grow their hair long seem to adopt. To which i said ‘er, is that yes?’  he said : yes man, squirt away.

Anyway, *no worries* then spread like wildfire through the backpacker population whilst back home Neighbours had become the number one soap which meant a whole generation of students picked up the phrase and then started talking with that really annoying Australian habit of making your speech inflection go up at the end of every sentence.  And then suddenly in the early 90’s every bastard was saying No Worries. And each No Worry was like nails down a blackboard but i learnt to live with it.  Like Tony Blair.

But it seems so wildly innapropriate for a late noughties frame of mind.  I mean there are worries.  There’s loads of fucking worries.  The recession.  Our leadersbeing a bunch of lying cheating bastards (if you’ve ever had a VAT inspection you’ll know that as a member of the public you don’t get to, er, forget that you ran through £5,000 worth of moat expenses or, er, change your desingated house 3 times a year….by accident), or Prince Charles, or global warming, or the sinister death of most of the bee population, or Gordon Brown, David Cameron, The rise of the BNP, 3 million people on incapacity benefit, 8 traffic wardens for every copper (who are all indoors filling out gender complians forms), car tax, tax, tescos, school fees, gas bills, dropping your iphone down the toilet, etc etc ad finitum.

so you see the phrase should be ‘Worries’.  Hi can I borrow a your mosquito stuff : worries.

there are no longer no worries.

Twitterwank : where corporations desparately trying to get to grips with ‘noo media’ try and jump on band wagons that they should probably let roll past.

This is not my first whitter about twitter being a load of crap that’s great if you’re 14 and like to know that your best friend has had waffles for tea but for the rest of us it’s mindless tosh.   But the puff bloody continues, it’s like the world has gone insane for Twitter and it’s really starting to look like the emperors new clothes.  I was hoping it would fuck off and go and live in Monoco like “Sir” Fred but it just keeps getting more powerful and seeping into my life from every angle.  I got spammed yesterday by Marks and Spencer.  Apparently I have some interest in the fact that they are 125 years old.  Just before I was about to delete the message I notice the little ‘t’ logo tucked up at the bottom of email. That’s right folks, M&S Twitters.  Now excuse me but who the fuck in this screwed up world wants to follow a fucking middle class food & clothes shop?  I mean Twitter is down with the kids innit?  So I clicked onto the Twitter page and what I found was the most obvious bit of marketing wank I have ever seen.  Lots of ‘folk’ chatting about where they can find their nearest salmon terrine.  Yes, really.  You can imagine the conversation at Marks HQ:

Marketing Director: OK team I saw this thing about Twitter on channel 4 last night and we need to get involved because it’s the new thing?  It’s what new media is all about.  Apparently.

Marketing Asst: Er, OK boss but why are we trying to get into 14 year old kids talking about spliffs and wanking.  And Stephen Fry?

Marketing Director: We need to be seen as a thrusting sort of cutting edge organisation.

Marketing Asst: But we sell middle class clothing.  and pants. And nice hangover food.

Marketing Director: just set up the fucking page or people will say we are fuddy duddy when we release the next set of crap sales figures.

Marketing Asssit : but everybody is releasing crap sales figures.  it’s a recession.  Aiming our marketing at the youth is a bit like my dad wearing trainers and dancing at weddings. it’s shit and embarassing.  Why don’t we film some naked middle class fat ladies running up a hill?

And lo.  1 week later the page is live. But nobody uses it. Apart from Stephen Fry.  So the marketing department invent 20 names each and start twittering to each other about pate and twin sets.  Which is why there are 500 people registered.  How long before this is queitly dropped?

Another totally unsuitable website with moronic-jumping-on-the-bandwagon-trainer-wearing-marketing-director-with-no-original-thought who has embraced twitter this week is:

Extel, a voip telecoms provider (yes, really, they think that Twittering is cool, kids really, get voip for your office, ah, you don’t have an office because you’re 14) - total members… 18!

keep an eye open BLOKES - Case if beer to the best of the worst corporate twattering.

Now we are not the greenest blokes in the world, or even the most caring about animals, but we like this bloke because for once he is a good banker! I know, big statment.

Some Kids TV is totally brilliant. This is very funny.