How to Cope with Being Dead

If you’re reading this, then there is a strong possibility that you are dead, and not coping, or that you will be dead sometime in the future and are worried about not coping.
The first step is checking to see whether you are actually dead and not just a bit hung-over. If you have no pulse, or there are large holes where any major organs should be, or you have an unnatural desire to chew on human brains (fig 1) then you are dead. CONGRATULATIONS! Acceptance is the first part of coping with your death.

Unfortunately, there is one problem that often faces dead people; they are buried in a thick wooden coffin under a good deal of fairly stiff soil. If this doesn’t apply to you, due to wishes of being cremated or stuffed-and-preserved so you can take centre stage in the living room once more, then feel free to skip this section. Luckily, several graves are fitted with a bell system, wherein you can pull on a string to indicate that service would be quite pleasant right now. However, people often either blame the bell’s ringing on the wind, or faint from fright when there is no wind. Due to the selfish nature of mankind, it looks like you’re going to have to get out of this pickle yourself. Thankfully, it appears that dying can actually be good for one’s health; it is widely known that, along with little old Italian ladies, the dead possess super-human strength. So, using a bit of ingenuity and uber-strong dead muscles, you should have shuffled out of your grave in no time.

When you are back on the surface, you’ll encounter several more problems, namely the fact that plucky groups of desperate survivors, or even the army, will try and shoot you. This is why you should always carry a certificate proclaiming the friendliness of your deadness, and remember not to chew on too many people.

Your next worry may be that you will be unable to find a suitable job. However, there is no place in today’s modern, progressed society for the awful prejudice that can be held against someone simply because they are dead. Just some of the fun, rewarding jobs that a differently-alive (to use the politically correct terminology) person can hold are shown below (fig 2)

Now that you’re dead, your social life is going to be quite different. Primarily, this will be due to the fact that sooner or later, you’ll stink like the rear-end of a rotten skunk. To mask this, there are plenty of perfumes, deodorants and colognes out there to hide your smelly shame. A further issue is that some of your friends won’t want to see you any more, on account of you being dead. In this case, they’re not your true friends, and maybe chewing on their brains a bit won’t go amiss. Also, you’ll be able to gain a lot of new friends by performing novelty bar tricks, such as juggling your own ears. Nothing wins people over like self-mutilation, cheap clown acts and a couple of pints of lager. (Fig 3)

Overall, the secret to coping with being dead is to embrace your un-life, but not let stereotypes dictate whatever you do. Show off your new found talents, but never go too far and cross the line of causing a virus outbreak and national panic. That would just be selfish.

How to Make a Cup of Tea

Tea. It built a trade empire, which in its heyday advocated the brutal treatment and persecution of thousands of natives, who were cruelly forced to grow the delicious crop, then sell it at low prices to the British, who in were desperate need of something to wash down their afternoon cakes, and spew in outrage at the day’s news (for more information on tea spewing, see Fig 1 of ‘How to Read a Newspaper'). But it sure is tasty!
Yet evil... (fig 1).

It is also positively ridiculously easy to make, which is why it’s so inexplicable when the majority of cafés, tea-rooms and their ilk manage to mess it up so extravagantly. If it’s not woefully under-brewed, essentially brown water, then it’s stewed for three weeks in a clay urn and is thick enough to clog up the Thames for a good few days.

This is why, if just for my mental wellbeing rather than anything else, I have produced a fool-proof, fail-safe, have-to-be-the-lovechild-of-Homer-Simpson-and-a-dodo-to-get-it-wrong list of instructions on how to make a Great British cup of tea. ‘Why are they so secure?’, you may ask. Well, quite simply, it’s because many of the steps are interchangeable, or simply voluntary AND AFTER ALL, ALL YOU’RE DOING IS PUTTING THREE (MAYBE FOUR, BUT I DIGRESS. APOLOGIES) THINGS INTO A MUG, STIRRING IT THEN LEAVING IT FOR A PERIOD OF TIME.

You Will Need:

• A teacup

• Water

• Kettle

• A teabag

• Sugar (optional)

• Milk(optional)

How you do it:

1) Boil the water in the kettle. Refer to kettle manual on how the kettle works. If kettle refuses to work, do not use cold water for the tea. Call the nice man from Comet for help. Sort your life out.

2) Place boiled water, teabag, and optional ingredients into teacup in any old order. Just bung ‘em all in, because contrary to popular belief it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference what order they go in

3) Stir, with anything non-organic which comes to hand and is clean. Leave for 1 to 5 minutes depending on how strong you want it. No more, no less.

4) Remove teabag, and drink tea from the teacup. Saucer, scones and spewing are optional, but recommended.

There. How hard was that? Not at all. Should anyone still need nannying, here are some top tips:

Remove teabag with a spoon or similar appliance if possible. Any other method is probably ill-advised. (Fig 2)

If the milk you are planning on using is so far past its best that it is in fact, cheese, then do not add to cup. Instead, add a slice of lemon and claim it is edgy and modern (Fig 3) despite the fact that tea with lemon is really quite an old tradition.

How to Go Shopping

Unless you live in the wonderful, magical land where online shopping is consistently reliable and on-time, then chances are that you will have to go shopping for the necessities at least once a week.
The major shop at a supermarket is a bit like life at a micro-scale. It’s confusing, disorienting, hectic and stressful, and full of people either shouting at you or pushing a large, heavy metal object at you at high speed with every intention to maim. So don’t even think about taking that last tin of chopped vegetables (fig 1). Also, you have no idea where the hell anything is.

Sometimes, to steel themselves for the forty minutes of torture they know awaits them, some people make a shopping list. From this, one of two scenarios can occur

1) You get to the supermarket, and have your trolley. You look at the list, and then swear to meticulously follow it from top to bottom, even if item number 1 is at one end of the shop, and item number 2 is at the other. Every item on the list must be found, and found in the order in which it is written down. The result: a two hour long shop which culminates in you having a nervous breakdown when you can’t find the coleslaw.

2) The list is just a rough guide. You’re going to do this as quickly as possible, so you can escape this shiny, plasticy hell-hole. This means you just go up every aisle you see once a single time, from one end of store to t’other picking up every item you see that rings a bell. The result: Twenty minutes of shopping, three hours of agony when you realise when you’re halfway home that as well as forgetting the tooth-paste, toilet roll and caster sugar, you’ve also left one spouse and a number of children in the supermarket café.  

There is, thankfully, a happy medium. It involves using your noggin and coming up with a loose but definitive plan which covers everything you need, which usually means waiting at the checkout and taking it in turns with your significant other to dash off and pick up something that you’ve just remembered, then bask in the glow of the points earned on your store-card. SAVINGS, SOON YOU WILL BE MINE!

In my experience (humble thought it may be) the most stressful part of the shop is usually the buying of cheese over the counter. In some supermarkets, you are issued with some sort of ticket with a number, and you are expected to wait until a voice booms your particular digits over the speaker. It is rather like waiting to be shot. This is because -for me, at least- the sitting down and waiting instils a sense of panic, which slowly matures like the fine cheeses in front of you. You get nervous. Will they like my cheese choice? Will they think badly of me? Are they going to get all snobbish when they see the Dairylea and Cheese Strings in my trolley? Then, when you are beckoned like a lamb to the creamy and mature yet tangy slaughter, the person in his cheese uniform waits, holding some very sharp wire in a threatening manner. Of course, the best, calmest solution to dealing with the problem of cheese-buying-anxiety is a simple and obvious one. Simply smash through the counter, pick up the largest wheel of cheese you can, throw it through the wall and run to safety. (fig 2)

The most important thing to remember when one is going shopping is not to panic. Hyper-ventilating has no place in today’s busy, consumer driven lifestyles. If you want to hyper-ventilate, do it in the safety and manure-scented comfort of a farmers’ market. The supermarket is a place for bold derring-do, where every bargain must be sought out and acted upon. Be brave, be dashing, and be thrifty. Good luck.

How to Read a Newspaper

As a race, humans are obsessed with what’s going on around them in the world. Albeit, this lust for knowledge does include, for some, wanting to know which celebrity has lost weight in a break-up while adopting a cute orphan, only to be found out to be the secret leader of an even more secret world-wide drug cartel, responsible for the deaths of dozens of people in gang warfare. But most people are just decent, normal folk who just want to know what’s going on. And this, friends, is what newspapers are for.

Despite each news-worthy event only having one way in which it panned out (i.e, the way it actually panned out), there are dozens of different newspapers out there, each with their own different spin on an occurrence or amount of indignation heaped upon people involved, be they actually responsible or not. As a result, it can be confusing, even frightening, to decide which newspaper you want to buy in the first place. Luckily, for your convenience (and because it takes up a large area, thus preventing the need to think of and write any more words. Words are tricky) I have provided, just for you, a handy table to see which paper suits your frame of mind.

(Click to enlarge)         

There are, indeed, others; notably the Times, the countless tabloid papers, and the ‘local rags’. However, I had unfortunately run out of both space and witty remarks to continue. (Looking back at the table, it appears I had run out of the latter some time before writing. In fact, why stop at the table. The whole series would be a more suitable and encompassing term.)

Once you have chosen your local paper, open it. Get a large bin bag, and clear away all the needless sub-sections until you have found the one or two bits of many that you actually desire to read. Burn the rest. All that remains is to make a nice cup of tea (if you don’t like tea, then tough. Just go with it. For instructions on tea making, see ‘How to make Tea’), sit down in a comfy armchair, and get ready to explode in outrage at at least one story, be it in the rise of price of lentils and bean-sprouts for the Guardian readers, or the latest conspiracy about the People’s Princess’s death for fans of the Express. Spewing tea everywhere for effect is optional, but greatly emphasises your disgust (fig 1). 

Try it. It will make you feel a lot better.

Finally, once read, the newspaper can act as a cunning, failsafe plan which can get you out of any sticky, undesirable situation which could possibly arise (fig 2) 

Facts and Tips

Following my 'How to...' theme, here a few useful facts and tips to help you out in any (read: barely any) of life's little difficulties. Again, I'm technologically incompetent, so just click the image below to see it all big like.

The Daily Fail

I'm in conflicted minds about the title of this post. On the one hand, I do appreciate a finely wrought and appropriate pun such as this. On the other hand, I find myself frowning at the fact that I have stooped to the level of using 'fail' as a noun, such is the current trend in internet patois. How extraordinarily vulgar.

Anyway, this is a piece of AS English Language homework; the brief was to retell the story of Jack and the Beanstalk in a medium of our choice. Enjoy. (I haven't yet found a way to get word documents on this blog-type thing, so just click on t' picture below.)

How to Protest

Let’s face it. There are times in life when one is, quite frankly, ticked off. A factory could decide to outsource, causing mass redundancies (and inevitably, a film ten years later depicting the plucky unemployed people’s refusal to give in and make a musical about their plight). A proposed motorway could cut straight through a quaint, Middle-England village, running straight over Grandma’s grave and the statue commemorating the first inhabitant to own a fridge. A posh supermarket could be destroyed, sparking a middle-class crisis when they are unable to find olive spread, capers, or the right type of mayonnaise.

Yes, there are times when even a very stiff letter to the Daily Telegraph isn’t enough to fully express one’s anger (fig 1). And it’s at times like these that the British sense of community and togetherness swells up, and groups of similarly hard-done-by people gather together to hurl a brick through a window.

Protests have a long, illustrious history, dating back to the Stone-Age when ecological modern-thinking cavemen would intervene on the behalf of the mammoth, rapidly being hunted to extinction. Unfortunately, large stone tablets are bloody difficult to use as banners (fig 2), so the idea of protesting never really kicked off until people found something lightweight to wave (Banners and waving will be covered in more detail later). However, the art of the protest progressed over the years, their demands being heard, and then consistently refused by the people in charge. And they say democracy is a lie.

Guide to Protesting

A fine example were the student protests over the removal of the cap on tuition fees. Luckily, they were a fine example of protesting, and will thus be used as our example here, though feel free to adapt these guidelines to any subject or scale that you so desire, from minor tiff to violent and decisive coup.

You will need:

• A group of like-minded people to protest with. One person waving a placard? Unlikely to achieve much. Two people waving two placards? Now we’re talking.

• Placards/Banners/Signs with well thought out, sensitive, witty, thought provoking messages (fig 3)

• Some sort of projectile to hurl, e.g.: stones, eggs, the packed lunch your mum made you, but turns out to be egg mayo (Yuk). Aim for maximum effect when hurling projectile, but be careful not to do it when the nice riot police men are watching (or mum, on the telly)

When your necessities are gathered, simply stand around looking disgruntled while waving your lovely banner. Eat any of the packed lunch which you do like, and hurl the rest. When all else fails, shock any nearby royals who happen to be passing (fig 4).  And remember, when all looks like it is going down the metaphorical pan, feign casual nonchalance while subtly and unnoticeably doing some more damage (fig 5). 

DISNEY!

There's really no excuse for this. I am so, so sorry. But let this serve as a lesson to schools that it is never a good idea to combine a large amount of disney and zoo video clips, movie maker, and a lot of free time.

Truth

I suppose, looking back at the whole affair, the seeds of discontent and suspicion were first sown a few weeks ago. That was when the whole thing kicked off.

Every night, the same routine. Come 10PM, the telly would be switched over to Channel 1, for the BBC News at 10. In his lilting valley tones, Huw Edwards would tell me of the day's events, and everything, no matter how depressing, how gruesome, how terrifying, would just seem all right. After all, the BBC makes everything better. Doesn't it?

And then I had an encounter which changed my life. Walking through town one day, I was accosted by a man, scruffy in appearance and demeanour. He was bloodshot of eye, frothing of mouth, and pungent of scent. He pulled me to one side.
"You poor fool! I've seen you, every night, watching the news, happy in your rut. Have you ever considered that there may be other news? Ever considered that there are other channels than beloved Auntie Beeb? All knowing, all loving, all caring Auntie Beeb?" He spat with disgust "You've wool in front of your eyes, my boy, and it's time it was pulled away!"
 Before I could respond, he had limped away, leaving me with a feeling of fear, an inkling of distrust, and a face covered in spittle.

His words, although clearly insane and delusional, rang true. In a twisted, obscene manner, yes, but true nonetheless. I really should try something new; expand my horizons and all that jazz. So, that night, after a session of Dave's original comedy (hah!) I dared to be different. I dared to break the mould. I dared to rebel.

I watched Channel 4 News.

It was fine, good enough, unremarkable. Yes, it covered the news, and yes, I learned things. But it seemed to lack the comforting warmth of the BBC. But, I persevered; not just with Channel 4, mind. Oh no. ITV, Sky and even (lord forgive me) Channel 5 all graced me with their journalism. I was gradually weaning myself off Auntie Beeb.

It was an odd feeling. Imagine a safety harness that has been there all your life, protecting you from life's little stumbles. You get used to it; so used to it, you forget it's there. It just seems natural. Now, imagine that it just disappeared. Life would seem new and scary and worrying. That's how I felt; I was permanently on edge, more aware of everything grim that was going on in the world. Despite this, I still resolved not to go back to the Beeb.

Then, one night, stuff began to happen. A knock on my door, at exactly 12 o' clock. I shuffled downstairs, blinking wearily. There was no-one there.

The next night, the same thing. A midnight visitor who fled before he could be confronted. So, the night after that, I employed some cunning. I fashioned myself a snug little den out of the coats in the hall, comfy and hidden from sight, and set my alarm to 11:55PM.

***

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Be-.
Then waiting.

***

Two knocks, and I opened the door. Standing there was a bland, featureless man in a grey suit, who seemed completely unsurprised at my finding him. He stood there, nonplussed, for a second, before enquiring, very politely, exactly why I thought it necessary to watch other news. Enquired why I would even question Auntie Beeb's judgement. I told him that an open mind was a good thing, thank you very much, and slammed the door on him.

The next thing I knew, I was in what looked like the waiting room for a doctor. There was a pleasant looking old woman of around 60 behind the counter. She was relatively short, with curled grey hair, glasses and a distinct aura of 'likes cats' around her. She smiled politely at me. I was alone.

"Excuse me, ma'am, but could you possibly tell me where I am?" My head had a slight groggy feeling, and my thoughts were ever so slightly blurred at the edges.

"Why, dear, you're at the Education Centre. Fancy silly old you not knowing that!"

I grinned, sheepishly. Come to think of it, I did realise this was the Education Centre. Silly me, indeed! Then I shook my head, and frowned.

"The Education Centre? What's that?"

The woman tutted. "It's for all those daft numpties who thought they knew better than Auntie Beeb, dear! No-one knows better than Auntie Beeb." She reached under the counter, and pulled out a saucer, cup, and teapot. She poured some tea into the cup, popped in a cube of sugar and some milk, and left it invitingly on the side. "Come and have a drink, deary. You look parched."

I was, so I did. The tea was delicious.

"So who runs this place then?"

"Silly chap! It's Auntie Beeb!"

I rolled my eyes. "Well yes, it's the BBC. Obviously. But who runs the BBC at the moment? Do they run this Education Centre, or is it some other department?" I took a swig of tea. It was really good.

"I said, dear. Auntie Beeb runs it. She helps make everyone feel ever so safe and secure. It's the waves, dear. The waves broadcast by our channels. They make everyone better. And those who forget get taught again."

I laughed. "You talk about 'Auntie Beeb' as if she were a real person."

The woman looked at me, appearing slightly confused. "Well, you're talking to a real person, aren't you, dear?"

My eyes bulged.

"YOU'RE Auntie Beeb?" I looked down at my tea. "Then that must mean-" She nodded. I should have felt alarmed, shocked, outraged that my tea had been drugged. But I wasn't. It was comforting, and reassuring. It just felt right. My vision went shaky, then all I could see was black.

***

I woke up the next morning, got dressed, brushed my teeth, and went downstairs to find some breakfast. I fed the cat, then flicked the telly on for the morning headlines. BBC 1, naturally. Well, who else?