News story of the day?

My mate and I saw Lily Allen in Bristol last Wednesday night. She was much much better than Lily Allen deserves to be. A most excellent night had by all.

Watch one of my best mates doing stand-up comedy here:

I met (once again) a girl on the weekend that I first encountered a couple of months ago. The first time I met her she was incredibly steaming and ranting about Middle East politics, Allah/God/belief, and pronunciation of Arabic. My mate, Tarek, and his wife wanted to adopt her. I told her that I loved her and she drunkenly laughed it off.

On Friday, when I met her again, she hugged me and told me that she'd been talking about me to her friends for weeks (as she'd never encountered anyone who talked so much sense, so she said, but she was pissed as fuck when she made this judgment and not much more sober when I encountered her again on Friday.) I think her drunkenness was most obvious when she introduced me to her mates as 'Allah', then, within the hour, threw up and asked me to tell her a fundamental truth. When I did she asked for another! I was so pissed that I couldn't think of one and certainly didn't think of, 'A body in motion tends to stay in motion...' What a dumbass I am.

Then she wanted to sit down and I lost her in the crowd. Fuck.

I haven't been able to get this girl out of my head for a second since I last saw her and, for some reason, I've since decided to learn Arabic.

I went to Tesco this afternoon to get some Innocent smoothie and a copy of The Independent. When I went to the paper-selling bit of the shop they had no copies of The Independent. They also had no copies yesterday and, thinking about it, didn't have any last Sunday either...

I went to the Customer Services desk and enquired as to whether they'd stopped stocking The Independent. 'Oh no mate,' says cheeky hung-over teen employee, 'we just can't sell you any.'

I gave him my best what-the-fuck face and enquired as to why this should be.

'Well, see, the guy that updates the codes in the admin department hasn't been in so the code can't be updated so we can't sell it to you,' says chirpy employee, as if it's the most reasonable explanation in the world.

'So,' says I, 'you have the paper but you don't have the ability to sell it to me?'

Employee looks sheepish and realising that I'm getting to the point where I won't even pretend to be civil about this ridiculous shit passes me on to his fellow employee and wanders off to do something more pressing that he's just remembered he has to do.

The upshot of it all is that Tesco, one of, if not THE, largest supermarkets in the UK thinks it's perfectly reasonable for someone to update the codes for a newspaper every single week ('See mate, every week you need a different code because it's a different date. You see?') instead of having the same code all the time and relying on the fact that the date is recorded by the date/time stamp of the fucking receipt! Someone will, apparently, telephone me in the week to give me some bullshit explanation for why someone can't manually sell me a newspaper without a specific code being assigned to it.

The world is getting stupider and it worries me more and more.

We went to see the One Man Star Wars Trilogy this evening. He was great and, if you have the opportunity, you should go to see him. Just don't sit in the front row. You'll thank me for that advice.

At the end of the show he made a 7 year old boy (who was dressed as Yoda, complete with robe, stick, mask and lightsaber, and was spotted in the crowd by him during his show) come on stage and wave his lightsaber around. We clapped and cheered and the lad seemed most pleased with himself.

I miss being 7.