This, I can assure you, is bollocks.

This year, I’ve stuck two fingers up the ozone’s nostrils and flown to Spain on a 7p flight (including all taxes and my BFH), and I’ve travelled round a fair bit of Britain. What I’ve discovered is that nothing has changed. The persuasive effect of constantly being told that everyone in Britain is holidaying in Britain this year only has an effect in a passing way. It exists as a conversational truth – a safe, commonly held piece of knowledge that does no harm to agree with.

“Where you going on your holidays this year then?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Probably just stay in the country. I think a lot of people are, with the recession and all that.”
“Oh yes, yes. Expensive abroad, isn’t it.”

This is where the power of the statement ends, because it is spoken full in the knowledge that you’ve got two weeks in Turkey booked in August and if Easyjet do a good deal you might sneak in a long weekend in October – maybe Munich for a few German lagers?

The problem with the statement, “there’s a recession on, I’m going to have a holiday in Britain this year”, is two-fold: a)  your country being in a period of economic decline has, in sum total, the most negligible real effect on where you can afford to go on holiday compared to last year, and b) you don’t really want to piss away 50 weeks of your life per year in exchange for a fortnight in Britain of looking at some more fucking oak trees, hearing George Alagiah tell you about death camps with a warm smile on his face and waking with a powerful fear that what began as a pleasantly warm day will end up with you staggering around an empty coastal town with a numb, sleet-battered forehead.

As you can tell, the core issue is that holidays in Britain are a last resort that you have to switch off parts of your brain to enjoy. I don’t think I’ve seen anything fundamentally new in this country since… well, I don’t actually know. All my earliest holiday memories are of things that looked familiar. A bit of a castle. A train. Elderly relatives in tan and biege clothes. Cups of tea in cheap cafes. Britain is all the same underneath.

Wherever you go, it’s just your last British holiday but moved to a new spot somewhere around the country. Variations are limited to inland or coastal, north or south and quaint or urban. All other details are superfluous because you will still be subjected to the same unremitting torrent of shit museums you would never otherwise go in, long walks around identikit shopping streets and streams and streams of draining comments about prices compared to what it’s like at home, the only brief respite being in attempting to get your head round the differently-faced people who populate this corner of the island.

Now, if I were to attempt to disprove my conclusion here, I would imagine that Edinburgh Castle might be a likely candidate to turn round and smack my judgement chops. Edinburgh – nice place, not too Scottish, bit of history, tourists coming from all over the world to visit. It’s got something going for it, right?

Well, no. Edinburgh is just another variation of the British theme. It is full of shopping streets, shit museums and things to tut at the price of. You will walk around its lovely cobbled streets with a good 80% of your brain sent on a fag break to keep it quiet. For all its aesthetic value and history so steeped in its streets it sticks to your feet, the part of your brain that wants to experience something new is just telling you to fuck off all this recession bollocks and go and see something different. It says to you, “Richard – look at that overly optimistic queueing arrangement, and ask yourself just why there are so many pointless, empty rows to get into this shit castle.”

This scene will be familar to any resident of the North-West under the age of 35, a demographic whose summer activities as a child consisted mainly of being taken round a disconcertingly quiet Camelot because their mum had cut a “buy one adult, get sixteen children free” voucher out of the local paper. It is a scene repeated across Britain’s vast, lottery-funded cacophany of museums filled with bits of bark and pewter and stately homes wallpapered with paintings of inbred upper class berks from days gone by.

If there weren’t column inches to be filled, nobody would bother pretending that anyone really wants to stay here for a holiday. Not really. It’s pretty easy to switch off your brain and pretend you’re interested in the variations of tree shapes, brick colours and local accents. But really, it’s all best left to people who haven’t seen this country before and genuinely find something interesting in our collection of tea shops, pubs, dilapidated public transport networks and differently shaped hills. With a whole world out there that fully embraces the brain and is a whole new experience, there’s not a journalist on any corner of this Earth who could convince me a damned recession is worth missing it all for.

I wonder about the motive for everything – for the way people behave, for what goes on in the world, and so on. It’s a little habit that I think I used to have latently but over the last couple of years has very much come to the fore. I like thinking in this way although it does have its complications – sometimes the questioning gets carried away into a spiral of wonder and doubt, to my own eventual detriment.

At about the same time as this started, I remember beginning to think more. Just generally, you know… more and more time was going towards questioning, and asking, and trying to form conclusions. At first you don’t notice much except that one day you suddenly understand why that person is so bothered about punctuality, and you can imagine what it’s like living in that person’s environment. It’s just little everyday things that take time to accumulate until you notice one day that you’re seeing through a lot more of life, rather than wading through a fog of uncertainty and confusion.

This has gone on and on for a few years now and I think it’s what unifies all those little threads of thought that come to me every so often. I remember six or seven years ago I noticed that I’d gotten over my teen angst, could make sense of it all, behave responsibly enough and so on. And I was a pretty serene person inside; I had a distinct calmness and was very relaxed with the world.

This has changed as the amount of time I spend thinking about everything has gone up. What I’ve found is that all this thinking, questioning and probing always digs away at that inner peace and leaves further questions behind. I’ve almost completely lost the ability to relax in my own company, which is one thing I used to pride myself on – being entirely comfortable by myself. Now, if I have a free moment, I dread what I’m going to end up thinking about up there. My brain never switches off from this mode and if there’s nothing of value to occupy it, it finds something of its own mad invention to play with, or failing that, goes crying in a corner in loneliness.

The reason why I think this sort of change is important enough to write about is because it affects the person I am day-to-day. My behaviour has changed because I feel this compelling urge to never just have an empty few hours in front of me… my boredom threshold with nearly all “entertainment” is very low these days, and I seem only truly content talking to people about things that matter. There’s something there inside me that gets irritated by trivialities and waste and wants to get to the point of everything, some burning impatience for the world to balance out perfectly in harmony with no squabbles or disputes.

The times when I end up on my own, I get so bored of thinking about these serious things and so frustrated by my own inability to do this “relaxing” thing that I begin looking for escape routes. I’ve kept up a long list of friends who I’ll go out of my way to see, if they can just take my mind off things for a little while. I spend too much money and go out too much just because it’s my happiest release in life at the moment, just bouncing off another person’s company and thinking about them rather than me. I like the new points of view and opinions I couldn’t have thought of myself. I guess after spending most of the day thinking introvertly about everything that happens, it’s nice to have some new stimulii.

I’m not happy with the way I think about the world at the moment, as it leaves me frustrated, bored and tired of myself. My attempt to cure this is to channel this empathy I have into a job that needs it, which I’ve taken a stabbing guess at being social work. I hope that if I have a job where thinking deeply about another person is an actual requirement, I’ll feel a little more useful than I do now, and some of the boredom and weariness that is driving me to live a life too fast for myself at the moment, will ease away.

• In 2007, 45% of Christmas gifts would have been more appreciated by the person they were least intended for.
• Between the fall of 1992 and spring 1998, four supertankers carrying Chinese toys to Europe sank in the world’s oceans, raising sea levels by 0.05cm.
• If all the trees ever felled to print greeting card envelopes were stacked atop one another, alien life from as far as Alpha Centauri would see the planet Earth as a distant space lollypop.
• PACKAGING IS INFURIATING

In this case, the argument is: Is packaging infuriating?

I’m not about to get all hippie on you, even though using the international unit of environmental damage (a Geldof), it’s known that six-pack ringlets kill 4 Geldofs of sea fish annually, and the irritating tin foil bit at the top of a pipe of Pringles that half of people leave on adds up to 12 Geldofs of waste tin foil in landfill. Far more pressing is the impact on mankind. Time = money, so how many dollars is the time spent trying to rip open a sachet of noodle powder without getting any on your fingers worth? What happens to vacuum sealed plastic when its infinitely close bond with the product is broken forever, as your knife tries to nick a corner before rage sets in and the whole shebang is cut to ribbons and forgotten forever?

What happens to the man who invented hard plastic sealed packaging? You know what? A grisly death.

It struck me earlier that there is one inescapable truth about Christmas: I will get a hard plastic sealed present. It might be the first (to spare my anguish and end the wait early) or it may be the last (by which point weariness of the wait for war will have set in) but regardless it will defeat me, morally if not practically. Hard plastic packaging is surely a byproduct of the Third Reich, originally intended as a mental torture device. Its mysogynist creator snook off to America after the war, knocked together a few missiles and in retirement started dabbling with plastics. “How can I package this egg cup for the feeble hands of American housewives, more cruelly..? If only it reduced their hands to ribbons… ha, ha! I have it! Das Judeverwirren!” And thus, the razor sharp edges of torn hard plastic began slicing into American hands.

Here’s my latest hard plastic packaged gift, a knife sharpener from Kim. (Don’t worry, she hasn’t been reduced to getting me kitchen utensils yet. She got me some cool knives too.)

Now doesn’t that look good? Check out the nice, firm edges – won’t that look good on a shelf, won’t it feel firm in your hands as you rip off the paper? Go on, feel it in your hands like the mounds of flesh on a whore’s buttocks. Look how tight the plastic forms around the object – don’t you just want to run your finger over the curve? Oh, so tight.

But, all good things… Let’s open the package.

It seemed a sensible place to start, to me. Nurse, pass the small nail scissors; incision, beginning upper hanging hole, down 10cm; stop. Hmm, Nurse Jones. We appear to have reached an impasse. It’s impossible to cut any further without the dexterity of Harry Houdini or a willingness to slice my hand open. How shall we proceed?

Nurse, flip the patient over – we’re going for a rear assault. Well this is certainly, uhm… illuminating. I can now read the instructions slightly more clearly. Alas, I’m no closer to the actual damned knife sharpener. A vague feeling of perplexity sets in, like observing the mating rituals of monkeys at a zoo and remembering how you had much the same approach until your late teens. It’s at this point that I always drop the scissors and begin flipping it backwards and forwards in my hands, looking for signs of weakness. Tearing the edges is physically impossible, them being constructed of a material impervious to all but industrial buzzsaws. Teeth usually come into play at some point, only stopping when the zings through the root canal become too painful.

It finally dawns on me that the easiest method to open this packaging is to carefully cut a circle in the back plastic, like a window, through which you can carefully pull out the cardboard instructions and then hopefully get to the object itself. If car keys operated the sunroof and elevator buttons took you to random floors, I might find it easier to swallow this absurd little invention. As it is, though, car keys operate car doors and button 2 takes you to floor 2. There is a natural order and simplicity built into these things, none of which has ever been applied to this thoroughly preposterous form of packaging, one which to the best of my knowledge is one of those things in life that is so utterly insane that it transgresses the level at which sane men question insanity and become blind to it, merely presuming if it is so mad that they cannot understand it then it must have been designed for a greater purpose by far greater men than themselves.

The confusion I feel that I have to consider opening a piece of packaging a victory registers, rage sets in and I begin to stab the hard plastic fronting. It now resembles a building in downtown Sarajevo. There is something immensely satisfying in sinking the small blade into its guts, the hollow puncture releasing gasps of air like a dieing boar in my hands. Richard 1, Nazi Scientist 0. And the final honour, the act of disembowelment, I pass to my captain. Tonight, men, we eat well.

On trivial, irritating The One Show-like illnesses

Somewhat genetically predisposed towards the mental over the physical, in a different time and place I would have only a few small saving graces to thank for not becoming a hunchbacked, corrupted cynic in a Dickens novel. I am not a tall man, I am not imposing and while hypochondria is as familiar to me as the ins and outs of Grecian table etiquette, I am not the healthiest of men. Sat lumbering in my torso like a heavy heart, my stomach protests against the majority of foodstuffs known to man and leaves me with a constant streak of heartburn drawn in a smooth scalpel line down my chest. Current record of continuous days attendance: 6 years and counting. And yet this is not my greatest of woes, as time is a great healer (or pacifier) and the searing streak becomes as much an everyday feeling to be checked off as present and correct as cold toes in the morning and an itchy nose. What grates more are the niggles, the irritations, the heavy heads and upset stomachs, the so minor complaints of everyday life that to complain about them is in itself impossible. And that is why the accumulation of these utterly trivial illnesses over the last year and half drives me to distraction: it is akin to a billion ants swarming over a whale – no challenge one on one, but one after another, a different matter. You can’t complain about one ant, but it’s too late to say a word by the billionth.

On being bed-bound and stimuli-short

Physical illness forces on me a time of reflection and introspection. As if I’m not consumed by these vices enough, to be left alone in a bed for 16 hours a day with only Star Trek: The Next Generation to keep me company, I soon drift into my own world. This, I think I’ve come to understand, is one of the catalysts of the swing from either a low or high back in the opposite direction. Everyday life affords so little time for contemplation that it’s only in those moments I’m alone that I begin to sift through everything that’s happened recently. It’s like being thrown a bundle of newspapers while you’ve no time to read them – you can either leave the news to history, or you can sit and read through it all. I’m a reader and it’s after reading that the news begins to affect me. Now it appears that no matter what the news, the process of thinking deeply about anything sets off a mood of reflection that helps me look more clearly at my issues of the day. A period of mania begins to appear as absurd as it is, a time of depression appears unrealistic and wasteful, and the move towards equilibrium begins.

On whether the body rules the mind, or the mind rules the body

The perception of self seems to affect quite importantly the resulting attitude towards one’s own body. I, for example, have never really felt much association with my physical form. It’s just the shell I’ve found my “self” in and while I care enough to keep it working, in the way you’d keep your car going, it doesn’t enter my mind for much of the rest of my time. Exceptions to this: times of illness as mentioned earlier, and during social occasions. The times when ignoring it is detrimental to yourself. The times when your body demands you pay attention. I think this relative degree of attachment between mind and body can explain many phenomena: anorexia and obesity, addiction and perfection, self-loathing and self-love.

However you choose to say it, all you need to know is that the axis are bad, just like in the Second World War. Anyone with a “x” in their name instantly becomes either a super-villain or a cleaning product, and to the best of my knowledge the North Koreans don’t have an international reputation for sparkling kitchen surfaces. They do, however, have a kick-ass boss… (and I want an introduction here like the bit in Bill & Ted when they get the famous dudes on stage)… Mr Kim Jong Il.

He let his people get a bit too hungry now and then but as we can see below all he needed to do was reach into his lovely, deep pockets and share his Werther’s Originals. I find it comforting to know in these times of international crisis that even the leaders of the axis of evil dress like grandads on a coach trip to Bournemouth.

When I think back, when I was a really quiet kid, my first battle in life was to overcome that and manage to get on with people. The real battle was to be funny because of the mates I had at school – back then, they were the witty kids at school, and now they’re the guys with an intelligent sense of humour at work, and I wanted to be on a level with them, but although the jokes were there in my head I never had the delivery innately. So as a lad I had this big battle to prove my sense of humour. I remember when I got into RPGs and it sounds rubbish but playing those actually did help my confidence a lot – it sounds ridiculous now but I really did use to hate sitting in a room of four of my mates where if I wanted to take part in proceedings I had to make myself heard. And it took time, but slowly I got used to speaking up and having the confidence to say a joke. I have always and still do very much hate attention but I learned ways (small things like speaking and then looking away) to deal with it. Over the next few years I built on that to the point where it was how I defined myself – the easy-going guy who’ll have a laugh with anyone, anytime.

Once I got over that inability to even really speak in groups or with a single person, I began to think about women. And I’d never really thought about that much because all I could think about was my inability to speak to people full stop. Now, I was one ugly duckling. I have never been sartorially blessed but as a lad I was even worse than I am now; I’m sure those of you I went to college with may well remember the glasses held together with wood glue, or the ripped open trainers. No matter your style, glasses held together with wood glue is an indication of mental deficiency. But over time, I began to slowly address this and found myself becoming vaguely appealing to women. It became a quest; some kind of innate satisfaction gained from knowing I could if I wanted. I very rarely did; that lingering doubt remained. But it was another impulse sated.

An observation I make is that it takes time for the conscious to become aware of the behaviour of the subconscious. In this case, it took me years to begin to perceive myself in these ways. And then one day I thought, hey, I’m not just a guy who make silly jokes, or who can appeal to women, there’s more to me. And from then on I felt the urge not to prove my humour, but to prove my seriousness. And I’d never really thought about that before because all I could think of was my need to prove my sense of humour and my appeal to women. Ever since then I have felt the need to show depths, and take innocent conversations to guilty levels, and slip in observations at unusual times. And why is this? I think perhaps the ego goes through stages, wanting to be seen in different ways. Once one need is satisfied, the next emerges. Thus you find yourself compelled to act in a certain manner, manipulate your behaviour, just to be seen in a certain light; just to be able to look someone in the eye with the confidence inside you that they know you’re a funny, attractive, intelligent person.

I am not sure if or what the next stage may be, but I am curious. I don’t feel the need to prove my humour to the great number of people I have forged proper friendships with who keep asking for my company, and I am with a woman who feels utterly right for me on both an emotional and utterly cold rational level, and the people I associate with know they can have a chinwag with me about anything serious under the sun because I enjoy that more than any other conversation you could list. So what is next? Do you know what? I think when your head levels out and existence rides along a plateau, it’s kind of a sign that you’re ready to sort out your own family. At some point the indulgences of your youth become less de rigour, more passe, and the next urge is for something more. Perhaps the next stage for me will be the couple of kids I’ve always sought; time will tell. Here’s to the journey.

Metallica are back, and this is good.