However, in the last week I have had two comments on the blog from people I don’t know. One comment was positive, and one negative… what to make of it. Firstly, I find it baffling that anyone would read my little blog, without having clicked on the link from my begging Facebook status. Again, that my friends read this thing occasionally gives me a real thrill, but having strangers cast their eye over my views is pretty exhilarating for me.

The first stranger who left a comment this week, left it about the post I wrote about Facebook, here it is:

You are SO right about Facebook. I think if you can use it for advertising that might be all its good for. I shut down all my FB pages back in May then re-opened my account after a week of FB withdrawal symptoms. Now I find myself becoming very bored with it as far as a social network. I get constant friend requests then notice that 4 months later they have yet to say hello. Your honesty about the FB stalking is very much appreciated. And funny, too!
Isn’t that nice. Thank you, whoever you are.I do try to inject a bit of humour in the things I write along with honesty and Facebook is a great source of material for me. I am baffled by Facebook and the entire social networking phenomenon, so it’s nice to see others agree with certain things I write about it.

The second comment was posted about my Vuvuzela blog. I don’t have this one to paste. I deleted it. I don’t take criticism well. I wish I hadn’t deleted it though, as it only goes to show that I am a pathetic, insecure worm who needs to be constantly showered with praise lest I burrow away in my worm hole where no one can judge me.

I only realised how pathetic it was to delete this comment after I had pressed delete. Why should I care what other people think? The basis of the negative comment was that my blog was extremely self-indulgent, as usual, and that it was a pile of bollocks… something along those lines anyway….

HELLO! The blog is called “The World According to Willum”, how much more self-indulgent can that title be? I write this blog to indulge myself. The fact that my friends sometimes read, and also seem to enjoy it is a form of indulgence for me… Is there anything as self-indulgent as a blog anyway? It surely is the  most self-indulgent form of expression out there. It is not for anyone, except the writer!

This is a pretty self-indulgent post… but I don’t care! Expect more posts, even more self-indulgent than the last ones… my self-indulgence knows no bounds! You can’t please all of the people all of the time, but if I can please just one person, if I can make someone who reads my little blog smile, that’s a triumph for me. After all, I write this thing for me, to indulge myself!

The vuvuzela is the most annoying thing to happen to major televised football competitions since Mick Mcarthy was deemed adequate to use as a co-commentator. The constant droning that emanates from every single stadium is drowning out the atmosphere and stifling the passion of fans, and it is making a very difficult watch.

I fell in love with World Cup football whilst watching USA ’94. I had only recently gotten into football, and watching the best teams come together for 4 weeks to compete at the top level was a genuinely exciting concept to me. I watched pretty much every game that I could in that first World Cup, and as I became more and more obsessed with football, I have  seen the sights and spectacles of World Cups past, and really enjoyed every single one since… Up til now.

Don’t get me wrong, I am still enjoying it. Granted the games have been a little slow to get going, and with the exception of the ever proficient Germans, no one has really impressed. However the constant humming, like a swarm of distant mosquitos, whilst first just annoying, is now detracting from the entertainment for me. It’s impossible to follow the game in the same way I am used to. No crowd reaction; no singing; no atmosphere. Just a constant drone….  Maybe I’ll get over it and get used to watching games in this manner… I can only hope, as there’s three weeks left yet!

Other than the vuvu’s, I am enjoying it. The BBC’s coverage, as usual is excellent, with informed pundits and great commentators (Mick aside). ITV is still not quite there. Whether it’s the patronising cut scenes that proceed and follow the ads and analysis which feature poor South African kids scrawling words on a chalk board, or the decision to give Edgar Davids (the world’s most boring pundit) a job in the studio, there’s just something that’s not quite right about the Brighter Side’s coverage. Perhaps they can get Christine Bleakley in to sit next to Adrian for the remainder of the games? Either that or just stop asking Gareth Southgate to give his views on the game!

Moan over, Japan v Cameroon is about to start!

And also, before I start, and just for the record; I don’t want to take part in “Mafia Wars”; I couldn’t give a flying ape’s testicle what new animals you have on “Farmworld”; and I have no interest whatsoever in becoming a fan of “sleeping in on a Sunday” or any such regular event that people seem to think it’s quirky to announce they like doing; and I do not want to “reconnect” with people I haven’t spoken to since I was 11.

I use Facebook for one thing, and one thing only; stalking people who I have not seen for years and subsequently judging their lives against mine. That’s what it’s for!

Because, good people, Facebook is the ultimate benchmarking tool. Where am I against the stupid kid from my class? Where am I versus the sporty guy? Am I doing better or worse than the fat boy? The answer to all these questions and more is there for you, at the press of a few buttons, and the uninvited look at a few private pictures which have been deemed “not too embarrassing to post”.

It is possible to spend hours each month, (conservative estimate) sifting through the reams and reams of photos posted by various friends. Each photo boldly telling you, the sad viewer, “look how much better a time I am having than you”. In Facebook photos everyone is having a good time except for the sad loser looking at them. That’s because no one takes photos of themselves sitting in their pyjamas at half twelve on a sunday eating a curly wurly whilst watching the Hollyoaks omnibus. No, every photo is a happy embrace with a friend, or a flirty smile to the camera whilst toasting the night. These photo’s are only a reflection of the lives people lead, but what a reflection they are.

In fact, not only can you judge your “friends” (who you may not have seen for the last 5 years) by the photos they have on there, but you can see what type of company they keep by monitoring the posts that are made on their walls. Most of the time, you don’t even have to go out of your way to do this, as the posts are nicely presented to you whenever you log on.The majority of the posts are harmless enough, but give the on looking Facebook voyeur yet another chance to glimpse the wonderful life you have created for yourself.

But is this healthy? Is it a good thing to see every single night out picture? Do you really want to know every little thought that pops into a person’s head whilst they mess about online? Do we want to become the generation who relates to their fellow man by “poking” one another virtually? I know I don’t…. But do you think I can break away from it? Not a chance.

I even use the damn thing to advertise this blog!

I booked my tickets on the Monday, and waited excitedly all week until Saturday night came along. Sure enough, the IMAX screens were completely sold out for the screening again. So it was with an mix of smugness and relief that I wandered over to the ticket collection machine to collect my reserved seats. I had even splashed out on Premiere seats, such was my excitement at the forthcoming two and a half hours.

Before entering the screen, I picked up my usual large combo of salted popcorn and coke. Then, I waited patiently in the mini que to pick up my special IMAX 3D glasses. I sat in the comfy seat and pushed my actual glasses as far back onto my nose as they would go, before perching the movie glasses on the end of my nose, and then sat back to enjoy.

This was exciting. The adverts were all in 3D. It was new and fresh, and the audience seemed together as they experienced this new cinematic experience as one. As a movie fan it is always exciting to experience something new, and so far I was not being disappointed.

Then came the feature presentation. James Cameron’s, budget blowing, box-office beating, movie behemoth Avatar… and the disappointment started. Avatar is not the worst film I have ever seen. But it’s by far and away the most disappointing.  Don’t get me wrong, the visuals are impressive, but there has to be more to a film than that, and Avatar fails to deliver on any other level.

The story has been done a million times before, basically. Only previous films have done it better, cleverer and less annoyingly than Avatar does it.

As soon as Phoebe from Friends’ brother started banging on about the mystical fuel source they were mining for on Pandorum which is called UNOBTAINIUM for Christ’s sake, I’m afraid I was gone. Unobtanium, was proving hard to OBTAIN you see, and the humans would need to shift the 8 foot Smurfs from their home tree if they wanted to OBTAIN some UNOBTAINIUM, which as I mentioned was pretty UNOBTAINABLE!

The first hour of the film moved so slowly, that when I checked my watch to see how much tripe there was left to stomach, I was shocked to find that only one hour had passed! I still had over half of this to go. I was seriously close to walking out…. In the film’s defence, the second half does briefly pick up, before the inevitable half an hour battle scenes which basically could have been lifted from any of the Lord of the Rings movies, or any fantasy movie for that matter.

As I said, Avatar is not exactly the worst film I have ever seen. Far from it. But in terms of cinematic disappointments, it’s definitely in the top one!

Now, I thought this was one of the accepted meal combos, but it turns out they tak this as two separate orders. If I had ordered the savoury pancakes, which come with sausage (a very odd combo in my mind) then this would indeed have been one of their discounted breakfast meals. However ordered in my way, they wanted £3.28 from me. I enquired as to why it was this price, and was told of my oversight.

The guy working behind the glass must have been in his fifties. He sighed loudly when I asked if my order was part of the breakfast combos, as if I were asking him if McDonalds sold ornamental cats. He then gestured towards the menu like a teenager in a bad mood, but I let this all pass as I had remembered that I had a full coffee loyalty card in my wallet. Sadly the full coffee loyalty card, that leads to a free cup of medium sized coffee, has become somewhat of a highlight in my sad existence, so I was willing to forgive the rudeness of this chap and slap him back into his place with my freebie.

He had other plans.

If the behaviour he demonstrated following my incorrect assumptions about the McDonalds breakfasts was churlish, the behaviour following my production of the free coffee card, at this late stage of negotiations was unbelievable. I handed him that card, and said I’d just be paying for pancakes then… He laughed, “No” he replied. He was laughing as he said this. I asked if I was too late to use it… “Just a bit” he said, shaking his head. Honestly, you’d swear I had asked him to shit me a golden egg. I couldn’t believe this guy’s attitude.

“In Future” he said to me, as though he were a school teacher berating me for forgetting my homework, “It may be better to produce this little voucher before you order, to avoid confusion”. What a prick! This guy was on a serious power trip, working behind a little screen at McDonalds drive-thru. It was insane.

What happened to “Have a nice day”, and the American style of service that McDonalds was founded on… I don’t really need an excuse to leave McDonalds, but I think this might be it… Maccy D’s is on the list!

I was woken up at seven this morning by a neighbour banging on my back door. She was keen to get me downstairs to see the damage that had been done to my beloved little Clio, it was almost as if she wanted praise for being the first person to bear the bad news. I wandered down to the car, disheveled with a very bad case of bed head. The glass was everywhere, and so were my CDs. They had tossed Morrisey’s Greatest Hits on the road as if it were not a masterpiece. But Morrisey was not the only casualty… Neil Young’s After The Gold Rush; Radiohead’s In Rainbows, and Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible were strewn, forlornly on the wet pavement. OK, the best of Motown was there too… I’m not an out and out indie kid. I didn’t know what to be more offended at. The act of mindless vandalism, or the assault on my taste in music.

It’s not the bad thing happening that bothers me. It’s dealing with the aftermath of the bad thing that does my head in. After the police had been to inspect the scene, and I was told it was now OK to tidy the mess, I just looked at the officer expecting him to produce some sort of number for me to call, a sort of, “Here’s the number for our after break-in clean up team son” type affair. But no such card appeared. Instead I was left staring at the glass… what the hell do i do now? The robbing bastards had not only offended my musical taste but they had left me with something to clean up too, the inconsiderate shits!

Needless to say, Blue Monday was more Ball Ache Monday for me… I have been informed that they have a possible suspect in custody by my helpful PCSO. Bring back hanging I say… bit harsh?

I never thought I would like it. Never, ever. Whilst it was on TV I caught the odd glimpse of it. All the talk of cocks, and balls, and dildos, and “funky tasting spunk” meant it was about as appealing to me as spending a long weekend in a log cabin, in rural Cumbria with Piers Morgan. From what I had seen of it, I judged it was not for me.

In fact, not only had I judged it was not for me, I convinced others it was not for them. I reeled off reasons as to why the show was not only terrible, but wrong and damaging. I would argue with female friends who liked the show, and scoff at their suggestions that it carried anything merit worthy within its content.

I now know I was wrong. If you are one the people I argued with, I am sorry.

The turning point came over Christmas… Having been converted to becoming a fan of The West Wing, over the course of the last few months of 2009, I decided to open myself up to catch up on shows that had passed me by over the last decade… If people I liked, liked these shows, then surely there must be something in there that I was missing…. Sex and the City was my most hated show… It was time to find out why!

I started watching it on Boxing Day; I am now about a third of the way through Season 4. I am genuinely looking forward to the next installment. I want to finish the whole series, watch the first movie, and pre-book for number two! The revelation is, for me, that the show isn’t just about sex… It’s about the characters… Sex is just the thing that brings them together and ignites the conversation. The characters are rich, interesting and above all funny. It is basically Entourage with women rather than men. It’s so money!

The fact that I was so wrong with this show, means I am opening myself up for more when I’m done. Whilst I can never see myself enjoying an episode of Supernatural, there must be a bunch of shows out there that have passed me by… so help me out and let me know what’s worth watching… Even if I’ve laughed at you for watching it before… Again, I’m sorry!

So what to write about? Well, I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but there seems to be a bit of snow about at the start of this new year. You know you are getting old when you look out of the window, see snow, and rather than whoop with joy, sigh at the prospect of having to go out in the god forsaken stuff and slip and slide your way to a freezing cold office for the day.

When I saw the snow come down on Tuesday, I sighed a little. Then I caught myself. “You’re not quite that old yet”, I said to myself, and packed away my things and left for the day. I spent the next day “working from home”, which is the adult equivalent of a snow day. Spending the morning in bed, and the afternoon catching up on missed TV, the adult equivalent of sledging down hills or building a snowman, I made the most of it. It’s all about perspective I decided. Sigh if you are really looking forward to going to your job each day and the snow prevents you from doing what you love. Sigh if the snow means you’ll have to eat a can of beans for tea because there’s nothing else in. But don’t sigh just for the sake of sighing.

Far too often, I tend to moan and bitch about tiny things, as soon as the opportunity to do so arises (as those of you who know me will testify).  This snow has made me re-think… Perhaps there is more to life. Forget moaning, and enjoy your snow day! That’s my new motto…. How long do we think this will last?

Now, either you will have read that and thought, “yep, I know exactly what Will is talking about there”, or you’ll be thinking that I am a bit of a loser whose parents could’ve done with buying him a games console rather than leaving him to play the No Talking game. Whichever way you have reacted, the reason I mention this childhood game, is that I don’t seem to be able to shake it. For this is how I live my life.

I seem unable to focus on one thing and follow it through to conclusion. Instead, I jump from idea to idea. I am gonna get fit, starting from….. Now. I am gonna read more books, starting from…..Now. I’m going to stop watching so much TV, staring from. You get the idea.

I look at others around me, and see them move on with things. Stick to things. Progress with things. They seem to have a plan, and be able to stick with it and follow it through. To see there ideas blossom and bloom into what they desire and to move past the minefield of distractions on towards the open fields of fulfilment that await on the other side.

How?

How do they do it? Did I miss a day in school where they sat you down and told you how to negotiate the shit in life and move on. Did my mum neglect to tell me. Why can’t I seem to do what comes so naturally to others, and why do I feel like my life is constantly starting from….. Now??

Car journeys can be fun on occasion. You can rediscover an old album, or shout vehemently at the conservative MP on the five live phone in. But most of the time it is not fun.

Those of you who have ever been in a car with me (or know me in general) know that I am not the most patient driver/person. In my mind, I am the best driver in the country, if not the world, and the other plebs on the motorway around me are obstacles whose sole purpose is to get in my way and slow me down.

Now that is proabably not the best attitude to approach distance driving from, but  have to work with what I’ve got…. and keep it real.

In the past, I have been known to admonish people who drive too close behind me, by staring into the rear view mirror and moving my finger, in a sort of “naughty you” way, like you might do to a dog. I regularly stare out drivers who pass me in a way that I don’t like, and on several occasions I have pulled alongside people who nearly cut me out and driven at the same pace as them, purely to frustrate them and teach them a lesson. I have even kicked motorway crash barriers in frustration of breaking down.

That’s the thing with me you see… I am about four hundred times harder in the car than I am in real life. I have had one “fight” in my life. I avoid conflict. But in the car, I welcome it. I even instigate it, if I feel that another driver needs to be taught a lesson.

I am also about four hundred times more psychotic… I create little songs in the car. Songs of frustration. The most memorable being the song I created whilst driving round the second multi-story car park we had visited in Chester that morning, after an hour of looking for somewhere to park the frigging car…The song was called “Oh My Fucking God!” The lyrics were quite simple, you just repeat the title of the song over and over again. But what made it difficult, is that you have to do this whilst straining to sing like a seven year old girl. It was quite hard to get through three parts of the song without feinting, but it was really rewarding when you managed it.

In the last week, I have driven to Glasgow and back in a day;  To Bristol, then Cardff, then back in a day; as well as my usual commute to Chester every morning. I have stared at 16 drivers with hatred in my eyes; Flashed my full beam at 2; Been threatened my the driver of an X5 for doing the wanker sign at him… he was. But, I can still look out at my car, and wait for that perfect journey. The one where no one gets in my way. The one where I am let out on a junction by a thoughtful motorist. The one that comes around once in a blue moon… Maybe the next one?