Misfits: Curtis' time-rewind Easter egg

Misfits has just finished its second series run on E4 in the UK - including a bonus Christmas special episode for us all this year - and has left fans divided by its problematic storylines, unexpected hermeneutic codes and wormhole-like narrative subtexts, even to the point of infuriating some and elating others. However, regardless of these perceived differences, the show has managed to grip virtually everyone who watched the first episode way back in November 2009 and across just a twelve month, two series and 13 episode span, Misfits has grown to be the most exciting and life-affirming show on British TV, period.

Dental plan

Last week sometime, I had to pop and do some shopping into my local supermarket and so, after a protracted time spent fondling nets of Satsumas and trying to decipher the ‘best before’ dates on half cucumbers and round lettuces, a sit down at my local cafe seemed the perfect remedy. Finding an empty table inside, I ordered a cup of coffee and a bacon butty from the young girl behind the counter and then sat down to peruse the morning paper I’d picked-up while shopping. As I begin to scan the pages, I became aware of two lads sat just across from me and they epitomised the appearance of the poverty-stricken youth of today: each was wearing a dark, hooded jacket, shell bottoms and trainers, with shaven heads finishing off the look. They must have been aged in their late teens or early twenties at a push and one of them was telling a profanity-laden story whilst the other listened, nonchalantly.

Council Tax blues (slight return)

My previous blog entry regarding late Council Tax payment and the subsequent red letter threatening me with court - see "Council Tax blues" for more details - garnered me with a comment from ‘Oldham John’ (not his real name, methinks!) and even though I pay just £13 a month due to being employed part-time, this stalwart of the community dished up some choice words for me to ruminate over. I reprint his message below, verbatim:

I can't get no Enlightenment satisfaction

With last week’s blizzard whiteout stretching the length and breadth of the nation, I was obviously unable to use my bike for travelling to work and had to resort to flexing my boot soles back on terra firma for the first time a while. Of course, this consists of trudging an eight mile round trip just so I can saviour working in subzero temperatures within a forty foot metal container with no heating, a fantastic experience I suggest everyone should sample at least once in their lives before they die from the onset of pneumonia. Ah, the need to earn money and survive in a consumerist dream world, balanced against developing a life-threatening disease if you choose to work!

Secrets found within a lost mobile phone...

Being of a certain age (and the less said about this the better) I can recall living through both my pre- and post- teenage years in a less technologically-advanced time period than that of today’s youth, who are unconsciously intertwined with the microcosm of their existence through everyday virtual knowledge. This self-educational data is attained via the solid-state worlds of the internet, mobile ‘phones and computers and is a place where the kids all dwell without a care in the world, safe in the knowledge that old has-beens like me may be able to browse a website or two but this is where our cursory skills abruptly stop (oh, hang on a minute!).

More snowfall and the UK media frenzy starts again...

Winter has arrived in the blink of an eye again across the UK - and specifically my northern enclave of greater Manchester - swamping all with its chilled blanket of ice crystals and bringing the whole of civilisation to a standstill because of an overnight snow sprinkle. This happened last year at virtually the same time and I wrote then (see "Christmas, New Year & the Big Freeze" for more details) about the absolute uselessness of our culture to perform the most mundane tasks when faced with nothing more than fluffy-white, frozen water descending from the skies. It is certainly a worry to look back at how the machinations of a world power crumbled because of a lack of Cheshire rock salt but we learnt from those mistakes, didn’t we...? Well, no...

On your daily bike

As I bike to and from work each and every day, I have ample time to observe the minutiae of everyday life unfolding before my weary, weather-buffeted eyes in all its unusual and unexpected ways. Most of the time I ride quickly past certain events and happenings without showing any more interest than a quick side glance across or the break of a smirk upon my face; just occasionally however, I do feel a need to stop and offer a helping hand, and this is what happened just the other day as I cycled back from work during a cold morning sprinkled with winter’s first frosts.

Council Tax blues

One of the most dreaded postal arrivals throughout the UK is the yearly Council Tax bill. Arriving each April, this soul-destroying, single piece of A4 paper is concisely broken down into barely-manageable monthly payments of such magnitude that all across our fair country, people are living with a form of social schizophrenia induced by its financially-crippling brevity. How much we individually pay is dependent upon which band your property has been squeezed into and how many are dwelling inside your house at one time or another; whether these denizens happen to be employed or not is a moot point to these ‘State Shylocks’ because unemployment benefits of some kind will fill the monetary void, thus keeping everyone happy.

Playing the eBay buying game, again… Pt 2

So there I was, bereft of my new Asus 1001HA laptop due to it going missing in mid-transit: a transit, I may add, that I had had to organise myself due to the seller being a complete simpleton and not having the postage money until he’d transferred my PayPal payment into his bank account many days in the future. After speaking to the lads at Interlink Express late Tuesday, I was informed again there still wasn’t any further scanning of my item in their system, so the festering hate continued to rise within me, much like a hangover’s bubbling bile rise.

Playing the eBay buying game, again...Pt 1

Another day arrives and yet another laptop flops down onto my doorstep from a dubious eBay purchase to further complicate my newly-developed technophobic life to the stretching point of no return. I say technophobic because this is the fourth laptop I’ve bought from eBay, the world’s biggest car boot sale for unwanted shit and with each one bought, I’ve found myself plunged deeper and deeper into the buyers’ nightmare of having to trust the dredges of society in order to try and grab a bargain. As any undertaking to save oneself money will be plagued with potential problems, you’ll be glad to learn for your reading enjoyment that in this latest two-part instalment this infuriating situation is well catered for.

What the f**k is that...?!

Breaking News: Rampaging Bigfoot caught on camera destroying Cop car!

Happy birthday The Boiling Rage: one year on in blog land

The Boiling Rage blog is one year old today. I’ve now been tapping the plastic keys on my QWERTY keyboard for the last twelve months in the hope of getting accidentally discovered and being found to be mildly entertaining. During this time, I’ve tried to post at least a single article a week and I’ve stuck to this regime most of the time, although for some reason I’m looking at 44 posts for 52 weeks, which gives me a shortfall of eight missing entries, seemingly lost forever somewhere in the virtual ether my blog dwells. Now, it’s unknown whether these lost paragraphs and misplaced snippets are of any consequence to Humanity or if their eventual discovery will tip the balance of the universe in favour of good against evil, so conjecture is irrelevant (but nice to presume): personally, I’m not holding my breath, though anything’s possible when faced with the unexpected sighting of such wordily slop.

A lost memory, recalled...

It’s funny how childhood memories are remembered, when as a grown-up you look back to a time in your distant past: trying to recall specific instances and vague nuances, the mind can and does form stringed-together sequences that sometimes need an adult’s perspective to bridge the missing gaps. These ‘mental gymnastics’ can lead to a falsified recall and contribute to all kinds of health problems in later life if not analysed properly, from such extremes as being convinced you were molested as a child at the hands of a family member to believing you were abducted by Aliens and underwent medical examinations while you slept!

BT Infinity: promises, promises...

Just the other week, I bumped into a good mate of mine inside a local supermarket as we were perusing the fruit and veg’ aisles and he dropped a bombshell within the first couple of seconds of our meeting: he’d just signed a new 18 month contract with BT for their new “Infinity” broadband service. After my incredulity began to subside, he went on to explain that one of their technologically-lacking cretins had promised unlimited downloads instead of the ten gigabyte cap he was now limited by and a connection speed increase from an already healthy 6mbs to a pretty blistering 15mbs.

New MP3 player, new Top 10

My newly purchased 4GB MP3 player arrived this weekend to replace the old and knackered 512mb one I’ve been stuck with - yep, there are still some people who aren’t even up into the gigabyte arena in the year 2010 - and though my current player had a smashed LCD and had lost of its equaliser function, the poor neglected thing had served me well for the last two years. Through all weather, the miniature jukebox has played its little silicon heart out each day during my ten mile cycle to work and once I realised using rechargeable AAA batteries would save me a small fortune, its running costs have been virtually unnoticeable, much like its dangled weight around my neck.

Sirens, Buses and a wall of noise

Noise, I f**king hate it. Anything overtly loud really boils my blood and if there’s one thing that guarantees mental implosion, it’s a siren. Sirens - whether they are emitted from a Police car, ambulance or fire engine - are destroying my very existence in this farcical, reality facade we all have to dwell within, although my life is made immeasurably more depressing because I live in a first-floor flat ten yards adjacent to a main road. This means I’m continually bombarded by a cacophony of ear-splitting alarms at all hours, regardless of decorum or respect for the sleeping masses strung along the two mile stretch of Rochdale road that runs from my abode to the Royal Oldham hospital. Also, being placed just a couple of hundred yards away from a major four-way junction makes things even harder still, as all emergency vehicles blast out their warnings as they accelerate towards any potential blockage with their blue neon lights flashing and their electronic horns wailing, oblivious to all and sundry.

A slip of the tongue

Early one Sunday morning the other week, while out and about looking for some potential bargains on a car boot sale, I happened upon a three-way heated debate involving a husband and wife stallholder team and a prospective male buyer who’d somehow caused the growing vocal catalyst me and many others were now stood around listening to. The wife was short, fat and incensed, the husband was big, fat and incredulous and the poor bloke appeared humiliated, dazed and confused with all this unintended attention aimed at him and was defensively trying to calm the situation down.

Cycling vs Fate: in need of a new God?

Yet again, I’ve experienced the brunt of God, the Gods or whatever universal energy force may exist out in the nether regions of the ether, pissing on me from up on high and having a good old time laughing its/their balls off at my expense whilst the last drips land. This disruption usually occurs two or three times a year at specific months and after many years of scrutiny and realisation, I try to prepare as best I can for the coming onslaught of Fate’s dice-throw. As I’m still limited to travelling to work using the age-old transport method of the bicycle, this is usually the weakest link in my so-called life and it is most likely to be one of the contributing factors towards my tri-yearly stresses. So it comes as no surprise that this month’s boiling rage has arrived with a plumb and has been ushered in with yet another cycle-related extravaganza of pain and suffering for myself.

40 as a milestone? I'm lucky to have reached it!

On the 23rd of July 2010, I finally entered middle age as I turned 40 years old with the passing of the midnight hour; quite literally, as I entered this world on the clock’s ninth chime, an early morning start to an eventful, if unfulfilled, life. It has taken me a few weeks of coming to terms with this monumental arrival - as shown with the lack of blog input during this period of time - but now I’m back with an amalgamation of my wastrel life’s highs and lows. I have tried to recall some of the key yearly events for possible future dissection of my psychologically damaged brain-box, although limiting my choices was hard work: some years were packed with eventful examples, yet others standout with their lack of instances and there’s a couple I truly cannot recall anything memorable happening at all. So, here’s a single example for each year spread across the last 40 years.

Sky News creates new word: "Capains"

On Tuesday just before noon, as I watched Sky News with Colin Brazier, I noticed that one of their usually meticulous copy writers for the text input on the rotating "Breaking News" banner at the bottom of the screen had made a spelling Faux Pas. The mistake took the form of a misspelt word pertaining to the Ryder Cup vice-captain choices of Golfer Colin Montgomerie and I watched as its luminous yellow background blazed the shameful error onto my retinas every few seconds. So with a spring in my step, I rushed off for my camera to try to capture this unusual occurrence on my digital sensor before the powers that be discovered their blunder and removed it from the fluctuating short-term memories of a half-bored public.

Parcel Force? P*ssing Farce more like!

As I use differing ways of delivering parcels within my job as an eBay manager, I’m acutely aware of which are the best and the worse in the realm of consignment and postage. For the majority of my work-related items, I use a dependable, private courier service that is competitive, always collect on time and offers fair rates; prices do shoot up if any stretch of sea-water has to be crossed and a weekend delivery is non-existent, but all in all I'm happy.

Dreams of what lie beneath

Like most people, I occasionally have vivid and extraordinary dreams that once I’ve awakened from stay with me for days afterwards, dwelling in my consciousness for repeated dissection and scrutiny. Now whether Freud and Jung would be so interested in my ‘mind-doodles’ is debatable as neither religious iconography nor sexual deviancy is really prevalent within my skull at the best of times! So, in the hope of resolving the many psychoanalytical elements which have broke on through from my dreamscape world, I’ve decided to input my latest example into this blog: perhaps someone will feel an affinity with me due to being as obviously confused as I or maybe I’m opening up too much for experts to discover a deep-seated Oedipus complex I was never aware of. Either way, allow me now to take you on a journey into the latest delusional thought process of your author...

The internet? It's bloody massive!

Found this great explaination over at This Blog Rules regarding how vast, huge and overwhelming the sheer size of the internet has now become. Many thanks to Medical Coding Certification for its release and to Ellie Koning for its sublime design:

Google Maps and a blast from my past

I was talking to a mate the other day when he casually mentioned that he’d been messing around on Google Maps, looking for something or other, and that they’d now implemented the street-view, mouse-drag yellow figure in most areas near to where we live. I answered nonchalantly at first but then remembered an instance from this time last year where I was pretty sure a Google Maps vehicle - complete with the four-way telescopic camera set-up protruding from its roof - spun a 180 degree turn in front of my car at a T-junction. I recall looking in Maps at the time on the road in question but to no avail, probably due to the vast amount of digital images Google would have to process before uploading a tiny patch of a housing estate in Chadderton, so forgot all about it until reminded.

Oat-bran - a mixture just too far

I have the unenviable task of having to do my weekly shop with my brother since I crashed and wrote off my own car late last year and as we both usually rub each other up the wrong way, this single forced jaunt can cause friction. I’m indebted to him really as it makes my life so much easier and saves me a small fortune in taxi fares, so to sound like I’m complaining isn’t really my intention at all as I’m completely grateful for his help. The problem is our personalities clash, which is probably due to the fact we both know we have no alternative to our every-seven-days brotherly trip, and either I’ll end up annoying him - or as in this example from our latest escapade - he’ll manage to annoy me with his rhetorical flummery.

In eBay sellers we trust

eBay and the collection of utter cretins that now dwell within its virtual confines have stripped away my very humanity over the last couple of weeks. Amid ever increasing examples of (un)intentional seller idiocy to contend with no matter where I’ve looked, I honestly believe my days on the world’s biggest auction site are now numbered. As I actually run eBay sites for a living and have done so for the last 5 years, the above statement is tantamount to making myself unemployed and back in the bosom of Job Seekers Allowance, which is not the most ideal situation I grant you. However, I feel I have the insight and understanding of selling and buying on eBay as a whole to comment upon some recent examples of moronic traders I’ve had to deal with within this silicon-based market place.

Teen forced to marry Cow after sex!

The headline says it all, really. Yep, it's an unbelievable but apparently true story from the newspaper, Jakarta Globe. We are informed that a young man of 18 by the name of Ngurah Alit was caught naked having sex with a Cow in a paddy field near to Jembrana, then tried to excuse his actions by blaming the heifer for flirting with him!

Things got a lot worse for this inter-species Lothario because in order to cleanse the village of his bestial transgression, the poor lad was forced to wed the animal before his neighbours, Police and interested journalists. It all seems to have been a little too much for Ngurah Alit though as he ended up collapsing at the ceremony due to the stress and embarrassment of his new-found infamy. And if you think it couldn't get any worse, then just don't ask what happened to the Cow...

Here's the complete article over at the Jakarta Globe:

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/static/national/380095.html

Tories + Lib-Dems = ?

Post-Election Coalition: Blue and yellow makes...? So, after almost a week of electoral wrangling, unelected puppet masters twanging strings and a confused populace trying to understand the election result, we the voters have ended up with a newly-formed British Government that now takes the shape of a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition. Obviously this is a political compromise of gigantic proportions, with a fragile balance to be undertaken by all concerned under the repeated media mantra of “It’s for the good of the country” to paper over the cracks that exist on the left-of-centre and the right-of-centre of both parties; an experimental aegis granted which, fingers crossed, can at least attempt to stem Britannia’s monetary haemorrhaging and halt our national deficit (thanks for the last 13 years, Gordon and all the best, mate!).

Walking and Dogs: ready for a workout?

Now we have some better weather across the UK, due to spring whistling in and pushing out the worst winter of the last thirty years, and so with this warmer arrival, I’ve decided to take advantage and embark upon daily walks to my workplace rather than use my bike. As I usually whizz along some farm lanes to save time and cut the frenetic early morning cycling to a minimum, having a nice leisurely stroll along these lanes - which skirt a local country park called Tandle Hills - with my camera in tow to capture the awakening flora and fauna seemed like the perfect addition to creating a stress-free day. Well, this was the original idea but in practice things haven’t really panned out as intended and that’s all down to our canine friends and their many forms: whether that form takes the appearance of small and cuddly or huge and f**king frightening, there’s one constant I’m sure of; I despise all shapes and sizes of every barking, bleeding dog.

Halifax Bank's Radio Station: feeling a little queasy

I’ve been feeling peculiar recently and it has taken some time to pinpoint the cause of my unsettled equilibrium due to untimely oral and rectal emissions intruding into my life. The symptoms appeared to come and go at random: from waves of nausea accompanied with rises of sickly bile, through intense bowel excavations of rumbling wind, to hot fevers that rendered me void of energy and coated in a sheen of fop sweat. I was at a loss to find a common denominator for these instigated troubles until, by chance, one day while watching TV, I found these feelings washing over my being during an ad break. So, I waited for the next showing of what I thought was the culprit and lo and behold, another viewing resulted in my body being wracked once again with violent upheaval and I’d found the cause of my televisual discomfort: it was all the fault of Halifax Bank’s latest set of TV ads, churning out their aural dross and banal flummery in hope hilarity ensures (it doesn't).

Obama Bin Laden? Welcome to the Mail Online's Typo...

Noticed this name error last weekend (it’s dated the 16th April), while reading the online version of the UK paper The Daily Mail; basically the headline created a confused amalgam of the USA’s first black President’s Christian name and the USA’s number one Al-Qaeda terrorist’s surname name. Feeling helpful and noticing the story had only just been put online, I decided to inform the cretin who'd written the piece by submitting the first comment to the story:

The General Election: a Red turning Blue?

Across the UK, we are now within the final countdown to the 2010 governmental General Election - which will take place on May the 7th - and we all get to flex our democratic choices by using our five-yearly voting extravaganza to usher in a real change in policy in the form of red, blue or, in the event of a long shot, yellow. So, either it’ll be the same old garbage we’ve just had or a new set of morons to destroy our hopes and aspirations for the foreseeable future; either way, nothing’s going to change, we’re all going to carry on complaining about lack of money, lack of jobs and lack of freedom within our rule-restrictive society, so why even bother to vote?

A tale of two Bicycles

As mentioned in previous blog entries (see "Cycling..." for more details) I have for now - over the last 6 months at any rate - been cycling to my place of work in what I like to refer to as an “enforced fitness regime”: this phrase basically means having to use a bicycle for a ten mile round commute into my job and thus enduring a physical workout I actually have no say in. Now, please don’t get the wrong idea and think I’m complaining about pedalling hardships without gaining some benefit from all this cycling; now I’m half a year into this perpetual sloggery, at an age where the good times are long gone and my belly's future does indeed appear bleak, I’ve noticed my once slack shape has tightened somewhat and I do feel quite fit, although not quite as a fiddle.

HSBC's "Integrity" & "Responsibility": What a load of old Bank...

With the vast corruption and continual bonus-greed rife within the Banking world during the last couple of years, our Capitalist masters have now decided to give themselves a publicity makeover in the hope of garnering our lost confidence. This development can only mean one thing: our weary eyes assaulted on a daily basis by newly-devised TV adverts, keen to sell us the same old themes of trust, assurance and dependability, only with a fresh lick of monetary sheen in order to divert our gaze from the real issues. Yes, it’s just another imagining of the old street-corner “cup and ball” trickster routine from eons ago, their hands swirling in a blur to confuse and fleece us of our hard-earned cash, regardless of whether we are aware of this illusion or not. Accompanying this brazen financial deception is the now socially-acceptable mantra, “Greed is good”: uttered by the main protagonist, Gordon Gecko, in Oliver Stone’s masterful Wall Street (1987), we all have these words ringing in our ears on a daily basis now as we’ve become governed by wanton thrusting, jealous grasping and unbridled selfishness, all unavoidable side-effects from stoking the insatiable furnace of Capitalism.

Our Un-Natural Selection

I am a great wildlife lover and advocate of being able to observe our flying little feathered things and cuddly little furry things in their natural environs, which in the UK means either flying above our heads in the sky or trotting about fields, moorland and hedgerows for our enjoyment. Most people in our animal-loving country appreciate and get pleasure from the little inter-species interaction we can garner during our high-powered, stress-filled, post-modern lifestyles. Whether this contact is taking the dog for a walk, stroking their lazy cat or putting nuts and seeds out for the birds – and thieving squirrels – that frequent their back gardens is a moot point to most of us: any dealings with the animals which surround us taps into and feeds our lost sense of belonging within the natural world, a world we seem to have separated from in our developed societies via technological advancement and obsession with monetary gain.

A trip to the Doctors... Pt 2

I’m now a few blog entries on from when I first visited my local NHS surgery due to feeling slightly unwell with my grotesquely swollen Parotid glands - see "A trip to the Doctors... pt 1" for more details - and where my Doctor issued ultra-strong antibiotics along with scattergun, tablet-taking instructions which I strived to follow to the best of my ability: however, this proved harder than I originally thought it would be due to the baffled state of my everyday thought processes. This memory confusion arose within just one day of ingesting the small, red-coated Milpharm tablets and almost immediately they reduced me to a gibbering, sweat-soaked sociopath liable to instantly explode in an antibiotic-induced fury of magnificent proportions.

Youth of today? Give me yesterday's childhood anytime

The youth of today and the death of tomorrow. Is this an accurate hypothesis or am I speaking after the fact; indeed, as I’ve had and enjoyed my early years, am I justified in not equating anything I see in today’s culture as being worthy for tomorrow’s foundation due to looking back in anger across my wasted years that started half a century ago in the middle of the 1980s? We all go through teenage rebellion and we can always pinpoint particular incidences that spoke to us, helped create who we have become, for good or bad, and to recall these memorable learning curves is a fascinating experience in trying to understand your former self through post-analysis.

BT Broadband: welcome to the dribbling trickle

It is my great misfortune to live in an area within the UK that has never had fibre-optic cable piped beneath its streets during the great flurry of work which was undertaken many years ago to future-proof our communication infrastructure. With our insatiable appetite for technological wonders perpetually advancing and creating more complex design, the time has now arrived that we can truly utilise these pre-laid cables: spreading out as neural pathway tracts and connecting billions of silicon brains around the globe means blisteringly fast broadband connections for everyone, everywhere, all the time... except if your area never had the cable laid in the first place.

A trip to the Doctors... Pt 1

Having not been to a Doctor for many a year due to being relatively illness-free, I found it surprising that just after New Year I had to ‘phone up my local surgery and make an appointment because of a long-lived-with-and-ignored ailment which had suddenly bloomed out of all proportion. This ailment has taken on the form of swollen Parotid glands at the back of my jaw-line over the last ten years and during this time they’ve flared up and subsided so inconsistently that whenever I’ve actually sought medical attention the diagnosis is eclectic to say the least: Glandular Fever, a compressed Wisdom tooth, Tonsillitis - even though they’ve been whizzed out along with my Adenoids years ago - and even Mumps at the age of 32 have been forwarded as causes!

Windows 7 UK adverts: anyone for an anal lobotomy?

The Personal Computer. If you are like me and exist within the PC realm as opposed to flouncing around in Apple’s i-nonsense, designer wonderland, then just the mention of those three words can fill the vast majority of people with technophobic dread. It’s just the thought of trying to fix your own Windows-based system when the inevitable problems arise that brings about a spate of fevered brows, cold sweats and panic attacks across the world’s Microsoft users, much like how Apple users are confabulated when faced with the bewildering option of a second mouse button. Now obviously as PC users, we all have our own personal favourite version of Windows - which can be anything from ’95 to Millennium, ’98 to NT and even 3.1 or MS-DOS thrown into the mix - but what most people will be more than happy to be using is XP, their most successful operating system to date.

Christmas, New Year & the Big Freeze

All across the United Kingdom during Christmas and New Year, we’ve had the worst snowfall for 30 years: we’ve basically been unable to do anything but watch our newly-adapted “Global Warming” infrastructure grind to a complete halt. Obviously this has come about due to the boffins in the white coats convincing the Government over a period of time that winters as we used to know them are a thing of the past, assigned to the history books along with things like Yew tree reverence, an English national identity and the Marathon peanut chocolate bar. However, the big brains appear to have got this one wrong now, so are trying to back track and change the term “Global Warming” into the non-specific “Climate Change”: underneath this aegis of terminology, we can now rest easy in the knowledge its title will cover all eventualities, from hot to cold and all the in-between.

Social networking: rejection the easy way

With the advent of internet-based, social networking sites exploding across the world’s computers like ... like a... an infectious “virus” (Christ, that’s poor!), our interpersonal skills development has not only ground to a halt but has actually gone into a reverse gear. For people of a certain age who can remember what it was like to have a face-to-face conversation with an actual human-being before Face Space, Bobe, Twatter and My Book came along, then this isn’t too debilitating: we can still access that synapse within our brain which can create authentic speech and thus can interact, albeit on a dwindling scale. However, if you’re under 30 and your life’s governed by the above digital technology via your laptop and iPhones, then your culture’s growth - indeed your own personal growth - is becoming more restricted with each insular key-press you perform. You see, that’s all it takes now for friendships to be formed and consummated or cast aside and left lying in tatters; with no eye contact or facial expressions to judge, then our selfish, callous finger-and-thumb actions are accelerating us all towards a future culture of anti-social recidivism.