It’s Halloween, this means that I will be hiding from the local children with the lights off and telly muted so that I don’t have to provide them sweets and they don’t interrupt X Factor (please let Jedward sing ‘Walk This Way’ for rock week). As a single man living on his own, I feel deeply uncomfortable giving sweets to children and why would I want to give anything to kids who for past 12 months have been locally wreaking havoc on mountain bikes while talking mobile phones, terrorising the elderly and are now mugging me under the banner of a pagan festival?

Then there are adult Halloween parties that require dressing up and I hate fancy dress more than I hate a urinary tract examination. I have never in all my life been to a party where I thought ‘you know, I am having a good time, but what would make it better would be wearing some polyester monstrosity that has caused my body to produce an odour that could be used in a chemical weapons attack’.

This is fun forced upon you rather than just letting you have fun. And you’re trapped, you can’t leave the party or even stop in the pub on the way home, you already look like a knob, but you’re now a knob with nowhere to go if the party is shit.

I have been reliably informed that fancy dress is an ice breaker at parties. Really, how long can the conversation about your costume go on for and how interesting can it ever be? Firstly, if someone has to ask what you’ve come as, then it’s probably not very good or you have come as a sci-fi character so obscure that your explanation will have you boring the fuck out of others in no time.

If you are going to dress up as a character from a series that only appears on Sky1, then do it with other some sad fuckers who think it is fun shooting paintballs at each other through a life size recreation of the Stargate (this actually fucking exists)? Do not regale me with reasons why the character’s story arc is allegorical and how it mirrors your own struggle in IT recruitment solutions.

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For months and months I have been paying for hosting this and email services, while being totally fucking lazy when it comes to making any sort of contribution to my blog. Apparently if I am going to get anyone to read this I have to make regular posts so that people get to read them. This is often particularly difficult when nothing really of consequence happens in your day and the most exciting thing was that you had managed to fill your Cafe Nero loyalty card and got a free cappuccino .

I have in fact been up to something really rather jolly exciting and that’s that I did my first stand-up comedy spot. This was all thanks to an old friend of mine making me do it and the X-Foundation who gave me the opportunity, all the name of charity I hasten to add. Although this was a side issue as the point of this was totally self-serving and I was completely out for myself.

After several weeks of tutoring by Chris Head, myself and nine others were ready, willing and armed mostly with wank gags. We did not learn of the line up until an hour before the show and true to my prediction I was up first. Just as well cos it meant that I could spend the rest of the evening tucking into the rider and getting shitfaced. Unbelievably, it went better than expected. They laughed in all the right places, a couple of lines got applause (I have given knob-cheese a brand name) and I even got some ad libs in.

This all left me with rather an odd feeling. Apparently this is called pride. Ms Rant introduced me to it, as she is one those mouthy Australian people they are apparently quite used to it. All that is required now is to prove myself to a room of complete strangers who are pissed up and ready to shout at me for no apparent reason. Provisionally that’s February 11, 2010 at the King’s Head, Crouch End. Let’s hope they are smegma friendly.

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