by Harry
There’s no point whatsoever in living through an entire year, a whole 365 days if you will, if you’re not prepared to sit down sometime near the end and draw up some fatuous lists celebrating things that might have happened during said year. I’m not the sort of person to shirk my responsibilties (unless I’m at work, or there’s football on the telly, or, you know, I can’t really be bothered), so here – in what was a strange and unsettling year on Planet Harry – are my top 5 top 10s of 2009…
5. Top 10 Albums of 2009
10. The King Khan & BBQ Show – Invisible Girl (garage rock duo present more hi-jinks)
9. Jacuzzi Boys – No Seasons (tuneful Floridian oddness)
8. Peter Doherty – Grace/Wastelands (sounds like The Clash at times, but not all the time)
7. Obits – I Blame You (shiny rock and roll)
6. Graham Coxon – The Spinning Top (better than the Blur reunion)
5. Magnolia Electric Company – Josephine (country gloom with occasional eau de Boss)
4. Built To Spill – There Is No Enemy (world-weary brilliance)
3. Maplewood – Yeti Boombox (they sound a bit like Canyon, but with shorter songs and better tunes)
2. Great Lake Swimmers – Lost Channels (acoustic loveliness)
1. Reigning Sound – Love And Curses (I like this more than the other 9)
I started the year with two jobs – one as a banker, one as a giggling buffoon on the Steve Show. Now I have no jobs, so I have a lot of time to kill. For the unemployed, Sudoku is a great thing. If you find a newspaper that offers an Easy, Intermediate and Hard Sudoku each day, you can a) kill an hour and a half, b) exercise your brain, and c) burn the newspaper for heat after completing them. The Easy ones are easy, I can polish off an Intermediate with little trouble, but sometimes the Hard ones are very hard and you have to just take a guess on a number…
4. Top 10 Numbers To Guess In Sudoku When You Don’t Know What Number To Put In A Particular Space
10. 7
9. 3
8. 6
7. 2
6. 1
5. 5
4. 9
3. 4
2. 8
1. err, 6 again
But let’s not forget, it’s not all peaches and pixie – if you don’t have work then you get a pitiful £63 a week from the state to keep you in razorblades and sleeping pills. But surely there’s hope? What else can you buy with your £63?
3. Top 10 Things You Could Buy With Your £63 Weekly Jobseeker’s Allowance
10. Staywell Infra Red Cat Flap
9. Rolsa Mountain Luna Shopping Trolley
8. H Fereday & Sons Queen Traditional Kitchen Scales
7. 4 Pack of Ultrasun Sport Factor 20 Suncream
6. Black & Decker Electric Leaf Blower
5. Ready Made Melamine Vivarium (With 2 Toughened Glass Sliding Doors)
4. New Fox Warrior Recliner Chair
3. Printmate Q6000A HP 1600/2600 Series Black Toner Cartridge
2. ‘Alina’ Doll Kit Sculpted by Adrie Stoet-Schuiteman
1. DrySenz UltraDry Commercial Hand Dryer Unit
Blimey, that’s enough hard-hitting social commentary for now. What about the music, eh? That’s what we’re all here for, hmmm?
2. Top 10 Tunes of 2009 (That Weren’t On Any Of Those Albums I Listed Earlier…)
10. Hex Dispensers – Doomsday Romantic
9. The Marked Men – Fortune
8. Holy State – Solid State Messiah
7. The Bitter Springs – And Even Now
6. The Cribs – Cheat On Me
5. Lou Barlow – I’m Thinking…
4. The Broken Family Band – St Albans
3. The Bird & The Bee – Love Letter To Japan
2. Art Brut – Alcoholics Unanimous
1. BC Camplight – Your Daddy Is A Little Girl
Now, come on, let’s be fair, I may have painted a bleak picture of unemployment during this piece. I’m sorry, don’t be upset. It’s not all that bad. I’m fine, really. To prove it, why not suck up my final top 10 of 2009…
1. Top 10 Best Things About Being Unemployed
10. Health and well-being. Avoiding packed trains on the daily commute into London means you don’t pick up several billion germs/bugs a day. These are some of the illnesses I haven’t had this year – cold, flu, earache, scrofula, tendonitis, mad cow disease, nursemaid’s elbow, the heebie-jeebies, Norfolk Nose, Ruislip Wrist, and Staines Massive Syndrome (which I believe to be a form of elephantiasis).
9. Finding yourself. Working for the last 13 years, you become accustomed, oblivious even, to the bizarre phoney rituals you have to go through to satisfy the endless cycle of work, praise, reward, only occasionally interspersed with the odd promotion or bollocking along the way. Without that cruelly manufactured system of institutionalised weirdness to adhere to, freed from the deafening background noise that blights your daily toil, and with the time to ponder, ruminate and contemplate your very being, you can find yourself again. Turns out I’m amazing.
8. Tip avoidance. My barber always asks if I have the day off work, so I look all sad and say that I’m between jobs, providing unarguable justification for not giving him a tip.
7. Duck feeding. More therapeutic than either standing on the bank of a river doing nothing or randomly throwing small chunks of bread when not near a river, duck feeding is the best therapy for the blues, even better than those desk-clacker-things from the 80’s. The borough of Richmond upon Thames now has some of the fattest ducks in the country. You have to be sneaky to make sure that the seagulls don’t see you though. They’ll peck your eyes out given half a chance.
6. Dealing with cold callers. You’ve got no idea just how many times you get phone calls during the day. It’s amazing. Most of them are selling insurance. What they fail to realise is that, unless they’re offering specialist insurance for the treatment of bed sores or seagull attacks, I have no need for their services.
5. Playing loud music during the day without complaints. The neighbours, suckers that they are, work. I play Hot Snakes records at amp-destroying volume and provide additional rhythmic support by smashing the radiator with a floor-standing lamp.
4. Availability for workmen. If you need a plumber to come out to make some emergency repairs, maybe if a radiator is gushing boiling water all over the lounge carpet while a floor-standing lamp lies nearby in pieces, at least you’re always in, paying daytime rates rather than rip-off-Britain evening/weekend charges.
3. Times, days and dates lose all meaning and relevance, especially if you watch all eighteen episodes a day of Friends on E4, More 4, Channel 4 and their respective +1’s, HD’s and OD’s. You jump forward and back in time at such a rate – Chandler’s fat/Chandler’s in the depths of painkiller addiction; it’s the awful one where Ross plays rugby/it’s one of the awful ones with Bruce Willis; it’s the era where they look a little too old for the ages of their characters/it’s the era where they look way too old for the ages of the characters, etc. What? It’s December now? You shitting me?
2. Daytime TV. ITV’s Taste The Nation was an uninspired combo of Masterchef, every bad reality show imaginable and a nightmare where Nick Hancock is responsible for your miserable death from muscular atrophy. It was a cooking competition pitting region against region, with the climax of each show unsurprisingly being Hancock’s announcement of the winner. However, he would do this by saying ‘The winner of today’s Taste The Nation is…….’. And then he would say 
nothing. For 45 seconds. I know, I timed it. With a stopwatch. 45 seconds. Does that sound like a long time? Try talking to someone, and before you get to the end of your point/joke/argument, pause for 45 seconds. They will either walk away, slap your face to ensure that you haven’t fallen into a coma, or, unable to withstand the pressure of the situation, start confessing to appalling crimes that a) they didn’t commit, and b) possibly never even occurred. I say bring back the test card, or pages from Ceefax, before more innocent people get sent to prison.
1. DVD boxsets. When daytime telly gets me down and the ducks are refusing my bread, I hit the boxsets. I never got into any of the big US series when they aired, purely because it was too much of a commitment. If 24 had been called 7, then I would almost certainly have watched it. But 24? I have to watch 24 of the things? And that’s just one series? No way, not happening. However, given the gift of time by misguided managers I devoured The Wire in double quick time, and I’ve just got to the end of season 3 of the Sopranos. 24 still seems too numerically intimidating, and Lost sounds rubbish, so hopefully I’ll have a job of some sort by the end of the Sopranos…
Steve Show Posse 