Its amazing what you see when you open your ears.

With my Bluetooth iPod headphones broken, I have been traveling the journey to and from work without the soothing comfort provided by Kanye West. I sit on an empty double seat, which I am lucky to get. There are not enough trams running today.

According to Metrolink this is because too many of the trams have developed faults from running into cars and driving over people. They are so short of trams, they even have to resort to using the ones with crappy names like "The Poppy Appeal" and "Sony Centre Arndale". (Further information on Tram Names is available.)

I sit and I look at my fellow commuters. I catch the eye of one girl, sitting a row behind me on the other side of the aisle. She is looking at me like I am big slice of pie. I do not think she sees me as a Meat and Potato pie - full of the stuff that isn't good for you, is usually thrown away and contains a high percentage of fat.

I hope she is looking at me like an apple pie. I may have a slightly hard exterior but when you get through it I am warm, soft and sweet. And I also taste good covered in cream.

Either way, I think she's hungry and wants to eat. I feel so violated, like I'm nothing but a sex object.

I glance at the old woman opposite me who is talking to herself and spitting what looks like the empty shells of Brazil nuts on the floor. On closer inspection, she could also be spitting rice to the floor.

Or the white chewy parts of a Bounty.

Or parts of her teeth.

I shudder, get up and alight with great haste.

I am growing a beard.

I am currently considering what sort of beard I should grow. I do not think I am hairy enough to grow a full beard. Plus, they're a bit sad. Full beards are for men called Ralph who wear anoraks and drive Volvos. I am, however, considering the step down and growing a goatee. But I worry. I can grow the moustache bit and the chin bit but they do not normally meet up. I would end up looking like an badly dressed extra from Pirates of the Caribbean.

I will not be growing "just" a moustache.
I would very much like to grow a fashionable "Craig David chin-strap" but my hand is not steady enough to maintain it.
I will probably end up with just a little devil beard stuck to my chin.

Do not worry, dearest reader, I have not lost my mind. This is just something I do every now and again. It will pass. One day I will wake up, look in the mirror and remember that I look like a twat when I have facial hair and shave it off.

Ok, so I'll admit it. I am not growing this beard as a fashion statement. My shaving technique is the stuff of legends. Being an only child (apart from my two sisters) and having a bearded dad, who drives a volvo, no one has ever taught me how to shave. As a young adult, I used to look like Freddie Kreuger's uglier brother. My face would have more cuts than there were on "It'll be alright on the night".

And that brings me to today. About three weeks ago, I nicked my chin. And every time I've shaved since then, it has bled everywhere. I am getting fed up with it. I have decided to give it time to heal and not shave for a while. But of course when time comes to shave my devil beard off, I already know the bathroom will end up looking like a slaughterhouse.

Its a vicious circle!

I am depressed!!!

I knew very early on today that it would be the equivalent of having speakers superglued to your head and with a Starsailor Album blasted into your ear drums.

It started when I put my contact lenses in and the solution I use had not neutralised itself. It kinda hurt when I put the lens in and when I say kinds hurt, imagine someone rubbing sand-paper across your eyeball while dripping molten lava into your tear duct.

And then I go out to find it is raining. You may not believe this but it does rain in Manchester. It was cold and rainy. The dirty magazines that littered the bushes on my way to the tram were becoming soaked and unusable. I began pining for the summer when at least the rain was warm.

Not even a squashy coffee could lift the grey clouds forming in my mind. Admittedly, pushing the plunger caused a bit of a smile. Not because I was pretending it was dynamite, like I usually do, but because the Cafetiere made a "little bottom noise" on its way down. The smile was short lived because my drink had grains of coffee floating in it.

:-(

And my Bluetooth iPod Headphones are broken.
And its Monday.
And I keep getting hammered in Football Manager 2006.
And I have nothing inspiring to do at work.
And I need a hair cut.
And its five weeks until my next day off work.
And my computer keeps crashing randomly.
And its thirty-some years until I can retire.

At least I have my health.
Its being so cheerful that keeps me going.

I try not to be a lazy writer.

I could write "and then I got off the bus" comedy every day of every week 358 days a year (I would rest on Cup Final Day and Christmas Day amongst others). You know the sort, you describe in detail about how you were doing something, usually sexual or unusual, and then in the last couple of lines you spring a surprise by saying something like - "and then I got off the bus". That is lazy writing. You can see an example of it from my very own archives - "The Commitments". Another example would be using the punchline "And that was just the teachers!"

Of course the laziest way to end a story is "and then I woke up and it was all a dream". I'm not sure how every other school worked but if you ended an essay like that in my school, you were taken behind the changing rooms and buggered. Having only recently stopped being an all boys school, there was an awful lot of anal sex. You would find it hard to walk past a classroom without seeing some rimming. And that was just the teachers.

It was with great reticence, and a slight twitching from my bottom, that yesterday I had to end my intruder story in that way. But of course, that is assuming that it was the end...

I walked out of my flat on a routine trip to the shops. As I locked my door my next door neighbour's door opened and she appeared at the door. "I think I have to make an apology to you. Did my friend come into your flat the other night? We'd had a load of drinks and he'd gone outside for a taxi and then decided to come back in."

"And when he came back to my flat he looked as white as a sheet and said 'I've just gone into the wrong apartment and this guy appeared and scared the crap out of me.' I'm really, really sorry, he didn't mean to do it. I'm just glad he didn't go into Sign Guy's house. He'd have called the police or, worse, the site manager."

"Or even worse," I add, "he could've left a note on your door."

So there we have it was an accident, I feel calm and relaxed about the situation now. It was not malicious and there was no harm done to anyone. I can put away my shotgun and be glad that it is over. Admittedly this is not very funny ending but it is an ending.

"One more thing," she added. "If you see my old flat mate, the one who looked like a brick out-house, don't let him in. He skipped out on me after not paying the rent for a couple of months. I've had the locks changed but I'm worried he could bust this door down. I still have all his stuff. In fact if you see him, call the police."

I am still quite shaken up about my intruder.

If it was a Friday night or a Saturday night then you may be able to put it down to drink, drugs or a heady cocktail of both. But who goes out till 5AM on a Monday Morning? I wish I'd have got up and challenged him. Even just so I could've got it clear in my mind why he was in my flat and where he was actually meant to be (There are at least two chav women living two floors above me, he could've been visiting them - I think these are the sort of women that would have late night and early morning visitors). But I was sleeping naked.

I mentioned it to My Mate Matt, who is a serial worrier. Although he's doing well now, he only frets from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep. I relayed the story to him and he paniced more than a tram full of commuters when I stand up and shout "Allahu Akbar". "It was probably someone casing the joint," he says hitting the red button, instigating full panic mode and showing a good grasp of street lingo, "He'll probably be back tonight and kill you in your sleep". I am actually quite calm about this. Unusually calm.

There are still a lot of unanswered questions. How did I manage to find the bedside lamp so easily and turn it on without thinking? Why is my abiding memory of the incident, the feeling of my cold naked testicles banging against my leg? Why, after it had happened, did I get up and calmly walk to my PC in the other room to see if the new episode of Lost had downloaded? If you walked into someone's flat by mistake, even if you were drunk, wouldn't you be really appologetic? How come I am still going to leave the door unlocked?

In fact there are so many things that don't add up, I have come to the conclusion that I dreamt it.

Hmmm, I did have those Cheese flavoured goldfish crackers before bed.
And Cheese is well known for causing nightmares.

I trust you. I really do. I trust you by telling you every infinitesimally small detail of my life. In fact I trust everybody. Apart from when it comes to driving my car - that goes without saying. I have no reason not to trust people. No one has ever done me wrong. And for that reason, when I am in the house, I leave the front door open.

I am having a strange but relatively normal dream. I am discussing life with my friend Carl. In this dream, his dad is looking to generate some extra work (he is a town planner), so I suggest that he goes around and knocks on doors. And then I wake to hear my burglar alarm beeping. Someone had opened my front door and is walking into my flat. I grab the light by the side of the bed, turn it on and point it towards the door. I wait and I think, who could this be?

Could it be My Canadian Friend who has come over after being scared by the shadow monsters?
Could it be Sign Guy who has finally found out that it was me who parked in his designated parking spot for 25 minutes on Friday?
Could it be Doc, my stuffed Midget Miner, coming back from a night on the tiles with Gustav?
Could it be Evangeline Lilly and Maggie Grace come over for another one of their midnight visits?
Could it be a spurned lover come back to exact revenge on me using a pair of pliers and a blow torch?

Or could I just be being robbed? It is amazing what an active imagination can do in three seconds. I feel really sorry for kids today whose entire lives consist of sitting in front of ISS Grand Theft Halo on their PlayBox, eating Pringles and drinking Tango. They should get out more, exercise their mind and use their imagination.

And so into the light staggers a white shirted man. "Ooops sorry, wrong flat." he said as he turned and left.

Obviously, I am quite shaken up by this but as I lay there worried, I think about what a fair and measured response would be. I do not want to lock my door. If I do; THEY win. The final bastion of my civil utopia is eroded and another step is taken towards Mrs Thatcher's "There's no such thing as society". I become just another person living in fear of my neighbour, waiting with a machete for him to look at me funny so I can slice him up.

Or am I just a gullible fool?

My hair! My beautiful hair!

It is raining quite hard and I haven't got an umbrella. I know real mean don't need umbrellas but then again real men do ghastly things like get drunk, eat kebabs and fancy Keira Knightley. Us metrosexuals are more concerned with the environment, buying soft furnishings and protecting the huge investment we have made in hair care products. Every drop of water hitting my head could be the one that turns my hair style from messy and stylish to just messy.

There's a big queue for the tram because of the football. I could be stood there for at least 12 minutes in the rain with my hair getting wetter and wetter. I decide to take the bus.

Taking the bus is a lot like taking the Metrolink, except the people are uglier, older and poorer and instead of showing adverts of Gary Neville in Malta, they show adverts stating that one in four women wet themselves and need a Tena lady pad. I count. There are 16 women on the bus. I look at four of them and wish I didn't know my "Times tables".

"Where are we now?" asks a very drunk football fan from Sunderland. His question is vaguely directed to anyone who is listening. I look out of the window and see the Hulme arch and the former location of the Cresents. "We're in Hulme, just near Moss Side." His face drains of colour faster than Jamie Oliver watching a kid eating a Turkey Twizzler.

The colour that drained straight out of the football fan has reappeared in a local, who is now red with rage and begins ranting, "This is not Hulme! This is St George's. Hulme is over there. How dare you call this Hulme! I live round here and we have nothing to do with Hulme. This is a 'nice' area. And its miles away from MOSS SIDE." He turns his head away from me and mutters "Idiot!"

He gets off the bus just by a large sign saying "Hulme Shopping Arcade".

I see her opening the door and emerge from through the bushes and step out of the darkness. "Hiya! How are you settling in?" says the Girl-Next-Door. "Yeah but the central heating is not working - I don't suppose you have the customer services number do you?". "Of course. Why don't you come inside and I'll find it for you." I usually wouldn't go into a strange woman's house, but the Rohypnol she slipped me is making me strangely compliant.

She turns her key in the door and pushes the handle down, "Ooops, it was already open and I've locked it. I suppose that's what three bottles of wine does to you". This place is awfully tidy, I think as I walk past three Rubbermaid storage boxes in the hall. There are perfectly well written notes on top of each box saying "Shoes", "Pens" and "Notes". She better like anal, because it looks like whomever she lives with is very anal. I step into the living room and see him sitting there.

Its Sign Guy! (For those of you who don't know him go here, here and finally here.) He is sitting on the sofa with his feet up eating Jaffa Cakes. He isn't wearing any socks and his toe nails are all yellow and mouldy. I try not to look at them but like car accidents, midgets and girls showing off whale tails, it is impossible not to.

"So you're after Customer Services? You'll speak to a nice girl named Sarah, who is completely clueless but always tries hard. I speak to her at least three times a week. They were supposed to be fitting the big iron gate a month ago and I've been ringing up asking about that ever since and then there was the bins and the lines on the car park and our hot water and our kitchen extractor fan. Oh and we wanted them to plant some yellow or brown flowering plants outside our window so that they would match our living room."

"And they'd match your toe nails." I think. Or at least I think I thought it and hope I didn't say it.

"If you want, tell them you know me - that should get you good service. You seem a very sensible person and you'd be a great asset to my team. Would you like a cup of tea? I would love to hear what you thought about our plans for forming a Residents Association and a Neighbourhood Watch."

I make my excuses and leave. I must get home to prepare to watch the sumptuous Sarah Beeney in Property Ladder.

"Box office 5 please"

Steven Hawking, who UCI cinemas seem to have poached from the Post Office and Woolworths as offical bingo caller, tells us to walk towards the flashing light on the till. We are going to see the "A History of Violence" starring Aragon, son of Arathorn and "Random Blonde Actress #5278". It should be a good movie - the reviewers said so. And they wouldn't tell porkies would they?

And then I find out what the movie is about and I get deja vu. The movie tells an everyday tale of a man running a coffee shop who also happens to have been an everyday mob hit man. This is more common place than you would imagine. First there was A long kiss goodnight, then there was The Bourne Identity and the Bourne Supremecy and of course Kill Bill.

So I decide to save myself a bit of time and play the movie in my head before it starts. Man / Woman is normal and has lovely Wife / Husband and at least one lovely kid and they live together in a white picket fenced old colonial house in Anytown USA. Someone shows up from their past and accidently recognises. Hillarity ensues as other people show up. Lots of people die and the the Hero(ine) goes back to living a normal life.

Since I already know what the movie is about, I decide to count how many blatantly obvious product placements there are. In the first fifteen minutes I count at least three references to "Coffee" and one to "Baseball". Then I have an epiphany. I begin to realise that this movie is a bit slanted but it turns out, it's not the movie, it's my glasses.

They have never been the same since they got a close up look of the sole of My Canadian Friend's foot. I wiggle the arms a little bit and then POP! The right lens comes out of the frame. The movie looks all fuzzy without my glasses on, so I struggle to get the lens back in. It is a hard enough task in the light but in the dark it's impossible. I'm wiggling and poking the lens. And then suddenly, I swear I saw "Random Blonde Actress #5278"'s muff. I quickly flick my glasses up and see a nipple, sending the half in half out lens spiralling to the floor. After rooting through five day old popcorn, the remainder of a hot dog and the person infront's hand bag, I find it. The lens pops in and I can resume watching the movie.

Ah, we're up to the part where the people who know his past show up - Chrysler!
Then some people die, Strider lives, the movie ends and it sucks.
After seeing it, I want to create some violence on those movie reviewers that convinced Matt it'd be a good movie.

Now I have to wonder, if this can happen in at least a dozen Hollywood movies, I have to wonder if any of my friends are really mob hitmen. Will even writing this alert them to the fact that I am on to them? This could be serious. I could be whacked! I could wake up to find Ruud Van Nistelroy's head in my bed and then swim with the fishes. And I can't swim!

Today is Jeans for Genes day and on the way into work, I had the usual panic. "What if I've got the wrong day and turn up at the office and I'm the only one in jeans, I'll look a right fool." And then I remembered that the vast majority of scruffy bastards at my place wear jeans every day anyway. Apart from today, when I'm the only one in jeans.

But why Jeans for Genes? What have they done to warrant getting my money, apart from some nifty alliteration (or is it assonance? I know its onomatopoeia because I can't spell that). I mean really, if all we needed was a pair of words that sound alike then we could have:-

Shirts for Shits day - for research into Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Chron's Disease. "Wear you shirt and stops shits for a day!"
Hats for Twats day - Either the money can be used for researching why some people follow Manchester City or it can be invested into the prevention of Thrush.
At the end of this month it'll be four months since I got my suit and then I'll start calling it "my grey suit". (MB waits while everyone scrolls down and finds the start of the joke which was in the middle of the last post. I'm drumming my fingers now, do keep up!)
Shorts for Shorts - Making sure that everyone who wants one has a midget as one of their friends.
Blouses for Houses - All the money goes to helping first time buyers getting on the property ladder.
Bracelets for Face-lifts - Keep the divorced Cheshire wives set looking 21 well into their forties.

I also found out that yesterday was Organ Donor Day and today is also National Courtesy Day. So will you all just fuck off and leave me alone, I've got to go and give away a kidney.

My pants are itchy.

And I mean that in the American sense. I'm not trying to say Americans become itchy or itch in a different way. Although I'm sure most of them do. While us Britons itch ourselves in a quiet, reserved, I'm not sure I should be doing this manner; the Americans probably itch in a "Hey Boy, look at me itch!" sort of way.

Of course I mean pants as in trousers. They are chaffing me and rubbing in places they shouldn't. I am wearing my new grey suit today. Come to think of it the suit isn't even that new, I have had it for several months. I have almost owned it long enough for it to just become my grey suit. At what point does it make that transition....

It's at this point that I should point out that I am not wearing any pants either (in the British sense of the word). There seems to have been a mix up in my washing schedule and I have run out of underwear three days before I was supposed to. Which is funny because exactly the same thing happened last time.

I suppose the easy answer is just to buy more pants by my dad told me never to take the easy way out. Plus I'm boycotting every male fashion retailer after they have refused to take part in the great "Day of the week" sock debate.

So I have three choices
A) Spend Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of every other week going commando
B) Buy some ladies underwear
C) Wear three pairs of pants for two days each
D) Wear one pair of pants for 4 days

Text the word "Pants" followed by the letter to 555-1176

"Neville Chamberlain!". After proving how intellectualistic I am by watching University Challenge, I seek more cleverer TV to watch. So I turn to Wife Swap.

"God I hope the Children aren't out of control and swear a lot." says the Strict Disciplinarian Wife. She obviously doesn't watch this show very much. That sort of statement is akin to someone going on Ready Steady Cook and saying "I hope I don't have to stand here and drink wine while I watch a trained chef prepare an easy to replicate dish that can be cooked in 20 minutes."

This is also a prime example of why this isn't called Husband Swap. The producers couldn't trust men to tell the truth on their applciations. "I really can't stand families who have two 18 year old nymphomaniac twins who enjoy seducing balding 45 year old strangers with a spare tyre Goodyear would be proud of."

And then as the show progresses, reality hits. The Strict Wife realises she's at Woodstock and the Soft Wife realises she's in Sandringham. The Strict Wife bans swearing and then gets a four letter - "Life's so unfair - I hate you!" - tirade from the poor put upon 13 year old daughter for asking her to clean her room. The Soft Wife makes the husband do house work, cook and enjoy himself - he ends up serving his Daughters some curry dish which contains about a bottle and a half of Jack Daniels.

And it continues, The Strict Wife says her new house is a pig sty her new husband oinks like a pig. The Soft Wife invites loads of kids around who decorate the dining room walls with some finger painted art and her new husband gets out a shot gun and repaints his kitchen walls with the Soft Wife's brains.

Both familes try and live like their new mum's old family. It doesn't work. Cue shouting, screaming and tears. Both families resist change and are then re-unted with their correct mum and everything goes back to the way it once was.

Repeat next week and then fade to black.

I go to Blackpool.

For those of you unfamiliar with Blackpool, imagine Las Vegas! But colder. Like Las Vegas, there are spivs trying to part idiots from their money. In Las Vegas they run Casinos in which people can pit their wits, skill and money against "The House" in games of chance and skill but in Blackpool they are selling Glow Sticks, Flashing Twizler things and Whistles.

We go to the Pleasure Beach, which is neither a beach nor pleasurable. I do not like going on Fairground Rides. If I wanted to sit in a little metal box, get a racing pulse, be shunted from side to side and be scared to within an inch of my life - I would get in a car which my Brother in Law was driving. It is many many years since I went to Blackpool, but thankfully they have not changed anything. I take up my role as bag, coat and valuable-watcher and see my little sister be thrown into the air at 1,000 mph, then see her sent hurtling upside down and finally be soaked to the bone. And she's smiling.

The dodgems is about the scariest ride I will go on. In a deliberate ploy to upset people with no common sense (and women), the accelerator is placed on the left hand side. After 1 minute of the two minute ride, everyone had figured this out and we were driving round. BUMP! BUMP! BUMP! I spot a particularly attractive raven haired goddess and ram her persistently against the wall in a very rugged and manly way. I enjoyed that.

We walk along the sea front to get some food. The wind is currently blowing at about 42 on the Beaufort scale. It is whipping up the sand off the beach and throwing it across the Golden Mile. It takes ten minutes to travel 15m into the wind. We turn around and travel the 15m in 1.36 seconds.

And then back to the coach. The Illuminations are the most wonderful part of Blackpool. I enjoy looking at them. "Wow, look at that its an Squid." I say to anyone who is listening. "Wow and here's another Squid!". There were Angels, Devils, Aliens and The Hamburgular.

However, I missed the "Mouse Running Up the Clock" and the "Dancing Pigs". I had found something else to look at. It has pretty flashing lights too. I am fascinated with the Coach's Sat Nav and watch it intently for the next hour and a half as we return home on a straight Motorway.