In terms of my work situation with the Doofus, I may have been dealing with it in the wrong way. Instead of getting frustrated about things and dreaming up scenarios in which she’s congealed in a huge vat of semi-skimmed milk that’s gone off, I should be making the best of it.

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have Parl Pilkington. I have the Doofus.

Take the following example. It’s fair to say that il Doofy doesn’t exactly have her finger on the pulse. Five minutes ago she suddenly announced to the only person in the office she regularly converses with that:

"I saw Star Trek for the first time at the weekend. I watched one episode. It’s really good".

After my colleague pointed out there have been umpteen Star Trek films and spin offs she commented, without a trace of irony, and as if Captain Kirk’s adventures weren’t fiction that :

"Wow. It’s very exciting isn’t it; going into the galaxy".

But I tell you what: her excitement at seeing Star Trek will be nothing compared to when she sees Star Wars in about ten years time.

She then returned to her chair, which it now takes about two minutes for her to be seated in after standing, due to the fixation with posture she’s developed over the last two weeks (she’s even going round the office looking at other people’s posture and taking notes).

The podcast’ll be available in the iTunes store in time for Christmas.

The practice of Googling your own or someone else’s name is pretty common amongst bored office workers, and something I’ve indulged in from time-to-time. Believe me, there’s no better feeling than typing in the name of an ex and finding out they haven’t become the CEO of BP in the few years since your break-up.

However, a former manager of mine had clearly done this over the last week and probably wished he’d hadn’t, Having typed I__ Sl__a into Google he came across a blog entry of mine which described him in particularly unflattering terms, although as it fell within my top ten worst jobs blog entries then the title should have given him fair warning.

I can’t decide on what would have been the most depressing part for him: Googling his name and reading a description that states he looks like Jeffrey Archer (he so does) and labelling him a “self-deluding tosser”, or that his profile is so low in the world that a mention on my blog comes up third in the search results.

Anyhow, I got an email from the government the good folks at BCUK saying the fat, balding Archer lookalike had been in touch and to remove his name from the blog. I would have thought his profile is low enough without this, and hasn’t he heard there’s no such thing as bad publicity? And I seem to recall apologising to anyone I've ever offended in my thirty years on Earth at the start of the week. Clearly not enough for some fat, balding fucks out there.

But this incident got me thinking about other people I’ve named on the blog and what I’ve said about them, and it occurred to me I’d made the scandalous allegation that Richard Madeley might, in sexual terms, be into adult babyism.

All I can say is that there'll be no blog amendments in respect to this and I’m quite prepared to be dragged through the courts by Madeley’s lawyers while the lanky twat declares his sexual life is entirely within normal parameters (if it is then he must have stopped shagging Judy).

Forget the K-Fed and Britney shag tape: what we really what to see is Madeley in diapers while Judy gets the bottle ready, not that he’s got a chance of getting anywhere near it…

A couple of evenings ago I watched Donal MacIntyre’s new series on C5, which examines the day-to-day business of ‘notorious criminals’. The first in the series was on Geordie thug Paddy Conroy, a man with serious anger management issues. Conroy was sentenced to eleven years for his part in the kidnapping and torture of a fellow crim who was alleged to have desecrated the Conroy plot in the local cemetery. The unfortunate fellow had his teeth removed with a pair of pliers, although Conroy denied the dental work was his own, only admitting to “dropping off” the patient at the spot where he just happened to have the emergency dental work performed. However, Conroy rather undermined his case by attacking a prosecuting lawyer in court and being dragged out by four screws, and was found guilty. Towards the end of the show Conroy went off on a terrifying four-minute rant against his perceived enemies, which culminated in him shouting “put that in ya fookin’ documentary!” An angry, angry man…

However, now and again there’s nothing more therapeutic than a bloody good shout at someone who deserves it, and there’s no-one more deserving in my life than the Spanish guy who lives in the flat beneath me. M’laddo DJs in his spare time and was practicing today. On my day off. Which I’d informed him, yesterday, today was. When I was asking him to turn his music down.

I hadn’t gone down with the intent of bawling him out, but had taken out my nosestud before knocking on his door, so at least part of me was ready for an escalation. It must have gone on for about ten minutes, and I noted there was someone else in the flat who claims not to speak English. However, just like when you’re abroad, say it loud enough and eventually they’ll understand.

I also discovered something beneficial about having a degree in psychology. At one point he said “I never had these problems when I was in a squat for two years (Me: “You’re not living in a fookin’ squat now though, are you!”). You did psychology: maybe you should look into your character and wonder why you keep complaining”. If there was blue touch paper around, it was most certainly lit at that point, as my own inner Paddy Conroy emerged through a tirade which went something like “yes, I have a fookin’ psychology degree, so excuse me if I don’t take your fookin’ amateur analysis seriously. Have you noticed I tend to knock on your door whenever you play loud music? Do you think the music might be the fookin’ trigger?”

I think that was my way of arguing that environmental factors were the key influence rather than genetics.

Anyhow, I now have a very peaceful flat and a sense of serenity within me. And the owners of the house are going to bollock him tomorrow.

Put that in ya fookin’ DJ set!

Proof I work with a doofus.

Colleague 1: "Oh, Robert Altman has died:"
Doofus: "Oh no!"
Colleague 1: "Yeah, he was 81."
Doofus: "Oh (in tone to indicate it's no big deal and a wonder he's not already dead). I thought he was 47."
TKK: (Shakes head, but then brightens up) "Maybe they'll release Nashville on DVD now!"

I, TKK, would hereby like to apologise to every person I’ve offended during my lifetime.

Mum and dad: I’m really sorry for the occasions on family holidays when I might well have been a bit brattish and dad, I’m sorry that I gave you the V sign behind your back when you wouldn’t let me go to a gig when I was sixteen (although, mum, having seen me execute this act of paternal disrespect you could have kept it to yourself rather than telling him).

To all my ex-girlfriends and lovers: I’m sorry for the times my performance was less than satisfactory in bed, and the times I got pissed off when you wouldn’t sleep with me. I’m sorry about the times I ended relationships in casual circumstances and the times I refused to let relationships go. K: I know I should have gone to your Eurovision party in 1999, even though I thought it was a bit naff, although how was I to know hardly anyone would turn up it and it made you feel unwanted. And R, I’m really sorry for that Saturday morning when I called you a “stupid fucking uneducated bitch”, but you had locked me out the house after I’d done the shopping that morning, and how was I to know you were behind the door and about it to open it and had only taken so long because you were in the shower.

And to friends, past and present, I’m sorry I always refused to lend you my DVDs, asked for petrol money when driving you around the length and breadth and Wales (when being in your company was payment enough), and hid library books in your bag in college so the alarm would go off and you’d look stupid. To NGW: I'm sorry at a party I fed back to you the comments a girl had made about your shagging technique. I should have kept to myself the line about how you "got on top and just wiggled about for two minutes". And to IDV: I’m sorry for shagging A. on your beloved rug and pretending to be out on a couple of occasions when you called round unannounced (but I was in bed with R on one occasion so it couldn’t be helped).

To the girl I stole cigarettes from and then whose lap I poured a pint of beer into during a heroic drinking session in Pop in Tottenham Court Road, I apologise. It must have been so uncomfortable going home on the night bus that night.

And Abilene: I'm sorry that I've been hinting I might take you for a slap-up meal, when there's more chance of me taking Mother Theresa out to dinner.

Why all the apologies? I can only assume that my karma account must be completely overdrawn due to my lifetime of ill deeds, and that's why I've been landed with sitting next to the most annoying fuckwit possible. Her being away on leave last week made me appreciate how fucking annoying she is.

My colleague’s latest thing is being totally obsessive about her posture and the way she sits in her chair. As a consequence of this, she now lowers herself into her seat like an pensioner getting into a mildly hot bath the first time after a scalding incident. I could probably slide the new Wembley under her backside by the time her butt makes contact with the chair and she stops gripping the handles. Watching someone go through this routine 30+ times a time is making me lose the will to live. For fuck’s sake! just sit the fuck down!

What else can I write? I don’t have the right…

I’m sure I can’t be the only one who’s been in a supermarket and seen a pensioner indulge in an anxious act of shoplifting (normally own-brand cat food), sighed deeply at the desperate state they must be in, then alerted the closest security guard and had the law-breaking old bag frogmarched off to the manager’s office.

However, even my heart of stone would allow for the odd exception, such as the two pensioners caught nicking from a student’s bag by CCTV at Sunderland railway station.

But rather like the council tax dodging old dears who keep evading their custodial sentences by the last minute actions of anonymous donors, I wouldn’t expect these septuagenarian Thelma and Louises to be sewing mailbags any time soon. The police description is as follows:

"Both were wearing knee-length skirts, white shirts or blouses and carrying shoulder bags. Both are described as having grey hair”.

Well I suppose it at least eliminates from their enquiries any OAP with a blue rinse.

Actually this isn’t a dilemma at all as I know exactly what I’m going to do, and is in fact a sneaky way of seeing exactly how ethical (or not) some of you are. So here’s the ‘dilemma’:

I ordered something from Amazon which didn’t turn up. I contacted them and after much grovelling they agreed to re-send the item. However, the original item (after a fortnight) arrived in the post this morning. Do I:

a) Return the duplicate item to Amazon

or

b) Flog it on eBay

A few months ago, while blog-surfing in work, I stumbled across an entry that was easily the funniest thing I’ve read on BCUK. The post contained the words "Jamie Oliver" and "cunt" in close proximity and ended, as it began, with the word "bastard". The individual behind the blog was of course the wank-artist formerly known as Sociopath74/Quintonpath/Shoehorn aka Mr Owen Wilson, currently residing in the ‘where the fuck is he now?’ file.

Frankly, I miss the fucker and his pulpit profanity, almost like Jerry Springer the Opera condensed into blog form.

My particular favourite were the blog entries where he’d lose his train of thought and end with something along the lines of "where am I going with this? Fucked if I know".

It takes sheer genius to cough to not knowing where your train of thought is going and end it thus.

But I digress.

The repeated deletions of his blog generally meant there’d be a break for a few weeks, before he returned having assumed a new identity. Waiting for him to return from his AWOL periods was like wondering who the next Dr Who was going to be.

A born showman.

But I digress once more.

His last deletion was quite some time ago, and not under the best of circumstances.

But if you’re out there fella, give us a sign.

Hmm. Where am I going with this?

Fucked if I know.

Alec Weston, 63, died yesterday after being knocked down by a bus while on his way to a BCUK blogmeet. Weston’s attention was diverted by a fan shouting "are you the Alec Weston?", and failed to see the No. 19 bus that fatally injured him. The incident was particularly tragic as Weston had only recently emerged from a self-imposed hermitic lifestyle, thanks to the favourable response to his debut novella and erotic thriller, The Story of V. Weston was only able to publish this slim novella in his lifetime, mainly due to the multiple rewrites of the sex scenes demanded by his publisher, and his recurrent writer’s block, with him often taking six weeks to complete a paragraph.

Born in England in 1943, Weston suffered the traumatic early experience of being the subject of a custody battle between his parents at the age of six. His mother lost the court case, and was forced to bring up Alec. In a further cruel irony that reportedly made Dr Ian Paisley chuckle, the court determined that the devout Catholic Mrs Weston should raise her son as a Protestant.

Radicalised in the early 1950s, Weston’s political coming of age took place during the Suez Conflict when, at only thirteen, he rejected the prevailing Establishment line that Nasser was the new Hitler, and opposed Eden’s attempts to prevent Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. This hostility to British Imperialism would be less of an issue for Weston when he later worked for the BBC on a documentary on the Singaporean experience of the British Empire.

Weston’s back story reflected the conflicted sexuality evident in The Story of V. After a brief flirtation with homosexuality at boarding school he became, in his own words, "vengefully straight", and these episodes would be filtered through his thinly autobiographical novella.

Married at 22, he met his first wife during their Oxbridge days. The marriage would last only five years, with Weston accusing her of preventing him from the "chance to live my twenties to the full", and inspiring his urge to look "for girls ever more younger than me to live my twenties through". This desire would reach its ultimate fulfilment in his relationship with Vanessa, a woman forty years his junior, and the inspiration for his novella, The Story of V.

Weston first made contact with Vanessa via an escort agency, and was dismayed to find she continued to let the meter run as their relationship passed from professional to the personal, with the final fee close to seven-figures. However, the experience would provide Weston with the impetus to complete his novella based on the experiences of a Chandler-esque anti-hero with a money grabbing whore.

On publication, The Story of V received early recognition, including the Literary Review bad sex award for the following extract:

What turns me on most - even more than shapely jean clad buttocks - is turning on a woman. If she gets turned on by me - then I get turned on. Big time. Her excitement fuels mine, and when I come I can't stop myself screaming...

The Weston family tradition of journal writing was continued in Alec’s Too Much to Declare online journal. Weston’s blog was marked by his gratuitous use of French, frequent complaints about BCUK administrators failing to update the top tags screen, and the phantom page views which sometimes gave him 32,245 hits a day, but still failed to secure him a place in the BCUK Top 20 blogs list. Weston was also the author of the short-lived and controversial Not in Leeds blog, a reaction to his perceived exclusion from the inaugural BCUK blogmeet. It was unfortunate that Weston’s subsequent attempt to attend the next blogmeet would result in his untimely demise.

Weston’s publisher has recently announced that an anthology of his online journal, No More to Declare, will be released in the spring.

Weston is survived by his mother and, of course, Vanessa.

a) Bruce Forsyth

b) Tony Bennett

c) Des O'Connor

I suspect not. In fact I've got money on Des lasting longer than Countdown.

Don't try and convince me otherwise. You can run from your past, but you can't hide. Behold:

The jesting knave Russell Brand

A defrocked Timothy Claypole

Uncanny!

What is it with the ubiquity of Russell Brand? Wherever I go people seem to be talking about him. Granted, they're either calling him a twat or a wanker, but I’ve never seen a figure that united the British public in this way since Hitler.

Due to the PR for Amnesty International’s recent Secret Policeman's Ball I’ve had to endure publicity shots of the hairy cornflake on the tube most mornings, but I can’t think of a more contradictory approach than having a slogan of ‘Protect the human’ and a picture of Russell Brand underneath it.

If only the likes of Brand and Richard E Grant (REG) were an endangered species...

As someone who collected almost every original Star Wars figure as a kid, and then had his mother give these collectors’ items away at some point in his teenage years (and guaranteeing a shit Christmas and birthday present for the rest of her life), I can testify to the sheer life-changing power of the Force. And being skint.

The release of Star Wars also had a huge impact on the finances of director George Lucas, who went from being a renowned moviebrat film maker to a celebrated merchandiser of Lego.

Lucas, unlike my mother, was farsighted enough not to underestimate the power of the Force Star Wars merchandising empire and, as a consequence, is absolutely fuckin’ minted.

Now you’d think a billionaire might want to share some of his wealth with the people who helped create his galactic Lego empire, but apparently not. Lucas is preparing legal action against Andrew Ainsworth, who designed many costumes for the original Star Wars, including the stormtrooper outfit.

To further illustrate the British influence on the Star Wars iconography, I can today reveal that Judy Finnegan was the original model for the stormtrooper look. Consider the evidence:

A stormtrooper

Judy and friend

Uncanny!

Not long ago there was an online petition going round, which for some reason was campaigning to try and save notorious London shithole the Astoria, due to be flattened for building work at Tottenham Court Road on the proposed Crossrail link. Besides the unmerited nostalgia that change invokes in some people, part of the whine was about how there are supposedly no decent small venues for bands to gig at, which made me wonder how many gigs these people actually go to. Last night I went to a gig at the newly refurbished Roundhouse at Chalk Farm, which they’ve done a superb job on. Much like the renovated Camden Palace (now re-named Koko), here is another excellent London venue perfect for small to medium sized bands to play at.

I remember hearing similar sentiments re the closure of ‘historic’ (or, as would be more accurate, outdated shithole) venues when the old Marquee club was shut in 1996 yet, as will happen when the Astoria is knocked down, the times won’t be a changin’. I know some people don’t consider a gig a gig unless they leave with trenchfoot, have been hit on the head by a couple of bottles of piss and used toilets that even the flies have to queue for, but they can bugger off and lay in front of the bulldozers that’ll demolish the Astoria. What the hell is wrong with being in a gig at a modern venue with quality acoustics, decent seating/standing, a bar that doesn’t resemble an operating theatre and toilets that don’t remind you of a Verdun trench in 1917?

So today I’m starting my own petition in support of the Astoria being detonated, whether or not Crossrail goes ahead. Maybe if we’re lucky we’ll get to wield a few sledgehammers ourselves, although despite my keenness to trash the place I’ll most definitely be leaving the toilet demolition work to the experts...

Walking home at the newly dark time of 5pm last night made we wonder if Halloween is getting just a little bit too professional. Five kids were running up the adjacent street next to mine in Scream masks, scaring the shit out of me passers-by, and attempting to trick or treat people on the street as well the affluent households of Finsbury Park.

Fuck these £80 Halloween fines. I’m of the opinion that there needs to be a legal age limit for trick or treatin’, just like there is for sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. Surely at fourteen you’re a bit old for knockin’ on people’s door and asking for sweets; at that age you should be movin’ on to breakin’ in through the back window before pissing on the Dude’s rug and making off with his DVD player.

Seeing a group of eight-year olds in home-made and, frankly, pathetic costumes is quaint and harmless. Having a six foot teen in a Scream mask shouting “Rrroar Trick or fuggin’ treat! Rorrrrrrr!” is a recipe for coronary heart disease.

At 30, I’m already brickin’ it for what Halloween is going to be like when I’m a pensioner. I foresee kids going around with zombie replicas following them around and turning N4 into Dawn of the fuckin’ Dead for the evening.

So rather than risk zombies taking over the streets of London, let’s keep Halloween for the under tens in their amateur costumes. You know it makes sense.