Recently in “vintage”...

In the North London community centre where my Monday night improvisation workshops are held, there is a poster on the wall (of a room usually used for a childrens' playgroup) that is what Larry David would call "a big bowl of wrong".

For several weeks I've been meaning to take a picture of it before someone else spots what I've spotted and destroys it in the name of all things decent and wholesome; last night was the final session of the term so I made a point of capturing it on my mobile phone.

(NOTE: As an exercise for the reader, write a list of separate ways in which this poster is just plain wrong. If you don't get at least seven, then you're really not trying...)

Here it is in its full glory:

Now here's the thing. Somebody had to put those kids in that position and think it was okay take a photo. I don't know whose idea it was to have one kid standing immediately behind the other whilst grimacing and holding his ears, but if that person is an adult they should be in prison.

Now I appreciate that we can't lay the blame entirely at the photographer's feet. Anyone can have a temporary lapse of judgement.

But someone at the marketing agency had to approve the photo, presumably by selecting it from a number of different photos taken during the same session. Someone had to look at that photo and think to themselves: "Yep, that's the one".

More worryingly, if this photo was the best and most suitable of those on offer, then I'm afraid to imagine what the kids were doing in the other shots.

One boy having a playful "tinkle" in the other's mouth, perhaps? Or one boy crawling around on all fours in a gimp costume while the other boy rode around on his back wearing a cowboy hat and smoking a cigar?

And once someone had, hard though it is to believe, selected this image from its photographic peers, then they or someone else in the same department decided that the best copy to accompany the photo was "Maximum Fun, Maximum Protection".

Without the Nivea brand in the frame, this would look to all the world like a shockingly ill-conceived attempt by Durex to break into the pre-teen market.

To continue: someone senior at Nivea then presumably had to sign off a paper proof of the poster and then someone else at the printers had to agree (albeit implicitly) that the best thing to do with this image of sexually ambiguous, prepubescent roughhousing was to produce several thousand hard copies for wide distribution amongst the nation's schools and playgroups.

I think I may, for the first time in my life, write a letter to the Daily Mail...

The branch of Woolworths on St John's Road near Clapham Junction station is closing down and I confess I have mixed emotions.

On the one hand it's such a familiar sight on the high street that its sudden absence will take a bit of getting used to. But on the other hand, during these difficult times for retail business and the economy in general, is there really a place for any shop that makes it so abundantly clear that it simply can't be arsed?

For instance, the window display often seems to be a work in progress, all boxes and no products. I have also wandered in to find the aisles in disarray and random items of stock scattered all over the floor and thought for a moment that I'd been accidentally permitted access during some annual stock taking, only to realise that it was a perfectly normal trading day.

And one of the last great puzzles left for mankind to solve following the successful mapping of the human genome must surely be to unravel the secret code behind Woolworths' stock selection.

Where else on the high street (or indeed anywhere) would you be able to buy a DVD player, some Pick 'n' Mix, a rubber plant, a multi-function vegetable slicer, a child's coat and a box of nails all under the same roof?

If there is some kind of consistent rationale to guide the decision to either stock or not stock a particular item then I would be very grateful if someone would share it with me. Because as far as I can tell you'd get a more internally consistent product catalogue if you asked a pigeon to choose the inventory by pecking at a long list of options.

Now you may see this 'creative' selection of stock as charming or even useful but I'm afraid I do not. Since Woolworths stocks such a random collection of products you can never be completely sure that the item you're currently seeking is not hidden away somewhere on the shelves. So I've wasted an awful lot of time looking for something which isn't there.

And that's the central problem with Woolies — the unwritten promise is that they could stock almost anything, but the reality is that they probably don't.

For instance, I can say with absolute certainty that The Carphone Warehouse won't sell candles, Boots won't sell Hulk action figures and Dixons won't sell lawn sprinklers. But Woolworths could very easily have all of these for sale in the same aisle. There may even be a special promotion offering a discount if you buy all three together.

If you're wasting so much time looking for products that Woolworths may or may not stock, I hear you say, why not just ask a member of staff to help?

Well, I might just as well ask a dog the best way to cook an artichoke or a newly-born baby for his view on the housing market. Because if there's one thing that Woolworths seems to do well it's to instil a consistent model of customer service in all of its staff, apparently based on the 3Is of ignorance, insolence and indifference.

Only PC World manages to create a more reliably appalling customer experience. Throw a stone into any crowd of people anywhere in the world and you've a better chance of hitting someone who knows about computers than you have in PC World. It is true to say that PC World has managed to raise the general level of computer literacy in this country, but only by removing from the pool people who know absolutely nothing about computers and giving them jobs in its superstores, thus slightly boosting the average ability of those remaining.

One of the keys to a successful retail business is to be able to reliably recreate the same shopping experience from store to store. Franchises like Subway and McDonald's do this particularly well. If I were advising someone setting up a new branch of Woolworths on how to recreate the instantly recognisable Woolworths experience I would say if you can make your customer service feel more like community service and your shop floor look like an inner city boot sale then you're 90% there.

For the last few Christmasses, Woolworths has run a fairly successful television campaign featuring two cheeky characters called Wool and Worth - a sheep and a sheepdog.

I have to confess that Wool and Worth consistently bring a smile to my face (who doesn't like a cheeky puppet) but there's a basic problem with them. They make far too much sense. A sheep paired with a sheepdog? That kind of logic can be found nowhere else in the Woolworths empire.

If the Christmas campaign truly reflected the incongruous spirit of Woolworths, Wool would be a dolphin, Worth would be a cactus, and they'd live in a hot air balloon.

But times move on and I will have to get used to the idea of there being no branch of Woolworths on my local high street. Rumour has it that a Waitrose will be built in its place. If true, this means I will have an ASDA, a Somerfield, a Sainsburys, a Tesco, two (!) M&S and now a Waitrose within five minutes walk of my flat.

I certainly won't be short of choice when it comes to restocking my fridge, but next time I'm in a hurry and I need a cheap toaster, picture hooks, an onion slicer, Buckaroo, cola bottles, A4 dividers, trellis, the new Coldplay album and a mini trampoline, I might find myself a little nostalgic for the big, red-fronted building that used to exist between SuperDrug and McDonalds.

Okay. I'm going to share a couple of fairly random and seemingly unrelated facts about myself, and I need you to keep them both in your head at the same time, otherwise the end won't make much sense.

I know it's a big ask, so if you're reading this first thing in the morning, maybe get a strong coffee down you and then come back to it. It needs to be done in one session.

Okay, here goes...

Fact #1: I Have Four Genuine Airline Seats Stored In My Loft

Fact #2: I Have A Ridiculously Expensive Juicer In My Kitchen

Got them? Airline seats, posh juicer. Airline seats, posh juicer. Okay.

I'll start with the seats...

Since having an idea a couple of years ago for shooting a series of comedy shorts set on a "no frills" airline, I have become mildly obsessed with the challenge of building a small section of an aircraft interior in my spare room.

Realising fairly early on that realistic-looking airline seats were going to be pretty tricky to build from scratch, I lucked out and found a company that was selling a load of them on eBay — a small airline had sent an entire plane's worth of seating to a specialist upholsterer to be reconditioned and had then gone promptly bankrupt.

It cost me £300 for four seats (complete with meal trays) including delivery. I've no idea if this was a rip off or a bargain. The second-hand airline seat market is pretty small and so it's nigh-on impossible to establish a fair price for air-worthy arse furniture.

Just in case you don't believe me, here's a picture of two of the seats before I took them apart and put them in my loft:

Now the basic logic with the aeroplane set idea is that if everything is shot with a sufficiently tight frame then not much of the actual plane interior would need to be visible since the focus would be on the two main characters — adjacent passengers sitting in two of the four seats. Video shot for the web (as this idea would be) tends to use more close-ups anyway because it's likely to be viewed in a small window on a computer screen or on an iPod rather than a 42" plasma TV.

So I decided that if I could make a couple of simple cabin panels, complete with vaguely convincing windows, and then filmed everything using a combination of tight two-shots (with both characters together) and close-ups, then that might well be sufficient to create a convincing (if claustrophobic) illusion of a real plane.

I wasn't too worried about the panel itself as I figured that a big piece of hardboard or MDF bent into a shallow arc would do the job but I frankly had no idea how to make an authentic looking window. In fact the window wasn't so much the problem, it was more the window enclosure, which even on the most basic of planes (yes, I've started taking pictures) is a pleasingly-bevelled affair:

I couldn't help thinking there was some perfect and readily-available substitute out there somewhere if only I could find it. The most promising idea I had was to use the rim of a plastic washing up bowl, but the ones I could find weren't quite the right size or shape.

So for several weeks I became more than usually interested in washing up bowls and it turns out that there's far less variety than you might imagine.

I was getting close to giving up on the whole idea, when I had a Eureka! moment in the most inauspicious of places...

(Okay, taking my lead from literary giant Dan Brown, I will attempt to artificially create tension by alternating between two narrative threads. So now to the juicer...)

A few years ago whilst on a health kick I bought myself a juicer. It wasn't super cheap but then it wasn't super expensive either. It had a picture of Anthony Worrell Thomson on the box, but I bought it anyway.

Now this juicer stood apart from the dozens of other shiny gadgets I've bought in my life in that I actually carried on using it after the first week or so. Now I'm not saying the novelty didn't wear off a little tiny bit but even months later I was still using it on a fairly regular basis.

This particular juicer was what is known as a centrifugal juicer, which basically means it has a high velocity spinning grater/mesh combination that grinds the fruit (or vegetable) up and then forces the juice out of the pulp through the tiny holes in the mesh using centrifugal force (which I recall my physics teacher telling me doesn't actually exist, it's the opposite force — centripetal — which is real...)

Anyway, this type of juicer has two major drawbacks.

Firstly, at full pelt, the noise level is roughly equivalent to one of those rotary sanders that middle class people use to trash the pine floors in their first property.

And secondly, it's a complete bastard to clean. I mean a real pain in the arse. In fact, by the time you've cleaned the mesh with the (miniscule) supplied brush and rinsed the 87 other parts you're thirsty all over again and have to juice some more fruit to stop yourself from dehydrating.

Despite these problems, I got a couple of years of happy juicing out of it, although I did have to spend around £1200 on a floating floor to help soundproof my kitchen, thus protecting my downstairs neighbour from the onslaught of juice-related decibels.

I'd been meaning to replace the juicer for ages and a few months ago I finally got around to doing some research and discovered that the accepted wisdom on the topic of juicers was that masticating juicers are much better than centrifugal ones.

As you might expect, a masticating juicer gently 'chews' the fruit and vegetables to extract the juice rather than shredding the crap out of it and then squeezing the resulting pulp like its centrifugal cousin. Think of the former as a gently co-operative camel or some such ruminant, while the latter is more like throwing carrots at a lawnmower and hoping to catch some of the generated spray in your mouth.

Masticating juicers are supposed to produce more juice, be quieter in operation and be easier to clean. They're also about three times the price of the centrifugal ones.

In the end I went for the Oscar Vitalmax in all of its chrome-plated splendour:

I want to believe that this glorious machine was invented by someone actually called Oscar Vitalmax, but I fear that the truth will only disappoint me.

Now the key component of the Vitalmax juicer, is its three-stage auger, of which more in a minute.

But for the moment, let's return to the homemade aircraft cabin...

You might recall that I'd been scouring my world for some objet trouvé to play the part of a cabin window in my aircraft set, having been disappointed by the selection of washing up bowls available.

The answer wasn't so much under my nose, as under my arse. On one particularly inspired visit to the smallest room, I realised that the internal rim of a toilet seat is really rather close to the desired contours of an aircraft window, and being wooden (well, my toilet seat is wooden) it could be cut to a more convenient shape and even sanded if necessary.

Now it is true that the hole in your average toilet seat is somewhat egg-shaped, rather than a true ellipse, but that's not a big deal. If one felt like being really anal (for once, no pun intended) about the whole thing one could cut two seats in half, and glue opposite halves together (i.e. bottom of 'egg' to other bottom of egg) and create something more symmetrical.

So I bought a cheap pine toilet seat from B&Q and 'trimmed' off the excess wood with a hand saw, leaving the sought-after contoured internal rim with a minimum of wood surround:

Having satisfied myself that the basic toilet seat theory was sound, and being somewhat of a butterfly in the concentration department, I left this work-in-progress in my spare room and moved on to other things.

That's all very well, you're thinking, but what about the juicer, and what the hell is an auger?

I'm glad you asked. According to Wikipedia, the answer to the second question is:

An auger is a device for moving material or liquid by means of a rotating helical flighting.

(Which does rather beg the follow-up question "What's on earth's a flighting?", but we'll ignore that one for the moment...)

In the case of the Oscar Vitalmax, the auger is about six inches long and looks like this:

That's fine. Have a good snigger. I know I did when I got it out of the box for the first time. No, no, you carry on. Fill your boots.

Fully composed now? Good. Now I'm not going to pretend that this isn't an inherently amusing-looking object. But after several months of using the juicer and removing this part to clean pulp off it with the supplied brush, not only did it cease to become funny, but I basically forgot that it had ever been funny. It became in my mind a perfectly normal, everyday object to have kicking around in the kitchen, or more specifically, lying in the kitchen sink.

If you're sensing an end to this story, then your instincts would be right, because finally this is where my two facts come together in the form of a life lesson learned the hard way. I concede that it's highly unlikely that anyone is going to find themselves in the same situation as me, but at the risk of total irrelevance please let me offer you the following advice...

Should you ever decide to invite a member of the opposite sex back to your flat for the first time, please remember to remove the recently-washed Oscar Vitalmax masticating auger from the kitchen sink, and close the door to your makeshift toilet seat workshop. Otherwise, based on my own experience, you might find that they very quickly make an excuse to leave before you have an opportunity to explain the presence of either.

Because however much I would like to believe that an open-minded, modern woman could set eyes on these obviously unconnected items, smile knowingly to herself, and think:

"Here's a guy who's health conscious, is practical around the house, and is actively engaged in interesting (if slightly quirky) creative projects...",

it's unfortunately also possible that she might instead look upon the same items with significant horror and think:

"Here's a freak who so brutally and frequently violates himself with a custom-made Bakerlite dildo that he can no longer use the toilet without a specially-adapted seat."

If just one person is spared the same fate as me, then this entry will have been worthwhile...

This has been a public information message from Man Writes Blog.

Firstly, I feel I should apologise for the lack of activity on Man Writes Blog over the last week or so. I confess I've been suffering a little from blogger's block and it's been lack of inspiration rather than lack of desire that has left MWB looking a little neglected.

However, I was listening to the Film Weekly podcast a couple of days ago and Jason Solomons was interviewing Garth Jennings (writer/director of Son of Rambow) in his floating studio housed on a barge in North London, and it reminded me of an old (but true — honestly) story that might serve as a useful stopgap until normal blogging service returns.

I hope you don't mind. Try to think of it as the blogging equivalent of when on telly they sometimes have to show a favourite episode of a sitcom in place of a scheduled programme, usually because something nasty has happened in the news that renders the planned programme tasteless or at least unsympathetic.

Except, in this case, what I'm replacing 'normal' programming with is, in itself, pretty tasteless and unsympathetic.

But anyway, here it is, The Barge Story. I hope you like it. It genuinely happened. I promise.

The Barge Story

A number of years ago I was invited, at rather short notice, to spend a weekend on a barge for the stag 'do' of an old school friend. Although I'd been reasonably close friends with the stag and his nominated best man during sixth form, we'd only had very occasional contact since leaving school and to be honest I was surprised and rather flattered to have been invited.

At school these particular friends had been fairly heavily involved with the church and in fact as it turned out most of the other members of the stag party had some kind of church connection; as a card-carrying heathen I felt a little bit on the periphery, but did my best to fit in.

We picked up the barge on the Saturday morning, received some very basic instructions about canal etiquette and the handling characteristics of the vessel, and were soon meandering down the Grand Union Canal stopping at various pubs on the way and having a perfectly nice time and enjoying unseasonably good weather.

It wasn't exactly the wildest stag party I'd been part of, but they were a nice bunch, and it was undeniably pleasant cruising down the canal in the glorious sunshine.

We stopped for a boozy lunch at a lovely canal-side pub and by mid-afternoon we were back on the move and the mood was decidedly relaxed. A few of the guys were down below sleeping off their lunch, I was at the back of the barge watching the world go by and the rest of the gang were at the front sunbathing.

Despite enjoying myself I still felt conscious of being the outsider. Although I'd been chatting perfectly happily with some of the rest of the group, there wasn't anyone I'd particularly gelled with and it seemed selfish and not a little cowardly to monopolise my two school friends.

There had been a slightly awkward moment early on where I was asked which church I went to and I tried to make a polite, respectful case for my conscientious atheism but I sensed that it hadn't done anything to further my integration with the group.

It had also come up in conversation that I'd 'done a bit of comedy' at university but so far my attempts at humour had fell on at least partially deaf ears so I was starting to feel the pressure in that department too.

While I was gazing over the canal pondering all of this, I spotted a dead rabbit floating near the edge of the water, and so driven by some latent schoolboy instinct I grabbed the barge pole and managed to fish it out of the water.

I glanced towards the front of the boat and soon realised that no-one had noticed me retrieving this rather macabre prize from the canal.

And then it occurred to me that this could be an ideal opportunity to liven up what had so far been a fairly pedestrian stag do and simultaneously demonstrate to everyone that I was in fact a comedy genius.

So I edged very carefully along the running board at the side of the barge, still holding the barge pole with its soggy payload draped over the end.

When I was within a few feet of the front of the boat I shouted "Incoming!" and lobbed the waterlogged corpse in a high, soggy arc onto the deck where the others were sunbathing.

Far from the exhilaration of a well-executed stunt, I soon felt a sickening, sinking sensation when I realised, at almost exactly the same moment as everyone else, that I'd just thrown, with no small fanfare, a dead puppy on the deck of the barge.

Not a rabbit. A puppy. It was unmistakably canine. In fact, it was difficult to comprehend that I'd ever thought it was a rabbit in the first place.

Never has the mood of a group shifted so quickly. "You sick, sick fucker!" said one of the stags in disgust and it was clear that he'd accurately represented the sentiments of the others. My protestations that I had mistaken it for a rabbit were met with not unreasonable scepticism, and I could tell from the look on everyone's faces that they all just thought I was a sick, Godless, puppy-hating bastard.

The commotion had woken the guys down below and they came up on deck demanding to know what was going on and I then had the indignity of standing by while my crimes were explained in full, with multiple references to Exhibit A, which was still lying, crumpled and sodden, on the deck.

The puppy was a very prominent reminder of my sins and so I very sheepishly tried to put it back into the canal. Unfortunately, while scooping a soft, floating object out of deep water with a pole is relatively simple, lifting such an object off a flat surface with the same pole it not. And so for several seconds I achieved the astounding feat of making the situation even less dignified by pushing the puppy around the deck like some horrific animal mop.

Then one of the guys pushed me out of the way, wrapped the pathetic-looking corpse in his towel and lowered it gently and respectfully into the water, perfectly defining the circle of decent and normal behaviour and leaving me firmly on the outside.

The final nail in the coffin of my self-esteem was when I overheard one of the stags ask the best man why on earth I'd been invited in the first place, only to learn that it was because one of the original members had dropped out and they had to find a last minute replacement to pay his share of the barge hire.

Suffice to say I was entirely shunned for the rest of the weekend and I never spoke to any of these people again.

But on the plus side, several years later I did win some gig tickets on Zoe Ball's XFM radio show when she asked listeners to contact her with stories of practical jokes gone horribly wrong. When I sent in the barge story, they closed the competition 15 minutes early...