After enjoying the denouement of Great Expectations, if slightly annoyed by Dickens' love of coincidence - (SPOILER ALERT) Magwitch is Estella's dad? Oh fuck off - I wondered how long it would be before someone did a YouTube parody called "Moves Like Jaggers" in which the Maroon 5 song was intercut with clips of David Suchet's portrayal of the slightly sinister and mysterious lawyer. He doesn't move all that much or that unusually which would make it doubly funny. In fact he's still quite a lot of the time. That's even funnier.
I would create this myself, but the idea of uploading an existing video to YouTube is beyond my technical abilities, let alone somehow downloading a BBC programme, editing it and putting music over the top of it so it's all in time. But I am sure there are nerds out there with the ability to make this dream come true. Go ahead with my blessing. You can even pretend it was your idea. It takes a comedy genius to spot the similarity between two things in current cultural vogue.
And after coming up with such an ephemeral comedic conceit I took the rest of the day off. I had planned to get some work done in this little perineum betwixt the scrotum of Christmas and the arsehole of New Year, but have been feeling a bit under the weather and then making things worse by getting a bit drunk (December 2011 has seen a real return to drinking form, but New Year shall put an end to that kind of shenanigans) and I've achieved nothing.
We watched more Community and then DVDs of Wall-E and Thor (an accidental Lovefilm contrived double bill with some similar themes approached from different but equally bizarre angles). That was quite a day of sloth.
To add to our laziness we had even done a big shopping order from Sainsburys.co.uk. We've used this service a few times now and it's generally quite good - it saves time and effort, but you are slightly at the mercy of the choices of the person doing the shopping for you. Will they choose the best vegetables and check for the latest sell by date? Or will they be more prone to do the opposite? They are likely to think of the interests of the supermarket above those of the consumer and yet if they do so they might have less consumers. It's a delicate balance. I had purchased some Actimel on special offer (and not sure why I even buy this stuff as I am sure it does no good, but a little yoghurty drink in the morning is a delight, even if, like me, you don't particularly like yoghurt any more than the next man). I had ended up getting two packs of 12 Actimel yoghurts. My girlfriend drinks them too, so that is a supply for a little more than three weeks. So I was annoyed to get this quantity of useless yoghurt drinks and find that the use by date was the 2nd of January. I had been given 3 days to consume 24 pots of yoghurt that is meant to help balance my stomach bacteria in some way, even though stomachs have done pretty well with that task for all but the last ten years of human history. This is the downfall of internet grocery shopping. Do I now have to travel to Chiswick to get my Actimels replaced. Does the time taken to do that justify the cost of the yoghurts? What kind of a man have I become that I not only drink Actimels but can't be bothered to go the supermarket myself? Did I learn nothing from Wall-E? I certainly learned nothing from Thor, except the provenance of a recent South Park episode that I had seen without fully understanding.
I emailed Sainsburys about my Actimel. It seemed stupidly petty. They haven't replied and now I am in an Actimel based purgatory where I can't drink any of the Actimels in case they want them back in order to furnish me with new ones. But if they don't give me new ones I will be wasting time in the 3 day window of Actimel drinking that is open to me (I might stretch it to 5 days as I like to live dangerously). What shall I do? What will become of me? Has anyone ever had a more 21st Century, first world, middle class dilemma than this?
