I’m trying to remember the last time I cried. Coincidentally, it was also the last time I masturbated. To pinpoint it more precisely, it was this evening when The One Show did a feature on breast cancer. A British man hadn’t won Wimbledon for seventy-seven years but we have to remember that’s only because it was seventy-six years ago that people from other countries started playing tennis. It can’t be easy for English people to know that Wimbledon has been won by the first Scotsman ever to pick up a tennis racket. Gerard Butler was there, smiling like somebody had deleted every film he’s made since 300 from his IMDb profile. Even Victoria Beckham was smiling, as if she’d just broken out of Arkham Asylum and was about to kill Robin. Having a Scottish tennis champion has certainly given us something big to live up to; we only had the discovery of penicillin and the invention of TV till now. Andy’s been awarded the Freedom of Stirling. That’s like on your eighteenth birthday finding out your parents have had a key cut especially for you that opens the bin cupboard. People are calling for him to be knighted because he’s done something no other Brit has done for the past seventy-six years. But that could set a precedent. They’d have to knight the next person who was funny on Radio 1 and the next person to finger Susan Boyle. Andy is set to earn £100 million. If I were in his position I’d buy up every tennis ball in the world, incinerate them and then enjoy my money safe in the knowledge that I’d never have to play that fucking stupid game ever again. For the first few years I’d be celebrating so hard that I’d turn up for every match dressed as a pirate and at the end of every set I’d lay my knob out on the baseline and demand Hawkeye took a picture. Did you watch the Virgin London Marathon? Anyone who’s got Virgin broadband or used their trains will know that a marathon is the quickest way of reaching someone twenty-six miles away. How about those elite runners from Kenya? Their time was a little slower than usual as they were repeatedly stopped and searched by the Metropolitan Police. It’s weird to see people running through the streets of London without plasmas. I grew up in a place where if you saw a guy running in a Mickey Mouse costume he was a paedophile. We were sponsoring him to buy a vibrator. Still, I think my favourite sports story of the year was that Sharran Alexander, the thirty-two-stone, six-foot mum from West London, is the entire British sumo wrestling team by herself. She’s hoping to fight in Japan this month but it depends on funding – and whether they’ve got biscuits over there. She says there’s not much that sportswomen of her size can do – it’s pretty much just sumo and allowing pole vaulters to land on you. She’s got to be the only top sports star who uses Stacey Soloman as their nutritionist. Apparently, the rest of the sumo team quit but brave Sharran has made sure they haven’t been missed, and the food budget remains as high as ever. I’d love to see her Rocky -style training montage – ‘Eye of the Tiger’ ringing out and sweat pouring down her face as she picks up her fourteenth Cherry Bakewell.
7 TV The best TV show ever would be a programme where really fat people were made to live in a house with a really thin door, and the winner would be whoever got thin enough to get out first. And all the furniture was made of cake. But we can’t even have that because it wouldn’t be quite deadening enough. I find it incredibly odd that TV, a terrible succession of images of ever-increasing meanness and bankruptcy, holds such a fascinating appeal for people. Even those like me, who believe they reject it, watch and tweet about it. Maybe we kid ourselves that we’re talking about the death of culture or something. Really, we’re just sprinkling the salt that helps people shovel this shit into themselves. Sometimes, when I found myself on TV