… AND GUESS WHAT, IT DIDN'T !!

... yup, it's true. I binned it.

In fairness, it was snowing, I'd drunk a whole bottle of red wine, pretty much, and the Taxi Rank outside the ICC was non-existent, so I thought I could get one outside New Street instead.

No excuse though, I could have made a million and one other decisions, actions, and I'd have been sitting here moaning about having to drag my sorry ass back to work for another year instead of sitting here moaning about NOT being able to get back to work.

How it happened I still don't know. Other than suddenly finding my legs in the air, heading towards the solid concrete ground thinking: "Sh*t, this is going to bloody hurt ...".

And it did.

I felt my right foot almost detach itself from the rest of me immediately on impact, leaving it hanging off, bleeding rather profusely. Thankfully the bottle of Chablis I'd downed earlier was doing a pretty good job masking the immense pain that was waiting to hit me. A security guard from the building opposite, having witnessed my inglorious plunge, dashed over to assist. As did a number of passers-by. I could wiggle my toes, but my immediate thought was "That's buggered up Christmas ...".

At this stage I didn't know I'd NOT broken it, as it turned out this was a dislocation with an accompanying fracture, but lying there, on the floor, waiting for someone of a medical disposition to arrive, all I could think of was how I'd get my cards sent, can I get someone to finish my shopping for me, etc. Everything except my own situation in other words.

The last time I was in an ambulance, I was accompanying my Grandmother to hospital 10 years ago following a funny turn she'd had. The last time I was in hospital as a patient, it was in order for me to exit my mother's birth canal. My phone battery was down, having had no chance to charge it up previously, I remember asking the paramedic in my alcoholic fug if he had much contact with the British Transport Police and if I could call my mother. Except, as a result of the pomage I'd consumed earlier, it came out asking if I could call HIM mother, which caused a good deal of mirth amongst the ambulance crew.

I was annoyed at myself having had a pretty good evening at this point. And upset at myself for having buggered up my ankle, and not only my personal, work, social and comic-con lives, but having done so in the most idiotic way possible. My thoughts turned to writing this very post as I had an oxygen mask attached to my face and a needle shoved into my arm. Upon being lumped into the ambulance itself, I asked the lady paramedic if I was going to end up on Channel 4 being laughed at by some curly-haired millennial TV presenter. She laughed and said no, then radioed that we were on our way.

To Sandwell General Hospital ...

"SANDWELL ?! Hang on, that's bloody MILES away !!" I thought to myself in my best Richard Hammond-type internal voice as Chewie punched it. Why not the QE, or West Heath, or even where I took my Mother after her own infamous spill 5 years ago.

Being taken to Sandwell was like being taken into the heart of the Klingon Empire, not to mention that the anaesthetic effect of the booze was rapidly wearing off and I no one had any idea yet what I'd done to myself. Upon arrival at A&E, I had my most of my trouser leg destroyed and had to borrow one of the the staff's mobile chargers in order to maintain any hope of being able to communicate this monstrous mishap to everyone who I needed to. A Tweet and a Facebook post got the news out there, then came another dose of something, another needle in my other arm, and then another mask on my face which sent me off to Narnia for a quick kip.

On emerging from this mini-coma hoping it was all dream after all, I found myself in a plaster cast, having had my dislocated right foot shoved back into place, then after a few hours in what felt like the USS Enterprise's shuttle bay, I was wheeled off to a ward in what was the NHS equivalent of being told to go and stand in the naughty corner to realise what I'd done.

A young Caribbean nurse came and took my blood pressure and hook me up to a drip, she was friendly and seemed to take a rather reassuring half-maternal, half-sexual interest in me as I relayed to her in my best, Clarkson-esque way what a total prat I'd been. Sleep was out of the question, given I'd just been put under a few minutes earlier.

Having put my phone into siege mode, I sat there watching the snow fall. I was miles away from home, in discomfort, with an injury that was going to keep me off work and require having to use crutches, a zimmer frame, and having to learn to walk again and make getting up or down stairs a bigger challenge than Stephen Hawking trying to play the well-known Takeshi's Castle game of bridgeball.

The sun eventually broke. Messages of support started coming through on social media. My brother in law and my mother were on their way with a much-needed phone charger. I then faced the prospect of having to urinate in what looked like a cardboard slipper, which I somehow accomplished. My temporary mother/girlfriend/nurse calmly came a took it way with some reassurance/light flirting. Then I had the first chance to change into a hospital gown which had the unfortunate side effect of flashing my arse every time I wasn't lying down.

Will and Mum eventually arrived just as I was being taken up to the ward that would be home for the next few days, much to Nursie's dismay and reluctance. Despite my foot being locked into position I had been told that I would be in for surgery later that day for a Swiss army ankle and that I wouldn't be able to eat or drink anything until then. Next to me was a rather odd skinny, bearded chap who clearly was on other substances that were not prescribed by anyone resembling a Doctor and who kept pinching my TARDIS-screen type TV because his was broken. He then spent the entire afternoon staring at a synopsis of "Homes Under The Hammer" and wondering where his psychosis medication was.

It was quiet, calm, and having seen family made it easier, but my thoughts immediately turned to my imminent surgery. The surgeon came, ummed and ahhhed for a bit, poke my toes with a pencil and left, the matron then stuck another needle into my hand and gave me some paperwork stating that if by some reason I came out with my foot on back-to-front, or if they had to chop it off entirely, it was my own fault and I wouldn't sue them. They then came and wheeled me into what was the most yellow room in the world, then stuck yet another mask on my face, sending me back into Narnia for another round.

For some reason I dreamt I was was Thor, and as I came around, my foot was in another cast, my toes looked like they'd been basted in tandoori sauce and as I recognised my father standing over me, I knew exactly what had happened ...

... Birmingham City had lost again at home, to bloody Fulham.

After chomping down an NHS chicken mayo sandwich, I was told I'd suffered an open wound dislocation with an ORAF fracture of the bone that sat on the one my mum had broken herself. I'd had two metal rods and 8 screws put in there, making me the world's most minimal cyborg and setting me up for a lifetime of setting off airport security scanners.

The first night was not good. The Vietnamese chap opposite me kept pinching everyone's drinking water despite being nil by mouth and putting back his own operation as a result. "Geoff", as I'd nicknamed my mildly-psychotic new friend next to me, kept moaning about his meds, and it was now snowing heavily.

Over the next two days, with no possibility of visitors due to the very snow that put me in this mess in the first place, I began contemplating things like when I would walk again, when I'd be back at work, when I'd be able to go to my next Comic-Con. And all the while contemplating how on earth I was gong to be able to handle my next bowel movement without bothering the nurse too much given they were short-staffed thanks to God's dandruff settling. Another wee in another cardboard slipper later and I felt I was going to be permanently constipated as I yummed down the NHS fish and chips I'd been served that night.

It's funny, just how much for granted we take being able to empty our bladders and bowels whenever we like. Having not shat properly for two days solid I could finally take no more and after breakfast and another cocktail of drugs, I gave in and called for the wheelchair with the bottom cut out and, having accidentally flashed my bum and love spuds at another (rather goregous student) nurse, was wheeled into a room where I promptly missed my target. Although it was rather a happier reunion between fresh air and my testicles.

That night a wannabe gangsta was bought in with a police escort boasting how he'd been shot and after chomping his way through the McDonald's his family had bought and using the word 'n***a' every five minutes as he got in touch with his 'crew', I attempted to get some sleep despite the Vietnamese chap deciding this was a good time to demonstrate his ability to out-snore a jumbo jet carrying the Foo Fighters trying to land in a wind tunnel being amplified by Iron Madien's speaker stack system.

The following day, having managed to regain control over my lavatorial habits and washed and shaved for the first time in a while, a slim, blonde lady looking rather like my brother in law's mum arrived with my crutches and a zimmer frame, and after an hour or so hobbling about like an octopus on roller skates and looking for all the world like my own grandfather, I was given my Iron Man / RoboCop leg / moonboot and discharged.

Meanwhile, the Vietnamese chap was still seemingly competing in the World Snoring Championships, 50p was asking for more McDonald's, and a local chap had been brought in with EXACTLY the same injury as me, on the EXACT same foot having done EXACTLY the same thing digging his car out of the snow.

Karma, eh ??

Having finally gotten home, and mastered the art of hopping up and down the stairs, I've been able to see some friends, sent my cards into work, successfully hobbled to and from the cinema and back to see the new Star Wars film, and even been round to my sister's. Christmas and New Year have now come and gone, and now I'm just sitting here, writing this blog, wondering if I'm ever going to be my old self again.

I miss being at work. I miss being at the pub on a Friday night, I miss being able to walk and miss being able to just hop upstairs and downstairs whenever I like to watch football and listen to music. I miss the fresh air, I missed the enforced bonhomie of New Year's Eve, I miss being independent to the degree I was, despite not truly being so, and I miss society as a whole.

I'm bored, lonely, thirsty, and wish to God that I hadn't done this to myself. All I had to do was be patient, just wait where I was, go the other way, stay out and have some fun, stick around for the after-party, have not have drunk so much wine, called a private cab rather than stubbornly go looking for a black cab on my mother's orders.

And now I worry, not about my finances, but both short term and long; my social life, my romantic prospects (yeah, right ...), and my Comic-Con calendar for this year, how much I don't want to rely on other people's goodwill and just how to get back on my own damned two feet and be myself again, all in the face of NHS bureaucracy and my mother's increased nimbyism.

This is my own personal purgatory, for now. And no-one to blame but myself.

Happy f***ing New Year everyone …

THIS ISN'T GOING TO END WELL …

It's the company works do this week, there are few activities quite so vexing as the Office Christmas Party; that obligatory gathering of bosses and subordinates, cronies and rivals, back-stabbers and back-stabbees. Plus a horde of husbands and wives who spend the entire night planning their escape.

But, in all seriousness, there's been a bit of a darth at the pub on a Friday night in recent weeks, and now the comic-con circuit's over for another year it's a chance to have some poncy food, drink like a fish, and all with the approval of the top brass.

I often even make my annual attempt of dancing.

Still, as we all know, there are the usual hazards involved in the office bash. This year for example it's the first time in year I haven't knocked work immediately afterwards so any potential for relying on memory loss for any indiscretions will not be a suitable back-up plan. Also it means less potential opportunities for 'doing a Sherlock' and sneaking out early. It all starts before when trying to pick your best outfit, in my case it's also a partial cosplay, aimed by teaming by Twelfth Doctor outfit with a casual shirt. It basically turns the evening into a cross between 'Time Heist' and '24-hr Party People', only without a sonic screwdriver.

So what if you slept with Rose from book-keeping. That's okay, maybe nobody knows. Maybe they didn't notice you were the last two to leave. Maybe she didn't burst in this morning announcing it to the room.

Throwing a decent party itself isn’t rocket science – New Year's Eve seems to get it better than Christmas itself for some reason - just provide drinks and snacks, assemble an upbeat playlist, have a few activities in your back pocket if people seem into it, ask everyone to dress up a teensy bit fancier than they would normally, et voilà: you have a room full of people enjoying themselves.

It should be simple enough. But that formula tends to fall apart like Birmingham City's back four when it comes to the month of December and your place of work. One December, a friend’s office Christmas lunch was booked at a central London hotel. There was great excitement all morning. Colleagues put on party frocks and snowman jumpers. The occasion promised unlimited prosecco, food and an afternoon off work.

But on arrival she found the equivalent of a Christmas party industrial complex. The banqueting hall was set for hundreds of Christmas lunches for staff parties from many companies. The turkey, sausages and roast potatoes were served from an assembly line, slopped out by bored kitchen staff who had seen it all before, and were about to see it all again.

As she ate her pale lunch, she was struck by how boring the conversation was. So she topped up her glass, then had another. When the meal was over, everyone exchanged Secret Santa gifts. Hers was tat. Then she watched as a colleague discarded her carefully chosen present. She then quit in the new year.

The 1980s Xmas party was premised upon colleagues meeting outside of the workplace, 'letting down their hair' and acting out the fiction that their relationship was founded upon friendship, not economic necessity. An essential part of that ritual was to engage in behaviour that was not permissible in normal office life - starting with public drunkenness, telling truths that could not be uttered elsewhere, misuse of the photocopier, etc etc

Most of us are now aware that work colleagues don't evade HR rules by putting on a paper hat. The rules of normal office life are seen to apply at all times. Colleagues now have more diverse perceptions of what is acceptable. Views about alcohol differ, and any joke can be misinterpreted as aggressive, or demeaning.

Still what's the worst that can happen, eh ??

HATE TO DATE ...

Whilst looking for something on TV to throw my slippers at the other week, (I don't actually WEAR slippers BTW, they are literally just for throwing at the TV at things that get on my nerves, it's a better substitute for a coffee mug or a whisky glass at least anyway, it certainly saves money on television sets) I came across Channel 4's romance simulator programme "First Dates".

My god, what a loathsome programme, and like most of these shows, the emphasis is typically NOT on not so much if any permanent couplings or happy-ever-afters emerge, but on how the woman feels about the misguided imbecile across the table, promptly followed by a polite description about how she 'only wants to remain friends', based purely on the standard of his stomach muscles, and no, I don't mean the ones used to digest the horrible poncey, overpriced food he'd just forked out for in the vain hope of only being rejected half as badly as the last time he tried this massive waste of time.

In the episode I watched, a woman was so unimpressed by her date, who was doing absolutely nothing wrong other than trying to match up to the impossible standard he was being set, whilst being judged solely on how many inches his trousers and wallet packed respectively, that she spent 10 minutes in the toilet and even plotted her escape in such a way I'm surprised Charles Bronson didn't suddenly burrow his way up from underneath the pseudo-vinyl flooring armed with a bunch of gardening tools.

Having re-entered the restaurant for her date, she spent her time telling the poor dopey sod that was losing a day's hard-earned wages in the vain hope of being allowed near her pelvis on a sub-rental basis that would have Blockbuster Video sobbing into their cornflakes, that she was looking for the opposite of him , before eventually being won around and agreeing to meet again.

This got me thinking.

Generally speaking feminists seem to want to encourage women to date and have sex casually from 21-28 ... while they focus on their 'career'. The trouble is that when these women do decide that the grind is too hard and start looking for an out, at 28 they are doing so at exactly the point at which it is perceived that their market value is passing it's peak and heading into terminal decline as the 'biological clock' starts ticking and they need to start dropping sprogs.

Bull.

If men who are 28 were to realise that 28 wasn't a good 'time to buy' as far as women are concerned, the game would be up. Women wouldn't be able to leap off the career ladder in their late 20s and early 30s with the ease that they presently can.

In addition I have always found it fascinating that when an older woman dates a younger man it is celebrated by everyone these days. It's a subgenre of both film and adult entertainment all on it's own, yet when a 46 year old man dates a 21 year old woman, it is still mostly demonised, it's made me think even more consciously about what minimal age of the girl I could potentially engage with is, as I'm knocking on the door of pre-middle age. I even have second thoughts about the age of girls I add to my social media accounts these days.

What I find funny in both of these situations is the fact that nobody seems to question that maybe both people actually like one another, or if the younger girl is manipulating the older man. I hear all the typical shaming that goes along with older men dating younger women. Co-incidentally it happened to someone I know a while back, and it actually sounds she was damn lucky not to have joined the ranks of single parenthood as a result due to his global philandering.

All this flashed through my mind as I read about Hatr, the very latest 'hot new dating app' that launched last week and promises to bond potential lovers over the things that they loathe. Overturning the traditional cheery positives (“Love the cinema, ice skating and anonymous sex behind a bin ?? Meet Maisie, 34, from Bolton … ”), Hatr allows eager singletons to form relationships based on their mutual aversions instead of what actually floats their boat.

Boy, oh, boy, that sounds right up my street. Romance through ranting, dating for the post-Brexit, Trump era, let’s really get that negativity out there, more openly expressed misanthropy in the world might just be what we need. Brendan Alper, the ex-banker who founded the app, says: “What we hate is an important part of who we are, but it’s often swept under the rug.”

Sounds interesting, as this very blog is founded on the principle that I think that rolling up your sleeves and having a damn good rant on everything is a key part of a modern, civilised society. I have always said if there's one thing I know to do, it's how to moan about things I don't like very much.

I actually, and somewhat ironically, hate the principle of online dating itself from a start, seeing as it would be perfectly possible for me to use a profile picture of Ryan Reynolds and tell a load of complete and total lies about myself to the point where anyone logged on to my profile, they'd be gobsmacked if they met me in real life that I'm not a gay 1970's pornstar-cum-astronaut.

But to be able to set up a profile based on the stuff that really grinds your gears and really, REALLY gets up your nose ?? Brilliant. I can now legitimately use my dislike of reality TV, Justin Bieber, Harry Styles, environmentalists, the EU, the Green Party, people who vote for Jeremy Corbyn, people who think Comic-Cons are for nerds, ham hock, horribly overpriced coffee, gym wankers, girls who are obsessed with guys with six-packs, burnt toast, cosplay snobs, Aston Villa Football Club, Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club, internet pornography, Simon Cowell, Jean-Claude Juncker, the E! Channel, late trains, cauliflower cheese, shoe shops and fashionistas to potentially find a romantic partner.

Nothing could be more destigmatising.

And yet, and yet, it fails to escape the fact that is one of the key dangers of the internet; this irresistible hobby of giving everything a verdict. A judgement, a thumbs up or down. One minute you're giggling as you hate 100 concepts in a minute on Reddit, the next you’re giving a hotel no stars on Trip Advisor, roasting a friend’s wedding photos on Facebook, trolling columnists on the Guardian website and voting down all the solo songs from the members of One Dire Erection.

Again, just a typical day for me.

It’s easy for the first thought on anything to be negative. It's something I face at work everyday. It takes a small effort to push through into kindliness. With a five-minute pause, you might wonder whether the lady who forgot to put a syrup shot in your coffee at Starbucks was feeling a bit lonely, or suffering a bereavement you didn’t know about, and choose not to damn her business in public for all eternity, just in case.

I have quite a serious crush at the moment on a seriously pretty barmaid at the pub me and my colleagues go to on a Friday night, not that I'd ever tell her, but also because she can be quite comically bad at what she does (she's a true Penny from The Big Bang Theory in every sense of word), but that doesn't stop you from planning what University your kids are going to go to.

Ironically, that's what stopped me from actually making any further progress with the only girl I ever snogged, at the old pub we used to go to, almost three years to this very day. She's now going out with a Norwegian man-mountain who looks like he eats raw hippos for breakfast and could chop down a tree with his bare hands.

Why ??

Because at the end of the day women as a species are still amongst some of the biggest absolute sheer f***ing hypocrites you'll ever meet. A few years down the line, you’re welcoming your beloved through the door with an exhaustive chorus of everything they’ve found annoying, depressing or loathsome that day, dumped at your feet like so many litres of old bin juice, transforming the evening into one long, grim, joke-free episode of Room 101.

Maybe I should mention that when I set up my Hatr profile …