Me, Myself, and My Amazingly Interesting Life

Oi, you. Sit down. No, not there, that's my seat. Over there. Yes, there.

Scooch over.

Aside from a couple of posts about my new flat (a riveting series of posts that shall be concluded very soon) I've talked very little about the general goings on of my life, something we should all be endlessly grateful for because the last thing the internet needs is another person whining about their supermarket receipts and telling us how cute their pet vulture is.

She's great for cleaning up the children's organs I keep leaving on the lawn.

However it was inevitable that a day would come when I could no longer withstand the inherent human urge to force my crippling tedium on other people and/or I hadn't got round to watching any new films worthy of review yet, so you'd better get comfortable and read the words I'm going to speak at you good like.



First off, it was my turn to experience that special day of a person's life every year where you have the literal birth-right to be told you're wonderful and get showered with praise and adoration for not winning a Darwin award. In other words, it was my birthday on Saturday (rapturous applause).

"Woo. Go Ben."

I'm now a big 'ole 19, which means I've already wasted a third of Mozambique's average life expectancy watching TV and complaining about things, including TV. It's been a good run so far. To celebrate, Fiona (yes, that one again. I'll find a new woman soon to freshen things up a bit) and I went to see Henri-Georges Clouzot's fantastic Les Diaboliques at the local independent cinema type place. In true noir style, we dressed up and looked like utter fannys walking down the street at 11am on a Sunday in our finery.

Me caught off guard in a rare candid shot.

Also, I got a mango, so yay.

I would have taken a picture of the actual mango given to me, but it didn't last the night.

Secondly, before I levelled up (still no sign of learning Hyper Beam) Halloween happened. That's the spooky one with all the bats. I opted to go as the infamous Jekyll and Hyde (not that Jekyll and Hyde); the costume actually took a surprising amount of effort to get looking good. I've seen how some people do costume posts, with all the naming exactly what brand you used and such, so I've tried to do the same here. The costume itself looked a bit like this:

Making myself paper thin and headless was the tough bit.

So from top to bottom that's a Next tailored waistcoat (like this, but not), New Look braces (kindly borrowed from Fiona), some shirt from a charity shop, a 99p cravat from eBay, a pair of lovely, and now hopelessly ruined, brown trousers also from a charity shop and one each of some crappy brown Primark trainers and my darling brown leather Collezione wing-tip brogues.

To do the whole "tattered" thing going on on the right there, I used the tried-and-tested recipe of teabags (Tetley), a stanley knife (Tesco) and a lighter (Clipper). Boil up a nice strong pot of tea, pour one cup, drink it, pour the rest into a large bowl or tub and dip half of the shirt, cravat and trousers into it. Leave to dry then hang up each piece of clothing individually (or ask someone you moderately dislike to hold them up) and hack at the appropriate side with a stanley knife in a similar fashion to Norman Bates' mother when the TV signal isn't great.

Anything is better than another fucking episode of Come Dine With Me.

Once suitably slashed, take the clothes outside and set fire to them with a lighter in what we experts call a "controlled burn". This consists of lighting various portions of the clothing, allowing them to burn for a short time and extinguishing them before the fire spreads too rapidly. This is repeated until an authentic burned look has been achieved or you leave it for a little too long a couple of times and panic.

Once all of that's done you've got yourself a pretty shnazzy costume. Now for the makeup. I bought some pretty goddamn sexy stuff called Collodium which is used to make authentic looking scars and a set of blackout contact lenses to take care of the more striking aspects of my appearance. Those paired with some conservative make-up application (I don't know, nor do I care about the brands of these things), a generous helping of Brylcreem and a half-shaved chin produced a rather convincing face that had the limitless potential to be mistaken for a poorly done Two-Face costume all night.

"I'd like to play a game..."
"THAT'S NOT EVEN FUCKING TWO-FACE YOU HEATHEN."

The finished costume looks like this:

Just shooting the shit with Spidey.

And that was Halloween and my birthday. You now have an extremely intimate insight into my personal life, do with that information as you wish. If you would like to use it for blackmail, my people will be in touch with your people.