How dare the X Factor!

I made Nathan sleep on the other side of the bed last night in an attempt to break him of his comical OCD tendencies! As a result, we both had an awful night's sleep! When you've slept by someone's side almost every night for fourteen years, you get used to certain regimes. I sleep on my right hand side and face the wall. It's almost impossible to break that habit! Now who's the one with OCD?!

I am eating mega-healthily again at the moment. As usual, with my cycle of getting fat and then getting thin again, I'm angry with myself for blithely eating too much cake over the past two months, so it's salads, soups, rice and that sort of thing for the foreseeable future. This wouldn't need to be the case if I'd had the self control not to stuff large quantities of shite into my mouth with the sole excuse that I was busy doing Brass.

I went to Sainsbury's to buy vegetables, and happened upon the most peculiar conversation:

Girl: Innit, Roshie?

Boy: (confused) What's that?

Girl: (triumphant) Yeah! Innit doh!

It almost perfectly summed up Youth culture. If they could have texted the conversation, I'm sure it would have been even more surreal. There would have been emoticons and no vowels, and I would have felt even older than I felt today!

We caught up on the X Factor last night and learned in the process quite how brutally racist the British public can be. It was the six chair challenge, where contestants are thrown into a bear pit of ghastly people baying for almost anyone's blood on offer. It's like a public execution. Proof, if proof were needed, that we're ripe and ready for an extremist right wing politician to appear who'll come up with a cock-and-bull conspiracy theory which gives us permission to kill the Poles, or the paedophiles or the Muslims or the trans community. History never repeats itself. Man always does...

Anyway, the particularly horrifying aspect of the show was the way in which the audience of gurning imbeciles responded to European contestants. One eccentric girl from Denmark, who, in fairness was dressed as a doll, was booed repeatedly until Sharon Osbourne was forced to dispatch her, and another, the best singer of the night in my view, a young girl from Finland, described herself in a cutesy way as a "Finnish snow fairy." This seemed to rile the audience more than if the poor thing had described herself as a Cheryl Cole hater. Cut to a woman in the audience rolling her eyes around in a sort of disgusted manner like people used to look when they saw gay people holding hands in the street. Mrs O told the girl she didn't feel "connected" with her performance, and requested that the girl, off the top of her head, sing something else... this time a cappella. They love a cappella singing on the X Factor, mistakenly believing it's some sort of gold standard when it comes to vocal performance, when actually the question ought to be whether a contestant can sing in tune with an accompaniment. Anyway, the girl started singing in French (rather beautifully I thought) and the entire audience turned on her. Booing, screaming, yelling, telling her to get off the stage. The panel joined in; "you're in Britain, honey, not France..." I felt entirely ashamed to be British. Imagine booing someone simply for singing in French? If we don't see ourselves as part of mainland Europe anymore, we should at least be respectful of those Europeans who have the misfortune of being over here at the moment. If Europe refuses to trade with us because it sees us as a country filled with backward, tragic, small-minded oiks, then we're profoundly done for as a nation. This has to be a place where people actually want to visit... and trade. The poor girl crept off the stage, plainly feeling ashamed, just as the Danish doll had done minutes before.