Jon's complete unabridged autobiography.

I am proud to present to you my complete, unabridged autobiography:

I was a massive fucking idiot.

Many thanks,

Jonathan May-Bowles

If good things come to those who wait...

... but he who hesitates is lost, where does that leave us? Fucked, thats where.

People who are better than me...

I am not sure quite what I am going for in this whole 'life' bizzle, but the following people do at least part of it better than me. This is a partial list and if you are not on it it means either A.) I forgot to put you on here or B.)you are trying to do something different to me. Also, if you are on the list it does not mean you are better than me in every respect, oh no no, it just means you are significantly better at at least one of the things I consider to be part of being JMB. If you don't like reading long lists of people names, I suggest you do not read the following long list of people's names.

The list:

David Cullen

PJ McCabe

David Quin

Jonathan 'Jack' Boyd

Jamelia Bear

Jack De'Ath

Ben Mansfield

Len Audaer

Ben Ford

Rebecca Clarke

Mario Creatura

Rachel Charman

Joff Manning

Phil Hooks

Sam Kiss (yeah, OK I admit it. Twunt.)

Est Donnelly

Chris Hall

Sally Healey

Phil Blakey

Martin Sedgewick

Tom Ingrey

Helen May-Bowles

Jack Lennox

Alastair Norgate

Keir Pearcey

Jonny Wooddin

Ed Brown

Dale Pluthero

Clare Spray

Duncan Scott

Sarah Jane Stenlake

Mikey Uong

Jon Wilson

Patrick McCabe

Right now I have top go and debate about Iran (My position? I think it should be legalised) so the list remains, as ever, partial.

But there is always a good side...

Pre-Script: Read the post before (i.e. just below) this one to make sense of it all. Trust me: less funny, but more right.


1.) Everyone seems to love my article. This, however, does make me feel worse for missing my latest deadline.

2.) The very big, very black, very garage/R'n'B/Urban MCs bigging up and pumping the arctic monkeys. "I bet YOU look good on the dancefloor!" Laugh? Yes I did.

3.) The eclectic range of music. Nicely fucking done.

4.) Meeting the marketting research guy for malibu and telling him that A.) Good night, well done, B.) I found the Big Black MCs bigging arctic monkeys hilarious on many levels (turns out he had seen me laughing my lilly white off at this already in the eve) C.) My disgust at the use of an East Side/West Side motif for the evening. As I expressed to my brief marketting friend, the east/west side thing was a real, you know, war, and countless young disenfranchised black men lost their lives for what was a massively pointless cause: money. I personally found the use of this tragedy as a marketting tool offensive and made a pledge - longe before i met market research man - to not buy any Malibu.

He says I was the only one to express such views.

But seriously, guys, if we had been chanting "Israel" and "Palestine" instead of "East Side" and "West Side" I'm sure we'd have all been a bit less comfortable. I hope.

Nevertheless, some bigwig marketting twunt will be hearing my very sultry and righteous opinions. So: I do actually win.

Because obviously i really would have drunk a lot of Malibu otherwise.

P.S. Oh, and I told him I really enjoyed the night "In an ironic way". He didn't seem to like that very much.

F.A.I.L.

There are a number of interpretations of the events I have just experienced.

1.) I thought a lovely young lady was coming onto me. I was wrong. I made myself vulnerable. FAIL.

2.) I thought a lovely young lady was coming onto me. I was right. At some point she changed her mind. I did not follow suit. FAIL.

3.) I thought a lovely young lady was coming onto me. I was right. But both she and I were to shit scared to properly make ourselves vulnerable, so we botched it. FAIL.


In my defence, I was lovely, kind, nice, friendly and (I thought) attuned to the signs. However, my inbuilt capacity for avoiding vulnerability like plague, and my total lack of self worth, precluded me from making "the move". Perhaps, therefore, I missed the moment and if so I am sorry. However, once you started talking about which one of your exes you thought was best to go back to I thought, perhaps, the moment had passed. So, if only out of curiosity, I asked:

Me: Did I really misread this or was there something between you and me this evening?
You: No. What? Are you joking?
Me: No
You: But you are, aren't you? Putting it on?
Me: No
You: Your putting it on, I know you are
Me: No
You: But you are really?
Me: Can we change the subject?

FAIL

But, despite your protestations, what I sense is really a reluctance to actually be intimate or vulnerable with anyone. I am the same. I'm sorry if I got this shit wrong - frankly, the rules to this game are really weird. I just hope for your and my sake that we didn't miss something good out of mutual fear or, more likely, my colossal ineptitude.

Jon’s laws of drunkenness:

1.) An object in drunkenness tends to stay in drunkenness unless an outside factor (running out of money, pub closing) intervenes
2.) Give a constant, C, which represents quantity of alcohol, the degree to which you will get drunk is inversely proportional to the recentness of your last encounter with alcohol
3.) There is at all times a strong positive correlation between your level of inebriation and how brilliant you think you are. There is simultaneously a strong negative correlation between your level of inebriation and how brilliant you actually are.
4.) As drunkenness escalates, the probability of your face rapidly and dramatically hitting the pavement approaches one.
5.) Likewise, the probability of you making an utter twunt of yourself approaches one
6.) Blah blah phonging your ex and crying down the phone approaches one
7.) Your level of drunkenness is inversely proportional to your understanding of the value of money
8.) The amount of alcohol you have drunk positively correlates with the apparent attractiveness of others. The amount you have drunk negatively correlates with your attractiveness to others.
9.) Statistically speaking, if you are drunk and your mouth is open you are talking shit.
10.) As the amount of alcohol drunk increases, the chance that you will remember any of this approaches 0.

Finally

11.) The amount of time before you actually decide to call into the shite late night ITV gambling show is inversely proportional to how much you ripped the piss out of it when you first turned it on.

Update

The "k" word, it turns out, is "coon".

Just thought you'd like to know.