Tom Bell Dot Net

1. Shredding documents, because not only is the act physically satisfying, it also has that feeling of saying “Fuck you!” to identity thieves and the surveillance state.
2. Obscure fruits. I’m a total pushover for anything new and unusual in the fruit & veg aisles: goji berries, ugli fruit, açaí, etc. Unfortunately, I was played like a sucker by Tesco once, who were selling dragon fruit, knowing that people like me wouldn’t be able to resist buying something which looks so amazing: neon pink skin, with little green sprouts all over. It turned out to have almost no taste whatsoever.
3. The Great Vowel Shift. The way that the English, over a period of about 300 years, decided to pronounce all our words completely differently. And not just that, but to do it over the same period that the printing press was invented and spelling was standardised, resulting in such an absolute mess of spelling and pronunciation that no-one can make any sense of.
4. The strong positive correlation between: the amount of fuss a culture makes about machismo and warrior codes of honour; and the endemic propensity towards man-on-man botty sex within that culture. See: Ancient Greeks, modern Afghans, the Parachute Regiment.
5. The insanely complicated ecosystem contained within a single fig.
6. Girls with geordie accents. Maybe it’s a combination of watching Byker Grove at an impressionable age, or living near Newcastle for three and half years, but I love hearing the likes of Cheryl Cole or Jayne Middlemiss speaking.
7. The seasons. It is an absolute blessing to happen to have evolved on a planet with a tilted axis, and to get to enjoy the changing of the seasons and the cyclical growth and contraction of the ecosystems we are part of.
8. Trees that grow over a main road and appear to have a silhouette of a bus cut out of them.
9. Obsolete constellations.
10. Pears. Pears are fucking delicious. And I don’t mean just a normal kind of delicious. I mean a crack cocaine kind of delicious. Every time I eat a pear, I find myself wondering in complete bafflement why I’m not just constantly eating pears.
11. When you eat a delicious sandwich you bought from a shop, and feel a bit sad that it’s finished, then look inside the sandwich packaging and there’s a big blob of fallen-out filling inside, waiting for you to scoop it out and eat it.
12. Each time October comes around, treating yourself to a new jumper, and it becoming your bestest, most favouritest new jumper ever.
13. Crisp jenga: when you grab an overly ambitious fistful of crisps, and then to eat them you have to carefully extract one at a time with your other hand, trying not to destabilise the clump so that they all fall to the floor.
14. A good shortcut. The more obscure or minor the road, the more satisfying.
15. The feeling of pushing your fingers into a bowl of dried lentils.
16. Cheese, as an art form, as a concentrated expression of the land, environment and culture which creates it.
17. The introduction to Roxy Music’s Out Of The Blue, especially the way the synth slides in at 00:37 like a spaceship streaking overhead.
18. That type of conversation you sometimes have with someone, usually someone you know very well and share a sense of humour with, which is more like a little double act improv comedy performance, just for your own shared amusement.
19. Reusable gift bags. Thank fucking god someone invented these. No more time wasted neatly covering something in wrapping paper that’s only going to be torn off. No more needless generation of paper and plastic waste. Now we are all joint custodians of a shared resource, the great gift bag pool, which we will constantly shuffle between us forever.
20. Cold roast potatoes. The roast potato is the most delicious food item in the known universe. There’s only one thing better than a hot roast potato with a Sunday lunch: a cold roast potato taken out of the fridge as a Sunday evening snack.
21. Computer games which require you to take notes (e.g. to sketch out a map, solve a puzzle, etc).
22. The phrase “it’s so crazy it might just work” and variants thereof.
23. Wasps, or rather the order Hymenoptera (wasps, bees, ants and sawflies). They’re all wasps really. Bees are just vegetarian wasps. Ants are flightless wasps. Wasps are amazingly diverse and specialised, mostly in parasitism. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a wasp species that specifically parasitised another wasp species that specifically parasitised another wasp species that specifically parasitised another wasp species.
24. When you can feel a storm a-comin’ in.
25. Rick Astley, who seems like such a genuinely nice, humble bloke, that it’s just impossible to see any article or interview he’s in without loving him a bit more. Also I’d rather listen to Astley playing covers of The Smiths songs than to that reactionary cunt Morrissey.

(Originally published on 29th January, 2007)

1. One or two word phrases which sum up entire groups of contemptible people or their habits, eg. ‘rednecks’, ‘Kappa slappers’, ‘Swear-hili’.
2. The way several-day-old balloons quickly deflate with a gentle squeeze.
3. Girls who are from the 50s, and are really ugly, but they don’t realise, because they’re from the 50s.
4. (more…)

(Originally published on 25th October, 2001)

1. Electricity pylons – utterly and quintessentially man-made objects, supplying modern civilisation’s most distinctive and vital resource, and dominating country skylines in testimony to our supremacy.
2. BBC2 weatherman Daniel Corbett – a man who loves the weather, and loves telling you about the weather.
3. Mint Aero Drinks – thick, creamy, sweet, minty and chocolatey, with a colour like comic-book toxic waste, and a taste that steals your soul.
4. (more…)