mostly david ephgrave

Consecrated ground has the same effect on evil spirits as when I cross the threshold of a Sports Direct.  (Bang goes the chance to do an advert for them; Sports Direct, not graveyards.) I visited the Stevenage branch of the sportswear giant (of giant mug-producing fame) this afternoon, to buy a pair of swimming shorts for next week’s trip to Center Parcs. I've seldom felt less comfortable than on entering the premises. It didn't help that a guy I went to school with works there ( who compared me to Ned Flanders, on a memorable and still niggling occasion ). I had visions of him spotting me across the shop floor and repeating his hilarious Simpsons-based assertion at the top of his voice while the rest of Sports Direct laughed. I have a vivid and paranoid imagination.  Everything about the situation screamed “awkwardness”. I was completely out of my depth (*swimming pun*). I wandered around the ground floor a few times, having writ...

Don’t let it be said that I harbour grudges, but the fact a guy in my class at secondary school once called me Ned Flanders still pisses me off. It doesn’t matter that it happened twenty years ago. It’s still raw. You may think it sounds like a tame insult, but it wasn’t. It was said with venom. I was the butt of his ‘hilarious’ joke and he didn’t care that I knew it or how I felt about it. What a cunt. He announced it in a Maths lesson like he’d stumbled across a witty, undeniable truth. “David’s just like Ned Flanders.” I wouldn’t have minded if it was accurate. I wasn’t a Christian zealot with a tache. I didn’t have a surprisingly muscular physique. I still haven’t, more’s the pity. My only similarity to Ned was that we were both big fan of The Beatles, but the boy in my class wouldn’t have been armed with this information back then. Bart and Milhouse didn’t stumble across Flanders’ secret Fab Four shrine until 2003, which was nine year...