Justification (somewhat 2005)

In 2001, a couple of weeks into my first year at university, my friend Josh and I were sitting in a student dive bar in Manchester on a Saturday night, inexplicably passing our time watching 'I Love the 90s', one of those nostalgia shows which passed for entertainment at the time and almost inevitably featured 'celebrity insights' from the likes of Wayne Hemingway and June Sarpong. As the hour-long show went on, Josh and I were to ascertain that I was in fact 'Mr. 1995', an amalgam of the various defining features of that year. Apparently this was because:

• I drank alcopops (having still not found it in myself, despite the discriminatory nature of British male pub-goers, to drink beer - don't worry, my beer belly will testify I have weaned myself onto it now).


• I owned a bottle of CK1, which I'd bought a year previously for 12 quid, not realising that the slogan 'A fragrance for a man or woman' actually meant 'a godawful stink for teenage girls and raging benders'.


• My music taste was somewhat waylaid in the middle of the previous decade, highlighted by the heated discussions the 'Blur vs Oasis chart battle' section of the show had raised.

I tried not to be slighted by Josh's simplistic analysis of my life - after all, I had a fairly normal haircut and had recently discovered nu-metal - yet in the years since I have made a vain attempt to keep up with the times, later shunning nu-metal when it was universally accepted that the entire genre, was utter, utter shite, learning to drink by choice, and finally to enjoy beer, and having a girlfriend buy me a fragrance that didn't have people chasing me down Canal Street. In this spirit of 'self-modernisation' I wholeheartedly embraced Web 2.0, signing up to all manner of social networking sites, even though I knew that I would be simply re-befriending the same friends I had on the last one I'd joined.

I have also realised that my all-consuming rage, not to mention my confusion and bewilderment at some of the idiosyncracies of my host nation, requires an outlet, and that perhaps bellowing my grievances into the great beyond that is the internet was probably a better idea than buying a shotgun and pumping rounds into passers by. For this reason I have decided to do what most people did in 2005, namely start a blog, thereby bringing myself to a level of recent history I'm comfortable with, being as I am only 4 years out of date. I have no idea, who, if anyone, will read this, or how frequently I will update it, but feel free to comment if you've made it down this far.

Until next time then.