Worst. Flatmate. Ever.

I had to live once with a man that pleaded guilty to stealing £230 from me. He spent it all on porn. The two important lessons I learned from this is that there is enough information on a Coop till receipt to buy things over the phone. And that the police can't make people homeless. Even criminal ones. So after he'd peaded guilty we had to take him back in.

The police had turned up unexpectedly to make the arrest. Twelve of them. At 1am. While me and my friend desperately sprayed air freshener to hide the smell of weed, the police barged through the thief's door and started asking questions. When they found the phone he'd used to steal the money, they marched him off. Leaving us to poke nervously around the room.

He had a pile of bin liners in the corner, propped up against a wardrobe door to push it shut against the weight of the other bin liners inside. They stank. Not just a bad smell but a presence that clung to your clothes and haunted you hours afterwards. There was a hole in one of the bags where a policeman had torn it open to see what was inside. I looked. It was used tampons. Each bin liner stuffed to a full, fat 'ready to throw out' size with soiled sanitary products. He'd lived in the house for three months with this stuff. With us. It turns out he got off using it as an aid and was trying to sell it to like-minded people. He'd collected his impressive stash through his job - cleaning at the local girls school.

It took a month to get him out. The bizarre legal twist meant we couldn't stop him living with us - even while he was awaiting trial - because it was his home too. I even recieved a verbal warning from the police after I stopped him using any part of the house besides sleeping in his room, and made him get out during the day. Turns out restricting access to where a person lives is illegal. I tried to point out that spending over two hundred pounds of someone else's money on skin mags wasn't exactly a moral grey area. “Sorry,” they said, but he'd logged a complaint and I had to give his key back. He did move out eventually after some friends came around and told him to leave or they'd burn everything he owned. He went, carrying two bin liners at a time, on the bus.

Tonight sorted

Well, this isn't going to be big or clever. I finished work tonight, went out with friends and had great time. We drank loads, we talked, we generally hung out. I'm moderately drunk now. Strong enough to hold up a conversation but far enough gone not to try and be too clever. I do know I won all the arguments with Rich Old School Stanton as to whether games you can play now beat games from God knows when. I won another argument I can't quite remember right now. I think. The main thing is that this, as a post, might be pointlessly uninformative but it's more than Kelly's cheating get-out clause sentence. God-damn it, this is a paragraph! Goodnight.

I just don't get poker

I've spoken to people who love it. They've tried to teach me; to explain the intricacies and skill of their precious, beloved game. But as far as I can tell it's nothing but lying and luck. Yes, you can throw away cards and change your hand with some sense of purpose. Or guess the odds and vaguely, sort of, hazard a guess as to what people might have. Ultimately, however, winning just comes down to bullshitting people. You can do it with nothing if you're a good liar or with a strong hand if you're lucky. Woo. What fascinates me is how it's considered such a manly game. I think it must be an alpha male thing where winning lets you claim superiority. Despite the fact you might as well just roll dice, “First one to six has the largest cock!”

In the old days...

After university I was technically a scientist. It should've been exciting. It wasn't. The thing about working in a lab is it soon feels like any other job. I was surround by liquid nitrogen, I played with hydrogen cyanide (a special game I called “trying not to die”) and spent my time encircled by all manner of bubbling tubes and danger. At one place where the chief tech thought health and safety happened to other people, we made gunpowder from scratch and set it off in the fume cupboards. We were supposed to be testing the fuel filters for the Eurofighter.

Overall, though, nothing really changed from day to day. Even though I had to go home once and explain to my girlfriend why part of my thumb wasn't where I left it and the nail had melted a bit. It definitely had its moments – short painful ones that ended in accident report forms – but it was only stimulating when things caught fire. And there's a limit to how many times you can get away with that. So I quit. Looking back now it was probably for the best.

Review: Lykke Li - Youth Novels

Three tracks into Lykke Li's album and I'd all but decided she was marriage material. That is to say she has a fragile wisp of a voice, an achievabley pretty face and enough good songs for me to look her up on Google image search. For the most part Youth Novels has a minimalist feel which suits her breathy sing-speaking style well. The opening track, Window Blues, is so basic as to be barren; pinned by a one finger piano phrase of two alternating notes, backed by a spooky spaghetti western choir. It sets the tone for the best of the album - vulnerable, dark and sinisterly sweet. Some of the up tempo tracks like Complaint Department keep a similar stripped-back approach - using an idiot-simple fuzzy synth bass like a spine to support its soft yet threatening flesh. Instrumental curve balls - a kettle drum throwing in a few warped "boing-g-g" drum beats, for example - only add a gentle reverberating confusion. But while these opening moments conjure a sense of ghostly acoustic experimentation, the sagging middle of the album kill the thrill utterly. The track This Trumpet In My Head is an unnecessary, unrewarding soundscape as the trumpet in question parps over classical guitar and a meaningless spoken vocal. "I can't get that trumpet out of my head" Lykke repeats endlessly. I can.

It's all downhill after that as increasingly normal instrumentation and arrangements cause the previously sparse and haunting echoes to plunge into a plodding inevitably. Even the confrontational imagery of lines like "For you I'd keep my legs apart" don't save songs like Little Bit from sounding like Hello Saferide's cast offs. There are a few bearable choruses but the more mainstream acousti-blandness throttles the previously eerie allure. It's hard to tell whether a studio producer or Lykke herself is responsible but I hope they know it's their fault the wedding's off. Tracks like My become a monotonous shuffling drone with a grating sing-song refrain, Let It Fall pulls out a buzzy drum loop that utterly fails to justify it's existence and I'm Good I'm Gone's mix of hand claps and chunky piano serves only to prove that someone might have heard of Feist but sure as hell didn't get the point. It's upbeat. It's got a catchy, shouty ensemble chorus. It's shit.

By the time the brilliant Dance Dance Dance emerges nervously, like Carrie into the prom queen spotlight, it's too late. The bucket's already fallen. The click-clack percussion and harmony-free instrumentation might recapture the opening's minimalist beauty but it's covered in the pigs' blood of previous tracks and no amount of adorable kooky girl charm is going to make John Travolta get up. Shame, really. As a stripped down EP this could have been startling but cloyed up with meh it feels like a missed chance.