Author Archives: Matt Hill
Waking up gives you cancer
If you believe the paper you’re reading, waking up gives you cancer.
Barbequed food gives you cancer, or God does. Cancer’s in the air, in your mobile phone, in the stuff you clean your oven with. If it’s not mutating those cells then it’s mutating those other ones. It’s patronising you from your box of cigarettes; [...]
The mannequin
My mother’s road is a leafy provincial strip in a dying town.
People have two cars, drink wine with their prozac, subscribe to Sky Sports and still think the internet’s biblical.
It’s slippy when it’s cold and the train station wasn’t earmarked for improvements anyway, so nobody cares that Manchester voted against the conjection charge.
It’s good if [...]
Ode to brollies
However expensive they are when it’s raining pots and pans and you’re in a queue for ten minutes because your boots leak and your hat’s not that powerful; however much they ruin your spatial awareness and make you clang into things you’d otherwise miss by three feet; however much they turn inside out, poke you [...]
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On true crime & crime fiction
My uncle’s over at the moment. He’s a strange man at worst and a hero at best, but basically he’s dying and everybody’s minded to ignore it.
Anyway, he’s full of trivia and smokes a lot of pot, and since the two are mutually exclusive I get told a lot about the world and all the [...]
New job
I started a new job on Monday. It’s teaching me about brevity.
Eurovision live blog: 2008
I remember my first Eurovision song contest party; I was nine or thereabouts. As it goes I’m fairly sure it was the first time – mothers aside – that I saw another woman’s nipple. She’d quaffed far too much and had flopped on to the settee with it all hanging out. I didn’t tell anybody.
So [...]
On sorries and apologies
I must’ve said sorry more times than I’ve eaten bananas, I decided. Just the other day I explained earnestly to a friend that I’d even apologise to somebody who’d just shot me for getting in the way of their bullets.
Recently I apologised in retrospect, via Facebook, for calling a boy a ‘panface’ at school – [...]
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Dad’s Cobra kit-car
Funeral’s good but it’s not the one. It’s like one, though. I mean we’ve all been standing outside and feeling sick and something has more-or-less died.
What it is really is that my Dad’s been building a kitcar for over twenty years — and now he’s had to sell it on account of he can’t afford [...]
My brother the DJ
My brother’s gone and moved back home for precisely the reason I did. It’s a bit like that story about two brothers moving home only I don’t remember which exactly – but it is like that story.
Basically it’s that we’ve had our independence for a while and then everything’s gone slightly wrong so we’ve lost [...]
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Stockport