Despicable Dave

I am going to be very regarded as very brave – or very stupid.

Why? Because I am going to hurl two posts into the blogosphere about myself.

This is the first and it describes the negative version of the Plastic Mancunian – aka Despicable Dave. I will try to address the balance with my next post – the positive version.

The idea was inspired by a song I heard recently where singer referred to his own negative version. I started thinking about how complex humans are and how our daily lives are a constant internal battle between our various personalities and flaws as they strive to reach the pinnacle and take over our bodies for a period of time.

As with other people I am a smorgasbord of weirdness; but rather than trying to identify and describe all of my weird traits, I thought I would focus on the good bits and the bad bits.

Here are the bad bits and, as you might expect if asked “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” at an interview, I will try to turn them into positives – maybe.

Paranoia

As regular readers may have guessed, I can be the personification of Marvin the Paranoid Android. I have attempted to make light of this negative trait by personifying my paranoia as an imaginary nemesis called Captain Paranoia, a nasty person who is a constant thorn in my side, telling me how useless, ugly, thick, despicable and hated I am. The sad thing is that while I may have given the impression that I ignore him, the truth is that I don’t – and he is responsible for some of my worst decisions, my lack of bravery and giving strength to my shyness (see later).

The good news is that with age, I genuinely care less, so Captain Paranoia’s voice is weaker and I do ignore him more and more.

Nevertheless, he still catches me me out sometimes and I kick myself for my weakness.

Shyness

I may have given regular readers the impression that I have taken my shyness by the scruff of its neck, shaken it about a bit, and kicked it into the middle of next week.

The truth is that deep down I am still painfully shy and every day is a battle to force myself to be brave. I have techniques that do genuinely work when I feel courageous; the problem is that more often than not I will walk away rather than talking to a stranger and, when faced with the prospect of, say, walking into a pub full of strangers, the “fight or flight” reflex turns into “flight” – and I run away.

I am deeply aware that had I been a rampant extrovert, who could waltz into a room full of strangers and charm each and every one of them, my life would have taken a very different path.

In retrospect, I can’t imagine what that would have been like. Shyness has made me what I am today – and it’s not all bad. I am quite content despite this flaw in my personality, perhaps because over the years having extrovert friends and a little bravery have steered me somewhere in that general direction.

Also, my job, as much as I curse it sometimes, has helped me considerably – an ally against shyness.

Who would have though it?

Grumpiness

While I thrive on my ability to have a good rant and entertain the troops, I am aware that this self-indulgent desire to put the world to rights is not everybody’s cup of tea.

I ignore that and carry on regardless. People who know me well are often entertained – at first. Yet sometimes I don’t know when to stop and start to become annoying. Mrs PM has pointed this out on a couple of occasions.

I know that sometimes I can be a stubborn arsehole and when I am stubborn AND grumpy I can be infuriating, particularly when the target of my wrath is a subject that somebody who is listening feels strongly about, and when I get carried away, one or two people have started disagreeing and I have noticed that the grumpy rant becomes an embryonic argument.

I like to get things off my chest; I wear my heart on my sleeve and while a grumpy rant may be therapeutic (and it really is, dear reader), I sometimes need to step back from the precipice and turn it into a joke.

And I do – usually at my own expense – which helps matters considerably.

Procrastination

A year or two ago I declared war on procrastination. I am losing the war. For a while I actually started to arrange my days so that I could somehow schedule the writing of a novel.

I failed.

I know why I failed – writing fiction is hard – extremely hard. I can sit here at my desktop and write utter gibberish to post on a pathetic blog but trying to invent a story that is captivating, interesting and compelling with colourful characters, a wonderful plot with subtle twists and turns, that finishes leaving the reader wanting more, is very difficult.

I tried sitting there and writing it – but then I found myself doing other stuff like surfing the internet, listening to music – even doing the washing and ironing or hoovering to avoid the pain of trying to get some fiction on paper.

Sadly, the tendrils of procrastination have invaded other parts of my life too and I have on occasion simply ignored things that I have set myself to do – like writing a blog post.

I know I can beat this; at work I am very meticulous, planning everything I do, setting myself targets and generally achieving them.

So why can’t I do this at home?

The war continues.

Indecision

A standing joke between Mrs PM and me is that I am a Libran and therefore totally indecisive.

To a certain extent she is right and sometimes for her, a woman who is impulsive and slightly impatient, giving thought to decisions can be infuriating.

Whether it really is a negative trait is something I debate about. I am very careful and will generally not leap into something without first considering the pros and cons of it. The problem arises when I take too long to come to a decision.

Usually, however, the decision I make is the right one but that is little consolation if it has taken me over a week to reach a satisfactory conclusion.

I can’t ever see myself improving either, because I simply cannot just do something that appears to be right at first glance, without considering the possible outcomes.

Any More?

The answer is, of course, a resounding YES.

As humans, none of us are perfect. Some people think they are but they are wrong. We all have a bad side and I think that if you accept that negativity then you can go some way to improving yourself.

I have listed five of my negative traits but there are many more. I’m sure that if you asked my friends and family, or spent an hour discussing my bad points with Mrs PM, you would have enough notes to be able to write a book what a despicable person I am.

The truth is I am not despicable at all. My next post will hopefully provide some balance because, when I think about it, I am quite happy and content with myself – despite my flaws.

So there!

Over to you dear reader.

What are your negative traits? 

Are you prepared to admit to them in a comment on a blog written by a mad arsehole who lives in Manchester? 

I hope so – go on – be a devil!

The Power of Dave

You may think that my name is Plastic – it isn’t. I’m not sure that I could go through life with the name Plastic Mancunian – people would think that I am as weird as my name.

What do you mean "You are!"?

My real name is Dave.

I love being called Dave. It is a great name, a wonderful name – a bloke’s name.

My mum and sisters, and indeed my aunts and cousins, all insist on calling me David, despite my insistence that Dave is the name I prefer to be known by. I guess in my mum’s case, she would argue that David was the name she chose, the name she fought over with my dad, and the name that is on my birth certificate.

My dad was called George, as was his dad and his dad’s dad. He wanted to prolong the family name by making me George IV; thankfully my mum won that particular argument. She didn’t get it all her own way, sadly, because I am stuck with George as a middle name, something I only rarely admit.

I can therefore understand why my mum insists that my name is David, and has drummed it into my sisters, my aunts and any other family members that, despite my protestations, I am David.

I’m not David – I am Dave.

Whenever I introduce myself to new people I say

“Hi, I’m Dave.”

That says it all for me.

Such is the power of Dave that there is a feeling amongst non-Daves that we are taking over the planet. And maybe we are.

For starters, in the UK, all Daves have our own TV channel named after us. I am not making this up.

Dave TV was named such because “Everybody knows somebody called Dave”.

And from my experience that is true. The channel also sells itself as “The Home of Witty Banter” and shows a constant stream of old favourite comedy shows. Such is the power of Dave TV that they have produced, exclusively, two new series of Red Dwarf, one of my favourite all time comedy shows.

Here is the trailer for the brand new series, Red Dwarf X, which started on Dave last Thursday:

And, of course, the hero of Red Dwarf is another Dave – Dave Lister.

This is the power of Dave. Of course, Dave TV was first mentioned by another Dave (David Lee Roth) in his video for Just a Gigolo:







Conspiracy theorists, who consider the Power of Dave to be an evil cult bent of taking over the world, may actually have a point.

Here is the evidence:




As well as having a logo on the moon, here in the UK, our Prime Minister is a Dave – David Cameron. That is just the beginning. It won’t be long before we have a Dave in the White House, the Parliament of Australia and the Government of Canada.

Getting a Dave into the Kremlin or the Government of the People’s Republic of China might be tricky though. I’m sure that there are Daves in Russia (Dave in Russian is Дэйв) and China (Dave in Chinese is 戴夫). There must be somebody with those names in those countries.

Here are one or two interesting facts about the name David:

David is a really old name, originating from ancient Mesapotamia.

St David is the patron saint of Wales.

Variants of David are Dave, Davey, Davie, Davy, Dafydd, Dewi, Dai, Daf, Dovi and Dof.

The female equivalent is Davina.

David means “Beloved”

As much as I love my name, I wouldn’t want every other bloke in the world to be called Dave – imagine the confusion and chaos that would ensue.

Dave is such a popular name at the moment that I know quite a few other Dave’s. On one project I worked on a few years ago, there were no fewer than four Dave’s all sitting on the same table. People would come into the office and say “Where’s Dave?”

Four people would look around and say “Here I am – are you blind?”

It was a tough project but a fun one, and while we were all working really hard, things went wrong, so much so that we created an “Excuses Register”. There were some classic in-house excuses that we all used but my particular favourites, given that there were four Dave’s, were:

“Dave asked me to do that.”

“Dave wrote that.”

“I thought Dave was meant to do that.”

Also, can you imagine being called Dave and married to a Davina?

“Dave and Davina” doesn’t really have a ring to it, does it? Or is that just me?

It just sounds – well – SILLY.

Thankfully Mrs PM is not called Davina, although if she were, I would still love her (though I may try to persuade her to change her name).

In conclusion, I would like to thank my mum for fighting to have me called Dave. I have my own TV channel and I share the name of a boy who slew a giant called Goliath armed only with a sling. If only I could do something similar.

I’ll leave you with a few quotes from a fellow Dave from America, a very funny guy called Dave Barry, a man who surely, like me, embraces the Power of Dave.

Violence and smut are of course everywhere on the airwaves. You cannot turn on your television without seeing them, although sometimes you have to hunt around.

Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face.

Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.

You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.

Never assume that the guy understands that you and he have a relationship. 

Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it. 

'Escargot' is French for 'fat crawling bag of phlegm'. 

If God had wanted us to be concerned for the plight of the toads, he would have made them cute and furry.