Short Story: The Truman Blog

Short Story: The Truman Blog

I wonder how many people out there at some point in their life have managed to convince themselves that they are actually on the Truman show. Come on, admit it, you know you’ve done it.

Whoever is writing the storylines to my life is having a jolly good laugh at my expense. This week has been far too coincidental to be unwritten. Someone has a plan. And whoever it is, I think they should rapidly get the sack. Their plot stinks and from my perspective their sense of humour is very bleak and unfunny. Although I am sure it is very amusing to the outside world.

Unlike on the Truman show, in my life there is no secret escape door at the other side of the water. Sometimes I wish there was some form on black hole that would suck me in and teleport me out of uncomfortable situations such as the one I am about to discuss, but the directors of the Po Show are yet to build that on my set. Tight bastards.

The other day I nipped home to try and get some vaccinations for Taiwan. I was hoping that my family doctor who has treated me for around 20 years would not try to charge me the £500 fee that the university doctor thought I could magically pay. But no, I was wrong, the NHS are as equally stingy in the land of fluorescent poo as they are in Manchester and the only vaccination I could get for free was Typhoid, the cheapest one of them all.

The price of a return train ticket to home is more expensive than the Typhoid injection itself. That’s travelling during off-peak time. When is off-peak time? No-one really knows, it doesn’t say anywhere on the National Rail website and call up and the staff themselves don’t even know – you just have to jump on a train and hope for the best. Mr Bean (my father) and I both decided that peak time must be before 9am, which meant I couldn’t get the 7.30 train back to Manchester as originally planned. I intended to catch the following train, but, ‘by chance’, my nana popped round meaning I had to stay around and chat and missed the train. I say ‘by chance’ because I don’t think it was at all by chance, I think someone upstairs was plotting an evil plan. I am almost sure of it, when my nana visited she gave me forty pounds, which NEVER happens. Something seriously fishy was going down.

So, out of all the trains that ran that day, I took the 9.30 train. Out of all the carriages on the extremely long train to Manchester airport, I chose coach C, for no other reason at all than it just happened to be where I was standing on the platform.

As it ‘happens’, at the next stop another person also caught the train to Manchester airport, and they just ‘happened’ to stand on the platform where coach C arrived. Of all the arrogant bastards in the world it could have been, it just ‘happened’ to be Rudolph. He is the man who just ‘happened’ to sleep with me and then just ‘happened’ to meet another girl a week later and shove his tongue so far down her throat he cleaned out her intestines. Funnily enough, this also happened to be the one day I got on the train without makeup and the bushiest hair-do of all time due to my mother’s supermarket brand shampoo.

This just happened to severely piss me off.

You would think, based on Rudolph’s extremely piggish behaviour, he would have just walked on by, pretended not to see me. But this man’s arrogance knows no boundaries. Instead, he decided to grace me with his almighty presence for the journey. The more I see him the more I become convinced that he was fathered by Piers Morgan. Every time he tries to open his mouth I just want to get a chisel and scrape the superglue from his lips so that he can talk properly. Unfortunately I didn’t have the essential tools at hand, a chisel, a can of pepper-spray, a pair of nail scissors to stab him in the eye. So I had to put up with listening to the tales of 'Rudolph the great'. He thinks it’s sexy to tell me hurt his cheeks hurt from boxing on Tuesday. I replied with, 'oh, I thought your face was just normally like that, and, well I was having a bad day when a complete moron came and started bothering me on the train but now I hear you got punched in the face I’m feeling much better.' He laughed it off in his arrogance but what he doesn’t quite grasp is that I’m being deadly serious.

The thing is, I still find him quite sexy. On the one hand I want to send him anthrax-soaked hate mail. On the other hand I want to rip off his clothes and bite him all over. I need help. I think it’s just that I’ve never hated anyone this much that it has turned into some sort of sick sexual fantasy. The next thing you know I will be seeing some sort of sexual therapist – which will make great material for the next series. I think we should rewrite the script, with Rudolph falling under a train in a freak accident that axes him from the show completely.

Another important member of the cast, who I won’t be killing off any time soon, is Panjita. She and I booked our flights to Taiwan today. We spent a glorious afternoon in the sunshine by the fountains in Piccadilly gardens, drinking iced coffee and discussing how much we hated Rudolph, but also loved the bank manager at Barclays for giving Panjita a loan and also the manager at the travel agents for giving us a good price on flight tickets. The travel agent looked suspiciously like my old housemate in Germany, Herr Becker, who I ‘by chance’ met in Brest airport because we both were stranded after our flight happened to be one of the only ones disrupted by a freak outburst of snow in Brittany, where it apparently never snows. Then three months later, Herr Becker arrived at my flat in Germany as my new Mitbewohner and it didn’t take long to figure out that we had ‘coincidentally’ met before.

I assume that Herr Becker has been demoted and now is an extra on the show, playing the role of my travel agent. He looks exactly the same, just like a cute hedgehog, all short, fat and sweet with short spiky brown hair and glasses.

On the way home from Piccadilly ardens another freaky thing happened to me. A man stopped me at the traffic lights and told me he thought I looked very attractive. Whoever is writing this script seriously needs to get creative with their lines.

This is strange because just moments before, in Piccadilly Gardens, I was moaning to Panjita about how I just want to meet a ‘nice’ man, an intelligent man, a man who is educated and sophisticated.

Next thing we know, some weird ginger guy with crooked teeth from Oxford is propositioning me at the traffic lights. He is in Manchester because he is taking part in university challenge.

Hello?!! Man upstairs. Sometimes us women don’t say what we actually mean. When we say we want a ‘nice’, ‘intelligent’ man, what we are really thinking is that we want some really bad man who is going to do lots of naughty things to us. He just has to be doing them to ONLY us. It’s not much to ask for. I definitely did not ask for the Sherminator.

You have to hand it to the directors, they really were quick to respond to my request for a nice guy, but I’m not going to get sexual fantasies over university challenge man am I? And I’m sure the viewers would hate him. Sorry to have ended his acting career so suddenly, but the story definitely does not end with me riding into the sunset with the Sherminator, asking each other trivia questions.

The post is now open for a new writer. Apply within. I will give you some hints about how I would like the show to end. First of all, 'the most handsome man in the world' will fall back in love with me, fly back to England and propose. In this case, I will decline, because I am too young and have too much to live for to be getting married. However, 'the most handsome man in the world' and I will enter a happy relationship in which we have frequent and wonderful sex and I receive fifty percent of his salary as a ‘shopping budget’. Furthermore, when it comes to collecting my degree certificate, the numbers 2.1 will have miraculously changed to ‘first class honours degree’.

There will be no more ginger university challenge men, there will be no more getting stranded in France, vaccinations will be free and there will be a teleporting black hole on every set.

Finally, Rudolph must die. Don’t care why, don’t care how. Just try to make it as slow and painful as possible. I think we can drag it out over at least 3 episodes.