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Where better to poke fun at the mundanity of modern life than on Twitter? Comedy writer Aaron Gillies – better known as @TechnicallyRon – has built up a huge following mocking everyday tedium: internet ads, Daily Mail website comments, biased news coverage… His silly ‘facts’ about penguins and faux washing machine symbols have been retweeted thousands of times by his 47,000-plus followers, and now he’s extended his Twitter thoughts into a witty book: ‘Life-abet – An A to Z of Existence’.
The book tackles humdrum modern life – from Netflix to nudity, landlord to lads – and features beautifully designed illustrations and charts.
To give you a taster, here’s an exclusive extract from the ‘P’ section that any Londoner will surely relate to…
‘Life-abet – An A to Z of Existence’ by Aaron Gillies is out now, published by Blink.
7am. You’ve yet to inhale your coffee, your body is slowly rejecting you. Your eyes are glazed and your hair is matted. There is a man rubbing up against your back and a rucksack in your face. You are commuting.
A Guide to the London Underground
A busy train is the epitome of all that is wrong in the world. Every annoying thing another human can do is represented here. There’s the one woman screaming into her phone. There’s a man picking his nose. One woman opens a food container that smells of ancient underwear and hot mayonnaise. A group of young men quaff Carlsberg and debate vaginas or the sport or something. This is humanity. This is why you want to live on a desert island.
What are the other viable options? A taxi? Why don’t you just ride your gold-plated horse into work? Cycling? Where every other entity on the road wants to annihilate you? You are trapped: trapped in a life of Oyster cards and bad breath.
You could try the bus, a metal tube filled with reprobates swerving past cyclists. A two-storey DEATH TRAP filled with single mothers and unemployed fathers. The bus is no longer an inanimate object, it is a moving sitcom. It engulfs the people and displays their flaws. People make noises on trains you never thought existed. Snorting noises of thick substances in their nose. Weeping comes from a few rows behind you; a drunken man swills a milk bottle filled with Malibu at you.
I commute while wearing headphones. The ostentatiously loud soundtrack in my ears forces reality into the background. I once commuted without my headphones. All that can be heard is despair. The frequency of regret can be heard by dogs. An American woman starts laughing; it cuts through you like a crowbar through butter.
Watch out for these road hazards…
And this is what those bus stickers should really say…
