Nirpal Dhaliwal - Watch Part Fifteen

( Nirpal Dhaliwal-Watch Parts One to Fourteen )

Things have slipped past me a bit, I was on holiday when the last NDW was due and haven't had much of a chance to catch up until now. So this is what your favourite pair of journos did in August and I'll try to bring things up to date later in the week. How's that for service?

( I'd rather be a 'coconut' than cling to race )

Try as I might I can't see anything in this article that's a dig at Ms Jones. Is this the end of an era? A week later and Nirpal is still choosing to attack other people...

( Face it, fatty - you're just greedy and idle )

The following week Nirpal writes about how he was lazy at school until he came round to doing his exams he says:

Exams are the fairest way of measuring ability. The affluent might be able to pay for private tuition for their children but kids with a desire to do well if properly encouraged can make up for it with individual hard work. I went to a nuthouse of a state school but I breezed through my GCSEs because I did a ton of revision on my own.

There was no way I would have done so well if it all been coursework. My school was so anarchic that it was impossible to behave in class; the mob mentality meant that any pupil who was obviously bookish was despised. It was easier to join in the mayhem and revise crazily in the run-up to exams than to perform consistently throughout the year.

To be fair to him he was, as he admitted the previous week, a lazy fat kid.

Exams are an excellent preparation for adult life, which is full of stress and expectations to deliver results while under pressure.

Nirpal Dhaliwal is an author who took some six years to write a novel, supported in that time by his then-wife. It's important to keep these facts close to hand when reading his columns.

Come August the 22nd and Nirpal is telling us how he tried cocaine once and didn't like it, and why Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse are arseholes (nice try Nirps, but you can't win me over that easily).

I have one friend with a drug problem and never show him any sympathy. I'm honest and tell him how tedious he is, unlike his fawning girlfriends whose mollycoddling has helped keep him an addict. He respects me for being straight and holding a mirror up to him.

He doesn't appear to have made any effort to encourage his friend to kick the drugs habit, he just calls him a boring idiot every now and then.

( Exodus from London? I just couldn't live anywhere else )

Damnit!

( Life passes by but I'm in no hurry to join in )

Towards the end of August there is that rare beast, a decent article from Nirpal about being an Asian indie music fan in the early Nineties.

I'm not sure whether my database is bust, or whether the only articles that Liz Jones wrote in August were on fashion. So, I'll finish with this article from the Western Daily Press:

( Jilted Liz has scared off house sellers in the West )

Hopefully when I get round to the September review they'll be back to slagging each other off in that way we love so much.

I Heart Charlie Brooker

He's doing BBC News this evening, and sounds genuinely rather than comedically angry at the unnecessary coverage of often nothing happening in the Madeline McCann case.