Ben Parfitt

I have a very bad back. It fails me regularly. I today discovered that the pain killers I’m on can be highly addictive if used over a prolonged period. No more than seven days, they say. Been taking mine for fourteen.

Two options present themselves:

A) Stop taking the painkillers B) The Next Michael Jackson

Option A clearly seems the most prudent. And Option B highly unlikely. But just imagine if. Sometimes in life you have take a gamble. That’s the difference between Alan Sugar and the MD of Linens Direct.

And they say Wayne Rooney’s not a role model!

I’ve done my back in this week. This happens to me every 12 to 18 months. Stems from an incident on a bus in Sri Lanka when we went over a particularly large bump. Which considering the genera standard of Sri Lanka’s travel infrastructure was probably closer to a chasm than a bump.

Every since then my spine, from time to time, decides to give way. Sometimes I’m unable to walk for a fortnight, sometimes just for a day or two. This one has been a bad one. A week on and I still can’t stay standing or sitting for more than a few minutes.

The result is that I’m unable to take refuge at the PC desk where I have the capacity to play my consoles on the PC monitor. Instead I’m bound to the bed. Which is in front of out 47” 1080p LCD TV. Which since we bought it has mainly been used as a soap and reality TV picture machine by Mrs Ben. While I use the £140 Hitachi monitor.

Anyway… I really want to play Portal 2. I’ve been playing it all week, on and off, as Mrs Ben has been at work and I’ve been at home. It’s literally all I can think about. You know when a game utterly captures you? And you have that itch to play it during all the moments when you’re not playing it? Doesn’t happen to me very often. But such is the quality of Portal 2.

But what am I actually doing? Watching Britain’s Got Talent. Mrs Ben has just finished watching So You Think You Can Dance? After that she has some Eastenders to watch, though I might convince her to watch Match of the Day instead if I can successfully stay on her good side for the next hour.

Which would be good. But not as good as playing Portal 2.