‘What are you doing? asked a colleague – Learning How to Kiss Creatively’

‘UGH green cuds bwirugh?”

“What are you on about?”

“Ugh green cuds bwirugh?”

“I’m going out. You seem to be drunk.”

No, you probably don’t know what I’m on about either. But believe me, if you were able to hear me saying that perfectly constructed phrase out loud you would know that I sound like I grew up on the mean streets of Hell’s Kitchen playing Officer Krupke with Woody Allen. It’s a Noo Yoik accent. Can’t you hear it? The trick is the “r” – you don’t sound the r unless it follows a consonant. Are green cards brighter? I’ve no idea why R didn’t get it.

It’s true, I’m not Meryl Streep, but I’m working on it. It’s been hard fitting it in what with all the other things I’ve been getting to grips with: How to Make the Grubbiest Stainless Steel Sink Shine; How to Fold a T-Shirt in Crease-Free Perfection in Less than Two Seconds; How to Administer Trigger Point Therapy to the nearest gluteus maximus in need of a bit of loosening. So much to learn!

Where am I amassing these essential life skills? Can there really be one place where all this knowledge is available in bite-sized chunks of video that you can watch at work while you’re pretending to do something much more important?

Yes. There is. It’s called videojug (www.videojug.com) and I am addicted. Its slogan is “get good at life”. Yes, yes, yes! I mean who doesn’t want to Get Good at Life?

Where has this been all of my life? Think of the hours I’ve spent battling with How to Pull Off the Michael Jackson Circle Slide and How To Hang a Pre Hung Door, when the explanation, with accompanying “professionally produced” video, has been sitting on the world wide waste-of-time in a treasure trove of 60,000 videos that will show me – and you – how to do, well, everything.

It’s true there were some that I couldn’t bear to watch (How to Get Rid of Genital Warts, How to Cure a Yeast Infection Naturally and How to Photograph a Nude Man) but there were others, many, many others, that have held me captivated.

“What are you doing?” asked a colleague, eavespeeping over my shoulder.

“Learning How to Kiss Creatively,” I said. “And by that I mean research.”

Oh yes, this will be good – How to Write a Newspaper Article (2 min 40 sec). Wow. If it turns out to be that easy I might have a mental breakdown.

At 54 seconds in we have to decide what newspaper we want to write for – apparently it could be the newspaper we read every day or it could be another newspaper. Hmm. I’m not convinced the instructor is making the best use of his or my time. By 2 min 12 sec the article is commissioned, written and now it’s about reading it carefully before submitting because editors are “very critical people”.

Apart from the odd nugget of truth, trust me, it’s not as easy as this. Honestly. I don’t mean to doubt the genius of videojug, but I’d recommend sticking to How to Hack a Nine Volt Battery. I mean who doesn’t need to know how to do that?