For someone who spends a disproportionate amount of his enthusiast-reserved time dealing with rundowns of charts and rankings of this, that and the other, I’ve never been much of a fan of the Top 10 list as a source of creativity and or comedy. List based writing and humour has its place I guess, but to me it has always seemed a rather artificial constraint, requiring you to either stretch a particular concept to breaking point in order to make up the numbers or restrict you to a particular number of elements just to stick to the format as it were.

Or maybe I never had an English teacher at school who set us a “Top 10 of x” exercise as homework, you work it out.

Sometimes you get a good reason to break the habit, and such an occasion presented itself midweek. It was Tuesday evening and I was in the middle of a crap week at work, having to do all manner of extra shifts in the studio owing to a lack of otherwise available staff and burning the candle at both ends to do so. Furthermore I was bored. Tired of the office, tired of the conversations around me and crying out for some degree of distraction.

So I did what any rational and connected individual in this kind of position does in 2010. I complained loudly on Twitter just how bored I was. Answer there came from the incredibly profound lady who writes Queen Margot and the Supper Club, a blog which for some odd reason I’ve neglected to link to until now.

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Now that was a challenge and a half. Suddenly I had new found motivation and a means of mental exercise to dial out the unspeakable crapness of my evening. It seemed a shame to waste the final list to the necessarily small audience paying attention to my 140 character ramblings, so it is with no small amount of egotism I present to you the full version of:

Top 10 things that James is rubbish at.

1) Ironing.

No man on the planet can actually do this to any degree of competence or accuracy. I’ve been known to stand cursing over a board in a steam filled room, watching as my electrically powered lump of stainless steel glides uselessly over a particularly rumbled shirt and leaves it as stubbornly lined, creased and (apparently) unwearable as when I began the exercise about 12 hours earlier. The pain is generally only ended by a wife-shaped female who loudly asks why on earth I don’t just leave it for her to do it (“because you’d take exception to any suggestion I might make that my ironing is your responsibility” is the truthful answer) before snatching the iron from my hands in order to render the errant shirt crisp, smart and looking like I’d just got it home from the shop in a matter of 30 seconds. I’ve timed this. It happens.

2) Throwing.

All girls throw better than me. All of them. My younger sister once explained to me that a large part of athletics lessons in PE at school for the girls are taken up with explaining the correct way to perform such athletic disciplines as running and throwing as this is apparently something that does not come naturally to the female of the species. When running, the female’s natural instinct is to flap their hands up and down by their sides rather than the tucked into the sides pumping action that we blokes do without thinking. Similarly the throwing action comes rather more easily to men than it does to women. The “throws like a girl” motion is actually genetically inbuilt rather than a measure of a person’s competence. Except that is when a man does it. I never learned or was taught to throw, an issue which only tended to rear its ugly head when playing cricket in the summer. The joy of fielding near the boundary was only tempered by the fear that a well aimed shot would come winging its way towards you, leaving you with the onerous task of returning the ball to the wicket in a timely and accurate manner so as to prevent the unnecessary concession of runs to the opposition. For the whole of my school career, I was the chap who palmed the ball and then tossed it to a nearby colleague so as not to send the ball winging its way at 90 degrees to the other boundary in a failed attempt to return it.

3) Art.

Again this was something that always used to bother me at school, the assumption on the part of every teacher that every child was blessed with the ability to visualise a scene and commit it to paper accurately and in a manner that was pleasing to the eye. The drawing of pictures was some kind of treat to be dished out, a way to fill up a few minutes at the end of a lesson or a way to distract those of us who had finished some exercise ahead of the slow ones at the back. “Just draw a picture to go with the text” was the instruction that was conveyed from the front in classes as random as Religion Education and Home Economics. Except this wasn’t a treat. This was torture. From the age of three when the boundaries of the shapes in my colouring book were little more than an aspiration, my creative abilities have generally confined themselves to the pen and keyboard. I’m no more able to draw a human smile than an elephant can perform heart surgery. Art lessons were nothing less than a hideous torture, an hour a week when the full scale of my personal inadequacies had to be laid down and worse still GIVEN A MARK OUT OF 20 by a lady with a blonde perm and a lisp. On one particularly memorable occasion we were set a homework task of drawing ourselves as we might look in 20 years time. I abandoned all pretence of creativity and turned in a neatly drawn picture of a coffin. This wasn’t to make some kind of deep impressionistic statement, more down to the fact that it had geometric straight lines and I could just about do those without ballsing it up. A year or so later my art teacher and I came to a gentleman’s agreement. She would stop wasting my time trying to teach me to draw as long as I agreed to stop wasting her time trying to learn.

4) Self deprecation.

After all when you are this awesome, why bother?

5) Pretending I know anything about football, beyond how it is supposed to sound on the radio.

Oh yes, I will freely and happily wax lyrical about the broadcast of football matches and what it means to those of us doing it and those people at home or in their cars listening. I appear to have spent most of the summer doing so after all. Discuss the finer points of tactics? Explain the ins and outs of the whole Gerrard/Lampard axis that so bedevils the England side? Asborb the complex nuances of the argument about whether Manchester City’s bottomless pit of funds amounts of trying to “buy the title” in the same way Chelsea did seven years ago? Completely beyond my ken. And pretty much everyone I work with knows this.

6)  Fashion.

My original tweet on this subject summed it up thus: To me being dressed properly extends as far as “genitals not on public view”. I think here I’m reflecting back on myself the way I view the world. For reasons that escape me I’ve grown up flatly refusing to judge anyone on the way they are dressed, to the extent that I am completely blind to the way people attire themselves on a day to day basis. I know from experience there are people utterly obsessed with the subject, scrutinising everyone they know for the cut of the fabric of their top, the style of their shoes and the extent to which they have accessorised. You know what? I really could not give a shit. The person I work with is the same person from day to day, regardless of what motif they have on their top or what colour their trousers are. Hence if I don’t care what other people are wearing, I see no reason why they should care what I am wearing. I’ll be berated by female companions for wearing shoes that appear to be a bit tatty or are unpolished. “Who cares” I will reply, “nobody will be looking at my shoes”. I mean why should they really, the shoes I am wearing are there to keep my feet dry and warm, that is all. I can think of nothing less interesting than staring at the floor to note what someone has on their feet. Yet I’m told people do this. In short, if you are about to get dressed after reading this and are worried about how you might look to me if you meet me, then please don’t. If I met you yesterday I do not have the first clue what you were wearing when we spoke. I did not notice and do not care.

8) Counting in the correct order.

7) Paying credit card bills on time.

In all fairness I don’t think anyone is are they? Plans to settle these oh so cumbersome debts are inevitably thrown into disarray by the way credit card companies have a habit of randomly changing the due date on your bill on an almost monthly basis. Just because they can. I’ve got one particular card which I have had since 1996, a period when I can vividly remember receiving the bill on the 10th of the month and then paying the appropriate amount into the bank around the 5th without penalty. That self same card still sends me bills on the 10th of the month, with payment due on the 22nd, a deadline which I consistently fail to meet owing to its on the nose proximity to my actual payday. Somewhere along the line in the intervening 14 years I have lost over two weeks breathing space in which to settle my debts. Deep down I know I should be annoyed about this, but I don’t have the time. Those £12 late payment penalties won’t earn themselves you know.

9) Finishing what I started.