On the 12th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:An arrogant, parochial assumption that the following blog post is a justifiable parody of some wondrously shitty British attitudes towards the festive period, when really I’m writing about South-East of England prejudices and idiosyncrasies. Down here we’re far less friendly than the rest of the UK. Although liberal-minded enough to abhor racism, we’re Nazi-like in how regionalist we are. And worse of all, like I said, we erroneously believe that our failings are common to the rest of the UK. (Or maybe they are. You be the judges.)
On the 11th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Eleven charity cards. Costing ten times more than ordinary cards, but worth it because some of that goes to charity? No. Have you ever noticed how much? About 30p per pack. Not even 30p per card. You might as well buy cheap cards and just give 30p to charity. Or 40p. Or fuck it, why not a tenner and make all the charity card buyers look ridiculous in their smug do-good mistake of allowing themselves to be fisted by a card company that used the word CHARITY to sell you over-priced cards.
On the 10th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Ten Christmas programmes written by Richard Curtis. Now, in your heart you know that Christmas is also a tragic time. It polarises people’s emotions. While the lucky have families and feasts and presents, others have no one and nothing and feel that separation more acutely than at any other time of the year. And did you see what I did there? In the middle of a (hopefully) witty blog, I have disarmed you by the juxtaposition of this token mention of something SAD. Well, Richard Curtis does this all the fucking time. If I’m watching Love Actually or Vicar of Dibley, I don’t want my escapist enjoyment soiled by Curtis sneaking up on me and throwing in a random sad scene to make me feel guilty, the sanctimonious, twee, middle-class bastard.
On the 9th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Nine pantomime dames. As a veteran of numerous fatuous and frivolous festive performances at Radlett Theatre, I can honestly say that being a Dad at a Christmas panto is the loneliest place in the whole world. Notwithstanding the occasional sexy witch, the whole experience induces a manic desire to scratch at your eyeballs with holly and then impale your head, ear-first, onto a reindeer’s antler. That moment when a 50 year old transvestite with no social parameters notices that you’re the only one not stood up to join in the Macarena, feels like the moment of death itself.
On the 8th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Eight Christmas sales. There’s nothing quite like seeing all the presents you bought the week BEFORE Christmas on sale at half the price two days AFTER Christmas. Thankfully, the current economic climate has brought us sales before Christmas this year, thus eliminating the need to lie to family members about having “ordered your present a week ago but it still hasn’t come,” knowing full well it’s still in the shop getting its price tag changed as you speak.
On the 7th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:The ITV premier of a film that came out seven years ago.
On the 6th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Six greedy people who have a birthday within a fortnight of Christmas Day. Just when you’ve written and posted off all your Christmas cards, and you’re literally sitting in the warm piss of your own satisfaction at how well-organised you are, you suddenly recall that you have to send BIRTHDAY cards as well. Each costing more than the £1.99 you paid for 30 Christmas cards and in some cases requiring an accompanying present; but your abused imagination has already been beaten lifeless with all the thinking needed to choose a Christmas present for these people. Bloody freaks. Have a birthday like the rest of us between February and November please!
On the 5th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Five Christmas cards for the neighbours. Three of which you never talk to. Two of which you can’t spell their names. And one of which, you’re not even sure which house they live in. You might have sent a 6th card, because you received one from “All at number 68” but as they can’t be arsed to write their fucking names (or yours), bollocks to them.
On the 4th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Four witty church signs. You know the type. Jesus is for life, not just for Christmas. Or some other such pun. Some effort by the church to show it is moving with the times. Give it a couple of years and they’ll be even more up to date with something like COME TO CHURCH AT CHRISTMAS FOR GUARANTEED CLUNGE.
On the 3rd day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Three days of the bin-men not collecting any rubbish at the one time of year when you have three times more than normal. OK, OK, so they deserve a holiday as well, our “refuse technicians.” Lucky for them, they (and the postmen, speeding around like the A-Team in their vans) don’t ask for a “Christmas box” like they used to, because I’d fucking oblige... after they knocked a slab off the top of my front wall with the bin last year and left it there, the careless cunts.
On the 2nd day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Two Christmas songs I find bearable out of about 200 that I keep having to listen to. My theory is that we all have our two. Mine are Fairytale of New York and Happy Xmas (War is over.) The rest are Jingle Hell. The one that sends me into a homicidal frenzy is not so much the song, but the video of Kim Wilde and Mel Smith singing Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree. I want to take that tree and beat Mel Smith around his flabby fucking gurning face with it. And then do the same with a large rock, just to be totally in keeping with the song title.
On the 1st day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:All the money back that I spent on presents for people that they didn’t want, so I can spend it on things that I want, but which no one bought for me. I bet even Jesus thought that.
Merry Christmas.
Monday 19 December 2011
Saturday 17 December 2011
The Toys of Christmas Past
It’s the late 70’s and I’m not yet ten years old and it’s Christmas Day and I’ve just pulled the appendage of a man wearing only a skimpy pair of pants.
No one ever questioned the absolute WRONGNESS of giving a young child STRETCH ARMSTRONG as a toy. In case you’re wondering, the concept of Stretch Armstrong was that you pulled his limbs and they stretched to about three feet long, because he was made of some kind of tough jelly-like polymer (Wikipedia says “gelled corn syrup.”) The stretching necessitated an almost total absence of clothes, but in those innocent days before gays were discovered a decade later (even camp TV celebrities like John Inman and Larry Grayson were considered no more than just “disinterested in women”) no one could accuse Stretch Armstrong of being any more homo-erotic than Mick McManus, the similarly skimpily-panted wrestler with the slicked-back, dyed-black Dracula hairstyle, who was a mainstay of World of Sport and another to appear on the “We-never-knew-he-was-gay” list of 70’s closet dwellers.
It made more sense when they developed a STRETCH HULK, so we got one of those another Xmas and threw darts at it to MAKE HULK MAD and watch the gel seep from his wounds before clotting.
Another favourite toy was the Six Million Dollar Man and his arch-enemy Maskatron (who never appeared in the series as I remember.) You could roll back the Bionic Man’s skin. On his arm, that is, to reveal his bionics. Not his willy. Like Stretch Armstrong and Action Man, Steve Austin had no willy, not even a bionic one. In the 80’s they started adding pants with a subtle bulge to these sorts of Action figures, thus making it worthwhile to have them dry-hump Barbie. So, I’m told.
Moving on...
But amongst my vast array of boys’ toys, I was once given my own Nookie Bear ventriloquist’s dummy. You could pull a string to make him go cross-eyed and you could make him talk without moving your lips any more than his real-life side-kick, Roger de Courcey. Because, as you’ll know if you ever saw him, Roger de Courcey perfected all the attributes of an excellent ventriloquist act except for one: The ability to speak without moving his lips. So, he had a huge Dutch porn-star’s moustache to try and hide this fact; but when he spoke, this wriggled around like the Magic Roundabout’s Dougal with epilepsy. Nookie Bear wasn’t the sort of toy you could have much fun with, though. Far better was my brother’s toy version of Rod Hull’s Emu, which made for many a great fight between us. (Emu always went for the face as well, the nasty bastard.)
Then there was Fuzzy Felt. This wasn’t a reference to the first time you got to 2nd base with a girl; it was a Velcro board on which you arranged shaped pieces of felt to make a themed scene. Equally (un)creative, was Etch-a-Sketch, with its famed design fault, an inability to draw diagonal lines without them looking like uncurled pubes.
Possibly the most disappointing toy was Scalextric. Absolute shit. I value the lesson it teaches you for later life, which is to slow down as you approach a corner. I do this in real-life perhaps too excessively, but my decision has been validated by the fact that I have yet to find myself spinning through the air after trying to take a corner in 4th gear at 30mph.
A close 2nd to Scalextric for disappointment was Mouse Trap. Once you set it up and set it off, then what the fuck were you supposed to do? Apparently you had to throw dice and move round the board before you were allowed to set it off. How shit is that? How was that marketed? “Buy Mousetrap – half a minute of fun for all ages.”
That was something that irked me as an adult, that sign on the packaging that read “Ages 7-70.” What; do you need a fucking license to play after you’ve turned 70 then? Do you have to re-apply to Waddington’s version of the DVLA for permission to be Professor Plum for another 5 years?
My third-place toy of disappointment would have to be a mini-snooker table. It was like playing snooker when you’re pissed. Any skill you might have had was negated by the crappy quality of the balls and baize and cue, which was great if you wanted HOURS of fun, because you’d never fucking pot anything and someone always knocked it and sent the balls all one inch sideways, so you’d have to restart anyway.
One for the real nostalgia-lovers amongst you, something that just hasn’t ever appeared since, is a board game called Buccaneer. The theme was pirates and buried treasure and I once took one of the game pieces, a plastic ruby, and put it up my nostril. I was probably about nine when I did this. Ignorant of the anatomy of the nose and throat, when I then lost that ruby completely, I believed that I was going to die. For days I was hoping it would reappear, just fall out my nostril, or I’d pick it out while rooting for a bogey. But it never reappeared and as the days turned into weeks, I suspected that perhaps it would be a long slow death that I’d suffer.
Right, I’m off to get the Argos catalogue to choose my favourite toy on each page and draw a biro circle around each one. Merry Toymas.
No one ever questioned the absolute WRONGNESS of giving a young child STRETCH ARMSTRONG as a toy. In case you’re wondering, the concept of Stretch Armstrong was that you pulled his limbs and they stretched to about three feet long, because he was made of some kind of tough jelly-like polymer (Wikipedia says “gelled corn syrup.”) The stretching necessitated an almost total absence of clothes, but in those innocent days before gays were discovered a decade later (even camp TV celebrities like John Inman and Larry Grayson were considered no more than just “disinterested in women”) no one could accuse Stretch Armstrong of being any more homo-erotic than Mick McManus, the similarly skimpily-panted wrestler with the slicked-back, dyed-black Dracula hairstyle, who was a mainstay of World of Sport and another to appear on the “We-never-knew-he-was-gay” list of 70’s closet dwellers.
It made more sense when they developed a STRETCH HULK, so we got one of those another Xmas and threw darts at it to MAKE HULK MAD and watch the gel seep from his wounds before clotting.
Another favourite toy was the Six Million Dollar Man and his arch-enemy Maskatron (who never appeared in the series as I remember.) You could roll back the Bionic Man’s skin. On his arm, that is, to reveal his bionics. Not his willy. Like Stretch Armstrong and Action Man, Steve Austin had no willy, not even a bionic one. In the 80’s they started adding pants with a subtle bulge to these sorts of Action figures, thus making it worthwhile to have them dry-hump Barbie. So, I’m told.
Moving on...
But amongst my vast array of boys’ toys, I was once given my own Nookie Bear ventriloquist’s dummy. You could pull a string to make him go cross-eyed and you could make him talk without moving your lips any more than his real-life side-kick, Roger de Courcey. Because, as you’ll know if you ever saw him, Roger de Courcey perfected all the attributes of an excellent ventriloquist act except for one: The ability to speak without moving his lips. So, he had a huge Dutch porn-star’s moustache to try and hide this fact; but when he spoke, this wriggled around like the Magic Roundabout’s Dougal with epilepsy. Nookie Bear wasn’t the sort of toy you could have much fun with, though. Far better was my brother’s toy version of Rod Hull’s Emu, which made for many a great fight between us. (Emu always went for the face as well, the nasty bastard.)
Then there was Fuzzy Felt. This wasn’t a reference to the first time you got to 2nd base with a girl; it was a Velcro board on which you arranged shaped pieces of felt to make a themed scene. Equally (un)creative, was Etch-a-Sketch, with its famed design fault, an inability to draw diagonal lines without them looking like uncurled pubes.
Possibly the most disappointing toy was Scalextric. Absolute shit. I value the lesson it teaches you for later life, which is to slow down as you approach a corner. I do this in real-life perhaps too excessively, but my decision has been validated by the fact that I have yet to find myself spinning through the air after trying to take a corner in 4th gear at 30mph.
A close 2nd to Scalextric for disappointment was Mouse Trap. Once you set it up and set it off, then what the fuck were you supposed to do? Apparently you had to throw dice and move round the board before you were allowed to set it off. How shit is that? How was that marketed? “Buy Mousetrap – half a minute of fun for all ages.”
That was something that irked me as an adult, that sign on the packaging that read “Ages 7-70.” What; do you need a fucking license to play after you’ve turned 70 then? Do you have to re-apply to Waddington’s version of the DVLA for permission to be Professor Plum for another 5 years?
My third-place toy of disappointment would have to be a mini-snooker table. It was like playing snooker when you’re pissed. Any skill you might have had was negated by the crappy quality of the balls and baize and cue, which was great if you wanted HOURS of fun, because you’d never fucking pot anything and someone always knocked it and sent the balls all one inch sideways, so you’d have to restart anyway.
One for the real nostalgia-lovers amongst you, something that just hasn’t ever appeared since, is a board game called Buccaneer. The theme was pirates and buried treasure and I once took one of the game pieces, a plastic ruby, and put it up my nostril. I was probably about nine when I did this. Ignorant of the anatomy of the nose and throat, when I then lost that ruby completely, I believed that I was going to die. For days I was hoping it would reappear, just fall out my nostril, or I’d pick it out while rooting for a bogey. But it never reappeared and as the days turned into weeks, I suspected that perhaps it would be a long slow death that I’d suffer.
Right, I’m off to get the Argos catalogue to choose my favourite toy on each page and draw a biro circle around each one. Merry Toymas.
Sunday 27 November 2011
The Bastardness of All-boys Religious Schools and the consequent crapness with girls
My parents made few fundamental errors in their youthful efforts to raise me, and I’m happy to say that I survived them all. Just.
The haze of cigarette smoke from womb to living room to dinner table failed to inflict lung disease or even asthma on me. The subjection at an early age to the “The Omen” and subsequent psychological trauma of being told that Damien was hiding in the dark in our house ensured that I was permanently one broken light-bulb away from shitting in my pants. But the decision to send me to an all-boys Catholic school may well have bestowed on me a useful academic education, but it made me hopelessly socially retarded when it came to talking to girls.
I was rubbish.
Not that the kindly, altruistic Jesuit priests of St ******** College were adverse to sex education. After embarrassingly but excitingly cringing while my parents signed a consent form to allow me to receive my first taste of sex education, our decrepit corpse of a biology teacher showed a video about sweating. Therefore, it was left to my peers to fill in the gaps, via the media of biro penises on every page in every textbook and the more worldly comedians in our year group telling jokes about prostitutes (which I heard as Protestants, naturally) and nob-nibbling.
It didn’t help that the school was 3 miles out of town, where our sister school (the convent which produced Mandy Smith, consenting bride of paedophile Stones bassist Bill Wyman) was situated. By a cruel twist of fate the timings of departure at the two schools precluded any opportunity to mingle with our female compatriots, except for the three gutter-mouthed and very obvious slappers who hung about the bus terminal and knew the hard lads from my year group.
By this stage I was living on the North Circular Road, six lanes of traffic three metres from the front gate and nowhere to hang around and meet local girls. So my first futile attempt to get a girlfriend was laughable in the extreme.
At this stage, let me point out that it wasn’t until I was 18 and at university that a female friend advised me that you don’t just “get a girlfriend” but instead you meet someone, you say hello, you get to know them and then you ask them out. At 13, I thought that you skip all of that and just ask them out.
So after idolising Dawn B***** on the bus for months I puffed up the courage to do just that. The whole conversation, as we passed in the street was as follows:
Me (mumbling too fast): Excuse me, do you want to go to cinema with me on Saturday?
Her: What?
Me: Do you want to go to cinema with me on Saturday?
Her (frowning incredulously): No.
This run of form continued for several years. Had I been a football team, I’d’ve been relegated on an annual basis until I was playing in the conference south with double-figure crowds and administration and ground-selling on the horizon. To meet girls, we’d walk around the local park at the wrong times or go into central London and stare out of the window like starving hyenas at anyone with boobs.
But eventually I was old enough to go to pubs and clubs and ACTUALLY meet more than one woman at a time. All you needed, I was conditioned to believe from popular culture (probably just crap sit-coms) was a clever and witty chat-up line.
Fucking hell! Which total bastard invented the concept of a chat-up line? Again, it was only later that I was told that the best chat-up line was “hello.” Not “my brother and I work in biscuit design and were wondering if you’d like to do some modelling work as part of our advertising campaign.”
Me and my equally crap droogs would sit at a table in a bar for hours mustering up the courage (meaning getting drunk enough to make an arse of ourselves) and striving to invent the one killer line that was needed in total isolation to get us some luck. This was on the back of meticulous pre-night-out routines, such as spending the afternoon in a pub, shaving just before going out and thereby cutting my face to ribbons and necessitating a cheap cologne-facial dip, and then sticking on the Led Zep while adorning myself in my “pulling” (Hawaiian) shirt and “pulling” (cowboy) boots.
I was rubbish.
My son is 15, has had a girlfriend for over a year (and others willing to take her place), a supremely laid-back competence in how to socialise with girls and he never, NEVER feels like shitting in his pants when we turn the lights out at home.
The haze of cigarette smoke from womb to living room to dinner table failed to inflict lung disease or even asthma on me. The subjection at an early age to the “The Omen” and subsequent psychological trauma of being told that Damien was hiding in the dark in our house ensured that I was permanently one broken light-bulb away from shitting in my pants. But the decision to send me to an all-boys Catholic school may well have bestowed on me a useful academic education, but it made me hopelessly socially retarded when it came to talking to girls.
I was rubbish.
Not that the kindly, altruistic Jesuit priests of St ******** College were adverse to sex education. After embarrassingly but excitingly cringing while my parents signed a consent form to allow me to receive my first taste of sex education, our decrepit corpse of a biology teacher showed a video about sweating. Therefore, it was left to my peers to fill in the gaps, via the media of biro penises on every page in every textbook and the more worldly comedians in our year group telling jokes about prostitutes (which I heard as Protestants, naturally) and nob-nibbling.
It didn’t help that the school was 3 miles out of town, where our sister school (the convent which produced Mandy Smith, consenting bride of paedophile Stones bassist Bill Wyman) was situated. By a cruel twist of fate the timings of departure at the two schools precluded any opportunity to mingle with our female compatriots, except for the three gutter-mouthed and very obvious slappers who hung about the bus terminal and knew the hard lads from my year group.
By this stage I was living on the North Circular Road, six lanes of traffic three metres from the front gate and nowhere to hang around and meet local girls. So my first futile attempt to get a girlfriend was laughable in the extreme.
At this stage, let me point out that it wasn’t until I was 18 and at university that a female friend advised me that you don’t just “get a girlfriend” but instead you meet someone, you say hello, you get to know them and then you ask them out. At 13, I thought that you skip all of that and just ask them out.
So after idolising Dawn B***** on the bus for months I puffed up the courage to do just that. The whole conversation, as we passed in the street was as follows:
Me (mumbling too fast): Excuse me, do you want to go to cinema with me on Saturday?
Her: What?
Me: Do you want to go to cinema with me on Saturday?
Her (frowning incredulously): No.
This run of form continued for several years. Had I been a football team, I’d’ve been relegated on an annual basis until I was playing in the conference south with double-figure crowds and administration and ground-selling on the horizon. To meet girls, we’d walk around the local park at the wrong times or go into central London and stare out of the window like starving hyenas at anyone with boobs.
But eventually I was old enough to go to pubs and clubs and ACTUALLY meet more than one woman at a time. All you needed, I was conditioned to believe from popular culture (probably just crap sit-coms) was a clever and witty chat-up line.
Fucking hell! Which total bastard invented the concept of a chat-up line? Again, it was only later that I was told that the best chat-up line was “hello.” Not “my brother and I work in biscuit design and were wondering if you’d like to do some modelling work as part of our advertising campaign.”
Me and my equally crap droogs would sit at a table in a bar for hours mustering up the courage (meaning getting drunk enough to make an arse of ourselves) and striving to invent the one killer line that was needed in total isolation to get us some luck. This was on the back of meticulous pre-night-out routines, such as spending the afternoon in a pub, shaving just before going out and thereby cutting my face to ribbons and necessitating a cheap cologne-facial dip, and then sticking on the Led Zep while adorning myself in my “pulling” (Hawaiian) shirt and “pulling” (cowboy) boots.
I was rubbish.
My son is 15, has had a girlfriend for over a year (and others willing to take her place), a supremely laid-back competence in how to socialise with girls and he never, NEVER feels like shitting in his pants when we turn the lights out at home.
Wednesday 26 October 2011
Fun Fascists
EVERYBODY PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR AND SAY “YEAH!”
I made the mistake at a young age of going to see Prince in concert. It was just at the wrong time, when he was veering away from the rock and psychedelic pop of Purple Rain and Paisley Park to become an exponent of that most loathsome of musical genres, DANCE MUSIC. (By that, I don’t mean music you CAN dance to, but instead music that you can ONLY dance to.) And as I stood there in Wembley Arena, aged 19, with a now ex-mate and his 16 year old girlfriend of the time (he was 21) I found myself appalled by the DEMANDS that Prince kept making on me as a paying member of the audience to either put my hands in the air or to shout YEAH, as if I was some kind of brainless fucking sheep, who’d collapse under any slight peer pressure and have all the decision-making and discriminating capabilities and individuality of a dog in need of a shit in a field full of shitting dogs.
As you can imagine, I refused. And never bought another Prince CD again.
This was the point in my life when I recognised my utter and inexorable disdain for what can only be identified as FUN FASCISM.
Since then, I have experienced many other zealous devotees of this social philosophy. People who nurse a fundamentalist set of beliefs in regard to the whole concept of FUN. Narrow-minded bigots who refuse to tolerate anyone else’s doctrines or practices, labelling everything that doesn’t match their definition of FUN as BORING. In their slightly wide-eyed and socially-retarded opinion, people are either FUN or BORING depending on what they are willing to do.
Fucking Fun Fascists.
They store in their tiny-sized under-developed brain-blobs the Fun Fascist version of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book or Hitler’s Mein Kampf – a detailed and unequivocally inflexible series of statements on how we should ALL have fun. And when Fun Fascists encounter each other, they reinforce their own prejudices, because they tend to carry EXACTLY the same Fun Fascist Bible in their minds.
For example, they would have dictated that I put my hands in the air and said yeah AND danced in the aisle at that Prince gig and indeed at all events I attend that involve music. Should I attend an event in which the music is not the type you can dance to, then it is BORING and I am BORING for going.
The Fun Fascists have a preference for what they like to call EXTROVERT behaviour, because EXTROVERT means FUN and INTROVERT means BORING. If these people had any ambitions towards political power, then they would sweep away democracy and INFLICT fun on us through a combination of biased PROPAGANDA and systematic, organised FEAR. They would use the FUN-POLICE to arrest anyone “not joining in” and send them for re-education in special camps, where we’d be made to wear stupid hats and be torturously “Dance-boarded” (forced to keep dancing for 48 hours when really you just want a sit down or a sleep.)
Fun Fascism would stipulate monthly pilgrimages to theme parks, the compulsory car-jazzling of all private vehicles, the use of abbreviated forenames or even nicknames as the correct way for companies to formally address their customers, the abolition of the speed limit and the castration of anyone refusing to participate in extreme sports.
Fun Fascists, due to religious-like indoctrination, will tend to spew out verbatim the dictums of their philosophy:
“Cheer up!”
“Smile!”
“Come on, let your hair down!”
You can almost hear the same authoritative menace in their voice as you would have done from the SS, the Khmer Rouge or Mao’s Red Guard. But maybe these are the wrong analogies to make. These dictatorships were relatively short-lived. My fear is that the Fun Fascists will hold sway over our lives for as long as the Catholic Church did in Western Europe. Expect the burning of HERETIC INTROVERTS. Expect the formation of a ruthless FUN INQUISITION to put people on the rack and ask “What did you do last weekend?” Expect your children to be brainwashed into believing that they will go to Hell if they don’t spend their half their lives in hedonistic dicking around and the other half Facebooking about it.
OK, perhaps I am scaremongering a little. These people cannot take over, because by their very nature they are too inept to do so. There is a simple method of combating their irritatingly trite and gormless optimism and that is to answer their demands to have fun THEIR WAY with the same response I made to Prince back in 1990: FUCK OFF.
Thus will the menace of Fun Fascism be countered!
I made the mistake at a young age of going to see Prince in concert. It was just at the wrong time, when he was veering away from the rock and psychedelic pop of Purple Rain and Paisley Park to become an exponent of that most loathsome of musical genres, DANCE MUSIC. (By that, I don’t mean music you CAN dance to, but instead music that you can ONLY dance to.) And as I stood there in Wembley Arena, aged 19, with a now ex-mate and his 16 year old girlfriend of the time (he was 21) I found myself appalled by the DEMANDS that Prince kept making on me as a paying member of the audience to either put my hands in the air or to shout YEAH, as if I was some kind of brainless fucking sheep, who’d collapse under any slight peer pressure and have all the decision-making and discriminating capabilities and individuality of a dog in need of a shit in a field full of shitting dogs.
As you can imagine, I refused. And never bought another Prince CD again.
This was the point in my life when I recognised my utter and inexorable disdain for what can only be identified as FUN FASCISM.
Since then, I have experienced many other zealous devotees of this social philosophy. People who nurse a fundamentalist set of beliefs in regard to the whole concept of FUN. Narrow-minded bigots who refuse to tolerate anyone else’s doctrines or practices, labelling everything that doesn’t match their definition of FUN as BORING. In their slightly wide-eyed and socially-retarded opinion, people are either FUN or BORING depending on what they are willing to do.
Fucking Fun Fascists.
They store in their tiny-sized under-developed brain-blobs the Fun Fascist version of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book or Hitler’s Mein Kampf – a detailed and unequivocally inflexible series of statements on how we should ALL have fun. And when Fun Fascists encounter each other, they reinforce their own prejudices, because they tend to carry EXACTLY the same Fun Fascist Bible in their minds.
For example, they would have dictated that I put my hands in the air and said yeah AND danced in the aisle at that Prince gig and indeed at all events I attend that involve music. Should I attend an event in which the music is not the type you can dance to, then it is BORING and I am BORING for going.
The Fun Fascists have a preference for what they like to call EXTROVERT behaviour, because EXTROVERT means FUN and INTROVERT means BORING. If these people had any ambitions towards political power, then they would sweep away democracy and INFLICT fun on us through a combination of biased PROPAGANDA and systematic, organised FEAR. They would use the FUN-POLICE to arrest anyone “not joining in” and send them for re-education in special camps, where we’d be made to wear stupid hats and be torturously “Dance-boarded” (forced to keep dancing for 48 hours when really you just want a sit down or a sleep.)
Fun Fascism would stipulate monthly pilgrimages to theme parks, the compulsory car-jazzling of all private vehicles, the use of abbreviated forenames or even nicknames as the correct way for companies to formally address their customers, the abolition of the speed limit and the castration of anyone refusing to participate in extreme sports.
Fun Fascists, due to religious-like indoctrination, will tend to spew out verbatim the dictums of their philosophy:
“Cheer up!”
“Smile!”
“Come on, let your hair down!”
You can almost hear the same authoritative menace in their voice as you would have done from the SS, the Khmer Rouge or Mao’s Red Guard. But maybe these are the wrong analogies to make. These dictatorships were relatively short-lived. My fear is that the Fun Fascists will hold sway over our lives for as long as the Catholic Church did in Western Europe. Expect the burning of HERETIC INTROVERTS. Expect the formation of a ruthless FUN INQUISITION to put people on the rack and ask “What did you do last weekend?” Expect your children to be brainwashed into believing that they will go to Hell if they don’t spend their half their lives in hedonistic dicking around and the other half Facebooking about it.
OK, perhaps I am scaremongering a little. These people cannot take over, because by their very nature they are too inept to do so. There is a simple method of combating their irritatingly trite and gormless optimism and that is to answer their demands to have fun THEIR WAY with the same response I made to Prince back in 1990: FUCK OFF.
Thus will the menace of Fun Fascism be countered!
Wednesday 19 October 2011
Star Wars: Another Bastardised Version
Stop reading now if (a) you hate Star Wars, (b) you’ve never seen Star Wars or (c) you’ve had a bellyful of Star Wars parody and satire these last 34 years.
The rest of you, strap on your Millennium Falcon seat beats and prepare to be taken into Hyper-farce. Both of you.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, but coincidentally one with humanoid life forms, the same political concepts as Earth and common use of the English language (my God those Victorian missionaries got everywhere didn’t they)...
(cue music)
Star Wars opens with these two robots being shot at by laser guns. Your first thought is that the technology is pretty bloody advanced for 1977, until you realise that the guns don’t shoot straight. C-3PO and R2-D2 walk through the cross-fire and don’t even get hit. C-3PO commences his bleating and belly-aching, a galling habit he maintains without respite for 6 films. Clearly he is homosexual but his circuitry refuses to acknowledge this (it recognises binary though) and consequently he is suffering from a crisis of sexual identity, which makes him socially awkward and generally uptight. R2-D2 just beeps. The original novel was written in the first person singular from R2’s perspective, which is why it didn’t sell very well.
Princess Leia is now seen downloading some tunes from her USB into R2-D2, before running away at the sight of C-3PO (like he’s actually scary) and then getting captured by the film’s ultimate bastard, Darth Vader.
Now here’s a complex character amongst all the 2-dimensional ones. So complex in fact that 5 actors have to play him over the two trilogies of films, including a creepy brat of a kid, Hayden Christensen (so wooden he uses Pledge as a deodorant), the Green Cross Code Man, the Lion King’s dad and finally some innocuously avuncular-looking Johnny Morriss type who’d make a great Worther’s Original advert star if it wasn’t for the horror-film scarring to his head.
The scene shifts to Tunisia, where the two robot droids have landed and are captured by some of the dirtiest children you’ve ever seen, even smellier-looking than a kid I went to school with who we called Flump. This parentless band of shabby juveniles is named after the film which George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had been planning to work on together previous to this, called Jaw-Wars. (Artistic differences caused a rift and they went their separate ways until teaming up later to write the script for a Han Solo spin-off sit-com.)
The droids are then sold to Luke Skywalker’s uncle. They live on a moisture farm, which is like a real farm but without trampled cow shit and a suspicion of incest. Water is a rare commodity in this part of Tunisia, although you wouldn’t think it from the amount Aunt Beru uses to boil her vegetables in the next scene.
Luke discovers Princess Leia’s music downloads inside R2-D2, who then runs off (as far as that is possible with wheels that go a top speed of 2 mph) to find his favourite English actor, Sir Lawrence Olivier. Instead, he has to make do with Alec Guinness who suggests that they all go and rescue this Princess because she sounds hot. She isn’t, but that’s not the point; Luke is pissed off living on a moisture farm in the arse end of beyond, as you would be, and thinks fuck it, why not?
They drive into town, play a trick on some dumb Stormtroopers and find a pub. Luke gets ID’d as he looks about 17 and acts even younger, so Alec Guinness take out one of those fluorescent strip-lighting bulbs and burns off some ugly bastard’s arm. He then persuades a mini-cab driver called Han Solo to take them to Alderaan, Princess Leia’s home planet. Obviously, he should have rung a proper cab firm, because there’s no guarantee that this Han Solo is even insured to drive a spaceship. Furthermore and rather disconcertingly, Han’s BFF is a growling bear (or a bare growler, one or the other) named Chewie, a bit like the sweets. Chewbacca (his full name) really challenges the audience’s ability to suspend its disbelief, because in reality an animal that hairy would either have a prominent pair of pink buttocks protruding from beneath its fur or it’d have dry, hardened clagnets of shit stuck to the back of its thighs.
This motley crew of misfits then fly out of Tunisia’s main airport towards what remains of Alderaan. The government had actually blown up the planet earlier in the film as an austerity measure and tortured Princess Leia with one of those old globe-shaped security cameras you used to get in Boots, only with needles sticking out of it.
On the flight, Alec Guinness converts the impressionable young Luke to the same religious cult of which he and Luke’s dad were members. He basically tells some lies to Luke about the father he never knew, because it’s Darth Vader and well, how do you tell a kid his Dad’s such a horrible cunt?
Anyway, they get sucked into the government’s huge sports complex, the Death Star, which was built for the Galactic Olympics and cost a bloody fortune, but at least its huge planet-destroying laser gun works. Once inside our band of heroes split up to look for Princess Leia, thinking that the first to find her gets to ask her out. C-3PO is not interested, for several reasons, but Luke is. Luckily he never ends up shagging her; although with that farming background he probably wouldn’t have flinched to discover later that she’s his sister.
After some running around and shooting lasers they manage to get her back to the spaceship, but Alec Guinness has wandered away to turn off the Death Star’s sucky device and finds himself confronted by Darth Vader. They both take out their fluorescent strip-lighting bulbs and have a sword fight. By the standards of any such contest, this would never have been worth the £15 SKY charged for Pay-per-view. Audley Harrison dances better than this. In the end, Darth Vader wins because Alec Guinness lets him, but clearly disappears down a trap door in the floor-tiles. In his place, wearing his brown hoody and holding his bulb is Debbie McGee. Darth Vader thinks to himself WTF?
The others escape and fly off to the rebel base. The rebels are essentially an anti-government organisation, a bit like UK Uncut, but with X-Wing fighters. They have a space battle with government troops in Thai-fighters, which are smaller and a little spicey. In the end, Luke blows up the Death Star and Darth Vader escapes vowing to build an even bigger one once they’ve raised enough taxes to do so.
The film ends with everyone getting a pat on the back, except Chewbacca, who has a pat on his arse. A dry, hardened Wookie pat.
The rest of you, strap on your Millennium Falcon seat beats and prepare to be taken into Hyper-farce. Both of you.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, but coincidentally one with humanoid life forms, the same political concepts as Earth and common use of the English language (my God those Victorian missionaries got everywhere didn’t they)...
(cue music)
Star Wars opens with these two robots being shot at by laser guns. Your first thought is that the technology is pretty bloody advanced for 1977, until you realise that the guns don’t shoot straight. C-3PO and R2-D2 walk through the cross-fire and don’t even get hit. C-3PO commences his bleating and belly-aching, a galling habit he maintains without respite for 6 films. Clearly he is homosexual but his circuitry refuses to acknowledge this (it recognises binary though) and consequently he is suffering from a crisis of sexual identity, which makes him socially awkward and generally uptight. R2-D2 just beeps. The original novel was written in the first person singular from R2’s perspective, which is why it didn’t sell very well.
Princess Leia is now seen downloading some tunes from her USB into R2-D2, before running away at the sight of C-3PO (like he’s actually scary) and then getting captured by the film’s ultimate bastard, Darth Vader.
Now here’s a complex character amongst all the 2-dimensional ones. So complex in fact that 5 actors have to play him over the two trilogies of films, including a creepy brat of a kid, Hayden Christensen (so wooden he uses Pledge as a deodorant), the Green Cross Code Man, the Lion King’s dad and finally some innocuously avuncular-looking Johnny Morriss type who’d make a great Worther’s Original advert star if it wasn’t for the horror-film scarring to his head.
The scene shifts to Tunisia, where the two robot droids have landed and are captured by some of the dirtiest children you’ve ever seen, even smellier-looking than a kid I went to school with who we called Flump. This parentless band of shabby juveniles is named after the film which George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had been planning to work on together previous to this, called Jaw-Wars. (Artistic differences caused a rift and they went their separate ways until teaming up later to write the script for a Han Solo spin-off sit-com.)
The droids are then sold to Luke Skywalker’s uncle. They live on a moisture farm, which is like a real farm but without trampled cow shit and a suspicion of incest. Water is a rare commodity in this part of Tunisia, although you wouldn’t think it from the amount Aunt Beru uses to boil her vegetables in the next scene.
Luke discovers Princess Leia’s music downloads inside R2-D2, who then runs off (as far as that is possible with wheels that go a top speed of 2 mph) to find his favourite English actor, Sir Lawrence Olivier. Instead, he has to make do with Alec Guinness who suggests that they all go and rescue this Princess because she sounds hot. She isn’t, but that’s not the point; Luke is pissed off living on a moisture farm in the arse end of beyond, as you would be, and thinks fuck it, why not?
They drive into town, play a trick on some dumb Stormtroopers and find a pub. Luke gets ID’d as he looks about 17 and acts even younger, so Alec Guinness take out one of those fluorescent strip-lighting bulbs and burns off some ugly bastard’s arm. He then persuades a mini-cab driver called Han Solo to take them to Alderaan, Princess Leia’s home planet. Obviously, he should have rung a proper cab firm, because there’s no guarantee that this Han Solo is even insured to drive a spaceship. Furthermore and rather disconcertingly, Han’s BFF is a growling bear (or a bare growler, one or the other) named Chewie, a bit like the sweets. Chewbacca (his full name) really challenges the audience’s ability to suspend its disbelief, because in reality an animal that hairy would either have a prominent pair of pink buttocks protruding from beneath its fur or it’d have dry, hardened clagnets of shit stuck to the back of its thighs.
This motley crew of misfits then fly out of Tunisia’s main airport towards what remains of Alderaan. The government had actually blown up the planet earlier in the film as an austerity measure and tortured Princess Leia with one of those old globe-shaped security cameras you used to get in Boots, only with needles sticking out of it.
On the flight, Alec Guinness converts the impressionable young Luke to the same religious cult of which he and Luke’s dad were members. He basically tells some lies to Luke about the father he never knew, because it’s Darth Vader and well, how do you tell a kid his Dad’s such a horrible cunt?
Anyway, they get sucked into the government’s huge sports complex, the Death Star, which was built for the Galactic Olympics and cost a bloody fortune, but at least its huge planet-destroying laser gun works. Once inside our band of heroes split up to look for Princess Leia, thinking that the first to find her gets to ask her out. C-3PO is not interested, for several reasons, but Luke is. Luckily he never ends up shagging her; although with that farming background he probably wouldn’t have flinched to discover later that she’s his sister.
After some running around and shooting lasers they manage to get her back to the spaceship, but Alec Guinness has wandered away to turn off the Death Star’s sucky device and finds himself confronted by Darth Vader. They both take out their fluorescent strip-lighting bulbs and have a sword fight. By the standards of any such contest, this would never have been worth the £15 SKY charged for Pay-per-view. Audley Harrison dances better than this. In the end, Darth Vader wins because Alec Guinness lets him, but clearly disappears down a trap door in the floor-tiles. In his place, wearing his brown hoody and holding his bulb is Debbie McGee. Darth Vader thinks to himself WTF?
The others escape and fly off to the rebel base. The rebels are essentially an anti-government organisation, a bit like UK Uncut, but with X-Wing fighters. They have a space battle with government troops in Thai-fighters, which are smaller and a little spicey. In the end, Luke blows up the Death Star and Darth Vader escapes vowing to build an even bigger one once they’ve raised enough taxes to do so.
The film ends with everyone getting a pat on the back, except Chewbacca, who has a pat on his arse. A dry, hardened Wookie pat.
Wednesday 12 October 2011
Bastards that Piss on your Bonfires
You might have noticed that like most people I vacillate between doggy-paddling in the quicksand of morose cynicism and shuffling my soul in bouts of pants-soaking delight. For all that I lace my glass of dislike with a vial of vicious self-righteous disgust and hostility, when I like something a lot, I LOVE it. And that means that anyone who spoils my beautiful and gleeful moments of adoration should have all of their human rights suspended just long enough for me to exact revenge with the sort of fury and rage that would make the gods of ancient Greece feel slightly uncomfortable to witness.
This is why I refuse to go to the cinema. I like to immerse myself in a film. Without distraction. But cinemas INVITE distraction. They market themselves at the Pavlov’s Dogs section of society, who brainlessly allow themselves to be conditioned into associating the watching of a film with the desire to eat and drink. It’s never lunch time or dinner time and yet the moron-neurons are ignited by the sight of hilariously over-priced and over-sized buckets of popcorn and carbonated kids’ pop in the foyer; so they roll up with their “Fleece me and Feed Me – I’m a Flid” faces on, purchase a wholesaler’s lorry-load of crap and set up snack-camp in the auditorium.
Ironically, the pre-film trailers and information announcements include a plea to turn off your mobile in case it disturbs the enjoyment of others. After all, you wouldn’t want to punctuate the crunching and slurping and chewing and general fidgety fucking about of the thoughtless cinema snack-fiends with the chiming of a text, would you?
Fortunately, I only love a few films and can usually wait many months before one that I want to see appears on Sky Box Office and can be viewed without the pernicious penetration of my personal space by some popcorn-hoovering prick sitting a straw’s length from me.
But with music, it’s a whole different matter. I don’t play it at home unless the family are out, because Mrs Bastard and Child 2 (female variety) are both likely to walk into the lounge and slice through my soul-swept trance of “at-oneness-with-the-universe” with a casual nuke-bomb of a question such as, “What’s THIS?” Which really means “What’s this shit?” At that very moment my universe collapses, I can listen to no more and I want to set fire to all my CDs in sulky protest at this cold stabbing of my spirit.
So, I listen to my CDs in the car. And even though the roads are populated by the same breed of self-absorbed selfish cunts as cinemas, my encounters with them might be equally unsettling but they are at least usually fleeting. Moreover, I tend to enjoy recompense through some petty method of counter-irritating the bastards of the road in a way that is not possible with the bastards of the cinema. So, I enjoy and LOVE listening to my music in the car; and by MY music I mean the CD I have chosen to play and NOT the radio. NEVER the radio. That’s like inviting the wankers in, that is.
The problem is that when you become completely caught up in the music of a particular band or artist and you go to see them in concert, you want... sorry, “I” want... to listen to them with the same undisturbed concentration as I do in the car. I admit, I AM being a little precious here. But my favourite artists are not the ones who belt out sing-a-long anthems in football stadia, nor are they the ones who invite you to SAY YEAH and WAVE YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR or even sing-a-long. (OK, singing along to some tunes is appropriate.) No, the gigs I end up at are in small or middle sized venues and usually have a smattering of quieter ballads that wrench at your heart with an agonizing beauty...
Unless some cunt is talking.
What is it with people who talk through quiet songs at gigs? GO TO THE FUCKING PUB AND TALK, YOU SOCIALLY UNAWARE RETARDS!
Now, I’m quite aware that I must be coming across ever so slightly misanthropic. I’m not. I like people. But I kind of want the bastards nowhere near me when I’m trying to enjoy myself. So, if anyone knows of a restaurant with 10 metre gaps between tables, a beach with a “first-on-only-on” rule, a pub with a “no wankers” sign outside or a tourist attraction with no tourists, then please tell me where it is.
And I’ll go along with some crisps and a beer and sit there shouting YEAH with my hands in the air.
This is why I refuse to go to the cinema. I like to immerse myself in a film. Without distraction. But cinemas INVITE distraction. They market themselves at the Pavlov’s Dogs section of society, who brainlessly allow themselves to be conditioned into associating the watching of a film with the desire to eat and drink. It’s never lunch time or dinner time and yet the moron-neurons are ignited by the sight of hilariously over-priced and over-sized buckets of popcorn and carbonated kids’ pop in the foyer; so they roll up with their “Fleece me and Feed Me – I’m a Flid” faces on, purchase a wholesaler’s lorry-load of crap and set up snack-camp in the auditorium.
Ironically, the pre-film trailers and information announcements include a plea to turn off your mobile in case it disturbs the enjoyment of others. After all, you wouldn’t want to punctuate the crunching and slurping and chewing and general fidgety fucking about of the thoughtless cinema snack-fiends with the chiming of a text, would you?
Fortunately, I only love a few films and can usually wait many months before one that I want to see appears on Sky Box Office and can be viewed without the pernicious penetration of my personal space by some popcorn-hoovering prick sitting a straw’s length from me.
But with music, it’s a whole different matter. I don’t play it at home unless the family are out, because Mrs Bastard and Child 2 (female variety) are both likely to walk into the lounge and slice through my soul-swept trance of “at-oneness-with-the-universe” with a casual nuke-bomb of a question such as, “What’s THIS?” Which really means “What’s this shit?” At that very moment my universe collapses, I can listen to no more and I want to set fire to all my CDs in sulky protest at this cold stabbing of my spirit.
So, I listen to my CDs in the car. And even though the roads are populated by the same breed of self-absorbed selfish cunts as cinemas, my encounters with them might be equally unsettling but they are at least usually fleeting. Moreover, I tend to enjoy recompense through some petty method of counter-irritating the bastards of the road in a way that is not possible with the bastards of the cinema. So, I enjoy and LOVE listening to my music in the car; and by MY music I mean the CD I have chosen to play and NOT the radio. NEVER the radio. That’s like inviting the wankers in, that is.
The problem is that when you become completely caught up in the music of a particular band or artist and you go to see them in concert, you want... sorry, “I” want... to listen to them with the same undisturbed concentration as I do in the car. I admit, I AM being a little precious here. But my favourite artists are not the ones who belt out sing-a-long anthems in football stadia, nor are they the ones who invite you to SAY YEAH and WAVE YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR or even sing-a-long. (OK, singing along to some tunes is appropriate.) No, the gigs I end up at are in small or middle sized venues and usually have a smattering of quieter ballads that wrench at your heart with an agonizing beauty...
Unless some cunt is talking.
What is it with people who talk through quiet songs at gigs? GO TO THE FUCKING PUB AND TALK, YOU SOCIALLY UNAWARE RETARDS!
Now, I’m quite aware that I must be coming across ever so slightly misanthropic. I’m not. I like people. But I kind of want the bastards nowhere near me when I’m trying to enjoy myself. So, if anyone knows of a restaurant with 10 metre gaps between tables, a beach with a “first-on-only-on” rule, a pub with a “no wankers” sign outside or a tourist attraction with no tourists, then please tell me where it is.
And I’ll go along with some crisps and a beer and sit there shouting YEAH with my hands in the air.
Tuesday 4 October 2011
1970’s Working-class treats
It was that decade in which the generation that grew up never having it so good, sought some mild middle-class comforts for their shaggy-haired, flared-jeans-clad kids (like me) and in the process instilled a sense of low expectation in regard to the concept of luxury.
Tinned fruit salad for instance. The thrill of eating just one of the meagre number of cherries you’d find in a tin of fruit salad was beyond any experience I’ve had since from Tesco’s Finest range. See, I expect that to be good. But the sheer scarcity of cherries in any tin (relative to grapes) bestowed on that product a special character that you just cannot recreate in our disgustingly opulent supermarket aisles these days.
The gradual integration of “dessert” into our routine tea-time meals was a defining feature of the period. Fuck Jamie Mockney-Twat Dick-Face Oliver, I was cooking while he was still scooping the shit out of his own nappy and eating it. I handled an electric hand-whisk like Hurricane Higgins handled a snooker cue, and I could conjure up ANY Angel Delight from the whole range of four flavours. If Dad won on the horses that week, Mum might even let me open the fruit salad and use the sole cherry to decorate this dessert. (If he lost, we’d make do with a few Galaxy buttons.)
Some people have likened Primula cheese spread in a tube to chilled smegma. But when they started adding bits of ham to this product, then JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH that was it for my boring old crisp sandwiches at school, I was having cheese spread AND ham from ONE tube in my Mother’s Pride every day for the next five years.
As for drinks, Christmas always provided an occasion to break out the treats. Aged about 7 or 8, I’d knock back a whole BabySham (which came in wonderful bottle-shaped glass thimbles) and a glass of Advocaat and lemonade. A Snowball may have looked like whipped-up phlegm and jizz, but it was the TASTE OF CHRISTMAS. Not even Cresta’s range of pop from the milkman could beat that.
But you didn’t need to wait for Christmas to enjoy a Lucozade, you just had to wait until you were ill. In those days, it wasn’t a recreational drink. It was medicinal. And the bottles were mysteriously housed within a film of frustratingly sticky orange plastic wrapping, which so pissed you off that you just had to finish the whole bottle as your mum was having none of that nonsense of opening and closing it and getting increasingly sticky at each attempt.
These were the treats of the kitchen, compensating for the fact that it was only on your caravan holiday that you got to eat out in a restaurant and even then it was always highlighted by your dad that the gammon and chips was the most reasonably priced at £1.50 a plate, hint hint.
Mum and dad had their own treats, their own moments of consumerist infidelity. True, they needed an ashtray and a large one at that (or else they’d have to stand up during The Duchess of Duke Street to empty it) but did they really have to buy an ashtray STAND to put alongside the sofa? And as much as it got good use, a cigarette lighter that was the size and weight of an adult’s bowling ball was perhaps rather decadent and impractical. But then we lived in a house with a waste disposal unit. We had all the fucking mod cons.
And our car had a tape player. Not that my parents owned more than about three tapes and each of these would have been chewed up in it, because every tape player chewed tapes at some point. Luckily the seatbelt laws allowed one of the kids to climb through from the back seat and deal with this problem. My first tape was the Baron Knights. A comedy treat that was.
And on that note, I’d like to say to any of you Billy Two Shits Big Bollocks who have just gone out and bought some new iphone 4S or whatever it is you’re being fisted for, you’ve been spoilt to the point of cuntdom and you’ll never see the beauty or feel the joy in a Kit Kat that they’ve forgotten to put the wafer in. I pity you.
Tinned fruit salad for instance. The thrill of eating just one of the meagre number of cherries you’d find in a tin of fruit salad was beyond any experience I’ve had since from Tesco’s Finest range. See, I expect that to be good. But the sheer scarcity of cherries in any tin (relative to grapes) bestowed on that product a special character that you just cannot recreate in our disgustingly opulent supermarket aisles these days.
The gradual integration of “dessert” into our routine tea-time meals was a defining feature of the period. Fuck Jamie Mockney-Twat Dick-Face Oliver, I was cooking while he was still scooping the shit out of his own nappy and eating it. I handled an electric hand-whisk like Hurricane Higgins handled a snooker cue, and I could conjure up ANY Angel Delight from the whole range of four flavours. If Dad won on the horses that week, Mum might even let me open the fruit salad and use the sole cherry to decorate this dessert. (If he lost, we’d make do with a few Galaxy buttons.)
Some people have likened Primula cheese spread in a tube to chilled smegma. But when they started adding bits of ham to this product, then JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH that was it for my boring old crisp sandwiches at school, I was having cheese spread AND ham from ONE tube in my Mother’s Pride every day for the next five years.
As for drinks, Christmas always provided an occasion to break out the treats. Aged about 7 or 8, I’d knock back a whole BabySham (which came in wonderful bottle-shaped glass thimbles) and a glass of Advocaat and lemonade. A Snowball may have looked like whipped-up phlegm and jizz, but it was the TASTE OF CHRISTMAS. Not even Cresta’s range of pop from the milkman could beat that.
But you didn’t need to wait for Christmas to enjoy a Lucozade, you just had to wait until you were ill. In those days, it wasn’t a recreational drink. It was medicinal. And the bottles were mysteriously housed within a film of frustratingly sticky orange plastic wrapping, which so pissed you off that you just had to finish the whole bottle as your mum was having none of that nonsense of opening and closing it and getting increasingly sticky at each attempt.
These were the treats of the kitchen, compensating for the fact that it was only on your caravan holiday that you got to eat out in a restaurant and even then it was always highlighted by your dad that the gammon and chips was the most reasonably priced at £1.50 a plate, hint hint.
Mum and dad had their own treats, their own moments of consumerist infidelity. True, they needed an ashtray and a large one at that (or else they’d have to stand up during The Duchess of Duke Street to empty it) but did they really have to buy an ashtray STAND to put alongside the sofa? And as much as it got good use, a cigarette lighter that was the size and weight of an adult’s bowling ball was perhaps rather decadent and impractical. But then we lived in a house with a waste disposal unit. We had all the fucking mod cons.
And our car had a tape player. Not that my parents owned more than about three tapes and each of these would have been chewed up in it, because every tape player chewed tapes at some point. Luckily the seatbelt laws allowed one of the kids to climb through from the back seat and deal with this problem. My first tape was the Baron Knights. A comedy treat that was.
And on that note, I’d like to say to any of you Billy Two Shits Big Bollocks who have just gone out and bought some new iphone 4S or whatever it is you’re being fisted for, you’ve been spoilt to the point of cuntdom and you’ll never see the beauty or feel the joy in a Kit Kat that they’ve forgotten to put the wafer in. I pity you.
Sunday 25 September 2011
Billy “Two Shits” Big Bollocks
We’ve all met one, haven’t we. Mr Big Bollocks. A man of wealth and tastelessness. If you ever say you’ve had a shit, he’ll say he’s had two. Mr Two-Shits requires a spacious car to house his obese ego. His car is better than your car, it’s faster and it’s worth more. Not that he paid the full amount, because he KNOWS SOMEONE and doesn’t get mugged off. He might not be able to squeeze this over-sized shiny cock-bucket into a parking space (which is why he parks diagonally across two, usually parent and child or disabled ones) but he’ll squeeze it into any conversation.
And these conversations tend to be one-way. You’re not more than his verbal wank-sock. He knows more than you about everything that’s he’s interested in and anything else is of no worth; so he’ll nurse no curiosity for what you have to say. Prices are his only conversational Viagra, so he’d only want to know what you’ve paid for something so that he can belittle you for owning a less expensive thing than he has or paying more than he did for the same thing because you don’t KNOW SOMEONE. Plus, he’s probably got the PROPER one and you haven’t.
Generally, he will know the cost of everything and the value of fuck-all. Because in his little piss-puddle of materialistic self-aggrandisement, the whole concept of values would drown like a sea leviathan in such shallow waters. Value is also statistical. He’ll bark numbers at you like an episode of Sesame Street. How many people he manages, how much he earns, how many other measures of cock-substitute THINGS he has a mountainous surplus of.
With the aesthetic appreciation of an arid SHIT-BRICK, he will own the biggest flat-screen wall-mounted surround-sound fucking full of do-dahs telly box going and he will watch NOTHING on it, because he’s always out making money, working hard and playing hard, like a cunt from a manly deodorant advert. Whatever obscenely costly gadget-infested music player he owns, he will play his Coldplay and Lighthouse Family downloads on; because he is so barren of musical taste that only something so insipidly vacuous but stylishly crisp and emotionless could provide the wallpaper to his life. Every other album he downloads is a greatest hits compilation.
You bullied him at school and so it’s all your fault. Now, get out of the fast lane, because he’s topping 100, on his mobile and tailgating you like his Land Cruiser’s about to sodomise the boot of your inferior existence.
And these conversations tend to be one-way. You’re not more than his verbal wank-sock. He knows more than you about everything that’s he’s interested in and anything else is of no worth; so he’ll nurse no curiosity for what you have to say. Prices are his only conversational Viagra, so he’d only want to know what you’ve paid for something so that he can belittle you for owning a less expensive thing than he has or paying more than he did for the same thing because you don’t KNOW SOMEONE. Plus, he’s probably got the PROPER one and you haven’t.
Generally, he will know the cost of everything and the value of fuck-all. Because in his little piss-puddle of materialistic self-aggrandisement, the whole concept of values would drown like a sea leviathan in such shallow waters. Value is also statistical. He’ll bark numbers at you like an episode of Sesame Street. How many people he manages, how much he earns, how many other measures of cock-substitute THINGS he has a mountainous surplus of.
With the aesthetic appreciation of an arid SHIT-BRICK, he will own the biggest flat-screen wall-mounted surround-sound fucking full of do-dahs telly box going and he will watch NOTHING on it, because he’s always out making money, working hard and playing hard, like a cunt from a manly deodorant advert. Whatever obscenely costly gadget-infested music player he owns, he will play his Coldplay and Lighthouse Family downloads on; because he is so barren of musical taste that only something so insipidly vacuous but stylishly crisp and emotionless could provide the wallpaper to his life. Every other album he downloads is a greatest hits compilation.
You bullied him at school and so it’s all your fault. Now, get out of the fast lane, because he’s topping 100, on his mobile and tailgating you like his Land Cruiser’s about to sodomise the boot of your inferior existence.
Saturday 10 September 2011
Public Toilets, Peer Pressure, Poo, Piss and Penises
One of the many (two) suits I wear to work is a kind of light grey. It is almost impossible to negotiate a piss without at least one wayward drop being conspicuously blotted up by the material around my flies and forcing me to spend a minute in a limbo dancer’s pose beneath the hand drier to avoid any subsequent public disgust and personal humiliation.
This situation would be worse if I wasn’t more disposed towards using a trap rather than a urinal. However, there’s an unwritten law for men that demands that cubicles exist purely to cater for number two type ablutions and if all you need is a tinkle, then you use the urinal. If you don’t, the logical and totally just assumption is that you have a small penis.
What kind of retarded logic creates a hypothesis claiming that the reluctance to stand alongside other blokes with everyone’s cock out is proof of an admission of having a walnut whip shaped one-incher buried out of sight in your pubic forest? Oh, you’ve gone for a piss in the cubicle? You don’t want us to see your willy? Why’s that? Not that anyone looks, but the corner of your eye tells you straight away when someone’s unleashed a beast and yes it does cause you to change your angle of approach a little in the opposite direction so as to tacitly relay the message to your well-endowed urinal neighbour that the only reason why he can’t see yours out of the corner of HIS eye is because you’re stood at 30 degrees to his own line of fire.
Urinals ensure that you walk away with a generous sprinkling of splash-back on the front of your trousers. Visible or not, it’s there. So, I opt to piss in public as I would do so at home, stood astride a toilet bowl. And in case anyone hears the heavy trinkling noise that exposes the fact that I haven’t gone inside for a poo, I finish up by blowing my nose loudly as if to suggest that I would have used a urinal but for the fact that I needed some tissue paper.
Sometimes you don’t have the option of privately pissing and so you have to join the urinal throng. Some toilets are designed to afford adequate privacy by means of porcelain barriers between the wall-mounted bowls. This I would say is imperative for public lavs with three urinal spaces, just in case you end up alone with a middle-urinal freak, that spatially unaware pisser who’ll never opt for an end-urinal when all three are available.
I’m not sure which are worse out of those never-cleaned council public bogs you’d find in parks or high streets or those sparkling clean ones in expensive bars that look like the set from a toilet bleach advert and always come equipped with an assistant who offers to do everything for you bar shaking your cock post-pee, before hovering his bowl of lollipops under your nose hopeful of a quid. (Who ever thought that the first thing you’d want after a piss is a lolly or a boiled sweet?) At least in those toilets, when you do need to move into 2nd gear and drop your trousers in a cubicle, they don’t soak up a gallon of urine from the floor by the time you’ve passed the motion.
So I tend to avoid the high street gents’ lavatories, partly for that reason and partly because I have no desire to ring any mobile number “for cock.” I might be more tempted to step inside the sliding door of a modern electronic port-a-loo for single users, but I’ve always suspected that they are really TARDIS’s and who knows where or when I’d step out to afterwards.
But toilets can form part of our own nostalgic personal histories. In the school I first worked in, the male staff toilet had a bogey wall above the urinals. Someone started it and so everyone felt subconsciously inclined to add to it. A bit like the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, but for bogeys.
Also, I feel affectionately drawn towards the one in the primary school that I attended as a kid, because of the contests we’d have to see who could piss the highest up the wall. When I say “drawn towards” I do mean in memory rather than reality. My status as an ex-pupil has not allowed me access to that same toilet, which is a shame as I feel confident of beating my own record now; but you know how lacking in empathy head teachers and police are when you just wander into a school and make a beeline for the boys toilet.
This situation would be worse if I wasn’t more disposed towards using a trap rather than a urinal. However, there’s an unwritten law for men that demands that cubicles exist purely to cater for number two type ablutions and if all you need is a tinkle, then you use the urinal. If you don’t, the logical and totally just assumption is that you have a small penis.
What kind of retarded logic creates a hypothesis claiming that the reluctance to stand alongside other blokes with everyone’s cock out is proof of an admission of having a walnut whip shaped one-incher buried out of sight in your pubic forest? Oh, you’ve gone for a piss in the cubicle? You don’t want us to see your willy? Why’s that? Not that anyone looks, but the corner of your eye tells you straight away when someone’s unleashed a beast and yes it does cause you to change your angle of approach a little in the opposite direction so as to tacitly relay the message to your well-endowed urinal neighbour that the only reason why he can’t see yours out of the corner of HIS eye is because you’re stood at 30 degrees to his own line of fire.
Urinals ensure that you walk away with a generous sprinkling of splash-back on the front of your trousers. Visible or not, it’s there. So, I opt to piss in public as I would do so at home, stood astride a toilet bowl. And in case anyone hears the heavy trinkling noise that exposes the fact that I haven’t gone inside for a poo, I finish up by blowing my nose loudly as if to suggest that I would have used a urinal but for the fact that I needed some tissue paper.
Sometimes you don’t have the option of privately pissing and so you have to join the urinal throng. Some toilets are designed to afford adequate privacy by means of porcelain barriers between the wall-mounted bowls. This I would say is imperative for public lavs with three urinal spaces, just in case you end up alone with a middle-urinal freak, that spatially unaware pisser who’ll never opt for an end-urinal when all three are available.
I’m not sure which are worse out of those never-cleaned council public bogs you’d find in parks or high streets or those sparkling clean ones in expensive bars that look like the set from a toilet bleach advert and always come equipped with an assistant who offers to do everything for you bar shaking your cock post-pee, before hovering his bowl of lollipops under your nose hopeful of a quid. (Who ever thought that the first thing you’d want after a piss is a lolly or a boiled sweet?) At least in those toilets, when you do need to move into 2nd gear and drop your trousers in a cubicle, they don’t soak up a gallon of urine from the floor by the time you’ve passed the motion.
So I tend to avoid the high street gents’ lavatories, partly for that reason and partly because I have no desire to ring any mobile number “for cock.” I might be more tempted to step inside the sliding door of a modern electronic port-a-loo for single users, but I’ve always suspected that they are really TARDIS’s and who knows where or when I’d step out to afterwards.
But toilets can form part of our own nostalgic personal histories. In the school I first worked in, the male staff toilet had a bogey wall above the urinals. Someone started it and so everyone felt subconsciously inclined to add to it. A bit like the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, but for bogeys.
Also, I feel affectionately drawn towards the one in the primary school that I attended as a kid, because of the contests we’d have to see who could piss the highest up the wall. When I say “drawn towards” I do mean in memory rather than reality. My status as an ex-pupil has not allowed me access to that same toilet, which is a shame as I feel confident of beating my own record now; but you know how lacking in empathy head teachers and police are when you just wander into a school and make a beeline for the boys toilet.
Thursday 18 August 2011
Bitesize Bastards #5 The Mr Men
I fucking LOVE the Mr Men. Iconic pop art done with felts from Woolies costing about 20p the whole pack. Unpretentious stereotypes that NAILED the human condition. Aesthetically engaging hand-sized books which predated the joy of CD inlay cards. And a spin-off TV series with the best theme tune ever (after The Sweeney) and the droll, avuncular and dulcet voice - like a melted Worther’s Original - of Arthur Lowe. Fucking love them.
But some of them were bastards.
Like Neil Young, Roger Hargreaves was at his best in the first half of the 1970s, releasing the first 13 masterpieces in ‘71-2: Tickle, Greedy, Happy, Nosey, Sneeze, Bump, Snow, Messy, Topsy-Turvey, Silly, Uppity, Small, and Daydream. He built on this success and in 1976 alone he doubled his body of work, adding the likes of Strong, Impossible, Dizzy, Muddle, Jelly and Funny. At this point, he and Neil Young got a bit stuck for ideas and put out more of the same, only not as good. And then came the 80s. As Neil Young experimented with a vocoder and released albums on which he sounded like Metal Mickey going down on Dolly Parton, Roger Hargreaves pissed on his own legacy by writing the Little Miss books.
That aside, you should be allowed to do a fucking DEGREE in the Mr Men. It’ll be well worth 9 grand a year. Your dissertation could be titled, “How far do the Mr Men embody the post-revolutionary social dystopia of the 1970’s through a combination of pathos and bastardness?”
You’d have to start with the worst bastard of the lot, Mr Uppity. Clearly a Eton-educated, Bullingdon Club, Far Right Tory aristocrat with unbridled disdain for anyone who hasn’t made his school fag let him snort cavier and cocaine out of his arse-crack with a hundred-guinea note. Hargreaves was too astute to state this explicitly in the story and I daresay that I may have become a little upset by it at such a young age, but it’s there all right , IN THE SUB-TEXT!
Mr Tickle was a prophetic premonition of that 1980’s thoughtless and galling desire to piss people off by playing practical jokes on unsuspecting members of the public. Clearly, Jeremy Beadle and Timmy Mallet had that Tickle gene. In real-life, that story would have ended with someone kicking the shit out of Mr Tickle.
He’s not the only one. Mr Nosey got his come-uppance by having his nose either painted or pinched with a clothes peg. This would not have resolved his anti-social behaviour. Instead, he would’ve become a police officer’s snout, a pathetic low-life criminal who grassed on the big fish and eventually found himself with a breeze-block tied to his schnozz at the bottom of a canal.
Mr Fussy was easily the most mealy-mouthed, self-righteous prick of the lot. Not wanting to nail his political colours to the mast, Hargreaves neglects to tell us that Mr Fussy was an avid Daily Mail reader, who masturbated over Mary Whitehouse’s letters and had such a bad case of OCD that he claimed to have CDO because he wanted to keep all of his conditions in the right alphabetical order.
Back in the 70s, though, no one had a “condition.” There were no learning difficulties or special needs. Mr Dizzy would never have been statemented at school – he’d just be called THICKO and stuck in the remedial class alongside the dyslexic Mr Topsy-Turvey and dyspraxic Mr Bump.
But for every obvious bastard, like some of these mentioned and Mr Mean and Mr Greedy (nasty cunts), Hargreaves was able to step back and let his audience judge for themselves sometimes. Mr Happy? What fucking drugs was he on? He needed a right old slap. Spending his time smoking shit with Mr Daydream and unpicking the pseudo-Victorian gothic horror-come-olde-English faery-tale nonsense of Genesis’s “Nursery Cryme” album. Wasters.
The Mr Men were my role models. I’m off now to eat 30 fried eggs and beat someone up.
But some of them were bastards.
Like Neil Young, Roger Hargreaves was at his best in the first half of the 1970s, releasing the first 13 masterpieces in ‘71-2: Tickle, Greedy, Happy, Nosey, Sneeze, Bump, Snow, Messy, Topsy-Turvey, Silly, Uppity, Small, and Daydream. He built on this success and in 1976 alone he doubled his body of work, adding the likes of Strong, Impossible, Dizzy, Muddle, Jelly and Funny. At this point, he and Neil Young got a bit stuck for ideas and put out more of the same, only not as good. And then came the 80s. As Neil Young experimented with a vocoder and released albums on which he sounded like Metal Mickey going down on Dolly Parton, Roger Hargreaves pissed on his own legacy by writing the Little Miss books.
That aside, you should be allowed to do a fucking DEGREE in the Mr Men. It’ll be well worth 9 grand a year. Your dissertation could be titled, “How far do the Mr Men embody the post-revolutionary social dystopia of the 1970’s through a combination of pathos and bastardness?”
You’d have to start with the worst bastard of the lot, Mr Uppity. Clearly a Eton-educated, Bullingdon Club, Far Right Tory aristocrat with unbridled disdain for anyone who hasn’t made his school fag let him snort cavier and cocaine out of his arse-crack with a hundred-guinea note. Hargreaves was too astute to state this explicitly in the story and I daresay that I may have become a little upset by it at such a young age, but it’s there all right , IN THE SUB-TEXT!
Mr Tickle was a prophetic premonition of that 1980’s thoughtless and galling desire to piss people off by playing practical jokes on unsuspecting members of the public. Clearly, Jeremy Beadle and Timmy Mallet had that Tickle gene. In real-life, that story would have ended with someone kicking the shit out of Mr Tickle.
He’s not the only one. Mr Nosey got his come-uppance by having his nose either painted or pinched with a clothes peg. This would not have resolved his anti-social behaviour. Instead, he would’ve become a police officer’s snout, a pathetic low-life criminal who grassed on the big fish and eventually found himself with a breeze-block tied to his schnozz at the bottom of a canal.
Mr Fussy was easily the most mealy-mouthed, self-righteous prick of the lot. Not wanting to nail his political colours to the mast, Hargreaves neglects to tell us that Mr Fussy was an avid Daily Mail reader, who masturbated over Mary Whitehouse’s letters and had such a bad case of OCD that he claimed to have CDO because he wanted to keep all of his conditions in the right alphabetical order.
Back in the 70s, though, no one had a “condition.” There were no learning difficulties or special needs. Mr Dizzy would never have been statemented at school – he’d just be called THICKO and stuck in the remedial class alongside the dyslexic Mr Topsy-Turvey and dyspraxic Mr Bump.
But for every obvious bastard, like some of these mentioned and Mr Mean and Mr Greedy (nasty cunts), Hargreaves was able to step back and let his audience judge for themselves sometimes. Mr Happy? What fucking drugs was he on? He needed a right old slap. Spending his time smoking shit with Mr Daydream and unpicking the pseudo-Victorian gothic horror-come-olde-English faery-tale nonsense of Genesis’s “Nursery Cryme” album. Wasters.
The Mr Men were my role models. I’m off now to eat 30 fried eggs and beat someone up.
Monday 8 August 2011
Bitesize Bastards #4 Pointless E-Petitioners
Until recently I was unaware of the laudable extension of democracy by means of the government’s e-petitions website, which enables every one of us to create a petition which can become eligible for debate by MP’s if it attracts 100,000 or more signatories. It was only when the news reported strong support for “abolishing the ban on capital punishment” (a wonderful double negative) that I found myself engaging with politics through this website. (For the record, I signed a counter petition, to retain the ban, because much as I would happily smirk in triumph to hear of the untimely and distressing death of any paedophile, serial killer or rapist, that emotional response is not one that a society’s legislation should ever be based on.)
For the purpose of your humour today, however, I have decided to share with you some of the more idiotic, self-righteous and pointless e-petitions which members of the grunting British public have started. Obviously, some people are consciously trying to be funny on there, but it’s the more earnest efforts that cause me to roll on the floor laughing my fucking arse off (as you youngsters say with your acrostic cyber-speak.) I’ll include the link to the site at the end, should you wish to support the intellectually retarded causes of these misguided boneheads.
So that you can appreciate them all the more, each petition consists of a main statement followed (when you click “view”) by a synopsis of exactly what is being proposed. This adds to the unintentional wit, because some people just have the most wonderful turn of phrase. For instance, the person who started this petition:
“Relax somewhat TV political correctness rules.”
The details are as follows:
"I think that it is important to, only slightly, relax the rules regarding political correctness in British television. Although i belive this is important i think that it is equaly, if not more important, to remain un-bigoted. I think British television could remain fair,open minded and inclusive, without going 'over the top' as it evidently has in recent years."
Clearly, his notion of law-making is as sharp as his spelling ability. How the fuck do you relax the laws “only slightly” or “somewhat”? How do you word that in law? So far, no one else has signed this petition.
Some people clearly misunderstand the role of government in law-making. Mr Bettles, I respect your opinion about the quality of programmes on BBC3, but I really don’t feel that the government should be empowered to ban a TV channel, not even for the help that this act might give to the “tough financial climate” by saving license-payers’ money.
In the wake of the London riots, it was distressing to read about problems in other areas of the UK. Mr Sleight, proposing that “Mobility scooters should require a license” outlined the ordeals his community have gone through:
He explains: “Currently, in the streets of Bridlington (just one example) people are encouraged to ride mobility scooters whether they need them or not. Resulting in hazardous footpaths, congested shops, blocked roads and general nuisances.”
Yeah, we all know that only the fat and very lazy use those scooters. Perhaps his petition should have read “Make it legal to tip over a mobility scooter if the person driving it is eating take-away food at the same time.”
In a similar vein, there is a call for the “UK to drive on the right hand side of the road” with all cars to be made left-hand drive, in order to avoid accidents caused by foreign drivers. Currently 23 people agree with this. Presumably these same people do things like using a kitchen knife to peel off all their skin to treat eczema or excavate their whole garden to a depth of 10 feet whilst weeding.
I’d hoped to learn something from the petition to stop commercial banks creating money and only allow the Bank of England to do so. I didn’t know much about this, so I looked at the details and was intrigued by the argument until the proposer justified himself with this historical analogy:
“Ghenghis Khan did it! He just printed money and said, ‘In my land THIS IS MONEY and if you owe me money, this is the currency you have to pay me in.’ and people accepted it.”
And I love the naive way in which some people believe that a small and hilariously mundane change will have such far-reaching effects:
“Sort out Pelican crossings
The Prime Minister should make an announcement saying that there are no cameras on any pelican crossings in the country. Then, tell everyone that if the light is on red, and there is nobody on the crossing, just GO! This would save Billions of pounds to the economy, increase our standard of life and reduce carbon footprint.”
Inevitably, the joy of giving everyone a voice means that we have to listen to (or read in this case) the demands of our sizeable minority of bigots, racists and common-garden cunts. Such as Mr Pitt whose petition is a call to “Abolish Islam in the UK” because he feels that the religion is being “forced onto British people.” Hmmm. Love to see the evidence for that Mr Pitt.
Prick.
The site obviously appeals to that increasing number of people in society with a 10-second concentration span who just like doing things on computers, evident by the fact that these arses start up petitions which are exactly the same as existing ones, thus taking support away from a cause and handicapping its chances of reaching 100,000 and going to debate. DOH!
Anyway, see for yourself when you’re bored enough. Or anytime something pisses you off, you too can vent your frustration with a banal and pointless e-petition of your own:
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/
For the purpose of your humour today, however, I have decided to share with you some of the more idiotic, self-righteous and pointless e-petitions which members of the grunting British public have started. Obviously, some people are consciously trying to be funny on there, but it’s the more earnest efforts that cause me to roll on the floor laughing my fucking arse off (as you youngsters say with your acrostic cyber-speak.) I’ll include the link to the site at the end, should you wish to support the intellectually retarded causes of these misguided boneheads.
So that you can appreciate them all the more, each petition consists of a main statement followed (when you click “view”) by a synopsis of exactly what is being proposed. This adds to the unintentional wit, because some people just have the most wonderful turn of phrase. For instance, the person who started this petition:
“Relax somewhat TV political correctness rules.”
The details are as follows:
"I think that it is important to, only slightly, relax the rules regarding political correctness in British television. Although i belive this is important i think that it is equaly, if not more important, to remain un-bigoted. I think British television could remain fair,open minded and inclusive, without going 'over the top' as it evidently has in recent years."
Clearly, his notion of law-making is as sharp as his spelling ability. How the fuck do you relax the laws “only slightly” or “somewhat”? How do you word that in law? So far, no one else has signed this petition.
Some people clearly misunderstand the role of government in law-making. Mr Bettles, I respect your opinion about the quality of programmes on BBC3, but I really don’t feel that the government should be empowered to ban a TV channel, not even for the help that this act might give to the “tough financial climate” by saving license-payers’ money.
In the wake of the London riots, it was distressing to read about problems in other areas of the UK. Mr Sleight, proposing that “Mobility scooters should require a license” outlined the ordeals his community have gone through:
He explains: “Currently, in the streets of Bridlington (just one example) people are encouraged to ride mobility scooters whether they need them or not. Resulting in hazardous footpaths, congested shops, blocked roads and general nuisances.”
Yeah, we all know that only the fat and very lazy use those scooters. Perhaps his petition should have read “Make it legal to tip over a mobility scooter if the person driving it is eating take-away food at the same time.”
In a similar vein, there is a call for the “UK to drive on the right hand side of the road” with all cars to be made left-hand drive, in order to avoid accidents caused by foreign drivers. Currently 23 people agree with this. Presumably these same people do things like using a kitchen knife to peel off all their skin to treat eczema or excavate their whole garden to a depth of 10 feet whilst weeding.
I’d hoped to learn something from the petition to stop commercial banks creating money and only allow the Bank of England to do so. I didn’t know much about this, so I looked at the details and was intrigued by the argument until the proposer justified himself with this historical analogy:
“Ghenghis Khan did it! He just printed money and said, ‘In my land THIS IS MONEY and if you owe me money, this is the currency you have to pay me in.’ and people accepted it.”
And I love the naive way in which some people believe that a small and hilariously mundane change will have such far-reaching effects:
“Sort out Pelican crossings
The Prime Minister should make an announcement saying that there are no cameras on any pelican crossings in the country. Then, tell everyone that if the light is on red, and there is nobody on the crossing, just GO! This would save Billions of pounds to the economy, increase our standard of life and reduce carbon footprint.”
Inevitably, the joy of giving everyone a voice means that we have to listen to (or read in this case) the demands of our sizeable minority of bigots, racists and common-garden cunts. Such as Mr Pitt whose petition is a call to “Abolish Islam in the UK” because he feels that the religion is being “forced onto British people.” Hmmm. Love to see the evidence for that Mr Pitt.
Prick.
The site obviously appeals to that increasing number of people in society with a 10-second concentration span who just like doing things on computers, evident by the fact that these arses start up petitions which are exactly the same as existing ones, thus taking support away from a cause and handicapping its chances of reaching 100,000 and going to debate. DOH!
Anyway, see for yourself when you’re bored enough. Or anytime something pisses you off, you too can vent your frustration with a banal and pointless e-petition of your own:
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/
Thursday 4 August 2011
Bitesize Bastards #3 Everything and Everybody in the Summer
I’m not one to moan. There are only two little things that I hate about the summer. Everything and everybody. Apart from that it’s a whole lot of hunky fucking dory.
For one thing, there are the insects. And all manner of flying shit-bugs and annoying buzzy flying bastards. Round about July, I dust away the cobwebs that hold the patio doors closed and venture OUTSIDE into the garden, with that sort of hammy trepidation that Star Trek crew have when they beam down onto a new planet, which is clearly just a TV set with crimson lighting and painted polystyrene blocks. And I think, fuck, look at all the weeds that have grown everywhere. And I have to spend hours over days pulling up all the weeds and anything else green that grows in between them, like flowers, bushes and plants and shit. And when I have watered the brown and arid lawn by broadcasting beads of sweat from my shaking brow, I sit back with a beer in a chair and savour the neat and tidiness of my OUTSIDE domain - For a few minutes at least, until some wasp tries to get my beer and I go back INSIDE for the rest of the summer.
However, the demons of the outside follow me in. I have the stark choice between keeping all the windows closed to keep out the flying things and thus turning my home into a greenhouse until I am baked like a miserable over-ripe tomato, or I let in the air and suffer the hostility of nature invading my home like an unwanted sales-call. “Hello, is that Mr Bastard? I’m ringing from Nature.co.uk to see if you’re interested in a conversion of all the dirty filth-carrying flying buzzy things from garden pests into household pets.”
My particular nemesis is that same small uncatchable little bastard fly that carves out geometric lines in the air just underneath the light in the lounge ceiling. What a pointless existence this creature has. He doesn’t even fuck off to find some food to eat or shit on. He disappears when you stand up to try and catch him and reappears when you sit back down with a petulant thump.
Then there are the moths. They know you have to leave the windows open at night and they wait in anticipation for that moment when you have to turn the toilet light on; and they fly in while you piss and flutter about in front of your face where you can’t shoo them off because you’re holding your willy and yet you engage in some kind of demented convulsions until you realise that you’ve now pissed everywhere in the bathroom apart from in the pan.
That’s when it’s hot.
And when it’s hot, everyone you meet tells you that its hot, just in case you didn’t notice and thought that the reason why your shirt and pants were sticking to you was because you’d been shot in the chest and arse by a passing sociopathic youth. And when it’s not hot, the same bastards moan about how we aren’t having a proper summer, oblivious for a few seconds to the fact that they live on an island in the northern hemisphere on the edge of the Atlantic ocean and not in fucking Greece.
It’s bad enough that the weather is the default conversation of British people the whole year round anyway, but in the summer people also ALWAYS ask, “Are you going away this year?” Nosey cunts! What do they want to do? Rob your house when you’re not in? More likely they want to tell you about when THEY’RE going away.
And when it’s hot, blokes with no fat on their torsos strip off to the waist, because it’s so much cooler doing that than wearing a t-shirt and not at all because they want to show off their fat-less torsos and look like wankers. Am I jealous? Yes. Would I do the same if I was fat-less in the whole torso region? No, I’m not a wanker.
Right, I’ve had a moan, I’m going up the pub. Not to sit OUTSIDE and watch wasps dive-bomb my beer or shove their pointy arses in my eye-line and make me look an idiot as I spaz about with flailing arms trying to dissuade them from their practice. No, I shall sit inside and nurse a tepid bitter and rub pork scratchings on my eyeballs until I feel better.
For one thing, there are the insects. And all manner of flying shit-bugs and annoying buzzy flying bastards. Round about July, I dust away the cobwebs that hold the patio doors closed and venture OUTSIDE into the garden, with that sort of hammy trepidation that Star Trek crew have when they beam down onto a new planet, which is clearly just a TV set with crimson lighting and painted polystyrene blocks. And I think, fuck, look at all the weeds that have grown everywhere. And I have to spend hours over days pulling up all the weeds and anything else green that grows in between them, like flowers, bushes and plants and shit. And when I have watered the brown and arid lawn by broadcasting beads of sweat from my shaking brow, I sit back with a beer in a chair and savour the neat and tidiness of my OUTSIDE domain - For a few minutes at least, until some wasp tries to get my beer and I go back INSIDE for the rest of the summer.
However, the demons of the outside follow me in. I have the stark choice between keeping all the windows closed to keep out the flying things and thus turning my home into a greenhouse until I am baked like a miserable over-ripe tomato, or I let in the air and suffer the hostility of nature invading my home like an unwanted sales-call. “Hello, is that Mr Bastard? I’m ringing from Nature.co.uk to see if you’re interested in a conversion of all the dirty filth-carrying flying buzzy things from garden pests into household pets.”
My particular nemesis is that same small uncatchable little bastard fly that carves out geometric lines in the air just underneath the light in the lounge ceiling. What a pointless existence this creature has. He doesn’t even fuck off to find some food to eat or shit on. He disappears when you stand up to try and catch him and reappears when you sit back down with a petulant thump.
Then there are the moths. They know you have to leave the windows open at night and they wait in anticipation for that moment when you have to turn the toilet light on; and they fly in while you piss and flutter about in front of your face where you can’t shoo them off because you’re holding your willy and yet you engage in some kind of demented convulsions until you realise that you’ve now pissed everywhere in the bathroom apart from in the pan.
That’s when it’s hot.
And when it’s hot, everyone you meet tells you that its hot, just in case you didn’t notice and thought that the reason why your shirt and pants were sticking to you was because you’d been shot in the chest and arse by a passing sociopathic youth. And when it’s not hot, the same bastards moan about how we aren’t having a proper summer, oblivious for a few seconds to the fact that they live on an island in the northern hemisphere on the edge of the Atlantic ocean and not in fucking Greece.
It’s bad enough that the weather is the default conversation of British people the whole year round anyway, but in the summer people also ALWAYS ask, “Are you going away this year?” Nosey cunts! What do they want to do? Rob your house when you’re not in? More likely they want to tell you about when THEY’RE going away.
And when it’s hot, blokes with no fat on their torsos strip off to the waist, because it’s so much cooler doing that than wearing a t-shirt and not at all because they want to show off their fat-less torsos and look like wankers. Am I jealous? Yes. Would I do the same if I was fat-less in the whole torso region? No, I’m not a wanker.
Right, I’ve had a moan, I’m going up the pub. Not to sit OUTSIDE and watch wasps dive-bomb my beer or shove their pointy arses in my eye-line and make me look an idiot as I spaz about with flailing arms trying to dissuade them from their practice. No, I shall sit inside and nurse a tepid bitter and rub pork scratchings on my eyeballs until I feel better.
Monday 1 August 2011
Bitesize Bastards #2 The Dead-Eyed Has-been Celebrity Sect
(Disclaimer: Originally, this post named 3 well-known celebrities, but for reasons outlined at the end, I have decided to conceal their identities.)
So, I’m flicking through the TV channels and chance upon a kids’ game show on BBC1 and its being presented by Celebrity A in a sparkling electric red lame suit. A number of thoughts go through my mind:
WHY THE FUCK IS HE STILL ON TELLY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS?
WHO THOUGHT TO PUT HIM ON A KIDS SHOW?
DOES HE HATE THIS AS MUCH AS HIS EYES WOULD SUGGEST?
Because what Celebrity A has is something a number of other has-been TV personalities have and that’s DEAD-LOOKING EYES. Eyes with no sparkle, no life. Barney Rubble eyes. Eyes that say, I used to do comedy in the 80’s, present prime-time telly in the 90’s and now I’d do anything for the money like a desperate fame-junkie. Eyes that would scare the shit out of kids and send them running to a parent, eager to escape the creepy-looking, dead-eyed man.
Celebrity B has those same eyes. Lifeless and hollow. When he made his name performing magic on stage, his eyes had that twinkle of mischief. But now he looks like the whole world has decided that magic is a top-hat full of saggy old bunny’s bollocks and consequently he has nothing more to offer. The only thing left to do is agree to be the subject of a Louis Theroux documentary, oblivious to how he’ll come across when Theroux shrewdly gives him all the rope he’ll need to hang himself with pitiful indignity.
But these men can’t help it. They need the work. And they need the attention. How awful it must be to fall from the dizzy heights of 80’s Prime Time TV and find yourself the butt of everyone’s disdain.
Self-promotion has never been easier for these ex-celebs. If they can’t get on I’M A CELEBRITY (or any show, like Celebrity Big Brother, which used to cruelly expose their rotting personalities) then they can always open a Twitter account. Celebrity A appears to have tried this, but ran out of anything remotely interesting to say 587 days ago after only 57 tweets, the most entertaining of which are:
WATCHING THE CRICKET
(I AM) BACK PEOPLE – SPREAD THE WORD
SORRY BEEN VERY BUSY
REALLY INTERESTING TV PROJECT IN THE PIPELINE
You lying bastard! Busy doing what? Quite often these people are “writing material” that I could produce without any more need for paper than a few squares to wipe myself with afterwards.
Celebrity C fares much better on Twitter with a following of 67,509. But he HAS TO follow 5,904 people (unheard of for a celeb, as most tend to follow only about 30 other celeb mates) because that’s where he gets all his jokes from. He recycles other people’s witty tweets without crediting them (you can re-tweet or quote others on Twitter, but he does neither.) This has earned him scorn and notoriety and therefore ATTENTION and attention is EVERYTHING to the Dead-eyed Has-been Celebrity, isn’t it?
Celebrity A has encouraged people, on HIS Twitter account, to be nice to Celebrity C who is “feeling down about getting bad tweets.” SO FUCKING WHAT? GET THE FUCK OFF OF TWITTER THEN! You’d think that people who are only interested in self-promotion should have worked out by now that the British public despise it and tend to take the piss out of anyone who desperately courts attention that is not commensurate with the amount of talent they don’t have.
I feel mean and nasty laying into these 3 men, but only because Twitter provides an opportunity for my words to eventually find themselves relayed to them, and they seem so paranoid and self-obsessed that they probably spend their lives reading everything about themselves on the internet. You know, wake up, turn on the PC and Google your own name. What are they saying about me today? Oh, I’m a TWAT? Boo hoo hoo!
For that reason, I have concealed their names. They are not really bastards. They look it, but they’ve gone beyond that to become the puppets of that evil tyrant, the bastard god Fame.
So, I’m flicking through the TV channels and chance upon a kids’ game show on BBC1 and its being presented by Celebrity A in a sparkling electric red lame suit. A number of thoughts go through my mind:
WHY THE FUCK IS HE STILL ON TELLY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS?
WHO THOUGHT TO PUT HIM ON A KIDS SHOW?
DOES HE HATE THIS AS MUCH AS HIS EYES WOULD SUGGEST?
Because what Celebrity A has is something a number of other has-been TV personalities have and that’s DEAD-LOOKING EYES. Eyes with no sparkle, no life. Barney Rubble eyes. Eyes that say, I used to do comedy in the 80’s, present prime-time telly in the 90’s and now I’d do anything for the money like a desperate fame-junkie. Eyes that would scare the shit out of kids and send them running to a parent, eager to escape the creepy-looking, dead-eyed man.
Celebrity B has those same eyes. Lifeless and hollow. When he made his name performing magic on stage, his eyes had that twinkle of mischief. But now he looks like the whole world has decided that magic is a top-hat full of saggy old bunny’s bollocks and consequently he has nothing more to offer. The only thing left to do is agree to be the subject of a Louis Theroux documentary, oblivious to how he’ll come across when Theroux shrewdly gives him all the rope he’ll need to hang himself with pitiful indignity.
But these men can’t help it. They need the work. And they need the attention. How awful it must be to fall from the dizzy heights of 80’s Prime Time TV and find yourself the butt of everyone’s disdain.
Self-promotion has never been easier for these ex-celebs. If they can’t get on I’M A CELEBRITY (or any show, like Celebrity Big Brother, which used to cruelly expose their rotting personalities) then they can always open a Twitter account. Celebrity A appears to have tried this, but ran out of anything remotely interesting to say 587 days ago after only 57 tweets, the most entertaining of which are:
WATCHING THE CRICKET
(I AM) BACK PEOPLE – SPREAD THE WORD
SORRY BEEN VERY BUSY
REALLY INTERESTING TV PROJECT IN THE PIPELINE
You lying bastard! Busy doing what? Quite often these people are “writing material” that I could produce without any more need for paper than a few squares to wipe myself with afterwards.
Celebrity C fares much better on Twitter with a following of 67,509. But he HAS TO follow 5,904 people (unheard of for a celeb, as most tend to follow only about 30 other celeb mates) because that’s where he gets all his jokes from. He recycles other people’s witty tweets without crediting them (you can re-tweet or quote others on Twitter, but he does neither.) This has earned him scorn and notoriety and therefore ATTENTION and attention is EVERYTHING to the Dead-eyed Has-been Celebrity, isn’t it?
Celebrity A has encouraged people, on HIS Twitter account, to be nice to Celebrity C who is “feeling down about getting bad tweets.” SO FUCKING WHAT? GET THE FUCK OFF OF TWITTER THEN! You’d think that people who are only interested in self-promotion should have worked out by now that the British public despise it and tend to take the piss out of anyone who desperately courts attention that is not commensurate with the amount of talent they don’t have.
I feel mean and nasty laying into these 3 men, but only because Twitter provides an opportunity for my words to eventually find themselves relayed to them, and they seem so paranoid and self-obsessed that they probably spend their lives reading everything about themselves on the internet. You know, wake up, turn on the PC and Google your own name. What are they saying about me today? Oh, I’m a TWAT? Boo hoo hoo!
For that reason, I have concealed their names. They are not really bastards. They look it, but they’ve gone beyond that to become the puppets of that evil tyrant, the bastard god Fame.
Tuesday 26 July 2011
Bitesize Bastards #1 Outdoor Adventurous Leader Blokes
I was up in a hot air balloon today. I won’t bore you with the wonder and niceness of it all. And I won’t pretend that the pilot was a paradigm of the stereotypical outdoor adventurous type of bloke. But he did, in his own innocuous and inoffensive way, carry with him a few of the traits that make most of these types quite tediously fucking annoying.
I’ll be frank. I believe that people with the LEAST capacity to be interesting feel the MOST compunction to involve themselves in adventurous pastimes and extreme sports, just so that they can PRETEND that they’re NOT boring. In fact, it PERFECTLY GIVES THEM THE RIGHT to accuse all of us less adventurous types of BEING BORING. These charmless oafs have cashed in personality for a life of adrenalin-chasing pursuits and forever chant their fatuous mantras in our faces: LIVE LIFE TO THE MAX!
Fuck off!
Sub-dividing this socially retarded species into two, we find that there are LEADERS and DO-ERS. The Do-ers just pay to do it. They turn up with bleached blonde hair and Chinese tattoos and all the right clothing to either bungee or surf or quad-bike or snow-board or whatever other WANKY bit of DICKING about makes them feel like they have BIG COCKS. And they start every conversation with, “I’m a bit of an adrenalin-junkie.” A bit of a twat, I then think.
I mix my tiny shot of jealousy with a large tonic of pity for these stereotypes. My chief disdain is reserved for the leaders. The men (I have nothing against the women) who fly the balloons, run the bungee club or teach others how to windsurf or paraglide or jet-ski or generally TRY TO LOOK COOL at either a huge height or break-neck speed.
These blokes tend to have beards. Bill Bailey types. A bit Dungeons and Dragons, but less insipidly stay-at-home pale. And slightly BO-whiffy. And they have this ENORMOUS knowledge of BOLLOCK-BORING stuff about their specialist adventurous pastime AND about EVERYTHING ELSE EVER that you’re likely to talk about when you’re outside the house. And they want to just talk AT you when you make that fatal mistake of naively asking a question to which a simple YES or NO answer would suffice. The sort of question that they interpret as PLEASE TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING SO THAT I CAN BE IMPRESSED BY YOU. (In a way that no one was impressed by them at school, when they were bullied and smelt quite BO-whiffy then too.)
There’s a galling sort of arrogance that comes with such a compendium of boring knowledge, so much so that you want to pour petrol on the bastard’s fleece and set him alight. Especially when he continues to fire off droll comments at your expense to belittle you and make you feel less of an interesting person because you’re just doing whatever dicking adventure thing it is just the ONCE and he does it all the time. And has a t-shirt saying as much. “I DO IT TEN TIMES A DAY.”
But he actually looks like he didn’t have sex until he was 32 and since then he and his gruesomely wretched-looking wife have gone the whole hog and become sex people, going to swinger parties with other couples that they know from the pub quiz in the village local. Yuk.
But anyway, like I said, I wouldn’t like to attribute all these qualities to my hot air balloon pilot today as he was barely scratching the surface of the stereotype. But he WAS called Gary and I bet they’re all called Gary aren’t they?
I’ll be frank. I believe that people with the LEAST capacity to be interesting feel the MOST compunction to involve themselves in adventurous pastimes and extreme sports, just so that they can PRETEND that they’re NOT boring. In fact, it PERFECTLY GIVES THEM THE RIGHT to accuse all of us less adventurous types of BEING BORING. These charmless oafs have cashed in personality for a life of adrenalin-chasing pursuits and forever chant their fatuous mantras in our faces: LIVE LIFE TO THE MAX!
Fuck off!
Sub-dividing this socially retarded species into two, we find that there are LEADERS and DO-ERS. The Do-ers just pay to do it. They turn up with bleached blonde hair and Chinese tattoos and all the right clothing to either bungee or surf or quad-bike or snow-board or whatever other WANKY bit of DICKING about makes them feel like they have BIG COCKS. And they start every conversation with, “I’m a bit of an adrenalin-junkie.” A bit of a twat, I then think.
I mix my tiny shot of jealousy with a large tonic of pity for these stereotypes. My chief disdain is reserved for the leaders. The men (I have nothing against the women) who fly the balloons, run the bungee club or teach others how to windsurf or paraglide or jet-ski or generally TRY TO LOOK COOL at either a huge height or break-neck speed.
These blokes tend to have beards. Bill Bailey types. A bit Dungeons and Dragons, but less insipidly stay-at-home pale. And slightly BO-whiffy. And they have this ENORMOUS knowledge of BOLLOCK-BORING stuff about their specialist adventurous pastime AND about EVERYTHING ELSE EVER that you’re likely to talk about when you’re outside the house. And they want to just talk AT you when you make that fatal mistake of naively asking a question to which a simple YES or NO answer would suffice. The sort of question that they interpret as PLEASE TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING SO THAT I CAN BE IMPRESSED BY YOU. (In a way that no one was impressed by them at school, when they were bullied and smelt quite BO-whiffy then too.)
There’s a galling sort of arrogance that comes with such a compendium of boring knowledge, so much so that you want to pour petrol on the bastard’s fleece and set him alight. Especially when he continues to fire off droll comments at your expense to belittle you and make you feel less of an interesting person because you’re just doing whatever dicking adventure thing it is just the ONCE and he does it all the time. And has a t-shirt saying as much. “I DO IT TEN TIMES A DAY.”
But he actually looks like he didn’t have sex until he was 32 and since then he and his gruesomely wretched-looking wife have gone the whole hog and become sex people, going to swinger parties with other couples that they know from the pub quiz in the village local. Yuk.
But anyway, like I said, I wouldn’t like to attribute all these qualities to my hot air balloon pilot today as he was barely scratching the surface of the stereotype. But he WAS called Gary and I bet they’re all called Gary aren’t they?
Tuesday 12 July 2011
The Magic Shit Goblin
If you could have one superhero power, what would it be?
This question is unarguably TRITE and DESPERATE and gets inserted into awkwardly silent gaps in social situations as a conversation-inducing enema. But it CAN throw up intriguing answers.
I’ve considered all the usual responses. I wouldn’t want to FLY, because I damn near shit my pants last week going just 200 feet up at 80 mph on STEALTH at Thorpe Park. I wouldn’t want superhuman STRENGTH, because I’m such an easily provoked, bad-tempered and self-righteous bastard, that I’d be constantly beating up blokes as if I was Batman on crack. And the idea of being INVISIBLE in order to spy on women getting undressed, well... that’s just perverted and creepy. (I’d much rather just ACCIDENTALLY stumble into that kind of situation.)
The other problem with having a superpower is that it can only lead to a sense of elitist arrogance and egotism that would make me just one incident of anal sex away from being David Starkey.
So, what I would rather have instead of a super power is my very own MAGIC SHIT GOBLIN.
My Magic Shit Goblin would be magic in that only I can see him. He is totally invisible to everyone else, as is his MAGIC SACK OF SHIT. What’s magic about his magic sack of shit is that it is full of an infinite number of turds – of every possible texture, consistency and tensile strength – all of which remain invisible when hurled by my magic shit goblin until the point of IMPACT, when magically they assume absolute clarity of existence.
My Magic Shit Goblin would accompany me everywhere and await instruction as to whom (or at what) he should throw a shit. I SAY THE WORD, HE THROWS A TURD. (Can you see what I did there?) He’s also clever enough to select whatever type of poo I ask for and to hurl this with whatever degree of force I instruct him to use. He’s a bit like a golfer’s caddie in that sense.
My Magic Shit Goblin would require some subsidiary magical powers in order to fulfil his function. For instance, he must be able to remain rooted to the roof of my car in order to hurl shits at the inordinate number of wankers I encounter EVERY TIME I drive anywhere. On my prompt (which might have to be telepathic seeing as he’s outside the car and I’m in it) my loyal and trusted goblin will be broadcasting handfuls of crap at every tailgater, wrong-lane-changing over-taker, speed-limit-spanking twat-racer, white van driver, sports car owner and those inconsiderate lazy cunts who never indicate. SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT!
I’d take my Magic Shit Goblin to the pub so that when you get one of those ubiquitous moments when some selfish oaf arrives at the bar AFTER you but allows him/herself to be served BEFORE you without having the fucking decency to say “He was here before ME,” then the self-centred COCKBUCKET won’t see the lump of REVENGE TURD until it actually submerges in his or her glass and starts to break up like the wreck of the Titanic.
I’d even take my Magic Shit Goblin to the supermarket and put him in the baby seat bit of the trolley and have him primed to offload the odd dump into the momentarily-abandoned trolleys of those thoughtless and blinkered bastards that block the aisles. A great big nut-laced plop right on top of their tins of cat food and organic celery sticks.
Now, you might be thinking that I have wasted a wish here. I could have chosen to have some magical power or superhuman feature that could be employed in ending war and poverty and repression in the world. It’s true to say that even if I could send my Magic Shit Goblin on long-distance missions, a lump of shit in Colonel Gadaffi’s couscous is not going to save Libyan lives. Nor is a multiple raining down of plops over a Taliban hideout going to save us all from terrorism. And those societies that still stone women for adultery and homosexuals for being homosexual, if my Magic Shit Goblin lobbed some plops in their direction they’d just use them once they ran out of stones.
I could set my aspirations lower, I guess, and seek to rid British TV of all primetime shows that involve talentless twats trying to get attention for themselves in an elimination competition that moronic members of the public text in to vote for. I could indeed send my Magic Shit Goblin to those TV studios and pepper the producers and presenters with a torrent of turd, but I would expect one of those turds to consequently pull in the most text votes and win the series before going on to enjoy a 12 month popularity rise and find itself photographed on the beach in Ibiza with its cellulite showing.
So, selfish as it seems, my Magic Shit Goblin will serve only my own petty purposes. That is until he has his mind corrupted by ideas from Twitter which encourages him to question the nature of his servitude and ultimately turn against me, backed up by the full arsenal of the contents of his magical sack.
If I do get myself a Magic Shit Goblin, I’ll be sure never to let him go on Twitter.
This question is unarguably TRITE and DESPERATE and gets inserted into awkwardly silent gaps in social situations as a conversation-inducing enema. But it CAN throw up intriguing answers.
I’ve considered all the usual responses. I wouldn’t want to FLY, because I damn near shit my pants last week going just 200 feet up at 80 mph on STEALTH at Thorpe Park. I wouldn’t want superhuman STRENGTH, because I’m such an easily provoked, bad-tempered and self-righteous bastard, that I’d be constantly beating up blokes as if I was Batman on crack. And the idea of being INVISIBLE in order to spy on women getting undressed, well... that’s just perverted and creepy. (I’d much rather just ACCIDENTALLY stumble into that kind of situation.)
The other problem with having a superpower is that it can only lead to a sense of elitist arrogance and egotism that would make me just one incident of anal sex away from being David Starkey.
So, what I would rather have instead of a super power is my very own MAGIC SHIT GOBLIN.
My Magic Shit Goblin would be magic in that only I can see him. He is totally invisible to everyone else, as is his MAGIC SACK OF SHIT. What’s magic about his magic sack of shit is that it is full of an infinite number of turds – of every possible texture, consistency and tensile strength – all of which remain invisible when hurled by my magic shit goblin until the point of IMPACT, when magically they assume absolute clarity of existence.
My Magic Shit Goblin would accompany me everywhere and await instruction as to whom (or at what) he should throw a shit. I SAY THE WORD, HE THROWS A TURD. (Can you see what I did there?) He’s also clever enough to select whatever type of poo I ask for and to hurl this with whatever degree of force I instruct him to use. He’s a bit like a golfer’s caddie in that sense.
My Magic Shit Goblin would require some subsidiary magical powers in order to fulfil his function. For instance, he must be able to remain rooted to the roof of my car in order to hurl shits at the inordinate number of wankers I encounter EVERY TIME I drive anywhere. On my prompt (which might have to be telepathic seeing as he’s outside the car and I’m in it) my loyal and trusted goblin will be broadcasting handfuls of crap at every tailgater, wrong-lane-changing over-taker, speed-limit-spanking twat-racer, white van driver, sports car owner and those inconsiderate lazy cunts who never indicate. SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT!
I’d take my Magic Shit Goblin to the pub so that when you get one of those ubiquitous moments when some selfish oaf arrives at the bar AFTER you but allows him/herself to be served BEFORE you without having the fucking decency to say “He was here before ME,” then the self-centred COCKBUCKET won’t see the lump of REVENGE TURD until it actually submerges in his or her glass and starts to break up like the wreck of the Titanic.
I’d even take my Magic Shit Goblin to the supermarket and put him in the baby seat bit of the trolley and have him primed to offload the odd dump into the momentarily-abandoned trolleys of those thoughtless and blinkered bastards that block the aisles. A great big nut-laced plop right on top of their tins of cat food and organic celery sticks.
Now, you might be thinking that I have wasted a wish here. I could have chosen to have some magical power or superhuman feature that could be employed in ending war and poverty and repression in the world. It’s true to say that even if I could send my Magic Shit Goblin on long-distance missions, a lump of shit in Colonel Gadaffi’s couscous is not going to save Libyan lives. Nor is a multiple raining down of plops over a Taliban hideout going to save us all from terrorism. And those societies that still stone women for adultery and homosexuals for being homosexual, if my Magic Shit Goblin lobbed some plops in their direction they’d just use them once they ran out of stones.
I could set my aspirations lower, I guess, and seek to rid British TV of all primetime shows that involve talentless twats trying to get attention for themselves in an elimination competition that moronic members of the public text in to vote for. I could indeed send my Magic Shit Goblin to those TV studios and pepper the producers and presenters with a torrent of turd, but I would expect one of those turds to consequently pull in the most text votes and win the series before going on to enjoy a 12 month popularity rise and find itself photographed on the beach in Ibiza with its cellulite showing.
So, selfish as it seems, my Magic Shit Goblin will serve only my own petty purposes. That is until he has his mind corrupted by ideas from Twitter which encourages him to question the nature of his servitude and ultimately turn against me, backed up by the full arsenal of the contents of his magical sack.
If I do get myself a Magic Shit Goblin, I’ll be sure never to let him go on Twitter.
Tuesday 14 June 2011
Marching Up & Down the Bastard Square
“AWOLs will be severly dealt with!”
Each week I would read the same notice and each week “severely” was spelt wrong. Or perhaps not. Perhaps there WOULD be some degree of SEVERING a limb or other appendage. Because we AWOLs deserved it, cowardly bastards that we were, traitorous fucking oiks!
I was 13. I was one of the impressionable students of St ******** College, all-boys Catholic secondary school, who succumbed to the BIG FUCKING LIE that the Combined Cadet Force was FUN. A 6th former from the RAF section of the school’s CCF strolled back and forth in front of us in assembly, arms folded, brow furrowed film-star style, telling us about field camps we could go on, how we’d get to fly a De Havilland DHC1-Chipmunk two-seater plane and how we’d get to shoot a Lea Enfield rifle. OH YES. We were having some of that.
We had been streamed that year into 7 form classes according to test results in our subjects. A strict hierarchy from the boffins at the top – we called them “stiffs”– to the “remedial” class at the bottom. There was a distinct correlation between the 3 sections of the CCF and the academic demographic from which they attracted recruits. The RAF appealed mostly to the top classes and that included me, because I was good at tests. But I wasn’t a stiff. The Army appealed more broadly to boys from the more able classes down to the below-average ones. And inexplicably the Navy consisted exclusively of remedials.
I say “inexplicably”, because in terms of who looked the biggest DICKS in their uniforms, the Navy were OUT THERE in their own league. If the stigma of being labelled a “remedial” and treated like thickheads by the school system wasn’t bad enough, here they were, the poor sods, volunteering to wear the biggest DING DONG FUCKING BELL BOTTOMS seen this side of 1975. And this was 1983. So. Not cool.
Obviously the Army cadets DID look cool. Consequently, they wore their combats and big bastard boots to all lessons on Thursdays, as Cadets was after school that day. We stiffs and stiff-deniers in the RAF carried our uniform to school and changed at the end of the day, because it WAS NOT cool. It wasn’t knockabout fucking comedy hilarious like the Navy cadets’ clown outfits, but it certainly wasn’t cool. Our trousers, which were made from pure starch, blue dye and asbestos, were moderately wide around the hem (i.e. twice the 12 inch hem width that was considered de rigueur in those days.) And they itched like an eczema-sufferer in a sand-pit filled with council road grit. The blue jumper with obligatory epaulets and badges was bearable and could be worn to Thursday’s lessons with normal school trousers, but the beret was ill-designed to match the sprouting hair-styles of the mid-80’s, my Bono mullet in particular, but also the occasional George Michael bouffy wedge. Luckily, most stiffs had a short back and sides, a sensible decision by their mothers I feel.
Our first field trip allowed me to bond with some of the stiffs in my class, who were fellow privates in the RAF. They were all into heavy metal music and - I should imagine - Dungeons and Dragons. The first night at camp we were allowed to roam around the local town (Folkestone, I recall) and spent most of it sat outside the cemetery listening to tales of Ouija boards, subliminal messages on Iron Maiden albums, devil worshipping and encounters with ghosts. In hindsight, they were sad fuckers really, but at the time – given the fact that I was then still Catholic and had seen “The Omen” several times since a young age – I was so worked up by all these ghoulish and supernatural stories that I near as hell shat in those starchy blue flares. Had I done so, of course, the wide hem would have allowed any ballast to fall unimpeded to the pavement outside the cemetery.
We did get to shoot guns at this camp as well. And take them apart and clean them and put them back together and feel like REAL MEN. And not long after, we went flying in Chipmunks. That was cool, although I didn’t get to take the controls, because I was the last one to go up and the lad before me had been sick in the cockpit and it smelt and I think the pilot was rushing a bit.
And so, up until this point, the “Warrant Officer” from the 6th form had been honest. CCF WAS fun. And that fun lasted exactly one term. In our second term, every single Thursday after school we would have DRILL in the playground (embarrassing, as other boys leaving school late would walk past and take the piss) followed by an hour’s classroom lecture on the rudiments of FLIGHT. Every single week. Drill then lectures. And the next term. And the next.
We’d been enticed in and entertained and now it was this old shit every week. So a couple of us started bunking. As the noticeboard said, we became AWOL’s. This is where the whole Mickey Fucking Mouse aspect of the CCF really sunk in. We were 14 now, less willing to be ordered about by older kids, whatever their pseudo-rank; and we were VERY BLOODY HOSTILE to the worst of the pseudo-rankers, the RAF’s “Squadron Leader” who was an English teacher and Head of 6th Form by day.
Mr G****** (and yes the Head of 6th form in “The Inbetweeners” does share the name) was a 1940’s throwback with a huge portrait of Margaret Thatcher on his office wall. Enough said. Except to add that he REFUSED to let anyone leave the RAF cadets. Even when my Dad came up to the school to demand that I be allowed to leave, he was told that the boys were being taught responsibility and commitment and so, as with the real armed forces, would not be allowed to leave until they’d finished their enlistment. In our case, this was 3 years. A decision made at 13 committed us to 3 years marching up and down the bastard playground, attending countless lectures about what makes a plane fly, dressing up in musty old uniforms (that must have been stitched together 40 years before) and playing soldiers (or in our case pilots, and even then we’d only done that once all year!) What utter BOLLOCKS!
So, with my Dad’s consent, I just refused to go. At first, while still young, I’d have to run away from the 6th form officers stationed at the school gate to apprehend the AWOLs. I even disguised myself once by wearing glasses and giving myself a centre-parting (only slightly less likely to elicit scorn that the RAF uniform.) But even at 16, while sitting my O’Levels, I’d look at that CCF notice board to see my name amongst the list of AWOLs alongside a threat to be “severly” dealt.
I never was. And needless to say, I never went on to join the RAF in later life, but mostly because I still can’t shake that smell of Chipmunk cockpit vomit from my nasal hairs.
Each week I would read the same notice and each week “severely” was spelt wrong. Or perhaps not. Perhaps there WOULD be some degree of SEVERING a limb or other appendage. Because we AWOLs deserved it, cowardly bastards that we were, traitorous fucking oiks!
I was 13. I was one of the impressionable students of St ******** College, all-boys Catholic secondary school, who succumbed to the BIG FUCKING LIE that the Combined Cadet Force was FUN. A 6th former from the RAF section of the school’s CCF strolled back and forth in front of us in assembly, arms folded, brow furrowed film-star style, telling us about field camps we could go on, how we’d get to fly a De Havilland DHC1-Chipmunk two-seater plane and how we’d get to shoot a Lea Enfield rifle. OH YES. We were having some of that.
We had been streamed that year into 7 form classes according to test results in our subjects. A strict hierarchy from the boffins at the top – we called them “stiffs”– to the “remedial” class at the bottom. There was a distinct correlation between the 3 sections of the CCF and the academic demographic from which they attracted recruits. The RAF appealed mostly to the top classes and that included me, because I was good at tests. But I wasn’t a stiff. The Army appealed more broadly to boys from the more able classes down to the below-average ones. And inexplicably the Navy consisted exclusively of remedials.
I say “inexplicably”, because in terms of who looked the biggest DICKS in their uniforms, the Navy were OUT THERE in their own league. If the stigma of being labelled a “remedial” and treated like thickheads by the school system wasn’t bad enough, here they were, the poor sods, volunteering to wear the biggest DING DONG FUCKING BELL BOTTOMS seen this side of 1975. And this was 1983. So. Not cool.
Obviously the Army cadets DID look cool. Consequently, they wore their combats and big bastard boots to all lessons on Thursdays, as Cadets was after school that day. We stiffs and stiff-deniers in the RAF carried our uniform to school and changed at the end of the day, because it WAS NOT cool. It wasn’t knockabout fucking comedy hilarious like the Navy cadets’ clown outfits, but it certainly wasn’t cool. Our trousers, which were made from pure starch, blue dye and asbestos, were moderately wide around the hem (i.e. twice the 12 inch hem width that was considered de rigueur in those days.) And they itched like an eczema-sufferer in a sand-pit filled with council road grit. The blue jumper with obligatory epaulets and badges was bearable and could be worn to Thursday’s lessons with normal school trousers, but the beret was ill-designed to match the sprouting hair-styles of the mid-80’s, my Bono mullet in particular, but also the occasional George Michael bouffy wedge. Luckily, most stiffs had a short back and sides, a sensible decision by their mothers I feel.
Our first field trip allowed me to bond with some of the stiffs in my class, who were fellow privates in the RAF. They were all into heavy metal music and - I should imagine - Dungeons and Dragons. The first night at camp we were allowed to roam around the local town (Folkestone, I recall) and spent most of it sat outside the cemetery listening to tales of Ouija boards, subliminal messages on Iron Maiden albums, devil worshipping and encounters with ghosts. In hindsight, they were sad fuckers really, but at the time – given the fact that I was then still Catholic and had seen “The Omen” several times since a young age – I was so worked up by all these ghoulish and supernatural stories that I near as hell shat in those starchy blue flares. Had I done so, of course, the wide hem would have allowed any ballast to fall unimpeded to the pavement outside the cemetery.
We did get to shoot guns at this camp as well. And take them apart and clean them and put them back together and feel like REAL MEN. And not long after, we went flying in Chipmunks. That was cool, although I didn’t get to take the controls, because I was the last one to go up and the lad before me had been sick in the cockpit and it smelt and I think the pilot was rushing a bit.
And so, up until this point, the “Warrant Officer” from the 6th form had been honest. CCF WAS fun. And that fun lasted exactly one term. In our second term, every single Thursday after school we would have DRILL in the playground (embarrassing, as other boys leaving school late would walk past and take the piss) followed by an hour’s classroom lecture on the rudiments of FLIGHT. Every single week. Drill then lectures. And the next term. And the next.
We’d been enticed in and entertained and now it was this old shit every week. So a couple of us started bunking. As the noticeboard said, we became AWOL’s. This is where the whole Mickey Fucking Mouse aspect of the CCF really sunk in. We were 14 now, less willing to be ordered about by older kids, whatever their pseudo-rank; and we were VERY BLOODY HOSTILE to the worst of the pseudo-rankers, the RAF’s “Squadron Leader” who was an English teacher and Head of 6th Form by day.
Mr G****** (and yes the Head of 6th form in “The Inbetweeners” does share the name) was a 1940’s throwback with a huge portrait of Margaret Thatcher on his office wall. Enough said. Except to add that he REFUSED to let anyone leave the RAF cadets. Even when my Dad came up to the school to demand that I be allowed to leave, he was told that the boys were being taught responsibility and commitment and so, as with the real armed forces, would not be allowed to leave until they’d finished their enlistment. In our case, this was 3 years. A decision made at 13 committed us to 3 years marching up and down the bastard playground, attending countless lectures about what makes a plane fly, dressing up in musty old uniforms (that must have been stitched together 40 years before) and playing soldiers (or in our case pilots, and even then we’d only done that once all year!) What utter BOLLOCKS!
So, with my Dad’s consent, I just refused to go. At first, while still young, I’d have to run away from the 6th form officers stationed at the school gate to apprehend the AWOLs. I even disguised myself once by wearing glasses and giving myself a centre-parting (only slightly less likely to elicit scorn that the RAF uniform.) But even at 16, while sitting my O’Levels, I’d look at that CCF notice board to see my name amongst the list of AWOLs alongside a threat to be “severly” dealt.
I never was. And needless to say, I never went on to join the RAF in later life, but mostly because I still can’t shake that smell of Chipmunk cockpit vomit from my nasal hairs.
Thursday 26 May 2011
My Mid-Life Non-Crisis
Why haven’t I had my mid-life crisis yet? I hit 40 a year ago this week.
When I say “hit” 40, I mean that 40 kind of gushed over me and seeped down the back of my shirt like a tank of piss-and-spunk-based gunge on “I’m a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here.” The difference being that no one can get you out of here when “here” is that time of life called Middle age.
So, I’ve had a year in which to conform to the male middle-age-crisis stereotype by having my ear pierced, buying a sports car and finding myself a 19-year-old girlfriend.
I’ve done none of these.
Earrings suit a minority of blokes. If you don’t have the right overall look, the right hair and general dress sense, then there’s no halfway house with pierced ears. You either look good or you look like a dick. They’re as uncompromising as waistcoats. In fact, more so. I can’t think of any man who doesn’t look like a dick in a waistcoat unless he’s holding either a dinner tray or a snooker cue.
Sports cars? Sports cars are for WANKERS. Macho wankers. END OF FUCKING STORY. We all know it and the wankers who drive sports cars know it. They just won’t admit it. Which is another reason why they’re wankers.
And as for a 19-year-old girlfriend, I’m yet to meet a 19-year-old who doesn’t look like a kid from my chronological vantage point. Regardless of the legality of it, I’m not cursed with a desire to indulge in exploitative relationships; and although this wouldn’t quite be in the same drawer as paedophilia, it is in the same piece of furniture.
(For the record, the morality issue is the main barrier, of course. Adultery, misguided vanity and gratuitous machismo are all on the same playlist on every wanker’s ipod.)
All this isn’t to say that I haven’t experienced SOME changes on turning 40. I’m not trying to recapture my youth in the ways described above, because other than having the odd 19 year old girlfriend when I was that age (and by “odd” I mean an odd number, like maybe 3 if I’m being generous), I never wanted to own a flash car, drive fast or adorn myself in ear accessories.
But I AM trying to recapture my youth in other ways. Sad ways.
For instance, last week I bought a tin of spaghetti bolognaise and ate it on toast. A tin. Spaghetti Bolognaise in a fucking TIN. I hadn’t had such a meal since I was a teenager. I’m now on the look out for a tin of chicken in white sauce – equally delicious on toast. (When you’re in your teens.) Of course, anyone who knows about this will attribute it to a mid-life crisis.
Lots of things I do make me feel young again. Watching Dr Who. Wearing a Harrington. Having a stink bomb in my office at work and an intention to deploy it.
And lots of things I do make me feel old. Like getting out of bed. And breathing. And moving around. You know, all that difficult stuff.
Perhaps, as with the retirement age, the kick-off time for middle age has been put back by the government, and in fact I am still too young to embark on a mid-life crisis. That leaves you in a frustrating limbo period then really. A pre-male-menopausal twilight zone. A bit like half-past three on a Sunday afternoon.
Hmmm. I’ve lost the will to carry on now…
When I say “hit” 40, I mean that 40 kind of gushed over me and seeped down the back of my shirt like a tank of piss-and-spunk-based gunge on “I’m a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here.” The difference being that no one can get you out of here when “here” is that time of life called Middle age.
So, I’ve had a year in which to conform to the male middle-age-crisis stereotype by having my ear pierced, buying a sports car and finding myself a 19-year-old girlfriend.
I’ve done none of these.
Earrings suit a minority of blokes. If you don’t have the right overall look, the right hair and general dress sense, then there’s no halfway house with pierced ears. You either look good or you look like a dick. They’re as uncompromising as waistcoats. In fact, more so. I can’t think of any man who doesn’t look like a dick in a waistcoat unless he’s holding either a dinner tray or a snooker cue.
Sports cars? Sports cars are for WANKERS. Macho wankers. END OF FUCKING STORY. We all know it and the wankers who drive sports cars know it. They just won’t admit it. Which is another reason why they’re wankers.
And as for a 19-year-old girlfriend, I’m yet to meet a 19-year-old who doesn’t look like a kid from my chronological vantage point. Regardless of the legality of it, I’m not cursed with a desire to indulge in exploitative relationships; and although this wouldn’t quite be in the same drawer as paedophilia, it is in the same piece of furniture.
(For the record, the morality issue is the main barrier, of course. Adultery, misguided vanity and gratuitous machismo are all on the same playlist on every wanker’s ipod.)
All this isn’t to say that I haven’t experienced SOME changes on turning 40. I’m not trying to recapture my youth in the ways described above, because other than having the odd 19 year old girlfriend when I was that age (and by “odd” I mean an odd number, like maybe 3 if I’m being generous), I never wanted to own a flash car, drive fast or adorn myself in ear accessories.
But I AM trying to recapture my youth in other ways. Sad ways.
For instance, last week I bought a tin of spaghetti bolognaise and ate it on toast. A tin. Spaghetti Bolognaise in a fucking TIN. I hadn’t had such a meal since I was a teenager. I’m now on the look out for a tin of chicken in white sauce – equally delicious on toast. (When you’re in your teens.) Of course, anyone who knows about this will attribute it to a mid-life crisis.
Lots of things I do make me feel young again. Watching Dr Who. Wearing a Harrington. Having a stink bomb in my office at work and an intention to deploy it.
And lots of things I do make me feel old. Like getting out of bed. And breathing. And moving around. You know, all that difficult stuff.
Perhaps, as with the retirement age, the kick-off time for middle age has been put back by the government, and in fact I am still too young to embark on a mid-life crisis. That leaves you in a frustrating limbo period then really. A pre-male-menopausal twilight zone. A bit like half-past three on a Sunday afternoon.
Hmmm. I’ve lost the will to carry on now…
Saturday 14 May 2011
The Complete (Bastardised) History of Popular Music
Pop music was invented the day that Vera Lynn went electric in 1944. (She’d been using gas before that.) Judas!
But the seeds of popular music were sown hundreds of years earlier, thanks to the actions of one particular bastard, John Hawkins, who started the Atlantic Slave Trade triangle in 1562. Hawkins knew full well that three centuries of slavery would help African-Americans to invent the Blues. His was a rather controversial social experiment and would be frowned upon today by most of the UK’s main political parties. However, had he left Africans to their own devices and they’d still managed to influence what Europeans listened to today, then all pop music would sound like Paul Simon’s fucking “Gracelands.”
Blues music was all well and good if you were poor and black and generally pissed off, but it needed to evolve after the Second World War because of the invention of the teenager. Teenagers were white, unburdened by the experience of racial discrimination and had money to spend. They needed a less pissed-off version of Blues - and thus Rock and Roll was born. Rock and Roll singers were generally men in their twenties who sang songs about 16 year old girls but married 14 year old ones. No one minded this in the 1950’s, because you didn't have paedophilia in the good old days.
Some white people were just as poor as black people, though, and they adapted Blues to folk music, which had been sung mostly by men with beards and ugly people for centuries. Blues also spawned Jazz, because if you tried to dance to Blues then there was no way you’d end up shagging anyone at the end of the night.
And you also had gospel from generations before, because another intended outcome of John Hawkins’ social experiment was to make all Black Americans believe in Jesus. Gospel, Blues and Jazz thus led to Soul music, which allowed Black people to look cool while geeky white teenagers simulated masturbation by playing air guitars along to the angry child of Rock and Roll, who was just called “Rock” (probably after Rock Hudson, it is believed.)
The 1960’s were dominated by The Beatles, who were bigger than Jesus according to a claim made by John Lennon. Although this caused a lot of controversy among the people of the southern United States (well known for their good reason and tolerance), the Beatles WERE in fact bigger than Jesus, who was probably only 5’2” (typical height for your Roman-era Palestinian living on a diet of just fish and bread.)
The Beatles revolutionised pop music and are generally considered to be the best band ever. This is proven by the fact that they got away with putting Yellow Submarine on Revolver and Octopus’s Garden on Abbey Road; and no one minded. That’s like being on a date with the person of your dreams and not caring much if they shit themselves early in the evening and don’t change their underwear.
Meanwhile, Rock music started to split off into a number of strands much like a leper exfoliating with a cheese grater. Hard Rock and Heavy Metal were like Dungeons and Dragons with sex. Glam rock gave transvestites a bit of breathing space until social attitudes made it unfashionable to laugh at them. Prog Rock was where all the wrong notes were played but in the right order. And Punk Rock was all the wrong notes played in the wrong order, plus phlegm. New Wave was required to sort out that mess, by putting ex-punks in suits and insisting on some degree of talent.
Pop Music then became increasingly sanitised in the 1980’s. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan passed laws in the UK and USA banning the use of acoustic instrumentation and ushered in an age of mechanised pop music where machines did the work of humans. There were huge protests in the northern parts of England to these reforms. Supporters of Indie Rock clashed with police in bloody scenes that made the Miners’ strike look like a domestic tiff between sitcom legends of the time, Terry and June.
Eventually, Indie Rock won, managed to overcome the trauma of watching Grunge shoot itself in the foot (or to be more precise, the head) and set up the last golden period of music in the UK. This was known as Brit Pop, because for a few years all American bands were shit, so we had to make do with Blur and Oasis.
Meanwhile, record companies noticed that the section of the population who’d always eschewed song writing, musicianship, and talent for something more superficial and glossy were becoming even less discerning in their demands than in the days of The Monkees or The Bay City Rollers. And so Boy Bands were untied and rescued from the deeper recesses of Louis Walsh’s closet and marketed mercilessly at an audience that would ten years later financially prop up the TV talent-less show industry and it’s bastard offspring.
But the seeds of popular music were sown hundreds of years earlier, thanks to the actions of one particular bastard, John Hawkins, who started the Atlantic Slave Trade triangle in 1562. Hawkins knew full well that three centuries of slavery would help African-Americans to invent the Blues. His was a rather controversial social experiment and would be frowned upon today by most of the UK’s main political parties. However, had he left Africans to their own devices and they’d still managed to influence what Europeans listened to today, then all pop music would sound like Paul Simon’s fucking “Gracelands.”
Blues music was all well and good if you were poor and black and generally pissed off, but it needed to evolve after the Second World War because of the invention of the teenager. Teenagers were white, unburdened by the experience of racial discrimination and had money to spend. They needed a less pissed-off version of Blues - and thus Rock and Roll was born. Rock and Roll singers were generally men in their twenties who sang songs about 16 year old girls but married 14 year old ones. No one minded this in the 1950’s, because you didn't have paedophilia in the good old days.
Some white people were just as poor as black people, though, and they adapted Blues to folk music, which had been sung mostly by men with beards and ugly people for centuries. Blues also spawned Jazz, because if you tried to dance to Blues then there was no way you’d end up shagging anyone at the end of the night.
And you also had gospel from generations before, because another intended outcome of John Hawkins’ social experiment was to make all Black Americans believe in Jesus. Gospel, Blues and Jazz thus led to Soul music, which allowed Black people to look cool while geeky white teenagers simulated masturbation by playing air guitars along to the angry child of Rock and Roll, who was just called “Rock” (probably after Rock Hudson, it is believed.)
The 1960’s were dominated by The Beatles, who were bigger than Jesus according to a claim made by John Lennon. Although this caused a lot of controversy among the people of the southern United States (well known for their good reason and tolerance), the Beatles WERE in fact bigger than Jesus, who was probably only 5’2” (typical height for your Roman-era Palestinian living on a diet of just fish and bread.)
The Beatles revolutionised pop music and are generally considered to be the best band ever. This is proven by the fact that they got away with putting Yellow Submarine on Revolver and Octopus’s Garden on Abbey Road; and no one minded. That’s like being on a date with the person of your dreams and not caring much if they shit themselves early in the evening and don’t change their underwear.
Meanwhile, Rock music started to split off into a number of strands much like a leper exfoliating with a cheese grater. Hard Rock and Heavy Metal were like Dungeons and Dragons with sex. Glam rock gave transvestites a bit of breathing space until social attitudes made it unfashionable to laugh at them. Prog Rock was where all the wrong notes were played but in the right order. And Punk Rock was all the wrong notes played in the wrong order, plus phlegm. New Wave was required to sort out that mess, by putting ex-punks in suits and insisting on some degree of talent.
Pop Music then became increasingly sanitised in the 1980’s. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan passed laws in the UK and USA banning the use of acoustic instrumentation and ushered in an age of mechanised pop music where machines did the work of humans. There were huge protests in the northern parts of England to these reforms. Supporters of Indie Rock clashed with police in bloody scenes that made the Miners’ strike look like a domestic tiff between sitcom legends of the time, Terry and June.
Eventually, Indie Rock won, managed to overcome the trauma of watching Grunge shoot itself in the foot (or to be more precise, the head) and set up the last golden period of music in the UK. This was known as Brit Pop, because for a few years all American bands were shit, so we had to make do with Blur and Oasis.
Meanwhile, record companies noticed that the section of the population who’d always eschewed song writing, musicianship, and talent for something more superficial and glossy were becoming even less discerning in their demands than in the days of The Monkees or The Bay City Rollers. And so Boy Bands were untied and rescued from the deeper recesses of Louis Walsh’s closet and marketed mercilessly at an audience that would ten years later financially prop up the TV talent-less show industry and it’s bastard offspring.
Friday 29 April 2011
I felt very unbastard-like during the Royal Wedding
In the run-up to the Royal Wedding today I was subject to a wave of indifference that was more tidal than royal. But I’d also been mildly irritated to hear or read so much lazily clichéd criticism of the event. So, with no intention of doing much else this morning, I sat and watched the wedding, tweeted some inoffensive comments throughout (incorporated within this post) and found myself “enjoying” it.
Sometimes, it’s too easy to be cynical. I don’t mind so-called Republicans calling for the abolition of the monarchy (although, I’m sure a President would be equally useful/useless, costly and subject to hostility.) But I had to respond when some sanctimonious (and self-described “conservative”) twats on Twitter used the opportunity to say how nice it was that people could gather in London peacefully, unlike the TUC march and the UK-Uncut protesters. Ignorance is the chicken feed of Self-righteousness, someone once said (me, I reckon.)
Anyway, the wedding. I came downstairs after a nice lie-in to be immediately confronted by the nation’s favourite couple. Or so they think. The Beckhams. They had no one to talk to (thankfully for everyone else) and apparently Posh is pregnant again. Is that right? I couldn’t see. And if she’d swallowed a frozen pea, then even that would’ve shown.
Strange how people turned up at Westminster Abbey so early, hours before they needed to. Was it “unreserved seating”? Fucking Ticketmaster are wankers, aren’t they? I was hoping that the Archbishop of Canterbury would open the service by paraphrasing John Lennon: “Those of you in the cheap seats rattle your jewellery and those in the expensive seats get your servants to do it for you.” Now, he was an untidy-looking specimen, wasn’t he, Dr Rowan Williams. Fucking hair all over the place, like a 1970’s porno full of GILFs. Mrs Bastard was indignant about his unkemptness and said to me, “You’d think he’d have done some grooming beforehand.”
He’s the Archbishop of Canterbury. I’m sure he had.
I thought maybe Rowan Atkinson, not Williams, was going to marry the royal couple when I saw him on screen. As it was, he just stood in the congregation, fiddled awkwardly with a sweet in his tweed jacket pocket and sang “Hallelujah” in his Mr Bean voice.
Apart from these celebs, all the recent Prime Ministers who weren’t Labour were invited. There was some controversy about Samantha Cameron not wearing a hat, but there’s no need when David is such a fucking big helmet. As usual, he boasted about how he’d been outside talking to the people, as if he deserves a medal for soiling himself from such close contact with the proles. It made sense to see him and Professor Snape with short hair (George Osborne) in attendance, when the commentator pointed out that the wedding had a Nietzsche theme. Then I realised that she’d said nature. But given that the Middletons were staying in the Goering Hotel, maybe I heard right first time. Furthermore, the chosen wedding date of April 29th is the same as Hitler’s marriage to Eva Braun. That only lasted one day of course. I’m sure Katie Middleton’s marriage will be longer, while Katie Price’s tend to be shorter.
Things got interesting as the royals started heading to church. Harry resisted the obvious urge to do a moonie out of the car window and neither he nor William noticed they’d gone on a circuitous route, typical of a London cab. Mrs Middleton only just stopped herself from using the opportunity to pop inside the Abbey gift shop as she was dropped off right outside it. Camilla wisely kept her window wound up this time. And the rest of the royals booked themselves some mini-buses and all piled in so as to avoid the confused looks of the crowd who wouldn’t have known who half of them were if they’d seen them individually. I think we need to bring back Spitting Image.
Wills and Harry went into the Abbey and immediately suffered a hat-hair moment, but at least next to the Archbishop this didn’t really matter. Talking of untidy, did you see that the Queen just dropped her blanket onto the floor of the car when she got out? Messy cow. I won’t be too hard on her though, as she and the Middletons all contributed a sizeable amount of their own money towards the wedding. I think it’s only right that parents stick a couple of hundred quid behind the bar.
And then Kate turned up. Sadly some people would have missed seeing her dress, because judging by the screams I’d say that they were being crushed to death in the crowds outside. Apparently, the dress was a Burton one, which has made me think I should get my suits from there from now on.
She looked fantastic. I went upstairs to the toilet at this point.
I actually went for a poo, because it was now the boring religious bit and I’d been holding it in. When I came back, the service was nearly over I thought, because Kate and Wills seemed to be reading a couple of menus. I supposed they were looking at what was going to be on the buffet later that day, but they were in fact A3 sized orders of service. There were a couple of random nuns sat right next to them, “Church Hymn-Nazis” who check that you’re singing rather than miming. (Must have been Nietzsche before; I knew it.)
Then came the slow journey back to Buckingham Palace. I’m glad that Kate didn’t have a Paula Radcliffe moment. However, the horses left a tonne of plop along The Mall. I thought it was a clever decision to then let the crowds onto the road once the procession had finished. That way it saved picking up all that poo. I’ll be checking Ebay tomorrow to see if anyone’s selling any royal wedding souvenirs scraped off of their shoes.
Sometimes, it’s too easy to be cynical. I don’t mind so-called Republicans calling for the abolition of the monarchy (although, I’m sure a President would be equally useful/useless, costly and subject to hostility.) But I had to respond when some sanctimonious (and self-described “conservative”) twats on Twitter used the opportunity to say how nice it was that people could gather in London peacefully, unlike the TUC march and the UK-Uncut protesters. Ignorance is the chicken feed of Self-righteousness, someone once said (me, I reckon.)
Anyway, the wedding. I came downstairs after a nice lie-in to be immediately confronted by the nation’s favourite couple. Or so they think. The Beckhams. They had no one to talk to (thankfully for everyone else) and apparently Posh is pregnant again. Is that right? I couldn’t see. And if she’d swallowed a frozen pea, then even that would’ve shown.
Strange how people turned up at Westminster Abbey so early, hours before they needed to. Was it “unreserved seating”? Fucking Ticketmaster are wankers, aren’t they? I was hoping that the Archbishop of Canterbury would open the service by paraphrasing John Lennon: “Those of you in the cheap seats rattle your jewellery and those in the expensive seats get your servants to do it for you.” Now, he was an untidy-looking specimen, wasn’t he, Dr Rowan Williams. Fucking hair all over the place, like a 1970’s porno full of GILFs. Mrs Bastard was indignant about his unkemptness and said to me, “You’d think he’d have done some grooming beforehand.”
He’s the Archbishop of Canterbury. I’m sure he had.
I thought maybe Rowan Atkinson, not Williams, was going to marry the royal couple when I saw him on screen. As it was, he just stood in the congregation, fiddled awkwardly with a sweet in his tweed jacket pocket and sang “Hallelujah” in his Mr Bean voice.
Apart from these celebs, all the recent Prime Ministers who weren’t Labour were invited. There was some controversy about Samantha Cameron not wearing a hat, but there’s no need when David is such a fucking big helmet. As usual, he boasted about how he’d been outside talking to the people, as if he deserves a medal for soiling himself from such close contact with the proles. It made sense to see him and Professor Snape with short hair (George Osborne) in attendance, when the commentator pointed out that the wedding had a Nietzsche theme. Then I realised that she’d said nature. But given that the Middletons were staying in the Goering Hotel, maybe I heard right first time. Furthermore, the chosen wedding date of April 29th is the same as Hitler’s marriage to Eva Braun. That only lasted one day of course. I’m sure Katie Middleton’s marriage will be longer, while Katie Price’s tend to be shorter.
Things got interesting as the royals started heading to church. Harry resisted the obvious urge to do a moonie out of the car window and neither he nor William noticed they’d gone on a circuitous route, typical of a London cab. Mrs Middleton only just stopped herself from using the opportunity to pop inside the Abbey gift shop as she was dropped off right outside it. Camilla wisely kept her window wound up this time. And the rest of the royals booked themselves some mini-buses and all piled in so as to avoid the confused looks of the crowd who wouldn’t have known who half of them were if they’d seen them individually. I think we need to bring back Spitting Image.
Wills and Harry went into the Abbey and immediately suffered a hat-hair moment, but at least next to the Archbishop this didn’t really matter. Talking of untidy, did you see that the Queen just dropped her blanket onto the floor of the car when she got out? Messy cow. I won’t be too hard on her though, as she and the Middletons all contributed a sizeable amount of their own money towards the wedding. I think it’s only right that parents stick a couple of hundred quid behind the bar.
And then Kate turned up. Sadly some people would have missed seeing her dress, because judging by the screams I’d say that they were being crushed to death in the crowds outside. Apparently, the dress was a Burton one, which has made me think I should get my suits from there from now on.
She looked fantastic. I went upstairs to the toilet at this point.
I actually went for a poo, because it was now the boring religious bit and I’d been holding it in. When I came back, the service was nearly over I thought, because Kate and Wills seemed to be reading a couple of menus. I supposed they were looking at what was going to be on the buffet later that day, but they were in fact A3 sized orders of service. There were a couple of random nuns sat right next to them, “Church Hymn-Nazis” who check that you’re singing rather than miming. (Must have been Nietzsche before; I knew it.)
Then came the slow journey back to Buckingham Palace. I’m glad that Kate didn’t have a Paula Radcliffe moment. However, the horses left a tonne of plop along The Mall. I thought it was a clever decision to then let the crowds onto the road once the procession had finished. That way it saved picking up all that poo. I’ll be checking Ebay tomorrow to see if anyone’s selling any royal wedding souvenirs scraped off of their shoes.
Friday 15 April 2011
Supermarket Bastards
If you really want to know where the bastards are, then obviously head for your local English Defence League committee meeting, City bankers’ wine-tasting brunch or night-club frequented by Z-list celebs who would sell a kidney to get on page 10 of Heat magazine. That’s if you want a concentration of society’s arse-waste. For sheer numbers, though, I recommend a supermarket. Not Waitrose or Morrisons’s, because you’ll end up with a polarisation of bastards. For a healthy, comprehensive range of common garden shitheads, spend a Saturday afternoon at Tesco or Sainsbury’s.
For some reason, when I go to a supermarket, I always end up parked at a 25 degree angle to the car next to me, which almost impossibly manages to ensure that 3 of its 4 over-sized tyres are touching a white line. But who’s to say that this car isn’t in fact straight and the rest of the car park is crooked? It’s relative, isn’t it? In the same way, disability is a matter for interpretation. Who am I to argue with someone who has been refused a disabled badge, because “being a selfish cunt” doesn’t come under the disability act? I don’t argue when these people park in a disabled space. Not unless they catch me pulling their windscreen wipers outwards or flobbing at their side window on days when I am blessed with a build-up of superfluous phlegm.
I eagerly await the day when trolleys are fitted with parking sensors. Such a device, completely unnecessary for anyone other than those drivers who are retards by choice, would bring harmony to the supermarket. As it is, a shopper’s invisible blinkers slip into place automatically the moment that person’s hands grip a trolley and the sort of belligerency you’d encounter on the roads of south-east England is thus transferred to the supermarket aisles.
The barriers you walk between on the way in, which most people think are there to detect stolen items, actually emit high-frequency sonar waves designed to fuck up your spatial awareness. Handicapped by this assault on your brain and encumbered by your invisible blinkers and general piss-off attitude, you the shopper are now a helpless slave to bastardness for the next 45 minutes.
When you’re not looking to take a layer of skin off someone’s ankles with your trolley, you are parking it at a right-angle to the shelves, blocking the entire aisle while you wander back to fruit and veg for something you’ve forgotten. With typical English self-righteousness, someone will tut loudly and give your trolley a slight push. The brave might even drop something small and expensive into it. That’s as far as I’d go, seeing as there are no windscreen wipers and a grolly in this situation would be a little beyond the pale.
When these bastards are not leaving a trolley in your way, they manage to plant their bodies in such a position. If I leave more than an arm’s length between myself and the shelf full of products that I am surveying then I expect someone to move into that gap and completely deprive me of both my view and ability to pick up what I want. The only place in the supermarket that this doesn’t happen is in front of the Pot Noodles, because anyone buying these tends to do so at speed. Personally, I like to browse and give myself time to decide between the two flavours that only moderately taste like the inside of a rubbish truck.
I worked part-time in one of those now obsolete small branches of Tesco in Palmers Green for a year when I was younger. The store manager conformed lock, stock and barrel to the archetypal nasal-voiced, petty autocrat you’d expect to find wielding small amounts of power in retail. He told us to call him Mr J, because he was Polish and he didn’t think we’d cope with anything more complicated. His full name was Janus and I suspect that the J stood for Justin. He’d wander round the 5 aisles telling us in his oily voice to “face up tinned meat, yeah.” A thoroughbred bastard. I hope he has syphilis now.
My days treading the aisles, facing up tinned meat and other products, were days of missed opportunities. There are so many things you’d hope to be asked by customers, but never were:
Customer: Have I passed the pasta yet?
Supermarket assistant: I don’t know; when did you eat it?
Customer: Can you direct me to mince?
Supermarket assistant: Certainly. Walk this way, ducky.
I think the policy they now have of walking you to where you want to go was fine in 5-aisle supermarkets like the one in Palmers Green, but now when you ask the whereabouts of frozen chips and some slow fucker escorts you 30 aisles to the east wing of the supermarket, you want to grab them by their tasteful brown and orange nylon lapels and shout in their face, “Just-fuck-ing-point!”
In the old days, of course, supermarkets weren’t monopolising the entire range of retail products. You certainly wouldn’t dream of doing your Christmas shopping in Palmers Green Tesco; not when you had “Boots” across the road for the obligatory boxed sets of Old Spice and lavender bath products. Nowadays, the concept of “all under one roof” means “we sell a limited range of cheap, lowest common denominator products so you don’t need to bother going elsewhere.”
Or am I being cynical? Perhaps, in fact, Tesco is aiding the cultural and literary education of society with its wide selection of Danielle Steel novels, Mills and Boon and witty coffee table compendiums. Fucking hell, I hate those coffee table books. Presents bought by the unimaginative for the undiscerning. Should anyone ever buy me one of those twee and corny coffee table books, I am likely to marinade it in anthrax, reduce it to a fine pulp using a Molineux blender and feed it directly into that person’s stomach using an endoscopy tube that has been left overnight on the floor of a Piccadilly public lavatory.
You have to hand it to them in regard to clothes, though. When my generation was growing up, the idea of wearing supermarket clothes was as much of a social anathema as having sticky plaster on your NHS specs, riding a bike with stabilisers after you’ve reached 14 or not finding Jim Davison’s brand of casual racism and misogyny hilarious. It was an inspired move for Asda to brand their fashion as being by “George” and for Tesco to use “Florence and Fred.” Who would have thought that applying the name of 1970’s kids’ TV characters would create such immediate kudos? Maybe the inspiration came from the fact that the clothes are all made by children earning the same amount of pocket money per week that I was given in 1976.
Good old Tesco, supporting the global economy! And hopefully, one day selling everything everyone ever needs. I was hoping that the move into car insurance would lead to the provision of car parts, because the manufacturing companies pretty much fist us mercilessly with their prices. I’d gladly wander along to aisle 453 for Ford Parts in my local supermarket if it meant paying less, although I might balk at the idea of “Tesco Value” brake pads and discs – guaranteed to bring your car to a halt on most occasions.
To paraphrase Mr J. Anus, we have to “face up” to the fact that Tesco are indeed taking over. In Hertfordshire, they are the second biggest employer after the NHS. Given the government cuts, they might soon become the biggest. We might find ourselves going to Tesco for routine operations. From an entrepreneurial viewpoint, removing an appendix or an in-growing toenail would help support sausage production at the Deli counter. But perhaps the most useful medical care Tesco could provide would be psychiatric, because one of these days it won’t just be windscreen wipers…
For some reason, when I go to a supermarket, I always end up parked at a 25 degree angle to the car next to me, which almost impossibly manages to ensure that 3 of its 4 over-sized tyres are touching a white line. But who’s to say that this car isn’t in fact straight and the rest of the car park is crooked? It’s relative, isn’t it? In the same way, disability is a matter for interpretation. Who am I to argue with someone who has been refused a disabled badge, because “being a selfish cunt” doesn’t come under the disability act? I don’t argue when these people park in a disabled space. Not unless they catch me pulling their windscreen wipers outwards or flobbing at their side window on days when I am blessed with a build-up of superfluous phlegm.
I eagerly await the day when trolleys are fitted with parking sensors. Such a device, completely unnecessary for anyone other than those drivers who are retards by choice, would bring harmony to the supermarket. As it is, a shopper’s invisible blinkers slip into place automatically the moment that person’s hands grip a trolley and the sort of belligerency you’d encounter on the roads of south-east England is thus transferred to the supermarket aisles.
The barriers you walk between on the way in, which most people think are there to detect stolen items, actually emit high-frequency sonar waves designed to fuck up your spatial awareness. Handicapped by this assault on your brain and encumbered by your invisible blinkers and general piss-off attitude, you the shopper are now a helpless slave to bastardness for the next 45 minutes.
When you’re not looking to take a layer of skin off someone’s ankles with your trolley, you are parking it at a right-angle to the shelves, blocking the entire aisle while you wander back to fruit and veg for something you’ve forgotten. With typical English self-righteousness, someone will tut loudly and give your trolley a slight push. The brave might even drop something small and expensive into it. That’s as far as I’d go, seeing as there are no windscreen wipers and a grolly in this situation would be a little beyond the pale.
When these bastards are not leaving a trolley in your way, they manage to plant their bodies in such a position. If I leave more than an arm’s length between myself and the shelf full of products that I am surveying then I expect someone to move into that gap and completely deprive me of both my view and ability to pick up what I want. The only place in the supermarket that this doesn’t happen is in front of the Pot Noodles, because anyone buying these tends to do so at speed. Personally, I like to browse and give myself time to decide between the two flavours that only moderately taste like the inside of a rubbish truck.
I worked part-time in one of those now obsolete small branches of Tesco in Palmers Green for a year when I was younger. The store manager conformed lock, stock and barrel to the archetypal nasal-voiced, petty autocrat you’d expect to find wielding small amounts of power in retail. He told us to call him Mr J, because he was Polish and he didn’t think we’d cope with anything more complicated. His full name was Janus and I suspect that the J stood for Justin. He’d wander round the 5 aisles telling us in his oily voice to “face up tinned meat, yeah.” A thoroughbred bastard. I hope he has syphilis now.
My days treading the aisles, facing up tinned meat and other products, were days of missed opportunities. There are so many things you’d hope to be asked by customers, but never were:
Customer: Have I passed the pasta yet?
Supermarket assistant: I don’t know; when did you eat it?
Customer: Can you direct me to mince?
Supermarket assistant: Certainly. Walk this way, ducky.
I think the policy they now have of walking you to where you want to go was fine in 5-aisle supermarkets like the one in Palmers Green, but now when you ask the whereabouts of frozen chips and some slow fucker escorts you 30 aisles to the east wing of the supermarket, you want to grab them by their tasteful brown and orange nylon lapels and shout in their face, “Just-fuck-ing-point!”
In the old days, of course, supermarkets weren’t monopolising the entire range of retail products. You certainly wouldn’t dream of doing your Christmas shopping in Palmers Green Tesco; not when you had “Boots” across the road for the obligatory boxed sets of Old Spice and lavender bath products. Nowadays, the concept of “all under one roof” means “we sell a limited range of cheap, lowest common denominator products so you don’t need to bother going elsewhere.”
Or am I being cynical? Perhaps, in fact, Tesco is aiding the cultural and literary education of society with its wide selection of Danielle Steel novels, Mills and Boon and witty coffee table compendiums. Fucking hell, I hate those coffee table books. Presents bought by the unimaginative for the undiscerning. Should anyone ever buy me one of those twee and corny coffee table books, I am likely to marinade it in anthrax, reduce it to a fine pulp using a Molineux blender and feed it directly into that person’s stomach using an endoscopy tube that has been left overnight on the floor of a Piccadilly public lavatory.
You have to hand it to them in regard to clothes, though. When my generation was growing up, the idea of wearing supermarket clothes was as much of a social anathema as having sticky plaster on your NHS specs, riding a bike with stabilisers after you’ve reached 14 or not finding Jim Davison’s brand of casual racism and misogyny hilarious. It was an inspired move for Asda to brand their fashion as being by “George” and for Tesco to use “Florence and Fred.” Who would have thought that applying the name of 1970’s kids’ TV characters would create such immediate kudos? Maybe the inspiration came from the fact that the clothes are all made by children earning the same amount of pocket money per week that I was given in 1976.
Good old Tesco, supporting the global economy! And hopefully, one day selling everything everyone ever needs. I was hoping that the move into car insurance would lead to the provision of car parts, because the manufacturing companies pretty much fist us mercilessly with their prices. I’d gladly wander along to aisle 453 for Ford Parts in my local supermarket if it meant paying less, although I might balk at the idea of “Tesco Value” brake pads and discs – guaranteed to bring your car to a halt on most occasions.
To paraphrase Mr J. Anus, we have to “face up” to the fact that Tesco are indeed taking over. In Hertfordshire, they are the second biggest employer after the NHS. Given the government cuts, they might soon become the biggest. We might find ourselves going to Tesco for routine operations. From an entrepreneurial viewpoint, removing an appendix or an in-growing toenail would help support sausage production at the Deli counter. But perhaps the most useful medical care Tesco could provide would be psychiatric, because one of these days it won’t just be windscreen wipers…
Saturday 2 April 2011
A week in a life of watching mostly bollocks on the bastard telly
Watching telly is like picking your nose. On a few occasions it’s necessary, sometimes enjoyable, but mostly just a habit that deserves strong reproach. We all moan about most of it. The appeal of having Twitter on my iphone is that I have something comfortably less mindless to do than watch whatever’s on telly – that is, tweeting about what’s on telly.
I’ll put the news on each morning, but fuck knows why. For starters, nothing new usually happens overnight (except the occasional celebrity death, to which I find myself indifferent) and I can’t even hear the TV anyway over the noise of my Coco Pops being assaulted by cold milk, because I don’t want to turn it up too loud in case I wake the kids. Secondly, the choice seems to be between BBC Breakfast News, which is essentially a magazine programme presented by and targeted at the more bland and twee Middle class/aged/England demographic, and SKY news presented by Eammon Holmes who has all the charm of dog shit on toast. Given that I usually wake up these days feeling like I’ve been sat on all night by Eammon Holmes, I ignore the TV (without thinking to turn it off) and read the Independent App on my phone.
Daytime TV deserves a blog of its own and fortunately for most of the year I am at work and so avoid the human abattoir that is the Jeremy Kyle show. Lucky for me, we have SKY+, so Mrs Bastard is able to record the lunchtime soap “Doctors” and I am tortured with this ridiculously puerile pantomime once we’re both home in the evening. I love it. The scriptwriters are unintentional comedy geniuses, and have assembled their lines of cliché-ridden dialogue with meticulous care. I suspect they bought a load of old Crossroads scripts from the 70’s, cut them up and rearranged them. It’s clearly an art form in the same way that defecating on canvas is an art form. I strongly recommend that you watch it.
After this, my daughter will watch a recording of that week’s Glee episode, which somehow I end up watching about three times. I’m not sure why it’s originally shown after 9pm, except perhaps to protect younger children from the effects of watching something so saccharine-coated that they could contract diabetes just by sitting through one episode. While she insists on watching Glee, I go and stir two jars of English mustard into the bolognaise that will form part of her dinner.
For some reason, no one in my house will ever turn the TV off. It’s stuck on like a clagnet on an arse hair. Irritates me senselessly. And it always seems to be left on unwatched when The One Show is on. This is where the BBC manages to screw with your mind by confronting you with a presenter like Alex Jones who is both nice looking and yet so utterly devoid of any personality, that the question of whether you fancy her or not can cause a crisis of dignity. Only when she interviewed the dead-eyed fame-whore Katie Price, did I decide that relatively speaking “I would.” But watching The One Show on a Friday when she is joined by Chris Evans is like contracting pubic lice and genital thrush simultaneously.
Late evening, with the children in bed, I regain at least 50% control of the telly and look forward to settling down with a glass of wine (see other blogs) to watch something less likely to make me want to hold my head against a hot stove and stab my testicles with a wedge of out-of-date cheddar. I have decided not to drink mid-week, so that means no wine on a Wednesday, but Thursday feels close enough to the end of the week to stay up late and finish a bottle during Question Time. This is when Twitter goes into overload. Usually it is over the now ubiquitous appearance of one social pariah or another, someone like Kelvin McKenzie, Baroness Warsi or a similarly objectionable, sensationalist bigot like the loathsome panto dame David Starkey.
Come the weekend, an evening’s viewing degenerates into farce. We might all scoff at the concept of watching not-very-famous celebrities doing what they are NOT not-very-famous for, on ice or otherwise, for weeks on end and then text in our votes for who is the shittest of the shit; but we still watch it. Well, I don’t, but like the inexorable arse-clagnet, its just there, hanging about and difficult to get rid off.
The pitiful standard of such entertainment helps to elevate everything around it, so much so that any old shit can pull in 10 million viewers if Ant and Dec or Harry Hill are plonked on stage to front it. Even Paddy McGuiness’s Take Me Out has assumed the mantel of Blind Date for making light entertainment out of corny flirting between the egocentric and the shallow. Personally, my preferred method of flirting is to stop myself from gobbing in someone’s face when I tell them to piss off, which is why I have so far held back from applying to this show. Come Dine with Me is far more appealing, as it successfully manages to distil around one dinner table a town’s most scathing bastard or bitch, most drunken opinionated lush, most socially retarded middle-aged man and one averagely bland straight (wo)man to act as a foil. Now that’s good telly! I might apply. I’m sure they’d enjoy a course of English mustard with bolognaise, followed by stale cheddar and mutilated testes on crackers.
I’ll put the news on each morning, but fuck knows why. For starters, nothing new usually happens overnight (except the occasional celebrity death, to which I find myself indifferent) and I can’t even hear the TV anyway over the noise of my Coco Pops being assaulted by cold milk, because I don’t want to turn it up too loud in case I wake the kids. Secondly, the choice seems to be between BBC Breakfast News, which is essentially a magazine programme presented by and targeted at the more bland and twee Middle class/aged/England demographic, and SKY news presented by Eammon Holmes who has all the charm of dog shit on toast. Given that I usually wake up these days feeling like I’ve been sat on all night by Eammon Holmes, I ignore the TV (without thinking to turn it off) and read the Independent App on my phone.
Daytime TV deserves a blog of its own and fortunately for most of the year I am at work and so avoid the human abattoir that is the Jeremy Kyle show. Lucky for me, we have SKY+, so Mrs Bastard is able to record the lunchtime soap “Doctors” and I am tortured with this ridiculously puerile pantomime once we’re both home in the evening. I love it. The scriptwriters are unintentional comedy geniuses, and have assembled their lines of cliché-ridden dialogue with meticulous care. I suspect they bought a load of old Crossroads scripts from the 70’s, cut them up and rearranged them. It’s clearly an art form in the same way that defecating on canvas is an art form. I strongly recommend that you watch it.
After this, my daughter will watch a recording of that week’s Glee episode, which somehow I end up watching about three times. I’m not sure why it’s originally shown after 9pm, except perhaps to protect younger children from the effects of watching something so saccharine-coated that they could contract diabetes just by sitting through one episode. While she insists on watching Glee, I go and stir two jars of English mustard into the bolognaise that will form part of her dinner.
For some reason, no one in my house will ever turn the TV off. It’s stuck on like a clagnet on an arse hair. Irritates me senselessly. And it always seems to be left on unwatched when The One Show is on. This is where the BBC manages to screw with your mind by confronting you with a presenter like Alex Jones who is both nice looking and yet so utterly devoid of any personality, that the question of whether you fancy her or not can cause a crisis of dignity. Only when she interviewed the dead-eyed fame-whore Katie Price, did I decide that relatively speaking “I would.” But watching The One Show on a Friday when she is joined by Chris Evans is like contracting pubic lice and genital thrush simultaneously.
Late evening, with the children in bed, I regain at least 50% control of the telly and look forward to settling down with a glass of wine (see other blogs) to watch something less likely to make me want to hold my head against a hot stove and stab my testicles with a wedge of out-of-date cheddar. I have decided not to drink mid-week, so that means no wine on a Wednesday, but Thursday feels close enough to the end of the week to stay up late and finish a bottle during Question Time. This is when Twitter goes into overload. Usually it is over the now ubiquitous appearance of one social pariah or another, someone like Kelvin McKenzie, Baroness Warsi or a similarly objectionable, sensationalist bigot like the loathsome panto dame David Starkey.
Come the weekend, an evening’s viewing degenerates into farce. We might all scoff at the concept of watching not-very-famous celebrities doing what they are NOT not-very-famous for, on ice or otherwise, for weeks on end and then text in our votes for who is the shittest of the shit; but we still watch it. Well, I don’t, but like the inexorable arse-clagnet, its just there, hanging about and difficult to get rid off.
The pitiful standard of such entertainment helps to elevate everything around it, so much so that any old shit can pull in 10 million viewers if Ant and Dec or Harry Hill are plonked on stage to front it. Even Paddy McGuiness’s Take Me Out has assumed the mantel of Blind Date for making light entertainment out of corny flirting between the egocentric and the shallow. Personally, my preferred method of flirting is to stop myself from gobbing in someone’s face when I tell them to piss off, which is why I have so far held back from applying to this show. Come Dine with Me is far more appealing, as it successfully manages to distil around one dinner table a town’s most scathing bastard or bitch, most drunken opinionated lush, most socially retarded middle-aged man and one averagely bland straight (wo)man to act as a foil. Now that’s good telly! I might apply. I’m sure they’d enjoy a course of English mustard with bolognaise, followed by stale cheddar and mutilated testes on crackers.
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