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.

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…

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.