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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)