A Bastard History of Crap Christmas Presents

The worst present my Dad ever got my Mum was perfume.  This iconic moment from the late 80s that says so much about their relationship when they were together, was captured on video tape and thenceforth available to enjoy for posterity.  I can see it now:  My mum opening the parcel;  my Dad - in stark contrast to the family trait of offering a self-deprecating apology when giving anyone a present - displaying naïve optimism about how expensive and top-of-the-range the gift was;  my Mum’s face, stony and stoic as the moment of denouement becomes akin to unwrapping a turd.  My Dad watches her, crestfallen, as she opens the bottle and sniffs.  “Do you not like it?” he asks, pitifully.  She retches; one of those enormous, hacking, phlegmy retches.  An uncontrollable wave of nausea engulfs her senses.  If my Dad had placed his buttocks either side of her nose and sharted, she might not have responded quite this badly.  “It’s like the stuff Greek women wear!” she moans (not actually with any xenophobic spite, as she is half-Greek.)

I have therefore never bought my wife perfume unless she has specified the type.  I learned from my Dad’s mistake.  But I didn’t learn enough.  When I met my wife, she was still 19 and had something of a different taste to what she had as she was pushing 40.  Not that I noticed this development.  So, when I purchased a pair of coconut shell ear-rings, made in West Africa and carved into elephant shapes, I believed it was a fiver well spent and just the sort of thing she likes.  It wasn’t.  She made it VERY clear the ear-rings were crap.  So, I rewrapped them and gave them back to her the following two Christmases.  By that point the joke had worn thin and she set fire to them before casting them into the rubbish.

This present-buying crapness dates back to when I was first old enough to get on the 29 bus and go to Wood Green on my own in order to choose something for the family. It would be harsh to call me a thoughtless present-buyer though.  An unimaginative one maybe.  At the time, I recall asking myself the question, “What does Mum like doing?”  The answer led me, on one occasion, into buying from Argos a drying rack for dishes and cutlery.  Even my Dad saw the error in this choice and pointed out the ungrateful message I might be sending Mum.  So, most other years I concentrated on her other pastime and bought her ash-trays, lighters or (when I was really short of ideas) just 40 Embassy.

Not that my Dad was (or indeed is) any easier to buy for.  Being a cynical old goat, he doesn’t really have any interests.  I tend to buy him a book each year and suspect he never reads it.  The only time he showed true gratitude towards a present was when I put a bet on for him for Italy to win the 2012 Euros (actually, that was a Fathers’ Day gift.)  They didn’t win, but it gave him more interest in the competition.

Within families, people tend to pick up on one thing that you’re interested in and then buy you something related to that every year for the rest of your life.  When my brother reached 16 or 17 he must have got so pissed once that my Dad ended up recounting this misadventure to my aunt who then formed the assumption that booze is his chief interest.  He thereafter received beer each Christmas and felt quite insulted by it.

You can, of course, just make a list and use your family like a retail delivery service.  This stops them making any mistakes.  I first did this at 12 and wrote down that I wanted Adam and the Ants’ new album, Prince Charming.  This was duly bought for me.  Dad inspected it after I’d opened it, cast aspersions on Adam Ant’s sexuality (and by implication on my own) by saying, “He looks like a pooftah” and then reading out the tracklist which included the song S.E.X., which he repeated until I had cringed my way into a small ball of embarrassment.

If only we could sometimes muster up the courage to say, “I don’t know what you want, so I bought you fuck-all.”  I’m sure my Mum would have preferred the smell of fuck-all to whatever foul liquid was in that perfume bottle back in ’88.

Bastard Catalogues of Useless Shit

Once upon a time, probably on a Hampstead pavement over an almond latte and a chicken pesto, a person of the corduroy persuasion must have experienced a light-bulb moment in which he or she resolved to start a business of selling useless shit to people at extortionate prices; prices that are justifiable on account of the fact that the products are personalised, unavailable anywhere else and presented in a sophisticated glossy catalogue and modelled by white, blonde, Midwich children and their fleece-clad families.

Without leaving myself open to a law suit (do we get them in Britain?) and naming any particular company, I would like to share with you the amusement I am receiving from flicking through one such catalogue of sickeningly twee over-priced useless shit, where indeed the major USP is that you can have anything personalised and you won’t find any of it for sale anywhere else.  But that’s unsurprising, as it is without doubt the most pointless lot of take-the-piss-priced crap you’d ever foolishly bang out your debit card details for.

To begin my sojourn through this emporium of excrement, I would like to present to you a pair of personalised Mr and Mrs cushion covers (£36).  Given that every straight man alive considers the very existence of cushions anathema to logic, a superfluous lump of discomforting adornment to a perfectly functional sofa, I can’t see such a present going down too well this Christmas.  Should anyone buy a pair for me and Mrs Bastard, I am likely to fill the covers not with cushion but with dog shit and post it back to the sender.

For a mere £75 you could purchase a personalised chopping board.  What the fuck would you choose to write on a chopping board except perhaps “Chopping Board” (in case some backwards idiot ever mistook it for a giant coaster)?

For £135 you can order a canvas print of… wait for it… WORDS!  Not just any words, but in fact words that you choose yourself.  The catalogue suggests, rather nicely in a fuck-off-nice sort of way, that you choose names of all the members of your family and their dates of birth, which would look NICE in a word-cloud on a grey background.  Nice or perhaps crap?

Now, if Dad didn’t like the cushion set, then let’s buy Dad some beer.  Yes, men like beer.  So, for just under a hundred pounds Dad receives each month for 3 months a whole crate (ie. six bottles) of British Beers of the Month, with mats and pub quiz so it feels like Dad is down the pub and not at home with his frighteningly blonde children of the damned.  Calculators out folks!  That’s £100 divided by 3 times 6 bottles, which is a fiver a bottle.  Twice what you pay in a supermarket for a bottle of bitter. So those beermats are probably made of gold then.

You can’t personalise the beers unfortunately, but you can personalise some cufflinks for Dad.  A different word on each cufflink, along with the dictionary definition in beautiful Times New Roman font.  I should think they have a lot of demand for the words FUCKING and MUG.

Perhaps the cufflinks will match the personalised collar stiffeners (£26).  Bits of metal that go inside your collars.  Inside.  Out of sight.  Where no one can see that they have your fucking name on.  Hmmm. I’m sure they’d work better stuck down your foreskin, as you’d be hard-pushed to get it up ever again after the despair you’re likely to suffer should your wife ever buy you such an item of unadulterated shit.

Sadly, the section of gifts For Her doesn’t warrant having the piss taken out of it, as it is full of predictably dull kitchen and jewellery crap, with kids’ names on or twee little slogans about cooking and wine-drinking.  Skipping therefore to the children’s section, I am expecting to browse my way through products that are either cute or educational.  Because I’m sure every customer’s child is “very bright and needs to be challenged.”  I was right.  Lots of wood, lots of wool and a plethora of diverse children’s names ranging from Josh and Noah to Katie and Lucy.

Finally, I’d like to imagine the conversation on that café table on that Hampstead pavement in which someone says, “We could sell a door mat in a novelty shape.  What shape would be fun?”  And the person answering, “A moustache” does so to the sound of a little piece of his soul dying from the indignity.

Educating the Bastard N.A.M.M.S (New Age Middle-Class Males)

While that paradigm of turpitude and self-aggrandising man of destiny Mr Gove slices at the education system with his relentless rapier of regression, someone really needs to have a word in his misshapen Pob-esque shell-like about the urgent need to introduce some form of specialised education for those of us who climb the social mobility escalator from council house to over-valued ex-council house in moderately affluent middle-class pockets of leafiness.

In other words, where are the fucking life skills for us New Age Middle Class Males?

Mr Gove, I hearby present to you my blue-print for such a qualification.  A new O’Level, if you will.

Unit One: Identifying Different Forms of Vegetable.

Up until the age of 20, when I met my Surrey-born Mrs, I could name 3 types of vegetable.  Carrots, Peas and Sweetcorn.  I had a suspicion that potato might be a fourth and never could remember about tomatoes or cucumbers being animals, minerals or fruits. But once I was cast into a middle-class jungle of exotic vegetables, a mind-expanding journey of un-tinned, soil-encrusted foodstuffs ensued.  What the holy fuck was a courgette?  This deformed cucumber was just the first muddied object to introduce itself to my dinner plate, followed by parsnips, aubergines and various coloured peppers.  It was with trepidation that I nibbled at these oddities, after all, I had grown up picking the onions out of beef burgers (ah, onions, that was a 4^th vegetable I’d heard about.)  Clearly, your average working-class lad must be made to learn the names of 364 vegetables by rote.

Unit Two: Dish-washer stacking

We don’t want our NAMMs to lack manual skills and so, with an eye to the fact that he will spend each day of the rest of his life loading a dishwasher, he must be trained to analyse space and items of used kitchenware; to think logically about maximising the former in order to provide a comprehensive cleansing of the latter.  Male pride is a fierce furnace that can warm the heart or explode in anger, and the successful and efficient loading of a dishwasher, in which no cubic centimetre is wasted, is what separates the middle-class men from the boys.

Unit Three: DIY

Your average 4-bedroom semi with all mod-cons and extensive garden is a minefield of “shit that can go wrong”.  A leaking tap, a flat tyre, an unreliable electricity supply to the garage, a cranking sound from the washing machine while on spin… these sorts of things can trigger long bouts of depression in your average NAMM unless he is trained to sort out the tragic inconveniences that can afflict a comfortable and care-free life.  Naturally scathing of anyone who “knows someone who can fix it” (which is one of those things a working-class person says, that you immediately distrust), a NAMM must learn to access information about the most widely recognised local tradesmen and to be able to research on the internet the true meaning of all the little icons next to the company name in the Thomson local or on their website.  (If they have no website, they’re cowboys so don’t use them.)  A NAMM will then expect the worst in terms of cost, feel they’ve got a deal if they charged any less and forever use that same tradesman confident that they don’t rip you off, because you didn’t notice that they had.

Mr Gove, of course, might dismiss my proposal, because he doesn’t foresee the NAMMs of the future being a particularly sizeable social group, given the financial constraints on access to Higher education for the working class, the unemployment levels in the under-25s and the fact that home-owning for the young is now a fucking Walt Disney fantasy pipe-dream.  There’ll be fewer and fewer lucky bastards like me who had his degree paid for and got on the property ladder when you didn’t need to put a kidney down as a deposit.

But maybe that’s all for the good.  All they do is write blogs, fret about how people drive and wish it was still 1982.

Friday Night’s Blue Plastic Bag Bastard

As the Scottish songwriter Malcolm Middleton put it, in customary bleak and downbeat tones, “staying in is the new going out.”  The track “Blue Plastic Bags” refers to what you carry your booze home in after an early Friday evening jaunt to your local shop.  Being something of a miserable bastard, this initially appealed to me as recognition of the sad realisation that you’ve reached that point in your life when you can’t afford nights out on a regular basis.  But recently the song reflects for me the much stronger, middle-aged-and-past-it ambivalence I have towards EVER going out.  I wouldn’t claim to have shackled myself fully to the harness of misanthropy, but I am finding myself increasingly in a position of jogging alongside that grim cart.

I look forward to Friday nights relishing the absence of any commitment to leaving the house.  I’m happy to sit alongside the family, fuck about on Twitter while they watch some crap on telly, pay more attention during a post-watershed comedy and finally polish off the final glass of wine and packet of Cheese and Onion Disco crisps to the accompaniment of BBC4’s music night.  Once the kids are in bed and I have started snoring, Mrs Bastard kicks me and I drag myself upstairs and pass out.

Mrs B sometimes indulges in a futile fantasy-world in which she believes she can tempt me to take her to a nice pub for a drink.  By “nice” pub, I refer to one which is decorated more pleasingly than our lounge.  The problem is, the décor alone fails to outweigh the burden of sharing my space with STRANGERS and the added burden of paying prices for alcohol that feel like financial rape.  My lounge contains no strangers and the booze that comes in blue plastic bags means I don’t resent drinking it.

So.  Sorry Mrs B, but a night in it is.

But if you want to socialise with FRIENDS?  (And yes, I do have some.  I knew what you were thinking there.)  Well, they can come round here and share the wonderful AMBIENCE of our lounge, our affordable booze, our choice of music on the home juke box, our bar snacks, our absence of strangers, our laughter filling the room and not some other fucking CACKLING WITCH or GUFFAWING BLOKEY BLOKE… (easy, settle down, breathe in, 1…2…3…4…5… and breathe out) …and a carpeted toilet to boot.

One day perhaps going out will be the new staying in.  But for now, to the sofa I go, to make arse-moulds in a sedate non-frenzy of Pinot Grigio and Discos.

My Poo Looked Like Morph

If you rifle through the archives you might notice that back in January 2011 I recounted for your amusement and disgust ten “true tales of bastardness involving poo.”  One theme cementing those stories together (in a sticky conglomeration of craposity much like an actual poo) was the existence of a victim.  This precluded, therefore, any instances of pooing in which no innocents were harmed.  Reluctantly, I held back on two highly notable experiences and thereafter forgot that I had not shared them in blog form.  So, it’s about time I did.

The first tale is the time I did a poo that looked like Morph.

Now you might be thinking that this is impossible.  Morph is human shaped.  Admittedly he is brown - a light brown much like the sort of poo you’d have following a day of eating cake and biscuits.  But he has four limbs; and there’s no way that a rectum can manipulate itself like some kind of anus contortionist to crimp out anything other than a lozenge-shaped waste product.  “Impossible!” I hear you cry.  And indeed, “Impossible” I remarked to myself when I turned to inspect this intriguing marvel of nature, this curious oddity of excrement.

And because it was so impossibly curious, I took a photo of it on my phone.  And showed everyone.

Sadly, the photo no longer exists as I have changed my phone three times since, so let me describe this rectal abomination.  It was in every way just like Tony Hart’s desktop plasticine friend, minus the eyes, mouth, nose and half an arm.  Yes, it had three and a half limbs.  How so?  Well I have pondered long and hard on how I managed this, but I suspect that it was one of those long and thin turds which twisted and rested upon itself in such a way as to coincidentally create a shape that was almost entirely consistent with the human form.

The photographic proof was often passed around the pub or sent to iron-stomached friends and it is with regret that this lost relic of mutated nature has since been flushed from existence.

Which brings me to my second tale.  I was 17 and visiting relatives in New York.  During a large family gathering (at which, incidentally, I met a second cousin named Enus but pronounced Anus) I went upstairs for a poo.  It was an en suite bathroom and less likely to invite usage, thus affording me some privacy in case I created an unsavoury aftertaste or some awkwardly anti-social noises.  Given that your average American eats a lot more than we do and often has the girth to prove it, you’d think that Armitage Shanks USA would fit wider U-bends in their bogs rather than narrower ones.  However, in this house it was not the case.  And what I considered to be a very average sized poo, full of English reserve and modesty, completely failed to flush first time.

As the floater baulked the sides of the pan in mockery of my effort to dispose of it, there was a knock on the door and a voice saying something like, “Hey Buddy, are ya finished in there?” (It probably wasn’t that, but you’ll notice I tried to make it sound American.)

Panicking that a second flush might be as futile as the first and realising that the pressure to vacate the bathroom after attempt number two would be overwhelming, I had to improvise quickly.  At home we always kept a wire coat-hanger behind the lavatory and used this to chop up anything unflushable.  My American cousins clearly had nothing of the sort to hand.  And so the only thing to hand was… my hand.

A couple of Hong Kong Phooey chops to that resistant faecal dollop ensured a successful second flush.  I left the bathroom with my head held high and returned to the party to shake the hands of many relatives who were fortunately oblivious to the depths to which my hand had recently sunk.

The Un-Bastard Olympics

I’ve taken my words from the previous post, deep-fried them in boiling excrement and devoured them humbly and with penitent apology.  Danny Boyle should be fucking knighted.  He set the scene for an Olympics that is proving to be so utterly fantastic that nearly all of us have thrown off the cynical scorn that can often form a lynchpin of our popular culture and national mood and replaced it with an out-pouring of the deeper and genuinely warm, celebratory and harmonious British characteristics.

And because of this wonderful coming together in a communion of admiration for Great Britain’s athletes (and that man Boyle’s unpretentious bulls-eye in aiming to capture the spirit of our history, culture and values) it has served to make those dissenters even more emphatic bastards for all their criticism.

It remains true that I still can’t work out what the fuck is going on in sailing, that the boats seem to be floating haphazardly on the water until a commentator declares a winner, and I may never watch it again; but I cheered like the rest of you to see Ainslie bob his way towards a gold.

It remains true, that Judo shall never appear to me to be anything beyond pyjama wrestling, but that is my failing; and our two medallists Bryant and Gibbons gain my ignorant applause.

Similarly, much as I have failed to be won over by the merits of Handball or Basketball, I have found new enjoyment in the likes of volleyball, weightlifting, badminton, table tennis, etc…

I have become un-bastardised, temporarily.  But others haven’t.  If you happen to browse your way through Twitter whilst putting arse-moulds into your sofa in front of the Olympics, you can get some sense of the national mood and the views and opinions out there.  And from this, you find in those dark and putrid corners some of humanity’s charmless turds.  The Tory MP Aiden Burley was the first to emerge and was rightly castigated by the nation for his ill-conceived politically-biased and borderline-racist outburst, which remains in the public domain despite the backlash.  But joining him are other flavours of bastard.

For instance, those blokey blokes who need to pair their applause for Jessica Ennis with some irrelevant comment about her looks.  I bet she loves looking through her Twitter mentions list to see that so many men “would”.  How reassuring that all her hard work has given her the opportunity to be sexually perved over by so many evolutionary throw-backs.  Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I switched on the women’s beach volleyball with an ulterior motive, but I wouldn’t sleazily slurp all over these athletes on a social network even if that’s how I felt;  which I didn’t, because the sport itself distracted me from the skimpy outfits and well-toned bodies.  Almost completely anyway.

Any event involving other countries brings out the xenophobic strains in the worst of us.  Fortunately, our successes have probably saved us having to endure too much overt disrespect towards the Germans and French (we’re beating them, that’s why!)  However, Andy Murray’s gold (and silver) brought out a backlash in which phrases like “surly Jock prick” were deemed acceptable by a good few wankers on Twitter.  Because…what?  He’s proud to be Scottish?  He’s serious rather jovial during post-match interviews?  He’s not pretty like Jessica Ennis?

Obviously, there remains a few miserable gits who still begrudge the money spent on this event in a time of economic crisis.  They peddle the simplistic utilitarian argument that belittles the powerful impact sport (or the arts) can have on people in terms of inspiring personal ambition, fostering good will in society and bringing pleasure to our lives.  That old crap about how every penny should be spent on housing people and feeding people from the hypocrites who don’t in fact abstain from spending money on their own pleasures in life rather than giving it away to the vulnerable.  Agreed, the costs against current cuts to welfare services is a debate; but I fucking hate the absolutism of sound-bite arguments you get from some misguided twats, again particularly on Twitter.

So, sweeping that little pile of moaners into a corner, let’s get on with feeling good about the country, about each other and about the wonderful achievements of people who have worked harder and shown more sacrifice and commitment that many of us ever have.

The Bastard Olympics

It would be uncool and tedious and criminally un-English to wet my pants in excitement over the London Olympics.  The universality of such global events means that the indiscriminately happy are afforded an opportunity to celebrate, while the mean, the cynical and the sardonic get a chance to rip the piss.  Everybody wins.  Of course, I shall admire the skills, the determination, the commitment and the achievement of every single participant; but we have a suitably limp and tongue-in-arse television sporting commentary culture to gush over all that is GOOD about the Olympics.  My intention, as always, is to join the ranks of the shit-pointers of society and hold aloft the torch of turpitude, so that its light might singe the hairs around each Olympic ring.

The Opening Ceremony will undoubtedly drive all social media into a frenzy of indefatigable piss-taking.  The choice of Frankie Boyle to direct was inspired.  Clearly, the organisers wanted something akin to Berlin 1936:  A few jokes at the expense of the Para-Olympians, something mildly racist to appeal to the older generations of East Londoners and the use of David Beckham as a personality-void straight-man for Frankie to bounce his bile off.

Yes, I know it’s not Frankie Boyle doing it.  It’s the excellent Irish writer Roddy Doyle.  And they’ve reformed The Commitments to kick off the ceremony with the official Olympic anthem, “Must Hang Sally (Gunnel)”.

Let’s face it, the Opening Ceremony will be like Eurovision Song Contest interval entertainment on steroids.  They’ll recycle some of those ubiquitous giant costumes from It’s a Knockout in the 70’s, have hundreds of local kids running between the pyrotechnics like synchronised looters and employ some X-Factor finalists to sing some sanitised pop-rock while the camera cuts to David Beckham in his VIP seat grinning inanely with all the personality of a bowl of spit.

Once the games commence, Sod’s law dictates that you only ever switch on during a sport in which you have zero interest.  I love ALL Olympic events with the exception of the following:

·       Events which can start and finish in the time it takes you to pop upstairs for a wee;

·       Events in which nothing actually happens in the time it takes you to pop upstairs for a wee, a poo or even one of those messy poos which demand a brief remedial stint in the shower;

·       Sports where participants do very little beyond working state-of-art equipment that has minimal margin of error;

·       Sports which kids can’t afford to do regularly, because they are so expensive and thus become hobbies for rich bastards;

·       Sports which have a much bigger and better appeal outside of the Olympics, so that a country can have several thousand non-Olympian participants who are better than an Olympic champion.

Let me know if you’ve worked out what that leaves and I’ll try and watch it.

Being at home during the day watching the Olympics throws up one of middle-aged man’s worse paranoia traps.   That is, I could be watching the Olympics, let’s say boxing, and the doorbell goes.  A visitor comes into the house and as we enter the lounge the TV coverage has cut to girls’ gymnastics or something involving Tom Daley.  And I’ll say, “Ah the boxing must’ve just finished.”  A defence too far.

Not that I’d necessarily watch the boxing.  It is the Olympic sport furthest removed from the real thing.  You get about 6 minutes of two boxers with pillow-sized gloves and duvets wrapped round their heads, scoring points if they happen to make any form of physical contact that is recognised by all three judges, if they are fast enough to press a button within a millisecond of each other.  It’s like primary school Gladiators.

There are also some sports which can only be appreciated with the guidance of the commentator.  Fuck knows who’s in the lead in any event involving yachts.  If I switch on to that load of cobblers, I won’t know if I’m watching an event or a couple of rich tossers dicking about on the Thames, having knocked back too much Bolly.

The beautiful irony of the games being sponsored by the two multi-national corporations most culpable for obesity in the Western world should be enjoyably ridiculed, but such sponsorship has saved the tax-payer no small amount and has also provided a cash clawback for Beckham’s agent, who masterminded the whole London 2012 Olympics purely to keep David’s public profile afloat.  If he was still playing proper football, then we wouldn’t even have got the Olympics.

As a teacher, I did become worried that Michael Gove was on the verge of demanding that we all work in our summer holidays by helping to fill the security deficit left by the feckless G4S.  They could send the army to help out at all the MANLY events (like rowing and anything involving the throwing of heavy objects) and send us teachers to where soldiers are too embarrassed to go.  Yes, it’d be that awkward gymnastics moment again.

The Strange Bastardry of Hair

The first time I realised that women had pubic hair was whilst watching an early episode of Minder in which Terry’s lust-interest of the week was a stripper.  (Believe it or not, Minder did start out with some proper-post-watershed scenes like that.)  That was a shocker.  I knew about boobs and bums at 10 years old, with a bit of a thing for Catwoman, Raquel Welch and the occasional Dr Who assistant; but I never would have imagined that any of these women kept something like that tucked away in their pants.

I say “tucked away” because the Minder stripper’s growler gave the impression that she’d half-inserted one of those troll-like Gonks between her legs.  A paradigm of 70’s vaginal fashion it was.

My hair-ducation (sorry) continued a year or three later thanks to Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.  Dennis had taken his German girlfriend swimming (Dagmar her name was, you know, with the eyebrows) and she raised her arms to rest against the side of the pool and what-do-you-know-it, she’s concealed the very same Gonk under each arm-pit.  I almost choked on my bag of Monster Munch.  Appalled by the idea that a woman could have hairy arm-pits, I appeased my outrage by resetting to a typical 80s xenophobic default position.  It was because she was German.  English women don’t have hairy arm-pits, but German women do.  A natural physiological difference caused by geographical displacement during evolution, I concluded (although not entirely in those actual words.)  This was later substantiated when German singer Nena got to number one in 1984 with 99 Red Balloons and shared her own under-arm version of the Black Forest with the Top of the Pops audience thanks to a sleeveless t-shirt and much arm-waving.

After this my teenage years brought me into contact with many a minge.  Not in reality of course, thanks to the sexually isolating environment of an all-boys’ Catholic school and my own crapness with women (see earlier post), but thanks to the soft-porn shelf of Hellenic Video in Green Lanes and the occasional illicitly-purloined Parade or Razzle magazine.  (I tended to steer clear of hard-core porn for the same reason that I dropped Biology before O’level.  There’s only so much anatomical detail I could stomach.)

And thus I was conditioned into considering my ideal woman to maintain a certain amount of growth down in the knicker region.  Which is partly why I don’t share the recent preference for a total absence of hair.  But I won’t judge.  It’s a matter of taste (metaphorically speaking of course.)  However, I am proudly narrow-minded and traditionally conditioned enough to pour heaps of scorn on MEN who shave their pubes off.  I have no logical reason for my disdain, so please don’t reply to my post with tales of tea-bagging and enhanced sexual what-have-you’s.   Gentleman, it’s up to you.  But what the fuck?

I looked down at myself in the bath this week and the question arose in my mind, if I were to shave my man’s penis garden, where would I stop?  Where would the borders be?  I’m only slightly hairier than average in general, but if I chose to wax my willy area, I’d be forced to keep nudging the border back until I reached both knees and neck.

As for the whole concept of a back-sack and crack wax, I can only cite one occasion on which such a state of baldness would have benefitted me, and it involved a particularly messy poo and the removal of an obstinate clagnet with a pair of nail scissors.  (Apologies if you just choked on YOUR bag of Monster Munch.)  My brother, who has an arse like Chewbacca, must have to keep a pair of shears down the side of his toilet for the same reason.

Really, the only decision I ever have to make is whether or not I keep my beard or shave it off for a few months.  It tends to be on a cycle dictated by own whims.  But since first sporting a beard, I have met with some prejudice.  I was horrified when a man once shouted to me from his car, “Fuck off your bearded wanker!”  I thought, what the fuck does my beard have to do with it?  And also, I was incredibly self-conscious going swimming with a beard if there were too many kids in the pool.  I thought I must look like a paedophile.  It would’ve been worse if I’d worn budgie-smuggler swimming trunks, or speados.

We do all have our prejudices in regard to hair.  One day it will be socially acceptable again to wear a moustache and not look like an 80s Liverpool player or mainstay on the gay club scene.  But until that time, you grow what you like, where you like and don’t mind me and my rants – but try to love the Gonk in your pants!

Sesame Street and its Bastard Political Agenda

It would be easy to surmise that Sesame Street was borne out of an acid-fuelled late-60’s Californian love-in.  But we’re talking about a BAD trip here:  One which the US Federal Government funded from 1969-82, presumably as a warning to pre-school aged American children about the dangers of narcotics.

And there we were thinking it was all good clean educational fun.  Consider it carefully, and you’ll come to the same conclusion as I have; that the world of Sesame Street is in fact a nightmarish dystopia, a grim vision of Hellish surrealism in which furry-puppets come alive and assume humanised characteristics; an apocalyptic bastardisation of an ordinary multi-ethnic downtown New York neighbourhood infested by freaks and monsters and creepy hippies with an obsession for the numbers 1 to 20.

It was the subliminal use of these numbers that worried me the most.  I felt that there was a political agenda here.  Right-wing, Tea-Party propaganda being fed to us against our knowledge.  Those numbers were not randomly generated to help us learn how to count.  I’m sure if you were to take the sequence of numbers that Sesame Street was “brought to you by” in the Republican administration’s years of 1969-76, you would uncover a secret code that translates to VOTE COWBOY!  As those US viewers grew to maturation in the 80s, that’s exactly what they did in Presidential elections.

A prime mover in this brainwashing was the “Mad Painter.”  He assumed the work-clothes of a painter-decorator, but let him into your home and he will do no more than use his stencil to paint the number 13 on one wall, leaving you to ponder whether you should call the police or a priest to deal with this unsettling implicit threat to your life.

Equally disturbing was “The Count,” a numerically-obsessed vampire, who spoke no words but numbers.  At first, no one knew the meaning of his numbers, until evidence started to suggest that the number he’d last say to you signified how many days you had left to live.  The police never managed to pin the related murders on him and he was able to remain free and his evil spawn became the cast of the Twilight films.  Perhaps, he should be known by the Transylvanian  spelling of his name, where in the Romanian language the “o” is discarded.

More explicitly menacing than the subliminal number hypnosis, were the fierce leviathans Big Bird and Mr Snuffleupagus.  The former assumed the sexually ambiguous, genderless form of a gigantic primeval winged monster and spent years issuing stark warnings about the latter.  Big Bird foretold the coming of the Snuffleupagus much like the Book of Revelation paints a graphic visual doom-scenario of the end of the world.  “He will come and SNUFF you out,” Big Bird would yell in a demonic trance.  Obviously, the programme makers toned this down a little (you know, because kids were watching), but the message was still clear.  And when he did finally make an appearance, Mr Snuffleupagus was indeed frightening.  Like a cross between a mammoth and a hairy ball of horse-shit.

The right-wing persuasive under-current manifested itself in the homophobic portrayal of Bert and Ernie.  A ridiculous send-up of a gay couple, who bickered and played with rubber duckies.  The message was, “Let’s all laugh at the gays,” much as it was “Let’s all laugh at this uncoordinated chef who manages to fall down the fucking stairs and drop all his cream cakes every time he makes any.”

The anti-immigration agenda was strong as well.  Each human depicted in Sesame Street represented different ethnic minority groups, but not in order to celebrate diversity.  They were shown as sexually permissive – you never knew who was married to whom, the assumption being that they swapped sexual partners on a regular basis.  Was Luis with Maria or Susan?  And who was Bob nobbing?  They were shown spending their time hanging around on downtown street corners, talking to creatures that inhabited bins, forming suspiciously friendly relationships with local children.  This was like “Birth of a Nation” all over again, this depiction of the immoral practices of the Unamericans.

Maybe I’m being alarmist.  The Federal Government withdrew its funding in 1982 and coincidentally this was the same year that Elmo was introduced into the programme.  This seems to signify a conscious turning point.  Unlike the anorexic-thin, dirty and socially inept Grover, the more brightly-coloured, cuddly Elmo represented the expiration of the political agenda and the start of the merchandising one.  From here on, Sesame Street’s bias was blunted, its cynical twisting and fear-fuelling of the American consciousness died; and instead, it was only in it for the money.  Elmo helped Grover to count.  As it turned out, they were counting the dollars.  But at least we were now allowed to warm towards Bob and Luis and Maria and Susan.  Bert and Ernie could now be respected for their monogamy.  The Count became an anachronism.  And the clumsy chef was applauded for his baking skills rather than derided for his lack of balance.

This blog was brought to you by the letters B, A, S, T, A, R and D and by the number two, which some fucking bearded hippy just painted on my computer monitor.  The Romanian count!

(disclaimer – knowing the power of American corporations and the swift way in which they’d sue the arse off anyone, I should here be explicit in pointing out that I am in fact taking the piss.)

Shiny Happy Bastards

“HELLOOO”

This is the call of a shiny-happy-bastard, a common sub-species of humankind that infests the workplace, the high street, the extended family get-together, in fact pretty much everybloodywhere.  Like jollified vermin.  It is a distinct call, shrill and almost breathless, with the emphasis on the superfluous O’s.  It is a misleading call; it reeks of some kind of warped pleasure at seeing you, contrary to the fact that you yourself are recoiling in irritation when faced with the source of that sound.

You can categorise shiny-happy-bastards into the genuine and the false, both as bad as each other.  The genuine must be considered as being simple in the head.  You observe the engulfing shroud of happiness with which they adorn themselves in social situations, a flagrantly garish garment of colour and extrovert-ism, and you think to yourself, “My God, what the fuck do you have to be so happy about?”  Indeed.  Life is never EVER quite that good.  So either they’re too stupid to realise or they have been lulled into an hypnotic trance by a misanthropic magician who gets his kicks from the shotgun blast of despair that this poor fucker will suffer once the fingers click and send him plunging sheer-cliff-style into a morass of grim realisation.

The genuine shiny-happy-bastard is incapable of showing any discrimination in life.  You could serve this hapless freak a Masterchef finalist’s three-course meal or a simple poo on a plate and the response to each will be equally celebratory and include the word AMAZING.  You could chainsaw this bastard into two halves and running through his flesh, like it might a stick of rock, would be the words to some trite positive zen-bollocks happy-crappy fatuous fortune cookie mantra.  The deluded sod has probably feasted on dozens of volumes of coffee table books full of that shit, the sort you buy a family member with no proper interests or hobbies in life.

The other kind of shiny-happy bastard is the false one.  Deserving of some respect, yes, because deep down they are hurting and this fantastically fabricated fun-filled folly of a façade is nothing more than a shield, a prop, a disguise.  But obviously, a very fucking annoying one, which you don’t feel you deserve to suffer just because they have shit they’re trying to cope with.  It gives YOU shit to cope with.  Them!

This is the shiny-happy-bastard who regularly assumes the mantle of the Fun Fascist (see other blog post). Even when they’re being less autocratic with their insistence on everyone being happy, they still retain an over-enthusiastic jolliness, a grinningly inane disposition and a disarmingly feckless outlook that drives you to want to kick them, hard, in the cock.

Especially when they see you looking less maniacally smiley than they are, and instruct you to “Cheer up.” 

Fascist.

Now don’t get me wrong, I wish happiness on all people.  I want everyone to be happy.  But it should be like a prize, something precious and earned, something fulfilling to attain, something not taken for granted or complacently  wrapped around yourself.  But most of all, it should be something you insufferable shiny happy bastards fucking well keep to yourselves when I’m anywhere near you.  GGGRRRRR!

My Dad’s a Marvellous Bastard

Inspired by the consistently excellent blog of one Mr Cyril Cacoethes (www.stupidrubbish.co.uk) I feel that it is time for me to take a voyage round my father. Not sentimentally, not poignantly, not even seriously; because that would bore you all shitless. So, by “voyage” I kind of mean a quick paddle about in a pedalo just for frivolous amusement.

To get the syrupy stuff out the way, by means of a disclaimer in case you think I don’t like him, let me just say that my Dad has a heart of gold and has put his kids and grandkids above himself ever since I was born. But he’s also a funny old bastard, a product of his times and environment and an incorrigible cynic and wit. He drives a black cab in London; and on any given day you might climb inside to be confronted either with a sociable and garrulous Jekyl or a beautifully rude and confrontational Hyde. Whichever one you get, you probably deserve it. How he’s kept his green badge in view of the number of people he’s told to “fuck off” beggar’s belief. To demonstrate his approach to customer service, I’ll cite one of hundreds of exchanges:

Passenger (gets into taxi): Russell Square!
Dad: Which one?
Passenger: Which one? There’s only one, isn’t there?
Dad: No, there’s Russell Square and there’s Russell Square please. Which one do you want to go to?

My advice to anyone entering his cab is to say please and thank you and don’t insult him with a tip any less than a pound or he’ll throw it on the pavement at your feet and suggest that you’re a tight cunt.

You can see we’re related, right?

I think the misanthropic strain may have been developed during his 20s when he was in the Met. One of my oldest and best friends, John, himself a copper, describes my Dad as a wonderfully “’orrible bastard, real 70’s Old Bill, ready to dish out some Sweeney-style justice in the back of a van.” It’s a rather exaggerated but affectionately-meant compliment.

Certainly, growing up, we felt that our Dad could handle himself, despite not being a big bloke and any car journey was made all the more interesting for the bouts of self-righteous swearing at fellow road-users and occasional excursions out of his door. As he grew older and certainly when his livelihood tied him to the road all day, he started to calm down. Nowadays, he lives according to the cliché, “Don’t get angry, get even.” And he don’t half go out of his way to get fucking even.

Like I said, we’re related.

He raised us as cynics and Catholics and the two just don’t go together, so something had to give. Nonetheless, he feels that he has “done enough time as an altar boy” and “gone to enough fucking masses” to have got himself into Heaven, should there be one, and therefore has no time for any religious cant or bollocks these days. But he loved the superstition surrounding religion and brought us up to fear the Devil, the Banshee and the Bogeyman. From when me and my brother were first allowed to watch The Omen, probably aged about 8 or 9, Dad used to regularly give us the willies by turning all the lights off in the house and shouting up to our bedroom just one word, “Damian!” This sent us screaming and scampering back downstairs.

When he wasn’t inflicting on us these psychological scars and making us fear the dark, he was instilling in us a deep sense of amusement at anything lavatorial. There’s nothing like a good poo anecdote to bring the male members of my family to the point of tears. As a copper he once followed through while on duty and threw his soiled y-fronts in the cleaner’s cupboard at the station. The next day he saw the cleaner, asked him how he was and received the reply, “Some dirty bastard has left a pair of shitty pants in my cupboard!” My Dad sympathetically agreed that this was disgusting and may well have suggested someone else who might have done it.

Being related to him, both my brother and I have soiled ourselves in public. Keep up the tradition, you know.

As I entered the self-conscious years of adolescence, Dad was very supportive in ensuring that I avoided making any decisions that might lead to me being accused of homosexuality. For example:

“What do you want to buy those poofter shoes for?”

“You want an ear-ring? What are you, a fucking poofter?”

“Adam and the Ants? Why have you got posters of that bloody great tart on your wall for? You’re not turning poofter are you?”

Pop stars were poofters. Footballer were poofters. Unmarried men in their 30s were poofters, including the mechanic whose garage backed onto our house, Robert the Iron. Dad would say “he’s harmless enough, though” and let him take me and my brother to Arsenal a couple of times, on condition that we didn’t let him touch our bums.

If you weren’t a poofter you might well have one of many other characteristics that my Dad would seize upon. Anyone who was dull or boring or a bit wet would be part of the “Willow family” because “they’re fucking limp.” Anyone who wasn’t a priest but involved in our church was a “mad monk.” And any member of the extended family who didn’t spend more than £10 on presents for us, or buy rounds at family get-togethers, were “fucking tight.”

Should you ever meet him, he’ll judge you in advance based on whatever group in society he might choose to classify you as belonging to; but faced with an individual he is warm and magnanimous. Such is his fundamental mantra in life: Expect the worst and you’ll often be pleasantly surprised.

(Assuming of course, that you say “please” and don’t wear poofter shoes.)

Bastard Bodily Smells

Easily the most convincing evidence against creationism and the existence of a benevolent deity is the fact that human beings smell FUCKING DISGUSTING sometimes. Admittedly, animals DO smell worse. But they have the temerity not to live in houses, but instead stay outdoors where their own distinctive whiffs can disperse into the atmosphere. Except dogs. I think some humans only keep dogs so that there is something in the house even ponkier than they are. Why else spend money on a creature that licks its own bollocks and then comes and tries to lick YOU?

This is my top ten list of the foulest odours produced by that most flawed of living organisms, the human being:

10. Harry Monk
What keeps Kleenex in business these days is the internet and men’s cock champagne. This is the magical substance that the Catholic Church decrees to be so sacred that it must not be wasted outside of heterosexual-marriage baby-making duties and altar boys. It lurks innocuously at the bottom of my list, because it really isn’t particularly offensive and has the almost chameleon-like characteristic of looking like snot and smelling like bleach. So you can deposit it in the toilet and no one will be any the wiser. Unless of course you leave a copy of the Grattan catalogue open to the page where Mylene Klass is in her undies.

9. Feet
I’ve always wondered why black socks smell worse than white socks at the end of a day and give you a sensation beyond smell in which you start to believe that the moist sock itself has been rubbed furiously over your tongue. This often leads to a desperate appeal for the offending foot-cover to be removed, a short-sighted request when one is then confronted with the even more overpowering stench of French cheese and Somme-style trenchfoot. Should the perpetrator then employ the damp sock as a Kleenex-substitute for nefarious purposes with aforementioned Grattan catalogue in solitary isolation, then you might find some chart-climbing up to at least number 5.

8. Fingernails
But fingernails don’t smell, you say! It depends where you put your fingers. For that reason, fingernails don’t remain entrenched at number 8 but fluctuate according to the most recent browsing history. What does make them unique is that element of surprise. Few people would be foolish enough to “smell my finger” when offered. There is enough cynicism in the world today to assume some kind of rotten motive. But with training, we can all master the headlock, which disables the victim and leaves you free to hold the offending finger right under his or her nose. Personally, I find a few seconds’ rectum scratching to be the perfect aperitif to this.

7. Women’s bits on a bad day
Far too much of a taboo to elaborate on this one. Moving on…

6. Armpits
The London Underground was designed at a time when everyone had BO and as a result absolutely no one gave a shit about how they smelt. But then, with the development of antiperspirants and deodorants, people got a bit uppity about each other’s smells and at this point London Underground should have brought all of their handles down to waist level. Having your nose an inch from a darkened patch of shirt material belonging to another commuter is mildly nauseating at the start of a long, hot tube ride back from work on a summer’s evening. If it’s still there when you reach Cockfosters then the likelihood is you’ve already been sick down your own suit and was too doped on the armpit fumes to notice.

5. Which brings us to… Sick
The wonderful thing about sick is that it’s like yawning. Someone else does it and you can’t help but want to do the same as well. You feel it in the air, don’t you? Some tangible acidic fog that wafts swiftly in your direction, emanating from the floor-minestrone that you’ve just watched splattered onto the pavement with the ferocity of tsunami. Strangely, the smell doesn’t last. It has a kick, leaves an after-taste but within seconds you’re over it. Like having a vodka and Pernod shot.

4. Anuses
In the same way that you shouldn’t really treat Bruce Wayne and Batman as separate people, I have decided to synthesise poo and fart into one bodily odour and simply label it ANUSES. I never understand the look of shock on people’s faces when they smell your fart. “That’s disgusting!” they cry in horror. As if they expect intestinal gas coming out of your arse to smell like something other than shit.

3. Breath
This is a bit of a variable. Some people have breath that does in fact smell like shit. However, breath remains above shit in this chart simply because you can easily avoid smelling someone’s bum. You can’t avoid smelling their breath if you have to talk to them. That’s the worst thing about breath. You can’t say anything about it and you can’t get away from it. People don’t expect you to hang around if they shit or piss themselves, or get sick or if they’ve made a big sex mess in their pants; but they expect you to put up with inhaling their putrid carbon dioxide flavoured with turd/Italian sausage/last night’s garlic/a partner’s genitals.

2. Stale Piss
When I was growing up we had a toilet on each floor of our house. Yes, it were luxury. But the upstairs toilet had no window and relied on a very noisy extractor fan. Therefore, given that the bedrooms were upstairs and we only used this toilet at night and didn’t want to wake anyone, we all pissed in the dark. Over several years the carpet in that blackened recess of the house became so doused in nocturnal urine (which as we know is the worst, in fact fuck me it’s almost orange!) that the CIA wanted to hire out the room for purposes of interrogating suspected terrorists.

1. Belly Buttons
Now this might just be me. Or it might be anyone who doesn’t have one of those freakish sticky out belly buttons like John Hurt on a spaceship. Or maybe it’s a disease as yet undiagnosed. But belly buttons are my number one worst bodily smell for a simple reason. I can tolerate my own sick, my own piss, my own pits, feet and breath. And I positively ENJOY the fruits of my own anus. But I cannot, have never and will never be able to stick my finger in my own belly button for a brief moment and hold it up to within an inch of my nose without feeling like my very soul has burnt for eternity. You know that bit in Harry Potter when the Dementors come and he has the life sucked out of him? Have you ever noticed what they are doing? Holding out their elongated fingers, fingers that have been soaking in the slimy filth of their own belly buttons. Yes, that’s the killer whiff! Chew on some belly button fluff and see what I mean.

Public Transport Bastards

I’m on a train. Quite possibly the most ubiquitous phrase on Twitter. Do you ever wonder what people did on trains before they had internet-enabled phones and personal music players? No, of course they didn’t fucking talk to each other, this is England, don’t be silly. It occurred to me yesterday, stood on the platform at West Hampstead overhead station, counting how many people that were distracted by their phones, how easy it must be these days for pickpockets. I judged this truism to be so profound that I took out my phone and tweeted it. And then tweeted, “Some bastard just stole my wallet.” Followed two minutes later by, “I’m on a train.”

There’s nothing like tube travel in London to bring out the belligerence in people. That and black bogeys. You know, those bogeys you find when you get home from a tube journey, bogeys that look like they’ve been scraped from the walls of a tunnel and grouted into your nostrils. I’m a self-righteous bastard (you may have noticed) and seconds before the train grinds to a halt, I can’t help trying to identify who is jostling for position with the intention of barging on ahead of the rest of us, from a rear-side or flank position, even before the passengers on the train have seen the doors open fully for them. Once I’ve identified this odious type of bastard, I’m in their way, feeling their tut on the back of my neck, foiled in their plans to grab that last seat before someone elderly or pregnant reaches it ahead of them. Should they employ Formula One over-taking tactics and slip past me, then I have to confess that the foot goes out and I wish them well with their trip.

Sadly, I drive a car with the same sort of paradoxically belligerent counter-belligerence; so in public I tend to be at constant risk of being punched in the face. So far though, the victims of my sanctimonious guerrilla warfare tend to be too cowardly to rise to the bait, which pretty much fits with their initial behaviour at which I am aggressively protesting.

As a consequence of having the polite bastard’s chip on his shoulder, my first act as London Mayor would be to employ train referees, armed with yellow and red cards. Yellow card for rudeness and a red if you make contact in the process. A straight red if you’re eating hot food on the train as well. Particularly McDonald’s. I’d rather put up with someone taking a dump on the seat opposite me, than watch, listen to and smell someone scoffing a burger over the course of half a dozen stops. If you’re on the Northern Line, people tend to do both at once.

Yellow for people who talk too loud as well. Straight red if they sit away from each other and do it. Buses are much quieter places. At least in the provinces, where there is more opportunity for the driver to put his foot down and treat us all to a Thorpe Park experience. That soon shuts you up. Watch out for buses with dislodged fingernails stuck into the metal bars and teeth embedded into the backs of seats. At least it stops people tweeting, “I’m on a bus.”

Unbridled and Unreasonable Bastard Prejudice against Neighbours

When you’re a kid, there’s nothing likely to make you more intolerant of other human beings than the fact that your neighbours are unacceptably DIFFERENT to you. Their houses smell different - and not in a nice way -and they have different habits and beliefs that can only be seen by you as ODD, simply because they are unlike YOUR family’s.

Suburban North London was never a hotbed of sectarianism and my parents were not the most devout of Catholics, but I found myself unable to refrain from a sanctimonious gushing of disdain towards the people who lived either side of us simply because they were Protestants and therefore WRONG. In one case, the dad Alan, had married a Jewish woman and this confused me as to what the hell their two daughters were. Did they believe that Jesus was God’s son or not? With naïve boldness, I once asked him that, and he gave me some liberal and reasoned response that was far too flimsy and vague for an indoctrinated fundamentalist papist like myself. Given that they had white walls and white cushiony furniture in their lounge and he was a softly-spoken articulate and bespectacled corduroy-trousers-wearing pseudo-intellectual, I decided that he must just be a WEIRDO. A hippy version of Graeme Garden from The Goodies with decidedly misguided beliefs.

On the other side of us, Les and Margaret’s family were Methodists. Which wasn’t even proper Protestants as far as I was concerned. Particularly as they got their kids Christened when they were about ten years old, instead of babies. They could have died any time before that and ended up in Hell, due to this lax procrastination, assuming that St Peter even LETS Methodists into Heaven. I supposed they might have had a less salubrious section to themselves, with not-so-comfortable clouds and less to eat.

Les and Margaret were also NORTHERN so they talked funny. They holidayed in Skegness, which sounded quite grim, even though I think Kevin Keegan was born there or played for them (or was that Scunthorpe?) Les drove a brown Princess and also owned an A-Team style van (this was before the A-Team, I should add) which he used to transport JUMBLE. As a generally annoying DO-GOODER, Les helped the local Cub-Scout Pack by collecting crap from local residents for the annual Jumble Sale. We reckoned that he kept the decent stuff himself and this was his sole motivation. Once a year their dining room would be a TETRIS-style maze (before Tetris of course) of boxes and old tat and you couldn’t see where you were putting your feet. I once trod in their dog’s freshly crimped-out plop, while wearing my new tassled-loafers, because it was hidden between boxes of Bric-a-Brac. I hated Les for that, just that one fact, that one poo that went all over my nice new shoes and was an arse to clean off; and I hate Jumble sales to this day as a consequence.

They had two dogs. Muffin, some kind of yappy little mutt, should have been called Guffin. We had to look after him in our house one weekend and he spent the whole time farting really stinky dog farts that smelt like gaseous dog shit, just as you’d expect. Their other dog was an Afghan with more bounce in it than sack of rubber balls. It was totally out of control and after a while slipped its lead and ran off, never to be seen again. Not that I blame it. We had smaller pets, like a hamster and a tortoise, but Les killed our tortoise. It was put into hibernation in his garage with their tortoise and he took ours out first to see if it was time for it to wake up. It wasn’t and it died. Because of Les. The cunt.

Les and Margaret had 4 sons with skinheads, tattoos, a penchant for mild criminal activity and an inability to sleep with the light off. When me and my brother had to sleep round, apart from having to share beds with the sons who were our age – beds which smelt disgustingly different to our own – this refusal to turn out the light at bedtime was pathetic and annoying. And ODD. Bloody odd people.

And so it is that you grow up thinking this of your neighbours: Urgh, why have you got that in your house? Urgh, why do you eat that? Urgh, why do you smell funny? Urgh, why do you think that? I’m all for embracing diversity nowadays and I have Alan’s liberal tolerance and reasoned mind (but not his corduroy trousers). But to be honest, despite all that, I still think you’re all ODD fuckers for being different to me, whether you live next door or not.

That Bastard Place Outside of Towns

Do you remember that Joni Mitchell song, when she’s moaning about people paving Paradise to put up a parking lot? By Paradise, I’m assuming she means the countryside. She probably is. It’s not just clever alliteration. It’s a social comment. A social comment about the need for more car-parks in the countryside.

I see her point, because I hate trying to park on mud and slopes and in awkward places ill-designed for cars. In fact, that whole bastard place outside of towns, that whole Nature area that fills the spaces between where we all live, that’s a bit of a fucking irritation sometimes, isn’t it?

The Bible started it, all this bias for Nature. The Garden of Eden is meant to be all beautiful and wonderful, but I bet if Adam and Eve had a proper house they’d’ve gone inside it for most of the day. I’ve got a garden and I only go in it every so often between April and August; to cut the lawn once a fortnight or to indiscriminately cut off all the growing bits that get in the way of where I might want to walk to fetch beers from the shed. The rest of the time I’m indoors, because it’s either cold and typically English-damp outside or it’s warm but full of insects and flying buzzing annoyances that land on you or come near your drink.

I live in South-East England. All the Nature areas here are just flat, charmless, green splodges of nothingness; spider-webbed by motorways and A-roads that sprawl uncontrollably from London’s fringes like an unkempt forest of 1970’s pubic growth sticking out of a pair of pants. There are few wondrous views that don’t involve a line of lorries and cars housing anguished commuters glued to their steering wheels by either hatred or apathy. Really, there’s no point visiting Nature where I’m from, that’s why I’ve never owned a pair of wellies.

Of course, wellies would be extraordinarily sensible and irritation-preventing if I went for walks out in Nature. Because, not having them means that when I do have to leave the domestic comfort of my house and surrounding concrete cosiness, I end up with mud all over my fucking nice footwear and jeans.

Not wanting to go and walk around in Nature makes you some kind of social leper. You’d face less intolerant disdain if you just told people that you were a paedophile. They go on about “getting some fresh air in your lungs,” but everywhere you go in Nature there are animals shitting on everything. If I stay at home, there’s only one room that constantly smells of shit; but out there, out in the uncivilised and wild spaces between our local A-roads, there’s shit everywhere.

And twats.

See, in the old days, the people who lived out there in Nature were harmless. Nature used to be for stinky people who married their siblings, shot rabbits and had never seen black people. Nowadays, rich bastards just drive their 4by4’s at 80mph through all the twisty turny narrow lanes; and if you happen to be poodling along at 40, not knowing where the fuck you are or whether the road straightens or bends again round the next blind bloody curve, or if in fact there’s some huge ditch or cliff or lump of dead animal carcass in the road, then some twat who knows the road inside out drives his Chelsea tractor up your arse with all the thrust and intrusion of George Michael in a Hampstead toilet.

I wonder if these bastards are just unconsciously irritated by the fact that they have a 5 mile drive to go to a shop that doesn’t deliver what they want. I wouldn’t fucking deliver anything to them. I’d love to own a Chinese takeaway in some village out in Nature and take phone calls from some bastard who wants you to find his converted barn in the pitch dark down some 3 inch wide track, which in the winter looks no more like a road than where someone’s pissed in the snow, just so I can say, “Fuck off and eat some mud or animal crap from all that Nature outside your house you bloody fleece-wearing middle-class hippy.”

And once all these Nature-loving town-haters have abandoned us soul-less rat-race heathens for their spacious squares of mud, they start soiling their corduroys in indignation when we build more houses on the bits of Nature on the edges of towns. Where else should we build houses? In the fucking sea?

But of course houses mean people and people mean crime and litter and noise. I fear crime much more out in Nature than I do in towns, because I can’t bloody see anything when I’m there. With no street lights anywhere, I fear crime and ghosts and monsters and crazed shot-gun wielding maniacs. As for litter, at least we have bins in towns. And as for noise, what’s noisier than your neighbour tearing up his 200 meter long un-made gravel drive at 50 mph in his fucking Range Rover? And that’s your next door neighbour half a mile away.

I guess it’s the huge defecation of concrete and metal on England’s formerly green and pleasant corner that has slowly turned us South-East-Englanders into such a breed of Nature-haters. We might pretend to LOVE Nature, because our educated, philosophical and cosmopolitan sensibilities decree that we SHOULD love it. But really, once we get out into it, we discover that it’s bloody inconvenient and irritating and packed with all the beauty and romance of dried shit hanging off a cow’s arse.

Therefore, I suspect that I have been townified to the point of utter bastardness. I do sometimes go for a countryside ramble (that’s the word they use for “aimless walk”, right?) but I have to overcome some deep-seated prejudices to get any enjoyment out of it.

At the end of the day, if there’s a dog poo on the pavement outside my house, at least I’ll be able to see it, so I say pave Paradise Joni, pave it!