The 12 Myths of Christmas

Let’s get a few things straight.  In fact, let’s get about 12 things straight, 12 Christmas myths that frolic around in the social ether like aimless snowflakes of disingenuousness.

Firstly, Christmas NOT being about Jesus anymore is not a BAD thing, and the reason why it’s not a BAD thing is because – and I’ll try to say this without jumping onto the fashionably militant atheist bandwagon of furiously trite pseudo-profundities – Jesus is a load of tosh.  Sorry if you believe in it, but without a shred of logical evidence or even a cigarette-paper-thin slice of POSSIBILITY that there is anything more to Jesus than a delusional Derren Brown who happened to be born into a society of incredible ignorance and superstition, I cannot begin to tolerate such pretensions.  Ditch the angels and stick a TARDIS on top of your Christmas tree (which I have, actually, this year), because Christmas Day is Doctor Who Day.  Fuck you if you think it’s a kids’ programme.  That’s just an unwarranted playground cuss, lazily flopped about by those with a gripe against too many other people enjoying something that they themselves happen to not enjoy.

Secondly, the time you spend ruminating over which Christmas card design is the most appropriate for all the people who will end up receiving it from you and your bumper box of identical cards is hugely disproportional to even the combined time that all of those recipients will spend looking at it.  It’ll be envelope open to card open to “oh it’s from those fuckers we never see” to mantelpiece in less than two seconds.  I couldn’t tell you what even ONE of the Christmas cards in my house has on it as a design (unless it happens to be particularly odd, like having a dog chewing a present open or something bizarrely un-Christmas like that) and it could well be that they’ve all got pictures of turds on, I wouldn’t know.

Thirdly, and still on the theme of cards, you are not a GOOD person because you choose to buy charity cards.  Have you ever read how much of the price is donated to charity?  Usually, peanuts.  So, you’re fooled into thinking that you’ve been morally erect and a paragon of altruistic righteousness and therefore you’ve done your bit and you don’t need to actually GIVE to charity or DO something for anyone who might need charity, because you’ve just allowed 30p of the retail price of a £5 box of cards to go to the NSPCC.

Fourthly, to batter down the inflated smugness of those who might have agreed with points 2 and 3 above and thus decided to Facebook everyone with the “we’re not sending cards this year, we’re making a donation to charity” get-out clause, can I just say one thing?  You lazy cunts.  Why can’t you give to charity AND send some bloody cards?  Oh, is it because you think it’s a waste of money and planetary resources sending cards, so you save on the latter and redirect the former to a worthier cause?  Well done you!  You’ve spread a worthy message and converted those of us living in the dark ages of consumerism and waste, so that now I too will save on at least one card, one envelope and one stamp, because I can guiltlessly cross you off my fucking Christmas card list.

The fifth myth of Christmas that I wish to burn to coal like the parsnip that fell down the back of the oven is yet another card-related snot-drop of fatuousness, and that’s the empty sentiment of the phrase “we must meet up in the New Year!”  Let’s be honest, this actually means, “I do like you, clearly enough to send you a card, but not enough to be arsed to leave my house and travel to an agreeable rendezvous location in order to converse with you, I didn’t last year and I am not going to next year, but if some force of nature flung us together, without any effort on either of our parts, for a short time, then it wouldn’t be unpleasant.”  And we put them off another year and then one year one of you will be dead and the other will muse on how you “should’ve met up.”

The sixth myth of Christmas is this:  Christmas songs are NOT annoying.  Stop being so bloody miserable!  They’re better than adverts and radio jingles and when they stay stuck in your head for days on end they give you a warm feeling, and not that warm piss feeling you had when you wet the bed as a kid, which then turns to horror as it cools and the realisation hits you, no, that’s what NOVELTY pop songs do to you.  Christmas songs are cosy familiar echoes of a past stripped of all its bitterness and misery.  I hated Wham when I was 13 (OBVIOUSLY) but I love Last Christmas.  I squirm with prudish discomfort at Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s video for Relax, but The Power of Love makes me weep.  And when I hear Walking in the Air I block out the memories of 1980s casual homophobia and the application of the Aled Jones insult to any boy at school who hadn’t quite met an accepted level of manliness, and I wallow in a snow-tinted nostalgia of Sunday evening tea in front of the telly, with the Woolworth Christmas tree lights flickering and the taste of Advocaat and lemonade and cigarette smoke in the air.

Finally, the seventh myth of Christmas, is that there aren’t 12 myths and furthermore, 12 of anything is too much.  Unless it’s those pig-in-blankets things, you know, the thin sausages wrapped in bacon that taste so good alongside turkey?  Jesus, I love those!

Merry Christmas, you bastards.

THIS.IS.THE.BASTARD.NEWS

“NELSON MANDELA IS… (only-just-perceptible pause for dramatic effect) …DEAD!”

The ITV News presenter was rolling around in the enormity of the headline like a coke-fuelled toddler in a ball pit.  He spat the line with Shakespearean tragic aplomb, as if we HADN’T been expecting this news for several years; but, more annoyingly, as if the news wasn’t in itself important enough to elicit emotion without such a crass whiff of sensationalism.

What’s wrong with, “Nelson Mandela has died”?  It is factual, objective and allows the listener to choose their own emotion in response.  I like “has died.”  We should use “has died” more often.  I wouldn’t advocate swinging so far away from “is dead” to some kind of twee euphemism like “has passed away” which carries all the nonsensical ballast of the fucking after-life as to suggest that we’d need Derek Acorah reading that particular news item.

And then we had SKY News, equalling ITV in its fondness for either sugar-coating or shit-coating each news item, coaxing us into staying tuned for “MANDELA – THE FUNERAL.”  There was even a trailer to this film.  It clearly looked like it would be an epic.  So good, in fact, that SKY executives were probably commissioning a creative team to brainstorm ideas for “MANDELA – THE FUNERAL 2.”

So, why is it that I watch the news with an expectation of being informed and those silly cunts who work in telly have decided that I should be entertained?  Because that’s what it is – entertainment.  That’s how it’s conceived, presented and edited – like a fucking variety show.  Perhaps because it’s all 24 hours now.

My favourite most galling feature of any particular such “News Show” is the sharing of viewers’ tweets and texts, as if another viewer would actually give a shit.  Do I want to know what Susan from Slough says about Mandela’s death, or do I want a sound-bite from someone who might have actually known him and is therefore ten trillion times more relevant than soppy Susan, who must suffer from some kind of social ineptitude to have even contemplated tweeting her comments to these telly folk.  (Oh look, they read out my tweet on telly, I’m famous!)

Groan.

The Terrible Beauty of Bastard Routine (Part Two)

This is going to be one of those blog posts that I write and make public with some degree of trepidation, anticipating a silent response confined to the minds of its readers which will most likely include feelings of pity and disdain; because this is the confession of an uptight and irritable human automaton as to how he spends a typical weekend.  I know what I am, a creature of habit, riled by the insignificant flaws in life’s rich tapestry and spurning all the clichéd measures of what our society deems to be necessary factors in LIVING LIFE TO THE FULL.  I aim my arrows of ambition at a cheap Argos dartboard of CONTENTMENT and demonstrate no interest in reaching for the sky or the stars as Douglas Bader and Steps might have encouraged.

Friday evening I return from work, moistened by an hour’s moderately-paced squash with my friend Tim, consequently confident that my weight-loss app will now credit me enough calories to eat and drink whatever the fuck I like that night.  Routinely, this means wine.  If the “squash with Tim” confession hasn’t already painted a picture of a middle-class bastard, then the suburban domesticity that has led to me unshackling myself from the beer-drinking conditioning of my youth must surely give you a clue.  Secondly – but only every few weeks, because we’re not fucking rolling in it, here in St Albans – we order a Chinese (same order every time) and sit in front of the telly gorging and boozing ourselves into a stupor  (I usually nod off during Graham Norton, despite the garish orange of the set burning into my retinas and the shrill laughter piercing my ear-drums like a maniacal Banshee).  This is quality family time.  Our boy, being 17, is usually out behaving better than this, but myself, Mrs B and our daughter will battle for control of the channels, with me coming out the loser and having to record whatever music shows are on BBC4 in favour of whatever tripe-for-eyes the females of the household wish to relax to.

Saturday morning arrives at about 9 am with lethargy, a dry mouth and a mild heaviness of the head.  Eventually, I will employ myself with the task of doing the housework, just like every modern man who is robbed of his need to hunt and fight and make things and who cannot ACTUALLY relax in a messy house, even though the perpetrators of nearly all of that mess can and would.  Yes, I am sorry to say, just for a couple of hours on these mornings, I fight back the loathing I have for the habits of those I love most, the untidy buggers.

The kitchen is cleared and swept and made in some respect more hygienic than a backstreet abattoir for plague-ridden Medieval dogs, before I move onto tidying and dusting and polishing the downstairs.  I studiously avoid getting any more polish on the new flat-screen HD telly, because within a week of buying the thing (having held out for years waiting for the old cathode ray tube antique to expire), I noticed a cloudy patch covering half the screen, reminiscent of a large piss-stain on a white bed-sheet, a point of ironic misadventure that galls me on a daily basis now.

The sound of dried sweetcorn kernels and other sizeable acrid debris being sucked into the hoover gives me an enormous sense of satisfaction.  I carry my machine of tidy-harmony up and down all three storeys, drumming up a second sweat of physical exertion in 24 hours and then reward myself with a late morning bath.

I measure out the rest of the weekend in laundry loads, the first of which will have hopefully completed by the end of my bath – I say “hopefully” because I own seven pairs of pants.  If it hasn’t completed, then I’ll have to wear swimming trunks or even some old underwear with a perished gusset for the next few hours.  To ensure that I am not rushed to hospital so embarrassingly attired, I avoid traffic for the rest of Saturday; but this is wise anyway, as Saturday afternoons tend to bring out the cunt in most drivers.

I bask in the clean tidiness of our home for the afternoon, devoting myself to work (I’m a teacher and a workaholic), while the football results trickle in and my family engage in more exciting pursuits, like shopping and socialising.  Some weeks we’ll have friends up for the evening, in which case I’ll be truer to my roots and switch to bitter as my booze of choice.  I’ll inflict my vinyls on the visitors for a few hours and congratulate myself on a level of sociable normality that the rest of my misanthropic existence belies.  Most Saturday evenings, however, it’s crap telly, wine and an unhealthy amount of distraction from the social media on my mobile.

Sundays tend to be more laundry loads and more school work and an impending sense of grief that the weekend is dying a slow death, occasionally punctuated by an Arsenal game on telly or the less common venture out of the house for some worthy reason.  If I have washed up the pans from a roast dinner and pulled the last pile of washing out of the dryer before 10 pm, then I don’t wallow in a desolate mood of abject irritation before bed and I reflect upon a weekend of productive contentment and unambitious joy.

They really ain’t even half-clever bastards

I’ve always nursed a desire to go on Mastermind.  Now that I’ve lived long enough to know the answers to slightly more than an embarrassingly miniscule total of general knowledge questions, it occurs to me that I might avoid coming last; if, that is, I can exercise the self-control required not to flap about when an answer is on the tip of my tongue and then to mutter FUCK’S SAKE when I’m told what it is, like everybody naturally would, because clearly you’re prepped by the Mastermind wardens not to do that as it makes for rather awkwardly shit telly.

The erroneous assumption that a demonstration of knowledge implies intelligence is one of our society’s sad maladies.   People who win Mastermind are NOT actually clever.  I’d be fucked off if I spent months researching from a wide range of sources in an effort to learn everything about a chosen subject as deeply infused with facts as The Life and Works of Bob Dylan, only to be beaten by some idle cunt who manages a score of 20 with no passes on Fawlty Towers, simply because he’s watched the same 6 hours of television again and again.  Or The Harry Potter Novels.  Oh well done, you’ve read 7 seven books and remembered them.  You lazy fucker.  Oh, and you work as a librarian?  One of those busy jobs that means you have fuck-all to do now that they have automatic machines in libraries?  No wonder you know everything about Emily Bronte (short life, one novel, you fucking cheat!)

An equally flawed belief held by many is that a high IQ score makes you a genius.  If you’ve ever sat an IQ test (one set by MENSA as opposed to one of those 10-question internet jobbies that you do and then have to sign up to something they’re selling to get your result), then you’ll realise that having a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re intelligent, and certainly far from being a fucking genius, but quite simply good at doing a certain kind of test.  And if you are good at doing that kind of test, you are invited to join MENSA, a club full of people who BELIEVE that they are the cleverest in the land and desire the opportunity to boast about being in MENSA and joining MENSA’s dating agency so that they can meet other people that are good at tests to have sex with and generally talk to about doing tests and quizzes and being ever so fucking clever.  The pure fact that someone would choose to join MENSA is the surest indicator of non-intelligence and therefore all members should be consequently excluded from MENSA for not being clever enough to have joined in the first place.

What I have NEVER nursed a desire to go on is University Challenge.  As a teenager, considering a university career, the impossibility of answering anything on that show caused me great anxiety and destroyed my confidence.  As a middle-aged adult, the impossibility of answering more than a few questions on that show causes me great confusion as to how anyone aged 18-21 knows that much about science, maths and culture.  What did their parents do to them?  Lock them in a cellar with the Encyclopaedia Britannica and electrodes tied to their toes, with no access to any television channel except BBC2 and a regime of 18-hour a day home-tutoring that forms an educational equivalent of Victorian child labour in its brutality and intensity?  Freaks.

At the other end of the spectrum is that now ubiquitous dumbing down of quiz questions linked to prime-time TV shows trying to make money by getting viewers to text in their answers to patronisingly brainless challenges like, “Which country do English people come from?  (a)  England, (b)  Brazil, (c) Tesco, (d) I’m a moron.”  Why not just ask people to text in, charge them a quid and say that someone will be randomly selected to win the prize?  Do they really believe that there are people out there who’d answer (a) and then consider their chance of success greatly enhanced, because not everyone would have known that?

I wanted to finish this blog post with a rant about the BBC quiz, EGG HEADS, but I have probably exhausted your patience by now and besides a loud beeping sound tells me that my 2 minutes are up; but I’ve started so I’ll finish:  Eggheads - What utter cunts.

Tuesday is Rubbish

My life experience of forty-three years and some months and a few days, seasoned with too many idle moments mindlessly soaking up the trivial mind-farts of hundreds of Twitter abusers, have combined to bless upon me the profound and perhaps even divine revelation that of all the days of the week, Tuesday is the most rubbish.

I say RUBBISH, because to call it SHIT would be to bestow upon it some degree of character that would elevate it above the mundane and arguably credit it with some kind of charm, albeit a crunchingly, hate-inspiring, nasty charm that would put it on par with Monday.

Tuesday ducks the hatred we hold for Monday.  It bears none of the curvy attributes of Wednesday, which teases us into believing that we are halfway to the weekend; it is a poor cousin of Thursday, who can sometimes be so welcoming that he tempts us into premature Friday-night-style behaviours; it shouldn’t be on the same planet as Friday and Saturday, never mind in the same row on a calendar; and it certainly isn’t Sunday, because Sunday is God’s day, and God lets us do what the fuck we want until the evening, when we get maudlin about the death of the weekend and Downton Abbey and ironing our work clothes and shit.

Tuesday has nothing to love or hate about it.  It just hangs there.  Like a barely detectable dried bogey in the nostril of someone you don’t know on a station platform on a grey day, not even gruesome enough or stalactite enough in its formlessness to elicit any nausea, as you nonchalantly glance at it without any subsequent emotion to make you even unconsciously afford it a second glance.

Tuesday is like that uncle that everyone has, the one with the moustache that he’s had since the 70s, who’s just THERE at family functions, whose name you’d forget if your aunt didn’t write it in Christmas cards to you, and even then it’s one of those names that is so characterless and ordinary that you still get it wrong sometimes, especially when you make that one effort to speak to him and you have absolutely fuck all to say; and after your depressingly pointless exchange in regard to the mildness of the day’s weather, you turn away and you would have instantly forgotten if he still HAD that moustache if you even cared to wonder about it.  That’s Tuesday.

If you want to give someone a particularly shit present ever, and I sometimes do, then I can highly recommend a nice beige nylon t-shirt bearing the words EVERYDAY IS LIKE TUESDAY; because that is so utterly VAPID that not even Morrissey would write a song about it.

The only thing that is funny about Tuesday is the phrase See You Next Tuesday, unless someone fails to work out that you are calling them a cunt and instead takes the comment at face value and instantly drops it into their deep brain-well of forgettable and useless things they’ve heard.

The pure fact that after a day’s work, I fill a gap between more work in the evening and loading the dishwasher with the writing of a blog post about how rubbish Tuesdays are, is in itself testament to just how fucking rubbish Tuesdays are.

Bastard Training Conferences

It all starts going downhill when you hear the word HOUSEKEEPING.

The person who organised the training conference has already spent half-an-hour behind a Disneyesque fixed smile that screams Botox and nitrous oxide overdose, rendering her expression more clenched rectum than smiling face, but some genuine glee seeps through as she is clearly feeling triumphant over the popularity of the individually wrapped chocolate bourbons that will end up dissolving like lepers’ cocks in the tepid coffees.

She utters the first fatuous cliché of the morning - apologising not for the cliché but for telling us how to save our lives in the event of a fire - when she says JUST A BIT OF HOUSEKEEPING FIRST… and babbles on about no fire drill being planned and how to access the AMENITIES.  I long for a time when the HOUSEKEEPING cliché evolves into a simpler THIS IS WHERE YOU RUN, THIS IS WHERE YOU PISS information broadcast.

She then unleashes the COMFORT BREAK label.

What cunt decided to add the superfluous adjective to a perfectly adequate word like BREAK?  She doesn’t say NUTRITION LUNCH, does she?  I don’t need to be fucking told the REASON for a fucking break do I?

Already, I want to get out of the room and use the amenities for a COMFORT SHIT.

But I’ll get a chance for a CHANGE OF SCENE, because we have BREAK-OUT ROOMS today (yayy!), she says.  Obviously these are clandestine cubby-holes with chalk outlines of tunnels and pommel horses; or perhaps listening booths for fans of 80s Chart-toppers Swing Out Sister.

Luckily the days of ice-breakers have passed.  Because now that Mrs Disney-Grin has assumed her redundant sedentary role for the rest of the morning, the TRAINER has ceased his affectation of frowning in concentration over nothing in particular on his laptop to hide the fact that he is actually all set up and just bored of waiting, and his wait is over and he gets to train us; but not before a pre-cum droplet of LIGHT HUMOUR in regard to his journey to the conference that morning. (ooh the traffic on the A414)

Now, for TRAINERS, this slither of personal trivia arouses only mild disinterest, and limited disdain, as he will only occasionally punctuate his efforts to impart some useful information on us with further brief anecdotal quips.  If, however, you find yourself sat in front of a MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER, then all features are reversed and you will be subjected to occasional imports of useful information punctuating a seemingly endless stream of anecdotal quips masquerading as MOTIVATIONAL TALK.

There are two ONLY problems with motivational speakers:  One problem is that they seem to think that you motivate others by being overly animated, like a bluebottle on amphetamines, irritatingly loud and stupid-voiced in desperation of not wanting to bore, and loaded with trite nuggets of faux-profundity in imitation of cheap greetings card truisms; the second problem with them is that they’re ARSEHOLES.

(As an aside, sorry to fall into the gender stereotyping of female organiser and male speaker, but my experience has shown that the sort of stereotypical features I am cheaply bandying about for your amusement actually fit those gender roles better.  Anyway. Moving along…)

A MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER is really just a LIFE COACH who has fuck all to say and says too fucking much as opposed to having fuck all to say and actually says fuck all.  The better ones have remodelled themselves as INSPIRATIONAL SPEAKERS and the fatter ones as PERSPIRATIONAL SPEAKERS.

An hour or two in and I might be feeling mental cramp, due to dangerous under-use of my brain cells and the burning flame of subversion sweeping through my few functioning neurotransmitters like dysentery; and I find myself plugging the silences caused by the trainer taking a COMFORT SIP of water with a loud cough disguising an actual articulation of the word WANKER.  I treat myself to a Fox’s Glacier mint from the fake crystal bowl in front of me and rue the fact that it makes my stomach rumble so badly that it is being clocked by the stranger sitting next to me on the table, a stranger that I have avoided both eye-contact and conversation with since she asked IS ANYONE SITTING HERE?  Obviously I felt a trifle rude for pulling the shutters down on any potential for small talk within seconds of her arrival, but once she’d gone ten minutes without knocking at them, I felt vindicated in my own aloofness.  Rude cow.

Anyway.  You hate a lot of it, don’t you?  And you hate the perennial cunt who turns up and keeps raising irrelevant points in an effort to appear as some kind of free-thinking philosophical maverick with more insight than us plebs sat there gradually undergoing some regressive fucking evolutionary metamorphosis into less sentient organisms.  And you enjoy the lunch and your doodles on the hotel pad, and at the end you fill in your evaluation form and out of dignity and pure English reserve you side-step the urge to wipe your arse with it and tick a load of boxes to tell lies about the whole thing being GOOD.

And with a COMFORT SCRATCH of your balls, you amble off.

Pets. Bastards.

So my family constantly badger me about getting a dog, which I suppose is better than dogging me about getting a badger, and I bark back the tiresome default response relating to how their inability to look after our guinea pig renders them in all likelihood completely incapable of caring for a much larger and needier pet.  I mean, it’s not my fucking guinea pig, but I’m the one who has to clean the cunt out.  I apologise for employing the term cunt and never mean it in the genital context, although the guinea pig does bear some resemblance to a classic 1970s German soft porn growler.  And cleaning out its hutch provides me with an experience of eternal surprise in regard to the animal’s capacity for shitting five times its own body mass within a fortnight and drenching the woodchip, newspaper and rotting wooden floor with a stagnant ocean of piss that causes me to suffer retina-trauma as the ammonia burns its way through my eyeballs as soon as I penetrate the filthy bedding with the first stab of a hand shovel.  I even clip its claws.  I am the only one who therefore picks the bugger up.  And yet he shows me no recognition or affection in return.  The most we ever get back is a high-pitched squeak which means Oi, my water bottle is empty or Oi, my food bowl is empty.  The only thing it has going for it is that it doesn’t bite and can live outside the house.

Unlike the hamster we had before.  Hamsters have fuckall going for them.  They don’t even have the advantage of a cute little squeak.  We had one a few years ago and it stunk out the dining room, bit my finger, chewed up bog rolls and only earned the label of being our pet on account of living inside a cage and being fed by us.  If it had appeared in the dining room of its own free will, cost-free, cage-free and uninvited, then we would have treated it like a mouse and set the traps.  The difference between pet and vermin in such cases is all in the level of invitation.

The hamster had been purchased, like most pets, to please the children and was a development of the even-lower-maintenance household animal, a goldfish.  Again, I was the only one who cleaned those bastards out, usually when the tank got to a point where you couldn’t see anything inside it; not that seeing inside was an issue, because the kids’ interest in the fucking things lasted marginally longer than the goldfish’s memory of having the kids actually look at it through the glass.  There was an interest-vacuum in the fish that lasted from the day after purchase to the day when it floated to the surface and drifted around on its side like an offensively un-flushable turd, providing a stark lesson to the kids about mortality and the futility of our own existence; which wasn’t quite how they’d interpreted it until I actually explained it in those terms.

The common personality quality of the guinea pig, the hamster and the goldfish was that none of them sought to kill another animal; although of course the hamster would have fucking savaged the flesh off me down to the bone if I didn’t happen to be a damn size bigger than the good-for-nothing little fucker.  This elevates all of these species above the domestic cat, an evil bastard of quite extraordinary insidiousness.  Easily the most exploitative of common pets, the cat’s habit of bringing into the house half-ravaged carcasses of birds and rodents, or sometimes semi-dead versions of such victims, is defended by the cat-owning community as small kindnesses and the cat’s method of giving its owner a present.  What bollocks!  That’s the cat saying to you, Feed me you cunt, or I’ll fuck you up like this, YOU HEAR ME? I’LL FUCK YOU UP, MOTHERFUCKER!!  A cat only has to look at me and I can read that same threat in its eyes.  They have the audacity to do that and then jump on your lap and expect a cuddle.  Cats want to be the babies of the babyless, until the babyless have a baby and then cats want to kill their baby.

Which brings us back to dogs and my family hounding me to get one (groans, sorry!)  Dogs do have a great many qualities and are the only animals that deserve to be granted pet status.  In other words, they benefit from living with people.  They’re hardly caged birds after all.  They are loyal, they interact and they are grateful.  But we don’t half forgive them a lot just because they’re dogs.  Imagine if a well-loved family member moved in with you and spent all of his or her time following you around the house, asking Who’s at the door? Who’s on the phone?  What are you eating?  Imagine them expecting to be fed and bathed and taken for walks and entertained with some repetitive game like throwing a ball which is brought back to you dripping in their fucking saliva.  Imagine if they plonked their head on your lap while you were watching telly and looked at you with a pathetic, dependent and gormless look in their eyes and then tried to eat your food or lick your face with breath smelling of their own fucking genitals.  And as if that’s not bad enough, imagine if their shit smelt the way dog-shit smells.  And you had to pick it up off the street whenever you went out.  People say dogs are like family members, but if family members were like dogs, you’d be pretty swift to apply some early euthanasia.

The only pet I ever had that I liked was a tortoise, and that’s because he looked like a dinosaur and I was nine.  And life in those days wasn’t saturated with videos of tortoises doing “funny” things or photos of cute tortoises being posted on social bloody media sites.  But there was a lot more dog poo around and you couldn’t go out for stepping in some.

The Leviathan of Bastardness that is Football

Why am I a football supporter?

Why am I a season-ticket-carrying, Arsenal-tattoo’ed, former fanzine –contributing, Hornbey-esque pilgrim to a particular square of partially-authentic grass upon which eleven men in the iconic colours of red with white sleeves ply their trade?

Perhaps it’s the history.  Emerging originally from the grimy urban squalor of Industrial Victorian Britain, football rewrote itself a much more glamorous history in 1992 when the Premiership was born.  I love immersing myself in the infinite data available on everything post-1992 that lets me thank SKY for granting me appropriately-priced access to every kick of the ball by every one of the Premiership’s greatest ever whatevers; and whatever they are great for, it’s something greater than the so-called great players of the time before the Premiership, when football was slow and hardly on telly and watched by hooligans and poor folk.

Perhaps it’s the sense of community.  When I stroll along the street to Arsenal, via a car-journey and train ride, walking side-by-side with other local fans from the immediate global vicinity of North London, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Berkshire, King’s Lynn and South East Asia, I feel that I am amongst family.  When I look around me inside the stadium, I am warmed by the diversity of the audience, a sea of faces that truly reflects the richness of our society.  Everybody is welcome, except a few gays and Muslims and the economically disenfranchised lower classes.  And together, we share football.  The friendly banter between rival fans that only spills over into brutal hatred and prejudice from a tiny minority of intimidating evolutionary throw-backs who attend ubiquitously and charm a larger group into participating in their bile.

Perhaps it’s the sportsmanship.  The way in which two sets of competing athletes make such bold sacrifices in order to win.  These might be sacrifices of integrity and fairplay, but at the end of the day, like, obviously, you know, they all shake hands with those who have cheated and dived and feigned injury and moaned and argued with officials and exchanged abuse with the crowd and spat and thrown water bottles around for some urchin to collect up.

Perhaps it is the competitiveness of it.  The excitement of an underdog winning an FA Cup every two decades.  The mystery of whether the richest team will win the league, or if the 2^nd or 3^rd richest will do it this year.  The joy of watching talent nurtured and developed to the benefit of a club who can then sell that player to someone who does win trophies and thus avoid administration and bankruptcy.

Perhaps it is the enormity of the sport.  The media coverage that saturates the internet and TV channels with minute-by-minute news about who said what about whom and what that might suggest could happen in terms of transfers or not; every quote by a source, real or spuriously anonymous, is seized upon and lauded like a Churchillian utterance in terms of significance and profundity.

Perhaps it is the unparalleled entertainment.  Where else other than a gig, the theatre, a restaurant, the local park, a social gathering, the cinema, an art gallery, a museum or any other sport can you get such entertainment for half the price?  And the amenities are something else.  As long as you’re not a woman and therefore not really expected to attend football in large numbers, then you can enjoy tiled toilets with troughs that are thirty feet long with minimal queuing.  And should you be hungry at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon - which many people are because it is 2 hours after lunch and 3 before tea and your brain is conditioned into thinking it needs additional sustenance – then you may access a limited range of just about affordable beverages and hot snacks, which amount to a small fraction of the cost of your ticket.  Like maybe only 1/10.  (I love a £7 slither of pizza when I just paid £70 for 90 minutes of being outclassed by Man United.)

Perhaps it is the only place where I can be myself.  As a casually-racist, homophobic, middle-income, financially wasteful, indiscriminating consumer of anything put in front of me; a man with a need to verbalise unselfconsciously his own internal angst and psychological damage in the form of overt affectations of passion that translate in real terms into aggressive and abusive obscenity; an inherently biased, unreasonable and blind-to-reality protester of every vice demonstrated by a rival but deliberately overlooked in my own team and behaviour; and a tireless customer of an exploitative business that kids me into thinking that my support is valued;  then yes, at football I can truly be myself.

No, I don’t have a Bucket List, but I do have a Fuck-It List

The whole idea of having a list of things you want to do before you die is one of the most disingenuous fucking concepts that we humans indulge our vanity in.  Oh, I so want to do that before I die!  WHEN else would you be able to do it?

I don’t have a Bucket List.  This fact might make me slightly less interesting at a dinner party of people who don’t know each other very well.  It might make me slightly less interesting as a human being; because, let’s face it, the sorts of aspiring activities Bucket List compilers compile on their Bucket Lists are the kind of things many people do purely to appear INTERESTING.

Oh, you parachute, do you?  That makes you SO interesting.  Please tell me about it.  I don’t parachute.  I must be so fucking dull.

And that’s on my Fuck-It list.  Parachuting.  Will my life be any less fulfilling if I never parachute?  No.  I’ve been in a plane and I’ve enjoyed the view and at no point did I ever nurse the desire to jump out.  It’s scary.  I’d leave a trail in the sky as if I was in a stunt team known as the Brown Arrows.

Climb Everest?  Fuck it.  I love a good mountain, and I’ve enjoyed the odd climb.  I say climb, I mean walk upwards.  All that proper climbing with ropes and hooks and trusting your life to something that was on discount in Millets a week before is not my bag.  I’ve taken cable cars and trains up some Swiss peaks and absolutely loved it, been emotionally moved by the experience, but I didn’t feel the need to be able to boast about it afterwards.  You’re paying for the name with Everest, aren’t you?  It’s like the mountain version of Hollister when George at Asda will do.

OK, I’ll make a concession.  People climb Everest for the challenge rather than the view.  Fine.  People parachute for the challenge.  Fine.  Test yourselves out, take some personal pride out of the experience, feel good about yourself.  But don’t do it so that you can tell people you’ve done it, because that makes you a wanker.  I’m not knocking the people who do these things for themselves.  I admire them.

It’s not really those personal challenges that I am venting my usual unreasonable wrath towards.  It’s the other sort of shit people put on their bucket lists that make me think fuck it.  I checked out Bucketlist.org on the Internet and perused the Most Popular section.  And it really emphasises the paucity of people’s aspirations:

·       Attend a Masquerade Ball.  Meaning, go to a pointless party of dickheads who like dressing up.  Fuck that.

·       Jump into a Pool Fully Clothed.  WHY?

·       Rope Swing into Water?  What, in the hope that you are one of the 30+ people to appear on You’ve Been Framed every episode and have Harry Hill HILARIOUSLY refer to you as a celebrity you bear a passing resemblance to, if people squint?

·       Walk Barefoot in the Rain.  I’ve done this enough times when I’ve had to go out to the shed in shitty weather, so that can go on my Fuck-It list as well.

·       Publish a book.  Because anyone can?

·       Set a World Record.  What for?  Having the saddest Bucket List ever?

·       Try a Fried Snickers.  Why not combine this with the previous one and it’ll be the last thing you do before you die, anyway.

I like the way the website combines cheap ideas like eating fried Snickers bars with prohibitively expensive suggestions like swimming with dolphins, which yes, we’d all love to do, but paddling with ducks is about the closest most people might get.  So, instead of a load of amazing-but-unlikely-to-happen ideas or silly-arse-self-indulgent-pointless-poncing-about ideas, he’s my Bucket List for ordinary folk.  Five sensible things to do before you die:

·       Take out some life insurance

·       Lock the back door

·       Make sure everybody knows that you don’t give a shit what’s played at your funeral, because you won’t be able to hear it

·       Sell all the unwanted shit you possess that your family would only give to charity shops anyway and spend the money on booze and takeaways (or a holiday swimming with dolphins)

·       Beat up someone who tells you they’ve parachuted, because it was on their Bucket List and then say, “Well done.  Now try and guess what’s on mine.”

Gig Bastards

I’d love to tell you about all the amazing gigs I’ve been to in the last 25 years; from standing in front of one musical idol – I am Kloot’s John Bramwell – in the Half Moon Pub in Putney, able to exchange conversation, to magical times watching so many other heroes – Dylan, Neil Young, Bowie, Floyd, Ryan Adams, Springsteen -  to eventually bowing to pressure from my wife and children in the nose-bleed section of the O2 and dancing to Madness, only to prompt my daughter to humiliate me by laughing raucously at my running-on-the-spot-ska-style-dad-dance.

I’d love to share those good times with you, but I won’t.  I don’t do “good times” in this blog.  I’d only bore you.  You have your own and shouldn’t give a casually neglected shit about mine.  So, I will stay close to form and share with you the BAD bits; because even when the concert is good, there are usually GIG BASTARDS to dribble some piss on your soul.

What prompted this grumpy reflection was watching the Stones at Glastonbury last week.  No, I didn’t go.  No, I didn’t want to go.  I saw them in 1990 and, like anyone else who has done so since the late ‘80s, did so because I thought it would be my last chance.  I looked upon that crowd of young, huddled, lost-in-the-moment festival goers and thought THANK FUCK I CAN WATCH THIS ON TELLY.  Oh, it’s not as good as being there, you say?  Well, true, I don’t have some selfish 20 year old on her boyfriend’s shoulders obscuring the view of the TV screen.  Nor a flag-waving cunt with an equally retarded sense of social circumspection.  I don’t have an over-malleable plastic container of warm beer that I queued 30 minutes and paid £7 for.  And I don’t need to cut a path of polite excuse me’s through 500 people to take a communal piss in a trough which affords the user a free unsolicited steam facial.  My sofa was better than being there.

Not always the case of course.  Being there IS usually what it’s all about.

Not when I saw Oasis at Wembley in their final year, though.  A series of external factors were at work anyway that night.  It was midweek.  I was driving and therefore sober.  I waited outside the tube for my brother-in-law and gazed with appalled disgust at a steady stream of the worst kinds of tossers you’d ever see at a gig.  Mouthy, swaggering, drug-pushing, aggressive, laddish, evolution-by-passed  arseholes.  We watched the gig from the rear of the pitch in order to avoid the worst of the beer-hurling moshiment of these fucking apes, and this meant essentially viewing the concert on TV screens, as Liam and Noel were mere pin-pricks on the horizon.  (A superfluous use of the word PIN there perhaps.)

A million miles away, on the opposite end of this spectrum of Gig Bastards, was proof that one seemingly-innocuous man has equal capacity to spoil your night as a thousand

geezers.  Don’t laugh, but I went on my own to see Jethro Tull at my local venue in St Albans.  YES, IT WAS FULL OF BEARDY-MEN, ALRIGHT?  And it was a nice sedate atmosphere in which to LISTEN to the songs and, you know, tap your foot a lot and maybe nod your head and think NICE and COOL and the such-like.  Well, all jolly lovely unless one beardy man two seats down from me decides to give his mate – next to me – a running commentary on what album each song came from and what year that was.  And occasionally sing along.  His mate had clearly no interest in Tull nor any discographical details, was often yawning, checking his phone or at one point actually properly sleeping.  When I challenged the bloke to shut up as we’d not paid to listen to him (it was St Albans, I didn’t want to call him a cunt just yet) he defended himself vigorously with a petulant cry of I’M JUST TELLING HIM ABOUT THE BAND, HE DOESN’T KNOW.

I have moaned in a previous blog about people that go to gigs and stand at the back chatting, brainlessly oblivious to the fact that it isn’t rock and roll on stage and so each heartfelt torch song (again, I am Kloot being a case in point) is punctuated by the inane chatter of a couple of gig bastards who really should’ve saved the money and gone to a proper pub that doesn’t provide live musical accompaniment to your tales of mundane fucking rubbish, you loud-mouthed ARSE!

For some reason, any gig I go to in Hammersmith finds me seated near to probably the same American girl with a voice that pierces through the music like an over-amplified violin being smashed into a sheet of plate glass.  Being English, you put up with it for a few songs, hopeful that she’ll adapt to our culture, before resorting to a few head-turns and fuck-off looks, before eventually saying DO YOU MIND? just before the encore.

Finally, a lesser common gig bastard that I have encountered was Bill Oddie.  I say encountered; I saw him walking down the stairs at the Royal Festival Hall just before a Martha Wainwright gig.  (Incidentally, Martha Wainwright herself is a gig bastard for chastising the crowd I was in at the Roundhouse for being English and therefore too quiet and making me think, oxymoronically, “fuck off and sing”.)  Back to Bill Oddie.  He’s not a gig bastard because he spoilt the gig or anything.  He’s a gig bastard because he’s a bastard and he was at the gig.  And wearing his fucking bird-watcher jacket.  Bearded cunt.

Bastards Popping Round

A neighbour of a Twitter chum emailed her to let her know that he would be phoning later to arrange an opportunity to come round and visit.  She then tweeted to share the irony of a neighbour emailing her to let her know that he would be phoning later to arrange an opportunity to come round and visit and I replied to ask why her neighbour didn’t come round to tell her that he’d emailed her to let her know that he would be phoning later to arrange an opportunity to come round and visit, just in case she hadn’t checked her emails.  I suggested that she ask him why, but cautiously advised that she phone to ask him rather than go round.  But to email first.

We milked the absurdity of this social farce as far as we could, within the constraints of 140 characters and the patience of our shared audience:  So, about 2 more tweets then.  And it prompted me to muse that in the old days people just popped round.

When I was growing up, the woman next door was always just popping round to chat to my mum.  And she’d say, “I’m just popping round.”  And my Dad would think, “She’s fucking round!” – replacing POPPING with FUCKING because there was no FUCKING POPPING about it.  No more that Hitler or Napoleon POPPED round Europe.  No more than Jack the Ripper POPPED round fucking Whitechapel.  But my mum liked our neighbour popping round and I must say that, casting a rose-tinted eye back into the past, I like the idea that people used to just pop round.

But I wouldn’t want anyone fucking popping round nowadays.

I LOVE people “visiting”.  You know, pre-arranged.  So, I’ve Hoovered and I’m not in the middle of something and I haven’t recently created a toxic breathing environment in the lavatory and I won’t begin to sink into an abyss of anxiety about how long they might STAY  round.  Even if I REALLY LIKED them.

Back to the past and all that bollocks about how you could leave your door open during the war and people would just pop in unannounced.  I guess, with no easy access to porn in those days, the likelihood of being caught in a compromising situation was limited and no more embarrassing than listening to Vera Lynn on the radio and wearing your wife’s knocked-off nylons while you did so.  People had nothing to nick in those days anyway.  Years later they had porn.  On Betamax.  So they locked their doors.  And if anyone wanted to pop round they’d have to knock.  Then at least you could pretend that you weren’t in.  But not if you’d just turned on the waste disposal, because then your sink would be making a noise like someone driving a 13 foot high bus through a 10 foot high metal tunnel.

Popping round in those days was always justified with a REASON and that reason was always a cup of coffee.  “Just popping round for a coffee!”  And would my Dad would mutter, “Why?  Doesn’t she have any fucking coffee then?  Next time just phone and we’ll post you a spoonful or flick some over the fence; save you the fucking walk.”  And my neighbour and my mum would stand in the kitchen and drink coffee and chat (or shout if the waste disposal was on) until my neighbour decided that she should leave, saying “I’d better go” but without any justified reason, because she really had fuck all else to do; and my mum would say, “Yes, I best get on,” and would go upstairs for another coffee and a fag and an hour of telly before “getting on” with anything.

Anyway, just so that you know, I’ll be tweeting to tell people that I’ve written this blog, but I thought I’d best mention in the blog that I’ll be tweeting and just to be on the safe side, I’ll mention in the tweet that… well, you get the picture.  If not, I’ll pop round and explain.

The Game of “Who’s the fucking busiest?”

There’s this game at work.  It’s called “Who’s the fucking busiest?”

I say “game” – it’s more of a default conversational belch.

I say ‘It’s called “Who’s the fucking busiest?”’ – but no one calls it that.  No one admits to even playing it.  But they do.

The rule is this:  If someone asks you “How are you?” and you say “Fine” then you lose.  Because FINE means NOT BUSY.  And the person asking secures the higher ethical ground in the context of the ethics of “BEING BUSY” BEING THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE IN STOIC MARTYRDOM.

To have any chance of winning, you should answer, “Busy.”  But no cunt wants to know HOW busy you are.  You saying BUSY is a gauntlet thrown down, to which the only counter is to OUT-BUSY you.  “Tell me about it!” the first protagonist will respond, paradoxically NOT wanting you to tell them about it, but instead to LISTEN to THEIR boasts of being busy.  Metaphorical cocks-at-the-urinals time.  “Yeah, me too.  Busy as fuck.”  Because as we all know, ‘fuck’ is a busy thing isn’t it.

The BUSY-OFF begins like two bulldogs in a barrel of raw beef.  The accomplished game-player will reel off a list of ALL the things they HAVE to do, because of course being busy is about the quantity of tasks and not the length of time it takes to do any of them.  After five minutes of listening to this mundane list of massively unimportant nuggets of information, you start wondering to yourself, “If you’re so fucking busy, why do you spend five minutes telling me what you have to do instead of fucking off to do it.”  And you know you’ll not be the only recipient of that self-pitying spiel that day.

God help you if you ASK someone to do anything.  “I’ve not got time to do that.  I’ve got to blah blah, blah blah, blah…” – five minutes of fucking blah-blah-blah-ing like a blahcunt from Cuntsville, New Blahdom.  You could’ve done it by now, you think to yourself, listening like an inert carbon-based lump of disinterest.

These sort of self-contradictory, self-lauding aspirants to globally-honoured stoicism are the last people you should ever tell ANYTHING about your leisure interests or experiences to.  Don’t light that touch-paper with “I did a bit of gardening at the weekend” because you’ll get back, “Wish I had time for gardening!” – the implication being that you aren’t busy, because you did SOMETHING ELSE.

I remember the reaction of some colleagues to this blog.  “Fucking hell, you must have a lot of time on your hands.”  Because of course, it takes HOURS!  And it’s not like I do it to relax, do I?  I can’t be busy enough. 

“You must have nothing better to do!”

Well, I kind of think that doing this is A LOT better to do than spending your life in a permanent state of one-up-man-ship moaning and boasting in this irritatingly cuntfest of a game called “Who’s the fucking busiest?”

Now fuck off, I’m busy!

The Unbearable Softness of the Ante-dental Panic Poo

I am an incredibly lucky bastard.  This does not, however, prevent me from bouts of unfounded anxiety.  My pathological fear of wasps might stem from never having been stung.  I apply this irrational pessimism to my health as well.  I am never ill – much to the envious disdain of friends and family, who are goaded into wishing me ill-health every time I taunt them with the boast, “I do not suffer from human disease, because I’m fucking Superman.” (For the record, “fucking” is used in its adjectival sense there, not as a verb.)  Nevertheless, I often fret over any tiny imperfection in case it might be some form of CERTAIN DEATH.  I am too proud (*scared) to actually bother a doctor with any concerns, except once when I had chest pains and it turned out to be caused by eating my dinner in front of the telly too often.

Which brings me to dentists.  As a child, I had one tooth pulled out and one filling.  Not bad for someone whose mother must have been on commission from Tate and Lyle.  As an adult, I stopped going to the dentist for about ten years, but since our kids needed to be taken, I have attended regularly and only had one additional filling and a reboot of my first filling.  So, yes, I am lucky with my teeth.

But I still loathe and fear every visit to the dentist.

Me and the kids had an appointment this morning.  The panic was evident in the poo I had before leaving the house.  I won’t disgust you with the details.  I feel the identifier “panic” before the word “poo” pretty much says it all.  It isn’t a warm day, but by the time we’d arrived, my shirt looked like it had done a series of Tenko, it had that Japanese-held POW clinginess to it.

Dental surgeries are by their nature, quiet and clean places.  But this merely enhances their chilling nature.  Horror feeds off that silence.  Dental surgeons and assistants creep past the waiting room door in scrubs and face masks like disciples of Joseph Mengele, freaking you out with sinister, devilish smiles.  The waiting room is adorned with photographs of teeth.  Not nice teeth.  Fucking disgusting teeth.  I don’t understand why dentists feel it necessary to show us how shit our mouths WOULD look if we DIDN’T come here.  FOR FUCK’S SAKE, WE ARE HERE – WE WON’T GET SHITTY TEETH LIKE THAT!  I mean, gums are pretty gruesome anyway, but to plaster a wall in blown-up images of Shane MacGowan’s dental history serves no purpose other than to inspire more fear and nausea.

This same strategy was employed in the maternity ward where our son was born.  There was a poster claiming to be reassuring, telling us not to worry if our baby came out looking a little odd or misshapen, because that was normal.  And to substantiate this assertion, it then showed a gallery of about 30 ABNORMAL new-born babies, with elongated heads, Picasso-esque features and skin like a rhino’s diseased ball-bag.  At first glance, you’d believe it was an anthology of Doctor Who's enemies.

Returning to the dentist…

Both of my kids went in before me and came out within minutes.  Neither had any problems.  One half of my brain attempted to fool the other half by thinking, “The kids are fine, so I should be too!” [No logical link]  “The dentist isn’t checking carefully enough, so I should get away with it” [Not a logical aspiration].  And then the other half of my brain fought back and exclaimed, “This is the perfect set-up for an ironical outcome.”

It’s that fear of an ironical outcome that I am often plagued with.  Like when I put the car in the garage for a seemingly small problem, I fear it’ll cost hundreds to resolve.  Going to the dentist, with its fear of the unknown, where the judgement of one person can cost you dearly, is just like putting your car in the garage, but with added physical pain to bolster the financial one.

They have this new thing now where you have to put safety glasses on as soon as you get in the dentist’s chair.  Dark safety glasses.  So you can’t see what they’re doing.  The chair menacingly reclines, and she pulls the retractable lamp down from the ceiling, asking if I’ve had any problems recently.  But her fingers have already stretched my cheeks apart, like a vet delivering a calf, and in my head I want to ask, “DO YOU EXPECT ME TO TALK?” but I know the answer will be, “NO, MR BASTARD, I EXPECT YOU TO DIE.”

Then it gets all fucking Bletchley Park, as she checks each tooth and speaks in code to her assistant.  I hear a series of numbers and letters and I panic, thinking WHAT THE FUCK DO THEY MEAN?  I am certain they mean something bad, particularly if she pauses for too long on one tooth, or says “zero zero.”

ARGH! ZERO ZERO?  THAT MUST MEAN THEY’RE GOING TO PUT ME TO SLEEP AND EXPERIMENT ON ME AND I’LL WAKE UP WITH MY TEETH SOWN INTO MY ANUS AND THEY’LL TAKE A PHOTO OF MY BLEEDING TOOTHLESS MOUTH AND PUT IT IN THE WAITING ROOM NEXT TO A PHOTOGRAPH OF MY FREAKISH TOOTH-FILLED BOTTOM!

But in reality, what happened today was that my teeth were fine, it cost a mere £18 for all of us and I texted my wife to update her on the outcome with the boast WE ARE THE FUCKING TOOTH KINGS.

Going for Gold

At the very moment that I learned about Margaret Thatcher’s death, I was watching a 1988 episode of “Going for Gold” on telly. 

This show was the pull factor that prevented me attending early afternoon lectures for most of my 2^nd year at university.  Digesting a lunch of Supernoodles or pig’s liver required a sedentary half-hour, post-Neighbours, in the company of Henry Kelly and a range of socially retarded misfits competing for the prize of “European Quiz Champion.”  The pure fact that contestants hailed from all over Europe (well, this side of the crumbling Iron Curtain anyway) appeared enough of a significant fact to warrant such a lofty assertion.  The stark reality confronting us viewers when these hapless morons opened their mouths was altogether contradictory.  Surely they weren’t quiz champions of their own countries, were they?  I mean, they sort of knew absolutely fuck all about fuck all.

One particular moment of neurotransmitter non-functioning was when Henry Kelly asked “What common liquid is technically known as H20” and 3 contestants guessed wrongly.  You could have guessed this level of highbrow intellectual challenge was coming during the show’s opening titles as the contestants were encouraged to give a quirky wave to camera as it focussed on them one by one.  If I’m being kind, I could say that the mix of nationalities resulted in a diverse array of idiosyncratic gestures which reflected what might have been the norm or perhaps even quite cool in each of their respective cultures.  However, I wasn’t kind, so I’d sit there with my housemate Phil and together we’d piss ourselves stupid pouring ridicule on every grinning contestant as he or she did a Fonzie thumbs-up, a window-cleaner wipe, a dead fish flapping in a net, a near-as-dammit Nazi salute or a jolly-sailor-bugger-you-later fisting of the air.

Henry Kelly was perfect for the role of quizmaster.  He was truly excited by it all, and was forever bobbing up and down on his toes as if someone was regularly tickling his balls, giving literal meaning to that anachronistic nugget of our homophobic past, “light on his loafers”.  With gentlemanly grace he’d ask the contestants about themselves and appear genuinely interested to hear that each one had a hobby that was so mind-numbingly dull that within half a sentence of hearing about it, anyone less generous would have driven burning kebab skewers into their ears so as not to have to endure the rest of the response.

There was an elimination round before the “first round proper” and we could never fathom why that wasn’t just called the first round.  The style of many questions required Henry Kelly to describe something or somebody in the first person, like so:

“Who am I?  I am a German born composer, famous for writing symphonies including the most famous one, Beethoven’s fifth…”

BUZZZZZZ!!!!!

“Hans from Denmark?”

“Is it Mozart?”

“No, Hans from Denmark, it isn’t Mozart.  I’ll continue.  Including the most famous one, Beethoven’s fifth.  My first name is Ludwig and my surname begins with B and rhymes with Hatehoven, but I am not Tchaikovsky…”

BUZZZZZ!!!!

“Lucia from Italy?”

“Tchaikovsky?”

You were kind of waiting for someone to buzz in early, after “Who am I?” and answer “Henry Kelly.”  And if he asked, “What am I?” then me and Phil would barrack the telly with a string of insulting terms, many of which would be considered hate-crimes now that it is no longer 1989.

For the “Grand final of finals” of the European Quizmongs, Henry Kelly would don his dinner jacket and bow-tie, itself worth twice the cost of the studio set behind him (and I’m sure it was a rented suit) and a tangible titter of gormless excitement would emanate from the audience.  The winner of the first series (a certain Daphne Fowler , famed Egghead, Brain of Britain, Fifteen to One double-winner and general “awful bore”) won a trip to the 1988 Seoul Olympics.  I like to think that the losing contestants were sent to North Korea.  For good.  In subsequent years, the grand prize was a gold-mining expedition to Australia, which probably meant deportation.

Sadly, Going for Gold was eliminated from our screens in 1996, but its legacy has been the culture of moronic TV text challenges that you now get on so many prime-time family shows:

What liquid is technically known as H2O?  Is it (a) Water, (b) Gibraltar or (c) Bring your daughter to the slaughter?  Text your answer to 08700 700 700.  Texts cost £2.50 each and those of you who text the correct answer will go into a draw to win the grand prize of Henry Kelly’s dinner suit complete with testicle-access flap and the scent of ineptitude.

Toilets of My Childhood

We had three toilets in my house when I was a kid.

Not because we were rich.  We weren’t rich.  Not money rich.  But we WERE toilet rich.  We moved into a newly built 3-storey, 3-bedroom, 3-bog, terraced house in a leafy London suburb in 1976.  I can’t tell you how exciting it was to discover a toilet on each floor.  Exciting and perhaps rather pointless.

However, each lavatory had a character of its own.  The ground floor one was used mostly by my brother and myself, because it was the most convenient convenience when you came running into the house, having been playing outside.  (For those of you born after 1985, I should explain that “playing outside” meant social interaction and physical activity for prolonged periods external to your place of dwelling.)  It was a judgement call whether we’d even bother coming home for a piss, as the local area was well-populated with a resplendent array of foliage and other concealed “natural” urinals; but if we were close enough to home and required a poo, then we’d hold it in until the tortoise was chomping cloth and then make a late dash for that lower-ground lavvy.  (OK, fair enough, if you’ve read other blog posts here, you’ll know that the occasional poo was dealt with al fresco.)

Perhaps because our parents tended not to use this toilet, my brother felt confident in applying some cheap biro graffiti to the painted wall.  “Boy oh boy” and “Matthew, King of the Poos” it read; much like the brown, personalised t-shirt I sent him for his 38^th birthday.  This graffiti was never washed off.  Nor was the brown stain next to it, which was the inevitable fall-out of an 8 year boy in a rush in a confined space.

The middle-landing toilet was the family shitter, next door to the lounge and housing with it one of our 2 baths.  The one we used.  So, our mum kept this room spotless.  You could eat Angel Delight out of that bowl, it was so pristine.  But scratch beneath the surface of anything so suspiciously clean and glorious and you’ll uncover some grimy truth.  In this case, it was the ubiquitous pair of heavily stained white y-fronts cast by either me or my brother behind the sink.  It tended to be the sink, because we kept a wire coat-hanger behind the loo itself, an essential tool in helping to “break up” anything that wouldn’t flush first time.  We were too embarrassed or scared (or perhaps responsible) to risk dropping such a toxic item into the laundry basket, for fear of cross-contamination, so this furtive strategy was demanded.  Mum usually found them within days, but by that point the offending soil had hardened like the lava over Pompeii and a blowtorch and chisel were called into action with the next washing machine load.

Finally, this tour of my childhood home’s triptych of turd-tanks takes us up to the top storey, the twilight toilet.  This room had no external walls, as it was between the two upstairs bedrooms of this terraced house and consequently windowless.  Therefore, it contained an extractor fan, which turned on automatically with the light.  A very noisy extractor fan.  Which would wake everyone if turned on during the night.  So we tended to piss in the dark in this one.

Now the universal insanity of having a carpet in any toilet is a problem magnified many times when you add into the mix the challenge of pissing in the dark.  You might use your knees to locate the rim of the bowl, but (given that we were all cavaliers and not roundheads in my family) there was no telling what angle that jet of slash would come out at.  So, you’d start away and hear nothing.  A terrible silence that meant you’d missed.  By the time you’d swung your body left and right until you could hear the relieving sound of water upon water, you’d already broadcast a litre of long-stored, night-time concentrate all over the carpet.

We weren’t money rich.  We never replaced that carpet in the 6 years we spent there.  By 1982, the fumes were enough to burn your retinas.

The Terrible Beauty of Bastard Routine (Part One)

I am brutally hauled from a state of nasal-cadenced torpidity by the radio alarm at 5.45am, tuned by a bed-sharer of less discerning musical taste to a station specialising in soul-less mid-80’s plastic rock and fatuous chatter from some treacle-voiced buffoon.  Cleverly, she has contrived the environment to ensure that the snooze button is within MY arm’s range rather than hers.  But the neurotransmitters are so numbed by this assault on their sensibilities, that they require several minutes’ exposure to the trauma before kicking back into function mode and sending that vital message to my arm to turn the fucking thing off.

I pour milk onto my layered cereal breakfast of mini-Weetabix with chocolate bits and Cookie Crisp (also with chocolate bits).  This is the preliminary kitchen task, allowing time for the kettle to boil and the Weetabix to evolve from their primitive paving stone consistency into something molten enough to suck through the gaps in my teeth – not that I choose such a method of eating - while I make myself a chocolate spread sandwich to take to work.  I dine on my soggerizing cereal combo in front of the telly, either appalled by the crassness of BBC Breakfast and its twee and odious assemblage of offensively unoffending presenters or embarrassingly pleasured by the nostalgic indulgence and mind-gum plot development of New Dallas, which I Sky+ each Wednesday.

I don’t like to rush.  My mental balance is kept in equilibrium if I am in the bath within 15 minutes of 6.58am.  (It used to be 6.55am, thus providing a wash’n’dry window of five minutes before waking the kids at 7.00am.  But I have rebelliously waged war at this deadline until in a Castro-esque time-coup I seized for myself three additional minutes.)  This pocket of undisturbed, hot-water-swaddled meditation consists of a long, scornful stare at Twitter on my phone, leading me to despair of the creative void that is evident in human web-based interactions at this time of the morning.

Yes, I lie in the bath with my phone in my hand.  I have never dropped it.  I am the fucking KING of not dropping my phone in the bath EVER and by far more skilful at this than anyone you will ever meet in your whole life.

When there is evidence that my children’s sleep pits have been evacuated and their own morning routines are underway, I choose a CD for the journey and get into my Vauxhall Astra and drive to work.  My journey is the exact same time as side one of an album.  I know that CDs don’t have sides, so let’s say it is the exact same time as half a CD.  Half a CD of an album of optimal length, that is.   About 40 minutes.  All albums should be 40 minutes in total.  Anything more is perverse.

I am in some ways an adventurous spirit.  My veins teem with spontaneity.  I never know which one of two enticing routes I will take to work until I reach the point where I can turn off one onto another.  In most other respects though, my drive is relaxing and without event.  Especially now that I have mastered my Car-Tourette’s and inadvisable over-reactive and aggressive counter-provocation when encountering your average bullying cunt of the road.  A couple of occasions when car-emergence and likely physical confrontation with such rogues almost reached fruition have led me to reflect that I am not actually able to beat up EVERYONE else and would therefore be wiser to cease the more fight-inducing behaviours that I have exhibited for over 20 years.  I haven’t quite gone cold turkey on this road-rage heroin, but I am safer sticking to the methadone approach of simply slowing down to the speed limit when an impatient and aggressive cunt is tailgating me and allowing him to suffer the inconvenience of my admittedly smug and sanctimonious passive-obstructive protests.  No wanker signs required.

Thus I get to work unmolested.  I am imbibed with half an album of my own choice, songs that have put pay to the Bon Jovi brainwashing I had 1 ¾ hours before, and I go to my office having stuffed the Nutella-filled wholemeal bread package into the staffroom fridge.  The beautiful routine of my mornings is now terminated by the job.

(to be continued…) 

The Take-No-Shit Bullshitter Bastards

I never cease to be tickled by the irony that seeps from the pores on the earnest faces of THOSE people who tell you that they “don’t take any shit from anyone.”  Because, clearly, the very fact that they are telling you this is an implicit admission that they DO take shit from people and have thus created a bravado to combat their frequently wounded pride.   That bravado manifests itself in the form of a mask, an alias, a self-righteous un-caped crusader, a fantasy aspiration that we might call the Take-No-Shit-Bullshitter.

The burden that these pitiful morons bear is one which compels them to perform an ostentatious act of complaint in every situation in which they are seen not to get their own way. 

For example, during the pre-Christmas postal chaos in which England’s lazy arses did all their present shopping online, I joined a snake-like queue at the local sorting office to collect some parcels.  Feeling quite sanguine about this situation, I was gently amused to witness a Take-No-Shit-Bullshitter refuse to accept that the parcel he had been expecting had not yet arrived at the sorting office.  The poor sods on the desk had a good look for it.  It wasn’t  there.  Your common garden Take-No-Shit-Bullshitter abandons logic and courtesy at this point, because he believes that he is being “done over”.  The system (or someone) is lying to him and “taking the piss”.  He won’t stand for it.  So he throws his toys out of the pram and begins to get shirty with the counter staff.  As if it’s their fault.

What goes through his mind at this point, knowing that defeat is inevitable, is a plan to say something PROFOUND that he can tell his friends about afterwards: 

“So he says to me that they haven’t got it and I say ‘well that’s seventy quid’s worth of stuff there’ and he says ‘what do you want me to do?’ and I say ‘you can bloody well pay me the seventy quid then or I’m not moving’.”  Profound?  Or perhaps deeply discourteous, unreasonable and patently illogical?  But the point is, he MADE A STAND and took no shit.

At this point, he needs to leave the scene with his dignity intact, having got nowhere with his complaint, so he will try to engage a bystander with eye-contact, to gain affirmation that he is RIGHT  and the source of his complaint is WRONG; and he will utter that trite and fatuous adjective that all Take-No-Shit-Bullshitters bandy about: “RIDICULOUS!”  And he’ll repeat it to his audience and crave complicit nods.  “It’s ridiculous isn’t it?  Ridiculous!”