On the 12th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:An arrogant, parochial assumption that the following blog post is a justifiable parody of some wondrously shitty British attitudes towards the festive period, when really I’m writing about South-East of England prejudices and idiosyncrasies. Down here we’re far less friendly than the rest of the UK. Although liberal-minded enough to abhor racism, we’re Nazi-like in how regionalist we are. And worse of all, like I said, we erroneously believe that our failings are common to the rest of the UK. (Or maybe they are. You be the judges.)
On the 11th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Eleven charity cards. Costing ten times more than ordinary cards, but worth it because some of that goes to charity? No. Have you ever noticed how much? About 30p per pack. Not even 30p per card. You might as well buy cheap cards and just give 30p to charity. Or 40p. Or fuck it, why not a tenner and make all the charity card buyers look ridiculous in their smug do-good mistake of allowing themselves to be fisted by a card company that used the word CHARITY to sell you over-priced cards.
On the 10th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Ten Christmas programmes written by Richard Curtis. Now, in your heart you know that Christmas is also a tragic time. It polarises people’s emotions. While the lucky have families and feasts and presents, others have no one and nothing and feel that separation more acutely than at any other time of the year. And did you see what I did there? In the middle of a (hopefully) witty blog, I have disarmed you by the juxtaposition of this token mention of something SAD. Well, Richard Curtis does this all the fucking time. If I’m watching Love Actually or Vicar of Dibley, I don’t want my escapist enjoyment soiled by Curtis sneaking up on me and throwing in a random sad scene to make me feel guilty, the sanctimonious, twee, middle-class bastard.
On the 9th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Nine pantomime dames. As a veteran of numerous fatuous and frivolous festive performances at Radlett Theatre, I can honestly say that being a Dad at a Christmas panto is the loneliest place in the whole world. Notwithstanding the occasional sexy witch, the whole experience induces a manic desire to scratch at your eyeballs with holly and then impale your head, ear-first, onto a reindeer’s antler. That moment when a 50 year old transvestite with no social parameters notices that you’re the only one not stood up to join in the Macarena, feels like the moment of death itself.
On the 8th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Eight Christmas sales. There’s nothing quite like seeing all the presents you bought the week BEFORE Christmas on sale at half the price two days AFTER Christmas. Thankfully, the current economic climate has brought us sales before Christmas this year, thus eliminating the need to lie to family members about having “ordered your present a week ago but it still hasn’t come,” knowing full well it’s still in the shop getting its price tag changed as you speak.
On the 7th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:The ITV premier of a film that came out seven years ago.
On the 6th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Six greedy people who have a birthday within a fortnight of Christmas Day. Just when you’ve written and posted off all your Christmas cards, and you’re literally sitting in the warm piss of your own satisfaction at how well-organised you are, you suddenly recall that you have to send BIRTHDAY cards as well. Each costing more than the £1.99 you paid for 30 Christmas cards and in some cases requiring an accompanying present; but your abused imagination has already been beaten lifeless with all the thinking needed to choose a Christmas present for these people. Bloody freaks. Have a birthday like the rest of us between February and November please!
On the 5th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Five Christmas cards for the neighbours. Three of which you never talk to. Two of which you can’t spell their names. And one of which, you’re not even sure which house they live in. You might have sent a 6th card, because you received one from “All at number 68” but as they can’t be arsed to write their fucking names (or yours), bollocks to them.
On the 4th day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Four witty church signs. You know the type. Jesus is for life, not just for Christmas. Or some other such pun. Some effort by the church to show it is moving with the times. Give it a couple of years and they’ll be even more up to date with something like COME TO CHURCH AT CHRISTMAS FOR GUARANTEED CLUNGE.
On the 3rd day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Three days of the bin-men not collecting any rubbish at the one time of year when you have three times more than normal. OK, OK, so they deserve a holiday as well, our “refuse technicians.” Lucky for them, they (and the postmen, speeding around like the A-Team in their vans) don’t ask for a “Christmas box” like they used to, because I’d fucking oblige... after they knocked a slab off the top of my front wall with the bin last year and left it there, the careless cunts.
On the 2nd day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:Two Christmas songs I find bearable out of about 200 that I keep having to listen to. My theory is that we all have our two. Mine are Fairytale of New York and Happy Xmas (War is over.) The rest are Jingle Hell. The one that sends me into a homicidal frenzy is not so much the song, but the video of Kim Wilde and Mel Smith singing Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree. I want to take that tree and beat Mel Smith around his flabby fucking gurning face with it. And then do the same with a large rock, just to be totally in keeping with the song title.
On the 1st day of Christmas a bastard gave to me:All the money back that I spent on presents for people that they didn’t want, so I can spend it on things that I want, but which no one bought for me. I bet even Jesus thought that.
Merry Christmas.
Monday, 19 December 2011
Saturday, 17 December 2011
The Toys of Christmas Past
It’s the late 70’s and I’m not yet ten years old and it’s Christmas Day and I’ve just pulled the appendage of a man wearing only a skimpy pair of pants.
No one ever questioned the absolute WRONGNESS of giving a young child STRETCH ARMSTRONG as a toy. In case you’re wondering, the concept of Stretch Armstrong was that you pulled his limbs and they stretched to about three feet long, because he was made of some kind of tough jelly-like polymer (Wikipedia says “gelled corn syrup.”) The stretching necessitated an almost total absence of clothes, but in those innocent days before gays were discovered a decade later (even camp TV celebrities like John Inman and Larry Grayson were considered no more than just “disinterested in women”) no one could accuse Stretch Armstrong of being any more homo-erotic than Mick McManus, the similarly skimpily-panted wrestler with the slicked-back, dyed-black Dracula hairstyle, who was a mainstay of World of Sport and another to appear on the “We-never-knew-he-was-gay” list of 70’s closet dwellers.
It made more sense when they developed a STRETCH HULK, so we got one of those another Xmas and threw darts at it to MAKE HULK MAD and watch the gel seep from his wounds before clotting.
Another favourite toy was the Six Million Dollar Man and his arch-enemy Maskatron (who never appeared in the series as I remember.) You could roll back the Bionic Man’s skin. On his arm, that is, to reveal his bionics. Not his willy. Like Stretch Armstrong and Action Man, Steve Austin had no willy, not even a bionic one. In the 80’s they started adding pants with a subtle bulge to these sorts of Action figures, thus making it worthwhile to have them dry-hump Barbie. So, I’m told.
Moving on...
But amongst my vast array of boys’ toys, I was once given my own Nookie Bear ventriloquist’s dummy. You could pull a string to make him go cross-eyed and you could make him talk without moving your lips any more than his real-life side-kick, Roger de Courcey. Because, as you’ll know if you ever saw him, Roger de Courcey perfected all the attributes of an excellent ventriloquist act except for one: The ability to speak without moving his lips. So, he had a huge Dutch porn-star’s moustache to try and hide this fact; but when he spoke, this wriggled around like the Magic Roundabout’s Dougal with epilepsy. Nookie Bear wasn’t the sort of toy you could have much fun with, though. Far better was my brother’s toy version of Rod Hull’s Emu, which made for many a great fight between us. (Emu always went for the face as well, the nasty bastard.)
Then there was Fuzzy Felt. This wasn’t a reference to the first time you got to 2nd base with a girl; it was a Velcro board on which you arranged shaped pieces of felt to make a themed scene. Equally (un)creative, was Etch-a-Sketch, with its famed design fault, an inability to draw diagonal lines without them looking like uncurled pubes.
Possibly the most disappointing toy was Scalextric. Absolute shit. I value the lesson it teaches you for later life, which is to slow down as you approach a corner. I do this in real-life perhaps too excessively, but my decision has been validated by the fact that I have yet to find myself spinning through the air after trying to take a corner in 4th gear at 30mph.
A close 2nd to Scalextric for disappointment was Mouse Trap. Once you set it up and set it off, then what the fuck were you supposed to do? Apparently you had to throw dice and move round the board before you were allowed to set it off. How shit is that? How was that marketed? “Buy Mousetrap – half a minute of fun for all ages.”
That was something that irked me as an adult, that sign on the packaging that read “Ages 7-70.” What; do you need a fucking license to play after you’ve turned 70 then? Do you have to re-apply to Waddington’s version of the DVLA for permission to be Professor Plum for another 5 years?
My third-place toy of disappointment would have to be a mini-snooker table. It was like playing snooker when you’re pissed. Any skill you might have had was negated by the crappy quality of the balls and baize and cue, which was great if you wanted HOURS of fun, because you’d never fucking pot anything and someone always knocked it and sent the balls all one inch sideways, so you’d have to restart anyway.
One for the real nostalgia-lovers amongst you, something that just hasn’t ever appeared since, is a board game called Buccaneer. The theme was pirates and buried treasure and I once took one of the game pieces, a plastic ruby, and put it up my nostril. I was probably about nine when I did this. Ignorant of the anatomy of the nose and throat, when I then lost that ruby completely, I believed that I was going to die. For days I was hoping it would reappear, just fall out my nostril, or I’d pick it out while rooting for a bogey. But it never reappeared and as the days turned into weeks, I suspected that perhaps it would be a long slow death that I’d suffer.
Right, I’m off to get the Argos catalogue to choose my favourite toy on each page and draw a biro circle around each one. Merry Toymas.
No one ever questioned the absolute WRONGNESS of giving a young child STRETCH ARMSTRONG as a toy. In case you’re wondering, the concept of Stretch Armstrong was that you pulled his limbs and they stretched to about three feet long, because he was made of some kind of tough jelly-like polymer (Wikipedia says “gelled corn syrup.”) The stretching necessitated an almost total absence of clothes, but in those innocent days before gays were discovered a decade later (even camp TV celebrities like John Inman and Larry Grayson were considered no more than just “disinterested in women”) no one could accuse Stretch Armstrong of being any more homo-erotic than Mick McManus, the similarly skimpily-panted wrestler with the slicked-back, dyed-black Dracula hairstyle, who was a mainstay of World of Sport and another to appear on the “We-never-knew-he-was-gay” list of 70’s closet dwellers.
It made more sense when they developed a STRETCH HULK, so we got one of those another Xmas and threw darts at it to MAKE HULK MAD and watch the gel seep from his wounds before clotting.
Another favourite toy was the Six Million Dollar Man and his arch-enemy Maskatron (who never appeared in the series as I remember.) You could roll back the Bionic Man’s skin. On his arm, that is, to reveal his bionics. Not his willy. Like Stretch Armstrong and Action Man, Steve Austin had no willy, not even a bionic one. In the 80’s they started adding pants with a subtle bulge to these sorts of Action figures, thus making it worthwhile to have them dry-hump Barbie. So, I’m told.
Moving on...
But amongst my vast array of boys’ toys, I was once given my own Nookie Bear ventriloquist’s dummy. You could pull a string to make him go cross-eyed and you could make him talk without moving your lips any more than his real-life side-kick, Roger de Courcey. Because, as you’ll know if you ever saw him, Roger de Courcey perfected all the attributes of an excellent ventriloquist act except for one: The ability to speak without moving his lips. So, he had a huge Dutch porn-star’s moustache to try and hide this fact; but when he spoke, this wriggled around like the Magic Roundabout’s Dougal with epilepsy. Nookie Bear wasn’t the sort of toy you could have much fun with, though. Far better was my brother’s toy version of Rod Hull’s Emu, which made for many a great fight between us. (Emu always went for the face as well, the nasty bastard.)
Then there was Fuzzy Felt. This wasn’t a reference to the first time you got to 2nd base with a girl; it was a Velcro board on which you arranged shaped pieces of felt to make a themed scene. Equally (un)creative, was Etch-a-Sketch, with its famed design fault, an inability to draw diagonal lines without them looking like uncurled pubes.
Possibly the most disappointing toy was Scalextric. Absolute shit. I value the lesson it teaches you for later life, which is to slow down as you approach a corner. I do this in real-life perhaps too excessively, but my decision has been validated by the fact that I have yet to find myself spinning through the air after trying to take a corner in 4th gear at 30mph.
A close 2nd to Scalextric for disappointment was Mouse Trap. Once you set it up and set it off, then what the fuck were you supposed to do? Apparently you had to throw dice and move round the board before you were allowed to set it off. How shit is that? How was that marketed? “Buy Mousetrap – half a minute of fun for all ages.”
That was something that irked me as an adult, that sign on the packaging that read “Ages 7-70.” What; do you need a fucking license to play after you’ve turned 70 then? Do you have to re-apply to Waddington’s version of the DVLA for permission to be Professor Plum for another 5 years?
My third-place toy of disappointment would have to be a mini-snooker table. It was like playing snooker when you’re pissed. Any skill you might have had was negated by the crappy quality of the balls and baize and cue, which was great if you wanted HOURS of fun, because you’d never fucking pot anything and someone always knocked it and sent the balls all one inch sideways, so you’d have to restart anyway.
One for the real nostalgia-lovers amongst you, something that just hasn’t ever appeared since, is a board game called Buccaneer. The theme was pirates and buried treasure and I once took one of the game pieces, a plastic ruby, and put it up my nostril. I was probably about nine when I did this. Ignorant of the anatomy of the nose and throat, when I then lost that ruby completely, I believed that I was going to die. For days I was hoping it would reappear, just fall out my nostril, or I’d pick it out while rooting for a bogey. But it never reappeared and as the days turned into weeks, I suspected that perhaps it would be a long slow death that I’d suffer.
Right, I’m off to get the Argos catalogue to choose my favourite toy on each page and draw a biro circle around each one. Merry Toymas.
Sunday, 27 November 2011
The Bastardness of All-boys Religious Schools and the consequent crapness with girls
My parents made few fundamental errors in their youthful efforts to raise me, and I’m happy to say that I survived them all. Just.
The haze of cigarette smoke from womb to living room to dinner table failed to inflict lung disease or even asthma on me. The subjection at an early age to the “The Omen” and subsequent psychological trauma of being told that Damien was hiding in the dark in our house ensured that I was permanently one broken light-bulb away from shitting in my pants. But the decision to send me to an all-boys Catholic school may well have bestowed on me a useful academic education, but it made me hopelessly socially retarded when it came to talking to girls.
I was rubbish.
Not that the kindly, altruistic Jesuit priests of St ******** College were adverse to sex education. After embarrassingly but excitingly cringing while my parents signed a consent form to allow me to receive my first taste of sex education, our decrepit corpse of a biology teacher showed a video about sweating. Therefore, it was left to my peers to fill in the gaps, via the media of biro penises on every page in every textbook and the more worldly comedians in our year group telling jokes about prostitutes (which I heard as Protestants, naturally) and nob-nibbling.
It didn’t help that the school was 3 miles out of town, where our sister school (the convent which produced Mandy Smith, consenting bride of paedophile Stones bassist Bill Wyman) was situated. By a cruel twist of fate the timings of departure at the two schools precluded any opportunity to mingle with our female compatriots, except for the three gutter-mouthed and very obvious slappers who hung about the bus terminal and knew the hard lads from my year group.
By this stage I was living on the North Circular Road, six lanes of traffic three metres from the front gate and nowhere to hang around and meet local girls. So my first futile attempt to get a girlfriend was laughable in the extreme.
At this stage, let me point out that it wasn’t until I was 18 and at university that a female friend advised me that you don’t just “get a girlfriend” but instead you meet someone, you say hello, you get to know them and then you ask them out. At 13, I thought that you skip all of that and just ask them out.
So after idolising Dawn B***** on the bus for months I puffed up the courage to do just that. The whole conversation, as we passed in the street was as follows:
Me (mumbling too fast): Excuse me, do you want to go to cinema with me on Saturday?
Her: What?
Me: Do you want to go to cinema with me on Saturday?
Her (frowning incredulously): No.
This run of form continued for several years. Had I been a football team, I’d’ve been relegated on an annual basis until I was playing in the conference south with double-figure crowds and administration and ground-selling on the horizon. To meet girls, we’d walk around the local park at the wrong times or go into central London and stare out of the window like starving hyenas at anyone with boobs.
But eventually I was old enough to go to pubs and clubs and ACTUALLY meet more than one woman at a time. All you needed, I was conditioned to believe from popular culture (probably just crap sit-coms) was a clever and witty chat-up line.
Fucking hell! Which total bastard invented the concept of a chat-up line? Again, it was only later that I was told that the best chat-up line was “hello.” Not “my brother and I work in biscuit design and were wondering if you’d like to do some modelling work as part of our advertising campaign.”
Me and my equally crap droogs would sit at a table in a bar for hours mustering up the courage (meaning getting drunk enough to make an arse of ourselves) and striving to invent the one killer line that was needed in total isolation to get us some luck. This was on the back of meticulous pre-night-out routines, such as spending the afternoon in a pub, shaving just before going out and thereby cutting my face to ribbons and necessitating a cheap cologne-facial dip, and then sticking on the Led Zep while adorning myself in my “pulling” (Hawaiian) shirt and “pulling” (cowboy) boots.
I was rubbish.
My son is 15, has had a girlfriend for over a year (and others willing to take her place), a supremely laid-back competence in how to socialise with girls and he never, NEVER feels like shitting in his pants when we turn the lights out at home.
The haze of cigarette smoke from womb to living room to dinner table failed to inflict lung disease or even asthma on me. The subjection at an early age to the “The Omen” and subsequent psychological trauma of being told that Damien was hiding in the dark in our house ensured that I was permanently one broken light-bulb away from shitting in my pants. But the decision to send me to an all-boys Catholic school may well have bestowed on me a useful academic education, but it made me hopelessly socially retarded when it came to talking to girls.
I was rubbish.
Not that the kindly, altruistic Jesuit priests of St ******** College were adverse to sex education. After embarrassingly but excitingly cringing while my parents signed a consent form to allow me to receive my first taste of sex education, our decrepit corpse of a biology teacher showed a video about sweating. Therefore, it was left to my peers to fill in the gaps, via the media of biro penises on every page in every textbook and the more worldly comedians in our year group telling jokes about prostitutes (which I heard as Protestants, naturally) and nob-nibbling.
It didn’t help that the school was 3 miles out of town, where our sister school (the convent which produced Mandy Smith, consenting bride of paedophile Stones bassist Bill Wyman) was situated. By a cruel twist of fate the timings of departure at the two schools precluded any opportunity to mingle with our female compatriots, except for the three gutter-mouthed and very obvious slappers who hung about the bus terminal and knew the hard lads from my year group.
By this stage I was living on the North Circular Road, six lanes of traffic three metres from the front gate and nowhere to hang around and meet local girls. So my first futile attempt to get a girlfriend was laughable in the extreme.
At this stage, let me point out that it wasn’t until I was 18 and at university that a female friend advised me that you don’t just “get a girlfriend” but instead you meet someone, you say hello, you get to know them and then you ask them out. At 13, I thought that you skip all of that and just ask them out.
So after idolising Dawn B***** on the bus for months I puffed up the courage to do just that. The whole conversation, as we passed in the street was as follows:
Me (mumbling too fast): Excuse me, do you want to go to cinema with me on Saturday?
Her: What?
Me: Do you want to go to cinema with me on Saturday?
Her (frowning incredulously): No.
This run of form continued for several years. Had I been a football team, I’d’ve been relegated on an annual basis until I was playing in the conference south with double-figure crowds and administration and ground-selling on the horizon. To meet girls, we’d walk around the local park at the wrong times or go into central London and stare out of the window like starving hyenas at anyone with boobs.
But eventually I was old enough to go to pubs and clubs and ACTUALLY meet more than one woman at a time. All you needed, I was conditioned to believe from popular culture (probably just crap sit-coms) was a clever and witty chat-up line.
Fucking hell! Which total bastard invented the concept of a chat-up line? Again, it was only later that I was told that the best chat-up line was “hello.” Not “my brother and I work in biscuit design and were wondering if you’d like to do some modelling work as part of our advertising campaign.”
Me and my equally crap droogs would sit at a table in a bar for hours mustering up the courage (meaning getting drunk enough to make an arse of ourselves) and striving to invent the one killer line that was needed in total isolation to get us some luck. This was on the back of meticulous pre-night-out routines, such as spending the afternoon in a pub, shaving just before going out and thereby cutting my face to ribbons and necessitating a cheap cologne-facial dip, and then sticking on the Led Zep while adorning myself in my “pulling” (Hawaiian) shirt and “pulling” (cowboy) boots.
I was rubbish.
My son is 15, has had a girlfriend for over a year (and others willing to take her place), a supremely laid-back competence in how to socialise with girls and he never, NEVER feels like shitting in his pants when we turn the lights out at home.
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
Fun Fascists
EVERYBODY PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR AND SAY “YEAH!”
I made the mistake at a young age of going to see Prince in concert. It was just at the wrong time, when he was veering away from the rock and psychedelic pop of Purple Rain and Paisley Park to become an exponent of that most loathsome of musical genres, DANCE MUSIC. (By that, I don’t mean music you CAN dance to, but instead music that you can ONLY dance to.) And as I stood there in Wembley Arena, aged 19, with a now ex-mate and his 16 year old girlfriend of the time (he was 21) I found myself appalled by the DEMANDS that Prince kept making on me as a paying member of the audience to either put my hands in the air or to shout YEAH, as if I was some kind of brainless fucking sheep, who’d collapse under any slight peer pressure and have all the decision-making and discriminating capabilities and individuality of a dog in need of a shit in a field full of shitting dogs.
As you can imagine, I refused. And never bought another Prince CD again.
This was the point in my life when I recognised my utter and inexorable disdain for what can only be identified as FUN FASCISM.
Since then, I have experienced many other zealous devotees of this social philosophy. People who nurse a fundamentalist set of beliefs in regard to the whole concept of FUN. Narrow-minded bigots who refuse to tolerate anyone else’s doctrines or practices, labelling everything that doesn’t match their definition of FUN as BORING. In their slightly wide-eyed and socially-retarded opinion, people are either FUN or BORING depending on what they are willing to do.
Fucking Fun Fascists.
They store in their tiny-sized under-developed brain-blobs the Fun Fascist version of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book or Hitler’s Mein Kampf – a detailed and unequivocally inflexible series of statements on how we should ALL have fun. And when Fun Fascists encounter each other, they reinforce their own prejudices, because they tend to carry EXACTLY the same Fun Fascist Bible in their minds.
For example, they would have dictated that I put my hands in the air and said yeah AND danced in the aisle at that Prince gig and indeed at all events I attend that involve music. Should I attend an event in which the music is not the type you can dance to, then it is BORING and I am BORING for going.
The Fun Fascists have a preference for what they like to call EXTROVERT behaviour, because EXTROVERT means FUN and INTROVERT means BORING. If these people had any ambitions towards political power, then they would sweep away democracy and INFLICT fun on us through a combination of biased PROPAGANDA and systematic, organised FEAR. They would use the FUN-POLICE to arrest anyone “not joining in” and send them for re-education in special camps, where we’d be made to wear stupid hats and be torturously “Dance-boarded” (forced to keep dancing for 48 hours when really you just want a sit down or a sleep.)
Fun Fascism would stipulate monthly pilgrimages to theme parks, the compulsory car-jazzling of all private vehicles, the use of abbreviated forenames or even nicknames as the correct way for companies to formally address their customers, the abolition of the speed limit and the castration of anyone refusing to participate in extreme sports.
Fun Fascists, due to religious-like indoctrination, will tend to spew out verbatim the dictums of their philosophy:
“Cheer up!”
“Smile!”
“Come on, let your hair down!”
You can almost hear the same authoritative menace in their voice as you would have done from the SS, the Khmer Rouge or Mao’s Red Guard. But maybe these are the wrong analogies to make. These dictatorships were relatively short-lived. My fear is that the Fun Fascists will hold sway over our lives for as long as the Catholic Church did in Western Europe. Expect the burning of HERETIC INTROVERTS. Expect the formation of a ruthless FUN INQUISITION to put people on the rack and ask “What did you do last weekend?” Expect your children to be brainwashed into believing that they will go to Hell if they don’t spend their half their lives in hedonistic dicking around and the other half Facebooking about it.
OK, perhaps I am scaremongering a little. These people cannot take over, because by their very nature they are too inept to do so. There is a simple method of combating their irritatingly trite and gormless optimism and that is to answer their demands to have fun THEIR WAY with the same response I made to Prince back in 1990: FUCK OFF.
Thus will the menace of Fun Fascism be countered!
I made the mistake at a young age of going to see Prince in concert. It was just at the wrong time, when he was veering away from the rock and psychedelic pop of Purple Rain and Paisley Park to become an exponent of that most loathsome of musical genres, DANCE MUSIC. (By that, I don’t mean music you CAN dance to, but instead music that you can ONLY dance to.) And as I stood there in Wembley Arena, aged 19, with a now ex-mate and his 16 year old girlfriend of the time (he was 21) I found myself appalled by the DEMANDS that Prince kept making on me as a paying member of the audience to either put my hands in the air or to shout YEAH, as if I was some kind of brainless fucking sheep, who’d collapse under any slight peer pressure and have all the decision-making and discriminating capabilities and individuality of a dog in need of a shit in a field full of shitting dogs.
As you can imagine, I refused. And never bought another Prince CD again.
This was the point in my life when I recognised my utter and inexorable disdain for what can only be identified as FUN FASCISM.
Since then, I have experienced many other zealous devotees of this social philosophy. People who nurse a fundamentalist set of beliefs in regard to the whole concept of FUN. Narrow-minded bigots who refuse to tolerate anyone else’s doctrines or practices, labelling everything that doesn’t match their definition of FUN as BORING. In their slightly wide-eyed and socially-retarded opinion, people are either FUN or BORING depending on what they are willing to do.
Fucking Fun Fascists.
They store in their tiny-sized under-developed brain-blobs the Fun Fascist version of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book or Hitler’s Mein Kampf – a detailed and unequivocally inflexible series of statements on how we should ALL have fun. And when Fun Fascists encounter each other, they reinforce their own prejudices, because they tend to carry EXACTLY the same Fun Fascist Bible in their minds.
For example, they would have dictated that I put my hands in the air and said yeah AND danced in the aisle at that Prince gig and indeed at all events I attend that involve music. Should I attend an event in which the music is not the type you can dance to, then it is BORING and I am BORING for going.
The Fun Fascists have a preference for what they like to call EXTROVERT behaviour, because EXTROVERT means FUN and INTROVERT means BORING. If these people had any ambitions towards political power, then they would sweep away democracy and INFLICT fun on us through a combination of biased PROPAGANDA and systematic, organised FEAR. They would use the FUN-POLICE to arrest anyone “not joining in” and send them for re-education in special camps, where we’d be made to wear stupid hats and be torturously “Dance-boarded” (forced to keep dancing for 48 hours when really you just want a sit down or a sleep.)
Fun Fascism would stipulate monthly pilgrimages to theme parks, the compulsory car-jazzling of all private vehicles, the use of abbreviated forenames or even nicknames as the correct way for companies to formally address their customers, the abolition of the speed limit and the castration of anyone refusing to participate in extreme sports.
Fun Fascists, due to religious-like indoctrination, will tend to spew out verbatim the dictums of their philosophy:
“Cheer up!”
“Smile!”
“Come on, let your hair down!”
You can almost hear the same authoritative menace in their voice as you would have done from the SS, the Khmer Rouge or Mao’s Red Guard. But maybe these are the wrong analogies to make. These dictatorships were relatively short-lived. My fear is that the Fun Fascists will hold sway over our lives for as long as the Catholic Church did in Western Europe. Expect the burning of HERETIC INTROVERTS. Expect the formation of a ruthless FUN INQUISITION to put people on the rack and ask “What did you do last weekend?” Expect your children to be brainwashed into believing that they will go to Hell if they don’t spend their half their lives in hedonistic dicking around and the other half Facebooking about it.
OK, perhaps I am scaremongering a little. These people cannot take over, because by their very nature they are too inept to do so. There is a simple method of combating their irritatingly trite and gormless optimism and that is to answer their demands to have fun THEIR WAY with the same response I made to Prince back in 1990: FUCK OFF.
Thus will the menace of Fun Fascism be countered!
Wednesday, 19 October 2011
Star Wars: Another Bastardised Version
Stop reading now if (a) you hate Star Wars, (b) you’ve never seen Star Wars or (c) you’ve had a bellyful of Star Wars parody and satire these last 34 years.
The rest of you, strap on your Millennium Falcon seat beats and prepare to be taken into Hyper-farce. Both of you.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, but coincidentally one with humanoid life forms, the same political concepts as Earth and common use of the English language (my God those Victorian missionaries got everywhere didn’t they)...
(cue music)
Star Wars opens with these two robots being shot at by laser guns. Your first thought is that the technology is pretty bloody advanced for 1977, until you realise that the guns don’t shoot straight. C-3PO and R2-D2 walk through the cross-fire and don’t even get hit. C-3PO commences his bleating and belly-aching, a galling habit he maintains without respite for 6 films. Clearly he is homosexual but his circuitry refuses to acknowledge this (it recognises binary though) and consequently he is suffering from a crisis of sexual identity, which makes him socially awkward and generally uptight. R2-D2 just beeps. The original novel was written in the first person singular from R2’s perspective, which is why it didn’t sell very well.
Princess Leia is now seen downloading some tunes from her USB into R2-D2, before running away at the sight of C-3PO (like he’s actually scary) and then getting captured by the film’s ultimate bastard, Darth Vader.
Now here’s a complex character amongst all the 2-dimensional ones. So complex in fact that 5 actors have to play him over the two trilogies of films, including a creepy brat of a kid, Hayden Christensen (so wooden he uses Pledge as a deodorant), the Green Cross Code Man, the Lion King’s dad and finally some innocuously avuncular-looking Johnny Morriss type who’d make a great Worther’s Original advert star if it wasn’t for the horror-film scarring to his head.
The scene shifts to Tunisia, where the two robot droids have landed and are captured by some of the dirtiest children you’ve ever seen, even smellier-looking than a kid I went to school with who we called Flump. This parentless band of shabby juveniles is named after the film which George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had been planning to work on together previous to this, called Jaw-Wars. (Artistic differences caused a rift and they went their separate ways until teaming up later to write the script for a Han Solo spin-off sit-com.)
The droids are then sold to Luke Skywalker’s uncle. They live on a moisture farm, which is like a real farm but without trampled cow shit and a suspicion of incest. Water is a rare commodity in this part of Tunisia, although you wouldn’t think it from the amount Aunt Beru uses to boil her vegetables in the next scene.
Luke discovers Princess Leia’s music downloads inside R2-D2, who then runs off (as far as that is possible with wheels that go a top speed of 2 mph) to find his favourite English actor, Sir Lawrence Olivier. Instead, he has to make do with Alec Guinness who suggests that they all go and rescue this Princess because she sounds hot. She isn’t, but that’s not the point; Luke is pissed off living on a moisture farm in the arse end of beyond, as you would be, and thinks fuck it, why not?
They drive into town, play a trick on some dumb Stormtroopers and find a pub. Luke gets ID’d as he looks about 17 and acts even younger, so Alec Guinness take out one of those fluorescent strip-lighting bulbs and burns off some ugly bastard’s arm. He then persuades a mini-cab driver called Han Solo to take them to Alderaan, Princess Leia’s home planet. Obviously, he should have rung a proper cab firm, because there’s no guarantee that this Han Solo is even insured to drive a spaceship. Furthermore and rather disconcertingly, Han’s BFF is a growling bear (or a bare growler, one or the other) named Chewie, a bit like the sweets. Chewbacca (his full name) really challenges the audience’s ability to suspend its disbelief, because in reality an animal that hairy would either have a prominent pair of pink buttocks protruding from beneath its fur or it’d have dry, hardened clagnets of shit stuck to the back of its thighs.
This motley crew of misfits then fly out of Tunisia’s main airport towards what remains of Alderaan. The government had actually blown up the planet earlier in the film as an austerity measure and tortured Princess Leia with one of those old globe-shaped security cameras you used to get in Boots, only with needles sticking out of it.
On the flight, Alec Guinness converts the impressionable young Luke to the same religious cult of which he and Luke’s dad were members. He basically tells some lies to Luke about the father he never knew, because it’s Darth Vader and well, how do you tell a kid his Dad’s such a horrible cunt?
Anyway, they get sucked into the government’s huge sports complex, the Death Star, which was built for the Galactic Olympics and cost a bloody fortune, but at least its huge planet-destroying laser gun works. Once inside our band of heroes split up to look for Princess Leia, thinking that the first to find her gets to ask her out. C-3PO is not interested, for several reasons, but Luke is. Luckily he never ends up shagging her; although with that farming background he probably wouldn’t have flinched to discover later that she’s his sister.
After some running around and shooting lasers they manage to get her back to the spaceship, but Alec Guinness has wandered away to turn off the Death Star’s sucky device and finds himself confronted by Darth Vader. They both take out their fluorescent strip-lighting bulbs and have a sword fight. By the standards of any such contest, this would never have been worth the £15 SKY charged for Pay-per-view. Audley Harrison dances better than this. In the end, Darth Vader wins because Alec Guinness lets him, but clearly disappears down a trap door in the floor-tiles. In his place, wearing his brown hoody and holding his bulb is Debbie McGee. Darth Vader thinks to himself WTF?
The others escape and fly off to the rebel base. The rebels are essentially an anti-government organisation, a bit like UK Uncut, but with X-Wing fighters. They have a space battle with government troops in Thai-fighters, which are smaller and a little spicey. In the end, Luke blows up the Death Star and Darth Vader escapes vowing to build an even bigger one once they’ve raised enough taxes to do so.
The film ends with everyone getting a pat on the back, except Chewbacca, who has a pat on his arse. A dry, hardened Wookie pat.
The rest of you, strap on your Millennium Falcon seat beats and prepare to be taken into Hyper-farce. Both of you.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, but coincidentally one with humanoid life forms, the same political concepts as Earth and common use of the English language (my God those Victorian missionaries got everywhere didn’t they)...
(cue music)
Star Wars opens with these two robots being shot at by laser guns. Your first thought is that the technology is pretty bloody advanced for 1977, until you realise that the guns don’t shoot straight. C-3PO and R2-D2 walk through the cross-fire and don’t even get hit. C-3PO commences his bleating and belly-aching, a galling habit he maintains without respite for 6 films. Clearly he is homosexual but his circuitry refuses to acknowledge this (it recognises binary though) and consequently he is suffering from a crisis of sexual identity, which makes him socially awkward and generally uptight. R2-D2 just beeps. The original novel was written in the first person singular from R2’s perspective, which is why it didn’t sell very well.
Princess Leia is now seen downloading some tunes from her USB into R2-D2, before running away at the sight of C-3PO (like he’s actually scary) and then getting captured by the film’s ultimate bastard, Darth Vader.
Now here’s a complex character amongst all the 2-dimensional ones. So complex in fact that 5 actors have to play him over the two trilogies of films, including a creepy brat of a kid, Hayden Christensen (so wooden he uses Pledge as a deodorant), the Green Cross Code Man, the Lion King’s dad and finally some innocuously avuncular-looking Johnny Morriss type who’d make a great Worther’s Original advert star if it wasn’t for the horror-film scarring to his head.
The scene shifts to Tunisia, where the two robot droids have landed and are captured by some of the dirtiest children you’ve ever seen, even smellier-looking than a kid I went to school with who we called Flump. This parentless band of shabby juveniles is named after the film which George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had been planning to work on together previous to this, called Jaw-Wars. (Artistic differences caused a rift and they went their separate ways until teaming up later to write the script for a Han Solo spin-off sit-com.)
The droids are then sold to Luke Skywalker’s uncle. They live on a moisture farm, which is like a real farm but without trampled cow shit and a suspicion of incest. Water is a rare commodity in this part of Tunisia, although you wouldn’t think it from the amount Aunt Beru uses to boil her vegetables in the next scene.
Luke discovers Princess Leia’s music downloads inside R2-D2, who then runs off (as far as that is possible with wheels that go a top speed of 2 mph) to find his favourite English actor, Sir Lawrence Olivier. Instead, he has to make do with Alec Guinness who suggests that they all go and rescue this Princess because she sounds hot. She isn’t, but that’s not the point; Luke is pissed off living on a moisture farm in the arse end of beyond, as you would be, and thinks fuck it, why not?
They drive into town, play a trick on some dumb Stormtroopers and find a pub. Luke gets ID’d as he looks about 17 and acts even younger, so Alec Guinness take out one of those fluorescent strip-lighting bulbs and burns off some ugly bastard’s arm. He then persuades a mini-cab driver called Han Solo to take them to Alderaan, Princess Leia’s home planet. Obviously, he should have rung a proper cab firm, because there’s no guarantee that this Han Solo is even insured to drive a spaceship. Furthermore and rather disconcertingly, Han’s BFF is a growling bear (or a bare growler, one or the other) named Chewie, a bit like the sweets. Chewbacca (his full name) really challenges the audience’s ability to suspend its disbelief, because in reality an animal that hairy would either have a prominent pair of pink buttocks protruding from beneath its fur or it’d have dry, hardened clagnets of shit stuck to the back of its thighs.
This motley crew of misfits then fly out of Tunisia’s main airport towards what remains of Alderaan. The government had actually blown up the planet earlier in the film as an austerity measure and tortured Princess Leia with one of those old globe-shaped security cameras you used to get in Boots, only with needles sticking out of it.
On the flight, Alec Guinness converts the impressionable young Luke to the same religious cult of which he and Luke’s dad were members. He basically tells some lies to Luke about the father he never knew, because it’s Darth Vader and well, how do you tell a kid his Dad’s such a horrible cunt?
Anyway, they get sucked into the government’s huge sports complex, the Death Star, which was built for the Galactic Olympics and cost a bloody fortune, but at least its huge planet-destroying laser gun works. Once inside our band of heroes split up to look for Princess Leia, thinking that the first to find her gets to ask her out. C-3PO is not interested, for several reasons, but Luke is. Luckily he never ends up shagging her; although with that farming background he probably wouldn’t have flinched to discover later that she’s his sister.
After some running around and shooting lasers they manage to get her back to the spaceship, but Alec Guinness has wandered away to turn off the Death Star’s sucky device and finds himself confronted by Darth Vader. They both take out their fluorescent strip-lighting bulbs and have a sword fight. By the standards of any such contest, this would never have been worth the £15 SKY charged for Pay-per-view. Audley Harrison dances better than this. In the end, Darth Vader wins because Alec Guinness lets him, but clearly disappears down a trap door in the floor-tiles. In his place, wearing his brown hoody and holding his bulb is Debbie McGee. Darth Vader thinks to himself WTF?
The others escape and fly off to the rebel base. The rebels are essentially an anti-government organisation, a bit like UK Uncut, but with X-Wing fighters. They have a space battle with government troops in Thai-fighters, which are smaller and a little spicey. In the end, Luke blows up the Death Star and Darth Vader escapes vowing to build an even bigger one once they’ve raised enough taxes to do so.
The film ends with everyone getting a pat on the back, except Chewbacca, who has a pat on his arse. A dry, hardened Wookie pat.
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Bastards that Piss on your Bonfires
You might have noticed that like most people I vacillate between doggy-paddling in the quicksand of morose cynicism and shuffling my soul in bouts of pants-soaking delight. For all that I lace my glass of dislike with a vial of vicious self-righteous disgust and hostility, when I like something a lot, I LOVE it. And that means that anyone who spoils my beautiful and gleeful moments of adoration should have all of their human rights suspended just long enough for me to exact revenge with the sort of fury and rage that would make the gods of ancient Greece feel slightly uncomfortable to witness.
This is why I refuse to go to the cinema. I like to immerse myself in a film. Without distraction. But cinemas INVITE distraction. They market themselves at the Pavlov’s Dogs section of society, who brainlessly allow themselves to be conditioned into associating the watching of a film with the desire to eat and drink. It’s never lunch time or dinner time and yet the moron-neurons are ignited by the sight of hilariously over-priced and over-sized buckets of popcorn and carbonated kids’ pop in the foyer; so they roll up with their “Fleece me and Feed Me – I’m a Flid” faces on, purchase a wholesaler’s lorry-load of crap and set up snack-camp in the auditorium.
Ironically, the pre-film trailers and information announcements include a plea to turn off your mobile in case it disturbs the enjoyment of others. After all, you wouldn’t want to punctuate the crunching and slurping and chewing and general fidgety fucking about of the thoughtless cinema snack-fiends with the chiming of a text, would you?
Fortunately, I only love a few films and can usually wait many months before one that I want to see appears on Sky Box Office and can be viewed without the pernicious penetration of my personal space by some popcorn-hoovering prick sitting a straw’s length from me.
But with music, it’s a whole different matter. I don’t play it at home unless the family are out, because Mrs Bastard and Child 2 (female variety) are both likely to walk into the lounge and slice through my soul-swept trance of “at-oneness-with-the-universe” with a casual nuke-bomb of a question such as, “What’s THIS?” Which really means “What’s this shit?” At that very moment my universe collapses, I can listen to no more and I want to set fire to all my CDs in sulky protest at this cold stabbing of my spirit.
So, I listen to my CDs in the car. And even though the roads are populated by the same breed of self-absorbed selfish cunts as cinemas, my encounters with them might be equally unsettling but they are at least usually fleeting. Moreover, I tend to enjoy recompense through some petty method of counter-irritating the bastards of the road in a way that is not possible with the bastards of the cinema. So, I enjoy and LOVE listening to my music in the car; and by MY music I mean the CD I have chosen to play and NOT the radio. NEVER the radio. That’s like inviting the wankers in, that is.
The problem is that when you become completely caught up in the music of a particular band or artist and you go to see them in concert, you want... sorry, “I” want... to listen to them with the same undisturbed concentration as I do in the car. I admit, I AM being a little precious here. But my favourite artists are not the ones who belt out sing-a-long anthems in football stadia, nor are they the ones who invite you to SAY YEAH and WAVE YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR or even sing-a-long. (OK, singing along to some tunes is appropriate.) No, the gigs I end up at are in small or middle sized venues and usually have a smattering of quieter ballads that wrench at your heart with an agonizing beauty...
Unless some cunt is talking.
What is it with people who talk through quiet songs at gigs? GO TO THE FUCKING PUB AND TALK, YOU SOCIALLY UNAWARE RETARDS!
Now, I’m quite aware that I must be coming across ever so slightly misanthropic. I’m not. I like people. But I kind of want the bastards nowhere near me when I’m trying to enjoy myself. So, if anyone knows of a restaurant with 10 metre gaps between tables, a beach with a “first-on-only-on” rule, a pub with a “no wankers” sign outside or a tourist attraction with no tourists, then please tell me where it is.
And I’ll go along with some crisps and a beer and sit there shouting YEAH with my hands in the air.
This is why I refuse to go to the cinema. I like to immerse myself in a film. Without distraction. But cinemas INVITE distraction. They market themselves at the Pavlov’s Dogs section of society, who brainlessly allow themselves to be conditioned into associating the watching of a film with the desire to eat and drink. It’s never lunch time or dinner time and yet the moron-neurons are ignited by the sight of hilariously over-priced and over-sized buckets of popcorn and carbonated kids’ pop in the foyer; so they roll up with their “Fleece me and Feed Me – I’m a Flid” faces on, purchase a wholesaler’s lorry-load of crap and set up snack-camp in the auditorium.
Ironically, the pre-film trailers and information announcements include a plea to turn off your mobile in case it disturbs the enjoyment of others. After all, you wouldn’t want to punctuate the crunching and slurping and chewing and general fidgety fucking about of the thoughtless cinema snack-fiends with the chiming of a text, would you?
Fortunately, I only love a few films and can usually wait many months before one that I want to see appears on Sky Box Office and can be viewed without the pernicious penetration of my personal space by some popcorn-hoovering prick sitting a straw’s length from me.
But with music, it’s a whole different matter. I don’t play it at home unless the family are out, because Mrs Bastard and Child 2 (female variety) are both likely to walk into the lounge and slice through my soul-swept trance of “at-oneness-with-the-universe” with a casual nuke-bomb of a question such as, “What’s THIS?” Which really means “What’s this shit?” At that very moment my universe collapses, I can listen to no more and I want to set fire to all my CDs in sulky protest at this cold stabbing of my spirit.
So, I listen to my CDs in the car. And even though the roads are populated by the same breed of self-absorbed selfish cunts as cinemas, my encounters with them might be equally unsettling but they are at least usually fleeting. Moreover, I tend to enjoy recompense through some petty method of counter-irritating the bastards of the road in a way that is not possible with the bastards of the cinema. So, I enjoy and LOVE listening to my music in the car; and by MY music I mean the CD I have chosen to play and NOT the radio. NEVER the radio. That’s like inviting the wankers in, that is.
The problem is that when you become completely caught up in the music of a particular band or artist and you go to see them in concert, you want... sorry, “I” want... to listen to them with the same undisturbed concentration as I do in the car. I admit, I AM being a little precious here. But my favourite artists are not the ones who belt out sing-a-long anthems in football stadia, nor are they the ones who invite you to SAY YEAH and WAVE YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR or even sing-a-long. (OK, singing along to some tunes is appropriate.) No, the gigs I end up at are in small or middle sized venues and usually have a smattering of quieter ballads that wrench at your heart with an agonizing beauty...
Unless some cunt is talking.
What is it with people who talk through quiet songs at gigs? GO TO THE FUCKING PUB AND TALK, YOU SOCIALLY UNAWARE RETARDS!
Now, I’m quite aware that I must be coming across ever so slightly misanthropic. I’m not. I like people. But I kind of want the bastards nowhere near me when I’m trying to enjoy myself. So, if anyone knows of a restaurant with 10 metre gaps between tables, a beach with a “first-on-only-on” rule, a pub with a “no wankers” sign outside or a tourist attraction with no tourists, then please tell me where it is.
And I’ll go along with some crisps and a beer and sit there shouting YEAH with my hands in the air.
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
1970’s Working-class treats
It was that decade in which the generation that grew up never having it so good, sought some mild middle-class comforts for their shaggy-haired, flared-jeans-clad kids (like me) and in the process instilled a sense of low expectation in regard to the concept of luxury.
Tinned fruit salad for instance. The thrill of eating just one of the meagre number of cherries you’d find in a tin of fruit salad was beyond any experience I’ve had since from Tesco’s Finest range. See, I expect that to be good. But the sheer scarcity of cherries in any tin (relative to grapes) bestowed on that product a special character that you just cannot recreate in our disgustingly opulent supermarket aisles these days.
The gradual integration of “dessert” into our routine tea-time meals was a defining feature of the period. Fuck Jamie Mockney-Twat Dick-Face Oliver, I was cooking while he was still scooping the shit out of his own nappy and eating it. I handled an electric hand-whisk like Hurricane Higgins handled a snooker cue, and I could conjure up ANY Angel Delight from the whole range of four flavours. If Dad won on the horses that week, Mum might even let me open the fruit salad and use the sole cherry to decorate this dessert. (If he lost, we’d make do with a few Galaxy buttons.)
Some people have likened Primula cheese spread in a tube to chilled smegma. But when they started adding bits of ham to this product, then JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH that was it for my boring old crisp sandwiches at school, I was having cheese spread AND ham from ONE tube in my Mother’s Pride every day for the next five years.
As for drinks, Christmas always provided an occasion to break out the treats. Aged about 7 or 8, I’d knock back a whole BabySham (which came in wonderful bottle-shaped glass thimbles) and a glass of Advocaat and lemonade. A Snowball may have looked like whipped-up phlegm and jizz, but it was the TASTE OF CHRISTMAS. Not even Cresta’s range of pop from the milkman could beat that.
But you didn’t need to wait for Christmas to enjoy a Lucozade, you just had to wait until you were ill. In those days, it wasn’t a recreational drink. It was medicinal. And the bottles were mysteriously housed within a film of frustratingly sticky orange plastic wrapping, which so pissed you off that you just had to finish the whole bottle as your mum was having none of that nonsense of opening and closing it and getting increasingly sticky at each attempt.
These were the treats of the kitchen, compensating for the fact that it was only on your caravan holiday that you got to eat out in a restaurant and even then it was always highlighted by your dad that the gammon and chips was the most reasonably priced at £1.50 a plate, hint hint.
Mum and dad had their own treats, their own moments of consumerist infidelity. True, they needed an ashtray and a large one at that (or else they’d have to stand up during The Duchess of Duke Street to empty it) but did they really have to buy an ashtray STAND to put alongside the sofa? And as much as it got good use, a cigarette lighter that was the size and weight of an adult’s bowling ball was perhaps rather decadent and impractical. But then we lived in a house with a waste disposal unit. We had all the fucking mod cons.
And our car had a tape player. Not that my parents owned more than about three tapes and each of these would have been chewed up in it, because every tape player chewed tapes at some point. Luckily the seatbelt laws allowed one of the kids to climb through from the back seat and deal with this problem. My first tape was the Baron Knights. A comedy treat that was.
And on that note, I’d like to say to any of you Billy Two Shits Big Bollocks who have just gone out and bought some new iphone 4S or whatever it is you’re being fisted for, you’ve been spoilt to the point of cuntdom and you’ll never see the beauty or feel the joy in a Kit Kat that they’ve forgotten to put the wafer in. I pity you.
Tinned fruit salad for instance. The thrill of eating just one of the meagre number of cherries you’d find in a tin of fruit salad was beyond any experience I’ve had since from Tesco’s Finest range. See, I expect that to be good. But the sheer scarcity of cherries in any tin (relative to grapes) bestowed on that product a special character that you just cannot recreate in our disgustingly opulent supermarket aisles these days.
The gradual integration of “dessert” into our routine tea-time meals was a defining feature of the period. Fuck Jamie Mockney-Twat Dick-Face Oliver, I was cooking while he was still scooping the shit out of his own nappy and eating it. I handled an electric hand-whisk like Hurricane Higgins handled a snooker cue, and I could conjure up ANY Angel Delight from the whole range of four flavours. If Dad won on the horses that week, Mum might even let me open the fruit salad and use the sole cherry to decorate this dessert. (If he lost, we’d make do with a few Galaxy buttons.)
Some people have likened Primula cheese spread in a tube to chilled smegma. But when they started adding bits of ham to this product, then JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH that was it for my boring old crisp sandwiches at school, I was having cheese spread AND ham from ONE tube in my Mother’s Pride every day for the next five years.
As for drinks, Christmas always provided an occasion to break out the treats. Aged about 7 or 8, I’d knock back a whole BabySham (which came in wonderful bottle-shaped glass thimbles) and a glass of Advocaat and lemonade. A Snowball may have looked like whipped-up phlegm and jizz, but it was the TASTE OF CHRISTMAS. Not even Cresta’s range of pop from the milkman could beat that.
But you didn’t need to wait for Christmas to enjoy a Lucozade, you just had to wait until you were ill. In those days, it wasn’t a recreational drink. It was medicinal. And the bottles were mysteriously housed within a film of frustratingly sticky orange plastic wrapping, which so pissed you off that you just had to finish the whole bottle as your mum was having none of that nonsense of opening and closing it and getting increasingly sticky at each attempt.
These were the treats of the kitchen, compensating for the fact that it was only on your caravan holiday that you got to eat out in a restaurant and even then it was always highlighted by your dad that the gammon and chips was the most reasonably priced at £1.50 a plate, hint hint.
Mum and dad had their own treats, their own moments of consumerist infidelity. True, they needed an ashtray and a large one at that (or else they’d have to stand up during The Duchess of Duke Street to empty it) but did they really have to buy an ashtray STAND to put alongside the sofa? And as much as it got good use, a cigarette lighter that was the size and weight of an adult’s bowling ball was perhaps rather decadent and impractical. But then we lived in a house with a waste disposal unit. We had all the fucking mod cons.
And our car had a tape player. Not that my parents owned more than about three tapes and each of these would have been chewed up in it, because every tape player chewed tapes at some point. Luckily the seatbelt laws allowed one of the kids to climb through from the back seat and deal with this problem. My first tape was the Baron Knights. A comedy treat that was.
And on that note, I’d like to say to any of you Billy Two Shits Big Bollocks who have just gone out and bought some new iphone 4S or whatever it is you’re being fisted for, you’ve been spoilt to the point of cuntdom and you’ll never see the beauty or feel the joy in a Kit Kat that they’ve forgotten to put the wafer in. I pity you.
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