The Strange Bastardry of Hair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sesame Street and its Bastard Political Agenda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shiny Happy Bastards

“HELLOOO”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fascist.

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

My Dad’s a Marvellous Bastard

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

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

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

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

You can see we’re related, right?

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

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

Like I said, we’re related.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bastard Bodily Smells

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Public Transport Bastards

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

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

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

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

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

Unbridled and Unreasonable Bastard Prejudice against Neighbours

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

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

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

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

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

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

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