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

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

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

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

Unit One: Identifying Different Forms of Vegetable.

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

Unit Two: Dish-washer stacking

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

Unit Three: DIY

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

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

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

Friday Night’s Blue Plastic Bag Bastard

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Poo Looked Like Morph

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Un-Bastard Olympics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bastard Olympics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Strange Bastardry of Hair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sesame Street and its Bastard Political Agenda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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