Snow and Bastards with Posh Sledges

My fellow citizens of St Albans have embraced the snow with their customary resilience and fascist liberalism.  Sledges from BMW’s 4-by-4 range are being tugged along the streets by many a fleece-adorned, middle-aged parent.  They might be stealing trays from McDonald’s in nearby Borehamwood, but here we approach our snow transport with class and affluence.

While their actual “St Albans tractors” were parked in drives and garages over the weekend - ready to glide effortlessly through the snow on Monday morning at normal speeds of 40 mph in 30 mph zones, scathingly dismissive of fucking over-cautious plebs in smaller vehicles like myself - the pavements and parks became a play-zone of plush plastic people-carriers.  Sledges designed to carry 2.4 children.  Parents, the same thoughtless cunts who won’t park between 2 lines outside supermarkets and won’t park at all outside schools, expecting childless pedestrians to indulge their territorial aspirations to own the pavement.  Sorry, my children are sledging here, please walk around us.

One exception, but superior in arrogance, was a tosser local to me who preferred to pull his child’s sledge along the road.  I am guessing that he is from a pocket of residence near to where I live, who for the rest of the year makes a point of reclaiming the road outside his house to play cricket with his kids.  If he lived in a cul-de-sac, then fair enough.  But it’s a through-road.  Cars arrive every few minutes, slow down and wait for this family of fascist liberals to make way.  My message to you, sir, is fuck off and live in a village.  This is a town.  In fact, it’s a small city.  Roads are for cars, not for jumper-wearing fucktards with delusions of rustic freedoms.

A Bastard History of Crap Christmas Presents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bastard Catalogues of Useless Shit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unit One: Identifying Different Forms of Vegetable.

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

Unit Two: Dish-washer stacking

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

Unit Three: DIY

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

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

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

Friday Night’s Blue Plastic Bag Bastard

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Poo Looked Like Morph

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Un-Bastard Olympics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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