Tuesday is Rubbish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bastard Training Conferences

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

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

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

She then unleashes the COMFORT BREAK label.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pets. Bastards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Leviathan of Bastardness that is Football

Why am I a football supporter?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

·       Jump into a Pool Fully Clothed.  WHY?

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

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

·       Publish a book.  Because anyone can?

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

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

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

·       Take out some life insurance

·       Lock the back door

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

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

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

Gig Bastards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bastards Popping Round

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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