The 12 Myths of Christmas

Let’s get a few things straight.  In fact, let’s get about 12 things straight, 12 Christmas myths that frolic around in the social ether like aimless snowflakes of disingenuousness.

Firstly, Christmas NOT being about Jesus anymore is not a BAD thing, and the reason why it’s not a BAD thing is because – and I’ll try to say this without jumping onto the fashionably militant atheist bandwagon of furiously trite pseudo-profundities – Jesus is a load of tosh.  Sorry if you believe in it, but without a shred of logical evidence or even a cigarette-paper-thin slice of POSSIBILITY that there is anything more to Jesus than a delusional Derren Brown who happened to be born into a society of incredible ignorance and superstition, I cannot begin to tolerate such pretensions.  Ditch the angels and stick a TARDIS on top of your Christmas tree (which I have, actually, this year), because Christmas Day is Doctor Who Day.  Fuck you if you think it’s a kids’ programme.  That’s just an unwarranted playground cuss, lazily flopped about by those with a gripe against too many other people enjoying something that they themselves happen to not enjoy.

Secondly, the time you spend ruminating over which Christmas card design is the most appropriate for all the people who will end up receiving it from you and your bumper box of identical cards is hugely disproportional to even the combined time that all of those recipients will spend looking at it.  It’ll be envelope open to card open to “oh it’s from those fuckers we never see” to mantelpiece in less than two seconds.  I couldn’t tell you what even ONE of the Christmas cards in my house has on it as a design (unless it happens to be particularly odd, like having a dog chewing a present open or something bizarrely un-Christmas like that) and it could well be that they’ve all got pictures of turds on, I wouldn’t know.

Thirdly, and still on the theme of cards, you are not a GOOD person because you choose to buy charity cards.  Have you ever read how much of the price is donated to charity?  Usually, peanuts.  So, you’re fooled into thinking that you’ve been morally erect and a paragon of altruistic righteousness and therefore you’ve done your bit and you don’t need to actually GIVE to charity or DO something for anyone who might need charity, because you’ve just allowed 30p of the retail price of a £5 box of cards to go to the NSPCC.

Fourthly, to batter down the inflated smugness of those who might have agreed with points 2 and 3 above and thus decided to Facebook everyone with the “we’re not sending cards this year, we’re making a donation to charity” get-out clause, can I just say one thing?  You lazy cunts.  Why can’t you give to charity AND send some bloody cards?  Oh, is it because you think it’s a waste of money and planetary resources sending cards, so you save on the latter and redirect the former to a worthier cause?  Well done you!  You’ve spread a worthy message and converted those of us living in the dark ages of consumerism and waste, so that now I too will save on at least one card, one envelope and one stamp, because I can guiltlessly cross you off my fucking Christmas card list.

The fifth myth of Christmas that I wish to burn to coal like the parsnip that fell down the back of the oven is yet another card-related snot-drop of fatuousness, and that’s the empty sentiment of the phrase “we must meet up in the New Year!”  Let’s be honest, this actually means, “I do like you, clearly enough to send you a card, but not enough to be arsed to leave my house and travel to an agreeable rendezvous location in order to converse with you, I didn’t last year and I am not going to next year, but if some force of nature flung us together, without any effort on either of our parts, for a short time, then it wouldn’t be unpleasant.”  And we put them off another year and then one year one of you will be dead and the other will muse on how you “should’ve met up.”

The sixth myth of Christmas is this:  Christmas songs are NOT annoying.  Stop being so bloody miserable!  They’re better than adverts and radio jingles and when they stay stuck in your head for days on end they give you a warm feeling, and not that warm piss feeling you had when you wet the bed as a kid, which then turns to horror as it cools and the realisation hits you, no, that’s what NOVELTY pop songs do to you.  Christmas songs are cosy familiar echoes of a past stripped of all its bitterness and misery.  I hated Wham when I was 13 (OBVIOUSLY) but I love Last Christmas.  I squirm with prudish discomfort at Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s video for Relax, but The Power of Love makes me weep.  And when I hear Walking in the Air I block out the memories of 1980s casual homophobia and the application of the Aled Jones insult to any boy at school who hadn’t quite met an accepted level of manliness, and I wallow in a snow-tinted nostalgia of Sunday evening tea in front of the telly, with the Woolworth Christmas tree lights flickering and the taste of Advocaat and lemonade and cigarette smoke in the air.

Finally, the seventh myth of Christmas, is that there aren’t 12 myths and furthermore, 12 of anything is too much.  Unless it’s those pig-in-blankets things, you know, the thin sausages wrapped in bacon that taste so good alongside turkey?  Jesus, I love those!

Merry Christmas, you bastards.

THIS.IS.THE.BASTARD.NEWS

“NELSON MANDELA IS… (only-just-perceptible pause for dramatic effect) …DEAD!”

The ITV News presenter was rolling around in the enormity of the headline like a coke-fuelled toddler in a ball pit.  He spat the line with Shakespearean tragic aplomb, as if we HADN’T been expecting this news for several years; but, more annoyingly, as if the news wasn’t in itself important enough to elicit emotion without such a crass whiff of sensationalism.

What’s wrong with, “Nelson Mandela has died”?  It is factual, objective and allows the listener to choose their own emotion in response.  I like “has died.”  We should use “has died” more often.  I wouldn’t advocate swinging so far away from “is dead” to some kind of twee euphemism like “has passed away” which carries all the nonsensical ballast of the fucking after-life as to suggest that we’d need Derek Acorah reading that particular news item.

And then we had SKY News, equalling ITV in its fondness for either sugar-coating or shit-coating each news item, coaxing us into staying tuned for “MANDELA – THE FUNERAL.”  There was even a trailer to this film.  It clearly looked like it would be an epic.  So good, in fact, that SKY executives were probably commissioning a creative team to brainstorm ideas for “MANDELA – THE FUNERAL 2.”

So, why is it that I watch the news with an expectation of being informed and those silly cunts who work in telly have decided that I should be entertained?  Because that’s what it is – entertainment.  That’s how it’s conceived, presented and edited – like a fucking variety show.  Perhaps because it’s all 24 hours now.

My favourite most galling feature of any particular such “News Show” is the sharing of viewers’ tweets and texts, as if another viewer would actually give a shit.  Do I want to know what Susan from Slough says about Mandela’s death, or do I want a sound-bite from someone who might have actually known him and is therefore ten trillion times more relevant than soppy Susan, who must suffer from some kind of social ineptitude to have even contemplated tweeting her comments to these telly folk.  (Oh look, they read out my tweet on telly, I’m famous!)

Groan.

The Terrible Beauty of Bastard Routine (Part Two)

This is going to be one of those blog posts that I write and make public with some degree of trepidation, anticipating a silent response confined to the minds of its readers which will most likely include feelings of pity and disdain; because this is the confession of an uptight and irritable human automaton as to how he spends a typical weekend.  I know what I am, a creature of habit, riled by the insignificant flaws in life’s rich tapestry and spurning all the clichéd measures of what our society deems to be necessary factors in LIVING LIFE TO THE FULL.  I aim my arrows of ambition at a cheap Argos dartboard of CONTENTMENT and demonstrate no interest in reaching for the sky or the stars as Douglas Bader and Steps might have encouraged.

Friday evening I return from work, moistened by an hour’s moderately-paced squash with my friend Tim, consequently confident that my weight-loss app will now credit me enough calories to eat and drink whatever the fuck I like that night.  Routinely, this means wine.  If the “squash with Tim” confession hasn’t already painted a picture of a middle-class bastard, then the suburban domesticity that has led to me unshackling myself from the beer-drinking conditioning of my youth must surely give you a clue.  Secondly – but only every few weeks, because we’re not fucking rolling in it, here in St Albans – we order a Chinese (same order every time) and sit in front of the telly gorging and boozing ourselves into a stupor  (I usually nod off during Graham Norton, despite the garish orange of the set burning into my retinas and the shrill laughter piercing my ear-drums like a maniacal Banshee).  This is quality family time.  Our boy, being 17, is usually out behaving better than this, but myself, Mrs B and our daughter will battle for control of the channels, with me coming out the loser and having to record whatever music shows are on BBC4 in favour of whatever tripe-for-eyes the females of the household wish to relax to.

Saturday morning arrives at about 9 am with lethargy, a dry mouth and a mild heaviness of the head.  Eventually, I will employ myself with the task of doing the housework, just like every modern man who is robbed of his need to hunt and fight and make things and who cannot ACTUALLY relax in a messy house, even though the perpetrators of nearly all of that mess can and would.  Yes, I am sorry to say, just for a couple of hours on these mornings, I fight back the loathing I have for the habits of those I love most, the untidy buggers.

The kitchen is cleared and swept and made in some respect more hygienic than a backstreet abattoir for plague-ridden Medieval dogs, before I move onto tidying and dusting and polishing the downstairs.  I studiously avoid getting any more polish on the new flat-screen HD telly, because within a week of buying the thing (having held out for years waiting for the old cathode ray tube antique to expire), I noticed a cloudy patch covering half the screen, reminiscent of a large piss-stain on a white bed-sheet, a point of ironic misadventure that galls me on a daily basis now.

The sound of dried sweetcorn kernels and other sizeable acrid debris being sucked into the hoover gives me an enormous sense of satisfaction.  I carry my machine of tidy-harmony up and down all three storeys, drumming up a second sweat of physical exertion in 24 hours and then reward myself with a late morning bath.

I measure out the rest of the weekend in laundry loads, the first of which will have hopefully completed by the end of my bath – I say “hopefully” because I own seven pairs of pants.  If it hasn’t completed, then I’ll have to wear swimming trunks or even some old underwear with a perished gusset for the next few hours.  To ensure that I am not rushed to hospital so embarrassingly attired, I avoid traffic for the rest of Saturday; but this is wise anyway, as Saturday afternoons tend to bring out the cunt in most drivers.

I bask in the clean tidiness of our home for the afternoon, devoting myself to work (I’m a teacher and a workaholic), while the football results trickle in and my family engage in more exciting pursuits, like shopping and socialising.  Some weeks we’ll have friends up for the evening, in which case I’ll be truer to my roots and switch to bitter as my booze of choice.  I’ll inflict my vinyls on the visitors for a few hours and congratulate myself on a level of sociable normality that the rest of my misanthropic existence belies.  Most Saturday evenings, however, it’s crap telly, wine and an unhealthy amount of distraction from the social media on my mobile.

Sundays tend to be more laundry loads and more school work and an impending sense of grief that the weekend is dying a slow death, occasionally punctuated by an Arsenal game on telly or the less common venture out of the house for some worthy reason.  If I have washed up the pans from a roast dinner and pulled the last pile of washing out of the dryer before 10 pm, then I don’t wallow in a desolate mood of abject irritation before bed and I reflect upon a weekend of productive contentment and unambitious joy.

They really ain’t even half-clever bastards

I’ve always nursed a desire to go on Mastermind.  Now that I’ve lived long enough to know the answers to slightly more than an embarrassingly miniscule total of general knowledge questions, it occurs to me that I might avoid coming last; if, that is, I can exercise the self-control required not to flap about when an answer is on the tip of my tongue and then to mutter FUCK’S SAKE when I’m told what it is, like everybody naturally would, because clearly you’re prepped by the Mastermind wardens not to do that as it makes for rather awkwardly shit telly.

The erroneous assumption that a demonstration of knowledge implies intelligence is one of our society’s sad maladies.   People who win Mastermind are NOT actually clever.  I’d be fucked off if I spent months researching from a wide range of sources in an effort to learn everything about a chosen subject as deeply infused with facts as The Life and Works of Bob Dylan, only to be beaten by some idle cunt who manages a score of 20 with no passes on Fawlty Towers, simply because he’s watched the same 6 hours of television again and again.  Or The Harry Potter Novels.  Oh well done, you’ve read 7 seven books and remembered them.  You lazy fucker.  Oh, and you work as a librarian?  One of those busy jobs that means you have fuck-all to do now that they have automatic machines in libraries?  No wonder you know everything about Emily Bronte (short life, one novel, you fucking cheat!)

An equally flawed belief held by many is that a high IQ score makes you a genius.  If you’ve ever sat an IQ test (one set by MENSA as opposed to one of those 10-question internet jobbies that you do and then have to sign up to something they’re selling to get your result), then you’ll realise that having a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re intelligent, and certainly far from being a fucking genius, but quite simply good at doing a certain kind of test.  And if you are good at doing that kind of test, you are invited to join MENSA, a club full of people who BELIEVE that they are the cleverest in the land and desire the opportunity to boast about being in MENSA and joining MENSA’s dating agency so that they can meet other people that are good at tests to have sex with and generally talk to about doing tests and quizzes and being ever so fucking clever.  The pure fact that someone would choose to join MENSA is the surest indicator of non-intelligence and therefore all members should be consequently excluded from MENSA for not being clever enough to have joined in the first place.

What I have NEVER nursed a desire to go on is University Challenge.  As a teenager, considering a university career, the impossibility of answering anything on that show caused me great anxiety and destroyed my confidence.  As a middle-aged adult, the impossibility of answering more than a few questions on that show causes me great confusion as to how anyone aged 18-21 knows that much about science, maths and culture.  What did their parents do to them?  Lock them in a cellar with the Encyclopaedia Britannica and electrodes tied to their toes, with no access to any television channel except BBC2 and a regime of 18-hour a day home-tutoring that forms an educational equivalent of Victorian child labour in its brutality and intensity?  Freaks.

At the other end of the spectrum is that now ubiquitous dumbing down of quiz questions linked to prime-time TV shows trying to make money by getting viewers to text in their answers to patronisingly brainless challenges like, “Which country do English people come from?  (a)  England, (b)  Brazil, (c) Tesco, (d) I’m a moron.”  Why not just ask people to text in, charge them a quid and say that someone will be randomly selected to win the prize?  Do they really believe that there are people out there who’d answer (a) and then consider their chance of success greatly enhanced, because not everyone would have known that?

I wanted to finish this blog post with a rant about the BBC quiz, EGG HEADS, but I have probably exhausted your patience by now and besides a loud beeping sound tells me that my 2 minutes are up; but I’ve started so I’ll finish:  Eggheads - What utter cunts.

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.