Extremist (Anti-Casualist) Bastards

Smokers, as opposed to people who smoke, contain amongst their number an extremist group who only respect other smokers who are addicted to nicotine and do at least 20 a day; and they consider anyone who casually smokes - on occasion and through choice - as inferior apostates who deserve to burn (or smolder) in Hell.  These people are Anti-Casualist Bastards.

There is an attitude rife in our society that mirrors the violently prejudiced intolerance of religious extremists, but is applied to some of the most mundane lifestyle choices that people make.  These extremists refuse to entertain the idea that something for which they nurse a deep passion or addiction can be enjoyed by non-zealots.  Smoking has always been one.  I was a smoker for a time as a young man, because I enjoyed it (and I believed I looked fucking awesomely cool), but I was the recipient of generously deployed disdain from proper smoker friends.  The fact that I smelt less bad than they did, squandered less money on fags and could never compete with the sheer amount of shit in their lungs and capillaries made me a pariah and isolated me from their closed-shop collective.  They “owned” smoking and I was a casual thief.

Football is the same.  Until I recently fell out of love with the game, I moved in the midst of arrogant fans who cursed – with a joviality totally concealed by animosity – anyone who claimed to be a supporter, but didn’t go to every possible match.  Should anyone care even less about a team, should they dare to “quite support Arsenal” by keeping an eye on most results and merely preferring them to other teams, then these extremist bastards would seek to arm these casual fans with bells, campaign to have them deported to a leper colony and refuse them the right to even mention the sacred name of their team.

There are charity-shop users who scowl at the rest of us for buying anything new, when there is so much barely soiled clothing available  cheaply (albeit not really much cheaper than the sweat-shop-produced cheap-as-cheap-labour clothing that lines the aisles of the major supermarkets).

There are vegetarians who would tear with their teeth at the flesh of casual vegetarians.

There are commuters who can detect casual train-users by their bewildered looks, inability to dart to the correct area of a platform where the train doors line up and by their propensity for politeness.  This weaker species is in danger of being stared at in an aggressive manner by extremist commuters, just for turning up and stealing the precious little amounts of oxygen available within a carriage.

If we’re going to speculate on the psychological compunctions behind such anti-casualism, then perhaps it is part of our natural territorial instincts; that desire that no one should piss on your piss; in which case the only solution for us casualists is simply that.  If you don’t commute but have to travel in rush hour, just piss yourself a space on the platform; and if you fancy a casual fag outside a pub one day, piss a ring around yourself to ward off the smokers.

Bastard Dog

We’ve got a bloody dog now.

 

I’ve never had a dog before, never wanted one; and I’d effectively stonewalled all attempts by my family to talk me into getting one.  Until this summer.  Now we’ve got one, a rescue dog from the local RSPCA and they all love him to bits.

 

But I don’t.

 

It’s been a total culture shock allowing an animal of significant size to inhabit my living space and it is this learning experience that I would like to share with you now, so that you can either laugh with me or at me, depending on where you stand on the Dog-Love Spectrum.  Personally, I’m somewhere in between “indifferent” and “irritated”.

 

His name is Harry and this is one of three words that he definitely understands, the others being “sit” (which he is capable of complying with if he isn’t distracted by another dog or a leaf moving in the wind) and “paw” (which prompts his only trick as such, that of lifting a paw.)  My family believe that he also understands all of our names, “dinner”, “walk” and “do you want to go outside for poos and wees”.  I’m not convinced.  Nothing in his expression or reaction to these words suggests to me that his brain capacity is coping with that amount of data.  What I do know is that he certainly does not understand the words “Bad dog”, “Piss off” or “Don’t lick the fucking carpet!”

 

Nursing an expression of limited cerebral processing ability, Harry’s main hobby is standing or lying in doorways when people are moving around.  That is, once he has recovered from the excitement of human movement.  I’ve stopped talking to him as I walk around, as this tends to induce an erroneous assumption that (a) I like him and (b) I’m going to play with him.  I don’t want to let him down, so I even avoid eye-contact. No, I tell a lie – it’s not about letting him down, It’s just that I can’t stand the stupid and needy look on his face as he starts to breathe heavily and blocks my passage with his fat knuckle head, his tail beating against the walls and doors in unrequited adoration. (As a nice aside, he actually injured his tail within a week of living with us, because he was so unused to wagging it so much.  We laughed about how we’d “broke the dog by making him too happy”, but then I discovered the £100 excess we had to pay the vet and the tale lost some of its charm.)

 

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I completely neglect him, though.  Now and again he gets my attention in an affectionate way for a minute or two; and I do walk him.  Picking up dog poo is obviously new to me (well, not totally new, as I used to pick it up as a kid – on the end of a stick, of course – and throw it at friends) but I haven’t found the experience as distasteful as I’d feared.  In cold weather, there’s something comforting about handling a freshly delivered hot one.  In cold weather, the ones he leaves in the garden solidify and subsequently become a joy to pick up.  The only times that this job becomes truly distasteful is when he does a soft one in long grass.  That takes a bit of effort.  So, no, overall I don’t mind picking up his poo, but I think I might need to start doing so using a plastic bag in future, like everyone else does.

 

Here’s a dog-characteristic that I’ll never get used to:  I have a deep-seated personal problem with the noise that people make while eating.  I’m sure I’ve moaned before about noisy bastards in the cinema, slurping their 2-litre cokes and chewing open-mouthed through their bin-bag sized packets of crisps.  Those sounds are like aural water-boarding to me.  So you can imagine how I react to the dog.  For my own sanity I stay clear of the kitchen when he’s eating in there, but then he’ll come into the lounge and spend five minutes licking his jowls, while I tear at the wallpaper until my fingernails bleed and make howling noises in a desperate attempt to escape – something you’d expect the dog to do, but never does.

 

On first getting him, someone quoted one of those meaningless and absurd nuggets of statistical nonsense which purported to claim that owning a dog makes people “70%” happier”.  Well, Harry has had that effect on the rest of the family – or approximately at least, given that I don’t have a fucking “Happiness thermometer” to measure it.  But as far as I’m concerned, the bloody mutt has given me just one thing of significance:  a reason to write a blog again after all this time.

White Van Bastard

Over twenty years of working as a secondary school teacher in the company of more women than men was proving to be a worryingly emasculating experience.  So concerned was I about how such toxic levels of exposure to female thinking had conditioned me to almost UNDERSTAND and often empathise with women, that I decided to chuck in the job and set about pursuing a career in the most manly of occupations – white van driving.

First things first, I had to get my white van licence and buy myself my very own second hand van to practise being manly in.

I had to sit an online theory test first.  I failed several times.  On the initial attempt, my efforts were swiftly nipped in the bud as soon as I entered my forename.  I was informed that “Michael” was an unsuitable name for a white van driver as it did not sound like a bark.  So, I tried “Mike.”  No joy.  I clicked the link to “clues” and chose the moniker “Lee” from a very short list of names that could be barked out loud over long distances, the others being Paul, Dave and Pete. 

“Do you wish to take the highway code test to check your ability to drive safely, before moving on to the section on white vans?”  Apparently the answer is not yes.  I eventually negotiated this trick question.

“What do you do if a bird gets into your van?”

Opening the window to let it out was not the right answer.  You don’t want to know what was.

Where I came almost completely unstuck was in the politics section.  Here I was judged to have some “dangerously tolerant views about immigrants.”  But eventually, I passed and booked the driving test.

In the meantime, I purchased a van, got it through an MOT and checked Google Maps for Unit 23 in the Industrial Park where the examiner, Paul, would assess my white van driving.

I turned up one morning at 6.30 am and as I stepped out to greet Paul, he was already shaking his head.  Scrutinizing my van with a critical eye and a slow shaking of the head, he immediately identified three faults that made my vehicle un-roadworthy.  Number one, it was too clean; number two, both brake-lights were working; and number three, there was no sign of any rubbish, copy of the Daily Star or McDonald’s cartons scrunched down the dashboard.

I re-booked my next test for 6 months later, by which point the bottom half of the van was covered in grime, and mould was growing on the drinks cartons down the dashboard.  On the way to see Paul, I stopped to buy a paper from the local shop, employing a learning point from the theory test by parking at an angle across a disabled space.  I didn’t quite pull off the fuckit-swagger as I got out, but I considered myself a passably genuine white van man.  I even had CUNT written in the filth on the back doors (originally, I’d gone for CLEAN ME and then the IF YOU THINK THIS IS DIRTY YOU SHOULD MEET MY WIFE standard bit of finger graffiti, but both of these were rubbed out and replaced by a passer-by with the more concise and appropriate noun vulgarising the female genitalia.)

When I turned up Paul looked at my CUNT and ticked a box on his examiner’s sheet.  The van passed muster.  He told me to start it up and then offered me a Starbucks tea.  When I declined, pointing out that not only was I driving, but I’d already had breakfast, he frowned incredulously and scratched an emphatic cross into a different box on his sheet.

The test lasted an hour.  I failed on a number of counts.  Paul listed my faults for me:

·       Failing to drive above 40 mph in a 30 mph zone

·       Over-use of indicators when turning

·       Pulling over to the kerb when stopping to pick up Dave

·       Under-use of the horn in situations demanding that some soppy arsehole gets out of your lane

·       Failure to use empty lane to by-pass traffic just because it was the wrong lane to be in

·       Failing to maintain a stopping distance of under 1 metre from the car in front

·       Failing to answer my mobile whilst driving at 60 mph even though it was obvious that the examiner was trying to ring me from the other side of Dave

·       Driving past fit birds without due care and attention

So complete was my failure that Paul’s only recommendation was that I sell my van and take up nursing.  Seemingly, the prospect of doing a proper day’s work was an aspiration beyond my capacity.

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.