Train Bastards

Add these things together and see what you get:

• A working day averaging 11.5 hours in an inner London secondary school
• Not having eaten since before noon
• Getting on a train home at 7.30pm
• Nursing an obsessive hatred for discourteous people
• Self-diagnosed misophonia aka ‘select sound sensitivity syndrome’ or ‘sound rage’
• A firm belief in the current existence of an inexorable social malaise 
• Being an irritable and moody bastard

What you get is a journey home from work each day in which I punctuate attempts at escapism (reading a novel about brutal murders in the creepily remote Icelandic countryside) with shooting homicidal side-eyes glances at fellow commuters guilty of the following hanging offences:

1. Watching videos or playing games on their phones without headphones.  The videos tend to be short and quite possibly amusing to watch, something someone has posted on Facebook no doubt, and therefore, in the minds of those with retarded social sensibilities, unlikely to cause offence if played loud for half a minute in a confined public space. Wrong, you bollock.  A sudden shattering of (usually a temporary) silence by the distorted cackle of laughter that soundtracks most of these videos only serves to make me wish for a superpower in which I am able to telekinetically cause objects of my choosing to force themselves twelve inches up their owner’s anus. The same applies to mindless phone games. I’m happy to support other people’s rights to their own escapism, but the electronic sound of bubble-popping coming from a game designed for monocellular cerebral organisms like the  mindless twats addicted to them does indeed tempt me to support organisations advocating forced euthanasia of the stupid.

2. Loudly having a work conversation on the phone.  In a self-important attempt to demonstrate that they have a busy job of making big decisions and telling people what to do, it seems that some train bastards are either actively craving a public audience or inconsiderately oblivious to the fact that they have one.  You never hear anyone talking loudly on the phone to someone at work in a compliant way, agreeing to follow an instruction or asking what they think. This behaviour is always a narcissistic showboating of whatever petty authority they happen to be endowed with in their dull and pointless, paid occupation.  Again, that wished-for superpower would save us all from this aural irritation.

3. Placing bags on the seat next to them, particularly when they sit on the outside.  This is the strategy of the selfish to discourage less confident fellow commuters from asking if they ‘may sit there’.  No matter that a train is busy and undoubtedly someone will want to sit there.  They expect to be asked, because they have already laid claim to that extra seat by plonking their bag there in the manner of a 19th century British imperialist, territorially erecting a flag and daring the indigenous inhabitants of the land to challenge their audacious act of expansionism.  My first desire is that if they’re going to act in a territorial manner then so will I, by pissing on the spare seat.  But you know what they say about who you’d give the steam to, so I usually settle for just telling the cunt to move.

4. Eating.  There is rarely an excuse for eating on a train. There is never an excuse for chewing with your mouth open. No one enjoys the descant of saliva-soaked slurping or that malignant combination of crisp-packet rustling and crisp-crunching consumption. To cope with this I scroll through Facebook hoping that someone has posted a video of pigs eating cold sick so that I can play it loud.

5.  Man spread.  I shouldn’t be too intolerant here. If your brain has made its way from your skull to your bollocks then I guess it must be uncomfortable to have your legs at anything less than a 180 degree angle.

My train pulls into St Albans at 8pm.  My wife usually collects me from the station. Apparently I’m a real joy to have in the car at this time.

My Top 10 Bastard Vomits

It’s good to share, especially bodily fluids and substances, and some time ago I shared with you, Dear Reader, the top 10 poo-related tales from my life.  Such an out-pouring of nostalgic self-indulgent depravity garnered more plaudits than most other blog posts of mine; and so it is, that I now develop that theme and spew forth from my past my top 10 vomit-related incidents.

 

10. The 70s was a great time for car and coach travel.  There was no air-con, the suspension in most vehicles was as flexible as a concrete slab being dragged down a stone staircase and a relaxed attitude to car safety meant sitting wherever there was room.  We holidayed a lot in a caravan that we towed to Cornwall, my family and my Uncle, Aunt and cousins, crammed into a Volvo estate, dragging the portable holiday home along the A303 at 60 mph for about 8 eight hours, all the kids in the boot.  I’d last about two hours before feeling ill, regardless of the travel sweets, at which point I’d clamber from boot to back seat and sit on my Mum’s lap, head out of the window.  Despite the G-force and the consequent flapping of my cheeks so that my face appeared to crawl backwards behind my ears, I wouldn’t feel any better, and at some point I’d vomit.  At that speed, the sick would spread itself all over the back window of the estate car.  Completely.  We’d arrive at the caravan site and my Mum would retrieve a spatula intended for the Bar-B-Q and sort out the by-now-crusty layer of discarded breakfast.

 

9.  I won’t be taking the credit for every vomit in this list.  This one goes to my friend Pat, aka “CJ” which stood for Cambodian Joe, a rather cruel nickname bestowed on him at secondary school on account of his lithe frame and the famine ravaging Indo-China at the time.  Ceej (short for CJ) liked a Guinness and on no less than two occasions demonstrated his stylish “puke-while-you-walk” move.  Strolling between pubs he would turn his head to one side and hurl over his shoulder without even breaking stride.  With a cool wipe of his mouth he’d assure us that he was OK and the next round was on him.

 

8. Running the risk of repeating myself, in case you missed it in the poo-related list, the puke my little brother did in response to the turd I left in the bath makes the top ten here.  I’ll let you investigate the details from that earlier blog post, but suffice it to say, there was no water in the bath, I was experimenting and my Mum bloody killed me afterwards.

 

7. My first ever trip abroad was a day-trip to Boulogne when I was about 13.  I vomited before we hit the coast and cringed to see the resultant hot gut-juice find the gully on the coach that carried it five rows of seats towards the back.  My partner for the trip was allowed to move away, the teacher scolded me for not forewarning him and securing the service of the available bucket and I spent the day in France lurking round the alleyways of the town, alone, enduring the after-shock mini-pukes and generally feeling like a complete fucking leper.

 

6. At a more mature age, nearing 40, and as Head of the Humanities faculty at the school in which I worked, I felt it to be correct and appropriate to set a good example to those younger colleagues for whom an end of term night out required the multiple consumption of shots.  I proved that I could take those shots like the best of them.  It wasn’t the Sambuca that caused me to ask my wife to stop the car three times on the way home so I could puke, it was my car-sickness.  I get car-sick, that’s all.  Nothing to do with Sambuca.

 

5. As a student, I went inter-railing with three mates.  Our first night was spent on a ferry crossing from Harwich to the Hook of Holland.  Once the bar closed, the need for alcohol (peer-pressure, of course – none of us really “wanted” anymore) lured us to check out the duty free shop where they sold a liquor called “Underburg”.  By the morning, given the motion of the sea and the delicate constitution of yours truly, I had added the prefix “Ch” to that drink.

 

4. My most recent sick was last week.  I had my normal breakfast of four Weetabix (with chocolate chips in it), took out my phone, belched and deposited a mouthful on my phone-case.  A bit out of the blue, that.

 

3. Names and details spared, I was once (it was one of very few times) kissing a girl, when I had to turn to vomit.  Drunkenness is a wonderful tool for getting someone to suspend their taste and dignity long enough to kiss you, but that suspension didn’t extend to continue a kiss after I’d done some interior decorating of my mouth with burning hot beer-fuelled stomach bile.  And I’d assumed she wasn’t that fussy.

 

2. I worked in a pub in Reading, while at University, called The Turk’s Head.  On my 20^th birthday, which started in a different pub at noon and finished in the Turk’s, my friends decided to kindly present me with a gift of a “Turk’s Head” t-shirt.  I put it straight on and it remained in its pristine, washing-powder-advert state of purest white for about half-an-hour, before I decided to lie down in a puddle of piss right underneath the urinals and get sick all over myself.  Come the morning, I felt that no washing powder advert would persuade me to do anything other than dispose of the thing.

 

1. School trips at primary school tended to be to either Devon or Somerset.  Either way, a fucking long trek on a 1970s coach.  Something marginally less comfortable than being held hostage by terrorists.  On one particular day trip from Combe Martin on the north Devon coast to Exeter in the South, I happened to prepare for the hour-long journey back by purchasing a can of limeade and a mint-choc-chip Cornetto.  The offspring of this unwise combination, coming as it did at the moment when I stepped off the coach outside our hotel, was as green as summer grass and as toxic as nuclear waste.  There was no doubting that my pre-journey snack had proved a poor choice.

 

So there we are, the contents of ten stomach-churning tales.  We have all met Hughie and Ralph for one reason or another. They are our friends and don’t forget, it is only for that moment in which it happens that getting sick isn’t one of life’s most laudable and levelling pleasures.

Consternation over a dog poo outside St Albans train station

At first, the fear dictated that there had been a death.  A crowd gathered on the pavement immediately outside the sliding-door entrance to St Albans City train station.  Struck by horror, their contorted faces dipped as one to scrutinise the ground between their circle of feet.  From the ticket barrier I caught sight of the commotion and surmised that the object of common viewing, of shared shock, must be a body, a fallen person, a casualty or perhaps even a corpse, freshly robbed of life.

 

It was in fact a dog poo.

 

In most other cities and certainly in any decade before the 1990s, this would have prompted no fascination at all.  But this was today, in the middle-class commuter city that boasts the highest house prices of any London satellite settlement; and this was a gloriously bright beige exhibit, resting crudely in an erratic formation of clumps, each one almost the size of a horse’s, starkly drawing attention to itself, strewn across that entrance as if to make a point, as if an over-sized dog had a political agenda it wanted to share with every St Albanian intent on railway travel today.  In short, it was a fucking huge pile of conspicuous shit left right in everybody’s way.

 

“You’d think one of the station staff would clean it up,” complained one indignant woman in a tone of voice that affected a degree of disassociation from faecal matter that is naturally impossible for a human.

 

“Don’t tread in it!” another woman warned her children, tugging at their arms in an effort to circumvent the offending land-mine of turd.  In the same way that our children are spared the fresh air, the freedom and the dangers that the offspring of the 60s and 70s faced and relished daily, so are they protected from ever standing in dog shit these days.  I have two children and notwithstanding the fact that one of them trod in our own dog’s plop in the garden last week, I’m pretty sure that they’ve both traversed childhood without the inconvenience of having to scrape stubborn excrement from between the lines of rubber that form the grip on a trainer sole.

 

They say that trauma burns images into the brain and that these remain for much time afterwards.  I personally cannot cleanse my memory of that scene today, but it has only been a few hours.  I grieve for those poor children, whose sense of horror was fuelled by the adults around them who were unable to cope with the situation.  In these moments, children lose that sense of security, that naïve faith in grown-ups that had led them to assume that we can protect them from anything and deal with every difficulty in life.  I daresay today was an immutable rite of passage for one or two of them.

 

I fled the scene.  I am not one to rubber-neck on motorways and there was no aid I could lend to this tragedy.  My hope is that the emergency services will remove all evidence of this canine arse-spillage before I use the station tomorrow, but not before some small spark of light can illuminate the grim darkness of today, ideally courtesy of some poor sod stepping right in it; because to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, “Life does not cease being funny when people die or a dog shits on the pavement any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”

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.