Why haven’t I had my mid-life crisis yet? I hit 40 a year ago this week.
When I say “hit” 40, I mean that 40 kind of gushed over me and seeped down the back of my shirt like a tank of piss-and-spunk-based gunge on “I’m a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here.” The difference being that no one can get you out of here when “here” is that time of life called Middle age.
So, I’ve had a year in which to conform to the male middle-age-crisis stereotype by having my ear pierced, buying a sports car and finding myself a 19-year-old girlfriend.
I’ve done none of these.
Earrings suit a minority of blokes. If you don’t have the right overall look, the right hair and general dress sense, then there’s no halfway house with pierced ears. You either look good or you look like a dick. They’re as uncompromising as waistcoats. In fact, more so. I can’t think of any man who doesn’t look like a dick in a waistcoat unless he’s holding either a dinner tray or a snooker cue.
Sports cars? Sports cars are for WANKERS. Macho wankers. END OF FUCKING STORY. We all know it and the wankers who drive sports cars know it. They just won’t admit it. Which is another reason why they’re wankers.
And as for a 19-year-old girlfriend, I’m yet to meet a 19-year-old who doesn’t look like a kid from my chronological vantage point. Regardless of the legality of it, I’m not cursed with a desire to indulge in exploitative relationships; and although this wouldn’t quite be in the same drawer as paedophilia, it is in the same piece of furniture.
(For the record, the morality issue is the main barrier, of course. Adultery, misguided vanity and gratuitous machismo are all on the same playlist on every wanker’s ipod.)
All this isn’t to say that I haven’t experienced SOME changes on turning 40. I’m not trying to recapture my youth in the ways described above, because other than having the odd 19 year old girlfriend when I was that age (and by “odd” I mean an odd number, like maybe 3 if I’m being generous), I never wanted to own a flash car, drive fast or adorn myself in ear accessories.
But I AM trying to recapture my youth in other ways. Sad ways.
For instance, last week I bought a tin of spaghetti bolognaise and ate it on toast. A tin. Spaghetti Bolognaise in a fucking TIN. I hadn’t had such a meal since I was a teenager. I’m now on the look out for a tin of chicken in white sauce – equally delicious on toast. (When you’re in your teens.) Of course, anyone who knows about this will attribute it to a mid-life crisis.
Lots of things I do make me feel young again. Watching Dr Who. Wearing a Harrington. Having a stink bomb in my office at work and an intention to deploy it.
And lots of things I do make me feel old. Like getting out of bed. And breathing. And moving around. You know, all that difficult stuff.
Perhaps, as with the retirement age, the kick-off time for middle age has been put back by the government, and in fact I am still too young to embark on a mid-life crisis. That leaves you in a frustrating limbo period then really. A pre-male-menopausal twilight zone. A bit like half-past three on a Sunday afternoon.
Hmmm. I’ve lost the will to carry on now…
Thursday, 26 May 2011
Saturday, 14 May 2011
The Complete (Bastardised) History of Popular Music
Pop music was invented the day that Vera Lynn went electric in 1944. (She’d been using gas before that.) Judas!
But the seeds of popular music were sown hundreds of years earlier, thanks to the actions of one particular bastard, John Hawkins, who started the Atlantic Slave Trade triangle in 1562. Hawkins knew full well that three centuries of slavery would help African-Americans to invent the Blues. His was a rather controversial social experiment and would be frowned upon today by most of the UK’s main political parties. However, had he left Africans to their own devices and they’d still managed to influence what Europeans listened to today, then all pop music would sound like Paul Simon’s fucking “Gracelands.”
Blues music was all well and good if you were poor and black and generally pissed off, but it needed to evolve after the Second World War because of the invention of the teenager. Teenagers were white, unburdened by the experience of racial discrimination and had money to spend. They needed a less pissed-off version of Blues - and thus Rock and Roll was born. Rock and Roll singers were generally men in their twenties who sang songs about 16 year old girls but married 14 year old ones. No one minded this in the 1950’s, because you didn't have paedophilia in the good old days.
Some white people were just as poor as black people, though, and they adapted Blues to folk music, which had been sung mostly by men with beards and ugly people for centuries. Blues also spawned Jazz, because if you tried to dance to Blues then there was no way you’d end up shagging anyone at the end of the night.
And you also had gospel from generations before, because another intended outcome of John Hawkins’ social experiment was to make all Black Americans believe in Jesus. Gospel, Blues and Jazz thus led to Soul music, which allowed Black people to look cool while geeky white teenagers simulated masturbation by playing air guitars along to the angry child of Rock and Roll, who was just called “Rock” (probably after Rock Hudson, it is believed.)
The 1960’s were dominated by The Beatles, who were bigger than Jesus according to a claim made by John Lennon. Although this caused a lot of controversy among the people of the southern United States (well known for their good reason and tolerance), the Beatles WERE in fact bigger than Jesus, who was probably only 5’2” (typical height for your Roman-era Palestinian living on a diet of just fish and bread.)
The Beatles revolutionised pop music and are generally considered to be the best band ever. This is proven by the fact that they got away with putting Yellow Submarine on Revolver and Octopus’s Garden on Abbey Road; and no one minded. That’s like being on a date with the person of your dreams and not caring much if they shit themselves early in the evening and don’t change their underwear.
Meanwhile, Rock music started to split off into a number of strands much like a leper exfoliating with a cheese grater. Hard Rock and Heavy Metal were like Dungeons and Dragons with sex. Glam rock gave transvestites a bit of breathing space until social attitudes made it unfashionable to laugh at them. Prog Rock was where all the wrong notes were played but in the right order. And Punk Rock was all the wrong notes played in the wrong order, plus phlegm. New Wave was required to sort out that mess, by putting ex-punks in suits and insisting on some degree of talent.
Pop Music then became increasingly sanitised in the 1980’s. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan passed laws in the UK and USA banning the use of acoustic instrumentation and ushered in an age of mechanised pop music where machines did the work of humans. There were huge protests in the northern parts of England to these reforms. Supporters of Indie Rock clashed with police in bloody scenes that made the Miners’ strike look like a domestic tiff between sitcom legends of the time, Terry and June.
Eventually, Indie Rock won, managed to overcome the trauma of watching Grunge shoot itself in the foot (or to be more precise, the head) and set up the last golden period of music in the UK. This was known as Brit Pop, because for a few years all American bands were shit, so we had to make do with Blur and Oasis.
Meanwhile, record companies noticed that the section of the population who’d always eschewed song writing, musicianship, and talent for something more superficial and glossy were becoming even less discerning in their demands than in the days of The Monkees or The Bay City Rollers. And so Boy Bands were untied and rescued from the deeper recesses of Louis Walsh’s closet and marketed mercilessly at an audience that would ten years later financially prop up the TV talent-less show industry and it’s bastard offspring.
But the seeds of popular music were sown hundreds of years earlier, thanks to the actions of one particular bastard, John Hawkins, who started the Atlantic Slave Trade triangle in 1562. Hawkins knew full well that three centuries of slavery would help African-Americans to invent the Blues. His was a rather controversial social experiment and would be frowned upon today by most of the UK’s main political parties. However, had he left Africans to their own devices and they’d still managed to influence what Europeans listened to today, then all pop music would sound like Paul Simon’s fucking “Gracelands.”
Blues music was all well and good if you were poor and black and generally pissed off, but it needed to evolve after the Second World War because of the invention of the teenager. Teenagers were white, unburdened by the experience of racial discrimination and had money to spend. They needed a less pissed-off version of Blues - and thus Rock and Roll was born. Rock and Roll singers were generally men in their twenties who sang songs about 16 year old girls but married 14 year old ones. No one minded this in the 1950’s, because you didn't have paedophilia in the good old days.
Some white people were just as poor as black people, though, and they adapted Blues to folk music, which had been sung mostly by men with beards and ugly people for centuries. Blues also spawned Jazz, because if you tried to dance to Blues then there was no way you’d end up shagging anyone at the end of the night.
And you also had gospel from generations before, because another intended outcome of John Hawkins’ social experiment was to make all Black Americans believe in Jesus. Gospel, Blues and Jazz thus led to Soul music, which allowed Black people to look cool while geeky white teenagers simulated masturbation by playing air guitars along to the angry child of Rock and Roll, who was just called “Rock” (probably after Rock Hudson, it is believed.)
The 1960’s were dominated by The Beatles, who were bigger than Jesus according to a claim made by John Lennon. Although this caused a lot of controversy among the people of the southern United States (well known for their good reason and tolerance), the Beatles WERE in fact bigger than Jesus, who was probably only 5’2” (typical height for your Roman-era Palestinian living on a diet of just fish and bread.)
The Beatles revolutionised pop music and are generally considered to be the best band ever. This is proven by the fact that they got away with putting Yellow Submarine on Revolver and Octopus’s Garden on Abbey Road; and no one minded. That’s like being on a date with the person of your dreams and not caring much if they shit themselves early in the evening and don’t change their underwear.
Meanwhile, Rock music started to split off into a number of strands much like a leper exfoliating with a cheese grater. Hard Rock and Heavy Metal were like Dungeons and Dragons with sex. Glam rock gave transvestites a bit of breathing space until social attitudes made it unfashionable to laugh at them. Prog Rock was where all the wrong notes were played but in the right order. And Punk Rock was all the wrong notes played in the wrong order, plus phlegm. New Wave was required to sort out that mess, by putting ex-punks in suits and insisting on some degree of talent.
Pop Music then became increasingly sanitised in the 1980’s. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan passed laws in the UK and USA banning the use of acoustic instrumentation and ushered in an age of mechanised pop music where machines did the work of humans. There were huge protests in the northern parts of England to these reforms. Supporters of Indie Rock clashed with police in bloody scenes that made the Miners’ strike look like a domestic tiff between sitcom legends of the time, Terry and June.
Eventually, Indie Rock won, managed to overcome the trauma of watching Grunge shoot itself in the foot (or to be more precise, the head) and set up the last golden period of music in the UK. This was known as Brit Pop, because for a few years all American bands were shit, so we had to make do with Blur and Oasis.
Meanwhile, record companies noticed that the section of the population who’d always eschewed song writing, musicianship, and talent for something more superficial and glossy were becoming even less discerning in their demands than in the days of The Monkees or The Bay City Rollers. And so Boy Bands were untied and rescued from the deeper recesses of Louis Walsh’s closet and marketed mercilessly at an audience that would ten years later financially prop up the TV talent-less show industry and it’s bastard offspring.
Friday, 29 April 2011
I felt very unbastard-like during the Royal Wedding
In the run-up to the Royal Wedding today I was subject to a wave of indifference that was more tidal than royal. But I’d also been mildly irritated to hear or read so much lazily clichéd criticism of the event. So, with no intention of doing much else this morning, I sat and watched the wedding, tweeted some inoffensive comments throughout (incorporated within this post) and found myself “enjoying” it.
Sometimes, it’s too easy to be cynical. I don’t mind so-called Republicans calling for the abolition of the monarchy (although, I’m sure a President would be equally useful/useless, costly and subject to hostility.) But I had to respond when some sanctimonious (and self-described “conservative”) twats on Twitter used the opportunity to say how nice it was that people could gather in London peacefully, unlike the TUC march and the UK-Uncut protesters. Ignorance is the chicken feed of Self-righteousness, someone once said (me, I reckon.)
Anyway, the wedding. I came downstairs after a nice lie-in to be immediately confronted by the nation’s favourite couple. Or so they think. The Beckhams. They had no one to talk to (thankfully for everyone else) and apparently Posh is pregnant again. Is that right? I couldn’t see. And if she’d swallowed a frozen pea, then even that would’ve shown.
Strange how people turned up at Westminster Abbey so early, hours before they needed to. Was it “unreserved seating”? Fucking Ticketmaster are wankers, aren’t they? I was hoping that the Archbishop of Canterbury would open the service by paraphrasing John Lennon: “Those of you in the cheap seats rattle your jewellery and those in the expensive seats get your servants to do it for you.” Now, he was an untidy-looking specimen, wasn’t he, Dr Rowan Williams. Fucking hair all over the place, like a 1970’s porno full of GILFs. Mrs Bastard was indignant about his unkemptness and said to me, “You’d think he’d have done some grooming beforehand.”
He’s the Archbishop of Canterbury. I’m sure he had.
I thought maybe Rowan Atkinson, not Williams, was going to marry the royal couple when I saw him on screen. As it was, he just stood in the congregation, fiddled awkwardly with a sweet in his tweed jacket pocket and sang “Hallelujah” in his Mr Bean voice.
Apart from these celebs, all the recent Prime Ministers who weren’t Labour were invited. There was some controversy about Samantha Cameron not wearing a hat, but there’s no need when David is such a fucking big helmet. As usual, he boasted about how he’d been outside talking to the people, as if he deserves a medal for soiling himself from such close contact with the proles. It made sense to see him and Professor Snape with short hair (George Osborne) in attendance, when the commentator pointed out that the wedding had a Nietzsche theme. Then I realised that she’d said nature. But given that the Middletons were staying in the Goering Hotel, maybe I heard right first time. Furthermore, the chosen wedding date of April 29th is the same as Hitler’s marriage to Eva Braun. That only lasted one day of course. I’m sure Katie Middleton’s marriage will be longer, while Katie Price’s tend to be shorter.
Things got interesting as the royals started heading to church. Harry resisted the obvious urge to do a moonie out of the car window and neither he nor William noticed they’d gone on a circuitous route, typical of a London cab. Mrs Middleton only just stopped herself from using the opportunity to pop inside the Abbey gift shop as she was dropped off right outside it. Camilla wisely kept her window wound up this time. And the rest of the royals booked themselves some mini-buses and all piled in so as to avoid the confused looks of the crowd who wouldn’t have known who half of them were if they’d seen them individually. I think we need to bring back Spitting Image.
Wills and Harry went into the Abbey and immediately suffered a hat-hair moment, but at least next to the Archbishop this didn’t really matter. Talking of untidy, did you see that the Queen just dropped her blanket onto the floor of the car when she got out? Messy cow. I won’t be too hard on her though, as she and the Middletons all contributed a sizeable amount of their own money towards the wedding. I think it’s only right that parents stick a couple of hundred quid behind the bar.
And then Kate turned up. Sadly some people would have missed seeing her dress, because judging by the screams I’d say that they were being crushed to death in the crowds outside. Apparently, the dress was a Burton one, which has made me think I should get my suits from there from now on.
She looked fantastic. I went upstairs to the toilet at this point.
I actually went for a poo, because it was now the boring religious bit and I’d been holding it in. When I came back, the service was nearly over I thought, because Kate and Wills seemed to be reading a couple of menus. I supposed they were looking at what was going to be on the buffet later that day, but they were in fact A3 sized orders of service. There were a couple of random nuns sat right next to them, “Church Hymn-Nazis” who check that you’re singing rather than miming. (Must have been Nietzsche before; I knew it.)
Then came the slow journey back to Buckingham Palace. I’m glad that Kate didn’t have a Paula Radcliffe moment. However, the horses left a tonne of plop along The Mall. I thought it was a clever decision to then let the crowds onto the road once the procession had finished. That way it saved picking up all that poo. I’ll be checking Ebay tomorrow to see if anyone’s selling any royal wedding souvenirs scraped off of their shoes.
Sometimes, it’s too easy to be cynical. I don’t mind so-called Republicans calling for the abolition of the monarchy (although, I’m sure a President would be equally useful/useless, costly and subject to hostility.) But I had to respond when some sanctimonious (and self-described “conservative”) twats on Twitter used the opportunity to say how nice it was that people could gather in London peacefully, unlike the TUC march and the UK-Uncut protesters. Ignorance is the chicken feed of Self-righteousness, someone once said (me, I reckon.)
Anyway, the wedding. I came downstairs after a nice lie-in to be immediately confronted by the nation’s favourite couple. Or so they think. The Beckhams. They had no one to talk to (thankfully for everyone else) and apparently Posh is pregnant again. Is that right? I couldn’t see. And if she’d swallowed a frozen pea, then even that would’ve shown.
Strange how people turned up at Westminster Abbey so early, hours before they needed to. Was it “unreserved seating”? Fucking Ticketmaster are wankers, aren’t they? I was hoping that the Archbishop of Canterbury would open the service by paraphrasing John Lennon: “Those of you in the cheap seats rattle your jewellery and those in the expensive seats get your servants to do it for you.” Now, he was an untidy-looking specimen, wasn’t he, Dr Rowan Williams. Fucking hair all over the place, like a 1970’s porno full of GILFs. Mrs Bastard was indignant about his unkemptness and said to me, “You’d think he’d have done some grooming beforehand.”
He’s the Archbishop of Canterbury. I’m sure he had.
I thought maybe Rowan Atkinson, not Williams, was going to marry the royal couple when I saw him on screen. As it was, he just stood in the congregation, fiddled awkwardly with a sweet in his tweed jacket pocket and sang “Hallelujah” in his Mr Bean voice.
Apart from these celebs, all the recent Prime Ministers who weren’t Labour were invited. There was some controversy about Samantha Cameron not wearing a hat, but there’s no need when David is such a fucking big helmet. As usual, he boasted about how he’d been outside talking to the people, as if he deserves a medal for soiling himself from such close contact with the proles. It made sense to see him and Professor Snape with short hair (George Osborne) in attendance, when the commentator pointed out that the wedding had a Nietzsche theme. Then I realised that she’d said nature. But given that the Middletons were staying in the Goering Hotel, maybe I heard right first time. Furthermore, the chosen wedding date of April 29th is the same as Hitler’s marriage to Eva Braun. That only lasted one day of course. I’m sure Katie Middleton’s marriage will be longer, while Katie Price’s tend to be shorter.
Things got interesting as the royals started heading to church. Harry resisted the obvious urge to do a moonie out of the car window and neither he nor William noticed they’d gone on a circuitous route, typical of a London cab. Mrs Middleton only just stopped herself from using the opportunity to pop inside the Abbey gift shop as she was dropped off right outside it. Camilla wisely kept her window wound up this time. And the rest of the royals booked themselves some mini-buses and all piled in so as to avoid the confused looks of the crowd who wouldn’t have known who half of them were if they’d seen them individually. I think we need to bring back Spitting Image.
Wills and Harry went into the Abbey and immediately suffered a hat-hair moment, but at least next to the Archbishop this didn’t really matter. Talking of untidy, did you see that the Queen just dropped her blanket onto the floor of the car when she got out? Messy cow. I won’t be too hard on her though, as she and the Middletons all contributed a sizeable amount of their own money towards the wedding. I think it’s only right that parents stick a couple of hundred quid behind the bar.
And then Kate turned up. Sadly some people would have missed seeing her dress, because judging by the screams I’d say that they were being crushed to death in the crowds outside. Apparently, the dress was a Burton one, which has made me think I should get my suits from there from now on.
She looked fantastic. I went upstairs to the toilet at this point.
I actually went for a poo, because it was now the boring religious bit and I’d been holding it in. When I came back, the service was nearly over I thought, because Kate and Wills seemed to be reading a couple of menus. I supposed they were looking at what was going to be on the buffet later that day, but they were in fact A3 sized orders of service. There were a couple of random nuns sat right next to them, “Church Hymn-Nazis” who check that you’re singing rather than miming. (Must have been Nietzsche before; I knew it.)
Then came the slow journey back to Buckingham Palace. I’m glad that Kate didn’t have a Paula Radcliffe moment. However, the horses left a tonne of plop along The Mall. I thought it was a clever decision to then let the crowds onto the road once the procession had finished. That way it saved picking up all that poo. I’ll be checking Ebay tomorrow to see if anyone’s selling any royal wedding souvenirs scraped off of their shoes.
Friday, 15 April 2011
Supermarket Bastards
If you really want to know where the bastards are, then obviously head for your local English Defence League committee meeting, City bankers’ wine-tasting brunch or night-club frequented by Z-list celebs who would sell a kidney to get on page 10 of Heat magazine. That’s if you want a concentration of society’s arse-waste. For sheer numbers, though, I recommend a supermarket. Not Waitrose or Morrisons’s, because you’ll end up with a polarisation of bastards. For a healthy, comprehensive range of common garden shitheads, spend a Saturday afternoon at Tesco or Sainsbury’s.
For some reason, when I go to a supermarket, I always end up parked at a 25 degree angle to the car next to me, which almost impossibly manages to ensure that 3 of its 4 over-sized tyres are touching a white line. But who’s to say that this car isn’t in fact straight and the rest of the car park is crooked? It’s relative, isn’t it? In the same way, disability is a matter for interpretation. Who am I to argue with someone who has been refused a disabled badge, because “being a selfish cunt” doesn’t come under the disability act? I don’t argue when these people park in a disabled space. Not unless they catch me pulling their windscreen wipers outwards or flobbing at their side window on days when I am blessed with a build-up of superfluous phlegm.
I eagerly await the day when trolleys are fitted with parking sensors. Such a device, completely unnecessary for anyone other than those drivers who are retards by choice, would bring harmony to the supermarket. As it is, a shopper’s invisible blinkers slip into place automatically the moment that person’s hands grip a trolley and the sort of belligerency you’d encounter on the roads of south-east England is thus transferred to the supermarket aisles.
The barriers you walk between on the way in, which most people think are there to detect stolen items, actually emit high-frequency sonar waves designed to fuck up your spatial awareness. Handicapped by this assault on your brain and encumbered by your invisible blinkers and general piss-off attitude, you the shopper are now a helpless slave to bastardness for the next 45 minutes.
When you’re not looking to take a layer of skin off someone’s ankles with your trolley, you are parking it at a right-angle to the shelves, blocking the entire aisle while you wander back to fruit and veg for something you’ve forgotten. With typical English self-righteousness, someone will tut loudly and give your trolley a slight push. The brave might even drop something small and expensive into it. That’s as far as I’d go, seeing as there are no windscreen wipers and a grolly in this situation would be a little beyond the pale.
When these bastards are not leaving a trolley in your way, they manage to plant their bodies in such a position. If I leave more than an arm’s length between myself and the shelf full of products that I am surveying then I expect someone to move into that gap and completely deprive me of both my view and ability to pick up what I want. The only place in the supermarket that this doesn’t happen is in front of the Pot Noodles, because anyone buying these tends to do so at speed. Personally, I like to browse and give myself time to decide between the two flavours that only moderately taste like the inside of a rubbish truck.
I worked part-time in one of those now obsolete small branches of Tesco in Palmers Green for a year when I was younger. The store manager conformed lock, stock and barrel to the archetypal nasal-voiced, petty autocrat you’d expect to find wielding small amounts of power in retail. He told us to call him Mr J, because he was Polish and he didn’t think we’d cope with anything more complicated. His full name was Janus and I suspect that the J stood for Justin. He’d wander round the 5 aisles telling us in his oily voice to “face up tinned meat, yeah.” A thoroughbred bastard. I hope he has syphilis now.
My days treading the aisles, facing up tinned meat and other products, were days of missed opportunities. There are so many things you’d hope to be asked by customers, but never were:
Customer: Have I passed the pasta yet?
Supermarket assistant: I don’t know; when did you eat it?
Customer: Can you direct me to mince?
Supermarket assistant: Certainly. Walk this way, ducky.
I think the policy they now have of walking you to where you want to go was fine in 5-aisle supermarkets like the one in Palmers Green, but now when you ask the whereabouts of frozen chips and some slow fucker escorts you 30 aisles to the east wing of the supermarket, you want to grab them by their tasteful brown and orange nylon lapels and shout in their face, “Just-fuck-ing-point!”
In the old days, of course, supermarkets weren’t monopolising the entire range of retail products. You certainly wouldn’t dream of doing your Christmas shopping in Palmers Green Tesco; not when you had “Boots” across the road for the obligatory boxed sets of Old Spice and lavender bath products. Nowadays, the concept of “all under one roof” means “we sell a limited range of cheap, lowest common denominator products so you don’t need to bother going elsewhere.”
Or am I being cynical? Perhaps, in fact, Tesco is aiding the cultural and literary education of society with its wide selection of Danielle Steel novels, Mills and Boon and witty coffee table compendiums. Fucking hell, I hate those coffee table books. Presents bought by the unimaginative for the undiscerning. Should anyone ever buy me one of those twee and corny coffee table books, I am likely to marinade it in anthrax, reduce it to a fine pulp using a Molineux blender and feed it directly into that person’s stomach using an endoscopy tube that has been left overnight on the floor of a Piccadilly public lavatory.
You have to hand it to them in regard to clothes, though. When my generation was growing up, the idea of wearing supermarket clothes was as much of a social anathema as having sticky plaster on your NHS specs, riding a bike with stabilisers after you’ve reached 14 or not finding Jim Davison’s brand of casual racism and misogyny hilarious. It was an inspired move for Asda to brand their fashion as being by “George” and for Tesco to use “Florence and Fred.” Who would have thought that applying the name of 1970’s kids’ TV characters would create such immediate kudos? Maybe the inspiration came from the fact that the clothes are all made by children earning the same amount of pocket money per week that I was given in 1976.
Good old Tesco, supporting the global economy! And hopefully, one day selling everything everyone ever needs. I was hoping that the move into car insurance would lead to the provision of car parts, because the manufacturing companies pretty much fist us mercilessly with their prices. I’d gladly wander along to aisle 453 for Ford Parts in my local supermarket if it meant paying less, although I might balk at the idea of “Tesco Value” brake pads and discs – guaranteed to bring your car to a halt on most occasions.
To paraphrase Mr J. Anus, we have to “face up” to the fact that Tesco are indeed taking over. In Hertfordshire, they are the second biggest employer after the NHS. Given the government cuts, they might soon become the biggest. We might find ourselves going to Tesco for routine operations. From an entrepreneurial viewpoint, removing an appendix or an in-growing toenail would help support sausage production at the Deli counter. But perhaps the most useful medical care Tesco could provide would be psychiatric, because one of these days it won’t just be windscreen wipers…
For some reason, when I go to a supermarket, I always end up parked at a 25 degree angle to the car next to me, which almost impossibly manages to ensure that 3 of its 4 over-sized tyres are touching a white line. But who’s to say that this car isn’t in fact straight and the rest of the car park is crooked? It’s relative, isn’t it? In the same way, disability is a matter for interpretation. Who am I to argue with someone who has been refused a disabled badge, because “being a selfish cunt” doesn’t come under the disability act? I don’t argue when these people park in a disabled space. Not unless they catch me pulling their windscreen wipers outwards or flobbing at their side window on days when I am blessed with a build-up of superfluous phlegm.
I eagerly await the day when trolleys are fitted with parking sensors. Such a device, completely unnecessary for anyone other than those drivers who are retards by choice, would bring harmony to the supermarket. As it is, a shopper’s invisible blinkers slip into place automatically the moment that person’s hands grip a trolley and the sort of belligerency you’d encounter on the roads of south-east England is thus transferred to the supermarket aisles.
The barriers you walk between on the way in, which most people think are there to detect stolen items, actually emit high-frequency sonar waves designed to fuck up your spatial awareness. Handicapped by this assault on your brain and encumbered by your invisible blinkers and general piss-off attitude, you the shopper are now a helpless slave to bastardness for the next 45 minutes.
When you’re not looking to take a layer of skin off someone’s ankles with your trolley, you are parking it at a right-angle to the shelves, blocking the entire aisle while you wander back to fruit and veg for something you’ve forgotten. With typical English self-righteousness, someone will tut loudly and give your trolley a slight push. The brave might even drop something small and expensive into it. That’s as far as I’d go, seeing as there are no windscreen wipers and a grolly in this situation would be a little beyond the pale.
When these bastards are not leaving a trolley in your way, they manage to plant their bodies in such a position. If I leave more than an arm’s length between myself and the shelf full of products that I am surveying then I expect someone to move into that gap and completely deprive me of both my view and ability to pick up what I want. The only place in the supermarket that this doesn’t happen is in front of the Pot Noodles, because anyone buying these tends to do so at speed. Personally, I like to browse and give myself time to decide between the two flavours that only moderately taste like the inside of a rubbish truck.
I worked part-time in one of those now obsolete small branches of Tesco in Palmers Green for a year when I was younger. The store manager conformed lock, stock and barrel to the archetypal nasal-voiced, petty autocrat you’d expect to find wielding small amounts of power in retail. He told us to call him Mr J, because he was Polish and he didn’t think we’d cope with anything more complicated. His full name was Janus and I suspect that the J stood for Justin. He’d wander round the 5 aisles telling us in his oily voice to “face up tinned meat, yeah.” A thoroughbred bastard. I hope he has syphilis now.
My days treading the aisles, facing up tinned meat and other products, were days of missed opportunities. There are so many things you’d hope to be asked by customers, but never were:
Customer: Have I passed the pasta yet?
Supermarket assistant: I don’t know; when did you eat it?
Customer: Can you direct me to mince?
Supermarket assistant: Certainly. Walk this way, ducky.
I think the policy they now have of walking you to where you want to go was fine in 5-aisle supermarkets like the one in Palmers Green, but now when you ask the whereabouts of frozen chips and some slow fucker escorts you 30 aisles to the east wing of the supermarket, you want to grab them by their tasteful brown and orange nylon lapels and shout in their face, “Just-fuck-ing-point!”
In the old days, of course, supermarkets weren’t monopolising the entire range of retail products. You certainly wouldn’t dream of doing your Christmas shopping in Palmers Green Tesco; not when you had “Boots” across the road for the obligatory boxed sets of Old Spice and lavender bath products. Nowadays, the concept of “all under one roof” means “we sell a limited range of cheap, lowest common denominator products so you don’t need to bother going elsewhere.”
Or am I being cynical? Perhaps, in fact, Tesco is aiding the cultural and literary education of society with its wide selection of Danielle Steel novels, Mills and Boon and witty coffee table compendiums. Fucking hell, I hate those coffee table books. Presents bought by the unimaginative for the undiscerning. Should anyone ever buy me one of those twee and corny coffee table books, I am likely to marinade it in anthrax, reduce it to a fine pulp using a Molineux blender and feed it directly into that person’s stomach using an endoscopy tube that has been left overnight on the floor of a Piccadilly public lavatory.
You have to hand it to them in regard to clothes, though. When my generation was growing up, the idea of wearing supermarket clothes was as much of a social anathema as having sticky plaster on your NHS specs, riding a bike with stabilisers after you’ve reached 14 or not finding Jim Davison’s brand of casual racism and misogyny hilarious. It was an inspired move for Asda to brand their fashion as being by “George” and for Tesco to use “Florence and Fred.” Who would have thought that applying the name of 1970’s kids’ TV characters would create such immediate kudos? Maybe the inspiration came from the fact that the clothes are all made by children earning the same amount of pocket money per week that I was given in 1976.
Good old Tesco, supporting the global economy! And hopefully, one day selling everything everyone ever needs. I was hoping that the move into car insurance would lead to the provision of car parts, because the manufacturing companies pretty much fist us mercilessly with their prices. I’d gladly wander along to aisle 453 for Ford Parts in my local supermarket if it meant paying less, although I might balk at the idea of “Tesco Value” brake pads and discs – guaranteed to bring your car to a halt on most occasions.
To paraphrase Mr J. Anus, we have to “face up” to the fact that Tesco are indeed taking over. In Hertfordshire, they are the second biggest employer after the NHS. Given the government cuts, they might soon become the biggest. We might find ourselves going to Tesco for routine operations. From an entrepreneurial viewpoint, removing an appendix or an in-growing toenail would help support sausage production at the Deli counter. But perhaps the most useful medical care Tesco could provide would be psychiatric, because one of these days it won’t just be windscreen wipers…
Saturday, 2 April 2011
A week in a life of watching mostly bollocks on the bastard telly
Watching telly is like picking your nose. On a few occasions it’s necessary, sometimes enjoyable, but mostly just a habit that deserves strong reproach. We all moan about most of it. The appeal of having Twitter on my iphone is that I have something comfortably less mindless to do than watch whatever’s on telly – that is, tweeting about what’s on telly.
I’ll put the news on each morning, but fuck knows why. For starters, nothing new usually happens overnight (except the occasional celebrity death, to which I find myself indifferent) and I can’t even hear the TV anyway over the noise of my Coco Pops being assaulted by cold milk, because I don’t want to turn it up too loud in case I wake the kids. Secondly, the choice seems to be between BBC Breakfast News, which is essentially a magazine programme presented by and targeted at the more bland and twee Middle class/aged/England demographic, and SKY news presented by Eammon Holmes who has all the charm of dog shit on toast. Given that I usually wake up these days feeling like I’ve been sat on all night by Eammon Holmes, I ignore the TV (without thinking to turn it off) and read the Independent App on my phone.
Daytime TV deserves a blog of its own and fortunately for most of the year I am at work and so avoid the human abattoir that is the Jeremy Kyle show. Lucky for me, we have SKY+, so Mrs Bastard is able to record the lunchtime soap “Doctors” and I am tortured with this ridiculously puerile pantomime once we’re both home in the evening. I love it. The scriptwriters are unintentional comedy geniuses, and have assembled their lines of cliché-ridden dialogue with meticulous care. I suspect they bought a load of old Crossroads scripts from the 70’s, cut them up and rearranged them. It’s clearly an art form in the same way that defecating on canvas is an art form. I strongly recommend that you watch it.
After this, my daughter will watch a recording of that week’s Glee episode, which somehow I end up watching about three times. I’m not sure why it’s originally shown after 9pm, except perhaps to protect younger children from the effects of watching something so saccharine-coated that they could contract diabetes just by sitting through one episode. While she insists on watching Glee, I go and stir two jars of English mustard into the bolognaise that will form part of her dinner.
For some reason, no one in my house will ever turn the TV off. It’s stuck on like a clagnet on an arse hair. Irritates me senselessly. And it always seems to be left on unwatched when The One Show is on. This is where the BBC manages to screw with your mind by confronting you with a presenter like Alex Jones who is both nice looking and yet so utterly devoid of any personality, that the question of whether you fancy her or not can cause a crisis of dignity. Only when she interviewed the dead-eyed fame-whore Katie Price, did I decide that relatively speaking “I would.” But watching The One Show on a Friday when she is joined by Chris Evans is like contracting pubic lice and genital thrush simultaneously.
Late evening, with the children in bed, I regain at least 50% control of the telly and look forward to settling down with a glass of wine (see other blogs) to watch something less likely to make me want to hold my head against a hot stove and stab my testicles with a wedge of out-of-date cheddar. I have decided not to drink mid-week, so that means no wine on a Wednesday, but Thursday feels close enough to the end of the week to stay up late and finish a bottle during Question Time. This is when Twitter goes into overload. Usually it is over the now ubiquitous appearance of one social pariah or another, someone like Kelvin McKenzie, Baroness Warsi or a similarly objectionable, sensationalist bigot like the loathsome panto dame David Starkey.
Come the weekend, an evening’s viewing degenerates into farce. We might all scoff at the concept of watching not-very-famous celebrities doing what they are NOT not-very-famous for, on ice or otherwise, for weeks on end and then text in our votes for who is the shittest of the shit; but we still watch it. Well, I don’t, but like the inexorable arse-clagnet, its just there, hanging about and difficult to get rid off.
The pitiful standard of such entertainment helps to elevate everything around it, so much so that any old shit can pull in 10 million viewers if Ant and Dec or Harry Hill are plonked on stage to front it. Even Paddy McGuiness’s Take Me Out has assumed the mantel of Blind Date for making light entertainment out of corny flirting between the egocentric and the shallow. Personally, my preferred method of flirting is to stop myself from gobbing in someone’s face when I tell them to piss off, which is why I have so far held back from applying to this show. Come Dine with Me is far more appealing, as it successfully manages to distil around one dinner table a town’s most scathing bastard or bitch, most drunken opinionated lush, most socially retarded middle-aged man and one averagely bland straight (wo)man to act as a foil. Now that’s good telly! I might apply. I’m sure they’d enjoy a course of English mustard with bolognaise, followed by stale cheddar and mutilated testes on crackers.
I’ll put the news on each morning, but fuck knows why. For starters, nothing new usually happens overnight (except the occasional celebrity death, to which I find myself indifferent) and I can’t even hear the TV anyway over the noise of my Coco Pops being assaulted by cold milk, because I don’t want to turn it up too loud in case I wake the kids. Secondly, the choice seems to be between BBC Breakfast News, which is essentially a magazine programme presented by and targeted at the more bland and twee Middle class/aged/England demographic, and SKY news presented by Eammon Holmes who has all the charm of dog shit on toast. Given that I usually wake up these days feeling like I’ve been sat on all night by Eammon Holmes, I ignore the TV (without thinking to turn it off) and read the Independent App on my phone.
Daytime TV deserves a blog of its own and fortunately for most of the year I am at work and so avoid the human abattoir that is the Jeremy Kyle show. Lucky for me, we have SKY+, so Mrs Bastard is able to record the lunchtime soap “Doctors” and I am tortured with this ridiculously puerile pantomime once we’re both home in the evening. I love it. The scriptwriters are unintentional comedy geniuses, and have assembled their lines of cliché-ridden dialogue with meticulous care. I suspect they bought a load of old Crossroads scripts from the 70’s, cut them up and rearranged them. It’s clearly an art form in the same way that defecating on canvas is an art form. I strongly recommend that you watch it.
After this, my daughter will watch a recording of that week’s Glee episode, which somehow I end up watching about three times. I’m not sure why it’s originally shown after 9pm, except perhaps to protect younger children from the effects of watching something so saccharine-coated that they could contract diabetes just by sitting through one episode. While she insists on watching Glee, I go and stir two jars of English mustard into the bolognaise that will form part of her dinner.
For some reason, no one in my house will ever turn the TV off. It’s stuck on like a clagnet on an arse hair. Irritates me senselessly. And it always seems to be left on unwatched when The One Show is on. This is where the BBC manages to screw with your mind by confronting you with a presenter like Alex Jones who is both nice looking and yet so utterly devoid of any personality, that the question of whether you fancy her or not can cause a crisis of dignity. Only when she interviewed the dead-eyed fame-whore Katie Price, did I decide that relatively speaking “I would.” But watching The One Show on a Friday when she is joined by Chris Evans is like contracting pubic lice and genital thrush simultaneously.
Late evening, with the children in bed, I regain at least 50% control of the telly and look forward to settling down with a glass of wine (see other blogs) to watch something less likely to make me want to hold my head against a hot stove and stab my testicles with a wedge of out-of-date cheddar. I have decided not to drink mid-week, so that means no wine on a Wednesday, but Thursday feels close enough to the end of the week to stay up late and finish a bottle during Question Time. This is when Twitter goes into overload. Usually it is over the now ubiquitous appearance of one social pariah or another, someone like Kelvin McKenzie, Baroness Warsi or a similarly objectionable, sensationalist bigot like the loathsome panto dame David Starkey.
Come the weekend, an evening’s viewing degenerates into farce. We might all scoff at the concept of watching not-very-famous celebrities doing what they are NOT not-very-famous for, on ice or otherwise, for weeks on end and then text in our votes for who is the shittest of the shit; but we still watch it. Well, I don’t, but like the inexorable arse-clagnet, its just there, hanging about and difficult to get rid off.
The pitiful standard of such entertainment helps to elevate everything around it, so much so that any old shit can pull in 10 million viewers if Ant and Dec or Harry Hill are plonked on stage to front it. Even Paddy McGuiness’s Take Me Out has assumed the mantel of Blind Date for making light entertainment out of corny flirting between the egocentric and the shallow. Personally, my preferred method of flirting is to stop myself from gobbing in someone’s face when I tell them to piss off, which is why I have so far held back from applying to this show. Come Dine with Me is far more appealing, as it successfully manages to distil around one dinner table a town’s most scathing bastard or bitch, most drunken opinionated lush, most socially retarded middle-aged man and one averagely bland straight (wo)man to act as a foil. Now that’s good telly! I might apply. I’m sure they’d enjoy a course of English mustard with bolognaise, followed by stale cheddar and mutilated testes on crackers.
Saturday, 12 March 2011
More about being a Middle-Class Bastard now
So, there I am last night, sitting in Alban Arena, the Mecca of light entertainment for St Albans and it’s leafy satellite villages, nursing an aching jaw for one hour 40 minutes, because when I’m not laughing out loud I am at least subject to the alien sensation of a unwavering broad smile; and the reason for this is that I have gone “out out” to see Micky Flanagan’s stand-up show.
If you don’t know him, Micky Flanagan is a 40-something, working-class Londoner now coping with all the foibles of the middle-class world in which he resides (a consequence of marriage and higher education) and this forms the basis for his observational humour. In other words, the cleverly humorous bastard has made my intended blog today almost fucking redundant. The best I can do now is fill in the gaps with the bits he left out and present them to you with humility from a darkened corner of the immense shadow that this man has cast.
I am sure many thousands of us middle-aged, middle-class men from working-class backgrounds exist. We bought Nick Hornby’s books and will one day be called upon as historical eyewitnesses to the gentrification of football and the feminisation and domestication of the British male. We’ve grimly held on to as many of the manly attitudes of our roots as our new middle-class lifestyle has failed to strip away. But for the most part, all that’s left is nostalgia, a tendency to want to fight people and a toleration of smokers and tinned fruit.
My children, now growing up in a semi in St Albans and going to a comprehensive (but nonetheless middle-class) school, are experiencing a childhood that will sadly deny them future justification for colouring their stories of youth with the same half-embarrassed, self-deprecating cynicism that I will lace this blog with. They have never trodden barefoot on pavements littered with dog shit, miles from home on summer evenings. They have been trained from an early age in post-toilet hygiene, rather than going through childhood in the belief that shaking the piss off your hands counted as washing them. And they will never have to rise to the challenge of surviving a whole day in a park playground with more health and safety risks than a ball-pit full of broken glass in a Tripoli leisure centre.
Playgrounds are defining images of many people’s childhoods. Back in the 70s and 80s playgrounds looked like playgrounds, but nowadays, near where I live, playgrounds look like woods. Everything is made of timber to blend in with the surroundings and thus avoid spoiling the ambience of the park with garish bright colours. And rather than building these child-friendly mini-assault courses on some good old-fashioned flesh-ripping, bone-breaking concrete, they use this artificial softened springy duvet-like sponge and STILL parents follow their kids round the playground with anxious outspread arms in case they fall. Fuck me, what would they have made of the medieval-designed, threat to life and limb that was a Witch’s Hat? These parents (and yes, I am one of them) would piss their pants with terror to see little Oliver or Jemima (NOT my kids names) graze their knees from carpet burn falling half a foot from a car-tyre swing onto the sponge-floor. (Sometimes its woodchip. Where I’m from the only place you’d find woodchip was in the wallpaper and the hamster’s cage.) Whereas, my mum was happy to wait for us to get home after dark and splash Dettol on our gaping wounds before picking the larger stones out of our flesh with her fingernails.
Another thing my children never experience is a complete void of ideas when they have to buy birthday or Christmas presents for a parent. Because these days, parents have “interests”. We like music and films and books and football and clothes and just about anything you can pick up from the supermarket for under a tenner. But I was never spoilt for ideas. I never knew what the fuck my mum and dad would want. Parents didn’t have “interests” in the 70s. What did they DO? Well, my mum smoked and cooked and did housework, so invariably she’d get something to aid her in these pastimes, including ashtrays, lighters and one time a drying-up rack to put next to the sink for the plates and cutlery. I got that from Argos. All on my own. I was very proud of myself. Dad liked smoking and betting on horses, so he got the same as mum but without any kitchen utensils. When we were old enough we might go into a bookies and buy him a six-horse accumulator.
To be fair, both my parents read a lot of books, but for some reason we never bought books. (Libraries gave them away for free and reminded you of that fact with 5-year overdue letters.) Being working-class didn’t mean you never read books. We weren’t fucking chavs. We might have watched a lot more ITV than what today’s middle-class parents would allow their kids (because it’s the TV channel equivalent of The Sun… which we also used to read, or at least look at.) I was a big fan of Enid Blyton, from “Noddy” when I was very young to “The Secret Seven” and “Famous Five” when I was older. I tried reading the “Famous Five” once to my own kids, but had to stop when Julian or Dick or someone started to talk about a boy at their school that they’d nicknamed “Sooty” because his skin was so black.
The casual racism of the average 1970’s working-class household tends to be swept under the carpet when people nowadays look back at that time. You’d never see “Love Thy Neighbour” on UK Gold, but even re-runs of “The Sweeney” have lines cut that I clearly remember, particularly one about a certain crook called Lee-Roy Brown. A rite of passage for us children of that time was the first time we turned round to our Dad and said, “That’s a bit racist,” after he’d told a joke about corner-shops or “blacks” (to use a milder word than most you might hear.) As a succeeding generation you have to take a higher moral ground and challenge your parents. But then your own children will do it to you. I get accused by mine of being homophobic just for suggesting that Louis Walsh might have more than a professional interest in some of the boy bands that come on X Factor. I’m only saying.
Sometimes I wonder if I am denying my children some of the joys of life that I fondly recall from my own youth. I feel that I should turf them out of the house today, without their phones or shoes on their feet (because the sun’s out) and then go to the corner shop to buy spaghetti bolognaise in a tin for dinner. We could even have it on toast.
If you don’t know him, Micky Flanagan is a 40-something, working-class Londoner now coping with all the foibles of the middle-class world in which he resides (a consequence of marriage and higher education) and this forms the basis for his observational humour. In other words, the cleverly humorous bastard has made my intended blog today almost fucking redundant. The best I can do now is fill in the gaps with the bits he left out and present them to you with humility from a darkened corner of the immense shadow that this man has cast.
I am sure many thousands of us middle-aged, middle-class men from working-class backgrounds exist. We bought Nick Hornby’s books and will one day be called upon as historical eyewitnesses to the gentrification of football and the feminisation and domestication of the British male. We’ve grimly held on to as many of the manly attitudes of our roots as our new middle-class lifestyle has failed to strip away. But for the most part, all that’s left is nostalgia, a tendency to want to fight people and a toleration of smokers and tinned fruit.
My children, now growing up in a semi in St Albans and going to a comprehensive (but nonetheless middle-class) school, are experiencing a childhood that will sadly deny them future justification for colouring their stories of youth with the same half-embarrassed, self-deprecating cynicism that I will lace this blog with. They have never trodden barefoot on pavements littered with dog shit, miles from home on summer evenings. They have been trained from an early age in post-toilet hygiene, rather than going through childhood in the belief that shaking the piss off your hands counted as washing them. And they will never have to rise to the challenge of surviving a whole day in a park playground with more health and safety risks than a ball-pit full of broken glass in a Tripoli leisure centre.
Playgrounds are defining images of many people’s childhoods. Back in the 70s and 80s playgrounds looked like playgrounds, but nowadays, near where I live, playgrounds look like woods. Everything is made of timber to blend in with the surroundings and thus avoid spoiling the ambience of the park with garish bright colours. And rather than building these child-friendly mini-assault courses on some good old-fashioned flesh-ripping, bone-breaking concrete, they use this artificial softened springy duvet-like sponge and STILL parents follow their kids round the playground with anxious outspread arms in case they fall. Fuck me, what would they have made of the medieval-designed, threat to life and limb that was a Witch’s Hat? These parents (and yes, I am one of them) would piss their pants with terror to see little Oliver or Jemima (NOT my kids names) graze their knees from carpet burn falling half a foot from a car-tyre swing onto the sponge-floor. (Sometimes its woodchip. Where I’m from the only place you’d find woodchip was in the wallpaper and the hamster’s cage.) Whereas, my mum was happy to wait for us to get home after dark and splash Dettol on our gaping wounds before picking the larger stones out of our flesh with her fingernails.
Another thing my children never experience is a complete void of ideas when they have to buy birthday or Christmas presents for a parent. Because these days, parents have “interests”. We like music and films and books and football and clothes and just about anything you can pick up from the supermarket for under a tenner. But I was never spoilt for ideas. I never knew what the fuck my mum and dad would want. Parents didn’t have “interests” in the 70s. What did they DO? Well, my mum smoked and cooked and did housework, so invariably she’d get something to aid her in these pastimes, including ashtrays, lighters and one time a drying-up rack to put next to the sink for the plates and cutlery. I got that from Argos. All on my own. I was very proud of myself. Dad liked smoking and betting on horses, so he got the same as mum but without any kitchen utensils. When we were old enough we might go into a bookies and buy him a six-horse accumulator.
To be fair, both my parents read a lot of books, but for some reason we never bought books. (Libraries gave them away for free and reminded you of that fact with 5-year overdue letters.) Being working-class didn’t mean you never read books. We weren’t fucking chavs. We might have watched a lot more ITV than what today’s middle-class parents would allow their kids (because it’s the TV channel equivalent of The Sun… which we also used to read, or at least look at.) I was a big fan of Enid Blyton, from “Noddy” when I was very young to “The Secret Seven” and “Famous Five” when I was older. I tried reading the “Famous Five” once to my own kids, but had to stop when Julian or Dick or someone started to talk about a boy at their school that they’d nicknamed “Sooty” because his skin was so black.
The casual racism of the average 1970’s working-class household tends to be swept under the carpet when people nowadays look back at that time. You’d never see “Love Thy Neighbour” on UK Gold, but even re-runs of “The Sweeney” have lines cut that I clearly remember, particularly one about a certain crook called Lee-Roy Brown. A rite of passage for us children of that time was the first time we turned round to our Dad and said, “That’s a bit racist,” after he’d told a joke about corner-shops or “blacks” (to use a milder word than most you might hear.) As a succeeding generation you have to take a higher moral ground and challenge your parents. But then your own children will do it to you. I get accused by mine of being homophobic just for suggesting that Louis Walsh might have more than a professional interest in some of the boy bands that come on X Factor. I’m only saying.
Sometimes I wonder if I am denying my children some of the joys of life that I fondly recall from my own youth. I feel that I should turf them out of the house today, without their phones or shoes on their feet (because the sun’s out) and then go to the corner shop to buy spaghetti bolognaise in a tin for dinner. We could even have it on toast.
Sunday, 20 February 2011
Where's that Bastard Wally?
If ever there was a more intentionally sadistic attempt to cause stress to the more cerebrally challenged children of the UK, then it must have been even more insidious than the “Where’s Wally?” series of books. The concept of lulling society’s more seratonin-starved youth into believing that its easy to spot a conspicuously identifiable boy in a highly detailed picture containing several hundred other people is just plain fucking cruel. Because it’s not easy. It should be, but its not. And the realisation that such an easy task cannot be negotiated in the few seconds that you’d expect to spend trying, can cause frustration, stress, long-term feelings of inadequacy, low self-esteem and psychological trauma; all of which manifest themselves into an inability to form stable relationships or assume the responsibility of parenthood, an unwillingness to undertake simple employment and a lasting suppressed rage which will occasional flare up and lead to criminal assault and probably incarceration.
Wally, you bastard, you have a lot to answer for.
So, which wanker came up with this idea? Whoever it was, the likelihood is that this person, as with most creators of children’s fiction, based Wally on his or her own son. You might lean towards being slightly sympathetic to any parents who found that every time they took their child out somewhere, the gormless little fucker would wander off and get himself lost. You’d even credit these unfortunate parents with some initiative for then dressing their child in a distinctive red and white top and matching woolly hat in order to be capable of finding them in a large crowd. And you would surely feel your heart go out to them when, after the 150th occasion of contacting the police to report their son missing, they had Social Services knocking on their door and the media turning them into the worst parenting pariahs since the McCann’s.
But then you’d think, why not just buy a high-viz jacket for the errant child? Buy some drugs that would induce agoraphobia. Stick a fucking lead on him like you do the dog. Whatever you do though, don’t turn your mishap into a series of iconic children’s books that could potentially cause society to collapse under its own frustrated sense of failure.
Perhaps I am over-reacting a little. The “Where’s Wally?” books should of course be lauded for their popularity, particularly as the spin off films and TV series have proved to be global successes. In case you’re not quite up to speed, I am referring to Harry Potter, Big Brother and Glee.
J K Rowling was commissioned to turn Wally into a literary and film icon by placing him in a situation where you’d never expect to find him: A boarding school for freaks, which was periodically attacked by some bastard with no nose and his right wing, gothic-looking cronies. If you didn’t know that Harry was an incarnation of Wally, then think about the usual reaction he gets when someone comes across him for the very first time. There’s always that look of awe and surprise as they slowly utter his name in prolonged syllables – “Har….ry….Pot…..ter!!!” Clearly, they’d spent ages trying to find him in a detailed drawing of a crowded fairground and now, here he was!
Adapting the concept of “Where’s Wally?” to television marked the start of the reality TV revolution. Hardening the humour somewhat, Channel 4 put a large crowd of people into a confined space and challenged us to play “Where’s the Arsehole?” With the same modus operandi as the original books, there were just too many to choose from and so, as with the books, it usually took about 3 months to single it down to one arsehole or wally. I am of course talking about Big Brother, “Where’s Wally?” for the small screen. And ironically, every housemate seemed to have suffered the same childhood affliction of struggling to find Wally on a page, because they each nursed the sort of fragile self-esteem that leads to over-compensating through self-promotion and affectation. In other words, they were a bunch of annoying c**ts. (And perhaps the worst was the one who looked the most like the original Wally - Sam Pepper.)
And so, “Where’s Wally?” evolved via Harry Potter into “Where’s the Arsehole?” aka “Big Brother” and then, like all good ideas, crossed the Atlantic where the Americans dumbed it down, glossed it over, sprinkled some sugar-coated moralising on top and made it a song-and-dance show that is now well-known to all of us as “Glee.”
“Glee” has a cast full of wallies or as our exiled cousins like to say, jerks. But in order not to tax their citizens of too much neuron activity, anyone you choose from the show can count as the jerk that you’re trying to find. Metaphorically, they all have red and white striped jumpers and hats. So, in case you can’t tell the difference, the programme makers have given each of them an obvious distinctive identify. Glee is a melting pot of stereotypes, but the message is clear. Celebrate diversity! You might be Christian or Jewish, disabled or able-bodied, Chinese or Hispanic, Black or White, Gay or Heterosexual, but you can still be a spoilt, self-centred, irritating show-off with the capacity to bastardise any popular song from the last four decades. You can’t however be any of that and be a Muslim. “Glee” shies away from having an obvious Muslim character, because that might just challenge a few innate prejudices too much. After all, between a red and white striped top and a red and a white striped hat is a white face and a red neck.
Finally, having started with Wally and ended with a totally unrelated diatribe against American redneck prejudices, I will return to base and reveal one more piece of useless fact. On page 11 of the 4th Wally book in the series, the prequel to the original, known as “The Phantom Wally,” it is actually impossible to find our chief protagonist, because in this beach scene he has been buried alive by violently neurotic bystanders who grew up reading the original books. Revenge is sweet.
Wally, you bastard, you have a lot to answer for.
So, which wanker came up with this idea? Whoever it was, the likelihood is that this person, as with most creators of children’s fiction, based Wally on his or her own son. You might lean towards being slightly sympathetic to any parents who found that every time they took their child out somewhere, the gormless little fucker would wander off and get himself lost. You’d even credit these unfortunate parents with some initiative for then dressing their child in a distinctive red and white top and matching woolly hat in order to be capable of finding them in a large crowd. And you would surely feel your heart go out to them when, after the 150th occasion of contacting the police to report their son missing, they had Social Services knocking on their door and the media turning them into the worst parenting pariahs since the McCann’s.
But then you’d think, why not just buy a high-viz jacket for the errant child? Buy some drugs that would induce agoraphobia. Stick a fucking lead on him like you do the dog. Whatever you do though, don’t turn your mishap into a series of iconic children’s books that could potentially cause society to collapse under its own frustrated sense of failure.
Perhaps I am over-reacting a little. The “Where’s Wally?” books should of course be lauded for their popularity, particularly as the spin off films and TV series have proved to be global successes. In case you’re not quite up to speed, I am referring to Harry Potter, Big Brother and Glee.
J K Rowling was commissioned to turn Wally into a literary and film icon by placing him in a situation where you’d never expect to find him: A boarding school for freaks, which was periodically attacked by some bastard with no nose and his right wing, gothic-looking cronies. If you didn’t know that Harry was an incarnation of Wally, then think about the usual reaction he gets when someone comes across him for the very first time. There’s always that look of awe and surprise as they slowly utter his name in prolonged syllables – “Har….ry….Pot…..ter!!!” Clearly, they’d spent ages trying to find him in a detailed drawing of a crowded fairground and now, here he was!
Adapting the concept of “Where’s Wally?” to television marked the start of the reality TV revolution. Hardening the humour somewhat, Channel 4 put a large crowd of people into a confined space and challenged us to play “Where’s the Arsehole?” With the same modus operandi as the original books, there were just too many to choose from and so, as with the books, it usually took about 3 months to single it down to one arsehole or wally. I am of course talking about Big Brother, “Where’s Wally?” for the small screen. And ironically, every housemate seemed to have suffered the same childhood affliction of struggling to find Wally on a page, because they each nursed the sort of fragile self-esteem that leads to over-compensating through self-promotion and affectation. In other words, they were a bunch of annoying c**ts. (And perhaps the worst was the one who looked the most like the original Wally - Sam Pepper.)
And so, “Where’s Wally?” evolved via Harry Potter into “Where’s the Arsehole?” aka “Big Brother” and then, like all good ideas, crossed the Atlantic where the Americans dumbed it down, glossed it over, sprinkled some sugar-coated moralising on top and made it a song-and-dance show that is now well-known to all of us as “Glee.”
“Glee” has a cast full of wallies or as our exiled cousins like to say, jerks. But in order not to tax their citizens of too much neuron activity, anyone you choose from the show can count as the jerk that you’re trying to find. Metaphorically, they all have red and white striped jumpers and hats. So, in case you can’t tell the difference, the programme makers have given each of them an obvious distinctive identify. Glee is a melting pot of stereotypes, but the message is clear. Celebrate diversity! You might be Christian or Jewish, disabled or able-bodied, Chinese or Hispanic, Black or White, Gay or Heterosexual, but you can still be a spoilt, self-centred, irritating show-off with the capacity to bastardise any popular song from the last four decades. You can’t however be any of that and be a Muslim. “Glee” shies away from having an obvious Muslim character, because that might just challenge a few innate prejudices too much. After all, between a red and white striped top and a red and a white striped hat is a white face and a red neck.
Finally, having started with Wally and ended with a totally unrelated diatribe against American redneck prejudices, I will return to base and reveal one more piece of useless fact. On page 11 of the 4th Wally book in the series, the prequel to the original, known as “The Phantom Wally,” it is actually impossible to find our chief protagonist, because in this beach scene he has been buried alive by violently neurotic bystanders who grew up reading the original books. Revenge is sweet.
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