My parents made few fundamental errors in their youthful efforts to raise me, and I’m happy to say that I survived them all. Just.
The haze of cigarette smoke from womb to living room to dinner table failed to inflict lung disease or even asthma on me. The subjection at an early age to the “The Omen” and subsequent psychological trauma of being told that Damien was hiding in the dark in our house ensured that I was permanently one broken light-bulb away from shitting in my pants. But the decision to send me to an all-boys Catholic school may well have bestowed on me a useful academic education, but it made me hopelessly socially retarded when it came to talking to girls.
I was rubbish.
Not that the kindly, altruistic Jesuit priests of St ******** College were adverse to sex education. After embarrassingly but excitingly cringing while my parents signed a consent form to allow me to receive my first taste of sex education, our decrepit corpse of a biology teacher showed a video about sweating. Therefore, it was left to my peers to fill in the gaps, via the media of biro penises on every page in every textbook and the more worldly comedians in our year group telling jokes about prostitutes (which I heard as Protestants, naturally) and nob-nibbling.
It didn’t help that the school was 3 miles out of town, where our sister school (the convent which produced Mandy Smith, consenting bride of paedophile Stones bassist Bill Wyman) was situated. By a cruel twist of fate the timings of departure at the two schools precluded any opportunity to mingle with our female compatriots, except for the three gutter-mouthed and very obvious slappers who hung about the bus terminal and knew the hard lads from my year group.
By this stage I was living on the North Circular Road, six lanes of traffic three metres from the front gate and nowhere to hang around and meet local girls. So my first futile attempt to get a girlfriend was laughable in the extreme.
At this stage, let me point out that it wasn’t until I was 18 and at university that a female friend advised me that you don’t just “get a girlfriend” but instead you meet someone, you say hello, you get to know them and then you ask them out. At 13, I thought that you skip all of that and just ask them out.
So after idolising Dawn B***** on the bus for months I puffed up the courage to do just that. The whole conversation, as we passed in the street was as follows:
Me (mumbling too fast): Excuse me, do you want to go to cinema with me on Saturday?
Her: What?
Me: Do you want to go to cinema with me on Saturday?
Her (frowning incredulously): No.
This run of form continued for several years. Had I been a football team, I’d’ve been relegated on an annual basis until I was playing in the conference south with double-figure crowds and administration and ground-selling on the horizon. To meet girls, we’d walk around the local park at the wrong times or go into central London and stare out of the window like starving hyenas at anyone with boobs.
But eventually I was old enough to go to pubs and clubs and ACTUALLY meet more than one woman at a time. All you needed, I was conditioned to believe from popular culture (probably just crap sit-coms) was a clever and witty chat-up line.
Fucking hell! Which total bastard invented the concept of a chat-up line? Again, it was only later that I was told that the best chat-up line was “hello.” Not “my brother and I work in biscuit design and were wondering if you’d like to do some modelling work as part of our advertising campaign.”
Me and my equally crap droogs would sit at a table in a bar for hours mustering up the courage (meaning getting drunk enough to make an arse of ourselves) and striving to invent the one killer line that was needed in total isolation to get us some luck. This was on the back of meticulous pre-night-out routines, such as spending the afternoon in a pub, shaving just before going out and thereby cutting my face to ribbons and necessitating a cheap cologne-facial dip, and then sticking on the Led Zep while adorning myself in my “pulling” (Hawaiian) shirt and “pulling” (cowboy) boots.
I was rubbish.
My son is 15, has had a girlfriend for over a year (and others willing to take her place), a supremely laid-back competence in how to socialise with girls and he never, NEVER feels like shitting in his pants when we turn the lights out at home.
Sunday, 27 November 2011
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
Fun Fascists
EVERYBODY PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR AND SAY “YEAH!”
I made the mistake at a young age of going to see Prince in concert. It was just at the wrong time, when he was veering away from the rock and psychedelic pop of Purple Rain and Paisley Park to become an exponent of that most loathsome of musical genres, DANCE MUSIC. (By that, I don’t mean music you CAN dance to, but instead music that you can ONLY dance to.) And as I stood there in Wembley Arena, aged 19, with a now ex-mate and his 16 year old girlfriend of the time (he was 21) I found myself appalled by the DEMANDS that Prince kept making on me as a paying member of the audience to either put my hands in the air or to shout YEAH, as if I was some kind of brainless fucking sheep, who’d collapse under any slight peer pressure and have all the decision-making and discriminating capabilities and individuality of a dog in need of a shit in a field full of shitting dogs.
As you can imagine, I refused. And never bought another Prince CD again.
This was the point in my life when I recognised my utter and inexorable disdain for what can only be identified as FUN FASCISM.
Since then, I have experienced many other zealous devotees of this social philosophy. People who nurse a fundamentalist set of beliefs in regard to the whole concept of FUN. Narrow-minded bigots who refuse to tolerate anyone else’s doctrines or practices, labelling everything that doesn’t match their definition of FUN as BORING. In their slightly wide-eyed and socially-retarded opinion, people are either FUN or BORING depending on what they are willing to do.
Fucking Fun Fascists.
They store in their tiny-sized under-developed brain-blobs the Fun Fascist version of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book or Hitler’s Mein Kampf – a detailed and unequivocally inflexible series of statements on how we should ALL have fun. And when Fun Fascists encounter each other, they reinforce their own prejudices, because they tend to carry EXACTLY the same Fun Fascist Bible in their minds.
For example, they would have dictated that I put my hands in the air and said yeah AND danced in the aisle at that Prince gig and indeed at all events I attend that involve music. Should I attend an event in which the music is not the type you can dance to, then it is BORING and I am BORING for going.
The Fun Fascists have a preference for what they like to call EXTROVERT behaviour, because EXTROVERT means FUN and INTROVERT means BORING. If these people had any ambitions towards political power, then they would sweep away democracy and INFLICT fun on us through a combination of biased PROPAGANDA and systematic, organised FEAR. They would use the FUN-POLICE to arrest anyone “not joining in” and send them for re-education in special camps, where we’d be made to wear stupid hats and be torturously “Dance-boarded” (forced to keep dancing for 48 hours when really you just want a sit down or a sleep.)
Fun Fascism would stipulate monthly pilgrimages to theme parks, the compulsory car-jazzling of all private vehicles, the use of abbreviated forenames or even nicknames as the correct way for companies to formally address their customers, the abolition of the speed limit and the castration of anyone refusing to participate in extreme sports.
Fun Fascists, due to religious-like indoctrination, will tend to spew out verbatim the dictums of their philosophy:
“Cheer up!”
“Smile!”
“Come on, let your hair down!”
You can almost hear the same authoritative menace in their voice as you would have done from the SS, the Khmer Rouge or Mao’s Red Guard. But maybe these are the wrong analogies to make. These dictatorships were relatively short-lived. My fear is that the Fun Fascists will hold sway over our lives for as long as the Catholic Church did in Western Europe. Expect the burning of HERETIC INTROVERTS. Expect the formation of a ruthless FUN INQUISITION to put people on the rack and ask “What did you do last weekend?” Expect your children to be brainwashed into believing that they will go to Hell if they don’t spend their half their lives in hedonistic dicking around and the other half Facebooking about it.
OK, perhaps I am scaremongering a little. These people cannot take over, because by their very nature they are too inept to do so. There is a simple method of combating their irritatingly trite and gormless optimism and that is to answer their demands to have fun THEIR WAY with the same response I made to Prince back in 1990: FUCK OFF.
Thus will the menace of Fun Fascism be countered!
I made the mistake at a young age of going to see Prince in concert. It was just at the wrong time, when he was veering away from the rock and psychedelic pop of Purple Rain and Paisley Park to become an exponent of that most loathsome of musical genres, DANCE MUSIC. (By that, I don’t mean music you CAN dance to, but instead music that you can ONLY dance to.) And as I stood there in Wembley Arena, aged 19, with a now ex-mate and his 16 year old girlfriend of the time (he was 21) I found myself appalled by the DEMANDS that Prince kept making on me as a paying member of the audience to either put my hands in the air or to shout YEAH, as if I was some kind of brainless fucking sheep, who’d collapse under any slight peer pressure and have all the decision-making and discriminating capabilities and individuality of a dog in need of a shit in a field full of shitting dogs.
As you can imagine, I refused. And never bought another Prince CD again.
This was the point in my life when I recognised my utter and inexorable disdain for what can only be identified as FUN FASCISM.
Since then, I have experienced many other zealous devotees of this social philosophy. People who nurse a fundamentalist set of beliefs in regard to the whole concept of FUN. Narrow-minded bigots who refuse to tolerate anyone else’s doctrines or practices, labelling everything that doesn’t match their definition of FUN as BORING. In their slightly wide-eyed and socially-retarded opinion, people are either FUN or BORING depending on what they are willing to do.
Fucking Fun Fascists.
They store in their tiny-sized under-developed brain-blobs the Fun Fascist version of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book or Hitler’s Mein Kampf – a detailed and unequivocally inflexible series of statements on how we should ALL have fun. And when Fun Fascists encounter each other, they reinforce their own prejudices, because they tend to carry EXACTLY the same Fun Fascist Bible in their minds.
For example, they would have dictated that I put my hands in the air and said yeah AND danced in the aisle at that Prince gig and indeed at all events I attend that involve music. Should I attend an event in which the music is not the type you can dance to, then it is BORING and I am BORING for going.
The Fun Fascists have a preference for what they like to call EXTROVERT behaviour, because EXTROVERT means FUN and INTROVERT means BORING. If these people had any ambitions towards political power, then they would sweep away democracy and INFLICT fun on us through a combination of biased PROPAGANDA and systematic, organised FEAR. They would use the FUN-POLICE to arrest anyone “not joining in” and send them for re-education in special camps, where we’d be made to wear stupid hats and be torturously “Dance-boarded” (forced to keep dancing for 48 hours when really you just want a sit down or a sleep.)
Fun Fascism would stipulate monthly pilgrimages to theme parks, the compulsory car-jazzling of all private vehicles, the use of abbreviated forenames or even nicknames as the correct way for companies to formally address their customers, the abolition of the speed limit and the castration of anyone refusing to participate in extreme sports.
Fun Fascists, due to religious-like indoctrination, will tend to spew out verbatim the dictums of their philosophy:
“Cheer up!”
“Smile!”
“Come on, let your hair down!”
You can almost hear the same authoritative menace in their voice as you would have done from the SS, the Khmer Rouge or Mao’s Red Guard. But maybe these are the wrong analogies to make. These dictatorships were relatively short-lived. My fear is that the Fun Fascists will hold sway over our lives for as long as the Catholic Church did in Western Europe. Expect the burning of HERETIC INTROVERTS. Expect the formation of a ruthless FUN INQUISITION to put people on the rack and ask “What did you do last weekend?” Expect your children to be brainwashed into believing that they will go to Hell if they don’t spend their half their lives in hedonistic dicking around and the other half Facebooking about it.
OK, perhaps I am scaremongering a little. These people cannot take over, because by their very nature they are too inept to do so. There is a simple method of combating their irritatingly trite and gormless optimism and that is to answer their demands to have fun THEIR WAY with the same response I made to Prince back in 1990: FUCK OFF.
Thus will the menace of Fun Fascism be countered!
Wednesday, 19 October 2011
Star Wars: Another Bastardised Version
Stop reading now if (a) you hate Star Wars, (b) you’ve never seen Star Wars or (c) you’ve had a bellyful of Star Wars parody and satire these last 34 years.
The rest of you, strap on your Millennium Falcon seat beats and prepare to be taken into Hyper-farce. Both of you.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, but coincidentally one with humanoid life forms, the same political concepts as Earth and common use of the English language (my God those Victorian missionaries got everywhere didn’t they)...
(cue music)
Star Wars opens with these two robots being shot at by laser guns. Your first thought is that the technology is pretty bloody advanced for 1977, until you realise that the guns don’t shoot straight. C-3PO and R2-D2 walk through the cross-fire and don’t even get hit. C-3PO commences his bleating and belly-aching, a galling habit he maintains without respite for 6 films. Clearly he is homosexual but his circuitry refuses to acknowledge this (it recognises binary though) and consequently he is suffering from a crisis of sexual identity, which makes him socially awkward and generally uptight. R2-D2 just beeps. The original novel was written in the first person singular from R2’s perspective, which is why it didn’t sell very well.
Princess Leia is now seen downloading some tunes from her USB into R2-D2, before running away at the sight of C-3PO (like he’s actually scary) and then getting captured by the film’s ultimate bastard, Darth Vader.
Now here’s a complex character amongst all the 2-dimensional ones. So complex in fact that 5 actors have to play him over the two trilogies of films, including a creepy brat of a kid, Hayden Christensen (so wooden he uses Pledge as a deodorant), the Green Cross Code Man, the Lion King’s dad and finally some innocuously avuncular-looking Johnny Morriss type who’d make a great Worther’s Original advert star if it wasn’t for the horror-film scarring to his head.
The scene shifts to Tunisia, where the two robot droids have landed and are captured by some of the dirtiest children you’ve ever seen, even smellier-looking than a kid I went to school with who we called Flump. This parentless band of shabby juveniles is named after the film which George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had been planning to work on together previous to this, called Jaw-Wars. (Artistic differences caused a rift and they went their separate ways until teaming up later to write the script for a Han Solo spin-off sit-com.)
The droids are then sold to Luke Skywalker’s uncle. They live on a moisture farm, which is like a real farm but without trampled cow shit and a suspicion of incest. Water is a rare commodity in this part of Tunisia, although you wouldn’t think it from the amount Aunt Beru uses to boil her vegetables in the next scene.
Luke discovers Princess Leia’s music downloads inside R2-D2, who then runs off (as far as that is possible with wheels that go a top speed of 2 mph) to find his favourite English actor, Sir Lawrence Olivier. Instead, he has to make do with Alec Guinness who suggests that they all go and rescue this Princess because she sounds hot. She isn’t, but that’s not the point; Luke is pissed off living on a moisture farm in the arse end of beyond, as you would be, and thinks fuck it, why not?
They drive into town, play a trick on some dumb Stormtroopers and find a pub. Luke gets ID’d as he looks about 17 and acts even younger, so Alec Guinness take out one of those fluorescent strip-lighting bulbs and burns off some ugly bastard’s arm. He then persuades a mini-cab driver called Han Solo to take them to Alderaan, Princess Leia’s home planet. Obviously, he should have rung a proper cab firm, because there’s no guarantee that this Han Solo is even insured to drive a spaceship. Furthermore and rather disconcertingly, Han’s BFF is a growling bear (or a bare growler, one or the other) named Chewie, a bit like the sweets. Chewbacca (his full name) really challenges the audience’s ability to suspend its disbelief, because in reality an animal that hairy would either have a prominent pair of pink buttocks protruding from beneath its fur or it’d have dry, hardened clagnets of shit stuck to the back of its thighs.
This motley crew of misfits then fly out of Tunisia’s main airport towards what remains of Alderaan. The government had actually blown up the planet earlier in the film as an austerity measure and tortured Princess Leia with one of those old globe-shaped security cameras you used to get in Boots, only with needles sticking out of it.
On the flight, Alec Guinness converts the impressionable young Luke to the same religious cult of which he and Luke’s dad were members. He basically tells some lies to Luke about the father he never knew, because it’s Darth Vader and well, how do you tell a kid his Dad’s such a horrible cunt?
Anyway, they get sucked into the government’s huge sports complex, the Death Star, which was built for the Galactic Olympics and cost a bloody fortune, but at least its huge planet-destroying laser gun works. Once inside our band of heroes split up to look for Princess Leia, thinking that the first to find her gets to ask her out. C-3PO is not interested, for several reasons, but Luke is. Luckily he never ends up shagging her; although with that farming background he probably wouldn’t have flinched to discover later that she’s his sister.
After some running around and shooting lasers they manage to get her back to the spaceship, but Alec Guinness has wandered away to turn off the Death Star’s sucky device and finds himself confronted by Darth Vader. They both take out their fluorescent strip-lighting bulbs and have a sword fight. By the standards of any such contest, this would never have been worth the £15 SKY charged for Pay-per-view. Audley Harrison dances better than this. In the end, Darth Vader wins because Alec Guinness lets him, but clearly disappears down a trap door in the floor-tiles. In his place, wearing his brown hoody and holding his bulb is Debbie McGee. Darth Vader thinks to himself WTF?
The others escape and fly off to the rebel base. The rebels are essentially an anti-government organisation, a bit like UK Uncut, but with X-Wing fighters. They have a space battle with government troops in Thai-fighters, which are smaller and a little spicey. In the end, Luke blows up the Death Star and Darth Vader escapes vowing to build an even bigger one once they’ve raised enough taxes to do so.
The film ends with everyone getting a pat on the back, except Chewbacca, who has a pat on his arse. A dry, hardened Wookie pat.
The rest of you, strap on your Millennium Falcon seat beats and prepare to be taken into Hyper-farce. Both of you.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, but coincidentally one with humanoid life forms, the same political concepts as Earth and common use of the English language (my God those Victorian missionaries got everywhere didn’t they)...
(cue music)
Star Wars opens with these two robots being shot at by laser guns. Your first thought is that the technology is pretty bloody advanced for 1977, until you realise that the guns don’t shoot straight. C-3PO and R2-D2 walk through the cross-fire and don’t even get hit. C-3PO commences his bleating and belly-aching, a galling habit he maintains without respite for 6 films. Clearly he is homosexual but his circuitry refuses to acknowledge this (it recognises binary though) and consequently he is suffering from a crisis of sexual identity, which makes him socially awkward and generally uptight. R2-D2 just beeps. The original novel was written in the first person singular from R2’s perspective, which is why it didn’t sell very well.
Princess Leia is now seen downloading some tunes from her USB into R2-D2, before running away at the sight of C-3PO (like he’s actually scary) and then getting captured by the film’s ultimate bastard, Darth Vader.
Now here’s a complex character amongst all the 2-dimensional ones. So complex in fact that 5 actors have to play him over the two trilogies of films, including a creepy brat of a kid, Hayden Christensen (so wooden he uses Pledge as a deodorant), the Green Cross Code Man, the Lion King’s dad and finally some innocuously avuncular-looking Johnny Morriss type who’d make a great Worther’s Original advert star if it wasn’t for the horror-film scarring to his head.
The scene shifts to Tunisia, where the two robot droids have landed and are captured by some of the dirtiest children you’ve ever seen, even smellier-looking than a kid I went to school with who we called Flump. This parentless band of shabby juveniles is named after the film which George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had been planning to work on together previous to this, called Jaw-Wars. (Artistic differences caused a rift and they went their separate ways until teaming up later to write the script for a Han Solo spin-off sit-com.)
The droids are then sold to Luke Skywalker’s uncle. They live on a moisture farm, which is like a real farm but without trampled cow shit and a suspicion of incest. Water is a rare commodity in this part of Tunisia, although you wouldn’t think it from the amount Aunt Beru uses to boil her vegetables in the next scene.
Luke discovers Princess Leia’s music downloads inside R2-D2, who then runs off (as far as that is possible with wheels that go a top speed of 2 mph) to find his favourite English actor, Sir Lawrence Olivier. Instead, he has to make do with Alec Guinness who suggests that they all go and rescue this Princess because she sounds hot. She isn’t, but that’s not the point; Luke is pissed off living on a moisture farm in the arse end of beyond, as you would be, and thinks fuck it, why not?
They drive into town, play a trick on some dumb Stormtroopers and find a pub. Luke gets ID’d as he looks about 17 and acts even younger, so Alec Guinness take out one of those fluorescent strip-lighting bulbs and burns off some ugly bastard’s arm. He then persuades a mini-cab driver called Han Solo to take them to Alderaan, Princess Leia’s home planet. Obviously, he should have rung a proper cab firm, because there’s no guarantee that this Han Solo is even insured to drive a spaceship. Furthermore and rather disconcertingly, Han’s BFF is a growling bear (or a bare growler, one or the other) named Chewie, a bit like the sweets. Chewbacca (his full name) really challenges the audience’s ability to suspend its disbelief, because in reality an animal that hairy would either have a prominent pair of pink buttocks protruding from beneath its fur or it’d have dry, hardened clagnets of shit stuck to the back of its thighs.
This motley crew of misfits then fly out of Tunisia’s main airport towards what remains of Alderaan. The government had actually blown up the planet earlier in the film as an austerity measure and tortured Princess Leia with one of those old globe-shaped security cameras you used to get in Boots, only with needles sticking out of it.
On the flight, Alec Guinness converts the impressionable young Luke to the same religious cult of which he and Luke’s dad were members. He basically tells some lies to Luke about the father he never knew, because it’s Darth Vader and well, how do you tell a kid his Dad’s such a horrible cunt?
Anyway, they get sucked into the government’s huge sports complex, the Death Star, which was built for the Galactic Olympics and cost a bloody fortune, but at least its huge planet-destroying laser gun works. Once inside our band of heroes split up to look for Princess Leia, thinking that the first to find her gets to ask her out. C-3PO is not interested, for several reasons, but Luke is. Luckily he never ends up shagging her; although with that farming background he probably wouldn’t have flinched to discover later that she’s his sister.
After some running around and shooting lasers they manage to get her back to the spaceship, but Alec Guinness has wandered away to turn off the Death Star’s sucky device and finds himself confronted by Darth Vader. They both take out their fluorescent strip-lighting bulbs and have a sword fight. By the standards of any such contest, this would never have been worth the £15 SKY charged for Pay-per-view. Audley Harrison dances better than this. In the end, Darth Vader wins because Alec Guinness lets him, but clearly disappears down a trap door in the floor-tiles. In his place, wearing his brown hoody and holding his bulb is Debbie McGee. Darth Vader thinks to himself WTF?
The others escape and fly off to the rebel base. The rebels are essentially an anti-government organisation, a bit like UK Uncut, but with X-Wing fighters. They have a space battle with government troops in Thai-fighters, which are smaller and a little spicey. In the end, Luke blows up the Death Star and Darth Vader escapes vowing to build an even bigger one once they’ve raised enough taxes to do so.
The film ends with everyone getting a pat on the back, except Chewbacca, who has a pat on his arse. A dry, hardened Wookie pat.
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Bastards that Piss on your Bonfires
You might have noticed that like most people I vacillate between doggy-paddling in the quicksand of morose cynicism and shuffling my soul in bouts of pants-soaking delight. For all that I lace my glass of dislike with a vial of vicious self-righteous disgust and hostility, when I like something a lot, I LOVE it. And that means that anyone who spoils my beautiful and gleeful moments of adoration should have all of their human rights suspended just long enough for me to exact revenge with the sort of fury and rage that would make the gods of ancient Greece feel slightly uncomfortable to witness.
This is why I refuse to go to the cinema. I like to immerse myself in a film. Without distraction. But cinemas INVITE distraction. They market themselves at the Pavlov’s Dogs section of society, who brainlessly allow themselves to be conditioned into associating the watching of a film with the desire to eat and drink. It’s never lunch time or dinner time and yet the moron-neurons are ignited by the sight of hilariously over-priced and over-sized buckets of popcorn and carbonated kids’ pop in the foyer; so they roll up with their “Fleece me and Feed Me – I’m a Flid” faces on, purchase a wholesaler’s lorry-load of crap and set up snack-camp in the auditorium.
Ironically, the pre-film trailers and information announcements include a plea to turn off your mobile in case it disturbs the enjoyment of others. After all, you wouldn’t want to punctuate the crunching and slurping and chewing and general fidgety fucking about of the thoughtless cinema snack-fiends with the chiming of a text, would you?
Fortunately, I only love a few films and can usually wait many months before one that I want to see appears on Sky Box Office and can be viewed without the pernicious penetration of my personal space by some popcorn-hoovering prick sitting a straw’s length from me.
But with music, it’s a whole different matter. I don’t play it at home unless the family are out, because Mrs Bastard and Child 2 (female variety) are both likely to walk into the lounge and slice through my soul-swept trance of “at-oneness-with-the-universe” with a casual nuke-bomb of a question such as, “What’s THIS?” Which really means “What’s this shit?” At that very moment my universe collapses, I can listen to no more and I want to set fire to all my CDs in sulky protest at this cold stabbing of my spirit.
So, I listen to my CDs in the car. And even though the roads are populated by the same breed of self-absorbed selfish cunts as cinemas, my encounters with them might be equally unsettling but they are at least usually fleeting. Moreover, I tend to enjoy recompense through some petty method of counter-irritating the bastards of the road in a way that is not possible with the bastards of the cinema. So, I enjoy and LOVE listening to my music in the car; and by MY music I mean the CD I have chosen to play and NOT the radio. NEVER the radio. That’s like inviting the wankers in, that is.
The problem is that when you become completely caught up in the music of a particular band or artist and you go to see them in concert, you want... sorry, “I” want... to listen to them with the same undisturbed concentration as I do in the car. I admit, I AM being a little precious here. But my favourite artists are not the ones who belt out sing-a-long anthems in football stadia, nor are they the ones who invite you to SAY YEAH and WAVE YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR or even sing-a-long. (OK, singing along to some tunes is appropriate.) No, the gigs I end up at are in small or middle sized venues and usually have a smattering of quieter ballads that wrench at your heart with an agonizing beauty...
Unless some cunt is talking.
What is it with people who talk through quiet songs at gigs? GO TO THE FUCKING PUB AND TALK, YOU SOCIALLY UNAWARE RETARDS!
Now, I’m quite aware that I must be coming across ever so slightly misanthropic. I’m not. I like people. But I kind of want the bastards nowhere near me when I’m trying to enjoy myself. So, if anyone knows of a restaurant with 10 metre gaps between tables, a beach with a “first-on-only-on” rule, a pub with a “no wankers” sign outside or a tourist attraction with no tourists, then please tell me where it is.
And I’ll go along with some crisps and a beer and sit there shouting YEAH with my hands in the air.
This is why I refuse to go to the cinema. I like to immerse myself in a film. Without distraction. But cinemas INVITE distraction. They market themselves at the Pavlov’s Dogs section of society, who brainlessly allow themselves to be conditioned into associating the watching of a film with the desire to eat and drink. It’s never lunch time or dinner time and yet the moron-neurons are ignited by the sight of hilariously over-priced and over-sized buckets of popcorn and carbonated kids’ pop in the foyer; so they roll up with their “Fleece me and Feed Me – I’m a Flid” faces on, purchase a wholesaler’s lorry-load of crap and set up snack-camp in the auditorium.
Ironically, the pre-film trailers and information announcements include a plea to turn off your mobile in case it disturbs the enjoyment of others. After all, you wouldn’t want to punctuate the crunching and slurping and chewing and general fidgety fucking about of the thoughtless cinema snack-fiends with the chiming of a text, would you?
Fortunately, I only love a few films and can usually wait many months before one that I want to see appears on Sky Box Office and can be viewed without the pernicious penetration of my personal space by some popcorn-hoovering prick sitting a straw’s length from me.
But with music, it’s a whole different matter. I don’t play it at home unless the family are out, because Mrs Bastard and Child 2 (female variety) are both likely to walk into the lounge and slice through my soul-swept trance of “at-oneness-with-the-universe” with a casual nuke-bomb of a question such as, “What’s THIS?” Which really means “What’s this shit?” At that very moment my universe collapses, I can listen to no more and I want to set fire to all my CDs in sulky protest at this cold stabbing of my spirit.
So, I listen to my CDs in the car. And even though the roads are populated by the same breed of self-absorbed selfish cunts as cinemas, my encounters with them might be equally unsettling but they are at least usually fleeting. Moreover, I tend to enjoy recompense through some petty method of counter-irritating the bastards of the road in a way that is not possible with the bastards of the cinema. So, I enjoy and LOVE listening to my music in the car; and by MY music I mean the CD I have chosen to play and NOT the radio. NEVER the radio. That’s like inviting the wankers in, that is.
The problem is that when you become completely caught up in the music of a particular band or artist and you go to see them in concert, you want... sorry, “I” want... to listen to them with the same undisturbed concentration as I do in the car. I admit, I AM being a little precious here. But my favourite artists are not the ones who belt out sing-a-long anthems in football stadia, nor are they the ones who invite you to SAY YEAH and WAVE YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR or even sing-a-long. (OK, singing along to some tunes is appropriate.) No, the gigs I end up at are in small or middle sized venues and usually have a smattering of quieter ballads that wrench at your heart with an agonizing beauty...
Unless some cunt is talking.
What is it with people who talk through quiet songs at gigs? GO TO THE FUCKING PUB AND TALK, YOU SOCIALLY UNAWARE RETARDS!
Now, I’m quite aware that I must be coming across ever so slightly misanthropic. I’m not. I like people. But I kind of want the bastards nowhere near me when I’m trying to enjoy myself. So, if anyone knows of a restaurant with 10 metre gaps between tables, a beach with a “first-on-only-on” rule, a pub with a “no wankers” sign outside or a tourist attraction with no tourists, then please tell me where it is.
And I’ll go along with some crisps and a beer and sit there shouting YEAH with my hands in the air.
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
1970’s Working-class treats
It was that decade in which the generation that grew up never having it so good, sought some mild middle-class comforts for their shaggy-haired, flared-jeans-clad kids (like me) and in the process instilled a sense of low expectation in regard to the concept of luxury.
Tinned fruit salad for instance. The thrill of eating just one of the meagre number of cherries you’d find in a tin of fruit salad was beyond any experience I’ve had since from Tesco’s Finest range. See, I expect that to be good. But the sheer scarcity of cherries in any tin (relative to grapes) bestowed on that product a special character that you just cannot recreate in our disgustingly opulent supermarket aisles these days.
The gradual integration of “dessert” into our routine tea-time meals was a defining feature of the period. Fuck Jamie Mockney-Twat Dick-Face Oliver, I was cooking while he was still scooping the shit out of his own nappy and eating it. I handled an electric hand-whisk like Hurricane Higgins handled a snooker cue, and I could conjure up ANY Angel Delight from the whole range of four flavours. If Dad won on the horses that week, Mum might even let me open the fruit salad and use the sole cherry to decorate this dessert. (If he lost, we’d make do with a few Galaxy buttons.)
Some people have likened Primula cheese spread in a tube to chilled smegma. But when they started adding bits of ham to this product, then JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH that was it for my boring old crisp sandwiches at school, I was having cheese spread AND ham from ONE tube in my Mother’s Pride every day for the next five years.
As for drinks, Christmas always provided an occasion to break out the treats. Aged about 7 or 8, I’d knock back a whole BabySham (which came in wonderful bottle-shaped glass thimbles) and a glass of Advocaat and lemonade. A Snowball may have looked like whipped-up phlegm and jizz, but it was the TASTE OF CHRISTMAS. Not even Cresta’s range of pop from the milkman could beat that.
But you didn’t need to wait for Christmas to enjoy a Lucozade, you just had to wait until you were ill. In those days, it wasn’t a recreational drink. It was medicinal. And the bottles were mysteriously housed within a film of frustratingly sticky orange plastic wrapping, which so pissed you off that you just had to finish the whole bottle as your mum was having none of that nonsense of opening and closing it and getting increasingly sticky at each attempt.
These were the treats of the kitchen, compensating for the fact that it was only on your caravan holiday that you got to eat out in a restaurant and even then it was always highlighted by your dad that the gammon and chips was the most reasonably priced at £1.50 a plate, hint hint.
Mum and dad had their own treats, their own moments of consumerist infidelity. True, they needed an ashtray and a large one at that (or else they’d have to stand up during The Duchess of Duke Street to empty it) but did they really have to buy an ashtray STAND to put alongside the sofa? And as much as it got good use, a cigarette lighter that was the size and weight of an adult’s bowling ball was perhaps rather decadent and impractical. But then we lived in a house with a waste disposal unit. We had all the fucking mod cons.
And our car had a tape player. Not that my parents owned more than about three tapes and each of these would have been chewed up in it, because every tape player chewed tapes at some point. Luckily the seatbelt laws allowed one of the kids to climb through from the back seat and deal with this problem. My first tape was the Baron Knights. A comedy treat that was.
And on that note, I’d like to say to any of you Billy Two Shits Big Bollocks who have just gone out and bought some new iphone 4S or whatever it is you’re being fisted for, you’ve been spoilt to the point of cuntdom and you’ll never see the beauty or feel the joy in a Kit Kat that they’ve forgotten to put the wafer in. I pity you.
Tinned fruit salad for instance. The thrill of eating just one of the meagre number of cherries you’d find in a tin of fruit salad was beyond any experience I’ve had since from Tesco’s Finest range. See, I expect that to be good. But the sheer scarcity of cherries in any tin (relative to grapes) bestowed on that product a special character that you just cannot recreate in our disgustingly opulent supermarket aisles these days.
The gradual integration of “dessert” into our routine tea-time meals was a defining feature of the period. Fuck Jamie Mockney-Twat Dick-Face Oliver, I was cooking while he was still scooping the shit out of his own nappy and eating it. I handled an electric hand-whisk like Hurricane Higgins handled a snooker cue, and I could conjure up ANY Angel Delight from the whole range of four flavours. If Dad won on the horses that week, Mum might even let me open the fruit salad and use the sole cherry to decorate this dessert. (If he lost, we’d make do with a few Galaxy buttons.)
Some people have likened Primula cheese spread in a tube to chilled smegma. But when they started adding bits of ham to this product, then JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH that was it for my boring old crisp sandwiches at school, I was having cheese spread AND ham from ONE tube in my Mother’s Pride every day for the next five years.
As for drinks, Christmas always provided an occasion to break out the treats. Aged about 7 or 8, I’d knock back a whole BabySham (which came in wonderful bottle-shaped glass thimbles) and a glass of Advocaat and lemonade. A Snowball may have looked like whipped-up phlegm and jizz, but it was the TASTE OF CHRISTMAS. Not even Cresta’s range of pop from the milkman could beat that.
But you didn’t need to wait for Christmas to enjoy a Lucozade, you just had to wait until you were ill. In those days, it wasn’t a recreational drink. It was medicinal. And the bottles were mysteriously housed within a film of frustratingly sticky orange plastic wrapping, which so pissed you off that you just had to finish the whole bottle as your mum was having none of that nonsense of opening and closing it and getting increasingly sticky at each attempt.
These were the treats of the kitchen, compensating for the fact that it was only on your caravan holiday that you got to eat out in a restaurant and even then it was always highlighted by your dad that the gammon and chips was the most reasonably priced at £1.50 a plate, hint hint.
Mum and dad had their own treats, their own moments of consumerist infidelity. True, they needed an ashtray and a large one at that (or else they’d have to stand up during The Duchess of Duke Street to empty it) but did they really have to buy an ashtray STAND to put alongside the sofa? And as much as it got good use, a cigarette lighter that was the size and weight of an adult’s bowling ball was perhaps rather decadent and impractical. But then we lived in a house with a waste disposal unit. We had all the fucking mod cons.
And our car had a tape player. Not that my parents owned more than about three tapes and each of these would have been chewed up in it, because every tape player chewed tapes at some point. Luckily the seatbelt laws allowed one of the kids to climb through from the back seat and deal with this problem. My first tape was the Baron Knights. A comedy treat that was.
And on that note, I’d like to say to any of you Billy Two Shits Big Bollocks who have just gone out and bought some new iphone 4S or whatever it is you’re being fisted for, you’ve been spoilt to the point of cuntdom and you’ll never see the beauty or feel the joy in a Kit Kat that they’ve forgotten to put the wafer in. I pity you.
Sunday, 25 September 2011
Billy “Two Shits” Big Bollocks
We’ve all met one, haven’t we. Mr Big Bollocks. A man of wealth and tastelessness. If you ever say you’ve had a shit, he’ll say he’s had two. Mr Two-Shits requires a spacious car to house his obese ego. His car is better than your car, it’s faster and it’s worth more. Not that he paid the full amount, because he KNOWS SOMEONE and doesn’t get mugged off. He might not be able to squeeze this over-sized shiny cock-bucket into a parking space (which is why he parks diagonally across two, usually parent and child or disabled ones) but he’ll squeeze it into any conversation.
And these conversations tend to be one-way. You’re not more than his verbal wank-sock. He knows more than you about everything that’s he’s interested in and anything else is of no worth; so he’ll nurse no curiosity for what you have to say. Prices are his only conversational Viagra, so he’d only want to know what you’ve paid for something so that he can belittle you for owning a less expensive thing than he has or paying more than he did for the same thing because you don’t KNOW SOMEONE. Plus, he’s probably got the PROPER one and you haven’t.
Generally, he will know the cost of everything and the value of fuck-all. Because in his little piss-puddle of materialistic self-aggrandisement, the whole concept of values would drown like a sea leviathan in such shallow waters. Value is also statistical. He’ll bark numbers at you like an episode of Sesame Street. How many people he manages, how much he earns, how many other measures of cock-substitute THINGS he has a mountainous surplus of.
With the aesthetic appreciation of an arid SHIT-BRICK, he will own the biggest flat-screen wall-mounted surround-sound fucking full of do-dahs telly box going and he will watch NOTHING on it, because he’s always out making money, working hard and playing hard, like a cunt from a manly deodorant advert. Whatever obscenely costly gadget-infested music player he owns, he will play his Coldplay and Lighthouse Family downloads on; because he is so barren of musical taste that only something so insipidly vacuous but stylishly crisp and emotionless could provide the wallpaper to his life. Every other album he downloads is a greatest hits compilation.
You bullied him at school and so it’s all your fault. Now, get out of the fast lane, because he’s topping 100, on his mobile and tailgating you like his Land Cruiser’s about to sodomise the boot of your inferior existence.
And these conversations tend to be one-way. You’re not more than his verbal wank-sock. He knows more than you about everything that’s he’s interested in and anything else is of no worth; so he’ll nurse no curiosity for what you have to say. Prices are his only conversational Viagra, so he’d only want to know what you’ve paid for something so that he can belittle you for owning a less expensive thing than he has or paying more than he did for the same thing because you don’t KNOW SOMEONE. Plus, he’s probably got the PROPER one and you haven’t.
Generally, he will know the cost of everything and the value of fuck-all. Because in his little piss-puddle of materialistic self-aggrandisement, the whole concept of values would drown like a sea leviathan in such shallow waters. Value is also statistical. He’ll bark numbers at you like an episode of Sesame Street. How many people he manages, how much he earns, how many other measures of cock-substitute THINGS he has a mountainous surplus of.
With the aesthetic appreciation of an arid SHIT-BRICK, he will own the biggest flat-screen wall-mounted surround-sound fucking full of do-dahs telly box going and he will watch NOTHING on it, because he’s always out making money, working hard and playing hard, like a cunt from a manly deodorant advert. Whatever obscenely costly gadget-infested music player he owns, he will play his Coldplay and Lighthouse Family downloads on; because he is so barren of musical taste that only something so insipidly vacuous but stylishly crisp and emotionless could provide the wallpaper to his life. Every other album he downloads is a greatest hits compilation.
You bullied him at school and so it’s all your fault. Now, get out of the fast lane, because he’s topping 100, on his mobile and tailgating you like his Land Cruiser’s about to sodomise the boot of your inferior existence.
Saturday, 10 September 2011
Public Toilets, Peer Pressure, Poo, Piss and Penises
One of the many (two) suits I wear to work is a kind of light grey. It is almost impossible to negotiate a piss without at least one wayward drop being conspicuously blotted up by the material around my flies and forcing me to spend a minute in a limbo dancer’s pose beneath the hand drier to avoid any subsequent public disgust and personal humiliation.
This situation would be worse if I wasn’t more disposed towards using a trap rather than a urinal. However, there’s an unwritten law for men that demands that cubicles exist purely to cater for number two type ablutions and if all you need is a tinkle, then you use the urinal. If you don’t, the logical and totally just assumption is that you have a small penis.
What kind of retarded logic creates a hypothesis claiming that the reluctance to stand alongside other blokes with everyone’s cock out is proof of an admission of having a walnut whip shaped one-incher buried out of sight in your pubic forest? Oh, you’ve gone for a piss in the cubicle? You don’t want us to see your willy? Why’s that? Not that anyone looks, but the corner of your eye tells you straight away when someone’s unleashed a beast and yes it does cause you to change your angle of approach a little in the opposite direction so as to tacitly relay the message to your well-endowed urinal neighbour that the only reason why he can’t see yours out of the corner of HIS eye is because you’re stood at 30 degrees to his own line of fire.
Urinals ensure that you walk away with a generous sprinkling of splash-back on the front of your trousers. Visible or not, it’s there. So, I opt to piss in public as I would do so at home, stood astride a toilet bowl. And in case anyone hears the heavy trinkling noise that exposes the fact that I haven’t gone inside for a poo, I finish up by blowing my nose loudly as if to suggest that I would have used a urinal but for the fact that I needed some tissue paper.
Sometimes you don’t have the option of privately pissing and so you have to join the urinal throng. Some toilets are designed to afford adequate privacy by means of porcelain barriers between the wall-mounted bowls. This I would say is imperative for public lavs with three urinal spaces, just in case you end up alone with a middle-urinal freak, that spatially unaware pisser who’ll never opt for an end-urinal when all three are available.
I’m not sure which are worse out of those never-cleaned council public bogs you’d find in parks or high streets or those sparkling clean ones in expensive bars that look like the set from a toilet bleach advert and always come equipped with an assistant who offers to do everything for you bar shaking your cock post-pee, before hovering his bowl of lollipops under your nose hopeful of a quid. (Who ever thought that the first thing you’d want after a piss is a lolly or a boiled sweet?) At least in those toilets, when you do need to move into 2nd gear and drop your trousers in a cubicle, they don’t soak up a gallon of urine from the floor by the time you’ve passed the motion.
So I tend to avoid the high street gents’ lavatories, partly for that reason and partly because I have no desire to ring any mobile number “for cock.” I might be more tempted to step inside the sliding door of a modern electronic port-a-loo for single users, but I’ve always suspected that they are really TARDIS’s and who knows where or when I’d step out to afterwards.
But toilets can form part of our own nostalgic personal histories. In the school I first worked in, the male staff toilet had a bogey wall above the urinals. Someone started it and so everyone felt subconsciously inclined to add to it. A bit like the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, but for bogeys.
Also, I feel affectionately drawn towards the one in the primary school that I attended as a kid, because of the contests we’d have to see who could piss the highest up the wall. When I say “drawn towards” I do mean in memory rather than reality. My status as an ex-pupil has not allowed me access to that same toilet, which is a shame as I feel confident of beating my own record now; but you know how lacking in empathy head teachers and police are when you just wander into a school and make a beeline for the boys toilet.
This situation would be worse if I wasn’t more disposed towards using a trap rather than a urinal. However, there’s an unwritten law for men that demands that cubicles exist purely to cater for number two type ablutions and if all you need is a tinkle, then you use the urinal. If you don’t, the logical and totally just assumption is that you have a small penis.
What kind of retarded logic creates a hypothesis claiming that the reluctance to stand alongside other blokes with everyone’s cock out is proof of an admission of having a walnut whip shaped one-incher buried out of sight in your pubic forest? Oh, you’ve gone for a piss in the cubicle? You don’t want us to see your willy? Why’s that? Not that anyone looks, but the corner of your eye tells you straight away when someone’s unleashed a beast and yes it does cause you to change your angle of approach a little in the opposite direction so as to tacitly relay the message to your well-endowed urinal neighbour that the only reason why he can’t see yours out of the corner of HIS eye is because you’re stood at 30 degrees to his own line of fire.
Urinals ensure that you walk away with a generous sprinkling of splash-back on the front of your trousers. Visible or not, it’s there. So, I opt to piss in public as I would do so at home, stood astride a toilet bowl. And in case anyone hears the heavy trinkling noise that exposes the fact that I haven’t gone inside for a poo, I finish up by blowing my nose loudly as if to suggest that I would have used a urinal but for the fact that I needed some tissue paper.
Sometimes you don’t have the option of privately pissing and so you have to join the urinal throng. Some toilets are designed to afford adequate privacy by means of porcelain barriers between the wall-mounted bowls. This I would say is imperative for public lavs with three urinal spaces, just in case you end up alone with a middle-urinal freak, that spatially unaware pisser who’ll never opt for an end-urinal when all three are available.
I’m not sure which are worse out of those never-cleaned council public bogs you’d find in parks or high streets or those sparkling clean ones in expensive bars that look like the set from a toilet bleach advert and always come equipped with an assistant who offers to do everything for you bar shaking your cock post-pee, before hovering his bowl of lollipops under your nose hopeful of a quid. (Who ever thought that the first thing you’d want after a piss is a lolly or a boiled sweet?) At least in those toilets, when you do need to move into 2nd gear and drop your trousers in a cubicle, they don’t soak up a gallon of urine from the floor by the time you’ve passed the motion.
So I tend to avoid the high street gents’ lavatories, partly for that reason and partly because I have no desire to ring any mobile number “for cock.” I might be more tempted to step inside the sliding door of a modern electronic port-a-loo for single users, but I’ve always suspected that they are really TARDIS’s and who knows where or when I’d step out to afterwards.
But toilets can form part of our own nostalgic personal histories. In the school I first worked in, the male staff toilet had a bogey wall above the urinals. Someone started it and so everyone felt subconsciously inclined to add to it. A bit like the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, but for bogeys.
Also, I feel affectionately drawn towards the one in the primary school that I attended as a kid, because of the contests we’d have to see who could piss the highest up the wall. When I say “drawn towards” I do mean in memory rather than reality. My status as an ex-pupil has not allowed me access to that same toilet, which is a shame as I feel confident of beating my own record now; but you know how lacking in empathy head teachers and police are when you just wander into a school and make a beeline for the boys toilet.
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