Kahunas

There are times when life is out to mince your balls.

If life is nice then it will tie you down to a table, arms outstretched, legs wide apart and will monologue at great length before activating the laser beam that will surely part your balls like peas ripped from a pod. It will talk to you and tell you why it is doing this. Why it has this grudge against you that it needs to exorcise via excessive singeing of your ball sack.

If life is malicious and feeling particularly nasty it will give you no warning whatsoever. You'll be going about your business as usual - perhaps a walk to the shops, perhaps filing a deadly dull report at work - when suddenly some kind of metallic gelding device will leap up at you from the shadows and attempt to remove your meat and two veg in a manner reminiscent of that wince inducing scene from Ice Pirates (kudos if any of you (a) ever saw that film and (b) actually remember it).

There are only two ways to react when life is set on claiming your kahunas as some kind of weird sports trophy.

You can either (a) buy kevlar underpants, walk around with your hands placed constantly over your crotch and look like you have a bad case of the crabs.

Or you can (b) just grow a much bigger pair of balls.

B it is then.

You Know You’ve Been Watching Too Much Disney Pixar When...

You start rating the music in Ice Age 2 and start fancying Elastigirl from The Incredibles.

Our youngest is at that age where he is discovering the joy of movies. Or to put it more accurately rediscovering the joy of the same movie over and over again.

He goes through spells where the same DVD is a la mode for entire weekends at a time. This is interminable when the DVD happens to be Thomas The Tank Engine or Barney The Purple Dinosaur but thankfully he’s quite discerning about what films he wants to watch.

Hence I am now surprisingly well versed in the best that Disney Pixar studios have to offer. I can recount entire swathes of script from all the Toy Story movies, Ice Age and The Incredibles.

More scarily I am starting to analyse them, score them on plot and character development, take them to task on their ethical content. I am getting to the point where I am taking them far too seriously.

I am getting to the point where I am loving them and deeply respecting the script writers and the story-boarders. And the composers.

Ice Age 2 has, I think, one of the best music scores ever. It’s brilliant in the same way that Gustav Holst’s Jupiter is brilliant and for much the same reason. The music is uplifting and jolly but without being frivolous and grating. It is rich in emotional range and spirit. I could quite happily listen to it all day long and highly recommend you all give it a go.

All this from a kid’s cartoon.

More worryingly though I am finding that Elastigirl from The Incredibles is one of the sexiest cartoon characters ever created. As Mr Incredible himself says; she is the perfect woman. I mean, just think about it – this is a woman who can stretch herself into any position. The mind just boggles. And plainly there has been a lot of mind boggling going on out there because when I searched Google for a suitable image of Elastigirl I was presented with a whole array of homemade porno pics of said Elastigirl.

Elastigirl legs akimbo.

Elastigirl contorting herself into positions that a gynaecologist would consider obscene (but possibly helpful).

Elastigirl displaying parts of her anatomy that the guys at Disney Pixar had probably never even dreamt of let alone drawn.

Hey, hey, come back, come back – you can check out Google later after you’ve finished reading! Those pics ain’t going anywhere, I promise you. Geez.

Anyway, it got me thinking. Is it a bit too weird to fancy a cartoon character? Is it only guys that do this?

Because I’m very aware that for a lot of guys their first boyhood crush was probably on Daphne from Scooby-Doo. Sure she was a little vacuous, too much of a Valley Girl for her own good, but you just knew she’d get down and dirty behind the sand dunes at a beach-front tiki party and do things for Scooby snacks that even the great Scooby Doo himself would baulk at.

Jinkies!

And then, somewhere in my mind, I seem to recall another cartoon diva that was a big feature of my childhood. Does anyone remember The Arabian Knights? I think it was one of the regular cartoons on The Banana Splits. I’m sure there was an Arabian girl character on there that used to float my pre-pubescent boat. I seem to recall genie trousers, exposed mid-riff and a veil... but maybe I’m making that up or even confusing it with something else?

I daren’t Google it. After the Elastigirl interpretations I’m not sure my heart could take it...

But... er... maybe one little peak couldn't hurt, eh? Just one?

Nerf Gas

Don’t mistake me. I hate those Nerf gun adverts on TV.

You know the ones. A group of all American teens (the wrong side of 16) who aren’t quite emotionally mature enough to dispense with the fantasy of being Bruce Willis in Die Hard, who rampage over an unbelievably clean urban landscape playing Nerf tag with their pump-action, fast loading Nerf guns and speaking like movie trailer voice-overs.

“You’re going down!”

“I’m locked and loaded!”

“Take that with my Nerf telescopic sniper rifle!”

“Eat foam Velcro-tipped dart, towel-head!”

Yeah. That kind of thing. I hate those adverts. Really hate them. And the kids in them. Nerdy jocks with too much testosterone but not enough to put away their toy guns and get themselves a proper girlfriend. They really get on my Nerfs.

So it was with much trepidation that we bought a couple of Nerf dart guns for the boys. The eldest was going to a Nerf dart tag party and hence had to be appropriately tooled up. So my wife, Karen, who’s knowledge of toy weaponry is worryingly superior to my own did the deed via Amazon and within a couple of days we were the proud owners of two gleaming green and orange pump action Nerf assault rifles.

The boys – including the youngest – have barely stopped playing with them.

It is disconcerting to see a 3 year old wearing eye goggles and operating the pump action on his Nerf gun like a ‘Nam vet. More worrying to discover that he got his eye in very quickly and, though is content to fire at everything and nothing most of the time, can still shoot the balls off a gnat when he wants to. Even the eldest boy – usually capable at missing a barn door whilst inside the barn – has discovered hitherto untapped reserves of accuracy.

The guns feel and look... er, good. They make the holder feel instantly macho and empowered. And I hate to say that. Because I like to think of myself as a pacific kind of guy. Not particularly marshal. But even I took great delight in bouncing a Nerf dart off the back of my wife’s head at 8 metres. It was a fine shot and took account of gravity and wind speed and the erratic movement of my target.

Technically it was friendly fire but, hey, with those credentials maybe I could get a job with the UN?

Joking aside though, I can’t help but see this affinity that we have with weaponry as deeply sad. And troubling. I’d like to put it down to the sportsman’s simple joy of launching an object through the air and hitting an aimed for target – a test of skill, accuracy and judgement.

But it isn’t, is it?

It’s about power and prowess and machismo. And even 3 year olds get it. Even when half an hour later they’re snuggled up in front of the TV watching Waybuloo.

It makes me feel like Sarah Connor’s son in Terminator 2 when he sees kids playing with guns in the desert and says, “We’re not going to make it, are we?”

‘Cos even if you don’t buy toy guns and toy swords for your kids they’ll go out and find an appropriately shaped stick and pretend one into being. What do you do? Place a limit on their imagination?

Denying our affinity for violence and aggressive is dangerous. The way I see it, it needs to be confronted. Marshalled, controlled, given a safe and constructive outlet.

And I guess this is where products like the Nerf guns come in. And believe me this is not an endorsement or a review – just my observations.

The darts are foam and relatively harmless. The guns come with protective goggles and vests. The vests have target areas on them. The competitive element has been ramped up rather than the murderous (though you can never expunge it completely).It’s just a game with a capital G.

So maybe those all American teens will grow up to be balanced individuals who channel their aggression into paint balling weekends or clay pigeon shooting precisely because they embraced their aggression in controlled play?

It’s certainly better that than them going on the rampage at a school or a town centre somewhere near you with an Uzi and a shotgun.

But ultimately, who knows?

I just feel like I have hypothetical blood on my hands this morning and it doesn’t feel too nice.

We’re Dead Hard In Leamington Spa

We are, you know.

I know you lot think we’re a bunch of soft Midland’s Spa water drinking Andy-Pandy shandy makers but really we’re so hard we’d make Lenny McLean poop his gusset. If he were still alive that is (RIP The Governor).

Want proof?

Well, here are two recent real life slices of anecdotal evidence.

Slice 1) One day last week, returning to work after my lunchbreak in the sun, I approached my place of work with a little more than the usual sense of trepidation because there was a ruddy great fire juggler outside the building. Juggling with fire. Or fiery brands / sticks / skittles whatever those damned things are that jugglers like to keep up in the air in states of perpetual tedium. I mean, what is it with jugglers? Why do they always look so smug? What’s so damned great or even damned useful about juggling? What possible useful application can juggling ever have outside of a circus or a kid’s tea party? I mean if you had to keep your eye on three objects whilst standing still for 10 minutes you’d just put two of them down, if not all three or even just put them in a bag or on a tray.

But I digress.

Some young studo-punk was juggling. With fire. And had a little cap at his feet in which he was hoping to catch a few stray pound coins. Only his benefactors would have to be good shots because you couldn’t get within 5 metres of the guy due to the wall of flaming death that he was weaving about himself.

Apparently a copper had already approached him and “had a word” but seemingly had then left him to it making no arrest and offering no caution. It seems that juggling with fire on a public thoroughfare is perfectly legal.

And the juggler had shown good sense by pitching his human immolation act right in front of Leamington’s Spa water drinking fountain so he could, no doubt, douse himself with sparkling sulphuric water should he ever mistime a throw and find his fuse inadvertently lit.

And the good people of Leamington? How did they react?

They didn’t. I saw mum’s pushing toddlers in prams and pushchairs so close to the fire juggler that their kids must have gone home with a suntan very like the one Richard Dreyfuss got in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. And possibly smelling of barbecue accelerant.

That’s how hard we are in Leamington Spa.

Slice 2) This happened last night. Heading home from work, I happened to pass over Victoria Bridge and I saw two passersby gripping tight hold of a drunk who had already swung one leg over the bridge and was intent on throwing the other over along with his entire torso into the long drop down to the spuming River Leam far below. The only thing this guy was holding onto was his can of Special Brew. As I passed I heard one of the passersby trying to reason with him. Something along the lines of: “if you throw yourself over it’ll be other people who’ll have to tidy up the mess”.

Good on you, I thought. You can always turn someone away from thoughts of suicide by appealing to their innate OCD nature.

The drunk rolled his eyes a bit, looked at his beer can and replied, “I don’ wanna make a mess for nebuddy. I’ll jus’ finish me beer firs’ an’ then I’ll jump.”

That’s how hard we are in Leamington Spa: life is cheap but you never waste a good can of beer.

Leamington is on all main train and coach routes and sports some of the loveliest hotels in the country. Do come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.

Jessica Alba, Leona Lewis And Me

It seems that some people just can’t take no for an answer.

It seems that some people who have everything – fame, riches, pneumatic boobs and easy access to a plastic surgeon – just can’t accept that a little person like me can say no to them and mean it.

But I’m really not interested. I’ve been blanking their emails for months and months but still they keep coming.

But now they’re getting devious. Now they’re offering me weird deals on meds and pharmaceuticals. Things to improve my performance in bed.

I ask you – is there anything less attractive than someone trying to get you into bed by selling you 5000 blister packs of Viagra? I mean, come on? If I need that many why you trying to get me into bed in the first place?

But it seems people like Jessica Alba and Leona Lewis think that normal rules don’t apply to them. They think that volume will blind me to context and I’ll go along with it.

Not so. I’m not interested.

I’ve tried emailing them back. Tried saying I don’t want to hear from them ever again. But all that happens is that I get even more emails – all from different email addresses but all plainly from Jessica and Leona and other famous starlets ‘cos it clearly says so in the subject line. How many email addresses to these girls have? Do they spend all their time creating them? How do they find time to do all their singing and acting and shit like that when they’re emailing me every day trying to sell me condoms and sex toys and drugs with names I’ve never even heard off? If it was Charlie Sheen I could understand it – but Paris Hilton? Britney Spears?

It’s like they’re all spamming me.

Spamming me for sex.

And that just ain’t right. Its skanky and nasty and not in a good way either.

I confess I don’t know what to do about it. I’ve tried writing firm but polite letters to the agents of these famous people but all I get back is abuse and loads of legal bullshit from Greenberg Glusker. The gist of it is, Jessica Alba and Leona Lewis are all denying having anything to do with it.

They’re denying all knowledge.

Well, that’s plainly just a lame cop out.

They just don’t want the world to know that I’m rejecting their advances.

Well, screw you, Jessica [or rather, not]. I’m telling the world right here right now.

I do not want to have sex with you! Stop hassling me with your weird sex-drug emails! Get a life, girlfriend!

You ain’t all that. Talk to the hand.

P.S. But we could still do a deal on the Viagra if you were prepared to ship it in smaller amounts. Purely for experimental use, you understand? Ciao.

Salt And Vinegar

When you’re watching a Western and you see all those dust balls rolling across the main street just before the main gunfight kicks off, have you ever wondered where they all end up?

No? Well, they end up in my street.

Along with yellow foam-styrene chip cartons, McDonald’s milkshake containers and old copies of The Sport (which could very well become museum items over the coming years).

I tell you this so that you don’t think my street is so clean it looks like something out of Trumpton. (How come Mrs Honeywell’s yapping dogs never foul the pavement, eh? Where are her pooper-scoop and her little plastic shit bag?)

My street is just a messy street. The town planners, when laying out the residential housing grid in the 1950’s, inadvertently created a trash vortex that pulls in rubbish from miles away and dumps it in the gap between my hedge and next door’s garden wall.

Or at least this is what I thought. This is has been my long held belief for years.

But I was finally disabused of this belief last Friday.

Leaving my house I chanced to look across the road where I witnessed a man in his thirties finishing a packet of crisps. Now, given there are public bins not 100 yards away, you’d expect him to screw up the packet and dispose of it responsibly. Well, you would if you were an idealistic fool who think that people actually care about their immediate environment. If, like me, you have a cynical bent you wouldn’t be too surprised to see him screw up the packet and lob it onto the pavement. ‘Cos that’s just how the majority of people behave these days. Like scum.

But no. It seems there was a third option.

This surprisingly well dressed lout carefully flattened out his crisp packet and took considerable pains to slide it between the slats of a neighbour’s fence.

I couldn’t believe it.

I mean, it’s bad enough to throw your litter to the four winds – people do it unthinkingly all the time. But what kind of inconsiderate, thoughtless, selfish prick expends time and energy shoving his rubbish into and onto the property of someone he doesn’t know?

I know, I know. Bigger things are happening elsewhere. This is a small issue.

But I can’t help but think it is somehow representational. There seem to be more and more people around these days who go out of their way to cause problems for others. Not just causing problems accidentally for other people, but deliberately doing it. Planning it. Devising ways to do it. Doing it even when doing it is not even the easiest option.

And what did I do? Nothing. I gave him a hard stare, Paddington Bear style, enough to make him turn around and face me under the iron disapprobation of my censure. But like Paddington I merely felt like I was a lone 3D character in a world of animated 2-dimensional cut-outs, i.e. I was the odd one out in this scenario.

The odd one out for caring and being pissed off at what this guy had done.

I did consider removing the crisp packet and following this guy home and shoving the offending article somewhere prominent on his own property but, I’ll be honest, even though Brian Turner has revamped the menus at the local A&E I am not overly fond of hospital food.

And besides. Why expend all that energy? A good gust of wind and that damned crisp packet will end up behind my front hedge anyway. The world is still the world.

Nothing has really changed.

*Sigh*

I never did like Status Quo.

Gob

Eavesdropping is necessarily a snide pastime.

I don’t think I’ve ever eavesdropped on a single conversation and come away thinking, “Ooh, they’re lovely people – I wish they were in my friend’s network so I could get to know them better”.

Generally I come away shaking my head, sneering, laughing and quite often disgusted at the small minded, bigoted, malapropism-rich outpourings of my fellow man.

Of course, I’m quite willing to accept that maybe I am just a big snob per se and congenitally live in contempt of my fellow humans.

But that in no way invalidates my claim that eavesdropping inevitably positions those being eavesdropped upon well beneath the moral hobnailed boots of those doing the eavesdropping. It’s just human nature.

This being the case, I was walking quite innocently back to work after my lunchbreak yesterday afternoon when I stopped at a pedestrian crossing. While I waited for the lights to change in my favour two other pedestrians approached the lights behind me and waited at my back. Two young teenage girls, the ubiquitous mobile phone held out in their hands like a Ghostbuster PKE metre and their overly glossed lips pulled into pouts big enough to form the south facing wall of a bouncy castle.

“Fockin’ gaffa tape. Fockin’ gaffa tape. Bastard. I mean, look, that’s what he wants me to get. Fockin’ gaffa tape. Can you believe it? Bastard. Fockin’ gaffa tape.”

And on and on and on. Those same few phrases repeated over and over while the orator’s companion laughed like a drain and no doubt was as familiar with the gutter as one.

I actually began counting how many times this delightful young lady swore. I got to 15 before the green man finally appeared and rescued me.

As I sped away I could still hear, “Fockin’ gaffa tape, fockin’ gaffa tape, bastard” singeing the air like hastily deposited nuclear waste and I found myself wondering whether anyone on this planet can ever find such constant expletive incontinence attractive. Or even think it adult or mature?

I mean I am right in thinking that someone who effs and blinds every second word is chromosome deficient, aren’t I? Their emotional / intellectual development has somehow stalled at the ‘bike shed badinage’ stage and they’re forever stuck with the mentality of a 15 year old where they think that heavy use of the eff word automatically bestows upon them the heady mantle of ‘Adult’.

I instantly found myself dismissing this pair as a couple of foul-mouthed, uncouth, thick as shit, nob chompers who will end up working in McDonalds and exorcising their dissatisfaction with life by wiping malicious bogeys onto the underside of all the bread buns.

Which isn’t fair. They might actually make it to Burger King.

Joking.

They might actually be intelligent. They might even be nice girls. From good homes. With a staunch moral view of the world and an acceptance letter from Oxford.

But I don’t think so.

We are how we talk. Our voice and choice of words express our personalities and our aspirations. I’m not talking about accents here. I’m talking about what we say rather than how we say it. To choose to swear so prolifically and so (deliberately) loudly speaks volumes about a mindset that has not only normalised aggressive displays of behaviour but has also promoted them as being the most efficient way to navigate modern society.

And that is deeply, deeply saddening and possibly speaks volumes about the rest of us.

Possibly.

Or it could just be that a potty mouth is a habit that people fall into when young and like all nasty habits needs a jolly good kick to get it broken.

Believe you me, I was tempted.

Anti Social Networking

I’ll be honest. Despite being a denizen of the internet for the last 15 years I am not up on the whole social networking scene.

I dragged my heels with Facebook (and still grit my teeth when I use it).

I tried MySpace and loathed it so dumped it. I now have NoSpace and am much happier.

Skype I’ve heard about but can’t bring myself to install.

Messenger I have permanently disabled because I hated the way it would launch itself on me as soon as I turned on my PC (like being hounded by a happy-clappy stalker).

Twitter I use infrequently and cynically, i.e. only when I have a blog post to sell.

I admit I tried ICQ (remember that?) in the early days but found it bothersome and frustrating – I’d be at my computer trying to do stuff and people would bug me for inane conversations overloaded with smilies and emoticons.

Emoticons. Urgh. I hate both the word and the concept. Let’s break it down: emotions / cons. You get my drift? :-P

But some Social Networking facilities have made it through my taste firewall. LinkedIn is one of them. It seemed a good idea at the time and helped me to reconnect with an old friend but since then I hardly use it. I’m Connected with a handful of people – some old school friends, some blogging pals and, er, that’s it.

Nobody – and I mean nobody – has used the site to contact me in the manner recommended by the site’s administrators, i.e. nobody has offered me work / money / commissions / contracts. It has done absolutely zilch for my career prospects.

But nevertheless I’m on there. Pimping myself. Or rather, pimping my online persona. Links to my web site and this blog. The kind of unthinking self promotion that we all do from time to time.

Suddenly, within the space of 2 weeks, I have had Connection requests from 2 people who work in the same Local Government corporation as me. People who I see once in a blue moon and only ever in a professional capacity. One of them is very, very high up in the corporation hierarchy. Very high up.

I confess it has put me in a spin.

You see, I don’t want these people getting too close to my online persona. I don’t want them reading my blog and the comments upon it and realizing what a cynical, back-stabbing little turncoat I am. I want them to continue thinking I’m a good boy who keeps his head down and deserves the money that they keep paying me every month.

This Connection thing is too close for comfort.

And utterly pointless.

I mean, what’s the good of them Connecting to me on LinkedIn? Are they going to offer me a job?

Hello? I’m already here.

So the barricades have gone up. And by barricades I mean I have ignored the email from LinkedIn – including the reminder email that tells me these people are still waiting for me to confirm a Connection with them.

I don’t want a Connection with them. The real life connection is bad enough. I don’t want them following the breadcrumb trail back to this ‘ere blog and the harsh excoriating heart of my lifelong malcontent.

I am simply too anti-social for Social Networking.

Too curmudgeonly. Too grumpy. And that’s the plain honest truth.

I mean, they’ll be wanting me to Poke them next. And that folks is just an interaction too far.

I think I may just have to be permanently AFK.

That’s all, folks. Goodbye.

P.S. Do feel free to RT this post.

So How Would You Sign “Another Whisky Please?”

Working Men’s Clubs are funny things. I think I’ve only ever been to about 4 in my entire life and up until last Friday they were solely to attend private parties or functions, hence the patrons stuffing their faces with cake alongside my own were not what anyone would in any way term “regulars”. They were all interlopers like me.

Friday, however, was different.

Friday was set apart by an invitation by my Sign Language tutor that invited us (his class) to come along during the evening and meet some Deaf people in a proper social environment. To be honest, there are a number of such opportunities that we can choose from – some later in the month to attend a proper Deaf Club in Coventry and others in Solihull – but this one attracted me because of (a) the proximity – it was in walking distance from my house – and (b) I have my second formal assessment tomorrow night and I figured the extra practise would be no bad thing.

So I’m walking to the Working Men’s club and I’ll be honest, my vision of the clientele and the whole ambience was of a very quiet snug (akin to the one in The Rovers Return), half full of men and women of a certain age sporting a certain hardy Northern-esque look, a dog or two asleep at the foot of the bar and a barman who spends the entire night giving non-locals pokey looks from his permanent place in front of the optics rack.

But what I got in actual fact was a lounge bar very like something out of Coronation Street, sparsely populated by people of a certain age who could quite easily get roles as extras in Heartbeat, a single dog (a hearing dog for the Deaf funnily enough) and a barman who gave me pokey looks as soon as I stepped foot inside the bar,

In fact his first words to me were, “How did you get in here?”

This made me think that maybe (a) I’d somehow slipped through the minefield and the barbed wire gun emplacements without seeing them or (b) I’d broken both my legs without noticing it or (c) he was confusing me with some bad-ass whippet owner he’d barred from the premises in another life.

As it was I could only answer sheepishly that the guy on the door had let me in after I’d paid a 50p entrance fee (and no sexual favours asked for).

As soon as I explained I’d come to meet the Deaf group though he relaxed, served me my whisky (though he diluted it with unasked for coke – plainly he thought I was a wuss; plainly I was because I accepted it without complaint) and left me alone for the rest of the night.

Naturally, being at heart a saddo, I was the only one from my class who’d bothered to turn up; everyone else is obviously saving themselves for the relative cool of the Deaf club in Coventry.

So it was just me, 5 Deaf people and a hearing dog. And a raffle that I couldn’t enter because I wasn’t a member,

I was at 42 by far the youngest person in the entire building.

As for the Sign Language... seeing it at work in a social context highlighted to me just how little I know and how paltry my level of expertise is. Making Signs is only half of it – having an instant visual recognition of other people’s Signs is the very important other half and that lack of immediacy really tripped me up on several occasions.

Thankfully one of the Deaf people there – a sprightly 84 year old named Billy – could talk (he’d lost his hearing due to being caught in a bomb blast in Glasgow during WWII when he was 10) and though he Signed simultaneously, if it wasn’t for his vocal narrative I would have spent much of the night staring into my whisky and coke feeling that everyone else was talking about me but not to me in a language that was whistling way over my head.

As it was, they were a very friendly group and made generous allowances for my ham-fisted level of expertise. I also learnt what a small world it is: Billy had been a soldier at the barracks during the same period and in the same street in Glasgow where my dad grew up as a boy. A big hello to everybody reading this from Maryhill.

The biggest thing I learnt though was how many different types of Deafness there are, how many different levels and experiences, how people’s Signing is not uniform but is as varied as their handwriting and just how distracting a jukebox can be when you are trying to concentrate and you are the only person who can hear it.

All useful fodder for the novel I am currently writing which features a Deaf character... though whether it will help me pass my formal assessment tomorrow remains to be seen.

And certainly not heard.

Goodbye And Thanks For All The Fish

I don’t know where to begin really.

I just want to say that I did start off with honourable intentions. And at the end of the day the whole process was a real life saver for me. It was necessary. I do hope you all believe that and won’t judge me too harshly.

But at the end of the day all this is a sham.

There’s little point prevaricating. I may as well cut straight to the chase.

This persona – this me that has been blogging for the last 6 years – is all fake. My life details, my family, my career are all works of fiction.

I am not married. I do not have children. I do not work for the local Government. My name isn’t even really Steve.

Technically I work for central Government though for very little recompense and without any choice in the matter at all.

My name is Adrian Jessop and I am currently serving a 20 year prison sentence for embezzlement with aggravation (I got caught by my boss and lamped him with a fax machine – he’s OK now but still suffers from extreme technophobia; not a good thing to be suffering from when you are the MD of PC World).

I was married – great girl called Suzie who was a trained trapeze artist – but she dropped me as soon as the old Bill came knocking after the fax incident at work. We didn’t have kids. She said it would lower her pelvic floor which would upset her entire centre of gravity and thus mess with the momentum of her forward swing. Apparently timing is everything.

Which may explain why she’d already got another man lined up before my name was even on the duty officer’s charge sheet. Got another man and was gone. While I was looking at a 20 stretch. My life reads like a country and western song. And I’m not talking “Jolene.”

Prison is hard. The food is crap. The work is boring. And the sex is at best inconvenient and at worst cause for split personality disorder.

But it does leave me a lot of time to write. Hence this blog.

Originally it was just therapy. A way to get my head around prison life. Away to defeat the regime rather than let the regime defeat me. Mental flights of freedom to compensate for the very real physical constraints that have seen me incarcerated here at Long Lartin for the last two decades.

I only meant the blog to run for a few months. Kind of an experiment. Just to see if I could do it.

But it took over. It assumed a life of its own. I found myself daydreaming during the laundry of what I could write about next. My dream, my fantasy of an ordinary, good life. I think that was the key to its success, you see. It’s ordinariness. It’s normality.

A blog about a multi-millionaire playboy... well, nobody would believe that. They’d see through it straight away. But an ordinary humdrum sort of bloke working for the council?

They’re two-a-penny. Every town has one. Probably more than one. It was like a ready-made niche. One I could slot into perfectly.

But the time has come to end it. It has served its purpose. I’m getting out in a couple of weeks. I don’t need this anymore, this literary crutch. I’m sorry if you feel let down. Feel that the time you have invested here has been wasted; has been extracted from you under false pretences. That was never my intention.

I’d like to thank you all. Truly. From the heart. You’ve kept me going. You’ve kept me alive. You’ve given me something good to focus on in the prison showers.

But it’s time to say goodbye.

Time to reveal the real me.

When I get out in a couple of weeks, maybe we could meet up?

I need some digs. Only temporary until I get back on my feet again.

Maybe just think about it, eh?

Yeah, yeah. I know. I’ll wait until I hear from you.

Story of my life.

Things Can Only Get Not Better

I’ve spent the last four Sundays having my weekends lulled into the great infinity of the past to the carefully modulated tones of Professor Brian Cox as he explains to me the Wonders Of The Universe.

There’s not a lot not to like about Professor Brian Cox even though one blogger has described him as having the “nasty wet lips of a rapist”. He’s kind of a human version of Bungle from Rainbow – only with the intellectual capacity of a young Einstein and the enthusiasm for the cosmos of a much thinner, more youth marketable Sir Patrick Moore.

My wife claims he has the perfect voice to fall asleep too (which may explain a lot of the late night phone calls she’s been making) though she’s at pains to point out that it’s not at all because he’s boring. On the contrary, what he says is incredibly fascinating and intellectually dynamic. It’s just that his soft, Rupert The Bear tones are endlessly comforting and after a busy weekend they can tend to have a pleasurably soporific effect.

Personally I stay wide awake to watch the computer generated representations of supernovas and black holes as Professor Brian talks about the end of the universe. That’s the kind of universal Armageddon renaissance man I am.

‘Cos the end of the universe is coming, folks. Professor Brian said so. All this starry shit we’ve got going on at the moment with galaxies and constellations... well, it’s just a passing fad. One day all those little lights are going to go out. All matter will dissipate. And the universe will become one unending stretch of darkness. Time itself will stop because there will be no more change.

Apparently it’s all down to entropy. Entropy is the natural order of things. Everything, given time will break down, collapse, fall apart and dissolve into a uniform state of formlessness.

This may explain my modus operandi at work but the less said about that the better.

I’m not sure how I feel about it really; the end of the Universe. I mean, one could take the bleak approach and think, “Well, what’s the point of it all, then? What’s the point of morality? Of caring? Of procreation? Of Katie Price?”

But the best thing about Professor Brian is his unfailing ability to see the wonder and the wonderfulness in all things. (With possibly the exception of Katie Price.)

Because as Professor Brian explained it, without entropy, without the end of all things being on the cards, we wouldn’t have a beginning of things. We wouldn’t have this miracle of life; this relatively tiny span of time in eternity where life in the universe is possible.

Of course, we wouldn’t have Katie Price, David Cameron and Eamonn Holmes either but I guess for the purposes of infinite possibility we have to accept the shit with the gold.

And so suddenly, it all makes sense. More than that, the preciousness, the sheer miraculous nature of life becomes clear. We’re lucky to be here. It’s amazing we’re all here, right now, together at this point in time. Although technically speaking, cosmologically speaking, this is the only time we could be here.

I think what I like the most about Professor Brian is the way he manages to imbibe hardcore physics with a truly non-denominational sense of spirituality. A sense of meaning, of higher order, of purpose. Without getting all God-bothery about it.

It’s a heady brew to partake of on a Sunday night and I shall miss it now that the series has come to an end.

But those lips... they are nasty and wet, I have to admit.

Fuckwits

The anti spending cuts march in London on Saturday has left me feeling rather ambivalent though, I admit, I am leaning more towards the sour.

My own Union was well represented although I myself did not attend the march due to personal reasons. Ironically I joked to a colleague last week that I wasn’t going as, if I wanted to have my ribs smashed by a policeman’s truncheon, I could easily do that in my own hometown on a Saturday night merely by pissing on the windscreen of the police surveillance van (though the chances are they wouldn’t see me).

The legitimate portion of the march – the largest portion – was, I think, a success. A success in that it was well organized, peaceful and had something (if news reports can be believed) of a “carnival atmosphere”. (What? Bearded ladies? Fire eating dwarves?)

Not a success in what it achieved though. Some Government mouthpiece has dismissed the march and has said that no government would change its policies on the strength of a protest march – even one that keenly displays the vastness of public dissent. Really? This from the same Government that crowed with delight when Mubarak stepped down as Egyptian president due to public demand and who have gone to war (let’s call a spade a spade) in Libya to “defend the lives” of those protesting against their current government. Seems, we, the UK people, do not have the same rights or regard in the eyes of our own UK politicians. Our voices in the UK do not count.

Sadly, the side of the story that has claimed the most column inches is the disproportionately small element among the protestors who broke away from the main march to initiate their own agenda on the streets of London. Namely attacking buildings, smashing shop windows, letting loose industrial sized fireworks in crowds containing small children and grinding their stupid little crotches above the porticoes of high profile edifices when they knew the news teams were filming.

Twats. The lot of them.

One overriding image I have in my mind is watching some beleaguered news reporter trying to deliver his piece to camera while some cock in a hoodie danced in the background and waved his V’s in the air whilst shouting some guff about “revolution”.

Oh please. Not that old lame warhorse? I’m all for ideals and the hopeful aspirations of the young but really? Class war? Anarchy? Smash the system? Have people really not moved on from the 80’s, the 70’s, the 60’s ad infinitum? Plainly not. Because yet again here are the same half baked ideas being spouted and held up as justification for a good ruck with the coppers by the same dirty looking dickheads that have plagued every generation since the invention of the dick. The same flimsy political understanding being used as motivation to go on the rampage like giant 2 year olds and smash up some windows and lob a few bricks. British Bulldog anyone?

My first thought wasn’t, ooh that guy is protesting for my rights; he’s standing up for my freedoms. It was: great, there’s a stupid looking cock on my TV, wasting my license money, spouting the same hackneyed political garbage that used to infect the common room at my 6th form and only inspired the crusty looking dope-head in the corner who had joined the Socialist Worker party the year before and thought he was destined to be the next Karl Marx.

Twat. Twat. Twat.

These idiots have merely overturned all the good the legitimate march might have achieved. They’ve undercut the whole thing. Carnival atmosphere? A public grotesquery more like. A bestiary.

What also annoys me most is how blind these fools were in their targets. Some of the banking corporations they hit did not deserve the slander of these oafs. Some of them had actually been prudent and honourable throughout the current economic crisis and looked after their customer’s money. But no. These dunderheads were so high on the sound of their own primitivistic protest they didn’t care. They just wanted to smash and kick and destroy. And oh yes let’s lob a few humungous fireworks at the shoppers passing by and see if we can blind some of the children. Look, Mr Cameron! Look what you have made us do! Hulk smash!

You know what? I grew out of “anarchy” and “class war” about 3 hours after I first heard about it. I may not have been the brightest of teenagers but I could still tell a big steaming pile of shit by its smell.

And I can still tell a fuckwit by the faces he pulls in front of a BBC news camera crew.

And that includes you as well, Cameron.

Meal Ticket

In for the long haul as we are in Austerity Britain I’ve been racking my brain cell for ways to come up with money saving ideas and sure-fire scams to ensure we get more for our hard earned moolah now that’s it’s plain the bankers aren’t going to flick us the crumbs from the banqueting table that we so unwillingly purchased for them last year.

One idea I’ve come up with should guarantee you free food at the favourite restaurant of your choice no matter where you live though it may also cause you to lose the meal should the restaurateur call your bluff.

It’s a brilliant idea and though I admit I came up with it in Leamington Spa’s Café Rouge I don’t want that fact in any way to slight the marvellous menu that they offer there. It’s just that upon my last visit they sat me and the wife right in the window so that we felt we had a bit of an audience as we ate. The passersby of Leamington Spa shared every morsel with us. And it got me thinking. Seeing me orgiastically stuffing my fat little face with their production line French cuisine was undoubtedly great free advertising for the restaurant. Therefore the inverse should also be true: i.e. seeing me pull horrific faces or even throwing up into the window would surely turn potential customers away in droves.

So what better way to bargain (or blackmail if you want to get all technical) a free meal than by threatening to throw up into the window of the eatery you have chosen to patronize? Or even better, just outside the door whilst waving a copy of the restaurant’s menu in your greasy little fist for all to see?

“Please, Mr Restaurant Owner, waive the bill or I shall be forced to release the dogs of wauuuugh...!”

I mean what could they do? Refuse? You merely introduce a couple of fingers to the back of your throat (if you don’t fancy doing this yourself it might be handy to invite someone along who is bulimic). Call the police? Merely throw up and then complain of feeling unwell... mutter something about the food not being cooked properly or food poisoning. The thought of all that bad press will see them bending over backwards to offer you all the freebies they can muster (as well as mopping up your spew).

I guarantee they’ll rip up the bill just to keep you quiet and your mouth literally closed.

So there you have it. The perfect way to take your loved one out for a meal but without having to dent your plastic or your wallet. Who says being a cheapskate can’t be romantic?

Look out for more money saving ideas on this ‘ere blog coming soon. I shall publish them just as soon as the medication wears off and I think of them.

With Apologies To Harrison Ford

First off can I just say that I have nothing against Harrison Ford. Or indeed The Dandy Warhols. Nor can I explain how the two have become inexplicably linked in my mind.

Harrison Ford was Han Solo for God’s sake. And Indiana Jones. The man is a legend. And is married to Calista Flockhart. Which may explain his long and legendary interest in all things wooden. And as for the Dandy’s... well, all I know of them is their song Bohemian Like You. But believe me, that’s been enough.

Because for some unearthly reason whenever I hear it I find myself composing alternative lyrics about Harrison Ford’s interest in carpentry. It kind of happens organically. I don’t know why. Maybe I need to see a psychiatrist?

Here then are, firstly, the original lyrics to The Dandy Warhols’ “Bohemian Like You’. And then secondly, my version that pays homage to Harrison Ford, actor, lumberjack and all round wood turner.

Bohemian Like You

You got a great car.
Yeah, what's wrong with it today?
I used to have one too,
Maybe I'll come and have a look.
I really love your hairdo, yeah.
I'm glad you like mine too,
See we're looking pretty cool.
Getcha!

So what do you do?
Oh yeah, I wait tables too.
No I haven't heard your band
Cause you guys are pretty new.
But if you dig on Vegan food.
Well come over to my work
I'll have them cook you something that you'll really love.

Cause I like you,
Yeah I like you.
And I'm feeling so Bohemian like you,
Yeah I like you,
Yeah I like you,
And I feel wahoo, wahoo, wahoo!

Wait. Who's that guy just hanging at your pad?
He's lookin' kinda bummed.
Yeah you broke up that's too bad.
I guess it's fair if he always pays the rent
And he doesn't get all bent
About sleepin' on the couch when I'm there.

Cause I like you,
Yeah I like you.
And I'm feeling so Bohemian like you.
Yeah I like you.
Yeah I like you
And I feel wahoo, wahoo, wahoo!

I'm getting wise
And I feel so bohemian like you.
It's you that I want so please,
Just a casual, casual easy thing.
Is it? It is for me

And I like you
Yeah I like you
And I like you, I like you, I like you,
Yeah I like you.
And I feel wahoo, wahoo, wahoo!

Harrison Ford’s Carpentry Like You

You got a great lathe.
It's not turning right today?
I used to have one too,
Maybe I'll come and have a look.
I really love your chainsaw, yeah.
I'm glad you like mine too,
See we're looking pretty cool.
Lumber!

So what do you do?
Oh yeah, I make tables too.
Though people say I'm bland
I do some acting too.
But if you're big on power tools
Well come over to my shed
And I'll let you play with a tool that you'll really love.

Cause I like you,
Yeah I like you.
And I'm into carpentry just like you,
Yeah I like you,
Yeah I like you,
And I feel wahoo, wahoo, wahoo!

Wait. What’s that mess just collapsed round at your pad?
You bought it from IKEA.
And it broke up that's too bad.
Well never fear I'll just grab my wrench
Smash up that old bench
And I'll make you a new couch while I'm there.

Cause I like you,
Yeah I like you.
And I'm into carpentry just like you,
Yeah I like you,
Yeah I like you,
And I feel wahoo, wahoo, wahoo!

I'm getting high
On polyvinyl acetate just like you.
It's your wood that I want so please,
Let's make a casual easy chair
with swivel legs just for me

And I like you
Yeah I like you
And I like you, I like you, I like you,
Yeah I like you.
And I feel wahoo, wahoo, wahoo!



And here’s a link to the original song on YouTube for those of you that want to sing-a-long: Bohemian Like You.

Abnormal service will be resumed shortly.

Elegantly Idle

How do you write with feeling about someone you have never met?

How do you write with feeling about someone you have never met who has died?

The internet is a curious thing. For decades hippies have wittered on about the global village, about global consciousness.

It all seemed like pie in the sky. An example of yoghurt weaving as it is known around these parts. How can people feel the same sense of connection with people hundreds if not thousands of miles away that they feel with their closest neighbours? It’s just not possible. It would be wonderful if it was but it just isn’t.

And then the internet happened. And social networking. And blogging. And for all the bad things they bring – yes, they can be as shallow, small minded and abusive as, well, people basically – they have also undeniably connected people at an emotional level.

We’ve seen it on the big scale. Revolution in Egypt. The outpouring of support for the disaster in Japan. People talking, responding, connecting. Caring. Suddenly we are all close neighbours.

It happens on the small scale too and the effects are just as big.

This morning I learnt of the death of a blogger whose writing I loved, dearly. I’d never met her. Never spoke to her. Never even Tweeted, Poked or Skyped. It was all in the blog.

Always archly funny, witty, pithy, Kaz’s words were always elegant, clever and incisive. A fiercely poised and intelligent lady. It was an honour when Kaz visited my blog and left a comment; when she took the time to express a feeling of connection.

She did so less as her illness took hold. She posted less on her own blog. Posted less words. Her energy was waning. Never her will. She knew what was coming. There were no sentimental “what if” posts. No wistful words published for posterity. The tagline of her blog still reads, “Even Idler”. I have no doubt that wherever she is now, she’d be finding that absolutely hilarious.

For those of you that frequented Kaz’s blog, I think today we will all be connected in our sadness, connected in our regret that the light of a real diamond has gone out. For those of you that didn’t, well, her blog is still there. A wonderful testament to an amazingly bright mind.

How do you write with feeling about someone you have never met?

The internet, this global consciousness, is a curious thing...

Spellchecker, You Big Fat Wuss!

So I open up Microsoft Word, my application of choice within whose electronic embrace I am writing my second novel, and it does that thing where it kind of pauses. The egg timer doesn’t appear but you can tell it’s working hard at something in the background. It calculates the number of words (11,801 if you want to know) and then the little animated spellchecker book in the status bar starts turning its pages like billy-o.

This is all par for the course. So I wait. And I wait.

And eventually a little dialogue box pops up. One I have never ever seen before in over 10 years of using Microsoft Office.

Apparently there are now “too many spelling and grammatical errors” in my novel for Spellchecker to continue working. So basically it isn’t going to. Spellchecker is going to stop. It’s going on strike and is putting its feet up. If I want Spellchecker to check my document in future I will need to press a button to activate it, i.e. I have to go out of my way and ask it nicely in future.

Great. I have broken Spellchecker. Me, little me, who prides himself on having a decent grasp of English. Sure, I occasionally slip up. The odd typo will appear now and then. I have sometimes, in the heat of the creative moment, written “your” instead of “you’re” but on the whole I like to think I can string a sentence together correctly.

Plainly those years at school and university, those years studying poetry and prose, those painful years writing it have been a waste. I am incompetent at using my own native language. Bill Gates has effectively told me so.

Well, sod you, Spellchecker. Especially as, typing this as I am in another Word document, you have underlined “sod” in blue because you don’t recognize it as a legitimate word, you know naff all about English. You know diddly-squat (there you go again – diddly gets a red underline) about how real people talk, about colloquialisms, about the realities of human speech and the creative literary process. You’re just a big list of rules and regulations and if something doesn’t quite match up with your limited parameters you spit the dummy.

Well, if you don’t want to Spellcheck my novel, fine. I don’t need you. I had a literary life before you came along and I’ll get along just fine without you now that you’ve turned your back on me. Yoo’ll see. I don’t need yoo anymoor. I can cope perfektly well wivout yoo, thank yoo very mutch. Take your stoopid Spellchecker and sod of.

We’ll see who has the biger kareer in inglish wont we?

Racist? Or Just Minority Interest?

We have a long running detective drama show in the UK called Midsomer Murders. It’s been running for donkey’s years and the format never changes. And neither does the plot. Basically each episode runs like this: a quaint, idiosyncratic, stereotypical English personage of a certain age who on the surface has their roiling emotions constrained by their stiff upper lip suddenly goes on the rampage and murders another quaint, idiosyncratic, stereotypical English personage of a certain age with something profoundly incongruous like a Black & Decker hedge trimmer or a Moulinex hand blender. Cue police investigation led by grumpy, cranky genius detective who solves the crime just in time to enjoy a cream tea at the local cricket club with his bridge playing wife and university graduate daughter. Cue titles.

Do feel free to take me to task (those of you who are fans of the show) if I have missed out any important plot points; I don’t think that I have.

The show’s creator, Brian True-May has, this week, got himself suspended by ITV chiefs for comments he made along the lines of “Midsomer Murders is the last bastion of Englishness” and he’d like to keep the cast all white as he feels to bring ethnicity issues into the show would change what the show is about. Basically he sees the show as being a fictional representation of an England that, if we’re honest, has never really existed. It is a stereotypical view of what we (the English) and more likely what others (the Americans) would imagine is a traditional English village. Cricketing whites, tea and scones, old boys clubs, war veterans with walking sticks, toffs with chips on their shoulders and Mellors the gardener nobbing one of the posh ladies of the amateur dramatics society behind the back of her boorish husband.

It ain’t real, folks, and it’s never been real. But this is the show’s very successful shtick. It has after all been running for over 14 years and been sold to 231 territories around the world (I wonder if any of those are Indian or African?).

The question is: is Mr True-May being racist in his adherence to a formula that has earned those very same ITV chiefs an awful lot of revenue over the last decade and a half. Is Midsomer Murders as a concept, racist?

‘Cos the backstabbers are coming out of the ITV executive director’s office with their knives of righteousness gleaming and freshly polished. They are “appalled” by his comments. An “investigation” has been launched. The story has even made the papers and the internet – no mean thing when it’s hardly been what you’d call a slow news week.

I’m going to stick my head out here and say that, in my opinion, neither the show nor Mr True-May are racist. Not on your nelly. What he and the show are being, however, in non-representational. But that is very different from being racist. But – and here’s the rub – the show isn’t meant to be representational. It’s a work of fiction. It taps into a stereotype of middle class Englishness and runs with it. Metaphorically the show is like drinking a cup of tea with your pinky sticking out. Chin-chin. Fancy a game of croquet?

I feel quite annoyed at the unspoken suggestion that the show should suddenly acquire itself an ethnic family just to tick that particular demographic box. I can’t think of a more cheap, shallow and cynical reason to get a black actor onto the cast. And I’m at pains to point out here that I’m not a fan of the show. What I am a fan of though, is the freedom of writer’s to be able to write what they like without having to jump through hoops just to appease the politically correct brigade who are so scared of offending anyone that they feel the imperative to impose the same restraints on every single show until all shows tick the same tick boxes and everyone is happy but no-one is watching the bloody show in the first place because it lacks character or individual personality.

Maybe I’m wrong. Christ, maybe I’m being racist. Am I? If the show was about an Asian village and about Asian life and values would someone be demanding a white family move in? Would that argument even get aired? Maybe that’s over simplifying it – which is a bad idea as this topic is a bloody minefield as it is.

As far as I can see, the show is a cultural backwater. Literally. What sells the show is this fake, incestuous, closed-off Englishness that inevitably leaves little room for an ethnic dialogue. The show is not real and makes no attempt to engage with real life and the real culture of England which – thankfully – is wonderfully diverse and culturally rich. But that is this particular show’s selling point. I think True-May is right. To meddle with that formula – for all it does little to appeal to me – would kill it off and ruin it for those fans who wish to suspend their disbelief and wallow for a couple of hours in a dream of England that didn’t even exist in E. M Forster’s time.

Ethnic issues are well represented on other shows and in other dramas. Nobody is being hard done by. What is happening is that the fear of racism and the fear of being perceived as being racist is resulting in a good many Union Jack bloomers getting themselves tied up into a right royal twist.

Chill out, people! It’s a minority interest show! Doesn’t that tick a tick box too?

For those of you that are interested here is the opinion of a Midsomer Murders viewer from India: Ramana's Musings...

P.S. Thank you for all reading my 700th post.

Boycott Stupid Blogs

Most of us accept spam now like we do litter on the street. We don’t like it. We wish it wasn’t there. We wish we knew who the people were who scatter it all around so we could rip off their heads and piss down their necks (or is that just me?) – but by and large we put up with it. We grit our teeth and accept that it is the natural consequence of sharing the world with inconsiderate, lazy, self serving idiots.

We get used to it. The offers of cheap Viagra. The invitations to join casino syndicates. Those “hello darlink, I want to be your love-woman from the Ukraine” emails from people who speak to us with an intimacy lifted straight out of a 1970’s top shelf magazine.

I turn a blind eye. I hit delete. I wash & go.

But occasionally, just occasionally, one gets my goat (or gets right up my goat if you’re of an Australian persuasion). I bet as soon as I type the title of this insidious piece of blogging spam at least 50% of you are going to put your hand up and say, “Ooh, I’ve had one of those too”. The other 50% of you will put your hand up and ask to go to the toilet. Well tough. You should have gone before you came in here, shouldn’t you?

Boycott American Women.

Or as the perpetrator writes it: BOYCOTT AMERICAN WOMEN. ‘Cos those capitals make all the difference, don’t they? You wouldn’t notice it otherwise. The entire message would get lost in the mindless, knee-jerk invective that swirls around this piece of blogging spam like a particularly nasty huey in a centrifuge.

I’ve lost count now of how many times I’ve had this “comment” suddenly leap out of nowhere at me for moderation. Plainly a cut and paste job, it doesn’t change at all.

But bizarrely it does actually link back to a bona fide blog / web site. It is not some yank-phobic computer trying to sell me Viagra. Behind this one-track publicity campaign is a real person. A real person who not only is vociferously swearing off American women himself but feels so passionate about the ill-health effects of dating American women that he wants us all to swear off them too.

Why should we boycott American women? Well, visit this guy’s web site and allow him to count the ways. No, I am not going to link to it – a basic Google search will no doubt encourage this particular floater to rise to the top of the toilet – and I suspect I am merely asking for trouble just by giving this dope free publicity by writing about it on my blog.

I just want him to stop proselytizing his [frankly] bigoted, sexist, chauvinistic, primitive creed on my blog. Not that he reads my blog, you understand, he just sees it as a gratis advertising platform for his own ego-rotting vendetta against the female members of his own community. And I object to that. To be honest, I’d much rather collude in the selling of fake Viagra or Russian mail order brides than participate is this guy’s “I’ve got a really small dick” smokescreen. And no that isn’t an invitation to the Viagra companies and the Kremlin to get me to play business footsie with them under the table.

Now, as it is, I have never dated an American woman and am not ever likely too (when I was in the market for Cheryl Ladd I was only 10 years old and now that I’m old enough I suspect she is too old to care for the idea). I am a happily married man. But every time I get one of Mr Boycott’s missives (is his first name Geoff? I’d love it if it was) I feel an almost overwhelming desire to go out and speed date Sigourney Weaver, Natalie Portman and Heather Graham all in one night. Just to be bloody perverse.

‘Cos this guy’s campaign is just not working. It is risible. It is sad. It speaks volumes about this guy’s inevitable loss of esteem, secret low self worth and perhaps a doomed date with a busty Valley Girl who took one look at this guy’s shrivelled Empire State Building and laughed so hard her retainer shot out of her mouth and performed an impromptu vasectomy.

This to me is the only explanation for this guy’s bizarre standpoint. Given enough time and money I could probably prove it empirically.

So to be short, my plan is to boycott Boycott American Women. And I’d like to invite you all to do the same. Not by infecting your blog with my manifesto but by using my own blog to exercise my own freedom of speech. Just as this guy is entitled to do on his own blog. Because, at the end of the day, he can write what the hell he likes on his blog. I just don’t want it on mine. I don’t want it foisted on me to the point where I have to take action to remove it again and again and again.

And to all you American women out there... I’m sure it would have worked. The sex would have been great (once I’d got you properly trained), the good times they would have rolled and we would have made beautiful non-Justin Bieber-music together... but the fact is, I’m married.

This isn’t a boycott. I’m just honouring the precepts of true love.

And as for reasons not to date American women go, that’s possibly the best reason there is.

2012 Is Gonna Suck

No. Seriously. It is.

As soon as I saw our magic red dancing bus containing David Beckham emerging from the smoke and the glory of the Beijing Olympics I just knew that London 2012 was going to a be a teensy bit wince inducing. I’m sure the racing and the jumping and the yachting and all the other stuff that the athletes do will be fine. It’s sport, goddammit. You just get up and do it.

It’s the ceremonial aspect that worries me. Because, let’s be honest, we as a country are not cool. We had a brief spell in the limelight in the 1960’s and that was it. We lost it again. We are the geeks of the world. Our greatest global export in recent times has been the Beckhams. If they are the best and the most noteworthy that our country can produce then we really are foobarred.

But back to the Olympics.

They’re going to suck. And I now have proof. Probably subconsciously, possibly deliberately, the UK’s official 2012 Olympic logo proves it beyond all doubt. I must point out at this juncture that this visual gag was brought to my attention by the 10 O’clock Live team last week. It’s great television at the best of times (though the interviews and debates are frustratingly brief) but this was an absolute clincher.

Look at the picture above. What do you see? Officially you are supposed to see “2012”. Some nutters claim it spells out “Zion”. Ignore them. They don’t know what they’re talking about. What the image actually shows, ladies and gentlemen, is “Lisa Simpson sucking somebody off”.

You’ve looked again, haven’t you? Just to make sure. And it’s there, isn’t it? It really is there. It’s Lisa Simpson and... er... somebody else.

I now cannot look at this logo without seeing Lisa Simpson not having sex with a Bill Clinton stand-in. Though oddly I can still watch The Simpsons and not make any obvious sexual connection at all.

Funny that.

So. The 2012 Olympics.

They are going to suck. Big time.

And that may be a very hard thing for this country to swallow.

One Man Can Make A Difference

You gotta love Scott Cooke.

If you've been brought up on a diet of superheroes and vigilantes; if you've ever wanted to have a spidey-sense that actually tingles when criminal trouble is near then you've got to take your hat off to the guy in the picture above.

Because he's living the dream. He's seized the day. He built it and is waiting for them to come. Scott is a bona fide vigilante.

And he has a proper superhero's outfit and everything. And just check that mean hombre "don't mess with me, purp" moustache motif. Yup, Scott Cooke is the man. He has it going down.

The people of Birmingham (UK) can rest easier in their beds at night. 'Cos Scott Cooke, aka The Statesman, is on the case. He's on the prowl.

He patrols the mean streets of 'Brum' just looking for lowlife scum to perform a citizen's arrest upon. According to news reports (here and here) Scott, a former Territorial Army soldier (hey, anyone remember Mike from Spaced?) spurns utility belts and web slingers and Iron Man techno-costumes in favour of a more down to earth crime fighting arsenal.

We're talking notepad and pen. We're talking torch (probably one of those Maglite things). We're talking a first aid kit choc-full of Elastoplasts and those weird thin bandagey things that no-one knows how to apply properly. And we're talking mobile phone for when, you know, Scott has whupped some mean spotty criminal ass and needs to call in the boys in blue to help cart off the bruised and bloodied hoods to the state penitentiary. Job done for another night. Rest easy citizens.

Of course, some people - some unpublic spirited people - take the pee and claim that as an effective crime deterrent, Scott falls a little short of the mark. A few cynics have tweaked and misinterpreted the crime stats and pointed out that Scott failed to stop "99 crimes in his own neighbourhood in the last month alone".

I think this is unfair. Let's look at this from a wider perspective. The police were also on duty during this time and they too failed to stop 99 crimes taking place in that very same neighbourhood. Shame on them. Meanwhile, there may have been a 100th crime that Scott did stop. That Union Jack jumper may have been the only thing between a wheelie bin being upturned in the road and rubbish all over the highway.

Yeah. It's easy to mock. Easy to snigger. But at least Scott is doing something. He's putting his time and money where his mouth is. He's out there. He's out there for us. For you and me, man. Well, you and me if we happen to live in Nuthurst Road, West Heath. But hey - if you want to live in a safer neighbourhood, maybe you should think about moving? Cut Scott some slack here; make it easier for him.

As for me. Well, I'm thinking of joining him. Not joining him in Birmingham 'cos getting back to Leamington Spa from New Street station is a real nightmare at the moment. But joining him in spirit.

I am going to patrol the mean streets of Leamington Spa. I'm going to get all vigilanted up. I'm going to call myself The MP For Justice. Though the local bad boys may call me The MP For Medieval Retribution On Our Asses. 'Cos I'm plannin' on getting all Biblical on the wrong doers and the ne'erdowells. I got me a torch. I got me a Victorinox penknife / bottle opener thingy (though I may have to leave this at home as apparently it's illegal to carry one on the street). I've got me a bottle of still spring water which can double as a rehydration device and a quick and easy way to wash grazed knees clean. And I have my wife's Kindle (well, once I've wrestled it out of her hands) ready for those quiet times when, through no fault of my own, I happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (i.e. the crime is happening elsewhere) and it gets a bit slow and I have time on my hands and get a bit bored. Oh and I may knock off at 9.30 'cos I like to be in bed by 10. Don't get snidey about this; just remember I'm not actually getting paid to do this. It's purely voluntary. Think yourself lucky that I'm willing to give up some of my free time to ensure your safety in the first place.

I just need someone to design a costume for me. Maybe some kind of pinstripe motif? Though I want a cape as well. And a utility belt that can hold a thermos flask. And, in a break from superhero tradition, I want to wear my pants on the inside of my trousers.

'Cos, you know, I don't want people laughing at me or anything.

Be safe, people, be safe.

I Mean It Ma’am!

Leamington was overrun by the boys in blue last week. Or rather boys in high visibility vests. The pigs were everywhere. Coppers. Rozzers. The Old Bill. The Fuzz.

You couldn’t move without risking a truncheon up the jacksy.

They left no stone unturned. Or stonehead.

Bins were checked and taped up. Sewers were probed. And then the big boys came in. The narks with peaked caps. The ones who mean real business. The proper coppers.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Leamington was about to become a hotbed for cultural revolution. That the battle lines had been drawn down the length of The Parade and today would not be a good day to purchase a new divan mattress from John Lewis.

But you’d be wrong.

Because instead of cultural revolution Leamington was in fact the venue for one of this country’s great cultural traditions: waving a little union jack flag at a lady in a big hat who waves like she’s been taught to do so by Mr Miyagi from the original Karate Kid, “wax orn, wax orf.”

Friday saw Her Maj The Queen visiting my home town of Royal Leamington Spa. She came dressed in shocking pink with Prince Philip in tow to formally open Leamington Spa’s brand new Justice Centre building.

That’s right. We no longer have a magistrate’s court. We have a Justice Centre. Sadly my suggestion to have a statue of Judge Dredd erected outside was met with askance looks and murmurs of “can we please relocate this geek to another country please?”

Leamington has at last put itself back onto the Royal map. You see, I’m pretty sure that the last time we had a Royal visit was in the 1800’s when Queen Victoria popped by to sample the spa waters and graciously allowed Leamington Spa to name itself Royal Leamington Spa. I find it somehow ironic that our response to civil disobedience has at last brought the currently reigning monarch back to our sleepy little backwater town to renew our regal connections.

Though I doubt the coppers of Victoria’s day checked the sewers quite so avidly (probably because there weren’t any sewers back then). What were our coppers looking for? Bombs I suppose. Or perhaps Royal souvenir poo hunters who were squatting down beneath the loos of the Justice Centre hoping that Liz or Phil might crack a little something off in the cells that they could sell on the black market. If any Chinese doctors are listening Royal poo has amazing healing properties but only if taken orally. Trust me, it’s true.

So did I go out and join the flag waving throngs? At first I thought no, sod this for a game of soldiers, I’m not against the Royals but I’m not a Royalist automaton either. I’ve got work to do. But the sun was shining and then I thought I’ve got work to do I’d rather be outside. So outside I went and joined the crowds. ‘Cos let’s face it, Liz is getting on a bit. The chances of her living long enough to ever have a justifiable reason to come back to Leamington Spa are pretty slim.

The crowds were as you might expect. Screaming school children waving flags, old ladies muttering, “Ooh she does a lot of charity work, she does, heart of gold she has, don’t she duck?” and cynical teenagers hanging around whilst cursing themselves for not having the courage of their convictions to moon in the face of a stern faced policeman or give the Royal convoy the finger.

The picture above is my own. It is the closest I am ever likely to come to England’s current monarch (unless my Knighthood comes through before she carks it). Annoyingly I was concentrating on operating my camera phone so much that I didn’t actually look upon her with my own eyes. I’m sure there is a life lesson in there somewhere but I can’t for the life of me be bothered enough to think what it is.

So there you have it. The Queen. Real news of national importance on this ‘ere blog. Proper journalism (almost). History recorded. The stuff of news. The fabric of our national identity interwoven with my own.

God Save The Queen! I mean it most heartily ma’am.

Though, of course, you do all realize there is little or no future in England’s dreaming...

Survival Of The Fittest

So are we still evolving?

This was the question posed by the BBC’s Horizon on Tuesday night (apologies to my non-UK readers). I don’t often watch Horizon but I did this week because, as you will have surmised by the many posts on this subject that I have published on this ‘ere blog, our evolution as a species is a subject that regularly keeps me awake at night and had nothing at all whatsoever to do with the fact that this week’s show was presented by flame-haired, curvy, science ingénue, Alice Roberts who, according to my wife, I have a “thing” for.

Ha! As if. Ahem.

So are we still evolving?

Well, then we look at the behaviour exhibited by Wayne Rooney, Colonel Gaddafi and Bible bashers in the mid-west of the USA, it would be fair to assume that no, we are not. If anything we have entered an evolutionary cul-de-sac or, quite possibly, are returning to single celled amoebas one brain cell at a time.

But this, of course, is just the cynical blog writer in me talking and isn’t factually true. The gorgeously honey-voiced, Dr Alice said so. More or less.

We are still evolving as a species. In fact we are changing completely as a species. Us folk today are technically a different form of human being than our ancestors were a thousand years ago.

With the amazing advances in technology that have revolutionized our existence and affected the existence of practically every other living thing on the planet some have posited the theory that natural selection as a process is dead. It has stopped. We have somehow removed ourselves from its melting pot.

This is not true. Natural selection is still occurring – just perhaps not at the life or death, cutting edge of evolution that it once inhabited. Our species is no longer being shaped by the “survival of the fittest”. The weak not only survive in our society now but also survive long enough and ably enough to pass on their genes to the next generation. We also, through our grasp of genetics and embryo manipulation, can select the traits of our future generations ourselves and not leave it up to the good old fashioned Darwinian process we’ve all come to know and love.

But this does not mean that evolution has stopped or that we have freed ourselves from its reins. Evolution is driven by the dialogue all species unconsciously have with their environment and each other. Sure we have changed our own environment, made it more comfortable and almost dove-tailed it to our needs – mauled it almost into an image of our own likeness – but that does not mean that the environment is still not working on us in ways that we cannot yet perceive.

And also, perhaps more pertinently, we have the evolution of other life forms on this planet to consider. They impinge on us very directly sometimes and the effects of this may well drive our own evolution in ways that could be sudden, drastic and unimaginable in their end results. Viruses evolve a lot quicker than we do. No sooner do we come up with a vaccine against them than they evolve in response and we find ourselves dealing with a virus that has suddenly become highly resistant to human control.

It is not beyond the bounds of reason that a particularly nasty pandemic could one day make a good stab at wiping us all out. But as the programme posits, should such an event occur, there may well be some survivors. Some survivors whose genetic make-up contains a previously useless and overlooked genetic anomaly which suddenly renders them immune from the new virus. It is these survivors whose genetic code would be carried forth into the future generations of our species and change its course forever. The evolutionary process – the survival of the fittest – would once again claim ascendency over our arrogant attempts to control our own destiny.

So. In short: we are all of us still evolving. Even Wayne Rooney.

And that single fact just blows my mind.

Just like Dr Alice.

My Bloody Valentine

Logistics is big business these days. You know: getting an item from A to B. B preferably being the address that has been stamped all over A. It is surely an indication of how advanced we have become as a society that we can send an item half way around the globe in 24 hours and deliver it to a specific postal code in the middle of nowhere. Talk about precision bombing of the friendly sort.

So. Logistics then. It’s an amazing concept. A global concept.

And we’ve all heard of a few of these companies that specialize in logistics. FedEx. DHL. Erm... and some others.

We are all dependent on them at some point. We are all pinpoints in the vast logistical web that is the human race; part of the logistics network in a mostly passive sense.

We wait for these guys to find us and render unto us that which someone else has deigned to make ours.

Things like Valentine’s Day presents.

My wife bought me one of those this year – as she does every year.

I have yet to receive it. It has yet (at the time of writing) to be delivered. Because the logistics people can’t seem to get their heads around the simple logic of reading an address label and assigning the package to a correct delivery route or even – and this makes me gasp – finding the right package with the right name and address on it.

I do not yet know what my Valentine’s present is. Only that my wife is as cheesed off as I am that we are still waiting for it to arrive. She has, bless her, bought me a second extra present to keep me going in the interim so you could argue I have benefitted from this balls up. But that isn’t the point, is it?

The first attempt to deliver the package was a non starter. DHL subcontracted the delivery to a local logistics company who, ironically, were located a mere mile away from my house. If I’d known this at the time I could have walked round to the depot. I wish I had. They’ve “lost” the package. Not that they’re admitting to this, mind. It has been “loaded onto one of their vans for delivery”. This status was apparently flagged up on the 16th February. So, I can only assume the driver is coming to my house via The Maldives and will arrive as soon as he can get someone to haul his van off the coral reef.

My wife rang and notified the vendor who were as cheesed off as we were. They sent out a second version of the item express delivery. This time DHL would deliver it themselves personally.

They didn’t. They called when my wife and I were both at work (surely a common occurrence these days), didn’t try the neighbours who were all in and took the parcel all the way back to their depot in Sutton effing Coldfield which is miles away from my house. It is not a part of the world either of us are familiar with so we did not fancy having to drive all that way, with the kids in tow, after a hard day at work. Could we come at the weekend? No. They are closed Saturday and Sunday. So if you are working parents you are pretty well stuffed.

We opted to have the package delivered to my place of work. I had to email them to do this – or so the automated telephone message informed me. I did so. I gave them every piece of information that a true logistics-head could want. Things like my name and my work address; the delivery code of the item, the original address, the service route, my mobile phone number, etc. Everything.

Yesterday DHL delivered the wrong package to my place of work. A package not addressed to me, with not my name on it and looking nothing like the package my wife had bought for me. Gregory Beavis if you’re reading this... I apologize for the delay of the delivery of your own package. It is currently in my possession.

Cue tightly voiced phone call to DHL (once I’d navigated the automated telephone firewall and actually got to speak to a living breathing half-thinking human being). Cue many apologies.

They could see straight away what they had done wrong. They had delivered the wrong package. They had not delivered the right one. This from a logistics company whose whole raison d’être is to deliver packages to the addresses printed on them.

Apparently they’re going to call again today and we are going to swap packages. Kind of like a dodgy drugs deal at an international airport. Only this time, I hope, without further foul ups.

I am not holding my breath.

I guess the moral of the story is this: if you want to guarantee that something is delivered to some specific person in some specific place you’d better bloody well start walking now and deliver it yourself.

Trust me; it’s the only logical thing to do.