Alcohol

I'm not a puritan (I couldn't give up sex and I don't like Cornflakes) but I drink so little I could be a teetotaller.

It has to be a special occasion indeed for alcohol to pass my lips.

Most of the time when I choose to drink it is not from a desire to take oral pleasure from the grape or the hop. There will undoubtedly be an element of peer pressure or the occasion itself will demand I allow my temple to be profaned with the bitter poison. A special occasion. Visiting friends and not wanting to reject their eagerly offered hospitality. A concession to "have just one" for the sake of appearances.

Secretly (though less secretly now) I would be quite happy if alcohol never entered my inner sanctum ever again.

It depresses me.

Alcohol literally depresses me.

It hit me earlier this week when I visited some very dear friends and shared a couple of pints of beer with them. At the time it felt fine. The taste was "ok". I would rather have had water or even a Coke but, you know, the occasion was one of those listed above and I accepted the offer of beer.

The trouble for me occurs the next day.

I felt depressed as all hell. Not hungover. Not ill. Depressed.

And it gave me a flashback to my twenties when I used to go out fairly regularly to pubs with friends and sink a few beers on a Friday night because that was what Friday nights were for.

I secretly loathed it. Not the going out. I could see that socializing was essential. It was the alcohol. The slavish adherence to "getting out of it" because that was what you were meant to do.

I rarely got drunk. Not out of a capacity to absorb huge quantities of alcohol and still walk a straight line but out of an internal mechanism whereby I find it very hard to let go and lose control.

But next day, Christ, next day the feeling of depression would incapacitate me every single time. So much so I would have to write off the entire day. I couldn't write. I couldn't trust myself to make any kind of decision. I'd just have to ride it through until the pall eventually left my system.

It got to the point whereby a simple equation (3 hours at the pub = an entire day written off) meant that I'd start to decline invitations to go out or find excuses to be elsewhere. For a couple of glorious years I'd just take myself off on my bike in the summer and spend my evenings cycling for miles and miles. I loved it. Sure it was solitary but being out and about in the British countryside was a real balm and, best of all, it gave me inspiration for the next day and I felt clean, hopeful and refreshed.

Alcohol could not compete.

For a while I tried to attach a moral payload to my choice not to drink but that was just dishonest. In truth if other people get genuine pleasure from drinking alcohol, good luck to them. For me it takes more than it gives and I'd rather not enter into the contract in the first place.

Does that make me a wuss? Maybe.

Personally, I like to think that it proves my hedonistic credentials. I like my pleasures to be unalloyed. A pleasure that you have to pay for later isn't that great a pleasure in my book. I want to have my cake and eat it.

Just spare me the accompanying glass of wine.

Wasp Flavoured Toast

Maybe he was depressed? Maybe he was just tired of life?

I'm not sure if wasps have any natural predators (aside from humans protecting their jam sandwiches) but it's possible his family had been wiped out in some random act of waspicide. Maybe the exterminator left him alive to spread the warning to other wasps? A cruel act of mercy.

I've run any number of scenarios through my mind this morning, trying to answer the simple question: why? It was such a horrible way to go. So senseless. So needlessly painful.

It's not like I make toast every day. In all honesty I'm not a toasty person. But once in a while the whimper of charred bread calls to my taste buds. Sometimes only beans on toast can fill that hole in my soul.

So there I am. Like a scene from a sitcom or a kitchen appliance advert. The epitome of domestic bliss. The bread is in the toaster. The toaster is on. The filaments are heating up; they're glowing red hot. Already the mouth-watering aroma of slightly burning bread is filling the air.

Enter suicide wasp stage right, through the open back door.

There's no preamble. He heads straight for the toaster like he already has an agenda. I make an attempt to wave him back outside again; it's instinctive even though I know wasps spurn any kind of direction or air traffic control.

And then before my eyes he immediately dive-bombs into the toaster. I mean he does a genuine kamikaze straight down the side between the filaments and the bread like the Millennium Falcon entering the Death Star.

I'm gobsmacked. I feel a little bit sick. I'm so shocked I can't even turn the toaster off for a few seconds. When I do I peer in gingerly.

I'm not sure what to expect. A blackened bubble of antimatter glued to one of the filaments maybe. Or half a wasp scorched into the toast like the remains of a victim of spontaneous combustion: just his wellington boots and the pipe he used to smoke left weirdly intact.

But there is nothing. Nothing at all. Even when I take out the slices of bread the bottom of the toaster is as it always is. Full of toasted bread crumbs. No sign of a blackened thorax or a smoking mandible.

I examine the toast. That too is as it should be. No unwanted sticky matter like superheated bubble-gum adhering to the surface.

Where the hell did the wasp disappear to? Did he incinerate completely? One clean flash of light and then gone forever? His every atom seared out of existence? There wasn't even any smoke or the pop and sizzle you usually get with shop insectocuters.

I confess I didn't enjoy my beans on toast after that.

I chewed every mouthful a little bit too carefully. Just in case something crawled out of the bread and made one of the beans start to buzz...

Pornification

So the Co-operative has issued an ultimatum to the UK’s lad’s mag publishers: cover up or push off.

Basically, the publishers of such literary gems as Nuts, Loaded and Zoo have until 9th September to start issuing their journals in “modesty bags” or risk a firm refusal from the Co-op chain to even stock the publications on its 4,000 shelves.

While part of me is smirking at the thought of the busty models on the cover of Loaded being forced into an opaque polythene chastity belt I can see that this is a complicated issue (unlike the content of the issues at the centre of the conflict).

I don’t think anyone would disagree that the sheer amount of virtual female flesh that is currently on display around the Western world is deeply disturbing in its volume. Bus shelters, newsagents, internet, calendars, television and computer games all over our technologically advanced hemisphere are awash with tanned cleavage and airbrushed thigh.

Time was when I was a kid you’d have to strain your neck up to the top shelf of a newsagent to see an exposed naval or the slightest hint of pokie action. Nowadays you have to shift aside glossy images of buoyantly racked soap stars and pop singers exercising their diaphragms by sitting legs akimbo just to get your hands on the latest CBeebies magazine for your children.

Now I am not a prude. I’m a normal, sexually dynamic bloke. If I see a picture of an attractive woman (doesn’t have to be a supermodel – in fact, personally, I have leanings towards the real woman end of the spectrum) I’m going to have the expected response.

But.

It’s a no-brainer that to commodify women and use them to sell product is morally, sexually and intellectually wrong. It’s actually worse when the product that is being sold is sex itself. There’s a weird kind of slavery ethos at work at that point that is worse because it is so insidious. Everyone is compromised by it. Everyone is cheapened.

I really don’t want my boys growing up in a world where one half of the human race is seen merely as a mass marketing tool and the other responds unthinkingly like the tools they undoubtedly are.

And yet I look at some of my blog posts – the last one is a good example – and it is plain that I’m not beyond throwing up a picture of an attractive actress to draw attention to my blog. Sure I don’t take the pictures and I don’t ask the models in question to pose so provocatively but I still use them to attract readers to my blog, to boost my stats.

I’m guilty as charged, milord. I guess it’s a good job my blog isn’t published as a glossy magazine because maybe it would be in a brown paper bag under the counter at the Co-op along with Zoo. Though I would hope that the articles contained inside mine would be a darn sight more thought provoking.

The issue at the heart of the problem is sex education. It hasn’t kept up with the march of progress. The hearts and minds of the young are ceaselessly influenced by the online world. And that world is, to quote shadow health minister Diane Abbott, completely pornified and the pornification has spread out into the real world too. This totally skews the attitudes of the younger generation towards sex, to each other and to themselves. Kids these days have far easier access to hardcore pornography than my generation ever did. Too easy access in my opinion. And it is barely regulated meaning that there’s a lot of nasty stuff out there being passed off as “the norm”. That is highly dangerous to an impressionable mind.

Sex education needs to catch up with this technological boom, catch on to what is happening and redress the balance. Because what is missing from this huge deluge of objectification and sex marketing is emotional content and emotional context – the most important aspect of any kind of sexual relationship. Without it objectification is inevitable.

With it the only thing that is inevitable is a just and righteous sense of outrage.

We need to teach people to re-engage with their hearts and minds – not just their genitals.

At best, chastity belts and modesty bags just sidestep the issue and make the whole topic even more fetishized. At worse they collude and allow the status quo to continue.

And surely nobody but nobody wants the Quo to continue?

Ho ho.

ATM WTF

I have a real problem with ATMs

Not just the fundamental issue of having to rely on a machine to present me with my own money in order to buy food to ensure my on-going survival – it’s something a little more prosaic than that.

It’s the beeps. The nagging beeps that harass you to remove your card or remove the money once it’s been squeezed out through the machine’s mealy-mouthed pinch rollers.

I get that the beeps are there as some kind of auditory spur, to prompt you into physically interacting with the machine at the appropriate time and in the appropriate manner. I get that they are an aid to informing people with visual impairments that a step in the process they have undertaken has just been completed.

But I hear the beeps as an impatient nag. An antisocial klaxon that announces to the world that I haven’t removed my card or my cash quick enough for the machine’s liking. It’s like beeping a car horn at someone because they aren’t moving fast enough or are in your way.

I find myself constantly in a race against the machine’s sensors; trying to whip out my card before the machine can get in that first beep; cursing when I inevitably fail to do it. Because let’s face it most ATM’s have a grip like a pornstar sucking… er… an ice lolly (for example).

The beeps are just too abrasive. Too impersonal. Too open to negative interpretation.

Surely a recorded voice would be better? Somebody like Kate Winslet softly intoning things like, “Thank you for using me to fulfil your transactional needs – you may now remove your huge wad from my slot.” I wouldn’t mind if the world and his daughter heard that emanating from the ATM I was using.

Of course, these messages would need to be carefully regulated and recorded solely off-site. Giving the local cashiers access to recording their own messages would only lead to trouble. Messages like “You can now remove your penis from my portal” or “You have been too late with your withdrawal and there is a chance I am now pregnant” would undoubtedly turn many a head in your local branch of HSBC and not in a good way.

But all things considered they would be an improvement on the beeps and might even be good for business. I’m sure I can’t be the only person who would rather the world saw me as a pervert with a cashpoint fetish rather than just another slightly OCD nerd.

Can I?

Special Delivery

Due to my little boy’s insistence I happened to catch an episode of Postman Pat the other day. And you know what it’s like; when you haven’t seen something for a long time and then you are unexpectedly re-familiarized with it you suddenly find yourself noticing oddities, making connections where you never saw them before, seeing evidence of a huge and dark conspiracy waving its huge naked bottom before your face.

Something is not right in the state of Greendale.

The children first aroused my suspicions. There’s a high percentage of ginger hairedness in Greendale which is difficult to reconcile when there is only one adult in Greendale who blatantly carries the ginger gene: Postman Pat. He is the only Alpha Male ginge in the entire area.

And this begs the question: just what kind of package is Pat stuffing through the letterboxes of all the ladies in the town? Is he siring a whole generation of little posties while he does his rounds? To paraphrase the theme song: Post-man, Postman Pat; we can guess what’s in his sack.

But it doesn’t end there. Or rather it doesn’t begin there. Because this wild sowing of the red haired seed plainly isn’t limited to the Greendale youth. Check out some of the older generation too. Mrs Goggins for example. Such an innocent grey haired old lady. But she’s obviously on intimate terms with Pat. Just a family friend you might say. But look again. If you imagine her hair as once being red she is suddenly a dead ringer for Pat himself. Their faces are virtually interchangeable. Now, she’s either Pat’s secret mother, his older sister or his prematurely aged daughter.

Either way the gene pool in Greendale is tighter than Jimmy Carr’s accountant’s wallet.

And there’s very little new blood that comes into the town. Sure, Ajay might drive that train in and out of the station all day long but there’s never anybody on it. No one ever gets off at Greendale. There’s just the locals. The same faces, day in, day out. And all those ginger haired kids who all have Postman Pat’s nose.

I’m telling you, Greendale is like Craster’s Keep in Game Of Thrones… with Postman Pat himself being the only single dominant male allowed to breed. A couple more series down the line and Greendale will start to see genetic defects manifesting among the populace – elephantitis of the limbs, mental disorders, a rise in Greendale suicide rates (especially when the kids put two and two together and realize they all have the same father as their own parents).

I may have to ban my boy from watching the programme way before then. We’ll certainly have to bail out before the riots start and the inevitable highly sensationalized tabloid news coverage.

I really don’t think this type of thing should be allowed on the BBC.

Thank God for Bob The Builder… He only has intimate relations with his cement mixer.

Just One Cornetto

Before I proceed with my review of The World's End can I just say how gutted I was?

Absolutely gutted. Unbelievably gutted.

I seem to recall something similar happening with Wright-Pegg-Frost's last cinematic outing.

Picture the scene: opening night on screen 1 at out local Apollo (i.e. the big screen) and, including the wife and I, there were only about 15 people in the audience.

Now, some of you - those not initiated into the world's of "Spaced", "Shaun Of The Dead", "Hot Fuzz" or "Paul" - may think that is an eloquent and succinct film review.

But you would be wrong.

Because numbers can and do lie (just speak to any politician).

I know the weather is crazy at the moment. I know it's too hot and sticky to contemplate sitting in a cinema with crap air-con for a couple of hours to watch a film which doesn't feature some American beefcake hero-thug saving the world by destroying it single-handed and getting his end away with an attractively buoyant supporting (and well supported) actress. But even so. Come on, guys! These are our boys! Our boys doing good.

I'm gutted on behalf of The World's End team because I thought the movie was superb. It was the most polished, accomplished and adept film the trio of Wright-Pegg-Frost have produced to date. Sure it's a slow burner; time is spent building the premise, time is spent establishing relationships but as soon as the weird shit hits the fan the film takes off like a cornetto powered rocket.

For all the trademark humour that we expect from this team I was impressed with the amount of pathos the story has; how real the relationships and interactions between the character were. They genuinely caught something about our culture that we can all identify with and relate to.

Pegg's Gary King is truly comic-tragic character. Not just the school loudmouth who never grew up; he's a scared little boy who is unable to let himself grow up - and this is the source of most of the film's humour and pathos. We can all relate to not wanting to let go of the past; with deifying good times in our teens so much so that the rest of our lives seem empty and unbearable by comparison but Gary King takes it to self destructive extremes.

Frost adds depth to the personality interplay as Gary's former best mate, Andrew Knightley, who seethes with unexpressed disappointment at Gary's inability to grow up. The true scope and nature of that disappointment is revealed later in the film and spins nicely against the glib banter that constantly sparks between the two up to that point. But it is Gary's backstory, that isn't revealed until the very end of the film, that suddenly places all of his desperate need to cocoon and relive his teenage years into poignant sharp focus.

Without wanting to spoil the ending too much there is a fantastic moment when a superior alien intelligence is basically seen off by a couple of lairy-mouthed drunks. Somehow that very rang very true to me. I think if alien life did one day descend on planet earth some drunk with a bottle of Diamond White would probably dropkick it back into its flying saucer and tell it to fuck off back to Pluto. This would be both our first and last alien contact.

The World's End is a brilliant film and a fitting finale to the Cornetto Trilogy. Don't be one of those idiots who shrugged at "Paul" when it had its cinematic release but then caught it on DVD month's later and finally raved about it. Go and see The World's End now, rave about it now and support Team UK now.

The world could end tomorrow. Life is too short to wait for DVDs.

Pitch

In response to absolutely no customer demand whatsoever I have decided to take the commercially unviable step of republishing my poetry collection – Pitch Mandible Stone (previously only available on Kindle) – as a bona fide, 100% real, printed and bound book that you, my prospective customers, can purchase via Amazon from almost anywhere in the world, safe in the knowledge that your hard earned money won’t see hide nor hair of a UK tax man whilst your eyes gorge themselves silly on my gloriously glib alliteration and marvellous metaphor-making.

Pitch Mandible Stone is available at the stonkingly reasonable (but possibly optimistic) price of £5.99 from Amazon.co.uk and at a comparable price dependent on exchange rates, etc, from other Amazonian outlets. Just click on the image above to facilitate your purchase.

If that doesn’t sell it to you enough, here’s another free poem from the collection. Enjoy. Or rather, enjoy and then purchase the book and then enjoy some more.


The Final Frontier

Very close to it now
And I cannot remember my mother’s arms.

The soft lake of her tongue escapes me.
My hands are dissembled roots

Shot through with silent films of water
That nothing touches.

This is the confirmation
And the countdown

To sleep.
In benign synchronicity

The jettison is a Belial of gentleness;
The lift-off a merciful Herod

Relocating the first born.
I am grateful for I am too weak for the stars,

For the meteors:
I sleep dependent on the breath of their dicey charities.

Gravity sucks the blue earth
Away from my feet

And begins the inhalation spaceward.
The dramas shrink to a hoarse molecule,

The Universe to a straw.
I propel through it absolved

Like a freight of grim electrics –
My obedient organs dissolving like cane.

In sodden degrees
I leave the winsomeness of blood and synopsis behind me.

I move on
And become beautiful and shoddy like a gas.

Hence I shall not want.
I shall have no kinship with green pastures.

Beyond them, there shall I lie.
In the morning I will sing to myself a new song –

My rod and my staff fainting like gauges to zero;
My burnt out rockets falling to a carboniferous atmosphere.

The airlock shushes open and it is finished.
There is to be no more of hope and I am relieved:

My heart is uncircled and through the gates of Babylon.

An Itch You Cannot Scratch

It is official.

Our cats are agents of pestilence and biological warfare.

I can only surmise that my enemies – of which I have many, (some highly placed in both the Royal family and the television industry – how else do you explain my non-starting TV career and being forced to break up from Kate Middleton just so she could marry William?) – conspired to enlist my own cats in a dastardly plan to lay me low.

In a plan as fiendish as strapping nuclear warheads to dolphins and training them to swim into Chinese ports my cats were laced with some kind of highly active flea attractant. Before they could say “Whiskas gives us the shits” they were complete little insectoid biozones carrying the flea payload equivalent of a million megaton atomic bomb.

Detonation occurred some weeks ago in an undisclosed location somewhere in the house. The explosion was despicably silent. We didn’t even know the thing had gone off until we started to get hit by the fall-out: horrid red blotches and welts began to appear on our lower limbs. In themselves they were quite painful and annoying but these were only phase one.

Phase two was the constant irritation that these welts (or bites if you prefer) engender in the weltee. Suddenly, our own unconscious and subconscious mind was being used against us. We began to scratch. Scratch whilst performing other tasks. Scratch in our sleep. Scratch when we knew without a doubt that we were scratching and knew that we really shouldn’t… because scratching only made things worse. Welts turned into open sores and wounds that wept blood.

And. Still. Itched.

We hit back. Chemical warfare. The cats as unwitting agents had to take the full blast. Both of them got Frontlined to within an inch of their feline dignity. They weren’t happy. They were inexplicably moist and experienced a chemical odour between their ears that they could not shake off.

I don’t know how many fleas we wiped out with that first strike but I do know it was us that scarred the sky so that the sun could not shine. No wait, that was from The Matrix. Sorry.

It wasn’t enough though. Frontline failed. And the front got pushed back and back until we found we had been overrun.

And now we have no choice. No choice at all.

It’s dirty bomb time.

We have an appointment with a vet on Saturday. A veritable veteran of inter-household hostilities such as we are experiencing at the moment. We are going to drop the big one. We are going to wield the power of the gods and unleash the power of a thousand suns.

Well, maybe not quite that but we are going to gas the entire house. We are going to wipe out all insectoid life within a range of 40 metres.

I’ve posted warning signs to give them one last chance: "Pack up your powerfully sprung hind-legs and head for the hills while you still can. Signed Dr Oppenheimer."

What a pity the bitey little buggers can’t read.

Mwah ha ha!

Prince Harry To Lead Native Americans In Open Revolt

The great thing about the modern world and social networking is that news can be delivered instantaneously in sound-bite form so that it is quickly and immediately digestible. I no longer need to wade through hours and hours of news channels or column inches of newsprint to get the gist of what is going down out there in the big wide world.

Some news today has had me smiling wryly and inflating with slightly irreverent pride for the latest achievement of one member of our Royal Family.

It seems that Prince Harry has qualified to become an Apache Commander.

I'm assuming that sometime over the last year he befriended a descendent of Cochise - maybe saved his life in a bizarre bingo accident on a reservation somewhere in America's mid-west - and that the relationship developed to that slightly awkward point where it was necessary for them both to nick the palms of their hands with a sharp knife and rub the wounds together so that they became blood brothers.

I guess after that it was just a small leap of ideology to thoughts of uniting all of America's scattered  Native American tribes. How Prince Harry managed to fit that into his Las Vegas itinerary without the world finding out, I don't know, but clearly the ginger Prince conceals many hidden abilities and skills the like of which his brother can only dream of. And by brother I mean, William, not his new brother Cochise who by now must surely be aware that Harry has heap strong medicine.

Once the First Nations were again re-established and as one behind their new leader, He Whose Hair Dances With Fire, the next step was quite naturally declaring war on the white European usurpers and taking back the lands and buffalo that they had stolen from their ancestors. I'm assuming that at this point traditional ties with Prince Harry's Germano-British family back home in the UK may have become strained unless Prince Charles has developed a sudden yen to sell Ye Olde Duchy Buffalo Mozzarella but Harry is plainly a man who likes to push his envelope out as far as it will go. And after all, blood is thicker than the monarchy especially when your palm is itching like buggery.

In the absence of John Wayne to act as an honourable counterpoint to the glory-hungry appetites of the US I fear this latest career move by the young Prince can only lead to bloody conflict and strife. The war on terror may have to take a backseat and bingo may have to be outlawed. It is unknown at this point whether Johnny Depp has abandoned his moderately successful movie career and his frequent on-screen liaisons with Helena Bonham-Carter to honour his Native American heritage and join the confederacy of First American tribes in their fight for emancipation under the gingery auspices of He Whose Hair Dances With Fire but it is certain that most of the cast members of Last Of The Mohicans are already paid-up blood brothers.

The tomahawk of war has been thrown, Obama. Or to paraphrase Shakespeare: the bow has been bent and drawn. It is time to make from the shaft of the ginger Prince.

Look Out Outlook

Back in my younger days, when I was single and had no care to be respectable, I had a joyous relationship with Hotmail.

So much so I had several Hotmail email accounts.

If I wanted to sign up to a web site or a subscription that I wasn’t sure was entirely kosher I would use one of my Hotmail addresses. When I was laundering money for the Triads I put all communications through my Hotmail account Wishywashy@hotmail.com. When I was gun running for Serbian gangsters deals were done via AK47sRUs@hotmail.co.uk. And when I was maintaining several mistresses simultaneously and patronizing a local escort agency I found totalesxclusivityguaranteed@hotmail.com really useful.

*sigh*

Those were the days. I’d log on, log in and frequently be surprised by the various communiques that were often or not waiting for me (frequently not).

And then things changed.

Not so much the getting married, having kids and becoming a 'law abiding citizen' thing. More the Hotmail mutating into Outlook type of thing.

Suddenly me and Hotmail or (if I must use its Snickers name rather than its Marathon name) Outlook (if you insist) became estranged. Suddenly our theme song changed from Dennis Waterman’s “I Could Be So Good For You” to Cliff Richard’s “It’s So Funny How We Don’t Talk Anymore”. We no longer had a thing going on.

Communication between us utterly died until now we barely even make eye contact.

When I try and log in these days all I get is the “I’m sorry, I’m not available right now” brush-off. Sometimes I only have to type the Hotmail address into my browser and I’m cold shouldered to the point where the log in page won’t even load. Outlook just isn’t putting out for me anymore.

See, Hotmail was fine when it was just an email client. When all I wanted was to send crapola and receive spam. We both knew where we stood and neither of us got ideas above our station.

But now Outlook wants to be the conduit through which I CONNECT to the entire effing internet. It wants to hook into my social networks and my own home computer. It wants me to diarize my life solely through its jealous online portal. It wants to store all my contacts and personal information inside its covetous cloud. It wants me to invest more time and energy into it than I’m willing to give. It wants to own me [man] and I didn’t ever come to Hotmail to be owned.

And I could just about cope with all that; I could just about shrug off all the irritation and irksomeness it causes me…

…if just once, just once the damned thing would load up properly first time and allow me to send just a simple sodding email without crashing on me.

Because that’s all I want:

An email account that sends and receives emails.

An email account that works.

Because the Serbs are getting impatient and the pimps are after me for welching on a deal. I’ve got urgent business to attend to Goddamnit!

Sonic Doom

I don’t, as a rule, like other people’s music.
 
This is a conclusion I have reached through a lifetime of empiric research.
 
“Other people” – certainly in Leamington Spa – invariably have poor taste, play 'up' and 'slow' tempo songs at times that are not appropriate to my mood or are white and like to think that below the surface they are Dr Dre’s main man and spiritual bro.
 
The above facts, on the whole, do not impinge on my life too much or cause me to impinge on others.
 
Except when, as happened yesterday, I was walking down the street minding my own business when the keys in my trouser pocket began to oscillate to some kind of sonic disruption that was fast approaching me from the rear.
 
To my eternal regret it was neither Matt Smith with his Doctor Who screwdriver or Keeley Hawes with a vibrator. It was in fact some teenager’s third-rate pimp mobile from the bowels of which was emanating the kind of low level bass frequency normally associated with fracking operations in Canada.
 
I felt the car’s approach long before I heard the actual music and longer before I heard the tinplate rattle of the engine. I swear the air shimmered in a sort of heat haze halo around the extremities of the vehicle. Like some kind of vibrato field had been created that would pulp anything solid that dared to cross its boundaries. Anyone with gallstones in the immediate vicinity would have found themselves instantly cured.

I cannot for the life of me tell you what musical track the guy was playing. There was nothing but a solid, constant bass rumble. The sound a black hole makes when it incessantly sucks all matter and light around it into its greedy maw. And let me tell you that this guy’s music etiquette certainly sucked like a black hole. He didn’t give a damn about anyone else. He didn’t give a damn about the asphalt powdering beneath the shadow of his passing. He didn’t give a damn about the rivets and bolts that were undoubtedly being shaken loose from the engine of the very vehicle he was enveloped within. He didn’t give a damn that even when he had driven four hundred yards down the road from me, the recycling boxes that the good people of Leamington Spa had left out for the sake of eco-conservation were still audibly vibrating from the residual shockwaves he had left behind.
 
That last is a God's honest actual fact.
 
The whole episode just made me want to sneer out loud. In fact I probably did precisely that but nobody heard me, not with the blood still pouring out of their ears.
 
Why do people do this kind of thing? Why? It is invariably men that do it which leads me to think that testosterone is a contributing factor. Are these tectonic plate shifting mega-rumbles the human male’s equivalent to birdsong and stags flexing their bruising antlers? Are women attracted by the possibility of having their DNA granulated at the quantum level by the bass line of Showaddywaddy’s “Under The Moon Of Love” played at a decibel level that can actually be heard on the moon?
 
Is that what women go for these days? Having their atoms split open by a sonic scalpel?
 
Is this both safe sex and its soundtrack?
 
I don’t know.
 
Once my eardrums had returned to their normal concave state I really wasn’t sure if I was coming or going. I only knew that the earth had moved for me and I was still not at all satisfied.

You Have No Defence Output, Earthling!

Just in: shock news that will have America's mid-West sleeping even more frequently with loaded shotguns (and see David Bowie preparing for a good probing) - The Ministry of Defence has closed down its UFO desk because it feels its Pluto Population Investigation unit is serving no purpose at all and is diverting valuable resources from more important defence purposes.

In layman's terms that should mean less annoying PPI texts for us all and more coffee for other desks in the MoD. Ha ha ha!

Actually. I made that bit up about the Pluto Population Investigation unit for the sake of a lame PPI joke. And in truth, it sounds like there really wasn't any kind of a "unit" at all.

Just a desk. Probably at the back of a huge open-plan office. Right near the photocopier. Manned by some poor guy in a seventies bomber jacket who never ever got invited to join the office lottery syndicate.

And actually it's only the UK MoD. So probably the USA is totally unaffected by this decision and is still in a state of high paranoia. So no change on the sleeping-with-shotguns front then.

That aside, it is sobering news though. When you think about it.

The UFO desk offers "no valuable defence output". Their exact words.

Now that either means the person manning the desk is so inept at collating the tonnes of information he must undoubtedly receive every year that the entire system was just unworkable or - and this is entirely my interpretation - the MoD has admitted to itself that it just cannot defend us against alien invasion.

They are in fact, even as I type, diverting funds to make alien proof Anderson Shelters to save their own scrawny military arses whilst selling the rest of us down the river. "Look, Mr Alien, we freely give you 99% of the human race without any kind of resistance at all, just leave us poor whimpering guys in uniform alone and please don't probe us for unobtainium because we haven't got any."

I think this is a tacit confession from the MoD that as far as "life out there" is concerned we are probably outgunned, out-thought and totally outed in both a gay and non gay way and there is absolutely no point in throwing anymore money at Star Wars defence programmes or sending Chuck Berry records into outer space.

We are ripe for the taking. We may as well all offer our naked arses to the sky right now.

Go on. Just pull down your kecks, bend over and submit to the will of Emperor Ming. It may take some time but just remember there's a lot of us on this planet and it'll take a while for his probe to reach us all. Sure, the unbelievers are going to moan and may even call the authorities... but who's going to stop you?

The MoD?

No chance.

Those wussies have gone to ground. It's just you and me and we've got to accommodate ET's glowing finger as best we can.

Good luck, people. Live long and prosper.

Freedom Of Speech For All Or Freedom Of Speech For None

Deyka Ayan Hassan, the 21 year old student who stupidly tweeted that anyone wearing a Help For Heroes T-shirt deserved to be beheaded in the wake of the murder of soldier Lee Rigby, has been sentenced to 250 hours community service. She’d gone to the police herself after receiving hundreds of abusive Tweets in response to her own threatening to kill her, rape her and burn down her home.

The facts of the matter are simple enough but my gut response to it isn’t.

The whole thing makes me uncomfortable.

Morally the standpoint of the authorities and those who participated in the original Twitter exchange is on ropey ground. It is either a criminal offense to post / write / utter an abusive Tweet / comment / joke or it isn’t. And if it is what the hell has happened to the idea of freedom of speech?

Freedom of speech is something we very rarely think about these days. I possibly only think about it so much because I am a writer. For most of us it is like the air we breathe. We take it for granted because we mistakenly believe it has always been there and will always been there. It is part of this country’s genetic make-up.

It isn’t and never has been. It is a right that was hard won by our forebears and a right that is now slowly being wrested away from us under the guise of common decency; under the guise of protecting us and responding to our sense of outrage, disgust and, ironically, our sense of justice and morality.

Yes, Deyka Ayan Hassan’s Tweet was stupid and reprehensible. A joke that backfired and wasn’t really funny in the first place. The audience for gross shock-jokes is thin at best and very choosy even when it is at large – just ask Frankie Boyle. But are we really going to arrest people for making poor quality poor taste jokes? What common good would that serve? Protecting the rest of us from our own sense of anger and sense of disgust? Excuse me, but I don’t want Mr Cameron and the law courts inserting themselves so intimately into my sensibilities, thank you very much! I’m quite happy to process my own anger and deal with my own indignation. I just want to be protected from would-be murderers, thieves and rapists (and immoral politicians and non-tax paying corporations). I can deal with crap comedians myself.

Of course, in an ideal world everyone would always say nice things about each other. We wouldn’t have hate preachers, or racists or inflammatory orators. We’d all quote Wordsworth all day long and be utterly bored witless.

This isn’t an ideal world. But having the right to freedom of speech makes it not quite as un-ideal as it could be. We can mock our politicians. Satirize those in power over us. Challenge the law and the state when they behave ridiculously and fail to serve us, the people, as they’re supposed to. That is our TRUE protection. But freedom of speech also means that other people can disrespect us, our favourite band, our hobbies, our beliefs and our country itself. They also have the right to make disgusting jokes and be verbally offensive and utter absolutely any old crap that comes out of their mouths. There is no halfway house in this folks. We either can all say what we like or we can’t.

And it would be a much darker world if we couldn’t.

I’m thinking Hitler. I’m thinking Stasi. I’m thinking police state.

The most disturbing thing though about the Deyka Ayan Hassan case is the lack of consistency. Why were those threatening her with murder and rape - far more personally offensive attacks (with no chance of any of it being “a joke”) – not also condemned to community service? Why were they allowed to be abusive and Deyka Ayan Hassan not?

Because in this case the weight of public outrage was on their side?

Well, who decides how far and exactly when that particular pendulum has swung?

Because it certainly isn’t you and it certainly isn’t me.

Is freedom of speech now dependent on the opinions of the majority? Or just those that are in power over us? Do we now need someone else’s permission and approval to divine if what we want to say is in line with our peers and therefore acceptable to say?

When that happens freedom of speech isn’t worth the paper (or blog) that it’s written on.

And that is a true abuse.

Leamington Is Full Of The Strangest People, no. 4: Anti ID Theft Derek

Having enjoyed a hiatus from gazing at the inevitably hairy naval of my hometown of Leamington Spa, I thought it was about time I resurrected this short series of posts that throw a blogging super trouper onto the underbelly of Queen Victoria’s favourite Spa town…

Today is the turn of Anti ID Theft Derek.

I first encountered Derek in Tesco which in terms of meeting weird people has the highest weird-to-normal ratio of any other venue in the UK (not including Stringfellow’s or Spearmint Rhino or other establishments of that ilk).

Now, Derek is one of those people with a very definite sense of identity. If he was a mallard he wouldn’t be content with cobalt blue and electric green feathers, no, he would be blinging himself up with bird of paradise plumage and other peacockery. Derek, you see, likes a bit of bling. Gold chains (multiple) around his neck; gold chains (multiple) around his wrist and the lot topped off with a porkpie hat resplendent with a red feather erupting up from the headband like a miniature erection.

Identity is a big thing with Derek. You cannot miss Derek. And Derek, I am sure, never fails to miss himself – Alzheimer’s is never going to be in Derek’s genetic makeup though obsessive compulsive behaviour might be.

Now talking of bling has probably given you the impression that Derek is in his twenties. Some thrusting young buck with a uranium knuckleduster hampering his joystick skills. This is not the case. Derek is in his sixties or I am the unwanted love-child of John Lennon and Lisa Tarbuck.

An old(er) man with bling is never a good thing. For one thing it can really disrupt an MRI scan just when you really need it the most.

Anyway, what caught my eye about Derek (aside from the gold accoutrements and the red feather stiffy) was the way he paid for his goods (one bottle of vodka and a four pack of cheap beer). He paid by card – nothing strange in that – but when it came time to punch in the PIN he placed his wallet tight over the machine like a barrier and then sealed the top of it with his own face thus appearing as if he had on a welding mask and was about to administer some kind of industrial coup d’état to the checkout machine. In fact he reminded me a little of that episode of Doctor Who where people had gas masks erupting out of their faces. I half expecting him to start asking the entire shop in a high-pitched voice: “are you my mummy”. Which the cashier would have had to answer no to as he was, well, a he.

Talk about paranoia.

Did he really think I was going to look over his tweedy shoulder, memorize his PIN code and then put it in The Times via some improbable crossword cypher or just publish it on-line in some easy-to-download format for America’s Prism surveillance programme to pick up on?

Plainly Derek has some real identity issues.

He’s scared people are going to want to steal his identity above all others and become the oddball glory that is him.

And I have to say, thinking about it, who wouldn’t want to swan around in a hat that comes complete with its own wafty hard-on?

Exactly.

I rest my case.

Soft Boiled

I’ve never watched Britain’s Got Talent – partly because a show like that tends to prove that Britain absolutely doesn’t and mainly because it just seems to be another star vehicle / cash cow for Simon Cowell. So it was with interest that I read that one of the participants had thrown some eggs at the judges live on last Saturday’s show.

To be honest my first reaction at reading that a woman had thrown her eggs at Simon Cowell was to think “blimey, that’s someone really desperate to have a baby but the alimony would be worth the 3 minutes of discomfort” (that’s the conception not the giving birth). And then all glibness aside I actually felt a pang of regret that I’d missed the glorious spectacle of Simon wiping egg smegma from his forehead onto the waistband of his trousers. It seems the young lady in question (I can’t be arsed to publicise her name) wanted to protest at the “dreadful influence” Simon has had on the music industry.

And much as I’d enjoy jumping onto the “let’s give Cowell a drubbing” bandwagon I have to say “hold your horses” at this point. The influence he’s had on the music industry? I daresay he’s had some. Once. Occasionally. But let’s not build his part any bigger than it has to be. He’s not that powerful. He doesn’t hold the entire music industry in the flat of his hairy palm. Anyone who’s at all serious about music views Cowell and his annual Cowell Bots as a bit of an irritating joke, surely? They rarely have any credibility and rarely last longer than the chocolate your Auntie Doreen bought you for Christmas. His influence is truly negligible. It’s just that, such as it is, it is well publicised. That is the result of 2013 celebrity sick Britain not the result of Simon being a god-like impresario.

And to be honest, if Miss Egg wanted to strike back at those who have ruined the music industry she’d have to take out half the population of the UK, i.e. all those daft buggers that bought the ruddy music in the first place and made Cowell’s crapola so popular.

That’s going to take a lot of eggs, believe me.

On the bright side, someone throwing eggs at Cowell sure beats millions of tasteless teenagers throwing their money at him… And I’m sure somewhere there’s a joke to be made about battery farming and Simon’s cheap celebrity production line that churns out so many rotten eggs each year… I just can’t be bothered to make it.

I just ain’t got the talent, see?

LOL. ROFL. AFK. ETC.

Language is the preserve of everybody and yet I often find myself falling into the trap my elders made before me: denigrating and sneering at the language of teenagers.

Teen-speak is an oddly fluid, cyclical, ever-changing, totally unpredictable thing. Now I recognize that all language is that to a point but teen-speak seems to evolve in ways that are counterintuitive to the way most changes occur to a language.

Teen-speak does not evolve through any obvious source of necessity – unless you count the necessity to be as different and “individual” as possible. Different in this case invariably mean different from all the grown-ups that teenagers secretly wish they were and individual in the sense that you fit in with your peers who are all speaking exactly the same lingo as you so that you feel part of a group or a gang or, that most wonderful of entities, a movement.

When I was a kid we had our own set of cool words.  “Cool” was one of them having made a post-modern ironic resurgence from the 60’s. I also recall “gnarly” was doing the rounds thanks to Bill & Ted and “no way / way” was popular thanks to Wayne’s World. We also had words like “eppy” for someone who was flipping out in today’s vernacular; “pleb”, “dickwad” and my own personal favourite “buttock-brain”. Of course, most of our special words were insults and a host of them survive today and have merely been added to by later generations. All were inspired by movies and TV, without a doubt.

Now “cool” is one of those strange epithets that has accrued a meaning beyond that of the original one. I’m sure it was as annoying to the older generation as “sick” now is to me. Lord knows I had enough trouble reconciling myself with “wicked” without having to take on board that “sick” now means “cool” which ultimately means something good and desirable.

I’ve noticed, however, that the internet and computing is now having a direct influence on the language of our young people.

My eldest boy, whilst chatting (read that as SHOUTING) with his mates via head-mic on X-Box Live continually refers to annoying players as “hackers”. It annoys the hell out of me because the activity of these people invariably does not involve them penetrating the mainframe of Skynet and bringing about the end of humanity and the rise of the machines.

And don’t even get me started on “LOL”. My boy says it constantly. And not even in an ironic sense either. I could cope with it if he said “LOL” drily in a situation or at a joke that was meant to be funny but plainly wasn’t. A “humour fail” (see, I can still get teen-speak) situation would be appropriate for someone to deadpan and say “LOL” as if they were speaking to an idiot who’d recited the same joke 50 times in the hope of cracking your reserve and finally making you laugh. Instead, “LOL” genuinely seems to stand in for actually laughing at something that is genuinely amusing. Albeit the kind of something that the rest of us would just crack a wry smile at or nod at bemusedly. It is in fact the kind of situation that does not require one ever to laugh out loud but just to feel amusement in a small quiet way. “LOL” now acts as a stand-in for a normal low-level humour response. What actually happens is that the use of the word “LOL” (is it actually a word?) strips the humour away completely from the situation whilst at the same time acknowledging that the speaker did actually get the joke. What is that? Ironic irony?

I’m just waiting for the inevitable development when the audience at a comedy gig no longer laughs out loud but merely utters “ROLF” under their breath every time their favourite comedian delivers a killer punch-line.

That will be the moment that teen-speak finally kills irony and humour and all intelligence forever.

You probably think there is no way that this could ever happen.

Well, I’m here to tell you:

Way.

A Little Less Banky

According to their TV adverts Barclays are launching a great new gimmick.

Personalized credit cards.

That’s right. Anyone with a camera or a hooky copy of Adobe Photoshop can design their own picture or graphic to be printed onto their Barclays credit card which they can then use in any store, restaurant or Heritage site in the country if not the entire world. Apparently, Barclay’s idea is to be “a little less banky”.

A-effing-mazing.

Being of a puerile bent, my mind instantly leapt at the potential for comedic mayhem that I could unleash onto my favourite unsuspecting store cashiers. A credit card with my middle-finger, enlarged by enforced perspective, erupting in eye-watering 3D as my gurning face grins lasciviously behind it. Yeah, swipe that shop clerk! Or maybe something a bit more satirical… me dressed up as a stereotypical crook – black and white striped jersey and black eye-mask, hauling a bag of swag over my shoulder. How much for my weekly shop, Mr Tesco? Daylight robbery? You betcha! Or even better… the ultimate social commentary. We’ve all heard of Christmas party goers photocopying their bum-cracks during office revels. Well, that’s small fry and amateurish compared to your very own credit card proudly displaying your cranked open bum cheeks below the MasterCard icon. Yeah, I’ll take some cash back on that please, Mr Cashier. Worth every frigging penny!

I even went so far as to mock up some initial designs and break out my digital camera. I even thought about acquiring a “back, sack and crack” but figured you could take suffering for your art a little bit too far.

In the end my little comedy ship ran aground before it even left the port (kind of like the Mary Rose only without the overblown Tudor ego weighing it down). It appears Barclays, utter killjoys that they are, have stipulated a few “image guidelines”. Here they are in all their full unbroken-down glory (my additions are in italics):

 

 

1. You must own the image or have the permission of the image owner to use it. (yeah, der)

2. If your image includes another person, you must have their consent to use it. (ditto)

3. The image you choose for your card must not contain any of the following:

• Trademarks or company names – eg, images marked with ® or ™ signs (so Jedi but not Star Wars)
• Images or text protected by copyright – eg, images marked with © or other watermarks or notations (no quotes from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four)
• Slogans, tag lines, branding, marketing or promotional products, services or images of companies (does that include “McBollocks”?)
•  Images of, or the name or nickname of, celebrities, musicians, sportspersons, entertainers, public figures, film stars, cartoon characters, members of the royal family or other famous people (bang goes my Paul Daniels’ “you’ll like this but not” a lot idea)
• Contact information – eg, telephone numbers, URLs, Facebook and Twitter usernames account numbers, addresses or email addresses (a major blow to call-girls everywhere and I can’t even poke the checkout girl)
• Political statements or images relating to ethnicity or religion (so much for my “Jesus, that’s expensive!” idea)
• Images of flags, except for the Union Jack/UK flag, St George’s Cross/English flag, St Andrew’s Cross/Scottish flag, The Red Dragon/Welsh flag and St Patrick’s Saltire/Northern Irish flag. If any of these are used, they can only be images of the original national flags and must not be edited, cropped or have any additional art work or writing on them (what about the Jolly Roger – is that not OK?)
• Images, signs, symbols or text relating to money, currency, drugs, tobacco, alcohol, gangs, hatred, graffiti, betting, gambling, or financial products and services (what? banking generally)
• Provocative, lewd or sexual images or content (that’s 95% of images on the internet ruled out)
• Nudity (does that include animals?)
• Offensive material – eg, images, signs, symbols or text relating to violence, death, injury, racism, cruelty, profanity, obscenity, weapons, firearms, ammunition or terrorism (that’s all references to the armed forces ruled out)
• Anti-social or obscene behaviour, or socially unacceptable groups (so sober pacifist tramps are OK?)
• Content where drinking, being drunk, smoking or gambling is the focus (the Great British social scene down the pan)
• Text, unless benign and in the English language (no interesting quotes from Chaucer)
• Any image that might reflect poorly or might engender hostility toward company brands, including MasterCard®, Visa® or Barclays (that’s my bumhole right out of the equation then)
• Any reference to the Olympic Games, World Cup or any other international branded event (no candid shots of the Ladies’ Bowls Tournament)
• Reference to any bank, building society or other monetary institution (so much for my “HSBC is great” idea and I guess the Mafia is out too?)
• Weapons, unless in a ceremonial context (what if I kill someone during a twenty-one gun salute?)

Right. Basically this rules out any idea that I have already had and / or any idea that I am ever going to have. I pretty much guarantee it. Apart from one. The word BORING in very large type spread across the face of the card.

*sigh*

Yet again, the bankers of this country have stifled creativity, public spending and the potential for economic growth.

Maybe the word “shameful” would be a more suitable design?

The Porcelain Preservation Society

Many of you (unless you live in a yurt) will have seen the new IKEA television adverts that extol us to do away with boring old traditional garden furniture and splash out on some Swedish decking and a hot tub. And by boring old traditional garden furniture they expressly mean garden gnomes (weirdly no mention is made of conspicuous clumps of pampas grass); those poor, rashly fired clay figurines that clearly classify their owner as being (a) stuck in 1970’s sitcom land and (b) pretending and failing to broadcast to the world that they are actually middle class.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has received a number of complaints about the myriad violent ways Mr and Mrs IKEA are shown dispatching the various garden gnomes that infest their gardens. In scenes that have probably made Oliver Stone puke his ring in sheer horror gnomes have been smashed against garden fences, eviscerated with high powered water hoses and skull-fucked with throbbing lengths of garden hoe.

Actually I made that last one up but it illustrates perfectly the 18+ tone of this gore-fest advertisement that glamorises war and extreme violence just to push a few deckchairs onto an unsuspecting public.
The ASA, however, have decided not to uphold the complaints as they feel that the “clearly fanciful and light-hearted” nature of the advert mediates the eye-wrenching, gut churning gratuitousness of the shlock violence.

And I have to agree. The only good garden gnome is a dead garden gnome and that’s all there is to it.

Of course, I am joking.

Garden gnomes cannot be killed. They cannot be killed because (and this may come as a bit of shock to the complainants) THEY ARE NOT ALIVE IN THE FIRST PLACE. They are inanimate objects. They are lumps of fired clay cunningly moulded to look vaguely like humanoid figures. They have about as much sentience as an IKEA barbecue fork. They do not have feelings, cannot feel pain and, I am pretty sure, do not have an aesthetic opinion one way or another as to the state of the garden they find themselves dumped in.

People have merely complained because of the anthropomorphic nature of garden gnomes.

Day in day out, all over Greece and in other parts of Europe, plates and cups are being wantonly smashed during the climax of Greek weddings. These poor plates have never even been eaten off; they have been denied the single, defining purpose for which all plates are made. Instead they have been made for one reason only: to be wedding fodder. They have been created to be destroyed, nothing more.

Where are these people when these innocent plates are being killed? Where is the “no plate born to die” campaign in the national press and on the internet? Wasn’t it Roger McGough who once poetically cried, “Monica, think of the saucers”?!

Why do these people not rush to defend these defenceless items of cheap porcelain?

I’ll tell you why. Because they are just plates. Because they are just manually manipulated bits of clay that have been unlucky enough not to be fashioned into little men with fishing rods and other spurious items of horticultural equipment.

Well, such hypocrisy and inconstancy really gets my goat. It’s time to restore the balance.

It’s time to stand up for teapots, claypipes and ceramic butter dishes everywhere. I am forming The Porcelain Preservation Society and I invite you all to join me in saying no to IKEA and yes to little clay men in galoshes. It’s time to love your mug, savour your gravy-boat and hug your jugs.

If nothing else we will do wonders for the Cornish pottery industry.

Now if you’ll excuse me, me and my Toby-jug have a titillating date with a hot tub…

Death By Beaver

When beavers were introduced to Knapdale, Mid-Argyll in May 2009 I cheered.

Being part Scottish I could only celebrate with my far-Northern cousins that finally, at last, their beaver needs were being met. It is a little known fact that there has long been a shortage of beaver in Scotland. Some blame the Highland Clearances, some the proliferation of Buckfast and deep fried Mars bars, most put it down to the hordes of midge flies that are attracted to anything warm and moist. After all an itchy beaver is an unhappy beaver.

However, as the classic beaver spurns any kind of fashionable depilation, it was agreed that a good full musky pelt would be ample protection against even the most determined of hormonally driven irritants and therefore the whine and nip of insistent little pests would be “nay bother” to the eager beavers waiting to set up home in the west coast of Scotland.

The beavers were duly released and allowed to run free and to this day thrive and prosper in Knapdale, Mid-Argyll.

It is a story worthy of the BBC’s Springwatch. A conservation success story to be shouted from the rooftops although we are yet to see Chris Packham get to grips with a beaver live on telly despite Michaela Strachan’s best attempts to the contrary.

All should be well. Beavers and beaver jokes have been resurrected in the British Isles to the glory of all.

And then comes the disturbing news today that a man in Belarus has been killed by beaver. The beaver population in Belarus is an eye-watering 80,000. I’m not sure what ratio that is to the male human population but surely there is enough beaver to go around.

Details are currently sketchy but it seems the man had attempted to capture the beaver in order to have his photograph taken with it.

Well truly, what man has not savoured the adolescent dream of being photographed running his fingers through the quivering fur of a beautiful, perfectly formed beaver?

It seems this particular beaver was having none of it though. It didn’t want to be tied down. It didn’t want to be posed. It didn’t want to be stroked. It wanted to be left alone and photo-shoots be damned. It was plainly the wrong time of the month. The beaver was not in season. The beaver bit and bit hard.

The poor man consequently died of his injuries.

Although “death by beaver” may sound to some a glamorous way to go I suspect my Scottish brethren are now twitching nervously beneath their sporrans and analysing growing beaver numbers in the Knapdale area with a sense of gnawing trepidation. Prime air-time on Springwatch is all very well but with a beaver population explosion on the cards it is only a matter of time before there is bloodshed in the Scottish bush.

After all, an angry beaver with teeth is not something you want erecting a dam at close quarters in your kilt.

Pitch Mandible Stone

If I have been absent from blogging of late it has been for the best of reasons. I have been busy compiling material for no less than 3 books ready for e-publishing on Kindle.

The first of these is now ready and available for purchase at the un-princely sum of £1.36. I apologize to those of you who are boycotting Amazon for their tax avoidance practises and hope that you won't hold their malpractise against me. I don't think my sales are going to line their pockets overmuch... but you never know.

Pitch Mandible Stone is my first proper collection of poetry. I've had the odd poem published elsewhere over the years - 30 or so in small magazines and various UK small presses - but this is my first anthology that solely comprises all my own work.

Pitch Mandible Stone is made up of 18 poems that are a fair representation of my poetic repertoire. I'm hoping that enough of you good kind people will buy a copy that I might be able to buy myself a pint with the royalties. Even if poetry isn't your bag or you don't have a Kindle to download it to I am hoping you will at least follow the link and hit the "like" button.

It's always difficult to describe a collection of poetry so instead, as a show of good faith, I'm going to offer you a freebie. A free poem taken from the collection. If you like it or find it sufficiently interesting to want to read more, well, you know what you have to do. Thank you in advance.


The First Casualty Of War

They come ferreting through the bindweed
Dropping bobble hats and gloves in the rush;
A line of duffle coated warriors
Slogging over terrain rough as new landfill.

The cemetery erupts with the bold
Lung explosion of shrill voiced mortars
And invisible grenades. Right arms carried
Like automatics judder with school yard kick-back.

What foes there are drop by the thousand
But there are some who do not die easy.

Ranks of guanoed seraphim stand
Against the advance goading the crosshairs
To collect and dog them like midge flies.
One squaddie more astute in his brutality than the rest

Pistol-whips the neck of a submissive angel
With a club of wood. He is saving bullets.
There is a god shattering crack – real not voiced -
And every tongue stops.

What crows there are fester upward
And offer amused catcalls to the air.


Some are too wise to the ways of death.

Dirty Poles

In an ideal world this post would be about my misadventures in a lap dancing club.

Instead it is about a misadventure with a broken washing machine. Misadventure. That makes it sound like the final verdict is a cop out from an inconclusive police investigation when in fact the verdict is far from inconclusive. It was, ladies and gentlemen, theft pure and simple.

Yes, the washing machine - condemned to death due to a clapped out motor - had been left in my front garden in full view of the street. Yes, my intention was to offload it onto the first rag and bone man that blew his trumpet my way. Yes, I had no intention of making any money from the transaction. I affirm all of the above.

But I put it to you that, lying in situ on my front lawn as it was, and all other intentions aside, that washing machine was still my property and legally mine. To remove it without my permission was theft plain and simple.

So. The local rag and bone man finally appears on his appointed day and I dash outside to hail him over. He grinds his flatbed truck to a halt, leaps out with the look of a martyr doing me a favour and finds me scratching my head at the huge washing machine shaped hole that has suddenly appeared in the reality that surrounds us.

It was literally there the last time I looked and now suddenly it wasn't.

Some bugger had half-inched it in the night. Probably while Karen and I had taken the car off the drive and gone into town to see Star Trek.

Unbelievable. Do these people offer a refuse collection service as well?

I had to apologize for wasting Mr Rag & Bone Man's time. He gave a pained shrug like he was used to this sort of thing and uttered the words, "probably them dirty Poles" before driving off in a squeal of copper piping and freshly fenced drain covers.

Great. Theft and casual, lazy racism all in one day.

To be honest, it's possible he wasn't slagging off all Poles in one foul breath but merely slighting the rival gang of Polish rag and bone men who also ply their trade along our street and, as he sees it, steal his business.

As it was I know for a fact that the washing machine was taken late in the evening when no rag and bone man would even think about stirring from the pub no matter how much free "any any old iron" was waiting to be had. Somebody else had nicked it, ethnic extraction as yet unknown.

And I am mightily pissed off about it but I find all avenues of recompense currently closed to me. The thing was broken and I wanted rid of it. So what does it matter?

It matters because whoever took it had made huge assumptions about the situation. That washing machine could have been specifically promised to someone. That machine could have been in full working order and only outside temporarily while we overhauled the kitchen. That washing machine could have been a novelty dog house.

They didn't ask to find out. They just took it. If they'd knocked on my door and asked me if they could take it I would probably have said yes and good riddance to it. But they didn't even pay me that smallest of respects.

It is the arrogant assumption that they had the right to take it without any kind of legal impediment that really grates with me.

An Englishman's castle is no longer sacred.

These days, unless you can nail it down, the natives are likely to steal the moat.

Jamie Oliver Child Abuse

In a move guaranteed to ensure his twatdom for evermore, “cheeky chappy” TV “chef” Jamie Oliver has claimed that an unhealthy packed lunch is on a par with child abuse and the providers of the packed lunch – the hapless parents – are the abusers.

I kid you not.

Being a regular internet surfer my sensibilities have long been bludgeoned to insensate dullness by the proclamations of idiots and emotional amoebas the world over but even I, desensitized oaf that I am, found myself reeling in shock at the sheer magnificent idiocy of Jamie’s latest outburst. It is idiocy on an Olympian scale. Stupidity big enough to gag a black hole.

Jamie needs to take the same care over what comes out of his mouth as to what he puts into it – and wants to put into ours.

A packed lunch, no matter how comprised of donuts, lard sandwiches, liquefied sugar and cholesterol shakes, cannot in any way compare with child abuse.

Does Jamie need to attend a corporate training course on what child abuse actually is? You’d think with Operation Yewtree currently decimating the BBC’s summer programming schedule, Jamie would be a bit more clued up. Maybe the BBC could spend some of our license money sending Jamie off to make a programme about child abuse and how learning about it affects him and, of course, he can throw in a few recipes for conciliatory vegetable and nettle smoothies while he’s at it to make the kids feel better about themselves? Except the last thing those kids need is king dickhead Jamie Oliver criticizing them over their choice of comfort food.

Most bad packed lunches are not formulated by parents setting out to wilfully harm their kids or even by parents who take evil, predatory pleasure from stuffing their kid’s Power Rangers lunch box with enough fat to make a McDonald’s burger feel positively anorexic. Most of the time a bad packed lunch occurs due to ignorance, poverty and, let’s not overlook the biggy, the fact that the child in question refuses to eat anything else to the point where the family’s own doctor advises them to just let him / her eat whatever the hell they like just as long as they are eating something and ingesting enough regular calories.

And what about those ordinary families who occasionally slip a treat into their kid’s lunch boxes? The occasional Mars bar or Twix? The infrequent chocolate mousse? Is that child abuse too? Or are we just the equivalent of chat room “lurkers” grooming our kids for worse things to come? Sucking them into an underground world where their dependency on chocolate and sugary drinks will make them easy prey for Machiavellian techniques to make them more biddable in years to come? “Do the hovering and there’s a Milky Way in it for you, son…” Christ. I’ll hand myself over to the Yewtree investigation squad right now, shall I?

Dear Jamie, do you know what one of the most soul destroying aspects of child abuse is?

Guilt. Being made to feel guilty about something that wasn’t your fault and something that you could in no way have any responsibility for. Abusers love guilt. It really does make those in their power more biddable.

Guilt is a nasty, insidious thing when it is not deserved (but nevertheless keenly felt).

Spreading it about and using it as a leverage tool to sell your own branded personal ethos to the country and bolster your flagging celebrity status is abusive in the extreme.

Isn’t it about time you turned yourself in to the cops, Jamie? (I hope one of them fucks you over with a Curly-wurly.)

The BARFTAs

You won’t have heard my name mentioned at last night’s BAFTA awards but you may have heard one of my jokes.

At least I think it was one of mine. It was a pretty damned weird coincidence if it wasn’t.

Some of you may have heard of this “Twitter” thing. A few of you may even use it on occasion. I know I tend to use it very occasionally. And like a lot of people on Twitter sometimes I get sucked into “Following” various celebs just to feel idiotically closer to them. The whole thing is very shallow and needy and more than a little shameful.

On occasion, when temptation gets the better of me, I may even try and send a Tweet to one of my favourite celebs, just in passing, nothing heavy meant by it and the whole exercise in no way affects my emotional or mental state to have you ignore me yet again, thank you very much, that is the last time I EVER EVER watch one of your shows, do you hear me you arrogant stuck up arsehole?

Because, of course, these people are bombarded with Tweets from needy idiots all the time wanting the instant gratification of a response from someone famous just to they can write a blog post about it. So many Tweets in fact that you have more chance of seeing Romola Garai’s stiches than having your Tweet actually seen by the intended recipient let alone having it replied to (and you will have to have watched last night’s BAFTAs to get the stitches reference).

I know this. So I have Tweeted a celeb on no more than 3 occasions in all my years using Twitter. Most of the time I am sane enough to keep away from such shenanigans. But sometimes, just sometimes, I get drawn in.

As I did yesterday morning. I just happened to see a Tweet from buoyant Northern comedy lass, Sarah Millican. She was on her way to the BAFTAs, was plainly nervous and so had done “a little sick in her mouth”.

To which yours truly, unsung comedy genius and master of quick wit and repartee that I am, replied, “Shouldn’t it be the BARFTAs then?”

The awkward Twitter silence that followed that gag made me feel pretty sick I can tell you. But I shrugged it off – *sigh* I never learn – and felt no negative feelings towards Sarah Millican; she's lovely. I rationalized it. It was my neediness that was at fault not the fact that she was too busy. C’est la vie.

And then at the BAFTA’s, lo and behold, whilst presenting an award Sarah makes a reference to the difference in Northern and Southern pronunciation and that now she was down South she ought to pronounce BAFTA “BARFTA”…

So a different spin put on it but the punch-line was essentially mine.

Right?

Or am I reading too much into it?

Was it just a coincidence?

To be honest, I don’t want any credit. Just the opposite. I want to assuage some guilt. The joke fell flat and I feel responsible.

Sarah, I’m sorry, pet. I feel like I really let you down.

Tweet me soon and we’ll talk about it. Kay?

Never Event

A Never Event, for those of you in the dark about such things, is a quasi-medical term to describe an unfortunate incident whereby a top surgeon accidentally leaves his Rolex inside a patient’s abdomen after performing some kind of life saving operation. It’s kind of similar to the aeronautical term, Near Miss. Except where Near Miss describes something that is actually a miss (as opposed to the more factually correct Near Hit), Never Event describes an unfortunate event that did actually occur. But never should have.

I’m not sure what the official statistics are but it’s something like for every 100,000 operations in the UK, 750 odd people will wake up after the anaesthetic has worn off to find they have been stolen by rogue gangs of Polish scrap metal dealers intent on liberating the MRI scanner that has accidentally been left inside their colon so they can get their hands on the copper wiring.

In percentage terms you have a 4/1000ths of a percent chance of somnambulistically shoplifting a pair of titanium forceps during a UK hospital operation and then paying for it with months of agonizing pain, another operation to remove it and another 4/1000ths of a percent chance that this time all they’ll leave in you is a cheese straw or a rolled up copy of Heat magazine.

Talk about an embarrassing hernia.

Apparently the bigwig experts are quick to point out that statistically this is bloody good and just shows what a bang-up operation (excuse the pun) the NHS really is. I don’t doubt it at all.

But for the unlucky 750 who inexplicably trigger off airport security scanners even when they’ve stripped down to their skimpies it is cause for little consolation.

And, at the end of the day, it is needless stupidity.

I’m sure that with the simple application of real-world logic Never Events can be eradicated completely from the NHS statistic sheets. And I have the answer.

It hit me the other day when I was in the bank and needed to fill out a deposit form. I didn’t have a pen on me but I knew the bank would have a couple lying around for me to use. Lying around but so cunningly contrived that they would be impossible for me to accidentally steal - either deliberately or in a fit of medical absentmindedness.

Because the bloody things are attached to the walls and surfaces with one of those metallic strings that appear to be made of hundreds of linked ball bearings.

This is what the NHS needs. Every piece of surgical equipment from endoscopes to the smallest laser scalpel needs to be attached to a bit of metallic ball bearing string which is in turn anchored to the hospital infrastructure. Hey presto, no hospital would ever misplace an item of beneficial butchery ever again.

And even if a speculum did end up accidentally deposited inside an OAP’s orifice, just attempting to wheel them out of the operating theatre and back to their ward would soon cause the problem to get flagged up pretty sharpish – especially if surgeons are suddenly garrotting themselves on the tautened string that is now stretched across the entire length of the theatre.

There. I declare operation Never Event a complete 100% success.

Sew him up, nurse, and let’s head down to the pub.

Oh bugger. Has anybody seen my watch?

Told You

A little while ago I was extolling the many potential virtues of 3D printing and opining that a few of the applications could be somewhat dubious.

Ne’er-do-wells printing themselves off a Bowie knife or a nuclear warhead for example. I was quite glib in my choice of examples.

Unsurprisingly – because, let’s face it, you don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict this kind of thing – somebody has now printed off a working handgun. And not just printed it off and fired it to prove that it can shoot bullets but has also uploaded the blueprints so that anybody – anybody at all – can print off their own gun. And fire it.

This somebody is from Texas. Which is so fitting it is beyond me to make a joke about it. Candy from babies and all that.

Various anti-gun groups are already up in arms about it (OK, that I will make a joke out of) and have expressed concern about such guns and blueprints falling into the hands of people too mentally imbalanced to safely be allowed to own a firearm (basically anybody who wants to own a firearm).

And I quite agree even as I sigh and shake my head at the ridiculousness of it all. Because although I warned off this type of thing happening I am very aware that a cheap version of one of these 3D printers costs over £5k to buy. I’m pretty sure you can buy a black market Colt .45 / Magnum / Star Trek phaser for less than a quarter of that these days – basically a metallic weapon that isn’t made of plastic and won’t melt in a house fire that you can buy quite cheaply off a bloke in the pub for less than a fortnight at Butlins.

So what’s the problem?

For me it is just the fundamental waste of designing a printable handgun. The world was hardly crying out for yet another handgun, now was it? Not being able to print one off was hardly an inconvenience of global proportions. We need less access to guns not more.

What we need more of are things that could improve health and life conditions for the majority of people on this planet. Printable medical equipment. Printable water purification devices. Printable artificial human limbs. Just three examples off the top of my head. I’m sure there are many, many more.

A plastic handgun that kills living things surely doesn’t appear on any sane person’s wish-list.

Nice try Mr Texas.

But next time try printing off the obituary pages of the local newspaper in Newtown, Connecticut and thinking a little harder.

The Leamington Spliff

I am aware of unnatural behaviour. Of trends being bucked. Of moulds being broken.

The natural order of things has changed. I first noticed it on a personal level. A sudden dropping off of ambition. I didn’t feel like writing so much anymore. All these amazing projects that normally fill my head suddenly felt tired and trad, man, and not at all in the spirit of filling up my senses like a night in the forest. They felt like too much work. Like I’d be directing my energies into channels that would just end up clogging my chakras, dude. I mean, why stress so much? Just kick back and relax. Let life wash over me. Surf it on the surfboard of my mind. Commune with my naval. Inhale deeply and imbibe. You know?

And then I kinda stopped caring so much. About stuff. Stuff that I can’t even get my head around to describe to you here. Big stuff. Complicated stuff. Stuff that doesn’t really matter because it is in no way cosmic or fundamental to my inner child.

And I thought hey this is weird. This is sooo not like me. I usually dig a bit of stress. I like a prick or two to kick against. But I was suddenly like all woo rather than all whoa. My yin was coping fine without my yang. What was happening?

And then I noticed changes on the outside of me too. Among my fellow town brethren. Everyone seemed more at ease. Like on a chilled level. Even the police crime statistics state that violent crime in the county has, like, totally dropped off. People are downing their knives and Kalashnikovs and just shooting the breeze with each other. They’re chilling with their bros and hos. Good times, you know?

So, like, what’s the causality behind this sudden mellowness?

For a long, long time I couldn’t even think about it ‘cos I was just so chillaxed. But then it kinda wafted against me on the breeze as I drifted home from work the other night. It kinda sidled up to me and then got right up inside me in a totally non-sexual way. It was in the air, man, and I breathed it in.

Marijuana.

It’s like scenting the air all over town. You can’t walk anywhere for long in this town of mine without some generous bro sending a special token of his love spiralling out into the atmosphere – it’s big toke love time, dudes.

Walking home for me is like walking through a huge hollowed out spliff. I travel through a drug tunnel every time I leave the house.

And suddenly my increased cravings for chocolate and snacks about mid-afternoon make perfect sense. Life is giving me the munchies.

And on one level I should be upset ‘cos it means I ain’t writing like I ought to. It means I’m not getting myself out of my career situation by the sweat of my brow or the toil of my mind. But on the other, sometimes it just nice to step outside and breathe in the free air.

You know what I’m saying?

Hmm?