Even after months of intensive coaching, the Tub of Lard still had some way to go before fully mastering the "winning smile".  

Let Me Through, I'm A Tub Of Lard

There's been a flood in Boscastle, Cornwall. Two inches of rain in an hour and a steep and narrow river valley combined to produce a wall of water ten feet high travelling at forty miles an hour. The last I heard there were still fifteen people missing. That's not the kind of thing we're used to in England; our weather, like our wildlife, is rarely dangerous, and hardly ever lethal. (To humans, at any rate. I believe shrews are known to die of stress during thunderstorms, which is ridiculous and makes a shrew a pretty sorry excuse for a predator, if you ask me.)

I've been to Boscastle. Long ago a man must have said "Look, everybody! A steep and narrow valley with three rivers running through it! In a part of England where it rains a lot! Let's build our flimsy little primitive dwellings right here!" That man was probably the First High King of All Boscastle. Right up until the first time it rained heavily.

It's a pretty village in the slightly warty, scruffy way Cornish villages are pretty, a bit like a young witch. I remember standing on the cliff-top there and thinking that if I ever got depressed enough to Do It, this would be as good a place as any. Anyway, I've long since moved on from the urge to fling myself from high places, (although I did have slightly dodgy moment at the top of the Duomo in Florence a few years back) which is just as well because the residents of Boscastle have enough to worry about without fat dead Irishmen washing up on the beach every five minutes.

For a start they've had to put up with a visit from the appalling John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister. Nobody really knows what Prescott's for, being ugly, obese, Northern and too aggressive to be allowed out much in case he starts punching people. Why the hell anyone thought that the mood of the Boscastlians would be lightened by the arrival of the Tub o'Lard beats me.

I can see that it might been effective if he'd been lowered from a helicopter during the rainstorm so that his enormous buttocks wedged themselves into the river valley, thereby creating an effective dam and saving the village, but to arrive the morning after the tragedy is, frankly, a case of "too little, too late", which strangely enough is the kind of remark Michael Howard makes about almost any aspect of Labour policy, seeming inexplicably to believe that seven years is long enough for us to have forgotten what a repellent little fuck he was when he was Home Secretary. He may actually be quite tall, come to think of it. He looks small on my telly. But then Prescott looks HUGE on the same telly, so who's to know? But I digress.

Anyway, if anyone in the government reads this, from a purely personal perspective, if there's an unexpected natural disaster in my part of Surrey and you think I need to be cheered up, please don't send John. Send me Charlotte Rampling.

Debate

With an election due sometime next year, it's fun watching the party leaders circling each other. Now that Labour's stolen most of the Tories' clothes, it's become increasingly difficult for Blair and Howard to claim any policies as their own. As they want to do pretty much the same stuff they can only say "If they do it, we'll do it more.", unless it involves public spending, in which case they have to say "If they do it, we'll do it less." The latest area for skirmishing is the Civil Service. Goes a bit like this.

Tony Blair: We will cut back on wasteful expenditure in the Civil Service by sacking 1,500 civil servants!

Michael Howard: Pah! We will cut back on wasteful expenditure even further by sacking 4,000 civil servants!

T.B.: Pah! We will also kill the civil servants we've sacked so that we'll save on unemployment benefit!

M.H.: Pah! We will kill the civil servants to save on unemployment benefit and make them into pies to feed poor people!

T.B.: Hang on a minute! I've got a good one! (Clears throat) Under a Labour government there will be no poor people!

M.H.: Bastard! (Shouting hysterically) Tony Blair's got a Fender Stratocaster but he only knows two chords!

T.B.: (Shrilly) Michael Howard's a lizard from Outer Space!

M.H.: (Sobbing) You love George Bush! You want to kiss him on the lips! With tongues!

T.B.: Aaaargh! You used to snog Margaret Thatcher! And she's old! Eeeeew!

(They start to claw feebly at each other while a crowd of M.P.s form a circle, chanting "Fight! Fight! Fight!".)

As a footnote, it occurs to me that as the Civil Service is the organisation which actually runs the country while politicians spend their time shouting, jumping up and down and flicking spit at each other, it's probably safer not to piss them off too much, as I would imagine that they have the ability, information, infrastructure and potentially the motive to fuck up the government of the day in more ways than it's possible to imagine.

Just a thought, lads.

"My God, it's a pack of feral bridesmaids!" hissed Smedley. "I'll try to kill the leader and when the little ones start to eat me, run for the Jeep. You might just stand a chance."

With their preternaturally keen eyesight Emma and Robin were alone in finding the bridegroom's version of "Puppetry of the Penis" entertaining.
 

Last to recognise the ugly mood of the crowd, Robin turned to find himself alone on stage and in mortal danger.

The beer and drugs having kicked in, David was unaware that his bride had run off and he was now trying to tango with a Fender Jazz

Distracted by the proximity of his hand to Soo's left breast, David stabs a photographer in the head. 

Yay! (2)

So, what did you do at the weekend, Davy? Oh, the usual. Had a few beers. Played a bit of guitar. Got married. Again. Yay!

Blessing and BIG party on Saturday...more later.

In case I was a little hard on Northern Ireland, here's a nice picture of The Giant's Causeway.

Surprise!

Northern Ireland has joyously discovered racism, seemingly embraced by "Loyalists", who have links with white supremacist groups on the mainland. I shouldn't be surprised, but I am.

I shouldn't be surprised because in N.I. we're dealing with people who wear the colours of the Israelis ("Loyalist" morons) or the Palestinians ("Republican" morons) just in case it proves difficult to start a fight any other way.

I shouldn't be surprised because during last week (as in many other weeks) a fire-engine putting out a house fire was attacked by a mob of stone-throwing monkeys.

And I shouldn't be surprised because as a primitive piece of social engineering, encouraging the migration of a bunch of murderous Scottish psychopaths to a cold and unpleasant island already populated by tree-dwelling cannibals was always going to be a tricky one to pull off. (I know that was a long time ago, but let's not forget the old joke: "You are about to land in Northern Ireland. Please put your watches back four hundred years.")

I'm just surprised because it seemed to me that there was still a lot of mileage to be had in the traditional kind of bigoted idiocy. Attacking and killing people because they have different political aspirations is what N.I.'s always been about, not looking for brown people to beat up. Let's face it, the only two things N.I. ever had going for it were low house prices and no racism, so now there's absolutely no point to the place. That's what really pisses me off. They should be greatful that anyone of any ethnic background other than pure bogtrotter wants to come anywhere near the ghastly place. The weather's lousy, the people are grey and miserable, the economy's built on sand, and if it wasn't for £4 billion a year in government subsidies they'd all have eaten each other by now. With Easyjet flights out of Belfast as cheap as they are I'm surprised the sodden hell-hole isn't empty.

I had this faint hope that as the piggy-eyed, potato-faced denizens of the place struggled to shift their social and political thinking from the 1600s to the twenty-first century, they might set their sights a little higher up the evolutionary ladder than 1920s Mississippi.

Fat fucking chance.