Things That Make Me Realise I Need To Get Out More

Thing Number One:
Someone told me that you should always cut up those plastic things that join four cans of beer together because otherwise when you throw out the plastic things that join four cans of beer together, wild animals can get their cute little paws and noses caught in the loops and die. With the amount of beer I drink I could unwittingly be responsible for wiping out the entire badger population of the Home Counties, so I religiously cut up the plastic things that join four cans of beer together before I put them in the bin.

That's not the worrying part. The worrying part is that I've become obsessed with cutting through all of the loops with one deft stroke of the scissors. There are up to nine loops to deal with; the four large rings which hold the beer cans plus four triangular holes and one sort of lozenge-shaped one in the middle. My technique is to twist the plastic thing that joins four cans of beer together into a strange and other-worldly shape and then cut. So far the best I've managed is two cuts. But I will prevail.


Thing Number Two
I've just been considering going onto Google and trying to find out the official name for plastic things that join four cans of beer together. There must be one, in a catalogue or somewhere. When salesmen gather at beer conventions it must come up in conversation all the time. Fortunes have no doubt been made and lost during the race to develop a lighter, cheaper and altogether sexier plastic thing that joins four cans of beer together. Beer magnates probably have different words for the variants in the way that Inuits have for snow or people who live in the country have for animal poo.

Thing Number Three
I find I'm sitting here in the house on my own sniggering to myself at the way "beer can" sounds like a Rastafarian saying "bacon".


I have to go now. Nurse says it's time for my nap.

Pillow Talk

In this week's local paper there's an article about a "Christian" group which has organised a petition to try to close down "Pillow Talk", a sex shop in my town. I've never been in the shop but it's not far from where I live and I drive past it quite often. I suppose it's just possible that inside the shop is the stuff of nightmare. There may be things on sale in there that would either make you chew off your own head in disgust or cause you to fall to the floor in a paroxysm of uncontrollable self-pleasuring, I have no way of knowing. I can say, though, that the window display is about as obscene as Marks and Spencer's underwear department. There are a couple of dummies wearing negligees (I admit the panties may well be split-crotch; it's a difficult thing to check out while driving at forty miles an hour, unless of course they're worn by your front-seat passenger. Ah, the memories.)

Anyway, it seems the axe the "church group" has to grind is that this shop window can be seen from the Y.M.C.A. across the road, and that "the presence of the store would cause distress to already vulnerable people living there." So, explain the "distress" thing to me, would you? I can see that if you're living in the Y.M.C.A. and not having sex with anyone except yourself the sight of a mannequin in a nightie might serve to remind you of your plight, but speaking from personal experience, if you've been unwillingly celibate for a while you don't actually need anything to remind you because you never think about anything else anyway. And if these people are worried that young people will be enflamed by the window display I would like to remind them that masturbation is unarguably unique amongst life's pleasures in that there is absolutely no downside so long as you've plenty of Kleenex; let's face it, if it was possible to wank yourself to death most of us wouldn't have made it past fifteen.

What really enrages me is that this church group, like so many others, are hijacking Christianity for their own purposes. They may well all have accepted the Lord Jesus into their lives, but what defines and unites them is not that they are Christians, but that they are joyless bigots with little black piggy eyes and mouths like dogs' arseholes. They are unnerved by sexual activity (although I suspect they have a secret leaning towards sado-masochism) and they regard the sight of their ugly twitching socially inadequate children as proof that no good can come of sexual congress.

They cling to a strange logic all their own: it goes "I believe this thing to be wrong; I believe in Jesus Christ. Therefore Jesus Christ believes this thing to be wrong." To which I respond lightly "I believe I hate bigots. Fuck you. And I believe if Jesus returned to Earth tomorrow he'd say "Fuck you" too."

Thankfully I can tell you, based on experience, that there are Christians who are enthusiastic in embracing the knowledge that being a Christian is entirely compatible with rock 'n' roll music, occasional mild and non-violent drunkenness, saying "fuck" quite a lot and shagging like a demon. I can tell you this because I'm married to one, and while there are things that cause her moral outrage, the fact that shops selling amusingly-shaped things made out of flesh-coloured latex continue to trade unmolested is not one of them.

Praise the Lord.