The Bugbear Zone

Moyles raises £2.4 million for charity but is still a complete arse

2011-03-21T12:42:00.003Z

Despite his broadcasting 'marathon' having raised huge bundles of cash to give to poor people, a survey has confirmed that dead-eyed, snaggle-toothed tub of blubber Chris Moyles is still loathed by everyone in Britain, even those who have never heard his radio programme.

Moyles's declaration on taking over the Radio One morning slot, that he was 'the Saviour of Radio One', gave many people hope that at some point he would agree to be scourged and then nailed to a suitably reinforced cross. Unhappily, it seems that it is not to be.

It is just possible that Moyles could have attained some measure of respect by not only raising the money but also donating all his vital organs to needy children in Ghana. The remainder of his sorry carcasse could have served as filling for pies to assuage the tearing hunger of orphans in the Sudan.

Typically, Moyles refused to go the extra mile, and remains a hate-figure. He has only himself to blame.

The Americana

2010-07-12T13:07:00.003+01:00

Friday July 9th. The Americana Festival, Newark, near Nottingham.

Bad shirt, too much Jack Daniels (no, after the band’s set – we’re professionals, for Christ’s sake.) Played adequately, got paid. Bought a dumb hat.

Yee hah, as they say in Nottingham. Sometimes.

Short Fuse

2010-07-06T14:17:00.004+01:00

The Daily Express’s front page headline today is “SWIMMING POOL BLACKED OUT TO APPEASE MUSLIMS”. It's a piece of trivial froth which certainly doesn't deserve to be on the front page.

In a fit of mischief I went onto the “Have Your Say” page and complained about the article being anti-Islamic toss. An Express reader responded thus:

"TERRIRIST SUPPORTER
The pathetic one is you - so blinkered and stupid that you cant see what is happening. The people of this country - the REAL people, not the invading hoard, are SICK of being told to change to accomodate a bunch of benefit scrounging terrorist supporting barbarians.

You sound as if you support these vermin? Maybe you also agree with blowing trains & buses up do you? Perhaps the anti-terror police should be looking carefully at people like you - I do hope they do because I for one dont believe anyone with your attitudes can be trusted and you shoul be removed from our streets."

Bit of a short fuse there, I think. It’s a worry that these people are roaming free with little fires of hatred blazing away inside. I tried to calm things down by replying that my golden rule is never to get into a discussion with people who are too stupid to spell “terrorist”, but was then accused of being bigoted against dyslexics.

At one point someone called me a "facist". I think they meant “fascist”, but who can say? And maybe I am a facist. Some of my best friends have faces, but there are still plenty I don’t like.

Closing the Gap

2010-07-02T10:26:00.003+01:00

There’s been a revelation from the National Audit Office (NAO) that rich people live longer than poor people, and that the gap in life expectancy is growing. Apparently that’s a bad thing, and we have to fix it, by improving the health of the poor.

We will do this through the tried and tested method of forming committees, commissioning a report which will cost £12 million, take three years to prepare, and run to seven thousand pages of blindingly obvious proposals, half of which will never be implemented. The other half will be implemented, and will not work.

It’s time for new thinking. Where the health authorities are going wrong is in assuming that poor people living longer is a good thing. It isn’t. For those living on state benefits in run-down council housing estates in Croydon, their ghastly, meaningless existence is wretched enough already without trying to squeeze another couple of pointless years out of it.

Rich people living longer isn’t a good thing either, what with them being not only annoying, but also responsible for all the evil in the world and everything. Anyway, I’m all in favour of equality, so the obvious answer is to reduce the life expectancy of the rich.

And this is where it gets interesting. I propose that, at a given age - and the current poor person’s life expectancy of 76 years seems appropriate – we bus the rich old people to the most impoverished parts of the UK, where the poor will be allowed to hunt them down like dogs.

Or maybe with dogs. The kind of dogs poor people go in for would certainly make a much better job of it than those stupid floppy-eared things rich people use for hunting foxes, although I accept that an opportunity for irony in bucket-loads would be wasted.

Although the rich old people should be easy enough to bring down and slaughter, the modest amount of exercise the poor people would get in running after them would undoubtedly improve their health, which is kind of where the NAO are coming from, I think.

Funny how the answers to just about everything are so much more obvious as you get older.

God Bless You All

2009-10-16T09:31:00.003+01:00

This may be my last broadcast, although I pray to God for his help and blessing in this, my hour of greatest need.

The squirrels are massing at the border, too numerous to count, and filled with a diabolical vigour. At night I can hear their tiny claws scrabbling at the fence. By day they sit in the treetops, counting my guns. Gun. Counting my gun. Even a squirrel can count to one.

I fear I brought this on myself. Enraged by the squirrels’ lust for the sweet roots of my begonias, I bought an air rifle and spent a few happy afternoons getting my eye in. On day three, I shot my first squirrel, from my sniper’s eyrie – the bathroom window.

Since that morning I have killed at least a dozen, and yet still they come. I will keep transmitting for as long as I can. Do not try to help us – save yourselves. May God bless you all.

The Aye-Aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis)

2009-09-09T12:21:00.001+01:00

Let’s face it, most of us have self-image problems, but nothing like those that must afflict the aye-aye. The hapless omnivore is in decline at least partly because it is quite likely to be killed because of the way it looks. A harsh fate, indeed, but there’s no doubt that the aye-aye is one of the strangest creatures on the planet.

Early naturalists had trouble making up their minds just what species it belonged to, and for a while believed it to be a rodent, because of its huge front teeth. In the end they gave up and awarded it a genus of its own, so it’s official - there’s nothing else like the aye-aye.

The aye-aye is scruffily be-furred, with huge, bat-like ears, a bushy tail and eyes like saucers. A piece of evolutionary whimsy has given it an unnaturally long and thin middle finger, up to three times as long as the others. The animal uses this elongated digit to tap the tree bark to locate grubs and insects and then hook them out, having first chewed a hole with those impressive front teeth.

As if the destruction of its habitat wasn’t enough to contend with, the aye-aye falls foul of the same fady which, at least in theory, afford the indri some protection. For the aye-aye, however, it’s all bad news.

To a degree the creature brings it on itself, because apart from anything else it can be a bloody nuisance. Like many other Madagascan animals it has too much self-confidence for its own good. It will stroll nonchalantly into a village and help itself to coconuts, mangoes, lychees or even eggs. No wonder the Malagasy view it with irritation.

But it’s much, much worse than that. In most rural areas on the island the aye-aye is thought to be a harbinger of evil which should be killed on sight. Reactions to the creature can be extreme. The Sakalava people, allegedly, believe that aye-ayes sneak into houses at night and murder the sleeping occupants by using that long, thin middle finger to stop their hearts.

Garbutt reports that in some areas, if an aye-aye enters a village the response is to kill the animal, burn down the village and move on. A harsh fate, one might think, for a creature whose only crime is to look like a large squirrel that’s been shot from a cannon.

For all its uniqueness, Madagascar’s wildlife is facing the many of the same problems as endangered species all over the world. Agricultural techniques which worked without too much damage to the environment when there were fewer people are proving disastrous now that the island’s population is approaching 20 million.

Madagascar (Part Three)

2009-05-05T09:41:00.003+01:00

The Indri (Indri indri)

Early settlers were – perhaps understandably – uncomfortable with the prospect of sharing the island with primates the size of gorillas, and upheld new-settler tradition by systematically slaughtering them all. As a result of this attrition, the indri is now the largest lemur on Madagascar.

The creature’s name comes from one of those pleasing misunderstandings which show that naturalists can be just as reassuringly dim as the rest of us. In this case it was Frenchman Pierre Sonnerat who failed to spot that, in the native Malagasy language, ‘indri’ just means ‘there it is’. You’d have thought M. Sonnerat might have overheard the phrase before in other incidents involving shouting and pointing, but perhaps he had other things on his mind.

The correct local name for the indri is babakoto, which translates as ‘ancestor’. Indri have traditionally been protected by taboos, or fady, because of their perceived resemblance to the sacred forebears of the Malagasy.

It’s the indri’s human-like behaviour, including a predilection for early-morning sunbathing – eyes closed, legs crossed, plams of the hands offered to the sunshine – and a complex system of communication calls involving roars and wails with a range of up to two kilometres, that backs up this resemblance.

It may sound as if the indri has a pretty easy time of it compared with some of its compatriots, but of course it’s not as simple as that. There’s not much consistency across the island when it comes to belief systems, and the fady which supposedly protect the indri vary widely from one area to another. In one location it may be taboo to eat an indri, but not to catch one and sell it to someone whose beliefs allow them to put in the pot.

In almost every case Madagascar’s endangered species are victims of agricultural policy. The slash-and-burn techniques, which give temporary viability to poor soil, reduce natural habitat by destroying forests and expose the soil to erosion, damaging hillsides and silting up lakes.

With its natural habitat in decline, Madagascar’s wildlife is increasingly forced into unwelcome contact with humans. As in most other parts of the world, this is almost entirely disastrous for the animals.

Imagine the scene. A Malagasy peasant – possibly the same one who shot the jumping rat earlier, possibly not – is trudging home after a long day, tired, hungry and starting to become a little unnerved by the forest’s lengthening shadows. There might be evil spirits in these parts, or so his granddad used to say.

And then he sees it, clinging to a tree in front of him, picked out by the beam of his torch. It’s a creature so weird and unnatural that he lets out a scream of terror. Then he feels silly. He looks again. The animal is regarding him with malice and a hint of mischief from enormous eves. Then, as he stands transfixed, the creature raises a long middle finger and flips him the bird.

Coming next - the Aye-Aye

Madagascar (Part Two)

2009-04-29T09:44:00.003+01:00

Thanks to gentle nudging from a man in Iowa, here's the fossa...

The Fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox)

Despite looking like a cross between a dog and a puma, fossa are actually members of the viverrid family – a group which includes the mongoose. They’re efficient predators, and aren’t at all fussy about their diet. Fossa will happily dine on insects, reptiles and rodents, and are agile enough to take to the trees to go after lemurs.

Near villages, fossa will also prey on chickens and other domestic animals, and as a result are hunted as vermin. In Malagasy folklore it is often claimed that fossa will attack cattle or even humans, but this seems unlikely. They do, however, have a reputation for unpredictability – there are stories of fossa wandering fearlessly into field camps, ransacking unoccupied tents, chewing boots and eating the soap.

It seems likely, however, that the real reason the animals are unpopular with the Malagasy is that fossa have great sex and people are just jealous. Firstly, the unrepentantly shameless females will sometimes mate with up to eight males a day, and both males and females are pretty enthusiastic.

Naturalist Nick Garbutt writes: “Copulation is noisy, with both sexes purring, snorting and shrieking, and, if uninterrupted by other males, can last several hours.” More often than not they do it in the branches of a tree, which is really just showing off. Fossa cubs stay with their mothers for around twelve months, meaning that females mate only every other year, which explains their joyous promiscuity when they finally get the chance.

Madagascar has a long history of interference from the outside world – the Arabs established trading posts as far back as the 7th century, the first European contact came in the 1500s in the shape of the Portuguese, and the island didn’t gain full independence from France until 1960.

Despite this, Madagascar’s indigenous culture has proved fairly robust and over half the Malagasy still practice traditional religious customs – the rest of the population are mainly Christian, with Moslems making up around ten per cent of the total.

Traditional religion in Madagascar emphasises links between the living and the dead. During the ceremony of ‘turning the dead’ - famadihana in the local language – the bodies of deceased relatives are taken out of their tombs, dressed up in nice new shrouds and carried around over the heads of the crowd for a while with much singing and dancing before they’re put back. Of the Christian clergy, the dour and repressed Protestants condemn the practice, while the Catholics, being fond of a good party, will often join in.

The Malagasy believe that their ancestors are deeply concerned with the activities of their decendants. They also, apparently, believe that their ancestors were covered in thick black fur with round, tufted prominent ears, yellow-green eyes and a bemused expression.

Next - the Indri

Madagascar (Part One)

2009-01-26T12:39:00.003Z

I'd pretty much forgotten about this - I wrote it a while back as a college assignment. (My tutor didn't think much of my sense of humour and gave me a C. Miserable bitch.) It runs to a little over 2500 words, so I'll post bits over the next week or so. I have yet to sell it in anywhere...

The island of Madagascar lies in the Indian Ocean off the coast of East Africa. On a map it looks, in the words of writer and naturalist Gerald Durrell, “like a badly presented omelette.” About the size of France, it’s the fourth largest island in the world – Greenland, New Guinea and Borneo are the top three – and is home to over 200,000 species, 80 per cent of them unique to Madagascar, and many of them in danger of extinction.

Whether we like to admit it or not, there are some species whose endangered status comes as no surprise. These are the creatures which somehow managed to find a quiet, secluded spot to hide while natural selection went blundering past. Through a combination of a fortunate location and a lack of competition from animals which are just, well, better at being animals, they have managed to survive, and in some cases even to prosper until fairly recently in evolutionary terms.

Until around 160 million years ago, Madagascar was attached to the African mainland – part of the super-continent Gondwanaland, which also contained Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica and India. As the continent broke up, Madagascar began to move away from Africa. The first lemur-like primates surfaced on the mainland about 60 million years ago and crossed to Madagascar soon after.

By the time monkeys appeared as the bright, confident, competitive new kids on the block, a mere 17–23 million years ago, the island was far enough east to be isolated and its wildlife safe from their attentions.

Madagascar’s diverse and teeming fauna flourished until the arrival of man, thought to be as recently as 2,000 years ago. Early settlers followed the same pattern as everywhere else on the planet by killing everything slow or stupid enough to be caught, big enough to look dangerous, or small enough to fit in a cooking pot. Viewing wildlife as lumps of protein rather than creatures worth preserving is an attitude still prevalent in some parts of the island today.

Although the island has an enlightened approach to animal conservation in theory – it has, for example, been illegal to kill lemurs or keep them as pets since 1964, and there are a number of protected national parks – the authorities continue to struggle with the difficulties of policing such a huge area.

Another problem is that Madagascar is one of the world’s poorest countries. Not long ago the island’s economy was fragile enough to have been sent into a tailspin by Coca Cola changing to a recipe containing less vanilla - a major Madagascan export - only for the economy to recover on the introduction of vanilla-rich Coke Classic.

The average Malagasy has an income of less than $300 per annum, and only 30 per cent of the island’s population of around 19 million lives in cities. The rest are dependent on agriculture, often at subsistence level, and are competing for resources with some of the planet’s most endangered species.

It’s all too easy, then, to imagine a scenario where a Malagasy farmer might be peacefully making his way home through the forest at dusk, his mind elsewhere, when a huge rat erupts from the vegetation of the forest floor like one of the more sophisticated types of landmine and hangs in the air in front of him, defying gravity just long enough for him to raise his shotgun and give it both barrels.

The Malagasy Giant Jumping Rat (Hypogeomys antimena)
The size of a domestic rabbit, the giant jumping rat has developed the ability to leap a metre into the air. While entertaining, this is unconvincing as a survival measure, as all even a dim-witted predator has to do is to stand still and wait for the rat to come down again. The ability to leap into the air and then immediately hurtle a kilometre sideways, or twenty minutes into the future, would obviously be better, although no doubt both those techniques would have their drawbacks.

Perhaps the rat relies on the predator feeling so embarrassed at missing its prey that it just keeps going, blushing and hoping none of its friends have seen it. Or, just maybe, the rat has heard that its major nemesis, the puma-like fossa, is also endangered, and thinks that it may be able to stay in the air long enough for the fossa to become extinct. It’s a bit unlikely, but who knows what a rat thinks?

Although the rats’ spring-loaded hindquarters are an interesting development, a better evolutionary tack would have been the ability to produce more offspring. Jumping rats are commendably but fatally restrained in their sexual practices – they are monogamous – and a litter usually consists of only one or two young, many of whom are lost to predators, both the indigenous fossa and introduced species like cats and dogs.

In fact the rat is at risk not from being used as target practice by nervous Malagasy peasants, but, inevitably, from the loss of its habitat to farming – the slash and burn approach to agriculture is still rife in Madagascar and impacts almost all the fauna on the island, herbivore and carnivore alike.

Coming next - the fossa.

Sounds like...

2009-01-14T09:55:00.004Z

Even though I left Belfast in 1973, I still have quite a strong Northern Irish accent. I didn’t realise how strong until a few months back. I was in a pizza restaurant in London with a bunch of Soo’s pals and their partners. (In a rare attack of culture we’d been to The Globe Theatre to see The Merry Wives of Windsor, which was reasonably funny by Shakespearian standards. Which is not that funny, actually.)

Anyway, as all of us are middle-aged or worse, it didn’t take long for the conversation to come around to health, good and bad. Someone asked me about the medication I take to control my blood pressure. “Atenolol,” I said, “and amlodipine.”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” they said, “Do you take anything for it?”

“Yes,” I said, “Atenolol and amlodipine.”

“But do you take anything for it?”

“For what?”

“For the pain.”

“What pain?”

“You said you were in a lot of pain.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Yes you did.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Yes you did.”

And so on. For about five minutes. Eventually one of us (I can’t remember which one) realised what the rest of you probably figured out a while back – in a noisy pizza place my accent makes the word “amlodipine” sound as if I’m complaining about searing agony.

How we laughed. And how empty our lives must be, to find hilarity in such meagre things.

God Bless Us, Every One

2008-12-15T15:06:00.010Z

Five months since putting anything on here – it’s a damned disgrace. And when I do decide to come back it’s inspired by another TV programme…

Disappointingly, Eoghan Quigg’s failure to win the final of The X-Factor this weekend didn’t result in civil disorder in his native Northern Ireland. Based on the carefully orchestrated teen hysteria which met the Quiglet when he went home for a visit last week, his relegation to third place in the competition should at least have resulted in a burning car or two.

After all, apart from drinking, urban violence is what the Northern Irish do best, and it’s a shame to let something like that just fade into the background, especially when you’ve got what is, compared with some of the previous reasons for burning down the neighbourhood, a perfectly serviceable excuse.

Let’s hope the recession will result in enough unemployment, poverty and subsequent boredom and bad temper to get Ulster’s disaffected youth back out on the streets where it belongs. I bet there are literally dozens of policemen in Derry these days who’ve never had even a piece of paving stone thrown at them, never mind a petrol bomb. Bunch of pansies.

The most interesting thing about The X-Factor is, of course, the procession of self-deluding lunatics we’re invited to laugh at in the first few episodes, as the programme consistently produces finalists who are merely third-rate versions of Mariah Carey or Westlife. This year’s winner was kicked off the show three years ago for not being good enough, and guess what? She still isn’t.

Quigg was, inexplicably, tagged as “cute” throughout the show, despite looking like the result of a hideous but fruitful sexual encounter between Dickens's Tiny Tim and a ventriloquist’s dummy. The programme supplied him with a vocal coach, but not, tragically, with someone who could teach him to smile like a real boy. Never mind, despite the bronze medal, Quigg has probably got a bright enough future, as long as he’s happy with his name coming just in front of the words “now appearing in Puss In Boots at the Alhambra Theatre, Leicester.”

Bonekickers

2008-07-23T16:38:00.003+01:00

This may be the wrong place to recommend a TV programme, and I have to confess that I've only watched one out of the first three episodes, but I have to mention this piece of truly awful dross for (at least) two reasons.

The whole sorry enterprise is about a quartet of unconventional, wisecracking, maverick archaeologists who shout a lot and have adventures, and if your instinctive response to that is to make sure the safety's off and there's a round in the chamber, then you're pretty much on the right track. It's the same gut reaction as that early encounter with the sado-masochistic albino assassin monk in the Dan Brown thing. You expect the worst, and that's precisely what you get.

Anyway, here's why you should still watch it. Firstly, Bonekickers is, quite possibly, the most laughably dreadful "drama series" the BBC has ever commissioned, and should be required viewing for anyone contemplating writing a screenplay, in terms of "under no circumstances do it ANYTHING like this unless you want to be laughed at".

We're talking serious bad here; plot lines, dialogue, characterisation, casting, lighting, editing, special effects, background music - all completely atrocious. If Bonekickers isn't in the "Dire Warning" section of every film studies course in the country within a couple of years, then I'm not a bald, portly Irishman with a bad attitude. And I am.

Secondly, while I'm not often a supporter of the "so bad it's almost good" school, d'you know, it almost is. After flinching and rubbing my eyes in disbelief a few times during the first five minutes I started to snort and giggle quietly to myself, a response I maintained for the rest of the show. I shall be watching the rest of the series, because, having found a programme that can make me laugh out loud after spending all day writing press releases about plasterboard I'm not going to turn my back on it.

On a scale of one to ten, Bonekickers is off the scale. In both directions.

The Hill District

2008-03-28T16:10:00.008Z

We’re off for a week’s holiday in the Lake District. For the benefit of my one regular American visitor (and here I’m using “regular” in the sense of “reasonably frequent” rather than “average”, because Bob’s from Iowa, and who the hell knows what’s average for Iowa?) I should explain that the Lake District is a district in England where there are a lot of lakes.

And hills. It could quite justifiably be called the Hill District. But it isn’t, so let’s not waste any more time on that one. What most people do when on holiday in the Lake District is climb the hills and look down at the lakes, unless they can’t be bothered, in which case they sit by the lakes and look up at the hills.

Of course, if you actually live and work in the Lake District it’s likely that you ignore the hills and lakes and just complain that it rains all the time, which it does. Hence the lakes. And the clever name.

Anyway, it’s a place I love. If you can handle slightly demanding hill walking (the kind of walking where you might have to use your hands occasionally – the guidebooks call it a “scramble”) it’s quiet and still, and the air tastes like spring water, and there’s nowhere on the planet I’d rather be.

Back In The Swamp

2008-03-28T11:55:00.003Z

It seems that the only time I post anything on here these days is to apologise for not posting anything on here, and now I’m doing it again. But today’s a little different.

It’s exactly a year ago today that I gave up my job as a corporate lickspittle and decided to wander the earth having adventures. Like Caine from Kung Fu, but a bit chubbier and a lot less Chinese. To date I'm still in Surrey, which is perhaps not that impressive, although Redhill is certainly the sort of place where you can have adventures. Just not the kind you'd want.

It’s been an oddly fragmented twelve months, and I’m still not making a living out of writing or music as I’d hoped, but I’ve been back to college and gained a formal journalism qualification. I’ve had news stories, reviews and feature articles published in several papers and magazines. I’ve interviewed music journalists, trauma victims, comedians, and the Climate Change Director of Greenpeace in Europe, which is pretty grown-up by my standards.

I’ve discovered that, to my surprise, I’m better at writing news than features, and better at both of those things than subbing, which, as a natural pedant, I thought I’d be good at. I also procrastinate like crazy unless faced with a deadline.

My mother died in December, which is something I’m still getting used to. I’m shamelessly trying to figure out how to get an article out of the event. She’d be proud of me for that. I’m also, as a result, an Irish landlord – like most Irish landlords, of course, I live in England.

Even though I’m determined to make a living out of creative stuff, at the back of my mind I’ve always thought, if the worst came to the worst, I could go back into a finance role. Last week I offered to help someone with an Excel spreadsheet. Spreadsheets were my life for fifteen years, up until I left Nortel Networks last year, and I consider myself an expert. I tried to explain how to do this advanced thing. I couldn’t remember.

So that’s it. Once your gills have gone you can never go back in the swamp.

God Only Knows

2008-02-08T17:23:00.000Z

I’ve spent some time in the company of Christians recently, and, although they’re pretty annoying they’re probably less likely to try to murder you than the other annoying people in Redhill who aren’t Christians.

By and large they seem to be nice people, as long as you ignore the fact that they’re all a bit nuts.

Now, I’m an agnostic. That’s not me being wishy-washy, it’s just an admission that there’s a lot of stuff I don’t understand. If I contemplate the mysteries of the Universe I just don’t understand how stuff works.

The Christians I’ve met seem to understand how stuff works, at least to their own satisfaction. Up to a point.

Then I ask why God fucks us around so much. “Ah, say the Christians. You wouldn’t understand.”

So that’s why I’ve decided to just not understand on my own and cut out the not understanding bit that involves God.

Blowing Goats

2008-02-07T12:40:00.000Z

It’s just been announced that the Royal Navy has stopped using goats in decompression experiments, which will come as a surprise to those who didn’t know they’d been doing it in the first place. Which was pretty much everybody, I should think.

In a press release which encourages the response “WHAT??!!”, or, indeed, “NO!!”, it’s claimed that goats were chosen because “their skulls are a similar shape to those of humans”. Now those are goats I don’t want to see. In fact, I don’t even want to think about them. My dreams are weird enough already.

It wasn’t all bad news for the animals. “They were never placed under water and they were not alone. Other goats were in there too," a defence official said yesterday, in a badly misjudged attempt at sounding reassuring.

Apparently the hapless creatures suffered brain damage, amongst other unpleasant effects. Presumably the difficulty in assessing whether a British sailor had suffered brain damage or not was the major barrier to using humans in the experiments.

2008-02-01T17:15:00.000Z

For some reason they’ve stopped selling chipmunks in the pet shop across the road from where I live. I have a strange fixation with chipmunks – they’re quite cute, but they have an odd reptilian slitheriness which I find repellent but oddly hypnotic.

They're like squirrels. But worse. I used to go and stare at them until I began to feel worried and then go home, which was interesting. I miss them.

But there’s a lot more weird stuff out there to capture my imagination. “It is the first new species of giant elephant shrew to be discovered in more than 126 years" says Galen Rathbun of the California Academy of Sciences, referring to his latest discovery, and I, for one, will not be taking the time to argue with him.

It’s in Tanzania, which means I’m unlike to get a look at a real one, but at least the BBC have photographs.

Watch Them Burn...

2008-01-30T17:05:00.000Z

Our family carbon footprint is probably that of an overfed yeti with Himalayan toe-bloat and we don’t yet run one of those hybrid cars which are made out of wattle and run on lentils or something, but Sooz and I do our best when it comes to recycling.

The local council pick up garden refuse, paper and cans every week. I’m constantly embarrassed by the number of beer cans. “Good party?” ask our neighbours. “Uhh, yes. Yes, party, right. Ahem.” I mutter, looking shifty.

I’ve taken to holding back the empty dog food tins so that I can put them in a layer on top of the Budweiser empties, but as the neighbourhood knows that we have only a terrier small enough to use a cat flap, it’s pretty obvious that I’m hiding something.

Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that, while the council collect the cans, we have to take glass and plastic bottles to the recycling centre ourselves.

Glass is okay. I don’t have a problem with glass, apart from the tiny broken shards that sometimes creep into the box and lacerate my best bass-playing finger when I’m not paying attention.

Wine bottles are great. They’re a reminder of gentle, drunken evenings with friends. Their very greenness is pleasing to the eye, particularly when the sun’s shining through them. And when you force them through the rubber grommetty things there’s a gorgeous suspended moment and then a satisfying crash. "I love the sound of breaking glass", as Nick Lowe once put it. And who doesn’t?

It’s the plastic bottles I can’t abide. There’s something fat and smug and insolent and yet insubstantial about them. They bounce out of the crate because they’ve been stacked too high, and anyway you should know better than to try to stack them because they don’t weigh anything.

They make an irritating flubbery bonking sound as they hit the floor, and you want to kill them by stamping but you don’t because it will do no good and that makes you insane with rage.

One day I’m going to follow them all the way to the place where they recycle them in the hope that I can watch them burn.

Multiple

2008-01-18T13:13:00.000Z

According to The Daily Mail, Britney Spears may have multiple personalities. Which comes a surprise to those of us who thought she didn't even have one.

Troubled Times

2008-01-18T12:52:00.000Z

These are troubled times for people of my demographic/socio-economic group/IQ level. The coked-up lunatics responsible – if that’s the word – for commissioning TV shows continue to plumb the depths by encouraging us to gorge on human suffering in all its forms.

Actually “human suffering” is a misnomer, because the hollow-eyed, publicity-starved freaks on reality shows don’t really feel pain like the rest of us. They use the gallons of endorphins they produce at the thought of getting their horrid, gurning faces on the box for five minutes to deaden the sensation of having their genitalia torn off by carnivorous wombats, or whatever piece of humiliation the producers come up with.

Celebrity Rehab is not the worst, or even the latest of these shows, just the last one I’ve heard of. I don’t care about the “people” on this show any more than the rest of them, but, fuck me, how can you make, or watch, a programme about somebody going cold turkey, live on TV?

I don’t necessarily subscribe to the “slippery slope” theory, but surely Cancer Kid's Chemo Camp can only be weeks away from hitting our screens. I know I don’t have to watch this stuff, and I don’t, but I know it’s out there. It’s like a colourless, odourless gas seeping out of the TV and rotting my very soul, in the same way that finding my daughter’s copy of Heat magazine under a pile of newspapers in the living-room explains why I’ve had a vague feeling of guilt, shame and nausea for the last few days.

Anyway, I reckon the next reality show will be called Cure My Obese Leprous Baby Or We Blind The Puppy, You Smack-Head Celebrity Plastic Surgeon On An Island.

Or something.

I So Knew It

2008-01-17T17:41:00.000Z

I told you they were tricky little bastards.

But chipmunks would be worse if they weren't all behind bars.

Wet Ninja

2007-12-14T17:22:00.000Z

I’m off to my homeland on Monday for a few days, and so I’ve been checking the news sites to see what kind of appalling mayhem the inbred halfwits of Northern Ireland have been dishing out to each other over the last week or so. Nothing much, but...

A team of fire-fighters was attacked by a moron who hadn’t stopped to wonder if a samurai sword was a match for a fully-functional fire hose. It wasn’t, of course, so they just sluiced him into submission. Strangely satisfying, that story.

More later…

The McWord

2007-12-12T15:41:00.000Z

In a bid to change the public perception of employment prospects with the company, McDonald’s has collected almost 105,000 signatures on a petition, which has now been submitted to the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The fast-food giant has long been unhappy with the negative implications of the OED’s definition of “McJob” – the dictionary calls it “an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector.”

In an attempt to combat this, and to raise the morale of the nation’s burger-flippers, the company enlisted the support of the broadcaster Sir David Frost, 35 MPs and former Confederation of British Industry chairman Sir Digby - now Lord - Jones, in trying to persuade the OED and other UK dictionary houses “to change the current definition of McJob to better reflect the reality of service sector jobs.”

The OED has yet to comment. At the launch of the petition a spokeswoman for the dictionary said “We monitor changes in the language and reflect these in our definitions according to the evidence we find.”

McDonald’s may have a point. Caterer and Hotelkeeper magazine dubbed the Golden Arches “the best place to work in hospitality”, and on its website the company has
launched its own retaliatory “McProspects” campaign, with a list of benefits and the slogan “Not bad for a McJob”.

It could be argued that McDonald’s have only themselves to blame – the company first registered the term McJobs as a trademark in 1984 as the name and image for the training of handicapped people as restaurant employees. The trademark lapsed, but the word re-surfaced in The Washington Post in 1986 and entered common usage in the US following a mention as a description of a “low pay, low prestige, low benefit, no future” job in Donald Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X.

McJob first appeared in the UK in the online version of the OED in 2001, but it was its appearance in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary – in 2003 – which seems to have first truly irked McDonalds.

The company considered legal action when the McWord first appeared in the US, but apparently was advised that it didn’t have a case. McDonald’s is notoriously lacking in a sense of humour and has an appetite for litigation when it comes to what it sees as slurs on its business.

Famously, in 1994, it sued two Greenpeace activists, who had distributed a pamphlet criticising the company, in what became the UK’s longest ever libel trial. The case was instantly and inevitably tagged “McLibel”, and went on for two and a half years, becoming the longest trial of any kind in British legal history.

Lasers In The Jungle Somewhere

2007-12-12T13:49:00.000Z

From Flight magazine:

"Boeing moved closer earlier this month to realizing a seven-year goal to demonstrate a high-powered laser as a weapon aboard a Lockheed Martin C-130H.

“Next year, we will fire the laser at ground targets, demonstrating the military utility of this transformational directed energy weapon,” Scott Fancher, VP and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems, said in a statement."

So that’s just marvellous. As if the US can’t do enough damage with conventional ordnance, by the middle of next year we’ll all be in Bond-villain fantasy-land. Brown people the world over will live in constant terror of the next death-ray strike, while Dubyah slouches around inside his hollowed-out volcano with that dopey coked-up smirk plastered across his little monkey face.

I know that having your family barbecued by a laser isn’t really any worse than having a bunch of high-explosive come down your chimney, but somehow it feels worse. Until the advent of that ultra-low-frequency-sound weapon they’ve been talking about for the past fifty years – the one that makes you poo your pants and then shatters your pelvis, ribcage and skull (in that order, so you get to enjoy it) – then I reckon the super-laser’s about as bad as it gets.

The Southern Marsupial Mole (itjari-itjari)

2007-09-22T17:52:00.000+01:00

Ok, it's been a long time, and under those circumstances I always seem to end up obsessing about animals...

Here’s a quote from a website:

“The marsupial mole is found in the central deserts of southern Northern Territory, northern and east-central Western Australia and western South Australia.”

So that’s clear, then.

In terms of their continued survival, man is not a real problem for the mole these days, although apparently there are some issues with “soil compaction caused by stock movement and vehicles”. In other words, they sometimes get trampled on or run over and squashed. It must be disheartening for the moles to realise that they’re going to end up as road kill even if they stay underground.

In the past things were different; there are records of thousands of mole pelts being traded between 1900 and 1920 in deals struck between Aboriginals and European cameleers which, no doubt, followed the traditional pattern of such deals - the Europeans got the moleskins and a few hundred thousand acres of ancestral lands and the Aboriginals in return each got two pairs of cheap calico trousers and smallpox.

As burrowers go, the moles are not particularly hard-core, tunnelling only 10cm below the surface and coming up to have a look around fairly frequently. Well, not a look around, exactly, as their eyes are vestigial and they have no optic nerves. Presumably they have just enough time to sniff the air for a split-second with their small, slit-like nostrils before being torn limb from limb by the foxes, dingos and cats which they don’t hear creeping up on them because of their lack of external ears.

A further dubious evolutionary development is that the marsupial mole’s pouch faces backwards, to prevent it scooping up sand and bringing the animal to a shuddering and undignified halt. Whether or not this rear-facing arrangement also results in the mole leaving a trail of little tiny pink mole babies, jettisoned and squealing, in its wake when at full throttle is anybody’s guess, but it would make perfect sense to me if it did. (It would explain the “endangered” sticker, that’s for sure.)

There are photographs of these things, and, trust me, they aren’t pretty. It’s always reassuring that creatures whose noses are “horny shields” and whose hands have become “scoops equipped with spade-like claws” tend to be on the small side, rather than there being the possibility that some hellish creature the size of a small rhinoceros is going to gouge its way up through the patio and join you in the hot tub.

Mutual Interests

2007-09-22T16:23:00.000+01:00

It’s always interesting to return to my homeland, which regular visitors to this site might possibly remember I regard with a mixture of amusement, horror and disbelief. Ninety percent of the population are bad-tempered, slow-witted hicks and the other ten percent are Eastern European immigrants who failed to do their homework properly and are frantically trying to earn the money for a ticket out of the place.

Anyway, on a light-hearted note I thought you'd be interested to know that the Belfast Telegraph has a "lonely hearts" page which is divided into three sections: "Men Seeking Women", "Women Seeking Men", and "Mutual Interests", where gays have to mix it with pot-holers, model railway enthusiasts and socially inept men with beards who work in I.T. and want to get together at weekends to re-enact the Battle of Naseby.

However, as we're talking about Northern Ireland here I suppose we should just be grateful that there isn’t a section labelled "Homos".

On a more encouraging note, on a visit to the village where I grew up I noticed that someone had taken the time to alter the sign for LESSANS ROAD so that it read LESBIANS ROAD, so there might be some hot action going on out in the sticks.

Creating A Monster

2007-09-19T11:41:00.000+01:00

Well, once again it’s been over a month since I posted anything on here, and I’m a little ashamed. Not abject, but a little disappointed with myself. In some ways it would be worse if my readership extended further than a cynical curmudgeon from Iowa, a pert-breasted nymphet trapped in the body of a portly Welsh accountant and a very small lady writer with a bad attitude, but they are loyal, if infrequent, visitors and I really should make more of an effort.

I’ve just spent a week in Ireland, trying to persuade my mother to allow a measure of helpful technology into her life. She’s eighty-seven, and physically a little frail, although she still lives alone and manages to do her own housework. On this visit I noticed there were a lot of cobwebs on the ceilings, but I reckon that’s bound to happen if you’re both short-sighted and four-foot ten in height. Mentally, she’s still in pretty good shape. She repeats herself a lot, and forgets things, but then I’ve been like that myself since I was thirty.

My mother is also becoming a bit deaf. “DO YOU KNOW, DAVID,” she bellows “I DON’T THINK MY HEARING’S AS GOOD AS IT WAS.”

“Well”, I say, “at your age you have to exp-“

“WHAT DO YOU THINK? DO YOU THINK MY HEARINGS NOT AS GOOD AS IT WAS?” she roars, not realising that I’ve said anything.

“NO! I THINK YOU’RE RIGHT!” I shriek.

“Oh.” She says quietly, looking crestfallen, and I have a sudden surge of sadness at the ageing process and the way it will ultimately turn us all into creatures who are figures of fun at best, and, at worst, a bloody nuisance to our families. (Our friends, of course, will still love us as they’ll be just as deaf, daft, drugged and incontinent as we are, so make sure you keep in touch.)

I had a long list of things to do, or rather to persuade my mother to do, but after a day or two I realised none of it was going to happen. Old people don’t like change, especially those, like my mother, who come from a background where money was always tight. They don’t like splashing out on luxury items like living-room windows which keep the draughts out, washing machines that work properly, and TV sets which don’t have to be slapped firmly on the right-hand-side every ten minutes to rid the screen of scrolling horizontal lines.

So I gave up on everything except for the mobile phone I’d bought her for Christmas, which my daughter had spent a full day teaching her to use, and which, inevitably, had been back in its box since December 28th.

It took five days. Five days of being shouted at and shouting back. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to try to explain something slowly, calmly and gently at the volume you’d use to stop a stray dog from crapping on your lawn, but let me tell you, it’s exhausting. Because mobiles look a little like TV remotes it took a full day to persuade my mother not to hold the phone out in front of her, pointed vaguely towards the corner of the room.

“NO! HOLD IT TO YOUR EAR! NO! WITH THE SIDE WITH THE BUTTONS ON IT TOWARDS YOUR EAR! NOW SAY SOMETHING! I DON’T CARE WHAT! TRY “HELLO”, FOR FUCK’S SAKE! NO, DON’T CRY, I’M SORRY, I’M SORRY!”

Actually it wasn’t that bad. Well, it was, but I didn’t swear and she didn’t cry. And it worked so well that while I was in the airport waiting for my flight home my mother used her mobile to call me four times. Once while I was checking in, once while I was having a pee, once while I was, at the insistence of the security staff, removing my belt and shoes, and once while I was sitting in the bar trying to relax. But that’s what always happens with mobiles, and I was proud of her.

But I think I may have created a monster.

Cook 'Em Slowly

2007-08-17T12:42:00.000+01:00

According to the TV news, Dublin’s council estates are over-run by dangerous breeds of dog with irresponsible owners. Following ten dog attacks on people this year, Dublin City Council has issued a notice to its tenants, threatening them with eviction from their houses if they don’t get rid of their dogs.

Interviewed, the owners of these inbred hell-hounds claim that they love their dogs because of their sweet nature, which is about as accurate and honest as a gun nut claiming to love his Glock because of the colour.

“He’s so good with the children,” they bleat, gazing mistily at the slavering red-eyed wolverine frothing at their feet. Presumably what they mean is that the beast swallows toddlers in one gulp rather than messing the place up by leaving stray arms and ears all over the carpet.

“He’s like one of the family,” they whine, which is perfectly believable, as right now their children are outside in the street mutilating a tramp prior to setting him on fire and then eating him alive.

The dog lobby, and I have to say I'm slightly depressed that such a thing exists, puts forward the opinion that “it’s not the dogs, it’s the owners who are the problem.” Interesting, the parallel with the gun lobby. (“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”)

Well, actually, bad, stupid, aggressive people with guns kill people, and people like that should no more be allowed to roam the streets armed with an irascible pit bull terrier than they should be allowed access to firearms.

They may be an argument for keeping big, tough dogs in certain circumstances, such as if you live in a remote cottage in a corner of Ireland under constant threat of attack by starving bears or rabid badgers or something. Keeping a brace or more of testosterone-fuelled rottweilers in a two-bedroom apartment on the seventh floor of a Dublin tower block is a liitle harder to justify.

I know it’s the owners who are the problem, but people are more difficult to get rid of than animals, even in Ireland. I also know that “it’s not the dogs’ fault”, which is somehow supposed to make you fell less stressed about the fact that your babies have just been dragged from their pram and eaten.

The Koreans have the right idea about dogs. Keep them in the pound for a while to let them soften up. They’ll still be a little tough, but, hell, cook ‘em slowly.

Creak Slam Yak Squeal Chortle Guffaw Bellow

2007-08-10T17:32:00.000+01:00

One thing is certain about Irish hotels; they’re not havens of peace and quiet. Unless you’re prepared to do a lot of painstaking research and / or spend a lot of money I wouldn’t advise staying in any Irish hotel on a Friday or Saturday night unless you’re prepared to sit up drinking until two in the morning. That’s what everyone else will be doing, and there will be no concessions to the feeble lightweights who want to get to sleep by midnight.

If you should decide to stay somewhere like Dublin’s Temple Bar, which is the epicentre of the city’s tourist area, you’ve only yourself to blame if your sleep is disturbed by the sounds of merriment and projectile vomiting, but heading out into the sticks may not prove much better.

In Ireland, country hotels are often hubs of the local entertainment scene (there’s nowhere else to go, for a start.) They’re always open to non-residents, and make most of their money from people using the bars and restaurant and attending weddings and discos – the wellbeing of those trying to get some sleep upstairs is not a priority.

The Old Inn at Crawfordsburn has a few notions of grandeur, making much of its 1614 origins – the brochure hints coyly at those who have stayed there. (“Highwaymen and presidents, Russian tsars and rock stars…” Yeah, yeah, very clever, I see what you did there.)

After a couple of disturbed nights I re-checked the publicity handout in the room, and to give them their due, at no point does the brochure use the word “quiet”, which is fortunate, because if the material had even hinted at tranquility I would have rolled up the leaflet very tightly and inserted it in the manager.

The brochure does mention “the picturesque village of Crawfordsburn”, and the place is attractive enough, I suppose. What they don’t mention is that the inn itself is right on the village’s main street, an after-hours rat-run which links the seaside resort of Bangor with the A2, which leads to Belfast. The traffic is constant, and even at three a.m. on Sunday morning there were still cars revving past our bedroom window at the rate of two or three a minute.

Our room turned out not to be, thankfully, directly over the bar or the function room where a wedding reception was taking place, but it was above the lobby and front door of the hotel. So, when the bar closed at around two a.m. the bunch of drunks moved first to the lobby (yak yak squeal chortle bellow), then out of the front door to the street right outside our window. (Creak. Slam. Creak. Slam. Creak slam creak slam creak slam creak slam creak slam. Yak yak squeal squeal chortle guffaw bellow.)

Much more yakking and squealing ensued, until the taxis arrived. (Vroom vroom slam squeal etc, etc.) Cabs continued to pull up, slam their doors and roar off for at least an hour. Then it went quiet. For five minutes.

Then the people staying in the hotel who’d been partying in Bangor or Belfast came back. By cab. (Vroom slam. Yak yak squeal guffaw. Creak. Slam.) They stumbled around the hotel for a while, trying their keys in at least twenty-five of the hotel’s thirty-two rooms before finding the right ones. They were, thank God, too drunk to have noisily enthusiastic sex, which would, I think, have been the last straw.

At around three thirty the remaining members of the hotel staff, waiting for their taxis home, moved to the lobby to have a boisterous and good-humoured discussion about their day. (Yak guffaw etc.)

At this point I finally lost my temper, put on a shirt, jeans, inserted one contact lens in the interest of speed and economy and padded, barefoot and enraged, down the stairs to the lobby. Due to exhaustion I was actually quite polite, but the staff members reacted with shock and contrition, and I was somewhat mollified, although I somehow felt that you shouldn’t have to have it explained to you that shouting at each other in a hotel lobby at four a.m. is not a civilised way to behave.

Ow

2007-07-15T12:57:00.000+01:00

I've been on holiday in Ireland, of which more later. Maybe. In the meantime there's one thing I've learnt which I will pass on to you. Fifty-four is the wrong age to try surfing for the first time. Ow. OW.

LOTR - Goblins On Stilts

2007-06-28T10:13:00.000+01:00

Lord Of The Rings, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, June 26th

Critical opinion seems divided on whether this is a hugely expensive piece of poo or just good fun. I'm not a big Tolkien fan so I went along without too many reservations apart from worrying about having enough legroom and whether I'd be able to get enough drink during the interval to cope with another ninety minutes of goblins on stilts.

As it turns out I'd put it in the "good fun" category. The sets are incredible, although as I'm of a nervous disposition the rising / falling / rotating stage made me a bit uneasy. Mark my words, that thing'll have sombody's leg off before the end of the run. Or hop.

There are lots of interesting lighting effects and clever trompe l'oeil stuff going on all the way through, and the Orcs are pretty scary, especially when they run up and down the aisles growling at everybody.

The cast is solid enough, with only the actor playing the Elvish king delivering a performance made of old ham sliced thick, and if there aren't any really memorable songs, by the same token there aren't any moments that had me thinking of faking a seizure so that I could be stretchered out.

Judging by the availability of cut-price tickets (I paid a fiver for a seat in the third row of the stalls) the public aren't exactly rushing to see the show, so you should be able to get a bargain. At that price it's a good night out, although two glasses of wine cost £10.40, a bit of a shock if, like me, you know that if you’re prepared to haggle in Urdu you can get five bottles of wine for that kind of money at the Vidhi Convenience Store on the Brighton Road.

(You also have to be prepared for your teeth to go black, but so far that’s always worn off after a while, as has the blindness.)

Anyway, back to the show. If you're a real Tolkien buff you'll probably hate it. If not, then it's an experience worth having.
But take a hip flask.

Ego Failure

2007-06-27T12:41:00.000+01:00

So, Paris Hilton is once again at large, and the world can breathe more easily now that the young lady has managed to get through her prison ordeal without succumbing to the tantalisingly unspecific “health problem” which, according to Sheriff Lee Baca, had played a part in her early release.

In extreme circumstances, such as when deprived of access to their handbags, sunglasses, shoes, recreational drugs and, most importantly, their retinue of sycophants, some “celebrities” can begin to suffer what has come to be described as “ego failure”, a disease which is, shockingly, almost entirely confined to those who have acquired fame and wealth despite a complete absence of discernible ability of any kind.

Those most lacking in talent are, tragically, the most vulnerable. Deprived of the constant gush of squealing approval from their coterie of arse-kissers they may well begin to dwell on the emptiness and pointlessness of their lives, and who can blame them? Hilton, as one of the most chronically tedious people currently in the public eye, would be particularly vulnerable to the condition, said a Hollywood doctor who specialises in Diseases of the Rich*.

“It’s widely accepted in the medical community that the severity of the condition depends on the pointlessness of the celebrity.” He said. “And I would judge Ms. Hilton to have significantly raised the bar when it comes to being pointless. In some ways it’s quite an achievement. But that doesn’t stop her being really, really pointless.”

Sheriff Baca hinted that he feared a suicide attempt, perhaps surprisingly talking about it as if it would be a bad thing, whereas to most of us a world with one less “multi-millionaire socialite” in it would be quite all right, thanks very much.

*With thanks to the late Tom Lehrer

Undercover Cameron

2007-05-24T11:21:00.000+01:00

The strangely moist and thoroughly unlikeable David Cameron, leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition and potentially the next elected Prime Minister, went undercover in Birmingham last week. Old-Etonian Cameron, who occasionally tries to disguise himself as a member of the lower orders by removing his tie and asking to be called “Dave”, spent a few days living with an “ordinary family”, Abdullah and Shahida Rehman. While he was in Brum Daveyboy also had a crack at being a teaching assistant at a local school.

It’s quite romantic, really, and not unlike the old folk tales where the King puts on a peasant smock, has a quick roll in the dung-heap and sets off to travel amongst his subjects disguised as a beggar. Those stories (at least the ones that get turned into folk songs) tend to follow a predictable pattern.

The undercover king, prince, pope, bishop, colonel, (or whatever), lustily plights his troth with a blushing maiden who steadfastly refuses to Do It with him because she is too pure, and also because he has no money. In Olden Times it seems, a maidenhead was rarely jettisoned without huge lumps of cash changing hands. How unlike the present day, when the phrase “there’s no such thing as an ugly rich man” is never used under any circumstances.

Desperate for a shag, the beggar flings off his smock to reveal his doublet, hose, fine stockings, and, most importantly, a bulging, throbbing purse of gold coins. At which point the maiden suddenly realises that she truly loves him and they rush to the hay-loft where they couple like maddened badgers.

They then either run off together and marry, or he dumps her and heads back to the castle leaving her to bear an illegitimate child, live for twenty years in poverty and then die horribly from smallpox.

And actually we don’t care what happens to them, because by this point the ballad, sung by a middle-aged Aspergic woman with dirty hair in a centre parting and a voice like two asthmatic piglets fighting in a bag, has reached the eighty-second verse and we have broken out in a slight sweat and abandoned all hope.

Not that Dave got up to any of that stuff. He came back having had “an experience which has strengthened my conviction about the right way to build a more cohesive Britain.”

Which is good, probably, but it’s not the kind of thing you’d want to write a song about.

Here's Your Pig's Bladder

2007-05-19T10:17:00.000+01:00

Chubby humourist Bll Bryson’s on an anti-litter campaign here in the U.K. at the moment. Seemingly irritated by an American daring to point out to them that they’re a bunch of slobs, a few people on the news opinion forums I frequent have been quite disparaging about Bill.

Some have even called into question whether or not he’s funny. Well, he is. I mean, I’ve never wept with mirth or had to lie down because my sides were aching after reading Bill’s stuff, but he’s an accurate observer and on the basis of an “evening with” he did at a local theatre a few months back, he’s also a genuinely nice bloke. He also manages to be funny without ever being truly unkind, which is harder than it looks.

I also have a soft spot for him because someone once suggested that I could be “the next Bill Bryson.” That’s flattering, but to tell you truth I’d rather be the first Bill Bryson, because then not only would I already be immensely wealthy but I’d also have a pretty good head of hair for a man in his fifties. (Although he should wash it more often, if his last breakfast T.V. appearance was anything to go by.)

On the downside, of course, the first Bill lives in Norfolk, a county which consistently fills me with dread, both because of the eye-watering flatness of the landscape and because for many of the inhabitants the job of village idiot is seen as the pinnacle of an aspirational and challenging career path. “Welcome on board, Jethro. Here's your pig’s bladder.”

A few hundred years ago people from Norfolk enthusiastically colonised many of the parts of North America which now feature in Stephen King novels and teen slasher movies. Many East Anglian traditions, such as folk dancing, incest, murder and cannibalism, often all with the same person and in quick succession, are still carried out by their descendents to this very day.

Bill claims to be happy in Norfolk, but I bet he keeps a gun under the pillow.

May Flash Fiction (1)

2007-05-09T09:22:00.000+01:00

The train pulls out of Euston on time, dead on four o’clock.

An hour into the journey and already it seems we’ve run out of things to say. We’ve had a brief discussion about the conference ahead. We’ve asked and answered a few questions about each other’s home life and after a very short while realised we really don’t care much about each other’s partners, children, pets, friends, if the truth were told.

For the last five minutes she’s been gazing out of the carriage window as the backs of houses fly past. Her jaw-line is tautened by the turn of her head. In the pallid spring sunlight I notice for the first time that her cheek is covered with the finest golden down. For a moment, unexpectedly, I wonder how it would feel against my lips.

Suddenly she turns to look at me. “I’m looking forward to this conference,” she says, “it’s been a long time coming.”

The phrase hangs in the air, and for a second our eyes lock, and then, coward that I am, mine skid away. When I find the courage to look back she’s smiling. “I’m a bit like that myself, sometimes.” she says, and turns her face to look out of the window once more.

The houses turn to woodland, then to fields and distant hills dappled with shadow and glowing in the westering sun. I pick up my newspaper, pretend to read, and dare to wonder what the next few days might bring.

Have Your Say

2007-05-02T16:22:00.000+01:00

I occasionally try to have my comments published on the BBC News "Have Your Say" website. I am rarely successful...

DEBATE:
Elections 2007: Will you be voting?
COMMENT:
We have many burning local issues in this part of Surrey, but I'll willingly vote for whichever candidate can guarantee that I will never again be doorstepped by Edwina Currie. Terrifying.
COMMENT STATUS:Awaiting moderation

DEBATE:
Has the government the right green policies?
COMMENT:
Interesting that those who believe global warming to be a fantasy created by Blair, "Greens" and "Lefties" seem also to be unable to spell, punctuate or construct a coherent sentence. It could be argued that this strongly suggests them to be morons, but I've heard there's some evidence to the contrary. So that's all right then.
COMMENT STATUS:Unpublished

DEBATE:
How should society tackle gun crime?
COMMENT:
Call me old-fashioned, but surely we could give these disaffected youths a few guns and their own island where they could savage each other to their hearts' content. It could be filmed as a "reality" T.V. show and the profits given to their victims.
COMMENT STATUS:Unpublished

DEBATE:
Are young people too hung up on body image?
COMMENT:
"Are young people too hung up on body image?" Yes, probably, but then young people tend to be hung up just about everything that doesn't matter, and most of them will grow out of it. Let's stop pretending this is important.
RECOMMENDED BY:2 people
COMMENT STATUS:Published

DEBATE:
Is the Anglican Church right to issue gay ultimatum?
COMMENT:
The sight of this bunch of delusional bigots slapping feebly at each other is not totally without entertainment value, but I fear it will soon become tiresome. As a suggestion for those torturing themselves on points of dogma, I would paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut's simple creed. "Believe whatever harmless lies you like, as long as they make you happy, healthy, brave and kind." Works for me...
COMMENT STATUS:Unpublished

DEBATE:
Should all UK imports and exports of poultry be halted?
COMMENT:
Yet another piece of misdirection - what will this ideologically and morally discredited government try to slide by unnoticed while this nonsense holds our attention? Incidentally, on the radio this morning someone referred to the national poultry "herd". Thank God we at least avoided a stampede. Yeehah.
RECOMMENDED BY:2 people
COMMENT STATUS:Published

DEBATE:
Why is the north fatter than the south?
COMMENT:
Surely the simplest way round this problem is to adopt the approach used so many times before in areas as wide-ranging as education, measuring inflation, unemployment and so on. If we were to move the goal-posts redefine obesity as "over forty stone" then most people in the U.K., North and South would comfortably fall into the "normal" category again. Problem solved.
COMMENT STATUS:Unpublished

DEBATE:
How can we tackle childhood obesity?
COMMENT:
Surely we could solve the problem by providing fat children with an exercise wheel like those used by hamsters. Connected to the National Grid these devices could go a long way towards solving Britain's energy problems without resorting to nuclear power or unsightly wind turbines.
COMMENT STATUS:Unpublished

DEBATE:
How should Britain prepare for Bird Flu?
COMMENT:
I'm greatly encouraged by the news that the 'flu has been contracted by a domestic cat - perhaps I can now look forward to H5N1 wiping out the bands of marauding squirrels which spend each summer enthusiastically violating my wife's hanging baskets. Come to think of it I won't shed any tears over next door's Jack Russell either. Bring it on.
COMMENT STATUS:Unpublished

I'll Use Paypal

2007-04-27T16:55:00.000+01:00

You probably think that on-line shopping is a breeze. If you're an old person, as I am, you might remember when, if you wanted to buy something, you had to actually leave the house and go to a shop. Not a "virtual store", or an "on-line mart", but a real shop, with a window at the front with wasps in it and a counter inside and an old gentleman wearing one of those special brown coats with a six-inch ruler and three pens in the top pocket.

Sometimes you had to go to two shops, or even more, to find the thing you wanted. And then you had to write a cheque. And bring the the thing you'd bought home on the bus, more than likely. And there'd probably be a light drizzle falling, and you'd get a bit wet and have to have a cup of tea when you got back.

AND SOMETIMES YOU COULDN'T BUY WHAT YOU WANTED BECAUSE THERE WEREN'T ANY LEFT!

Now, considering that millions of people on the planet have to walk miles each day just to collect clean drinking water, I tend to think that even the old style of shopping was pretty fucking easy. And shopping on-line is so phenomenally slothful it actually makes me feel guilty. Let's face it, there are no arguments, it's a piece of piss.

Paypal doesn't agree.

Their current advertising campaign invites you to compare the preferred option of "I'll use Paypal" with the following scene of drudgery and sheer exhaustion:

"I'll spend the next few minutes hunting around for my credit card so I can type out that number (yes, the really long one) across the middle, and that 3 digit thingy on the back. And, of course my expiry date. Oh go on then, and my billing address too."

God, that sounds completely ghastly. Positively inhumane. You might have to type in your credit card number! Well, fuck me. I wouldn't be surprised if the non-Paypal version of on-line shopping is ultimately subject to the same universal opprobrium as child slave labour or the use of landmines.

What next? As far as I know the smart money is on the development of a microchip implanted just behind your ear which will monitor your buying patterns over a period of time and then forecast what you want to buy before you even know you want to buy it, contact the website and your bank and sort it all out while you're asleep. You won't even have the stress of wondering when your stuff's going to arrive because you won't know you've bought it until the parcel arrives. Surprise! And it's just what you wanted!

The only time you won't get what you want is when it's clothing and the chip knows your arse is going to look huge. Then you'll probably just get a nice handbag.

Now that's the kind of technology that makes life easy. "I'll use Paypal" indeed. You're having a laugh.

Another True Story

2007-04-27T13:45:00.000+01:00

Now that I’m free to wander the earth having adventures like Caine from Kung Fu things are starting to happen to me. Last night I was rehearsing with some musician friends. One of the songs we worked on was “Short People” by Randy Newman. In case you’re not familiar with Mr. Newman’s oeuvre, the song contains the following lyrics:

They got little hands
And little eyes
And they walk around
Tellin' great big lies
They got little noses
And tiny little teeth
They wear platform shoes
On their nasty little feet

At the time of the song's release, when he toured those parts of the United States where a sense of humour is a rarity but proof of a permanent sense of outrage has, by law, to be produced at a police station every twenty-eight days, Randy received death threats in the mail. It was never proven that the vertically diverse were responsible, although the fact that teeny-weeny little ladders were sometimes found propped against Randy’s mailbox was thought to be significant.

Anyway, that's the song we rehearsed last night. This morning, as I walked into Redhill town centre I was stopped in the street by a midget who asked for directions to the road where I live. She didn't actually ask for directions to my house, so it might have been a coincidence, but to tell you the truth it spooked me.

When I got home I checked in all the flower pots and behind the sofa and everything seemed to be in order, but then I've no idea how midgets operate, and it's obviously much easier for them to go under cover than for the rest of us.

Maybe I should look up their modus operandi on Google.

Making A Name

2007-04-26T16:55:00.000+01:00

A genuine news story from my local paper...

"A Redhill man who suffers bouts of depression broke into a Salvation Army citadel near his home and defecated on the floor near the piano, a court heard. Ray Barnett, defending, said: "I asked him why he did it and he said he wanted to make a name for himself.""

If anybody had bothered to ask me I would have told them that the way to really make a name for yourself would be to defecate on the ceiling.

The Spell Of Total Enlightenment

2007-04-25T16:17:00.000+01:00

It's been a weird few weeks. On March 30th I left my job as corporate lickspittle to wander the earth and have adventures. I had been with the company for almost twenty years and I can honestly say that I hated pretty much all of my time there, except for the parts that were merely dull.

Anyway, they turned me loose with a warm but insincere handshake and a severance package which will allow me to sit around for a year or two with my thumb up my arse should I so wish. Then I'll have to either get a job or start selling body parts. (Somebody else's body parts, obviously.)

Sooz and I went on a week's holiday in Derbyshire to help with the transition, and did a lot of walking, eating, drinking and sleeping. On my return I went into my study on Monday morning, turned on the computer and Wondered What To Do Next. Then I Went A Bit Nuts.

The problem was, I think, that while I was at work I was gainfully but pointlessly employed in an environment which, although not in the same league as being an air traffic controller or neurosurgeon when it comes to stress levels, was still fraught enough to fill my head up with Work Stuff, so all the Other Stuff I should have been thinking about could be pushed to one side during the day. In the evening I had the excuse of having had a hard day making a living to allow me to avoid thinking about the Other Stuff then, too.

So, with no Work Stuff to worry about I was visited by The Spell Of Total Enlightenment, and I started trying to think about all the Other Stuff at once. On Monday I thought about: making a will, changing my mortgage to another lender, taking out life insurance, registering with the Job Centre, calling my pension company, setting up a meeting with a financial advisor, booking a service for my car, booking an MOT for my car, selling my car, contacting charity organisations to see if they wanted any volunteers, buying a new desk for my office, getting the parts to fix the shower door, booking a holiday in Durham, booking a flight to Ireland, checking out training courses and finding a new job.

And, of course, trying to read, research and do some writing, which was the point of leaving my job in the first place.

After an hour or so I wound up in the corner of the study with the wastepaper basket on my head, singing the chorus of "Don't Touch Me There" by The Tubes. Then I calmed down, and made a list.

Three weeks later, I've crossed a few things off the list and added a few more, and I'm pretty much back in control. My days seem extraordinarily full, and not as structured as I'd like, but I'm making progress of a kind.

A Lot Of Dead Alpacas

2007-04-15T18:47:00.000+01:00

The Ministry of Defence has released figures relating to compensation to claimants “affected” by low-flying aircraft during the year 2005-2006. The amount awarded was £4.1 million, a huge increase over the previous year, when the sum was a paltry £760000.

Many of the incidents relate to farm livestock. The M.O.D. tells us that it’s “very unlikely that stock is hit directly and killed”, which is reassuring to a degree but not all that surprising, unless you’re farming giraffes, in which case it’s
still unlikely but not impossible.

It's well known that at the onset of Spring giraffes tend to get a touch exuberant and do a lot of leaping and bounding. The effect of a giraffe being sucked into an air intake is not something that’s easy to reproduce convincingly under stringent test conditions, but one can hazard a guess that it’s likely to prove fairly unpleasant for animal and aircrew alike.

More likely are occurrences of “huddling”. Many farm animals, from
sheep to more exotic breeds such as llamas and alpacas, are just as
likely to crowd together for mutual reassurance in moments of
danger as to try to make a run for it. Under these circumstances
it’s quite possible that a single Chinook landing a little
over-enthusiastically could annihilate an entire flock.

However, although it’s not difficult to see how these tragic events
can come about, the amount of compensation still seems extremely
high.

£4.1 million’s a lot of dead alpacas. Or giraffes.

The Last Post

2006-12-21T15:39:00.000Z

Although possessed by a melancholy end-of-year world-weariness I thought I'd better post something, particularly as this is my penultimate day in the office in 2006 and my broadband connection at home, thanks to what my ISP laughingly described as an "upgrade",has been rendered somewhat erratic.

Thirteen posts in a year falls squarely between "feeble" and "pathetic" on the enthusometer, especially compared with 2004, when I began blogging - why, bless me, the posts are too numerous to count!

I think what's happened is the my day-job has become steady, rather than insanely busy one minute and slack the next. I preferred the latter state of affairs; adrenalin tends to help you over the peaks and the troughs are good for buying guitars on eBay, checking out the occasional piece of genuine amateur girl-on-girl action (as I believe it's called) and, of course, writing.

The other more worrying possibility is that now I've decided to take writing seriously I won't be able to do it. Earlier in the year I decided that as my job was driving me insane I would retire early (at age 55) and to that end I would have to create a body of work of a high enough standard to submit for publication. Since then I've hardly managed to write a thing, good or bad, although on the plus side the need for displacement activity has meant that my bass playing has improved. Perhaps I should decide to become a professional bass player in the hope that I'd begin to write again.

Anyway, I've had a bit of a shock recently. I'm not sure who was responsible, as nobody will own up, but a book called "The Know" by Martina Cole appeared in the house recently. I'd never read anything by Cole and was only vaguely aware of the name, but apparently she's a best-selling author who's sold millions of books. Her plots are, as I understand it, usually about drug addicts, prostitutes, criminals and other assorted low-lifes ("The Know" is about hookers, pimps and paedophiles).

The subject matter's not an issue for me, although it's not the knd of stuff that really interests me, but what completely stunned me was Cole's total inability to write. I raised the subject with Suzie Creamcheese, who, despite being justifiably feted for her magnificent breasts, is a surprisingly erudite and well-read young lady. When I got there she was busy, but, because of my obvious agitation, agreed to see me.

"You have no idea!" I squealed. "Martina Cole is the worst writer I've ever come across."
" Worse than Dan Brown?" she murmured, letting the lifeless form of the tiny jockey who'd been pleasuring her drop from between her moist thighs.

"Martina Cole makes Dan Brown read like John fucking Steinbeck." I cried, stepping over the crumpled dwarf and permitting myself a sly glance at her steaming genitalia. "I'm confused! I always thought there were people who were clever and read books and then there were other people who were stupid and watched crap television shows instead! But there must be stupid people who read books as well as watch crap television shows! What does it mean?"

Suzie opened the drawer of a filing cabinet and took out another jockey, still shrink-wrapped. "It means", she pouted, "that, when their T.V.'s been repossessed, some stupid people get so bored that they try reading. And when they try reading they feel more comfortable if the book's such an unadulterated piece of shit that they could have written it themselves."

She began to peel the tiny equestrian. "You'll have to excuse me. I bought a six-pack of these little chaps yesterday and they'll have gone off by tomorrow. Now where did I put those AA batteries?"

As I left I heard a shriek of triumph, a buzzing and, after a pause, the faintest of moans, uttered by whom and whether of pleasure or despair it was impossible to tell.

Today at Stormont

2006-11-24T17:11:00.000Z

Interesting times in Northern Ireland today, where the two main political parties were supposed to nominate their representatives for the posts of "First Minister" and "Deputy First Minister" in the stalled devolved governmental assembly. The nominees were expected to be the Reverend Ian Paisley, leader of the DUP and Martin McGuinness, leader of Sinn Fein.

Paisley has loomed like a malevolent ogre over Northern Irish politics since I was a child. A fundamentalist Christian, he has risen to power supported by those who see negativity and intransigence as a virtue in a country where compromise is essential. His bigotry is the stuff of legend (he once put forward the view that The Pope was the antichrist). The thought that this demented cleric could rise to power says much about the lunacy of the Northern Ireland Protestant electorate and proves that they would vote for a monkey as long as it was wearing an Orange sash. Ian Paisley is determined that Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom.

McGuinness is no better. A convicted terrorist, he is consistently sulky and self-righteous, steadfastly refusing to acknowledge that republicans can ever be in the wrong. He is an enthusiastic embracer of The Holocaust Excuse (which states that any behaviour, however evil, can be justified by referring to wicked acts carried out against the perpetrators in the past.) Interrogated on the concept of "terrorism" following the September 11th attacks, he stated that the I.R.A. were not terrorists, but rather "patriots who made some mistakes", which no doubt came as great comfort to the burned, blinded, faceless, legless and bereaved. Martin McGuinness is determined that Northern Ireland will become part of the Republic of Ireland.

That these two buffoons can prosper in Northern Ireland is proof if proof were needed that the Northern Irish are entirely unfit to govern themselves, and why they're allowed to vote is a mystery to me. The only light relief in today's sorry proceedings was when lovable old Michael Stone strolled into into the government building at Stormont with a knife, a gun, a bomb and a specially trained genetically-engineered carnivorous giraffe off its tits on crystal meth and thirsting for Catholic blood. I'm not completely sure about the giraffe, to tell you the truth.

How Stone, who was jailed in 1988 for the cold-blooded murder of three Catholics at an I.R.A. funeral but released as part of the Good Friday Agreement, and clearly ought to be not only heavily sedated but permanently manacled to a large and immovable object in a padded cell, was able to get into a building full of prominent politicians beggars belief, bearing mind that in the rest of the U.K. the police apparently have carte blanche to shoot people dead for just being brown.

Anyway, to paraphrase a politician who's name for the moment escapes me, overheard settling, exhausted, into his aeroplane seat after his first visit to Belfast. "What a bloody awful place. I need a drink."

Literary Form And Stuff

2006-08-21T11:59:00.000+01:00

I joined an online writers' forum a few weeks ago. It's called The Write Idea. Yes, I know, but then it could have been called Write Oh, Write On, Write Up Your Alley, or even, conceivably, Waiting For Mr. Write. Which isn't such a bad idea, actually. I'm sure people on the forum do get off with each other occasionally, and on the basis that a poem about fellatio has had 370 views and 63 replies so far, they're obviously a pretty frisky bunch.

One of the regular topics in the forum is to do with poetic form. Every fortnight one of the members comes up with a type of poem which has a particular meter, rhyme scheme or both, and other menbers have a go at writing a poem in that form. Some of the results are pretty good, actually, but I find myself inexplicably irritated by the whole idea.

It may just be that I'm intensely lazy, which I undoubtedly am, but I think that it's because, not being a poet myself, I feel that they should more properly be putting their energies into quaffing tumblers of absinthe while deflowering milkmaids or shepherd boys (according to gender and / or orientation) and other poet type stuff rather than having to worry about sets of instructions. For example:

"Capital letters denote identical lines.
Lower case letters denote rhyming lines.
(A and A’ are non-identical lines that rhyme with each other).

ABA
bCB
cDC
dED
eFE"

That's a terzanelle, by the way. Is it really? Well I never.

I mentioned this to my son, who despite being a professional musician is also of a literary bent. "This has nothing to do with writing!" I whined. "It has as much to do with poetry as doing a crossword! Or Scrabble!"

"I had a go at the ottava rima a while ago." he said. "I got into the rhythm of it after a while. I quite enjoyed it. And if you're planning to write this up try not to piss people off too much."

Road Trip

2006-08-16T11:12:00.000+01:00

Unlike most Irishmen, who in my experience tend to come with a dangerously large helping of recklessness built-in, I've never been a natural risk-taker. I've always tried pretty hard to fend off spontaneity but sometimes it just creeps up from behind and starts humping your leg. As a result of carelessly lowering my guard in the Tourism Center in Dublin a couple of months ago, Sooz and I will soon be spending five days touring Ireland, Dublin to Dingle and back, crammed into a Landrover with two drivers and half a dozen total strangers.

I have a few concerns. At least one of our fellow-travellers could well turn out to be, if not exactly clinically insane, then at the very least the sort of bloke who drinks pints of Old Stoats' Scrotum and spends weekends with a group of chums re-enacting the Battle of Naseby. Other more likely other options for fellow-travellers, however, are Iowans in search of their roots, couples in matching cagoules who call each other "poppet", and of course, people who have decided that they quite like the idea of a road trip but also realise that their days of piloting the VW Microbus to Katmandu are over. People a bit like us, in fact.

Anyway, in an attempt to get slightly more grown-up about my writing, and spurred on by sporadic nagging from both Sooz (in person) and Toad (who sends me emails saying encouraging things like "write something, you arse") I've decided to keep a travel log and try to turn the trip into some kind of article - at the moment I'm trying to interest some magazines and newspapers in the idea, but haven't exactly been swamped with offers so far.

And, looking on the bright side, if the others on the trip are annoying enough I might even get a murder mystery out of it.

The Return Of The Man Who Never Came Back

2006-07-11T17:10:00.000+01:00

It's been over three months since I wrote anything on here. It would be nice to be able to report that it's because I've been finishing my novel (which will probably happen sometime after I start it, I suppose), or at the very least that I'm unable to get to the computer not only because I'm quite drunk but also because Susan Sarandon's sitting on my face. Alas, no.

No, it's all been down to a combination of Work and Beer, I'm afraid. Work which stresses me out and gnaws away at what passes for my immortal soul, and Beer, which seems to help with the stress but saps my will to do anything except hit the sofa and watch terrible TV. I've even taken to watching Big Brother. "Why?" you might ask. "Fucked if I know." I would respond, because I still truly hate the programme, and if I walked into a bar and the inhabitants of the Big Brother house were there, then I'd leave. Immediately. Even if I'd already ordered a drink. And I'm not someone who leaves an unfinished pint of Stella without good reason. So why, then, am I suddenly prepared to let the sight and sound of these attention-seeking sub-normal fuckers into my living room? Who can say?

Anyway, I've decided that as this blog is the only even mildly creative outlet I have at the moment I can't let it shrivel up and die, even if the only visitors are my chum Gareth, one or two assorted Yanks and of course Toad. (I'd be hard-pressed to explain what Toad is.)

So there you go. I'm back. Sort of.

Gently, Bentley

2006-04-06T13:23:00.000+01:00

On the way to work today I overtook a little blue van driven by a little teeny weeny old lady. On the side of the van was written the following: "HOT ROCK THERAPY" and "EAR CANDLES".

I had no idea what that meant so when I got into the office I looked up ear candles on Google. I know I have my moments and a bit of a thing about Dr. Gillian, but fuck me gently, Bentley, there are some weird people out there.

And one of them drives a little blue van.

Charlemagne's Dad

2006-03-30T13:37:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I worked (or rather "worked", as it consisted mainly of jelly-nailing) at my company's office in Harlow, Essex, which is a ghastly place. The county of Essex is a desolate windswept wasteland dotted with towns and villages so horrific in appearance that the word "eyesore" was invented specially to describe them and even so almost entirely fails to adequately convey their awfulness. Essex people are without exception ugly, stupid and inclined towards violence to strangers, so that if for some reason you have to travel through the county it's advisable to drive very fast and make sure you've locked the car doors, otherwise they will drag you out and burn you, alerted to your foreign-ness by your opposable thumbs and the lack of dribble on your chin and shirt-front.

Anyway, in my eagerness to get out of the place last night I packed up hurriedly and put everything in my laptop case. Apart from my laptop, of course. I managed to forget that, and left it plugged into the docking station I was using. This morning, still unaware that I had no computer, I drove the forty-six miles from home to my usual office in Maidenhead, where I discovered my error. Exclaiming "My goodness! How foolish of me! Would you believe it!", or words to that effect, I got back in the car and drove another sixty-six miles to Harlow

As a result I found myself in the car and listening to the radio at a time when I'm usually either at my desk (during the week), or still in bed (at weekends), so I got to listen to a discussion programme hosted by pretentious but loveable old Melvyn Bragg and featuring three academics who were so clever that they could barely string a sentence together, so specialised and focussed were their great big brains. One of them had recently discovered the phrase "can of worms", and used it several times during the programme, possibly in the in the belief that it sounded hip and modern.

Thanks to the programme I learnt a lot about Charlemagne, appointed Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day 800 A.D. and conqueror of pretty much the whole of Europe, or at least the fashionable bits. One of the things I learnt was that Charlemagne's dad was called "Pippin". Which I think is hilarious.

In the toilet at the Harlow office there are two signs on the wall. (Permanent signs, that is; somebody occasionally puts up a temporary one which reads "Caution! Wet Floor And Trailing Cables!" which has to be one of the least reassuring signs I've ever come across.) The first permanent sign reads "Please Do Not Stand On TheToilet Seats As They Will Break." I've never had that one satisfactorily explained to me, but it says a lot about Essex.

The other sign reads "Please Leave This Toilet As You Would Wish To Find It." As I'd what I'd really like to find in the toilet is Dr. Gillian McKeith swinging by the neck from a wire noose attached to the hook on the back of the cubicle door I find that particular sign just a little disappointing. Every time

Take The Jelly In The Left Hand and The Hammer In The Right

2006-03-23T13:17:00.000Z

It's a long time since I wrote anything on here; I've been "busy" at work for the last few weeks. Busy, as a reassuringly cynical colleague puts it, "nailing jelly to a plank". The phrase is supposed to convey the mind-numbing pointlessness of what I do, but what I do is much, much worse than that. I mean, even if the nailing part didn't go well you could always eat the jelly and then whittle the plank into an amusing shape. Or use it to beat Gillian McKeith to death. (For pity's sake leave me my dreams, else I have nothing.)

In the film Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman is punished by being made to dig a deep hole in the ground, then fill it in. Then do it again. And again. You might think that Paul had it rough, but at least he was out in the fresh air building up a good set of pecs, whereas I spend my "working" day sitting in front of a computer listening to the sound of my arteries silting up against a backdrop of marketing wankers playing with their Blackberries and braying at each other. (Although of course on the plus side I'm not really at risk of being shot dead by a psychopathic prison guard in mirror shades or mauled by savage hounds, so every cloud has a silver etc., etc.)

What I appear to be doing all day is move numbers around on spreadsheets, but what I'm really doing is helping to maintain the illusion of control. There are millions of us, all over the world, whose sole purpose is to make senior managers feel that they may not know what to do, but by God they have the data to help them do it. It occurs to me regularly that, when asked yet again to spend three days of my life analysing the ins and outs of a cat's arse, I should ask for proof that the data I provide will actually be used to help make decisions that will help the business, otherwise I should respectfully decline the request. Still, it's a living, and I don't hate it that much, but I certainly don't want to have to describe it to people.

Even though I'm a resolutely misanthropic old twat I still unaccountably get asked to the occasional social gathering, and thus it was that I found myself at Jilly's birthday party, cornered by a Small Intense Woman who was determined, possibly out of a misguided sense of etiquette, to ask me about what I did for a living.

S.I.W.: "So, what do you do for a living? Exactly?"
Me : "I have the world's most boring job. Thank you for showing an interest, but I really don't want to talk about it."
S.I.W.:(Roguishly) "I'm sure it's not that bad."
Me: (Bleakly.)"It's so much worse than "that bad" that "that bad" doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the "that badness" of it. Can we talk about something else? Tell you what, If what you do for a living is interesting, and please, let me be the judge of that, then tell me about your job. If it isn't, then we can talk about all those fat people programmes on T.V. If you like."
S.I.W.: "I'm an acountant. In spite of what people think, it can be really interesting."
Me: "Oh, look over there! An escaped leopard!" (I run off.)

Anyway, I have to go now. My boss is getting a little nervy and I have to give him a thirty-seven page Powerpoint chart pack to explain the financial impact of something on something else. It will get as far as his laptop case and stay there until he takes it out, turns it over and gives it to his two-year-old son to draw on.

Snake-oil And Nutrobabble

2006-02-22T13:05:00.000Z

You might well think that with so much real trouble in the world it's a little superficial to worry unduly about T.V. programmes, but every so often the schedules take on a character so horrific that it pushes war, famine, pestilence and the destruction of the planet's ecosystem into the background.

Specifically, there's You Are What You Eat, hosted by "Dr." Gillian McKeith. It has been suggested that Gillian's doctorate is the kind you get by sending off a coupon from a Cinnamon Grahams box with a fat cheque, but I'm less bothered by her qualifications or lack thereof than the fact that she's a whining self-righteous rat-faced Scottish bitch with scruffy hair who makes a living stalking the airwaves peddling snake-oil to the stupid and gullible.

On the "Frequently Asked Questions" page on Gillian's website you can find the following exchange:
Q. The Fast Formula Horny Goat Weed Complex - do I take it as a course of medication? What's the recommended dosage?
A: Follow directions on the label. It may be taken regularly or when needed. It’s food from plants, and thus nourishing to the organs, energising, strengthening and totally safe.

Note the reassuringly scientific tone of "it's food from plants, and thus nourishing to the organs." And yes, the Fast Formula Horny Goat Weed Complex allegedly does what the name suggests - it helps you to get It up. There are probably other Complexes on the website to help you keep It down, stop It pointing off to the left, or make It whistle Camptown Races. Dr. McKeith may sell magic stuff that will make It a size, shape and colour so otherworldly that It looks like something dreamed up by H.P. Lovecraft. As I said earlier, Gillian peddles snake-oil.

Anyhow, back to You Are What You Eat. Every week Gillian visits a fat person who has an unhealthy diet, humiliates them, talks a lot about poo and gives them advice, most of which is blindingly obvious. The rest is just pseudo-scientific nutrobabble*. This week the subject of Dr. G's derision was a woman who, at eighteen stone, was around eight stone (or a complete small person's worth of lard) overweight due to a diet composed entirely of cakes and chips in enormous quantities.

"Stop eating cakes and chips!" cries Gillian. "Eat more healthy stuff!"

"Ohmigod!" squeals the fat person, weeping with gratitude. "Dr. Gillian has shown me that my fatness is caused by eating cakes and chips in enormous quantities, something I did not know already because of my immense stupidity. This will change my life. Or at least reduce the number of cakes and chips in it."

Before that, of course, we have to listen to the scrawny Scottish cow talking about bodily functions. "Do you fart a lot? Are they smelly?" The fat girl shamefacedly admits that, yes, she does, and yes, they are, and is then dragged off for colonic irrigation, which of course we get to watch. Transparent tubing. That's all I have to say.

Later the same evening there was a programme following the experiences of four heroin addicts as they went cold turkey. Live.

I didn't watch that one.

*pronounced "newtrobabble".

The Five-And-A-Half Bugbear Man

2006-02-08T12:31:00.000Z

The trouble is there are just too many things to worry about, what with the streets of London being full of ugly blokes with beards wanting to cut our heads off, retired terrorists in Northern Ireland whining about not being allowed to form a government despite being blatantly unfit to do so, and all manner of terrifying apocalyptic stuff going around. It's depressing, but taking your mind off it's easy - just watch a T.V. programme about really fat people!

And not just any ordinary fat people. This wasn't some slightly plump mum from Basingstoke needing to lose ten pounds to restore her confidence. This was Patrick Deuel, the Half-Ton Man. When filming began Patrick weighed 78 stone, which translates on my calculator as 1092 pounds, or about five and a half of me. Patrick, unable to walk (or in fact stand up, or lie on his back without suffocating under his own lard) looked a lot like someone piloting his own hovercraft from a prone position. With a life-raft on his back.

Strangely, perhaps because of his helplessness and immobility, Patrick was less disgusting to look at than you'd expect, so you couldn't really begin to hate him properly until you got to know him. Then it became apparent that what we had here was Jabba the Hut, but uglier and without the charm. After being carted off to hospital Patrick lost a lot of weight (about three people's worth to be exact) but still remained convinced that his bulk was due to some sort of tragic genetic twist of fate rather than being down to the consumption of the fifteen thousand calories a day shovelled into him by his wife, who was not only a bit of a monster herself but also clearly completely insane.

The strangest thing about the programme was that nobody grabbed this imbecile of a woman by the ears, slammed her head against the wall and screamed "WHY DID YOU KEEP ON FEEDING HIM, YOU EVIL TWISTED FUCKING MORON!? After Patrick had been allowed to come home (still huge and pretty much unable to get around unaided), his wife had the task of monitoring his diet. It went like this:

Interviewer: "So have you got Patrick on a special diet?"
Wife: "No, not really. It's just a question of counting the calories."
Interviewer: "So how many calories are in that?"
Wife: (Staring blankly at a pan containing five poached eggs.) "I have no idea."

Good luck with the weight loss, Paddy, me boy.

The Next Piece Of Dross

2006-01-06T15:18:00.000Z

The other night (Tuesday) I found myself slumped in my customary TV-viewing position on the sofa (head and pelvis at roughly the same height, beer within easy reach, you know how it goes). There had been a certain amount of negotiation required beforehand, because I wanted to watch what turned out to be a light-hearted and pretty dopy documentary based on Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men In a Boat at nine o'clock.

Now, my stepdaughters are highly intelligent girls, but you'd never know it from their choice of TV programme. Their preference for nine o'clock viewing was Teenage Tourette's Camp, but after a few minutes of blustering, whining and, eventually, sobbing, I got my own way. The downside, however, was that as a compromise at eight o'clock we all sat down to watch My Child Can't Stop Eating, which as a title gave a pretty good idea as to the subject-matter. I'd sneered at the programme title earlier, on the basis that the TV production companies churn out crap at such speed that they don't have time to think about what to call the next piece of dross. ("Oh, look, just call it People Having Accidents And Hurting Themselves A Bit But Not So Seriously That You Feel Bad About Laughing and leave it at that. What's the next one?")

Being a pompous middle-aged snob I'm not happy with the direction popular TV's taken over the last few years, in particular the "reality" stuff, which, call me old-fashioned, seems no more than giving viewers the opportunity to either laugh at or be smugly appalled by people whose houses, figures, lives, children, finances or personalities are more fucked-up than their own. Of course in my part of Surrey people probably see these shows as aspirational lifestyle guides. They won't get to laugh at anyone until Bankrupt Zombie Lepers hits the screen. But I digress.

Anyway, despite my stepdaughters not having any Weight Issues that I can see (although I grant you a jowly middle-aged 200-pound bloke is perhaps not the best judge of these matters), they seem to enjoy looking at fat people on TV, so we began to watch My Child Can't Stop Eating. I'd joked beforehand "I don't understand the problem. Why don't they take their food away? Or do they just start on the pets and the furniture?"

Well, actually, they do. Pet food, anyway. It turns out that they suffer from Prader-Willi syndrome, which not only leads to reduced IQ and severe learning difficulties, it also prevents the production of the chemical which stops you feeling hungry when you've eaten enough, and also, in a final fit of spite, slows the metabolism of the sufferer so that they can gain weight on nine hundred calories a day while wanting to consume about nine thousand. Not only has the condition a name you can snigger at, it has a nasty sense of humour too.

It's possible that the programme had an uplifting and life-affirming message in it somewhere, but it was just too depressing, so we turned it off. No respite from Terrible TV though, as the alternative choice turned out to be Gillian McKeith's New Year Detox, of which more later, perhaps.

What do you think Teenage Tourette's Camp was about?

Tif?

2006-01-03T12:41:00.000Z

Tif, poet and sometime visitor to this site, seems to have shut down her blog. I rarely commented on Tif's stuff because I could never think of anything intelligent to say about it, but it was apparent, even to me, that the girl had talent.

As Libertybob has pointed out, Tif's decision to shut the shop seems to have something to do with harassment from an ex-partner. A link to his blog suggests him to be a violent moron, and it angers me to think of all the bright sparky women in the world who have had their lives ruined by stupid, controlling men who, rather than celebrating them, feel somehow threatened.

I hope Tif is okay, and I also hope that she continues to write, if not for our benefit, at least for her own.

I also have to confess that I'm childish enough to want to go onto the moron's blog and call him names. I'm fighting the urge, but it's tough.

In Borneo

2005-12-06T14:44:00.000Z

Great excitement amongst wildlife enthusiasts this week as they've discovered a new species of carnivore in (on?)Borneo. (The in / on thing's been concerning me since the news reports this morning. Presumably on the basis that Borneo's an island the reporter said "on Borneo", but it's a pretty damn big island, so I'm more comfortable with "in Borneo". After all, you don't say "on Australia".)

Anyway, they have a couple of photos of this thing, which is described as being slightly larger than a domestic cat, red in colour, with long back legs and a long fuzzy tail. Sounds completely terrifying to me, but then as you know I'm even unsettled by chipmunks. And the word "carnivore" covers a multitude of sins. If this thing eats slugs and a few mice then I'm comfortable with it, but what if it has a deep-seated urge to feast on human flesh?

And suppose it stows away on a cargo boat bound for old Blighty? I could be happily making my way round the supermarket and the next thing I know some sabre-toothed ginger wallaby has leapt out of the organic bananas and ripped my throat out. These things happen.

Apparently this is the first discovery of its kind since the famous ferret-badger of 1895. They didn't describe the ferret-badger, which I was pleased about because I was upset enough already. Bet the fucker ain't pretty, though.

Thanks Suzie

2005-11-30T10:05:00.000Z

Thanks to the firm-bodied young accountant's almost complete lack of workload, which gives her ample time to investigate the mysteries of Blogger, I now have some permanent links to other blogs, and will add more soon.

"Morialekafa" is a real find - a retired anthropology professor who has a fine writing style and a reassuring hatred for Bush, Cheney, and all the other faulty human beings we'd like to see loaded into a siege catapult and fired a mile out to sea.

Mmmmm, ample.

Not So Bright

2005-11-23T11:54:00.000Z

I would dearly love to have permanent links to other blogs, like Libertybob, Tif and others, but I'm too stupid to work out how to set them up in my template. If any of you other Blogger users can give me simple instructions I'll be grateful. As well as better informed.

I'd also like to draw your attention to Suzie Creamcheese's blog. She's a fine big healthy girl, and her heart, like her breasts, is definitely in the right place. Ahem.

Hard Currency

2005-11-04T09:34:00.000Z

Sooz and I are going to Dorset for the weekend, to visit our friends Dave and Diana who moved to a village called Winterborne Stickland a couple of years ago(thatched cottages, local inn full of colourful rustic types, slight but all-pervading smell of cow-shit, that sort of thing.)

Dave is a cartoon animator by profession, and at the height of his success he worked on Yellow Submarine and Watership Down , amongst other things. He is small, Scottish and a fully paid-up manic-depressive, and as he plays tenor saxophone he has acquired the nickname "Toots", which he bears with dignity and grace. In common with many people who have decided to move to the country, Dave now makes a living doing just about anything he can, including painting cutesy-wootsie murals in kids' bedrooms, teaching saxophone, building work and so on. As he says, "Everyone has their price and at the moment mine is two bob and a pickled egg*."

Diana is bright, sparky, and looks a lot like a Disney fairy godmother (in fact for a while I thought that Dave might have drawn and animated her rather than go out and get a real girlfriend.) She has a tendency to sing Frank Zappa numbers after a few drinks and works as an Anti-Social Behaviour Officer, which means her job is to try and help dissaffected youth(s) to moderate their behaviour before they end up dead or in jail. It's the sort of job that most of us could probably stick at for about fifteen seconds before punching someone in the mouth, so in my book she's as fine a person as Mother Teresa, and a lot more cuddly.

The other reason that I'm going to Dorset is that my guitar-player son Matt has a couple of gigs there, and I've volunteered to drive him. Sooz and I have booked a room at the inn Matt's playing at tonight, so this evening we can have dinner, watch a young white boy playing the blues like an old black man, have a few drinks and crawl straight up to bed. I'm taking my bass with me, so at tomorrow night's gig, after Matt's finished his acoustic blues and ragtime set, Dave and I, plus a few local musicians, will join him for what is likely to turn into a lengthy and drunken jam session.

It promises to be a a good weekend.

* For the benefit of overseas visitors and young people, this is an archaic expression which refers to pre-decimal U.K. currency. Any attempt to explain pre-1971 British currency to a foreigner or even to a Brit born after about 1965 will lead to an embarrassing amount of ribaldry and disbelief, but here goes...

Before we had a system with one pound being equal to one hundred pence, British currency was made up of pounds, shillings and pence, which was naturally abbreviated to "L.S.D." Huh? I know, I know. It gets worse...

There were twenty shillings in a pound and twelve pennies in a shilling and therefore two hundred and forty pence in a pound. In addition there were coins worth a quarter of a penny (known as "farthings"), half a penny (pronounced "haypenny", don't ask me why), three pence (called a "thruppenny bit"), six pence, twelve pence (a shilling), two shillings (called a "florin"), and a coin which was worth two shillings and six pence and called a "half-crown". The "crown" coin, worth five shillings (or a quarter of a pound) was no longer in general circulation even when I was a child, although special occasions sometimes warranted commemorative issues. Paper money started at the ten shilling note which represented serious spending power when I was five years old.

Considering all of the above, the indigenous population of the British isles got along okay with the complexities of the currency, although arithmetic lessons sometimes got a bit tricky, as I recall. We didn't have so many tourists back then and we hated the ones we did have, so the fact that our money system rendered foreigners confused and tearful was regarded as a bonus. The old advertising trick of showing something costing £10 as £9.99 came out in those days as £9 19s 11d. There was also an imaginary unit (no notes or coins)called a "guinea", which was worth one pound and one shilling and was somehow considered to be slightly more upper-class than mere pounds, and used by expensive tailors and the like.

As well as all the above, there were slang words for some of the coins. A sixpence was a "tanner", and (getting perilously close to the point of all this), a shilling was known as a "bob". Like the "quid" for some reason it was always singular, as in "Can you lend me ten bob?" (Poking fun at Americans who say "It cost me fifty quids" remains one of the few pleasures left to the British, so don't tell your friends any of this.)

So...bearing all of the above in mind you will realise that Dave (remember Dave?) is suggesting that he is prepared to work for a very small amount of money indeed. And a pickled egg, of course, which is always worth having.

Singing Mice And Stuff

2005-11-03T15:35:00.000Z

Scientists have discovered that mice have a much wider vocabulary than previously suspected. Not that they could take a philosophy class or anything, but apparently when you record their squeaking (the mice, not the scientists) using microphones sensitive to very high frequencies and then play the noises back four octaves lower, you get a series of sounds not unlike birdsong. (Why do people say "not unlike", instead of "like"? Is "not unlike" as like "like" as "quite like"? I heard someone say "not unfond" recently, and almost managed to stuff him into a sack with a dozen ravening weasels, but, alas he was oily and wriggled free.

I was surprised that the fact that mice can sing is considered to be newsworthy; after all, they did a perfectly workmanlike job in Disney movies back in the fifties and sixties. I know they had a tendency to pronounce "Cinderella" as "Cinderelly", but I have to say that's really just nitpicking considering that they probably worked for cheese, and being able to persuade your cast and crew to work for dairy products instead of hard cash has always been key to bringing a movie in under budget.

Oh, and the other item of news this week is that David Blunkett has resigned from Tony's Cabinet. Blunkett might be considered to be unfortunate because he's blind, but for the same reason he probably doesn't know how terrifyingly fucking ugly he is, so it balances out.

The News

2005-10-27T13:28:00.000+01:00

One of the things that's noticeable when you go to the U.S.A. for the first time, apart from the fact that everything seems familiar because you've already seen it in films and on television, is that your home country ceases to exist as far as news broadcasts are concerned. When I spent a few weeks in upstate New York I quite enjoyed the U.K. news blackout, but I know people who are enraged by Americans' apparent ignorance of and lack of interest in anything outside the U.S. To tell you the truth I'm quite happy for Americans to remain blissfully ignorant about the rest of the world, because when they do decide sit up and take an interest it seems to end in tears. Or carpet-bombing. Or both.

Anyway, despite being innately grumpy I'm a reasonably fair-minded man, and I don't think the average Brit is much more interested in or better informed about the outside world than the average Yank. We don't even really care what happens in France and it's only thirty miles away, and despite paying lip service to all that European Union stuff, the rest of Europe is still, well, just too foreign.

Other Europeans aren't like us, though. We had a German couple (guests at a friend's wedding) staying with us at the weekend; her English was very good. His English was better than mine. They were highly intelligent, well informed about just about everything, and confounded national stereotyping by having a passably decent sense of humour. I don't speak any German, and all I know about the Germans is that they came second in World War Two and in the 1966 World Cup Final and that they've just elected as Chancellor a lady called Angela Merkel. (The "g" is hard, as in "angle".) I've been to Frankfurt once, but it was a business trip, meaning that rather than seeing any of the city I just saw the inside of an airport, a hotel and an office, interspersed with cab rides. All I remember is that Frankfurt airport is a dull place in which to be delayed for four hours and that the cable channel in the hotel had the most disturbingly gynaecological porn movie I've ever seen, which was about as sexually arousing as watching a cow give birth to a two-headed calf. (And if that's your favourite thing please don't tell me.)

Anyhow, back to the news. In case anyone's interested, the U.K. news items on the radio this morning included the following:

- The Government has announced plans to introduce a partial ban on cigarette smoking in public places but has chickened out of a total ban, despite its success in the Republic of Ireland, where tobacco sales have fallen by almost ten percent as a result. In England smoking will not be permitted in pubs which serve food, but will be allowed in premises which don't serve food and in private clubs, so in all likelihood tobacco consumption will not actually reduce but just move from one place to another. Parliamentary opponents of a complete ban have unexpectedly found themselves possessed of a fierce desire to protect the rights and freedoms of the individual. And an equally heart-felt and noble reluctance to place in jeopardy the £8 billion a year the Government collects in tax on cigarettes.

- Ex-Manchester United footballer George Best, famed for his phenomenal talent on the pitch (and enthusiam for alcohol, partying and long-legged blonde ladies off it) is in hospital and at death's door. George had a liver transplant a few years back but due to an oversight was fitted with only one new liver rather than the four or five connected in parallel which he needed to cope adequately with his prodigious consumption of hard liquor.

- Chris Moyles, breakfast-time radio presenter and self-styled "saviour of Radio One" now "attracts" 6.5 million listeners every day. Moyles is a pointless potato-faced twat who, unpleasant even by disc jockey standards, has managed to confound critics by being even more irritating than his Breakfast Show predecessor Sara Cox, herself responsible for more radios being flung through more windows than any other presenter since the birth of public broadcasting. Moyles is famed for being rude to and about just about everyone and everything, and manages to achieve this without once displaying a single spark of empathy, humour, or humanity. It is of course a simple matter to turn off the radio to avoid Moyles; at the time of writing, universal access to a switch which would subject him to a series of excruciatingly painful and ultimately lethal electric shocks remains, disappointingly, just a dream.

- Five hundred years after becoming extinct in the U.K., European beavers are once again living wild in Gloucestershire. Six Bavarian beavers have been released on a five-hundred acre site in the hope that they will breed and establish a self-sufficient colony. Apparently the animals were originally hunted to extinction for their fur and also, to quote the BBC, "for the pain-relieving properties of their anal-gland secretions." I don't really want to speculate on who first discovered these properties or indeed under what circumstances, but if you happen to be walking in the Gloucestershire countryside and see someone with a beaver's arse clamped to his face, give me the benefit of the doubt and assume I've got toothache.

For Tif

2005-10-12T17:43:00.000+01:00

I haven't got much time to write just now, but I knew Tif would be keen to see a photo of the band...

Smells

2005-09-24T12:35:00.000+01:00

Thy say the Queen thinks the whole world smells of paint because every time she goes anywhere they redecorate a couple of days before the visit.

I think that the Queen always smells of wee, firstly because she's an old lady and secondly because nobody would ever have the nerve to tell her.

Organ Donors

2005-09-22T14:22:00.000+01:00

There was an item on the radio last night concerning the shortage of organs available for transplant; apparently we're not keen on carrying donor cards ourselves and we're also a bit squeamish about the thought of our loved-ones' squidgy bits ending up inside some total stranger. There was a lot of discussion about how to change things, but no conclusion was reached. I have a suggestion.

In exchange for a signature on an organ donor card we give every seventeen-year-old boy in the country a motorbike and just enough tuition to make him over-confident.

"You need a liver? Come into the store-room with me, I'll pick you out a nice one."

Turre

2005-09-08T14:53:00.000+01:00

I hadn't been to Turre before, but Sooz had, and apparently it used to be a pleasant little town. Times change.

There's a lot of new building construction in Turre and as buildings going up look a lot like buildings coming down the first impression is that the town's been subjected to sporadic and inaccurate shellfire in the recent past. The air is hot and full of dust, and the skyline is ragged and unfinished and cross-hatched with cranes. Even half-finished, you can tell that the buildings aren't going to be pretty, although compared with most of the others along the Avenida de Almeria they don't have much to beat.

The supermarket shelves are stacked with HP sauce and Cup-a-Soup (although Sugar Puffs have been renamed "Globs", which is cheering for some reason I can't quite put my finger on.) Trolleys are being sulkily pushed round by grumpy fat blokes wearing Arsenal tops or by scrawny blondes with Croydon Facelifts*, big hoop earrings and those thong-height spinal tattoos which seem to be compulsory on stupid ugly loudmouthed women. One has a tattoo of a Smurf: classy. They communicate with each other by gobbling in a Sahf Lahndun dialect so untroubled by consonants that it could almost be Chinese, as in "I goh'ah noo tah'oo." They communicate with the checkout operators through a series of gestures and grunts. The Spaniards are poker-faced and surly, and who can blame them?

Some of these people are tourists, but most are expatriates who have sold up back home and have moved to Turre because property's cheap, it doesn't rain much and because there are so many other Brits you could spend the rest of your life without ever having to speak a single word of Spanish. Believe me, there is no other reason for wanting to live in Turre.

Our apartment is a couple of miles out of town and has a nice view of the Sierra Cabrera (on the far side of the inevitable golf course.) You can sit on the terrace with a beer and watch the moon come up over the hills, oblivious to the fact that Eastern European crooks have broken into an apartment at the other end of the block and are stripping it bare.

*For the benefit of my occasional Transatlantic visitors it is perhaps necessary to explain that a "Croydon Facelift" is the term used to describe the facial expression caused by wearing the hair in a dangerously tight ponytail, leading to the appearance of inexpertly performed cosmetic surgery and popularised by women in Croydon, a town in the South of England a visit to which is guaranteed to make you feel a surge of affection for your own town, no matter where you live. I would venture to suggest that a weekend in Croydon would even make Libertybob feel a measure of warmth towards Chicago.

Holiday Reading

2005-09-01T11:02:00.000+01:00

I probably shouldn't confess to this, but on the basis that I may save someone from wasting time, I have to confess that last week, in a spirit of curiosity, I tried to read The Da Vinci Code. I'd already heard that it was poorly written, and while I'm nowhere near well enough educated to aspire to being a literary snob I have trouble with stuff that's clumsily put together. I'd also heard that it was worth persevering because of the "interesting" revelations and all that bollocks, so I thought I'd give it a go.

I was uneasy from the start, because any novel which introduces the character of a masochistic red-eyed albino assassin monk in the first chapter is unlikely to turn out to be Great Literature. By the time I got to the discussion of the multitude of significant hidden references to female spirituality in the work of Walt Disney my main regret was that the copy I was reading belonged to someone else so I couldn't throw it in the pool.

So for what it's worth, my opinion is pretty much as follows: clumsy prose, laughable one-dimensional characters, superficial research, complete lack of any wit or humour, predictable "revelations". On the plus side, uhhh, no, there isn't a plus side. To sum up in the words of the late Bill Hicks, "Piece of shit. Walk away."

I walked away. I didn't finish it. I neither know nor care What Happens At The End, nor do I want anyone to tell me the identity of The Teacher. Someone commented on a radio book programme that Dan Brown has "succeeded in lowering the bar when it comes to writing a novel", and that means that Suzie Creamcheese will probably now be encouraged to finish her book and find a publisher, and quite honestly a world where that can happen isn't one I want to live in.

The Flight

2005-08-31T18:30:00.000+01:00

As you probably know, these days the police in London are allowed to shoot you in the head for just looking a bit shifty, so when they made the usual announcement about turning off mobile phones before the flight I didn't argue, particularly as it's not that long since most terrorists had accents like mine, and also because a few minutes before, the X-ray machine had spotted that my step-daughter was trying to smuggle a weapon onto the plane, in the form of a corkscrew with a little knife-blade attachment. Fortunately she's young, white, blonde and posh, so the authorities felt it wasn't necessary to kill any of us.

I don't really understand the concern over mobiles; airlines are always reassuring us about safety, to the extent that I firmly believe that the systems are so sophisticated that pilots are only really there to tell jokes and flirt with the cabin crew. Navigation? Plane steers itself. Forget all that following railway lines stuff, type in "Almeria" and you can do the Guardian crossword and then doze off for a couple of hours. Landings in poor visibility? No problem, computers do all that. I'll bet if I had a tenner for every pilot who's "landed" a plane with a stewardess sitting on his face I'd be a wealthy man. Or at least I'd have several tenners.

Get a phone call from your mother, however, and within seconds you'll be plummeting towards the Pyrenees wishing that know-all friend of yours hadn't explained to you that the "brace" position is only used because it's easier to identify bodies that have still got their heads on.

Uneventful flight, though. No drunks, no screaming babies, no praying nuns. Being Easyjet of course there was also no legroom, no in-flight movie and no free meal. On balance, though, I'm happy to pay five Euros for a slightly sweaty chicken baguette as long as they spend the profits on basic maintenance.

A Whole Month

2005-08-30T13:32:00.000+01:00

It's been over a month since I wrote anything on here, partly because I've been on holiday in Spain for two weeks and partly because to take two weeks holiday requires me to work like a five-year-old in a Nike factory for two weeks before that.

But Spain was an interesting mixture of good, bad and ok and I'll tell you about it within the next couple of days.

The Deal

2005-07-29T17:04:00.000+01:00

As an Northern Irishman myself I have always felt entitled to indulge in what I would describe as "forthright" comment on the behaviour of my lying, cruel, cowardly, secretive, self-pitying, ungrateful, whining, greedy, backward, whey-faced, morally bereft fellow-countrymen, but today, the day after the I.R.A.'s announcement that it has given up murdering people in cold blood, I can only wish them well.

I wonder what has led this bunch of roguish, rosy-cheeked, twinkly-eyed assassins to arrive at their momentous decision? I can't see that there's been any real progress in terms of Ulster politics, although as it's a place where "progress" translates as "not going backwards as fast as usual", I might be failing to pick up on some of the subtleties of the situation.

Many times over the last couple of years I've tried to work out Tony Blair's rationale for supporting Bush in Vietraq; Bush's agenda was crystal-clear - after the September 11th attacks Someone Had To Be Seen To Pay, and although nobody believed Saddam was involved he was unpopular, virtually unarmed and not quite white. I don't go for the Iraqi Oil conspiracy theory - it ascribes to the U.S. administration far more guile than I believe them capable of.

But what was in it for Blair? The decision to take the country to war made him deeply unpopular at home and in the rest of Europe. Surely he must have made A Deal?

So that's it, I reckon. "George, old chum, we'll back you up in Iraq if you stop funding the I.R.A. and if they step out of line you have to let us fuck 'em up. We might even have to give Dublin a bit of a seeing-to. A sort of slight carpet bombing kind of thingy. How's that sound? All right with you, that's great. And can you make sure they know we've made this deal? That'd be lovely. Thanks, mate."

Could be completely wrong, of course. Anyway, apparently the lads are going to "de-commission" their weapons (whatever that means) although apparently they won't allow the process to be filmed or photographed because that would be "humilating", and of course it would be.

Their spokesman declined to comment on whether it would be more or less humiliating than having to hire someone to wipe your arse for you because your hands have been blown off by an I.R.A. bomb.

July 27th 2005

2005-07-27T13:12:00.000+01:00

If my Dad hadn't had a dodgy ticker which dropped him in his tracks for good way back in 1986, he'd have been ninety years old today, probably still drinking too much whisky and wandering about singing "Minnie The Moocher". I'm absolutely sure that I was the only five-year-old in the village of Saintfield, County Down, Northern Ireland who'd heard of Cab Calloway, and much good it did me.

My Dad was an intelligent, kind and strikingly ugly man, who looked a lot like Quentin Blake's drawings of Roald Dahl's Big Friendly Giant, although he wasn't thirty feet tall, which was fortunate as it would have made his career as a teacher pretty much impossible. Before going into teaching he had served in the Middle East and Africa in the Pioneer Corps, which left him with admiration for the African tribes of Basutoland, a profound dislike of Egyptians and the ability to swear in Arabic, which came in handy when stray dogs got into the garden and crapped in the flowerbeds.

I'd only just grown out of thinking my Dad was a buffoon when he went and died, and I have a lot of regret that I know so little about his life as a child and as a young man. He was a teenager during the Depression of the thirties and the family moved from the North of England to London to try to find work. On the outbreak of war he joined the Army, reaching the rank of Captain and meeting Sergeant Sarah McMillan of the ATS, who ended up as my mother, was eighty-five years old last month, and is also, I know, thinking about him today.

Happy Birthday, Dad. We miss you.

Bent u zekere Greta bent geen travestiet?

2005-07-06T13:49:00.000+01:00

You know I wouldn't lie to you, so I know you'll believe me when I tell you that I spent last weekend at the U.K.'s First International Boogie-Woogie Piano Festival. As it's a bit of a minority interest here, musicians and audience could be crammed into the village hall at Fontnell Magna, Dorset, later spilling over into the local pub, where much Woogie-ing and consumption of foaming ale continued into the early hours.

I've never had much time for the piano, believing that musical instruments should be things that you can pick up and cuddle; playing the piano has always seemed to me too much like sitting at a machine and pushing buttons. (The fact that it's a lot harder to play than the bass guitar might also have something to do with my inability to get to grips with it.) Were it not for the fact that my friend Matthew is a keyboard player and was keen to go to check out the opposition I'd probably have given the festival a miss.

Anyway, I can tell you that those Boogie-Woogie chaps are fiercely competitive and one of them was pretty damned funny for a German. They also show off almost as much as rock musicians, although playing the piano with your teeth or behind your head is not really an option. You could set it on fire, of course, but you'd need a lot of lighter-fluid to get a really satisfying blaze going.

Interestingly, apart from one Brit most of the performers were from the European mainland; two pianists from the Netherlands, one from Germany ("Now I vill tell you ze joke about ze muzzer of my vife, yes?"), and one from (I think) Belgium, plus a Dutch vocalist called Greta, who was so tall, so blonde, so pretty, with such big hair and such a sparkly frock that I assumed she was a transvestite until I got up close and took a good look at the hands and the adam's-apple. I'm fairly sure she was a girl.

After a couple of hours of Boogie-Woogie I had to suppress a desire to leap onto the stage and slam the piano lid down on the wrists of the musician, but by downing many pints of muscle relaxant and breathing deeply I was able to recover my sang-froid.

A little of that stuff goes a hell of a long way.

Tailgating

2005-06-28T12:58:00.000+01:00

There were traffic delays last night on the way home, caused by three out of four lanes being blocked by a multiple pile-up involving a truck and at least five cars. The damage didn't look that bad; the cars appeared to have been shortened rather than wrecked, so I had the luxury of being able to get angry without having to feel really sorry for anyone.

As some of you already know, tailgating is one of my pet hates. It's worse than purely aggressive driving, somehow, although I'm not all that keen on that kind of stuff either. It's the sheer bloody stupidity of it that gets to me. Sometimes I watch cars in the next lane travelling twenty feet apart at ninety and my scrotum takes on the texture of corduroy.

How can they drive so close, so fast, and yet be so relaxed? What goes through their heads, I wonder? (Apart from the tailgate of the car in front, potentially.) I need Libertybob's Mindiacs to get behind the prominent eyebrow-ridges of those pointed little skulls and let me know how they think, but in the meantime I can only guess:

(1) "I'm driving a BMW M3, and not only have I been blessed with great teeth and fairly large genitalia, I also have reflexes on a par with a cross between a striking cobra and Ralph Schumacher. And my car has great brakes. And if I drop back any further then another car will cut in front and I'll have to drop back even more which means that I'll actually be going backwards. Probably.

(2) "I'm driving a Volvo, which as everyone knows is not constructed out of Coke cans flattened out like ordinary cars, but rather from the stuff they use to make flight recorders in aeroplanes, and therefore capable of withstanding an impact equivalent to hitting the ground at six hundred miles an hour, so rear-ending a Fiat Uno at eighty is no big deal. For me, at least."

(3) "I'm driving a Range Rover, which means that I'm an imbecilic thirty-year-old blonde with nice tits and the ability to suck the chrome off a trailer-hitch, which is why my husband has rewarded me with this huge vehicle. As it's twice as high and three times as heavy as anything I'm likely to hit I'll probably be safe. So far this year I've already been involved in four serious accidents all of which were my fault, but due to my husband's immense wealth I'm immune to prosecution."

Anyway, these people are obviously far too stupid to work out that they're driving dangerously without help. Obviously if I had my way then ideally I'd like to have them killed, because let's face it, nobody's going to miss them. However, I'm all too aware that, due to my childhood being spent in Belfast, many of my views are seen as inhumane, so I'd compromise and settle for a forward-facing speed-sensitive distance sensor which makes an irritating noise when you're driving too close for the speed you're doing. (Some people might argue that many cars are already equipped with such a device, but not everyone has a wife or girlfriend.)

Oh, hi Soozie. Ow.

Wah-ooo! Squirrels Of Surrey (2)

2005-06-13T10:59:00.000+01:00

We have to give some thought to both positioning and timing. Lily The West Highland Terrier is a dog whose grip on reality is fragile at the best of times, as she demonstrates each time she tries to bite an aeroplane on its way into Gatwick, believing it to be Small, Slow and Near rather than Big, Fast and Far Away. If she's confronted with a helpless squirrel in a wire cage she'll have some sort of excitement-induced seizure, particularly if Soozie and I are both at work and unable to intervene. We decide that if we position the trap on the (flat) garage roof then Lily may not notice.

The other thing is that I don't like the thought of the squirrel being trapped in the cage from eight-thirty in the morning until six-thirty in the evening while we're away from the house, even if the little bastard almost killed my wife, so we agree that we won't set the trap until Monday morning, because I'm working at home then so I'll be able to give the captive rodent my immediate attention. (Note to self: check if squirrels are rodents. They're definitely not fish, insects, birds or lizards. And not marsupials either. After that it gets trickier.)

Seven a.m. on Monday morning I bait the trap with peanut butter and pistachio nuts and put it on the garage roof. I go up to my office and start working. After about half an hour Soozie comes in. "We've got one," she says. "and he's not happy."

I don't know what I expected, really. I suppose I thought that the animal would be sitting quietly looking sulky and waiting to be allowed a phone call to its lawyer or something, but what I see when I go down and look at the cage is this frantic ball of fury hurling itself against the wire mesh, and attacking it with its teeth. It's already covered with blood and getting more hysterical by the minute. I decide I have to let it go straight away, but I'm determined to get at least some value for the £15.99 I paid for the trap, so I put on a pair of gardening gloves in case the squirrel tries to maul me, and put the cage in the car.

I drive to Redhill Common and park. Parents and young children are walking past the car on their way to St. John's school, and I have to stand in front of the car boot so that they don't see that I have a blood-soaked animal in a trap. The sight of a burly bald bearded man with a guilty expression loitering near a school causes the parents to look at me with deep suspicion. When they've gone I hurriedly grab the trap and walk into to the edge of the woods, open the door and watch the squirrel streak off into the trees without a backward glance.

I get back to the house. Soozie's just about to leave for work. She looks at the empty trap which still has blood and pieces of squirrel-lip all over the wire. She looks at me. We can't use the trap again, can we?" she says. "No, Soozie," I reply, "we can't."

Wah-ooo! Squirrels Of Surrey.

2005-06-08T17:15:00.000+01:00

We've been having trouble with squirrels recently. Actually it's Soozie who's having the problem, as she's the real gardener in the relationship. I only like the kind of gardening that consists entirely of reclining on a sun-lounger with a beer, while Soozie embraces what I have come to call Full Contact Gardening, which involves a lot of heaving heavy sacks about, digging and nurturing things. She loves the little plants she raises and gets upset if they fail to flourish.

Anyway, due to some mysterious shift in the balance of nature in the Redhill area, this year we have lots more squirrels than usual and they have become emboldened to the point of insolence. At some point I fear they may begin to feast on human flesh, but so far the little bastards have merely developed a taste for running along our fence and flinging themselves onto the hanging baskets, where they wreak havoc.

(Interesting word, "wreak". It only gets used together with the word "havoc", and "havoc" only gets used with "wreak". You don't say "where they do havoc." The only other time we use "wreak" is in its past tense, as in "wrought-iron". But I digress.)

Back to the squirrels. I don't know why they like the baskets, but the end result is that they dig up all Soozie's baby petunias, exposing their little infant roots and killing them. In principle Soozie's kind to animals, but in practice if those squirrels were a fraction slower there'd be a pile of furry carcasses from one end of the garden to the other. We can't get them. Nobody I know owns a gun, and actually Im not sure I could do it - a clean kill would be all right, I suppose, but the thought of winging one and having to listen to its whimpering death-throes doesn't do a lot for me. In any case I have a strong Belfast accent and people who sound like me have ended up in a police cell with a black bag over their heads for a lot less than waving a shotgun about.

One morning a couple of weeks ago I was at work and Soozie phoned. "They've done it again." she squealed piteously. "And I had an idea and I thought that if I put chilli powder round the baskets it would make the squirrels sneeze and put them off so I sprinkled the powder but I was so upset about my dead petunias that I was crying and I rubbed my eyes and I had chilli powder on my hands and it went in my eyes and it really hurt and my eyes were watering on top of the tears and I had to drive to work and I couldn't see properly and I could have been killed." She paused to take a breath. "I COULD HAVE DIED BECAUSE OF A FUCKING SQUIRREL!"

So at the weekend we buy a "humane" squirrel trap. It's a wire mesh box with a spring-loaded door connected to a little plate inside where you put the bait, the idea being that the squirrel's weight trips the spring and the door shuts. Then you take the trapped squirrel for a long car ride and release it indignant but unharmed. This assumes that the average squirrel has a poor homing instinct and therefore will be unable to hitchhike back to your garden in a couple of days. Anyway, who'd stop their car for a squirrel? Nobody, that's who, not even if it was heavily pregnant.

to be continued...

Old Bass Players Never Die. Right?

2005-06-07T18:34:00.000+01:00

After many long weeks I have a little spare time to write something. I feel under a little pressure to make it good, not having written anything on here for so long, but I'm not going to let it worry me too much.

It's about 6:40pm, and I'm in the office. I'm still here because I'm going to meet up with a friend for a beer at 8:00pm and I live too far from the office for it to be sensible to go home first. I could fill the intervening time with corporate warrior stuff, but bollocks to that, frankly.

I'm meeting Joe (the friend) at The Red Lion. Joe's an interesting person. He's a great guitar player. He plays left-handed, and for a reason. Joe used to play right-handed. Did everything right-handed I suppose, although I did't know him then. Then, when he was in his early twenties, Joe suffered a severe brain hemorrhage, severe enough to significantly affect the motor function on the left side of his body. He recovered, but the dexterity of his left hand was permanently impaired, and he could no longer play the guitar. Rather than decide to give up playing, Joe taught himself to play left-handed, which I think is interesting because it proves that the skill is not in your fingers, but in your head.

There's a band playing at The Red Lion tonight, the Grapevine Blues Band. A few years back, when I was between bands and they were looking for a bass player, Grapevine were quite keen for me to join them. It didn't get as far as the audition stage, so they might not have hired me anyway, but I told them I wasn't interested. The reason was that Grapevine are quite a successful outfit. They all have day-jobs, but they quite often do mini-tours, when they head off to Italy or Holland for a few days, playing in blues clubs.

The realisation that after years of wanting to do that kind of stuff I had reached a stage in my life where I found the very idea of it exhausting made me profoundly depressed, but then, as some of you know, I am of a melancholy disposition.

Hey ho.

Soon

2005-05-23T09:12:00.000+01:00

Very soon. I'll write something very soon...

Types

2005-04-21T13:31:00.000+01:00

The company I work for has two offices I visit from time to time. One is full of sales people, the other full of design engineers. They are, unsurprisingly, very different types of people, and I've summarised them as follows.

Design people:
- Sandals
- Facial hair
- Asperger's Syndrome
- Dungeons & Dragons

Sales people:
- Aftershave
- Cufflinks
- Overconfidence
- Snowboarding holidays

Feel free to add to this list should you wish.

Soon...

2005-04-21T13:27:00.000+01:00

Not dead, only sleeping.

Dormant, in fact. And that's started a whole train of thought as to whether a dormant is like a dormouse, but an ant.

Someone help me.

Things That Make Me Realise I Need To Get Out More

2005-03-14T10:51:00.000Z

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

2005-03-10T17:30:00.000Z

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.

Sorry

2005-02-03T08:41:00.000Z

The last time I apologised on here I got a comment from someone (whose name escapes me, thankfully) berating me for not apologising for being European and also for not being grateful enough to the U.S. for protecting my:

life
wife
sexual orientation
arse (see above)
children (real and step-)
freedom to vote in democratic elections and worship at the church of my choice
currency
house
job
car
domestic animals
precious bodily fluids

So I apologise again with more than a little trepidation.

It's been weeks since I wrote anything on here, partly because I usually write most of my stuff at work, and considering that my job's about as meaningful and rewarding as nailing jelly to a plank, it's been strangely busy. The company I work for is going through a tough time, so the perceived wisdom is to run about squealing and doing lots of stuff. Any stuff. (To borrow the Titanic analogy, "Well, we tried rearranging the deckchairs but we're still sinking. Hey, let's paint the funnels a different colour, see if that helps.")

Also, most of my spare time has been spent trying to help my older son with his career in music, as he finishes at university this year and has belatedly realised that in June he'll be on the streets clutching a second-class degree in philosophy and staring a day-job in the face, so I'm doing a lot of mailing, CD-burning (copying, not fundamentalist protesting), going to gigs and so on.

Anyway, that's why the Zone's been quiet lately. Sorry.

Decisions, decisions...

2005-01-13T23:58:00.000Z

There's so much good stuff in the news at the moment it's hard to know where to start.

We've got Disgusting Michael Howard, leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, shamelessly sucking up to crime-obsessed Daily Mail readers and campaigning for a change in the law so that it will be legal for righteous homeowners to overpower burglars and feed them into their blenders, or something.

We've got Prince Harry, the charmless half-witted younger son of Chuck and Dopey Di, dressing as a Nazi at a fancy-dress party and being pilloried in the press for his "insensitivity". (Good job his Bin Laden outfit was in the wash.)

We've got Tony Blair and his Chancellor Gordon Brown engaged in a weird little hissy whispering campaign against each other, which is, frankly, no way to win an election, even if your opponent is the aforementioned and thankfully unelectable Disgusting Michael Howard.

And we've had real weather for the last couple of days, with flooding and winds of up to 120 miles per hour, which makes for great television, especially as it's happening in places like Northern Ireland and Scotland which we Home Counties types don't really care about.

And it was with great satisfaction that I listened to the report about the luxury cruise liner Aurora which developed engine trouble a few miles out of Southampton, which meant that a bunch of rich people have spent forty thousand quid apiece to sit staring at the Isle of Wight for a week.

Yay!

I shall expand on some or all of these in due course...

Goosebumps

2005-01-10T17:14:00.000Z

I don't know what to make of this, but it's all true...

If I wake up during the night and have to go downstairs to get a drink of water, the instant my foot hits the third stair from the bottom, what hair I have on the back of my neck stands up, and my skin crawls. It doesn't get any worse, and I don't see or hear anything spooky-wooky-wooky, but it happens every time, and now if I wake during the night I usually decide to stay thirsty. (Yes, I know I could bring a glass of water up with me when I go to bed, but that's not the point, and you know it.)

And there's more: I was working at my computer a couple of weeks ago. It was about five pm, so it was dark outside. I had headphones on, so I was a little isolated from the world, as it were, but out of the corner of my eye I saw my step-daughter Cassie come into the office. What was strange, though, was that she ducked down under the desk behind me (there are two desks in my home office.) I turned around, thinking that she was fooling around, and (you've probably guessed this one already) there was nobody there.

Now here's the thing. I DON'T BELIEVE IN THIS STUFF! AND I WANT TO BE ABLE TO GET TO MY KITCHEN AT NIGHT WITHOUT FEELING LIKE A SCARED FOUR-YEAR-OLD!

Maybe it's acid flashbacks from the 70s. And I thought I'd got away with it.

2005-01-06T12:48:00.000Z

David's medication had successfully reduced his cholestrol levels; however there were one or two side-effects the drug company had neglected to list on the box.

2004-12-24T12:54:00.000Z

A very Merry Christmas from David and and his shy, retiring new bride.

Season's Beatings

2004-12-23T17:06:00.000Z

This isn't at all seasonal, but at work this morning somebody with a strange accent in the next pod used the word "summarised" and I heard it as "Samuraised." It took me back to my martial arts days...

I took up Shotokan karate in my early thirties because somebody told me it was a good way of keeping fit and I was bored with just running and going to the gym. At the time I was working out at least three times a week and running a lot (maybe twenty miles a week) so I thought I was in pretty good shape, but after my first session of karate training I had blisters on my feet and was so tired I went outside and threw up.

I persevered, though, and over the next while my feet hardened up, my stamina and coordination improved, and at one point I was 180lbs of solid muscle, as opposed to "before" (150lbs of ribs and teeth), and "now" (200lbs of lard). I reached 4th kyu - to put it in perspective the first grade (where you swap the white belt that came with the pyjamas for a red one) is 9th kyu, and if I'd continued, my next grade, 3rd kyu, would have been brown belt. Shotokan is a traditional style of karate, which means there's a lot of emphasis on set-piece attack and defence stuff and kata. It's not a full-contact discipline, but it's tough enough, and over the years I managed to pick up plenty of bruises, a few cuts, a broken toe and cracked ribs, and a back problem when someone unexpectedly kicked me so hard it lifted me off my feet and landed me heavily on my arse. You should have seen the other guy. He was laughing like a drain, as was every other rotten bastard in the dojo. Overall, as a way of getting physically fit I think it was second to none - in terms of self-defence the story's a little different. Of course if nothing else you get to learn some Japanese, which is useful in case you ever get the crap beaten out of you while you're on holiday in Tokyo, because you'll be able to tell the police what they did to you. "Well, officer, I think it was probably a kizama-zuki that broke my nose, and it was definitely a mawashi-geri that knocked me out."

Some of my conclusions on the subject of self-defence and street violence are as follows:

- You can get used to being hit. People laugh when I tell them this, but I think it's the most important thing I learnt. The first time someone hits you hard it shocks you, but when it happens to you a couple of times a week, although it still hurts, you don't just hop about with your hand over your eye going "Ow!", you decide to check it out later and start thinking about how you stop it happening again (which usually involves hitting your opponent as hard as possible.) In a real fight situation it's quite likely that you'll be taken by surprise and have to take a punch, but if you can survive the first one you have a chance to stop the second. Of course if there are knives, guns or blunt objects involved it's a different story; on balance I think it's undesirable that you try to get used to being stabbed, shot or beaten with a baseball bat, and if you ever get to actually like it, then you're just weird. Each to his own, of course.

- "The bigger they are the harder they fall."? No, the bigger they are the harder they hit. They also have long legs which they can use to kick you up in the air from a distance (see paragraph three). My strategy for dealing with big opponents in the dojo was to get in close so their longer reach wasn't such an advantage (point one, "getting used to being hit" tended to come into play quite a lot when using this approach, but I was never able to think of anything else.) In a street situation the best strategies are probably running away and outnumbering, if practical. Faking a heart attack may well prove effective, but you'll probably get your wallet stolen while you're concentrating on being still and blue.

- If there's more than one attacker you're probably a goner, unless you're carrying a sidearm. Two-to-one is bad. Three-to-one means you're definitely going to get a beating. Trying to be their friend, giving them all your money and starting to cry are all worth trying if the old standby of running away isn't practical. You could also offer one or more blowjobs; not an attractive proposition if you're a straight male, I'll grant you, but I say if it saves you from a pounding then get on your knees, boy. Get some mouthwash, gargle and get over it. It'll probably make you appreciate your girlfriend all the more, although she may not want to kiss you for a day or two. It might be as well not to tell her about it. If they're not impressed with your pretty mouth and you have to fight, rather than trying anything complcated try and get hold of a brittle part of one of your attackers and break it. Try to stay on your feet; if you end up on the ground curled up in a ball they may well keep on kicking until they get bored, and that could be a long time in Redhill, where people aren't that bright and there isn't much else to do after the pubs have shut.

- Unless you're a Mean Motherfucker you'll always be at a HUGE disadvantage when it comes to street violence. Always always. They want to hurt you and you don't really want to hurt them back. There's absolutely nothing you can do about this except be aware of it as a fact. Stay away from public places where you know people like to hurt other people. Seems quite simple, really. If you have to go to those places and you have a sports bag stencilled with the words "Seishinkai Karate - Striking Cobra Dojo", leave it in the car - the fastest gun syndrome didn't die with Doc Holliday. If you think you're likely to get drunk and go up to complete strangers and challenge them to hit you in the stomach as hard as they can, then I don't want to go drinking with you. I've seen it and it can only end one way.

- And finally, although I'm prepared to consider alternatives, in my opinion there is no doubt that the scariest words in the English language, especially delivered in a quiet voice, are "Are you calling me a liar, pal?"

Merry Christmas...

2004-12-23T09:25:00.000Z

I've just realised that it's nearly a month since I posted anything on here (and that was a short and slightly depressing poem). I've been busy at work and my free time has been taken up with things which are time-consuming but not necessarily interesting to write about, and I'm reluctant to post stuff about not having anything to say. Although I seem to be doing it now. Ahem.

Disappointingly my Jehovah's Witnesses haven't been round to try to get me to cancel Christmas, disappointing because I enjoy my annual doorstep opportunity to pretend to be wildly enthusiastic about Paganism.

There's a fair amount of stupidity in the news at the moment; I hope to write about some of it over the holidays, although I fully intend to be too drunk to write for at least part of the time. (I feel that as it's a religious festival, offering up my liver to The Lord is probably the least I can do.)

Anyway, thanks to all of you who have called in and left comments, encouraging or otherwise, especially Libertybob, who has been a consistent supporter of my ranting since I started this back in March this year. Check his site out - sanity, humour and quite often dreadful poetry.

Merry Christmas.

Love (in a manly way of course)

David

The Diver

2004-11-29T15:08:00.000Z

Forward, backward, reverse,
That's the way.
Always inward, sometimes twisting,
Seldom straight or free.

I will raise my arms and soar
Above their pale excited faces.
Tuck, pike, and wonder
If I can enter the concrete
Without a splash.

Definition of the Word "Rant"...

2004-11-16T13:51:00.000Z

I haven't had time to do anything on here for a while, but this is just to make sure you link through to this site. Makes my occasional tirade look laid-back...

Thank The Lord

2004-11-04T15:55:00.000Z

I'm not usually an overtly religious man, but I said my prayers last night. I got down on my knees to give thanks to Almighty God that the American people had listened to His Holy Word and re-elected His Champion, George W. Bush.

President Bush (how reassuring that phrase sounds to all right-thinking people) now has another four years in which to make not only America, but ultimately the entire planet, safe from terrorists. Following his triumphant victory in Iraq and the liberation of its people, the President, with the backing of not only the American People, but also the Almighty Himself, can now don his Shining Breastplate of Righteousness, mount his Charger of Truth, and ride out to take the Holy Word of the American Way of Life to the other benighted lands which are secretly crying out for Enlightenment.

Many of these people have lived under such oppression for so long that they believe themselves to be content, absurd though it may seem to us. It's America's Sacred Duty to help them, using carpet bombing if necessary. After Iraq will come Iran. Then, on the basis that it starts with the same letters and has some terrorists in it, Ireland, although there may be pressure on the government to just reinstate the old U.S. policy of getting rid of some kinds of terrorist by giving them money.

The War on Terror at home will not be so easily won. Terrorists are everywhere, and can take on many forms. We all know that homosexuals are just as much terrorists as brown people with big bombs. In fact they're worse, for they threaten not only our way of life but also our bottoms. Who knows when one of these disgusting sodomites will leap out from the shadows, rip off our trousers and inflict unspeakable indignities on our cat-flaps? That's something I think about all the time, as I'm sure you all do.

As the Good Lord Himself might well have said had I been writing His material, "Thou shalt use thy bottom only for doing poos. And also thy willy only for wees. Unless thou art joined in matrimony. And even then it's a bit of a gray area. To be honest I haven't really thought the sex thing through. Apart from homos; they definitely need smiting."

That's the kind of thing God would say, if I did his stuff.

I'd like to close with a hymn by Randy Newman. It just sums up everything that's right with American foreign policy.

Political Science by Randy Newman

No one likes us-I don't know why
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try
But all around, even our old friends put us down
Let's drop the big one and see what happens

We give them money-but are they grateful?
No, they're spiteful and they're hateful
They don't respect us-so let's surprise them
We'll drop the big one and pulverize them

Asia's crowded and Europe's too old
Africa is far too hot
And Canada's too cold
And South America stole our name
Let's drop the big one
There'll be no one left to blame us

We'll save Australia
Don't wanna hurt no kangaroo
We'll build an All American amusement park there
They got surfin', too

Boom goes London and boom Paree
More room for you and more room for me
And every city the whole world round
Will just be another American town
Oh, how peaceful it will be
We'll set everybody free
You'll wear a Japanese kimono
And there'll be Italian shoes for me

They all hate us anyhow
So let's drop the big one now
Let's drop the big one now

God bless you all.

God bless America.

Anxious

2004-11-01T13:40:00.000Z

I was driving through Reigate on Saturday and there was a road sign which read "Caution. Change in priorities ahead!".

Now I'm anxious.

Election Time!

2004-10-28T13:46:00.000+01:00

I got into a bit of rant over at Susie's and I enjoyed it so much I thought I'd post it here...

As an outsider what surprises me about the U.S. media (and also the electorate) is that they appear to have some measure of respect for the candidates, whereas here in the U.K. we recognise that politicians, particularly those seeking the highest office, are in fact vermin who should be hunted down, captured, tortured and then killed. If they have reproduced then their entire families should be sterilised. (Don't try and tell me that Michael Howard can't be accurately defined as a sexually transmitted disease)

Anyway, it may seem ludicrous that the only candidates for the job of Most Powerful Man in the World are a half-witted monkey and an empty suit, and laughable that the people entrusted with choosing between them are Americans, for fuck's sake, but that's, as they say, life.

Hey ho.

Horribly Wrong

2004-10-14T14:31:00.000+01:00

My graphic designer (who also happens to be my Final Wife) says that the light-on dark template I'm using is difficult to read and that I should change it to something a bit more sensible. As I am monumentally stupid when it comes to this stuff there may be a terrible accident. If it all goes horribly wrong, please bear with me.

I fear from experience that even if it goes right I'll lose the any comments posted on here, which is a shame.

Maybe I'll leave things the way they are.

The Power Of The Bugbear

2004-10-13T11:53:00.000+01:00

Guess what, chaps! A couple of days after my unkind words about him, Norman Wisdom has announced that he's retiring from showbiz. Okay, he's ninety years old, so he might have been considering it anyway, but you have to admit it looks like I managed to push him over the edge.

Apparently Norman was a big star in Albania, where he was known as "Pitkin". Films like "Pitkin Goes To The Workers' Collective Summer Picnic" were immensely popular under the regime of King Zog, where the only other permitted form of recreation was the fiercely competitive "Growing Root Vegetables Into Slightly Amusing Shapes" League.

According to the news reports Norman was famous for his catchphrase "Mr. Grimsdale.", which, let's be honest, is not that clever a catchphrase. I'm not a comedy writer, but I'd put money on being able to come up with something a little more witty and urbane than that.

Anyway, now that I've seen what the power of the Bugbear can accomplish I'm going off to concentrate on visiting a plague of pubic hornets on Giles Brandreth. I realise you Americans don't know who Giles Brandreth is, but trust me on this one, if you knew him you'd thank me.

Malnourished Goat-Faced Dikes #1

2004-10-07T22:06:00.000+01:00

I'm not proud of this. In fact, frankly, there's a good deal of shame attached to it all. In hope of mitigation I have to put it to you that I was in Cornwall on holiday and it was raining quite a lot, but I did it. I watched a makeover programme on TV. I take a small degree of solace from the fact that I've never seen this particular programme before and would rather have my worst enemy take charge of tightening a razor-wire tourniquet round my scrotum than ever watch it again.

In this case it was hosted by a pair of visually interchangeable malnourished goat-faced dikes (hereinafter referred to as "GFD1" and "GFD2" because my lawyer advised me not to use their real names.) Believe me, no matter how civilised and even-tempered you believe yourself to be, if you had to spend more than half an hour in their company there would be no option but to pour a pint of beer over their expensively coiffured but noisily vacant heads.

The concept is that the GFDs, apparently famous for being Real Stylin' Bitches or something, take two Real Girls and do fashion stuff to them, which gives them greater confidence, total fulfilment, etc, etc. To start with of course there are more than two Real Girls, because on this kind of show the humilation can't start early enough and so to begin with the cannon fodder count is around ten. There are little cameos of all the RGs, giving them an opportunity to tell the camera why they should be chosen, and we pan back to the GFDs while they invent spurious reasons for their final selection (spurious becuse the only purpose of the selection process is to arrive at the RGs who are most likely to allow themselves to be humilated on national television without either slashing their wrists or punching one or other of the GFDs in the mouth.)

The entire group then stands in a room while the GFDs toy with them clumsily for a few minutes until the tension builds. The decision is announced, the Rejected Real Girls skulk off into the night to abuse their stunted children and get fat while the Chosen Real Girls do that winning thing which involves temporarily adopting the motor functions of a cerebral palsy victim at a Stevie Wonder gig while squealing "OhmyGod. OhmyGod. Oh. My. God. OhmyGod." The Almighty is unmoved by their supplication - after thirty seconds or so they're both still ugly. Hey ho.

The next phase is to visit the homes of the Chosen Real Girls, whose names escape me, thankfully, but Karen and Sharon will do. The GFDs examine the contents of the Girls' wardrobes, retching quietly as they use laundry tongs to drop the offending garments onto a blazing bonfire. Karen's stuff is boring but inoffensive, while Sharon's looks like it was chosen by her guide dog.

Then we meet the husbands. Karen's spouse is a colourless corporate git who is disappointed at what he perceives to be her lack of confidence at company picnics, or something like that. Now I don't even know the woman, but it's blindingly obvious to me that the poor hapless bitch's real problem at these events is the palpable wave of pity she feels coming off all the other wives when they realise that her husband is indeed the plum-faced robotic little twat standing beside her.

At first I think Sharon's husband is doing an impression of Norman Wisdom in one of those inexplicably revered but entirely fucking awful 1950s Ealing comedies where he has a speech problem, wears his cap sideways and gets hit on the head with a large shovel every five minutes. (For the benefit of young people or American visitors who don't know who Norman Wisdom is, think Jim Carrey at his most annoying and double it. Now stick a needle in your eye. There, you've got it.) Sharon's old man is for real, though - there's no mention of what he does for a living. I give it some thought, but apart from organ donor I just can't visualise a role for him.

It's quite apparent that a fashion makeover is completely futile. Call me sentimental if you like, but I begin to think that what would improve these girls' lives beyond recognition would be to take their husbands outside and put a bullet in the back of each pointed little head.

And we're still only halfway through the show! Boy am I having fun!

Do! Do! Do The Selfish Monkey!

2004-09-23T13:21:00.000+01:00

It must be catching; Ed (The Selfish Monkey)packed in the blogthing a couple of months back.

I'm going to Cornwall on holiday for a week with no internet access and so won't be posting anything, nor will I be able to read and comment on anyone else's stuff, and anyway, to tell you the truth, I'm a little tired with the whole blogbusiness at the moment. There seem to be too many other things to worry about, and not nearly enough things to poke fun at, so I think I'm going to put what energy I have into other stuff, like getting fit and playing bass.

So...thanks to you all for dropping by over the months and giving support, advice and the benefit of your skewed sense(s) of humour. I'll still read your stuff and comment from time to time, but for the time being at least, the Bear's hanging up his, errrm, paws.

Batman and Robin - a response

2004-09-15T13:17:00.000+01:00

Of all the U.K. news stories that make it through the U.S.A.'s "Not America Or Eye-Rack, So We Don't Care" filter, the one that Libertybob's asked me to comment on is "Batman and Robin Meet The Queen." I'm not an expert on either the disgusting Windsor family or the forces that drive people to dress up as super-heroes, but I'm prepared to give it a go, particularly as Bob is the only person who visits this site (apart from Susie Creamcheese, who disappointingly turns out to be a big Welsh bloke rather than the moist, pouting nymphet I had in mind).

Anyway, there are a number of different points raised by this news story, and I'll give it my best shot:

Dressing as superheroes; hmmm, tricky one. "I'm an estranged father being treated like shit and it's not fair because fathers are really uhhh, heroes. And super." Okay, got it. But the bloke who did Spiderman had more cred. Marvel beats DC any time.

I you're a protestor, dressing up in any kind of funny costume not only attracts attention from the media but is supposed to make it less likely that you'll be shot dead by the security forces. In this country that strategy still works pretty well. As a rule, if you're found in the grounds of Buckingham Place wearing a balaclava helmet, combats with side-arm-sized bulges and a sack marked "anthrax" there's a strong probability that even the Metropolitan Police will decide to take you out, although even then you're not necessarily a goner unless they can see that you're black.

As terrorists are quite smart these days it's only a matter of time before they're all dressing like Biffo the Bear and running round doing terrorist stuff unchallenged, so my own view is that just to be on the safe side anyone dressed in any kind of "humorous" costume should be shot dead, unless they can prove they're on their way to a fancy-dress party. Actually, due to the difficulty in telling the difference between a genuine fancy-dress party and a cell of merciless terrorist assassins we should probably target the partygoers as well. People involved in street theatre are most likely innocent of serious crime but let's face it, they need to be wiped out more than anybody.

I'd also like to draw the attention of the authorities to the people who run the fancy-dress shop in Merstham. They didn't laugh at my joke about the trucks that deliver helium canisters floating away.

Frances, Gaston, Hermine, Ivan...

2004-09-10T18:04:00.000+01:00

The East coast of America, and Florida in particular, seems to get a lot of hurricanes. (We hear more about the storms that hit Florida than all the others partly because they're of greater severity than the others and partly because Florida is populated entirely by tiny dried-up husks of old people who weigh so little that they often get sucked up into the slipstreams of trucks and end up miles from home, so hundred-mile-an-hour winds are more of a problem for them than for the rest of us.)

It doesn't happen in England, or at least, not often. We certainly don't have to give them names to tell one from the other. When we talk about "The Hurricane", we mean the one we had back in 1987, which peaked at a relatively puny 94 miles per hour. At the time I was living in a part of rural Cambridgeshire where there were three houses, five trees and nothing else from one horizon to the other except fields full of brussel sprouts, so the storm damage was limited. (They can withstand a lot of damage, can sprouts, which is good, because it means that after World War Three the cockroaches will still have something to eat.) Anyway, back to hurricanes; if we're up to "Ivan" already that means there have been nine hurricanes this year already, and it's only September.

Bearing that in mind, what I don't understand is this: why do Floridians continue to build ordinary houses? There would seem to be only two sensible approaches:

1 - Dig a large hole. Turn it into a spacious and well-equipped cellar. Live in it. If you feel the need to live above ground during the summer months, make sure that the dwelling you construct is made out of the cheapest, flimsiest materials available, then when it blows away while you're hiding in the cellar, not only won't you care, but if it lands on somebody it won't squash them. Part of the roof of the cellar (or floor of the house, depending on whether you're up or down) would of course be a sort of electric trapdoor thing to allow you to quickly move televisions, stereo systems and stuff up and down as required.

2 - Rather than build a normal house, build a windowless (CCTV cameras could take the place of windows) reinforced concrete pyramid, with walls at least two metres thick and deep foundations. No hurricane's going to move that motherfucker. The pyramid concept could prove immensely popular in Florida, with most of the population looking like a triumph of the embalmer's art already. On the death of the occupant, no need for a costly funeral, merely seal the doors and walk away.

You know it makes sense.

NB: "The Flimsy", and "The Cheops" are registered trademarks of The Bugbear Construction Company Ltd.

2004-09-02T14:56:00.000+01:00

Not realising his favourite "special"restaurant was wired for sound, Michael asked for "a roast child, about this big"

2004-09-02T14:52:00.000+01:00

"Why don't they trust me?" thought Michael.

Michael Who? Oh, Him...

2004-09-01T17:44:00.000+01:00

I've been away for a while, and I was going to post some stuff on here about my honeymoon (no, not that sort of stuff), but there are some wonderful things going on that I have to talk about.

You may already know how I feel about Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative party. In a way I'm delighted that the Tories have once again chosen a leader who may well have it in him to grow to be genuinely deserving of the nation's hatred. Admittedly, compared with the deranged and malevolent Margaret Thatcher he's a minor player in the loathing stakes; a film clip of the Thatch can still bring on the adrenalin rush and the red mist, while with Mike it's a more subtle flesh-crawling thing, but it's a lot better than John Major (Grey, dull, nerdy voice), William Haig (Young, bald, looks like a baby), and Ian Duncan-Smith. (Who? Exactly.)

Michael has a decidedly scary smile, particularly when he's trying to fake sincerity. I wouldn't for one moment suggest that he might have a taste for human flesh, but you can never tell. He also has a weird speech impediment which renders him unable to pronounce words which end in "ble", so you get "possibill" "peopill" and, ultimately, "unelectabill".

Anyway, Mike's in trouble with the White House. Yay! As I understand it, it goes like this. As Leader of the Opposition, Mike's job is to try and embarrass Tony Blair and generally fuck up the Government of the day. (I have a niggling feeling that this might well be treason, for which he should be arrested and killed, but I might be wrong). It's difficult for Mike to attack Tony on domestic policy, because it's pretty much the same as Mike's policy. The most controversial policy issue in the U.K. is the Iraq war, (Tony lied to us, made errors of judgement, etc, etc). Mike has tried to use this to attack Tony.

George isn't too sure who the hell Mike is, but he knows that someone's being unkind about his bestest friend outside the U.S. and this makes him really cross. Mike wants to visit the U.S. and meet GWB. The White House says "We're not too sure who the hell you are, but you've made our friend Tony very sad. We don't want to talk to you. And we know where you live."

Fighting back tears, Mike pretends not to care, but in reality spends most of his waking moments trying to figure out how to get out of this one, because with an election in the U.K. next year he has enough to worry about without the prospect of being hunted down by the C.I.A.'s finest assassins.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha!

My heart soars like a hawk.

2004-08-18T13:08:00.000+01:00

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