self-serving scum

dave leaned over to me, his speech slightly slurred after a long session in the portobello star.
‘knowwha, mate? i got a corker for conference!’
‘do tell’, says me.
‘i’m gonna start by getting them all on their feet and saluting the troops.’
‘wheel out the poor saps dying in our wrongful war?’ i say.
‘damn right’, burbles dave.
‘radical! i approve. gonna bringem home?’
‘my arse’ stifling a genteel burp as he swigs the last of the laurent perrier, ‘they can damn well stay ’til we’ve crushed the ragheads! and i’ll tell you what’s even better…. i’m getting a general in the cabinet.’
‘junta?’

‘bless you, feller. look at this – they even wrote me a list of policies. top secret.’ he tapped his nose, managing not to miss.

i looked at the list – it was in crayon. it said…
“lovely samantha.
look happy/moved.
dead baby.
look solemn.
struggle about whether to continue.
continue.
look noble/tortured [both if possible - either if too tricky]
labour bad.
tax cuts.
don’t say ‘paki’ [ask bruce if necessary]
flags – songs – kiss sam [no tongues]“

‘policies, big dave?’ i ventured.
‘that’s the speech. “policies” is the other side’
and it was. the word “policies” was definitely on the other side of the paper.
just “policies”.

i smiled thinly.

’see!’ he beamed, ‘that’ll show them!’
‘err and the actual … policies?’
‘oh we’re gonna come up with some if we get in; plenty of time for that. after dinner. still, i have worked out one thing’
i waited expectantly….
‘change’

‘err?’

‘we’re ready for change!’

‘ah’

‘you ready for change?’ he beamed at me awaiting my approval.
’sure, big d’
‘brilliant; then we’ll have a bottle of bolly this time. tired of laurent perrier’

sam was gonna give him such a slap when he got home.

latest search term mania

it should surprise nobody that my searches now have an even more phallic quality than of yore.

some of our new favourites are (yes) ‘donky cock’ (for sheer predictability) and the infinitesmally more creative tho equally badly spelled ‘donky + cock’ and the direct ‘there’s a great big penis up my butt’.

however, head, shoulders and rampant donkey danglers above the rest is the simultaneously comforting and enquiring ‘how does sweetmeal biscuit appeal to us’. if ever they discovered how web searches really work they would (to steal shamelessly from douglas adams) promptly disappear to be replaced by something even more inexplicable.

great big donkey cock

is my favourite piece of graffiti ever. i saw it 20-some years ago on the side of a bus shelter at four lane ends. it was accompanied by a diagram notable only for its anatomical inaccuracy.

it involved triangles. a faux-naif proto-banksy perhaps?

anyway that was just the usual laughable attempt to drive traffic towards double figures and amuse or embarass those kind or foolish enough to have bogrolled me. on a greener note it should provide some perv searches for me to blog about and help this to remain the sustainable source of low quality reading matter you both love – the online equivalent of recycled toilet paper. or at least that is my lofty aspiration. to that end, a minimum of 97% of the words you are reading have previously been used by me or someone else.

so if this post wasn’t about that, what is it about? (pauses and hopes to remember…)

it was in fact about a major moment of epiphany that came to me today – the latest step, if you will, on my zen road to enlightenment/endarkenment. i have learned that a household bin, fill it though you may with bleach, washing up liquid or other cleaning products will fail to do the decent thing and clean itself. only when the delicate alchemical balance is achieved between cleaning product and modicum of effort do you get a sparkly, clean-smelling bin.

glad you came? ah well.

maybe you are none the worse for the time spent here. and at least you have learned more about the great big donkey cock you sought.

pointless post about a non-sad search

you’ll never believe what my top search term is right now?

nowt freaky.

‘witchy woo‘ is currently in pole position (not in any terpsichorean way obviously). admittedly she is hotly pursued by the refreshingly enthusiastic ‘big penis wow great’ and the frankly humdrum ‘bigpenis‘ (no time to hit the space bar, there might be some hot porn out there getting cold). which i think proves that even in the warped world of the intatoobz a good witch beats 2 large knobs.

hurrah fer witchy again.

25 years too late

watching footage of the g20 protest, it seems the media has decided the police have a bit of a thing for beating the crap out of unarmed members of society.

two thoughts spring to mind.

one – orgreave. the footage was there. it was no secret. i saw it and i know lots of others did. the media were pretty quiet about it. not the sort of story they wanted, i suppose. not like the miners who dropped the concrete on a taxi taking a striker to work. that got lots of play. they moved heaven and earth to show it. fair enough, that was murder (or a perfect piece for the news, depending on how you look at it), but chasing unarmed men over a mile on horseback armed and in riot gear isn’t exactly the hallmark of a healthy democratic society. brown people do that and we send in the un. 25 years and they start to worry about police violence. even the dinosaurs thought quicker than that.

two – when i saw the footage on the news tonight it bore the imprint of sunday times tv. call me a cynical old sod but when did they get this stuff of police hitting people with riot shields? it’ s been a while since it happened. still, i wouldn’t want to accuse the press of jumping on a bandwagon.

all the bad stories coming out of westminster are about the government. it can’t be they are the only ones doing crap things, can it? it seems murdoch and the other press barons who feed us with the news they need to warp our opinions and make sure the government we have is favourable to their interests, has tired of labour. my friend dave will be delighted. i called to tell him but sam said he was off down the ‘undefined embarassing disease clinic’ and then claimed fran was on the other line bitching about her sham marriage. frankly i have no idea what all that was supposed to be about. hope she hadn’t been at the cooking sherry. again.

still, if annoying people tell you the government is politicising the police, just smile and say ‘orgreave’. freaks the fuck out of them.

but do remember. plenty of people fought very hard to stop all that ‘armed cavalry riding down (unpopular) members of the public’ shit. they’ll be happy it’s come around again and this time with acceptable victims. not scum like the miners who wanted to plunge us into a second dark ages. and maybe feed their families, selfish buggers.

oh yeah… and that crap about those who forget their past being doomed to repeat it. or as brecht would say: ‘the bitch is in heat again’.

the best search

‘china girl love bic penis’.

entirely in two minds.

typo? normal person? or very very weird???

you be the judge.

a post about sex (wahey)

no, i lied – it’s about g20.

now i like an acronym as much as the next person.

assuming the next person spent three years at university buggering about, getting up late and reading the occasional book, as opposed to doing a real degree like law where you were supposed to end up knowing stuff. or – gawd help us all – just got a bloody job when they left school. (shudder – more than 20 years and i’m still valiantly managing not to achieve what some real people did aged 16).

‘flotus’ doesn’t mean something that got chucked off a boat or even a fart in the bath (unlike edward woodward). it would appear to mean ‘first lady of the united states.’ michelle o (not the big o), the lady who asserted her importance in a truly feminist way by telling barry (he and i tell jokes about how stuffy big dave is) to get the hell out of her closet. (no snidey jokes please; snickering about homosexuality hasn’t been mistaken for funny since 1979). (actually i’m not sure i have been mistaken for funny since about 1979 either but hey…)

now both the things i know about flotus have been culled from reclusive leftist (one of the best blogs in this life and the afterlife – but how can you not know?) so i must simultaneously acknowledge the great and truly learned dr socks as my educator and spare her any responsibility for the views that follow.

it’s never good when the heads of the g20 nations descend, the good the bad and silvio berlusconi. but what makes it almost the equivalent of hearing that the place where you live has been chosen to host a garden festival (consett and ebbw vale were the first two in britain – you with me now?) is that with these overdressed monkeys come the wags. partners you imagine have something better to do with their lives than get stuck in london’s traffic have to hug each other, pose for photos and errr well that’s about it really cos they are 95% women (apparently herr merkel found something to do and we do hope it wasn’t downloading tedious ‘adult’ (oh please) features on expenses). so what did they do? they shopped and went to the opera.

well fuck that.

how much more proof is needed that the world continues to view women as some kind of designer accompaniment to us, the men what make everything happen (hmmm credit crunch? nice work, us!)? of course herr merkel is a quantum chemist and looks dreadful in floaty floral prints, so had to miss this beeno. angela also feared he would be embarassingly ignorant on the subject of eyeshadow and urged him to stay at home lest she be shown up. it could have been his unconvincingly-dyed hair and there at least, i agree, ange has a point.

however, michelle o (short for ‘oh for fucksake’) did not fritter away her time here in the uk. she chose to visit a school and talk to some female pupils. feminists may briefly take their heads from their hands – she urged the benefits of education and the role of women as leaders of a society (in a metaphorical sense, you assume). but she said lots of good stuff about being all they could be. she went on to say (re-insert heads in hands and assume brace position) she had met some truly inspirational women while in britain: there was the queen, sarah brown and … maggie darling, all of whom were doing great work. now you may be scratching your heads (makes a change from banging them against the brick wall). i was.

even i remember who the queen is. i can spot sarah brown as gordon’s other half, but it took me a moment to make the logical leap that maggie darling is alistair darling’s wife. now, she is a journalist and has the misfortune to be labelled as feisty (ohmigod, scary – woman with a job) – and mrs o may or may not know she seems generally to be referred to as maggie vaughan (i’m not going to lambast her for that – i didn’t know either). none of that is particularly important.

what does strike me as significant is that the only people michelle was allowed to meet were other women (though probably not merkel as she’s busy talking serious stuff with the boys). and the role models she chose for the young women she urged to build our future were: one who matters by dint of being someone’s daughter and two who are someone’s wife. i’m sorry if she really is some kind of burning feminist beacon but ffs, why didn’t she just add some pole dancers and glamour models while she was at it? still, i imagine her dress looked nice.

i was reassured to hear one of the girls wasn’t too sure what the queen did (join the club) knew sarah brown but was totally in the dark about maggie darling. should go far.

sad search – short post

‘big piens’

oh dearie dearie me.

another year another 365.25 dollars

the fear-inducing dateline 1 jan 2009 stared out at me from my mobile phone.

what have i done with the last 365 days? why did i not earn a dollar a day? was my hair really that grey when this year started?

i learned things, some of which i was actually conscious of learning, i sat in the hall where twelfth night was born – walked in a place where shakespeare definitely trod and listened to the immortal words of lawyers in that place. i guess you can’t win ‘em all. i gained a qualification – which after 20 years away from formal study was almost a shock. i failed to gain a job, which after many years of never growing up and doing what people might regard as a real job was less shocking. i was frustrated by how antiquated the bar truly is and humbled by how kind many of the people in the profession are.

i had another year of laughter and tears (often simultaneously) with two children who might make a man believe in the divine and who would test the patience of a saint. i frequently wished there was a saint whose patience they could try trying. i was reminded at least 365 times how much i owe the clp for all her love and how much richer life is with someone of such unfailing kindness in it. many many times i thought i must call my mother to tell her something glorious or mundane and remembered i couldn’t any more.

i breathed, i ate, i drank, i appealed for stumpings – some of which were given. i lived. and it was bloody good.

i hope you had 365.25 days of wonder of your own. i hope those you love enriched your lives as mine has been enriched. i hope you lived and hoped and laughed and that we will all of us get through another year of this joyful, incomprehensible – and frankly rather daft – mess. i hope, if your year has been one you are glad to see the back of, that next year will see the seeds you have sown bear fruit, that you will feel the wheel turn and raise you up; if you have lost people dear to you, that their love and legacy remains and grows as the emptiness of loss dulls and dwindles; if your year has been full of shit, that next year’s flowers will grow fuller and sweeter. i hope for all of you, the love you put out there will shine back at you so brightly it reminds you of why you bother. and i thank those who have shone some of that love and kindness my way – you are the greater for it.

and if you ended it as i think i have, more confused, amazed, and thoroughly in awe of how fucking wonderful the whole shebang really is, i hope you will find that next year is even … more.

and most of all i just hope.

enjoy.

your wondering chum

xxx

he’s back and he’s making a better world

mayor bidswick blitherington-browne (you know the one: posh bloke – pointlessly-expensive, polluting car – mayor of kensigton and chelsea as featured in my post of Aug 8 last year; whaddya mean you don’t remember it! i thought it was a particularly good one. oh…) is back.

well, i say he’s back… he has hit those advertising sites on the side of bus shelters with a vengeance! plastered all across the royal borough (average cost of property £1,298,447 this August) is his cunning plan to fix homelessness.  it’s a goodie!

the posters remind people it’s a bad idea to sleep rough or drink on the street and if they insist on doing it the police will have a jolly stern word. and here’s the genius bit. they write it in english and then what looks like polish to catch yer bloody builders who would presumably be crashing everywhere after a couple of bottles of tyskie.

whence came this blinding flash of light into the otherwise untroubled brain of a tory? …

the mayor has given the chauffeur the day off, turned up the eminem and is doing the ton round notting hill; he burns off a few chelsea tractors (casually flicking the v’s to yummy mummies picking up the kids at pembridge hall) squelches a few inconveniently-placed pedestrians in the process and suddenly like galileo observing the moons of jupiter or the bloke who invented pork scratchings, he is struck by the fact that random bodies littering the streets could seriously affect property prices. a real headscratcher, this one. he lights a capstan full strength and it all becomes clear. he will have a serious word with these inconsiderate people! eh voila! (though he generally regards filthy foreign words as a brussels-sponsored plot)

the day after the posters go up all you can hear in chelsea is the sound of the homeless (having realised the mayoral foot has been put down – hence the increasing road fatalities – and rough-sleeping mullarkey will no longer be tolerated) dashing to the nearest estate agents, picking up details of a few reasonably-priced apartments and sorting themselves out.

simple yet brilliant. i’m amazed nobody came up with this before. next week mayor bidswick blitherington-browne sparks up a fatboy and solves the global recession. my mate dave will surely be having a word any day now.