The Fishwhacker Swindle?

G. Bananas is clever and sage,
Qualities all too rare in this age.
But he’d better watch out:
With ape-hunters about
He might end up blogging from a cage.

When Doc Scientist tried to correct a
Perceived defect in SafeTinspector,
He crossed Hungbunny’s style
With FatMammyCat’s bile
And he wound up with Hannibal Lecter.

El Barbudo’s a coarse, foul-mouthed man
And not much of a Foot Eater fan.
But I’ve beat him this time –
I’ve unmasked him, the swine!
He’s none other than Archbish Rowan.

Doc Maroon’s a most excellent guy;
His Opera was amusing and wry.
But, wrapped up in his blog,
He’s neglected his job
And his planes have all dropped from the sky.


Anti-Barney was tucked up with Ted
When his nemesis loomed over the bed.
Now poor old AB
Finds it painful to pee
‘Cause he walloped the wrong purple head.


Books and art Lindy wants to discuss;
In return we just argue and cuss.
She’s so smart and profound,
Why’s she hanging around
With a bunch of no-hopers like us?


Update!


Philip C’s a pedant, sad to tell;
I should tell him to piss off to hell.
But I cannot do it
Lest I’m called hypocrite –
For I am a pedant as well.


More to follow.

Dysgraphic American weirdo Arlington Hynes has tagged me. “God knows what this means”, I thought at first, but I’ve since gathered that this is some kind of Internet meme with no higher purpose than its own propagation. In the face of such an unstoppable force I’ve decided to bend over and comply.


Seven movies I like

The Terminator
Terminator 2
Terminator 3
Reanimator
Bride of Reanimator
Night of the Living Dead
Dawn of the Dead


Seven books I like

The Quiller Memorandum
Quiller KGB
Quiller’s Run
Quiller Bamboo
Quiller Barracuda
Quiller Solitaire
Quiller Balalaika
- by Adam Hall


Seven things I say

“Stick it in the other end, you idiot.”
“I don’t watch this stuff, I’m buying it for a friend.”
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
“Mind what you’re doing with that cheese grater.”
“I don’t care what it says on the label, lick it up.”
“Oops, we’ve got a live one here.”
“Anything, as long as it’s got mayonnaise.”


Seven things that attract me to the city

There are none – I’m getting as far away as I can (and have made it to Essex so far)


Seven things to do before I die

Take revenge on mine enemies
Go to Norway
Travel back in time
Have a meaningful conversation with another human being
Have one more cigarette without falling right off the wagon again
Make somebody laugh
Get rid of the rash


Seven things I can’t do

See previous list (ah ha ha haaa, I bet nobody else has thought of doing that before)


Seven people to tag

This is tough. It might be taken in the joshing spirit in which it’s intended, or the wrong way completely. Or, more likely, it’ll be ignored. Nevertheless, it’s worth choosing some good sports, so:

LindyK
El Barbudo
The Waste Paper Basket
Sarah
Michael Barrymore
Eggagog
The SafeTinspector


Update!

Can't seem to find Bryan Ferry's URL so I've replaced him with Eggagog. Do check this being's blog out if only to see pure, raving madness up close.

Much as I like Americans, they have a collective intellectual blind spot when it comes to distinguishing between the various inhabitants of the Briddish Isles. So I’ve come up with this handy guide which you can cut out and keep for next time you visit (or just print it off if you don’t want to damage your monitor).


The Scotch

Scotland is in the extreme north of England and is occupied by the Scotch. The country was invented in the late 13th century by William of Orange, a hairy primitive type with an Australian accent who tried to break part of the British landmass away from its moorings. He was defeated. Since then, the Scotch have nursed a chip on their shoulders the size of Greenland. Your Scotchman is generally freckled and bearded, and has a sentimental streak, especially when in his cups, though don’t be lulled into a false sense of safety because that beery bonhomie can turn at the nudge of a pint glass into blind, savage violence. The Scotch tongue is abnormally swollen which means that all consonants and most vowels are pronounced with a prolonged roll of the tonguetip against the front of the hard palate. The incomprehensibility of the Scotch language has led some scholars to question whether it can in fact be classified as a method of communication at all.

Native Scotch dishes include Scotch the drink (after which the people take their name), deep-fried shortbread, and haggis, which is a spherical construction of offal and teeth the size and shape of a football (or fitba, in the local argot). The men wear a green Burberry-check skirt called a sporran, and the women wear very little. The country’s overwhelming preoccupation with hatred of the English over the centuries has left little time for cultural or scientific development, and apart from the odd minor contribution in these areas – the discovery of penicillin, the invention of television and the telephone, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Annie Lennox – it is generally agreed that the dark ages still hold sway north of Hadrian’s Wall. Apart from all this, your Scotch is generally an amicable companion as long as you don’t get him started on that hoary old myth about English people having no knowledge of his nation’s history or lifestyle.


The Irish

The Irish live in Ireland, or Eireland as they quaintly call it, which is just across the Irish Sea which gives the island, Ireland, its name. What a beautiful country this is, with its rugged countryside of green rolling hills alternating with marshes, and laced throughout with forests [have to check that last bit – ed.]. The Irish are a delightful folk who dress to match the natural beauty of their verdant land. They love craic, which is not as it sounds an act of aggression but rather a type of mildly alcoholic beverage (sobriety is valued deeply). A peace-loving people, they have recorded not a single act of violence in the last 500 years. Every Irish home has a fiddle, which is played with gusto at each mealtime and social occasion. The fiercely religious nature of Irish society led to the forced expulsion of the only homosexual Irishman, Oscar Wilde, in the 19th century. Great storytellers, these charming folk have kept alive a rich heritage of myth and legend through the years, notable examples being the Great Potato Famine and Bloody Sunday; although it must be said that certain seditious elements have in recent years tried to brainwash the unsuspecting populace into believing that there is historical truth in these fantastic tales.


The Cornish and the Manx

These offshoots from the main British line became extinct in the early part of the 20th century, although scientists have talked of recreating them using recombinant DNA techniques.


The Welsh

A low-browed, squat, hirsute group of valley-dwellers, extant examples include musician David Gray and actor Rhys Ifans. Your typical Welsh presents a paradox in that his beautiful singing voice is at odds with his grotesque appearance. Like the Scotch, the Welsh have abnormal tongue anatomy and this results in the tip of the organ lingering in the front of the mouth whenever the letter L is pronounced. Rumours of the sighting of bizarre Welsh-sheep hybrids scampering through the valleys are obviously wholly unfounded, as even sheep have their standards. The Welsh contribution to world cuisine is represented by the rarebit, and to popular culture by the alcoholic poet Bob Dylan. Those Welsh who are not Papist are to be found dancing naked around ancient menhirs on pagan festival days, worshipping Bacchus and other earth gods. Notoriously untrustworthy, the people have given their name to the American verb to welsh. They have their own prince.


The English

“Has ever nature beheld such a race of warriors? Fleet of foot and with the musculature of a Bronze age Greek, the four winds rippling through his flaxen hair, the Englishman strikes down his foe with fire and stone, yet ever-present mercy stays his hand when that enemy be vanquished. That cunt Hitler doesn’t know what’s coming.”

- Winston Churchill, the House of Commons, 3 September 1939


Sixty-seven years is a long time, and Sir Winston would scarcely recognise his people today. In fact the only thing ‘bulldog’ about the English today is their faces. The world-renowned Empire lies in ruins. Savile Row, once the last word in style, has been supplanted by sports shops with whose wares the drunken, mewling, self-pitying, self-righteous, wife-beating, sexually incontinent, television-addicted, illiterate, innumerate, cultureless, feckless, deadbeat dross of humanity are pleased to deck themselves. Obsessed by breasts, bottoms, defecation and farting, these moral and intellectual smurfs waste every second of their lives trying to exist as close to the level of the reptile as possible. Their proud aspersions on the rest of the continent of which their country is a part, reflects their cosmic, terrifying insecurity about themselves. Smaller in number is the subset of the English known as the Nobs. These beings retain the stiff backbone that conquered the world, but this is because they have been forced to lie prone throughout their years of secondary education while being rogered up the rectum by a floppy-haired psychopath called Crispin. They are effete wastrels, walling themselves off from their unwashed brethren and frittering their utterly pointless lives away in parallel fashion. I shall not go into much detail about a third group, the middle classes, as they are an irrelevance, spending as they do all their lives on the Internet.


So there you have it. Hope you enjoy your visit.


Update!


Seems I've made one or two errors in the above piece. Smart-arse Michael the Tubthumper sorts it all out here.

I’m having a lousy few days for original ideas, so I thought I’d point this out.

I wish I had at least one relative as interesting as Tom Petty’s father, who spent his evenings hunting gators in the Florida swamps. Why is it that I always choose a movie over a book when faced with an idle couple of hours? On Harry Hutton’s site, Hungbunny comments that ‘Anonymous’ is always synonymous with ‘cunt’ – perhaps someone should create a Blunt Cogs cartoon of Anonymous. I hope Brewski’s all right. Red wine always seems to lead to dark stool. I can’t seem to find a consistent blogging voice. Where is the Ka-boom? Nostalgia is so common it must serve some evolutionary purpose. I will never stop picking at my nails. Green is supposed to be a relaxing colour but it hurts my eyes. There’s a twist at the end of The Turn Of The Screw which no-one else seems to have picked up, and I can’t understand why. I think the birds will evolve into the dominant life form on earth. I hate Coldplay. I wish I didn’t need to sleep except when I felt like it. Hospitals have an appealing smell. My urine has a funny aroma in the mornings. Some blind people are just pretending. Werewolves fascinate me. Nobody has ever taken me to a sports match. Writing is an effort and the results are disappointing. There’s no point to desserts and people who like them just haven’t had a big enough meal. I hate hearing the word ‘bitch’ used as a noun. Purple is an unnatural colour. My nuclear war post yesterday is the shittest, most uninspired shower of drivel I’ve ever read. I love dogs and I hate cats. I can’t mow the lawn because it’s been raining. Against my expectations I feel sorry for Mark Oaten. I’m a combination of extreme sloth and nervous, compulsive energy, like a car with the accelerator and the brake pedal both pressed down.

I collect films about nuclear war. So far I have 11 on my shelf, ranging from the utterly brilliant (Threads) to the atrocious (The Day After). Some of the most chillingly effective ones don’t show the actual explosions – The War Game, a pseudo-documentary about the effects of a limited nuclear strike on Kent, and Testament, which deals with the toxic aftermath on a small Californian town, are good examples – but in the bulk of them, the star is the mushroom cloud.

There’s something horribly beautiful in this iconic image. There’s the devastating flash, followed by a moment of terrible calm before the cloud starts worming its way up and spreading out. Witnesses to the many above-ground tests during the fifties and sixties have said that the sight of the cloud forming exerts a hypnotic effect on the observer. Reading up about all this as a teenager, I was surprised and I must admit a little disappointed by how quickly the cloud dissipates; I’d always assumed it hung around like a monument for a few days at least.

When I was fourteen, in the mid-eighties, I was convinced like many others that nuclear war was inevitable. I woke in the mornings wondering whether the world was going to be torn apart that day. I wasn’t scared, exactly, more suffused with a sense of all-pervasive dread. Ironically, a nuclear exchange was probably less likely then than it is now; more crazy people have nukes today than had them in those days, and barring the admittedly real possibility of an accident, neither the West nor the Soviets were stupid enough to fire first.

You can keep your biological and chemical weapons. The world would recover from even a massive attack with them. Nukes are the real worry. I never bought the utterly stupid idea of unilateral disarmament, and as long as the world is the way it is, I’d prefer Britain to have lots of guns and bombs as a defensive and deterrent measure. But may Satan wreak eternal and terrible pain on the scum who pushes the button first.

Don't flame me if this is a stupid request, but I can't for the life of me work out how to add other things to my sidebar. I've tried the blogger tutorial in the Help section but it doesn't give me the information I need. What I'm trying to do is create a new heading in addition to the existing ones of Links, Archives and Previous posts. Can anyone give me some pointers? Thanks in advance.

I finally picked up the engagement ring for the beloved today. In the shop I noticed a selection of engagement rings... for men. It’s apparently all the rage.

How fucking gaye is that?

I have two trainees under my supervision at any given time, and my job as I see it is to discourage them as far as possible from pursuing this line of work.The current pair are Simon and Raj. Simon is a lost cause. He enjoys it all too much. His eyes, usually dull and unfocused, take on an unhealthy glint whenever he’s running his hands over cold, smooth skin. He lingers, long after the job’s finished. The other day I found him elbow-deep in the abdominal cavity of a middle-aged lady; when I asked why he was dawdling, he said he was ‘making sure she was properly packed’. Every so often he slopes outside for a crafty fag and doesn’t wash his hands on the way. He comes back with a smirk playing about his lips, and I swear once the zip of his trousers was halfway down.

Raj is different. I took him into my office yesterday during a tea break and said, “Raj,” I said, “I need to have a word with you.” He swallowed, wide-eyed, the poor bugger, as if I was about to criticise his work. I said, “Raj,” I said, “what are you doing here? You’re a young man, you shouldn’t be spending your university days like this. You should be out taking drugs, getting your leg over, stringing out the years of idleness and dependency as long as you can. Why do you want to go into this business?”
“Because I want to help people.”
I sighed and offered him my other stick of Twix. “Help them. They’re beyond help, lad. In case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I want to help their families, and to give them a dignified exit.”
I considered this. “Do you believe in reincarnation?”
He said he didn’t, which caught me off-guard as I’d assumed he was Hindu. I’d been going to say that it didn’t matter how you exited if you were going to be coming back anyway. I had to try a different tack.
“Raj, listen to me very carefully. This job is for weirdos, freaks and psychopaths. For people who those silly Goth types are just dressing up as. You start off fascinated by the science of it. As the years pass, you become hunched, short-sighted and squinting. Your skin turns yellow and the formalin stink gets ingrained so deeply that it becomes part of you. Your humanity shrivels to a cold, hard nugget buried like a fossil in a stone wall of cynicism and bitterness. You laugh at images of war on television. Living people bore you and anger you in equal measure. You find yourself studying them for veins that would be easy to puncture; you eye up their heads and estimate what thickness of bone-cutter blade you’d need to take the top off. Your dreams become ever more bizarre; you wake from images of a basement full of cadavers all nodding in time to ‘Lighten Up’ by Morcheeba. Get out, Raj. Get out now.”

He took the Twix, which he’d declined before, bit into it and smiled shyly. “I’m going to change all that,” he said, and went back to work.

I'm not easily offended, but this is something that made me cringe.

The Fishwhacker Swindle is a month old tomorrow, and the deluge of fan mail is unstoppable. Below are some examples of the letters and emails I’ve received, and my replies, so you can get a flavour of the kind of gay banter with which I occupy myself.


Anonymous (f.eeter@eetmyfeet.co.uk) emails: Great, great blog! Will scoop the awards for 2006!

Thanks, whoever you are.



Mummy (footiesmater@squeers.com) emails: Yes, I second that.

Stop, you’re embarrassing me!



Barabas Knight from Vancouver writes: YOUR’E SITE SUX!!!

My site or my sight? Your spelling style makes this unclear. I have myopia, yes, though why that’s any of your business I don’t know.



Mike Moist from Dartford writes: Where were you last night? I waited for an hour in that toilet.

You make me sick to my stomach.



Pink Boy (denudedone@razor.co.za) emails: you hairy twat

Wrong blog.



Mr Gryphon from Burnley writes: I read your blog every day, and am most gratified by the strong stand you take against Marxist-Leninism and homosexuality. The Internet needs such a bulwark against the red, homosexual tide of filth engulfing us.

Thanks, Mr G. Most people think Bolshevism and fudge-packing ended with the fall of the Wall and the death of Quentin Crisp respectively, but there are in fact dirty communists and gayers everywhere. Give me a ring and we’ll have a pint some time.



Mr Gryphon from Burnley writes: No thank you. In my experience relationships founded on respect falter at the introduction of intimacy.

Suit yourself, cuntbubble.



Pink Boy (denudedone@razor.co.za) emails: you really got a phd and are gonna take over the world?

Wrong blog again. Tosser.



Gassed (lentilsoup@brrapp.com) emails: I don’t BELIEVE U R REALY a corps stuffer I think u r really Gorge BUsh cos u r so rihgt wing. u fuckin moon bat why? do u always writ about comunists and gayes like there not realy poeple. U moon bat

Right wing lunatics are wingnuts. Left wing lunatics are moonbats. Get your terminology right before contacting me again. In fact, get a lobotomy.



Pink Boy (denudedone@razor.co.za) emails: why do you pretend to be a gorilla?

Email the wrong blog again and I’ll track you down and castrate you.



And a text message:


Hi George!!! Missed you at the cabinet briefing this morning!!!!! Where the F were you? Anyway Dick and Rummy say it’s all go for Operation Nukes 2 Iran! Speak soon. Condi xxx

Along with the cutting edge phenomenon of blogging comes a whole new vocabulary to master. Helpfully, I herewith provide a partial glossary of neoblogisms (nee-OB-luh-jisms).


Acommencholy: the state of mild depression experienced when repeated checks of your site reveal no new comments on your latest post, or (worse) no comments at all.

Fucklestop: the embarrassing experience of bringing a string of comments to a complete halt with what you thought was a killer remark, but which now reads as totally uninspired.

Boorseep: the increasing tendency to use profanity in everyday speech as a result of exposure to it on blogs (as in: “May I help you across the cunting street, madam?”).

Wanklescurry: the desperate searching of linked sites for mentions of your own site or name.

Boozer’s Dread: the morning-after unease upon reading the previous night’s drunken blog comments in which you proposed sexual intercourse with another blogger, or threatened them with violence, or both.

Profanidredge: a time-wasting post which tries to make up for its utter lack of original ideas with an excess of obscene language.

Cacklefelch: to grasp at straws in order to come up with an idea for a comment on someone’s post when you should really not bother making any comment at all.

Babblewrath: the inchoate rage that grips you when every other blog’s posts that day are far better than yours.

Voidhowl: the desolate sense of existential meaninglessness that descends at the end of an evening’s pointless, futile blogging.

.

Adopting the principle that it's far easier to steal an idea than generate one, I'm picking up on the Anti-Barney's post about some of us and have come up with a single word that pops into my mind in association with each of the people whose blogs I link to at present. Noreen, Ball Bag and Harry aren't included as they don't stoop to visit our sites.

In no particular order:

Doc Maroon - avuncular
Binty - pissed
Gorilla Bananas - wry
Dr E. Scientist - quark
LindyK - sunny
HA HA HA - Puck
Anti-Barney - rage
El Barbudo - snarling
JokeMail - Cartman
Andraste - phwoaarr
Brewski - deranged


Try it, it's therapeutic.

Oliver turned his head away and squeezed his mouth and eyes tight shut. Mummy sighed and put down the fork.
“Darling, you have to try a little.”
“Don’t like greens,” Oliver said crossly. He hated them, actually.
Mummy moved her chair closer and put her hand against his cheek. “Darling, do you know what happens to little boys and girls who don’t eat their greens?”
“Nothing.”
“No, darling. Not nothing. Something bad.”
Oliver smiled at Mummy suddenly. “Nothing bad can happen to me, Mummy. I’m going to heaven.”
“But how do you know you’re going to heaven, love?”
“Because I’m not going to hell, because I’m not a homosexualist.”
When he had stopped crying and had washed the taste of soap away with some orange squash, Mummy said, “There’s something worse than going to hell, dear. Much worse.”
Oliver couldn’t believe his ears. “Even worse than hell?”
Mummy smiled gently. “Yes, love. The Neckrofyle will get you.”
“The Neckferyle? What’s that?”
“He’s a nasty man who finds little boys and girls and also grownups who haven’t eaten their greens, after they die but before they go to heaven, and he does horrid things to them.”
Oliver frowned. “What does he look like?”
“He’s tall and thin, with long thin fingers and a long tongue -”
“As long as Mummy’s Secret Friend’s tongue?” chuckled Oliver. Mummy blushed prettily. Her Secret Friend was so secret that Oliver wasn’t allowed to tell even Daddy about him.
“Longer, darling. And no eyes, either. He sees you by feeling you.”
Oliver was bored with the rubbish Mummy was saying and began to throw his peas at the cat. He forgot all about the silly Neckrofyle.

Oliver didn’t eat any fresh fruit either and six months later, as a result of his severe vitamin C deficiency, he developed scurvy. In the hospital the nurses tried to push forkfuls of creamed spinach past his bleeding gums but he spat it out. As he felt himself slipping away, he smiled weakly, happy that he was going to be in heaven soon where you ate and drank frankincense and myrrh and nobody tried to make you eat nasty greens.


He lay in a room that was like his bedroom but with no light, and the walls were a funny light blue and there was no mattress. It felt like he should be cold but he wasn’t. He was wearing a queer plastic coat wrapped like a blanket around him. His eyes were open and he couldn’t close them, which felt funny and he laughed, except he couldn’t laugh because he couldn’t even breathe and he didn’t mind. The nice lady and the ugly man had done strange things earlier, putting big needles (which didn’t hurt!) in his neck and arms and tickly powder on his face, and he’d tried to talk to them but they hadn’t heard him. Now he was resting, thinking happily about the funeral tomorrow which was going to be like a big party, before he went to heaven.

Then there was a squeak, and at first he thought it was a mouse but it went on too long and he realised it was a door opening. A bit of light came in the room and he tried to turn his head to look at it but couldn’t. Someone was coming in! He was suddenly scared. A man leaned over him and he tried to scream but his mouth wouldn’t work. The man was tall, the tallest man he had ever seen, and he had a white face and a huge mouth with no teeth, and no eyes, just empty holes. The man’s tongue came out and was so long that it flicked up against his cheeks. The man lifted a long skinny finger over Oliver’s face and wagged it, and made a sad clicking noise like Mummy used to when he had been naughty.

The Neckrofyle!




Will Oliver escape the clutches of the evil Neckrofyle and find peace in the afterlife? Find out in part two!

Last week a more-than-usually wasted Brewski suggested that amateur dramatics companies were little more than seething cesspits of adulterous carnality, veritable modern-day Sodoms and Gomorrahs. That’s not my experience at all. To protect the identities of my fellow members, I’d better use a pseudonym for the group I belong to – let’s call it something like, oh, I don’t know, the Chipping-under-Norton Thespian Society.

The CUNTS has its fair share of the usual annoyances you find with this sort of endeavour, but rampant rogering is not one of them. The rehearsals are in a draughty town hall which gets hellishly cold of a winter’s evening. There’s a bit of bitchiness and backbiting, though not too much. The women mostly look like the back end of a bus, or are over 70, or both, and the few 20-year-olds who appear from time to time are just passing through. And, of course, there’s a resident prima donna, in this case a man, who throws shrieking tantrums when he doesn’t get his way but whom we have to treat nicely because he’s far and away the best actor in the society and if he left, CUNTS would be fucked.

None of that really bothers me, however. The worst thing about amateur dramatics is the audience. They’re old, and I mean really old, on average, because our group has been going for 90 years and many of them have been coming since they were babies. I suppose I should be grateful for their support, but it means that we can’t put on really deviant plays with lots of swearing and shagging. Plus, they’re deaf, and start muttering during quiet bits even when you’ve whispered a line at the top of your voice. They seldom laugh at the really funny lines which have been rehearsed over and over again, night after night, the ungrateful sods. You’d think that forking out a measly six quid to come and support a community activity like the CUNTS would lower expectations and that they’d realise they weren’t going to see Ian McKellen doing King Lear, but oh no, they purse their lips primly whenever a line is fluffed or someone trips over a bit of loose carpeting the fucking stage manager hasn’t bothered to tack down properly.

A couple of shows ago I was operating the sound and lighting console at the back of the hall and had a chance to watch the audience on all three nights of the performance. One old git was nodding off in the second row and his wife had to keep elbowing him in the kidneys. A couple of fucking teenagers were having mobile phone conversations, for Christ sakes. I mean, what were the little bastards doing there anyway? They should have been off drinking meths and spreading the pox among themselves like normal kids. One woman ate her way through a three-foot long baguette all through the first act, feeding it into her fat grotesque face as if she were passing a stool in reverse and at the wrong end. My thoughts turned to a beautiful picture I have in a book of a Heckler & Koch SG1, one of the best sniper’s rifles in the world.

Just finished a weekend shift at work, which for us corpse mechanics means long stretches of mind-fucking boredom punctuated by crises. I was sitting reading a copy of Viz when a suicide came in. They take a while to reach us because there always has to be a coroner’s investigation first, so by the time we get them they’re fairly rancid as a rule.

This one wasn’t too messy, a self-poisoning, but I hate those types because they piss me off so much. Someone reads on the label that more than eight paracetamol per day can be harmful, so they take triple that to be on the safe side, thinking they’ll slide into a nice dreamy coma and wake up getting a blow job from an angel. Instead they endure days or weeks of agonising liver-rot before liquefying into a jaundiced pool of pus. Every sentient being must know by now that pills are the least effective way to off yourself quickly, so why oh why oh why do the sad dumb fucks keep at it?

Anyway, people who commit suicide are on the whole selfish cunts. The only time suicide can possibly be worth it is if you’re utterly alone in the world, with no-one who gives a fuck for you, and I don’t care what people say, there are very, very few people in that position. Even then it’s very rarely a clever thing to do. But if there’s a single person, or even animal, who feels at least affection for you, then you’re an utter bastard to kill yourself. It’s one of the most cruelly aggressive acts you can undertake. The exception is of course the scum of the earth, like rapists and child molesters – they should be actively encouraged to delete themselves.

I worked on the stiff with Lorraine, my colleague, and at one point (might have been when I was fixing the eyes shut) she asked if I’d like to go to a post-Christmas work do. What she really meant was, “Sorry about turning you down two years ago and I want your body”. I’d taken her out back then for coffee but it had gone no further, even though I’d offered to let her come up and see my collection of Stanley knives, something I reserve for special people. I can’t go out with her now as my heart belongs to another, so I said, “Sorry, Lorraine, but I’m busy.” It made my day.

Well, he’s got my vote with a sense of priorities like this. Top Tory David Cameron asked yesterday:

As Britain faces an obesity crisis, why does WH Smith's promote half-price chocolate oranges at its checkouts instead of real oranges?

He’s right about the first bit. Snickers are much nicer. I’ve never cared much for chocolate oranges, though that film with Anthony Burgess wasn’t bad, especially that bit with the high-speed menage-a-trois to the tune of Rossini.

But why the fuck would any responsible newsagent be dispensing real oranges to the great unwashed? Those things are deadly. I once saw a man who’d been hit in the eye with a squash ball, and the impact had forced his eyeball against the lower orbital plate so that it had burst and the eye had sort of dropped down below the socket. One of your Burberry types could wreak havoc with a small, hard object like a citrus fruit.

No, Mr Cameron, you’re clearly a tofu-gobbling pinko and I won’t be voting for you after all.

I need to get a grip on my life. I drink too much, sleep too little and sit around at work wasting time, and my temper’s getting shorter.

Just yesterday I heard Charles Kennedy, dwarfish pisshead and Redhead of the Year 2003, describe himself on the radio as ‘aggressive’. I took this as a challenge, and had to pull the car over to the side of the road where I sat shaking with impotent fury. There’s always someone, isn’t there? You’re trying to have a quiet pint when a political party leader turns around and craps in your face.

Any time, Charlie, if you think you’re a bit tasty.


Update!

Kennedy is dead! I've heard some piss-poor excuses for backing down from a fight, but this...


Update!

Sorry, that's politically dead.


Update!

No, I was right the first time.

I went back to work today and was bitch-slapped by reality so hard that a couple of teeth fell out. Fifteen bodies? What the fuck were people doing over the festive season? Three of them had been in the same car crash – what possessed them to take to the roads at this time of year? They might have been drunk, of course, which would count in mitigation.

One of the poor buggers was a tramp who’d been dredged out of a pond after a couple of days. His head was like an enormous soft white pumpkin. I’ve seen worse, but it was a fucking nightmare getting arterial access as his throat was so swollen, and once I got the needle in I had to massage the tissue to circulate the embalming fluid, which wasn’t easy or much fun as his skin was so doughy and friable it kept slipping off in sheets. Plus, I was badly hungover, and the fumes made me sick. I need to reconsider this work, I really do.

School prefects are cunts. Lots of people have probably talked about them on their blogs before now, so this might not be very original; and I’m sorry to start the year on such a negative note, but I was talking tonight to my fiancee's brother's girlfriend who's 19 and was recently a prefect and was trying to defend them, drunkenly… on the whole, prefects are cunts.

I started high school in 1982, and that year I was a pathetic, puny child who didn’t dare volunteer for the under-13 rugby team. The cunting prefects, all rugby heroes even if their academic performance wasn’t worth shit, decided to gang up on me and the bunch of sorry losers I hung out with at the bottom of the playing fields and roll us down the hill so that we ended up eating the dirt in the bottom of the sodden ditch which the fucking arsehole groundskeeper never bothered to fill in even though the cuntfaced upper-middle-class parents had been writing to the school board and the local paper about the poor upkeep of the best school in the area. No, it wasn’t an English school; it was a private boys’ school in Johannesburg, South Africa, but it was influenced enough by the Eton mentality that my story has relevance for any of you cunts who matured in public school Britain.

There was one particular arsehole, Eric Mauff, who was a prefect and prop-forward or some such exalted position in the First Team and who ordered me to go and wash his car while he sat on the stands as a reserve with his arm round the shoulders of his incredibly beautiful brunette girlfriend, and as I was scurrying away to scrub the fucking car she let out a laugh and I hated her and him and swore that I’d never turn out like him or her, and that bullies like them were fucking scum.

Four years later in 1986 I was a senior at the school, and I wasn’t a prefect because I was too geeky and unsporting to make the cut, but one or two of my friends were appointed as ‘pricks’, as we called the prefects. They were decent guys, to a man, but one day I saw one of them walking across the lawn with a smug smarmy look on his face, and he was allowed to do that as a ‘prick’ while I wasn’t because I wasn’t privileged like him, and nor were 90% of the rest of us, and I turned into a communist. I became a right-wing anti-communist later at university, but that’s another story.

My points are: 1) it’s incredible and frightening how corrupting a trivial accolade can be to someone as young as one in his teens; 2) no matter which social stratum you find yourself in, there’s always somebody above you waiting with a poised cosh; 3) Eric Mauff is a cunt, and wherever he is now, I hope he’s either redeemed himself or is burning in a living hell.

It’s pathetic to be determined by your past and to blame your loser life on your early experiences, and I gob on people who regard school traumas as binding on their later existence. You take the shit that’s dished out to you, you deal with it, and you move on. I’m sure there are decent people out there who were prefects at school and who exercised their power and responsibilities with justice and mercy, and to you I mean no malice.

But most of you pricks were utter cunts.

Fuck, that was a bad one. I’m going back to bed.