Run! Run!

It’s the time of year when the garden is cobwebbed by…well, cobwebs and spiders make themselves known. If anything, the things are even bigger than last year. The webs are like the catch-nets of a Russian factory trawler, anything up to the size of a crow had better be worried about being snagged.

As for the spiders themselves, imagine a tennis ball with fangs and legs and you’re getting there.

Okay, it’s not quite that bad, but I can’t believe that anything that large hasn’t been eaten by something larger yet. What’s the problem, venom? Actually, that probably is the problem.

Certainly it makes clearing the garden a bit more exciting if, like me, you’re a great big girl. It is entertaining though, so I’m told, to watch me realise that the spider I was near is now missing from its web and so leap about like a loon, smacking myself like a flagilent and screaming ‘get it off me, get it off me’. Apparently my ‘dance of the spider’ is akin to somebody neglecting their medication and fitting on the dance floor.

Naturally, the spider itself is watching from the guttering of the shed thinking ‘what the hell?’

Still, garden is now cleared and sacks of plant material now await transportation to local recycling area for composting into Tesco value salad. The problem with the smaller garden is that you can’t have a really good raging bonfire, comprising equal parts wet leaves and old tyres, to really get a fug up and stink out the entire neighbourhood. What’s the matter with the neighbours, don’t they have tumble dryers? If they insist on hanging their washing out on a line to dry then it’s going to end up smelling of barbeque in the summer (result, chased down street by foxes thinking you’re a large slab of chicken in Cajun marinade) and traditional bonfire (wet leaves) in the winter.

Those scented candle people should get their act together and produce some sort of scented log you can fling into the blaze to give it an authentic scent of 'autumn mist' or something. Or conkers.

Flickr

I'm impressed. I've been reading a lot about the Web 2.0 but to me it's just what the web used to be like, before the corporate big boys got in there and took it over. Youtube and blogging and especially Flickr is about sharing things. I love it, I love that you can upload images of traction engines, I love that you can set privacy on your photographs so that you don't have some pervert humping his fist over pictures of your gnomes. Most of all I love that you can put your own pictures up and just keep going back hoping that somebody will comment, that's right, begging for approval.

Jesus, there's EVERYTHING there. You can search for tags like 'scooters' or 'lamps' or something totally bloody obscure and you will get a hit back.

What I like though is the quality. There are loads of good photographs there. It's beyond blogging, where there is a huge amount of dross and very little decent content, rather, the cream seems to flat to the top. There are lots of great photographs of really interesting stuff and very few photographs of gurning teens in bikinis in a bar in faliraki.

There are lot of creative people out there with an eye for the curious - and it's being piped live into the world. Excellent.

I'll be there for yooooooooooooooooooooooo

What constitutes friendship changes, like the state of your teeth, throughout your life. This is not to say that friendship is wobbly and full of rusk early on, marinated in beer later before finally ending up stained beyond recovery with marmite and, probably, rusk, at the last.

Friendships forged in childhood are often held up as the most important and, indeed, seem the most innocent (largely because they are uncomplicated by the threat of your best mate shagging your girlfriend/boyfriend/dog or goldfish) and are founded either upon camping trips to find dead bodies (literature), sharing a coat peg at school (real life) or tying for first place in a ‘who can pee the highest’ competition (hopefully at primary school (usually ending up with a urine based ‘sword-fight’ and drenched socks) but for men can extend into mid-thirties).

As we get older it becomes harder to make friends. This is because our social group shrinks from the ocean of the playground to the puddle of the pub and because we spend less time sober (unless you went to school at an inner city comp. where hangovers and homework went hand in hand) and hence able to remember names.

Another contributing factor is that friends of convenience (be your best mate if you lend me your Top Trumps for the day) become easier to reject (be your best mate if I can hop on your wireless bandwith for the day to download porn that’s not even legal in any of the countries ending in ‘stan’).

So as a grown up, it becomes increasingly difficult to make friends and certainly attempting to enter a school playground to lend kids your Top Trumps is frowned upon, usually ending in a new friendship with somebody called ‘gripper’ on D Wing.

Adult friendships are usually forged by Rites of Passage. This involves alcohol, cubed by embarrassment and raised to the power of nudity.

As your circle of friends decreases, so your circle of acquaintances increases. These are usually friends of a loved one. If you’re very, very lucky your loved one will realise that just because you like them, you don’t have to like the people they like. Remember, you haven’t had the bonding experience with these people, you weren’t there during the great coat peg crisis of ’79 and with luck you won’t have been drenched in their pee. Without this context it can be hard to tolerate somebody who can talk for that long about their love of Top Gar. Warning: using the word ‘tosser’ about any of these people will result in a frost warning for the week ahead in your domestic circumstances. Worse, it may also lead to criticism of your friends. Worse still, most of that criticism is probably valid, but best left unconfronted.

But even if you think yourself friendless, or if your friends are known only to you through their chat room handles or as elves in a MMPG, you have to be better off than the ‘adults’ who enter reality television, have manufactured bonding experiences and confess everlasting friendship to camera. While these people usually have the emotional maturity of a whelk, it does seem that a lot of their bonding is based on lying around chatting and drinking. This is not how you make friends. What these people really need is a good who-can pee-the-highest competition, televised, followed by a pooing on each other’s heads competition. Okay, that’s not what they need to make friends but by Christ it’s what they deserve.

That’s the way you can tell they are not real friends, they don’t have nicknames. Real friendship is when you start grinning with anticipation because your partner has handed you the ‘phone with a quizzical expression and said ‘it’s somebody called ‘Zorro’ for you’.

Latest outrage

I have, of late, found my fuse shortened, my spleen more often in need of venting and the boiling point of my blood now reduced to room temperature. To try and combat either flying into rage or the drinks cupboard every time I read the news and screaming 'WTF' more than a dozen times a day, I have been training myself to take delight in the simple things in life.

When I saw the story about those stupid, fat, ugly witches that are taking orders for junk food from schoolkids and then delivering them through the bars of the school while standing in a graveyard - what in the name of all that is damned and floating in a shit filled lake in the lowest reaches of Hades is going on? It would appear that some pikeys are trampling the graves of the dead in order to give kids chips for lunch. What's the matter, are they worried that they are not getting enough fast food at home?

On the one hand, a 'backlash' to the healthy eating campaign of Jamie Oliver, on the other, a load of thick-as-shit chavs out to make some money.

One look at the creatures pushing their trans fatty acids, grease and lips and hooves in the shape of a burger tells you everything you need to know (yes, I am one to judge on appearances, what about it?) What are they using the profit they get from the kids on, eh? Crack. Crack and vodka. Crack and vodka and more chips (show me a pusher who's not a user).

As for any excuse about the quality of the food or not getting enough time - what absolute bollocks. Anyone who hands chips through a school gate to a panting, sweaty, spotty teenager one step away from a heart-attack and two steps away from a bellywheel is not the sort to be able to construct a reasonable debate about freedoms and obligations in society and the role the individual plays in accepting and resisting the machinery of state.

Bottom line - the kids are in school. What they do in their own time is up to them but this is not their own time. They are temporary citizens in a despot's regime, not a democracy. They should do as they are bloody well told or bring a packed lunch. As for anyone who genuinely believes that having fast food every day is acceptable - where have you been, sat in McDs for the last five years staring gormlesssly out of the window, unable to watch television because you can't concentrate and unable to read because you couldn't pay attention in school?

Luckily, this is easily resolved. The priest should mention that, 'ah-hem, this is not public land, so kindly fuck the fucking fuck off' (With luck it's the parish of Paul Wicker, the Tall Vicar) and the school should put up plywood - (any pikey having a friend read this to you, let me give you the cultural reference you can tell the reporter from the Star - say 'it's like the Berlin Wall' because obviously it is protecting one group of people from decadence but more importantly because, looking at the photographs, the monsters flogging chips would not look out of place in 1970s East Germany).

Or, stop educating kids about the dangers of fast food. Oh, and remove the crossing on the road outside the school too, because obviously that removes their right to be mown down by some tosser in two tons of 4x4 speeding by a school, not concentrating and eating a burger.

I've eaten at '15', Jamie Oliver's place and it was, as a dining experience the best I've ever had while eating out. Given a choice between eating there and dinner at the home of one of the chav hounds, I know where I'd rather strap on the nose-bag.

One of the three things worth a solitary dime

My God I’m happy. After a moment of internet madness in the week my delivery arrived from Amazon - practically a crate! (okay, two books and a CD) and I spent most of the evening stroking my new possessions. One of these was that sweetest of purchases, an omnibus edition of two books that I’d lent out and had never seen again (rather unusual for me to lend books, people normally get as far as ‘can I borrow…’ before they see the look on my face and shut up, and if they get all the way to the end of the sentence, they get put off by having to sign the formal notice that failure to return will result in crucifixion) and which I’m now greatly enjoying re-reading. The other book is hardback and came wrapped in cling film. My god, how cool is that. Impulse buy but it’s a beautiful edition.

Of course, it’s not just things that make me happy. Earlier in the week a bloke with his dog got on my train (I was running very late and the train was populated by workshy gits like me and pensioners). The dog was mid-sized and with a fabulous wire-haired white coat and the watery morning sunlight fell on it just so, like the yellow of the yoke of a fresh egg. If there is anything as happy as a dog in a patch of sunlight, I’ve yet to see it and I became happy by osmosis.

So that, I though, deserved a post. No bile, no ranting angrily from foam flecked lips resulting in spittle down the tie, just a state of happiness bordering on medication.

What the web was invented for

http://www.b3ta.com/

Raising the quality threshold

Since I plugged my freeview box into my telly I’ve made three astonishing discoveries. One: you are never more that seven seconds from an episode of ‘Friends’ (and even though you remember them being funny, on repeat they strike you as dreadful whenever Joey and Chandler are off-screen). Two: watching the ‘presenters’ on those auction tee-vee channels whoring themselves to flog towels (‘only 7,000 left now, come on you bastards, we’re not going onto the drinks-cabinet-in-the-shape-of-Marie-Antionette-with-gillotine-bottle-opener until we’ve got rid of this lot’) is as compulsive as slowing down to have a good neb at an RTA. Three: Either I am getting some taste in my old age, or television is shit.

Actually, given the number of repeats I’m looking at thinking ‘this is shit’, it appears telly always WAS shit and I just never had anything better to do. Now, TV has to work like a 12 year old in a trainer factory to get my attention, as with a single flick of the finger I can banish some gurning idiot and replace him with Metroid Prime. (Sorry mum, even now when I turn the telly off I’m unlikely to go and run round in the garden getting fresh air until I fall over an vomit from the excitement, exercise and pollen).

Sadly, it’s not just external forces, temptations and pleasures that have me reaching for the ‘off, off, in the name of Beelzebub off!’ switch. Television programming appears to be committing some sort of slow motion suicide. Either that or with so many channels, the pool of talent has thinned out to form a sort of puddle. A puddle comprised of piss and with a thin film of oil on top. Let’s take a completely random example…ITV.

In particular - ‘X Factor’. This does not have me reaching for the ‘off’ button. This has me reaching for my specially adapted Armstrong and Hughes steam-powered liquid bovine excrement high velocity despenseron automatic 5000, so that I can go to whatever dreadful leisure centre it is they record that abomination unto humanity and make a statement by showering everyone involved in steaming shit in the same way it pollutes my world whenever I mistakenly see it. It’s like anti-entertainment, like kryptonite for feeling good about yourself.

Then they follow it up with some sort of extra programme on ITV2. Presented by people not talented enough to be in terrestrial telly speaking to people not talented enough to already have a recording contract or, as they are known, fatties.

ITV loves fatties. Humiliating them anyway. They should just cut the crap and have Saturday night consisting of fat girls being insulted, crying and then pushed into a pit of margarine and given a chainsaw to defend themselves again, oh, I dunno, a bear.

The benefit of the freeview box is the unexpected treat. A quality piece of television you never saw originally and is now as fresh and lovely as the first time it probably caused outrage in the Daily Mail. Usually it’s some piece from the seventies, easily identified by the soft look of the video and the haircuts and lapels of a gentler age, where one could wear sideburns without being openly mocked or feared or a bewildering combination of both. For instance, ‘The Averngers’. Christ! Why is this programme not on all day every day. Never saw the original broadcasts but now they ooze class, style and fun.

Telly is going to have to work a lot, lot harder to retain my affections and the conclusion of my romance with the idiot box will not be marked by anything as soppy as a letter. No, those programme that do not cut the mustard will be taken out and shot, apart from X Factor which, I strongly suspect, will be a stake through the heart job.

Meat treat

Just as forecast, after an August so wet that I was starting to develop gills, September is proving to be sunny and gorgeous. This means I was able to delight the neighbours last night by ritually buggering the meat of choice (pork) on the barbeque.

Truly, barbequing is the perfect way to cook food. Bring grill up to temperature, leave for a few minutes to allow heat to kill off anything nasty, throw tonight’s meat on barbeque. Sit, drink, rise, flip meat, sit drink, poke meat, sit, drink, serve. Hopefully by this time matters such as what you are going to have with your meat will have been taken care of.

Joss Wheadon is my master now

A weekend that re-affirmed my view that things make you happy.

Shopping in Croydon on Saturday. If the world needs an enema, Croydon is where they are going to insert it. While you can see that everyone involved with the town has really striven to make it as pleasant as possible, with trees, pedestrian areas and trams, it’s let down by the enormous drag factor of its citizens. This is where they get the guests and audience for day-time confrontation shows, just running round the place with a big net, or tempting them into the back of a van with McDs. The teenagers are ugly, the adults are fat and the kids run wild without adult supervision but free from the fear of abduction because they’re all ugly too.

It’s not all bad, there was one girl in a tee shirt that read ‘future footballer’s wife’. Rather amusing and, for that town, like a night out with Wilde, Marx and Rochester.

Came home knackered and stuck the film ‘Serenity’ on.

Oh yes - fantastic!

In fact it was so good I shot out the next day and bought the box set of the series. This is something I’ve not done since I was single and Saturday night could be something of a drag but oh my God it was excellent. Have only watched a bit of the first episode but it’s like the first time I saw Star Wars…better, in fact, as the memory has not been pissed all over by the sequels.

Ah, sci-fi and western mythology, is there anything better?

Perky bloody forigners

Jesus! My head! It’s a full body hangover that is only now starting to abate thanks to paracetamol, fat coke and lots of tea - oh, and sweating what appears to be neat tequila.

Evening started well with a pint of organic bitter. Examining the murky stuff that looked not so much brewed as just hoiked up from a ditch somewhere, I knew I’d be in trouble later. Couple of pints and into the centre of town. London is at its most bearable at this time of the year, with everyone standing on the pavement drinking and chatting.

New hazards are springing up though. As well as the usual backpackers and buggies, buskers and beggers, we now have rickshaws and, the latest addition, lots and lots and lots of people trying to hand you London’s new free paper - a Muroch rag I wouldn’t spit on. It’s hard to go ten yards at the moment without somebody waving a free paper inches from your face like a chequered flag at the end of a car race. Luckily, my brutal drinking companion has no issues with saying, very loudly ‘no, I don’t want your fucking paper, now fuck off’.

Ended up in Waggamammas, where the a/c just couldn’t cope. Luckily I was able to sweat quite a lot, so that was okay. Waggamammas dining is refrectory style, with strangers sharing benches and long tables. One couple sat next to us but, obviously impressed by the way we were noisily schlurping noodles and having a conversation probably liberally sprinkled with swearing and politically incorrect remarks, swiftly moved (note to self, lacquer self in deodorant in future).

Then a young woman was shown to the seat next to us. Single diner with a book - ‘a brief history of time’. I waited until we were about five minutes from being ready to go and then, being pissed, asked her if she was enjoying what she was reading.

‘Oh, yes, it’s great’.
‘Have you heard the audio-book? It’s a bit monotonous’.
‘No, I didn’t know there was an audio book.’
‘American eh? New York?’
‘New Jersey.’

Now I only know two things about New Jersey, that it has a famous turnpike that is where Jimmy Caan gets killed in ‘the Godfather’ and that it’s where Tony Soprano lives.

‘Lovely, and are you enjoying London?’

And so on. Turns out she’s a stude studying Linguistics (‘wow, I imagine it can be daunting studying all those foreign words, do you find you have trouble getting your mouth around the long hard ones?’) and she was lovely. What she must have thought God alone knows - if it was ‘who the fuck are these two drunk sweating gits?’ she hid it well.

Bill arrived (first time I’ve been brought a bill without asking - queue at door might have had something to do with it) and we departed. I’ve dined alone many times and don’t mind talking to people, as long as it’s not for long. I think I even said ‘we’ll stop bothering you, you peobably want to eat your noodles’ but she was perkily chatting up a storm by that point.

I felt old, once upon a time I would have turned on ‘the charm’, now I just wanted to make sure she got in a cab and got home okay. My brutal friend was a little more honest ‘too bad she wasn’t better looking and had a friend’. Yes indeed, and too bad we’re a couple of old farts. ‘True.’

Rounded off the evening with a mohito and a beer and another beer and that, I suppose, is why I feel like a toasted shit baugette today. It is now time to hit M&S and buy up every egg and bacon sandwich in the place.

Striking camp

Grave news of a further tilt of the axis of evil towards the end of the world not as we know it - but as it should be.

The label on the ‘camp’ coffee bottle is changing. Ever since I can remember when I’ve walked past it in the supermarket I’ve been cheered by the little picture of the highland fusilier being served his camp beverage by his trusty Indian manservant.

The new label apparently has them taking coffee together.

I don’t f**king think so! First off, the coffee has to be laced with whisky, it’s the only way to make the bloody stuff drinkable. This means that any Mohammeden cannot drink it, as it’s against their religion to drink and against the scot’s religion to waste good scotch on a colonial.
The revised label is, of course, another sop to erasing this nation’s glorious colonial past. There’s an awful lot of rot talked about Imperial guilt. I don’t have any, for three reasons. One - look what happened to the countries we left to their own devices - total bloody chaos, they were all far better off united and hating us. Two - we gave them all sorts of neat stuff like railways. Three - these days whenever somebody says ‘empire’ I automatically think of the Death Star, so don’t tell me the consequences of empire are far-reaching.

If we’re going to have Imperial guilt though, at least we should have the things around us to feel guilty about! What’s the point of feeling guilty about something that has nothing to do with you and is not your fault. If I wanted that, I’d convert to Catholicism.

Duck!

In an effort to try new things to eat (okay, because my usual product had sold out and I had to go with an alternative) I tried duck eggs this weekend.

Fan-tastic. Not only are they beautiful, a beautiful white - but they are bigger than hen’s eggs!

The only drawback is the picture of the duck on the front of the box. Okay, so they are free range and okay so they are lovely, but an adorable looking duck might as well have a speech balloon saying ‘enjoy eating my children’.

Which, you know, I did.

Going green

I am by no means a deep green environmentalist. I’m happy to fly and I love love love all my gadgets with their lithium ion batteries. But Jesus Christ! Sometimes you just have to take a breath and think that we’re about half an hour away from the collapse of civilization as it falls under the sheer weight of all the useless, pointless garbage we produce and apparently sell to people who don’t need it.

Air freshener. Who buys air freshener? I’ll tell you who - common people. That’s right, common people with middle class pretentious. There was an advert last night for some sort of spray thing that makes the room smell lovely. Or, and here’s just a suggestion - how about buying a bunch of flowers every week? Then you can compost them, or eat them.

But the capper on the crapper was this mini sir freshener thing you fir in your loo so that, presumably after you have rendered it about as pleasant as a leper hospital in Kabul, you press. This no doubt drowns out whatever vileness you have just created with bouquet of synthetic stench.

Or…open a window! Has the world gone fucking mad? What do people THINK they are going to experience when they enter a loo? If you want to have the scent of lavender while answering the call of nature, go poo in the forest. Otherwise, open a window or get some flowers or change your diet.

Who wants their house to smell like a Parisian knocking-shop? Give me the lingering aroma of bacon and the small of the damp grass coming from the back garden any day.

Croc Botherer no more

Sad news this morning with the passing of pet pesterer the Aussie Croc Botherer. Never saw his programmes but most of the time I understand he was doing the equivalent of running a stick up and down the bars of a cage to aggravate the inhabitant. Okay, so he was doing it in the wild, there was no cage and the animal in question was normally a snake, but the principal is the same.

I have a pact with animals. I don’t annoy them and they taste good. What worries me about people prodding lizards and so on for entertainment is that it’s not really entertaining. Animals interact with animals, not people. If you prod a lizard of COURSE it’s going to get annoyed.

So hearing that he’d been impaled by a stingray was, while of course a tragedy and blah blah blah also, in some way, a clear case of messing with the bull and getting the horns. Or rather getting killed by a really big fish.

Fat ugly litterbugs

ankers! That’s the sort of git that eats at McDs. Fat, ugly, bloated and sad, filling their faces with the bits of the cow that the supermarkets don’t want. In the drive through, their cars ride low. When they waddle to the counter you can hear the chaffing of their enormous thighs as they sweat their way up to the counter, oozing last nights grease and smacking their lips at the thought of getting another load of shit food down their necks before going home and listlessly watching reality telly with a glassy eyed stare normally associated with dead fish.

The good thing about the inability to run of the average McDs consumer is that when I fund the one that littered my front garden with their hash brown wrapper, they won’t be able to make a speedy getaway when I harpoon their enormous arse and cut them up for fucking dog-meat.

McDs really does manage to blot the landscape. Their premises are an eyesore that stink of processed chemicals and fat, their customers are truly trolls and now they are exporting their litter to me.

I did think for a while about posting it back to their head office. It’s genuinely worth the stamp to mail a discarded wrapper back to those bastards.

Then I hit upon the ultimate revenge - I dropped it in my recycle bin.

That’s right, I’m hitting back. This is one wrapper that’s not going to stay litter. It’s going to be recycled, bought by somebody and, I sincerely hope, used to print out environmental literature on.