Jugglers wanted

Where have all the jugglers gone? A few years ago, one could hardly make ones way along the pavement for jugglers. Fairly crap jugglers it has to be said, jugglers who thought that keeping three balls aloft for a few seconds constituted a spectacle worthy of having a ring-master introduce them, but jugglers none the less.

They were, at least, marginally entertaining. Most entertaining of all of course was when they headed into heavy traffic to recover a dropped ball. These jugglers came in three basic varieties. The first was the tosser wearing sequins, balancing on a unicycle and hoping for a crack at the juggling big time - that is, a pitch in a windy corner of Covent Garden and a future of being ignored by Londoners and having their act upstaged by some tramp behind them pissing into a can of lager then drinking it.

The second was the middle class tosser who had acquired dreadlock hair extensions and was spending his gap year attending clown school and ‘busking’ to supplement his coke habit.

Finally you came across your opportunistic begger. The most hopeless juggler because any early success would see busking fees converted into White Lightning cider, which significantly impairs hand to eye co-ordination and, eventually, the ability to stay upright.

Call me old fashioned, but I like to award effort, and the sight of somebody desperately trying to keep one ball, fashioned from a can of super-strength lager, in the air is to me far more satisfying than some flash goit juggling flaming weasels. Anyway, it makes me smile. Grimly.

Which is why I think we need more jugglers. There’s a lot of rage around these days. Most of it repressed and undirected. Sometimes you feel rage at organisations or structures so large you can’t do anything about it - like the rail transport system, or Nestle. Other times you can apply your rage directly but know you must not. Two incidences from today - the cantering fuckwit of a moron lorry driver who decided to deliver a load of girders to a building site at rush hour, so holding up traffic. I don’t mind this if he at least looked apologetic, but he and the smug fuckwit builders he was delivering too all looked as though they were getting off on the chaos. Obviously I nearly gave them a verbal bollocking but weighed the chances of a kicking and decided to fume inwardly and bring the date of my impending combustion from repressed rage forward by a minute or two. My journey in to work set the clock back in the right direction - an ex-first class seat in a decommissioned first-class carriage. Obviously rich people have fat arses and hence require wider seats, so I was able to stretch out. Impending combustion was then brought forward again by some bloody woman on her mobile.

I raised sonic screens (iPod on!) and blanked her out, but not before the unkind thought flashed across my mind of how richly satisfying it would be turn round and explain to her that it wasn’t the volume of her voice that bothered me, or the banality of her conversation or even the evident belief that the rest of the train and most of the Home Counties would be interested in her prattle that annoyed me - no - it was her obvious reluctance to take elocution lessons.

Oooh, I’m such a snob.

A juggler, right then, would have helped, mostly because I’d have wrestled his can of lager off of him and downed it in one.

Possibly the decline of the juggling is linked to the rise of the blog. We no longer need the slings and arrows of outrageous behaviour offset by life-enhancing experiences such as witnessing the wonder of a bloke moving his hands quite quickly - because we can simply vent by text.

(Why are there no women jugglers? Maybe it’s because men are so adapt at handling balls?)

Or maybe it’s because in a world where you don’t need talent to be on telly, or to have a certain sort of watered down celebrity, circus skills just don’t cut it on the pavement. Maybe it’s time for reality busking - coming soon to a street corner near you - two tossers bickering for hours and hours and hours with a phone number you can call to get rid of one of them - calls charged at a quid a pop.

Cut, paste, post

Gentleman and Player, Wednesday September 13 2006

A piece about plugging in my freeview box. Includes the line:

'never more that seven seconds from an episode of ‘Friends’'

Guardian, Tuesday October 24 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1929916,00.html

A piece about being connected to Sky telly. Includes the line:

'never more than 45 minutes away from a Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps repeat'

Two things are very clear. I have higher standards than the Guardian, as I would never allow any Murdoch product room in my house. The second is that Friends is on Freeview even more often than Two pints is on Sky.

The staff of life

Thanks to those puffed up popinjays in Human Resources, not to mention the interfearing busybodies at the health and Safety Executive, recruiting staff is not the joy it used to be.

Gone are the days of 'trial by crumpet', when one would dispatch a likely candidate to get you afternoon tea in the shortest time possible. Gone too are the simple recruitment tools of simply giving the job to somebody with the right school tie. (The right school tie is not, of course, the tie of the school you went to. To work with somebody who may have knowledge of what foulness you got up to, even if no conviction resulted, is too great a chance to take. Rather you want somebody from a school that your utterly humiliated on the field of sport or, better still, the field of battle, either in this century or one past.) Gone forever indeed are the days when you would carefully weigh up the pros and cons of each candidate and finally, after painstaking deliberation, give the job to the one with the biggest breasts.

Now we have interviews and oversight committees. This is, so it said on my last written warning, to stop 'abuse of the system' although I always think that a brown paper envelope stuffed with fivers says more about you than any CV ever could.

The trouble with recruiting is that the field is so narrow. Those American army chaps have it right - go to a town full of poor, poorly educated, poorly spoken and poorly dressed people and convince them that shitting yourself in terror behind a sandbag wall in some arse-hole country in the middle of nowhere is a solid career choice. Christ, i wish I was able to recruit like that - it would be straight down to the 'Lap of Luxury' erotic dance spot to ask any of the girls writhing on their poles whether they would like to change careers. The pros are that it's indoor work with very little heavy lifting, the cons are that you'll still have men leering at you but they won't be shoving tenners down your pants.

Coughin'

Because I'm a man I never get a cold. I get flu. Christ along knows what I'd think I had if I ever got the flu - pnumonia probably, or some strain of flu that has been imported from somewhere foreign, or genetically modified by the Government or something.

Naturally, being of a scientific bent I do not blame my cold on any virus. Rather, it is the result of stopping drinking.

I had, it has to be said, been knocking the sauce a little last week. This was because, frankly, it was tremendous fun. I guess the problem was coming to a sudden stop by going cold turkey on Friday. By Sunday I was sniffling and snorting and had developed the theory that, in cold weather, males need to top up their alcohol like machines need to top up their anti-freeze. And if it's got a robust flavour and goes great with pasta, so much the better.

Naturally I did the decent thing and raided the cupboard for all of the half-used and out-of-date cold medication I could lay my hands on, eventually downing a cocktail of tablets that would keep a peddler in BMWs for a month.

And went off to work. In this I surprised even myself. Firmly of the opinion that the sick, the lame and the short do not belong in the workplace, I detest those who come to work to sneeze into the air con, but in I went. I was, I suppose past the contageous stage and anyway now have my own office to infect. So I slammed the door and ran up the yellow ensign.

Truth be told though I spent most of the day fantasising about staying at home. There's only one way to be sick, and that's in style. One should take to ones bed and burrow beneath at least a duvet and a dozen rugs, all the while grasping a hot water bottle. One should have access to fluids at all times, this means tea, lots of it. One should have soups. one should also have reading material - nothing too taxing so ditch David Copperfield and pick up the Dandy or Beano.

So one spends the day in a sweated fever and emerges thinner, wanner but altogether healthier and ready to drink again.

As it is, I'm beginning to suspect that a side-effect of the pills I've been taking is to supress the urge to drink - God knows what will happen when I finish them, possibly it will result in my chewing the top off of a bottle of chardonay to get at the stuff.

Two's company

Unless you're a hermit, it's likely that, at some point in your life, you are going to have to share your dwelling with somebody. If you are very lucky, these people are called servants, if you are less lucky, this person is called '0594582 'Disembowler' Phillips'. You may be a bit socially backward and move directly from the parental home to the marital home, leading, if you are male, to a lack of ironing powers throughout life (until your wife hits 40 because...) if you are female, an acceptance of a life of drudgery until you hit 40, when you go 'off the rails' and discover gin and sherry, in pints.

For many of us, the first experience of living with others is the Shared House. This results in a number of surprises. Now living with people from different social backgrounds you will find some to look down on and secretly suspect that some are looking down on you. One thing pulls you all together though - you all went into a house share hoping for 'This Life' and ended up in 'the Young Ones'.

There are three main features of living in a shared house. The first is that wildly different tastes in music can all be played at the same time at ear-shattering volume in close proximity - a scientific fact exploited at this year's V festival. The second is that it's an acceptable mistake, rather than a faux pas, to have meet, charm and have sex with somebody you find in the kitchen and subsequently find was waiting for your flatmate to get home - if you get them back in position and only lightly dishevelled by the time said flatmate arrives home.

The third feature is the feud. This normally starts with an argument about washing up duties, progresses through sulking and ends with the domestic nuclear option - a post-it note left on the fridge door. If Kim Jing Phil abandons development of nuclear bombs and starts developing really strongly worded post-it notes instead - beware!

After this, sharing a home with a significant other should be a breeze. Any serious domestic issues can be offset by remembering that tea does not make itself and if there is a dispute and the other is in the wrong - banish them to the sofa (the term 'in yer box' works a treat here). If your partner is unaccountably angry at you - take to the sofa - this is normally located conveniently near a television with access to Freeview (Note: porn previews are normally ten minutes every hour) and a games console. A word of advice though: when being asked, in a conciliatory tone the next morning, 'how did you sleep?' the answer is 'terrible', not 'sleep? Fuck that, I finally cracked that tricky level on Metroid Prime!

Final thought - spare bedrooms mean guests. Usually the very people you moved out of your family home/shared home/Strangeways to avoid. Stick to a sofa.

Adopting an attitude

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Those are the letters spelled out when you whack your forehead against your keyboard in frustration.

Fhgeyrvfbjkfbjvjhergejdksla;a’LSAKDJDHjdgfgfhfdkjsl

Is what is spelled out when you whack your forehead against the keyboard and then roll it from side to side in the hope that when you have stopped, you’ll either have drawn blood, the world will be a better place or you will have brain damaged yourself to the point where it seems quite acceptable that a story about a pop star adopting a child is getting so much media coverage.

And what media coverage it is. You can see the editors of telly programmes and newspapers furiously wanking with demented pleasure as they bark orders into phones, the receivers of which are getting heavier with spittle by the syllable. Let’s get photographers, hundreds of them, to get a picture of the kid. Let’s jam cameras in his face, let’s stake out the pop stars home. Let’s have pictures, let’s have ‘experts’, let’s have comment and analysis because if we have enough sound and fury, the stupid of the world will not notice there is no news.

The media is furious. Pop stars should know their place and that place is to be aloof and glittery. As for African children, they should know their place too - which is to stare out of pictures with those big eyes, starving to death. They should not be whisked through airports after travelling first class.
Probably Madonna just wants another child because she wants to ensure she can continue to use the mother and baby car-parking space in her local Tesco. Certainly, judging by the sort of people that actually use them, adopting a kid for this purpose would fit right into their normal behaviour pattern. Personally I don’t give a shit about these baby and mother car parking spaces - if you want to bring your kid to the supermarket, fine, but don’t expect special treatment. Just because you got pissed on cheap vino a few years ago and had unprotected sex with some desperate horny git does not give you the right to park closer to the supermarket.

Or maybe it does. I’ll make a deal. If they behave in the store you can park where you like. That’s no shouting, screaming, running or snatching stuff off shelves.

Too much to ask? Thought so.

I have no problem with people snatching kids from African countries. Really, what was the future for that kid? Did it involve a privileged and monied upbringing and a private school education? Possibly not. Civil war and AIDS? Hummmn.

I don’t have a problem with this at all. In fact the way to do it is to get a landie and ram-raid the orphanage and scoop up a whole lot of kids and drive non-stop across Africa and Europe to offer these kids something better, ending up by doing a handbreak turn across three ‘mother and baby’ spaces and pinning a ‘wise vehicle choice?’ protester against the wall.

Obviously there would have to be a couple of stops on the way to defray expenses, flogging few of the kids to shoe and textile manufacturers to act as slave labour, but as these products are bought in such numbers in the west there’d be no moral objection. I mean, have you seen the MPG on a landie?

Beauty

Have spent the last hour or so timber treating my shed. I'm looking at it now and I can't tell you how happy I am! The sun bleached shiplap planking that has taken a beating over the summer is now a woody gold and when I add the second coat tomorrow it will darken to the same colour as the timebers of the ships that saved us from the Armarda.

I had thought that there was noting quite so glorious as a man and his shed, now i learn that there is - a man, his shed and cresote!

Poor vehicle choice

Will Duguid's piece in the Guardian today was the perfect storm of gutlessness, arrogance and pomposity.

I do so hope that when he attaches a 'poor vehicle choice' to some vehicle that he and he alone has decided does not meet his exacting standards, he makes sure that the owner of the vehicle has a right to reply, either through attaching a stamped, self addressed envelope or even an anonymous e mail address.

Given that the ability to comment on the piece is unavailable, I'm guessing that he doesn't, but instead simply recounts the slapping of the paper on the windshield to the next audience he suspects will appreciate it, much like some other strutting prick of a yob might recount the vandalising of a car to his mates.

I am not defending the Porch Carryon. It's an ugly car driven by ugly people who are taking night-classes in stupidity and occasionally drug dealing. It's not an off road vehicle, it's a fashion statement and the statement is: 'I'm a c**t'.

But by not having the guts to remonstrate with the owner face to face when having the opportunity, you lose the right to criticise, especially in print. Want to stop that person driving that car? Okay, smear it in dog excrement, every night, get a stencil and leave the words 'buy a bike' on the bonnet, in Times New Roman 128 point bold dog-s**t.

What especially offends me is that the writer feels he has the right to speak on green issues when he has a child. Certainly, in terms of noise pollution and consumption of resource without giving anything at all back, and at the same time keeping the fast-food industry and the moulded plastic toy industry afloat, a child is hard to beat. I trust it is okay for me to slap a 'poor reproduction choice' onto the forehead of the next squealing brat I see when out shopping?

Finally though, a thank you. This has settled my choice of next car. It's going to be a Land Rover Defender. I think we should all buy Land Rovers and I think that when we do so, we should say to land Rover 'I'm only going to buy this car if you knock off ten percent of the purchase price for the next charity that buys one from you.' Make no mistake, when you are tooling through rough country and you have a fridge full of medicine to deliver, you don't want to be doing it on a push-bike.

Let's just hope that once you have spent a year in Africa, being shot at, threatened, seeing your work succeed or fail but always always trying to make a difference, that when you come home and park up, whoever sticks a 'poor vehicle choice' leaflet on your window at least has the decency to offer you the right of reply.

Doggies

There was a good letter in The Groiniad the other day, commenting on the recent 'spate' (two) 'dangerous dogs' attacks that made it to the national news. It quoted an Irish vet who had once opined that 'the problem is when the intelligence is on the wrong end of the leash'. How true.

I'm sure that people are being savaged to various degrees by dogs every day, but it's only when something truly awful happens, as it did the other week, and it involves 'dangerous dogs' that it makes the national press.

What exactly is a 'dangerous dog' anyway? In my experience it's one you try and withhold bonio from. Any dog can be dangerous, the problem is the fang to muscle to size ratio. Seeing a 'rat-on-a-stick' variety turn into a toothed missile of vengance can be amusing, unless it's your ankle that's savaged. Seeing a rotweiller go nuts is a lot less amusing, unless it's the owner it turns on, then generally it's funny as hell.

A dangerous dog then is generally considered to be a rotweiller or pit-bull, and not an ugly girl you went out with once, made the mistake of shagging and who now won't leave you alone.

When the dogs were making the news it was the wrong kind of dog days. Dog days are generally accepted to be the sort of weather we are currently enjoying at the moment, clear skies and more sunshine than we know what to do with. The term comes from Egypt, where the late summers coincided with the appearance of the constellation Sirus low in the sky and the flooding of the Nile. This was good news for the Egyptians, who depended on the flooding to irrigate their lands but even more important meaning an end to their hosepipe ban.

Dog days are quite different to going to the dogs. This expression usually means that something is on its way out or not as good as it used to be. Successive generations have thought that this country has been going to the dogs for so long we should rename it 'Walthemstow'. Currently, going to the dogs is encouraged, at least by bookmakers, as the gurning idiot features of Gazza knacker grabber Vinnie 'hard man' Jones stare out from a poster, waving a fan of cash and inviting you to lose it all on dog racing. I assume that they are using Vinnie because he is associated with dog racing, that is, he's not posh enough to go horse racing.

The day they have little dog jockeys, that's the day I'll watch dog racing.

Neither dog days nor going to the dogs should be confused with dogging - though maybe going to the dogs could describe the act of leaving the house to go dogging. Dogging is not, as I thought, an updating of the simple Victorian pleasure of ratting, where a gent would pit his Jack Russel against hoards of savage Thameside rats to see who came off best (use of traps by the dog was considered unsporting).

Dogging is, apparently, when you drive to a car park and have sex with strangers. Presumably they have also arranged to go there, possibly through the internet, or dogging would be sitting in a deserted car-park thinking what a waste of an evening you've had - or furiously masturbating until point of arrest.

I assume it's called dogging because it's named after the most comfortable position for sexual intercourse in a Vauxhall. Surely it's not called this after the other things dogs get up to in cars, which appear to be shredding the back seat when bored and their owner has spent too long in Sainsbury's, or sticking their head out of the window when the car is in motion, letting their ears flap wildly and going, as much as a dog, can 'wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!'

The problem is not so much the dangerous dog as the dangerous owner. Certainly, from what I've seen, pit bulls and rotweillers tend to be owned by strutting pricks who think that a big dog will make them a big man, much in the same way that some infantile boy-racer thinks that a stick-on spoiler and a few stickers will turn his three door hatch-back from a school-run and shopping runabout into a performance car.

The other owners are of course drug dealers.

The thing that has struck me about the shaved-haired, vest wearing, underweight tossers who own these dogs is that they rarely have them on a leash, this is probably because they are too thick or poor to own one, but possibly because when 'Satan' does go ballistic, they don't want to be attached to it.

You can always tell responsible dog owners, they are the ones happily swinging a plastic bag full of dog-shit, looking for the nearest appropriate bin. Dangerous owners don't clear up after their dogs - why should they need to, as Satan has already shit in their wardrobe back home and, when discovered, eyed their owner is if he were basted in gravy and assumed a 'and what are you going to do about it?' expression.

The passing of greatness

I am now buying a daily paper. This is in part because during hospital visits over the summer I got used to doing crosswords ('superbug', 4 letters - MRSA!) and cannot bring myself to buy a super-jumbo book of puzzles and so look like a secretary. As a result, daily paper = lots more recycling but with the added bonus of being able to monitor the unrest in the world. In case your interested the current unrest level is 'lots'.

It also means you get to read obituaries.

Of course the greatest paper for obituaries is The Telegraph. This is because they specialise in military obits, usually of somebody who did something so bloody brave that you start crying when you read it. This normally involves disobeying orders, a native village, defending a hopeless position with, basically, a fruit knife and adopting some kid who would otherwise not even be a statistic. These men normally have corking nicknames - 'tiger', 'bear', swordfish' and so on. This is in amusing contrast to the rest of their names - Maj. Gen. Reginald Wilston 'Tiger' Thruttock-Buterworth, VC, DSM (bar).

Of course, this brings on feelings of shame at my own lack of heroics, and lack of medals, but most acutely that my nickname is 'cockring'.

So - and this is why this post should have a black border - we come to two passings of greatness.

The first is Peter Norman. Up to now I knew him as 'who?' and that's shamefull, so mums tell your kids - he's the white guy on the podium next to the black guys giving the black power salute at the Olympic Games. Ahhhh, now you know him. Apparently he's a lot more than that, and the story of that photograph, and especially the incident of the gloves, is a great one.

That's the problem with obits. They mark the passing, usually, of people who you really wish you had a chance to know, This is bad because good people are dying, but it's good because it means that the actions of good people are more noteworthy.

Which brings us to Tom Frame.

Tom Frame was part of my childhood and a big part of my adulthood. A true artist, he lettered the pages of the comic 2000AD. I always thought what he did was cool but when I tried to produce my own comic and letter it (sheet of acetate over the art, captions and speech bubbles on sticky paper, then cut out, then stuck on, then jesus jesus jesus it's stuck to my hand) I really had an appreciation.

Make no mistake, this guy was an artist. This was the guy that let Judge Dredd, Halo Jones, Nikolai Dante and Johnny Alpha speak.

This is the guy that made Judge Dredd say 'Gaze into the fist of Dredd!' - the greatest moment in comic history - ever.

More food faddery

When faced with a complex problem or illness there’s nothing like suggesting a quack cure - shoving a banana up your arse to cure colon cancer for instance (peel it first - you don’t want to look foolish). The purveyors of quack cures should, at least, be honest in their trade. ‘Dr’ Gillian McTeeth for instance, should start each of her ‘programmes’ where she ‘bullies’ ‘chubbos’ by rolling into town in a horse-drawn wagon, pulling up in the town square and putting on a medicine show flogging ‘McTeeths all-nachural-snakebite-liniment’, a patent cure-all for warts, coughs, lost limbs, teenage boys playing with themselves and, if you drink the stuff, sobriety.

Of course, all cures are found in nature, it’s just that drug companies spend a lot of time and money combining them into the right doses. For instance, they have to get the tiger-bollock to bear-bile to baby-penguin-beak proportions just right to make Viagra actually work (alright smart-arse, you tell me what’s in it then?).

Early man discovered that chewing willow bark could get rid of a head-ache. How the hell did they work that one out? Did some poor sod, desperate for a bit of pokey-fun, just make his wife chew on a variety of stuff until her brow unfurrowed? His research means that we now have effective pain relief and that a ‘headache’ is no longer an excuse to refuse congress. We have gone on to develop more advanced pain relief and more advanced excuses, such as ipuprofen and ‘looking at that girl all night’.

Luckily we no longer have to wander into a health food store to get healthy food - this is good news if you don’t speak Beard. You can simply go to your local supermarket, pick up an apple and admire its smooth glossiness and colour, then put it back, pick up the whizened windfall next to it bearing an ‘organic’ sticker and make your way to the check-out, secure in the knowledge that the purchase of organic food is doing you good, because it costs so much you’ve had to cut down on the booze you were going to buy. At some point in the process you may make the mistake of calculating the value of the apples you used to see lying on the ground underneath a neighbour’s tree when you were a kid. You may want to have a little weep at this point.

To cure this depression, a visit to a health food store is encouraged. This is because it’s impossible to feel depressed when you feel smug, and that’s what health food stores sell, that and bran. The folk behind the counter wear beards, beads, sandals and sweaters that have been ethically knitted by well-paid peasants. Of course people who eat in McDs also wear garments hand-stitched by peasants in the third-world, it’s just that these tend to be trainers and they tend to be put together by children in sweatshops.

A visit to a health food shop usually results in two things: being stalked by squirrels anxious to get their hands on your fruit and nut mix; and the kind of catastrophic bowel movement that is so long you have to send a postcard to friends half-way through to reassure them you are still alive, and so horrific that you have to go to a writing/dance/mime/painting workshop for the rest of the year to find a medium to describe it.

The cure for depression is straightforward. Avoid reading the sort of newspaper that is cobbled together from unchecked press-releases grabbed at random from the slush pile in the bin by the fax machine in the news room - and drink. Hardly a week goes by without a story (probably from an unchecked press-release but what the hell) about alcohol being great for us in some way. Also, it’s an excuse for having pokey-fun, rather than avoiding it.

Quiz time

Q. What's wrong with this picture?

A. that's right, the sausages are chippolatas. Chippolatas are a children's sausage, but I had some left over after providing lunch for the nephews yesterday. I tried to offset with extra chips but somehow it was not quite right. A lesson to us all, only ever use proper sausages and leave the chippolatas for the under-9s.

Obviously I ate the whole lot, I'm not turning into some sort of food-faddie vegitarian.

It's going to be another six days before I can try for the perfect Sunday breakfast again. Maybe I'll leave the chips but bring in some liver and onion to the mix. Hummmn.

Blogging - the dark side

Jesus fucking Christ - it's like watching your uncle trying to dance at a wedding. David 'tosser' Cameron has got himself a video blog. Not the sort of video blog you would expect from an Eton old boy now a tory MP, that is, nasty clips of him shoving various items manufactured by Hornby up his arse (00 scale signal box anyone?) but an informal (shirt sleeves rolled up) video blog of him explaining tory policies.

I managed to watch about 50 seconds of it, and have been frantically trying to disinfect my hard drive ever since. I am resigned to never getting rid of the memory of actually seeing the video blog excerpt (although I will up my consumption of tinned food in the hope that there's such a thing as selective Alzimers), it's a scar I'll carry with me.

Basically, what you get is Dave at the sink in his humble 18 gazillion pound London home, being pestered by his children while he tries to make his pitch.

1. Why not put the kids to bed, then go to your study and make the pitch? Why do you insist on working in what should be a family environment?

2. Why does he not scream 'shut the fuck up, daddy's working' on the fifth inturuption, or simply batter the noisesome brat with a blow of quite tremendous force?

3. Who the fuck does he think he's fooling? Video blogging was cool about six months ago and yes, youtube is conquering the planet but to make in impact the blogs have to have a certain quality, be quaint, or interesting, or topical. Not a fat fuck talking twaddle.

Finally - the opening remark - 'look out BBC and ITV, we're out to get you.' This is, I would suggest, something along the lines of 'we are fed up with our message being strained through your editorial sieve'. The trouble is, this is exactly the sort of message, delivered in exactly the sort of way, that is usually followed up with 'let me tell you the truth about black people' or 'children are sexual beings at age six and I don't think there's anything wrong with my taking the pictures I did of them' (pull back to reveal blogger speaking from cell shortly before he has the shit beaten out of him by fellow inmates for being a nonce. Now I'm not saying that David Cameron comes across like a bit of a racist pedo on his blog - I'm saying that he comes across EXACTLY like a racist pedo on his blog.

The whole thing is hysterical - artificial, dull and annoying. But it's made up my mind, this is him free of media spin - and you can see that he actually is a prick.

Rage and torrents

I now have conclusive evidence that the drivers of 4x4s or people carriers fall into two categories, arrogant or stupid.

1 October is downpour day here in the green-again county of Surrey (motto: it's green 'cos it rains a lot dumb-ass!). the thunder has rumbled all day and the clouds have boiled across the sky, big and black with hints of grey and bruise. Now and again they shake like a dog and decant.

This has resulted in the roads of the area having their own little brooks as gutters overflow, as well as pools and, I bet, the occasional ox-bow lake. It also means that people start to drive like loonies.

Or park like loonies. Obviously, those shopping in M&S in banstead must be thrilled that a designated 4x4 parking area has opened up for them. It's painted bright red and has the word 'bus stop' written on it, but this does not stop them from filling it with eight 4x4s. It did stop the bus, obviously, and meant that anyone that was infirm or had a buggy or, you know, just wanted to keep dry had to walk into the road but sod it, all that matters is that the fat, sweating, ugly and fucking fucked up fuckers in their 4x4s get their raspberry pavlovas that much quicker. I hope they fucking choke on them.

As for people movers - these are, apparently, handed out to those who cannot think. genuinely, who have a problem with reasoning. Case in point, when faced with a narrow road and a car parked in the lane the people carrier is using, with my coming in the opposite direction, does the people mover slow to a halt behind the obstruction and wait for me to pass (as more than hinted at in the Highway Code) or do they just swing out into the path of the oncoming traffic, that is, me.

Swerving, listening to R3 and humming along though I was, I still had time to see the expression of utter gormlessness on the face of the driver. this is the face of somebody called Gomer who has a metal plate in his head and has been hit by lightening so often that his nick-name is 'Rod'.

This is a truth stumbled on late in life that is disappointing - the truth is that there are people who are just too stupid to be trusted with a car. genuinely, they do not have the mental ability to pilot the damn thing at 30 miles an hour, Christ knows what happens to them when they get onto the Motorway - actually I know, they sit in the middle lane drooling and thinking that a caravan would make their happiness complete.