Abysswinksback

Their Election, Nobody's Pond

2012-01-24T09:12:00.000Z

Click to enlarge (the picture, not the egos).

Soaking Up Books, Soap And Internet

2012-01-19T13:12:00.002Z

The internet is busy at the moment with talk of SOPA and PIPA.

At first I thought this referred to a sordid sex tape featuring a much loved BBC natural history presenter and the future Queen of England’s baby sister.

But, no.

In case you are unaware of the issues, legislation is afoot to protect copyrighted material from piracy. On the face of it this sounds like a good thing and I, for one, have no wish to aid ruthless individuals prepared to kidnap innocent civilians in exchange for cash (even if their presence on the briny might have helped out a little with the Costa Concordia while that twat of a ship’s captain watched it sink). What’s at issue is the problems any such legislation will bring in its wake, and there are genuine fears that the present openness of the internet will be severely compromised.

That’s why large numbers of websites were blacked out yesterday — to protest at the catastrophic error of judgment the US would make if it committed itself to SOPANAM.

I support the protest initiative but worry how history will view it. After all, if your web site is blacked out for a day, who will know any different the following day? Your protest will be as the non-existent subjective thoughts of a functionalist’s zombie clone of yourself.

So that’s why I’ve chosen to blog with reference to the topic rather than throw a shroud over my concern. And, yes, it should have happened yesterday, but I was rubbing shoulders with the clergy and despite their insistence that we’re all going to live forever they’re absolute fuckers for being fobbed off and told to wait until tomorrow.

So here is the post you should have had — a post you might in the future be denied for reasons spurious and convoluted.

It’s about reading in the bath — specifically what kind of technology should follow in the wake of the waterproof handheld device and whether this kind of wizardry belongs in the bathroom anyway.

The problem with handhelds (and I omit from my list here the dictating genius cat — we’re talking tablets and the like) is that while they’re a great substitute for books in most respects other than odour and that zippy thing you can do with the pages, I’d never use one for reading in the bath. This is not to say I’m impossibly clumsy and possessed of a bathtime book reading history full to bursting with dropped Wars And Peaces, but if I’m going to start being clumsy in the future, I’d rather it be with a modest paperback than some product of Steve Jobs’ cerebellum twice the price of a swanky washing machine.

I’m guessing many of you are in a similar position — lying in the bath with a book, wondering how to mix and match your libraries so you have a collection of books for ease of storage and being on the go and another collection of books for soaking up the Radox with, all allied to a schedule which allows you to flit from bath to world back to bath again, and from chapter to chapter to chapter, without the need for two versions of whatever it is you’re reading.

Surely the answer lies in the bathroom equivalent of the wall-mounted HD TV — an overhead cinematic screen you can access from a rubber-bound console by the duck and loofer rack? With such technology it would be possible to luxuriate with any and all of your books without the need for duplicates and with no fear of submerging your Jane Eyres by accident.

Does this sound like a good thing?

Personally, I think not.

The one great advantage of an actual book is that it only does one thing, and when you slither between the bubbles, reading is the only deal in town (unless you’re a serial masturbator). A screen capable of displaying ebooks in the bathroom, though fine as an idea, will probably never be invented (and if it has been, won’t last long). Likely, any such device will come bundled with internet access so we can check our email between paragraphs and scrub our bottoms to the jaunty rhythms of endless Bathtime Fitness Regime Gurus. While reading may be an option here, it won’t be the only show in town — especially if you lack a blind or frosted glass and your bath is directly in front of a window. Soaking in the tub is where you go to get away from all that nonsense, surely? Those stimuli that prompt you to do things, find things out and buy stuff?

Call me a precog, but I reckon the bathroom will be the saviour of the printed book.

As for the internet — even with or without SOPA, it definitely has its place, and in the domain of soap, may that place forever remain NOWHERE.

News of Sock Monkey and Vacuum Cleaner Fiction to follow shortly...

Pontifico

2012-01-15T17:05:00.002Z

I’m undecided as to where to go with this blog right now.

Do I play it like a pontificating avatar from on high and lavish the world with sporadic and lengthy orations between battling the forces of evil and performing street magic with my halo?

Or do I opt for the shorter post, returning time and time again with easily digestible snippets like a deranged drunk graces the walls of buildings with urine?

Maybe there’s scope for a double act here with the avatar playing the straight man to the drunk’s ridiculous proclamations. Or maybe it’s the drunk who’s straight, struggling to come to terms with the outpourings of a heaven gone mad, urine or no.

It’s a tough decision.

Moleculery du Soleil

2012-01-13T15:36:00.000Z

A cluster of molecules that will form an arc of sunlight over my garden some time around June 8th has been amassing this afternoon for a rehearsal.

Its arrival has opened up a temporal worm hole just behind my shed through which half a dozen humongously-scrotumed intergalactic warriors have been peering since lunchtime, but in spite of the evident danger I’m in, I’m good with the overall summery glow about the place.

By the weekend, it’s back to lashings of rain (or so we’re told) and temperatures to shame the combined Dickensian freeze-fest of all the recently screened Scrooges and Wooges, and my To Do list has been upgraded accordingly with a multiple underpant plan.

I’m reminded that for the past two years, our bright new Januarys of Hope have come bundled with snow and ice and penis-invaginating frosts, so what a great relief it is to have a smattering of the brightness to come smatter itself over barren bough and hoppity boppity sparrow.

Checking out now in order to sunbathe, after which I may go on a rampage round my local Tesco in a revealing woolly bikini...

Jain Hair

2012-01-10T12:43:00.002Z

When things got particularly hot last summer, I popped into my local Jain Hair outlet to have my scalp cropped.

If you’ve been to Jain Hair before, you’ll know how quick they are at shifting the punters. As their strapline says: In & out in 30 seconds or we chant on your birthday and sponsor a maltreated pony.

So I’m expecting a quick zip under the Tibetan Remington when the saffron-robed manager informs me that his staff are downing tools for a twenty minute meditation. Apparently, Bono’s lawnmower has conked out and they figure he needs a little zen-style goodwill transcendentalising his way.

“But I’ll be late for work,” I say.

“He who rushes,” the manager begins, “is as a thrush among the rushes of a swamp when the North Wind blows.”

“No chance of one of the acolytes fitting me in, then?”

“Acolytes? We’re all equals round here, mate.” He bows low till his head swings between his ankles and hands me a photocopied pamphlet about the miracle of life. “Have a nice day — and don’t murder anyone.”

The philosophy of the Jain Buddhists is a simple one: life is precious and none of God’s creatures should ever be harmed. If the Jain had been in charge of Auschwitz, maybe a few more people would have made it through till 1945. I pondered this (and more) as I sat in my greenhouse among my cactus collection, breezing through the pamphlet, and when time came to move everything prickly indoors at the end of September I was minded once again to reflect on the sanctity of life.

Why?

Because the fattest of my cacti, it appeared, was now host to a colony of tiny fruit flies — tiny fruit flies that the beast in me wished to swat from existence. There’s no fruit on cacti, of course, but since it would be wrong to describe the flies as either gnats, bluebottles or craneflyesque monstrosities of wing and antenna and sting, ‘fruit flies’ it has to be — hordes of them, buzzing about like the coat buttons of leprechauns magicked into the air by O Reilleys of telekinetic vim, urging me to swat swat swat. Oddly, my hand was stilled as if a spectral tug-o-war team of hairdressing monks had lashed a panda fur rope about my wrist and yanked in unison. Once again, I heard the Jain Hair manager’s words, as clearly as if he were standing in front of me looking totally plucked.

“Have a nice day — and don’t murder anyone...”

Three months on, and the flies now inhabit my landing window. When I wake each morning, half a dozen fresh new insects ber-zoop about prickle and glass with the gadabout glee of Disney’s finest full stops from the script of Snow White tossed high like Roger McGough apostrophes. At first I allowed them to proliferate, but when Son of Whirl complained about the light being blotted out by “that cloud of darkness swirling at the top of the stairs with the menace of an Apocolypse-style abomination” I realised it was time either to defy the wishes of my favourite Buddhist hair stylists or Blue Peter a special attachment for the vacuum cleaner to suck them to a more shed-based kind of safety.

And that’s when I saw it in the 27½p shop: the Special Battery-Powered Plastic Sucky Tubey Thing For Vacuuming Spiders And Wobbies.

Technical conundrums prevent me from bringing you the conjoined buzzing harmony of the transported flies and the Tubey Thing’s “Can Do, 150%” AAA batteries, but if you imagine the contents of a sex shop plugged in to the generator used by Queen during the Live Aid gig at Wembley, maybe your ears will sing with the right kind of zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzuuuuurrrrrbbbbbb.

How many lives have you saved since the end of the Summer?

And would vacuum cleaner fiction be of interest in the absence of a bonkbuster or thriller?

Nosing Around Oxford

2012-01-06T08:52:00.002Z

Monday was a strangely Oxfordian affair.

After a visit to said historic university town, Famille Whirl sat down to watch the latest Inspector Morse spin-off, Endeavour, and a pair of pyjama bottoms emerged from the washing machine baggier and saggier than a turbo-charged slimmer’s flesh.

Oxford is a peculiar place, having generated over the centuries a kind of self-perpetuating momentum for itself. It has an abundance of history, reflected in the glass of every college window, but also a thriving sense of presence, in part thanks to the hordes of tourists lapping the place up with their pixel-grabbing photographic paraphernalia. It’s one of the few places I can think of where stripping to the waist would fail to get you noticed unless you were a rampaging horde of apocalypse-hungry zombies, such is the volume of visual interest in abundance. The fact that it boasts a branch of Carluccios is the icing on the taking of the piss.

We flounced around the streets for a while like gay and jolly 20s debutantes before seeing a few of the must see attractions. First stop was Christchurch College, simply because we had the map upside down and couldn’t pronounce Ashmolean. Or museum.

The college offers a guideless guided tour thanks to a series of strategically placed railings and strips of bunting that usher you from one place to the next like you were being goosed by a kindly spirit. There are courtyards and cloisters, water slides and bouncy castles, and (of course) college buildings by the shedload. Skirting between the tables of the college refectory, it’s hard not to be impressed by the portraits suspended from the walls — all those great men and women from student intakes past, resplendent in their wigs and ludicrous finery trying their hardest to look like Evil Editor. Actually, the paintings are almost exclusively of blokes, but that’s Oxford for you. We later discovered parts of the first Harry Potter film were shot here, along with the final scenes of Titillate My Don XIII and a documentary about the wacky antics of Slik before Midge Ure became a household name. No doubt Morse and Lewis were here too at some stage. And Prince Philip, bless the old bastard.

Round the corner from the refectory is the college chapel, a modest homunculus of Cotswold style stone with those Christmassy coloured windows you often see in churches that escaped the Blitz, the Vikings and the sales rep from Everest. Tucked away between the nooks and crannies are the tombs of courtiers and cavaliers (plus the occasional bishop of note whose ritual buggery at the hands of the mob is lovingly detailed on the accompanying 4-tablet stone placard). I was particularly taken by a casket next to the condom machine. Like many you see in English churches, it resembled an Egyptian sarcophagus, with a carving of the person entombed within resting as a lid over the box. In this case, the stony armour suggested a knight or soldier, or maybe a peasant in New Year fancy dress caught up in some melee or another. Particularly Egyptianesque was the sphinx-like absence of nose, chipped away over the years by rascally choristers with their equally rascally Oxford University tweezers. Had the sphinx been erected in England, its nose would have been replaced the moment the alien spacecraft collided with it. I’m guessing that’s what happened to the figure on the casket in question. Indeed, here’s a particularly touristy photo of me pointing up the lovingly crafted replacement nostril holder.

According to the placard on the casket, something of this guy’s facial featurectomy must have been foretold in the runes.

Nowers! What kind of a name is that?

All of which traipsing round the streets of Oxford and deductive reasoning leads me to Endeavour. It’s not often that I enjoy spin-offs, particularly when they’re spin-offs of spin-offs like Joey’s Shirt and Bubble’s Cousin Meets Horse #4 From Mister Ed, but Lewis seemed to work and so does this. Apart from the silly cameo scene in the hospital with John Thaw’s daughter, it more than held its own against the Morse legend and I hope ITV commission a full series. Sadly, there’s very little anyone can do to save my wibbly pyjama bottoms...

New Year New Danglies

2011-12-30T10:17:00.003Z

Quite how Father Time got himself involved in an annual ritual alongside a new born baby without being locked up for paedophile crimes against humanity, I have no idea.

All I know is, the old guy with the beard has taken a number of disturbing liberties under cover of the bulldozer moving all the heaps of festive chocolate from one end of my living room to the other and the sighs of relief following the departure of irritating extended family members, most notably killing my laptop and iPod and the turbo switch on the tumble dryer. Sad but true, it looks like I shall be forced to spend some of my Christmas money on replacement electrical goods rather than the full Lady Gaga transvestite makeover I had planned for the opening weeks of January.*

* As it turns out, I’d have been a few grand short of the Full Gaga even if the Father Time had failed to destroy my stuff, so maybe I was being a little optimistic. Looks like the bearded one has spared me the toss up between an Andy Murray and three and a half Ken Clarkes.

The more you think about it, the more the whole Father Time / Weird Annus Dribblis Baby arrangement seems a little far-fetched. I still have trouble with the whole Jesus and Mary thing, not to mention Brian Eno and Brian Ferry. Call me a dumbo, but I can’t see any mother figure presiding over this annual rebirth. Maybe she’s elsewhere, dropping sprogs every December 31st only to have them kidnapped and transported to a distant dimension by an old git who, for the past million zillion millennia, hasn’t once got the Philishave he put on any of his Christmas lists. It must be sad for that mother figure, shambling namelessly in the void between hope and pelvic thrust, especially if she knows about us lot, swanning around at her expense, buoyed by the bonny bounce of a bright new year.

Maybe if we all went for an Andy Murray tranny op, Father Time could be persuaded to stay away for a few years. That way, the nameless mother figure could get to spend a some time with her kids and experience the joys of a fledgling cosmos bristling with every promise of tomorrow. As for us, being stuck in limbo for a while might not be very much fun, but assuming the mantle of a grumpy Scottish stubble grower would work wonders for persuading ourselves that it really wasn’t happening to us.

So to hell with it!

The iPod can wait!

Anyone else game for a little sacrifice in order to help a nameless mother figure in another dimension? If you’re short of shekels, a single Ken Clarke might do the trick...

2011's Last Slugs

2011-12-28T14:28:00.003Z

The days between Christmas and New Year always seem to me to be something of a muddly kind of nothing.

You can’t really listen to carols any more and Shakin’ Stevens is even further off limits than he was prior to the 25th — and yet it’s not quite time to plan ahead with all seriousness and contemplate the forthcoming year.

So, as the last of the bubble ‘n’ squeak vapours blend into the whispery pre-2012 air, there’s a slug afloat on gelatin feel about the place...

Eve Eve Huzzara!

2011-12-23T15:13:00.001Z

There’s been much talk on the Twitoblogofriendotwatowtfoshutthefuckuposphere about today being “Christmas Eve Eve”, as if somehow we’ve all only just discovered that’s what it is.

Whatever you choose to call today (and I’ll settle for Friday 23rd every time), it’s pretty much the last opportunity for getting in the last of the presents and the food for all the feasts — unless you’re a deranged enough sort to be leaving everything till tomorrow, in which case, best of luck to you as you battle to surmount the human pyramid of warring consumers in the frozen veg section of Asda armed with tinsel-covered machetes handed out by the security staff...

So I’m spending the afternoon catching up on the last of the seasonal necessities, like ironing the turkey and ensuring none of the coins in the Christmas pudding are Euros. Maybe I’ll have the odd mince pie, maybe I’ll sink half a bottle of whisky and a few chocolate bars — I dunno. Today I shall lounge and flounce like a man of seasonal leisure, tying up loose ends and magicking up the spirit of Christmas before things start cracking off big time tomorrow with the arrival of Mother of Girly of Whirly’s Mobile Tomb of Misery and Destruction dead on the witching hour of twelve noon.

It only remains for me to thank my visitors old and new for what has been a pretty shitty year. Hopefully, with Gadaffi and Kim Jong-Il both gone, 2012 will bring us a better class of crazed dictator to distract us from our own stupidity in all matters social, moral and financial. If we’re especially lucky, one of them might get to be US President.

In the mean time, here’s a re-tread from the archives...

Merry Christmas linky isthmus

Chef Off

2011-12-20T10:26:00.005Z

You can’t switch on the telly at the moment without being greeted by some celebrity chef or another grinning from the screen with both hands shoved up a glazed fowl’s arse.

If it’s not Jamie Oliver spitting out details of a pukka chestnut jus recipe from between his botoxed tripe lips, its Ainsley Harriot singing the praises of gander sebacious gland oil, high on a pint and a half of Kovonia, with his giant bald head glistening beneath the studio lights like the sealed glans of a neutered giant.

As for Antony Worral Thompson’s stuffing, I can only hope that some time soon a gang of suitably unpleasant have-a-go heroes will see to it.

It’s not that I claim chapter-and-verse knowledge of all things festive and culinary, nor even that my appetite for recipes fresh and exciting has wilted in the mistletoe heat — I just wish all these celebrity chefs would bog off to a secret hideaway and cannibalize each other till only their mushroom hats remained.

Then, maybe we can have some serious telly in the run-up to Christmas, like hairstyling tips c/o Little Mix and Jeremy Clarkson drowning a hapless lesbian in a swimming pool full of his own froth...

Grandad's Special Festive Android Bonanza

2011-12-16T12:46:00.000Z

Here's a festive short story for you all, to accompany your yuletide glee as you sit around the fire burning your nuts.

There's a few f-bombs, I'm afraid — saw afraid, as it happens.

Podcast Powered By Podbean

I'm indebted to the delightful Fairyhedgehog for inspiring me to finish this one. Had it not been for her latest blog post, this story might have remained in a drawer, half-formed like a prototype for Beyonce's next pair of buttocks.

Her story is here.

Surviving An Austere Christmas

2011-12-13T12:13:00.004Z

According to all records of hope sting, most of us are now set to enjoy something of an “austere Christmas”.

This is not to say that Santa is about to bypass us all in his tempered miracle zeal, because as we all know [kid spoiler approacheth], Santa is, in fact, us. Sad but true, it’s just how it is, here at the flobbly end of 2011.

So as we all grapple with limited means to rival a chrysalis-bound butterfly beached in the frost, what can be done this year to guarantee that our stifled generosity can rise to the occasion and deliver tangible festive output fit for all the family?

Let’s start with the basics.

Tucked away in every family shed is one of these:

According to my DIY-minded friends, this chunk of workmanly kit has been deployed over the centuries to assist in the erection of more cathedrals and in-home stair lifts than most of us have had hot dinners. Now it’s time to shave our figgy puddings with it, reducing them in size to slightly smaller versions of themselves and saving up the shavings for years to come. In ten years’ time, not only will we have graced the Christmas table with nine pudding-o lites indistinguishable from their full size counterparts, but we’ll have sufficient leftover slices of figginess to create a tenth for free in 2021.

“We hear your logic, Whirl — but do you have any tips to help out families with pets?”

Of course I do. Everyone is familiar with the idea that a family pet adds value to our limited mortality, ie that having something fluffy and friendly about the place acts as a considerable distraction from the inevitability of our final and crushing demise, particularly if said fluffy and friendly pet is an elephant clad in a giant tea cosy. Further value can be added to our sense of Christmas occasion by decorating our pets as we do our trees and refrigerators. So it’s time to festoon the dachshund with a little tinsel, or grace the cat with baubles ‘pon every foot. Whatever your pet, there’s always an odd scrap of garland or tinsel at the bottom of every box of Christmas decorations that would otherwise lay idle. It would cost next to nothing to deck out your much-loved pets thusly, and if there are any scowls or yowls of complaint, you might wish to remind them of the terms of the deal, ie that without mankind to feed and water them, most household pets would die a miserable death in a cruel and heartless wilderness.

Note: For anyone with a tankful of insubstantial shiny flippetyfish, I know it’s kind of tedious, but glitter does actually superglue underwater.

“OK, what about dinner? Cranberry sauce is soooo expensive.”

Agreed, but if cuts have to be made, why not bash a hardback copy of Roget’s Thesaurus against your nose till it bleeds, and decant a few cupfuls of the red stuff into a reindeer-themed jugette? Throw a few grapes into the mixture and no-one will notice the Great Cranberry Deception, because the wine you’re serving for dinner will, of course, be Lidl’s own white cider and everyone ought to be too pissed to care. With so much lipstick about the place from kisses under the mistletoe, no-one will ever see the bruises to your face, and when the good times roll again, you can pass your crooked conk off as an act of aspirational home plastic surgery allied to a dream of meeting your favourite pop star.

“Any tips for a turkey substitute? Are there cheaper birds, maybe pigeons or sparrows?”

Forget poultry altogether. It’s time-consuming to fatten birds up and until we find a way of recycling all the beaks and toenails it’s also a massive waste of resources. Best thing to do is invest in a dozen of the cheapest frozen burgers you can lay your hands on. The breadcrumb-filled nature of most modern burgers lends itself to infinite malleability once they’re thawed, and with the right artistic wherewithal, a dozen budget burgers can be moulded into a perfectly passable headless, wingless, legless, lifeless lump of festive mock poultry. Simply sprinkle with feathers from one of Granny’s pillows and hey presto! Oiseau du Jour!

“The fairy lights are costing me a fortune in electricity! Help!”

It’s true that twinkly lights are an ambient drain on the pocket — especially for those who insist on hosting an animatronic Lapland in their back garden — so it may be time to recall the illuminatory staple of medieval times, ie the candle. As long as you keep the tree regularly moistened with sprays of water, any arrays of candles slung from it will have next to zero chance of burning down your house.

“Times are hard. We need Rudolph’s carrot for dinner. Sorry.”

It’s a shame to play the harsh one when it comes to feeding imaginary seasonal quadrupeds, I know, but for the sake of the kids there’s nothing for it but to bite the weeniest morsel off the tip and throw the rest into the pan. If the kids are at all concerned about Santa’s publicly-spirited reindeer missing out on a few treats, you could always try reasoning with them. The worldwide reindeer carrot pot is potentially a vast one, and if we all chip in a little bit, there’s no danger of malnutrition-generated antler rot. In actual fact, going with the present arrangement of personally feeding individual reindeer is a recipe for unwarranted obesity and a squandering of the world’s carrot resources.

“It simply won’t be Christmas without the new festive Cliff Richard CD of shamelessly sugary wank.”

Oh yes it will. Save your money and sing a medley of Cliff’s finest as a family while you wait for the brussels sprout fug of bum gas to dissipate. “Saviour’s Day” really comes into its own when there’s more than the usual stimulus to gag.

“Are you absolutely sure that whole budget burger mock-turkey thing will fool everyone? My parents’ folks are coming, and in addition to not being born yesterday, they were both born in the thirties when this whole austerity deal was the norm?”

The solution here is to glaze with gruel — and while they’re drying off, remind them that without your charity they could be spending Christmas in a care home.

"But what about aunties and uncles? Cousins and nephews and stuff? It’s such a lot of people to buy for!"

Fortunately, all those Somali pirates have clubbed together to offer a home kidnap service. For a modest fee you can arrange to have extended family members incarcerated for the duration of the festive season, ‘missing, presumed dead’. Upon their return in the New Year, all you need to do is inform them that your Christmas budget has already been spent on discounted burgers for responsible family members who successfully managed not to be kidnapped, and the whole present buying conundrum can be bypassed like a dream.

If anyone has any further tips, the comment trail awaits your cost-cutting suggestions.

Festive Digestive 5

2011-12-08T12:04:00.001Z

click to enlarge

Festive Digestive 4

2011-12-06T15:46:00.001Z

Festive Digestive 3

2011-12-05T12:21:00.001Z

click to enlarge

Festive Digestive 2

2011-12-04T07:15:00.001Z

click to enlarge

Festive Digestive

2011-12-03T09:35:00.001Z

click to enlarge

For John: Still Dead, Still Gone

2011-11-25T14:57:00.001Z

It seems like an age ago now, but there was a time when the Human League were the most exciting thing since Star Trek’s Lieutenant Uhura stuck a butt plug in her ear and began receiving communications from alien beings. Gone were the shambling long-haired prog-o-hippies of yore and the wailing banshee of undiluted misery who changed her name from Roberta Joan Anderson to Joni Mitchell. In their place stood brash new techno bands with haircuts like designer ladies’ handbags. Of these, the League were the finest, and their lead singer, Phil Oakey, the most evidently clutch.

I first remember hearing them in the back room of a pub called The Union, right at the start of what turned out to be a lifelong experiment with alcohol. To date, I’ve never seen so many people packed into so small a space, up to and including the celebrated circus contortionists Nicky and Nacky and their Trunk No Bigger Than A Toaster. When you rubbed shoulders with people in The Union, it was by virtue of having been squeezed through their bodies to the arm on the far side.

In the corner of the room stood a jukebox, gaudy as a gypsy caravan minus the wheels and roughly the same kind of size. From seven till eleven every Friday and Saturday night it belted out a succession of scratched 45s to the delight of the Union’s motley clientele. For 5p you could choose from a selection of records to shame an 80GB iPod (so long as you had an hour to spare braving the crush to locate it) and the lone stool beside the jukebox’s hulking magnificence was fought over until closing time by hardcore musos duelling with dodgy roll-ups.

Around this time is when John first appeared on the scene. He was much older than everyone else who frequented The Union, though how much I’d hesitate to say; when you’re sixteen, it’s still hard to figure out how old people older than yourself really are. Maybe he was forty, I don’t know. What I do recall is that his wardrobe looked like it had been dragged out of the nearest Oxfam shop (and by ‘wardrobe’ I mean his clothes, not an actual wardrobe — if he’d turned up for a pint with a wardrobe, either the jukebox or a dozen revellers would have been forced out onto the street). No sorrier a collection of scuffed and shabby clothes have I seen before or since, all thrown over his careworn frame in varying shades of brown, and when he spoke, his words were even harder to decipher than most over the boom of the jukebox on account of his broken nose. At some stage in his past he’d been involved in a fight and beaten with a crowbar. If you think of what you might look like if you’d gone a hundred rounds with Joe Frazier you’ll have some idea of the damage done to his face — especially as Joe Frazier died recently and the only way you could go any kind of distance with him now is if his corpse was strapped like a demolition ball to a very long rope and swung by an ogre at your head. Clearly, John had led a difficult life and had it not been for drunken idiots like me and my mates, I’m guessing there were very few people in his life to talk to. Aside from passing comment on the music throbbing from the jukebox and the foolishness of the punks’ fascination for all things ‘safety pin’, his words spoke only of the past: adventures and altercations he’d had with people long since gone from his life.

As we threw on our clothes to go out of a weekend, my mates and I would ponder the John Conundrum. Would he be around tonight? Sat in the corner like a beaten anachronism, ready to parley over a pint or two of mixed? Sometimes he was, sometimes he wasn’t. If his irregularity had been a matter of choice I don’t suppose he’d have been any different from people like the Eagle Boy Gang, who tended to frequent the Union in their ridiculous tartan get-up only when their special New Romantic Spazz Night had been cancelled by the local night club. When John failed to put in an appearance, it was usually because of some genuine bother, like being thrown out of his bedsit or getting arrested, all matters upon which he preferred not to dwell too much. The one time he didn’t show for weeks on end was the one time the police found him dead.

According to my mate Ash (think Jim Morrison but with leatherier trousers and cornea), John was discovered unconscious and struggling to breathe in a grubby public toilet late at night. By the time he made it to the hospital he was a goner. No-one ever found out any more. We didn’t even know his second name. Maybe we should have mounted a hormone-rich teen expedition to uncover the truth of it all, but when you’re sixteen, you’re kind of stupid that way. When you’re sixteen, there’s always some new fascination lurking behind every corner and letting go of stuff comes with the zits. John came and John went, is all, like a television program that grabs you for a few weeks and then is gone. In any case, if we’d partaken of any kind of fact finding expedition in a public toilet, most likely we’d have ended up in a sorry state too. So were we heartless for not caring, for not bothering to want to know? In some ways, probably we were.

What matters now is that John is still as dead and gone as he was in 1981, and I wonder who else remembers him now. It’s not that I wake up every morning with an image of his broken nose blurring from my pillow, or sit and meditate on his death like a morbid guru whenever I’ve no sandals to crochet.

All I know is, whenever I hear the Human League, his sorry and dishevelled form intrudes on the gaze of my mind’s eye, hauling the Union’s mighty jukebox on his back like Jesus treading his final steps with the cross.

Needless to say, neither Oakey’s handbag vocals nor the rhythm of the synths inspire me to dance in any way.

Elephantitic Dork-out Week

2011-11-16T16:36:00.001Z

If it’s possible to have elephantitis of the brain, this week I seem to have contracted elephantitis of the part of the brain responsible for making the brain as a whole function properly, the sorry effect being that most of the grey matter I normally rely on for getting from dawn till dusk successfully has been squeezed out of my ears by a bulbous lump of even greyer matter complete with floppy-abouty trunk-like appendage.

Watch as I stumble like a half-wit to erase the contents of a backup hard drive only to accidentally wipe from all existence the contents of my Main Data Drive!

And is that a dinky 8GB flash memory stick I see before me — or merely the void where once it sat upon my desk until I mislaid the fucker?

Let’s celebrate with a curry so badly burned that the pan in which it was cooked is now capable of shielding me from radiation thanks to the blackened ex-korma carapace I figured was going to eat for tea until I dorked out like an uberdork handing out his dork essence from on high!

Or what about that query letter to an agent whose name I managed to transform into nothing even remotely like her actual name — and then mis-spelled my own?

Girly of Whirly’s favourite dinky top? Now an unrecognisable shade of bleugh thanks to being tossed in the washing machine with a load of my socks!

And it’s only Wednesday.

My only consolation is that the trunk I mentioned came in really handy for cleaning the bath. Given the finite number of walls in my bathroom (the standard cube-formed six) there are a surprising number of nooks and crannies practically unreachable without having been born a gibbon. You can say what you like about the supremacy of Mr Muscle, but when it comes to getting stains and smears off difficult-to-reach surfaces there’s nothing to beat a prehensile proboscis the size of Nigerian Viagra salesman’s cock.

Hoping to be back later in the week with a post about 80s music. If I don’t make it, you’ll just have to assume I’ve accidentally poisoned myself or dashed blindly in front of a firing squad...

My Caprino Mind Warp

2011-11-13T15:53:00.001Z

It’s over two weeks since my last post and I’m just checking in to assure everyone that I haven’t been murdered, abducted by aliens or buggered by psi-goats.

In addition, I also haven’t been...

* Commanded by the Greek army to produce black market Feta cheese.

* Snorkelling, with or without skimpy trunks.

* Lashed to the back of a tired 70s comedian for a celebrity quiz show lampooning the stupidity of Joe Public.

* Undergoing surgery in order to become Julie Whirl.

* Rubbing grannies with olive oil and butter to help them out with their aches and pains.

* Buggered by psi-goats and robbed of my short-term memory.

I mention this because there are flutters of inconsistency breaking out across the blogosphere as people wind down or close their blogs in order to tweet, befriend and troll. In my case, it’s just been a busy fortnight, is all, and rather than post details of things I never had time to do, or all the ponk I somehow became embroiled in, I’ve run with the whole psi-goat thing because, again, it never actually happened.

It’s over two weeks since my last post and I’m just checking in to assure everyone that I haven’t been murdered, abducted by aliens or buggered by psi-goats...

My I Ching Venetian Blind

2011-10-28T11:58:00.000+01:00

The sun continues to beam unusually brightly for October, and as I sit, tucked up snug inside my sheepskin boiler suit, I feel aglow with the very best of the world’s radiance.

My only complaint is that the glare — reflected from every surface of my study, including the sheep’s eyeballs — makes typing at my laptop almost impossible and my descent into Typo Central as inevitable as the shrieking of hapless angels kidnapped by demons and thrust into the bowels of Hdaes.

Normally, of course, I’d draw the curtains and throw a necessary shroud over my workspace, but since Girly of Whirly has taken them down to run up into a ball gown, I’ve had to crack out the I Ching venitian blind from the attic, where it has resided for the past twenty-five years alongside boxes of clutter and old bicycles — and the remains of some woman who claimed to be a long-lost aunt who I was (sadly) forced to club to death after an altercation.

I originally purchased the blind in 1985 when uncertainty about my future had reached fever pitch. The I Ching, as you’re probably aware, is a kind of divination device you can use in the absence of being bossed about the place by a mad dictator or having any clue about what to do with your gift of free will. Rendered in venetian blind form, it can also serve as a handy means of moderating the degree of light available to rooms (and, in my case, partial concealment for an attic corpse).

The idea is very simple. Every time you adjust the slats, one of the sixty-four I Ching hexagrams is displayed at random. For tasteless design buffs, such blinds are a great addition to living rooms bursting with crap, but to seekers of the truth such as I was in 1985, they’re perfect for posing philosophical conundrums while dealing with the realities of night and day.

It’s up now, and I can more or less see to type. A gentle breeze blows from the open window, causing the blind's plastic slats to chitter like the legs of distant beetles, and as I sit, wrestling with the sub-plot of a spurious story, I’m minded to check in to an I Ching divination website to seek counsel about what to have later for lunch.

First, I must formulate a question, some item of purest ponderousness upon which the oracle can “make like a sage”.

And the question I choose is: Should I finish off the curry from last night or make a fresh cheese and tomato sandwich?

A hexagram appears on the slats, tugged into being by the pull cord which I now see has a withered ear dangling from it.

According to easternwizzdomRus.com, this is hexagram 49. Named ‘KO’, possibly after one of the Teletubbies’ parents, it’s composed of two parts, namely ‘The Joyous’ and ‘The Clinging’, and embodies the idea of moulting or shedding. According to Chin Chin Wee (who runs this particular site from the privacy of his weirdo bandana), the idea here is that just as animals’ pelts and religious and political movements come and go with the seasons, so it is with the subject matter of my question. More specifically, Wee says,

Fire in the lake: the image of REVOLUTION
Thus the superior man
Sets the calendar in order
And makes the seasons clear.

In terms of imagery, this makes some kind of sense. If there were ever a fire in the lake here at Whirl Towers, it would scare the bejesus out of half the neighbourhood in a way guaranteed to make heads revolve, and if the cyclic changes Wee describes are inevitable, it makes sense to have a timetable for predicting their comings and goings to which one can refer.

But what does this mean for my lunch?

My curry, though more revolutionary than a cheese and tomato sandwich in terms of spiciness and potential for inducing gastric tornadoes, is nonetheless an old curry — ‘yesterday’s pelt’, if you like.

Conversely, my cheese and tomato sandwich is the more revolutionary of the two by virtue of the simple fact that I haven’t made it yet. The cheese remains unsliced, the tomato unmachetied, and nothing short of a revolution of matter is required to change this. Plus, being from Belgium, the cheese has a 'pelt' of mould.

So I’ve decided to eat both.

I shall reheat the curry and dip my sandwich into it naan-style, cross-legged in my study chair like an eastern potentate, as the shadow of KO plays upon my sheepskin. Philosophically speaking, it’s the worst kind of cop-out, but I’m an unrepentant foodie and I don’t care.

Feel free to check in to the comments trail with your Friday lunchtime treat, especially if you decide to consult the oracle about it first.

Posing For Family Photos

2011-10-24T11:36:00.002+01:00

I’m no great fan of ‘the Family Photo’.

This is not to say that my hard drive isn’t bursting with pixel after pixel of Son of Whirl gurning for England or Girly of Whirly lolloping from exotic location to exotic location in a selection of dazzling bikinis — if truth be told, I’ve snapped such a colossal volume of fam-friendly bobbins with my camera over the years I could bore most immortals with the resultant slide shows.

No, the sort of family photos I refrain from applauding are those taken by professional photographers. As I walk Geoff’s ghost round my neighbourhood, shadowy lounge windows trumpet glimmers of these obscenities from mantlepiece, dresser and display, and it’s all I can do to draw my cowl over my eyes for fear of being haunted in my sleep by some vile image of Mum and the Kids and Grandad and Barney the Dog and the urn containing Jerry the Terrapin’s remains. Grinning faces, staring out through the whipped cheese of their own vapidity against a backdrop of faux reality and lovely jumpers. Arghhh! If my skin weren’t so tightly bound to my body, these kinds of images would almost certainly creep it the heck off my bones.

So imagine my delight this Saturday when Mother of Girly of Whirly turned one thousand and dragged our entire extended family to a professional studio for a professional shoot with a professional photographer whose name out-pretenced the most fluffily exotic of Nigella Lawson kinky dinky fairy cake recipes.

To be fair, it all kicked off sensibly enough: thirteen people, all more or less related to one another, arranged like a smartly dressed football team, smiling their sibling rivalries into oblivion.

Then came the wriggling and writhing around on the floor.

Gone are the days of sitting on chairs, it seems, or even leaning nonchalantly against the wall with the pensive glee of underwear models. These days, you get to lie prone on the floor as grandkid after grandkid piles onto your back in a human pyramid of visually appealing suffering. We had Mother of Girly of Whirly snapped in mid-air as strapping sons gave her a leg and a wing beside a huge potted plant; babies hung from Tarzan-style vines over heaps of mothers dressed as Roman goddesses playing their offspring, pendulum-style, with bare feet; and finally, a kind of trapeze act involving too many somersaults and a mural of the Niagara Falls. Apparently, this new approach to family photography is good for “capturing people’s personalities”, but until we see the final images of fear, incredulity and shame, I don’t suppose we’ll know how accurately represented we were as a miserable bunch of buggers.

Whatever the outcome, it was a lot of hard work for an inch square hologram branded onto bleached dolphin fin flesh bound in a frame of purest wicker, which is what Mother of Girly of Whirly has chosen to hang over the downstairs loo. Sure, the fridge magnets were £500 cheaper, but seeing as it was such a special day for her it would have been foolish not to go the distance.

Hopefully, that’s me done now on the whole family photo thing until Son of Whirl is twenty-one and hitched to a girl with a face like a horse...

Legs? I Never Mentioned Legs!

2011-10-17T12:12:00.002+01:00

Regular visitors may remember a post I ran a while ago about Victoria Coren — specifically her skills as a consummate turner.

Since that time, I have noticed (c/o my tracker) that random visits to this site relating to ‘victoria coren legs’ now outnumber any references to ‘Noddy Holder’s Cock’ and ‘Medical Students & Leather-clad Sub-dom Sex Slaves’ by about 2:1.

I can quite understand why someone might want to type ‘cock holder’ into their browser and how such a search could lead them to me via the miracle that is cybertranslocutery flammery. As for medical students and the realm of the sub-domly, the two go together like ‘chalk and cheese’ and ‘black and white’ at a Things That Don’t Go Together festival.

But ‘victoria coren legs’? What kind of search is that?

I have no doubt that Victoria Coren has perfectly interesting legs and less doubt still that there are plenty of people out there who would like to see more of them. Why they’re ending up here is beyond me (the random visitors, not Ms Coren’s legs). My original post doesn’t mention legs at all, either dangling from said quiz host and poker whizz’s torso — or anyone else’s.*

*OK, so there’s knees and bottoms — but nothing that would get you here via ‘legs’.

So let me clear things up about the whole Victoria Coren thing. I stand by everything I said in that original post (apart, perhaps, from changing my stance towards people in gorilla suits), ie that Victoria Coren is the best Turner To Facer in the quiz hostess business. And that’s all. Matters concerning her legs are nothing to do with me and as far as the whole turning thing goes it wouldn’t make the slightest difference what kind of legs she had — or even if she was an amputee.

If you’re here because you’ve just typed ‘victoria coren legs’ into your browser, then BUTT OUT, LOSER — this is a serious writing blog.

Naked Tootsie Un-Nirvana

2011-10-15T09:53:00.003+01:00

Looks like my slippers have finally had it.

By ‘it’ I don’t mean “sex with a giant interstellar hippopotomoid” (though from the visual clues, this wouldn’t be too much of an inaccurate assessment); what I’m referring to is an ‘it’ in terms of functional life as a pair of slippers. That, dear friends, is what they’ve had.

One slipper, it’s true, could solo on, like a Wise without a Morecambe, a Kim without a Mel, the concept of the number 5 with one less plastic Jackson. Its sole, unlike that of its partner, has not prised free from the faux faux suede in a totally unmendable way, and I could conceivably hop around the place in it with my other foot tucked snugly in a blanket or tea cosy. But this would be like David Beckham continuing to play football for B and C teams until he’s forty-five. Plus, I don’t hop too well these days, even when roused to anger by the thought of having to shell out hard-earned cash on a new pair of dinky foot muffs.

So what am I to do with my single slipper? It’s a finite universe after all, and Hollywood has already burned off 5% of it beefing up Schwarzenegger’s pecs for the Terminator movies. It would be useless as a mantlepiece ornament, and no use as a burglar deterrent to sit alongside the chainsaw in the hallway, and even if I could fit it with motorized wheels, I no longer have an Action Man to sit inside it.

For now, I’m going to hang it on a hook beside my computer, where it can remain like a sleeping bat until such time as I need to “beat myself up” about something. When next I lose my wallet in the supermarket or find myself scammed into airmailing my family to some hardcore Nigerian mak your cock like that of a snake merchant, I’ll take my slipper down from its hook and thrash myself repeatedly about the torso with it.

The knackered slipper, I’ve sent to my local. The Dog and Wrestler has just been taken over by a couple from County Tyrone after years of neglect, and as part of its refurb, now boasts a menu featuring the resurrected 70s favourite, Chicken & Chips in a basket. Last time I was in they were out of baskets after a rugby lads’ stag night went horribly out of control, so I figure they could use some help.

Weekend Gruelling

2011-10-11T15:49:00.004+01:00

In these harsh economic times it’s more of a treat than usual to send out for a take-away.

Nonetheless, on Saturday night, Girly of Whirly and I counted up our shekels and plumped for a modest Chinese feed to cheer ourselves up while we pondered the prospect of global financial meltdown.

Our local Chinese take-away is much like any other — there are fish, a selection of pretty young girls in dinky hats, and the usual array of newspapers and magazines from 1988. The cuisine is far from Ken Hom, but you get a nice enough meal for under fifteen quid without having to buy in a ton of chips or a pizza with every topping but the kitchen sink.

What I hadn’t expected when I turned up on my unicycle was for the Golden Palace to have closed down. Even more surprising was that it had been replaced by a branch of Gruel R Us.

Harsh economic times, indeed.

As I pondered the menu in the window, it seemed to me that Gruel R Us was definitely positioning itself just below the very bottom of the market. Fifteen quid would buy you everything on the Chef’s Specials section and most things were forty to seventy-five pence. But what to do? With Girly of Whirly ironing the cutlery back home and the nearest alternative being Big Bob Bumcrack’s Burga Bar it was either a case of cycling home empty handed or taking a risk on a form of cuisine fit for the workhouse.

Call me an optimist, but I bustled past the tramps huddled in the doorway and took out a fiver like Dirty Harry unpacking a Magnum.

“What yer want?” said the bloke at the counter.

I studied the cauldron, the ladle. “I suppose it’s gruel isn’t it?”

“Or fritters,” the bloke replied curtly. There seemed no need to ask what was in the fritters — or whether the bloke’s name was Terry Jones. All I needed to figure out was what flavour to go for, and whether I wanted it pouring into an empty pop bottle or a rusty oil can.

While I cogitated, the bloke spoke again. “Chicken?”

“Actually, that would be very nice, thank you.”

He shook his head. “What I meant was, you look scared shitless. It ain’t poisonous you know. Ask any of the regulars outside.”

I turned to the pallid faces pressed up against the glass by trails of snot. “So is there any chicken?”

“Not tonight, no. All we’ve got left is Plain.”

Girly of Whirly’s face flashed before me, a wash of intolerance and rage. The longer I took to cycle home with something the more I risked being poisoned in my sleep in the run-up to Christmas.

“What’s in the Plain?”

“Fuck all. That’s why it’s called ‘Plain’.”

“OK. How much?”

“55p a pint,” said the bloke. “But I’ll knock you 5p off if you’ve got your own bucket.”

A meek smile played my lips like the last twitches of an electrocuted stunt man. “Sorry. My son’s nicked the bucket for his school history project.”

There’s always a sense of anticipation whenever a feast-to-be is being prepared, but as the bloke sloshed my dinner into a pair of worn wellies I couldn’t help feeling moderately sick. Fortunately, I didn’t spew up. He’d only have mugged me for trying to set myself up in competition.

“One ten.” Such courteous gruffness.

“Thanks,” I said, and scurried outside to attach the wellies to my paniers.

When I got home, Girly of Whirly was moderately incandescent. “Where the hell have you been?”

I flopped the wellies onto the dining table. “You know how it is with fine dining. The more exquisite the ingredients, the harder they are to source.”

Her nostrils flapped shut like spasming ani. “I said noodles, not dragon bowels.”

Treat clearly shot to pieces, we raided the larder for tinned tomatoes and pasta and rustled them up with a few chillies. It wasn’t exactly haute cuisine but it did have the advantage over the gruel of ensuring that our stomachs didn’t suffer a horrible demise. In any case, a few of the patio slabs had worked loose over the summer and we were fresh out of concrete.

I suspect there’s more of this sort of thing to come, with bathtubs taking the place of council swimming pools and donkey-drawn charabancs replacing buses and trains.

So — how was your Saturday night?

Baby Slugs

2011-10-04T11:21:00.003+01:00

In spite of the unusually hot weather here in the UK it’s nonetheless the very beginning of Autumn. The leaves are browning, the witches are polishing their balls in preparation for Hallowe’en — and my kitchen is awash with baby slugs.

I have no idea how this happens, or why it only happens at this particular time of year, but every morning since last Friday, I’ve risen to discover slugs by the half a half a dozen slithering their way along my supposedly gastropod-unfriendly lino. In the dawn’s virgin light, it’s possible to see their silvery trails weaving between the chair legs, under the fridge and partially up the wall via numerous treacherous skirting boards. I don’t know whether they’re racing, idling around or simply acting on some genetic predisposition to wazz me off big time but there’s only one thing for it once I’ve spotted them, and in the absence of an M&S Slug Getter Upper (similar in function to the eco-friendly Wasp Leash for those pesky bobbers about a-window), I bundle them into a sheet of kitchen roll and toss them in the wormery.

Today, there were four such slimy off-wazzers, and I still can’t make my mind up whether they were a quartet, a pair of duos or a trio and a solo artiste — or four independently awkward mucusy entrepreneurs. To be honest, at 6.30 in the morning it’s the kind of speculation I can do without.

As ever, once they were out of the way I settled in front of the TV with a plate of muffins to catch some early morning drivel — interestingly, today, an interview with a maths professor who has devised an equation for tracking the relationship between the width of David Cameron’s mouth and the weight of his cheeks in preparation for the PM’s inevitable evolution into a curmudgeonly old fat man — and that’s when I noticed Numero Funf winding its way over the carpet towards the front door.

At first, I thought it was trying to escape. It’s what you’d do when you’re an illegal immigrant and the cops have rumbled your mates: make a beeline back to the border. Tossing my muffins aside, I leapt up to confront it, annoyed to be witnessing its rubbery foulness as I chomped my breakfast into a similarly textured mush. That’s when I saw how far it had travelled, this tiny slug no bigger than a sliver of grated cheese (albeit brown cheese). My carpet is no Axminster, but it’s got quite a pile on it. To this slug, each protrusion of twilled wool must have been like a thick, fuzzy spear. I couldn’t tell which direction it had taken because the spears were clearly so absorbent they’d soaked up the silveryness of its trail. Whichever way it had come, it must have travelled at least ten feet, all the time having its limited supplies of mobility-enhancing mucus sucked from under it. So how come it hadn’t shrivelled to a twiggy husk? And why didn’t it just stop and wait for the gastropod emergency services? As I hovered over it, watching it battle on, with its wibbly bits swaying from side to side, it seemed to me that here was a very determined creature indeed (in the sense that a slug can be determined as we humans understand the term). Maybe I’m Disneyfying the little ole thing, but — my — what a battler this guy was. Could this be The Little Engine That Could for the Noughties? Hugo the Litter Baby Slug? Look, toddlers all, how his indefatigable spirit and pluck drives him on in the face of all obstacles, how he will grow to triumph in all endeavours as a well-rounded and courageous adult! Marvel at his vim, his spunk! Cheer as he battles the forces of evil with his trusty sidekick, Weirdneck the Ant!

For a moment I was away with the children’s book fairies, and had even begun designing merchandise to accompany the series — like Hugo wristwatch straps and salt shakers — when Drivel TV reminded me of the time.

So I bundled Hugo onto an egg spoon, out into the garden, and strode from my house into the arid nightmare world of late 2011 England, emboldened as a knight of the realm inspired by the slimiest of will o the wisps.

My Slasher Zombie Adventure

2011-09-29T07:06:00.002+01:00

On my travels about the four Kingdoms of the Orb I normally pack a few tissues in my back pocket for use in nasal emergencies. During the hay fever season there’s often a bulge in my trousers the size of a small Linford and people have been known to stop in the street, wondering if my pelvis has rotated a hundred and eighty degrees about the base of my spine (though they usually get what’s happening when they see my feet — and I sneeze).

Yesterday I was devoid of such mucus-busting luxuries. And yesterday, I had a killer nosebleed.

Stranded, half a mile from the train station (and tissue-vending shops), I began oozing blood like the leader of a horror zombie tribe, splashing droplets onto the pavement and spidery trails all over my fingers. Nothing I did could stop the flow. Very quickly, I realised it was Goodbye Fleece Time as I pinched the fluffy blue wuffiness of its fabric about my nostrils. “It will rinse out in the bath,” I thought, “as long as I make it home having not been drained of all fluid.”

But still the blood came, still it oozed, backing up against the top of my throat till I could hardly breathe. Every hundred yards I had to remove my fleecy bung in order to release the pressure. Sadly this also meant releasing a parabola of scarlet to shame the Black Knight scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

I suppose I should have knocked on someone’s door and asked to use a few sheets of kitchen roll — but there’s something about looking like you’ve just been in a life-and-death battle with a crazed Rottweiler that kind of kills the idea stone dead.

So I shambled on like a slasher movie victim (albeit without the eerie music).

Now, it isn’t every day you find a pair of white socks lying on the pavement, but I’m glad to say that yesterday, I did. It was a hot day for September — 27 degrees so we’re told — and I figured that maybe some svelte fitness freak had stripped them off during a run to cool herself down. Whatever the reason for them being there, I whipped them from the tarmac and bunged the least smelly up my right nostril, concluding that pride and emergencies share a mutual exclusivity along the lines of Little & Large and humour. Sadly the torrent-stemming effect turned out to be much the same as for my fleece, but at least I wasn’t ruining my own clothing.

And that’s when I encountered my first passer-by: a girl of nineteen or twenty (and possibly a student returning after the summer break).

My first thought was — are these her socks?, so I stared hard at her feet for a couple of seconds as my mind span with get-out clauses along the lines of hey look, I’ve found them — but then I got bitten by a horse.

My mistake here was to forget the golden rule of EYE CONTACT. Maybe if I’d thrown her a friendly smile, she might have wondered if my blood-drenched form indicated the presence nearby of a film crew, prompting her to clamber from her bike and volunteer herself as the victim of a zombie nibbling.

As it was, her startled eyes fell upon what was clearly the weirdo neighbourhood psycho killer, sniffing the foot fetish sock of his previous victim and hungry for the legwear of his next.

Her response was immediate, knee-jerk. Without pausing to gasp, she pedalled past me furiously, wailing, “aaaargh! Monster! Woman killer!”

Call me a quick learner, but that’s the last time I’m shoving a pair of women’s socks up my nostrils, prom.

Small World Stars

2011-09-21T06:40:00.003+01:00

Is it me, or is a nasty screw being turned increasingly on our affairs?

I ask this question in the wake of news released this week that caning in schools is being mooted as a potential solution for dealing with unruly school kids, not just by the usual suspects with fond memories of how “birching never did me any harm”, but also (alarmingly) by increasing numbers of parents.

My stand on this is a simple one, namely that discipline based on fear is no kind of discipline at all. I’m long enough in the tooth to recall the cane being used at a few of my earlier schools and it seemed to me to offer no deterrent whatsoever — my friends and I still got beaten up and had our bikes stolen, and at least one of the kids responsible went on to murder a three year-old girl in cold blood. In that sense, the end of corporal punishment made no difference to me: I was never on the receiving end of the cane and never behaved in such a way as to fear its potential lash.

What disturbs me about all this now is my own naivety. I had always presumed that the abolition of corporal punishment in schools was a done deal, a necessary step in the advancement of human wisdom that would never be overturned unless the planet was invaded by space Vikings with a penchant for pliant wood. Like George Michael’s appeal to teenage girls after he put on weight and started crashing cars, the whole thing looked like a goner from the 70s onwards. But of course, the human race has a proud history of being a bunch of grubby little shits and I suppose it was only a matter of time before all that shittiness resurfaced, masquerading as “common sense”.

Where this leaves us now is open to question. My hope is that the punitive resurgence of which this whole caning thing is but one aspect is yet another spectre raised whose phantom spooking won’t make it to the rattling objects stage. On the other hand, five years down the line, we may all be party to parliamentary debates about the differences in degree to which children of varying ages may be lawfully chastised: raps on knuckles for the over 12s and light slaps for the foundation year, perhaps? Whatever happens, the dial is evidently flickering on this one (and others like it), and its new location on the scale is as yet unfixed. There’s still time to look at what we currently have and ask searching questions about its value. An overly lax and tolerant approach which is fuelling a national demise? Or reason in spite of our beastliest instincts?

I mention this because my novel (details in menu bar) is set against a softly pre-dystopian background which is registered as normal on the dial by all the main characters and world inhabitants. Quietly, I ask: What is ‘normal’ and how do we decide? There are no armed police enforcing the laws of a draconian government nor any kind or perceived oppression, yet in the version of England I present, the dials have been fixed in place for so long that no-one has the faintest recollection of where zero is. Acts of barbarism that you and I would find abhorrent are everyday events in this world of the numbed, and grubbiness hovers in the background of the plot, ever present and taken as read, like the low, incessant rumble in Eraserhead.

In one scene, my protagonist stumbles into a crowded market place on his way across town looking for romance. As he pushes his way past a crush of bodies outside a glitzy TV showroom, he finds himself party to a weekly social event taking place across the nation. Thursday night is National Execution Night — and this week, some hapless female from the underclass is being strung up from the gallows. Gangs of lads await the spectacle with their fags and lagers, businessmen discuss proceedings on their mobiles, and housewives squeeze their buggies to the front of the mob: it’s what you do. When I wrote the scene I had the intention of making things as impossibly grisly as I could — “turning up the dial to 11" if you like. So in addition to the to the central spectacle of someone being hung or electrocuted on live TV, there are X Factor elements and sprinkles of game show pizazz to jolly along the vengeful bloodlust. In my version of post-millennial England, you, dear viewer, can pledge cash to raise the stakes and vote for the manner of death, content in the knowledge that your hard-earned money will be used to help the needy. After all, you can recoup the lot by betting on how long the victims manage to string it all out — along with a range of other Double Yer Money variables. As the heartbeat and breathing stats flash from the HD over your fireplace like cartoon KERZONKs and KAPOWs, how pleasing it is to know your vote came top of the heap this week. Dirty chav stole money from a pensioner and now she’s getting her come-uppance: your come-uppance. So sit back and watch your quid being well spent. Look! A little Downs boy is initiating the proceedings. Officials point him to a lever and encourage him to pull — but bless his little heart, he needs some help. From the split screen, the victim’s brat of a kid wails into the night as her mum spins and kicks from the rope. The commentator makes a joke about women footballers and bemoans the “waste of a nice pair”. Then the body is cut down from the gallows. The Downs boy makes his way to the super sparkly lever as the crowd chants Go Spacker Go. Three. Two. One. And the hounds are released from their traps.

It’s still as much of an outlandish nightmare scene as when I wrote it in 2008 — only it kind of isn’t. Odd though it seems to me, the dial on reality is notching closer to that of the spoof world of my imaginings. Of course we’re not about to hang people in front of their kids on live TV as a way of fixing Buggered Britannia, but as a society we were once told didn’t exist, we do seem to be developing something of a hunger for a return to beating, shaming and incarcerating ourselves out of harm’s way.

Hoover The Now With Your Brain

2011-09-15T06:16:00.004+01:00

We’re barely into September and already the first crops of plastic pumpkins and ghoulie masks are making their way onto supermarket shelves. Back in August, I even saw an advert prompting one and all to BOOK YOUR CHRISTMAS MEAL emblazoned in a shop window on a 20' x 10' muralette. Thankfully, they only meant Christmas this year.

Why this urge to get things out of the way as quickly as possible? To prepare? To take the longest possible run-up?

What’s the problem with it just being now?

Maybe our preoccupation with warp driving out of the present is simply a way of fending off the oblivion merchants who insist on playing down the future. With a winter of strikes looming and the prospect of Feta cheese disappearing off the menu as the Greeks scour their economically barren landscape for a new currency, it’s like we’re gazing into a negatively charged crystal ball with positively charged eyes. No wonder we’re all going goggle-eyed about what’s immediately in front of us.

Staying focussed on the whispery business of our lives as they happen is by no means straightforward. Our senses bombard us with information all of the time and unless we gouge our eyes out with spoons, stuff our ears with cotton wool, place pegs over our noses, stick our tongues to the roof of our mouths, and excise all appreciation of the tangible (up to and including which way up is), being in the here and now is kind of the default setting for most of us. Trying to be here or get here is pointless because we already are. So why do we bother?

Maybe Buddha had it right when he said all those deep and meaningful things about serenity and not sticking your willy in a food processor (and if it wasn’t him, it was Batman — but you get the point).

I mention this because I’m now sitting cross-legged on a product I hope to roll out across the UK with the backing of at least one Dragon (though preferably not Duncan Bannatyne on account of the death threats and the terrier semen hair lacquer).

My patented Buddy Bag (tm) will soothe, relax and inspire like no other Buddha-festooned bean bag before it, transporting you to the eternal present on its abundance of pink vinyl.

As you lay spreadeagled upon it, mindful of its inner polystyrene ‘beans’ and their unique arrangement within the cosmos from Buddy Session (tm) to Buddy Session (tm), the enriching energy of NOW will flow within you (unless you have the wind or a salesman calls).

The first hundred Buddy Bags (tm) sold will come bundled with a CD of myself chanting while yogic flying atop it. Mainly, it’s rhyming koans and haikus but I’ve also thrown in a few football songs, some Amy, and a ten minute recording of myself brushing my teeth which is gently relaxing — like the waves on a distant shore slapping against a beached whale’s corpse.

Any takers? If you’re quick, I might also throw in the world’s most accurate wristwatch.

The Gnats Of Irritation Invade My Brachial Plexus

2011-09-09T16:22:00.008+01:00

For the whole of this morning my hands have been thrashing and twitching like the novelty Rose Pouchong tea I’ve taken to drinking recently has been laced by the pouchongers of China (or possibly Huddersfield) with some kind of Whirl-destroying nerve agent.

Any sentences I’ve typed ended up like thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis.

Or l i ke th i s .

When I came to drink my second cup round about half past eleven I was almost afraid to boil the kettle just in case I scalded the flesh from my body.

Then it dawned on me: this isn’t a weird kind of shakiness resulting from the onset of infusion poisoning — it’s because I haven’t posted on my blog for nearly four days and my fingers are itching for something to do other than churn out work-related crap.

So I cleared my desk immediately with a wild swoop of my arms (after several missed attempts karate chopping the wall like some fitting martial arts artiste) and sat down to set to with gung ho.*

* Not a martial artiste, btw — it’s just a turn of phrase. In any case, I never sit down to write in the same room as anyone capable of separating my head from my neck with the merest flick of their tongue.

That’s when I realised I had sod all to write about.

No prog rock lookalikes in my neighbourhood have been brutally assaulted recently, nor has Mr Do Something done something all over my life; Stoat no longer plays for Stilton, and if you think for one minute I toyed with dressing up in a kilt again just because Obama’s ratings are going through the roof of the Abyss, then you’ve got more things coming to you than a tambourine man with a red flag at the Pamplona bull run (and, yes — I nearly wrote ‘pavlova’ there).

Hmmmph. Conundrum

All I’ll say is that the shaking has stopped for the time being. Knowing my luck, I’ll be inspired to make a cocktail later this afternoon from a selection of exotic fruit juices and will no longer be able to summon any shakeability.

So — how was your Friday?

What Good Do You Imagine You're Doing, You Fools?

2011-09-05T12:07:00.004+01:00

The problem with taking an early morning constitutional at the moment is that lots of other people are at it, most of them sporty types.

I’d love nothing more than to meander through a woodland glade at crack of dawn, alone with only my serenest thoughts and wisps of elves and unicorns billowing through the bracken — possibly in my cape.

What I can’t be doing with is fitness enthusiasts blasting their salty pheromones into the atmosphere as they stomp past, oblivious to the beauty of their surroundings.

Muscular duos of sinew-pumping, lycra-clad thrustoiditude, I say unto you: fuck off to the bloody gym so I can dream up some decent fiction alongside the ancient oaks, the spirits of woodelande beings and the occasional festooniment of the ridiculous.

Ditto Mrs Shouldn’t Be Walking Let Alone Running, clad in her bombardment of Mad Lizzie tracksuit colours! It’s one thing to jump out of the way for burly lads whose eyes are so fixed on some implausible metabolic horizon that they would willingly tramp into oblivion all other sentient beings, but quite another to have to be prepared to catch, and then resuscitate, some poor deluded old fool on the offchance that she might die, suddenly and violently, like a lawnmower engine fitted to a space rocket fired up to fly to Jupiter in under a fortnight.

Terra firma shuddered this morning, like the San Andreas fault had relocated to downtown Midlandio-sur-Mer, and instead of the sonorous breathing of imaginary dragons, all I heard was the puffing and panting of people who obviously haven’t discovered the fitness benefits of climbing up and down their own stairs a hundred times. That, my imbecile irritati, is the most energetic thing you can do this side of holding your own breath at the very bottom of the Marianas Trench for half an hour — so why don’t you all bloody well go and do that instead of pissing me off with your ludicrous displays of ‘fitness’?

Playing Nat King Cole On Your Own Face

2011-09-02T09:57:00.005+01:00

For part of my holiday reading this year I chose Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku.*

* I also ran my eyes over a fair few restaurant menus (though never in bed for fear of prompting langoustine-riddled nightmares).

The premise of the book is that there is going to be a future — a future that will be happening soon.

In the spirit of Jules Verne, Kaku has taken his insider knowledge of the latest scientific breakthroughs and mapped out what the possibilities for the coming century might be if they work out.

Electric cars, magnet-powered telekinesis, morphing bras and mankinis: it’s all in there.

Some of the possibilities (like space tourism) seem perfectly plausible and are already happening in fledgling forms, and Kaku’s analysis of the demise of ever-increasing Silicon chip computer power seems sound. However, my concerns were prompted by the number of times Kaku referred to Star Trek, specifically in that “look how a lot of gooky sci-fi ideas from said hit TV show have evolved into science fact” kind of a way, and I’m reminded of all the hopeless inventions and innovations flagged up on Tomorrow’s World which died a horrible mid-70s death.*

* Like the Brian May detector box which kept going off in Judith Hann’s hand even though Queen were thousands of miles away live on stage in Detroit.

I have no wish to claim Kaku isn’t an expert (though if he does turn out to be a deluded fraud, there’s definitely a place for him in a future prequel series of Dr Who playing the first incarnation of everyone’s favourite time lord), but my experience of predictions of the future is that they are generally wrong.

The very best ideas falter and fail or are scuppered by chance disasters, weird things happen which no-one could have predicted, and the universal constants of the cosmos shift and change and turn around like Graham Norton playing a serial transvestite in a West End farce on a revolving stage lit by a zillion stroboscopes.*

* Why don’t physicists know that the one universal constant is Dulux magnolia emulsion?

Whether Kaku’s speculative expertise turns out to be right or wrong, I don’t particularly care. As I read the book my intention was never to bone up on the latest in theoretical physics and pump action nanodildos; primarily I read it to fill myself up with fiction fodder.

The point I’m getting to (because there is one) is that I don’t tend to get a lot of ideas for fiction from reading fiction. Fiction isn’t a raw enough material for my tastes. It’s too polished, too finished, too final — like a Barbie doll you can only play Barbie with — and I’ve always found it tends to feed back into real life more than into new real fiction. Like the nanoscientists Kaku mentions in his book, I prefer to start from the bottom up, with all the stuff that has zero to do with fiction.

As Son of Whirl would have it, I’m an “Elemental Mage” rather than a “Sorcerer Savant” or “Bloke With A Ridiculous Bloody Hat”.

So what about you, fellow writers? Do you recycle fiction into more fiction or start from scratch elsewhere? Or do both? Neither? Something else?

Whirl's Bank Holiday Weekend Q&A

2011-08-29T07:24:00.011+01:00

Why are you having a Bank Holiday Q&A?

Because it’s a bank holiday weekend, I’m back from my holidays — and because I can.

But you’re asking all the questions! What Kind of Q&A is this?

It’s my kind of Q&A, so butt out, Big Nose.

Nose off!

Arse Face!

Knob!

Grolly Pimp!

So. Anyway. Is it true your car was stolen on holiday?

Not quite — Girly of Whirly and I only found out it hadn’t actually been stolen after we telephoned the gendarmes, by which time we presumed we’d be spending a couple of nights rotting in a French jail for irritating said cops with our bogus robbery antics.

How could your car have been stolen when it actually wasn’t?

We walked round the car park three times but mysteriously missed its uniquely filthy silver glow on every single occasion.

Crikey! Next thing, you’ll be telling me the gendarmes screamed into the car park at the precise moment you finally clapped eyes on your supposedly stolen vehicle.

Your assessment of the comic timing on this one is not wrong.

Were you bricking it, given that the gendarmes pack rods?

Some of my hastily layed bricks were reserved for this, yes, but I was mainly thinking about our initial encounter with the gendarmes barely seconds into our holiday as we rolled off the Eurotunnel train into Calais.

Would that be the same Eurotunnel train as the one where you were caught short with no functioning toilets and an endless queue of doubled-up Dutchmen?

Yes.

So what was the problem with the gendarmes in Calais?

We pulled in front of them on the ring road in our excessively laden car and they stuck the Vs up while packing their rods.

Phew! I thought you were going to say they pulled you over and frisked you till the goosepimples crawled up your neck and made giant lychees of your heads.

Don’t be silly. That only happens in Tripoli — and then only to clearly transvestite dictators down on their luck.

He still has his own hair.

So they say.

Moving on, what was all the business with the malevolent goats?

Apart from a layer of fromage de chevre on a 650-cheese pizza there was no direct goat-on-man action, I’m pleased to say — but I did notice that while I was away, no less than three people dropped in to this blog as a result of searching for “attacked by a goat”.

Hmmm, enough said about the goats. I’m sure you don’t want to scare your readers with any further talk of quadruped menace — so what about the restaurants?

Crawling with creatures with either too many legs or none, I’m afraid. It’s said the French have strange taste in food but I think it’s more a case of a taste for strange things that aren’t food.

Okay — so what about the waiters? And the food?

You mean the overly generous oriental chap who graced my trois boules de Monsieur Whippy with more chantilly cream than actually existed in the world right after serving me a sea bass the size of a whale and a starter monstrous enough actually to be more of a “finisher”? Or the liquified salt cod and mash that came served in a bowl with a jacket potato accompaniment as if in a Look Out There’s A Carbohydrate Midas About kind of a way. Ha! At least that one was tastier than the self-organising fat molecules cunningly self-organised into a pile of chips dancing in a cloud of eau de Carbonised Maris Piper.

Were you molested by a drunk French nudist?

Not quite — though he did come close enough for us to see the blacks of his pubes.

Any skinny dipping for you?

Not intentionally. That said, I did forget I was in a public place on one occasion while changing out of my trunks and accidentally flashed a wrinkled old lady.

Was she scared?

Luckily, her head was buried under a copy of Le Figaro. Made her miniature ludicrous dog howl, though, like it had been prodded with a cattle prod still attached to a rampaging bull.

How was the weather?

Mostly sunny and bright but there were a few days when the French seemed to have laid things on Le Pub style to make us feel at home.

So — plenty of thunder and lightning, huh?

Yes — plus they kept lining up to drench us with their hose pipes.

Including the drunk French nudist?

Including the drunk French nudist. Luckily he was so drunk, his exuberant parabolas missed us, otherwise we’d have gotten absolutely soaked.

By ‘us’ I presume you mean Girly of Whirly and Son of Whirl. What were the highlights of their holiday?

Son sloped around with the enthusiasm of a cocoon for the whole fortnight, breaking the aching silence only occasionally with comments such as, “this is crap”, “this is boring” and “what’s so interesting about the inside of a useless church?” In contrast, Girly of Whirly was a typhoon of energy, racing from one shop to another for a traditional Gallic basket like she does every time we visit France despite there being about a dozen such holiday souvenirs collecting dust in the attic.

Did you kiss Zinedine Zidane in the toilets at E LeClerc?

When I threw my arms around the guy and pressed my lips to his cheeks, I was absolutely certain it was him, but you know how easy it is to make a mistake in the twilight world between urinal and hand basin. Turned out to be Franck Ribèry.

Talking of grottos, how were the many troglodyte caves you visited?

You mean, did I inadvertently offend the ugly woman dressed in green behind the counter at Les Grottes de Matata by joking that her Village Troglodyte badge was a name tag rather than a Gallically reversed reference to the tourist site in question — the same ugly woman who was, in fact, English?

What happened when she tried to wrestle you to the ground in a fit of anger?

We were very fortunate that Franck Ribèry had taken a shine to me and had been stalking us since I kissed him in E LeClerc, and he burst from a group of bewildered Germans and defused the situation with his ball skills.

Beats goats, I suppose.

I’ve heard he does.

That it?

Always end on a goat...

Whirl Goes Sunbathing

2011-08-11T09:46:00.002+01:00

Running away to catch some sun while England burns seems almost irresponsible but my skin needs the flicker of credible sunlight across its disturbing pallidity — plus there’s no way I’m walking round Brum in a hoodie while possessed by some Android-hungry feral frenzy.

This means nothing will be happening on this blog until almost the end of August — unless you, dear readers, choose otherwise.

In a ‘cat away, mice can play — hey, they can even dress up if they like’ kind of way, I’m leaving the comments trail open for samples of your teenage poetry.

Think of it like Tie A Yellow Ribbon.

A man goes to prison and emerges years later to find his sweetheart — a bearded 70s hippy — has strangled an oak tree half to death with dyed knicker elastic. What it never mentions in the original song (by Dawn*) is that the guy got sent down for rioting in San Pedro (specifically, stealing two boxes of 8-track tapes from a liquor store and, in the absence of a bona fide hoodie, inadvertently exposing himself trying to tie his underpants round his face).

* Dawn? More like The Middle Of The Afternoon On Bloody Mercury

So tie me some ribbons while I’m away.

Five contributions, and I’ll post a sample of my own teenage poetry at the start of September.

Ten contributions, and I’ll post an academic treatise on the genre.

Fifteen contributions, and I’m staying in France...

Snakes Still Alive (Yet)

2011-08-05T14:11:00.002+01:00

Did anyone catch Dragons’ Den this week?

The new series featuring that bus conductress woman with the Black & Decker workmate stuffed under her jacket?

I’m a regular watcher of the show, partly to keep tabs on how dreadful most people are at giving speeches and presentations, but mainly to fulfill my need for mocking spurious creations.

This week, there was a bloke who’d come up with spectacular initiative for preventing splashback while you’re sitting au bobbeur. I’m guessing he came up with the idea after accidentally dropping a rubber duck down the pan while cleaning the bath. One set of opened bowels later and — Eureka! An inflatable toy floating dead centre in the water can nullify any degree of splashback bar the Full Honours Stomach Bug Splatterpan Posse Of Doom.

None of the dragons went for it, of course. For starters there was no point investing in the manufacture of a product that had already been invented in other forms (from balloons to tennis balls to other floaty bobbly things up to and including dead fish). Secondly, it was just a bloody stupid idea. There’s enough to do with a toilet brush on a cleaning day morning without the extra requirement of scraping shit off a ludicrous obstacle costing £9.99.

But I’m nothing if not an entrepreneur — and it got me thinking.

A duo of trained water naga would be perfect for remedying splashback.

Instructed to swim in opposing circles when presented with an overhead gusset, they could quickly produce a Dyson-style cyclonic suction effect on the water that would eliminate any hint of splashing and speed anything deposited quickly away. If your loo handle was fitted with a scent ‘n’ detergent dispenser there would be no need to clean up afterwards. Or ever. The naga would continue circling each other for a few more minutes in a miracle of self-cleaning. Why — you wouldn’t even need a loo brush.

I envisage a range of products.

You’d have your basic twinned naga as described above — but then there would be advanced versions.

With the Home Safety option, your naga would act as watchdogs whenever you left the house, circling once every fifteen minutes to produce a roar like the growl of a slumbering bulldog. Any unwanted house guest failing to be deterred in this way could always be bitten and poisoned to death at a later stage.

Add on a Kleenee Weenee plan and your naga could function as an accessory washing machine on those days when you have too much dirty laundry for a single load. I can see the TV ad for this one right now. Mrs TV Family is straining to fill the washing machine when her husband (played by James May) wanders into the washroom with two pairs of smelly socks and some stained cycling shorts. He shrugs, as if to say, “there’s no way these will fit in that damned tiny machine without straining the door or damaging the tub so I guess I’ll have to turn up to the gym tomorrow reeking like some disgusting tramp!” Mrs TV Family smiles (and I’m thinking here of either Caroline Quentin or Edwina Currie) and chirps back, “don’t fret, love — just toss them in the Kleenee Weenee Naga.”

A similar scheme could work well with dirty dishes — or children — and, if the naga were especially intelligent, wheeling Granny to the Bingo.

The top-of-the-range product would have to be ultra swanky, mind, with multiple layers of naga like a Gillette ten blade razor or quintuple glazing or a fizzy drink so fizzy there’s no actual liquid in the bottle.

Think ‘multiple double helix of serpents’ — all the way down the soil pipe to the centre of the earth. Sewers, as they currently exist, would be rendered obsolete overnight, and if enough people bought into the Swankee Option, mankind might have at its disposal a global network of powerful jet-like motors for avoiding a future asteroid collision emergency.

Again, the TV ad:

Quentin: The suction on that thing is so powerful it’s unravelled the twill on my knickers!

May (chortling): Yes — and that huge chunk of space rock that’s been hurtling towards the earth since 735 B.C. has just sailed right past and smacked into Venus!

Am I on to a winner or am I on to a winner?

The Two Fifteen From Havana To The Midlands

2011-08-03T06:48:00.005+01:00

Weird things happen on crowded train journeys.

I never meant to make one yesterday; it was supposed to be a regular journey complete with space to stretch my legs and no requirement that I be breathed on from a distance of less than six inches by a fat woman whose ludicrously thick layers of slap somehow failed to disguise a Tolkienesque beard.

But so it goes with trains. It only takes one points failure, one delayed connection, for an otherwise pleasant experience to be transformed into a weird kind of torture. Add to that a dead husky sled team on the line and you’re talking torture orchestrated by a sadist savant.

So as we’re jockeying for space in the aisle — those fortunate enough to have bagged a seat pretending to be more disabled/ill/dead than those standing — this old black guy sidles up.

Actually, ‘guy’ is the wrong word — he’s more of a gent.

Struggling to hit 5' 6", he’s dressed in a smart jacket midway between lime and sage with a neatly folded handkerchief sitting elegantly in the top pocket. His trousers are pressed, his shoes are smart, and atop his head is a straw boater, all of which gives him the appearance of a man bound for Havana rather than Walsall.

He perches his slender backside on the edge of a table, somehow managing to maintain his poise and composure among the assembled throng of the twisted and stiff, and had it not been for his distinctive scent, my curiosity would have passed on to some other traveller, maybe to flit back from time to time but certainly not to remain with him for most of the journey.

It was an odour I haven’t encountered for thirty-odd years — an unmistakable whiff from days gone by when football shorts were made of real cotton and chafed the insides of your thighs.

This smart little gent smelled of mothballs.

I’m tempted to ask what became of mothballs but I suppose the answer is obvious: they make your clothes fucking stink. But it does beg the question, whatever happened to moths? Why did they stop inhabiting cupboards and wardrobes some time around 1977? Personally, I blame the nylon underwear.

While my nostrils are busy processing this information, arranging it next to the ming of sweaty bra, bearded lady and inevitable egg and cress sandwich, Mr Havana takes out a book and proceeds to read, his hands cupping its hard backs like a polished lecturn. It’s a book about trades and shares — a very ‘on the money’ topic given the number of world economies suddenly on the skids. Problem is, it looks like it’s been lifted from the dusty back shelf of a failing Oxfam where it’s resided for the past half a century between the 1911 Pears Cyclopaedia and a margerine carton full of ear wax bound for Ethiopia.

The remainder of my uncomfortable journey lasts another half an hour and I can’t take my eyes off him. He doesn’t move and he doesn’t shuffle about but I can tell by the slight shrinkage of his jacket and the fixity of his knees that he’s working very hard to maintain this posture, poised on the edge of a table on a crowded train with book in hand. He reads it with a studious look on his face, like he’s weighing up these facts and figures of yesteryear and applying his new-found knowledge to today’s financial woes. There are graphs, which he traces his finger along like he was stroking a fluffy caterpillar with sensitive skin, and the words, he goes back to again and again, as if re-evaluating their import in light of insights flashing beneath his boater.

All the way to Walsall, in a haze of mothballs, he reads.

This out-of-date hardback book about trades and shares.

All the way from page 7 to page 7.

When the train finally groans its way into the station, I’m tempted to follow him, to see where he goes, but having been barred from the loo thanks to the crush, I badly need a wee.

Disappointed to let this curious chap slip away, I follow the bearded lady into the Gents...

Flared Up

2011-07-26T06:53:00.001+01:00

Looks like I nearly missed my own Guest Post over at Pygmy Giant.

If you hurry, you can almost miss it too...

The Pre-Morph Squisheroo

2011-07-19T06:14:00.001+01:00

Several half-formed blog posts currently lollop at my feet like larvae. Their thin skins glisten like pearls as they wiggle on the tiled floor below me with the squeak of rubber gloves dragged over glass.

None are sufficiently developed to spread their wings or do that weird bobbidy-bobbidy thing with their antennae and it would be wrong of me to take snaps of their embryonic nudity — particularly on a Tuesday. I know pregnant mothers go on to keep the scans of the babies in their wombs (in fact, the woman across the road has had hers blown up and framed*) but I’m no pregnant mother.

* over her front door

So until the chitin has formed around their blubbery exteriors, I’ve chosen to sit lightly upon the largest and squeeze a little juice out of the spiracles.

It isn’t proper blogging, I know, but it beats recycling an old post. There’s quite a gurgle to it when I wiggle my bum around, and a line of miniature prismatic fountains ebbs and flows from their sides as I bounce up and down.

I’m tempted to press on and squeeze this one flat as a crêpe , but whatever these fluids are, they would almost certainly be followed by bona fide innards — assuming I didn’t pop the thing first.

So maybe I’d better dismount and change my trousers...

Astral Travels As My Hair Unravels

2011-07-11T06:17:00.002+01:00

According to my Time Line of Inevitable Rot and Decay, by now I should be sprouting tufts of hair from each ear sufficient to repopulate the barren scalp of a Rooney, a John, or an “of Cambridge”.

Quite why appendages aurodynamically designed to guide sound waves down funnels to the brain suddenly invite upon themselves these swathes of fluff at the exact same time the mechanisms of the inner ear begin to falter, I have no idea — I didn’t make up any of the rules governing evolution, genetics or the need to repeat things over and over to people with twinned rugs strapped to the sides of their heads.

Me? I’m just the Single Wispy Ear Hair Guy. I don’t tend to flag this up by wearing either a monogrammed T shirt or name badge, but that’s nonetheless who I am.

Most of the time it’s almost impossible to distinguish my ears from those of a new-born baby. All that softness, that freshness, you’ve never known before: that’s the loving touch of my folliculoure.

Catch me later on in the hair cycle and, if you look very closely, you’ll see a tiny filament sprouting from the cusp of my lobe like an invisible miniature piglet had become stuck inside my lughole looking for truffles, leaving only its coily tail exposed to the atmosphere.

If it weren’t for Girly of Whirly and her miracle tweezers, there’s every possibility I might forget about it completely — for months, years, decades — only to discover it trailing along behind me like a pulled thread on a Shakespearean arras.

Later today, she’ll lay me down on the Plucking Couch — probably between peeling the potatoes for tea and incinerating some hapless door-to-door salesman with the ferocity of her dragon breath — and gently prise my near-invisible strand of hair from me till the Plucking Suite echoes with a microwave-style ping.

Maybe I should collect them all and mount them, or knot them into a small winter hat for the Whirl Towers Blackbird. After all, people have framed their navel hair and hung pictures from coiled toenails before (I remember: there was a pull-out supplement once with the News of the World).

Over the course of five or ten years, maybe I’d have enough fine silvery hairs for a pair of false eyelashes or a moth brush.

I could weave a rope so the homonculus inside my head could get out and use the toilet from time to time.

Hmmm, not sure.

Any suggestions?

Summer Heat

2011-07-05T14:23:00.003+01:00

In the absence of Evil Editor’s writing exercises, I find myself making up titles for books and then trying to write them. What kind of a waste of time is that?

To stimulate the squirty bits of my creativity glands, I’ve signed up to an Indie Ink writing challenge. The idea is a simple one: lots of writers swap ideas for stories with each other then go away and write them. Everyone has a different prompt, which means that when all the stories are written, no-one has to trawl through 101 versions of My Favourite Dog or The Day I Contracted Vaginal Herpes.*

* or The Day I Contracted Vaginal Herpes From My Favourite Dog...
My partner on this fledgling escapade is Brad MacDonald, whose rendering of my suggestion of “The Glistening Arc” appears here.

Me? I got...

SUMMER HEAT
c/o dishwaterdreams

July is here in England again, and with it, a sub-zero Alaskan chill to freeze toads fast inside their ponds and flocks of birds onto horizons like they’d been nailed there.

I walk to the pump house in my tri-layer whale blubber boiler suit with the gait of a female wrestler with fat thighs, cursing myself for sleeping through winter. Every February, I’m charged with painstakingly setting the temperature for the coming summer’s bloom, guided in my hundredths of a degree calibrations by insider information about the proposed swanky hot pant designs from Jean Paul Gaultier— only this year, I messed up, and now look at the place! There are almost as many icicles dangling from branches as curious whiskers poking round corners on the Planet of Cats. As for the snow, I expect the citizens of some distant Tundra world are already filing a complaint for climate theft.

The temperature valve is much as I left it last September, poised to usher in Icelandic dust clouds and a frosty reception for news about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s extra-marital shenanigans. Its mechanism is stuck fast with a combination of ice and rust and it’s clear I’m going to need some help. Summer is for dying of skin cancer, not hypothermia, and if I don’t get this valve fixed, people will start to complain.

I poke my head out of the pump house door and whistle for Dexter, my cartoon badger accomplice. When I got the job as temperature guy, I requested something exotic like a dragon or a humungous spider, but the God of Literary Tropes said no. Personally, I think there must have been a job lot of badgers left over from The Wind In The Willows. Either that, or Dexter is one of A. A. Milne’s editing casualties, cut from Pooh’s adventures to make way for Eeyore.

Whatever the truth of his factotumic existence, Dexter emerges from under a pile of newspapers by the hedge and stomps across the snow with a couple of Rafael Nadal signature model tennis racquets strapped to his back feet. It’s a perfect strategy for a cartoon badger able to walk on two legs, but since Dexter is a quadruped-style cartoon badger, his front legs slip about all over the place like the snow had been sprayed with engine oil, and he struggles not to skeeter headlong into the hedge.

He squares up to me in his workman’s cap and pyjamas. “Is it the pump again, boss?”

I sigh, recalling the washout summer of 1991. “Indeed. Fetch the tools.”

Dexter looks back at me disapprovingly, as if to say, “whaaaaaat? You beckon me over here through this wasteland of frost only to send me back again? If you knew there was a problem with the pump why didn’t you call me over with my tools and save me the trip?” I’m so glad Dexter isn’t a cartoon badger telepath.

Suitably tooled up, we toil together for half an hour, the heat of our labour stemming the combined frostbite count to a single toe (which Dexter snaps from my foot and tosses into the Let’s Make A Golem bin), but in spite of our efforts, nothing shifts the last scales of rust from the valve — not even the Coldplay CD we hung on a scarecrow several summers ago to strike terror into the hearts of marauding starlings.

I set down my dual wield machete and pickaxe combo, resigned to glance back over my shoulder to the pump house’s shadows — shadows in which lurks the mightiest weapon ever to threaten to blight the cosmos: the pan-Galacticaar Uber Super Whopper Plasma “Destroy All” (tm) Mega Ultra Cannon. Had I not won it in a Help The Aged tombola, no doubt some intergalactic despot would have destroyed the universe with it by now.

Dexter’s badgery eyebrows prick up, snagging on cobwebs overhead. “You realise merely thinking of pressing the ON switch on that thing could risk fracturing the time-space continuum?”

I grin. “As we’re already two goes in on that count sans evident Armageddon, what say we plug her in?”

With odds like these, my accomplice needs no persuading: he clearly wants to go back to bed whatever the cost, one hundred and ten per cent.

I stand the galaxy-destroying artifact against my Black & Decker workmate to peruse its vast array of knobs and dials while Dexter zig zags erratically back toward the house, unravelling the flex.

“I’m about a foot away from the socket in the kitchen,” calls Dexter. “Can you move the cannon a little my way?”

The flex tugs, whipping a line of snow into the air from the frozen lawn outside. “Technically, yes — but then the nozzle will be too far away from the pump to wreak the precise kind of havoc upon it we require.”

Neither of us requested background Conundrum Music, but it nonetheless sounds from a hollow in a tree trunk between us as if cued by a wicked minor deity with a penchant for irony.

Dexter grins uneasily. “We could always argue it was never destined to be a ‘barbecue summer’...”

“Or we could grab the extension lead from the scullery.”

It’s a Eureka moment on a par with the day I stopped using meringues as paperweights — only problem is, I followed up said brainwave with a subsequent flash of brilliance which saw off all ten of my extension leads in a charity bunjee jump.

Dexter grins uneasily once again, his demeanour morphing from perplexed badger to manically enthusiastic chewed rat. “Maybe if we switch the cannon to STANDBY we could eke out a bit of warmth...”

I nod, flipping back the dial from Total Destruction Of All Known Things Past Present And Future, through Oceans Boil But Selected Androids And Reptiles Survive and on past Your Granny May Fall Ill For A Week With A Stomach Bug But Don’t Hold Out Too Much Hope For That Pet Guinea Pig till the light next to the nozzle dims to a pale amber.

I’m expecting lightning bolts or arcs of pure inferno hellfire to come bursting from the cannon’s nozzle, but instead, a gold-coloured liquid drips from a hidden funnel, and unfolds slowly across the snow like a drizzle of honey, revealing green sprays of grass steam cloud by steam cloud. Butterflies flitter from its undulating gloop, the beat of their wings prompting flowers to erupt from the snow-laden hedgerow and blue streaks to race across the sky. Before we know it, there’s some idiot in Hawaiian shorts on a pushbike chasing a girl in a bikini and a dozen Morris Men snorting the pollen-fuelled snot of their allergies into handkerchiefs as gnats buzz about their hats and bells.

Dexter glances at his newspaper bed. “Shall I break out the sun loungers?”

I reply with a nod of my head that shakes nary half a pint of sweat from my tanned brow. “The loungers, the sound system — and The Beach Boys...”

On The Couch With Sock Monkey — And Kiersten White

2011-07-04T05:56:00.005+01:00

SM: Whaaaat? Where’s Big Nose?

KW: Is that a metaphor? Or are we being literal? Am I supposed to analyze the question? Or are you just supposed to analyze the answer? So, if I answer in a cosmic sense, like, “Where are any of us, really?” will that make me a better patient than if I answer in a very literal sense, like, “Buying a new package of socks to replace you should you displease me,”? Because I want to establish something right now. I don’t wear socks. Ever. So whatever psychological pull you might have on Big Nose because of subconscious associations with comfort and warmth don’t exist here.

SM: Okay, forget my regular client. You’re clearly where the Couch Dollars are at...

KW: I think we should set some boundaries. First of all, you’re my therapist, not my shrink. Heaven knows I can’t afford to lose any inches off my height. Second of all, only I am allowed to make short jokes.

SM: Fine. As long as I can play my soothing dolphin medley CD you can make as many short jokes as you like — though it would help if you didn’t insist on kneeling. Why not recline? On my couch? It’s 100% vinyl.

KW: I’m not kneeling, I’m practicing yoga. I’ve heard it is great for relaxing, so I’m determined to become THE BEST RELAXER EVER and practice in every free moment I have. Ever. So far I’m not feeling very relaxed.

SM: Despite the flip flops? Maybe we should skip the dolphins and move straight on to the Beluga...

KW: Vetoed. Bad lullaby associations. Aren’t you supposed to be asking me questions? Other than about my footwear choice? Or are you analyzing my choice of flip-flops and deciding that it indicates I’m clearly hostile to you (and all socks) and therefore an uncooperative patient so you’re just eating up the time before you can move on to some sap who adores your wooly, sweat-inducing constriction? I was right about this from the very beginning, wasn’t I. You just want patients who secretly worship you or at the very least see you as a necessity. How long have you had this raging inferiority complex?

SM: (ahem) In my own modest way I was merely seeking to address your relaxation issues without recourse to an aromatherapy massage sponge glued to a road drill. What’s wrong with whales anyhow? Were you raised by a cabal of aquatic shibboleths? As an overly worshipped simian with a raging inferiority complex who you’ve nonetheless burst in to see without an appointment, I’d be giddily intrigued to find out.

KW: I’m curious about your need to bring other animals into this session. Isn’t one enough? Do we really have to run the full scale of mammalian life? Because whale trumps monkey in pretty much every aspect other than opposable thumbs, and you don’t have a corner on the market in that one. Actually, you, being made of socks, don’t have opposable thumbs at all. Do you secretly wish you were a sock whale, instead, because then your glaring lack of prestidigitation skills would be camouflaged by your impressive girth?

SM: Whale trumps monkey? What kind of Scissors Paper Stone logic is that? If you'd ever scuba dived off the coast of Costa Rica with a dozen of your psychoanalyst monkey guru pals, you'd know what havoc a bunch of primates can wreak on even the fiercest of humpbacks — and that's on their home soil, lady. As for my lack of opposable thumbs, blame Son of Whirl. He tore one of my arms off! Anyhow — what are you here for?

KW: Scissors Paper Stone? What kind of games do you play?? Everyone knows it’s called Rock Paper Scissors. But honestly? I had no idea this was supposed to be therapy. I just wanted to show off my flip-flop tanline. If I’d known you were a package deal with the tootsie pictures, I’d never have shown up in the first place. If I want to be analyzed, I’ll just read my own books and be horrified by my massive, massive issues being played out in print for an international audience. But, since I’m here, how about a game of Rock Paper Scissors, or the updated version, Monkey Whale Parasite. Oh, I forgot—you just have the one hand. I’m off then. These sandal tanlines don’t make themselves, you know. Until next time!

For those of you who don’t already know, Kiersten White is the NYT bestselling author of the Paranormalcy book series whose hair is almost as silky smooth as the skin on her feet. Her uncannily brilliant blog, Kiersten Writes, can be found here (so be good, and follow both links).

The Clock

2011-06-29T07:17:00.003+01:00

It’s an odd thing, having kids.

Every day they have sprouts and spurts that inch them on towards adulthood, offering up with every smile and curse a sort of mirror in which hitherto buried aspects of your past have one last chance to be reflected.

Not that it was like this right at the start, of course.

My first few weeks as a newbie parent were tinged to the point of saturation with a sense of yearningly cavernous brain death, and even if I’d had the wit to foresee how the workings of my son’s emerging prodigy organ would one day spark off memories in my own, I couldn’t have made use of this bizarre intergenerational phenomenon. At FOUR WEEKS, getting dressed was hard enough. Truth be told, in those crazy days between his slither from Girly of Whirly’s distressed undercarriage and Michael Owen famously baffling the Argentine defence, Son of Whirl had more cerebral nous than did I.

It took until Christmas for the full Dad/Wibbleblob hook-up to crank into gear — and only then thanks to a set of curling tongs in which my son became entangled after we forgot about him and went down the pub. Never abandon your six month-old baby beneath a Christmas tree.

I don’t know about you, but after the age of 18, the quality of the Yuletide gifts you receive starts tailing off with a vengeance. Instead of All The Things You Want you get All The Things You Bloody Don’t, Things You Can’t Work Out Why Anyone Would Want, and Things You Can’t Believe Anyone Would Want To Manufacture or Merchandise Let Alone Purchase.

When Son of Whirl arrived, my descent into a pan-Yuletide Argyle sock swamp came to an abrupt end. Beneath the tree were presents — real presents — resplendent in their all-singing all-dancing fluorescent plastic funnee animalz in-yer-face-ness, allied to a sense of excitement about the place not witnessed since my mum’s now-deceased bugger of a beagle ran off with my grandma’s false teeth midway between the turkey, the Christmas pud and the return of our Saviour and all of his angels (and possibly Nat King Cole).

That’s when I first realised I was about to embark on a journey that would involve me replaying my entire life from the perspective of an evil fascist dictator/overlord metamorphosing, year on year, into a hapless, gibbering slave.

But it meant I got to watch Naomi Wilkinson on Channel 5's Milkshake every day, so I figured it was worth a go.

Since then, there have been numerous fits and starts in my son’s growth and development, each one challenging the cosy understanding of yes, yes, he’s growing up to which I’d become accustomed in my slackness.

The transition from Thomas The Tank Engine Boy to Evil Star Wars Light Sabre Wielding Mutant was particularly distressing. Gone was the constructive linking together of a railway line for the good of Sodor. Instead, we had to endure the wanton destruction of cherished family heirlooms for the good of sod all. Why do they all get such a kick out of batting for “the Dark Side”? And — oh — the fun of ‘learning to start a fire’.

With every change comes a hinny of sensations that won’t rest anywhere for a few days. It shuffles up and down your spine as if Patrick Moore were playing the bones like a glockenspiel (with thistles) and in dark of night, hovers between eye and lid with the flicker of a monitor streaming images of Max Schreck brushing his teeth.

You want to keep them preserved in time and space but you can’t, and the worst part of all is when the changes are so subtle, the growth so slow and sneaky, you don’t notice it until well after it’s happened.

“Oh, he’s stopped doing that.”

So, today is a That Day — a day when the clock has run on a few hours without me — and I’m sad.

Things will return to normal by the end of the week, I know, and we can all get back to the genuinely enriching business of watching him grow into a mature adult like the rest of us — obsessed by money, power and sex (and possibly some hopelessly whiny pop star).

Until then, I’m going to mope about the place like wretch.

And A Big Red Bow For My Bonnet

2011-06-27T05:55:00.001+01:00

I love it when Whirl Towers plays host to weekend guests.

Gone are the workaday slices of toast and Whoppashoppa’s own tea bags, the paper underwear and the plastic knives and forks.

In their place come muffins hand-rolled into Greek letter shapes by Belgian TV celebs as part of a charity drive for abused donkeys and their trainers, top of the range lingerie that rustles like a collision between two distant gas giants unless you bend your knees like a chimp, and a collection of background operatic favourites so shamelessly highbrow and Italian as to prompt the corpses of slain ancient Britons to rise from the sod and make a beeline for the nearest Roman ruin, there to daub spectral runes of protest ‘pon the mottled stones.

Plus — I got to iron my doilies.

How To Live In San Pedro

2011-06-22T06:44:00.009+01:00

How to live in San Pedro?

You carry a whip on your hip.

I really ought to write period or full stop now to illustrate the simplicity of my insight, but I’m not the kind of blogger who ever writes period or full stop (apart from when I’m making some kind of point*) so I won’t.

* this not supposed to be a pun, btw — it’s just what happens when you get sidetracked**

** like a donkey falling into a ditch along with a painted caravan full of cheery Irish ruffians***

*** see?

How do I know this?

In the merest whisker of the dream I had last night, I’m walking down the street in San Pedro. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do. It’s back-to-back terraces on a sloping hill and though I haven’t yet altavisted ‘San Pedro’, I’m guessing said US burg doesn’t boast those. Gauchos, probably, and some twat dressed as Yul Brynner driving around in a car the size of a beached whale (I’m presuming San Pedro is by the sea).

Anyhow, I have a whip on my hip — in a Didn’t Watch Indiana Jones Or Miss Bondage Queen IV Last Night So WTF kind of a way. Maybe there’s a shortage of belts in the dream world, I don’t know. Maybe the angels of the unconscious were being kind to me by handing me a whip to tie round my waist so my modesty wouldn't be compromised when my trousers fell down in San Pedro. I don’t make the rules.

So: me, whip, San Pedro. That was my dream.

Or almost.

Just as the delights of Cheesy Classics FM roused me from my sleep with some chorale nightmare, a guy cries out (and I didn’t see whether this was from a diner, a parking lot, or the saddle of a whippet while bounding down the aforementioned sloping hill), “that guy knows how to live.”

It’s not often my dream observers are so kind to me, particularly in so brief a dream, but as I meandered downstairs to make a cup of tea, it felt like I’d been lent a certain swagger, like I was that Dream Me, strolling down the street in San Pedro with my whip.

But not for long.

Sometimes, reality can be so cruel with its Hard Rocks Of Reality disillusionment: I’d left the back door open last night and as I stood to boil the kettle, whip almost in hand, my all-too-real foot squished into the back of an all-too-realer a guest slug.

Hawaiian Shorts

2011-06-16T15:43:00.002+01:00

My Sunday Feeling, Scummy Gnome, Ovaltine

2011-06-12T09:13:00.001+01:00

How can one resist the lure of a Sunday morning car boot sale, with its fields of rubbish and tat piled high against the horizon as if a thousand refuse lorries had gathered back to back in a wagon trail circle of the damned and defecated en masse till their groaning steel ani could take no more?

Bizarre as it may seem, I can resist such a lure with ease.

So while Girly of Whirly pounds the cattle-free turf hunting for plates and bowls we don’t need, attachments for utensils we don’t own, and anything reduced from over fifty quid to under fifty P — even if it’s signed by Dale Winton and comes with a spare plug — I shall languish at home with my muffin ‘n’ egg breakfast, clad in slippers of softest fluff and gown of M&S, possibly freaking out to something by Bach or Mozart or Bruckner c/o my Kidz Kazoo Klazzikz CD.

Truly, I am “easy like a lucky bastard”.

You?

Rubbing Hieronymus On Your Koch

2011-06-10T13:28:00.004+01:00

Why on earth do drug companies insist on giving their hi-tech pharmaceuticals such ridiculous names?

Ibuprofen, Acetaminophen, Cogibobamucophren — what have these names to do with pain relief or freedom from underarm polyps of a bulbous nature?

Okay, so I made up the last one, but if the -phrens win out over the -phens and -fens in any future nomenclature trends, maybe it will find its way into your medicine cabinet, possibly even your bloodstream.

When your head is pounding with the quasi-migraine throb of a full-on post-editing zonker, wouldn’t it be so much easier to reach for the Jim?

Or when your piles are gorged to the point of poking out the neck of your sweater, how much simpler to spoon on the Gemima?

I’m compiling a hit list of new pharmaceutical brands to mail out after the weekend.

After all, if ‘Dave’ can be TV channel, surely anything goes in this hip new millennium.

Any suggestions?

Plus, I Can't Find My Bloody Sunglasses ANYWHERE

2011-06-04T10:46:00.004+01:00

What a great Spring we’ve had here in the UK.

In years to come we will speak of “our little April drought” and “a sun aglow with the radiance of a prince’s baubles” as we scroll through screen after screen of whited-out megapixel memories.

But hasn’t it been chilly with it?

With every splash of sun has come a snap breeze — whooshing from under bluebell and around bud, then up between your legs like a born again gooser with Edward Scissorhands hands (only instead of scissors, they’re white chocolate Magnum ice creams. And maybe it’s Francis Rossi.)

One minute, you’re (like) Let’s take a gentle stroll to the greenhouse in this uncanny Spring heat, let’s bathe in the warmth of the sun like some weird kind of human basking reptile — then the next you’re (even more like) For fuck’s sake! Has a miniature intergalactic freight cruiser of liquid Nitrogen just nosedived into my bum crack? No, waitaminute it’s just some weird-looking guy with Mr Whippy’s top-of-the-range merchandise glued to his wrists as if by Glacerie Magicke!

But not this last week, not since May became June — and thoughts turned to tennis and nightmare vacation shark attacks.

Since Monday, I’ve been blissfully able to stroll to my greenhouse free from rectal peck of chilly gusts. Shorts have been donned, and with them, the gait of a cool dude surfer boy in full Languish Mode, swigging from a can of kerray-zee Ginseng nonsense drink, with a hippyesque girl on his arm and his surfboard slung from his inner thighs in a harness arrangement because he’s run out of free hands c/o the chick and the drink and his backpack is locked away in his sun-drenched ole VW (and would have been useless anyway on account of his board being ten feet long and he a midget).

I realise now I should have eased myself into this Summery arrangement more gradually — potted a red and then a yellow and then a another red instead of tipping up the whole snooker table and having done with in a flurry of balls.

For the frosty clench of a gust-shocked backside is as naught in the agony stakes compared to torment’s blistered red leather carapace screeching DIE! DIE! DIE! from my shoulders.

I’ve rubbed my scorched wound with numerous healing unctions and balms — including a whole bottle of Girly of Whirly’s Opium and a chunk of Extra Mild Cheddar — but I can’t bear the touch of anything resembling clothing. It’s like the skin of a burned roast chicken: hard and crusty and cracked and liable to slip right off the sinew from the merest prod.

All of which makes walking Geoff’s ghost round the neighbourhood something of a potential embarrassment. For years she had a special Cat Lead we were told “cats love”, complete with instructions of how to coerce her into wearing it without breaking her neck or courting imprisonment. She was never a walky kind of cat, so until she died the lead lay idle in a box in the scullery along with an Alan Titchmarsh hallowe’en mask and job lot of laxatives I won in a pub quiz in 1988. I have to tell you, walking a dead cat’s spectre round the place is a difficult enough business without looking like a suicidal maniac dragged from a pyre. As the cat lead’s chain chinks along the pavement just inches from where my faith in the afterlife keeps it soundlessly aloft, some fat kid or some bony old git or some dog-walking harridan will come bounding round the corner, instantly expressing with their faces a sense of wonder-cum-rudely-probing-bemusement as to whether I lost my cat in a house fire despite a brilliant rescue attempt or burned it to death to save putting my back out burying it alive and got unlucky with the petrol. You try mustering an apologetic shrug under these circumstances.

Until the soreness dies down and I can construct a wheeled feline doll to trundle along behind me, the best I can hope for at the moment is an encounter with Mr Do Something. If anyone has a selection of bizarre cream in his medicine cabinet, it’s him.

The Simulacra Blackbird WHACK-YA!

2011-05-30T21:47:00.003+01:00

Bizarre as it may seem, my understanding of my state of being in the world right now is that I am Right Off The Chart Bananas “Level 27" (!!!) delusional.

So — have I witnessed the as-yet-unborn spectres of my future offspring duelling in some timewarp mayhem scenario with remnants of my Viking ancestors, possibly with swords, possibly with psywarp face-morphing nonsense-twaddle CerebroKin?

Or accidentally clubbed to death seven clearly maniacal ninja types who turned out to be nuns on a makeover night?

Or even shaved what passes for the hirsuteness of my masculinity from my face despite it being a Lounge About The (Heck) Goddamn Vista bank holiday Monday?*

* For anyone not resident in the UK, “bank holiday Monday” is like a fusion of the worst ever monsoon, a stag night for Captain Misery, and that once-in-a-lifetime moment when otherwise optimistic souls cross over from the path of hope to the abyss of inevitable suicide.

No!

No!

No!

It is none / not / nothing of any Base U-R Belong To Us kind of shenanigans.

Shamed though I am to say it, I am pecked into the corner of confound by a blackbird.

A!

Again, A.

A blackbird.

Investigative flappy birdy inquisitors mass, cry “which a blackbird? Which a blackbird proclaimethest ye about?

Oh, to answer with a hearty bellow of, “that f*cking black one, you dimwits — the one tugging the worm from the hitherto undiscovered remains of some poor, hapless housewife buried in what was to become my garden in 1953!”

Or again, “my trained familiar, Zanzibar, for whom no mortal secret is secret and no TV remote control immune to being buggered up by dint of peck or faeces or wild avian sex romp.”

Which blackbird is this? That visits me daily? Friendlyly a-peck and with tail feathers a-bobbin’ like the tail of some overenthusiastic terrier reared on UberChum?

Is it A blackbird? My special,friendly blackbird? Whose tail feather motion I may dream of retraining in some Strictly Come Dancing Meets Epitome Of Michael Gambon’s Eerie Ruthlessness kind of way?

Or is it two or more individual blackbirds? Hopping about between the foxgloves and the dreamcatcher blasters like a posse of Whirl-confounding evolutionary miscreants dressed as a singular saint?

I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS WITH THIS BLOODY A BLACKBIRD!

But he/she/them/they KEEPS ON HOPPING ABOUT MY GARDEN, tweeting like some tweety kind of crazy thing.

How many blackbirds are fooling me into believing my garden plays host to A friendly blackbird?

Arghhh!

Arghh!

Arghh!

A Teenager's Muffins

2011-05-26T11:33:00.001+01:00

“They’re not too horrible...”

The moment I passed judgement on the chocolate muffins Son of Whirl had made in cookery at school, I remembered why I never became a high ranking diplomat.

To be fair, the texture was pretty much perfect — a blend of sponginess and fluffiness not witnessed since Dawn French experimented with a perm — and you couldn’t have asked for a more equal distribution of chocolaty lumps. But there was something missing in the overall flavour, some soupcon of taste, some zing, some ‘special certain something’.

After several minutes’ hard thinking, in which I tried to match my fake smile of encouragement to my son’s froglike droop of near-suicidal disappointment in the hope of forming between us a perfect circle of father/son bliss, we hit on salt and vanilla essence before moving on to the bald conclusion that the missing ingredient was, in fact, flavour*.

* Apart, of course, from the chocolaty lumps — which tasted of sh*te.

I’ve never before tasted anything that tasted of nothing, but my son’s dozen muffins did, and I have to tell you it’s a sensation on a par with trying to kiss a ghost. There’s something there, but there isn’t — a thong of remote possibility lost up the bumcrack of incontrovertible reality.

It’s sausage pizza next week and even if it turns out like some Heston Blumethal Dead Boxer’s Penis Flan (left for a month to go mouldy then used as a nest-cum-toilet by a family of virus-ravaged rats), I’ve resigned myself to praising its glories.

This is not out of pity, you understand. My son is so tough he can put on his Simpsons pyjamas all by himself and withstand the agony of brushing his own teeth for an impressive one day a fortnight.

It’s guilt, pure guilt.

Plus, I have no desire to waste another hour of my life on the Xbox playing a consoling game of Blow Up Undead Hitler Fanatics With Weapons That Never Existed In The 1940s Let Alone Now.

Mock Rick And I

2011-05-19T07:14:00.009+01:00

Why do I live in a town of lookalikes?

Or is it simply that the human gene pool is shallower than we think?

Or do famous people only get to be famous thanks to of lots of similar people clubbing together to get their chosen MeeMee spotted by the media so they can bask in the reflected glory?

If it’s true that you have to speculate to accumulate, I’d better start clearing out the attic.

Anyhow, on to my point.

Just round the corner from me lives Mock Rick Wakeman. I’ve never seen him flouncing around in an ankle-length cape or loading the back of his car with a dozen Moog synthesizers — but those eyes! That hair! That beard! Truly, it is he!*

* I should point out that he doesn’t resemble Rick Wakeman in his dashing 70s prog rock sorcerer incarnation so beloved of the Human Barbie Doll League, for to gad thusly in this austere new decade would be tantamount to declaring a Steiner education (for which, I now understand you can be permanently LOCKED UP).

So, yes, some days in the street, it’s just me and Mock Rick, bumbling along minding our own business with nary a care in the world about the world (other than, perhaps, on my part, a moment’s reminiscing about whether Jon Anderson will ever release another pretentious album of his trademark hippy drippy castratio twaddle).

Mock Rick passes one way, I pass the other in a Yin/Yang dance of idle perambulation. One day, he is the Yin to my Yang, the next, the Yang to my Yin. Why we’re never run over, I have absolutely no bloody idea.

Is that a glittery statuette of Bach poking from his dungaree pocket?

Don’t be silly — it’s just a yellow label tuna ‘n’ sweetcorn sandwich from the supermarket, partially crushed but nonetheless edible, and no doubt when he gets home he’ll nibble it with relish with his feet up watching Bargain Hunt, possibly swigging a can of lemonade from one of his two fridge freezers (because even though he’s MOCK Rick and owns no array of Steinways, the laws of Look-ee-like-ee dictate that beyond the physiognomy there must be some small similarity, some quirk of replication in the fabric of the universe, all of which kind of explains why Dr Christian Jessen collects saddles).

So we pass.

We nod.

We idle.

Maybe I’ve said ‘morning’ to him, I don’t know. Maybe I’ve even said ‘morning’ to him in the afternoon and he’s thought what’s Mock Whatsit thinking? and as long as his Whatsit isn’t Bette Midler then I’m fine with this kind of Pavement Friendly. Maybe he’s not even generously mocking like me. Maybe I’m not even any kind of Whatsit — just That Bloke. You never know how it goes with someone you see most days but have never said more than ‘hello’ to.

Me and Mock Rick.

Mock Rick and me.

Bumbling along the street in our dungarees and our snazzy Hawaiian shorts as seasons pass and dogs shed fur and generations of insects come and go, sometimes with the irritating and ironic buzz of a Hammond organ on the blink.

So when Mock Rick got hit over the head with a crowbar the other week, naturally I was shocked.

To me, he’s someone I might get to talk to one day. Thanks to some chance accident with a fat woman on a bike, where we both run across, drape our cardigans over her immodesty. Some kid with a lost pet toad. Some Morris Men collecting money for the old folk, but one of them chokes on a Satsuma.

If we spoke, would I admit to harbouring a secret joke about him? That he reminded me of an ageing hero of pompous sub-Classical keyboard trilling? That every time we pass I think, “tee hee, there goes Mock Rick”?

Better that than being the miserable fucker who left him in a pool of blood for the sake of the contents of a till.

On sight.

Prunes With Hatchets vs Cheesy Nibbles On Forks

2011-05-17T06:57:00.003+01:00

Averse to editing?

As a suggestion, why not try meditating on this rewrite of Stevie Smith’s most classicalest lines:

All things pass.
Editing is fondue.

To keep things simple, it helps if you drop the first part.

No more dissection of paragraphs and clauses with the curling tongs of perfect form — simply immerse your chunks of prose in the sizzling oil of literary brilliance, coated in The Sublime’s savoury batter and pronged on The Ridiculous’ slender fork.

Gather round the non-stick tub with your writer chums and take it in turns to poke nuggets of succulent goodness about with the deftness of young children hooking funfair ducks — only without the need for snotty noses and headlice.

Invest in a top of the range tripod and a trussed baby dragon! Comb the oil from the hair of a seborrhaic Mexican wrestler! Procure a set of forks so sharp as to draw no sound from the piercing of a perfect pickled onion!

The long road from first draft to finished book/story just got a whole lot easier...

Chapter Ten

2011-05-13T18:05:00.002+01:00

The biggest problem with writing is that it’s a solitary affair — hours spent shuffling spectres round the arse end of nowhere hoping not too many of their non-existent heads need chopping off at the editing stage to appease imaginary agents and readers.

Some say writing can drive you mad.

Me?

I say it drives you to muffins —and my swelling midriff agrees.

If you’re a writer, every once in a while it does you good to take a potter out to the greenhouse and read aloud to whatever you have growing in there (even if it’s a corpse-shaped fungal aberration slumped in the corner by the dibber dispenser).

Even better, is committing yourself to video.

So here’s the start of a my current Chapter Ten — complete with irritatingly unfixable timelag and Depp-inspired quasi-bandana.

Storywise, all you really need to know is encapsulated in this handy blurb:

Hapless loser Duane Pistaine is all at sea.

The plan had been to crash a party and declare his undying love for Kate.

But that was before the courage-boosting booze and drugs.

Head full of stories from his favourite comics, he stumbles into town, unaware his goggle eyes are witness to a vomiting up of the town’s darkest secrets he will later wish he’d witnessed a little more clearly....

Would you read anything like this — or are you just after my bandana?

Repost c/o Blogger hurtling "up the Spazz".

Muses, Crafting, Uncovering

2011-05-05T09:07:00.001+01:00

In an infinite universe of infinite possibilities, infinite numbers of your stories exist.

Your sole task as a writer is to uncover them from the archaeological dig sites of the netherworld and deliver them intact to a finite shitball hooked on fuel and death and cash.

Remember this every time you are stuck for words, for inspiration.

Bring this thought to bear upon your every unfillable blank page.

All your characters say and do, all that happens in your story, is waiting to be discovered in this way.

So equip yourself with all manner of shovels and scopes and lenses and detectors.

There is no need to “make anything up”.

The Normal We Back Back To

2011-05-03T06:55:00.000+01:00

Apart from the subhuman demi-beard threatening to obliterate my face and upper torso, there’s not a great deal of difference between the pre-quadruple-bank-holiday fest and the post-Wedding barbecue clean-up.

Roaring sunshine, “charming” Pippae, weird looking sausages, the loss of Our ‘Enry and Their Laden — all these things look set to persist into the immediate future on the same uncontrolled wave of vacuousness upon which the driftwood of most of 2011 has thus far been afloat.

Here in the UK we now have to slither our collective synapses around a change in the voting system like cerebro-octopi mass hugging a hitherto unknown alien artifact.

Try doing that after you’ve spent four days burning vol au vents and watching 28 hour footage of undiluted pomp.

I’m reminded of the News of the World headline from when Katie Price first started dating Alex Reid:

THE HANGOVER AFTER THE BENDER

Could be a fractious week.

Whirl's Ultimate Official Insider Guide To The Royal Wedding

2011-04-28T14:40:00.014+01:00

Come back tomorrow for more ultimate official insider coverage of the greatest event of the century...

Evil Editor Is Five

2011-04-23T09:00:00.003+01:00

In an infinite cosmos it’s almost inevitable that cruel, fat, heartless, muttonchops-sportin’, dreamer-crushin’, muffin-bustin’, stud-pumpin’, reality checker checkin’, slush exterminatin’, Grisham-enpooperatin’, query-witherin’, weredingo-tamin’, Varmighan-enthrallin’, agent-evisceratin’ hunks of cerebrally radiant manhood such as Evil Editor should court scorn, anger and FURY FURY FURY from disenchanted writers the world over.

But not in this galaxy. Not today.

Fools that we are — humans, baboons, crustaceans all — we simply can’t get enough of that ‘ole loveable bundle of mischief as he celebrates his fifth blogeeversary.

Five years!

Wow, that’s something!

In Cat Years, that’s thirty five!

In Gnat Years, the guy’s an immortal!

Go and wish him a happy birthday here.

Eggs Suspended In Mid-lay Up The Backside Of Easter's Chicken

2011-04-19T06:56:00.003+01:00

This may be my last blog post for a while — not because I’m dying or giving up blogging or suffering from a gamut of huge cranial pustules from whose leathery skin winged creatures will undoubtedly burst, you understand, but the onset of Easter brings with it the misery of Conference Season and I must away to a secluded hellhole, there to mingle with others of my kind in an effort to boost our mutual professionalism.

In that respect, my slide along the double helix of Christ’s last moments and the final hours of multiple Cadbury’s Creme Eggs is all set to mirror the passage of a caged elephant (possibly like Dumbo — or, since I’m trying to elicit sympathy here, Dumbo’s mother) through Blackpool’s sunny streets on a scorching July afternoon.

Beyond the iron bars: such splendours!

Yet here in my converted Ford Transit van: merely an old Star Trek duvet cover and a heap of my own poo!

(Brief digression: after my grandad died, my Blackpool-crazy grandma took me on holiday to said “South of France of The North West”. My abiding memory of the place is that you couldn’t walk more than fifty feet without stepping in a heap of donkey shit. So if I were a caged elephant, maybe I’d be better off being cruelly wheeled through somewhere like Skegness or Great Yarmouth to spare me the indignity of feeling trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea with only the squeals of a flailing trunk directed at a barren and uncaring universe to serve as a record of my plight).

This is not to say that where I’m going isn’t pleasant, or that I’m not looking forward to shared muffins and brainstorms with the cream of the nation’s gibbering homonculi, but I’d much rather be sat at home chilling by the barbecue with Girly of Whirly and Son of Whirl — even if Mother of Girly of Whirly pays a visit to brush up on her ritual persecution techniques using me as a surrogate me.*

* This is how pecking hens get to kill two birds with one stone while preserving the malevolent avian population.

So — while I may get out to visit your blogs over Easter and post the odd frippery on BumBook, I can’t think there will be much activity here for the next week or so (unless there’s a drunken punch-up or synchronised abseiling Bono lookalike attack).

All of which means, have a lovely Easter — and come back pronto for my “privileged access” Royal Wedding coverage (unless it’s rained off or Osama Bin Laden blows everybody up).

Quadriceps Ahoy

2011-04-15T14:35:00.002+01:00

I’d set today aside to wear a pair of shorts.

Other things were scheduled, of course, but all with the wearing of shorts at their epicentre.

So: a whirl of writing, cooking, cleaning, admin and miscellaneous phone calls, all circling like electrons round the comforting nucleus of a pair of khaki shorts.

Only three problems.

First, the button had fallen off my shorts and I couldn’t be arsed to find a replacement and sew it back on.

Second, it’s way too cold for any of that nonsense.

Third (and most important), I changed my mind anyway.

What possessed me to want to lounge about the place like a louche surfer boy? Far better to don a pair of sensible slacks and stride from room to room looking casual-yet-efficient — and (according to the postman) personable. To be honest, I suspect my postman is a little short of female company in the evenings. The tiny wad of post he handed over this morning could easily have been slipped through the letter box without the need to ring the doorbell three times while praying, half prone, on the doormat (and I know this because I saw him through the curtain). Perhaps he’s figured out I’m a pre-op transvestite — which reminds me, I must ring the clinic.

I mention all of this because unless you live in some far flung part of the world whose days and nights and months and years are laid out according to the Dwarven Cheese Cycle, it’s the end of the week in a few short hours and it may be that what seemed like the best-laid plans on Monday morning are now in tatters, like the skull ‘n’ crossbones of an unfortunate pirate ship after a raid on galleon throbbing with Danny La Rue cyborg clones.

So — if it’s all gone tits up for you, console yourself with the thought that poor old Whirl never got to wear his shorts even though he badly wanted to, and the whole sorry affair was self-inflicted.

The “someone less fortunate than yourself” isn’t always me — only today, it is.

Hope that makes everyone feel a lot, lot better...

When Mobility Becomes An Abomination

2011-04-13T06:48:00.004+01:00

I hate the way Mobile Dog Grooming has found its way into Yellow Pages.

In the olden days, of course, Yellow Pages was strictly for professions such as plumbers and washing machine repair people and circus strongmen who could rip a telephone directory in two and help you out with any villains who needed roughing up.

As for dogs, I can’t recall them doing anything in my youth other than bounding down the street shitting everywhere, attacking small children and transforming clothing and upholstery into unconvincing simulacra of their miserable moulting selves.

Such a shame God begat the French.

And somewhere inbetween begatting baguettes and a pathological hatred of American cultural imperialism, the French begat all manner of accessory canine ponciness, up to and including dog clothing, dog haircuts, dog manicures and dog bloody dog dog dog.

All of which means that every Wednesday morning the “Groomobile” pulls up in front the house opposite with its weird Mr Whippy style barking chime and awaits the shabby blob of cack-encrusted fur loved by my neighbours but far from loved by YT.

Said creature then lumbers merrily inside like a brainwashed toddler visiting Santa’s grotto — only with less of the brain and considerably more of the grot. Shame there isn’t a Groogroomobile.

Presumably, there’s a glut of sophisticated pooch pampering machinery tucked away behind the driver’s seat: whirling scrubbers and buffers, scented shampoo sprayers, flea sensitive tweezers on springs, poo pluckers, nail polishers, chocolate bone dispensers, dog-shaped vibrating massage baskets, hair trimmers, whisker shiners and everything a cherished family pet could ever wish for.

Or maybe there’s just a convicted paedophile with a jar of Vaseline and a toilet brush.

Point is, where the hell did all this come from? Isn’t it enough that there are two dog grooming parlours within walking distance? And rain practically every day from June to bloody June? Poodle parlours are a stupid enough idea in their own right without putting wheels on them and driving them in the direction of my street. And what kind of poodle parlour boasts that it’s “also for cats?” I wouldn’t be surprised if my neighbour has her hair done while she’s waiting for the dog to be de-wormed.

“Now offering Hopi Ear Candle’s!!!”*

* No beagles.

I’m almost tempted to fabricate the dog equivalent of Sock Monkey and book an appointment with the Groomobile just so I can have it out with whoever presumes to hawk it about town as “the convenient way to groom your pet”.

Grrr!

Let There Be Gravy

2011-04-09T08:28:00.002+01:00

It’s been a frantic week in the news, with speculation rife on matters of great import.

Will Steve Coogan play Saif Gaddafi in the forthcoming film, Carry On Bombing?

Will Wayne Rooney ever become a modern day Eliza Doolittle under the tutelage of Prince Harry and Chris Ewbank?

Will Kevin Whately submit to nip and tuck plastic surgery and replace Hathaway as his own much maligned sidekick in a future series of Lewis?

And, of course — who will win Whirl’s gravy?

I can now confirm that the answers to my 3rd Bloggiversary Quiz have been checked and verified, neatly ironed and laid out like the Seven Dwarves’ underpants prior to the gusset examination scene Disney cut from the movie to make Snow White seem less of a prig, and — drum roll, fanfare, Red Arrows flypast — I am pleased to reveal the worthy winner.

But first, here is the inevitable roll call of the people who bummed out dismally, mumbled into a feedback-ravaged microphone in an empty room on a distant star.

Fairyhedgehog scored 2, Sylvia batted 1, Simon Kewin hit 2, Evil Editor managed 2 in spite of not even trying to answer most of the questions, Moonrat came top of the bottom with 0 along with JJ — leaving AA to come top of the side with a slightly different means of getting 100% wrong answers — Jinksy bowled a 1, and Dave Fragments broke his Abysswinksback Quiz Duck by wrestling to the ground a perfectly respectable 3.

(The answers, by the way, are 1c 2c 3a 4a 5c 6c 7d 8c)

All of which leaves one or two people unaccounted for — the people Sock Monkey referred to as “the clowns”.

Despite his generous offer of a drawing of a hat, Peter Dudley was deemed to have cheated and bottom spankers have been dispatched.

Similarly, JaneyV’s remarks about jam were treated as infantile frippery but since the bottom spankers had already been sent out to deal with Peter, the Mule of Drool has been untethered and packed off on a train to Whitterville.

Also falling foul of Sock Monkey’s rulemeistery was Sarah Laurenson, who thought she could get lucky by plumping for C for every answer. As it turned out, she could have been very lucky indeed and WON with a top score of 5. However, she might equally have gone with B and scored ZERO. So, batten down the hatches, missus, for Cap’n Pokey & His Hip Hop Prod-U Orchestra is on its way over.

All of which leaves the winner.

Scoring a genuinely amazing 4 correct wrong answers was...Old Kitty!!!

Congratulations — and prepare for gravy.

On The Couch With Sock Monkey

2011-04-05T06:29:00.003+01:00

WO: Morning.

SM: What the hell are you doing here? You’re not booked in for a session.

WO: Just thought I’d see how the judging was going.

SM: The what?

WO: The judging. You know, for my contest? The gravy?

SM: *blank simian look, like a fish that’s just swallowed another fish and doesn’t even realise it*

WO: Don’t tell me you didn’t get my email...

SM: Oh, yes — that. I presumed it was a prank.

WO: What’s pranky about a 3rd Bloggiversary Celebration?

SM: I’ve told you before, it exposes you as a talentless narcissist, a borderline psychotic intent on flaunting his myriad psychological problems — and with the whole gravy thing you play right into your own unwitting hands.

WO: Not so — I was wearing rubber gloves when I wrote out that last post.

SM: What?

WO: Very squeaky on the keys but not a dribble of Bisto splashed the keyboard.

SM: Now you’re being facetious.

WO: Is that one level up from narcissistic? I don’t remember...

SM: So you still want me to judge this thing, right?

WO: I’d be honoured.

SM: What’s wrong with Girly of Whirly?

WO: You want a list?

SM: Okay then — that son of yours?

WO: You’re passing up a list for a database of some vast alien culture?

SM: I see.

WO: Lucky you — I reel.

SM: No need to ask about Mother of Girly of Whirly, I suppose?

WO: No. And thanks for reminding me.

SM: Don’t mention it. Your hair suits the spiky look.

WO: So — will you do it?

SM: It’ll cost you.

WO: Do you take gravy? It was on 2-for-1 in Cheep-o-Mart.

SM: Under normal circumstances, I’d be utterly offended by such an offer but it just so happens I’m preparing a culinary treat later tonight and your gravy would save me a trip out to the supermarket in the rain. Don’t furrow your brow like that — it’s a fur thing.

WO: Brilliant! I’ll drop the gravy by this afternoon, along with the answers and the judging guide.

SM: The judging guide?

WO: A few people have cheated and one or two haven’t taken it at all seriously.

SM: Said the narcissistic borderline psychotic.

WO: Ha ha. What are you cooking, just out of interest?

SM: Peaches and cream. It’s not so much cooking as mixing together.

WO: So why the gravy?

SM: I’m allergic to cream.

* oh look, a momentary pause for comic effect *

WO: Should I bring some potatoes?

SM: Yes.

Me Is Has Was 3

2011-04-01T07:53:00.003+01:00

Much has been written recently about the decline of blogging in the age of social media — sadly on blogs which people are too busy Twitting and Twatting to read.

But here at Abysswinksback, the spirit of blogging rolls boldly on, like Mick Jagger’s flesh scrunched into a ball and tossed down a hill like a testicle.

To celebrate my third bloggiversary I’ve chosen to refrain from offering up the remains of a butchered quadruped to a dubious masked deity — mainly because my local supermarket now demands such a commitment in order to secure its “bonus points” and I’m fresh out of mongrels.

Instead, I’m hosting a quiz, clad in a glittery suit of purest Bonanza.

The rules are exquisitely simple.

Take a look at the following eight questions and aim to get AS MANY ANSWERS WRONG AS POSSIBLE. To help you, most of the questions have multiple wrong answers and some have no right answers whatsoever. Sock Monkey has compiled a hit list from the wrongest of the wrong and whoever checks in to the comments trail with the closest match of correct wrong answers WINS GRAVY.

Whoever you are, wherever you are in the world — yes, that’s right, YOU COULD WIN GRAVY.

You have until 11.59pm GMT on Monday 4th April to check in, and though you may enter as many times as you wish, only your first clutch of answers will count.

In the event of a tie, names will be drawn from a hat, and in the event of a hat, I’m leaving the building. In the event of this not constituting any kind of event in your estimation, chip in to the comments trail anyway — it’s been a long time since we hit a hundred round here which all sounds too much like the current plight of Jocky Wilson to bear thinking about.

Best of luck to one and all and thanks for stopping by.

No biting, kicking, punching, elbowing, de-spleening or one-on-one disembowelling permitted. Remember: this is good clean fun for people with good clean underwear...

1.

Reptiles are referred to as ‘cold-blooded creatures’ — but why?

a) They are ‘creatures’ and not ‘wardrobes’.
b) While dogs and cats and horses are frequently seen sporting coats, cloaks and other apparel, no-one ever bothers to knit or crochet anything for reptiles.
c) In 854 B.C., a cabal of disenchanted Abyssinian hamsters circulated a rumour about reptiles being “colde, aloof and of leatheryness moste eville” which stuck.
d) Without the label ‘cold-blooded creatures’, 95% of all reptiles would end up in the washing machine on too hot a spin.

2.

Examine, if you have the stomach for it, the photo below.

To which precise spot (or spots) are my Whirly eyeballs immediately drawn?

a) Robin’s wristwatch, far left* — because I always want to know the time.
b) The trio of manly bulges (via a series of ballistic saccades) — because I always try to slip the phrase ‘ballistic saccades’ into every sentence I can (unless I’m asking a policeman for directions to the nearest menswear emporium).
c) The fossilised fish skeleton grafted to Maurice’s stomach, far right — because I’m toying with the idea of having a Pteranodon’s collarbone done on my right leg.
d) Eyes, teeth, assembled bouffantery — in precisely that order — because I’m a human being hardwired to respond to facial features (and bears).

* How I pander to those unable to distinguish Bee Gee from Bee Gee!

3.

In Greek Mythology, where the hell was the cloakroom?

a) Two doors down from Pluto’s spa pool.
b) Halfway up Mount Olympus atop a human pyramid of demihumans.
c) Honolulu — which is why so many Greek heroes were forced to romp around looking spectacularly overdressed.
d) TRICK QUESTION! In Zeus’ original vision, robes were intended to be hung on the Hydra’s multiple heads, but when said novelty coat hook was slain (along with the replacement minotaur thanks to a cunning plot which also saw Priapus sadly sidelined), the phrase just sling it on the settee, love was born — though at the time, of course, the settees in question weren’t from IKEA. And Zeus wasn’t hitched up in an everlasting travail of immortalness with “the missus”.

4.

Why could I never, ever eat a raw oyster?

a) Oysters are like the Borg: swallow one and you have to take on all of them.
b) I’m a tidiness obsessive and the flibbly bits round the edges of their bobbliness make me feel uncomfortable.
c) I’m a vegan — plus, I can’t swim.
d) When I was two years old my Grandad shoved a slug down my throat trying to explain what it felt like to choke on your own tongue during the Battle of the Bulge.

5.

Monkeys descend on your neighbourhood — so “en masse” that the hapless ones close to the ground are crushed to a Proboscis ‘n’ Baboon pulp by the triumphant Bonobos cruisin’ the surf overhead.

You can’t run, you can’t swim, you can’t fly, you can’t teleport — and with no Cliff Richard on hand to inspire you with medlies of his greatest ever hits, what should you dooooooooo?

a) Carry on ironing your underwear (this option is only available to people who habitually press their own skimpies while harbouring delusions of saving the world).
b) Stand behind a sign marked, “Turn Left Here, Crazed Monkeys — For Peanuts, Bananas And Lifelong Excess Simian Romance”, praying their gullibility matches their skill at negotiating a ninety degree turn at speed.
c) Flip open the trapdoor of your 1-Use Nuclear Holocaust Bunker, muttering, “such a waste, such a waste, such a waste...”
d) Take a deep breath, inflate your rubber ring, take another deep breath, inflate your rubber ring again, take yet another deep breath and puff, puff, puff, puff, puff, puff — till a torrent of liquiefied monkeys blots you from all existence thanks to a terrible decision, taken scant weeks ago, to shop for budget beach accessories at Aldi rather than Lidl.

6.

You purchase a mongoose rupturing kit from Tesco — not to finish off your favourite family pet in a fit of supermarket-endorsed cruelty, but simply to burst an unsightly zit on its nostril.

How should you restrain the mongoose while you apply the spike to its angry pustule?

a) Back legs gripped tight between your teeth, like a sheep shearer.
b) Back legs gripped tight between your teeth, like Alan Shearer in a tryst with Victoria Beckham and a B&Q sink unit.
c) Wrap it in foam so you can secure it without squeezing it to death.
d) Don't even try it — dial Freefone Mongoose Restrainers Anonymous right away on 0800 277255.

7.

Which of the following is not a line from my latest project, “Broken Vacuum Cleaner & MacKillop, Investigators of the Downright Weird”?

a) MacKillop made to throw out a stiletto — a feat he might have pulled off as a sporty twentysomething male or jiu jitsu cyborg — but with cellulite slung from his frame in concentric rings dozens deep, he was no match for the forces of anatomical impossibility and he tumbled into a cabinet of frozen puddings.
b) From where MacKillop was standing, it looked like a straight mortal combat scenario: twin leech-possessed humanoid civilians vs morphed pan-weirdishness investigator brandishing three hundred solid grams of tinned fruit cudgel clout.
c) The alien hordes wriggled in seamless unison, despite being split wide open from the rapidfire burst of MacKillop’s enchanted shallots, swung now in increasingly frenzied circles above what remained of his head.
d) Broken Vacuum Cleaner peered over his shoulder, his flex now dangled into the loop of a wry smile. “By Hess’s rotating brush, I think you’re right! We may just have thwarted the spearhead reconnaissance vanguard of some evil intergalactic invasion force.”

8.

Why do gnats never fly into each other as they buzz around in their clouds?

a) They use a form of sonar, like bats — only much, much, much, much smaller.
b) A network of synchronised “mutable polarity” magnets strapped to their abdomens sustains them in a permanent state of attraction-repulsion-attraction-repulsion, complementing the zuzz of their wings with a gentle hum.
c) Gnats are easily shamed by YouTube Bloopers.
d) Actually, they fly into each other all the time but they’re so tiny and insignificant we don’t notice.

So there you have it. Another year, another trussing of brain cells to the yoke of a hog-tied ass. Apologies to anyone stopping by looking for kilts or messiah-shaped birth marks — but stick around through April and beyond as delights are revealed like go-go dancers flung from balloons. Or something like that.

On Crotchless Tights And Creeping

2011-03-26T07:57:00.003Z

I’ve just emerged from the shower following an encounter with a masked intruder.

Not strictly true, as it happens, but read on.

When I’m not sticking my fingers together with glue, one of the fun things I like to do is to get as much soap in my eye while I’m showering. In the same way that coke snorters blast their nostrils in order to up their daily excitement count, so it goes with me and soap. I could slip, I could hit my head, I could die. It transforms a perfectly pedestrian activity into a potentially life-threatening ‘thrillsville-style’ one. And costs nothing.

So this morning, I went with Move #32: The Forehead Shower Gel And Accidental Lean Backwards Uh-Oh.

Lather seeped between my squinting eyelids. I reached out for the sponge tray, clung on. Call me a wuss, but I even affected a girly shriek like the woman in Psycho before she was Psychoed.

That’s when I saw him — the masked intruder!

Okay, so it was only a trio of maroon towels hung up on the rail, but for the splittest of split seconds, they appeared to me as a hooded villain in mid-creep, hungry for my blood, my entrails — maybe even my weird banana soap.

It’s times like these when I count myself fortunate that I never took up Kung Fu. Knee jerk Jackie Chan high kicks are inadvisable when all that separates you from your would-be assailant is a shower screen of solid glass.

Anyhow, this all got me to thinking. Of scenarios featuring multiple masked intruders.

Like an intruder, about to put on his mask, who is interrupted by a second masked intruder.

Or three masked intruders stopping off at the Masked Intruder Outfitters to claim refunds on their ill-fitting masks.

Or a reformed masked intruder who cracks while shopping in Asda and climbs into a freezer cabinet with a potato sack over his head.

(That last one wasn’t a multiple masked intruder scenario, but you get the general idea.)

So, as we warm ourselves up for this Thursday’s forthcoming Bumper Abysswinksback Third Bloggiversary Celebration (to which you must link with the fervour of Dale Winton having his toenails done, btw), I’m throwing the comments trail open to multiple masked intruder speculation.

If you’re a spammer, so much the better.

And if you don’t want to talk about masked intruders, there’s always soap.

Count The Calories, Clock Up The Pain

2011-03-22T06:49:00.001Z

Keeping fit is the new black, it seems.*

* and that’s black as in style/fad/fashion, note — not ‘magic’ or ‘panther’ or ‘failed Jamie recipe’.

From Land’s End to John O Groats, people are hopping onto immobile bicycles, connecting their limbs to mechanical pistons and pulleys and practising their isometric bum-busting techniques up against filing cabinets with a selection of flowery bath towels.

Some, like Zen Workout Queen, Stacy, are getting Yogic to the point of putting hairs on the chests of their Inner Guru.

Here at Whirl Towers, the preferred mode of staying trim is the Wii Fit.

When Girly of Whirly received one recently for her birthday, it took me half an hour of trilling my fingertips ineffectually atop its surface to realise it wasn’t an iPad.**

** When the iPad finally arrived, Son of Whirl broke it mistaking it for the Wii Fit.

Since then, it’s proved itself to be a godsend in the Overall Physical & Mental Improvement department — though we have lost the little red dot responsible for working out your centre of gravity a few times.

So here’s the itinerary for so far this morning.

* Two light jogs round Wuhu Island.

* Synchronised sparring with the reformed cockney villain formerly responsible for shaving Vinnie Jones’ tramlines.

* Bumping the numbered balls to a total of ten via a series of Ooh Missus pelvic thrusts.

* Pretending to be Eddie the Eagle (lounge curtains closed for this one).

It’s a punishing schedule, I know, but I’m happy to report that thanks to Girly of Whirly sticking at it, I managed to lose 4 calories as I dozed upstairs from the vibrations shaking the house to its foundations.

Hasty Tasty — A Feast Of Brief Fiction 1

2011-03-20T09:06:00.004Z

The octet of moles arranged themselves in a circle on the pulsating contraption’s rodent-shaped plates, eyeing one another with zealot finality.

A tentacle swooped overhead, and with a whirr and a buzz, a glut of sci-fi potentialities flickered into being as the contraption powered up to what its central dial reported was MAX.

One by one, the moles' innards slid from their skins and plopped into a central aperture where robot knives and forks plucked muscle from bone and sifted the various humours for ReSYK.

Octoalienthingy marvelled at his creation’s simplicity.

A dual quartet of pelts! Three trios of velvety skins and a matching pair! Whichever way he looked at them, laid out before him with a frisson of fried epidermis still sizzling from their bloodied bum holes, they were perfect for his needs on this night of all nights.

From the Visitroposcope, Girloctoalienthingy’s eyes seemed to gaze down on him longingly and he fancied one of them winked like a twinkling star.

Tonight they would dance, they would make love. Possibly even pull in a pizza.

He threw on his hat and cape then, one by one, slipped his spangly new moleskin mittens over the tips of his tentacles and oozed his dapper bulbousness into the depths.

Flying Whirl Syndrome

2011-03-18T17:18:00.001Z

You know when you’re momentarily airborne? For longer than you were expecting and much longer than is your custom? And you make it past the brief guffaw as your feet pedal at the air like 101 Hanna Barbera cartoon characters prior to some inevitable clifftop plummet? Only there is no plummet because you have to remain airborne somehow? And the whole Where The Hell Has Terra Firma Gone thing seems to go on for such a terribly long time you lose all sense of what ‘touching base’ may mean? But you know you have to try to touch base somehow for fear people might think you’re dead, or your blog will go mouldy (or worse) from neglect like a dead terrapin left out in the sun for a week?

That’s kind of where I’m at right at the moment — flying through the last few days of the 2010/11 cycle before the next onslaught of bold new hours equinoxes its load all over my sorry carcass.

My one consolation?

The Abysswinksback Three Year Bloggiversary flickers on the horizon with the bawdiness of a pirate ship fuelled by hi-grade rum and a single multiply buggered cockatiel.

So. ready yourselves — for there will be gravy.

How The Have-A-Go Amateurs Are Wrecking Pop

2011-03-14T06:51:00.003Z

Oh I See — It's A Bin

2011-03-09T07:04:00.001Z

We’re always being invited to “think outside the box”.

Ironically, this is a very odd box to pass around amongst ourselves.

If there are circumstances and habits which bind us and confine our thinking, why also factor into the creativity conundrum an imaginary container it takes conscious effort from which to extricate ourselves?

The existence of “the box” is itself “the box”.

Too late to disinvent all these ludicrous flaps of phantom cardboard now, I suppose.

So I’m filling mine with frog-shaped cheese and Men from Mars and other illusory nonsense the better that I might speculate more freely.

Since When Did Saving The Environment Require Me To Rupture My Eyeballs?

2011-03-05T16:26:00.006Z

If anyone needed an indication of just how stupid I am* my advice would be to read on.

* without reviewing every post on this blog since April 1st 2008

The more I go on with this peculiar business of submitting material to literary agents, the more I’m convinced that the people accepting only paper queries, synopses and chapters are destined to be reincarnated as sorry individuals who mutter, “must have been something I did in a previous life”. Email is easier, quicker, cheaper, savvier — and heaps better for the environment.

That said, when it comes to editing stories and scripts, I much prefer having hard paper copies upon which to scribble, scrawl and correct myself to oblivion. It’s hard to see everything all at once on a computer screen and heaven help me if whimsy should demand I sketch a willy and balls in the margin.** Add to this the legitimacy of a Times or Courier font (“hey, this looks just like a real book!”) and a corrections blitz becomes almost impossible via a keyboard, I find. This kind of hardware is for fine tuning only, much later down the line.

** at the time of writing, FunneeKok Pro 1.9 is retailing at £29.99

Far better to curl up on a bed or settee with a wad of paragraphs and a stiff biro-shandy combo. Tick here, cross there, rewrite lines by the *************, until every amendment is ready to be struck to hard disk.

Sounds great — but this is where we come to the stupid bit.

Not all Documents To Be Edited are equal. Worse still, neither are Paragraphs Within Documents To Be Edited. Print out a ten page document and you could find yourself post-corrections holding pages that didn’t need touching. That’s when you think, “why, I could have got away with printing eight pages rather than ten if only I’d known...” quickly followed by “how wasteful and costly to the environment, not to mention my wallet...” and ultimately, “so next time round I’ll print everything out in 7pt — draft — to be extra-uberecowarrior.”

‘Next time’ in this particular instance was 5.45am this morning, in the 'fathoms deep angler fish' glow of my energy saving Uselessness Lamp.

I shan’t trouble you (or embarrass myself) with how long I persisted, believing I was “determined and tenacious”...

Studying For My O Larvals

2011-03-02T06:42:00.000Z

It’s been a while now since I rose like a butterfly and flapped my way out of my front door with a smile on my face (in spite of the coily proboscisy suck-up-the-nectar thing poking from my chops).

Maybe it’s been the unrelenting greyness, the unwelcome February agenda. Or maybe my matching Snuggli bedsocks and hat are too comforting, too hard to replace with their matching Worki-Work counterparts.

Without blowing my opposite of a trumpet, the way I’ve emerged from my bed these past few weeks has owed less to levity and potentially uplifting zest and everything to the plummet of a poisoned maggot from a rancid steak in a seedy restaurant.

Oh, how my Michelin hoops of pupe have rolled from the edge of the mattress — apart from the one time I went off at an angle and got suspended in mid-hoop like the coach in The Italian Job.

This morning, I’m happy to say I’ve made something of an improvement. Hobbling two or three yards and walking into a wall isn’t quite The Full Fritillary, I know, but neither is it Hapless Pupoid Limbo, so there’s hope for me yet.

This Time, She Really Didn't Make It

2011-03-02T06:30:00.005Z

No more blog cat, I'm afraid.

Geoff died yesterday after a week of illness and will terrorize us all no longer with her feline wonders.

Next Time, I'll Glue My Head To The Fridge...

2011-02-26T18:00:00.004Z

This has happened so many times over the past two weeks that I'm deliberately taking it up as a new hobby just to spite fate...

Michael Gove Kissed My Shoes At The BBC Celebrity Whippet Rodeo

2011-02-24T07:57:00.006Z

Before anyone gets too excited that the Michael Gove to whom I refer is the uberintellectual eel gene repository and all-round smiter of anti-3Rs methodology to the stars currently presiding over the nation's educational wherewithal, I should point out that since June 2010, the number of small to medium sized dogs bearing this monicker has risen substantially — much like the late 80s escalation of Koi carp named Kylie Minogue — and so when I proclaim, Michael Gove kissed my shoes at the BBC Celebrity Whippet Rodeo, let's be perfectly clear that I'm talking about a dog and have in no way lured you here under any kind of false pretences bar the usual suspects.

And so, to the main event...

The history of whippet rodeos is well-documented so I won't bother cluttering up this post with too much of the back story — less still, any superfluous links. If you're at all interested, just type 'whippet rodeo' into your browser and I'm sure you'll uncover hundreds upon hundreds of suitably informative pages (though do make sure your browser search settings are set to SAFE because unfortunately, like Dungeons & Dragons, this noble sport has fallen prey to hijack by certain unsavoury wings of the porn fraternity). All you need to know is that in 1934 a fifteen year-old nipper called Christopher Wearbrooke clambered aboard faithful family pet, Thinnun, and rode himself between the dustbins of Belton St, Cardiff, into history via PC Dick Dickson, a clip round the ear and an opportunistic bugger attack. As it turns out, Thinnun himself was history within five minutes of the ride c/o a broken spine, but had it not been for his few brief moments as a would-be steer (and subsequent metalwork projects involving numerous unknown dogs and Wearbrooke's bicycle crossbar), the sport of whippet rodeo would have remained uninvented to this day, possibly even longer.

For the past two years, BBC Radio Cardiff has covered the event using money saved from John Barrowman’s make-up budget in the wake of Torchwood’s demise. Like Comic Relief, Live Aid, Sport Aid and Keep Granny Smiling Even Though She’s Barely Seconds Left, the Celebrity Whippet Rodeo is a charity fundraiser of which this country should be justly proud. Let’s just hope its founder, 70s keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman, is honoured with a knighthood sometime soon. If rumours are true that his prog rock classic The Lost Cycle is to be played as Prince William and Kate Middleton leave Westminster Abbey after their forthcoming wedding, I wouldn’t be surprised if he replaces Camilla as potential future queen. After all, he has the hair.

The roll call of contestants for the event read like a combined who’s who of comedy, pop, theatre, dance, 6 o-clock news and kitchen — in short, the biggest collection of showy artistes this side of Hitler’s wartime To Do list. I was on hand as a volunteer to help an old school friend make cups of tea for the G-H group of celebs between rides. For two months prior to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I’d been banking on meeting up with Harrison Ford.

“No,” said my friend, “he’ll be in the E-F room — or would be if he wasn’t famously afraid of dogs.”
“Snakes!” I urged, “it’s snakes” — but before we could resolve the argument, Antony Worral Thomson and the woman from Availablecar.com strolled in looking lost and kept us busy for the next half an hour with their unbelievably petulant demands for Lapsang Souchong.

As it turned out, another of the celebrities present at the rodeo was Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove. If ever there was a man capable of manipulating his elfin jockey anatomy to aplomb atop a straining canine, it's Mr Gove, and as soon as I saw him kicked back in a swivel chair puffing studiously on his Mississippi meerschaum I knew he’d be more than capable of beating the pants off the other celebrities — up to and including bookies' favourite, Lenny Henry. Turned out, he was one of the judges, and as the day wore on, clearly more of a hardline Jason Gardiner than a fluffy Robin Cousins as he dispensed paltry figures and harsh words in equal measure like he was behind the dispatch box announcing cuts to the education budget. Bold and technically accomplished though Cilla Black’s twelve and a half seconds in the saddle were, Gove only awarded her a 4 and offered no sympathy when her teeth flew out and hit a disabled boy from Chippenham.

Then a funny thing happened — the sort of funny thing upon which momentous events often hinge, only in this instance it wasn't so much momentous as funny (like I said, in fact). The BBC's coverage of the Celebrity Whippet Rodeo was itself being covered for a documentary about cameramen called Careful How You Zoom In On The Titties and one of the guys filming behind the judges' podium forgot he was miked up.

"It's a right laugh, this," he said, "there's this geezer sat in front of me with the same name as that dog over there under Lemmy from Motorhead. If I were producing this show, I'd boot hairychops and let the judge have a go. And now ladies and gentlemen, Michael Gove riding Michael Gove — imagine that."

As far as I'm aware, the cameraman documentary never made it to screen, but these words were beamed live to the Millennium Stadium with much the same effect on the thrill-hungry audience as the call for a disembowelled Christian before the Colosseum’s finest.

To his credit, Gove agreed to partake in the spectacle (the politician, not the dog — dogs are notoriously dumb and get to do as they're told). But only on one condition. In order to protect his suit from saliva, Gove insisted the whippet be wrapped in cling film and its legs securely bound. Quite how the binding of the legs was intended to protect his clothing no-one knew, but he was adamant.

"Great!" said the jubilant producer. "This will make TV history."

"And five hundred pounds, payable in cash," replied Gove. It's remarkable how the privately educated can keep their wits about them with a squirming pooch and a team of volunteer stewards grunting and groaning between their outstretched thighs.

I suspect very few of you will have had any experience of trussed, partially suffocating dogs, but in my previous bloggerly incarnation as a pre-op transvestite, I picked up one or two tips. From where I was standing, it was clear to me that Gove's biggest problem was neither his suit nor his reluctant steed's ability to indulge in any kind of Secretary of State tossing. Lemmy, it seemed, had become extremely aggressive now he'd polished off the bottle of Asda whiskey used to lure him away from Gove (the dog).

"I didn't headline the Stow-on-the-Wold Icons of Metal Festival in ‘87 before an audience of 24,000 to have sand kicked in my face," he bellowed. "I've seen what I'm A Celebrity did for Joe Pasquale and no way am I having this profile-boosting opportunity stolen from me!" — and with that, he flung himself through the air at the MP for Surrey Heath as the crowd instinctively roared the chorus to Bomber.

The whole thing was like witnessing a mugging on the Tube — nobody moved, nobody helped, nobody lifted a finger. The judges, the audience, the celebrities — even Sir Alex Ferguson — stood mute and fascinated like eunuchs before a half-speed stripper. I knew if I didn't act fast, either Gove the MP would end up strangled, Lemmy permanently paralysed by Gove's hitherto unreported Putin-like martial arts talents, and the whippet crushed in the flailing limb melee of gnarly rocker vs Big Society reformer — but microseconds before my instincts kicked in and I threw myself headlong at the writhing bodies, I caught sight once more of Cilla’s dentures poking from the disabled boy's skull.

"Oi, Jools!" I called — because the diminutive ex-Squeeze trillster and his big band were providing the music for the event and his piano happened to be right next to where the kid lay bleeding — "chuck me Cilla’s teeth will you?"

The moment he grabbed on to those Blind Date choppers, I saw they were embedded deeper in the boy’s skull than either of us (or even Conan) would have liked. Luckily, things turned out okay because the boy had one of those supportive neck braces and Jools managed to yank the teeth free with no risk of subsequent conviction for GBH or exposure as a closet Excorcist bed scene fantasist.

“Here,” he cried, in that velvety nasal voice of his, “I’d take a pop at Lemmy if I were you.”

My plan had been to do exactly that, using the teeth as a boomerang in the hope of rendering Lemmy unconscious so that Gove (the MP) could be hauled to safety and Gove (the dog) rolled over into the recovery position, but since Jools had clearly plumped for the Aboriginal missile strategy himself, no sooner had Cilla’s teggies left his hand than they looped over the audience and arrived right back where they started, ie on a trajectory for the disabled boy's open head wound. Fortunately for the boy, a mortified Cilla crouched over his quivering body administering mouth-to-mouth and the teeth bit harmlessly home into the protective padding strapped to her buttocks. Phew.

Future trivia quiz shows will no doubt baffle contestants with their brain teasers about the precise duration of this denturely airborne parabola — but everyone in the Millennium Stadium that day knew the answer: exactly the same amount of time it takes an inveterate hundred-a-day heavy metal demigod clad in a leather one-piece to tear Gove (the dog)'s head from its body mistakenly believing it to be the head of Gove (the MP) and hurl it into the air with a loud cry of, “bollocksbastardwankarsetwat!”

What a position to be in — on the stage of the biggest venue in South Wales, halfway between a prone Cilla Black and a crazed Lemmy Kilminster as the still-yelping head of a pedigree longhair whippet comes hurtling towards you, lit by a stroboscopic halo of fag lighter flashes. I count myself fortunate that years of strumming his bass guitar had rendered Lemmy’s elbow joint incapable of full extension and the whippet’s head fell ten or so feet short of where I was standing. After a series of short Dambusters-style bounces across the floor of the stage, it finally came to rest, lips first, against the toe of my (inappropriately named, as it turned out) Hush Puppy. It landed, it rolled — and then it kissed.

And that, my friends, is how Michael Gove kissed my feet at the BBC Celebrity Whippet Rodeo.

(With thanks to Mr London Street, from whose 2nd Bloggiversary comment trail the inspiration for this post was plucked.)

The Flowing Pink Chiffon Experiment

2011-02-17T17:16:00.005Z

Nathan Bransford ran a great post last night on the current state of the Blogosphere. In essence, he asks: Have Blogs Peaked?

In full, his post is here.

I’ve been aware for some time that since Facebook, Twitter, Arsebook, CheeseToss and other similar social networking sites took off big time, substantive blogging seems to have taken something of a hit — and I’ve corresponded personally with some of my followers about much the same topic.

Indeedy, in the Tangerine Guru’s comment trail, I harp on thusly:

Comment 1

I'm definitely noticing a downturn in traffic, commentary and visitors.

With the exception of a few hip sites I visit, this seems to be mirrored across the dimpled ball formerly known as "the blogosphere".

Facebook and Twitter seem to have siphoned people off into a chittery chattery form of social interaction at a cost to the more substantial offerings available on Blogger and Facebook.

Which is a shame.

Hopefully, this is a "flour through sieve" moment and we'll be left with a better selection of blogs in the long run as the chitter chatterers are weeded out (not that you can weed with a sieve anywhere other than Mixed Metaphor Land, of course...)

Comment 2

One further comment.

I tend to find that my more substantial posts are commented upon less frequently than my frivolous ones.

If I post some researched commentary about writing, I may get a few hits, but if I go with a photo of a gorilla in a tutu, accompanied by a single exclamation mark, my visitors are all over me like mayo on a quarter pounder.

My plan for today had been to dig out something suitably simian-cum-shamelessly-JulianClaryan but most of the photos I found were either copyrighted or disgustingly pseudopornographic — or both.

So, in the spirit of pushing the experimental boat out further, here’s a link to some photos of gorillas in tutus.

And here’s a picture of an exclamation mark.

Here commenceth the Whirl/Nate Blog/Mayo Test/Crock-o-Shite.

The Joy Formidable

2011-02-14T11:45:00.010Z

The O2 Academy in Leicester is what’s known on the UK gigging circuit as an “intimate venue”.

What this means is that when things really hot up, everyone gets to writhe in their own sweat like fish in the bowels of some haul-rich trawler while a handful of Oxygen atoms diffuses at speed through every available lung.

Call me smart, but for last night’s Joy Formidable gig, I took along a wetsuit (complete with snorkel) and a packet of hi-energy digestive biscuits to soak up the mosh pit.

Sadly, the promised new state-of-the-art Academy facilities had been hijacked by a student performance of The Mikado and I was ushered round the back of the building along with my gigging partner, Vader, by security men clearly developing their muscles for the wealth of job opportunities the inevitable Big Society riots will bring them.

“You’re in the Old Queens Hall,” they said (though not in unison — that’s barber shop quartets, not posses of hard men clad in fluorescent yellow jackets).

Ah yes, the Old Queens Hall. Many happy memories: The Sundays, Curve, Mallard Hopper — and Doug “Goose Breath” Contusion & His All-Walsall Sugar Rush Ensemble.

Vader and I arrived just as the last power chords of support band, Airship, resounded round the wood-panelled walls. It’s an odd gig venue, the Old Queens Hall — a cross between a thirties lecture theatre or library and a showroom for some Elizabethan Ikea — and tonight, they’d clearly toned down the lights out of respect for President Mubarak’s departure to create a Tutankhamun’s Tomb chic. As ever with Uni gigs, the queue for the bar spawned rows, columns and tiers — but this time, only as far as the ladies’ loos. Just water for me and Vader, it seemed, along with some bog roll to light the way back to the stage.

By 8.30 it was time to strap on my snorkel ready for the headline act when support band #2 surprised me by striding onto the tiny stage radiating gloom like Lee Evans sweats. Music is very much a matter of taste and what some love, others hate. In the case of The Chapman Family, there was too much pain and anguish for my liking — just a tad more, and I might have become the only survivor of the UK’s first terrorist-free mass suicide.

When Stockton-on-Tees’ finest were done, Vader and I entertained ourselves with a selection of pre-headline act pastimes such as Guess The Sex Of The Weirdo, Stick The Blu Tak On The Bald Guy’s Head and Que est-ce que Doth Yon Stage Set Signify? This last one, we played for a good twenty minutes, and after studying the curious arrangement of twisted wooden sculptures and lights at the back of the stage, Vader won with knock-down Christmas decoration cargo shipwrecked off the coast of Anglesey.

Then suddenly...

For a three-piece, The Joy Formidable possess a very big sound indeed and from the moment they powered up their distinctive throb I suspected the stage set concealed the Llanelli Community Gimp, complete with tambourine, maracas and an uncontrollable desire to make merry. That’s when I began to feel a little conspicuous in my wetsuit.

From the outset, lead singer Ritzy Bryan mesmerised the crowd with her deft facial antics. All frontwomen possess some degree of charisma, described variously as “electrifying”, “sexy” or “hypnoticalistic” — or, in James Blunt’s case, “dispensed with a wickerwork ladle” — but Bryan has a quirkily unique appeal which sets her apart from other alluring Welsh peroxide blondes with beautifully defined patellae. One minute, she’d be rocked right back, guitar on hip, in the throes of a glowing smile as if trusting an invisible Snowdonian rhino to support her svelteness, while the next, she’d be staring the crowd down with the ferocity of a football hooligan in a wig, all the time hoovering up attention like a gorgon hungry for novelty garden gnomes. Allied to her luminous vocals and thrill-spangled manipulation of the fretboard, her considerable front makes Ritzy Bryan a force to be reckoned with.* When big time success comes (as it MUST), even the most humongous of venues will struggle to swallow her a limb at a time, let alone whole.

* Ok, I confess — I constructed this last sentence from cut-ups of the NME like Bowie used to do with his lyrics (and most of his clothes).

Throughout the gig, bassist Rhydian Daffyd divided his energies equally between punching out the band’s distinctive rhythm, slapping buttocks with Ritzy during frequent Strictly-style mock tangos, and inciting the crowd into a wild frenzy as if he were a Frankenstein hybrid of crazed gym instructor and devilishly cunning pirate captain — only with a mains hookup to his bass rather than his neck and a neat black shirt instead of matching lycra boxers, eyepatch, and irritating bird of paradise. Such a shame Leicester’s gene pool still reels from the “zest debt” it built up spawning Gok Wan’s insufferable hairdo. Wild, wild frenzies there were, but regrettably, it was the rage of lettuce. Just one soul braved the barrier and clambered onto the stage, and had this been Birmingham, Manchester or Cardiff, he’d have mobbed Ritzy to within two slobber-free square inches of her dinky dress fabric as she twanged away on her AXE — or thrown himself backwards into a hastily arranged circle of no-one. As it was, he blundered around for a second or two like someone waking from a thirty year coma in the pet food aisle of Morrisons before being bundled offstage by a roadie.

By far the bulk of the night’s energy, drive and wildness was supplied by drummer, Matt Thomas. He’d been issued with a fetchingly trendy Gallic hooped top which might easily have been mistaken for a fashion statement had he been a poncy keyboardist or pointless backing vocalist-cum-limbodancer-cum-twat, but when your role is to pound out a stick-to-skin onslaught of relentless riddim for well over an hour, top of your list of essentials has to be a reliable tool for WORKING OUT WHICH WAY UP IS, and with Ritzy bobbing around like an enraged Lulu and Rhydian giving it the Full Johnny Depp On A Treadmill while you pound, pound, pound, pound, pound, wearing a hooped shirt is far preferable to having a spirit level nailed to your tits. Unusually for a drummer, Matt was positioned to the very right of the stage, but such was the ferocity of his paraflamallantisiliogochgochgochadiddles during the course of the set that he ended up over on the left with his legs in the air and smoke trailing from his cymbals like some hapless WWII kamikaze pilot had flown through a temporal worm hole and thought, “hey, The Joy Formidable are fucking brilliant.”

It’s most unlike me to quote imaginary (and unfortunate) 20th century Japanese aviators with a penchant for self-harm, but I’m having that one tattooed just above my belly button. The moment I first heard this band — relatively late in the day in Feb 2009, I’m ashamed to say — I knew they were destined for great things. Last night, they proved me right. My only disappointment as of now is that unless the Earth is gobbled up by a galaxy-sized whale-like monster hunting temporal worms to supplement the plankton, this is probably the last time I’ll get to see them at an “intimate venue”.

A shame — but as another of Leicester’s famous sons, Gary Lineker, would say: “Whirl, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about...”

The Importance Of Names In Fantasy Literature

2011-02-11T08:48:00.006Z

The Riders of Rohan have always been a surprise to me — not in the sense that they come bursting out of my bathroom cabinet at random every few hours á la Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition (though they did try it on last Tuesday night when I was picking a flake of sweetcorn skin from between my teeth), but rather because their name lends itself so easily to practically all forms of mockery.

On the whole, Tolkien was a dab hand with names (and a lecturer friend assures me this is because he was so terribly embarrassed about his own — indeed, Gollum’s now infamous postural shenanigans owe their origin to Tolkien’s frequent pacing around his Oxford study room cursing his ancestors for not being Smiths or O Donovonovons), but with the “Riders of Rohan”, he clearly lost it. Boromir, yes. Saruman, yes. Even Treebeard is passable. But Rohan? With its riders? To be honest, he’d have been better off calling the place Cock.

You desire reasoning?

Okay then, here goes.

Realistically, if you were a barbarian horde of thousands upon thousands of pit-forged Uruk-Hai led by an ultra powerful wizard (himself in thrall to your mutual ultimate overlord, the uberdark Sauron), mention of “the Riders of Rohan” in conjunction with their “coming” simply wouldn’t have you quaking in your hobbitflesh boots in my opinion. More likely, a Mexican Wave of sniggers and guffaws would ripple across your Urukness like a kaleidoscope of colour along a randy cephalopod’s back — only it would be a Mordor Wave, with weirder hats than sombreros being tossed into the air and frequent interruptions to the pulse thanks to spontaneous gratuitous acts of mindless violence.

Uruk-Hai 1: Oi! Pack pushing, you ugly git!

Uruk-Hai 2: It wasn’t me, it’s a Mordor Wave, pug-face.

Uruk-Hai 1: Who are you calling pug-face?

(Over the sniggers and guffaws comes the rumble of knobbly clubs being prised from their sheaths)

Uruk-Hai 3-17, 19-45, 49-72: Fight! Fight! Fight!

Uruk-Hai 19, 46-47 (as they lie, trampled half to death on the Tolkienesque sod): Riders of Rohan! Ha ha! That’s so so so soooooooo funny!

I should point out that now the rout has started, this is very definitely not how things would appear if you were sat at the top of the hill on your proud stallion — if you were, in short

No. I’ll have to start that sentence again. Fit of the giggles. It’s just got to me. Sorry.

OK. Cool it, Whirl. One. Two. Three.

I should point that out now the rout has started, this is very definitely not how things would appear if you were sat at the top of the hill on your proud stallion — if you were, in short, a Rider, late of Rohan

Rider 1 (of Rohan): Look how they quake and quiver in their boots!

Rider 2 (of Rohan): Hobbitskin boots, I’ll be bound: the footwear of choice for craven cowards!

Rider 3 (of Rohan): ‘Tis our name they fear! Rohan!

Rider 1 (of Rohan): And our riding prowess, our saddle skills!

Rider 2 (of Rohan): Though our capes are pretty good too!

Rider 4 (of Rohan): Yes, let’s not forget our capes! We’re known for them almost as much as our riding prowess and our saddle skills!

Rider 3 (of Rohan): Capes crocheted by our womenfolk! Womenfolk almost as revered for their clothing as we menfolk are for our riding!

Rider 2 (of Rohan): In Rohan!

Rider 1 (of Rohan): In Rohan, aye — and beyond!

Rider 4 (of Rohan): Hang on, fellow riders—

Rider 2 (of Rohan): Of Rohan!

Rider 4 (of Rohan): Of Rohan, yes. Riders — methinks those barbarian grunts are actually the belly laughs of unrestrained mockery!

Rider 2 (of Rohan): Then let us make ready our charge while they are wrong-footed, helpless, prone!

Rider Leader (of Rohan) (who’s been sitting at the back looking poncy for the past five minutes) (of Rohan): Instruct the womenfolk to remove the crocheted nosebags from the horses! And iron the capes!

Rohan — ha!

What the hell was Tolkien thinking when he came up with that duffer?

With thanks to the barbarians of DragonCon 03 (and their seamstress girlfriends).

If In Doubt, Start With A Great Analogy

2011-02-07T17:57:00.000Z

In some respects, blogging is much like developing your penis with a sink plunger and two dozen thoroughbred mules: go crazy and you end up with a monster, go easy and the mules trample you to death, mocking your torpor.

When I began this blog, I envisaged a series of short features that would build over time into the cyber-uselessness equivalent of collectible football cards, possibly interspersed with the odd bit of fiction.

What I've ended up with is something quite different — an amorphous ladling of wibble-stuff over a cluster of interlinked vacuums.

And, less frequent postings to boot.

As I prepare for my forthcoming three-year bloggiversary, I'm determined to find the epicentre of this Abyss into which I find myself winking — the heart at the core of the frippery, the frippery that buoyantifies the heart — and since any such endeavour might resolve itself in the worst kind of navel gazing, I call upon all my stalwart followers, stalkers and smutbot mine regurgitators to chirp in with a vote for their favourite post so far in order that my more regular intended future offerings might rub ilk. My own picks should still be in the sidebar to your left, mostly chosen from popularity as evidenced by comment hits at the time. And I could be wrong.

Spring beckons, and with it come the seeds of renewal and opportunities for courageous mooning.*

* That has nothing to do with anything, btw — I just like the sound of it.

Meanwhile, whatever vile slurry your tastes and peccadilloes dredge forth, come back next week for the return of Protrudio and reportage from the cutting edge of sonic onslaught.

We Are The People Closing Our Libraries

2011-02-05T09:46:00.003Z

As my flesh has taken to rotting and my teeth and hair have begun making preparations for The Great Disgracing Bunjee, I’ve tried to avoid being drawn into political battles — especially on this fun (and possibly hip) blog.

I wasted too many hours of my twenties “opposing Thatcher” when I ought to have been getting on with something a little more productive than harrying the lackeys of a harridan.

My preference these days is for letting the wrong be wrong, allowing them the privilege of going to hell in a hand cart. People are generally quite useless at changing even the smallest aspects of their behaviour and opinions and when their chins are really set there’s very little point in someone like me coming along and making like a chiropractor — especially if I try my damnedest to “be firm”.

That said, I now find myself ever more distracted by rumblings from this country’s uppermost underbelly about What Has To Happen and What We Must All Do and, in spite of my better judgment, I set aside my biddable demons for a moment and permit myself a rare stare into the Abyss of monsters. Why, I could almost be Clint Eastwood in The Unforgiven.

If you’re here because you’re a writer, you’ll already be aware that today in the UK, protests will be taking place at libraries across the country — libraries that could soon be shut down.

Libraries, it seems, are no longer affordable.

But in order for this to be true, we have to believe it.

My question today is who, in this instance, is doing the believing?

It certainly isn’t library users. If I had the time, I would link to every news item, every comment trail on the net — and this post would run to a considerable number of alarming yards. As of now, there are 38,000 hits for “library closure” on Google, if you’re interested — and yes, I’ve confined my search to 2011. Drop into any link on any page and you will see real people, real concerns — kids who will lose their book club, pensioners who will lose access to information, public events that will cease to exist. What you may not find are people with nowhere to go, who sit in libraries keeping warm with a copy of The Sun scant yards from

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there.

I don’t suppose people working in the library departments of local councils are great believers in library closures either. As for their bosses, the people who control the purse strings, I suspect their role in all this will be akin to that of the loyal foot soldier forced by a masked coward to chop off the King’s head. For all its supposed Small Government aspirations, the coalition does seem to be gifting councils with powers of decision it might otherwise trust only to “the market” — the Cheshire Thumbs Up of the Invisible Hand, if you like. To be honest, it’s difficult to know whether the Government is for or against library closures. I haven’t seen any evidence of ministers planning to attend today’s protests — less so, writerly grandees like Jeffrey Archer who have benefited directly from the Public Lending Right — and until the papers are awash with headlines such as Cameron To Sanction Library Closures or Turns Out He Is A Cunt After All, I’m prepared to treat their silence as a mark of respect for these essential public spaces. I am, after all, an optimist rather than a cynic.

All of which kind of leaves me, in my search for believers in the unaffordability of libraries, with all the people who don’t actually use them, perhaps, or don’t have any direct influence over whether they stay or go, the people who resent their taxes being spent on services they don’t use themselves, the people who don’t care, the people who have no preference either way — in short, the people lining up outside libraries up and down the country even as I put the finishing touches to this post, all chanting WE HATE LIBRARIES and waving placards emblazoned with WASTE OF MONEY, WHO NEEDS BOKS?!! and KNOCK THE PLACE DOWN WE WANT ANOTHER SUBWAY.

Who else might it be?

Here ends this momentary cessation of winking, this stare into the Abyss of monsters. Do come back later in the week for Protrudio, news of Geoff’s latest furballs or more from the succinct-yet-pointless singular parrot of fiction.

I’m off into town now to support my local library. Just hope I can make it through the sea of angry protesters throwing Molotovs at the wheelchair access ramp.

One Parrot Fiction #3

2011-01-30T09:22:00.002Z

Click to enlarge — but be warned: your clothes may not fit afterwards.

A Casting Off Of Albatri 11

2011-01-27T23:43:00.003Z

Strangle The Young

Rictus fingers
grasp at life,
can't cup it.

Ever,
all our nevers.

Sup it.

With Apologies To All Who Are Holebound Today

2011-01-27T09:31:00.004Z

Much as I would love to join in the fun of Rabbit Hole Day by descending down said lapin-friendly portal with all nonsense blazing, I'm currently so far UP a similar otherworldly invagination (with neither oars nor sails nor all-singin' all-dancin' parrot to guide me) that if I were to report back with my findings, I'd most surely be hung, drawn and quartered.

A roll call of bona fide usually unusual suspects can be found here.

On The Couch With Sock Monkey

2011-01-24T06:56:00.002Z

WO: Happy New Year.

SM: What? It’s January the 24th — practically next Christmas.

WO: Okay, suit yourself. I was only being polite.

SM: If you had any inclination towards being polite, you wouldn’t have failed to show for your last appointment. On the 7th. Maybe you could have wished me Happy New Year then.

WO: Yes. Sorry. I was going to say something about that.

SM: So?

WO: My washing machine broke.

SM: And, what? In the absence of your trusty washing machine there were no buses?

WO: In the absence of my washing machine, there was water. Everywhere. Including the telephone socket.

SM: So — not a “Happy New Year”, then.

WO: If truth be told, no.

SM: So let me get this straight. You let me down on your first appointment of the year, then for the second, you swan in like nothing had happened and try to fob me off with a bogus greeting. What are you planning for next time? To urinate on my couch?

WO: Ah. About next time...

SM: Don’t tell me. Let me guess.

WO: Okay.

SM: What?

WO: You said “let me guess”. So, go on then, Mr Supposed To Know Everything About My Brain.

SM: I’ve told you before, it’s not just about brains. Human beings are more than the sum of their parts — even if one of those parts went missing at an early age.

WO: Don’t try to change the subject, you charlatan!

SM: Your car needs an MOT?

WO: No.

SM: Doctor’s appointment?

WO: No.

SM: Dentist?

WO: No.

SM: Hairdresser?

WO: Now you’re just taking wild guesses.

SM: Job interview?

WO: Nope.

SM: Gas man? Electric? Broadband?

WO: Nopey nope.

SM: Hospital appointment? Roof blew off? Washing machine broke again? Locusts? Earthquake? Aliens?

WO: Ha! Oh this is good, very good.

SM: Laugh if you must, but for your information, I’m using the technique known as “rational enquiry”, eliminating all the reasons it can’t be in order to reveal the truth.

WO: Very clever, but that’s not how it works with Guess Why I Can’t Come Next Time. Follows the same rules as a quiz show. “I have to go with your first answer” and all that.

SM: Very well, then. You can’t make it next time because you concluded over the Christmas break that I was a fraud and that every single penny you’ve ever paid me has been a waste of your precious money. You would have told me you’re quitting on the 7th, but you bottled it, and you were going to tell me the moment you walked in this morning, but you bottled it again, and now you’ve decided to cancel our next appointment care of some excuse far more spurious than a broken washing machine so you can text me between now and then with a coward’s exit and spare yourself the horror of telling me face to face.

WO: Hmmph. It’s no good saying it now.

SM: But I’m right, aren’t I?

WO: Yes. If you want. Fine.

SM: So?

WO: You’d better hit the RECLINE button on the couch while I look for my diary...

The Curse Of Swollen Piles

2011-01-19T06:29:00.001Z

Confession: when it comes to admin I’m a Doer-as-U-Goer, not a Hardcore Piler-Upper.

I like my inboxes cleared and my outboxes smeared with a rocket-fuel-like ejaculate of efficiency.

Piles of washing up after Sunday dinner? No chance! The moment those hot plates hit the dinner table, every last spoon and mixing bowl feels the dishwasher’s Radox splash.

That said, I don’t iron underpants.*

* So please, no cries of “Anal! Anal! Anal!” — especially if you’re reading this on your phone in the supermarket.

Since mid-November, however, I’ve got a little behind.** Piles of papers, unsorted, lie next to a computer crammed with cluttered directories, a phone packed with too many photos and memos and no-nos.

** Admit it, you want to snigger.

So I’m having a clearout — a bit like Santa after Christmas with the elves who ate too many chocolates.

The clichéd image, of course, is of the human-cum-octopus hybrid, busily attending to his backlog of unfiled detritus while swigging from a pint glass of Red Bull.

But that would be too easy. Far better that I drag some unsuspecting human-cum-octopus hybrid off the street and force him/her/it to crack down on my burgeoning piles. Or grab hundreds of the beggars, chop off their arms, and construct some kind of Tidying Golem.

As you don your clerical Marigolds, how do you picture yourselves?

A genuine Abysswinksback spangly Blogger Award awaits the best deployment of imagery, especially if you’re clearly making it up...

The Night I Treated Victoria Coren To Moussaka (And Unlimited Gin)

2011-01-16T09:29:00.010Z

Can I make a complaint?

About the the bloody telly?

Specifically, last night’s feeble channel-deep regurgitation of suffering?

Let me be clear about this, Mr & Mrs Sort The Schedules – when Famille Whirl hogs the settee of a Saturday night, armed with its salmon rolls and dinky donky dips, it expects to be entertained by a cornucopia of bedazzlement to rival Elvis’ sequins the night his pants flew off at Caesar’s Palace after one too many snorts of coke.

As it was, after the docu-soap that is Primeval, there was nothing much we fancied bar repeats, and since the salmon cobs had already begun striking home at my gullet, I said, “let’s see what we’ve got videoed.”*

* I’ll cut here the subsequent snark-laden exchange with Son of Whirl about our ‘video’ actually being a Freeview box.

As a family, we scanned the hard drive.

Just three choices, it seemed.

First up was a hundred and eighty minutes’ worth of David Tennant romping round as Hamlet – a recording now well over a year old. With a heavy group sigh, we moved on. “We’ll get round to watching it some day...”

Scrolling past undeleted episodes of Poirot and one of those How Publicly Visible Is Your Stupidity? programmes featuring a makeover of a friend’s childhood home, we came across a documentary about Mark E. Smith from The Fall. Rictus grins all round.

Finally we settled on Only Connect. Four whole episodes, as it happened – back to back, to recreate the Saturday Night Spirit so terribly absent since the end of the X Factor and Harry Hill’s Very Squeaky Head.

Famille Whirl simply loves Only Connect. It’s the only quiz show on TV that levels out our puzzle-solving playing field. Instead of the usual scenario where Girly of Whirly wins at ‘entertainment’, Son of Whirl triumphs at ‘miscellaneous crap’ and I come top in the ‘everyone knows this, but give him a chance’ category, when it comes to quiz show royalty such as the Connecting Wall, we’re all equally useless.

All of which is a very roundabout way of saying that I only watch the show for Victoria Coren.

Let me pause for a second to still my butterfly lungs.

It’s not so much a case of “ticking all the right boxes” or the fact that she’s so tiny she’d be the perfect person with whom to be trapped down a mineshaft – for me, it’s the way she turns to face the contestants. All panel game hosts have to master this skill, and some manage it better than others. So for example, what Stephen Fry lacks in poise he more than makes up for in affability, while Simon Amstell, in his tenure on Never Mind The Buzzcocks, relied on the Swivel Chair Ploy and frequently assaulted guests from behind. As for Sue Barker’s movements, the only mystery surrounding their origin is the precise voltage passing through the crocodile clips attached to her thighs.

Be in no doubt, viewing public, Victoria Coren is the best Turn To Facer in the business. I could watch her turning to face teams of contestants all day: The Cambridge Tintinnabulators, The Choo Choo Enthusiasts, The Effete-yet-strangely-rough-handed Scribblers, The Chirpingford Maserati BoyZ, The Chimp Breeders, The Stow-on-the-Wold Satanists – bring them on, say I! Then watch Victoria face them, watch her turn from captain to captain...to weird bloke on the end of the left panel... to camera...and finally (and I don’t know how she does this) to all.

It’s not so much the turning motion itself, but the way she copes with her unfeasibly long blonde hair without resorting to the Weathergirl’s Whoosh or the Starched Torso ‘n’ Neck Combeau of Potential Lumbar Dismay – and she’s stern as you like without being mean like Anne Robinson, yet friendly as a loving puppy dog without the need to lick anyone’s face.

I rather think I’d like to take Victoria Coren out to dinner. But not for the witty conversation, the food, the post-pud Poker. I’d take her to watch her turn.

The Savoy Hotel! A table for three! By the Help Yourself To Salad counter!

I’d pull out her chair, let her sit. Then shrug, almost embarrassed, as I tossed a coin to determine which side of her to place myself. “Heads it's left, tails it's right.”

Knees suitably under the silk tablecloth, bottoms snug on velvet, we’d survey le choix de canapés yummique, chatting idly about the Boer War and the digestive tracts of numerous species of turtle (it’s a guess: she’s very knowledgeable). All the time, she’d be turned to me, head tilted in that way, hair doing that non-whoosh thing – unless there was a gorillagram strutting its stuff by a neighbouring table, in which case she’d turn spontaneously and I’d be forced to cover my excited champagne snort with witty retort about an anti-asthma nasal implant.

And then my phone alarm would sound.

“Excuse me, Victoria,” I’d say, rising from my seat, “but it’s time for me to move to the other side.”

As I crossed to the spare place at the table, she’d turn to follow me, move in precisely the way she does on TV – but slower, and with no distracting letters of the Greek alphabet or spectacled frumps boasting four-digit IQs.

More talk – this time maybe David Cameron’s smile and the price of half cucumbers in Waitrose.

Moments later my alarm would sound again. And again, every two minutes, till either the battery or the Savoy’s supply of coffee ran out.

Creepy?

Not at all, say I.

At the first hint of Victoria (or anyone else) suspecting me of being some kind of narcissistic control freak, I’d be up out of my seat and straight over to the bloke in the gorilla suit with a morally robust sit down here and talk to the nice lady, Kong Face!

Or, better still, I’d arrange the diners into teams, one half to the right of our table, the other to the left, leaving the gorillagram free for his next appointment.*

* Katie Price’s new fridge.

I take my peccadilloes very seriously, thank you very much.

Looking back, the decision to watch Only Connect was the right one. Famille Whirl was thoroughly entertained (especially when Geoff got a question about Aristotle horribly – yet amusingly – wrong), I was inspired to dream about a fantasy tête-a-tête with a woman whose atlanto-axial joint I admire, and no-one was forced to endure any vile, vile dating shows or Top One Hundred Top One Hundred re-runs.

Happy.

Beats Blogging About Vacuuming The Fluff From Your Navel, I Suppose...

2011-01-13T10:17:00.001Z

Toenails.

For many people, they’re an irritating fact of anatomical matter, a throwback to the days (before there were tights and socks to be perforated) when your pinkies needed a little protection from all those Pteranodon-jettisoned boli and ground-hopping bobbles of sub-reptilian gristle that would one day evolve into bees.

Right now, mine are a kind of living exodus, a collection of molecules organised into shell-like husks whose mission in life is to get the heck away from my brain as quickly as possible for fear of being incorporated into some madcap idea involving dressing up or horseplay.

Resolved to put them out of their misery with deft cuts of a clearly useless Christmas cracker gift (no, not the padlock incapable of securing anything, or the fish-shaped sliver of plastic shaved from Clare Petulengro’s Tupperware collection...), I don goggles and set to.

So — how was your mid-morning tea break?

The Writer's 'Giraffe Conundrum'

2011-01-09T08:21:00.001Z

I hate it when the plot runs out of control.

Especially in fiction.

Maybe you’ve experienced something like what I’m about to outline, maybe this is how it goes for you, too. If so, take comfort from the fact you’re not alone. Then slash your wrists, if only to keep your hand in...

Let’s say you’re writing about a time-travelling giraffe trapped in a wizard’s lair.

And let’s say he gets to throw a chair at the wizard.

Don’t ask why, he just does. It says so in your first draft:

thewizxard stared hard at the giraffe somtihing about his eyelashes but not bristling, then gir grabs chair and throws it, hits wiz, knocks unconsc

So you write, “the giraffe grabbed the chair and threw it at the wizard”, resolved to tackle the business about the eyebrows next (or drop it altogether, perhaps). Simple.

Then you remember, earlier in the scene when you were describing the wizard’s lair, you referred to a cat asleep on the chair. It’s not an essential cat, just decoration, included along with the crystal ball and the cinnamon incense sticks to convey something of the wizard’s mystique. But now you’re wondering, “what happens to the cat when the giraffe picks up the chair?”

Options now proliferate, like wannabee Lady Gagae.

“The cat eyed the giraffe suspiciously.”

“The giraffe stared hard at the chair. Only moments ago, a cat had lain asleep upon its velvet seat, but now it had vanished...”

“The cat rose to its feet. ‘Back off, you long-necked fiend!’”

Suddenly, it’s three-way dialogue time, and your characters have to start twitching, rolling their eyes and manifesting all sorts of ridiculous and unnecessary mannerisms so people can figure out who’s talking in the absence of tags.

“Yes!” The wizard smiled. “It’s my cat, my familiar”
A grin from the cat. “Yes.”
The giraffe’s long lips drooped. “I’m not smiling.”

Or maybe you’re Old School, in which case there’s endless intoning, ejaculating and meaowing.

So what do you do? Go back to the description of the wizard’s lair and amputate the cat? Or accept the offer prompted by your reasoning as you re-examined the idea of the giraffe throwing the chair? What if the cat is stuffed? Nailed to the chair? Or is it the chair itself that’s at fault? Should the giraffe throw something else at the wizard, leaving the decorative cat to sleep blissfully on in the background? Could it simply punch the wizard with a deft one-two of savannah-mottled hoof? And does your protag need to be a giraffe at all? Maybe you’d be better off with a warthog, then you could ditch the wizard altogether and run with a rom-com centred on the cat’s unrequited love.

The problem with the plot running out of control is that it has to at some point. If nothing runs, you haven’t got a plot. This is as true for outliners as it is for pantsers. Whether you’re setting sail on a wide open sea or winging it down a ravine in a raft, it’s almost impossible to know at the time of committing air to script or pixel whether you’re running with with an idea or phrase capable of opening up your story or shutting it down hard. Giraffe good, cat bad? Cat good, boxing giraffe good? Giraffe bad, suicide good?

These are the cliffhangers your readers never get to see.

My Childhood Bike

2011-01-06T10:13:00.009Z

Kids!

Bombing around the estate on bikes in their flappy trousers and snorkel parkae!

Ride like the wind, the whoosh of Hai Karate, you Teenage Rampage rebels!

For truly, thou art bionic. Or as my friend used to say, “bijolic” (which I never understood: he wasn’t deaf).

Not for me the trendy Chopper, with its ridiculous seat so unnervingly generous in buttock placement options. Chris the Twat had a Chopper, and when he clambered aboard, his overall level of twattiness quadrupled.

Not for me the stylish racer. Even at the age of nine I’d figured out these were Hunchback Manufacturing Machines. Plus, before he got his Chopper, Chris the Twat rode one – and it was a right spazzy effort.

Not for me the ordinary boy’s bike, seen in every street, every park and every TV show (including The Double Deckers and How Meaningless Is My Life?).

Nope. No way. Nopey Nope.

For I was the boy who inherited his Grandad’s Raleigh Twenty.

That’s right, I ~~drove~~ rode a girl’s bike.

According to the story passed down to me, it appealed to my Grandad for three reasons.

Firstly, it was perfect for riding short distances, like to and from work, the shops.

Second, it had colour-coded gears built into the handgrip. Perfect for an OAP with no sense of smell.

Third (and most important), it had a basket on the back for his sandwiches. And that, my friends, was the clincher.

If this seems the worst kind of inheritance a 70s hot rod could be lumbered with, my other grandad left me two sets of false teeth which my Dad insisted I kept in a jar of water by my bed. “Pray to God you’ll never need them, son. But if the worst comes to the worst, they’re there for you.”

So, let’s skip the years of childhood trauma and cut to the time I’d finally accepted my lot as a pre-pre-op transvestite, and cut (again – like a slasher) to the park, the ‘adventure playground’, where gangs of biker boys from neighbouring streets zoom and swerve and race, and girls from Special Girl Land lounge on swings and roundabouts looking like the phwooaaar ones from Jackie, eager for incredible stunts.

There goes Chris the Twat with a magic skidder. Nearly comes off, but he’s such a twat he somehow doesn’t.

Cheers of adoration ring out from the roundabout as my mate with the bijolic hearing aid performs an almost gymnastic feet-off-pedals splits that would have had future generations of even the most spartanly talented BMX Boyz howling with derision. But these were the days before brand names, when you could get away with anything (and I should know, because somehow I survived them).

Now it’s the turn of Stu From Dahn The Road. He fixes the muddy embankment in his eyes, juts forth the unwhiskered chin of resolve and valour – then introduces one and all to another rude word for ‘willy’ and sparks up a Rothmans with a blowtorch from his dad’s shed.

My trick? To be honest, the best I could manage was to pedal for more than a few yards without my puncture repair kit falling out of my basket. As for my bike, it wasn’t exactly “stunt”.

But I’ll say this for the Raleigh Twenty: it was the perfect bike for a boy with fledgling you-know-whats stuffed down his nylon Y-fronts.

To demonstrate why this is the case, let’s run an imaginary race as a thought exercise.*

*For the uninitiated, this is an act of visualisation midway between lateral thinking, guided meditation and three pints of Special Brew with a meths chaser.

Let’s have a boy on a boy’s bike and a girl on a girl’s bike. If you like, since this is a 70s themed post, you can call them John T and That Skinny Tart From Down Under. Name the children as you wish.

They rev up, they pedal – and they’re off!

As the supersonic kids approach their maximum speed, a mongoose races out from a nearby bush and they must brake hard to avoid injuring it. (Some rules, to prevent the thought exercise being scuppered by clever cloggses: killing the mongoose means they won’t be allowed to stay up and watch The Sweeney, and we’ll assume they can’t swerve to avoid it on account of the yearning pit between the soon-to-be-swept-away terraced houses and the soon-to-be-built hypermarket/carbuncle.)

So who is travelling the fastest?

Why the boy, of course. D’oh. Boys are made of speed, zest, get-up-and-go; girls are made of knitting and generally being useless. And this is reflected in the design of their bikes. Allied to a sportier bike frame, the superior pumping action of the boy’s legs carries him farther and faster than that of the girl. To be honest, it’s a wonder she’s agreed to this race at all – she should be at home polishing her ballet slippers.

Fine. So who brakes first, Whirl?

John T again. No Brainer. His lightning reflexes far outstrip the stumbling, almost paraplegic, efforts of his female counterpart. In ten years’ time he’ll be careering round the Med in a speedboat while she’s stuck at home ironing slugs from the garden to turn into curtains – or children.

So does this mean John will fly from his seat first? Especially if his bike is a Chopper and therefore in no way designed to accommodate a backside anywhere along its foot-and-a-half of useless Ford Escortesque vinyl?

That’s right! And for any girls checking in today who might be getting hot under the collar about the potentially sexist nature of the observations made so far, let’s move swiftly to the killer question, in which the boy gets his just desserts in the name of equality.

You mean, John T?

Better than that. Any boy.

So what’s the killer question?

Why do boys’ bikes (ie bikes designed specifically for boys (the sex designed specifically with vulnerable globules of gristle dangling between its legs from nerve fibres connected to the part of the brain responsible for REGISTERING SENSATIONS OF AGONY)) have solid metal crossbars directly in front of the seat upon which it is possible to slide, slide, slide until – THWACK! – you reach the handlebars?

In a universe of balance and harmony, the best boys can hope for during such a Mongoose-Brake-Flight scenario*, is to have their differences split equally. ‘Two to the left’, ‘two to the right’ and ‘one either side, but the wrong way round’ don’t bear thinking about – let alone Chris the Twat’s speciality when he owned his spazzy racer: ‘both dead center, tied in a knot, while flying from an Knievel-style ramp’.

* For reference buffs, this is yet another term coined by Hans Eysenck that’s been picked up and misappropriated by the NLP fraternity.
I admit, long ago, on my bike, in my parka, I cut a truly risible figure. Especially when my dad raised the seat for my 21st with a broom handle. But as I walk the high street of adulthood, resplendent in my lack of wheels, I'm proud to have owned my Raleigh T.

Call me the lucky one, but I'm the only man of roughly my own age able to negotiate the rat run between Poundland and Cash 4 Offspring in anything like a straight line...

Specu-Lash-Whosh

2011-01-04T08:33:00.003Z

One of the things I’ve come to like about blogging is how it keeps me on my toes.

True, my keyboard sits on a shelf eight feet up my study wall, but even if my ground floor were free of appliance-unfriendly custard, what I now see is a particularly feeble gag would still just about cut he mustard.

In my Abysswinksback hopper I have well over two dozen half-written blog posts which never saw the light of day. Either they ran out of fizz, lacked a backbone of hardcore writing acumen, or focussed solely on contentious subject matter like plucking Daniel Day Lewis, the fate of Buzz Aldrin’s exfoliated skin molecules while he was in orbit, and semen.

I’ve tried several times to breathe life into one or two of these posts like some hapless culinary Frankenstein heating up bubble ‘n’ squeak in a wok, but whenever I've finished, they seem to lumber from the screen like decerebrate laboratory animals, usually giraffes.

Maybe I’m falling prey to my inner Zeitgeist Wand Carver, unable to consider worthy for public utterance anything lacking the zing of nowness. Or maybe that post about semen really was way too infantile.

Or maybe, it’s just a typical Tuesday.

Lurid Pink-o-hula Ra

2011-01-01T07:44:00.003Z

From the withered remains of 2010 rises the fluffy bunny of 2011.

As a veteran of these almost Dr Who-like annual makeovers, I can’t say I’m too upset about the demise of 2010. It’s not so much what happened as what didn’t – the lost teeth rather than the fist-sized chunks of chocolate cake stuck at the back of your throat.

But lurid pink? Are you serious? What kind of fluffy bunny is this?

I suppose when mucus drips freely from the hard nose of reality, it’s better shimmering with such a colour than regulation Snotty. Which is not to say that the fluffy bunny of 2011 now bounds gaily across my lawn showering the snow-blackened shrubbery with its nasal bounty. Far from it. I merely wish to point up the omens we’ve amassed to ourselves, how 2011 is going to be The Nightmare To End All Nightmares (particularly in the UK where the swine have made off with all the pearls and now seek to charge us all for having cast them). It’s a villainous dagger of the mind on a par with the falling from Heaven of beds of roses, free Beyonce CDs. Or whatever swing of fate the oracles predict.

Okay, okay, I’ll confess.

I’m preparing this post a day in advance, like a Blue Peter presenter folding her half dozen incomplete Origami Chihuahua acrobats, Nigella flopping her doughy rondules into bowls overnight till the yeast has risen.

It’s New Year’s Eve. 2010. Still.

The withered remains remain unwithered and the fluffy bunny neither bounds nor showers; appears pink nor lurid, bunnylike nor otherwise.

It’s the secret Old Father Time slips in between the exagerrated hopes and fears with his sickle, there to be read like secret sigils woven into Jools Holland’s seborrhoaic follicles:

The future hasn’t happened yet. This will always be true.

The Chimera Hinterland

2010-12-28T07:42:00.004Z

And so, to the chimera hinterland between Christmas and New Year – the time 12th Century Dutch scholars called Deroes Maakte Omhoogdit (which means, quite literally, Whirl made this up).

The tree still stands, buckling under the weight of its festive glory, yet something of the Christmas spirit has passed. The star atop its highest spiny limb now heralds the arrival of the New Year rather than a trio of wise men bearing Ferrero Rocher.

In our calorie haze, we pause to look both forward and back, reflecting on what has been and pondering what is to come while elderly relatives try to knock back the last of the Dalwhinnie without us noticing.

As we ponder an immutable past (which already buckles beneath our gaze like a devious phantom) and gaze into the same future as always (the one that hasn’t happened yet, no matter how much we try to buck the speculative odds), it’s worth remembering the timeless words of His Divine Munificence, The Yeged-Godi.

“Between each fridge magnet and fridge, a slip of air so wafer-thin as to be breathable only by the tiniest of micro-organisms.”

Whirl's Christmas Greeting

2010-12-24T07:26:00.003Z

Just time for one final swoop over the nest before Christmas.

The nest of my followers.

Fluffy, joyful, all.

Hatched from the eggs of enthusiasm.

Bound for horizons of wonder.

With tiny beaks a-chirp.

And feathers whistling through the breeze.

In hats, maybe hats of all colours.

Or those fluffy Snoopy lounge suits you can get – the ones for slobbing around in between Masterchef and Newsnight.

That’s what I’m wearing now, as I swoop.

O’erhead.

Because swooping under is technically dive-bombing, and would pre-suppose your nest languishes in an eyrie (along with Dave Hill, perhaps) or atop some other bizarre geological structure with air directly below it rather than earth.

A mountain or an outcrop, say.

But no, your nest is in a tree, a plain and simple oak tree.

A clutch of twigs between the verdant leaves and acorns.

I pause in mid-flight wondering, “is it oaks that have acorns?” but I’m too busy swooping to Google it.

No iPhone, anyhow.

And if I tried to access Whattreewhatseed.com in mid-air, I could easily veer off course and meet with disaster.

My beak cracked against the side of the mountain.

(Despite the tree not being a mountain, it is in fact next to one).

Or the nest.

For, yes, I picked the hardest and thickest twigs to protect you.

Actually, they’re more like logs.

Which is why the tree is bent over.

And why I’d miss it if I were accessing Google, and fly headlong into the mountain.

But none of this is going to happen.

Because they’re acorns for the purpose of this swoop, right or wrong.

Or that swoop, should I say.

Sometimes you can get so preoccupied you forget what you’re doing.

So I’ll wing may way back round and swoop again.

Thinking of Christmas.

Such a time of cheer.

In the relentless, tormenting darkness.

That was a joke by the way.

About the cheer.

(Another joke).

(But less funny than the first).

(Not that the first was funny anyway).

(But you get the idea.)

(About what a magical time Christmas is).

(Figgy pudding, Morecambe and Wise, and always, always , always, some ropey Channel 5 show featuring unknown (and not very good) magicians performing well known (yet badly done) tricks).

(Personally, I only trust Paul Daniels to make things disappear.

And it’s sad to think that one day, he’ll disappear himself.

Though it won’t be magic.

So this is why it’s important to treasure Christmas.

It’s not about the tinsel, the presents, the feasts, the boozing and the endless games of Race Round The Living Room with grandma and granddad in wheelbarrows.

Even though it feels like it most of the time.

Christmas is for caring and sharing, maybe even coming over uncharacteristically schmalzy.

And doing so with those you love.

Including the cat.

Or a dog if you have one.

Or cockroaches, if you’re Polenth.

Also, your followers.

Who I’ve missed once again btw thanks to a second distracted swoop.

No idea how, as I see you’re now waving banners and have laid out a runway of cheese slices.

Three things to say about that.

Firstly, sorry.

I’ll swoop round again and land this time, promise.

Second, thanks for caring.

It brings tears to my eyes.

Thirdly, you should have knitted leaves together for the runway.

We’re supposed to be nibbling Olive-Stuffed Cheesy Gondolae before the turkey, remember?

Without the Gondolae, the olives will roll about all over the place.

And the Gondoliers will have nothing to do.

They’ll riot.

Pelt us with nuts as we eat, crying, “you’ve stolen our livelihoods, you fiends!”

Whatever you do, don’t make it a rolling runway by using up all the pickled onions.

Save them for bargaining with the Gondoliers.

“Two onions each if you promise to lay off the nuts.”

“And, yes, you can sleep on the pudding till we eat it.”

Coming in to land now.

So this is technically post-swoop, pre-alighting.

And then we can get down to the festivities.

In our Snoopy lounge suits and our assortment of crazy festive hats.

So thanks for stopping by.

Thanks for snuggling in my nest.

Without too much biting, punching or chainsaw wielding.

(Gowan, try it – there’s no socket).

Have a merry Christmas.

And I’ll see you again when the last scraps of the turkey have been sandwiched.

(Or droplets of Butter Bean & Parsnip Pilaff spread on toast if you’re a vegetarian).

Spurned By Avians, Shunned By Acrobatic Rodents

2010-12-22T08:24:00.004Z

This is the Luxury Bird Feeder Girly of Whirly and I purchased last weekend to help all the neighbourhood wildlife eke out the misery over Christmas.

That’s right — half a coconut shell packed with compacted Alpen two years past its sell-by date.

To be honest, we might as well have stuffed a load of polystyrene packing blobbules in a Nazi stormtrooper’s helmet and hung it up on a gallows.

Not a peck, not a scratch, not a chip of squirrel machete.

All my base are belong to Sweet Fanny Adams, it seems.

Yuletide Equine Romance

2010-12-21T16:09:00.005Z

Just time for a quick snippet of movie footage shot on my mobile yesterday morning as I romped through the snowy wasteland to check up on Maurice...

Ladle On The Festivity

2010-12-19T09:50:00.003Z

Today marks my official run-up to Christmas.

Yes, the tree has been up for a week, and yes, we have lots of festive snow, and yes, I’ve started on the whiskey a couple of days early (along with the chocolates, the Satsumo wrestlers, the nuts and the stray sultanas that didn’t make the pudding), but today we have our first guests, our first shot at Holiday Wii, and Son of Whirl and I get to cook a full Sunday roast in our matching pinnies.

I don’t profess to being the greatest entertainer on the planet, but here are a few tips I’ve found useful for those of you hosting gatherings of friends and family this year.

1. My Mum always used to decorate up the pictures hung in our living room with tinsel and spare baubles from the tree. I’ve since found this works especially well if said pictures are replaced with placards reading CHEER UP, YOU MISERABLE BUGGERS.

2. Pets, too, can be similarly adorned. Geoff has a wooly glove we converted into a fairy light display of wonder when she was a kitten, and though she can’t roam far when she’s strapped and plugged in, she radiates Christmas cheer year after year. That said, she could do with a bigger glove now she’s 17...

3. Never, ever, treat yourself to weird-sounding “luxury” cheeses.

4. Got an irritating uncle? A horrid granny? Some other relative you don’t want round but can’t not invite? Why not convert your garden shed into a scintillatingly festive Lapland grotto, complete with animatronic Santa, elves and reindeer, and lock him or her securely inside till well after New Year?

5. Ironing Brussel Sprouts isn’t ‘Blumenthal’ — it’s just stupid.

6. Lacing the pre-feast glasses of sherry with crumbled indigestion tablets can cut out no end of fuss later on.

7. Never, ever, ever hire out a live bear for the kids to pet.

8. Coins inserted into the Christmas pudding should be thoroughly washed beforehand. To prevent any notes from going soggy, roll them up inside the casing of an old biro and seal at both ends with Blu-tak. Same goes for cheques.

9. Scour your back catalogue of Christmas music for any trace of Gary Glitter. Nothing kills a family celebration stone dead quicker than a predatory paedophile in silver platforms.

10. Tired of traditional party games? Out of batteries for the Wii? Why not Bazuka That Verruca?

Dave Hill Reminisces

2010-12-18T07:27:00.003Z

Dave, speaking from his clifftop eyrie in Wolverhampton.
(Image c/o Ted Nasmith, Guitar Wizardry Made Flesh c/o Dave himself)

Cliff! Whirl! Action!

2010-12-13T14:01:00.002Z

Holder Time Beckons

2010-12-07T06:52:00.001Z

This weekend has been nominated as The One.

This is when the Christmas decorations will be dredged from their attic boxes and hung about the place, when the spent wax of 2009 will be plucked from 2005's tinsel and umpteen Santas ironed/glued.

If things go according to plan, it should take an afternoon: one hour to put everything up, two hours to find everything in the attic, and three hours making trips to B&Q to get all the bloody lights working. So glad I never invested in an animatronic reindeer when they were all the rage.

Last weekend was definitely too early, and March 15th clearly too late, and since most homes in my humble little row of olde worlde cottages have yet to display a single luminous elf, I’m guessing my neighbours plan to go with this weekend too.

What will be interesting this year, given the current climate of austerity hobby horsing on prior greed, is whether the people normally responsible for draining third world countries of their power will erect their full complement of all-singing all-dancing all-bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing neon Lapland chic.

Will, for instance, my street be negotiable in vehicles larger than a baby buggy c/o Mr Weird Moustache dropping from his retina-searing festive display the ten foot incandescent snowman?

Will the ludicrous wobbly reindeer strapped to the roof of number 22 once more serve as a lighthouse for aliens wishing not to crash into the Earth on their way from Pluto to the Everward Crests of Zubaluba VII?

And the flashing SANTA STOP HERE signs? Will their numbers actually gift said miraculous toy bringer a genuinely possible choice? Some instead of all, so he’s actually got time to savour a Kit Kat or two on the way round, the poor bugger?

In my youth, we had no candle bridges, no triple-sized rocket powered sleight orbiting the roof, and only the one set of fairy lights. And Santa was my Dad.

Simple times, so long ago, and yet so close, so—

oh to hell with it, you know what I’m angling to repost...

The Flibbly Bits Of The Damned

2010-11-30T07:07:00.004Z

The great thing about designing your own bathroom* is the bonanza of fun you can have mixing and matching tiles ‘n’ towels.

*ie thumbing through the various catalogues and shouting That one! That one! That one! until you reach your budget limit.

The worst thing about designing your own bathroom* is the consequence of making a wrong decision about the mix ‘n’ match tiles “ ‘n’ ” towels.

* And it really is bizarre how you can reach your budget limit before you’ve even thought about the bath, the sink, the shower and the loo.

So. Tiles first. The easy part.

Girly of Whirly and I were adamant that we didn’t want to go with any kind of nouveau Slasher Horror Dungeon look, and took umbrage at the numerous variations on the theme of Clearly Bloody Horrid.

So we went with white.

Plain, white, and satin — with a tasteful natural stone border containing fossilised miniature ferns.

To offset the plainness and the whiteness, we decided on a deep maroon for the towels. Personally, I blame Johnny Depp’s lips. It certainly wasn’t my idea.

And this is where the whole thing — my whole world — went decidedly tits up.

The problem with luxury maroon bath towels (and they really are SO luxury, exotic furry animals queue up outside our door asking to have their pelts replaced with them), is that they moult a fine maroon dust, tiny particles of towel fibre that get. Bloody. Everywhere.

Six months on, in spite of numerous washes each per week per towel, the entire bathroom can end up being covered in a maroon veneer within minutes of drying your backside.

Maroon fluff, everywhere, like some ghostly anti-Jif aura.

Removing the wretched stuff takes weeks. Weeks of work, on hands and knees, scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing. And the more you scrub the less it comes off the plain white satin tiles. The more you scrub the more it moves around in clods, forms amorphous blobs of maroon horridness along the lines of grouting and in awkward nooks and crannies twixt soil pipe and difficult-to-reach cupboard.

I’d rather fight lions in the Colosseum than clean my sodding bathroom.

Rather invite Dale Winton to weigh my bollocks on a wooden spoon.

So I’m looking for the bathroom towel fluff equivalent of those prawny molluscy insect creatures people put in their aquariums, the ones that clean the gunge off the sides of the tank with their innate flibbly wibbliwibbliness.

I’ve built a little hut for one on the landing, complete with bedding and a wheel, en suite facilities and wifi.

All I need now is a weblink, a brochure, directions to a specialist towel fluff mollusc retailer.

Any ideas?