Wash, dry, repeat...

Don't blame me for dirty language. At least that doesn't smell.

I’m taking the liberty of composing a blog post today about something that affects us all.  Personal hygiene.  And bottomly stink.  Over the past month, I have suffered all kinds of bum-flavoured intimate guff, none of which was mine.  It’s now time to share...

The most up-to-date vulvular violation happened earlier today, when I met a friend in a cafe in Chorley and used the cafe’s toilet.  I stared down at the toilet seat and there it was, grinning back at me: someone’s secret smile; a labia lithograph, etched on the plastic like sinister photocopied genitals.  Except there was no photocopier involved and the ink was actual fanny batter.  Yes, I’m taking about the beastly phenomenon of a fangita print on the toilet seat.  Eeuw.  To make matters worse, the mean age in the cafe was about 82.

Nobody likes home-made arse art

I know you’re weeping with sympathy for me here, but it is not the first time I have experienced this.  My former place of employment specialised in hoopla, goolie and bum prints on the one toilet that was shared by about fifty people.  Not to mention, the occasional turd dressing with a side-order of wee.  

Several questions spring to mind here. 

A: how can people’s eye/arse co-ordination be so bad that they can’t manoeuvre themselves accurately onto a seat that is designed to allow the bottom bits to hover comfortably over a hole, without hitting the seat?  

B: What have the people done to have dangleage so dirty, that they leave a greasy mark? 

C:  How can they stand up and walk away from arse inspired toilet-seat-decoration that is as eyecatching and distinctive and NOTICEABLE as Warhol’s tins of Campbell’s soup? 

See, the Japanese have got it spot on.

Wipe the fucking toilet seat if you can’t be bothered to wash your genitals, people!  And don’t piss all over the seat and leave it!  You’re not a cat and it isn’t a litter tray.

 

For defacating-age adults

Only the other week, on holiday, I visited the swimming pool toilet after a very expensively groomed and bikini clad older woman came out of the cubicle, having dropped her intestines and a guff bomb that would take out Rochdale.  She never warned me.  I nearly choked to death.  Could she not have said in a range of languages, “Give it five minutes.”?  If I were teaching languages in school, this would be one of the first things I would teach children.

If someone puts this on, buy soap

My other gripe is personal stink.  If I, sitting next to you, can smell your intimate savoury twang, why can’t you?  Everyone has occasion to go to the toilet and think, fuck, I’m a bit ripe.  Time for a go on the bidet.  Even the girl in Homeland wipes her kebab with a soapy flannel when she has to go to a meeting but hasn’t had time to shower.  That Billingsgate/chocolatey tagnuts smell, people, is a prompt to get out the soap and water BEFORE people sitting near you start to smell you through your jeans.  Same goes for armpits.  Nobody needs to choke on oniony ones.  Get 'em washed.

There is a school of thought that says human intimate smells are natural and full of pheromones and arouse the interest of the opposite sex, even while driving a Fiat Multipla, wearing orange polyester.  But I say, we’ve come further than that.  Let Vivienne Westwood put fanny batter in her perfume.  I don’t need to pay £50 for a bottle of Eau de Boeuf.  And neither should you!

I agree in principle, but men aren't always the culprits.

Walk Away!

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but the point of walking is to get from one place to another without rolling or need of a tarmac-based luge.  I learned to do it 39 years ago and so far, can do it quite well.  I taught my children to do it when they were a little over a year old and they’re pretty shit hot at it too, except the bits where they trip and fall on their heads.  So, given that we’ve pretty much got walking sorted, why does my Mother-in-law insist we do walking whenever we see her?

          

“Let’s go for a walk.  They’re such city children.  They never walk,” she says.

But of course, here’s the lack of logic in her statement.  They do walk.  They don’t roll around on a giant ball like a Dyson hoover made of meat and hair.  And yes, they are city children but living in a city doesn’t preclude ambulatory activity using real feet and knee joints.  We’re not all so chi chi and sophis in Manchester that even nine year olds can boast their own pimped up mobility scooters.

.

Croydon: area of outstanding natural beauty

Then she says, “We’re on the edge of the countryside here.”

And this is what really made me choke, before I’d even snagged my Pringle jumper on a bramble in the “woods”.  My in-laws live in Croydon.  My Mother-in-law must be wearing cow shit spectacles if she thinks she’s been living on the edge of the countryside in Croydon for over twenty years.  Streatham has some grass but it doesn’t make it the Cotswolds.  There’s a Lido in Tooting but those things floating in the water are balls of snot, chunks of polystyrene and hair, not the Maldives.  Perhaps all these years she has been mistaking the teenagers in the Whitgift Centre for comely Friesian cows.  Maybe she thinks the tram is some Trans-Alpine Express through the bucolic Swiss slopes instead of a piss-flavoured public-carrying slow death bullet, taking in the smells and sounds of New Addington, like a scene out of Deliverance with tattooed white men driving souped-up H-Reg Fiats instead of banjos, coz dey iz well fly, innit, bruv?

Gollum says, "I haz da precious, innit? It go from 0-60 in 3 minutes, yeah?"

           

So we went for a walk.

                

Now, I hate to break it to you, city dwellers, but they have mud instead of tarmac in the twenty square metres of Croydon countryside.  You can’t wear platforms or stilettos or white trainers or brand new school shoes.  And this sadism runs in the family...

My Sister-in-law lives in proper rural Kent and I can report that she is also a keen lover of walkies and they have real mud there.  And cow shit.  Lots of cow and horse and chicken and sheep shit and rabbits that are not stylish jackets but which sit around with myxomatosis, giving you the evil eye.  There’s not a single human turd in sight.  And she likes.  Walking.  In.  The.  Shit.  Not because she’s getting from her house to, say, the shop or the pub, which would be a sensible use of legs.  But because it’s “bracing” and “fun”.  Warning: These are euphemisms for “fucking freezing” and “pointless”. 

I love to go a-rambling

My Sister-in-law once made me do walking during the Summer because she lives in an “area of outstanding natural beauty”.  Yes, well, there are fields and I can see them from her garden and from the car.  I was wearing white linen trousers and brand new canvas Pumas, for God’s sake!  We got stung by nettles, the linen ended up hemmed in horseshit and my husband fell down a pothole and broke his anus.  This is torture, not hospitality.  We didn’t even take a flask of gin for emergencies.  All wrong.

Shanice staged a sit-in protest when she was told New Look doesn't accept American Express

Having begun this horror story, I’m going to stop here before some of you die of flange-failure.  My point is that walking as a pastime is wrong.  Just utterly fucking pointless.  You get mud all over perfectly good shoes and snag your favourite clothes.  There’s nowhere to go for a wee.  Face it, there’s nowhere to go.  Running is different.  That’s exhilarating and good exercise.  But walking...just save it for the bloody shops, all right?  I iz a city kid, ja’getme?

           

Biohazard: Contains madness and phlegm

 

Hello everyones.  I has been ill a lot lately.  I has bean coffin and coffin and chokin’ and there is lots less oxygen in my brian.  It iz three weaks now and I iz still poorly wiv broncheyetis.  I am bored now.  So I has done lots of fings to keep me happy at home and nice and warm.

I has done drumming.  It looks like this: Please watch this film now coz it is proper cobblers.

 

Foot Fightings

In my head, my drummings looks like Taylor Hawkins out of the Foot Fighters with boobs or Dave Growl out of the Foot Fighters and Nirvananas with boobs but reely, my drummings iz like a pile of steaming plop and I has coffins a lot too while I am doing them.  Becos I iz a bit old, I has started weeing a bit when I coff.  I am wearing a thingy to soak up the wee.  I don't think the Foot Fighters or dead Khurd Cobain or not dead Katie Perry does wee when they coff. 

I has done art.  Like this, except not like this, because this is a bit shit and my drorings are less shit:

I has done ironings.  This means I get to make the clothes flat as well as doing steme inhalations, wot the doctor said was a good thing for my weezing.

Ironings is good for making things flat and growing flem

It is a lot like a day centre for lazy, daft people in my house but I am the only person hear and I am talking to myself a lot.  I has been ill enough now.  I has coffed up so much furry, green flem that I called the last one Joost and made him a cheese sandwich.  

Please send messages to God and Santa and ask for me to get better soon and get more oxygen in my brian.

Amen.

Happy New Year, Pippa Middleton.

It's all about Pippa's personality really

What’s the bet that Pippa Middleton didn’t look like me after Christmas?  Cow.  She of the perpetual pert bottom and women like her.  I bet they spent all of the holiday season hungry, eating only spouts, drinking only water and revelling in the fact that they won’t wake up on New Year’s Day with an extra belly, diggy-in knickers and their tiddies keeping their shoes clean. 

I'd like to say I was pleasantly surprised by my reflection on 1st Jan.

Luckily, pertness runs in my family, so that's OK.

Well, I’m not like her.  Today, with a nasty dose of bronchitis and my jeans button undone, I’m more like the supply teacher in South Park.  I went to the sales by accident on the 2^nd January and tried on three pairs of trousers in the size I should be.  It was like trying to shove a king-sized duvet made of lard into a pillow case.  I wasn’t about to be humiliated by some bloody trousers, now, was I?   Chances were, those trousers were only on the clearance rack because they had been mis-sized anyway.  They were badly sewn.  THAT was the reason I couldn’t get them over my hips.  Nothing to do with the chocolate and wine and crisps and cake and pudding and meat...oh, the extra meat!  (I swear it took me about three weeks to go for a number two after all that animal protein.)

So I made a pact with myself to fight the flab an ounce at a time.  I ate soup for lunch for THREE WHOLE DAYS.  I went to the gym religiously for THREE WHOLE DAYS.  Now we’ve reached 20^th January 2012 and already I have lost ZERO pounds.  My arteries are no more than cylindrical kebabs. Wanna know my diet secret?  No.  I didn’t think you did.

Fuck it.  Wheel on the chocolate.  This battle's long lost.

There is no point to this blog post other than I have started 2012 overweight and wheezing like Michael Hutchence in a tangerine/stocking-themed auto-love tryst: but without the fun or glamour.  I hate January.  I hate diets.  And I hate diggy-in knickers.  Happy New Year.

Horrormoanal Twelve Days of Christmas Humbug

On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Long Johns: Beware the sexual magnetism.

Some bobbly long johns from Marks and wynciette pyjamas from Primark wot have faded in the wash and lost a button.

On the second day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Some Nectar points for paying the gas bill, a new pack of anusol for the piles and a bic razor for the thorny Kevin Keegan legs.

On the third day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Iboprufen for the back that I pulled out whilst removing a shoe and corsodyl to gargle away a furry tongue.

On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A bottle of Jolt so I can stay awake for ten minutes past water-shed: long enough for a festive fumble.

On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Six mystery dented tins from Asda, a pile of yellow stickered veg and a tub of on-the-cusp-of-going-fizzy yoghurt, hold the fois gras.

Taste the Difference Christmas tree. I don't like to stint

On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A fifteen year old Christmas tree from Woolworths and a load of plastic baubles from Asda that are too shit to fit on the tree properly and spend a fortnight falling off and rolling round the back of the radiator.

On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A failing metabolism that deposits five tonnes of lard on my inner thighs just from looking at Morrisons’ mince pies and a load of ensuing wind that makes me smell of forgotten sprouts.

The devil's knackers

On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

An argument with my mother about how snotty the veg should be on Christmas Day and how the in-laws’ presents for the kids are WAY shitter than hers.  Aren’t they?  AREN’T THEY?  And when I don’t answer because I wish to be diplomatic, I’m a disloyal bastard, naturally.

On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Some slightly undercooked meat at my in-laws that gives me the trots, some crap Swedish card games that make my brains pickle themselves in their own despair, monster back ache from sleeping in a bed that hasn’t had a new mattress since 1964 and hayfever from sleeping in a room with carpet that has never ever been replaced, since the time when carpets were first woven out of man nasal hair.

On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A pile of Christmas presents that demonstrate clearly that despite my being a tight arse, everyone else has actually spent a lot less on me, three non-matching pillow cases and four hours of competitive old person Scrabble.

If you let her have gizzard on the triple score square, we're stuffed.

On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Two bickering children, pretending they’re actually wild cats in the back of the car during a five hour journey back up north, scratching each other, dropping crumbs from bad bendy peanut butter sandwiches that have started to smell of plastic bag and a bladder that can’t decide if it does or doesn’t want a wee.

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A load of shitty repeats on telly, no Uncle Buck with John Candy, yet another New Year’s Eve spent in the company of that dorky tit, Jools Holland n pals, the sense that there’s nothing to look forward to until the cherry blossom is out and the spectre of yet another January spent water-skiing through horizontal rain to work in a basement office where people regularly and mysteriously leave perfect arse-shaped prints on the toilet seat.

Professor Brian Cox: thinking woman's crumpet

Aren't staaars brillieeeeernt?

I think it’s a fairly commonly held view that Professor Brian Cox is every thinking-woman’s DILF.  (Dad I'd Like to...you get the drift)  He has hair.  Lustrous brown hair like a nice pony or a wig.  It’s thick and stuck to his head, unlike most men of 40+, where the hair has migrated downwards and reappears in the nostrils, ears and foothills of their burgeoning bellies.  And he has teeth.  What teeth!  Truly a Wonder of the Molar System,

Never underestimate the lure of nice gnashers

like glistening giant windows on the world.  And he has legs.  Well, you know, I could go on but the main thing about Brian Cox is that he talks like an ordinary bloke and he saunters around like a bit of a dick and he comes out with bonkersly clever stuff in a really accessible way.  We love him in my house.  My 9 year old daughter, in particular, puts him on a pedestal and announced when Wonders of the Solar System first shone out of our telly that she was going to be an astro-physicist and go to Cambridge University.  Ahhhh, what a child!  

I think her aspirations are brilliaaaant, as Brian Cox would say.  Why?  Well, because her parents are a pair of over educated duffers who chose utterly useless subjects to study at university and consequently ended up in the most random and boring careers known to humanity.  Who the fuck needs to be fluent in medieval Dutch epic poetry and slightly conversant in Kafka?  Anyone?

In search of the dog-particle, last seen pissing up a lamp post.

If ONLY I’d paid attention in maths.  If ONLY I hadn’t sat through physics trying to sniff the Bunsen burners when I should have been listening.  If I’d scored more than 2/40 in maths, I could be generating the Higgs boson now by chasing very fat people on their mobility scooters round and round the crisps aisle in Lidl and forcing them to smash into each other underneath the rack of “Imperial Spirit” and eggnog-flavoured drink.  I could have been in Cern, creating quantum Black Forest Hole gateaux that bends time and is only 14 calories per slice.  

Sadly this was not a requirement for GCSE algebra

But I didn’t.  At school I had a physics teacher who gave the term “fart-faced old wassock” new meaning.  You had only to say the word “God” by accident and she would expel you from the lab for blasphemy.  She was one boring bastard.  I should have tried jumpstarting her during the classes on circuits and electricity.  Then the chemistry teacher had no chin.  Say no more.  Add to this the fact that I am fundamentally stupid and my only grasp of maths involves spelling rude words upside down on the calculator, and you’ve got...well, you’ve got an arts student, haven’t you?  On a career path to nowhere.

So feeling like I wanted to encourage my brainiac daughter all the way to Cambridge, I queued in Waterstones in Manchester to get my daughter’s copy of Wonders of the Solar System (the book) signed by Professor Bri.  I fancied a good gawp at the Sublime Overlord of all Dorks – yes, that includes me.  I’m a dork too - and even put my lipstick on to give the impression that there is more to me than my anorak.  But then I had to buy his new bloody book on quantum physics which, no doubt, I’ll end up wedging the bathroom door open with because it has hardly any pictures in and the words are in small print.  

Jagshemash. Her vagine hang like a sleeve of wizard.

When I got to the front of the queue, Lord Bri was charming and obliging.  But you know what?  I felt like Borat trying to put the marriage sack on Pamela Anderson in a book shop.  Click on the link if you don’t know what I’m talking about.  I couldn’t stop grinning and gabbling.  What a complete tit!  Really, I shouldn’t be allowed near celebrities.  So now I’m waiting for the restraining order to come through the post.  Waterstones are surely going to ban me from book signings, unless they’re my own.

But the point of this is not that I went to letch at old Bri (well, I sort of did).  I went because I want to encourage my daughter to do science because I don’t want her to fritter away the first twenty years of her working life, as I have, hating her bullshit accidental career and waiting for a vocation to happen to her.  If Brain and his soporific Oldham twang can chivvy her down the path to her own scientific discovery, then it’s worth feeling like Borat.  Wa wa wee wa.

Funny Rollercoaster

Like many writers, I observe people very closely and take inspiration for my writing from what I find.  Occasionally, I find beauty and greatness.  Sometimes, I find shallowness, conformity, bigotry, one-upmanship, ignorance, chippiness, lack of charity and absence of humility.  Mostly, I find a combination of good and bad.  Sometimes, what I see disappoints me but I do see the humour in the layer of bullshit at the bottom of life.

Warning: Ed Byrne is funny because he take the piss and moans.

Personally, I don’t like to boast publicly about the good things in my life because there will always be someone out there who’s got a shittier deal than me to cope with.  So I moan and generally try to take the piss, make people laugh, expose the ridiculousness of everyday life and some of the flaws in the people I see.  This is the writer’s way and having seen Ed Byrne perform last night, this is the comedian’s way too.  

I have been a fan of good quality stand-up comedy for decades.  When I lived in London, me and the husband used to go to The Monday Club at the Tattershall Castle.  This is a big old boat moored on the Thames.  There, they host a comedy showcase night, where up and coming as well as established talent cut their teeth and new material on an experienced audience.  Over the years, I saw Ross Noble, Shappi Khorsandi (she was bloody terrible twelve years ago but has greatly improved since), Stephen K Amos and many others who have since become household names and there were also some comic greats like Andrew Maxwell, Daniel Kitson, Jeff Innocent and Ian Stone who unfortunately haven’t.  Think Ed Byrne looks fresh-faced?  We went to see him do a gig in Reading about twelve years ago and then I saw him again last night.  He’s a consummate performer.  I’ll also never forget (although I try) the time Jimmy Carr was a new name, supporting Daniel Kitson at an Edinburgh Festival warm-up gig in Clerkenwell’s Comedy Cafe.  Carr was bloody terrible and although I think he’s great as a TV show host and ad-libs very well, I still can’t stand his 1970’s style Bob Monkhouse-esque one-liners.  So stiff and formal!

In any case, I feed off comedy intellectually and I try to make my own writing for children as funny as possible.  Making people laugh is such a tricky and skilful art.  It requires great discipline and most importantly, requires a truly miserable bastard to do it properly.  Only the brutally honest, anti-social arsehole can sit as an outsider and find the funny in everyday things, the woefully crap and irritatingly ghastly.  You have to have the troughs of the emotional rollercoaster to see the negative and turn it into comedy gold and then you have to have the heady peaks to perform or write it with enthusiasm and energy.  I’m not talking about the rollercoaster of the bi-polar here.  I’m talking about the full range – both highs and lows - of normal adult emotion. 

My car was towed, my goldfish has syphilis, my grandmother is dying: Praise Be.

At the weekend, I had a debate with someone about writing critically about life.  And my thoughts are this: nobody wants to hear streams of tambourine smacking, flag waving, evangelical bullshit about your life.  If all you do is boast: how brilliant you are, how fucking genius your children are, how immensely gymnastic and fulfilling your sex life is, how firm and fragrant your turds come out, how fast and quality your car is, how well paid your job is, how lucky you are to be God’s chosen Alpha Male or Female and how gorgeous you are, inside and out, then people are going to want to punch you.  You’re lying.  Plain and simple.  And nobody wants to hear that shit.  Life just isn’t like that.  Optimism should always be tempered by healthy cynicism.  And for those people who do only see the anodyne, the bouncy and the fluffy in life, perhaps you are emotionally crippled or on valium.  

Yes, don't be fooled by the paint job. My Overfinch does 1000mph.

For me, it boils down to this: Should I report to you in this blog that my car is sparkling clean and howls like a rabid beast down the road, inspiring envy in all?  Would that be entertaining?  Would it be truthful?  NO!  The truth is, my car is OK, but the interesting aspect of it is the litter all over the carpets.  I call it kid compost.  The fact that the interior smells of farts is also more interesting because as a family, we are prodigious farters.  Should I boast about my 9 year old daughter coming top in science and having great bone structure?  NO!  The truth is that she can lay claim to both of those things but it’s more interesting to report that she is an untidy little fecker, whose bedroom is carpeted wall to wall with dirty tights and knickers.  I expect her to start her own Dale Farm community in the back garden any day now.

Yes, my six pack is the envy of all, especially as Threshers did me 50% off.

So really, in the yin and yang of life’s experience, should I write only about the happy, sunshiny bits that are intensely personal and that might make some other fucker, worse off than me, feel like a piece of shit?  Or should I write the stuff that everybody recognises?  The spots, the flab, the bald patches, the embarrassing smells, the irritation, the angry outbursts, the mortifying faux pas?  Should comedians just come onto the stage and talk for two hours about how great life is?  Would that be funny?  Would it air on channel Dave for the next ten years, if they appeared on Mock the Week, praising the positive aspects of the current Governments’s fiscal policy?  You, the reader, can decide...