Beeny, Brits and sore bits

I started a blog post about the Brits, but then, because lady holes are too close together and I am stressed off my tits, I got a bladder infection. It’s hard to blog when you’re pissing razor blades. It’s hard to do anything when your brain is comprised mainly of mashed potatoes. And mine is... 

I have a project to extend and renovate my house that is already six months behind schedule. My house, in case you missed previous posts, is a shithole, made mainly from brightly coloured sanitary ware and broken 1980’s kitchen in dark oak, where the cupboards smell ominously of fish.

My luxus kitchen, where the best worktop is a box with a chopping board on top.

In my house, an old woman called Beryl was found not alive. In my bedroom, in fact. So now, I call the place Dead Beryl’s house, because it belonged to Beryl and she is dead. Admittedly, she is the best work colleague I’ve ever had (I work from home). Dead Beryl never argues or gives me the finger behind my back or pisses on the toilet seat. Although I suspect her life of muesli abuse has caused the toilets to growl when you flush.

See? Sarah Beeny looks cool in a hard hat. I just look a helmet.

But that’s OK, because I’m going to be extending and renovating the house imminently and the very awesome Sarah Beeny is going to document my nervous breakdown for posterity on her show, “Double Your House for Half the Money.” If only I could underpin my comparatively lacklustre boobies as well as the house foundations. Perhaps The Beeny will have some tips... Men: I said tiPs!
Pay attention!

Behold, the glory of my tower of soup! Eat your heart out, Bernard Black.

I’ve also gone partially deaf because of Dead Beryl and her dust-encrusted curtains, which look like a cross between a magic-eye poster from the early ‘90’s and an old lady’s floral underpant with extra large crusty flowers for the myopic and hygiene-challenged. Plus, I’m still writing and hotly pursuing literary stardom like a stalker with furtive words in my flasher-mac pocket instead of a gun or a schlong. This comes with its own challenges, like realising you’re sick of just being the person who washes the skanky undercrackers and makes nutritious food that only looks a bit like vomit and which everyone just consumes with no real appreciation of the effort that went into any of it. 

So, folks, there’s a storm raging in The Horrormoanal Woman’s head. Some call it a mid-life crisis. I call it an epiphany. 2014 will be a year of metamorphosis for me.  And yes, I’ve started liking the things young people like again. It can’t be long before I try to squeeze my sausage meat legs into hotpants or something similarly embarrassing for my family.

Aw, Katy Perry. You look reet bonny in that uniform.

Anyway, back to the Brits: After years of moaning that any new band to emerge in the last ten years is a bag of arse, I found myself enjoying about 40% of the music at the Brit Awards 2014. I already liked Arctic Monkeys, but this time, unlike when I watched Glastonbury last summer, I liked other things too. For instance, I enjoyed Bastille a bit, and it wasn’t just because I wanted to touch the singer’s head. And I enjoyed that band with the warbly, big-haired bird, Rudy Mental. Don’t get me wrong, I still think Katy Perry missed her opportunity to stack shelves in Asda.  To my jaded old eyes, One Direction looks like a bunch of idiotic little scrotes, gurning and churning out pop with more synthetic composition than orange squash from a pound shop. I still think, when Alex from Arctic Monkeys gave that rambling acceptance speech about rock and roll and sludge and glass ceilings, he sounded like my eight year old off his nuts on blue Smarties. Having said that, he did come up with better pissed-up sound bites than my stock Drunken-Lady-Viking witticisms of: “where’s the bucket?” and “get help”.

When I get drunk, I do this, rather than come up with quotable soundbites. That's why I write and am not a pop star.

But generally, the Brits was great. I actually got sweaty palms in a good way when Grimmy snogged James Corden. Beyoncé looked like a really nice bottle of Gordon’s gin in that sparkly dress.

So, I’m coming round to the idea of new things being okay. Maybe a new me could be okay too, then. Time to ditch the anorak and council estate hair? Maybe...

Christmas Parties - ho ho f*cking ho!

I have a love/hate relationship with Christmas parties. When I was in paid employment, works’ dos always filled me with consternation... 

Apparently, it is not de rigeur to piss oneself at the office party.

On the one hand: How and why should you endure hours of enforced frivolity, whilst sitting next to or opposite someone you fucking hate? Surely, everyone knows how it feels to look at the cheap, sweet cooking wine and think, if I don’t drink this, I am going to die to death of brain deflation. If I do drink this, I am going to tell Mr. Sweaty Knob Cheese and his over-inflated, ego-inflicted side kick, Miss Hoity Toity Pointy Tits exactly what I think of them. We’ve been there, many times, haven’t we? Looking down at your poorly cooked turkey and stuffing, pondering how you could be at home, snorting supermarket own brand gin; having farting competitions with your other half whilst watching Grand Designs and writhing with semi-sexual anorak envy at Kevin McCloud’s McMurdo parka. 

As you can see, I don't like to overdress at parties but I do shave.

On the other hand: This is the offer of a NIGHT OUT. Shoreleave from HMS Parenthood and Grand Designs. Of course you’re going to fucking go! For once, you can take off the thermal vest that is starting to get stiff under the armpits. Kick off those disintegrating slippers! Do your roots! Shave your cleavage! Take a chisel to the kid-puke stains on your favourite coat! So, you shoehorn yourself into something ill-fitting and sparkly, that looked good when you lost all that weight four years ago. You slide your crispy trotters into the fuck-me shoes that make your arches sting and require you to use the short arse in the office as a walking stick. You put on your best knickers and the bra that aren’t grey with perished elastic. 

And what happens?

It’s a disaster, because your boss expects you to be nice to Hoity Toity and the Knob Cheese. You have to do Secret Santa and buy the bastards something witty, like a tartan scarf with a depressed cat ironically embroidered onto it instead of depleted Uranium and a Jaegermeister bottle full of Harpic 100% Limescale Remover. Then come the crackers. As if wearing a brightly coloured paper hat and reading out remedial jokes isn’t denigrating enough when you do it with your family. Now, you have to do it in front of the accounts manager, who hasn’t stopped looking at your saggy, lacklustre boobies for the last twenty minutes.

You CAN polish a turd! Treat spotty Gail to some of this.

Maybe....maybe you’re obliged to dance and you forget yourself. Twerking to Slade, because it reminds you of the time when you didn’t need gastro-resistant capsules or cod liver oil. And now your pile has come down and you’ve left a little trail of soggy arse-maltesers on the dancefloor because your pelvic floor collapsed in 2005. Maybe, you have to make a quick getaway before you have a complete prolapse into Goolie Julie’s clutchbag or you accidentally tell the boss that he/she is a humourless, tedious cock gobbler of epic proportions that even cooking wine or scribbling out his/her face with permanent magic marker won’t temper or repair.

So, my fine friends, the trouble with Christmas parties is not Noddy Holder or my Father-in-Law scratching his ear flakes at the dinner table. The trouble lies with me. When I had them, I hated them. Now that I’m self-employed and don’t get invited to any, everyone else’s seem to be wonderful, exotic functions. For yet another year, I shall therefore sit, festering in the shadow of my sticky laptop, festooned with ironing and peeling Dead Beryl wallpaper, wondering that invitations to glamorous events simply do not land on my door mat. But once they do start to come my way again, it will be good, for lo! They will be literary parties, where my modus operandi of getting horribly drunk really quickly, talking bollocks at a deafening volume and then mooning at people I’m not very fond of or flashing a tit at those I am will blend in seamlessly with the other quasi-alcoholic sociopaths. But for now, perhaps it’s better I stay at home this year. Again...

Remember! Beer goggles are an essential Christmas party accessory.

Karmic Dysentery

Okay, okay. I realise I haven’t blogged since the summer. I’ve suffered guilty guilt at the thought of leaving you without recreational swearing or entertaining facts about piles for months. My excuse is that I was writing a crime thriller and a series of books for small children AND doing a rewrite on a kids’ novel that went exactly nowhere. The stuff that makes money has to come first, right? Those anoraks and big knickers don’t buy themselves.

So what has been on my mind lately? I’ll tell you what...Karma. That stupid fucking idea that if you’re a good person, good things will happen to you, and if you’re a bastard, your bumhole will knit together, causing you to asphyxiate slowly on your own acrid guff. 

The optimist in me thought this might work...

Being a naive knob-cobbler, I have always thought that if I give to charity – hell, I worked for charities for about 20 years – nice things will come my way. I thought my karma account was in the black and I could expect great health, multiple book deals and thin knees to come my way. What did I get instead? Varicose veins, literary obscurity and dysentery. Yeah, you heard me right. Dysentery.

In October, my Father-in-Law, always the keen climber of stairs in the dark, managed to climb the stairs in the dark...and fall headlong back down to the bottom, because he’s a doddery old fart – more Stannah Stair than Fred Astaire. He broke his head. Well, actually, that’s a fib. He broke 3 vertebrae in his neck and painted the walls with the inside of his head but mercifully, the head wound was superficial and the neck will mend. 

Muggins – Karma Queen, here – plus family went trekking down to the fragrant vale of Croydon to visit Stannah Stair in hospital. He was wearing his new traction ensemble, complete with a Tena pad on his head and support stockings. Notwithstanding my sock-envy, I was glad to see him alive. And I was certain I had earned 50 billion karma points for dropping everything to do a 300 mile round trip to show support  (I would have done it, even without the karma points, because I’m not a complete cow). 

Remember, Father-in-law: Stannah Stair, not Fred Astaire!

But no! What happened? We took my Mother-in-Law out for lunch to a local restaurant to cheer her up.  Within a few hours, I felt like I had been poisoned with potassium or polyester or plutonium or whatever it is that old Eastern Bloc spies spike your butties with.  Then I turned into an intestinal jet wash. 

Dysentery, to the unacquainted, is an affliction - the kind suffered by actors in Bridge on the River Kwai and Tenko - whereby everything on the inside apart from your bones makes a very fast getaway through your arse. I survived on diarolyte alone for a full week. I went through my entire range of Primark winceyette pyjamas.

This was my karmic payback for caring. And, as soon as I was up and about again, we all came down with flu. Then my child’s drum teacher got the hump and sacked me off for poor attendance. 

So now, I’ve decided that being a nice person is seriously overrated. I am going to hone my skills at being an obnoxious fat-kneed turd and we’ll see if that doesn’t turn me into an overnight success. I’ll let you know how I get on. In the meantime, I’m off to mug a student for his Children In Need collecting tin...

Warning: belief in Karma can cause terminal disappointment and bad wind.

Horrormoanal Twelve Days of Christmas Humbug

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

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.

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.

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.

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.