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.

Pets: Furry friends or a tragic snack?

I haven’t blogged for a while because I’ve been writing a long, long book with swearing and nookie and other stuff in it.  But life has been happening to me even during my internet absence.  Mainly, I have spent the last half a year being nagged rigid by my children about pet ownership.  So, it seems right that I should devote this blogpost to my curmudgeonly views on domestic animals. 

My views look a bit like this...

Animals: they bloody stink, don’t they?  And they cost a fortune to keep.  And then they die.

When I was a kid, we had two goldfish won at a fair.  I called them Fish n Chips.  Chips got eaten by Fish.  Then only Fish was left.  Fish ate his turds for about eight years and then ended up floating at the top of the tank like a dead sardine suffering from existential despair.  I later discovered that his demise was caused by my grandmother giving the hapless bumhole a tablespoon of food when we went on hols.  The fish literally ate until he burst. My mother let me bury him in the back garden. 

Several attempts at goldfish ownership later, I ended up with another fish called Fish.  That fish lasted an impressive ten years until, like Steve McQueen out of The Great Escape, he kept flipping himself out of the tank.  He ended up white, covered in mucus and listing to starboard on the bottom of the tank like Leonardo di Caprio in Titanic or that moaning bird out of Twilight.  We administered fish-euthanasia by leaving him on a saucer overnight in the hope that he would die quickly.  In the morning, amidst a waterfall of my teenaged tears, Mum said he’d gone in the night.  I don’t know where he’d gone but I doubt she’d bunged him a fiver and dropped him at the bus stop. 

The other horror of pet ownership that haunts me even now was the sad tale of Bopper Bunny.  I was eight.  Bopper was a gorgeous black and white Dutch rabbit.  We put him in a hutch that my idiot father had made from offcuts of wood.  He had a window instead of wire mesh.  This was a mistake.  When the sun shone on little Bopper, Bopper started to cook like a furry Sunday roast.  Consequently, he was confined to his airless hole of a bedroom.  He got diarrhoea and Mum couldn’t afford to take him to the vet.  Despite cleaning his hutch every week, Bopper spent six months trailing a ball of shit and fur around the size of Geoff Capes’ fist.  

Poor, tragic Bopper lived only two years and survived being let out by the local yobs on our estate and the bouncing shitball. 

One day, we came home from shopping, Bopper was stretched out in his window.  Rigor mortis had already set in.  Even in death, we failed Bopper.  My mother refused to touch the dead rabbit.  She shovelled him out on a spade, dropped him but eventually managed to put him in a shoe box.  But he had been stretched out when he died and Mum was only a size 5.  His legs couldn’t be tucked in.  So his coffin was comprised of an ill-fitting shoe box and a Kwik Save bag.  Bye bye, little Bopper, with your feet sticking out the end.  It was utterly tragic.  Worse still, I wasn’t allowed to bury him in the back garden.  So Mum slung him on some waste land and their endethed the story of my childhood experiences of pet ownership.

Tragic but true.

So when my kids ask me for pets, I simply say, “NO.  PISS OFF!” because my hurts have still not healed after all these years.  Fortunately, I have been given a second chance though, as two rabbits came to live in my garden and now there are five.  It smells of wee in the garden but they are so cute, it’s worth it.  

This post is in memory of Fish, Chips, Benson & Hedges, Fish and Bopper.

Fifty Shades of Shite

Great retro smut

My generation grew up skimming the pages of Sidney Sheldon, Harold Robins and Jackie Collins books for kicks and to gain a politically dodgy sex education.  What child had not plundered their mother’s library book pile and read the goldfish scene in Lace by the age of twelve?  The early eighties was still a period in history when it was acceptable for a man to be master of a woman’s body and her will.  But not now.  Not 2012.  No fucking way.

Toilet roll

Therefore, in the interests of protecting the public’s mental health, rather like a twelve year old kid from the eighties but with the writing skills of an agented author, the academic understanding of somebody who studied the feminist politics of violent hardcore porn at Cambridge University and the sexual experience of a forty-year-old who has been around the block a few times, I have read the first chapter and then skimmed my way right through Fifty Shades of Shite, from one nookie scene to another.  I have done this, so that you don’t have to.    

The writing in this MFI wardrobe of a novel is appalling but there are other bloggers who are currently taking this to bits very well.  I want to concentrate on the portrayal of sex in the book.  

First of all, there are several leit motifs and character ticks in the novel that crop up time and time again.  The most irritating is Ana Steele’s constant use of, “Holy Crap” and “Holy Cow” and even “Holy Moses”.  Holy Cow is used with such regularity that I began to wonder if EL James was hinting at the spiritual value of beef curtains.  Crap, double crap and triple crap are the sort of expletives I would expect from Hermione Grainger before she was legal.  All wrong.  If you’re going to write a novel with sex on pretty much every other page, for fuck’s sake, learn to swear properly and do it with style.  Other leit motifs include nuzzling body parts with your nose, including Miss Steele’s flange, and the ripping of a foil condom pack.  Now I may be going out on a limb here, but incessant crotch sniffing is reminiscent of truffling pigs and the act of opening a foil condom packet makes me think only of basting a Sunday roast.  Both are about as sexy as taking a shit in a bath full of cold baked beans.  

Which brings me onto my next topic.  Taste.  Mr. Grey makes Miss Steele shove her thumb up her woo woo and lick the resulting lady blancmange on many an occasion.  She describes the taste as “salty”, as though she’s referring to a Kentucky Fried Chicken family bucket.  Anybody who has had a go at this will know that fanny batter tastes neither like hummus, nor like marmite, nor like a bag of soggy Walker’s ready salted.  It’s a frankly ridiculous choice of word.  And Miss Steele, who seems to have no gag reflex, unlike 99.9% of all other women, thinks giving Mr. Grey a blow job is like sucking on a popsicle.  Well, we are already told that his erection rises out of the bath like the giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Boy of Ghostbusters fame.  Interesting when, in terms of size, most ordinary men are upstaged by a Cumberland sausage.  But not only does Steele not gag, she doesn’t comment that his todger tastes like a cucumber made of meat with all the pissy aftertaste of a badly filleted steak and kidney pie. 

Nor is Mr. Grey’s love juice anything like the reality of lumpy porridge mixed with PVA, smelling like a cross between a slime alien toy and bleach.  She swallows enthusiastically.  Dickhead!

The other preposterous pile of Holy Crap in this novel is the assertion that Miss Steele is a 21 year-old-virgin but has never touched herself.  Mr. Grey insists his submissive woman have a shaved kebab.  But what 21 year-old virgin is not going to have a Brian Blessed down there?  And what 21 year-old has never masturbated before, let alone embarked on a bad experiment which resulted in frost bite off that carrot in the fridge?  Or at least tried to fathom the erotic qualities of the back door by shoving a biro up their bum hole?  This text is saying that only a man can bestow sexuality on a woman.  Before that, she is an asexual blank canvas with no understanding of her own body.  What piss!  And don’t get me started on the politics of a man forcing a woman to go on the pill.

There are elements of the sexual activity that are just naive.  Anyone woman who’s ever done it in the bath knows two things: soap stings like fuck and any water-based nonsense ends up in strange soapy wee leaking out of your body for the next 20 minutes like you’re an incontinent chemical toilet.  I’ve yet to meet a woman who, on the second day of her period, wants to shag more than she wants to punch someone.  Above all, at no stage does Christian Grey fart under the duvet, wear his socks during sex or get a pube stuck in his teeth.

No, it seems clear to me that a fourteen year old boy and a virgin at that has written this book.  The writing is shocking.  After just skimming it, “my subconscious is quaking at the knees” suddenly has new poignancy.  If I ever have to read about someone rolling their eyes at themselves or having their sex cupped again, I may eat my own bile.  The sex is utterly puerile and consists only of grabbing a girl’s boob, a bit of wanking, a spot of missionary and one occasion with her on top.  That, apart from the female character being knocked around a bit and LOVING it, is basically it.  Fifty Shades of Shite is about as satisfying and adventurous as being fingered on the night bus.  Do yourself a favour...don’t read it!

Wash, dry, repeat...

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.

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.

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.

.

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?

           

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”.

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.

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.

 

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.

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. 

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.

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.