Back from the dead

I'm not dead. Not really. It's just that I've spent the entire winter doing writery stuff and climbing pyramids and painting and chasing chickens.

I've got the first four books in a historial adventure series for 7+ year olds coming out with HarperCollins Childrens in July 2013. It's awesome. I did have a picture of the cover here and told you the name and everything, but then a friend pointed out I might terrify children who google it, so I took it down. I'm writing under a pseudonym and it seems I have become a man with a cat and a keen interest in Dr. Who. I bet he doesn't do as much ironing as me.

The other thing I did earlier this year, instead of blogging, was move house. I have acquired the home of Dead Beryl, so called, because her name was Beryl and she is now dead. She popped her clogs in what is now my bedroom. I like to think she died in her sleep peacefully and there is nothing malign remaining in the house, apart from a slightly perplexing smell of fish in the kitchen cupboards and a lot of dust that makes me sneeze at least 8 times per day; technically a full orgasm.

Dedicated poo free zone

Beryl's downstairs toilet is so bright, one can only think of sunshine, although the seat is unbearably cold and means I cannot poo there. Her kitchen can only be described as crenelated and brown. Best of all, the honey pine clad ceiling in the bathroom puts me in mind of Finnish porn saunas, so Dead Beryl should be glad that her taste in decor is being celebrated on the internet as a thing of retro glory and erotic inspiration.

Evil chicken. Why the fuck are you in my garden?

One of the things we have recently come across in the new, old Dead Beryl house is a chicken. The chicken appeared one day in the garden, scratching around. I was perplexed because it had a head and feathers and wasn't wrapped in cellophane. I did wave a jar of Patak's curry paste at the stray chicken, but it refused to get out of Dead Beryl's flower beds. Eventually, I resorted to bullying a local child, who is an expert on living-chickens-that-have-never-seen-the-inside-of-an-Asda-chiller-cabinet, into shoving it though a hole in a neighbour's hedge. But the chicken came back. I have still not decided what to do with it, but there are always thai dishes that would do it real justice. Alternatively, I could give it All Bran and then squeeze it, rather like an icing sock, over my borders, as chicken manure is very good for plants.

Finally, despite the fact that I have a fear of heights, life-threatening piles, varicose veins and fat knees, I climbed a pyramid in Mexico. It was very high up and windy. As you can see from this photo, I ended up with hair that made me look rather like a cross between Arthur Scargill and Lady Gaga. This was almost topical, since Thatcher died the following week and had a face that looked like it had been poked, stupid hair and an active dislike of Comb-over King, Arthur Scargill.

Quietly shitting oneself needn't look unstylish. You too can look like a hirsute Scargill with fatter knees.

As I have blogged so infrequently recently, I'm thinking of posting one chapter per fortnight or even per week of a sweary comic novel I started writing some time ago. I guess the novel will most appeal to women really, and since the women's fiction market is pretty dead at the moment, it might be more fun to publish the chapters here than to finish the book and try to get a deal for it. I'm working on other things now, after all. The story is called Not for Profit. It is truly the work of The Horrormoanal Woman and not Marnie Riches, as it is full of filth. If enough people like it, I will finish writing it and give it to someone in AM Heath, my literary agency. Watch this space!

I'm off to try for another poo in the toilet of strong sunshine now...

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!

Professor Brian Cox: thinking woman's crumpet

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, 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?

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.  

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.