Sweep it under the carpet.

Recently I have been plagued with feelings that I have let my life wind down a bit:

My job is a depressing waste of time counterweighted only by the fact that it requires about as much effort as lifting an empty box once every 20 minutes over a working day....interspersed with the occasional urgent lunge toward my telephone where I call my own answering machine and leave myself a message.

My social life is pottering along nicely but is only a hairsbreadth from becoming a close knit circuit of dinner parties and book reading meetings. That isn't due to a lack of opportunity to explore the surrounding world or even a lack of invitations to attend varied hedonistic occasion, it is more down to an internal sense of age.

So many weights begin to build upon social adventure as time passes...it hurts more in the morning that it used to....I’m more tired after work than I used to be....I’m reticent to skip sports lest I suddenly put on 40 stone and sound like I’m drowning in my own fat when I speak....I feel like I should be saving money not spending it and am aware that I might end up like a neglected old war veteran rationing the heating and attempting receding inside my own emotionally scarred memory bank to escape the cold....I feel like I used to be more fun, but I’m aware that I dislike that person as well on account of them being a super twat bag....I miss 3 day drinking binges with wild drug intake in a crack flat with only gnawed pieces of mouldy bread and 40 cans of lager for sustenance....but it would kill me and I’d have cunts for friends.....

and so on....

These things bother me sometimes despite the avenues of social exploration that I do adopt always resulting in a fine time and an anecdote or two, perhaps it is just the volume of opportunity that London offers making exploration seem a little less adventurous?

Regardless; I live in Stoke Newington, Hackney and recent event has evidenced quite nicely that my concerns are unnecessary and ill founded as I live in an area so absurd as to quite literally bring the sort of carefree nonsensical idiocy to my very front door.

From the street you must approach our basement flat abode by journeying down a set of steps into a large patio area suitable for BBQ's and the like. Under these steps is a cupboard guarded by a metal door and a bolt. In this cupboard is a dirty, damp stinking collection of our friend’s spare clothes and old bed linen. Quite recently the weather has become aggressively foul and this seems to have scattered and disturbed the local homeless community like ants facing an assault of boiling water. One of these street scavengers too shelter in our yard, a point that I was alerted to one morning as I strode naked into my room, glanced out of the window that was directly ahead of me and noticed a ragged looking fellow sat on a plastic chair and doffing his cap at me like an English gent on a Sunday who's garden I was passing.

Interestingly, when faced with a potentially violent, complete unknown loitering in your yard covered in mud and rain, the revealing of one's own birthday suit seems inconsequential.

Feeling a deep sense of empathy for his situation, I called in to working citing a tramp in my yard and stayed in bed allowing him shelter. The ambitious little fellow was not happy with his lot though and promptly smashed the lock of the cupboard off, bent the bolt and put up home in the musky under stair cubby hole, a veritable stig of the dump.

Being a natural coward, I stayed in bed until he left and told myself that I was being a Good Samaritan. Over the following week he returned on occasion to his newly found home to roost until my flat mate (a small girl from Birmingham) took up the man of the house mantra and shoed him away like a stray cat, though given her mindset I’m sure that had he in fact been a stray cat, or dressed as a cat, he would now be living in the flat and defecating in the cat litter box as freely as his cat suit would permit.

The ordeal over I gradually regained the confidence to walk through the yard as oppose to the all new head down dash attack that I had adopted. That is until but a few days later another one of club street roamer came strolling through our threshold gate and began plodding down the steps full of aplomb and as smiley and happy as lord.

He wanted to know if his chum 'was in'....was in? 'Was in' in so much as the cupboard was now his permanent abode? I wonder if he's informed the Post office of this new address and left a forwarding address at on top of the cardboard box that he used to live in.

Barely having recovered from the surprise at the audacity of our parasitic friend I was enjoying one of my favourite day's in the house with tea, biscuits, computer games, Father Ted DVD's and children’s TV(I’m hooked on the new adventures of Iron Man), when two burly looking men began sweeping up outside my front door. Disconcerting at the best of times but our front door has a glass transparent front and leads directly from the yard into the lounge.

So whilst naught but a couple of inches of glass separated me from these angry looking do-gooders, I pondered, 'how often can I ignore events like these before I begin awaking to a homeless sleeping next to me in bed and a behemoth of a man vacuuming my room?'

Before the full impact of that thought had reverberated through me one of them knocked on the door.

This was it, he obviously wanted to sweep up the kitchen wearing a dress, and I was doomed.

Apparently they were builders, and apparently they were sweeping up the mess that they had made but a few days earlier and apparently his broom had snapped so could he borrow mine?

In a flash I had provided my sweeping device, innocent as they motivations of these men, they made me uncomfortable and I wanted them gone. Some time later (there was a great deal of mess and my broom is of limited usefulness resembling more of old toothbrush than a method of 'sweeping' away rubble) a knock at the door, and the call of 'I’ll just leave it put here mate', though he didn't look that bright so probably miss-spelled his own sentence, 'out hear'....

Once I was sure that the coast was clear I poked my suspicious little head around the door fearing having to sign for delivery of a package that the tramp had ordered or something, perhaps a new welcome mat. The broom was leaning on the wall. Or rather, A broom was leaning on the wall. The Builder had swapped it for a white one of similar quality taking my blue one with him.

BUT WHY?

The brooms were of similar inefficient quality, this wasn't the alleged broken broom and presumably he had to go and get it, else never would have needed mine in the first place.....

Perhaps he fears the colour white? Or is so unhappy in his marriage that any variety of any kind is vital to the perpetuation of his bliss? 

I wish him well with his new broom and certainly haven't suffered for the replacement, but I am now acutely aware that I do not need to leave my own living room to endure anecdote provoking lunacy and that anyone who says that one is wasting one's life by just sitting in front of the TV is completely wrong, if anything to go out, to leave all of that to go on un-seen would be a crime.

After all, if a tramp moves in to a cupboard and no-one knew he's done it, would he have really moved in at all?

In Decision.

Decisions are the toughest part of life.

Not only does the approaching need for a decision drag in one hand a Christmas stocking brimming with glorious potential, but in the other a fettered old sack oozing putrefied dreams.

Should I go on holiday?

Should I leave my wife?

Should I hold up traffic by stopping and asking directions or just take this next left? It's probably left...

Should I call that client today?

Shall I pass the ball or shoot for goal?

Should I hand this wallet in or spend the money?

Should I vote for George Bush or just kill myself now?

Should I drown my housemates cat in the river or just club it to death with a hard back copy of Blitz Cat and then claim that the book 'fell' off the shelf?

(Are you technically a casualty of World War 2 if paraphernalia that only exists because of it kills you?)

There are endless decisions of every level of importance and every one of them right down to the subconscious and accidental shape our lives and consequently the existential reality of those around us in some sort of decision making Fantastic Mr. Fox Trot.

The Butterfly effect ones choices are immeasurable and unquantifiable, but conjecture is nonetheless interesting.

Last Friday night I stopped out after work for a drink in the White Horse pub Soho. From the window I could see the back of a theatre that the erstwhile Dylan Moran is performing in. He was standing out the back of theatre swilling a glass of wine and manically waving a cigarette as per his comedic persona. Either Dylan Moran has become his own character or Black Books is really more of a documentary.

That was at about 6pm and there was something seductive and vital about the way Moran carelessly swilled his health away whilst being entirely successful (appearing on the surface to do so without any effort and almost to hold success in contempt). Instantly I felt the need to regress to an infantile state of booze swilling, foot loose, foot uncertain, good time lovin' student Dom.

Luckily I had a party invitation ready and willing.

By 3am I was without my coat, my beloved mid nineties adidas tracksuit top, my mobile phone headphones and my mind...oh and my house key. Not noticing the lack of house key until I arrived at my front door the torrent of thoughts...'my housemates not in...should I go back to look for the key....I can't afford that taxi....can I smash a window?....what if I try to and the brick rebounds of the window and hits me in the face?...What would Bruce Willis do?....

Knowing that I had to be up in 5 hours anyway to get myself to Surrey to lose a game of horribly amateurish football to men better suited to sitting down in a curry house than running around, I just couldn't sanction the taxi spend to travel across London to stay within the protective walls of a friends sanctuary.

There is something about whistling wind and a border line Ice storm that makes a man covering his Torso in naught but a baby blue Childs 70's T-shirt feel vulnerable. Alone and vulnerable...in Hackney. The excuse to launch Rockets into the air and burn one's own hand off with fire sticks is definitely not lost on the children of Hackney and the 6th of November was not a good place to be drunk, cold and with no where to go. It felt similar to Stalingrad 1944 and had there been a fellow human around that I was capable of overpowering I would surely have panicked and eaten him.

As it was, I was a very lucky fellow. I use lucky in the broadest sense of the term, as there was a sleeping back out on our washing line that I had neglected to bring back into the house to see how long it would take for it to be stolen. It was of course damp and cold sort of like a corpse just pulled out of the Thames being pressed against your face. This was to be my plank of wood at sea, my puddle in the desert, my slippers in a snow storm.

Tucked away on the hard cold concrete floor with this wet bag pulled up over my head I was just well protected enough to doze off until morn and awake having absorbed the bag moisture into my now wrinkly skin. I looked like a man who had gone into a cocoon and emerged 60 years older, an age accelerating hibernation serving little to no use or purpose lest I need to enter a pruniest face competition or to go undercover in a care home.

Was this all Dylan Moran’s fault? It was his decision to emerge out the back of the theatre and be all physically charismatic and carefree...but who made the decision to send him out that way in the first place?....and who made the decision to build the theatre in the first place? I have much work to do if I am to identify the culprit and have my vengeance.

Perhaps though there are even worse consequences. Perhaps an inquisitive firework wielding child due to embark upon DofE the following week saw me clamber youthful and enthused into the embryonic sleeping rag and happened to be passing later that morning when I twitched and writhed until the sack spat me out, birthed like a sodden foal, reborn, an octogenarian. Fearing the consequences of entering a sleeping bag he refused to attend the DofE award opting instead to spend the time studying at school under the supervision of a teacher. The teacher was a lonely middle aged spinster with confidence problems and after a couple of days of proximity they find themselves in an impassioned embrace, the confused hormones of youth crashing into the menopause, a symphonic eruption. Inevitably, the ensuing media storm drives them both to move to Eastleigh for a fresh start, where the boredom results in their mutual premature deaths just 6 months later.

My fault? Or Dylan Moran’s?

Dermot-itis.

It was prime-time television, it was a Sunday, my flat mate had control of the remote control and I was trapped under the oppressive weight of a belly flopping fat man of a hangover.

The scene was set for subjection to the televisual equivalent of attending a karaoke night in the Rhondda Valley with a vice on the top of my head gripping at my temples, a dog strapped to the vice barking incessantly into one ear, whilst a screaming malnourished baby is strapped mouth first to my other ear.

And so X factor began with the usual strobing effect of a light display designed to completely baffle the audience and fox them into thinking that something of value was going to happen; other than a bunch of self obsessed casualties of the modern celebrity disease further sickening the wafer thin fabric of personality that allegedly still exists amongst our youth that is.


Naturally, there was the usual repetitive formula: The 'judges' arrive and every one cheers as ominous music follows them out onto the stage, the harbingers of doom. This is always followed by the acute awareness that having put oneself in a position where the credibility and personality of Cheryl Cole can make or break you is a bit like bending over in a prison shower with the soap already wedged between your buttocks and an ACME cartoon sign point at it. Well, it isn't observed that way, but it really should be.

Next the carefully compiled collection of desperate, attention seeking, brain dead fucktards are wheeled out before us to showcase how idiotic they are as a unit with some kind of 'team' performance. Once the audience has been stunned into disbelief, convinced that this really is the peak of entertainment and talent otherwise how could anyone have the gall to showcase it, the collective are removed and then hoisted back on individually, to sing, dance and ultimately cry.

The crying has become an implicit part of the performance these days. Sing, dance, cry. Almost as if being marked by a special board of Olympic judges with boxes that need ticking and ranking.

-Sing:  7 (sang someone else’s song not as well as they sang it...again)
-Dance: 1 (dancing that only someone now convinced that conviction is more important than visual effect   would attempt...again)
- Cry: 10 (perfect, instant, convincing, desperately selfish and transparent).

I could go on, but complaining about what should be self evident to a nation of perfectly well educated Brits with an incomprehensible depth of culture and intrigue at their finger tips BUT IS APPARANTLY NOT, is as tedious as the show itself.

HOWEVER, this Sunday, something marvelous occurred. The events of this particular episode of Twat Factor were so overwhelmingly beautiful that we shall claim that the only reason I shan't watch it again is so not to ruin it.

Dermot O’Leary, much maligned by those with an IQ over 17 but much loved but those with a chronological existence of under 17. Describing exactly why he is a terrible presenter that should be shot for having the gall to accept his massive wage for being a useless sack of unrecyclable, non bio-degradable waste, is remarkably difficult to get exactly right. This Sunday, Dermot O’Leary finally gave us the anecdotal example required to dismiss the babblings of the dribblingly idiotic that he has a value.

Dermot O’Leary accidentally blurted out at a clearly confused, unfit aging Whitney Houston who's dress had mimicked her career and come undone, leaving her partly exposed....he blurted out in general on stage filler communication, designed to make Whitney look good and set up album/tour plugging....he blurted out in the midst of what is the summation of what could be termed his 'talent'...."you don't take any punches do you Whitney".

It is only sad that his career has not been torn from his sweating mitt as he clearly realised what he had just said as soon as it popped out of his yapping bleat box. It was all down hill from there as he then proceeded to clap Whitney by pounding a closed fist into an open hand, the type of obscure idiocy that only someone aware of a mistake can make as they scrabble around inside their own tiny minds to find all the things that they absolutely must not do.

As the drivel wound down to it's gurgling conclusion, I sloped off to bed hangover finally absorbing the last throws of consciousness, but my slumber was all contentment, assured that somewhere, Dermot O’Leary was more uncomfortable than I.

Paying the Price of Katie Price.

Today’s ‘hot’ news in the Guardian was yet another terrifying reminder of the damage that humanity has done to the global climate. The article showcases the effects of speeding up climate change and explains that the Greenland Ice sheet is uniquely vulnerable and melting at an unexpected and terrifying rate.

The same of course can be said of the soul of one Katie Price (Aka Jordan) as it squirms, squeals and writhes in the fires of hell before she’s likely to be anywhere near the end of her mortal life, let alone have passed on and suffered the inevitable consequences of eternal damnation. It seems reasonable even to believe that the certainty with which she is going to hell concludes the perennial question of the existence of the after life.

Over the last few months, the most deliberate indifference to the banshee like squawking of Katie Price has proved no defence against the accumulation of the knowledge of her every move. At some point in the recent past the two most pointless human beings on the face of the planet broke off a relationship. A relationship that is, with as much depth and emotional value as two Barbie dolls that had been dropped in Ronseal and inadvertently landed with their eternally static faces on top of each other seemingly simulating a kiss.

Why do we know this? We know this because they haven’t shut up yapping about it for 3 months. Why do we know that they haven’t shut up about it? Because it has been the front page story of every, nonsensical, bile spewing, humanity slaying shit rag this side of Gordon Browns to do list. Why do we know that? We know it because just above every piece of media that might nourish or stimulate the thought process of the British public, just at eye level, is a Heat magazine or an OK magazine or the Sun or the Daily Star. Any number of these insults to journalism, fit only for wrapping up a dead cat before you bury it, are currently in circulation, at last count there were actually more tabloid journalists than people in the world…..

Utter rubbish, annotated by people so desperate to be considered a journalist that they will write about the text that someone who broke up with someone sent when they were pretending to be upset……and then felt the need to forward the text to all the journo/PR contacts in their phone….and write about it….for 3 months…..on a daily basis.

Obviously it is no coincidence that in the case of Katie Price and Peter Andre, they have stamped their devil hooves as loud as they could as a pre-amble to both having an incredibly dull reality show about themselves released. Blur vs Oasis eat your heart out.

On the bright side, as a reaction to the airing of the first episodes of these pustules on the cheek of television, a ratings war has erupted. There are even people who are willing to refer to them selves as ‘Team Andre’ and have begun to harangue Katie Price. With any luck this will develop into the spiky, self obsessed infestation being ripped limb from limb by enraged hordes of Andre fans wearing old Richard Nixon masks converted by an ill conceived recycling plan into the face of Peter Andre.

Despite all of this though, it doesn’t seem fair to blame the likes of Price and Andre for any of this. They are just incredibly well animated automatons being lead like starving prisoners into a furnace that they think contains food. It even almost seems naïve to point the finger of blame at the perpetually interested members of the public who insist on dipping their frontal lobes into this literary pot of acid. After all, who knows better the meaninglessness of this all than the publishers and the journalist’s who produce the information and farm it out like Nestle powdered milk to ill educated developing countries.

The Daily Star today:



It is not the fi rst time Kate has lashed out in public since she split from pop singer Peter.


During her wild booze-fest in Ibiza earlier in the summer, Kate threatenedto “cut” Daily Star Goss Girl
Jessica Brown.


And last month, after spending a week’s holiday cavorting for the press cameras with new fella Alex
Reid, 34, she greeted me on her return to Britain at Gatwick Airport by snarling: “Is it true you take it
up the arse?”

First of all it is worth noting that the spelling and typo errors on the above are as published, but more importantly notice that Katie Price has probably the first time in her entire life asked a layered an poignant question.

She asked Gemma Wheatley, the journalist in question, ‘Do you take it up the arse?’

She most certainly does. In a desperate, futile attempt to gain a sense of self worth, to be a member of what can be one of the most valuable, powerful and well respected institutions in contemporary human existence, a Journalist, she takes it up the arse from a giant un-lubricated Devil’s fist from deadline to deadline. It must be agony, and I hope she gives birth to a Goat as penance.

In the long run, Gemma Wheatley can molest Katie Price as much as she wishes through the Daily Stars bleating trumpet, she needs Katie Price, her retarded giant child, blind stupidity, raw venom, pure selfishness and whopping great mammary glands. She needs Katie Price. Imagine that. Just imagine it.

Edgy Veggie

What is it about Vegetarianism that incites such a sweepingly dismissive attitude from the average meat eater?



It is a patient vegetarian whom thinks it wise to raise an eyebrow, or grimace at jocular talk of bludgeoning a beast of burden or sucking marrow from the femur of a ferret.



The peculiar response is usually one of aggressive mocking. Not your run of the garden, lads together, tongue in cheek jousting in and around each others belief systems or principles, but a genuine short tempered blurt.


The intrinsic flaw in communication is that the meat eater will move from the innocent asker of a question, such as, 'why are you a vegetarian', to a group of people lambasting the moral crusader in question - whether they answer the question or not.

Said lambastication will be full to the abattoir brim with Normative arguments. That is to say statements that propose a value beyond factual observation.
Example:
'You NEED to eat meat' or 'Vegetarian food ISN'T as good as meat'.

Idle, nonsensical, meaningless, aggression. Despite the nature of the statements being structured to draw argumentative responses, the aggressing party will then look at the respondent like a preaching fundamentalist when they finally offer their feelings on the matter.

For example, my official stance is simply this:
'I do not need to eat meat to have a healthy, fulfilling life. Taking the life of an animal without cause or necessity seems to me to be spitting in the face of the human soul that we have been afforded. The very thing that allegedly sets the human aside from the animal is the ability to consider, to think in a considered and self-aware fashion. This is the very process that allows us to pose moral questions and require answers before we continue with an unnecessary indulgence'.

The common response:
'I like the taste of meat too much to give it up' 'Meat is good for you' 'You need meat to survive' 'It's the food chain' 'A lion wouldn't think twice before eating you'.
'I don't agree with Vegetarianism'.
The implication:
Vegetarians are idiots.

At this juncture, roughly 30 minutes of terrible jokes about how eating lettuce is killing a lettuce and telling me I would eat meat if my mothers life depended on it....etc.....

The inflated sense of victory and achievement that comes with this is born of the fact that there are invariably more meat eaters in the room than vegetarians. The lack of interest in pursuit of the debate from the vegetarian once this level of puerile nonsense is introduced to undermine a perfectly reasonable discussion point, in order to maintain the status quo only exacerbates this.

Perhaps what causes the habit laden, blood gargling retards who shout out this feculence freely whilst smashing the bones of their victims into the top of their skulls, is that they are being asked to question the morality of their actions simply by the existence of a vegetarian.

What is preferable - to double check that you are safe from mass ostracism by colluding with those who's actions match your own? Or to carefully consider your own real feelings about a point of moral question.

There is no debate about whether the moral question exists. Vegetarians have asked it.
There is also no debate about whether the next person who tells me that i need meat to survive, blissfully unaware that i am in fact... alive...will be faced with, instead of apathy and disregard, vitriol and persistence.

This is a vow:

Come near me with a normative argument designed to sidestep consideration of the question being asked and i will hound you like hungry wolf tracks sheep, until you wilt and die of exhaustion.
Why do meat eaters aggress vegetarians? Fear, fear that they are Jew killing Nazi's dressed up as parents and friends.

'That and because meat clogs the artery that takes blood to their brain', I might say if i were to adopt the approach of my enemy.

Which i won't.

The Joy Division at the Hub.

Negotiating the politics of the work place can be a difficult affair that will oft drive one to the very brink of despair.

Common sense will clash with functionality on an almost hourly basis. Ease of process is usually harranged and dragged to the floor by middle management for no explicable reason. There is, in fact, nothing quite so fascinating as watching a perfectly reasonable idea preyed upon like a straggler on the wilds of the African plains, brutally subdued and strangled by a prowling hungry Lion. The helpless on lookers plod on perhaps only meters away from the thrashing victims final lifeless twitches, tapping away, heads down, tapping cowardly belligerent emails back and forth in silence never daring to open their challenge to the floor.

Have you ever read a Zebra's outbox content?

'That Lion thinks he's the Billy Bollocks, but he doesn't know what he's fucking talking about. I heard he's shagging a Giraffe behind his wife's back anyway, but she actually knows and doesn't care because she's pregnant with by that Macaque monkey that's always hanging about'.

It isn't all doom, gloom and wild frustration though, just every now and again, business process will falter, trip and celebrate individuality. A dangerous move that normally signals and alarm flashing in HR's offices with a Neon sign screaming 'SUPPRESS SUPPRESS'. An example of this occasional occasion was last Friday:

In an attempt to involve the staff in a new centralised office site shrewdly named, 'The Hub', my office in the midst of a tube strike requested that those of us who had difficulty getting to work, annotate our tales of innovation and ingenuity.

Naturally, there is very little outside of utilising a different mode of transport and getting up early that can be done about a tube strike. The idea that someone might feel compelled to report to all and sundry that they cleverly took a bus instead of headed underground to stand in a sweltering sardine tin, frankly left me embarrassed for our vision less stumbling HR department.

So i contrived a ridiculous, rushed and childish lie about how I had dealt with this allegedly complex travel situation.

To my delight I arrived this morning to this:

http://thehub.incisivemedia.com/tube-strike-escapade

Which in case the link doesn't work, Reads:

Tube Strike Escapades
It is impressive how far some employees will go to get into work
Thank you to everyone who submitted their stories concerning the obstacles they faced trying to get into the office and the creative ways in which they battled to overcome them. We have awarded Rekha Pindoria from the Finance department with a bottle of champagne for her efforts, arriving at the Haymarket office at 7.00am!!One other employee's imaginative endeavour stood out above the rest, demonstrating 100% commitment and loyalty to Incisive Media.Unfortunately this heroic colleague submitted their story anonymously! Therefore if you wrote it or know who did, please contact Terri-Ann Barry in the HR department, as we have a bottle of champagne waiting for them....

"Travelling to work from Stoke Newington ran a risk of being a difficulty, with already over crowded buses put under desperate pressure from those who would normally dive underground like rats up at Seven Sisters or Tottenham Hale.
To counter act this I devised an ingenious alternative route to work that considered all eventualities in almost prophetic fashion.
What I first needed was to stop off on the way home on Tuesday and accost a teacher from the school at the top of Kingsland road. After attacking him from behind and wrestling him to the ground, I took a brass rubbing of his face and clothing that would allow me to accurately impersonate him the following day.
The morning came and as yet still free of arrest from the previous nights assault, I was able to disguise myself as the teacher in question. Having risen suitably early I was afforded the privilege of perusing the down stairs windows of the surrounding housing until I spied a blue school uniform resting on a drying rack. The uniform of the school on Kingsland road.
Strategically placing myself as 'passing by' it was a cinch to strike up conversation with an unsuspecting parent who was then more than accommodating in providing me with a lift to the school as I plied them over the top insidious complements about their prodigious offspring.
As soon as the car door was shut I had bolted, my disguise left strewn behind me, a triumphant trail of debris.
The second leg of the journey was trickier. Fully aware that London transport would fall over themselves with glee at the site of a tube driver, I acquired a uniform from a local dry cleaner, bribed with stolen oyster cards, and approached the Northern Line. Next all I needed to do was adopt the greedy confused bewilderment suited to an unskilled worker in miserable conditions wielding the power of the underground transport system.
The ruse had worked, I was permitted through the doors with cheers and a pat on the back from the management staff.
I boldly took my position in the tube driving seat. It was a this point that the swift thinking and nimble mind that my role at incisive had honed to perfection kicked in. After all, who but James Bond himself could master the controls of a vehicle he had never before been faced with?
Closing my eyes and with sweat of the kind that only tense scenes from the Wire would normally produce racing from my forehead, i pushed the lever entitled, 'GO'. IT WORKED! and i was off.
Screeching to a halt at Tottenham court road and storming off the train exclaiming that I had changed my mind and stomping up the stair well with calls of 'down with Boris' and 'No tube in my name', I had all but completed my journey and had made it to work right on time....dressed unfortunately, as a tube driver."

A bottle of champagne....for wasting 30 minutes of the working day that they pay me to attend, contriving this pointless fabrication.

I've been waiting nearly 6 years for office process to work out in my favour and it finally has.

What now though?

Perhaps this is what really happened to Ian Curtis whilst he moonlighted as a admin assistant?

We can but speculate.

Kim Jong Bender.

North Korea are launching nuclear warheads left, right centre and back.

This is not the 'WMD' fear mongering that punctuated the peak of the Bush/Blair 'axis of evil' affair. That was the very worst kind of manipulation of public opinion. By the time the tectonic plates and prehistoric depth layers of half truths, slight of hand and down right bare faced ugly lies had even begun to be layed out in a way that could be understood and translated we'd invaded, celebrated and bombed the usual friendly fire quota into the headlines. We were stuck on the much bigger issue of what to do next.

The concept of the 'axis of evil' linked all of the worlds key 'bad guys' into one easy to swallow idea. It allowed our governments to behave like a street gambler with some cups and a small ball. They hustled our £20 bid off us and had us pick pocketed whilst we looked on in a bemused awe.

North Korea however, is a terrfyingly real threat. Internal perception, ideologies and convoluted misconceptions within a highly suspicious and genuinely aggressive military government could result in any number entirely unpredicable and suddenly volatile explosions. In this case, literal explosions.

The first real opportunity for the public to be called into action to understand this reality arrived on our news stands today. Newspapers such as the Independent and the Guardian lead the way with the headlines.

A sure sign of a real issue with genuine intrigue that doesn't require manipulation to be understood is when the more liberal and/or more intellectualised forms of press lead with an statement exposure of the event not a judgement of western political participants reaction to it.

A surer sign, a flashing neon light screaming at you 'panic, run, flee like a footballer faced with a quadratic equation', is the the tabloids did NOT make a fuss about it and were more content to comment on Jordans brazenly childish relationship with Peter Andre. This does of course mean that the politicians currently in power are less obsessed with political gain, or that there aren't any oil reserves to be stolen from North Korea, but it also means that they might deal with the situation properly.

There is though a real opportunity being missed. Perhaps, if we were all very shrewd, and we all left very quietly, the woman I saw skimming past the Guardian and resting on a copy of Glamour (or some such) and was more motivated by the headline 'Angelina fights back but Brad's still texting Jen' than she was by 'North Korea launches two more missiles'; she could be left wading through the article when the missles hit Britain and we are all sailing away to a new utopia where Brad Pitt's texts are his own business.

In fact, does any body have Kim Jong Il's email address? I know roughly were she lives, and i heard her say that Kim Jong Il was Gay. Thought he might like to know.

Hash Brown Re-Hash.

The art of inspired story telling, unique method that stands out independent in nature, style, rhyme and reason has for a long time been tenuously identified.

Ever since the Ancients passed on their poetic forms and Beowulf was penned, the majority of fantastical exaggeration and formulae of tale can be made comparable to these early works. Once the unstoppable creative greed of a Rousseau, Orwell, Dickens or Shakespear is added to the fray, little is left for the modern literary mind as it spills out re-hash after re-hashed re-hash. They are likely to be young bohemians stuffing hash browns in a hash smoker fuelled frenzy whilst they make a hash of it at that.

The only way is up as they say and that seems to be the modern solution to this problem. Escalate existing tales. Re-make films, film books, modernise old TV shows, make them faster, brighter, bigger. Big, Bigger, BIGGEST the proles scream from their tortured, writhing, daily primordial soup.

To my mind, there are at least another 10 years of flagrant plagerism to be endured before we can begin the process of plagerising the plagerism in the name of a new modernity. A few nooks and crannies though may well slip through the net in the misguided name of PC. That's Political Correctness not Phil Colins by the way. Nothing escapes the net of Phil Colins. Once he has you in his sights you are done for, he's like the hunter apes from the planet of the apes, faster and stronger than you...and he knows the lay of land....fear him.

Two glaring re-hash, re-dux, revolutionary opportunities that I predict will be saved until the last drop has been squeezed from multi media, but that I would dearly love to see and hope to inspire are as follows:



'The Superfluous Six'









A take on the famed Enid Blyton tales. This new tale of adventure will re-invigorate the genre whilst simultaneously redressing the blatant class divide and latent racism of her more famous penmanship.



Six white children all from middle class backgrounds are superfluous to the point of invisibility within their social and family settings. As such they are blessed with the freedom of reign that will take their adventure searching far and wide, further than ever before as they can be away for an Odyssey, but no one will notice.

On their travels they will encounter many a danger, many an adventure. These will likely be being dealt with by the local law enforcement services ultimately progressing into protracted court battles or petering out due to loop holes in the law or the bigger picture being considered, yet our heroes will flap about in a superfluous fashion, having little to no impact on the progress or outcome of each situation. The reader will immediately identify with their impotency and irrelevance in the fight against crime, and those looking for racial connotation will see only 6 bleating white people screaming for attention that will never come.

............

Pob Nights: (Paedo Pob)









The ever haunting image of 'Pob'.



The original format was thus:

In a typical episode, the celebrity visitor to the show finds a label attached to a piece of string on the gates of Pob's garden;

If in my programme you would be,

Wind the wool and follow me.

The celebrity guest then follows the woollen string, winding it as they go, and encountering a second label;

Wind it slowly, wind it fast,

A secret you will find at last.

Ultimately the wool is found to be Pob's unravelled jumper, and he is awoken to trace his name on the screen. Over the course of the programme, the celebrity guest reads a story, and solves a word puzzle with Pob.

Before the end of the programme, the celebrity guest gives Pob a gift, usually related to their story, which they attach to the woollen thread of Pob's jumper. Pob retrieves the gift, and plays with it, stopping periodically to wipe the programme's end credits from the camera lens. The episode always ends with Pob blowing out a candle held by a ragdoll. The next celebrity visitor is seen arriving at Pob's garden, realises they are a week too early, and leaves.

Pob is often accompanied in his mischief by a silent teddy bear called Teddy.

In it's all new, hyper entertainment re-hash incarnation, 'Pob Nights', Pob shows his true colours.

Marauding around a local red brick housing estate in Taunton, Pob and Teddy are local Paedophiles using vibrantly coloured woollen string to lure unsuspecting youngsters into a disused and well concealed building where a 'celebrity' as he calls them, client to you and I, lies in wait.



The silent 'Teddy' is now simply a name for Pobs first victim, whom suffering from Stockholm syndrome has taken it upon himself to assist Pob in his 'mischief'. Teddy hasn't spoken since the 'incident' in which he first met Pob.



Each episode begins with Pob breathing on the window of his next victim and writing his name in the condensation.....



The show content will involve Pob evading the local law enforcement and generally progressing toward trapping his prey who will always look as if they may just escape.





Before the end of the show, the 'celebrity' give Pob a 'gift', or in this case collection of pictures of children in comprimising situations. Pob 'plays' with them...and himself, stopping periodically to wipe clean the show's end credits.



The episode will always end the same way, with Pob blowing out a candle held by the captured child.



A bleak tale, but be assured, the victim will always have done something that renders them deserving of a biblical punshiment during the episode, such as being a glutton and eating all of the family pudding before anyone else can get to it, or generally being a lazy child who won't help with the housework upsetting a despairing mother.

...................



So there we have it, 2 fast 2 furious eat your heart out and there is no need to re-make the Hulk the 40th time.



For all copyright enquiries please contact me on.....

Origins.

It’s a sunny day. Al is out on the pavement awaiting his parents, dressed in typically scruffy early 20’s attire. Jeans, trainers etc. They pull up next to him in a new Mercedes, he jumps in the back of the car.


Mother: ‘Hi Al’ cheerfully

Al: ‘Hello, how are we all?’ (Upbeat)

Father: (Cutting in)‘Where are we going then?’

Al: ‘The Warm As Toast café, it’s not far, I go there all the time, the lunch menu is excellent’

Father: ‘Your graduation celebratory meal and you want to go to a Café that you always go to?’

Al: ‘Well, i…’

Mother: (Cutting in) ‘Why we couldn’t have just gone to the graduation ceremony….!?’ (The rhetorically posed question whimsically tails off.)

Al: ‘Like I said….’

Father: (Cutting In)‘Which way is it then? I can’t sit here with the engine running all day, this thing guzzles petrol you know. The SLK does 37 miles per gallon, your crappy old Ford does more like 50’.

Al: ‘It’s not THAT old. A friend of mine just managed to take his on a road trip to the Alps and back, so it must be good for something?’

(Met with Silence.)

Al: ‘It’s left here’.

(The car pulls off.)

Parking in a road full of nothing but battered old hatchbacks and inner city bin bags scattering the pavement, the brand new Merc looks distinctly vunerable. As they all climb out of the car, the smartly dressed parents seem acutely aware that they do not fit in to the surroundings.

Mother: ‘Are you sure we won’t get a ticket? Why are all these bins in the road? It’s not very nice is it!?’(catching herself being impolite and putting her arm round her son with a commiserating hug.)

Al: ‘It’ll be fine’.

(They step round the corner)

Al: ‘Here we are’.

The Warm As Toast Café is ahead of them. A large sign above the door spells out the intials in big letters:
T.W.A.T
……………….

WOODN'T it be nice.

Today, I am working so hard that the below was a question that i asked myself. I was staggered to discover that there was somebody with more time on their idle wandering hands than even I, newly deposed king of idling.

What WOULD we do withouth the internet i ask you?


..............................................

How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?
In: Jokes and Riddles [Edit categories]



Woodchucks Chucking Wood
I think that the woodchuck could chuck as much wood as he wanted! By the way what is a wood chuck? Is it like a gopher? This is difficult to question answer. The amount of wood that woodchucks would chuck on a given day varies greatly with the individual woodchuck. According to a Wall Street Journal article, New York State wildlife expert Richard Thomas found that a woodchuck could chuck around 35 cubic feet of dirt in the course of digging a burrow. Thomas reasoned that if a woodchuck could chuck wood, he would chuck an amount equal to 700 pounds.
Some say it depends on three factors:
The woodchuck's desire to chuck said wood.
The woodchuck's need to chuck the aforementioned wood.
The woodchuck's ability to chuck the wood.
Others say:
He would chuck, he would, as much as he could, if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
If he could chuck wood, the woodchuck would chuck as much as he could!
A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
A woodchuck would chuck all the wood that the woodchuck would chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
If a woodchuck could chuck wood, he would and should chuck wood. But if woodchucks can't chuck wood, they shouldn't and wouldn't chuck wood. Though were I a woodchuck, and I chucked wood, I would chuck wood with the best woodchucks that chucked wood.
If a woodchuck could chuck wood, then s/he'd chuck all the wood, s/he'd chuck and chuck and chuck and chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
It would chuck the amount of wood that she sells seashells on the seashore divided by how many pickles Peter Piper picks.
One quarter of a sycamore if you give him a quarter for every quarter of the sycamore he cut.
It might depend on how many female woodchucks were present. Or, it could depend on whether the woodchuck's mother-in-law was around or not. If she was, he'd be chucking all day. If not, he'd be watching the football game.
Some maintain that woodchucks could not and would not chuck wood at all.
It depends on how good his dentures are!
A woodchuck, would chuck, as much wood, as a woodchuck, could chuck, If a woodchuck could chuck wood. But unfortunately, woodchucks do not chuck wood.
About 5.72 fluid litres of wood
About as many boards as the Mongol hoards would hoard if the Mongol hordes did hoard boards.
Um....... 23????


Tons. More than you can count. Honestly. No one can chuck more would than a woodchuck.
If the woodchucks name was Maurice, then it could chuck all the wood that it wants to. However, if its name is Frank, no chucking would be for it.
Due to the average size of a wood chuck and the general density of wood (not including cork) if a wood chuck could chuck wood it would probably get through about 6.573 pounds per day, assuming the wood chuck is functioning correctly.
Using the formula: (W + I) * C where W = the constant of wood, which is well known to be 61, as agreed in many scientific circles. I = the variable in this equation, and stands for the word "if" from the original problem. As there are three circumstances, with 0 equaling the chance that the woodchuck cannot chuck wood, 1 being the theory that the woodchuck can chuck wood but chooses not to, and 2 standing for the probability that the woodchuck can and will chuck wood, we clearly must choose 2 for use in this equation. C = the constant of Chuck Norris, whose presence in any problem involving the word chuck must there, is well known to equal 1.1 of any known being, therefore the final part of this calculation is 1.1. As is clear, this appears to give the answer of (61 + 2) * 1.1 = (63) * 1.1 = 69.3. However, Chuck Norris' awesome roundhouse kick declares that all decimal points cannot be used in formulas such as this, and so it must be rounded to the final solution of 69 units of wood.
How Chuck Norris got involved
A woodchuck would only chuck as much would as Chuck Norris would allow it to, because the woodchuck shares Chuck's name. Therefore, Chuck must punish it and make it chuck as much wood as Chuck can. So, a woodchuck would chuck as much wood as Chuck could.
None cuz a wood chuck cant chuck wood! :P
Approximately 3.9675 pounds every 5.6843 seconds. So there.
2.865 lbs every 11.3686 Seconds?
About 15 pounds a minute.
i speak differently i say WHAT DOES YOUR QUESTION HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING! and btw its 84% lol
it depends how good his dentures are!!!
As much as he needed to be satisfied
But the true jokey answer, as told by my grandfather is: As much wood as a woodchuck could chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
a woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

Floundering Bounder.

I saw today something that occurs everyday, in fact, i see it every day. Today though, I really saw it.

I was feeling vulnerable on my daily route to work. The wind was biting cold and i had selected a thin Plastic Mack to shroud my quivering cocktail stick bones. My belly was empty and had tightened itself into a cramp when faced with the morning revulsion of feeding the cat. Cat food is so oppressively pungent and looks like a war ration. The last thing i need as i attempt to iron shirts, hunt for matching socks and find those bloody keys that I've hidden from myself, is to be reminded of World War one and all the suffering that makes my morning shout, stamp and whinge look like a trip to Hawaii with Pamela Anderson in tow.

I stopped in the street on my last leg of the journey, shoulders arched up over my head like a wing-ed Demon. I stopped because i wanted a respite from the nature of the journey to work. A to B. A, being a desirable though ultimately purposeless home, full of beds, meals and idle entertainment. B, being the work place, my physical bread and butter, though my metaphysical desert inducing famine.

When people travel from A to B, especially if it is work related, they seem almost entirely single minded, operating on some sort of auto pilot. The strangest thing is the level of frustration they display when anything obstructs this journey, even for an instant. Often, it has been apparent that the traveller will almost be searching for frustration, huffing with indigence at the person in front who objected to leaping fearlessly in front of an oncoming Juggernaut travelling at 60 mph, and shouting at it, 'BACK, BACK YOU VEHICLE OF SATAN, I AM RIGHTEOUS, I AM GOING FROM A to B AND THOU SHALT NOT OBSTRUCT ME LEST YOU BE SMOTE'. It seems somewhat unreasonable on reflection.

I on the other hand like to stop at any given point on a journey, simply to re-assert my freedom. I will go to work, I will go to B, but I will do it my way, in my time and i will find something to enjoy or to involve myself in en route if it bloody kills me. The feeling is not one of defiance or of a desperate search for individuality amongst the grinding cogs of social necessity, it is similar to the childhood trudge toward a ticking off.

One figure of authority would send you to visit another, be it parent or teacher. In between, whatever happens at the two ends of spectrum, is your time and yours alone. So why rush it? Inevitably i would be moping along like a rain soaked beagle either brimming with indigence or racked with trepidation but also guilt. I was rarely reprimanded unless I had crossed some moral boundary, caused misery, inflicted something upon someone and was as such shaken to my bones by an empathy that rendered my previous action senseless. I would on these walks, stop, sit, idle, chew the fat, fatten a goose, goose a gander anything to create a personal experience separate from the point of the journey so that I might take something of my own from the experience.

That is what I was doing today, when I saw it.

A man in his 50's wearing a suit looking pained by despair, jogging on the spot behind a small cluster of people moving slower than he wished down the street. Not enough people to be a permanent block, a brief obstruction.

Why? It is unlikely that this was an impromptu bid to reclaim the fitness of a forgotten youth. It is unlikely that he was a raging but bold agoraphobic bravely but desperately racing to his destination like a child that needs the loo.

It is likely that he was late or at risk of becoming late. It is also likely that he was high enough up the food chain at his age, that it was the shitty rod that he has shoved up his own anus and inflicted upon everyone else in the name of protocol that he was beating himself with.

Or was it that he simply wasn't thinking? If he was late, then he is exactly that, late and no amount of running on the spot will turn back time. Ambitious though running against the turn of the earth on it's axis is, it won't get it moving the other way, and even if it did, the desired effect would not emerge. If he is nearly late, then he will be in work there or thereabouts on time, a few minutes either side and simply walking at a higher pace where possible would suffice. Attempting to plow through the thudding grey rock of London Commuter crowding is only adding frustration and a sense of being wronged to his plight.

It only takes a brief look around to notice that they are all doing the same thing, panic stricken, desperate to get to work convinced of their purpose.

Why is this so distasteful to my palate?

It's the greed, the way they demand that their journey is more important than everyone else's and even worse, the way this futile act that tickles the gag reflex creates an almost universal sense of righteousness permitting them to take the aforementioned shitty stick and jab it in my eye whenever my methods, my scribble, drifts outside of the line that they are all adhering to with Biblical fervour.

So, I stood and watched him go, it took him fucking ages and i thought it was hilarious when he smacked his brief case against a lamp post and ran on as if it hadn't happened.

Then I went to work, my journey my own.

'Everything happens for a reason'.

This morning entailed a bus journey and me nursing my 5th hangover of the working week.

I was acutely aware of the 'imago horribilus' of my fermenting features.

I looked like alchohol someone who had experimented with Botox with a do it yourself kit, ultimately only managing to inflate ones own face.

This in mind, despite the misery of attempting to catch a morning bus and the gymnastic one footed stance required to sqeeze into my allotted centimeter square (a right of the londoner), I carried with me a sympathy for my fellow passengers endurance of my presence.

However, there is always one person who insists on approaching the boundaries of tolerance, then burns the boundary, invades your space and claims it for their own is there not?

In this instance the protagonist of my pompous huffing was a South African lady making a phone call at incredible volumes. The volume itself was a mere trifle, her piercing accent a light clip around the ear and the dullness of her responses nothing more than a barely noticable headache cureable with a quick popping of a 16pence paracetamol....

...Her crime was far more sinster, a lurker of a crime, the type of crime that should rest naked in the cold, damp, dripping corner of a medieval dungeon, fed only with rats and mouldy bread.

She finished almost every sentence of her conversation with the remark, 'Every thing happens for a reason'.

Be sure that it does, but i fail to see how this oral parping can be tolerated. A statement designed to console or explain, but offering none of the necessary facets or functionality required to achieve these things save to be open to interpretation. The extended reach and purpose of this abomination is that the woman has not formulated an opinion on what is being said to her. She has been presented with a problem by someone in need, glanced into the dusty cupboard of her mind and lazily hurled out, 'Every thing happens for a reason'.

I hardly think that a survivor of a Tsunami would be greatly comforted by the sentiment, nor indeed the actual reason.

Most tsunamis are caused by earthquakes generated in a subduction zone, an area where an oceanic plate is being forced down into the mantle by plate tectonic forces. The friction between the subducting plate and the overriding plate is enormous. This friction prevents a slow and steady rate of subduction and instead the two plates become "stuck". As the stuck plate continues to descend into the mantle the motion causes a slow distortion of the overriding plage. The result is an accumulation of energy very similar to the energy stored in a compressed spring. Energy can accumulate in the overriding plate over a long period of time - decades or even centuries. Energy accumulates in the overriding plate until it exceeds the frictional forces between the two stuck plates. When this happens, the overriding plate snaps back into an unrestrained position. This sudden motion is the cause of the tsunami - because it gives an enormous shove to the overlying water. At the same time, inland areas of the overriding plate are suddenly lowered. The moving wave begins travelling out from where the earthquake has occurred. Some of the water travels out and across the ocean basin, and, at the same time, water rushes landward to flood the recently lowered shoreline.

So there you go. Your family is dead. Your house destroyed. The family pet missing presumed searching for his bone, never to find to it, eventually becoming stuck in a rabbit hole and starving to death. Worry not though, because as a South African lady on the number 243 once told me, 'everything happens for a reason'.

Unfortunately, I spent such a lavish amount of time and energy chewing on this wasp, that the insufferbale journey was over before I knew it, leaving a real window of opportunity for this woman with an elbow instead of a brain, to with reasonable cause suggest to me that, indeed, 'everything happens for a reason'.

Bronchial Heroism.

Sometimes all we need to re-invigorate our souls is a change of scenery.

If one stays in the same place, visiting the same shops, seeing the same faces and routinely travelling along the same routes for too long without loving, (and i mean loving like I loved my Optimus Prime action figure when i was 8), one's environment it all fades out into background noise. The subtle daily differences become lost behind a deafening drum, a hum drum to a hum bug.

The turgid mud that becomes day to day activity amid almost complete sensual break down is almost impossible to observe as the total annihilation of the senses by this routine trudge is so complete as to mask even it's own existance.

Today I made my way to work on a route new to me, from my new rented accomodation. Every footstep was unsure of itself. This was not least to be blamed on 3 days of almost literally bathing in whiskey, but the way that each step and every decision was as potent as being stabbed with a pin was screamingly apparant.

The real gift, the santa's stocking brimming with brazil nuts and freshly ripened fruit that change brought me, was not fully realised until i entered an unto now unfrequented strip of tube journey. Necessity nuzzled me into the breast of Goliath of a man during the Londoners favourite early morning game of sardines made ever more exciting by it's jarring thrusting locomotion between A and B on the tube.

Just ever so slightly behind me, his brief case wedged into the small of my back was the vile criminal who was crushing my face into the warm embrace of an unwilling recipients chest. This man was in his mid 50's and was enthusiastically relaying to a younger near suicidal colleague something insidious. Regulations and their implications were being reeled off referred to only by numbers and the occasional snort of disbelief that regulation 24 could be mistakenly actioned as a regulation 432. The type of bone marrow disolving boob who is this enthralled by the intimacies of his job must invariably be singularly unimaginative, decidedly lonley or power hungry with about as much access to power as a communist peasant in 1950's Russia.

The man looked like someone had attempted to remove him from the fabric of reality with laser treatment. A faded imprint regretably conceived some 50 years gone, only a lack of technology had left his stain in place.

Despite all of his crimes it could so easily have been nothing more than a part of the morning din had this not been a special day glittering with new observations. However, the man seemed to have a bronchial condition and a sniff reflex. With the regularity and relentlessness of an artillery gun during the Allied bombardment at the Somme, he roared from the depths of his twitching raw pestilant lungs, then suddenly would snort a crackling rich thick slime back from his nostrils.

This sound, this horror, smashed into my ears, drowned my entire being like a sudden tidal wave of steaming manure, constantly withdrawing then swamping my arched tense expectant whole over and over.

Even now, 4 hours later, i want to scream at the resonance of the experience, shove him in front of a hurtling train then smash the remains into oblivion with a mallet.

Yet,

He's the best thing that has happened to me for 3 months and probably the best thing that will happen for another 3 months, because i actually heard him and will likely hear and see all of the wonderful things that have been thrust into context by him.

Thank you, you feculant, blabbering, oafish plague on mankind, may you spread your spluttering filth upon another deserving soul and bring them back from their unwitting brink.

If i were a German...

It was a dull grey morning in London.

It was THIS dull grey morning in London, and all was..is...well....dull. I'm sure it is all very exciting somewhere in the country.

Somewhere, a slack jawed youth with an unfathomably twisted mind, plunging inexorably downward into the depths of an ever darkening emotional state of the blues is caressing his fathers blunderbuss with menacing intent.

I however am content in my office, twitching, barking and occasionally dozing off in the 10 yard space that i can brand my very own. 'I'll put an open jar of pickles there if i so wish damn you, that bit's still my desk!'.

I read this morning of the shootings in a school in Germany. It made me feel uneasy, as if there were a madness floating indiscriminately around and could land at any moment....

Then suddenly from the foggy morning silence that rests upon the office, muffling acceptance of the rawness of the start of a working day...a shrill test of my credentials as a lunatic:

'I saw Watchmen last week.' States the ghoulish pissant who sits behind me.

'Is it good?' One of her foul culturally famished behavioural conformist associates, bleated in instinctual response.

'It was, but there was too much of the comic book in the film, it was too long, they copied it too directly from the comic'.

'Have you read the book then?'

'No.'

..................................

Is this the moment when I rise suddenly from my chair and begin firing, all of the worlds contradictions, disappointments and mundane vapid waste of potential, channelling through my veins into the pump action shot gun and onward, delivering armageddon to the infidels? Is it?

No.

The woolly headed fools have wrapped my tormented soul in a cotton wool, muffing all and any independent thought.

What a relief, I must be sane...

In communicado.

Man in streets: 'eh eh'

Me: 'Can i help you?'

Man: Waves his hands around, seemingly doing some sort of tribal dance.

Me: (noticing a cigarette balanced between his long nailed, crow legged, yellow fingers)...'Would you like a light'.

Man: Nods and grins. He resembles a child, except a smoking child with high waisted chino's and wrinkles. He accepts the lighter, and returns it.

Me: 'Thanks' (not sure why i'm thankful...is it for surviving the ordeal?)

Man: 'East London Mosque?' He points and shrugs.

Me: (Master of communication as I am, I presume that he wants to know where it is). 'What road is it on'.

Man: 'Yes, someone died'.

Me: 'What road it is it on?' (pointing at a road sign)

Man: 'Yes'.

Me: 'That way'.

Man: Hobbels off elated holding the cigarette near his mouth but without smoking it.

............................

'If I were a German, you'd be dead'.
Defiance 2008

Stop Horsing around you Clown.

At race tracks across the country men have turned the past time of betting on the races into a veritable art form. This sport is unlike any other form of betting as it is genuinely tangible to play the odds, study form and know the participants and the conditions well enough to have a talent for the gamble.

The Horse is as an important an individual in this focal point of public interest as the jockey or the trainer. Huge sums of money are invested in the purchase, breeding, training and maintenance of these beasts and often in the minds of the participants the Horse has become more revered and more beloved than the people.

This is just one example of how the common horse is held in such high regard. Show jumping, Polo, Rodeo's etc. Areas of police work rely on horses, soldiers across the globe have changed the shape of battles consequently the political map with careful usage of the Horse. What of Gengis Khan had he not had a Horse?

This fascination with the animal is so significant that some groups of people are actually referred to as 'Horsey'.

The Horse is without a shadow of a doubt a symbol of success, power, beauty and its absence would have profoundly changed the world and large swathes of social interaction, self perceptions and recreational activities.

How can it be then that the term 'Horsing around' is utilised with so similar a meaning as the term, 'Clowning around'?

After all, the current status of the average clown is far from prodgious and one might struggle to recall the last time a Clown changed swayed the pendulum of world political power (George Bush aside). There was even a BBC documentary on Clowns which exposed the sad state of the Clowning industry for what it has become. One Clown in question, Tommy Tickle displayed the rotting underbelly of being a clown in its rawest form, as quoted in the Times Tommy is,

'A plump, bald man with a voice as crusty as Krusty's, he even thought his own daughter “vile”. Kids these days, they had no moral boundaries. He always wore a cricket box, because you can tell a child 100 jokes but there is none as funny as punching a clown in the nuts. '

To put it bluntly, you wouldn't kick a Horse in the nuts.

Presumably, both Horse and Clown were once of equal ilk? Both often seen messing about, inducing hilarity but essentially ignoring the rigours of the day to day bind of a job in adminstration perhaps. The intimation of, 'Clowning' or 'Horsing' around is that it is a harmless though unproductive activity, the cyncisim in the statements is tapered with an endearing quality and unlikely to escalate to full reprimand or actual disdain.

How fortunes have changed for the Clown and the Horse. Horses have put in the hard graft, they are as reliable as a Horse for example. The key for the Horse is that they have retained a sense of independence despite becoming humourless grafters. This independence seems to have saved them from the pitfalls of team bonding. You never see a group of Horses out in a bar leering over a barmaid and downing pints of lager whilst standing on their heads.

The Clown has also retained an independence, but it is perhaps more an enforced lonliness that has slowly lead to an increasing alcholoism and hatred of Children. This personal abuse has since undermined the very essence of their point, to bring joy and to raise spirits. Instead they have been raising spirits in a darkened room all alone, in a glass....dressed as a clown.

A sorry demise for Clowns, a heroic rise to fame for Horses. What could possibly have lead to a situation where these two could have gone in such different directions?

The likely protagonist would appear to be the enemy of the people, the nemisis of the intellectual and the oppressor of the female race. Vanity. Quite simply, during those pivotal socially embrionic days of the latter Teenage years, who would it be less embarrasing to be seen with, a Clown or a Horse?

This is what the Clown must endure, as children of younger and younger ages learn to love horses and kick Clowns in the balls, Clowns lose their sense of fun and with every declining step lurch further toward extinction. As for the Horse, i fear their motives. After all, never trust a Trojan Horse.

Prim, proper, front, centre and plastered.

The life of a professional in 2009 is tough. There is a shrinking economy putting jobs at risk and an ever growing number of higher education graduates emerging from the university womb ready to steal your job eager as beavers. The pressure to be perfectly turned out and to thrust oneself into the working day with the enthusiasm of a child at Christmas tearing into presents has never been so great. It is paramount that the succesful professional exeed targets, arrive early, leave late, innovate the generation of new revenues and skip lunch.

How then does one cope with the diminishing returns, growing work loads, increased expectations carefully balanced against the cessation of chocolate rations and job loss whilst fitting in a vibrant social life and general pressing life administration issues such as gas bills, short haul holidays, relentless drinking and 'girlfriend time'?

Well, i'll tell you:

Last night (sunday), i strolled to my local Tesco in search of a few bits and pieces with which to negotiate a succesful dinner, perhaps a glass of wine and a film before hitting the hay allowing for a comfortable 8 hour sleep pre the working week.

Unfortunately the Tesco extra in question only has room for a limited choice in stock. Missing are loose vegetables, all vegetarian protein options save for Quorn Sausages, they have no cheddar, no beans, no pasta, in fact the missing list is endless. They will however always have in stock, Chippati flour, pot noodles and heat magazine.

In the face of such odds and to negate the demoralising effects of trawling through the proverbial wellington boot in a fishing net that consituted my options, i bought a bottle of wine and 8 cans of lager.

On the journey home i saw a local tramp sitting looking dejected with his head in his hands. Presumably he had taken his last £2 into tesco to buy cider and returned with a bag of Chippati flour instead.

So, to wind down my Sunday and prepare for the week, i put on an episode of the frankly fantastic 'Band of Brothers' and opened the wine. 6 episodes, 1 bottle of wine and 5 cans of lager later...otherwise known as 2:30am, i crawled into bed.

The morning alarm hit me like a mallet in the face. Standing in the shower using my shoulder to prop myself up the moment to get out and get ready arrived when my knees buckled as i fell back to sleep standing up.

Having forgotten to dry clean my only suit, which incidentally is actually a dark blue blazer and a pair of dark blue trousers that do not match and were purchased seperately, i was forced to rumage through a dusty bag to find a worn old pair of brown work like trousers i used to wear in part time jobs.

Running an iron over the scrumpled heap that consitutes my now off white shirt, i glanced in the mirror to decide upon how necessary a shave was. Was it necessary? Very. Did i do it? No.

Once in the office of course a staunch professional facade is vital to overcome the undoubted look of horror on the face of the office manager when he casts his eyes over my lacklustre appearance. ....(I look like i have been shot with a stun gun but concluded that work is more important than my health).

Unfortunately one of the office conversations is weaving its inexorable path toward idiocy within earshot.

Office idiot: 'Oh i love spandau ballet, you know, Goooold and True, so good'.

Other office idiot: 'Is that Ross Kemp?'

Office idiot: 'No Martin Kemp'

Other office idiot: 'What else have the written?'

Office idiot (who LOVES Spandau Ballet): 'Oh those are the only two i know'

Thereafter follows 20 minutes of singing these two songs untunefully to attempt to illustrate who she is talking about.

This saps my enthusiasm, so i have a cup of tea to help mask the smell of alchohol, google 'giant rats' discovering that a man in china has caught a rat the size of a cat: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/4688453/Giant-rat-caught-in-China.html and then write this load of twaddle to help waste some time before lunch.

Luckily i have 3 meaningless phone calls lined up to make after lunch and a host of points of interest to explore on Wikipedia.

Those graduates don't have a chance.

Daily Chore.

Directly in front of me is a pot plant.

I am sitting at my computer in the office that i work in, pulling a 'work' face and occasionally reaching for the phone, lifting the handset, dialing, replacing the handset, then mumbling faux frustration at the lack of repsonse from my intended conversation reciepient. It's unsurprising that there was a limited response as I have just phoned my own answering machine.

The pot plant is in a similar predicament to myself and i can't help feeling a kinship with it. There is something evocative about the way that it's wilting brown tipped leaves scream both neglect and loneliness. The top of the plant is clawing at a thin stip of window, a window so slight as to implicate that one might fire arrows out of it at bewildered passers by.

I might fire arrows out of it at bewlidered passers by, if only for the cheap thrill of the inevtiable arrest.

Behind me a group of 20 something females who work on an events team are discussing what their respective boyfriends did for valentines day. This began as an exploration into each others boyfriends valentine spend, presumably in the form of a competition with egotistical pretentions but now they seem to have caught themselves off guard as the potential to take the results home and berate the unfortunate love interest with the results dawns slowly upon them.

It's like watching the sun rise, but when the day ahead has already been pre-determined as a horrible nightmare. Slow, inevitable, enlightening and soul crushing.

The pot plant looks like someone built a concrete jungle on top of a forest and preserved the plant to placate some sandle wearing Green Peace hippies who might make a fuss.

Just behind the pot plant a man with the social skills of a loaf of stale bread is standing roughly 3 inches from a more junior member of staffs face bleating football facts at him. The junior member of staff did not ask, why he is being told is beyond even the most enthused of the work drones surrounding them. The taught desperate smile of politeness plastered all over this unfortunates face literally screams, 'Leave me alone, why is your breath so bad? let me stare blankly at my computer screen, what the hell are you talking about?'.

Soon it will be over and he can sink back into 3 more hours of mind numbing silence.

It is said that each google search uses the same amount of energy as boiling a kettle. I boil 89,435 kettles a day on average and am singlehandedly buringing a new hole in the ozone layer so that i can one day escape through it.


There is a picture of Peter Sutcliffe that i have identified on google images. For the next 15 minutes i plan to muse on how best to include it in an office round Robin to guarantee my sacking....