Going, Going,...............Gorn.

I an vamoosing, pissing off to greener pastures, dancing the light fandango as I prepare to step fearlessly into the wilds of untamed Cumbria. With little more than a knapsack, a gnarled walking stick, and a bar of Kendal mint cake I will subsist on the bounty provided by mother nature. I shall drink deep of her pendulous udder as I sleep 'neath the stars and a gentle breeze ruffles my tent.

The truth, I am afraid, is rather more prosaic.

A comfortable warm cottage and lots of eating and drinking are a more realistic and desirable prospect. I shall take a few short untiring strolls, as long as there aren't any steep slopes and it isn't raining (which it will be).

I'm hoping that Julia Bradbury will be about, doing her hiking thing. Being ,as always, the perfect gentleman I shall offer to massage her weary limbs..



Which will be nice.

The Strange Death of Cremola Foam

I get a bit fed up with the current obsession with wholesome organic foodstuffs. Personally I'm not prepared to pay more for a carrot that has been doused in rose water and gently massaged by an oriental lady before being gently eased from the earth. It won't taste any different from a normal carrot, and I'm sure it won't be any more good for me.

If you ask me our life expectancy has been vastly increased due to the range of chemically enhanced foodstuffs which were ingested during the 1970's and 1980's. Each of us should be grateful for the role that the likes of Vesta Beef Curry and Findus Crispy Pancakes played in boosting our juvenile immune systems.

Unfortunately, due to unfathomable corporate shenanigans, the recipe for the great Cremola Foam has gone AWOL. I used to like the stuff: not that I can remember much about it apart from the Liver Salts explosive fizz that used to erupt when it came in contact with water. All I do know is that it obviously didn't contain any natural ingredients whatsoever, and was consequently a very good thing indeed.

I think I last espied a tin lurking at the back of my grandmothers larder in 1977, or thereabouts. If I recall correctly it had a faded label and a fine encrustation around the lid.

I don't think Cremola Foam was universally popular, being more common in Scotland and Northern Ireland than England, but it certainly left an indelible mark on those who ingested it. If anyone is lucky enough to find a tin behind the jam jar of assorted screws in their garden shed they are respectfully requested to send it to HM Govt Biological and Chemical Warfare Dept, Porton Down, England.

Bad Losers

Johnny Frenchman has been having a moan about Agincourt again. Apparently the dastardly Eeeengleeesh were no better than war criminals, executing the flower of French knighthood when they really should have offered them prunes and custard.

It's a tough old life being a Frenchie. Let's face it, it's hard when you're rubbish at war and elect big noses and stack heeled dwarves as President. I say saucisson to them.



I'd give that Carla Bruni one.

Bruvvers (Boring Political Stuff)

I hate the British Labour Party with a passion. I hated the donkey jacket (middle class poseurs) clad university lefties who polluted 80's Student Unions, spouting bollocks while quaffing subsidised beer and demanding that the bar be renamed to honour Nelson Mandela. I hated the oleaginous Blair and his spurious Everyman posturings as he informed us that 'things can only get better'.

The one thing the Labour Party can be guaranteed to do is ensure that the working class remains working class. A combination of crap schools, debilitating welfare benefit culture, and a bloated public sector dependent on taxpayer largesse see to that.

Unfortunately no one likes to admit to voting Conservative, as this means you are irredeemably evil and a lick spittle for the vile capitalist overlords. If you live on the Celtic fringe you won't dare admit to voting Conservative, as this makes you a lover of the evil Thatcher (destroyer of clapped out loss making shipyards and steelworks) and could result in a severe kicking.

My real problem with the current crop of Labourites is that they haven't done an honest days work in their lives, progressing from Sociology Degrees to lecturing at glorified Polytechnics or managing Cultural Diversity Outreach Policy for local councils. Ask them what a balance sheet is and they'll think you're referring to trampolining.

Of course the Liberal Democrats (what a stupid name for a political party) are just as bad,if not worse, in this respect. As for the Tories, they appear to have been captured by a coterie of Eton and Oxbridge slimeballs who are of independent means and are clearly only interested in politics for the sake of power and self glorification.

I really think that I should be dictator. I wouldn't be a very good dictator as I don't much like telling people what to do, but at least I wouldn't make it compulsory for people to carry around a fucking card to prove who they are.

Oh, and I'd bury Coldplay alive.

You will know me by the trail of my dead

Some people have phobias; I'm cool with that, but some people are so foaming at the mouth phobic about inconsequentials that they really should be bound, gagged, and chucked in the nearest canal.

This is the time of year when Mr Mousey Mouse likes to come in and play. He is annoying, I'll grant you; what with his incontinence and penchant for chewing everything to shreds. They don't bother me much, mice; I just catch or poison the little buggers. As far as I'm concerned they're just an iritating fact of life like hangovers, or politicians.

Unfortunately I had another guest from hell last week who subjected me to a tirade of abuse because a mouse had got into her house. She seemed to think that it is a policy of mine to let vermin infested houses to Joe Public. How does she expect me to stop intrepid rodents from gaining ingress? Perhaps I should erect machine gun towers and lace the boundaries with anti personnel mines.

She reported me to the Environmental Health, who laughed and marked her complaint down as 'unsubstantiated'.

Mad bint.

The Consolations of Philosophy

I'm not sure if I prefer Schopenhauer or the great E L Wisty. It's a toss up between Wisty's ruminations on the evils of macism and old Schopes musings on romantic love. I'd quite like to have them both round to dinner as it would be a great privilege to witness the dialectical sparks fly as these two great minds tussled over the nature of philosophical truth.

I don't know a great deal about philosophy, but I would have made a good Epicurean as I'm fond of my grub.

Forward the Buffs!

It's official: modern music is rubbish.

I'm staring at my shelves of CDs and thinking: shall I copy this cornucopia of musical wonderfulness to my hard drive? No, I won't, because I never listen to 99% of it and I probably never will. I could put it on shuffle on my iPod I suppose, but that would be random just for the sake of it pointlessness.

I'm sure that there's lots of exciting music about, there always is. It's just that I'm increasingly of the opinion that it happens in clubs with audiences of less than one hundred people. The air will be humid with sweat, the wooden floor will resonate the bass up your spinal column, you will leave uplifted and profoundly deaf. It won't sound the same recorded. It'll sound even worse when you're standing in a large field waving a flag with 50,000 other mongs.

I've decided not to listen to any more contemporary music. From now on it's the collected works of the really rather lovely Billy Chldish for me. It should take until at least 2020 to get through them all.

So that's all right then.

Down on the Farm

My paternal grand parents were farmers. I'm quite proud about this as it gives me roots in a bucolic world where TB riddled milk was sold to shoeless urchins in industrial conurbations. They didn't stick to milk, the auld folks; they were mixed farmers which meant there were honking pigs, gormless sheep, and irritating chickens pecking about industriously and completely pointlessly. They also had lots of cats, which were good for kicking if you were at a loose end.

My father had a head fit in his early forties and decided that he would inhale the family vapours and forgo his progress in academe for the delights of shovelling out vast steaming mires of cow shit in the depths of winter. Back to the simple life: lugging about bales of hay to pleasure bovine morons, acquiring an unhealthy obsession with the weather forecast, becoming decidedly masturbatory when presented with a Massey Ferguson tractor.

Happy days. Well, he lasted a year before reverting to type.

Farming is only tolerable if you are Hugh Fearnley Whittginstall (Huge Fairly Windscreen Wiper) and are an Eton and Oxbridge educated toff with a large trust fund, contacts in the meedja, and difficult hair.

The best of times and the worst of times

I once almost missed school dinner at Primary School; an older ruffian relieving of me my last ball-bearing during a crunch game of marbles and grinning as I was left bereft and inconsolable.

Thankfully a couple of older kids recognised my distress and led me to the dinner hall. I'd lost my ticket, but the dinner ladies still let me in. Everyone else had eaten and left so that was my first solo dining experience. The service was a bit amateurish, but I got the full three courses and cheered up immediately.

Who needs ball-bearings anyway? It's not as though we're all cut out to be Andrew Carnegie.

Chairs

Some chairs are made for looking at, some are made for sitting in. I hate to paraphrase the late John Lennon, that arrogant deeply damaged individual, but he was right.

Narrowness: a simple seam of pure gold that has been mined and remined in search of the last elusive nugget. Seasick Steve is odd, it's almost as though he's been invented for some X Factor demographic of males who exist in permanent obeisance to Robert Johnson. It's almost too simple, too rudimentary to be valid.

But it works.



The girl in the mauve top isn't so sure. In fact, she looks positively censorious.

Imponderables for the Weekend

Why do people put prawns in fish pie? They go all rubbery and 'orrible.

Why do bankers assume they know more about people's business's than the owners do when they don't even know sweet FA about their own?

What is the point of Canada?

Why are MTV Europe proposing to honour Rick 'Ghastly' Astley? Surely it can't have anything to do with his dancing? He always looked like he was stumbling around in callipers to me.

Why do people like Bruce Springsteen? He's a calliper dancer as well, and you can't be a blue collar man of the people when you're loaded.

Why has Madonna started wearing big pants? Dead frightening.

Why am I very confused and obviously not made for these times?

The Undead

I have just purchased a notebook computer from one of the undead. I don't make a habit of buying stuff from pasty faced vampires, but after a good 30 minutes spent flailing my arms and pleading for assistance from various acned bum fluff upper lipped 'sales' assistants I couldn't be choosy about who to grace with my plastic.

Computer salesmen aren't really up on the finer points of the customer/provider nexus, probably because they spent their formative years masturbating over grainy images of Pamela Anderson on low res monitors. Either that or they were too engrossed in endless online role play gaming sessions to master the intricacies of real world interaction with flesh and blood people.

Mr Moonface the Vampire obviously hadn't had a sniff of vitamin D in the last decade or so. To look unhealthier he would have to have been brought up in a cellar and fed on pork scratchings and Irn Bru. I suspect that he must have been, judging from the wide range of facial and bodily tics that he displayed.

I'm beginning to think that PC World must recruit their staff from the pool of ex mortuary attendants who have been dismissed for displaying necrophiliac tendencies. Perhaps next time I visit I'll dole out some fake tanning cream, just to drop a subtle hint.