Killer Fact!

Top five per capita baked bean consumption by country.

1. Ireland 5.6 kg
2. Britain 4.3 kg
3. New Zealand 2.3 kg
4. USA 2.0 kg
5. Australia 1.3 kg

What’s Ireland thinking about? I’ve been to Ireland once or twice and I can’t remember baked beans on the menu. In fact I can’t remember seeing an Irishman eating beans. It doesn’t ring true. Irish cuisine is that strange modern European mixture of the welcoming native traditional and the mean stateless nouvelle. It’s as if they leap frogged from the optimistic sixties to the cool dude nineties missing out the fish fingered seventies altogether. So I can’t believe they eat all these beans. There’s been a mistake. No pun. Maybe they feed them to the horses.

Then there’s us. 4.3 kg is about 10 tins. Now I like beans, always have. I’m common, I can’t help it, I do like a baked bean, but I don’t eat 10 tins a year. Maybe I do. It’s certainly worth thinking about.

New Zealand. Doesn’t surprise me. What else they got? Nothing to look forward to, poor little kiwis. Beans on toast is still a treat to them.

USA, well we all know their diet is the pits so I suppose the baked bean is the only proper nourishment they get, big fat lumps that they are. They think they invented them as well but we know better don’t we?

Australia, that’s a surprise, don’t know why, but you’d think they would avoid beans just on a matter of principle. They’ve got a terrible cussed nature when they’re given time to think about anything, your average Australian, but the weather’s good or so I’m told. Round the coasts. Not inland; inland it’s all flies and sand and those big long road trains driving across the desert looking for backpackers to murder. Or so I’m told.

Spanish brandy and Pepsi Max and daytime TV…

is the abyss.

I’ve had a touch of peritonitis this week, or was it impetigo, pleurisy, typhoid? Who cares I can’t remember. That’s the trouble with duvet days; sickies to you and me. You see, the working class suffer such a poverty of ambition when we phone in sick on Monday mornings that we usually blame ‘flu’ or ‘upset stomach’. What a crock. Any manager will see through that in two seconds flat. Worse is getting the wife to phone in for you. Don’t be a simp. Stand up man. Grasp the phone and tell them straight you’ve got nodular brain pus coming out your ear and you’ll be in by Wednesday afternoon once you’ve seen your doctor. Always tell them you are going to the doctor whether or not. Then, when you limp in at 2.00 pm, immediately start moaning to anyone who’ll listen about the foreignness of Britain’s GPs and how the waiting room was full of smelly addicts waiting for methadone. Remember to ask off early, “so you can get your prescription before Boots shuts.” All this adds verisimilitude to your barefaced lies; any lingering suspicions about your weekend proclivities will be expunged and your boss will reconsider his cynical nature.
It’s totally win win.

Blame Kim Ayres.

Interior: English newsagents circa 1982
Sound: background level “Blaydon Races”

Enter cheery faced paperboy shoplifting (as we all did) and getting caught by sourfaced newsagent.

Cue the Geordie accent.

Paperboy: Can ah have a coupla bagsa chew-dah oot me wages?

Surely the acme of British televisual advertising.

Up there with Cadbury Smash and putting a tiger in your tank and the man on the Hovis cobbled hill on the bike with no brakes. Actually I hated that one. As a child I really loved the polar bear on the Fox’s glacier mint and the polar bear in the Cresta adverts. I must have had a thing for polar bears, although now as an adult I’d shoot one without compunction. I’d shoot it twice. In the eye. And the cubs.

These days British adverts are totally, and I do mean utterly, CRAP. The only one I like was the recent campaign for MFI where ‘ordinary’ people are seen arguing at home, as we do, then it turns out they are in an MFI showroom. Oh how I smiled at that. To be fair it was done well. I liked the teenager coming home late and the older couple in bed, they both got a snicker out me. Still, I don’t need to buy a couch right now, so bit of a wasted effort there.

Note for Americans:

Chew-dah is Tudor, a defunct potato chip manufacturer which did odd flavours like hedgehog or mint sauce, you get the picture, it was when we were unsophisticated and less concerned with image; when we took ourselves less seriously; you know, way back then.
So,
Newspaper boy from the north east of England: May I have two bags of Tudor in advance of my remuneration?
Cadbury Smash was instant mashed potato. It was considered groovy.
Tiger in your tank was Esso gasoline. Bengal tigers were liquidised and mixed in with the fuel at the refinery.
Hovis is bread with sawdust in it that sticks in children’s throats and makes them choke.
Cresta was a soft drink that was frothy man and came in weird colors.
MFI is a discount furniture warehouse. No one knows what MFI stands for.

Careful with that axe Eugene


I
was wondering why we all had knives as boys. First off was the availability. Every newsagent sold them. They had them on cards hanging up beside the pipe cleaners and those red petrol capsules for lighters. There were always three types and they ranged from about four inches long down to about an inch and a half for the really small kids. They had tartan or pearl handles or they were flat and silver, though those ones were dearer. I always liked the 2 ½ inch tartan handled ones. The perfect little penknife for little hands and little pocketsies. Second, they were cheap. They only cost pennies so were easily replaced. Thirdly, people were always giving you them as small treats, like crème eggs or postal orders. I got scout knives with tin openers on them, souvenir penknives with thistles or “Bonny Scotland” written on the side and, when I was ten, a visiting American aunt gave me the first Swiss army knife anyone had ever seen. My friends and I had never heard of the Swiss army and were enthralled by the tweezers and toothpick. It was almost James Bondian. We thought the scissors were girly but admired totally the workmanship in the overall package.
There was hours of enjoyment to be had with a knife. There was knifey. Knifey is played like twister. The object is to make your opponent do the splits or fall over. We’d play knifey on any bit of grass. Also you could make a knife blade venomous by sticking it in the eye of a dead cat. We would dissect worms quite dispassionately; there was no malice in it. At the seaside we could shuck mussels for bait quick as any fishwife. If you found yourself near a tree or on a bench especially in one of those shelters where old people sit on the promenade, you would carve out your initials on it. You did it without thinking; the brave bit was inscribing “loves S.M.“ below. Mmm, Susan McMillan, my first true love. Then there was whittling. To a nine year old boy, making a pointed stick is the essence of pleasure. When just right, you took the finished stick along the shore looking for jelly fish.
I still carry a penknife. I’ve lost a couple at the airport, I keep forgetting. Talking about that, not long after 911 I was queuing up behind this old pensioner you know the type, he looked like Harry Lauder and when he emptied his pockets into the tray, he pulled out the biggest penknife I’d ever seen. It was ancient. Of course they took it off him, he was furious so they took his lighter as well, he was totally bereaved. Silly old bugger, what was he thinking?

Funny how I find myself
Alone with you


In Iceland they’ve got this outdoor swimming lake that’s heated by geo thermals. They make a big thing about it but it’s quite pongy and disappointing actually. It’s a rotten thing to say but there it is. Sorry Iceland, but it’s true isn’t it?
There used to be an outdoor pool in every British seaside town. Arbroath had a great one, a big lido affair in white art deco concrete with ice cream kiosks and changing booths with saloon doors so you could see the girls’ pants coming down past their ankles. I think the kiosks sold toffee apples and candy floss as well.
Back then a small bottle of strange pop with a straw and a packet of salt ‘n’ shake crisps kept me happy for ages.
If I got two straws, so much the better.
The Clyde resorts were sub tropical in comparison to east coast Arbroath and our crisps and pop of a higher standard. At lunch there was always water and you weren’t allowed to dip your bread in the soup. The soup was never heinz tomato although I lived in hope. After lunch I was totally unsupervised. All the kids were. You ran across the railway line to get to the beach, the piers were all working piers with no handrails or anything gay like that, the rocks were lethal so we’d fish off them, they would hire you a motor boat by the half hour, on your own at nine years old, it took all your pocket money but was totally worth it. We were always standing on broken glass or rusty nails sticking out of driftwood or getting fishhooks stuck in our arms. All boys carried knives back then. I had a sheath knife with a tartan handle that I wore scout style on my snake belt. It had Red Indians stamped into the leather sheath. I was only eight or nine but you would have to have killed me to stop me wearing it. During the day everyone had factor a half Ambre Solaire rubbed on them and at night it was calamine lotion.
At night in the hotel for dinner, you had to be on your best behaviour which meant smiling and using the cutlery properly and keeping your mouth closed and your elbows off the table and not playing with your food even if it tasted funny and not staring at any old residents. You could tell the residents because they had hp sauce on their table at breakfast. Then you might be released to the arcade for an hour and more often than not it was off to see Johnny Beatty or Jack Milroy in some variety show. We saw Andy Stewart once which was as big a deal as Led Zeppelin.
What’s all this about? I’ll just tell you. I’m having a look through the archive. I’m clearing all statistical registers. Emptying the RAM. It’s full of stuff and if I don’t have a rake through every now and then, I’ll get Alzheimer’s and I won’t have any room left for the important things like this new blade geometry which looks counter intuitive but could increase efficiency by a full percent.
Tundra! That’s the word I was looking for. Never mind why. Yeah, tundra.

As the population of the world increases, so must our individual significance diminish. Is this is a worry? In Britain we are all to be bar-coded soon. Our DNA will be databased and we will carry identity cards like in the war against the Germans and our cars are to be satellite tracked and our dogs chip and pinned and all our towns c.c.t.v.ed and our stealthy movements in the bushes monitored by heat sensitive cameras in helicopters. None of this is an imposition but it does feel like it. Most of us aren’t murderers but in a free society we’d like the option and we’d like a sporting chance.

Another worry is that it’s the wrong sort of people that are increasing. They might come here and take our jobs. They can’t have mine because foreigners aren’t clever enough but they might get jobs as functionaries of these new databases. Foreigners have no idea that the whole strength of the British administrative system is the pernicketiness of our officials. They are virtually incorruptible.
It’s not like America where you can bribe any official with a few bucks and a dolly bird (Sopranos series 2 & 4) or eastern Europe ditto or Africa don’t get me started or Spain or Italy or any hot catholic country when I think about it, or the grasping Chinese or crackpot Indians with all that karmic shit going on, or heaven forefend your Islamist Arabic hellholes where nothing works, no, in north western Europe it is our little jobsworths with the pencil moustaches and the clipboards that actually make the place worth living in.

Otherwise it’s like Brazil. Not the country but the film by Terry Gilliam, which was good but not nearly as good as Napoleon Dynamite which was the best film ever but by someone else.

Sweet.

Bonzo goes to Bitburg and has time for a cup of tea
as I watched it on TV
somehow it really bothered me


In the week that ex First Lady and fine actor Jane Wyman [see above], died, Thatcher our ex prime minister was invited to Downing Street for tea with the Browns. This kind of revisionist shit really kills me. Just so we don’t forget: Thatcher and Reagan were nut bars. A Labour leader talking to Thatcher sucks ass.

pick up the pieces…

Come on down to the river of sound

In about eight weeks or so, some time in November, we,
the cul de sac of the Maroon Diaspora, shall receive the
Fall Newsletter from our west coast American relatives.
We got the first of them in 1995. It was a shock. Not only
did the world not end at Kirkintilloch but we were exposed
as chronic under achievers.
Even the document itself drew astonished gasps. The production values were slick to say the least.
American flags, embedded photos, typefaces, it had it all.
It was the American Vogue of round robins.
Well, no.
Actually it wasn’t. When we read it, we scoffed.
We scoffed in our inverted snobbery. When we read of their success in school, on vacation, in real estate, did we feel pride however vicarious?
Uh-uh, being Scotch we ripped them to shreds.

‘ I’m surprised it doesn’t play “The Star Spangled Banner” when you open it.’ We smirked.
‘ Uncle Tommy passed a kidney stone - bit like reading this newsletter.’ We sniggered.
‘ It won’t win a Pulitzer.’ We sneered. We, who couldn’t string a note for the milkman.

Most uncomfortably for us guilty Scots, it had lots of brazen little catholic references to prayer and God and being blessed.
Our shame was exposed.
At the end of an uninterrupted line of Scottish Catholics with more than our share of rebel Irish mixed in, we, that is my sister brother and I, have been secret Taoists for years.
We’d never risk our souls with protestant Calvinism,
you have to draw a line somewhere, but we’ve turned our back on Mother Church.
I remember introducing Mrs Maroon to my parents, explaining that she prefered not to follow The One True Faith.
“Good for you!” they said in wonder, ” how terribly brave.“
Paradoxically, they think the sun shines out her ass which strengthens my belief that all Scottish are atheists.
We just pretend.
Not so our Americans. They have the evidence before them. Their faith works.

In the succeeding years we have grown to love the
Fall Newsletter as much as we always loved them,
our American branch, with their patriotism and their faith
AND all that real estate.
God bless them.

For Andraste.

In one of my levels of Hell, Andraste the Rabbit Girl comes through the door and she’s into the Bruins locker room and they’re all semi naked, horsing around, having a celebration with tons of Guinness and the Pogues are playing in the corner with the Dubliners or something…
BUT,
as she moves through her throng of heroes, she notices that all the players are the ones who failed her beloved Broons in some way, the bush league wannabes, the ones who miss the puck, swiping at thin air like twats, the ones who couldn’t hit a barn door, the injury prone, the druggies, the useless ones that can’t pass, block, fight, or just plain skate and should never have been permitted to put on a sacred Bruins shirt in the first place! And the good looking ones are gay and bitchy and the rest are weedy or fat and now that she’s looking, they are all like GI Joe ‘down there’, they got nothing, nada, and the Guinness is actually a fake concoction of root beer and coca cola and big mental Shane the Pogues front man has been soberised and he’s combed his hair and pressed his jeans and has perfect teeth and is singing about puppy dawgs and it’s not the actual Dubliners but a shit tribute band called the Dub-LAND-ers…

I can keep this up for weeks, Rabbit Girl.
Release my red hot chillis forthwith!

* * *

I just read “this book will save your life” by a.m.homes; a disjointed yet pleasing Los Angeles adventure.
But,

have a look at this little extract.


‘I’m still not sure you’re not that asshole,’ the guy says to him.
‘What can I say to convince you?’
‘Very little. Do I look bad?
‘You look…rough,’ Richard says.
‘I go in phases; right now I’m in a fight with my body. Do I smell?’
‘Not from here.’
‘I’m on a deadline.’ He dips his fingers into a bag of lettuce and puts some in his mouth. ‘Greens, very good for you.’ He eats them as though he craves them, as though greens are the new candy, the new Swedish Fish. ‘Where have you been?’ he asks.


Dearest comrades, didya spot it? Didya?
For many this side of The Pond, the reference to Swedish Fish would have gone right over their heads, but not us, eh gang? And why not? Because our good friend SafeTinspector introduced them to us a year ago, that’s why not.
Truly, our corner of the Blogosphere is without peer. We are the new depository, the new Alexandria, the light of our collected knowledge shall blind the troglodytes!
When I saw the words “Swedish Fish”, my face was a picture. Talk about smug. SafeT. I salute you.

LATE UPDATE: If yer wonderin' why I ain't replyin' to all yer witty comments an' suchlike, I keeps losing Haloscan. I don't know if it's a general problem or peculiar to this machine. I've even lost the comments shortcut off the main page now.

Typhoon

Midnight on the Pacific and skimming through surf and flying fish, two dolphins are on their way home from a school reunion that turned into an anchovy hunt. Although the evening has gone superbly, something is evidently weighing on the mind of the female dolphin as they glide along. Something she must get off her chest:

‘I thought you said we’d leave when the moon came up?’
‘It would have been rude, we couldn’t just leave.’
‘Well you certainly couldn’t.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You should see yourself sometimes.’
‘Oh here we go. I wondered how long it’d take.’
‘That school are my friends, you’d think for once you’d…’
‘They’re my friends too.’
‘Not any more they aren’t.’

Her lifelong mate, a dashing bull despite his age, vents in exasperation and is about to sulk when he spots an escape. He points with his nose.

‘Look, the flying fish are changing course.’
‘That’s right, change the subject.’
‘They’re heading south, I wonder if Ian and Denise are still up.’
‘Well if they are, we’re not staying all night.’
‘Race you.’
‘No, OK-1-2-3-Go!’
‘Cheat! I wasn’t ready! Come back! Start again!’

Some flexing of their eager flanks and they leave the surf, heading off over unbroken sea. And as we watch them go, our view widens and we see that the surf the dolphins were riding is the bow wave of the largest moving object on the surface of the planet.

In one of those cataclysmic events that happen in every age; events that bring misery untold to countless generations; Pat had booked some musicians to provide entertainment in her tavern. They were the first folk band in recorded history. The bosun, a great hairy armed brute of a man called Bananas had inveigled his way into the band. With his unopposed thumbs none was better on the concertina. The ensemble was murdering “Brennan on the moor” as the captain slipped in the door.

Hennessy took in the layout as he made his way through the gloom towards the bar. As swashbuckling custom demanded, the inn was lit by rings of dripping candles set on dangerously heavy cart wheels. These had been hoisted into the rafters on ropes secured Flemish style with cleats on the wall. His shrewd eyes settled on a half dozen rough sailor types playing pinochle under just such a perilous hazard. He allowed his cruel lips to part in an enigmatic smile revealing his perfect teeth.

Setting the standard for the next 210 years, ‘The Claymores’ were taking great care not to smile or move any part of their bodies as they played. Being folk purists they understood the difference between music and pleasure, so before each song the earnest bandleader would also try and explain its significance. He was keen for the drinkers to know what had inspired every composition that they might appreciate it more, but setting their own standard for the next 210 years, the audience ignored him and continued to talk and laugh among themselves.

‘No, no, Mr Burns, I’m not that sort of girl’ squealed Ayres in the corner.
‘Call me Rabbie!’ cried the poet, making a grab for Ayres’ cabbages.
‘Naughty!’ replied the botanist, hitting the poet square in the face with her tankard.
‘I love spirit in a lassie’ was the inevitable reply as The Bard redoubled his efforts.

Aren’t hotels shit?

There are no good hotels in Scotland. There is always something that totally ruins your stay – the staff. There is a morbid slapstick to the service in a Scottish hotel that makes you want to kill yourself. As a nation we should admit right now that we can’t do it and shut all our hotels with immediate effect. They are all crap.
For me, hotels that are not untrammelled luxury are a penance. The only hotels I like to stay in now are posh foreign ones like the Frankfurter Hof. It is fabulously expensive but they accomplish that effortless comfort so elusive elsewhere. And they do it with such bland efficiency. The thought, forever unspoken, pops inevitably into one’s head, “is this how they managed their genocidal mania?” But then they treat you in such an adult way that you’d forgive them anything. You begin to wonder about fascism. You start to think; these people aren’t all bad. It creeps up on you. I loved it; every godamn Nazi minute.
Then there’s the Savoy. Talk about anal. Of course it’s my class insecurity talking, but for two grand you’d think they could put me at my ease. Everything they do for you is a fucking chore, or else it’s revealed to you in a patronising flourish. Oh look darling, running water! Even the cut flowers are shit. The arrangements are all amateurish funeral parlour floribunda disasters. And the tipping! At least have the decency to put a smile on your smarmy faces you cheap smelly bastards. The staff smells of old carpets at the Savoy.







Ayres, man of letters and ship’s botanist had been sent ahead disguised as a woman of easy virtue. As always, half the crew had advised on his wardrobe.

More rouge!
Bigger bust!

Now there weren’t no breadfruit nor guava to be ‘ad onboard, so Ayres improvised wi’ a brace o’ cabbages. An’, as is the tack in these ‘ere yarns, on his entrance to the aforementioned Clatty Pat’s Tavern, he come under the rovin’ eye of a romantic poet who were a-sittin’, scribin’ his poems, in the corner…

If I don’t, get some shelter,
Lord, I’m gonna fade away…

Perhaps you may be interested to hear how I fell in love with a beautiful lesbian. It was on Monday night past. Of course back then I didn’t know she was a beautiful lesbian. That came later. I knew from the moment I saw her she was beautiful. I’m not blind. I was back in Croydon. Here’s the rub, she was pretty fat. As to her lesbianism, I hadn’t yet put all the facts together. She WAS wearing sensible shoes but so did Mrs M at her age. Five of us sent to Surrey for two days. She was positively elfin back then AND she loved sex; she had a one track mind. Mrs Maroon that is, not the beautiful lesbian, I’m getting to HER in a minute. I can’t remember the name of the joint but it’s right across the street from Croydon town hall. Big round tables, nineties wine bar. The beautiful lesbian was sitting side on talking to her girlfriend when I saw her first. What love is love if not at first sight? From then on it was over for me. You’ve seen the sort of thing, of course you have; four men out drinking in their office clothes acting the bigshots like the Sopranos or something. Christ, let me forget. Did I mention we lost one? That’s right; one of our number didn’t come out to play. He was from Warrington in Cheshire. That left four. Four men standing at the bar [which I hate] scanning the place like twenty year olds. What were we thinking? I had put my wedding ring ON before we left Gatwick and was feeling a bit conspicuous. I should explain: Me and Mrs Maroon aren’t married but years ago we bought wedding rings one weekend. It was fun at the time. Mine cost £35.00. We sometimes like to wear them together, I don’t really know why, we just like to. So I’m even less proud to tell you. In this sort of situation, ie out drinking in a strange town, I’ve been known to put mine on as a repellent and as bait. I know it’s a pretty crummy trick but I figure either way you’re covered. Think about it. Yeah? I told you it was crummy. I was deliberately drinking with my left hand. Everyone in the bar must have seen that ring. They would have seen it in Mordor. By this time I’d had a couple of subtle eye contacts with the beautiful lesbian. Each time it was like a wave of adrenaline. A band of Vikings from Technical Development we were. So I had just turned to the bar for more drinks when the beautiful lesbian decides to press in behind me for a bottle of wine. I’m not some masher but I could feel them on my shoulder blades. So I turned around facing her, to give her some room and they sort of rubbed my arm as I did so, sort of one after the other but she never noticed and she said cheers or something when I stood back to let her in. I didn’t tell you about them before because I didn’t want to give you the wrong idea. It wasn’t just about them. They were only part of the picture. Her name was Florence. Yeah I know, you’re thinking and she had a friend called Zebedee, look it’s after 3 o’clock, I’m going to have to continue this later.

Pedalpushin’

I’m up on the eleventh floor
and I’m watchin’ the cruisers below…


Watched the Tour of Ireland go through Limerick and Westport and all the other picturesque bits and I for one was mulling it over. I bet none of you remember Sean Kelly. The great Irish Champion? Thought not.
For a shallow man, I run pretty deep sometimes. It was obviously A Sign.
Time to get riding!

I’ve got an official Benesto jersey and padded cycling pants which are most flattering. I should post a picture. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve stopped at the other pub to the admiration of their womenfolk. Sluts so they are. They ALWAYS make some comment and come over to look at the bike. It’s the saddle. They can’t keep their mitts off it. It’s a gel-filled masterpiece of the erotic saddler’s art. I always feel funny watching them handle it, pinching the gel through the neoprene with their firm competent hands and long fingernails…

Anyway, I couldn’t stop on Sunday night because I was red and wheezing like a set of old bagpipes. I was Humpty Dumpty, in fact his fat ugly brother. The lycra was squeezing my stomach to death. And anyway I wasn’t sure I could get my feet free of the cleats (oh yes friends, I ride with cleated shoes) without falling over because my legs had gone all that jelly way and my bottom was very hot and slippy. Too much information? I agree.
Stick to the facts.
15 miles (24 km) dead flat, no wind, perfect evening, 49 minutes.
That’s 18.36 mph or 29.38 kmph in new money.


Oh God, I could do better than that.
You betcha!

Late sports update: see below

Aleksandr Pushkin! Yury Gagarin! Doctor Zhivago! Boris Godunov! Mikhail Lermontov! Ivan Denisovitch! MAGGIE THATCHER!
Can you hear me?
Can you HEAR me?
Your boys took a hell of a beating here tonight.
A HELL OF A BEATING!


(trad.)
oh it’s a grand old team to play for,
oh it’s a grand old team to seeeee,
and IF
you know
The History
well it’s enough to make your heart go “oh oh oh OH…”
we don’t care what the ******* say
WHAT the hell do we care?
for we only know
that there’s gonna be a show
and the Glaaas-gow CELTIC will be there…


cue the tinkling piano…(Rodgers and Hammerstein)
When you walk…
through the storm…
hold your head…
up high…

What a night.

Footnote: Last weekend The Bhoys utterly and totally thrashed the Edinburgh club, Hearts (Rangers Lite) 5-0. What did the witty scamp of a DJ play over the tannoy at Paradise? Why, the theme tune to Hawaii Five-O of course. Oh how the Hearts team laughed. Actually they didn’t. They’re all poor Lithuanians and have never seen a TV let alone Steve McGarrett. God bless them.

******* insert pejorative name for city rivals here.

It’s Thursday !

Aren’t Thursdays tops? While they are nowhere NEAR the full blown Gregory Peck of Fridays, there is nonetheless a buttery pleasure about them. They are the Natalie Wood of the week. They have, to my mind, totally supplanted the Jack Lemmoness of Wednesdays; you know, that midweek celebration you give yourself for surviving Brad Pitt Tuesdays.
That just leaves Mondays. Harumph.
See now I’ve annoyed myself by re-living the Joan Crawford of Mondays past while worrying about the Dame Judi Dench of those yet to come, when instead I should be planning the nineteen year old Lauren Bacall of a weekend.

Hmmmmm, Lauren, of course I know how to whistle heh heh heh oh you are naughty Lauren…

Feisty philosopher triumphs in bruising battle with beastly bureaucrats!


Last night there was an item on the Scottish news about how the Crichton Campus of the University [Via Veritas Vitae] had been saved.
Why did that ring bells with me? I’ll just tell you.
A contributor to these pages, the well known philosopher and acolyte of Antonio Gramsci, namely Eryl Shields the kitchen bitch herself, had been campaigning for just such an outcome.
I’m sure I speak for us all when I wish her our hearty congratulations.

As Gramsci himself might have said while fading in gaol,

“…pre-history ends and history begins.”


Anyway, it’s still 1798 and our brave ship Shannon is lying off the Ayrshire coast at Ballantrae. In a spirit of open friendship the guns have been run out to cover the quayside and the custom house in an arc of genial fire should the need arise.
Onshore, swashbuckling captain Barney (Barnacle) Hennessy with three of his most trusted crew, have tracked down the objects of their pursuit to a cavernous alehouse called “Clatty Pat’s”…


Call it morning driving through the sound
In and out the valley

So far this week, I have been mainly listening to Yes.

transference /’trans(t)s-/fer-ən(t)s, 1 : the redirection of feelings and desires to a new object. 2 : symptom of being a total arse.

I am a long-time sufferer of this debilitating condition and now that the Tour de France is ended, my transference is raging, like, all over the place.
For example, I extol Ayres to get on HIS bike because I have a bike that I never ride. You see how it works? I keep it in the shed. The bike. It’s totally made out of plastic and exotic metals. Ayres has an excuse; he doesn’t know that after 4 or 5 days on a bike, it becomes addictive, that you end up thinking of any excuse just to ride the thing. I have no such defence. I’ve seen the Promised Land. I’ve looked down from the hilltop at the sleeping plains spread below, ready for plunder.
That bike is put together like a lever watch, it really is. If I sat on it, it would break. It is utterly silent. I don’t mean in the shed, I mean when I ride it. It doesn’t squeak or click or clank, the brakes come on with a whisper. When I bought it in 2003, I put it on my visa and I’m still paying it off.
Sitting here, facing the facts like this has been good, although my chest has tightened with embarrassment and my face is totally scarlet. In the Scottish idiom, I’ve “taken a pure beamer”.
Confession always drains me emotionally. Must have a cuppa. Tomorrow we’ll discuss procrastination.

procrastinate \p(r)ə-‘kras-tə-,nāt \ prō vt~ to put off intentionally and habitually, vi~ to put off intentionally and reprehensibly, the doing of something that should be done…

‘Give me a break! I’m DOING IT!’

Dear reader, how often have we shouted those words up the stair to our loved ones, when we had no intention of doing whatever it was we said we were doing? Perhaps you’ve just found another number in your sodoku, or maybe that beer is particularly hopsome, or maybe you’re just plain lazy and too scared to begin.

‘The longest journey starts with the shortest step.’

Wouldn’t it be great to hang the man who first came up with that? Or make a pyre of cheesy greetings cards and sling the bastard on.

‘procrastination is the thief of time’
Fred, you’re right! Here, hold this can of petrol.
‘never do today what you can put off till tomorrow’
Fred, that’s the wrong way round.
‘tomorrow never comes’
How true, got a light?
‘strike while the iron’s hot’
I shall Fred, could you stand on that straw bale?
‘make hay while the sun shines’
Time to shut up, Fred.
‘car...’
Don’t say it Fred.
‘carp…’
Don’t Fred, I won’t be responsible
‘CARPE DIEM!’
You just had to, didn’t you? WHOOSHHHHHHH


Deedle-deedle-deedle-dee…Layla! You got me on my knees…

You may be interested to know we were at a lock-in the other night. Remember them?
Free jukebox and the Devil take the hindmost.
All the old crowd have turned out and your mind and body returns, way…way back to the days when everyone had summer suntans and we could dance and we weren’t afraid to show it and the sex we had was better than the rubbish that young people put up with these days and you had a black futon and a big black couch to go with it and black wooden shelving units that you were dead proud of and a pioneer stereo and tons of scratched LPs and while you were waiting to go out you’d have a can of lager and a weak doobie and your girlfriend would be taking ages to get ready and she’d take a couple of puffs and a couple of slugs out your beer and give you a snog for about an hour and it was hot and passionate and cool and innocent at the same time and you thought you were the only man who ever had the luck to feel that good.
Christ, it was only a lock-in. GERROVERITT!
Sunday night, Mr Parker called, said; listen son you’re wasting time, there’s a future for you in the fire escape trade…

Foot Eater 1 AHK Maroon 0

Humble pie must be eaten quickly. It now seems the man fighting for his life with 90% burns is an engineer. What a bummer. Worse, he was a PhD student at Cambridge. You couldn’t make this stuff up. Please God, tell me it wasn’t Trinity.
I don’t know what bothers me more; Foot Eater being right or my upcoming medical. My previous plans are kaput.

‘Right Maroon, spread ‘em, I want to see those two veg. Christ, you’re fatter than ever and still drinking I see. No excuses Maroon, my patience is pretty thin with engineers right now, especially hoity toity Cambridge ones. Bend over, this is going to hurt…’

On the upside, the Tour de France has started and wasn’t the Garden of England looking just perfect for it? I bet Ayres threw his TV out the window.