the brilliantly leaping gazelle

I wish to apologise to anyone who read my “the shit in the shit on the shitter post’ read the warning that presaged it, and were understandably disappointed to read on only to discover that it wasn’t as gross as they’d hoped. I can only assure them I’ll try and redeem this shocking lack of toilet based obscenity with todays effort, which reading back now before posting is nowhere near as gross as advertised. In my defence, I’m on holiday and therefore can’t draw upon inspiration from Viz’s Profanasurus,

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The body is a wonderful thing, so wonderful that we in fact take it for granted. We give no thought to the frankly miraculous ability for the skin to immediately begin to repair itself after being cut. Or the fact that all broken ribs need is some tight bandaging and rest. Or indeed elasticity, a phenomena whereby by the brain basically heals itself. I could go on, but you get the point. And if the point is your body telling you in unmistakeable terms that you need to eat more fruit and vegetables, you know two things for sure. First being, if its gotten to this state of affairs, any remedial action you take now will only have future benefits and secondly, your body will emit sounds that no human should.

Initially, you’ll notice that you are expending a lot of effort without any commensurate result. We’re not talking about phantom poo’s here, the one’s when feel you’ve extruded a turd the size and girth of a baby’s arm, are sometimes lucky enough to feel still leaving your body as it enters the water, only to see an empty pan meeting your expectant gaze Disheartening doesn’t begin to cover it, and even bother to pretend that you don’t have a Scooby what I’m on about. Because you do. But we’re not talking about phantom poo’s here, what I mean is when you’ve sat on the toilet for so long that your arse goes numb but the water below remains untouched. The air, however doesn’t.

There are many sounds one hears, all of them amplified by the wondrous acoustic properties of covered porcelain and to which I’ve spent rather too much time distracting myself by trying to describe the many sounds of a grumpy sphincter.can make. First off there’s the bog standard one, which sounds rather like like the noise a balloon makes when you slowly let air out it. A sort of high pitch squeak which if you emitted on a boat far out to sea, would be mistaken by dolphins as a mating call. Or if you were elsewhere in the house, perhaps thoroughly engrossed in a good book, might hear and think ‘Ah good, the mousetraps are working.’

Then there are the ones that sound like someones trying to open a door whose hinges haven’t been oiled. Ever. The sort of sound that would be followed by a blood curdling scream in a horror movie. Then there are the strange gurgling noises that issue forth from somewhere below the belly button, but one isn’t sure where exactly. The sort of gurgling sound that conjures thoughts of a mad scientists house and beakers full of foaming green liquid. I start to while away the boredom by wondering exactly how high pitched a dog whistle needs to be, or at what point a humans ear starts to bleed. Anything other than focus on the fact that not much of anything is happening, but consoling myself that I’m in the right place if it does.

When this aural hoax happens, I take comfort in the knowledge that every single human being ever has experienced this. That every person who has ever lived has looked up at the same moon, gazed upon the same sun, felt grass beneath their feet, felt oddly uncomfortable when they see a couple where the female is taller than the male and whose arse has sounded like the last sound a dying bird makes.

Humpty Dumpty used words as and when he liked, with no regard for their meaning, deciding on what they meant according to his own whims. Brian is exactly the same. According to the BBC news site:

King Charles added that he and his wife would now rededicate their lives to “serving the people of the United Kingdom, the Realms and Commonwealth”

How exactly are they planning to do this? Is he going to volunteer one day a week as a teaching assistant at an inner city primary.? Is she going pull all night shifts as a hospital porter at an NHS hospital. No. He just spouts the same old guff and expects us tug our forelocks, bow so much that our noses are scraping the floor and unquestioning believe him. Goebbels maxim regarding telling a big enough lie often enough that it becomes true springs to mind whenever I hear about the ‘hardworking royals’. A single mother who lives on benefits and struggles to feed her family is hard working. A fireman is hardworking. Someone whose most difficult decision each day is what colour tie to wear when he cuts a ribbon for some charity set up just as a tax dodge by isn’t anything other than dressing up and pretending.

The only person he’s ever served is himself. Oh, and that nice old man at the drop in centre that the PR team helped set up once.

As the title suggests, this is not something to read if you are eating.

Don’t say I didn’t warned you.

They say that travel broadens the mind, and indeed it does. I’ve discovered loads of new, irrational prejudices that would’ve remained unknown to me if I stayed at home. But thankfully there are a few remaining grains of sand with which to bedevil my seaside idyll.

One of them is the ever present conspiracy of bed manufacturers. They seem incapable of comprehending the idea that some people are over 6ft tall, and as most can’t take off their legs and prop them by the side of the bed, might need a bed that allows for this. Generously, I might add. It is as much use as a cement football to make beds that are not only small, but also have restraints at the foot of them. Meaning that not only is the bed too small, you can’t even stretch your legs out over the end. You are effectively imprisoned. And why this bizarre affectation for memory foam mattresses? As far as I can tell, the only memory a memory foam mattress has is of every one who’s ever slept on it.

And bed withs are another bugbear…

But nowhere near as infuriating as toilets that are so manifestly unsuited to the task they’re meant to facilitate, it almost makes me believe in the devil and that he’s somehow possessed the minds of plumbers when they install bathrooms.

Take this morning. Without going into detail, (which means I’m about to) I prefer to toilet sitting down for both activities, and for the second of these, being able to spread my legs as far as possible. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t much care for extruding potentially very messy objects out of my body only to have them squashed together at the point of exit and make even more of a mess. (Imagine someone really tightly swashing together a Nutella sandwich. Or perhaps don’t.) I know. Silly me for not wanting to be shitty me.

But the toilet in this place has been sandwiched between a wall and the bath. Between the wall and my left leg there is but the width of two of my calves. On the right, even less, resulting in the less than edifying spectacle of me hoisting the leg into the bath and leaning over to my left to successfully complete the matter in hand. Made all the more difficult when there is a growing sense of urgency about things.

I warned you.

Have just caught the end of ‘celebration concert’ at Windsor Castle, the one to mark Brians ability to sit on a chair and wear a hat. You know, the Windsor Castle the taxpayer paid to have rebuilt after it was nearly burnt to the ground. That one. Mind you, its a good job Brian doesn’t know any smokers.

Anyway, Kate Perry was bothering peoples ears and wearing something that was truly out of this world. Really. The last time anyone had seen that material it had been covering the NASA Lunar Rover on the surface of the moon, but I guess NASA and Lunar sort of told you it wasn’t in the deep oceans.

Then Take That came on and I thought ‘Blimey, the years haven’t been kind to Mark Owen have they?’ He used to be the sweet faced good looking one. But now, not so much. Long hair and cuban heels on a man over 40 is not a good look. Howard or Jason, the one that isn’t Gary or Robbie anyway, looked like he was the sort of bloke that should be helping police with their enquiries.

And not since ‘Live Aid’ have I seen Brian so unconvincingly look like he was enjoying himself. One of the Junior leeches was there. In a suit and tie, of course. What else would a 9 year old boy wear to a concert. And it certainly put the con into concert. Compulsory fun, the audience being told how great x was, how brilliant y was. It made me mad.

In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that someone has liked my last blog post who I didn’t even know got them anymore, I’d be pulling someone’s hair out by now

You know how sometimes you have a feeling when after you’ve seen something and you just feel sullied by the mere fact of bearing witness to it? That in some unknowable way you’ve betrayed yourself, have let yourself down, are less of a person. I had thankfully never encountered that feeling before. I can’t write that now.

I am currently in Southwold with my partner and her 92 year old mother, ostensibly to have a break by the sea, but specifically so her mum could watch the coronation on a big TV and generally be made a fuss of. This was her third coronation and because her mum has hearing problems, was oblivious to my less than forelock tugging directors commentary.

And there was a lot to be less than forelock tugging over. Where to start? There was just so much ridiculousness to chose from. The very idea of a supposedly forward looking, notionally egalitarian nation still having a monarchy for starts. And that nation more than happily closing off some of its capital city so a a bloke could sit on a chair, put on a hat that even Liberace would baulk at, and all the time wear a pained expression on his face, rather like that of someone whose trying to hold in a really large fart. That would be the same bloke who constantly bangs on about how modern Britain is now multi-cultural and therefore multi-faith, but see’s nothing hypocritical whatsoever in being crowned defender of a faith that most people don’t share. A faith moreover that was explicitly created by one of his predecessors so he could get a divorce.

And a faith, which like them all, reinforces the notion of a higher power, that we are merely their humble servants and our duty is to pledge allegiance to it. In the 21st Century? I mean if the higher power were money or fame, fine, I’d buy that. But an invisible being like Santa? Except that you get presents when you’re alive with Santa, you don’t have to die first. And writing of death I’ve not seen people move so slowly since I helped out at an old peoples home back in my 6th Form days. The whole ceremony could’ve been over in a fraction of the time if people faster than asthmatic geriatrics, there’d been much less singing and less pot pourri. Or poo pourri. Or was it popery her mum was harrumphing about? One of them anyways.

But enough of that, ‘The Big Country’ is on the telly, Leech and Mackay have just had their fight and there’s the duel between McKay and Hennessey over Jean Simmons soon. Epic.Timeless. Proper majesty.

I know I haven’t posted here in a while, but this is due some good reasons and a less good reason. In the former category are two week long holidays by the sea, while in the latter is the fact I’ve been feeling suicidally depressed.

Not that I want to commit suicide I hasten to add but rather that what depresses me most is that others haven’t.

Some of them are handily gathered at COP 27. I thought it’d all packed up and gone home, everyone clutching their macrame goody bags and brimming with an invigorated sense of superior self-righteousness but no, they’re still there, all 35,000 of them, earnestly discussing how something needs to be done by someone else to avoid something no-one wants. To do anything about if all of the previous COP conferences are anything to go by. I mean, has anything substantial been achieved, other than some politicians getting selfies with film stars? Yes, there’ve been protocols and agreements, fine speeches and urgent calls for action but the last time I checked things were getting worse.

Thats what makes me mad is the fact that people in a position to do anything about it didn’t and instead of advocating for necessary changes that might slow the rate of climate change, rather sought to discredit the science they knew to be true – mainly because they’d commissioned it themselves – and argued for an increase of the things they knew to be causing climate change. When exactly ‘Big Oil’ knew is a matter of opinion. Some say 1959. Others go with sometime in the 60’s. The more charitable go with 1977.

Whatever.

Back to COP 27, They’ve been having one of these sandal summits every year sine 1992. Did you know that? I didn’t. And I don’t know what the point of this one is either, apart from young people claiming hey’ve been denied a future that is. A future which, thanks to their parents wilful selfishness in having them in the first place, is growing increasingly uncertain. So whilst doing something, cutting down on doing something else and stopping doing something else altogether is all well good, consuming less still involves consuming. As I’ve said many times before on this blog, the earths human population is far too big. We need a cull, let’s say at age 70, because if you haven’t achieved everything you want to achieve by then, you’re never going to. Knowing there was going to be a cull for everyone on their 70th birthday might actually focus minds. Also no new births allowed from August 2023 until 2043.

Essentially old fuckers need to die and younger fuckers need to stop fucking lest they fuck us all up more than they already have.

We’re fucked enough as it is.

I must confess that up until recently I never had any strong feelings about Judi Dench. Indeed she must’ve thought about me about as often as I though about her. I had though we could continue in this happy state of mutual indifference until one of us died, but alas no.

It turns out that she wrote a letter to ‘The Times’ newspaper – do people still do that – to complain about the forthcoming season of ‘The Crown’, you know, the one no-one has seen yet. Anyway she worries that “a significant number of viewers, especially overseas, may take its version of history as being wholly true”

Yes those people who need to made aware in the most obvious way that ‘The Crown’ isn’t a documentary, its a work of fiction.

Like ‘M’ was in all those Bond films, albeit without such lavish sets.

Maybe its just me, what with me having a brain injury and everything or possibly the fact that I’m a demented wrongcock or even that I’m just the sort of warped individual who finds irony in what most would accept is a far from ironic situation. Or is it fact that I lived through the 1980’s and whole Mrs. Thatcher era of firm government and so can’t but help find some grim pleasure in all of this. What comes around and all that. Yes, I’m sure its that.

The catastrophic economic situation that the Tories have plunged this country into didn’t happen overnight. This has been has been years, decades in the making. Not that it was a desire for Mrs.Thatcher to bring about the current chaos, but rather the wholly inevitable result of a belief in the infallibility of the markets, that their ruthless profit based logic was a welcome panacea to what she saw as the failure of the state.

Essentially, the markets were impartial actors, with no interest in social policy and were thus best placed to determine the direction the country should take. According to right-wing economic polices (and I’m massively simplifying here), should the markets take fright at some aspect of economic policy a government was pursuing, they would react accordingly. You know, by doing exactly the sort of thing we’re seeing now, and although this isn’t as dire as Black Wednesday, its dire enough. The value of the £ falling, making government borrowing on the bonds markets more expensive. Interest rates going up. Billions spent trying to fix things resulting in probable tax rises and public sector spending cuts.

For many years the Tories endlessly trotted out the lie that the financial sector was an industry in which UK plc should be proud. They cut regulations, claiming it increased competitiveness in the markets. Labour either believed this or believed the markets did, because when they came to power in the late ’90’s things continued apace. The markets were left alone, despite scandal after scandal. The global financial crisis and the ensuing bailout didn’t stop some in the markets making eye-watering sums while everyone else suffered. The film ‘The Big Short’ explains how and why, but essentially some people bet things were going to turn out the way they did. Richie Sunak knows all about this. He set up his own investing firm so he could better get his nose in the trough.

Anyway now we find ourselves in the middle of shitshow that the markets have created. The markets which we were constantly assured were impartial, which would never do what they’re doing and dictating who or what political choices are open to us. I writes ‘us’knowing full well that ‘us’ has a very narrow definition indeed. If we’re ‘lucky’ about 160,000 Conservative members and if we’re really ‘lucky’ a new PM could be elected by 357 Conservative MP’s before ‘Eastenders’ on Monday night.

Obscenely the only way we can get out of this economic maelstrom is by placating and pandering to those very same markets and the 357 know this better than anyone. Possibly because some of them they hope to work for them soon.

It’s as ironic as Boris’s Johnson becoming our next PM

Well, no-one saw that coming. Of course by no-one I mean anyone who is over the age of 18 and hasn’t been living under a rock that entire time, knows that the Conservative party didn’t become the most successful political party ever by tolerating what they perceive as lame duck leaders. It is as sentimental as a colonic irrigation and does much the same thing when it needs to.

When I write successful I mean successful in the very narrowest of political senses, that of winning elections. Not trivialities such as helping to create opportunity and wealth for all, facilitating a shift in social values such that this country properly rewards those whom we can’t do without – NHS doctors and nurses, teachers and firefighters – and rejects those we can do without – hedge fund managers, estate agents and homeopaths. But there is little chance of that happening when a political party that has been in power either alone or in coalition for 72 of the last 100 years clings to power.

If ever Britain looked like a banana republic it is now. One can almost hear the laughing in the Kremlin. For centuries Britain has loftily boasted about being the ‘mother of all democracies’ except now we’re the mutha of them. Although this presents Sir Not with a conundrum. He can call for a general election, with all the paralysis and uncertainty that would inevitably unleash, or he can be statesmanlike. Put country before party and all that, the whole ‘it’s a far far better thing than I have ever done’ vibe.

He could issue a statement saying that he could call for a general election, of course he could but he won’t because what the country needs right now is a sense that the adults are in charge. Announce that he’ll give the new PM his full support and in return for that he wants a general election in February 2023. That he doesn’t want to add yet another crisis onto the rash of them that has been 2022, but rather just get though this one and start the New Year with a new PM.

Unlikely, I know, but if people aren’t whispering that in his ear, then they aren’t serving him well, they’re serving him up

People who are a lot cleverer than me and whom I would hate to get seated next to at a dinner party or sat next to on flight to Australia, have for a long time suggested that the existence of parallel worlds isn’y science fiction but science fact. A world that is the the same as ours, but different.

Its theoretically possible anyway and in the same way that ‘compassionate Conservatism’ is theoretically possible, we just nod our heads and distance ourselves from whoever is making such outlandish claims. But it is a nice fantasy to imagine that all the travails and catastrophes that have beset our time on this planet could simply be erased by creating another earth. A new improved earth, Earth 2.0, the updated version, free from all calamity’s and mistakes of this one. No religion, no wars, no capitalism, no climate crisis.Bliss.

I was thinking of Earth 2.0 this morning and thought ‘what if..’, as I considered the two ‘protesters’ who are currently holding up traffic from crossing the Dartford Crossing for the second day, by scaling 100ft up it and staying there. The police seem incapable of doing anything, other than basically waiting for them to come down and and preventing traffic from using it. Anyone who was ever on a protest up until say 2010, and was either kettled, arrested or charged by baton wielding riot police in full body armour – and at a few I got all three – can’t begin to understand what’s going on with the police these days. They used to say that you were getting older when the police started looking younger than you, but I wasn’t prepared for when the police didn’t act like the police anymore. But I digress.

Back on Earth 2.0, the protesters have scaled up the bridge, but as there’s no climate crisis, they’re protesting about something else. The cancellation of their favourite T.V programme, that a new colour hasn’t been created, or simply that there isn’t anything to protest about. Anyway, they’re up there and whilst everyone agree’s they have a right to protest, everyone also agree’s we have a right to ignore them and simply carry on, which in this case would involve using the crossing to cross something. Of course the police would be on hand to ensure the safe and steady flow of traffic. They’d also direct traffic away from any potential impact site, so if one of the protesters did fall, it’d be on a nice clear patch of bridge, so the camera’s could get a nice clear shot of it.

And if the police let it be known that from here on in, they’d be adopting a rights based policy – yours to protest and ours to ignore you and carry on – then we’d see exactly how many of ‘protesters’ were serious and how many were nothing more than entitled attention seeking Jeremy Hunts.