Yes, yes … I know … it’s been six whole months since my last blog post and you’ve been worrying yourself sick all that time, not knowing how you should think about certain things, or whether I would ever be around again to offer your lives a much needed injection of wisdom and humour that you’re frankly unable to formulate for yourselves. Well, fear not, for I have risen, out of the ashes (well, out of the ramshackle spare room studio playing host to my band’s noise-making activities for most of the past year) and ready to deliver some righteous word-mangling into your eager eye-boxes that they might electrically tickle those parts of your brain responsible for giggling like a loony or getting into a Daily Mail-style froth at what a giant pile of steaming arse this world can be from time to time. As is so often the case, it all begins with an argument on Twitter … Read more “The Mighty Douche”
Flipping channels the other night, desperately trying to find something less likely to rape my IQ than, well, pretty much everything that every network has ever shat into its nightly schedules ever, I stumbled on to “Are You Having a Laugh? Comedy and Christianity”, an offering from BBC1 in which the self-righteous former MP, epic dance failure, and massive bag of conservative catholic judgement and masturbatory nightmare-fuel Ann Widdecombe was using her loud, barely-contained witch’s cackle to whine about how Jesus and his billion-strong gang of sycophantic stalkers have become something of a target for comedy in the modern era, and that this simply won’t do. Apparently the one-time candidate for Tory party leadership, frequently referred to by the people of Britain as “Doris Karloff” (presumably because she has the looks and substantially atrophied thought-processes of a recently exhumed corpse), sees the widespread mockery of people’s most cherished beliefs (well, hers at least) as being yet another example of the continuing persecution of christians, in wilful ignorance, it seems, of the fact that, actually, nothing is “sacred”. Read more “Sacred Cow”
Don’t look at me like that! Unless we spent the night intensively researching the contents of each other’s underpants and you’ve somehow forgotten (it’s perfectly understandable – I am, after all, the sexual equivalent of Alzheimer’s), then you’ll know perfectly well that I didn’t mean it like that. I was merely asking, albeit in a “nudge nudge, wink wink” sort of a way, how your 2012 has been? Did you have a good christmas? Survive the Mayan apocalypse okay? Did you enjoy the Olympics? What about the Diamond Jubilee? [if you answer “yes” to that last one, please fuck all the way off right now]. Was it, by and large, a good year for you, your family, friends, and/or insert suitable noun to indicate other members of your social circle here? Okay, look, I admit it, I’m completely shit at dealing with life’s little pleasantries whenever a detectable measure of sincerity is required, and especially when, hands in the air, I kind of did mean it like that. Well, I meant it in a metaphorical way … let me explain … Read more “How was it for you?”
Sport and I have never really seen eye to eye. In fact, we’ve never even really seen eye to navel, what with my general interest in athletic endeavour being somewhere in the neighbourhood of my enthusiasm for the idea of working deep in the very bowels of the Greater London sewer system; other people can do it if they want, but please don’t try to include me or engage me, don’t bring your passion for either into my house, and for fuck’s sake stop going on about it because I really couldn’t care less. For me, the seven year march of the London (copyright LOCOG) 2012 (copyright LOCOG) Olympics (copyright LOCOG) represented nothing more than a £10 billion sports day we couldn’t afford and that was being run for the sole benefit of the corporate sponsors and all the fitness nazis and sports bores who get off on physical displays of repetitive tedium. So, when I sat down to watch the opening ceremony I did so fully expecting to have my abiding cynicism cemented by a cringe-making, cack-handed farce that presented Britain as a nation of deluded spanners. I certainly wasn’t expecting to be proved wrong on an absurdly epic scale. Read more “London Calling”
One of the bizarre things I’ve discovered about getting older, at least for me, is not that I find myself worrying about nature’s great, big, ticking, death-shaped clock of impending mortality cessation; nor is it that I’m concerned with checking off the list of things one is supposed to be in possession of at this point (wife, kids, mortgage, dog, massive sense of futile despair at one’s interminable existence etc.) – it’s more that I’ve come to feel like I’ve sort of always been this “age”, as if my personality were a suit that was at least 14 sizes too large and was just waiting for me to grow in to it. The suit might have had one or two minor alterations over the years, nothing drastic, but it otherwise remains pretty much exactly the same as when I first got it. As your tastes, opinions, and beliefs begin to coalesce in your twenties and thirties, you develop a far clearer understanding of who you are, what kind of suit you’re wearing, and what radio station you should be listening to. Read more “Radio 4 Radicals”
