Thursday 31 December 2015

NEW YEAR EVENSONG, 2016

Today, Organised Crime issues us a scornful, contemptuous greeting, deciding that it should not investigate itself any fuirther. In the nineteenth century United States, Stephen Foster, knew, too well, the role of the bankers and their servants in government. This is the late Kate McGarrigle, her sister, Anna, her son, Rufus and some usual suspects, performing Foster's Hard Times, a capable ensemble and a poignant rendition.  
It ain't Auld Lang Syne.



 1. Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears, 
While we all sup sorrow with the poor; 
There's a song that will linger forever in our ears; 
Oh! Hard times come again no more. 

Chorus: 'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary, 
Hard Times, hard times, come again no more
 Many days you have lingered around my cabin door; 
Oh! Hard times come again no more. 

 2. While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,
 There are frail forms fainting at the door; 
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say 
Oh! Hard times come again no more.
 Chorus 

3. There's a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away, 
With a worn heart whose better days are o'er: 
Though her voice would be merry, 'tis sighing all the day,
 Oh! Hard times come again no more.
 Chorus 

 4. 'Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave, 
 'Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore 
 'Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave 
 Oh! Hard times come again no more. Chorus

Monday 28 December 2015

JOKE ON THE WATER.

CAMERON LEADS COMA 
IN FLOODS PRAYER MEETING


RAIN-RAIN-GO-AWAY
COME AGAIN ANOTHER DAY.

Good morning, everyone,  and a happy Christmas to decent, hard-working families doing the right thing. I have just chaired a meeting of COMA, that's the one with Mrs Tracey May, 67,  and Mr Micky Fallon, 69, yes, fiercely clever and able ministers, and, to emphasise the seriousness with which we are taking this thing, whatever it is, I can reveal that we were all, in solidarity with the, what we call in govament, the Wet Ones, are sitting around the table in our bunker wearing  Wellington boots, yes, green ones, and we are in complete control of this situation, as it develops, we are monitoring things and putting measures  in place to deal with things, as they, sort-of,  happen. If they do. Which is by no means certain.

Life in Austerity Britain.



And did I mention that during the current set-back.......What?  Alright then, the current national catastrophe.  While the North of England resembles Bangla Desh, the govament is allowing the food banks to continue to trade, albeit reminding them that some of their clients may not actually be homeless-through-avoidable-flooding but actually just, as Mr Ian Duncan Smith is always saying, shirkers, milking the system.

Yes, we are all in this together, me, the  inbred aristocrat, who can't do his two times table  and you, sir,
 the plucky little Northerner, boiling his treacle and eating his ferrets. 


My name is Davymandias, King of Kings;
behold my works, ye mighty,
and despair.

In the meantime, I would just like to put on record my gratitude for the way that, under my leadership, the British people may be drowning in shit and sanitary towels but, you know what, they're just jolly well getting on with it, not complaining, not getting into the blame culture, because compensation, recompense, that sort of thing, they know that that, like access to justice, is only really for richer, better sorts of people, the ones over them. Yes, myself and the govament, yes, and the City of London crime cartels, yes, of course, and her majesty Queen Brenda of Ruritania, her heirs and successors, nephews, nieces, cousins, aunts, uncles, children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and their great granchildren, quite proply, in my view.

I, myself, Cameron, Scourge of Europe, have, or is it has, yes, I think so, it's a past tense, isn't it, I has visited the people who wade in darkness 

Yes, dear, you have my promise: no top-down reorganising of your NHS, no increase in VAT.....No?  Right, then, you have my promise that I will give you people, the Wet Ones, anything you need, as long as it doesn't cost money.


and taken every opportunity of a photo-opportunity, as and when my people could arrange one, is that right, can you have an opportunity of an opportunity?  Anyway, PR, or public relations, is in my urine, I mean my bones and some of our wonderful emergency services personnel 
 
I am honoured, as your commander-in-chief, to shake your hand and assure you that your P45 is in the post. Yes, that's right,  your mate, Prince Harry, he'll be along in a minute, to have his photo taken.

delighted by the cuts to their services were very happy to stand in line and  have their photo taken with their prime minister.

And anyway. I would remind people that Stewart of Iraq and Afghanistan is, as we speak, as I speak, rather, I'm the chap in charge, after all, bringing his very considerable experience of wossaname to this crisis, 


Yes, and that's water, there, I saw water in Iraq,
not as much as this, mind, but enough to have a good understanding of it.  It can be jolly wet at times.


well, it's not really a crisis, is it, lessbeclear, a few oiks  drowning in watery shit, as their DFS  sofas float past them - the bankers forfeiting their very necessary, and in my view entirely proper million-pound bonuses, thassacrisis, as I'm sure we all agree. No, Rory Stewart, even the name sounds like heroic competence, and just look at his successes in Iraq and Afghanistan. 


Yes, that, there, it's a hill, and they have them extensively in Afghanistan.  You can read my thoughts on hills in my book, Little Rory and his Big Walks, in Abroad Places.

No, lessbeclear, in Little Rory, we have the right man on the ground. Alright, not on the ground. In the water.

No, the blame game, it helps no-one. But there is a great community spirit, a sense, even, I might say, of celebration, as people lose homes and belongings and lives which the financial industry, quite proply, in my view, refused to insure.


Mr Benn has been doing his bit, too. Splendid fellow, not a terrorist supporter, like so many in his party. well, I say his party, but lessfaceit, there's only one, isn't there?


 'Slike me old Dad always used to say to us; those chaps, up North, in the cloth caps, the very salt of the earth, they are, doing that  whatchamacallit, that work stuff, getting dirty and tired; yes and dashed poorly paid. Do you know what I mean?  And then he said that it was up to us, their betters,  to patronise them as much as they'd stand for.  Now, here's a fifty-pee coin, my good chap, because you and I are neighbours, and I want you to go and treat yourself to a nice warming slap-up slice of bread and dripping  with all the trimmings and a jolly nice warming cup of strong sweet tea.  No, no need, I can claim it back on expenses.

 I am now confident that everything that can be done hasn't been done and that everything that can be done in the future won't be done. And I give you my cast iron assurance, that I shall not flinch from saying what I think it is that people want to hear, even  if it isn't and I don't mean a word of it anyway, and that as I retire to a belated but dry Cotswolds Christmas, my fawts'n'prayers will be with you, God bless you all, my Cumbian subjects. And keep your powder dry.

Oh, and just before I go, I should take this opportunity to remind people that the HS2 project, once completed, will mean an end to this sort of community drown-in, up there,  and the local people will be able to just get on with  their Eccles Cakes and their dog-fighting.  Howzat?  Well, it's obvious, I would have thought.  we sinply load all the flood water on the train and the driver drives it to the sea,  Yes, and twenty minutes faster that it used to take.

Dave'n'George.

A junky and a nitwit at at the controls of UK plc,
the runaway train.

Friday 25 December 2015

E'EN 4 THINE OWN NAME'S SAKE, LOOK YOU, ISN'T IT. PRAYERS FOR CHRISTMAS DAY, WITH HUW WELSHMAN.





Hello and welcome to Christmas Day Prayers, with me, Huw Welshman

You know,  viewers, at this time of the year, we often pray for the baby Jesus and food for the hungry and peace on Earth, all that type of thing, and very worthy it is too, look you, isn't it.   But there are more important things than that.  I mean them, isn't it, more important things than them. Or is it those, fucked if I know, I'm just a journalist, woddooIknow about English?.  And here, at the  PBC News, with me, Huw Welshman, we would invite you to pray for some very special people, who should be uppermost in your minds at this very special time in our lives.  

Let us bow our heads, here in the studio, and yes, in homes up and down the land.  And let us pray for Tim.  Tim is far away from home.  It is true, Oh, Heavenly Father, that Tim has been desperate, for decades, to be very far from home, among strangers, but there have been times, recently, when, despite his best efforts,  he has not been on television constantly, especially currently, now that many are preoccupied with thoughts of thine only begotten son and coujldn't give a fuck about Tim, and he is sore afraid, Lord,  that people will tire of his grinning, imbecile narcissism, his Stepford wife, his brainwashed  children and that they will realise that Tim is actually quite a boring, irritating,  self-obsessed prat. Yes, if you will, like Andy Murray with a smiley face glued-on, look you, boyo.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for Tim, now and at the time of his re-entry and in the Eternity of nobodiness and anonymity which awaits him, thereafter. 
And serve him fucking right, too, horrid, smirking git. 
In the name of Sputnik One, Yuri Gagarin and the holy Apollo Eleven.  Amen.


Look, children, it's Daddy Tim.
Yes, you're very own TellyDaddy.

Oh, what's that?  I'm just being told, viewers, in my earpiece, that this evening Tim can be seen, up there, orbiting us, weightless and grinning,  yes,there will be other people there, too, helping, but Tim, being English, he's the important one, look you, in the space station, I mean, the Russian Space Programme'd just fall to bits, drop out of the fucking sky, were it not for Tim, grinning and waving,  and since he's passing, Tim would like everybody in the South of England to jump up and down and  wave at him.  No, not the people in the North, who are perhaps too busy to pray, unless it's for dry weather, or for that prat Rory Stewart to fuck off and leave them alone, to fill-up their sandbags, again, and try and clear the shit  and the sanitary towels out of their dishwashers, again.  But everyone in the South,  they should pray for Tim. And wave,  Tim will hear your prayers. And maybe sign autographs for you.  That's the kinda man he is.

We pray, now, heavenly Father for the stranger in our midst,  a traveller, come to us from a foreign land and now cruelly mistreated by the Philistine.  


We beseech thee, Lord, that thy servant, Jose, find employment swiftly, for, verily, Lord, he is down to his last few tens of millions of pounds.  We pray that soon the nation will see his snarling or morose or contorted psychopathic face, hear his full, bullying horridness and enjoy his ridiculously poor spoken English with which he persuades millions of morons that he is enigmatic and inscrutable, when he is, in fact, 


just a thick cunt. 

In thy name, Oh, Lord, we ask that he be put in charge of the  Manchester United  Marketing Corporation, instead of that equally repellent Dutchman, wotsisname, van Dyke, is it?

We so  beseech Thee, Oh, Lord, in the name of Sir Alec PigFace, the late Sir George Best and the holy, deranged football fan. 
Amen

And we're just reading a mr ishmael, on Twitter, saying that somebody should kick this monkeybastard hard in his spoiled fag face and send him back to DagoLand, where he should manage a bull-fighting team, the hurling from roofs of harmless donkeys or some other filthy Dago sport. Well, not exactly the Christtmas siprit, there, but it takes all sorts, isn't it.

Your thoughts and prayers are now sought for a disturbed elderly gentleman in the beautiful Cotswold village of Chipping Sodom. Gerry's feeling pretty fed-up with life, Lord. He is feeling cramped in his home


 and since he started, many years ago, to have violent utbursts when he didn't get his own way, poor Jerry has been all but ostracised from decent society.  It is true, Heavenly Father,   that old Jerry is still popular with riff-raff like David Cameron and Rebekka Witch and has found part-time employment on a shopping channel, but no decent person would be seen dead with the old boy.  Indeed, Lord, he has even been banned from here, thy PBC, and fuck knows, we let any old filth work here, isn't it, look you. We pray, Lord, that peace and more prosperity shall visit Thy servant, Jerry, and remain with him, even unto his heart attack, which, given the life he leads,  cannot be too far away, if it please Thee, Lord, who knowest our goings-out, our comings-in and our fascistic, rabble-rousing redneckery.


 In the name of the Bugatti, the McLaren and the holy Ferrari.
 Amen. 

We ask you not to omit from your prayers, young parents, Gerry and Cilla,  who, this year, have not been so prominent on our screens and in our celebrity magazines, although they continue their good works, namely striving for the improvement of the nation's parenting skills, upon which, Hear us, Oh, Lord, Gerry'n'Cilla, have much to say.

 
In the name of  Lord Leveson, the Metropolitan Police and the holy, government-funded PR bully, Clarence Shit, Amen.

And finally, in this prayer section of the show, we turn to the elderly.  And your prayers and thoughts are requested for an elderly Norfolk lady and her rather large family.  None of them go to work, and they keep having babies, expecting everyone else to keep them.  They just breed and breed, like fucking rats, then they get divorced, go on the piss, take drugs, demand endless holidays, regiments of arse-wiping servants, fly around the world mixing with torturers and child molesters and keep trying to interfere with the govament of the country.  
Let us bow our heads in prayer for Mrs Brenda Battenberg and  her official husband, Phil Papadopoulus.  

I need to stand-up for this one. And so do you.
All rise.

Oh Lord, we beseech Thee, on behalf of thy servant, Brenda, and her pestilential spawn, worse, Lord, we suggest, than  the plague of fucking locusts which Thou didst send upon the Egyptian in the Book of Exodus.


Let, Lord, thy servant, Brenda, live an nine-hundred years span, like unto thy servant, Methusela, and we pray, Lord, that she outlive even unto the seventh generation of  the  accursed tribe of Ruritania, for whist thy servant, Brenda, herself,  is an hateful  sight in the eye of  most of those she calleth subject, she is nowhere near, Lord, as fucking bad as any of her likely successors.

We so beseech thee,  Lord, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, aka Yourself. E'en 4 thine own name's sake, as it were.
Is it Yourself, talking to God? Or Yourselves?
Fucked if I know. I'm not a fucking theologist.
I read autocues for a living.

And, now that we have prayed together, 
as a special Christmas treat I am going to be joined by my fellow entertainer, world renowned bluesman,  roots musician and vocal coach, yes, it's my old neighbour from the Valleys, Sir Tom Jones, and we're gonna do a number together.


Sir Tom, whaddarewegonna do?  

Well, thanks, Huw, and as you said, I'm a bluesman to my soul. And as you know better than anybody, Pontypridd is the beating heart, look you, of the Mississippi Delta.


Aaaaab-so-lutely, Sir Tom

 All my hits've been great blues songs,   What's New Pussycat, I mean, they don't get much bluesier than that, Les Reed wrote that one, and lessfaceit, Huw, Les Reed is what we call in the industry the BluesMeister, he wrote for all the blues greats. As well as myself there was, well, there was  Cleo Laine, Engelbert, Petula Clark, Lulu, Engelbert, Herman and the Hermits, The Fortunes, Engelbert, The New Vaudeville Band, he even wrote for the Dave Clark Five, and they were like the premier British Blues Band, them and Herman and the Hermits, I mean, No Milk Today and Something Tells Me I'm into Something Good, blues gold, they are, them Hermits records.

So what's it gonna be, Sir Tom Jones, OBE;  what song are we gonna do together?

 
 
Well, Huw,since we're both Welshmen - you, yourself, are even named after one, isn't it, boyo, and since, like, espio....espian.....since spying, like, an' killin', an fast cars an' the Secret Service, MI5 an' that lot,  an' right sexy women, too, like, who can read and write, always turns me on, that, women that can do that sort of thing, as well as the other, since spyin' and such like  'ave such deep roots, like, look you, in the Welsh valleys, and since Sir Sean Connery and I are such good friends, wosssat....? No, no...... least I don't think he still beats his wife.... an' anyway, I think he only ever did that with Diane, 'is first missus, like, an' only when she needed it, like.  A proper gentleman, Sir Sean, a knight, Huw, like myself.  Oh, I know he's a Scotchman, but we're realy good mates, like. Both Celts, we are, me an' my fellow Sir, Sir Sean.  I love that Celtic music, I do, 'swhere my roots are, see, there and in the Delta Blues.  But those Celtic songs, Val Doonican, he used to belt them out, Delaney's Donkey, Paddy McGinty's Goat, can't beat them old traditional Celtic numbers, not in my opinion.  Yeah, Cilla Black, lovedher2bits, I did. Yes, I was at her funeral. 


 No, no, they didn't let me sing, which was why I'd come all the way from my 'ome in America, like, which is where I live, to belt-out a great blues number or two, have the mourners throwing their panties at me, down the aisle, the wimmin, anyway.  But no, never was gonna happen. There was some homo-sexualist there, hogging the limelight, like they do, an' he never fucking shut-up, Huw, you know what they're like. 


Dearly bebuggered, I mean beloved. 
 Worramylike, yer 'oliness?
Never think I were an RC choirboy, back in the day.
Well, mebbe you would.  There's still many a good tune to be played on an old boy soprano.
Ooh, get her, get the Bishop.
But no, look.
We are gathered  together here to remember our Cilla, and to mock all them heterosexuals, like she did on her fabulous shows.

 
He's not even a bluesman, he's a fucking  drag queen, or an animal trainer, or something.  Oh, don't get me wrong, all perfectly honourable branches of this great entertainment  industry of ours, Huw. And it's not that I got anything against poofs, my dresser's a poof, an' my wig man.  


Not that they'd make me look like an old queen or anything.
You don't think I look like a sad old queen, do you, Huw?
Us being welshmen, together, like, you'd tell me if I looked ridiculous, wouldn't you? I mean, 75, it's the new 18, isn't it, look you?

And not that they'd try anything on with me, norrifthey know what's good for 'em, anyway,  but that bloke, that Lily Savage, I dunno, frankly, Huw, what Cilla saw in him.  Fag-hagging, we call that, in LA. But no,  I often see him in LA, where I live, Sir Sean.  The valleys? Live in the valleys? Pontypridd? You must be fucking joking. But no, I though that with my connections to the world of cloak and dagger we might do
that old R'n'B number, the best ever James Bond theme, Thunderball.


Thunderball it is, then.
 Lay-deez-angenullmen, lets' hear it for the legend that is Sir Tom Jones.  
And me, Mr Huw Welshman
.
Sad, pathetic and rather stupid old-aged pensioner thrusts pelvis at camera and shouts:

                                  
 Why, why, why
Dee-li-lah?
Why, why, why
Dee-li-lah?
Da da da da da da da da da.



Well, sorry about that, viewers. Sir Tom seems to be having a technical problem.  With remembering who he is. And what he's supposed to be doing. Probably thinks he's at Glastonbury again.
Best thing is we go over to the weather, now, with Jayne Tits, who is with the floods minister, in Cumbria.
Been nice praying with you.
We must do it again, sometime.
Only not with the old nutter.

Thursday 24 December 2015

CHRISTMAS EVE CAN KILL YOU.


 What can we  say about it all?
 For most, it is but an inevitably disappointing affirmation of their shackling to consumerisme nouvelle totalitarienne, of their families' lives and appetites and futures being determined  by the servants of a handful of wicked, greedy bastards - those who have and continue to steal everything by any means up to and including holocaustal war on civilian populations.  

A Christian at prayer.
Deck the whore with boughs of money
Tra-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la

Some will, tonight and tomorrow,  sing Gaudete, Christus est natus, as they worship the long-prophesied Christ-child, the virgin birth,  the rescinding of Adam's  original sin and the hope of redemption and resurrection.
  Much smarter people than I believe in this miracle so, unlike the Reverend Dawkins, his own priest, in his own church, I can say but  Amen - let it be so.
For most, however,  in the countries of active or culturally-entrenched Christianity, their even  notional faith is turned upon them,  their purses and wallets;  Christmas, as ever,  will be  a desperate, indebting and frustrating nonsense, sitting in a bath of WTF-ism;  the unnecessary  feast vastly over-rated, ill-digested, troublesome and not worth the fuss and expense, it is not as though we starve throughout the year, or even, as we should, throughout Advent.  Selling a stuff-yourself-til-you-puke feast to an already overweight, fasting-averse population  is a triumph of GodlessHeathenBastard mind-control advertising.

None, though,  no mere wife or common-law hussy,  however fierceley they are scourged, will ever recreate Nigella's simply yummy Xmas Fayre.

A kitchen scrubber
First, send the servants out for several heaped teaspoons of cocaine, I find that Colombian is the best, although, sometimes, anything will do.  If you can't find coke, don't be afraid to use weed, lots and lots of it, marijuana's just simply one of those things you can never have too much of. 
 What?  Yes, in your cooking. 
Although I find I can smoke it, well, all the time,
in one of those clever bong things;  
your dealer will let you have one.

or Tom's

 
 The real pub landlord, a stupid ignorant  fat fuck.

Ooh, arrr, viewers, just you follow them scrumptious recipes of moine'n you'll all be as elfy as worrIyam. What I love is that you can take two kilos of lard, two kilos of butter, two kilos of brown sugar, two kilos of caster sugar and a great big scrumptious two kilos of honey, mix it all togevver wiv some really scrumptious chocolate  and you've got a really helfy Christnmas snack for the liddle 'uns. S'worritsallabout4me,keepin' me family helfy.

or Jamie's perfect, healthy cuisine, 

 

for it doesn't exist, it is a televisual confection, filmed over and over, in September, until it looks right, then lit and orchestrated and arranged and styled, its creators, probably off their faces on coke or booze, tasting but a teaspoonful and pronouncing it simply Ambrosian. 

Without endless supplies of labour, materials and an entire production team, poor Mum's turkey, cooked in a tiny, inefficient, dirty oven will probably taste like shit, turkey does, anyway, no matter what you shove up its sundered arse.  And anybody aping BoyJamie's approach to food-handling will probably have a merry, diarrhoeic New Year, the dirty fucker; Christ, if he'd ever worked in a decent hotel he'd have had his arse kicked all around the range; dirty, dirty, dirty man. Why has his producer never said to him, look, Maestro, kicking  oven doors closed with your street shoes, they could have anything on them, dogshit, sperm, snot, spit, not to mention that they are, anyway, filthy, stinky sweaty trainers, not really shoes at all, just bitsa fucking filth, sold to you by criminals like Nike and you know, Chef, they can be transferred, all those germs on and in your shoes,  by hand, by teatowel or oven glove, and, as for wiping your hands on your trousers, and then sticking your fingers in dish after dish, without washing them in-between, well, y'know, even these bloated little bastard kids that you'er trying to educate,  the ones that're gonna die at forty from exploding livers, gonna be so fucking fat they'll need to be winched in and outa bed, whose teeth are all gonna fall out and there's not enough fucking dentists, anyway, to fix the fat bastards up with false ones, and even if they were the bloated fucking mutants wooden be employable and wooden have no fucking money to pay a fucking dentist even  if there was one, which there won't be, but even them, the bloated, blubbery stupid ones with the tooth decay and the failing kidneys, even  they would know that putting your shitty shoes near their grub, and sticking your bacteria-infested mitts in everything you see  and then in your gob and then over the arse of your trousers is like, y'know, bad shit, man?  
All I wanna do is use my fame to make more money, I mean, save the national diet, yeah, from the supermarkets poisoning everybody. Only not Sainsburys.

I should think that what with his vile spices  and his utterly filthy kitchen habits,  Jamie Oliver is single-handedly responsible for the national epidemic of what we call irritable bowel syndrome, has given any who follow his recipes and his filthiness an incurable case of the shits. And, God bless his greedy little piggy head, he simply can't give up, he has  made maybe a hundred million pounds from his filthy, greasy, finger-licking food  bollocks;  he could afford an education, to relax, travel the world, but being in  salmonella showbusiness he must endlesly renew his dire, greasy, infected  cheeky chappy, currently he is a dietician, gonna make the nation better; 
right, son, first go and wash your fucking hands you cheeky cunt, and invest in a box of latex gloves, like I do.

  The family visits will be a festival of strained madness and simmering rage.  Even here, in ishmaelia, a realm largely without family relationships, Christmas spurs contact. I have just received a fucking Dear Uncle  email from a distant nephew, although all of mine are distant, some of them I've never even seen, nor want to, fuck me, being related to their mother was punishment enough for one lifetime.  I haven't seen her in forty years and being much older than me, I expect her to be dead from drink and fags and depression and I live in fear of a horde of nieces and nephews arriving whom I have never seen, 
expecting me, somehow, to care for them, bequeath them stuff.  It's times like these that I wish I had Rottweilers, instead of Harris.  


I'd love to be able to say to somebody Get off my property, Sir or I'll set the dogs on you.  Harris, however, is not up to controlled savagery.


 Even the fucking television will be an insult, its owners and managers holidaying in the Bahamas, a skeleton staff broadcasting ancient fucking rubbish that the viewers have paid to see several times over, indeed, their parents have paid several times to see it, before they were born, and,  having shopped their fucking fingers off buying plastic and silicon shit for the  little LuvEm2Bits,Me  sugar-maddened, attention-deficit, pornography-saturated, consumer-crazed  lunatic kids


Some, of course,  suffering from Otherness, will be  stumbling ragged by the road, Plenty's one-point-six diesel, with lowest-ever carbon emission, whooshing past, on a mission of goodwill to all men, just not the ragged ones;keen to give unto those who have, avoiding like the plague those who have not.  Some will be bereaved, revisiting,  enduring all their joint yesterdays alone, maybe alone for ever, now, sick, faltering,  GlabaCorp's cruelly  ubiquitous enforced bogus jollity, a relentless, rusty blade, prodding at their heart's wound, twisting.  Many, many are estranged, separated, irreconcilable, alienated, maybe hospitalised, incarcerated, squatting, trying to find a place to kip in our citizen-hostile cities, forever anxious, pulling Life's cheap cracker alone, with both hands.

But, hey, Fuck the Others, no reason to put our Christmas  on hold.  They should just get a life.

And that is  the way of it, such empathy  as we are able to feel for others, such as remains, after govament has trashed the homeless as villainous, lazy and unworthy; the old as selfish and greedy for not surrendering their property to the young;  the sick and infirm as workshy chancers, living off the rest of us, bone idle.  And so we leave it the professional carers  and the cynical,  showy regiments of tin-rattling  care,

The national conscience, sub-contracted.

 maybe bunging them  a few pounds; for to pry, too deeply, into state-sponsored Sorrow, well, we might have to do something about it.

I have no answers and, overwhelmed, as I am sure everyone must be by this yearly atrocity, this remorsless bombardment, this wasteland where footfall in the wretched shopping malls is the index of our national value, the purchase of worthless tat our very own act of deliverance, our  unavoidable disappointment a price worth paying,
I'm sorry to mention it.

Those parts of the pagan MidWinter festival not colonised by Greed, those  unmolested Christian essences of fellowship and neighbourliness, those gifts of Creation - life, light, hope, purpose and art's magic, I wish to all here, with thanks for your goodwill.

We wish you merry Christmas and a happy new year. 

Christmas Evensong Blues
Babe, I'm broke and I got no place to go.

This is from Sorrow's anthology. Not, as Gillian Wlash says, by Doc Watson but originally a gift to us from the angelic Mississippi John Hurt,  a man whose music, much imitated, steeped in slavery and share-cropping, was somehow bathed in delight and mischief. 
I have been listening to Hurt all my life and he always makes me smile.

This arrangement, by Dave Rawlings, for  his magical 1935 parlour guitar  and his partner, Gillian,  is the finest re-working of this song that there could ever be, bluesy, pretty, melancholy and dusted with Heaven's dissonant reminders.

Wednesday 23 December 2015

THE PEOPLE WHO WALKED IN DARKNESS HAVE NOT SEEN A GREAT LIGHT.

 It would be wrong to say that I missed Benn junior's recent peroration on the virtue of vice, the honour of homicide or whatever contortion he performed for the delight of his tumescent colleagues during their communal lusting for mass murder of Syrians, Isilites, wogs, anybody, really, just, with a heavy heart,  kill the fuckers, 'swhy we came into politics;
 
 I didn't miss it, for nothing on Earth would have enticed me into Benn's orbit, I would rather kiss Michael Howard's oily, rancid arse than observe a Benn plying the family's Godless trade.  And  Hilary, either as treacherous caricature of his Papa or in his own weaselly, wordy way, malformed and reptilian,  is a sight to repel those craving decency.


I do not despise the Benns for their socialism for they have none,   are not remotely collectivist, much less Christian,  neither would share a farthing with the poor but only sell them books, preach at them, smugly, of Heaven, just around the corner from the next by-election;  just another family of grubby, gobby parasites, with whom we are  long overblest and by whom we are overruled, divided, robbed and shat upon.  Not even the fatuous estimation of great oratory would bend my ears  and eyes  to Hypocrisy's Hilary Benn, gobbing-off about war.  There are, in any event, no orators still in MediaMinster, thay are gone, now, along with Art and Reason and Nationhood, and were proof required of these absences, then the idea of Hilary Benn as orator should be sufficiently positive.

 

God fucking help me, I have heard enough such self-absorbed  tedium from his old man, I deserved a break from Bennism, God's own reproof to those who seek worthiness in narcissistic filth, gazing adoringly at its own fecal image. 


Since his death, I have come to despise Benn the Father, for his diarising, indeed, I  begin to think  that the furtive telling of tales to oneself  should become punishable with ostracism by one's fellows.  I mean, if you were down the pub, or in a NewPeople's wine bar or pavement cafe or wherever the fuck these poor shackled bastards  congregate to bray and hiss  and photograph themselves, but say it was the pub, and you're sat there with some of the lads and one of them is not drinking but instead is scribbling-down, under the table, what everybody else is saying and then he's going to go home, 

 
 The smuggest, smirkingest old gossip who ever lived.

have a nice cup of tea and then speak your  joint evening into a tape-recorder, complete with distortion and excision and waspish invention, and then, and then this is the good part, then get some old biddy to type it all up, because, y'know, he's too important to do wimmin's work, and let's face it, typing always was wimmin's work, and so, in solidarity with wimmin everywhere, he's not going to encroach on their employment, and then give it to some fag, wife-beating  publisher, so's he can sell your night down the pub to other people, well, somebody like that, some ratty little scribbler, he'd deserve to find himself lying in the pub car park, wondering how he'd got there. 

Instead of the masturbatory gesture, shaken in incidents of roadrage, with the noun being mouthed, a better world would see a scribbling hand-gesture, accompanied by a silent "Diarist!

I had a chimney sweep here, yesterday, a nice lad, black as the Ace of  Spades with his work and with a huge, white smile, like a stage nigger would have had, back before racism and its effortless criminalisation of word and thought.  It is a woefully misregarded trade, chimney-sweeping and I can listen to a good sweep for hours, a good brickie, come to that.  My previous one has left the isles, he was an amateur luvvie, Ivan, happiest in the chorus line of Pirates of Penzance, and lived in a maelstrom of counterfeit romances with interesting but younger women, not nonce-younger, just in their twenties and thirties,  while he was pushing fifty and to whom he would play  sooty Svengali. All of these liaisons resulted in financial troubles and fierce invigilation by the taxman;  Ivan, thus hamstrung,  has now gone Sooth taking  his knowledge of household thermo-dynamics with him;  what he didn't know about thirty-feet high Georgian chimneys, like mine, wasn't worth knowing;  their construction, their  properties, their dimensions and angles, their flammability, their  proper pots and cowls.  He'd swept in great Edinburgh Georgian homes, unblocked and recommissioned fireplaces once redundant, now an arriviste's dream, and more importantly, a great selling feature, now that the home is become commodity, ever-engorging aspiration and vassal to junky chancellor, George.

Since Ivan's been gone, we haven't bothered with having the Rayburn  stove-chimney swept and it has kind of fallen out of use; our not eating meat has lessened its utility, too,  but it does heat an unused part of the first floor, burns the waste, especially the wood offcuts which I still seem to generate and it looks and smells nice, elemental, I throw the wood ash, which is always disappointingly slight, in the compost, so that, in itself, makes me worthy, doesn't it, according, anyway, to the Gospel of Monty Don,
which saith, never ye an opportunity miss  to stress thine own virtuous, ethical and most earnest worthiness, to the planet and its teeming programme schedulers. 

Yes, more of a ministry's how I see my tenure at Gardeners World, 'sall about responsibility, caring,  very deeply I might say, for the  garden that is our planet, wearing carefully selected pre-worn clothes and talking like a cunt.

 It is probably even a great selling feature, here,  too, my Rayburn,  although it is, what, sixty, seventy, eighty  years old, a plain white Rayburn Royale, the kind which features in every TeeVee period drama from All Creatures Great and Small to Foyle's War.  A proper arriviste would have a shiny, new, red or green one, an Aga,  with shiny, steel lids; with shiny, copper pipes and a shimmering, shiny  halogen-lit tiled surround, which never saw soot or vapour or  grease but sat smokeless and shiny, gleaming and humming, like a domestic nuclear reactor, the fabled kitchen hub,  centrepiece to the shiny consumer lives of busy professionals, as if  antidote to their empty, greedy minds, their garlicky breath, their vile children  and the little filthy brown stains on their underwear.
 Better, in my consumer opinion, have a forest of bidets,  at a few hundred pounds apiece, one in every toilet in the house, than a glistening, ten-grand Aga, for thus, doth the Empire of Health and Hygiene flourish and prosper. I live in hopes of a true, true, true nanny-state,  one  which is anathema to our own mr mongoose, one  urging us to wash our soiled arses as well as we do our hands.
Instead, via winsome, tongue-tied infants, Andrex embeds us in the one true faith, that of surreptitious , rueful shit-smearing, and calleth it Clean. 
Can't be any doo-doo on my  botty, Mum;
I've smeared it all around with Andrex bogroll.
The sweep, though.  Yesterday, I sat in the kitchen with him, while he worked, something I rarely do, normally departing with an I'll be through here if you need me. We had got talking, though, and I was doing a few wee chores on the kitchen table, anyway, sorting toolbox bits'n'pieces, so it wasn't as though I was just sat there, watching him.
He used a rotary brush, not a traditional bristly brush, a six-stranded  flail, really, which he shoved up and down the chimney, fixed, at the end of the flexible, connected rods, to a powered screwdriver, which would have spun the flail at many thousands or revolutions per minute.  I guess that the strands were tough enough to dislodge soot deposits but flexible enough not to harm the stonework, seemed to be, anyway.
It was a productive encounter, the job's a good un,  he'll get paid promptly, we each learned something from the other and a little bridge was built  over Alienation's fiercely cold and rising waters.

He told me, though, a bit shyly, of a recent encounter with another non-Orcadian.  I have mentioned previously that I simply do not know where the house keys are,  that we go away for weeks at a time,  leaving the place unlocked,  that the car keys are always in the unlocked car.  It is not that people on this side of the Pentland Firth are especially virtuous,  just that there is so very little career opportunity for the burglar or the car thief;  even hundreds of metres from my nearest neighbour, I can still be overlooked, and am, neighbours know better my comings and goings than I do myself, and a hue and cry would ensue should an unknown vehicle appear parked  in my grounds and if it escaped then said vehicle can only leave the islands by registered ferry, requiring personal identification and there is simply no tradition of fencing stolen property locally,  through pubs or carboot sales;  honesty, therefore, at least as far as property goes,  is justifiably assumed, just not by another of my chimneysweep's customers.

We had been talking about customer relationships, how very important they were to the small business, moreso than in GlobaTheftCorporation, where, if you're lucky, a recorded voice is ethically deployed to tell you to fuck off, otherwise you are played the Four Seasons, the lively one, anyway, Spring.  He had said several times how sorry he was to have delayed his visit and although it actually made little difference to me he was berating himself  for paying so much attention to customers who shouted at him, demanding, dictating Acceptability or rather, its Un-ness, and so little to those, like myself, who didn't. I told him that once, just once, a customer, well not a customer, an window-shopper, come inside,  had so enraged me, so stretched my patience that I clipped him sharply around the ear and ejected him from my premises,  that he called the cops, and that a witness, whom I had not known was present, on an upper floor, advised them that he, or indeed they, would have ejected this horrid little bastard through a closed door or a plate glass window, so vexatious and improper had he been. The cops duly vouchsafed this sentiment to the complainant and he left, rubbing his ear and muttering. I said that mr sweep should by no means strike his gobby clients but that inviting the particularly obnoxious client to  Go And Fuck Yourself, served a very useful purpose, a sort of a mental hygiene steam-valve, releasing the pressure of a thousand slights.

The miscreant, in this particular chimney-sweeping case, had loudly complained, when told that the sweep could only attend during his own working hours and had very begrudgingly left his key, under a stone. As mr sweep was completing the task he noticed an iPad, strategically placed, partially hidden, in a place where it could only have been placed in order to give surveillance of the task and the worker.  I guess that this behaviour is near-enough legal but shockingly bad form. Worse, it is an extension, by the citizen, himself,  of the state-sponsored belief not in the citizen but in the citizen-suspect; people  cleverly setting electronic security measures against their own neighbours.  Must give Mickey Fallon a hard-on, that.

And you're sure it fires through wheelchairs?
 Yes, you can't trust anybody, that's why we have to kill them.
Wogs, benefit cheats, disabled  people, they're not, you know, not really, not disabled at all. 
The radio was on the other day and had happened to land upon Radio Four's Greatest Hits. Extra, is it?  It was the simpering shrink, Anthony Clare, interviewing Tony Benn about his wondrous self, in the studio psychiatrist's chair.  Clare was on a hiding to nothing for Benn had a lifetime behind him of blethering narcissistically to his own ends, and no showbiz headshrinker like Clare was going to unearth anything truthful about him, even though his monumental vanity and worthlessness were to be heard in his every conceited phrase.

In the few minutes that I heard of the show, I was struck by Benn senior's sense of Alwaysness, time after time he said assuredly: Y'know, as I always say, as my mother always said, as my father always said, as I always said to the children, when they were growing up,  d'you know what I mean?  Alwaysness, yes, that would be at the very core of my own, wotachamaycall it, my own national treasure celebrityness, d'you now what I mean? It was, in passing,  strangely unsettling,  incongruous, to hear Benn's patient, avuncular articulation of Knoworramean? -   it was as redundant, as lazy and irrelevant an interrogative as the truncated version more commonly repeated by those less privileged  than Benn, himself. However cosily bracketed,  his absurd belief in  the permanence of his trite phoney dogma, it was as though once something had been said  by he or his,  it became immutable, irreversible, righteously, scripturally certain, the moreso with its repetition; in the Benn circle they do not speak but axiomise. And have a jolly nice cup of tea.  Now, I drink many varieties of tea but would not try to weave its consumption into morality or ethics, Benn, though,  the national treasure, abstemious and temperate, never failed so to do, sucking, simultaneously at his tobacco addiction   None of his hoary maxims could be questioned for if he believed them who could doubt? In his wider quotational  repertoire, Benn always sought, in advance, authentication by his fellow-greats, starting his dreadful, practised  replies with, D'you know, I'm with my fellow socialist,  Jesus,   on this one or D'you know, I can't put it better than Confucius, my fellow-philosopher or Well, it's like my fellow-author, George Bernard Shaw always said............

I drifted-off, into a nightmare reverie of Benn, swigging his hourly pint of milky Ty-Phoo,  dictating his wretched diaries, for the  next morning's Mrs Mopp to  transcribe, of him sitting between  Two Thousand  Years of Wit and Wisdom  and   piles of dictionaries of quotations and biography, searching them for  verification of his own phony do-gooderness. 


 And then by darker visions of his mammoth fallatiotron with Willy Hague, the two MediaMinster whores, together touring the nation's sold-out small theatres, people flocking to their surprisingly friendly and witty banter, as though they were a   medicine show, for the feeble-minded, the deranged;  a travelling Dave Channel.  If you don't know about the Dave Channel, keep it that way. It is not diabetes will kill me, it is my imagination.  Firebrand lefty, Christian socialist, national treasure touring with nonce-apologist, prettyboy-loving, slaphead, teenage mutant, sixteen pints a night grotesque, redneck carpetbagger. The mutant's last resort; from Ken Dodd to Michael Jackson, Whisky Maggie to Gnasher Sturgeon; there is no business like showbusiness, fearful horror given life, it is all around us.

But mainly it's the Alwaysness of Benn, and indeed of so many in his filthy trade, which is so annoying;  they possess a certainty quite alien to me, as though they really led the life unexamined, never proof-read, much less edited themselves, but merely spouted unhesitant  rubbish and drivel, as to the Oxbridge manor born.

mrs ishmael, with my coercion, used to keep a Commonplace Book, more jotter than diary but a kind of continuum, a record of vaguely notable stuff. I, on the other hand, could never write a diary for, like the assasins' fretful target, my mind never sleeps twice in the same place.  If I have slept, I awaken each morning a new person, yesterday's man fortified or diluted by each and everything I have experienced between sleeps, but never the same man;  never a fit person to chronicle the myriad happenstances of my life,  be they the predisposed or the chance.  Even a work diary was beyond me,  I only ever did stuff - completed things -  that were scheduled weeks or days  ahead, not months,  and so I resisted the writing-down  of them, if it was important I remembered, unfailingly,  to do it. As to a personal diary, being randomly and largely self-educated, I have never really been able to figure-out what has happened in the past eighteen hours, I don't have a framework, a field of reference, by which to succinctly precis what has just happened to me;  only after some time, often a long time do I understand what happened, the idea of  summarising it, at the time, for publication or as an aide memoire seems to me utterly foolhardy, a denial of growth and change, a preposterous, contrary vanity.

It could be argued that these commentaries, here,  are diaristic and in some senses - their continuity, for instance; their repetitions - they are inevitably so, they are also, unusually for me, written in the first person,  a stylising which I have  avoided all my life.  On the other hand,  although they are not scrupulously anonymised they do not appear under my given name and they are, somewhat luxuriously, not commercial.  That these are not diary entries is clear enough in that often the greater and wiser volume of text appears in the commentaries of others, which, in turn,  shape my own future thinking;  a co-operative, in short, not a diary, a group effort, shaped by stakeholders, past and present.

I do not suggest, here, that there are no certainties, for there are things in Heaven and Earth, which I used only to think I knew, but which now I believe;  I merely say that the synchronous, arbitrary and selective annotation of one's lived experience, as favoured by political filthsters, and its presentation as remotely true, accurate or reliable is at best a foolishness, a pretence.   Tony Benn, famous, like Lord Mike Biscuits, 
I say, when the show's over, I generally like a few bourbons or custard creams, be a good chap;  I killed Whisky Maggie, y'know.



for his flouncing, and, like a watered-down, tabloid Samuel Pepys,  for his diaries, 

was, even by the meagre standards of his peers, a vain, self-adoring fool;  that Benn, an effete, self-obsessed,  wealthy careerist and an empty-headed soundbiter was able - and encouraged - to colonise and  then torch the landscape of the Left, so that his very name became, to MediaMinster,  a useful  byword for  profligate evil -   was an irreparable, national catastrophe. 

 That his ghastly spawn, and grandspawn, moreover, now shit on us from the same exalted latrine of state, must delight the cheapskate vulgarian himself, sipping fiery  tea, down there, with his master, Satan. 

To divert ourselves from  medieval-scale  national larceny and from global mayhem with the mewlings and pukings  of a hereditary simpering nobody such as  Hilary Benn is, to put it mildly, regrettable.  
We, who know better, should not differentiate between  one specimen of  vermin and another on the grounds of their speechifying skills; firstly, they don't have any to speak of and secondly they need no encouragement whatsoever from us, much less our critical appreciation of their filthy lies. We should not suspect our neighbour so that he becomes our enemy; instead we should scrutinise,  eject and punish our tormentors.  I remember, just six or seven years ago, being entranced by Obama's speechifying, and look how he turned out.  I never believed a word of it but especially after George Dubya Chimp, the fact that he could, then, with his aides, frame something approaching a sentence was refreshing;  Hilary Benn, tossing himself off in the commons,  vying for Corbyn's job, well, he wasn't even goping to be in Obama's league.

Some of them, though, Benn's worknmates, we  pay them two or sometimes three sets of wages, expenses and pensions.


Wull, I must say, Andrew, that it's  just a wee bit rich, blaming me for Donald Trump, all I did was invite him into Scotland, give him tax breaks, override the community he was despoiling, fall for his lies and appoint him my personal ambassador.  I think you'll find that, as with the oilprice, Andrew, and the referendum which, I also think you'll find, we actually won, that I was entirely correct as well as resolutely honest and proper, acting entirely in the interests of the Scottish sovereign people.
  That'll be twenty-five hundred of your English pounds, please, yes in Scottish pounds.


Wull, I must say, Andrew, that it's a wee bit rich, blaming me for  yon Forth Road Bridge fiasco, fallin' doon, like it is, and causing chaos all over Scotland. Aye, the transport minister have all bin loonies. An' aye, it is right, we have bin in govament for eight years, but I think ye'll find, Andrew, that that disnae mean we can be held responsible for anything that goes wrong. Jeez, mon, if that wis the case we'd be fair fucked, what wi' the polis an' the skules an the NHS, all ganging' doon the drain, not tae mention the oil price falling, an' everyone in Aberdeen gangin' aboot wi' their arses in their hands, mebbe havin'  tae sell one a their three RangeRovers, an' all as a result, I might say, o' David Cameron fixing the oilprice, quite  agin the spirit o' the vow that he made to the sovereign Scoattish people at the referendum, which, I think ye'll find, Andrew, that we won.


 What they do need, North and South, across the Irish channel

Property magnate, cuckold and gabshite, Peter Robinson, self-suspended First Minister of the Six Counties, pouting in one of his twelve hundred neckties, like a Mafia Wiseguy, so he is.

Well, I must say, so I must, Andrew, that that's a wee bit rich, so it is, youse saying that I crashed the Stormont Assembly, just to divert attention from the wholly and entirely and utterly conemptible lie that I'm no better than a thief, when,  in fact, as youse well know,   I am nothing but a thief.  All of my political life, so it is, as you well know, has been devoted to serving this fractured community of ours, and the fact that I have had the good fortune to become a multi-millionaire on property dealings, and that my dear, official wife, Mrs Grannygate, has had the good fortune to pay for the sexual favours of a young man through govament grants which she arranged while an elected representative of the People of Northern Ireland, well, all of that is pure hearsay, so it is. And so it is a bit rich, Andrew, for people like yourselves  to go casting aspersions on the good name of a decent, loyal Orangeman, doing his best, so he is, to serve his people to the very best of their gullibility.

 and what I wish them all, 


in a seasonal spirit, 



is a happy hanging-up by the neck from Westminster Bridge. Or the Forth Road Bridge. Or the one over the Lagan. As long as  we wish them anything else we will adoringly eat their shit, high days, holy days, Christmas Day.
 Party parliamentary democracy, 
the arse which never closes.