The Sunday Ishmael: 26/11/2023

It's been a great to see the parsing of Jeremy Cunt's Autumn Statement this week, both here and in the press - shows that the Great British Public are not as easily fooled as the Conservatives think we are. They sent out the new totty, Laura Trott, this morning, to tell us lies. This is her, pleading with Laura Kuenssberg to believe her, in the teeth of all evidence to the contrary:

Laura: Please, please, please believe all this made up nonsense and don't be nasty to me. 

Laura: No, Laura, that's all bollocks, isn't it? 2.2 million more workers now pay the 20% basic rate of income tax than three years ago, and 1.6 million more workers are in the 40% tax bracket.

Laura: That’s actually not true. For people on average wages, their taxes would have been cut by about £1,000 on average since 2010. 

Laura: Oh, come on, dear, I know you are new here, but you can't get away with this crap. You know, and our viewers will have seen and heard on many occasions, taxes are going to reach a post-war high.

Laura: (giggles prettily) Yes, I am new, Laura, and this is my dream job. I'm such a lucky girl. Spreadsheets and everything. I'm Chief Secretary to the Treasury, you know. 

Laura: The overall tax burden is going up. Shouldn’t you just be straight with people? For every additional £4.00 people are paying, you are giving £1.00 back.

Laura: (trying to pout charmingly) Yes, and isn't that good, Laura? It is targeted. Wealthier people are being asked to shoulder more of the tax burden.

Thirty-nine year old Laura Trott, an Oxford graduate (of course), was appointed a Member of the British Empire in 2016, in David Cameron's Resignation Honours for her political and public service. She is currently the Conservative MP for Sevenoaks in Kent, a lushly wealthy constituency, which has had a Conservative MP since 1924. They must like her as she has a majority of 40.9%, which is pretty good. Her claim to legislative fame was her bill to restrict access to Botulinum Toxin and filler cosmetic procedures for under 18 year olds, which was passed into law in October 2021.

Bit ironic, that. I was transfixed by Trott's curiously static mouth as she attempted to pout prettily for Kuenssberg and the cameras. You see a lot of that, these days. TV women with curiously smooth and buttery upper lips - not a smoker's wrinkle amongst the lot of them.

The other fun thing on the Laura Kuenssberg Show this morning was the fight between Unison General Secretary Christina McAnea and Reform UK leader Richard Tice about immigration figures and British culture. It got quite nasty, with Chrissy claiming there isn't one, calling in aid her Oirishness and Dicky using the my dad's bigger than your dad defence: "When he gets out of the Celebrity Jungle, Nigel Farage will be "absolutely furious" when he sees the migration figures. And he will be President Farage. Just you wait."

Honest, you couldn't make this stuff up.

What else in this week's news? Oh, yes, heart-rending  photographs of Israeli children hugging their dads after being released from Hamas detention. Here's a photo to redress the balance:

This is Israa Jaabis, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2015 when her car burst into flames a mile from a checkpoint in the West Bank. Israa's family said the fire started because of an engine fault. She suffered severe facial burns in the fire, but her requests for surgery were turned down by prison authorities. Here she is hugging her 15 year old son, Mua'tassim, who was eight years old at the time of her arrest. 

And old Politicians don't die, fade away or depart with dignity to polish their money. We had Baron Munchausen of Chipping Norton last week roaring back as Foreign Secretary - and, just see what happened! Cease Fire and  Hostage Release the same week! No, no, mrs ishmael. That was a Coincidence. Actually, Baron Wrongway went to Ukraine, not Israel. And no, he hasn't sorted that one out yet.

And this week it is wee Alex shouldering his way into the spotlight again. Such sport. I'm getting quite fond of the fat little bastard, what with his chippiness in the face of adversity and the disgraced Nicola Sturgeon. Anyway, he's equipped himself with a shiny new lawyer - well, the last one didn't like him. Remember? Gordon Jackson QC, was overheard (and recorded) saying of his client:  "He [Salmond] certainly was... I don't know much about senior politicians but he was quite an objectionable bully to work with....I think he was a nasty person to work for...a nightmare to work for." 

Anyway, wee fat Alex is now suing Nicola Sturgeon and her former civil servants for ‘misfeasance’. In court documents today he accuses her and her officials of having ‘conducted themselves improperly, in bad faith and beyond their powers with the intention of injuring Mr Salmond’......  ‘criminal leaking of confidential documents, the concealment of documents in defiance of court orders and a criminal warrant, the misleading of the court during judicial review proceedings, the soliciting of false criminal complaints, and ultimately the commission of perjury at a parliamentary inquiry’. Wow.

It is a civil action (lower standard of proof) and Salmond is seeking £3million in damages.

The suggestion is that because Sturgeon, her husband, Peter Morrell, and John Swinney have all been cleared out of the way having been interviewed by the police under arrest over the matter of large sums missing from Party funds and the mysterious appearance of an expensive motor home on the driveway of Sturgeon's mother-in-law (no charges have been laid against the three), the way is now clear for Salmond to return to power by merging his prospering Alba party with the failing SNP and picking up the cause of Scottish nationalism - to which end this civil action is a feint. We'll see. Just a few words on the wee fat bastard's sartorial presentation from mr ishmael: 

Sir Alex Lard, of Donald Trunp, plc, Chief of the Jock Tribesmen, also part-time prime minister of Scotland, part-time MP and part-time MSP and full-time cross-dressing, obese, inebriate, gluttonous monster, poses in a neat, wee, below-the-knee, Jock S&M outfit, designed for the shorter man with the fuller figure and revealing a tempting glimpse of fetching white calf. The sporran, swinging gently against the genital area, adds a frisson of exhibitionisme-lite for those jaded with beating their wives, interfering with their nieces and nephews or brutally attacking their opponents in the sectarian divide which so characterises Salmond's Smart, Successful Scotland. Asked about this strange apparel one of the Tribesmen's spokespersons said it was a means by which Jock men could announce their manliness to the world, by dressing like big girlies.

D'ye have any cake in yer bag, mammy?

Fat Alec in his First Ministerial costume of bumfreezer and trews poses with his mother on her annual day out of the attic, where she is normally kept, awa' frae human ken, d'ye ken? Alec only draws his three salaries not because, like all politicians he's an unprincipled greedy fuckpig but because of Scotland's long history of suffering under the English, in the Union, see, which they themselves requested, because their bankers, then, as now, had fucked everybody up the arse with a broken bottle. If it wisnae fer they English bastards and centuries of oppression Alec wouldnae be raking in three salaries, expenses and pensions and four hunnerd poond a month fer food, - Aye, food, in Westminster, when parliament wisnae sittin' and he wisnae even in the fucking country, the fat cunt.

 It's just like NewLabour - pious, egalitarian horseshit from the mouths of gangsters, only up here, when the SNP shit in your face the faeces are tartan. Och, aye.

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Contest Answers and Results

Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland. 

Alnwick Station was built in 1887 of huge size and grandeur which  reflected North Eastern Railway's ambition to impress royal visitors to Alnwick Castle. It was closed in 1968 under the Beeching cuts. In 1991 Mary Manley opened a second hand bookshop called Barter books in the old Alnwick station. I've been visiting it since very soon after its inception, and it has now grown to take over the whole station. It was described by Chris Mullin as a "national institution" and by the New Statesman as "the British Library of second-hand bookshops".

Dunstanburgh Castle, Northumberland
The castle is a 14th-century fortification on the coast of Northumberland in northern England, built by Earl Thomas of Lancaster between 1313 and 1322, taking advantage of the site's natural defences and the existing earthworks of an Iron Age fort. By the 1920s its owner could no longer afford to maintain it and placed it under the guardianship of the state. When the Second World War broke out in 1939, measures were taken to defend the Northumberland coastline from a potential German invasion. The castle was used as an observation post and the site was refortified with trenches, barbed wire, pill boxes and a minefield. It is now owned by the National Trust and run by English Heritage.

Craster, a small fishing village in Northumberland.

Home of the legendary Craster kippers. The smokehouse is owned by L. Robson and sons. First, the herring are split on a machine capable of splitting 500kg per hour, this replaces the numerous “herring girls” that used to split the herring by hand. Then the herring are placed in a brine solution of plain salt and water for a predetermined length of time depending on their size and, lastly, they are hung on tenter hooks and placed in the cavernous smokehouses. Fires are placed under the rows of herring made of whitewood shavings and oak sawdust and these smoulder away for up to 16 hours before the kippers are ready. The firm will post their Kippers to all parts of the U.K.

Alnwick Castle Gardens

A complex of formal gardens in the grounds of Alnwick Castle, Northumberland. Redevelopment of the garden was instigated by Jane Percy, Duchess of Northumberland in 1997, and has been led by Belgian landscape designers Jacques and Peter Wirtz. It is the most ambitious new garden created in the United Kingdom since the Second World War, with a reported total development cost of £42 million.

Wallington Hall, Northumberland

Wallington is a country house and gardens located about 12 miles west of Morpeth. It has been owned by the National Trust since 1942, after it was donated complete with the estate and farms by Sir Charles Philips Trevelyan, the first donation of its kind. It is a Grade I listed building. Wallington has a large collection of antique dollshouses, and eight murals in the central hall depicting the history of Northumberland, painted by William Bell Scott. Wallington visitors included members of the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood, who painted the pillars.

The Winner?

mr bungalow bill, who came closest with his answers.

Thanks to all who participated or had a bit of a think about it.

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More japes, jollity and political satire  can be found in the  four-volume Call Me Ishmael oeuvre,  the work of editor mr verge.

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps :

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With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

The Sunday Ishmael: 19/11/2023

 Learn Politics 101 with mrs. ishmael.

Case Study

You have managed to secure the top job, in the teeth of scepticism, an appalling dress sense and all probability, assisted by a charismatic woman of colour whose outrageous domestic policies are immensely popular with the electorate, but not with the wokerati, who, quite frankly, constitute a tiny percentage of the mass of British voters. You have succeeded a fantastically popular, very fertile and funny party animal, whose chaotic approach to the role managed to tank the economy and earned the deep enmity of the President of Russia. There is but a year to run until a general election is required, at which point your party will be voted out of power unless you can do something amazing to win back all the voters who have been alienated by the indifference to the conditions of the majority of the British people by the wealthy (lets not call them oligarchs) cabal in power. You have appointed to the three Great Offices of State the following: 

Home Secretary: Sue-Ellen Brave-Man - qualifications: black, female, Brexiteer, committed to reducing illegal migration into the UK.

Foreign Secretary: James Clever - qualifications: unshaven big black bloke, Brexiteer, hosts a private Youtube channel dedicated to painting miniature models from the wargame Warhammer.

Chancellor of the Exchequer: Jeremy Cunt - qualifications: persistent whitebloke, everything he touches turns to shit, but it's ok because he is a Charterhouse and Oxford man and a descendant of Sir Streynsham Master, a pioneer of the East India Company and a relative of Queen Elizabeth II and Sir Oswald Mosely (leader of the British Union of Fascists).

What do you do next to gain the support of the British public, win the next election and keep your chums in lucrative jobs?

1. Cut taxes, raise wages and duck out of supporting foreign wars.
2. Sack the popular, clever black woman, shuffle the unshaven big black bloke into her job and replace him with a sulky Bremainer with strong connections to China, still riding the Greensill scandal - Greensill Capital specialised in supply chain finance, where businesses borrow money to pay their suppliers. Despite Cameron’s lobbying efforts to secure it a slice of the Covid money-pie, it never received any money from the Covid scheme and collapsed in March 2021. Its failure was estimated by a parliamentary inquiry in 2021 to have cost UK taxpayers up to £5bn.  The sulky Bremainer is not an elected MP. But then he wasn't an elected Prime Minister.

Yes, students, that's right! Option 2 is the right answer! Riding to the rescue is CallMeDave, now Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton, for fuck's sake. First thing he did was fly to Ukraine to meet the Dwarf Zelensky, to whom he reiterated the UK's commitment to provide moral, diplomatic and "above all military support for... however long it takes".

Honours Amongst Thieves

Well, look, lessbeperfectlyclear about this. 
I am absolutely one hundred per cent committed to those campaigning today on the issue that Spads Lives Matter, they do matter, they matter very much. 

I don't necessarily think they should lie down in the roads and stop people going on holiday but if I could just make a personal observation, in my own case, as Prime Minister Emeritus, I simply cannot under-estimate the contribution made to this country by - sorry, wossat?  

Over-estimate ? Not under-estimate?  
Well, woddever, let's not be pedantic. 
They do both mean exactly the same thing.
 I simply cannot wossaname the contribution made to this country by Mrs Prime Minister Cameron's personal stylist,

throughout my time working very hard, 
being  in charge of you all.  

I mean, lessbeclear, she didn't have much to work with,  Mrs SamCam often resembling one of Mrs Brookses rather fine equine specimens, 

and although even after her stylist had done her job she still looked like a horse,  she was at least one with a nice frock and high heels.  

Walk on, Dobbin, there's a good horse.

The idea, quite proply resisted, in my view, by Spads Lives Matter, that Mrs Scissorhands should not be rewarded with public funds and medals for doing my wife's hair, is frankly untenable. 
Yes, like I was, as prime minister, after BorExit, untenable. 

But that's all a bridge under the water, now,
I've always prided myself on being up to trend with what's happenin' on da street

and Spads Lives Do very much Matter.  
And although he wasn't quite a Spad, my right honourable friend, 

Mr Sir George Junky, to whom I have given the Order of Knight Commander of the Senior Common Room,
was of great special assistance to me in running the money laundry.  
 
Wosssat? 
Yes, the City of London, yes, and the property market, the money laundry. 
 Well, what happens is that our colleagues in Organised Crime, yes, Russians or Chinese, or anyone, really, who has stolen vast sums of money, or perhaps made fortunes selling drugs or arms, we let them know that the laundry is open to them, so they can clean it all up nicely, thank you very much, the stolen money, before stashing it in one of my father's offshore places.
 But lessbeclear, it isn't just foreign criminals, it's also our own very valued ontrapanooers, 


like Sir Phil Green, 


Sir Phil with Mrs Horse, 
I mean my good lady wife.


And with myself, the prime minister, 
getting our stories straight.


Sir Philip, owner of clothing retailer Arcadia Group, will scrutinise government  expenditure from the past three years to try to identify where savings can be made.
The conclusions from the external review will feed into the Comprehensive Spending Review due to be completed in October.
Announcing the appointment, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said:  

"We are extremely fortunate to have Sir Philip, with his immense commercial experience and of course his fantastic track record at managing large organisations, on board.
"Sir Philip has made clear to the Government the importance of his business remit which has always been that efficient operating is different from cost cutting and removing jobs."

One of our hereditarty MPs, Maude, even among collegiate filth like Lansley, Hague, Letwin and Fox, had a superior knack for talking pompously out of his arse. 
He has been honoured for the clarity of his judgements - Sir Philip's fantastic track record -  with a seat in the Lords, amongst so many other thieving filthsters.

what they do, our laundry customers,  is steal very, very large sums of money from their own countries, yes, money which should have been spent on schools and hospitals, yes, taxpayers' money, and then they hide it, I mean invest it in British properties. 
Well, yes, of course, it cranks-up the price of housing for ordinary people like nurses and teachers but who gives a fuck about them? 

If they'd wanted to have a home or two of their own they should've gone to Eton, like decent people do, and had their father, quite proply in my view,  invest money for them in a tax haven, instead of having it stolen by the govament and given-away to wogs and single mothers.
.And yes, the only alternative is to build millions of cheap homes but who in their right mind would do that? I mean that'd simply take us back to the bad old days of full employment, proper wages and council housing.  I simply say, what would happen to those people working so hard in the food banks, if we went back to proper employment and affordable housing?
There's no telling where that would lead.
You might see privately owned utilities, like the railways and water and shortly the NHS being run for the benefit of ordinary riff-raff, and not for the wealth creators.  
Yes, alright, if you will, by and for Organised Crime.

And if I could just offer a word of advice to Mrs Askey, 
not that I'm a back seat driver or anything, it would simply be not to worry your old head, too much, dearie, about the Stinky Point power thingy, whatchamaycallit,  the nuclear boiler.  
It'll never happen.  
One of the things that she'll learn as prime minister - if she doesn't go into a diabetic hypo and die, the poor old dear, when the going gets tough  - one of the things she'll learn is that quite often, nearly all the time, in fact,  a govament announces all sorts of shit that's simply never gonna get off the starting chips. What?  Get off the starting gate? No?  Get out of the starting gate?  I wish you'd make your fucking mind up. I quite clearly said that Stinky Point was never gonna get off the starting gun.  Yes, exactly like the child sex fuck buggery torture'n'murder enquiry.  Yes, it does keep stalling. Yes, exactly, yes, it was meant to.  
Yes, long grass, quite right.

Yes, I know the Breferendum was meant to keep us in EuroCrime. Yes, I know it did the opposite. But that's not the fault of me and Mr Sir Junky George, now, is it;

 'snot as though it was anything to do with us.  

Yes, they are all unintelligent, the people who voted disobediently, yes, just like they say on the PBC, all day long, there  does need to be another Breferendum. And this time the stupid people, from Northern, and places like that, they jolly well better do as they're told. Yes, by the journalists, and the Trannies, them too, quite proply in my judgement.

 But there's a case in point, here, about the honours; just take Dame Louella, the outgoing chair of that now sadly stalled enquiry, ( The former chair of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse resigned after less than 18 months, the third chair to resign after it was established.) yes, the Kiwi bint, with the specs.

 I mean, she's only earned about a million and half, plus exes, of course, and quite proply, in my judgement, so there's a shortfall in her  earnings of at least a coupla mill. Wossat?  No, of course I don't think she should pay it back. She has, lessbeclear, done some very valuable work, going home on holiday and so on, before abandoning it altogether because of some awkward questions.  
 
And I think the very least we can do to compensate her is make her a Lady, or somesuch. Make her Lady Dame Louella. 

 Whaddayamean, she already is a lady? 
No, no, forgive me, but I think you're entirely wrong, there. 
Dame is just her name, like Dame Kiri Tikanawa, they all have three names, down there, in the arsehole of the planet;  I think you'll find  that Dame's quite a common Christian name, among Kiwis.  All around that part of the world,  Australia and New Zealand, yes, commonwealth places that we no longer trade with, preferring the Frogs, with their over-priced and unreliable nuclear boilers, and the Hermanns, with their filthy Volkswagens. 
But no,  I mean, there's this Dame Louella of the kiddy-buggery enquiry; there's Dame Kiri, who's a sort of music hall turn and there's Dame Edna Everidge, the famous hissing old tranny. 
 See, it's just a name, Dame,  like Sheila. If Dame Louella was really a Lady, she'd be called Lady Dame Louella, wouldn't she? So the very least we can do for Dame Louella is  actually give her a title.  

Yes, for services to people pretending to have been assaulted by their betters.
And lessbeclear, after I wasn't able - most unreasonably - to send  his father to the House of Lords, the very least I could do was give Mr Will Straw a knighthood 
 
for his utter cuntishness.

Yes, and while I'm here, this isn't the first time I have been wrongly accused of bringing the honours system into disrepute. Only the other day, that chap,  Ishmael, he was saying quite unpleasant things about one of my other appointees to the House of Lords. Honestly, you'd think it was part of the  legislature or something, and that people used it as a business address;  that they dined extravagantly on the very best cuisine, and all for thirty-five pee a head.  Yes, and anyone'd think they claimed three hundred quid a day, just for turning-up, signing-in and then fucking off to their favourite bondage parlour.  Lessbeclear about these figures; it's only a grand and a half a week, plus dinners, hardly anything to get excited about. It's not even a hundred grand of public money; peanuts, when you think of how disabled people defraud the rest of us.

You know, the reason I had the most expensive education that money could buy was not to make me well  educated, I'm simply too thick to be educated, it was to make me well-connected, yes, with the spoiled children of other thieving bastards. And quite proply, in my judgement. Yes, George and Boris.  Education?  That's for people who have to work, instead of steal. So lessbeclear you can take your anathema and stuff it up your rudimentary canal.
Wosssat? 
Alimentary Canal?

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And after that refreshing commentary on the honours system, of which he is now a beneficiary, by Baron Munchausen, back to Politics 101.

It is not just the Tories who are thieving, lying bastards, of course. The SNP can give them a run for their money, any day, although, being Scotland, which is a mysteriously dirt-poor country, despite the largesse still flowing up the Great North Road from the pockets of English tax payers, via the notorious Barnett Formula and the Scottish Block Grant, the sums involved are pocket money in comparison with Westminster Largess. For example, a mere £630,000 for a camper van? Anyway, Michael Matheson, SNP,  Cabinet Secretary for NHS Recovery, Health and Social Care incurred charges of  £10,935 after taking a Parliamentary iPad on a family holiday to Morocco. (Why Morocco? Lots of nice beaches in Scotland. What could Morocco possibly provide that you can't get in Scotland? He wanted the Scottish tax payer to foot the bill, firmly stating that he incurred the charges while completing constituency work, and that he had not been aware that he needed to replace the SIM card in the iPad to switch over to the Scottish Parliament's current mobile contract. He tried to claim £3,000 of the bill from his expenses budget, with the Scottish Parliament paying the remainder out of its own budget. First Minister Humza Yousaf said this was a "legitimate parliamentary expense". The bill was  more than the total of all MSPs' mobile phone, business line, tablet and staff phone bill expenses claimed in 2022/23 combined, a mere £9,507. Then it turned out that Matheson had been emailed by Parliamentary officials in February 2022, telling him to update the SIM cards in his devices almost a year before his holiday. So he agreed to personally pay back the full cost of the data roaming bill -but, after previously having specifically denied that any unauthorised persons had been using the iPad, on the  16 November, Matheson admitted to the Scottish Parliament that the charges had been incurred owing to his sons using the iPad to watch football matches, but he would not stand down as health secretary. That's the last time he'll be taking his family to Morocco - all they want to do is watch the bloody footie, anyway, so no point in taking them to the notorious homosexual haven of the 1950's. They just wouldn't appreciate it.

In Room 9 of the El Muniria hostel, William Burroughs wrote The Naked Lunch. It is on the bookshelves here, but I haven't read it. It was banned under US obscenity laws and the blurb says it is a mixture of autobiography, science fiction, satire and descriptions of gay sex.

 Burroughs lived in Room 9, while fellow Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac rented Room 4 and Room 5 on the floor above. 

Prior to independence in 1956 Tangier was an international zone that was administered by several different European countries, without a very rigid rule of law. In the words of the English academic Andrew Hussey, Tangier was "a utopia of dangerous, unknown pleasures." The Americans who turned up in the 1950s were escaping from a country in which homosexuality was outlawed.  Westerners could indulge their lusts with a limitless supply of young locals in need of money, and smoke an equally limitless supply of the local cannabis. The differential in wealth between foreigners and Moroccans created a thriving market in prostitution. In his early days in Tangier, Burroughs was not particularly sensitive to local culture. In a letter to Allen Ginsberg in 1954, he is not even able to keep track of his conquests:

"I go to bed with an Arab in European clothes. Several days later… I meet an Arab in native dress, and we repair to a Turkish bath. Now I am almost (but not quite) sure it is the same Arab. In any case I have not seen no.1 again... It's like I've been to bed with 3 Arabs since arrival, but I wonder if it isn't the same character in different clothes, and every time better behaved, cheaper, more respectful… I really don't know for sure."

William Burroughs, circa 1965

I'm sure it is not like that anymore and that Peter Bone would not be received with the sort of welcome accorded American sex tourists pre 1956. You heard about Bone and his Boner? 

Further evidence of Jilly Cooper's thesis that the Tories are sex addicts. On 16 October 2023, the Independent Expert Panel recommended that Bone be suspended from the House of Commons, after a report found he had "committed many varied acts of bullying and one act of sexual misconduct" against a male member of his staff. The report stated that, having booked a single room for the two of them on a work trip in 2013, Bone had "dropped his towel and exposed his genitals close to his employee's face" while they were in the bathroom, then exposed himself to the complainant in their shared bedroom. He was also found to have pressured the man into massaging him when they were alone in the office, and to have thrown objects or struck him on a number of occasions. Bone's sex object must have been quite a young man, as his Dad complained to CallMeDave in 2015, who failed to deal with the situation, so Dad complained again in 2017 to Theresa May (then Prime Minister).

 As the Conservative Party had not resolved its own investigation in a timely manner, the employee made a complaint through the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme in October 2021,  which prompted an investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards who upheld the five allegations relating to bullying and harassment, and one of sexual misconduct by Bone. Bone's appeal  against the findings was dismissed, so a report to the House was made on 16 October 2023 recommending his suspension for six weeks. The Conservative Party withdrew the whip the next day, suspending him from his membership of the Parliamentary Conservative Party. The old bugger isn't giving up gracefully, though, he is clinging to his job and continues to sit as an independent MP.

Learn Economics 101 with Rachel Reeves, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Don't sign up for this course. It is all lifted from Wiki. No harm in that - I do it all the time, but I do give them money when they write to me saying they are strapped for cash again (it happens a lot). Rachel has not exactly said sorry - they don't, politicians, but has graciously acknowledged she should have been more meticulous with her acknowledgements and referencing.

Obituary corner

de mortuis nil nisi faecum

She's dead, then. I read one of hers, once, Possession, I think it was. It was very heavy going, but that was a long time ago, before I joined my book club and learned to read literary novels and discuss them in arse-clenching detail. I could probably manage another one these days. We'll recall mr ishmael's thoughts on the Byattian oeuvre:

I saw that AS Byatt once, not sure what it was, may have been Lord Bragg's drooling, groupie, teeth-and-hair South Bank Show. 

Byatt was talking about her modus operandi, her creative process, she has a hubby-gofer called Peter, and he's an absolute treasure, rather like  a  little woman or little man, who does for her, drives her about the place, a housekeeper/chauffeur/confidante/whipping boy, she simply couldn't do what she does without him, ghastly. She and Peter were up in Yorkshire,  reee-surching  some load of pretentious, dreary old shite, some hokum set, where else, but in academe, which  she was dreaming up for her  readers and they'd done whatever it was they went to do, her local colour ree-surch,  and were on the way back to Hampstead  or the  South of France, when she realised that in some descriptive paragraph she'd Rushed the Gorse, hadn't quite got it down right, the Gorse - gorse, for overseas readers, is a tough, prickly shrub with yellow flowers which grows wildly in abundance, particularly in the North of the UK, it's like locoweed, only you can't smoke it - simply mustn't Rush the Gorse, crucial to the telling of the tale, it was and so she made Peter, the absolute treasure, take her  back so's she could sit and Be With the Gorse.  Shouting at the radio, I was; hopefully is a fucking adverb, ya mad, frigid old trout.

 Byatt says this of her creativity:

       " I think of writing simply in terms of pleasure. It's the most important thing in my life, making things. Much as I love my husband and my children, I love them only because I am the person who makes these things. I, who I am, is the person that has the project of making a thing. Well, that's putting it pompously – but constructing. I do see it in sort of three-dimensional structures. And because that person does that all the time, that person is able to love all these people. "  ( trans: I am the fucking breadwinner.)

 Driving back to Yorkshire, to do the Gorse-describing quality  control,   I woulda fucking killed her. And if I ever see her on the side of a Highlands road, Being With The Gorse, I will.

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Answers to the what I did on my holidays contest will be delayed, to give a further opportunity for entries to be submitted. All we've had so far is Northumberland and Newcastle. I'm hoping for a little more detail.

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There's a wealth of CallMeDave material, which we'll have the opportunity of posting over the coming months as our new Foreign Minister gets busy on the World Stage. In the meantime, here's a little piece extracted by editor mr verge, from mr ishmael writing as John Bright, MP, in May 2008:

"But all is now changed. Mr Cameron, the walking miscarriage, will soon rule. He will root out fiddles, scams and moonlighting. On his blank, strangely erased face we will see a righteous thunder as he dragoons his troops into concentrating on the job for which, in a four-yearly festival of competitive promising, they debase themselves before complete strangers. Tories will be dragged from their merchant banks, their insider dealings and their bondage brothels. The subsidised bars and greasy silver spoons of the Palace of Westminster will fall silent as MPs concentrate on what they are paid to do, but in order to continue to attract the very best - people like Prescott & Conway & Oaten - and in order for Mr Cameron to ensure that honourable and right honourables on all sides do not completely scupper his Ascension, salaries, exes and pensions, for so long so unfairly pegged at pittance level, will obviously have to go up. And up. And up. Knighthoods, cocaine and rentboys all round."

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Your Stanislav and Ishmael habit can be supported by ordering the four-volume Call Me Ishmael oeuvre,  the work of editor mr verge.

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps :

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

 

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

The Sunday Ishmael: 12/11/2023

What I did on my Holidays

Sorry to have neglected you for so long, but I'm back in the Bracing Isles now, after a perfectly splendid autumn holiday in glorious Englandshire, best part of Scotland. Apart from some emergency dental treatment, costing £100 and occasioned by biting down on a slice of artisanal bread (just watch that healthy stuff - the crusts are made of compacted aggregate, very good for the bowel), I survived my holiday unscathed. A selection of my holiday snaps follows - and because we haven't had any fun, jollitry, competitions, anagrams or crosswords lately, here's this week's competition.

Where did I go?

There's a clue on the destination board of the ghost train, but where is that ghostly platform?

Clue: The largest second hand bookshop in England. What is it called?

Clue: this ruined castle is walking distance (if you are good at walking, like mr. mike, but not like me - I swear I've broke my left foot and had to buy a pair of those expensive kiddy shoes - all moulded, cushioning whatever) of the little fishing village in the following photo, which is internationally famous for its artisinal, hand-finished product:

Clue: this is one of a collection of water engineering features in the garden of a family that, but for the mischance of history, could have secured the English throne. Shakespeare gives the scion a nifty line in back-chat:

Lady Percy. What is it carries you away?

Hotspur: Why, my horse, my love, my horse.

Lady Percy. Out, you mad-headed ape!A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are toss'd with.....

Hotspur : Come, Kate, thou art perfect in lying down: come, quick, quick, that I may lay my head in thy lap.

Extra points for identifying the play.

Some autumn colour for you:

So, minimum points for identifying the county, I'm expecting our ishmaelian detectives to also give me the places featured. Our lugubrious gent at the head of the post is a guide who kindly posed for me after shocking my teenage companion into expletives deleted when he opened the door to invite us into this:

Competition answers through the comments in the usual way - apart from the fame and the title of blog clever clogs the star prize winner will choose a forthcoming blog topic.

Learn Constitutional Monarchy 101 with mrs. ishmael.

I was cruelly amused by what they did to Brian, by the way: dressed him up like a Ruritanian popinjay and made him read out a list of stuff that he fundamentally disagrees with but is no longer allowed to say so. In the forthcoming parliamentary session, My government will make a steaming, roaring, splattering horse's ass out of me.

 

Head bowed under the weight of his museum piece of a hat, stiff with jewels and pearls en tremblant, his face expressed his humiliation and dismay as his fat little fingers fumbled with the list of Sunak's demands. For the benefit of our overseas readers who are unfamiliar with these arcane practices, the State Opening of Parliament is a piece of theatre in which the King is dressed in velvet and ermine, with very large satin bows adorning his shoulders and is enthroned in the House of Lords, together with the equally fancifully dressed Lords and Ladies whilst Black Rod (honest, not invent), gathers up the Commoners (MPs, the Prime Minister and holders of the great offices of state), and knocks on the door before they are allowed in to stand at the back in their boring old suits to listen to the King reading out the speech written by the Prime Minister which sets out the laws that Sunak would like to be passed in the forthcoming Parliamentary session. Here they are on their way out - the folks with white hair are wearing wigs, for fuck's sake.

It's embarrassing, so it is.

As you know, I am a pacifist, constantly appalled by the wars that rage around the globe. The latest one has pushed the Ukrainian one off the front pages. Is it nastier than the usual? Probably not. I've been wondering why, in what is a secular nation, these religious wars are being played out on the streets of London, taking up air time, demanding that we take sides, disrupting what has now become Remembrance Weekend - the commemoration of previous wars.

I think it is because people enjoy war. They like it. They think it is fun. And exciting.

The aged Jilly Cooper has written yet another novel about rich people fucking and has been touting it extensively. Her thesis is that Tories screw all the time. It seems to be borne out by a detail in Nadine Dorries' exposé, The Plot, which is subtitled the political assassination of Boris Johnson. Amidst allegations of plots and dark arts, there are also allegations about an MP who his own Whips' office believe is a rapist, and an MP having sex with a prostitute on a billiard table while four colleagues watched.

Here's mr ishmael, writing in 2013 about these matters:

WHAT THE PAPERS SAY, THE FILTH-O-GRAPH. POLLY FILLER AND THE FANGS OF DOOM

In the late 'sixties and early 'seventies, Jilly Cooper was the Polly Filler of her day, writing meaningless tripe for the Sunday Times

 

she had neither the piss and vinegar verve of Marjorie Proops at the Mirror or the witty insouciance of Catherine Whitehorn at the Observer, but few of them do,  then or now. Doesn't matter,  there's always room in skymadeupnewsandfilth for a woman's point of view, if they can't be persuaded  to get their tits out, that is, and Jilly plodded on delivering her turgid weekly analysis of this or that.  But then she discovered a talent for writing spanking novels, not spankingly good, spanking.  They were set among serially unfaithful, horsey people in the home counties, people with big dicks, big tits and big bank balances.  I think they were, anyway, I never read one and my understanding of Jilly's oeuvre is pieced together from hazy memories of the book covers - well-filled jodhpur bottoms, riding crops and stiletto heels,  that sort of thing, Ah,  here they are,  I wasn't wrong,

 

 

 

the sort of mild BDSM stuff which the Filth-O-Graph would love to put on its front page, if only it wasn't still pretending to be a newspaper.  

Throughout time, it seems,  Jilly has hymned her love for hubby, Leo. 

 

 Leo was a waster and a prat, maintaining a mistress for years, probably at Jilly's expense but that's their affair, or so you would think.

Leo died recently, after loyal and faithful Jilly having nursed the worthless tosser through years of the dribbling disease 

 

and the Filth-O-Graph, today, published an open letter to the widow Cooper from world authority on bereavement, child abuse, consumer affairs, tarty underwear, old age and anything else that can keep her in the  public eye,  Ms Esther Fangtzen.

In about fifteen hundred words, Esther shares with us - and, presumably, Jilly -  her fears about but also her confidence in Jilly's ability to handle widowhood. The horrid old fraud offers Jilly 1500 words of 

 

unsolicited, patronising, condescending psycho-consumer-luvvie babble whilst hosannahing her own, adulterous, home-wrecking affair with and then marriage to the ghastly Desmond Wilcox, now dead, let us - and he -  be thankful for small mercies of deliverance.

 Not satisfied with intruding into another's grief, Esther also manages to shamelessly, impertinently  plug her latest, self-serving charity, something to do with older people, like herself;  we must trust in the perspicacity of octogenarians and that they tell her to go and fuck herself.  If you thought the press was already in the gutter, you should read this piece of shit.

How does this phoney old monster continue to infect our public discourse?  I keep saying, it's Oxbridge, those bastards are everywhere,  they are like an invisible pox, gnawing away at Decency's innards.    

 

Bit lower down love,
like I get the kiddies to do for me

and mind your teeth, eh?

 

Two prominent child protection experts share strategies.

.........................................................................................................................

Your Stanislav and Ishmael fix can be obtained by ordering the four-volume Call Me Ishmael oeuvre,  the work of editor mr verge.

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps :

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

 

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

Leaving Aberdeen harbour on the sea road to Orkney.