'ROUND, 'ROUND, GET AROUND, I GET AROUND

Unlike so many here, I'm not much of a traveller;  bit of Europe, bit of North America, that's about it.  I was, however, infected with that restless, hungry feeling at a very early age -  I attended five different primary schools,  then two grammars, two colleges and much later, one university.

The five primary schools were crucial;  the first was Ulsterville Primary, in Belfast - I'm not kidding, Ulster-ville; all my people, save my Dad, were raving mad Orangemen and women, 


My name is Ishmael and this is my tribe.

pre-Paisley-ite Presbyterian bigots;  Michael Stone, 


the grenade-lobbing,  funeral-bomber  and parliament-stormer
 
 is my never-laid-eyes-on-him cousin; 

another cousin was William Moore, one of the '70s Shankill Butchers, tied people in chairs and hacked them to slow, painful,  shredded  death;  a ringleader, he admitted eleven of nineteen  sadistic murders

The judge said, well, you can imagine what he said;  notwithstanding, our Wully was released under the Good Friday agreement.  Don't know if Mo Mowlam had a snog for him, wouldn't be surprised. Dead, now.

and after a few months, maybe just  a few weeks of loyalist, Mick-hating Ulsterville, Belfast was in my soon-forgotten  past and I was at Nazeby Road Infants School in Lozells, I think - maybe it was  Alum Rock, maybe I rubbed tiny shoulders with the unfortunately mutant Mr  Ozzie Osborne - in Birmingham. After Nazeby Road it was a school  in which I stayed so briefly I cannot remember it,  then it was Tindall Street Primary School, Balsall Heath, for a couple of years and finally, in primary terms,  Grendon Road County Primary School at the city's-edge, Maypole area until eleven-plus and King Edwards Grammar School, Camp Hill. 

Another upshift took me to Bangor Grammar School, County Down, took me back among the crazed, homicidal, torturing, neanderthal meatheads - David Trimble, his Lordship of Bigotry,


 was a few years above me.  

 
Trimble with his friends, marching for intolerance and hatred.

Trimble of course, was Blair's patsy in the whole Ulster Carve-Up, too stupid to read even the runes of his own demise, too stupid to breathe;  I always said it was a poor school, Trimble's the proof.

In his autobiography, from the safety of the House of Lords,  Trimbs rants and raves - now - about our then headmaster, Randall Clarke, how he hated  him, what a cunt he was;  at fourteen, I told Clarke  to his know-it-all, inveterate spanker's  face, told him he was a cunt.   I also told him that Hell would freeze over before he raised his cane to me,  unless he wanted a broken jaw. I don't think anyone had ever fucked him off before, certainly not a putative victim of his perversion.  Needless to say I was moved on again to  a couple of other, undistinguished institutions in Belfast and my education just petered-out;  university was much later.

It amazes me, today, that people still call for the return of child-beating;  it can only debase further the beater and if the victim is compliant - takes it like a man -  then one can only fear for his or her future never-did-me-any-harm personal development.  One of the great disappointments of my life is that I never had an adult encounter with Mr Jack Watson, maths and science teacher at King Edwards, he never used them on me but he fashioned, exquisitely, little cats-of-nine-tails  from bunsen burner tubing and included in his sadisdic arsenal one of those big, sinister ebony rulers.  Oxbridge, you see, turns out great men, freaks like Watson.  Given the opportunity I would've beaten him half to death. No, really, I would.

I call the move back to Belfast an upshift but it was really my father's second attempt at self-renewal, at escape from Authority.  Don't know to this day, never will, why,  in the first place,  in the middle of a nineteen fifty-five night my family, at a moment's notice,  fled Belfast for Birmingham.  I do know, however, that in 'sixty-three,  my father drank-drove away his PSV driving license 

he drove one of these, an earlier one, 
without suffixed year letters but much the same. 


 - everybody did it, then, well, anyone who drank and drove did both together - was banned for a year and so we were On the Road Again, back to a place where, pre-computer, pre-DVLA, he could drive unnoticed.  Trouble was that my mother died a few weeks after the return to Northern Ireland.  And so, effectively, did he. Motherless children, let me tell you, do have a hard road, but shit, I could be here for weeks, with this travelogue of the Isles of Complaint. And in any event, I'm not complaining; why would I complain about who I am?

She only lived to forty-eight, he stumbled on until sixty-two, disappointed by life, disappointed by his three children;  he and I  had bouts of closeness and bouts of estrangement, I hadn't seen him for a few years when he died. If there's any blame it's his.  He was the grown-up. But I don't suppose there is. People do what they do, mostly believing they're doing their best, it's only later that they repent.

Anyway, when you go to lots of different schools you learn lots of different stuff; as well as all the taught syllabus, there is the auto-didacticism of quick-study survival - who are the important kids; what are the games; where are the hang-outs; what's the pecking order among the teachers but the most important thing is, Which language do they speak, you gotta blend-in, don't you;  six-year old, inner-city Brummies  don't wanna play marbles with someone who speaks OrangePaddy, and six year-olds, ten year-olds, any year-old kids can be and usually  are repellingly, remorselessly cruel, even when, as now, their monster parents Luv'EmToBits, DoAnyfin4'Em.  I was bilingual by the age of five-and-a-half, speaking Brummie outside the house, Lisburn Road Belfast within, so I was.

An easy facility with shape-shifting and mimicry came to me, then, of necessity, almost from  infancy, as did a kind of sang-froid about relationships and friendships -  they just flowered and as easily withered with each change of school. I was popular with the teachers, they all said to me - at nine and ten - Ishmael, you must be a writer.  I was always top or second of whichever class I was in and even so I was popular with the kids, too;  it was easy and meaningless, perhaps not meaningless, perhaps just a precocious awareness of sic transit gloria mundi - so passeth the glories of the world or more prosaically, Everything is shit;  all I was doing was what, by then, had become a secondary yet undeniable part of my nature. maybe it was the entirity of my nature, fakery. Deformed by successive, massive insecurities, internally twisted into a guilty figure of eight - my Mum didn't know that I had abandoned her beloved, Ulster-Scots, tut-tutting, nasal street twang in favour of whining, indignant Brummie and when she found out she was heartbroken but most of the time I managed to fool all parties, just;  my surface cool was a veneer, glued-on by desperation, pinned and edged with terror.  Still is. And   each change of school stemmed from a move to a generally more desirable neighbourhood and meant that I had to learn another set of  extra-school rules, hierarchies, locales, churches, shops  and characters. 

Some, people like Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, 

Remember? When you were young?
Course I do, mate, 'smy life's work.
No business, I always say, like showbusiness.

have managed to make lucrative artistic careers from childhood and adolescent tumult and upheaval;  trouble is that in Waters' case the icy precision of his music and its endless, endless  rehashing is eventually revealed not as art or insight  but just as a showbusiness drum to beat.  I don't know how they do that, those people, pull-out  their rhyming innards  for their audience's delectation.  Once or twice, maybe, it might be cathartic but touring your childhood round the world, decade after decade,  with a cast of thousands, Oh fuck that,  there's not enough money in the world, is there?  I must say, in fairness, that I saw a Pink Floyd concert in the late 'seventies, at Knebworth, - I had only gone to see Captain Beefheart

 - and it was amazing, Dark Side of the Moon, live, with real, low-flying Spitfires. Or Hurricanes.  


 But I wouldn't ever want to see another one.

 In our tramelled and regularised culture, a childhood  of constant change and interruption does not and in my case has not led to the Rewards of Obedience, not even in the sense of Twenty Years Of Schooling And They Put You On The Day Shift rewards.  It came to pass, you see, that after a childhood spent adapting, shape-shifting to fit-in everywhere I eventually didn't fit-in anywhere.   And certainly not in mid-sixties Belfast, where they painted the kerbstones red-white-and-blue and the B-Specials auxiliary police force kicked the shit out of anyone who even looked like a Fenian.  I was there just as the civil rights movement was kicking-off and by God it was an awful fucking place;  lacking affiliation to any hubble-bubble in it's reeking,  hate-filled cauldron, I split. Again. I don't know if anybody does it anymore, running away to sea;  there are probably health and safety regulations against it, although  I found the SS Ramore Head a much safer, more agreeable place to be than grammar school. It was as far around the world as I ever went and after that experience, package tours just didn't mean anything to me,  I have largely stayed in the British Isles.

 It was a strange, unsettling childhood, mine but  none of these  developmental aberrations matter a fuck when we think, if we do at all, of brown kids walking miles to drink a mouthful of shitty water, of brown kids drone-dismembered for democracy or of brown and yellow kids machine-gunned in their refugee boats by Aussie convict riff-raff, anxious that  no more nignogs pollute the land which they themselves stole from Abo.  I don't wish to offend mr mike, who has made the place his home but I never met an Aussie, male or female, who I didn't immediately want to punch in the gob, repeatedly.

Travelling and its fabled broadening of the mind doesn't compare  with the refining fire of constantly being the NewBoy; by the age of eleven  I had long completed   Emotion's Grand Tour,  stood fretfully under her leaning towers, lunged and parried on her battlements, been torn apart in her amphitheatres, faced her indifferent firing squads. Enough sightseeing for a lifetime.

Maybe that's why rather than foreign travel I have preferred  bombing around the British Isles in cars, only in cars, not on 'buses or trains or in any vehicle or conveyance which brings me into contact with others; I tried motor-cycling but it broke my neck, a considerable number of other bones, too, mainly in the head department.  My excursions have  been  a life-long series of road movies, restless and hungry for sure but not global, not even continental, just private, intense and focused.

Living in the Vale of Evesham, I used to think that Northumberland was a long way away, Cornwall, too.  Who was that bloke, Governor General of Canada or something, wrote the Richard Hannay books, John Buchan,  that's him, see, I unWiki-remembered him in the end, all on my own.  John Buchan, he wrote, in a couple of my childhood books,  about men of derring-do, charging up the Great North Road at Oh, fifty miles an hour, bent on some mission which would keep the Empire safe from Jews and foreigners.  

Belting up the A1M, in the 'nineties, in an unbreakable  three-litre Volvo was, for me, childhood fantasy made real. This was a huge, important journey, up the Great North Road.   It was only when I moved up here, to the top of the world, that I realised that Bamburgh Castle is only a hop, skip and a jump from Worcester. And that what was once the Far North is now the Deep South, bonny lad.

Moving here, to Scotland, the best part of England, twisting  up and down the A9, I soon got used to proper distance driving and would,  a decade ago, drive, alone,  from John of Groats to Worcester in ten or eleven hours; white knuckle, high-speed, stopping only for petrol and for the dogblokes to take a pee.  Roaring through the Highlands one night at a hundred miles an hour, I instinctively, fortuitously slowed just in time to avoid a deer, big as a fucking elephant, marching down the road like he owned it, with a half-a-dozen lesser deer in his wake, maybe they were his bitches.  I was soon, nevertheless, back at a hundred miles an hour, rolling, one-handed cigarettes and drinking warm, flask  coffee.  Getting out at the other end was like climbing from the grave and when I went to bed, the room spun a seasick spin and all that my closed eyes could see was an endless white line, rushing towards me, passing beneath me, on the wrong side.  It was a form of mania,  the I-Can-Do-This,  I-Can-Do-Anything kind.  I guess those days are gone, although I live in hope of having a male  argument with someone and saying, Alright, then, here's five-grand says I can beat you to Land's End, in any car you want to drive.  

There's not too many people do that - drive six-hundred miles, straight-off, non-stop, alone.  Jerry Clarkson,

of course, does it all the time, with a little unseen help. It is, though,  the Clarkson Rally, consistent with Monty Don's bland erasure of any other labourers in his vineyard, as though it is he and he alone who so perfectly plans and manages, weeds, digs and mulches his vast garden, as though his really is a horticultural labour of love and not a teevee show with limitless funds, with scores, if not hundreds of production assistants doing the work, off-camera, shredding license-payers' fifty-pound notes into compost.  Consumerism's deceitful oddjob man, is Monty.

 

Posing, of course I'm not posing, I'm being earnest.

Doing his solo, marathon drives, Gerry Clarkson will have a huge convoy in train, just out of shot, his every fatigue soothed, his every risk atomised and minimised;  he will have lawyers and doctors on stand-by;  his million pound motors will be maintained to billionaire standards of excellence; Clarkson will have motorised deerstalkers driving ahead of him, licensed to kill, just in case anything happens to Mrs Clarkson's wee fat bald old  boy. 

By now, you would think that Mrs Ishmael and I are old enough to know better than to  hurtle along the nation's highways, Hell for leather, she ought to be,  anyway;  I think she's about fourteen, and bossy, whilst I am just twelve or so, maybe eleven, but even so last Friday we set off an another demondrive.  It is one of marriage's oddities that I feel that I am the car driver, even though currently I'm not. Doesn't matter,  I am at the collective motoring helm.  I had some major surgery on my foot in June and await, shortly, a plastic surgeon's reconstruction;  it's only a small one, on the edge of my heel but it's crucial and  I have been off my feet for months and unable to drive;  hopping, limping and wheelchairing;  that I-Can-Do-Anything madness afflicts me still, regardless of the fact that I can presently  do fuck all and in the middle of a gale we took the Midnight Ferry for Aberdeen to make, next morning, an onward journey to Kilmarnock in order to  collect Harris, the dog and then sprint hundreds of miles across Scotland and up the A9 to the short sea crossing, homeward bound.

I've travelled on a lot of night ferries and they're all shit;  sickly drunks passsed-out on the floor or students camped determinedly, feet-up on the couches but the Aberdeen boat, 



coming down from Shetland, carries live animals on the car deck, so as well as the sounds and smells of stir-fevered, drunken, imbecile oil riggers going ashore for a spot of wife-battering - Christ, what a segment of humanity they are,  they make the foul, brawling  gits from Big Fat Gipsy Wedding look  genteel- as well as the skriking and misbehaviour of vastly over-indulged Islands bairns; as well as the sneering, lazy inefficiency and conceit ot the largely Belfast-born stewards  - or staff as they are now called -  there is the overwhelmingly  nauseating reek of sheep piss;  crawling, in the morning from the coffin-like cabin - you have to have a cabin's privacy or you'd be up on several murder charges - you are met by the smells of cheap bacon,  the kind cooked hours before and self-coated with salty, slimy, white exudate; of drunkards' vomit and of terrified animals.  It's no way to travel but we couldn't have covered the distance any other way, not in a day. 

The rest of the journey was easy, it was just hard going. Not all bad, though, on the way home we saw  foresty Perthshire' brilliant late autumn colours 

 and we saw the first snow on the Highland peaks. We did the journey, home to home, anyway, in  22 hours, about 550 road miles and 150 by sea.  When I told Nurse she looked at me as though I was mad.  Healthy people wouldn't even do that, she said, missing the point, I felt,  entirely. 'Snothing, I calmed her, you shoulda known me when I was younger,  I used to really get around.

  And besides, this bloke needed a home.
In a hurry.

DOWN THE LEVO SHOW

RICH BUSINESSWOMAN MOANS.

I FELT LIKE A FABULOUSLY WEALTHY ENTERTAINER IN  WHOM PEOPLE WERE INTERESTED.

MS JK CROW AT THE LEVO SHOW.

Counsel to the show,  Mr Anthony Chevenix-Beard:

You need no introduction from me, Ms Crow, you are one of the most famous businesswoman in the world….

JKC:  Actually, I am a businesswoman…..

ACB:  Yes, that’s what I said…..

JKC You need to be careful or else I’ll put my lawyers on you.  Or my publishers.  Or my PR team. You know, I just simply fail to see why you would ask that question…..

ACB: I haven’t asked any questions, yet.  But do you think you might confirm your name…?

JKC:  Yes my name is JayKay Crow. And I’m very rich.  Not that it matters.  I live a fairly normal life, running my megabusiness and suing newspapers.

ACB:  Yes, quite, and if we could turn to paragraphs one to five hundred and three in your witness statement……

JKC:  If I could just say that we businesspeople are not like other people, not that there’s anything wrong with other people.  It’s just that me and my husband, who is private, and my publishers and  my marketing team and Warner Brothers  and the BBC all just want  to bombard every child in the world with my brand and make their parents buy my product and all the franchised materials, whether they want to or not.  Nothing wrong with that.  But when people start bombarding me with questions well, that’s a different thing.  I don’t make any money out of it, for one thing.  And, well, that’s enough.  I should be able to walk down Prince’s Street in Edinburgh where I sometimes live, although you may not broadcast the fact, I should be able to walk down Prince’s Street dressed in thousand-pound notes if I want to and not have  people  asking me  just how  the fuck I get away with all this shit?

Lord Levo: I am conscious, your ladyship,  that you have given up your time to come here, so if you would like a ten-minute break to confer with your lawyers about whether anyone has printed anything about you today, that will be fine by me.   And actually I could, myself, do with a Tom Tit  and a snort of the old marching powder.

All rise.

THE OBITUARY PAGE

Up all night, leaning on the windowsill, I once watched His Grace The Lord Hatterjee on an Open University programme about boxing, the pros and cons; Spitgob, three sheets to the wind, was banging on, perhaps - who knows the mind of a Lord -  in erotic reverie, about how too very bad it was, seeing “young men beating themselves insensitive (sic)." Most of the time I agree with Roy, about that, at least.  A shame, though, that he never sorted out that filthy business of spraying spit everywhere, I mean, how hard can it be -  a bit of surgery or dentistry or just self-discipline, you’d think that someone who wanted to run the country would be able to deal with a little problem like that;  like Gordon Snot and his filthy habits,

 Now just you watch out young man or I shall set my mother on you.

 Hattersley’s  refusal to deal with  his spit betrayed an arrogance widespread in politicians; in common wth their uniform ugliness,  they share a belief that what they are saying is of such importance that it doesn’t matter if contemporaneously they are eating snot, scratching their balls or spitting all over people.  Fuck ‘em, all of ‘em, filthy, thieving, pimping, lying, murderous, shiteating cocksuckers.

But the boxing.  I agree with Hatters, until, that is, I see some whining little turd like wotsisname, Murray, and the facial agonies he displays if his tennis ball goes out – like his Lordship, Murray is a notoriously petulant Momma’s Boy –

 and he wants to burst into tearful tantrums, ties himself up in knots,  and then I think, This ain’t sport, this is fucking showbiz, for pansies and nitwits, it's like Riverdance.  Boxing, that’s the only proper sport for a man.  Go on, punch his fucking lights out. Kill him.

I know that jockeys can get thrown off their mounts, and that they – mainly tax-evading Irish tinkers and pushy Italian midgets with big, big mouths -

An angry, mimiature wop jockey, Detorri; who gives a fuck, shortarse.

suffer a long, dark night of the soul if they are not allowed to whip the poor beasts down to the bone: I know, too, that Motocross riders and Formula One glamourboys can crash and burn and that the Poppy-flaunting Premiership GangRapists can, when the occasion demands, dive to the ground in the penalty area with spectacular shrieks and grimaces of imagined injury and foul play. It's the modern game, say the pundits, a professional foul;  a what?  Do fuck off.

 Mr Wayne Potato attempts primitive communication with his team-mates.
Why don't we all fuck the same tart, together like, all at the same time?
Teambuilding, that's what that is.
And if she complains we can set the lawyers on her.

But despite all the pain  that professional sportspersons suffer, searching the North Sea for fish fingers  on a trawlerboat, working on a building site or going down a fucking mine remain the most dangerous occupations, alongside, that is,  working for Uncle Sam in Afghanistan. And then relying on charity for your maimed, invalid  lifelong support, stress on the second syllable, inVALid;  well, come on, really now, if they were valid citizens,  or valued, like, say, Neil Kinnock, there wouldn't need to be an annual - these days all-year-round -  begging festival, just to get them back on their feet, those as still   has feet, that is, see Ishmael passim.


Now Look. Members of the armed forces are all in this together, too.
Just like the rest of you.

I read that CallHimDave's chums in the hallowed, wealth creating circles of Bizness hope to cop three hundred billion in reconstruction fees, three hundred billion, after the rest of us paid a half a billion to destroy Libya,  objectively, to protect the citizens, well, the puppet citizens anyway. I suppose a billion or two  of that profit for NewLegs4Tommy'd be out of the question, fat fucking chance, Georgie boy's chums at  Vodafone won't even pay the tax they owe in the first place. Six billion they got away with.

MORE HOW TO SPEAK COALITION
by Mr George Osborne.

Let's be clear, this govament was elected to deal with the defecit.

Mr Nick Robinson, the govament's political editor

If you say so, Chancellor.
And could I just present you with this present as a token of my esteem?

That's more like it.  I hope it's solid gold;
currency's fucking worthless.

  And anyway, the directors'  boards'll  all be packed full of retired British politicians, probably even Gay Dr Fox, all needing to fill their boots.  No, charity's the thing, obviously, not taxation.  A job for that insufferable cunt,  Wogan, below.

Or His Serene Highness, Prince Gormless,

he's a bit of a poppy-waver, and a part-time pilot, when he's not too busy on holiday, which, like his father,  is most of the time.

Or any of the shameless fucking parasites,  they all love talking about Tommy, just as long as it doesn't cost them anything. What I struggle with is how Tommy allows himself to get roped into all this shit, why doesn't he just mutiny until he gets a guarantee of proper lifetime care if injured on duty?  What the fuck is the matter with him? Doesn't he know how much we pay Peter Mandelstein and Tony Blair, for the rest of their pampered lives? The lure of Celebrity, in many cases, I suspect, obscures what should be a simple decision to go on strike. Or maybe shoot a few of their senior officers.

By the right, quick Karaoke.
The Soldiers, number five in the topten,
singing to raise money for wounded soldiers.
How very Napoleonic Warsish.

  Not as though Ahmed in Kabul is actually, as Field Marshal Gordon Snot warned us, a hair's breadth from  hosing-down Wolverhampton High Street with a load of Kalshnikovs.  And why should he bother, when we send him out plenty of fresh teenage children to eviscerate?  The natural consequence of all this forces showbiz shit  is for people to say, Well Company Sergenat Major, if you can raise a half a million quid just by making a record, then you don't need my fifty pee for a Poppy.....And while you're at it, do you think you could just raise your own wages, you know, as I said, while you're at it.
But I came to talk about boxing and the myth of celebrity.

Two large, extremely fit athletes, fit to the nth. degree,  knocking fuck out of  and hoping to stop each other's  senses and vital organs is a sporting encounter of a whole other order, both incomprehensibly stupid and eye-wateringly courageous.

Who you callin' nigger, nigger?

I've  never seen one, except on the box, which isn't really seeing it at all, knowwarramean'Arry. I don't know if I could watch one, a heavyweight one, at any rate, but it might be somewhere in my hundred things to consume before dying.

Like many of my astonishingly stupid peace and love generation I had my early, well,  teen and twenty,  opinions formed, not, as I believed, by some angelic,  anarchic fraternity writing an underground press -  all those people are millionaires now, or billionaires, or living out in LA, - not by sitar-plucking androgynes, nor by radical priests and psychiatrists but  by all the usual shitmongers,  the same rabid opportunists as have been cutpursing and catchpennying since Mediaeval times, buy my Plague pies, pilgrim,  God's Blood, they're most satisfying, and only a farthing, three for an a’penny, every little ‘elps.

The vague beat-protest-hippy pseudo movement of the fabled 'sixties fragmented, of course, into all sorts of disputatious and counter-productive splinter movements -  I can come back to why they were counter productive, if, that is,   a glance at the current, massive, EU coups d’etats, Western wars of economic occupation and energy crises and Earthcrimes are insufficiently demonstrative of the comprehensive failure of My my my m-my my  generation, baby. Three times my generation voted for Bloody Thieving Tony and Imelda Blair. It was probably the sight of him carrying a Fender Strat into Downing Street wot done it.

Pete Nose, incidentally, librettist, composer, editor, drug addict,  child pornography researcher and leader of the Oo, is up on his ancient hind legs again, berating this or that aspect of new technology for it’s failure to continue adequately  rewarding he and countless other jumped-up layabouts for their artistic achievements, as though what the world needs is an infinite sucession of posturing egomaniacs like himself,  artistically worthless and obscenely overpaid; this wanker' Townshend'd be a little more bearable if he'd actually said to Old Bill, No, fuck off with your caution for kiddie porn, charge me - 

Right, Pete, human morality and social justice.


there was Black Power and Gay Power, WomenPower and GreenPower, all swiftly and seamlessly absorbed into mainstream commerce, enriching all concerned,   New Publishing, NewMusic, NewCinema; worse, coarser than the old, but just as profitable. Steven Fry, the new Oscar Wilde,  Alan Sugar the new PT Barnum, only vile and cruel,  nasty and vicious, a barrowboy gob without restraint,  finally found his metier, not that he'd know what a metier is, getting paid for bullying people;  Steve Odd  Jobs the new Henry Ford;  I, like most people in the world, have  never had an iThing in my life, fuck me, Jesus, however do I manage, here, in consumer purgatory?

If you watch daytime teevee, and it is, trust me,  an education - for one thing,  the war channels will lead you to  the conclusion that the German nation should have been permanently dismantled after the Nazi Terror, even the good Germans, which ninety nine per cent of them of course were, just a few of them doing all that industrial scale atrocity shit, Liebschen.  And given  their extensive criminal record, why don't we just take all their money off them now, and spread it around among ourselves?  Eh, what would Frau Trousers think of that scheissen?

I mean, we could just steal all their shit off them, build another wall around all of them,
and sell them food at extortionate rates, maybe experiment on their children a bit.

But anyway, if you do watch daytime teevee, about every eight minutes you’ll see an old greyhaired gentleman

And you get a free biro, just for signing away a portion of you pisspoor pension.

trying to frighten his fellow elderly citizens into buying a worthless, funeral expenses insurance policy.  He’s a multi-multi-millionaire, having spent a whole lifetime sucking, in one medium or another,  on Celebrity’s cock. His fellow Northerner, the late Sir Jimmy Nightmare, at least raised some money for charity, and the still extant Sir Bruce Fawsyth, although having spent his early career grovelling at the feet of Sammy Davies junior and others can at least sing a dance. A bit. But our man's schtick, on which he built a four-decade career consisted of variations on a theme of:   Mr Bob Hope, I think I have covered, for our delighted viewers, most of the ways in which you are wonderful but I wonder, would you kindly tell us,  in your own words, about some of the other ways in which you are outstandingly magnificent;  Ms Angie Dickinson, you must have had some famous suitors, tell us about them,  Mr Billy Connolly, tell us one of your extremely funny jokes, one about, what is it you call them, Bobbies, Jobbies? And Mr Cassius Clay or Mr Mohamed Ali,

 as I believe you now call yourself and nothing wrong with that, perhaps you’d recite one of your very clever, if I may say so, poems.

The Michael Parkinson Show, along with the A Life In The Day feature, in the back of the Sunday Times Colour Supplement, these were the dawn of celebrity culture,  of the charting of fame, per se; these were the somewhat shocking days when showbiz Gods stepped down from screen and stage and shared their wonderful lives with us,  American stars, coyly baring their arses for Parky's energetic tongue; Cleo Laine, writing, or having ghost-written, in the ST, a page of snooty, self-serving drivel about life in the Laine-Dankworth household -  I remember that the vastly over-rated  chanteuse had trouble with staff, couldn't get them, it seems. And was struggling with jazz renderings of Shakespeare's sonnets.  It was heady stuff, how celebrity lived,  a long way from OK and Hello magazines, but it was their precursor;  I think the ST editor was future Murdoch lickspittle, Andy Jock Neil, who certainly hasn't lost his fascination with shallow celebrity.

Parky's journalistic raison d'etre fecal was that he was from Up North, and in some imaginary childhood of deprivation his woeful, jambutty and rickets British way of life had been transformed by Hollywood stars, larger than life, in some flickering Odeon or Gaumont and By 'Eck, now that he had a chance to lick them arses nowt'd stop him.

How we watched from the other side of the screen as Yul Brynner, for instance,  boasted of his innumerable achievements, his mastery of languages, of dance, of athletics, of the guitar, of remorseless self-promotion;  we thought this was true grit, unaware that like dinner plates on sticks in an ailing Variety act, we were being fervently spun by the infotainment industry.  Others soon followed, chat-showing, Des O'Connor, Swinging London's Simon Dee, Terry Wogan,   eventually the format reinvented itself in the form of poor, mad,  loony witch, Caroline Ahearn,

Mrs Merton her nightmare baggage, Coronation Street on bad brown acid,  and then  that awful motormouthing lawyer, Clive Davis, what a cunt.



The essence remained the same, though, promotion of the latest book or record or film, in exchange, generally,  for a wee bit of banal chitchat.  There is also, of course, a gaggle of  presenters, skilled in the cheap black art of goading the inept, of further damaging the damaged, Jerry Springer was the leader of the pack, followed by the sanctimonious, simpering Trisha, dangerous if employed as Community Psychiatric Nurse, apocalyptic on National TeeVee and then  there's the  monstrous Jeremy Kyle - regular readers will know that we are opposed to capital and corporal punishment, but I could suspend my judgement to watch this man beaten to death, over, say seventy-two  hours;  hard not to think that he's an agent of skymadeupnewsandfilth, engaged  in the ruination and capitulation  to ShitCorp of the entire nation.  The States has studiosfull of chatarses, notably our own Mr Piers Moron, who manages, nevertheless, to get in deep with the stars every week or so, here, in Blighty, a true moron for our times.

Back then, though, we thought all that stinky, watery shit,  the celebrity chat, was truly revelatory, well, I did, anyway, as it splattered around the toiletbowl of my consciousness. And I remember watching Mohamed Ali on Parky.  A great man, I thought, bold, witty  and intelligent.  When he described the white man as his enemy, I almost cheered, that's how dumb I was.  Wasn't he a draft dodger, too? And the way he danced around in the ring, that was magic, that was, for a negro to do all that.  That was showing them.

And that, I am ashamed to say, has, remained, more or less, my opinion of the young Cassius  Clay.  At least it was, until Joe Frazier died and I became, belatedly,  refreshed by the truth of the matter.

Aside from training,  gabshiteing and the occasional fight, Cassius Clay Mohamed Ali  never did a day's proper work in his life, he was groomed for the Olympics and after winning there he just moved from one huge paycheck to another,  there was a hiatus, of course, when he was stripped of his license to fight after declining Uncle Sam's invitation to IndoChina, where he could have  joined in the killing of  three million, roasted some gook children, thrown some suspects out of Huey helicopters and fucked up the forests for decades to come, defending Freedom at home and abroad;
Frazier, on the other hand, was nigger trash from Carolina, who started working in the fields at the age of seven, never had an education and took up fighting in Philadelphia in order to feed himself. He didn't go to 'Nam because he was  then a father, but always said that if called on by his country he would've. As he evaded the Draft, Ali was cute enough, and by this time being micromanaged and scripted by the Nation of Islam's capo, Elijah Mohamed, to get himself declared a conscientious objector, without having to flee, as did so many, to a  cold Canada. Elijah Mohamed wrote  the winning phraseology, No VietCong never called me a Nigger; Why should I go halfway around the world and kill other brown folks, which resonated globally and as war popularity waned, endeared Ali to the Peace Movement. The records and testimonies of those present indicate that, rather than a free spirit who had just found Allah, Ali was, body and soul, Elijah Mohamed's bitch. But  ironically, it was Frazier who prevailed upon Tricky Dicky, then president, successfully petitioning him to restore Ali's fighting license, and Frazier who had bunged Ali substantial sums, as his income dried-up.

Fit to fight again, Ali faced Frazier  three times, in each fixture sharpening the taunts which, once amusing,  were now hateful.  Despite Frazier's quiet, fraternal  support in his dark hours, Ali, in his fashion, insisted on calling him an Uncle Tom. He was not a cosy liberal by any means, a Republican and unfashionable among the cognoscenti, but Frazier was by no means an Uncle Tom. Enraged by Ali's cheap taunts, in their first match, at Madison Square garden Frazier, in what became known as the Fight of the Century,  nearly dismembered the favourite, the wisecracking jive-ass, showy Black muslem.  Afterwards Ali, despite his thorough beating at Frazier's hands  screamed fix! The ref and judges were white and had sided with the Uncle Tom. The press, of course, rolled with their gobby darling and a swift rematch saw Ali beating  a then lacklustre Frazier. The ref and judges, this time, according to Ali, were still his enemy but had managed to deliver the correct decision, despite being whites.

Their final fight was the mythical Thrilla in Manilla, in October 1975. Ali, the hypocrite,  pious and sanctimonious about marriage publicly, had jumped at the opportunity to take his new mistress out of the States, away from his wife.  But at home his wife was watching teevee coverage of the event as Ali and his bint were received with What a beautiful wife you have, Mr Ali,  by President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Cherie.
 

President Tony and Imelda Marcos,
corrupt, greedy dictators and unlikely boxing promoters.

The rightful Mrs Ali was on the first  jet out to Manilla and gave the Champ a swift rub-down with a thick copy of the Holy Koran.


Ali's fun, this time, which nearly killed him  - and may well have caused the illnesses from which he has suffered for decades - was to rhyme Gorilla with Manilla, dressing in a Gorilla suit and repeatedly slapping a Gorilla doll, as though Frazier was a Gorilla, a uniquely black-on-black insult. Ali, pampered, spoiled,  theatrical,  over-confident,  forever thinking that he was clever, woefully understimated the blitzkrieg he was storing up for himself inside the muscled rage of former field nigger, Frazier.

Ali took the first few rounds but thereafter Frazier punished him without mercy;  the ref, a Japanese, also halted Ali's customary dirty trick of holding opponents by the back of the neck and the ensuing rounds are breathtaking,  the amount of punishment absorbed by both fighters is beyond imagining, Frazier, for instance, pummelling Ali's hips, in order to raise massive, immobilising haematomas, stop his fucking dancing around, thumping him time after time in the heart, the liver nad the kidneys, to cause swelling and internal bleeding.  But by the fourteenth round Frazier's right eye was nearly closed by Ali's repeated left hooks, he was almost blind, anyway, in the left eye and his trainer, fearful that he would be killed, and much against Joe's own wishes, threw in the towel unaware that Ali was unable or unwilling to come out for the last round, having told his corner team that he felt he was dead;  a few premature seconds had cost Frazier the fight which he would otherwise surely and deservedly and justly won. As Ali was declared the winner, he collapsed on the floor and lay there immobile for minutes, Frazier, meantime, dancing angrily around the ring and vivacious at the ensuing press conference was every inch the winner. Only he wasn't.

The bad blood rightly continued for decades. And as Ali slid into Parkinson's disease and a role in the States as,

well, I don't know what, some sort of avuncular, wheezing has-been, Frazier continued to train fighters in his gym


and at every opportunity reminded folks that
You see that man, 
Ali,


 you see what's wrong with him, I did that to him,
don't float like no fuckin' butterfly no more.

I don't know if there was some fearful, last minute rapprochement between two of the best fighters in boxing  history. But I do hope not.

ROYAL WEDDING NUMBER TWO. WE RATE THE OUTFITS. FROM OUR ROYAL EDITOR, NICK SLAG, IN HMP WORMWOOD SCRUBS.

 Mr & Mrs PotatoHead, cantering down the aisle.

 DO YOU, ZARA, TAKE THIS OIK TO BE YOUR LAWFUL SCRUM-HALF?

DO I?  NOT 'ALF, GIDDY-UP.

Miss Pippa Arse unfortunately  was not present when Zara, daughter of bad-tempered old slapper, Anne and that dopey,  stuttering buffoon, Mark Philips, wed her stable lad. Probably too common for Anne, is Pippa.  The Princess Royal - fuck me, Jesus but  there is an infinity of titles these fuckers award themselves - is famously snooty,  tight-fisted, randy  and up her own arse, rather like her late Aunt, the dipso, Margaret, indeed, Anne's  mother,  Queen Tupperware,  is hardly known for her benevolence, except with my money, to herself and her kin.

The rest of the riff-raff were there, though, for a night-before party on the former Royal Yacht Britannia, a wedding in a sealed-to-the-public Edinburgh kirk and a piss up from a vodka fountain in Holyrood House, one of Brenda's Northern palaces.  The rugby player groom was supported by stars from that sweaty firmament, Lawrence Coke Dealer Dalallio among them and the Firm was out in force, Brenda and Phil the Greek, Mr and Mrs Prince Gormless

SENIOR MEMBERS OF THE BOARD OF FREELOADERS INTERNATIONAL,

RELAXING AT A PREVIOUS KNEES-UP AND TAKING THE AUSTERITY PISS.

The Royal Wedding Group in the Throne Room at Buckingham Palace on 29th April 2011 with the Bride and Groom, TRH The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in the centre.

Front row (left to right): Miss Grace van Cutsem, Miss Eliza Lopes, HRH The Duke of Edinburgh, HM The Queen, The Hon. Margarita Armstrong-Jones, Lady Louise Windsor, Master William Lowther-Pinkerton.

Back Row (left to right): Master Tom Pettifer, HRH The Duchess of Cornwall, HRH The Prince of Wales, HRH Prince Henry of Wales, Mr Michael Middleton, Mrs Michael Middleton, Mr James Middleton, Miss Philippa Middleton.

and the Young Conservatives were represented by  Prince Harry Hewitt,  the famous drunken Hooray Henry bastard

 I COME FROM A BROKEN HOME AND A DISFUNCTIONAL ROYAL FAMILY.
THE TORTURED YOUNG WARRIOR, ANXIOUS TO BE OUT SHOOTING WOGS.
FROM A SAFE DISTANCE.

who delighted crowds by stumbling up the gangway of Britannia, before the Sun was over the yardarm. Six thousand fans, as the Scotsman described the assembled Edinburghian dimwits, cheered and applauded as they were excluded from the happy couple's happy day.  No doubt there were congratulations from Wisteria House and the head office of MoribundBrothersRUs,

LABOUR'S ROYAL FAMILY SEND THEIR CONGRATULATIONS.

I SIMPLY SAY THAT IF PRINCESS DIANA WAS ALIVE SHE WOULD WANT ME TO BE PRIME MINISTER.

NO, SHE'D WANT ME.

AND IF THERE IS ANY EVIDENCE OF MY COMPLICITY IN TORTURE WE MUST ROOT IT OUT AND COVER IT UP.

 praising the great work these shameless gold-diggers do on behalf of horse riders  everywhere,  and, indeed, the Olympics, which were, let us not forget, secured for Britain by a Labour Govament, led by someone we have all completely forgotten about and in fact never knew or worked for, below.

LABOUR'S TONY BLAIR TAKES OLYMPIC GOLD 

IN THE MASS MURDER, TORTURE AND GANGRAPE TRIATHLON.

His Royal Highness, Andy, Duke of York, friend and employee of child molesters and coke-snorting Arab playboys,

I KNOW OF A GREAT HOUSE, I CAN LET YOU HAVE IT FOR THREE MILLION OVER THE ASKING PRICE. AND YOU CAN FUCK MY EX-WIFE, FOR A FEW QUID.

FIFTEEN GRAND'LL DO IT, CHEAP FOR A FAT DUCHESS.

PRINCESS FERGIE, DRUNKEN EX-ROYAL FOR HIRE, HOURLY RATES

OR ALL NIGHT.

was there but his former wife, the greedy, idle fuckpig,  author, tireless charity worker and all around slag, Ferguson, was absent, maybe she was deemed too rotten, even for a gathering of the rottenest. Fat Andy, probably still piqued at having to sack himself from all those junkets around the world was attended, instead, by his daughter, Beatrice, Princess Freeloader.

Under pressure from, well, nearly everybody apart from his private clients, the disgraced duke has proclaimed grandly that he was thinking of giving up his lucrative pimping career anyway and has decided that now is the right time to move on and undertake fresh challenges, the cheeky cunt .  This disgusting arsehole is said to be Queen Brenda's favourite son, still, what with the petulant fairy, Edward and the greedy, idle, sticky-fingered, ski-ing fornicator, Brian, the tight-fisted, creepy old crow isn't exactly spoiled for choice in the sons department.

And as for Granny, the HM part of HM Govament, she retains her customary self-protective silence as, in the form of Old Etonian layabout, Oliver Letwin, Her Govament is now openly boasting that working people need to  have fear instilled, need to be worried about their employment. It is a kind of a New Victorianism which the Toffs' cabinet promotes, only without the invention, the resources of Empire, the skills of artisanry and the markets of the globe, a Clarksonian Britain, of stupidity, vanity, greed and corruption.  If we are to meet Mr CallHimDave's expectations of us in the Great New Age of Coalition Austerity;  many must lose their jobs, insists his idleness, Letwin,  if productivity and quality of outcomes are to be maintained in the public services - only not among the politicians or the bankers or the very wealthy, like this  ridiculous shower of slime, cardboard cut-out  princesses and princes in comic opera uniforms,  Christ, no, certainly bloody not. The Royals, and the News of the World, they're the concrete which holds the nation together. Off with their fucking heads would be my sentiment, up against the wall, motherfuckers.

But in Ruin's Britain,  providing a spectacle of extravagance,  unmerited privilege and ostentatious contempt, the second in a few months,  the House of Windsor-Saxe-Coburg-Battenberg, via its extended network of benefits claimants, courtier pimps, panderers and shamelessly enthusiastoc arselickers can be deemed productive; showy Ruritaniasm for the Sun-reading imbecile is, after all, a form of public service.  Maybe good Queen Brenda, never one to upset Her Govament, not even in the face of an unprecedented  and unmandated attack on the rights and living standards of millions of her subjects, can add to the happiness of this sporty couple, Zara and Wotsisname,  by giving the young couple, to the nation's tumultuous delight,  a county or two, she cannot have used them all up on Prince Gormless's recent wedding. Or maybe she can, but she can always declare some new ones, always enough money for Royal Dukes and Earls and Princesses, just the poor and the sick should go to the wall,  the best people must retain their tiaras and palaces,  their Chipping Norton mansions.

Along with bent  senior cops and bent senior politicians in the pay of skymadeupnewsandfilth, the regular jamborees, jubilees, tours, birthdays, ski-ing holidays and weddings of this filthy gang of Greco-German slag  upstarts must comfirm our image, abroad, as the most Northerly banana republic in the world. God save the Queen, Brenda, her heirs and successors.


THE HEIR PRESUMPTIOUS, PRINCE NEDDY SEAGOON.

show moreOne is conscious that one is all in this thingy together. Only not this one.

Yes, the medals and sashes, grand aren't they, one won them. Off one's mother.