NOTHING TO GROUSE ABOUT

MIDWINTER

This birdbloke has been marching around the garden for about three years now, looking very pleased with himself;  

 

 he is lucky that  he is not in the grounds of some of my fellow ex-pats, where  he would have been blasted to inedibility  - why do all the nutters have shotgun certificates? - hung up for a week or so, nonetheless, and his hard, bluey flesh roasted and  rhapsodised over; it really is fucking awful, grouse, better off having some of poultry's  lips, eyes  and gizzards, recycled so successfully  McDonalds.

I'm always pleased to see this chap, strutting, his redbrest stuck out,  but he's some way away from the house and I have never managed to snap him, if, indeed, it is the same him.  He may live in the garden somewhere, he may fly over the wall, although he doesnt look as though he does much flying. When I first spotted him I bought a camera tripod, thought I'd set it up, zoomed-in and ready but it just gathered  dust and I can't, therefore,  tell people Oh, and I keep grouse on my land, well, I can't show them a photo, at least I couldn't.  But I can, now.

 

 

Harris, on his first meeting with mr grouse, treed him, 

like a good boy does and would have killed him if possible;  he now knows that he has  a grouse or two at the back of the house, as well as rabbits, hares and hedgehogs and a fluctuating population of cats at the front,  to keep him on his toes.

We were lucky, he is a very good boy,  the most obedient Yorkie we have had, a firm word is all he usually needs,  he has been  trained to start  sort-of whirling when he needs to go out, or drawing attention to his lead and  he has learned several new words, he is a quick study;  he is very affectionate, very boisterous, bright-eyed and  mischievous.  He obviously comes from a good home, his luggage was full of good quality dogbloke stuff, leads and harnesses -  that he had a shoulder harness was good, in itself  - the best that money could buy, his bowls and blankets the same. He is easy to feed, scoffing three or four sachets a day of Caesar. Oh, and a salad sandwich, some Scotch Broth and he is particularly fond of trifle, which he is not allowed, much.  The vetbastard says he's fine, although you can see that by looking at him, and keepng the fifty quid. He just comes and flops firmly beside one's thigh, drops his head in one's lap, sighs and goes to sleep.  Can't want more from a warrior lapdog.

Even so, tree-ing the grouse was the first blog-worthy thing he had done;  he can't get in here just because he's a dog,  a bit more to it than that, if he wants to be the hereditary blogdog. Can't just walk into the job, he's not the Prince of Wales, now, is he?

With Harris's coming we are seeing a bit more of the garden than is usual in Winter. Here, in the land of the Midnight Sun, the seasons are more pronounced than down South, well, Winter and Summer are, not quite endless days in June and not quite endless nights in December.  They are not exact opposites,  there is an hour or two, in summer's wee,  small hours  of twilightish gloom, between 2.00 am and 4.00  but since one is normally asleep between those hours and unaware of them, the daylight seems  endless.  In even the depth of winter it is light between 9.00 am and 3.00 pm,  you can get out and about in the light, if you're quick about it; it can be strange, though,  often the low, wintry Sun is  harsh and electric, almost drawing a pencil line around things.  

In summer we cannot see through these branches to the Sound, beyond.

  

This avenue of whitebeam, too,
 normally completely  obscures the house.   

    

And beyond here, come Spring,
 will be a thousand new daffodils, I keep saying to mrs i,
 shoulda been two thousand, five thousand.

 There are masses of evergreens but not on the visual borders 

and in winter it's as though we are stripped bare.

I am not bothered about people being able to see in, 

there aren't any.

 It's being able to so easily see out that unsettles me.

In less than a fortnight, however, Earth will tilt again and we will hurtle into Summer;  nothing MediaMinster can do about that.

WOTSONTELLY. THE GREATEST DEAD LIVING HUMAN BEING. ALL CHANNELS, ALL THE TIME.

  Just you keep on bombing those nigger children, Barry, my dear friend.

I will, Nelson, I certainly will, wherever they are, I'll rain hot shit down on their little nigger heads. 

Tonight, my gfellow motherfuckers, I feel the world's pain,  the world's loss.  Every innocent child I ever killed, every village I bombed;  every raghead niggerbastard I tortured, Nelson was my inspiration.

Christ almighty, things are tough, you turn on PBC 1 and it's Tony Blair, pontificating to his former biographer and personal arselicker, Jon Sopel,  about Nelson Mandela;

 

  Just you keep on bombing those nigger children, Tony, my dear friend.

I will, Nelson, I certainly will, until my dying day, if I can.  There's always plenty of wars to commission, for the right price.

As you know, Jon,  Nelson was a great personal friend and an inspiration to all of us in the war stroke torture business.  That'll be twenty-five thousand pounds, please.

PBC2 has former Cairngorms National Park snowshoes monitor and utter cunt, Danny Alexander, telling the fuckwits in the QT studio that they gotta work until they drop, it's the right thing for the country. Because of all the debt, you know,  the debt that's  that's really all your fault.  For voting Labour, all those years.  It was very naughty of you and you must all take your share of the blame. And it doesn't help to blame the bankers.

 For whom I wish to work, when I leave govament, which will be very soon, one way or another.  And anyway, I took a paycut when I came into govament.  Not a paycut, actually  I took a massive taxpayer-funded rise, but in a spirit of all-in-it-togetherness declined a couple of per cent of it,  which, luckily, I can retrieve through my exes.  And now, like most people in the snowshoes hospitality industry, I bump along on  about three grand a week. so I won't take any lectures on living in the real world.  I thought somebody'd run up to him and punch him in his fat, horse-shitting, ginger face

How on Earth can it be that someone like Alexander is in goverment, what happened, is this the vengeance  of Gordon Snot, his bloodied,  nail-bitten claws of Doom directing our affairs by default,  bequeathing us a poltroon like  Danny Boy; how bad do things have to be before someone like Alexander gets to work in the fucking Treasury and the entire nation doesn't die from laughing -  Darling, get me an ambulance, this comedian's on again, he'll kill me, he will, talkimg through his arse, like that,  he hasn't a fucking clue, has he, babbling away there.  

And   the greatest living human being is finally dead.  It's not often, only once, in fact, that I have agreed with the dreadful Whisky Maggie.  Nelson Mandela, like Gerry Adams and Marty Kneecaps,   was a terrorist and it's not  in Tony Blair's gift  or anyone else's gift to unterrorist any of them. Nelson Mandela might have been a terrorist in a good cause, but they all say that, don't they, people who plant bombs?  Apartheid  was a shit system.  But now that it's run by black bastards instead of white bastards does that make it OK? 

 Is it OK, now,  for black cops to shoot unarmed black miners, just because Mandela is out of jail?

 

 Was it OK for blacks, inspired by Mandela's former Mrs, to burn other blacks to death? 

 

 

 

It can't be wrong, because Mrs Mandela has never been sent to jail for inspiring the mass immolation of her opponents, or the beating  to death of her schoolboy soldier, Stompie; party animal, Nelson, has never condemned her,  he  won't now.

Tutu, Archbishop Gob

And why is it the right of this gobby little prick to forgive all these monsters, black, white and brown? Truth and Reconciliation, horseshit,  no business like showbusiness

And is it OK, in Nelson's Rainbow Paradise, for black cops to drag a black to his death, obscenely, handcuffed to the back of their truck?

Never mind, Nelson, fancy another glass of champagne with Naomi Campbell, some bent diamonds, perhaps, blood diamonds, they're called, dunno why, must be the colour.

 

 Bob Geldof and David and Victoria Beckham are coming to party with you  tomorrow. And President Spunky Bill,  they all dig you.

 People of South Africa, I feel your tits, I mean pain,

aw, shucks y'all know what  I mean, you black folks're cleverer than we give you credit for. Right, who's got the cocaine?

And where is the progress in the fact that Nelson's party, the ANC, is a bunch of thieving, murdering, anti-democratic  bastards, every bit as bad as the former ruling regime, South Africa, today, is a dangeroulsy violent shithole, corrupt from top-to-bottom

de Clerk, unseating himself.

What is it, then, Mr de Wotsit, that a president actually does?

 

It's axiomatic that politiciasn, even amateurs, like Mandela, will rewrite history in the flaming tail lights of their own dazzling comet.  In the matter of the so-called Cold War, Thatcher bathed in the mad, stuttering  comedian, Reagan's starlight, as he awarded himself imaginary Oscars for bringing down the Berlin Wall.  It was as though Gorbachev, Change's bold instigator, had played no part in that momentous period.  FW de Clerk, the man who released Mandela and vounteered the end of white minority rule, has been Gorbacheved.

I was and remain sceptical about Mandela's greatness, upon what is it based, lots of people go to jail;   if it is a matter of him serving quite a time in jail, well, here at home we have Harry Roberts, who has served nearly fifty years in jail, despite being given a recommendation of thirty years, for killing some cops, an act of criminal terrorism if ever there was one.  There is no forgiveness, no celebrity, no hope for Harry,  Harry's never going to be prime minister, no matter how well prison qualifies him for the job, as it did Mandela.  I don't know how many people the early ANC killed, how many cops, but unlike as in poor old Harry's case, in the end it didn't matter.

If it is suggested that Mandela sprang from jail with a well-rehearsed plan for a new nation, well, that's bollocks, as is the very idea of placing in charge of a vast, troubled nation a man who had been banged-up away from society for decades,  I mean,  who in their right mind'd do that shit.  Oh Yeah, I wanna be governed by that bloke who's been looking at four walls  and wanking himself off for thirty years.  Of course it didn't happen, did it, how could it,  the great statesman could ony ever have been a marionette figurehead, bleating about peace and love, what the fuck would he know of running a country. No, fronting-up a ganster take-over, that was his game  And having parties, always with the parties, President Mandela

And if it is the suggestion that the people of South Africa no longer live in insanitary townships, brutalised by cops, 

 

well, one would have to argue that in many ways - save for the enfracnhisement of people who are expected to vote only for the ANC - South Africa is worse now than it was when Nelson Mandela was in prison.  I don't know, I haven't visited but that's the way it seems, a nasty shithole for most, a paradise for a few wealthy people of all races, including the Mandela franchise-hungry family.                   

N'kose sikelele, Africa, my arse.

A lazy, stupid and  corrupt  MediaMinster will feast on this for days, maybe weeks, the PBC will fly a regiment of gobs to Jo-burg and  send seaoned corespondents up-country, so's we don't miss anything; it'll be as though Christ was ascending to Heaven. Mr Tiny Speaker will declare the whole house in mourning for God's giggling, black messenger,  for GlobaCorp's willing stooge. 

And the black childen will still die for lack of an aspirin, a dressing or a glass of water;  the black children will still be burned by Freedom's sticky, clinging napalm and the black children will continue to be batoned and macheted by their elders, as the UN sighs wearily  and  rifles the petty cash.

Move along, now, nothing to see here,
bread and circuses is all.

                                                               

HIGH WATER RISING

We have extreme weather forecast, here, in the North.  The worst storm since 1995 is predicted to peak at 2.00 am on Thursday.  There is a shitload of stuff - galeforce winds, rain, blizzards and encroaching seas - a tidal surge.  I wasn't here in 1995 but sat up all night through a really bad blow - 125 mph at times - in, I think, 2002, it was magnificently awful, we just had to sit it out.  

The council has its flood teams out and is anticipating that one of the coastal towns will be seriously flooded, requiring evacuation. These times are a pain, I look around the courtyard and the near gardens, spotting, everywhere, hazards which could be uplifted and dashed through a window, humping them indoors, pots and trays and ornaments.  I've been ill for months and let things go, a bit, well, I haven't,  I've just been incapacitated by surgery and narcotised a lot of the time  I haven't been near the big fuck-off truck since May, asked mrs i to go and fire it up in case we need to evacuate and the battery's flat. I have one of those brilliant new batterypack starter things, you know, the ones garages have,  but even now the wind is blowing too strongly to lift the bonnet,  the Citroen's in dock for a belt change and all we have in which to flee, if necessary -  mrs i, Harris and I - is the Smartcar, not much room for survival stuff. 

 I don't anticipate that the sea will reach us, it is close, a hundred and fifty metres, maybe, most of it flat but there is a step-up of a metre or two to  the house, so we should be alright, I mean, that's why the Vikings and then the Christians built here, we may well get some spray and some seaweed,  the bottom garden may be swamped and  the newly-planted thousand daffodil meadow  destroyed,  floated away, to Norway.  There is a ten-foot, metre-thick dry stone wall around the bottom garden. but I doubt that it's tidal-surge-proof. 

 This is a double gabled house with a valley in the roof,  the wind seems to find it's way through and around and over and the most that happens, usually, is that we lose a couple of slates, but if the roof goes,  that's it, job done,  the house'll be wrecked.  We lost a conservatory in the last big one and if this one is worse than that we may well lose both of them. It's not the conservatories,  so much - conservatories, Christ, it sounds like a stately home, it's not -  it's the contents,  the one has tools and tools and tools and tools and tools, cupboards full  to bursting with polishes, stains, waxes,  glues, fillers, sandpapers, pins, nails, screws, on and on and on,  all of it labelled and sorted and shelved and hung and drawered; potions and powders, gifted me by the oldboys when I was a newboy, weird litle tools, punches and clamps and things for bevelling.  I don't know what I'd do if I lost that lot.  It's not the money, it's just that it's, in a way, my lifetime's summit,  that collection of doingstuff.  I know that I can go and put my hand on nearly anything I might ever need;  being a man who can Do Things came late to me and it is  a status I treasure.

We might be flooded out, we might be blown down, everything lost;  shouting at each other through sheets of rain or snow, like in the movies.  The snow here, in blizzard, is amazing, hits you like  a burst from an  angel's Tommy gun, not lethal but painful, at a hundred miles an hour; getting in and out of  the car can be nigh on impossible, you can't  hardly shoulder the door open against the wind and once open, the wind, in an instant, will fold it backwards against the wing, or even rip it off.  

There will be power cuts, outages as we now, all men of the techie world, call them,  but we are well-, even over-prepared for them, in every respect save electricity, one of these days, one of these days, I must sort-out  some back-up, off-grid electricity, submarine batteries or something,  Forgive me, therefore, should I not respond to anyone kind enough to comment, normal service will be resumed.  It starts  to blow now, vast and thrumming, like God doing heavy breathing; angry rain and sleet enfilade the windows with rapid fire,  concentrated volleys of Nature's  chilly musketballs; hark, the herald demons sing.                

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 ouevre is pieced together from hazy memories of the book covers - well-filled jodphur bottoms, riding crops and stilleto 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 satidsfied 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 octagenarians 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.

CHOPPER UPDATE. LUVVIES FLY IN.

No, no, I love Glasgow, I really do,

it's just more practical for me to live in California.

 Is Judy no' here, my very, very dear friend Dame Judy Dench?  Mike, Michael Caine?  Tommy Cruise?  Sharon Stone. What?  This is nae a film, then? What the fuck am I doin' here, the noo,

 d'ye ken? Darling, does ma heid look big in this beard?

Och, it is a terrible tragedy, all they wee folk, oot fer a pint and gettin' kilt, but at least it's no' as bad as me having the bumcancer.  Och, well maybe we did cure it but somebody famous like me, having it and then no' havin' it,  that's worse, isnae it,  than one a they wee, poor nobody-cunts dyin' from it?  Disnae matter if one a they fuckers dies, or all of them, for that matter.  Is m'very, very, very dear friend Michael Parkinson no' here, sellin' his funeral insurance, he's missin' a very real opportunity, d'you no' think? Right, am away hame tae ma very, very dear wife, wotsername, my girrrrls and ma money.  (sings and makes plunk-plunking noise on banjo) 
Cal-i-forn-ia, here I come.......

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER STUDIES CONDOLENCE CARDS.

 

It's what I came into politics for, to tell lies, to be shifty and hypocritical, milk every opportunity which comes my way and then fuck off to Europe on a huge salary.  These dead people, it's a great tragedy for this great city of Birmingham

WHAT THE PAPERS SAY. ALL OF THEM. GAY NEWS.

YOUNG MAN WHO JUMPS IN WATER IS POOF.

                                      

 Diver comes out as perfectly normal, insufferable, self-publicising prick.  

This is all perfectly normal, say all the papers on pages 1,2,3,4,5,6, and editorials.  There is no story here, says skymadeupnewsandfilth,  the PBC, al Jazeera, Fox News and the rest of them, every hour on the hour.  All perfectly normal. 

For how being gay will improve Tom's jumping into the water, check out our sports section.  In our health supplement, Dr Raj Persaud, famous telly psychiatrist and crook will explain how this is all perfectly normal, as straightforward, says Raj, as stealing another writer's work and publishing it as one's own.

And our showbiz editor will learn from national treasure, Lady Sir Elton John,  the best places to buy children, should Tom and his partner wish to become perfectly normal young parents, in their sixties.  In young, normal Tom's honour,  Lady Elton and his husband, Mrs David Furnish, are considering re-writing their most famous song, Candle In The Arse  and calling it Candle In The Water.

In Downing Street, unelected prime minister, David Cameron, said that he, himself,  would be delighted to marry young Tom and his partner in  a normal same sex marriage on the lawn of Bummer Ten, I mean Number Ten.  Let's be clear, scowled the Old Etonian fuckwit, this sends out a clear message that people, news people, especially, should concentrate on rubbish like this, instead of scrutinising my govament proply.  Not that they do.

Readers with photographs of normal Tom and his normal partner may wish to submit them to the Editor. Preferably with their cocks out.   Top money paid, no questions asked     

EVENSONG. EMMYLOU HARRIS, SLUMMING IT.

Emmylou and her big Gibson, she could harmonise the sounds of the slaughterhouse.  Don't know about him, though; even if he's not unique  you have to admire him as a stylist, but he's hard to like; it's just that, in interviews, he does - if such a thing is possible - a low-key, downbeat  bombast,   an insistent, softly-spoken I-Know-Bestism.  Just becaue he's sold a  hundred and fifty million records and filled amphitheatres of adulation  all over the world.

This, I think, is the best of their rather pointless 2006 collaboration- Emmylou doesn't need to play with an ageing pub rocker, a bald ego from the days of the Compact Disc jamboree.  She brings the odd interesting   dish to the table,  he just eats everything up                                      

TIME IT WAS AND WHAT A TIME IT WAS.

PEOPLE TRY TO PUT US DOWN.  

It's the new Bogeyman, being mistreated in the care home  which is costing you your life's savings.  You worked all those years, just to be tortured to death by a poorly-paid, body-pierced, Polish lesbian working for a firm of healthcare cunts and

 probably owned, from a safe distance,  by a Tory MP and his wife. 

Government doesn't give a fuck,  they'd prefer you dead;  the cops don't give a fuck, they don't give a fuck about anything, worthless, lazy bastards; the CPS doesn't give a fuck,  they don't want to prosecute corporations, they want to work for them;  your relations don't give a fuck, you bred vile, selfish,  money-grubbing consumeristas,  they want you dead while you've still got some money to leave them;  how dare you have had a house, how dare you have had some savings, you are the fucking enemy within, you fucking old bastard, it's people like you that's been keeping bright young people down.  You don't deserve a drink of water.  What?  Clean you up, you dirty old git?  I'm a graduate, I don't do shit.

The Filth-O-Graph, today, reveals, as if it needed revealing, that  a thousand people have been thirsted to death in so-called care homes.  You have to laugh.  Don't you?

 

 I wonder how many of them, bleating, now, like sheep in the abbatoir,  voted for  Whisky Maggie's orgy of privatisation, maybe copped a few grand for themselves; how many of them voted  for the Tony&Cherie Blair Retirement Fund wars? 

 

 Now they,  themselves, their clamouring memories; their quivering frailties and multiple vulnerabilities;  their bright shiny loves and their dark, dirty  lusts;  their withering stalks and their dusty blooms;  their entire beings,  the precious distillation of their three-score and ten years;  all the matters and opinions and experiences to which they amount are no more than irritating figures on a corporate balance sheet; their lives' gold transmuted to base metal by the spiv alchemy of the pinstripe Market;

  where have all the flowers gone?

Mrs ishmael's daughter stays now and again and  one of the first things she does is refresh  the  dogblokes' water bowls, she just does it, in passing, automatically;  she was never asked to do it, it was never her duty, it's just something  she does. 

 Makes you weep with  rage that employees paid to care for old people cannot or do not even manage to ensure them a glass of water; they and their employers should have all  their property confiscated and be set to hard labour,  they're good for fuck all else.

CHOPPER COPPERS. GLASGOW HELICOPTER BLUES

They must be made for insomniacs, like me, wasted on opiates and anti-convulsants, up all night, leaning on the windowsill.  I refer to the reality cop shows, doesn't matter if it's some 20-stone,   redneck sherrif in Arkansas, forcing an SUV ofF the road, YeeHaaing his dumbfuck head off  or some scrubbed and hair-gelled, bi-curious bobby in a BMW high-speed pursuit vehicle; 

 doesn't matter where in the world the action is taking place, the commentary will be by some snarling, unpardonably stupid, dribbling, cliche-mongering Geordie cunt who thinks that he's Clint Eastwood and that a speeding driver is up there, criminalogically-speaking,  witn the serial killers.

After watching a few of these dreadful shows  I concluded that car theft should no longer be a matter for the police.  It's a fucking outrage is what it is,  that there can be ten or twelve copcars and a helicopter engaged in the apprehension and recovery of a knocked-off Vauxhall Astra worth about a hundred quid,  be cheaper just to buy the owner a new car; twenty or thirty cops, their cars and a chopper engaged maybe for hours, just because some fucking shitbrained idiot couldn't be bothered to secure their rusty old banger.

RIGHT-RIGHT-RIGHT, VEHICLE IS TURNING RIGHT INTO DEPRIVATION CLOSE. STINGER IS DEPLOYED REPEAT STINGER IS DEPLOYED. VEHICLE IS CRASHED.  I REPEAT VEHICLE IS CRASHED. ROGER THAT.  I HAVE THE DRIVER. HE'S IN A GARDEN. I HAVE HIM ON THE THERMAL IMAGING CAMERA. 

ROGER THAT TANGO OSCAR BRAVO ALL UNITS ALL UNITS. HELO REPORTS THAT DRIVER  IS HIDING IN GARDEN. REPEAT, HIDING IN GARDEN. ALL UNITS APPROACH WITH CAUTION........

And they drag a scrawny fourteen year old out of a dustbin,  his rodent features pixillated-out and three of them on each of the little fucker's limbs. Job done.

These cops will have frightened the shit out of scores of motorists, the chopper whoop-whooping overhead and the searchlight will have disturbed or woken hundreds of innocent citizens and the costs will be in the thousands, maybe tens of thousands of pounds, junior might get some community service or a few momths in a young offenders institution and eventually the car owner will get his property returned. Oh, they hooked the keys off the hall table, through the letterbox,  with a long bit of something.  Oh, I didn't know I left the keys in it, I was just, just doing something.  Crooklok, no, why should I do that, car's got an alarm,  Disable the alarm?  I didn't know they could do that.

Now, if AstraMan was aware that he and  his thieving insurance company - and not, via the Old Bill, the rest of us - were  responsible for his motor, he would maybe fit a good immobiliser, maybe, if he was leaving it for a while, fit a clamp, too; he would just have to do whatever he had to do, or give up car ownership.  Simple.  It would only take a few instances of the cops saying Yer motor nicked, sorry, pal, none of my business, secured it, had you, move along now or I|'ll nick you.  Word would spread like wildfire, lock yer motor up tight, remove plugleads, switch off the fuel somewhere, fit a crooklok, they work.  And if you have a two hundred grand motor that a specialist thief might hoist up onto a trailer and ship out to Arabia then you can just pay some unemployed English graduate three quid an hour to sit in it, when you park it up, he can work on his master's while he's there,  or, most sensible of all, you could say to Mercedes, Listen, Herman,  unless you  make this car absolutely un-nickable I'm not gonna buy it.  I don't care how you do it, that's your problem.

But no.  Modern policing career opportunities dictate that life must replicate the movies and every fucking semi-literate yellow-jacket  must have the chance to discharge his Taser into some poor cunt with a heart condition, must be able to smack the legs out from under an innocent bystander, must be encouraged to fling some poor woman around the custody suite and most scandalous of all, must , as often as possible, blue'n' two his tyre-smoking way through built-up areas, often in pursuit of a tiny placcy bag of marijuana with a street value of Oh, seven hundred thousand pounds, maybe a million, when its cut with grass clipping, maybe two mill and best of all in high-speed, helicopter-supported pursuit of a stolen car which must inevitably run out of petrol and which, by any evaluation, is not worth the lives-endangering effort of this noisy cavalcade of the stupid, yapping at each in boys'talk jargon.

Coppers yuman  rights though, innit?  Goes with the job.  What is the matter with them.

A little sidebar with myself.  Being a Queen's constable is one of the most important jobs in the country;  why isn't it - at least - a graduate-entry-only profession? Why is it that a few weeks' training and a year's probation is seen as enough?  I'd sack 'em all and start again. 'Snot as though they prevent or solve any crime, not really,  there's just the same hundred thousand or so villains being recycled round the system  every last one of them invited to have scores of other offences, of which they know nothing,  TIC'd, taken into consideration with no added sentence, in order to improve clear-up rates.  Those cops not working for Murdoch or his equivalent are fencing recovered stolen property and drugs, running prostitues or providing intelligence to big-time gangsters.  Everybody knows this is the case,  knows that it is only the thin blue line which protects us from utter Decency.

Anyway, one fell from the sky over Glasgow, a chopper.  
 

Shouldn't have been there, in my opinion.  Why does nobody ask questions about this?  Are we at war? Is Glasgow like fucking Syria, all of a sudden, Lebanon, Somalia?  Do we gotta have some greater yellowjacket dickhead spying on our Saturday night.  Times are tough, tough choices, austerity;  do we want a helicopter menacing us from above or do we want  intelligent, dedicated  constables  coming from us,  being among us, being with us, of us?  Do we want law enforcement or do we want Mel Gibson?    

It doesn't matter a fuck what we want,  the copocracy just gets bigger, more criminal, less accountable and more useless.  I saw the new TopCop of the newly-unified ScottishMasonicPoliceService, he was commenting about the helicopter falling from the sky.

Chief Constable Gob.
That's Salmond, there, posing, on the right, and his  Justice seckatry, Kenny McShitferbrains,
wonder why they're there, perhaps gonna roll-up their sleeves, get doon wi' the dead.  Best not, eh, best leave it to Scotland's magnificent emergency services to whom I pay full tribute and which would be better were I GodEmperor of this great nation bla blah blah 

Looked like Princess Diana, he did, Chief Constable Gob,  schooled in faking doe-eyed sincerity  straight from central casting.  Shove it in their faces, give 'em what they want, PR at its best.

And the eye witnesses, seems like people school themselves, rehearse for just such an event, maybe there's a business opportunity, Let Us Coach You On What To Say, If You Are Ever Near An Accident, Catastrophe Or Neighburhood Murder.  They were all rich in simpering, self-depracatory gunge.  Just doin' what anyone'd do,  they chorussed, heroically, angelically, of their efforts in um....err....just doing what anyone'd do.  Make you fucking puke. 

 Jim Murphy was there, NewNewLabour defence shadow.  Gosh, all he did was what anyone'd do, but he did it with all the steel and insight and thoughtfulness of a lying, thievingbastard politician. 

No. y're alright, I can do as many interviews as you like, please.  No I'm done heroing, now that you're here,  the cameras, but I was only doing what any other happenstance hero'd do.
 
  I never understood the phrase turd-polishing until I saw Jim, the other night, now I do.

Get these fucking things down on the ground except for emergencies, proper emergencies, a stolen car is not an emergency and Saturday night is not alright for fighting.  Airborne police? Do fuck off. And do remove the cameras observing mr plod for some future, shoestring-budget, latenight teevee show;  he's too important for that, if he only but knew it.                   

ONWARD, UNCHRISTIAN SOLDIERS, EVERY LITTLE HELPS

A few years back I received a letter from the Salvation Army's missing person's bureau. Somebody,  they wouldn't say who,  was missing me, wanting to know where I was.  There wasn't anybody who didn't know where I was that I wanted to know where I was.  Anyone who knew me at all, would know where I was.  And anyone who simply knew my name would googlefind me in seconds;  even people in the Caribbean who didn't know my name were able to find me, or find my young friend, stanislav, who visted me, sometimes;  just a little research was all it took.  This person, then, who wanted to know where I was, was stupid, inept, without resource because they did know my name and address and date of birth;  that was another reason for not wanting them to be able to contact me;  I, none of us, are short of encounters with stupid people and having the brassbanders put me in touch with yet another one seemed to me to be decidedly, on their part, unfuckingChristian. 

Robert Anton Wilson counselled: Remember, before you go out of the door each day,  that ninety eight per cent of the people you are going to meet will be stupid assholes;  not sure how he arrived at the ninety-eight per  cent figure but it's near enough for jazz.

But it was a conundrum, how could anyone who knew my full name and current address and date of birth - with which they had  provided the SallyAnn -  need help in locating me?

The letter, signed  by a Major Rupert Golightly-Gospel, extolled the work of his Army in re-uniting estranged families and friends, the cheeky cunt.  He'd never met my family, obviously.  All I had to do was consent, own-up to being me, it's a fair cop, Major,  and some  cack-handed, confused imbecile would re-enter my life, doubtless to the glory of God, if not to the glory of me, Ishmael..

I ignored the letter.  Three or four more arrived and I ignored them.  Then one arrived from the DWP - Am I Ishmael M Smith? Yes of course I fucking well am, you know I am, you are fucking well writing to me, aren't you, you know my name, my address and my date of birth, don't you, what more do you want, you already have my national insurance number?  And if you are, you see, continued the DWP, the Salvation Army wanna talk to you.

I ignored that one, too, but wondered how the fuck these shinyfaced, tut-tutting, demented busybodies can manipulate a government department.

The letters continued to arrive, one every couple of months, until there was one which identified the seeker;  it was a person who knew me very well, knew where I was, had visited, had sat at this very laptop and needed only to pick up the telephone in order to contact me.

Their enlistment of God's Army is a mystery beyond my understanding and I can only assume that this entirely unnecessary and fraudulent  inveiglement added a frisson of drama to a straightforward estrangement. Too much Cruelty TeeVee.

I don't know what all this cost but this is where your collecting-tin money goes, in fucking nonsense, in employing sentimental half-wits like the Major and in badgering defenceless citizens, like me.  Fucking do-gooding bastards. The nerve of some people, who do they think they are, blundering about, interfering?  

The eventual self-identification of the seeker brought a relief for the letters had stirred painful and disturbing  memories, long subdued, of a different  person whom I had good reason to banish from my corner of reality.  You would, wouldn't you, on receipt of such an impertinent inquiry, scan your recycle bin of horror, thinking Who the Fuck is this,  what  ruinous chorus of complaint am I to hear now? There ought to be a law against this sort of thing.

 

But that's not the half of it. I was up in Tesco an hour ago,  I was outside with  the Harrisbloke and having just entered a moment ago, mrs ishmael came out of the store in tears.

Wossamatter, what is it?  Oh, Ishmael, I'm crying, I'm so upset. They're asking for food. For the poor people.  A food bank. Here. In our country.

She was weeping, a grown woman, in the middle of the fucking carpark

The store foyer  was bannered-up.  This is what they need, sugar, dried milk, tea, etc etc,  they don't need caviar or parma ham, like decent people do. Whatever you donate, Tesco will add thirty per cent.  In conjunction with the Salvation Army, Tesco is helping you to create a strong neighbourhood by giving food hampers to those in need at this very special time of Consumermas. We even have, via the Salvation Army,  God's own imprimatur,  that's trade mark, for the benefit of customers unhindered by erudition. 

 

 No other store offers you the chance to work with God. And if they do, we'll give you a free hymnbook voucher and five pounds off your next forty-pound spend. The spend which is really a save.

Good, isn't it, smugged a dopey shelf-stacker, delegated to guard the growing stack of hampers, not even hampers, just those green, plastic bread trays,  the ones with a half-life of forty billion years.  Good, I snarled, raging, good ? Hanging a few bankers would be good.  Oh, yes, he said, nervously. And, as an afterthought,  he said if it wasn't for them we wouldn't need to do this, would we? It was as though he had only just, that second, made the connection, a light had finally gone on in his mind,   maybe that really was the case.  That fat oaf, Carmichael, our hypocrite MP, 

Wossat, poor people, sorry, can't hear you.
I'm seckatry of state for Jock, you know, ho ho ho.

THE BRUISER BRUISED.

As we predicted, LibDem Big Al is so far doing a great job for the Tribesmen.
Here, in a national debate, he is being Sturgeoned good and proper; every commentator saying that he made a fool of himself.

'as he been down, getting his picture taken,  the useless piece of shit, poncing about?  He stopped following me at that point, wouldn't know who his MP was,  and I bit my tongue anyway, none of it was his fault, except that on reflection he'll think I'm a nutter,  that'll be his fault.

Mrs ishmael was beside herself,  winding herself up, like she does, anxious, worrying; why aren't we paying old people enough money, just to live on, be warm, not be hungry,  we have all this money for war 

 

- the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the UK, conservatively, £20,000,000,000 and achieved worse than fuck all -  and we have food banks, here, in our country.  

Because, darling, of people like Carmichael and people like the Salvation Army, ever willing to hold Villainy's coat, as long as, for a brief moment,  they are in Celebrity's  flickering limelight. Charity is the new rock'n'roll.  Utter filth, like the Windsor gang, have their own charities, Hollywood slags have their own charities, are given charity ambassadorships by thieving gangsters at the UN;  charities like Barnardos have been pimping vulnerable children for decades.  Don't argue, they tried it with me.  Father Hudson's Homes, in Birmingham,  the noncing monsignors,  appointed by His unHoliness, himself;  papal knight Savile,  the greatest charity fundraiser in history; convents full of bitter, harridan brutes, stealing children, enslaving children, torturing children.  How many times, how many times, how many times ?

Mrs ishmael  knows all this stuff, she's worked among human wreckage all her life, the fragile and feckless, washed up on the shores of Insolence,  the meek and mild, disinherited that the Proud may strut.  There's nothing she doesn't know about the over-reach of the state,  the cruelty of its officers.  It was just such a slap in the face, the weasely Tesco sanctimony,  the justifying of Ian Duncan Smith's criminality, - yesterday, some city spivs awarded themselves billions in seasonal bonuses - as though this vile foodbank palaver was no more than an exercise in community singing, was not a clebration of shame. Ah-one-two-three-four  Let's all piss in the faces of the poor. 

 

 It's the willingness of the community to engage, docile and compliant,  in this charitable sleight of hand and feel good about itself,  that's what shocked her.

Don't get upset, get mad, been telling you for years, charity bandits are part of the problem, sweeping up after the offence, paying themselves bundles of idiotmoney, donated by idiotdonors to salve their idiotconsciences.  And in a way the Salvation Army is worse because its careerists award themselves Ruritanian ranks and ribbons, like the Prince of fucking Wales;  the other ranks, the buglers and the charity shop attendants, they're strictly voluntary, but the Captains and Majors are like all Captains and Majors.  Paving slabs,  that's the thing, lamp posts, crucify the bastards, let them be martyrs, instead of  being do-gooders for Ruin.  Jesus, of course, would've considered Himself a private.     Don't think it's very much to do with Jesus, though, the Salvation Army.

I never responded to the seeker and I haven't had a letter for a while now but the next time I'm in London I will pop-in and see the Major, in his missing persons HQ and put the fear of God in him.  
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An afterthought on Money being the root of all evil, courtesy of mr verge.