call me ishmael

Sunday, 9 May 2021

The Sunday Ishmael 9/05/2021

Great Ideas that have had their day:

1. The United Kingdom.

Scotland, best part of England. Photo sourced by mr ishmael 4/12/2011

I'm afraid that's it for the Union. The settled will of the peepul of Scoatland has been expressed through the ballot box

Never could she have imagined, a wee gurrul at Dreghorn Primary School, that one day she would single-handedly destroy the United Kingdom. Never mind. At least this one got stuffed:

Scotland's first minister for cholesterol takes a wee walk with his mother. (Ed. note - his wife).

Having sold Aberdeenshire to his friend, Mr Donald McTrump, a man obnoxious even by American standards, Fat Alec Salmond is trumpeting his success in approving the covering of the Highlands with two hundred feet high pylons through Scotland's infant National Park; options of routing the cables from proposed windfarms either underground or sub-sea were not examined.

COUNTRY FOR SALE TO HIGHEST BIDDER, NEWS FROM SCOTLAND, BEST PART OF ENGLAND 12/1/2010

And now mrs Fish can begin to make good on the manifesto promises:

Freeze income tax and remove council tax for under 22 yr olds
Increase NHS spending by 20%, abolish NHS dentistry charges and maintain free prescriptions, invest £10 billion to replace & refurbish health facilities over the next 10 years.
Establish a National Care Service. Increase investment in care by 25%
Invest £250 million over 5 years in drug intervention
Invest £33 billion over 5 years to support 45,000 jobs
Invest £33 million in an energy transition fund to support the oil industry to diversify
Set up a £10 million fund to allow companies to explore & pilot the 4 day working week.
Provide 100 grants of £50 grand to young people or families to stay or work on the isles
Invest £30 million in island infrastructure
Increase the Scottish Child payment to £20 per eligible youngster.
Provide free school breakfasts, lunches and a computer device with internet connectivity to all primary school children and a free bike if their parents don't get them one
Provide £1billion to close the educational attainment gap and create a National Digital Academy
Build 100,000 affordable homes by 2032. Spend £3.5 billion on supporting an estimated 14,000 jobs in the building industry
Decarbonise heating in 1 million homes by 2030, using £1.6 billion in climate change funds

Best get all of this done before the last manifesto pledge - to remove Scotland from the United Kingdom; otherwise, where's the money to come from?

So, it's all sounding good - lots and lots of jam tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow as we creep our petty pace to dusty death. We really must hold oor Nikki's nose to the wheel on this one - bet everyone will want to come live in smart, successful Scotland, healthier and wealthier day by day.

Mustn't grumble - mr ishmael and I never paid for a single prescription after moving to bonny Scotland, and, over the years, we had two heavily, heavily subsidised oil heating systems installed. And now there'll be alternative heating systems to replace the fossil fuel systems: we had a chap round once to sell us a windmill system. Here's mr ishmael on what transpired:

You'll get seven-and-a-half grand a year in feed-in tariff. And you'll get all your electricity free; what's not to like?

And how much the fuck does one of these wind turbines cost?

This one's sixty-three grand. Plus the VAT.

How much?

But you can get a loan for that. At five per cent. And so after about eight years, or nine, it'll all be paid for and the seven-and-a-half grand a year'll be yours.

If I live that long. And what happens if I want to sell the house?

Well, you're liable for the loan.

And what about the feed-in tariff?

Oh, that stays with the house.

He was an oily bastard. Teeth too white, hair too just-so. Far too work-out fit for a man of his age. A smile that flashed out Would I lie to you? Too fucking right you would. And he drove one of those obsidian, half SUV-half lorry vehicles with blacked-out windows, like he was a gangsta rapper and not a ten-thousand year, stone age DNA-ed, far Northern webfoot inbred. They do actually exist, the webfingered and footed, I know somebody who knows one.

SCOTLAND, BEST PART OF ENGLAND 8/9/2012 wind turbines

2. The Labour Party

Just walk away from the chips, Starmer, and forget about the beer.

And was it fair to sack Rayner just because she may - or may not - have one of these:

Respectable Hartlepool matrons were aghast at the ways of the fancy London Lawyer Labour Leader, flaunting his dietary predilections in their honest, god fearing constituency, as they flooded into the polling station in their massed, handbagged battalions to kick him in the nuts. “Coming round here, eating fish and chips and drinking pints of beer, the very idea!" Didn’t work in Plymouth, either. Eating Fish and Chips in public.

Can’t resurrect the Labour vote with fish n chips. Not even pie n chips. Nor pints of wallop.

They’d rather have a proper champagne swilling Tory. Blair and Brown between them did for the Labour party. And any subsequent machination and shuffle could not revive the corpse.

3. The Monarchy

Forced to support themselves by exploiting their meagre talents and connections, the royal family plumb new depths. This one,

Micheal Ofkent, appears to have been the subject of a scam by the Sunday Times and Channel 4, who posed as executives from the fictitious House of Haedong, a South Korean firm, and induced the Queen's cousin to boast during a zoom meeting that he could exploit his royal connections to gain access to Vladimir Putin's inner circle and represent the interests of the House of Haedong for a fee of £143,000 plus £50 grand for a confidential four or five day trip to Russia.
Ofkent is 50th in line of succession to the throne, but started out in seventh place when born in 1942. There really are an awful lot of them.

He should have adopted mr ishmael's policy for dealing with telephone scammers. You know - the one with the curly-cocked pig.

And it seems that Meghan Ofsussex has followed in the footsteps of children's author, Sarah Ofyork by trying to raise some cash by writing a book about a bench. Kate Ofcambridge might join in:

imagined and created by mr verge - chapeau.

Just a thought - is there a county in England that doesn't have a royal named after it?

The "Chilean mining accident", began on Thursday, 5 August 2010, with a cave-in at the San José copper–gold mine, northern Chile. Chile's President, Sebastián Piñera, cut short an official trip and returned to Chile in order to visit the mine.Thirty-three men were trapped 2,300 ft underground and 3 miles from the mine's entrance via spiraling underground ramps. After the state-owned mining company, Codelco, took over rescue efforts from the mine's owners, exploratory boreholes were drilled. Seventeen days after the accident, a note was found taped to a drill bit pulled back to the surface: "Estamos bien en el refugio los 33" (We are well in the shelter, the 33 of us). Three separate drilling rig teams, nearly every Chilean government ministry, the United States's space agency, NASA, and a dozen corporations from around the world cooperated in completing the rescue. On 13 October 2010 the men were winched to the surface one at a time, in a specially built capsule, as an estimated 5.3 million people watched via video stream worldwide.

GOTTA PICKA POCKET OR TWO

drafted 27/10/2010

I'm sick of them, now. I was thrilled when they were found alive and when they started coming up. Didn't matter where they were from, it's just shit, that, being trapped, like those blokes in the Russian 'sub, the Kursk, was it; better just to be killed straight off than all that running out of air shit, upsetting the viewers, well, some of us. I firmly believe that Formula One fans follow these racing cars all around the world hoping, praying, gagging for Lewis Hamilton or Jensen Button to crash and get toasted, they'll be the ones who had their fingers crossed for a cave-in, down there in Chile.

They could have been from anywhere, the miners, didn't matter a fuck, the heart went out and the stomach turned over,. Now, the whole thing is like a nationalist party political broadcast, Chile this and Chile that and that pimp bandit, El Presidente, waltzing or is it tango-ing, Berluscone-ing his way around the world, as though he, himself, was down on his hands and knees for two months, digging like a bastard with his bare hands, rather like Comrade Snot, now of the Kirkcaldy Oxfam Shop, and all his shit about saving the world and it being the right thing to do for the country, and only he could have thought of it because he was a son of the fucking manse and the cleverest boy in the school and heard voices in his mad, snot-gobbling head and no, he wasn't gay, how could he be, hadn't he married enthusiastically, in his early fifties, couldn't wait, and Sarah-George was his best thing ever, especially now that he was working in the charity shop, because nobody wanted to pay to hear his crap, his nailbitten Claw of Doom metronoming on the lectern, his jaw doing that drywank jawdrop thing Dah-Dah-Dah and bits of snot all over his tie; El Presidente was gobbing away, just like Snotty did, only in better English, surreptitiously, obliquely, taking the credit for the rescue, even though the State had fucked things up in the first place, deregulating the mines and letting the el-Mafia run them.

Not happy with that shameless tub-thumping, he was giving people lumps of rock, well, giving 'em to Queens and unelected prime ministers. And how does anybody know that they're genuine rescue rocks? Not like they're from the Sea of Tranquility, brought back by NASA. Coulda just been picked up off the ground. You know what politicians are like, especially Dago ones, probably kept all the real rocks and are flogging them on eBay - are they Dagos, the Chileans, don't know anything about Chileans, are they Christians, for instance? Could be head-shrinking cannibals for all I know, like we have in the wilder parts of Scotland, best part of England. I know they make Cabernet Sauvignon and have dangerous mining operations, proper businesses, see, like Zombie George Spunkface wants us to have, none of that regulation bollocks, health and safety and all that.

Betcha anything that those number-crunching folk over at the Taxpayers Alliance* have something to say about health and safety, eh, waste of their taxpayers' taxes which, as we all know, are different, more important, than any old ordinary taxes that other people, not in The Taxpayers Alliance pay, well, other people, everybody, actually, everybody pays taxes, apart from rich people. Don't hear the TPA going on about rich people not paying any taxes at all. And you don't have to be in an alliance, to be a taxpayer; some of us actually don't mind paying taxes, me and mr mongoose, for instance; the social wage, is what taxation brings, roads and stuff, I can get in my SmartCar, here in the far North and just drive straight down, largely without let or hindrance, to Land's End, the roads are signposted, driveable, drained and illuminated, the vast majority of people drive more or less safely, millions and millions of cars don't collide. OK, it can all be better, much better, but that is dependent upon a radical, revolutionary change in the way we order our lives and in the people whom we pay to decide on things; the elimination of career politicians and the selection, for limited terms, of non-careerist, independent, non-party public servants is the only sensible goal if we would reverse the Ruin which twentieth century parliaments have wrought. The TPA's incessant whining about taxes, as with the output of most self-selecting ThinkTanks, is cheap, populist, redneck horseshit. They should shut up and fuck off, the TPA, go and look after their parents, or their greedy bastard illiterate fuckpig thirty-something children, maybe tell them that No, Toby, you can't have everything you want, not even if we shoot all the benefit scroungers, actually, Darling, Mummy and Daddy won't be able to leave you every penny they ever made, with interest, it's because of all those nasty taxy-waxys that the nasty govament makes us pay. Yes, Darling, Clearly, it's frightfully unfair.

They have a mission statement, the TPA, dunno what it is, anytime I hear the word Mission, misapplied so, I think: Drunk, Nonce or Non-Specific Arsehole. Missions are what soldiers have, airmen, and the other ones, the ones with no air cover, they do missions, too; ordinary people have aims and objectives. Anybody come near my house, talking about fucking missions, not that they would, not even the fucking Jovas, impudent fucking bastards, most likely being deterred by the sign: Presbyterians Will Be Hanged, but if anybody does, come here talking about his fucking mission, I'm gonna kick his fucking missioning arse up an down the lane marked Private. It is part of the colonisation of the language, this mission shit, MDA doggerel, by the largely illiterate, the infuriating gabshite, who says Clearly before his every pack of stupid, cliche-bound, Devil-As-Ever-Is-In-The-Detail shitbrain lies. I read the word mission and that was all I needed to know about the TPA. Mission statements are what those awful fuckpigs at Marks and Spencer have. And Tesco. Save More By Spending More. Easy.

They seem just like Tories without parliamentary seats, the TPA, small govament, private sector is best; shit a fucking red-white-and-blue brick they would, jumping up and down on the toilet screeching, the greedy, grasping jumped-up pseudo middle class imbecile wankers, if any of their services were withdrawn before they can engineer some exclusive alternative, like that insufferable git, Toby Young, of the private school alliance.**

Prick's writing in the Filth-O-Graph, today, that Barack Obama isn't quite black enough, needs to be a bit blacker, says Whitey Young, the braying, racist cocksucker; mixed race, you see, doesn't quite tick Toby's boxes, wants Barack to be a full-on buck nigger. Jesus fucking wept, only in the Filth-O-Graph. Or the Times. Or the Sun. Or the Mail. Or any of them, nasty racist poison disguised as commentary. Toby fucking Young - why is anyone called Toby? - wants to run schools for his wretched, ghastly spawn and probably to rub shoulders with the spit-spraying misfit, Gove, the gobby, apologising idiot; giving parents a choice, giving himself a choice, is what he means.

Oh, yes, much easier for Jemima and I to have all of our delightful and gifted children privately, in very special and suprisingly cost effective private hospitals, yes, especially if something goes wrong, requiring intensive lifetime care, it'll only cost us pennies, you see, because we take the money from the riff-raff, who aren't as well equipped as us to work the system, we need to have a private health visitor, pay privately, but only a little bit, for all the inoculations, drive them to private schools on private roads, pay for our very own private police constables, yes, and courts and prisons, too; drink private water from private taps; have private libraries, and parks and private, yes, private public transport and best of all privately care for our elderly demented parents who might spend decades farting and dribbling and not knowing who the fuck they are, or us, tubes up their noses and pipes coming from their dicks, stinking of piss. Think of all the taxes we'd save, if only we could get away from this dreadful notion of society, and people pooling risk, working together so that all can be cared for. Well, Clearly, it's simply not good enough.

Can't think why anyone pays them any mind, meself, the TPA. Anybody with a hole in his arse knows that local govament, taking its cue from MediaMinster, is corrupt and useless; fucking Rotarians and fucking Masons buying-up fucking councillors by the coachload; counting the TPA pennies isn't going to shame them from office. Just look at the so-called parliamentary expenses scandal, last year, business as fucking usual, every last fucking bastard of them guilty of at the very least guilt by association, of turning a blind eye. And them supposed to be lawmakers. Oh, fuck me, was I thieving, well, of course, it wasn't my fault, I'm an honourable fucking member and look, I paid the money back; just as soon as I was caught out, I said to Mrs Cameron, Samantha, Darling, we have to pay a few quid back, but don't worry, we'll get it all back again when I'm prime minister, no, don't worry, you won't have to touch your millions, or mine.

But anyway, rescue celebrities, it's a bit much, innit. Get down on their hands and knees and thank God, or Whoever, and never go down underground again; that's the ticket. Not as though they did anything brave, is it, just sitting there, underground, any bastard can do that. And many of us might have to, as the Pig Society kicks us all into reverse gear, onwards, to the Thirties.

GOTTA PICKA POCKET OR TWO drafted 27/10/2010

*The TaxPayers' Alliance (TPA) is a libertarian pressure group in the United Kingdom which was formed in 2004 to campaign for a low-tax society. The group had about 18,000 registered supporters as of 2008 and claimed to have 55,000 by September 2010. However, it has been suggested that a vast majority of these supporters - who do not contribute financially or engage in campaigning - were simply signed up to a mailing list.

Questions have been raised about the funding of the organisation and there is speculation that significant contributions are received from overseas. The TPA was given the lowest possible grade for financial transparency by Who Funds You, a British project that seeks to rate and promote transparency of funding sources of think tanks.

** Wiki tells us that Young has continued to be at the centre of controversy. In 2015, he wrote an article in advocacy of genetically engineered intelligence, which he described as "progressive eugenics". In early January 2018, he was briefly a non-executive director on the board of the Office for Students, an appointment from which he resigned within a few days after Twitter posts described as "misogynistic and homophobic" were uncovered. In 2020, he promoted misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Both anthologies of the work of mr ishmael and his young Polish friend, Stanislav, Plumb Cheap for You: Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack - are available to purchase for mere money at Lulu or Amazon. It is cheaper to buy from Lulu. Here's how to buy your own copies:

Please register an account with them first. This will save you a couple of quid, as going straight into the link provided below seems to make paypal think it's ok to charge in dollars, and apply their own conversion rate, which will put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow our link; a pop-up box asks for age confirmation - simply set the date to (say) 1 January 1960, and proceed. (If you type the title, the anthology will not appear as a search result until the "show explicit content" box - found at the bottom left by scrolling down - has been checked. You may also see the age verification box, as above, at this point.)

The full title is "Vent Stack love from stanislav" by ishmael smith, and the cover you'll see is red with white titles and a picture of Buster the Previous Blog Dog having a green thought in a green shade.

Link for the paperback:

https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/vent-stack/paperback/product-q8jzk2.html?page=1&pageSize=4

Or...

shorter link, which might make it easier if you wish to paste it into an email and tell a friend:

https://tinyurl.com/naajavmu

Honest, Not Invent is available in paperback or hardback.

Link for Hard Back :

https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/honest-not-invent/hardcover/product-njr7vg.html

Link for Paper Back :

https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/honest-not-invent/paperback/product-wq2kpg.html

At checkout, try WELCOME15 or TREAT15 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, the book (including delivery to a UK address) should cost £10.89

Saturday, 8 May 2021

THE APES HAVE IT, THE APES HAVE IT, I MEAN THE AYES.

Certainly the noise comes from the Nats, the tribesmen are in full throat

mr ishmael, 16/09/2014

Sunday, 2 May 2021

The Sunday Ishmael 2/5/2021 The frivolous edition

I need to start today's Sunday Ishmael by apologising, most sincerely, for my heteronormative privilege.

Right, that's out of the way and I can move on to explore the preposterous case of the actress who has cut off her boobs to spite her face - sorry - to feel comfortable in her body. And to prevent children from dying - I didn't make that up. Sorry, the actor who has had his breasts removed surgically. And has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show to boast about it, in a broken little voice.

She's feeling a lot better, now she's got rid of the milk-producing glands whose primary function is to feed babies - very specialised bit of kit, boobies, and she can - wait for it - wear T shirts! Poor mad little thing.

What is it like to walk around in this space that is you? asked Oprah, in all seriousness. Oprah's got lots of booby, and seems pretty damn pleased about it, judging by the amount of cleavage on display.

Anyway, back to heteronormative privilege. Said privilege has allegedly been much exercised by gorgeous, pouting Doctor Who assistant, Mickey Smith.

Mickey, who fought against the Daleks so bravely, has been accused by 20 women of verbal abuse, bullying and sexual harassment^. One allegation is that he filmed a nude audition by one actress without her consent and showed it to a female employee to whom he exposed his penis in the back of a limousine, groping her in the lift the next day. Another actress alleges that he sexually propositioned and threatened her. Other women allege that he wanted them to perform sex scenes nude, and refusal angered him.

^{So that's him fucked, then. No, not that sort of fucked.}

^{His career in tatters sort of fucked.}

In response to the allegations BAFTA suspended his membership and his Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema Award^. ITV says it won't broadcast the final episode of Viewpoint, a series he was in and has suspended it's international distribution. Industry Entertainment declared they would no longer be representing Clarke and Sky immediately halted his involvement in any future productions. He needs to see a good employment lawyer or consult his Trade Union Representative.

^{These
are allegations, remember, not criminal charges, not assessed by the
CPS to see if there's anything there that will stand up (sorry) in
Court, not tested in evidence under oath, not subject to cross
examination.}

Clarke issued a statement denying "any sexual misconduct or criminal wrongdoing" apart from one allegation that he had repeatedly made remarks about an employee, for which he apologised and said he was seeking professional help "to change for the better".

It's tough in time and space -

Mickey alleges that Captain Jack Harkness is worse, but gets away with bouncing his penis on the shoulders of random females because he is charming and gay.

Time for the Doctor to step in and sort them out - here's mr ishmael:

Speaking at Paedo House, the new Doctor Who, that jock prick luvvie, Capaldi,

said to a young fan, SeeYouYaWeeFairy, if ye dinnae do as I tell ye, I'll rip off yer stupid fag heid and shit doon yer throat, now, fuck off oota here and wait fer me in the Savile Suite.

Bravo! Gosh, isn't he wonderful, screeched the assembled

Doctor Who production team, our jobs're safe for another fifty years.

Decorating Gate

Some people say they are cross with Boris because of the lack of transparency - the obscurity surrounding sending the begging bowl around Tory benefactors. Some really don't like the influence his girlfriend has over his decorating and other choices. Some think it is shitting in the face of the respectable to live with his fancy woman and bastard openly in a great residence of State.

Not really. It is yet another, entirely appropriate, manifestation of class rage. Another example of splatters from the Great Latrine of State. Another manifestation of the contempt in which the ruling class holds everyone else.

Look, we have to employ Agency Workers, up here in the Bracing Isles, as there are insufficient locally based workers to undertake essential tasks. These workers are provided with accommodation for the duration of their contract. They don't pay rent. They are expected to keep the accommodation clean, but certainly don't redecorate. Isn't there a parallel? The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is provided with a rent-free flat for the duration of his time in office and receives an annual public grant of £30,000 to spend on his living quarters. Most of us could do a fabulous make-over every year for £30 grand, even if we're not doing the painting ourselves. And those of us who go to B&Q for decorating essentials resent, deeply resent, the conspicuous consumption demonstrated by a decorating bill in the region of £200,000 - presumably, on top of the annual £30 grand bill. FFS, £230 grand could buy you a whole house in many parts of this country. Not London, obviously, the money-laundering capital of the world.

Bin Gate, Grave Gate, Aggregate Gate

and now..... Aqua Gate. (that's Latin for Water Gate)

You may remember that I told you about the various gates that have scandalised the good people of the Bracing Isles over the last few years? The most recent has been Step by Step Gate, in which the Development and Infrastructure Dept ordered in £20,000 tons' worth of sandstone in order to raise the paving around the front and west entrance of the Grade A listed, twelfth century St. Magnus Cathedral, to become level with the main door, thus concealing the original graciously wide three steps in order to improve disabled access. However, Orkney Islands Council has refused its own application to develop the front of St Magnus Cathedral. One councillor described OIC as a “bureaucratic monster” following news that £20,000 worth of sandstone was purchased for the project before it had been submitted to Planning. At a meeting of the Planning Committee on Wednesday, March 3, the proposal from OIC asking for listed building consent was refused by Orkney Islands councillors, after Historic Environment Scotland (HES) - the statutory consulting body - said the works “would have a significant detrimental impact on a building that is recognised as being of international importance.”

Moving to refuse the plans, Councillor Tierney was unhappy that the works would conceal the bottom section of some stone pillars. He said: “With the bottom of the pillars hidden, it’s like putting on a nice pair of shoes with fancy buckles on them, and then standing in water halfway to your knees. I think it would look absolutely ridiculous.”

The Director in charge of the Department of Cock-Ups, who had, hitherto, been widely considered an attractive candidate for the Chief Executive post - currently vacant, but being caretaken by an Agency Worker on an indefinite contract (does he do his own decorating, I wonder?), has shuffled off to a somewhat smaller carriage on the Gravy Train,

leaving the Council after 14 years to become the managing director of Aquatera Ltd's consultancy branch, with only 30 staff to play with, having previously led the largest department in a Council employing around 2000 staff. The local paper reported: "his departure from OIC comes amid a senior management restructure, and an ongoing investigation into the development and infrastructure department’s £1.4 million stone order from Glensanda Quarry. The Interim Chief Executive of OIC said: "He has made a tremendous contribution to the work of the council since he joined the organisation in 2007. While I am pleased that he will be taking on such an important role with a prominent local company, I am very sorry he is leaving us. He will be greatly missed."

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Attempted theft by telephone is in the news again:

At 3.51 minutes in, the target of the attempted scam, a reporter, fires a round of fucks - but it's not a patch on mr ishmael's technique:

It has become normal for people not to introduce themselves but demand first your self-identification to them; we get calls all fucking day which open, Are you ishmael smith to which I reply, perfectly reasonably, that's not the question, the question is Who the fuck are you? You called me, never mind who I am, who are you, you got no fucking manners?
If you were a friend and had my number legitimately you'd know who I was, wouldn't you?
Often, you can tell by the delay and the background noise that this call is coming from a criminal call centre in Islamabad or whatever they call Delhi, these days.
I have a formula, now, for these cunts. He or she says Good morning, Sir, how are you, I am Keith or Sally, calling from Microsoft about your computer. Ah, Keith, I say, how is your mother? My mother? Yes, I saw your mother on the internet, last night, fucking a herd of pigs, sucking their curly cocks. But your mother, Keith, she may be a fat, poxy old whore but at least she's honest, whereas you're just a thieving black cunt, aren't you ? You're not Keith, you're Ahmed or something. If it's Sally on the phone I say, Ah, Sally, you sound like a nice girl. Why don't you go and do proper prostitution, instead of trying to rob people in foreign countries, you worthless cunt.

People are quite shocked when they hear this, gasping the R word, you can't say that, ishmael. But these people are trying to steal money from us, they are not really from Microsoft, they bought our 'phone number and they call people like us all day long, hoping to get the bank details of some poor soul and rob them; racism be damned, they're thieving black cunts, that's what they are, they're the racists, trying to rob well-mannered British people who are soft and polite, conditioned to be nice to vermin. They have declared race war, declared that they want to rob me of what little we have. I've been here getting-on for twenty years and the most black people I have ever seen have been in my house, friends, visiting me; honest, not invent. That wouldn't wash, though, with the Virtuous, to whom it is the pious word which counts more than the deed.

There's no fucking end to this tele-banditry. I had a recorded one a couple of weeks back. Some cunt saying he was from HMRC, it was about my tax and if I didn't call him back immediately I risked imprisonment. Now,this obviously works sometimes or they wouldn't do it and one wonders why the government doesn't do something but the government, of course, will be in the pay of the companies that organise it all, the government, in fact the parliament, are consigliere to Organised Crime, of which 'phone terrorism is just a small branch. When it comes to the unwonted approach of strangers, therefore, I shoot first.

He did, too - I was present when he fired the round of pig-fucks into Keith. Here's a lengthier essay from the draft archive from 2012.

Thoughts before Heart By-Pass Surgery.

It was just personal stuff, from my personal pockets and off my personal person; my white Swatch watch, my reading glasses, a pen and a little wallet with AA card and organ donor card, some money cards and a hundred quid of Run-Away-From-Hospital cash money - proper money, to get me a cab or a train somewhere, if necessary, and there were some books, too. It all had to be packed, with clothes and pyjamas and toiletry stuff into a couple of small suitcases and then Stored Away. Mr Ishmael, you'll be going to theatre in the morning and then you'll go to the Intensive Care ward and then to the High-Dependency ward and only then will you come back here, so it has to be Stored Away. Nurse said this as though it was an epic of tribulation, this Storing Away business, like this situation - longish-stay patients from two hundred miles away bringing stuff with them - was a huge inconvenience to them, but then it seems to me that acting like a martyr to patient-invoked inconvenience is part of a nurse's basic training, how much better would their lives be without any fucking patients, clogging the place up?

Shouldn't be a surprise to me. I knew, even before reading Erving Goffman's Asylums, way back before before, that institutions exist and are organised solely for the benefit of their staff; schools, hospitals, prisons, universities, parliaments, the staff, or the faculty, as they call themselves or the Honourable Members, are the permanent residents and the patients, students, inmates or electors just have to be managed in as easy and desultory a fashion as can be got away with.

Teachers don't give a fuck, do they, they can't give a fuck, that their charges leave them unable to frame a sentence, unable to do two-times-fucking-two; alright, granted that the rot is set-in so deep that now a couple of generations of teaching folk don't know grammar, spelling or mental arithmetic themselves but they must, outside their whited sepulchres, encounter ordinary people, non-teachers, people like you and I, who can read and write and add-up without a hand-held instrument of Satan..........they must just have no shame, teachers, and they get around that deficit by doing what all such people do, they hide behind the battlements of what they call their profession.

Hospital nurses, though, in the main, must be among the most institutionalised of lazy maladroits, shiftless, dispirited, keen not to nurse but to idle, gossiping; to bully, harangue and proscribe; washing their uniforms in the same washing machine as their children's nappies, travelling to work, via the shops, or who knows where, in their uniforms, daubing their hands with this gelshit, as though 'twere infection control made goo, fuck all the other violations of common sense, I've got this stinky goo on my hands, and anyway, I'm going on my break, now.

I've been in a few Highlands clinics and in three of them I contracted MRSA - months on antibiotics, each time, months of worry. And I know exactly why, there is no mystery, it's that the nurses are dirty, lazy bastards.

The Aberdeen hospital is massive:

you'd think there'd be room enough in here for a couple of small suitcases, without nurse doing a song and fucking dance of indignation.

It employs thousands of people and occupies acres and acres over six sprawling floors, miles of fucking corridors, shops, restaurants, clothes shops and one of those rip-off joints selling 'papers and crisps and salt-fat-and-sugar shit, wall-to-wall poison for those already ill and their visitors. There's a chapel and an art gallery. Surely, I thought, they can find some small corner for a few suitcases, they can only do a coupla heart cases a day, at the most you're talking about a dozen suitcases at any one time in the cycle; why is it that the public sector jobsworth - whom I defend before all comers - so loves to persecute her customers with trivia and gabshitery. Space is at a premium, she whined, we don't have room for suitcases. I don't give a fuck if you throw all this stuff in the fucking incinerator, Nurse, I mouthed, I have got more fucking stuff than you could conceive of and I will very swiftly get some more fucking stuff brought in, just get your stupid face out of mine, just fuck off and bully some other heart patient, you fat, stupid, idle bitch. Never entered Nurse's feeble mind that this bloke is going for bigtime major surgery in the morning and maybe I should be nice to him, polite, thoughtful, attentive, you know, act like a nurse.

They were only two small suitcases and they'd been full when I arrived at the hospital, fully-clothed; the preparatory booklet had said nothing about Everything Being Stored Away and I'd thought - if I thought about it at all - that there'll be a locker and a drawer wherein I can park this stuff, that's what normally happens. Anyway, I had this packing-up of every little thing to contend with, before I could concentrate on the morn's business of having my sternum split open and my heart and lungs removed for a few hours. Oh, and my leg sliced from ankle to groin and fuck knows what else. But pack it all away I did, with the aid of a plastic bag which Nurse eventually provided.

And with each item that I squeezed and folded into Storable Awayness I sensed, with fear and loathing, another portion of my identity, my life disappearing.......

I remembered that just before my late friend, Dick, passed away, I sent him a birthday book, via Amazon: The Good Soldier, a faction novel about the Iraq Occupation and that when I was at his house maybe eighteen months after he'd died, there it was, on the bookcase, a bookmark a third of the way through, creepy stuff, there it still was, this book, a tangible bond between he and I, more durable, unfortunately, than was life. And I had taken a book with me to hospital - Stainless, a gothic/LA vampire story - which mrs ishmael had started and abandoned before I got to it, she being an emeritus professor of vampirology, amongst other things, she had seized it upon its arrival, sent by a friend. She read half of it and then dismissed it but I read it all in virtually one go and as well as some elegantly crafted writing there were all sorts of observations about Hollywood and LA and showbiz which could only have been made by someone who, like the author, Todd Grimson, lived there - you couldn't make it up. Oh, you could make up the vampire stuff easily but the characters from within and on the edges of celluloid celebrity made deranged, home-grown monsters like Bruce Forsyth and Piers Morgan look like normal, decent individuals; they were truly and wholly believably decadence made flesh. Would I live to urge a complete reading on Mrs Ishmael, should I scribble a note inside the cover, Oh, by the way, Dear, now that I'm dead, I do - or I did - think that you should try this again? It's a morbid game, being in hospital.

I never take my watch off, it is as light as a feather and waterproof, well, once in a while I take it off and wipe a damp cloth over the bits in contact with my skin but that's only for a minute or so. A couple of years back some mystery form of arthritis or neuropathy - no swelling, just chronic pain - made wearing a watch very uncomfortable. My friend, Mike, the former JumboJet pilot, said that he'd stopped wearing a watch the minute he retired and never missed it, there's clocks everywhere, he insisted, in the car, on the computer, on the cooker, on the phones, who needs a watch. Well I tried it for a couple of weeks and I found that I do need a watch, doesn't matter how many devices there are now with the exact time on them, it isn't the exact time that I want, a roughly correct time'll do, just as long as it's there, where it's always been, on my wrist. So I put my heavy metal watch in the drawer, with other redundant treasures and tried a lighter, leather-strapped one, that was just as bad, hurt like Hell, so I bought this Swatch one and it's perfect. I love it. I love it in the way I love my Smart car, there's no chrome, there's no acres of leather, no fake walnut strips, no pretence that you're actually, gentlemen, sitting in your club, not that you're a member of a club, no pretence that this vehicle was put together by pipe-smoking craftsmen in white overalls, the rev counter and the speedo look like they were made out of hairdryer material but my one-litre sports version Smartcar goes like stink, even stinkier if you use the paddle-shift instead of the auto, you can let the roof down at any speed and all this is because anything that can be plastic is plastic. You could offer me any number of oily, smoky MGBs, Cs, GTs; Spitfires, GT6s - all that blokey rubbish - and I wouldn't exchange my Smart car. And as for Swiss watches, well, we only ever had one, cost a grand in a mad moment and it was forever in the jeweller's, being serviced or cleaned or regulated or some fucking snooty horologists' hocus-pocus that cost a minimum hundred quid just for taking the back off. The Swatch keeps perfect, waterproof time, it doesn't hurt me, I can read it in the dark, I can change the battery myself and it cost thirty quid.

These tiny discoveries which we make - about Stuff and how it works, whether it works, about Design, really - sort of make us feel better about ourselves and at the same time angry for having been suckered for so many years by all the other stuff that doesn't work, was never meant to work. So, although the watch is just a watch it is important to me inasmuch as finally, eventually, after all these years I have sorted-out the whole watch shitfest. I don't want a Rolex, they're vulgar; I don't want an Omega, I don't go diving in wrecks, I don't go climbing Everest; I am not a submarine commander, I don't want a Tag Hauer, I don't want a Phillipe Patek, all I want is my cheap, little indestructible Swatch. And I could kick myself because I bought my daughter one over thirty years ago and thought Fuck, this is some cool shit, but I was too much ConsumerMan to buy myself one, Gold Avia, that's the thing for me, a gentleman's timepiece. But here I was, in ward Z, as I came to call it, not only taking my watch off but Storing It Away.

I dunno about you but at the back of my mind, with any general unaesthetic, anything, even just for a lower back manipulation, I get that fixin' to die feeling. I am sure I'd get it anyway but I did an awful lot of business with surgeons and anaesthetists and although some of them were fine, decent people, a lot of them were complete Jimmy Carr arseholes but worse than that the nature of my business took me into their homes, I met their families, their lovers and in some of them there was some crazy shit going on; one of the anaesthetists was, as well as her day job, a battered wife; I wouldn't want her, God bless her, putting me to sleep for a split second. Anyway you look at it, they're just people and even if they're not fuck-ups they could have had a bad night, or a row before leaving home. We Zen-Presbyterian-Marxists believe that Shit Happens, that we should take what we have and give it to the poor and that (now more than ever) the workers of the world should unite. But mainly we believe that Shit Happens. And I used to know but now I believe that most of the Shit Happening happens to me.

I looked at my little wallet, a card case, actually, I never felt grown-up enough for a wallet and it's only since cards became compulsory that I've even had this little thing with it's serried, internal ranks of pockets. At least it fits in my hip pocket and I don't have to wear a jacket to accommodate one of those long wallet things which grown-ups favour. Back before before, I used to just keep money in my pockets, like a decent fucking Christian did. My old friend, Felix, though, used to carry a fucking purse - one of those half-circular, folding, zipperless ManPurses that you open and tilt and jiggle about until some coins slide into view, complete load of bollocks, I blame his parents, both Oxford dons, I mean, a half a crown or a few shillings or coppers were never that important that you had to keep them in a purse, not like they were gold sovereigns. And it'd only hold about a quid, anyway, less if it was all in pennies, or pence. Good for fuck all, only make you feel more anxious, not less. Or maybe you'd just forever be saying No, that's alright, my good man, you keep the change, old purse is groaning a bit at the seams, must be, Oh, sixty pence in it, or more. You see, the ManPurse is just some of that shit we were talking about, shit that doesn't work, never could work. It's what pockets are for, putting small change in, most blokes have and have always had access to at least three pockets, any one of which will comfortably hold more than a purse, and furthermore, although men can and do lose their trousers in a variety of circumstances, this event can be nowhere near as frequent as is losing the fucking purse. I suppose one could lose the trousers and if one was dressed for, shall we say, the city, still retain one's purse in any number of jacket or waistcoat pockets................. It's not even as though he was tight, Felix, far from it. But I looked at this little wallet of mine and started poking about in it, just to save mrs ishmael from having to do so, should the anesthetist be pissed or should the surgeon just up and fucking kill me because a few years ago I had one of his brethren arrested and hauled down the nick. And when I plumbed the depths of this little appurtenance there was all sorts of stuff in there, receipts for this and that which I had squirreled away, maybe for sentimental reasons, tickets for this and that. And as I was smoothing-out these ancient scraps I was up against the clock, for two nurses would be coming in a few minutes to give me some Temazepam, which they guaranteed would knock me out in the blink of an eye, unaware, bless them, that as a younger man I would've guzzled the contents of their pharmacy and then ridden a motorcycle on a highwire across Niagara Falls whilst reciting the Illiad and rolling myself a joint, in mid-air. I dunno, were those the days ? Maybe they were. Alright if you survive them. Some didn't. But in another time they might've died in a war. At least the hedonistic, early mortality Baby Boomers had some fun, before choking on their own vomit or crashing their cars. I think it was fun, anyway. Never, in any event, for me, would be the Rewards of Obedience, no Flowers of Success would smell for me, no prizes englitter my grasp. But then the road to Hell has a silver lining, invisible, intangible to the Obedient.

And that's Nursie's function, to make you Obedient.

mr ishmael's essays today are:

Extract from The Day the Stoat Killers Called published 29/5/2019

Extract from The Sunday Ishmael Special Kennedy/Dr Who Edition: Did Lee Harvey Oswald abduct Madeleine McCann? Doctor Who to Investigate. published 24/11/2013

It was just personal stuff drafted 8/9 2012