GOIN' UP THE COUNTRY.

One of the really great things about having a Rayburn solid fuel stove is that you become  familiar with your chimney pots, rodding the chimney, changing the cowl and generally buggering about, fifty feet up in the air, usually in a rainy gale; today it was fine and we took the platform to its maximum height of seventy feet.

Another really great thing is that you rediscover the coalman of your childhood, he is as grimy as ever, as superhuman as ever, stoically hefting massive, dirty loads on his back, like some pressed-to-drudgery Al Jolson, a scruffy nigger minstrel. I greeted him today as though he was freshly landed from Alpha Centauri, Yo, dirty black toiling motherfucker, welcome to Earth, my face must have said. I don't know what I expected but he wasn't it, subconsciously I had anticipated a bagged carbon-based energy delivery operative and customer liaison officer, y'know, a professional, like everybody is now, in Blatcherite Britain, with a name badge and a corporate uniform, maybe a BlackBerry, or at the least a clipboard, or one of those computerised tallysheets that the electric man uses to miscalculate your consumption and engage you in a two or three year battle to get them to scale back their ruinous demands. 'Sfair enough, I suppose, they're probably still bunging that embittered and repulsive old pinstripe fuckpig,

Tebbit, now and again, for having given them the family silver, much to the delight, still, of his Filth-O-Graph blog's horde of elderly expatriot worshippers, spot on, Lord Norman, as usual, string 'em up, these trade unionists, fuck me, Norman, am I glad I left Britain and only come back for a free operation, that Jeremy Clarkson, he should be prime minister, and yourself, Lord Sir Norman of Telecom, there's hundreds of them, Tebbitites. And the red braces beneficiaries of his privatisations are probably still paying the smirking cocksman and absentee father, Pinstripe Parkinson and the slimeball, wotsisname, the slug, Baker,

CartoonMan, collects them, he does, only probably not the Spitting Image ones.

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 Roll up, spivs and Flash Harrys, get your cheap family silver here, clear 'em all out, The BarrowBoy Cabinet c 1990

And Douglas Hurd, he'll be on the payroll, although he and Pauline Neville Corpse

 Baroness Pauline Neville Corpse, Dave Cameron's Security Supremoess and Spokesperson on Money Laundering  with Genocidal War Criminals.

swiftly hoovered-up ten million apiece for advising Slobodan Milosovic on his grand larceny, or banking matters, as Douglas would call it, talk about Tony and Imelda, this couple moved like shit off a shovel, but we don't mention Slobo in polite circles or even in the Tory party, pisspoor and hysterical as it is and Douglas is such a gentleman, the lousy, thieving simpering shitbag. And we haven't even thought of all the bungs that His Grace The Lord Mark Thatcher will have demanded, for Mumsy, ie himself.

 Viscount Arsehole.

Fuck me, when you think about all those privatisations and everybody who has to earn from them it's a wonder that it doesn't cost a hundred quid to turn the fucking light on or make a phone call to some bastard who insists that your call is very important to him and which is Ruin shorthand for I don't care what your complaint is, You can just Go and Fuck yourself, actually a neat distillation of the mad old boot's personal ethos, No Such Thing As Other People.

But the coalman, anyway, has somehow escaped the professionalising downwards which has so disfigured the nation this past thirty years; no jargon for him, Where do you want it? In the coalhole? Fair enough. Same old, taciturn, dirty filthy bastard, driving a crap lorry.

It's all bollocks, this Aga business, or Rayburn, don't know what the difference is, it's not like you have Whining David and Ruth Slut Archer popping round for a fucking good moan; people from Country Living doing a photospread of How Ishmael transformed this charming period ruin merely by ripping up the floorboards, knocking down the walls and installing a heap of old scrap iron which won't even boil the especially purchased and horrifyingly expensive whistling kettle never fucking mind heat the radiators and cook the Sunday fucking lunch and make an ideal cosy spot for the blogdog, Buster

to curl up in front of in one of his many beds but Ishmael's not disappointed, no, disappointment doesn't do it, Ishmael loves having the chimney sweep and the plumber virtually living with him. Unlike what they tell you,  the shore doesn't become covered with perfectly shaped driftwood, cast up from a sunken Russian freighter, providing you with a year's fuel, merely for the picking-up of it, the rusty, smoky old ruin doesn't disgorge fabulous scones and Yorkshire puddings and enchanting baked potatoes, no, what happens is that you get the bastard going with a box of firelighters and ten kilos of kindling and a carrier bag full of expensive anthracite, haul yourself up off the floor, wash your hands so hard with Swarfega that you need a fucking skin transplant, go and sit down for five minutes and fuck me, the bastard's gone out. Needs more draw, don't we all. Poke about in the firebox and try to light the fucking thing up again, it's still warm, shouldn't be too hard, only it is and you have to pull the whole fucking filthy mess out on the floor and start again with another box of Value Firelighters, the ones that don't really, unless you soak them in white spirit and burn the hair offa your hands when you light the bastard and it goes Whoosh and maybe burn your fucking moustache off, too and you look like a lunatic clown, all cinders and soot and no moustache, or not much of one anyway. And since the Rayburn came you only wear Highland National Costume which is a blue quilted boiler suit with a brown leather belt outside becuae there's just no point in wearing anything else for being on permanent Rayburn fixing duty and at least the quilted boilersuit is warm which the Rayburn isn't, or not very often, not in the sense that you take off your overcoat indoors or stop wearing your Thermal, Desperate Dan underwear. Best of it all is that we already had a perfectly good central heating system but cancelled the oil deliveries when the Rayburn initially fired-up successfully and then found ourselves sitting shivering and enraged when it packed up, or needed tweaking as they call hitting the bastard pipes with a sledgehammer.

What you need for one of these fucking things is a fucking slave, a Rayburn Wallah, maybe one of that tide of head-chopping dwarf ex-soldiers which is over-running the country and they won't let them in down the British legion, because they're wogs, like, and we don't want their sort coming in here and using our toilets, me and the lads didn't fight and die so's we could have dirty filthy little bastards standing on the toilet seat and shitting their curry and rice all over the shop and wiping their arses with their hands and me and the lads always knew that Joanna Lumley was right into the nignogs,

size isn't everything, mind. But I was thinking that since they'd go and chop the heads off a half dozen yellowbastard JapSonsOfNippon before breakfast for half a crown a week that maybe they'd come and fetch my coal, chop up the kindling and keep the Rayburn stoked-up like it was the Eternal Flame over JFK

 Come on, Bahadur, light my fire.

and I'd give them a fiver a week and a wee patch of thistles to cultivate, they could sleep in the byre, with the cats, I'm not racist or anything. It's gotta be better than playing the old soldier up in the Himafuckinglayas, Scotland is the best part of England and you never know, the little Ghurka bastards might get on with Jock, they're both short and stupid and belligerent and neither of them can speak fucking English worth shit.

The offending apparatus in a couple of rare, sequential moments of combustion.

It is true, though, for anyone tempted by all the TV Hugh Fearnley Wotsits to abandon the City and try the Good Life, it is fucking hard work  and you need ree-sources, not dosh so much, just personal ree-sources, way down inside. And a little furry warm brown friend.

The Rayburn has settled down, now, at last,  the chimneys are sorted, drawing properly. Just in time for Summer.  The spivs and the Flash Harrys are eyeing what's left for them to flog to their mates, not much but they'll find something,  they'll do robbery and call it austerity.