EVENSONG, GILLIAN WELCH AND DAVID RAWLINGS. MOUNTAIN MUSIC

RED, RED WINE.

I was pissed a lot in the late 'seventies, never really got on top of booze until I was in my forties and realised that there was no law said I had to get inebriated as often as possible.  I remember the moment that I just thought I don't have to do this, I don't even like it;  beer, I fucking hate it, it tastes like piss, worse than piss, all of it, the real stuff and the other stuff, it's all piss.  And the whisky, fuck me, being intoxicated means being poisoned, who'd wanna do that? Who'd wannna poison themselves and stagger around the place being clumsy and stupid and rude and then, the next morning, feeling like guilty Death and cracking-on about what a great night it was, Fuck, did I tie one on, last night.

Anyway, I just stopped.  Really pissed people off.  My late friend, Dick, I'd go to his house, just like normal, for dinner.  I'd still take him a bottle of Scotch or a bottle or two of that pissredwine that he liked and he'd bound up to me and say Ishma-a-ael, what can I get you?  You got a cup a tea, Dick? Cup a tea? Course, right away, I'll put the kettle on.  You can't beat a cup a tea, Dick, there's nothing like it, I'd say;  y'know, one pint of beer is much like another, a gin and tonic is, especially after a couple, much the same as a scotch and ginger or a brandy and soda.  But a cup a tea,  there is nothing like a cup of tea. When you want a cup of tea a cup of Horlicks just won't do, will it?  But if you've got no whisky, then a brandy'll do fine, right? Kettle's boiling, Ish, I'll go and make your tea.

Just stopping booze was easy, same as the fags, there's nothing to give up, you don't need fagplasters on your skin, not if you want to stop.  You just stop.  You just say Oh, fuck that, I'm not doing that anymore;  it's fucking killing me  and I don't even like it, why would I carry on doing this;  am I a fucking lunatic or something?

One of the things, you see, about being a boozer or a smoker is that you're always - fucking always - running out of booze and fags, especially fags.  When we used to be drinkers we always had to get in the car, go down Spar or even further, to the Offy, buy a bottle of gin or something and drink it, generally all of it, more or less at once. You wa' ishe an' lemon? naah,  no worry, ash it comesh, make a double, eh? Ish already double.  Okay, mekkit quadruple double, eh?

 And then there'd be no booze in the house again and, if you weren't drunk enough, after the bottle of gin, you'd have to get in the car a second time and drive, pissed as a rat, down to Spar again.  And if it was too late for that you'd have to crack open some three-week old bottle of Home-Brew-From-Hell Rhubarb wine which we'd optimistically if incompetently made ourselves and which was  a substance whose only purpose on Earth was to give the drinker ruinous, crippling, blinding and agonising diarrhoea -  endlessly recurring  explosions of high-temperature, jet-propelled, bowl-splattering  liquid shit. Le posterieur flambe.  Christ almighty,  the stuff I've drunk, it's a fucking miracle 'swhat it is, that I'm alive in any form at all.

I was invited to a party one night, in Earlsdon, Coventry.  It was two neighbourhood  Jack-the-Lads, doing their understanding  of hospitality.  When I got there, there was one bottle of dry Martini and about six blokes, all already pissed from the pub. What  sorta party is this?  No worries, Ishmael, we're going out for some booze.  A few minutes later I heard an odd, metallic rumbling in the distance and going out for a look I saw these two rolling a metal beer barrel down the middle of the fucking street.  They'd liberated a ten-gallon barrel of Guinness from the backyard of the local British Legion.

How we gonna drink that? I said, back inside;  you need a tap and some gas to pressurise it, either that or an oxy-acetylene tin-opener.  We can shake it.  Waddayamean, shake it? Shake it. You know. Up and down. How's that gonna help? Well, if we shake it and you stick something in the valve, a fork maybe,  and some fucker stands over there with a bucket, it'll spray out, into the bucket.  But it's fucking Guinness, who drinks Guinness? 'Sall we could get at this time of night.

And that's what we did.  Took turns shaking the barrel and drinking the Guinness from the bucket.  Best party I ever went to. 

I was in hospital within twenty four hours, though.  Renal colic.  Renal colic is the worst thing that can happen to you.  You could have your legs blown off and it wouldn't feel as bad as renal colic.  Kidney stones, in case you don't know, are nasty, sharp-edged  little deposits of calcium which build up in the tubes around the kidney.  They're fine as long as you don't get dehydrated - like you do after drinking  Guinness from a bucket - because when you get dehydrated those tubes contract and the stones start to move, inside you, scraping and slicing along.  Renal colic, they call it. It's fucking murder.  Nurses say it's worse than childbirth.  They gave me morphine in the hospital.  And I've never drunk Guinness since.

But when I was properly on the piss, in about '78, I was hanging out with an  Irish waiter, Billy.  Billy was the most accomplished drinker I have ever met.  It was his life, drinking. Oh, he had a wife, Joy and a son,  William - my wee William - whom he loved but who had left him because of his drinking and this only made him drink more.  We were on the piss morning, noon and night, living in that hazy netherworld where you can drink yourself sober, or so it seems.  

One day, anyway, in 1978, I read in the Sunday Times about a wine that was particularly good at that moment and fetching £25 a bottle, a fiver a glass;  this was when a pint was about thirty-five pence;  Chateau Cheval Blanc, Saint Emilion 1968,  it was.

This wine snobs' article  rang a bell. Billy, I said, you've got a case of red wine stashed upstairs.........No, fuck off, you're not.......Is it Saint Emilion 1968.......It might be, I stole it years ago from the Highlands Hotel and it's for me and my wee William to drink when he's old enough....But you'll be dead by the time he's old enough to drink, you're bound to be, look at you,  and that fucking witch of yours'll only pour it down the sink, fucking Presbyterian cow, how could anyone call her Joy, miserable, sourfaced bitch like that, Grief is more like it........'Sno use Mr Ishmael, we're not drinking it.....Can we just have a look, see if it is the sixty-eight?    

It was.  And it took me about an hour, to talk Billy into opening a  Just one, mind you bottle.  I had made him read the article and the thought of five pounds a glass wine just sitting there, in a box, and the pubs being closed and everything, was just too much for him.  He'd been a wine waiter and he knew a little bit, more than I, and he carefully opened a bottle, insisting that we leave it to breathe, Oh, for a good fifteen seconds.

The late Douglas Adams in his HItchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series  used to have a lovely turn of phrase, once describing the effects of drinking a Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster as akin to being struck over the head by a gold bar wrapped in finest silk.  This first glass of Saint Emilion '68 was nothing like that. It was like Mother's milk, laced with opium, marijuana, chocolate, LSD and the tears of Christ;   all the doors of perception were flung  open wide, revealing a scintillating, luxurious universe, warm, comfortable, safe, every breath I took wasn't just a breath, it was a sublime inhalation of pure divinity.  I was flabbergasted.  At a fiver a glass, this shit was for nothing.  At that moment - and ever since - I beseeched God to make me rich, let me drink this stuff every day of my life;  let me clean my teeth in Saint Emilion '68, let me pour it on my cereal, just don't let me go back, Lord, to Brew Eleven, Trophy Bitter or Harp Lager, deliver me from Breakers and Carlsberg Specials.

I have never had that wine since and short of a lottery win, I never will;  it now sells for £550 a bottle,  a hundred and ten pounds a glass.  But I'm really glad that just one time, I drank a case of it.  I don't know what happened to Billy or to the Guinness-heisters.  All those people we used to know are an illusion to me now.

I do know, I understand, I empathise, I resonate with pissheads.  I know about waking up at five in the morning and needing a drink just to open my eyes, and there not being one,  looking at the clock, knowing that the Asian shop half a mile down the road will be open in three hours and I can then buy a bottle of sweet sherry, keep me going until the pubs open.  God loves a drunk and as long as they don't start fighting I can put up with them. I've been a drunk, my brother was a drunk and my sister was a drunk, God loves a drunk and so do I.

The Saint Emilion episode  really did have an impact upon me.  Later, much later, I was in Brittany with Dick and I discovered nice Cognac - Armagnac, actually - and I thought, again, fuck me but the rich know how to live, this stuff is beautiful.

But with one thing and another, these days I hardly drink at all. Instead, I buy booze and keep it in the cupboard.  I just keep it. I'll open something at the drop of a hat if somebody wants it but I rarely touch it just for myself. What I do say is, Go and pick a whisky, open it up and we'll see what it's like.  Doesn't happen often but it does happen.

And it happens because we were invited, a few years ago, to a post-Christmas supper with some ghastly, hideous, misbegotten sonsafuckingbitches that Mrs Ishmael knew from work; fuckpigs, both of them, claiming that they were deeply involved in the Higher Arts - amateur dramatics, another word for wife-swapping and bondage parties if you ask me, Am-Dram, but why any of them would wanna swap with any of the other ones is a mystery upon which I dare not dwell.  They had briefly, Robin and Diana - and disastrously - owned a wee hotel on one of the outer isles, one of those places that look, from the air, as though they were floating dog turds.  Robin, anyway, had retained a collection of, I dunno,  three or four hundred single malts, most of them more than half-drunk, some of them just dregs.  And he bored me shitless with phoney arsehole talk about peatiness and smokiness and heatheriness and notes of this and that, holding forth like he was Polonius lecturing Laertes,  the cunt.  And he did this for half an hour whilst I was chewing on Diana's wretched turkey sandwiches and he never  even offered me one.  

I heard, years later, that he fell victim to some rare illness, probably one brought on by miserliness and I laughed out loud.  Hope he dies, hope that Diana takes-up with some other Am-Drammer and that he drinks all the malts.

And talking of malts, it was the malts that got me into buying booze.  Like most people of a certain age the single malt Scotch has been part of my popular culture;  drunk by fictional  heroes and movie-screen action men;  the single malt has denoted discernment, wealth and power, man of the world stuff. I was always more than happy to have a bottle of blended Scotch in the house.  I always remembered my Dad, at Christmas 1960, proud as punch that he had, on the mantelpiece, a half bottle of White Horse whisky and a silver-foil layered box of a hundred Players cigarettes,  it sat there, for a day or two,  the box of fags, like a glistening Faberge egg for poor people.  And he died, at sixty, from all those fags.

The possession of a  full bottle of Bells, therefore, was, for a long time, quite an achievement for me - one of those, y'know, those vile consumerist yardsticks whereby everything's cool just as long as we are doing better than our parents.  Didn't matter what it tasted like, Bells or Grants,  I just poured dry ginger on it, anyway. And then a few years back I was in Ullapool on the Scottish West Coast.  Me and Mrs Ishmael were there with Mr and Mrs Dick who were visiting our home in Inverness.

The wimmen went fat-quartering. No, it's not what it sounds like, fat-quarters are pieces of fabric used for quilting at which Mrs Ishmael is a dab hand and while they went to one of those twee wee shops Dick and I headed for a hotel.  Shall we try one of these single malt whiskies? Yeah, OK, if you want, beats sitting beside you while you're drinking tea.

I had a look behind the bar and a bottle of Dalwhinnie took my fancy, it was just a nice bottle.  We'll have two of them, please and a couple of halves of Belhaven.  When the barmaid told me the price I nearly fell off my stool,  I can't remember now but I think it was getting on for fourteen quid.  You could buy a bottle of blended Scotch for what I paid for these two drinks.  Funny thing was that after we'd been sipping these single malts for a few minutes dear old Dick said to me, Whaddayathink, should we try another one? And so we did.

Before he went back to Birmingham, Dick bought me a bottle of Dalwhinnie.  And I've been buying them and things like them ever since.  As I said, I rarely drink but the single malt, the decent cognac and the decent  red wine, they're nice things to have, nice things to give to people.  I don't have a bottle of wine that cost more than twenty quid, a brandy that cost more than fifty and the malts are about the same. 

 The really good malts, however, or so I understand, we never see in the shops, for the very good reason that no-one could afford them,  they are hundreds of pounds and they go to our new masters, in Russia and China. 

I hope I never get to taste them.

It's funny, I don't need it, but drink remains part of the furniture of my being; 

just having it is enough.

 

It may well be that, just as I wish on Robin, the AmDram skinflint,  I will never drink these and  somebody else may enjoy them;  the difference between Robin and I is that I wouldn't mind that in the slightest.

EVENSONG. TWO OLD DRUGGIES FUCKING ABOUT.

THE GREAT STORM; PRINCE HARRY SAFE

As gale-force winds lashed the important part of the country the populace, as one, fell to its knees, thanking God that His Serene Highness, Prince Harry Ginger was safe from cocaine, I mean harm.

CHAMPAGNE HARRY IS M'NAME,

CHAMPAGE DRINKING IS M'GAME.

Writing in the Filth-O-Graph, which he used to edit, Sir Charles Moore-Of-The-Same-Old-Tosh, said, 

 

 He's quite ga-ga, you know, 

poor man should be in a home, like me.
But not with me, fuck no.

Not since one completed one's landmark biography of the Blessed Baroness Margaret Thatcher has one felt such profound relief;  one's better, in every particular - in birth, breeding, demeanour and privilege - had been spared a tree falling on his noble Range Rover and damaging his serene person as he may or may not have been veering up and down Kensignton, off his most excellent royal face, not that he would.  My sources in the military, Field Marshal Lord Max Hastings, 

Field Marshal Lord  Hastings of Fleet Street, the PBC and Mount Tumbledown, VC and bar.
 
have assured me that heroes like his Highness are regularly dope-tested. As if.

That was Sir Charles Moore for us, there, expressing what I am sure is the national sentiment.  This is the PBC news at one, with me,  Kate Silvertits. 

 I just wanna be seen as a serious journalist.

And in other storm news it has emerged that up to two people have been killed and some people haven't been able to go to work,  gathering instead at rail and bus stations community-singing Nah nah nah nah-na-nah nah, nah-na-nah nah, He-ey Jude to mark the devastation caused by what has become known as Storm Jude, after the late Sir Paul McCartney, skinflint, narcissist and former Beatle, who continues to release records from beyond the grave.

FABSTER PAUL, FOREVER YOUNG,

WILLYA STILL NEED ME, WILLYA STILL FEED ME, WHEN I'M A HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FOUR?

Up to some trees, possibly as many as a couple of hundred, have been blown over and as many as a whole third of one per cent of the population is without any electricty, French or Chinese, and power companies are saying that due to this shortfall in consumption, prices will have to go up again to ensure that the lights don't go out, the sea doesn't boil  and their shareholders are not short-changed by as much as a farthing. 

 

 It is right, said unelected prime minister, Cameron, that wealth creators are proply protected, otherwise they will stop giving money to my party in perfectly understandable  gratitude for the favours we do them.

THE LOVELINESS OF BORIS

London Mayor, Boris Cock, said, Ho-ho-ho, Londoners are jolly well getting on with things, just as they jolly well oughter, you know, wearing those sequined thingys and eating up their plates of jellied eels and I cannot adequately express my admiration for them as they dash around my city, bicycletting in imitation of my good self or upon my jolly well fantasmogorical  omnibuses or is it omnibusi, fucked if I know, don't really speak latin, all a bit of a show, for avoiding tricky questions.  That Kate Silvertits, wouldnmind having her on my old bicycle-made-for-two, what?  cogito ergo shagum, that's what I say.  Chinese?  Taking over London?  Don't talk balderdashum.  That's the Russians.

And now over to our legal correspondent, Joshua RosenPhillips who is outside the Old Bailey for us.  Josh, how's the wife, Melanie, after being sacked by the Mail, Oh, sorry we are live on air, best leave the Hava-Nagilahs til later.  What can you tell us about proceedings there, at the Bailey?

SKANKY FLAME-HAIRED MONGRELESS UP BEFORE THE BEAK. 

 

 Well, Katie, she's pissed, is Melanie, but then she always is, silly cunt. THat's why they call her Mad Mel Phillips. And as for the trial of the year, Skanky Becky, her old man, Spiv Charlie; former Cameron bumboy, Coulson and absolutely shitloads of other Fleet Street filth are in the dock here on various, quite serious charges of filthing.  And it must be said that the two main accused are friends of wotsisname, that fucking idiot who thinks he's prime minister, thinks he's leader of the Tory Party.... y'know, the one who wanted to bomb Syria,  the one the Chinks wouldn allow in the door, that fatuous fucking imbecile, wossisname....???? |Cameron, that's it, another silly cunt. Well, people are saying that he, too, should be in the dock, having promised Murdoch the world, even agreeing to have arch-Murdochshite Coulson, living in the cupboard under the stairs at Downing Street, in exchange for Murdoch support at the election.  Funny, though, that even with the Dirty Digger onside he couldn't resoundingly beat the loathed Gordon Snot.  No, I think Cameron will have some serious questions to answer.  Not that I or anyone else in the PBC will be asking them.

(both) He's a lying, thieving piece of shit, and in my book that makes him the right man for the job.

(both) He/she's a lying, thieving piece of shit and in my book that makes him/her, the right man/woman for the job.

A quick summary then, at the top of the hour.  PBC executives have got away with stealing millions of pounds, Lord Chris Patten is still at the helm, Prince Harry is as sober as a judge and some of the unelected prime minister's closest friends and aides are facing prison, unless Mr Murdoch has some shit on the judge, which he will have.  Silly bearded git, Paxman, salary one million pounds per annum, will be babbling over at Newsnight, later.

And now the weather, with Hazel Tits

NO MANNERS, NO TALENT, NO BRAINS, NO LIVER. NASTY MAN DIES FROM OVER-INDULGENCE.

Impossibly over-rated poltroon, Professor Lou Reed, has died, aged 71, shortly after a dreadfully bourgeois liver transplant.  Reed was famous twice-over, firstly with 'sixties New York druggie band the Velvet Underground and then for his 1972  LP, Transformer, produced by David Bowie;  Bowie, a screaming bisexual, was the Danny la Rue de nos jours, a female impersonator who transfixed many, most of whom should have known better. 

Bowie had a hit with novelty record,  Space Oddity, in the late 'sixties and then forced his way into youth consciousness with a series of invented and pharmaceutically fuelled camp personalities,  all the young dudes and dudesses loved  Bowie's screeching, his make-up and his hairstyles and his Transformer collaboration with Reed shoved the latter into make-up and black nail varnish.  

 

Transformer, amongst other trash, contained the atrocious Perfect Day, the ghastly Walk On The Wild Side and was redeemed only by the hypnotic ooh-oohing of Satellite of Love.

Reed couldn't sing and claimed that one chord was good, two chords were bad and three chords were jazz.  Much is made, nevertheless,  of the protopunkness of the Velvet Underground, who were little more than a warring, musically disparate  quartet which was wheeled around by fellow non-artist, Andy Warhol, to his various Happenings at which they would play, sort-of, while acting as a screen for his precious movies.  It was all shit.  I have the early Velvets' records and, y'know,  there's the odd funky track -Waitin' for the Man, Sweet Jane, All Tomorrow's Parties, Pale Blue Eyes - and all of them, Reed compositions, are infinitely better performed by others.

Like many others, however, with too much front - people like Morrisey, whoever he may be -  Reed lived long enough to become a grande dame and a weepy, once-counterculture-now-mainstream music press laments his death as though he were Shakespeare, instead of a sublimely lucky prat.

No, the true avant-gardeistes of the 'sixties and 'seventies were Frank Zappa and the incomparable Captain Beefheart, love them or hate them and I do both,  they were soaring, inspired maniacs;  Reed was, throughout his overblown and irrelevant career nothing more than - in the proper gobby, worthless sense of the word - just a punk.

 

Pete and Lou;  no business like show business.

There is a YouClip of Reed being hosannahed  by  the boy-obsessed Pete Nose, of the Oo.  Pete claiming, as they haltingly duet, that he loves Lou.  Takes one to know one, she smiles.  I'll try to post it, it's simply the worst version  of Pale Blue Eyes, although even the best versions don't amount to much

                

EVENSONG. MATRACA BERG, BACK WHEN WE WERE BEAUTIFUL

.......AND DOG WILL HAVE HIS DAY.

There have been a couple of dog stories recently that got my goat, whatever that means, some mediaeval idiom, referring to  ye slight or ye offence or ye insult, yonder churl hath mine goat taken, maybe;  all the linguists and grammarians and classicists have fled these parts  so in their absence I should rehearse one of the very few things I learned at Warwick University, which is that the Y of Ye Olde English Fayre - or whatever - is not,  was not a Y but a thorn, a rune, shaped like a Y but pronounced "th,"  meaning that Ye Olde Whatever is properly pronounced The Olde Whatever; the misuse and mispronunciation of Ye is one of those howling solecisms, like the old adage, an exact replica, PIN number and - my favourite numbskullism - The Reason Why;  old enough to remember that hopefully is an adverb and to know what an adverb is, all this stupid fucktalk, beloved of, extraordinarily, education experts like Michael Gove, no longer amuses me, why the fuck should  I listen to people who don't even know what it is that they are saying, I dunno; Father, smite them hard, where it hurteth them, for they know not what they do, sonsafuckingbitches,  that would be my dying, crucified imperative, never mind forgiving the fuckers. But the recent dog stories, like the gibbering elite,  help illuminate our fucked-upness, help signpost the route of our ruination.

I've been trying to find an older Yorkshire Terrier in need of a home, a home purchased, incidentally, with a Yorkie's needs in mind.  Years ago  we lost a dear little  chap  due to living on a main road  and so a big, safe garden,  a long, long way from traffic and neighbours was one of our boxes to tick, as the clever housebuyer says,  when looking for a place here, in Scotland, the best part of England;  it was a right thing, too, a rightly-ticked box, for none of our other three boys died, shocked and whimpering,  under the wheels of a car; all lived their average lifespan, old age and illness compelling me to have them lethally narcotised,  easier to bear, that,  than seeing the light go out of little Frankie's eyes as he died in my arms,  in the middle of the road, my daughter looking-on, aghast.

We  have twenty years experience or so of homing shelter dogs and after the pain of Buster's dying had eased, we thought it'd be easy enough to  find a new oldboy in one of the country's hundreds of re-homing centres.  I say oldboy but Mrs Ishmael insists that we have, for the first time, a bitch, whom she wishes to call Gracie.  Having had a quartet of blokes all named after pugilists - reflecting a little dogbloke's fight to survive in our world - Frankie, Rocky, Buster and Barney, I would find it odd to be saying,  Who'sAGoodGirl?  but I am sure I would manage. And I would, of course, soon afterwards, get a proper dogbloke, maybe call him Mohamed.  But not Chris.

But gender notwithstanding there's not a homeless Yorkie to be had in Scotland.  I look at all the nation's dog re-homing  sites regularly and about ninety per cent of the dogs are Staffies, 

 

Staffordshire Bull Terriers,  poor ugly bastards, bred for some fucked-up machoman - or woman - and then abandoned.  There oughta be a law against  dog breeders. Somebody should just repeatedly punch into their faces the message that There are more important things than money.

They are not pretty dogs, Staffies,  but there are so many of them, caged -up, cared-for, if that's the word, by the  misanthropes who work in these places that I have sometimes thought, well, maybe I should take one of them on, somebody has to but I am simply not fit enough to manage one, exercise him, play with him, keep him in line.  But maybe it wouldn't be so bad;  I have a one-acre walled garden and he could run around alldaylong, tire himself out, do dogstuff, chase the birds, chase the rabbits, chase the hares;  there are some dreadfully conceited grouse who strut around the place, as though they were peacocks,  he could frighten the beJasus out of them,  bark at the cows on the other side of the wall. It wouldn't be too bad,  be better, wouldn't it, than what happened to those four machosymbol dogs who killed the fourteen-year old girl, a while back.  Kept in tiny cages in  a tiny house, starved; the poor beasts went mad, who wouldn't?

There is some corollary between poverty, disadvantage and inappropriate dog ownership. I remember a wise, old probation officer, John Sanderson,  telling me that in the 'seventies he had got sick of climbing dogshit-strewn stairways to gardenless council flats, visiting his clients, to find that on their settee was invariably a German Shepherd, called Sabre or Rebel;  couldn't feed themselves, these people, mainly, or look after themselves, yet they had these huge and potentially lethal dogs living alongside they and their innumerable and equally neglected children.  Loved 'em to bits, they did,  their kids and their beasts.

This neglectful love seemed to be the case, recently,  in a house in Wigan, where a Ms Beverley Colcanon's pack of neglected dogs, two of them Staffies, two of them Bull Mastiffs, attacked and killed young Jade.  Ms Colcanon was today given a suspended sixteen months jail and a couple of hundred quid fine;  seems about right to me, as these things go,  that's the way the law is, the attack happened on private property, beyond the writ of the Dangerous Dogs Act and Ms Colcanon was being punished for neglect of the dogs, not for their killing of the child;  too subtle a distinction for those who had legal responsibilty for Jade

Just in a sidebar, here: the Canadian Royal Commission of Enquiry Into the Non-medical Use of Drugs, some years ago, could find only one fatality, ever, as a direct result of cannabis use.  The user had smoked so much dope that he experienced a severe attack of what we call the Munchies - an over-stimulated appetite, especially for sweet things  - and died from a distended bowel, the result of eating pounds and pounds of chocolate.  Selling cannabis can result in a fourteen-year jail sentence, selling Staffordshire Bull Terriers, Bull Mastiffs and Rottweilers  is entirely legal.

     

Jade, 14, dogmeat

The dead girl's stepfather, as seems to be the case with all dead girls' stepfathers, is a gobby ignoramus, demanding this, that and the other, from the Courts and from the govament. 

 

 He's let down, he whines, heedless of the fact that maybe he should've checked out  the places where his stepdaughter was spending her time and that a place with four big, strong, mistreated dogs shouldn't have been one of them. Stupid cunt. Another of Ruin's benisons is that those guilty of gross irresponsibilty can now become campaigners, soireed and feted at Downing Street and in the shabby, fleeting, cynical  melee of MediaMinster.  Tell us, Mr and Mrs Stupid,  our viewers will be interested to know, how should the law be changed to cover up your mistake...?  Thanks,  Mr and Mrs Stupid  but we're right out of time, over now to Kate SilverTits with the rest of the news

Still, you can't blame him,

Ruin's beautiful parents, Gerry and Cilla. That's Cilla, on the right, the one with the DeathFace.

 post-McCann, parents don't need to be responsible for their kids' safety, merely adroit in blame-shifting. 

Everybody, of course, is to blame for young Jade's awful, sickening  death; being eaten alive or being mauled to death, doesn't matter what you call it,  doesn't matter what the beast is, whose fangs are doing it - shark, crocodile, dog;  Christ, it doesn't bear thinking about.  It's Coliseum stuff.

People who breed dogs, especially killerdogs, for money, animal traffickers, especially when  so many dogs are homeless, well, words fail me.  I have stood, dragooned by kin, next to them  at Crufts and I think there's a better class of person in Wormwood Scrubs.  They're to blame, whoever bred and sold these dogs needs a quick rub-down with a housebrick.  The girl's parent and step-parent had a legal responsibility and a duty of care,  they're to blame;  we need to know where our children are and what they're doing; we can't be entirely risk-averse but we must be risk-aware;  that's what parents are supposed to do, check-up on things. We, all of us, ignore the obviously perilous in our midst;  whether it is vile, obnoxious,  little bastards running riot,  the Luv'EmToBits consumer brats of imbeciles,  or whether it is lunatic women with too many animals, we all just walk-on-by and do as Stepbloke does, blame everybody else.

But there's been  two dog stories in the news.  The other one provided a tragic, well, to me it was tragic, backdrop   to the Damien McBeast story.  

Damien was one of Gordon Snot's posse of homo-erotic gangstermen - Big Al Campbell, the inebriate, manic depressive bisexual;  Pete Mandelstein, the thieving fairy; the  stuttering Milibrothers, maybe even the Ballses, God knows what PixieWoman perversions are exercised among Snotty's inbred and intermarried circle. 

 Damien was  one of the toiletbowl splatters with which Gordon, paranoid and mistrustful,  

Oh yes, he works for me, but I don't know what he does

surrounded himself and whom he charged with doing his bullying for him, his lying, his threatening; whom he charged with pursuing the frenziedly swinging needle of his moral compass, doing the Right Thing For The Country,  the horrible fucking bastard, may his nasty, vengeful, tut-tutting Presbyterian God pour sulphur in his one good eye.

Damien had fallen on his sword when the extent of his cowardly and underhanded dealings was revealed, even vowing that Gordon - the greatest man he had ever met - knew nothing of his misdeeds. 

 I am not the great Andrew Pisspoor Neil and so I know little of this sewerworld of MediaMinster but I would guess that Damien McBride was no worse than any other turd floating around in its waters;  how could he be,  they're all filth; scabby, smirking  hacks like Nick Robinson and Toilets Maguire,  deepthroat knobsucking for what they call access to the shameless  wretched, people  like Huhne, whom they court still and Cameron and Clegg, lightweight nobody chancers,  propelling themselves on jets of watery faeces as they shit, day after day, in our faces;  they are, all of them, sat upon, licking or sniffing around the Great Latrine of State; fellating one another, even as they defecate;  felchers,  ponces, slags, nonces, thieves, blackmailers, pimps, whores and war criminals, all of them; liars, hypocrites, cheats and embezzlers, all of them.  What the fuck, amongst this institutionalised crime family, is so exceptional, so bad about Damien McBride?  

They will all swear that they wouldn't ever stoop as low as McBride, even as they are doing so,  the huffier they are, the more guilty they are.  So it was all a bit of a confection, McBride the Repenter and his Book of Revelations, a bit of gossip but perhaps enough to embarrass Ed Tonsils at his annual, staged  rally, as if anything would embarrass the stuttering, ham-fisted, millionaire-eejit.  One of the rags, anyway, paid Damien a hundred grand for the serialisation rights of this fucking rubbish and he was trailed around the rally, looking  like a whore at a hockey match, a photo-op here, an interview there. He always looked pissed to me, sweaty and unwholesome and one of the PBC's hacks denounced him to his face as a self-confessed alcoholic, as though it was a crime, being an alcoholic;  the PBC's gossamer veneer of  correctness and sensitivity to Otherness and Illness being floodlit in all its thieving, noncing hypocrisy. 

 No, no, I'm deeply ashamed, Damien  gurned,  that's why I'm making all this money, working for  Paul Dacre, I mean setting the record straight, so that others follow the straight path and not the crooked one. 

As the Penitent stood on the promenade what is called a seasoned protestor hove into camera-shot behind him  and faced a Portillo moment.

Simpering right-wing thug, Portillo

 Older readers may remember that the PBC's grande dame of railway memories and late night political  backbiting,  Lady Michael Portillo, was once - instead of being a moribund lackey-stooge to Jocky Neil - a potential leader of the Conservative party, as was, and thus a potential prime minister.  He bottled his leadership bid, however, when questions were asked about his time at Cambridge;  was he,  like everyone else there, a dabbler in brown-hattery, did he punt from the wrong end of the boat.  Chagrined, he was, poor Mike, and scotched his leadership campaign.

A while later, Portillo, in a taxi but with a squadron of goons around him, was kinda door-stepped by the courageous if wrong-headed gay activist, Peter Tatchell,  who wanted to challenge him about, I guess, his anti-homo stance while in Whisky Maggie's govament of spivs. Immediately and quite illegally, Tatchell was assaulted and wrestled to the ground by Micky's goons, 

 

whilst le premier manque sped away, smirking that smirk which he has since tried so hard to eradicate, but not quite.  

The grammar school gang, poncing off us at the PBC.

Interesting that Portillo currently damns Old Bill's treatment of the dreadful Andrew Pleb Wotsit;  people asking awkward questions should, by Portillo's own lights, be assaulted and thrown to the ground.

And so it was for the poor anti-nukes  protestor, trying to upstage Mr McBride and his publishers.  It is perfectly legal to step anywhere on the public footpath or highway, broadcasters may not close off a public right of way but Mr McBride's handler and publisher, the gay thug, Iain Cardigan, of the Mrs Dale's Diary Tory blog did not see it that way and acted like the proper thicko Tory spiv that he is;  he attacked the old boy 

 
and in the process the old boy's dog bit his owner.


  
Now, that Iain Dale is a complete cunt is no surprise to anyone, even himself; try as he may, the ghastly, rancid  old homo, for all his inspiring-as-a-cardigan blogging and begging  cannot find a Tory seat in which to stand, nobody likes him, even in Toryland.  That would-be Torybastards  like him feel entitled to suppress legal protest with violence comes as no surprise,  either,  that's what they're like, always a hair's breadth from a goosestep,  just a spark away from a torchlit rally.  Portillo or Dale, they'll beat up anyone who gets in their way. And call it Freedom.

But the worst thing about this thuggery was the response it elicited from the commentariat.  Everybody, from the Poncing4Gove Toby Young in the Filth-O-Graph,

 y'know, the slaphead, gabshite rent-a-mouth, the ultimate pushy parent, he thought it was a die-laughing show, the victim's little dog, biting his master.  And so did everyone else who incorporated this ruinous little tragedy into their acts. Journalists, commentators and infantile stand-up so called comedians, like this fucking jumped-up retard


This fuckwit has an apparently endless series
 on the PBC's yoof channel, 
maybe senior management is bumming him.


they all, jesters and hacks,  feasted on the discomfort caused, by Power, to both man and beast,

Vote for me. Or I'll knock you down.

Dale, a big hulking stupid ignorant  cunt, an obnoxious bully, knocks an OAP to the ground, isn't prosecuted and the best bit of the story is  not only that Dale's behaviour is applauded but that the confusion and fear which he created in the poor little dog is seen as almost the joke of the century.

Those who know about such things say that children who pull the legs from spiders, who mistreat pets and wild animals are more likely to become serial unspeakables; even so, I always was a bit sceptical about PETA, a largely pop-starry organisation aimed at promoting the ethical treatment of animals but the older I get the more that Cruelty repels me,  the more I see its celebration as harbinger of our doom. From Cruelty TeeVee, with the likes of the drunken old slag Anne Robinson, through the almost Nazi persecution of the disabled - the new Jewry, it's all their fault - to  this bullyboy business with the arse-dipping Dale and the national response to it, the country's beginning to resemble a bear pit,  in which the vulnerable are taunted and abused  for the entertainment of the masses.  Bread and circuses.  For hard-working families.

EVENSONG. GOOD MORNING, AMERICA, HOW ARE YOU? THE LATE STEVE GOODMAN SINGS HIS DISAPPEARING RAILROAD BLUES

TRUTH AND FICTION, A WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS.

I often think that we live in a series of parallel worlds, these days.  I don't give a flying fuck about sport, for instance, and I am not alone in this indifference, yet sport, its fixtures, its trivia and its personalities threaten to overwhelm us;  like most people, I despise the very idea of political parties, their existence and structures are     contrary to the idea of public service, yet  we are  cinstantly fed a diet of pap,  concerning  the wicked doings of three uniform gangs of criminals; MediaMInster haughtily claims to represent us, to intercede for us, to make us better and yet they are vermin, all of them;  the cops claim to protect us when, in fact, they kill us and beat us and frame us and they are never, ever, ever convicted, well, maybe one in  a thousand.  The person most likely to kill you is your doctor, he will find a way; he will mis - or over-prescribe, he will ignore obvious symptoms, he will be a dirty, filthy bastard who does not think he needs to wash his hands;  if he is in a hospital he will bully you, perform the wrong operation and send you home without proper care or medication and yet,  thanks to a ridiculously over-promoted Labour Health Seckatry, we shower him with money,  the drug companies shower him with money, everybody admires and respects him.  Many of our soldiers, never mind being heroes are sadistic  and murderous brutes.  These are just a few of the conflicting parallel realities,  the wilderness of mirrors amid  which we wrestle.

Now and again, though, something happens which lets the truth in, draws back the veil and on the Filth-O-Graph, today,  the ghastly Ben  Hodges, a formerly showy, faux-Labour activiste but now an angry, showy Ed-basher, wrote a piece circusising the McCann horrorshow, asking  the odd pertinent question - what about all the other missing kids ? There was a comments sign on the piece but when I looked where the comments should be there was another sign saying Comments Closed,  there weren't any comments at all.

In my experience of cyberspace, commenters - on 'blogs or 'papers - are generally quite sceptical;  they are naturally disobedient  and forthright - that's why Power hates the Internet - and I guess what happened, today, with Hodges' piece, was that there was a deluge of anti-McCannism with which the Filth-O-Graph did not want to be associated, comment, therefore, in this section of its comment section was forbidden.  I cannot but find this quite comforting, even the rednecks despise the McCanns with a ferocity that MediaMinster will not permit to speak its own name.

The world which gave Obomba a Peace Prize is the same world that tries to bamboozle us about Gerry and Cilla;  we should hunt-down its inhabitants and expose them, sunlight will kill them.

PORTUGESE POLICE. WE HAVE SOLVED JILL DANDO MYSTERY, MET POLICE ARE SHIT

Portugese coppers search Hyde Park for clues.

Maybe eet was-a Jeemy Savile 'oo keel her.

This is the news that the PBC's CrimeShit programme, still reeeling from the death, decades ago,  of its presenter, Jill Dando, is to broadcast a programme made by a bunch of drunken, sponging Portugeezer cops who have been here for months on an all-expenses paid junket.

We are-a making ay-a 'ow you say, reconstructio time-a-line-a of ze a-keeling of  ze bambino Jill Dando, said His Excellencio El Colonel Manuel Labor, of the Portugeezers Police Federation.  Ze a-Metropolitania coppers are-a fucking rubbish and-a could-a not-a find-a their-a own-a dick in their-a own-a trousers, never-a mind-a that their-a cleana-upa rate is a-fucking rubbish,  eesa about three-a fucking per centa, innit.  Ees-a fucking rubbisha. And zat ees why we have-a come here, like cheeky fuckers, to-a sort-out their-a fuckups.

Britain's honorary Justice Minsters, the right revolting and money-grubbing fuckpigs, Gerry and Cilla McCann, 

 Every Picture tells a story.  

said that They were the Real Victims here, and if the Portugese police have any spare money thay should give it to them.  As should everybody else in the world. Even if you have already given to our Don't Find Maddie Fund, you can give again. And again. Details of how you can give us money are on our website.  We have long since used your donations to pay-off our mortgage, giving us more time to appear before you on TeeVee, in strictly-controlled media scenario events.

Sttill not sacked.

 Lord Sir Benie Hagen Daas, capo-di-capi,  boss of the crime gang known as the Metropolitan Police, said, Listen, me an' my boys did our level best to frame that cunt, wotsisname, Barry George, for the murder of Jill Dando, we 'ad 'im bang not to rights and what thanks do we get?  The fucking Appeal Court, that's what.  We lock up innocent people and the fucking courts let 'em out again. I dunno why we bovver.

An' I must say that we fink that foreign police forces coming into our jurisdiction and re-openin' our cases is takin' a fuckin' liberty.


PBC hack crawls from under stone.

 

Mr Nick Ross, formerly of Savile-World and known associate of Bernie's Mob, said that although at the time, as a crime reporter, he was absolutely one hundred per cent convinced of the guilt of Barry George, even writing  many paid columns to that effect, he had never and would never apologise for being entirely wrong.  It's my PBC training, he said, we are trained  never to apologise  And it is my professionalism which enables me to state categorically that Gerry and Cilla McCann did not kill Lord Lucan's nanny.  Even though they probably would've if there was enough money in it.

WOTSONTELLY. BEING FOR THE BENEFIT OF MRS RAFT

"Good grief, are there three Snows? "

Herditary broadcasters discuss how they might better serve the public.
 
Yes, there are three Snowmen, cousins, all descended from generals and bishops; in the middle, the execrable tosspot and excuse for a journalist, Jon, Jon Sox,  the Bruce Forsyth of newsreaders.  

Jon has a job for life fronting Channel Four News and flying all over the world but especially to Washington, to be near the senators and the president, if only for a day or two.  Apparently C4 can only report on serious Uncle Sam stuff by having Jon whizz over there and stand in front of a camera - wearing stupid socks and stupider ties - at the Lincolm Memorial, wetting himself at the whole  divine Americanness of it. All expenses paid.  By us.  Jon has won the luvvie-journalist's equivalent of the Oscar many times  and been praised all around the Street of Shame.

 On the right is elder swingometer statesman, Pete, a  former PBC news presenter whose windmilling arms and inane commentary in days of yore briefly enlivened  the corporation's general election coverage.  But not much. His unfailing contribution to election night was his gibbering that we wouldn't know the result until the result was in,  genius. He quit in 2005, claiming he was too old, which he was, as well as too stupid and good for fuck all, although the reality is probably that the PBC wanted the more telegenic but equally worthless Jeremy Vine to dance around its increasingly technological - and expensive - election coverage; Jerry does execute a mean two-step over the flashing constituencies, looking like a prick.

Pete's main contribution to broadcasting, though,  is the launching of the career of his son, Dan, as yet another  scrappy, ill-informed telly-historian.  Peter joined Dan in many of his first programmes, co-presenting and lending spurious gravitas to the younger nincompoop but of course Dan made his career entirely on his own merits with no help from his father or his father's connections at the PBC, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

The older Snowmen are overly  married, Jon recently dumping his thirty-five year partner for a more exotic model - don't you just hate that? - and  Pete has a platoon of children from various partners. We must hope that he can find them all jobs in the family business;   Christ,  it's bad enough having only two Dimblebys shitting in our faces from the Great Latrine of State; three Snows adding to our daily effluent is  nowhere near enough.

THE BITCH IS BACK, BRIEFLY.

Almost before you could say facelift.....

Hillary Trousers,  former gay icon 

 

and pestilential  hopeful is back with more downhome recipes for global harmony. It Takes the Bombing Of A Village, that was her last bestseller.  I think  I mean presidential hopeful, or do I, the woman is a pestilence, a lying, cheating crook who clings to her married name - if not to Spunky Bill himself, may God burst his rotten heart wide open - merely to bolster her chances of becoming Uncle Sam's first shriveled old crone president.  It's not that I am against women or anything,  I like women,  I really do, sometimes I think I prefer women to men, other times I think I prefer men to women but I think it's just a phoney comradeship with men, I'd rather go into battle with men but I'm never going to go into battle, not now; I'd rather do a project with a man, although wife and daughters have, by osmosis, become adroit, and obedient, which is important, some men'll do as they're told, others  want to discuss options,  want to do what they think they want to do. I don't, I don't want to do what they want to do. I know what I want to do and that's all there is to it. Women politicians, anyway, in my view, are no worse than men politicians. And no better.

She's been gobbing off at Chatham House, has Hillary,  

 

  can't hardly see the stitches

about the need for - wait for it - a grown-up debate about her government stealing my correspondence. The nerve of some people, who do they think they are? It's not so long since she was bribing David Bananaband, then - inexplicably - UK foreign seckatry

 to tamper with the British courts in order to protect Uncle Sam's International Torture squads from scrutiny. 

 

I think this poor sod was  actually one of our victims but Hey, we're all allies.

The poor lads who did this to him are probably PTSDed. A job for Help for Heroes. The nigger, however,  is now quite dead. So fuck him.

It didn't quite work but Dave still got his reward,  being hoiked out of  his, where was it,  Middlesborough constituency and flown to the Big Apple to head-up, as we say, International Rescue. 

 God help the rescuees, with a shithead like Miliband looking out for them;  looks as though he couldn't ride a tricycle without falling off and with his record they probably stand as much chance of being waterboarded as fed and watered; everybody, to the US government, being a terrorist manque.

I saw him on the box the other day, platitudinising woodenly,  as only he can,  numbnutted, evasive and pompous, about the shit in Syria and what his people can do about it -  nothing, they need more donations, obviously not from him or his rich masters but from all the people on zero-hours contracts, going down foodbanks and freezing to fucking death and just looking at him, all smug and I-Know-Best, I thought to myself, maybe this is all shit, this brotherly betrayal bollocks.  

Maybe Dave's post at IR - and what it will lead to, helping  the witch, Hills,  and Spunky Bill try to get back to the WhiteHouse - was always a done deal and he just went through the motions with the Labour party leadership election.  It's obvious he didn't give a fuck about his constituency, pissed off, like Blair, as soon as he could.  And who could blame him, who would want to lead the shamelessees of the   Gordon Snot rump, people like the property-flipping Ballses, Ed and the Ice Pixie Woman

 

Andy Burnham, 

 

Look, just because I was in charge when all those people died in North Staffs, doesn't mean I was in charge.

Harriet Soursister, 

Bluestocking Labour aristocracy,

the immoveable deputy great leader;
you can see the class; 

the insufferable, motormouthing  gabshite, Caroline Flint

need to get to bed earlier, dear

  and his dopey, speech impaired bruvver;  who, in their right mind'd want to lead that bunch; no money in that game.  But the Clintons have trousered billions and can put some his way.  Just a thought.

Syria's been a shithole for ages, why is it that Bananaband needs to talk about it all of a sudden, just as his boss needs to raise her reptilian head above the parapet - as to her proposed debate, any fule knows that it is the security of the government from the people that matters, nothing else, absolutely nothing else, the government MUST be kept secure from the citizens,  there's not going to be a debate about that, fuck, no.

The more likely impetus for Hillary's reappearance  is that Barry Obomba is looking, well, like a fucking idiot; 

My fellow motherfuckers,
this is all the Republicans' fault.

the thug,  Putin, has stuck a balalaika up his arse, Basher Assad is laughing at him, Israel's Benjy the Bastard is as mad as Hell and even the bandit, Khazi, in Afghanistan, is firing a round of fucks into him, saying Uncle Sam is good for fuck all, the corruption is down to his contractors - which it will be - and that all GI Joe has achieved is the industrialised slaughter of innocent Afghanis and the  concomitant popularisation of the Talimen,  who were, in any event, not so long ago, Uncle Sam's favouritest allies.

At home, the rednecks are shutting-up shop, it's sundown on the union,  and this, too, is Fuckhead's fault. The miniscule reform of healthcare in the States has been Democrat policy for years; Hillary, as First Lady,  managed to blow it out of the water, so deft are her political instincts and experience - hick lawyer, housewife  and philanderer's doormat - and when this administration resurrected it, Obama was vain enough, stupid enough to allow his name, his legacy imprimatur to attach to it;  it wasn't ObamaCare, it was DemocratCare,  the work of a movement, not of a nitwit community organiser, out of his depth, probably out of his mind with delusions of grandeur. 

 And now the TeaParty are thrashing him with the whips  and cudgels  of his own vanity.  This is all his fault.  The  global game was up when he blustered in Sweden that his infamous, maladroit redlines were not actually his but the world's;  they were no such thing and thinking people everywhere will have seen their creeping disappointment with this wretched phoney amplified, underlined and  confirmed.  He really is good for fuck all.  His once impresive speechifying and sloganising now ring strangely silent, like a  tongueless bell,  people are wise to his conceits,  wise to his inabilty to extemporise sans autocue, wise to his jive-talking and his soul-singing; wise to the fact that their commander in chief is a dummy.  

And all that's before you look at his slavish servitude to the financial terrorism of Wall Street and its policies of punitive unemployment, poverty wages  and stagnant growth,

 its insistence that the rich get vastly richer and the poor become vastly poorer - e pluribus unum noire; one out of many, it's about right, one per cent doing fabulously well,  while  the Fed, the Treasury, the Congress, FoxNews and the White House make sure that everyone else does fabulously badly.  The constitution, trashed by Dubya, remains trashed; America is a terror state, people spied upon, imprisoned without recourse to habeas corpus, beaten, gassed, tasered and microwaved by state and federal goons.  And all the while America, terrorised and brutalised by its rulers,   trumpets its exceptionalism,  the greatest nation on Earth, illiterate, imprisoned, impoverished, hungry and unemployed; polluted and despoiled by EarthCriminals who own the BigHair Congressional and Senatorial whores, shooting and raping itself in unimaginable numbers.   The modern home of slavery, ethnic cleansing and state brutality, America fully merits Ahmed's withering description - The Great Satan.

Obama is dead in the water and the vile Clinton can smell blood, that's why she's out, testing the depths of her support although unfortunately for her the lesbian groundswell which picked up her sorry ass is spent on the shores of the Obamaism which Hills  first decried but then, a slave to ambition and status, embraced. She, too, by grubby association, by shabby nepotism and by personal venality is also  dead in the water; slighted, vengeful womanhood will not again support her and she will be on the wrong side of the double-entry reckoning which America must swiftly make. 

Perhaps her only option will be to make her quietus with Spunky Bill, two rats in a gilded cage, she with her lovers, he with his, until Death do them part. And the sooner the fucking better.