The Sunday Ishmael 11/7/2021

Mordaunt fires a round of fucks into quivering Blackford.

 

In a thin week for anything other than football, the SNP chose to enliven the Commons with a debate on Covid contracts. Costly little Ian Blackford, he of the dainty footwear and a £1000 a year newspaper habit, had a solid go at Westminster's "endemic cronyism during a global pandemic, the misuse of funds and covid profiteers." (Best not mention the £500 million of public contracts awarded without any competitive process and approved by Holyrood without scrutiny, as reported by the Herald on Sunday). And also best not mention Blackford's expenses claim for 2018/19 - £149,863.38 on staff, £45,533.17 on travel, £37,867.66 on office costs and £22,775.73 on accommodation. Blackford, a former investment banker at Deutsche Bank, has probably grown accustomed to nothing but the best.

Ian Blackford, Leader of the SNP at Westminster

Fortunately for the Government, Penny, the Paymaster-General, appears to have brought along her machine gun in order to fire a round of fucks into Mr. PotatoHead.

She elegantly announced: 

 "I always take pleasure in taking part in SNP debates; I have done a few and am beginning to notice a pattern. I have been called here previously to defend the UK’s position on jobs, while the SNP has dismissed the 545,000 Scottish jobs that are reliant on Scotland’s being part of the UK; I have been called here to discuss the importance of hypothetical EU funding mechanisms, while the SNP dismisses the very real United Kingdom dividend to the taxpayers of Scotland of £2,000 per person; and in another debate the SNP sought to be the champions of democracy while they ignored the result of two referendums. Although it might be a surprise to some that, in a week when we have had more revelations about the Scottish government’s own lack of financial propriety and literacy, the SNP has called a debate on such schemes, it is not a surprise to me: I think it shows admirable consistency, as well as a complete lack of self-awareness with a large helping of assumed piety."

Having been accused of being part of a 'posh old pals’ network 'that starts at Eton and Harrow': she responded: Our four-nation NHS will continue to work together, as will our chief medical officers. My fellow Ministers and I - all comprehensive-school educated, by the way—will come to this House to be held to account, and we will continue to reject the distracting, delusional and divisive debate from the SNP."

The derivation of the surname Mordaunt is from the French verb mordre - to bite, possibly referring to the sarcastic or biting sense of humour of the first Mordaunt. 'S'obviously in the genes.

It has been a week when you'd struggle to find anything other than Football, Covid, NHS.  mr ishmael drafted this in 2014, and it remains absolutely pertinent - especially his thoughts on watching the England v Italy game.

 

THIS SPORTING LIFE drafted 27/8/14

 News and current affairs coverage, infotainment,  has become a self-renewing  Advent Calendar of Shit. Currently, the opened window terrifies us with Caliphatist jihad but the very nature of the news machine ensures that this will pass, even if there is a conflagration, its attraction will pass, be supplanted; when Old  Queen Brenda dies, for instance, then nothing else in the world will matter, her death will be all the news, Martians might land, Jesus arrive to judge the quick and the dead, it won't matter, there is an order of precedence in these things.  A Dead Queen Brenda will trump the Second Coming. That's how it is.

 To everything there is a news window, turn, turn,turn. Just recently there have been windows into the perils of air travel, Malaysian air travel, anyway;  the perils of transatlantic yachting;  the perils of sabbaticalising in Malaya;  there are ragheaded Trojan horses rampaging around Alum Rock, fissuring the unity, the cohesion and the integrity of important people, people  like Michael Spit and elderly dancing queen, Teresa May.  

 I don't know if there's anything new in Alum Rock, Golden Hillock Road, Washwood Heath, those places. Last time I was in Alum Rock, about twenty years ago, it was like a foreign country, peopled by rude, nasty belligerent  arseholes who looked like they'd cut your fucking head off, soon as look at you, and that was just the women;  it was like a no-go area for whites.  I couldn't believe it, it used to be an Irish enclave, some Poles, too. I lived there, briefly, as a child.   It was always a shithole and the flowing waters of   the bourgeois gentrification which has transformed places like Moseley bypassed Alum Rock, it was always a poor shithole of a place but on this occasion it was truly  frightening  and  after five minutes I jumped in my car and fucked off out of it as fast as I could. It was broad daylight and  at that time of my life I  had been accustomed to walking around Handsworth at any time, day or night;  I was never worried about blacks or maybe it was that they were never worried about me but that ferocious hostility from Moslem men, women and children in Alum Rock really shook me.   I am not surprised to hear that it is now barricaded-up against the Infidel, its schools teaching alienism.  The teachers all sound very reasonable, unafraid, on the telly, denying any such thing as enforced Mohammedanism, they ought to know but there seems to be something funny going down. Whatever it is, it doesn't merit its own window in the calendar and its prominence will have arisen only to serve the purpose of two equally shabby, inept and vainglorious coalition ministers.  I mean, this shit's been happening for years.  Sparkhill, Lord Hatterjee's old constituency, it's the most Northerly banana republic in the world;  NewLabour and bent moslem councillors, it is the fabric of the inner city. And sometimes the outer ring. The Tories have bent Round Tablers and Rotarians; Labour has Sikh, Hindu and Moslem Crime Incorporated.  Both  deploy the  knowing handshakes and secret whispers of the Freemasons.  Filth, all of it, local government. What's new, here?

We, meantime, must peer inwards, through the window, and talk vexedly amongst ourselves. Look, the Alum Rock window has opened.   Now, what opinions can I share with friends and colleagues about  Alum fucking Rock? Don't actually have any.  Opinions. Never mind.  I'll look in the Guardian. 

 I don't give a fuck about any of it.  Three hundred Malayans and Chinks, I don't give a fuck;  a quartet of nitwit nincompoop mariners, fuck 'em;  some MommasBoy dork wandering around in the jungle so's to feel better about himself and his carbon footprint, well, he won't be feeling anything now, will he, won't be worrying about giving something back, silly cunt. If he really wanted  to give something back he would have stopped jetplaneing his fucking conscience all around the world. Prick. Flying around the world to help turtles.  Turtles?

It is a daily invitation to the blues, all this shit that you can do nothing about and which doesn't matter, anyway.  It's not that I am inhuman, indifferent to sorrow, that "No man is an island stuff". I'm a believer.  It's just the showbizzing of it all.  It is the sort of thing you used to read about in  a quarter column  of newsprint - white man lost in jungle, trusty natives bearing body back to civilisation.   Now, his fucking mother is everywhere, doughty, indefatigable, beseeching, demanding of Pile-of-shit Hague that he does something.  It's a private tragedy, love;  you're never gonna be a star, just like that other one, the Mum who's dopey forty-year old hacked the Pentagon, MediaMinster'll run you on a quiet day but nobody really gives a fuck, not when Harrison Ford's broken his ancient ankle.

 As all in MediaMinster seek to deflect, to silence the angry cries of constituents screaming for Ukippery; each window of tragedy  is  more deeply, more distractingly gazed into and analysed for us by gobby, gung-ho, shithead relatives, ignorant of the concept of No Comment; scrutinised for us expertly by paid talking heads, most of whom are actually talking arseholes - upside-down yachtologists,  rainforest survival experts, radar nerds.  I wonder what all these people do, do they sit around, waiting for their sort of emergency to arise; security experts, foreign affairs experts, suicide experts, ash tree experts, volcano experts, bumblebee experts;  where the fuck are they all and how do they earn a living, one which they can abandon at the first call from skymadeupnewsandfilth?  And how come I'm not one of them,  I could blether authoritatively for hours, any subject under the Sun. The Devil, as ever, is in the detail; Ah, easy to say with the benefit of hindsight;  I obviously cannot comment  about this individual case;  we must learn lessons and move forward;  there is some ree-surch which indicates that this may not be the case;  well, it is a big area to search.

I don't know if they actually exist, these Advent Window Gazers, maybe they're  CGI, special effects.  But there is certainly no shortage of them, maybe they are just a function of the idea of something being News or maybe it's the reverse -  nothing can actually become News, unless there is at least a platoon of story-related gobby experts, expert on whatever it is that is newsworthy.  I mean, imagine, this thing, whatever it is,  happens and there aren't any experts on it.  Kay Burley, for instance, can't do thinking out loud, she has to have some expert at whom she can fire the feisty questions with which her earpiece is prompting her, between the advertising breaks and the sports updates, couldn't expect Kay to do speculation or deduction or extrapolation, she is, after all, just a Botoxed moron, with tapeworms where anyone else'd have a brain and some feelings.....

Whenever the Pillars of the Temple might just be falling down, might require only a little push from public scrutiny,  attention is quickly diverted.  All of a sudden we become nationally obsessed with the fate of a few hundred people aboard a phantom airline, a sunken Korean ferry.  And then another window opens, a mass shooting in the United States of Atrocity, John Sox'll be business classed over there like a fucking shot, reporting to us from this grim New England town, where tragedy stalks blah blah blah....as America  wrestles with   blah blah blah.....gun control....how many tragedies like this will it take before.....blah blah blah.  Regular as clockwork comes   another tweaking of the Gerry and Cilla McCann Show - next week, said Chief Inspector Filth of the Met's Foreign Holidays On Overtime Squad, we plan to dig-up the Outback of Australia and interview some known Aussie paedophiles, burglars, gipsies, paedo-burglars, gippo-paedos, kangaroos, crocodiles; we have absolutely no strong leads, no evidence whatsoever  and me and my officers are absolutely determined that we will leave no dead-end unexplored in the search for liddle wotsername. 

And now, this week,  a window opens into the trials and tribulations of a planeload of weepy tongue-tied, patriotic millionaires,

THE THIEFA WORLD CUP


A TOURNAMENT AWARDED TO THIEVES BY THIEVES, 
COMPETED FOR BY TEAMS OF GANG-RAPING, 
COKE-SNORTING CELEBRITIES

the national hope is resting on the fifty-thousand pounds per day, spotty shoulders of Wayne Potato, or so it seems, should he play, should he not play, should it be on the left or the right and his fellow oiks, poor Wayne the GrannyBanger and the whole ridiculous World Cup Tournament will enthrall us for as long as Team England can remain in it; not, probably, very long. Win or lose, though,  the World Cup window will open,
enriching the few, dazzling and bamboozling the many. 

The PBC's Team Brazilia,
three dummies and a questionmaster.
 And nation shall speak shite unto nation.

The trouble with these poor people, ordinary Brazilians, rioting and what not, is that they shouldn't mix politics with money, I mean sport, don't you agree, panel?


Aye, yower not wrong there, Gary, me man. I mean all them lads is tryin' to do is do a good job fer their country, like I were when I kept falling doon, like, in't penalty box and pretendin' some cunt 'ad kicked me over, never worked, like, burahwasdoinitfermecountry. An' the lads are doin' it  fer their country. And fer their own careers, too, like, you know, in advertising or sponsorship or even in foo'ball - an they're 'avin to contend wi' nig-nogs, like, - cos that's wot they are, lessbefair, no offence  to you two lads, yer almost 'onorary Englishmen, after all, Rio and Thierry - disruptin' things and rioting, like, just because they got no 'ouses or jobs or 'ealthcare while their govament is spending billions on footy fer rich folks to watch.  I mean, they got no sense a proportion, 'ave they?  I mean, I allus say, Gary,  that ye cannae trust a nation where 'alf the wimmen's got great big shiny cocks  between their legs, where there oughter be a Berkshire, can you? Ladymen, cannae abide them, me.  That Alan Hansen,

 allus had me doots aboot that one.....

That's right, Alan, poverty, neglect, exploitation and oppression, they  shouldn't be allowed to interfere with the beautiful game.  And as for the street kiddies being hungry, well what's wrong with us sending them all a great big donation of out-of-date potato crisps, hasn't done me any harm.


What, eat 'em?  Fuck no, they're really bad for you, fat, starch, salt.  Top athletes, like m'self, we  don't get where we are by eating shit like this.  No,  but they're OK for the kids, course they are.  It's like anything, moderation's the word, probly no more than three or four bags a day.


And, oh, hang on, I'm just hearing in my earpiece that we can have a quick word with David Beckham.  Dave, is it true that you're being sponsored by those fucking gangsters in Quattar or wherever it is, that roasting hot shithole which never should have been given the world cup, is that right? 

Oh, thanks, Gary, but me an' Victoria, we can't comment on, like 'ow we got so rich but basically it's wot Ishmael said, above, when 'e wuz talkin about the war - steal it, sell it, flog yer arse off, knowarramean, apples an pears, apples an pears, trouble'n'strife, trouble'n'strife. Prince 'Arry, is 'e takin' a bung? Shoulden be surprised, me.  Y'know 'is uncle would, duncha, be a million for  a bung, would Prince Andy. No, atchelly, we are all good friends, me and Victoria, wiv the Royals. Fanksalot, Gary, for everyfink the BBC's done fer me an' Victoria. 

It hardly seems worth mentioning amongst all the other venality but national hero, Beckham, is actually being sponsored in one of his endless self-publicising ventures by the very people who bought the THIEFA Cup for Quattar, little wonder that as one of the leaders of the failed UK bid,   the poor, tattoed,  money-addicted freak is  keeping so quiet.

I was up all night, leaning on the windowsill and I thought I'd watch the football, England v Italy.  I do believe that following football indicates, in the follower,  a lower position on the evolutionary scale but I'll watch a game every couple of years or so. And I like reading about football, some of the writing is very good;  the players, though and the managers and the fans, well,  they and I, we don't inhabit the same spaces. For a start, the idea of a mass anything gives me the heeby-jeebies and a footy crowd, cheering and ranting and singing like fucking Zulus is not a place in which I want to be;  been there a couple of times, and that was two times too many. It was back in the good old days  when a tide of drunkards' piss ran down the steps and the smell of Bovril filled the air. But I have enjoyed the odd televised match, generally at a high level, Euro or World Cup games.

And so I watched the match, me and Harris.  It was OK but like snooker and tennis and F1 and no doubt everything else, footy has been monetised out of all recognition, it's all just grindingly efficient, every potential flash of genius squeezed out of it, throttled at birth.  I haven't seen a football match for a while and was intrigued by the pink boots, some yellow ones, too, but only for a minute, wosalthatabout, I thought, pink boots? And then when I saw that they all had Nike logos on them I realised that they will just be the equivalent of Roger Federer's Rolex watch;  Lewis Hamilton's head-to-toe Santander outfit - like some weird, devout Moslem women, he is, Lewis, swaddled from tip-to-toe;  Gary Lineker's crisps, Mo Farrer's Virgin broadband connection,  these are the modern sporting rewards.  Federer, Nadal and Jabberwocky have earned about eighty million dollars apiece in prize money but their sponsorship deals will probably amount to many times  more.  What I was doing, I realised, was participating in a corporatised leisure event. 

................................................................................

 Football, Covid, NHS - The NHS has had such a revival of public affection that it has  a lot to thank the global pandemic for. Mr ishmael, frequently at the mercy of the NHS in England and Scotland, was immune to its charms through bitter experience.

 DOING THE ROUNDS   22/1/2011

Just back from the local hospital. I've had chest pains for a few days and all the websites say if you have chest pains, even without pre-existing heart disease, you call an ambulance.  I didn't think it was heart trouble, I thought it was a side effect of  new antibiotics but it kept hurting and in the wee small hours Mr Death seems to be creeping around the cabin door more determinedly than in the light. I couldn't cope with paramedics again, God bless them, especially not at 2.30 in the morning, they think that once you call them you become their property. So we drove to the hospital.  Last time it was ambulance,  paramedics and air ambulance and fuck knows what else, lucky to get back alive and uneviscerated, I was. Heading for the hospital this time in the SmartCar I rehearsed it all again and nearly turned back. But it was ok, it was a side effect. A quick ecg and  a thoughtful examination and the doc agreed, you're right, it's the flucloxacillin taken the lining off your gullet and your stomach, drink this, it's Gaviscon.  In ten minutes the pain was decreasing. I did just what it said on the leaflet, I said, took it an hour before food. That's what you shouldn't have done, she said, read the leaflet, it's bollocks, always take it with food, trust me, I'm a doctor.

 

NHS BLUES 7th September 2013

I could go on for days.......I am old enough now, wise enough, to know shitheadedness when I see it and in the past few months I have seen breathtaking incompetence from senior health professionals, worse than that, though, is the hand-in-hand  cowardice and the mutual arse-covering; this is a system beyond reform and in Scotland, at least,  hopelessly overrun with second-rate, foreign locums.  

A Malaysian anaesthetist and a South African registrar, one of the pigshitstupidest men I have ever met,  - really, really, you look at him and listen to him and wonder, marvel at the fact that he can dress himself and you wonder what he's doing here, a laughing stock among even the ward auxiliaries and  wonder why he's not working in Grandfather Nelson's modern superstate, what are we doing employing fucking rubbish like this?  - persuaded me that my surgical procedure should be conducted under local anaesthetic,  I agreed, expecting a little paring-away with a scalpel; instead,  it involved the surgical equivalent of an angle grinder, with my  blood and bone and tissue flying everywhere, including, I kid you not, into  my face.  It took the Malaysian three attempts - about a minute -  via the venflon in my wrist, to finally knock me out, the  surgeon continuing regardless, as though his life depended on it; as to this monumental fuck up, no-one has since had the courage  to say  a word to me about it,  the surgeon-welder has fucked-off home to Hungary and as I said I am now under a different, proper hospital where even the nurses seem to be at the level of professors. 

 Some of my daily, community team are so long in the tooth that they actually worked on  Piper Alpha's melting survivors and they are knowledgeable, vigilant and amazingly dexterous; others, junior, freshly qualified nurses in the local hospital are stupid, filthy, lazy slatterns;  you wouldn't trust them to walk your dog.

I had my heart surgery in Aberdeen just over a year ago and I felt as though I was being treated by NASA - brilliant, sophisticated techniques deployed by a hugely respectful, compassionate, talented and dedicated team of experts, some from abroad but all fluent even in idiomatic English.  Leicester Royal Infirmary, on the other hand,  in my experience, is a filthy, shambolic, polyglot, twelve-storey shithole which should be demolished; overrun by  dangerously useless foreign nurses and doctors who can't or won't speak English, a spell in that place would surely nourish one's inner Ukipper. I saw an oriental nurse, doing diabetic blood tests, whose actions could not but pass infection from one patient's bloodstream to that of the next patient; she wiped-off excess blood from a patient's thumb-prick not with a swab or a piece of cotton wool but with the thumb of her latex glove, repeating the process, wearing the same glove, with the next dozen patients, into each patient's bloodstream, thus,  passing the blood of the previous patient.  She should have been jailed. Fortunately - and sensibly - I always do my own bloodtests in hospital and waved  the filthy bitch away.  In the same ward, another, young, student male nurse, spread sepsis in a uniquely thoughtful way - when he performed the bloodtests he would carefully tape a little cotton wool to the test site, each time tearing the tape between his teeth.

The NHS should not contain such dramatic, catastrophic disparities but at this time it is being run by larcenous Tory spivs and their bent mates; previously it has been run by NewLabour filth like Alan Milburn, the insufferable Andy Burnham and the mind-bogglingly inept and over-promoted gabshite Patsy Leatherface Hewitt;  all have and some are still shamelessly lining their pockets from the NHS. Christ, we think Lord Chris Pooh of the BBC is bad when he's just a bent cunt, Millburn and Hewitt are gangsters.

But I've digressed. A mixed bag,   therefore, of absenteeism experiences.  I have been hugely, hugely fortunate and I am very grateful but  like so many, I have also been shamefully neglected and mistreated.  That's the way it is and I see no remedy for it. 

This is rather sweet and very poignant and stays with the health theme.

 

BUSTER, THE BLOG DOG. HEALTH BULLETIN

He's a bit drawn-looking;  this was en route to the vetbastard and he's considerably better, after a shot of antibiotics, a couple of hours later, below;  pampering him with his six or eight daily dinners and preoccupied with the big C, we had become just a wee bit slipshod about his heart medications, and anyway, he's a deceitful little bugger,  spitting them out in secret places, I blame his parents; I keep telling him, Gimme a break, man, I have a heart condition myself and I don't get half your attention, just eat the fucking pills, willya, ya dohwanna die,  do you, not when you're getting all this fantastic food and fuss, everybody going, Aaah, we love Busterkins, hoosagoodboythen, Aah, BusterBusterBoo, HowGoodADogAreYou, and worst of all, to the tune of EreWeGo, EreWeGo, EreWeGo: WeesAnPoos, WeesAnPoos-WeesAnPoos- Wees-An-Poos, Wees-An-Poos-Wees-An-Poos-Wees-An-Poos, Wees-An-Poos-Wees-An-Poos-Wees-An-Poos, Wees-An-Poo-oos, Weeees-An-Poos.

And you don't want me to scrunch them all up in a puree and squirt them in your mouth with a plastic syringe and hold your gob clamped shut, so's you don't spit 'em out, do you?  This debases our relationship, you just gotta play the white dog, here. All it takes is a day or two of missed pills and he gets the fluid around his heart and it pisses him right off, miserable as sin, he is.  My fault, shouldn't ever trust a Yorkshire Terrier. And it's winter as well, and he hates it. He has a brand new fur-trimmed, thickly lined waterproof, well, not real fur, obviously and we're trying to source him some boots but even so the winds up here are amazing and he is a hundred.  So he doesn't get out as much as he likes. And the teevee's shit.



The vetbastard, who pronounced him dying three Christmases ago, says he's the best Yorkie she ever saw, such a fighter, she means he's a good customer.

 

mr ishmael's essays today are:

This Sporting Life                          drafted 27/8/14 

Doing The Rounds              drafted 22/1/2011 

NHS Blues                                         drafted 7th September 2013                                  

Buster, The Blog Dog. Health Bulletin        drafted November 2010       

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

PROWRITINGAID15, WELCOME15 or TREAT15 in the coupon box, which  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

Oh, just go away.