EXECUTION BLUES.

Albert Pierrepoint was the last great British executioner.  He was so good at what he did that for the Nuremberg hangings he was commissioned into the British Army as a lieutenant-colonel and sent out to hang the Nazis - the ones that weren't any good to the Russians or the Yanks, anyway.

Uncle Sam's necktie artistes were so inept, with their cowboy nooses, that they were either strangling Hermann to death, with shit and eyballs everywhere, or ripping his fucking head off completely. The Limey hangman demonstrated to them the finer points of his trade, despatching the Hermanns neatly and swiftly, ripping-off not even one Kraut head

 Pierrepoint came from a family of hangmen, his Da' and his uncle had been the official executioners for both England &Wales and Ireland, when we still owned her and Albert assisted them both, learning, forgive me, the ropes and when he  inherited the official executioner post and the little case containing the notes and tables on hanging and the deadly little noose he  made a steady living travelling the British Isles, killing people.

He was very adroit, Albert.  He kind of boasted that he would enter the condemned cell as the clock began to strike eight and his client would be dead before the eighth peal of the bell. The condemned cell door would swing open, Morning, old chap, he'd say, grasping the prisoner's hand and quickly walking him to the trap-door in the adjacent cell, the Topping Shop, pinioning his arms as they walked; once on the trap-door Albert's assistant would strap the man's legs together whilst Albert pulled a hood over his head, the assistant would draw back the safety catch on the trap-door and Albert would step back pulling the lever as he went.  The poor bastard never knew what was happening and in most cases died instantly, Albert having carefully calculated the length of his drop by means of reference to  Home Office tables compiled over many decades and by means of his own hangman's eye.  Having, the previous evening,  surreptitiously viewed the man through the Judas hole  in the cell door, Albert would minutely adjust the home office recommendations depending upon the idiosyncracies of each victim's musculature, if he was five feet eight with a thick neck and shoulders  he would need a longer drop than a five feet eight man of slight build. In nearly all of Albert's executions the spinal cord was severed at exactly the right vertebrae to cause instantaneous death.  Just the same, they'd leave him or her hanging there for an hour whilst Albert, the prison Governor  and his guests all went and had a hearty breakfast;  hungry work, hanging. Even so, if, before Abolition, you had been sentenced to death I am sure you would have paid good money to have Albert doing the business for you.

Those horrid, snarling little brown bastards in Indonesia, the ones with too many teeth in their mouths, those ugly little monsters could do with an Albert Pierrepoint, to help them execute people humaneley, well, less inhumanely. Gotta be more economical, too,  one hangman, one fee, one breakast.  I don't know if each of the eight executionees had their own firing squad, all to themselves but if they did that's ninety-six of the little brown bastards  and  nearly a hundred bullets. I was going to say that these shootings have put me in touch with my inner Farage, made me hate every last little angry brown bastard in Indonesia  but I guess he'd applaud the Indonesians' death penalty as being a litle corner of a foreign field that is forever England.

 I don't know what it was, today, why this particular obscenity shook me so  but a huge, red rage overtook me.  If there was an Indonesian charge d'affaires' gaff here, I'd have set fire to it and happily  beaten the diplomats to death, calling them rotten little brown bastards as I did so, cursing their rotten little brown bastard parents and their rotten little brown bastard children. And don't start me about how the NHS would be fucked sideways to Christmas if it wasn't for Indonesian arse-wipers.  I don't care, I don't want to be nursed or tended by nasty, angry little brown bastards, beardy women and angry,  conceited men, fuck 'em.

I read a lot about Pierepoint when I was younger   and was struck not by his humanity, that would be ridiculous, but by his efficiency;  he did that dire duty as well as it could be done and that included sparing the condemned as much distress as was possible, given the circumstances, and sparing him a slow, painful and probably unimaginably humiliating death.  

With these  brown bastards, it is the savagery of the process as much as the cruelty of the fact - shooting someone for something he did a decade ago, when he was someone else -  some poor smallfry, dragging him, screaming,  to a post or a wall, taking aim, firing and then checking that a dozen rounds have done the trick, and all whilst government and lawnforcement cartels grow rich on the continued absurdity of the War on Drugs - the Indonesians are planning to shoot a British granny for handling  three or four kilos of smack, I wonder how many kilos young parent, Sir Elton John consumed, when he was playing-up, Elt; of course, a rich junkie, was soireed in Downing Street, Granny a poor mule, will be shot to pieces.

Little Big Man

President Nasty Little Brown Bastard.
 
 Hanging's too good for them, Indonesians. Another  Boxing Day Tsunami, that's what they need, 
the last one taught them nothing.

CLAUSE FOUR REVISITED.

Mr Thomas B Hall commented on the last post that he was content to support a tiny, electorally insignificant and hopeless but uncompromising political party. Dave Nellist was the last MediaMinster politician for whom I had any respect and on the couple of occasions on which we spoke he struck me as gracious and sincere. Too gracious for the cunt, Kinnock, who, enraged by Nellist's only taking from his MP's salary the same wage as a skilled worker in his Coventry constituency, had him deselected.

 I post this broadcast not to proselytise but just in case others missed it, which would not be surprising, although I will say that I wish Dave and his comrades well, they should be neither insignificant nor hopeless. 

 Tearful Tommy Sheridan destroyed the left in  Scotland, snorting it away with cocaine bought from  party members' subscriptions, and Gorgeous George Galloway has pimped it away in England; maybe, in providing a collectivist's counterpoint to Poundland's lurid, discordant singularity Dave Nellist may yet, though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, rattle the cages of the unGodly. 

DREAMS OF NO RETURN. A MADMAN DEPARTS.

Waddawewant? Anal rape.

Whendowewannit? In the next Cleggalition.

Clegg supporters at the launch of  his party's ShitBook, yesterday.

My fellow child molesters,

All Cyril did was assault some children; what's so bad about that? Dave Boy Steel, former Chief Shitman.

my fellow shit-eaters,

 

 ShitParty copraphiliac shadow home secretary, 

Mark Oaten.

 look, I've eaten so much teenage fecal matter

 it's made my hair fall out.

How so Liberal is that?

my fellow wealthy benefit cheats,

 

 So I only stole fifty grand because I was gay and I didn't want my parents to know. ShitParty Education minister and ShitBook author, Dave Laws. 

So yes, of course I'm a millionaire, isn't everybody?

my fellow jailbirds,

 Yes, I deeply regret it, being found out. 

Former ShitParty energy minister, Chris Huhne, 

writing in the Guardian,

 on wife-bullying and perverting the course of justice.

And on claiming twenty grand of taxpayer pounds when his criminality forced him out of the Cabinet, as they call organised crime's HQ.

Yes, of course I'm a millionaire, isn't everybody?

my fellow incompetents,

The building contractors' friend, 
Lord Boy Steel-Shitman, 

presided over the Holyrood parliament building costs rising from fifty million pounds,

 to five hundred million pounds, half a billion fucking pounds for a talking shop.
It was a foreign architect, said  adulterer, Steel, Liberally; 

what do you expect from foreigners? 
Yes, of course I'm a millionaire, isn't everybody?

my fellow gropers, grabbers and bottom fingerers,

Mike Hairy Hancock, CBE,  ShitParty Portsmouth MP, 

where he molested every constituent he encountered.

 Now believed to be standing  as a Groping Independent.

my fellow dipsomaniacs,

Charlie Pisshead, deeply principled former Chief Shitman and TeeVee non-personality, courageously  admitted to incompetence and unsuitability  through alcohol addiction a full ninety seconds  before his former aide was to blow the whistle on him.

my fellow raving lunatics

Field Marshal Lord Paddy Rupert-Golightly-Jockstrap-Narcissus, PC; VC, Croix de Guerre, Congressional Medal of Honour;

Nobel laureate, Oscar winner;

former Commanding Officer, Queen's Own Shitmen Regiment;

war hero, visionary, historian, distinguished statesman, orator, writer, philosopher, economist,  theologist,

TeeVee personality, adulterer and steely-eyed delusional maniac.

Delirious, stark, staring, raving, dribbling, foot-stomping, door-punching, climbing the walls bonkers, is Paddy; raging, unhinged, preposterous, rabid, demented, frantic, Napoleonic, gibbering out of his mind, mad as a box of fucking frogs;  Paddy is the ShitParty Election Supremo; how can it lose?

and last but not least, sickening hypocrites.

Straight Simon Hughes, 
warty, pervy,  bisexual queerbasher; liar, ponce, pseudo-Christian, cynical polytheist and all-round creepily untrustworthy bastard;  the ShitParty's justice minister.

What I say to you, all my colleagues, in the parliamentary party. And those several dozens of members and activists up and down the country, in the nation's public conveniences. What I say to you. Is this. 

Has it been  easy for me, a lifelong Tory, to lead my party into coalition with other lifelong Tories. Yes, of course it has.

And the nation should give me credit for doing the easy thing.   Not the hard thing, it's easy to do the hard thing. Not everyone would have done it the easy way. Some would have stood on their principles. And let the Tories fall, within a few months. But not me.  

Did I desperately want to be Deputy Tory Prime Minister?  Of course I did. It's what I came into politics for. I'd rather have been Tory prime minister. But we all have to make sacrifices. And I am sure the voters will give me credit for it. Has it been easy to pretend  that I'm not a Tory? Yes, of course it has. The main thing is that I have been in govament. And that I have managed  to keep the Tory faith, whilst destroying the prospects of you Liberals ever being taken seriously again.

 

Did I ever doubt what we were doing to Britain, throwing sick people out of their homes because they had an extra broom cupboard, where they kept their wheelchairs or dialysis machines? No, of course not.

People will know that as Tories our manifesto is our solemn word to the British people that we can be relied upon to break our every pledge, piss on our every promise and betray our every principle, not that we have any. And this one offers people the stark choice of me being in Downing Street, shafting poor people

 or him

 or him

People ask me if this election is about one thing and one thing only.

 Of course it is.

Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.

UKIP SUZY, OUR VERY OWN GNASHER.

I thought UKIP Suzy was great. I promise, I was not watching the Poundland manifesto show, it was just on, mrs ishmael having watched Breakfast TeeVee with her breakfast and departed, heedless of  my discomfort. It doesn't matter how often I complain that I don't care what they say, about anything, she insists on telling me what they've just said about the latest scandal, abduction, health or fashion fad, although, this morning she was also bemoaning their clumsy language- what do they mean, ahead of the election?

It was still on, anyway, as I carefully prepared my  spinach and soya breakfast roulade and I couldn't help but be struck at how comprehensive and entirely  achievable were her remedies for the nations ills.

All we have to do is leave the EU and we'll all be fully-costed millionaires, tended by a superior health service in public ownership, guarded by the best army since the Roman Empire and best of all NO WOGS.

 Suzy and Sid's Great Book of Shite.

  

Well, to be honest  with you,  and although Suzanne has done a great job making-up my manifesto for me, we don't actually mean no wogs, we want the right sort of wogs.

No, no racists in my party, absolutely none.

And just to prove it I will, quite frankly, let's be honest, do you know what, close the show with a little cabaret, dedicated to the many black members of my party. 
They've been a bit noisy today but that's just the way they are. 
Have to shout to be heard in the jungle, where they come from. 
Anyway, a-one-two-three......

If U-Kip Suzy, like I-kip Suzy,
Oh, Oh, Oh what a gal.

She was very good, I thought, UKIP Suzy, as these things go, especially on foreign aid and cutting ministries but  most especially when compared to Sid, himself, who looked and sounded knackered.

The sharpest televisual contrast of this morning, however, was not between Suzy and Sid but between Suzy and Nick Clegg.  If you saw and heard someone, down the library, say, if you still had one, ranting like NickClegg was, you'd contact the Community Psychiatric Nurse, if you still had one.

I know she's just another hustler, Suzy, but she made a good fist of it this morning.  

Sid must be hoping she doesn't shove it up his arse.

THE SUNDAY ISHMAEL, THE TRAVEL PAGES, SCOTLAND, BEST PART OF ENGLAND; WASHINGTON NEWS, THE RIGHT OF THE GOVERNORS TO MURDER THE GOVERNED

I went to the barber's in Redditch, in 1999; it was just after the death  of Old King Hussein of Jordan and Arab John gave me a trim  and told  me all about  the Hashemite dynasty, what bastards they were; and I went again, today,  22nd March, 2015, in Dundee. 

I hated it, the barber's, from my very first experience; when I was about four,  they sat me on a plank between the arms of the big chair and my Dad said, shortback'n'sides. I screamed my head off and I have never liked it since, the phrase or the sound of the clippers. It may be that grooming other men, like nursing them, is a perfectly natural choice of job but it wouldn't be mine. Fuck no.

 Seems a long time, I know, sixteen years, between groomings but it's just  so irrelevant, barbering. I need no-one's approval of my appearance, it is an impossibly long time since I worked for anyone else and that circuit, of approval-seeking, is long-since shorted.  I don't shit in people's gardens or wipe my hands on their curtains or anything and I wear latex gloves if I even make anyone a slice of toast but my hair, as long as it's clean, never enters my thoughts;  being barbered, furthermore,  is such a strange intimacy, all that looking-at and talking-to another bloke in the mirror, I can't be the only one made uneasy by that strange, public confessional booth, by a professional groomer telling one what would look good, hair-wise, parting-wise. 

My Dad  treated me, much later, after instilling in me a loathing of all gentlemen's hairdressers, everywhere, to a barbershop shave - you know, all that fetishy palaver, a roasting  hot towel in tongs  draped over my face, a badgerbristle brush soaping my face  and a stropped, cut-throat razor gliding over my Adam's apple.  Seems to me like the sort of ritual a hangman or a suicide bomber might enjoy, before going about his day job.  Once was enough. Those Al Capone blokes, in Chicago,   they must've been fucking mad, sitting in a chair with some spic fairy waving a blade around their windpipes.

I think the Ruperts used to command their batmen body servants to do it to them,  the hot, close shave; but then the Ruperts, well, TE Lawrence-Rupert, of Arabia, anyway, used to require of his manservant that he  beat  his  guilty buttocks  for him, with leather straps and God only knows what else.  A man's life, in the army, thrashing his master's arse.

I haven't  turned into Robinson Crusoe or anything,  these past sixteen years, I just get mrs ishmael to tidy things up, once in a while; sometimes I do it myself, just wash it, comb it all forward and scissor a couple of inches away, job done, it's not surgery or anything.  But it's thinning  on the top now and I thought I'd better get a trained bloke to even things up a bit and so I went into the A Class Turkish Barbers,

 just over  the road from my hotel,

the Malmaison Boutique Hotel And New People's Brothel. 

Meeting comely young men and hard-faced but  inviting  young women in every elevator is not the strangest aspect of a stay in Malmaison.  It may be that a steady supply of prostitutes is all part of the service in a city hotel and the Malmaison emphasises the potential raunchiness of a stay within its confines. For when you need a room in a hurry, that sort of thing accompanies the house  logo of a panting couple, clawing at each other.  The toiletries supplied all come with pornographic explanation and innuendo, the fig shampoo tube, for instance -  gettin' jiggy wit da figgy,  away from home you want sexy foam.  something to make them (ooh-ooh-ooh) moan and groan. squeeze the tube, that's quite enuff.oh my lord, you look hot in the buff. now all clean no longer dirty, isn't it time for you yoo get flirty) and half of the wardrobe is given over to a Malmaison mini-bar, stocked with expensive cheap champagne and bottled cocktails,  in case he or she needs industrial-scale  plying with drink, the more mal to be.  I don't think there was ever a time when that sort of crudity appealed to me. All a bit racist, too, I think, that enuff in the buff stuff. And the tone is lowered further by the Do Not Disturb sign, whic reads, insrtead of DND, Clean-Up on the one side, Clear Off on the other. Not an ideal way to instruct mainly immigrant domestic staff; still, if the purpose of your visit is purely carnal, as the management seem to want it to be, then insulting the menials might produce a much-needed hard-on. Maybe it is owned, the Malmaison chain, by some cunt like Beardy Branson for it has all of his personal hallmarks.

This is broad daylight au Malmaison and the lights are on.

 A new experience, especially for those who are jaded with being able to see what they are doing, the Malmaison's exclusive design team has  developed very dark corridors,  leading through very dark doors into very dark rooms which are cunningly  unlit by strangely useless lightbulbs, pinhead-bright, but useless to see-by, like stars a trillion light years away, before Time began;  the walls are dark, the carpet is dark, the furniture is dark, the curtains are dark, even the television has, somehow, had all the light leeched from it.

Towards the end of 2001, A Space Odyssey, the hero finds himself, at the farthest end of space and time, in what appears to be a replicated Earth domicile but it only looks like a proper place, everything is plastic, copied visually from a photo; drinks and foodstuffs, although in authentic packaging, contain only ersatz goo. This not-quite-rightness, this Looks-Like-A-Hotel-But-Isn'tness of the Malmaison was apparent not only in the decadent dinginess of its miserable fucking  decor but in the staggering, breath-taking, heart-stopping  incompetence of  the staff - receptionists who couldn't receive; waiters who couldn't wait, barstaff who could neither pour nor transport a drink, yet all grinning like masturbating chimpanzees, all addressing us as YouGuys, urging us to Enjoy!  One teenage waitress, who couldn't safely carry two empty side plates, informing us, as though she was God's personal Maitre d'hotel, that her particular, special, personal favourite among the desserts was the pineapple blanquette, whatever the fuck that is, and as if any bastard in his right mind would give a fuck what her favourite pudding was, stupid slut When I was a kid I worked in Belfast's  then-great Grand Central Hotel, where waiters worked for months, in what was called the Still Room,  making tartare and horseradish and Hollandaise sauces; creating wafer-thin, delicately curved Melba Toast, curling butter, polishing silver, glass and crockery before being allowed  anywhere near the fucking dining room. Once there they would learn how to vacuum the floor, polish the tables, lay the linen, set the silver without even the hint of a fingerprint and eventually they would be allowed to, using a spoon and fork, place in front of a customer, just-so, a hot plate, onto which a fully-trained waiter would silver-serve his meal. Other waiters, chefs-de-rang,  cooked on a lamp at the table, Stroganoff, Steak Diane, Crepes; might pan-fry and fillet, with a spoon and fork,  a whole Dover Sole Meuniere. The country, its hotels and restaurants, it's First Class train buffet carriages, its town halls, its passenger liners,  was once awash with people who could do that stuff.  I can do all that stuff and so some slip of a girl who serves soup with her finger it, telling me about her favourite pudding is only going to set my teeth on edge.  Some countries still train catering staff; I think in Ireland being a barman  needs an apprenticeship and the Europeans still value proper service. Nothing wrong with service and people shouldn't conflate it with servility. As mr bungalow bill often repines, those things which we do with our hands and eyes, we should do well. Ruin has robbed us even of the satisfaction of knowing how to wait at table, made feeble and worthless what was once a complex set of skills. Enjoy!

In the barbers,  I sat me down on the leather settee and commenced to watch Turkish Gaz shave this bloke's already closely-shaven head until he looked like a concentration camp victim and then take twenty quid off him.  In the other chair, Turkish Gaz's brother, Solly, was doing the same to another customer, only he was leaving a line, half-way up the scalp,  the kind of thing I used to do with the lawnmower, a line between mown strips that wasn't really there;  this was a neat line all the way around his head just above his ears which kind of made the almost-invisible stubble look as though it was, well I don't know what it was supposed to look like, looked fucking stupid to me, two-tone, that's what it was, a two-tone shaved head. See, bro, I 'as got yo line, innit, chortled Turkish Solly of A Class Turkish Barbers, Dundee.  'Ow many times it is I 'as done yo line now?  Issa lot anyway, I could do that line in me sleep, man, tellin' ya.

Growing concerned that this was not a gents' hairdressers in the usual sense, I had been looking along the counter for some scissors but all I could see was a vast selection of electric razors, black ones, red ones, white ones. And hair driers.  They each had a couple of hairdriers, slung in holsters on the counter, like Colt .45s in the Sherrif's office. Whaddatheywant with hairdriers, I wondered, these guys have virtually fuck all hair when they come in here and none at all by the time  Gaz and Solly're done with them, what's to dry? You don't need a hairdrier for a shiny bald head with a fucking line around it. But then I saw Sol, down the other end, he had flames coming out of hands which were  frantically waving around his customer's recently shaven head.  Fuck, he's caught fire, poor bastard, mind you, paying twenty or thirty quid  to look like a nineteenth-century convict, he can't be right; probably just spontaneously combusted, Nature's way of telling him he's a waste of space, which he surely is;  happens all the time, I understand, just go up in flames and smoke, they do, only their shoes left, or in this bloke's case his lurid green and pink trainers.  I used to worry about that quite a lot, spontaneously combusting,  going so far as to mind-design a sensor-operated, shoulder-borne  fire extinguisher, with a nozzle on a tube just above the head, one wisp of smoke and a mighty deluge would flood the wearer, but these days I am less self-centred in my anxieties, more community-, more planetarily-orientated, worry myself sick, sometimes,  I do, about big fuck-off lumps of asteroid smashing into the Earth at sixty thousand miles an hour, blowing everything to fuck, roasting us all in our beds and blacking out the Sun for a hundred years;  serious climate change, that stuff, a  gazillion kilotonne nuke, turning everything all Golden Wonder.  You may mock my concern but cosmically speaking  that sort of shit happens every five minutes.

And then I understood, that what Sol was doing, down the other end of the salon,  was burning the hair out of wotsisname's, TwoToneHead's,  ears, with a lighted spill and he was waving his hand in and out of the flame, I suppose to stop the ear catching fire.  Fuck this, I thought,  for a game of soldiers, I came in here for a bit of a trim, not an Aushwitz scalping and having my ears set alight; I'm off, I'll buy a good pair of scissors and do it myself. In the hotel. No, not in the hotel, too dark, even in broad daylight, cut my ear off, I would and some whore probably bust-in, anyway, offering me a figgy shampoo or a pineapple blanquettejob a la mode. I'll give myself a trim when I get back home.  Not having some gobby Turkish git poofter set fire to my fucking head, after he's shaved it bald.

But I was too late, Turkish Gaz was extending to me a plastic cape and saying Your turn, sir, sorry to keep you an' 'ow is you today, an' 'ow you want yo' hair?

Before I sat down I said to him, struggling for an idiom, and regretting it immediately,  You do old-fashioned? Cutting?  With scissors?  Only me not wanna shave, like other blokes, certainly no shavez-vous  mon tete, comprenez? 

No, is OK, can scissors do. 

 And me not wanna catchee fire, in ear hole. 

 I didn't think he would, put the fire in my ear, not unless I let him shave my head clean, like a boiled egg, which I wouldn't. Be like Galipoli all over again if Gaz and Sol tried that. But I could see the grim logic of it, now, the fire, what's the point of  removing every trace of hair from the cranium, if there's strands hanging out from the earhole? Look fucking rubbish, that would. It was actually quite sensible, in the world of NewPeople's convict chic coiffure, to set fire to your ears.  Crazy fucking bastards.  Although, if we set fire to the Pampas grass - you can't cut the fucking stuff, not without a nuclear-powered, laser chainsaw - it just grows back bigger and tougher.  Maybe there's former customers of A Class Turkish Barbers, Dundee, walking around the town, tripping over their ear-hair, smashing their dumb faces on the pavement. Serve 'em right

You want hair cut to ear, like this, Gaz enquired of me in the mirror, or above  ear,  like this?

Maybe just below ear a bit.

Like so?

Yeah, like so, just make a  bit tidy, make even-out. OK? 

OK.

I can put myself in trance, almost at the drop of a hat; no, I can, really, I can, just drop my chin on my chest, close my eyes, drop my hands in my lap, breathe-out and I'm gone;  I dunno if it would see me through an asteroid colliding with  John O' Groats and dumping a trillion tons of super-heated water on my house but it works for things like epidurals and that's what I did as Gaz snipped away, doing that folding-between-the-fingers and stretching and snipping thing that proper barbers do. I shut my eyes and lost myself.

You wan' some nice spray?

OK, whatever you think.

I wish I hadn't said that because I soon smelt like what I imagine a Balkans Bond villain to smell like, sweet and heavy and a bit unwholesome but as sixteen-yearly haircuts go it wasn't too bad. And I found out what the hairdriers were for.  Barbers in ancient days used to brush you down with soft-bristle brushes, pull your collar away and brush all that scratchy stuff the fuck out of it,  then they'd sweep your hair from around the floor  using a cheap, nylon sweeping broom and a dustpan. I used to wonder what they did with all the hair, the barbers, I mean, it was, in those days, anyway, a lot of hair; maybe they were in touch with the people to whom the Nazi Hermanns - all of them - sold the Jews' hair, the stuff they shaved-off, before they gassed them - vaste not, vant not, eh, Jahwohl, ist gut, mein Fuhrer, some mattresses can make, mit ze hair from ze dead Jews. Ach, nein, nein, zat vood mean sleeping on top ov ze filthy Jewbastards,  I am ze fucking Fuhrer, must I sink of every fucking sing?  For you, feldwebel of haircutting, iss ze Russian front, fucking dumkopf;  you are sure zat you are not a fucking Jew, maybe your grandmutter, she vaz a fucking Jew, eh? 

 Every minute or so, during my trim, Gaz would blast me with a hairdrier, to get rid of the clippings and when he had finished he half-crouched, half-scampered, half-ran after the hair on the floor, coralling it, at hairdrier point, little bits of stubble - apart from mine, which could be measured in inches -  in a pile in the corner of the shop, like mouse droppings. 

He only charged me a tenner. Wasn't too bad an experience at all, once I had determined to take some Turkish heads, like we used to, if they came near me with scalp-arson in their eyes. I wondered if they knew of or were bothered by the number of inns and coaching houses in England named The Turk's Head or The Saracen's Head;  I mean, if we, not that we would, went to Turkey on holiday and found, in every street - do they have streets? - a coffee shop called the Brummy's Head, the Scousers Entrails or heard one Turk say to another, see you later, Ahmed my brother, for a coffee, down the Geordie's Giblets, salaam eleikum, and it's your turn to pay, I wonder how we'd feel.  But fuck 'em, anyway, Turkish barbers, not as though they're important to proper people, not like my young friend, stanislav, was, a Polish plumber.  

I am glad I had the haircut but I feel, as I often do in Scotland's mean, city streets, that men of more refinement than I would've fled;  even borderlands Berwick-on-Tweed being noticably more civilised  than Scotland's dire, Tribesman reservations. An Empire sensibility, Resolution, that's what a man needs, in the towns and cities which have fallen to the cult of Gnashing.

But going to the doctors' in Dundee,  that, fuck me, was an whole other thing; I have never seen so many sick people, all in one room.  And although I have sat in a room talking to six released lifers I have never seen so many dangerous, crippled and  malformed citizens all gathered together as there were in this laughingly-titled health centre.

I had 'phoned my own doctor, at home, concerned about something.  Go and see a local GP, she said, tell 'em to get this x-rayed.   But they have no appointments, I already tried.  They have to see you,  they have no choice.  I found one which would see me eventually and the waiting room indicated that  the Black Death or worse was alive and well in Dundee, not quite the plague exactly but an NHS Trust'sworth worth of cancers, malnutrition, addiction and obesity, knife and bottle wounds;  every other person had one of those things in their throats;  the ones who didn't weigh forty stones weighed seven or eight, in danger of slithering out of their shell-suits and down a drain; skins translucent, junkies stage-whispered at one another about which doctor was on and what they'd give them;  there wasn't a-bit-of-a-cough or an upset tummy to be seen, every bastard was dying, apparently, of abuse or neglect,  the guy next to me with the thing in his throat reeking, still,  of cigarettes.  It was all a depressing, macabre illustration of  When you got nuthin, you got nuthin to lose;  it was like being in the ante-chamber to that ward in the hospital, the one where all the men with no legs form-up their wheelchairs like a wagon train and power-wheel themselves  outside, for a fag.

Must be one of the sorriest sights in the developed world, this.

Those people, dying for want of an antibiotic, blinded by dirty water, what must they think of us; flushing our toilets with drinking water, smoking ourselves to death in hospital?

When I went to the Allan Carr Easy Way To Stop Smoking Clinic they told us that there were two kinds of people among  whom the Allan Carr approach wouldn't work - teenagers, whose parents were paying the hundred-quid fee for them, and amputees who had already lost legs to smoking-related illness.
 The kids, he said, didn't care, it wasn't their money and the amputees were too far gone in addiction to ever be well again. 

Most people who go to that clinic - and its branches worldwide - stop smoking but not everybody knows about it, and many are now deluded into thinking that they need nicotine patches or chewing gum, need to be shepherded throught themselves, by smoking cessation teams, teams of experts.  It's rubbish, all that, you just need someone to lay out for you just exactly how stupid smoking is and then you'll stop, just like that, there's nothing to give up, it's like banging your head on the wall, only more dangerous.
 
Easy to be smug, though, about having stopped that lunacy and I think if I hadn't and had instead, as was likely and may still happen, contracted a fatal, smoking-related illness I'd find myself a tobacco executive, Jazzman Kenny Clarke'd do,  the fat cunt,

the one who is a former health seckatry and worked for British American Tobacco,  and cut his fucking heart out. See what he made of that as an exercise of free will. 


Ye-e-es, I'm a Tory you see, ye-e-e-es,
 and rather unlike the socialists, I must say,  I believe in freedom of choice. 
And that's why I worked for a time,  selling killer drugs to poor children in the third world. 
They make the choice and I make the money, ye-e-e-es
Dolphin Square? 
Never heard of it.


I had a visitor, here, last week, from the Black Country; his back's fucked, his legs're fucked; his hands're stained, not yellow but black;  he doesn't sleep and he coughs.  But it int the fags wot causes that, no way.  It's a soyentifick fact, it is, that smokin' dunt cause none a them. Oh, fair play, it may cause cancer burr I yint got that. I'll stop long before I get that fucker. He's fifty-three. 

Scotland, or Scotland's cities, seem to be filled by people like that,  like my visitor, people stupidly vicious to themselves, thinking they're clever.  The life expectancy in parts of Glasgow is depressingly short and much as I despise Whisky Maggie it is crass and opportunistic of the tribesmen to blame her for  Glasgow's epic pilgrimage to self-destruction.  Sure, everybody knows that the savaging of  shipyard, colliery and foundry workers was an act of wilful political cruelty committed by filth like Tebbit and Heseltine, by spivs, cocksuckers, childfuckers, bullyboys, thieves and beasts but that's no reason to smoke yourself to death, is it;  no reason to beat your wife and  neglect your kids, just because your footba' team lost; no reason to eat shit fried in lard  and snort smack. One can, of course, blame Thatcher for everything and believe in a bizarre Nirvana, in  a Scottish renaissance, if only the hated English'd fuck off but junkies and wifebeaters and drunks are not going to be its midwife, no matter what Gnasher tells them about the Scoattish peepul.

Forty miles east, 

 in Sterling, 

or a hundred miles north, 

in Inverness, in the Great Glen, 

 Scotland isn't writhing in the desperate throes of longed-for nationhood, 
doesn't have a full-time job hating the English,
that's just the nutters, most of whom know little or nothing of their own history, obviously.


 Living in or on the edges of the Wilderness doesn't half give one a sense of proportion.
It isn't Scotland which ails the Tribesman.
It isn't England which ails the Tribesman.
It's the fucking city.
Living in Glasgow or Dundee  and having all his hair removed by Turkish Gaz, beating his wife and getting pissed out of his mind, that's the tribesman's ailment.

They live in shit, they eat shit, they drink shit, they talk shit and they allow some snarling, good for fuck all, rabble-rousing, tub-thumpng, flag-waving, life-long career gabshite like 

Jesus, I'm sure anyone at school with her would've hated her fucking guts.
 
wee Nicky Sturgeon to feed them indigestible cliches of shit; too stupid, far too stupid to see that she and her Sugar Daddy, the FatMan,


Does this really fool anybody, 
this fat, smirking cunt in his fancy dress?

 have far more in common with the filthsters in MediaMinster than ever they do with some ginger, cider-swigging, beetle-browed, cross-dressing, knuckle-dragging, wife-beating, neanderthal savage, who couldn't count to five using his fingers.

like this.

Time after time I enquire of Central Belters, Y'ever been to Orkney, seen the stones, Skara Brae?  Inverness, the Cairngorms? 
Nah, keep meanin' tae, y'ken.... 
But I loves Eyebeetha, me.

Sometimes I say, Y'ever been to Canterbury, see the cathedral? Oxford, London? The Albert Hall, the Proms?
Durham, maybe, see the cathedral there? No?


No way, yon's English history. 
An' I hae me ain culture, ken, 
aye, an me ain music.

 Finished in Dundee, instead of blasting up the A9, white-knuckling to the ferry as usual, we lit out, north-west of Pitlochry into Victorian, hunting and fishing Scotland.


Even seeing Dame Judi Dench and Dame Billy Connolly,
at her own wee postbox.

This is the hated A9. 
More accustomed, previously, to the M42, 
I love it. 
It is my own Route 66, 
my own Highway 61

 running from up in the hovel-sprinkled
Badlands of Caithness

down to sparkling Invernessshire

and Perthshire .

Talking of Caithness, my recent visitor couldn't, simply couldn't, not no way, simply cooden get 'is 'ead around how them people can live there.

There int no people, loike, do me bleedin' 'ead in, 
that would. Norravin no people.

He lives here,

in the Black Country

 Travelling, anyway, northwards from Dundee

We entered the Tay Forest Park. It was gorgeous; trees, water,  and mountains, trembling on the edge of Spring, the odd sheep, some Highland cattle,

 just like the Beasts, Drinking at Sunset,  in all those Victorian water colours. 

There was no traffic and we travelled about fifteen miles, as fast as the road would allow, which was  approaching thirty miles an hour, until we reached our hotel for the night. We passed a farmer now and again, coming the other way on a quad bike, going between his jobs, giving us a brief wave; I am sure one could work a life away there, in the country, nestling in the mountains, watching the seasons.

When I was an infant, sitting on her knee, my mother lullabied me with a song which I now know to be The Road To The Isles; her father's family were Orange Glaswegian and she, like many in Belfast, had absorbed Glasgow street slang and idiom and was fiercely sectarian. The song of The Road To The Isles, though, in her voicing,  was  rythmically wistful -

Sure, by Tummel and Loch Rannoch
And Lochaber I will go,
By heather tracks wi' heaven in their wiles;
If it's thinkin' in your inner heart
Braggart's in my step,
You've never smelt the tangle o' the Isles.

It was just a couple of years back,  I discovered that not only were Tummel and Loch Rannoch and Lochaber  real places but that quite as a result of an accidental departure from the A9 I was actually standing beside Loch Rannoch reading a signpost to Tummel, Lochaber and to the Isles.

The approach to Loch Rannoch


The hotel, built in the 1880s.


And a room

with a view

On this trip we were heading back home, looking just for an overnight stay, and for the river- and loch-side journey through the still-snowy glens. Any half-way decent hotel would have served that purpose but this was an establishment in which you would expect to find George Clooney,  being rich, debonaire, handsome and  gipped out of his coffee. Inside, it was a fairly typical Highlands hunting lodge - tartan carpets, antlers on the wall, fireplaces, settees and oak sideboards, all perfectly fine; the food and the service were nigh-on perfect and the tarrif half that of Dundee's Malmaison Knocking Shop.  But it was the view outwards  which electrified; in Dundee  I had looked-out over a depressed,  grubby street, strewn with food containers, fragranced, occasionally,  with happy hash smoke;  in Loch Rannoch, a vast, crisp Creation bid me Welcome, have a nice day, and meant it.

Here, in the Highlands,  in the distant, off-road Wilderness,  is the Scotland for which people say they would die;  here is the prompting of my own thought that  Scotland is  the very best part of England.  

It is oddly encouraging that those of us who reside and wrench a living in rural and remote Scotland are the least likely to vote with  a road-locked and ranting urban  minority cult, inebriated,  embittered and too lazy to even visit the lands over which they claim Lordship.

 If  Scotland's natural, fierce,  soaring grandeur could speak it would say, Ye've never, wee Gnasher, smelt the tangle o' the Isles, awa' then and boil yer heid. 

THE FOREIGN PAGES, 

AMERICA'S WAR AGAINST ITS CITIZENS

My fellow motherfuckers. 


 I stand before you to-day as our  wholly militarised country faces even more difficulties with the negro race.  

There was a time.

My fellow motherfuckers,

A time before the Civil  Rights Act.

When humans were entitled. To protect themselves. From animals.

But those days. When they knew their place. Are long gone. 

And now it seems.

 That all they wanna do is bitch.

 

 And our proudly militarised lawnforcement stormtroopers4democracy.  


Regularly find themselves.
 Outnumbering these dangerous folks so badly. 

That they don't all get an opportunity. 
As is their God-given right.

To pop a round in their black asses.

My fellow motherfuckers.

 That can't be right. 

As my good friend, songwriter emeritus and national treasure. 
And inextinguishable Beacon of Freedom. And spokesperson of the equality generation. And campaigner for human rights reminds us:

Dah-da-dah-daah da-daah-da-daah-da-daah-da-daah,
everybody must get shot.

And it was my good friend and stooge, Dr Bob, who sang to us about niggers only being a pawn in the game, about how William Zanzinger was unfairly sentenced for killing that piecea nigger trash, which he didn't actually do, or mean to do;  it was Bob who reminded us that the times ain't actually a-changing, the cops and the governors and the senators are still killin' niggers on the street, just like they always did.

Fuck me, Jesus, 
seems like we can't turn around without some nigger sonofafuckinbitch gettin' his ass blowed away by lawnforcement. Everywhere you look. They're gettin' their big black asses shot, getting choked, 

being beaten to death and when that shit ain't happenin' they're gettin' fried, gassed to death or being handed nine-hundred year sentences to be served on they ownsome in some six-foot square shithole only comin' out to receive a good kicking offa the guards, As fine a body of men. As ever served. This fine nation of ours.

Well, my fellow motherfuckers, we all done with pussyin' around with this shit. 
It's like Mayor Rudi Guilian-eye-oh done said.

We  need zero tolerance of black folks.  
These Goddamn niggers are just plain criminal.  And he should know. Anybody knows about criminals it's Mayor Rudi; didden he single-handedly save New York City after Saddam Hussein bombed the Trade Centre, killin' all them folks and even collapsing buildings that wasn't even nowhere fuckin' near where them planes hit; 
 
I mean.
 How's this shit supposed to happen?
That a building just falls the fuck down. In its own footprint. In free fall.  Just because there was a wastepaper bin caught fire?

  That's the kinda nigger evil we face, today, voodoo, plain and fucking simple, that sonofafuckinbitch just magicked that buildin' into collapsing, takin' all them tax records with 'em, too; spells, hocus-pocus, shit like that, 'swhat we up against.  Nigger shit. Don't matter if them niggers is growed men or babies in the cradle, only good one's a dead one. Ain't we learned nothin' about this shit?

Anyway,  just like President Kennedy said, when he and his bro' wasn't bangin' the ass offa poor Marilyn Mun-roe,


Happy Birthday, Mr President,
You met my brother, bitch?
He'll love ya to death.

 and then havin' her killed, what he said, that  greatest  of criminal presidents,  was that we need far-sighted and radical solutions. An' that's just what I'm gonna give y'all.

(assumes nasal Boston accent and speaks in sing-song, preachy style)

 
My fellow motherfuckers, 
I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a nigger  on Mars and not  returning him safely to the earth.

 No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

We propose additional funds for other engine development and for unmanned explorations - explorations which are particularly important for one purpose which this nation will never overlook:

  the non-survival of the man who first makes this daring flight. But in a very real sense, it will not be one nigger going to  Mars -  if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation of niggers. For all of us must work to put them there.

 We  choose to go to Mars 
not because it is easy 

but because it is the only thing we can do with all these cocksuckin', bone-idle, fuckin' nigger sonsafuckinbitches  


complaining their black asses off everytime one of them get's murdered by a decent, white  public servant. 

And as to. 
My other achievements. As your president. And Torturer-in-Chief. Let me promise. That those folks. Who lost their way. And tortured the asses off of. A number of Serve 'em Right innocent people. Niggers and such. And Asians. Let me assure this great nation. That those honest, God-fearing torturing folks. Got nothing to fear.  Not from me.

We gotta look forward, not backwards. To the next batch of people that's needs torturing.  America has become so great, such an example of Freedom and Justice.  That we have enemies everywhere.  And that's why we gotta torture more'n'more folks, lock 'em up, deprive 'em of sleep, visitors and contact with lawyers, then torture 'em some more.  This is  the Uninted States' great mission, the Freedom to torture absolutely anyone. But especially niggers.

 
So we gotta kill them. 

That's what presidents do. 
Set the agenda. 
For the American people, 
Godammit,

 I'm  so emotional I could shit.

I wanna talk, now. About the economy. And how I fixed it. The rich folks. Who employ me. Are richer'n ever they were before. And the poor folks. Who don't matter.  They're poorer than they ever were before, too.
 So that shows. My fellow motherfuckers. That we treat all people. Exactly the same. The rich're richer. And the poorer are poorer.  To those who hatheth, hath been giveneth. And to those who hatheth not hatheth been takeneth awayeth.  Could anything be.
 More American than that? 

 Under my administration. 
The American Dream is alive. If you're born poor. The odds are. That you'll die poorer. And if you're born rich. The odds are. That you'll die richer. Much richer. Leastways, I will. 
And if you're black, not only will you be poor, beaten and thrown in jail, y'all have the right to be shot dead.

I wanna turn now. To foreign policy. Under my leadership. We are opening a new relatioinship. With the people of Cuba. Just as long as they do what we tell 'em. They too, will soon. Realise their dream. Of Coca Cola. And MacDonalds. And internet pornography. Which is the right of all men and women. As well as being shot dead on the street by lawnforcement.

Street Legal

Whydya shoot the nigger eight times?
I ran out of bullets after that.

Wherever they are born, niggers and brown folks deserve the right which they enjoy, here, in the Land of Freedom.  The right to be shot dead for no reason, just because some psychobastard, serial killer cop feels like it.

 God Bless Amerika.

Next week. 

President Hillary Trousers Champion  on What I learned about Decency and Integrity from my pretend husband, Spunky Bill.