HAVE MERCY, I CRY, CITY.

From mr ishmael's drafts, 28th April 2014. No wonder everyone's ill....

I was thinking about The City;  I mean The City in the sense that I mean The Dog;  all my dogblokes have become the same dog The Dog, his dogness is uniform.  Same with the city,  they may have different characteristics but to me they are just The city. 

 One December  afternoon I was in Buckingham Palace Road, obtaining a passport from the Irish Embassy, the following day I was in Amsterdam;  London had been vile, filthy and noisy, edgy with criminality, cop cars blueing-and-twoing constantly;  bursted, black binbags were crammed opportunistically into alleyways and corners. Amsterdam was  Elysian by comparison but they were both The City. All my cities have become The City.

No doubt city dwellers would consider this an unjust misappellation - York isn't Exeter, Worcester isn't Durham -  but then they all just call the non-city places The Country, don't they? So fuck 'em.

I don't get to many cities, these days - Dundee, Aberdeen and the sparkling jewel of Inverness are my common city destinations; sometimes,  I get down to Birmingham, calling at historic towns, en route,  Berwick, Alnwick,  maybe Durham travelling down the A1 and A1M;  Stirling, Carlisle, maybe Penrith travelling down the M8/M74/M6.  That's about it, I haven't been to London since, well, not this century and I wouldn't visit Liverpool or Manchester for all the tea in China.  I think I have been to all of the English mediaeval cathedral cities and have enjoyed them all, if enjoy is the right word.

The professional travelogueiste - recently the vile Tory spiv, Portillo, obviously, like so many filthsters,  granted a pensioned sinecure  for life by the PBC - would have us recognise and characterise every hamlet in the land, instantly understand its people, its history and geography, its crafts and trades, its customs and traditions;  Portillo, for he is actually, despite his wet-lipped verbosity, quite stupid, dips, stagily - as though it was his and not his producers' idea - into something called the Bradshaw's Guide to British Railway Journeys and assumes, on our behalf,  that  all human British life is there; a few concocted interviews with local oiks and the odd dignitary  delude the viewer into thinking that Portillo's mincing through Glasgow or  Filey  or Llandudno is actually pure scholarship which  we just happen to find entertaining because we're sort of worthy and clever ourselves, can spell chaise longue, stuff like that, maybe even know what one is, maybe even own one;  not that they're worth having, good for fuck all the chaise longue, a design disaster.  

Anyway,  Evesham, he slurps, in some eye-haemorrhagingly lurid shirt'n'trousers combo,  is actually famous for its Aspergers Syndrome, what?  Cut?  Right, take seventeen:  Evesham, according to my Bradshaws, is famous everywhere for the quality of its Asparagus - only not in Peru, or Israel or any of the other places which grow most of the asparagus  we now consume, all the year round, nothing, I always say  about a free market and exploited workers -  and I'm here to meet Bob Plod whose family have been growing this prince of vegetables for many, many centuries.  Hello, I'm Michael, tell me, Bob, what is it, do you think, about the... the...SparrerGrass as I believe you yokels call it, what is it that makes it taste so good, to nasty metropolitan fairies like me? The taste, simple as that? Well, there you have it, viewers, straight from the horse's arse,  and dipped in melted butter, I mean mouth.  And on now to my next stop, Worcester, which Bradshaw describes as a charming Mediaeval/Georgian city of immense charmingness.  Portillo, brings to the Victorian railway network what Tony Robinson and his  elderly Graverobbers bring  to archaeology - nothing, fuck all. Both of these wretches are causative of what is,  in itself  ungrammatically described as dumbing-down, both peddling shit as education.  At least, in Robinson's case you can say that he walks about a bit, jumps in holes and gets his hands dirty, Portillo minces tight-arsedly around the country, as though, like David Suchet playing Hercule Poirot, he was deliberately wearing shoes two sizes too small.  Go on, watch him, next time PBC2 fills up an hour by  repeating his slobbery drivel, you'll see. Maybe it's a protective arseclinch, developed for self protection, in his glory days, in the Palace of Westminster. I know Nigel Evans wasn't predating in Mikey's days, but there's plenty of other ones, most of them, I should think

The city, though,  is not so easily nibbled into half-hour, tabloid  Portillo  bites. You get no sense of the city via the gogglebox because it's not just visual, it is noisy and smelly, pulsing and vibrating, flashing and strobing.  And then there's the shit, Oh the shit,  there's fucking millions, billions  of tons of shit.  You rarely see it, of course, the shit,  but its all around you.  Way, way back, my  late brother and I took some Mescalin and found ourselves wandering what seemed like vast, continental distances around early-hours Birmingham;  somehow we started in Moseley and next thing you know we were in Castle Bromwich.  I think what happened was that every so often I would become paralysed by the complexity of driving a car and we'd get out and walk for a bit.  The sodium streetlights seemed to be burning my scalp off, their columns hissing and crackling, neon tubes lasered my brain and traffic lights changed in a slo-mo kaleidoscope so utterly disorientating that I couldn't hold-on to whatever it was that  the colour indicated - was Red for Proceed With Caution, or was that Green;  why don't they just stay one fucking colour until a man gets a grip? 



Never mind Love Is All Around, it ain't.  

But shit most definitely is.

Y'ever wondered, walking between a couple of tall office buildings or high-rise blocks, just how much shit is  tumbling down pipes, just a few feet from your face,  how much shit, piss and Christ knows what else is just, well, all around you, kept from your nostrils and lungs just by dodgily-plumbed pipes, a bit of plasterboard and a breezeblock,  twenty-, thirty-, forty-, fifty-storey columns of roaring shit, cascading invisibly all around you;  traversing the city on foot you are crossing between, flanked by, hemmed-in on all sides by shiny towers of shit;   you are journeying through a veritable shit-gala, a  mountain range of busy, vertical toilets.

And then, under the pavement, there's fucking rivers of shit and piss and condoms and dead goldfish and blood and piles and used elastoplasts  and sanitary towels;  Greater London is a city of twelve million arseholes, all shitting ethnically diverse, seventy per cent of it non-white, curry'n'ginger'n'chili shit,  pastashit, sushishit, McDonald GoldenArchesshit, Polskishit, Somalishit, Bengalishit, Yemenishit, Baltishit, Franco-Germanicshit, Chinkyshit, SaudiSheepsEyeballshit, it's the effluent equivalent of the Tower of Babel and it's cosmopolitan horridness  is all pouring, helter-skelter, into a crumbling, subterranean Victorian sewer network that probably no bastard understands, or ever understood. And  then there's the piss and blood and snot and semen and saliva, all the rest of it,  Christ Alfuckingmighty, it's over your head, it's behind you, it's in front of you,  it's rushing past your ears, it's under your fucking feet,  you only gotta take a stroll down the average road in a London suburb and every house you pass will be flushing away kilos of turds every few hours, probably constantly;  oh,  the houses might look nice, from the outside, but they're just nicely parcelled-up shit factories, and they run for miles and miles and miles, a gigantic industrial estate of shit, that's what London is.  I don't know how anyone survives all that, all that shit everywhere. In the Southern Ocean post I mentioned my friend Coleridge's water, water, everywhere and all the boards did shrink, don't know what ancient mariner monologue  of guilt might describe the modern city,  faeces, faeces, everywhere, Lord, how the place did stink.  We don't smell it, of course, not unless we're on drugs, something like lysergic acid dyethelamide.  And then, lemme tell you,  it blows your fucking head off.  But it's there, pumped out into the street by extraction fans, working flat-out, in order to maintain for our employees a holistic, ergonomic and hygienic workplace experience.  That's it, just pump all the shitfumes out into the street, they'll probably be carried upwards, won't they, and diluted, quite harmless, really, seven or eight million morning shitblasts discharged over BorisVille.

My young, friend, stanislav, once railed against the utter madness of the tres desirable  ahn sweet, as he put it, the idea of building a special, hardboarded shithouse in the corner of an already pinched bedroom, so's hubby and wife, presumably, could enhance their intimacy by the sounds and smells,  the groans and splatterings of one another's defecations, could develop the fragrance of their bedlinen by wafting it with  a pungently fetid arsebreeze, raving fucking mad he thought it was, the ahn sweet,  that people would pay good money to shit in their bedrooms,  stanislav, coming as he did, from a horse-drawn economy had little time for such  sophisticated modernities. Best is go outside and do dump in proper exterior shithouse, can open door and let in breeze, send smell over nextdoor washing is only fucking bastards anyway; anything else fucking madness is, can turn fucking hose on outside shithouse or pressure washer bought off gobby old fairybastard on shopping channel; if poor bastard is and no hose has got, maybe has spent all of dole money on scratchcard and pizza can anyway fling bucket of fucking water over shithouse;  in bedroom ahn sweet only can squirt fucking airfreshener, what doesn't fucking work and gives cancer, anyway. Is fucking rubbish, shithouse in bedroom, might just as well store dogshit in fridge

But the en suite is actually just shorthand for The City.  I mean, I know everybody pretends that they don't shit, but they do and not only that but with the colon-ising of the national kitchen by the likes of Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Hugh Fuckhead and that fucking  lunatic, Blumentit, the national diet, and thus the national shit now contains irritants, abrasives and  toxins never meant to enter the British bowel;  I am sure that nine people out of ten suffer Irritable Bowel Syndrome as a direct result of Jamie Oliver, his wretchedly spicey bezzymates ingredients and his disgustingly bad-examplish lack of the most basic food handling hygiene standards,  the dirty, filthy fat fuck;  the Department of Health should send around a Kick-Him-To-Death squad, and stomp his oily, mutant face into the ground, not all cheffy-liked, just bish-bash-bosh, stomp the fucking life out of him,  man's a fucking menace. One member of the squad could just rythmically kick him hard in the rectum, reciting, with each impact:  Kick-Wash-Kick-Your-Kick-Fucking-Kick-Hands-Kick-You-Kick-Filthy-Kick-Fucking-Kick-Phoney-Kick-Fucking-Mockney-Fucking-Bastard. Kick-Kick-Kick.  And then just a drizzle of the very best virgin olive oil and a few artfully torn shreds of  coriander.  There, an arse-kicking in under fifteen minutes. An' it don't costya nuffink, which my kids, Poppy and Sesame, fink is just magic.

"Googling the lack of TV-kitchen handwashing throws up a 2016 blog by Patrick Boshell, which refers to a survey of screen chefs done by the europeancleaningjournal.com & name-checks Jamie Oliver as a notable culprit - evidently Mr Ishmael was basing his satirical rage on confirmed observation, and while it’s perfectly likely Mr Oliver has changed his ways and these days you could probably eat oysters off his jacksie with your bare hands, it was, regrettably, perhaps, not ever thus. The incitement to violence is clearly a Celebrity Deathmatch routine."