The Easter Sunday Ishmael 12/04/2020

Mr Ishmael fails to get a test drive 

In the Spring I went into Harry Fairbairn BMW, in Inverness.  I looked at an X1, a small what they call SUV and at a 3 Series Touring, that's what they call an estate car, I don't know why, you can tour in any car, can't you, but you can only carry shitloads of stuff in an estate car, or a van;  I might want a van one of the days but I can and do hire them for fifty quid a day and BMW don't make vans, not yet, anyway; so, as far as I'm concerned, they should call the 3 Series Touring a 3 Series Estate car, shouldn't they, because that's what it fucking is.  I said  I'd be back in August for a test drive in the touring estate car and the SUV car.  I booked the tests by 'phone, last Monday, for the coming Friday.

It was like entering a cathedral of glass and steel and rubber, the premises preposterously clean, the cars just unrealistically shiny, lit by a constellation of those tiny wee lights;  you got the feeling that if you ever took one of these vehicles outside you'd be committing an act of unpardonable vandalism;  they gleamed and shimmered like a Crusader's armour; stood beside them, mere humans looked like garbage, even the sales executives in shiny black suits;  I looked like what I am, an islander, who lives on a windy shore, down a long, sometimes muddy lane and who has  forgotten - or doesn't give a fuck about - how to dress for the city, especially the BMW main dealership end of the city.  

I didn't worry too much about that, I had been in earlier this year, I had 'phoned to arrange the test drives and I was unlikely to have travelled a hundred and thirty miles - got on a boat and everything - just to get a free ride in a new car with a stupid name. I already have a new car, not a BMW new car but a Volvo new car.  I kinda hoped they'd take me half-way seriously, even being without a shrunken suit, a shiny head and a snuffler's  beard, yeah, and no portable 'phone.  Y'mean mobile 'phone, sir? No, I mean portable 'phone, your phone's not mobile, you are, your phone's portable.  Maybe it's no wonder sales persons don't take me seriously.  Not only do I not have one, myself, which must soon become a crime, but I - not always, sometimes I let it go -   start redefining what it is that they think they understand with such an expert understanding. It's dreadful what this babyshit 'phone rubbish has done to the world.  I mean, just take Richard Sharpe, a few years ago he had been a full colonel in Wellington's army, had countless commendations for gallantry, had enriched himself and his comrades from the spoils of war, had captured one of Napoleon's regimental eagles, for God's sake, and now, here he is, flogging what they call packages for O2, whatever that is, something to do with portable 'phones.

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Another Hari Seldon moment

TALKIN' WORLD WAR THREE BLUES

Well, lessbeclear, I'm not saying that there will be war, just that it's a hundred-to-one certainty. And that's on top of all the babies dying, despite the very excellent NHS - which we are quite busy giving away to anyone abroad who wants it - doing what it can to save them. What? Oh, they'll die you see, as an inevitable consequence of Boris the BabyKiller telling lies about me. That's the sort of thing that happens because people disobey their sovereign Lords. And because of us leaving Europe, not that Europe will allow us to leave, but if we were to leave, all the babies would die. Not a lot of people know that it is only due to our membership of the Common Market that so many babies survive.

And on top of all the babies dying from the Brexit Plague there will be total unemployment, that's right, no jobs for anyone, apart, of course, for those of us in govament.

And there'll likely be no food. Not many people know that every bite we eat comes to us from Europe. And quite frankly if we leave Europe, not that they'll let us leave, but if we do, they'll simply not want to send us any free food, as they do now

So there it is, War, Plague, Famine and wossaname, what's the other thing, yes Clint Eastwood on a Pale Horse, killing every bastard.  That's it, the Four Horsemen of the Apprenticeships.

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DIABETES AND SHIT

They say in the East, mr dick, that when a man prefers being asleep to being awake 'tis time he were dead. Most of my life I have begrudged sleep, always worried about missing something, always, in Maestro Thompson's words, Watching the Dark,somebody has to, and it's what I do here, mostly, watch the dark, identify the shadows in the corner. 

Recently, though,  been rocking my soul in the bosom of Morpheus, not his product, just the idea of him.  I don't think I have slept completely for decades;  I never go througn Sleep's dark and silent gate into unconsciousness, I am always conscious that I'm not fully asleep, that I'm half-awake.  Whatever it is I have recently found myself, say, looking at an empty coffee cup for hours and hours, thinking, I really must get up and take that to the kitchen, or looking at the laptop on my desk, thinking, I just have to walk over there, sit in that old chair and look at the blog, I'll do it in a minute, maybe tomorrow, maybe at the week-end, maybe next week, well, it's nearly next month, I'll do it then.

Maestro Cooder sings......It's a slo-o-ow consumption, killing me by degrees, and  one  of the old blind Mississippi blues boys sang.....well, they went for the doctor, an' he said, soft an' low, y'know he might get better, but he'll never be well no mo'. I think that's about the strength of it, might - well, I do - get better but I'll never be well no more.  That's OK, none of us will be better than we have been.

I used to feel quite guilty about my thirty years diabetes. It's not any of my fault, I have never taken sugar, I was always slim and active;  I think it was just in my mother's family.  Even so, I have thought about the costs to the NHS and I often buy stuff myself, from online medical suppliers - meters, testers, dressings, instruments, antiseptics. At least I did until just recently, when there was a slew of tranny-sensitive shows on TeeVee, Derek, a very ugly man and an even uglier woman having a couple of years pre-op counselling and medication and then eight or ten surgical procedures and then a lifetime of counselling and aftercare and then, no doubt, an opportunity to reverse the whole ghastly business if, as he will be, he is even more fucked-up than he was before. And so I thought Fuck this shit, what am I doing spending a hundred quid on a blood pressure meter?  I'm just gonna go down the surgery and screech at them that I must have whatever I want, at someone else's expense;  I can spend the hundred pounds on make-up and false nails. 

And from Huw Welshman, in the Newsroom:

 

Good Evening, Viewers and welcome to the 6 o'clock news from the BBC with me, Huw Welshman, your half- a- million- pound a year reader-out-loud. Now to the News Proper. And this is a statement from a Labour Shadow-Minister that anyone who says they are a Tranny is a Tranny. There can be no doubt about this, look you, isn't it, yes. Well, I don't know about you, Viewers, but some of us might have a different view. There was that story, wasn't there, which we covered a little while ago about the Welsh Rugby player. He was a bumholer, this chap. Hard not to be, I suppose, when you are down there in the scrum, all those sweaty male bottoms, all that pushing and shoving, all those muscles, 'sno wonder is it, look you, isn't it that a bit of bumholing is going to go on in the showers afterwards, soaping down and singing Men of Harlech. This bloke, anyway, he made no bones about being a bumholer. He'd come out, isn't it, even told his parents; everybody and his dog knew that bumholing was his thing. He was Wales' most favourite bumholer and the toast of the nation. But what had got his goat was that the Sun newspaper had gone to his parents asking questions, breaching his privacy, look you.  
And before we continue tonight's news, we have a text from a Mr. Ishmael, who is a little bit angry at one of yesterday's headlines in which we said that some thick Ulster lorry driver had caused the deaths of 39 Vietnamese, stowed away in the back of a lorry. Mr. Ishmael says that surely these people caused their own deaths. They embarked on a criminal enterprise attempting to force their way into a country wherein they had no right of entry and once there to take advantage of that country's services and infrastructure. Who did they think was transporting them? Was it the International Red Cross or was it a gang of criminals? Mr. Ishmael points out that each of these dead Vietnamese had paid $30,000 (US) before embarking on their criminal conveyances. Now, viewers, $30,000 is fuck all to me, or, indeed, anyone working at the BBC, but, if we consider that there were nearly 40 of these people and that they therefore spent approaching a million dollars on this criminal enterprise, you have to ask, don't you, isn't it, what they could have done to improve things in their own country with that money? A Workers' Co-operative or a new political party? Instead, they gave this money to criminals not just to take them to another country illegally, but to one which is probably the furthest away from their origin. They must have known that this was extremely hazardous and yet were confident that within a few minutes of arrival in the U.K. they could walk around smiling, availing themselves of our services on the grounds that they had come in U.K. to make better life. Mr. Ishmael makes the point that his grandparents, his parents and he himself have all fought, struggled and paid vast amounts of tax in order to create and fund those very services which this lorry-load of Vietnamese people had come to steal. He is sure that the gang of people-traffickers are a bad lot. He is also sure that it would not be their intent to slaughter their well-paying customers, such a thing being bad for business and evidently presenting a huge risk of imprisonment. Perhaps the correct sentencing in this matter should mirror whatever sentence, if any, is passed upon those, if any, found culpable of the massacre in Grenfell Tower, and, given the numbers involved, those partly responsible for the deaths of the Vietnamse should receive half the sentence of those convicted of killing the residents of Grenfell Tower, a company which should of course include London Mayors Sadiq, Johnson and Livingston; successive Chancellors of the Exchequer who have turned the London property market into the world's biggest money-laundering centre as well as Fire Chief Danny and her Merry Men, all of whom advised the Grenfell Tower residents against escaping their fiery and smokey deaths. He continues that unlike the very caring people at the BBC he doesn't actually give a flying fuck for the feelings of bereaved Vietnamese families or indeed the families of those immolated in the recent Pakistan train crash, drowned in the Air France and Air Malaya crashes or the families of thousands slaughtered in America's daily gun massacres. And that's before we even think about the starving millions in Africa and the dispossessed in Iraq, Syria and the Yemen. Mr. Ishmael thinks there's rather too much counterfeit concern for grieving families all over the world, a bogus and disagreeable sentiment from which he has opted-out. 

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COOKERY CORNER

Well, blimey, sometimes, y'know, I think I have the best job in the world. Y'know, for me, this is what it's all about. I got all these fish'n'chip shops, I'm on the telly, paid a fortune for  talking absolute bollocks and now the PBC've sent me here to the beautiful island of Lesbos - it's a strange sort of name for a place, isn't it,  more carpet-munching than olive squeezing, I shouldn't wonder, from the sound of it and I'm not kidding you, the waters're just full of refugees, you can literally grab 'em out of the water with your bare hands, dig a pit in the sand and roast 'em quickly  with some local rosemary and garlic, and oh, that Lesbos garlic, for all my gift with words, I simply cannot descriptify it. But no, for me this is what it's all about, roasting  other creatures  alive and eating them with a glass of local vino; it simply doesn't get any better than this.

See what I mean, readers, that prat's a fucking superstar, picks a handful of weeds, shoves 'em up a lobster's arse, roasts the poor thing alive, gets pissed, talks fucking nonsense and you pay him a fortune.  Public schoolboy, Stein the Fish, the fucking bastards're everywhere, that ugly, double-barreled hairy git, Saviour of the Fish, Hugh something, he's one, too.

Obituaries - 2017

On a Dead Politician

James Martin Pacelli McGuinness  23/05/1950 – 21/03/2017, an IRA leader and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland from May 2007 to January 2017. The Saville inquiry concluded McGuinness was "engaged in paramilitary activity" at the time of Bloody Sunday and had probably been armed with a Thompson submachine gun. In 1973, he was convicted by the  Special Criminal Court, following his arrest near a car containing 250 pounds (110 kg) of explosives and nearly 5,000 rounds of ammunition. In August 1993, The Cook Report alleged his continuing involvement in IRA activity, of attending an interrogation and of encouraging Frank Hegarty, an informer, to leave a safe house in England to return to Derry, where he was murdered. Experienced Troubles journalist Peter Taylor,  in his 2008 documentary Age of Terror,  alleged that McGuinness was the head of the IRA's Northern Command and had advance knowledge of the IRA's 1987 Enniskillen bombing, which left 11 civilians dead.

The Blair view of McGuinness is of course framed  through his own lens  of  counterfeit virtue.

Look, I simply say that, alright, Martin might have killed three thousand people, many of them members of my own armed forces, shot in the back from British houses on British streets;  OK, so what, we've all killed soldiers and civilians; we've all tortured people;  it's what you have to do, to bring Peace. He may have maimed and tortured thirty thousand; he may have cost the British taxpayer billions of pounds which could be spent on, well, anything really, but prefereably on nuclear weapons or MPs salaries,  but none of that matters, you see, what matters is that he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me in bringing peace to Northern Ireland - even though he'd started the war in the first place - and to the wider world, where I had the honour and responsibility of starting the wars, or at least making  them possible. And if it wasn't for Martin I might never have felt the Hand of History around my neck, I mean on my shoulder. No it's simply not right to call my late friend, Martin, a loathsome, sadistic serial killer, a right Satan's cocksucker, a monster criminal excused investigation and trial by a cheap politician on the make;  he was much, much more than that. But as Lady Imelda and I often remark over the dinner table in our bunker, a profiteer is without honour in his own land.   That'll be three hundred thousand pounds please. Yes, for m'foundation.  Yes, the one like President Hillary's. Yes, funds from despots and tyrants to be used for subverting democracy.

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On a dead  Father of Rock and Roll

SAINT CHARLES COUNTY BLUES.

Charles Edward Anderson Berry 18/10/1926 – 18/03/2017, he refined and developed rhythm and blues with songs such as "Maybellene" (1955), "Roll Over Beethoven" (1956), "Rock and Roll Music" (1957) and "Johnny B. Goode" (1958).

If only Chuck Berry had been white, middle class and preferably Jewish; if he'd had a savvy manager who trained him to be Oh, so studiedly enigmatic and if he'd had an audience firmly up its own effete arse, he'd have had a Nobel Prize long ago.  I don't think that cheesy French ministers of culture fell over themselves trying  to give Chuck whatever it is, le companion des lettres et des artes, not with France being one of the most racist countries on Earth - wouldn't see them giving a gong to a nigger. And apart from that the Frogs don't do rock'n'roll, do they?