The Sunday Ishmael 23rd August 2020

mr verge suggested that you might enjoy the opportunity of  (re-) reading stanislav's Sunday Ishmael from August 2009. More fun is than the News.

ZEN IN THE ART OF THE KILNER JAR

Go down in garden, stopping to admire extra-terrestrial bastard up against wall;

MAN-EATING GONORRHEA PLANT, FROM MARS IS

can sometimes not sleep for worrying about this fucking thing - and many other abominations of life but never mind, is other story, and not suitable for Sunday Lifestyle feature with stanislav.

Carry-on down in garden and pull up rhubarb, is probably century old, hundred of fucking years, this bed of rhubarb and needs good rubdown with flamethrower but produces every year so never mind.

Once upon a time every bastard had rhubarb in back garden and chicken too but came the 1960s and George, Paul, John and that horrible stupid fucking bastard with the nose, luckiest moron alive and the idea of fucking rhubarb get flung out in street along with fabulous acoustic piano made of walnut and mahogany and ebony and smash to fuck with sledgehammer. Didn't matter that rhubarb was rich in anti-oxidant and fibre and jam can make and chutney, too and crumble, just by going down in garden; didn't matter that piano only needs tuning and new generation can learn magic of intervals and octaves; no, smash the bastard up, From Me To You.

Was one particular sonofafuckingbitch vandal on telly call Barry fucking Bucknell.

EARLY BBC GABSHITE 

Ho, viewers, fed-up with that horrid old Victorian door made from nasty old pitch pine imported from North America, seasoned, planed and made into six fielded-panelled doors by proper joiners, whose hands now are coffin dust but their work remains proud testament ?

Well, in this programme I am going to show you how to cover the bastard up, hide all those planes and profiles and mouldings and figurings with some nice nasty hardboard. Because I am a fucking idiot, given license by the BBC, to destroy tradition and foment Ruin; worse than Clarkson, me, him off Top Gay. All you need is a pin hammer, a box of pins and the soul of a Philistine. You just pin this rubbish over the nice door, like this, bang-bang-bang. And then you just undercoat the nice hardboard that you've pinned all the way over the door and gloss it over with white gloss, or stylish purple. And Hey, Presto, you have a smooth, sleek Scandinavian-style door for the modern home. All sign of craft or organic material completely obscured, looks like a proper piece of shit, simply by following my easy to understand, fuck things up, instructions.

Next week, viewers, if you have one of those nasty old fire surrounds made from oak and marble and brass,

I will show you how to smash it out with a sledgehammer, plasterboard the fireplace and fit a nice Berry MagiCoal four-bar electric fire with living flame (a red bulb) all set off by a quality plywood surround. Just like the real thing, only rubbish.

Up until the Great War To Kill All The Cratfsmen, we made the best furniture in the world, beautiful, practical and durable, better, less finicky, less bulbous than in Holland, exquisitely jointed, not just fixed with bolts, as in France, better, more perfectly proportioned; a skilled workforce, nurtured by patriarchal employers like Maple & Co - the Cadburys of the furniture trade - and an abundance of fabulous timbers from throughout the Empire, together with a growing market among the new middle classes at home and the Empire civil servants abroad, saw the production of millions of items of household furniture made to a standard unimaginable today. That fucking chump, Bucknell and his producers, with his panel pins and his jigsaw, trashed that whole tradition; given his head he would have sanded and painted the Maple & Co despatch boxes over which Snotman and Flashman weekly fight their phoney war; few children now know anything but plastic, medium density fibreboard, nothing organic in their homes, nothing which took two hundred years to grow, years to be seasoned, nothing of Mother Earth but her detritus. Bucknell died a while back at 91 and all over the land we can see 19th century pine doors hanging, examine them for the closely-stitched pinholes around their edges, his legacy, some, at least, of his vandal-projects, retrieved, restored; much else, of timeless value, swept away, smashed, burned, Ruined, the useless, pestilential bastard. Ruin's servants are everywhere that bluster and gabshitery and pig ingnorance can earn a few mediaquid. No business like showbusiness is.

Rhubarb deprivation shit, though, and piano-smashing and vandalism and veneration of music hall acts like Beatles is just harbinger, very soon came domestic Ruin, poncy fucking architect living in Georgian Rectory in Herefordshire and councillor up to arse in masonic fiddle says, come my good inner-city fellows, is up in fucking sky for you, mates, and no more pesky rhubarb. Will smash with bulldozer old community, even though could preserve and fix up good with decent plumber installing new bathroom, go up in sky, instead, with no garden, is modern living, who needs garden and rhubarb and maybe chicken, anyway, apart from me of course who simply cannot function without few quiet private acres to help my creative process, darling. Is wholesale blitzkrieg assault on working-class community and support system and kinship network and corner shop and pub which has served since industrial revolution, just smash-up perfectly good house made from brick and timber and slate and substitute concrete shithouse, twenty stories high. You will love this shit, shoved up in the sky with people you never have seen and poxy underfloor heating you can’t afford. And just wait until the fucking lift breaks down, as it will.

HMP UK

Ceolmond was Mercian king in olden day, so will call sprawling, shitty, inhuman, alienating slum city in sky Ceolmond's Wood, or Chelmsley Wood, see, is urban shithole, but authentic name. Heritage is.

Anway, poor bastard up in sky has no fucking chance, can just watch property, property, property, as Penny and Sacha, young professionals, seek, as they say, to downsize from their riverside penthouse to a converted barn while retaining a small pied a terre in Chelsea, as you do, they only have three-quarters of a million and may have to raid Penny's father's pension fund in order to get just exactly what they want, they may have to make a few sacrifices to live the dream but they believe the barn conversion can be completed with great integrity and sit appropriately in the landscape, and thus the BBC feeds envy and resentment, heedless that braying fuckpigs like Penny and Sacha pour accelerant on the urban tinderbox that is, for many, HMP UK. Don't it make you wanna rock'n'roll, the BBC?

Never mind rhubarb patch, not even shed has got for hobby, poor bloke in skyhouse, his life may as well have been covered-over with hardboard, can get allotment but fucked off can be at a moment's notice from BigBrotherState of Comrade Snot if it is The Right Thing For The Country, TRTFTC being whatever mad mantra enters Snotman's diseased brain, brings fleeting comfort to his rank, heathen Godless sonofafuckingbitch soul, may Heaven blind his other eye and send fiery pox up his rectum, weeping warts to suppurate his foreskin and may legions of burning children haunt his guilty, Presbyterian slumbers, the horrible fucking bastard.

It's not just him, though, and his organised crime families, there has been gleeful participation in Ruin. In previous posts stanislav has mentioned the grammar school totalitarianistes nouvelle, they smile, and care like fuck and give to Oxfam but stomping over the faces of the poor they, too, wrought Ruin, they are, or were, senior this, chief that, directors of this and that - is an absolute forest of made-up titles for these bastards - or wannabees, which is worse; managing the poor on behalf of the rich, they delivered the working class into a place that the great egalitarian, Lord Prescott of CockOut, calls, in his sweet Nazi phraseology, the Underclass. Fit for nothing, lacking skill, trade or craft, clutching make-believe degrees in make believe subjects, the new bourgeoisie flocked to an expanding public sector and became the people their fathers fought, jobsworths, blind-eyeturners, mealymouthed lickspittles; the greediest, stupidest, idlest, most pampered generation in history, the fabled babyboomers. They're the ones to blame, not just Snotman or Blair or Thatcher, for Ruin. Togged-up in their jeans and trainers, old men and women, off to a Bruce Springsteen concert.

But the rhubarb runs away, here is method for bottled rhubarb.

Tools required

Kilner jar, is only couple of quid.

Big fuck off knife.

Saucepan

Oven.

Ingredients

Some rhubarb,

Lots of sugar

Some vanilla stuff

Lots of cheap brandy.

Chop leaf from rhubarb with BFOK and put in compost bucket.

Chop stem in two and half centimetre chunk or however many is inches.

Can wash if fussy but going in oven is and boiling sugar.

Put Kilner Jar in oven at warm.

Pour lots of sugar in litre of water until saturated solution is and can't dissolve no more sugar, for fucks sake. Bring up to boil.

When Kilner jar is hot remove carefully from oven and put on trivet or some other heat-proof thing, otherwise burn ring makes on table.

Carefully fill-up jar with rhubarb, packing tightly as fuck and place visibly couple of star anis, doesn't matter about this, is all bollocks from WI.

Pour in cupful, maybe two if is for Christmas consumption, of cheap brandy, or even three; good measure, anyway, rhubarb cost fuck all and delicious pudding makes with brandy flavour and thick double cream. Can also add vanilla stuff but is not so important as cheap brandy and can forget about.

After ten or fifteen minutes and anyway before turns to caramel remove sugar syrup from stove being very careful because can roast bollocks off and no amount of cheap brandy will anaesthetise molten sugar-coated testicle, can drink whole litre bottle from Spar and still will scream like fucking banshee and upset dog, Buster, who ankle will bite and soon round kitchen running will be shouting like bastard, holding roasted, toffee-covered scrotum and trying to shake-off dog, Buster, and Mrs stan shouting is Don't hurt Buster, only little dog is and is upset to fuck by you doing shouting like mad bastard. Best to be very careful with syrup is.

Pour syrup into Kilner jar up to top and put back in oven at hot temperature and leave for thirty minutes, can go and do blog or something else and then come back and remove jar from oven with suitable testicle precaution, see above. At this time get oven glove or teatowel rag of death, filled with germs, and snap lids close with patented Kilner fastening and avoid getting fold of skin trap in between snap fastening

Is very very important that next bit is not done until jar is cooled down, after hour or two or is third degree burn and smirking lesbian paramedic. Pick up jar and turn upside down. If syrup doesn't piss out all over hands and up sleeve then is good bottling and put in sideboard until Midwinter or Christmas, whichever is best. If syrup does piss out is crap bottling and best is to eat immediately, only not just one bloke or terrible shits will have and be pissed at same time leading to terrible rectal consequence, million times worse than le posterieur flambee derive from macho Vindaloo-munching, but not so bad as molten sugar all over John Thomas and Henry Halls is. Worse possible thing is get hot sugar on marital meat and potatoes and run down garden screaming, chased by dog, Buster and get gobble up by man-eating plant and just lie inside being slowly digested and bollocks hurting like fuck and dog barking outside; fuck me, is nightmare world, this Sunday Supplement shit.

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Once upon a time, as we started, all had rhubarb who wanted it, chickens, too, back-to-backs, between the wars semis, nearly everyone was or could easily be connected to Creation; they could touch it, all around their homes; pick it and eat it from their gardens; the architects and the planners made war on the poorest of them, cleansing them from their own neighbourhoods and putting them in concentration camps.

Later, Thatcher and her pinstripe spivs, Flouncy Heseltine and the rodent,Tebbit, sold-off what was not theirs, exchanging stolen properties for votes, devaluing completely the perfectly legitimate concept of social housing for rent and coincidentally creating what we now call sink estates, the people who missed her Ladyship's get-rich-quick boat now living in places which are a byword for bad. The Buildng Societies, too, no-one's to sell, managed to, somehow, and all were delivered to the kindly wisdom of shameless larcenists like Fred Goodwin, knighted for his goodness by Mr Snot, the pretend prime minister.

Among those too tardy or short-sighted to have bought stolen council houses, most were unable to enjoy the fruits of Snotman's No More Boom And Bust Borrowing Spree, either, and probably just watched, window-licking, desolate, abandoned and forsaken, the Underclass, Chavs; people with no rhubarb, much less Kilner jars, these are the forgotten, ignored monument to the great, post-war movers and shakers, the babybooming bastards.

What do we say to some child born unto us in this parentless wasteland of deprivation, as we mow our lawns and bottle our fruits, practice our twee, wee crafts, patting each other on the back for being green, frugal, prudent, trading tips and recipes ?

I know, what we say to them is, Look, Kid, if you work hard you can go to Oxbridge, too, just like Jack Straw's kid, on his own efforts. Or maybe you should just settle for an ASBO.

The word lifestyle is one of Consumerism's triumphs, isn't it, reeking of Epicurianism, discernment, Oh, fuck me, this doesn't suit my lifestyle, as though to arrive at our lifestyle we weigh and value against some supreme, quality benchmark our every purchase, rather than, as is often the case, just doing what's easiest; the lifestylist lives as though our base drives are measured by some consumer-chic Virtue, our shitty, frightened little lives actually a perfect haiku, each syllable a refined, harmonising coincidence of wants. Because you're worth it.

So the - on the face of it preposterously archaic - idea of bottling your own rhubarb is, at least, rebellion against buying somebody else's, because it suits your lifestyle. The Kilner jar is old stuff, tactile and beautiful, no micro-processors. If you can, try it, adapt it. It means that instead of, in mid-winter, buying imported sunshine from TESCO, we can unbottle some of our own, reclaiming from Ruin some of the skills and values despised and feared by Globacorp.