The Sunday Ishmael 13/12/2020

 Do you think Dominic Raaaab is okay? Has he been rushed to hospital with a cranial embollism? 

Like a skilful boxer, petit Andrew Marr in his nice blue tie, jabbed away at Dom this morning:

   Do you like my blue tie? Now in your bowels, Foreign Secretary, in your bowels, Deal or No Deal?

  

Andrew, as you know, there is always room for Creative Contours in the drafting.

What? I've had to put on my glasses, Foreign Secretary - you'll notice they match the tie - isn't it true that Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that the chances of anything coming from Marrs - oops, sorry,  the chances of no deal are a million to one? And that the one thing that shouldn't change after Brexit is the ability to trade freely in Europe?

Well, Andrew, it shouldn't.

But it is Not True, is it, Foreign Secretary? And will you be protecting British fishermen whilst fishing in British waters from the incursions of foreign mega fishing boats? Isn't there a fishing boat that takes 25% of the entire fishy population of the North Sea back to Holland?

Another Fishery Protection Vehicle has been commissioned.

And will you be deploying the Royal Navy?

We will defend our borders and enforce proportionately with all four of our Royal Navy vessels. Now leave me alone, I've got a headache.

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

The Andrew Marr show - best comedy show on the BBC, which, I suppose, isn't saying much. Anyway, it is not surprising that this deal business has gone right up to the wire, because it is so difficult talking to Foreigners:

From Monty Python & the Unholy Fuss Over Brexit 

hat-tip to mr verge

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

Here's an idea!! Let's eat the fish ourselves. Everyone must have a fishy on their little dishy. It is your national duty.

And we can beat those cheese-eating surrender-monkeys at their own game - Britain has cheese.

As people consider how they are going to use the five days of reprieve from lockdown over Christmas - will they spend it with older family members or leave them alone as usual -  let us remember December 2010, the coldest December since 1890. Mean temperatures that month were 5 °C below the 1971-2000 average. Snow had fallen, snow on snow......

logan airport after blizzard

Do all these people live in shit town?

Jesus fucking wept, why can't these gobby bastards stay at home with their horrid brats? It is  Christmas,  the very time  of  the bleak midfucking Winter;  snow has fallen, snow on snow. What exactly the fuck is it that they want from life? Winter but no winter, is that it, a winter break, but no snow? Why don't they fuck off and live in Benidorm, most of them can't speak English, anyway;  quite how they expect the airlines to "communicate" with them, as they all so bitterly want them to, when they're all greedy, pig ignorant  morons is a matter of conjecture, couldn't spell communicate most of them. Oh, fuck me, they whine, Brummy imbeciles, if only they'd communicate with me, then I wouldn't really appear to be the  grubby, docile, brain dead, consumerist bottom-feeder that I am, being treated as badly as  a trainload of Polish Jews, some shitmouthed managerialist cunt in a pristine, made-to-measure Hi-Vis yellow jacket, bleating on skymadeupnewsandfilth, Look, ve haff given zem snacks und hot drinks, ve are all verking so ferry hard to get zem avay on zeir hol-i-daze. Ve sinply cannot shift all zis fucking snow udderwize it vould eat into our profits, nein?  Zeir is tons off ze fucking stuff und it is every fucking vhere, on ze ground, on ze fucking Stukas, vot are ve supposed to do mit ze fucking stuff, ve just haff to vait for it to fucking melt.  Vinter? Vot is dis schidt?  Blankets?  Zey vant blankets? Und camp beds?  Iss only so many fucking blankets in ze vorld, und zey cost money. Und ve are not here, mit ze greatest respect, to spend fucking money on ze fucking passengers, ze fucking passengers are here to spend ze  money mit fucking us, Jah?  Learn ze lessons, ve must do zat. Und draw eine line unter all dis schidt. Ze fucking Israelis bastards, zey haff ze right idea, shoot ze fuckers dead, if zey von't shut up.

Rubbish, they are, customer and provider, alike, locked together in  a cycle of greed and stupidity, what the late Mr  Auberon Waugh - God bless him but not his hideous, felching spawn,  Alistair, is it, Alexander, maybe,  and Daisy - would have called the New Britons, Oi really 'ad promised the babbies a trip to DisneyWorld an' now them wot's n charge  wun't even communicate wiv me, said Wayne, from Alum Rock, cos, loike,  it is Christmas, after all, an' they got a roighht, int they, to a decent  'oliday?

Cheap air travel is the creation of less than a lifetime and through its tax status it  is invisibly funded, subsidised,  even by those who wouldn't dream of using it.  That fat, smirking, oily Greek bastard, wossisname, is it Stavros, runs OilyJet, and the mad leprechaun, Michael O'Looney, of Air Begorrah, these grubby fuckpigs have persuaded the persuadable that they are actually not shitbrain morons but discerning members of the JetSet, toddling off to the world's shitholes, in search of God knows what, and making cunts of themselves and simultaneously the rest of us.  I don't know what tax revenues might flow into the govament of the coalition if airlines were charged VAT on their fuel, like I am, and like you are  but it might go some way towards offsetting the holy deficit. Oh but they'd only go and fuel-up in Orly or Stuttgart, squeak the same sort of worthless shiteaters as claim that we mustn't tax the bankers or they might desert us, go and rob some other bastards, as if.

The same people as are buggering off to fucking Jamaica will be whining their stupid heads off in January when retail figures - and thus tax revenues - are released, when the effects of economic mismanagement and punitive cuts start to be felt,  good and fucking proper.  They should spend their money at home, in the country whose public services have nurtured them, whose small retailers provide them still with goods and services, whose  friends and neighbours dig them, still, from the snow.

I learned early-on that for many these annual  consumer days can be hard, an icicle in Memory's heart; bereavement, illness, separation, anxiety and poverty weave their grim, relentless Outsider spells, blanketing Mothers Day, Fathers Day, Valentines Day, Birthdays, Easter Day and Christmas Day and the rest  in Sorrow and betimes in Rage. Why we do this to so many of our brothers and sisters - rub their noses in their particular misery, so vulgarly, ostentatiously and extravagantly celebrate whilst others weep and mourn or find themselves in the hands of the Salvation Army when no kin  remain to tend them; even at Christmas, nobody loves you when you're down and out - why is it that we insist on feasting while so many others hunger?  It's like that song, by that dreadful, old,shouty wailer, Shirley Bassey, I who have nothing....can only watch with my nose pressed up-against the window pane.  This  is what we really do, we are not, most of us, celebrating either the midwinter solstice or the birth of the Saviour, just shutting the doors against those who have less. And maybe saying a swift, guilty grace over our preposterous and unnecessary feasts;   Bucks Fizz for breakfast, vodka in the cranberry sauce, Burgundy in the gravy, Port in the Stilton? yes please, let's play at being rich, if only for a day, and don't forget the Sherry, in the trifle, and the burning brandy, on the Christmas pud. No wonder the rich, the Bullingdon Boys, scoff. No wonder the whole business is so desperately pointless, so unsatisfying, so disappointing, so trashy, so twenty-four carat  phoney, even - probably especially - for those gourmands nouvelle et stupide enjoying a wickedly delicious Marks & Tories Christmas Dinner, dreaming that Twiggy and her girls'll pop around for drinks, in  their  lingerie and high heels. 

 But never mind, eh,  we now judge our national merit purely by the  weekly, even the daily footfall, as the suits call it, in shopping malls, by the sales figures trumpeted by some scrubbed,  shiny, over-confident, shitbrained fuckwit, in hock, body and soul, to GlobaCorp, a regional sales manager, maybe, striking fear into the hearts of his shabbily treated workforce, Life having somehow denied him the punch in the gob he so richly deserves and so  desperately needs if he is not to die howling in frustration, loneliness and belated self-reproach. They have been all over the telly, of late, these ciphers, these dead-from-the-neck-up retail men, insisting that all will be well, if only their stores take more money than they did at this time last year,  all of Western civilisation reduced to the  sclerotic philosophy  of a Business Studies graduate. Seems apposite, really, governed as we allow ourselves to be, by a crap PR man and a gang of idle spivs. On Boxing Day, as people flock to buy goods seventy per cent cheaper than they were forty-eight hours ago, the suits are jubilant, it's all compensated for the drastic sales figures of the last month, as though, idiots, we divest ourselves of all knowledge of trading, profit and loss accounts, as though turnover was the same as profit;  they talk to us as though we were tiny children, these retail men, ignorant of arithmetic.  Look, heart attack-level deflation; Everything's Happy Shopping Again.

The great reformers, Blair and Brown, had a sufficient majority to just maybe skew things the other way a little, towards compassion and modesty and restraint but instead promoted the greed and stupidity which, more than anything, -  more even than Iraq - in the person of the ghastly Imelda, define the NewLabour Project, filthy riches, filthy, shit-eating reptiles, jetting around the world at my expense, grubby and shifty,  looking for free stuff;  bribed and bought, talking about God.

There was a brief, slight possibility, an opportunity, anyway,  for  the boom-and-bust cycle  being at least adjusted, for Greed being put back in his cage, or at least tamed a little. And look what they did with it. A pox on them;  I hope that in his first Christmas out of Power Gordon Snot gnaws and shreds his fingernails to the elbow, stumbles from his awful Fife villa bleeding profusely and that his hideous beard takes the children from him to live, unhappily ever after, in a lesbian co-operative.

I don't know what Christmas Jesus would have made of Mervyn King and Jeff Randall and George Osborne, just for instance, the moneychangers, the taskmasters, the usurers, the high priests, the confident, shiny servants of the Devil, washing their smug faces in his ejaculate but I guess He would have rearranged their furniture somewhat and given them all another name.  We, living in Ruin,  are hostage, like Jesus Himself, to Money and Power; in His case His message is deployed as a  means into children's throats and rectums by unholy, filthy degenerate fucking monsterbastards in frocks who need beating to death; the noncing monsignors, Pope Nazi, cardinals and archbishops, synods and conclaves, vestries, presbyteries, rectories, vicarages and manses, all an interwoven, underground escape route for the vilest,  the tabbooists, the doers of the unimaginable; bless me,  Father, for I have sinned, Go away, my son, and sin in another parish, another country;  it is the Lord's work, Beastliness is next to Priestliness. And the Nonce-Protector General preaches at us, here in our own country, from Radio Four.  I trust the Devil has a white-hot poker, sitting in the fire these millennia, marked,  Holy Father's Arse, for the use of; C'mon Benny, spread your cheeks for me, and you mustn't tell anybody about this, it has to be our secret, isn't that the way it goes?

 Our earnings  are taken from us and given to the already wealthy, our native resources stolen and sold back to us exorbitantly by privateers, carpetbaggers, uncouth and incompetent, elevated by the wretched, amoral cadaver, Tebbit, Lord of Telecom, in exchange for seats on their boards, a euphemism for a bare-faced bung, the disgusting old spiv, pontificating poisonously in the Filth-O-Graph to a horde of ageing, angry, racist, illiterate,  wimmen-hating masturbators, as though he was a model of probity, and not a shabby fucking crook.  Our national treasures are stolen from us, prohibited to us;  our independence of mind is driven  from us by by inferior teachers, who don't know and don't care, God rot their  garlic and pasta-inflamed imbecile bowels, that hopefully is an adverb; chided by fretful, o'er ambitious conformist parents, desperate that junior has a fit-for-toilet-paper degree in order  to validate, somehow,  his life-long neglect at their hands; and  we are set obediently to the goggle-eyed worship of surgically savaged, drugged-up prostitutes and  twittering, arseweeping nancyboys, showering each other with Oscars and  Emmys and fucking Brits, worthless, vain, idle, career cocksuckers, good for fuck all, their  wretched, shitty lives, their counterfeit artistry, like so much else, owned by the rotten, filthy, lawless  bastards of skymadeupnewsandfilth,  their thoughts not their own, not even random but orchestrated by MediaMinster, so crassly done is this, so obviously, that a Victorian coalminer would have cried, Oi! Yer takin' the piss, you are. Our subtle, demanding, ethically-concerned current generation, however, aware consumers, feisty, fun-loving but hard-working, dunderhead nitwits, all of them, cannot even smell the shit flooding into their faces from those white-teethed, well-groomed automatons on the other side of the TeeVee screen,  they wouldn't be aware of it if it was sprayed over them at high pressure from a shit-converted water cannon.

Murdoch journalist Randall, for instance, a sober version of Col. von Fawkes of the BBC,  a chippy, barroboy type, in pinstripe, who spectacularly, like most of them,  didn't see the Crash coming, has, this week, insisted that Britain's airports make us the laughing stock of the world, even though airports all across Europe, smaller and less complex than Heathrow,  have been disordered by heavy snowfalls; Moscow's nine thousand municipal snowploughs are unable to cope with the weather but Russia is  not the laughing stock of the world. Today, thousands of US flights are cancelled due to snow but Randall won't stride up to the camera saying America is a laughing stock, fuck, no; it is his own nation which Randall is paid to denigrate with his lies and distortions; Cable,  the foxtrotting nitwit,  insists Gobby Jeff, has declared war on the twenty thousand employees of NewsCorp - skymadeupnewsandfilth - when he has done nothing of the sort; David Laws, the  cowardly,  faggoty housing benefit cheat, should be brought back forthwith, demands Randall, his was just a stupid mistake, dishonestly claiming tens of thousands of pounds, he's a millionaire,  you see; a  sick, stark contrast to Randall and his paymasters' views on some single mother fiddling a few quid, to get by, in this, the land of already contemptuous pensions and benefits;  Randall, his tongue metaphorically probing and slurping up Murdoch's poxy arse,  making traitors of all who do not join him, on pinstripe knee, eating shit. Fuck him, I hope he dies over the holiday, Randall, choking on a TurdRoast.

 Christmas, however we denominate it, is a telling punctuation mark, especially now that its in-house managers and various chief executives so water it down, adapting it to multi-cultural, multi-genderism;  Oh, such fun we shall have, soon,  when Prince Brian becomes fid-def at large,

 fondling Christianity and Islam simultaneously, nibbling at  Sikhism and Buddhism, spit-roasting himself on a Romano-Greco skewer, reverencing all the angry gods, and none, the useless, selfish, gibbering fathead.

Those of us, though, Godlessheathenbastards, who cannot but love the idea of a Christian Christmas, tinged, albeit, by an ancient,  highjacked, pagan, cosmological  iconography;  those of us who love the hymns and the liturgy and the prayers, whilst despising both the  slutty celebrants and the showy congregants, those of us who are actually, as recent events have indicated, a quiet, resentful majority, must, in this bleak mid-Winter, wish each other well, for Change, like  Sumer is a cumin in.

Happy Christmas, friends.

Tom Waits is what Leonard Cohen might have been, if only he hadn't been so fucking prissy. And if he'd been a musician.
Here's a Christmas carol you won't hear on Songs of Praise.

 mr ishmael's essays today are:

Do all these people live in shit town?                           drafted 20/12/10

 

A Christmas Carol. It's not the Economy, Stupid          drafted 27/12/10

 

Storm Barbara    ( extract from)                                    drafted 24/12/16 

 

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Land girls, digging for Victory