I was away for Christmas, away from the Bracing Isles, staying with kind friends in Englandshire, who marvelled at my Pollyanna enthusiasm for what they perceived as miserable winter weather. How cold it is, they would say, But there's no wind, no rain, no snow, no hail, I would reply, the sky is blue in bits and that's the sun, I do declare.
Getting off the island was nail-biting stuff - would The Hrossey be cancelled, as so many sailings were being postponed? Would the crossing be one of those head-down-the-toilet jobs, with a diabolical sea state? Many Anxious Consultations ensued of Northlink Ferries Operational News and the BBC weather forecasts.
It's one of those marvellous romantic phrases, like "the wolves are running, Master Kay", but "the snow gates are closed" means you have to turn around and go home - if you can, or try to find a remote Scottish hotel in which to remove your wet stockings.
My onwards journey was fairly uneventful - the snow soon turned to water, the sat nav on my phone behaved impeccably - I've given up on the car satnav because it is so old it panicked last time I drove across the magnificent new Forth Bridge,
declaring OFF Road, Off Road, Turn around when safe to do so, clearly under the impression that I was driving into the river. The phone sat nav didn't even get upset when the road was closed by many police cars and ambulances following someone's ruined Christmas.
I felt quite the intrepid traveller when I arrived unscathed at my friends' home and ready for my turkey. I was not at all disappointed that the turkey was not prepared to Stanislavian instructions:
A FEAST OF JAMIE
Jamie Bloke says go down local turkey farm and kill bastard with own hands. Is right organic. First chase after turkey in mud and shit and grab bastard by legs. Mrs get one end and stan get other end and twist like fuck, pulling like tug of war, knack is to twist and pull just right and snap turkey neck.
Often bastard break free and bite and fucking squawk and shit and run around and is back to square peg one. Stanislav make rugby tackle on fucking turkey and bastard still won’t stop still and get killed. Go back in van and get biggest in set of Stilson wrench and chase turkey bastard all around, land blow on bird now and again but often is just fall on arse in mud and turkey shit.
Go back in van and start up engine.
Not much damage in the end, is just bumper and headlight and radiator all smash up
but turkey is good and fucking dead, crush between van and wall; not bite no other bastard. Pay farmer hundred quid for turkey and hundred quid for wall and hundred quid for field all ploughed-up and hundred quid for not phone cops and hundred quid for RSPCA. Fuck me, thought plumbers was bad. But five hundred quid for smelly old turkey about ten years old and made from leather and most is all fucking claws and feathers and shit. And have to pay cousin small fortune to fix up van with iffy parts off eBay.
Anyway, get turkey up on table and splash liberally with white spirit off Sainsbury or petrol from Sainsbury garage will do if not got any spirit and set on fire until feathers is all burn off. Is best open windows. If no spirit and no gas is best cover with grated firelighter and light from other room. No need for too fussy. Is Christmas and feather, like run out of money, is Xmas custom. Rub both hand vigorously down jeans and slap dead turkey on breast and stroke, going, mmmm just look at that, mmmm, just look at that. Only lightly season - put few handful of black pepper and couple of kilo of rock salt up turkey jacksie and pound or two of ripped up weeds from garden, hedge clippings from summer will do, and few tube of squeeze garlic paste off Sainsburys. Not bother with pull insides out. All adds to great organic flavour.
Now is best part. Go in garden with wheelbarrow. If poor and not got garden, never mind, go down park, is open at Christmas, full of wino and incognito crack prostitute from Cabinet and children shoot and stab each other but never mind, is Christmas, eh, in prosperous, cautious, prudent Britain. Anyway, make plenty shovel of dirt in barrow and mix in smooth paste with couple of gallon of water from pond and season with several kilo of garlic smash with brick and few jar of strawberry jam from Sainsburys. Is good friends, garlic and strawberry, reassures Jamie. Make delicious mix of flavour on top of dead turkey.
Go back in house and prepare turkey for oven by putting in big fuck off dish and pour over tasty and flavoursome mud crust. Get brother-in-law, Waldemar, away from Christmas with Clarkson Video - Oh, this car go so fast my hair catch fucking fire, Oh, this car so slow get overtake by fucking glacier; Oh, Birmingham is shithole; Oh, you might think I am fat useless repetitive overpaid BBC cunt. But you’d be wrong. Waldemar help shove turkeybastard in oven, kick door with foot and weld-up tight with gear from van and roast at five hundred Celsius, Gas Mark 20, for several days. Maybe a week. Maybe fortnight. Remove when cooked.
Must admit Turkey en croute with dock leaf and Bisto sorbet not best ever family Christmas dinner.
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It seems that most people don't watch the News these days. Avoiding Learned Helplessness syndrome. Anyway, not having any News meant I had lots of time for my Christmas book: The Plot by Nadine Dorries. It weighs 520 g. Waterstones have it on sale - down to £19.99 from £25.00. Here's the blurb:
The explosive behind-the-scenes account of the plot to bring down Boris Johnson. You think you live in a world where the elected are chosen by the people. Think again. When Boris Johnson came to power in 2019, he did so with the largest Conservative majority since Margaret Thatcher. Rewriting the political map, he united a party and shattered Labour's fabled red wall. And yet, just three years later, he was ousted by the same members who had once greeted his leadership so rapturously. What had gone so wrong? The Plot is the seismic, fly-on-the-wall account of how the saviour of the Conservative Party became a pariah. Told with unparalleled access, from multiple inside sources talking with astonishing candour, it reveals the shocking truth about powerful forces operating behind the scenes in the heart of Westminster and those who became the architects of a Prime Minister's downfall. This is the story of a damning trail of treachery and deceit fuelled by an obsessive pursuit of power, which threatens to topple the very fabric of our democracy.Needless to say, I loved it. Believed every word. And it has to be true, judging by the extremely negative reaction of Tories, pundits, commentators, think tankers and the BBC. The Plotters are identified as Michael Spit Gove, Dominic Cummings, Dougie Smith, Lee Cain and an eminence grise called, for the purposes of the book and to avoid being sued, Dr. No. It should be possible for Ishmaelians to uncover his identity, because he is a Conservative said to have attempted to set fire to a house where a family, including a child, were sleeping in their beds. When a young woman rejected his sexual advances, he cut her little brother's pet rabbit into 4 pieces and pinned them to the front door for him to see when he came home from school. Apparently he has been arrested for harassment and embezzling and has been imprisoned. (That being his one redeeming feature).
Dougie Smith is identified as the organiser of sex parties for politicians, and his Wikipaedia page offers us this in verification: "For at least five years from 1998, he ran Fever Parties, an organisation which hosted "five-star" swinger parties. A senior Conservative Party aide, he worked as a speechwriter for David Cameron and a Tory party headquarter's activist under Theresa May, before later working for Boris Johnson in an unknown role. In 2019, Nigel Farage, then the Leader of the Brexit Party, alleged that Smith was involved in intimidation and offering bribes in exchange for political candidates stepping down." On one occasion, a Conservative MP had sex on a snooker table with a prostitute, cheered on by 4 other Conservative MPs.
The purpose of all this plotting was the gaining and retention of power, and returning to the European fold. Apparently Sunak was chosen to be PM because he was wealthy, well connected and handsome.
Really?
Anyway, he's just a place holder for the Plotter's preferred Prime Minister. Kemi Badenoch. What the actual fuck?
Sunak was interviewed by Laura Kuensberg this morning. He is very hard to listen to, on account of his peculiar accent, and rapid delivery. And avoiding saying anything. Here's an example - asked about the Rwandaforfuck'ssake plan, he swerved into his Albanian deal in which illegal Albanians are returned speedily to Albania. Laura dragged him back to Rwanda, whereupon he claimed it was the same thing. If you enter the country illegally, you will be returned to your country of origin or to Rwanda. So Laura battered on, asking him if he would ever ignore a Rule 39 order - that's an injunction by the European Court of Human Rights, deployed in June 2022 to block the removal of migrants to Rwanda (yes, its been going on that long, and not a single migrant has been deported there, despite it costing us, the British taxpayer, £140 million in 2022, a further £100 million in 2023 and an anticipated £50 million in 2024. James Cleverly confirmed to Parliament that we are going to give Rwanda a further £50 million in 2026).
Sunak slid around the question, avoiding saying he would ignore a Rule 39 order, but coming up with an inspired weasel phrase instead; he would not "let a foreign court stop our ability to remove people, once we have been through our process of parliament and our court system."
They've obviously spent so much on this one that there's no turning back - or, as Macbeth has it: "I am in blood / Stepped in so far that should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er"
"There comes a time, doesn't there, a time beyond crisis, when Ruin does its work. This is ours. It is the political caste which has thus delivered us, a pox on them all; cry Havoc! let slip the dogs of resistance".
This, and much, much more can be found in the four-volume Call Me Ishmael oeuvre, collected by editor mr verge.
Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.
Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps :
please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.
Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr
Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux
https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4
At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.
With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.
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| I'm back in the Bracing Isles now. |
11 comments:
You're not v good at ferries up there, are you, mrs i?
Works both ways, Mr mongoose: stops the unwashed getting in as well.
Ferries aren't the only thing we're not good at, mr mongoose. The little planes servicing Kirjkwall Airport are ancient things, held together with hope and rust. When one of their elastic bands break, the planes are grounded for "technical problems" increasingly frequently. One chap, a prostate cancer sufferer, missed three consecutive appointments at the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary because of "technical problems". When they do fly, weather conditions make the experience grotesquely horrible - I was on a flight up from Inverness to Kirkwall in a gale one time, so bad the air stewardess or flight attendant or whatever they are called these days, sat in her seat the whole flight, strapped firmly in - no trolleys with offers of tea, coffee or nasty wine. In fact, the trolley broke loose of its tethers and started inching its way down the aisle by itself, probably remembered the routine and was trying to go it alone, but the nearest passenger caught and restrained it. The plane can just drop, disconcertingly, a bit like a roller coaster at Alton Towers. Anyway, when the lights of Kirkwall airport hove into view, the relief was palpable - but the plane overshot the run way, climbed, banked and lined up for another go. Again, it was blown sideways and the pilot headed up and round in a massive circle. He announced to the passengers: you have probably noticed that we are having some difficulty in making a landing. I will make a third approach, and if I can't land, I will have to take you back to Inverness. At which point a voice at the back of the plane called out - "for god's sake, take us back to Inverness now". He did get the plane down on the third approach and we all disembarked, white faced and wobbly. My friend at the reception desk, whose job it is to open and close the gates and answer questions, said to me as I staggered past: Bit bumpy, was it?
mr mike is quite right - there's only 9 miles between the southernmost part of the Orkney Isles and John O'Groats, and the sensible thing would be to build a sub sea tunnel - run the communications cables down it, get rid of the ferries, nice undersea road - but nobody wants it as they don't want to let the riff-raff in.
I also had trouble with my homewards journey, by the way - the Tuesday Aberdeen to Kirkwall ferry was cancelled due to atrocious weather conditions, they couldn't put me on the next Aberdeen boat on the Thursday as it was fully booked, the next boat after that was not until the Saturday, so I took the Scrabster to Stromness boat instead, on the Wednesday - which entailed driving through the north of England and the whole of Scotland. I left at 7.30 am and got to the ferry terminal at 6.00pm, after some white-knuckled driving across the top of Scotland, barrelling through Porthgower so the demons couldn't get me - they boil out of the hillside on black, rainy nights; taking the Berrydale Braes like a rally driver and footy to the floorboards through the badlands of Caithness. I really shouldn't have taken that one hour shopping break in Inverness.
Also, mrs i, there is this thing called efficiency. If you burn oil or coal or gas to make electricity, you lose some of the energy. Then when you've made your electricity, you lose some of it sending it somewhere and/or storing it somewhere and then getting it out again as a useful something. These numbers are all known. Over the years boring people like me work to make the losses less but these numbers have been whittled about as far as they're going to be. The idea of burning say gas and turning it into electricity to send to a port and then store on an ocean-going ship in order to drive primary propulsion is almost criminally stupid.
In fact, so stupid is it that I'm going to have to go look no to see if it was ever true or just some PR BS.
Wishing you Mrs I and all Ishmaelians a happy new year.
I believe this coming twelve months will prove to be an eye-opener for many, especially the covidiots who believed govament for the past four years. What with elections either side of the pond, there’s gonna be some strange shenanigans going on. Biden to be ‘retired’ to a secure rest home, Trump being ‘offed’ by the CIA/ Pentagon, with martial law declared, Rashid Sanook to walk away to count his billions on a beach front in California, the tories obliterated, never to see office, ever again, Kweer Stamerer to be in permanent opposition, cause we all find out what a two-faced lying bastard he is.
Corbyn is threatening to start a new, real, proper socialist party to challenge at the coming election, gotta be worth £3 of anyone’s money, if only for the laughs - it’ll work this time comrades, honest, everything’s for free! water, gas, ‘lectricity, WiFi, beer, fags, state housing, legalised weed, more money for rNHS, clause 4 the means of production, 100% tax for the rich to pay for it all, no more war, no more poverty, no more disease, it will work this time, it will, it will.
Watched a programme on the teevee dodgy stick, Creating Christ, there’s a book also, how the Romans fulfilled prophecy, in AD 70. Vespasian and his son Titus tore down the temple, thus being the second coming of the Messiah and how St Paul wrote the blueprint for Christianity, fascinating stuff, worth a watch or a read if you can find it.
I got a book for Christmas, 180* UNLEARN THE LIES YOU’VE BEEN TAUGHT TO BELIEVE by Feargus O’conner Greenwood, not an Irishman, apparently. 755 pages of ‘the truth’ I shall let you know, when I know, everything.
Thank you, mr inmate, and a happy new year to you - despite all your dire predictions!
Your TV recommendation sounds excellent - I shall go in search. I've been watching Mary Beard's Roman series on Youtube - equally fascinating, with amazing pictures of Roman ruins - those buggers built to last. One programme analyses the Decline of the Roman Empire - not, as we had been taught to believe, over-extension, too-lengthy communication and supply lines, corruption at the heart of the Empire - no, she reckons Christianity saw it off.
You’re welcome mrs I, the Creating Christ documentary was a bit mind blowing, especially with the Biblical references quoted by the authors, the early Christian symbology, in the catacombs in Rome, compared with Roman coins of the time and Paul’s (Saul) inversions of Jewish law, to convince early Hebrew Christians.
Dire predictions? No not at all, I think it would be loads of fun if they all happened.
I tracked down mr inmate's recommendation "Creating Christ" on Youtube. Here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHOK66qj9xc
Despite a very annoying female voice over and populist presentation, I agree with mr inmate - this is a significant and accessible summary of the political reasons for the establishing of the cult of Christianity and the process by which it was achieved. An early example of SkyMadeUpNewsandFilth. A couple of significant take-aways: "Politics and Religion were the same thing and worked in tandem to suppress the mass of the people". "Christianity was for the ruled, not the rulers."
'Twas ever thus. From the beginning was the Lie.
Best crack on with your Christmas book, mr inmate - we're waiting for your thoughts. Having read "The Plot" in one go, swallowed huge gulps of "The Spare" (best argument yet for the abolition of the monarchy), I'm now on "Baroness Falkender." I'll let you know if there's any good goss.
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