The Sunday Ishmael: 18/12/2022

 

 

at last I knew
Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
       Made my heart swell, and still it grew
       While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
       Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
       In one long yellow string I wound
       Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
       I am quite sure she felt no pain.....
And thus we sit together now,
       And all night long we have not stirred,
       And yet God has not said a word!

 Extract from Porphyria's Lover, by Robert Browning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nasty disease, Porphyria, hereditary, but triggered by environmental factors. If only Harry had been Hewitt's son, he'd have escaped it, for it stalks down the generations of his father's inbred family. But just look at the noses sported by King George III, Prince William of Gloucester and Prince Harry, pictured above - identical. Harry gets his gingeriness from his English Tudor ancestor, Harry the VIII, through his mother's line, 

but that nose is defo a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha nose. Looks like the family porphyria was present in James V of Scotland and his daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, both father and daughter enduring well-documented attacks that could fall within the constellation of symptoms of porphyria. It is widely accepted that George III suffered from porphyria attacks, one of which caused him to address the House as "My Lords and Peacocks"........and  passed the genetic flaw along to his great-great-granddaughter Princess Charlotte of Prussia and her daughter Princess Feodora of Saxe-Meiningen. George III's great-great-great-grandson Prince William of Gloucester was reliably diagnosed with variegate porphyria.

 Porphyria causes the body to produce too much porphyrin, which is used to make heme, the part of blood that carries oxygen. It can cause chest and abdominal pain, muscle cramps, hallucinations, seizures, purple-coloured urine, or mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, and paranoia. Onset is between ages 20 and 40. The genetic predisposition is triggered into attacks by a range of factors, which include exposure to sunlight, some medications, recreational drugs, particularly cocaine, alcohol abuse, physical and emotional stress.

 

 So, best advice to Meghan is to remove her husband to a cold, dark country, keep him away from the cocaine, stop stressing him out  and cut her hair short, in order to avoid death by hair strangulation.

 The oddest thing to be reported this week was Mr Kayla Lemieux, a woodwork teacher in Canada, whose employers allow him to turn up to school and teach children whilst dressed like this:

The Halton District School Board suggested it would be a violation of the Ontario Human Rights Code to criticize or to stop Mr Lemieux wearing the huge breast prosthetic. It has been suggested that the gentleman is  suffering from a condition known as autogynephilia, where a male is sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a woman, or an arousal fetish by performing a grotesque sexual display to children. However, a student in Mr. Lemieux' class says the giant prosthetic breasts are in fact a kind of absurdist protest against woke culture and he would regularly ‘drop redpills to his class, such as how silly gender neutral bathrooms are’. His aim is probably ‘to get fired, then sue for discrimination’.

The thought of Mr. Lemieux as a performance artist does not dispose me any more kindly towards him.

Orkney  Recipe Corner. 

Christmas is looming and the birds are all under an avian flu protection order, so it is time to consider the Christmas feasting.  I was at a Christmas event the other day when this sliced, greyish, solid, wet thing was served with lumpy school custard. "What's that then?" , I enquired. Duff. It is a sacred object in Orkney, beyond criticism. You thought Christmas pudding was bad? Food of the gods in comparison with Duff. My dining companion picked up her bowl and spooned Duff and Custard into her mouth. "This is when I miss my mum the most", she murmured, around a mouthful of DuffandCustard. "Her Duff was the best. She boiled it for days."

 Go on - have a go - tis the season to eat yourself sick, after all.

 

200g Plain Flour 

125g Oatmeal
150g Suet

125g Dark Brown Sugar
1 Tsp Ground Ginger
1 Tsp Ground Cinnamon
1 Tsp Mixed Spice
1 Tsp Baking Powder
1 Tsp Bicarbonate of Soda
3 Tbls Black Treacle
2 Eggs (Medium)
125g Currants
125g Raisins
150ml Milk

Mix all the ingredients together. Take a cloot, lay it out and  cover it thickly with floor. Form the Duff into a ball, place it in the cloot. The floor will form a skin over the duff.

Tie up the cloot around the Duff with string. Submerge it in a pan of boiling water and boil for a minimum of 4 hours. Longer, if you have a few days to spare. Keep topping up the water.

Take the Duff out of the pan of boiling water and untie it.  The flour skin will look white and fatty. Slice it up and serve with school custard.
The Duff will last 2-3 days and can be reheated or fried in butter for breakfast.

If you make two, once cooled, you can use it for Ba' practice.

The Council has made a good start on putting up the Ba' boards across the doors and windows in Kirkwall to prevent breakages and glass injuries.

We've had some snow, and I promised mr bungalow bill some snow pictures:

 Dopey Dumbfuck Finance Minister John Swinney defines Scots earning £31,093 as possessing broad shoulders and therefore they should pay 42% income tax. To support those earning less. The average Scottish salary  is £31,672. So he is expecting Scots earning less than the average wage to pay tax at a higher rate. He is also perfectly sanguine about job losses in local authorities, justifying his refusal to meet the Confederation of Scottish Local Authorities (CoSLA) block grant funding request by saying that local authorities need to reform themselves. He is going to spend the money he raises on the Scottish NHS - which desperately needs reforming, not more money thrown at it, and on Education - always popular, that one.  He argues that Scots enjoy the benefit of something called a Social Contract, so its ok that they are the most heavily taxed partner nation in the United Kingdom. Horrible fucking bastard.

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

 Next Sunday is Christmas Day, God help us, but we should be able to endure it because mr mongoose has promised us  a Christmas Crossword. Something to tackle after you lay down your knife and fork after the diseased bird and clapshot and before essaying the Duff. If you are Orcadian, of course, you will be otherwise employed, pursuing the Ba' through the streets of Kirkwall. But not if you live in Stromness, where they play a sort of tug of war with a tree.

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

 

thanks to editor mr. verge, there are now three anthologies of the collected works of ishmael smith:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack  and Ishmael’s Blues are all 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 :

Thanks to editor mr. verge, there are now three anthologies of the collected works of ishmael smith:
Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack  and Ishmael’s Blues are all 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
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.

Caption Contest

Bad Moon Rising

 mr verge said: Those memory ledgers tend to have haunted hinges, mr mongoose, forever springing open of their own accord.

 

Forgive me if I've told you this before but a couple decades back, this time of year,  I found myself at a select sherry gathering at the Courthouse in Kirkwall. It was a clear, cold, December night. Stars crackling in their reflections on the wet streets. Black tree skeletons. The ruins of the Earl's Palace stark against a city sky line utterly unlike Birmingham.

I was in a little huddle of persona hardly grata in the corner. The host tended to skip past us in pinstripes, shiny shoes and sherry bottle on his way to more significant personas. Left in our huddle, we entertained ourselves with details of matters confidential which the press would have killed for. The story they already had was sensation enough. Back in the day, before electricity, T.V. and home telephones, (but not long before) in the middle of the flat Harray/Dounby plain, a young woman lived with her mum. She entertained gentlemen callers. Her mum helped her with the ensuing births. No doctor or midwife was called to the births. The pregnancies were concealed, for shame. The babes did not survive their landings on the shores of time - strangled or drowned by their grandmother and buried under the kitchen flagstones; there they lay, unacknowledged, unnamed, unknown apart from local gossip, until the cottage was bought by improvers who remodelled the kitchen. When the flagstones came up, little baby bones were uncovered. The press were told that there were three babies under the floor. 

 

Utterly failing to catch the eye of the sherry-wielding host, I asked the Inspector if there was anything further on the Harray Babies. Ah, said Big Paul, leaning in confidentially, arm reposing comfortably on my shoulders, we've sent the sub soil off for analysis. 

And?

Well, it's difficult. Baby bones are soft, the builders disturbed the site before they realised what they were looking at, it's all churned up ...

And?

It's looking like at least five babies, possibly more......

My colleague had told me that Orkney is a thin place, where the boundaries between the worlds are not fixed, and realities bleed through. That Orkney calls certain people to live here ...

Aye, right. 

After the Christmas sherry party, I drove home across the West Mainland, crossing the Harray/Dounby plain, on a crisp, cold, clear December night, with  a yellow moon heavy and low in the sky, my car's moon shadow preceding me, absofuckinglutely terrified.

Inspector Paul Eddington of the Kirkwall force says: "We are not carrying out a murder enquiry. We are currently involved in information gathering to pull all the pieces of this puzzle together. These bones cannot be proved to have come from any particular member of a family, as they are too small and fragmented, and to suggest ownership would be insensitive."

 

And the coloured girls go

 

The Sunday Ishmael: 11/12/2022

Henry V Act 1, Sc 2

Fear the main intendment of the Scot,
Who hath been still a giddy neighbor to us.
For you shall read that my great-grandfather
Never went with his forces into France
But that the Scot on his unfurnished kingdom
Came pouring like the tide into a breach
With ample and brim fullness of his force,
Galling the gleanèd land with hot assays,
Girding with grievous siege castles and towns.....

For once the eagle England being in prey,
To her unguarded nest the weasel Scot
Comes sneaking and so sucks her princely eggs...

That was a result that went down very well indeed in at  least one corner of our DisUnited Kingdom. The weasel Scot has been jubilating. Anyone but England. And how delightful for them that it was their old friend and ally that knocked England out of the World Cup, even by way of such a dishonourable victory. An infrequent  watcher of the footie, I was shocked and dismayed to see the blatant cheating, thuggery, barging and tripping perpetrated by the French - not to mention the spitting. 

When I was a kid, there were signs up in every bus forbidding spitting and everyone knew that spitting was something only horrible old men did and that it spread tuberculosis. If you couldn't swallow because your lungs were rotting, you were expected to expectorate into your hankie. Now the habit has become popularised by footballers who run, fall, roll and skid in other players' spit, their boots churning aerosol droplets of disease into the air to be breathed in by everyone else. Filthy fucking bastards. Not a hanky to be seen amongst the lot of them. 

And the great Harry Kane - what was he aiming at when he sent the ball flying during his 84th minute penalty kick?

 You need nerves of steel to be a football supporter. No wonder middle aged men are forever dropping off the twig with heart attacks. It's all the stress hormones, liberating sugars and fat into the blood stream, ready to fight the French, but instead settling onto the walls of arteries in deep despair. That's it now - me and football - we're done. 

Turning to matters political, did you see Rishi Sunak, the horrible fucking bastard, announcing that he is working on "new tough laws" to protect people from strike disruption? He told MPs if "union leaders continue to be unreasonable, then it is my duty to take action to protect the lives and livelihoods of the British public". 

No, no, no, you overprivileged simpleton, the action you need to take to protect the British public is to ensure they can afford their electricity bills and food shopping. Does this wealthy but dim unelected Prime Minister really think he can convince the public that their fight is with "trade union leaders" who for some unaccountable reason want to "hold the country to ransom"? Does Mr Shit-for-Brains, in his return to Thatcherian rhetoric and policies, want to precipitate civil war? If there is no legal route to protest, then how else will the citizenry take forward their grievances? Pat Cullen, General Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal College of Nursing told Laura Nose this morning that the NHS is carrying 100,000 vacancies, that the NHS is in a mess, it is despicable that UK nurses are the lowest paid in Europe and that her members are  not greedy people and just want to make ends meet.

Sounds entirely reasonable to me. But not to horrible fucking fat stubbly bastard Foreign Secretary Cleverly, who said nothing to do with me, guv, not my job, negotiate with your bosses - This is Not Political.

Not like this:

Which may well have something to do with soaring electricity prices, inflation and a lack of money to pay decent wages.

At Scapa today:

And thick and fast they came at last,
And more, and more, and more —
All hopping through the frothy waves,
And scrambling to the shore.

mr verge said: Those (memory)ledgers tend to have haunted hinges, mr mongoose, forever springing open of their own accord.

 

 It was, as they say, a dark and stormy night. Unless you've ever hunkered down in a cold, rubble-walled, 200 year-old house in the depths of the countryside whilst the skies above were riven by the battle cries of angels and devils and torrential sheets of rain were blown by gale-force winds sideways against rattling windows, you have no idea, no idea at all. Oh by the way, do you suppose that windows are so called because whenever  rocks and mud fell out of the side of a neolithic house everyone shouted - Wind - O, and ducked?

 

Anyway. Back to the dark and stormy night. mr ishmael and I were watching Midsummer Murders and congratulating ourselves on having had the roof re-slated. Cost a small fortune, but was entirely necessary because it had been raining in on the top floor and mushrooms were growing on the carpets. Our attention was on the telly, in the small pool of light that never penetrated the shadowy corners of the room, despite mr ishmael's best efforts with different lighting systems. 

 

I began to hear a small drip. It might have come from the adjacent utility room. It was only a small drip, like a leaky tap, safely ignored. Especially because mr ishmael had become convinced that I liked to report maintenance  issues to him for the sole purpose of vexing him. You've never liked this house, he'd growl. I have to say, there were many, many maintenance issues to report. I've never come across a house so ornery, so downright dugged  before. And so dirty. Ancient stone dust seemed to sift onto newly-polished surfaces the minute the duster was put away. Bulbs would blow constantly. He'd get around to fixing whatever the latest crisis was. Eventually. A bucket might have to be deployed under the sink for a few months before whatever was wrong with the plumbing was first admitted, then fixed. Not without the rebuke - why didn't you tell me about this earlier? Can't fix it if I don't know about it. But.. but don't you remember? I did. 3 months ago. 

 

Sometimes the solutions were ingenious. Once, when cleaning behind the shower cubicle, trying to track down the strange smell in the shower room, my reluctant hand encountered something cold, clammy and flaccid. Moist and yielding. Dear god, no, there's something dead behind here and I've just put my hand in it. Or could the dog have squeezed into the tiny space for a secret poo? And it seems to be raining behind here. Mr ishmael rigged up his powerful site-lights-on-a-tripod and we squinched around to see whatthefuck it was. Hard to see in the narrow space, even with the arc lights. It was grey and smooth and the smell was horrid, but vaguely familiar. Put these bio hazard gloves on, instructed mr ishmael, and pull some of it out. I'd do it, but my hands are too big. And I don't bend like that. And it's a girl's job. Suppressing my girly flinching, I did as I was told. The mother plant seemed to shudder as I pulled a bit off. In the full light, it was obviously a bit of wet fungus.Not ectoplasm at all. But the free-standing shower cubicle, a sodding great ugly monolith, couldn't be moved. And it was continuing to rain behind there. The shower had been installed by the previous owner, a man, his wifie proudly informed us, who was nacky. He liked to use whatever came to hand for his relentless, remorseless, improvement programme. The appropriate shower hose fittings reposing in the nearest B&Q - Inverness, some 150 miles and a sea journey away, the nacky man had deployed a handy length of garden hose. Job's a good'un. What could possibly go wrong?  Nothing, as far as he was concerned. He sold the dugged historic house on to us, and bought a nice, new, insulated, warm, bright little house in Kirkwall because his wife was a city girl at heart. Over time, of course, the hose failed and it was impossible to access it because the shower cubicle, some Victorian lump that he had liberated, could not be moved without a full dismantling job. So mr ishmael took out the wall behind the shower cubicle, accessing it from the other side, which turned out to be the servant's staircase, fixed up the shower with a nice new length of garden hose and some jubilee clips he had in his stash, and popped in a newish piece of plaster board to repair the wall.

 

Right. Back to the small drip. mr ishmael had his library table under the window, which during a summer's day looked out onto fields full of buttercups, daisies, kye and yows. Tonight, it was a black rectangle. No street lights, no friendly lights from a neighbour's home - (no streets, no neighbours). In that shadowy corner of the room,  the small drip speeded up, splashing onto computer, telephone, speakers, papers, cables, pens, half-full coffee mug, the leather scriver of the antique writing table. 

What the fuck, we exclaimed, what has the house done now? 

 

"Run upstairs and check," urged mr ishmael. "Maybe you left the tap on in the basin in the bedroom."

Well, obviously I didn't. The room was unused. The taps were turned off. But bubbling up out of the plughole and the overflow outlet was a stream of black, scummy water, filling the basin and pouring onto the pale carpet in a tide of filth.

I reported the situation to mr ishmael.  By which time the ceiling was fat with water and the drip had turned into a torrent. 

 

"Where is it coming from? How can water run uphill and flood a room on the second storey? Run outside and have a look at the side of the house."

 

"In the dark? In the howling gale? In the driving rain?"

 

"Best take a torch," he advised, kindly.

 

Outside, bent double against the wind, I struggled round to the side of the house. Everything seemed just as it should. The down pipe from the roof was joined by the waste pipe from the bedroom's basin. I reported back. 

 

"I'll have to go and look. Needs a man to understand a flood running uphill". 

 

Negotiating the path to the side of the house was even trickier for mr ishmael, whose mobility was compromised. Once there he was as  stumped as I was. 

"Only one thing for it. I've got to relieve the pressure in the down pipe. Get my big fuck-off drill. The one with the massive bit."

Braced against the dry-stone dyke, mr ishmael aimed the mighty drill at the down pipe. It went in. Nothing happened. Until he reverse-engined and pulled out the drill bit. A geyser of filthy water under high pressure hit him in the chest and bore him to the ground.

 

Back inside, drying out, we  considered the situation. Upstairs, the water was no longer swooshing out of the basin onto the sodden, blackened carpet. Downstairs, there was no more drip, although bits of ceiling had fallen onto the soaking computer. Outside, through the gale and driving rain, could be heard the torrent of the new horizontal water feature. We still didn't know how this had happened. 

 

In the dry, sunny, wind-free morning, mr ishmael made some more test holes in the now-ruined down pipe, until he hit a solid concrete plug in the downpipe a little below  his original hole. When the penny dropped, his language contained ripe animadversions on cowboy builders, censuring their apparent practice of neatly sweeping into the downpipe all the slate and cement residue from the very, very, expensive re-roofing job.

 

One day, I'll tell you about the time I went to work, leaving mr ishmael to replace a washer in the kitchen tap.

 

 Church Notices

 The Ladies of the Church have cast off clothing and may be seen in the church basement on Friday afternoon.

This afternoon there will be a meeting in the south and north ends of the church. Children will be baptised at both ends.

For those of you who have children and don't know it, we have a nursery downstairs.

Ladies, don't forget the jumble sale. It's a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Bring your husbands.

The Associate Minister unveiled the the church's new campaign slogan - Last Sunday I upped my pledge. Up yours.

 

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

 

thanks to editor mr. verge, there are now three anthologies of the collected works of ishmael smith:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack  and Ishmael’s Blues are all 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
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.

Energy crisis?

 

The Sunday Ishmael: 4/12/2022

mr Bungalow Bill said...
The good old sun, Mrs I, and the waters. They will do. (27/11/2022)

 

Do not forget the new life, mr b.b. - in the leaf litter, the small green tips have already appeared 

The Sports Page:

Now, I know that there's a big football tournament on, but that's no reason for me to pay it any mind. Especially in Scotland, which is fairly indifferent to the event as Scotland is not in it, not being very good at football.

Wet herring:

There's been a not-inconsiderable controversy this week. About racism. Lady Susan Hussey's line in small talk has been criticised, even though her former boss, Her Late Majesty, the QE2, was famous for asking "where have you come from today?", or "have you come far?"

The allegation that Susan's particular line of chat strayed into racist interrogation has lost her the job she has held for decades. Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish that she would take her employer to the Employment Tribunal on the grounds of constructive dismissal, illegal dismissal, ageism, sexism and reverse-racism. 

Now, your hand may be itching to seize the handiest wet herring and lay about that elderly, privileged, hatted, pearl-earringed, expensively coiffed head with its extravagantly fire-proof teeth, but hold your contempt, for here is  Ngozi Fulani, the recipient of Sue's "violent racism":

Ngozi, birth name Marlene Headley, is a black activist who went to a Buckingham Palace party looking for a ruck, equipped with a tape recorder and a grievance. Doubtless the notoriety she has achieved will assist her charity for black victims of domestic abuse in terms of publicity and grants. Dressed up like Hollywood's idea of an African woman, she utterly refused to give a straight answer to Lady Susan Hussey's increasingly bemused polite ice-breaker conversation, then marched herself off to the BBC, who very gleefully took up the cudgels on her behalf.

I've been the recipient of that sort of questioning here, in Bonny Scotland:

Where are you from? Kirkwall.

No, where were you from before that?  Stromness.

No, where are you really from? Oh, alright then, I give in. England.

Talking of Bonny Scotland, what has Fatty Blackford been up to?

 

He likes to project the image of a simple crofter on the Isle of Skye, does Fatty, whose vicious campaign to become the MP ruthlessly hounded to his death the last holder of that constituency, amiably alcoholic Charlie Kennedy. Fatty, of course, is no more a simple crofter than I am - an Edinburgh man, he was first an analyst, then a manager with NatWest Securities before running Deutsche Bank's equity operations in Scotland and the Netherlands. He has maintained his lucrative financial side-hustles whilst trousering his fees as SNPMP and has amused us in the Commons as leader of the SNP, having been twice ejected for unParliamentary conduct. He has now been moved onto lesser things by Gnasher. He attributes his downfall to a group of Scottish National MPs known as the Tuesday Club, a sort of sub- sub- Bullingdon Club, who play five-a-side football, go drinking and eat curry together on Tuesdays and plot. It's a tough game, politics. Doubtless Charlie is laughing his leg off in the Elysian Fields.

Poetry Corner

Provincial Public Houses blaze,
Corporation tramcars clang,
On lighted tenements I gaze,
Where paper decorations hang,
And bunting in the red Town Hall
Says 'Merry Christmas to you all'.
And London shops on Christmas Eve
Are strung with silver bells and flowers
As hurrying clerks the City leave
To pigeon-haunted classic towers,
And marbled clouds go scudding by
The many-steepled London sky.

Extract from Christmas by John Betjeman  

 

It is dark, dreach, drear, depressing, oppressive December, again. I wish they would stop pretending that we are all surrounded by friends and family, all hotly anticipating a jolly, holly, snowy, sexy, tinselly, greedy, non-faith christmas extravaganza of party clothes, sparkling wine, perfume, perfect presents and feasting in which the eyes of little children light up at the sight of Brussels fucking sprouts. Lightly sauteed with chestnuts and crispy bacon of course.

 

I brought on the depression myself by watching Jamie Oliver's  Perfect Christmas. Some clever, money-saving Christmas producer has hit on the wheeze of editing all Jamie's Christmas Specials into one time-travelling marathon, in which Young Jamie wipes the turkey entrails off on the seat of his jeans, cutting to old Jamie ripping the skin off a boiled ham and striating the white fat, back to Young Jamie making cock-tails wiv 'is best mates: 'ere you go - fill a crystal whisky tumbler - yeah, we've all got one of them in the back of the cupboard - wiv ice, pour in a jigger of Rum, then a capful of Angostura Bitters, more ice, a tablespoonful of caster Sugar, give it a stir, frow in anuvver jigger of rum - wotever  takes your fancy, top up wiv more ice, slice of dried orange, stir it up a bit, drink it down, fall over. 'Ere's anuvver: fill your cock-tail shaker wiv ice, pour in your snow goose voddy, squeeze a halved lime into it over your 'and to catch the pips like and show how manly you are, not wincing as the lime juice seeps into all those little burns, abrasions and cuts that we proper chefs 'ave on our 'ands, top up wiv more vodka and a tablespoon of sugar, give it all a big shake - if there's any space left in the cock-tail shaker, best fill it up wiv a bit more vodka, strain into martini glasses and serve to your guests when they arrive. Guaranteed to get them excited.

It's on an endless reel on The Food Channel, together with the rest of the TV chefs. 

It's the season to remember mr ishmael on haute cuisine:

 

"Bought some Sainsbury's sausages yesterday, there's a picture of Jamie Oliver on the front, on the back it says "Prick with fork" Can't argue with that".
 Everyone seems to hate Jamie Oliver, but, let's be honest, he's done well in life for someone with mild Down's Syndrome. The secret ingredient in a lot of those recipes is saliva.
   I value my intestinal wellbeing too much to eat food that some filthy fucking bastard has prepared in some fucking crawling, infested shithole of a kitchen.  Y'ever work in a kitchen, d'ya know how little they get paid? Christ allfuckingmighty, Cookie coulda had his hand up somebody's arsehole five minutes before he went on duty, he could have all manner of infections and diseases and like that insufferable prick, Jamie Oliver,  he might think that food handling hygiene and cross-contamination are all imaginary, dunappen in the real world, bish-bash-bosh, there y'are,  snot, shit and gonorrhea, all prepared for under a tenner and in less than fifteen minutes an' my kids, lemmetellya, my kids, Poppy and Floozie,  they love this shit, can't get enough of it. Oh 'ang on, the rosemary and chili souffle is ready, they're bezzie mates, rosemary an' chili, drizzle 'em all up wiv some good olive oil and they make magic togevva,  just have a quick taste, dip me 'and in, shove it in me Norf'n'South, 'ave a good old lick, wipe it on the arse a me jeans an' jobsagoodun.

 

 I musta seen this cunt of a man a hundred times, handling raw flesh and then going to his black pepper mill, givin' it a good ol' twist, then going and handling some salad and then coming back to the good ol' pepper mill and givin' it another good ole'twist and then  handling some bread, never washing his brass bands, never, in its entire life, washing the pepper mill, the man's a walking disease, anyone dining at his house must wake up next morning with the old posterieur flambee, arse on fire from overspiced food laced with bacteria off mine host's dirty hands.  That's Oliver, filthy fucking Cockney gabshite, the second luckiest man in the world, after Ringo Starr.  I donwanna eat any shit prepared by anybody of the same subspecies as Jamie Oliver.  I'd rather go hungry than eat in a restaurant. 

 

Millionaire Mockney luvvie-cook, Mr Jamie Oliver, on the death of the drunken waster, Mr Keith Floyd: I fink what we should do is like stuff 'im, up the Jacksie, just go out in the garden and grab some really 'ot chilies, like the ones wot give 'im the arse cancer, chilies really love bowels, what the Poles call le posterieur flambee, just mash 'em all up in a mortar and wotsit, or just 'it 'em wiv a brick, add some really, really 'ot curry paste, Sainsburys is best, a coupla good 'andfuls of paprika and cayenne pepper and a tablespoonful of finely ground glass, all mixed up wiv a good pincha salt and wheelbarrow fulla garlic and shove it up the old boy's bottle and glass, innit, send 'im off a treat that will, 'smore or less what 'e done to 'imself, daft fucker, coulda 'ad a right proper career. Like me. Oh yeah, and mustn't forget, summink else, you get a tanker full of nasty red plonk, most expensive is best and you just keep pumping it into the old boy, even after it comes running out, you keep on pumping that shit in there so's it pickles all the bits wot ain't supposed to be pickled. Bon vivant, they call it. Gluttony wiv a plummy voice. 

 

Mad bastard and shaven-headed freak, pretentious arsehole and lousy cook, Mr Heston von Blumenthal said:
I want to take him into my laboratory (his kitchen, the cunt) and preserve him in cognac laced with a julienne of wrens tongues, in a casket of bitterest Belgian chocolate garnished with gold leaf and crushed diamonds and stored in my specially constructed pantry, kept at a perfectly controlled optimum temperature by Tahitian virgins fanning the air across trays of Moondust imported from NASA and keep him until cryogenics have caught up with me and at some point in the future, when he has been revived, I want to decant the late Maestro. And eat him.

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mrs ishmael: whenever I suggested to mr ishmael that he might like to go to a restaurant to celebrate his birthday, there would be an anguished cry: Are you MAD? Let other people touch my food? And on my birthday? Have you no heart?

Church Notices

Wednesday the Ladies Liturgy Society will meet. Mrs. Johnson will sing Put Me in My Little Bed accompanied by the Minister.

Scouts are saving cans, bottles and other items to be recycled. Proceeds will be used to cripple children.

This being Easter Sunday we will ask Mrs Lewis to come forward and lay an egg on the altar.

Don't let worries kill you - let the Church help.

The Low Esteem Support Group will meet on Thursday at 7 p.m. Please use the back door.

The congregation is asked to remain seated until the end of the recession.

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thanks to editor mr. verge, there are now three anthologies of the collected works of ishmael smith:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack  and Ishmael’s Blues are all 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
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.