The Secret Life of Unicorns

Unicorns are lovely. I mean really lovely. Not the sort of lovely that merely equates to a well-rendered toasted sandwich, or a walk on a crisp winter's morning along an adequately maintained bridleway to a fairly interesting National Trust stately home with someone you sometimes play squash with accompanied by their tolerable children and some slightly chilled cans of supermarket brand stout – I mean really really lovely.

What could be nicer than a unicorn? The classic portrait of the unicorn is of that majestic, mythical creature resplendent in rolling green hills (probably somewhere in Shropshire), next to a rainbow, just far enough away for awe-struck kiddies to see, but not approach, before it canters off to have afternoon tea with a griffin. Joey Barton¹, the Chancellor of the Royal Unicorn Society of Great Britain, echoes this sentiment in the opening line of his poem Unicorns, which starts: “Unicorns. Well bugger me, aren't they great”.

Except now, we're being told this isn't the case at all. It seems they've been getting good publicity for no good reason, and this is a Bad Thing. The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA)² reported last week that they had discovered a unicorn lair in Pyongyang, from a time when – get this – they had to be banished from the kingdom by King Tongmyong. Banished! The lovely unicorns!

Now either the KCNA are wrong, and the unicorns were never in the kingdom to be kicked out in the first place and didn't live in a lair with the words “Unicorn Lair” scratched into a rock at the entrance to it, or they have obtained yet another scoop of Pullitzonian proportions and confirmed the suspicions of scientists that in fact, unicorns were actually no good all along. Let's go with the latter.

It turns out that far from being mythical, or lovely, they really did exist and were essentially the horrible-bastards-about-town of their day. What started as a healthy working relationship between man and beast quickly soured when it turned out that unicorns were notoriously cantankerous. Sometimes they would go weeks without even speaking, and when they did it would only be to criticise (“I know you want me to help plough this whole field, but I'm telling you there's no chance you're growing any flax on this sandy grit you so laughably call your livelihood”) or dangle the turnip of fake hope (“I could give you the secret to eternal life – but I won't because you've got an ugly soul”. “Ooh look, a rainbow! No, its gone”).

When tethered to wooden railings outside the Korean bars of old (which American pioneers famously recreated in the frontier towns of the Wild West) they would often file through the rope with their horn, before bursting through the saloon-bar doors to announce there was a fire down the street. But there was never ever a fire. They would then trot off down the street whistling irritating yet catchy songs that would stay in people's heads for literally tens of minutes.

Whilst it is sad that the KCNA have exploded the myth of the Lovely Unicorn so effectively and ruthlessly it is still a testiment to their journalistic principles that they have chosen to do so, and the world is a better place for knowing the truth. Perhaps now that picture postcard will be replaced with another, more realistic one; that of a North Korean man chasing a unicorn down the road with a rolled-up newspaper, ready to give it a pasting. Let's hope so.

1. No, not that one.

2. Yes, that one. 

Spreading Christmas Cheer (over a chicken breast)

Its the time of the year where each day it is getting one day closer to Christmas, meaning everyone needs to buy their Christmas presents from the Christmas shop. Christmas!

This means that Christmas adverts are back on the television, and it was difficult to miss the controversy surrounding this year's offerings. There's that one with the snowmen and the singing, the one with the singing and the dancing; plus Morrisons and Asda are leaving dads up and down the land weeping into their Batman costumes by giving all the credit for the Christmas Day experience to an actress. Only the coffee firm who chose to run with an advert depicting Rasputin fisting a lobster have escaped criticism.

For many, the appearance of Christmas adverts is the official beginning of Christmas itself. There are problems with this – its essentially a construct, and therefore unlike the first swallow of the winter, or the last man standing at an office booze-up, should not be taken as a natural sign of this watershed. However this is rendered less moronic compared to the excitement that seems to grasp some at the first sighting of the Christmas advert for Fizzy-Cola-Super-Pop. My childhood Christmases may appear to have not been as traditional as I once imagined when I admit that not once did I spend evenings on end gazing out of the window, awaiting the distant rumble of articulated lorries. In fact there was a haulage firm and skip hire at one end of the road, and the shuddering and jostling of the lorries and their rusting chains as they hurtled through the narrow bends of the village scared the living shit out of me; I would tend to be walking up the road at the time to purchase sherbet from the newsagents, or something equally wistful and nostalgic. I still occasionally run for the panic room at DAL Towers when a tractor coasts past the bottom of the drive to this day.

Altogether more appropriate were the adverts they used to show for mayonnaise. These were mercifully brief, tended only to be shown in the couple of weeks leading up to Christmas Day, and listed the foods you could eat with said condiment in a jaunty reworking of The Twelve Days of Christmas. It spread the message of the deliciousness of Christmas, and mentioned the word Ham. If anything this was a more palatable marker for the start of the festive season, and if you didn't like it, it was also very easy to ignore; such was the brevity that one could simply belch loudly to avoid it. Nowadays even the lengthiest of burps would only take you into Act III of the latest M&S epic, in which Twiggy discovers the powdery snowball fight she had at the beginning of the advert distracted her from remembering to put any ruddy clothes on.

Sadly the mayonnaise adverts have now changed and, whilst still not up to the duration of the aforementioned epics, the simplicity has gone and the deliciousness has been replaced with vaguely unpleasant recipe ideas. Stir a spoonful of it into mashed potato. Spread it on top of a chicken breast and grill it (which would surely have the same effect as leaving a pile of mayo in the midday sun and allowing it to dry out into a form of gone-off eggy savoury fondant icing). Spread it on a wall and eat it with a pickled egg. Mix it with tonic and drink it from a tramp's boot. All and none of these ideas are suggested, and in DAL Towers at least, ignored with contempt.

In the week when the Leveson Report will be published and Chelsea are set to announce their next three managers, it is important we do not lose sight of the importance of the loss of the simplistic mayonnaise adverts. Without them we are left staring out of the window, waiting for the lorries to roll in.

Valuable Lessons to be Learned

(The following was written, and lost, two years ago. Its relevance and the impact of its succinct dissection of the issues of the day have, naturally, not diminished at all in the intervening period). 


Today, the nation breathed a sigh of disappointment as it was announced that no, the 2018 FIFA Football World Cup Kickathonfest 3000 was apparently not to be held in England. I say the nation, but there appears to be quite a few people now saying that they “didn’t want it anyway”, or “probably couldn’t afford it” – as if Sepp Blatter was going to turn up for a month at their three-bed semi in Walsall and instantly demand that not only you serve him eggs benedict, but that you also personally steward every single game single-handedly and sort out some sandwiches for half time while you’re about it. Either way the whole sorry debacle has taught us a thing or two.

The BBC, and therefore the England bid team, needed teaching a lesson

A strong vein through the Panorama programme on corruption within FIFA (which, incidentally I didn’t watch – I can’t get past the part with Jeremy Vine) was the lack of transparency in the organisation, and in the bidding / voting process. A breath of fresh air was felt to waft around Zürich then when it was announced that the voting figures would, for once, be released. After Sepp Blatter warns the “electorate” about the “evils” of the media. After they had already voted the English bid into oblivion. To provide a “transparency” of sorts; meaning the kick in the nuts was with a glass slipper, I suppose.

People are people

Andy Anson, head of the English bid, has revealed his disappointment at being told to his face by delegates that they would vote for him. He then had his dreams cruelly ground into the floor as he watched two whole votes plop through for what Sepp described as “The Motherland of Football”. Mr Anson – not only are people generally gobshites, rich people who are part of a cabal are even more so. Next week Andy learns another lesson when himself, a coat made of money and the Tube combine to really stuff up his day.

Cameron, Beckham and Windsor are technically useless people

The “big guns”, as they were referred to, didn’t achieve their aims today (i.e. success). Impassioned pleas from an iconic star of the game; reasoned pleas from the political head of the country; royal pleas from the future King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: all fell on deaf ears. Apparently it doesn’t matter how many shiny telegenic faces you throw at a sporting wall, unfortunately some of them just will not stick. The surprising thing is that, aside from David Beckham, the other two are the epitome of the FIFA way; a silver spoon-fed Tory from Eton and one of a long line of royal spongers should have got the message through to a crowd of over 60s on the take.

Sepp doesn’t like the cold weather

 If there’s one man who doesn’t have to worry about Jack Frost this winter, it certainly isn’t Our Sepp. Having obviously seen the shenanigans that Russia got up to with Gazprom, he swiftly got them onside before starting to fret about what to do once the gravy train finally departs from Moscow in 2018. Never fear – the third bar on the Casa Blatter fire will never be turned down, with Qatar accounting for one-third of the globe’s gas reserves. As an added bonus, out of all the contenders Russia and Qatar were placed lowest in the most recent Press Freedom Index; so he won’t even have to put up with Jeremy Vine dossing on his sofa.