Electile Dysfunction

Election Fever has gripped the nation! Like many fevers, the symptoms are unique to its type: Disco causes one’s back to be got off the wall, so hellbent is the sufferer to acquire themselves some good times in and amongst “the boogie”; Yellow causes the victim to incessantly repeat the lyrics to early Coldplay songs (honk!!); Scarlet cau- you get the idea. What has baffled scientists for years is that the symptoms of Election Fever are much like those of the common cold, insofar as it is accompanied by a low monotonic grumbling by its sufferers, and the broken-but-believable promise that it’ll all be over and out of the way soon. Just drink plenty of water.

Now anybody reading this who has also read the entries below will realise that this is not a place for the subtle dissection of politics; nor is the author equipped or qualified to suitably scrutinise that world of people in suits, blaring at each other like transistor radios in an abattoir, in a big palace protected by men in tights. That job has kindly been taken up by Angry People Everywhere, who seem to manage to find the television cameras that apparently are parked on all of our streets, and to catch the eye of eager news website editors looking for a nicely spittle-flecked tweet to ostensibly gauge the pique of the nation.

A cursory glance at the coverage of results coming in the morning after the election shows that an incredible amount of fuss is being made at the apparent successes of UKIP – sadly not a friendly initiative encouraging you to immediately have a quick snooze, as I found to my detriment listening to a Radio 4 report on them whilst driving the local Darby & Joan group to their bridge game – but in actual fact the UK Independence Party, which itself apparently stands for the United Kingdom Independence Party, which further stands for the Uniteredest Kingdomest Independentious of Partirifficness. The main thrust of opinion coming from people who have openly admitted to having voted for UKIP – the party that, to our everlasting gratitude, first alerted us to the existence of Bulgarians – is that they have done so because the three major Westminster political parties have ignored what their concerns are, poor lambs, having obviously been forgetting to check their answerphone messages. UKIP is MORE than just a PROTEST PARTY, they say, and their votes were not a protest, OKAY? Whilst verbally waving around a placard covered in expletives and giving the interviewer the come-on for a ruddy good kettling.

Far be it for this to be to the detriment of those voters – who are laudably using their constitutional right to make shockingly crap decisions, and with gusto – it would seem at first glance that a political party whose campaign pamphlets predict immediate Immigrantageddon, and whose supporters tend to be justifying their choice of candidate because the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems apparently haven’t dared broach the subject of immigration and the EU to any great depth, would be by definition a protest party with a very narrow brief indeed. At second glance this would appear to be the case also. However what this all ignores is the most serious revelation of all from this set of elections, which only requires one glance:

      







Nigel Farage appears to actually be a ten pin bowling pin.

This alone means that the march of UKIP must be stopped now at all costs. Admittedly it is a long way off from a stage where they may be jostling for government, but there are actions that need to be taken now and policies adopted to ensure that events will never even get close to this scenario. It would be necessary to completely redesign the House of Commons so that a greasy aisle leads up to the dispatch box, and instead of a ministerial car he would require one of those pin-setting machines to be installed, all of which at a cost the country cannot currently afford. Apart from the logistical difficulties, the international loss of prestige resulting from our country having a piece of American sports equipment as our top politician would be even more difficult to swallow for UKIP supporters than the current issues facing us that they have espoused.

Furthermore, at random five minute intervals during Prime Minister’s Questions, it would be necessary for the lights to be dimmed and UV-sensitive paint applied to the walls while everyone furiously attempts to knock him down before the time limit in order to score double points and/or secure a 2 for 1 pitcher of Woo Woo at the bar. One would barely be able to hear the steady, reasoned debate we have come to know and love from the House above the noise of pinging air hockey tables, teenagers protesting at fake IDs being rejected, and Sandra shouting at Kevin to Leave It.

So for the sake of our once proud nation, please reconsider the next time we go to the polls – lest we all end up in the gutter. Let's go on strike. Make sure we don't go spare. Bowling jokes.

A Nice Can of Greer

Being a man, its sometimes all I can do to occasionally remove my puce, glistening face from behind whatever lump of slaughtered carcass I happen to be guzzling to bare my buttocks at a passing citizen from another town, kill a bomb to bits with my bare hands, or bellow profanities at a heron. On having completed one of the above last week, I happened to glance at a closeby switched on computer screen which informed me that people had been mulling over what would happen if women ruled the world.

The article in question included the testimony of experts and pictures of inspirational women in positions of influence, including Condoleezza Rice, Christine Lagarde off of the IMF, and Judge Judy; and the conclusions drawn suggest that yes, it would be a Good Idea. Women are generally more empathetic and this leads to a collaborative approach to leadership, rather than a competitive one. Who would you rather have sorting things out at the UN. Basil Fawlty or Polly? If you had to choose one. Yes, one of those two. No its not real its just for a game, I couldn't think of a better example right now. No, you can't choose someone else. No, I know Manuel could represent Spain as well at the same time but that's not the point for this exercise and OH SOD OFF

This author for sure is choosing neither to refute or celebrate the findings; its an interesting read, and as food for thought its chunkier than a concrete Big Soup with depleted uranium croutons. Certainly the caretakership hasn't been exactly tip top so far, so why not have a change? Whatever is said here is irrelevant anyway, seeing as the average person's influence on the machinations of party politics and global business is equal to that of me yelling driving directions at Charon, Pluto's moon. But on washing the petrol off my hands and returning the matches to the kitchen drawer after visiting a nearby orphanage for some “bants” with the lads, I spotted a nearby television which was also switched on and it opened my eyes to an array of potential pitfalls to be overcome if the gynarchy is to succeed.

Firstly, what if its the elderly Sicilian women who take over? According to Mama-Mia Margarine, they'll be too busy tricking poor unsuspecting taught-bodied young men into occassionally exposing their genitals to them. When they're not doing that, they'll be too busy stuffing their faces with boulders of bread smothered with butter substitute (infused with the Crone's Catnip that apparently allows them to live to 154 years old and still not get tired of looking at an innocent's meat-and-two against their will) to notice that the world's electricity bill hasn't been paid in months, we've all had the power cut and literally all the milk in the world has gone off.

But what of the young, go-getting office worker types? The television, literally seconds after the toothless cackling from the previous featurette has faded, soon confirms that no, they would be no ruddy good either. What used to be known as a Fizzy-Cola-Super-Pop Lite-Break has now turned into a full-blown Fizzy-Cola-Super-Pop Lite-Picnic. No wonder the economy, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer is constantly at pains to point out, is “Up the Shitter”; what used to be thirty seconds or so of drooling at Etta James and listening to a man clean the windows – or something like that – its now a whole bloody afternoon crafting a plan of Ocean's Twelvian proportions just to get a look at some manflesh.

The amount of planning that is required to successfully pull off this particular “heist” is phenominal, if you consider that 1) you first have to make enough friends to have a picnic; 2) you need to get a job, in order to buy a nice picnic blanket and afford clothes to go to the park in; 3) you need to make sure that everyone can make it to the picnic on the same day, otherwise its simply Going To The Park, which isn't the same at all; 4) remembering that Tina is coeliac, so bring a radish for her to eat; 5) it needs to be a sunny day, which never actually happens; 6) with government cutbacks the chances of there being a grass cutting man at all – let alone a buff one – are slim and 7) you need to buy a can of Fizzy-Cola-Super-Pop and hope that the buff grass cutting man is flimsy of brain enough to pick up, and attempt to drink from, a can that has been rolled towards him like a sticky grenade from a gaggle of eejits waving and grinning like maniacs. All for a few seconds of Washboard Gawp. All that time organising could have been spent sorting out Mali, surely? And will you still be so keen on him while he is tending to his torn-up face when the can explodes under the blades of his Flymo? Would you? WOULD YOU? You would? Oh.

And what of the normal men – the Non-Adonises? They can be found getting over excited about fried chicken, convincing their wives and girlfriends that they are doing their chores using cardboard cutouts in order to escape to drink Slightly Effeminate Rum, and generally ladding it up. And then, in the break for half time of the Premier League football, the special adverts just for us boys; weak lager, followed by a reminder not to drink and drive; a nudge towards gambling, before a reminder not to gamble with that tab you're about to smoke because it may well turn into a gooey pepperami in your hand.

Whoever does end up ruling the world – be it a continuation of the old guard of old men, a change towards women or Plankar the Crab Lord (predictably, my money is on the latter) – the first thing they could do is at least make that five minutes a bit less depressing. In that spirit, they've said nothing against combining the lot by drinking and smoking ourselves to oblivion whilst riding a lawnmower, so we just need the weather to perk up now.

Paper View

“Our nation is divided”, announces Rob Brydon, and instantly a series of half-chewed mouthfuls of Cheerios-and-Milks are blasted toward television screens up and down the land as the breakfasting public attempt to somehow take stock of what this could possibly mean. Brydon has famously been involved with announcements of considerable gravitas before, from the premature proclamation of Prince Harry’s pregnancy, through to the brief nine minute outlawing of football, to the declaration of war by the UK on Button Moon. His involvement in this, then, means it’s likely to be a biggie.

So what is it that renders our Sceptred Isle in twain? What quandary, what monumental issue could be so mountainous as to cause this nation – this Kingdom no less, built on the backbone of Churchill and full of such a British je ne se quoi that even Shakespeare* himself was moved to write “Britain eh. Well bugger me, ent it great.” – to split apart like a Victoria sponge hurled into a swimming pool? It must be the issue of Gay Marriage surely? Scottish Independence, mayhap? The relevance of Cheryl Kurl, née Tweedy? Tell us Brydon. TELL US.
 
TELL US.

It turns out the answer is None Of The Above. In fact it concerns The Below. What Brydon is asking us, on behalf of Softy Soft Dog Bogrolls plc, is if one “scrunches” or “folds”. Perhaps a question more pertinent would be to ask which boot one puts on first in the morning before plunging both feet through the television screen in sullen disappointment.
  
As far as fearsome debates go it’s up there with “Which roundabout in Manchester is your favourite?” and “Is next door’s silver birch tree evil or not?” This particular functioning human has never been made aware of any such debate and it wasn’t even anything that crossed one’s mind before – you just sort of get on with it and hope that the 20p-worth of time doesn’t expire, leaving you exposing yourself to the high street as the space-age doors swoosh open and the Buck Rogers Toilet tells you that yes, number two, your time is up. 

It appears to be the thin end of the wedge; how long before this sorry waste of time is lent to other unfortunately necessary products, with Olbas asking “Which do you prefer? Decanting menthol oil into a handkerchief drop by drop, or squeezing it over a rag like so much chloroform ready to be smooshed into an unsuspecting teenager’s face? And while we’re about it, chloroform users, do you smoosh or casually swipe?”, or the degree of flair deemed to be suitable when dusting ones trainers for athletes foot.

It was bad enough attempting to sit through Brydon’s gurning and shrugging during Would I Lie To You? (“how do they come up with this stuff?! These tall tales!” SPOILER – Natalie Cassidy didn’t come up with it herself, Bob) but now he’s forcing feeding us yet more BS; chummily bringing arsewipeage to the forefront of the consciousness, where it has steered clear from up until now for a very good reason. As the mouthpiece for a bogroll-hawking company it’s pretty obvious to see where he’s talking from.
 
*(Darren Shakespeare, Secretary-General of the Plymouth Darts League)

C4L - FML

An email plopped into the inbox at DAL Towers earlier today, from London 2012. “At last!”, I swiftly and prematurely concluded; my application for The Olympic Sports Collective of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (I refuse to call them “T*am GB”) had reached my friend Sebastian, and he had responded to let me know that yes, I’d been accepted for the position of Running Man.

Sadly upon further inspection, all but a millisecond later, I realised that the subject matter appeared to be “Thirsty For More?”. Having just polished off the third of four mid-morning liveners, and having unscrewed the fourth ready for a jolly good eyeballing, I then assumed it to be Sebastian offering me an exciting cut-price offer for some form of delicious hooch-booze in a bottle.

Sadly sadly upon further further inspection it wasn’t Sebastian at all, and I would have to wait another few hours for the delightful clink of bottleneck-‘gainst-lens. It was in fact an underling – possibly his Squire or a minor baronet – asking me if I was thirsty for more gulps from the drinking bottle of inspiration, in the comfort of my own leafy locale. Whilst initially disappointing, I took a moment away from pounding the side of the nearby bookie’s window with rage to reflect that at one point during that Glorious Summer Of Sport, I actually responded to an advertisement displayed on the television in the gap between ITV News and ITV Central News and asked HM Government to make me Fit For Life. They'd said they could, provided I could Change 4 Life (because 4 sounds like fore, geddit?) 

This was no ordinary call-to-arms; it was an insistence that yes, there is more to life than watching ITV News and ITV Central News. Go out there and fling a Frisbee! Frolic in the sunshine! Get a dog! It provoked some deep soul-searching, and made one wonder if indeed following the C4L programme could:

-          Prevent the plasticine around my midriff literally turning into a Continental 185/60R14, with actual tread detail?

-          Abort the truckloads of white-tac currently hurtling towards my ailing ticker along the little rubbery corridors?

-          Turn me into a smiling orange clay man?

-          Sufficiently please the omniscient cockney voiceover man, and prevent him from poking me in the side and randomly stealing the dinner from my plate?

-          Get me a dog?

Being, at heart, a man of science, instead of actually standing up and launching into the programme, it was the opinion of the DAL editorial staff that an experiment would be more suitable. And therefore, instead of actually completing any of the activities suggested it will be up to the applicant, Zeus Blitzkrieg, to complete the tasks and compare the successes, failures, and crisitunities befalling him compared to The Control (i.e. the author) who will continue to exist as if walking up two flights of stairs whilst eating some raw broccoli was a madman’s fevered dream.

Zeus is a similarly lazy individual but eager to learn and is generally more amenable to the suggestions of good old HM Gov’t. Therefore stay tuned for the results in the coming weeks; and up next, its ITV Central News.

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.