This weeks announcements ...

To the wife also in the home baking aisle this afternoon, I'm afraid your husbands been murdered...can i borrow a shovel? You let him roll his trolley over my foot and then not apologise and have the cheek to look at me like I've just invaded Poland. Bitch

To the professor who upset my friend this week, you've written thirteen books, impressive yes, however I am sure after working on the equation for thirty years, you have yet to make one incredible discovery by now - your wife has left you and you've wasted you've life.

To Mike Ashley who has 500 million quid and wants to spend his time in Newcastle? If I had 500 million quid I'd want my own self-cleaning fucking sex yacht. Wake up Mike you idiot.

To the Jessica Fletcher lookalike drawing cash out today, I was sooo scared, because seeing Jessica fletcher turn up means there will be a murder. It's like going to an old folks home dressed as death, I've never done it but I'd giggle if I saw it.

Oh and The Daily mail has a headline generator online which comes out with an average headline title, things like 'Asylum seekers invade Britain with a new form of AIDS that lowers house prices'"
http://www.qwghlm.co.uk/toys/dailymail/ CHECK IT OUT

Have a great weekend, keep your eye out for pics and I will be back with my acid tongue on Monday afternoon!

See yA!


Chris x x x x

Cereal

I love cereal, it makes everything seem right in the world. Today is dress down Friday, for that we are grateful. Must dash hair to straighten blah blah blah! I left my straighteners on and they have melted a hole in the piano stool, thankfully my fat arse covers it up, but seriously irritated now. BOOOO!

whip him into shape

Fifa President Sepp Blatter has come forward this week saying the football transfer system is like "modern slavery", with Ronaldo vocally agreeing after his desperate attempts to sign with Milan some time back. I'm sure all those years ago the Egyptians were saying 'we're being treated like footballers' whilst being whipped and tortured for fun.
We're all saying Ronaldo doesn't have a sense of perspective. Since he was a young boy he has been praised ludicrously rewarded for having well coordinated feet.Of course he's not got a sense of perspective, we're lucky he has not killed someone with very skillfully with his feet.
We have no idea what it is like to be Ronaldo, drinking smart cocktails, having sex with beautiful android women. If we had to live Ronaldo's life for five minutes, we would shit our brains out of our eyes. That is my moving cry to understanding for Ronaldo.
Football is just a distraction from the war and the economy, they might as well have someone come on the telly with a big bunch of keys, hold them up and say 'look at the shiny shiny.'
Oh, and if football is like slavery, you can bet your arse Max Mosely will be thinking he is in the wrong career. (that will be cut before print I am sure)

Desperate Dave

Am I alone in saying that I wouldn't tend to trust a middle aged man with a short shaved bleach blonde hair cut? Desperate Housewives kicked off the current season last night, with an episode entitled 'a visions just a vision' is it really? To be honest, if two gravestones came alive, I think it would be safe to say I'd gone slightly mental right? Yes the (ever so bloody long) mystery of Dave Williams continues to drag its sorry arse in amongst the great moments by the rest of the cast. Props must go to Lynette's husband who loudly proclaimed he'd give up everything to have sex with a seventeen year old, right in front of his wife. Gabby and Carlos get back to bickering with witty one liners now his sight has come back - perhaps he'll shave and dye his hair now - YOU LOOK A MESS, CLEAN UP. Susan and Mike are still on/off on/off on/off. Susan, wake up and try and move your botox filled nose, He's unblocking Catherine's sink now, get some self-respect sweetie. So we go back to psycho Dave, talking to his door and two strangers that only he can see. What has Mike Delpheeno done that is so bad? Did he buy the last bottle of hair dye before the company went bust? I think Mike became like a typical English plumber, promising to turn up and fix Dave's sink with the right parts and under budget, instead turning up at two in the afternoon with a pony. Perhaps that does justify Dave seeing two ghosts, plumbers can drive you mad.
So what is it Dave come on just tell us already - get some therapy and ditch that leather jacket you so insist on wearing?
It's beginning to grate on my nerves, all this mystery wrapped in a bottle of hair dye. Psychopaths are never that nice, and certainly unable to hold down jobs, play drums or make such nice looking cocktails. Just have it out with Mike at a band rehearsal, hug it out, then pack your bags and sod off.

who knows....you?

The past year has stopped me asking why, why?
I've let go the need to know why, I take the answers that are supplied.
I thought I chose the surest road, but that road brought me here.
Maybe not knowing is getting through.
Thoughts please,

Apparently they are going to make yet another spiderman movie. BOOOOORRRRIIIIIIINNNNNGGGGGGG!
If you want to stop spiderman, why don't you just trap him in a giant bath?
Don't make another film PLEASE! No one gave a shite the first, second or third time, we don't care and I speak officially as the voice of the nation.

2012...

This week, the goals and targets were set for the 2012 Olympics. Do we need targets? We are good at darts and pool, we don't need a £9.2 million stadium we need a giant Weatherspoons pub. What we are attempting to do at the 2012 games is win more then forty-four medals. Imagine the scenes of disappointment if that doesn't happen, I can see it now.
"Well we should have done better in the shooting and this team from South Manchester really know it" The biggest worry about the whole affair is just how much the whole thing will cost, and being competitive of course we want to better the big opening ceremony. Was the opening ceremony in Beijing really that great? Anyone who thought the opening ceremony was amazing, has never been to Blackpool on ecstasy.

A cheerier work environment

YA THINK!?!?!?!

Don't mind your mouth

Language. Language, language, language. In the end it all comes down to language.
“Language is the universal whore that I must make into a virgin,” wrote Karl Kraus or somebody so like him that it makes no odds. One of my favourite remarks. T. S. Eliot said much the same thing in a different way: “to purify the dialect of the tribe”. But is there a “higher language”, a purer language, a proper language, a right language? Is language a whore, used, bruised and abused by every john in the street … is the idea of purifying the dialect of the tribe a poetic ideal or nonsensical snobbery?
Bearing in mind that I am fully aware that I (try to) sound like the worst kind of pseudo-intellectual twazzock most of the time, let’s look at this closer. There is language, the thing itself, the idea of language.
I am using not only English, but my own brand of English, an English salted, spiced, pickled, seasoned, braised and plated up to you bearing all the flavours of my class, gender, education and nature. Nonetheless, I can no more change my language than I can add a cubit to my height or, sadly it seems, take a pound from my weight. Well, perhaps that’s going a little far. I can attempt to disguise my language, I can dress it up into even more elaborate and grandiose sentences but at the same time I can strip it back to something stark and bare.
English is for all of us the language of Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible. And to our native English today we have added the language of American sitcom and drama, American movies and Australian soap operas.
Music is enjoyable it seems, so are dance and other, athletic forms of movement. People seem to be able to find sensual and sensuous pleasure in almost anything but words these days. Words, it seems belong to other people, anyone who expresses themselves with originality, delight and verbal freshness is more likely to be mocked, distrusted or disliked than welcomed.
There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind.
I don’t deny that a small part of me still clings to a ghastly Radio 4/newspaper-letter-writer reader pedantry, but I fight against it in much the same way I try to fight against my gluttony, anger, selfishness and other vices. I must confess, for example, that I find it hard not to wince when someone aspirates the word ‘aitch’. Haitch Eye Vee, you hear all the time now, for HIV. It’s pretty much nails on the blackboard to me, as is the use of the word ‘yourself’ or ‘myself’ when all that is meant is ‘you’ or ‘me’ but I daresay myself’s accent and manner is nails on the blackboard to yourself or to others too, in itself’s own way. I don’t mind either that the word ‘meld’ is now being used as a kind of fusion of melt and weld, instead of in its original sense of ‘announce’. Meld has changed … that’s okay. There’s no right or wrong in language, any more than there’s right or wrong in nature. If you are the kind of person who insists on this and that ‘correct use’ I hope I can convince you to abandon your pedantry. Dive into the open flowing waters and leave the stagnant canals be.

But above all let there be pleasure. Let there be textural delight, let there be silken words and flinty words and sodden speeches and soaking speeches and crackling utterance and utterance that quivers and wobbles like rennet. Let there be rapid firecracker phrases and language that oozes like a lake of lava. Words are your birthright. Unlike music, painting, dance and raffia work, you don’t have to be taught any part of language or buy any equipment to use it, all the power of it was in you from the moment the head of daddy’s little wiggler fused with the wall of mummy’s little bubble. So if you’ve got it, use it. Don’t be afraid of it, don’t believe it belongs to anyone else, don’t let anyone bully you into believing that there are rules and secrets of grammar and verbal deployment that you are not privy to. Don’t be humiliated by dinosaurs into thinking yourself inferior because you can’t spell broccoli or moccasins. Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years.

Scunt.

An extract for a podcast.. with thanks to those who worked with me to make me sound like my brain exists.

Sometimes, by accident, language fails to provide and when it does the results can be hugely detrimental to the human race. Orwell famously suggested that language preceded thought, such that if the word ‘freedom’, for example, is removed from the dictionary, then the very idea of freedom will disappear with it be and be lost to humanity. A smart tyranny, he said, would remove words like justice, fairness, liberty and right from usage. But my thought occurred to me when I saw a graffito which took up a whole gable end wall in London the other day. It proclaimed, in great big strokes of white paint: “One nation under CCTV”. A good angry point – the American dictum ‘one nation under god’ sardonically replaced with a comment about Britain’s unenviable position as the Closed Circuit Television capital of the world. But … the satirical shout all but fails for one simple reason: CCTV is such a bland, clumsy, rhythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word, that the swipe lacks real punch. If one believed in conspiracy theories, you could almost call it genius that there is no more powerful word for the complex and frightening system of electronic surveillance that we lump into that weedy bundle of initials. For if CCTV was called … I don’t know …. something like SCUNT (Surveillance Camera Universal NeTwork, or whatever) then the acronyms might have passed into our language and its simple denotation would have taken on all the dark connotations which would allow “One nation under scunt” to have much more impact as a resistance slogan than “One nation under CCTV”. “Damn, I was scunted as I walked home,” “they’ve just erected a series of scunts in the street outside,” “Britain is the most scunted country in the world” … etc etc. Or maybe, just maybe, we should stick to the idea of initials and borrow a set that have already taken on the darkest possible connotations of evil and tyranny. Surveillance System. SS. ‘Britain’s SS is bigger than that of any other country.’ ‘The SS has taken over the UK’. Neither of these assertions would sound nearly as good if substituted with those lame letters ‘CCTV’, would they? Well, whether Scunt or SS surely there really should be a memorable and punchy new designation for CCTV – at the moment it is simply too greasy to wrestle. I wonder what other enemies lurk in our society that need names to bring them out into the light? I look forward to your thoughts.
I do not look forward to your thoughts on which inaccuracies and grammatical ‘mistakes’ irritate you though. This is not Feedback on Radio 4, or the letters page of the Daily Telegraph. You are welcome, of course, to disagree with my dislike of pedantry and to attempt to convince me that there is ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ English.

Tramp

Courtney Love was back in Court, again, this week and she went with a different fashion style, it was sort of homeless-lady chic.

....duh....mmm...ahhh

In 1546 Henry the eighth closed down all the brothels in Southwark, and in 1952 Evita Peron dropped dead and went missing for sixteen years. Non of this is of any use for anything I am writing, but doesn't your mind wander when you've smoked a joint?

To be serious for five minutes

To write a series piece, as one must do every now and then, is in fact quite difficult, not necessarily the topic, but finding the subject on which to write the thoughts of one who is so young, feeble, distant from reality, perhaps pathetic! So I leave it up to a marvellous young man of seventeen to ask the question, and so this next entry, I dedicate to him.
Here is his question.

Foster wrote in Howards End that "truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything; it was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to insure sterility."
It strikes me one of the problems secular society has had is with a failure of imagination. (their own) When it threw out the liturgy and poetry of the Bible it didn’t replace it with anything else, and we are left with a Dawkinesk atomistic reductivist society. If we are intent in being anti theistic, in creating a society where we don’t bow to the theism of the external God and we care about the internal humanity, how can we infuse secular society with the poetry and the liturgy to make people care about each other in an almost religious notion?

Dear Kyle,

I have to write neutrally here, and perhaps write against you, not always an easy thing for me (especially) to do, in order for you to find the right answer and maybe challenge you as well.
I think it is fair to say that any failure in society is a failure of imagination to some extent, a failure to penetrate the minds of others. G.K Chesterton, whilst he came under a lot of criticism for not always being a particularly pleasant religious man, he did say some good things, and of atheism he wrote:
“The trouble when you stop believing in God is that you don’t believe in nothing you believe in anything.”
Perhaps we do live in a culture where reason and so on are not glorified and deified, as they should be. The criticism you (and I) face is from those who would say we shouldn’t always allow religion the trick of maintaining that the spiritual and the beautiful and the noble and the altruistic and the morally strong are in anyway inventions of religion or are particular or peculiar to religion.
Christ, said ‘let he who is without sin, cast the first stone.’(Jn8:7) Anybody who said that would have won a great deal of respect and interest, it is one of the greatest and most beautiful phrases ever uttered, BUT there is absolutely no monopoly on beauty and truth in religion.
I am going to borrow the idea of the Greek radical poet Shelly (Prometheus unbound), who wrote if you were to compare the Genesis myth, which had bedevilled our culture, the Western culture for an age, it was essentially a myth where we should be ashamed of ourselves. God said: ‘Why are you naked?’ (Gen 3:11)
Who told you were naked? What possible reason have we to believe that we are naked or that if we are naked there is something to be ashamed of? That what we are and what we do is something for which we should apologise. Our dreams, our impulses, our desires our drives our appetites, they are not things we should apologise for. Our actions sometimes we do apologise for and we excoriate ourselves for them rightly. But that is the Genesis myth.
The Greek myth of Prometheus who stole fire from heaven and gave it to his favourite mortal – man, left the Greeks running around saying we have divine fire, we have it within us, we are as good as the Gods, whatever they have, we also have. So whatever the Gods were, capricious and mean, jealous, stupid rapine and so on – all the things which Greek Mythology shows us that they were, and for that the Gods punished Prometheus, and chained to the corpuses and the vulchers ate away at his liver every day and it grew back because he was immortal of course. Shelly wrote that he understood that the mythological idea that championed a real humanity, a real ‘humanism’ as we now call it, is that we are captains of our own soul and masters of our own destiny, and that we contain any ‘divine fire’ that there is.
Perhaps Kyle, there is some relation of this idea of ‘divine fire’ to the God that we both know and understand to be the God of classical theism. We are told we can move mountains apparently, so perhaps we have simply gone astray with our thoughts and ideas through a great lack of nearly every necessary human quality and instinct. My personal opinion (as I think I have been neutral long enough) is as follows
The sheer lack of intelligence and insight and ability to express themselves and to enthuse others of the priesthood, the clericy here in this country and indeed in Europe, is nothing short of shocking. God once had Michelangelo, Bach and Motzart on his side, and now he gets someone with ginger whiskers and tinted spectacles who reduce the glories of theology to a kind of ‘sharing’ Some would say the fault is in our stars but the glory is in our stars. We take credit for what is great about man and we take blame for what is dreadful about man as well. We have a Father as human beings, and we have a divine one too. We have to grow up, and realise that to grovel or beg at the feet of God is not weakness but strength, is not to bring further shame to oneself but to raise oneself up to the feet of one whose feet it is an honour to kiss.
Does that answer your question? No, Ok, well I will try again soon!

If, like me you are wandering what to have for dinner tonight, and again, like me you are wandering how to get the perfect skin on your parsnips, then very much like me...you're mental.

What?

JUST DISCOVERED THIS PHOTO, I remember nothing about it. My life is becoming like an episode of Crime Scene Investigation, piece by piece the evidence comes together to reveal that I, a man of twenty one, truly am I wine drinking tosser. (was..given/giving up booze)

Sunday morning telly.

If it's one thing I do a lot when I am off work or lounging around, is watch telly. Especially shit television. I can't help but be fascinated by all these people who go off in search for their dream home, and people finding things in their attic and being told it's worth hundreds only to find it sells for £2.50.
The television I hate though, is a program called The Heaven and Earth Show, designed to fill the religious slot without actually being too religious. It is an absolute piece of lamentable television in that it is sort of supposed to be about religion, (labeled religious broadcasting) but they are afraid of mentioning any specific religion, so everyone on there is supposedly bit nice and sort of spiritual and open to other peoples ideas. That's not what religion is about. Religion is about saying "this is my idea , I'm right, and at best people who have not got that idea should try and adopt it and at worst we should send a crusade against them to kill them all." And years ago that is what would have been said. The Heaven and Earth Show is a tour around a Cathedral before showing how to cook chocolate brownies for the local fate. They make spectacular biennial points, with presenters who are offspring from the goody two shoes nursery. What you really want is an angry Muslim cleric, instead you get some half dead 'celebrity' who goes off on a project to learn about Buddhism, but so afraid are the producers to call it by its name, they patronise us by saying the presenter is going for 'a bit of me time.'
Give us some one who will make a good point, 'hang on you believe that, that's bollocks.'
The Argos Christmas catalogue is more spiritual then this program. Next they will show a woman wearing a crucifix and pixelate the cross in the event it may cause offense.
And everything in this programme is fair game, you can have someone saying they believe in ghosts and nobody says anything to challenge this, they are merely asked in what way ghosts help them. Sod off with your ghosts, you're insane. If they actually had some religous person on the show, it might look slightly better. Sit a ghost believer next to a Cardinal and you have something worth watching, until then, it will remian luke warm dishwater with bits of hideous 'nice' bullshit talk floating in it.
Two words have become two very creepy in the past five years. Respect, which is over used mostly in politics and the Daily Mail, is culled from a South Central American Black African word, a word which for understandable reasons was developed for the 'self'.' We have abused ut and made it a slogan for the Tory campaign of empty promises.
The other word is offense, it is now common to hear people say 'I'm rather offended by that,' as if that gives them certain rights when it is merely and no more then a whine. It has no meaning no puropose it doesn't deserve to be 'respected' as a phrase.
"I am offended by that," well so fu**ing what.

How to save the planet.

I like most people, simply cannot understand why recycling my tin cans has not sorted everything out. I want a proper explanation, at the very least I want all my old tin cans back, what are they doing with them? We in the West are responsible for this, we consume far too much. But if you want to talk about over consumption, let's look at books. Everyday, thousands of books are printed and most of them go completely unread. If we really want to save the planet, we need to go back to verbal storytelling. If an author has something to say, he should jump on a horse, go to the nearest village and start shouting about it. Let's see if Dan Brown has quite so much to say after that.

Liverpool News

***Breaking News***
This is not a joke I promise. Ex criminals will work as ambassadors when Liverpool becomes 'City of Culture' later this year. HONESTLY. I refrain from making any comments despite my body popping convulsions. But don't argue with the culture issue please.
They are cultured the Scousers, stand on a street corner and within seconds you will hear someone shout out 'Is this a dagger I see before me.'

What next....

Who ya gonna call......dunno can't find the number

The way we deal with criminals in this country has got to change has is not? Particularly terrorists I reckon. Abu Qatada (WHO?) was the latest example of our nonchalant attitude to terrorism this week.
The preacher of hate was released on bail on the condition that he doesn't leave his house, and doesn't visit or speak to Osma Bin Laden. That's really got to have screwed him over.
"Oh no, how bad, I had booked two tickets to see Slumdog Millionaire on Sunday, the Government are so mean, my tickets are wasted"
What have we done about the Mugabe situation? A man who made an election so corrupt that Ant and Dec took second place and our response is..... we will take away his honorary degree. Seriously! Edinburgh University has revoked his honorary degree of law! Well done people, you show him we mean business by messing up his C.V
And it is us that suffer. In ten years time we will be flying naked on glass planes and look back on a three hour wait at Gatwick (whilst being mugged outside the Tie Rack), as a blessing in terrorists disguise. Take your shoes off? If you can't work out the man tiptoeing in brouges might have something to hide in his size 9's then you should imprisoned for crimes against the brain. Leave us in flip-flops alone, we want to get to Malaga and start ordering chips and gravy thank you.
Period.

Chris McG

Queenie.

The Queen is said to be considering premium rate phone lines for the palace this week, as the effects of the economic financial crisis continue to take more lives and leave them surrounded with nothing, but simply drowning in a pool of their still-warm blood. (<-- too much?) Premium phone lines, are you sure? If the Queen lived Birmingham, that wouldn't work, but I bet the Queen knows that. I'm sure she'd have Princess Anne cleaning your window screen when you pull up at traffic lights if this was Birmingham. Fuel prices are starting to rise again. After the last giant increase in fuel, places charging as much as £2 per litre, everyone is beginning to fear that they won't be able to afford a work or social life. Great, we can't get to the office or go dogging. I don't speak from experience, but I don't think using your bicycle is quite the same.
And as for that woman winning the lottery, well!
"It won't change my life.... I mean I might have a conservatory built you know for the grandkids" said the Northern retired winner.
Well if that's how you feel GIVE IT BACK THEN.
As the doom and gloom encircles, mugging and robbery is on the up. So I guess it won't just high street prices that will be slashed from now on eh?

Chav you seen my tracksuit?

Young people, they are very scary. When I was young I was scared of young people, I resolved this by reasoning that when I was older, I would be taller then the young people and I would not be scared of them anymore. But then they armed themselves which I though was just unfair.
I'm not scared of Goths though, which is a shame because they make more of an effort to look scary. 'Does my vampellic countenance not scare you?' not really no. I know a chav, if I bring him here it will be like a dog worrying sheep.
And I was intimidated outside Somerfield by 'EMOS' as they are known, I think between the two of us we know which one of us you are most likely to harm, now leave me alone I'm trying to buy a cooked chicken whilst they're still fresh.
My tweed and I are off hunting. Catch you later!

Blind (stinking vomiting forgetful) Date!

Never Been Kissed, Fifty First Dates…Voluntarily or forced, we have all watched movies noted for there overwhelming slap in the face topic…finding love. These films come out three or four times a year and give is an introspective look into the complex system we have of dating. In our minds, we see a guy, who likes a girl, and asks her out. We are deluded, it rarely happens like that, so where has this idea/ideal come from? It isn’t a lie, of that we can be sure. But the dating process does not happen in this land. It isn’t a case as some think, that we have changed old fashioned words such as courting and pairing, we have jut thrown the motion of dating out of the window, approximately the moment Bacardi Breezers were invented.
So where has dating gone? More importantly, where is it happening? We all want a piece of this – finding love over the phone or hunting down a girl/guy you saw on platform three whilst sipping your mocha choca latte. It comes down to three things:
Behaviour,
Discretion,
Confidence.
Dating is like playing a game of poker, you have to show a few cards and keep a few cards to your chest:
‘I’m punctual and employed, but I’m holding obsessive and sexual deviance.’
It isn’t a lie not to tell your date everything, but you have to pick and choose what information you give away about yourself.
It is incomprehensible that the Americans and Australians are able to find themselves able to get on a date every week if they want. They speak the same language as us, but they engage with each other in a completely different manner. They have such love and joy about everything and anything, especially meeting new people and taking a genuine interest in them. I stayed with my family in Melbourne over the summer, and got absolutely ridiculously drunk one evening. Despite the fact I wanted to take my shirt of and go dancing, in a self-induced ridiculous frame of mind, my Auntie just looked on with love and pride, seeing me flawed and faulty being lifted to bed on my Grandma’s Stanna chair lift. Beautiful. If this had happened in England…. ASBO. We are victims of pettiness and misery fueled by our cynicism about each other, lover or not.
Our American and Australian friends are excelling in every aspect of personal well-being; good health, a balanced work/home relationship. This has lead to less single people, an increase in marriages and a decrease in separations. And it started with a date!
We don’t date anymore, because it involves us presenting ourselves as perfect, soba, like we're saying, “Do you want to mate me, I think you do?”
We want to present ourselves on that date warts and all (well not warts…that might be a bit awkward) unlike Australians or Americans they meet, they go for pizza or coffee, but not us. I’m not talking about seedy one night sex, I could be talking about the love of ones life, but we can’t present ourselves without going over to someone completely hammered, numb and mauling our way through some incoherent ramble. I wish we could have a slice of the Americans confidence.
“If I like a girl I ask her out, even if it’s lunchtime, who cares?”
Try that with an English accent and a British bulldog guy asking the question;
“Jackie, do you wanna go for some pizza on Wednesday?”
“Back of Dave, that’s a little bit rapey.”
The Prince and Princess fairytale scenario is seen as too drippy and nostalgic now. If we have trouble going to the ball, it is not for lack of a dress or transport, it’s because we’re too pissed to get out of the front door and the taxi is late.
Girls from eleven to fifteen are proof that we are the most radical, sinister creatures on how relationships with the opposite sex should be. When a girl is eleven all she wants to do is sing and dance for her Father, she is Daddies princess. By twelve she is just about interested in dancing for her Father and lining up her Barbie’s in age order.
Then, Thirteen, first boyfriend, over the park, Chlamydia. DEPRESSING.
We have to start to ask more from each other, and expect more of ourselves. Valentine’s day has come and gone, and if like me you were drinking bottles of blue nun and taking rohipnol like they were smarties it is time to make a change!
This year is a year to date. So build up the courage to ask out someone who you would only dream would hit you with baseball bat.
Finally, I can leave you with ‘Dear Deidre’ letter I had a few weeks ago, because sometimes dating does go wrong.

Dear Chris,
I went on a date with a guy at work, and now he keeps sending me emails telling me he wants to give me something that will drive me wild and insane, I don’t like him what shall I do.

Well, I wrote straight back to her and said it could be rabies or thrush so it was right to keep clear of the psycho. Don’t let some clerical assistant ruin your weekend love, save it for the boss.

Chris McGowan

Wacko, placko, scooby snacks

Is it me, or is Michael Jackson becoming like one of the villains from a scooby doo sketch?
Wandering around an abandoned funfair wearing a plastic face, it's hard to see the difference.
Maybe the photo shown is unkind, but he is starting to look like a clown who has had a heart-attack. The puff handed music genius (did you see those photos?) showed the star looking disheveled and, if we're honest, a bit like mouldy puff pastry that someone had sneezed on with a fatal dose of MRSA. His family were all looking fresh faced during an interview to promote their reunion tour this week, saying that it was not how old you are, but how old you feel - which I'm sure is the real reason all the Jackson Five look about fourteen years old, and not at all because they're pumped to their frozen eyebrows with rat poison. If their testimony is to be believed then how do you explain Michael? At 51, he has the mental age of a seven year old, and the body of a 60,000 year old techno robotic cyborg. Britain's Sun newspaper reports that Michael has contracted a staph infection that has spread through his body and has the potential of becoming a flesh-eating condition, How many bugs do you know eat plastic? And if such bugs do exist, why can't they recycle my empty coke bottles?

Operation

When you die, your body should revert to the state.
NOT MY WORDS, but the words of a Labour MP at dinner party.
Calling the idea that your body is important after you die, the MP said:
"The state should be able to do what they like with the body after a person dies. People shouldn't believe all that business of important body after life stuff, it's bol***x."
I suppose when only one in ten surgeons say that they have only ever performed several vital operations on plastic dolls it hardly fills you with confidence that they were tested on their operation skills on a board game where if you take the kidney out incorrectly a buzzer sounds off and the patients nose light up.
Also, Doctors are being encouraged to open on a Saturday, to reduce waiting times for appointments with their G.P. Isn't one of the joys of going to the Doctor that you get to have time off from work? I can see the advert now:
"If you're going to be ill, do it on a Monday"
In other health news, a woman is suing her Doctor, for the location of his surgery. The woman was told she had a terminal disease and almost instantly, fireworks went off in the field behind the surgery where they were rehearsing for a festival to be held at the weekend.
Personally speaking, I would love fireworks to go off after I received bad news, I find the power of fireworks still reduces me to giddy childlike joy.
"Chris, you've got genital warts again but ahhhh look a Catherine wheel!"

To the owner of the Porsche convertible, who undercut me this morning then had to do an emergency stop to avoid his death (doubt you give a shite about killing others); wake up and smell your larger shandy. You're a middle aged man having a nervous breakdown.
Thanks.

After a clear abuse with hair straighteners this morning, I sat fingering my locks like a Rapunzel in a holding cell. The grooming process was wasted, because the rain outside has made my hair look like I'm an Alsatian dolled up for a disco.
This thought developed at the bus stop, as I queued with a line of pensioners who are going into town to collect their doubled winnings for the month, before going to use all their energy playing BINGO. I used to play BINGO halls, and it is a nightmare! Pensioners suddenly become like Robocop, managing to fill in their own sheet, and every other blue rinsed soul, of which ten still haven't got the lid off the jumbo marker. All of this is for a knitted toilet roll cover, goodness knows what they would be like if they were playing for money.
Try and get them to find the volume button on the telly however and it is like you are explaining to them a war plan of how to invade Poland.
I digress as usual.
At the bus stop, as my hair was getting larger, (I went from slick boy to Diana Ross in this damp wait) the old lady in front of me, trumped! This in itself is hilarious, but then......she blamed the kid stood next to her. "Go away you smelly little bugger!" What a state of bliss it must be in life to truly not give a shite.
God Bless old people.

Careless whisper, and driver.

George Michael has said in a new documentary that the press are the most dangerous hunters in the animal kingdom. This is not what I am reporting on. When George was asked about the circumstances that had caused his downfall, George referenced to the famous picture (shown) when he fell asleep at the wheel after too much cannabis. He said; 'I regret that of course, and I vow will never be seen like that again, sleeping at the wheel.'
Yea right, what's he going to do, have curtains fitted in his Range Rover?
When asked about all the sex he had, George said:
"The sex I have is worth all the media hassle I get."
Perhaps George, but after choosing to play hide the sausage with a toothless vagrant in a soup kitchen, instead of sipping champagne on your private yacht with all your celebrity friends, we can't help but judge you, I mean it's not exactly club Tropicana is it?

Chris McGowan

it's coming home, it's coming home......bloody hungry

I had to report on plans for a new sports stadium in London last week in preparation for the Olympics. I discovered that as from February, officials have banned food in sports grounds, and they will search you to make sure you are not bringing food in. Nice to see we've got our priorities right don't you think?
"What's this, a knife? I hope you weren't planning on making sandwiches."

Every little helps....destroy the soul :-)

Usually when you see a sixty-year-old woman on all fours grunting you expect them to be looking for a panic button. Well, in Tesco on Friday evening it was in fact to be part of a bigger scene of events that would unfurl leaving me helpless to do anything else but rush home and throw plans of shepherd’s pie and garden mint peas to one side, and scrawl down these few and not every profound words.
I know I’m old fashioned, I still think that chav girls are really wearing lockets of purity, instead of clunky gold chains which double up to form weapons on happy-slapping unsuspecting victims. But, I appreciate that the half-term holiday for parents is like having liquid led slowly dripped into their stomach. During the week of snow and blizzards the schools shut, leaving kids across the country having a quarter term break whilst the whole country collapsed and we waited for Gordon Brown to phone up Spain and effectively say ‘can you pass the salt’. Really what the nation should be saying is “get back to school you little shits and stop throwing snowballs at my hanging baskets.” In this weather I trudged down to Tesco to join in panic buying, thus queuing for thirty minutes to self pack and scan, making no progress because the local Fagin is trying to put a widescreen telly through as button mushrooms.
Whilst it enrages me that people stock buy on bread milk and so on, leaving no essentials for anyone else, I don’t think it is panic buying is it? Panic buying is leaving the supermarket with thirty mars bars, three kit-kats and a pot of goose fat. Yet, interestingly we are the only nation who bond on a negative, who love to have a moan, we get pleasure from it.
“How was your day Dave?”
“Shit, how was your day Steve?”
“Shit, let’s go to the pub Dave?”
Happy.
Steve and Dave leave with endorphins slowly leaking into their blood stream as they moan about the real effects that Sharia Law would have on this Country. Standing in a supermarket queue, is where you can see first hand the irrational thinking we have become victims of. Two guys stood in front of me, discussing Miley Cyrus alleged racist pose in a photograph. What I hate is the (what I call) ‘pub philosophy’ these two men indulged in, which now we insist is polluted into our societies general reasoning for misbehaviour.
“She wasn’t racist, she was just too thick to realise that what she had said could be construed as racist.”
I don’t want to come across as overly lefty and liberal, but I find that highly dangerous thinking. If I went out into the street, grabbed someone and started to stab them, but shouted loudly, ‘you have got to let me off, I am thick as shit.' Would i get away with it?
We can complain about the culture which we live in quite easily, we can write about it in The Guardian whilst we eat our humus, we can analyse it. But can we change it?
The generation that surrounds us now fit into two clear brigades.
THE BUT
‘I’m not judging…but’ and the other category
WHAT NEXT?
‘They're expanding the congestion charge, what next a tax on sneezing?’
They’re ruining the soul of this land. And what these people claim might be true, but we are a brief sneeze in time, and we spend most of it defining ourselves by pettiness.
Snow Patrol wrote a song on their album ‘Eyes Open’ entitled ‘You could be happy’ poetically describing the wish of one person to another; ‘take a glorious bite out of the whole world’ after so many years of unhappiness, this was the author’s final wish.
It seems we do live in this ever expanding culture of depressing the good we witness with the word BUT, and make their own misery on hearing the news with WHAT NEXT?
When humour and nature collide, a natural moment of profound joy is witnessed and is the only real antidote to the gloom (self-imposed or not) we are surrounded by.
Thus I find myself back in Tesco, paying at long last for my items, when the lady before me drops her four-pint of fully pasteurised milk creating a large dairy tidal wave across the floor. This woman had queued for the same time as everybody else, she was in just as much of a rush to get home and put her twenty-three loaves of bread in the freezer, so this spillage was nothing short of a total inconvenience to her whole life, but gave the useless security guards that grace the store an opportunity to rush over with there safety cones bypassing the pensioner that has probably just cracked her third replaced hip (why don't they just fit a slinky in a pensioner?). The man who was behind me at the self-serve checkout, saw the incident, and quickly recognised the proverb; don’t cry over spilled milk. He saw the situation; he weighed it up, and realised he was about to make the funniest joke of the day. The old woman looked up, and before the excited man could erupt with pleasure at his comment, she said without any word:
“Say it, and I’ll but the empty bottle up where the sun don’t shine, and you don’t look like you would enjoy that.”
With woeful sorrow, the man left. But how priceless it was to see a man stripped of joy by a woman covered in cow juice. Marvellous.

Chris McGowan

Sleeping dogs and bears lie

http://dailybooth.com/chris21

I have joined daily booth, a website that encourages you to take a picture a day for a whole year. Basically online photo blogging. I am jumping on the proverbial bandwagon here, but I can't contain myself with just one photo a day. Oh well, it might come to pass that I get bored, but for now, snap away.



After a tiring day at the office, followed by two hours lunging and stretching at Bicester's finest gym, I just wanted to hang out with my mate and chillax.

Baaaaa humbug

I spoke to my cousin on Friday, who lives in Pontypridd South Wales. He works at the weekends in a travel agency that specialises in weekend breaks, which means he gets to travel about the country and parts of Europe. When I asked him how people respond to him, mostly because he is very young, he says the only thing that ever stays the same is someone will always make the noise of a sheep around him. The term of endearment is affectionately ‘sheep shagger’. How charming.
What is the thought process of this comedic eruption - The sheep noise? I don’t understand the thinking behind it.
Someone thinks - “I will do my best to pretend to be a sheep."
Either you are a sheep playing a very risky game...or you are an Englishman pretending to be sheep, playing I think, a much riskier game.
The mind boggles.
Good luck to him anyway, his career is soaring!

Chris McGowan

My Dirty Scented Bomb

Safety and security, has gone mad – the conclusions of an online petition of 903,000 people. I AGREE! The angriest I have been at an airport was flying to Belgium some months back. I decided I had to take my own precautions looking after my luggage and checked myself in. Well, it being a short break, I had the things one needs; including a lovely razor, Gillette Mac III – don’t laugh - it’s the best a man can get officially. Got to the bag screening and… confiscated!
“This is a potential weapon you could cut the pilots throat.”
Bullshit, this is the Gillette Mac III, it is the smoothest shave you can have. You could hardly cut your own throat with the bloody thing. The worst thing that could happen is that the Pilot could look ten years younger. Then they looked through the rest of the of the items and basically just took me to a bin and emptied my toiletries in front of me because of the crappy 100ml rule, (God, I hate Al Queda). No sharp objects or liquid allowed I'm 90% liquid, what you want me to do, board my teeth!? Yes they looked at my lemon and lime foot scrub and peppermint exfoliater as if it was the ingredients for a dirty bomb. I was going to swallow it like a drugs mule, but I guessed by the time it came out the other end, I think the lavender and musk scented candle would have lost its effect. Never mind. It was nice while it lasted.

Freaks in love

I hate the fashion at the minute. How are we supposed to dress cool? It's all skinny fit jeans, neckerchiefs, and straggly hair... I mean I don't want to look like David Essex. What do you accessorise with, a dog on a piece of string? I say this because around the bustling uptown of Oxford's chic and trendy wine bars and boutiques on Saturday, chiseled chinned guys with kasabian-esque locks, girls with perfectly loose curls and a boho kaftan shirt over tight leggings, surrounded me. I was surrounded by beautiful couples seemingly doing beautiful coupled things. This in itself is not to be criticised or mocked with a sense of hatred, or indeed fuelled by my single lifestyle, even though amongst the beautiful couple festival I was beginning to feel like I was a lost member from the Schindler's list reunion party.
It is however, fascinating to try and understand; at what point in your life do relationships become so desired, so cool and so essential in ones striving for a successful life? As these thoughts were dancing around my mind, I returned to the cafe I favour in Oxford - a place where they do a wonderful traditional pot of tea and ditch the latte with the squirt of vanilla caramel essence. As I sat pondering, and deleting everything I had written down in the last three hours, I purposely distracted myself by eavesdropping on three twenty something girls also indulging in traditional tea and biscuits on the table opposite my own work station. One was, as she described, in a 'on off relationship that was great sex' to which I cannot help but ponder if in fact she was merely having sexual relations with a with a table lamp. The other companions of this lightscrewer were a single gal and an engaged lass. Despite their varied relationship status, they couldn't help but have a degree level standard in trashing men and the problems in finding a good man!
How many people admit to being screwed up by love? How many times do we hear about the disastrous effects of being in love. If divorce rates are sky high, and bastard children are at record levels, have we simply lost what we know love definably is? Or are we redefining an out of date ideal too high and too complicated, to become more easily labeled and so more enjoyed at the cost of allowing love to be temporal? - Have we really become the Sex and the City generation?
Let's invoke Freud - he won't mind; he's a sublimated patriarchal figure I can't get over (there is a joke in that sentence). Freud might have it that I (a somewhat visceral performer at times) use psychical processes that need unconscious repair in order to reset. I like to think that after I verbally ejaculate my truisms-glazed-with-madness, I collapse and lots of little thoughts climb into my ears and reset all the motors before I'm ready to go again. Perhaps that's what dreams are; the daily MOT of the mind. What I am trying to say in this point, is that in fact our thoughts on love change almost instantly - and on closer inspection, they change the minute we fall in love ourselves. We dream of love, and we dream of finding it, but it is only on discovering our first love that the feeling itself becomes clear to us as such a vital part of our being and well-being.
Take, for instance, your good self as a child. You recoil against love when you are watching a film. When you see two people staring at each other in that specific way, or touching each others lips, the mere motion is nothing short of pathetic in your eyes and mind and the film is ruined. But suddenly it hits you and it all falls into place. You quickly understand why nearly every novel you have ever read is a love story, you become connected to all these extraordinary voices that have passed you by before it had hit you. But you also feel a curse, a welcome pain which does lead to a catastrophic (in the proper sense of the word) not necessarily disastrous but a life changing and turning moment leaving nothing the same again.
It is simple to see that such a volcano of feelings can only lead one to become more....drippy, if you will. The senses sharpen and you become sensitive and appreciative to poetry, art, nature and landscape which all connects itself to this one big feeling you have.
The very time you lay eyes on someone and that enormous spark of electricity occurs it is indescribable, what happens cannot be expressed to even a tenth a degree of what it is one is actually feeling. You are completely enthralled, and transformed. There elbow is astonishing, they way clothes hang off of them is so much classier then on anyone else. Every single part of them is made beautiful. It is still one of the great miracles of life.
We spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture that very moment when the incoherent became coherent, when:
"The fountains mingle with the river, And the rivers with the ocean;"
(Percy Bysshe Shelley - Love's Philosophy)

Perhaps then writing about love is so very pointless, for in truth it cannot be understood by those who have not fallen in it, and to those in it, it is so incomprehensibly beautiful it is not possible to describe to a level of recognition by you, the reader. Be that as it may, pointless, does not sell, so I am forced to try and make a stand-point, discuss an issue, even better - spin skeins of thought into humorous fronds and webs of introspection; take my red-brick truisms and plaster them with neurotically over-patterned wallpaper. The truth is - love does that all by itself. To me, single (not available), I resign my mind to thinking love is merely hassle and foolish, and coupled life is nothing but a time where you wait to split up and exchange half of your property and possessions for one, two or at best three years of sex. But when I fall in love.....?
On the other hand the couples, who are now filling the cafe in which I write, are beacons of triumph that love does not do what it says on the tin because it makes very little promises beyond the over whelming feeling of completeness and madness and as far as I can witness from behind my laptop - happiness. Of course sometimes it won't work out they way one had thought it all would, but that is no reason to resign oneself to eating Pot Noodle and listening to power ballads night in night out. It is simply another chapter in the journey that makes your life and mine strong enough to hold the weight of time.
We may be about to turn into the Sex and the City generation of which I wrote earlier, but I think we should and will make a u-turn back to looking for our own true and real love, then the suggestion box presented to us in five extreme women. Sure you are reading this article thinking it will help you in some way, and it will, consider this a slap in your face. It WILL HAPPEN and you will go from being swarmed by couples to double dates and synchronised texts and phone calls to your better half. DIS-GUS-TING
I read a woman’s valentines magazine the other day and saw an article entitled ‘How to know what’s going through the man in your life’s mind as he’s choosing your present”. It was a surprisingly long article, which at no point featured the words “This’ll do! A giant Toblerone, she’ll love that!”
Weird. Humans... we live, immured in the thick slimy walls of our own egoism, comfortably convinced we can perceive how we’re perceived, but of course, that’s bollocks. The rosiest tinted specs are in fact mirrored. When we colour the objects we survey, we paint in ourselves, waving.

……right, now to go and hit the couple in front of me with the crust from my pannini.

Chris McGowan

What I am needs no excuses.

John Kennedy used to often say, “Throw a lantern on your problems”. In essence it can be read as simple advice to us, to not try to solve everything on our own. Face what needs to be faced so that you might be even pushed at times to do what is necessary.

I spoke to my Auntie this week, who told me of a desperately sad and horrible tragedy with the death of the four year old - Darcy Freeman. Her father just dropped her from the West Gate Bridge into the Yarra River. How could such a thing happen in our times when we are surrounded by so many highly technological means, which in many people’s opinions make our lives so more manageable and productive. The state of mind of the father who caused this terrible tragedy is now understood to be extremely fragile and far from stable. Recently separated, he was trying to make some sense of his new situation. Surely he needed help in this area. Surely be needed professional help to cope with his new situation. I wonder whether he sought help and support, or if he was offered it by anybody?

This is not easy to do. Very often we are embarrassed to admit that we need help. We are afraid that if we admit to someone that we are in some kind of need then we appear to be weak. As a consequence we would lose the respect that others might have of us. Strangely enough, even when we are in dire straights we are too proud to admit that we cannot handle the situation by ourselves. The result is that we become more overburdened as the time goes by with many dire consequences. It is true, change is painful. It is not that easy to admit our shortcomings and we try to hide our situation with the result that one day we can easily succumb to a tragic solution because trying to hide our situation demands a lot of energy and it is very draining.

Recognising there is a problem is the first step towards rehabilitation. When we have the courage to face our problems, we are renewed with a certain creative energy. Fear, shame and guilt often make us stay in isolation. It is by showing our wounds, by allowing ourselves to be helped and supported by others; we learn that our brokenness, our wounded-ness can be transformed into one of our finer triumphs in life.

My life for quite a while had not been that edifying. I was wounded, hurt and I felt abused by people I thought cared sincerely about me. Yet, it is the English way to not let your emotions wash over other people. So I sought a solution for some happiness in ways that were not life giving. I also discovered that the colour and flavour had disappeared from my life, and quickly realised they are not merely accessories that pepper my day-to-day existence, but in fact they are necessities to which you and I should enjoy, in their richness and complexity. Eventually I opened up before it was too late, and someone encouraged, guided and accompanied me to experience the powerful process we now define in secular terms as ‘moving on.’ The hardest and most productive part of that ‘process if you will’ was realising how dangerous the vice of self-pity (to which I had become accustomed to) truly is. More then pride, supposedly the cardinal sin, self-pity is the worst possible emotion any one can have. To paraphrase Oscar Wild on hatred, and I think self-pity is a subset of hatred not the other way round;
‘It destroys everything around it except itself.’

Self-pity will destroy relationships, it will destroy anything that’s good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and it will leave only itself. It’s so simple to imagine that you are hard done by and things are unfair, and that you are under appreciated. For me it was by my thinking ‘if only I had a chance at that, things would have gone better, I would be happier’ and perhaps that may be true, but to pity oneself as I in fact did, is to do oneself an enormous disservice.

I hope that young people who are going through such personal turmoil and despair will not give up, but join me and others young and old in rediscovering the colour and flavour in life of which I write, and of which I am beginning to enjoy again.
What power! What energy! This is the basic essence of life.

Trust in someone, chose to be better NOT bitter.

Chris McGowan