Don’t look at me with that tone of voice

"Look mummy, she's having tarantula cunnilingus! Doesn't she know that spiders don't have tongues?"

I was just in Spar. A family came in, and huddled round the newspaper stand.

“She’s been in Playboy” says the precocious 14 year old daughter.
Ok, I’m dealing with Liberal parents. I leaf through Heat and try to ignore them.
The girl takes her tweeny sister over to the lad’s mags.
“Oh my god look at Nuts!” she lisps, “I can’t believe she’s on the cover!”
I start to feel a bit sick in my feminist/prudish parts, and I have to walk down to the freezer section to cool off.

"Oh God! I haven't tried this flavour. Who am I??"

While I zone out with the Viennettas, I think ‘Should they know this stuff?‘ They know more than an (admittedly late flowering) 30 year old man about the Glamour Industry. Maybe their parents are porn stars, or refuse to have a lock on their bedroom door.

I often dismiss things as ‘just wrong’ because I wouldn’t want to do it. But who the fuck am I? Some kind of taste-maker?

"Another box ticked"

Is it right to cut yourself off from certain experiences?

Is it right to say ‘I will never try this’ and have done with it?
Fair enough, you may say, if we’re talking something BIG like heroin, or murder?

But where do you draw the line? If it’s legal? If it’s moral? If it’s mentioned in the Guardian?
“OMG, if you haven’t eaten Basking Shark buttocks, you’ve never tasted food”
Part of the middle class world-view is that everything is there for the taking: foreign countries provide interesting food promotions in Waitrose, and other cultures provide amusing anecdotes at dinner parties (“We were captured and raped by the janjaweed. It’s simply divine!”). Keeping up with the Smyth-Headingley’s requires single minded dedication to seeking out new experiences. A pathological need for MORE.

“1001 movies you must see before you die” “The Bucket List” “Must Haves”:
We’re constantly being told that we’re missing out.

Fuck off and leave me alone. If I go to my deathbed without having watched Citizen Kane, have I wasted my life? If I die before I try the Backwards Cowboy position, am I losing out?
Am I fuck. I refuse to believe your hype. I refuse to bully myself into trying stuff for the sake of ticking a box. If I’m not careful, I could lose faith in my own judgement- “I like this because NME gave it 10/10”.

I would quite like to be happy more than 50% of the time, and find a way to go bald gracefully, but that’s where my ambition for the future ends.

Getting older is a shift of perspective- you go from instant gratification (now!), to a 5/10/50 Year Plan (then!) where life becomes about Big Stuff: how to get to where you’re going, and whether it’ll be worth it when you get there.

"I'm a clean living motherfucker"

Also as you get old, your face becomes weathered. Your life is written in crow’s feet and saggy jowls. Your face betrays you, the fucker.

Apparently, Esther can instantly tell when I try to suppress my emotions. Apparently I have whenever I am mad, I get an “anger chin” and whenever I’ve done something naughty I get “guilty lips”. I wonder if each of my features is associated with a feeling: a horny nose? a peevish eyebrow? a cringing cheek?

Damnit, this means that she can read me like a (picture) book.

George Michael had the same problem. Poor bloke, his transparency made him the object of ridicule at discotheques.

“Dogs are people too”

 

"Mummy, do I look pretty?"

Lisa bought matching rain coats for Devo and Goldie. One is red, the other yellow. Both have detachable hoods. Today they swapped the hoods over, and took them proudly on their walk.

Halfway down the road, they kept getting very odd looks, especially by men. They looked at each other and then down at the colour coded dogs. Suddenly they realised what they must look like to other people: two 30 something women who have dressed up their dogs to look like children. Two crazy spinsters living a fucked up fantasy world of anthropomorphic perversity.
Quickly before more people noticed, they took the coats off and hurried on their way.

The dogs got soaking wet, but at least their owners reclaimed their dignity.

"Nudes are so this season"

Money Making Scheme no. 14: I want to open a trendy clothes shop called ‘The Emperor’s New Boutique’, and all the mocha sipping, Clogg wearing, utility chic-ing, Honda driving, wallet overflowing neo-yuppies that these ridiculous hair salons and ugly clothes shops full of ugly clothes keep popping up to cater for will pile in and throw their AMEX plastic at my laughing greedy face. And I will sell them NOTHING! Hahahahahahahaha!

I am getting very pissed off with birds. Every time I walk past a tree or bush, I can hear hundreds of them whistling, tweeting and blogging all over the shop. But can I see a single feathery fucker? Can I Bo Diddley! I demand to see your cute fluffy faces now!

The worse thing is that some fuckers know when you’re looking for them- woodpeckers and treecreepers walk around the other side of the trunk when you try to catch them. How infuriating!

Everything else has been tamed and commercialised, why can’t they do that with wild birds? I want instant gratification with tits, thrushes and blackbirds. (All of which sound like euphemisms and innuendos.)

There should be a law against things looking cute if you can’t touch them. Only ugly, featherless and slimy things should be allowed to be wild.

“Naff off you ugly little fucker”

Kung Fu Fighting

Kung Fu (father of Esther, Lisa, Carmen and Bella) popped by to take the girls to visit their granny. She lives in Rotherham, a most dreadful affliction.

"'Waldo's New World Order' the radical feminist-lesbian alternative to Jim'll Fix It, never passed the pilot"

With each daughter he conceived, Kung Fu hoped the next would be a son- by the fourth girl, his ambition shifted to having a lesbian daughter. Unfortunately, he is still waiting for some closet-exiting. Had any or all of then been a boy, they would have been called Waldo.

Spare a thought for the schooldays of the phantom sons: the hope of his generation was never enough to change the basic meanness of human nature. Waldo is not a name that would ever be tolerated by school children.

Waldo is also frighteningly close to the surname of the tallest man in the world EVER: Robert Wadlow. When I started to grow past everyone else age 10, I used to obsess over his growth chart “this is something I can excel at!”. Unfortunately I stopped at his 8 year old height of 6’2.

"That's how to get girls: gravitational pull"

Kung Fu lived through the last great twin cultural traumas of free love and imminent Third World War. It was enough to drive anyone crazy (along with the dragons that he hallucinated in the fields nearby), and duly he began stock piling tinned food in the cellar of their Hebden Bridge home, along with his weapon of choice for protecting the stash; a mail order crossbow. After all he had to protect a pack of erstwhile Waldos from nuclear holocaust.

"Hippies only work as a Second Life avatar" Discuss.

His anti-Russian defence was only rumbled when Weasel broke the ‘only’ tin opener, and Kung Fu gleefully nipped to the cellar to fetch a brand spanking new one. Weasel took a look at what else he had down there, and found everything. Out went the crossbow and ‘slap’ went his cheek. At least they ate like UHT kings for a while.

Kung Fu is the biggest Captain Beefheart fan I have ever met; although in the wake of his death, everyone seems to have been into him, like, forever. Apparently Esther thought he was a genius poet, coming up with ridiculous and fantastic word combinations at mealtimes. It was only later that she realised these were all Beefheart lyrics.

I think it takes a genius to remember his songs, and also to oversee the viper-pit of free thinking daughters for so long.

As for Captain Beefheart, even Sly Stallone has come out as a fan. Such is the bonding power of peer pressure:

I Believe in the Futility of Belief

“That’s funny, I seem to have stopped getting spots on my face these days” I said to Esther on Monday. “Ah, maybe I’ve finally grown up”. I have been looking for a sign of adulthood for about 15 years. Having sex and drinking booze were non starters because they just make me act more like a child.

“Don’t jinx it!” she replies with glee.

“Balderdash and piffleschwab!” I expectorate. One of the things therapy has taught me is that you shouldn’t fear words. The worst, most depraved or disturbing thought can be safely expressed and it won’t make it happen. Life just isn’t that magical.

Now that I consider myself free from superstition, I scorn the illogical faith of others.

Today I have 3 sore bumps in the worst places possible:

1. The middle of my top lip

2. The end of my nose

3. On the very peak of my cheek

I refuse to believe that I caused these! It’s impossible. I feel like a J. K. Rowling muggle, or like my grandad, who thinks that if he ignores the internet, it will go away.

It’s time to put superstition to the test. I’m going to say something now and if it happens I will believe, I promise.

“I will get some this week”

Haha, put that in your pipe and smoke Mr Fate! It’s the least likely thing possible!

"Well now Harry, I truly believe I can keep this accent up for the whole franchise"

 

 

“BUGLY” (Boring and UGLY)

I am handing in my Lady Gaga essay. I’m on the train. Everything is going smoothly so far- I caught an 85 bus which took me right down to the station, and there was no queue so I got a ticket in time for the train…

Now I’m sat on the train. A woman has parked her buggy outside the toilet and is screaming at her kids.

“Waaah!”

“Do that again and I’ll hit you on the hand very hard!”

“Waa-” Abrupt silence.

2 minutes later.

“WAAAAAAAH!”

“I mean it! SHUT UP!!!!” her shout echoes down the carriage.

As middle-aged women turn round in motherly concern, I decide it’s time to drown her out with some Kanye.

I had a dream last night that me and Esther had a baby. More of a nightmare really. I aged a lot that night.

“Was it nice?” Esther asks when I tell her in the morning.

“It was difficult” I say diplomatically. This banshee on the train settles it. No kids till I can stand to be near them in public. No kids till I have a personality transplant.

Why would anyone choose to be tested to the brink of sanity by screaming, puking, shitting sacks of stress? In my dream, Linda sat on our baby’s head like she does to me in the morning, and we had to rush it to the hospital.

Who in their right mind would choose kids over pets? You can’t legally pet your kids. You can kid your pets though (“cheese! cheese!” Esther promises Devo when he runs away. He comes sprinting back expectantly. “Like fuck” she mutters as he is shoved back on the lead).

"Erm, excuse me, I am a mouse. I am entitled to cheese"

I look out of the train window and think ‘If someone was sat here who cared about beautiful scenery, they’d think it was awesome’ As it was, I turned away in apathy.

The boy opposite me is tapping his foot at the same time as me. What are the chances that we are listening to the same song? Would it be weird to ask him? My inappropriate interest in strangers is going to get me in trouble. Curiosity maimed the human, as the saying goes.

"Excuse me sir, where did you get your hair dreaded?"

I’ve glanced around buses before and seen 9 out of 10 people with their faces buried in the same page of the Metro. Synchronise page turning- Go.

Then again it’s usually the Guilty Pleasures double spread because that’s the most likely place to catch sight of some rude bits.

This reminds me of John Cooper Clarke

I guess that’s what the Sun, Mirror and Sunday Sport are for.