» Cringe!

Dum, dum, dum, dumadumadum
September 1986, I’m a long way from home, working in Larrrrrrrndon, staying in the company’s halls of residence during the week. I’ve been staying here for months and haven’t really made an effort to get to know any of the other employees also resident. They spend time in the bar or are out enjoying the fleshpotty delights of the crapital, I spend quite a lot of time camped out in the teevee lounge.

It’s Eastenders, Lofty and Michelle are about to get wed and the teevee room is packed to the rafters. I have a seat, others are sitting on the floor, standing along the walls, hanging from light fittings, the works. Older folk could remember the moon landing, the next generation would get the twin towers to gape at but for us, this is the television event of the decade.

Soilers follow:

Michelle jilts Lofty.

End of spoilers.

Lofty goes back to his flat to have a bit of a cry, slumped against his door he draws breath prior to some manly sobbing. The screen is silent. The room is silent.

Except for one bloke at the back who, timing his line to perfection, shouts ‘never mind Lofty mate, have a wank!’.

Events followed thus: hundreds of traumatised ‘stenders fans all draw breath at the same time to laugh and, in just that moment, there is a sound like a thunderclap in a tin shed as my bottom laughs just a half second ahead of everyone in the room guffawing.

Everyone is howling with released tension, laughing at the joke and laughing at Fart Lad.

The room was packed, I couldn’t even exit gracefully, just had to sit there with a face so red I suspected somebody might try and post letters in my mouth. Programme finished. My shame took far longer than that to leave me. Strangely, I did not get laid that night.

Months later somebody asked if I was ‘the bloke who had farted during Eastenders?’.

Twenty two years later I can laugh about it, but only after clenching first.
(Fri 28th Nov 2008, 13:36, More)

» Sleepwalking

Writing your name in the snow
The number of stories about peeing in wardrobes being related here is startling. It’s a bloody epidemic. Indeed it seems to be so common an occurrence that I’m amazed Mr Tumnus was not described on his first appearance as ‘dripping wet and reeking of piss’.

If anyone from Ikea reads the messageboards then I imagine in a few months time their range of bedroom furniture will include the ‘Piskabinet’, a wardrobe with a pressure sensor on the floor that, on sensing the presence of an unconscious inebriated loon stepping onto it, opens a compartment containing a galvanised bucket with an inch of bleach in the bottom.

It’s bad enough when you pee in your own wardrobe but a lot of the stories seem to be about peeing in the wardrobes of others. Actually, given a choice this seems to be a sensible option but it does mean that there may also be a market for the Piskabinetdelux which, on sensing moisture on the floor of the wardrobe, opens the trapdoor to the crocodile pit. The only problem with this approach is the health and safety loops through which you have to jump to get planning permission for a crocodile pit these days.

A friend of mine has actually peed in a wardrobe. In his defence he was drunk and asleep at the time (can you be drunk and asleep?). He was in his very-soon-to-be-ex girlfriend’s bedroom. Actually I think the episode may have started the countdown clock on her ex status. Maybe he was trying to engineer a break-up and this was a cry for help - although I would have thought that the actual cry for help was made when he came to standing upright in a wooden box in the pitch darkness up to his ankles in urine.

God knows it could be worse, you could wake up in a wardrobe your unconscious mind thought was a cubical, in a crouching position, reaching for the loo roll and wondering where the hell that vile smell is coming from.
(Fri 24th Aug 2007, 14:17, More)

» Presents

Bespoke Monopoly
A few years ago, the people who make Monopoly came up with the genius idea of local editions. You could go round your home town buying up the cathedral, the local footie stadium and so on. It was also, of course, tremendous fun to see if your street was of a high, or low, value – congratulations! you live in a shit part of town and now everybody knows it.

Recently, I found out that you can even have a truly bespoke edition:

www.mymonopoly.com/home.php

And became a bit obsessed about it (essentially you design your own monopoly board and can customise certain squares. Two things though, first, they don’t allow naughty words and second, it’s eighty fucking quid!)

Surely this is a fantastic idea for a couple of reasons. The first is that you can have a really, really, really local version. Live in a tiny village? A hamlet so small it actually has a horse sharing arrangement with a nearby town? The sort of place that has submitted a claim for an EU grant to afford an idiot? The sort of place that only famous folk singers and homicidal maniacs ever come from? Well, why not have a village edition, with local landmarks like the war memorial, church and bus shelter. In fact since they closed down the post office, that’s it for local landmarks, so you are going to have to get creative; ‘that spot where Darren shagged our Sally’, ‘Where Jon was sick after he drank all that scrumpy’, ‘Where we burned that tramp’, ‘The pond’, ‘Roadkill’ and so on.

But why are we restrained by geography? Monopoly comes out at family gatherings when the usual arguments have been exhausted and everyone needs some fresh material to bicker about. So how about some properties that have a special place in family history, ‘where Cousin Sadie had her first wedding’, ‘where cousin Sadie had her second wedding’, and have the second location cheaper than the first? Or the classic: ‘The house Tom’s bitch wife got in the divorce’?

Or moments or occasions? Like your twelfth birthday party could be a low value square because you peed yourself with excitement in front of everyone when you opened your present and it was He Man. (Oh, the humiliation!)

Other low value squares: the time your cousin tried to ‘touch’ you, the time your cousin went to prison because you made up that story about him ‘touching’ you, the time you held a funeral for your pet dog (that wasn’t actually dead, you were just going through a morbid phase). High value squares could be ‘My first drink’, ‘passing my driving test’ or the ever popular ‘out and proud’ (adjacent to ‘dad makes full recovery from heart attack’).

Better still: family secrets edition! But is ‘Tina’s little problem’ a high or low value square? And will ‘That time Auntie Vic came home early and found Uncle Tony sucking the milkman’s cock’ fit on one square.

Of course, the real benefit would be to use people, not places or occasions. Fed up with having to put up for years with Granma’s sadistic game of arranging family photographs on her sideboard in order of current preference, and always being banished to the Siberia that is propped up against the lamp? Then imagine her delight at finding that you have designated ‘Granny Gin Breath’ as the lowest value square on the board.

I predict a fist fight before anyone passes ‘Go!’
(Fri 27th Nov 2009, 16:16, More)

» Family Holidays

Caravan Tales Part II
The Lake District 1979. My older brother tolerates my staying up late with him to watch, on the B&W telly, the B&W movie ‘Night of the Demon’. This is still just about my favourite horror film, mainly because you don’t actually see much of the demon, it’s all suspense and suggestion. My younger self though, was terrified, especially at the thought of something lurking…between the caravan and the toilet block. That’s right, no loo in the caravan.

I was too scared to own up to needing to visit the toilet block. Even when promised use of a torch. Frankly, you could have put a fucking tommy gun in my hand and not got me out there. God knows it wasn’t anything as mundane as peados and wierdos I was worried about (the kids back then on the caravan park were gargoyles, all scabs and snot – you’d have to be a sicko indeed to go after one), it was a sixty foot fucking fire demon. But my bladder kept me awake, giving me more time to get wound up, until I hit on a cunning solution.

What I learned was this – peeing into a plastic basin in the dead of night in a tiny bedroom in a silent caravan sounds like a fucking roll on a snare drum at the Last Night of the Proms. It almost drowned the noise of my brother laughing in the next room.
(Tue 7th Aug 2007, 20:58, More)

» Council Cunts

Organised stupidity
A friend of mine has a house with a garden behind it. At the bottom of his garden are not faries, but a fence. Beyond this is a kind of lush green no-mans land of overgrown thicket, bramble, fox-shit and numberless footballs, tennis balls, frisbees and shuttlecocks that his kids have kicked, thrown and generally twatted over his fence. Then there’s another fence and then an alleyway before more houses, streets and so on. So, houses, gardens, ribbon of fence, ribbon of green inhabited by overgrown undergrowth, abandoned athletic equipment and probably the occasional cat corpse, next ribbon of fence, alleyway.

The fence between the green space and the alley is useful. It provides much-needed security, basically it’s an anti-scally measure and means that the sort of people who use alleys have to scale it if they want to gain access to the Lost World, allowing them the opportunity to sidle up to my mate’s garden fence and, oh, I don’t know, touch themselves while watching him barbeque, or poke their winkies through a knot-hole and pee on his hardy perennials.

So my mate was quite surprised to see council workmen removing this perfectly good fence. So much so he asked them what the fucking fuck they fucking thought they were fucking doing.

The workmen did not a) speak Tourettes or b) know, so my mate was directed to the council offices. There, some poor drone really earned their council-tax funded wage, as he wrung out of them that it was being removed to ‘increase security’.

This did not go down well. But he was powerless to reverse the decision, trapped in a web of fuck-wittery like a foul-mouthed Kafka character.

The punchline comes a month later when, it being council election time, a fuckwit councillor rings his doorbell and asks if she can rely on his vote. Apparently he made Paxman look like Parkie as he grilled her on the doorstep about the fence and enquired if the missing panels had been put to use anywhere else, like her back garden?

‘Of course not!’ Came the reply,
‘Pity, there was graffiti on one that said ‘cunt’. Good day.’
SLAM
‘And I’m voting bloody green!’
(Tue 31st Jul 2007, 10:45, More)