» Driven to Madness

I once got
some cheap tickets to go and see a well known London ska-pop band playing a super-secret gig.

Trouble was the venue was some pissy little pub in a godforsaken suburb where the hand of London Underground had never set foot and it would take me three buses to get there, meaning I would have had to leave for home after approximately the first song.

Worse still, this was at a point in my life a few years ago where due to certain stupidities on my part I'd lost my driving licence, and had sold my car as a consequence (to keep me out of temptation to drive anyway on 'special occasions' -- just like this one in fact).

So I called up a mate of mine who did have a car, explained the position, and asked if he wouldn't mind giving me a lift to the gig in return for the other ticket to see the Nutty Boys.

To which his response was "Fuck off, you're just trying to set up an atrocious pun for a b3ta QOTW, aren't you?"
(Sat 6th Oct 2012, 1:14, More)

» House Guests

Well, where to begin
I'm not some kind of rigid disciplinarian or anything, honest I'm not, but unlike everyone else these days (or so it seems) I have tried to raise my kids to appreciate authority and the law. And normally they're pretty well behaved.

But sooner or later everybody slips up. My darling sprogs, doubtless having seen countless US TV shows featuring 'sleepovers' and 'pyjama parties', decided they wanted to have a friend come and stay. But they thought I wouldn't like the idea, so the little rogues managed to smuggle him into the house without me knowing, and hide him.

It turned out that this bloody friend of theirs was a lot older than them, not to mention, shall we say, from a completely different background. First he crept out of hiding and stole my flipping beer. Then he stole one of my kids' toys and completely bloody wrecked it. Then it turned out he had some nasty bug and gave it straight to my younger boy, making him really ill. And then, to cap that, it turned out he was in trouble with the authorities, and I had half the local police turn up on my doorstep. I didn't know where to put my face, I can tell you.

The last straw was that when I finally got this toerag out of the house, he stole one of my sodding geraniums and made my son's bicycle fly. Now is that or is that not beyond the pale? Thank god he's not shown up again since; I've been dreading a sequel for nearly thirty years....
(Fri 7th Jan 2011, 0:59, More)

» Redundant technology


I love my motor, me, even though she's the most ancient, unfashionable, creaky old charabanc you're ever likely to see and she's had no less than ten owners before me. At least I look after her; I'm pretty sure some of those previous guys had little or no idea about maintenance! I've even heard it said that she's the last working model of her type.

She generally gets me and my friends where I want to go (not always on time, but never mind). I tend to avoid major roads, as she tends to get strange looks and I don't want to make anyone crash -- though a few years ago when I was in a rush I had to take her along the M4. Bloody hell, that was one nightmare ride!

Every now and again I've had a go at trying to make her look a bit more fashionable but it's pretty futile, really -- playing pimp-my-ride on something that old is never really going to do much good. Once or twice I've wondered whether to trade her in for something newer and more reliable, but I just couldn't; there's too much of me in her, and some would say, too much of her in me.

I just wish that bloody chamaeleon circuit would fix itself.
(Tue 9th Nov 2010, 15:34, More)

» Bullshit and Bullshitters

Awfully rude
Cue wavy lines, cue harp music -- we're going back in time, woo woo, to an era when I was only a wee junior Cabbage in final year at primary school -- so I and my friends would have been around ten years old, eleven at most.

Now this was a time before the Internet, be it noted. Not for us the joys of being able to access pinpoint quality photos and high quality streaming video of felching and grannybagging online. We were old enough to snigger like the little beasts we were at the Sex Pistols record "Frigging In The Rigging" without actually knowing quite what most of it was about, and what those attachments between the legs are for, and why boys have them and girls don't...

...All except for Norris. Norris was the biggest boy in the class and as so often happens, size of body went in inverse ratio to size of brain. Norris was a thicko. He was too thick even to realise that he could have commanded some kind of grudging respect by becoming a bully. So we were taken aback when one day he claimed "I can touch my willy and it gets hard and stuff comes out!"

Touch willy, sure, anyone can do that. Gets hard, well, hmm, yes, some of us had noticed something similar. Stuff coming out? Get away, you bullshitter!

"It's true!" "'Snot!" "Is!" "Isn't!" "All right, Norris, prove it!"

Thankfully he didn't whip his trousers down and start bashing the bishop on the spot. He offered to bring some 'stuff' into school next day to prove his tale.

Next day rolled around, and we all clustered round Norris as soon as he arrived. "Let's see it!"

Norris produced a little plastic pot and displayed it for our inspection.

"Norris... That's toothpaste."

"Isn't!" "Is!" "Isn't!" "Is!" "Look, Norris you spacker, it's still round from coming out of the nozzle! ...and it tastes of mint!"

Yes, to prove my point, I stuck my finger into Norris's "semen" and tasted it. Thankfully, I was right, and it *was* toothpaste...

So let's just sum that up: I encouraged a 10 year old boy to have a wank and collect his semen so I could taste it. I'm going to a special hell, aren't I?

Length.... nah, let's not go there.
(Mon 17th Jan 2011, 12:25, More)

» Housemates From Hell III

I had two housemates
Both lived upstairs from me.

One of them rarely emerged from his room except to answer the door to the Pizza Hut delivery man and scoot back to his room with his trophy.

He didn't even leave his room to use the bathroom -- he collected enormous empty orange squash bottles and pissed in them.

I finally managed to get him to talk to me long enough to ask why. Apparently he was scared to come out of his room because he was scared of the other upstairs housemate's (admittedly very loud and indistinguishable from roars of pain) sneezes.

He lived with me for a year and spent 364 of those days unemployed, the 365th being spent working at a Christmas pudding packing factory which he refused to return to because he claimed nobody else spoke English there.

And despite only being 21 or so he had a collection of pipes that would have put a 1970s geography teacher with leather elbow patches to shame.
(Mon 16th Mar 2015, 3:46, More)