Tag Archives: funny

Top Money Saving Tips to Survive the Recession

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Remove the engine from your car, and cut holes in the floor beneath everyone’s seats, so their feet can easily touch the road. Then simply use the ‘Flintstones’ method to pedal your way around town. The strong leg muscles you build from this method of travel will aid you in outrunning security when you’re stealing family tubs of Lurpak from Asda.

Sellotape sausages and pork chops to your arms and legs under your clothes, and run through your local park, suing the owners of any dogs that bite you.

Buy a cow. Not only will you save money on dairy products and lawnmowers, but you’ll also be able to make money by charging people to ride the cow. And I’m not talking children doing the bovine equivalent of a donkey ride, either. I’m talking perverts. Rich local perverts. Be the cow’s pimp. Dress it in leather, smear its disgusting, pat-flecked face with lipstick, and make it an OnlyFarms account under the name ‘Holed MacDonald’. Then, buy or steal a step-ladder, and wait for the mooooo-lah to roll in.

Two hollowed-out dead hedgehogs make ideal substitutes for a pair of children’s football boots.

Spray ‘PEDO OUT’ in giant letters over the front of your neighbour’s house, then enjoy the free heat from the petrol bombs.

Heat yourself without gas or electricity by using the power of anger and surprise. Pin reminders of shocking real-world events on your living room wall, and look at them whenever you’re feeling cold. For the warmest blood possible try these ones: ‘JACOB REES-MOGG HAS HAD SEX MULTIPLE TIMES’ and ‘LEMBIT OPIK ACTUALLY PUMPED ONE OF THE CHEEKY GIRLS’

Save money on food and entertainment by pretending you’re Ant and/or Dec hosting an inexplicably popular jungle-based ITV gameshow. Force your kids to eat raw daddy long-legs and house spiders straight from the webs while you film it all on your phone. If they complain, tell them they’ve lost the public vote, and make them crawl through piles of rat bones until they get some perspective.

People in England, Wales and NI: save money on medical prescriptions by simply refusing to become ill.

Skint, but your family has a hankering for fast food? Recreate the McDonalds experience by painting your hamburgers grey, smearing them with campylobacter, and serving them with the haunted look of a person contemplating self-immolation.

Want a pet but can’t afford one? Recreate the experience of having a budgie by placing an empty cage in your living room and occasionally shouting, ‘SHUT THE F*** UP!’ at it. Still not enough? Experience the thrill of keeping a fish as a pet by filling a bowl with water and then forgetting about it until the water goes stagnant, and even the microbial life inside it is dead. Then flush it down the toilet.

Take a leaf out of Halloween’s book. Dress up in a long cloak and a novelty mask each and every night, and chap doors with a basket in one hand and a knife in the other, demanding money in exchange for a joke. It’s a win/win, because If you’re arrested, at least you won’t have to worry about food and heating for a while.

Sell Monopoly money to children and idiots.

Take the financial sting out of Christmas by becoming a Jehovas Witness until February.

Can’t afford dental treatment? Simply start a new career as a Shane MacGowan tribute act.

Menstruating ladies: tackle period poverty and its associated embarrassments by foregoing sanitary products altogether and spending one week out of every month dressed in a white boiler suit whilst carrying around a brush with red paint on it. Added bonus, you might get hired to do someone’s living room.

Dress up as a bin, and squat outside of high-end bakeries and supermarkets with your mouth open.

Love watching the BBC, but BBC TV License becoming too expensive for you? Stop watching and paying, but keep the spirit of the BBC alive by walking through the streets with a microphone in your hand looking for interesting and significant events, and then ignoring them because they don’t fit the government’s narrative. Alternatively, narrate your love-making, or acts of lonely masturbation, in the voice of David Attenborough.

Father Christmas’s Covid Countdown

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Santa lumbered towards the gantry. The platform jolted and quivered as his fat frame thumped down onto it, one tree-trunk-like leg at a time. His head elf, Grogu, jumped. Not because he was scared, which he certainly was, but because of physics. The jump was entirely involuntarily. Each one of Santa’s crashing steps sent him flying into the air and back down again, the world’s most reluctant astronaut. Santa suddenly stopped. Once the aftershocks had settled Grogu bowed his tiny head, scrunched up his face, and braced himself for impact. Santa usually liked to announce his arrival with a swift, open-handed slap. This time he didn’t. He simply ignored Grogu. Either that or he’d decided to leave the violence until the end of their exchange for once. After all, versatility is the key to good management.

Santa looked down over the half-empty factory floor below, a wave of steadily mounting disgust ruffling the corners of his nicotine-tinged moustache. He gripped the railings as if they were elf necks.

“What in the name of sixteen sodomised snowmen is going on down there, Grogu?” he boomed. “There’s next to fuck-all elves on that shop floor! What am I paying them for?”

Grogu shuffled uncomfortably. “You, eh…” he mumbled, “You aren’t paying them, Mr Claus.”

“And they still get too much!”

Santa looked down at Grogu. Well, there wasn’t really any other way for Santa to look at him. A thoroughly contemptuous sneer fanned its way through Santa’s moustache. “What sort of a f***ing name is Grogu anyway?”

Grogu kept still and quiet, like you would if there was a T Rex in the vicinity.

“Well?” asked Santa. “Where are they all?”

“I think Covid is to blame, sir.”

“Covid? Is he the little one with the warty face and the funny eye? I’ll f***ing swing him by the ears into a polar bear’s arsehole, by Christ. Called a strike has he?”

“Covid is a disease, sir.”

“You’re f***ing right he is, Grogu, and my boot’s the cure.”

“No, no, no. Covid isn’t an elf. It’s an infectious virus. We’ve been issued with directives insisting that we socially distance while on the shop floor.”

Santa’s face twisted into the furious sort of shape you’d normally associate with people who’d just had an arse fart directly into their face. “WHO ISSUED THESE DIRECTIVES?” he roared.

“Em… Elf and Safety.”

Santa thumped the railing with a giant pink fist, the clang reverberating across the entire factory. It sounded like the tolling of a bell calling the elves to execution, which perhaps it was. Grogu’s heart started hammering so quickly that if you’d seen his bare chest you’d have sworn there was a woodpecker trapped inside it. The elves below all looked up in unison, the collective cricking-snap of their up-thrust necks plainly audible. Santa went a deep sheen of ruddy pink as he noticed the coverings over the elves mouths.

“IF THAT’S MRS CLAUS’S KNICKERS YOU’VE GOT STRAPPED TO YOUR F***ING FACES I’LL THUMP EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU INTO THE SNOW WITH A FROZEN DEAD WALRUS! DON’T THINK I DON’T KNOW THEY’VE BEEN GOING MISSING FROM HER DRAWER!”

“Sir, they’re masks,” said Grogu, half-apologetically, half-terrified. “To… to make it less likely the infection will spread if one of the elves contracts it.’ Grogu squinted down into the sparsely dotted collection of his fellow elves. ‘Em, except for Yulper and Chimrick in the far corner there, they actually do seem to have pairs of your wife’s skiffs stretched over their lips.’”

Santa’s face turned as red as his suit. He reached deep into a pocket of his coat, and in a finger-click of a second pulled out and threw a hard, green Christmas bauble. It zapped across the room like a comet, making an ominous thunk-clunk noise at it struck first Yulper’s skull and then Chimrick’s, ping-ponging between them and knocking them both to the floor, where they sprawled like chalk outlines.

“I WANT THEM BURNED IMMEDIATELY!”

Grogu nodded and leaned over the railing. He shouted down in his loudest voice, which admittedly wasn’t all that loud. ‘BURN THE PANTS!’

“NOT THE F***ING PANTS!’ corrected Santa. ‘THOSE TWO FILTHY, CROTCH-SNIFFING, TRIANGLE-EARED C***S WHO SWIPED MY WIFE’S LIP-LOADERS!”

A couple of burly gnomes in leather jackets jogged onto the factory floor , grabbed Yulper’s and Chimrick’s legs and dragged their unconscious bodies out of sight. The elves continued to stand there, gazing up at Santa with bulging, unblinking eyes.

“How did this happen, Grogu?”

“Well, best guess, she left some of her sexier undies drying on the radiator by an unlocked window and the temptation was just too…”

Grogu raised his head from the cold steel that was pressing against his cheek. It took him a few seconds to realise he’d just been punched half-way across the gantry.

“I MEAN THE VIRUS, YOU UNSHAKEABLE DANGLEBERRY!”

Grogu staggered to his feet like a reanimated corpse and shambled up the gantry to Santa. “Well, the scientists, em, aren’t sure, sir, but there’s a popular theory that all this started when a gnome in the South Pole ate a penguin. Or fucked it. No-one’s quite sure.”

Santa stamped a foot and sent Grogu flipping over onto his bum. “OF COURSE THEY FUCKED IT, THOSE FILTHY, FISHING-POLE MOTHER-F***ERS! THEY’D ROUST A MALE WHALE’S BLOW-HOLE IF THEY THOUGHT NO-ONE WAS LOOKING! AND I’VE GOT ABOUT FIFTY OF THE VIRUS-RIDDLED BASTARDS RIGHT HERE IN THE NORTH POLE!”

Santa again grasped the railing. He leaned over the top of it like he was going to be sick, but only angry words vomited out onto the elves below, who were all still staring up at him.

“WHAT ARE YOU ALL STILL GAWPING AT, YOU DIMINUTIVE DICKBAGS? GET SOME BLOODY WORK DONE!”

There was a momentary silence during which the elves were either too brave or too stupid to move. Santa’s eyes bored into them all with the strength of a superhero’s laser-beam. One of the elves coughed, and then one of them said:

“Fat c**t.”

You could have heard a pin drop. Santa was far too furious to react. His system was overloaded with rage to the point of impotence. His head twitched from mask to mask, mask to mask, in the vain hope of detecting some minute disturbance in the fabric suggestive of recent speech. Those jaggy-eared rats! He turned to Grogu, who’d just managed to get back on his feet, ordering him calmly:

“Grogu, I want standard issue masks issued to each of the elves on duty, with North Pole branding. Every elf must wear one, supplied by me, no exceptions, from now on, a fresh one each day. Bring a box of them to my office first though, just before my 12 o’clock shit. I’ll teach those mouthy little f***ers to gob off.”

***

Santa thundered to his office and called an urgent Zoom meeting with corporate. He sat at his desk, feet up, eating tubes of Pringles like they were Smarties, and intermittently scratching his balls. The oily, smarmy, eminently punchable head of the Head of North Pole Corporate Strategy flashed onto the large screen mounted on the office wall in-front of him. Santa reached into one of the desk drawers and fished out a bottle of whiskey; started glugging it straight.

“Claus, you old son of a gun, you!” schmoozed the Head, an obscene grin bisecting his face.

“Graham, you fucking c***!” Santa growled back, with no trace of a smile at all. “Question: I’ve only got about a third of the workforce on the shop floor because of this stupid virus thing, productivity is down 300 per cent and I’m way behind on quota. What am I supposed to do? Move Christmas to f***ing April? Cause that’s the only way I’ll be able to pull this shit off.”

“I know it’s a challenging time for you,” said Graham, and then nothing further. He just stood smiling. Santa thought for a second that the connection had frozen.

“Anything else?”

“We’re behind you one hundred per cent.”

“No help though? No ideas, no suggestions?”

The waxy-skinned corporate statue grinned at him for another few seconds more. “We’ve got one hundred per cent faith in you.”

“Graham, I’ve got to make toys for every little c*** in the world and then deliver them to every little c*** in the world. These are impossible circumstances.”

“Not the Muslim world.”

“What?”

“Well, you said the whole world. It’s not the whole world, though, is it? Barely one per cent of China, almost none of Africa. The majority of your work goes to the English-speaking ‘A’s: Australia, America and the Arseholes Who Still Think They Rule the World. Tell you what, if you think it’ll help, you can cut out Switzerland. No one really likes Switzerland anyway.”

“Oh great, so I can knock some chocolate and cuckoo clocks off the f***ing list. That still leaves countless hundreds of millions of houses!”

Graham’s smile cracked, quivered, went flat, then returned to normal. “You’re being outperformed by Amazon, do you know that? They’re making your operation look like the amateur cluster-copulation that it is. They’re doing what you do once a year, once a day, and they’re doing it perfectly. And let’s put something in perspective here. You’re living in a shack in a snowy wilderness surrounded by your wife’s underwear and dying polar bears, while Jeff Bezos is living in a billion dollar fortress on the moon. The moon! All your sponsors, Coca Cola, Mattell, every single one of them would pull out today if not for the high Santa brand recognition and the advertising revenue that comes from it, and the fact that you maximise their profits by using slave labour. Sorry… zero pay contracts.”

Santa slammed his whiskey bottle down on the desk. Not to make any dramatic point. Just because it was finished. “Exactly: we use slave labour. So we bring back those lazy ass elves from furlough and we make them all work together, harder than ever, round the clock, and who gives a f*** if they get sick. I’ll put the gnomes on a plane to the South Pole and they can bring in the New Year gang-banging penguins. Problem solved.”

Graham winced. “Ooooh, bad PR, Mr Claus, bad PR.”

Santa leaned back in his chair. “So people don’t care if the little f***ers are being worked to death, just so long as they don’t get sick from a virus while they’re doing it?”

“Absolutely,” smiled Graham. “The market research confirms it.”

Santa leaned back in his seat and smiled thinly. “Jesus Christ, and I thought I was the evil bastard. So, in summary, Graham, you’ve been absolutely and completely f*** all help.”

“Always here for you, Mr Claus.”

“Always here to do f*** all, you mean.”

“I feel this has been a most productive meeting. Oh, before I go, just one more thing: you can’t go into any houses this year.”

Santa shot upright. “Come again?”

“Covid restrictions. We can’t risk the spread of infection, especially since you’ll be flitting between hundreds of millions of homes.”

Santa laughed. “So what the f*** am I supposed to do? Drop a payload of presents from the sky like I’m a drone above Fallujah? Shout ‘HEIDS’ as I rain down animatronic puppies over Paisley?”

Graham smiled his widest smile. This was the smile finale. The big one he’d been working up to. “I trust your judgement, Mr Claus.”

And with that, he was gone, smile and all.

“We’ll see about that, you grinning plastic prick,” growled Santa mischievously.

***

Grogu was a little surprised to find himself standing in-front of a mounted camera dressed as a slutty nun, complete with crotchless panties and blood-red lipstick.

“Em, remind me how this is going to help save Christmas again, Mr Claus?”

Santa stood tweaking the camera and laughing. “Well, now that all of you workshy little twerps have got OnlyFans accounts set up, you’re going to be raking in money from all the world’s perverts, money that I’m going to use to order all the world’s presents through f***ing Amazon. Let Jeff Bezos take the strain, the swotting, bald, Bond-villain c***.”

What a fantastic idea of Santa’s. Even better that he’d stopped the gnomes from burning Yulper and Chimrick. Their OnlyFans account featured them parading around in his wife’s pants while wearing shit-covered face masks, intermittently kissing each other, and it was his biggest earner. There really was a frightful amount of perverts out there, and between them and their deep pockets they were saving Christmas for a generation of hopeful, cherubic children.

“And, em, what’s this?” asked Grogu, holding up a bendy latex implement that possessed the dimensions of a large poloni sausage.

“That’s a double-ended dildo, son.”

“And…em… what am I supposed to do with it?”

“I trust your judgement, Grogu,” said Santa, as he lumbered from the room.

“SANTA?” wailed Grogu, “WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH IT?”

“Go f*** yourself, Grogu!” he called back.

It was the best Xmas Eve ever. Santa didn’t have any presents to deliver, so he spent the evening flying through the skies, from Coatbridge to Copenhagen, Berlin to Brisbane, halting the reindeer every now and then to hover over a FedEx or DPD van and take a great big curly shit on it from the air.

At precisely 5am on Christmas morning, Santa snapped the reins and called to Rudolph: “Make haste for the moon, you red-nosed nobber. I’ve saved a bit of supper for that shiny-headed son of a bitch, Bezos, and it’ll soon be time for my six o’clock shit.”

Merry Christmas everyone!

 

Scots on a Plane: The Family Honeymoon

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Airports are dreadful places that seem to exist only to give parents new reasons to shout at their children. Queues, shops, cafes, restaurants, crammed avenues and concourses: the modern airport is everywhere you’ve ever had to lose your shit at your children, all rolled into one. If the Mind-Flayer from Stranger Things was a building, it would definitely be an airport.

I’ve got to hand it to airport authorities: they’re ingenious, dastardly bastards. They know just how to work you, leading you through and along their labyrinths like coked-up rats in a maze. As soon as you’re through the security gates you’re funnelled into a giant shop (the first of many), where cries of ‘me want, me want, me want’ fill the air – and that’s just from my wife. She loves perfume. Not necessarily buying it. Just being around it. I had to spend a solid five minutes pivoting and dashing around snatching glass vials from the hands of my fleet-footed children while she sniffed seemingly every scent ever to have existed. Can there be any new smells left? Or any celebrities who haven’t endorsed a scent? We can’t be too far away from the arrival of ‘Diffidence’, by the late Bruce Forsyth.

I don’t know if I’ve overcome my fear of flying, or if my kids’ disobedience in the airport had left me no longer caring if I lived or died. Never-the-less, I was the best I’ve ever been on a flight without the aid of alcohol, pharmaceuticals or muttered promises to a God I don’t believe in.

I had to mask my true feelings about flying for the sake of the kids, to show them there was nothing to worry about, even though there clearly fucking is when you’re careening through the sky in a highly combustible tin dildo. If worst came to worst I’d like to think I would encourage us all to link hands and exchange looks of silent, sad acceptance, like the toys sliding down towards the furnace in Toy Story 3, but in reality I’d probably be screaming a bumper dictionary’s worth of swear words and hurling my own shit in the air like a chimp.

I’m not usually a fan of take-offs, but watching my eldest son lost in hysterical delight at the sensation in his stomach as we ascended (this was his first ever flight) distracted me from my unease. It was beautiful.

We flew with Ryanair, an airline whose passenger manifest seems to consist exclusively of hen-dos, stag-dos, old lads who still dress like sexual conquistadors in their mid-20s, and leathered-and-lacquered old ladies.

One of these such ladies – a boozy, crag-faced grandma – sat in the seats in-front of us. She fancied herself as something of a banter-merchant, a belief that only strengthened the more ferociously drunk she became. With each passing minute her cackles increased exponentially, in direct proportion to my rocketing despair. The more emboldened the drink made her, the steadier the barrage of banter that came my way. Had her banter been a flower, she would have picked it up, plucked its petals off and crushed its ovary to dust, before blowing the remnants in my face. I wasn’t exactly praying for an air disaster, but I would’ve been happy if a window had blown open just long enough to suck her out into oblivion.

My sister picked us up at Alicante, and we drove the half-an-hour or so to her villa. The first thing that struck me about my surroundings, gazing out the car window at the passing landscape, was that the concept of town-and-city planning didn’t seem to exist here. All there was for miles around was flat, scorched landscape, broken by the occasional incongruous crop of scraggy, withered green. Farms, houses, strip malls and holiday complexes were peppered around the panorama in a hopscotch way, with no discernible attempt to blend or group. I guess that’s what happens when corruption is the rule rather than the exception in the planning departments of local government.

“Senor, can I build a strip-club next to your funeral home?”

“Senor, you could put your strip-club IN the funeral home if the envelope’s big enough.”

As we got closer to my sister’s villa I saw more and more developments for ex-pats and tourists; little cubes that looked like they were designed by the Flintstones, but built by the Jetsons.

My sister had a lot of beds in her house, but small ones, and spread across two floors and three rooms. My wife and I had to sleep apart every night, keeping a kid each with us, Christopher, our youngest, taking the bed on the bottom floor, and Jack taking the bed on the first floor. We switched rooms and kids throughout the holiday, depending upon varying factors such as who Jack wanted to read him a story that night, and which of us could be arsed dealing with the more screamy one.

On the night I’m about to detail – which will henceforth be known as the night of blood-curdling terror – I was lying next to a sleeping Jack when a large, red moth descended from the shadows outside the lamp-light, and almost hit me straight in the face. It struck my shoulder and thudded down onto my rucksack that was lying on the floor at the bedside. I laughed, and watched its next moves with a smile. The moth sat there for a moment or two. Then it flapped and jumped towards the bed, before finally slithering behind it. It… what?

Wait a minute, I thought.

Moths…

…Moths don’t slither.

I wasn’t smiling any more.

A cold dread seized my skull, squeezing me alert. I dropped the book and hopped to my feet, staring from the empty space where the moth-thing had landed to the tiny gap it had squeezed through. If I’d been in a horror movie, I would’ve been the person shining a torch down a dark basement corridor saying, ‘Helloooo?’ in a croaky voice.

I carried Jack downstairs to the bed where his mother and brother lay sprawled, legs akimbo, limbs askew, and slotted him in next to them like a human Tetris piece. There was plenty of room for me – provided, that is, I contorted myself like a 12-year-old Russian gymnast. I didn’t care about comfort: better crumpled and cockroach-free than lying in a spacious bed with the haunted and twitchy demeanour of a combat soldier. My wife opened one eye; an eye that said the same as her mouth:

‘You’re not coming in here.’

‘There’s a cockroach up there,’ I said.

‘I heard,’ said the eye as it closed. ‘Pathetic.’

Pathetic? I was Indiana Jones, and that little guy was my pit of snakes; I was Superman, and he was my Kryptonite. That cockroach was the one chink in the armour of an otherwise impeccably brave man… except for when it comes to, em, wasps, heights, death, rejection, my mother, em… apart from that, though, the one chink in my armour.

Anyway, it was time to be brave. I needed my glasses, my book and my drink, which were all still encased within the roach room. I crept upstairs and stood in the door-frame, willing myself to walk inside. It took me about five minutes to work up the courage, and even then I ran in and out of that room with the speed of a little boy who’s just walked in on his parents shagging. In the morning the cockroach was gone, and so was my self-respect.

On our first full day we stopped off at Merca China for beach and pool supplies. Merca China is a chain of giant warehouses filled with baubles, bangles, beads and bad customer service; the very worst you’re ever likely to experience. The staff make you feel about as welcome as a rogue turd in a swimming pool that’s already bobbed half-way down an old woman’s throat.

The lady who served me didn’t look up at me once; just stood there staring angrily at the counter-top that rested between us, chewing gum like a speed-freak. She snatched the money from my hands and chucked the change at me with the rage-filled intensity of an aggrieved wife hurling her cheating husband’s clothes from a top-floor bedroom window. What crime had I committed beyond interrupting her afternoon mastication? I was aware of the unhelpful stereotype of Asian shop-keepers shouting ‘Hurry up and Buy’ at you, but this was the first time I’d experienced ‘Hurry up and die.’ The Merca China chain is closest in spirit and target market to our own B&M, except here both the B and the M stand for ‘Fuck You’.

We also experienced an authentic Spanish market, which was like a shanty town, but with second-hand sofas and cheap churros. I know markets like this usually attract an older demographic, but I’ve never visited one where you could sign up to start paying direct debits towards the cost of your funeral. No joke.

‘When you’re down the market, could you please bring back a dressing gown, a garden gnome, twenty packets of cigarette papers, some old models of vintage cars, a pound of oranges, and the peace of mind that can only come from a secure and flexible after-life plan?’

Whenever we went to a little cafe or tourist restaurant I always popped in to the ex-pat’s shops nearby. The range of second-hand paperbacks that were on sale helped to paint a picture of the ex-pat’s sociological make-up: Catherine Cooksons and Andy McNabs, sweeping romances and tales of war, spies, and intrigue. Clearly these were older people – retirees and escapees from Blighty – with an old-fashioned, romantic and defiantly binary view of the world; the sort of folks who would’ve voted Brexit, and probably still did, despite living in fucking Europe.

As the holiday was in part a honeymoon – by virtue of its proximity to our wedding – my sister recommended an eatery that would be just the ticket: a ‘traditional’ Spanish restaurant tucked away in an obscure suburban square, thoroughly off the beaten track, complete with mandatory tapas courses, and deliciously inexpensive carafes of wine (inexpensive is my favourite flavour). She said she’d drop us off, take the kids back to the house, feed and entertain them, then come back for us in a few hours’ time. At this point my gratitude started tussling with my paranoia, imagining Highway Robbers with little tick-lists of foreign blonde children.

We very rarely take time apart from our kids. We’re a family, for better or worse, and we do everything together, particularly mass mental breakdowns, at which we excel. This, however, was our honeymoon, so we felt entitled to a few hours’ respite from being maw and paw. Each of us separately has spent time apart from the kids, but it’s a strange feeling to be together, just the two of us, without them: a heady mix of guilt and joy, a cocktail we found was best washed down with copious amounts of wine. Or cocktails. I loved every minute of our freedom, but occasionally got a passing feeling like I’d just burned down an orphanage.

It helped that the restaurant our sister had recommended for us was like something out of a European art-house movie from a different era. The little trattoria has been owned by the same family for eons, and it shows in the personalised clutter and paraphernalia hanging from the walls and around the bar. People have been coming here for years, from all around the world, again and again, and they stay in touch. Up on the wall behind the bar were postcards from as far flung places as Britain, Australia, Scandinavia, and Texas.

I came armed with enough basic Spanish to ask for the menu, the bill, and to ask where the toilet was. I used my phone to Google any other phrases I needed. I always think it shows respect and value to use the native lingo, instead of just wandering in and shouting everything slowly in English like you’re talking to a dog (“I SAID DO. YOU. HAVE. THE. CHIPS. WITH. CHEESE, PEDRO? God, why don’t these people speak the Queen’s English?). Plus, it’s always good to learn new things. The bistro had its own resident cat. Good old Google told me how to ask the waitress its name. I was expecting it to be Ramone or something.

But it was called Fluffy.

That’s the memory of the holiday that will always stick with me: tipsy in that little trattoria, stuck in time, the minutes feeling like long, happy hours, the sun beating down outside; and in the town square just beyond the door, the spiral art installation, held in place by braces attached to trees, that we walked up – giggly and giddily – to survey the unbroken, dusty landscape beyond the town.

We stood there together in silence for a few moments, side-by-side, looking out at a different dusty landscape: that of our future.

All holidays and honeymoons have to end. As do all things, good and bad.

I’ll drink a cheap carafe of wine to that.

Adios, amigos.

Read a separate article from the same holiday about our trip to the mountains, featuring excitement, despair and a stolen car HERE

Breaking Fast: Dad’s in the Stress Business

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Breakfast is the little chunk of free-time/me-time enjoyed in the gap between stirring from bed and stumbling out the door for another soul-crushing day performing menial tasks for minuscule pay that will barely cover your overheads, but make fat-cats and shareholders significantly richer. How do I like my coffee in the morning? Bitter, thanks. Very bitter.

‘Break fast’ is also a description of what happens to your sanity and self-control when you’re trying to work through the breakfast routine with your children. I’ve always been a morning person, but no longer. I’m now a mourning person – in mourning for the times when I could be a morning person without the happy whistles being ripped from my lips by two children going to war over a fucking waffle or something.

Not all breakfasts, of course. Some of them can be a blessed victory. It’s the law of averages. If you stood forty-feet away from a basketball net with your back to it and lobbed basketballs behind you like a human trebuchet, you’d get the odd three-pointer from time to time. Some mornings we bound down the stairs singing and dancing like the hosts of a 1970s variety show. We have cutesy conversations, play practical jokes and stop just short of shooting rainbows from our eyes. Most mornings, though, breakfast feels like the basketball’s rebounded off the backboard, come bouncing back towards me at great speed, and knocked me unconscious.

My two boys, 3 and 5, are a close-knit team: they cuddle; they play; they laugh; they have each other’s backs. But closeness isn’t all sunshine and lollipops. Sometimes that closeness brings out the worst in them, triggers some genetic or chemical imperative deep inside them to fight to the death over scant resources in the cramped conditions of our cave… I mean house. I swear sometimes those two boys go to bed bickering, proceed to bicker with each other inside their dreams, and then wake up to recommence bickering immediately, a seamless chain of ten-hour-long bickering that surely qualifies for inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records.

They bicker about everything: who’s first to use the toilet; who’s first to go down the stairs; who gets to be carried down the stairs, or gets to hold my hand; who gets the first cup of juice – ‘I WANT THE GREEN CUP, I SAID I WANTED THE GREEN CUP!’ ‘THEY’RE BOTH GREEN, YOU BASTARDS!’ – who gets a vitamin tablet first… everything. Bicker, bicker, bicker. I sometimes feel like calling in the UN. Or getting the Knesset and the Palestinian Authority to arbitrate.

Here’s a typical scene for you. Let me take you into the dark heart of our kitchen (by this point, the boys have already fought over who gets to squeeze the jelly-meat sachets into the cats’ bowls):

I put two plastic breakfast bowls on the counter-top. Jack walks into the kitchen first. I ask him what he wants. He asks for a type of cereal we don’t have at the moment. I tell him we don’t have it. He takes a strop. I talk him down. He relents. I ask him to choose again. He chooses another brand of breakfast cereal we don’t currently have. I imagine myself drowning in a giant vat of Rice Krispies. Finally, he chooses Cheerios, which I pour into a bowl.

Chris the Younger walks in. What’ll it be, Christopher? Cheerios, he says. Jack loses his shit. ‘I don’t want Cheerios if he’s having Cheerios. I want Chocolate Hoops instead.’

‘Me want Chocolate Hoops!’ shouts Christopher, his face contorting into a half-cry.

I imagine myself being the little boy inside the hooped cereal almost eaten by Rick Moranis in ‘Honey I Shrunk the Kids’, but this time I’m eaten. I can feel Rick Moranis crunching through my bones like candy, and it feels good.

The odds are high that one of the kids will either spill their juice, or spill their milk and cereal all over the living room table and floor. I prepare myself for the possibility, but I’m never really prepared. Whenever it happens I still contemplate trying to choke myself to death with rolls of kitchen-towels.

We watch an episode of classic Doctor Who with breakfast. We do it every morning. It’s nice. Twenty minutes of calm and curiosity, of imagination and inspired questions. Half-way through the episode they finish their food, put down their spoons and canter over to the couch, ready to fight over who gets to sit on the left-hand side of me, and who gets to sit on the right-hand side.

The TV goes off, and I ascend the stairs to complete my morning ritual of shit and shower. Again, flip a coin. Will my peaceful poo-poo be interrupted? Will these little poo-surpers of the throne oust me naked and annoyed into the hallway? Yes. It’s 50/50 to be honest. Last week we formed a vast Mexican Wave of evacuated effluent. I sat first, Jack hammered on the door, I yielded to him (you sacrifice for your children – plus, I didn’t want to have to clean up his shitted pants), then no sooner had Jack plopped the first dollop than his mini-me was throwing open the door and angrily demanding that he, quite literally, move his ass.

It’s chaos.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

(Yes I would, but I didn’t want to end this with you thinking I was a bad person)

DISCLAIMER: Some aspects of the breakfast routine may have been exaggerated for comedic effect. Real breakfasts may be 20 to 40 per cent more blissful than listed herein. Any similarity to persons living or dead is wholly intended, as I’m writing about me and my children, you arse.

Dreamtime: Night-time Convos with your Kids

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Trying to get our nursery and early-primary age kids to sleep can take its toll on our sanity. We sit there in the dark with them for what feels like days as they pick at the wall, drum on the side of the bed, flick the buttons on plug sockets, and contort themselves into shapes Russian gymnasts would baulk at – doing anything and everything, really, except closing their eyes – all the while fighting the rising tide of irritation that’s pushing us ever closer to Hulking-the-fuck-out. Inexplicably, despite our best and most desperate efforts, we’re usually the ones who end up falling asleep. The indignity of it: drummed to sleep by our own over-tired kids.

It’s not only easier just to give up and go with it: it’s better. After all, we have some of the most marvellous conversations of all with our kids inside that limbo-land between hyperactivity and unconsciousness. Daft, sweet conversations full of warmth, whimsy, lunacy and laughter: Twin Peaks meets Mr Tumble with a dash of Austin Powers – with banter that sings, zings and pops like dialogue from an Aaron Sorkin show written exclusively for kids.

On those nights you’d gladly sit in the half-dark chatting nonsense with them forever.

My kids sleep in single beds on opposite sides of their bedroom. The space between the two beds is small, but large enough to house a black leather reclining chair, upon which my wife or I will sit, depending upon whose turn it is to do the stories. Our youngest, Christopher, who’s now three, always falls asleep first. He insists on cuddling your arm, which he pulls into his bed and yanks close to his chest like a favourite teddy bear. Jack, freshly five, is a different story. He’s almost always still awake by the end of the last story, and will do everything in his power to repel sleep. The other night, after about the five millionth shush, I decided to indulge him.

‘Daddy,’ he said. ‘Did I tell you I saw Santa at school today?’

Regular readers of this blog will be well aware of my opposition to the Santa myth. They’ll also know that I was over-ruled and out-gunned on the matter, hence why Jack fully believes in Santa, knows I don’t, and feels deeply sorry for me as a consequence. Never-the-less, I decided to indulge in a dance of devilment around the periphery of his belief.

‘How many Santas have you seen this year in total, do you reckon?’ I asked him.

He pursed his lips. ‘Two.’

‘I think it’s three.’

He nodded, as if to say, ‘Yeah, what’s your fucking point?’

I pressed on, adopting the air of a smug prosecutor about to snare him in a Columbo-esque trap: ‘Was it the same Santa each time, do you think – the same guy just moving around – or were they all different Santas, like there was more than one of them?’

I could see him processing this. ‘They were… different, I think,’ he admitted.

‘A-HA!’ I said, leaping to my feet, and rhythmically slapping him about his cheeks. ‘IN YOUR FACE, YOU GULLIBLE LOSER! THAT’S IT! THAT’S BLOWN THIS CASE WIDE OPEN! HOW DO YOU FEEL NOW, YOU DUPE? YOU DORK? YOU HOPELESS MORON?’

OK, I didn’t say that. I’m not a complete monster. What I said was: ‘Is there only one Santa in the world, do you think? One real Santa?’

He squidged up his mouth in thought. ‘Yes,’ he said earnestly.

Time to wave your cigar, Columbo. ‘So if only one of the three Santas you met this year was the real Santa… then what are the other two?’

‘Robots,’ he said, without any hesitation, and with considerable authority.

So much for Columbo. All credit to him, that’s a bloody brilliant answer. It’s just a shame his quick mind and powerful imagination has to be employed in the service of a vast conspiracy perpetuated annually by millions of quasi-Stalinist Santanistas [And, yes, I am tremendous fun at parties].

‘Do you still not believe in Santa, daddy?’

He looked like a little puppy dog, and I suddenly felt like an angry miser with my foot drawn back for a kick. Now that the Santa myth was entrenched in his psyche – thanks to the endless reinforcement of it by everyone around him – his happiness was indivisible from its shape. I held his hopes and dreams in my hands. My truth – the actual, literal truth – would only make him cry now, even though he’d already heard it from me during previous discussions on the topic. The lie’s roots were now too deep to be extracted without killing the host.

‘I’m still not convinced he exists,’ I told him, softening my stance in order to preserve it, all while taking care not to break his tiny little heart. You bloody monsters. I wasn’t done with this line of reasoning yet, though. I still entertained hopes of helping him to a breakthrough; hand him the key to cast off the shackles himself.

I stroked my chin. ‘What do you think Santa does for the rest of the year when he isn’t out delivering presents?’

‘Well, he tells the elves to get things ready.’

Ah, that’s healthy, isn’t it? In Jack’s eyes Santa is some Victorian-era factory owner, cracking the whip to get those marginalised ethnics working their tiny green butts off. I shook my head. ‘But that won’t take up too much of his time.  What does he do all the rest of the time? The other eleven months of his year?’

Jack batted my question back like it was a slow-moving ping-pong ball. ‘He just sits on his bum. On a chair.’

I had to run with this. Best case scenario, I kill Santa. Worst case scenario, I coax some laughs from that little mouth of his. Hopefully both. ‘So Santa’s got magical powers. He can travel all over the world in one night, delivering hundreds of millions of presents, but he doesn’t use that power the rest of the year? Like, to stop robberies? Or to help put out fires? “SANTA, HELP ME, I’M BURNING!” “Sorry, son, I’m too busy just sitting in my chair.”’

Jack laughed. ‘No. He just sits there.’

‘That lazy fat git.’

Jack laughed again.

‘”SANTA, HELP ME, MY SHOP IS BEING ROBBED!” “Bugger off, it’s June! Can’t you see I’m sitting in my chair, for Christ sake?’”

I left Jack with the imprint of a kiss on his forehead, and a room ricocheting with giggles. Success. Just as long as he stayed asleep now.

There are limits to this whimsy lark.

A little while later I was in my own bed watching TV. This is still something of a novelty, as we only became a two-TV household relatively recently. Jack appeared at the doorway revealing first a foot, then a shoulder, and finishing off with the big reveal of his bed-mussed head.

‘Daddy,’ he said, his face downcast. ‘I keep trying to get to sleep, but I keep thinking of zombies, and I don’t want to go to sleep because then I’ll dream of zombies.’

I paused the TV. I was watching Vikings. Probably best not to add rape and decapitation to his list of nightmares. He watched me for a moment or two, wondering if I was going to order him back to his bed or make room next to me. I smiled.

At times like this I always think about the episode of Cracker where Fitz delivers his mother’s eulogy. He tearfully recounts how as children he and his brother crept up to their living room to watch a boxing match on TV through a crack in the door. Long past their bedtime, Fitz somehow just knew if he pushed open the door his mother would let them both into the warmth of the room to watch the match with them. Fitz’s brother later tells him that he had no interest in the boxing match. He’d only wanted to watch his mum and dad.

‘Come here,’ I said to Jack. All thoughts of zombies must have staggered from his thoughts, else they were never there to begin with, because he bounded over to my side of the bed with a massive grin on his face. I budged over and let him snuggle in.

‘Zombies, huh?’ I said.

‘Every time I try to think of something nice, it turns into a zombie.’

I considered it for a moment. ‘Well have you tried thinking of something that’s a zombie first and then turning it into something nice?’

He looked up at the ceiling and a little smile appeared on his face.

‘It’s your brain. You tell it what to think, not the other way around.’

He seemed happy with this.

‘Hey,’ I said, tousling his head. ‘Do you think there’s a little zombie boy out there somewhere creeping into his dad’s bed because he woke up having a nightmare about a normal little boy?’

I could feel Jack’s grin creeping against my bicep. He fell asleep soon after, just as his little brother burst into the room, eyes aflame, hair a mess. He fell asleep on the other bicep.

I didn’t press play on the TV for a long time afterward. I had no need of it. All I wanted to do was watch my two boys. While I still could.

Time is precious.

Santa’s Journal (Entry 8) – May 24 2013

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I spent the morning trying to get through to Coca Cola. Kept getting their switchboard.

‘This is Frank McGarry calling,’ I said in my sternest, boomiest voice. ‘I need to speak with management.’

I always use my real name when I’m angry with them. They know I mean business when I cast off my Santa branding and let my Glasgow show. It didn’t work though. The receptionist told me that the big boss was in meetings all day. I asked for the man under him. Surprise: he’s in meetings too. And the man under him. I think I went through the entire list of staff, top to bottom, trying to find someone to take my call. It turns out that even the guy in the fucking mail room is in meetings today.

Next I called the management at Dwerg Neuken. They’d speak to me, alright, but I’d’ve been better talking to a brick wall. Christ, I’d’ve been better talking to Margaret. I got through to their CEO, some whiny-voiced arsehole by the name of Jorg Griswald, and told him in no uncertain terms that what he was doing to the elves was immoral and deplorable. That the elves were a loyal, decent and hardworking lot who didn’t deserve to have their meagre pay slashed even more. And, besides, if anybody is going to make their lives an unending misery, it should be me!

‘I am full of large apologies today, Mr madam,’ he said, his reedy Norwegian accent going up and down like an asthmatic mouse on a pogo-stick, ‘but what does our business with the little people of the snow have to do to you?’

‘What does it have to do with me?? I’m Santa Claus, motherfucker!!!’

From what I was able to piece together from his terrible command of English, Jorg will answer only to his masters at Coca Cola. I was a mere puppet, a mascot, a breathing piece of branding, scarcely a human being. His exact words were: ‘Sooner I would be taking orders from Mickey Mouse, yes?’

Which is why I’m posting him a big bag of reindeer shite. First class.

 

Santa’s Journal (Entry 4) – May 14 2013

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Last night’s party for Gundal was so good I woke up in Greenland. The flight home was a bit shaky, because the reindeers were still a bit pissed, too. Six of them vomited into the Arctic Ocean, and I caught a bit of splash-back. I’m sure we’ve left a few elves behind. I might send one of the more responsible elves back with Rudolph later in the day to do a reconnoitre/search-and-rescue thingy.

Margaret was pretty furious with me. Worried sick, she was. She left the community centre quite early in the evening complaining of a headache, and I said I wouldn’t be too far behind her. By this point, however, I was dressed as a polar bear and roaring at elves, so maybe she shouldn’t have put so much stock in my promise. I guess I’m just trying to rationalise in light of my shenanigans. Margaret said to me this afternoon that I should start acting my age and have a bit more respect for myself. Especially since all of the elves look up to me. By the time she uttered that line I was too hungover even to do the obvious and cruel elf-related height joke. So I vomited into a bucket instead.

‘You should be top of your own naughty list, Frank McGarry!’ she told me.

That’s my real name: Frank. I’m not supposed to reveal that information for fear of contractual reprisals. ‘Brand continuity’ and ‘image integrity’ are the relevant buzz-words here, I believe. But I come from a long line of Santa Claus’s. We’re not immortal; just ordinary Joes living in extra-ordinary circumstances, working for a bunch of extra-ordinary arseholes. There are rites of succession, sort of like what they do with Popes. We die, and another Santa takes our place, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.

No more journal today, though. My skull feels like it’s filled with explosive eels. And I’ve got a dear wife to crawl to, and sick to scrub.

I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For…

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My behind-the-scenes webhost program tells me which browser search terms have led people directly or indirectly to Jamie Andrew With Hands. Granted, for some of the entries my website will have been on page 633 of 120,000 of the search engine’s results, but never-the-less: here are some of the more amusing search terms. Type these in and sooner or later you’ll find this site, although you’ve got to wonder what some of these people were actually looking for in the first place. I’ve sorted the searches under appropriate headings.

Cunt 

what a cunt: Hardly surprising that this search should lead to me.

sheep shagging cunt: My grandfather may have been from Aberdeen, but I find this insulting.

cunt beauty contest: It may relate to the piece on this site about the ‘Miss Falkirk 2012’ competition, but I’m holding out hope that there exists somewhere in the world a vaginal beauty pageant. Miss Piss Flaps or something. ‘And now that the swimwear section is over, we move on to the talent contest. Bring on the ping pong balls, the American football and the cans of Irn Bru.’

why are bus passengers all cunts: Probably keyed in by a pre-postal bus driver, seconds before he recreated the movie Speed on the First 60 service to Alloa.

photos being taken of cunts: This is either the Scottish vernacular for ‘photos being taken of people’ – and why would you search for something so banal? – or the user was searching for photos of photos being taken of female genitals. Indescribably weird.

fat mexican cunt: The nationality is unambiguous – the person being searched for MUST be Mexican – but must the owner be fat or the cunt itself? I guess we’ll never know. And for that we should be thankful.

see our cunts all lined up: But why?

cunts lined up for fucking: Ah, I see. Guiness World Record attempt?

hairy man cunts: Oh dear. Is this what the future holds for the Ladyboys of Bangkok once they get a bit older? ‘Ladies and gents, please welcome to the stage the Hairy Man Cunts of Motherwell!’

very nice cunts very nice cunts: So good they searched for it twice. If they were so concerned about cunt quality, perhaps they should have searched for ‘exceedingly good cunts.’

turkish people are cunts: Ah, must be a bit of Googling from the German minister for Immigration.

Which brings us to the next category of searches:

Foreigners

on holiday in marmaris the turks shagged her later she told her hubby: Oh, you romantic fool, searching for such a tear-jerker! Could you not spell Romeo and Juliet? Or maybe the searcher was a horny cuckold reliving the story of his wife’s infidelity, a tub of wallpaper paste and an empty toilet roll tube at his side.

scottish fat fucked in marmaris: Dunfermline man leaves tub of dripping in his hotel room; Turkish cleaner fucks it. That’s my guess, anyway.

do turkish men pay for blonde girls: No, you racist. Just because blonde women don’t want to sleep with you for free on holiday doesn’t mean that the Turks you see with little British floozies draped over them have paid for it. For greater success, my friend, try the Turkish technique out for yourself. You’ll only need two things: lies and alcohol.

cockmail persian: Sounds like some dodgy Iranian cartoon character to me.

greenland piss: Is this some sort of delicacy? I’ve heard it goes really well with…

reindeer shit: …yeah, that’s right. Think I saw it on Gordon Ramsay. Greenland piss and reindeer shit. Or is it Icelandic goat spunk with reindeer shit? I can never remember.

greenland wanking: Well, what the fuck else is there to do in Greenland, except gut seals and go sledging? For added fun why not add a splash of wanking? Little tip, though. Don’t leave your willy unsheathed for too long in those sub-zero temperatures or your little tip will break off in your hand like a false nail.

And with that we segue into the next category of searches:

Famous Folk

richard and judy wank: Is this a declaration (if so I don’t want to see the evidence), or a wish to see it happen? Merciful Jesus. Or maybe ‘The Richard and Judy wank’ is a new sexual sensation, similar to ‘You Say, We Pay.’ I’ve got it! A guy’s girlfriend/wife turns her back as he goes through her female contacts on Facebook, describing them to her as he beats off. If she gets twenty of them right, her prize is his promise not to be looking at her sister’s tits at the point of ejaculation. We’ll call it ‘You Guess, I’ll Mess.’

has louis walsh ever gotten a blowjob: Why would Louis Walsh disseminate this information? And why would anyone want to know this? Unless they wanted to be his first…

eagles cheerleader jamie fingering herself: I typed this one in, as it sounded… interesting? Incredibly disappointing. I ended up watching Thora Hird fingering herself instead. Save.

And now a less fluid segue…

Shagging and that

quad amputee model fucking: And you thought my comedy set was amoral.

postman fucking village housewife: As long as his black and white cat wasn’t involved.

fucked by a snake: Mounty Python? I don’t know why anyone would want to watch that. Just watch normal shagging, you degenerate. Willies are a bit like snakes anyway, aren’t they? Well, mine is. Foul and leathery.

dog fuck: Oh dear. Jamie Andrew With Hands would never condone that… unless you mean:

dundee sluts shagging: (see above)

ya.fucking.fat.orange.shag.bag.road.airdrie.scotland: The internet is so inclusive even the mentally ill can enjoy it. Well seeing they’re from Airdrie, though.

www pussy s in hands.com: I just checked. This website doesn’t exist! Which is a shame because I thought this was my chance finally to see Jamie the Eagles’ cheerleader fingering herself. Fuck it. I’ll just watch Thora Hird again… Get those thick grey tights off you, you old beauty!

jackface sexe: I looked into what Jackface was. A lot of intriguing answers. The last one made me laugh. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=jackface No mention of it being a masturbatory cum face, though. Would have placed that at number one.

buckie women raped: Some sick puppies out there. Inaccurate anyway. I’ve seen women who drink Buckie. You don’t rape them. THEY rape YOU.

posh pussy: The singer or the class? The cunt or that cat? Questions, questions.

prostitutes in grangemouth: The standard is low, but there aren’t many towns out there where you can get a syphilis-themed blowjob for the price of a bottle of Buckfast.

she was rubbing my cock: A search engine is a strange place to boast this. Perhaps he thinks the computer is his pal, like HAL 9000, and he’s just keeping him in the loop.

what is a twat wand: I’ll get back to you on that one. Sounds like a Harry Potter-themed dildo to me, though. I typed this into google and found a porn-site with a video called NAUGHTY MILF JAMS MAGIC WAND DOWN MOUTH AND TWAT. I thought, ‘Hmmm, intriguing. I haven’t encountered this niche depravity before. Women sticking magic wands inside themselves.’ But it wasn’t a wand. It was a fat old man’s cock. Which wasn’t very magical to be honest. There’s another video advertised on the same page of the site, which is called DIRTY GIRL BOINKS HUNG STIFFY. Who named this porn video? A 12-year-old boy who’d just watched an episode of Scooby Doo?

And now to our final category

Grannies and Trannies

pictures of single grannies in grangemouth: It’s not as off-putting as it first sounds. Most grannies in Grangemouth are 23 anyway.

porn granny jk: Jakey? JK (as in Rowling)?

grannie fucking: Oh my.

granny sex queen: I googled it. No crowned geriatrics, although there was a link to MY MATURE GRANNY: FACIALS. Feel free to have a butcher’s, my filthy little readers, but I’m giving that click a miss. Unless one of you gets in touch to say it was Thora Hird again, in which case it’s showtime.

granny stiflin vagin: I’m lost for words.

tranny with the last name andrew: OI!

Jesus Christ!

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I never doctored these, or came up with the idea, but I just had to share them. Very funny. The theme is ‘Jesus is a Jerk’, and I suspect the images are from Christian materials that have been subverted/raped by cheeky wee scamps the world over.

 

Movie Reboots – COME SHINE WITH ME

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Jack tries to keep cool after his croquettes burn in the oven.

Dinner parties can be stressful at the best of times, but this Film Four production takes social awkwardness to a chilling new level. Reuniting the original cast of The Shining, Come Shine With Me sees writer Jack Torrance returning to the Overlook Hotel to cook for Danny, Wendy, Scatman Crothers, and his mental son’s imaginary friend Tony – all for a crack at the £1000 prize money. It’s not as easy as it sounds, though. Tony used to haunt the finger of a famous French food critic, and so Danny’s index digit is always on the waggle: ‘This food makes me glad I’m only a finger with no mouth, Mr Torrance.’

Add to that the constant pressure on Jack to chop up his family into so much spotted dick, and you know there’s going to be a lot more tension in store before you hear the words: ‘Heeeeerrreeeee’s dessert!’

Dave Lamb’s acerbic commentary is a delight. ‘Good luck slicing the garlic with that axe, Jack. I think there’s a sledgehammer around here somewhere if you can find yourself a walnut.’

Look out for more of your favourite catchphrases in the movie, like: ‘All wok and no sautee make Jack a full boy,’ and ‘Watch out for that fucking axe, Scatman!’ We particularly liked the ending, which sees Jack freezing to death as he tries to retrieve his black forest gateaux from the hedge maze.

IF YOU LIKE THIS, YOU’LL LOVE: Stephen King’s ShIT. One of the writer’s turds is buried in ‘Pat’ Cemetary. It returns to possess a teenage girl, from Maine obviously, who takes a misanthropic writer hostage and breaks his legs with a mallet. Also look out for: Tommy’s Knockers.  

 

Movie Reboots – JOHN CANDYMAN

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"Heeeeeeeeeeeeereeeeee's John Candy!!"

Say his name five times into the mirror, and you summon the angry ghost of John Candyman. Does he flay you with his hook? Disembowel you? Lop your head off? Worse. He casts you in a Steve Martin film.

John Candy had several reservations about appearing in this film – top of the list being that he’s dead. However, Hollywood trade magazine Variety reported that a seven figure sum soon convinced Candy to come back to life. Actors’ unions are now up in arms over what they perceive as a grave case of ‘positive discrimination’.

‘Already we have Rex Harrison resurrecting himself to star alongside a recently re-animated Dudley Moore in Under Siege 26,’ said an angry Jamieson Girthrocket, of Roles Taken From the Living (ROTFL), ‘What next? Die Hard 12 with Clark Gable?’

In the original Candyman, the eponymous villain opened his jacket to reveal a stomach crawling with bees, an echo of his brutal death. In the new film, John Candyman will unbutton his shirt to reveal a fully-grown bull charging from his colon, as a consequence of dying during a violent steak-eating contest against Dan Akroyd.

IF YOU LIKE THIS, YOU’LL LOVE: The House on Notting Hill. Foppish Hugh Grant throws a posh dinner party to impress Julia Roberts. His soul quickly gets torn in half by an angry army of ghosts, who are sick fed-up of his humming, hawing, ooo-ing, ah-ing, and fringe-tossing. ‘If you’re not going to shag her,’ say the ghosts, ‘you might as well die.’ Die Hard 12 with Clark Gable starts shooting next April.

 

In the End, There Was the Beginning

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Films are like fashion. Remember that film with the terrible special effects you laughed at in the 70s? Remember that film you loved so dearly you watched it fifty times a day and only communicated with other human beings through chunks of its dialogue? Well, they’re coming back… sort of.

Now that the cinema world has come of age, its going full circle. Over the last few years we’ve witnessed countless reboots, reimaginings, remakes and far-apart sequels; some of them good, some of them great, and many of them grating.

Star Trek, Batman, Terminator, Psycho, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Indiana Jones, Lost in Space, Alfie, the Italian Job: just a small sample of films and sagas that have had the treatment, with many more to follow.

I’m going to be posting tasters of the celluloid remodellings and regurgitations we’ve got to look forward to from the maestros of horror and science-fiction in 2012.