Christmas: A One-Star Review

If the Christmas season was an Amazon product I’d give it four stars. Not because it’s all that good, but because I’m nice, you see. I wouldn’t want to hurt Christmas’s feelings.

If the Christmas season was a place of interest, or a restaurant or something, I’d give it four stars on Trip Advisor, and I’d probably write something like, ‘Loved the bit where the little people opened the presents and smiled, and couldn’t fault the bit where everybody ate the bitter-tasting green Maltesers and the dead bird with Bovril poured all over it, but if I’ve any mild criticism to offer – and it seems churlish even to mention it – and, really, it’s very, very mild criticism indeed – mild as an Amish curry – it’s that for well over ninety per cent of that small handful of festive weeks I felt like I wanted to raid a private scorpion breeder’s aquarium and stab myself to death with their collection, and then run over a cliff onto a field of landmines screaming, ‘Why? WHY won’t you JUST let me DIE, God?’

‘Apart from that though… excellent.’

The kids were fuelled by a cocktail of excitement and chocolate, making them psychotic whirling scarecrows of tears, screams and laughter, their behaviour made all the worse by them being unbound from routine and purpose. We tried to take them out and about, and occupy their time as much as possible, but bad weather, worse finances and a dearth of places to go in the middle of a winter holiday didn’t make that easy. If they weren’t fighting over each other’s new toys, they were fighting over each other’s old toys; sometimes they just fought because of muscle memory. Separately they were fine, angelic even, and together they could be wurlitzers of warmth and unity, but most of the time they squabbled like pigeons on meth, pecking at each other over the smallest of injustices and infractions. ‘I WANTED THE BLUE SPOON!’ ‘THAT’S MY ONE!’ ‘BUT I ALWAYS HAVE THE BLUE ONE!’ ‘IT’S MINE!’ ‘YOU’RE NAUGHTY!’ ‘I’M NOT NAUGHTY, YOU’RE NAUGHTY!’

Standing there amid the screams and recriminations, I could feel my blood pressure rising like a thermometer inside the sun’s arse. Even on otherwise tranquil trips away, the ghost of Stressmas was never too far from my heart. I took our eldest, 5, to the local country park so we could don our wellies on, trudge through the mud and shout borderline abuse at farm animals, but on the road there some geriatric jerk-off in a gleaming BMW decided to dangerously tailgate me in the rain and wet on a dangerous stretch of road, with my little boy buckled helplessly into the site of impact like a tiny Crash Test Dummy.

In my usual calm manner, I gesticulated wildly and hammered the horn, calling him a murderer and a few other choice names besides, before totally losing it and punching the rear-view mirror off its perch and down onto the floor. The old man gunned his engine and revved past me at high speed, staring straight ahead to avoid my furious glare, which begs the question: why was he tailgating me in the first place? Anyway, I wasn’t proud of my little outburst, and I apologised to the boy for losing my temper, telling him that big people made mistakes sometimes, too. I asked if we could keep this little outburst between the two of us so I’d have time to replace the cracked glass in the mirror, so naturally he grassed me up to his mum the next time he had a chance. I guess I’m proud. I’ve taught him well by instruction, if not always by example.

The festive season had genuine highlights, of course, with Christmas Day being the obvious top dog. What’s not to love? Looks of surprise, delight and gratitude on our children’s faces; getting to spend the day with close family; eating well,  laughing, being merry and beating those sons of bitches at every parlour game, board game and quiz game brought to the table. Budge over, Jesus. There’s a new God in town.

So there’s no point writing about how lovely the loveliest bits were, because I want to make you laugh and/or nod in shamed recognition, not start cooing and ooing and aahing.

My second favourite part of the season was our eldest kid’s nativity play, which I enjoyed enormously, mostly because our lad was the star of the segment. He played the grumpy, boom-voiced inn keeper around whom the well-worn story of baby Jesus revolved. Although he was natural and confident in his poise and delivery, I can’t deny it hurt my feelings a little that he disobeyed my instruction to holler out ‘ALL HAIL LORD SATAN’ at the end of the big musical number. I’ll remember that, you little (Peter O’) tool!

The nativity was merely the opening act of a two-hour long extravaganza. We watched each of the remaining six classes perform their medleys of music and madness. I took particular delight in spotting those kids who were hating every agonising second of the experience; the ones who’d rather be out in the playground being smashed in the face with a lead pipe than standing on stage in full view of their community wearing a silly hat and dancing awkwardly to an old Boyzone song from 1992. Around 95 per cent of these squirming, dead-eyed children were boys. It may surprise you, but the overwhelmingly hyper-masculine, working class culture of this part of Central Scotland doesn’t always lend itself well to theatrical exuberance.

My kid’s performance aside, the best –the absolute best – bit of the show was definitely when they brought out the cardboard Twin Towers. OH NO THEY DIDN’T! Oh YES they did. Each class’s segment was built around the theme of a particular decade in the school’s history. Primary 2 had the 2000s, which covered 9/11, an atrocity that not for one second I thought they’d cover. When the curtains opened, I even whispered jokingly in my wife’s ear, ‘2000s? What are they going to do here: recreate 9/11?’ Then out came those two big pieces of cardboard with lots of little windows drawn on them in black marker, and down fell my jaw. What the hell was coming next?: two six-year-olds running out from the wings of the stage wearing pantomime airplanes and screaming ALLAHU AKHBAR?

Mercifully, the action segued from mention of the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil, to the many sporting successes of 2002. Tonally, it was like flicking through a classic women’s magazine. (’10 SECRETS TO A MORE LOVING YOU’ ‘KIDS SAY THE FUNNIEST THINGS’ ‘MY UNCLE CHOPPED OFF MY MUM’S HEAD AND USED IT AS A COCK WARMER’) There was no mention of the second Iraq War, but I figured the teacher’s main goal probably wasn’t to stage a live, theatrical documentary worthy of John Pilger.

Before the morning’s entertainment was over we’d had the wedding of Princess Di and Prince Charles (thankfully they omitted the Paris-based sequel: Di Hard); a nine-year-old girl stomping out on stage in character as Margaret Thatcher, and a ten-year-old Joey from Friends repeatedly shouting out ‘How YOU doin’?’. It was surreal as merry shit, and of course, for that reason, I loved every ridiculous second. I prayed that the finale would be JR Ewing and Jimmy Savile conveying the Iran Contra affair through the medium of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, but, alas, they just sang a Christmas song. I hereby offer my writing services for next year’s Chrimbo concert. I’m thinking ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ meets ‘The Hills Have Eyes’. Get your people to call my people. I think we might have a hit on our hands…

——————————————————————————————————————–

JOIN ME LATER IN THE WEEK FOR A TALE OF TICKETS, TERROR, PISS AND VOMIT AT THE EDINBURGH CHRISTMAS MARKET

Jacob Rees-Mogg – By the Nanny Who Knows Him

Jacob Rees-Mogg is without doubt the hippest man on the planet right now. Not only has he recently changed his name to Bae-Club Rees-Vlog, but next week he’s at the MOBOs performing his brand new hip-hop single ‘F*** YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!’ (his song about the London Fire Brigade) I can just see him on stage now, twirling his sceptre, cocking his top-hat and drawling something devastatingly polite into the microphone: ‘You know, one is rather fond of severely inconveniencing them bitches, if you’ll permit me a momentary lapse in grammar, all you people out there who fiercely indulge in intercourse with the women who gave birth to you.’

But it wasn’t always thus. Believe it or not, Jacob used to be considered a little starchy.

I know, right?

And I know better than most. I was his nanny. I adored that be-spectacled little ubermensch so much that I decided to stay on in his service even from beyond the grave. I’m his ghost nanny, you see. The perfect nanny for the Rees-Mogg family, as it turns out, because they don’t have to pay me anything (Nanny McNo-Phee).

Jacob’s great-grandfather, Hogg-Lees Rees-Mogg

They’re a lovely bunch, the Moggies, despite the fact that it was Jacob’s great-grandfather who killed me. He’d been drinking French furniture polish and sniffing gunpowder all day, and said he could smell ‘the whiff of the pickaninny about me’ before beating me to death with a copper serving spoon. It was a rare lapse in etiquette for a man who usually comported himself with impeccable manners: he of all people should have known that it’s a grapefruit spoon for murdering servants.

Still, my brutal murder was at least in-keeping with Rees-Mogg family tradition. Jacob’s great-great grandfather blew my mother’s face off with a blunderbuss because she ‘looked at him a bit Chinese’ as she was making him a swan  sandwich. What a character! I just feel disgusted that I never had any kids of my own so that Jacob could one day employ them in some menial position before smashing them to death with a signed copy of the King James Bible.

I’ll never forget when little Jakey was born. His mum and dad were so over-joyed they could barely contain their lips from breaking into a tight, perfectly straight hyphen. Little Jakey slipped out of his mother’s clam-pit without any fuss at all, as nonchalant as a complete bastard of a politician lounging insouciantly on the front benches of the houses of parliament during a crucial debate. I’ve never seen a child look so absolutely, completely, utterly and adorably full of withering indignation and arrogant rage. A wee smasher! The man who would one day write the political best-seller “It’s HIS-Tory, not THEY/THEM-Socialists” was already there in that tiny, pale, baleful little creature.

Not fifteen seconds later, he spoke his first words; an Oscar Wilde quote: ‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.’ Not moments later, his grand-father beat him half to death with a hickory stick for not having said it in ancient Hebrew.

Jakey was a delight growing up, he really was. It took him a long, long time to wean himself off breast-milk. Even now he still enjoys the odd suckle on my ghostly titties. And sometimes I like to soothe him by turning invisible and gobbling him off in the cabinet room. But that’s just what a good nanny does, by golly.

When Jakey was about six he used to burn ants with a magnifying glass, except instead of ants it was working class people, and instead of a magnifying glass it was a shotgun. Sometimes he’d give them a sporting chance and chase them across his private minefield, promising to let them live if they could guide themselves safely to the other side with the instructions he’d painted on the ground in Aramaic.

He was nice like that, you see. Always trying to better people. He couldn’t help himself. That’s why he became a conservative, of course. So that he could help people more fortunate than himself, so one day they’d help him become as fortunate as them. And then he could just help himself to, you know, whatever the fuck he liked.

I remember his first proper big boy’s bed was made from the pelts of endangered monkeys. Well, not strictly accurate. It was the entire monkeys it was made of, all of them still alive, bound together like a raft. He took great care to angle the monkey anuses away from his face, but if a monkey did happen to shit on him as he slept, he’d just wake up and throw it to the crocodiles. Sometimes the monkeys would get lucky, and the crocodiles wouldn’t eat them, because they were already full from eating too many Malaysian servants that day. Well, I say ‘get lucky’. If a monkey survived the croc pond little Jakey would chase it round the garden and smash its brains in with an ivory cane, before masturbating over its tiny little corpse. Even to this day I can’t take him to the zoo without drugging him first.

Most of the time, though, Jakey would put his erections to good use. Once a week he would get a servant to jerk him off with an antique oven-cosy into a tiny crepe pan, which he’d then order his pastry chef to make into a man-muck omelette for his ground-maintenance staff, reasoning that a little of his DNA in their nutritious snack might make them a bit smarter by-proxy, the self-abusing, crotch-sniffing bumpkins that they were.

I remember as he got older and became a more proficient wanker he started shouting out in Latin at the point of climax. Once he accidentally gibbered out an ancient gypsy curse which he unknowingly placed upon his pet horse, Titus Andronicus. It was a literal gypsy curse in that it turned his horse into an actual gypsy. It still looked like a horse, but you could just tell. Poor Jakey was distraught at having to put it down. Even still he was smart enough to use a harpoon gun so there wasn’t any risk of being contaminated by its filthy gypsy blood.

Well, Jacob is all grown up now, but if you go into his old room it’s exactly as he left it from his wild teenage years: posters of Jesus on the wall; the Turkish hookah filled with orphan’s tears; his extensive book collection, including Enoch Powell’s best-seller ‘Europe Can Suck My Bendy Banana’; his blow-up Maggie Thatcher doll, with stolen-milk stains around the anus; his flared knickerbockers; and his seed-encrusted copies of ‘Murdered Monkey Monthly’.

And, do you know, he’s never stopped making me proud. Just this week he said something that made me tingle with joy. ‘Nanny,’ he said, ‘If you weren’t already dead, I’d jolly well kill you with my priceless antique letter-opener that once belonged to Adolph Hitler.’

The big-hearted, sentimental fool that he is!

Cunt of the Week (17th April 2013) by Jonny Seaton

t1I’m going to set my stall out straight away: I hate the Tories. I can’t stand them, in fact, but my first memory of them was a positive one. In 1975 I remember Margaret Thatcher being elected as the first female leader of a political party, and thinking, as a 6 year old, ‘That’s good.’ My main female role model at that time was my mum, and she was brilliant, a really positive influence on me.

Perhaps it was my doctor father’s left-wing leanings, or perhaps it was the 80’s and the height of political comedy with Ben Elton and Spitting Image vying for our attention at putting down those in power; either way, I realised that the Conservative Party were not the party of the people….unless of course the people you were referring to were ‘society’s elite,’ a phrase that was something of an oxymoron in the 80’s, as Thatcher had denounced society, and claimed that it didn’t exist. As she put it: ‘There’s no such thing as society.’ (‘Elite’ is also open to interpretation: by elite I mean the rich, or the wannabe rich.)

Major: like an old Clark Kent, minus the Superman.

Major: like an old Clark Kent, minus the Superman.

But after introducing the poll tax, the vicious attacks on the unions and strikers, the denationalisation of once great industries, the initial steps in privatisation of the Health Service and so on, Thatcher was eventually deposed by her own party. There followed a slight move from extreme right-wing, blue politics to closer-to-centre, grey politics with seven years of John Major – a man so dull that not even the later revelation that he had had an affair with Edwina Currie could liven up his image. And it was image that the next PM, Tony Blair, was all about. Tony will be remembered for a few things, most notably an illegal war; a war that I totally agree with, if I am honest. Saddam Hussein was a bad man who committed genocide against the Iraqi Kurds, and if that was the reason for the invasion there would have been a lot less of an issue. The official reason was Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), but none were ever found – they were never going to be found. What Iraq did, and does, have in abundance is oil; and with the USA calling the shots, we were always going to war.

Gordon Brown squeezing an imaginary Tony Blair heart.

Gordon Brown squeezing an imaginary Tony Blair heart.

The collapse of the financial services led to Labour’s downfall, despite a couple of years of a good man, Gordon Brown, whose biggest problem was timing. Blair’s legacy was that the next Prime Minister was going to be a Tory. A big reason for this was the collapse of the financial services and the plunging of the UK into recession; interestingly enough a collapse that can be accurately traced back to the US policies of Reagan, which had been copied by Margaret Thatcher in the 80’s: greed, self and money; a man mind thyself attitude.

David Cameron: even his own shadow thinks he's a cunt.

David Cameron: even his own shadow thinks he’s a cunt.

So on 11 May 2010 the public went to the polls, and nearly 30 million turned out to vote, which is a great turnout (about 65% of those eligible). The Tories won 308 seats, which wasn’t enough for a majority unless combined with the seats of the Liberals – and don’t get me started on that! Many saw this as a protest vote, but whatever the reasons the Conservatives were back in power.

So 13 years since we last had a Conservative Government we had another, and the ‘everything now’ society in which we live caused people to forget how bad it was the last time. There is a feeling amongst the electorate that all the parties are much of a muchness. The bland politics of Major and Blair did nothing to dispel that. They are wrong: Cameron is very much one of Thatcher’s children. He has been in power for less than 3 years, and what have we seen?

  • Cuts to the armed forces and an end to the Scottish Regiments, replacing them with one cheaper Scottish Regiment. In the best traditions of Thatcher, this is a Scottish-only thing.
  • An end to the separate Scottish Police Forces, being replaced by one force…. another Scottish thing
  • Cameron is continuing the gradual erosion of the NHS
  • Cameron is undoing all of the good that came from the Beveridge Report, which fought the ‘five giant evils’ of Ignorance (Education), Idleness (Work & Pensions) and Disease (NHS)
  • Iain Duncan-Smith claiming he could surive on £57 per week
  • The introduction of a Bedroom Tax, potentially forcing the most vulnerable in society to take in unknown lodgers
  • The phone hacking scandal, and Cameron’s disclosed closeness to Rebekah Brooks, the editor at the height of the scandal. She is set to go on trial in September this year but I doubt anything will come of that. Am I cynical, perhaps?
Thatcher's coffin being led to the ground by the BNP, who won the competitive bid to run her funeral.

Thatcher’s coffin being led to the ground by the BNP, who won the competitive bid to run her funeral.

So on this, the day that Margaret Thatcher is buried, you would think that my cunt of the week is the Conservative Party. Well, I am afraid you are wrong. Yes, I despise them; I hate everything they stand for and wish they did not exist. However, what they stand for is well documented: they are the party on the right; they are the party of money; and the party that likes to keep that money circulating amongst themselves….

My cunt of the week is… well it could be you? Did you vote? No. Do you complain about the Government? You do? Well, it is you then. Voting is the right of every free person over the age of 18 in the UK. It is a democratic right, and one that if you forego then you forego the right to complain that this party – which has always been composed of cunts – continue to do what they have always done.

Jonny Seaton

Jonny Seaton

THIS WEEK’S GUEST WRITER Jonny Seaton is fast becoming a regular and favourite on the Scottish stand-up circuit. Last month he reached the grand finale of Radio Forth’s Big Comedy Audition, and received great praise from the judges. Outside of comedy, Jonny works as a fluffer for the animals on David Attenborough documentaries. ‘When David Attenborough wants to see two elks fucking, then David Attenborough GETS to see two elks fucking,’ explains Jonny. ‘But sometimes they’re not in the mood. David won’t accept this. He’ll say things to me like, “I didn’t fly all the way to Africa and trek through bloody jungles and across deserts getting my arse bitten off by mosquitos just so that these two lazy cunts could ruin my money shot.” Oh, he can be quite brutal sometimes. That’s where I come in. Sometimes you need to be tough, with a vice-like grip, sometimes gentle, like you’re shaking hands with a brittle-boned Oompa Loompa. Yes, I love my job, but it can be challenging. You try wanking off a tiger.’

The cost of failure can be high. On one occasion Jonny failed to excite two apathetic rhinos into having sex, and so Attenborough ordered Jonny to put on a rhino costume, and fucked him himself.

Jonny once went to France. He liked it.

Not all of this biography is true… Jonny fucking hated France.

FOLLOW JONNY ON TWITTER: @BalernoDad