Top Money Saving Tips to Survive the Recession

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.

Santa’s Journal (Entry 3) – May 12 2013

Spent most of the morning revising my ‘Naughty List’. Coca Cola told me I couldn’t use one anymore, that no child could be excluded from Santa’s services no matter how bad their behaviour. I’ve got the memo here somewhere. Ah, yes.

‘It is not your responsibility as one of our major brand representatives, nor the responsibility of Coca Cola itself, its subsidiaries or shareholders, to comment on or offer judgement upon the behaviour of individual customers or to create criteria under which customers could be excluded from our services based on arbitrary and often subjective codes of conduct. Coca Cola is a profit-driven company, and those profits, and indeed our brand, would suffer if we were to behave in this manner. Moral positions are best adopted and enforced by the church, and penalties best enforced through the legal system. It is not in our interests to attempt to fulfill the roles of either institution.’

So, roughly translated: ‘It doesn’t matter if some wee cunt’s put a brick through an old disabled woman’s window, doused her beloved pet-cat in paraffin, set it alight and then taken potshots at its screaming body with a pellet gun; so long as his parents are prepared to spend more money than they have in their bank accounts on Christmas presents, and continue to encourage their Hell-spawn to glug Coca Cola in quantities that would obliterate an elephant’s pancreas, then who gives a flying Yeti’s bawbag?’ I’m no legal eagle, but I do have a first-class honours degree in Reading Between the Lines, and a doctorate in Advanced Bullshit Detection.

Margaret took my blood-pressure again today. It’s high. My heart’s smacking around in my old chest like a jet-propelled pin-ball.

A photo of Snelling, reproduced in the interests of public safety. WARNING: he doesn’t normally look like Barry Cryer. He’s a master of disguise. BEWARE.

Anyway, Innis Snelling. He’s definitely top of the naughty list this year. I won’t go into too much detail and defile my memoirs with a record of his disgusting misdeeds, but suffice to say he got up to some sickening, sexual, banana-related ethnic tomfoolery. And what’s with the lad’s name? He sounds like a rejected Harry Potter villain. No toys for you, motherfucker.

Wee Gundal the elf’s birthday bash tonight. That should relax me.

 

 

Memories of Marmaris – Pt 2

Ah, Marmaris is beautiful. Nearby Turunc is beautiful. Everywhere I went was beautiful. On a jeep safari I saw sweeping, dusty fields, lit by the sun like the Benicio del Toro bits in Traffic; lush green forests winding over rugged rock; the snaking mountain roads skirting panoramic views you would be happy to fall towards to your death, spending your last moments snapping like some demented Japanese tourist. Out on the boats there were beautiful bays (to call them sun-kissed would be a cruel underestimation – the bays were sun-fucked); gently swaying palm trees planted in hot, jagged sand; giant, hazy-green hills standing guard over the coast-line in the distance; and water at the beach so pure, clean and clear you’d have thought it was invisible.

Tequila Islam-er

Turkey has a secular government, but culturally it’s predominantly Muslim: although you won’t find much evidence of this in Marmaris. Unless the Qu’ran’s been rewritten to include passages like this: ‘Blessed are they who cut about with their lips hanging out of their bikinis and drinking alcohol until they projectile vomit in each other’s mouths’.

You’ve got to love the woman on TripAdvisor who raged about her experience in Turkey, drawing particular attention to ‘the bloody singing from that mosque at half four EVERY morning!’ Love, I’d be annoyed if I had to put up with that racket outside of my window in Grangemouth, Scotland. Multiculturalism or no multiculturalism, I like my sleep, and if it was disturbed by a recording of some bearded Brian-Blessed-alike booming out holy shite even before the seagulls had started their daily wailing, then those speakers would be getting chucked into the River Forth. (so too, probably, would my dismembered, headless corpse, but at least I’d meet my death after a half-decent night’s sleep) But you’re on holiday in an Islamic country. Thomas Cook can’t make the Muslims renounce their religion and stop praying for a week just so you can have a nice, quiet holiday getting drunk and reading Jackie Collins’ novels by the poolside with your tits out.

Och Noo the Aye

On my first night in Marmaris, a Turkish tout asked me where I came from. ‘Scotland,’ I replied. He then made a particularly eerie noise. ‘I’m sorry?’ I asked. The penny soon dropped: he was trying to say: ‘Gonnae no dae that.’ Excellent. He then implored me to ask him, ‘How no?’, whereupon he ejaculated: ‘Just gonnae no!’ (allow me to make it clear that I’m using ‘ejaculated’ in the sense of ‘issued forth’, rather than suggesting that the poor little man was so excited by the prospect of imitating Ford Kiernan that he shot his bolt).

Another chap could tell me all about Falkirk, as ‘one of his ex, ex, ex, ex, ex, ex, ex, ex, ex girlfriends (his words)’ was from there. As usual, the Marmaris definition of relationship is stretched to its very limits.

In the idyllic, sun-soaked bay of Turunc I encountered a man who could do a more impressively accurate Glasweigen accent than anyone of non-Scottish extraction in the history of the world. I wanted to take him home and place him in a circus somewhere. These people had done their homework. But you know why they’d done their homework, right? Correct. Every one of those cunts was trying to get money out of me. Which leads me to this next section…

The Real Hustle

Yes, Marmaris – and I’m sure all of Turkey itself – is beautiful. And, despite it being a relatively poor and horrendously corrupt country (if this piece was on Wikipedia, this is the point at which it would say: citation needed), the people are generally nice. But they do want your money: all of it. And the ingenuity they display in trying to part you from it is breath-taking.

It begins at the airport where you have to hand over an English tenner to a highly-uninterested and award-winningly grouchy customs officer. This is a down payment on all the rest of the money you’re going to have to spunk away over the course of your holiday.

My coach driver stopped off at a small café bar about an hour out of Dalaman, where I experienced my first taste of Turkish creative accountancy. Gambling correctly on me being a clueless first-timer with no idea of New Turkish Lira’s value, the little boy behind the till (well, nobody seems to use tills – they rack up your bill on a calculator) lovingly sold me two cans of juice, a large packet of crisps, one packet of chewing gum and a bottle of water for the equivalent of 7.50GBP. So much for Turkey proving dirt cheap, as I’d been promised by all who’d been before.

Then there’s the constant touting, more bloodthirsty than anything you’ve ever experienced before. One typically sunny day, my then-girlfriend and I decided to eat at a restaurant by the marina. By the time we’d downed our hideously expensive Cokes, we were being frogmarched to a jewellery store by a wee guy who spoke no English. This was after listening to a long, eloquent speech by the proprietor about how in this small world, this global community, we must all be brothers and help each other out – ostensibly by buying hideously expensive Cokes from him, and then diamond rings and leather from some dodgy cunt mate of his in town. We managed to get free glasses of water from the jewellery store owner before he sussed out we were paupers and swiftly sent us packing. I think the look in my eyes that said ‘How fucking much?’ tipped him off.

Speaking of tips, there are tip boxes everywhere. On the sides of buildings, in the backs of taxis. I wouldn’t be surprised to find them in the backs of Turkish ambulances. ‘That’s 7.50GBP for a fractured wrist, and an agreement to buy a diamond bracelet from my dodgy mate for a broken leg.’ It’s like Turkey’s handed over the responsibility for its economy to Ryanair.

If things get out of hand, Scottish people, you can always phone 'The Polis.'

Although most of the bar workers are genuinely friendly people, you won’t remember – or care about – this after day three. Certainly my tolerance to touting underwent a radical transformation. I went from cheerfully engaging in banter with every touter who chanced his luck, to imagining their sweet, sweet collective deaths at the bottom of the ocean.

People, Turkish jaikeys presumably, even crashed roll-ups from me as I walked down the street. Not that such occurrences are unheard of down Falkirk high street, but still. Which reminds me: if you can find it over there, which I managed to do, don’t buy any tobacco. The packet may say Golden Virginia on it, but you can bet your bottom dollar (it’s all you’ll have left after a week) that the contents have been swept up from a barber’s-shop floor and cut with desiccated camel shite.