The Doctor Wants To See Your Box Filled

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A few years ago, as part of my then-job, I accompanied a guy to an appointment with a consultant at the local hospital. The consultant was your classic, staid, stuffy, be-spectacled, salt-and-pepper-haired, dead-eyed psychopath of a clinician. Which made it all the more strange when he entered ‘BANTER MODE’, like some android clicking a switch in its positronic brain.

‘Yes, and who’s this with you? Marvellous. Where are you living now? Is it nice there? Good. Good. Is that OK with you? Are you happy with that? Yes, and have you had a good day?’

The doc seemed unused to, and uneasy about, chatting like this with people like us. It made me imagine Frasier Crane being trapped in an elevator with the cast of Still Game. The ‘conversation’ was stilted and forced, like small-talk by check-list. There was a good reason for this:

He had a check-list.

This he presented at the end of the consultation, complete with pen and clip-board. One of the questions was – and I paraphrase slightly due to lack of a photographic memory – ‘Did the doctor have a friendly demeanour and seem interested in you as a human being rather than just treating you like a number?’

Poor prick. On top of having to remember thousands of facts about the part of the human body in which he specialises, and trying really hard not to accidentally murder people, some little pen-pushing, number-crunching bureaucrat is forcing him to be jolly and natural with people according to a very strict set of criteria in order to satisfy government friendliness targets. That explains his banter, which I admit was perfectly natural – but ‘natural’ in the same sense that floods, turds and strokes are natural. How much are these surveys costing? And who really cares? I don’t want my doctor to be nice to me. I just want him not to kill me.

‘Ah, so good to see you. Ha ha ha, charming, charming. So, how’s your sister? Is she? Oh, marvellous, marvellous… by the way, you’ve got AIDS.’

Doctors have a gruelling enough job without having to contend with customer satisfaction surveys. Especially GPs. Imagine how horrible it must be for them to have had to listen to 16,000 old ladies per day wittering on about their sons’ new jobs; the weather; their ancient, battered and leaking prolapsed arseholes; how their daughters-in-law don’t cook properly for their sons; how ungrateful their sisters are; how it ‘wisnae like that’ in their day, and generally droning on and on and on and on and on, with neither pause nor end, because they’ve fuck all else to do on a Tuesday afternoon and all of their friends are dead. And now the old incessant, piss-scented yammerers have been handed check-lists? Jesus, that’s like handing Jason Vorhees a chainsaw seconds after calling him ugly. Heaven help our GPs.

‘I got the feeling that the doctor just wasn’t interested in the work history of my son Johnny, the electrician. He’s in that Gibraltar, you know. But I’m not keen on that wife of his, oh no. Thinks she knows it all. Never listens to what I tell her, well, she’ll learn the hard way, so she will, it’s like I’ve been saying to my friend, Jeannie, she’s the one with the bad foot, she lives doon that road that’s filled with the gays and the junkies. Well, it’s no fur the likes of me to be spreading the gossip and that, but she wiz in that corner shop the other day and she saw that yin and that other yin coming in and buying a…’

ENOUGH! No checklist, OK, NHS? What I want from my doctors is simple. If I’ve cancer, catch it. If I’ve chlamydia, get riddae it. If I’ve a dicky heart, help make it start. OK? I don’t want to be my doctor’s BFF, lol oh doccy you be my bestest pal ever pinky swear you will be lol. Right? So let’s help end this madness.

By taking part in my 87 page ‘Should the NHS conduct customer satisfaction surveys?’ survey.

Cunt of the Week (6 August 2012) by James Walker

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Hello. Before I start properly, let me say this. Unlike what I’ve seen from the other writers of this feature, I feel very uncomfortable using the word ‘cunt’. It’s not a natural thing for me to use that word, and in my head, the fact I’m putting quotes around the word means that I’m not really saying it, and the quotes sort of cancel the word out, which is of course inaccurate, but will help me sleep at night.

But maybe it should be a word that I’m a bit more comfortable with. For that reason, I am picking not one, but two of them. That’s right. I’m going to write about two of the fucks (I am very happy to use ‘fucks’ all day long.)

Now I like Ant & Dec. They’re fine. I’ve not been harmed by them in any way. I do not have a beef with them. My beef is with their smaller counterparts, Little Ant & Dec. If you watched Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway,you’ll probably be aware of Little Ant and Dec. It was a segment of the show where A & D introduced these two kids, who were the child versions of them and they went off and interviewed celebrities and whatnot. They seemed very nice, and quite funny. I enjoyed them up until when the show finished.

‘Then why on earth are they your ‘cunts’ of the week?’ you might be thinking, in italics.

Well what I said at the end there. That’s exactly it. The show finished, and after that, nothing. Little Ant & Dec were no more. I both thought, and hoped, that it was going to last forever. It’s not as if they’d been going since the PJ & Duncan days, but I personally think the parents of Lil’ A & D should’ve had the foresight to get together and conceive a good few years earlier so that such a thing could have happened; I know that I’m going out in a few nights, so have just washed my best top, so looking forward is always a good thing to do. They were on one TV show and that was it.

Three for the price of two.

It’s just a shame that they’re not still around now, doing the same things as Ant & Dec, but a bit smaller, that’s all. It’s almost as if they were just shoved on to Saturday Night Takeaway as part of a recurring segment, and their future as Little Ant & Dec after the show wasn’t even considered. Little Ant & Dec are no longer together, and that’s why they are my ‘cunts’ of the week.

And finally, some people might be thinking ‘oh, well Little Ant & Dec actually aren’t that little anymore and are very possibly taller than the actual, properly aged Ant & Dec, and would no doubt have different interests and generally wouldn’t want to be known as a smaller version of other men for the rest of their lives. So it wouldn’t really work now, anyway’. I have decided to ignore those people entirely.

The enigmatic James Walker, who wishes to remain faceless for security reasons. Either that, or he’s incredibly fucking ugly.

THIS WEEK’S GUEST WRITER James Walker is a guy who is not very good at writing in third person and I, being him, can attest to that. Both he and I have done a bit of stand-up before as the same man and he has not won any awards (and neither have I.) I live in a flat together with him and they, and we have two hands between us. She has decided that this bio bit has already gone on a bit too long, and he and me and them would have to agree.

ALL OF US ARE ON TWITTER HERE: @jameswalkerguy.

 

Beauty Pageant: Scotland Style

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The Miss Falkirk beauty pageant was held at the Inchyra Grange hotel last night. Usually when we hear the words Miss Falkirk they’re included in the sentence: ‘Geez, there’s an asteroid heading for Scotland. I hope it doesn’t miss Falkirk.’

Beauty pageants like Miss Falkirk can trace their ancestry back to America, beginning with a modelling event hosted by huckster and showman P.T Barnum in 1854 (the man who coined the phrase, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’) and culminating in the all-singing-all-dancing Miss America contests.

But we Scots embrace American culture somewhat awkwardly; whenever we attempt to emulate the glitz and glamour of their big show-stopping events it inevitably feels like the act of trying to squeeze an angry, shit-covered rhino into a tiny Gucci prom dress.

Anyway, I was at the inaugural Miss Falkirk last year, during which there was a wonderful culture-collision moment. When America met Falkirk.

It happened at the end of the night. The evening’s host, Steve Courtney, from local radio station Central FM, was about to announce the winners. There were many people to thank, and much excitement and anticipation to be wrung from the moment, which Steve was clearly relishing. Or maybe he was stalling for time until everything was ready. Whatever: he got his talk on.

‘Ladies and gents, it’s been a wonderful evening, I’m sure you’ll agree. But there can be only one winner, and I can tell you’re all eagerly awaiting the announcement. And so, without any further ado, it falls to me to tell you that the winner… the Queen who will be crowned…. of this…. the first Miss Falkirk… and what a contest it’s been, folks, they’ve all been great. Haven’t they all been great?’

Miss Falkirk 2012 finalists

The audience – which comprised the contestants’ immaculately dressed and coiffured mums, grannies and little sisters, and a large helping of cognitively-challenged, heavily drunk, knuckle-scraping car-park brawlers – was growing restless. Seats could be heard shuffling over the hard-wood floors; the odd nervous cough. Children were fiddling and fidgeting with their hands. The girls on stage were frozen like the last ten seconds of a Police Squad episode.

‘It truly has been a great one, ladies and gents, a competition and a night right up there with the best this town, and country, has to offer. So without any ado, no further ado at all… I’m just about to announce…. the winner…. the winner of Miss Falkirk 2011…. held here… in this lovely venue… and so the winner is… wait for it folks… here it comes… of this year’s competition…’

And then, in the silence of one of Steve Courtney’s lingering pauses, amidst a quiet crowd of hundreds, it came: the Falkirk-ification of this most American of nights.

‘…yes, it’s time. The winner… of Miss Falkirk… in the year of our Lord two thousand and ele…’

‘GET ON WITH IT, YOU CUNT!’

Followed by shocked silence. Which in turn was followed by one solitary burst of laughter: from my mouth. Not one single other person was laughing, or even smiling. Welcome to Falkirk, folks. It’s beautiful and terrible.

Good old Steve just stammered a little and moved on, completely ignoring the ‘cunt’, which was very professional of him. Especially considering that he probably wanted to pluck the little bastard out of the crowd and hurl him through the nearest wall.

Falkirk: sometimes I love you.

Cunt of the Week (30 July 2012) by Gregor Wappler

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Jamie Andrew With Hands says: I’ve never felt moved to include a disclaimer in a ‘Cunt of the Week’ before, but here it is, folks. This week’s guest writer doesn’t so much sail close to the wind as become the wind, and wipe out a few shore-based tourist resorts. The tourist resorts being your sense of taste and decency. Yeah, I know, that analogy’s a bit muddled. But go with it. As I was reading over Gregor’s submission, I thought, ‘Should I censor this? Is it a bit rich to proclaim myself the arbiter of decency given that my current stand-up set is about a quadruple amputee? Is it wrong to censor creativity, however horrible it is?’ So, with all that in mind, I’ve decided to run with it. You have been warned. Gregor Wappler is a terrible and hideous human being.

I had a long think about what topic to cover when considering this week’s Cunt of the Week. I read some previous articles written by my contemporaries, and took inspiration from Mr. Robin Valo’s article last week about Facebook, and the fact that people think their opinion matters so much that they constantly update their statuses with pointless things.

So I thought that on the eve of the annual celebration of gratuitous self-gratification – I am of course referring to the hell that faces comedians every year, the Edinburgh Fringe – I would focus my attention on the hugely cunty aspect of modern life that is fame-seeking; i.e. people who just want to be famous for the sake of being famous, despite possessing no discernible talent. You know, glorified attention whores, a few of whom I have already passed on my way to my fringe base in Edinburgh; singers and bands already with the guitars and microphones out on street corners, singing and jiving away, desperately battling for attention from complete strangers because of some Oedipal longing in them for love and attention that was not adequately received and provided by their parents during the all important developmental years.
Well I have news for these cunts: it’s the 30th of July; the Fringe HASN’T EVEN STARTED YET! At least wait until it has begun before singing your fucking contemporary folk songs! This pathological need for undeserved adoration and attention seems to have built up to boiling point and more since the inception of shows such as X-Factor and Britain’s Got Talent.

Now every cunt and their dog (quite literally) thinks they are deserving of fame and money for singing badly, or just generally being their spastic self. Everyone thinks that their opinion means something, and that people should listen to what they have to say. Newsflash: your opinion means fuck all, and nobody else should listen to you, you fucking mongoloid spastic cunt.

The British population voted on Britain’s Got Talent this year and came to the conclusion that a dog is currently the most talented person in Britain today. A fucking dog! What a bunch of spastics. There should be a way of tracking these people down so that we can ban them from voting in important things, like the general election; or, failing that, putting them all in a big sack, filling it with cement and throwing it into the North Sea, along with the fucking prize-winning dog.

This person has just searched for attention and found it, and for how long? Well, the dog’s already about seven, so it probably only has two good years of performing left before it succumbs to broken legs and fucked joints from performing unnatural tasks every night. It should be put down, and its owner raped simply for wasting our time and getting on our collective tits.

This is what i mean: everyone thinks they can/should be famous, because they abused a dog and made it the most famous/’talented’ thing in Britain, and rapists and paedophiles get bad press! At least Ian Huntley didn’t vote for Pudsey the fucking dog! No, he just had terrible bath-time etiquette; however, he did keep a clean crime scene.

Gregor Wappler

THIS WEEK’S GUEST WRITER: Gregor Wappler is an Aberdeen-based stand-up, who was born in Milngavnie (which for all you non-Scots out there is pronounced guh-van). He’s been a Scottish Comedian of the Year semi-finalist, and once managed to use that little key to open the corned beef tin without snapping it off. As you can probably tell, Gregor’s stint working at the Rape Crisis Centre wasn’t a long or happy one; although it did give him plenty of material for next year’s Fringe, and his collaborative comedy double-act with Daniel Tosh: ‘The Rapes of Mirth.’ Gregor Wappler is the reason the Scottish Spastics’ Society changed their name… to the Gregor Wappler Foundation for Mongoloids. You can see Gregor and fellow stand-up (and Cunt of the Week contributor) Robin Grainger at this year’s fringe:  http://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/comedy/applause.

FOLLOW GREGOR ON TWITTER: @gwappler1

FOLLOW GREGOR AND ROBIN’S SHOW ON TWITTER: @applause2012

Remembering Gately-Gate

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Rik Carranza (@rcarranza) tweeted a link to a blog in which the Daily Mail was given a kicking for yet another example of horrible, insidious bigotry. Here it is here: http://botherer.org/2012/07/28/the-daily-mail-and-how-an-nhs-death-means-racism-is-fine/ Read it, because it’s good. I have spoken.

And then read the following piece I wrote a few years ago about another bout of Daily Mail nonsense, this one centering on ignorance of civil partnerships rather than multiculturalism. Remember Jan Moir and the Stephen Gately fiasco?

Gately-Gate

I think it’s fair to say that the only person not aware of the Jan Moir/Stephen Gately controversy is Stephen Gately himself. The debate about Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir’s spurious and offensive attempts to link civil partnerships to death, seediness, tragedy and suicide has rolled across newspapers, TV news bulletins and, of course, the blogosphere.

Stephen Fry, Charlie Brooker, and tens of thousands of complainers to Ofcom have made their voices heard. Good old Fry, speaking out via Twitter (accused by some of orchestrating a “twitch-hunt”), said:

“I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathsome and inhumane.”

Sometimes the succinct punches possible through Twitter sum up a situation better than any lengthy diatribe. Charlie Brooker, in his excellent rebuttal and rubbishing of Moir’s insidious bile, described said insidious bile with the words:

“Spiralling galaxies of ignorance roll majestically against a backdrop of what looks like dark prejudice, dotted hither and thither with winking stars of snide innuendo.”

And so the humanitarian and journalistic crisis I’d like to name ‘Gately-gate’ was born.

Moir’s response to this whirlwind of hate whooshing towards her across cyberspace was to conclude a follow-up article with this:

“In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.”

What naughty little rascals we are. How on earth did we manage to get the wrong end of the stick?

Let’s look at it this way: Moir is a journalist; that’s her craft; words are her raw materials. She’s supposed to be good at taking those words and putting them together so that the people reading them – even readers of the Daily Mail – can understand the sentiment and the points she’s set out to convey. But then she does appear to be the queen of disingenuousness and misdirection.

You can’t nudge-nudge-wink-wink at a tenuous link of your own creation between gays getting married and gays killing themselves, or dying on holiday, only to claim later that no, no, no, that’s not what I meant at all, I was only trying to show that gay people, like straight people, can have unhappy unions! I think we knew that already, Jan. People are people, and whenever you put them together, whatever their race, religion, sexual orientation or personality, you’re going to get a hefty proportion who don’t gel.

It’s worth looking at what Jan Moir originally said:

“Another real sadness about Gately’s death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.

Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages. Not everyone, they say, is like George Michael.

Of course, in many cases this may be true. Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately’s last night raise troubling questions about what happened.”

And then her re-interpretation of her own words:

“In writing that ‘it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships’ I was suggesting that civil partnerships – the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting – have proved just to be as problematic as marriages.”

Did I miss the Peter Tatchell speech where he seethed: ‘Give us our gay marriages, so that we can perfect your lousy heterosexual efforts; and become little gay beacons to the dream of eternal coupling; never to part, never to argue, never to divorce.’ And, anyway, having read Jan’s two statements, can anyone see any correlation between her original line of thought and the reworking? In reading the former, can you see the meaning replicated in the latter? There’s that word of the day again: disingenuous.

Nice work, though, to find a causal link in such disparate tragedies. Has any research been done into how many car accidents have involved men from civil partnerships? Perhaps wedded gays can’t drive properly, presumably because they’re all so busy trying to suck each other off as they hurtle down the motorway.

Jan continues:

“It is important that the truth comes out about the exact circumstances of his strange and lonely death… I am sure he would want to set an example to any impressionable young men who may want to emulate what they might see as his glamorous routine. For once again, under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see.”

Em, only one small problem there, Jan. As much as I found his music hideous, Stephen never set himself up as some sort of gay trailblazer – despite her assertion that he was a ‘Gay rights’ champion’. He’d never claimed to be a role-model for anyone. In fact, he only came out when someone went knocking on the door of The Sun. He was just living his life. He never preached on morality, never got himself in the newspapers every week – or even, latterly, every year – never rubbed any aspect of his life in anybody else’s face.

But even if the coroner’s verdict turned out to be ‘wrong’ (which it clearly wasn’t) or, as she still slyly maintains… in fact, let me interrupt my own sentence there so that I may reproduce some of Jan’s words verbatim. It’s easier, because she does most of the work for you:

“…it seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately’s death – out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger – did not have a bearing on his death. At the very least, it could have exacerbated an underlying medical condition.”

Yes, because the innumerable heterosexual people I’ve known, or read about in the newspapers, who do on a regular basis the things that Moir outlines in the paragraph above are forever keeling over like poisoned canaries.

But even if the coroner was ‘wrong’ what happened to Gately is still none of my business, the public’s business or Jan Moir’s business. I suspect that Jan Moir, and certainly a hefty proportion of Daily Mail readers, would have found Gately’s private life ‘more than a little sleazy’ and ‘different and dangerous’ even if it was proven he’d only ever had wholly monogamous relationships, and healed the sick and the lame in his spare time.

But, again to hammer home the point: even if in the hours preceding his death Gately had parachuted through the hotel room window, naked and erect, straight into the waiting bottom of the Bulgarian man, while his partner videotaped it, it still wouldn’t have been any of Jan Moir’s business. There’s no case to answer.

Some said Charlie Brooker was being a typical reactionist, muddled leftie in calling for people to complain to Ofcom in their droves: ‘He’s always banging on about free speech and the Big Brother society, isn’t he?’ you can hear them say, ‘Why is he now trying to silence this woman just because she’s coming out with stuff he doesn’t like? He’s a hypocrite, isn’t he?’ Not quite. Look at what Charlie actually said:

“Jan’s paper, the Daily Mail, absolutely adores it when people flock to Ofcom to complain about something offensive, especially when it’s something they’ve only learned about second-hand via an inflammatory article in a newspaper. So it would undoubtedly be delighted if, having read this, you paid a visit to the Press Complaints Commission website (www.pcc.org.uk) to lodge a complaint about Moir’s article on the basis that it breaches sections 1, 5 and 12 of its code of practice.”

This is clearly more about just desserts than censorship. The Daily Mail, hoisted by its own petard. What’s good for the goose…

Cunt of the Week (23 July 2012) by Robin Grainger

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It’s not tricky being annoyed at something. It is tricky, however, finding just ONE cunt or symbol representing said cuntitude, upon which to base one’s annoyance. (I just used the antiquated term “one” there to describe myself. You must already think I am a cunt.)

I had many thoughts about whom or what my victim would be. I scanned the competition. Richard Hunter told the council to fuck off; Fraser Edwards used his wit to banish real ale drinkers (I’m informed he was tucking into a Bishop’s Finger at the time…) and the lovely John McGoldrick did away with an absolute knob of a customer. My contemporary cunt caller-outers seem tough to beat.

I thought perhaps to target my rage on racists. Nah, racists are too easy. It would be much more fun, hypocritical and overall cunty of me to focus my rage on an area of modern life. An area which spills in on us like a randy priest, not just on Sundays, but daily: social networks.

How ironic to hate social networks when this display of vitriol will be shown on social networks. I realise I am as much a slave to social networking as anyone is, and this annoys me. I’d much rather have posted the blog by carrier pigeon.

Social networking is helpful if you want to promote something, share music and engage in shoot-shittery,but some people want everyone to know fucking EVERYTHING. Who gives a fuck where you are eating? Who gives a fuck that you got a new job? All that does is remind me that I have eaten tear-sodden rice for 11 consecutive days while wanking over the fact that I might not get the woman with the glass eye at the job centre.

Social networks also take the fun out of life. If you are with mates drinking and have a laugh, why do you have to return home to find yourself tagged in a status that reads ‘Drinking and having a laugh’? You know! You were there! None of the world’s important events would have happened the way they did had social networking been around. The Last Supper would have simply been: ‘Jesus is in Nandos tagged with 12 others. The waiter totes knows we didn’t order the wine. LOL.’

At this juncture I’d like to express hatred for social networks simply because they have become a breeding ground for fucking abbreviations. Use the whole sentence you dicks. We didn’t learn speech just to piss it all up the cyber-toilet wall did we? The fact that this generation is progressively more retarded than the last isn’t a coincidence; it’s because morons are saying ‘LOL’ as opposed to actually laughing.

On the other hand, at least the JFK mystery wouldn’t have been a mystery: the killer would have ‘checked in’ at the book depository.

Social media is just too time consuming. It takes over everything. Remember the thrill of meeting anyone new and learning that they are interesting? Facebook timeline punched that joy right in the gooch. Now, if you are single and like someone, you can stalk them backwards to find out they had an eating disorder, own a Sex And The City boxset and have a fondness for Jedward. In the good old days it would take a long-term relationship to build up that kind of hatred for a person.

Social media also makes people – mostly retards – believe that their opinion is as valid as everyone else’s, when it is actually formed from ignorance and fucking stupidity; Before this, you wouldn’t have to see these people spew their polyp-heavy, tabloid-flavoured diarrhoea all over your life and laptop screen. More people care about what lip balm Katie Price wears with which to boredly glaze a monosyllabic moron’s cock, than they do about actually having a conversation with a real person in real life. Celebrities for the most part are cunts; they are worshipped on social networks by cunts, therefore social networks are cunts for keeping the whole cuntcycle in motion. Kill them all.

I suppose it all boils down to me really. I need social networks, but I fucking loathe them. Perhaps if I dedicate the rest of my life to tabloids and The Only Way Is Essex, with a full volume backing track by Bieber on repeat, I may find myself joining the masses of mindless, joyless fucks out there. Let’s hope I’m not converted. Or cuntverted.

PS: The original draft of the blog wasn’t about social networks, it was about onions. I fucking hate onions. I don’t trust them. No vegetable should have the power to make a person cry. Unless that vegetable is a terminally ill loved one.

Robin Grainger

THIS WEEK’S GUEST WRITER Robin Valo Grainger is a 23-year-old stand-up originally from Mordor (Cornhill, Banffshire), but now living in Edinburgh, because he thinks he’s better than you. Especially YOU. He’s been on the laugh circuit since September 2010, and in that time has made it as a semi-finalist in the Laughing Horse New Act Of The Year competition, and semi-ed it again for the Scottish Comedian Of The Year competition in both 2010 and 2011. Some cunts from The Skinny have said that he’s like ‘David Bowie going through an emo phase,’ and credited him with ‘swagger, energy and some great ideas.’ The Daily Record called him, ‘The most diabolic sex criminal since Glitter.’ Grainger alleged that he was abused by a ghost in 1998, and since then has never been able to watch an episode of Scooby Doo without screaming in primal terror and masturbating himself into a bloody, crying mess. Puzzlingly, any TV show featuring John Craven has exactly the same effect on him. Robin Grainger is really looking forward to being dead.

FOLLOW ROBIN ON TWITTER: @robinvalo
READ ROBIN’S BLOG: aboynamedrobin.wordpress.com
SEE HIS FRINGE SHOW: http://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/comedy/applause

‘You’ll find that one in the ‘Vaginal Fantasy’ section, Sir.’

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What’s happened to book genres recently? We knew where we were with Western, Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, Adventure, and the like, but now the branches of the Genre Tree bear the fruit of some strange and confounding sub-genres. One that caught my eye recently was Vaginal Fantasy.

What’s that then? Any book written by Derek Acorah? It got me wondering, and I imagined a few possible explanations for the phrase. At first I thought Vaginal Fantasy might be a whole sub-genre written for women who spend their lives dreaming of possessing increasingly absurd and far-fetched vaginas.

‘And so, as the sun set behind the hills of Dakota, I squatted in the half-dark, wishing with all of my heart that my fanny could be a leopard. In the morning, my wish had come true, and Tiddles, my pet cat, had paid the ultimate price.’

Perhaps it is the vaginas themselves that are fantasising:

‘Oh what a tortured cunt am I! How I dream of art, of culture, of music! What music I could play as a pianist, were I not condemned to be rammed by one… if only the world could hear me perform I know it would show its appreciation. Oh, how I long for that clap!’

(This next bit hinges on you pronouncing the word ‘vaginal’ in your head so that it rhymes with ‘Lionel’. Potato, pota-toe.) Or is Vaginal Fantasy the latest instalment of the weird Japanese video game series, but with a mingey twist?  If so, it’s begging for a Pokemon cross-over.

But, no, unsurprisingly, it’s none of these things. A book qualifies as Vaginal Fantasy if its intended readership comprises the sort of women who want a dash of porn with their schmaltzy romance. I suppose it’s just a snazzier way of saying ‘erotic fiction’. Thrills and Boom, if you like. Or Thrills and Broom, if you’re feeling really, really adventurous: JK Rowling take note.

‘I just made up the Titticus Outticus spell for a laugh. Who knew it would actually work, Hermione?’

Incidentally, JK, if you’re reading this, sweetheart, I’ve come up with a few ideas you can use if you want to do a Vaginal Fantasy version of Harry Potter – squeeze a few millions more out of the franchise before everyone gets swept away by the next big thing in young adult publishing, which will probably be a fantasy romance about a time-travelling, sex-mad college kid who just happens to be a flesh-eating zombie. Anyway, here are my suggestions for new, sexy Harry Potter titles:

Mary Squirter and the Thrill Officer’s Bone

Hairy Botter and the Chained Bear Secretes

Old Harry Scatter and the Pensioners of Ass-Kablam!

Hell, JK, why be so subtle? Why not just go the full hog and call it:

Harry Potter Goes Absolutely Fucking Bongo Mental and Pumps Everything That Moves, Even Dumbledore, And I’m Talking About the One That Died AFTER He Died

If more Scottish writers get in on the act then we could have our own sub-sub genre, simply called ‘Fanny-tasy.’ Anyway, 50 Shades of Grey is a good example of Vaginal Fantasy, although, having endured some of its chapters, I’ve decided that if a woman wants the book to have a sexy effect on her vagina then she should probably just roll it up and fud herself daft with it.

~~~~~

I stumbled across another sub-genre a few years ago as I was wandering zombie-like around 24-hour Asda. When passing through the book aisle my eyes chanced upon a ticket on a shelf that read: ‘Misery 3-Pack.’ Misery 3-Pack? Who the Hell thinks to themselves, ‘Ooh, I’ve got a wee night to myself here. Get the fire on, put my feet up, get a book out, all cosy. And do you know what I’m hankering after? A nice bit misery, that’s the ticket.’

And not just one chunk of misery: but a three pack! Human history is a long, bitter struggle for survival, throughout which we’ve made it our mission to remove as much misery as possible from our existence, largely through advances in sanitation, medicine and technology. And now, as most of us in the West are privileged to live in an era of comparative safety and luxury, we’re turning to misery as entertainment? What a peculiar little species we are.

Books in this genre are usually autobiographical, and always harrowing; tales of abuse endured and survived; stories that would make even Hitler reach for a box of hankies (although he probably did reach for a box of hankies when his lieutenants reported mass Jew deaths to him; using them to mop up something other than tears, I’d imagine). Typically, Misery Lit books contain sentences like this:

‘It was then I realised, as granny tethered me to a rat in the dungeon and prepared the greased javelin for my helpless starfish, that we probably weren’t going to Disneyland after all.’

As with sex, there’s big money in misery. I wish I could write some Misery Lit. The trouble is, before you can do that you need to have suffered quite a horrific childhood, so that you can draw from those experiences. And my childhood was quite decent. Not perfect – whose is? – but broadly speaking I had quite a comfortable, lower-middle-class upbringing, during which I never feared for my life, or wondered where the next meal was coming from. And the point is this: if my mum had taken the time to beat and shag me, I could’ve been a fucking millionaire by now. Selfish bitch.

50 Shades of Jew – Part 1

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My tribute to the work of EL James, written in the same style… but set in 1940s Germany. General Grey had asked to see me at Nazi HQ and I was so nervous. That morning I’d made myself some toast, spread the butter and then put it in my mouth. I then chewed the toast until it became wet and spongy between my lips and then what else could I do but swallow that toast? I get so nervous when I’m eating toast because I’m so awkward. The toast usually makes me so nervous when I’m eating it that I become like a young deer and drop it, awkwardly. Why is everybody else better at eating toast than me? No, no. I mustn’t think like that. My friend Gertie was with me. ‘Do you want some toast, Gertie?’ I asked her. She is beautiful and sleepy and tall and likes to wear green trousers and a nice white blouse with cuffs that look that way that cuffs do when people wear them. ‘Yes,’ said Gertie. ‘I would like some toast.’ So I made her some toast.

The General’s office was in a big glass, steel and sandstone building, with lots of steel, glass and sandstone. I was intimidated and nervous and was also feeling a little awkward and intimidated. Why are you so stupid, Anastasia Frank? There’s no need to feel so awkward, nervous and intimidated, the voice in my head told me. But it was too late. I was already feeling very, very nervous, intimidated and awkward.

I walked into the building and found that it was full of beautiful, blonde women with blue eyes, and also lots of beautiful, blonde men with blue eyes. Was there some kind of rule at Nazi HQ that they could only employ beautiful, blonde people with blue eyes, I wondered? They made me feel awkward, nervous and intimidated and my heart was beating so fast that it was like a bat out of hell reaching terminal velocity on its way up towards the stars on the back of a rollercoaster. God, why did I have to look so frumpy and Jewish?

‘Sit down,’ said one of the blonde women.

‘So you want me to sit down here?’ I asked nervously, playing with my long, brown hair.

‘Yes. That would be prudent at this time.’

‘And where would you like me to sit?’ I asked humbly.

‘In the chair,’ she replied, making it clear that she thought she was above me.

‘You would like me to sit in this chair?’ I asked awkwardly.

‘Yes.’

‘This one?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘You’d like me just to sit here on this chair?’

‘If you wouldn’t mind.’

‘OK. I will,’ I said, playing with a piece of my long, brown hair. Nervously.

‘Are you enjoying our long, protracted conversation, Ana Frank?’

‘Yes, I guess. What I like most about it is that not a single part of it seems superfluous in any way.’

‘I am glad that we are in agreement on this.’

‘I would be glad, too, if it wasn’t for how nervous I’m feeling right now.’

‘Would you like some toast?’ she asked.

‘Do you have any soup?’ I replied, regretting the words that had sprinted from my mouth the second they had started running through the air like some runner running a race, and wishing that the ground would open up and swallow me whole like a great big throat.

‘We don’t have any soup,’ she replied, raising a suspicious eyebrow.

~~~

God, what will General Grey look like, I thought to myself, as I nervously fiddled with my hair. To be at such a high rank in the German army he must be quite old. Possibly about 60, but still sexy enough, I was sure, to make it feel hot in my down below bits, out of which I pee but from which I sometimes get a hot, sudden gush of lady feelings. Holy crap, I was nervous. Why are you so nervous, Ana? You’re wearing your best maroon skirt and peach cardigan that suits you so well, after all.

‘General Grey will see you now,’ said a beautiful, blonde woman. I just about crapped myself. Holy gosh!

I was just about to rise from my seat like Icarus when an attractive young black man stepped from General Grey’s office, being manhandled by three sexy German officers. They had him in a vice-like grip, and were shouting something about ‘triggers’ to him. I didn’t quite catch it, but it sounded sexy. I wondered if I’d ever see that handsome African man again. I hoped so, but I wasn’t sure why. Something was happening beneath the satin of my undergarments, like a fish struggling to breathe in a small puddle of water. Holy crap, I was nervous.

‘Send the fucking Jew in!’ shouted the General, so coldly and sexily. I had not laid eyes on him yet, but I was sure that I could detect the ghost of a smile on his lips. Those beautiful, sculpted lips, I could see them now in the cinema of my mind, and they were having an effect on me that I couldn’t describe… or something.

I was so nervous that I did a forward roll into General Grey’s office, barrelling through a Nazi flag that was draped from the ceiling. Gee whiz, I was nervous. He stormed over sexily and ripped it from my body, casting it aside like a Honeymoon bedsheet. I felt so naked, even though I still had all of my clothes on. I looked up at him and into those eyes – god, those beautiful, attractive, cold, horrible, sexy, disgusting, vile, wonderful, multi-coloured, award-winning, tortoise-shaped, amazing, lickable, deserted, massive, steely, hungry, gorgeous, yukky, arrogant, indescribable, grey eyes – and found myself blushing, turning the same colour as a paperback copy of Animal Farm.

His office had a big wooden desk in the middle of it, and a window, and some walls, and on those walls were some pictures and that. And the floor was made of floor tiles, and they were black, and he also had a chair that I guessed was handy for him when he wanted to sit down at his desk. I found myself burningly curious to see him sit down, and I didn’t know why. You know why, Ana, said the voice in my head. No I don’t, I replied, blushing and angry at my own thoughts. I don’t know what you’re talking about! You want to see those calves, and to become his leg farmer, Ana… or something. I was angry that the voice might be right.

‘Are you gay?’ I asked him.

‘Are you a Jew?’ he replied angrily, the ghost of a smile dancing on his lips.

He was beautiful. Imagine the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen, and that was him. For some inexplicable reason I just knew that one day I’d like him to go at my womb with a Black and Decker drill and a set of Allen keys.

‘Take this, you vile, mongrel bitch,’ he said romantically, pinning a beautiful yellow star to my cardigan. ‘I’ll be coming for you in the next few days.’

So he wanted to see me again. I had never felt so happy. But did he really mean it? Oh, my world was upside down.

‘I really mean it,’ he said, the ghost of a smile on his lips, as he sexily punched out my  front teeth.

50 Shades of Shite

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It’s like something out of Doctor Who. All of our women have gone into a hypnotic half-coma, precipitated by the arrival of a strange and mysterious alien artefact. It came as if from nowhere, but within days had enslaved the fairer sex the world over, giving their eyes a zombified glaze and turning their brains to mulch. The artefact is a tome containing ancient and magical words which, when read, transport their readers’ minds to the 19th century, back to a time where being smacked around and hate-fucked by a rich psychopath was considered romantic.

I’m talking, of course, about 50 Shades of Grey, the first instalment in a trilogy of erotic fiction by English author EL James. The word ubiquitous was invented with this book’s arrival in mind. It’s become a full-blown fad, just like Nazism in the 30s.

Women are convincing themselves it’s the most romantic piece of pussy-twitching genius they’ve ever read. It was bad enough when all of the adult women I knew were creaming themselves over children’s author JK Rowling, but this time it’s gone too far. At least Harry Potter never tied Hermione to a piano and shoved a wand up her twat.

My girlfriend’s been ensnared. I’ve never seen a book devoured so quickly. Three books, actually, because she’s on the last one now. She’s reading EL James in bed, on the couch, on the toilet, in the car. She even read it during an argument, I shit you not. Up came the book, covering her face like a printed-and-bound middle finger. The worst thing is, she freely admits that she thinks the book is poorly written and shit (a bit like this website), but claims to be hopelessly addicted to it nonetheless. She might as well sook EL James’s words up with a syringe and then inject them into her arm.

‘Oh, but I need to know what happens next,’ she says. This isn’t a book: it’s the printed equivalent of a salacious conversation taking place between two nosy gossips over a tenement garden’s fence.

‘Ooooh, did you hear about our Anastasia?’

‘Ooooh, I know, shacking up with that rich guy.’

‘He ties her up, you know.’

‘Oooooh, that’s the least of it, I heard. Hits her with a paddle and shoves things up her muff, our Jeannie said.’

‘Oooooh, I’m lucky if my Frank even takes his socks off in bed, never mind shoving things up my muff!’

Apparently, this book is sexy, despite the opinion of one Amazon.co.uk reviewer, who wrote: ‘The fact that the book is pornographic wouldn’t bother me, if it weren’t for the fact that is sounds like sexual encounters as described by an 11-year old.’

All of the women I’ve spoken to who are reading this book claim that it gives them hot flushes of arousal, sometimes striking them in the most public of places. So, guys, if you see a red-faced woman squirming in her seat as she reads this book on the bus, get in there and try your luck. But don’t bother with any cheesy chat-up lines. Just look deep into her eyes, and then punch her hard in the tits. Honestly, this book makes me think that if they rewrite the Koran to feature spanking paddles and dildos, we’ll all be muslim this time next week. Where’s Germaine Greer when you need her?

Ladies, ladies, ladies. Have you seen a picture of the book’s author? Here it is, here. Take a good, long look at her. She’s the one who’s been giving you vaginal palpitations. Her. The sort of sexually malfunctioning wet-fannied fatty you’d find manning the jizz-fest on 0898 sex-chat lines. Do you really want to be rubbing yourself raw at night because of the fantasy world this menopausal momma has created? You might as well get your grannie to read you ‘The Tropic of Cancer’ as you do squat-thrusts on a love-egg.

But how can I say so much about the book when I haven’t even read it? True, I’m an ignorant bastard. But not for long. 50 Shades of Grey is sitting next to me on the couch, begging me to read it like the dirty slut it is. And I’m going to. Either I’ll have my hypothesis confirmed, or be completely shocked at how wrong I was, and possibly send EL James a bunch of flowers and a golden dildo. Whatever happens, I can use the book itself to spank my girlfriend raw.

Stay tuned for my fair, balanced and reasonable reaction to this fucking heap of illiterate shite.

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In the meantime, click on the link below to read ’50 Shades of Jew’, written in tribute to EL James and in an exaggerated version of her style.

Cunt of the Week (09 Jul 2012) by Jordan RA Mills

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Jump on board Jordan’s Fun Bus. Final, and only, destination: Hell.

I’ve wanted to write a Cunt Of The Week piece since Jamie introduced this section of his blog, but didn’t quite get round to it. Partly this was because it would require deciding on the precise cunt I wished to afford the title, and that meant narrowing down a myriad of options. There are many cunts I have encountered, some anatomical, some abusive terms of hate, and some abstract applications of the word.

I have a couple of past bosses who are cunts, but I don’t like to write about them because it would take too long to illustrate their inherent cuntishness with innumerable examples; Edinburgh is a cunt, but I risk alienating much of the readership (and my potential comedy audience) if I pursue that. I think smokers, and the smoking ban, and cyclists, are all cunts. These are predictable, run-of-the-mill targets for the label, though. As is That Cunt Cameron, the man busily fucking up life for everybody in the UK, and I feel I would have to do some proper research to condemn him eloquently. Instead, I wrote FUCK THE TORIES across the back of a shirt, and wear it everywhere. It’s heartfelt, and something we can all agree on. Fuck them.

One American solution to the Megabus problem.

Having told you some of my considerations for the title, all of them dismissed, it is left to announce my present Cunt Of The Week. And what an utter fucking cunt I have lined up for the (dis)honour. Despite not having a TV, or even the internet (beyond the capabilities of my phone), it didn’t escape my attention that there was an incident on a Megabus the other day.

I’ve made many trips around the country in the past twelve years – up and down to London, Dundee, Edinburgh, Manchester, Nottingham, Buxton, Birmingham, for work, holidays, or for gigs. Some of these were spent in the company of friends, many more were conducted solo. Bus and coach travel on this island is a fucking nightmare at the best of times, regardless of the operator. My first ever trip down to London took eleven hours instead of (an equally unpalatable) nine; another trip down was marred by the driver blasting music all through the night, preventing us from sleeping; this was the same trip where they started to leave the service station before the scheduled time, leaving people behind.

An overnight bus trip from London to Glasgow took an hour to board, and then the double-decker broke down as we passed the Thames. And so we sat there, the engine turning over and over, before the driver eventually announced that a second bus would be joining us and we would have to transfer over to it. Twenty minutes’ later, he finally managed to get the engine going again.

On the way up the road, with no further problems, the secondary driver came up the stairs to admonish somebody for some minor misdemeanour – drinking, I think. Despite the wayward passenger apologising, the primary driver pulled onto the hard shoulder shortly afterwards, marched up the stairs to reiterate his mate’s threats (adding one about abandoning the guy at the next services), and then returned downstairs, whereupon he singularly failed to restart the bus. So it was, therefore, that a cramped and packed double-decker sat on the side of the motorway for two hours at 3a.m., again adding hours to an already unpleasant experience.

There are further personal examples too, but my complaints have always fallen on deaf ears and I long ago decided that it was always – ALWAYS – worth the extra cash to take the train or to fly instead. I cannot remember ever taking a coach trip to any part of the UK and disembarking thinking, ‘What a wonderful journey, I enjoyed that.’ Naw. It just doesn’t happen. 

The new Hamlet ad, perhaps?

This week’s cunt, then, is whoever took it upon themselves to prolong the misery of an entire coachload of passengers by seeing something ‘suspicious’ (in the form of an electronic cigarette: witchcraft, I suspect, to some of the cretins who populate this sorry excuse for a nation). Instead of challenging the person, or quietly alerting the driver, they managed to get the bus pulled over, caused the motorway to be closed in both directions, and get responded to by – at the BBC’s estimate – 24 armed response officers, 18 fire appliances, 25 police vehicles, 4 ambulances, 2 bomb disposal units, and 2 sniffer dogs. That’s cuntery that you can quantify right there. 

Is THIS how it happened? Full, second-by-second reconstruction to follow.

Whoever you are, well done for being such a spineless cunt that you couldn’t simply ask, ‘Excuse me, what are you doing?’ and instead grassed an innocent person up to a fucking bomb squad. Everyone on the coach was made to leave it with guns trained on them, and as someone who grudges the slightest delay caused by a fuck-witted backward passenger, I can only begin to imagine the sheer hatred I would have for you had I been on that bus.

I hope you are suitably embarrassed, you time-wasting cunt.

SOURCES: 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18738402
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-18728246
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-18728303

Jordan RA Mills

THIS WEEK’S GUEST WRITER Jordan R.A. Mills writes lots, some would say too much, but he is mostly a good cunt and so people tolerate his wordy indulgence. He keeps a blog about his stand-up comedy adventures – http://jramills.wordpress.com/author/jramills/ – and recently wrote an acclaimed short satire of the medium, which was filmed and can be watched here: http://vimeo.com/41548848

Jordan is perhaps best known for devising and producing the Children’s ITV series ‘Gangsta Troll’, which featured the aforementioned troll and his two best mates: an owl who wore gold medallions, and chain-smoked with the help of a terrified sparrow; and a labrador called ‘Big Dave’, who could scratch hip hop records. Everyone’s favourite episode was the one where Gangsta Troll had a rap battle in the street against a wise-cracking pigeon. The series was cancelled when Jordan produced the episode ‘ABC, Open Wide For Me’, in which Gangsta Troll took lots of magical meth that caused him to shit letters of the alphabet into a policeman’s mouth.

Jordan died in 1987.

FOLLOW JORDAN ON TWITTER: @JRA_Mills

Blakey the Jakey: A Modern Scottish Fairytale – The Conclusion

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The story so far: as we prepare for the concluding chapter of the Blakey saga, we find our hero in his grandma’s house. He’s lost his money, his family, his self-respect (what little he possessed) and now grandma is the only one who can help him turn things around. In a nutshell: he’s fucked. Or is he? (yes, yes he is)

Catch up with Part 1 – http://www.jamieandrew-withhands.com/2012/06/10/btjp1/

Catch up with Part 2 – http://www.jamieandrew-withhands.com/2012/06/14/btjp2/

Catch up with Part 3 – http://www.jamieandrew-withhands.com/2012/06/22/btjp3/

Catch up with Part 4 –  http://www.jamieandrew-withhands.com/2012/06/28/btjp4/

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As Grandma listened, with a mounting sense of boredom, to Blake’s tale of business acumen gone wrong, she occupied herself by burning a chunk off of the armchair and crumbling it into a large cigarette paper.

This was because all of Grandma’s furniture, from the armchair to the sideboard to the footrest to the mantle-piece, was made out of massive, sculpted blocks of cannabis resin. Her footrest alone had a street value of thousands.

‘So, ye sold yer maw’s car tae some jakey at the market, eh? Ye daft wee bastard,’ laughed Grandma, rolling the rest of her fancy cigarette into a perfect cone shape.

‘Aye,’ sighed Blake. ‘and ah cannae go hame till I’ve goat the cash back. She’ll kill me, gran.’

‘Take yin ae ma shelves,’ she said, pointing behind her, ‘Ye’ll make gid profit.’

‘Thanks, gran, that’s magic,’ smiled Blake, clapping his hands with delight.

Grandma indulged herself in a moment of thoughtful inhalation. ‘Aye, son,’ she began, exhaling a jet of sweet-scented smoke in his face, ‘But if ye dinnae pay me back in a week yell get yer knees broken.’

Blake nodded.

‘Ah mean it. Business, family or no. Ye’ll be on crutches.’

Blake actually rose and kissed his grandma. On the forehead, though. And quickly.

The blaring wail of police sirens assaulted his ears before the sound slowed and died, like the batteries had failed. A high-pitched squeal then made way for an echoed-clicking as a policeman’s voice bellowed through a loudspeaker.

‘We know you’re in there, Grandma, the game’s up.’

‘Fuck,’ she lamented.

‘Ho, you, ah didnae lament,’ said an irritated grandma to Jamie Andrew as he wrote her words on this screen, ‘and ah’m no irritated, ah’m fuckin’ furious. Efter ah escape from the police ah’m gonnae come efter you and knock fuck out of you.’

Jamie was certain that Grandma wouldn’t survive her encounter with the police.

‘Third wall?’ laughed Grandma, ‘Jamie Andrew, ah’ll pit you through the fourth, fifth, sixth and fuckin’ seventh wall, ya cunt!’

Anyway, Grandma leapt from her seat and wrenched a shelf from the sideboard, handing it to Blake. Blake accepted it and tucked it firmly into his jacket. The boy looked like he was half a turtle’s head away from destroying his boxer shorts.

‘Get oot the back door and run, Blakey,’ she implored, ‘and take this tae.’

She handed him the cone from her mouth, slapped him on the back and swiftly ushered him towards the kitchen.

As Blake threw open the back door and began his rush into Grandma’s garden, and the hedgerow and park beyond, he could hear her loading her pump-action shotgun and striking up a dialogue with the officers out front.

‘Right, little pigs, come get it!’

‘Grandma, if you don’t let us in we’ll be rough, we’ll be tough and we’ll blow your door down.’

‘No by the hairs oan ma sticky big baws!’

*** 

And so Blake merrily zig-zagged his way through the streets, selling chunks of his shelf along the way until a long line of pink-eyed, crisp-munching pot-heads were shadowing him like a dragon’s tail. The only sounds that could be heard were a hundred or more people crunching Monster Munches, snapping off segments of Dairy Milk bars and frantically trying to re-arrange their JSA appointments on their mobile phones.

‘Follow that wee laddie,’ they shouted.

Blake happily puffed and sucked on his cone: the more it burned, the slower he and his vast procession of stoners became. With stacks of tens, twenties and fifties poking out of his jacket pockets, the happiness overwhelmed him and he began humming, shouting and singing pro-IRA songs, all the while mimicking the playing of a flute.

Children saw the procession and hollered with glee: ‘It’s the pie-eyed Piper of Hampden!’ And they followed.

‘Wait a minute,’ said a confused bystander. ‘Isn’t it more the other side that’s traditionally associated with flute-playing? This muddled sectarian reference doesn’t make any sense!’

‘It’s called creative license, you picky prick,’ said another bystander.

‘It’s called thon Jamie Andrew bein’ a daft cunt,’ giggled grandma as she thundered down the road with her shotgun. ‘And ah’m no gigglin’, ya fuckin’ smart arse!’

***

Blake arrived back at his family home with more than enough money for a new car and a nice holiday. He was eager to make his mother proud and happy. And having a roof over his head and not getting his throat slit was a bonus, too.

‘Hello,’ he shouted, fingers prising open the letterbox. ‘Maw?’ he shouted through it again. ‘Aw, YUK!’ Blake wiped away his piss from earlier with disgust.

Eventually, just as Blake had started kicking the door with all of his might, it opened to reveal his mother, half-naked and with a large half-naked bear of a man by her side.

‘Aw, it’s you,’ she snarled. ‘Thought I told ye no tae come back.’

‘But maw,’ beamed Blake, holding up the money, ‘I goat aw the cash back. Double. Triple even! In fact, ah widnae be surprised if it wiz qua… kawrd… kwardroo… fuckin’ four times as much!’

His mother snatched the money from his hands and stuffed it in her blouse. ‘Gid,’ she smiled, ‘But ye can still piss oaf, because ah met a new man, we’re gettin’ mayried and we’re movin’ tae a different toon.’

‘Bit…’ Blake was aghast. He stared up at the big fellow bear-hugging his mother. ‘You’re the…you’re that bouncer fae the nightclub,’ said Blake.

‘Aye,’ the big man replied, ‘Yer maw was oot dancin’ last week an she loast yin aye er orthy-pedic shoes, fir er corns and that. I kinna thought it wiz hers so ah brought it roond the day, she tried it oan, it fitted and then…well…’

He winked.

‘Then he telt me he had a few boab and pumped us on your bed, ye wee dick,’ beamed his mother, before slamming the door in Blake’s face.

***

Blake found himself sitting back on the grass where all of this had started. He passed the time throwing stones at the neighbours’ cars and listening to his mother’s shrieks of delight from the house.

Before long he felt a large hand on his shoulder.

‘BAD DAY, LITTLE MAN?’ asked the genie.

‘Aye, somethin’ like that.’

‘TELL ME ABOUT IT. I HAD TO QUIT MY JOB TODAY. STRESS. I’M OFF ON ILL HEALTH, CONSIDERING EARLY RETIREMENT.’

‘Aye?’ replied Blake, not really interested; too busy staring at some teenage temptress teetering across the road, all tits and legs. ‘How wiz London, ye ken, wi they seven wee guys in the car?’

‘IT STARTED OFF QUITE BADLY, A BIT MUCH TO TAKE. I FELT BETTER ABOUT IT ALL ONCE I’D DISEMBOWELED THEM AND FED THEIR INNARDS TO THE DOGS, THOUGH. GUESS I’M NOT CUT OUT FOR THIS SORT OF WORK ANYMORE.’

‘Dunno whit ah’m gonnae do either, like. Nae hoose, nae family, nae money.’

‘TELL YOU WHAT,’ smiled the genie, ‘HOW ABOUT I GRANT YOU ONE MORE WISH, ON THE HOUSE. ANYTHING. ANYTHING YOU WANT. I’LL GRANT YOU MY LAST WISH. GO ON, KNOCK YOURSELF OUT.’

Blake stared on as the girl’s tight buttocks swayed out of view. He looked up at the genie with a relieved smile and then back down at the ground. He was thinking hard.

‘COME ON, ANYTHING. MONEY, FAME, WOMEN, POWER, AN ISLAND, A COUNTRY, A HIT RECORD, THE PLAYBOY MANSION, AN ARMY, A PLANET, THE UNIVERSE? ANYTHING! USE YOUR IMAGINATION! HONESTLY, ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING! I WANT TO HELP YOU.’

Blake stood up, full of hope and excitement, finding it hard to restrain the impulse to grab and kiss the genie.

‘It’s goat to be money,’ laughed Blake, jumping with delight, ‘I wish I wiz the richest person in the whole world.’

Blake stopped and stood deathly still, screwed his eyes up expectantly and tensed his shoulders. He expected to open his eyes to see a fortress of gold surrounding him, a throne at his rear and all the women of the world lying like a naked, writhing carpet at his feet. He opened them and all he saw was a giant middle finger pressed into his face.

‘SWIVVEL, YOU LITTLE BITCH. WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS IS, A FUCKING FAIRY TALE?’

Pouf. And he was gone.

Blake went off in search of some more Buckfast. Not to rub this time. Just to drink.        

THE END

Cunt of the Week (02 July 2012) by Euan Meikle

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Greetings fellow citizens. When Jamie asked me to nominate a Cunt Of The Week, I had to think long and hard (two words not normally found in the same sentence as Jamie Andrew). This world has a plethora of ‘see you hen teas’ to choose from, names such as Jeremy Clarkson, George Osbourne and Pastor Fred Phelps all came to mind as being worthy of weekly cunthood. However, I decided not to waste time venting bile on such small fry and so have opted to line up her Majesty the Queen in my crosshairs (metaphorically speaking, of course, as no doubt MI5 are taking notes).

Firstly, I want to state that I don’t believe Elizabeth Windsor, an 84 year old granny, who no doubt loves her friends, family and corgis, is a particularly bad person. She’s certainly not up there with Hitler, Freddy Krueger or whoever came up with the Go Compare adverts. My beef is with this imaginary entity that centuries of tradition and ritual, pomp and circumstance have created: The Queen.

It gets my goat that in the 21st century a perfectly ordinary woman, with the standard number of heads, legs and genitals, is somehow perceived as superior to the rest of us purely because some of her very distant ancestors won a few battles. Since Tharg hit Zog over the head with a club in order to steal his woolly mammoth burger, humans have always tended towards hierarchies of some sort. However, in this day and age, surely our leaders ought to have to earn the power, respect and fancy hats that come with the position.

The weirdness of the whole concept is best summed up by taking a look at ‘God Save the Queen’ (the original, not the Sex Pistols’ song). I’m not even going to go into the offensive verses about ‘rebellious Scots to crush’, and ‘beating up Welshmen who look at you a bit funny.’

This song is essentially a request that God, who made the whole universe and all of time and space and reality, take time out from his busy schedule to take a personal interest in the health and well-being of this one, wee old lady. Later verses get even more surreal, imploring the almighty to rescue her from any potential assassins, and even interfere in the politics of rival nations. One can imagine God sitting on a cloud somewhere, thinking: ‘Well, I really ought to do something about cancer, and the whole Syria situation is getting a bit sketchy, but my top priority has to be showering my choicest gifts on Lizzy and confounding the knavish tricks of the French.’

Unfortunately it seems we’re going to be stuck with the royals for some time yet, barring them being outed as giant lizards from another planet. Just remember, as Johnny Rotten once sang: ‘those tourists are money.’

THIS WEEK’S GUEST WRITER: Euan Meikle was the first man in western Europe to successfully have full sexual intercourse with a musk ox. Ironically, given his hatred for the title, The Queen wanted to recognise this feat and give Euan a Knighthood for ‘Services to Extraordinary Acts of Beastiality.’ Euan now lives in Stirling, Scotland, with the musk ox, and their three children. He spends his time making the kind of music they play in Guantanamo Bay to get the terrorists to confess, and you can listen to it in all of its electronic glory, here:  http://soundcloud.com/yuan-mekong.

FOLLOW EUAN ON TWITTER: You can’t: he isn’t on Twitter, the technophobic slag.

Cunts of the Month – CoTW Retrospective

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Welcome to our first monthly Cunt of the Week retrospective. Below the ugly mugs of last month’s guest writers are their names and their nominated Cunt. Click on the picture you want, and prepare to be transported to their rants.

Tam Wotherspoon – NORTH CAROLINA

 

Rik Carranza – MATTEL

Fraser Edwards – REAL ALE DRINKERS

Richard Hunter – ARGYLL AND BUTE COUNCIL

The Rain in June Falls Mostly on the Toon: Grangemouth Gala Day 2012

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We just don’t do carnivals, fairs or fetes with as much aplomb or on the same grand scale as the Americans. Maybe it would help if we smiled occasionally, but we’re genetically incapable of such a facial contortion. We Scots would only smile if God proved his existence once and for all by a) reaching a thumb from Dover to Berwick and squashing the English like woodlice, and then b) rounding off the miracle by replacing the North Sea with heroin.

Or, at a pinch, we’d smile if there was a special episode of ‘You’ve Been Framed’ in which each and every video featured David Cameron being stabbed in the balls by a different angry dwarf in a kilt.

Yes, the Americans like a good smile. If the Grangemouth Gala Day was held in California, USA, (which would be rather unlikely, I’m forced to admit) it would be a non-stop, 24-hour, noisy orgasm of vim, streamers, colour, mariachi bands and pomp, featuring half-naked back-flipping pom-pom girls – with smiles so blinding they could down aircraft – jiggling their breasts with the enthusiasm of a force 4 earthquake. There would be a 50ft-tall animatronic Mickey Mouse shooting fireworks out of its bell-end into the hungry, gaping mouth of a robot Pluto, as sixteen million children wept with joy. And somewhere, somehow, there would be guys in red bell-boy jackets playing trumpets on the backs of motorbikes – upside down and through their arses.

This year, in Grangemouth, Scotland, the Grangemouth Gala Day looked like… well, it looked like exactly what it was: a procession of miserable cunts in anoraks shuffling through the rain in search of the most suitable cliff for an act of mass suicide. It looked like there’d been a delivery of crepe paper and face-paints to a funeral march. If you haven’t visited Grangemouth before and find yourself wondering what it looks like, have a gander at the drug-riddled communities in HBO’s ‘The Wire’, but imagine that everybody’s white.

So What is the Gala Day?

Well, it’s technically a Children’s Day, which makes me a bit of a cock for slating it. It’s not really meant to be enjoyed by the likes of me, childless interloper that I am. What’ll I be doing next? Telling you how shit I found the latest episode of Sesame Street because it wasn’t nearly as good as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?

The galas themselves started off as annual celebrations for miners and mining communities, but the focus of the celebrations was shifted for the following wonderful reason:

In the late Nineteenth century, some Miners’ Gala Days were given over to children in order to reduce drunkenness.

Resources for Learning in Scotland website

And we all know how successful a strategy that turned out to be. Here’s the zinger:

Gun Terror of Oilman 

A teenage thug pointed a gun at the head of a man who told him off for breaking bottles in a kids’ play area.

Gary Martin told 45-year-old oil rig worker Jim Kelly: ‘You’re dead.’

But Mr Kelly grappled Martin to the ground and got the air pistol off him, Falkirk Sheriff Court heard yesterday.

The terror attack happened on Grangemouth Gala Day in June.

Lawyer Andy Bryson said Martin was ‘exceedingly drunk’ at the gala day.
www.thefreelibrary.com

Ah, yes. The only flaw in that plan was that by 2012 all of the children would be alcoholics, too. Alcohol does indeed still play a huge part in the Grangemouth Gala Day. Like they say of the 1960s: if you can remember what happened, then you weren’t actually there. Grangemouth has other things in common with the 1960s, in that it’s full of incredibly racist people with shite haircuts taking drugs and having unfussy sex with strangers.

(actually, a joke I used to tell on-stage about Grangemouth is that it’s a lot like Amsterdam: in that it’s completely flat, and filled with drugs and whores.)

So What Happens ‘an That?

No smart alec remarks: this arch is pretty fucking cool. And The Muppets was the only TV show that made me shut up as a child.

What happens is this: each year a ‘royal family’ is assembled from one of the local primary schools, a different school having the honour of doing this each year until it’s back to the start of the cycle again. Kids at the year’s chosen school are then asked if they’d like to volunteer themselves to be one of the gala’s persons of special significance. Those who do are then whittled down by their schoolmates by means of a popularity contest, until each of the main roles are filled: Queen, Ladies in Waiting, Paiges, a Flower Queen etc.

The girl elected Queen (Republicans take note) then has the arduous task of selecting just one of her classmates to be sealed inside a BMW and slammed into a wall by a drunk driver. OK, I made that bit up.

There’s no King of the Gala Day, but one lucky boy does get to be the Prince, whose role it is to follow the Queen around muttering increasingly unhelpful racist remarks. OK, I made that bit up, too. But they should introduce that role. It’d be so easy to find viable candidates amongst the people of Grangemouth.

Dustbin Beaver is actually slang for a Grangemouth girl.

The parents of ‘the royals’ then have to spend £80 million trillion pounds building an arch display over their homes. If they’re poor, they simply steal the necessary materials, or just selotape bits of A4 paper that read: ‘ALL HAYL THE QUEAN’ to their windows. Some of the displays are incredible. You know, fairy-tale castles, enchanted forests, 1940s cinemas. And some of them are shit.

On the day itself – where it’s usually raining despite the event taking place towards the end of June – trucks filled with children (that makes it sound like a pogrom: no concentration camps are involved), and floats prepared by other schools and local businesses, and pipe bands, and brass bands, and veterans, and such like, all form a long procession through the streets, before arriving in the central park for the crowning ceremony. And, as we’ve already established, lots of people get drunk.

Oh, and there are lots of flags everywhere. Or bunting, as they call it. Which sounds to me a little too much like a sex act. And a jolly good one at that.

In closing, as I’ve already stated, it’s actually a grand day out for the folks of Grangemouth, especially for those with relatives taking part in the procession. And some of the arches have been super-awesome in this and previous years, as you’ll see from the pictures below. (OK, part of this, like with the Skinflats article, is life-insurance, but I mean it, too, honest!) Actually, my niece was in the procession this year, and she was awesome, so get that roond ye.

GALLERY

Graceland in Grangemouth, circa 2008.

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And, of course, this happens at the Grangemouth Gala Day shows every year, and must be shared with the world:

BEHOLD… COBO! Urban dance legend of Grangemouth! Enjoy the video…

watch?v=x_pcZctvizQ

Blakey the Jakey: A Modern Scottish Fairytale – Pt 4

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The story so far: Blakey is having a bad day. He’s been kicked out of his mum’s house, lost all of his money, and missed out on a chance to exploit a genie. Things are looking bleak for Blake for him. Still, at least he’s not part of the Seven Little Wasters’ crew. What a bunch of bawbags they are. Blakey’s last resort is to fall upon the mercy of his grandmother, and that’s where he’s heading now… with a mounting sense of trepidation. You’ll understand why in a minute or so. She’s a ‘character’, and we know what it means when we describe someone in those terms: that they’re fucking mental.

Catch up with Part 1: http://www.jamieandrew-withhands.com/2012/06/10/btjp1/

Catch up with Part 2: http://www.jamieandrew-withhands.com/2012/06/14/btjp2/

Catch up with Part 3: http://www.jamieandrew-withhands.com/2012/06/22/btjp3/

————————————————————————————————————————-

Grandma’s council house was the only property in the street that was still decked out with Christmas fairy-lights – in March. They stayed flashing and pulsing three hundred and sixty five days a year. It was always Christmas time at grandma’s.

Wooden animals, painted bright and bold, were planted like trees in the over-grown grass. A pink flamingo, leg cocked, sat in the centre of the lawn, surrounded by cheeky monkeys, laughing lions and timid tigers. Little bonzai trees, at the foot of the hedge, lined the inside perimeter of the grass. Red balloons, at least fifteen of them, bounced and floated everywhere. On the front door, a varnished, oval plaque proclaimed, ‘Number 89. Gingerbread House. Catch Me If You Can – You Scum.’

Blake shook his head at the tacky display and gave a furtive glance around as he approached the door. Blake never liked admitting the blood connection between him and Grandma. She could be a tough old bitch but…

‘This yin’s aboot ready fur the nuthoose,’ he scowled, kicking a balloon out of his way.

Blake rapped loudly and quickly on the door, jamming the buzzer with his free hand at the same time. A jet of pressure cascaded down from his shoulders to his toes. He had to get in and out of public view, or he felt like he’d explode.

‘Come oan, come oan!’

Beep! Beep!

Blake heard the sounds of hip-hop hammering the air. He turned around to see a gleaming red hatchback sports car parked on the road outside of his grandma’s gate. The seven little wasters were piled in the front and back, bottles of Buckfast clasped in each of their hands. A large man with a blue turban sat in the driver’s seat – with a very unhappy look on his face.

‘Ho, Blakey boy! Is zat yer girlfriend’s hoose?’

Laughter.

‘Ho, ho! Wait till we tell orra boys in oor street! They’ll pish themsel’s!’

‘Ah didnae ken there wiz a Disney World in this toon!’

Shrill whoops of laughter.

‘Whose yer girlfriend: Minnie Moose?’

Whoop, whoop!

‘Well, cannae hang aroond. We’re aff tae London, go tae Stringfellas an that.’

‘Aye, an Soho! Get wee Harry’s end away!’

‘Ma end’s away, ye cheeky bastard.’

‘Settle, Harry, wankin’ disnae coont, pal!’

‘KILL ME, PLEASE. MAKE IT QUICK.’

Ho, ho. Whoop! Whoop! It was becoming like an episode of Rikki Lake written by Irvine Welsh.

‘Aye, we’ve goat a million poonds, ya dancer!’

A bottle of Buckfast came spinning from the back seat of the car towards Blake.

‘Catch.’

Blake did, firmly between his two hands.

‘Least we can dae.’

‘Noo ye can get pished up and sook yer granny’s baws!’

The car screeched away. Blakey fired off a few salvos of expletives, but the seven little fuckers were too far away to be hit by them.

The door to Grandma’s house opened and Blake shoved his way in before daylight had a chance to cast its revelatory spotlight upon Grandma. The door slammed shut behind him. Before him, fat arms extended and proportionately fat lips pouted.

‘Come gee yer Grannie a big kiss, Blakey.’

‘Eh…nut. Ah dinnae think so.’

She snatched the Buckfast from his hands and kissed it instead.

‘Hey, whit are ye…,’ Blake began to protest.

‘Dinnae start shit, Blakey, or ye’ll be through that wa’.’

Blake let out a sigh of defeat, shrugged his shoulders, and then laid his rucksack by the door. Blake’s grandma placed the Buckfast on the kitchen counter and then returned to the hall.

‘Dinnae mention it, gran.’

Blake’s gran wore a criminally short skirt, orange nylon tights, stilt-like high heel shoes, a floral patterned boob tube, and her face contained enough make-up to allow a clown to feel natural. This might have been acceptable attire if, for one, they had both lived in an alternative universe (or San Francisco); for second, if grandma had been younger; for third, if she didn’t have tattoos encrusting half of her body, a large scar cascading down her cheek, and biceps to make a post-spinach Popeye sweat; and, most importantly, fourthly: if grandma had been a woman. A fat cigar was jammed into the left side of grandma’s mouth, dripping hot ash onto the carpet and sending plumes of acrid smoke up Blake’s nostrils.

‘Get ben that kitchen and get the tea on or I’ll gee ye a fisting ye’ll never forget.’

Grandma burst through into her living room leaving Blake, ashen white, to deal with the tea.

The kitchen door was slightly ajar and Blake could hear voices drifting through as he filled the kettle with water.

‘My, grandma, what big hands you have.’

‘Aye, a’ the better tae grab ye with!’

‘My, grandma, what a big mouth you have.’

‘Aye, a’ the better tae plluggg mummble gobbo shlurp en floosre…’

‘Ho, grandma, mind thay big teeth on ma jed, will ye?’

‘Mmmmm mmmm mmmm mmmmm.’

‘My, grandma, what’s this huge thing? What an absolutely massive big, fat, hard co…’

The screeching whistle of the boiling kettle never did announce itself at a more appropriate moment. Blake kicked the kitchen door firmly shut and tried to stymie his third panic attack of the week.

Grandma eventually entered the kitchen, adjusting her bra and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Blake could hear the front door as it slammed shut. A set of lipstick-stained teeth grinned at Blake.

‘Just seeing yer grandpa off,’ stated Grandma in her deep, husky voice. Grandma whipped a tenner out of her bra and shoved it into Blake’s hand. ‘Take that, son, yer grandpa owed me that fir a job ah did fir him last week.’

Blake gagged back a faint dribble of vomit.

Blake’s grandpa was also a man. His grandpa visited his grandma six to seven times a day, six days a week and managed to be a completely different man each time.

‘So whit can ah dae fir ye, Blakey, son? Ye only ever visit yer poor grandma when yer hiding fae ma sister or efter something. So which yin is it?’

‘Baith, grandma. Baith.’

‘Ah’ll bet it’s money.’

‘Aye, grandma. Jist a loan, ken?’

‘It’s no for drugs is it, Blakey?’ she asked, issuing a cold stare.

‘Naw, gran, naw.’

‘Right,’ she nodded, satisfied, ’cause there’s nae need fir that. You shid huv the gid sense to deal so ye can get them for free, ken?’

‘Aye, gran.’

‘Gid boy. Noo, get they teas, ye wee cunt, an let’s go ben the living room.’

————————————————————————————————————————-

CONCLUDES NEXT WEEK.

Blakey the Jakey: A Modern Scottish Fairytale – Pt 3

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The story so far: Blakey squandered the last of his family’s financial reserves on strange, magical beans – with rather a high street value – which earned him banishment from his mother’s council flat. He found a bottle of Buckfast and discovered a genie inside. Unfortunately, things didn’t go according to plan and Blakey was left without a single wish fulfilled. Well, sort of. As we left him, he was off on a journey to his grandma’s house: his last hope. This is part 3, something you’ve probably deduced from the title of the post. 

Catch up with Part 1: http://www.jamieandrew-withhands.com/2012/06/10/btjp1/

And Part 2: http://www.jamieandrew-withhands.com/2012/06/14/btjp2/

————————————————————————————————————————-

It was nearing lunchtime and Blake was on his way to grandma’s. The sun peeped its head out from behind a huddle of clouds, draping a warm sheen over the maze of cloned streets. Blake wiped his brow and licked his dry lips. A hackle-rising niggle began to gnaw at his limbs and head, as his bloodstream screamed out for a fag. No money though.

But there was always a way to get fags. It took him close to forty-five minutes to forage for glass juice bottles, the length and breadth of the neighbourhood, so that he could afford a packet of Mayfair with the twenty-pence-a-time glass deposits. Not a wheely-bin nor a hedge nor a single lawn was left unturned in the frantic search.

In one of the gardens along the way he saw a group of five students, four of them mad-eyed and rolling in the grass. The fifth was sparking his lighter and staring at the flame slack-jawed, as if it was the most impressive thing he had ever seen, or ever would see.

‘Wow.’

They were like a gaggle of extras from ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’.

‘Terry, the sky’s falling down, the sky’s falling down, man! Look!’

‘So it is! What are we going to dae? The sky’s falling doon!’

‘Some’dy huz tae tell the Queen!’

‘Christ, we have to tell somebody!’

‘Wow. Better tell them it’s green too, man.’

‘Let’s go.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘What?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Maybe that buffalo over there’ll know the way,’ whined one of them, pointing at Blake.

After suggesting that they go and procreate with themselves, Blake made his way briskly to the convenience store: rucksack, coat and arms bulging with clinking, bulky bottles.

***

Blakey went awa’ doon Chally D.

A drooling pack of seven little teenage boys – average age twelve – were crowded near the entrance to the store. A battery powered ghetto-blaster lay in their midst, pumping out the aggressive thump of American hip-hop – a musical message from one ghetto to another. Here were seven mini-Eminems in the making.

Blake watched as a gaunt young woman, clad in a sheepskin coat and a belt-like mini-skirt, took a slightly off-balanced journey across the precinct from the doors of the motel to the pub adjoining it.

The seven little hip-hoppers saw her and began wolf whistling.

‘There’s that prossie again!’ one of them jeered.

‘Look at her, she’s well off her tits on somethin’!’

‘Go’n yersel, hen!’

‘She’s a ho!’ one shouted.

‘Aye, a high ho!’

‘High ho!’ another one laughed.

‘Get yersel’s a job, ye cheeky wee buggers, off tae work yez go!’ yelled an old man at the bus stop, raising a fist and waving his walking stick.

‘Fat chance, ye auld duffer!’ one of them screeched.

The prostitute waddled through the double swing-doors of the bar, disappearing with two fingers aloft, directing them back at the menacing rabble.

‘Aye, we ken whaur they fingers hiv been, hen!’

Riotous laughter erupted.

As soon as they saw Blake approaching the doors of the shop, the seven wasters flurried deeper into activity, bouncing around and howling his name out.

‘Blake, man, Blakey pal!’

‘Go’n get us a bottle ay Buckie, sir!’

‘Aye, we need Buckfast, like!’

***

It was almost a rite of passage in the town: the misappropriation of Buckfast for the too young by the almost old enough. No doubt in some distant pocket of the future, Blake’s children would be buying Buckfast for their children and so on and so forth. Almost tradition. Blake agreed to their request and took their money, which was more a fistful of coppers than a fistful of dollars.

Blake first approached the serving counter to off-load the glass bottles and then slipped the reciprocal packet of fags into his coat pocket. Result! As he sauntered off and started perusing the drinks aisle, Blake received a few askance glances from the husband and wife duo behind the till.

‘What the Hell is he doing?’ whispered the wife.

‘I’ve no idea, Margaret,’ replied Johnny, her husband. ‘Each generation’s getting scarier than the next.’

They kept watching him, glad that they had never had children of their own.

‘Come oan, ye wee buggers, I ken yer in there,’ Blake snarled, rubbing vigorously at every bottle on the shelf. ‘Come oot! Come oot and gee me a million poonds!’

‘Shall I phone the police, Johnny?’ she whispered, a hint of fear shadowing her features.

‘No, Margaret,’ he sighed, ‘I think it’s the doctor that boy needs.’

A flash of fake ID and a sigh of relief later, Blake was presenting the Buckfast to the seven thirsty little skivers. They were characteristically grateful.

‘Effin’ magic!’ one cried.

‘Top-class, sir!’ yelled another.

‘Woooo!’ another one simply said.

‘Aye, cheers, Blake. You want a swally?’

‘Nah, better no, lads,’ said Blake, ‘ah’m goin’ tae ma grans. She’ll hae sum in the fridge, like.’

A chorus of chuckles. ‘Nice one, big man.’

‘So whit ar yoose boys goin’ tae dae?’ asked Blake, taking out a fag and jamming it in between his lips.

‘Sum guy’s gonnae meet us behind the joab centre. He’ll hae Snow White way ‘im.’

Blake raised his eyebrows. ‘Whit?’ he asked.

Seven little fingers reached to seven little nostrils and they all gave a heaving, over-exaggerated sniff before descending into manic laughter once more.

‘Snaw White,’ winked the ringleader.

Blake resumed his trek to grandma’s, shaking his head as he left behind Dopey, Flunky, Junkie, Cokey, Skin-full, Ear-full and Doc (on account of his Doctor Marten boots).

————————————————————————————————————————-

TO BE CONTINUED

PART 4 COMING NEXT WEEK

Skinflats and the Magic Torch

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The bonnie village of Skinflats.

Skinflats is actually quite a nice wee village, and I’m not just saying that incase some of its residents read this article. Well, OK, there’s a little of that. Have you seen some of the people who live there? Big leg-o’-lamb arms, match-strike chins and shotgun licences. (hack punchline alert) And that’s just the women! Do you know what Salmand Rushdie’s agent said to him when he was writing ‘The Satanic Verses’?

‘Say what you like about Mohammed, mate, but for fuck’s sake don’t slag off Skinflats.’

‘You aint from around here, are ya, boy?’

The village is surrounded by acres of fields (or, to give them their local name: the burial grounds). Those fields are to the people of Skinflats what the empty desert is to the mobsters of Las Vegas. Many a fingerless hand and a brutally disembodied boaby sleeps with the bushes up them thar fields. So, if it’s all the same with you, I’ll just say nice things. I want to be Robert de Niro in this movie; let some other daft cunt be Joe Pesci.

What I will say is this: I had the pleasure of working in Skinflat’s local shop many, many years ago, and found the village to be a lot like Brookside Close. But with slightly more laughs. And a lot more hidden corpses.

Skinflats, though, eh? What a name. It sounds like the sort of place lost hillwalkers stumble across in the dead of night, tragically unaware that its inhabitants are all horrifically disfigured mutant cannibal serial killers who live in tents made from human flesh. The sort of place whose name you’d never expect to utter without the accompaniment of terrifying, Castle-Dracula-style thunder claps. The sort of place that would make an estate agent say: ‘Well, congratulations on your land purchase. I hope Skinflats proves to be a lucrative location for your new motel, Mr Bates.’

David Beckham was so distressed when Seb Cole told him he had to go to Skinflats, that he started to morph into Bruce Forsyth.

So what was I doing there? Taking a walk down memory lane? Admiring the scenery? Scoring drugs? No, it was Olympic Torch day. The flame had been to Stirling and Falkirk that morning, and was about to be carried through Skinflats on its way to Fife and Edinburgh. The people of Skinflats were overjoyed to be having their ten minutes of fame.

‘This’ll put Skinflats on the map,’ I heard someone say. No. No it won’t. An air strike would put Skinflats on the map. Tomorrow, they won’t even be talking about this in Bo’ness, much less London. Even in fifty years time when some plucky lad who got the day off school to see the flame pass through the village tries to remember the splendour of the day, he won’t be able to differentiate this real memory from the sixteen-thousand acid flashbacks also housed in his brain. ‘I’m sure it was a zombie Colonel Gaddafi running down the street with that flame. Just as the air strike hit.’

Anyway, maybe he can just re-read this blog and it’ll all come flooding back to him. The day was nice and bright and sunny, and the whole village was bustling with people waving flags, cracking jokes, and smiling and laughing, and generally having an awesome time. I dunno; maybe they were just drunk.

Normally if you saw a guy carrying a flaming torch through Skinflats, you’d expect the rest of the villagers to be right behind him with pitchforks shouting, ‘Burn the monster!’ Or, at the very least: ‘The Sun says there’s a paedo living somewhere within a fifty-mile radius. Let’s burn the fucker who moved into number 27 last week, just incase! Anyway, he said ‘hello’ to my daughter this morning, and that’s how it starts!’

But this day was different. Even the convoy of police bikes was greeted with warm, uproarious cheers. This struck me as odd. Like George Bush being carried through Baghdad by way of a jovial mass crowd-surf. Usually the arrival of police vehicles in Skinflats causes a mass exodus, or at the very least turns the village into a fortress: with every snib on every door clicking shut, and those behind the doors jamming them up with tables and wardrobes, and blacking out the windows, like they’re preparing to survive to the end of a zombie film.

The bike cops clearly thought they were the star attraction, as they gunned it down the street giving a series of wacky waves and salutes. One cop even gave a rolling five slap down a line of children’s hands. You might be cheering now, kids, but that’s the cunt who’ll be arresting you for cocaine possession in eight to ten years – which, coincidentally, will also be your sentence.

The best thing about the torch coming through Skinflats was the traffic chaos that preceded its arrival. A long jam of angry, self-conscious people all trapped in their cars, whilst a whole village peered at them. They must have felt like they’d gone for a day out at the safari park, and broken down in the lion enclosure. I tried to stare at as many of them as possible.

The Cunta-Cola truck.

It wasn’t long before a procession of yellow Olympic vehicles came trundling through the village. Lots of cars that looked like New York taxis. And the Coca Cola truck, of course, with a gang of reps walking beside it handing out free bottles of cola. Principles be damned: it was a hot day and I was thirsty. That freebie was gubbed. I know McDonalds sponsor the Olympics, too, and was a little annoyed that they hadn’t sent a truck laden with free beefburgers. Bank of Scotland had a truck in the procession, too, with some English cunt on its open top-deck dancing like a dick to shitty pop music. No free money getting handed out, I noticed.

Nice choice of sponsors for an international sporting event: Coca Cola, McDonalds, and Bank of Scotland. ‘Hey, kids. You’re all going to be fat bastards with diabetes and no pensions. LET’S FUCKING CELEBRATE!’

Eventually the guy with the flaming torch got off of his little yellow bus, jogged for about 100 metres, everybody cheered, and then he got back on his bus again, the lazy bastard. And I’m glad I was there to see it. One day I’ll be telling my grandkids about this. Telling them how shit it was. The free Cola was good, though.

This is the best picture I could manage!

* sincere apologies to the people of Skinflats. I love you all, you know I was only having a laugh (ie, please don’t kill me – I’m trying to put you on the map!).

** Note to foreign readers of the site, especially Americans. Skinflats genuinely is a lovely village, and also the birthplace of William Wallace, so do come visit if you’re flying in to Edinburgh. Thanks, Jamie.

Cunt of the Week (18 Jun 2012) by Richard Hunter

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Guest writer: Richard Hunter.

Hello. As your guest writer this week, I’ve been racking my brains for which subject to choose. Obviously, Jamie Andrew was first choice, but given that this will still be true when he next begs me to write a piece – as no-one else has submitted one yet – I’m sure we can wait for that.

So, my CUNT OF THE WEEK goes to Argyll and Bute council.

Yeah, that’s right: those cunts.

I should point out it’s for a specific reason, and if you’re on Twitter (@Tricky308, by the way) then you will probably already know why. If you live in the Argyll and Bute area then I’m guessing you have a few hundred reasons. To be specific, it’s the banning of the blog ‘Neverseconds’, which is written by an 8-year-old girl called Martha Payne.

In truth, the council only placed a ban on the taking of images. I suppose at this point I should explain.

Martha writes a daily blog, under the name Veg, at http://neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk/ which details what she had for lunch that day; this includes a health rating, mouthful count and a picture of the food on offer. She will also collate pictures sent from other lunchtime diners around the world, and will rate their lunch, too. Our food does not stand up well by comparison!

Richard’s stage direction for this picture: {JAMIE INCLUDE PICTURE ONE HERE} {and remember to delete all theses little edit notes before you publish it you thick cunt}

The council saw fit to ban the pictures being taken because they felt Martha was taking pictures of the wrong type of food. Here’s the quote:

“The photographic images uploaded appear to only represent a fraction of the choices available to pupils, so a decision has been made by the council to stop photos being taken in the school canteen.”

So are they saying that Martha’s only option if she wants to keep taking photos is to upload to her blog every possible combination of dinner that day and then rate them all individually? I would think childhood obesity is enough of a problem in Scotland without forcing a little girl to eat 20 different portions for lunch, just so she can write a factually accurate blog that night. I suppose if she did take this option the council would no longer need to worry, as by day 5 her hands would be too fat to type without hitting several keys at once, and within 2 months the inevitable heart attack would cease the blog altogether.

Argyll and Bute council have also claimed that the ‘school catering staff had been left “in tears” by press coverage’ and they ‘feared for their jobs’.

Anybody else smell shite? That may well be the biggest bunch of bullshit I’ve seen in type since Jamie sent me that text about how his gig ‘went well’. Does anyone with a child actually blame the dinner ladies (or catering staff, if that term offends anyone) for the dross meals that are served up? NO, of course we fucking don’t: the dinner ladies work their arses off to provide this food. And, yes, OK, it’s not to a great standard, but when they’re working with ‘Big Bob’s Chicken’ (almost 19% chicken inside) or ‘Sandy’s Sausage Meat’ (made from only the healthiest of hamsters), then how the fuck could they manage to serve perfection? If they could get the backing from the councils, who in turn decided to spend more on a child’s lunch than a prisoner’s breakfast, then perhaps the council wouldn’t be so ashamed of the blog that is clearly just showing up the horrendous shit our ( and by ‘our’ I mean ‘your’, as I have no kids) kids are being fed.

Check out these two pictures:

 

 

 

 

It’s even more embarrassing when you look at the pictures! I’m sure it wont take much guessing from you readers to figure out which of the above pictures is being served in Argyll and Bute, and which came from Spain.

The silver lining in this whole debacle is that since Friday the 15th of June the blog has had over 100,000 hits* (I’m imagining right now that Jamie is trying to work out if he can get Falkirk council to ban his site so that he can aspire to similar figures) and has raised over £30,000 for the charity this website was all about. Oh, that’s right, I never mentioned that. This blog that the C.O.T.W is taking down – and, yes, I know they were technically just banning the pictures, but as it’s a blog based around pictures of Martha’s food, it wouldn’t work terribly well without the pictures, would it? – was set up to raise money for Mary’s Meals: a small charity that serves up life-saving meals to people who have been greatly affected by the East African food crisis.

It costs around £7,000 to fund the start-up for a kitchen to help provide these life saving rations. As of Thursday morning, young Martha’s website had helped to raise £2000, with her over-all target being the seven thousand to see a kitchen opened. But by Friday night the pledge stood at a little over £30,000. Infact, if anything, the people at Argyll and Bute council have helped…

Nah, they’re still total Cunts!

‘SCOTLAND OR NOT?’ A fun new lunchtime game. HINT: if there is Irn Bru visible, it’s probably Scotland.

OK, this is the REAL picture of Richard Hunter. But he does look a little like that Mexican cunt from season 3 of ‘The Shield’.

THIS WEEK’S GUEST WRITER Richard Hunter is well aware that his name shortens down to DICK Hunter, and so are any audiences who have seen him perform stand up. His first gig took place in 2007, and that went so fucking well for him that he chose not to gig again in Scotland for another 4 years. He did fuck off to Australia and gig there for a while, where he realised that they think the name ‘Dick Hunter’ is just as funny as all the cunts in high school did as well.

Just yesterday Richard found out that he doesn’t live in Denny, Falkirk, but in Dunipace, Falkirk. A fact that has made not one solitary difference to his already quite pathetic life.

He would like me to point out that since he started to take stand up seriously, last JULY, he has taken part in 87 gigs, whilst my current gig count is 94, and I have been taking this seriously for nearly 2 years (closer to 18 months, if we’re being picky). I think what Richard’s trying to say is that i’m a lazy cunt. 

If you want to know more about Richard, or find out how horrendous he can be with a movie-based pun, then by all means follow him on Twitter.  But don’t bother adding him on Facebook. You may follow him, but you’re not his fucking friend (don’t feel sad about this: your name will be added to the list of everybody Richard has ever met)!

Richard regularly appears on-stage naked, ending his set by thrumming himself off with a little glove-puppet he calls ‘Grahamie Mandrew.’ As he ejaculates over the front row, he’s been known to shout: ‘BROLLY UP, YOU FUCKING WHORES! IT’S RAINING DICK JUICE!’ Please bring a sou’wester if you come to see him perform.

FOLLOW RICHARD ON TWITTER: @Tricky308

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Write for next week’s Cunt of the Week (CoTW): http://www.jamieandrew-withhands.com/2012/06/01/cunt-of-the-week/